Studies in Italian Art 189982832X, 9781899828326

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STUDIES IN ITALIAN ART

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STUDIES IN ITALIAN ART

ANDREW LADIS

The Pindar Press London 2001

Published by The Pindar Press 40 Narcissus Road London NW6 1TH · UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1 899828 32 X (hb) ISBN 1 899828 58 3 (pb)

Printed by Woolnough Bookbinding Church Street, Irthlingborough Northants NN9 5SE

This book is printed on acid-free paper

TO THOMAS BRUMBAUGH, OLEN BRYANT, AND LEWIS BURTON

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Contents Preface

i

ESSAYS I

Giovanni Pisano: Unfinished Business in Siena

II

The Velluti Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence

16

III

An Early Fourteenth-Century Triptych in Memphis and Florentine Painting in the Glow of Duccio

43

IV

The Legend of Giotto’s Wit and the Arena Chapel

61

V

An Old Picture in Florence

96

VI

Immortal Queen and Mortal Bride: The Marian Imagery of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Cycle at Montesiepi

103

A High Altarpiece for San Giovanni Fuorcivitas in Pistoia and Hypotheses about Niccolò di Tommaso

122

VIII

Antonio Veneziano and the Representation of Emotions

141

IX

An Order for Drawings after Agnolo Gaddi’s True Cross Cycle in Florence

159

The Reflective Memory of a Late Trecento Painter: Speculations on the Origins and Development of the Master of San Martino a Mensola

165

VII

X

1

XI

The Death of Giovanni d’Ambrogio

183

XII

Salvation and Vision in the Brancacci Chapel

188

XIII

“Two Nude Figures by Masaccio” and The Importance of Being Earnest

262

Sources and Resources: The Lost Sketchbooks of Giovanni di Paolo

268

The Music of Devotion: Image, Voice, and the Imagination in a Madonna of Humility by Domenico di Bartolo

305

XVI

Benvenuto di Giovanni at Sixteen

327

XVII

Perugino and the Wages of Fortune

337

XIV

XV

XVIII Ornatissimi Vasi: Italian Maiolica and the Renaissance

360

XIX

384

Richard Offner: The Unmaking of a Connoisseur

REVIEWS XX

Moshe Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture

409

XXI

Millard Meiss, Francesco Traini

418

XXII

Marvin Eisenberg, Lorenzo Monaco

421

Additional Notes

425

Index

427

Acknowledgements

445

ESSAYS

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I

Giovanni Pisano: Unfinished Business in Siena

H

ISTORY, we are told, is both large and little, the sweeping, often unseen forces that play through societies and the incremental, ordinary actions of anonymous individuals. It is the Industrial Revolution and Hitler’s hubris; it is the Black Death and Milton’s blindness; it is the Reformation and the workaday struggles of people leading quietly narrow lives. Our own century offers much, perhaps too much, evidence of human nature, but for the Middle Ages facts about prominent figures are scarce, often resistant to interpretation, and, therefore, all the more intriguing. Artists, even the most distinguished, enjoyed no more than modest social standing along with other craftsmen, and documents that mention them rarely present more than impersonal glimpses of their labor, their financial status, and their marital situation: the public aspects of private lives that assuredly were made up of emotions and attitudes, laughter and sorrow, flesh and blood. Between the greatest Italian sculptor of the High Renaissance, Michelangelo, and the greatest Italian Gothic sculptor, Giovanni Pisano, stretch a world and two centuries of difference in what we know about artists on a human level; nevertheless, one cannot help but wonder about the personality of the remoter and dimmer figure. Titanic and arrogant, able to infuse impervious stone with searing affective power, Giovanni lived a life of glory but also conflict. He may well have been as compelling and complex a person as his more famous sixteenth-century successor, but documents reveal little. There is his work. But how darkly through the glass of his art did Giovanni express his own temperament and character rather than those of his age? One cryptic record, heretofore unrecognized, offers an irresistible and suggestive opening to his spiritual life. The Capitoli or by-laws of the celebrated Sienese Società dei Raccomandati al Santissimo Crocifisso, a group attached to the Hospital of

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Santa Maria della Scala and later known as the Disciplinati dello Spedale, include, in a list of members compiled at the time of its foundation in 1295, a “Maestro Giouanni dell’uopera.”1 Although lacking the patronymic bestowed by his famous father Nicola, it is essentially the same abbreviated form, referring to his role as sculptor-in-chief of the Cathedral workshop, that occurs in a variety of different Sienese documents dating between 1295 and 1297.2 As a member of the Raccomandati, Giovanni joined a group whose membership included a broad cross-section of male Sienese society. In addition to friars and monks from seemingly every order, its ranks counted a host of lay professions: tailor, notary, and scribe, goldsmith, woodworker, and smith, purveyor of dry goods (pizzicaiuolo), shoemaker, and judge (giudice). Moreover, its rolls admitted the modest laborer as well as notables such as the rector of the hospital of San Andrea, the chaplain of the Misericordia, and a deacon of the Cathedral. Theirs was a penitential organization dedicated to

1 Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS I.V.22, fol. 19v. The first group of members follows the date 1295; a second begins in 1360; 1400 is the last date recorded in the manuscript. Recorded in two manuscripts (MS I.V.22 and I.V.23), the Capitoli of the confraternity, but not its membership rolls, were published by L. De Angelis, Capitoli dei Disciplinati della venerabile Compagnia della Madonna sotto le volte dell’I. e R. Spedale di S. Maria della Scala di Siena de’ secoli XIII. XIV. e XV. nella pubblica biblioteca della stessa città, Siena, 1818. As Monti has observed, the Compagnia was founded not merely reformed in 1295; it survived until the early Quattrocento, when it split into two groups, one devoted to Beato Andrea Gallerani and a second devoted to the Madonna. The heir to the original confraternity was the latter, which came to be known as the Compagnia dei Disciplinati della Madonna sotto le volte dello Spedale. The literature on Italian confraternities is vast, but for a general account see G. Meersseman with the collaboration of G. Pacini, Ordo Fraternitatis: Confraternite e pietà dei laici nel medioevo, 3 vols. (Italia Sacra: studi e documenti di storia ecclesiastica, vols. 24–26), Rome, 1977. For the Società dei Raccomandati see G. M. Monti, Le Confraternite Medievali dell’Alta e Media Italia, Venice, 1927, vol. I, pp. 27–33 and vol. II, pp. 234–247. 2 See the documents collected by P. Bacci, “Di alcune nuovi indagini su Giovanni di Niccola pisano (1248–1314),” in Documenti e commenti per la storia dell’arte, Florence, 1944, pp. 7–51. In a document dated 31 August 1295 (Bacci, pp. 35–36), “magistri Johannis” is one of several “magistrorum Operis” who are mentioned in the Biccherna along with painters identified merely as “magistri Vannis de Camporegio et magistri Duccij pictoris.” In another from 5 December of the same year and also from the Biccherna (Bacci, p. 37) he appears as “magistro Johanni de Opera sancte Marie.” In May 1296 the Statuti of Siena twice refer to him as “magistrum Johannem capomagistrum Operis Sancte Marie” (Bacci, p. 38), and in 1297 the records of the Consiglio Generale allude to him even more obliquely in reference to a plan for the projected new baptistry, “secundum quod designatum est, vel designabitur per magistrum Johannem” (Bacci, p. 40).

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the Virgin, to whom they were servilely bound by a sort of feudal vassalage, but focused on the suffering Christ, to whom their queen referred them, hence the term “raccomandati” by which they were known.3 At least in the ideal code of conduct outlined in its by-laws, the confraternal lives of Giovanni Pisano and his fellow members were shaped by ritual action and guided by a communal ethos.4 Excepting usurers, notaries who collaborated with them, and excommunicates, nomination and election to the confraternity was open to all who met the requirements of age, moral standing, and spiritual devotion. Prospective members had to be at least twenty years of age, and election or denial followed a period during which their lives were investigated by a committee of six, two for each of the city’s three terzi, and during which their acceptance might be jeopardized by the negative report of any member opposed to them. Once admitted, brothers were enjoined to conform to a prescribed code of conduct. In addition to guarding against “evil practices” (le male usançe): cursing or other “coarse language” (disonesto parlare), crapshooting or any other form of gambling,5 brothers were required to feed the poor, to comfort the sick, and to honor the dead. Besides attending mass every Sunday or at least contemplating the “Holy Body of Jesus Christ” (Sancto Corpo di Jesu Christo), their vows demanded that on the Lord’s Day they come to the Compagnia, where an eternal lamp burned before a crucifix in the chapel, and on Fridays “a disciplina,” communal experiences that bound them together and reinforced such private spiritual exercises as daily prayer and regular confession. Obedience to the prior was conjoined with respect for each other. Upon meeting, brothers greeted each other by pious formula: “laudato sia Jesu Cristo,” said one, who might have been a laborer or goldsmith making his way past the Cathedral; “laudato sia elgli sempre, e benedetto,” responded the other, who might have been Maestro Giovanni del Uopera. And should they 3

On this point see Meersseman, 1977, vol. III, p. 1320. The following discussion of the rules of the confraternity is drawn from the original source as published in L. De Angelis, Siena, 1818, pp. 31–57. It should be noted that many of the provisions found in the Sienese statutes are conventional to such documents in general. See the examples reproduced in Meersseman, 1977. 5 Similar warnings commonly appear in the rules for other confraternities. The Constitutions of the fifteenth-century Compagnia di San Tommaso d’Aquino are even more explicit, noting “E perché dal giuocho ne prociedono molte magli e scandoglie e chomunamente se fa nel dì de le feste” and cautioning brothers to avoid people about whom “se puoi avere chativa sospetione de mala fama, cioè con garçone o altra giente schandolosa.” See O. Marinelli, La Compagnia di San Tommaso d’Aquino di Perugia, Rome, 1960, pp. 52–53. 4

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find themselves among outsiders, they exchanged this ritual greeting, worth twenty days of “perdono,” in a way that anyone hearing them “had nothing to whisper about” (non abbia materia di mormorare). Secrecy and suspicion were in fact essential. Perhaps for this reason a prior could lead the confraternity in public procession on the night of Good Thursday and, with the permission of its members, on but one other occasion during his three-month tenure. On such occasions the members’ personal identities were subsumed by a collective identity that was both invested in and projected by a symbolic uniform of robe (chappa) and hood (visiera): on such occasions Giovanni Pisano was no longer Giovanni Pisano but one of the Raccomandati. Otherwise brothers were specifically forbidden, unless granted leave by the prior, from public displays of penitence: “niuno possa andare fuore disciprinando iniuno tempo, senza licentia del Priore.” Foreigners could only be welcomed if they produced official documents from their native company, and even then they were given no more than two days of hospitality. And anyone divulging the secrets of the confraternity was subject to punishment and possible expulsion at the discretion of the prior. Perhaps more threatening to a brother’s good standing were any number of other lapses, often as slight as failing to wear “garments below the knees in seemly fashion”(e panni longhi di sotto al ginocchio nel modo honesto), a failing that, if spied by a confrère and reported in secret to the prior, could lead to expulsion, simply at the will of the latter official. Within so strict and circumscribed a society, one could hardly ignore the eternal gap between noble ideals and human weakness, hence the requirement that every brother be present at chapel “quando si fa generale disciplina” so as to give a good example of himself (sia tenuto, et debba per dare buono exemplo di se, et buona edificazione), and this was done to guard against hypocrisy and mere show (per cessare sia ogni ipocresia, et ongni vana apparientia di fuore). If expelled, brothers suffered the indignity of knowing that their names were inscribed on a gessoed panel inscribed with the names of those banished from the company (tavola ingessata ne la quale si scrivano tutti e chacciati de la Chompagnia). Only after a year could they resubmit themselves, properly chastened and reformed, and hope to pass muster after a fresh investigation into their lives. Only when readmitted into the fold could their name be erased from the list of the fallen and returned to a panel bearing the names of the brothers, an object whose form is illustrated by later examples.

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1. Giovanni Pisano, Crucifix, Siena, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo.

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What Giovanni Pisano thought of the rules of the confraternity or how well he upheld them, one will never know, but by his very membership he accepted and promised to follow a clearly articulated code of ritualized behavior that integrated him into Sienese society. The rubrics of the Capitoli thus provide a tantalizing hint about the external form of his life: a precise frame that defines one aspect of the human person. He joins a list of other Italian Medieval and Renaissance artists who belonged to confraternities, and like Martino di Bartolommeo who was a member of the Disciplinati della Madonna in the early fifteenth-century, he may even have provided

2. Guccio di Mannaia (?), Seal of the Compagnia dei Raccomandati al Santissimo Crocifisso di Siena (impression in gesso on the left), Rome, Museo di Palazzo Venezia (sezione Corvisieri Italiana no. 177). 6

According to notices recorded by Romagnoli, Martino di Bartolommeo painted a Last Judgment in fresco for a chapel of the fifteenth-century off-shoot of the Compagnia del Santissimo Crocifisso, i.e., the Compagnia della Madonna sotto le volte dello Spedale, to which he belonged, serving as its Camarlingo in 1410 and in 1412. See E. Romagnoli, Biografia analogica de’ bellartisti senesi, etc., Florence, 1976, vol. IV, p. 46 (original manuscript preserved in Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS L.II.3, ca. 1835). For a summary of the life and career of Martino see the biography by M. Ciatti in Il Gotico a Siena, Florence, 1982, pp. 304–305.

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the services of his art for the company to which he belonged.6 Indeed, one cannot help wondering if the remarkable wooden crucifix (Fig. 1) now preserved in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo of Siena7 was not in fact carved by Giovanni in the founding year of 1295 for the chapel of the Compagnia del Santissimo Crocifisso, whose inventory of 1325 begins “A riverentia del nostro Signore Jhesu Xhristo Crucifixo” and lists: “In prima una Crucifixo.”8 Surely no work could better stir the emotions of those dedicated to contemplation of Christ’s suffering, and such a devotional purpose might even explain its unusual type, which John Pope-Hennessy has noted “is personal to Giovanni Pisano and seems not to have been imitated in other localities or by other artists,”9 but which is reflected in the seal of the Compagnia (Fig. 2)10 and, in a more remote way, even by the late fourteenthcentury crucifix (Fig. 3) still preserved on an altar of the Raccomandati’s descendants, the Compagnia dei Disciplinati sotto le volte dello Spedale.11

7 For this undocumented sculpture, which measures 110 cm. in height, see J. PopeHennessy, “New Works by Giovanni Pisano, I,” in Essays in Italian Sculpture, London, 1968; M. Ayrton, Giovanni Pisano, Sculptor, New York, 1969, pp. 114–116 and 218–219; M. Seidel, La scultura lignea di Giovanni Pisano con annotazioni tecniche di Luca Bonetti, Florence, 1971, pp. 21–22; J. White, Art and Architecture in Italy: 1250–1400, second edition, Harmondsworth, 1987, pp. 139–140; and again M. Seidel in Scultura dipinta: Maestri di legname e pittori a Siena, 1250–1450, Florence, 1987, pp. 24–27. Seidel (1971) points out the difficulty of situating the work in Giovanni Pisano’s chronology, but a dating ca. 1295 is entirely possible for a work otherwise so uncertain as to elicit sharply divergent propositions on this score: ca. 1270, as cautiously proposed by Seidel (1971), ca. 1280, as Seidel (1987) suggested at a later moment, and ca. 1305 (?), as suggested by White. The earlier date was accepted by A. Kosegarten-Middeldorf, “‘Langiolo cholla testa di sco Giovanni in mano’: Zum Werk Giovanni Pisanos,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, XXXIV, 1990, p. 33. 8 The inventory, preserved in the Biblioteca Comunale of Siena, is published in De Angelis, Siena, 1818, p. 114 ff. 9 Pope-Hennessy, 1968. 10 The seal, which is dated around 1295, is inscribed on the recto as follows: S[igillum] SOTIETATIS. RECOMENDATOR[um]. IH[es]V[s] XPI[sti]. CRVCIFIXI. D[e] SENIS. It has been attributed, with highly tantalizing arguments, to the goldsmith Guccio di Mannaia, whose two brothers, one of them also a goldsmith, were members of the Società del Santissimo Crocifisso. For the seal, the attribution to Guccio di Mannaia, and the comparison to Giovanni Pisano’s Crucifix see E. Cioni Liserani, “Alcune ipotesi per Guccio di Mannaia,” Prospettiva, XVII, 1979, pp. 47–58. See also the entries by G. Previtali and I. Hueck in Il Gotico a Siena, Siena, 1982, pp. 95–99. 11 See A. Bagnoli in Mostra d’arte restaurate nelle province di Siena e Grossetto, II-1981, Genoa, 1981, pp. 59–61; and R. Bartalini in Scultura dipinta, Florence, 1987, pp. 96–100.

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3. Sienese, Crucifix of the Compagnia dei Disciplinati sotto le volte, Siena, Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala.

It was a far larger, public purpose that dominated Giovanni’s years in Siena: the decoration of the façade of the Cathedral (Fig. 4), whose bristling surface was to be populated by a host of spirited figures united in celebrating the Virgin, mother of Christ and protectress of the city. Giovanni Pisano’s exact role in the design and execution of the project is uncertain. Although he was engaged by the Opera del Duomo by 1287, it is not until a document of 1290 that he is referred to as “caput magistrorum,” and none of the extant documents describe the nature of his work or mention any specific pieces. Yet his controlling influence upon the richly sculptural design of the façade is plain, especially in the prophet-populated lowest zone of the portals, where, as John White put it, “architecture has become a stage, a natural habitat in which cliff-dwelling figures walk and gesture, argue and discuss,

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4. Siena, Cathedral, Façade.

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crying their prophecies out across the architectural spaces.”12 Even in the careful but artificial context of the gallery that houses them in the Museo dell’Opera, where they are severed from their setting, arranged like specimens, and deprived of their proper partners, the individual figures offer overwhelming testimony to the power of the sculptor’s gift and to the importance of the project that he was never to see completed. One wonders what they looked like when by December 1297 Giovanni left Siena, abandoning his figures, some perhaps no more than blocked out, amid the disarray of the marble yard of the Cathedral workshop, as Michelangelo was later to leave unfinished some of his greatest sculptures scattered on the floor of the Medici Chapel. Giovanni’s departure from Siena was anything but tidy. The years immediately preceding his exit were filled with all manner of responsibilities, some of which presumably came with the position of capomaestro but which nevertheless did not make carving sculptures any easier. Giovanni did not escape censure (in 1290 he was fined 800 lire13) or the challenge of a rival (between 1287 and 1293 he suffered competition from the mysterious but apparently gifted Ramo di Paganello14), but if he survived these soon to seem small obstacles, the condition of the Cathedral Works that he oversaw did not go unnoticed. Records grew more tangled and accounts languished, but what else was to be expected from an office manned by a clerk who could neither read nor write! In May 1296 the officials of the Commune ordered that the Opera be assigned a literate clerk, but by then it was too late. Giovanni’s position, already strained, collapsed a year later in May 1297, when the officials of the Opera ordered an investigation, hoping to bring work on the façade from “a good beginning to a better end.” What emerged from a discussion in the Consiglio Generale del Comune was a shocking picture of waste, negligence, and dereliction to the point of malpractice at every turn. Littering the marble yard were large quantities of stone halfcarved or broken, statues roughed out but abandoned, and whole blocks still intact but ruined by exposure to rain. No matter what their state, however, they had been lying about as disjecta membra for so long and the confusion

12

White, 1987, p. 118. Giovanni was condemned by the podestà Messer Giovanni di Messer Accorimbono during the first half of 1290, but the sculptor’s transgression is left unspecified in the record, which refers to it only as “dicte condempnationes.” See Bacci, 1944, pp. 31–32. 14 For Ramo di Paganello see Bacci, 1944, p. 40. 13

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and lack of discipline were such that no one could remember what their intended purpose was or where they were supposed to go. Apparently there were no working drawings and no regular working procedures. What, if not chaos, is reflected in the curiously vague but inclusive wording of the report, which specifies but leaves unnamed the “capomagistro, seu capomagistris et magistris”? No matter where authority rested, they were all bound to salvage what they could and to begin putting things right within a month or else face further coercive measures. But by year’s end Giovanni had quit Siena never to return.15 Behind he left ten years’ labor upon the most ambitious project of his life, indeed one of the most ambitious sculptural projects in all of medieval Italy, whose “better end” was not reached, without regard to Giovanni’s original and apparently unrecorded intentions, until perhaps as much as a century later in the 1370s. About the scandalous findings of the official investigation, nothing more is said: neither heated denial nor unfettered confession. Perhaps the situation was too obvious for words of any kind. As capomaestro or as one of several capomaestri or even as one of numberless maestri, Giovanni would have borne considerable and unavoidable responsibility. Nevertheless, as Michael Ayrton has said: “No one can explain how so great a master could have been so negligent of the fate of so great an undertaking, nor if the fault lay in the man. No one knows whether he was the loser in some conspiracy of faction, a driven man guilty of malpractice or the innocent victim of the negligence and stupidity or enmity of others.”16 Yet, surely it would be a romantic notion to think that a document as frank and damning as the investigative report of 1297 fails to mention him by name in sensitive deference to his talent, and surely it is ignoring the evidence to exculpate the artist by laying the blame at the feet of unresponsive civic authorities, whose presumed reluctance to allocate sufficient funds ultimately led to the deplorable state of affairs that they so ruthlessly condemned.17 Under what condition did Giovanni take his leave: dignity, disapproval, or disgrace? With so much smoke it is hard not to think the worst.

15

These and other documents relating to Giovanni Pisano in Siena are published with stirring commentary, to which I am much indebted, by Bacci, Florence, 1944, pp. 26–51. 16 Ayrton, 1969, p. 89. 17 This suggestion is submitted by White, 1987, p. 122.

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Giovanni’s pathetic fall, in what might be termed the tragedy of the façade, is echoed in the margin of his private life. Beside his name in the roll of brothers of the Compagnia del Santissimo Crocifisso appears a single word: “chassò,” literally, “cancelled” or, in effect, “expelled.”18 One cannot help but think that his part in the public fiasco of the Cathedral façade played a part in the terse, two-syllable judgment that led to his secret excommunication. In the end the word “chassò” might serve as Giovanni’s valedictory. His thoughts escape us, but in the inscription to his pulpit in Pistoia, completed four years later in 1301, there is perhaps a slight defensiveness, not to mention hollowness, in the assertion that “Giovanni carved it, who performed no empty work.”19 And it is perhaps in light of his lost decade in Siena and as a clue to a tragically flawed personality that one should read the grandiloquent but ambivalent inscriptions on his pulpit in Pisa (Fig. 5), his last major work, completed in December 1310, when he was sixty, no longer young, and perhaps within sight of his end. Although he remained a Sienese citizen to his death, one inscription, which reads like a funeral encomium delivered by a professional orator, reclaims him for his Pisan birthplace and praises him as: “endowed above all others with command of art of pure sculpture. Sculpting splendid things in stone, wood, and gold, he could not have

18

Although the English “cancelled” does not have the gravity of “expelled,” the word was widely used in the latter sense, namely “cacciar via,” not only in the Capitoli of the Sienese confraternity but in others as well. See, for instance, the regulations of the fifteenth-century confraternity of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Perugia, where any brother falling victim to the dangers of “giuocho e male compagnie” (as described above in note 5) is to be given three chances, receiving after the first infraction a private warning by the prior and the chief officials of the company, after the second a public warning in front of the entire company, and after the third expulsion, that is, “sia chasso de la Chonpagnia.” The same procedure and the same term appears concerning other failings: “E s’il faciesse, sia amonito in secreto e publicho, chome è ditto de sopre, e se non se chorregiesse, sia chasso de la Compagnia.” See Marinelli, 1960, pp. 52–53. As early as the fourteenth-century, the word was also used with reference to soldiers dishonorably discharged: “Mandar via dal servizio con ignominia.” See S. Battaglia, Dizionario della lingua italiana, Turni, 1961, s.v. “cassare.” 19 Ayrton, 1969, p. 123. The full inscription reads: LAUDE DEI TRINI REM CEPTAM COPULO FINI/ CURE PRESENTIS SUB PRIMO MILLE TRICENTIS/ PRINCEPS EST OPERIS PLEBANUS VEL DATOR ERIS/ ARNOLDUS DICTUS QUI SEMPER SIT BENEDICTUS/ ANDREAS UNUS VITELLI . . . QUOQUE TINUS/ NATUS VITALI BENE NOTUS NOMINE TALI/ DISPEMSATORES HI DICTI SUNT MELIORES/ SCULPSIT IOHANNES QUI RES NON EGIT INANES/ NICOLI NATUS SENSIA (scientia) MELIORE BEATUS/ QUEM GENUIT PISA DOCTUM SUPER OMNIA VISA.

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5. Giovanni Pisano, Pulpit, Siena, Cathedral.

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carved base ones even if he had so wished. There are many sculptors: to him only remain the honors of praise. He made celebrated sculptures and varied figures. Whoever you are, when you have marveled [at them], then you will approve them rightly. Christ have mercy on him who had such gifts. Amen.”20 If there is doubt about whose voice speaks in the first inscription, there can be none about the second in which smugness and self-importance, persecution and self-pity veil, not to say negate, all contrition: “He now cries out: ‘I have not been on guard enough, since the more I have shown [by my achievements] the more I have experienced hostile injuries in my heart.’ But I [the monument] endure the penalty of an ignoble man with an unembittered mind, so that I may take envy away from him and soften his sorrow. And let me entreat an honor [from you]: bedew these verses [with your tears]. He proves himself unworthy in reproving a man worthy of the crown; thus he reproves himself and approves him whom he reproves.”21 20

The translation is taken from Ayrton, 1969, p. 161. I am grateful to Jan Ziolkowski for offering a new translation of this problematic inscription. Different interpretations may be found in Ayrton, 1969, p. 160; White, 1987, p. 133; and, more persuasively than the others, Pope-Hennessy, Italian Gothic Sculpture, London, 1955, p. 181. The first part of the inscription runs beneath the narrative reliefs, while the second appears along the step beneath the pulpit: 21

LAUDO DEUM VERUM PER QUEM SUNT OPTIMA RERUM QUI DEDIT HAS PURAS HOMINEM FORMARE FIGURAS. HOC OPUS HIC ANNIS DOMINI SULPSERE IOHANNIS ARTE MANUS SOLE QUONDAM NATIQUE NICHOLE CURSIS UNDENIS TERCENTUM MILLEQUE PLENIS JAM DOMINANTE PISIS CONCORDIBUS ATQUE DIVINIS COMITE TUNC DICO MONTISFELTRI FREDERICO HIC ASSISTENTE NELLO FALCONIS HABENTE HOC OPUS IN CURA NEC NON OPERE QUOQUE IURA. EST PISIS NATUS UT JOHANNES ISTA DOTATUS ARTIS SCULPTURE PRE CUNCTIS ORDINE PURE SCULPENS IN PETRA LIGNO AURO SPLENDIDE TETRA SCULPERE NESCISSET VEL TURPIA SI VOLUISSET. PLURES SCULPTORES REMANENT SIBI LAUDIS HONORES CLARES SCULPTURAS FECIT VARIASQUE FIGURAS QUISQUIS MIRARIS TUNC RECTO IURE PROBARIS CRISTE MISERERE CUI TALIA DONA FUERA AMEN. (I praise the true God, through whose agency the best of things exist, who has permitted a man to fashion these pure figures. The hands, alone in their skill, of Giovanni (the late

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Impassioned, bitter, and conflicted, stung by condemnation, foreseeing more, and forestalling all with a conclusion seeking less to praise than to blame, Giovanni has insisted on the last word, but it is one whose inescapable shadow is guilt, perhaps about opportunity squandered and glory unrealized.

and son of Nicola) carved this work here when thirteen hundred and eleven full years of our Lord had passed, while Federigo, count (at the time, I say) of Montefeltro ruled over the Pisans, of one accord and yet separate with Nello di Falcone assisting, concerned not only with this work but also with the rules of the craft. He was born at Pisa, like that Giovanni who is endowed above all others with command of the art of pure sculpture. Sculpting splendid things in stone, wood, and gold, he could not have carved base ones even if he had so wished. There are many sculptors: to him alone remain the honors of praise. He made celebrated sculptures and various figures. Whoever you are, when you have marveled [at them], then you will approve them rightly. Christ have mercy upon him who had such gifts. Amen.) CIRCUIT HIC AMNES MUNDI PARTESQUE JOHANNES PLURIMA TEMPTANDO GRATIS DISCENDA PARANDO QUEQUE LABORE GRAVI NUNC CLAMAT NON BENE CAVI DUM PLUS MONSTRAVI PLUS HOSTICA DAMNA PROBAVI. CORDE SED IGNAVI PENAM FERO MENTE SUAVI. UT SIBI LIVOREM TOLLAM MITIGEMQUE DOLOREM ET DECUS IMPLOREM VERSIBUS ADDE ROREM. SE PROBAT INDIGNUM REPROBANS DIADEMATE DIGNUM. SIC HUNC QUEM REPROBAT SE REPROBANDO PROBAT. (Here Giovanni encircled the rivers and regions of the world, undertaking without hope of reward to learn many things, and preparing everything with heavy labor. He now cries out: ‘I have not been on guard enough, since the more I have shown my[achievements] the more I have experienced hostile injuries in my heart.’ But I [the monument] endure the penalty of an ignoble man with an unembittered mind, so that I may take envy away from him and soften his sorrow. And let me entreat an honor [from you]: bedew these verses [with your tears]. He proves himself unworthy in reproving a man worthy of the crown. Thus he reproves himself and approves him whom he reproves.)

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II

The Velluti Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence In Memory of Ulrich Middeldorf

W

ORKS by Giotto, his immediate pupils and other artists make the church of Santa Croce in Florence one of the most impressive interiors in Italian art. Yet in spite of the attention focused on it, one of its principal chapels, which is of major significance in the history of Florentine Trecento painting, remains little appreciated and generally misunderstood. Situated in the transept of the church, beside the door to the sacristy, this chapel (Fig. 1), which is dedicated to the holy angels and once belonged to the Velluti family, has suffered in the shadows of its betterknown neighbours. Its stained glass window, pairing three archangels with iconographically appropriate mortals, is now in Giotto’s Bardi Chapel, and, until cleaned in 1981, its murals were badly obscured not only by grime but by heavy repainting. The condition of the Velluti murals, which on the left wall depict St. Michael’s Miracle at Mt. Gargano (Fig. 2), on the right the Fall of the Rebel Angels (Figs. 3–4) and SS. Mary Magdalene and Alexander Bishop of Fiesole 1 on the window wall no doubt accounts for the confusion among those 2 concerned with the chapel decoration. In photographs taken before the restoration the reason for the usual attribution of the murals to a follower of 1

A fragmentary inscription, “. . . MAG . . . LENA,” helps to identify the figure of the Magdalen, in any case easily recognizable in her hair shirt; another, faded but fortunately complete, “SCS ALEXANDER EPS FESVLANVS,” vouches for the identity of this seldom depicted saint. 2 For the chapel and its mural decoration see W. and E. Paatz, Die Kirchen von Florenz, v 1, 1955, pp. 547 and 565–6; C. Volpe, “Un momento di Giotto e il Maestro di Vicchio a Rimaggio,” Paragone, XIV, no. 157, 1963, pp. 304; J. Gardner, “The Early Decoration of Santa Croce in Florence,” Burlington Magazine, 1971, pp. 391–392; and for earlier

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1. View of the Velluti Chapel, Sta. Croce.

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2. Jacopo del Casentino (c. 1279–1349/58), St. Michael’s Miracle at Mt. Gargano, after 1321. Velluti chapel, Sta. Croce, Florence. Before restoration. 3. Jacopo del Casentino, The Fall of the Rebel Angels, after 1321. Velluti Chapel, Sta. Croce, Florence. Before restoration.

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4. The Fall of the Rebel Angels (detail). Before restoration.

Cimabue is apparent in such features as the angels’ jewel-encrusted garments, their multi-coloured wings, and especially the formation and modeling of most of the faces. But such characteristics, which suggest a date soon after 3 the transept chapels were built c. 1310, were due to a restorer ; cleaned (Fig. bibliography, E. Sindona, L’Opera completa di Cimabue, 1975, p. 119. For the stained glass, attributed to Jacopo del Casentino with little comment, see G. Marchini in Primo Rinascimento in Santa Croce, 1968, p. 55 and in Atti del I convegno sulle arti minori in Toscana (Arezzo, 11–15 Maggio 1971), 1973, p. 75. 3 An inscription, “GALILEO CHINI RESTAURO’ L’A. MDCCCIC,” testifies to a nineteenth-century restoration. In addition to repainting the narratives, Chini also provided

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5. The Fall of the Rebel Angels (detail). After restoration.

5), the murals display the style of a generation for whom Cimabue was no more than a memory. Indeed, this style, with its roots in the work of the Master of St. Cecilia (Fig. 6) and its similarities to Pacino di Bonaguida (Fig. 7), stands at a significant remove from Cimabue. The author of the Velluti murals may now be identified as the same important but neglected master Jacopo del Casentino to whom Marchini recently attributed the chapel’s stained glass (Figs. 16–18). Documented facts concerning this artist’s life are few. His date of birth is unknown and each with a new lower border, complete with little busts of angels as in the authentic bands along the sides and top; below the dado he mimicked the curiously archaic pattern found at this level on the altar wall. A full account of the actual condition of the murals must await the as-yet-unpublished results of the recent restoration.

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6. Master of St. Cecilia, Enthroned Madonna with Saints and Angels, Sta. Margherita a Montici.

7. Pacino di Bonaguida, Madonna and Child, S. Michele, Castello (Florence).

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8. Jacopo del Casentino, Arte della Lana Tabernacle (detail). Panel, 2.38 x 1.20 m. Palazzo del Arte della Lana, Florence.

9. Jacopo del Casentino, Cagnola Triptych. Uffizi, Florence.

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10. Jacopo del Casentino, St. Michael’s Miracle at Mt. Gargano (detail). After restoration.

that of his death uncertain, his full name is a mystery and his place of birth is undocumented. Only one of his pictures is signed and only two are dated, but the works associated with him are numerous and, as Richard Offner claimed, suggest a long career embracing virtually the entire first half of the 4 Trecento. The murals in the Velluti Chapel contain the stylistic elements characteristic of Jacopo del Casentino. Only in his work may we find the summary drawing, the heavy forms, and the distinctive shapes and proportions of the genial people who inhabit these paintings. The bold corkscrew curls framing the face, the long firm jaw, the broad flat cheeks, the full, often smirking lips, the long, strongly highlighted, aquiline nose, and the large, sometimes bulging eyes: these features, characteristic of the youthful, beardless heads in the murals, are recognizable in certain figures from the Arte della Lana Tabernacle (Fig. 8), attributed to Jacopo since the early sixteenth century, and from his only signed work the Cagnola Triptych (Fig. 9). Even though most of the heads in the Miracle at Mt. Gargano differ in type from those in the accompanying mural, they also appear in Jacopo’s repertoire. The coarse features of some of the male by-standers resemble those of St. Bernard in the Cagnola Triptych, while others in sharp profile (Fig. 10) are virtually 4 Until recently only one dated work by Jacopo, a Presentation in the Temple in Kansas City, dated 1330, was known, but now a fragmentary Virgin and Child Enthroned in Crespino sul Lamone near Marradi (between Florence and Faenza) has come to light. This picture is dated 1342 and was correctly attributed to Jacopo, on the photograph in the Berenson Archive at I Tatti, by M. Boskovits. For Jacopo’s life and works, see R. Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, section III, v. II, pts. I and II, 1930 and section III, v. VII, 1957.

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11. Jacopo del Casentino, S. Miniato Altarpiece (detail). S. Miniato al Monte, Florence.

identical to an angel in the same panel or to the donor in Jacopo’s S. Miniato Altarpiece (Fig. 11). Jacopo probably painted the Velluti murals at a relatively early stage in his career. Although his development is unclear, after c. 1330 his works 5 are remarkably eclectic. The Velluti murals, on the other hand, are less self-conscious. The strong formative connexions with the Master of the St. Cecilia and Pacino di Bonaguida tentatively suggest a date in the second or third decade of the Trecento. At first glance, the two murals differ so greatly in their contrasting types and settings as to account for the theory which has sometimes been advanced that different painters were involved in them and at different 5

Jacopo adopted Giottesque, Sienese, and Daddesque characteristics at will: compare Jacopo’s Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna, his Madonna and Child in the Pinacoteca Vaticana to Ugolino di Nerio’s Madonna and Child in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and his Coronation of the Virgin in Bern to Bernardo Daddi’s Coronation in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.

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times. But in reality the differences are superficial. Far from reflecting distinct ideas of two artists, they constitute an intentional contrast between the rival parts of a coherent whole. In spirit and structure they are fundamentally related. They depict two races, human and supernatural; and two worlds, earthly and celestial, but they result from a single vision. It is a vision alien to the idealism, drama, and monumentality of Giotto. Like Jacopo’s other works (Figs. 12–13), both murals reveal a turn of mind which is accustomed to thinking in two dimensions, and a corresponding delight in surface decoration. This is evident in a tendency to symmetry, to the silhouette, and to the significant frozen gesture. As narratives they seek to charm rather than to challenge; and they display a telegraphic

12. Jacopo del Casentino, S. Miniato Altarpiece.

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13. Jacopo del Casentino, S. Miniato Altarpiece (detail).

manner of narration that relies on the telling gesture or pose rather than on emotion. Eschewing drama, they relish narrative, so that tangible objects, whether they be demons in the air or plants on a mountainside, fill each painting almost corner to corner. In consequence no matter how violent the subject, each narrative is as playful and transparent as a marionette show. The Fall of the Rebel Angels (Fig. 14) takes place at the very edge of heaven. Under a field of now-dim stars the floor of heaven descends in concentric bands of deepening blue which is distinct from the dark pigment used for the rest of the background. As countless demons, swept off the edge and falling helplessly beyond the frame, fill the dark region below, St. Michael and an irresistible phalanx of angelic warriors prepare to strike the final blow. One foot trampling a devil, the Archangel slides up the retreating dragon’s spine and forces a band of beleaguered demons, waving spears and shrieking like an outnumbered tribe, to withdraw to a shrinking corner of heaven.

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14. Jacopo del Casentino, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (detail). After restoration.

Even though much of the surface, inevitably the portion painted largely a secco, no longer survives, it is clear that Jacopo was a painter who relished variety and detail. He shows zoomorphic devils in every conceivable pose, armed angels, no two alike, and a splendid dragon whose heterogeneous physical characteristics inspire curiosity rather than fear. His penchant for description and for pattern affects every aspect of the painting. Even movement is decorative. If in the work of Giotto movement results primarily through the actions of the figures, here it is less a function of action in space than of line on surface. This is especially apparent in the central figures of St. Michael and the dragon; these two are poised in eternal confrontation, an encounter that is enlivened largely by the exquisite calligraphy of their intertwining silhouettes. Despite very different iconography, the same principles apply to the Miracle at Mt. Gargano on the opposite wall. As in the Fall of the Rebel

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Angels, Jacopo treats the action diagrammatically while elaborating every part of it. Age, sex, and social standing are matters of note. From Gargano and his servants to the bishop and his flock (Fig. 15), each figure is unique. Old and young, rich and ragged, fat and wizened, bearded and smoothcheeked, tonsured and veiled — each element has its place in the narrative, both as illustration and as decoration. Jacopo’s attachment to the foreground plane is as strong in the Miracle at Mt. Gargano as in the Fall of the Rebel Angels, but because the scene takes place on earth, he tries to capture the paradoxical idea of vast distance within a shallow space. The placing and scale of his figures emphasize the mountain’s height. An unheroically small St. Michael points out the little bull sheltering near its peak to the crowd of worshippers massed below. Originally, numerous plants, now faded or lost, reduced the slope of the mountain to a minimum, making it appear even steeper than it does

15. Jacopo del Casentino, St. Michael’s Miracle at Mt. Gargano (detail). Before restoration.

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today. Despite their sometimes lively action, the actors also emphasize the foreground plane by their tendency to appear frontally or in profile. The crowd, though dense, appears flattened, and the archer, though facing out, seems to perform the remarkable feat of shooting at a target behind his back. In contrast to the work of Giotto, whose landscapes are subordinated to his figures, the setting dominates the actors, who become a part of it. Mood rather than drama is Jacopo’s aim. While a rabbit peers from the safety of his hole, flowers, trees, and grasses of every kind cover the holy mountain like so many notes in a scale. If the Fall of the Rebel Angels once coruscated with the unearthly shimmer of silver, the Miracle at Mt. Gargano danced to the soothing play of green. For a painter given to such seductive lyricism, violence is uncongenial and sentiment more natural than passion. As a result, in both murals, as in the S. Miniato Altarpiece (Figs. 12–13), the inherent violence of the legends is cancelled by the decorative effect of the whole. Despite different subjects the two Velluti murals are harmonized in an almost uncanny way; differences of composition and narration are systematically interrelated within a larger scheme which embraces the chapel as a whole. A semicircle controls the composition of the Fall of the Rebel Angels; within it, an inverted triangle advances the narrative and gives force to the Archangel’s impending thrust at the dragon. One sees precisely the opposite construction in the Miracle at Mt. Gargano. The dominant form in this case is a triangle, the mountain, and here the narrative follows the path of a buoyant arch that springs from the servant who follows the flight of Gargano’s arrow, through the trees and the mountaintop, to the kneeling women. The contrasts between the two designs even extend to the character and placing of the groups within them. In the group with Gargano a zigzag rhythm beginning and ending with the servants’ staves is contrasted with the curving pattern formed by the background behind their moral counterparts on the opposite wall, namely the dragon and devils. Surely it is no coincidence that each of these groups, both associated with sin, appear toward the entrance to the chapel — that is, away from the altar — whereas their moral betters, the profile group of the bishop and his faithful on the one side and the frontal group of the angels on the other, are presented in similar friezelike arrangements directly facing the altar. In each painting the moral conflict oscillates between these opposing groups and centres on the agents of divine justice — the bull in the earthly scene, St. Michael in the

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heavenly one. The altar is thereby identified as the source of divine grace both in the mimetic world of the paintings and in the actual space of the chapel. While such a narrative system in effect mechanizes action, it also clarifies the unifying theme of both narratives, that is, the sin of pride. The thirteenth-century writer Voragine, whose influential Golden Legend describes the two episodes at length, explains that Gargano, a great and wealthy man, lost a bull from one of his herds. Only after much searching did he and a band of his servants discover the bull at the summit of the mountain sharing Gargano’s name. Still angry with the animal for causing him so much trouble, Gargano shot a poisoned arrow at it, as if this arrogant gesture could somehow punish or be a lesson, but miraculously the arrow returned and struck him dead. After a three-day fast imposed by the local bishop upon the frightened townspeople, St. Michael appeared and explained (too late for Gargano to take heed) that the mighty Gargano had 6 trespassed upon sacred ground under his protection. On the subject of the Fall of the Rebel Angels Voragine writes: For when Lucifer sought to be equal to God, the Archangel Michael, standard-bearer of the heavenly host, came forward, and cast the rebels out of Heaven, imprisoning them in the dark regions of the air until the day of judgment. They are not permitted to dwell in Heaven, which is the upper region of the air, and is bright and pleasant, nor with us on earth, lest they molest us excessively. They abide therefore between Heaven and earth, that they may suffer when they look upward to the glory which they have lost, and may be tortured with envy when they look downward, and see men 7 ascending to the heights whence they themselves have fallen.

As designed by Jacopo del Casentino, the narratives in the Velluti Chapel do more than compare the arrogant acts of Gargano and Lucifer. By contrasting the upward strain of the earthly scene with the downward thrust of the other, they define the limits of the medieval cosmos as described by Voragine and define the proper spiritual relationship between man, who aspires to heaven through faith, and God, who elevates only the faithful to his kingdom. 6 The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, trans. and adapted by G. Ryan and H. Ripperger, 1969, p. 579. For the iconography of St. Michael’s legend see G. Kaftal, The Iconography of the Saints in Tuscan Painting, 1952, cols. 737–742. 7 Golden Legend, p. 583.

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In keeping with the chapel’s dedication, its stained glass window shows Gabriel and the Annunciate Virgin (Fig. 16), Michael and the Emperor Constantine (Fig. 18), Raphael and Tobias (Fig. 17). In the Trecento the task of designing and painting stained glass regularly fell to painters, since as Cennino Cennini noted dryly, glaziers 8 possessed ‘more skill than draftsmanship.’ The evidence of numerous trecento chapels, including several in S. Croce, indicates further that often a single artist contributed both the glass and mural decoration. This custom apparently prevailed in the Velluti Chapel; for the windows, previously

16. Jacopo del Casentino, Annunciation. Stained glass. Velluti Chapel, Sta. Croce, Florence.

17. Jacopo del Casentino, The Archangel Raphael and Tobias. Stained glass. Velluti Chapel, Sta. Croce, Florence.

8

Cennino Cennini, Il Libro dell’arte: The Craftsman’s Handbook, trans. by D. Thompson, Jr., 1933, p. 111.

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18. Jacopo del Casentino, St. Michael and the Emperor Constantine. Stained glass. Velluti Chapel, Sta. Croce, Florence.

19. Jacopo del Casentino, Arte della Lana Tabernacle (detail).

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20. Attributed to Pacino di Bonaguida. Stained glass. Sta. Croce, Florence.

21. Pacino di Bonaguida, St. Nicholas, Accademia, Florence.

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22. Pacino di Bonaguida, St. Procolus, Accademia, Florence.

23. Jacopo del Casentino, Crucifixion. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin

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24. Pacino di Bonaguida, Crucifixion, c. 1315-20. Accademia, Florence

attributed to Jacopo, display the same style as the murals. One may easily observe the close kinship between the heads of Michael, Raphael, and Tobias and the angels in Jacopo’s Arte della Lana Tabernacle (Fig. 19). Equally apparent, the relatively well-preserved figures of Gabriel and the Annunciate share with the mourning Madonna and St. John from the Oberlin Crucifixion (Fig. 23) the characteristically attenuated proportions, narrow sloping shoulders, and loosely fitting draperies of Jacopo’s standing figures. Significantly, the swaying posture and scalloped silhouette of the Madonna also bring to mind certain standing figures, especially the St. Luke, in Pacino di Bonaguida’s roughly contemporary Accademia Crucifixion (Fig. 24), whose partly obliterated date must have read either 1320 or, more likely, 9 1315. But the windows, no less than the murals, reveal Jacopo’s mind as

9 That the window, like the murals, is linked to Florentine art of the second and third decades of the Trecento, especially to the work of Pacino di Bonaguida, is suggested not only by the figures but even by their decorative enframement. The simple design of the

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25. Jacopo del Casentino, St. Michael, c. 1328. Acton Collection, Florence.

well as his hand. The armed and bearded Emperor Constantine, whose head is remarkably similar to that of St. John the Evangelist from the Arte della Lana Tabernacle, is perhaps the single most impressive figure from the Velluti window. Yet one is not moved by respect for his might or reverence for his age; rather, one responds to the painter’s characteristic enthusiasm for decorative effects, since the figure’s elaborate costume, embellished with feathers, leaves, fronds, and circles, became an excuse for Jacopo to indulge in the most spirited play of patterns. Velluti window’s borders, composed of repeated squares, each embellished with a schematized drawing of a leaf, is identical to the borders of the window from the Giugni Chapel of the Apostles, now in the Peruzzi Chapel (Fig. 20). Interestingly enough, this window is perhaps attributable to Pacino, for the figures of the apostles closely resemble the half-length saints from Pacino’s dismantled polyptych in the Florentine Accademia (Figs. 21–22), a work confidently dated to the 1320s. For Pacino’s Accademia Crucifixion and dismantled polyptych, see L. Marcucci, Gallerie Nazionali di Firenze: I Dipinto Toscani del secolo XIV, 1965, pp. 22–24.

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Like nearly all trecento chapels, the Velluti Chapel no longer preserves what was often the most important furnishing of such sacred places, its altarpiece. Given the enormous losses of works from the period, connecting a panel with its original location is a risky business and such attempts, when made without the aid of documentation, inscriptions, or heraldic evidence, are strictly speaking hypothetical. Yet in the case of the Velluti Chapel one picture, a finely preserved panel of the Archangel Michael in 10 the collection of Sir Harold Acton in Florence (Fig. 25), so completely satisfies the iconographic, physical, and stylistic considerations as to make its identification as the Velluti Altarpiece highly probable. The panel, still in its original frame, did not have wings or side panels; its size (131 x 63 cm.) was common for single-panel altarpieces in the early Trecento, and its shape, a gable with shoulders, did not appear with wings or side panels in pictures of 11 this size. The painting displays the characteristics of Jacopo’s manner at every turn: the ponderous forms, the vaporous shadows, the amiable spirit and the decorative effect of the whole. Of all Jacopo’s many works, the picture is closest to the Velluti murals and stained glass. St. Michael’s head, particularly the curving, softly shadowed jaw, brings to mind not only the Madonna from Jacopo’s Cagnola Triptych (Fig. 9) and the angels in the Velluti Fall of the Rebel Angels (Fig. 5), but, even more strongly, the heads of Raphael, Tobias, and Gabriel from the Velluti window (Figs. 16–18). Perhaps equally indicative is the slightly awkward arrangement of St. Michael’s limbs, parallel with the picture plane, which creates an oddly immobile, flattened effect reminiscent of the angelic warriors in the Velluti Fall of the Rebel Angels. Despite the volumetric and spatial potential of the archangel’s forms and pose, movement results less from action than from line. As in the Velluti murals, design controls narrative. In the Fall of the Rebel Angels St. Michael’s victory is imminent. In the panel it has been accomplished; but the decorative intent is similar in both. Every line of the dragon’s body in the mural expresses fear and tension; his tail and neck coil and twist over his arched back. In the panel every line of the monster’s expiring body grows limp as he sinks out of the picture and forever away from the starry orb he dared to covet. Despite the dramatic potential of the subject, movement is 10 Before entering the Acton Collection, the panel was formerly in the collections of Elia Volpi and Leopold Bengujat in the Palazzo Davanzati, Florence. 11 For single gabled panels, see E. Garrison, Italian Romanesque Panel Painting: An Illustrated Index, 1949, p. 78 and 154–6.

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divorced from action; in the panel, as in the mural, drama is secondary to the complex pattern composed by the figures’ silhouettes. In the mural a series of diagonal lines converging near St. Michael’s right foot propels the narrative; a similar device characterizes the panel, where a series of lines — St. Michael’s sword, shield, and legs — fans out from the moral heart of the image, the archangel’s avenging hand. The varied, almost playful colours betray the decorative character of the style in a way that can only be imagined for the murals. Wearing a uniform of soft colours, the warrior-angel brandishes a shield emblazoned with a red cross upon a shiny grey field, possibly tin, that is also used for the hilt and blade of his sword. His particoloured wings, the starry blue orb, and even the dragon, whose soft green body is fancifully encrusted with red and blue spots, must have been even more delightful against the original untarnished background, which is not gold but either silver or an economical substitute 12 for gold. Like the Velluti murals and window, the Acton St. Michael must date between the second and third decades of the century. Little time can have separated it from Bernardo Daddi’s exquisitely graceful St. Michael 13 at Crespina (Fig. 26), a picture that is convincingly dated before 1328. Iconographically the two panels depart from Florentine tradition both before and after. Whereas in other Florentine representations St. Michael, already victorious, stands quietly facing outwards, the slain dragon at his feet, Jacopo and Bernardo instead turned to the Sienese type illustrated by Ugolino di 14 Nerio. Yet the two Florentine versions are closest to each other, and while one cannot state with certainty which of the two was painted first, the dating 12 The background might be one of several things: silver leaf painted with a yellow glaze, known as ‘argento meccato’; tin leaf with a yellow glaze; or a silver base laminated with extremely thin gold foil, possibly to be identified as ‘oro di metà’. I am grateful to Erling Skaug for the preceding information. For further discussion about the different types of gilding used by trecento painters see E. Borsook, “Jacopo di Cione and the Guild Hall of Judges and Notaries in Florence,” Burlington Magazine, CXXIV, 1982, pp. 86–8; and L. Tintori, “ ‘Golden Tin’ in Sienese Murals of the Early Trecento,” Ibid. pp. 94–5. 13 R. Offner, “An Archangel by Bernardo Daddi,” International Studio, XCIII, 1929, pp. 21–26. 14 See the examples by the Master of the St. Francis Cycle at Assisi (the Funeral of St. Francis), the St. Cecilia Master (Triptych, Detroit Institute of Art), Giotto (Bologna Polyptych), and an anonymous late trecento Florentine (pilaster fresco, Orsanmichele, Florence). For Ugolino’s panel, in the Museo d’Arte Sacre, Grossetto, see B. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance; Central Italian and North Italian Schools, II, 1968, Fig. 42.

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26. Bernardo Daddi, St. Michael, before 1328. S. Michele, Crespina (Pisa).

of Daddi’s version before 1328 provides an approximate dating for the Acton picture as well. In iconography, style, and dating the Acton picture agrees with the Velluti murals and window. Fortunately, the chapel decoration may be dated more precisely than the stylistic evidence alone permits: Donato Velluti, in a well-known passage from his Cronica Domestica written between 1367–8, states that the chapel decoration was completed under the auspices of Monna Gemma de’ Velluti, and he implies that this work was undertaken after 1321.15 His assertion is not only consistent with the style but indeed also with the iconography of the decoration. One must remember that Velluti’s reference to the chapel appears in a section of the chronicle devoted both to the author’s stepgrandmother, Monna Gemma, and to her son Alessandro. Unlike some 15

La Cronica Domestica di Messer Donato Velluti, ed. by G. C. Sansoni, 1914, pp. 104–6.

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chroniclers, Velluti did more than record the memorable achievements and events of his relatives’ lives; he often described the physical appearance, personality, and character of those in living memory. So vivid are his details, so close are the principals to the chapel in S. Croce that one cannot help but draw conclusions about the patrons that may explain the commission in a way seldom possible for the Trecento. Monna Gemma de’Pulci married Filippo Velluti in 1296 and in the following year bore him a son, Alessandro. The chronicler Donato Velluti, Alessandro’s nephew, as a child knew him and remembered a tall handsome youth, strong, agile and brave. These qualities were not always nobly used, for he could be vexatious: he would often raise Donato, then still an infant, perilously high into the air merely to provoke the boy’s nurse. Apparently, this side of his personality was never tamed. After his father’s death, Alessandro inherited a sizeable fortune, but instead of preserving it he became a spendthrift and a ne’er-do-well. In Velluti’s eyes the fault lay with the youth’s doting mother, Monna Gemma, and apparently Lamberto, Donato’s father and Alessandro’s half-brother, agreed. As Alessandro’s senior by almost thirty years, Lamberto could be expected to take a paternal interest in the youth. He saw no solution but to separate Alessandro from his mother and to install him in the service of a friend and neighbour. It was on matters of business for his new guardian that Alessandro, in his early twenties, went to Palermo. There, instead of mending his irresponsible ways, he worsened, and according to the selfrighteous view of Velluti, for this he was punished. One December day in 1321, setting out to hunt birds, he discovered a nest of doves in a cistern. Unable to reach them, he fashioned a harness so that he might lower himself to them, but Alessandro’s ingenuity was greater than his technique, for the harness broke and the hapless youth, not yet twenty-five, fell to his death. Before departing on his ill-fated journey, Alessandro had drawn up a will. In it he named his mother sole beneficiary of his estate, but after Alessandro’s debts were settled, all that remained of his patrimony were some houses in Florence. At this point in her life, Monna Gemma, who had become a Franciscan tertiary upon her husband’s death, now left her house for good and, renting out all her new property, withdrew to S. Croce, doubtless to the residence of the pinzochere beside the church. Perhaps in part with the modest income from Alessandro’s bequest, she financed the completion of the family chapel in S. Croce.

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Although Velluti does not specify the work done at Monna Gemma’s behest, he must mean the decorative program undertaken by Jacopo del Casentino. The presence of the seldom-depicted St. Alexander, Bishop of Fiesole, identified by an inscription and shown with a male donor at his feet, can only refer to Monna Gemma’s son, Alessandro, and even the narratives may have been chosen with him in mind. While the Franciscans of S. Croce of course determined the liturgical function of the Velluti Chapel, 16 the specific choice of appropriate images was left up to the patron. Monna Gemma was free to choose from a lengthy list of subjects with angels, but her choice of two episodes from the legend of St. Michael, while appropriate to a chapel dedicated to all angels, may well have held special meaning for her. Though writing later in the Trecento, Giovanni Dominici doubtless expressed a common belief in arguing that the appropriateness of holy images varied with the particular situation. A young boy, he says, should be shown images of the Massacre of the Innocents, so «that he should fear arms and armed men,» while young girls should be inspired by such pictures as 17 the eleven thousand virgins, since “like calls to like.” The Miracle at Mt. Gargano in the Velluti Chapel may be read as a kind of parable addressed in retrospect to Alessandro’s life. Certainly, Monna Gemma, an overindulgent mother suddenly left childless in her advancing years, could have seen a parallel between the deaths of her ill-starred son and Gargano. Perhaps in the end even she, like Donato Velluti, acknowledged Alessandro’s willfulness as the cause of his undoing. Nor would it have been difficult for her to see the Fall of the Rebel Angels as another illustration of this literally fatal flaw. Retiring to S. Croce, Monna Gemma could live, until claimed by senility and finally by death in 1340, with the memory and lesson of Alessandro’s life. In this light, can the figure of St. Mary Magdalen, companion to 16 This point was recently stressed by I. Hueck, “Stifter und Patronatsrecht. Documente zu zwei Kapellen der Bardi,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, XX, 1967, pp. 267–8. In Donato Velluti’s day the chapel was commonly known as the chapel of St. Michael, but according to the earliest extant necrology of S. Croce, dated 1439, the Velluti and some of the other chapels in the transept were not devoted to a specific saint but rather to a saintly class; the Bardi di Vernio Chapel was dedicated to the Holy Confessors, the PulciBerardi Chapel to the Holy Martyrs, and the Velluti Chapel to the Holy Angels. See Florence, Archivio di Stato, MS 619, fol. Iv. 17 Giovanni Dominici, La Regola del governo di cura familiare, ed. by D. Salvi, 1860, pp. 131–2; translated in I. Origo, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1957, p. 234.

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St. Alexander, refer to Alessandro’s mother? The Magdalen may have been Monna Gemma’s patron saint since baptismal and legal names did not always coincide, but in any case she was an appropriate model. Monna Gemma may well have sought strength from the example of another who, at the end of her life, also renounced the world for a life of prayer. Although Donato Velluti does not say precisely when the chapel was decorated, given the agreement between his account and the style of the decoration, the murals may be connected with Alessandro’s death in December 1321. In all likelihood the chapel decoration was completed soon afterwards, as early as 1322. Thanks to Velluti, who knew both mother and son, who surely learned more about them from his father Lamberto, and who in 1348 himself commissioned a now-lost cancello or wrought-iron gate for this same chapel, the programme carried out by Jacopo del Casentino assumes special significance in the history of trecento patronage. Not only can one identify the patrons of the Velluti chapel, itself unusual, but one may go so far as to suggest the possible motivation behind the iconographic programme. For this reason alone the Velluti Chapel is of great historical interest; yet it is also of capital importance for understanding Jacopo del Casentino’s development. Because it can be dated to about 1322, it provides a basis for dating Jacopo’s early works and must, therefore, play a crucial role in any future attempt to unravel his chronology. Yet apart from the chapel’s critical value and qualities that make it Jacopo’s most impressive work, this long ignored corner of S. Croce has even wider historical importance, for it is the only monumental ensemble in fresco, tempera, and glass attributable to a non-Giottesque painter in early trecento Florence.

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III

An Early Fourteenth-Century Triptych in Memphis and Florentine Painting in the Glow of Duccio “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.” (Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2, Line 66)

I

RREFUTABLE in its logic and poignant in its childlike innocence, this simple thought sums up the naive incomprehension of Shakespeare’s young lovers, Romeo and Juliet. Their transgressive attraction goes against the given order of the society they chance to inhabit, and to everyone but themselves the fatal impossibility of their love is as plain as day. Yet, compelled by the irresistible emotion of inner nature, they remain steadfastly resistant, indeed, blind to the ancient destructive forces of an outer world whose uncivil injunctions effectively contravene even natural law. So unmindful are they of grudging history that they willingly sacrifice themselves to their desire without regard to the consequences of who and where they actually are. To their misfortune, theirs is a love conceivable only in a neverland without names. Ironically, each speaks the other’s given name over and again, as if enchanted by the sensuous music of its syllables and as if trying to conjure up the echo of a tangible delight, but each also remains oblivious of the undeniable reality of that other name, inherited and unchosen but equally significant and inseparably conjoined to the first: they are Romeo and Juliet, but, though they would have it otherwise, they are also Montague and Capulet. What’s in a name? An inescapable welter of ideas that makes up a history, and this holds true not only for the fictions of Shakespeare but also for the usually less tragic conjectures of connoisseurship. When a work of art acquires a name, that is, the name of a specific artist who is said to have created it, it thereby acquires more than

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1. Lippo di Benivieni, The Crucifixion with Scenes from the Passion and the Life of St. John the Baptist, ca. 1315–1320, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 61.201 (tempera on wood panel), 25” x 27”.

a mere label. It acquires an historical and human context. A name usually comes laden with associations that unavoidably shape the way we perceive and understand the thing it defines; thus, when accurate, a name can be a life-breathing gift to an otherwise centuries-distant, inanimate work of art. For much of its modern history a small fourteenth-century Italian Triptych depicting The Crucifixion with scenes from the Passion and the life of Saint John the Baptist (Fig. 1), now in the collection of The Brooks Museum, has enjoyed no more than a vague identity, much less a name, and undoubtedly this shadow-existence has been to its cost, for being nameless has deprived it of the attention that its high quality warrants and that the

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human identity of its maker might well have brought it. Since its earliest record in 1879 and even after arriving at the Brooks as a gift from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in 1958, the Triptych presented a puzzle to scholars of Italian painting. Was it Umbrian or Tuscan? If the latter, was it Sienese, Pistoian, or Florentine? If Florentine, was it Giottesque or related to the anonymous St. Cecilia Master? Was it painted at the turn of the fourteenth century or was it later, perhaps even so late as to anticipate the International Style and Ghiberti?1 In retrospect this zigzagging pattern of ideas, odd though it may seem, was not without sense, and even when disagreeing scholars made perceptive and ultimately valuable observations about the Triptych. After all, thinking and rethinking are but steps in the usually irregular course whereby scholarly investigation reaches consensus and, with luck, sometimes finds its bearings. Bit by bit, a preponderance of opinion has increasingly favored a Florentine origin and an early fourteenth-century date for the work. The key step came in 1957, when Federico Zeri, in a private written opinion to the Kress Foundation, compared the Triptych with two images of the Lamentation, one of them in the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard and the other now in a private collection (Fig. 2). Although his insight had no immediate effect on scholarly opinion about the Brooks Triptych, once the two Lamentations he cited were connected persuasively with a specific Florentine painter by the name of Lippo di Benivieni (something that took almost twenty-five years),2 it was only a matter of time before the painting in Memphis would follow in their train. In fact, a decade ago in 1986 Angelo Tartuferi placed the Brooks Triptych within the “close circle” of Lippo di Benivieni.3 In doing so, he acknowledged, as Zeri had already done, the similarities between the scene of the Lamentation in the Brooks Triptych and the two other Lamentations, which by then, in fact, were attributed to Lippo. 1

For earlier literature on the work see F. Shapley, Italian Paintings, XIII-XV Centuries, London, 1966, 31. 2 M. Ciardi Dupré, Il Maestro del Codice di San Giorgio e il Cardinale Jacopo Stefaneschi, Florence, 1981, p. 170. The attribution of the double-sided panel in the Fogg is the less persuasive of the two, and one wonders whether workshop participation is the cause in the less accomplished and less elaborately ornamented scene on the reverse: “Woman Behold Thy Son” between Saints Peter and James the Less. 3 A. Tartuferi, “Corpus of Florentine Painting: Nouveautés sur le Trecento,” Revue de 1’Art, no. 71 (1986), 44–45. Because I was unaware of Tartuferi’s article when I examined the work itself some years ago and thought of Lippo di Benivieni, my opinion, while not original, is independent, thereby giving our shared conclusion greater force.

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2. Lippo di Benivieni, Lamentation, ca. 1315, Private Collection, Milan (tempera on wood panel), 14 ½” x 10”.

As further evidence, he compared the figure of Saint John the Evangelist in the Memphis Crucifixion with the similarly gesturing figure of the same saint (Fig. 3) from a partially dispersed polyptych bearing Lippo’s name and enjoying an exceptionally unclouded history: not only was the polyptch by Lippo made for a branch of the prominent Albizzi family of Florence, almost certainly the altarpiece for their chapel in the now-destroyed church of San Pier Maggiore near Santa Croce, but it was still in the possession of their descendants, the Alessandri.4 Finally, Tartuferi rightly remarked the halo patterns, over whose fanciful designs the painter of the Memphis Triptych, like Lippo in his other accepted works, appears to have delighted (Fig. 4). While floral, geometric, and exotic calligraphy of pseudo-kufic designs 4 This branch of the prominent Albizzi took the name Alessandri around 1370. The Altarpiece remained on the Alessandri altar until the destruction of the church of San Pier Maggiore in 1784, after which it was apparently disassembled and certain parts lost

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3. Lippo di Benivieni, Albizzi-Alessandri Altarpiece, ca. 1315, Private Collection, Milan (tempera on wood panel), Mourning Virgin, 15 ¾” x8 ¼”; St. John the Evangelist, 15 ½” x 8 ¼”.

4. Detail of Fig. 1: St. John the Baptist Entering the Wilderness.

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against hatched backgrounds, derive from Sienese painting of Duccio’s time, such motifs also appear in early fourteenth-century Florentine panels, where, however, they seldom flourish with as much infectious variety and inventiveness as they do in the paintings of Lippo di Benivieni. The halo patterns provide strong evidence that, at the very least, the Brooks Triptych came out of the workshop of Lippo di Benivieni: four of the patterns, etched freehand into the haloes of different figures in the Brooks Triptych, match precisely the designs found in four small panels depicting two Prophets and two Angels from Lippo’s above-mentioned Altarpiece for San Pier Maggiore.5 Moreover, the individual features of the face as well as the attenuated, swaying silhouette of the Madonna in the Brooks Triptych correspond to the less elegantly designed but equally sharp-browed Virgin from the same Albizzi-Alessandri Altarpiece (Fig. 3). The numerous analogies with the latter work only strengthen the previously noted, though perhaps less immediately obvious, comparison between the standing figure of the mourning John the Evangelist in the Brooks Triptych and the figure of the same saint that once formed part of the Altarpiece. The accumulated parallels between the two works are striking and mutually reinforcing. In the end, the connections between the Brooks panel and the Albizzi-Alessandri Altarpiece are so close as to press the conclusion that the two works were painted by Lippo di Benivieni at about the same time, or, as I am inclined to believe, around 1315 for the Altarpiece and slightly later, between 1315 and 1320, for the painting in the Brooks. Indeed, the exquisite fineness of the craftsmanship in the central panel of the latter and the subtlety of the design

or destroyed. For the history see, R. Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, New York, 1956, sect. 3, vol. 6, 44–46. It is worth noting that the wife of Giotto’s pupil the painter Taddeo Gaddi was a member of the Albizzi family. Since painters’ lives were so intertwined by customs of kinship as well as professional association and amicizia, one wonders if this fact is significant coincidence. For a document dated 1366 and recording “Domina Francisca filia olim Albizzi Ormanni” as Taddeo Gaddi’s widow, see A. Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi: A Critical Reappraisal and a Catalogue Raisonné, Columbia (Missouri) and London, 1983, 263, doc. 133. 5 The pattern decorating the halo of the leftmost of the two figures standing at the far right of the Brooks Lamentation is also found in the halo of the Prophet Isaiah from the Albizzi-Alessandri Polyptych. The pattern in Saint Peter Martyr’s halo in the central panel depicting the Crucifixion in the Triptych matches that of the Prophet Daniel, while the pattern of the Magdalen’s halo in the Brooks Lamentation is repeated in the haloes of both of the two Angels from the same Polyptych.

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even in its wings, where the condition of the surface is considerably poorer6 and where the technique is less polished, indicate that the Triptych is largely autograph, that is, designed and, at least in the central panel, painted by Lippo di Benivieni himself. The Triptych appears to have been painted at a fully mature moment in the artist’s career, when Lippo was able to effect a exceptionally graceful synthesis of his Florentine sources and his Sienese inclinations. The attribution the Brooks Triptych to Lippo di Benivieni makes sense of the disparate influences observable in it, for Lippo was a painter of unusual complexity. Indeed, the erratic critical fortune of the Triptych parallels the even greater trouble scholars have had in defining this elusive painter’s art. The rarity of his surviving works has not made the task easy, for even including the production of his direct assistants and more remote circle, as well as recently attributed works that might be spurious, Lippo’s surviving oeuvre is relatively small.7 Nevertheless, this limited body of paintings, virtually all on panel, has given rise to a variety of ideas about who he was. According to one view he was from Umbria or, as some would have it, specifically from Perugia. Yet another faction claims him for Tuscany, but from which part of that creative heartland: Florence, Siena, or perhaps even Pistoia? Each city has had its advocate, but as with the Brooks Triptych itself, critical characterization of Lippo di Benivieni the painter has moved increasingly toward the view that he was a Florentine and that he was a close contemporary of Giotto, the presiding genius of the age and the motive force behind the dolce stil nuovo in Florentine Trecento painting. One could do no better than to repeat the brilliant assessment of Richard Offner, published forty years ago. Acknowledging that Lippo’s “painting is overlaid with mixed tendencies, derivations and influences,”

6

Although skillfully retouched, the surface of the work is rubbed throughout but more so in the wings, where the damage is worst along the extreme edges. One need only point out the presence of the halo of a second angel — but no head! — at the left edge of the Baptism. 7 For an expansive view of Lippo’s work, see M. Boskovits, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, Florence, 1984, sect. 3, vol. 9, 25–34 and 169–188. Following Volpe, Boskovits, perhaps justifiably, associates with Lippo works previously attributed by Offner to the Master of the De Filiciaia Cross, but elsewhere the group wants in distinctions that would account for the considerable variations in quality and style. For instance, to my eye, Wilkins’ classification of a Saint Christopher in Santa Maria Novella (pl. LXIa) to a master working around mid-century is more convincing than the claim in favor of a painter in Lippo’s circle.

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Offner suggested that Lippo was closest to the anonymous but highly influential Master of Saint Cecilia, “in whose studio he may have worked” and that he was descended ultimately from the tradition of Giotto’s teacher, Cimabue. Comparing Lippo’s figures to those of Giotto, Offner poetically and perceptively noted that the former’s “are gnawed by the labour of a tireless, unrelenting conscience. Such a race can claim but one immediate ancestry, and that is Cimabue’s troubled world in the Upper Church in Assisi, and the angels and prophets attending his two Madonnas in Florence and Assisi. There and there alone shall we discover our painter’s heads — heads provided with ostentatiously unforeshortened ears, and beetling, bristling brows, knitted in similar wrinkles by similar cares, there the tormented, explosive mood and the transitional action; there also, the articulated fingers and the bones of the metacarpus: all of them survivals that our painter’s period and a changed conception of representation conceal or disguise. These parallels attach our painter by deeper, more evident ties to his predecessor than any other Trecento Florentine, and make him besides more truly representative of a continuity from the Dugento to the Trecento than any other painter known to us.” Yet, Offner also observed something else: that Lippo’s art also “passed through the refining process of the Sienese influence: the works of Duccio and of his circle principally.”8 As Offner’s insight suggests, Lippo’s Triptych in The Brooks is clearly, indeed, profoundly Florentine in its iconography, which is not only responsive to the contemporary art of Giotto but also respectful of the Dugento tradition represented by Cimabue and his remarkable descendant, the still-anonymous Master of Saint Cecilia. The latter’s influence is evident in the Flagellation, where the sharply angular, even awkward silhouettes of Christ’s tormentors evokes the brutality of the action. Lippo similarly echoes the Master of Saint Cecilia in the oddly off-balance pose of the executioner in the Martyrdom of Saint John the Baptist, no less than in the colors of his dress, in which the combination of bright blood-red and a sky-blue seemingly touched by clouds recalls late Dugento illuminated manuscripts but which here somehow also suggests both the Baptist’s violent end and his ultimate spiritual victory. Yet, there is something extraordinarily fresh about the latter figure: the mellifluously harmonious interplay of his circular shield and the billowing, airy curves of his cloak, evoke a sense of spontaneous, fleeting movement that places the work in the century of Giotto. 8

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Offner, Corpus, sect. 3, vol. 6, vi.

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5. Giotto, Lamentation, after 1305, Arena Chapel, Padua, (fresco), 91” x 93”.

Giotto’s influence on Lippo is most obviously seen and felt in the Brooks Lamentation. As others have noted, the composition is a reduced and compressed variation of Giotto’s powerfully affecting scene from his great cycle in the Arena Chapel in Padua (Fig 5). Isolating the figures of Mary and Christ in the lower left, Lippo reversed the disposition and thrust of the hill, which in the context of his work not only serves to frame the two leading actors but also, as in Padua, boldly slices the scene in two. This sharp diagonal intensifies the emotion of the keening, brilliantly clad figure of the Magdalen, who punctuates its end and whose attitude is so different from the shocked immobility of the spent and lonely figure at Padua. The pathos of the scene, which in Giotto’s version depends upon too many subtleties to discuss here, survives in the meaningful poses and contrasting attitudes of Lippo’s figures, which are cast in a coarser but nonetheless ruggedly expressive treatment of form.

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The thoughtfulness of Lippo di Benivieni’s understanding of Giotto and the skill by which he conveys the story’s emotion are evident in the Brooks Lamentation but even more in another version, very close to it in style but finer in quality and psychological nuance (Fig. 2). Slightly larger and more vertical in format, the second version is also more richly embellished by a double border of incised patterns against an airy gold, where careening angels dissolve into wildly nervous shapes and carry the drama to the fieriest pitch of agitation. The vertical bands of the inner border descend from the nails of the cross and, with it, act as a frame within a frame. As in Giotto’ use of architecture, the device endows the drama with a kind of geometric clarity and emotional logic by leading the eye from the bloodtouched nails, instruments mystically restored to the cross, to the paired heads of the Madonna and Christ on the left and to that of the Magdalen on the right. Three distinct outcroppings of rock on the left parallel the three figures of John the Evangelist and the two women who bend over the sacrificed body. Caressing his face, the Virgin’s arm, in a device also found in Giotto’s composition in Padua but put to different use, seems to spring from the crook of Christ’s elbow. By means of this double entendre, the eye follows her arm to her son’s face but is also led by his arm to John and, in turn, to the Magdalen. Like Giotto, Lippo uses figures as a way of focusing attention, as in the way that the heads of two of the holy women frame the conjoined faces of the Madonna and Christ. Equally Giottesque is the persuasiveness of certain gestures. Particularly remarkable is the action of the woman at the far left, whose two hands are significantly juxtaposed and effectively contrasted, the one covering her mouth, the other raised, palm outward, in a gesture of disbelieving despair. It is a gesture carried to a more vehement, theatrical level by the angels above: each covers its face and seals its eyes with one hand but with the other points out to our eyes that upon which they themselves cannot bear to look. But in addition to two Florentine artistic currents, Lippo di Benivieni and the Brooks Triptych in particular are linked to two of the city’s most prominent institutions: the Baptistery and the church of Santa Maria Novella. Dedicated to the patron saint of Florence, the Baptistery of Saint John occupied a symbolic position at the religious and civic heart of the city, and Dante’s affectionately proprietary reference to it as “il mio bel San Giovanni” must have expressed the feelings of many Florentines. Santa Maria Novella was no less important as the chief Dominican house in the city, indeed, one of the greatest in Italy.

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The connections with the Baptistery are visibly evident in the left wing of the Brooks Triptych, which depicts three significant moments of passage in the Baptist’s life: his youthful retreat into the wilderness, from where he proclaimed the coming of the Messiah; his anointing of the Messiah by means of the ritual of baptism, when God the Father acknowledged Christ as his flesh; and his death, which was the price of his faith. Lippo’s compositions show more than a passing awareness of the same scenes depicted in the thirteenth-century mosaics of the Baptistery, and, one suspects, that the association must be direct and more than conventional, much less sentimental. In fact, a document dated February 1314 records that Lippo di Benivieni was entrusted with a commission of no small importance for the Baptistery itself, which, in the words of the document, should “greatly illuminate and delight the hearts and eyes of citizens and all other persons who look on it” (multum alluminant et delectant corda et oculos ciuium et singularum personarum aspicientium eas): he as master-in-chief (caput magister) and his assistants were to paint by January the following year a tabernacle enshrining a statue of the city’s heavenly advocate, John the Baptist, with scenes from the saint’s life.9 Although Lippo’s work, like the statue itself, is lost, one cannot help but think that he would have been inspired by the familiar and, therefore, perhaps readily comprehensible compositions directly visible in the mosaics of the dome above. And one cannot also help but think that the scenes in the Brooks Triptych reflect Lippo’s work for so prominent a building. That, in fact, they do is suggested by a detail in the Baptism. Echoed in the landscape, the gracefully sweeping movements that describe the Baptist, while not a feature of the mosaic image, anticipate Ghiberti’s figure from his first set of bronze doors for the Baptistery, on which he labored throughout the first quarter of the fifteenth century, that is, a century after Lippo’s historiated tabernacle. The latter, though deprived to our eyes, was still visible in the sixteenth century, when it made a tantalizing appearance in Giorgio Vasari’s otherwise muddled biography of Lippo, and it is tempting to hypothesize that, though separated by a century and by different audiences, Ghiberti’s figure as well as the one in the Brooks Triptych reflect a common source, namely, Lippo’s lost tabernacle for the Baptistery.

9

For the document, originally published by Milanesi, see Offner, Corpus, sect. 3, vol. 6,

29.

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If anything, the connections between Lippo di Benivieni and the conventual church of Santa Maria Novella are even more compelling. The presence of Saints Dominic and Peter Martyr, who stand at the outer edges of the central Crucifixion, convincingly indicate the Dominican sympathies of the work’s patron, but the figure of the Crucified Christ in the central panel evokes the example of Giotto’s over-life-size Crucifix (Fig. 6) that was made for that church. The volume and weight of the figure; the solid geometry of belly, thighs and chest; the fall of the head framed by a veil

6. Giotto, Crucifix, ca. 1290s, Sta. Maria Novella, Florence (tempera on wood panel), 215” x 159 ¾”.

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a hair; the gently curved fingers of the open palms: all have their origins in Giotto’s conception. Painted, as its recent conservation has shown, in an almost monochromatic technique that modeled the green underpaint with thin layers of creamy flesh, it substituted undeniable tangibility and uncompromising reality for the emotive physical contortions and elegant artifice of Cimabue’s earlier interpretation for Santa Croce. Produced, as most scholars now believe, in the last decade of the thirteenth century, Giotto’s Crucifix had an overwhelming and lasting impact on subsequent Florentine depictions of the subject, including Lippo’s version in the Brooks Triptych, but the latter, which is more attenuated and less emphatic than Giotto’s figure, also takes into account another Giotto: the painter of the Arena Chapel. The Crucified, like the Lamentation, is seen through the prism of the Padua. Unless one prefers to believe that Lippo somehow knew those distant works first-hand, one cannot help but wonder what paintings, now lost but in the style and perhaps as profound as those in the Arena Chapel, once existed for the painters Florence to see. In Santa Maria Novella, Lippo di Benivieni would have seen not only Giotto’s Crucifix, which must be counted the greatest painted cross of the thirteenth century, but also that century’s greatest Madonna, a panel of overwhelming beauty and originality: the Rucellai Madonna (Fig. 7), which was commissioned on April 15, 1285 by the lay confraternity of the Società dei Laudesi della Vergine of Santa Maria Novella from the leading master of the day, Duccio di Buoninsegna, who was the Florentine Cimabue’s chief rival and who, rather than Florentine, was Sienese. Duccio’s colossal panel, which rises nearly fifteen feet height (14’ 9 1/8” x 9’ 6 1/8”) and whose beauty and daring surpasses anything in Cimabue’s surviving work, doubtless offered inspiration to the discerning mind of an artist like Giotto. Duccio’s vision of the Heavenly queen descending from on high was the most prominent, though hardly the only, example of a long-underrated Sienese artistic presence in Florence. Little wonder that Florentine patrons responded to Sienese painting of the day and little wonder, to repeat Offner’s words again, that Lippo’s art “passed through the refining process of the Sienese influence: the works of Duccio and of his circle principally.”10 10

Noting the tendency of recent criticism to underestimate or ignore the Sienese influence in Lippo’s art, M. Boskovits (Corpus, sect. 3, vol. 9, 27) rightly seconded Offner’s assessment. The Importance of Sienese painting and in particular the Rucellai Madonna is also stressed by H. Maginnis, who makes the observation that Duccio suggests the notion of

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7. Duccio, Rucellai Madonna, 1285, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (tempera on wood panel), 177 ½” x 114 1/8”.

Although Duccio’s influence is not obvious in the Brooks Triptych, it is unmistakably present in a fragmentary panel (Fig. 8) now in New York. Although the faces of the figures are repainted, the insouciant calligraphy of their golden hems is derived from Duccio’s great example. Moreover, the size of the New York Madonna suggests that it was probably made, like the Rucellai Madonna, for a confraternity. Although drastically cut down on all sides, the panel originally must have measured over three meters high, and thus would have rivalled not only Duccio’s Madonna but also those by Cimabue for Santa Trinita (11’ 7” x 7’ 4”) and Giotto for Ognissanti (10’ 8” x 6’ a heavenly descent, in “Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna and the Origins of Florentine Painting,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 123, 1994, 147–164.

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8 1/4”), which were probably also made for confraternities.11 Its confraternal function is suggested not only by its size but also by its iconography. The words of a famous medieval hymn to the Virgin are written on the wide border of the brocade hanging behind the holy couple: “Ave maris stella / Dei Mater alma / Atque semper virgo / (Felix coeli porta)” (Hail, Star of Ocean, / Child Divine who barest, / Mother, Ever-Virgin, / Heaven’s Portal fairest). Doubtless sung by the group that worshipped before her, the hymn repeats one of the Virgin’s many epithets and accounts for the eight-pointed stars that decorate her halo. If the hymn extols the Virgin’s role in guiding humanity across the troubled waters of life’s journey to the safe port of eternal salvation, the painting also stresses the vehicle by which salvation is won, the mystery of the Incarnation and the mystery of Christ’s sacrifice. The dove 8. Lippo di Benivieni, released by the hands of God, like Madonna, ca. 1300-1310 (?), the initial words of the hymn, recalls The Metropolitan Museum of Art, images of the Annunciation, as does, Lehman Collection, 63.203, New York perhaps, the Virgin’s gesture, while (tempera on wood panel), the pomegranate in Christ’s hand 67 1/3” x 34”. symbolizes his death, which, as in the Eucharist, is thereby mystically associated with his birth. But Lippo’s appreciation of Duccio’s example and his understanding of the spiritual mentality behind the latter’s Rucellai Madonna are not surprising. According to a document dated 1316 and until recently 11

Although Cimabue’s panel for Santa Trinita and Giotto’s for Ognissanti are usually thought to have stood on the high altars of their respective churches, the evidence of each

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overlooked by art historians, a painter by the name of Lippo — almost certainly our Lippo — was not only a member but even an officer of the confraternity of the Laudesi of Santa Maria Novella. Thus, Lippo di Benivieni was more than familiar with Duccio’s Madonna: he literally worshipped and sang before it, and as an active painter as early as 1296, he may well have known the genius who painted it, Duccio himself.12 Who better than Lippo to paint a work inspired, both in its form and function, by the Rucellai Madonna? In contrast to the Rucellai and New York Madonnas, however, the Brooks Triptych must have been intended for individual, rather than public spiritual exercise. Small, though hardly small enough to be casually portable, it probably occupied a specific, more or less fixed place in a cell or room. Drawing on both Giotto’s cross and Duccio’s Madonna from the same church, Lippo reveals in the Brooks Triptych an understanding of the mentality of private devotion. The document of 1316, in fact, records Lippo as producing works for the Laudesi, and even if the Brooks Triptych, whose style agrees with such a dating, was not one of those works, it is easy to imagine that a member of the confraternity, wanting such a work, might naturally have turned to his lay brother Lippo di Benivieni. The central image recreates the death

panel’s similar form, as Belting and Maginnis point out, favors their having served a function similar to Duccio’s panel for Santa Maria Novella, that is, for lay confraternal worship. See Maginnis, 1994, 164 n. 27 and H. Belting, Bild und Kult, Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst, Munich, 1990, 433–45. 12 Boskovits, Corpus, 26–27. Lippo’s entry into the confraternity of the Laudesi may have been paved by other members of his family. Could another painter by the name of Benivieni di Chiarino, who served as an officer of the company in 1314, have been Lippo’s father? Given Lippo’s close derivation from the Master of Saint Cecilia, might Benivieni di Chiarino be identified as that anonymous painter? In this regard, one ought to keep in mind that Wilkins persuasively attributed most of the murals in the Rucellai Chapel to the Master of Saint Cecilia, working around ca. 1305–10. Moreover, the contract of commission for Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna in 1285 records that the confraternity of the Laudesi appointed a painter (possibly Lippo’s uncle, as Boskovits suggests) by the name of Dino son of the late Benivieni and from the parish of Santa Maria Novella, to act as one of the supervisors of the work (not as a clerk and not, as Boskovits doubtless inadvertly suggests, for Duccio’s Maestà for the Cathedral of Siena. For the document of 1296, which is the earliest notice to mention Lippo and which records him as taking on an apprentice for three years from February 20th of that year, see Offner, Corpus, sect. 3, vol. 6, 29. For the Master of Saint Cecilia’s murals in the Rucellai Chapel of Saint Catherine, see Boskovits, Corpus, 1984, 133–134 (with earlier bibliography).

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of Christ not as an historical event but as a timeless reality. Its setting is a landscape of the imagination, and its aim is not so much to stir an emotional recreation of the event as to stimulate contemplation of its significance. While the figures, particularly the Virgin and John, manifest grief in their faces, their restrained gestures, paradoxically poised between immobility and spontaneity, are at once expository yet natural. The four standing figures, which are symmetrically disposed along the foreground like columns, somehow stir the eye upward toward the center and the body suspended above. Diminishing any suggestion of spatial depth, they focus attention on the image of the Crucified who rises from their midst, as in a vision. Isolated against a plain field of gold, his cross lacking even the usual superscription, and his figure, particularly his head, slightly larger than those of the figures below, Christ is projected on a different, more remote, mystical level. The whole character of the presentation elevates him to the realm of ideas, rather than the immediate reality of earthly events. In this context, the figure of the Magdalen, whose rapt gaze is given visible direction by the line of the angled footrest, embraces the cross in such a way as to seem an extension of it and of Christ’s body. Her golden hair, though now faintly visible, flows down her back like waves of water, and her robe almost suggests a fantastically copious river of blood issuing from the otherwise almost bloodless body. Although the three vertically disposed scenes in each wing are arranged in descending order according to the chronology of the life they depict, they are also selected and designed with the intention that the worshipper read them horizontally, that is, as typological parallels across time and space. Thus, the wilderness into which the youthful Baptist retreats on the left parallels the darker, nocturnal landscape of Gethsemane on the right. In the trials of the wilderness the Baptist encounters the Eucharistic lamb carrying a white banner inscribed with a red cross, and echoing the Eucharistic implications of that detail, Christ in the garden, feeling the weakness of his fleshly body in a moment of doubt, begs his heavenly father, “if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” The Baptism is the central moment in the Baptist’s life, but the way its composition and its colors mirror the Flagellation suggests a parallel between the water that is the symbol of death and rebirth in the former and the blood that is the sign of death and future resurrection in the latter. Finally, the death of the Baptist is set against the death of Christ. In this scene, as indeed throughout the Triptych, iconographical connections are reinforced by visual analogies: John’s body mirrors that of the dark-robed holy woman who holds Christ’s right hand;

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the executioner’s shield corresponds to a point that marks the confronted faces of Mary and Christ in the Lamentation; and the executioner’s upraised arm and sword in part echo the lines of the cross on the right. In moving from one wing to the other and from one analogy to another, the worshipper’s eye repeatedly crisscrosses the magnified body of Christ in the central panel, never forgetting its crucial place as the axis of the sacred mystery of salvation and offering a visual parallel to the ritual repetition of his name, Iesu, in certain devotional hymns and prayers. The iconic treatment of the central panel and the Eucharistic references in the accompanying wings, take on an even greater meaning in light of the Dominicans’ special devotion to the feast of the Corpus Christi, that is, the mystery of the real presence of Christ in the host. The feast, which was initiated in the thirteenth century and enjoyed popularity throughout Europe, was accompanied by a procession, still enacted today and still powerful enough to move those who witness it. In Florence the procession, in which the sanctified host was carried through the thronging streets of the city, began at the church of Santa Maria Novella and, after winding its way through every quarter, ended at the Cathedral and its Baptistery, the ancient spiritual heart of the commune as a whole and where Lippo’s painted tabernacle once stood. It is easy to imagine Lippo participating in this procession that began and ended at two buildings undeniably significant in his life and career. Of his private life, we have no more than a glimmer of light from documents and from what is suggested by the ideals of confraternal worship, but as a painter Lippo di Benivieni was, as Boskovits justly claims, “undoubtedly one of the major personalities of Florentine Trecento painting.”13 And his Triptych in the Brooks is not only a rare and remarkable example of the especially subtle character of his art, but also offers concrete evidence of his intimate connections with the Dominican movement. The depth and importance of the Brooks Triptych has always been present in it, if not always readily visible or comprehensible through the veils of time and misunderstanding, but how much more meaningful a thing that small object becomes when glimpsed through the lens of its original context and the life of its original maker, that painter with the unfamiliar name of Lippo di Benivieni. What’s in a name? Sometimes, nothing less than the pulse and breath of art.

13

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IV

The Legend of Giotto’s Wit and the Arena Chapel

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EW periods in Western history are more immediately synonymous with calamity and woe than the fourteenth century in Italy. War, hunger, pestilence, and death, singly and in concert, time and again, swiftly and to stay, rode into the peninsula and drained it of life. The fear, anguish, and pain that they left behind naturally color our perception of the age, but even the “Century of the Black Death” preserved that abiding and profoundly human restorative, the impulse to smile. Although such themes as Original Sin, Christian Sacrifice, and Final Judgment offered painters little invitation to follow the comic muse, the Christian story had its less somber moments, which, to a subtle interpreter, presented a world of potential. For writers, who more often dealt with secular subjects, the opportunities for humor were greater, and it is above all in the secular and dramatic literature of the day that one gains insight into the character and place of the comic in fourteenth-century experience. Not only do these sources show that medieval man laughed, but that laughter penetrated every level and every sphere of society. After a distance of more than seven centuries, this is not easily apprehensible among surviving works of Italian painting, but one great cycle, Giotto’s murals in the Arena Chapel, presents characters and situations that are, in a variety of ways, intentionally comic. Far from threatening Giotto’s serious purpose, they magnify it.1 1 Comedy has always been associated with theater or literature and hardly at all with painting. To theater belong Aristophanes, Shakespeare, and Molière. To theater, too, in a way, belong such modern forms as the silent film and the comic strip, which usually use works and images in combination. But take away the words from a play and one does not always take away what is comic. Insofar as a representational painter can describe a thing or a character or a dramatic situation, his work can contain intentionally comic elements. To identify, much

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Humor is a vital element in the work of the Florentine writers Giovanni Boccaccio and Franco Sacchetti. The pages of the Decameron, written around 1350, and the Trecentonovelle, written around 1390, fairly bristle with witticisms, jokes, and vulgarities that are recounted in stories encompassing the whole of medieval society, not excluding painters or their frequent patrons, churchmen from lowly friars to popes.2 Not only was the clergy apparently capable of appreciating humor that can still make us blush, but churches themselves were not always places of grave solemnity. Certainly the sanctity of God’s House hardly restrained a pair of peripatetic friars who found mischief impossible to resist when, working in tandem, they managed to move a simple congregation to tears by delivering an impassioned eulogy for a man they had never met.3 Did the All-Seeing, we wonder, shake his paternal head at such irreverence? If so, perhaps he smiled on the occasion of a learned theologian’s eagerly awaited sermon in Sta. Croce in Florence: Sacchetti, who claims to have been present, recounts how, in the course of expounding on his theme, the nature of Christ, the good preacher grew more and more agitated until, asking, “What is the face of Christ like?,” he turned to an image of the Savior and answered “It’s not like that Holy Face over there; if Christ looked like that, I’d split a gut!” (“Non è fatta come la faccia del Volto Santo che è colà, che ben ci vegno a crepare, se Christo fu così fatto!”) Hearing this confession, the congregation, which had perhaps expected a more conventional argument, “began to laugh, and laughed and laughed, so much that for a good while neither could the said Master speak nor others hear.”4

less to analyze such elements, however, poses semantic problems. The available language of criticism is a borrowed and not always adequate thing, more appropriate to words, whether spoken or written, than to images. Certain forms of humor, such as sarcasm, which depends on vocal inflection and tone, are impossible in painting. Others, such as irony, satire, parody, derision, and wit, while within the painter’s grasp, can only be described and interpreted with terms drawn from literature. This language applies to pictures only in an approximate way. 2 No less a pope than Boniface VIII, immortalized by Arnolfo’s statue in the Florentine Opera del Duomo, was won over in an episode recounted by Sacchetti, in which (to give the title), “Uno cavaliero di Francia, essendo piccolo e grasso, andando per ambasciadore innanzi a papa Bonifazio, nell’inginocchiare gli vien fatto un peto, e con un bel motto ramenda il difetto.” See F. Sacchetti, Il Trecentonovelle, ed. A. Lanza, Florence, 1984, Novella XXIX. 3 Trecentonovelle, Novella XXII. 4 Trecentonovelle, LXXIII. The translation is my own. Sacchetti’s story is based on actuality. Recalling both the Maestro Niccola of the Novella and his sermon, Sacchetti discusses, in a letter, the danger that ineptitude could pose to piety. Agreeing with the

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Such a world had a place for the jokes, antics, pratfalls, put-downs, double-entendres, tricks, deceptions, impersonations, and teasing of painters. It had a place for Buonamico Buffalmacco. Well might Boccaccio and Sacchetti remember a man who had the audacity to help convince a simple colleague to believe himself invisible on one occasion5 and to believe himself pregnant on another.6 Clearly, this Buffalmacco must have been a smooth talker, but he is remembered above all as a practical joker. Sacchetti, and later Giorgio Vasari, in his life of the painter, relate that even as a youth apprenticed to Andrea Tafo, Buffalmacco was capable of devilish jests. Disliking Tafo’s habit of rising to work before dawn, for example, he decided to give his master a lesson that would make learning the art of painting more convenient: he outfitted enormous beetles with lighted candles and at the hour of Tafo’s rising set these flickering creatures loose in the teacher’s room, a trick that sent the poor man trembling under the covers. By convincing him that the “devils” he saw would bother him only at night, Buffalmacco spent his student days on a more leisurely schedule.7 Buffalmacco and his irrepressible friends, Bruno and Calandrino (whose simple-mindedness became proverbial: far Calandrino is to sell someone the Brooklyn Bridge), romp through one prank after another, some, such as one in which Calandrino is tricked into eating glazed dog droppings, too vulgar to repeat.8 Sometimes these painters’ barbs stung even the most powerful patrons. On one occasion, Buffalmacco was commissioned by the Perugians to embellish the town square with an image of their patron Sant’Ercolano. Sacchetti and later Vasari, who repeated the story, write that the painter had

preacher, Sacchetti believed that Christ “fu il più bello e ’1 meglio proporzionato corpo, che mai fosse, e non ebbe gli occhi travolti nè spaventati.” For Sacchetti’s letter, see Trecentonovelle, Florence, 1724, 225–30. A painter’s clumsiness certainly made a ready target for the verbal darts of the late 15th-century poet Strazzola, who lampooned the mysterious Venetian, Ombrone, for painting a Christ so ugly that it could lament: So those who see me laugh and do not pray,/Making game of my ill-formed effigy,/Which wipes out reverence among the people.” Quoted from C. Gilbert, ed., Italian Art: 1400–1500 (Sources and Documents in the History of Art), Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1980, 194–95. 5 G. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. V. Branca, Florence, 1951–52, VIII, 3. 6 Decameron, IX, 3. 7 Trecentonovelle, Novella CXCI; G. Vasari, Le vite dé più eccelenti pittori scultori e architettori, nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. R. Bettarini and P. Barocchi, Florence, n.d., 161–63. 8 Decameron, VIII, 6.

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worked less than a fortnight when one local after another began pestering him to finish. At length, exasperated by all the carping, he muttered to himself, “What the devil! These people are all crazy, so I’ll paint to suit their madness.” (“Che diavolo è questo? Costoro sono tutti pazzi, E io dipignerò secondo la loro pazzia.”) Logic argued that the patron of lunatics could hardly wear the laurel of poets or the gold of kings, so he crowned the holy saint with a slimy tiara of fish.9 Precisely this kind of sensibility and inventiveness, if not license, might have helped Buffalmacco’s boon companion Bruno to paint a fantastic battle between cats and rats.10 Such tales, first recorded by near-contemporaries, are perhaps more than amusing literary fictions.11 A tenth-century Byzantine text recounts the seemingly improbable story of the battle of cats and mice, and this moralizing subject was in fact also taken up by painters: an eleventh-century Austrian fresco — located in a church — shows resourceful felines wearing shields, brandishing swords, or threatening with bows and arrows as they storm a castle defended by equally human-handed rodents; and in 1468 the Florentine merchant and chronicler Benedetto Dei, writing from Paris to his brother in Florence, mentions having bought “a great storied painted paper, about twelve feet or so, which had the battle of the mice and the cats, a pleasant thing to see, and a bargain.”12 9 Trecentonovelle, Novella CLXIX. Also see Novella CLXI: this story, which involves Buffalmacco and the Bishop of Arezzo’s pet ape, considered the relationship between painter and patron. By means of two pranks, one by the animal on Buffalmacco, then another by the painter on his patron, the story contrasts the mindless mimicry of the animal with the reasoned imitation of the artist and further makes the point that, while the patron is master, the artist is more than a pet. In other words, the painter, like Stefano, may have been nature’s ape, but he was nobody’s monkey. 10 Decameron, VIII, 9. See the thorough discussion in P. Watson, “The Cement of Fiction: Giovanni Boccaccio and the Painters of Florence,” Modern Language Notes, XCIX, 1984, 43–64, esp. 52–55; and the ingenious reading of this story in V. Kirkham, “Painters at Play on the Judgment Day (Decameron VIII, 9).” Studi sul Boccaccio, XIV, 1983–84, 256–77, Kirkham connects this story to the great mural of the Last Judgment in the Camposanto of Pisa, which is now given, in my view wrongly, to Buffalmacco. For the mural and for Buffalmacco, see L. Bellosi, Buffalmacco e il trionfo della morte, Florence, 1974, but also M. Meiss, Francesco Traini, ed. H. Maginnis, Washington, D.C., 1983. 11 The reader who believes, as I do, that these stories may contain some truth will want to keep in mind that Boccaccio was also aware and, to a degree, influenced by classical literary precedents. See Watson (as in n. 10). 12 O. Demus, Romanesque Mural Painting, New York, 1968, 629–30 and fig. 293. The theme may have had wider currency than one at first might think; according to Demus, the

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Unfortunately, no matter how real the painters or their subjects, the connection between the stories of Boccaccio and Sacchetti and the art of Bruno and Buffalmacco must remain a matter of speculation, because we know next to nothing about these painters’ works. However, the Decameron and the Trecentonovelle do mention another artist whose work survives: Giotto. The personality of Giotto, as presented by these writers, is very different from that of Bruno, Calandrino, and the arch-prankster of the group, Buffalmacco, for unlike them, Giotto is never a buffoon: he is a wit, as much a master of the pungent retort as he is a master of painting.13 Boccaccio conveys this clearly in the only story about Giotto included in the Decameron. There, one reads that Giotto and Forese da Rabatta, a brilliant jurist, were once making their way back to Florence after a day in the countryside when they were caught in a thunderstorm. Borrowing two old cloaks and two worn-out hats from a peasant, they continued in spite of the rain, but by the time the sky had cleared they were thoroughly soaked and covered with mud as well. With the rain at an end, Forese, who at his best was no Apollo, took a good look at his companion and, Boccaccio writes: The sight of him so disreputable, ill dressed, and in that predicament, tickled his sense of humor, and without considering his own plight laughed aloud saying: “Ha! Ha! Giotto! If a stranger who had never cast eyes on you before, were suddenly to meet you in this condition, do you suppose he would take you to be the finest painter in the world, as indeed you are?” Katomyomachia of Theodorus Prodromos differs on essential points from the mural in the Johanneskapelle at Pürgg and, therefore, was probably not the text for it. One might also note the famous detail of two rats astride cats who in turn are worrying two more rats in the oft-illustrated XPI page from the Book of Kells, Trinity College, Dublin. For Dei’s letter, see Gilbert (as in n. 4), 182. 13 The notion of Giotto’s wit was well enough established by the late Trecento that in a 1376 commentary on the Divine Comedy Benvenuto da Imola even ascribed to Giotto an elegant Latin pun: asked why he who created such beauty with his hand also produced such ugly children, the painter, according to Benvenuto, retorted, “Quia pingo de die, sed fingo de nocte.” The anecdote is manifestly untrue, for Benvenuto borrowed it from his friend Petrarch who, following Macrobius, ascribed it to the ancient painter Mallius, but it illustrates how 14th-century humanists saw Giotto. This and the many other anecdotes concerning Giotto in the works of writers from Dante to Vasari are rehearsed by E. Falaschi, “Giotto: The Literary Legend,” Italian Studies, XXVII, 1972, 1–27. The ancient topos of the witty artist of course persisted, but it may have been summoned up on occasion to support a truth. The case of Donatello is instructive. His word play is recorded not only in a story — perhaps entirely invented — by Poggio Bracciolini, but also in a letter — usually a more credible document. See Gilbert (as in n. 4), 170–71.

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66 “Perhaps he would,” replied Giotto readily, “if when he saw you, he had the faintest suspicion that you had ever learned your A B C.”14

With that, the nimble Forese was in the unfamiliar position of being hoisted with his own petard. Even when indulging in a common practical joke, Giotto, as presented in one of Sacchetti’s two stories about the painter, impresses us with his ingegno. Sacchetti’s story, which Vasari quoted in toto, concerns a shield that Giotto was once asked to decorate. Although the job was smaller than his usual work and unworthy of him, he might not have given it a thought had his patron been of noble birth. However, the man was a rube and neither appreciated Giotto nor knew himself, because he wanted the shield painted with a coat-of-arms as if he were a king. Giotto accepted the commission but gave the man more than he asked. Playing on the word “arms,” in the sense of weaponry, Giotto derided the man’s foolish pretension by painting his shield with all kinds of military instruments, armor, and hardware.15 But the most famous illustration of painterly wit is the story of Giotto’s “O.” Its fame is due to Vasari, if not its invention. Four biting lines attributed to Burchiello already have the tenor of proverb: “Al tuo goffo buffon darò del macco,/ Che più che l’O di Giotto mi par tondo,/ E da qui innanzi più non gli rispondo/ Per non gittar le margarite al ciacco. . . .” (“I’ll serve mere mush to that fat buffoon, who’s more tondo than Giotto’s O; and from now on I’ll ignore him: why throw pearls before swine?”) Seizing the pun on tondo as round or in relief and tondo as empty-headed, Vasari fashioned a typically elegant and pointed anecdote to illustrate the difference between good taste and ignorance. His story goes that, hearing of Giotto’s fame, the Pope sent one of his courtiers to seek him out. After stopping first in Siena and collecting drawings by painters there, the papal investigator arrived at Giotto’s shop and asked the master for some proof of his skill. Gracious even when another might have been disdainful, Giotto took a sheet of paper and, with one swift, unbroken movement of his wrist, drew a perfect circle.

14 Decameron, VI, 5. The above translation is taken from the edition by F. Winwar (The Modern Library), New York, 1950. Boccaccio notes that Forese could have passed for one of the Baronci (see above and n. 21). The next story begins: “Ridevano ancora le donne della bella e presta risposta di Giotto .” For a recent attempt to see Giotto’s country walk in terms of the topos of deceptio, see P. Stewart, “Giotto e la rinascita della pittura. ‘Decameron’ VI. 5,” Yearbook of Italian Studies, V, 1983, 22–34. 15 Trecentonovelle, Novella LXIII; Vasari (as in n. 7). II, 120–21.

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Confronted with what was after all a simple tondo, the courier began to think the affair was taking the shape of an insolent joke and indignantly asked if that were all Giotto meant the Holy Father to have. More than enough, Giotto replied with an ironic smile (“ghignando”). When this wingless Mercury recounted all to the Pope only to see His Holiness stupefied by Giotto’s skill, his indignation must have quickly melted into shame. To use a term by which Vasari evokes both Burchiello and Boccaccio, the courtier was a man of “grossa pasta,” a noodle-brain. How right he was to suspect Giotto of tacking a tail to his seat: that little mark was both a dextrous gesture of manual ability and a deft characterization of the fool who ran the errand.16 The Giotto found in Boccaccio, who was twenty-four at the time of the painter’s death in 1337, in Sacchetti and in others such as Petrarch who helped perpetuate his persona, and in Vasari, who did much to popularize it, is a literary figure, a fiction. Lacking a different kind of evidence, we cannot be sure that the literary Giotto accurately reflects the historical one: we are left with a legend. Only when we turn to the painter’s work — that is, to the painter himself — does the legend become more intriguing: the pictures in the Arena Chapel suggest that the stories told about Giotto, while perhaps not historically true, are at least rhetorically true. A sustained and manyshaded thread of humor runs through portions of the Arena Chapel and helps to make up the fabric of Giotto’s epic cycle. Its presence enlarges our understanding of the painter as well as the work: it bears witness to a side of Giotto’s artistic personality that resembles the legendary figure developed in the writings of Boccaccio, Sacchetti, and Vasari. The broadest characterizations in the Arena Chapel are the clownish figures of Stultitia, or Folly, and the wine steward in the Wedding at Cana.17 Their appearance is so odd that even today, one suspects, they could not

16 For the Burchiellian sonnet, “Contro al Cancelliere della Signoria,” see Il Burchiello e i Burchielleschi, ed. E. Giovanetti, Milan, 1923, 230. The above translation is my own. Vasari (as in n. 7), II, 103–04. Boccaccio (Decameron, VIII, 3) says that Calandrino was “di grossa pasta.” 17 L. Schneider, Giotto in Perspective, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1974, 4, pointed out the parallel between Giotto’s proverbial wit and certain passages in the Arena Chapel, above all the steward in the Wedding at Cana. P. Barolsky, Infinite Jest: Wit and Humor in Italian Renaissance Art, Columbia and London, 1978, 10, developed this notion further and stressed the comic nature of Giotto’s Folly. More recently, L. Bellosi, The Complete Works of Giotto, Florence, n.d., 34, accepted the comic reading of Folly and the Wedding at Cana.

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escape the pointing of fingers and delighted laughter of children. Stultitia (Fig. 1) is a dumpy oaf who perches on a low rock and raises a heavy club to the heavens as he lets out a tongue-wrenching screech. Spherical objects, probably stones,18 hang from an engirding belt as thick as his wrist and keep this dodo on the ground. Like an exotic, avian prince, he sports a crown of bells and feathers and wears rags that trail behind him in a mock-elegant train.19 In the Trecento, bloated, barefooted, would-be birds like this were a source of laughter.20

18

In a trecento mural found in the Casa Minerbi, Ferrara and unquestionably based on Giotto’s representation, bells hang from both the figure’s feathery crown and his belt, but in Giotto’s version the bells of the crown are smaller than the objects around the figure’s waist. Stones, associated with the vice in the late 14th-century illumination attributed to Jacquemart de Hesdin in the Petites heures of the Duke of Berry, would heighten the ironic contrast between the figure’s heavy, earthbound appearance and his upward-straining gesture. For the example by Jacquemart, see the illustration in C. Cuttler, Northern Painting from Pucelle to Bruegel, New York, 1968, fig. 17. For the Ferrarese Folly, see R. Varese, Trecento ferrarese, Milan, 1976, fig. 42. For a survey of the fool in illuminated manuscripts, mostly English, and a discussion of his various attributes, see D. Gifford, “Iconographical Notes towards a Definition of the Medieval Fool,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXXVII, 1974, 336–42. 19 Stultitia in all its forms was far from an unknown subject in Giotto’s time. Not only do Dante, Boccaccio, and Sacchetti all use the word, but the concept has a long history in a vast literature encompassing the Old Testament, Latin maxims, and Christian exegetical writing, as well as the medieval poem De Stulticiis, and the Officium Stultorum. For the history of the concept and for a discussion of the vicious nature and often comic manifestations of the fool, see B. Swain, Fools and Folly During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, New York, 1932; and Gifford (as in n. 18). The mock-kingly appearance of Giotto’s Folly was observed by S. Pfeiffenberger, “The Iconology of Giotto’s Virtues and Vices at Padua,” Ph.D. diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1966, chap. V, 6–9. Giotto’s crowned wild man in the border near Stultitia was probably not a complete invention: Gifford notes a 15th-century Milanese illumination that shows the Fool as a wild man (as in n. 18, 342). 20 The tendency to laugh at deformity was strong enough in the 16th century that Giovanni della Casa felt obliged to condemn it: “It is therefore a point of good manners to avoid making fun of anyone, and it is wrong of people to reprove others for their faults either by what they say, like Forese da Rabatta who laughed at Giotto’s appearance, or by their actions, as many do when they mimic stutterers or cripples or hunchbacks. It is just as wrong to mock people who are deformed or freaks or midgets or undersized . . .” (Galatio or the Book of Manners, transl. R. S. Pine-Coffin, Harmondsworth, 1958, 62). The 14th century could even laugh, perhaps more easily than we, at stories involving the blind, the deaf, and the halt. One need only mention Sacchetti’s Novella CXL, which describes a slapstick nocturnal brawl between three beggarly blind men, their barking dogs, an irate innkeeper, and his screaming wife. In the end, the blind, having lost the little money over which they started the fight

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The medieval ability to laugh frankly at the bizarre and the grotesque, which innumerable literary examples make clear, may be illustrated by a story from the Decameron in which a mischievous youth interrupts a debate over which family was the oldest and noblest in Florence by nominating the Baronci. Although his suggestion provokes jeers and incredulous laughter, he convinces his companions with an analogy taken from art: You must know that the Baronci were made by the good Lord when He had scarcely learned to draw, while the rest of us were manufactured later. You want to know how this is true? Simply compare the Baronci with other people. While all the rest have respectable-looking faces, properly proportioned, what is the case with the Baronci? There’s one with a long, narrow mug, and another with a face as wide as a platter. Here’s a fellow with a tremendously long 1. Giotto, Folly. nose, and one with a mere stump. Padua, Arena Chapel. Then again there is one with a chin that juts out and up, and a huge pair of jaws that would honor a donkey, and another with one eye larger than the other, or set farther down on his face — all of them looking like the caricatures children scrawl when they are just beginning to draw. You see, then, it’s evident enough, as I said before, that the good Lord made them when he was just learning and therefore they’re older than other people, and nobler.21 and now very nearly lame from their own canes, look so pathetic that, when they go back to begging, they earn so much as to thank their lucky scars. 21 Decameron, VI, 6 (transl. Winwar, as in n. 14).

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2. Ornamental figure. Padua, Arena Chapel.

A trecento audience felt few qualms about laughing at the grotesque, especially when deformity marked the Vices and other villainous characters. Such laughter is neither innocent nor good-natured but knowing and condemnatory.22 A fourteenth-century audience could rightly scorn pity for the malformed body, the clownish costume, and the incongruous action of Stultitia, for these features in fact express the figure’s vicious nature.23 Giotto made this point of view clear by means of two virtually unnoticed details (Figs. 2 and 3) that appear in an adjacent decorative border above a nowsealed passage. The subsidiary location and playfully bizarre appearance of the pair of figures, each shown half-length and framed by a delicate vinescroll, remind one of the fantastic imagery that crops up in the margins of manuscript illuminations, but their function here is less whimsical than satiric. The first, a crowned woman, holds a book that she could never read because two clubs, of the kind Stultitia brandishes, grow out of her eyes. Her companion, a kind of wild man, or king of wild men, for he too is crowned with a faintly visible vine, wears a coarse animal skin garment and rests the now-familiar club on one shoulder. The clubs the one has for rays of sight 22 Barolsky (as in n. 17), 10. Also see V. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi, Stanford, 1966, 124–44. 23 Swain (as in n. 19), 10–26.

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3. Ornamental figure. Padua, Arena Chapel.

and the club the other carries, like a scepter, describe two varieties of folly. One afflicts those who have learning at their fingertips, but fail to use it; the other strikes those unlettered brutes who, lacking sense, would put on crowns and fancy themselves noble.24 In both cases, Giotto makes clear the characteristic flaw of folly: blind ignorance. We are particularly aware of this when we consider Folly in relation to his moral opponent Prudence (Fig. 4). This virtue has the attributes of a scholar and a seer. A book and compass testify to her learning; a mirror manifests her self-reflection; 4. Prudence. Padua, Arena Chapel.

24

It is of course precisely this second type of folly that Sacchetti has Giotto ridicule in the story of the shield.

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5. Wedding at Cana. Padua, Arena Chapel.

two faces, one female and youthful, the other male and mature, let her face the future with an eye to past experience: “wisdom shineth on the face of the prudent man, the eyes of the fool are in the ends of the earth” (Prov. 17:24).25 The ill featured steward at the right in the Wedding at Cana (Fig. 5) is less fanciful than either Stultitia or the little figures in the adjoining border but hardly less grotesque. His gargantuan belly balloons over his straining belt, its turgid shape emphasized by the pot-bellied urns in the foreground. He wears a cap whose laces could never meet and lifts a glass

25

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to taste a liquid which we know, and which even his tugging, pug-nosed friend, can now see, is wine. To put it in terms of a familiar pun attributed to Giotto: he is a “goffo buffon,” a fool of “grossa pasta” whose shape and head, like the once-empty amphorae, are equally tondo. This jughead fails to recognize the good wine saved for last: he deserves only “macco.” The steward’s ignorant foolish doubt serves as a foil for the mild obedience of the other servants, one of whom is rewarded with Christ’s blessing, while 6. Detail of Way to Calvary. another serves the bride, Padua, Arena Chapel. an imposing figure, who, significantly, sits directly below a delicately shaped and once-silver vase upon the roof. The contrast between the precious vase on high and the heavy, orb-like urns in the foreground has, of course, sacramental connotations. But it also restates, in symbolic terms, the contrast between the worthy and foolish servants. This second meaning might be lost, however, were it not for the steward’s comically grotesque appearance and his ironic inability to see how stupid and literally shortsighted his action is. One ridicules him just as one ridicules Folly, and like Folly, whom he parodies, his appearance enforces Giotto’s didactic purpose. Such laughter depends on our awareness of the character’s viciousness; hence, there is no moral contradiction between the steward and the mirthless figure of a fat executioner in the Way to Calvary (Fig. 6). Both resemble Stultitia in the way that other figures in the Arena Chapel, such as the Jewish priest Caiaphas, who recalls Ire, are based on Giotto’s Virtues or Vices. Like the steward, this fool misses the obvious: while the puny and now but faintly visible hammer he holds may nail

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7. Last Judgment, detail of Hell. Padua, Arena Chapel.

Christ to the Cross, it cannot prevent his ultimate victory over death.26 Here, Giotto unmasks the black underside of Folly. Although the viewer is not invited to laugh, he is made to understand that the tormentor and the steward in he Wedding at Cana are cut from the same cloth: in one Giotto exposes the vice, in the other he parodies it. The dark reproving humor evident in Giotto’s treatment of Folly is hardly a unique occurrence. As much and blacker humor resounds through Hell (Fig. 7), where guilt obviates mercy and sin justifies ridicule. Zealous laughter echoes through this inferno, a spaceless subterranean realm unbrightened by the four rivers of fire that stream from Christ’s feet and hurtle the damned and their devils into an unending round of torture and mockery. Here, every soul belongs to Satan, a bloated, horned, and taloned monster, squatting upon two dragons who, like him, perpetually devour his 26

To Saint Paul the infidels were “stolti,” as noted by E. Selvatico, Osservazioni sulla Cappellina degli Scrovegni nell’Arena di Padova e sui freschi di Giotto is essa dipinta, Padua, 1836, 56.

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8. Detail of Fig. 7.

subjects. He is a black parody of the Just King, who sits in a mandorla of light, the symbols of the Four Evangelists shining at his feet, and who not only condemns but also blesses. Mimicking the angels announcing the end, one of Satan’s apish lieutenants, dressed in armor, blows a trumpet to call the damned to their inevitable place in his master’s maw. Some are not eager (Fig. 8). Surely too late, one soul tries to escape by hiding behind the Cross, which he doubtless never embraced so firmly in life. None can hide, all are now naked: two devils subduing a man blinded long before this pull the clothes over his head to expose the enormity of his sin.27 Just below, a parade of devils and doomed begins its descent. One man enters on his own hauling a sack over his shoulder, while a devil masquerading as an official, papers in hand, oversees the proceedings. Others outside, perhaps aware that the time for striking bargains is past, put up wild resistance, but to no avail: they are now and forever the playthings of demons. Giotto’s acrobatic

27

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This detail was noted by Bellosi (as in n. 17), 52.

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9. Detail of Fig. 7.

devils cavort with endless, almost gleeful energy, finding fun in games of reenactment and impersonation, painful tricks and dirty horseplay as earthy as any of Buffalmacco’s scatological pranks. In the depth of Hell a bishop, still wearing his miter, blesses a humbly kneeling monk whose piety is untroubled by the bag of money they exchange or, indeed, by the devil who carries him and his fellow hypocrite off. Rueful warnings of another kind appear under the shadow of a bound couple (Fig. 9) who, suspended by ropes and a hook, hang by their genitalia while a demon plays a wicked game of swinging from the lady’s luxuriant hair. Here, the sins of the carnal are played out with mock-seriousness: an old man offers money to a rouged and willing maiden who, like him, is oblivious to the monsters pulling and tearing at their flesh. Bawdy torments, as horrific if not so graphic, must have played a part in a great representation that took place in Florence in 1304. By April of that year a papal legate had apparently reconciled the feuding Black and White factions of the city, a major feat of diplomacy that occasioned

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a citywide celebration. Even here the Florentine spirit of competition prevailed, as one group tried to outdo the other in devising the most spectacular diversions “per fare allegrezza e festa.” On the last day of April, men of the Quarter of S. Frediano put up notices “che chiunque volesse sapere novelle dell’altro mondo” should meet at the “regno di S. Frediano” on the next day, May Day. The two thousand or so who assembled the next afternoon on the Ponte alla Carraia witnessed an unearthly sight. The whole bridge had become a stage for what Villani called a “giuoco da beffe,” an enormous representation of Hell, complete with flames, demons, and wailing men, all held aloft in boats. And if one can believe Antonio Pucci, author of the Centriloquio (written in 1373), the sights of that imagined place were both terrifying and funny because “chi piangeva di quello, e chi ridea.” Although Giotto was almost certainly in Padua in 1304 and would not have seen this spectacle, which Vasari attributes to none other than Buffalmacco, the event suggests that, not unlike some modern film-goers, his Florentine contemporaries did not find horror and amusement (Villani’s word is “sollazzi”) incompatible, an attitude that is paralleled in Giotto’s great mural in the Arena Chapel.28 Sinners in Hell, like Stultitia, and the steward in the Wedding at Cana deserve no pity. One laughs at them because they are ugly, stupid, vicious, and, thus, worthy of approval, scorn, and ridicule. However, Giotto was capable of creating characters whose frailties not only make us smile but win our sympathy. Such is the case with his treatment of the Virgin’s earthly husband, Joseph. Giotto’s interpretation of Joseph is not unique, resembling the figure developed in medieval religious drama.29 Doubtless

28 Unfortunately, the celebration ended in catastrophe because the enormous weight of the actors and the thronging crowds made the bridge collapse, killing many who, Villani wryly commented, got what they came for: news of the other world. For excerpts from Villani and Pucci, see A. D’Ancona, Origini del teatro italiano, Turin, 1891, I, 94–97; Vasari (as in n. 7), II, 170. The earthly comedy attached to medieval devils is discussed by Kolve (as in n. 22), 142–44. A. Magli (“La lauda drammatica e la funzione dei diavoli,” in Atti del IV Colloquio della Société Internationale pour l’Étude du Théâtre Médiéval, Viterbo, 1983, 215–33) argues that devils in Italian drama were seen in comic terms with the rise of the sacra rappresentazione. 29 Kolve (as in n. 22), 247–53. Also see C. Deasy, “St. Joseph in the English Mystery Plays,” Ph.D. diss., Catholic University, 1937. For examples in Italian drama, see four medieval Perugian liturgical dramas compiled by V. de Bartholomaeis, Laude drammatiche e rappresentazione sacre (1943), Florence, 1967, I, 58–93. The well-known interpretation of Joseph as a comic figure in Northern art was recently disputed by S. Schwartz, “St. Joseph in Meister Bertram’s Petri-Altar,” Gesta, XXIV, 1985, 147–56.

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both the painter and his patron were with this dramatic tradition. A play of the Annunciation was performed on the site of the Arena for over three centuries, beginning in 127830 and, though lost, it may well have included the type of Joseph found in other dramatic representations. The medieval picture of Joseph was not shaped by the canonical Gospels but by the books of the Apocrypha. Of these the Protoevangelium of James and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew are the most influential sources for details that reappeared in the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine and the Meditationes Vitae Christi31 as well as in drama and in painting. Above all, the Apocrypha stress Joseph’s old age. So he appears, bent and gray, when he is mentioned for the first time in the events preceding the Virgin’s betrothal. In accordance with divine instructions, all the eligible men of the house of David are asked to come forward to compete for the Virgin’s hand. They meet at the temple each bearing a rod upon one of which the Lord will reveal his choice by a sign. When the high priest begins to collect the rods, Joseph grumbles that he is too old for such foolishness, and only with prodding does he consent to offer his rod with the others. After a prayer, the high priest returns the rods one by one. At the last moment, when it appears that no sign will come, a dove lights on Joseph’s rod. The Protoevangelium of James suggests Joseph’s reluctance by mentioning that he was the last to proffer his rod and the last to get it back. In the gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, the version Voragine follows, a more cautious Joseph leaves nothing to chance and hides 30

J. Stubblebine, Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes, 1969, 73; V. de Bartholomaeis, Origini della poesia drammatica italiana, Turin, 1952, 129–30; and D’Ancona (as in n. 28), I, 25. Painters and even paintings were, at least indirectly, involved in theatrical productions from the 13th century. In a dramatic representation of the Nativity that was performed in the Cathedral of Padua from about 1261–63, a panel of the Virgin and child was used — in lieu of actors or sculpture — to stand as the manger. See H. van Os, “The Madonna and the Mystery Play,” Simiolus, V. 1971, 5–19. Nevertheless, I do not believe that Giotto’s cycle merely illustrates the play performed in the Arena or some other. Indeed, specific borrowings from theater into painting of this period are unlikely. Yet, in a generic sense the way that Giotto employs certain types, develops characters, and sets up situations may be called theatrical. For recent attempts to draw specific connections between medieval painting and theater, see E. Battisti, “A caccia del gesto teatrale,” in Il teatro italiano del rinascimento, ed. M. de Panizza Lorch, Milan, 1980, 403–23, and F. Scarpellini, “Echi della lauda nella pittura del XIII e XIV secolo,” in Le laudi drammatiche umbre delle origini, Viterbo, 1980, 165–85. 31 The Apocryphal New Testament, transl. M. James, Oxford, 1980; J. de Voragine, The Golden Legend, transl. G. Ryan and H. Ripperger, New York, 1941; and, Meditations on the Life of Christ, transl. I. Ragusa, ed. R. Green, Princeton, 1961.

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10. Collection of the Rods. Padua, Arena Chapel.

his rod; when the high priest falls for the ploy and overlooks the missing rod, the old man heaves a sigh of relief, but his feeling of success is premature because at the last moment a nosy angel gives him away. Once the Lord makes his choice known, Joseph abandons all restraint and protests that he is old and she but a girl, and that such a union will make him a laughingstock. In medieval religious drama, where Joseph’s age is a commonplace,32 his protests sometimes turn into howls. In the fourteenthcentury drama performed at Coventry, he plays for sympathy by drawing the

32

The notion of Joseph’s advanced age entered Italian medieval drama in the early 14th century (F. Doglio, “Erode furente e i Magi cristiani, dall’officium stellae alle laudi drammatiche perugine,” in Atti del IV Colloquio della Société Internationale pour 1’Étude du Théâtre Médiéval, Viterbo, 1983, 175–95) and by the 15th century, if not earlier, he became synonymous with old age. In one play, the wife can say to her husband; “Non vedi tu che tu pari un Giuseppo/Con questa barba già canuta e bianca?” See D’Ancona (as in n. 28), I, 639.

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11. Prayer before the Rods. Padua, Arena Chapel.

piteous picture of a weak old man badgered till his end by the demands of a young and indefatigable wife.33 In the Arena Chapel Giotto softens the characterization of Joseph found in the Apocrypha and in some of the religious drama, but he sustains the character’s importance by devoting no less than three scenes to his selection and betrothal. These scenes have been inadequately explained. In the Marriage of the Virgin, for instance, Cesare Gnudi observed a “sweet and solemn tempo,”34 a description that is hardly wrong, but incomplete, for in addition to establishing a tone appropriate to the Virgin’s betrothal, by stressing Joseph’s age, the painter develops a portrayal that is at once profoundly human and gently comic. Giotto places Joseph in situations whose irony stems from the tension between the demands of God and the frailties of man. In the Collection of the Rods (Fig. 10) the eligible men eagerly 33 34

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Deasy (as in n. 29), 35. C. Gnudi, Giotto, Milan, 1958, 138.

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12. Marriage of the Virgin. Padua, Arena Chapel.

tender their rods under the searching looks of two priests. Can the priests, for all their wisdom, imagine that the Lord has in mind none of the young virile faces hopefully pressing close but instead the old graybeard who lingers far in the back? By the simple device of placing his protagonist to one side and partially cutting him off by the frame, Giotto perhaps suggests the notion that the last shall be first, but he also quietly conveys Joseph’s understandable reluctance. As the high priest leads the Prayer Before the Rods (Fig. 11), the youths crane forward in open-mouthed anticipation, their eyes wide with excitement, but Joseph, who does not share their hope, shrinks into the crowd with the naïve wish that the All-Seeing will overlook him. Of course, Joseph’s hope is contrary to his fate, for in the end (Fig. 12), he is forced to surrender to God’s will. If the old man’s reservations and fears can be appreciated, so can his worries about this marriage. How old Joseph looks beside this thin, modest girl who never appears as maidenly in Giotto’s later scenes! It is, of course, the inequality of the match that makes the priests frown, the maidens smile, and the youth mutter; skepticism,

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no longer politely discreet, moves one irrepressible youth to the verge of laughter as he gives the old man the traditional slap on the back.35 Giotto’s restrained interpretation of the Virgin’s betrothal parallels the action of a medieval play from the Abruzzi. The youths in the play, like those in Giotto’s painting, serve as a foil for Joseph. As the youths present their rods, more than one remarks how he eagerly hurried to the temple, but Joseph, embarrassed by his age, actually hides his rod — unsuccessfully. At the marriage, the youths commiserate with each other as they break their rods. Because they do not understand the Lord’s reasons, they are both disappointed and bewildered as they watch the young Virgin wed a man, who, as one of them tartly remarks, “has no meat on his back” (“no a polpa adosso”).36 When Joseph next appears, he is the same endearing, put-upon character as before. After his betrothal, the Apocrypha say that Joseph went away for a time, returning only to find his spouse pregnant. He confronts his worst fears: he is a spent, old man shamed by a lively wife who wasted little time in making him a cuckold. Sorrow over his once-virginal wife’s defilement blinds Joseph to the workings of God. So firm is he in his logical, earthbound view of procreation that, when the Virgin explains the angel’s visit, Joseph is astonished that she should take him for such a fool. Yet, if he is limited by his earthly experience, he is never guilty of folly, for he never denies God: when an angel at last appears to him too, he recognizes the will of God and puts aside rash, face-saving thoughts of dissolving the marriage or of sending Mary into hiding. In the Nativity (Fig. 13), angels greet the arrival of the Incarnate Word with exultation. He is no ordinary infant who gazes knowingly into his mother’s eyes, as the Virgin, the midwife, and even the ox, who all stare at him so intently, well recognize.37 But Joseph (Fig. 14) cannot concern 35

For wedding customs in medieval Italy, in particular for both the charivari and the ritual slap in representations of Saint Joseph’s marriage to Mary, see C. Klapisch-Zuber, “The Medieval Italian Mattinata,” Journal of Family History, V. 1980, 2–27, and “Zacharie, ou le père evincé,” Annales, economies, sociétés, civilisations, 1979, 1216–43. 36 V. de Bartholomaeis, Il teatro Abruzzese del medio evo, Bologna, 1924, 49–65 and 335–44. 37 Once again, Giotto breathed life into an established idea; Voragine (as in n. 31), 48, writes that the Nativity “was revealed to every class of creatures from the stones, which are at the bottom of the scale of creation, to the angels, who are at its summit.” This notion appeared in connection with specific images of the Nativity; to cite only one example, the panel of the Nativity from the Romanesque pulpit once in the Florentine church of S.

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13. Nativity. Padua, Arena Chapel.

14. Detail of Fig. 13.

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15. Adoration of the Magi. Padua, Arena Chapel.

himself with this child. Not without hardship, keenly felt at his age, has he found these humble lodgings. As he does not hesitate to tell his wife in medieval drama, he is tired, and so, like the huddled sheep, he has settled in for the night. His lids heavy, he is halfway to a slumber so deep that, in the next scene, the Adoration of the Magi (Fig. 15), as in a nearly contemporary liturgical cycle from Perugia, not even a cosmic celebration, including angels and a comet, much less the earthly splendor of the three kings and their noisy train with its braying camels,38 can keep him from nodding (Fig. 16).39 When he later learns of Herod’s intention to murder all male children newly born in Bethlehem, Joseph dutifully leads his family to safety (Fig. 17). The smell of danger, which Giotto makes all too real in the subsequent Massacre Pier Scheraggio and now in S. Leonardo in Arcetri is accompanied by the verse, “Nobis Admixtum, cernunt animalia Cristum” (“Christ, joined with us, is perceived by the animals”). For the pulpit, see T. Hoving, “A Long-lost Romanesque Annunciation,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, XX, 1961, 117–26. 38 P. Barolsky, “Piero’s Native Wit,” Source, I, 1982, 21–22. 39 The shepherds in the Perugian play in fact note that because Joseph is old he has fallen asleep: “Ioseppe no la (Mary) pò aitare/ch’ è desvenuto per la gran veghiezze.” See the text of the “Natività del signore” in E. Faccioli, Il teatro italiano: Dalle origini al quattrocento, Turin, 1975, I, 55. The play is part of laudario probably composed between 1320 and 1325 for

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16. Detail of Fig. 15.

17. Flight into Egypt, Padua, Arena Chapel.

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of the Innocents, charges the Flight into Egypt with tension and urgency. A youth hurries the ass with a switch, and Mary, the central character in the scene, holds her child close while fixing her determined gaze on the way. In spite of the peril, anxiety never threatens the Virgin’s regal dignity, but for the stooped old man in front the urgent pace of this uphill journey is hard. The frown he gives the placid youth beside him indicates what he actually says in the Perugian cycle mentioned earlier: that he is overburdened and tired.40 In the end, as always, though he may complain, he accepts his appointed role. For all his grumbling and inadequacies, Joseph remains a lovable character. His frailties never contravene his essential goodness, for they are natural; when he resists the Lord’s instructions, it is not out of evil but because he is just not up to it. The Joseph of the Arena Chapel is not unlike a Joseph at whom one laughs in a story by Sacchetti.41 The novella describes an episode that occurred on a Sunday outing when Giotto and some of his friends went to the church of S. Gallo. According to Sacchetti, going to this church on the first Sunday of every month was a Florentine custom more social than religious, people visiting less to seek grace than camaraderie. Such a mood apparently prevailed that day. Listening to the master tell a story as they made their way on the Via del Cocomero (today the Via Ricasoli), the company came upon some pigs of the thick-coated kind often seen in representations of Saint Anthony Abbot. One of the pigs suddenly darted and, getting in Giotto’s way, knocked the great man down. Demonstrating that he was as fast off his feet as he was on them, Giotto got up and, smiling, said, “Aren’t they in the right? Without ever repaying them with so much as a bowl of broth, haven’t I earned thousands of lire with their bristles?” (O non hanno e’ ragione? Ché ho guadagnato a’ mie dì con le setole loro migliaia di lîre, e mai non diedi loro una scodella di broda.”) At this Giotto’s friends began to laugh and, marveling at both his grace and his wit, proclaimed him master of every situation. The episode of the pigs establishes the tone for the rest of the novella, which relates how, on their return from S. Gallo, Giotto and his friends visited the church of Ss. Annunziata and, “as usual” (“come’ è usanza”), stopped to look at the paintings. Seeing a picture of the Madonna a confraternity of flagellants in Perugia. For the date and for a discussion of the cycle, see Doglio (as in n. 32), 275–95. 40 Doglio (as in n. 32), 298. 41 Trecentonovelle, Novella LXXV.

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with Joseph beside her, someone asked Giotto why Joseph always seems so melancholy. To this Giotto replied, “shouldn’t he be, when he sees his wife pregnant without knowing by whom?” By pointing to the horns that poor Joseph thinks he must now wear, Giotto makes a joke, but by explicating the character and situation with surgical skill, he displays both an uncommon understanding of human motivation and empathy. Indeed, after hearing him, his companions in this story agree that Giotto was not only a master of painting but also a master of the Seven Liberal Arts. Although they may have begun like those who, according to Sacchetti, “vanno e guardano più con la bocca aperta che con gli occhi corporei o mentali,” in the end they recognize the value of the lesson Giotto had to teach. One is struck as much by the naïveté of Giotto’s colleagues in the second episode as by the painter’s repartee. The infancy of Christ, where one encounters Joseph, was hardly an obscure subject. Nevertheless, Giotto’s fictional friends failed to penetrate a familiar character whose reactions were outlined both in the Apocrypha and in the Golden Legend and given voice in the drama. Their purpose is to stress, by contrast, the rarity and special character of Giotto’s insight. Now whether the real Giotto actually said anything of the kind will never be known, but a look at Giotto’s work, above all at the Arena Chapel, reveals an intense preoccupation with the inner lives of men. Even in the Trecento the subtlety of Giotto’s characterizations may have been difficult for some to appreciate. To others, it may have been part of the beauty of his work. It is perhaps fitting to consider in this light the words of Petrarch’s testament, composed in Padua in 1370, little more than a generation after Giotto’s death: mentioning a treasured panel of the Madonna by Giotto, he said that, while it astonished those who were masters of art, the ignorant understood nothing of its beauty.42 The painter of the Infancy Cycle in the Lower Church in Assisi failed to comprehend Giotto’s comic characterization of Joseph, even though his work depends directly upon the Arena Chapel. His versions of the narrative, although more elaborate, are diminished. In the Adoration of the Magi he doubles the number of attendants to four, adds another restive — but silent — camel, and makes the Holy Family abandon the humble shed in favor of a porticoed villa; but despite such loquacity, he omits Joseph. In the Flight

42

Petrarch’s Testament, ed. and transl., with intro. T. Mommsen, Ithaca, NY, 1957, 21–25 and 79–80.

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18. Follower of Giotto, Flight into Egypt. Lower Church, S. Francesco, Assisi.

into Egypt (Fig. 18), the bent old man leads the party up a rising path as in Padua, but one has little sense of Joseph’s weariness because he is no longer the only elderly figure on foot and because the artist has eliminated the by-play between Joseph and the youth. The suggestion of haste, left implicit in Giotto’s contrast between the Virgin’s concern for safety and Joseph’s exertion, is what mattered most to the clumsy painter of the Assisi mural. Joseph, the ass, and the youth all lurch forward in almost regimented unison, and the ass dangerously lifts two left feet off the ground, perhaps because the youth is not content to encourage him with a stick but also gives him a push for good measure. In the end, one finds it hard to agree that compared to the Paduan version of the scene the Assisi Flight into Egypt is, in the words of one writer, “more subtle and profound.”43 43 M. Gosebruch, “Gli affreschi di Giotto nel braccio destro del transetto e nelle ‘vele’ centrali della chiesa inferiore di San Francesco,” in Giotto e Giotteschi in Assisi (1st ed. 1969), intro. G. Palumbo, Rome, 1970, 150.

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19. Giotto, Joachim Retreats to the Wilderness. Padua, Arena Chapel.

In truth, trecento painters rarely exploited the potential humor in the Christian story.44 Giotto’s achievement is all the greater because, in the Arena Chapel, he not only develops more or less established types, such as Joseph, but he also introduces comic passages that are without precedent, parallel, or issue. Like his other comic figures, Giotto’s children and animals serve as foils, helping to establish an essential counterpoint to the principal action, but unlike Stultitia, the wine steward, the damned, or Joseph, their treatment is not satiric, witty, parodistic, or ironic. It is something gentler that can be called playful. Over the course of three scenes the animals in the story of Joachim establish a comic undertone that makes the old man’s high seriousness slightly ridiculous. Expelled from the temple on account of his childless marriage to Anna (Fig. 19), the future father of the Virgin takes refuge One prominent example is Taddeo Gaddi’s raucous Marriage of the Virgin in the Baroncelli Chapel, Sta. Croce, Florence. See A. Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi, Columbia, MO and London, 1982, 27–30. 44

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among his shepherds and flocks. Humiliated, he approaches with his eyes open but remote, his head lowered, and his robe drawn about him. The shepherds cannot know, as the viewer does, what troubles him, but they sense that something is amiss. They exchange furtive glances, and the one on the right lifts his hand in what is perhaps a questioning gesture, still common in Italy. The dog, with the endearing innocence of his kind, rushes up to greet this newcomer and, jumping at his feet, searches the old man’s face for a sign of reciprocal gladness. The sheep, while iconographically necessary, are far more than mere props. Crowded together in the sheepfold, they pour out and gradually win room. Their movement, at first rushed, slows almost to a stop in the center foreground. Linked to the sudden, ascending movement of the dog and the steady, descending pressure of melancholy Joachim, their progress helps describe the rhythm of a great pendulum, a mechanism that animates the shepherds’ exchange. But the sheep serve more than a formal purpose, for this picture is about seeing and understanding. The shepherds, the dog, and the sheep display varying degrees of awareness. Unlike the shepherds or even the dog, the sheep go desultorily about their business looking in every direction, even behind the sheepfold, but theirs is a curiosity without perception or empathy, for they ignore Joachim. In the Sacrifice of Joachim (Fig. 20) the Virgin’s father is on all fours, his eyes intent, his arms stiff, his hands clenched and pawlike as he listens to the angel tell him that God has heard his prayer. It is a serious moment but also a happy one. Appropriately, Giotto enhances the impression of Joachim’s surprise and makes one smile by drawing a mischievous analogy between his posture of frozen attention and the rigid stance of a frolicsome sheep who readies to withstand a butt from a dark-coated friend. In the next scene, the Dream of Joachim (Fig. 21), the angel appears to the isolated figure of Joachim in a dream, but even now perhaps, while the waking world is quiet, the dark sheep longs to gambol as he looks down from a bluff that separates him from his erstwhile butting partner. In such a world, if animals possess childlike sensibilities, children can be as frisky as animals and charmingly innocent of adult-world drama. In the Entry into Jerusalem (Fig. 22) a crowd of all ages hails the triumphant Savior and his Apostles at the city gate. Boys clamber up trees, wave palm branches, and make a carpet of their clothing. One youth bends over and throws his tight-fitting robe inside out but, as yet unable to free his hand and his head, may untangle himself only to find his Savior gone. Another, more successful boy stretches deeply and bringing one knee to his chest almost prostrates

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20. Sacrifice of Joachim. Padua, Arena Chapel.

21. Dream of Joachim. Padua, Arena Chapel.

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22. Entry into Jerusalem. Padua, Arena Chapel.

himself as he looks, not at Christ, but at the now almost-vanished little colt accompanying the ass. Like the boy in the painting, Giotto cast his vision upward, and the heaven he saw was mild and comforting. On the triumphal arch above the Annunciation (Fig. 23), the Lord dispatches Gabriel to the Virgin with the news of the Word, an episode that commonly appeared in plays of the Annunciation, perhaps including the one performed at the Arena Chapel.45 45 See the Annunciation plays presented in de Bartholomaeis (as in n. 29), I, 99; II, 7–8; III, 223. The Dispatch of Gabriel, which appears in the Meditationes Vitae Christi, perhaps derived from Byzantine religious drama. See F. Mather, Jr., “Giotto’s First Biblical Subject in the Arena Chapel,” American Journal of Archaeology, ser. II, XVII, 1913, 201–05; and A. Medin, “Nota illustrativa di talune storie dipinte nella Cappella degli Scrovegni,” Atti e Memorie della Regia Accademia di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Padova, XLIII, 1927, 3–11. Giotto’s panel of the Enthroned Christ, which is set into the wall above the Annunciation, may have been used as a door through which the dove or the angel descended during the play. Gabriel’s dispatch and his physical descent were part of a Florentine Annunciation play staged

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23. God Dispatches Gabriel. Padua, Arena Chapel.

On either side of the enthroned Father angels float upon the blue; some play music, while others, locking fingers, dance on wispy clouds.46 In the relatively well-preserved group on the right (Fig. 24) one angel throws a watchful, over-the-shoulder glance at two fluting angels who bring up the rear. These sparrow-like creatures, which appear nowhere in the Arena with Brunelleschi’s help in the Annunziata in 1439. See C. Molinari, Spettacoli fiorentini del quattrocento, Venice, 1961, 35–54. Such “special effects” were engineered, doubtless with less ingenuity than Brunelleschi’s, during the trecento: Sacchetti (Novella LXXII) mentions a representation of the Ascension, enacted in the Carmine, in which Christ rose toward the roof on a line. Unfortunately, on that occasion the climactic moment failed to thrill: the miracle moved so slowly that one of the writer’s friends grew restless and complained, if Christ Himself “didn’t go any faster, He’s still alive.” 46 In an early 15-century Annunciation play by Feo Belcari, after God instructs Gabriel to go to the Virgin, the angels “che vanno in compagnia di Gabriello” sing a lauda; then after the Annunciation and the Virgin’s response, the angels, still in Heaven, sing a salmo. See M. Bonfantini, Le sacre rappresentazioni italiane. Raccolta di testi dal secolo XIII al secolo XVI, n.p., 1942, 209–13.

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24. Detail of Fig. 23.

Chapel except in this scene, have the curly hair and round faces of children, and they even wear cloaks like the one worn by the swaddled Christ Child in the Adoration of the Magi.47 Surely, Giotto wished us to smile at this bit of whimsy, for if angels are never old, the innocence of childhood is somehow especially angelic. Yet even these junior members of the heavenly choir fulfill an important role: floating directly above the Annunciate Virgin, they are an appropriate prelude to the Incarnation. Moreover, if the children, the animals, and the figure of Joseph elsewhere affirm that the miraculous occurs in the natural world inhabited by the worshipper, these agnoletti suggest the infinitely more reassuring idea that what is thought of as natural also occurs in the celestial world inhabited by the Divine. 47

Children or putti parodying men are common in Roman art, as in a sarcophagus in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. By the quattrocento agnoletti were not only common in Italian painting and sculpture but also in numerous theatrical performances. Children dressed as angels and making music appeared in the 1439 Annunciation play performed in the Annunziata. See Molinari (as in n. 45), 39–40, n. 10.

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From their respective places in Giotto’s cycle, such diverse figures as the child angels, the animals, the children, Joseph, the wine steward, Stultitia, and the devils in Hell produce laughter of varying tone, rhythm, and spirit. The subsidiary figures who are its instruments never trivialize the principal action, but instead enhance it, often restating the major theme in a minor key. Beyond their narrative roles they serve the theological function of reminding us that unlike God who is pure and vast, man is complex and limited, his nature composed of every vice and every virtue. It is man’s good fortune that God, as Voragine wrote, never confuses natural weakness with evil.48 Knowing this we may smile at Joseph’s grumblings or at the indecorous antics of children meeting the Messiah and well imagine that the Lord is smiling with us. Through the agency of humor, long neglected despite its central place in the literary legend of Giotto, the Arena Chapel reveals unexpected profundity. Never before in Italian art had man and God been more accessible, each more in the other’s image, for Giotto humanized not only man but God.

48

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An Old Picture in Florence

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ARKNESS has the power to unsettle. Who has not felt, in the world of the imagination or firsthand, the isolation and vulnerability of walking down a narrowing street so oppressed by shadow that the eye’s reach is less than the ear’s? The power of darkness to frighten perhaps was greater in the Middle Ages, when superstition’s grip was wider, but fourteenth-century Florentines were not entirely defenseless against such fear. Tabernacles containing holy images watched over the streets and crossroads, and served a purpose that was both practical as well as spiritual: at night, the lamps that burned before them must have served as beacons guiding those still about and reminding them of God’s omnipresence. To the poet Guido Cavalcanti, the originally thirteenth-century and originally outdoor Madonna at Orsanmichele was a “rifugio e conforto.” Lamps illuminated her shrine in acknowledgement of her efficacy and as testimony to the devotion she inspired: Sana in pubblico loco gran languori, Con venerenza la gente l’inchina, 1 Dua luminara l’adornan di fuori.

Cavalcanti’s Madonna of Orsanmichele was one of a category of images that took many forms. Painted on plaster or on panel, carved from marble, modeled in terra cotta, and sometimes glazed or painted, street tabernacles 2 appeared in astonishing numbers from the Duecento through the Baroque. 1 For the miraculous Virgin of Orsanmichele and for Cavalcanti’s poem, see G. Poggi, Or San Michele (Florence: 1985), p. 15. 2 For street tabernacles, see A. Cocchi, Notizie storiche intorno antiche immagini di Nostra Donna che hanno culto in Firenze (Florence: 1894), pp. 109–114; G. Carocci, “I Tabernacoli

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Indeed, so popular and vigorous was the phenomenon, that one late nineteenth-century survey counted the remarkable number of some five hundred surviving or known examples produced in Florence between the 3 thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries. But statistics tell only part of the story. The importance of these images in Florentine life is also apparent from the fact that on occasion the finest artists were asked to produce them: Domenico Veneziano, Andrea del Castagno, and perhaps Donatello. Of course, the painters’ legacy has suffered most, for paintings kept outdoors, especially frescoes, are perforce at great risk. All too often, when a frescoed tabernacle survives, it is damaged not only from exposure, but also from well-meaning attempts to preserve and improve. As any pedestrian in Florence knows, more than a few of the city’s frescoed street tabernacles consist of a fragmentary image, often repainted, enclosed by a later frame, and sealed under glass. Survival has its price. The modern aspect of many street tabernacles contravenes their original purpose, for by imperiling the legibility of the image, it detaches it from its intended audience, the passer-by. Fourteenth-century examples on plaster, by virtue of their great age, have especially suffered, yet some of these older images are among the most important of the type. At first glance, one does not expect much of a small tabernacle near the church of San Lorenzo, in the Via Sant’ Antonino at 4 the corner of the Via Faenza (Fig. 1). It is easy to overlook this Madonna and Child, despite the fanfare provided by the cloud-swept angels of its 5 eighteenth-century stucco frame. The seated Virgin, now cut off at the knees, was once probably shown full length, doubtless on a throne, but di Firenze,” Arte e Storia 22 (1903–1904): 147-148, and ibid., 23 (1905–1906): 7–8, 27–28, 56-57, and 87-89; M. Wackernagel, The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist: Projects and Patrons, Workshop and Art Market, trans. A. Luchs (Princeton: 1981; orig. pub. Leipzig: 1938), pp. 185–189; P. Bargellini, Cento tabernacoli a Firenze (Florence: 1971); B. Cole, The Renaissance Artist at Work: From Pisano to Titian (New York: 1983), p. 178. 3 Wackernagel, p. 186, n. 193. 4 This particular section of the Via Sant’ Antonino was formerly the Via della Cella di Ciardo. See Stradario storico e amministrativo della città e del comune di Firenze (Florence: 1929), p. 5. 5 The tabernacle in the Via Sant’ Antonino is recorded by Carocci (1905–1906): 88. Carocci classified the painting as «opera di scuola giottesca e della maniera di Taddeo Gaddi»; but his attribution was made at a time when Taddeo’s name was a catchall, freely attached to fourteenth-century Florentine pictures of different styles. More recently, M. Boskovits gave no arguments but attributed the image to Bernardo Daddi: see A Critical and Historical

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1. Taddeo Gaddi, Madonna and Child, Street tabernacle from the Via Sant’ Antonino, Florence.

no evidence of a setting or of a seat survives. Heavy repaint, applied in slapdash fashion, covers the figures’ draperies and renders folds, highlights, and shadows as so many smears, except where it has flaked to leave the surface badly pocked. The halos, the hems of the Virgin’s garments, and the star upon her shoulder have all been ineptly regilded; and, as if this were not enough, cracks in the plaster score the surface. The heads have not escaped the restorer’s (restorers’?) brushes; however, the technique in these areas is appreciably more careful. To determine the identity of the original artist under such circumstances might seem more suited to clairvoyance than to connoisseurship, but in this case the fourteenth-century painter still Corpus of Florentine Painting, sect. III, vol. IX (Florence: 1984), p. 346. Nothing is known about the circumstances behind the commission. I am grateful to Mr. A. Quattrone of the Florentine Gabinetto Fotografico for providing me with a photograph of the fresco under discussion.

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manages to make himself understood: under the glare of the protective glass and the fog of repaint one can discern the typical forms of Giotto’s great 6 pupil, Taddeo Gaddi (c. 1300–1366). The faces of the Madonna and Child are close in their drawing, proportions, and expressions to figures from Taddeo’s early and in some ways most engaging years — that is, from the Baroncelli Chapel of about 1328 to 1330 (Fig. 2); the Berlin Triptych, signed and dated September 1334 (Fig. 3); and the Bern Enthroned Madonna and Child (Fig. 4) from approximately the same period. Despite differences in scale, technique, and condition, such particulars as the shape of the Madonna’s face, the drawing of her near eye with its long, straight lower lid, and virtually every feature of the Child’s head are characteristic. Beyond such superficial similarities, however, the

2. Taddeo Gaddi, Prudence. From the first vault of the Baroncelli Chapel, Santa Croce, Florence. 6

Precisely because of the unfavorable situation of the work, this writer failed to see it in the proper light until after the publication of his monograph on the artist.

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3. Taddeo Gaddi, Enthroned Madonna and Child. Central panel of a triptych, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

4. Taddeo Gaddi, Enthroned Madonna and Child. Kunstmuseum, Bern.

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figures in the fresco recall Taddeo’s types in other ways: their expressions while restrained, are alert, and their movements, while controlled, are free. By their vivacity, the figures — particularly the Christ child — enhance the suggestion of space. A preoccupation with spatial effects is a well-known feature of Taddeo’s art, readily apparent in the Baroncelli Chapel in Santa Croce but also in panels such as the Berlin Triptych and the Bern Madonna, where the saints in the enframing arch of the former and the kneeling figures in the foreground of the latter move with as much ease as the Christ child 7 from the Via Sant’ Antonino. Turning his gaze to the right — that is, toward the crossroad — the Christ child raises His right hand to bless those who pass by. Although His gesture is common, found in countless fourteenth-century images large and small, the way He draws His arm and hand in front of His body is remarkable. In other works from the 1320s and 1330s, Taddeo, like Giotto in the Ognissanti Madonna and Bernardo Daddi in numerous pictures, isolates the child’s gesture against the Virgin’s bosom, but here he adopts a solution that recalls the action of the Child in Cimabue’s Santa Trinità Madonna, endowing it, however, with an ease and naturalness unknown to the duecento painter. Indeed, this one gesture approaches in quality Taddeo’s work in the Baroncelli Chapel and surpasses the skill of contemporary works 8 by his assistants. In its treatment of the Christ child, the badly damaged Madonna and Child from the Via Sant’ Antonino preserves a shimmer of what must have been an impressive and perhaps even captivating work. As the only street tabernacle attributable to Taddeo, its addition to his œuvre offers further evidence of his versatility. Although he excelled as a painter of large-scale murals such as his images for the refectory of Santa Croce, elaborate fresco cycles such as the Baroncelli Chapel, and large altarpieces too numerous to mention, Taddeo also produced small devotional panels, stained-glass windows, and manuscript illuminations. And if the street tabernacle from the Via Sant’ Antonino commands our attention more for its historical importance than for its aesthetic qualities, one ought to remember its value, however muted, as an expression of a 7

For a discussion of Taddeo’s career and of the above-mentioned works, see A. Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi: A Critical Reapraisal and a Catalogue Raisonné (Columbia and London: 1982). 8 Compare, for example, such lesser works as the Madonnas in Castiglion Fiorentino, from Voltiggiano, and in the Horne Foundation, Florence. See Ladis, pp. 192–193, 196–197, and 215.

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unique intelligence, one of the most daring and influential in fourteenthcentury Florence. As Browning reminds us (“Old Pictures in Florence”): Wherever a fresco peels and drops, Wherever an outline weakens and wanes Till the latest life in the painting stops, Stands One whom each fainter pulse-tick pains; One, wishful each scrap should clutch the brick, Each tinge not wholly escape the plaster, — A lion who dies of an ass’s kick, The wronged great soul of an ancient Master.

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Immortal Queen and Mortal Bride: The Marian Imagery of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Cycle at Montesiepi

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ITHIN sight of the abandoned Cistercian monastery of San Galgano, a Tuscan Tintern Abbey whose majestic Gothic ruins must ever quicken the romantic heart, stands the imposing twelfth-century rotunda of Montesiepi, also dedicated to San Galgano. It was there that the knightly saint was buried — on the spot where the Virgin and her heavely court, sheltered within a circular temple, appeared to him. It was there that the saint was to embed a sword in stony ground that softened to no touch but his.1 A small fourteenth-century chapel attached to the rotunda seems like an unwelcome and unromantic excrescence, yet despite its unprepossessing exterior, the chapel contains what is perhaps the most affecting Annunciation of the entire Italian Trecento (Fig. 1). Although but a sketch, a sinopia never intended for view, its quickly rendered yet eloquent lines present the moment of the Incarnation in a powerfully human and moving way.2 Startled by the unexpected appearance of Gabriel, Mary is overcome with a fear that

1 E. Repetti, Dizionario geografico fisico storico della Toscana, 1835, vol. I, pp. 13–14 (Abbazia di San Galgano). For a good summary of Saint Galgano’s legend and of the history of the site, see E. Borsook, Gli affreschi di Montesiepi, Florence, 1969, pp. 8–11. Also of use is a guidebook by V. Albergo, Eremo e Abbazia di San Galgano, Pistoia, n.d. For images of San Galgano’s legend, see G. Kaftal, Iconography of the Saints in Tuscan Painting, Florence, 1952, cols. 423–432. 2 For the cycle see E. Borsook, Florence, 1969; G. Rowley, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Princeton, 1958, pp. 62–64 and 140–141; M. Meiss, The Great Age of Fresco: Giotto to Pontormo, New York, 1968, pp. 60–65; and B. Cole, Sienese Painting: From Its Origins to the Fifteenth Century, New York, 1980, pp. 168–174.

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1. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Sinopia for Annunciation. Chapel of San Galgano, Montesiepi.

suggests hysteria and the threat of violence: cowering upon the floor, she clings to a column as if seeking strength from its unshakable firmness. The image of a woman reduced to such trembling submission cannot but elicit sympathy, yet in no other surviving Annunciation of the entire Italian Renaissance is the Virgin shown in this way. Its life at Montesiepi was short. Not long after Ambrogio Lorenzetti and his shop decorated the chapel in the early 1330s,3 the Annunciation (Fig. 2) was altered by a second painter, probably a follower of Ambrogio’s brother Pietro,4 who amended the figure 3 A full discussion of the dating of the cycle lies outside the scope of this article, but the generally held view of a date in the 1330s is based both on the style of the murals and on external evidence, notably a treatise by the seventeenth-century abbot of the monastery, Antonio Libanori, who records that the chapel once preserved an altarpiece inscribed as follows: “Questa tavola, con la Cappella fece fare Ristoro da Selvanella MCCCXXXVI” and, below, “Nicolaus Segre me pinxit.” The altarpiece, whose author was probably Niccolò di Segna, is either lost or unidentified. See A. Libanori, Vita del Glorioso S. Galgano, Siena, 1645 (also Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, Bargagli-Petrucci 960) and Borsook, 1969, p. 12. 4 Just as there is wide agreement on the attribution of the cycle either to Ambrogio or to Ambrogio and his shop, most scholars believe that it was a follower of Pietro Lorenzetti

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of Mary to show her in a more conventional attitude that suggests the knowing obedience of her eventual response: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” The electrifying emotion of the original conception, its uniqueness, and its unorthodox transformation into a conventional type have the features of rejection, if not censorship. Apparently, it was not an image too startling to approve at the time of its completion, but it was too unsatisfactory to preserve. Widely ascribed to the genius of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, the abortive innovation of the prostrate Virgin hardly appeared ex nihilo; rather, it was part of a carefully conceived program that cast traditional concepts in a strikingly untraditional way. To a degree heretofore not fully recognized, the cycle, in its original unacceptable form, cast the Virgin as the central protagonist in the mystery of redemption and focused on the encounter between the Virgin and her angelic messenger; moreover, the Annunciation, though usually examined in isolation, communicates its fullest meaning when considered 2. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Annunciation (after restoration).

who made the changes in the original cycle. Recently, however, B. Cole (1980, p. 174) has suggested that “a mediocre follower of Ambrogio” might have been responsible.

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not only in the context of its site and the surrounding, damaged remains that define its place in the iconography of the cycle but also in relation to the literary parallels that define its place in Trecento spirituality. The Annunciation visualizes a biblical narrative in emotional terms that are perhaps as sensible today as when it was painted, but it also presents imagery that resonates with ideas now dimmed by distance, ideas that were derived from the Bible and patristic sources but that, in the fourteenth century, doubtless more readily reached the ears of the faithful in the language of the vernacular. Religious hymns or laude from the period not only suggest the depth of medieval ardor but also offer clues about how the imagery at Montesiepi was understood,5 for despite its pathos and emotional power the Annunciation of course operates on a symbolic as well as a dramatic level. The column, which serves such a prominent dramatic purpose in Ambrogio’s sinopia and which becomes a curiously prominent feature in numerous later paintings and which was in fact retained in the revised Annunciation at Montesiepi, is more than an innocent prop: it was an ancient Marian epithet. Found in the writings of Saint Bernard, founder of the Cistercian Order, and of other church fathers, it was a also frequent image in hymns. One late fourteenth- early fifteenth-century lauda begs: “Tu, donna piacente, sie nostra colonna,/ secorri la gente con misericordia:/ fonte surgente in cui gratia abonda,/ abbia pietà d’ongne peccatore!”6 The fresco at Montesiepi doubtless was intended to evoke the idea of the Virgin as Ecclesia who serves as mankind’s support as well as the related notion of Mary’s fortitude7 and perhaps even to suggest a parallel with Christ’s humiliation at another 5

M. Baxandall (Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, Oxford, 1972, pp. 45–48) notes that paintings were “exterior visualizations” of the public’s “interior visualizations.” Baxandall points to sermons as a way of recapturing that public’s understanding and response. 6 G. Varanini, L. Banfi, and A. Burgio, Laude cortonesi dal secolo XIII al XV, 1981, vol. II, pt. 1 (Il codice 180 della fraternita dei laici nella Biblioteca Comunale di Arezzo, ed. by A. Burgio), p. 202 (no. 49). Another lauda invokes the Virgin: “Colona sij del segolo [secolo], in alto sij fermata.” See G. Varanini, ed., Laude dugentesche (Vulgares Eloquentes, vol. 8), Padua, 1972, p. 24. The idea is of course also found in Latin hymns, such as a fourteenthcentury example that stresses her role as humanity’s support: “Ave prima columnarum,/ orbem portant quae terrarum,/ cornu frangens sublimium/ et exaltans humilium.” Another sings, “Salve salutis alumna, ave fidei columna....” See F. Mone, Lateinishche Hymnem des Mittelalters, Freiburg im Breisgau, 1854, vol. II, pp. 237 and 281. 7 In a sermon on the Annunciation Bernard discusses the Virgin’s fear and in addition to the famous comment, “Turbata est, sed non perturbata,” notes: “Quod turbata est,

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column; nevertheless, in the original conception the symbolic significance of the column is subsumed by the emotional force of the drama, which focuses on the pathetic figure of the Virgin. It was the affective power of this interpretation that perhaps led to its undoing, for such drama, which lay beyond the power of mere words — even the impassioned lyrics of a lauda — may have overwhelmed the symbolic content of the imagery. Ambrogio’s role in devising the program must remain a matter of speculation, but in any event neither he nor the patrons invented the motif of the Virgin embracing the column. Although Borsook, seeking a source other than Ambrogio’s imagination for the idea, suggested that it may have been inspired by accounts of a column that stood in the church in Nazareth where the Annunciation was said to have occurred,8 the painter and his patrons probably enjoyed a more immediate source, for the remarkable iconography as well as the deeply human treatment of the event had parallels in contemporary devotional literature. One need not go farther than Borgo San Sepolcro, which enjoyed close connections with Siena, as did Chiusdino, San Galgano’s native city, and Volterra, in whose diocese Montesiepi and verecundiae fuit virginalis; quod non perturbata, fortitudinis; quod tacuit et cogitavit, prudentiae.” See Bernard of Clairvaux, Opera, Rome, 1966, vol. I (“Sermones super Cantica Canticorum,” 1–35) Sermo 2.9. In translation the whole passage reads: “She was troubled, but not distressed. It is written, ‘I am troubled and do not speak, but I consider the days of old, I remember the years long past.’ And so it was with Mary. She was troubled, she did not speak, but she pondered what sort of greeting this might be. That she should be troubled is only virginal reserve. Not to be distressed shows courage. That she was silent and pondered shows prudence.” For the translation see Bernard of Clairvaux and Amadeus of Lausanne, Magnificat: Homilies in Praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary, (Cistercian Fathers Series: Number Eighteen), trans. by M.-B. Said and G. Perigo, with an intro. by C. Waddell, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1979, Homily 3.9. 8 Borsook, 1969, pp. 29–30. The author cites Fra Niccolò da Poggibonsi’s Libro d’Oltramare, a diary written between 1346 and 1350. More recently D. and P. Diemer, followed by Freuler, put forward the even more improbable argument that the image of the Virgin collapsed on the ground revives an Early Christian type, derived from apocryphal sources and known through an ivory, in which the Annunciate receives the Word while at a well. In the ivory, however, the Virgin has not collapsed in fear but simply kneels in order to fill her jug. One must suppose, therefore, not only that Ambrogio was familiar with this abandoned and virtually unknown imagery but that he either misunderstood or consciously rethought it. See D. and P. Diemer, “Turbata est a sermone eius.—Zu einer ungewöhnlichen Verkundigungsdarstellung des Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Befund und Deutung,” Zum Verhaltnis von Empirie und Interpretation in Sprach und Literaturwissenschaft, Tübingen, 1979, pp. 154–168; G. Freuler, Biagio di Goro Ghezzi a Paganico: L’affresco nell’abside della Chiesa di S. Michele, Florence, 1986, pp. 42–46.

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the nearby abbey dedicated to him stands.9 Singing of the Annunciation, an early fourteenth-century lauda once heard in Borgo elaborates upon the Virgin’s emotional response to the angel’s greeting and specifically refers to the column: a vergine fo paurosa, quando udi l’angel parlare, k’era honesta e vergognosa, començo tucta a tremare, vergogniava co-llui stare: compania non avea usata. Fra se medesma pensava onde l’angelo era entrato, forte se maravelgliava, ke vedea l’uscio serrato; el suo viso era cangiato, tutta quanta era cangiata. Abraçava la colonna, per la paura ch’avea; tanto el piangere l’abonda, sostenere non se podea; la dolcissima Maria pensava essare enganata.10 9

Repetti, 1835, vol. I, pp. 13–14 (Abazia di San Galgano). The laudario, which is preserved (without a catalogue number) in the Biblioteca Comunale of Arezzo, may have belonged at various times to more than one confraternity in Borgo San Sepolcro, so that one cannot be certain which group originally commissioned it. See E. Cappelletti, ed., Laude di Borgo San Sepolcro, Florence, 1986, p. 41 and, for the hymn, p. 65 (no. 1, “In Festo Anuntiationis Sancte Marie”). Similar verses are found in an another laudario, dated 1426, from Faenza (and now preserved in the Vatican library, Vaticano latino 11 251): 10

La Vergene se spoxa, quando a` l’Angel parlare, ch’era honesta e vergognosa, començo` tutta a tremare, vergognosa cum lui stare, de compagnia non era uxada.

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The image described in the hymn and depicted at Montesiepi elaborates upon the account in the gospel of Saint Luke, which recounts that the angel’s mysterious appearance troubled the Virgin. Rather than the later moment of happy resolution depicted by countless paintings and expressed by showing the Virgin in an attitude of regal obedience, both the hymn and the mural depict a moment of doubt and thereby emphasize the Madonna’s humanity. This emphasis was hardly new in Sienese painting at the time that the Annunciation was painted. It could be found in the work of Guido da Siena and in the prominent and almost contemporary altarpiece painted by Simone Martini for the Sienese Cathedral, but the mural exaggerates her response in a way that underscores both her humanity and her low estate. In Simone’s painting the Virgin recoils from the angel with a kind of defensive inhalation, but the slow balletic movements of the two figures, who are at once animated and still, immediate and detached, are so full of elegant, insouciant artifice as to remove the image from the realm of the spontaneous and the ordinary. By contrast, the painting at Montesiepi is more direct and extreme. What could be more dramatic than the contrast between the two principal figures. At once submissive and looming, Gabriel kneels to proffer a palm, yet his spreading wings and trailing drapery seem to touch three corners of the chamber and endow his expansive bulk with buoyancy and grace. Before Gabriel’s calm self-possession the Virgin sinks into a coiling mass upon the floor and seems to shrink into herself. The added space behind her only heightens the contrast between Gabriel’s largeness and her own diminishment. Yet, paradoxically, the figures’ emotional and dramatic opposition gains clarity and force by means of their likeness, for the Virgin falls to the floor in a pose that echoes that of the angel, whose proffering arm even parallels her grasping one. The strictness of the visual parallel connects the two figures in such a way as to enforce the inescapability

Abraçava la collona de paura ch’ella avea, tanto el pianger che l’abonda sostener non se possea: la dolcissima Maria pensò de essere inganata. See F. Carboni, “Laude cortonesi in un ‘Librocolo’ faentino,” in G. Varanini, L. Banfi, and A. Burgio, Laude cortonesi dal secolo XIII al XV, Florence, 1985, vol. IV, pt. 1, pp. 144–145 (“Lauda gracioxa per la Vergene Maria”).

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of the confrontation and thereby to underscore the Virgin’s plight. This interpretation may have lacked decorum, but it was hardly heretical. It expressed, in highly theatrical terms, the frailties of Eve’s descendant, and in the suggestion of ravishment gives sensuous form to the supersensuous idea of Mary as the sponsa Dei or bride of God whose room becomes a thalamus.11 The sanctity of this space, which is rendered discrete by the intervention of an actual window, is such that not even Gabriel may enter it but must communicate his message through fictive openings painted on the embrasures of the window, whose light links the two figures and at the same time illuminates the actual space of the chapel.12 Even if Ambrogio, who apparently allowed assistants considerable responsibility in carrying out the cycle, did not actually invent the motif of the Virgin at the column, his genius shines no less, perhaps more, in the way that he visualized the idea on the wall. The treatment of the Madonna found in the sinopia for the Annunciation is a logical part of a coherent program and, however stirring when considered in isolation, gains added resonance in the context of the images around it. Although some of the decoration is lost, what survives tends to direct attention toward the altar wall: in the two lunettes that crown the side walls ranks of saints and angels (Figs. 3–4), including San Galgano, approach the throne of the eternal Queen of Heaven, who occupies the lunette directly above the Annunciation (Fig. 5); in the lateral vaults two prophets point toward the Maestà (Figs. 6–7), while a third in effect forms a pinnacle above her.13 As Borsook has argued, the theme of the wall as a whole is the 11 On the erotic connotations of the Annunciation see Y. Hirn, The Sacred Shrine: A Study of the Poetry and Art of the Catholic Church, London, 1912, pp. 290–293. 12 As at Montesiepi, an arragement that shows Gabriel and mary flanking a window may be found in Lippo Vanni’s cycle at San Leonardo al Lago and at Biagio di Goro Ghezzi’s cycle at Paganico, but the idea is perhaps presaged in Pietro Lorenzetti’s Arezzo Polyptych. See Borsook, 1969, p. 28; Freuler, 1986, plate I. 13 The prophet directly above the Maestà cannot be identified, as his inscription is fragmentary. The prophet to the Virgin’s left is Habakkuk. The inscription on his scroll, “Operuit caelos gloria eius et laudis eius plena est terra” or “His glory covered the heavens, and the earth was full of his praise” (Habakkuk 3, 3), refers to the moment of the Annunciation, when the shadow of the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary. The prophet to the Virgin’s right is Haggai. The inscription on his scroll, “Magna erit gloria domus istius novissimae” or “The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former” (Haggai 2, 9), refers to the Church, Ecclesia, and the New law that supplanted the Old at the moment of the Annunciation. Borsook argued persuasively that the inscriptions also allunded to San Galgano, specifically to his rotunda and to the mountain on which it sits. See Borsook, 1969, pp. 16 and 21.

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3. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Saint Michael leads Galgano to the Celestial Court. Chapel of San Galgano, Montesiepi. 4. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Saints and Angels approach the Celestial Court. Chapel of San Galgano, Montesiepi.

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5. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Maestà (before restoration). Chapel of San Galgano, Montesiepi.

redemption of man through the mystery of the Incarnation,14 but it ought to be noted further that the unusual placement of the Annunciation directly behind the altar serves to underscore the liturgical implications of the scene. Of course, such concerns were appropriate for a funerary chapel, which this apparently was,15 and as in laude of the period, Mary is the chief protagonist. It is her role as the vessel of salvation that lies at the heart of the program. The Maestà depicted above the Annunciation establishes a contrast between the Queen of Heaven and the figure of Eve reclining at her feet (Fig. 8), the first surviving instance of an iconography that is found subsequently in other paintings,16 but the relationship, based on a long patristic tradition 14

Borsook, 1969, pp. 30–31. This idea is reinforced by the presence of a balding or, more probably, tonsured donor who is shown kneeling behind Gabriel and very much in media res in the painted version of the Annunciation. He may also appear in the sinopia, where a vaguely sketched figure stands discreetly in the doorway behind the divine messenger. Borsook, 1969, p. 31. 16 Borsook, 1969, p. 25. The iconography of the recumbent Eve at the feet of the enthroned Mary, which probably originated with Ambrogio Lorenzetti, is known through 15

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6. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Haggai. Chapel of San Galgano, Montesiepi.

7. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Habakkuk. Chapel of San Galgano, Montesiepi.

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8. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Maestà (detail with Eve). Chapel of San Galgano, Montesiepi.

linking the two women,17 also extends to the Annunciation, where Mary, like Eve, is shown on the ground (Fig. 9). As is known from writings and from some dozen mostly Sienese examples in which the fallen woman usually holds a fig. See G. Coor-Achenbach, “Neither a Rose nor an Apple but a Fig,” The Burlington Magazine, CIV (1962), p. 305; and S. Esche, Adam und Eva, Dusseldorf, 1957, p. 60, n. 179. 17 Borsook, 1969, pp. 25–26. Saint Bernard wrote: “Propterea curre, Eva, ad Mariam; curre, mater, ad filiam; filia pro matre respondeat, ipsa matris opprobrium augerat, ipsa patri pro matre satisfaciat, quia ecce si vir cecidit per feminam, iam non erigitur nisi per feminam.” (“Eve, run then to Mary, run to your daughter. Let your daughter now plead for her mother and take away her mother’s reproach. Let her now reconcile her mother to the Father. For if man fell on account of woman, surely he will rise only through another woman.”) Bernard of Clairvaux, Opera, Rome, 1966, vol. IV (“Sermones in laudibus virginis matris, II, 3), p. 23. The translation is taken from Bernard of Clairvaux and Amadeus of Lausanne, Magnificat, p. 17. Meiss (1968, p. 65) argued that the source for the unusual juxtaposition of Eve and Mary, as well as the specific characterization of the Virgin as an empress, was to be found in Dante’s Paradiso (Canto XXXII: “The wound which Mary closed and anointed, she who is so beauteous at her feet opened and thrust”), but, however tantalizing, a direct connection is unlikely and, moreover, unnecessary for understanding the imagery: one finds insistent parallels between the Fall and Redemption, Eve and Mary in a work as far removed in time and space from Montesiepi as the eleventh-century bronze doors of Bernward of Hildesheim.

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9. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, View of altar wall with Maestà and Annunciation. Chapel of San Galgano, Montesiepi.

numerous other pictures of the Annunciation that show the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the error of Eve, or Eva in Latin, is reversed, releasing mankind from woe, at the moment that the angel utters her name in reverse, “Ave,” to the second Eve. The Ave maris stella sings of the Virgin as “Mutans Evae nomen,” and another hymn, with irresistible word play, lays bare the connection and its significance: “Nostrum vae per ave tollis,/ Nomen Evae dum revolvis/ Gabriele nuntio.”18 At Montesiepi the program develops a network of relationships out of the well-understood mystical connection between the two. Eve appears between the two figures of Mary and mediates between the Virgin’s most humble and her most elevated states. Eve’s appearance and position, at once seductive and lowly, emphasizes her earthliness and alludes to the consequences of her fateful mistake.19 Like the serpent, who is cursed to crawl forever in the dust, Eve, the mother 18

Quoted from Hirn, 1912, pp. 287 and 521 n. 38. Cole (1980, p. 171), who describes Eve as a “temptress” with “siren-like beauty,” rightly emphasizes the figure’s seductiveness. This is suggested not only by her pose, her bare feet, and her vaguely classicizing garment, but perhaps even more by her long hair and 19

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of humanity, lies on the ground deprived of her upright stance, a position which, according to Gregory the Great, deprived her of the ability to contemplate the Creator.20 Further, such a positon suggests her powerless submission to the authority of her enthroned opposite and contrasts the Annunciate’s chastity with her own wantonness. If Eve stands between mankind’s original place in heaven and subsequent fate on earth, Mary offers Eve’s children the means of overcoming Original Sin and rising once again to the level of angels. The contrast between high and low, authoritative and meek, powerful and vulnerable is implicit in Ambrogio’s original conception of the Annunciate Virgin, but it receives its logical complement in the figure of the Enthroned Virgin, whose head rises, like the column to which she was compared, above all others on the wall and who is shown with emblems of power and rule. Not only did the painter crown her and dress her in a resplendent mantle of surpassing richness, but he gave her the orb and scepter usually reserved for kings and emperors (Fig. 10). She is “quella altissima raina,”21 the “virgo imperiale,” and “l’alta donna encoronata”22 of song. It is toward her that the ranks of angels and saints, reminiscent of the measured processions depicted on the walls of Early Christian basilicas, converge in homage from the lunettes on the adjacent walls as part of a continuous and, in effect, circular scene illustrating San Galgano’s vision —

the animal-skin garment she wears. In fact, one finds the latter two features, long hair and an animal-skin cloak, in an early fifteenth-century representation of Luxuria by Pisanello (Vienna, Albertina, No. 24018r). See G. Paccagnini, Pisanello, London, 1973, Fig. 106. The figure of Eve at Montesiepi is also similar to the figure of Babylon as depicted by the midfourteenth-century painter Allegretto Nuzi in a fresco in San Domenico, Fabriano. Shown astride a seven-headed hydra representing the seven deadly sins, Nuzi’s Babylon is a longtressed and barefoot woman wearing a low-cut, diaphanous dress with long sleeves that are slit almost to the shoulder. See the illustration in G. Donnini, “On Some Unknown Masterpieces by Allegretto Nuzi,” The Burlington Magazine, CXVII (1975), pp. 535–540 (Fig. 30). 20 Gregory the Great, Moralia in Iob, viii, 9, 19 in Patrologia Latina, LXXV, col. 813 AB. I am grateful to my colleague Thomas E. Polk for alerting me to this passage. 21 G. Varanini, L. Banfi, and A. Burgio, Laude cortonesi dal secolo XIII al XV, vol. II (Il Codice 180 della fraternita dei laici nella Biblioteca Comunale di Arezzo, ed. by A. Burgio), Florence, 1981, pt. 1, p. 189 (no. 46). 22 G. Varanini, L. Banfi, and A. Burgio, Laude cortonesi dal secolo XIII al XV, vol. I (Il codice 91 della Biblioteca Comunale di Cortona, ed. by G. Varanini), Florence, 1981, pt. 1, pp. 90 (no. 2) and 111 (no. 6).

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10. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Maestà (detail of Virgin Enthroned after restoration). Chapel of San Galgano, Montesiepi.

now ours — of the Madonna in a rotunda,23 a treatment as daring in its use of space as in its specific depiction of Mary.24 Although not unprecedented, the idea of the Virgin enthroned as queen and unaccompanied by either the infant or adult Christ, was rare,25 and in this instance it was suppressed by the hand of the same follower of Pietro Lorenzetti who altered the Annunciation below. Stripping the Virgin of her badges of power by either covering or painting them out and replacing those attributes with the

23

As the identifying inscription above San Galgano and the Archangel Michael in the adjoining the scene is lost, one cannot be absolutely certain which of San Galgano’s two visions at Montesiepi the scene is intended to show; however, Borsook has argued persuasively that in all likelihood it is the one in which the Virgin instructed him to construct the rotunda. See Borsook, 1969, p. 16. 24 Ambrogio’s extraordinary willingness to ignore the natural boundaries of the architecture in designing the upper tier of murals is stressed by B. Cole, 1980, pp. 169–170. 25 Borsook, following E. Guldan (Eva und Maria, Graz-Köln, 1966, p. 130) notes the existence of examples from as early as the thirteenth century and, thus, underplays the unusualness of the iconography.

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infant Christ, the painter, no doubt at the command of his patrons, refashioned the empress into a mother. Although logical within the overall program of the wall and perhaps the chapel as a whole, the original conception of Mary as a solitary queen, like the image of the prostrate Virgin embracing the column in the Annunciation on the wall below, was so rare as to be unfamiliar, but the absence of the figure of Christ brought it to the edge of heterodoxy and made it perhaps even more daring than the Annunciation. No wonder, like the figure of the Annunciate, it too was transformed into a conventional and doubtless more readily understood type. The original program did not ignore the theme of the Virgin as the genetrix of salvation, but it developed it metaphorically through the imagery of flowers and fruit. Ambrogio and his patrons drew a parallel between the fig held by Eve and the palm offered by Gabriel, for unlike most images of the subject — including Ambrogio’s version of 1344 — in this case the palm is heavy with fruit, or as described in a hymn: “una palma in mam li pose,/ con un fructo molto aulente.”26 The fruit of salvation, of course, is an antidote to the fruit of sin, and Eve displays a scroll whose inscription asserts as much while also referring to Mary’s high estate: “Feci pecchato perché passione soferse: fino a che questa reghina sorte nel ventre a nostro redentione.”27 The two women who flank Eve, the only women besides the Virgin in this lunette, elaborate on the idea of redemption. Plausibly identified as twin manifestations of the virtue Charity, who is more commonly represented as a nursing mother, one, amor dei, offers the Virgin a heart whose shape is analogous, perhaps not accidentally, to Eve’s fig and to the orb held by Mary in the original version;28 the other, amor proximi (Fig. 11), carries an uncharacteristic straw basket of the type appropriate for harvesting and tenders a nosegay of flowers. And finally, the high Queen of Heaven is presented with bowls filled to overflowing with

26

The lauda comes from the same collection as the one, quoted in the text above, that includes the image of the Virgin embracing the column. See E. Cappelletti, 1986, p. 135 (no. 121); another (pp. 126–127) from the same laudario reads: “L’Onipotente chiamò el Gabriello,/ quello vertuoso angelo tanto bello, de`.lli la palma de quello fiore novello,/ per cui la umana gente fo salvata.” 27 Borsook, 1969, p. 26. 28 Borsook (1969, p. 43 n. 63) suggested the possibility that Ambrogio intended to establish a visual parallel between the orb in Mary’s hand and the fig in Eve’s.

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11. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Saints and Angels, detail of the Maestà. Chapel of San Galgano, Montesiepi.

roses and lilies, both epithets applied to her: “Tu se’ rosa e tu se’ gillio,/ tu portasti el dolce fillio . . . .”29 The floral and vegetal imagery of the wall was a commonplace in literature of the Virgin: in one lauda she was praised as a “palma preciosissima,” a “viola violata,” a “roxa ingarofolata,” the “verga d’ubidiencia,” an “oliva replantata,” and “balsamo olentissimo.”30 As Borsook has pointed out, such imagery, as well as the connection of Eve with Mary and the inclusion of the two aspects of Charity, reflects the writings of Saint Bernard, whose commentary on the Song of Songs (2, I) rhapsodizes: “Come la Vergine Madre di Dio è il ramo, così il Figlio il fiore . . . Cosi fiorì il ventre della 29

Varanini, Banfi, and Burgio, Laude, I, pt. 1, Florence, 1981, p. 91 (no. 2). These epithets, which are but a few of the many associated with Mary in countless sources, are taken from a hymn originating with a thirteenth-century confraternity of Servites in Bologna. See Varanini, Laude dugentesche, 1972, pp. 23–27. 30

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Vergine, inviolato, intatto e casto . . . la cui gloria non avrà mai fine. O Vergine, nobile germoglio, quale grande altezza tu raggiungerai?”31 And while likening the pure Virgin, whom he identifies with the Church, to a tall, flowering shoot, he compares the corrupt Eve, whom he identifies with the Synagogue, to a stunted, flowerless fig: “The fig is a good image, for though sprouting from the sound patriarchal root it never aimed to reach toward the sky, never aimed at lifting itself from the ground, never responded to the root by putting out branches, by blooming into flower, by an abundance of fruit. O stunted, twisted, knotty tree, how completely illsuited to you is your root.”32 The contrast between the tall, flowering shoot and the stunted, barren fig developed by Saint Bernard is implicit in the use of similar imagery at Montesiepi, where the palm and the fig restate in metaphorical terms the obvious contrast between high and low, upright and prone found in the treatment of the Virgin in her manifestations as immortal queen and mortal bride. The floral imagery adopted at Montesiepi, like the handling of the principal figures, served to further a specific interpretation of the Virgin and of her role in the drama of human salvation. As in Bernard and in the more popular laude, she was the tall flower whose fruit could lift mankind from the dust and restore us to God’s sight. Of course, floral imagery, in any case appropriate for a festival of spring, alluded to the original setting, Nazareth — meaning “Flower,” and only encouraged Bernard to offer rhetorical bouquets: “Flos nasci voluit de flore, in flore, et floris tempore.”33 However, could the use of such imagery at Montesiepi perhaps also have been encouraged by a willingness to cast the cycle in terms that would have local as well as universal relevance? The imagery of fruit and flowers must have had ready significance for this rural community. Its members would have known the hardness of the recalcitrant earth that mankind was fated to work after the Fall. They would also have understood the hope for a heaven filled with natural beauty. Even the figure of San Galgano (Fig. 12), whose legend was depicted on the side walls 31

As quoted in Borsook, 1969, 26. Bernard of Clairvaux, Magnificat, 1979, 60.3. The original reads: “Bene ficus, quae bona licet Patriarcharum radice prodierit, numquam tamen in altum proficere, numquam se humo attollere voluit, numquam respondere radici proceritate ramorum, generositate florum, fecunditate fructuum. Male prorsus tibi cum tua radice convenit, arbor pusilla, tortuosa, nodosa.” Bernard of Clairvaux, Opera, Rome, 1958, vol. II (“Sermones super Cantica Canticorum,” 36–86), p. 143. 33 As quoted in Hirn, p. 282. 32

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12. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Saint Michael and Saint Galgano, det. Fig. 3.

of the chapel, was perhaps connected to the theme of salvation and the imagery of fruit, for Galgano, whose sword is still preserved in the adjacent rotunda, was an Italian King Arthur whose touch could soften stone. As he approaches the Maestà in the company of saints and martyrs, it is the sword in the stone — before whose cruciform shape he died on his knees in prayer — that he offers the Virgin, much as the sons of Adam might offer the hoe. The toil of making the rocky earth pliant and fruitful could be seen as a parallel to Galgano’s miracle and to the Virgin’s humiliation at the column as well as to Christ’s passion on the tree of life, and, as the patrons might have been reminded by lauda upon lauda, it was through such debasement and suffering that divine charity would open the way to mankind’s return to the heavenly garden.

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VII

A High Altarpiece for San Giovanni Fuorcivitas in Pistoia and Hypotheses about Niccolò di Tommaso

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HE fourteenth-century account books of the church of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas in Pistoia present a fascinating picture of almost continuous artistic activity involving paintings, sculptures, and lesser works. One wellknown project for a high altarpiece took at least eight years and at one point required an inquiry to identify the leading painters still living in the aftermath of the Black Death. The document listing the best available masters in Florence, Siena, and Lucca is, by virtue of its uniqueness, one of the most instructive in the history of trecento Tuscan painting, particularly as the work finished by Taddeo Gaddi still stands in the Church. The altarpiece was completed in 1353, when Taddeo received a final payment for his work, but previously unpublished records show that Taddeo’s picture did not long retain its place of honor: less than two decades after it was finished, another painting replaced it on the high altar.1 1

For the altarpiece by Taddeo Gaddi and its documentation, including the notice seeking the artists best able to paint it, see A. Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi: Critical Reappraisal and Catalogue Raisonné, Columbia and London 1982, pp. 58–61, 159–161, 255–258. For the documents concerning the replacement for Taddeo’s picture, see the Appendix, Doc. I below. I am grateful to Gino Corti for corroborating my transcriptions of the documents published in the Appendix. For artistic activity in the church of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas, Pistoia, see L. Zdekauer, “Opere d’arte senese nella chiesa di San Giovanni Fuorcivitas di Pistoia,” in: Bull. Senese di Storia Patria, vol. VIII, 1901, p. 180. There were, of course, projects besides those involving Sienese artists. One was initiated as early as 1352, that is, the year before Taddeo Gaddi received final payment for his work on a high altarpiece. A notice from 1354 records the substantial deposit of twelve florins, reserved from the income of two years before, to be used toward “le dipinture.” The subject but not the medium of these paintings is specified in

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The plans for a new picture were quickly conceived but slow to take shape. The project was not funded at once by a single bequest but by numerous donations from the community at large. The operaii, or governors of the church, collected money for the project and apparently paid for whatever they could afford step by step, a method earlier adopted for Taddeo’s altarpiece. The project was well advanced by 1364, for in that year the operaii accepted a contribution “per aiuto all tavola nuova, la quale è facta all’antare di Sancta Maria,” also called the “altare maggiore,” and on December 29th of that year paid “per fatura della tavola,” that is, for its construction. Once assembled and in the possession of the Opera, the picture was not immediately painted, because it remained unfinished two years later in 1366, when the operaii recorded a gift “per fare aiuto ala taola a dipingniere.” Actual painting in fact began no earlier than 1370, when a “maestro Nicholò dipintore da Firenze,” later also called “maestro Nicolao da Fiorenza,” received a partial payment for the “tavola di Santa Maria che de[v]e dipingere.” This “maestro Nicolao” finished painting the new altarpiece by 1372, when at an unspecified moment in that year he received a final payment for his work. Thus, within two decades after Taddeo Gaddi had finished one painting for the high altar of San Giovanni, another took its place.2 a later notice. On 19 May 1357 the deposit was given to the prior of the church “per fare fare a dipingere la maestà e la donna nostra cholla storia de’ magi” according to the wishes of a single patron, one monna Salvagia di Michele. (AS Pistoia, Patrimonio Ecclesiastico C 450, San Giovanni Fuorcivitas: Libro d’ Entrata e Uscita, 1353–1376, fol. 14r and 61r. ) Probably the paintings were to be murals, because elsewhere the documents tend to be specific when referring to panels, whereas for murals, which are sometimes identified only by the context, they are not. For example (and to give yet further evidence of art made for this church), one reads in the Entrata for 1344; “Item. avemo da monna Barotta donna di Ser Matteo per l’anima sua e de’ suoi morti per aiuto della dipintura di sancta Katerina . . . soldi XI.” As the following entries from the Uscita of 1344 explain, this “dipintura” is a mural: “Item. demo [per] facitura li ponti quando si dipinse la trave . . . soldi III, denari VI” and “Item. demo a Lazzaro dipintore, per ché dipinse in nella trave grande in su che stanno le taule dipinte e la croce grande, la storia di madonna santa Maria e di santa Katerina . . . libri X, soldi XVI.” (AS Pistoia, Patrimonio Ecclesiastico C 449, San Giovanni Fuorcivitas, Libro d’ Entrate e Uscita, 1320–1350, fol. 189v–190r. ) 2 That Taddeo’s picture should have been replaced so soon after its completion is a striking departure from usual practice. Altarpieces were remarkably durable and could be expected to have a long life; indeed, Taddeo’s picture could not have suffered some catastrophic accident, for it survives, albeit damaged, to this day. Documents specify that Taddeo’s picture was intended for the high altar, but after its completion the operaii clearly changed their minds about its function. Perhaps its iconography no longer satisfied.

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Although the documents are imprecise, one can believe that the “maestro Nicolao” they mention is the Florentine Niccolò di Tommaso. This identification stems largely from Niccolò di Tommaso’s well-known activity is Pistoia, where he painted his greatest surviving work, the murals in the former convent chapel of the Tau (i.e. of St. Anthony the Great). A document in fact records that “Maestro Niccolao da Firenze” was painting in the Tau in November 1372, the very year that the high altarpiece for San Giovanni Fuorcivitas was finished.3 More intriguing is the fact that both churches and the painter Niccolò di Tommaso had links to a single individual, Fra Giovanni Guidotti, “precettore della magione di Sant’Antonio di Firenze” and founder of the Tau. When Guidotti decided to build, for the salvation of his undying soul and those of his family, a chapel in Pistoia he presented his plan on 26 February 1361 to the prior and canons of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas, in whose parish the chapel and convent were to stand on land contiguous with their church. Obtaining consent, Guidotti pursued his plan, which was celebrated by Matteo Villani in his Cronica

3 The attribution of these murals to Niccolò di Tommaso depends, above all, on the compelling arguments of Offner, who related them to the painter’s signed altarpiece of 1371 formerly in the church of Sant’Antonio Abate in Naples and now in the Museo di San Martino there, and secondarily, to the corroborating evidence of a document stating that a “maestro Niccolao da Firenze” was painting in the Tau in 1372. For the documentation concerning Niccolò di Tommaso and the Tau, see Lucia Gai, “Nuove proposte e nuovi documenti sui maestri che hanno affrescato la Cappella del Tau a Pistoia” in: Bull. Storico Pistoiese, vol. LXXII, 1970, pp. 75–94, especially p. 88. Gai’s proposal that part of the chapel was painted by a second master whom she identifies as Antonio Vite fails to persuade. To be sure, the painting in the Tau is uneven, sometimes dramatically so (one need only compare the loveliness of the Fall of Adam and Eve with the crudeness of the stories of Bishop Athanasius), but the variations in quality are more easily explained as the result both of participation by assistants and of Niccolò di Tommaso’s own erratic procedure. For Niccolò di Tommaso, see R. Offner, “Niccolò di Tommaso”, in: Art in America, vol. XIII, 1924, pp. 21–37; id., “Niccolò di Tommaso and the Rinuccini Master”, in: Studies in Florentine Painting: The Fourteenth Century, intro. by B. Cole, New York 1971 (first published 1927), pp. 109–126; id., “A Ray of Light on Giovanni del Biondo and Niccolò di Tommaso”, in: Flor. Mitt., vol. VII, 1956, pp. 173–192; and id., A Legacy of Attributions, ed. by H. Maginnis, New York 1981, pp. 87–92. For more recent research on Niccolò see F. Bologna, I pittori alla corte Angioina di Napoli, 1266–1414, e un riesame dell’arte nell’età fridericiana, Rome 1969, pp. 326–328; M. Boskovits, Pittura fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento, Florence 1975, pp. 35–36 and 202–204, nn. 108–115; and A. Tartuferi, “Appunti tardogotici: Niccolò di Tommaso, il Maestro di Barberino e Lorenzo di Bicci”, in: Paragone, vol. XXXVI, 1985, pp. 3–16.

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fiorentina, even after he was transferred to Naples in 1369.4 In this same year Niccolò di Tommaso, probably the painter, appears twice in the rolls of the Florentine Prestanze, but his assessment went unpaid, possibly indicating his absence from the city.5 Niccolò may have left for Pistoia to begin his work 4 E. Carli, Gli Affreschi del Tau a Pistoia, Florence 1977, p. 3. The documents were published by S. Ferrali, “L’ordine ospitaliere di S. Antonio Abate o del Tau e la sua casa a Pistoia”, in: Il Gotico a Pistoia – Atti del 2° Convegno internazionale di studi, Pistoia 1966 (actually published 1972), pp. 181–245. The reference to Villani, who dated the foundation of the convent 1340, is cited in F. Gurrieri, “La Chiesa di S. Antonio Abate o del Tau” in: Bull. Storico Pistoiese, III series, vol. V, 1970, p. 4. 5 This Niccolò di Tommaso’s failure to pay his assessments for the Prestanze in 1368/9 may be significant, since he did not usually default: on seven of eight occasions in 1363/4 he is recorded as having made a payment. But is the man residing in the quarter of Santo Spirito, gonfalone Scala, popolo San Giorgio the painter? The fact that the documents fail to give his profession does not invalidate them, since trecento sources do not always do so. To give one example: on 27 October 1367 a notice concerning the Cathedral includes among dozens of others the names of Matteo di Pacino, Giovanni Bonsi, and Andrea di Cione, none of them identified as a painter. (C. Guasti, Santa Maria del Fiore: La costruzione della chiesa e del campanile, Florence 1887, pp. 202–205, doc. 190. ) What makes the Prestanze notices significant is that their Niccolò di Tommaso lived in the same section of the city as the Niccolò di Tommaso who witnessed Nardo di Cione’s will in 1365. Although the Niccolò di Tommaso who is mentioned in the latter document is not identified as the painter, scholars have rightly assumed that he was, for the close affinity between the styles of the two painters suggests a personal connection as well. Thus the Niccolò di Tommaso mentioned in Nardo’s will of 21 May 1365 is probably the same one recorded in the Prestanze in 1363–1364 and in 1368–1369, since both resided in the popolo of San Giorgio. For Nardo’s will, see G. Milanesi, Nuovi documenti per la storia dell’arte toscana dal XII al XV secolo, Rome 1893, p. 58, no. 77. There is another difficulty with the documents. Two volumes of the Prestanze, those recording the assessments of March 1368/9 and of 28 June 1369 (ASF, Prestanze 132, fol. 40r and Prestanze 143, fol. 31v), record the name in a way that differs from the nine volumes for 1363–1364 (Prestanze 78, fol. 12v; Prestanze 86, fol. 10v; Prestanze 89, fol. 14v; Prestanze 99, fol. 13v; Prestanze 109, fol. 11v; Prestanze 112, fol. 40v; Prestanze 116, fol. 11v; Prestanze 120, fol. 150r, Prestanze 123, fol. 11v.) Instead of “Niccholaus Tomasii,” they record “Nicholaus hospes Tomasii,” that is, Nicholaus a tenant of Tomasii. Since the residence is the same, the variation is apparently an error on the part of the scribe. Such apparently was not the case of Niccolò di Tommaso’s friend Nardo, who in the Prestanza of 23 March 1362/3 (Prestanze 35, fol. 63r) is listed in the quarter of San Giovanni, gonfalone Vaio, popolo San Rossello and is said to be the tenant of a gentleman with an odd nickname: “Forte Bezzolis vocatus Bambo” immediately precedes “Nardus Cionis pictor hospes dicti Bambi.” Both men paid their assessment (three florins each) on the same day, 8 April 1363. This document offers further evidence that Nardo never married. At the time of the census for San Giovanni Fuorcivitas in 1348 he apparently was living with his brother Orcagna and at the time of his death he left no wife and no children. On the question of Nardo’s marital history see Offner, Corpus, sec. IV, vol. II, 1960, pp. IX–X, n. 6.

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1. Niccolò di Tommaso, Altarpiece with St. Anthony Abbot Enthroned and Sts. Francis, Peter, John the Evangelist, and Louis of Toulouse. Naples, Museo di San Martino.

in the Tau, which as early as 8 May 1362 was described as being “pro majori parte constructam.”6 Guidotti, who probably knew of Niccolò di Tommaso in Florence and who employed him in the Tau, may well have been the intermediary who also secured for him the commission from the Anthonite church in Naples, for which Niccolò produced his only signed work, an altarpiece dated 1371 (Fig. 1). Because Niccolò di Tommaso’s career paralleled the movements and activities of Guidotti, it appears likely that the “Maestro Niccolao da Fiorenza” working in San Giovanni Fuorcivitas was none other than Niccolò di Tommaso, who may have been recommended to the operaii of that church by his patron Giovanni Guidotti. That the painter’s name is once given in the documents for San Giovanni Fuorcivitas as “Nicolao” tends to support his identification as Niccolò di Tommaso. It is perhaps a significant coincidence that documents in the vernacular tend to adopt the variants “Niccolao” or “Niccolaio” rather than the more common “Niccolò” by which the painter is known in art historical 6

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Carli (n. 4), p. 3.

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literature. In addition to the document of 1372 identifying the painter of the Tau as “Maestro Niccolao da Firenze,” another from the same year says that “maestro Niccholao da Firenze” restored a picture in the Cathedral of Pistoia. The Florentine Prestanza of October 1375 records him as “Niccolaio di Tomaso dipintore,”7 and as one of those who are invited to render an opinion for the Opera del Duomo in 1366-1367, he is once referred to simply as “Niccholao,” even though the documents, all of which are in Latin, elsewhere adopt the Latinized form “Niccholaus.”8 Thus he may well be the “Niccolao” mentioned in Franco Sacchetti’s well-known story (novella CXXXVI) involving Taddeo Gaddi, Orcagna, and Alberto Arnoldi, all of whom were Niccolò di Tommaso’s contemporaries.9 The painter’s idiosyncratic name leads to a controversial subject, viz., Niccolò di Tommaso’s possible connection with two documented altarpieces roughly contemporary with his activity in Pistoia (Figs. 2, 3). Both pictures were painted by Jacopo di Cione, but they were begun by a painter that the surviving documents, with inconvenient brevity, call simply “Nicholao” in one case and “Niccolaio” in the other. According to a document dated 30 October 1372, the Coronation produced for the Florentine mint or Zecca was commissioned from two painters, “Nicholao” and Simone “pictoribus civibus florentinis,” who were to produce the “imaginem gloriose Virginis Marie . . . et etiam imagines quorundam aliorum sanctorum . . . .” At some later moment “Nicholao” and Simone, whose full identity is unknown, apparently abandoned the picture, thus on 31 October 1373 “Iacobus Cini,” now universally identified as Jacopo di Cione, received 138 lire (little more than the 134 lire given to “Nicholao” and Simone for their part) “pro complemento picture gloriose virginis Marie, matris Christi, et aliorum sanctorum dei.” Offner and Marcucci, following Gaye and Sirén, identified this “Niccolaio” as Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, who indeed did collaborate with Jacopo di Cione in 1383 in Volterra, but Boskovits, following Berenson’s suggestion, rejected the identification with Gerini in favor of one with 7

ASF, Prestanze 262 (1372), fol. 41r. Guasti (n. 5), p. 178, doc. 156. This same document also takes the liberty of calling Andrea di Bonaiuto by his nickname, “Andreuczo.” Niccolò di Tommaso also is mentioned in five other related documents, see pp. 167–189, docs. 141, 142, 155, 169, and 170. 9 F. Sacchetti, Il Trecentonovelle, ed. by A. Lanzi, Florence 1984, pp. 272–274 and 651. Lanzi identifies this Niccolaio as Niccolò di Beltramo who in 1351 worked alongside Alberto Arnoldi on the Florentine Campanile, but the identification with Niccolò di Tommaso is accepted by Offner 1924 (n. 3), p. 36; and Boskovits (n. 3), p. 204, n. 115. 8

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2. Jacopo di Cione and Niccolò di Tommaso, Zecca Coronation. Florence, Accademia.

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3. Jacopo di Cione and Niccolò di Tommaso, Saints, wing of the San Pier Maggiore Coronation. London, National Gallery.

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Niccolò di Tommaso.10 The latter view is correct on grounds of style. The drawing of certain heads, particularly the female profiles (St. Catherine on the extreme left and St. Reparata on the extreme right), may be compared to heads in the Tau (e.g., the profile head, second from the extreme left, in a scene depicting the wives of Esau and the head of a groom at the extreme right of the Adoration of the Magi). Moreover, the draperies of Sts. Matthew and John the Evangelist who kneel in the foreground of the Zecca Coronation, recall the broken rhythms of the kneeling angels’ garments in Niccolò di Tommaso’s signed St. Anthony Altarpiece of 1371 and those of the angel Gabriel in the Tau Annunciation (Fig. 4).11 The case of the San Pier Maggiore Coronation now in London is slightly different. This impressive work, which is documented from 1370-1371, also involved a collaborative effort between a painter called “Niccolaio,” who in November 1370 provided the design of the picture, Jacopo di Cione, who provided the color, and two other painters, Matteo di Pacino and Tuccio di Vanni. This “Niccolaio” was paid the substantial sum of twelve florins (for fourteen days’ work over the course of three weeks) “per disegnare la tavola,” which probably meant incising the compositions into the surface of the panel. Boskovits correctly asserted that here too the designer “Niccolaio” is to be identified as Niccolò di Tommaso, but evidence of his draughtsmanship is more difficult to discern, perhaps because in this case the painted surface is completely Jacopo di Cione’s work. Nevertheless, the kneeling figures and the profile heads again recall Niccolò di Tommaso, even though the painted contours frequently depart from the lines “Niccolaio” incised into the surface.12 Now, strictly speaking, the identification of the “Niccolaio” who designed the San Pier Maggiore Altarpiece in 1370, the “Nicholao” who

10

For the Zecca Coronation, now in the Accademia in Florence, see Gaye, Carteggio, vol. II, pp. 432–433; Vasari-Milanesi, vol. I, p. 595; O. Siren, Giotto und seine Stellung in der gleichzeitigen florentinischen Malerei, Leipzig 1908, pp. 80 with n. 2, and 90 and the appendix by G. Poggi, pp. 101–102; L. Marcucci, Gallerie Nazionali di Firenze: I dipinti toscani del secolo XIV, Rome 1965, pp. 99–101; Offner, Corpus, sec. IV, vol. III, 1965, p. 37, n. 10; and Boskovits (n. 3), p. 209, n. 33. 11 See the illustrations in Carli (n. 4), plates 29, 44, and 45. 12 For the San Pier Maggiore Altarpiece, see R. Offner, “A Florentine Panel in Providence and a Famous Altarpiece”, in: Studies (Rhode Island School of Design), 1947, pp. 43–61; M. Davies, National Gallery Catalogues: The Earlier Italian Schools, London, 2nd ed., 1961, pp. 389–396; Offner (n. 10), pp. 2, 4, 38, and 42; and Boskovits (n. 3), p. 202, n. 107.

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4. Niccolò di Tommaso, Annunciation. Pistoia, Chapel of the Tau. Detail: Angel Gabriel.

began the Zecca Altarpiece in 1372, the “Maestro Nicolao da Fiorenza” who painted a high altarpiece for San Giovanni Fuorcivitas between 1370 and 1372 as being one and the same with the “Maestro Niccolao da Firenze” who was working in the Tau in 1372 — that is, Niccolò di Tommaso — is a hypothesis, but it is both plausible and probable. The lively demand for the skill of this master ought not to surprise. The patronage of Giovanni Guidotti may have helped to bring Niccolò di Tommaso the commissions for Naples and San Giovanni Fuorcivitas as well as for the Tau, but his hiring would not have been merely a matter of expediency. In the years around 1370, the years immediately following the deaths of Taddeo Gaddi (d. 1366), Orcagna (d. 1368), and Niccolò’s friend and colleague Nardo di Cione (d. 1365), Niccolò di Tommaso was by default, if not by talent alone, one of the leading painters a depleted Florence could offer, and the large number of his surviving works attest to his industry.13 Unfortunately, none of his extant pictures can be identified 13

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See the list of pictures in Boskovits (n. 3), pp. 202–203, n. 108.

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with certainty as the high altarpiece for San Giovanni Fuorcivitas, but one at least cannot be ruled out. The badly damaged left wing of a large altarpiece (Fig. 6) formerly in the Albrighi Collection in Florence but put up for auction at Sotheby’s in Florence in 1986, is related to Niccolò’s Naples Triptych of 1371 as well as to the Zecca Coronation begun by Niccolò in 1372. Above all, in terms of style, quality, and therefore dating, the panel is closest to the murals in the Tau. What makes the stylistic evidence tempting is the prominent position of three saints, shown kneeling in an arrangement usually associated with images of the Virgin’s Coronation, appropriate for a Pistoian provenance: St. John the Evangelist, patron of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas and in the place of honor, is followed by St. James the Great, patron of Pistoia, and St. Anthony Abbot, who holds a book emblazoned with the letter “T”.14

5. Niccolò di Tommaso, Kneeling Female Saint (sinopia). Pistoia, San Francesco. 14

See Boskovits (n. 3), p. 203, n. 108 and fig. 66; also illustrated in R. Fremantle, Florentine Gothic Painters from Giotto to Masaccio etc., London 1975, Fig. 356.

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6. Niccolò di Tommaso, Saints (wing of an altarpiece). Formerly Florence, Albrighi Collection (Auction Sotheby’s Florence, April 14, 1986)

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7. Niccolò di Tommaso, Two Angels (fragmentary mural). Quarrata, Baldi Papini Collection.

In view of the range of Niccolò’s activity in Pistoia, it would not be surprising to learn of other works in that city. Indeed, his hand may be recognized in a fragmentary sinopia from San Francesco (Fig. 5). The haloed figure of a female saint has fallen to her knees and, casting her glance above, draws one hand to her chest in a gesture that underscores her devotion. With her left hand she tenders a summarily sketched object, perhaps an attribute that in the finished painting might have helped to identify her. The drawing is confident and, in the upper half of the figure, careful. The painter took pains in describing the head, whose simplified features are indicated by strong contours. Apparently he began here, with the head and torso, then added the arms, which are indicated by a much softer, more fluid, unshadowed line. Similar lines across her forehead, cheek, and chest define the edges of a transparent wimple and the collar of her dress. The use of the wimple, common in female figures by Nardo di Cione but also by Niccolò di Tommaso, as well as the simplified shape of the torso, the long cylindrical neck whose entire length is modeled under the chin, the placement and

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8. Niccolò di Tommaso, Last Judgment. Pistoia, Chapel of the Tau. Detail

shape of the ear, the characteristically spatulate fingers of the extended hand, the uncertain placement of the raised arm, and above all the profile, notably the long pointed nose, the short mouth, and the rounded tip of the chin, all find close parallels in the work of Niccolò di Tommaso (Figs. 7, 8).15 The expansion of Niccolò di Tommaso’s activity in Pistoia during the early 1370s has implications for the painter’s poorly documented life. In recent years Bologna, Boskovits, and Tartuferi have argued that Niccolò di Tommaso painted his only signed work, the St. Anthony Altarpiece of 1371 while in Naples, and they have even assigned a group of murals and panels in Naples and the surrounding region to the same painter and, therefore, to the same moment.16 The validity of these attributions and their dating lies 15 The image was published with the attribution to a Florentine painter of the early fifteenth century by U. Procacci, Sinopie e Affreschi, Florence 1960, p. 239 and plate 41. Procacci does not give its precise provenance. 16 Bologna, followed by Boskovits and Tartuferi, attributed to Niccolò di Tommaso a tabernacle in the chapel of the castello of Casaluce. This mural depicts Pope Celestine V

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outside the scope of this essay, but if Niccolò di Tommaso is to be associated with these many projects then one must allow for the possibility that he traveled to Naples a second time, after his Pistoian sojourn. Possibly not before 1373 did he leave Pistoia, for as late as 22 December 1372 Niccolò is recorded restoring an altarpiece in the Cathedral, and the decoration of the Tau, which was still in progress in November 1372, may have extended into the following year. Thus, when in 1373 the account books of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas mention “Maestro Nicholò dipintore,” this again, despite the form of the name and imprecision about his citizenship, may well be Niccolò di Tommaso. In any case, instead of an artist called to Pistoia for a single work, one sees an artist whose activity was wider and whose presence was more notable. How long or whether Niccolò di Tommaso remained in Pistoia after 1373 cannot be stated with certainty, but in any event he was probably absent from Florence, for his name fails to appear in the records of the Prestanze for 1373 and 1374.17 Apparently he returned to his city by 1375, because the Prestanza for October of that year puts his residence in the quarter of San Giovanni, gonfalone Drago, popolo San Cristofano; however, he is listed among the delinquents for this Prestanza, and when his assessment is eventually collected on 17 May 1376 it is from a third party on Niccolò’s behalf. In the Prestanza for August 1376 his name is again dropped, perhaps because he had once again left the city or because this time death had claimed him.18 Enthroned and, in the intrado of the arch, the patron, Raimondo del Balzo, who died in 1375. See Tartuferi (n. 3), p. 3 and p. 12, n. 2 with earlier bibliography. The attribution was also accepted by D. Wilkins, Review of Bologna (n. 3) in: Art Bull., vol. LVI, 1974, p. 129. In addition, two other pictures have been linked, more or less directly, to Niccolò di Tommaso’s Neapolitan foray: first, a Virgin Enthroned with Saints and Donors in the Certosa of San Giacomo at Capri and, second, a Crucifix in the church of the Disciplina della Croce in Naples. For the latter pictures again see Tartuferi (n. 3), pp. 3–5 and 12, nn. 5 and 7 with earlier bibliography. 17 Niccolò’s name is not found in any of the four quarters of the city in volumes of the Prestanze for 1373 (ASF, Prestanze 226, Santo Spirito; 227, Santa Croce; 228, Santa Maria Novella; and 231, San Giovanni) and for 1374/5 (ASF, Prestanze 234, Santo Spirito; 239, San Giovanni and Santa Maria Novella but possibly incomplete; 240, Santo Spirito; 241, Santa Croce; and 243, San Giovanni and Santa Maria Novella). 18 ASF, Prestanze 262 (October 1375), fol. 41r lists “Niccholaio di Tomaso dipintore” among those who failed to pay their assessment for the Prestanza for October 1375. The volume for the quarter of San Giovanni (Prestanze 261, fol. 118v) lists “Niccolaus Tomasi

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But precisely when Niccolò di Tommaso died remains a mystery. No document after 1376 states or implies that he is alive. He is probably not the “Niccholò dipintore” found in the quarter of San Giovanni, gonfalone Drago in the Prestanza for May 1380 (actually paid on 6 June 1380), for the listing disagrees with the way his name is usually given in these records.19 One cannot know with certainty whether he is the “Niccolaio Masi” listed in the rolls of the painters’ Company of St. Luke; for although the patronymic is dissimilar, this name appears two before that of Nardo di Cione, and the improbably late date of 1405 appended to this name is written over another, now-illegible figure.20 Perhaps, however, he is the “Niccolaio dipintore” who in 1402 is mentioned as already dead (for how long?) and whose will was at last taking full effect in that year. According to the terms of this testament, which remains untraced and whose date therefore is unknown, “Niccolaio’s” property had been bequeathed to his widow and two nieces and subsequent to their deaths was to be divided equally between the Company of St. Luke and the Convent of Santa Felicita. This notice is intriguing because the parish of Santa Felicita was Niccolò di Tommaso’s earliest known address, so recorded in the Estimo of 1351, five years after his matriculation into the guild after January of 1346. The painter’s connection with this neighborhood continued because some years later, in Nardo di Cione’s will of 1365 and in the Prestanze for 1363 and 1364, he is said to be residing in the adjacent popolo of San Giorgio.21 pictor,” who only satisfied the authorities when a “Stephanus Johannis Bonacursi” paid on his behalf on 17 May, presumably of the followiing year, 1376. Niccolò’s name fails to appear in the “Registro” covering the quarter of San Giovanni for the years 1375, 1376, 1378, and 1379 (Prestanze 298), and it fails to appear in volumes specifically for other sections of the city in August 1376: Prestanze 294 (Santo Spirito), 295 (Santa Croce), 296 (Santa Maria Novella); and in April 1378: Prestanze 332 (Santo Spirito), 333 (Santa Croce), 334 (Santa Maria Novella). 19 ASF, Prestanze 420 (May 1380, San Giovanni), fol. 217v. This “Niccholò” is not Gerini who is listed in the gonfalone Chiavi on fol. 235 of the same volume. In May 1380 (Prestanze 418, fol. 107v) a “Niccholò di Tommaso lengniaiuolo vocchato Boccio” is listed in the gonfalone Leone Nero of Santa Croce, but this is clearly a homonym. The same may be true for the Niccolò di Tommaso recorded in the Sega of 1354 (fol. 301v) as living in poverty in the gonfalone Rota of Santo Spirito, according to Colnaghi, Dictionary, pp. 190–191. 20 Procacci, Bonaccorso di Cino e gli affreschi della chiesa del Tau a Pistoia, in: Giotto e il suo tempo, Rome 1971, pp. 356–357, n. 22. The notice was first published by G. Masselli, Memorie italiane riguardanti le belle arti, ed. by M Gualandi, ser. VI, Bologna 1845, p. 186. 21 See Appendix, Doc. II below. The notice from the Estimo is recorded in G. Milanesi’s notes, see Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS, Carte Milanesi, vol. III, fol. 201r. For the date

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Much remains uncertain about Niccolò di Tommaso’s career, but one may begin to reconstruct his activity after 1367, date of his last participation in deliberations about the Florentine Cathedral; as early as 1369 Niccolò di Tommaso left Florence possibly for Naples but more likely for Pistoia (to begin his work in San Giovanni Fuorcivitas? in the Tau?); in the following year he received partial payment for the high altarpiece of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas, which he had not yet begun to paint; setting aside the altarpiece for Pistoia and possibly leaving the decoration of the Tau in abeyance, he traveled to Naples as early as 1370 to undertake an altarpiece, completed in 1371, for the church of Sant’Antonio there; returning to Pistoia he completed the altarpiece for San Giovanni in 1372 and pursued his work in the Tau and in the Cathedral of Pistoia; at some point in the same year he was in Florence to begin the Zecca Coronation; in 1373 he perhaps received an additional payment from the church of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas. His death may have come as early as 1376. If in the end Niccolò di Tommaso remains as elusive to us in death as in life, he is now more than a speck in the distance. Little by little he and his art have grown clearer, and we are beginning to see that for a brief time long ago he was an artist of considerable standing and popularity, an artist perhaps overshadowed by his friend Nardo di Cione to whom his art owes so much, yet nevertheless capable of an admirable child-like poetry all his own. One day we may hope to know him better and to have facts rather than hypotheses.

of his matriculation in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, see Irene Hueck, “Le matricole dei pittori fiorentini prima e dopo il 1320”, in: Boll. d’Arte, LVII, 1972, pp. 114–121. Niccolò’s name immediately follows Orcagna’s; Nardo di Cione’s follows ten later, after those of Daddo Daddi, Andrea di Bonaiuto, and Puccio di Simone. As Procacci ([n. 15], p. 256) stresses, Niccolò’s matriculation is the earliest reference to him in trecento documents, and the assertion (advanced by Crowe-Cavalcaselle, vol. 1, p. 335; also repeated in the ed. by E. Hutton, London 1908, vol. I, p. 281) that Niccolò di Tommaso was, along with Jacopo del Casentino and Bernardo Daddi, one of the founding members of the Company of St. Luke is an oft-repeated error.

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Appendix of Documents DOC I: Pistoia, Archivio di Stato, Patrimonio Ecclesiastico, C 450 (San Giovanni Fuorcivitas: Libro d’ Entrata e Uscita, 1353–1376) fol. 127r (Entrata 1364) Avemo da mona Mazzea, donna che fue di Bianchalana, per aiuto all tavola nuova la quale è facta all’antare di Sancta Maria per anima sua . . . fiorini II d’oro fol. 130v (Uscita 1364) Demo [a] Stefano di Canbino dì XXVIIII di dicienbre per fatura della tavola di Sancta Maria omine XLVI di grano per soldi X l’omina monto libre XXIII, e di contanti li demo, secondo che fuorono li patti tra noi e llui, libre XXXVIII soldi IIII, siché la tavola ci v[i]ene in tuto fiorini dicioto d’oro . . . libre XXXVIII, soldi IIII fol. 144v (Entrata 1366) Avemo da mona Melda per fare aiuto ala taola a dipingniere, omine XIII di grano, avemone . . . libre VI, soldi X fol. 176v (Uscita 1369) Demo a dì XXVIIII di novembre a prete Filippo per uno choperchio della tavola nuova ch’è faccto all’atare maggiore . . . libre III, soldi XV fol. 188r (Uscita 1370) Demo a maesstro Nicholò dipintore da Firenze, come apare a libric[i]uolo a foglio [lacuna], per parte di pagamento della tavola di Santa Maria che de[v]e dipingere . . . fiorini XVI d’oro, libre O, soldi O fol. 201r (Uscita 1372) Demo ditto dì a Zari per achonciare la taola di Sancta Maria... libre I Demo a maestro Nicolao da Fiorenza per resto della taola di Sancta Maria, fiorini XIII 1/2 d’oro e soldi IIII vagliono . . . libre XLVI, soldi II fol. 207v (Uscita 1373) Demo al maestro che pionbò i feri della chortina della taula nuova . . . libre O, soldi XVI Demo a Bartolino fabro per libre LXXX di feri della cortina della taula nuova . . . libre X, soldi XII, denari VIII Demo a Zari per lo sopracielo dell’altare nuova [sic] e dipi[n]tura e taule e ponitura . . . libre IIII

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140 Demo a Bati, dipinse la cortina . . . libre O, soldi X Demo a una don[n]a, chusciò la chortina . . . libre O, soldi V Per libre XXXI once II di pionbo per li feri . . . libre III, soldi II, denari IIII Per XXXVIIII anella per la cortina . . . libre O, soldi V fol. 208v (Uscita 1373) Demo al detto Jachopo [Ciani] per la detta Opera, a foglio 6, nel ditto quaderno ischritti per mano del sopradetto Angnolo, promisse per maestro Nicholò dipintore, fiorini due d’oro . . . fiorini II d’oro

DOC. II: Florence, Archivio di Stato, Conventi Soppressi 83 (S. Felicita 112, Memoriale 1357–1405) fol. 21r. 31 novembre 1402 Memoria e ricordanza che a dì ultimo del mese di novembre nel MCCCCII Ser Lorenzo di Bartolo cappellano del monistero di Santa Felicita di Firenze et Ambruogio di Bencivenni dipintore dierono uno lodo tra monna Cubella donna fu di Niccolaio dipintore, per l’una parte, e monna Monnina e monna Anna nepoti furono del detto Niccholaio, per l’altra parte, sopra i beni che furono del detto Niccholaio, i quali beni debbano rimanere al detto monistero e alla compagnia de’ dipintori a ogniuno per metà dopo la vita delle soprascripte tre donne e chome più distesamente si contiene nel detto lodo scripto per mano di Ser Tomaso di [lacuna] notaio dell’arte degli speziali di Firenze

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VIII

Antonio Veneziano and the Representation of Emotions

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MONG the many memorable passages in Giotto’s cycle in the Arena chapel, perhaps none is more moving than the dialogue between the Madonna and Christ in the Lamentation (Fig. 1).1 This is unforgettable drama. In fourteenth-century Florence only Giotto, with his profound understanding of the human condition, could treat the Christian story in such a vividly emotional way. Even the Death of St. Francis in the Bardi Chapel in Florence, impressive though it is, lacks the intensity, range, and subtlety of the Lamentation. How much rarer, then, are such effects in the works of his contemporaries. Florentine painters after Giotto often produced works of strong feeling, but seldom did they do this by representing particular emotional and psychological states. Though never widespread, this interest was revived and developed in the fifteenth century. By 1423 Gentile da Fabriano was representing the expressions of various figures in his crowded Adoration of the Magi, and soon thereafter Masaccio painted his famous Expulsion of Adam and Eve. But even before these innovations sculptors had led the way. Certainly Donatello must be considered the most notable master of what might be called the psychological approach, but the earliest great attempt in this direction by a Renaissance artist came in 1401, when Brunelleschi

1 This paper was presented in April 1984 at a symposium in honour of Frederick Hartt; I offer it again as a token of my affection and esteem for this generous teacher and friend. I am pleased to remark that since this essay was submitted for publication, Giorgio Bonsanti has published a note agreeing with the attribution also proposed here. See G. Bonsanti, ‘Uno Stendardo di Antonio Venziano,’ Paragone, XXXVI, 1985, pp. 53–6.

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1. Lamentation (detail) by Giotto (1266/7–1337), c. 1305–6. Arena Chapel, Padua.

presented his entry in the competition to design the second set of bronze doors for the Florence Baptistry (Fig. 2). In retrospect, it is easy enough to see why Filippo’s relief failed whereas Ghiberti’s succeeded. But what a magnificent failure! And we who look at these figures today may see, as Kenneth Clark put it, ‘an intensity of purpose, and a feeling that men’s relations with God and with each other is a terrible, and ultimately tragic, responsibility.’2 While in recent years there have been increasing claims that artists towards 1400, especially painters, prepared the ground for the flowering of the Renaissance, in particular by reviving some of the aims and forms of 2

K. Clark, “Donatello and the Tragic Sense in the Quattrocento,” in The Art of Humanism, 1983, p. 12. The dramatic character of Brunelleschi’s relief was recognized by the author of the Vita di Brunellesco, who pointed out such details as ‘that finger under the (victim’s) chin.’ For this and for a full description and analysis of the panel see R. Krautheimer, Lorenzo Ghiberti, 1982 (first ed. 1956), pp. 44–5.

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2. Sacrifice of Isaac by Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), c. 1401–2. Gilded bronze, 54 x 45 cm. Bargello, Florence.

Giotto and other artists of the early Trecento,3 little has been said about their interest in representing specific emotions. Yet at least one painter working in a late trecento idiom, perhaps one of the most misjudged of all late fourteenth-century Tuscan painters shared this interest with the leading sculptors and painters of the new movement: Antonio Veneziano. Despite his name, neither his place of birth nor where he trained is known. Between 1370 and 1388 documents mention him first in Siena, where he worked in the Cathedral, then in Florence, where he entered the Arte de’ Medici e Speziali in 1374 and finally in Pisa, where he painted in the 3 B. Cole, Masaccio and the Art of the Early Renaissance, Bloomington, 1980, Chapter 1, pp. 3–35; M. Boskovits, “‘Giotto Born Again,’ Beiträge zu den quellen Masaccios,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, XXIX, 1966, pp. 51–66. M. Boskovits, “Mariotto di Nardo e la formazione del linguagio tardo-gotico a Firenze negli anni intorno al 1400,” Antichità Viva, VII, 1968, pp. 21–31. D. Wilkins, “Maso di Banco and Cenni di Francesco: A Case of Late Trecento Revival,” Burlington Magazine, CXI, 1969, pp. 83–4.

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Camposanto; however, these notices present conflicting clues to his origins. In Siena he was called Antonio da Venezia, in Florence he was Antonio da Siena, in Pisa he was either Antonio da Siena or, more often, Antonio da Venezia.4 To complicate matters, his identified works are few, and the most important of these are in poor or ruinous condition; moreover, his style combines both Sienese and Florentine features. Not surprisingly, more than one art historian has seen him as something of a gypsy, wandering from city to city and from country to country; indeed, the more imaginative critics even pursued him to Spain, where he presumably faded away around 1390.5 Illustrating the unpredictability of actual events, documents discovered by James Czarnecki permit a sharp revision of Antonio’s biography and encourage a reconsideration of his work. By a search of surviving Florentine tax records Czarnecki concluded that Antonio’s later life was less adventurous than was thought. Indeed, the evidence argues that, after finishing his work in Pisa, Antonio did not meet his demise, but probably returned to Florence, where he resided after 1393 and where he died no earlier than 1419 and perhaps as late as 1424.6 Suddenly a career of some twenty years has become one of fifty. Having restored to Antonio a late phase longer than all of his previously known activity, the problem remains to identify works to account for it. Fortunately, a little-known painting of The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (Fig. 3) in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence helps to shed light on Antonio’s later career; more than its value for reconstructing Antonio’s development, this picture is of interest for bringing into focus a largely unrecognized aspect of his art, and in so doing it stimulates a reassessment of his place in Florentine art. The question of who painted this remarkable picture is an old one. Although scholars have tended to classify the Beheading as an early quattrocento work, they have been puzzled by the presence of features that recall the early Trecento and by others that hardly seem Florentine at all. Ulrich Middeldorf succinctly summed up the paradoxical character of the 4 For the fullest and most accurate compilation and analysis of the documents concerning Antonio see J. Czarnecki, “Antonio Veneziano, A Florentine Painter of the Late Trecento,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington, 1978, Introduction and Appendix III. 5 M. Boskovits, Pittura Fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento: 1370–1400, 1975, pp. 154–6, 280–3. 6 For a summary of the evidence, see J. Czarnecki, “A New Panel by Antonio Veneziano,” Burlington Magazine, CXIX, 1977, pp. 188–91.

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3. The Beheading of St. John the Baptist here attributed to Antonio Veneziano (active 1370–possibly 1419/24), c. 1400–10. Tempera on cloth, probably linen, 112.5 x 75 cm. Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo, Florence.

painting when he suggested that it might be a fifteenth-century copy of an early trecento prototype.7 Yet of the painters working in Florence towards 1400, Antonio Veneziano was the one whose style offered just this kind of peculiar mixture of Florentine and non-Florentine elements along with echoes from the early Trecento.8 Looking at the Beheading the connexion with Antonio may be sensed in the measured movements of the figures and in the full, almost clumsy, 7

L. Becherucci and G. Brunetti, Il Museo dell’Opera del Duomo a Firenze, n.d., vol. II, pp. 282–3. More recently L. Bellosi (in Prospettiva, 37, April 1984, p. 90) opined that the painting might be “assai più antico di quanto si crede di solito.” In addition to the above bibliography see also J. Beck, “Una Prospettiva . . . di mano di Masaccio,” in Studies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Painting in Honor of Millard Meiss, ed. by I. Lavin and J. Plummer, 1978, pp. 49–50 and n. 7. 8 R. Offner, “The Panels of Antonio Veneziano,” Studies in Florentine Painting, 1927 and 1972, pp. 67–81; J. Czarnecki, “Antonio Veneziano,” 1977, p. 191.

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4. St. James by Antonio Veneziano. Tempera on panel, 51 x 35.5 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

heaviness of the forms. The formation of many features only substantiates this impression, and, although a full morphological analysis of the painting perhaps would tax the reader’s patience, this much must be said: the figures’ fleshy, blunt-fingered hands and cloddish feet, and particularly the executioner’s broad face, with its prominent nose and full chin, are typical of Antonio’s homely types. If the head of the executioner is compared to that of a St. James (Fig. 4) in Berlin, similarities may be discerned not only in the broad proportions and the strong noses, but also in the formation of the cheeks and in the use of highlights to define the bony or muscular projections of the neck and chest. Even if Antonio is not a master given to grace or elegance, he is nonetheless a forceful draughtsman, able to reduce forms to simple shapes and apt to prefer broad curves or softened angles. A firm line, reinforced by bold modeling, defines the executioner’s silhouette in a way that recalls the figure of Christ from the Torre degli Agli murals (Fig. 5), and the executioner’s equally simplified raised arm is the reverse of an evangelist’s from the same mural cycle (Fig. 6). Antonio especially favoured

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5. Christ Blessing by Antonio Veneziano. Detached sinopia for a fresco. In storage at the Gallerie Fiorentine, Florence. Once in the Torre degli Agli, Florence.

6. Evangelist by Antonio Veneziano. Detached fresco from the Torre degli Agli, Florence.

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7. St. Ranieri’s Voyage to Pisa by Antonio Veneziano, documented 1384–7. Detached fresco, Camposanto, Pisa.

the long, soft-angular curve of the executioner’s lowered arm,9 whose shape, strengthened by shading, has as much breadth as the many times larger sails of a ship from the Pisa murals of 1384–7 (Fig. 7). Even more impressive than the authoritative drawing of the Beheading is Antonio’s tempered rendering of his violent subject. The pathos of the saint’s lifeless arms has no parallel in late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century representations of the subject and brings to mind Alberti’s admonition to painters that “the members of the dead should be dead to the very nails.”10 The unremarkable action of the executioner sheathing his sword takes on a peculiar finality and tension. His fingers, locked around the hilt and gripping the scabbard, are as tense as the Baptist’s are limp. His face, which recalls a similar figure by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (Fig. 8), is as animated as the Baptist’s is calm. Unexpectedly, his expression betrays no malice. His head inclined almost in a posture of mourning and his lips gently parted, 9 The feature is a virtual signature, found with slight variation in figures large and small throughout Antonio’s production. See the St. Peter from the Altenburg Apostles, the child viewed in profile to the right in the Death of St. Ranieri, and finally the tiny Flagellants in his signed panel in Palermo, all illustrated in B. Berenson. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: Florentine School, I. 1963, Figs. 256, 258 and 259. 10 L. Alberti, On Painting, trans. and with an introduction and notes by J. Spencer, 1973, p. 74.

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8. Martyrdom of Franciscans at Ceuta (detail) by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (active 1319–47), San Francesco, Siena.

his brows knit upwards and his eyes flash as if struck by sudden regret. Although the executioner is the necessary agent of injustice, at the same time he reflects emotions proper to the faithful. By combining passages of naturalistic observation with a technique that encouraged abstraction and a composition that exploited frontal or profile views, Antonio presented the subject with clarity and immediacy. His simple, almost emblematic presentation at once helps to capture a charged moment of psychologicial awakening and to foster an elegiac mood that calls to mind Caravaggio’s famous Borghese David. Antonio achieved an effect unique among Early Renaissance versions of the theme, even though he presented his figures in conventional poses often found in scenes of beheadings both before and after. Antonio’s picture acquires its unusual directness in large part from its suppression of action and from its compressed composition. Florentine representations of the Baptist’s

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death, such as Andrea Pisano’s for the doors of the Baptistry, usually include spectators, or the prison where the saint was held. Yet Antonio’s composition, which reduces the setting to a strip of ground and which compresses the scene to such an extreme as to show the executioner standing directly behind the body of the saint, is not unique; however, it otherwise appears to occur only rarely in small-scale works. Closest of all to Antonio’s picture is an illuminated initial with the Martyrdom of St. Paul (Fig. 9).11 No doubt the similarity is coincidental, for Antonio is unlikely to have known this work, but there is perhaps another, more significant parallel: just as the illuminator apparently superimposed his figures in order to accommodate them within the forms of the letter ‘S,’ so Antonio may have arrived at a similar solution by bowing to the peculiar demands imposed by something about which I have as yet said nothing: the intended function of his picture.

9. Martyrdom of St. Paul by an anonymous Bolognese painter, late thirteenth century. Tempera on parchment, MS. Lat. 1016, fol. 55. Biblioteca Estense, Modena.

11

For this work see A. Conti, La Miniatura Bolognese: Scuole e Botteghe, 1270–1340, 1981, pp. 48–50 and colourplate XIV. See also the Martyrdom of the Baptist from a fifteenthcentury Sienese missal. Cod. X, II, 2, fol. 268v, in the Biblioteca Comunale of Siena, illustrated in Il Gotico a Siena (exh cat.), 1982, p. 375.

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The single fact that the painting, which may have been cut down slightly to its relatively modest present dimensions (112.5 x 75 cm.), is painted on cloth, probably linen, indicates that it served as a processional banner, that is, what was known as either a palio, a stendardo, or a gonfalone.12 Although unusual in that it is apparently painted only on one side and in that it depicts a single narrative subject, there may well have been others like it, for few Early Renaissance banners have survived. Not only were they more fragile than panel pictures, but by the very nature of their function, these paintings, which on appointed feast days were carried by members of public institutions and privileged groups such as confraternities,13 suffered harsher treatment than did altarpieces. As a means of lengthening their life, Cennino Cennini recommended that their gilded parts be varnished ‘because these banners, which are made for churches, get carried outdoors in the rain.’14 Their function must also have encouraged painters to keep their designs simple, so that the images would be easily legible to the crowds watching them as they passed. It is sad indeed to think how few are the surviving items produced for religious celebrations in the Early Renaissance — all the more so when one recalls that such importance was attached to these insignia that the finest artists were asked to provide them: Fra Angelico, Andrea del Sarto, and perhaps Botticelli.15 The very acquisition of a gonfalone could be an occasion for pomp. On Sunday morning 13 August, 1469 the officials and many brothers of the Compagnia di San Bernardino at San Francesco in Siena, dressed in the robes of the confraternity and accompanied by trumpeters, paraded to the house of the Sienese painter Sano di Pietro, who presented them with the banner which he had begun some two years before and for

12

B. Cole, The Renaissance Artist at Work: From Pisano to Titian, 1983, p. 156; M. Wackernagel, The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist: Projects and Patrons, Workshops and Art Market, trans. by A. Luchs, 1981, pp. 138–41. Wackernagel distinguishes between gonfaloni and stendardi, which were painted on canvas, and segni di processione, which were painted on panel. Cannon uses palio as a synonym for gonfalone, see n. 14. 13 For confraternities see R. Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence, 1982 and G. Monti, Le confraternite medievali dell’alta e media Italia, 2 vols., 1927. 14 “ . . . perchè alcune volta questi palii, che si fanno alle chiese, sono portati di fuora, piovendo. . . .” See the edition of the Libro dell’Arte edited by F. Tempesti, 1975, Chapter CLXII, p. 127. The above translation is taken from The Craftsman’s Handbook: The Italian ‘Il Libro dell’arte,’ trans. by D. Thompson, Jr., 1933 and 1966, p. 104. 15 Wackernagel, World, p. 140.

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10. Martyrdom of St. John the Baptist by Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Mone, called Masaccio (1401–c.1428), 1426. Tempera on panel, 21 x 61 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.

which he had received final payment only the previous day. This object, apparently now lost, must have been a splendid thing, for on it Sano was allowed to lavish two hundred squares of gold. It depicted, in the words of a 1483 inventory, “Cristo quando andò ala pasione.”16 Florentine devotion to their patron saint, mixed with more than a little civic pride, is evident in the lavishness of their Baptistry, which Dante, doubtless echoing a common sentiment, called “mio bel San Giovanni” (Inferno, XIX, 17); but local affection for the protector of Florence found its most exuberant, if fleeting, expression in the annual ceremonies surrounding the saint’s birth, commemorated on 24 June. Among the 16

This work was mentioned by the Sienese Archivist Ettore Romagnoli in his notes on Sano di Pietro but the documents remain partially unpublished: Siena, State Archives, Patrimonio Resti 208 (Compagnia di San Bernardino, Entrata e Uscita: 1452–92), fols. 58v, 68, 68v, 70, 70v, and 301; Patrimonio Resti 215 (Compagnia di San Bernardino, Inventari: 1483–1626), Fol. 1.

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many splendid rituals associated with the occasion, which is described by Antonio’s contemporary, Gregorio Dati, were huge processions carrying innumerable relics, no doubt including the Forerunner’s finger, acquired in Constantinople in 1391, and painted banners. To the sound of music and singing, these precious objects, borne by men in pairs wearing richly embroidered garments of silk and gold, were carried from the Cathedral through an equally glittering city, whose shops displayed their most beautiful wares, among them objects in gold and silver, painted panels and sculptures.17 Given the depth of Florentine devotion to their patron saint, the feast of the Baptist’s death on 29 August, though less important must have been nonetheless impressively observed. The processional banner by Antonio Veneziano may have been made for use on that lesser holiday, and, although the original provenance of the picture is unknown, the most likely patron would have been the Arte di Calimala, which, as the most powerful Florentine guild, was in charge of the city’s most important complex, the Cathedral and Baptistry, and which as early as 1341 organized a ritual celebration on the feast of the Beheading of the Baptist, who was not only the city’s patron saint but theirs as well.18 Yet in the end, while the requirements of function may well have affected Antonio’s composition, they did not necessarily determine his interpretation. Even the most conventional iconography can be invested with fresh content. When Masaccio treated the theme of the Baptist’s martyrdom in the predella of his Pisa Altarpiece of 1426 (Fig. 10), he too drew inspiration from the past. His composition follows the well-established tradition exemplified by the thirteenth-century mosaic in the Florentine Baptistry, but by recasting it 17 L’Istoria di Firenze di Gregorio Dati dal 1380–1405, ed. by L. Pratesi, 1902, pp. 90–6. For the feast of St. John in Florence see R. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence, 1980, pp. 240–63. For the Baptist’s finger see W. and E. Paatz, Die Kirchen von Florenz, III, 1952, p. 386 and G. Richa, Notizie Istoriche delle Chiese di Firenze, divise ne’ suoi quartieri, VI, Florence, 1754–62 (reprinted Rome, 1972), pp. 188–9. 18 On the feast of the Beheading, apparently for the first time in 1341, the officers of the guild and a representative of each fondaco offered a taper (torchietto) to an image of the Baptist, on a pier facing east, in Orsanmichele. Unfortunately, it is not clear whether the painting was a fresco or a panel. Florence, State Archives, Carte Strozziane, LI, II, fol. 123. It is also worth mentioning that according to a record culled from the now-lost papers of the Arte di Calimala, one ‘Antonio di Franceso pittore,’ possibly but not certainly identifiable as Antonio Veneziano, was painting a tabernacle ‘drento all’altare maggiore’ of San Miniato al Monte, Florence on 18 August 1407. For this notice see K. Frey, ed., Le Vite . . . scritte da M. Giorgio Vasari, Pt. I, I, 1911, p. 324.

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11. Crucifixion by Antonio Veneziano. Tempera on panel, 68 x 62 cm. Museo di San Martino, Pisa.

according to Early Renaissance principles of natural movement and rational space defined by light, Masaccio brought out the action in a way that was unprecedented. Working with a different but also conventional iconography, Antonio chose instead to emphasize the subject’s emotional possibilities. The rendering of expressions evidently often interested Antonio. He reveals this preoccupation throughout his work: one sees it in the intensity of a monastic saint’s devotion, in the irregular profile and mocking smile of a tormentor from the Palermo Flagellation, and profusely in the Pisa Crucifixion (Fig. 11), where, despite the relatively schematic execution that tends to characterize Antonio’s smaller works, he captures the quiet dignity of the Good Thief and the fearfulness of the Unrepentent one, the thoughtfulness of one soldier and the open-mouthed wonder of another, the

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despair of the Magdalen and the anxiety of a smirking gambler who draws the last straw. Surprisingly, the one writer who recognized Antonio’s ability to represent specific emotional states was Vasari. Taken at face value, however, Vasari’s sixteenth-century biography of the painter, particularly the closing anecdote, seems quaint and fantastic: Being much inclined by nature to the study of herbs, he (Antonio) devoted himself to the mastery of Dioscorides, taking pleasure in learning the properties and virtues of each plant, so that he ultimately abandoned painting and devoted himself to distilling simper with great assiduity. Having thus transformed himself from a painter into a physician, he pursued the latter profession for some time. At length he fell sick of a disorder of the stomach, as some say, through treating the plague. . . . His skill as a physician equalled his diligence as a painter, . . . and he left behind him a high reputation in both professions.19

Reading this obvious fabrication one might easily smile and dismiss the old rascal, but one must remember that Vasari’s Lives is as much a work of art criticism as it is an historical record, as much about the art of the Renaissance as about its makers. Vasari frequently manipulated the biographical form so that criticism masquerades as fact. Vasari’s use of the device is, if anything, more transparent when he writes about the artists of the Trecento. Vasari’s claim, then, that Antonio Veneziano abandoned painting for the related craft of medicine may be interpreted as a figurative device, as an extended metaphor occasioned by his understanding of Antonio’s art, for in his lengthy description of Antonio’s murals in the Camposanto at Pisa, Vasari dwells on the almost clinical veracity of certain expressions. In his account of the cycle, which takes up the better part of the biography, he praises the attitudes of some figures ‘lost in wonder,’ others weeping, and still others singing — the latter known only through a nineteenthcentury drawing (Fig. 12) — so that ‘in their gestures, carriage and all their movements . . . they exactly resemble a choir of singers.’ He also describes, in unusually specific language, the representation ‘of a man possessed, with the face of a madman, distorted convulsive gestures, his eyes

19

G. Vasari, Le Vite . . . , ed. by G. Milanesi, Florence, 1906, I, p. 667. The translation is by A. Hinds for the Everyman’s Library edition ed. by E. Rhys, 1927.

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12. Funeral of St. Ranieri (detail) by Johann Anton Ramboux (1790–1866). Drawing after mural by Antonio Veneziano in the Camposanto, Pisa. Ramboux, vol. VI, fol. 420, Staedel Institut, Frankfurt-am-Main.

glistening, and his mouth grinning and showing his teeth, so remarkably like a person really possessed that nothing more true or life-like can be imagined.’ Unfortunately, imagine one must, for the figure is lost, and one is only a little better off with the poorly preserved figure of a dropsical woman (Fig. 13), ‘whose withered face, dry lips and swollen body exhibit with as much realism as a living man could the devouring thirst of those suffering from dropsy, and the other symptoms of that disease.’20 The present condition of the murals, which have managed to survive the perils of decay, restoration, and a World War, makes it virtually impossible for one to see them as Antonio intended or even as they were in the sixteenth-century, but Vasari’s enthusiastic description, clearly based on first-hand knowledge, rings true and draws attention to an aspect of Antonio’s art that is prominent elsewhere in his work, above all in the Beheading of the Baptist. Indeed, the Beheading must be regarded as Antonio’s most profound exploration into the human psyche. For this reason as well as for the delicacy of its colouring, which especially recalls Starnina’s frescoes of 1404 in the 20

Op. cit. IV, pp. 316–7. This reading of Vasari’s life of Raphael was pointed out in a lecture by Paul Barolsky.

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13. Death of St. Ranieri (detail) by Antonio Veneziano, documented 1384–7. Detached fresco, Camposanto, Pisa.

14. Zuccone (detail) by Donatello (c. 1386–1466), 1423–5. Marble, complete height nearly two meters. Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo, Florence.

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Carmine, it appears to be later than any of Antonio’s other known works, probably dating, as most scholars have argued, from the first decade of the Quattrocento. During the opening years of the new century Antonio worked near, and perhaps alongside, the founders of the Early Renaissance. Although his work drew its inspiration from the past, from the examples of Giotto and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, it was not entirely antithetical to theirs. The moving Beheading of the Baptist suggests that although Antonio expressed himself in the simpler language of the Trecento, he nevertheless shared with his younger contemporaries, especially Donatello (Fig. 14), an interest in human drama, an interest whose revival was part of the triumphant vision of the new art.

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An Order for Drawings after Agnolo Gaddi’s True Cross Cycle in Florence

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HAT painters in Early Renaissance Italy copied each other’s work is well known. Writing around 1400 Cennino Cennini, the self-proclaimed heir to the tradition of Giotto, promised that the aspiring painter could improve his skill if he followed this advice: “affaticati e dilettati di ritrar sempre le miglior cose che trovar puoi per mano fatte di gran maestri. E se se’ in luogo dove molti buon maestri sieno stati, tanto meglio per te. Ma per consiglio io ti do: guarda di pigliar sempre il migliore e quello che ha maggior fama . . . .”1 Numerous drawings, among the most notable being Michelangelo’s studies after Giotto and Masaccio, show that artists followed this advice. In addition to isolated figures from admired works, however, painters also copied whole compositions, as typified by Parri Spinelli’s drawings after Giotto’s Navicella. Although some drawings of compositions were student exercises, others entered a painter’s sketchbook to be held in reserve until needed, and still others were made with a specific immediate purpose. Drawings rather than memory alone must have aided the painter of a picture whose iconography and composition followed another.2 How else can one explain the dissemination of images, such as Giotto’s Raising

1 Cennino Cennini, Il Libro dell’Arte, ed. by F. Brunello and with a preface by L. Magagnato, Vicenza, Neri Pozza Editore, 1971. 2 For a survey of drawing in Early Renaissance Italy, especially for a discussion of the various kinds of drawings from the period, see F. Ames-Lewis, Drawing in Early Renaissance Italy, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1981. For drawing during both the Trecento as well as the Quattrocento, see B. Degenhart and A. Schmitt, Corpus der Italienischen Zeichnungen, 1300–1450, 4 vols., Berlin, Mann, 1968.

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of Lazarus in the Arena Chapel to the Magdalen Chapel of San Francesco, Assisi; the stories of Job in the Camposanto of Pisa to Bartolo di Fredi’s cycle in the Collegiata of San Gimignano; the central panel of Bernardo Daddi’s San Pancrazio Polyptych to the great altarpiece in the Collegiata of Impruneta; and Taddeo Gaddi’s Presentation of the Virgin in Santa Croce, Florence to the Limbourg Brothers’ Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry?3 On occasion painters were instructed to finish paintings of one kind or another after existing works,4 but whether the intention to imitate arose 3

To list the numerous examples of copied compositions goes beyond the scope of this note. For Giotto’s Raising of Lazarus and the version in Assisi, see L. Bellosi, Giotto, Florence, 1981, figs. 80 and 118. It is worth pointing out one detail that argues against Giotto’s authorship of the Assisi fresco and, therefore, in favor of the intervention of a drawing between Padua and Assisi: the eyes of Lazarus, closed to indicate death in Padua, are shown, in accordance with other contemporary representations, open in Assisi. Although the painter of the Assisi picture repeated Giotto’s composition closely, he failed to understand Giotto’s characteristic choice of the crucial, most dramatic interpretation, in this case that charged moment when Lazarus awakens from death. No doubt he had use of a drawing for the composition, but no drawing, even the most careful, could transfer to him Giotto’s powers of analysis. For a discussion of the closed eyes of Giotto’s Lazarus see the forthcoming article by R. Sullivan in The Art Bulletin (September 1988). For illustrations of the stories of Job in both Pisa and San Gimignano, see C. Fengler, “Bartolo di Fredi’s Old Testament Frescoes in S. Gimignano,” The Art Bulletin, 1981, vol. LXIII, pp. 374–384. For Bernardo Daddi’s San Pancrazio Madonna and its descendent at Impruneta, see M. Boskovits, Pittura Fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento, 1370–1400 Florence, Edam, 1975, tav. 9 and 61. For Taddeo’s Presentation of the Virgin, see A. Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi: A Critical Reappraisal and a Catalogue Raisonné, Columbia (Missouri) and London, University of Missouri Press, 1982, pp. 27ff and 246. One might also mention further that the Limbourg Brothers’ illumination of December from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry copies the motif of dogs setting on a boar, known from a drawing by Giovannino de’ Grassi. 4 In 1447 the Venetian painter Michele Giambono agreed to produce a painting that was “to be in the form and similitude in its fabrication, decoration and wooden framing” as an altarpiece by Giovanni d’Alemagna. The wording of this document is vague enough to suppose that Giambono’s instructions extended to the format and framing alone; however, sometimes the contract might specify the imagery in no uncertain terms: in 1448 the Sienese master Sano di Pietro was required to include in the predella of an altarpiece for the chapel of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena: “istorie di Nostra Donna, chome sono quelle della faccia dello Spedale” rephrased for clarity as “cinque storie di Nostra Donna alla similitudine di quelle che sonno a capo le porte dello Spedale della Scala, mettendo in mezo l’Assunzione et da ogni lato due storie, le quali storie debbano essare dipente gentilmente . . . . ” For the Venetian notice, see D. Chambers, Patrons and Artists in the Italian Renaissance, Columbia (South Carolina), University of South Carolina Press, 1971, pp. 186–187. For the Sienese document, see G. Milanesi, Documenti per la storia dell’Arte Senese, Siena, Onorato Porri, 1854, vol. II, pp. 256–259. For yet another example see a 1472 testament that orders an altarpiece for San

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from the patron or the painter, drawings doubtless aided the production of copies by assistants, copies from one medium and scale into another, copies from one style into another, and copies separated from their prototypes by time or distance. Yet, to my knowledge, until now no documentary evidence noted the demand for the key instrument in this phenomenon: drawings after existing compositions. The evidence comes from an obscure source, the Company of the Holy Cross in Montepulciano (whose name suggests a connection with the Franciscans), and involves one of its members, a painter by the name of Nanni (or Giovanni) di Caccia.5 This Nanni di Caccia must have been a painter of modest standing, for in 1402 he accepted the task of whitewashing the meetinghouse of the Company.6 On at least one occasion, however, Nanni had an opportunity to practice a higher branch of his craft. In 1415 the Company of the Holy Cross paid him for having gone to Florence to copy the stories of the Holy Cross: 1415. Uscita: E più spendemo, dati a Giovanni di Chaccia che andò a Fiorenza a ritrare le storie della crocie, Lire V contanti ebe da Lando di Giovanni di Lando . . . Lire V, soldi 0, Denari 0.7 Terse though this notice is, it admits interpretation. That Nanni produced a set of drawings after the stories of the True Cross in Florence is evident from the modest payment and from the language of the document: the verb ritrarre from which derives ritratto or portrait, is precisely the one Cennini used in the above-quoted passage on drawing.8 Unfortunately, the notice fails to specify which images Nanni actually copied for the Company of the Holy Cross, but one immediately thinks of the cycle painted around 1390 by Agnolo Gaddi in the choir of the church also dedicated to the Francesco, Siena and stipulates that the picture be a copy of one completed the previous year by Matteo di Giovanni: F. Donati, “Per la storia artistica della chiesa di S. Francesco,” Miscellanea Storica Senese, vol. II, 1894, pp. 169–171. 5 A notice dated 1400 provides a list of the members of the Company: included is “Giovanni di Caccia dipentore.” Florence, State Archives, Compagnie Soppressi Montepulciano, C.CCCXI, no. 2, Compagnia di S. Croce, Debitori e Creditori: 1400–1472, c.2v. 6 On January 9, 1402 (new style) “Nanni di Caccia” received nine florins, 24 soldi, 6 denari to “ascialbare la nostra casa, cioè della compagnia de la Santa Croce.” The document furthermore specifies the way in which Nanni is to carry out the task. Florence, State Archives, op cit., c. 24. 7 Florence, State Archives, op. cit., c. 33. 8 C. Cennini, Il Libro dell’Arte, 1971, chapter XXVII, p. 27.

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Holy Cross.9 Most of the known cycles of the True Cross are found in Franciscan churches, and Santa Croce was not only the chief Franciscan house in Florence but one of the most important centers of Franciscanism in Tuscany. Moreover, the decoration of its vast choir by Agnolo Gaddi, the leading Florentine painter of his day, was one of the greatest mural projects in late Gothic Italy. In 1415 not only were Gaddi’s murals undimmed by Masaccio’s shadow, they were the most prominent and apparently the only monumental illustrations of the legend in the city. Members of the Company in Montepulciano may well have heard of them. Indeed, their renown must have been great and swift in coming, for they served as the primary visual source for other True Cross cycles in Tuscany: as early as 1410, some five years before Nanni’s mission, Cenni di Francesco made obvious use of Agnolo’s images for his cycle in Volterra;10 in 1424 they inspired Masolino’s work in Empoli;11 and even as late as the middle of the century Bicci di Lorenzo, who initiated the famous Aretine cycle eventually completed by Piero della Francesca, was apparently indebted to them.12 The notice from Montepulciano is probably the earliest, albeit indirect, documentary reference to Agnolo’s murals and yet another indication of their fame and authority. To what purpose did the company plan to put Nanni’s drawings? Were they before us, their technique, format, degree of finish, and quality might suggest an answer, but in any case the Company’s request is unlikely to have been idle: whether Nanni’s drawings were to be used toward the making of frescoes, panels, manuscript illuminations, or embroideries, surely they were ordered with a specific, if not immediate, project in mind. 9

B. Cole, Agnolo Gaddi, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 21–26 and 79–81. For Cenni di Francesco’s cycle in the Oratorio della Croce di Giorno, San Francesco, Volterra, see M. Boskovits, op. cit., pp. 126–127 and 239n. 167, and the illustrations in R. Fremantle, Florentine Gothic Painters from Giotto to Masaccio etc., London, Martin Secker and Warburg, 1975, figs. 790, 792, and 796. 11 B. Cole, “A Reconstruction of Masolino’s True Cross Cycle in Santo Stefano, Empoli,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, vol. XIII, 1968, pp. 289–300. 12 The True Cross cycle of San Francesco, Arezzo was conceived in 1416, and according to Gilbert: at the outset the patrons’ “plan for the Franciscan church in Arezzo had doubtless been still another close copy of Agnolo Gaddi’s cycle, and when it was at last begun in 1447 the elderly and reactionary Bicci di Lorenzo seems to have actually begun one . . . .” For the question of Piero’s debt to Bicci and the latter’s to Agnolo (evident in the two lunettes), as well as a discussion of other Tuscan cycles, see C. Gilbert, Change in Piero della Francesco, Locust Valley, New York, J.J. Augustin, 1968, pp. 73–75 n. 36, and pp. 75–86 n. 38. 10

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That the Company of the Holy Cross should dispatch someone from Montepulciano in southern Tuscany to Florence to copy a cycle of images is noteworthy, for although Montepulciano at this time was under Florentine rule,13 it remained within the Sienese sphere of artistic influence, and as evidence one need only mention the presence of Taddeo di Bartolo’s colossal altarpiece for the Cathedral. Only shortly before Nanni di Caccia’s expedition, in 1412, Benedetto di Bindo had completed painting the legend of the True Cross for the doors of a reliquary cupboard in the Sienese cathedral,14 yet the Company instead turned to a Florentine source. Did they not know of the Sienese cycle? Did they perhaps find it unsatisfactory to their purpose? Or did they make a deliberate choice in favor of Agnolo Gaddi’s work? In any case, their decision was, despite the added cost and trouble of the longer journey, a practical and cautious solution. For a painter to invent images from a text, such as Pietro Lorenzetti was once asked to do,15 would be more difficult for the artist and riskier for the patron.16 And an ordinary painter might well find his imagination and skill overwhelmed rather than stirred by the problem of inventing successful pictorial equivalents for a narrative as complicated as the epic legend of the True Cross, which, if properly told, treated centuries as if they were hours and countries as rooms in a doll’s house. Adam and Eve, Solomon and Sheba, Constantine and Helen, Heraclius and Chosroes, lead a teeming cast of Jews, Romans, Early Christians, Persians, and angelic messengers 13

E. Repetti, “Montepulciano,” s.v., Dizionario geografico, fisico, storico della Toscana etc., Florence, 1839, vol. IV, pp. 464–492. 14 For the panels completed in 1412 by Benedetto di Bindo for the “Arliquiera” or reliquary cupboard in the sacristy of the Cathedral of Siena, now in the Museo del Opera del Duomo of Siena, see P. Bacci, “Le storie della invenzione e esaltazione della S. Croce dipinte da Benedetto di Bindo e compagni per l’”Arliquiera” del Duomo di Siena (1412),” in Fonti e commenti per la storia dell’arte senese etc., Siena, Accademia degli intronati, 1944, pp. 195–229. 15 A payment of one libro was disbursed to “Maestro Ciecho de la Gramatica che trasse la storia di San Savino in volgare per farla nela tauola.” See P. Bacci, 16 One must not think that painters in this period always pleased their patrons. Even a well-known subject could be botched: In 1453 a painter, whose name the scribe omitted (sparing him embarrassment but teasing our curiosity), was paid for an unsatisfactory painting of the Arrest of Christ: “A [blank] dipentore a dì 18 d’aghosto soldi quaranta, sono per una istoria dipense, la quale quela quando fu presso il Nostro Singniore, perché la detta fighura no fe a perfezione né bela et pero d’achordo chol chapitolo mi chomisero [g]li dese soldi 40 et chossí [g]li [h]o dati--libre II.” Siena, State Archives, Patrimonio Resti 984, Compagnia di S. Niccolò e S. Lucia, Entrata-Uscita: 1412–1467, c. 199.

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deployed in battles, processions, visions, and miraculous cures not confined to Eden, Jerusalem, and Rome.17 The decision of the Company of the Holy Cross in Montepulciano to acquire drawings after an existing series was the expedient solution, one consistent with the essentially conservative character of patronage and image-making in the Early Renaissance.18 Moreover, in sending to Florence for drawings after Agnolo Gaddi’s cycle it appears that the Company took care to select “the best one and the one with the greatest reputation.”

17 The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, trans. and adapted by G. Ryan and H. Ripperger, New York, 1969 (orig. pub. 1941), pp. 269–276. See also P. Mazzoni, La Legenda della Croce nell’Arte italiana, Florence, Alfani e Venturi, 1914. 18 The conservative tendencies of patrons and artists, both of whom thought in terms of types and function is stressed by B. Cole, Italian Art, 1250–1550: The Relation of Renaissance Art to Life and Society, New York, Harper and Row, 1987.

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The Reflective Memory of a Late Trecento Painter: Speculations on the Origins and Development of the Master of San Martino a Mensola

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URSUING the studies of an earlier generation — Bernard Berenson, Roberto Longhi, and above all Richard Offner — recent historians of art have continued to devote attention to the classification of late fourteenthcentury Florentine painting. Because of their endeavors many anonymous painters, whose pictures long floated in a sea of uncertain attribution, are better understood and thereby perhaps closer to eventual identification as well as to more meaningful interpretation. Among the host of anonimi who worked during the last quarter of the ’300, one of the most important goes, in scholarly circles, by the formidable pseudonym of the Master of San Martino a Mensola, after the eponymous church near Florence which houses his most impressive painting (Fig. 1). Since the 1950s scholars, particularly Klesse, Fremantle, and Boskovits, have grouped some two dozen murals and panels, several of them quite large and prominent, around the San Martino painting of 1391 and three other works dated by inscriptions between 1385 and 1395.1 Despite this body of evidence, however, the character of the 1 For the Master of San Martino a Mensola see B. Klesse, “Der Meister des Hochalters von San Martino a Mensola,” in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, VIII, 1959, pp. 247–252; L. Bellosi, “Da Spinello Aretino a Lorenzo Monaco,” in Paragone, no. 187, 1965, pp. 18–43; L. Marcucci, Gallerie Nazionali di Firenze: I Dipinti Toscani del Secolo XIV, Rome, 1965, p. 144; A. Conti, “Frammenti pittorici a Santa Croce,” in Paragone, no. 225, 1968, pp. 10–20; F. Zeri, “Sul catalogo dei dipinti toscani del secolo XIV nelle Gallerie di Firenze,” in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, ser. VI, LXXI, 1968, 65–78; R. Fremantle, “Some Additions to a Late Trecento Florentine,” in Antichita Viva, XII, pp. 3–13; M. Boskovits, Pittura Fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento, Florence, 1975, pp. 124–126, 236 n. 158,

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1. Master of S. Martino a Mensola, Triptych, (1391), Florence, San Martino a Mensola.

Master of San Martino a Mensola’s art remains a matter of debate and the course of his development problematic and vaguely defined. Central to an understanding of the Master’s art is the dated altarpiece of 1391 in San Martino a Mensola and, even more, a splendid panel (Fig. 2), dated 1385, in the collection of Sir Harold Acton. One recognizes in both panels the broad faces and unfocused gazes, the sturdy limbs and bulky forms typical of the Master’s robust types. One finds in them, as indeed even in his smaller panels such as a Madonna Enthroned (Fig. 3) once in a Florentine private collection, an unabashed love of pattern, which coincides with late trecento taste but which he perhaps also pursues as a result of personal predilection. This characteristic manifests itself most obviously in the elaborate brocades with which he creates luxurious floral carpets, hangings, and canopies for the figures in some of his panels. But even when

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2. Master of S. Martino a Mensola, Madonna and Child with Angels, (1385), Florence, Collection of Sir Harold Acton.

3. Master of S. Martino a Mensola, Madonna and Child with Saints, Florence, Private Collection.

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4. Master of S. Martino a Mensola, Madonna and Child with Saints, (1387), detail, Florence, S. Croce.

omitting such obvious trappings or when working in fresco, a medium illsuited to showy effects, he betrays a tendency to favor line and pattern above form and space. For instance, the perspective of an unadorned Enthroned Madonna and Child (Fig. 4) that he painted for Santa Croce in 1387, though praised for its emphatic recession,2 in fact, strains so hard that its space tilts until it finally collapses. In the end its insistent diagonals and slippery planes, which suggest rather than describe a deep space, do little more than provide a sharply contrasting pattern beside stout, ponderous figures whose forms are modeled in a way that suggests stone. Even the latter contribute to the Master’s decorative aims. Each is conceived as if it were a dressmaker’s 237 n. 161, 379–381, 408, and 418; and R. Fremantle, Florentine Gothic Painting, 1976, pp. 275–284. For recent attempt, which for the moment must remain an unproven but attractive possibility, to identify the painter see L. Bellosi, “Francesco di Michele, Il Maestro di San Martino a Mensola,” in Paragone, XXXVI, 1985, pp. 57–63. 2 Boskovits, 1975, p. 125, observed that in the Santa Croce mural “la struttura elaborata del trono e il pavimento a piastrelle potrebbero far parte anche dell’attrezzatura scenica di un dipinto del secondo decennio del Quattrocento.”

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dummy or a wire armature onto which a skin of flesh or cloth is applied or draped. Yet, at its best, as in the Acton and San Martino a Mensola panels, the Master’s essentially linear style is captivating. In the central panel of the San Martino a Mensola Altarpiece the brilliant robes worn by the Virgin and Saint Julian descend in slow, smooth curves which break, curl, and unexpectedly fold. A less calligraphic but still melodic line governs the Acton panel, where the swags of the Madonna’s canopy together with the angels’ wings, arms, and draperies compose a complicated mandorla enframing the Madonna and Child with blazing color. In both, perhaps not by accident, the delight in overwrought decorative effects extends to the complex patterns of the raised gesso surfaces of the pinnacles. Because the Master of San Martino a Mensola is a painter less concerned with space and form than with contour and color, his approach is effective on a small scale as well as large, and indeed he sometimes attains similar results in both. In the central panel of the San Martino a Mensola Triptych the Madonna and the two flanking saints, Julian and Amerigo, are related to each other and to their frame in much the same way as the Madonna and the foremost paired saints in the vastly smaller Florentine Madonna Enthroned, even though in one picture the Madonna stands and in the other she sits within a splendid tabernacle of brocade. Moreover, the tooling of the haloes, again despite the dramatic difference in scale, repeats a favorite pattern, apparently Orcagnesque in origin, that is also found both in the Acton Madonna and in the altarpiece in San Martino a Mensola as well as in other panels by him. The Master’s connection with the circle of Orcagna, indicated by his treatment of haloes, was long ago observed by Klesse, but his precise relation to the brothers Andrea, Nardo, and Jacopo di Cione, much less his development, has remained unclear. Earlier students drew the broad outlines of the Master’s personality: Klesse stressed the formative influence of the Orcagna circle;3 Zeri noted the borrowings from Agnolo Gaddi;4 Marcucci espied a subtle connection with Spanish painting.5 But making sense of such observations, much less charting the painter’s career has been more problematic. One cannot overestimate the difficulties of sketching the career of an artist about whom the only known facts are four dates (1385, 1387,

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Klesse, 1959, pp. 248–249. Zeri, 1968, p. 76. 5 Marcucci, 1965, p. 144. 4

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1391, and 1395),6 two or three names (Berardo di Ser Ridolfo Pretasini, Zati, and perhaps Nasi),7 and some two dozen paintings.8 Indeed, the necessarily tentative nature of the undertaking is demonstrated by the sharply different characterizations proposed by Fremantle, Boskovits, and Bellosi. Fremantle presented an unusually exotic picture of the Master of San Martino a Mensola: despite the admitted Orcagnesque features of his work, he argued, the Master was a pupil of Antonio Veneziano, but his style was susceptible to modification, for in later years he came under the influence not only of Agnolo Gaddi but also, as Marcucci had opined, of Spanish painting. After 1391 the painter returned to what Fremantle called “Florentine values,” that is, a greater concern for volume and space, as well as “soft humanity.” The peculiar constellation of characteristics that Fremantle perceived — Antonio Veneziano, Agnolo Gaddi, Spanish painting, and “Florentine values” — suggested to him the possible identification of the anonimo with the mysterious Starnina.9 Rejecting much of the substance of Fremantle’s outline of the Master of San Martino a Mensola’s career, Boskovits saw the Orcagnesque pedigree of the Master and noted his response, during the later 1380s, to the art of Agnolo Gaddi and to the Master of Santa Verdiana, both of whom stirred in him a late Gothic delight

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These are the dates given by the inscriptions on four paintings: 1385 is the date of the Acton Madonna and Child; 1387 the date of the Santa Croce fresco; 1391 the date of the San Martino a Mensola Triptych; and 1395 the date of a homeless Madonna and Child with Two Donors formerly in the Bellini Collection, Florence. 7 Berardo di Ser Ridolfo Pretasini is the patron depicted in the Santa Croce fresco; the Zati arms appear on the San Martino a Mensola Triptych; the name of one Andrea Nasi appears in the fragmentary inscription on the Acton Madonna and Child, but whether he is the patron is unclear. The inscription on the latter picture reads: “ANNO DOMINI MCCCLXXXV DI XX . . . D’AGOSTO QUESTA . . . /A(NIMA?) ANDREA NASI FA . . . (M?)ERZETAIO (S?)ER MEI SANDRO. . . . 8 It is beyond the scope of this article to consider every attribution to the Master of San Martino a Mensola; however, several of Fremantle’s attributions are rightly rejected by Boskovits: Madonna and Child, detached fresco in the museum at Fucecchio (Fremantle, 1973, fig. 6); fragments of a border decoration from the chapel of Saint Jerome in Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence (Fremantle, 1973, fig. 9); Saint Louis of Toulouse, Castellani Chapel, Santa Croce, Florence (Fremantle, 1973, fig. 10); Saint Paul, M. H. De Young Museum, San Francisco (Fremantle, 1973, fig. 21). In my view also indefensible, despite the support of both Fremantle (1973, fig. 110) and Boskovits (1975, p. 381), is a fragmentary fresco of the Madonna and Child in San Pietro a Quintole near Fiesole. For the latter work see below, n. 12. 9 Fremantle, 1973, passim.

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in rhythmic line and naturalistic detail but did not lead him to return to “Florentine values” or, for that matter, to participate in the Giottesque revival of the late Trecento.10 Bellosi sought to put the discussion on a more concrete plane by connecting the anonimo with an actual name: Francesco di Michele, who in 1385 was commissioned to fresco the Logi tabernacle near Colonnata. To what remains of this enterprise, the Four Evangelists from the vault, Bellosi linked a series of other works, including frescoes in San Bartolomeo in via Cava in Prato, a panel with San Ivo at Polesden Lacey, a badly preserved tabernacle once at San Martino alla Palma, a lunette on the facade of the church of San Martino a Paperino, and a panel depicting Saint John the Baptist in the Florentine church of Santa Croce. For Bellosi the latter panel and the frescoes in Prato were early works reaching backwards in time to the 1370s and, therefore, of crucial importance in plotting the early career of the so-called Master of San Martino a Mensola. These latter works revealed, as others had noted, the painter’s Orcagnesque origins, but more precisely they led, as Longhi had guessed, to the art of Andrea da Firenze.11 Of Bellosi’s daring attributions, the documented Logi tabernacle offers the most tempting links to the known works by the Master of San Martino a Mensola, but the difficulty is that the similarities are restricted to but one figure from it, the Saint John the Evangelist. Moreover, one expects but does not find an especially close connection with the Acton Madonna of the same year; instead, the figure most approaches the Master’s later work. In the end, however attractive, Bellosi’s admirable effort on behalf of Francesco di Michele must remain, for this writer, a debatable hypothesis, whose uncertainty, therefore, puts his conclusions in doubt. With so much disagreement few proposals about the Master of San Martino a Mensola, even the most persuasive, can hope to free themselves entirely from the realm of speculation. In any event, it might profit to consider the evidence for the Master’s origins and development. Of all of his works, the earliest is a panel in the church of the Sacro Cuore in Florence (Fig 5), a picture that, as Fremantle and Boskovits rightly claim, preceded the Acton Madonna of 1385;12 moreover, like the latter work — 10

Boskovits, 1975, pp. 124–126 and 379–381. L. Bellosi, 1985, pp. 57–63. 12 Fremantle, 1973, p. 4, fig. 11, attributed a Virgin and Child in the church of San Pietro a Quintole to the Master of San Martino a Mensola and dated the panel about 1387, that is, near the Santa Croce fresco. Although Boskovits, 1975, pp. 124–125 and 381, accepted 11

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5. Master of S. Martino a Mensola, Madonna and Child, Florence, Sacro Cuore.

which Longhi with inspired error once misattributed to Giovanni Bonsi13 — it reveals the nature of the painter’s origins. Although a panel such as the Master’s Saint Jerome in the Gallerie Fiorentine demonstrates in its evocation of the Zecca Saint Matthew now in the Uffizi an abiding respect for Orcagna and Jacopo di Cione, it describes but the lesser part of his artistic makeup.14 It was above all the sweet spell of Nardo’s art the attribution, he apparently recognized its incompatibility with the Master’s known works during the mid-1380s. Instead, one suspects that he saw in its “iconic” character confirmation of the Master’s Orcagnesque origins and, therefore, dated it 1375–1380: he thus would have it be, according to his suggested chronology, the earliest known work by the Master. But even with an early dating, it seems to me that the attribution is unconvincing and merely serves to confuse the related problems of the Master’s origins and his development. 13 R. Longhi, as cited in the catalogue of the exhibition, Mostra dei tesori segreti delle case fiorentine, Florence, 1960, p. 6, no. 5. 14 For both pictures, the Master of San Martino a Mensola’s Saint Jerome and the Saint Matthew by Orcagna and Jacopo di Cione, see Marcucci, 1965, pp. 79–80 (Saint Matthew) and 144 (Saint Jerome).

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that captivated the Master of San Martino a Mensola, who doubtless knew the work of both Nardo and Orcagna in the original and as perpetuated by their brother and heir, Jacopo.15 The Florentine Madonna Enthroned recalls Nardo’s exquisite Goldman Madonna in Washington (Fig.

6. Nardo di Cione, Triptych, Washington, National Gallery of Art. 15 For Andrea di Cione, known as Orcagna, see R. Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, section IV, vol. 1, New York, 1962; cfr. also: K. Steinweg, Andrea Orcagna, Strasbourg, 1929; H. Gronau, Andrea Orcagna und Nardo di Cione, Berlin, 1937; M. Boskovits, “Orcagna in 1357—and in Other Times,” in The Burlington Magazine, CXIII (1971), 239–251. For Jacopo di Cione see R. Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, section IV, vol. 3, New York, 1965; for Nardo di Cione: see R. Offner, “Nardo di Cione,” in Studies in Florentine Painting, edited by B. Cole, New York, 1972 (first published 1927), pp. 97–108; and R. Offner, A Critical and Hitorical Corpus of Florentine Painting, section IV, vol. 2, New York, 1960. Jacopo, along with his brothers Andrea and Matteo, was literally Nardo’s heir, as recorded in the latter’s last testament of 26 December

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7. Nardo di Cione, Madonna Enthroned, New York, New-York Historical Society.

6) and his impressive Madonna in the collection of the New-York Historical Society (Fig. 7). In a less obvious way Nardo’s influence also penetrates the Acton Madonna. Besides the tender lyricism of figures, one may note such specific features as the richly patterned brocade that swaddles the Christchild: although echoes of Orcagna linger in the way the cloth wraps around the Child’s hip,16 it is decorated with a pattern of flying birds not unlike those common in works from the Cione circle, particularly Nardo’s (Fig. 8).17 Indeed, the generally Orcagnesque mixture of the Acton picture, which is perhaps even more clearly stated in the Sacro Cuore Madonna, is comparable to a collaborative work, the San Giobbe Madonna and Child (Fig. 9) of 1365 designed by Nardo but, in my view, completed by Jacopo.18 Even in the Master’s name-piece of 1391, the calligraphic rhythms

1366, published by G. Milanesi, Nuovi Documenti per la storia dell’arte Toscana dal secolo XII al XVI, Rome, 1893, pp. 58–59. 16 See for instance the Child in Orcagna’s Altarpiece, perhaps painted for the Florentine church of Santissima Annunziata but now in the Accademia. Illustrated in Marcucci, 1965, fig. 45. 17 This pattern recurs over and again in the Master of San Martino a Mensola’s work. See B. Klesse, Seidenstoffe in der italienischen Malerei des 14. Jahrhunderts, Bern, 1967, pp. 146–148. 18 For this panel see Marcucci, 1965, pp. 76–77; and Boskovits, 1975, p. 202 n. 104. Both scholars attribute this work to Nardo di Cione with assistance without going so far as to introduce Jacopo’s name. The idea of a collaboration between Nardo and Jacopo is suggested by A. Ladis, Taddeo Gaddi, Columbia (Missouri) and London, 1982, p. 60.

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8. Nardo di Cione, Standing Madonna and Child, The Minneapolis Institute of Art.

9. Jacopo di Cione and Nardo di Cione, Madonna and Child, (1365), Florence, Accademia.

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10. Master of S. Martino a Mensola, Triptych, detail, Florence, S. Martino a Mensola.

of the Madonna’s robe (Fig. 10) evoke the distant memory of Nardo’s Goldman Madonna as well as the small, somewhat less-accomplished Standing Virgin and Child in Minneapolis.19 But by 1391 the Master’s work had begun to fall under the sway of the leading figure in Florentine painting of the day, Agnolo Gaddi. One may see this clearly in one of the two fictive half-length altarpieces that he painted in the rural church of San Martino a Terenzano (Fig. 11), not far from the virtually contemporary altarpiece that stands in San Martino a Mensola. The Gaddesque cast of the Virgin and Two Saints at Terenzano, 19 For this picture see R. Offner, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, sec. IV, vol. 2, New York, 1962, pp. 28–29; and European Paintings from The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, London, 1971, p. 379.

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11. Master of S. Martino a Mensola, Triptych, S. Martino a Terenzano.

12. Workshop of Agnolo Gaddi, Saints Julian, James, and Michael, New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery.

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whose unassuming character was perhaps also in part determined by the modesty of the commission, is evident when it is compared to a fragmentary panel attributable to an assistant of Agnolo Gaddi, a Saints Julian, James, and Michael now at Yale University (Fig. 12).20 To judge from the Master’s surviving works, the picture of 1391 marks both a climax and a turning point in his career. That large and lavish commission, which he undertook for the Zati who once owned the land on which Berenson’s Villa I Tatti now stands, was preceded by other notable commissions: in 1387 by an otherwise pedestrian mural, important by virtue of its location in Santa Croce, and in 1385 by the Acton Madonna, once the central element of a fair-sized altarpiece that, if one may guess at the content of the fragmentary inscription, may have been painted for a member of the prominent Nasi family. Although generalizations about so mysterious a painter are difficult and must remain hypothetical, his later paintings appear to to be less attractive but more ambitious: they hardly suggest a decline in popularity or even in craft, but a change in direction. After 1391 the character of his work altered as it fell further under darkening shadow of Agnolo Gaddi. Like another, contemporary anonimo, the less-gifted Master of Santa Verdiana, the Master of San Martino a Mensola modified his style in light of the overpowering success of Gaddi, whose popularity and influence he thus reflects.21 In the case of the Master of San Martino a Mensola the results were not always felicitous. The example of Gaddi, who was perhaps himself encouraged by patrons, may have spurred the anonimo to develop such naturalistic pursuits as portraiture, in 20

Although most scholars have attributed this panel to Agnolo himself, B. Cole, Agnolo Gaddi, Oxford, 1977, p. 73, assigned it to the School of Agnolo Gaddi; similarly, R. Offner, Italian Primitives at Yale University, New Haven, 1927, pp. 20–21, attributed it to the shop of Agnolo. For further literature see C. Seymour, Jr., Early Italian Paintings in the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven and London, 1970, pp. 37–39; and Boskovits, 1975, p. 301, where it is dated 1380–85. 21 For the Master of Santa Verdiana, whom Offner dubbed the Master of the Louvre Coronation, see F. Zeri, “Il Maestro di Santa Verdiana,” in Studies in the History of Art Dedicated to William E. Suida, London, 1959, pp. 35–40; Boskovits, “Der Meister der Santa Verdiana: Beiträge zür Geschichte der florentinischen Malerei um die Wende des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts,” in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, XIII, 1967, pp. 31–60; and Boskovits, 1975, pp. 104–107, 229 n. 96, and 382–387, who in stressing his Orcagnesque origins attempts to identify him as Tommaso del Mazza. For Offner’s tentative attributions to this painter see Offner, ed. by H. Maginnis, A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting: A Legacy of Attributions, Locust Valley (New York), 1981, pp. 43–47.

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which he was surprisingly gifted, as both Fremantle and Boskovits have observed22 and as is testified by the many donors he portrayed so incisively in his paintings, even the too broadly sketched and greying gentleman with the craggy nose, drawn cheeks, and troubled brow in the Santa Croce mural. But was it not also the example of Gaddi, whose work hearkened back to the age of Giotto, that led to uncongenial experiments in the rendering of volume? Like the Master of Santa Verdiana, the Master of San Martino a Mensola produced results bordering on the grotesque: forms puffed and swollen to the bursting point, as with the balloon-like face of the 13. Master of S. Martino a Christchild in the San Martino Mensola, a Mensola Triptych of 1391 or Madonna and Child, the similarly bloated Child in the Stalybridge (Cheshire), Astley fictive triptych at Terenzano. Cheetham Gallery. The prominence of Agnolo, in whom lived both the practices and the aims of Giottesque tradition, coincided with a revival of the early Trecento in Florentine painting, and to this phenomenon, as Fremantle intimated, the Master of San Martino a Mensola apparently also responded.23 In a Madonna and Child at Stalybridge (Fig. 13), a work that probably follows his dated

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Fremantle, 1973, p. 5; and Boskovits, 1975, p. 125. On the Giottesque revival in late trecento Florentine painting see M. Boskovits, “‘Giotto Born Again’: Beiträge zu den Quellen Masaccios,”in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, XXIX, 1966, pp. 51–61; D. Wilkins, “Maso di Banco and Cenni di Francesco: A Case of Late Trecento Revival,” in The Burlington Magazine, CXI, 1969, pp. 83–84; and Boskovits, 1975, pp. 88–89, 223 n. 37, with earlier bibliography. 23

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14. Bernardo Daddi, Madonna and Child, Florence, Berenson Collection, Villa I Tatti.

painting of 1395,24 the anonimo eschews the superabundant ornament and linear playfulness of the late Gothic in favor of a more chaste and ponderous effect that is reminiscent of an earlier generation of pictures, such as Taddeo Gaddi’s stolid Virgin and Christ in the familiar church of San Martino a Mensola.25 The vaguely Giottesque appearance of the picture, which was perhaps inspired as much by Agnolo Gaddi as by a direct return to Giotto and his followers, is evident above all in the amplitude and weight of the figures but also their evocation of specific motives. The Madonna and Child revive a degree of both the action and the sentiment of Bernardo Daddi’s tender and 24

Boskovits, 1975, p. 381, proposes the plausible date of 1395–1400 for the picture at Stalybridge. 25 For this picture, which was probably intended for the church of San Martino a Mensola and which was painted ca. 1345–1350 with the considerable assistance of Taddeo Gaddi’s shop, see A. Ladis, 1982, pp. 51–53 and 222–223.

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exquisitely graceful Madonna now at I Tatti (Fig. 14), and the angels kneeling in the foreground are perhaps even more remarkable. In their overstated largeness, their passionate gazes, and their ambiguous poses (for despite a symmetry so strong as to suggest two strictly confronted profiles, they present their backs and both their wings), these figures find no analogues in Orcagna, his brothers, and their followers; nor, for that matter, do they approach the angels in a painting such as Agnolo Gaddi’s Coronation of the Virgin in London (Fig. 15). Rather, they recall some of the loosely draped, bulky figures in Taddeo Gaddi’s murals for the Baroncelli Chapel in Santa Croce and, even more, the softly clothed creatures that the Master of San Martino a Mensola would have known from the Baroncelli Coronation inscribed with Giotto’s name (Fig. 16). At this late point in his career the Master of San Martino a Mensola apparently found inspiration in various related and sometimes distant sources, 15. Agnolo Gaddi,Coronation of the Virgin, which commingle like vague London, National Gallery. reflections on the cloudy surface of a old mirror. Unlike other painters of his day who were content to replicate in a bald way the forms and motives of the Giottesque past, he attempted something more difficult: to fashion pictures that evoke an earlier, golden art by means of an idiosynchratic reassembling of recollected elements. Although this purpose is clearest in the Master’s late works, it is perhaps detectable even in his early Madonna from the Sacro Cuore, for in that picture two angels spread a cloth of honor whose pattern evokes memories

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16. Giotto, Coronation of the Virgin, S. Croce, Baroncelli Chapel.

of panels by Bernardo Daddi.26 Was the Sacro Cuore Madonna painted to replace an earlier picture, which it also attempted to recall? To be sure, it would not be the first instance in Florentine Trecento painting when a picture consciously set out to resemble an earlier work.27 In any case, whether demanded by the commission or motivated by the artist’s personal aims, the Sacro Cuore Madonna foreshadows an aspect of the Master of San Martino a Mensola’s later art. Undeniably, the painter owed much to the shop of Orcagna, particularly to Nardo, whose formative influence dominates his early pictures, including the Sacro Cuore Madonna, and registers with ebbing force in those of his later career, but the example of Gaddi encouraged him to shift the focus of his art. It did not, however, alter the nature of his sensibility. In its return to Giottesque forms his late work, insofar as it is known, would seem far removed from the lyricism of his Nardesque beginnings and the dreamy exoticism of the San Martino a Mensola Triptych, yet in its evocation of the past it reflects an art given fundamentally and evermore to nostalgia.

26 For a catalogue of textile patterns employed in fourteenth-century panels, see B. Klesse, Seidenstoffe in der italienischen Malerei des 14. Jahrhunderts, Bern, 1967. 27 On the question of conscious emulation in early Italian painting, see the important essay by B. Cole, “Old in New in the Early Trecento,” in Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, XVII (1973), pp. 229–248.

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XI

The Death of Giovanni d’Ambrogio

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IOVANNI d’Ambrogio is a name no longer on the lips of many, yet the once-noted architect and sculptor lived and worked during the most decisive and defining moment in the history of Florence. First documented in 1366, namely, in the year that the last of Giotto’s direct followers Taddeo Gaddi died, he also witnessed the passing of Taddeo’s talented son Agnolo as well as the advent of the Quattrocento and a new art created by the likes of Filippo Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Nanni di Banco, and Donatello. The latter were of course his contemporaries and colleagues, alongside whom he worked and among whom he enjoyed a position of prominence. Over the course of his long career of more than fifty years, he was not only entrusted with such projects as the decoration of the Loggia dei Priori in Florence and the construction of the Chapel of the Holy Girdle in Prato, but he also served as capomaestro of the Florentine cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore from 1401, year of the famous competition for the new doors of the Baptistry, until October 19, 1418, when he was forced to retire on account of his advanced age.1 As a sculptor and as capomaestro, he abetted, oversaw, or witnessed at close range notable projects at the Cathedral: the decoration of the Porta della Mandorla, the sculptural program of the facade, and the initial planning of Brunelleschi’s dome. Yet, despite Giovanni d’Ambrogio’s importance and his highly visible and well-documented position in Florence, 1 For Giovanni d’Ambrogio see B. K(replin), s.v., Thieme-Becker Kunstlerlexikon, XIV, Leipzig, 1921, p. 103; G. Brunetti, “Giovanni d’Ambrogio,” Rivista d’Arte, XIV, 1932, pp. 1–22; G. Kreytenberg, “Giovanni d’Ambrogio,” Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, XIV (1972), pp. 5–32; M. Wundram, “Der Meisterder Verkündigung in der Domopera zu Florenz,” in E. Guldan, ed., Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte: Eine Festgabe für Heinz Rudolf Rosemann zum 9. Oktober 1960, Munich, 1960, pp. 109–125.

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no extant records have mentioned him after his retirement or have marked the date of his demise: it would seem that he went quietly and without notice from a stage suddenly shining with far brighter lights than he. Thanks to the explicit testimony of his last will and testament, however, it is now clear that his death came on November 18, 1421, three years after his retirement and mere months after the death of his younger and now more famous contemporary Nanni di Banco.2 It is also apparent that Giovanni d’Ambrogio hoped for more than obscurity. In a brief document dated three days before his death Giovanni bequeaths to his wife Sandra for the duration of her life the income from lands located at San Andrea a Doccia and Santo Stefano a Pitelli. His granddaughter Filippa he says must content herself with a dowry, whose value, however, is left blank. He names as his principal heirs his son Lorenzo, a sculptor in his own right, and his grandson Ambrogio, also known as Lorenzo, but he specifies that if neither is survived by a male heir, his estate is then to be divided equally by the hospitals of Santa Maria Nuova and Santa Maria della Scala. Such provisions are no less expected and conventional than his bequests to the Cathedral, the poor, and the city walls; however, one further request has a more emotional resonance and suggests something of the undeniable prestige he enjoyed during his life: he asks that his body be buried in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, whose building and embellishment had occupied so much of his professional life. Interment there would thus give him the honor of being placed among the leading citizens of Florence, including his predecessor as capomaestro Giotto3 and, eventually, his brilliant colleague Brunelleschi.But such a request, which would have set an immediate precedent for Brunelleschi, was not something that could be gotten simply for the asking. Burial in the principal church of the city, a structure fraught with undeniable civic symbolism, was a signal 2

M. Bergstein, “La vita civica di Nanni di Banco,” Rivista d’Arte, XXXIX (ser. 4, vol. 3), 1987, pp. 55–82. 3 Writing c. 1340, Giovanni Villani records that after Giotto’s death on 8 January 1337 “il più sovrano maestro stato in dipintura che si trovasse al suo tempo” was buried “con grande onore” in the church of Santa Reparata following the exceptional permission of the Commune. His tomb must have been in the ancient part of the church, and a stone of white marble, noted by Vasari, must have been moved into the new section, where in 1490 the monument carved by Benedetto da Maiano and inscribed with a verse by Politian (“Ille ego sum, per quem pictura extincta revixit”) was erected. The words of Villani’s Cronica are taken from R. Salvini, Giotto: Bibliografia, Rome, 1938, p. 4. For Giotto’s tomb see C. Brandi, Giotto, Milan, 1983, p. 172.

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honor requiring special dispensation from the Commune, one reserved for heroes of the state and, among artists, possibly to be conceded to a Giotto or a Brunelleschi. There is no evidence in surviving deliberations of the responsible officials that they ever debated granting such an honor to Giovanni d’Ambrogio.4 He had given long and valuable service and had contributed much, but no matter what Giovanni might have thought of his own star, apparently in the eyes of others around him, perhaps lately bedazzled by new lights, it had shone not brightly enough.

Appendix: Giovanni d’Ambrogio’s Testament

Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Notarile Antecosimiano 13527. Mazzetti, Matteo di Niccolò da Sesto, vol.I (1385–1426), filza 1, no. 60. 1421. 15. Novembre In dei nomine Anno domini ab eius Incarnatione Millesimo quadragentesimo uigentesimo primo. Indictione secunda die quinto decimo mensis nouenbris. Actum in populo Sancte Reparate de Florentia, presentibus Ser Francischo Bentadis maliscalco populi Sancti Laurentii de Florentia, Paulo olim Pauli barberio populi Sancte Maria Maioris de Florentia, Martino Iohannis populi Sancte Reparate de Florentia, Bernardo Francisci dicti populi, Andrea Donati populi Sanctorum Apostolorum de Florentia, Iacopo Francisci populi Sancti Martini a Pagliariccio de Mucello comitatus Florentie et Matteo Casini populi Sancti Laurentii de Florentia testibus ad hec habitis et approprio hore infrascripti testator uocatus et rogatus etc. [in the margin left, below: “Decessit die XVIII novenbris 1421”] Cum nichil sit certius mortis et incertius hora mortis hinc est quod Iohannes 4

For this negative assertion I am grateful to Margaret Haines, whose careful examination of the Cathedral records encountered no mention of Giovanni’s request having been discussed or approved.

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186 olim Ambrosii magistri populi Sancte Reparate de Florentia, sanus mente et intellectu licet corpore languens uolens suorum bonorem omnium per hoc suum nuncupativum sine scriptis testamentum suam ultimam disponere et ordinare voluntatem et suum nuncupativum sine scriptis testamentis condendo in hunc modum facere procuravit et fecit videlicet. [In margin left: “publicatum in parte ut infra fit mentio publicatum totum et restitutum Magistro Dominico de urbe veteri (Orvieto)”] Imprimis quidem animam suam omnipotenti deo et beate Maria semper vergini et toti celesti curie paradisi commendavit, corpus vero suum cum de hac vita migrari contingerit sepelliri voluit adpud [sic] ecclesiam Sancte Marie del Fiore de Florentia. Item reliquit opere murorum civitatis Florentie soldos decem florenorum parvorum. Item reliquit opere Sancte Reparate de Florentia soldos decem florenorum parvorum. Item reliquit sacrestie nove Sancte Marie del Fiore soldos viginti florenorum parvorum. Item amore dei et pro remedio anime sue reliquit et legavit florenos viginti auri dandos et solvendos et distribuendos amore dei et pro remedio anime suorum [sic] et suorum pro dominam Sandram uxorem dicti testatoris illus pauperilibus personis et locis temporibus et terminis quibus et prout [cancelled: “quibus”] eidem potuit in secreto honerans de predictis conscientiam ipsius domine Sandre. Et quod ad predicta facienda et exequenda gravari non possit. Item Institutionis reliquit et legavit domine Filippe [cancelled above: “filium olim Laurentii”] nepiti [cancelled: “filia”] dicti testoris videlicet Laurentii filii olim dicti testatoris, dotes suas et seu partem dotes sue per ipsum testatorem eidem et seu eius viro datas et traditas [amount left blank], iubens et mandans eidem stare co[n]tenta de predictis et quod nichil ulterius petere possit in hereditatem et bona dicti testatoris. Item reliquit et legavit domine Sandre uxore dicti testatoris toto tempore vite sue et denec vidua steterit et dotes suas non petierit, usumfructum, redditum et pro ventium vnus poderis dicti testatoris cum domo pro laboratore et terris labborativi alboratis, viniatis, boschatis, et prativis et soldis, positi in populo Sancte Andree a Doccia comitatus Florentia loco dicto a Prunatelli et partim in populo Sancti Stefani a Pitelli loco dieto a Citerna, via mediante, infra suos confini, [in margin:

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“quod ad presens labora(t) Bettus Martini Chirici”]. In omnibus autem aliis suis bonis sibi heredem universalem instituit Ambrosium vocatum Laurentium nepotem dicti testatoris et filium olim Laurentii filii olim dicti testatoris. Et in casu veru quod dictus Ambrosius sive Laurentius quandocunque decederet sine filiis et descendentibus legiptimis et naturalibus, tunc et eo casu filii heredem instituit et dicto Ambrosio substituit hospitale Sancte Marie Nove de Florentia pro vna dimidia et hospitale Sancte Marie della Scala de Florentia pro alia dimidia. [in margin left: “publicatum tantum in ista parte et cum isto capitulo et restitutum hospitali Sancte Maria della Scala pro me iohannem Ser Iacobi Salvetti”] Item in dicto casu inre instituit, reliquit et legavit dicte, Filippe eius nepti predicti [sic] et uxori Antonii Iohannes Cechi toto tempore vite sue usumfructum redditum et proventum omniam bonorum dicti testatoris. Et hanc asseruit esse suum testamentum etc., cassans etc., rogans etc.5

5 I am grateful to Gino Corti for his kind and expert help in corroborating and correcting my transcription of the document presented here.

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XII

Salvation and Vision in the Brancacci Chapel Queen. “If it be, Why seems it so particular with thee?” Hamlet. “Seems, madam? Nay, it is, I know not ‘seems.’“ Hamlet, I. ii

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HE Brancacci Chapel (Fig. 1) is a monument history will not let us forget but fate will not let us see — not, at least, as its makers intended. Yet, the time-battered murals that line its walls still constitute one of the most stirring and influential series of images in the history of art. They are concerned with the nature of earthly existence but also with the laws of human vision, for their content is indissoluble from their form and their technique. From our now-distant vantage point in the twenty-first century, we can see that they not only defined the character of Italian Renaissance painting at its point of origin in fifteenth-century Florence but helped to set the long course of western art until the late nineteenth century. In so doing, they established artistic and philosophical principles that hold fast despite the veil of time and that continue to haunt our imagination to this day. Their position, as writers of the Renaissance were quick to recognize, is due in large part to the singular talent of one man: Tommaso di Ser Giovanni known, probably with affection, by the untranslatable nickname “Masaccio” or “big ugly Tom” (December 21, 1401–1428), who was born on the feast of Saint Thomas in the rural village of Castel San Giovanni not far from Florence in the Valdarno. What was exceptional about the outlook and work of this painter who was never anything but young? To writers of his own century the answer lay above all in his faithfulness to the truths of vision. Masaccio, as the Florentine Humanist Alamanno Rinuccini put it with classicizing rhetoric: “in painting [Masaccio] expressed the likenesses of all natural things in such a way that we seem to see with our eyes not

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1. Brancacci Chapel, S. Maria del Carmine, Florence. Overall view.

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the images of things but the things themselves.” For Cristoforo Landino, who was more specific, he was “a very good imitator of nature, with great and comprehensive relief, and a good designer and pure, without ornament, because he devoted himself only to imitation of the truth and to the relief of his figures. He was certainly as good and skilled in perspective as anyone else at that time, and of great ease in working, being very young, as he died at the age of 26.” By the mid-sixteenth century, when Giorgio Vasari wrote his famous and influential biographies of artists, Masaccio had already acquired something of the status of a holy figure among painters, and the Brancacci Chapel had become his shrine. The painter from the wilderness was the revealed prophet of a new art, foreshadowed by Giotto, fulfilled by Michelangelo. According to Vasari, “all the most celebrated sculptors and painters who lived from his day to our own” — including Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, “who owed to this chapel the beginning of his beautiful manner,” and “the most divine” Michelangelo — “have become excellent and famous by exercising themselves and studying in this chapel.” Unfortunately, our eyes will never see what those painters saw. From the start, the project did not have an easy history. Although decoration of the chapel was begun in the 1420s by Masaccio and by his colleague and sometime collaborator Tommaso di Cristofano Fini (c. 1400?–1440), known — as if to distinguish him from his friend — by the diminutive “Masolino” or “Tommy,” it was left unfinished for more than fifty years until completed by Filippino Lippi (c. 1457/8–1504). Since the fifteenth century, the murals of the Brancacci Chapel have endured not only the centuries’ silent gnawing but also more than their share of accidents and misbegotten attention, so to appreciate their aesthetic character as well as their intellectual content, it is essential to keep in mind that what we see of them is damaged and imperfect. Doubtless already darkened by Vasari’s time — in 1516 lamps in the chapel were burning half a barrel of oil every day! — the murals were periodically but never more than temporarily revived in every century since their creation with water, varnish, or repaint. As if that were not enough, they also fell prey to changing taste and to the ambitions of later patrons. Escaping one owner’s desire in 1680 for something more up-to-date than “those ugly characters dressed in long robes and cloaks in the manner of the antique,” they were less fortunate during the century of the Enlightenment. Between 1746 and 1748 the vault, by then apparently damaged by dampness, was replaced with a new one, an operation that entailed altering the window and occasioned the loss of the murals on the

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upper walls of the chapel, by then judged as having “no worth.” But worst of all was a fire that in late January 1771 devastated most of the church. Although the chapel and what remained of its murals narrowly escaped, they were irremediably altered and so, in a strict sense, lost. The fire, besides causing sections of plaster to fall and submerging the whole painted surface of the chapel under a layer of black soot, darkened unalterably and forever those colors whose chemical content included iron by subjecting the pigments on the wall to a melting heat. It also provoked a long series of wellmeaning but generally obscuring restorations. The paintings that artists of the Renaissance held in such reverence are hardly intact, but a conservation campaign completed in 1988 has freed the murals of the accumulated repaint, smoke, varnish, and dirt of centuries. A mere glance at photographs of what the murals looked like before their cleaning is enough to see the extent of their transformation. In addition to the irregularities of some distorted colors and more than a few areas of loss, we have to admit that surface details are mostly worn away. The generally more unified impression we once saw is gone with the repaint, and the soft transitions that Vasari praised have now become more abrupt. But the result is not entirely negative. In the bargain Filippino’s minuteness is better appreciated, and Masolino’s colors have acquired exceptional freshness and delicacy. And Masaccio’s colors, once so dark and limited in range, now appear more luminous and more consistent with those of Masolino and his other contemporaries, so that he seems less the grand “mutation” some have regarded him. Even so, for some, perhaps familiar with another Masaccio, his work may have lost a bit of its mystery, the heroic simplicity, the monumentality that linked him in a mystical chain to Michelangelo. Yet, there is still more than enough at which to marvel. Although the surfaces are pocked, scratched, and worn and although the forms and colors are sometimes raw, sharp, and in some places even flat, on the whole the murals are nonetheless more legible today than at any time since the eighteenth century. It is perhaps a measure of their greatness that, even with their wounds more frankly exposed than ever before, they still communicate so vividly their vision of an ennobled, active humanity and its place in a mutable natural world. Founded in 1366/7 by Piero di Piuvichese Brancacci and originally dedicated to Saint Peter, the chapel that stands in the right transept of the conventual church of Santa Maria del Carmine was evidently built by the late 1380s as the burial place for the Florentine branch of the

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prosperous family of silk merchants. Who actually commissioned the original mural decorations is a question unanswered by surviving evidence, but the undocumented paintings produced in the 1420s, perhaps from as early as 1424 until 1428, by Masaccio and Masolino, were undertaken during a period when Felice di Michele Brancacci exercised legal control of the chapel. Unfortunately for the latter, he never saw the decoration of his family chapel completed. By 1428 Masolino had quit Florence and Masaccio, having left the project unfinished, was dead. In 1432 Felice himself, who had opposed the ascendant Medici party, was branded a traitor of the state and expelled, never to see home again. The project, thus broken, was only completed in the mid-1480s by Filippino Lippi, whose father Filippo had been a member of the convent during the 1420s and, as an aspiring painter himself, had surely watched, if not helped, Masaccio and Masolino. Thanks to the account left by Vasari and to the evidence of two sinopie recently recovered on the window wall, as well as the existing murals, we can go far toward reconstructing the iconographic scheme of the chapel. Drawn from the Gospel of Matthew but also from the Acts of the Apostles and The Golden Legend, Jacobus da Voragine’s influential thirteenth-century compendium of saintly lore, it presents the most extensive, though not the only, surviving Petrine cycle produced in Florence. On the very simplest level the images compose a biography. The cycle, in its original form, traced the life of Saint Peter, beginning not with his actual birth but with his spiritual birth, that is, when already as an adult he first became Christ’s disciple. Hence, Peter is always shown as an older man with gray hair and short, gray beard. This first episode, when Christ having seen Peter the fisherman at work at his nets with his brother Andrew, then called him to become a fisher of men, once appeared in a now-lost lunette on the left side of the Brancacci Chapel. It appeared opposite another scene from the saint’s discipleship, that is, the episode when, following Christ, he walked on water but, becoming frightened, started to sink, so that Christ had to save him. Both of these episodes indicate Peter’s singular role among Christ’s disciples, and he was singled out at other times as well. On the occasion when Christ and the disciples were asked to pay a tax but, being penniless, could not, it was through Peter that Christ performed the miracle whereby Peter found money for the tax in the mouth of a fish. This episode is depicted on the middle register on the left wall of the chapel. At the time of Christ’s arrest before his death, Peter, otherwise so loyal, was frightened of also being arrested and, as Christ foretold, three times denied knowing his

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teacher, acts of cowardice that later filled him with remorse. A scene once on the upper left of the window wall and now known through a recently discovered sinopia, shows Peter weeping in penitence after his denials. After the Crucifixion, Peter was singled out again. Moments before the resurrected Christ ascended into Heaven, He appeared to the apostles and instructed Peter to take care of his followers. Speaking figuratively, Christ said to Peter, “Feed my sheep, feed my lambs,” and this episode, known through a sinopia, appeared on the upper right of the window wall. The rest of the cycle is devoted to Peter’s ministry during the difficult early days when Christianity was being persecuted and doubted. During this period Peter preached, baptized, and healed: he preached at Jerusalem and baptized 3,000; he healed a cripple before the temple in Jerusalem; he raised a dead woman in Joppa; and he even healed the maimed with his shadow. He also possessed the power to strike down. Thus, on one occasion when a man named Ananias tried to cheat Peter and the church by not contributing his tithe, he fell dead at Peter’s mere word. Peter contributed to the establishment of the church, and he was named first bishop of Antioch, where he had been imprisoned for a time by the local king, Theophilus, but where he converted both the king and the city by resurrecting the king’s dead son. Peter’s enthronement as first bishop of Antioch, depicted on the lowest register of the left wall of the Brancacci Chapel, also marked the beginning of the official church, not only in that city but also later in Rome. In Rome, the setting for the large scene on the lowest register of the right wall, Peter contended with persecution and sin in the form of the Emperor Nero, who was under the influence of a charlatan named Simon Magus. Although Peter consistently refuted and exposed Simon, Nero still had the apostle locked up and eventually crucified. Because the narrative program of the chapel illustrates in a detailed way the exemplary life of Saint Peter, the images can be read according to the order of events in the saint’s biography, but because they are put within the context of the story of Adam and Eve — whose importance to the whole is paramount — and the larger theme of salvation, the cycle also demands to be read without regard to narrative or chronological sequence. Over and again, we are invited to make connections across time, to consider ideas suggested by visual analogies and contrasts, not only within a single scene itself but also from one scene to another adjacent, opposite, or even diagonally across from it on another wall. Who did what, particularly in the sections painted by Masaccio and Masolino, is still a debated question that

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2. Masaccio, The Tribute Money.

goes to the heart of their relationship and their artistic identities, but the cycle nevertheless presents a remarkably coherent and carefully conceived thematic whole. At least in what survives of it, there is no argument about one thing: Masaccio was the dominant creative force in the Brancacci Chapel, a force so powerful as to influence Masolino from the scaffolding and Filippino from the grave. It was Masaccio to whom artists and writers of the Renaissance responded, and it was Masaccio, not Masolino, who became a prophet in the Vasarian epic of man’s salvation of art. Like Giotto before him, Masaccio — “Giotto born again,” as Bernard Berenson aptly reincarnated him — sought to present a human drama enacted by substantial and familiar beings moving on a carefully controlled stage, and also like his great predecessor he sought to make his narrative clear and accessible. But if he shared some of his ancestor’s aims, he also shared those of his contemporaries, the sculptor Donatello, the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, and the architect-theorist Leon Battista Alberti, and so as compared to Giotto his art gains greater vivacity and immediacy by means of its more rigorously optical and, therefore, more sentient and analytical description of the features of man and the natural world. In a way unprecedented in Italian art, Masaccio orchestrated the elements of nature — light, shadow, atmosphere, and space — and the elements of art into a seemingly casual but complex and measured visual symphony, one in which all the various interrelated parts compose a perfectly unified whole and one that more than ever before involves those who look at it.

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Nowhere is Masaccio’s genius more profoundly evident than in the Tribute Money (Fig. 2), perhaps the most important painting in a city of fabled creations. Not only does this work exemplify the aims of the Early Renaissance as a whole but of Masaccio’s art in particular. At the same time, it sums up and sets forth the major theme of the chapel, the saga of human salvation as seen through the prism of Saint Peter’s life. The story is recounted only in the Gospel of the former tax collector Matthew (17:24–27), which tells of the arrival of Jesus and his apostles in Capernaum on Lake Gennesaret: When they came to Capernaum, the collectors of the half-shekel tax went up to Peter and said, “Does not your teacher pay the tax?” He said, “Yes.” And when he came home, Jesus spoke to him first, saying, “What do you think, Simon? From whom do kings of the earth take toll or tribute? From their sons or from others? And when he said, “From others,” Jesus said to him, “Then the sons are free. However, not to give offense to them, go to the sea and cast a hook, and take the first fish that comes up, and when you

3. Masaccio, The Tribute Money (detail).

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4. Masaccio, The Tribute Money (detail).

open its mouth you will find a shekel; take that and give it them for me and for yourself.” Historians have gone out of their way to point out the ostensible triviality of this episode and its rarity in art, but precisely because of that Masaccio perhaps felt free to alter the text and to recast the story in a way that sharpens its dramatic character. Rather than a sequence of conversations, moments, and settings almost innocuous in their civility, he constructed a single triangular and dangerously incendiary confrontation (Fig. 3). We are drawn immediately into the center of it by a brilliant flash of warring colors. One lone representative of local authority, his intense vermilion clothing fiery and aggressive beside the Savior’s deep blue, stands like an unexpected obstruction before the group (Fig. 4). Mouth open in speech, he sticks out an importunate hand palm up for money and, as if this were not enough, at the same time — or so it seems — comes close to prodding Christ in the chest. At this, Peter (Fig. 5), his face knotted and mouth twisted with a ferocious emotion that seems all the more pugnacious beside John the Evangelist’s placid profile (Fig. 6), raises a paw-like hand as if to answer

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5. Masaccio, The Tribute Money (detail).

6. Masaccio, The Tribute Money (detail).

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7. Masaccio, The Tribute Money (detail).

8. Masaccio, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve.

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in kind. Belying the meaning of his name, he leans forward on a body now become an ungainly, teetering, seemingly three-legged thing. His is an instinctive reaction, possibly reckless but one that according to the Bible and other sources would not be out of character: Voragine, following Saint Augustine, said that had the saint found out Judas’ plot, “he would have torn the traitor to pieces with his teeth;” and, of course, on the night of Christ’s eventual arrest Peter’s violent temper did lead to bloodshed, when after taking a knife he slashed off the ear of the high priest’s assistant. We are thus aware of potential danger, and as in Giotto’s Arrest of Christ in the Arena Chapel in Padua, the pressure of the moment is made all the more intense by the constricting circle of apostles who focus on the center. The confrontation between Peter and the tax collector, worsened by the fact that each thrusts out his left hand, takes on the uncomfortably sinister air of a showdown. At this moment, Peter, though a disciple of peace, seems little better than the other, for in confronting him he actually resembles him. The pair are, in fact, not only antagonists but also analogues, whose likeness is suggested by their equally expansive movement in opposing directions, by their subtly mirrored stances, and doubtless by the once more ardent yellow of the saint’s agitated robe. But stepping between them and looking directly at his most passionate and occasionally errant disciple, Christ serenely points out the solution (Fig. 7). Unmistakable and authoritative, his gesture shines brightly above the sparring lefts that hang dissolving in the air. Masaccio’s scene is indeed all too trivially human and vulgar, yet curiously it is presented in a tone whose lofty gravitas makes us wonder if there is perhaps not more in it than first meets the eye. Masaccio, after all, is an artist who encourages us to look closely but also to take the longer view. Just as the small human incident at the heart of the Tribute Money is the most immediate part of a story played out in the second and final episodes to the left and right, so the story of the Tribute Money is part of a larger drama that stretches beyond the narrow chronological limits of the frame and, encompassing the entire wall, unfolds with the story of Adam and Eve on the entrance arch of the chapel to the left (Fig. 8). It is a story no less human than the one on the wall beside it. Guilty of disobedience, the two sinners burst into the shocking glare of a pitiless, searing light, so strong it seems to bleach the flesh of Adam’s fingers and thigh. At the very instant that this alien world of dust and barren rock opens before them, the protective gate of Paradise seems to narrow and shrink, sealing from human view the lush beauty of the garden and

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God’s face. There only one thing was forbidden them: the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now, the words of their maker — “the day you eat of it you shall die” (Gen. 2:17) — pursue them with inescapable, penetrating meaning, perhaps already made explicit in the skull-like features of Eve’s foreshortened face. Not only the once-golden rays of God’s voice but even the avenging angel’s glowing red clouds and the shadowed ridges in the landscape beyond, all seem to radiate from the same invisible source and force them on. The fall and rise of the two hills, following legs and cutting through knees, lends abstract force to the cadence of human steps (Fig. 9). And still, within the compositional network of boldly crisscrossing rhythms the angel’s rigid knee, like a feature out of 9. Masaccio, Giotto’s art, adds irresistible pressure The Expulsion of to Adam’s burdened shoulders. But Adam and Eve rather than physical force, it is (detail). nothing more or less than the consciousness of guilt that seems to drive them away, for with innocence lost, they now know shame. Although naked and as different in their nakedness as he is dark and she its opposite, both share the same emotion, the same guilt. And seen from the floor below, they even seem to fuse into a single heaving shape, blurred by movement and light: Adam’s dark, almost faceless head seems to merge with Eve’s, and his arms, sometimes criticized for their awkward proportions, for a halfmoment seem hers too. Not only does his arm overlap hers but his flesh seems to be transparent, for in a kind of optical double entendre light meets shadow on his forearm along a line that simultaneously suggests the contour of her underlying arm as well. Light and shadow seem to join them shoulder

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10. Brancacci Chapel, S. Maria del Carmine, Florence. View to the left of the altar. 11. Brancacci Chapel, S. Maria del Carmine, Florence. View to the right of the altar.

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to shoulder. They are two hearts in one form, swollen with a common agony, wailing with a single voice. The quaking emotion of Adam and Eve’s expulsion (Fig. 10), so different from the still contentment and dark sensuality of Masolino’s phosphorescent Temptation (Fig. 11) on the opposite side of the entrance, follows the thrust of the angel’s gesture and, as if giving visual form to Eve’s piercing scream, reverberates in the repeating waves, in the curving shore, and even in what remains of a now-leafless, windblown tree behind Christ in the Tribute Money. Then, dissipating and diminishing to a pianissimo, it slows and comes to a stop at the place where Peter pays the tax. Beside the fury of the Expulsion, the closing episode of the Tribute Money has an air of fixity and somber quiet (Fig. 12). His head recalling classical images of Hercules, Peter is very different from the angry, unstable sinner we see in the center or, even more, the ambitiously foreshortened, collapsed form who draws the coin from the mouth of the fish. His passion cooled and now resolute

12. Masaccio, The Tribute Money (detail).

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13. Masaccio, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve (detail).

in a way that very much reflects the meaning of his name, he follows the downward thrust of the transaction to its conclusion. By the same token, as the apostle at last satisfies that unwelcome demand, the official stands relaxed and at rest, his appearance muted by shadow, his pose without strain. Holding a lowered staff and positioned before a walled path, he is the antithesis of the dynamic, airborne, sword-bearing angel who guards the entrance to Paradise (Fig. 13). The contrast between the angel and the tax collector, like the contrast between the two episodes of which they form part, extends even to technique, for the carefully rendered description of the wooden texture of the post that separates Peter and the tax collector is a world apart from the looseness and freedom with which Masaccio painted the Expulsion. Clearly, Masaccio understood the dual properties of light to define form and to define texture, or what Leonardo would later call lume and lustro, but more than that he also perceived their effect on the viewer, whose eye, like the painter’s brush, can be encouraged to dwell on the tightly rendered patterns of one surface or to glide over another. Understanding this, he was able to manipulate the

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viewer according to the breadth and implicit speed of his brushwork, and in an analogous way he also understood that light and shade could be used to reveal and to hide, in short, to discriminate. Accentuating and animating the movement of the right hands of Christ and Peter in the central episode while diminishing the lefts of Peter and the tax collector, Masaccio’s light not only furthers the action but also clarifies it. Such calculated selectivity, which is different in degree but not in kind from the more dramatic effects of Caravaggio and Rembrandt in the seventeenth century, guides our eyes and, miraculously implying the passage of time, heightens the suggestion of spontaneous movement. To the latter end, the painter’s brush is the handmaid of light. Thus, Masaccio’s handling varies from figure to figure in the Tribute Money, the one softened by shadow, the next picked out by light, and in this sense, too, the two scenes at the ends of the wall and at the margins of the narrative are extremes. By furthering the dramatic contrast between them, Masaccio brought the unrestrained emotion and explosive movement of the Expulsion to an even more decisive and unmistakable pause. The formal links that Masaccio developed between the story of Adam and Eve and the Tribute Money do, in fact, allude to a larger, underlying, thematic connection, one that is suggested by the passage in Matthew (17:22–23) immediately preceding the story of the tribute money: “As they were gathering in Galilee, Jesus said to them, “The Son of man is to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him, and he will be raised on the third day.” By means of this juxtaposition in Matthew’s text, the story of the providential fish becomes a parable on the Passion, that is, on Christ’s death and resurrection from the tomb. Like the tribute, which Christ paid even though as son of the greatest king he need not have, the Passion was an act of awesome humility, for only by debasing himself and taking the form of his creature, a lowly thing made of dust, could the Lord redeem humanity from the curse of Adam and Eve and reverse its downward fall. The tribute that Peter delivers into the hand of the tax collector is thus an allusion to God’s merciful, loving gift of his only son “delivered into the hands of men.” With that death he repaid the debt “for me and for yourself,” and, canceling the error of Original Sin, thereby reopened the way back to eternal life in the garden. God’s abiding mercy is perhaps apparent in the Expulsion, where the angel’s poignantly sympathetic expression suggests the presence and assurance of divine love even at this terrible moment of retribution. It is precisely such love that stands in direct contrast to the hatred of Christ’s punishment at human hands.

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14. Masaccio, The Tribute Money (detail).

In light of the larger meaning of the Tribute Money, the prominent but generally ignored post (Fig. 14) that is so carefully positioned and forcefully projected between Peter and the tax collector is perhaps no more casual than the story itself. It is, after all, the object closest to us in the image and, indeed, on the entire wall. So close to us is it that the frame below cuts it off, preventing us from seeing where it enters the ground.1 Yet, curiously, the post in the Tribute Money is so near as to seem unfixed in space, but that is perhaps the point: it pops up out of nowhere, mysteriously and without explanation, very much like the providential fish that emerges from the lake (Fig. 15). We are even invited to draw an analogy between this object protruding from our space and the tax collector, who at the center not only stands poised at the lower edge of the scene and shares our point of view but is the only figure in contemporary dress. Moreover, the only other props 1 It may well be that it is, so to speak, grounded in contemporary life. The word posta meant not only a post but also a bookkeeping entry or even a place where taxes were collected, and a tax is still termed an imposta in Italy. Whether taxes were at one time actually collected at a public place marked by a post of some kind remains uncertain, but in any case the term posta ferma, meaning literally “fixed spot,” also signifies a business transaction completed or an account settled.

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15. Masaccio, The Tribute Money (detail).

in this spartan drama — “pure, without ornament” — are two, both of wood: Peter’s fishing rod and the tax collector’s staff. Are these wooden poles perhaps allusions to the Crucifixion as well, for what was the cross if not the instrument by which God rescued humanity and at the same time the instrument by which the laws of human society exacted their painful price? However central an event the Passion is in Christian history, like the trivial story of the tribute that it encompasses, it in turn is encompassed by something larger. This wider drama, which includes the Expulsion, is not only essential to the Christian scheme of history but, most remarkable of all, also to Masaccio’s vision in the Brancacci Chapel as well. Indeed, if we cannot understand the Tribute Money without reference to the Expulsion, we cannot fully understand either without reference to the Temptation. It might seem odd to place the Expulsion of Adam and Eve on the left side of the entrance, since their temptation by the serpent, depicted by Masolino in a corresponding position across from it, comes first in the Biblical narrative, yet the Expulsion is not only a conclusion but also a beginning, for it marks the start of humanity’s earthly journey and at the same time alludes to its end. Beginning with the Old Testament and continuing to fulfillment,

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though not completion, in the New, the dark saga of man’s exile and pilgrimage in this world only ends with the end of history itself at the moment of final judgment. If Adam and Eve’s banishment from Paradise and entry into the temporal and spatial continuum of the world marks the beginning of earthly history and Christ’s Passion its middle, then the Last Judgment, when time and space dissolve, defines its end. But the Christian view of history is not only circular but also providential. Thus, framing and encompassing human existence in the world and in time is another, higher existence beyond earthly time and space: eternal life in the garden, whose sublime happiness we knew before the Fall and perhaps, after Judgment Day, may know again. That state of self-sufficient oneness with God is the goal toward which humanity aims, and its conditions, which we see in the figures of Adam and Eve in Masolino’s Temptation, are fundamental in understanding Masaccio’s conception of the world outside Paradise, for he conceives of the earthly world of time and space that Adam and Eve encountered beyond the heavenly gate as antithetical to the one they left behind. When Eve tells the

16. Masolino, The Temptation of Adam and Eve.

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17. Masaccio, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve (detail).

serpent that God has forbidden them from eating the fruit of the fateful tree, that beguiling creature persuades her otherwise: “‘You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Gen. 3:4–7). Later, Adam and Eve pass from the nocturnal darkness of the Temptation, where they are shown with their eyes wide and bright (Fig. 16), into the intense light beyond the gate in the Expulsion (Fig. 17). Their shame is evident along with their guilt, and so they cover themselves, but there is something more, and this is what makes Masaccio’s interpretation truly remarkable: having opened their eyes to knowledge, they awaken to discover that they are blinded by it (Fig. 18). Adam does not merely hide his face but touches his darkened sockets, and Eve lifts up her head to reveal deep gray gashes, where before we saw hazel spheres set in sparkling whites: as well as

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guilt, the horror of their emotion is also the hysteria of sudden and crippling blindness. Whereas Masolino’s Temptation, with its unusual black background, is identified with the certainty of wide-eyed innocence in the dark, Masaccio’s Expulsion is thus identified with blinding knowledge in the full light of day. But how can this be? Adam and Eve enter the world of natural forms, natural space, and natural light, in short, our world, for the gate of Paradise in the Expulsion is identified with the actual entrance to the chapel and the fictive light of the murals is identified with the actual light from the window on the altar wall. In both the Expulsion and in the Tribute Money, Masaccio captured the visual reality of earth and wind, of rocks and waves, of sunlight and shadows, of tangible things and vast spaces, of recognizable shapes and human emotions: the experiential world of the senses. Thanks to his manipulation of light and shadow, Masaccio painted, as his near contemporaries said, according to the truths of human vision and counterfeited the world we see with our eyes, but in his extraordinary scheme the tangible reality of earthly vision has become a symbol of ignorance and deception, all the more compelling because it fools us too. Light is still

18. Masaccio, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve (detail).

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identified with truth, but just as there are two lights, earthly and divine, there are two truths: the truth of this world — what by the logic of natural laws we perceive visually — and that of heaven — what we cannot see but know by faith. But unlike the abiding reality of heaven, that of the world is fleeting, paradoxical, and false. To our everlasting trouble we live in a realm of illusion and mistaken appearances, where things seem to grow and shrink, take shape and dissolve, disappear into the distance or, like the post in the Tribute Money, appear unexpectedly in front of our eyes. It is certainly true, as Cristoforo Landino said, “nothing is visible without light,” but as Masaccio also reminds us, the same light that reveals space, form, and texture can also blur, dissolve, and obscure. And so, in leaving the unchanging spiritual reality and true light of God’s sight, Adam and Eve entered the false light and false beauty of the changing world of matter, where what is true and false, like good and evil, is not so easy to discern. This, alas, is our world, a bewitching but constantly shifting, mutable place of growth, decay, and flux, a benighted place where nothing remains what it seems, a place of enchanting illusion, where images projected on a flat surface can even pretend to dissolve the solid wall behind them. In the end, our ancestors discover that the knowledge they sought is really no knowledge at all but only the curse of confusion, uncertainty, and doubt. The illusory nature of earthly truth is a notion that shapes the very structure of Masaccio’s design. In the Tribute Money Masaccio presents us with a paradox within a paradox: a scene that seems trivial but is not, set in a world that seems concrete but is not. In parallel fashion, both narrative and form, point to something more, to a deeper meaning that lies behind appearances and beneath the immediate surface. This is not merely a paradox but a mystery. It is, however, a logical mystery, and to convey the rationality of God’s plan Masaccio constructed both his design and his narrative in terms of simple mathematical relationships based on a module. In its thinking his system is remarkably like the modular architecture of his friend Brunelleschi, and while, of course, lacking the exactitude of architecture, it is apprehensible with the naked eye and allows us to take the real measure of his story. The width of the Tribute Money is six times that of the Expulsion, so the proportional relationship between the two scenes is six to one (Fig. 19). Then, using the same module, the three episodes of the Tribute Money in turn divide according to their relative importance in the story: three for the central confrontation (which goes as far as Peter’s right foot in the payment), two for the payment, and one for the episode of the

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19. Masaccio, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve and The Tribute Money.

fish. At the same time, Masaccio lays bare the centrality of that seemingly insignificant confrontation in the larger drama of Salvation by placing it at the center of his modular scheme. The Expulsion and the episode of the fish on the one hand and the payment on the other frame the confrontation between Christ and the tax collector in a way that reflects their importance. Thus, the proportional relationship of the episodes on this register is one to three to two, and these numbers, which parallel the relative importance of each part of the story, are echoed and reinforced by the number of leading actors in each part as well: Peter alone in the episode of the fish; Peter and the tax collector in the payoff; and in the central and most important episode Peter, Christ, and the tax collector: one, two, three. We are reminded that the word “ratio” derives from the Latin to think or to mean. Although the action in the Tribute Money has the air of a casual encounter, Masaccio applied his system of modular design even to his figures and thereby gave a mathematical dimension to the naturally interconnecting human relationships that otherwise seem based on spontaneous emotion. As already noted, the width of the central group amounts to three times the module; yet, that same unit of measure factors into the placement of the figures within it. Thus, it is no coincidence that the central group, which amounts to three times the module, subdivides into three roughly equal parts, each corresponding to the three principal actors: Peter, Christ, and the tax collector. But the surface geometry of Masaccio’s design is even more subtle than that: the distance from Peter’s extended pointing right hand to that of his antagonist, the tax collector, form an internal unit

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within the larger group of the apostles that, not coincidentally, equals two units of measure. Then, as a result, the two apostles at the far ends of the group, Andrew and that splendid figure with his back to the payment, each constitute one-half of the module and frame the three principals in a perfectly balanced way: one-half to two to one-half. But there are even other mathematically precise relationships: the distance between the three principal actors, Peter, Christ, and the tax collector, equals the module. Then, too, the distance between Peter’s pointing hand and Christ’s head also constitutes one unit of measure, and following the logic of the drama, as if the thought from Christ’s head proceeds logically to Peter’s gesture, the modular unit delimited by those two points divides precisely in half at a point marked by Christ’s raised right hand. The role surface geometry based on a module, which is even suggested by the giornate in the plaster (Fig. 20), even embraces the secondary episodes and such seemingly minor features as the trees in the background, the tax collector’s staff, and the post that intrudes on the payment at the right. Both the composition and the human 20. Masaccio, The Tribute Money (detail in raking light).

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drama are part of a unified and measurable whole that is also a complex of significantly interrelated parts. Form and content are inseparable, and underlying this trivial story is the incontrovertible logic of mathematics. In arranging the fourteen figures at the center of the Tribute Money Masaccio sought, as would Leonardo when faced with a similarly difficult problem in the Last Supper, to preserve the unity of the action while heightening the reality of the drama. Here too, he relied upon numerical and, since his figures stand in a spatial grid, even geometrical arrangements in a way that must have deeply impressed the later master. The overwhelming impression is of a single integer or perfect form, but within that unit other figures animate it. Rather than being fixed, these secondary forms, are overlapping and shift, depending upon how we weigh the action or survey the actors. The central group is often rightly compared to a circle or an ellipse, but it is also a denser, more complex, irregular, and elastic thing. It is both a complex compound as well as a single atom: several interwoven geometrical forms encompassed within the dominant impression of a circle. It has the intimacy of a frieze, the animation of a figure eight, the inclusiveness of a horseshoe, as well as the unity and perfection of a circle. Christ is the crux, pivot, linchpin, and hub of it all. The simple clarity and perfection of the whole, doubtless reinforced by the fact that the central axis of the entire wall occurs precisely where Christ plants the weight of his right foot, has a numerical proof as well. The cast shadows help arrange the figures in ranks in depth: the tax collector is first, then Christ and Peter in the second file, then Andrew, John, and the apostle on the far right, and then the rest. In the abstract language of numbers the sequence reads: one, two, three, and then the rest. But Masaccio also divided the group in a way that emphasizes both its symmetry and its symbolic content. He encourages us to see Peter and his foil John the Evangelist as a pair, just as he shows John’s twin seemingly sewn, Janus-like, to the tax collector’s head (Fig. 21). He also detached Christ by framing his luminous, animated head between two impassive graybeards, a clustering that is significantly accented by three trees directly behind them. The whole group is then completed by the figures, functioning like great parentheses – four on the left, three on the right — at either end. The action moves from the center out, but somehow it then returns to Christ, as if in answer to some arithmetic imperative: the few, the two, the one in three. And so the group, like a perfectly balanced equation, multiplies and divides, but also like a living organism, expands and contracts from and

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21. Masaccio, The Tribute Money (detail).

22. Masaccio, The Tribute Money (detail).

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23. Masaccio, The Tribute Money (detail).

24. Masaccio, The Tribute Money (detail).

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25. Masaccio, The Tribute Money (detail).

to its heart. The incident between Peter and the tax collector, the story of the tribute money, and, by implication, the drama of Salvation come full circle to rest in Christ, alpha and omega, the one in whom it all began (Fig. 22). From Christ springs a solution summed up with unmistakable clarity by his gesture. Mysteriously, his is a gesture that points in two directions, both to the fish and to the payment at the right. As if giving logical explanation to the resolution of the drama as well as to the deflating effect of Christ’s action, Masaccio fashions a rightward progression of gestures that moves with the ineluctable force of arithmetic toward the drama’s end. First, the knot of hands around Christ’s gesturing right (Fig. 23); second, the parted pair of the tax collector’s left hand and Christ’s lowered one (Fig. 24); and, third, the tax collector’s right hand indicating the payment (Fig. 25), or in the language of numbers: three, two, one. Masaccio’s image, whose paradoxical simplicity and subtlety must have stirred Raphael as well as Leonardo, points to the profound truth that lies beyond the banalities of this world. Surely it is no coincidence that this story,

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which is so much about numbers, has as its central subject the ultimate symbol of material wealth: money. What, we are asked, is the value of earthly riches beside eternal life, for the gleam of gold is as false as the beauty of the fruit of the deadly tree of Paradise. The numbers of this world do not add up, whereas those of the divine plan are finite, clear, and perfect. By means of the supremely rational mathematical structure which underlies his image and which conveys the elemental certainty and rightness of God’s plan, Masaccio, like Brunelleschi in his architecture, gave proof to Giannozzo Manetti’s assertion that the mysteries of the Christian religion are as logical as the axioms of mathematics, but by juxtaposing this notion in a tellingly antithetical way with the emblem of earthly wealth, he gave it a more piquant and profound immediacy and concreteness. Masaccio’s habitual use of antithesis points to a way of thinking that is fundamentally dramatic. This cast of mind runs so deep as to govern both the form and content of the rest of the painter’s work in the chapel, and its dominance as a characteristic is such that it even appears to shape the work of his collaborator Masolino. Indeed, if we consider the Tribute Money in relation to Masolino’s Saint Peter Healing a Cripple Man and the Raising of Tabitha (Fig. 26) on the opposite wall, its themes as well as its style take on sharper relief. The two scenes are in many ways antithetical. Whereas the Tribute Money is set in sight of the country, Masolino’s scene takes place in a town. Whereas in the Tribute Money the landscape forms a great descending 26. Masolino, Saint Peter Healing a Cripple and the Raising of Tabitha.

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27. Masolino, Saint Peter Healing a Cripple and the Raising of Tabitha (detail).

arc into which the light enters in a strictly horizontal direction, Masolino’s image has an enclosed box-like feeling into which shadows fan out from the cripple in the lower left hand corner. But beyond such superficial differences, the two scenes answer each other and set each other off in other ways as well. Masolino’s setting, which elaborates the perspectival system suggested by Masaccio’s building in the Tribute Money, is perhaps the most engaging urban view since the early fourteenth century and Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Effects of Good Government in the City in the town hall of Siena. Perhaps Vasari had this scene in mind, when he rightly praised the “softness and harmony” of Masolino’s colors in the Brancacci Chapel. It is a beguiling work, and one in which Masolino declares himself to be no less skilled than his partner in the tricky technique of true fresco. As if divided by a street, the foreground opens to a vista of a wide square, paved only in the distance and parting at intersections to reveal glimpses down cross streets lined with delightfully colored palazzi, each one slightly different in height, color, and design (Fig. 27). From windows equipped with the iron hardware known as erri, we see further proof of the

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city’s wonderful variety and richness: gossiping neighbors, bird cages, potted plants, cloth hanging over a sill here and there, even so exotic a creature as a tethered monkey poised on a ledge near another. Down below, a conversing couple sits on a bench, a young mother leads a barefoot child by the hand, and others go about their business. This seems hardly the setting for pain, sickness, and death. Indeed, its infectious delight in description and relish for ornament contrast with the spareness of Masaccio’s Tribute Money on the opposite wall. Yet to contemporaries Masolino’s view must have reflected — far more than any other Florentine work we know around this date — life outside the door of the Carmine itself. It is painted with just enough veracity to blur the line between the fictive world of the narrative and the recollected experience of the viewer, but as it approaches the natural world it also detaches itself from its textual source. According to the unrelated accounts in the Acts of the Apostles, the events depicted by Masolino took place in two separate cities: in Jerusalem, where Peter healed a cripple before the entrance to the temple (Acts 3:1–10),2 and in Joppa, where he subsequently raised the holy convert Tabitha (Acts 9:36–41).3 How familiar would most fifteenth-century viewers have been with the not immediately obvious details of these stories, which are not identified by inscriptions as in some painted cycles? Perhaps not much more than many people today. It is worth remembering that even so practiced and literate an observer as Vasari, who looked at this chapel with great care, misidentified the episode on the right as Peter raising Petronilla. But perhaps the names of the supporting cast are less important than the action itself. By combining less than commonplace stories with strongly familiar settings, these episodes from Peter’s life, like the story of the tribute money recounted by Matthew, take on the flavor of parables. Key to our understanding of Masolino’s painting are the young men who occupy its center (Fig. 28). Although occasionally identified as the

2

The biblical account reads: Peter fixed his gaze on the man; so did John. “Look at us!” Peter said. The cripple gave them his whole attention, hoping to get something. Then Peter said: “I have neither silver nor gold, but what I have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk!” Then Peter took him by the right hand and pulled him up. 3 The text reads: Peter first made everyone go outside; then he knelt down and prayed. Turning to the dead body, he said, “Tabitha, stand up.” She opened her eyes, then looked at Peter and sat up. He gave her his hand and helped her to her feet. The next thing he did was to call in those who were believers and the widows to show them that she was still alive.

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28. Masolino, Saint Peter Healing a Cripple and the Raising of Tabitha (detail).

two followers of Peter who called the saint to Tabitha’s deathbed, they are not much like him. Indeed, as their dress tells us, they are anything but his messengers. Whereas Peter, as Voragine recounts in The Golden Legend, turned his back on the material things of the world by his simple dress, these two are cut of different cloth. Dressed in velvet and fur-lined cloaks, colored stockings, and showy turbans, they are the resplendent blossoms of an urban campo studded with jewel-like stones and no less delightful to behold than their secular habitat. In a way the pair personify this place: more than its denizens, they are its genii loci, its local spirits, but like the tax collector who stands exactly opposite them in the Tribute Money, the two youths in Masolino’s scene, while perfectly in harmony with the world around them, are out of joint with God. Young and beautiful, adorned with golden hair, these colorful representatives of the jeunesse dorée (Fig. 29) stand in marked contrast to the ragged cripple (Fig. 30) and to Tabitha, whose bloodless, careworn face wears a pallor as deathly white as her shroud. Looking inward to each other in a way that recalls Adam and Eve in the adjacent Temptation and walking with steps that almost echo those of our first parents in the

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29. Masolino, Saint Peter Healing a Cripple and the Raising of Tabitha (detail).

30. Masolino, Saint Peter Healing a Cripple (detail).

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Expulsion, they pay no heed at all to Peter or to the misery at the margins of their world, any more than they notice the rocky ground at their feet. They seem not to understand that when Christ proclaimed — as Matthew records in the chapter preceding the story of the tribute — “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” (Matthew 16:18), He was referring not only to the apostle but also to the dangerous and inhospitable place that Adam and Eve encountered at earth’s door. To some, seduced by the gleam of money or a pearl-studded hat, the world might seem a beautiful garden, but to others it is but a rocky, barren field. The soul, as the late fourteenth-century merchant Paolo da Certaldo advised, “should have two spiritual eyes,” one open to the heavenly “goods” (beni) of eternal life and the other trained on the terrible punishments of hell. Wrapped in splendid garments of a sumptuousness forbidden in quattrocento Florence, the selfcentered and gilded youths in Masolino’s painting have given in to the vain, superficial things of the world; simply by their foppish appearance these showy flowers of fashion make us mindful of what they fail to see: the beauty of providence and the greater and lasting wealth of salvation. We might well recall Christ’s urging in answer to his own question, is not “the body more than clothing?”: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these” (Matthew 6:25–29). And so, Peter has put the gilded ones behind him not once but twice. Like the Tribute Money, Masolino’s image shows a world that is alluring but as false and worthless as it is fleeting, but whereas Masaccio’s story conveyed that notion through the metaphor of money, Masolino’s does so through the metaphor of clothing. It is an idea suggested by the account in Acts, which records that when Peter arrived at Tabitha’s deathbed, “all the widows came to him in tears and showed him the various garments that [she] had made when she was still with them.” In Masolino’s painting, whose lower right corner is fairly filled with drapery, two black-robed widows appear at the head of the bier. One of them holds a cloth to her bosom, while the other kneels beside a simple tunic laid prominently on the ground, not only beside Tabitha but directly in front of us. This humble garment recalls the episode of Peter extracting the coin from the fish in the Tribute Money, where the saint has likewise placed his cloak on the ground. Moreover, the tunic beside Tabitha’s bier, which may be seen as the emblem of a life “marked by constant good deeds and acts of charity,” is close in color to the tattered clothing of the beggar cured by the saint’s act of charity.

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Although the beggar asked for money, Peter offered him something else: “I have neither silver nor gold, but what I have I give you,” and what he, like Tabitha, received was infinitely more precious. Surely, then, it is significant that the beggar, with his remarkably foreshortened and beautifully fashioned leg so praised by Vasari, hardly seems crippled at all, whereas the youths are shown without hands, as if disabled by the material wealth that covers them.4 Confronting each other across the space of the chapel the Tribute Money and the Saint Peter Healing a Cripple and the Raising of Tabitha, so closely related in theme and specific iconography, were probably also painted in tandem. The evidence suggests that at least on this level of the chapel Masaccio and Masolino worked together until no later than September 1425, when Masolino left the picture, so to speak, by departing for Hungary probably not to return until 1428. Did he unexpectedly abandon the project to his partner or was it their considered intention from the start that Masolino paint only in the upper parts of the chapel and not at all in the lower? We may never know, but in the middle register, where their work is most intact, they divided the work equally and with a degree of harmony that has the appearance of a plan. In fact, by the latest — and persuasive — count, the number of giornate or sections of plaster that correspond to work sessions are identical: forty-six for each painter on this register. Although the labor may have been equal, the driving creative force was Masaccio’s. We 4

To fifteenth-century Florentines and particularly to the Brancacci, who were, after all, silk merchants, the imagery of clothing could hardly have been more concrete and relevant as a symbol of material wealth than money itself. These two things, money and cloth, in fact, reflect the basis of the fifteenth-century Florentine economy, built on banking and on the manufacture and trade of cloth. Beyond that, we have to remember the more bedazzling effect clothing must have had on the popular imagination of the day. As late as the sixteenth century, a German merchant’s preadolescent son would beg, not only for a pet, as a child of today might do, but also for stockings of many colors, satin purses, boots and spurs, and even an Italian crown hat. On one occasion the boy’s mother writes her husband, “you must have a satin purse made for little Balthasar,” adding “he tells me every night that you are bringing him one,” or in another letter: “Little Balthasar warmly greets you, and he has charged me to ask you to bring him a pair of red stockings and a purse.” But clothes, as sumptuary laws attest, were not entirely free of moral danger. Thus, the same merchant, then in Lucca, writes his wife about a young man in his charge: “His father writes and begs that he not be allowed to do anything improper, or to wear expensive or silk clothing, all of which happened before.” See S. Ozment, Magdalenda and Balthasar: An Intimate Portrait of Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe Revealed in the Letters of a Nuremberg Husband and Wife, New Haven and London, 1989.

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detect this in some of the less successful aspects of Masolino’s effort. Like Masaccio, Masolino made Peter into a seemingly three-footed creature in the episode of the cripple, but whereas in the Tribute Money the device helps to characterize the saint, here it is a timid, awkward, and ineffective detail. Apparently following his colleague, Masolino even adopted a modular division of his scenes on the right wall and entrance arch according to the same ratio of one to six found in Masaccio’s two scenes on the opposite side of the chapel. Like Masaccio, he divided his larger composition, which is marked by a too-prominent vertical axis, into six parts; however, he adopted the idea without understanding it and, unlike Masaccio, made no discernible effort to link his figures according to this system. Although the suggestion of emptiness at the center of the Raising of Tabitha is perhaps intentional, we have to admit that the effect is not especially successful. In the end, Masolino’s scene, when measured on Masaccio’s terms, lacks the integration and force of his partner’s: the whole is less than the sum of its parts. In the Brancacci Chapel Masolino worked under Masaccio’s irresistible influence. We have only to think of a work such as his Virgin of Humility in Munich (Fig. 31), with its insouciant Gothic rhythms, its sweetness, and its daintiness, to see that in the Brancacci Chapel his figures have greater bulk and simplicity, even though the gently serpentine ripples of Gothic movement still linger in the Temptation and in the climactic episode of Tabitha’s resurrection. Yet, it also appears that in his turn Masaccio was not unmindful Masolino. His work here avoids the boldness, the roughness of his earliest known painting, the San Giovenale Altarpiece of 1423 (Fig. 32), and the difference is due perhaps in some measure to his response to Masolino as well as to the natural process of his meteoric evolution. Setting the two artists’ earlier paintings side by side, they seem incompatible, even contradictory. This discrepancy led the great critic Roberto Longhi, in a brilliantly perceptive if ultimately wrong-headed analysis, to describe their work in the Brancacci Chapel as a kind of discordant clash. Who dominated the relationship? For Longhi, it was the gentler of the pair. He even argued that Masolino painted the most important head in the Tribute Money, a painting otherwise entirely by Masaccio. He noted that Christ’s face, which has the mildness of a lamb, differs from the “apostolic wolves” that encircle it, and he opined that Masolino must have painted it after his companion had finished the rest of the scene. We now know, however, that the painting was achieved according to traditional mural technique, that is, from top down, so that the head of Christ was far from one of the last sections

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31. Masolino, Madonna of Humility, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

32. Masaccio, Madonna and Child with Saints, 1422, San Giovenale, Cascia di Reggello.

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33. Masaccio and Masolino, Virgin and Saint Anne, Uffizi, Florence.

painted. Moreover, to subordinate Masaccio to Masolino goes against the long and consistent testimony of history as well as the evidence of the works themselves. Yet, the head of Christ, which has rightly been compared to that of Adam in the Temptation, is somehow different from those around it: Is that difference a possible clue to the painter’s intention? It suggests that Masaccio, who made such skillful use of antithesis throughout his work and who varied his technique from one figure to the next in the Tribute Money, consciously adopted something of the softness and fineness of Masolino’s style. He probably did this — not because he borrowed a drawing by Masolino, which he would hardly have needed for a head of Christ — so as to set off the head of Christ, to draw our eyes to it, to fix our attention on it, and, thereby, to adumbrate by its bright calmness the omniscience of Christ the teacher and perhaps also to imply the notion of Christ as the second Adam come to redeem mankind from the error of the first.

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Although Longhi compared the two painters’ collaboration to a “concert of the deaf ” (a phrase whose perfect wit is sensible even to those of us with imperfect hearing), it was instead as harmonious as the music produced by different but complementary sections of an orchestra. Indeed, the style of one sets off the other in much the same way as they are related to each other in another collaborative work, the Virgin and Saint Anne (Fig. 33) probably painted ca. 1424. In the latter panel, Masaccio, as most agree, painted the Virgin and the Christ Child at the center, whereas Masolino was responsible for most of the angels at the margins. However odd this might seem, the selective combination of the two styles in the painting has both iconographic and aesthetic motives: It heightens the effect of tangible, projecting relief and, at the same time, by making Christ seem especially solid, furthers the notion of the real presence of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist. As the eye moves from Christ and the Virgin to Saint Anne and the angels, forms soften, sweeten, and are etherialized, as if melted by real and metaphysical distance. By means of this stylistic counterpoint, the two painters not only sharpened each other’s individuality and showed each other’s strengths to advantage, but they also conveyed an essential truth of Catholic dogma. Was the solution that the two painters arrived at in the Virgin and Saint Anne perhaps an idea that they tried to apply to the more complex division of labor in the Brancacci Chapel? We cannot be certain, but we ought to allow for the possibility that, as in the panel, Masaccio and Masolino consciously sought to dovetail their respective manners from the start. This may have worked in a vertical direction, with Masolino responsible for the more distant upper sections (as Vasari, who was in a better position to judge than we, in fact, claimed) and Masaccio for those nearest us. But it may have also worked in a horizontal fashion on the middle register, where the two painters’ styles intersect on the altar wall (Fig. 1). As others have noted, Masolino is at his most Masaccesque in the figure of Saint Peter in the scene of Saint Peter Preaching (Fig. 34), and Masaccio is less obviously like himself in the generalized figures of the youths who appear in the background of the Baptism of the Neophytes (Fig. 35). Moreover, whereas the landscape in the former is painted in the style of the adjacent and continuous landscape in Masaccio’s Tribute Money, that in the latter is more simplified and in keeping with the style of Masolino’s neighboring scene: indeed, as Luciano Bellosi has pointed out, Masaccio painted the landscape in Masolino’s Saint Peter Preaching and Masolino painted the landscape in Masaccio’s Baptism of the Neophytes. And is it coincidence that the cripple in Masolino’s Saint

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34. Masolino (landscape by Masaccio), Saint Peter Preaching.

Peter Healing a Cripple should be foreshortened in a way that recalls Masaccio, while the corresponding figures of Peter and the tax collector in the concluding episode of the Tribute Money (namely, the payoff ) are so planar? In any event, whether by design or accident, the painters are most starkly apart in the two confronted stories of Adam and Eve, and, as in the Virgin and Saint Anne, this formal antithesis was perhaps intentional, as a way of suggesting the larger thematic framework of the cycle. It is above all within the context of Paradise lost and Paradise desired that we must consider the scenes that form a natural grouping on the altar wall. Besides the Saint Peter Weeping and the Pasce oves meas that flanked the window and that Vasari attributed to Masolino, the wall depicts scenes that the sixteenth-century writer described in generic terms. As a whole, they allude to the pastoral and liturgical mission of the apostles and the church, charged by the Good Shepherd to teach, to baptize, to heal, and to feed. This mission was a matter of importance to the Carmelite monks of the convent, who claimed to trace their ancestry from the prophet Elijah and who, therefore, saw themselves as specially chosen guardians of the true

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35. Masaccio (landscape by Masolino), The Baptism of the Neophytes.

word, not only under Peter and his successors but even during the Old Testament days of Elijah and John the Baptist. They thus make watchful appearances alongside the apostle here and in the scene where Peter assumes his episcopal seat. It is, however, the overriding theme of the entire chapel, namely Salvation, that encompasses the pastoral and liturgical mission of the apostles and the church, including the Carmelite Order. All of the scenes on the altar wall of the Brancacci Chapel are in some way linked to the larger theme of Christ’s atonement for Original Sin, the commemoration of that sacrifice in the mystery of the Eucharist, penitence, and judgment. By analogy and by antithesis the scenes on the altar are related in formal and thematic ways to each other or to those on the entrance depicting the first parents. The penitent Peter, who weeps out of guilt after having thrice denied Christ early in the Passion, was placed on the same side of the chapel as the agonized figures of Adam and Eve in the Expulsion. By the same token, Christ’s innocent flock of lambs, which awaits sustenance in the Pasce oves meas, an episode that occurred late in the Passion story, appeared on the side with Adam and Eve eating the deadly fruit. The innocents who hear Peter

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preach the true word invite comparison with the similarly naive Adam and Eve who are seduced by the false word in the Temptation, and the broadly described body of the shivering youth, who stands before a leafless landscape waiting to be cleansed of Original Sin, echoes the freely painted figures of Adam and Eve in the Expulsion. Moreover, the antithetical movements of the lowest pair of scenes, rising with those who are healed in Saint Peter Healing with His Shadow (Fig. 36) and falling with Ananias’ death in Saint Peter Distributing Alms (Fig. 37), corresponds to the action in images of the Last Judgment, in which the blessed are elevated to the right hand of Christ, while the damned are humiliated to his left. And in these scenes, as in the Tribute Money and the Raising of Tabitha, humanity’s search for spiritual illumination and eternal well-being is conveyed with remarkable concreteness and immediacy. It is a manifestation of the Renaissance focus on man that the image of the human body should become a powerful metaphor in this chapel, which in so many other ways proclaims the ideas of the new era, and this is perhaps nowhere more strikingly clear than in the scenes on the altar wall. The figures in the Saint Peter Baptizing the Neophytes divide into two contrasting groups, one on the left, including Peter and the crisply delineated and carefully modeled portraits behind him, and another on the right, including the broadly painted and vaguely featured neophytes (Fig. 38). The two

36. Masaccio, Saint Peter Healing with His Shadow.

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37. Masaccio (with later additions by Filippino Lippi), Saint Peter Distributing Alms and the Death of Ananias.

38. Masaccio, The Baptism of the Neophytes (detail).

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39. Masaccio, The Baptism of the Neophytes (detail).

40. Masaccio, The Baptism of the Neophytes (detail).

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groups are joined together in the center by two complementary figures, one dressing and the other undressing. The Masolinesque landscape, while linking the scene to the adjacent painting by Masolino, also serves to heighten the impression of distance between the figures in the foreground and those beyond. Distance in this case, however, is more than physical, for the figures undressing or awaiting their turn stand at a spiritual remove as well. Masaccio understood the significance of the ritual as immersion, for he has brilliantly removed the solid ground at the center, so that the figure being purified by the holy water sinks into the river basin and almost below the frame. But Masaccio, as Paul Hills has pointed out, also understood the meaning suggested by its Greek name, photismos or enlightenment. As also in Giotto’s Baptism in the Arena Chapel in Padua, a brilliant river of light descends from above, filling — far more persuasively than in the earlier work — the center of the scene with luminous water and bathing the figures with light. In the process the waiting neophytes seem to dissolve in much the way that the sudden burst of light bleaches and blurs the features of Adam and Eve in the Expulsion. While linked in form to our errant parents, the neophytes contrast with their splendidly modeled brother in the foreground, once one of them but now purified and cleansed by divine water and light (Fig. 39). The vivid beauty of his body (Fig. 40), so different from the quivering lumps of flesh that are those who still wear sin, puts his spiritual transformation in terms of a physical metamorphosis. Like the cripple on the adjacent wall and whom he recalls, God’s grace has made him whole. Physical transformation is precisely the outward subject of Saint Peter Healing with His Shadow. As Peter and John the Evangelist make their way down a wide street (Fig. 41), they walk past those who hope for almost nothing, only “that when Peter passed by at least his shadow might fall on one or another of them” (Acts 5:15). Masaccio has made this a story about the magical, easily missed, split-second suddenness with which divine grace can work. Time contracts to so small a thing that it seems to stop. Peter, who stares out as if transfixed, seems frozen and still, yet there is a powerful tension between the outward movement of the figures and the inward rush of the perspective, so that John’s drapery fluttering in the breeze and the distant features of the astonished man and the buildings beyond suggest, as they will in the work of Uccello, the notion of movement and speed. Moreover, Masaccio has also used distance to suggest the passage of time. We can readily measure what was, what is, and what will be in the quickly rising sequence of figures occupying the left half of the composition, but at the

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41. Masaccio, Saint Peter Healing with His Shadow (detail).

same time, Masaccio fixes the entire story on the infinitesimal moment when Peter’s shadow touches the figure in the foreground (Fig. 42). The latter is a pathetic creature, so misshapen that he hardly seems human, yet at this instant, when the saint’s shadow stretches to him, his hopeful face fills with light and his light-touched hand begins to lift in the air (Fig. 43). Through God’s healing grace, he will rise upright and whole, for as we can see in his already-changed colleagues, who once were what he is, past is but prologue. This instantaneous physical metamorphosis, which is the essence of the miracle, is the outward sign of an underlying spiritual truth and lays bare saint’s real gift: the happiness, beauty, and comfort of Paradise, where the dehumanizing suffering brought about by the sin of Adam and Eve does not exist. The healing power of divine mercy, which may come as a voice, water, light, shadow, or some other thing and through which mankind can hope to become complete again, is of course a theme appropriate to a funerary setting, but in the Brancacci Chapel, particularly in the work of Masaccio, the images of the dead and broken take on more subtle shades of meaning. They allude to the promise of eternal life, but this idea is put in social and

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42. Masaccio, Saint Peter Healing with His Shadow (detail).

43. Masaccio, Saint Peter Healing with His Shadow (detail).

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political terms, that is, in material terms: they are the weak and innocent, the lambs of God for whom Peter is responsible, and they are the destitute of the earth who can hope for the spiritual riches of Paradise. In the passage immediately following the story of the tribute money, Matthew records that “the disciples came to Jesus, saying, ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them, and said, ‘Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:1–3). And He goes on to warn, in boldly corporeal language, of the dangers of the material world: “‘Woe to the world for temptations to sin! For it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the man by whom the temptation comes! And if your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it from you; it is better for you to enter life maimed or lame than with two hands or two feet to be thrown into the eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and throw it from you; it is better for you to enter life with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into the hell of fire’“ (Matthew 18:7–9). In the Brancacci Chapel the cripples and their ilk, who are painted with such sympathy and who are invested with such dignity, are that afflicted body of humanity, the forgotten and vulnerable in man’s kingdom, who are rich, beautiful, and worthy in God’s sight: the last who shall be first. And those wooden canes, crutches, and stools of theirs are perhaps more than merely their attributes and the inalienable emblems of their suffering. Are they not also their crosses, which remind us that Christ said: “he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:38)? The various themes of the chapel — the contrasts between blindness and sight, wealth and poverty, power and weakness, injury and health, cunning and innocence, the domain of men and the kingdom of God, bodily wants and divine providence — all play a part in Masaccio’s depiction of the Distribution of Goods and the Death of Ananias (Fig. 44). The story, which is drawn from the Acts of the Apostles (4:32–5:11), is set in the context of the early Christian community, in which no one “ever claimed anything as his own, rather, everything was held in common.” But in the nature of things one man by the name of Ananias, with the connivance of his wife, secretly kept back part of the proceeds from the sale of a property and, instead, placed only a portion at the apostles’ feet. Miraculously, however, Peter saw through the deception and condemned him, whereupon Ananias, and later his wife after him, fell dead. In a device reminiscent of Giotto, a building in the middle distance is placed at an angle, so that its meeting walls and projecting corner

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44. Masaccio, Saint Peter Distributing Alms and the Death of Ananias (detail).

restate in architectural terms the central encounter between humanity and God’s vicars. Holding open a small pouch whose contents we are not allowed to see, Peter gives alms to a woman carrying a breechless babe-in-arms, as others in need approach: an ancient woman, withered as old fruit, leaning on a cane; a bald cripple, no longer young, relying on crutches and a wooden leg. Despite their deformities, natural and accidental, there is in them, as in the mother and child, a dignity and simplicity belied by their low estate and at odds with the ignobility that brought down Ananias. Like the Tribute Money and the Raising of Tabitha, this scene is about possessions and inner versus outer beauty; perhaps for that reason Masaccio, going beyond what is demanded by the textual source, developed its central image into a leitmotif. He shows us Peter’s pouch, the large sack beside Ananias’ corpse, the bag worn by the crippled man, and even something else, for the maiden glimpsed in the distance places her hands on her belly in such a way as to suggest that she herself is a vessel and container. The unseen wealth she carries within alludes to spiritual wealth, providential wealth that the poor enjoy but that the rich man Ananias never had.

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But the expectant mother, whose swollen body is a kind of deformity akin to the others we see, also appears in relation to another figure glimpsed through the crowd: a man kneeling in the distance yet strategically placed at the crux of the composition. Who he is has long been a matter of debate, and determining his identity is not helped by the fact that the lower portion of this damaged scene, notably the figure of Ananias, was extensively reworked at a later moment, apparently by Filippino Lippi. Even so, we can see that there is a connection between the two figures. They are linked by the central axis of the composition and by an opening that both divides the frieze of actors into two groups and links the foreground to the middle distance. Moreover, like the corpse lying face down before us, the man who lifts his head in supplication wears the bright red robes that in the fifteenth-century symbolized wealth and status. Alone among the members of the community, but like Ananias, the kneeling figure makes an offering; however, does he approach God with an open heart or does he, like Ananias, hope to fool the All-seeing? Significantly, Masaccio shows us but one part of his face: his eyes, which, unlike the gleaming lights of the poor, are heavily shadowed and dark. And we ought not to forget that in the background of Saint Peter Healing with His Shadow, which the perspective encourages us to see together with this one, a man stares at the miraculous physical transformations taking place before him with openmouthed wonder and wide-eyed astonishment. Could it be that Masaccio, fashioning a counterpoint to Peter’s charity, has shown Ananias twice, alive and dead, blinded in life by the false lure of material things and, as a consequence of that sinful choice, deprived in death of the true wealth of eternal life? Could it be that Masaccio, hoping to suggest Ananias’ unrepentant corruption, has also contrasted him with the hobbling figure in the left foreground, whose dull red suit is cut like the dress of only one other figure in the cycle: the tax collector in the Tribute Money? As Adam and Eve learned, cunning does not profit, and outward things, as we saw in the Tribute Money and in the Raising of Tabitha, are often deceptive. Sometimes those who seem beautiful, wealthy, and powerful have no prospects, whereas those who seem ugly, poor, and weak, the lambs of God, are the greatest in God’s sight. For it is they, as Matthew records, to whom Christ said: “Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek all these things; and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all” (Matthew 6:31–32). And so, these seemingly deformed or

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feeble innocents, set below the surpassingly beautiful figure of the neophyte in the luminous scene above, know God’s bountiful grace, whereas the rich man does not. As in the Tribute Money and the Raising of Tabitha, Masaccio has made the contrast between inner and outer strength, between inner and outer beauty especially vivid and immediate by reference to the facts of contemporary experience. Not only does he portray the world with astonishing truth but he peoples it with figures who are carefully observed. The community he shows in the Saint Peter Distributing Alms, while as varied as its natural and architectural setting and as multifaceted as humanity itself, includes precisely those who in the fifteenth century were most vulnerable and at risk, those at the margins and crossroads of existence: the old, the infirm, the very young, and the daughters of Eve. These are the unfortunate “others,” who are required to pay tribute in the kingdom of men and for whom Christ, as we know from the Tribute Money, paid it. The juxtaposition of contrasting types in the Saint Peter Distributing Alms helps to make each figure more vivid and is another manifestation of Masaccio’s fundamentally dramatic way of thinking. It also recalls Alberti’s advice to the painter in his famous treatise On Painting (1436) and Leonardo’s dictum: “beautiful things and ugly things appear more forceful one beside the other.” Although much has been said about Masaccio’s illustration of the Renaissance concept of man’s dignity, these figures suggest that his art ought to be put in the context of the larger debate among fifteenth-century philosophers and men of letters, a debate that contrasted man’s dignity with his misery. Beginning in the late fourteenth century, Humanist writers as diverse as Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati, Lorenzo Valla, Bartolommeo Facio, Fra Antonio da Barga, Poggio Bracciolini as well as Giannozzo Manetti entered into the discussion, but no matter whether they emphasized man’s miserable ignobility or his noble dignity, they were aware of its complement. In the Brancacci Chapel, as in the writings of Valla and Barga, the latter a prior of the convent of San Miniato al Monte in Florence and a friend of Felice Brancacci’s ally, Palla Strozzi, we find the fundamentally Christian view that human misery on earth is set beside the promise of happiness in heaven. In the Brancacci Chapel, as in these writers thought, man’s status is understood in the context of his creation and fall and Christ’s atonement and judgment. Man is not inherently bad, for as God’s creature, he is beautiful, but sin, which is an element no less active than the serpent in the Garden, confuses, deludes, and brings nothing but suffering

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and, ultimately, damnation. There is also in the program, again as in Valla and Barga, emphasis on the notion of volition, for man, like Adam and Eve in the Garden and like Peter who obeyed Christ and paid the tribute or like Peter who later denied him, man has it within him to determine his fate, to choose virtue and good, or sin and evil. This dynamic, activist view of man reconciles a Christian focus on God with an anthropocentric preoccupation that is Renaissance in essence; moreover, it corresponds to a consistent effort to engage us, the viewers, in the visual and intellectual fabric of the chapel. The kingdom of God and our place in it, as well as man’s ability to assure his own salvation is the focus of the two large scenes on the lowest level of the chapel (Figs. 10–11), and although completed long after Masaccio’s death — so that their relationship to his original scheme must remain, strictly speaking, conjectural — they nevertheless echo and extend the themes set forth elsewhere in the chapel. In them Peter is joined by Saint Paul, another sinner whose blind eyes were opened to God. The story of Theophilus, in which Peter converts the pagan king of Antioch by reviving his long-dead son, is paired with the saint’s subsequent elevation as founding bishop of the church at Antioch. Opposite these related episodes of Peter’s triumph are stories of Peter’s trials set in Nero’s Rome, where the apostle disputes with the magician Simon Magus and, failing to convert the emperor, eventually meets his death. Framing these stories are two scenes on the entrance arch: Saint Paul Visiting Saint Peter in Prison, painted beneath Masaccio’s Expulsion, and the Liberation of Saint Peter from Prison, which appears below Masolino’s Temptation. Except for a considerable portion of the story of Theophilus, which was begun by Masaccio, these scenes were painted by Filippino Lippi decades after the initial, aborted campaign to decorate the chapel had come to an end. To what degree Filippino’s work adheres to the original plan, we probably will never know. To be sure, he strove to harmonize his usually more unruly and expressive style with that of the early fifteenth-century masters around him. Did he also take recourse to drawings, which Masaccio must have made and may have left behind? In any event, Filippino was bound to respect the iconographic program as he found it; thus, in the context of the rest of the program the contrast between the two rulers, who are tellingly paired across the space, is also about blindness and sight, choice and salvation. Witnessing the miraculous resurrection of his son, who is placed directly below Christ in the Tribute Money in a way that suggests a parallel to the Savior’s sacrifice and subsequent victory over death, Theophilus opens his eyes and is converted (Fig. 45). Nero, by

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45. Masaccio (with later additions by Filippino Lippi) Saint Peter Raising of the Son of Theophilus and Enthroned as First Bishop of Antioch (detail). 46. Filippino Lippi, The Crucifixion of Saint Peter and Saint Peter Disputing with Simon Magus (detail).

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contrast, refuses to abandon evil. Instead, he remains steadfastly deceived and blinded by the false wizardry of Simon Magus, whom Voragine portrays as Antichrist, and orders Peter’s death (Fig. 46). Diabolically alluring, Simon possessed the misleading power to alter the features of his face, but unlike the physical transformations that elsewhere in the chapel convey spiritual rebirth, his was nothing but evil masquerading as wisdom. Perhaps to suggest the impostor’s two-faced guile, Filippino has shown him in the not-quite-persuasive guise of Dante, the great Christian poet of the Divine Comedy (Fig. 47). Ever-blind, Nero is fooled, and his error contrasts with the ultimate conversion of Theophilus, a sinner who, like Saint Paul, once persecuted Christ and his church. Each makes his own choice and ultimately determines his own fate. Although danger often comes with a face as beguiling as Eve’s serpent, each one of us, we are told, has the power to follow the true word or the false, to choose salvation or perdition. The story of Theophilus is then also about repentance, certainly an appropriate notion for a place, where in burying the dead we might very well consider our own end, and Masaccio presented this idea with powerful immediacy. The figure of the enthroned Theophilus (Fig. 48), shown holding

47. Filippino Lippi, Saint Peter Disputing with Simon Magus (detail).

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48. Masaccio (with later additions by Filippino Lippi), Saint Peter Raising the Son of Theophilus and Enthroned as First Bishop of Antioch (detail).

49. Masaccio (with later additions by Filippino Lippi), Saint Peter Raising the Son of Theophilus and Enthroned as First Bishop of Antioch (detail).

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50. Masaccio and Filippino Lippi, Saint Peter Raising the Son of Theophilus and Enthroned as First Bishop of Antioch.

the orb and scepter of rule and elevated in a way that suggests both pride and authority, is somehow detached from the freely moving, animated figures around him. He stares out with eyes fixed above the crowd, as if he were an unmoving idol rather than a man of flesh and blood, but once converted, he reappears transformed into the subdued figure who humbles himself at Saint Peter’s feet (Fig. 49). As elsewhere in the chapel, his spiritual conversion is put in terms of a physical alteration, but Masaccio may have sought to make this notion especially vivid and immediate here in the lowest register, where the mimetic world of the paintings not only draws physically close to us but also takes our contingency more visibly into account. In the eyes of some of Masaccio’s contemporaries the scene may have had a startling familiarity and applicability to their own experience, for the figure of Theophilus is probably no imaginary head but the effigy of a specific and notorious individual, Giangaleazzo Visconti, perhaps the most feared tyrant in early fifteenthcentury Italy and enemy of Florence. Ruthless, power-hungry, unrestrained by ordinary standards of morality, Giangaleazzo waged a war that almost succeeded in extinguishing Florentine liberty. Thanks only to what was taken as divine intervention did the Republic narrowly escape in the summer of 1402, when plague unexpectedly carried off their enemy, then poised for the kill on the Florentine frontier. The memory of that conflict and its providential resolution, if not fresh, may have returned to mind at the time when Masaccio was painting this scene, for the republic was again caught in another impossible struggle against the Visconti, this time, Giangaleazzo’s equally ambitious son, Filippo Maria. As Florentines faced the burdens

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and uncertainties of war against Filippo Maria, there could hardly have been a more compelling and concrete personification of monstrous evil paradoxically combined with hopeful encouragement than the current enemy’s father Giangaleazzo, a contemporary equal to Rome’s Nero. Yet, as impossible as it might seem, unlike Nero and like Theophilus, Giangaleazzo was miraculously humbled by divine power. According to the legend, the pagan Theophilus was repentant and in converting even conceded a part of his house to the new church; thus, he appears, hat removed, kneeling at Peter’s feet. God’s embracing arms, we are told, are wide enough even for the likes of him, and it is this larger theme that is the real subject of the image, for in the gentle figure at Peter’s feet we see Theophilus’ clothes but not his arrogant face: it is as if in repenting of his former ways, he has become unrecognizable and has undergone a transformation that is physical as well as spiritual. The Raising of the Son of Theophilus (Fig. 50) is a scene peopled by figures that are somehow familiar and specific as well as others that are almost certainly portraits. Notable among those we can, with good reason, name are the figures in the group at the far right, in which Masaccio apparently included none other than Masolino, Alberti, Brunelleschi, and himself (Fig. 51). The introduction of portraits, a practice Filippino perpetuated in his 51. Masaccio, Saint Peter Raising the Son of Theophilus and Enthroned as First Bishop of Antioch (detail).

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additions to the scene, makes the concourse between the imaginary world of the painting and our experience perhaps greater here than in any other scene in the chapel. As Alberti said, “Comparison is made with things most immediately known,” to which he added the Protagoran tag that “man is the best known of all things to man.” To Masaccio’s contemporaries it would have been especially easy to see this scene as an extension of their society and a reflection of themselves. Much has been said about possible allusions to contemporary events in the chapel, and it is hard not to think in such terms. But how finite, how specific would such references have been? Do the scenes of water allude, as some have thought, to Felice Brancacci’s maritime interests? Is the Tribute Money and the Death of Ananias an exhortation to civic duty in the context of contemporary discussions about the catasto, a new tax legislated in 1427 in part to finance the Florentine republic’s defense against the Visconti? Do scenes of taxes in a cycle of the life of Saint Peter, who is a transparent symbol of the papacy, indicate the church’s position on the legitimacy of secular authority? Are we to see the cycle as an affirmation of papal power in light of challenges from John Wycliffe, the Hussites, and the conciliar movement? All of these events and issues are part of the chapel’s historical context and cannot be entirely dismissed, but whether they also played a role in its conception and form is another matter. Such things may or may not have entered into the thinking of those who paid for the frescoes, those who devised the scheme, and those who interpreted it; however, the program of the chapel operates above all on a higher, symbolic level. We should not mistake as merely topical the devices whose purpose it is to make the larger spiritual aims of the cycle more immediate and meaningful, for in drawing parallels to contemporary individuals and events that are too literal or narrow, we run the risk of trivializing and misunderstanding the transcendent metaphysical aims of the program. It may seem curious that, along with the living, Masaccio, and later Filippino, included images of men long dead, but we are after all in a place of burial with the dead under our feet. Theophilus’ court, with its remarkable wall encrusted with panels of porphyry alternating with others of marble, is perhaps also meant to allude to the actual mortuary setting, for such panels, while suggesting the sumptuousness of a princely court, are also typical of ecclesiastical furniture, particularly tombs. Above all, porphyry, whose depiction here in panels of such large size is notable, was especially associated with burial. But in the Christian scheme, death, to which all humanity beginning with Adam and Eve is condemned, will be followed by the

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resurrection of the body. Did Masaccio wish to suggest as much? Was the revival of the long-dead boy, which is placed under a scene referring to the Passion and which is framed by scenes on the entrance alluding to the soul’s confinement and release from its earthly prison, intended to evoke the day when all the dead will rise from their tombs? In that hour men of every rank, kings and clerics, painters and cripples, neophytes and mothers will stand together, as they do in depictions of the Last Judgment. Moreover, is it a coincidence that we find a precedent for portraiture in fourteenth-century scenes of Paradise, such as the Giottesque mural in the Bargello and Nardo di Cione’s frescoes in Santa Maria Novella? Here, as in those images, highly individualized figures, congregate at the right hand of Christ, whose sacrificed body stood on the altar, symbol of his tomb and cradle of his living presence in the Eucharist. Thus the assembled throng in the Raising of the Son of Theophilus includes all manner of mankind, uomini famosi or famous men notable for their virtù, which might be faith or patriotism, as well as humbler folk like painters and architects. The inclusion of heads resembling portraits is a device of enormous affective power and makes those of us who will one day soon be dead more conscious of our physical and moral selves. This is precisely the not uncommon warning uttered by the open-jawed skeleton in Masaccio’s Trinity in Santa Maria Novella (Fig. 52): “I once was what all of you are and what I am you too will become.” And it is in the context of the hereafter that one odd pairing in the scene is

52. Masaccio, Trinity, Santa Maria Novella, Florence.

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53. Masaccio, Saint Peter Raising the Son of Theophilus and Enthroned as First Bishop of Antioch (detail).

less curious than it first seems. Seated at the right of Theophilus or the likely effigy of Giangaleazzo Visconti is a figure probably identifiable as Coluccio Salutati (Fig. 53), none other than the Visconti’s implacable and vocal enemy in the defense of Florence. That he is now made Giangaleazzo’s righthand man, as it were, may have struck some of Masaccio’s contemporaries as remarkable, but they might thereby have realized that this match, inconceivable on earth, is one that could only ensue in heaven, where all things are indeed possible. The notion of the resurrection of the body on the day of judgment, in any case the logical end of a cycle that begins with man’s fall, is perhaps also implied by the antithetically rising and falling action in the two lowest scenes on the altar wall (Fig. 1). And it might have been even clearer, had the legitimate conclusion to the story of Nero, the fall of Simon Magus, appeared on the wall opposite the Raising of Theophilus. Such might well have been the original scheme, because a fragmentary mural on the wall behind the altar has plausibly been identified as the Crucifixion of Saint Peter. But probably at some later moment in the fifteenth century, the mural on the altar wall was hidden from view by the much-venerated thirteenth-

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century Madonna that is still in the chapel.5 If Masaccio and his patron had wished to allude to judgment and to a community of shades come to life on that blissful-remorseful day, what we now see of that idea is attenuated by changes in the program. Nevertheless, it is the just and fitting climax toward which the entire cycle builds. Indeed, judgment and salvation are ideas ineluctably connected with the reversal of human misfortune through Christ’s Passion. Always identified with the altar, Christ’s death would have found a parallel in Peter’s crucifixion, and so the apostle’s death, like that of Christ, should be understood in relation to the final resolution of the epic saga launched by the Expulsion of Adam and Eve, a story that traced humanity’s fall from grace near God into the uncertainty and suffering of the material world, our world, the world of the chapel itself. Indeed, blindness and sight, error and repentance, choice and judgment are themes that also play a part, as Voragine records, in the final episode of Saint Peter life. Speaking from the cross and in the throes of death, the apostle explained his last choice in terms that resound throughout the Brancacci Chapel: “Lord, I have desired to follow Thee, but I did not wish to be crucified upright. Thou alone art erect, upright, and high. We are children of Adam, whose head was bowed to the ground: his fall denotes the manner in which men are born, for we are born in such wise that we are let fall prone upon the ground. And our being is so changed that the world thinks that left is right, and right is left.” But the Raising of the Son of Theophilus, Masaccio’s last work in the chapel, is also about the kingdom of art and the near-miraculous powers of the painter. To judge from what remains of Masaccio’s work, it was to be a formal as well as an iconographical climax to the cycle. It is certainly more elaborate than the Tribute Money, which contains thirty-two giornate 5

During the recent conservation campaign fragments of another scene, apparently the Crucifixion of Saint Peter, were discovered on the wall behind the altar, where they had been hidden from view by the dugento Madonna, which was probably placed on the altar after 1435, and its Baroque frame. Why would the mural have been covered so soon after it had been painted? We have no way of knowing what its condition was in 1428, when Masaccio left for Rome, but assuming the work was intact, perhaps the absence of a traditional altarpiece proved unsatisfactory or perhaps veneration of the Madonna grew so great as to outweigh the priority of the scene on the wall behind the altar. Although the attribution of the fragments to Masaccio himself is not without question, the work nevertheless appears to have formed part of the original program. And as no cycle of the life of Saint Peter could omit his martyrdom, Filippino was bound to repeat that crucial scene somewhere; in the process, he was forced to depart from the original scheme, perforce subverting its full intention.

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54. Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi, 1423, Uffizi, Florence.

as compared to thirty-six by Masaccio alone in the scene directly below it. Indeed, the Raising of the Son of Theophilus has the copiousness and variety of Gentile da Fabriano’s famous Adoration of the Magi of 1423 (Fig. 54), translated into the language of the new movement. Its profusion, which offers a striking and perhaps intentional contrast to the Tribute Money, belies Landino’s characterization of Masaccio’s work as “pure, without ornament,” but it is worth remembering that when Landino’s work appeared in 1481, this scene almost certainly stood incomplete and perhaps vandalized: he

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might well have ignored it. Still, it is in many ways an astonishing work. With its crowd, whose density Filippino only appears to have lessened, the Raising of the Son of Theophilus is perhaps the one surviving work by Masaccio that gives us an idea of a slightly earlier image that he painted in the cloister of the same church, the Sagra, a monochromatic mural achieved in terra verde and commemorating the dedication of the church of the Carmine on April 19, 1422. Of this image, which is echoed in several later drawings, Vasari praised the way Masaccio was able to show, as he does in the Raising of the Son of Theophilus, figures five and six deep and the way he introduced a host of portraits. The similarities between the two works may not have been lost on Filippino. Among the assembled citizens in the Sagra, Vasari notes that Masaccio included the gate keeper standing key in hand, and in the Raising of the Son of Theophilus one of Filippino’s figures stands with his back to the group of Carmelite friars and holds a key. The key is, in any case, an appropriate image for a cycle devoted to the keeper of God’s kingdom. The arrangement of figures in depth is a problem of perspective. Earlier painters could simply stack figures in vertical ranks, one behind another, a solution that was orderly but contrary to the rules of vision. Masaccio’s figures, who occupy a fictive extension of our world, obey our laws. We catch glimpses of them as they crane their necks, peer over each others shoulders, and try to see the miracle that for most of them is out of view. And like any group of people who might find themselves at such an out-of-theordinary event, they gesture their surprise, look out in astonishment, ponder the mystery in reverent silence, or turn to discuss it with their neighbor. There is in Masaccio’s figures a casualness, spontaneity, and variety far more convincing than in any of his other surviving paintings. There is, however, little that is haphazard about what Masaccio does here. After all, the scene is related in visual as well as iconographic terms to the Tribute Money. For instance, the irregularly spaced urns on the wall seem casually placed, but in fact they, like the principal figures, correspond to significant points in the scene above. Indeed, despite Filippino’s intervention, the crowded S-shaped composition of the Raising of Theophilus has an underlying structure that reflects the modular system of the Tribute Money directly above it. Following an arrangement that must have been determined by Masaccio’s original design, the figures the Raising of Theophilus are massed into groups that correspond precisely to the three episodes in the Tribute Money, not only in terms of their position on the wall but also according to

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55. Masaccio, Saint Peter Raising the Son of Theophilus (detail).

their relative importance in the narrative. Thus, the central miracle, echoing the central confrontation above, is given the greatest weight, three times the module, whereas the enthroning of Peter is two, and the group of advancing spectators at the far left is one. As in the Tribute Money, Masaccio’s modular system, whose full complexity, alas, we will never know, can be detected in the placement of some of the figures. We see this in an area where Masaccio’s original design does survive, namely, in the group of six figures between Peter and the enthroned king (Fig. 55). However irregular and, therefore, natural their placement seems, it is nonetheless the result of skillful, measured calculation that is not only more complex than in the figural arrangement of the Tribute Money but even playful. Peter and the dark-haired figure in green, namely, the first head to the right of the king, are aligned with the vertical gray moldings framing the leftmost porphyry panel of the wall behind them, so that the wall serves as a convenient ruler. Between these two figures, the man in green and Peter, are five heads that approach the central axis of the

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porphyry panel in regular increments, if one reads them as points on a graph rather than objects in space. Staring out at us with an expression of wonder that anticipates Uccello, the frontal figure immediately to the left of Saint Peter has as his partner the magnificent attendant who casts his spherically drawn eyes in a backward glance up to the king. Though placed in very different positions in space, they line up with the vertical edges of the porphyry panel behind them. Between them is another, more obvious pair: the two bald heads reminiscent of Donatello’s Zuccone. The latter, in turn, frame a dark-bearded man, who is placed precisely along the central axis of the porphyry panel. Yet, when read according to their positions in space, however, these paired heads plot a criss-crossing pattern that also ends at this same dark-bearded figure. Looking down his foreshortened nose, the figure at dead center of this cradled skein of faces inspects us through narrowed eyes, as if he were a cat (Fig. 56).

56. Masaccio, Saint Peter Raising the Son of Theophilus (detail).

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57. Masaccio and Filippino Lippi, Saint Peter Raising the Son of Theophilus (detail).

As Uccello will later suggest, there may well be one vanishing point in a perspective system, but there are an infinite number of points of view in nature. Masaccio’s figures look in almost every direction and from a variety of vantage points (Fig. 57); they are so believable that they encourage us, by the power of suggestion, to do what they are doing: to look, search, and analyze with our eyes, the chief instruments of our rational selves. This is but a more subtle version of a device recommended by Alberti, who urged the painter, presumably as a way of guiding the viewer, to show one figure who looks out to catch the spectator’s attention and at the same time points into the painting. The figures in Masaccio’s painting are as aware of us as they are of themselves, and by their action of looking they urge us to a higher consciousness of our physical selves. When we follow their example and look around, we find all manner of odd things happening in the image. According to the laws of perspective things seem to diminish as they recede, but do they always? The frame cuts off Theophilus’ splendid Brunelleschian palace (Fig. 58), so that the windows that run parallel to the picture plane are like dark horizontal dashes, but then a corner turns, a wall recedes, and the windows,

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instead of getting smaller, grow taller, taller, and taller. At that point, the top of the wall becomes another ground line and our point of view is now sharply lower, so the receding trees beyond diminish as if they are being radically truncated, so to speak, from below. This amuse bouche or, better, amuse yeux is precisely the perspectival device that Mantegna will put to very different use in his Martyrdom of Saint James in the Eremitani in Padua. The altering effect that our point of view has on how we perceive a thing restates a theme of a chapel: things are not what they seem in this confusing world of sunlit matter. But in the Raising of the Son of Theophilus we notice an interest in optics as well as morality or, as Brunelleschi himself said in a contemporary sonnet, an effort “to make visible to others that which is uncertain”: lo ‘ncerto altrui mostrar visibile. Because of our point of view, we see the edge of the receding eave of the building on the right from below. The line of the eave is a firm edge, but the roof above Theophilus’ head is a more ambiguous thing. Lower than the first, it presents its entire tiled surface as a swollen line or, more precisely, a sharply flattened parallelogram. It has been distorted in much the same way as the wall, which we know is really a ledge, even though it looks like nothing more than a line, too thin in any event to support those monochromatic terracotta urns that are in themselves a demonstration of rilievo achieved through pure chiaroscuro. But even these pots, from which two trees (and at least as many double entendres) almost seem to sprout, are perhaps not what they seem? We wonder if these oddly squat things, here foreshortened sharply from below, are not the unrelieved victims of the laws of vision, that is, if Masaccio 58. Masaccio and Filippino Lippi, Saint Paul Visiting Saint Peter in Prison and Saint Peter Raising the Son of Theophilus and Enthroned as First Bishop of Antioch.

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is showing us, rather than the thing itself, the thing distorted as the eye would see it: spherical urns so warped that they look like giant eggs. In any event, what we see is what would have happened to the beautiful tondi on Brunelleschi’s facade for the Florentine Hospital of the Innocents had not the clever architect taken the precaution of making them slightly oval instead of perfectly circular.6 Masaccio knew that sometimes solid things seem to appear as if out of nowhere or disappear along with space. Distance seems to vanish between Theophilus’ palace and his courtyard wall, which continues behind the humble structure on the right and by implication also behind the palace to the left. Space thus seems to contract to a line or the fold of an envelope, and by the same token rabbits come out of hats: At either end of the scene groups of figures enter the stage past the Brunelleschian pilasters of the space-constricting frame, almost as if out of magical air. For Masaccio the frame has become a kind of giant passe-partout, and as if to confuse us further, the group of figures at the far right of the scene, namely, Masaccio and his artist-friends, appear before an enframing doorway that is open but impenetrably black. But perhaps we should expect the unexpected in a scene where the principal character, Peter, is shown in vanishing profile! One thinks of the famous story, best known in a version composed by Brunelleschi’s biographer Antonio Manetti, of La Novella del Grasso Legnaiuolo or the Fat Woodworker, in which the architect of the vanishing point, performs the miraculous trick of making the woodworker, an otherwise abundantly tangible fact, disappear into thinnest nowhere. Counterfeiting his voice, instructing the victim’s friends, even controlling the locale, he persuades the woodworker that he never was, that his previous life was but a dream, that he is in fact another id. With an innocent-seeming “Good morning, Matthew,” the artist has the astonishing necromantic power to make one thing into another: to be or not to be. And so, after admitting that “these are certainly new things,” the uncertain woodworker, who hitherto enjoyed a vague existence as “the fat one,” finds his happy end in Hungary, that is, far, far out of sight. 6 The effect, as Masaccio perhaps suggests, is potentially comic, and apparently at least the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio understood this. In the latter’s famous cycle for the vast choir of Santa Maria Novella, where he illustrated the lives of the Virgin and Saint John the Baptist, the scene at the distant summit of one wall depicts the Banquet of Herod. In a prominent position in the foreground of this scene, whose position high above the floor causes its space to constrict in a way that distorts the architectural setting as well the figures, what has the painter done but introduced a dwarf!

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It may seem ironic that a scene peopled by so many dead and gone should be rendered with such joie de vivre, but the dead in the Raising of the Son of Theophilus are no longer dead. Like Saint Peter, Masaccio has revived them and miraculously allowed them to join the living, including us. In so doing, he perhaps also intended to revive a topos in ancient writings about art: the vivacity of dead painting, a theme later developed by Vasari and others during the Renaissance. In any event, Landino and others praised Masaccio precisely in just such terms, and his art is filled with what Alberti called the “miracles of painting.” So full of life and so full of curiosity was he, and so fast was he developing that we can only wonder how much the young painter might have accomplished with a just a few more years, not to mention a decade or the lifetime granted others. Already, in the Raising of the Son of Theophilus we espy enough inspiration for the next generation of artists and beyond: not only Fra Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Paolo Uccello, Andrea del Castagno, Domenico Veneziano, Piero della Francesca, and Domenico Ghirlandaio but also Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. The Brancacci Chapel, as Vasari said and as the young Filippino must also

59. Masaccio, Saint Peter Enthroned as First Bishop of Antioch (detail).

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60. Masaccio, Saint Peter Enthroned as First Bishop of Antioch (detail).

have recognized, quickly became something of a shrine, a place where the principles and secrets of the new movement were free to those who could see them and where artists could learn as brothers. The fraternity of artists, another theme beloved by Vasari, is a notion perhaps suggested by Masaccio himself. In that grouping in the right corner of the Saint Peter Enthroned (Fig. 59), we see him self-portrayed along with his collaborator Masolino, with Alberti, and with Brunelleschi, who upon hearing of Masaccio’s death is said to have kept repeating “We have suffered a great loss.” The four colleagues crowd together at Saint Peter’s chair, where Masaccio, as if acting for them all and as if in answer to his doubting name, stretches out a gifted hand to touch the saint (Fig. 60). Although each one is an individual as distinct from his neighbor as from each of us, they are

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also part of a larger community that includes not only the Brancacci clan but all the children of Adam and Eve, and for that reason perhaps, impossible though it is, Masaccio and his brothers in art seem to cast but a single shadow against the wall.

Selected Bibliography Alberti, L. B. On Painting and On Sculpture, ed., trans., intro., and with notes by C. Grayson. London, 1972. Baldini, U. “Dalla scoperta di San Giovenale a quelle della Brancacci,” in Gli Uffizi (Studi e Ricerche, no. 5: I pittori della Brancacci agli Uffizi), pp. 11–18. Baldini, U. and O. Casazza. The Brancacci Chapel. New York, 1992. Baxandall, M. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century: A Primer on the Social History of Pictorial Style. Oxford, 1972. Beck, J. “‘Fatti di Masaccio . . . ,’“ In Memoriam Otto J. Brendel: Essays in Archaeology and the Humanities, ed. by L Bonfante and H. von Heintze with C. Lord. Mainz, 1976, pp. 211–14. Beck, J. Masaccio: The Documents. Locust Valley (NY), 1978. Berenson, B. Florentine Painters of the Renaissance. New York, 1896. Berti, L., ed. La Chiesa di Santa Maria del Carmine a Firenze. Florence, 1992. Berti, L. Masaccio. State College (Pa.), 1967. Berti, L. and U. Baldini. Filippino Lippi. Florence, 1975. Berti, L. and R. Foggi. Masaccio: Catalogo completo dei dipinti. Florence, 1989. Berti, L. and A. Paolucci. L’Età di Masaccio: Il primo Quattrocento a Firenze. Florence, 1990. Bocci Pacini, P. “Umanesimo in Masolino,” in Gli Uffizi (Studi e Ricerche, no. 5: I pittori della Brancacci agli Uffizi), pp. 19–32. Borsook, E. The Mural Painters of Tuscany, 2nd ed. rev. and enlarged. Oxford, 1980. Boskovits, M. “‘Giotto Born Again’: Beiträge zu den Quellen Masaccio.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, XXIX (1966), pp. 51–61. Branca, V., ed. Mercanti scrittori: ricordi nella Firenze tra medioevo e rinascimento. Milan, 1986. Caneva, C. “L’ultimo della Brancacci,” in Gli Uffizi (Studi e Ricerche, no. 5: I pittori della Brancacci agli Uffizi), pp. 85–92. Casazza, O. “Al di là dell’immagine,” in Gli Uffizi (Studi e Ricerche, no. 5: I pittori della Brancacci agli Uffizi), pp. 93–101. Casazza, O. “Il ciclo delle storie di San Pietro e la ‘Historia Salutis’: Nuova lettura della Cappella Brancacci.” Critica d’Arte, LI (1986), pp. 69–84.

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260 Casazza, O. “La grande gabbia architettonica di Masaccio.” Critica d’Arte, LIII (1988), pp. 78–97. Christiansen, K. “Some Observations on the Brancacci Chapel Frescoes after Their Cleaning.” The Burlington Magazine, CXXXIII (1991), pp. 5–20. Cole, B. Masaccio and the Art of Early Renaissance Florence. Bloomington (Ind.), 1980. Debold von Kritter, A. Studien zum Petruszyklus in der Brancacci-Kapelle. Berlin, 1975. Fremantle, R. “Masaccio e 1’antico.” Critica d’arte, CIII (1969), pp. 39–56. Hartt, F. “Art and Freedom in Quattrocento Florence.” Essays in Memory of Karl Lehmann, ed. by L. Freeman Sandler, Locust Valley (NY), 1964, pp. 114–31. Hills, P. The Light of Early Italian Painting. New Haven and London, 1987. Jacobsen, W. “Die Konstruktion der Perspektive bei Masaccio und Masolino in der Brancacci Kapelle.” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, XXI (1986), pp. 73–92. Joannides, P. Masaccio and Masolino: A Complete Catalogue. London, 1993. ——-. “Masaccio, Masolino and ‘Minor’ Sculpture.” Paragone, XXXVIII (1987), pp. 3–24. ——-. “‘Masaccio’s Brancacci Chapel: Restoration and Revelation.” Apollo, CXXXIII (1991), pp. 26–32. La Novella del Grasso Legnaiuolo, ed. by P. Procaccioli and with an Intro. by G. Manganelli. Parma, 1990. Longhi, R. “Fatti di masolino e di Masaccio.” Critica d’Arte, V (1940), pp. 145–91. Manetti, A. Vite di XIV uomini singhulary in Firenze dal MCCCC innanzi, ed. by G. Milanesi. Florence, 1887. Meiss, M. “Masaccio and the Early Renaissance: The Circular Plan.” Studies in Western Art (Acts of the Twentieth International Congress of the History of Art). Princeton, 1963, vol. II, pp. 123–145. Meller, P. “La Cappella Brancacci: problemi ritrattistici e iconografici.” Acropoli, III, (1960–61), pp. 186–227 and 273–312. Molho, A. “The Brancacci Chapel: Studies in Its Iconography and History.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XL (1977), pp. 50–98. Offner, R. “Light on Masaccio’s Classicism” in A Discerning Eye: Essays on Early Italian Painting by Richard Offner, ed. by A. Ladis. University Park (Pa.) and London, 1998, pp. 269–79 (orig. pub. in Studies in the History of Art Dedicated to W. Suida on His Eightieth Birthday, London, 1959, pp. 66–72). Ozment, S. Magdalena and Balthasar: An Intimate Portrait of Life in SixteenthCentury Europe Revealed in the Letters of a Nuremberg Husband and Wife. New Haven and London, 1989. Pandimiglio, L. I Brancacci di Firenze: Felice di Michele vir clarissimus e una consorteria (Quaderni del restauro no. 3). Turin, 1987.

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Pope-Hennessy, J. Donatello’s Relief of the Ascension with Christ Giving the Keys to Saint Peter. London, 1949. Procacci, U. “L’incendio della chiesa del Carmine del 1771: La Sagra di Masaccio; gli affreschi della cappella di San Giovanni.” Rivista d’arte, XIV (1932), pp. 141–232. Procacci, U. “Sulla cronologia delle opere di Masaccio e di Masolino tra il 1425 e il 1428.” Rivista d’arte, XXVIII (1953), pp. 3–55. Procacci, U. “Nuove testimonianze su Masaccio.” Commentari, XXVII (1976), pp. 223–237. Roberts, P. Masolino da Panicale. Oxford, 1993. Rossi, P. “Lettura del Tributo di Masaccio.” Critica d’Arte, LIV (1989), pp. 39–42. Shulman, K. Anatomy of a Restoration: The Brancacci Chapel. New York, 1991. Sisi, C. Michelangelo e i maestri del Quattrocento. Florence, 1985. Sonetti di Filippo Brunelleschi, Intro. by G. Tanturli and with textual notes by D. de Robertis. Florence, 1977. Spike, J. Masaccio. New York, 1995. Trinkaus, C. In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought. 2 vols. London, 1970. Vasari, G. Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. by G. Du C. de Vere and with an Intro. And Notes by D. Ekserdjian. 2 vols. New York and Toronto, 1996. Verdon, T. “La Sant’Anna Metterza: riflessioni, domande, ipotesi,” in Gli Uffizi (Studi e Ricerche, no. 5: I pittori della Brancacci agli Uffizi), 1989, pp. 33–58. Voragine, J. de. The Golden Legend, trans. and ed. by G. Ryan and H. Ripperger. New York. 1941. Volponi, P. and L. Berti. L’opera completa di Masaccio. Milan, 1968. Wakayama, E. “Lettura iconografica degli affreschi della Cappella Brancacci: analisi dei gesti e della composizione.” Commentari, XXIX, (1978), pp. 72–80. Watkins, L. “Technical observations on the Frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorisches Institutes in Florenz, XVII, (1973), pp. 65–74. Welliver, W. “Narrative Method and Narrative Form in Masaccio’s Tribute Money,” Art Quarterly, n. s. I, (1977), pp. 40–58.

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XIII

“Two Nude Figures by Masaccio” and The Importance of Being Earnest

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OMETIMES Clio behaves more like a teasing Celia than the grave muse of history she claims to be. Celia, from the Italian celiare, “to jest,” which is analogous to the Greek ghéloia,1 is the uncrowned genius of countless writers, including Boccaccio, Poggio Bracciolini, Piovano Arlotto, Francesco Berni, and Giorgio Vasari, for all of whom mimesis was no nemesis to imagination. In dealing with the past — even the recent past, much less as remote an era as the Renaissance — truth is rarely simple and never pure. But when the subject is Masaccio, the greatest early Florentine painter after Giotto, even a fiction erected on flimsy fact holds genuine interest, as if being teased by a house of cards is worth the ironic discomfort of knowing it will go only so high. The facts are these: an inventory dated 1529 of goods formerly owned by Palla Rucellai but doubtless confiscated and in any case then currently in the possession of the Florentine Officials of the Rubelli, who, in recording their sale to the Strozzi family, also itemized their contents — that is, 18 lots, including “2 figure Ignude di Masaccio in . . . .”2 The suspenseful 1

The Greek word (roughly pronounced “yéllya” derives from the verb gheloiázo, “to make sport,” and even offers the forms gheloiloghia, “laughable talk,” and gheloiástria, “female jester.” See E. Sophocles, Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods (Cambridge, Mass.: 1914), s.v. Perhaps further worth noting in this context is that celia, which in Pliny is described as a “spirited drink,” is a particularly Florentine usage and that the name Celia may also refer to a comedienne. 2 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Carte Strozziane, serie V, vol. 105 (Giornale “C”), fol. 111v. I am grateful to Paul Barolsky for calling my attention to this document and to William Wallace for his inestimable assistance. For information on the Office of Rubelli, I am indebted to Margery Ganz.

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ellipsis does not indicate a blank, no lost train of thought, and no simple cancellation, but an artful series of marks that make the would-be archivist feel like the hapless butt of a very old joke: some are certainly letters, others merely resemble them; some are drawn effortlessly from the point of a quill, others are labored and heavily inked. They are the unspoiled muddle of perhaps two words superimposed, in part canceled, partially amended, and suggestively permitting several readings yet rendering none: the whole, short thing an exquisitely risible scribble. But what of that handiwork “by Masaccio”? Writing, perhaps with some haste as well as with a functionary’s indifference, the scribe may not have had an antiquarian’s appreciation for the aesthetic or historic appeal of objects (one thinks of Niccolò Niccoli’s delight in antiquities and in the works and company of the finest artists of his day);3 the scribe may not even have had the buyer’s understanding of what value, monetary or otherwise, the name carried. How he came to record it or what it meant to him at that hour, one can only imagine. Written almost precisely a century after Masaccio’s death in 1428, how accurate is the “attribution”? To be sure, the notice, like other items in the inventory, refers to what now would be classified as a work of art: in addition to the “two nude figures by Masaccio,” one reads of marble heads and reliefs, a porphyry tondo with gilded letters, a drawing of the story of Sheba and Solomon, paintings on linen, a Virgin in gesso, and even maps of Italy and Rome. This “Masaccio” is the single mention of an item’s maker by name. Thus, even if the appellation is an error based on hearsay rather than on an inscription or a document (much less recognition of the painter’s style), one will concede that, true or false, it probably refers, actually and not homonymically, to the same Masaccio who helped paint the Brancacci Chapel: the historical Tommaso di Ser Giovanni, born in San Giovanni Valdarno on the feast of Saint Thomas in 1401 and died, probably in Rome, sometime in 1428. If one can believe Vasari, the chapel in the church of S. Maria del Carmine was famous among painters and students of art throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It had become, and in 1529 still remained, an unofficial academy, attracting those who sought to learn the secrets of Masaccio’s talent — notably, perspective and

3

See the biography in Vespasiano da Bisticci, Vite di Uomini Illustri del secolo XV, ed. P. d’Ancona and E. Aeschlimann (Milan: 1951), pp. 434–444.

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its corollary, rilievo.4 By the sixteenth century, Masaccio had become a legend, and in addition to its magical connotation, his nickname may have become proverbial, gnomic nomenclature for the highest achievement in art.5 4 According to Vasari: “That chapel has been frequented continually up to our own day by innumerable draughtsmen and masters; and there still are therein some heads so lifelike and so beautiful, that it may truly be said that no master of that age approached so nearly as this man did to the moderns. His labours therefore deserve infinite praise, and above all because he gave form in his art to the beautiful manner of our times. And that this is true is proved by the fact that all the most celebrated sculptors and painters, who have lived from his day to our own, have become excellent and famous by exercising themselves and studying in this chapel—namely, Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, Fra Filippo, Filippino, who finished it, Alesso Baldovinetti, Andrea dal Castagno, Andrea del Verrocchio, Domenico del Ghirlandajo, Sandro di Botticello, Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Perugino, Fra Bartolommeo di San Marco, Mariotto Albertinelli, and the most divine Michelagnolo Buonarroti; likewise Raffaello da Urbino, who owed to this chapel the beginning of his beautiful manner, Granaccio, Lorenzo di Credi, Ridolfo del Ghirlandajo, Andrea del Sarto, Rosso, Franciabigio, Baccio Bandinelli, Alonso Spagnuolo, Jacopo da Pontormo, Pierino del Vaga, and Toto del Nunziata; and in short, all those who have sought to learn that art have ever gone to this chapel to learn and to grasp the precepts and the rules for good work from the figures of Masaccio.” The translation is by G. Du C. de Vere, Giorgio Vasari: Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, intro K. Clark, 3 vols. (New York: 1979), I, pp. 388–389. See also Vasari: Le Vite . . . (1550 and 1568 eds.), ed. with commentaries by R. Bettarini and P. Barocchi (Florence: 1966), III (text), pp. 130–132. For pre-Vasarian attributions to Masaccio, see the summary in P. Murray, An Index of Attributions Made in Tuscan Sources before Vasari (Florence: 1952). For recent literature on the artist, see L. Berti, with an essay on the restoration by U. Baldini and entries by R. Foggi, Masaccio: The Documents (Locust Valley, N.Y.: 1978); B. Cole, Masaccio and the Art of Early Florentine Painting (Bloomington, Ind.: 1980); U. Baldini and O. Casazza, La Cappella Brancacci (Milan: 1990); U. Baldini, Masaccio (Florence: 1990); A. Ladis, The Brancacci Chapel, Florence (New York: 1992); and P. Joannides, Masaccio and Masolino: A Complete Catalogue (London: 1993). 5 One thinks immediately of Dante’s famous lines comparing Cimabue with Giotto. In 1395, Lorenzo di Niccolò and Niccolò di Pietro Gerini assured Francesco di Marco Datini, the famous merchant of Prato, about a crucifix that they were in the course of painting for him (and which he probably had not yet seen): it was so well designed, they wrote, that not even Giotto could have done better (“chi’ è designate cosi bene, che se 1’avesse disegnato G[i]otto, non si potrebbe migliorare”). Datini well understood such rhetoric. For his part, in 1396 he grumbled that what Agnolo Gaddi, Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, and a third painter were billing him for painting the loggia of the Palazzo Datini in Prato was exorbitant: “Methinks when Giotto was alive he was cheaper!” Giotto’s name was invoked even outside the art market: in a passage in his Ricordi (written sometime between 1393 and 1424), the Florentine merchant Giovanni Morelli describes the hands of his daughter Mea as being so beautiful “that they might have been painted by Giotto.” For the letter from Gerini, see A. Gealt, “Lorenzo di Niccolò” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, Bloomington, 1979), 141. For

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“Two nude figures by Masaccio.” The words cause one to reflect upon the many proofs of Masaccio’s artistic conquest of the human body, an objective he shared with Brunelleschi and Donatello. Perhaps his two most famous nudes are those of Adam and Eve from the Expulsion in the Brancacci Chapel. But equally unforgettable is the figure of the expectant neophyte kneeling in the river Jordan in the scene of Saint Peter Baptizing. As the holy water from Peter’s cup touches his head and soaks the hair that partially obscures his young face, his magnificent body becomes a metaphor for the miraculously transformative power of the Holy Spirit. Extraordinary though he is, however, his figure seems all the more persuasive by virtue of its juxtaposition with the nearly naked youth who stands next in line. The latter figure, admired by Vasari and mentioned by countless writers since, grips his chest, presses his thighs together, yet still shivers in the cold, his body a quivering outline of almost dissolving, snowy flesh. But the Brancacci Chapel has other figures that suggest Masaccio’s likely practice of drawing from the nude. What of the splendid dorsal view of the tax collector in the Tribute Money? And could these “two nude figures” perhaps not have been less idealized? One recalls the twisted forms of the cripples in Saint Peter Healing with His Shadow or the aged and infirm crowd in the Death of Ananias. And even in other surviving works, one has further evidence of Masaccio’s fascination with the human body, however ordinary, appealing, or broken it might be, however favored by parentage or changed by the vicissitudes of life, however misshapen by the ways of the Lord or the laws of perspective. But what if, in sorry truth, (to pierce our deflating bubble again), these were nudes by another painter, such as Giovanni di Ser Giovanni, Lo Scheggia — Masaccio’s far less gifted brother? And what kind of thing were these “two nudes”? The last word in the item seems to have been, at least at first, “legno,” wood. Two wooden sculptures by Masaccio! The idea that Masaccio was a sculptor has been promoted in a serious way,6 and there is, in fact, clear evidence that many Datini’s comment, see the translation in I. Origo, The Merchant of Prato, Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335–1410 (London and New York: 1957), p. 262. The passage in Morelli is found in Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli, Ricordi, 2d ed., ed. V. Branca (Florence: 1969), pp. 177–189. See B. Cole, “Morelli, Mea, and Giotto,” Apollo 113 (1981): 113–114. 6 J. Beck, “Masaccio’s Early Career as a Sculptor,” The Art Bulletin 53 (1971): 177–195, attributes to Masaccio the relief of the Coronation of the Virgin above a portal of the former church of S. Egidio in Florence (now part of the facade of the hospital of S. Maria Nuova). As Paul Joannides points out in proposing a design by Donatello carried out by a “semi-

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Renaissance artists practiced and excelled in more than one art.7 In Masaccio, one confronts, besides, an artist whose work owed a great deal to the inspiration of sculptors such as Brunelleschi and Donatello, who might have offered him the benefit of their experience, if not their instruction. But, alas, there is no concrete evidence of a single surviving sculpture by the hand of that most sculptural of painters. Could the very attribution of sculpture to Masaccio, however, have been inspired by more or less popular acknowledgment of the most salient feature of his painting — namely, rilievo?8 “Legno,” or what appears to be “legno” in the inventory of Palla Rucellai’s former property, was definitely but unclearly made into something else. It is difficult to tell what. Other items in the inventory are “in cartone,” which suggests drawings; but such a reading for the “two nudes by Masaccio” falls on the certainty of an “o” where there should be an “a.” One might make out “cornice,” which suggests a painting, perhaps a panel, in a frame; but one might also eke out “cotone,’ which appears nowhere else in the inventory or in those near it and which would be an odd way of suggesting canvas when other items specify images “in pannolino.”

independent” assistant, Beck’s attribution of the Coronation to Masaccio “has not found agreement, but it has the merit of drawing attention both to the sculpturesque qualities of Masaccio’s work and to a sculpture significant enough to have influenced Donatello’s 1434 cartoon of the same subject for an oculus of the Duomo, as Beck points out.” See Joannides, p. 462, and id. “Masaccio, Masolino and Minor Sculpture,” Paragone 38, no 451, n.s. 5 (Sept. 1987): 3–24. Beck’s proposition that Masaccio was a sculptor as well as a painter deserves to be reconsidered in view of the last twenty-five years of research. 7 In the Trecento, one thinks above all of Orcagna, who was not only a practicing painter and sculptor, but also an architect. Agnolo Gaddi also mentions one Giovanni, “a painter who carves figures.” Gaddi recommended this Giovanni, a painter but one who “ancora intaglia di figure,” in a letter dated 20 Oct. 1383 to Francesco di Marco Datini. The document is ambiguous but allows for the interpretation that this painter, like another sculptor Gaddi cites, could be found in Pistoia: was he perhaps referring to the leading Pistoian painter of the day, Giovanni di Bartolommeo Cristiani? See B. Cole, Agnolo Gaddi (Oxford: 1977), p. 61, doc. no. 8. for the above translation, see Origo, p. 261. 8 Even before Masaccio’s day, legends referred to sculptures by Giotto and Maso di Banco, who painted in a sculptural style and to whom modern historians speculatively attribute specific sculptures. See the summaries in Murray, pp. 81–82 (for Giotto) and 112 (for Maso di Banco). Ghiberti claims to have seen the “provedimenti” that Giotto made for the first stories that were destined for the Campanile of the cathedral. He also notes “a marble figure four braccie high” by Maso di Banco. According to Ghiberti, Giotto was “dignissimo in tutta 1’arte, ancora nella arte statuaria,” and he asserts Maso’s excellence in both arts as well. See J. von Schlosser, I Commentari (Berlin: 1912), pp. 37–38.

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In the end, diligence and ingenuity go unrewarded. One is left with a tantalizing mystery. How one wants to believe in the existence of further wonders by that wonder of artistic nature! One cannot help drawing in the mind’s eye figures Masaccio might have made. But the facts add up to nothing more than an unyielding archival charade de calcule. They stimulate pleasant musing, but the “two nudes by Masaccio” are not necessarily sculptures or paintings or even by Masaccio — our Masaccio — at all. Earnestness given its due, this baited fact is never likely to be much more than a suggestive fiction, if not true, at least well found — nonetheless, nothing more than a fact whose origins are a terminus. But for the historian, there is at least an honest lesson and no small importance in being frank.

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XIV

Sources and Resources: The Lost Sketchbooks of Giovanni di Paolo

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RAWING and copying are as old as art. From the time of the first picture on a cave wall, artists have drawn from their own solutions, hoping to record, learn, and create. Even today, in an age that both aches for “the shock of the new” and celebrates the disposable, art tends to look like other art; yet the tendency of art to feed on itself was certainly no weaker during the Renaissance. In fifteenth-century Siena painters generally held to medieval ideals and methods, and the great stirring in neighboring Florence affected Siena but in a half-hearted way, for Sienese painters lived in the thrall of a golden tradition. The art of their early trecento giants, Duccio, Simone Martini, and the Lorenzetti, shaped Sienese painting during the entire fourteenth century and beyond. Driven in part by popular devotion, by official sanction, and by nostalgia, this tradition was a way of affirming Sienese culture’s identity, and by the fifteenth century it was so powerful that Sienese artists, no doubt often at the insistence of patrons, had long grown used to referring to existing models. One need only recall the lengthy progeny of the trecento altarpieces for the cathedral or the many descendants of the murals painted by Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti on the facade of the Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala.1 These prototypes were so familiar

1 H. B. J. Maginnis, “The Lost Facade Frescoes from Siena’s Ospedale di S. Maria della Scala,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 51 (1988): 180–94. For another example of this phenomenon see M. Eisenberg, “The First Altar-piece for the Cappella de’ Signori of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena: ‘tales figure sunt adeo pulcre . . . ,’” Burlington Magazine 123 (1981): 134–48. The conservatism of Italian painting is stressed by B. Cole, Italian Art 1250–1550: The Relation of Renaissance Art to Life and Society (New York, 1987).

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and so revered that in a Lenten sermon delivered in the Piazza del Campo in 1427 San Bernardino could ask certain of his listeners to recall the apparently well-known action of the Virgin in Simone Martini’s still-famous Annunciation in the cathedral: “Have you seen that Annunciate that is in the cathedral, at the altar of Sant’Ansano, next to the sacristy? Of a certainty, she seems to me to strike the most beautiful attitude, the most reverent and modest imaginable. Note that she does not look at the angel but is almost frightened. She knew that it was an angel; why was she troubled? What would she have done had it been a man! Take this as an example, you maidens.”2 Clearly, by the quattrocento looking to trecento paradigms for inspiration, both moral and artistic, was accepted and common practice in Siena. To make their copies or versions painters must have first made drawings. Unfortunately, few fifteenth-century Sienese drawings of any kind survive,3 but the painters of Siena, like those elsewhere, doubtless produced them. Medieval artists, both Italian and transalpine, had made use of pattern books, bound collections of drawings that served as an archive of copied stock images ready for transfer into the medium of paint, and from this tradition arose the model book, which functioned in much the same way in fifteenth-century Italy. Containing relatively finished studies that might offer a clue to the painted image, model books were a vehicle of conservatism; nevertheless, a more experimental kind of drawing developed in the quattrocento, for in addition to bound books of drawings, artists apparently also owned portfolios of loose sheets of a kind described by the writer Cennino Cennini.4 Such collections of sketches must have served

2 As quoted by K. Christiansen in K. Christiansen, C. Strehlke, and L. Kanter, Painting in Renaissance Siena, exh. Cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), 4. For San Bernardino’s references to paintings, see E. Carli, “Luoghi ed opere d’arte senesi nelle prediche di Bernardino del 1427,” in Bernardino predicatore nella società del suo tempo (Todi, 1976), 153–82. 3 See, for instance, the small group published in B. Degenhart and A. Schmitt, Corpus der italienischen Zeichnungen, 1300–1450 (Berlin, 1968). 4 C. Cennini, Il Libro dell’arte, ed. by F. Brunello and with a preface by L. Magagnato (Vicenza, 1971), 28–29 (chapter 29): “Abbi a modo d’una tasca fatta di fogli incollati o pur di legname, leggiera, fatta per ogni quadro, tanto vi metta un foglio reale, cioè mezzo: e questo t’è buono per tenervi i tuo’ disegni ed eziandio per potervi tenere su il foglio da disegnare. Poi te ne va’ sempre soletto, o con compagnia sia atta a fare quel che tu, e non sia atta a darti impaccio” [Have a sort of pouch made of pasteboard, or just thin wood, made large enough in every dimension for you to put in a royal folio, that is, a half; and this is good for you to

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not only as an archive of images or copied details but also as a place to experiment and observe, with the result that the sketchbook could serve as both an aide mémoire and a creative tool.5 Sometimes including sketches after widely disparate works and displaying a range of quality, they illustrated what must have been a not so rare phenomenon: artistic curiosity without reference to style. Among the most famous of such drawings are those by the Veronese artist Pisanello and his following, who produced a surprising array of sketches after works of art as well as studies after plants, flowers, costumes, fabrics, animals, and human beings dead and alive. On one sheet, for instance, Pisanello made a drawing after a mural by Altichiero in Padua and, doubtless at a different time, another after Giotto’s Navicella in Rome.6 Elsewhere, he made drawings after antique marbles as well as after contemporary sculpture, and on yet another sheet the head of an angel from Filippo Lippi’s Barbadori Altarpiece now in the Louvre looms like a ghostly apparition beside a figure from Michelino da Besozzo’s Marriage of the Virgin now in the Metropolitan.7 In Siena the only artist to approach such breadth

keep your drawings in, and likewise to hold the paper on for drawing. Then always go out alone, or in such company as will be inclined to do as you do, and not apt to disturb you].” This “pouch” and the habits of work that it betokened had moral value for Cennini and formed part of his urging toward temperate and wholesome living, which of course precluded “indulging too much in the company of woman,” if the painter hoped to take care of the condition of his hand and learn to draw well. The above translation is taken from Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook: The Italian “Ill Libro Dell’ Arte, trans. D. V. Thompson (New Haven, 1933), 16. 5 For a discussion of model books, pattern books, and sketchbooks see F. Ames-Lewis, Drawing in Early Renaissance Italy (New Haven and London, 1981), 63–89; F. Ames-Lewis and J. Wright, Drawing in the Italian Renaissance Workshop (London, 1983), 95–101; F. Ames-Lewis, “Modelbook Drawings and the Florentine Quattrocento Artist,” Art History 10 (1987): 1–11. 6 The copy after Altichiero’s Fall of the Pagan Temple in the Oratorio di San Giorgio in Padua appears, along with the copy after Giotto’s Navicella, on the recto of a sheet (Milan, Ambrosiana F. 214 inf., No. 10) whose verso shows a copy after one of the Dioscuri in Rome and assorted studies of peacocks and a pair of legs. The sheet apparently formed part of a taccuino di viaggi that happened also to be shared by both Gentile da Fabriano, who began it, and by Pisanello, who inherited it from the former. See A. Schmitt with an introduction by B. Degenhart and a preface by G. Fiocco, Disegni del Pisanello e di maestri del suo tempo, Venice, 1966, no. 15; and F. Ames-Lewis, Drawing in Early Renaissance Italy, 1981, pp. 71–72. 7 For this drawing, which is recorded in the Bacri Collection in Paris, see M. Fossi Todorow, I Disegni di Pisanello e la sua cerchia, Florence, 1966, p. 142 (cat. 215).

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and receptivity was Giovanni di Paolo.8 So frequent, so varied, and often so precise are this painter’s quotations from earlier and contemporary artists as well as from himself that they imply the existence of a substantial collection of drawings built up, used, and reused over the course of his long career. Alas, not a single independent drawing securely attributable to Giovanni survives.9 Nevertheless, Giovanni’s vanished collection, contained within those now-imaginary sketchbooks, can be partially reconstructed on the basis of his paintings, in which borrowed gestures, poses, figures, groups, architectural details, and compositions appear and reappear time and oftdistant time again. The resulting evidence presents a case study notable not so much for its uniqueness as for its detail, and in the end the pursuit of Giovanni’s lost sketchbooks reveals more than a mere inventory of their contents: it offers insight into their creator’s habits of mind and into the mentality of his day. Even within the context of Sienese reverence for tradition and within the context of contemporary artistic practice, Giovanni’s use of drawings after other works of art — including his own — is unusual, for whereas in the case of other artists such drawings were more or less occasional, in Giovanni di Paolo’s hands they became a fundamental part of the creative process. To modern thinking such willful appropriation and repetition would seem to demonstrate an unappealing lack of originality, but it was Giovanni’s gift to clip, recombine, and thus refashion such borrowed

8

For Giovanni di Paolo the fundamental studies, to which this essay is greatly indebted, are: J. Pope-Hennessy, Giovanni di Paolo, London, 1938; J. Pope-Hennessy, A Sienese Codex of the Divine Comedy, Oxford and London, 1947; C. Brandi, Giovanni di Paolo, Florence, 1947; and C. Strehlke in Painting in Renaissance Siena, New York, 1988. 9 Although bearing general resemblances to Giovanni’s paintings, a sheet with Four Nudes, attributed to him by Degenhart and Schmitt, remains doubtful. See Degenhart and Schmitt, 1968, vol. I, part 1, pp. 319–320 (catalogue no. 240). On the other hand, Strehlke, following a suggestion by Christiansen, made a more persuasive case for attributing to Giovanni di Paolo c. 1470 the drawing of A Male Saint that appears in an unfinished initial on fol. 41r of a Roman Missal, Ms. X.II.3, in the Biblioteca Communale, Siena. See C. Strehlke, “Three Notes on the Sienese Quattrocento,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, CXIV (1989), pp. 278–280 and fig. 15. On the role of drawings in Giovanni’s workshop practice M. Alexander (“An Unknown Early Panel by Giovanni di Paolo, Pantheon, XXXIV, 1976, p. 271) suggested Giovanni’s “adaptation of figure drawings in a pattern book which was used frequently in the workshop over a period of years.” The notion was seconded by Pope-Hennessy, who also supposed the use of pattern books for Giovanni’s close contemporary Sano di Pietro. See J. PopeHennessy, “Giovanni di Paolo,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, XLVI (Fall 1987), pp. 39–46.

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inventions in ways that made them his own, and it was his luck to live in a culture that valued his skillful manipulation of others’ ideas.10 With which artist Giovanni di Paolo trained remains only a guess, but his introduction to painters and painting probably came early in life: early enough for him to have picked up a brush as easily as a rattle.11 During the second decade of the Quattrocento, when Giovanni probably served his apprenticeship and when he is first documented as a painter, Sienese artists paid abiding reverence to the tradition of the Trecento. Above all, the youthful Giovanni pursued the examples of Simone Martini and his artistic descendants. A work such as his Pecci Polyptych of 1426 (Fig. 1) doubtless is the result of hours of drawing, copying, and emulating, for it is Simonesque not only in a number of specific details but in its style. Indeed, so powerful is Giovanni’s evocation of the trecento master, that he may lay claim to being in some ways closer to Simone than were Simone’s own followers. However, he is not Simone reborn, and his work is more than an expression of mere revivalism, for while the Pecci Madonna pays obvious obeisance to Simone, it does so through a type borrowed from Taddeo di Bartolo (Fig. 2).12 It is in this skillful reconstitution and reinterpretation of his sources that Giovanni displays his gift. The art of Simone and his followers played a formative role in defining Giovanni’s style, but, as the Pecci Madonna suggests, his allegiance to this tradition hardly impaired his receptivity to other models. Indeed, his 10

For an examination of the interplay between copying and innovative interpretation in later drawings see E. Haverkamp-Begemann, with C. Logan, Creative Copies: Interpretative Drawings from Michelangelo to Picasso, London and Amsterdam, 1988. 11 Giovanni’s father was Paolo di Grazia known as Boccanera. Upon the latter’s death, Giovanni’s mother, one Monna Mina, may have remarried the painter Nanni di Giovanni di Ser Cecco, for she was named his heir in 1428. As Brandi argued, Giovanni probably studied with this obscure figure who entered the guild in 1389. See C. Brandi, “Ricordi della vita e dell’attività artistica del pittore senese Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia detto Boccanera (1399 circa-1482), Documenti e commenti per la storia dell’arte, Florence, 1944, pp. 69–70. According to Milanesi, Nanni di Giovanni di Ser Cecco, who is mentioned again as late as 1414, was the son of Giovanni di Ser Cecco, both a sculptor and architect who served as capomaestro of the Cathedral Works in 1376. See G. Milanesi, Documenti per la storia dell’arte senese, Siena, 1854, vol. I, p. 40 n. 2. 12 The dependence of the Pecci Madonna upon Taddeo di Bartolo was observed by PopeHennessy, who suggested that the figure of the Madonna may have been borrowed from a work such as Taddeo’s Madonna at Grenoble, while the Christchild may have been inspired by Taddeo’s altarpiece in S. Caterina della Notte. See Pope-Hennessy, Giovanni di Paolo, 1938, p. 5.

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1. Giovanni di Paolo, Pecci Polyptych (1426), (detail), Castelnuovo Berardenga, Prepositura.

2. Taddeo di Bartolo, Triptych (1400), Siena, Santa Caterina della Notte.

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3. Giovanni di Paolo, Saint Jerome, Siena, Pinacoteca.

4. Sienese, Diptych. Philadelphia, Johnson Collection.

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5. Giovanni di Paolo, Agony in the Garden. Rome, Pinacoteca Vaticana. 6. Duccio, Agony in the Garden from the Maestà. Siena, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo.

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works reveal not merely an awareness of the art of the past but an almost promiscuous attraction to a wide variety of stylistically diverse sources. To give only three examples out of many: a jewel-like painting of Saint Jerome (Fig. 3) datable to ca. 1425 recalls many of the features, if not the style, of the right wing of a diptych (Fig. 4) in the Johnson Collection in Philadelphia;13 a predella dating from the 1430s contains figures, ultimately derived from Ambrogio Lorenzetti, that are replicated in a picture attributed to Benedetto di Bindo;14 and an Agony in the Garden (Fig. 5) from the later 1430s includes a reclining apostle whose pose is derived from a figure in Duccio’s Maestà (Fig. 6). Such eclecticism and selectivity are remarkable and cannot be attributed entirely to the artist’s patrons. Giovanni’s use of an isolated detail, a single figure, or a group copied from another image suggests that he was naturally drawn, by curiosity as well as respect, to the inventions of his fellow artists. Giovanni was pragmatic, and pragmatism opened him to solutions other than those of the great monuments of Sienese tradition. Indeed, it made him receptive to sources farther afield as well. On one occasion, when he depicted Saint Francis Appearing in the Chapter House at Arles (Fig. 7), he must have enjoyed the use of a careful drawing, probably his own, after the mural in the upper church at Assisi (Fig. 8).15 A comparison of the two reveals something of Giovanni’s independence and ingenuity in imitating. The similarities between the mural and Giovanni’s version are too obvious to require lengthy description. They extend to the modeling of the figures and to the drawing of their draperies. Yet the two works are hardly identical.

13

The connection was noted by Pope-Hennessy, Giovanni di Paolo, 1938, p. 29. For the diptych see John G. Johnson Collection: Catalogue of Italian Paintings, Philadelphia, 1966, pp. 71–72 (no. 153). 14 For the Lorenzettian Crucifixion attributed to Benedetto di Bindo see Torriti, 1990, pp. 150–153; for Giovanni’s Crucifixion in the Lindenau Museum, Altenburg see C. Strehlke in Painting in Renaissance Siena, pp. 172–175 and R. Oertel, Frühe italienische Malerei in Altenburg: Beschreibender Katalog der Gemälde des 13. bis 16. Jahrhunderts im Staatlichen Lindenau-Museum, Berlin, 1961, pp. 90–92 15 Finding no other Giottesque contact in Giovanni’s work, Pope-Hennessy (1938, p. 74) believed that the painter probably got this composition “a seconda mano” but one may observe another borrowing in Giovanni’s Way to Calvary in Philadelphia, where architectural elements in the background depend upon the Master of St. Cecilia’s Liberation of the Heretic from the Franciscan cycle in the upper church at Assisi. Strehlke (Painting in Renaissance Siena, pp. 172–175) noted similarities between the buildings depicted by the Master of St. Cecilia and Giovanni di Paolo but did not suggest a direct borrowing.

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7. Giovanni di Paolo, Saint Francis Apperaring in the Chapter House at Arles, Siena, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo.

8. Master of Saint Francis, Saint Francis Apperaring in the Chapter House at Arles, Assisi, San Francesco.

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Giovanni has shuffled some of the figures, for instance placing Saint Anthony flush to the left and bringing some of the brethren closer about his feet. A more significant seating change results from Giovanni’s decision, possibly occasioned by the horizontal format of the panel, to lengthen the bench, which now seats four; however, this revision did not require adding a sixteenth disciple. Rather than invent unnecessarily, or to put it in the ameliorative, rather than waste unnecessarily, the new friar on the end is none other than the excised left half of a Janus-like pair seated in the center foreground of the mural. But Giovanni’s revision goes beyond rearranging place cards or cutting and pasting. His is a stylistic and dramatic reinterpretation. He suggests the ampleness but not the weight of the original figures, and in general his version forfeits the gravity of its source, wherein the bulky figures seem to have sunk to the bottom of the scene like rocks in a tank. Giovanni’s figures, above all the two saints, tend to be slighter and daintier, and they occupy a space that is airier and vaguer. Moreover, there is about Giovanni’s scene an animation and tension achieved in part by giving the drama a new focus. The mural at Assisi adopts a low viewpoint and an earthbound outlook that is more comfortable with solid fact than with mystery. The miracle is suggested less by what it is than by what it is not, for Francis seems to float only because Anthony clearly does not. By contrast, Giovanni’s work lifts the viewer into the air to share the saint’s elevated position. As he opens his arms, the light on a distant wall glows, the arch of the doorway seems to spread, and the space around him swells. The bolder, tauter, and more dynamic effect heightens the feeling of tension and the sense of wonder. Although Giovanni’s treatment of the figures in the Apparition at Arles may seem to diminish the geometric character of the mural, Giovanni in fact imposed a different geometric structure upon the scene.16 In the mural the diagonal lines of the roof and the bench eventually converge at a point eyelevel with the seated friars who flank the entrance. Giovanni of course raised that point to the line of the window sills and Saint Francis’ waist. Further departing from his source, Giovanni then caused the diagonal moldings above the heads of Saints Anthony and Francis to converge precisely at the end of the bench and thus created a geometric focus to balance the

16

Pope-Hennessy asserted that “inside the general scheme variations are used to counteract the inherent geometricism of Giotto’s composition.” See Pope-Hennessy, 1938, p. 74.

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figure of Saint Anthony. Reminding us of the patterned landscapes for which he is justly famous, this feeling for geometry is characteristic of Giovanni, but it also shows that when he went about the business of organizing a composition, even one invented by another, he was no craven slave to his source but recast it according to the dictates of his style and his needs. While on the whole early fifteenth-century Siena was provincial and conservative, the city could hardly remain unaware or untouched by events in rival Florence. For his part, Giovanni was a painter whose art may be seen as a metaphor of the Sienese painter’s dilemma, for it reflects a tension between urbanity and insularity, between traditionalism and modernity, between individuality and self-effacement. As his pictures show, Giovanni must have made drawings of numerous contemporary works of art, both Sienese and Florentine. He copied Jacopo della Quercia’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Fonte Gaia, and he evidently made drawings of the bronze reliefs for the baptistry font produced in the 1420s by Quercia along with Ghiberti and Donatello. Although apparently uninterested in the qualities we associate with the new movement, Giovanni was able to trade on the novelty and effectiveness of these solutions when at last he incorporated them into his paintings. Doubtless Giovanni preserved the drawings in his collection, for he reused and exploited them as a handy resource. His modus operandi is suggested by his borrowings from one of his greatest sources, Gentile da Fabriano. When Gentile arrived in Siena in 1425, he had already enjoyed triumphs in Brescia, Venice, and Florence; now, as one of the most famous and successful painters in Italy, he was on his way to Rome at the invitation of the pope.17 His presence and activity in Siena must have been a signal event, and local painters were bound to take notice; but rather than the envy Vasari so often attributed to his fellow artists, Giovanni appears to have been filled with admiration. Although Gentile’s great work in Siena, the Madonna del Campo, is lost and its influence, therefore, conjectural, Giovanni was quickly and deeply struck by the foreigner’s art. The older master’s influence is manifest as early as 1426 in the Entombment from Giovanni’s Pecci Altarpiece. As Christiansen has observed, Giovanni adopted from Gentile more than the device of the dramatic cast shadow.

17

For Gentile’s career see K. Christiansen, Gentile da Fabriano, Ithaca (New York),

1982.

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9. Gentile da Fabriano, Quaratesi Madonna, London, National Gallery, Collection of Her Majesty the Queen.

18

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Gentile must have been the source for the composition and certain figures, because they were repeated in a panel by Gentile’s earliest Florentine follower, Arcangelo di Cola.18 These early drawings after Gentile apparently had an ongoing usefulness, serving as sources of inspiration for paintings in the decades to come. Indeed, Gentile exercised a powerful and lasting impression on Giovanni, who was surely attracted by the formal qualities of the older master’s art as well as by its richly inventive content. When Giovanni went to Florence in the early 1430s, a trip documented only by the internal evidence of his paintings, he must have sought out and made drawings of Gentile’s two altarpieces there. The influence of the Quaratesi Madonna (Fig. 9) is noticeable in the style as well as the imagery of a picture possibly painted in 1436 for the church of San Francesco in Siena (Fig. 10) and now in the Collection of the Monte dei Paschi, but even more explicit is an Adoration of the Magi (Fig. 11), part of a predella dating from the 1430s, which, like a companion Nativity and a Presentation of Christ in the Temple, is derived directly from Gentile’s

Christiansen, Gentile, 1982, p. 50.

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10. Giovanni di Paolo, Madonna, Siena, Monte dei Paschi.

11. Giovanni di Paolo, Adoration of the Magi, Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art.

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1423 Strozzi Altarpiece in Florence (Fig. 12).19 Giovanni’s drawings of the latter work must have been annotated as well as detailed, because his paintings reproduce not only the compositions and the play of draperies, whose softness takes us far from the incisive drawing and gemlike surfaces of Giovanni’s Simonesque early works, but even many of the colors. Although Giovanni was faithful to Gentile’s Adoration, the much smaller scale of his painting no doubt forced him to omit many particulars. The way he juggled some of what is left suggests that his approach was additive. It is possible that, beyond a drawing of the whole composition, he made sketches of various sections of Gentile’s painting (Fig. 13) and then reconstructed them in a way different from the original, for the monkey riding a camel’s back finds himself dangerously within reach of a leopard, and the lavishly dressed rider in a red hat no longer consorts with an equally aristocratic companion in a gold-brimmed cap but with the modestly outfitted figure, perhaps a servant, who originally appeared behind him. Elsewhere the results are less happy. The mastiff, who in Gentile’s painting turns his muzzled head to keep an eye on the movements of a restive horse, retains his attitude but, since the horse is gone, not his motivation. If Giovanni was taken with the seemingly countless naturalistically observed passages in Gentile’s picture, he did not replicate them. Nor did he fully capture the dazzling splendor and superabundance of that inexhaustible cornucopia of glittering and luminous forms. Above all, what he shared was Gentile’s feeling for nature’s poetry, but unlike Gentile, who was capable of darkness or mystery, Giovanni’s simpler heart saw nature as untarnished and ever-benign. In his version of the Adoration the golden-bulbed bushes flourish, the cave swells, and Gentile’s sometimes dangerous landscape gives way to a simple patchwork of open fields and ribbony paths that are sewn into hills touched by the light of a bird-sprinkled sky. It is a child’s wellgoverned country, and its naiveté imbues the story of the kings from afar with the innocence of a fairytale. One can well understand how Giovanni seems not to know that in the real worlds of the jungle and human society a leopard might kill a monkey and a nobleman might snub an inferior. Giovanni’s later depictions of the Adoration of the Magi suggest that his first drawings in turn inspired new ones or continued to serve as a creative

19 For this predella and its component panels, including the Nativity (Rome, Pinacoteca Vaticana) and the Presentation of Christ in the Temple (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art), see Strehlke in Painting in Renaissance Siena, pp. 189–191.

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12. Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi, 1423 Florence, Uffizi.

12. Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi, (detail), Florence, Uffizi.

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14. Giovanni di Paolo, Adoration of the Magi, Washington, National Gallery.

resource. In the process an original drawing became separated from the moment when it was done and came to belong to a second, later moment, when Giovanni saw it afresh. The group including the Holy Family reappears, now reversed, in a predella panel in Washington from circa 1445 (Fig. 14). Although the poses and even the play of folds of the later figures depend upon his earlier work, Giovanni’s calligraphy is simpler. The complicated patterns and profusion of forms found in his Gentilesque version give way to something far more chaste. Apparently to better achieve this, he returned to his earliest known Adoration, a painting now in Rotterdam but which once formed part of a predella from the 1430s.20 The Rotterdam Adoration is itself a complex work that reflects knowledge of Gentile, Sassetta, and the late trecento painter Bartolo di Fredi, whose large and impressive Adoration, which may have stood in the Sienese Cathedral, Giovanni certainly knew and perhaps copied,21 drawing inspiration from the ill-featured groom and the horse shown from the rear. However, in the case of the Washington picture 20 For the Adoration of the Magi, which is now in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, see E. Taselaar in H. van Os, J. van Asperen de Boer, C. de Jong-Janssen, and C. Wiethoff, eds., The Early Sienese Paintings in Holland, Florence and The Hague, 1989, pp. 66–72. 21 For Bartolo di Fredi’s Adoration of the Magi see P. Torriti, La Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena: I dipinti, Genoa, 1990, pp. 112–114. Torriti does not accept the suggestion, put for-

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what Giovanni wanted was the frieze-like figural arrangement, now looser than in the Kröller-Müller Adoration; moreover, in consulting his earlier version he also appropriated and modified the figure who stands, hands at his waist, at the edge of the scene. As an artist Giovanni di Paolo was acquisitive, retrospective, and literal,22 using the same designs over and again, but such was the power of his imagination that he could impress his own personality upon borrowed goods. Gentile’s Virgin, Child, and two of the magi reappear yet again, during the 1460s — that is, decades after their first appearance in Giovanni’s work — in a predella panel in the Linsky Collection at the Metropolitan (Fig. 15), but in the later version the worldly spectacle of Gentile’s work is stripped away. The scene, now set in a poor stable, is humble, touching, and intimate. Deprived of their originally magnificent context, the figures belong to Giovanni, their adoptive parent, more than to Gentile, their natural one.

15. Giovanni di Paolo, Adoration of the Magi, New York, Metropolitan Museum.

ward by M. Moran (“Bartolo di Fredi e 1’Altare dei Fornai del 1368: nuova interpretazione di un documento,” Prospettiva, IV, 1976, p. 30), that Bartolo’s work was painted for the Sienese Cathedral. 22 Giovanni’s literal way of thinking is stressed by Pope-Hennessy, “Giovanni di Paolo,” 1988, pp. 6–7.

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16. Giovanni di Paolo, Presentation of the Virgin, Siena, Pinacoteca.

17. Giovanni di Paolo, Presentation of the Virgin, formerly London, Collection of Lord Bearsted.

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18. Gentile da Fabriano, Presentation of Christ in the Temple (1423), Paris, Louvre.

The changes in style between the Pecci Altarpiece of 1426 and the Linsky Adoration present the image of an artist of almost baffling complexity and mercurial changeableness. Sandberg-Vavalà called him a chameleon,23 and so he was, but he was also an alchemist, forever combining seemingly contrary elements. As Brandi observed, a panel depicting the Presentation of the Virgin (Fig. 16) depends ultimately upon the Lorenzettian fresco on the facade of the Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala and directly upon Lippo Vanni’s mural and San Leonardo al Lago, which Giovanni, who also worked for the convent, knew first-hand.24 Giovanni’s panel recalls the late trecento work in the design of the hexagonal temple, and the connection between the two is made explicit by the figures of Joachim and an adjacent man casting a backward glance. In the mural, however, the man looks toward another bearded figure whom Giovanni has not bothered to include. Instead, Giovanni introduced beggars, who, like the floral borders just beyond, were inspired by Gentile da Fabriano. Joachim and his companion, figures descended from Lippo Vanni, as well as the figure of Anna reappear in another version from the later 1430s25 (Fig. 17), but now, thanks to 23 E. Sandberg-Vavalà, Sienese Studies: The Development of the School of Painting of Siena, Florence, 1953, p. 300. 24 Brandi, Giovanni di Paolo, 1947, pp. 21–22. For Lippo Vanni’s murals at San Leonardo al Lago see E. Carli, Lippo Vanni a San Leonardo al Lago, Florence, 1969. 25 According to a note on the photograph preserved in the Offner archive at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, the panel, previously recorded in the Bearsted Collection, was once also owned by Otto N. Kahn.

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19. Giovanni di Paolo, Purification of the Virgin (1447–1449), Siena, Pinacoteca.

20. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, Florence, Uffizi.

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21. Giovanni di Paolo, Presentation of Christ in the Temple, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Giovanni’s kaleidoscopic vision, they are joined by two stylish ladies from the predella of Gentile’s Strozzi Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Fig. 18). Giovanni applied his method of extracting, excising, and recombining elements from various sources to large, important paintings as well as to small ones. Figures borrowed from Gentile thus intrude into subjects for which they were never intended. The most famous example is the Purification of the Virgin (Fig. 19) that Giovanni painted between 1447–49 for an altar in Santa Maria della Scala.26 The patrons of this large panel, the guild of the Pizzicaiuoli or meat picklers and pork butchers, may well have requested a work in the form of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s altarpiece (Fig. 20) for the nearby Cathedral, but despite his literalism Giovanni was too independent to give them a mere duplicate. Already at an earlier moment in the late 1430s, when Giovanni was most strongly under Gentile’s intoxicating spell, he had painted a version after Gentile’s composition (Fig. 21) but had avoided turning out a 26 For this work see Strehlke in Painting in Renaissance Siena, pp. 218–224; H. van Os with a contribution by G. Aronow, Sienese Altarpieces: 1215–1460, Groningen, 1990, II, p.122–128.

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simple copy of Gentile in favor of a modern work colored by the gilded lens of tradition. The figures and most of the setting derive from Gentile, but less obvious elements — the tiled floor, the inlaid altar table and the priest standing behind it, as well as the spaciousness of the temple — are evocative recollections of features in Ambrogio’s painting. A decade or so later in the Pizzicaiuoli Altarpiece the relationship between the past and the present has become more balanced, and at the same time the whole is more strongly personal. While Giovanni retained many features of Ambrogio’s architecture, he crowned the temple with a fanciful dome reminiscent of the Florentine cathedral, and while forgoing many of Ambrogio’s decorative embellishments, such as the inlays and the star-studded blue vaults, he sought to animate the architecture and indeed the scene in general. The perspective rushes back at a faster speed; the floor tiles proliferate, pulsating with a new-found insistence; and the dragons crawling on the central arch grow to a fearsome weight and, extending their territory, take over the lateral arches as well. Into this bolder, more energetic architecture, colored in a brilliant, intense palette closer to Gentile than to Ambrogio, he introduced some of Gentile’s figures, actors who are more lively than the trecento master’s. Yet, Ambrogio, not Gentile, was the source for the arrangement and choice, if not the design, of most of the figures: the priest in the background and two other men are taken directly from Ambrogio, but even the Virgin’s two female companions, the less visible of whom is a variation upon the profile figure in Ambrogio’s panel rather than the woman shown in three-quarter face in Gentile’s painting, get a better view of things as they are now placed directly behind the Virgin, while poor Joseph pulls up the rear as in Ambrogio. The carefulness, subtlety, and unpredictability of Giovanni’s choices are evident in his treatment of the Christ Child. This figure is a complex synthesis in itself, for while he sucks his finger as in Ambrogio’s Purification, he kicks and squirms as in the Ambrogian altarpiece in San Pietro alle Scale (Fig. 22). But the Child is not the only figure sewn, like Dr. Frankenstein’s creation, from different parts: while the Virgin is Gentile’s, she holds a cloth very similar to that held by Ambrogio’s; Joseph appears to be a free variation of both Gentile’s and Ambrogio’s figures; and the prophetess Anna, while shown in three-quarter view as in Ambrogio, is otherwise drawn from Gentile except for one small but significant detail: her pointing hand. Despite its complex, not to say tortured, genesis, the Pizzicaiuoli Altarpiece is an original creation, rather than an empty pastiche. Possessing

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22. Follower of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Altarpiece, Siena, San Pietro alle Scale.

neither the majestic harmony of Ambrogio’s painting nor the gentle intimacy of Gentile’s, Giovanni’s work projects a nervous excitement not found in its sources. And it was Giovanni’s own version and the drawings he must have kept that later served as the basis for yet another depiction of the subject datable to the 1460s (Fig. 23), but it is typical of Giovanni that the spirit of the later, less crowded and only slightly smaller work in turn owes little to its chief source, his own Pizzicaiuoli Altarpiece. Rather, it shares the chaste simplicity of the contemporary Linsky Adoration of the Magi and three companion panels that are so close in style to it that they must have once served as its predella.27 We are far from the lavishness and brilliance of Gentile, yet in designing this late Purification Giovanni must have referred once again to his original drawing after Gentile, for he returned to the simplified architecture of the earlier work. Instead of the arched openings found beyond Joseph and Anna in the Pizzicaiuoli Altarpiece, he put up walls 27 Strehlke independently suggested that the predella reconstructed by Pope-Hennessy (“Giovanni di Paolo,” 1988, p. 31) and including the Linsky Adoration (along with a Nativity in the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, a Christ among the Doctors in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and a Crucifixion at Christ Church, Oxford) originally stood below Giovanni’s late Purification of the Virgin from the Conservatorio di San Pietro in Colle Val d’Elsa and now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena. See Strehlke in Painting in Renaissance Siena, New York, 1988, p. 209–210.

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23. Giovanni di Paolo, Purification of the Virgin, Siena, Pinacoteca.

as in his version after Gentile; moreover, he made the lateral arches pointed, and he outfitted the arch of his nave and the first two window arches with a simpler form of the Gothic tracery found in his Gentilesque predella. That the late Purification was a rethinking of the Pizzicaiuoli Altarpiece is further suggested by the fact that for the prophetess Anna Giovanni returned to Ambrogio’s figure. Although he could easily have gone to the Cathedral to make a new drawing, it is more likely that as with the other changes Giovanni consulted the existing drawing in his collection. There is, however, usually nothing automatic or mechanical about Giovanni’s method. His collection was a living, growing organism, in which ideas took on an internal life of their own, perpetuating themselves and giving birth to others. A splendid Coronation of the Virgin (Fig. 24), dating from the 1450s and now in the Metropolitan, clearly depends upon an earlier one from 1445 in the Sienese church of Sant’Andrea (Fig. 25).28 Especially close are the figures of Christ and the Madonna, whose draperies 28

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For these works see Strehlke in Renaissance Painting in Siena, pp. 200–204.

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24. Giovanni di Paolo, Coronation of the Virgin, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

25. Giovanni di Paolo, Coronation of the Virgin (1445), Siena, Sant’Andrea.

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26. Shop of Giovanni di Paolo, Madonna Enthroned, Poggioferro, Parrochiale.

27. Giovanni di Paolo, Annunciation (1445), Rome, Pinacoteca Vaticana.

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28. Giovanni di Paolo, Annunciation, Washington, National Gallery.

are so similar in design if not in character that they can have been reproduced only with the aid of a drawing. But the Coronation does not spring fullblown from the sketchbook of the artist. It is more than a variation or a partial copy. It is part of a rich fabric of interwoven ideas. In Giovanni’s art a picture can project forward and also backward in time. It might be related by various degrees of affinity and consanguinity to a chain of sources that filled the painter’s sketchbook and teased his imagination. Just as the musicmaking angels in the New York painting later reappeared in a different context, that is, an ugly and poorly preserved Madonna Enthroned (Fig. 26) painted (one must hope) by Giovanni’s shop,29 the Virgin in the two Coronations is something of a displaced person herself. She is a reversed, enlarged, and embellished version of a Madonna from an Annunciation (Fig. 27) dated, like the earlier of the two Coronations, 1445. The source for both is yet another Annunciation (Fig. 28) dating from the later 1430s and now in Washington. The latter picture in turn reflects knowledge of 29

The connection between the angels in the Coronation and the altarpiece at Poggioferro was also observed by Strehlke, Painting in Renaissance Siena, p. 204.

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Angelico, who in his famous Annunciation in Cortona took up the idea of combining Gabriel’s visit to the Second Eve with the tragedy of the first woman’s expulsion from paradise. For the story of the Expulsion, however, Giovanni turned to Jacopo della Quercia’s relief from the Fonte Gaia, which he apparently garbled, because here, as well as in the famous Creation of 1445,30 one of Adam’s arms takes the position Quercia gave to Eve’s. But Quercia and Angelico do not exhaust Giovanni’s sources for this remarkable pictorial palimpsest. In keeping the Gentilesque character of the rest of the predella he decorated the roof of the Virgin’s house with raised gold tondi of a kind found in Gentile’s Strozzi predella as well as in his own version of it, but the source for the roof itself is unexpected: the unusual structure is taken from the Franciscan cycle in the upper church at Assisi (Fig. 29). The Washington picture, that complex concoction of disparate and seemingly irreconcilable ideas, in turn was part of the genetic makeup of Giovanni’s two Coronations and several Annunciations,31 for even in the case of a familiar subject, such as the Annunciation, inventing figures and a composition ex novo was not Giovanni’s usual practice. At a time when artists thought in terms of pictorial types and worked for a public not so fastidious to penalize them for it, drawings preserved success and provided a starting point for new departures. For Giovanni drawings must have had enormous practical value as labor-saving devices. Like Pisanello, he may well have owned drawings of such seemingly minor details as brocade designs, as well as others of figures and compositions. When it came to producing a painting, particularly one to be delegated to assistants, Giovanni might have found it easier and safer, if one may borrow a twentieth-century term, to recycle. When a Saint Louis of Toulouse from a polyptych dated 1453 (Fig. 30) served as the basis for the design of a Saint Augustine from a virtually contemporary polyptych dated the following year (Fig. 31), it may have been

30 For the Creation and its related panels see Strehlke in Renaissance Painting in Siena, pp. 192–200. 31 In particular, one may note an Annunciation that is depicted on a section of an embroidered altar frontal; originally from Santa Maria della Scala, the embroidery is now preserved in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo of Siena (see D. Gallavotti Cavallero, Lo Spedale di Santa Maria della in Siena: Vicenda di una committenza artistica [Pisa, 1985], 243–46 and fig. 236). Although recently classified as anonymous Northern workmanship, the design of the Annunciation is attributable, as Strehlke noted independently (Painting in Renaissance Siena, 52 and 60 n. 76), to none other than Giovanni di Paolo. In addition to the building, particularly the now-familiar roof, the circle of angels where god the Father dispatching

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29. Master of Saint Francis, Dream of Innocent III, Assisi, San Francesco.

30. Giovanni di Paolo, Polyptych (1453), Siena, Pinacoteca.

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31. Giovanni di Paolo, Polyptych (1454), New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

as much a matter of saving energy as anything else. At the very least, such a method had the virtue of efficiency. Gabriel brings to mind the cosmic spheres in Giovanni’s Creation in the Metropolitan. And the garden, no longer the wild tangle of the earlier Annunciation and other panels but instead an orderly carpet, perhaps so designed to facilitate the task of embroidering, recalls the floor beneath the Pecci Madonna of 1426. Such parallels might at first suggest an early date were it not that the interior of the Virgin’s house comes closest to spaces in Giovanni’s famous series illustrating the life of Saint Catherine of Siena, a series dating from the 1460s. Even more persuasive is the relationship between the principal figures and those in a late Annunciation wrongly appended to a large and grotesque picture from the 1470s (Torriti, La Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena, 238–42, fig. 301). In the end the evidence argues that the embroidery is a mature work dating from the 1460s, and in fact a document of April 12, 1464 records that Giovanni di Paolo was paid forty lire for producing designs of stories of the Virgin to be embroidered for the sacristy of Santa Maria della Scala (C. Brandi, Documenti e commenti, 84–85). The Annunciation is probably the result of that commission. More important to the present discussion, it is linked in specific and sometimes surprising ways to both Giovanni’s earlier and contemporary imagery.

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32. Giovanni di Paolo, Crucifixion (detail), San Leonardo al Lago.

Nowhere is Giovanni’s essentially retrospective, literal, additive, but surprisingly flexible approach more readily visible than in his many Crucifixions. These are too numerous to be considered in full here, but as Pope-Hennessy has recently pointed out, certain figures or, to be more accurate, certain poses in Giovanni’s representations of this universal drama reappear over and again without necessarily losing their force or persuasiveness.32 One of the most often repeated is a figure who locks her fingers above her head in a highly expressive gesture of uncontrolled despair. She appears as one of the Maries in Giovanni’s remarkable mural at San Leonardo al Lago (Fig. 32); elsewhere, and with success, she is the Virgin; nor is the figure, including the play of its drapery any less effective even when, having undergone a sex change, it appears, reversed, as Saint John the Evangelist (Fig. 33). The pose was virtually foolproof, and Giovanni probably exploited it out of practicality as well as conviction. It remains

32

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33. Giovanni di Paolo, Crucifixion (detail), Siena, San Pietro a Ovile.

34. Follower of Giovanni di Paolo, Crucifixion, Siena, Santo Stefano alla Lizza.

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legible and communicative in the poorest settings, even in a Crucifixion (Fig. 34) so weak that according to Pope-Hennessy one cannot “believe that Giovanni di Paolo paid much attention to its execution.”33 Perhaps he felt no need. Safe in the knowledge that familiar, tested poses assured a measure of success regardless of the execution, he adhered to a method, seemingly made to bedevil the art historian, that could help even the least talented drudge in his shop or following. But Giovanni’s method had its weakness, and of course the painter suffered failures, alas, with increasing frequency as the years mounted and as his peregrine curiosity waned. Although his healthy productivity suggests that his work satisfied a certain audience, one has no way of knowing how contemporaries responded to any of his works, even to an important altarpiece such as one Giovanni completed in 1463 at the behest of Pope Pius II. In the eyes of modern critics the picture in the Cathedral of Pienza has never been regarded as a compelling achievement. It is easy to see why, but more than mere failure of technique, the painting exposes the limitations of Giovanni’s way of making images. The painting is one of a series of altarpieces designed for a humanist pope, who had had his cathedral built in the new Renaissance style and ordered pictures designed all’antica.34 Even a painter as resolutely Gothic and vernacular as Giovanni, who was probably no Latin scholar and who showed little apparent interest in antiquity, must have recognized the classicizing taste of his patron and the classicizing context of the commission. Either he could, like Sano di Pietro, ignore these special circumstances or, like the other papal painters, Matteo di Giovanni and Vecchietta, confront them. Giovanni the ever-adaptable, the ever-resourceful attempted the latter. The figure of Christ in the Pienza lunette (Fig. 35) is unlike any other in Giovanni’s oeuvre. Instead of the ectomorph in an earlier version in the Vatican35, the sacrificed body is that of a muscular nude, and the head is more forcefully foreshortened than in the earlier figure, whose head incidentally is a detail borrowed from Giovanni’s Pecci Deposition of 1426. Like the iconography of the Virgin adoring the child on her lap, which is found in fully Renaissance pictures by painters such as Alesso Baldovinetti, 33

Pope-Hennessy, 1938, p. 76. For a full discussion of the altarpieces of Pienza Cathedral see van Os, Sienese Altarpieces: 1215–1460, vol. II, pp. 193–214. 35 For this work see Strehlke in Renaissance Painting in Siena, pp. 172–175. 34

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35. Giovanni di Paolo, Altarpiece (1463), Pienza, Cathedral.

the figure of Christ may have struck a modern note, but Giovanni’s bow to modernity was meretricious. Faced with the Renaissance problem of a unified field in the main panel, Giovanni’s way of organizing the composition remains rooted in the past. The result is incoherent. The attending saints stand on the wobbly perspective of a floor decorated in a pattern borrowed from Sassetta.36 Although they are brought close to the Child, they are somehow cut off from him and each other. Raising his arms as he steps 36

See for instance the large Madonna and Child (no. 325) in the Pinacoteca, Siena, illustrated in Torriti, 1990, p. 176.

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forward, Saint Francis seems to miss the object of his adoration, and Saint Clare, who is drawn directly from the design for a figure in Giovanni’s 1454 Polyptych in the Metropolitan, stands inexplicably isolated from the others. Digging into his old bag of tricks, Giovanni treated a Renaissance panel as if it were a Gothic polyptych, but what worked for his Altarpiece of 1453, which in fact shows Saint Francis in a similar, albeit reversed pose, here produced altogether different results: a case of the emperor’s new clothes. But more than the inadequacy of Giovanni di Paolo’s conservative and introspective method of picture-making, the Pienza Altarpiece exposes a mentality unsuited to the intellectual challenge of the moment. Giovanni confronted a world of clarity, rationality, and measure, but his was an art given to irresolution, irrationality, and the immeasurable. Paradoxically, his deliciously fantastic paintings were the result of a self-conscious, literalist approach, an approach that functioned according to the rules of an oldfashioned game long played in Siena, and as long as Giovanni could produce a Gothic picture, he was resourceful enough to weave his old magic. By about 1470 the septuagenarian painter probably labored against weakening eyesight and enfeeblement;37 nevertheless, under the right circumstances success could still be his, as in an extraordinary panel of the Last Judgment (Fig. 36). Evoking the vague and distant inspiration of Fra Angelico, Paradise is a place of oddly muted joy, an unearthly place where rabbits nestle under violets the size of human heads and where souls, almost dwarfed by pinks

36. Giovanni di Paolo, Last Judgment (detail), Siena, Pinacoteca.

37

Giovanni himself asserts his weakening physical condition in a tax declaration dated 1478: “Appreso sono vechio et non posso più lavorare perché la vista mene manchata et non vecho [veggo] molto.” See Brandi, Documenti e commenti, pp. 90–91.

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37. Giovanni di Paolo, Paradise (1445), New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

nearly as large as umbrellas, still seem to wear death’s pall in their ashen faces. The Blessed have seen its like before, for most of them are probably based on drawings Giovanni made some twenty-five years earlier for a Paradise from an altarpiece of 1445 (Fig. 37). The handicaps of age posed no obvious impediment, for here Giovanni was painting with practiced hands the type of picture he did best, and once again he could turn inward to himself and let his imagination take flight on the wings of those familiar drawings, collected over the course of a lifetime, that were among the tools of his craft and an abiding resource.38 38

A slightly different version of this paper was first presented at the Metropolitan Museum as part of a symposium, which I co-organized along with Keith Christiansen, in conjunction with the exhibition, “Painting in Renaissance Siena.” I am grateful to the Metropolitan Museum for making the symposium possible and to Keith Christiansen for inviting me to participate.

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The Music of Devotion: Image, Voice, and the Imagination in a Madonna of Humility by Domenico di Bartolo*

I

N the fifteenth century, both in Siena as well as in Florence, the enhanced ability of painters to represent the incidents of the visible world abetted the affective power of religious images. Illusion, one might say, was devotion’s greatest pleasure. Projecting itself toward those devouring receptacles that are our eyes, an image could stir the imagination and draw the believer into itself and past the realm of sense toward contemplation of things spiritual.1 In the transit from the particular to the infinite, visual sensations captured the eye’s attention, but they were merely the most salient features of that passage. In this regard, a Madonna of Humility (93 x 59.5 cm.), painted in 1433 by the Sienese painter Domenico di Bartolo di Ghezzi (ca. 1400–1444), is one of the most inventive and enthralling devotional * A version of this essay was delivered in 1998, at the annual meeting of the College Art Association, in Toronto. I am indebted to Dott.ssa Anna Maria Guiducci, Dott.ssa Elisabetta Razzi, and Andrea Campbell. 1 Just as paintings encouraged the viewer to pray, prayer might manufacture sensations and images in the mind after the fashion of Margherita Porete (d. 1310), a female mystic who, as part of her spiritual regimen, “dipinse una figura dinanzi alli occhi dela mente sua, la quale rapresentava a lei la similitudine del suo diletto. . . .” The passage is taken from an account of the life of Margherita, who, though now little-known, may be regarded as the leading proponent of quietism in the Middle Ages. Born in Hainault, she became a Beguine and developed ideas that were to have a strong appeal. Between 1296 and 1308, she was put on trial because of ideas promulgated in her devotional treatise Le Mirouer des simples ames et que seulement demeurent envouloir et desir d’amour, which the bishop of Valenciennes put to the flames to no avail. In 1308 her persistence landed her in prison in Paris, where she was tried before an inquisition that rewarded her noble resolve by burning her as

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images from the early Renaissance (Fig. 1).2 By far the most delicately crafted work in Domenico’s oeuvre, the panel is equally refined in its content. Taking up the topoi of divine light and angelic music, Domenico develops and interweaves these two themes into a visual sonata on the symbolic manifestations of illumination and prayer. In Domenico’s Madonna of Humility a formal symmetry between the strip of green beneath the Virgin’s feet and the strip of gold above her brow, suggests a symbolic symmetry, namely, the dual status of the woman who is at once an earthly woman and a heavenly queen. Two cushions raise her imperceptibly from a grassy carpet, whose flowery lushness is an analog to her own fertility and where sweet-scented violets and daisies, both among her epithets,3 symbolically betoken the beauty of her humility. Adorned with a heretic on June 1, 1310. Despite all this, her ideas survived her and were spread by way of various manuscripts, including translations into Italian and English. See Scrittori di religione del Trecento, volgarizzamenti, ed. by G. De Luca, ed. Scrittori di religione del Trecento, volgarizzamenti (Turin, 1977), 4: 739–40. 2 For Domenico di Bartolo see C. Strehlke in Painting in Renaissance Siena,Exh. cat. (New York, 1988): 249–257; “Domenico di Bartolo,” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1986); E. Sandberg-Vavalà, Sienese Studies: The Development of the School of Painting of Siena (Florence, 1953), 246–254; J. Pope-Hennessy, “The Development of Realistic Painting in Siena,” The Burlington Magazine, 84, no. 494 (1944): 110–119 and no. 495 (1944): 139–145; H. Wagner, Domenico di Bartolo (Göttingen, 1898). Wagner, who dubs Domenico “the first Renaissance painter in Siena,” places him in an historically flawed and disadvantageous position by assessing his accomplishments in relation to Florentine art. Reflecting a view that asserts the primacy of Florence, he compares Domenico to such Florentine artists as Filippo Lippi, Andrea del Castagno, and Domenico Veneziano. By contrast, Sandberg-Vavalà rightly insists on Domenico’s essentially Gothic and Sienese character, while also regarding Domenico’s career as a “parable of the great refusal of Siena as a school of painting towards the opportunity offered by the rapidly developing Renaissance.” On the painter’s Virgin of Humility, see G. Damiani in Una scuola per Piero: Luce, colore e prospettiva nella formazione fiorentina di Piero della Francesca, ed. L. Bellosi, Exh. cat. (Florence, 1992), 59–63; C. Strehlke, “La Madonna dell’Umiltà di Domenico di Bartolo e San Bernardino, Arte Cristiana, 72, no. 705 (1984): 381–390; “Domenico di Bartolo,” 19–41 and 215–216; P. Torriti, La Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena, i dipinti dal XII al XV secolo, (Genoa, 1980), 344–345; H. van Os, Marias Demut und Veherrlichung in der sienesischen malerei, (Gravenhage, 1969), 125; Sandberg-Vavalà, Sienese Studies,246–252; C. Brandi, Quattrocentisti senesi, (Milan, 1949), 263. 3 See Laude cortonesi dal secolo XIII al XV, (Florence, 1981), 1: 110 (lauda 6), which hails her as a “pulchra margarita.” In another (2: 200, lauda 49) she is hailed as “viola adornata” through whom the elect can hope to rest for all eternity in the “giardino de 1’amore” that is heaven. For the symbolic epithets of the Madonna see Y. Hirn, The Sacred Shrine: A Study of the Poetry and Art of the Catholic Church (London, 1912), 434–470, especially 437ff (flowers), 439 (daisy and violet).

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1. Domenico di Bartolo, Madonna of Humility, Pinacoteca, Siena.

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a star and gems that are, again, among her emblems, a halo and a crown proclaim her majesty. Cut of the same stuff as the golden field above her, the crown’s bejewelled spikes are formed into roses and lilies: not only do these flowers, too, refer to the Virgin, but they recall and then transform the humble blossoms at her feet. By means of such details, which reflect the realm of sense but also lift the worshipper toward that of the incorporeal, the panel draws the eye into itself and toward a place where both material and immaterial spaces converge. But even more than flowers, crown, and halo, another object may have originally magnified the effect of sensual delight many times more than Domenico’s gilded or painted forms — no ordinary object, but one capable of bewitching the viewer’s eye and making the luminary imagery of Domenico’s image almost magically concrete. Near the center of the Virgin’s chest one may observe, even in photographs of the panel, a shadow delineating the form of a circle, marked both by traces of what appear to be rays and by a hole that is at once its center and the precise point where the Virgin’s robe is gathered (Fig. 2). The physical evidence of the panel itself, the iconography of the painting, and Sienese pictorial tradition (not to mention sartorial common sense) suggest that an object was once attached to the panel and that it was a brooch, probably of rock crystal. The application of a pin encasing an actual gem was not unprecedented in Sienese or even in Tuscan painting, but as demonstrated by examples in the Pinacoteca of Siena alone, the practice of embellishing the surface of a painting with glass or gems was more common in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.4 In some instances mirrors, usually made of flat pieces of glass, were recessed into haloes5; in others deep cavities scooped into the 4 One should also note the evidence of sculpture: in the Pinacoteca of Siena, precisely in the same room with the panel attributed to Guido’s follower Dietisalvi di Speme, a wooden sculpture of a sainted bishop (St. Clement?) still preserves a piece of glass or a flat piece of crystal that is glued to the chest at a position appropriate to a brooch, even though the gesso that must have once enframed it is lost. Through the translucent surface of the applied glass or crystal one may read a painted crest. The Bargello in Florence preserves two other sculptures relevant to the discussion: 1. a Balia from c. 1390 by the Sienese Mariano d’Angelo Romanelli (Inv. 4 s.1.), which is embellished with a broach encasing a diamond-shaped piece of glass, possibly painted on the reverse of the glass or the surface of the sculpture; and a sixteenth-century Umbro-Marchigian Kneeling Madonna (Inv. 10 s.1.), which shows a long and surprisingly wide pin projecting from the center of the Madonna’s hem, where at some point a separate object was attached to the sculpture. 5 See the San Bernardino Madonna, illustrated in Torriti, La Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena, 12.

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2. Detail of Fig. 1.

wood imply the use of stones.6 Perhaps the most famous and inventive echo of this tradition is a mural rather than a panel, namely, Simone Martini’s Maestà in the Palazzo Pubblico, where the Virgin wears a rock crystal brooch that is pressed into the plaster and is surrounded by a gilded pastiglia setting.7 More relevant to the case of Domenico di Bartolo’s Madonna, however, is the example of a dugento panel from the circle of Guido da 6

See the dossal illustrated in ibid., 13. Chronologically closest to Domenico’s example are several panels dated ca. 1383–84 from Spinello Aretino’s altarpiece for the church of San Ponziano in Lucca. These include an Enthroned Madonna, now in the Fogg Art Museum, and two lateral panels depicting Saints Benedict and Ponziano, now in the Hermitage. In each panel rock crystals are set into brooches formed, as in Simone’s Maestà, of raised pastiglia. For this altarpiece see M. T. Filieri, ed., Sumptuosa tabula picta: Pittori a Lucca tra gotico e rinascimento, Exh. Cat. (Lucca, 1998), 139–42. 7

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3. Follower of Guido da Siena, Madonna and Child Enthroned, Pinacoteca, Siena.

Siena (Fig. 3)8. Rock crystal gems, still preserved in their original silver and copper settings, decorate the halo, while another serves as a bejewelled pin fastening the Virgin’s robe. The practice, perhaps rare but not unknown in fifteenth-century Sienese painting, sheds light on a little-appreciated aspect of Domenico di Bartolo’s art: his ability to fashion a hybrid of the unprecedented and the old, his ability to combine daring perspectival effects and features traditional to Sienese painting. In the case of the Madonna of Humility, the ancient convention of incorporating a tangible, light-refracting, starry gem into the physical body of a panel could hardly have been more metaphorically appropriate, for “cristallo splendente” was yet another image for the Madonna.9 Thus, Domenico transformed both things and the illusion of things into poetic figures. The 8 For this panel, now attributed to Dietisalvi di Speme, see Torriti, La Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena, 1990, 16. 9 See the lauda in G. Varanini, L. Banfi, and A. Burgio, eds., Laude cortonesi dal secolo XIII al XV, 2 vols. (Florence, 1981), 1: 131 (lauda 11); 2: 212 (lauda 53). The latter lauda

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4. Detail of Fig. 1.

presence of an unavoidably solid yet vaporously reflective object at the center of the painting would have been at once a figurative and a pictorial device: an assertion as well as inversion of the nature of truth and the viewer’s relationship to it. Such an object would have functioned as both a mirror reflecting physical things and a window illuminating spiritual ones. In the end, it would have served as a visual and symbolical opening through which the thoughtful viewer might enter the paradoxically animated yet immutable domain of the painting. While having a magnetic effect upon the eye, this luminous thing would have served as more than an ocular mechanism: by the power of its tangible presence as well as by its light-reflecting effect, this precious gem would have recast the luminary and stellar imagery of the painting in undeniably dazzling terms. Moreover, by asserting itself into our space, it would have emphatically acknowledged our physical presence and must have functioned as a rhetorical imperative, commanding us to “look.” Like the putative brooch, the flowery carpet upon which the Virgin sits, as well as her crown and halo, two banderoles, projected in perspective, affirm the viewer’s presence, draw the eye into the picture, and reinforce the pictorial imagery of the whole. One scroll lies at the Virgin’s feet and recedes from the threshold of our sight. A second (Fig. 4), borne on wondrous rose-

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colored wings, sails above the holy mother’s head toward the heavens and the fixed star inscribed within her halo. While one of these wings seems to protrude out of the panel and toward the viewer’s space, the other turns inward and momentarily hovers above an angel who joins his hands in prayer and looks heavenward. The latter’s intent eyes help propel the magical wings’ flight, and as we, the viewers, follow the trajectory of his attentive gaze, both the angel and the object of his stare situate us, too. As the shadowed ends of the scroll curl against the gold, first this way then that, the gently keening letters of an inscription address themselves to us.10 By means of perspective and, then, by means of words the two scrolls appeal to our sense of sight and thereby to our sense of sound and, ultimately, to our intellect. Each scroll, by virtue of its appearance and its content, assumes a distinct character in accordance with its position, its message, and its tone. In the end, these inscriptions, the one tilted and fixed the other shifting and spirited, not only reinforce the notion of the Virgin’s dual status as earthly mother and heavenly queen but also define the spiritual aspirations of the viewer. The one above is a salutation, recognizing and addressing the Virgin in a reverentially oblique way by figurative means rather than by name: AVE STELLA MARIS, GEMMAQUE PRETIOSA, “Hail Star of the Sea, Precious Gem.”11 Both of these hallowed metaphors of light, perhaps once asserted in visibly dramatic terms by a gem affixed to the Virgin’s bosom as well as by her crown and halo, were part of the vocabulary of a wide audience. Not only do they appear in secular poetry,12 but they are recurring images in Latin and vernacular laude or hymns, which during the Middle

repeats epithets found in other hymns and reflected in numerous paintings: regina sovrana, stella chiara, rosa olorosa, giardino ornato de frescho verdura. 10 Inscriptions (in this case each carried aloft on a single wing) are found in a fourteenthcentury allegorical mural in the Palazzo della Lana in Florence. Strehlke, “Domenico di Bartolo,” 24, claims that the wings are attached to the Virgin’s halo and interprets the invention as a reference to the Holy Spirit. 11 For epithets of the Virgin, specifically for those referring to her as a star and as a precious gem, see Hirn, The Sacred Shrine, 437 (precious stones) and 465 (star). 12 The Sienese poet Guido Guinizzelli (c. 1230–1276) combines the imagery of light and gems in a love poem, “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore.” In addition to the sun and a light whose “splendore fu lucente,/ né fu davanti ‘1 sole . . . ,” he mentions the virtue preserved “in petra prezïosa.” See E. Sanguineti, ed., Guido Guinizzelli, poesie, Milan, 1986; reprint, 1997), 22–24.

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Ages helped to embed “stella maris” and “gemma preciosa” into the popular consciousness.13 Moreover, in fifteenth-century Siena, as Carl Strehlke has persuasively argued, they were also echoed in the celebrated sermons of S. Bernardino.14 The imagery of light also informs the thoughts behind the words of the scroll placed at the Virgin’s feet, but here the voice is almost abject, entreating her to hear the pleas of those who kneel as beggars before her, their sovereign. Rephrasing the epithets voiced by the winged words above the Virgin’s crown, echoing their sound, and describing in abstract nomenclature the sensual features of the Virgin’s halo and adornments, the Latin inscription exclaims: O DECUS O SPETIES O LUX O STELLA SUPREMI ETERIS EXAUDI MISEROS FAMULOSQUE PRECANTES or “Oh Ornament! Oh Splendor! Oh Light! Oh Star of the Highest Ethereal Realm! Listen to the prayers of your miserable servants.”15 The words of this hexameter, praised for not only for the visual beauty of their classicizing script but also for the silvery sophistication of their poetical effect, are more the language of an invocation than a salutation. Rising with every phrase, the crescendo of this musical concatenation of metaphors, each more lofty than the first, conveys a gradual amplification of feeling and awe. Although the imagery is especially similar to the language of religious hymns, this yearning utterance differs from the first in its inflection, cadence, and, therefore, voice. Exalted in its imagery yet placed at the feet of the divine mother, the words of the inscription placed on the ground between the Virgin and the worshipper emphasize her elevated status as well as humanity’s debasement and dependency. The latter sentiments color the line that follows. Elegant in its euphonious internal rhyme16 but written in smaller characters, it records 13 The examples are too numerous to list. “Gemma pretïosisima” appears in a Cortonese lauda published in Laude Cortonesi dl secolo XIII al XV, 1: 100 (lauda 3: “Ave, donna santissima, regina potentissima!”). 14 For the influence of San Bernardino on the imagery of the painting see Strehlke, “La Madonna dell’Umiltá,” passim and “Domenico di Bartolo,” 15–41. For Bernardino’s use and interpretation of amarum mare see Strehlke, “Domenico di Bartolo,” 28. 15 See Strehlke, “Domenico di Bartolo,” 1986, 26–30. Strehlke emphasizes decus and speties as referring to the Virgin’s beauty, which is hers because of the beauty of the fruit of her womb. He aptly notes San Bernardino’s reference (Opera Omnia, 2: 380–381) to Psalm 45.2: “It is blessed in beauty (in decore), as in the Psalm — ‘Thou are fairer than the children of men.’” 16 Brandi, Quattrocentisti senesi, 263, remarked on the poetry of the full inscription, and this was amplified by Strehlke (1984, 385), who noted, in addition to the calculated metrical

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the words, presence, and stance of another supplicant: the painter himself. In singling himself out from the many by the symbolic identity of his name, Domenico calls unique attention to his body and his soul, but, as if in guarded compensation, he also shrinks his words, in effect lowering his voice to a verbal proskynesis or a decorous whisper of selfabasement: DOMINICUS DOMINI MATREM TE PINXIT ET ORAT. MCCCCXXXIII (“Mother of God, Domenico painted and prays to you. 1433”). Unlike all of the other inscriptions in the painting, this declaration is specific in time and singular in person. It identifies the image’s maker, who at a precise moment in time implicitly re-enters the space of the panel and humbly adds his prayers to the collective and constant appeal of humanity in general and of each passing viewer in particular. In their differing content and tone the various phrases in Domenico’s panel are comparable to a succession of distinct voices, and Domenico develops this idea into a visible theme, giving it its clearest expression, indeed, amplifying it, by means of the angels, who accompany the Madonna and who add their calls to the musically poetic prayers and praises of humanity. Crowding together, two peer over the Virgin’s shoulder and sing (Fig. 5), their physical conjunction giving visual form to the harmony of two voices blending in song.17 Looking upon the Christchild who is the common object of their separate gazes, their eyes, like their lips, act in concert as structure, the elision between supremi eteris as well as the juxtaposition of Dominicus with Domini. 17 The five angels, who encircle the Madonna and Child, abet the formal and symbolic symmetry of the painting, while enlarging upon its meaning, for it is they who mediate between gold and grass, heaven and earth, eternity and an abiding present. These soulful, endearing beings “press closely,” in the words of Sandberg-Vavalà’s acute description, “as though to shut in the holy group from the observation of the profane into a small space of privacy and intimacy into which they, the angels, and we, the privileged spectators, alone are permitted to enter” (Sienese Studies, 247). Indeed, they create a niche or sanctuary of human forms for the much larger figures of the Madonna and Child, and it is by means of this imaginary architecture, open to the gilded heavens, that Domenico achieves the crucial and purposely ambiguous transition from the weighty three-dimensionality of the lower portion of the panel to the flat incorporeality of its highest reaches. Moreover, at the center of the painting and at the center of the viewer’s attention the Virgin’s mantle parts, as if to reveal a precious mystery within the “cella” or tabernacle of her person, namely, the Word made flesh. Cradling the Child tenderly upon a cushion in her lap and against her womb, she simultaneously holds and displays his body; handling him by means of a veil of swaddling cloth, even she treats him as if he were a sacred object. In this action and in the profound, melancholy pensiveness of her lowered face, the Madonna implies both foreknowledge of

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5. Detail of Fig. 1.

well. Tilting their heads together, touching to stay in time, and apparently mouthing the same sound according to the prescribed strength and pitch of Christ’s future death and the commemoration of that sacrifice in the liturgy of the mass. For the image of the Virgin as eucharistic tabernacle see Hirn, The Sacred Shrine, 162, 321, 330, and 460. See also Laude cortonesi dal secolo XIII al XV, 2: 219. Lauda 56 refers to the Virgin as a divine “cella,” while also dwelling on the stellar and luminary imagery also found in Domenico di Bartolo’s painting. Part of the hymn reads: Altissima stella lucente, de noi sempre ve stia a mente! Stella chiara matutina, che resplendi più che dia, sovr’ ogn’ altra se’ regina, madre de Dio omnipotente Stella sovr’ onni altra bella, vergene madre polçella, de 1’alto Dio tu fosti cella e sua casa resplendente, Stella se’ tu de le stelle ella quale el sole resplendee, che per noi in terra venne quando aparve in orïente.

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the music, they perform as one, both harmonizing on the same melody.18 In fact, an inscription — the lyrics of their song — issues from the juncture of their brows and into the air, as if to suggest not only their vocal harmony but even their mental accord. Three words in gold: Adoramus te Christe are all that remain of a longer inscription. Now barely visible to the naked eye, it once continued, not in gold but in greyish white, and thus magically metamorphosing in mid-phrase, it curled lazily into the golden field above like a smoky plume of burning incense. Although now almost wholly dissolved, the inscription’s initial words in gold are enough to identify it as the opening rubric of a hymn exalting the cross and lamenting Christ’s sacrifice, a hymn associated with the service for Holy Thursday of Passion Week: “We love you, O Christ, and we bless you, because you redeem the world by your cross.”19 Appropriately, then, as the angels give thanks, adore, and pray, their demeanor corresponds to the words of the hymn and infuses the image with a poignant, bittersweet feeling appropriate to an awareness of this infant’s preordained sacrifice. Accompanying and amplifying the singers’ plaintive lyric, two musicmaking angels embrace the whole with the music of a three-stringed viella and a portative organ,20 but precisely which notes the players strike, the

18

The position of their mouths suggest either a long “e” or, with less likelihood, a long “a.” I offer this hypothesis on no authority other than the personal experience of a lifetime of reading lips. 19 The translation is taken from Strehlke, “Domenico di Bartolo,” 28. See also the same author’s discussion in “La Madonna dell’Umiltà,” 381. While celebrating the joyous birth of world’s Savior, the angels’ song also helps to remind the worshiper of Christ’s suffering and death on humanity’s account and the ritual perpetuation of that sacrifice in the mystery of the Eucharist. For the literate viewer, reading the words of the melody corresponds to a reading of Christ’s action in the painting. As in Masaccio’s slightly earlier Pisa Madonna, where the Christchild is shown eating grapes as a way of signifying the oblation, a similar meaning must apply in the case of Domenico’s child, who by the thoroughly human action of sucking on his fingers suggests the holy food of his sacrificed flesh. Giovanna Damiani, following a suggestion from Antonio Natali, notes that the inscription appears to confirm a connection with the Franciscans, as argued by Strehlke. The language of the prayer is similar to the language of Saint Francis’ testament: “Ti adoriamo, Signore Gesù Cristo, in tutte le tue chiese che sono nel mondo intero e ti benediciamo, poiché con la tua santa croce hai redento in mondo.” See Fonti francescane, 1983 ed., 131, Testamento (1226), 5: 6–7. 20 According to John Stinson, these instruments are so compellingly rendered as to make one ask whether they might not be visual replicas of instruments that were actually performed and that the painter knew.

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beholder cannot see, for the fingers touching the keyboard and pressing the strings are out of sight. While playing in time, they are detached from any fixed moment, so that their playing is continuous, or, to put it in linguistic terms: their playing is forever in the progressive present. The one extends the bellows to its fullest, while his accompanist draws the bow to its end, and while the former casts a doleful glance toward the viewer, his companion’s eyes reveal an inward concentration. In the midst of performing, the latter fixes his thoughts upon the musical score, which is incised against the gold background as if emerging from his memory (Fig. 6). Paralleling the ascent of the singers’ words as well as the winged invocation, the players’ notes waft upward and seem to disappear beyond the panel’s edge. The mensural notation recorded on the four-bar scale upon the gold is no random or garbled invention but, in fact, real: the melody is legible as a polyphonic

6. Detail of Fig. 1.

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setting for the hymn presently being performed and sung, “Adoramus te Christe.”21 Moreover, it corresponds to the action of those who play it in that it is continuous and ongoing, for we catch it in mid-phrase. Like the various verbal phrases within the image, this melody composed for multiple voices and instruments, is there for the viewer to read, and joining the words of first one, then another, and finally all of the inscriptions, the imagined sound of this music helps to bring players and singers, painter and worshipper into mental unison, for what are notes or letters but two systems for denoting sounds? Motionless images and silent utterances thus unite in common pursuit of a higher truth, rather than the mere specular reality apprehensible with corporeal eyes and audible with corporeal ears.22 In hearing with the mind’s ear, the viewer, no less than the painter, thus joins an ever-expanding group that glorifies the Virgin and, hoping one day to see her “faccia a faccia,” now, ad alta voce, petitions her to “listen.”23 21

See D. A. Mocquereau, Paléographique Musicale: Les Principaux Manuscrits de Chant Grégorien, Ambrosien, Mozarabe, Gallican, publiées en fac-similés phototypiques, (Tournai, 1922; reprinted Bern, 1971), 12: 369. For assistance musical, I am grateful to Michelle Fromson and to John Stinson. The musical notation was first discussed by Giovanna Damiani, who counted some sixty-five notes, “in notazione mensurata quadrata nera con 1’eccezione di una semibreve bianca—la penultima in alta. . . . ” Moreover, she argued that the notation is consistent with the work of Guillaume Dufay during the 1420s and 1430s; indeed, she goes so far as to suggest that “1’esordio con un intervallo di quarta ricorderebbe irresistibilmente il tema famoso dell’Homme Armé o anche la testa delle contratenor del mottetto in onore di sant’Andrea Apostolo di Dufay.” Damiani even allows for the possibility that Domenico was himself a musician. On this question see the appendices. 22 This notion recalls the urging of Giovanni da Fécamp, whose devotional writing enjoyed wide success between the Trecento and the Cinquecento: “Accompagniamo le nostre voci con quelle de’ santi angeli, e lodiamo lo comune Signore come meglio possiamo. Eglino lodano Iddio puramente, e di ciò non cessano, li quali sempre stanno fermi nella divina contemplazione, poi che veggiono Iddio non per ispecchio né per figura, ma a faccia a faccia.” See “Giovanni da Fécamp, “La ‘confessione teologica,’” in Scrittori di religione del Trecento, volgarizzamenti, Prosatori minori del trecento: scrittori di religione, ed. by Don G. De Luca (Milan and Naples, 1954; reprinted Turin, 1977), 2: 271–72. 23 If the painter’s musical experience perhaps urges us to give him some credit for the poetic sophistication of the Madonna of Humility, it begs another question: for whom was this panel intended? Despite its exquisite craftsmanship and its elegant visual tropes, the work points less to a learned private client than to a highly literate group, such as a confraternity or a monastic community of either sex. The scale of the object, nearly a meter high, implies corporate patronage, but, even more telling, the nature of its imagery bespeaks of a group, for the image incorporates a variety of scripts, adopts the use of the plural in the prayer, and employs multiple instruments, multiple singers, and multiple appeals, each distinct yet all in unison.

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In this miraculous object, surely one of the most remarkable inventions of the Quattrocento, Domenico di Bartolo orchestrated a harmonious polyphony of utterances, sounds, and voices that speak, play, and sing, all in accord with images articulated in terms of visual as well as verbal tropes. Calling into play all of the senses and urging the attentive viewer progressively toward ever-elevated realms of sensual, intellectual, and spiritual consciousness, Domenico’s Madonna of Humility draws its audience into itself, and for those looking upon its spiritual landscape with sensing eyes, it opens up a wondrously compressed little world, where mere inches make a distance and so short a distance makes a difference. By means of sight and the memory of all else, a silent image speaks. Proving that the mind has ways to reach places the body will never know, Domenico di Bartolo’s Madonna of Humility acknowledges the posted presence of the earthly viewer and endows realness to a spirit-realm beyond the senses. It is itself an exquisitely crafted instrument in perpetual performance, forever bidding us to add our voices to those within it, to join a timeless concert of the imagination, to experience a divine music we need only see to hear.

Appendix I: Excursus on Domenico di Bartolo and Music In the relatively small oeuvre from Domenico di Bartolo’s brief career music is a recurring leit-motif. Perhaps the most prominent illustration is found in one of the painter’s murals for the Ospedale della Scala, The Education and Betrothal of the Foundlings,24 but more relevant to the above discussion is a panel of the Virgin of the Assumption (Fig. 7). Slightly smaller (73.3 x 50) than the Madonna of Humility, the Assunta depicts an almost life-size “close-up” of the Virgin’s head and shoulders, in effect producing an icon of the Virgin of the Assumption. Thus reduced, the image depends upon the memory of the contemporary viewer and can only function as a legible and comprehensible image by relying on the viewer’s awareness of the numerous and prominent Sienese representations of the subject. Although the abbreviation the Virgin’s body and the immobility of her pose abstracts the image from the incident-filled realm of human action and elevates it to a cerebral, 24 For an illustration of this scene, which depicts figures in a singing loft, see D. Gallavotti Cavallero, Lo Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, vicenda di una committenza artistica (Siena, 1985), 163, fig. 123.

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7. Domenico di Bartolo, Virgin of the Assumption, S. Raimondo al Refugio, Siena.

paranarrative realm, the story of the Virgin’s assumption nonetheless appears implicitly, and with emotion, in this work. As with Domenico’s Madonna of Humility, however, words act in concert with painted forms to amplify and vivify the subject. The inscription in the Virgin’s halo forms the opening words of an antiphon sung of the feast of the Assumption: ASSUNTA EST MARYA IN CELUM GAUDENT ANGELI LAUDANTES BENEDICUNT DOMINUM. MARIA VIRGO ASSUMPTA EST AD ETHERELI THALAMUS IN QUO REX REGNUM STELLATIO SEDEC SOLIO. These words, which suggest the Virgin’s elevation to the side of Christ and her place in the nuptial chamber of his throne, in effect encircle her isolated head with song. Perhaps it is no coincidence that, in its rejoicing angels and its ethereal starry realm, the poetic imagery in the hymn for the Assumption recalls that found in Domenico’s much more complex and finely crafted Madonna of Humility.25 Especially relevant to Domenico’s Madonna of Humility are two recently identified drawings (Figs. 8–10), in particular one of the Ascension, from an illuminated gradual at Pomerance, south of Volterra. Composed within an initial, Domenico’s Ascension depicts figures lifting their eyes toward a scroll, whose words

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(perhaps in the painter’s hand) repeat the opening words of the accompanying hymn. The two designs attributable to Domenico are the first evidence of his activity in the field of manuscript illumination and are, therefore, of considerable historical importance. Moreover, of the two the Ascension is among Domenico’s most accomplished works. Datable to c. 1440-4, the drawings of course accompany and illustrate the liturgical music in the gradual, but more than that they echo certain formal and iconographical features developed in the Madonna of Humility.26 Beyond the evidence of Domenico’s work, however, there is unexpected testimony that leads one to suspect that the painter’s knowledge of music and musical instruments may have been more than ordinary or superficial (Appendix II) and that Domenico may have been uncommonly suited to the task of creating a work as learned as the Madonna of Humility. The evidence is cryptic but suggestive: documents from the year of Domenico’s death, which may now be fixed toward the end of the year 1444, record that the painter repaired a “clavicembolo” for the Sienese convent of S. Maria degli Angeli and did so “for the love of God.” According to the documents: “Maestro Domenicho dipi[n]tore aco[n]ciò uno clavice[m]bolo el quale era dell co[n]vento e meritava la sua fatica, ci[o]è la co[n]ciatura, donó a frate Giovani p[er] amore di Dio a dì 4 di luglio 1444.” In recompense the convent records say Domenico was given six st[aii] of wheat on August 16th, and this is repeated in a third notice, chronologically out of order and dated August 4th, which mentions “una som[m]a di grano,” again specified as six sta[ii]. The notice of August 4th informs us that the payment was not only for repair of the above-mentioned strom[en]to but also for other money owed him by the convent. Apparently, however, the convent’s obligation to the painter ended during this same cluster of days, for in the margin of the August 4th notice appears the word “vacata” or annulled), the terse indication of a transaction never effected. A second annotation tells us why: the words “req[ui]escat in pace” are meaningful enough. Domenico must have died before the end of the summer of 1444, if not before the end of that month. According to documents from 1444 (see Appendix II), Domenico di Bartolo, in fact, restored a “clavicembolo” for that particular monastery. Domenico apparently repaired this “stromento” as a favor to his kinsman frate Giovanni “per amore di Dio.” Coincidentally, Domenico’s act of kindness occurred days before his death, which the documents allow us to fix more precisely as having come before the end of

25 For the Assunta, now in S. Raimondo al Refugio in Siena, see Strehlke, “Domenico di Bartolo,” 217–18, who notes the figure’s relation to the lost Assumption on the Porta Camollia and convincingly dates the panel ca. 1435–40. As with the Madonna of Humility, Strehlke points the probable influence of San Bernardino. 26 For the gradual, which also includes drawings by Sano di Pietro, see R. Bagemihl, “A Sienese Gradual at Pomarance and the Early Tuscan Renaissance,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 129 (1997): 19–36.

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8. Domenico di Bartolo, Pentecost, Gradual, fol. 209, Pomerance, parrochiale.

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9. Domenico di Bartolo, Ascension, Gradual, fol. 204r, Pomerance, parrochiale.

10. Detail of Fig. 9.

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324 1444. That Domenico had a special relationship with the convent is further implied by the fact that the notice from August 4th mentions him as the “pare[n]te” of one “frate Zohane de Viva.” Now, it is known that on January 17, 1440 “Magister Domenicus olim Bartoli pictor de Asciano civis Senensis” entered into a contract to marry Antonia de Viva, daughter of “Vive olim Pacis Pannilini de Senis,”27 and it is further known that in February 1446 the widowed Antonia entered the convent of the Angeli.28 In entering the convent of the Angeli, Domenico’s widow may have wished to be near, Giovanni di Viva, who was her dead husband’s “parente” and perhaps her brother. In addition to evidence about Domenico’s death and his family, the records of S. Maria degli Angeli, like the gradual at Pomerance, also include notices concerning Sano di Pietro and hint at a heretofore undervalued association between Domenico and Sano. Although the documents do not indicate that the two artists were engaged in any common project for the convent, their appearance in these records supports the evidence of their participation, if not collaboration, in the gradual at Pomarance and may reflect a formal association of some sort between them. In any event, it was Sano who in 1445 completed the Coronation begun by Domenico in the Palazzo Pubblico, and it was he who probably completed a now-fragmentary polyptych begun by Domenico and in the Pinacoteca of Siena.29

27

As recorded in Strehlke, “Domenico di Bartolo,” 257, but first published by P. Bacci, Alcuni documenti nuziali di artisti senesi del XIV.o e XV.o secolo (Siena, 1934), 19. 28 See Strehlke, “Domenico di Bartolo,” 269. The document (cited by Strehlke as Archivio di Stato di Siena, Pergamena, Santa Maria degli Angeli, 18 feb. 1446) identifies the painter’s widow as “ . . . honesta domina Antonia filia Vive olim Pacis de Senis e uxor olim magistri Dominici Bartoli de Asciano pictoris d’Asciano districtus Sensis e vicis Senesarum.” On the convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli, see A. Liberati, “Chiese, monasteri, oratori e spedali senesi, ricordi e notizie: Monastero di Santa Maria degli Angeli detto del ‘Santuccio,’” Bulletino senese di storia di patria, 7 (1948): 122–128. Little is known about this house, which was at one time two adjoining convents, the so-called “Santuccio” and Santa Maria degli Angeli, before their suppression in 1810. In 1440 the Augustinian Canons Regular occupied the convent of the Angeli, and this is confirmed by explicit testimony in the volume containing the notices published here. Nevertheless, before the Canons occupied this house, which is said to have been in great disrepair, it belonged to nuns. Apparently Santa Maria degli Angeli was a double house, at least after 1440, and from at least the sixteenth century, notices refer to the nuns of Santa Maria degli Angeli o Santuccie, as if there were only one edifice. 29 See Torriti, La Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena, 195, no. 225, fig. 242.

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Appendix II: Documents Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, B.IX.14, Monastero di Santa Maria degli Angeli di fuori di Porta Romana, Entrata-Uscita (1444–1485) Uscita c. 2v. 1444 Maestro Domenicho dipi[n]tore aco[n]ciò uno clavice[m]bolo el quale era dell co[n]vento e meritava pure assai la sua fatica ci[o]è la co[n]ciatura, donó a frate Giouani p[e]r amore di Dio a dì 4 di luglio 1444 `Ãn[n]e avuto per resto di paghamento del sopradetto clavicembolo st[aii] sei di grano, gli donó frate Michele a dì 16 d’agosto 1444......................................st[aia] 6 di g[ran]o A dì 4 d’agosto demo una som[m]a di grano... Maestro Domenico depintore pare[n]te di frate Zohane de Viva per conciatura de uno strom[en]to ch’egli ce co[n]ció et p[er] altri d[anari] ch’egli aveva avere da noi........................st[aii] 6 (in margin above: posto al libro vechio 97) (in margin to the left: vacata) (in margin below: req[ui]escat in pace) c. 20v. 1444 Marzo [1445] M[aestr]o Sano dipi[n]tore de’ havere a dì xvi di ma[r]zo uno f[iorino] di camera duchescho es quale ci è p[o]sto p[er]ché lo p[er]mettemo vendere vino v[er]meglio dopo la pasqua alt[...]am[...]tto el [con]to a moneta posti ina[n]zi a c[arta] 21 a suo [con]to............................L. xiii. s. xiii

Entrata c. 21v. 1445 Aprile M[aestr]o Sano dipintore de’ dare a dì v d’ap[ri]le l[ire] nove s[oldi] diece p[er] mezo moggio di vino v[er]meglio li demo [con]dutto alla botte sua di vettura e di gabella a n[ost]re spese...............................L. viii. s. x `An[n]e dati a dì vi del detto L[ire] quatro s[oldi] dicesette et l[ire] quatro s[oldi] tredici n’aveva dati chome appare in q[ue]sto a c[arta] 20 som[m]a.......L. viii. s. x M[aestr]o Sano de’ dare st[aii] sei di grano ebbe di casa nostra a dì [lacuna]

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Uscita c. 56 gen[n]aio 1447 [1448], febraio M[aestr]o Sano dipentore de’ ave[re] s[oldi] dieci d[enari] otto p[er] lire sedici di la[r]do p[er] denari otto la lira ci de’ a dì [lacuna] gen[n]aio posti i[n] questo a c[arta] 62 .........................L.0. s. 10. d. 8 Entrata c. 62. 1448 novembre M[aestr]o Sano dipintore de’ dare st[aii] sei di grano già è buono pezzo, e i[n] questo a c[arta] 54 [in margin below: pagato [et] p[erò] ca[n]celló.....st[aii] vi g[ran]o]

Uscita M[aestr]o Sano dipe[n]tore de’ ave[re] s[oldi] x d[enari] viii sono p[er] la[r]do è i[n] questo a c[arta] 56.........s. 10. d. 8 [in margin below: pagato [et] p[erò] ca[n]celló]

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XVI

Benvenuto di Giovanni at Sixteen

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ISTORICAL evidence concerning the lives of artists in quattrocento Italy often survives in odd and inscrutable fragments. A case in point is the Sienese painter Benvenuto di Giovanni (September 13, 1436–ca. 1518), whose life and work as a whole are illuminated by a substantial body of surviving documentary and artistic evidence but whose first years as a painter have nevertheless remained obscure. Until now, he was an artist who made a single fleeting appearance in a document dating from early in his career but who then went unnoticed until many years later, by which point he was a fully formed and accomplished painter with no little experience. In 1453, while still a teenager, Benvenuto found work in the Baptistry of the Cathedral of Siena. Unfortunately, the relevant document, which records no date beyond the year and fails to specify his status or his responsibilities, is frustratingly imprecise.1 He was, however, not the only member of his craft employed in San Giovanni at the time. During the same year Lorenzo di Pietro, known as Vecchietta, who had previously undertaken major commissions for the Ospedale della Scala, was in charge, as he had been at least since 1450, of completing the decoration of the vaults with scenes illustrating the articles of the Creed and the walls with scenes illustrating Christ’s Passion, and it may be assumed that Benvenuto was paid to assist him.2 Whether Benvenuto was hired for this particular project or formed 1

G. Milanesi, Documenti per la storia dell’arte senese, Siena, 1856, vol. III, p. 79. For a summary of the facts concerning this project, which Vasari mentions in his life of Vecchietta and which was begun in 1447 by the foreigners Michele di Matteo Lambertini, Agostino di Marsilio, and Giovanni da Forlì, see H. van Os, Vecchietta and the Sacristy of the Siena Hospital Church: A Study in Renaissance Religious Symbolism, ‘s-Gravenhage, 1974, pp. 65–66. Van Os asserts that “In those days Benvenuto was working in Vecchietta’s workshop,” 2

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part of Vecchietta’s workshop cannot determined with certainty, but in any event his association with the older master was probably more than casual. Indeed, it appears to have been decisive in the formation of his style. Such at least is the evidence of his earliest dated work, an Annunciation of 1466 in the church of San Girolamo near Volterra.3 The considerable period of thirteen years — half of what is nowadays considered a generation — between Benvenuto’s first appearance as a painter in 1453 and his first dated work of 1466 has heretofore remained unillumined by documentary evidence. Yet, his activity during these years is of interest because, as Pope-Hennessy has said, in his youth Benvenuto was “a painter of extraordinary accomplishment.”4 Did he, during this time, withdraw into the relative obscurity and possible comfort of a subservient business relationship with Vecchietta or perhaps Sano di Pietro, neither of whom lacked for work? Perhaps he did, but a group of records from the “Spedale overo chompagnia” of San Niccolò e Santa Lucia, a penitential confraternity meeting in the Spedaluccio di Santa Lucia and attached to the church of Sant’ Agostino in Siena,5 reveal that he nevertheless also undertook work on his own account as well. In 1453, namely in the same year that Benvenuto di Giovanni was working in the Baptistry, he was also commissioned by the confraternity to decorate its chapter house. Thus, on June 16, 1453, that is, three months before his seventeenth birthday, the painter received one large florin for “parte di cierte fighure se gli è aloghate but, however likely, this is still surmise. For Vecchietta see G. Vasari, Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori, ed. by G. Milanesi, Florence, 1906, vol. III, pp. 75–79; G. Vigni, Lorenzo di Pietro detto il Vecchietta, Florence, 1937; C. Brandi, Quattrocentisti senesi, Milan, 1949, pp. 121–132 and 264–265; E. Sandberg-Vavalà, Sienese Studies: The Development of the School of Painting of Siena, pp. 254–261; B. Cole, Sienese Painting in the Age of the Renaissance, Bloomington (Indiana), 1985, p. 32–43; and L. Kanter in K. Christiansen, L. Kanter, and C. Strehlke, Painting in Renaissance Siena, 1420–1500, New York, 1988, p. 258–263. 3 Surely correct is the generally held view that Benvenuto both trained and worked with Vecchietta; nevertheless, Pope-Hennessy’s suggestion that Benvenuto received some of his training from Sano di Pietro cannot be dismissed. See J. Pope-Hennessy, assisted by L. Kanter, The Lehman Collection. Vol. I: Italian Paintings, New York, 1987, p. 162. 4 Pope-Hennessy, 1987, p. 162. 5 Founded in the thirteenth century, the Company of San Niccolò was a penitential confraternity of disciplinati that met in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine until 1398, when it moved the Spedaluccio di Santa Lucia, from which it acquired its second name. For the confraternity see Antonio Bandini, “Compagnie diurne e notturne: Chiese e monasteri con illustrazioni varie,” (post 1822), Siena, Biblioteca Comunale, MS. E.III.16, fols. 12–14.

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ad pengniare,” and a subsequent notice specifies these figures and their location more precisely as a series of eight scenes, clearly murals, of Christ’s Passion “a chapo 1’uscio del’entrata,” for which he was paid at the rate of 3 lire, 10 soldi per scene for a total of 28 lire. Whether or not Benvenuto devoted all of his energies to the project remains uncertain, but the fact that he could undertake to paint a cycle of murals suggests that his employment in the Baptistry may have been at an end. In any event, his work for the confraternity continued well into the following year, but it must have proceeded with interruption, since payments are recorded in two ledgers through the summer and fall of 1453 but then stop on December 30. Work apparently recommenced the following summer, when Benvenuto, received another payment in August, and the project continued to its completion in November 1454, when a notice, preceded by payments for the gold and blue that must have been added a secco and toward the end of the project, records a final payment to Benvenuto, by then eighteen, “p[er] resto dipentura a fato a nostro capitolo p[er] isino a dì 10 di novembre,” that is, a year and five months after he first took on the commission at the age of sixteen. The first payment to Benvenuto on June 16, 1453 is of particular interest because it says at once less and more than the other notices about him. The official keeping the accounts could not remember the painter’s patronymic and left a blank space in its place, a fact that perhaps indicates how little he knew this boy; however, as if to indicate precisely which painter by the name of “Benvenuto” he meant, he compensated by adding a detail mentioned in none of the other payments: “vno de’ nostri frategli.” Benvenuto was, then, no ordinary laborer; he was an insider, bound to the confraternity by vows of common principles and by rules of common behavior. One can hardly guess at the depth of his convictions or the strength of his commitment to this charitable group; yet, he was still a member as late as 1481.6 Is it not reasonable to suppose that his spiritual relationship with the confraternity abetted his professional relationship with it? To be sure, artists were no different from tradesmen of virtually every kind and position who entered such pious organizations, and Benvenuto joins other artists, such as the painter Martino di Bartolommeo, in working for 6 The brothers of the confraternity, including one “Benuenutus Johannis,” witnessed the sale of a piece of property on August 20, 1481. See Siena, Archivio di Stato, Patrimonio Resti 953, Compagnia di San Niccolò e Santa Lucia (Contratti, testamenti, memorie: 1421–1709), cc. 19v-21 (no. 20).

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the company to which he belonged,7 but because Benvenuto was so young and in all likelihood a newcomer one wonders if his commission was not offered and likewise undertaken in a spirit of charity and reciprocal benefit. Surely a confraternity in need of a service might naturally engage one of its own, and in turn a member, particularly one who was a teenager at the start of his career, might be willing, likewise as a gesture of charity, to provide that service at a good price. And if Benvenuto were also shrewd, he might have seen the potential gain of future commissions arising from friendships nurtured by common association in the group.8 What Benvenuto di Giovanni’s Passion cycle looked like, one cannot say, for it is lost, but it is hard not to think that in 1453, when the experience of his work in the Baptistry with Vecchietta was at its freshest, the teenage painter hewed closely to the older master’s example. By the time he was to paint his remarkable Passion predella (Fig. 1), which has plausibly been connected with his altarpiece of the Ascension of 1491 (Siena, Pinacoteca), he had long arrived at a distinct personal style, yet even there Vecchietta’s design for the Baptistry remains sensible as the source of inspiration for the expansive setting, for the distant cityscape, for the figures of Christ and the two ruffians who treat him so brutally, and for the boys watching the violence from the treetops. How much stronger and more palpable would the older master’s influence have been in 1453, when Benvenuto was probably still finding his way. Adherence to Vecchietta’s example, were that in fact Benvenuto’s approach, was no guarantee of success, and, as Benvenuto discovered in 1453, a craftsman hired to provide his services and to manufacture a product was never above criticism from those paying him. One reads evidence of 7 Martino di Bartolommeo was a member and twice an officer of the Compagnia della Madonna sotto le volte dello Spedale, for whose chapel he painted a Last Judgment. For a good summary of the painter’s life see M. Ciatti in Il gotico a Siena (exhib. cat., Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, July 24-October 30, 1982), Florence, 1982, pp. 304–305. 8 One wonders if there was a connection between the confraternity, which was associated with the church of Sant’ Agostino, and Benvenuto’s altarpiece in the Fogg Art Museum, which was evidently painted for an Augustinian community because three of the four saints that accompany the Enthroned Virgin and Child are of the Augustinian order: Augustine, Monica, and Nicholas of Tolentino. For this panel see E. Forbes, “An Altarpiece by Benvenuto di Giovanni,” Art in America, I (1913), pp. 170–179; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University: Collection of Mediaeval and Renaissance Paintings, Cambridge (Mass.), 1919, pp. 132–136; and R. Van Marle, The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting, The Hague, 1937 (reprinted New York, 1970), vol. XVI, pp. 399–400.

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1. Benvenuto di Giovanni, Way to Calvary, National Gallery, Washington.

bungling, albeit perhaps error born of inexperience, into the words of a notice from that year that speaks of dissatisfaction and temporary failure: “A (lacuna) dipentore soldi quaranta sono p[er] vna istoria dipense, la quale quela quando fu p[r]resso il nostro singniore, e perché la deta fighura no fe a p[er]fezione ne bela e però d’achordo chol chapitolo mi comisero li dese s[oldi] 40 e chossì li o dati . . . L. 2.” Although the document, which appears along with others for Benvenuto and the mural project on which he was engaged, omits the name of the painter or the location of the painting in question, it specifies the subject, the Arrest of Christ, and is dated August 18, 1453, that is, soon after the time Benvenuto di Giovanni, who is the only painter mentioned in these records during this year, undertook the task of painting Christ’s Passion in the company’s chapter house and had already received a payment for it nearly a month before on July 21, 1453. At this

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early point in his career Benvenuto di Giovanni could hardly claim long experience with the difficult techniques of mural painting, and the words used to describe the painter’s effort — “no fe a p[er]fezione”— may in fact suggest a technical failure whose result is indicated by the accompanying aesthetic judgment: “ne bella.” Despite his failure, the painter, who can have been none other than brother Benvenuto, was fortunate, for he was paid anyway and allowed to proceed: at least in this instance the acid laws of business did not corrode the pearl of Christian charity. The youthful painter was treated with a sympathy accorded to a brother, but seldom, if ever, encountered in relations between patrons and artists, who operated as much according to the chilling realities of economics and money as with understanding and trust. In this, there might have been more than a little comfort to a boy of sixteen, who at such an early point in his career may well have been grateful for the opportunity for a commission of this kind but who was perhaps unused to the responsibility of working on his own. Thus, Benvenuto’s membership in the Confraternity of Saints Nicholas and Lucy and his work for the group offer tantalizing and suggestive openings onto both his spiritual life and his early progress as a painter, but beyond the importance of this experience for Benvenuto’s biography, the episode offers rare evidence that the spiritual and professional lives of artists in fifteenthcentury Siena were sometimes interwoven for better or worse in ways not readily apparent after the lapse of half a millenium.

Appendix of Documents

Archivio di Stato di Siena, Patrimonio Resti 976, Compagnia di San Niccolò e Santa Lucia, Entrata e Uscita: 1440–1468 (Memoriale “C”), c. 50: 1452 (Entrata, from June 1, 1452 through the last day of May 1453; the account of Galghano d’Antonio Cierchiaio, which begins “a dì primo di giugnio e da finire a di ultimo di magio 1453”) Àn[n]e dati a dì 19 [the first digit is substituted for “2”] d’ottobre [1453] F[iorino] vno largho valse L[ire] 4 S[oldi] 15 e p[er] lui da Bartaloccio di Tadeio e p[er] noi il paghó a M[aestr]o Benvenuto dipentore e so’ a lui a fol. 53 e a entrata da me

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Francescho K[amarling]o affo. 70 L. IIII, S. XV, D. 0 c. 52v: 1453 Maestro Benvenuto d . . . (lacuna) vno de’ nostri frategli (“dieno dar . . .”: cancelled) dipentore die dare a dì 16 di G[i]ungnio Fior[ino] vno Largho chont[ant]i [e]be da me Franc[iesc]o di Bart[alocci]o K[amarling]o sono p[er] parte di cierte fighure se gli è aloghate ad pengniare p[er] dilibarazione del chapitolo e so’ a mia vscita a fo. 206 L. IIII, S. XV, d. 0 E a dì 21 di luglio L[ire] cinque S[oldi] 0 auti chontanti da me Franciescho di Bartolommeo K[amarling]o chome apare a vscita a fo. 206 L. V, S. 0 E a dì 11 d’otobre S[oldi] quaranta [e]be chontanti da me Franc[iesc]o di Bart[olomme]o K[amarling]o e so’ a vscita a fo. 207 L. II, S. 0 E a dì 19 d’otobre L[ire] quatro S[oldi] quindicci [e]be p[er] noi da Bartalocio di Tadeio e quali e so Bartaloccio li da per Ghalghano d’Antonio Cierechiaio sichome apare a lui in questo a ff. 50 e so’ a vscita da me Francesco K[amarling]o a fol. 207 L. IIII, S. XV L. 16, S. 10 c. 54: 1453 Maestro Benuenuto di M[aestr]o Giouanni dipentore die dare a dì 30 di dicienbre S[oldi] vinti [e]be chontanti da me Franciescho e so’ a mia vscita aff. 208 L. I, S. 0 E die dare L[ire] sedici S[oldi] dieci sono per tanti n’era debitore in questo a fol. 52. L. XVI, S. X, D. 0 E die dare L[ire] 9 ebe per noi dall camarlengho dall Monte a dì 12 d’agosto come apare ala posta dell comuno a questo a fo. 56 e so’ a mia uscita a fo. 30 L. VIIII, S. 0 E die dare S[oldi] trenta achordai per lui a Conte Chudaregli speziale per azuro e oro tolse da lui a dì 7 d’ottobre . . . . . E die dare a dì 11 d’otobre S[oldi] 10 ebe contanti e so’ a mia vscita a fo. 210 in

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334 tut[to] S[oldi] 40 L. II Ànne dato per 8 storie dipense dela pasione a chapo 1’uscio del’entrata L[ire] 3, S[oldi] 10 storia per tuto L[ire] 28 L. XXVIII Memoria chome a dì 9 (“di gienaio”: in the margin above) auemo da do[n] Giouani chamarl[en]go de lo monte di provisione d’Andrea de Charaia L. dicioto S. quato (sic.) D. 8 e so’ a mia entrata di me Lodovicho affo. 71 L. 18., S. 4, D. 8 c. 56: 1454 Da do[n] Giouani camarlengho del monte L[ire] noue per noi a Benuenuto dipentore a dì 12 d’agosto e so’ a mia entrata a fo. 72 L. VIIII, S. 0

Patrimonio Resti 984, Compagnia di San Niccolò e Santa Lucia, Entrata e Uscita: 1412–1467

c. 197v (c. 189v ant.): 1453 (Uscita) (The following item is preceded by one dated June 3 and followed by one dated July 8.) A Maestro Benvenuto dipentore L[ire] quatro S[oldi] quindicci cho[nta]nti a F[iorino] vno largho e so’ a lui al m[emoriale] C affo. 52 L. 4, S. 15 A M[aestr]o Benuenuto dipentore a dì 21 di luglio L[ire] cinque chont[anti] e so’ a lui al m[emoriale] [a cross: cancelled] C affo. 52 L. 5 c. 199 (c. 207 ant.): 1453 (Uscita) A (lacuna) dipentore a dì 18 d’aghosto S[oldi] quaranta sono p[er] vna istoria dipense, la quale quela quando fu p[r]esso il nostro singniore, e perché la deta fighura no fe a p[er]fezione ne bela e però d’achordo chol chapitolo mi chomisero li dese S[oldi] 40 e chossì li o dati L. 2

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c. 199v (c. 207v ant.): 1453 (Uscita) A Maestro Benuenuto dipentore a dì 2 d’ottobre S[oldi] quaranta chont[anti] in suo mano e p[er]ò ne li de Ant[oni]o Cielorini e so’ a lui al m[emoriale] C aff. 52 L. 2 A vno da N[ . . . ]aiano S[oldi] vinti vno a dì deto (3 October) sono p[er] (somma?) vno e mezo di chalcina ci rechò p[er] riscialbare e p[er] dipengniare e p[er] lui a Sauino di M[aestr]o Meio L. 1, S. 1 A M[aestr]o Benuenuto a dì 19 d’ottobre F[iorino] I largho e la chonpangnia Chalghano Cierchiaio e p[er] lui Bartaloccio di (lacuna) Cierchiaio e so’ a lui al m[emoriale] C aff. 53 L. 4

c. 200 (c. 208 ant.): 1453 (Uscita) A M[aestr]o Benuenuto di M[aestr]o Giouanni dipentore S[oldi] vinti chont[anti] e so’ a lui al m[emoriale] C aff. L. 1 (The item preceding this one is dated 20 December and the one following it is dated 1 January 1454.)

c. 202 (c. 210 ant.): 1454 (Uscita) A Benuenuto dipentore L[ire] noue ebe p[er] noue dal camarle[n]go del monte p[er] parte di suo salario apare che deba dare a memoriale C a fo[lio] 54 L. 9

c. 202v (c. 210v ant.): 1454 (Uscita) A dì 2 di setenbre p[er] 3 some di rena ma[n]dò Tonio di Stefano p[er] lo dipentore S[oldi] 4 S. 4 A Pauolo d’Agniolo da Toiano p[er] una soma di calcina s[oldi] 14 p[er] lo dipe[n]tore S. 14

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336 A Benuenuto nostro dipentore p[er] 1 suo a dì 11 d’otobre s[oldi] 10 contanti e s[oldi] trenta p[er] lui p[er] azuro e oro paghai a Conte Chuidaregli speziale e so’ a una sua ragione a memoriale C a fo[lio] 54 L. 2 A Benuenuto nostro dipentore p[er] parte di paghamento L[ire] deci i[n] un fiorino egr( ?) ebe i[n] sua mano e so’ a suo ragione a li[b]ro C a fo[lio] [lacuna] L. 10

c. 203 (c. 211 ant.): 1454 (Uscita) A Benuenuto di M[aestr]o Giouani nostro dipentore L[ire] cinchue p[er] resto dipentura a fato a nostro capitolo p[er] isino a dì 10 di nouenbre L. 5

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XVII

Perugino and the Wages of Fortune

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LATE nineteenth-century drawing for an imaginary monument to Perugino (Fig. 1) may stand as a succinct emblem of how history has treated the painter. Presumably conceived for the city of Perugia, the unrealized project is a record of local civic pride but also an expression of nationalism in the wake of the Risorgimento, when monuments to the champions of Italian culture sprang up throughout the new nation. Embellished with the symbolic griffins of Perugia, as well as escutcheons, narrative reliefs, inscriptions, and profile portraits, it was to be an opulent structure of stone, marble, and bronze. At its tall summit a seated winged figure lifts a crown to a fanciful effigy of the painter, who stands on a pedestal which raises him to the heavens. “GLORIA AL ARTE” sings a bronze inscription below the cornice, while a fuller, more specific explanation runs at the bottom of the sheet: “Il genio dell’arte, porge la gloria al Perugino” or “the genius of art tenders glory to Perugino.”1 In this there is an irony: the painter apotheosized in the drawing is a youth, and that single feature evokes one whose existence has long shaped Perugino’s historical likeness: Raphael (Fig. 2),2 whose own youth in the shop of Perugino is 1 The pencil and watercolor drawing of the monument to Perugino (Georgia Museum of Art, Collection of Giuliano Ceseri) is by Augusto Felici. About the artist little is known: he was born in 1851 in Rome, where he completed his training around 1872. He left Italy in 1892 to pursue a successful career as a sculptor in India, specifically Baroda. In Italy his most notable work is a colossal, still-extant figure of of St. Anthony of Padua, which substituted a fifteenth-century sculpture on the facade of the Santo in Padua. Neither the place nor the date of his death is known. See M. Bussagli, Dizionario biografico degli italiani, Rome, s.v. The present bronze monument to Perugino was eventually erected in 1923 according to a design by Enrico Quattrini. 2 I owe this observation to Shelley Zuraw. The resemblance between Perugino and Raphael in the nineteenth-century reception of the two is demonstrated by the example of

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1. Augusto Felici, Design for a Monument to Perugino, Collection of Giuliano Ceseri, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia.

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legendary. Since the sixteenth century, Perugino has been overshadowed, indeed rendered virtually invisible, by the overwhelming brilliance of his pupil. He has usually been treated as merely a lens trained on Raphael, usually magnifying the latter but occasionally, with the lens reversed, reducing him to human scale.3 In either case, Perugino’s fortunes are linked in a profound and underappreciated way to the second edition of Giorgio Vasari’s rich and complex Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, published in 1568.4 2. Thomas Crawford, Raffaello MCCCCXCIX, Collection of the West Foundation, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, Georgia.

Thomas Crawford’s suave Raffaello MCCCCXCIX. Although the sculpture shows Raphael as a courtier, it celebrates him above all as a prodigy, a meaning that is emphasized by means of a date pointedly incorporated into the title of the work. The date is both a historicizing device and an interpretation, for it makes Raphael an especially youthful-looking sixteen and thereby urges the viewer to regard the youth’s native talent with wondrous astonishment. This suave marble, in fact made in 1855, was recently placed on loan from the Collection of the West Foundation to the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. 3 In Perugia the city’s principal street, a piazza, as well as its picture gallery identified the achievements of the local hero Perugino with his latterday compatriots. For the literature on Perugino see P. Scarpellini, Perugino, Milan, 1984 and J. Wood, “The Early Paintings of Perugino,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia), Charlottesville (Virginia), 1978. Fundamental for the study of the painter’s life and art is P. Canuti, Il Perugino, 2 vols., Siena, 1931 (reprinted Siena, 1983). 4 All quotations in this essay are from the Italian edition by G. Milanesi, Florence, 1906 (reprinted 1981) or the English translation by G. du C. de Vere, London, 1912 (reprinted with an introduction and notes by D. Ekserdjian, New York, 1996).

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Whether winning praise or suffering criticism, the critical reception of Perugino is inextricably linked to Raphael, and the former’s fortunes have risen or fallen in relation to those of the younger master. During the nineteenth-century rediscovery and reappreciation of the “primitives,” or those painters preceding the age of Raphael, artists such as the Nazarenes of Germany and the Pre-Raphaelites in England turned admiring eyes on Perugino and others before him. Some writers, including John Ruskin, elevated Perugino to art’s summit, for Perugino was literally the ultimate pre-Raphaelite. Yet others, notably Heinrich Wölfflin, diminished him by invidious comparisons with the High Renaissance trinity of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael.5 Both views of Perugino ultimately depend Vasari. As with many other artists in the Lives, Vasari gives an account of Perugino’s life and art that is at once positive and negative, thus allowing later writers to draw from it what they wished. In truth, Vasari’s “biography” is an amalgam of facts, shrewd analysis, and purposeful fiction; it is a carefully plotted construction and part of the writer’s larger conception of the progressive ascent of art from its humble beginnings in the age of Giotto and “i primi lumi” to its effulgent maturation in the age of the “divine” Michelangelo and Vasari himself.6 Perhaps because Vasari has both guided historians toward the truth and led them astray, his conception of Perugino remains imperfectly understood. In the richness of its metaphorical imagery and in the subtle artifice of its structure, Vasari’s life of Perugino is one of the most compelling and imaginative passages in the Lives. For Vasari, Perugino was a flawed individual and a flawed artist, but the writer’s historical scheme

5 For Perugino’s critical fortune see Wood, 1-37, passim. Before the nineteenth century Perugino’s name was hardly familiar; nevertheless, he was perhaps appreciated by a select few. In The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) Oliver Goldsmith presents the comic character of a would-be connoisseur, who sought to hide his ignorance by making himself remember two rules: always to quibble that a picture would have been better had the artist taken more pains and always to praise the works of (the presumably mysterious) Pietro Perugino. 6 On the literary character of Vasari’s Lives see Paul Barolsky: Michelangelo’s Nose: A Myth and Its Maker, University Park (Pennsylvania), 1990; Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari, University Park (Pennsylvania), 1991; Giotto’s Father and the Family of Vasari’s “Lives”, University Park (Pennsylvania), 1992; The Faun in the Garden: Michelangelo and the Poetic Origins of Italian Renaissance Art, University Park (Pennsylvania), 1994. Equally essential for the study of Vasari’s writings and particularly for Vasari’s treatment of the relationship between Perugino and Raphael is P. Rubin, Giorgio Vasari: Art and History, New Haven, 1995.

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also casts him in majesty: Vasari’s Perugino is all the more a tragic figure — even heroically so — for the merits of his work and for the glory that the genuis of art bestowed upon him in life. Perugino, in fact, occupies a crucial position in the structure of Vasari’s Lives. The principal theme of Vasari’s life of Perugino is fortune, in both senses of the word: money and fate. Adopting language that resonates with monetary connotations and emphasizing the material circumstances of the man who won fame for his murals in the Perugian Collegio del Cambio, the prologue contains a series of opposing ideas that appear and reappear throughout the life, as the painter’s fortunes change and eventually come full circle: poverty and wealth, habit and ardor (fervore), industry and genius (ingegno), necessity and character (virtù), ridicule (vergogna) and honor, blindness and sight. Poverty, Vasari begins, can be a benefizio (benefit but also benefice); it can serve as a powerful force, spurring those who are ingegni or clever to become both “perfect” and “excellent.” As the example of Perugino shows, good can come from bad: leaving the estreme calamità of Perugia for the favorable environment of Florence, the painter turned “night into day.” Having before him il terrore della povertà, he knew no other pleasure but work and denied himself every comfort, even sleeping on a mere cassa (chest but also cash box). Spurring the painter to lift himself from destitution, poverty opened the course that wealth might otherwise have blocked. Yet, foreshadowing the end of his tale, Vasari implies that Perugino made a bad, indeed a Faustian, bargain: so much did he fear poverty that he was willing to compromise, that is, to settle for rising, “if not to supreme eminence, at least to a rank in which he might have the means of life.” As Vasari tells it, Perugino came to Florence on the advice of a mediocre but wise unnamed painter who was his first teacher, and in that cradle of genius he thrived, because the competetive atmosphere of Florence encouraged high standards and in the name of excellence even permitted censure and ridicule (biasimo). Above all, the air of Florence engendered, to use Vasari’s paradoxical and pointed phrase, “una cupidità di gloria.” Developing a shrewd business sense, Perugino won numerous commissions and became one of the most successful masters of the day. “In a few years, then,” writes Vasari, “he came into such credit [credito], that his works filled not only Florence and all Italy, but also France, Spain, and many other countries to which they were sent. Wherefore, his paintings being held in very great price and repute, merchants began to buy them up wholesale [incetta] and to send them abroad to various countries to their own great

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gain and profit.” Of course, it is an extravagant exaggeration to think of Perugino’s paintings filling the whole of Europe, and it is a subtle twist to suggest that the limitless demand of the market reduced them to mere merchandise. Nonetheless, Perugino must have been a good businessman and must have known how to run a large and prolific workshop. That much one can tell from the evidence of his art and from the more than 500 surviving documents about his life and work. During the last two decades of the fifteenth century Perugino was possibly the leading painter in Italy. Even contemporary sources argue as much. In his Cronaca rimata of c. 1485 Giovanni Santi, who sent his son Raphael to study with Perugino, paired Perugino with Leonardo: “Due giovin par d’etade e par d’amori/ Leonardo da Vinci e ’l Perusino,/ Pier della Pieve, che son divin pictori.” Writing to his father in 1500, the worldly Agostino Chigi described Perugino as “il meglio ma[e]stro d’Italia.”7 Indeed, during the course of his long career of more than half a century, he worked not only in Florence and Perugia but also in Venice, Rome, and Siena, to which latter place Vasari says he was “almost forced to go” by reason of his fame. Moreover, his patrons included such notables as Sixtus IV, Isabella d’Este, and Julius II. Vasari’s account of Perugino’s success is based, therefore, on sound and readily available information, but even so, he refashions the facts to suit his literary purpose. At first praising Perugino, Vasari then claims that the painter was driven increasingly by money alone, so that what had been a virtue turned into a vice: in short, he tranforms Perugino into an avatar of avarice. Following a pattern set at the start of the life, Vasari’s Perugino is felled by the same thing that lifted him up: Florence herself. “For Florence,” he warns, “treats her craftsmen as time treats its own works, which, when perfected, it destroys and consumes little by little.” By means of two paired but contrasting stories, Vasari gives a vivid illustration of how Perugino lost his virtù and was undone, as he rode the wheel of fortune first up and then down. The two stories, when read in relation to each other, cast the painter in two contradictory lights and thereby suggest Vasari’s fundamentally paradoxical, if not oxymoronic, conception of him as a successful failure: one tale illustrates Perugino’s nobility, the second his meanness. In the first tale, Vasari relates that Perugino once worked for a prior who was skilled at making ultramarine blues, precisely, the Renaissance

7

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Canuti, Il Perugino, II, 383, doc. no. 384.

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painter’s most costly material. Having a large quantity of this blue and naturally delighting in it, the prior encouraged Perugino to use it, but at the same time he was so jealous of the precious substance and so suspicious of the painter that he would never trust him to use it except under his watchful eye. “Pietro, who had an honest and upright nature, and had no desire for another man’s goods save in return for his own labour,” decided to teach the prior a lesson. Having beside him a vase for the blue and a basin of water, Perugino dipped his brush in the basin “at every second stroke” on the wall, so that the blue quickly disappeared into the basin of water without much progress in the picture. The exasperated prior, who grudgingly refilled the vase with more and more blue, lamented over and again, “Oh, what a quantity of ultramarine this plaster consumes!” Only much later, after gathering the blue from the basin, did Pietro return it to the miserly prior with an admonition: “Father, this is yours; learn to trust honest men, who never cheat those who trust them, although, if they wished, they could cheat such distrustful persons as yourself. ” Mistrust is also the theme of the second story, which Vasari relates much later: indeed, it is the culminating event of the Perugino’s life and a pathetic inversion of the tale of the prior. Having departed Florence and returned to Perugia, Perugino found work in the latter city as well as in his birthplace, Castello della Pieve, but by then the hero was a changed man. “It was ever Pietro’s custom on his going and coming between the said Castello and Perugia, like a man who trusted nobody, to carry all the money that he possessed about his person.” Apparently knowing his routine, “certain men” one day lay in wait and robbed him of all he had—all, that is, except his life, which they spared “for the love of God.” Even though the painter later recovered much of his money, he still nearly died of grief. Perhaps inspired by what Vasari had heard about the actual circumstances of Perugino’s demise from plague and his unceremonious burial in a field near Fontignano, it is the last anecdote Vasari tells before recording the painter’s death. The wheel had come full circle. As Vasari has it, Perugino’s art paralleled the same circular, and ultimately disastrous, course of his life. At first, Vasari offers praise that rings true five centuries later: fresh and lovely coloring, novel inventions, lifelike portraits, and beautifully receding views that were “a particular profession” of his. The truth of Vasari’s critical observations is borne out by Perugino’s surviving work. One has only to look at the delicate colori cangianti of his predella panels, the conviction of his portraits, and the gentleness of count-

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less landscapes. The Crucifixion in S. Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi in Florence (Fig. 3), among his greatest frescoes, transmits a quiet, soothing ardor conducive to meditation. The Vision of St. Bernard in Munich (Fig. 4), among his greatest panels, balances clarity and mystery: the perfect, architectural order of the whole; the echoing forms of the architecture, whose softly lit and gently billowing arches link St. Bernard to the Madonna; a light that is strong without being sharp, coupled with luminous shadows reminiscent of Leonardo. Yet, along with vocal praise Vasari also whispers reservations. He singles out the extraordinary invention of a Pietà, now in the Uffizi (Fig. 5), in which, “to mention only one thing, he made the Dead Christ all stiffened, as if He had been so long on the Cross that the length of time and the cold had reduced Him to this. . . .” Then, he proceeds to fault the technique but excuses Perugino for what he “could not know, seeing that in his time they were only just beginning to paint well in oil.” In another Pietà (Fig. 6) the coloring is so “lovely and novel” that Perugino — and here is the fatal

3. Perugino, Crucifixion, S. Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, Florence.

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4. Perugino, Vision of St. Bernard, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.

5. Perugino, Pietà, Uffizi, Florence.

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6. Perugino, Pietà, Galleria Pitti, Florence.

stroke — “made the craftsmen believe that he would become excellent and marvellous.” Vasari’s conditional “would become” foreshadows the verso of such premature success: for all his virtues, Perugino fell short of fulfilling his promise. And so, as Vasari tells it, the wheel of fortune swung ever downward. Time finally overtook Perugino and began to “consume” him, as Vasari had predicted. Such were the demands for his work that he relied more and more on his assistants and on old ideas: his art became repetetive, mechanical, and mannered. “Now,” Vasari writes, “Pietro had done so much work, and he always had so many works in hand, that he would very often use the same subjects; and he had reduced the theory8 of his art to a manner so fixed (ed 8 As Patricia Rubin reminds me, one must emphasize that the word “theory,” which has a particularly loaded meaning for the modern reader, ought to be understood as having to do with Perugino’s creative method.

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era talmente la dottrina dell’arte sua ridotta a maniera) that he made all his figures with the same expression.” Thus, in Vasari’s account, too much success spoiled Perugino’s art, which in the end lacked the vitality and the ingegno it once had had. His work became vacuous and, in effect, insincere. Although later writers echoed Vasari’s view of Perugino’s decline to empty repetition, the painter was conforming to a long-sanctioned and effective practice of copying that served many Renaissance artists, including Vasari himself. Nonetheless, it must be admitted that the painter’s work, as Sydney Freedberg has observed, sometimes possesses a “stiffness and literalness”9 as well as a quietism that too often lapses into “inertia.”10 Yet, Vasari’s portrait, in which biographical details have a metaphorical purpose, is far more damning. To stress the notion of Perugino’s artistic degeneration Vasari goes so far as to parallel the insincerity of Perugino’s art with a lack of faith. “Pietro,” he writes, “was a man of very little religion, and he could never be made to believe in the immortality of the soul—nay, with words in keeping with his head of granite (suo cervello di porfido), he rejected most obstinately every good suggestion.” Rather than the noble aim of virtù, he “placed all his hopes in the goods of fortune.” Indeed, like Faust, “he would have sold his soul for money (per danari arebbe fatto ogni male contratto).” Thus, the story, told in the preceding paragraph, of how the aged Perugino was robbed of all his fortune takes on a chillingly ironic cast. Vasari’s Perugino is hollow and hypocritical, even in the face of death, “at his earnest entreaty” and “for the love of God” he persuades the villains to spare his life. In so doing, is Vasari’s Perugino any better than a thief himself? Although Vasari’s charge of irreligion has been discounted or ignored by recent scholars, it was taken seriously, indeed, literally by more than a few nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers, who passionately refuted it. Anna Jameson preferred to believe that “there is such a divine beauty in some of the best pictures of Perugino, such exquisite purity and tenderness in his Madonnas, such an expression of enthusiastic faith and devotion in some of the heads, that it would be painful to believe that there was no corresponding feeling in his heart.”11 In the course of arguments such as this, however, 9

S. Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence, 2 vols., (first published 1961, second edition 1972) rev. ed. New York, 1985, 62. 10 S. Freedberg, Painting in Italy, 1500-1600, rev. ed., Harmondsworth, 1990, 50. 11 Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters, 10th ed., Boston, 1865, 147. The debate was not without its ironies. Ascribing the charge of irreligion to “others,” Edward Hutton rejected

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early writers hit upon an essential quality of Perugino’s art, a quality recognized since the fifteenth century, when the Duke of Milan’s agent said of that “exceptional master”: “His things have an angelic air, and very sweet.”12 Vasari would hardly quarrel with that, but his tale should not to be taken literally. On the contrary, in Vasari’s fiction, Perugino’s obdurate irreligion is a metaphor of blindness, not about matters of the spirit but about the values of art. It is no accident that Vasari has Pietro’s decline coincide with Michelangelo’s ascent. One is reminded of Dante’s remark concerning the fleeting nature of fame: “In painting Cimabue thought he held the field/ And now it’s Giotto they acclaim—/ The former only keeps a shadowed fame.” But the pairing of Perugino and Michelangelo was about much more than fame. For the author of the Lives the “divine” Michelangelo was the fulfilment of all earlier prophecies of art’s rise toward perfection. Although still successful, Perugino had outlived his moment, and continuing in a style that he had formulated long before, he was unable to see how a world that had once placed him at the summit was now turned upside down. As a concrete illustration of the once-great Perugino’s inability to comprehend the new art

such “gossip” on the authority of Vasari, who recorded that Perugino was “honourably buried at Castello della Pieve.” With a great roar he, like Mrs. Jameson, then offers as evidence Perugino’s own work: “It might seem that any such assertion is scarcely worth combating [sic], since no man so eagerly antagonistic to Christianity, so strong a rebel as to refuse in his last helplessness the ministrations of the priest, the comfortable words of those who had always, as the world believed, possessed the words of life, would have devoted the whole of his life to that service, so that in all his work there are scarcely five pictures which do not in some sort repeat her message and have not stood on her altars, or been worshipped on the walls of the templess she has built for God and man to come together. Nor is it likely that a fanatic atheist would have so often received commissions from religious orders, or devout persons, or have been permitted to paint in the sanctuary of St. Francis. That he died as he had lived, a son of the Catholic Church, whose work he had done so successfully, that he was honourably buried at the last seem necessary to be believed, and since Vasari expressly states thus much, there appears to be but little ground for any doubt about it.” Quoted from Perugino, London and New York, n.d., 193–194. 12 As quoted in M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Oxford, 1972, 26. Baxandall cites P. Müller Walde (“Beitrage zur Kenntnis des Leonardo da Vinci, Ein neues Dokument zur Leonardo da Vinci, Ein neues Dojument zur Geschichte des Reiterdenkmals für Francesco Sforza. Das erste model Leonardos,” Jahrbuch des Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen, XVIII, 1897, 92-169) as his source. Although Canuti omits the document from his exhaustive corpus of transcriptions, Scarpellini, like Baxandall, cites Müller Walde.

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symbolized by Michelangelo, Vasari relates the tale of a war of words that led to a suit in court. Vasari introduces Michelangelo immediately after relating the degeneration of Perugino’s art into empty mannerism. Old but still with honor and fortune, Perugino wants to see something of the much-heralded Michelangelo, not out of a genuine interest in the younger man’s art but because its increasing glory was beginning to put him in the shade. As darkness beset him, Perugino, now bitten by envy, recklessly began to lash out at his colleagues: “seeing the greatness of his own name, which he had acquired in every place through so grand a beginning, being obscured, he was ever seeking to wound his fellow-workers with biting words.” At last, Michelangelo publicly condemned Perugino’s art as “goffo,” a word that rings of ridicule.13 Taking offense, Perugino brought Michelangelo before the Tribunal of the Eight, “where Pietro came off with little honour.” The story is a fiction, for Perugino, who in 1504 had joined Leonardo, Botticelli, and others to give his opinion on where to place Michelangelo’s David, doubtless knew of Michelangelo’s work, and far from enmity there is tantalizing evidence to suggest admiration: in 1508 Perugino named a newborn son “Michelangelo.”14 But it suited Vasari’s purpose to tell a tale of hostility and humiliation. The benighted Perugino had been judged — and by Michelangelo himself. In juxtaposing these two men Vasari was suggesting a collision of giants, one that had in fact taken place in a different arena: the Sistine Chapel. Since the sixteenth century the Sistine Chapel has been identified with Michelangelo, but in the fifteenth century it belonged to Perugino. Not only did Perugino produce one of his most memorable inventions in the mural depicting Christ Delivering the Keys to St. Peter (Fig. 7), but he was probably in charge of the équipe of artists (including the likes of Botticelli, Luca Signorelli, and Piero di Cosimo), who painted the lower walls of the chapel. Moreover, Vasari well knew that Perugino’s murals on the altar wall had been “thrown to the ground in preparing the wall for the Judgment of the divine Michelagnolo . . . .” It was indeed Michelangelo’s judgment that led to Perugino’s ruin.

13 For this word see P. Barolsky, Why Mona Lisa Smiles, 13-14. Barolsky draws a droll analogy with the English “goofy.” Rubin (Vasari, 125) aptly renders the word as “dolt,” when it is used as a noun. 14 For this suggestion see J. Wood, 30-31 n. 5. For the document see Canuti, 285, doc. 493.

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7. Perugino, Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter, Sistine Chapel, Vatican.

As fortune’s wheel sank toward bottom, Perugino’s public humiliation at the hands of Michelangelo led to another, ultimately catastrophic one at his very own hand: the affair of the double-sided altarpiece for SS. Annunziata. Intended for the high altar of the church, Vasari claims that the panel was to show the Assumption of the Virgin (Fig. 8) on the front (that is, the side intended to face the congregation) and the Descent from the Cross (Fig. 9) on the back (or the side intended to face the monks’ choir). First entrusted to Leonardo, who never began it, then to Filippino, who died having designed the Descent from the Cross, it fell to Perugino to complete. “It is said,” Vasari writes, that when the work was at last finished, it was faulted by “all the new” artists for its lack of ingegno, because Perugino had used the same figures he had used before. Besides the criticism of younger painters, Perugino also suffered the barbs of “friends,” who “twitted him” (tentandolo) with the charge that he had exerted hardly any effort but, “either through avarice or to save time,” had resorted to the same tired ideas. To this, Vasari has the uncomprehending painter reply in forma pauperis: “‘I have used the figures that you have at other times praised, and which have given you infinite pleasure; if now they do not please you,

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8. Perugino, Assumption of the Virgin, SS. Annunziata, Florence.

9. Perugino and Filippino Lippi, Descent from the Cross, Accademia, Florence.

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and you do not praise them, what can I do? ” Bankrupt of ingegno and blind to his now-low estate, he is bombarded by insults and mockery from “his friends,” who thereby effectively run him out of town. Even so, Vasari implies that Perugino’s forced departure was unusual, for he left “although now old.” He exited a city, where he had once reigned supreme but which had now consumed him. And what of the altarpiece? It too speaks of Perugino’s reversal of fortune, for according to Vasari’s tale the panel was turned around, so that Filippino’s design faced the front and Perugino’s the other, that is, the wrong way. He who had once been at the forefront ended with his back to the future. In fact, for Perugino the future had come long before in the person of Raphael, but only after the former’s inglorious death does Vasari introduce the younger master. Perugino, Vasari says, “made” numerous painters who worked in his style but one, “who worked for many years under Pietro,” stood out: the “miraculous” and “truly most excellent” Raphael. The latter “devoted himself heart and soul to the honourable studies of painting, and surpassed his master by a great measure.” Perugino reappears in Vasari’s life of Raphael, where, in contrast to his own life, he is not only “very courteous and a lover of beautiful genius” (cortese molto ed amator de’belli ingegni) but also a prescient judge of virtù. There, Raphael’s “good and loving” father Giovanni Santi is described as taking the boy (il putto) to Perugia to meet Perugino, “who, as he heard tell, held the first place among painters at that time.” Perugino, “after seeing Raffaello’s method (maniera) of drawing, and his beautiful manners and character (le belle maniere e costumi), formed a judgment of him which time, from the result, proved to be very true.” Vasari goes on to say: “It is a very notable thing that Raffaello, studying the manner of Pietro, imitated it in every respect so closely, that his copies (ritratti) could not be distinguished from his master’s originals, and it was not possible to see any clear difference between his works and Pietro’s . . . .” Modern historians agree. Perugino prepared the way for Raphael: Perugino’s portrait of the painter Francesco delle Opere (Fig. 10) anticipates Raphael’s pendant portraits of Angelo Doni (Fig. 11) and Maddalena Strozzi, and Perugino’s complex Pietà for S. Chiara in Florence (Fig. 6), so praised by Vasari, anticipates Raphael’s powerful Baglioni Pietà (Fig. 12). Indeed, so close were Perugino and Raphael that in still other works art historians have often found it difficult to say whose hand painted what. Raphael, as Vasari wrote, became Perugino, so much so that the younger painter made himself invisible. The irony, of course, is that by eventually

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10. Perugino, Francesco delle Opere, Uffizi, Florence.

11. Raphael, Angelo Doni, Galleria Pitti, Florence.

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12. Raphael, Pietà, Galleria Borghese, Rome.

surpassing his master, Raphael returned the favor — even taking his place centuries later on the latter’s intended monument (Fig. 1).15 Thanks to Vasari, Perugino has been treated as a foil for Raphael, but in actuality Vasari saw Perugino as a foil for much more. In the indistinguishibility of Perugino and Raphael, Vasari observed not only the intersection of two lives but the revolution of two eras. In Vasari’s essentially neo-platonic, tripartite scheme of art’s progressive rise to perfection, Perugino and Raphael are emblems of two distinct ways of becoming an artist16 and two distinct

15

The monument that the Perugians eventually erected in honor of their native son, in fact, shows him as a much older figure, but even so, his introduction to the young Raphael still finds its place among the reliefs illustrating the principal events of his life. 16 On this point see Rubin, Vasari, 380-381. Rubin notes the way in which Vasari fashions the image of a saintly Raphael by playing on his name “Santi.”

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stages in art’s inexorable progress, as well as emblems of the transfer of greatness from one age to the next. Hidden but implicit in Vasari’s dark portrait of Perugino is high praise, for Perugino stands at the summit of the second age initiated by Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Masaccio. Perugino is, in fact, the climax of the second part of Vasari’s Lives. It is no accident that the artists enframing Perugino either know or fall into their proper place in Vasari’s history. Pintoricchio and Francia, who precede Perugino, set off and foreshadow the latter by way of their fictionalized deaths. Like Perugino, Pintoricchio is a foil, and Vasari wastes little time in establishing the painter’s subordinate position: he claims, with exaggeration, that the latter’s murals in the Piccolomini Library in Siena were based entirely on cartoons designed “by the hand of Raphael.” Vasari uses Pintoricchio’s death to anticipate themes that will come to the fore in his life of Perugino: poverty, avarice, and fortune. Vasari tells the tale of Pintoricchio, who, while working for the convent of S. Francesco in Siena, was put up in a room stripped, at the painter’s insistence, of all furniture. The friars tried to oblige him but left a chest that seemed too big to remove. Pintoricchio, however, “like the strange and whimsical man that he was,” complained so loudly and long that finally he hounded the friars until they agreed to carry it away. As fortune would have it, the troublesome chest became a cornucopia: upon being lifted, a plank broke and out spilled 500 gold ducats. Even though the money was never his, Pintoricchio was vexed at his missed fortune and the good luck of the “poor” Franciscans, who in any case devoted their lives to holy poverty. Indeed, “he took it so much to heart, being unable to get it out of his thoughts, that it was the death of him.” Whereas Vasari’s Pintoricchio is an analogue to Perugino, Francia is his antithesis. Unlike Perugino, who obdurately lives too long and remains blind to the art of the new age, Francia recognizes that his time has passed. Indeed, Vasari says that Francia and Raphael established a friendship and a mutual regard by means of letters, and although Francia longed to see the works of the much-praised younger master, he “was now old, and too fond of his comfortable life in Bologna.” But, as Vasari would have it, Raphael sent his great St. Cecilia (Fig. 13) to Bologna in care of Francia. Along with the crate containing the panel, Raphael also sent a letter. in which the younger master “besought Francia, if there were any scratch in the work, to put it right, and likewise, as a friend, to correct any error that he might notice.” The latter request could only be made to an equal, and so “with the greatest joy” Francia had the panel uncrated and placed in good light. It was then that

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13. Raphael, St. Cecilia, Pinacoteca, Bologna.

he beheld its extraordinary beauty: “such was the amazement that it caused him, and so great his marvel, that, recognizing his own error and the foolish presumption of his own rash confidence, he took it greatly to heart, and in a very short time died of grief.”17 The lives of Pintoricchio and Francia point toward the crescendo of Perugino’s unfortunate career, but Vasari follows the latter’s life and concludes the second part of his epic with a lullaby.18 In the life of Luca Signorelli, Vasari himself appears and serves as a figure of the glorious fortune to

17

As Rubin (Vasari, 125-126) points out, already in the 1550 edition Vasari “turned Francia’s career into an example of misguided conceit,” so that his “self-esteem bcomes his fatal error.” 18 Although Vasari gives less specific information about Perugino’s works in the first edition of the Lives, he may have already conceived of Perugino as a crucial figure in the thematic organization of his work, for the latter’s life concludes the second part of the 1550 edition. For the placement of Perugino’s biography in the earlier edition see Rubin, Vasari, 381-382.

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come in the third part of the Lives. Vasari tells the story of a time when the aged Signorelli visited “the house of the Vasari.” At the time, Vasari writes, Giorgio was but “a little boy of eight years old.” He recalls, as if speaking with intimacy to his reader, that Signorelli, “having heard from the master who was teaching me my first letters, that I gave my attention to nothing in lesson-time save to drawing figures, I remember, I say, that he turned to my father Antonio and said to him: ‘Antonio, if you wish little Giorgio not to become backward, by all means let him learn to draw, for, even were he to devote himself to letters, design cannot be otherwise than helpful, honourable, and advantageous to him, as it is to every gentleman.’ Then, turning to me, who was standing in front of him, he said: ‘Mind your lessons, little kinsman.” Then, Vasari adds, when Signorelli heard “that the blood used to flow from my nose at that age in such quantities that this left me sometimes half dead, with infinite lovingness he bound a jasper round my neck with his own hand; and this memory of Luca will stay for ever fixed in my mind.” With that good luck charm Signorelli, who knew his place but who also knew the stuff of genius, sent the young Vasari toward his destiny in the third part of the Lives. Framed as it is by the lives of Pintoricchio, Francia, and Signorelli, Vasari’s life of Perugino assumes heroic proportions and swells with pathos. In Vasari’s almost operatic orchestration, Perugino is a kind of Lear, who ends up blind and displaced. But Vasari’s portrait is more than a distortion; it is a conscious overstatement that brings the second part of the Lives to a thunderous climax. Above all, behind the tragedy of Perugino lies his greatness. Thus, in the “preface to the third part” Vasari places Perugino at the summit of those who had come before, above Botticelli, above Mantegna, above Signorelli. For Vasari, Perugino is the perfect figure of transition, since at one point he and Raphael are indistinguishable. Alas, in the long run, however, Vasari’s portrait of Perugino has cost the latter his due and left his career more difficult to assess. How different he appears in a self-portrait in the Cambio in Perugia (Fig. 14). Here, too, he is surrounded by worthies, but beside those wonderfully fantastical heads, he, by contrast, seems rather unheroic and out of place. The disheveled, homely little man from Perugia projects little of the pretense and arrogance of Vasari’s portrait. Indeed, this frank image seems to match the unworldly, if not provincial voice heard in his letters to Isabella d’Este. Perugino’s fortunes perhaps are inextricable from the circumstances of his life, that is, his propinquity with talents whose accomplishments make

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14. Perugino, Self-portrait, detail from the Collegio del Cambio, Perugia.

15. Perugino, Apollo and Marsyas, Louvre, Paris.

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his seem less than they really are. Nevertheless, his works offer an abiding counterproof and the greatest of them are, in Jeryldene Wood’s apt image “tranquil and pure melodies for a single flute.”19 And so, perhaps the most fitting monument to Perugino and his place in history is not not one imagined by others but one fashioned by the painter himself. There could hardly be a more appropriate metaphor of Perugino’s fortune than his Apollo and Marsyas (Fig. 15), that extraordinary premonition of the fully classicizing images of the sixteenth century. The picture pairs a lesser being and a divinity, but rather than the satyr of myth, Marsyas is human, as if he and Apollo were descended from the same race. The pair’s likeness infuses the legend with an unexpected poignancy; yet, one does not confuse the two. The god is appropriately radiant, and the long hair curling and fluttering about his regal head is but another attribute. With a look not untouched by sympathy, he listens to the somehow innocent figure who plays a “single flute,” while above his head birds dot the sky like fleeting notes. This remarkable image, once given to Raphael, presents a classical world that is still in a preternatural, unheroic, and half-awakened state, a world that is but an elegiac dream of victories won and glory lost.

19

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Wood, 1985, 1.

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Ornatissimi vasi: Italian Maiolica and the Renaissance For Bruce Cole

“T

HAT which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet,” but a misnomer may say more about the named and the namer. To Dante and others in the fourteenth century “Maiolica” was an island marking the western extremity of the Mediterranean: “ . . . tra 1’isola di Cipri e di Maiolica” (“ . . . twixt Cyprus and Majorca’s shore,” Inferno, XXVIII, 82).1 To later Italians it referred to a distinctive pottery, the metallic lusterware that they imported mostly from Spain through the city and island of “Maiolica.” So much was the place associated with the ware that when Italians began to produce lusterware of their own toward the end of the fifteenth century they still called it maiolica. Eventually, all Italian painted tin-glaze pottery, lustered and unlustered, answered to the exotic name of that Spanish island. The Italians’ appropriation of a foreign name for what became a renowned local art is a linguistic parallel to an economic and artistic conquest. The history of maiolica and its development from modest utilitarian ware to a refined art form pregnant with Italian society’s aspirations, attitudes, and beliefs says much about the Renaissance itself. During the Middle Ages Italians in the center of the peninsula where maiolica would flourish produced a rough pottery (Fig. 1) whose bold, schematic designs, often projected into relief and always sensitive to the potted surface, compensated for a limited palette of quiet colors: copper

1

See for instance Il Pecorone, a late fourteenth-century collection of tales: Ser Giovanni: Il Pecorone, ed. by E. Esposito (XV, 1, 92–94).

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1. Ceramic Bowl. Orvieto, ca. 1400. Founders Society Purchase, The Detroit Insitute of Arts, Detroit.

green and manganese purple-brown. Because its transparent lead-glaze allowed the buff surface of the clay to show, this ware, now known as “archaic maiolica,” has an admirable honesty and earthiness. Although made for use, it also possessed an aesthetic dimension. In numerous cities, such as Pisa, Lucca, Narni, Pavia, and Rome, colored plates were inserted into the facades of buildings, where their only purpose was to decorate and to relieve solid expanses of masonry with color and pattern.2 For more elegant ware Italians turned to the Islamic world, above all to Spain, where they could get lustered, tin-glazed pottery. Although its delicate, sometimes even complex painted patterns must have made their own ware seem crude, the magic lay in the lustering, which endowed the surface with the seductive allure of a metallic, iridescent sheen. As their 2 Italians developed the relationship between architecture and ceramics. Glazed backgrounds set off the fourteenth-century reliefs on the Florentine bell-tower, but the phenomenon found its highest expression in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the glazed terracotta sculptures of Luca della Robbia and followers.

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golden surfaces and sometimes extravagant, unwieldy shapes suggest, these lusterwares, produced by Moorish craftsmen in the region of Valencia, were prized as much for their visual appeal as for their usefulness (Fig. 2). Late in the fifteenth century a Spanish writer observed, not without satisfaction: “The communal industry of Paterna and Caceres is the making of fine jars, jugs, bottles, chargers, plates, bowls and tiles and like desirable objects. But the beauty of the golden ware of Manises excels them all, painted in a masterly manner, which with good reason has made all the world its admirer, so that the Pope himself and the Cardinals and Princes of the world all covet it, and are amazed that anything so excellent and noble could be made from common clay.”3 He might have added that it was also bought by members of the rising merchant class whose arms appear on many surviving pieces: the Medici, degli Agli, Morelli, Arrighi, and Guasconi of Florence; the Spannocchi, Tondi, and Mannucci of Siena. It was, in short, a luxury item but of a peculiarly common sort, more attainable than gold or even lesser metals but a luxury still. That it was constitutes a remarkable development, because the notion of ceramics owned for display as well as use went against the universal knowledge that underneath its shiny surface lay mere clay. The demand for this ware parallels the widespread taste for the opulent and lavish, the gilded and ornamented in early Renaissance art. During the second half of the fourteenth century and beyond, Italian art displayed a tendency toward the ever more ornate and elaborate. Although evident in paintings such as Gentile da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi (dated 1423), the voluptuary taste of the age also found expression in clothing: not only in the materials themselves—brocades, velvets, and silks sewn with gilt thread—but also in a style that could call for trailing sleeves elaborated with scalloped fringes and ornamented with little bells that twinkled in the light and tinkled with every movement. Thus, at the marriage in 1448 of one Florentine merchant the bride wore a velvet costume requiring—in addition to gold leaf, pearls, tinsel, brass, and a quantity of golden feathers and enameled flowers in red and blue — no fewer than eight hundred peacock feathers.4

3 As quoted in W. Watson, Italian Renaissance Maiolica from the William A. Clark Collection, London, 1986, 14. 4 M. Phillips, The Memoir of Marco Parenti: A Life in Medici Florence, Princeton, 1987, 42.

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2. Hispano-Moresque Bowl. Spain, 15th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975. (1975.1.1647)

Wedding dresses, paintings, and lusterware were items that appealed to the same delight in luxury, but what good is taste without money? The appeal—but also the means to satisfy it — owe a good deal to the fact that Italians during the fifteenth century enjoyed wealth — wealth, if not ill-gotten, gotten with pain. The cycle of prosperity may be traced to a nightmarish calamity, the so-called Black Death of 1348, which carried away nearly half of the population of Europe. Enjoying the accumulated riches of all the world, the half left living gave in to unfamiliar indulgence, including the purchase of beautiful objects.5 In the fifteenth-century market for luxury ceramics Hispano-Moresque wares occupied a prominent place, but their exalted position was hardly 5

See the excellent study, to which I am much indebted, by R. Goldthwaite, “The Economic and Social World of Italian Renaissance Maiolica,” Renaissance Quarterly, XLII (1989), 18.

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invulnerable. Seeing opportunities in a favorable climate, Italians entered the field and in a characteristically Renaissance spirit of creativity and entrepreneurship began producing wares that challenged the Spanish hold on the market and taste. By the sixteenth century Italian potteries not only dominated local markets but conquered others. So much so that their success outside Italy engendered another, more widely known misnomer: “faience,” after Faenza, one of the leading Italian centers of manufacture. Economic success depended upon more than a public willing and able to pay; it required local craftsmen willing but also able to produce an attractive product. It is perhaps no accident that the economic success of the Italian ceramics industry coincided with technological advance. In the fourteenth century improved kilns allowed Italian potters to exploit the technical and aesthetic advantages of a process they had known since the early thirteenth century: tin-glazing. In addition to being more reliable than lead-glazing, which tended to cause colors to run in the firing, tin-glazing produced a smooth, opaque, white surface that was not only attractive in itself but, even more notable, a perfect background for colors. And from about the mid-fifteenth century Italian potters had a wider palette of colors derived from minerals: yellow, orange, green, purple, cobalt blue, and black. Moreover, despite secrecy about techniques, they also learned to produce the remarkable luster effects that had made the Hispano-Moresque wares so famous. Depending upon the availability of materials as well as the availability of craftsmen, local schools in places such as Florence, Faenza, Deruta, Cafaggiolo, Castelli, and Siena developed and flourished (Fig. 3), producing ware of high quality and distinctive appearance. Never content to make strict copies of Spanish lusterware or Chinese porcelain, Italian craftsmen offered imaginative alternatives. Although the decorative repertoire of maiolica had its limits and local differences began to blur (it was too easy for a painter to move to another town or for a painter in one place to copy the ware of another), the range of painted decoration was vastly more elaborate and varied than the conservative Spanish offerings. Improved techniques and an expanded decorative repertoire affected not only luxury wares but even the strictly utilitarian pottery that constituted the largest category of production. One of the largest sources of demand came from pharmacies (Fig. 4). These institutions, which grew more numerous and wealthier after the Black Death, were not the dispensaries for chemicals of today. In the Renaissance a man was as healthy as what he ate; hence a doctor could as easily warn against certain food as prescribe a

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3. Map of Italy showing the principal Renaissance pottery centers. Reproduced from T. H. Wilson, Ceramic Art of the Italian Renaissance (1987) by permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.

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4. A Pharmacy. Woodcut illustration from the Chirurgia of Hieronymus Brunschwig, Augsburg, 1534. Courtesy of Duke University Medical Center Library.

5. Pharmacy Jar. Florence, Workshop of Giunta di Tugio, ca. 1431. Museum Purchase, The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo.

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potion.6 Stocking not only medicaments but all manner of herbs, spices, oils, balsams, scents, soaps, sachets, sweets, jams, and even artists’ pigments, the Renaissance pharmacy of course was connected to the sick bed and to the birth chamber but also to the toilet table and, even more, to the kitchen. It was a haven of vanity and a source of delight as well as relief.7 And because much of its stock was in liquid, paste, or syrup form, it required vessels of all kinds — canisters, mortars, jars, jugs, bottles, and pots — in maiolica. Moreover, pharmacies required such containers, whose contents were identified either by an inscription or by a symbol that might be painted on the surface or written on an affixed label, in sometimes staggering quantities. A contract made in 1430–31, for instance, required the Florentine potter, Giunta di Tugio (active ca. 1400–ca. 1450) to make some one thousand jars for a single institution, the Florentine hospital of Santa Maria Nuova.8 Pieces produced in such bulk were far from luxury items: yet, arranged in rows on shelves, Giunta di Tugio’s pottery must have created a pleasing ensemble, at once dignified and vivacious. Painted in thick blue-black zaffera a rilievo, heraldic lions rear and silhouette-men wander through curtains of oak leaves graceful enough to seem like floating seaweed when an occasional fish swims to the top (Fig. 5). Monastic houses, which were miniature communities, also had dispensaries, and brothers, who like Browning’s Brother Lawrence in some cases tended private gardens, might also keep jars in their cells. One recalls

6 Francesco Datini’s doctor, worried about his patient’s potentially overindulgent delight in fruit, warned him in May 1404: “As to the fruit to which you bear so sweet a love, I grant you almonds, both fresh and dried, as many as you like; and nuts, both fresh and dry and well cleaned . . . and fresh and dried figs before a meal, and also grapes; but after a meal, beware of them. Take melons, in season, before a meal, and cast not away what is in them, for that is the best and the most medicinal part. And I will grant you many cherries, well ripe, before a meal; but by God, after a meal let them be.” Quoted in I Origo, The Merchant of Prato, rev. ed., Harmondsworth, 1963, 295. 7 In the Renaissance such concerns might easily come together: as a treatment against baldness one sixteenth-century text, which touted the value of putting “small and despised things to curative uses,” recommended mouse droppings, no doubt made more palatable by being mixed in honey. See the treatise, putatively ascribed to Gabriele Fallopio, Secreti Diversi et Miracolosi, Venice, 1563. 8 T. Wilson, Ceramic Art of the Italian Renaissance, Austin (Texas), 1987, 32. In Siena in 1518 Maestro Benedetto delivered nearly two thousand pieces to the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova. For the latter statistic, noted by Langton Douglas, see D. Sutton, “Robert Langton Douglas: Connoisseurship and Commerce,” Apollo, CIX (1979), 337.

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Filostrato’s tirade against worldly friars in the Decameron (VII. 3): “Ah, blight that they are on this rotten world! They’re not ashamed of their corpulence and florid cheeks. They do not blush at the effeminacy of their clothes, and all that belongs to them, and they strut about, not with the humility of doves, but with the arrogance of turkey-cocks, with crests triumphant and chests puffed out. We’ll say nothing of the fact that their cells are full of crocks crammed with ointments and balms (lor celle piene d’albarelli di lattovari e d’unguenti colmi), of boxes full of all kinds of sweets, of bottles and flasks overflowing with liquors and oils, of casks running over with Malmsey and Cyprian wines and other generous vintages, so that the onlooker might easily take them for the shops of druggists or perfumers, rather than the cubicles of holy men.”9 But albarelli or “pharmacy jars” also found their way into private settings. Great houses had the equivalent of medicine cabinets containing jars sometimes decorated with the family arms. Yet if one can trust paintings that show “drug pots” used as vases for flowers, even these utilitarian objects had a decorative purpose, and this appeal, which could transcend function, helps account for the diffusion of maiolica ware in the domestic sphere. In practice the boundary between decoration and usefulness often blurred in accordance with the function and the location: the glazed pavement Luca della Robbia is said to have made for the Palazzo Medici won praise for its beauty and technical perfection but also for keeping the room cooler in summer;10 one installed for Isabella d’Este in 1494 rescued her studiolo, which “could not be more beautiful on account of it,” from drabness but also from an infestation of mice previously nesting under the floorboards.11 Sometimes maiolica was used in a mostly decorative way: for ceiling tiles, plaques, and small sculptures, which might be a vignette of multiple figures,

9

It is worth noting that the boundaries between mysticism, medicine, and magic were blurred in this story. When the lusty Sienese Friar Rinaldo was caught in a proverbially compromising and potentially dangerous situation, he escaped by convincing the gullible cockold of a husband that his little son was ill: “Friend, it’s the worms he has in his body, that are affecting his heart and might easily be the death of him.” And, as if he were a witch doctor, he adds, “But don’t worry, I’ll put a spell on them and kill them all, and before I leave this house you’ll have the child as hale and hearty as ever you’ve seen him.” See The Decameron, trans. by F. Winwar, New York, 1955, 400. 10 Vasari, Le Opere, ed. by G. Milanesi, Florence, 1906 (reprinted 1981), II, 174. 11 M. Casali, “Ceramic Tiles for the Gonzaga,” in Splendours of the Gonzaga, ed. by D. Chambers and J. Martineau, London, 1982, 45.

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6. Inkstand with St. George and the Dragon. Faenza, late 15th-early 16th century. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, William A. Clark Collection, Washington.

as well as for potentially functional items such as inkwells (Fig. 6), which could also be sculptural groups. Yet other forms were more obviously utilitarian: a scrittoio or study might include writing cases complete with little drawers and vessels for cooling drinks or fruit;12 bedrooms might have basins for washing;13 and mothers might receive food in vasi di puerperali or 12 G. Cora, Storia della maiolica di Firenze e del contado: Secoli XIV e XV, Florence, 1973, vol. I, 417. 13 In 1471–72 the inventories of René, Duke of Anjou record “a large plate of Valencia, tin-enameled with golden foliage,” also called a “lavouer a mains,” which the duke used to wash his hands. See T. Husband, “Valencian Lusterwares of the Fifteenth Century: Notes and Documents,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s., XXIX (1970–71), 15 and 28.

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7. Osservanza Master. Birth of the Virgin (detail), 1440s. Museo d’Arte Sacra, Asciano.

accouchement sets (Fig. 7). Above all, however, maiolica made its way from the kitchen into the dining room, that most public of private quarters where display served personal pleasure. Here, the well-do-do of course traditionally preferred metal, which in Italy meant silver and gold, but, remarkably, maiolica — mere earthenware — gradually gained favor, so that by the late sixteenth century it graced many noble and princely tables. Yet because value — or perceived value — mattered where snobbery came into play, maiolica faced resistance. During the Renaissance the wellto-do made a practice of displaying trays, bowls, pitchers and the like on a serving table, that is, on a credenza, a term, along with servizio or service, that Italians were the first to use in the modern sense of a decorative as well as a functional ensemble.14 So common was it to show off in way, that, in the eyes of Vespasiano da Bisticci, it was a mark of Cardinal Cesarini’s (1398–1444) simple way of life that “His house was sparingly kept without 14

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Goldthwaite, 1989, 21.

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luxury or sideboard display (credenza).”15 As one sees in paintings, such as Botticelli’s depiction of Boccaccio’s tale of Nastagio degli Onesti, the objects put out for display and later used at table in the fifteenth century must have been of metal, for gold and silver more readily demonstrated wealth, if not taste. In 1477 rapacious relatives, hearing of the bishop of Padua’s imminent death by plague, rushed to his house, and while too frightened to sit at the dying man’s side, were hearty enough to carry away his valuables, especially his collection of silver plate. When, burning with fever, the bishop asked for drink, his only remaining companion “brought him some wine in an earthen cup (in una iscodella di maiolica), but the bishop was not too ill to prefer his silver: “‘Why have you not given me a silver cup?’ The chaplain, who was a simple creature said: ‘Monsignore, there is neither cup nor tazza left, for your kinsfolk have carried them all off.’”16 Of course they left the earthenware: why bother with maiolica when there is silver? A man like the fabulously wealthy Sienese banker Agostino Chigi, who has been described as a sixteenth-century Rothschild, refused to allow maiolica in his house, but when one considers the way he lived, his scruple makes sense. At one banquet his guests ate from gold dishes engraved, not with Chigi’s, but with their own coats of arms, a deft gesture which combined vanity with flattery and which required but a goldsmith’s hammer to accommodate the next guest list. At another, where Chigi’s guests dined al fresco in a loggia overlooking the Tiber, they had greater proof than the feast itself of their host’s liberality: after each course the gold and silver dishes, instead of being sent to the kitchen, were cast into the river. Pottery could hardly provoke the same amazement. Nor could fragile earthenware satisfy the wily Chigi’s sense of humor and shrewdness, for who has ever stayed rich throwing money away? Once the guests were gone servants fished out his far from imaginary wealth by means of hidden nets.17 For the worldly Chigi gold and silver plate was a form of conspicuous consumption with which mere clay could never compete, but elsewhere in

15

Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le Vite, ed. by A. Greco, Florence, 1970, I, 142. Vespasiano, Renaissance Princes, Popes and Prelates: The Vespasiano Memoirs, trans. by W. and E. Waters, ed. by M. Gilmore, New York, 1963, 171. See also Vespasiano, ed. by A. Greco, I, 265. 17 L. Pastor, The History of the Popes etc., ed. by F. Kerr, London and St. Louis, 1950, VIII, 117–18. See also P. Barolsky, Infinite Jest: Wit and Humor in Renaissance Art, Columbia (Missouri) and London, 1978, 94–95. 16

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the early sixteenth century maiolica served as a relatively inexpensive and, more significantly, an attractive substitute. An early sixteenth-century writer from Naples sneered, perhaps nostalgic for a grander time, that the nobility of his day had given up eating and drinking from gold and silver in favor of ware made by “common clayworkers” (cretari). The fashion spread to other places: Federico II Gonzaga of Mantua reportedly enjoyed eating off earthenware;18 Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara considered maiolica worthy enough to buy for his table; and, further south, a visitor noted, in this case with admiration, that the Duke of Calabria’s table was splendidly set with what he called “porcelain.” By the end of the sixteenth century a document authorizing a pottery to be built in Milan observed that everyone, especially the nobility, appreciated maiolica for their dining rooms.19 And in 1557, when Cipriano Piccolpasso, himself a patrician who had received a humanist education that included study of the arts, wrote his treatise on the manufacture of maiolica, he did so in the hope that the art, which “has remained amongst persons of small consideration,” might “pass into the courts, amongst lofty spirits and speculative minds.”20 The reasons for the remarkable shift in attitude that not only admitted maiolica into the house but welcomed it into the princely banquet hall are complex, but foremost are the virtues of the ware itself. These were both material and aesthetic. A man such as the Neapolitan poet Sannazzaro liked it because it was more “delicate” than work in silver and gold. Doubtless, one of the qualities that made it so was its relative lightness. The great patroness of the arts, Isabella d’Este learned that the ware being made for her would be “more elegant, thinner, and lighter” (più galante, più subtile, et più legiere).21 To others the material abetted the senses most obviously connected with eating, that is, the taste and smell. The notion that earthenware improved food had a sanitary as well as a gastronomic appeal. One seventeenth-century author on the household noted: “many gentleman, princes and cardinals want their food served up on dishes of white maiolica, which is safer than tin, not picking up bad odors, and cleaner, just as one sees princes use crystal

18

J. Mallet, “The Gonzaga and Ceramics,” in Splendours of the Gonzaga, ed. by D. Chambers and J. Martineau, London, 1982, 42. 19 Goldthwaite, 1989, 19. 20 As quoted in A. Caiger-Smith, Tin-Glaze Pottery, London, 1973, 100. 21 Goldthwaite, 1989, 28.

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for drinking although they have cups, glasses and other dishes in gilded silver.”22 Considerations of this sort reflect the fact that sixteenth-century Italians had become more sophisticated and that Italian cuisine had become both more varied and refined than in the past. Wealth also meant enjoying more elaborately prepared and presented food. The preparation of food, as indicated by the increased number of cookbooks from the late fifteenth century, became a matter of serious enquiry. By the middle of the sixteenth century Platina’s famous De honesta voluptate et valetudine (Of honest pleasure and worthwhile life), which included his friend Master Martino’s Libro de Arte Coquinaria of ca. 1450, had gone through six editions and three translations after its initial publication in 1474.23 Then as now, food itself, as well as what carried it, nourished social and even moral pretensions. Northern visitors, including the French (who in the study of food as well as in the study of wine followed the Italians), discovered in Italy a new world of culinary sophistication. Although Montaigne might lampoon the pretentiousness of an Italian chef who discussed fine points of food “as if he were speaking of some grand point of theology,” cuisine had in fact become an art, and a chef such as Martino could call himself “egregio maestro” (distinguished master), as if he were a doctor of laws. Such pride arose from a sense that cooking and dining involved a kind of inventing. Pietro Aretino acknowledged, not without irony, the contribution made by the birthplace of Renaissance art to the art of cooking and to the seduction of the palate: “I think myself that the inventor of salads was a Florentine, and he couldn’t have been otherwise because the art of setting the table, decorating it with roses, washing the glasses, putting plums into pies, garnishing liver with herbs, making black-puddings and serving fruit after the meal, all come from Florence. Those avid and diligent little Florentine brains (i suoi cervellini asettatini, deligentini) were so subtle that they concocted all the ways in which cooking can tempt the jaded appetite.”24 The tables of the nobility and the well-to-do, laden with a dazzling array of foods, required a correspondingly greater variety and number of dishes.25 22

Goldthwaite, 1989, 20–21. The Secular Spirit: Life and Art at the End of the Middle Ages, New York, 1975, 35. 24 Selected Letters, trans. with an intro. by G. Bull, Harmondsworth, 1976, 123. 25 The impressive statistics collected by Goldthwaite include mention of a service of 154 pieces that came to a convent along with a nun, another of 257 belonging to the d’Este of 23

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Italians began to require not merely dishes but services, whose complexity foreshadowed the specialization of our day: cups, bowls, plates of all sizes and shapes, as well as candlesticks, pitchers, flasks, cooling vessels, cruets, saltcellars, large rectangular trays, and even holders for toothpicks.26 But more elegant and abundant food is only part of the story. Dinnerware became specialized not simply because of the way in which food was prepared and served but because of the way it was eaten. Beginning in the fifteenth century, instead of eating from common trenchers, sometimes mere slabs of stale bread, Italians ate off individual plates, replaced with every course, and used a full range of cutlery including forks, a rarity in the north, where one German ecclesiastic, apparently worried about its corrupting influence, damned the utensil as a “diabolic luxury.”27 By contrast, as early as the fifteenth century, in Italy the fork was a symbol of urbanity: “Sundays I dine on a plate with a fork like the city folk, never fishing with my hand in the bowl” (Desino poi la domenica al desco/con la forchetta come i cittadini, né mai con man nella scodella il pesco, Sonnet 168), wrote the poet Il Pistoia (ca. 1436–1502). More dishes and the fork were symptoms of more elegant and stricter conventions, and dining etiquette, as in the modern sense, meant knowing how to handle a bon mot as well as a bonbon. The elaboration and codification of rules of dining were part of a general concern with manners that produced such books as Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528) and Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo (1558). Already in the fifteenth century Vespasiano da Bisticci had described the elegant habits of the humanist, bibliophile, and antiquarian Niccolò Niccoli (1364–1437) in a way that acknowledged the social and intellectual implications of dining: “Of all men ever born he was by far the cleanest, in his eating habits as in all else. When he was at table he ate from the most beautiful antique dishes, so that his table would be covered with dishes of porcelain or of some other elaborately decorated type (vasi di pocellana o d’altri ornatissimi vasi). He drank from cups of crystal or some

Ferrara, another of 306 ordered in 1592 by the officials of Ascoli Piceno for state banquets, two services bought by the Medici from Faenza, one in 1564 of 307 pieces and the second in 1589 of 374, and another of 610 pieces made in Faenza for the Gonzaga of Novellara. See Goldthwaite, 1989, 23. 26 Goldthwaite, 1989, 21–22. 27 A. Cabanès, Moeurs Intimes du Passé, Paris, 1919, I, 248. See also The Secular Spirit, 1975, 60 (no. 66).

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other fine stone. To see him at table, as old as he was, gave one a sense of refinement. He always insisted that the table cloth before him be of the whitest, like all his other linens. Some may be astonished to hear that he possessed such a vast quantity of tableware, and to these may be answered that in his day things of this sort were not so much in vogue or so highly prized as they have been since. . . .”28 For the universal and exquisitely refined Niccolò, earthenware — of a certain sort, to be sure — had a place at the table. No doubt his antiquarian interests encouraged his taste; however, in addition to beautiful things, the man whom Vespasiano celebrated as “the reviver of Greek and Latin letters in Florence” also admired skill and those who had it. He delighted in receiving gifts of “marble statues, or antique vases or paintings or marble sculptures, or marble inscriptions, or pictures by distinguished masters, or many panels in mosaics,” yet he was also “amicissimo” with the leading artists of his day: Brunelleschi, Donatello, Ghiberti, and Luca della Robbia. He prized genius as well as its fruits. The development of manners may be seen as part of a general appreciation of man-made things, including man himself, as works of art. “If, then,” argued della Casa, “we appreciate a graceful appearance in animals and even in lifeless objects, which have neither heart nor soul, how much ought we not to foster it and value it in human beings?”29 In the realm of art the medieval emphasis upon materials mattered less and less as the Renaissance progressed, and ingegno or ingenuity mattered more and more: mere clothes no longer made the man and human genius could make humble clay into art. Of course the medieval concern with materials hardly vanished altogether (it would be several centuries before the “ready-made” or before artists sought to transform detritus from the wastebasket): the fascination with lustering reflects an abiding delight in rare and brilliant metals, and it is surely no accident that the lustered maiolica of early sixteenth-century Deruta favored blue and gold, traditionally the painter’s most precious colors. Nevertheless, it was certainly something other than the intrinsic value of the material that led Isabella d’Este of Mantua to have a piece of maiolica sent to Ferrara for repair.30 28

Except for the addition of part of a sentence, as quoted in Goldthwaite, 1989, 25. See Vespasiano, II, 239. On manners see, in addition to Cabanès, N. Elias, The History of Manners: The Civilizing Process, New York, 1982 (first Eng. ed. 1978). 29 Galateo or the Book of Manners, trans. by R. Pine-Coffin, Harmondsworth, 1958, 97. 30 Goldthwaite, 1989, 27.

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8. Pilgrim Flask with Venus and Adonis. Urbino, Fontana Workshop, ca. 1570–80. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, William A. Clark Collection, Washington.

The Duchess, like other Italians, no doubt admired maiolica for its beauty: its lustering, which simulated the effect of precious metal; its shapes, which often copied the traditional forms of metalwork; and its coloring, which achieved a brilliance, intensity, and permanence previously found in enamels. Apart from the beauty of the results, the counterfeiting of other costly and highly admired materials might be valued for its art, and perhaps the greatest manifestation of skill was the counterfeiting of visible reality. The skills of the panel and mural painter transformed the aims of art in general and affected the ambitions of even the modest pottery painter. The ability of maiolica painters to suggest such things as believable space contributed to an extra-ordinary phenomenon in the history of ceramics: the development of the first true narrative painting since antiquity. Now armed with newfound ability, the maiolica painter explored and conquered new worlds in galleons of his own. A painter could bring a story to life before the eyes. In one late sixteenthcentury pilgrim flask (Fig. 8) the tragic figures of Myrrha and her lover Adonis are set behind curling horns that both embellish the body of the

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9. Plate with Diana and her Nymphs. Venice, Maestro Domenico (or workshop), ca. 1565-70. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, William A. Clark Collection, Washington.

vessel and mark the foreground. Playing on the difference between the solid and the illusory, the painter created a delightful optical conceit: the figures seem to project almost as vigorously as the applied plastic decoration on the sides. Clearly, maiolica became a painter’s medium, but astonishing effects came at a price. Some istoriato painters occasionally ignored or fought the irregular surfaces they painted so that in some instances one is reminded of the old adage about the square peg and the round hole (Fig. 9). All too often the traditional harmony between form and decoration, which had distinguished even the earliest wares, suffered a wound or even died: killed, to borrow a phrase from Erwin Panofsky, from an overdose of perspective. Nor was this all. To meet the demands of creating and inventing so many complicated and learned narratives, maiolica painters had to give up a degree of independence. Although Renaissance painters were always

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freely borrowing from each other, sixteenth-century maiolica painters, no doubt with the encouragement if not at the insistence of patrons, began to rely increasingly on designs borrowed from panels and murals. Prints and drawings, the latter sometimes made specifically for maiolica by artists of high standing such as Battista Franco and Taddeo Zuccaro, helped maiolica painters to illustrate the most elaborate narratives and to achieve the most remarkable effects, but in the process maiolica became an appanage of monumental painting and maiolica painters almost the Myrmidons of court artists. In retrospect, the Golden Age came with a certain enslavement: like Faust, the maiolica painter bartered his soul. Nevertheless, the development of istoriato painting meant that maiolica could be laden with meaning as well as with food. Already from the fifteenth century maiolica painters were producing images as well as patterns, but the development reached a climax in the age of Michelangelo and Raphael. The imagery might be suggested by the intended function of the object but also by its intended location. The domestic and private destination of much maiolica accounted for images dealing with personal behavior and with courtship, marriage, and the family. Bowls, cups, and plates given as wedding gifts might serve as ritual expressions of love, loyalty, or the hope for prosperity, which of course included children. Accouchement sets, bowls and trays used to serve pregnant women and new mothers in their confinement, depicted scenes of love or birth. Like the dolls and the deschi da parto or birth salvers these objects offered women appropriate models of behavior, whose mere presence, by some mystical power, might help them give easy birth to beautiful Christlike babies.31 Because of its domestic setting maiolica also reflected the problems of daily life (Fig. 10) and the values of popular philosophy. Images, sometimes based on fables and illustrating cautionary sayings drawn from the Psalms, Seneca, Petrarch, as well as popular culture, offered commonsense advice, encouragement, or moral affirmation. Such works reveal the practical side of Italian society. Here, one hears the voices of the bankers, the merchants, the artisans. Theirs is a society that condemns sloth: “Without labor one cannot eat;” celebrates action: “Deeds, deeds and not words;” and warns against folly (Fig. 11): “Who washes the head of an ass wastes the soap.” Naturally,

31 C. Klapisch-Zuber, “Holy Dolls: Play and Piety in Florence in the Quattrocento,” Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy, trans. by L. Cochrane, Chicago, 1985, 310–329.

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10. Maiolica Salt Cellar with A Man Clearing his Sinuses. Urbino, First half of the 16th century. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1904. (04.9.15).

11. Plate with A Man Washing the Head of an Ass. Deruta, ca. 1550-60. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975. (1975.1.1039).

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such images and aphorisms could often be humorous or satiric. Some were frankly ribald and appealed to those carefree spirits for whom a tumescent member was a delightful natural fact, as real as the Virgin birth. Images such as these were made to be seen, and, even when appealing to what might seem vice, helped to transform the objects on which they were painted, into objets de vertu. Around 1520 maiolica painters, especially in the Duchy of Urbino, began to undertake themes drawn from ancient history and mythology. Such classicism, no doubt encouraged by patrons in the tradition of Niccolò Niccoli, elevated istoriato painting to new artistic and social heights. Classicism of subject matter and style, for the chief source was the patron saint of classicism, Raphael of Urbino, reflected the patron’s learning, his sophistication, and his status. By 1640 a gift of two plates would be accompanied by a letter explaining — in sixteen pages of detail — the iconographical intricacies and significance of the istorie.32 Far from being despised, maiolica could now carry the values of an elite who sought to recapture Parnassus. Along the way maiolica lifted its makers too. The rise of the artist during the Renaissance from craftsman and tradesman to genius and courtier may be seen as indicative of a new conception of man that arose during the Renaissance. For Saint Augustine and the Middle Ages “the creature,” that is man, “could not create”: God, and only God, as Saint Thomas Aquinas resolutely maintained, had that power. But during the Renaissance the creative faculty devolved to man as well, and of course, now so gifted, man no longer remained merely human: he was, as artists like Michelangelo became, “divine.”33 Thus the maiolica painter triumphed along with his medium. Along with pride in his accomplishments came both intellectual and social aspirations. In the early fifteenth century—and for the first time since antiquity—a potter, Giunta di Tugio, marked the wares produced in his workshop, but by the sixteenth century painters and sometimes potters and lusterers were initialing or signing their work. Maiolica painters absorbed the intellectual and social pretensions implicit in the subjects they painted.

32

Goldthwaite, 1989, 29. E. Panofsky, “Artist, Scientist, Genius: Notes on the ‘Renaissance-Dämmerung,” New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Renaissance, a Symposium, 1952, New York, 1953, 90. 33

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12. Plate with A Maiolica Painter at Work. Cafaggiolo, ca. 1510. By courtesy of the Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The Urbinese painter Francesco Xanto Avelli wrote poetry, devised moral allegories, and commented on contemporary events. Giorgio da Gubbio assumed a title and adopted an aristocratic surname, becoming Maestro Giorgio Andreoli. The maiolica painter’s new self-image is most vividly illustrated in a plate that shows a sixteenth-century painter at work (Fig. 12). The painter sits in a carved chair beside which is placed a little table arranged with six cups of colors and brushes. To the fascination of a gentleman accompanied by a lady, for she holds a handkerchief and a piece of fruit, the nobly dressed painter pursues his art. The examples of his work placed on the stone bench are indeed proofs of skill, for one casts a shadow and the other is foreshortened in such a way as to project over the ledge. The painter is both genius and courtier, and his craft is a gentle calling worthy of admiration and a place in polite society. One is reminded of Leonardo’s ingenuous argument on the superiority of painting over sculpture: whereas

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13. Maiolica painters at work. Illustration from Cipriano Piccolpasso’s manuscript, I tre libri dell’arte del vasaio (1557).

the sculptor perspires and labors under a cloud of marble dust, the painter can sit as his ease. Never mind that in the case of the maiolica painter the truth was more like the unglamorous picture shown in a drawing from Cipriano Piccolpasso’s manuscript (Fig. 13): it is highly significant that a maiolica painter could conceive of himself and his craft in such noble terms. It is typical of the Renaissance and what Richard Goldthwaite has called the “imperial expansion of taste” into every facet of life during this period that humble pottery could become an art and, by a thoroughly modern process of reciprocity, its humble makers could become artists. By the middle of the sixteenth century triumph was theirs. The painter, architect, and writer Giorgio Vasari compared maiolica to the work of the ancients; what he concluded ought not to surprise: “So far as we are aware, the Romans did not know of this method of painting on vases. The ones found containing the ashes of their dead or other things have the figures hatched, with only black, red or white colouring, and never glazed or containing the modern

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charm (vaghezza) and variety of painting.”34 So noble was maiolica that Vasari, whose name indicates an ancestral connection with the ceramics industry, sought to arrogate some of its glory for himself and his family by ascribing both the resurrection of the art and, indirectly, even the taste for painted ceramics to an earlier Vasari, also named Giorgio: “In the time of M[esser] Gentile Urbinate, bishop of Arezzo, he discovered the old method of colouring earthenware vessels in red and black, which had been employed by the old Aretines until the days of the King Porsena. As he was an industrious person he made great vases a braccia and a half high, which may still be seen in his house. It is said that one day, as he was looking for vases in a place where he thought that the ancients had worked, he found in a clay-fi field at the Ponte alla Calciarella, in a place of the same name, at a depth of three braccia, three arches of ancient ovens, and about them a quantity of fragments and of broken vessels with four whole ones. These he presented to Lorenzo the Magnificent when on a visit to Arezzo, having been presented by the bishop, a matter which gave rise to the subsequent relations between him and that most illustrious house.”35 Unearthing the kilns of the ancients was like unearthing their sculpture, their science, their philosophy. By means of metaphor maiolica acquired the sanction of ancient tradition, and by surpassing the past artists won honor. But what greater expression of self-esteem could there be than Vasari’s implication that Renaissance princes owed their refinement in part to artists who had disinterred the past and instructed their taste? Ennoblement was a fair reward. In the course of its triumphant rise from ordinary usefulness maiolica had become a vehicle for Renaissance society’s highest values and a means by which artist no less than patron could assert his self-worth. Its history serves as a revealing testimony to a culture that by taking a little lump of clay, fashioning it, and then breathing life into it, could transform even the slightest man-made thing into art and its maker into a conqueror.

34 Vasari, Lives of the Painters etc., trans. by A. Hinds, London, 1927, IV, 20. See also Vasari, ed. by Milanesi, VI, 581–582. 35 Vasari, Lives, II, 353. See also Vasari, ed. by Milanesi, II, 557–558.

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XIX

Richard Offner: The Unmaking of a Connoisseur

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HE world scorns all knowledge beyond its reach, and because scorn lightens the imputation of ignorance, Pacino — hitherto little more than a name — has been made its special object.” At some three-quarters of a century’s remove these words about a remote painter’s fate — part Olympian pronouncement, oracular utterance, and nugatory flourish — sound at once mysteriously prescient and quaintly precious. But they may likewise be taken as emblematic of Richard Offner’s scholarly ambition and his scholarly fortune. In the twilight of the millennium Richard Offner is remembered chiefly as the twentieth century’s most discriminating connoisseur of early Italian painting and as the designer of the monumental A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, an unfinished, thirtyvolume structure as heroically aspiring and as vainly grandiose as the longabandoned facade of the Gothic Cathedral of Siena. But the Corpus was merely a beginning, not an end, and the Corpus is only one aspect of Offner. For Offner, connoisseurship, criticism, and history were different kinds of knowledge and different stages of understanding. Striking a balance between ocular evidence and imaginative interpretation, his essays give voice to the observations of the connoisseur and occupy an intermediate step toward his ultimate and never-accomplished goal, a history of Florentine painting. Unlike the unachieved history and unlike the unachievable Corpus, however, his essays are somehow nonetheless whole unto themselves. Yet, more than connoisseurship and less than history, the essays are not easily classified today, and while often cited, they are little emulated and, one suspects, improperly read. Perhaps for the modern reader both the obstacle and the inspiration are one and the same: a tension or, to put it in the ameliorative,

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a reciprocity in Offner’s method between science and poetry. For us, however, what justifies the effort to read them — and sometimes conceding their scholarly and methodological preoccupations does require effort — is precisely their value as abiding demonstrations of ingeniously vivifying analyses controlled by meticulously assembled facts. They are tours de force of sensitive and penetrating criticism, venturing toward the ineluctable creative core of the remote, disembodied artists they invoke in a way rarely equaled in the ever-mounting and ever-more intellectualized art historical literature since. And at least in the case of Giotto, one of the greatest and most problematic painters in the western tradition, Offner’s compelling interpretation remains unsurpassed. Offner’s method and his outlook had roots in the late nineteenth century and in Europe. Born in Vienna in 1889, Offner emigrated to America in infancy and grew up in New York, but after taking his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1912, he returned to Europe on a fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, while pursuing his doctoral degree from the University of Vienna under Max Dvorák (1871–1921). Although Dvorák was the author of Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte, there is little of that almost mystical point of view in Offner’s published work; rather, it was the Dvorák of the Van Eyck studies who must have exercised a decisive influence. Nevertheless, Offner’s training undoubtedly instilled in him rigorous discipline and an unshakable respect for Wissenschaft that eventually was to become a principal, and perhaps dooming, feature of his Corpus. By 1914, at the age of twenty-five, Offner had produced a slender, apparently remarkable, and now-lost dissertation on fifteenth-century Florentine drawings, but his true intellectual domain was early Italian painting and his spiritual home was another Florence, the city of Giotto and the dolce stil nuovo. Beginning in the second decade of this century and continuing after he joined the faculty of New York University in 1923, Offner undertook the life-long investigations into “gold ground” paintings that were to have him venturing from Tuscan hill and valley to Tuscan church and villa in pursuit of ancient panels and murals, an enterprise that was to occupy him until his death in Florence in 1965. In the early years of this century no one dedicated to the study of Italian painting could escape the ideas and personality of another Harvard alumnus, Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), who had taken not only the world of Italian art but the young discipline of art history by genteel storm. And Offner, once baptized by the volatile fire of intellectual exchange, acknowledged

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as much in the preface to his Studies in Florentine Painting of 1927: his greatest debt, he wrote, not without a hint of apologetic deference toward a paradoxically prickly and thin-skinned lion, was to “Mr. Bernard Berenson, of whose accomplishment every student of Italian Art, and of criticism generally, bears reverent recognition. To his stimulus, to the quality of his culture, to his penetration, to the accessibility of his incomparable library, I owe endless profit and inspiration from the early stages of my study.” By the early decades of the twentieth century Berenson’s accomplishment indeed was undeniable: he was a pioneer-explorer who had virtually opened up a new world. When Berenson first set foot in Italy in 1888, the remote territory of Renaissance painting was, if not undiscovered, largely uncharted and perhaps in a deeper sense, as Oscar Wilde said of America, undetected. Too often, attribution was a matter of prodigal conjecture or inherited tradition, and beyond a few great names to which were associated all manner of outlandishly disparate works, most paintings floated like so much flotsam on a sea of misattribution and anonymity. Berenson set out to draw a clearer, more factual map of the vast body of Italian paintings from the late thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries. With enough fervor for a missionary he resolved to give himself up “to learning to distinguish between the authentic works of an Italian painter of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and those commonly ascribed to him. Here at Bergamo, and in all the fragrant and romantic valleys that branch out northward, we must not stop till we are sure that every Lotto is a Lotto, every Cariani a Cariani, every Previtali a Previtali. . . .” In taking on this quest, however, he was thrust into the role of rebel. The effect of his work on the academic community and on the art market was unavoidably subversive, and its often shocking results may be gauged from his response to an 1895 exhibition of Venetian paintings at the New Gallery in London: of the eighteen putative Giorgiones, Berenson rejected every one. Berenson’s scrupulous, quasi-scientific method also became the basis for Offner’s. Like Berenson, Offner adopted a system of classification that was based on principles of morphology, a procedure of examination that derived impetus from corollary efforts in the natural sciences. Berenson, who had built upon the initial researches of Karl Friedrich von Rumohr (1785–1843), Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1817–97), and especially Giovanni Morelli (1816–91), described the mechanics of this approach in the introduction to his Essay in the Study of Sienese Painting, published in 1918, during Offner’s “first bright Florentine days”: “A generation ago, when a beginner, I enjoyed

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the privilege of being guided through the Borghese Gallery by a famous connoisseur. Before the Pietà now ascribed to Ortolano I fell into raptures over the tragic pathos of the design. My mentor, who perhaps had had his fill of emotion in the work of art, or perchance was impatient of my neophytic aphasia, cut me short with: ‘Yes, yes, but please observe the little pebbles in the foreground. They are highly characteristic of the artist.’ ‘Observe the little pebbles’ has become among my intimates a phrase for all the detailed, at times almost ludicrously minute, comparisons upon which so large a part of activities like mine are spent.” By developing Morelli’s comparative approach, by using photographs (as Morelli had also done and as Offner was to cultivate into something of a fetish) both to aid his visual memory of specific shapes and perhaps to enforce a certain objective distance, and by exploiting the collateral evidence produced by archivists like Gaetano Milanesi, Berenson achieved striking results that had something of the reassuring demonstrability of scientific investigation. While adopting Berenson’s method, Offner carried it — and not without cost to his long and erratic personal relationship with BB — to an even finer level of ocular analysis and categorical precision. Like Berenson, Offner was a cartographer-scientist, but his scope was narrower and his approach perhaps even more exacting, taking into account not only “the little pebbles” but also the granules of sand between them. It was as if he believed that connoisseurship was, as the Victorian naturalist John Fiske said of human science, “but an increment of the power of the eye.” Offner’s aspirations, however, were more complex, more ambitious than that. He borrowed not only the method Berenson had developed from Morelli but also the accompanying vocabulary of science. Some of Offner’s early essays, collected in Studies in Florentine Painting, included illustrations of details — significantly, almost all of them of heads — assembled as a group on a “specimen page,” which he intended as “a pictorial synopsis of individual style.” In addition to his faith in pure observation (and despite his seemingly unscientific disposition in favor of certain types of details as more revealing than others, and despite an equally unscientific neglect of color, no doubt conditioned by his reliance on black-and-white photographs), he did not shrink from such curious-sounding, pseudo-scientific terms as “graphology” or “alinasal angle.” Indeed, Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), who was to become the latter’s colleague at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts from 1931 and whose approach to the study of art could hardly have been more different, respectfully credited Offner with “developing connoisseurship in the field of

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Italian primitives with the closest possible approximation to an exact science.” Focusing on the fourteenth century, Offner set out to refine Berenson’s broad sketch of that anticipatory phase of the Renaissance. He sought to fix its peaks and valleys and to clear “the areas of Florentine painting of lesser growths to admit more light upon the greater flora,” for without taking into account even the smallest shrubs one could not truly appreciate the qualities and outlines of the forest. Only by means of comparing the works of artist to artist, he claimed, could each grouping be “seen in a longer alignment” (a reference to the history that never progressed beyond his imagination), but for Offner that wider understanding depended upon considering the lesser as well as the greater figures: “by dealing with the material in this way, the ground is also cleared of stray growths, and the main features of the historical panorama sharpened towards a truer view of a still shadowy period.” It was under such an assumption that in 1928 Offner envisaged his multi-volume A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, a work that ought to be seen in the context of similarly ambitious endeavors in other fields of European art, such as Adolph Goldschmidt’s corpus of medieval ivories (1914–26), Wilhelm Bode’s study of Italian bronze statuettes (1923), Max J. Friedländer’s Altniederländische Malerei (1923), as well as the contemporary studies of Kurt Weitzmann on Byzantine ivories and G. F. Hill on Italian medals. For Offner, however, the obligatory attention to minor no less than to major figures demanded by such an enterprise, though essential for a balanced understanding of his subject, was perhaps in some ways an unwise and poorly rewarded expenditure of his particular talent as a critic-historian. And, of course, one wonders, did his perfectionism distract him from larger questions and the longer view? Berenson, for one, was not above caustically (and unfairly) mocking Offner’s legitimate pursuit, a pursuit actually stimulated by Berenson’s own groundbreaking work. Sir John Pope-Hennessy was present in 1959, when Offner made the pilgrimage to pay his respects to the bed-ridden and dying Berenson at I Tatti, where he had long reigned, in Panofsky’s words, as “the art bishop of Florence.” Ignoring now-petty disagreements about this attribution or that, Offner praised the frail giant for the importance and lasting value his work was sure to have, to which Berenson, raising a refined hand for emphasis and as if to guide the trajectory of yet one more figura serpentinata, countered (to Offner’s innocent satisfaction): “Ah, but you, Richard, you discovered the Master of San Martino a Mensola.” Later, upon Offner’s departure, Berenson remarked, with a sarcasm unsubdued

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by his own condition: “s’invecchia male.” So, unlike Berenson, who cast an Olympian gaze upon the whole continent of Italian Renaissance painting and who, perforce, showed diminishing patience with its less prominent features and even disdain for his younger competitor’s more restrictive but obviously successful and no less sincere preoccupation with them, Offner concentrated his efforts and his imagination on but a part, albeit the whole of an important part: that seminal province of its earliest genius, the fabled land of “gold grounds.” Together with focus and precision Offner joined uncommon, perhaps even obsessive, caution and a sometimes excessive secretiveness: once refusing to divulge even to that soul of integrity Ulrich Middeldorf his opinion of who (certainly not Giotto!) had painted the Badia Polyptych). In cultivating caution he had the luxury of traveling to remote places and of contemplating obscure works of art via photographs, many of them made expressly for him to his meticulously exacting standards. More than any other scholar of his day or possibly since, he relied on portable reproductions, and by photographs of course he meant black-and-white, not color. His rigorous preference for images reproduced in black-and-white was yet another manifestation of his prudence: it was a vote of no confidence in the color reproductions available in his day, which he regarded as too distorting — and not without justification, since modern technology has certainly made color plates more seductive and sharper but perhaps even more dangerous for their deceptively less obvious inexactitude. Setting up photographs in his office, Offner came to his conclusions slowly, both after living casually with the object-substitute as it were and after repeated, almost microscopic examination of every millimeter of the image at hand. Lady Caution, his stern dame sans merci, would receive her demanding due. Believing that the history of art “should be evolved directly out of its concrete examples,” Offner began with the single object, insisting on the absolute superiority of first-hand examination, even arranging his academic career so that he could spend only one term teaching in this country and the rest of the year in Europe with the objects of his study. Using photographs that caught what he saw in the work but using them as substitutes always, he coolly dissected the work of art and in the process sought to disentangle it from “the verbal system with which the literature of art has overlaid it.” By means of photographs he hoped to permit his students and his readers to do the same. Only after close and tenacious scrutiny of every physical feature of a work of art could the historian-critic introduce relevant external

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evidence, and only then could he hope “to free the presentation of both problem and conclusion” from the unintended limitations of language, to “secure the concrete image against factitious elaboration or simplification,” and ultimately to convey to his reader, by means of purposefully chosen, affecting prose, the sense of his aesthetic experience in a description that aimed to express his considered conclusion about the work and its place in the wider historical landscape. As Max Friedländer sagely observed long ago: “Academicians [by which may we also understand latter-day devotees of “critical theory”?] enter the museum with ideas, art connoisseurs leave it with ideas. The academicians seek what they expect to find, the art connoisseurs find something of which they knew nothing.” Similarly, Craig Smyth noted how Offner “sought to convey, not only devotion to finding the truth, but the uncompromising ideal of accepting it, even when it fails to satisfy a preconceived theory.” By such unpredictable, arduous, and hardwrested means Offner’s “functional reaction” as a connoisseur and then his interpretation as a critic-historian could achieve “objective validity” by ringing true with his reader. It was an approach, as Offner himself regularly pointed out, determined by his subject, early Tuscan painting: a field which survives in depleted and fragmentary form, which counts few works in pristine condition or in their original location, in which “signatures” are not always to be trusted, and in which, to say no more, documents are scarce or misleading, contemporary sources indirect, many artists anonymous, and workshop productions frequently numerous and complicated by degrees of collaboration and quality. Photographs thus served as concrete checks against false observations and against false notes of interpretation. They might even offer instructive clues, in Craig Smyth’s words, “about damage and restoration and on the harm both do to the understanding and enjoyment of the work of art.” Students in Offner’s courses at the Institute of Fine Arts thus proceeded according to his preliminarily formalist method, and regardless of their eventual area of specialization, more than a few remained convinced in later years of its decisive value: they looked, considering an image — often merely a close detail of an image — in strictly formal terms, describing what they actually saw, adjusting their eyes to shapes and effects, even before identifying any item of subject, much less before venturing to suggest meaning. In short, they learned to see. Craig Smyth has vividly described what the exercise was like: the long silences (so long, in fact, that the slides usually emerged from the projector too hot to handle without gloves!), the

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students’ first tentative remarks, and Offner’s skillful probing, encouraging, clarifying, restating, until the visual shape received an approximate and reasonable verbal cast. In the end, says Smyth, studying with Richard Offner was “to feel the cleansing power of his impatience with unfounded generalization and cliché, and the inspiration of his greatest skill, the ability to see.” By contrast, according the Smyth, Panofsky’s lectures were swift, dazzling, pyrotechnical displays of boundless erudition, inexhaustible wit, and vast scope. Panofsky and Offner: to their students they represented two complementary and exemplary poles: the macrocosm and the microcosm. Discipline, precision, and caution. These austere virtues were bound up with Offner’s creed as a connoisseur, with his conviction that a mistaken attribution not only compromised one’s assessment of a specific object and others around it, as well as the artist who made it, but ultimately — and most significantly — one’s understanding of its historical context, about which he was widely if unostentatiously informed. His now-unfashionable belief in touchstones served as a tool by which to measure an artist’s talent and accomplishment. Prudence and order encouraged him to restrict an artist’s oeuvre above all to authentic or certain works: these he grouped into an essential, magnetic core or sun, around which planets or other images orbited at ever-greater distance from the center and in turn exercised a gravitational pull of their own on lesser objects that circled them like moons or criss-crossed their compass-paths like random meteors. His system led to an attributional conservatism that nowadays has come to be seen as impractical and unnecessarily, even falsely, restrictive — at times even a bit dotty. Even so sobering a notice as Offner’s obituary from the New York Times, describes “the usually grave Dr. Offner smiling and skipping in a street in Florence. Dr. Offner, who was then immersed in the study of Bernardo Daddi, explained ‘I’ve just found an 11th hand in the Santa Croce altarpiece.’“ If true (and why not?), would Offner’s delight be inferior to the singular exhilaration of a scientist discovering the molecular structure of a previously undetected element? Surely the intent of the anecdote was not to speak ill of the dead but to suggest Offner’s intensely passionate dedication to the sometimes enigmatic operations of connoisseurship and the enthusiasm that burned beneath the dignified reserve of the soigné gentleman in a brown suit, solid-color tie, and handmade shoes. Yet, the premise of his approach still has undeniable value: one more easily notices dirt in an immaculately clean and well-ordered house. The trouble, of course, is that most of us are indifferent and unwilling housekeepers.

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Unfortunately, for reasons difficult to know, Offner himself was not at the last entirely faithful to his own ideal: whereas his conception of Bernardo Daddi is an intricately designed and finely polished object, his late volume on Giovanni del Biondo, an artist whose large body of work shows often startling internal variations, has the quality of a non finito, like a piece of sculpture little more than roughly blocked out, without handsome, crisply articulated distinctions between master, workshop, followers, and circle. “Inductive proof,” he acknowledged even while urging perseverance, “has its peculiar tedium, and we too easily lose patience with it in our eagerness for conclusions. . . .” One suspects that he did not — perhaps could not — devote the attention to a Biondo that he gave to a Daddi, but this discrepancy has not helped champion a connoisseurship of chronometric precision and “cleanliness.” Then, too, there is time and the attitudinal changes borne by the years. Berenson perhaps had Offner (as well as undoubtedly himself ) in mind when late in life he observed that every connoisseur starts out as a constrictionist but ends up as an expansionist. By contrast, Panofsky, who preferred to believe himself blessed with one nearsighted and one farsighted eye, put a different spin on the matter and, according to William S. Heckscher, had Berenson specifically in mind when he opined: “connoisseurs as they get older become increasingly narrowminded and farsighted, while humanists become increasingly fairminded and nearsighted.” It is worth noting, however, that Offner never disclaimed his exquisitely ramified view of Daddi and company. For Berenson attributions were directional, and even an unsubtle classification could be an inspired blunder. Of course Offner recognized this too but assiduously sought to limit his errors to an absolute minimum, on the principle that only that which is certain gives the clearest understanding of an artist’s creative aims and abilities. Time has rewarded him by having few of his attributions completely rejected by later appellate courts of art historical consensus. But his was a pyrrhic victory: after all, once accepted, a mere attribution no longer needs its argument — or, it would seem, its defender. And, indeed, subsequent scholarship has preferred to follow Berenson’s and even Longhi’s more casual, less exacting, less immaculate — or, to put it diplomatically, more exploratory — example, and therein lies the tale of Offner’s later reputation: invariably cited and reverently praised, he is quietly ignored, even by those who at once profess to admire him and justify their rejection of his fine distinctions on the grounds (or, dare one say it, the prejudice posturing as principle) of better-informed historical hypothesis, such as the

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collaborative, fluid nature of the way early Italian painters worked. The famous Offner of the Corpus seemed more machine than historian, yet his essays suggest a larger talent, only partially realized, a talent that was much the greater part of his ambition as a connoisseur: the critic who would be historian. Offner was not a camera. He was not merely, as in Cézanne’s famous assessment of Monet: “only an eye, but what an eye!” He was also a connoisseur-critic of rare discernment: an ornithologist rather than a mere birdwatcher, a poet rather than a mere pedant. After all, the century of Comte was also that of Bergson. Offner, like Berenson before him, recognized the limitations of Morelli’s positivism and the limits of scientific method. If at first Berenson had restricted himself to the more or less measurable little proofs “with which the science of connoisseurship must reckon,” both he and, later, Offner found it necessary to distinguish between those details produced by the master and those that might have been produced by his followers, in short, to interpret. In fact, it was not enough to recognize a detail: what mattered was the telling detail, the detail that revealed the characteristic, organic structure of an artist’s production, that shed light on his development, and that elevated it from the superficially analogous manufacture of a manually proficient imitator. Moreover, in identifying an artist’s authentic works, Berenson wanted to define their essential, unifying spirit, their élan vital or what he and Offner called “artistic personality.” Artistic personality was not biography or psychology in the literal sense but a critical conceit that derived from the viewer’s aesthetic response to a work of art and that applied human qualities to its style, not to its maker. An artistic personality was, as Offner put it, an imaginary figure “endowed with a fancy, a taste and possessing a hand.” And an attribution was, therefore, not merely the pondered sum of a collection of objectively recorded morphological details, but also an aesthetic impression linked to the memory of others like it. The concept of artistic personality thus joined to the rational positivism of Morellian connoisseurship an element of romantic feeling, what Berenson was to term “ideated sensations” but what, as early as 1912, Roberto Longhi (following the aesthetics of Benedetto Croce) would insist was merely “intuition,” and what as late as 1989 Sydney Freedberg, buttressing the Berensonian view, characterized as the connoisseur’s mental apparatus in terms of a scientific mechanism. Connoisseurship, Freedberg writes, is not

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“that unfathomable, non-rational, and animal-seeming thing that is called ‘intuition.’ ‘Intuition’ is no more than the shorthand process, computerlike in its swiftness, with which the most expert connoisseur acquires and enters data into his mental bank of remembered similes, then compares, analyzes, and arrives at a solution.” More than a difference in semantics, this debate represents a conflict of scholarly outlooks that was to have wide and on-going reverberations about the criticism of specific works of art and the historical interpretation of artistic periods in general. It is, however, to the point to remember that the French word connaissance, from which our word connoisseur derives, has connotations of both science and intuition. For his part, Offner recognized the necessity and value — indeed, the centrality — of aesthetic response, but like Freedberg, though more than Berenson and certainly more than Longhi, he would perhaps have thought, like the putupon overseers of the Cathedral of Milan, that ars sine scientia nihil est. Yet, conversely Offner might have asserted also that scientia sine poetica nihil est. To convey the emotion of an aesthetic experience Offner, like Berenson, had had before him the brilliant prose-poetry of Walter Pater (1839–94). For Pater, who stressed the importance of temperament and “the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects,” the temple of art was first erected on the solid beams of words and then arrayed in shimmering fabrics woven from skeins of more, more, and still more words: all spun effortlessly from both eye and soul. If for Morelli the work of art was the product of an artist’s hand, for Pater it embodied his mind. First published in 1888, The Renaissance exercised a wide and lasting influence. Pater’s Luca della Robbia is the fashioner of “fragments of the milky sky itself.” His Leonardo is a magician and the Mona Lisa a mysterious she-sphinx, omniscient yet dumb, immediate yet remote, imperturbable yet undead: a dangerously alluring “diver in deep seas,” a traveler through countless worlds and timeless eras, a being elemented of earth and wind, fire and water. In actuality, Pater was little concerned with attributions or with verifiable facts, but the unforgettable imagery of his characterizations continues to resonate more than a century later. As early as 1898 Roger Fry noted that Pater “makes so many mistakes about pictures; but the strange, and a for a Morelli-ite disappointing, thing is that the net result is so very just.” Acknowledging the limits of science, Berenson admitted that “our studies are not the fittest subject for the dialectical method” and begged “the student, even when not perfectly convinced by my arguments, to believe in my conclusions.”

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In the end, Offner also recognized the necessity and power of affective prose. He borrowed not only the analytical method Berenson had developed from Morelli and the accompanying language of science, but also the critical notion of artistic personality and a Paterian aspiration to convey that most unquantifiable, subjective thing, aesthetic emotion. For Offner, as for Berenson, an artistic personality was defined “on the basis — the only real basis — of style,” but each attribution was also “a differentiation of aesthetic experience.” Thus, alongside his desire for a “scientific” basis for attribution and interpretation, Offner acknowledged the role of something less measurable but somehow universal: “And yet science or no science, I seriously believe that the art-historian has this in common with the better part of thinking humanity, that he knows by a sort of Kantian intuition when he is right, or at least when the tendency of his conclusion is.” However aware of pursuing a moving target, Offner nevertheless aimed to justify objective evidence with his particular, individual aesthetic response: “For if scientific truth will never be arrived at, in a subject that draws its material from a functional reaction, our conclusions, as will be seen, are capable of reaching objective validity.” Here, his confidence perhaps surpassed that of Berenson, who had cautioned that “Argument in our field can never be conclusive: it can only be directive.” For Offner, however, only the most scrupulous analysis of visual data could grant him the authority to convey his experience, that is, to speak and thereby give meaning to his observations and classifications. For Offner only objectivity rationalized the critic-historian’s perceptions and only precise, evocative prose had the power to animate coldly observed facts. His essays are written in a language that attempts to articulate, with seamless convergence of observation and interpretation, what his discerning eye perceives and what his words ultimately hope to stimulate, and eventually persuade, his readers to see as well. But unlike Pater, or in later days Kenneth Clark and Sydney Freedberg, and much more like Berenson, Offner was not a natural writer, and despite the strength of his English and his daring use of metaphor, one has a sense that the written word came to him with as much deliberation as did his attributions and his slow, measured speech: one difficult word at a time. Perhaps for that very reason he recognized “the perplexities and elusiveness of verbal argument.” Nevertheless, despite his discomfort with words, he recognized their worth. In the introduction to his Studies in Florentine Painting he almost remonstrates: “But if verbal proof has been limited, it has been found necessary to reinforce the conclusiveness of the evidence

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offered in the illustrations, by verbal indications of points of analogy.” Ever cautious, ever the perfectionist, he wrote with care and concision: indeed, one wonders whether Panofsky had Offner in mind when he tersely defined a connoisseur as “a laconic art historian,” a remark of implicit respect, since for Panofsky an art historian was in turn “a loquacious connoisseur.” Offner’s introductory essays for the Corpus are brief and to the point; his essays few. Moreover, unlike Pater, Offner’s descriptions of works of art or his characterizations of painters, such as the one that begins his essay on Pacino di Bonaguida, are never fully sustained from beginning to end. They are, rather, more like flashes of light on the surface of water at night, suggesting the shape of the time-shadowed mass that lies below. Evoking his interpretations by means of a poetic shorthand, they necessarily share the stage with the demonstrable, “scientific” considerations that are tedious but necessary in order to articulate the impulse “which the original intuition has by a synthetic and instinctive act of consciousness selected and drawn into it.” In the end, Offner’s attributions, however accurate and however ingenious at the time they were made, are yesterday’s news. His arguments for or against are of little interest to an audience that today would no more question most of them than the shape of North America on the map. It is, however, his cautiously contemplated critical interpretations that are the very imaginative confections that still have the power to give breath, to communicate, and ultimately to contribute to history. Having a poet’s daring with metaphor, Offner perhaps also required a poet’s talent, for the fourteenth-century paintings that were his subject remain far more reticent and aesthetically inaccessible than do the works of the later Renaissance and its long aftermath. Although uneven in its force, Offner’s figurative language has the effect of stimulating the imagination, and it is always inextricably grounded in painstaking visual study. Its value is apparent whether he errs about an attribution or whether writing about subjects, like Castagno, further away from his usual terrain. For Offner, poetry, sometimes as compressed as the narrow metrical compass of a haiku, gave life to the science of connoisseurship. Thus, the gold ground of Giotto’s Goldman Madonna in Washington evokes “the tremulous light of early morning.” Elsewhere, some of Nardo di Cione’s male figures have an “odd purring gentleness,” even though au fond the gentle Nardo’s art is a “Dream of Fair Women,” and his image of the divinity is (in that pre-feminist era) “like all godhead, instinct with the male principle.” Unlike “appreciationism”

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(which, in Panofsky’s wry obiter dictum, “deprives naiveté of its charm without correcting its errors”), these passages are much more than empty rhetorical flourishes: they are suggestive summations informed by thoughtful scrutiny and by a sure command of the literature. Naturally, some of the longer passages in Offner’s essays are more ambitious. To anyone familiar with paintings by the Master of the Fogg Pietà Offner’s atmospheric, almost mysterious prose is richly suggestive and strangely accurate: “He absorbs you by his passion, which is always allowed to wholly possess his figures — suggesting that aspect of human life in which impulse works slowly, but with the certainty of instinct and the directness of fate. There is accordingly a kind of primitive force in his types.” Even more evocative and just are the following descriptions of Niccolò di Tommaso’s scenes of Genesis, where the reader is first reminded “that a fourteenth century representation of Paradise was determined by the undeniable and undisputed conventions both of contemporary Weltanschauung and of contemporary art, which we have been centuries breaking down. Unlike our Paradise of rapturous extensions of earthly freedom, of perpetual surprises, of infinite ease, and healing calm, our painter’s Paradise was, in its simple intention, a supreme opportunity for amorous longings. Rock-bound, bare, it is soft and leafy only for the Fall. . . . The Serpent has the head of a complaisant and furthering procuress, and Adam and Eve are all-forgetful in their desire. How harsh and unsparing seems the final Expulsion of such gentle and trusting children of nature!” Offner then goes on to describe, in a way that is profoundly interpretative and cannot be dismissed as a hollow articulated impression, that “the scene changes in the Fall, where a diapered background of small leaves and flowers spreads like a mille-feuille behind the figures. Standing like Aphrodite before the dazed Paris in fifteenth century representations of The Award of the Golden Apple, Eve seems to have risen from the earth, on tall and slender limbs, chastened in shape like a Greek jar, and displays the miracle of her pearl-tinted body as she offers it in the symbolic apple: Adam accepts it, as if to maintain a dramatic as well as the merely physical symmetry.” The rich, rapturous, and now-exotic effect of Offner’s prose does not, thereby, indicate a failure of judgment or an abdication of his role as historian. On the contrary, while evoking the essence of his aesthetic response, he was also able to suggest the relative level of the art and its position in the larger picture. Nowhere perhaps is the tension between science and poetry in Offner’s approach more jarring than in his essay on Jacopo del Casentino. In it,

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almost buried — or should one say framed? — by a list of attributed paintings (a list that is dryly annotated and, therefore, more “scientific” than any of Berenson’s famous lists that were its inspiration) one encounters in an unexpected and, therefore, all the more startling way — like a ruby in a pebbled path — what is probably still the most exquisitely sensitive characterization and carefully calibrated assessment of Jacopo del Casentino’s modest talent that one will find in the literature: “Out of the association of these works, a coherent personality for the first time shapes itself — a determinate presence, constant to a purposeful principle, and moving in its own world. The world of supreme masters has range, hope, and a selfestablished reality of existence that the poor world of actuality seems long ago to have lost; the one offers us a rapturous liberation from the other. But Jacopo’s world is narrower and less resourceful, with definite boundaries in all directions; affording peculiar charms and interests to be sure, but rarely filling the imagination. Its inhabitants are shy, timid and vaguely expectant, for his is a world also that furnishes no occasions either for the proof of courage nor, of the capacity to face crises; a sort of paradise without serpents, but also without beatitudes. Save where he leans on other masters, Jacopo’s personages and their doings want both in moral effort or moral effectuality; they content themselves with the mild blessedness of acquiescence in unrealized or unadventured hopes. And seldom suggesting prolongations into larger realms of beings, they even more rarely create about them an environment which undeniably justifies them.” Nowhere, however, is Offner’s talent more evident, more compelling, or more profound than in his magisterial essay on Giotto, undoubtedly also the most famous of his occasional pieces. More than any other discussion, it defined Giotto, above all the Giotto of the Arena Chapel, for the Englishspeaking world. Here is Giotto the equal of Phidias, a narrator of superior skill and solemn profundity, an artist of universal stature. “Giotto’s art,” he had already summed up in the introduction to his Studies, “by idealizing action and psychology chilled the spontaneous human sympathies; by its structural balance, it arrested the mobility of life, and burdened the sensibilities by its monumental weight.” In “Giotto, Non-Giotto” he elaborates that view and fashions an unforgettable and now-familiar portrait of Giotto’s artistic being. “Giotto’s concern” in the Arena Chapel,” he writes, “was with establishing the dignity of human fate through the material significance of the human figure,” and thus his composition “subjugates the individual form to a corporate order and equilibrium” that “implies

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a non-naturalistic treatment of the figure.” In this, Giotto’s composition “approximates a regular geometric pattern” but is far from rigid or inflexible; rather, it “ultimately achieves a remarkable elasticity through a constant tightening and loosening of the thread of his story, a constant focussing and diffusion of the attention.” But it is in his conception of Giotto’s ennobled humanity whereby he singles out the painter’s greatness: “As the underlying tone in Giotto is moderation, so the predominant virtue is temperance. Man is neither as troubled nor as rebellious as he is in Cimabue, nor as susceptible to emotion as in Simone Martini. Perhaps the distinguishing trait of Giotto’s man is a deep humility of spirit. He avoids violent or frenzied action. His gesture is not confused by a tension or struggle of the will, and the figure shows no sign of maceration. And the scale being in all respects human, there is an absence of heroic suggestion. There is no trace of pride, grandeur of self-exaltation. The atmosphere is accordingly one of unworldliness; man stands detached from earthly things and interests. Nowhere is human frailty so frankly postulated and so graciously condoned, and nowhere the doctrine of brotherly love so nobly affirmed.” Without ever using the term and perhaps unwittingly encouraged by the educational training of his day, Offner conceives of Giotto as a classicist. Using a formalist language derived, as with so much else in his work, from Berenson, his conception of Giotto and his belief in a formalism of meaning owes its germinal motive to Berenson’s interest in the psychology of perception. He notes that in the Arena Chapel “individual expression is moderated: it becomes the projection of an abiding inner state rather than that of a momentary impulse.” He then goes on to say: “But by the same principle such expression is not confined to any single part of the figure. It may be said to pervade it.” What is this but Berenson’s anticipation of the formalist notion of “significant form” elevated to a supremely higher level? “Giotto, Non-Giotto” epitomizes a kind of interpretative criticism not only surpassing Berenson but also outside Panofsky’s altogether different talent? If “Giotto, Non-Giotto” is a triumph, it must also be counted both a failure and a disappointment. Published in two installments in 1939, Offner’s essay was written in response to the great Mostra Giottesca of 1937. The latter was, as Offner noted, “the most important ever held for the completeness of pre-and-post Giottesque examples;” above all, it “brought together works scattered over many churches and galleries under a daylight never known to have entered the places for which these works had been painted.” The effect of so great (and today, alas, inconceivable) an assemblage

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1. Page from Offner’s copy of the Mostra Giottesca with his annotations in pencil. Library of James G. Czarnecki, Omaha, Nebraska.

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2. Giotto, Crucifix, S. Maria Novella, Florence.

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of related works from that remote period must have been staggering. As Offner himself said, “The shock of actually seeing them has in cases proved too great to insure sound judgment.” But at last, here was an opportunity to reach consensus on the key, defining figure of Florentine Trecento painting. Already, a dozen years earlier, in the introduction to the Studies, Offner took grim measure of scholarship in his field: “Perhaps the most persistent fallacy in the criticism of Florentine painting is the uncensored belief that the fourteenth century is divided between Giotto and his followers. However close to the truth the theory of isolated scholars may have been, their practice seems invariably to be at the mercy of this error. At present all that is being willingly admitted of this period, is that Giotto was its initiator and Siena the source of a transfiguring influence. Misled by the Giottesque prejudice, students have been giving too little place to that influence, have underrated it, and worse, they have almost entirely neglected the nonGiottesque painting of this moment.” The latter part of his assessment is less true today, and Siena’s importance is gradually being salvaged, but in 1937 he was certainly warranted in thinking that the exhibition had stimulated interest in Giotto and had raised hope for “a less distorted view of the artistic panorama and of Giotto’s place in it.” Offner’s strategy was to tackle the heart of the long-standing debate by comparing the murals in the Arena Chapel with those commonly ascribed to him in the upper church in Assisi. His analysis is too extraordinary to summarize. Its effect on English-speaking historians was profound and, on the whole, lasting, but elsewhere, particularly among Italian and some German scholars, it met resistance, polemics, and ingenious counterarguments. Instead of a solution leading to consensus, he had managed to stoke the fires of a controversy that was hardly put to rest by the exhibition of 1937, by Offner’s essay in the wake of it, or by much else since. Surely he could not have underestimated the emotion behind the debate, and surely he had been aware of the intellectual risk from the start, but in the brief time between 1937 and 1939 could he have been fully cognizant of the possible connection between partisan views and nationalist feelings that would, by other and more incendiary means, erupt into world war? At heart he had always believed that individually perceived visual data and impressions could hardly be translated into the common coin of words, indeed, that such phenomena ultimately are, in Hayden Maginnis’ apt term, ineffable. “All adventures of the eye,” Offner maintained, “like those of touch, of taste, of smell, of hearing, elude language. Language can barely approximate them,

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and then only by analogy of example.” “Giotto, Non-Giotto” was the most visually penetrating, poetically inspired demonstration of Offner’s method: and yet, in the political sense of revising opinion, it had failed. Did he perceive it with disillusionment? As an essay it is curiously incomplete. At the start of the first installment he states unequivocally that he intends to argue his views, not only about Assisi, but also about the Santa Maria Novella Cross, yet the latter work is never mentioned again.1 Moreover, in the final note of the essay he offers the prospect of further discussion in the future: “The foregoing stylistic confrontation of the works of Giotto and the St. Francis cycle has been necessary before it becomes possible to deal with the positive aspects of either. The discussion of these aspects, which in no way touches the validity of my present findings, I shall leave to another occasion.” That occasion never came, and “Giotto, Non-Giotto” marks something of a turning point in Offner’s career. There was, of course, the shock of the war and the subsequent emergence of more communicative, more accessible methods championed by scholars such as Panofsky, Meiss, and Pope-Hennessy but, beyond that, one can only guess at why the rest of Offner’s Giotto, why all of Giotto, from glorious start to finish, never 1

Offner annotated only two entries in his personal copy of the catalogue for the Mostra Giottesca. By far the most extensive concerns the Santa Maria Novella Crucifix (Figs. 1 and 2) and perhaps suggests, not coincidentally, a measure of deliberation still at work in Offner’s cautious mind. The marginalia and underlinings take the form of an informal census of scholarly opinion, registering how various scholars weighed in on the contentious question of its attribution to Giotto. Lining up below “Si” in the margin are Thode, Vitzthum and Volbach, and Suida. Names of other connoisseurial combatants (Cruttwell, Khvoskinsky [sic], Toesca, Cecchi, all of whom accepted the work as Giotto’s at least in part) are mentioned in the text of the entry but remain unnoted or unmarked by Offner. Doubters are indicated by a “?” and include Coletti (about whom Offner underscored the words “parziale esecuzione” in the text), Salmi, and Oertel. “Non” is followed by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Sirén, Beyet [sic], Schlosser, Frey, Weigelt, and “B.B.” To this list an underlining that becomes an arrow adds A. Venturi, Fabriczy, Van Marle, Vavalà, and Rintelen to those opposed. An underlining on the second page of the entry becomes an arrow ending in “Si” for Tarchiani, Ragghianti, Bertini Calosso, Gamba, Mariani, and Körte. The last precedes Offner’s name, set off and thereby detached by a vertical bar, recording his previously published opposition to the attribution. Was all this attention, this shorthand measure of an intellectual fray, evidence of reconsideration? Did these exceptional annotations suggest lingering doubt on Offner’s part? To be sure, the only other annotation in that massive catalogue reveals, on the contrary, a private moment of unforgiving decisiveness: in response to another scholar’s attempt to relate a Stigmatization attributed to the School of Bonaventura di Berlinghieri to Bonaventura’s famous panel in Pescia Offner wrote, “pure drivel.”

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came. One thing is certain: after 1939, Offner’s essays are relatively few and generally of a different cast. Increasingly, it appears, he turned his attention, redoubled by the expert assistance of Klara Steinweg (1903–72), to the Corpus, and working, as was his habit, on a number of volumes at once, he saw some eleven of the projected thirty appear during his lifetime, with three more later seen to completion by Dr. Steinweg. The contrast with the essays is instructive: virtually fetishizing Wissenschaft, the Corpus contains, as it did from the beginning, fully developed catalogue entries. Going far beyond the skeletal form of Berenson’s lists, these entries include not only careful comments about condition and provenance but also itemize staggeringly comprehensive bibliographic references to the attribution of each catalogued work, as well as an extensive and still enormously valuable body of iconographical notes that Offner generated with the unacknowledged assistance of Georg Kaftal, whose indispensable volumes on the iconography of the saints in Italian painting in turn incorporate Offner’s unacknowledged, often provisional and, therefore, unpublished connoisseurship regarding specific paintings. Above all, however, the photographs in the Corpus assume an overriding importance in relation to the whole, outweighing, obviating, and, ideally, transcending verbal argument: unlike Offner’s essays, the Corpus is, in effect, a connoisseurship of silence. Was this a retreat, a natural maturation of his intellectual interests, or a pragmatic realization that first things had to come first: that no cogent interpretative history of early Florentine painting could be written as long as the business of classification remained unfinished? In any case, one year before his death and with the Corpus still many volumes from an end, the septuagenarian Offner sympathetically echoed Leonardo’s famous lament: “Will anything ever be finished?” In the present art historical climate, Richard Offner is out of fashion, and his type of art historical writing — part science, part poetry — is quietly scorned. It is a question of faith to predict that the pendulum will swing in his direction, but to remember Offner for the exhaustive apparatus criticus of the Corpus and not for his introductions to it or for his essays is to ignore the more ambitious, if physically smaller part of his work. Rooted in positivism yet yielding to imagination, his essays are poetic interpretations at once guided by dedicated experience and controlled by rigorous scholarship. Beyond their important historiographic connections with Pater and Berenson on the one hand and with Clark and Freedberg on the other and even beyond their intrinsic worth as compellingly vivid,

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still-meaningful criticism with lasting historical implications in the serious pursuit of understanding, they offer an example of what may be gained from a reciprocity between discipline grounded in facts and imagination stirred by vision. It is not an easy recipe to follow, but neither is it knowledge beyond our world’s reach. Rather, in the borrowed words of a fellow-pilgrim, “it serves as a beacon to those amateurs still committed to the beauty, dignity, and moral force of art, and it also serves as a bridge between the premises and ambitions of an earlier time and the future course of art history.” Rather than scorn that “lightens the imputation of ignorance,” it merits the respectful appreciation of every student who believes in an art history that has its beginning and end in art.

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REVIEWS

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XX

Moshe Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture 1

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POKEN language is a system of sounds, that is, aural signs by which human beings communicate, but as those with imperfect hearing know, it is not the only means of exchanging ideas before taking recourse to the written word. Visual clues, especially gestures and movements of the body, may accompany or in some instances outweigh speech and intonation. The urge to gesture is profound and universal, and its existence as a phenomenon has made it a subject of enquiry for both philosophers and scientists since antiquity. Plato analyzed the movements of the body in relation to the stylized movements of Greek theater; Leonardo studied them with a view to investing the artificial world of paintings with the vivacity of nature. Ritualized gestures were incorporated into the conventions of the Early Christian liturgy, and others, of impious significance, remained beyond the power of polite society to suppress. Whether sanctioned or abhorred, gestures of all kinds have ever accompanied human concourse, and while it was not until the seventeenth century that a body of visual signals became codified into a systematic “language” of signs, who could deny that earlier gestures also conveyed expression and meaning. The trouble lies in identifying and interpreting gesticulation, for by its very nature it is fleeting and visual; moreover, outside the conventions of modern sign language living gestures, even those found in a familiar culture, can be imperfectly allusive. How much more difficult, then, is their interpretation in the fictive world of fourteenth1

Moshe Barasch, Giotto and the Language of Gesture (Cambridge Studies in the History of Art), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987,

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century painting. Strangely enough, however, this is a question that seems less problematic in the case of Giotto, particularly the Giotto who painted the cycle of murals in the Arena Chapel in Padua. At once subtle and clear, his work in Padua communicates with compelling force by virtue of its intellectual complexity as well as its naturalism. This naturalism is such that we recognize the essential humanity of his figures and apprehend their actions despite their cultural distance from us, and we do so in part by means of their somehow familiar gestures. Moshe Barasch’s Giotto and the Language of Gesture is the first systematic investigation of how the painter derived and used gestures as a means of enhancing the affective and intellectual content of his art. It is a study rich in ideas and even richer in observations, but unlike the author’s earlier book on gestures of despair, it is also a book about a single painter and his creative process. What it has to say about gestural conventions is stimulating, but what it has to say about Giotto implies a very different painter from the boy who, “impelled by nature herself,” as Vasari put it, was always drawing “pictures of things he saw” and who, according to legend, Cimabue is said to have discovered drawing the picture of a sheep from life. It is the bold proposition of Giotto and the Language of Gesture that to insist, as have writers since Cennini, Ghiberti, and Vasari, on the idea of Giotto’s return to nature is to obscure understanding of how the great fourteenth-century painter conceived and used gestures in his art. Barasch argues that Giotto’s “primary source was not uncontrolled nature, carefully and independently observed; it was rather the gestural patterns provided by established social acts.” In actuality, the seeming naturalism of Giotto’s figures is informed by a highly self-conscious appropriation of gestural conventions that were shaped and codified by ritual usage in rhetorical, liturgical, theatrical, judicial, and artistic practices. Understanding their meanings in those formalized contexts is “useful in the description and analysis of the gestures represented by Giotto,” because the meanings that specific gestures had outside the realm of art persisted, albeit “in a hidden, submerged way,” in the new context of Giotto’s art. Not only was Giotto aware that borrowed gestures carried with them traces of their original significance and context, but he went so far as to exploit them for his own purposes: indeed, a “characteristic feature in Giotto’s employment of transferred conventional gestures is his use of these half-articulated, submerged meanings and connotations.” This is a thesis that fashions nothing less than a new conception of the painter.

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Ambitious and learned, the book ranges widely over the vast territory of art before Giotto. Greek statuary, Roman coins, Early Christian sarcophagi, Byzantine ivories, Gothic capitals, Carolingian manuscripts, and even Egyptian coffins are all within its ken, and swinging through time with an ease born of long study, the author culls this diverse material as a means of classifying and interpreting nine specific gestures, each the subject of a chapter: “the speaking hand,” “awe,” “prayer,” “crossing the hands on the chest,” “the gesture of incapacity,” “ covered hands,” “imposition of hands,” “grasping the wrist,” and “expulsion.” These are followed by analyses of two scenes from the Arena Chapel, the Pact of Judas and the Noli me tangere. For the better part of the book, then, Barasch adopts an approach that excises a gesture from a figure and its specific narrative context, and, before reattaching it once again, considers it as an abstraction or, more properly, as the symbol of an abstraction whose significance may be understood by means of its analogues in earlier art. It is an approach that allows a given gesture to resonate. What Barasch calls “the speaking hand,” a group of gestures that accompany and indicate speech, is thus profitably considered against the background of Roman oratory and Christian gestures of benediction. By invoking images of Roman emperors, right hands raised, as well as images of the blessing Christ in Byzantine and western Medieval art, he summarizes the long-standing use of such gestures in the centuries before Giotto. And although Giotto never saw the Augustus of Primaporta or the Pantocrator at Daphni, he, like other painters of his day, must have been affected, as one readily accepts, by the gestural conventions behind those works. “The speaking hand,” as Barasch is the first to observe, is the most common gesture in Giotto’s work, but it is so much a part of scenes in the Arena Chapel that one easily takes it for granted. One has only to consider how lifeless and dumb the Sacrifice of Joachim would be if the angel did not gesture, as he now does, toward the Virgin’s future father but merely stood facing him, right arm at his side and hidden from view. “The speaking hand” is the longest and, along with the discussion of such actions as “covered hands” and “prayer,” among the most persuasive sections of this book. These are of course precisely the least “natural” of the gestures that Barasch considers. One cannot dispute the liturgical implications of covered hands, an action that, as the author admits, stretches the notion of what constitutes a gesture. Barasch of course considers figures, such as the aged Simeon accepting the long-awaited Savior into his hands in the Presentation of Christ, who are placed in ecclesiastical settings and

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engaged in ritual actions, but he also notes the covered hand of the Virgin’s attendant in the Visitation and thereby enlarges one’s understanding of the sacral mood of the scene. There appears to be some truth to his suggestion that her action is both “a formalized manifestation of adoration, appropriately offered to the highest-ranking figure [the Virgin] present in the scene” and “an expression of awe filling the attendant as she witnesses the holy event.” His attempts to include other figures in the category, however, veer too far from the probable. Surely the figures of the sleeping Joachim in the Dream of Joachim and the sleeping Joseph in the Nativity are shown wrapped in their cloaks so as to ward off the cold and not as veiled signals of sacred happenings. Barasch invites one to think about the possible significance of more than a few little-considered passages in Giotto’s work, and for this specialists will be grateful, but on occasion his conclusions, while provocative, are highly speculative and might leave some readers in doubt. Considering the Ascension in the Arena Chapel in relation to gestures of prayer, he observes that the figures in the upper realm occupied by Christ adopt the orans gesture, by then presumably archaic, whereas those in the earthly lower realm occupied by the Virgin adopt the modern gesture of prayer or what he terms “the folding of hands.” This gesture, he notes, “although occasionally performed also in heaven, seems a gesture clearly appropriate to the terrestrial sphere.” Admitting that “We cannot test this idea,” he offers a tentative conclusion: “Giotto, then, perceived of the time-honoured, archaic prayer gesture as befitting beings in paradise, the new prayer gesture as suited to human mortals.” But is there not a simpler explanation? The figures beside Christ, representing souls at last released from Purgatory, tend to echo his gesture and movement, which in turn is related to the action of the virtue Hope as depicted by Giotto elsewhere in the chapel. Hope, which is most assuredly an aspect of prayer, and the ascending movement essential to the narrative surely mattered more than a distinction about certain figures’ earthly or celestial status. By treating gestures as motifs Barasch is able to draw unexpected parallels between figures at great remove from one another, but sometimes his groupings are not particularly meaningful. Both the advantage and the danger of this method is apparent in his discussion of gestures that he assembles under the broad category of “awe.” These are gestures that assume “the posture of immobilization, particularly with lowered or folded hands.” Allowing for variations of the gesture, he draws parallels between a widely

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scattered group that one would not readily consider together: the male mourner at the far right in the Arena Lamentation, the maidens behind the Virgin at her Marriage, the famous figure of Joachim retreating to the wilderness after his expulsion from the temple, a servant (which Barasch unaccountably identifies as a girl) in the Wedding at Cana, two by-standers in the scene of St. Francis at the Christmas Crib at Greccio in the Upper Church at Assisi, two angels in the lunette with St. John on Patmos in the Peruzzi Chapel, and a servant in the Dance of Salome also from the latter place. Now, these are figures associated by virtue of their gestures, but the formal similarities between their poses do not necessarily indicate equivalences in meaning. Much depends upon the particular role that a figure plays in a specific narrative context. In the case of the figures mentioned above, their similarities strike one as less interesting and significant than their differences, which one perceives by assessing both the scene in which each appears as well as the narrative as a whole. Surely the affective value of the despondent Joachim retreating into the wilderness, a figure who speaks not only with his hands but even with his back, is significantly different from that of a by-stander at the Virgin’s wedding. The attitude of the latter figure, whose role in the scene one must be grateful to Barasch for considering, may well suggest a degree of incomprehension and wonder. These are feelings that are related to awe and make sense for a simple mortal unable to fathom the workings of a God who could pair the aged Joseph and the youthful Mary. But by what means, short of strained reasoning, can Joachim be said to convey awe? Barasch arrives at this interpretation not so much from the internal evidence of the scene or of the Paduan narrative as a whole but from a notion that these figures are related to the metaphor of “bound hands,” which “was sometimes physically re-enacted in ritual and court ceremonies.” It is a theory some will dispute. One must know how the gesture of “bound hands” was performed. If it resembled the attitude of Christ, whose hands are in fact shown bound, in the Paduan image of Christ before Caiaphas (which Barasch does not discus in connection with this gesture), then it differed markedly from the gestures considered under the category of “awe.” But why is it necessary to turn to the procedure of the courts to explain the gestures of these figures? Their gestures, in which the hands are actually not so much bound as cradled, occur within the realm of ordinary human behavior, even today. It is far easier to believe that both the ritual gesture and the gestures in Giotto’s paintings had the same source, that is, nature. This is not to deny that Giotto’s work makes use of artistic conventions but rather

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to lay stress on the way Giotto revitalized them by a keen apprehension of human behavior. Besides groupings that stretch the definition of a gestural category, the thesis of Barasch’s book is weakened by errors of description. Such are of course the occupational hazards of the risky business of reading pictures, but it goes without saying that inaccurate description will compromise even the most tightly reasoned interpretation. Despite the thoughtful looking that went into this book some of its conclusions, perhaps urged by loyalty to a particular conviction about the way Giotto worked, mistake the visual evidence. For instance, Barasch says that the gesture of “awe” is illustrated “particularly clearly by the maiden in black directly behind the Virgin” in the Marriage of the Virgin, but he makes this assertion on an erroneous reading of the figure, who, incidentally, is not dressed in black but a robe of reddishbrown. Rather than letting “her hands hang down in front of her body, one hand clasping the other,” she in fact merely lets her right hang limply as if from a sling formed by her robe. Her analogue is not, as Barasch claims, the male figure standing toward the margin of the Lamentation but a maiden dressed in yellow-brown in the scene of the Virgin’s Wedding Procession. The figure’s attitude and her role in the scene are legitimate matters for investigation, but her gesture, if it is that at all, is completely unrelated to those assembled under the rubric of “awe.” Rather, one again suspects that her casual pose, while certainly not without meaning, was derived from observation. Barasch makes even larger claims for the figure of a youth who walks behind the holy family in the Flight into Egypt. The youth closest to the foreground “extends his hand in a noble, highly rhetorical gesture, again approaching in a general manner the configuration of the benedictio latina (though the hand is held horizontally rather than vertically).” Identifying the gesture as an “unusual and surprising speaking hand,” he adds: “The index and middle fingers are extended, freely and elastically, the ring and little fingers are curved under. The gesture strikes us as artificial and affected, and this character is enhanced by the fact that the bright hand, with its twisted outlines, stands out on the dark background of the other figure’s garment. The intrinsic nobility and preciosity of the hand is perhaps also enhanced by its juxtaposition to the donkey’s tail. Nowhere, it seems, has Giotto so isolated a noble speaking gesture and treated it as a self-contained motif.” The young man, Barasch claims, is “obviously explaining to his companion the mystery of the event they are witnessing” and by means of his gesture

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perhaps “in some way establishing the connection between the event and its liturgical consequences.” But what Barasch reads as an “artificial and affected” gesture of blessing and speech is not drawn from liturgical or oratorical practice; it is in fact something rather ordinary and natural as an action: holding a faded switch, apparently painted a secco yet still visible even in the somewhat murky illustration reproduced in Barasch’s book, the boy hurries the ass. However mundane, the action is nevertheless valuable as a device and evidence of Giotto’s dramatic skill, for it contributes to the feeling of urgency that pervades this scene of escape from mortal danger. Barasch’s error hardly diminishes the many virtues of his work, but it betrays a tendency of the book to seek a recherché interpretation of a figure’s role when the evidence favors a more straightforward one that is no less subtle but of a different kind, that is, one that recognizes Giotto’s imaginative recreation of nature as well as his awareness of artistic and social conventions. In a sense attributions are like descriptions, and a mistaken attribution can compromise an interpretation as surely as a faulty description. It is a problem that even a book concerned with specific iconographic matters cannot escape, for this is, after all, a book that concerns itself not only with Giotto’s work in Padua but disputed works attributed to him. One problematic attribution (and one that has nothing to do with Giotto) illustrates the danger. After offering an informative survey of the gesture Barasch terms “crossing the hands on the chest,” which in its early history carried with it the idea of a sacrificial offering, he examines medieval examples. He makes striking observations about a panel, now in the Vatican (his fig. 41), that depicts the Man of Sorrows flanked by two adoring angels on an upper register above the Virgin, Joseph, and two angels kneeling in adoration before the infant Christchild. He rightly notes that the Man of Sorrows and the angels beside him, as well as the Virgin below all are shown with their hands crossed over their chests. One agrees that the gesture “may convey adoration, and perhaps even humility, on the part of the angels,” and surely “The Virgin may express her adoration of the Christ-child by crossing her arms. But the Man of Sorrows, who so ostentatiously performs this gesture, is surely not meant to convey his humility. Is the gesture meant to express his request that his sacrifice be accepted?” This intriguing idea, as many others in the book, is left in the interrogative. Nevertheless, if Barasch cautiously refuses to insist on a specific meaning, his description of the picture will encourage further speculation. However, it is a discussion that is

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called into question by a doubtful assertion. The panel, he says, is “an early fourteenth-century panel, produced in Germany,” whose existence proves that, as in Italy, “The motif must quickly have become popular north of the Alps as well.” But to my eyes the panel is mid-fourteenth-century Italian, specifically by Allegretto Nuzi, and can have no bearing on the transalpine diffusion of the gesture. The conclusion is perhaps still correct, because, to be fair, the author suggests the existence of other northern examples that he does not enter into evidence, but it betrays a tendency to favor a symbolic motif to the neglect of the mind behind the hand that painted it. Indeed, Barasch is most successful in one of the two concluding chapters of his book, where in analyzing the Pact of Judas he profitably enlarges his discussion beyond matters strictly concerned with gesture. Noting the unusual placement of the scene on the triumphal arch opposite the Visitation and out of its proper sequence in the Passion, he embarks on a discussion that probes in a more comprehensive way than his earlier chapters. His suggested explanation for this odd feature, that each scene marked the beginning of a period of Christ’s life, is more satisfactory than the formalist argument put forward by Rintelen and others, and readers will be stimulated by Barasch’s commentary, itself indebted to Meyer Schapiro’s semiological approach, about profiles in Giotto’s art as well as by his discussions of the moral weight of the various physiognomies in the scene and the symbolic value of color. It is, however, when he ventures into the field of legal procedure that his argument becomes attenuated. It is not at all certain that the evil action of the devil, who grasps Judas by the shoulder, can be related to such things as the “friendly grasping” that was termed confirmare and that arose in cases involving “transference of a child into the tutelage of his protector.” Barasch admits: “We do not know if Giotto was aware of the meanings attributed to this gesture in law and ancient custom, and if so, what his sources were. The one thing we can maintain is that in applying the gesture in the Pact of Judas he was in full agreement with these traditions and customs.” But was he? As Barasch points out, this book is a beginning, and future studies may want to consider the implications of gestures for defining Giotto’s personality and oeuvre. In particular, those who, unlike Barasch, do not accept Giotto’s authorship of the Franciscan cycle in the Upper Church in Assisi are likely to wonder if there is really not a significant difference in the handling of gestures in the Arena Chapel and in the various works attributed to Giotto in Assisi or, for that matter, in the master’s Florentine

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mural cycles. Further study will perhaps be able to shed light on the Assisi problem, one of the most nettlesome in Italian art and one that revolves around the fundamental nature of Giotto’s art. On the surface this is not a book that concerns itself with matters central to the business of connoisseurship, but insofar as it aims to define an aspect of Giotto’s creative method, it helps to define what kind of artist he was. Despite its erudition and its probing questions, the book places greater value on those gestures that are most recoverable, that is, the codified symbolic actions drawn from judicial and liturgical ritual, but one must admit that the spontaneous, ephemeral gestures of the Trecento are, strictly speaking, irrecoverable. Clearly, the evidence culled from such ritualized settings as the court and the church can only provide a partial picture. Giotto was certainly aware of liturgical ritual, with artistic convention, and perhaps even with legal custom, but the genius of his art was such that he subsumed the symbolic shorthand of ritualized gestures and actions into an art shaped by nature. Although in its preoccupation with gestural patterns and sources Giotto and the Language of Gesture loses sight of the essential personality of Giotto, it raises numerous worthwhile questions and has much to say about the history of gesture as a social phenomenon.

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XXI

Millard Meiss, Francesco Traini 1

W

HEN Ruskin visited Pisa as a young man in 1845, the gigantic mural of the Triumph of Death in the Camposanto posed “no new thought,” and a companion work illustrating the arduous, but reputedly uplifting, lives of hermit saints presented him with “no temptation.” Subsequent writers may have agreed about the latter but failed to share his confidence about the former: today these murals are the subject of elegant controversy among connoisseurs of early Italian painting. The prime mover of the discussion was the late Millard Meiss, who over fifty years ago sought to define the artistic personality and oeuvre of the painter responsible. Ironically, none of Meiss’s vigorously argued proposals for the attribution, dating and interpretation of the murals has gone unchallenged. Indeed, the current consensus appears to be against them. Francesco Traini collects Meiss’s occasional contributions to the problem and in so doing attempts to reassert the fundamental correctness of his views as they evolved in the face of new evidence and, finally, opposition. Specialists and students will welcome this slender volume, largely for two reasons; first, because it provides a means of approaching a complex subject and, second, because it presents the thinking of one of the most influential art historians of the period. The problem of Francesco Traini, to borrow the title of the earliest, largest and most important essay in the collection, is essentially a problem of connoisseurship. Though nowadays unfashionable among art historians, perhaps as a reaction to the work of many earlier historians of Italian art (including Meiss’s teacher Richard Offner), the association of a work of art 1

Millard Meiss, Francesco Traini, ed. and with an introduction by Hayden B. J. Maginnis, Washington, D.C., Decatur House Press, 1983.

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FRANCESCO TRAINI

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with an artistic personality remains central to any true understanding of art as history. In the course of his career-long concern with this particular problem, which began as a doctoral dissertation, Meiss assembled a small but diverse body of works, including the murals in the Camposanto, around an altarpiece inscribed with Francesco Traini’s name. These paintings, he argued, dated from the middle of the Trecento; moreover, the morbidity and harshness of the Pisan murals typified the response of Tuscan art to the catastrophic Black Death of 1348. By the time he published his last essay on the subject thirty-eight years later, his views were not exactly the same. He was forced to accept the likelihood of a date in the 1330s, before the Black Death, for the murals, and he was inclined to re-evaluate Traini’s role in a series of manuscript illuminations in Chantilly, for if they, like the murals, really dated from the 1330s, then their author could only be Traini himself and not a follower. Nevertheless, despite such changes of mind, he provided what still remains compelling evidence that these various works on plaster, panel and vellum comprise a more or less coherent group attributable to Francesco Traini and his workshop. One only wishes that the illustrations crucial to his case were always as clear and as large as in the original articles. No such problem befalls the prose. Except for an odd lapse into confusing technical jargon (without reading the relevant passages in this book, how many of us could distinguish a “plastic pictorial style” from a “linearistic plastic style”?), the essays are well written and carefully argued. That is not to say that all of Meiss’s initial conclusions are always unassailable, for questions of attribution and dating, as Meiss well knew, are ultimately subjective. Why else would he carry some of his arguments to “forbidding length”? Even so, they were not enough to prevent a radically alternative counter-proposal from the Italian scholar Luciano Bellosi, who argued, largely from circumstantial evidence, that the murals in Pisa were not painted by the Pisan Traini but by the elusive Florentine Buffalmacco. Fortunately, a summary of the entire critical problem, as well as a discussion of certain key questions in the debate, appears in Hayden Maginnis’ excellent introduction. Because the volume is not a monograph, the introduction is not only valuable but necessary. Even with it, however, there is a quality of incompleteness about this book which the introduction cannot entirely overcome. The problem of Francesco Traini can hardly be understood without reference to Bellosi’s book on Buffalmacco and to Meiss’s own

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Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death, in which the Pisan murals have a small but memorable role. As Maginnis says, the problem is far from resolved, but this book serves as both a convenient tool and a posthumous rebuttal. To be reminded of Millard Meiss’s thoughts is to accompany him once again, and those trying to make their way across what the editor aptly calls the sticky and sometimes baffling “web of Trainesque art,” will find no better or more engaging guide.

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XXII

Marvin Eisenberg, Lorenzo Monaco 1

I

F, as the Neoclassical painter Ingres insisted, drawing is the probity of art, perhaps caution is the probity of history. To be sure, it is a quality essential for anyone venturing into the floating, halflit world of a painter as prolific, mysterious, and influential as Lorenzo Monaco. Like Botticelli and Ghiberti, he was the subject of sympathetic curiosity in the wake of Art Nouveau, which found in the effortless, swinging curves of his draftsmanship affirmation of a contemporary style, and like Botticelli and Ghiberti, his place in Italian art is secure, but unlike his better-known compatriots he has not been rescued from the critical distortions of yesteryear, which saw him through the blurring filters of the International Gothic and Sienese painting. Marvin Eisenberg’s book is the first modern attempt to give clearer shape to the artistic personality of a painter who dominated the Florentine scene for the wayward generation between the death of Agnolo Gaddi and the advent of Gentile da Fabriano, Masaccio, and Fra Angelico. Without denying the role of either Sienese tradition or the innovations of the International Gothic, Eisenberg instead persuasively stresses the primacy of Lorenzo’s Florentine heritage. By offering a sharply etched revision of Lorenzo Monaco’s individual style and his accomplishments, Eisenberg’s essay conforms to the traditional expectations of the monographic format, but in the end his lapidary and delicately suggestive characterizations of specific paintings, whether taken up in the conveniently compact essay or in its massive accompanying catalogue, as well as his learned and exquisitely careful consideration of a host of historical desiderata constitute one of the

1 Marvin Eisenberg, Lorenzo Monaco, xxii and 243pp. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1989.

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most instructive journeys into the world of early Italian painting in many years. In 1390, while probably still in his teens, Lorenzo Monaco, then known by his secular name Piero di Giovanni, entered the Florentine monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, but before the decade’s end his religious profession would not prevent his leaving the confines of the monastery, where he had emerged as a painter of talent, to open a workshop of his own while retaining his association with the Camaldolese Order. He soon enjoyed astonishing success at the head of a large and productive enterprise, and by the time of his death in 1423 or 1424 he had ridden a powerful wave of popularity to its crest. Even after nearly six centuries’ time a sizable body of works survives as evidence of the responsive chord his art struck in the imagination of his contemporaries, but the very scale and complexity of his production have also complicated historical interpretation of it. Eisenberg has produced an orderly reading of this large, once confusing territory and at the same time brought into relief the essential features of Don Lorenzo’s style. The text of his book, which he unabashedly describes as a “critical essay,” focuses on a small group of some fifteen works that in his view constitute the touchstones by which all other paintings linked to the master ought to be judged. He does not argue his choices in the essay, where such discussion would mar his analysis of Don Lorenzo’s achievement, but rather in the catalogue, which serves as the arena for consideration of narrower problems in general. The works analyzed in the introductory essay stand at the summit of a pyramid, from whose elevated vantage point Don Lorenzo registers most purely and forcefully. This group of course constitutes the pinnacle of Lorenzo’s achievement, but Eisenberg can hardly be accused of fashioning an overly restrictive definition of the painter’s oeuvre, for the works discussed in the introductory essay form part of a rather large catalogue of some ninety works by the master and his shop. These are joined in positions furthest below and away from the summit by over seventy additional paintings by Lorenzo’s following. Eisenberg thus offers a judicious assessment of a widely ramified body of paintings. As is to be expected, the most problematic attributions concern Lorenzo’s youthful production, and it is in this nettlesome area that my own reservations, which center on three Madonnas in the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, in Berlin, and in the Berenson Collection in Florence, are greatest. Nevertheless, one ought to remember that appending a work to the beginning of an artist’s career, a maneuver that Sydney Freedberg has compared to cantilevering, is

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LORENZO MONACO

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the connoisseur’s most difficult feat and sometimes requires a critical leap of faith. Laying a queer lot of paintings at Lorenzo’s feet, other critics have gone too far in this regard with the result that Lorenzo Monaco has become more of a corporate name like Calvin Klein. Eisenberg has judiciously resisted this pressure. For instance, he rightly rejects the idea, put forward by Gronau and seconded by Zeri, Boskovits, and others, that a Coronation of the Virgin now in the Courtauld Gallery, along with a group of works following in its train, is an early work by Lorenzo. So cautious is Eisenberg in general that his analysis of these paintings cannot easily be dismissed, and, however the jury votes on a painting here or there, one hopes that his catalogue will serve as a corrective to the casual nature of many attributions to Lorenzo. When a panel of the Madonna and Child from the Thyssen Collection was attributed to Don Lorenzo himself in a recent exhibition in Lugano, it became clear that Eisenberg’s opinion, which the author of the catalogue noted but did not follow, was right. The coarse execution, fumbling drawing, and abrupt shifts of colour in the Thyssen panel place it, as Eisenberg argues, among works by the master’s shop. One of the great virtues of Eisenberg’s essay is his sensitive analysis of Don Lorenzo’s use of light and colour, which he often describes in the critical language of music. An observation such as one about the luminary implications of gold in the predella of Lorenzo’s remarkable Agony in the Garden, now in the Accademia in Florence, deepens one’s appreciation of both that painting and its creator. Some readers, used to seeing Don Lorenzo’s works in the consistently overlit conditions of the Uffizi and other galleries or conditioned by the almost overexposed look his paintings have in most publications, might be put off by the darkness of the color illustrations in Eisenberg’s book, but they ought not to be. Apart from one disastrous example, in which the imperfectly preserved mural of the Betrothal of the Virgin in the Bartolini Salimbeni Chapel seems the victim of some murky violet miasma, the colour reproductions, which cannot have been easy to make, in fact effectively suggest the soft illumination of the church interiors for which most of Don Lorenzo’s works were painted. As a result, the colours in the images acquire depth, the shadows achieve unexpected luminosity, and the highlights, such as the leaves in the background of the predella with Flight into Egypt from the Bartolini Salimbeni Annunciation, sparkle with something of the darkling magic of the original. Indeed, although the book concerns itself in large measure with the complicated problem of classifying Lorenzo Monaco’s production, it is

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informed by a magisterial understanding of the content, manufacture, and function of Italian paintings, not only the paintings of Lorenzo Monaco but of his milieu as well. The catalogue and notes are rich with valuable, though sometimes not easily retrievable, discussions of all manner of topics ranging from the carpentry of Italian panels, the technique of fresco painting, the imagery of the Mass and the Offices of the Virgin, the organization of a painter’s workshop, even the laude of Jacopone da Todi and seemingly minor matters such as “Oriental” costume. Eisenberg has written a book that will prove indispensable to historians of early Italian painting, a book that establishes a firm foundation upon which others, asking different and no less important questions, can now safely build.

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Additional Notes II The Velluti Chapel in Santa Croce, Florence As originally published, the List of Illustrations reads as follows: Unless otherwise stated the works in this article are by Jacopo del Casentino (c. 1279–1349/58). Figures 1–3 are in fresco. Plate II. St. Michael, c. 1328. Panel, 131 x 63 cm. Collection Sir Harold Acton. Here identified as the Velluti altarpiece 1. St. Michael’s Miracle at Mt. Gargano, after 1321. Velluti chapel, Sta. Croce, Florence. Together with Figure 2, this photograph was taken before restoration 2. The Fall of the Rebel Angels, after 1321. Velluti Chapel, Sta. Croce, Florence. Previously attributed to a follower of Cimabue 3. Detail of Figure 2. This photograph was taken after the restoration of the wall painting 4. Arte della Lana Tabernacle, second quarter of the fourteenth century. Panel, 2.38 x 1.20 m. Palazzo del Arte della Lana, Florence. Stylistically similar to the Velluti Chapel murals 5. Cagnola Triptych, 33.7 x 16.4 cm., central panel; 35.2 x 10 cm., left wing; 35 x 9.6 cm., right wing. Uffizi. The only signed work by the master 6. S. Miniato Altarpiece (detail), early fourteenth century. Panel, 1.85 x 1.06 m. S. Miniato al Monte, Florence 7. Annunciation. Stained glass. Velluti Chapel, Sta. Croce, Florence 8. St. Michael and the Emperor Constantine. Stained glass. Velluti Chapel, Sta. Croce, Florence 9. Crucifixion by Pacino di Bonaguida (active 1303–39), c. 1315–20. Panel, 2.48 x 1.51 m. Accademia, Florence 10. St. Michael by Bernardo Daddi (active 1312-48), before 1328. Panel, figures nearly life size (see Offner). S. Michele, Crespina (Pisa)

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IX An Order for Drawings after Agnolo Gaddi’s True Cross Cycle in Florence This essay was originally published in Italian as “Un’ ordinazione per disegni dal ciclo della vera croce di Agnolo Gaddi a Firenze.”

XII Salvation and Vision in the Brancacci Chapel This is a revised version of the central part of The Brancacci Chapel, Florence, published by George Braziller in 1993. For the opportunity to correct that earlier publication and to clarify my ideas, I am grateful to Liam Gallagher and the Pindar Press. This essay is, unapologetically, a meditation on the mural program of the Brancacci Chapel with special emphasis on Masaccio’s contribution, and, as such, I have kept notes to a minimum. Rather than issues of attribution and dating of the kind that have dominated the literature, this essay is concerned with the indissoluble relationship between form and meaning in Masaccio’s art. Some of the ideas articulated here are perhaps speculative, but they have their beginning and end in the images themselves.

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Index

Abruzzi, 82 Acton, Sir Harold, 37, 166–67, 171 Agostino di Marsilio, 327 n. 2 Alberti, Leon Battista, 148, 194, 239,245–46, 258 Albertinelli, Mariotto, 264 n. 4 Albizzi family, 46, 48 Alessandri family, 46 Alfonso d’Este, 372 Altenburg, Lindenau Museum, 148 n. 9 (Antonio Veneziano), 276 n. 4 (Giovanni di Paolo) Altichiero, 270 Amadeus of Lausanne, 107 n. 7, 114 n. 17 Andrea da Firenze, 127 n. 8, 138 n. 21, 171 Andrea del Sarto, 151 Andrea di Bonaiuto. See Andrea da Firenze Andrea di Cione. See Orcagna Andreoli, “Mastro” Giorgio, 381 “Andreuczo”. See Andrea da Firenze Angelico, Fra, 151, 257, 264 n. 4, 296, 303, 421 Ann Arbor, Michigan, 24 n. 5 Antonia di Viva, 324

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Antonio da Barga, Fra, 239–40 Antonio Veneziano, 141–58, 170 Altenburg, 148 n. 9 Florence (Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo), 144–46, 148–51, 153, 156, 158; Torre degli Agli, 146–47 Palermo, 154 Pisa (Camposanto), 148, 155–57, (Museo di S. Martino), 153–55 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 380 Arcangelo di Cola, 280 Arena Chapel. See Giotto Aretino, Pietro, 373 Arezzo, 110 n. 12, 383 Ponte alla Calciarella, 383 S. Francesco, 162 Arrighi family, 362 Arlotto, Piovano, 262 Arnoldi, Alberto, 127 Arnolfo di Cambio, 62 n. 2 Asciano (Museo d’Arte Sacra), 370 (Osservanza Master) Ascoli Piceno, 374 n. 25 Assisi, S. Francesco, Lower church, 50 (Cimabue), 87–88 (Giotto), 159–60, 160 n. 3 (Magdalen

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428

Chapel) Upper church, 38 n. 14, 50 (Cimabue), 276–78, 96–97, 402–03, 413, 416 Athens, Georgia (Georgia Museum of Art), 337–39 Augustine, St., 380 Avelli, Francesco Xanto, 381 Ayrton, Michael, 11 Baldovinetti, Alesso, 264 n. 4, 301 Bandinelli, Baccio, 264 n. 4 Barasch, Moshe, 409–17 Baroda, India, 337 n. 1 Barolsky, Paul, 156 n. 20 Baronci family, 69 Bartolo di Fredi, 160, 284 n. 21 Bartolommeo, Fra, 264 n. 4 Bayet, Charles, 403 n. 1 Bearsted, Lord (formerly), 286 (Giovanni di Paolo) Belcari, Feo, 93 n. 46 Bellosi, Luciano, 170–71, 419 Benedetto da Maiano, 184 n. 3 Benedetto di Bindo, 163, 276 Bengujat, Leopold, 37 n. 10 Benivieni di Chiarino, 58 n. 12 Benvenuto da Imola, 65 n. 13 Benvenuto di Giovanni, 327–36 Berenson, Bernard, 127, 165, 178, 194, 385–89, 392–95, 398– 99, 403 n. 1, 404, 422 Bergson, Henri Louis, 393 Bergamo, 386 Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, 24 n. 5 (Bernardo Daddi), 99–101

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(Taddeo Gaddi), 146 (Antonio Veneziano), 152 (Masaccio), 422 (Lorenzo Monaco) Berlinghieri, Bonaventura, 403 n. 1 Bern, Kunstmuseum, 99–101 (Taddeo Gaddi) Bernard of Clairvaux, St., 106, 107 n. 7, 114 n. 17, 119–20 Bernardino, S., 269, 313 Berni, Francesco, 262 Bernward of Hildesheim, 114 n. 17 Berruguete, Alonso, 264 n. 4 Bertini Calosso, Achille, 403 n. 1 Bicci di Lorenzo, 162 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 62, 65, 66 n. 13, 67, 68 n. 19, 262, 368, 371 Bode, Wilhelm, 388 Bologna, Pinacoteca, 38 n. 14 (Giotto), 355 (Raphael) Bologna, Ferdinando, 135 Boniface VIII, Pope, 62 n. 2 Bonsanti, Giorgio, 141 n. 1 Bonsi, Giovanni, 125 n. 5, 172 Borgo San Sepolcro, 107–8 Borsook, Eve, 107, 119 Boskovits, Miklòs, 60, 127, 130, 135, 165, 170, 179, 423 Boston Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 291 n. 27 (Giovanni di Paolo) Museum of Fine Arts, 24 n. 5 (Ugolino di Nerio) Botticelli, Sandro, 151, 264 n. 4,

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INDEX

357, 371, 421 Bracciolini, Poggio, 65 n. 13, 239, 262 Brancacci family, 191–92, 223, 259 Felice di Michele, 192, 246 Piero di Piuvichese, 191 Brancacci Chapel (S. Maria del Carmine, Florence), 141, 188– 261, 263, 265 Baptism of the Neophytes, 227, 229–33, 239 Crucifixion of St. Peter and St. Peter Disputing with Simon Magus, 241–42 Death of Ananias, 265 Expulsion of Adam and Eve, 141, 198–200, 202–4, 206–11, 222, 229–30, 233, 249, 265 Liberation of St. Peter, 240 Pasce oves meas, 228–29 St. Paul Visiting St. Peter in Prison, 240, 255 St. Peter Baptizing, 265 St. Peter Distributing Alms, 230–31, 236–39, 246 St. Peter Healing a Cripple and the Raising of Tabitha, 217–24, 227–28, 230, 237–39 St. Peter Healing with His Shadow, 230, 233–35, 238, 265 St. Peter Preaching, 227, 230 St. Peter Rising the Son of Theophilus and Enthroned as First Bishop of Antioch,

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241–45, 247–56, 258 St. Peter Weeping, 228 Temptation of Adam and Eve, 202, 206–9, 220, 224, 230, 240 Tribute Money, 194–99, 202–20, 222–24, 226–28, 230, 237–40, 246, 249–52, 265 Brescia, 279 Browning, Robert, 102, 367 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 93 n. 45, 141–3, 183–85, 194, 245, 255, 258, 265–66, 355, 375 Bruno, 63, 65 Braunschwig, Hieronymus, 366 Buffalmacco, Buonamico, 63–65, 77, 419 Burchiello, 66 Caceres, 362 Cafaggiolo, 364, 381 Calandrino, 63, 65 Cambridge, England, Fitzwilliam Museum, 422 (Lorenzo Monaco) Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fogg Art Museum, 45 (Lippo di Benivieni), 291 n. 27 (Giovanni di Paolo), 330 n. 8 (Benvenuto di Giovanni) Campbell, Andrea, 305 Capri, Certosa di San Giacomo, 136 n. 16 (Niccolò di Tommaso) Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 149, 204 Cariani, Giovanni, 386

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430

Casaluce, 135 n. 16 (Niccolò di Tommaso) Cascia di Reggello, S. Giovenale, 224–25 (Masaccio) Castagno, Andrea del, 97, 257, 264 n. 4, 306 n. 2, 396 Castel San Giovanni, 188 Castelli, 364 Castello (near Florence), S. Michele, 21 (Pacino di Bonaguida) Castello della Pieve, 343, 348 n. 11 Castelnuovo Berardenga Prepositura, 272–73, 279, 287, 298 n. 31 (Giovanni di Paolo) Castiglion Fiorentino, 101 n. 8 (Taddeo Gaddi) Castiglione, Baldassare, 374 Cavalcanti, Guido, 96 Cavalcaselle, Giovanni Battista, 386, 403 n. 1 Cecchi, Emilio, 403 n. 1 Cenni di Francesco, 162 Cennini, Cennino, 31, 151, 269, 270, 410 Cesarini, Cardinal, 370 Cézanne, Paul, 393 Chantilly, Musée Condé, 419 (Francesco Traini) Chigi, Agostino, 342, 371 Chini, Galileo, 19 n. 3 Chiusdino, 107 Christiansen, Keith, 279, 304 n. 38 Cimabue, 19–20, 50, 55–56, 101, 348, 399, 410

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Clark, Kenneth, 142, 395, 404 Cleveland, Cleveland Museum of Art, 281 (Giovanni di Paolo) Cole, Bruce, 360 Coletti, Luigi, 403 n. 1 Colle di Val d’Elsa, Conservatorio di S. Pietro, 291 n. 27 (Giovanni di Paolo) Colonnata, Logi tabernacle, 171 (Francesco di Michele) Comte, August, 393 Constantinople, 153 Cortona, Museo Diocesano, 296 (Fra Angelico) Coventry, 79 Crawford, Thomas, 339 Crespino sul Lamone (Marradi), 23 n. 4 (Jacopo del Casentino) Crespina Val di Tora (near Pisa), 38–39 (Bernardo Daddi) Cristiani, Giovanni Battista, 266 n. 7 Croce, Benedetto, 393 Crowe, John Arthur, 403 n. 1 Cruttwell, Maud, 403 n. 1 Cyprus, 360 Czarnecki, James G., 144, 400 Daddi, Bernardo, 97 n. 5, 101, 138 n. 21, 180–82, 391–92 Berlin (Gemäldegalerie), 24 n. 5 Crespina, 38–39 Florence (Uffizi), 160 Dante, 52, 65 n. 13, 68 n. 19, 114 n. 17, 152, 242, 264 n. 5, 348, 360

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INDEX

Daphni, 411 Dati, Gregorio, 153 Datini, Francesco di Marco, 264 n. 5, 266 n. 7, 367 n. 6 degli Agli family, 362 Dei, Benedetto, 64 della Casa, Giovanni, 68 n. 19, 374–75 della Robbia, Luca, 361 n. 2, 368, 375, 394 Deruta, 364, 375 d’Este family, 373 n. 25 Detroit Institute of Arts, 38 n. 14 (Master of St. Cecilia), 361 Dino di Benivieni, 58 n. 12 Dietisalvi di Speme, 308 n. 4, 310 Dioscorides, 155 Domenico di Bartolo, 305–26 Domenico Veneziano, 97, 257, 306 n. 2 Dominici, Giovanni, 41 Donatello, 65 n. 13, 97, 141, 157–58, 183, 194, 253, 265–66, 279, 355, 375 Dublin, Trinity College, 65 n. 12 Duccio di Buoninsegna, 43, 48, 50, 55–58, 276, 268, 275 Dvorák, Max, 385 Eisenberg, Marvin, 421–24 Empoli, S. Stefano, 162 Fabriano, S. Domenico, 116, n. 19 Fabriczy, Cornelius von, 403 n. 1 Facio, Bartolommeo, 239 Faenza, 364, 374 n. 25

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Federico II, Gonzaga, 372 Ferrara, 375 Casa Minerbi, 68 n. 18 Federigo da Montefeltro, 15 n. 21 Felici, Augusto, 337 n. 1 Fiske, John, 387 Florence, 122, 131, 144–46, 157–59, 161, 183, 268, 279, 305, 341–45, 351–52, 362, 364, 373, 385, 388, 391 Acton Collection, 36–37 (Jacopo del Casentino), 166–67, 169, 170 n. 6, 171, 174, 178 (Master of S. Martino a Mensola) Albrighi Collection, 133 (Niccolò di Tommaso) Archivio di Stato, 125 n. 5, 136–37, 161, 262 Arte de’ Medici e Speziali, 143 Arte di Calimala, 153 Bellini Collection (formerly), 170 n. 6 (Master of S. Martino a Mensola) Berenson Collection (Villa “I Tatti”), 180–81, 422 Campanile, 127 n. 9, 361 n. 2 Company of St. Luke, 137, 138 n. 21 churches: Baptistry (S. Giovanni), 52–53, 60, 142, 152, 183 Cathedral (S. Maria del Fiore), 60, 125 n. 5, 138, 153, 183–84, 266 n. 6, 290 Ognissanti, 56

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432

Orsanmichele, 38 n. 14, 96, 153 n. 18 Sacro Cuore, 171–72, 174, 181–82 (Master of S. Martino a Mensola) S. Chiara, 352 S. Croce, 16–42 (Jacopo del Casentino), 55 (Cimabue), 62, 89 n. 44, 99, 101 (Taddeo Gaddi), 141 (Giotto), 160 (Taddeo Gaddi), 161–62 (Agnolo Gaddi), 168, 170 n. 6 (Master of S. Martino a Mensola), 170 n. 8, 171 (Master of S. Martino a Mensola), 178, 181–82 (Giotto), 391 (Bernardo Daddi), 413 S. Egidio, 265 n. 6 S. Felicita, 137 S. Lorenzo, 10,97 S. Maria degli Angeli, 422 S. Maria a Montici, 21 (Master of St. Cecilia) S. Maria del Carmine, 93 n. 45, 141, 170 n. 8 (Master of S. Martino a Mensola), 188– 261, 263, 265 S. Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, 344 (Perugino) S. Maria Novella, 49, 52, 54–55 (Giotto and Lippo di Benivieni), 58 (Giotto, Duccio), 58 n. 12 (Master of St. Cecilia), 60, 247 (Masaccio and Nardo di Cione), 256 n. 6

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(Ghirlandaio), 401 (Giotto) S. Martino a Mensola, 165–66, 169, 170 n. 6, 170 n. 7, 174, 176 (Master of S. Martino a Mensola), 179, 180 (Taddeo Gaddi), 182 S. Miniato al Monte, 24–26 (Jacopo del Casentino), 29, 153 n. 18, 239 S. Pier Maggiore, 46, 48 (Lippo di Benivieni), 129–30 S. Pier Scheraggio, 82 n. 37 S. Reparata, 184 n. 3 S. Trinita, 56, 423 (Lorenzo Monaco) SS. Annunziata, 86–87, 93 n. 45, 94 n. 47, 174 n. 16, 350–51 (Perugino and Filippino Lippi) Hospital of S. Maria della Scala, 184 Hospital of S. Maria Nuova, 184, 265 n. 6, 367 Hospital of the Innocents, 256 Loggia dei Priori, 183 museums: Accademia, 33–35, 36 n. 9 (Pacino di Bonaguida) 128 (Jacopo di Cione and Niccolò di Tommaso), 130 n. 10, 131–32, 138, 174 (Jacopo di Cione and Nardo di Cione), 174 n. 16 (Orcagna), 175

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INDEX

(Jacopo di Cione and Nardo di Cione), 351 (Perugino and Filippino Lippi), 423 (Lorenzo Monaco) Bargello, 143 (Brunelleschi), 247, 308 n. 4 (Mariano d’Angelo Romanelli) Fondazione Horne, 101 n. 8 Galleria Pitti, 346 Gallerie Fiorentine, 172 (Master of S. Martino a Mensola) Opera del Duomo, 127, 144–45 (Antonio Veneziano), 157 (Donatello) Uffizi, 22 (Jacopo del Casentino), 24 n. 5 (Giotto), 37 (Jacopo del Casentino), 50 (Cimabue), 172 (Orcagna and Jacopo di Cione), 101 (Cimabue, Giotto), 141 (Gentile da Fabriano), 226–28 (Masaccio and Masolino), 282–83 (Gentile da Fabriano), 288, 290 (Ambrogio Lorenzetti), 344–45, 352–53 (Perugino), 423 (Lorenzo Monaco) Officials of the Rubelli, 262 Palazzo Davanzati, 37 n. 10 Palazzo del Arte della Lana, 22, 32, 35 (Jacopo del Casentino), 312 n. 10

Index.indd

433 Process Black

433

Palazzo Medici, 368 Ponte alla Carraia, 77 Porta della Mandorla, 183 Private collection, 166–67 (Master of S. Martino a Mensola) tabernacles, Via S. Antonino, 96–97 (Taddeo Gaddi) Torre degli Agli, 146–47 (Antonio Veneziano) Via del Cocomero (Via Ricasoli), 86 Via Faenza, 97 Via S. Antonino (Via della Cella di Ciardo), 97 Zecca, 127–28, 130, 132, 138 Fogg Art Museum. See Cambridge Fontana workshop, 376 Forese da Rabatta, 65, 68 n. 19 Francesco di Michele, 168 n. 1, 171 Francia, Francesco, 355–56 Franciabigio, 264 n. 4 Franco, Battista, 378 Freedberg, Sydney, 347, 393–95, 404, 422 Fremantle, Richard, 165, 170, 179 Frey, Karl, 403 n. 1 Friedländer, Max J., 388, 390 Fromson, Michelle, 318 n. 21 Fry, Roger, 394 Fucecchio, 170 n. 8 (Master of S. Martino a Mensola) Gaddi, Agnolo, 159, 161–64, 169–70, 176–83, 264 n. 5,

2/15/01, 12:16

434

266 n. 7, 421 Gaddi, Taddeo, 48 n. 4, 89 n. 44, 96–102, 122–23, 127, 131, 180–81, 183 Castiglion Fiorentino, 101 n. 8 Florence: Fondazione Horne, 101 n. 8 S. Croce, 89 n. 44, 101 160 Via S. Antonino tabernacle, 97 n. 5, 98–102 Voltiggiano, 101 n. 8 Gallerani, Beato Andrea, 2 n. 1 Gamba, Carlo, 403 n.1 Ganz, Margery, 262 n. 2 Gaye, Giovanni, 127 Gentile da Fabriano, 141, 250, 270–76, 279–80, 282, 285, 287, 289–92,296, 362, 421 Gerini, Niccolò di Pietro, 127, 264 n. 5 Ghezzi, Biagio di Goro, 110 n.12 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 45, 53, 142, 183, 266 n. 8, 279, 375, 410, 421 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 256 n. 6, 257, 264 n. 4 Ghirlandaio, Ridolfo, 264 n. 4 Giambono, Michele, 160 n. 4 Giorgio da Gubbio. See Andreoli, “Mastro” Giorgio Giorgione, 386 Giotto, 16, 24 n. 5, 25, 29, 38 n. 14, 49–52, 61–95, 101, 141, 143, 158–60, 179, 179 n. 23, 183–84, 184 n. 3, 185, 190, 194, 200, 233, 236, 262, 264 n. 5, 266 n. 8, 270, 278 n.

Index.indd

434 Process Black

16, 340, 348, 385, 389, 396, 398–403, 409–17, Bologna: 38 n. 14 Florence: S. Maria Novella, 54–55, 58; Uffizi, 24 n. 5, 101 Padua: Arena Chapel, 51–52, 55, 61–95, 141–42 199, 233, 398–99, 402, 410–12, 415–16; Santo, 337 n. 1 Rome: Navicella mosaic, 159; Pinacoteca Vaticana: 24 n. 5 Giovanni da Fécamp, 318 n. 22 Giovanni da Fiesole, Fra. See Angelico, Fra Giovanni da Forli, 327 n. 2 Giovanni da Forli, 327 n. 2 Giovanni d’Alemagna, 160 n. 4 Giovanni d’Ambrogio, 183–87 Giovanni del Biondo, 392 Giovanni di Messer Accorimbono, Ser, 10 n. 13 Giovanni di Paolo, 268–304 Giovanni di Ser Giovanni, Lo Scheggia, 265 Giovanni di Viva, 324 Giovannino de’ Grassi, 160 n. 3 Giugni Chapel (S. Croce, Florence), 36 n. 9 Giunta di Tugio, 366–67, 380 Gnudi, Cesare, 80 Goldsmith, Oliver, 340 n. 5 Goldthwaite, Richard, 382 Granacci, Francesco, 264 n. 4 Gregory the Great, Pope, 116 Grenoble, 272 n. 12 (Taddeo di

2/15/01, 12:16

435

INDEX

Bartolo) Grossetto: Museo d’Arte Sacra, 38 n. 14 (Ugolino di Nerio) Gronau, Hans, 423 Guccio di Mannaia, 7 n. 10 Guido da Siena, 109, 309–10 Guido Guinizzelli, 312 n. 12 Guidotti, Fra Giovanni, 124, 126, 131 Guasconi family, 362 Guiducci, Anna Maria, 305 Guillaume Dufay, 318 n. 21 Haines, Margaret, 185 n. 4 Hartt, Frederick, 141 n. 1 Harvard University, 385 Heckscher, William S., 392 Hill, G. F., 388 Hills, Paul, 233 Hitler, Adolf, 1 Hungary, 223, 256 “Iacobus Cini,” 127 Impruneta, 160 Ingres, J. A. D., 421 Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 387, 390 Isabella d’Este, 342, 357, 368, 372, 375 Jacopo del Casentino, 18–20, 22–24, 138 n. 21, 398 Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Art Museum, 24 n. 5 Florence: Acton Collection, 36–38 Palazzo dell’ Arte della Lana,

Index.indd

435 Process Black

22–23, 32, 35 S. Croce, 16–42 S. Miniato al Monte, 24–26, 29 Uffizi, 22–23 Oberlin: Allen Memorial Art Museum, 34 Jacopo della Quercia, 279, 296 Jacopo di Cione, 127–30, 169, 172–73, 173 n. 15, 174 n. 18, 175 Kaftal, Georg, 404 Kahn, Otto N., 287 n. 25 Kansas City, Nelson-Atkins Museum, 23 n. 4 Khvoshinsky, Basile, 403 n. 1 Klesse, Brigitte, 165 Körte, Werner, 403 n. 1 Lambertini. See Michele di Matteo Lambertini Landino, Cristoforo, 190, 210, 250, 257 Leonardo da Vinci, 190, 213, 216, 239, 257, 264 n. 4, 340, 340, 381, 394, 409, 350, 404, Libanori, Antonio, 104 n. 3 Limbourg Brothers, 160 Lindenau Museum. See Altenburg Lippi, Filippino, 190–91, 238, 240–46, 249 n. 5, 251, 254, 257, 264 n. 4, 350–52 Lippi, Filippo, 192, 257, 264 n. 4, 270, 306 n. 2 Lippo di Benivieni, 43–60 Cambridge, Massachusetts: Fogg Art Museum, 45

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436

Milan: private collection, 45–48, 52 Memphis, 43–60 New York: Metropolitan Museum, Lehman Collection, 56–58 Lippo Vanni, 110 n. 12, 287 London Courtauld Gallery, 423 (Lorenzo Monaco) Lord Bearsted (formerly), 286 (Giovanni di Paolo) National Gallery, 129–30 (Jacopo di Cione and Niccolò di Tommaso), 181 (Agnolo Gaddi), 280 (Gentile da Fabriano) New Gallery, 386 (Giorgione) Victoria and Albert Museum, 381 Longhi, Roberto, 165, 171–72, 224, 227, 392–94 Lorenzetti, 268 Ambrogio, 103–21 (Montesiepi), 148, 158, 218, 276, 289– 91 Pietro, 104, 110 n. 12, 163 Lorenzo di Credi, 264 n. 4 Lorenzo di Niccolò, 264 n. 5 Lorenzo di Pietro. See Vecchietta Lorenzo Monaco, 421–24 Lotto, Lorenzo, 386 Lucca, 122, 223 n. 4, 361 S. Ponziano, 309 n. 7 (Spinello Aretino) Lugano, Thyssen Collection, 423 (Lorenzo Monaco)

Index.indd

436 Process Black

Macrobius, 65 n. 13 “Maestro Domenico,” 377 Maginnis, Hayden B. J., 402, 418–20 “Magistri Duccij,” 2 n. 2 “Magistri Vannis de Camporegis,” 2 n. 2 Majorca, 360 Mallius, 65 n. 13 Manetti, Antonio, 256 Manetti, Gianozzo, 217, 239 Mannucci family, 362 Mantegna, Andrea, 357 Mantua, 375 Marchini, Giuseppe, 20 Marcucci, Luisa, 127, 169 Mariani, Valerio, 403 n. 1 Martino di Bartolommeo, 6 n. 6, 329, 330 n. 7 Masaccio (Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Mone), 141, 152–54, 162, 262–67, 316 n. 19, 355, 421 Florence: S. Maria del Carmine, Brancacci Chapel, 188–261; Sagra, 251 Uffizi, S. Giovenale Madonna, 224–25; Virgin and St. Anne, 226–27 S. Maria Novella, 247 Maso di Banco, 266 n. 8 Masolino da Panicale (Tommaso di Cristofano Fini), 162, 190– 95, 202, 206–9, 217–28, 240, 245, 258 Master Martino, 373 Master of St. Cecilia, 20–21, 24,

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INDEX

38 n. 14, 45, 50, 58 n. 12 Master of the Filiciaia Cross, 49 n. 7 Master of the Fogg Pietà, 397 Master of the Osservanza, 370 Master of San Martino a Mensola, 165–182, 388 Master of Santa Verdiana, 170, 178, 178–79 Matteo di Cione, 173 n. 15 Matteo di Giovanni, 161 n. 4, 301 Matteo di Pacino, 125 n. 5, 130 Medici family, 192, 362, 374 n. 25 Lorenzo the Magnificent, 383 Meditationes Vitae Christi, 92 n. 45 Meiss, Millard, 403, 418–20 Memphis, Brooks Museum of Art, 43–60 (Lippo di Benivieni) Messer Giovanni di Messer Accorimbono, 10 n. 13 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 56–58 (Lippo di Benivieni), 270, (Michelino da Besozzo), 282 n. 19, 291, 291 n. 27, 56–58 (Lippo di Benivieni), 285, 289 (Giovanni di Paolo) 292–93, 295, 296, 298, 303–4 (Giovanni di Paolo), 363, 379 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1, 10, 190–91, 257, 264 n. 4, 340, 348–49, 378 Michele di Matteo Lambertini, 327 n. 2

Index.indd

437 Process Black

437

Michelino da Besozzo, 270 Middeldorf, Ulrich, 16, 144, 389 Milan, 372 Cathedral, 394 Private collection, 46–48, 52 Milanesi, Gaetano, 387 Milton, John, 1 Minneapolis, Institute of Art, 175–76 (Nardo di Cione) Modena, Biblioteca Estense, 150 Monet, Claude, 393 Monna Mina, 272 n. 11 Monna Salvagia di Michele, 123 n. 1 Montaigne, 373 Montepulciano, 161–63 Cathedral, 163 Company of the Holy Cross, 161–64 Montesiepi, Chapel of San Galgano, 103–21 Morelli family, 362 Morelli Giovanni, 264 n. 5, 386–87, 394–95 Mea, 264 n. 5 Munich, Altepinakothek, 224–25 (Masolino), 345 (Perugino) Nanni di Banco, 183–84 Nanni di Caccia, 161–63 Nanni di Giovanni di Ser Cecco, 272 n. 11 Naples, 131, 135, 138 Disciplina della Croce, 136 n. 16 (Niccolò di Tommaso) Sant’ Antonio Abate, 124 n. 3, 126

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438

Museo di San Martino, 124 n. 3, 126, 130, 135 Nardo di Cione, 125 n. 5, 131, 134 137–38, 169, 172–76, 182, 247, 396 Narni, 361 Nasi family, 170, 170 n. 8, 178 Andrea, 170 n. 7 Nazareth, 120 Nello di Falcone, 15 n. 21 New Haven, Yale Art Gallery, 177–78 (Agnolo Gaddi) New York, 385 New-York Historical Society, 174 (Nardo di Cione) New York University, 385 Niccoli, Niccolò, 263, 374–75 Niccolò da Poggibonsi, Fra, 107 n. 8 Niccolò di Beltramo, 127 n. 9 Niccolò di Segna, 104 n. 3 Niccolò di Tommaso, 122–40, 397 Nuzi, Allegretto, 116 n. 19, 416 Oberlin, Allen Memorial Art Museum, 34–35 (Jacopo del Casentino) Oertel, Robert, 403 n.1 Offner, Richard, 23, 49–50, 55, 127, 165, 384–408, 418 Ombrone, 63 n. 4 Orcagna (Andrea di Cione), 125 n. 5, 127, 131, 169, 172–73, 173 n. 15, 174 n. 16, 181–82, 266 n. 7 Ortolano Ferrarese (Giovanni Battista Benvenuti), 387

Index.indd

438 Process Black

Oxford, Christ Church, 291 n. 27 (Giovanni di Paolo) Pacino di Bonaguida, 20–21, 24, 384 Castello (Florence), 21 Florence, 33–35, 36 n. 9 Padua, 270 (Altichiero) Arena Chapel. See Giotto Paganico, 110 n. 12 (Biagio di Goro Ghezzi) Palermo, 154 Panofsky, Erwin, 377, 387–88, 391–92, 396–97, 399, 403 Paolo da Certaldo, 222 Paolo di Grazia (Boccanera), 277 n. 11 Paris, 305 n. 1 Bacri Collection, 270 n. 7 Louvre, 270 (Filippo Lippi), 287 (Giovanni di Paolo), 289, 296 (Gentile da Fabriano), 358–59 (Perugino) Parnassus, 380 Parri Spinelli, 159 Pater, Walter, 394–96, 404 Paterna, 362 Pavia, 361 Petrarch, 67, 87, 239, 378 Perugia, 49, 337, 339 n. 3, 341–43, 352, 357–58 Collegio del Cambio, 341, 357–58 (Perugino) Compagnia di San Tommaso d’Aquino, 3 n. 5, 12 n. 18 Perugino, Pietro, 264 n. 4,

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INDEX

337–59 Pescia, 403 n. 1 Philadelphia, Johnson Collection, 274, 276, 276 n. 15 (Giovanni di Paolo) Piccolomini Library. See Siena Piccolpasso, Cipriano, 372, 382 Pienza, Cathedral, 301–3 (Giovanni di Paolo) Pierino del Vaga, 264 n. 4 Piero della Francesca, 162, 257 Piero di Cosimo, 349 Pintoricchio, 355–56 Pisa, 143–44, 148, 153, 361, Camposanto, 64 n. 10, 144, 148, 155–57 (Antonio Veneziano), 160, 418–20 Cathedral, 12, 15 n. 21 Museo di San Martino, 154–55 (Antonio Veneziano) Pisanello, 116 n. 19, 270, 270 n. 6, 296 Pisano Andrea, 150 Giovanni, 1–15 Nicola, 15 n. 21 Pistoia, 49, 138, 266 n. 7 Archivio di Stato, 122–23, 139–40 Cathedral, 138 S. Andrea, 12 (Giovanni Pisano) S. Antonio Abbate del Tau, 124–27, 130–32, 135, 138 (Niccolò di Tommaso) S. Francesco, 132, 134

Index.indd

439 Process Black

439

(Niccolò di Tommaso) S. Giovanni Fuorcivitas, 122–24, 126, 132, 138 Pius II, Pope, 301 Platina, 373 Plato, 409 Pliny, 262 n. 1 Poggioferro, Parrochiale, 294–95 (Giovanni di Paolo) Polesden Lacy, 171 (Master of S. Martino a Mensola) Pomerance, Parrochiale, 320–23 Pontormo, Jacopo da, 264 n. 4 Pope–Hennessy, Sir John, 7, 299, 301, 328, 388, 403, Porete, Margherita, 305 n. 1 Prato Cathedral, Chapel of the Holy Girdle, 183 Palazzo Datini, 264 n. 5 S. Bartolommeo in Via Cava, 171 (Master of S. Martino a Mensola) Pretasini, Berardo di Ser Ridolfo, 170, 170 n. 7 Previtali, Andrea, 386 Prodromos, Theodoros, 65 n. 12 Pucci, Antonio, 77 Puccio di Simone, 138 n. 21 Pürgg, Johanneskapelle, 65 n. 12 Quarrata, Baldi Papini Collection, 134 (Niccolò di Tommaso) Quattrini, Enrico, 377 n. 1 Quattrone, Antonio, 98 Ragghianti, Carlo, 403 n. 1 Raimondo del Balzo, 136 n. 16

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440

Ramo di Paganello, 10 Raphael, 150 n. 20, 190, 216, 257, 264 n. 4, 337, 339–40, 342, 352–57, 378 Razzi, Elisabetta, 305 Rembrandt van Rijn, 204 René of Anjou, 369 n. 13 Richmond, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 94 n. 47 Rintelen, Friedrich, 403 n. 1, 416 Rinuccini, Alamanno, 188 Romagnoli, Ettore, 152 n. 16 Romanelli, Mariano d’Angelo, 308 n. 4 Rome, 279, 337 n. 1, 342, 361 American Academy, 385 Dioscuri, 270 n. 6 Galleria Borghese, 149 (Caravaggio), 352, 354 (Raphael), 387 Museo di Palazzo Venezia, 6 Navicella mosaic, 159, 270 (Giotto) Pinacoteca Vaticana, 24 n. 5 (Giotto), 275–76, 282 n. 19, 294–95 (Giovanni di Paolo) Vatican, S. Pietro, Sistine Chapel, 349–50 Rosso Fiorentino, 264 n. 4 Rotterdam, Kröller-Müller Museum, 284–85 (Giovanni di Paolo) Rubin, Patricia, 346 n. 8 Rucellai, Palla, 262, 266 Rumohr, Karl Friedrich, 386 Ruskin, John, 340, 418

Index.indd

440 Process Black

Sacchetti, Franco, 62, 65–67, 68 n. 19, 86–87, 93 n. 45, 127 Saint Petersburg, Hermitage, 309 n. 7 (Spinello Aretino) Salmi, Mario, 403 n. 1 Salutati, Coluccio, 239, 248 San Andrea a Doccia, 184 San Francisco, M. H. De Young Museum, 170 n. 8 (Master of S. Martino a Mensola) San Gimignano, Collegiata, 160 (Bartolo di Fredi) San Giovanni Val d’Arno. See Castel San Giovanni San Leonardo al Lago, 110, 287 (Lippo Vanni), 299 (Giovanni di Paolo) San Leonardo in Arcetri (near Florence), 84 n. 37 San Martino a Terenzano (near Florence), 176–79 (Master of S. Martino a Mensola) San Pietro a Quintole (near Fiesole), 170 n. 8, 171 n. 11, 171 n. 12 (Master of S. Martino a Mensola) Sandberg-Vavalà, Evelyn, 287, 403 n. 1 Santa Margherita a Montici (near Florence), 21 (Master of St. Cecilia) Sannazzaro, Jacopo, 372 Sano di Pietro, 151–52, 160 n. 4, 271 n. 9, 301, 321 n. 26, 324, 328, 328 n. 3, 352 Santi, Giovanni, 342 Santo Stefano a Pitelli, 184 Sarto, Andrea del, 264 n. 4

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INDEX

Sassetta, 302 Schapiro, Meyer, 416 Scheggia, Lo. See Giovanni di Ser Giovanni Schlosser, Julius von, 403 n. 1 Seneca, 378 Shakespeare, William Hamlet, 188 Romeo and Juliet, 43 Siena, 49, 107, 122, 151, 268, 279, 305–26, 327–36, 342, 362, 364, 402, Archivio di Stato, 163 n. 15, 332–36 Baptistery, 327, 330 Biblioteca Comunale degli Intronati, 150 n. 11, 271 n. 9, 325–26, 328 n. 5, 328 n. 6 Cathedral, 2, 8–13, 109, 143–44, 163, 269, 327, 384 churches: S. Agostino, 328, 330 n. 8 S. Andrea, 292–93 (Giovanni di Paolo) S. Francesco, 148 (Ambrogio Lorenzetti), 151, 280–81 (Giovanni di Paolo), 355 (Pintoricchio) S. Caterina della Notte, 272 n. 12, 273 (Taddeo di Bartolo) S. Maria degli Angeli, 321 (Domenico di Bartolo), 324, 324–26 S. Maria della Scala, 289, 296 n. 31 (Giovanni di Paolo)

Index.indd

441 Process Black

441

S. Pietro a Ovile, 299–300 (Giovanni di Paolo) S. Pietro alle Scale, 290–91 (Giovanni di Paolo) S. Raimondo del Refugio, 319–20, 321 n. 25 (Domenico di Bartolo) S. Stefano alla Lizza, 300–1 (Giovanni di Paolo) “Santuccio.” See S. Maria degli Angeli Collection of the Monte dei Paschi, 280–81 (Giovanni di Paolo) Compagnia della Madonna sotte le volte dello Spedale, 330 n. 7 Compagnia di San Bernardino, 151, 152 n. 16 Compagnia di San Niccolò e Santa Lucia, 328–36 (Benvenuto di Giovanni) Consiglio Generale del Comune, 10 Disciplinati dello Spedale, 2, 2 n. 1 Fonte Gaia, 279, 296 Hospital of San Andrea, 2 Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, 1–2, 8, 268, 287, 319 (Domenico di Bartolo), 327 Misericordia, 2 museums: Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo, 5, 7 (Giovanni Pisano), 275–79

2/15/01, 12:16

442

(Giovanni di Paolo) Pinacoteca, 274, 276, 284 n. 21, 285, 288–92, 296–97, 298 n. 31, 303–4 (Giovanni di Paolo), 305–21 (Domenico di Bartolo), 324 (Domenico di Bartolo and Sano di Pietro), 330 (Benvenuto di Giovanni) Palazzo Pubblico, 118, 160 n. 4, 218 (Ambrogio Lorenzetti), 309, 309 n. 7 (Simone Martini), 324 (Domenico di Bartolo and Sano di Pietro) Piccolomini Library, 355 Porta Camollia, 321 n. 25 Società dei Raccomandati al Santissimo Crocifisso, 1–7, 12 Spedaluccio di Santa Lucia, 328 Signorelli, Luca, 349, 356–57 “Simone,” 127 Simone Martini, 109, 268–69, 272, 309, 309 n. 7, 399 Sirén, Osvald, 127, 403 n. 1 Skaug, Erling, 38 n. 12 Smyth, Craig Hugh, 390 Società dei Laudesi della Vergine (S. Maria Novella, Florence), 55, 58 Spannocchi family, 362 Spinello Aretino, 309 n. 7 Stalybridge (Cheshire), Astley Cheetham Gallery, 179

Index.indd

442 Process Black

(Master of S. Martino a Mensola) Starnina, 156, 158, 170 Stefano, 64 n. 9 Steinweg, Klara, 404 Stinson, John, 318 n. 21 Strehlke, Carl, 313 Strozzi family, 262 Palla, 239 Suida, Wilhelm, 403 n. 1 Taddeo di Bartolo, 163, 272–73 Tarchiani, Nello, 403 n. 1 Tartuferi, Angelo, 45–46, 135 Thode, Henry, 403 n. 1 Tintern Abbey, 103 Toesca, Pietro, 403 n. 1 Toledo, Museum of Art, 366 Tommaso del Mazza. See Master of S. Verdiana Tondi family, 362 Toto del Nunziata, 264 n. 4 Traini, Francesco, 418–20 Tuccio di Vanni, 130 Uccello, Paolo, 233, 257 Ugolino di Nerio, 24 n. 5, 38, 38 n. 14 Urbino, 376, 380 Valencia, 362 Valla, Lorenzo, 239–40 Van Eyck brothers, 385 Van Marle, Raimond, 403 n.1 Vasari family, 357 Antonio, 357 Giorgio, 53, 65–67, 155–56, 184 n. 3, 190, 192, 219,

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443

INDEX

227–28, 258, 262–63, 264 n. 4, 265, 339–59, 382– 83, 410 Vecchietta, 301, 327–28, 330 Velluti Chapel (S. Croce, Florence), 16–42 Velluti family, 16, 39–42 Venice, 279, 342, 377 Venturi, Adolfo, 403 n.1 Verocchio, Andrea del, 264 n. 4 Vespasiano da Bisticci, 370, 374–75 Vienna, 385 “Villa I Tatti,” 178, 180, 388 Villani Giovanni, 77, 184 n. 3 Matteo, 124 Visconti family, 246 Filippo Maria, 244–45 Giangaleazzo, 244–45, 248 Vite, Antonio, 124 n. 3 Vitzthum, Georg, 403 n. 1 Volbach, W. F., 403 n. 1 Volpi, Elia, 37 n. 10 Volterra, 107, 162, 320 Oratorio della Croce di Giorno (S. Francesco), 162 n. 10 S. Girolamo, 328 (Benvenuto di Giovanni)

Index.indd

443 Process Black

Voltiggiano, 101 n. 8 (Taddeo Gaddi) Voragine, Jacobus de, 30, 78, 882 n. 37, 192, 220, 22, 249 Wallace, William, 262 n. 2 Washington, D. C. Corcoran Gallery of Art, 369, 376–77 (William A. Clark Collection) National Gallery, 173, 176 (Nardo di Cione), 284, 295– 96 (Giovanni di Paolo), 330–31 (Benvenuto di Giovanni), 396 (Giotto) Weigelt, Kurt, 403 n. 1 Weitzmann, Kurt, 388 White, John, 8 Wilde, Oscar, 386 Wöllflin, Heinrich, 340 Wood, Jeryldene, 359 Wycliffe, John, 246 Zati family, 170, 178 Zeri, Federico, 45, 169, 423 Ziolkowski, Jan, 14 n. 21 Zuccaro, Taddeo, 378 Zuraw, Shelley E., 337 n. 1

2/15/01, 12:16

ChHeading1.indd

421 Process Black

12/04/00, 1:08 PM

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