Space, Image, and Reform in Early Modern Art: The Influence of Marcia Hall 9781501513480, 9781501518010

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Space, Image, and Reform in Early Modern Art

Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

LXXVII

Space, Image, and Reform in Early Modern Art The Influence of Marcia Hall Edited by Arthur J. DiFuria and Ian Verstegen

ISBN 978-1-5015-1801-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-1-5015-1348-0 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-1-5015-1345-9

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Raphael and Workshop, Constantine Addressing his Troops and his Vision of the Cross, 1520–24, fresco, Sala di Costantino, Vatican (Photo: Art Resource, New York, NY) Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Foreword Substance and range, companionably lived and shared. That is the rare gift we have received from Marcia Hall over the last four decades. The questions she has posed don’t settle for easy answers. Does a work of art stand alone? What happens when works of art are configured as ensembles? What does each work contribute and what comes from the grouping? How does the chorus they produce resonate in a space shaped by ritual, belief, and desire? In their most abstract form, these are the questions that drove the 1979 book based on her doctoral dissertation, Renovation and Counter-Reformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, 1565–1577. That book formed the basis of an inquiry that would animate Hall’s work over the next decades. What is the threshold between the work and the world, and how is meaning produced at that threshold? A child of the 1960s, Marcia Hall understood from the beginning that no work comes as a complete and selfsufficient package, yet at the same time she never believed that all meaning is brought to and out of the work by external agents and institutions. She has always worked from what the works of art offer to their environments, tracking the ways these affordances were taken up by conscious actors – viewers, patrons, and, often enough, other artists. How does painting perform traditional religious functions even as it undergoes radical change? How did Italian painters respond to the debates over images that prevailed in the sixteenth century, and to previous pictorial responses? These large questions come down, for Marcia Hall, to the dilemmas faced by painters when imagining and then filling the surfaces of panels, canvases, and walls. How does a work manage the power of color in such a way as to reinforce or complicate the messages of composition and gesture? How does a work’s conversation with other artworks, recent and not so recent, resonate with its other tasks? Are works of an advanced, theorized artistic culture designed for viewers of different kinds? Are all levels of an artwork’s operation available to all viewers? The array of essays assembled in this volume attest to the substance and range of Marcia Hall’s work, and the ongoing vitality of its impact. Most of the time, gifts beget other gifts, unfolding onwards and outwards in a widening field. This volume is a moment of gathering and acknowledgment, a bouquet offered back to a beloved teacher and writer. Alexander Nagel

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-202

Space, Image, and Reform in Early Modern Art The Influence of Marcia Hall Over several decades the work of Marcia Hall has recharted the territory of the church’s spatial interior, the facture and affectivity of the altarpiece, and the controversy over images before and after the Council of Trent. Space, Image, and Reform addresses Marcia Hall’s important work. Although numerous studies now engage these issues regularly, this volume accrues the advantages of a single paradigm to better assess the applicability and range of her contributions to art history. Bringing together a number of papers to engage Hall’s work and relate it to new areas of study, this volume pushes her investigation of the image further back in time, further afield, and deeper into familiar topics. Each chapter of the book briefly relates Hall’s work to the topic it addresses, thus achieving a comprehensiveness, cohesion, and broad appeal not usually present in edited volumes. The book works cumulatively to provide blocks of theoretical and empirical research on issues spanning the style and function of images before their audiences and in their ecclesiastical spaces over two centuries.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-203

Contents Foreword

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Space, Image, and Reform in Early Modern Art List of Illustrations

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Ian Verstegen and Arthur J. DiFuria, with Tracy Cooper Introduction 1

Part 1: Historiography and Methods Ingrid Rowland Chapter 1 Raphael’s Bankers: Agostino Chigi, Bindo Altoviti, and Jakob Fugger Tamara Smithers Chapter 2 Surpassing Nature: Raphael’s Artistic Apotheosis Ian Verstegen Chapter 3 In the Sistine Chapel with Marcia and Leo

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Maureen Pelta Chapter 4 What Becomes a Legend: Correggio at the Crossroads of Biography and Style 101

Part 2: Space Costanza Barbieri Chapter 5 The Rediscovered Iconography of Palazzo Milesi’s Façade by Polidoro da Caravaggio, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, and a New Drawing 125

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Rose Marie May Chapter 6 San Giacomo degli Spagnoli in Rome on the Forefront of Reform: Remodeling the East End in the 1550s and 1560s 145 Joanne Allen Chapter 7 Religious Reform, Sacred Space, and Bad Behavior in Late Sixteenth-Century Orsanmichele 161

Part 3: Image Sarah K. Kozlowski Chapter 8 Matter and Meaning in Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross 191 Arthur J. DiFuria Chapter 9 The Netherlandish Relief-like Style in the Age of Art Stuart Lingo Chapter 10 Mannerism’s Masks

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Part 4: Reform Jonathan Kline Chapter 11 Order and the Anagogic Approach of the Mind to God: On the Philosophers in Raphael’s Disputa 271 Larry Silver Chapter 12 Painting the Invisible God at Sinai

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Anne H. Muraoka Chapter 13 A Question of Faith: “Making Strange” in Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew 311

Part 5: Back Matter A Bibliography of Marcia Hall’s Works Notes on Contributors Index

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List of Illustrations Figure 1.1

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Unknown artist, Portrait Medal of Agostino Chigi, this version struck in lead, ca. 1510. Diameter: 73 mm. British Museum, Department of Coins and Medals, G3.IP.436. Photo: © ARCHIVIO GBB / Archivi Alinari 17 Giovanni Bazzi, “Il Sodoma,” Marriage of Alexander and Roxane, detail of Alexander. 1517. Wall fresco, Villa Farnesina, Rome. Susana Guzman/ Alamy Stock Photo 19 Raphael, Portrait of Bindo Altoviti, ca. 1515. 59.7 × 43.8 cm. Oil on wooden panel. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1943.4.33. Photo: Bridgeman Images 20 Raphael, Madonna dell’Impannata, 1514. 158 × 125 cm. Oil on wooden panel. Florence, Galleria Palatina, Inv. 1912 no. 94. Photo: Bridgeman Images 25 Girolamo da Carpi, Portrait of Bindo Altoviti, ca. 1544. 88 × 73 cm. Oil on marble. New York, Private Collection. Photo: The Picture Collection/ Alamy Stock Photo 30 Pietro Giampaoli, Medaglia per il centenario del ritrovamento delle ossa di Raffaello. Sanzio, issued by the Pontifica Insigne Accademia dei Virutosi al Pantheon, 1936, 6.35 cm. Private collection. Photo: Author 37 Poste Vaticane of Raffaello Sanzi for the Quarto centenario della Pontifica Insigne Accademia dei Virutosi al Pantheon, 1943. Smithsonian National Postal Museum, Washington DC. Photo: Smithsonian National Postal Museum, Washington, DC, https://postalmuseum.si.edu/object/npm_ 2008.2009.82 44 Raphael’s Tomb Memorial, sixteenth century. Pantheon, Rome. Photo: Author 46 Detail of Raphael’s sarcophagus, marble, ancient Roman sarcophagus with inscription from 1833. Pantheon, Rome. Photo: Author 49 Benvenuto Cellini, Project for a Seal for the Accademia del Disegno, 1563–1569, drawing on paper, 33.2 × 22.2 cm. London, British Museum, object number 1860,0616.18. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum 51 Anonymous copy after Giulio Bonasone, Portrait of Raphael, mid to late sixteenth century, engraving on paper, 24.6 (trimmed) × 189 cm (trimmed). London, British Museum, object number 1871,1209.807. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum 52 Anonymous copy after Federico Zuccaro, Portrait of Raphael, ca. 1600, pen and brown ink over black chalk, brush with brown wash on paper, 30.5 × 14.6 cm. Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, inventory number 1341F. Photo: Gallerie degli Uffizi 54 Nicolas Chaperon, Memorial to Raphael, published in Sacrae historiae acta a Raphaele Urbin: in Vaticanis Xystis ad picturae miracuium expressa Nicolaus Chapron Gallus a de delineata et incisa D. D. D., 1790

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-205

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List of Illustrations

(originally in 1649). Photo: Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 56 Carlo Maratti, Homage to Raphael, published in Imagines Veteris ac Novi Testamenti to Raphaele Sanctio Urbinate in the Vaticani palatons Xystis mira picturae elegantia expressae, 1674, etching by Pietro Aquila, 31.1 × 38.8 cm trimmed. New York, Metropolitan Museum, museum number: 47.100.613. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1947 59 Carlo Maratti, Homage to Raphael, published in Imagines Veteris ac Novi Testamenti to Raphaele Sanctio Urbinate in the Vaticani palatons Xystis mira picturae elegantia expressae, 1674, etching by Pietro Aquila: detail of Nature. Metropolitan Museum, New York. Museum number: 47.100.613. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1947 60 Anton Mengs, after Carlo Maratti, Homage to Raphael, drawing on paper, 1741, 30.8 × 390 cm. London, British Museum, object number 1928,1016.10. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum 61 Medal Dedicated to Raphael, bronze, before 1761, 6.9 cm. London, British Museum, object number G3,IP.940. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum 62 Angelo Comolli, frontispiece to Vita inedita di Raffaello da Urbino, illustrata con note da Angelo Comolli, etching, 1790. Photo: Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 63 Designed by Carlo Maratti, etching by Jakob Frey, Portrait of Raphael, published in Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Descrizione delle immagini dipinte da Raffaelle d’Urbino nel Palazzo vaticano, e nella Farnesina alla Lungara: con alcuni ragionamenti in onore delle sue opere, e della pittura, e scultura / di Gio. Pietro Bellori. In questa nuova edizione accresciuta anche della vita del medesimo Raffaelle / descritta da Giorgio Vasari, 1751 (originally in 1695). Photo: Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 64 Hugh William Williams, Skull of Raphael exhibited at the Accademia di San Luca, etched by W.D. Lizars published in the The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction: Volume XXIII, May 1834 65 Image of Raphael’s open grave published in Carlo Fea, Per la invenzione segurta del sepolcro di Raffaele Sanzio da Urbino nel Pantheon di M. Agrippa in settembre e ottobre del 1833 / compendio di storia e di reflessioni dell’avvocato Carlo Fea, 1833. Photo: Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 68 Rose left at Raphael’s grave, a daily ritual by the Italian state for the year 2020 (with exception of the COVID-related closure from March 8 to June 9, 2020). Pantheon, Rome. Photo: Author 70 Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam (detail), Sistine Chapel, Vatican. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY 80 Michelangelo, The Last Judgment, Sistine Chapel, Vatican. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY 82

List of Illustrations

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Michelangelo, The Last Judgment with “line of fate” (after Steinberg) 83 Correggio and his Family, artist unknown, Codex Resta, inv F261 inf 76/ 2, 72. Late seventeenth-century drawing, commissioned by Sebastiano Resta after a drawing owned by Carlo Cesare Malvasia. Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy 107 The Muleteers; lot 318, Waring & Gillow, Ltd., Auction Catalogue of St. Serf’s House, Roehampton, Surrey, October 20 and 21, 1920, 30; photo by author with many thanks to the Mellon Center, London 110 Resta’s drawings of variously attributed, purported portraits of Correggio, Resta Codex, inv F261 inf 76/2, 2. Correggio and a Woman, Imaginary Portrait of Correggio, Study for the Portrait of Correggio and Correggio and His Family/Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy / © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana/Mauro Ranzani/Mondadori Portfolio/ Bridgeman Images 113 Correggio: Ceiling Vault frescos, camera of Giovanna da Piacenza, Convent of San Paolo, Parma (1518–1520). Album/Alamy Stock Photo 117 Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio, Maturino da Firenze, Palazzo Milesi, Rome. Photo: Eugenio Gozzano 126 After Polidoro, Cloaked male figure, here identified as Phocion the Good, from Palazzo Milesi, red chalk heightened with white (413 × 275 mm). Private collection, Rome 127 Enrico Maccari, The Façade of Palazzo Milesi, in E. Maccari, G. Iannoni, Graffiti e chiaroscuri esistenti nell’esterno delle case di Roma (Rome, 1876), plate 38: “Decorazione di Palazzo Milesi, Via della Maschera d’Oro.” With kind permission of the Accademia di San Luca, Istituzione Biblioteche Centri Culturali di Rome, Biblioteca “Romana Sarti” 128 Enrico Maccari, The Façade of Palazzo Milesi (detail of figure 3) 129 Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio, Maturino da Firenze, Palazzo Milesi (detail), Rome. Photo: Eugenio Gozzano 129 After Polidoro, Phocion, detail from the frieze of Palazzo Milesi, pen and brown wash, 244 × 106 mm (Inv. 6203 recto), Louvre, Cabinet des dessins, Paris 131 After Polidoro, Phocion, detail from the frieze of Palazzo Milesi, pen and white wash, 252 × 156 mm (Inv. 9112 verso). Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Rome 132 Giovan Battista Galestruzzi, after Polidoro, Cato the Younger and Phocion the Good, detail from the frieze of Palazzo Milesi, Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome. Photo: Author 133 Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio, Phocion the Good, black and white chalk, 261 × 181 mm (Inv. K.d.Z. 20743). Sammlung der Bibliothek des Kunstgewerbemuseums, Kunstbibliothek, Berlin 134 Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio, Cloaked male figure with a stick, red chalk, 193 × 89 mm (Inv. F.f. 1.59). British Museum, London 135 La prima, seconda & ultima parte delle vite di Plutarcho: di greco in latino: e di latino in volgare tradotte: & nouamente con le sue historie

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List of Illustrations

ristampate. Stampate in Vinegia: per Nicolo di Aristotile detto Zoppino, 1525 del mese di luglio. Biblioteca Casanatense, segnato B(MIN) II.3 137 Giuseppe Vasi, Archiginnasio della Sapienza, Plate 161 from Delle magnificenze di Roma antica e moderna . . ., 1747–1761, etching. Getty Research Institute, Muzio Collection, 88-B12976 146 Dominique Barrière, Fête of the Spaniards in Rome in the Year of the Jubilee, 1650, sheet: 15 3/16 × 24 15/16 inch, etching, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 49.50.270 146 Paul Marie Letarouilly, San Giacomo degli Spagnoli, 1853, 23 7/16 × 17 5/16 × 1 3/16 inch engraving, from Édifices de Rome moderne; ou, Recueil des palais, maisons, églises, couvents et autres monuments publics et particuliers les plus remarquables de la ville de Rome, Paris: Bance, 18. Photo: author 147 Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta, Crucifixion, originally for high altar of San Giacomo, 1560, oil on canvas, Santa Maria in Monserrato, Rome. Photo: author 153 Nostra Signora del Sacro Cuore, Rome, interior, 2015. by Livioandronico2013, licensed CC by-SA 4.0. https://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en 157 Orsanmichele, Florence, exterior. Photo: Joanne Allen 163 Orsanmichele, Florence, interior. Photo: Joanne Allen 164 Salimbeni Chapel, Santa Trinita, Florence. Photo: Joanne Allen 167 St. Anne Altar, Orsanmichele, Florence. Photo: Joanne Allen 172 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 350, loose sheet. 1587 design. Photo: By permission of Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo 175 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 350, loose sheet. 1588 design. Photo: By permission of Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo 178 Altar balustrade, Santo Stefano al Ponte Vecchio. Photo: Joanne Allen 179 Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross, begun in 1452, fresco, Arezzo, church of San Francesco, main chapel. Scala / Art Resource, NY 193 Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross (detail of sapling in The Death of Adam). Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali / Art Resource, NY 196 Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross (detail of beam in The Meeting of Solomon and Sheba). Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali / Art Resource, NY 197 Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross (detail of board in The Burial of the Wood). Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali / Art Resource, NY 198 Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross (detail of cross in The Finding and Proving of the Cross). Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali / Art Resource, NY 199

List of Illustrations

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Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross (detail of cross of light in The Dream of Constantine). Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali / Art Resource, NY 200 Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross (detail of gold cross in The Battle of Constantine and Maxentius). Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali / Art Resource, NY 201 Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross (detail of battle standard in The Battle of Heraclius and Chosroes). Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali / Art Resource, NY 202 Raphael and Workshop, Battle of the Milvian Bridge, 1520–1524, fresco, Sala di Costantino, Vatican. Photo: Art Resource, NY 213 Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael, Massacre of the Innocents, 1513– 1515, 27.4 × 41.5 cm. British Museum, London. Museum Number V,5.27. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved 216 Philips Galle after Luca Penni, Fighting Gladiators, 1562, 34 × 47.5 cm. British Museum, Number V,8.117. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum 217 Cornelis Bos after Frans Floris: Gathering of Manna, ca. 1554, 30 × 38 cm. British Museum, Number 1950,0520.430. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum 218 Perino del Vaga, Crossing of the Red Sea, 1522–1523, 118 × 201 cm, Inventory no. 450. Photo: Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan 219 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, Apollo and the Muses, 1549, 29 × 21 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, object number RP-P-1952-219. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 219 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, 1549, 26 × 38 cm, British Museum, London. Museum Number 1869,0410.132. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum 221 Raphael and Workshop, Constantine Addressing His Troops and His Vision of the Cross, 1520–1524, fresco, Sala di Costantino, Vatican. Photo: Art Resource, New York 225 Raphael and Workshop, Donation of Constantine, 1520–1524, fresco, Sala di Costantino, Vatican. Photo: Art Resource, New York 226 Michiel Coxie, Continence of Scipio, ca. 1530, 22.2 × 29.8 cm, red chalk on paper, British Museum, London, Museum number, 1946,0713.151. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum 227 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Frontispiece,” Victories of Charles V, 1555, 15.3 × 22.8 cm, British Museum, London. Museum Number 1868,0208.57. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum 229 Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Suleiman the Magnificent Forced to Raise the Siege of Vienna,” Victories of Charles V, 1555, 15.6 × 22.8 cm, British Museum, London. Museum Number 1868,0208.61. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum 230

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Figure 9.13

Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Charles Inspecting his Troops Near Ingolstadt, Victories of Charles V, 1555, 15.6 × 23.3 cm, British Museum, London. Museum Number 1868,0208.65. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum 231 Attributed to Giuliano Bugiardini or Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio, Portrait Cover with Masks and Grotesques, ca. 1516, oil on panel, 73 × 50.3 cm, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY 239 Attributed to Giuliano Bugiardini or Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio, Portrait of a Lady, ca. 1516, oil on panel, 73 × 50.3 cm, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY 240 Agnolo Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, and Jealousy (detail), ca. 1550, oil on panel, 192 × 140 cm, Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY 244 Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi, ca. 1541–1545, oil on panel, 102 × 83.2 cm, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY 245 Agnolo Bronzino, The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, 1565–1569, fresco, Florence, San Lorenzo. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY 248 Agnolo Bronzino, The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, detail. Photo: Scala/ Art Resource, NY 250 Agnolo Bronzino, The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, detail. Photo: Scala/ Art Resource, NY 251 Michelangelo, Night, ca. 1524–1534, marble, Florence, Medici Chapel. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY 254 Agnolo Bronzino, Christ in Limbo, 1552, oil on panel, 443 × 291 cm, Florence, Museo dell’Opera di Santa Croce. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY 256 Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Florence, San Lorenzo, 1519–1534. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY 257 Michelangelo, Medici Madonna, ca. 1524–1534, marble, Medici Chapel, Florence, San Lorenzo. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY 258 Giuliano Bugiardini, Madona del Latte, ca. 1518, oil on panel, 121 × 76 cm, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY 259 Michelangelo, sketches for the Madonna and Child, ca. 1524–1526 (?), pen and ink, 39.9 × 26.8 cm, London, British Museum. Photo: The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY 261 Michelangelo, Madonna and Child, ca. 1524–1526 (?), black and red chalk and heightening, 54.1 × 39.6 cm, Florence, Casa Buonarroti. Associazione Metamorfosi, Rome. Photo: Scala, Florence/Art Resource, NY 262 Michelangelo, Holy Family, ca. 1524–1526 (?), black chalk, 31.4 × 18.9 cm, London, British Museum. The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY 263

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Rapahel, Disputa (Detail), 1509–1510, fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY 276 Raphael, Study for the Disputa, 1509, 24.5 × 40.0 cm, pen and brown ink, London, The British Museum, inv. no. 1900,0824.108. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved 277 Raphael, Study for the Disputa, 1509, 29.9 × 43.3 cm, ink and chalk, Vienna, Albertina, inv. no. 224. Photo: The Albertina Museum, Vienna 278 Raphael, School of Athens (Detail), 1510–1511, fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY 279 Rapahel, Disputa (Detail), 1509–1510, fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY 281 Rapahel, Disputa (Detail), 1509–1510, fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY 282 Rapahel, Disputa (Detail), 1509–1510, fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY 288 Lucas van Leyden, Dance Around the Golden Calf, ca. 1530, oil on panel, center: 93.5 × 66.9 cm; left wing: 91.7 × 30.2 cm; right wing: 91.8 × 30.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, object number SK-A-3841. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 296 Lucas van Leyden, Moses Striking the Rock in the Wilderness, 1527, glue tempera on linen, 181.9 × 237.5 cm. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Acc. No. 54.1432. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; www.mfa.org 300 Marten de Vos, Moses Showing the Tablets of the the Law to the Iraelites, with Portraits of Members of the Panhuys Family, their Relatives, and Friends, 1574–1575. Oil on panel, 153 × 237.5 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague. Inv. No. 249. Photo: Mauritshuis, The Hague 302 Hendrick Goltzius, Moses with the Tablets of the Law, 1583, ink on paper, 58.3 × 42 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, object number RP-P-OB-10.403. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 305 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599– 1600. Oil on canvas, 322 cm. × 340 cm. Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY 313 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, detail, Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599–1600. Oil on canvas, 322 cm. × 340 cm. Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY 319 Leonardo da Vinci, Last Supper, 1495–1498. Oil and tempera on plaster, 460 × 880 cm. Refectory, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan. Photo: Scala/ Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY 327 Leonardo da Vinci, detail, Last Supper, 1495–1498. Oil and tempera on plaster, 460 × 880 cm. Refectory, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan. Photo: HIP/Art Resource, NY 328 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, detail, Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599–1600. Oil on canvas, 322 × 340 cm. Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY 333

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Ian Verstegen and Arthur J. DiFuria, with Tracy Cooper

Introduction The words comprising this book’s title, “space,” “image,” and “reform,” form a series of coordinates marking pressure points in the early modern use of religious images. Marcia Hall has contributed one of the great voices of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries to the scholarly discussion of early modern sacred imagery. For over half a century, she has published valuable studies and syntheses of fundamental problems of patronage, painting, and reception in the tumultuous culture of Renaissance Italy. The present volume offers a set of art historical inquiries honoring Hall’s work in a variety of ways. In some of this book’s essays, admiring colleagues offer studies that build on the ideas, artists, and theoretical constructs we closely associate with Hall. In others, scholars have contributed essays acknowledging Hall’s contributions by essaying new approaches to areas she has pioneered. Still other essays present works by former pupils of Hall’s whose scholarly pursuits stem from their experiences with her. Through the prism of these approaches, this book advances the thinking on issues that have been at the core of Hall’s work. Marcia Hall’s myriad contributions to Renaissance art history began with a PhD dissertation (Harvard, 1967) under Sydney Freedberg (1914–1997) addressing the style of sacred art in mid-sixteenth century Florence after the CounterReformation changed the needs of the sacred institutions commissioning art.1 Embarking by ocean with a Fulbright to Florence, her task was to understand the efforts by the Franciscans of Santa Croce and the Dominicans of Santa Maria Novella to fill their altars with works by local mid-sixteenth century painters such as Agnolo Bronzino (1503–1572) and his ilk, the so-called Florentine Maniera. While studying the archives there – the suppressed convents of the Archivio di Stato and also the Archivio di Santa Croce – she made a series of discoveries that pushed her scholarship well beyond addressing the figural inventions on display in the works commissioned by the church. Hall unearthed considerable new evidence indicating massive medieval constructions in both churches that the Arezzan painter, author, architect, and impresario Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) was to renovate. The result was a groundbreaking dissertation on the relation between the ideology of Counter Reform, the revision of sacred space, and artistic production. The dissertation was revised after a return to Florence and a stay at I Tatti and eventually accepted by E. H. Gombrich into a

1 Marcia Hall, “Art of the Counter-Maniera in Florence” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1967). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-001

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series at Clarendon Press as Renovation and Counter-Reformation.2 Hall has continued to pursue each of these concerns throughout her storied career. Marcia became enthralled with the intellectual challenges inherent in the findings of conservation science. With the aid of grants from the NEH and the Kress Foundation, her research took a new turn. Guided by her friend Joyce Plesters, she began investigating the way in which Italian Renaissance painting materials and techniques affected the color systems deployed by Italian artists from Cennini to Caravaggio. She organized two landmark conferences – Color and Technique in Renaissance Painting in 1980 at Temple University, where she had begun teaching in 1973, and The Princeton Raphael Symposium (Princeton University, 1983), the latter in collaboration with John Shearman (1931–2003) – to promote greater interaction between art historians and scientists, an early foray into materiality and technical art history.3 Hall synthesized the thoughts developed in these venues into a pioneering book for art historians pursuing Italian Renaissance painting and those who wish to learn more about early modern painting techniques in general: 1992’s Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting, written during periods at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Williams College Clark Institute of Art.4 The deliberate inversion of its subtitle, privileging “Practice” before “Theory,” identified what would remain her long-term focus addressing the work of art as a physical object. In addition to its considerable scholarly import, the book has also earned the rare distinction of being beloved by painters, who guard it jealously. It is a tribute to Marcia as a writer of clear prose and discerning eye. A couple of years teaching at Temple University’s Rome campus shifted Hall’s focus more intently to the papal city. Following further research on NEH and Fulbright grants, among others, Hall was inspired to undertake a large-scale review of Cinquecento painting. The result was a tome that Hall’s colleagues and students from the late 1990s will recall she affectionately referred to as “Dopo,” a double entendre, playing on the titles of many Italian exhibitions and catalogues, and also an Italian shorthand nickname from the first word in its title: After

2 Marcia Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, 1565–77 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 3 Marcia Hall, ed., Color Technique in Renaissance Painting (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1987); John Shearman and Marcia Hall, Princeton Raphael Symposium: Science in the Service of Art History (Princeton, NJ: 1990). 4 Marcia Hall, Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century (1999).5 A copious survey of the various sixteenth-century Italian painting movements leading to, revolving around, and responding to the art of Raphael, the book was well received for its combination of ambitious scope, attention to detail, and the “ease” with which Hall described the “visual force” of the art she analyzed.6 Hall continued this landmark publication’s address of the field’s big questions by editing state-of-scholarship volumes. The middle years of the 00s witnessed the publication of no fewer than three anthologies she edited on Michelangelo, Raphael, and Cinquecento Rome.7 With these books, Hall brought together a blend of well-established and rising scholars deploying a variety of approaches to fundamentally important topics. Her volume on Rome became the model for a larger series from Cambridge University Press, Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance, in which she served as series editor and co-edited the volume on Naples (2017) with Thomas Willette. Marcia’s skill in coordinating multi-contributor projects grows out of her enjoyment of professional collaboration both in her teaching and publishing. She regularly participated with Temple colleague Tracy Cooper at meetings of the Renaissance Society of America, along with mutual students and colleagues, where they continue to propose sessions of shared interest (Raphael 2020 in Philadelphia is on the horizon as of this writing). One of their collaborations resulted in the co-edited multi-author volume, The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, regarding the place of the senses in religious experience and church reform in Italy and the North.8 There was a felicitous concordance with the 450th anniversary of the closing of the Council of Trent, celebrated with a conference hosted by one of the volume’s contributors.9

5 Marcia Hall, After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 6 David Franklin, “Review of After Raphael, by Marcia Hall,” http://caareviews.org/reviews/ 185#.XNW-FKl7ndQ. 7 Marcia Hall, ed., Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ (Masterpieces of Western Art) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Marcia Hall, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Raphael (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Marcia Hall, ed., Rome (Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance) (New York: Cambridge University Press England, 2005). 8 Marcia Hall and Tracy Cooper, eds., The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 9 John W. O’Malley, SJ, organized the conference “Trent and its Impact” on November 7–8, 2013, at Georgetown University, to celebrate the 450th anniversary of the closing of the Council of Trent on December 4, 1563. See videos of the presentations: https://president.georgetown. edu/trent-and-its-impact.

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During the second half of the decade, Hall had engaged Hans Belting’s seminal identification of a turn in sacred art’s function, which took root in the midto-late Quattrocento and flowered in the early decades of the Cinquecento, to elide artistic concerns with the traditional uses of icons.10 The result of research supported by the NEH, with I Tatti and CASVA residencies, the prize-winning The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, el Greco, Caravaggio (2011) once again returned Hall to the synoptic view afforded by After Raphael to situate sacred art’s newly accrued artistic refractions within general history, stylistic developments, and emergent artistic and patronal responses to the Reform movement.11 She was awarded Temple’s only university-wide chaired professorships in 2012, the Laura H. Carnell Professorship, in recognition of her scholarly accomplishments and contributions, having served also as long-time director of graduate studies in art history. At this writing, yet another survey – a worthy successor to Color and Meaning – has appeared, with an even broader temporal span: The Power of Color (2019).12 If in 1992 her introductory chapter asked “Can We Know What Renaissance Color Was?” her latest book demonstrates how far the world of conservation science has taken us in this direction. The better comprehension of materials and techniques, their aging process, addressing the physical condition with discretion have become part of a lexicon available to art historians and even the general public, in part due to the many contributions of Hall in this area. She chooses color to be her lens again (Color, mmmm, her latest students call it), following the development of materials from the fifteenth century through to the twentieth and the rise of synthetic pigments, a trajectory from color as a means for naturalistic representation to a direct expression of interior meaning. With their balanced attention to the object’s primacy and the cultural forces inscribing it, Hall’s scholarly productions have served as stabilizing works in the historiography of Italian Renaissance painting.

10 Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1990). 11 Marcia Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio (London and New York: Yale University Press, 2011). 12 Marcia Hall, The Power of Color: Five Centuries of European Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).

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Historiography and Methods Marcia Hall’s works have always had revisionist consequences. This is to say, she has altered indelibly the discourse in the fields in which she has worked most intensively – interior church spaces, restored color, Michelangelo, Raphael and his impact, the meaning of early modern style, and the role of the sensuous in religious art. Moreover, many of her works bear an acute awareness, if not an explicit address, of the state of the fields they pursue. For example, After Raphael was written with a strongly self-conscious sense of its own intervention in the debate over Mannerism after the fading of the great paradigms of the 1950s and 1960s of Friedlaender, Freedberg, Shearman, and Smyth.13 However, Hall’s impact on the historiography of each of her chosen fields has never been through sustained, directly historiographic discussions. Nor has she ever proffered theory for its own sake. Rather she has sought to base historical interpretation directly in texts and the works of art themselves. The closest she has ever come to an extended, directly historiographic discussion of the field is possibly her pithy “A Note on Style Labels” that accompanies After Raphael.14 There, Hall’s commentary displays balanced understanding of the discipline’s dependence upon style labels, despite the ways in which they tend to limit or arbitrarily oversimplify historical perceptions of artistic production. Such misperceptions are often at the expense of an awareness of organic stylistic complexities. Entire oeuvres can receive critical downgrades as the result of their inability to adhere to a specific style label, conceived from a substantial temporal retrospect. Our book’s part 1 begins by carrying forward the spirit of Hall’s historiographic awareness of Raphael scholarship with an essay by a longtime friend, Ingrid Rowland. She pulls the curtain back on Raphael’s patronage circle with a look at the most powerful bankers of Rome: Agostino Chigi, Bindo Altoviti, and Jakob Fugger. Although Chigi was Sienese, Altoviti was sympathetic to the Florentine republic, and Fugger was a German, each prospered in papal Rome where money and cooperation made the papacy thrive. Each cultivated Raphael as a way to express their unsurpassed wealth, learning, and expansive cultural compass: Chigi with his famous chapel, Altoviti with the Madonna dell’Impannata, and Fugger with the Pala Fugger in Rome’s Santa Maria dell’Anima.

13 Friedlander, Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967); Sydney Freedberg, “Observations on the Painting of the Maniera,” Art Bulletin 47 (1965): 187–97; John Shearman, Mannerism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967); Craig Hugh Smyth, Mannerism and Maniera (Locust Valley, NY: J.J. Augustin, 1962. Reprint, Vienna: Irsa, 1992). 14 Marcia Hall, “A Note on Style Labels,” in After Raphael, xii–xv.

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In “Surpassing Nature: Raphael’s Artistic Apotheosis,” Tamara Smithers – one of Hall’s former PhD students featured in this volume – explores the historical place of Raphael in Italian culture after his death. Raphael of course figures into many of Hall’s works, and given her characterization of his style and technique during his life, Smithers shows how these unique qualities were mobilized for posterity with the model of the perfect artist. In the Counter-Reformation Raphael was useful as an artist who could paint orthodox subjects, manage a large workshop useful for the propagandistic aims of popes and kings, and at the same time promote his own authority as befitting the emergence of the idea of the modern artist. Admittedly, the chapter in this book’s historiography section by Hall’s former PhD student Ian Verstegen risks testing his mentor’s patience. He places her work in a paragone with that of her sometime interlocutor Leo Steinberg, particularly their respective interpretations of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and altar wall. Verstegen highlights Steinberg’s moments of interpretive bravura, his identification of a “line of fate” in the Last Judgment, for example, or his identification of a “preemptive Eve” in the Creation of Adam.15 While Steinberg’s works are most often read as an opening up of interpretive play, he is actually quite traditional. His work on the ceiling dares to suggest that he has found its one, hidden meaning. Hall instead bases her interpretations on standard texts and comparative analyses of visual evidence. In this, she invokes more coherence. Nevertheless, because Steinberg does not refer to the basic interpretive principles of texts or artistic programs, it is not clear how to confirm his readings. Meanwhile, Hall’s invocation of basic Augustianian theology or techniques of fresco painting allow one to retrace her steps. Our historiographic section closes with an essay by Maureen Pelta, a scholar and longtime friend of Hall’s who has benefited greatly from their scholarly exchange. Pelta honors Hall’s embrace of style debates by exploring Correggio’s shifting historiographic status. Pelta goes straight to the source of many illinformed historiographic determinations, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.16 She identifies Vasari’s famous denial of the Parmense master of an artistic sojourn to Rome. He could not infer the presence of Rome in Correggio’s style. Pelta explains how, by the eighteenth century, the idea of Correggio had been transferred to a historically mediated problem of ancient influence. The debate centered on determining 15 Leo Steinberg, “Who’s Who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam: A Chronology of the Picture’s Reluctant Self-Revelation,” Art Bulletin 74, no. 4 (1992): 552. 16 Giorgio Vasari, “Vita di Antonio da Correggio Pittore,” Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori (Florence: Giunti, 1568), 16–19.

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exactly if and when the Roman trip may have occurred, or if the local evidence of antique statuary held sway in his art. Through such discursive machinations, he became a new-found model to follow for “proto-baroque” illusionistic ends. This “nexus of aesthetics and biography” framed how we might approach an artist like Correggio at all.

Space Our essays pursuing spatial issues build on the many ways in which Marcia’s work manifests her acute sensitivity to the importance of the environs paintings inhabited for gauging their significances. The pursuit of her earliest work, to understand the spaces of mendicant churches in Florence, particularly Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, receives significant follow-through in subsequent works on other subjects.17 While she was specifically interested in Mannerism and Vasari’s paintings for the two churches, her work contributed a number of fundamental insights into the functions of late medieval church spaces. Vasari cleared out the medieval accretions in both churches and simplified their decorative programs according to standardized altar tabernacles and a coordinated altarpiece iconographic program. At Santa Maria Novella, Vasari utilized older altarpieces for his new scheme and commissioned new works for Santa Croce.18 In her archival research, however, Hall discovered something entirely unexpected – each of the two churches had been outfitted with massive rood screens, or tramezzi, which separated choir from nave. In effect, such architectural members divided spaces, creating divisions between lay and clerical church inhabitants, male and female, and, above all, those with access to the Eucharist and those not granted the privilege. Her work underscored that for worshippers before Vasari’s renovations, Eucharistic consumption was severely limited, as was communion in general. It was the efforts of reformers and the rising cult of the Eucharist, culminating in the missives of the Council of Trent, to require the opening of the church space for ready access to the high altar, where the Host was prescribed to be kept. Hall’s discoveries inspired a number of works – research on late medieval rood screens, but also studies on Counter-Reformation efforts to unify sacred

17 Marcia Hall, “The Ponte in S. Maria Novella: The Problem of the Rood Screen in Italy,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974): 157–73; Marcia Hall, “The Tramezzo in The Italian Renaissance, Revisited,” in Thresholds of the Sacred; Dumbarton Oaks Papers, ed. Sharon E. J. Gerstel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 215–33. 18 Marcia Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation.

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spaces and altarpiece programs.19 In a recent article, Hall has noted that work on such topics is far from over because so many questions remain about gender divisions and regional variation.20 Indeed, Hall’s works that do not directly address sacred space bear her attunement to the spatial implications in early modern paintings. For example, although color and conservation science were not necessary for developing an awareness of the early modern experience of viewing paintings conceived for spaces designed for spiritual meditation, Color and Meaning is notable for its emphasis on how color schemes worked with light in sacred environments to condition reception. Thus, part 2 – Space, works its way into interior concerns only after considering the spatiality of a painted building exterior. Costanza Barbieri, whom Marcia examined for her PhD dissertation with Rona Goffen at Rutgers, writes on the sgraffito decorative program on the exterior of Rome’s Palazzo Milesi, a façade masterpiece by Polidoro da Caravaggio and Maturino da Firenze.21 One of the many effects of Hall’s After Raphael was to restore to the early sixteenth century canon of painting the reputations of painters such as Polidoro, who specialized in façade paintings, which have since vanished from view.22 Hall also insisted on the continued importance of Polidoro for later generations, as in Federico Zuccaro’s series of drawings detailing the education of his brother, Taddeo Zuccaro.23 Barbieri brings to light a previously unknown drawing (Barbieri, figure 5.2) that enables her to push our understanding of the

19 Donal Cooper, “Franciscan Choir Enclosures and the Function of Double-Sided Altarpieces in Pre-Tridentine Umbria,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 64 (2001): 1–54; Jacqueline Jung, The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200–1400 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Giles Knox, “The Unified Church Interior in Baroque Italy: S. Maria Maggiore in Bergamo,” Art Bulletin 132 (2000): 679–701; Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University. Press, 2002); Louise Rice, Altars and Altarpieces of New St. Peter’s: Outfitting the Basilica, 1621–1666 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Ian Verstegen, Federico Barocci and the Oratorians: Corporate Patronage and Style in the Counter-Reformation (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2015), 43–66; Tracy Cooper, “Singers and Setting: Choir and Furnishing in an Age of Reform: The Example of San Giorgio Maggiore,” in Architettura e musica nella Venezia del rinascimento, eds. Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2006), 183–200, with earlier references. 20 Marcia Hall, “Another Look at the Rood Screen in the Italian Renaissance,” Sacred Architecture 27 (2015): 11–19. 21 Costanza Barbieri, “‘To Be in Heaven’: St. Philip Neri Between Aesthetic Emotion and Mystical Ecstasy,” in The Sensuous Counter-Reformation, 206–229. 22 Hall, After Raphael, 73–78. 23 Brooks, Taddeo and Federico Zuccaro: Artist-Brothers in Renaissance Rome (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007).

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Palazzo Milesi’s iconography past the traditional view that it portrays the Massacre of the Niobids. By viewing the newly discovered drawing alongside Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, she identifies the famous personages portrayed with the same confidence as any sixteenth-century Roman familiar with the ancient text, published not long before Polidoro conceived and executed the painting. Throughout, Barbieri uses Hall’s notion, laid out in After Raphael, that such imagery functioned “like [an] effective orator” for its audience, thus conditioning the neighborhood ambient with a multivalent antiquarian patronal presence as did altarpieces for early modern churches. If Marcia clarified the practices of the late medieval with the tramezzo and the Counter-Reformation that abolished it, Rosie May – a PhD pupil of Marcia’s – explores the intermediate period when ideas of spatial unification were beginning to percolate. Her subject, Rome’s Spanish national church of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli, provides a provocative counterpoint to the mendicant churches of Florence. Both the Florentine and Roman projects addressed the layout of their respective churches and removed barriers to increase the Eucharist’s accessibility to the laiety. But May’s essay highlight’s San Giacomo’s added charge in its connection to the royal Spanish crown. She identifies how Spanish authority navigated the issues inherent in reform on the Roman stage. The section on spatial issues ends with an essay by Joanne Allen on a Counter-Reformation topic that enlightens Hall’s work on the mendicant churches of Florence. In her discussion of the Orsanmichele, Allen describes in detail the removal of a tramezzo that is similar to those that Hall studied so many years ago. The updating of this important Florentine building’s liturgical spaces occurred under the supervision of Duke Cosimo (1519–1574). Documenting this process’s relation to diocesan visits and liturgical concerns, Allen also identifies consequences in unifying such a space anew. Without a barrier to the altar, and with so many entrances, the Orsanmichele became subject to unanticipated, shocking concerns – the new arrangement made easier illicit encounters, especially with prostitutes, in the church space. The ironic outcome was that a new screen, this time a short balustrade, was added to reintroduce barriers into the church, restricting lay access to the altar in the way the quattrocento tramezzo had.

Image With subsequent major works on the image, Hall’s focus fanned out from the formal to include the status of painters as agents of cultural change, makers of works of substantial social import. For example, Color and Meaning (1992)

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furnished concerned readers with a compendium of examples of how artists from Giotto to Caravaggio devised color schemes that generated a range of meanings for their viewers. Similarly, After Raphael (1999) assessed the Urbinate master’s impact on Cinquecento painting by tracking the transmission of his methods and style across Europe via the diaspora of his workshop’s principal members. Hall charted a history of sixteenth century Italian painting that identified the various pressures put on images by early antiquarianism, the impetus of High Renaissance classicism, the translation of the effects of relief sculpture into a painted “relief-like style,” the end of Mannerism in the 1550s, and the rise of the post-Tridentine Counter-Maniera. The Sacred Image in the Age of Art (2011) inverts the question scholars have traditionally brought to the mid-sixteenth century image debate. Instead of asking how the heated and sometimes violent discourse over the validity of sacred art resulted in its destruction, Hall’s book explores how artists reformulated their work in response to these conditions. In each of these examples, Hall’s continued emphasis on the work of art’s sensuous qualities – its status as a product of masterful artistic conceptualization and manual manipulation – generates meanings ranging from the visceral to the cerebral.24 Although Hall’s legacy is varied and thorough in its contextualization of the image, the essays in this section by former students and presentday colleagues find ways to further her innovations, thus paying tribute to her. The first chapter in our book’s part 3, by Sarah Kozlowski, combines several of Hall’s approaches in ways that transition us from the spatial issues of part 2. Focusing on Piero della Francesca’s True Cross fresco cycle in Arezzo’s Basilica of San Francesco (1452–1466) in situ, Kozlowski returns us to Hall’s contributions on form’s resonance during the mid-Quattrocento in central Italy. Her essay here builds on Hall’s emphasis on the coloristic elements of Piero’s practice to address the cycle’s materiality. The artist’s introduction of down modeling and methods of fresco painting that allowed for tonal flexibility comprises the key formal aspect of the cycle for Kozlowski’s essay. She argues that the narrative of the true cross’s discovery prompted Piero to devise his frescoes to foreground the notion of materiality. Piero elides the cross’s material nature with the materials of art’s making. In Kozlowski’s view, Piero wanted to fashion paintings that ignited a call and response with the material manifestation of the cross in the very church where he painted the narrative of its discovery.

24 Continuing themes found again in Hall and Cooper, The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church.

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Art DiFuria’s contribution to this volume applies Hall’s work on Italian painting to the concerns of Netherlandish artists. “The Netherlandish Relieflike Style in the Age of Art” extends Hall’s paradigm of the relief-like style to Northern Europe. According to Hall, the relief-like style was an alternative method of organizing pictorial elements in relation to the frame and the picture plane imitating the shallow spatial effects of antique relief sculptures. Emerging from late Quattrocento antiquarian interests, the style coalesced as a legitimate compositional mode in Raphael’s designs for the Sala di Costantino, completed by the key players of his workshop after his death. Netherlandish artists with experiences in Rome brought their own version of the relief-like style north to serve specialized alternative needs of their homeland. After situating the style’s spread to northern Europe within the larger currents of motival exchange between Italy and the Low Countries, DiFuria highlights the relief-like style’s imperial associations. First pressed into service on behalf of the Vatican by Raphael and his workshop in the Sala di Costantino, this became useful for the Habsburgs. The relief-like style’s visual allusiveness to monumental antique works could serve Netherlandish artistic cognoscenti or liefhebbers (“art lovers”) who wished to subvert Catholic associations in a Reform context. With its application of Hall’s findings to northern art, DiFuria’s essay not only points to the stylistic developments so central to her work, it also provides a point of transition to our book’s last section, where reform becomes the central focus. Also benefiting greatly from the example of Hall’s work on the relief-like style’s artifice is Stuart Lingo, whose essay “Mannerism’s Masks,” returns to a topic dear to her, the emergence of the sixteenth-century Florentine Maniera. In Hall’s vision, we cannot disassociate the artifice of the relief-like style from definitions of the Maniera. Building on After Raphael’s demonstration of a necessity for an approach to Cinquecento art that moves beyond pure style-neutrality, Lingo examines the masks that accompany many works by Michelangelo, Bronzino, and the artists in their orbit. Lingo proceeds according to Hall’s tenets in his examination of the masks that accompany many works of Michelangelo and Bronzino. They are, according to Lingo, the perfect emblem of obfuscation via artifice. The mask, like the stony appearance of the relief, is an instrument of opacity, which interposed art between the believer and the religious message. The very success of the relief-like style was its generality, thus, in its very definition it was not tied to a specific genre. Not surprisingly, the artifice of the relief and the mask were either left open to a range of interpretations for northern audiences or cast aside by the next generation.

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Reform Reform and Counter-Reform placed stringent new demands upon artists to adapt to newly organized surroundings. Among the greatest merits of Hall’s work has been to put aesthetic and formal factors into play with those of religious devotion and control. In a lesser-known essay, Hall adroitly reviewed Savonarola’s prescriptions for images, a nascent reform of sorts that lay fallow in the syncretic impetuses and the sumptuousness of Julius II’s Rome.25 In “Order and the Anagogic Approach,” Hall’s former doctoral student Jonathan Kline picks up the thread his mentor established with her mastery of the carriage of late Quattrocento Florentine discourse on the sacred into early Cinquecento Rome. Kline maps humanistic thoughts on the sacred onto Raphael’s Disputa. He points out that although scholars have worked hard to illuminate the theological thinking evident in the School of Athens, there has been little exploration of philosophy’s presence in the Disputa. In the process, Kline details the painting’s broadcast of philosophy’s importance for ordering desire and thus maintaining one’s spiritual balance. More concretely, he identifies the presence of Plato and Aristotle in the painting, which is after all the counterpart to the more famous fresco to which it sits opposite. The result is an understanding of the Julian papacy’s theological masterwork that affirms Hall’s scholarly investment in the High Renaissance unity of the works of Raphael’s classic phase. The artist’s address of art’s materiality, at issue in the visual culture around sacred art in the years after the opulent patronage of Julius and Leo, is at the core of Larry Silver’s essay. Silver, whom Hall cites in Sacred Image in the Age of Art for reading an early draft of her introductory chapter on northern reform, addresses Lucas van Leyden’s Dance Around the Golden Calf (ca. 1530), perhaps the most important painting from the end of the artist’s career. Lucas devised the painting as the image debate had begun to intensify. During the late 1520s and early 1530s in Europe, the Reformation prompted heated discourse on the topic of sacred art’s usefulness for worship. Like DiFuria’s essay on the relief-like style, Silver demonstrates the usefulness in importing an interpretive model of Hall’s north of the Alps. As Hall does with Italian artists in The Sacred Image in the Age of Art, Silver describes Lucas’s triptych as the artist’s consummation of a lifelong pursuit of formulae for creating effective sacred pictures. Characterized by Silver as a “pious picture about an act of idolatry,” Lucas’s painting confirms

25 Marcia Hall, “Savonarola’s Preaching and the Patronage of Art,” in Christianity & the Renaissance, eds. Timothy Verdon and John Henderson (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 493–522.

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sacred art’s instructive nature for a northern audience that had become newly uncertain of its utility. Also furthering Hall’s study of the image’s shifting status in the aftershock of sixteenth century Reform is Anne Muraoka’s essay on Caravaggio’s paintings of sacred subjects. Also a former doctoral student of Hall’s, Muraoka offers a refreshing exploration of Caravaggio’s sacred art suggesting ways to overturn that which has often been assumed about the artist’s relation to reform tenets. In The Sacred Image in the Age of Art, Hall borrowed a phrase from Russian Formalist theory, “making strange,” as a model for explaining the rhetorical import of unusual features in post-Tridentine art. Muraoka uses Hall’s interpretive device as a point of departure for arguing against the traditional hesitation to attribute to Caravaggio a nuanced awareness of Counter-Reformation ideology. It is through the pictures themselves that Muraoka also demonstrates Caravaggio’s understanding of the Counter-Reform inflected devotional practices of his day. In doing so, she demonstrates in Caravaggio’s work precisely the level of pictorial intelligence Hall’s work has sought to be identified in Cinquecento painters. Thus, the subjects that the authors in this book address have a breadth that is reflective of Marcia Hall’s own scholarly production. Moreover, as a cross section of works that build on Marcia’s own scholarly interests, these essays demonstrate not only her command of an impressive range of complex topics and her remarkable knack for identifying issues at the core of Renaissance art historical studies, but also her ability to convey key concepts in the field to those in her circle. As a collection of essays by former students and longtime colleagues, these essays are also a testament to her collegiality. But above all, this anthology reveals her uncanny ability to move the field of Renaissance art historical studies to new places, original insights, and genuine contributions to the thinking in the many topic areas she has helped to pioneer. Rather than simply imitating Hall’s methods or her voice, these essays are in conversation with the work marking her illustrious scholarly career. Hall has always practiced her scholarship and teaching with conviviality and a flourish of style. Students, friends, colleagues, family, will remember her hospitable welcome and their appreciation of her latest artful arrangements of Ikebana – a practice brought home from her period at Temple Japan – as they enjoyed conversations over the table. We hope this bouquet that we present possesses a satisfying variety, filling out a full and multi-colored collection of flowers. If this is our achievement, it is only because Marcia devoted herself to so many fields and made such a strong impact on studies of Renaissance art, architecture, and its historiography.

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Ian Verstegen and Arthur J. DiFuria, with Tracy Cooper

Works Cited (for Marcia Hall’s works cited in this introduction, see below, Part 5, Back Matter, “A Bibliography of Marcia Hall’s Works”) Barbieri, Costanza. “‘To Be in Heaven’: St. Philip Neri between Aesthetic Emotion and Mystical Ecstasy.” In The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, 206–30, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Belting, Hans. Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1990. Brooks, Julian. Taddeo and Federico Zuccaro: Artist-Brothers in Renaissance Rome. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007. Exhibition catalog. Cooper, Donal. “Franciscan Choir Enclosures and the Function of Double-Sided Altarpieces in Pre-Tridentine Umbria.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 64 (2001): 1–54. Cooper, Tracy E. “Singers and Setting: Choir and Furnishing in an Age of Reform. The Example of San Giorgio Maggiore.” In Architettura e musica nella Venezia del rinascimento, edited by Deborah Howard and Laura Moretti, 183–200. Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2006. Franklin, David. “Review of After Raphael, by Marcia Hall.” http://caareviews.org/reviews/ 185#.XNW-FKl7ndQ. Freedberg, Sydney. “Observations on the Painting of the Maniera.” Art Bulletin 47 (1965): 187–97. Friedlander, Walter. Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism in Italian Painting. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967. Jung, Jacqueline. The Gothic Screen: Space, Sculpture, and Community in the Cathedrals of France and Germany, ca. 1200–1400. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Knox, Giles. “The Unified Church Interior in Baroque Italy: S. Maria Maggiore in Bergamo.” Art Bulletin 132 (2000): 679–701. Rice, Louise. Altars and Altarpieces of New St. Peter’s: Outfitting the Basilica, 1621–1666. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Rosenthal, Earl. “Plus Ultra, Non plus Ultra, and the Columnar Device of Emperor Charles V.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 34 (1971): 204–28. Shearman, John. Mannerism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. Smith, Jeffrey Chipps. Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Smyth, Craig Hugh. Mannerism and Maniera. Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1962. Reprint, Vienna: Irsa, 1992. Steinberg, Leo. “Who’s Who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam: A Chronology of the Picture’s Reluctant Self-Revelation.” Art Bulletin 74, no. 4 (1992): 552–56. Verstegen, Ian. Federico Barocci and the Oratorians: Corporate Patronage and Style in the Counter-Reformation. Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2015. Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’ più eccelenti pittori, scultori ed architettori. Florence: Giunti, 1568.

Part 1: Historiography and Methods

Ingrid Rowland

Chapter 1 Raphael’s Bankers: Agostino Chigi, Bindo Altoviti, and Jakob Fugger Oddly enough, Raphael’s most illustrious portrait of a banker depicts not his great patron, Agostino Chigi of Siena (1466–1520), but rather Chigi’s young Florentine rival Bindo Altoviti (1491–1557), another Tuscan transplant to the papal courts of Julius II and Leo X. In fact, despite Chigi’s international reputation, only a single definite portrait survives from his lifetime: the obverse of a bronze medallion by an unknown artist (Figure 1.1) showing the bearded banker in profile, wearing a flat cap with ear flaps and a pleated, apparently fur-lined highcollared giornea (sleeveless overcoat).1

Figure 1.1: Unknown artist, Portrait Medal of Agostino Chigi, this version struck in lead, ca. 1510. Diameter: 73 mm. British Museum, Department of Coins and Medals, G3.IP.436. Photo: © ARCHIVIO GBB / Archivi Alinari.

A sixteenth-century drawing by Jacopo Salviati of Chigi’s mortuary chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, shows another portrait in bronze adorning the

1 Examples of the rare medallion exist in the British Museum and the Medaglieria Vaticana. See also G. F. Hill, A Corpus of Italian Medals of the Renaissance before Cellini (London: British Museum, 1930), 229–30, and Plate 141, figures 885, 886, 888. For the giornea, see Gabriella Aruch Scaravaglio, Enciclopedia Italianana, s.v. “giornea,” http://www.treccani.it/enciclope dia/giornea_%28Enciclopedia-Italiana%29/. Personal Note: My debt to Marcia Hall and her support is simply incalculable. The quality of her scholarship, her generosity, and her joy in life have been a lifelong inspiration, to me as to many others. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-002

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banker’s pyramidal tomb, but Gian Lorenzo Bernini replaced that image with his own marble version in the mid-seventeenth century.2 There are other possible – even probable – portraits: one of the bystanders in Lorenzetto’s bronze relief of Christ and the Samaritan Woman, now on the chapel’s high altar, also bears a strong resemblance to Chigi, with his aquiline profile and trimmed beard; in Raphael’s original design, this element decorated the oblong cenotaph at the base of Agostino’s pyramid, and within the conventions of sixteenth-century Italian religious art it would not be surprising to find the donor of a religious commission appearing as a witness to a holy encounter. Several of the images of Hercules and Jupiter from Chigi’s suburban palazzo, now the Villa Farnesina, might also represent the fiftyish master of the house, but none of these identifications has yet been bolstered by documentary evidence.3 Instead, without an image of Chigi as he really might have looked at the peak of his financial ascendancy, posterity must imagine him in the idealized vision portrayed on the walls of his own bedroom (by Giovanni Bazzi, “il Sodoma”): as a vibrant, youthful Alexander the Great (Figure 1.2), with a classic Grecian profile rather than Agostino’s prominent Tuscan beak.4 Raphael’s portrait of Bindo Altoviti (Figure 1.3), by contrast, was famous from the outset. Giorgio Vasari, in his Life of the artist, reports that it was “regarded as utterly marvelous” (tenuto stupendissimo) not least, surely, because the sitter himself was so supremely attractive.5 When Bindo sat for Raphael just after his wedding in 1511, the young banker was all of twenty, ten years younger than the renowned painter from whom, as we shall see, he may have commissioned as many as three works to celebrate his entrance as a full-fledged adult into the cutthroat world of papal finance. For a wealthy banker, Altoviti is dressed in this image with remarkable simplicity. No fur lines his indigo blue giornea, which slips back to reveal only the pleated ruffle that lines his white linen undershirt and his luminous skin (while also bringing out the limpid color of his eyes). His cap and jacket are a sober black, 2 The drawing, by Francesco Salviati, was linked to the Chigi Chapel by John Shearman, “The Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 24, no. 3 (1961): 132, and Plate 22, b. Originally, Chigi’s tomb occupied the pyramid on the opposite side of the chapel, now the monument to his younger brother Sigismondo. 3 These images include Hercules resting on his club in the frieze of the waiting room, Hercules slaying the Hydra in the Sala di Galatea, Jupiter in the Sala delle Prospettive, Jupiter in the Sala di Amore e Psiche, and the enigmatic figure visible in the mirror-polished shield of Minerva in the Sala delle Prospettive. 4 Ingrid D. Rowland, “Render unto Caesar the Things which are Caesar’s: Humanism and the Arts in the Patronage of Agostino Chigi,” Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1986): 691–92. 5 Vasari, Le Vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori (Florence: Giunta, 1568), vol. 3, 77.

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Figure 1.2: Giovanni Bazzi, “Il Sodoma,” Marriage of Alexander and Roxane, detail of Alexander. 1517. Wall fresco, Villa Farnesina, Rome. Susana Guzman/Alamy Stock Photo.

the recommended hue for merchants, though the painting does hint at large and elaborate sleeves. The prominent position of the gold ring on the young banker’s index finger provides one of the clues that this is a wedding portrait. With his azure eyes, his rosy complexion, his silky blonde hair, and his bee-stung lips, the bridegroom needs no further ornament than his youth. That youth, however, had been anything but carefree and innocent. His father, Antonio, head of the papal mint in Rome, had died in 1507, when Bindo, the sole legitimate son, was only sixteen.6 Seven years before reaching the official age of legal majority, therefore, Bindo Altoviti had already assumed responsibility for his family fortunes.7

6 Aldo Stella, “Altoviti, Bindo,” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 2 (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia italiana, 1960), http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/bindo-altoviti_(Dizionario-Biografico)/ (accessed December 13, 2018). 7 Melissa Meriam Bullard, “Mercatores Romanam Curiam Sequentes in the Early Sixteenth Century,” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance History 6 (1976): 51–71.

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Figure 1.3: Raphael, Portrait of Bindo Altoviti, ca. 1515. 59.7 × 43.8 cm. Oil on wooden panel. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1943.4.33. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

Art historians generally concur that the portrait’s design, with its striking pose, is certainly Raphael’s, though the actual work of painting may have been delegated, in whole or in part, to Gianfrancesco Penni or Giulio Romano.8 The deep shadows and oblique light source reflect the artist’s intense study of Leonardo, and in fact the conspicuously beautiful angel in both versions of Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks takes a spiraled pose similar to Altoviti’s.9

8 David Alan Brown dates the portrait to 1512 in “Raphael’s Portrait of Bindo Altoviti,” in Raphael, Cellini, and a Renaissance Banker: The Patronage of Bindo Altoviti, ed. by Alan Chong, Donatella Pegazzano, and Dimitrios Zikos (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2004), 97. The National Gallery of Art in Washington dates the painting to “ca. 1515” on its website: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.12131.html (accessed December 13, 2018). The painting is similar enough to the portrait of Tommaso Inghirami (in the Galleria Palatina in Florence), which is usually dated to 1510, that the dating to 1511 does not seem problematic. 9 Brown, “Raphael’s Portrait,” 99–105.

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Raphael would further develop the combination of stark background and dramatic shading in subsequent portraits, notably the double image of Andrea Navagero and Agostino Beazzano he painted for Pietro Bembo, and the late selfportrait with a friend (most recently identified as Giulio Romano) sometimes known, wrongly, as Raphael and his Fencing Master.10 These paintings, in turn, may have provided one of the chief inspirations for the distinctive chiaroscuro style that Caravaggio would develop once he settled in Rome.11 Raphael is also drawing from a contemporary fashion for painted images of young men in love, inspired by Petrarchan poetry, and by the works of Raphael’s Venetian friend, Pietro Bembo.12 Albrecht Dürer’s early self-portraits from the 1490s belong to a similar category, showing the artist as a pensive young man, emphasizing his flowing blonde hair and a shirt open to provide glimpses of bare flesh. Raphael had never seen these marvelous images himself, though he admired Dürer’s prints, and in 1515, the two artists exchanged drawings with one another.13 Bindo Altoviti always identified himself as a citizen of Florence, but he was born in Rome in 1491, to Antonio, a Florentine merchant romanam curiam sequens, “following the Roman Curia” (the phrase went back to the Middle Ages, when the Curia moved frequently, but in Bindo’s own lifetime, the Roman Curia would also move, bankers and all, to Bologna and Orvieto).14 His mother, Dianora Cybò, was a niece of the reigning pope, Innocent VIII. The Altoviti had been a prominent Florentine merchant family for centuries, their capital based on the proceeds from agriculture and the cloth trade.15 From the firm’s Roman office, Antonio Altoviti lent money, leased contracts from the papal state, and managed the papal mint.16 He was also closely allied with the Florentines who had driven out the Medici in 1494 and replaced their dynasty with a revived

10 Late Raphael, ed. by Tom Henry and Paul Ioannides (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2013). 11 Ingrid Rowland, “The Battle of Light with Darkness,” The New York Review of Books, May 12, 2005. 12 Brown, “Raphael’s Portrait,” 99–105; Pietro Bembo e l’invenzione del Rinascimento, ed. by Guido Beltramini, Davide Gasparotto, and Adolfo Tura (Venice: Marsilio, 2013), 127–57. 13 Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, catalogue entry for Portrait of Bindo Altoviti, in Raphael, Cellini, and a Renaissance Banker, 374–75. 14 Melissa Bullard, “Bindo Altoviti, Renaissance Banker and Papal Financier,” in Raphael, Cellini, and a Renaissance Banker, 21–58. 15 Bullard, “Bindo Altoviti,” 21–58. 16 Bullard, “Bindo Altoviti,” 21–24.

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republic – in which, however, the leading figure, Piero Soderini, was elected to an office more worthy of a lord: Gonfaloniere a vita (“Standard-bearer for life”).17 Bindo Altoviti’s betrothal in 1508 to eleven-year-old Fiammetta Soderini, Piero’s grandniece, confirmed his family’s eminent position in Florentine society.18 Given the youth of bride and groom, their marriage was postponed for three years, until 1511. Their household would be based in Florence, in the ancestral Altoviti buildings around Borgo Santi Apostoli, but Bindo, as a married man, also began extensive remodeling work on his palazzo in Rome. Commissioning his portrait from Raphael provided one more confirmation that he intended to enter upon the Roman banking community with a flourish. Two extraordinary figures dominated the world of Roman finance in 1511: Agostino Chigi of Siena and Jakob Fugger of Augsburg, amid a swarm of ambitious banking houses like the Sauli of Genoa, the Bartolini and Strozzi of Florence, and the Spannocchi of Siena. For all of these merchants “following the Roman Curia,” sponsoring works of art and architecture provided public confirmation of their success, and commissioning a Raphael Madonna furnished one of the ultimate proofs of taste and piety, in addition to enormous wealth. Chigi, from his base in Rome, began to order works from Raphael in 1510, as soon as the artist’s singular skill became evident from his frescoes in the papal apartments.19 With his boundless wealth and his adventurous taste, he would become Raphael’s most important patron outside the papacy.20 Bindo Altoviti’s portrait was also commissioned early in Raphael’s Roman career, yet another indication that the young banker was a man to watch. Jakob Fugger, who spent his youth in Venice, had come to Rome in the 1490s to evaluate the possibilities of investing in the Curia, but he ran his powerful firm from Augsburg, working through his local agents Johannes Zink and Engelhard Schauer (who assimilated to the point of adopting the Italian version of his name, Angelo Sauer).21 Eventually, however, as we shall see, the Fugger firm also decided to leave its mark on Rome by ordering its own Raphael altarpiece for Santa Maria dell’Anima, the church of the German community in Rome.

17 Donatella Pegazzano, “Life of Bindo Altoviti,” in Raphael, Cellini, and a Renaissance Banker, 5. 18 Pegazzano, “Life of Bindo Altoviti,” 5. 19 Matteo Procaccini, “Schede IX.28–IX.31,” in Raffaello 1520–1483, ed. by Marzia Faietti and Matteo Lanfranconi (Milan: Skira, 2020), 410–11, 420–21; Roberto Bartalini, Le occasioni del Sodoma: Dalla Milano di Leonardo alla Roma di Raffaello (Rome: Donzelli, 1996), 59. 20 Amélie Ferrigno, Raphaël et Agostino Chigi: Le Peintre et son Mecène (Rennes: Presses Universitaires Rennes, 2018). 21 Aloys Schulte, Die Fugger in Rom, 1495–1523 (Leipzig: Von Denker and Humblot, 1904), vol. 1, 9.

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The Medici may have been expelled from Florence in 1494 and the family bank dismantled in 1498, but Florentine bankers in Rome still depended on the Medici for support, for the family itself, with its many branches, had neither disappeared, nor lost its massive influence. In Rome, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, the son of Lorenzo il Magnifico, had risen to prominence under Pope Julius II for his abilities as a scholar and diplomat. Appointed cardinal at the age of 13 by a heavily pressured Pope Innocent VIII, he had grown up in Florence, but moved to Rome in 1500 and quickly drew notice for his interest in art, literature, and music, as well as his generosity with money. A Florentine curial banker, Leonardo di Zanobi Bartolini, managed the cardinal’s finances through contacts with, among many others, Agostino Chigi, the house of Fugger, and, among the rising new generation of bankers, Bindo Altoviti.22 The vacuum left by the closure of the Medici bank had left all three with new room to maneuver, and all three had made the most of their opportunity.23 For young Bindo and his even younger wife, 1511 was a challenging year to marry and begin to set up households in both Florence and Rome. The world of curial finance was notoriously unstable under any circumstances: Popes, normally elected as elderly men, reigned on average for a much shorter timespan than monarchs and warlords, and with each pope’s death the personnel of the curia changed significantly. Furthermore, the contracts and companies that governed early modern business, including the leases issued by the papal state, usually lasted for only three or four years.24 But life itself was short. In an era when most adults could expect to live to the age of 55 or so, even the most illustrious careers, like those of Chigi, Fugger, and Altoviti, blazed and faded in a brief span of time. Political instability added to the volatility of Roman finance in the first years of the sixteenth century. Ever since the French invasion of 1494, which had reached as far south as Naples, the Italian peninsula had been a constant theatre of war. In 1511, for example, Pope Julius began the year by leading a military campaign against Ferrara from his mobile court in Bologna, braving the snow in a white fur hat, and engaging in the international conflict known as the

22 Götz-Rüdiger Tewes shows that Bartolini maintained a “shadow bank” for the exiled Medici in Rome, Kampf um Florenz – Die Medici im Exil (1494–1512) (Cologne, Böhlau, 2011). See also Lucia Nuti, “Re–moulding the City: The Roman possessi in the first half of the Sixteenth Century,” in Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe: The Iconography of Power, ed. by J. R. Mulryne, Maria Ines Aliverti, and Anna Maria Testaverde (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2015), 129; Tobias Daniels, “Die Bücher des Humanisten Christophe de Longueil. Das Römische Inventar von 1519,” Humanistica Lovaniensia 67.1 (2018): 105–7. 23 Bullard, “Bindo Altoviti,” 21–53. 24 Felix Gilbert, The Pope, His Banker, and Venice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1980), 67.

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War of the League of Cambrai, which since 1509 had involved France, the Holy Roman Emperor, and Julius himself in a consolidated attack on the mainland holdings of the Venetian Republic.25 When Bindo Altoviti took up his responsibilities as head of his family bank and his newly formed household in 1511, both Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici and Agostino Chigi were abroad on diplomatic missions for Julius II, still deeply embroiled in the War of the League of Cambrai. (On the other hand, an Augustinian friar named Martin Luther came to Rome in the winter of 1510–1511 as the junior partner in a diplomatic mission from Wittenberg).26 As part of that continuing conflict, in September 1512 the cardinal accompanied a contingent of Spanish and papal troops to recapture Florence, toppling Piero Soderini’s government and installing Giuliano de’ Medici, the cardinal’s elder brother, as lord of the city.27 If that were not enough for a young curial banker, the greatest upset of all occurred a few months later: Julius himself died on February 1, 1513. On March 9, the College of Cardinals elected Giovanni de’ Medici as Pope Leo X.28 Despite his intimate connection with the Soderini faction, Bindo Altoviti weathered the swift series of transitions in Florence and Rome that brought the Medici back into power.29 He had worked cordially with Giovanni de’ Medici for years, and especially with the new pope’s agent, Leonardo di Zanobi Bartolini. Decades later, with a different pope and a different set of Medici rulers, he would plot against the Medici regime and send his son off to do battle against them, but Leo lavished favors on the Florentine bankers who followed the Roman Curia, and Bindo profited handsomely from cooperating with the Pope. Around 1514, he invested his profits in a commission to Raphael for a Madonna, now known as the “Madonna dell’Impannata” (the “Madonna of the Window Frame,” Figure 1.4). Giorgio Vasari, who would later work for Altoviti himself, described that painting in glowing terms in his Life of Raphael: Vasari writes, “It depicts an elderly seated St. Anne, who hands Our Lady her Son, so beautiful in his nude body and the features of his face that he brings cheer to anyone who looks at him; not to mention that Raphael, in painting Our Lady, has shown everything beautiful that could possibly contribute to the air of a Virgin with modesty in her eyes, honor on her forehead, grace in her nose and virtue in her mouth, as well as her dress, which shows an infinite simplicity

25 26 27 28 29

This is the main subject of Gilbert, The Pope, His Banker, and Venice. Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther, Renegade and Prophet (New York: Random House, 2016). Bullard, “Bindo Altoviti,” 25–26. Bullard, “Bindo Altoviti,” 26–28. Bullard, “Bindo Altoviti,” 26–35.

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Figure 1.4: Raphael, Madonna dell’Impannata, 1514. 158 × 125 cm. Oil on wooden panel. Florence, Galleria Palatina, Inv. 1912 no. 94. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

and nobility. And really, I can’t think that you will ever see anything better than this.”30 Agostino Chigi, who had owed his initial rise to the Medici bank, also enjoyed privileged status under Leo X. The Pope was a guest on several occasions at his riverside villa, where Leo would eventually preside over Chigi’s second wedding in 1519.31 Despite the inveterate rivalry between Siena and Florence, Tuscan bankers who followed the Roman Curia needed to collaborate with each other, and Chigi worked with a number of Florentine colleagues. By the time of Leo’s election, he had established a uniquely influential place within the Roman

30 Vasari, Le Vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori, 77–78. 31 Ingrid Rowland, ed., The Correspondence of Agostino Chigi (1466–1520) in Cod. Chigi R.V.c (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2001), 76, 82; Gilbert, The Pope, His Banker, and Venice, 71.

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Curial apparatus.32 Chigi must have understood, however, that his mercantile career had reached its peak with the previous pope. Julius had taken an active part in managing papal finances, freely using his powers of excommunication and interdict to balance his own budget, and to support the daring investments of merchants, Chigi especially, who took high risks to pursue high profits.33 Leo had been an effective diplomat for Julius (in part because of his skill at double-dealing), but he lacked that pope’s forceful political vision. As a result, he was ill-prepared to deal with the emerging challenge of Martin Luther, who, unfortunately for the Medici pope, posted his 95 theses on October 31, 1517, when the papal treasury, so carefully amassed by Julius, had already run out.34 Under Leo, Agostino Chigi moved quickly to remove himself as much as possible from direct participation in the alum industry he had dominated.35 Instead, he followed the pope’s own predilections and shifted his interests to culture: art, architecture, music, poetry, and natural philosophy, fortified by capital, that, unlike Leo’s, ran no risk of dwindling.36 He was 46 when the new pope was elected at the precociously young age of 37. There was no guarantee that Chigi would ever live to see another pope, let alone one like Julius, or to chart some other meteoric path to greater wealth than the huge amount he had already gathered. He adjusted his life accordingly, still a titanic presence in Rome, but a man acutely aware of his own limits – except for the limitless prospects of what he could draw, as a patron, from a creative spirit like Raphael. Chigi’s patronage of Raphael during the reign of Leo X set a standard that is still legendary. The great banker did not entirely withdraw from political involvement – together with the pope, he helped sponsor the 1516 coup that toppled the lord of Siena, Borghese Petrucci, and replaced him with his cousin Raffaele – but Chigi’s economic ventures no longer had the backing of an entire state apparatus and a sympathetic pope. For all his learning, Leo was not a particularly imaginative man, except in devising slightly sadistic practical jokes.37

32 Chigi also helped to provide the bribes for Leo’s election; Gilbert, The Pope, His Banker, and Venice, 146 n. 10. 33 Gilbert, The Pope, His Banker, and Venice; Rowland, The Correspondence of Agostino Chigi. 34 In May of 1517, Leo took violent action against an alleged assassination plot, confiscating property and income from several cardinals; see Alessandro Ferrajoli, La congiura dei cardinali contro Leone X illustrate (Miscellanea della R. Società Romana di Storia Patria) (Rome: R. Società Romana di Storia Patria, 1919). 35 Rowland, The Correspondence of Agostino Chigi, 165–67. 36 Ferrigno, Raphaël et Agostino Chigi. 37 See, for example, William Roscoe, The Life and Pontificate of Leo X (Liverpool, J. McCreery, 1805), vol. 3, 330–36.

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Leo X and his lack of fiscal responsibility may have slowed Agostino Chigi’s financial career, but a precarious situation in Rome was manna from Heaven for Jakob Fugger in Augsburg. Initially, in the late Middle Ages, the Fugger bank had made its money in textiles, but by the end of the fifteenth century Jakob Fugger had invested massively in silver and copper, managing mines in Bohemia, Hungary, and Tyrol.38 He had spent his youth in Venice, learning the intricacies of Italian financial practice, the most sophisticated of his era, and began to work closely with the papacy under Julius II, with the help of his agents Zink and Schauer.39 It was Fugger who first financed the pontiff’s corps of Swiss Guards, founded in 1505.40 In 1508, Jakob Fugger took over the lease of the papal mint from the late Antonio Altoviti, Bindo’s father, and held it intermittently until 1524. In 1517, already familiar with the Roman marketplace, Jakob Fugger struck a new deal with cash-strapped Leo X to sell indulgences in German lands and devolve the proceeds to the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. A paper certificate officially confirmed that, in exchange for hard currency (put down the slot in the top of specially designed wooden coffers), the buyer of an indulgence would be spared a certain number of years in Purgatory before becoming pure enough to enter the Earthly Paradise. Coffer loads of metal coins made their way to Rome, leaving their paper trail behind, all the while Jakob Fugger collected his own massive cut of the total revenue.41 When Pope Julius laid the cornerstone for the enormous St. Peter’s project in 1506, he did so in full confidence that he and his successors would be able to pay for it – already assuming that much of the income would be in German metal. Not surprisingly, Jakob Fugger gained the nickname der Reiche – “the Rich” to Agostino Chigi’s “Il Magnifico.” And not surprisingly, Martin Luther, the son of a copper smelter, noticed something odd about exchanging so much good German metal for paper promises from Rome.42 To judge from his own career, Bindo Altoviti must have paid careful attention to the way in which these two titans of international banking, Agostino Chigi of Siena and Jakob Fugger of Augsburg, maneuvered their way around both Rome and the continent. They did it in large measure by staying out of

38 For everything Fugger, see the Fugger website: https://www.fugger.de/home.html (accessed December 13, 2018). 39 Schulte, Die Fugger in Rom. 40 Schulte, Die Fugger in Rom, vol. 1, 49. 41 Reinhold Kiermayer, “How Much Money was actually in the Indulgence Chest?,” Sixteenth Century Journal 17:3 (1986): 303–18. 42 Ingrid Rowland, “Martin Luther’s Burning Questions,” The New York Review of Books, June 8, 2017; Martin Luther and the Reformation, 2 vols. (Dresden: Sandstein, 2016).

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each other’s way, complementing each other rather than competing, and both owed the exponential rise in their fortunes to Pope Julius II and his careful eye for finance. They also invested in people, spotting talented employees, while their ability to tender massive loans meant that they underwrote many of the bribes that proved indispensable for obtaining high office in church and state. Chigi owed his wealth to the beginnings of a monopoly on alum, a scarce mineral indispensable to the cloth trade over which he acquired significant control between 1501 and 1503.43 Alum money gave him the means to supply Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere with the money to buy his election as Julius II in the conclave of 1503. Fugger, on the other hand, concentrated on metal and indulgences. His money financed two Holy Roman Emperors, Maximilian I and Charles V, a cardinal, Albert of Brandenburg, and a flock of lesser princes and churchmen.44 Both bankers saw no conflict between spiritual and financial goals. Thanks to Julius II, Chigi used excommunication and interdict as a weapon against debtors and creditors alike.45 When Martin Luther finally met with a papal representative (who was armed with a warrant to arrest him), the encounter took place in Fugger’s Augsburg mansion.46 Chigi sent his talented employee, the Sienese metallurgist Vannoccio Biringucci, to study the workings of the Fugger mines.47 The two magnates almost certainly colluded on shaping the course of the international conflict known as the War of the League of Cambrai, which stretched from 1509 to 1516. If they ever met in person, it would have been in Rome in the 1490s or in Venice between 1511 and 1512, at the German bank known as the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. Agostino Chigi certainly admired the frescoes of Titian, Giorgione, and Sebastiano del Piombo on the outside of the Fondaco, and brought Sebastiano to Rome with him in August 1511 as one of the souvenirs of his Venetian trip (the others were his mistress, a Greek printer, and 30,000 ducats from the treasury

43 Didier Boisseuil, “Production d’alun et monopole Romain en Toscane méridionale (fin XVe–début XVIe siècle),” Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome 126, no. 1 (2014): 231–44; Jean Delumeau, L’alun de Rome, XVe–XIXe siècle (Paris: SEVPEN, 1962); Gilbert, The Pope, His Banker, and Venice; Rowland, The Correspondence of Agostino Chigi. 44 Greg Steinmetz, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: The Life and Times of Jakob Fugger (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015). 45 Rowland, The Correspondence of Agostino Chigi, XIX, 47, 57, 111, 129, 132, 133, 152, 156, 174, 208, 241, 276. 46 Roper, Martin Luther. 47 Vannoccio Biringucci, De La Pirotechnia Libri X (Venice: Curtio Navo, 1540), 10v mentions the Fugger mine at Bleiberg as “Plaiper;” see also Ingrid D. Rowland, “Abacus and Humanism,” Renaissance Quarterly 48:4 (Winter, 1995): 722.

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of San Marco). He had hoped to attract Titian, but Titian was not about to move into direct competition with Raphael and Michelangelo.48 In 1517, an aging, childless Jakob Fugger turned responsibility for his Roman operation over to his nephew Anton, who promptly ordered an altarpiece from Raphael. Thanks to the research of Stefania Pasti, we now know that the “Pala Fugger,” was commissioned by the younger Fugger, and completed after Raphael’s death by Giulio Romano and Gian Francesco Penni.49 It hangs today in the apse of Rome’s German church, Santa Maria dell’Anima, a few yards away from the chapel in the Augustinian church of Santa Maria della Pace, where Raphael painted a fresco of Sibyls and prophets in 1514 for Agostino Chigi.50 Raphael’s death of a brief, virulent fever in April of 1520 shocked Rome. Agostino Chigi’s death four days later was less of a surprise, as he had been extremely sick for several weeks. Jakob Fugger died in 1525. Bindo Altoviti went on to an illustrious career under Pope Paul III, culminating in his service as depositario generale, chief treasurer to the papacy, but he carefully kept the range of his investments within Tuscany and the papal states and left the international networks to Anton Fugger.51 Neither, however, did Bindo Altoviti play it safe, especially in politics. Under the protection of Roman-born Paul III, he conspired openly to depose the young Duke Cosimo de’ Medici in Florence and restore the republic. Girolamo da Carpi painted him in this period – in oil, on gleaming Carrara marble! – as an older, careworn figure, swathed in fur, brocade, and satin, the thinning of his golden locks compensated by a luxuriant beard (Figure 1.5).52 Bindo is still a handsome man, but the striking blue eyes no longer gaze outward; they look off to the side, narrowed and alert. There is no avoiding the force of his intelligence in this portrait, nor his wealth. He shows the strain of his rivalry with another precocious young man endowed with a head for business, an eye for art, and a gift for politics: Cosimo de’ Medici, Duke of Tuscany,

48 Matthias Wivel, ed., Michelangelo and Sebastiano (London: National Gallery of Art, 2017). 49 Stefania Pasti, “The Commission and Iconography in Pala Fugger by Giulio Romano,” Artibus et Historiae 38, no. 76 (2017): 231–57. 50 Michael Hirst, “The Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria della Pace,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 24, no. 3/4 (1961): 161–85; Cecil Clough, “Raphael at Santa Maria della Pace: Chronology of the Frescoes,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 120 (1992): 78–88. 51 Bullard, “Bindo Altoviti,” 30–51; Mark Häberlein, The Fuggers of Augsburg: Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 68. 52 Philippe Costamagna, catalogue entry in Raphael, Cellini, and a Renaissance Banker, 398–99.

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Figure 1.5: Girolamo da Carpi, Portrait of Bindo Altoviti, ca. 1544. 88 × 73 cm. Oil on marble. New York, Private Collection. Photo: The Picture Collection/Alamy Stock Photo.

who had come to power as an improbable eighteen-year-old but quickly adapted to his position. For years, the young duke and the aging banker played along with one another, but finally, after enduring years of Altoviti subversion, Cosimo had had enough. In 1554, he banished Bindo to Rome and confiscated the Altoviti properties in Florence and the rest of Tuscany. As a crowning blow, he transferred Raphael’s Madonna dell’Impannata from the family’s private chapel to his own chapel in the Pitti palace.53 But he let his adversary take Raphael’s beautiful portrait to Rome.54 The Duke of Tuscany was happy to live without that particular blonde Adonis on his wall, however exquisite the painting’s workmanship.

53 Brown, “Raphael’s Portrait of Bindo Altoviti,” 96. 54 Brown, “Raphael’s Portrait of Bindo Altoviti.”

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Works Cited Bartalini, Roberto. Le occasioni del Sodoma: dalla Milano di Leonardo alla Roma di Raffaello. Rome: Donzelli, 1996. Beltramini, Guido, Davide Gasparotto, and Adolfo Tura, eds. Pietro Bembo e l’invenzione del Rinascimento. Venice: Marsilio, 2013. Biringucci, Vannoccio. De La Pirotechnia Libri X. Venice: Curtio Navo, 1540. Boisseuil, Didier. “Production d’alun et monopole Romain en Toscane méridionale (fin XVedébut XVIe siècle).” Mélanges de l’Ècole Francais de Rome 126, no. 1 (2014): 231–44. Bullard, Melissa Meriam. “Mercatores Romanam Curiam Sequentes in the Early Sixteenth Century.” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance History 6 (1976): 51–71. Chong, Alan, Donatella Pegazzano, and Dimitrios Zikos, eds. Raphael, Cellini, and a Renaissance Banker: The Patronage of Bindo Altoviti. Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2004. Clough, Cecil. “Raphael at Santa Maria della Pace: Chronology of the Frescoes.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 120 (1992): 78–88. Daniels, Tobias. “Die Bücher des Humanisten Christophe de Longueil. Das Römische Inventar von 1519.” Humanistica Lovaniensia 67, no. 1 (2018): 105–7. Delumeau, Jean. L’alun de Rome, XVe–XIXe siècle. Paris: SEVPEN, 1962. Faietti, Marzia and Matteo Lanfranconi, eds. Raffaello 1520–1483. New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2020. Exhibition catalog. Ferrajoli, Alessandro. La congiura dei cardinali contro Leone X illustrate (Miscellanea della R. Società Romana di Storia Patria). Rome: R. Società Romana di Storia Patria, 1919. Ferrigno, Amélie. Raphaël et Agostino Chigi: Le Peintre et son Mecène. Rennes: Presses Universitaires Rennes, 2018. Gilbert, Felix. The Pope, His Banker, and Venice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1980. Häberlein, Mark. The Fuggers of Augsburg: Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Henry, Tom, and Paul Ioannides, eds. Late Raphael. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2013. Hill, G. F. A Corpus of Italian Medals of the Renaissance before Cellini. London: British Museum, 1930. Hirst, Michael. “The Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria della Pace.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 24, no. 3/4 (1961): 161–85. Kiermayer, Reinhold. “How Much Money was Actually in the Indulgence Chest?” Sixteenth Century Journal 17, no. 3 (1986): 303–18. Martin Luther and the Reformation, 2 vols. Dresden: Sandstein, 2016. Nuti, Lucia. “Re-moulding the City: The Roman possessi in the First Half of the Sixteenth Century.” In Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe: The Iconography of Power, edited by J. R. Mulryne, Maria Ines Aliverti, and Anna Maria Testaverde. Abingdon: Ashgate, 2015. Pasti, Stefania. “The Commission and Iconography in Pala Fugger by Giulio Romano.” Artibus et Historiae 38, no. 76 (2017): 231–57. Roper, Lyndal. Martin Luther, Renegade and Prophet. New York: Random House, 2016. Roscoe, William. The Life and Pontificate of Leo X. Liverpool: J. McCreery, 1805. Rowland, Ingrid D. “Render unto Caesar the Things which are Caesar’s: Humanism and the Arts in the Patronage of Agostino Chigi.” Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1986): 691–92.

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Rowland, Ingrid. The Correspondence of Agostino Chigi (1466–1520) in Cod. Chigi R.V.c. (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2001. Rowland, Ingrid. “The Battle of Light with Darkness.” The New York Review of Books, May 12, 2005. Rowland, Ingrid. “Martin Luther’s Burning Questions.” The New York Review of Books, June 8, 2017. Scaravaglio, Gabriella Aruch. Enciclopedia Italia, s.v. “giornea,” http://www.treccani.it/enci clopedia/giornea_%28Enciclopedia-Italiana%29/. Schulte, Aloys. Die Fugger in Rom, 1495–1523. Leipzig: Von Denker and Humblot, 1904. Shearman, John. “The Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 24, no. 3 (1961): 129–60. Steinmetz, Greg. The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: the Life and Times of Jakob Fugger. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015. Stella, Aldo. “Altoviti, Bindo.” Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani 2. Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia italiana, 1960, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/bindo-altoviti_ (Dizionario-Biografico) / (accessed December 13, 2018). Tewes, Götz-Rüdiger. Kampf um Florenz – Die Medici im Exil (1494–1512). Cologne, Böhlau, 2011. Vasari, Giorgio. Le Vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori. Florence: Giunta, 1568. Wivel, Matthias, ed. Michelangelo and Sebastiano. London: National Gallery of Art, 2017.

Tamara Smithers

Chapter 2 Surpassing Nature: Raphael’s Artistic Apotheosis Raphael is the rare painter who was never out of fashion

Marcia B. Hall’s opening statement in the introduction of her edited volume The Cambridge Companion to Raphael from 2005, above, reminds us that interest in the artist has never ceased.1 Numerous conferences and exhibitions about Raphael’s work – including Hall’s brainchild “The Princeton Raphael Symposium” – were held in celebration of the Raphael Year of 1983, which commemorated the five

1 Marcia B. Hall, “Introduction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, edited by Marcia B. Hall (New York: Cambridge University Press: 2005), 1. Personal Note: The topic of the cult of Raphael (and the cult of Michelangelo) were not ones I considered pursuing at any great length until Dr. Hall, as I called her at the time, posed two questions on the “Cult of the Artist” as part of my doctoral written exams at Temple University in 2009. These questions began my fascination with how the elevation of the status of artists, especially that of Raphael and Michelangelo, manifested in visual form. My gratitude goes to Marcia for pointing me in this direction, for allowing me to explore the topic on my own terms, and for teaching me through example to satiate my intellectual curiosity. I also thank her for posing those two questions that simultaneously fueled my long-time passion for the art, life, and myth of Michelangelo and sparked a new interest in the art and legend of Raphael. Some aspects on the cult of Raphael presented in this essay were first touched upon in my 2012 dissertation “Memorializing the Masters: Renaissance Tombs for Artists, and the Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo” and are more fully considered in my book The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo: Artistic Sainthood and Memorials as a Second Life, forthcoming with Routledge Publishing. I have received support for various aspects of the present study from the National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Seminar at the American Academy in Rome stipend (2011), Temple University (2012), Austin Peay State University (2013, 2014), a Lindsay Young Visiting Faculty Fellowship through the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee (2016), and a Friends of Princeton University Library Research Grant (2015–2016). Special thanks also to Vernon Hyde Minor, Heather Graham, Sheryl E. Reiss, and Phillip Brown for conversation and support along the (long) way of this topic’s development. My appreciation goes to my past student workers Allison McCann, Katherine Tolleson, and Madeline Eron, as well. I would lastly like to thank the editors of this volume Ian Verstegen and Arthur DiFuria, who are also former students of Marcia Hall, for their valuable feedback during the writing process. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-003

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hundredth anniversary of his birth.2 Hall’s foundational work, in collaboration with John Shearman, importantly commenced conversations about art historical scientific analysis. Festivities planned for the fifth centenary of Raphael’s death in 2020 proved equally plentiful, whereby Hall’s scholarship plays an integral role. Her study entitled “Raphael’s Late Style and his Use of Imprimatura” was presented in the session “Since the Princeton Raphael Symposium of 1983: Quo vadis?” at the on-line conference Reconsidering Raphael to be held April 9–10, 2021.3 Additionally, Hall’s impact, regarding her own interest in and enthusiasm for Raphael’s art, on those who have had the privilege of studying under her, the present author included, is substantial.4 During his lifetime, Raphael was praised for “ingenii divina tui vis,” the god-like power of his intellect.5 Upon his death in 1520, the letterati celebrated his ability to

2 John Shearman, and Marcia B. Hall, “Introduction,” in The Princeton Raphael Symposium: Science in the Service of Art History, edited by John Shearman and Marcia B. Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), xiii. See also Sylvia Ferrino-Pagden, “Post Festum: Die Raffael Forshung seit 1983,” Kunstchronik, no. 41 (1988): 194–217. 3 Five Raphael sessions were originally scheduled to be presented at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting on April 2–4, 2020, in Philadelphia, PA, which was cancelled due to world-wide COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. The sessions were re-envisioned into the twoday virtual event Reconsidering Raphael hosted by Vassar College and sponsored by the Renaissance Conference of Southern California (Co-organizers of sessions I, II, III, V: Yvonne Elet, Sheryl E. Reiss, Linda Wolk-Simon; Co-organizers of session IV: Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper). Many other events and exhibitions were planned for 2020, including the anticipated exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome, March 5 through June 2, 2020, titled “Raffaello 1520–1483.” Soon after opening, the exhibition was closed due to Italy’s nationwide COVID lockdown, reopening June 2 with the intention to extend through August 30, 2020. 4 Hall’s former advisee Tiffany Lynn Hunt (Ph.D. Temple University, 2020) presented a paper in the “Since the Princeton Raphael Symposium” session at Reconsidering Raphael entitled “Raphael and the Material Turn: The Role of Technical Analysis since 1983.” Hall has advised several students who completed dissertation scholarship in Raphael studies. On this, see Kline “Classical Theologians in Raphael’s Frescos of the Stanza della Segnatura,” in “Christian Mysteries in the Italian Renaissance,” 197–282; Smithers, “Memorializing the Masters”; Willever, “Raphael’s Galatea and the Villa Farnesina: Going Viral in Text, Paint, and Print in the Sixteenth Century”; and Wallace, “Chapter 2: Space and Memory in Cinquecento Rome” and “Chapter 3: Simulation of Space: Egyptian all’Antica Imagery in Cinquecento Reconstructions of Rome,” in “Cultivating Egyptian all’Antica Imagery as Emblems of Rome in the Sixteenth Century,” 63–11, 112–69. Kline’s essay in the present volume is entitled “Order and the Anagogic Approach of the Mind to God: On the Philosophers in Raphael’s Disputa.” 5 John Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources (1483–1602) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), vol. 1, 257–58, document 1516/18, dated after June 1516 and likely before Raphael’s death in April 1520 cited from Girolamo Leandro’s Carmen on Raphael and the Reconstruction of Ancient Rome.

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surpass nature and to “bring the dead back to life.”6 And so began his artistic apotheosis. Raphael’s epithet as “God of Art” remained a part of his legacy through time, his late seventeenth-century biographer Giovanni Pietro Bellori denoting him similarly as “Il Divino Rafaelle,” for example.7 The lamentation of Raphael was the lengthiest ever witnessed for an artist. Mourning Raphael and commemorating him for years to come provided a focal point for his devotees, resulting in the formation of a new kind of artistic camaraderie centered on “artistic sainthood.”8 A desire for followers to connect to the esteemed founder of Roman painting ensued in the wake of his death. Cleverly, Raphael had already established his creative heirs before he died, thus creating a long lineage of which many desired to belong.9 Raphael unsurprisingly became a quasi-divine figurehead for Roman art corporations, the Compagnia dei Virtuosi al Pantheon and the Accademia di San Luca. His work and legend beguiled artists such as Taddeo Zuccaro, Federico Zuccaro, Annibale Carracci, Peter Paul Rubens, Carlo Maratti, Nicholas Poussin, Claude

6 For the epigram written by Baldassare Castiglione, see Tilmann Buddensieg, “Raphael’s Tomb,” in Sixteenth-Century Italian Art, edited by Michael Cole (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), 19: “Te dudum extinctis reddere posse animam.” The full Castiglione epigram is provided in Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, translated by Gaston Du. C. de Vere (London: Philip Lee Warner Publisher, 1912–14), vol. 2, 915, and Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, edited by Paola Barocchi and Rosanna Bettarini (Florence: Sansoni, 1966), vol. 4, 213. For further discussion on Raphael as medicus and the Raphael compared to Christ, see especially Roberto Fedi, “In Obitu Raphaelis,” in Studi di filologia e critica offerti dagli allievi a Lanfranco Caretti (Roma: Salerno éditrice, 1985), 195–201. Kathleen Weil-Garris, “La Morte di Raffaello e la Transfiguration,” in Raffaello e I’Europa, edited by Maria Luisa Madonna and Marcello Fagiolo (Rome: Istituto poligrafico e zecca dello stato, 1990), 185–86; Piers D. G. Britton, “Raphael and the Bad Humours of Painters in Vasari’s ‘Lives of the Artists’,” Renaissance Studies 22, no. 2 (April 2008): 192–96; David Rijser, Raphael’s Poetics: Art and Poetry in High Renaissance Rome (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 39–44; and Maria Loh, Still Lives: Death, Desire, and the Portrait of the Older Master (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 196–97. See also Smithers, “Memorializing the Masters,” 176–78, and The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). 7 Another epigraph written by Antonio Tebaldeo reads in part “tu deau artis eras” as translated and cited in Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, vol. 1, 661, document 1520/85, composed ca. 1520, which may have been intended to be placed on the tomb but was displaced by Bembo’s lines. For Bellori, see Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni, edited by Evelina Borea (Turin: Eibaudi, 1976), 31. 8 This is a term coined by the author to refer to the artist’s afterlife (fame and divinization after death). The phenomenon is explored in Smithers, The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). 9 Nicholas Penny, “Raphael in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 132, no. 5336 (July 1984): 486. Penny recently discussed a similar topic: see Nicholas Penny, “Canonization and it’s Consequences,” keynote speech presented at “Reconsidering Raphael,” on-line conference April 10, 2021.

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Lorraine, Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin West, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, just to name a few. Raphael’s popularity amongst his followers stemmed from the emulation of the visual qualities of his artwork, an occurrence now known as “Raphaelism,” where artists sought to carry on the stylistic tradition he established.10 Collectors also highly desired his work. One in particular enshrined a painting by his hand not because it was a religious icon, but simply because it was a “Raphael.”11 Of course, not everyone liked his art. In fact, some did not “like him at all.”12 Withstanding schools of criticism through the ages – from late-Renaissance Venetian art writers and painters to the Bamboccianti to late Baroque Rubénistes to the Victorian Pre-Raphaelites, for example – as a whole, Raphael’s general popularity, especially in Rome, never waned from his own time through the nineteenth century.13 Four centuries after he died, he continued to be referred to as a “god of painting.”14 The denotation of “RAPHAEL SANCTIVS URBINAS” – a play on his

10 See John Pope-Hennessy, Raphael (London: Phaidon, 1970), 223–55, who calls it “postRaphaelitism.” 11 Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, “From Cult Images to Cult of Images: The Case of Raphael’s Altarpieces,” in The Altarpiece in the Renaissance, edited by Peter Humfrey and Martin Kemp (New York: University Press, 1990), 165–189. For more on the power of the artist’s hand and di sua mano, see Smithers, The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). 12 Sylvia Ferino-Pagden,“Problems of Method and Perspectives in the Studies of Raphael,” in Raphael in Rome, edited by Antonio Paolucci, Barbara Agosti, Silvia Ginzburg (Vatican City: Edizioni Musei Vaticani, 2017), 19, cited from Marco Boschino, La Carta del Navegar Pittoresco. (Venice: li Baba, 1660): “Stago per dir che nol me piase niente.” While nonetheless praising his work, Bellori found issue with Raphael’s painting for being “too studied.” From Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Descrizione delle immagini dipinte da Raffaelle d’Urbino (Rome: Appresso gli Eredi del q. Gio Lorenzo Barbiellini, 1695), VII, cited in Michela Di Macco, “Moments of Dialogue between Art History and Restoration in the Conservational Events of Some of Raphael’s works,” in Raphael in Rome, edited by Antonio Paolucci, Barbara Agosti, and Silvia Ginzburg (Vatican City: Edizioni Musei Vaticani, 2017), 99. For more criticism of Raphael’s style, see Philip Sohm, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (New York: University Press, 2001), 27–42. It is not possible to fully treat the topic in this essay. 13 For a discussion of a decline in international artistic interest in Raphael at the end of the nineteenth century until revived interest from artists such as Pablo Picasso and David Hockney, see Patricia A. Emison, The Italian Renaissance and Cultural Memory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 126–29. Salvador Dalí is also known for drawing inspiration from Raphael’s work. 14 Antonio Muñoz, La tomba di Raffaello nel Pantheon (Roma: Palombi, 1920), 75 n. 167. The author cites Jacques Marquet De Norvins, Charles Nodier and Alexandre Dumas, Italie pittoresque (Paris: Abel Ledoux, 1845), vol. 2, 93, who calls Raphael a “dio di pittura.” On Raphael as a god of art, see Fedi, “In obitu Raphaelis,” 195–201. Vasari wrote about Raphael’s artistic divinity at length. By speaking of Raphael as a gift sent from God and by playing on the artist’s surname “Santi,” Vasari elevated Raphael to saintly standing in the first widely read biography of the artist. On this topic, see Paul Barolsky, Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 38–39. For more discussion and bibliography on the

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surname Sanzio – continued his legend as an “artistic saint” well into the twentieth century (Figure 2.1 recto).15

Figure 2.1: Pietro Giampaoli, Medaglia per il centenario del ritrovamento delle ossa di Raffaello. Sanzio, issued by the Pontifica Insigne Accademia dei Virutosi al Pantheon, 1936, 6.35 cm. Private collection. Photo: Author.

This essay focuses on a particular aspect of Raphael’s cult-like memorialization and commemoration: the trope of the artist’s divine-like power to surpass Nature, which took the form of popular iconography praising Raphael through the centuries after his death. The notion stems from the famous lines placed on Raphael’s grave: Here lies that Raphael, by whom Mother Nature herself feared To be outdone while he lived, and when he died, feared that she herself would die.16

Throughout the early modern period, as the distich-turned-axiom became solidly attached to Raphael’s posthumous persona, images of Diana, the Goddess

“divine” artist in the context of the status of the Renaissance artist, see Smithers, “Memorializing the Masters,” 13–46, and The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). 15 See below for discussion of this medallion. On the Vatican stamp (figure 2.2), Raphael’s surname is noted as his birthname “Sanzio,” avoiding denotation of “saintly.” 16 The epitaph reads: D.O.M. / RAPHAELLI. SANCTIO. IOANN. F. VRBINATI. / PICTORI. EMINENTISS. VETERVMQ. AEMVLO / CVIVS. SPRIRANTEIS PROPE. IMAGINIS. SI. / CONTEMPLERE. NATVRAE. ATQVE. ARTIS. FOEDVS / FACILE. INSPEXERIS / IVLII II. ET. LEONIS. X. PONTT. MAXX. PICTVRAE / ET. ARCHITECT. OPERIBVS. GLORIAM AVXIT. / VA. XXXVII INTEGER. INTEGROS / QVO. DIE. NATVS EST. EO ESSE DE SIIT / VIII. ID APRIL. MDXX. / ILLE. HIC. EST. RAPHAEL. TIMVIT. QVO SOSPITE. VINCI / RERVM MAGNA PARENS ET MORIENTE MORI. See also Vasari, Lives, vol. 4, 249–50 and Vite, IV, 213. I would like to thank Sheryl E. Reiss for the translation from the Latin. See also Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, vol. 1, 660, document 1520/84.

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of Nature, were employed to express this notion as an emblem of sorts. The use of the verse, the image, or both combined celebrated Raphael’s artistic legacy as artifex creator. Raphael, like many other artists thriving during the early Cinquecento, must have considered his own contributions to his rise to fame. He resourcefully generated a desired style that could and would be emulated, thus, providing himself the best possible chance to achieve enduring renown.17 His high prices further comment upon his status and demand.18 As Robert Williams observes, Raphael sought to be the best universal painter (ottimo universale), fashioning his artistic identity in a decidedly deliberate way where he was his own “artful construct.”19 Raphael’s art exhibited the right combination of the assimilation of classical elements and the perfection of nature so that he became the “embodiment of timeless perfection” for academic artists, many cited above.20 And as Hall succinctly puts it: Raphael’s paintings were “the model to be copied.”21 Hall’s scholarship on the artwork and artistic influence of Raphael has greatly contributed to new understandings of his technique and style as well as the influence of his style on subsequent artists. In a singular summarizing sentence describing Raphael’s Disputa, Hall eloquently and concisely explains why his style elicited long-lasting praise: “The tools at command of the artist – the composition, color, light, figure type, pose, gesture – have been put in the service of conveying a higher and more harmonious reality.”22 This fresco epitomized the “Raphaelesque,” as first described by Giorgio Vasari, exhibiting the utmost beauty, grace, and sweetness.23 Raphael’s

17 David Ekserdjian, “Establishing a Norm for the High Renaissance: Raphael and the Dissemination of a Style,” in Modello, regola, ordine, edited by Hélène Miesse and Gianluca Valenti (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2018), 217–35. For further discussion on the topic, see also David Young Kim, The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance: Geography, Mobility, and Style (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 126–30. 18 Jonathan K. Nelson and Richard J. Zeckhauser, “Raphael, Superstar, and his Extraordinary Prices,” Source: Notes in Art History 38, no. 1 (Fall 2018): 15–23. 19 Robert Williams, Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne (New York: Cambridge University, 1997), 83. 20 Robert Williams, Raphael and the Redefinition of Art in Renaissance Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 74. See also David Allen Brown, Raphael in America (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1983), 16–17. 21 Hall, “Introduction,” 11, my italics. 22 Marcia B. Hall, “Classicism, Mannerism, and the Relieflike Style,” in The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, edited by Marcia B. Hall (New York: Cambridge University Press: 2005), 223–27. 23 In his discussion of this artwork, Vasari describes various aspects as “bellisime,” “dolcissime,” and “graziosissime.” See Vasari, Lives, vol. 4, 220–21 and Vite, IV, 172. According to the Oxford Living Dictionary, the term “Raphaelesque” was first employed in the eighteenth century.

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work, in general, displayed the right combination of variety and difficulty; difficulty that he overcame with ease.24 After the artificiality and excesses of Mannerism, the clarity of Raphael’s middle period was an archetype for proper decorum of devotional art during the Counter-Reformation.25 Artists who looked to Raphael’s work to create a new type of sacred image, like Federico Zuccaro, were part of a movement termed “Counter-Maneria,” although Federico appeased patrons on both sides.26 Additionally, according to the Roman viewpoint such as that of Bellori, the Carracci Reform reached its peak through Annibale’s exposure to Raphael in Rome, returning to the foundations of painting.27 In the art world, for many, to return to the foundations was to look to the paintings of Raphael. As his artwork was acclaimed for its grace and beauty, these were also aspects of art believed to be foundational for the new Roman art academy under Federico in the late sixteenth century.28 Raphael’s designs went beyond recording what was found in the observable world. As Hall perceives, it was the balance between imitation of nature and revisioning of nature that placed Raphael at the center of discussions for later academicians and art writers too, such as the late seventeenth-century author Bellori.29 Artists of the late Seicento such as Maratti greatly admired the work of Raphael, and considered themselves to be a part of the painting tradition he initiated.30 The stylistic qualities of Raphael’s artwork, which included his interpretation of the antique, became foundational

24 Pierluigi De Vecchi, “Difficulty/Ease and Studied Casualness in the Work of Raphael”, edited by Patrizia Nitti, Marc Restellini, and Claudio Strinati, in Raphael: Grace and Beauty (Milan: Skira, 2001), 29–38. 25 On the decorum of Raphael’s art, see Williams, Raphael, 76–83. For the development of Raphael’s style see 18–28. 26 Marcia B. Hall, After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 194–99, and XIV–XV. The term was first used by Sydney Freedberg. 27 Charles Dempsey, “Raphael’s legacy in Italy circa 1600,” in Late Raphael: Proceedings of the International Symposium edited by Miguel Falomir (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 156. For the contemporary debate of whether Annibale’s best reform came while in Bologna or after arriving in Rome, see 157. 28 Julian Brooks, Taddeo and Federico Zuccaro: Artist-Brothers in Renaissance Rome (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007), 106. Lectures at the Academy in March 1594 discussed a variety of topics, including grace and beauty. 29 Hall, After Raphael, 5–6. 30 For Bellori’s discussion of the influence of Raphael on Maratti, see Bellori, Le vite, 625–33. On the topic, see also Manuela B. Mena Marqués, “Carlo Maratti e Raffaello,” in Raffaello e l’Europa. Atti del IV Corso internazionale di alta cultura, edited by Marcello Fagiolo and Maria Luisa Madonna (Rome: Ist. Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, 1990), 543.

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to the academic notion of Classicism.31 With an emphasis on the importance of his later stylistic experiments that mimicked ancient reliefs, Hall’s essay “Classicism, Mannerism, and the Relieflike Style” in the Companion to Raphael overviews the significance of the main literary and scholarly promoters of his classicism through the ages, such as Bellori, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Heinrich Wölfflin.32 The significance of the impact of Raphael’s “high style” under Julius II remained at the center of many discussions of the twentieth century as well, including those of Hall’s Harvard University graduate advisor Sydney J. Freedberg.33 Hall’s Companion to Raphael anthology presents many significant studies, some of which focus on aspects of the results of Raphael’s stylistic popularity from revivals of his classical style in France to broader European fame in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries to the restoration of his works.34 As Carl Goldstein rightly points out in his essay, authors such as Quatremère de Quincy, J. D. Passavant, and Eugène Müntz helped change the direction of the focus of the cult of Raphael from one centered on his art to that of his personality.35 Before their work was published, however, Angelo Comolli published Vita inedita di Raffaello da Urbino in 1790, which was the first biography of Raphael’s life in nearly 100 years since Bellori’s Descrizione delle Stanze di Raffaello (1695). Comolli’s 31 For a full discussion, see Hall, After Raphael, 5–7. In regard to Raphael setting the standard of seventeenth-century classicism, see di Macco, “Moments of Dialogue,” 99. For a larger discussion, see M. Volpi Orlandini, “Annotazioni in margine alle tendenze classiciste e raffaellesche nella cultura romana tra 1607 e il 1672,” in Raffaello e l’Europa: Atti del IV Corso internazionale di alta cultura (Rome: Ist. Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato-Archivi di Stato, 1992), and Christoph Schmälzle, “Klassizismus zwischen Renaissance und Griechenkult: Raffael als Ideal,” in Raffael als Paradigma Rezeption, Imagination und Kult im 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Gilbert Heß, Elena Agazzi, and Elisabeth Décultot (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012). For bibliography and discussion of Raphael during the nineteenth century, see Smithers, The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). 32 Hall, “Classicism, Mannerism, and the Relieflike Style.” For Raphael’s popularity with German and Swiss writers and artists, such as Wölfflin, and the influence Raphael’s style had on Classicism, see Ekaterini Kepetzis, “Romantische Identitätsfindung: Zur Konstruktion des Idealkünstlers in den Viten Raffaels der Brüder Riepenhausen,” in Raffael als Paradigma Rezeption, Imagination und Kult im 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Gilbert Heß, Elena Agazzi, and Elisabeth Décultot (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012). 33 Hall, “Classicism, Mannerism, and the Relieflike Style,” 228–32. For the impactful writing of Freedberg, see Painting in the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1961). 34 See the following in Hall, The Cambridge Companion to Raphael: Goldstein, “French Identity in the Realm of Raphael”; Perini, “Raphael’s European Fame in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”; and Hoeniger, “Restoring Raphael,” for more on Raphaelism and restoration of Raphael’s works. 35 Goldstein, “French Identity in the Realm of Raphael,” 252.

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biography sparked a revival in Raphaelism and a general interest in the artist’s life. For example, Ingres, after reading the vita along with other earlier biographies of Raphael, began a series that intended to have five paintings of the life of the artist, which were to include Raphael’s birth and death.36 This new interest in the cult of personality contributed to the abundance of modern scholarship on Raphael. Hall’s publications have played a major role in the robust literary response to Raphael’s art and fame. Several key factors, in addition to the appreciation of the style of his work, aided Raphael’s unparalleled artistic celebrity and the resulting outpour of commemoration; subsequent artists also looked to his working methods for a new kind of professional practices. His working method was particularly influential during the late Cinquecento and Seicento, the era of expanding interest in academic art throughout Europe. Subsequently, the artistic admiration of Raphael’s art by academics across Europe during the early modern period and beyond was unprecedented. Artists in Rome in particular celebrated his artistic heritage. As several studies in Hall’s Companion to Raphael indicate, his success was rooted in his effective multi-dimensional, collaborative practices, as Bette Talvacchia discusses in her essay on the workshop of Raphael. Talvacchia pinpoints a “double-pronged” method of both teaching pupils and allowing independent artists to flourish under his direction as leading factors in his entrepreneurial efficacy. Not only did managing a sizable workshop allow for the undertaking of many large-scale commissions at one time, it also allowed for a wide range of talents to develop within. Resultantly, Raphael’s students prospered in their own right after his death, such as Giulio Romano in Mantua. The managerial style founded by Raphael offered study and training, somewhat like an academy but with specific goals pertaining to a commission, which provided a prototype for institutional academies later on.37

36 Only two of the series were completed: Raphael and the Fornarina and The Betrothal of Raphael. On this, see Martin Rosenberg, Raphael and France: The Artist as Paradigm and Symbol (State College: Penn State Press, 1995), 165–82. At the opening of Raphael’s grave in 1833, Ingres procured dust fragments of Raphael’s skeleton. See Valérie Kobi, “Shaping Posterity: Ingres’s Violin,” in Object Fantasies: Experience & Creation, edited by Philippe Cordez, Romana Kaske, Julia Saviello, and Susanne Thürigen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2018), 125. I am indebted to this author for providing a list of bibliography on the cult of Raphael centered around his remains during this century. See 125 n. 1. For more discussion, see Smithers, The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). 37 Bette Talvacchia, “Raphael’s Workshop and the Development of a Managerial Style,” in The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, edited by Marcia B. Hall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 167–85. In a recent study, new observations have been made about Raphael’s division of labor regarding the output of drawings for assistants in his late career. See Ferino-Pagden, “Problems of Method and Perspectives in the Studies of Raphael,” 19. “All in the Family: Raphael’s

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Prosperous commissions coupled with the mass distribution of his designs via prints assisted in Raphael’s new type of artistic following. Patricia Emison expounds upon this in her study on Raphael’s prints, also in Hall’s Companion to Raphael. His collaboration with the printmaker Marcantonio Raimondi during the second decade of the Cinquecento likely developed out of a desire to validate his position and, more importantly, to disseminate his art. His partnership with Raimondi helped make Raphael known internationally since prints were essential for circulating imagery outside of Italy during the Cinquecento and later centuries. For example, Antonio Salamanca replaced Raimondi in the 1530s, using the plates to profit his own printing business, while on the other hand Giorgio Ghisi worked in Antwerp in the 1560s and 1570s making new prints from Raphael’s paintings.38 Engravings were important to art connoisseurs and collectors, as well as for artists, providing imagery of artworks unknown firsthand. Raimondi’s prints “after” Raphael were especially valuable to the work of the Rome-based French painter Poussin, for example.39 The appearance of Raphael’s name on these prints was an essential element to his rise in renown. Such prints “after” his works, along with designs specifically intended for print, spread Raphael’s name as “Inventor” throughout Europe.40 He recognized that his signature could perpetuate his artistic fame.41 Raphael was business savvy in many ways and, perhaps even during the early stage of his career, knew full well that the circulation of his name acted as effective advertising, especially in prints made after his work. Although they only make up a small percentage of his paintings, Raphael’s “signatures” in both

Workshop and the Business of Art,”presented at the Reconsidering Raphael on–line conference, April 9, 2021. 38 Patricia Emison, “Raphael’s Multiples,” in The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, edited by Marcia B. Hall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 187. See also Talvacchia, “Raphael’s Workshop,” 184. Regarding Ghisi, see also Suzanne Boorsch, Michal Lewis, and R. E. Lewis, The Engravings of Giorgio Ghisi (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985). 39 See Elizabeth Broun, “The Portable Raphael,” in The Engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi, edited by Innis H. Shoemaker (Lawrence, Kansas: Allen Press, 1981), 36–37. On Raphael’s efforts to popularize his work with antiquarians of his day, see Madeleine Claire Viljoen, “Prints and False Antiquities in the Age of Raphael,” Print Quarterly 21, no. 3 (2004): 235–247. Lastly, see also Ekserdjian, “Establishing a Norm for the High Renaissance” on Raphael’s understanding of the power of the print. 40 Emison, “Raphael’s Multiples,” 187. See 198 for Raphael’s signature in print. See also Lisa Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 67–94. 41 David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print 1470–1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 103. See Smithers, The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming) for expanded discussion on the use of Raphael’s name and signature.

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sacred and profane imagery (whether placed by Raphael himself or someone else later) are creative and confident; his name also appears on paintings that he partially worked on (or his name may have been placed on works he did not execute at all).42 If inscribed by him, it would have been yet another way to denote artistic ownership and advertise his trademark.43 In the boldest placement of his “signature,” in response to Michelangelo’s well-known, audacious mark of authorship on St. Peter’s Pietá, Raphael’s name mimics embroidery on the garment of the Virgin in the Canigiani Holy Family (1508).44 This minute detail was first made clear in modern times after the cleaning, as noted by Hubertus von Sonnenberg in his essay in Shearman and Hall’s Princeton Raphael Symposium.45 While these signatures were essential for claiming artistic authorship, no mark of authorship became as important for the cultivation of his legacy, such as his by now-famous self-portrait in the School of Athens. An earlier mirror-image almost identical depiction is shown in the autonomous self-portrait oil painting held at the Uffizi dated between 1504–1506. These depictions of the artist – with a black cap and dark wavy, shoulder-length hair – became the main prototype for his effigy for the next five centuries.46 Dedicatory collectables such as medallions and stamps featuring this portrait-type were produced for various demarcation celebrations, including the one hundredth anniversary of the opening of Raphael’s tomb in 1933 and the fourth centenary of the founding of the

42 Even if the “signature” or placement of his name, in any of these cases denotes inauthenticity, as Livio Pestilli proposes with La Fornarina, the very presence of Raphael’s name signifies the importance of the branding. The author suggests that the overt placement on La Fornarina can only mean that the work was not fully authored by Raphael. On this, see Livio Pestilli, “The Artist’s Signature as a Sign of Inauthenticity,” Notes in the History of Art 32, no. 3 (2013): 6. 43 Rona Goffen, “Raphael’s Designer Labels: From the Virgin Mary to La Fornarina,” Artibus et Historiae 24, no. 48 (2003): 124. The author first addresses signatures in Goffen, “Signatures: Inscribing Identity in Italian Renaissance Art,” Viator 32 (2001): 303–370. For further discussion and bibliography on signatures during the Renaissance, see Smithers, “Memorializing the Masters,” 47–61, and The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). 44 Goffen, “Designer Labels,” 126 and 128–29, for Raphael’s signature in response to Michelangelo’s. 45 Herbertus von Sonnenburg, “The Examination of Raphael’s Paintings in Munich,” 74, figure 91. For the Crucifixion, see Judith Plesters, “Technical Aspects of Some Paintings by Raphael in the National Gallery, London,” 20, figure 21, both in The Princeton Raphael Symposium. 46 See “Self Portrait, Raffaello Sanzio,” Le Gallerie degli Uffizi, accessed June 23, 2020, https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/raffaello-autoritratto. This painting was the promotional image for the “Raffaello 1520–1483” exhibition. For this, see “Raffaello oltre la mostra,” Scuderie del Quirinale, accessed June 25, 2020, https://www.scuderiequirinale.it/pagine/raffaellooltre-la-mostra.

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Compagnia dei Virtuosi al Pantheon in 1942 (Figures 2.1 and 2.2).47 The medal, issued in 1936, was apparently requested by members as a memento of the centenary celebration of the opening.48

Figure 2.2: Poste Vaticane of Raffaello Sanzi for the Quarto centenario della Pontifica Insigne Accademia dei Virutosi al Pantheon, 1943. Smithsonian National Postal Museum, Washington DC. Photo: Smithsonian National Postal Museum, Washington, DC, https://postalmuseum.si. edu/object/npm_2008.2009.82.

Raphael’s tomb memorial, begun shortly after his death on April 6, 1520, is the first large-scale, permanent funerary monument made to honor an artist. Mantegna, who died in 1506, had arranged for and designed his own memorial chapel in Sant’Andrea in Mantua; however, it is not nearly as imposing as the tabernacle

47 This stamp is one in a series of great Roman artists issued by the Vatican to celebrate the quarto centenario of the founding of the Virtuosi in 1943. 48 After the opening of Raphael’s grave, the Virtuosi issued multiple medallions. On the medal illustrated here, see Anna Lisa Genovese, “L’effigie di Raffaello nelle medaglie dei Virtuosi al Pantheon,” Annali della Pontificia insigne Accademia dei Virtuosi al Pantheon 16, (2016): 284.

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Baldassare Peruzzi designed for Raphael in the Pantheon.49 As a result of his elevated standing, and with the express permission of Pope Leo X, Raphael received an unprecedented burial in the ancient building. After its seventh-century conversion to a church, the Pantheon – Sancta Maria ad Martyres also known as Santa Maria Rotunda – had remained empty of decoration, only having been used as a place of interment for the modest burials of the canons of the Rotunda.50 Raphael’s funeral celebrations were far more extravagant than any other artist’s before him with the close following of Bramante, who received a stately burial in St. Peter’s Basilica, also a highly unusual event for a non-cleric. It appears that Pope Leo granted these two men, who were both head architects of St. Peter’s under his pontificate, special burial privileges, acts that ultimately commented upon his position as a great Medici sponsor of the arts. Despite that many artists and writers imagined Raphael’s funeral (and death) throughout the ages, only one contemporary document exists describing his funerary rites. A letter discovered by Sheryl E. Reiss relays that the artist was “buried with great pomp,” carried to the grave surrounded by painters carrying 100 torches.51 Raphael’s tomb, as Shearman describes it, was “on one level a monument to a great pope” and on another “a monument to a failed dream of great works of art” making it a “historical construction of great power.”52 Furthermore, Shearman equates Raphael’s death to that of Mausolus as discussed by Pliny in the Natural History, where even after their patron, Mausolus’ queen, died, the sculptors carried on with the work of the king’s mausoleum at Halicarnassus, deciding it would also honor their work and profession to do so.53 In addition to producing wide-spread effigy-style portraits and commemorative imagery, 49 On Mantegna’s memorial, see Smithers, “Memorializing the Masters,” 131–34, and The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). More bibliography and discussion of Raphael’s tomb in the context of the cult of the artist can be found in Smithers, “Memorializing the Masters,” 171–81, and expanded in The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). 50 Buddensieg, “Raphael’s Tomb,” 15–16. 51 Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, vol. 1, 588: “sepeliti con grandissima pompa l’uno e l’altro. Raphaello hebbe centro torce portrate tucte da’ dipintori,” cited in a letter dated April 14, 1520 to Paolo Maffei in Rome to Mario Maffei. For images of Raphael’s death and funeral, many from the nineteenth century, see Anna Lisa Genovese, La Tomba del divino Raffaello (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2015), 29–51, and Marzia Faietti and Matteo Lanfranconi, eds., Raffaello 1520–1483 (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2020), 54–66. See also Matteo Lanfranconi, “Ille hic est Raphael. La Morte di Raffaello nelle parole dei contemporanei,” in Raffaello 1520–1483, edited by Marzia Faietti and Matteo Lanfranconi (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2020), 43–53. 52 John Shearman, “Giorgio Vasari and the Paragons of Art,” in Vasari’s Florence: Artists and Literati at the Medicean Court, edited by Philip Jacks (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 22. 53 Shearman, “Giorgio Vasari and the Paragons of Art.”

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Raphael’s disciples found honor in memorializing him at the tomb site long after he died. As Tilmann Buddensieg first observed in depth in modern scholarship, the original tomb memorial did not contain an effigy or visible tribute such as a personification of Fame, apparently per Raphael’s preference; instead, the intended object of veneration was the statue of the Madonna del Sasso by Lorenzetto (Figure 2.3).54

Figure 2.3: Raphael’s Tomb Memorial, sixteenth century. Pantheon, Rome. Photo: Author.

The memorial displays an inscription, the epitaph likely written by Bembo, cited above, boasting Raphael’s creative supremacy over Nature.55 Bembo’s epigram was neither the first nor the last to praise an artist in this way. Giotto, as the early Trecento architect of the Florentine Cathedral’s campanile, received a cenotaph memorial in Santa Maria del Fiore under the rule of Lorenzo Il Magnifico during the late Quattrocento. Since Giotto was also a painter, the epitaph commends his

54 For more on the Madonna, see Buddensieg, “Raphael’s Tomb,” 10–24. 55 On the inscription, and subsequent uses, see Genovese, La Tomba del Divino Raffaello, 79–90.

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ability to bring his figures to life, claiming his talent in painting paralleled that of Nature in her creations: I am he through whom painting, dead, returned to life And whose hand was as sure as it was adept. What my art lacked was lacking in nature herself. To no one was it given to paint better or more. Do you admire the great belltower resounding with sacred bronze? This too on basis of my model has grown to the stars. After all, I am Giotto. What need was there to relate these things? This name had stood as the equal to any long poem.56

Giotto’s epitaph is analogous to the lines written for Fra Filippo Lippi, a painter similarly acclaimed for his life-giving ability to create. Filippo’s epigraph in the cathedral in Spoleto eulogizes him as an illustrious artist with expert painting skills who was able to bring his images such animation, it left Nature confounded: Here I am brought, Filippo, painting’s fame, To nought unknown why wondrous grace of hand. With craftman’s fingers I gave colour life And fooled the living with its long-awaited voice. Nature herself by my expressive figures stilled Confesses me the equal of her arts.57

Both monuments – Giotto’s commemoration and Filippo’s memorial – were sponsored by Il Magnifico and feature epitaphs written by the poet Angelo Poliziano.58 This ultimately reflected Florence’s late fifteenth-century humanistic attitude, which included an exalted status of the artist. Due to the aptness of their craft in improving upon what was found in the natural world, these artists were awarded permanent and prominent public remembrance. Raphael’s epitaph and the many epigrams written to pay tribute to him, echo these sentiments, showing prolonged engagement with the theme of the paragone with Nature as a popular eulogy throughout the sixteenth century. In

56 See Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010) 123, who translates from the Latin, here only cited in part. See also Vasari, Lives, vol. 1, 94 and Vite, II, 122. 57 Jeffrey Ruda, Fra Filippo Lippi: Life and Work with a Complete Catalogue (London: Phaidon Press, 1993), 43, per the author’s translation. See also Vasari, Lives, vol. 3, 88 and Vite, III, 341 for the Latin. 58 See Smithers, “Memorializing the Masters,” 113–20, and The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming) for further discussion and bibliography on the monuments for both Giotto and Filippo Lippi.

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general, epigram writing was an essential part of the Renaissance humanistic mourning process. Visitors would often leave cartellini bearing written remembrances. As a later example, nearly half a century after Raphael’s death, the Florentine letterati affixed comparable little poems to Michelangelo’s ephemeral catafalque in San Lorenzo upon his death in 1564. A handful of these ruminated upon his artistic command and his effect on Nature, following in the tradition of Poliziano, Bembo, and others. An excerpt from a verse written by Antonfrancesco Grazzini reads that upon Michelangelo’s death, “Art may weep whilst Nature may rejoice.”59 Further illuminating the cultural importance of epigrams, Vasari’s second edition of the Vite includes epigrams at the end of the biographies; many were either fictitious or could have been written on cartellini left on the grave, as was tradition.60 The artist in paragone with Nature was a common topos; for example, Donatello’s biography was embellished regarding his burial celebrations. In an anonymous poem recorded by Vasari, Donatello is praised for his skill in bringing speaking-likeness and breath to his works, triumphing over past ancient greats, and even the capacity of Nature to create.61 The eulogies of these artists – Giotto, Filippo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo – are all steeped in the same humanistic rhetoric; however, what is unusual in Raphael’s case, is that the praise continued well after his death. Despite that fifteen other known epigrams similar in theme were composed for Raphael, the words of Bembo were the most public, and therefore the most impactful.62

59 Rudolf Wittkower and Margot Wittkower, The Divine Michelangelo: The Florentine Academy’s Homage on His Death in 1564 (London: Phaidon, 1964), 78, for the full poem as translated from the Italian by the Wittkowers and for the facsimile in the Italian. A similar poem was written by Cavaliere Paolo del Rosso. Comparing Michelangelo to Nature served as a way to extol him in life too: notably the frontispiece of Ascanio Condivi’s Vita di Michelangelo, a biography sanctioned by the artist, features the 1546 engraving by Giulio Bonasone illustrating a portrait of Michelangelo with the following lines: “In as much as Nature can be in art and art in Nature,/ This man, who was equal to Nature, teaches by art.” I thank Timothy Winters for this translation from the Latin and Una Cadegan for conversation about it. 60 On Vasari and epigrams, see Maia Wellington Gahtan, “Epitaphs in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives,” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 5 (December 2011): 6–7. 61 Vasari, Lives, vol. 2, 254 and Vite, III, 224–25. Vasari, who also commissioned epigrams for his biographies, very well may have done so here (or invented this epigram). See also Smithers, “Memorializing the Masters,” 112, 139–41, and The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). 62 See Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, vol. 1, 639–66, for a complete list of and discussion on all the epigrams written upon Raphael’s death. Some scholars believe Bembo’s epitaph might have been composed by Tebaldeo instead. Select recent bibliography includes David Rijser, “The Practical Function of High Renaissance Epigrams,” in The Neo-Latin Epigram: A Learned and Witty Genre, edited by Susanna de Beer, K. A. E. Enenkel, and David Rijser (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009), 125–27, and Raphael’s Poetics, 1–90; Stefano Pagliaroli, “L’epitaffio di Pietro

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Figure 2.4: Detail of Raphael’s sarcophagus, marble, ancient Roman sarcophagus with inscription from 1833. Pantheon, Rome. Photo: Author.

The couplet remained significant into the nineteenth century when Raphael’s body was exhumed and reburied; the well-known words were engraved on an imperialage sarcophagus gifted from Pope Gregory XVI for the artist’s reburial, reinforcing Raphael’s creative capacity to outdo Nature (Figures 2.4 and 2.1 verso).63 Raphael’s acclaimed victory over Nature had been expressed as early as 1518, two years before the artist’s death.64 The topos of the artist outdoing Nature – not expressly applied to Raphael but to the role of the artist in general – had been borrowed from antiquity and revived during the last half of the Quattrocento, as

Bembo per Raffaello,” in Pietro Bembo e l’invenzione del Rinascimento, edited by Guido Beltramini, Davide Gasparotto and Adolfo Tura (Marsilio Editore: Venice, 2013), 292–99; and Genovese, La Tomba del Divino Raffaello, 79–90. See also Smithers, “Memorializing the Masters,” 181, and The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). 63 Vitaliano Tiberia, “Passato e presente del più antico sodalizio romano di artisti,” in I virtuosi al Pantheon, 1700–1758, edited by G. Bonaccorso and T. Manfredi (Rome, 1998), XIX. For larger discussion, see Smithers, “Memorializing the Masters,” 202, and The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). 64 For the 1518 poem by Francesco Raiboldini il Francia referencing Raphael’s paragone with Nature, see Luigi Castagna, “‘Ille hic est Raphael.’ L’epitafio latino per Raffaello al Pantheon.” Aevum 71 (1997): 629, cited from Vincenzo Golzio, Raffaello nei documenti, nelle testimonianze dei contemporanei e nella letteratura del suo secolo (Vatican City: Gregg International Publishers, 1936), 333 (vv. 12–14): Vinta sarà Natura, e da tuoi inganni / resa eloquente dirà te lodando / che tu solo il pictor sei de pictori.

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evidenced in the memorials of Giotto and Lippi.65 Those who bettered Nature, not merely imitated it, were extolled for their ingegno, a quality understood to be innate and of divine origin.66 By the Cinquecento, the metaphor alluding to the artist’s power – the faculty to create – was the ultimate form of popular praise. While Cenino Cennini, in Il libro dell’arte from around 1400, first instructed artists to draw from Nature and engage the imagination, it was Vasari who emphasized the superiority of art over Nature in discussions of disegno throughout his biographies, especially the second 1568 version.67 In his opening of Raphael’s vita, Vasari echoed the sentiments of Bembo’s distich: “Him nature presented to the world, when, vanquished by art through the hand of Michelagnolo Buonarroti, she wished to be vanquished, in Raffaello, by art and character together.”68 Despite popularity of the literary trope, visual imagery referencing Nature in relation to the position of the artist as creator did not surface until the midsixteenth century: Vasari’s house decoration, Titian’s personal motto, and Benvenuto Cellini’s proposals for the seal of the Accademia del Disegno, for example, all highlight the artist’s supremacy over Nature.69 The designs by Cellini – although not selected as an emblem – most closely relate to the imagery that was to become associated with Raphael (Figure 2.5). In a response to Vasari’s call for a competition for the insignia of the Academy in the early 1560s, Cellini focused on the

65 Pliny the Elder relays countless stories about ancient painters who fooled Nature and tricked fellow artists in order to demonstrate creative superiority. See Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, translated by John Bostock (London: Taylor and Francis, 1855), book 35. Renaissance anecdotes of artistic preeminence over Nature and other artists, and even artists fooling patrons, were central to biographic rhetoric, especially for Vasari. 66 For a discussion of ingegno, see Martin Kemp, “The ‘Super-Artist’ as Genius: The SixteenthCentury View,” in Genius: The History of an Idea, edited by Penelope Murray (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 32–53, and Behind the Picture: Art and Evidence in the Italian Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 229–32. See also Patricia Emison, Creating the “Divine” Artist: From Dante to Michelangelo (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 321–48 for historiography of the term. 67 Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook: The Italian ‘Il Libro dell’arte’ (New York: Dover, 1932), 15; and Vasari, Vite, throughout. The concept of the artist surpassing Nature was also employed by Venetian writers, such as Ludovico Dolce, for example, the verb “colorito” brought life to forms, making them true to or truer than Nature. See Mark Roskill, ed. and trans., Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (New York: New York University Press, 1968), 214. For more on the topic, see also David Rosand, Painting in Cinquecento Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 24–26. 68 Vasari, Lives, vol. 4, 209 and Vite, IV, 155. 69 For discussion and bibliography on Vasari’s frescoes and Titian’s emblem, see Smithers, The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). For a study on artists’ competition with nature, see Mary D. Garrard, Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

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artist’s relationship to Nature in four of his five designs. One held at the British Museum shows a winged cult statue of Diana Polymastes. To the left an inscription states “la Tromba della nostra Fama viene dalle Braccia;” reiterating this line, trumpets symbolizing fame stem from Nature as her arms because, according to Cellini, it is through manual dexterity that artists create, and thus bring renown. Per Cellini’s remarks at the bottom, the artist’s intellectual creative process of disegno was on par to Nature’s fecundity.70

Figure 2.5: Benvenuto Cellini, Project for a Seal for the Accademia del Disegno, 1563–1569, drawing on paper, 33.2 × 22.2 cm. London, British Museum, object number 1860,0616.18. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

The comparison of Raphael to Nature affixed to his posthumous persona. This is expressed in a variety of types of dedicatory imagery. The most distinct aspect 70 The design in the British Museum (Registration number 1860,0616.18) also features a serpent, an emblem of Duke Cosimo, and a lion, a symbol of Florence. For more on Cellini’s designs, see Nicholas Turner, Florentine Drawings of the Sixteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 163.

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about the translation of the literary formula to a prototype image is that it actively kept Raphael’s legacy alive and visibly accessible, as it was used repeatedly to acclaim the artist throughout the succeeding centuries. Although yet to be expressed in iconographic terms, Bembo’s lines first accompanied visual imagery placed below an awkward portrait of Raphael by an anonymous artist, evidently inspired by an image made by Giulio Bonasone from the mid-sixteenth century (Figure 2.6). Underneath the image with an inscription referencing Raphael’s epitaph, a hand-written note further emphasizes Raphael’s dominance in painting, and makes a second play on the conceit that Nature was lost without him. While the context of this print referring to “RAPHAELIS SANCTII,” “Saint Raphael,” is

Figure 2.6: Anonymous copy after Giulio Bonasone, Portrait of Raphael, mid to late sixteenth century, engraving on paper, 24.6 (trimmed) × 189 cm (trimmed). London, British Museum, object number 1871,1209.807. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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unknown, subsequent imagery extolling Raphael reveals more about how successive artists sought to celebrate his legend.71 As first director of the Academia di San Luca in Rome in 1593 (established in 1577), Federico Zuccaro looked to Raphael as a source of inspiration. It is well known that both brothers – Taddeo and Federico – intently studied the work of Raphael in order to master his style.72 Upon his brother’s death in 1566, Federico ensured Taddeo’s burial was close to Raphael. As regent of the Compagnia dei Virtuosi, he was interred in the Pantheon’s Cappella di S. Giuseppe di Terrasanta, later known as the Cappella dei Artisti due to the many artist burials there. The last lines of the inscription claim what Nature (Mother) feared in Raphael, she dreaded equally in Taddeo.73 Artists with real connections to Raphael, such as Baldassare Peruzzi (d. 1546), who designed Raphael’s burial tabernacle, and Perino del Vaga (d. 1547), who assisted Raphael with decorations at the Vatican Logge, had already been buried nearby or in the chapel.74 In a further attempt to declare his fabricated connection to Raphael, Federico also planned to feature an image in his Roman house – now only extant in a copy – showing Raphael posed as Isaiah from his fresco at Sant’Agostino in Rome (Figure 2.7). The work is one of a

71 My gratitude goes to Devon Baker for pointing me towards this particular copy of the print in the British Museum. An original print by Bonasone is held in the British Museum, London (museum number H,4.1), which gives a similar epithet “RAPHAEL SANCTII.” On this image, see Loh, Still Lives, 43. A pendant portrait of Michelangelo attributed to Enea Vico is also held at the British Museum (accession number 1849,0210.244), provoking the question as to whether the Raphael image after Bonasone was also made by Vico. George Santayana, “On the Epitaph of Raphael,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35, no. 1 (Autumn 1976): 5–6 mentions a print of Raphael from ca. 1540 by P. (Pietro) S. (Stefanoni) F. (Formis) after Bonasone, cited in Carl Ruland, The Works of Raphael Santi da Urbino as Represented in the Raphael Collection in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle (London: Weimar, 1876), 8, xvi. 7–8 (which I was not able to access). The copy in the British Museum, however, is not catalogued as P.S.F. but appears to be the same image. I would like to thank Constance McPhee for this reference. See also The Illustrated Bartsch, XV n. 347. I also appreciate the assistance of Evelyn Lincoln. 72 On this, see Clare Robertson, Rome 1600: The City and Visual Arts under Clement VIII (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 282. 73 Loh, Still Lives, 200. The epitaph was possibly written by Annibale Caro, who Loh notes was the “Bembo” of his time. See 265 n.106. 74 For further discussion, see Smithers, “Memorializing the Masters,” 247–54, and The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). See also Susanna Pasquali, “From the Pantheon of Illustrious Men: Raphael’s Tomb and its Legacy,” in Pantheons: Transformations of a Monumental Idea, edited by Richard Wrigley and Matthew Craske (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 38. For discussion set in the context of portraiture, see Loh, Still Lives, 198–201. Loh’s 2015 publication touches upon several topics that are explored in my 2012 dissertation, not cited by the author.

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Figure 2.7: Anonymous copy after Federico Zuccaro, Portrait of Raphael, ca. 1600, pen and brown ink over black chalk, brush with brown wash on paper, 30.5 × 14.6 cm. Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, inventory number 1341F. Photo: Gallerie degli Uffizi.

series to honor great artists.75 These portraits, part of the larger cultural framework begun during the Quattrocento, sought to honor uomini famosi through portraiture; Federico’s home, like that of others in the art world before him such as Vasari, celebrated artisti famosi, which inadvertently placed himself in their privileged company. The significance of Federico’s portrait of Raphael lies in that it is the first to transform Bembo’s epitaph into a pictorial motif: here, Raphael holds a sketch of Diana of Ephesus, the Roman goddess of Nature shown with her many breasts as Diana Polymastes. This small detail on the mid right, almost lost to the inattentive viewer, suggests that Raphael not only could imitate Nature but he could also improve upon her creations, which included an image of her. An unusual painting of a similar design was also made around the

75 For the possible Michelangelo pendant to the Raphael print, see museum number 1983, U.2881 in the British Museum. Zuccaro also designed portraits, Michelangelo, Taddeo Zuccaro and Polidoro. See Brooks, Taddeo and Federico Zuccaro, 2–3.

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same time, solidifying the notion on the more permanent medium of leather, which now resides in the Pinacoteca Comunale in Macerata, Italy.76 As the founder of modern Roman painting, Raphael was honored abundantly during the seventeenth century. French academicians with connections to Rome such as Poussin and Nicolas Chaperon, for example, sought to make artistic associations to Raphael. Poussin’s well-known “Raphaelesque” portrait from 1650 reveals a subtle allusion to the theme made popular by Raphael’s epitaph: the artist’s superiority over Nature is referenced by her personification between two canvases on the left.77 On the other end of the spectrum, Chaperon blatantly refers to Raphael. His design for the frontispiece of Sacrae historiae acta a Raphael Urbinis, etchings of Raphael’s Old Testament scenes in the Logge of the Vatican, published in Paris in 1649, depicts a memorial with an effigy of Raphael being crowned by Fame (Figure 2.8).78 His self-portrait on the left points to an inscription with Bembo’s abbreviated epitaph and secondary lines stating “We are not dust, we are not shadow, here the Urbinate allowed me to live, I am that famous Raphael.”79 This clearly denotes Chaperon’s status as a follower of the “famous Raphael” while at the same time reveals the increasing popularity and ubiquity of the couplet (the script at the bottom further reiterates Chaperon’s association to the master).80 This published image also further disseminated the idea of Raphael’s 76 For the drawing, see Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, vol. 1, 645; and Matthias Winner, “Poussins Selbstbildnis von 1649,” in “Il se rendit en Italie”: études offertes à André Chastel, edited by Giuliano Briganti (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante-Flammarion, 1987), 380. A copy of the drawing of Raphael exists as well (sold at Christies in 1987). See Brooks, Taddeo and Federico Zuccaro, 36. A pendant leather portrait of Michelangelo is in Macerata. For discussion, further bibliography, and illustrations of both portraits and the drawings, see Smithers, The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). 77 Loh, Still Lives, 44–47, discusses Poussin’s interest in Raphael. For more on the meaning of the portrait’s connection to Raphael, not considered by Loh, see Winner, “Poussins Selbstbildnis von 1649,” 371–402. The well-known image is held at the Louvre, Paris (museum number 7302). For more on Raphael and Poussin and the French Academy, see Emison, The Italian Renaissance and Cultural Memory, 123–25. 78 Chaperon, Sacrae Historiae Acta a Raphael Urbin. My gratitude goes to the staff at the rare book room of Princeton University Library Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology for their hospitality in accessing this source and others in May 2015. 79 Genovese, La Tomba del Divino Raffaello, 29. The Latin original reads in full: “Ille hic / est Raphael / timuit / quo sospite vinci / rerum magna / parens / et moriente / mori / non pulvis non umbra / me videre Chapron / hic dedit: Urbinatus / ille ego sum Raphael.” 80 The inscription at the bottom reads: “N. Chapron / Inventor / Ad eximium pictorem Nicolaum Chaperon / Picturam Raphael mutis revocavit ab umbris / tu Chaprone iterum reddis utrique diem.” A copy of the print is held in the British Museum (museum number 1972, U.373.1). For more on the image in addition to Genovese, La Tomba del Divino Raffaello, see Winner, “Poussins Selbstbildnis von 1649,” 380–82.

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Figure 2.8: Nicolas Chaperon, Memorial to Raphael, published in Sacrae historiae acta a Raphaele Urbin: in Vaticanis Xystis ad picturae miracuium expressa Nicolaus Chapron Gallus a de delineata et incisa D. D. D., 1790 (originally in 1649). Photo: Author. Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.

status as victor over Nature, an essential aspect of his afterlife persona.81 Additionally, even though Chaperon died shortly thereafter, the constructed relationship assures his place as Raphael’s artistic heir for posterity’s sake. The effort to link oneself to Raphael was arguably never stronger than with the painter Maratti, director of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome (1664–1665, 1699, 1706–1713). Regarding his interest in Raphael, Nicholas Penny humorously proclaimed: “In Maratta another artist is trying to escape and Raphael

81 Genovese mentions another early modern example where Raphael’s tomb is referenced: in Gaspare Landi, Giovinetta con urna funeraria (1795), at the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, the urn held by the muse states “Ille Hic Est Raphael.” See Genovese, La Tomba del Divino Raffaello, 30. For the image, see “Giovinetta con urna funeraria, Gaspare Landi,” Lomardi Bene Culturali, accessed June 24, 2020, http://www.lombardiabeniculturali.it/opere-arte/schede/L008000040/?view=autori&offset=1&hid=2036&sort=sort_int.

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has been recruited to stop him.”82 Maratti restored Raphael’s Vatican stanze frescos and was soon after publicly acclaimed for reinstating life to the dead paintings with his divine hand.83 In his essay “Annibale Carracci e l’Accademia di San Luca,” Zygmunt Waźbiński discusses Maratti as “Another Raphael” who desired to further validate the rebirth of interest in Raphael during his time by making connections through Rome’s “Second Raphael,” Annibale (whose paintings he also restored, and whose student Andrea Sacchi he studied under).84 As Hall notes in her discussions of the Carracci in After Raphael, Annibale, who like many others, came to Rome to study the great masters which included Raphael.85 Annibale’s interest in Raphael was made firm when he was interred near him in the Pantheon soon after his death in 1609 (although a memorial was not made at this time). Many of Raphael’s disciples – pupils and colleagues as well as later followers considering themselves heirs of his artistic tradition – had been buried near the famous master, in the case of Peruzzi, Perino, and Taddeo, previously mentioned. For some artists, especially members

82 Penny, “Raphael in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” 497. 83 Di Macco, “Moments of dialogue,” 102: “Carlo, we see your hand can give life . . . who now can deny the divinity / Of your right hand, if it can bring back to life / That which has been stolen by death?” from Campelli’s Arcadian poem In lode del Sig. Carlo Marattii Principe dell’ Accademia del Disegno, per aver fatte risorgere così mirabilmente alla luce le pitture del Palazzo Vaticano, cited in Giuseppe Ghezzi, Le buone arti sempre più gloriose nel Campidoglio (Roma 1704), 59. Di Macco and others have noted that this act legitimized Maratti as the New Raphael. See 101. See further Marqués, “Carlo Maratti e Raffaello,” 541–63 and Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, “Raffaello e le sue reincarnazioni,” Accademia Raffaello 1 (2006), 5–30. See Cathleen Hoeniger, The Afterlife of Raphael’s Paintings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 72–107 for Maratti’s restorations of Raphael’s Loggia of Psyche from 1693–1695 and the Vatican Frescos from 1702–1703. Hoeniger presented a paper entitled “Raphael versus Mother Nature” as part of the Reconsidering Raphael on-line conference in the session “Since the Princeton Raphael Symposium of 1983: Quo vadis?” The paper addressed the restoration of paintings by Raphael that were damaged by nature. 84 For discussion of Maratti as “un Altro Raphael,” see Zygmunt Waźbiński, “Annibale Carracci e l’Accademia di San Luca: a proposito di un monumento erretto in Pantheon nel 1674,” in Les Carrache et les décors profanes (Collection de l’École Française de Rome. Rome: De Boccard, 1988), 578–82. For a recent study on Annibale’s interest in Raphael’s work, see Clare Robertson, “Raphael into the Baroque: Drawing in the Carracci Workshop,” in Raffael Als Zeichner: Die Beiträge des Frankfurter Kolloquiums, edited by Joachim Jacoby and Martin Sonnabend (Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2015), 201–9. 85 Hall, After Raphael, 283.

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of the Virtuosi and/or the Accademia di San Luca, being interred near the capomaestro solidified real or desired connections to Raphael’s artistic heritage. Physical association with the artist’s grave as well as the physical presence with his remains proved particularly potent as a construction of individual and communal artistic identity.86 To give their shared tomb greater prominence, and to publicly declare his reverence to Annibale and Raphael, Maratti made modifications to the site in the 1670s, notably adding an inscription and a marble portrait of each artist by Pietro Paolo Naldini.87 Bellori explains the reason behind the additions of effigies: sadly one hundred and fifty years had passed without a portrait of Raphael for visitors so that they could see an image of the revered master in order to venerate his memory, “venerare la sua memoria.”88 It is clear at this moment that the object of adoration turns from the Madonna and Child to Raphael.89 Although Maratti himself was not interred in the Pantheon, he made connections to these two established artists in other visible ways by producing a variety of dedicatory images. He designed ideal extravagant memorials for them both, Tomaso Montanari seeing the prints as a pair.90 Maratti’s design for Annibale states the artist’s constructed relation to Raphael; this, of course, places Maratti as the culmination of Raphael’s lineage. In Maratti’s fanciful homage to Raphael engraved by Pietro Aquila, a putto props up an image of Diana Polymastes in the lower-left corner, certainly inspired by Federico’s design

86 On this, see Smithers, “Memorializing the Masters,” 247–54, and The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). 87 A bronze copy of Raphael’s portrait from 1870 is currently set in the niche while the originals are on display at the Protomoteca Capitolina in Rome. I would like to thank Giorgia Pellini of the Sovrintendenza Capitolina ai Beni Culturali at the Musei Capitolini for the tour in February 2020. For further discussion and bibliography on the late seventeenth-century changes to the shared tomb site, see Smithers, “Memorializing the Masters,” 191–99, and The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). 88 Buddensieg, “Raphael’s Tomb,” 18, cited from Bellori, Descrizione delle immagini dipinte da Raffaelle d’Urbino, 102. See also Hans Ost, “Ein Ruhmesblatt für Raphael bei Maratti und Mengs,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 27 (1965): 281. 89 Buddensieg, “Raphael’s Tomb,” 18. 90 Tomaso Mantanari, “Bellori and Christina of Sweden,” in Art History in the Age of Bellori: Scholarship and Cultural Politics in seventeenth-century Rome, edited by Janis Bell and Thomas Willette (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 100. See also Waźbiński, “Annibale Carracci,” 609, and Donatella Livia Sparti, “Giovan Pietro Bellori and Annibale Carracci’s SelfPortraits. From the “Vite” to the Artist’s Funerary Monument,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 45 (2001): 79–83. A copy is held at the British Museum, London (museum number 1896,1118.114.3).

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Figure 2.9: Carlo Maratti, Homage to Raphael, published in Imagines Veteris ac Novi Testamenti to Raphaele Sanctio Urbinate in the Vaticani palatons Xystis mira picturae elegantia expressae, 1674, etching by Pietro Aquila, 31.1 × 38.8 cm trimmed. New York, Metropolitan Museum, museum number: 47.100.613. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1947.

(Figures 2.9 and 2.10).91 The print’s dedicatory inscription restates Bembo’s distich and includes Maratti’s additional laudatory lines naming Raphael as Rome’s “Premier Painter,” or “Prince of Painters.”92 The design, emphasizing allegories of the

91 Elisabeth Schröter, “Raffael-Kult und Raffael-Forschung: Johann David Passavant und seine Raffael-Monographie im Kontext der Kunst und Kunstgeschichte,” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 26 (1990): 388–89. See also Waźbiński, “Annibale Carracci,” 561; Genovese, La Tomba del Divino Raffaello, 30 and 68; and Mantanari, “Bellori,” 100 for discussions of Maratti’s design in Imagines Veteris Ac Novi Testamenti a Raphaele Sanctio Urbinate in the Vaticani palatons Xystis mira picturae elegantia expressae J.J. de Rubeis cura. P. Aquila delin. Sculp. (C. Fontettus delin. Et. sculp.) (Rome: 1674). 92 In Maratti’s Homage to Raphael, he added an inscription below Bembo’s epigraph, most notably the line “RAPHAELIS SANTII URBINATIS PICTORUM PRINCIPIS.” See also Ost, “Ein Ruhmesblatt,” 284–85.

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Figure 2.10: Carlo Maratti, Homage to Raphael, published in Imagines Veteris ac Novi Testamenti to Raphaele Sanctio Urbinate in the Vaticani palatons Xystis mira picturae elegantia expressae, 1674, etching by Pietro Aquila: detail of Nature. Metropolitan Museum, New York. Museum number: 47.100.613. Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1947.

arts and symbols of immortal fame, depicts Raphael surrounded by mourning personifications of the three arts of disegno – painting, sculpture, and architecture.93 Maratti’s image served as a prototype for several foreign painters active in Rome who also wished to make ties to the renown of Raphael: Charles Louis Cheron in 1721 and Anton Raphael Mengs in 1741 both created homages to the artist based on Maratti’s original design (Figure 2.11).94 In France, Raphael’s work stood for the pinnacle of Italian painting: he is honored in Antoine D’Argenville’s three-volume biographies of famous painters published between 1745 and 1752.

93 Matthias Winner, “‘. . . una certa idea’: Maratta zitiert einen Brief Raffaels in einer Zeichnung,” in Der Künstler über sich in seinem Werk: internationales Symposium der Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rom 1989, edited by Matthias Winner (Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1992), 542–44. The image doubly promoted Maratti’s Scuola del Disegno and placed him as Raphael’s successor. Moreover, the three allegories were certainly made in response to those on Michelangelo’s tomb in Santa Croce in Florence. A drawing of the design by Maratti is held in the Louvre (museum number RF 49959). 94 For Mengs’s drawing, see Ost, “Ein Ruhmesblatt.” Cheron’s design served as the title page of VII Tabulae Raphaelis Urbin featuring engravings of Raphael’s Sistine Chapel tapestry cartoons.

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Figure 2.11: Anton Mengs, after Carlo Maratti, Homage to Raphael, drawing on paper, 1741, 30.8 × 390 cm. London, British Museum, object number 1928,1016.10. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Jacques-Ignace de Latouche’s Gloria dei pittori più famosi della storia designed in 1744 is featured at the front of the first volume displaying an idealized memorial with personifications of fame, the Muses of Painting, History, and Nature.95 Nature, as the now-prolific image of Diana of Polymastes, is on the left as a symbol of the artist’s triumph over her. During the late seventeenth century or early eighteenth century, a celebratory medal of the same subject – Raphael’s artistic supremacy over Nature – was produced (Figure 2.12).96 The obverse illustrates

95 Genovese, La Tomba del Divino Raffaello, 31. Painting, or Nature, as a possible reference to the verses on Raphael’s tomb, is also represented in Gio. Battista Cipriani’s Le Grazie incoronano il busto di Raffaello from 1778 incised by Francesco Bartolozzi. See 32. 96 The medal is mentioned in Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, vol. 1, 645. The medal was most likely cast at the same time, or slightly after Maratti’s late seventeenth-century designs, and before the mention of the medal type and its illustration in Gaetanis’ Museum Mazzuchellianum of 1761. Per Philip Attwood, Keeper of Coins and Medals at the British

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the prototypical likeness of Raphael while the reverse features an image of Diana Polymastes with the Latin inscription quoting Bembo’s two lines. The reuse of the distich in the medal as well as in the prints demonstrates that the couplet had

Figure 2.12: Medal Dedicated to Raphael, bronze, before 1761, 6.9 cm. London, British Museum, object number G3,IP.940. Photo: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

firmly attached itself to Raphael’s likeness as the artist’s axiom, and that the iconography of Diana had become his attribute.97 This importance is reiterated by the medal’s appearance on the frontispiece of Comolli’s 1790 Vita (Figure 2.13).98 The portrait type can also be found on the frontispiece for Bellori’s Descrizione designed by Maratti, where the memorial-like festoons reference classical

Museum in 2011, see Gaetanis, Museum Mazzuchellianum, 10–11, and image plate LII (which I have not had access). For the museum entry, see Tamara Smithers, “Medal Dedicated to Raphael,” The British Museum, 2011, http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/ collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=3386719&partId=1. I thank Mr. Attwood for this reference plus the following information: Trésor numismatique et de glyptiqut contains an entry on a copy in Vienna, possibly now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Another copy, as mentioned by Gaetanis, also exists in the Musei Civici in Brescia. 97 Ost, “Ein Ruhmesblatt,” 293. 98 Angelo Comolli, Vita inedita di Raffaello da Urbino. Rome: Salvioni, 1790. An inscription on the Comolli image notes that the medal was in the Museo Casali in Rome at the time. The image is also reproduced as a lithograph by Friedrich Rehberg from 1824, where it is enclosed within a laudatory laurel wreath. On this, see Schröter, “Raffael-Kult,” 388–89. For more on the medal’s use by Commoli and bibliography, see Stefano Onofro, “L’abate Angelo Comolli (1760–1794) e il confronto Raffaello‐Dürer,” INTRECCI d’arte 1 (2012): 65–80, who cites Smithers, “Medal Dedicated to Raphael,” from 2011, which pointed the author to the bibliography on the topic of Nature. At the time of Onofro’s essay publication, I had yet published my 2012 dissertation “Memorializing the Masters,” which also discusses the theme in relation to Zuccaro and Maratti’s drawings.

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Figure 2.13: Angelo Comolli, frontispiece to Vita inedita di Raffaello da Urbino, illustrata con note da Angelo Comolli, etching, 1790. Photo: Author. Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.

funerary motifs, as if the portrait were a tomb effigy (Figure 2.14). This is similar to the imagery in Vasari’s second Vite as well as his Libro de’ Disegni.99 Bellori systematized his theory of classicism in his lectures given at the Accademia di San Luca under the presidency of Maratti during the late Seicento. By voicing his views of art, Bellori concretized his idea of the artist’s role and his relation to Nature. So, in a way, Bellori, not just Maratti, believed he was continuing Raphael’s legacy.

99 See Bellori, Descrizione delle immagini dipinte da Raffaelle d’ Urbino. For the portrait type, see Pope-Hennessy, Raphael, 9–10. Maratti’s design was reprinted by Karl Frey in the early eighteenth century, further illustrating the international popularity of Raphael. I would like to thank Helena Wright for drawing my attention to this copy by Frey (Johann Jakob); a copy is held in the graphic Arts Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (museum number GA 21629). For discussion of the festoon motif used by Vasari, see Joan Stack, “Artists into Heroes: The Commemoration of Artists in the Art of Giorgio Vasari,” in Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art, edited by Mary Rogers (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 163–75.

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Figure 2.14: Designed by Carlo Maratti, etching by Jakob Frey, Portrait of Raphael, published in Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Descrizione delle immagini dipinte da Raffaelle d’Urbino nel Palazzo vaticano, e nella Farnesina alla Lungara: con alcuni ragionamenti in onore delle sue opere, e della pittura, e scultura / di Gio. Pietro Bellori. In questa nuova edizione accresciuta anche della vita del medesimo Raffaelle / descritta da Giorgio Vasari, 1751 (originally in 1695). Photo: Author. Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.

For Maratti, who achieved great fame in his own time, connecting to Raphael was personal and a driving factor in his efforts as an artist and as principe of the Accademia di San Luca, of which he was bestowed the unprecedented title of principe for life during his third term. Emulating Raphael’s classical style, restoring his frescos, and renovating his tomb, validated his connection and status as continuing the legacy set forth by Raphael. Maratti, who also collected Raphael’s artwork, was accused of going so far as to steal Raphael’s skull.100 100 On Maratti’s art collection, see Ost, “Ein Ruhmesblatt,” 284, who on 295 n. 19 cites Melchior Missirini, Memorie per servire alla storia della Romana Accademia di S. Luca (Roma: De Romanis, 1823), 161–62. On Maratti and the skull, Loh, Still Lives, 211 cites “Discovery of the Remains of Raffaelle,” 511.

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Figure 2.15: Hugh William Williams, Skull of Raphael exhibited at the Accademia di San Luca, etched by W.D. Lizars published in the The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction: Volume XXIII, May 1834.

In short, the Accademia di San Luca had come to believe it was in possession of Raphael’s skull, which it kept in a glass case wreathed with laurel (Figure 2.15).101 Members lined up each year on the feast day of St. Luke, the patron saint of painters, to ceremoniously touch their brushes to it, as if the remains held some

101 Due to interest in phrenology at the time, the collection and display of skulls, and casts of skulls, was in fashion, and not unique to the case of Raphael. For example, Correggio’s skull was placed on display in Modena. See Christine Hübner, “‘Die Exuvien einer der schönsten Menschen, in jedem Sinne’: Die Schädel Raffaels zwischen Reliquienkult und Anthropologie,” In Sterbliche Götter: Raffael und Dürer in der Kunst der deustschen Romantik, ed. Michael Thimann (Göttingen: Georg-August-Universität, 2015), 74. This is the most thorough study on Raphael’s skull. See also Genovese, La Tomba del Divino Raffaello, 133–54, published in the same year. For bibliography and discussion on Raphael’s skull and in the broader context of the cult of the artist and collection of “art relics,” see Smithers, The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming).

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sort of miraculous painting power.102 Grand Tourist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had a plaster cast made to proudly take back with him to Weimar.103 Eventually, a debate ensued – of whether the Accademia had Raphael’s skull (in their offices) or the Virtuosi did (buried behind the Madonna del Sasso in the Pantheon), resulting in sensational gossip far and wide from art affiliates to popular culture enthusiasts.104 A satirical poem by G. G. Belli sung, “It’s a Raphael, it’s not a Raphael.”105 On September 14, 1833, the grave was opened.106 “Here is the head!,” architect Gaspare Salvi exclaimed, trembling with emotion.107 The crowd gasped. Some cried tears of joy.108 How “miraculous” the finding of the “immortal”

102 David Alan Brown and Jane Van Nimmen, Raphael & the Beautiful Banker: The Story of the Bindo Altoviti Portrait (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 113, cited from M. Quatremère De Quincy, Histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de Raphaël (Paris: Librairie de Charles Gosselin, 1824), 392–93. Editions were also published in 1833 and again in 1835 after the opening of the tomb. 103 Brown and Van Nimmen, Raphael & the Beautiful Banker, 112, according to Pierre-Jean David d’Angers. 104 There was also a debate on whether or not he was actually buried in the Pantheon. See Smithers, “Memorializing the Masters,” 202–4, and The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). See also Brown and Van Nimmen, Raphael & the Beautiful Banker, 112 for more detail. Apparently, a document had been found in 1831 that disproved the theory that the skull in possession of the Academy was Raphael’s. On this, see France Nerlich, “Raffaels heilige Reliquie: Überlegungen zu einem kunshistorischen Ereignis,” in Raffael als Paradigma. Rezeption, Imagination und Kult im 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Gilbert Hess, Elena Agazzi, and Elisabeth Décultot (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 48, who refers the reader to Friedrich Overbeck’s letter to Philipp Veit on October 18, 1833. See Johan David Passavant, Rafael von Urbino und sein Vater Giovanni Santi (Paris: Brockhaus, 1860), vol. 1, 563, for the debate over where Raphael was buried. 105 Brown and Van Nimmen, Raphael & the Beautiful Banker, 212 n. 29 cited from Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, Poesie Romanesche, edited by Roberto Vighi (Rome: Liberia dello Stato, 1989–1990), vol. 5, no. 110, 70–71: “é Rraffaelle: nun é Rraffaelle,” written after the affair despite that Belli did not attend the opening. Nonetheless, he did not miss the opportunity to comment upon the silliness of the opening, which apparently included this chant from the crowd. 106 Nerlich’s essay “Raffaels heilige Reliquie” is the most thorough study on the exhumation of Raphael’s skeleton and the surrounding events, consulting over thirty sources from the nineteenth century that discuss the opening. See also Genovese, La Tomba del Divino Raffaello, 91–116. For the present author’s discussions, see Smithers, “Memorializing the Masters,” 99–204, and for extended conversations and additional bibliography, The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming). 107 Pietro Odescalchi, Istoria del ritrovamento delle spoglie mortali di Raffaello Sanzio (Rome: Nabu Press, 1836), 15: “Ecco il capo!” See also Brown and Van Nimmen, Raphael & the Beautiful Banker, 113, and 212 n. 29. 108 Loh, Still Lives, 211 and 262 n. 157, cited from Carlo Falconieri, Memoria intorno il rinvenimento delle Ossa di Raffaello Sanzio: con breve appendice sulla di lui vita (Rome: Nabu Press, 1833), 11: “un lacrimar di gioja.”

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Raphael was!109 Attendees rushed inward to get a glimpse, and to touch and kiss his bones, as if he really were a saint. Salvi apparently ran his fingers along Raphael’s teeth!110 Before reinterment, plaster casts – relics for display in the Virtuosi’s offices – were made of his skull as well as larynx and right hand; until recently, the former was still encased in the dusty old offices behind the Pantheon’s grand pediment. A copy of the larynx and skull are currently on display at the Raphael house museum in Urbino where the artist was born.111 For those who attended the opening, it was deemed a “sacred day for the arts.”112 Several artists documented various phases of the event in visual form, some of which included portraits of attendees.113 Prints of the occasion, along with medals, and later publications written by eyewitnesses, quickly circulated around the world, allowing the event in Rome to become universal.114 Among these was a simple linear image published by Carlo Fea showing the most incredible aspect: Raphael’s skeleton was left on open display similar to that of a holy figure, causing quite a stir of emotion and excitement (Figure 2.16). Viewing the artist’s exposed remains – available to the public for six days – certainly would have been an exhilarating affair, and a crowded one: three thousand entry tickets

109 Odescalchi, Ossa di Raffaello Sanzio, 14: “miracolose.” Odescalchi repeatedly refers to Raphael as immortal. First published in 1833. I thank the director of the Biblioteca Hertziana in Rome for allowing this source to be scanned for my use in June 2013. 110 Odescalchi, Ossa di Raffaello Sanzio, 11: “a toccarli, e perfino a baciarli.” For Salvi’s interaction, see 15, and Brown and Van Nimmen, Raphael & the Beautiful Banker, 133 and 211 n. 24. 111 I would like to thank Vitaliano Tiberia for a tour of the old Virtuosi Pantheon offices in June 2013, when I was told that the location of the skull was unknown. In February 2020, per several email exchanges with the secretary of the Virtuosi, I was informed that the gesso skull owned by the Virtuosi was under restoration for the “Raphael Year.” The casts of Raphael's skull and the hand have the same Virtuosi inventory number; see Anna Lisa Genovese, “I Virtuosi e Raffaello nell'Ottocento,” in La collezione della Pontificia Insigne Accademia di Belle Arti e Lettere dei virtuosi al Pantheon: dipinti e sculture, ed. Vitaliano Tiberia, Adriana Capriotti, and Paolo Castellani, 116–26 (Bologna: Scripta Manent edizioni, 2016), 116 and 121 inv. 212. Hübner, “Die Schädel Raffaels,” 87 relays that the “precious relic” was transferred from Rome on the day before Raphael's birth in 1870 to the Palazzo Ducale, where the newly established Accademia Raffaello in Urbino was based. See Smithers, The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo (forthcoming), for further discussion and bibliography. 112 Nerlich, “Raffaels heilige Reliquie,” 48 cited from Odescalchi, Ossa di Raffaello Sanzio, S. 12f. 113 For a full discussion, see Genovese, La Tomba del Divino Raffaello, 103–116, who provides illustrations of these images, and Nerlich, “Raffaels heilige Reliquie,” 62–67. 114 Nerlich, “Raffaels heilige Reliquie,” 49, and 62–63. Camuccini retained official rights to draw the skeleton. These were reproduced as lithographs by Giambattista Borani. For the debate on the “Italian monopoly” on producing images, see 70–73. As mentioned, above, medals were also issued.

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Figure 2.16: Image of Raphael’s open grave published in Carlo Fea, Per la invenzione segurta del sepolcro di Raffaele Sanzio da Urbino nel Pantheon di M. Agrippa in settembre e ottobre del 1833 / compendio di storia e di reflessioni dell’avvocato Carlo Fea, 1833. Photo: Author. Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.

were sold.115 One observer gushed to a friend in a letter, “I have peered into Raphael’s open grave . . . my soul is filled to such an extent . . . How a shiver came over us as the remains of the master laid there uncovered.”116 Thrilling visits to his grave were nothing new, of course, since his memorial had become a destination for sightseers of the city soon after its erection. Domenico di Orazio Alfani, writing half a century after the artist’s death, boasted that he saw “the tomb of the most famous painter and architect Raphael.”117

115 Schröter, “Raffael-Kult,” 381, cited in H. Schaffhausen, Der Schädel Raphaels. Zur 400jährigen Geburtstagsfeier Raphael Santi’s (Bonn: Max Cohen and Sohn, 1883), 6. 116 Schröter, “Raffael-Kult,” 380. Written by Johann Friedrich Overbeck to Philipp Veit, director of the Städelschen Art Institute and member of the Accademia di San Luca, cited in Passavant, Rafael von Urbino, vol. 1, 565. 117 Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, vol. 2, 1256, document 1576–84/1.

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Raphael was reburied with a second funeral held at midnight on October 18, 1833. For Friedrich Overbeck, a German artist who attended, it was “unforgettable,” so surreal that it seemed as if it were a dream.118 France Nerlich observes that in Overbeck’s self-identified mystical transfiguration, Raphael took on the role of the prophet for him. Unfortunately, regarding Raphael’s tomb, what the present-day visitor now sees is mostly the result of the 1911 restoration by Antonio Muñoz, who tore down the altar setting venerating the Madonna and Child and exposed the ancient sarcophagus.119 As celebrations for Raphael took place at the site in 1920, 2020, despite its challenges, brought many tourists. In memoriam, Italy placed a rose at Raphael’s grave for each day during the five hundredth anniversary year of his death while open (Figure 2.17).120 Truly Raphael’s “second life” – his fame – is undeniably long-lasting.121 In closing, the artistic apotheosis of Raphael was centered on the celebration of his status as the founder of a new type of art in Rome, one rooted in surpassing Nature. Discourse about how Raphael’s art was better than Nature’s creations positioned him as divine-like in the eyes of his hagiographic followers. His artwork served as the ultimate prototype for perfection (and so was his skull, apparently,

118 Nerlich, “Raffaels heilige Reliquie,” 75 cited in a letter to Overbeck’s sister Lotte Leithoff the next day Margaret Howitt, Friedrich Overbeck. Sein Leben und Schaffen nach seinen Briefen und andern Documenten des handschriftlichen Nachlasses (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1886), 561: “Nicht wahr, da wirst Du glauben, daß entweder ich träume indem ich dies schreibe, oder Du indem Du es liesest? Und doch ist es buchstäbliche Wahrheit . . .. Und ebenso habe ich die unvergessliche Freude gehabt der feierlichen Wiederbestattung . . . gestern Abend beizuwohnen.” 119 Buddensieg, “Raphael’s Tomb,” 18 n. 35. See also Muñoz, La tomba di Raffaello. Attempts were made in 1933 to rectify the 1911 demolition by the architect Alberto Terenzio. On this, see Genovese, “L’effigie di Raffaello nelle medaglie,” 284. See Faietti and Lanfranconi, Raffaello 1520–1483, 60–61 for an image of the 7.7 meters tall facsimile displayed in the “Raffaelle 1520–1483” exhibition intended to show the tomb without its nineteenth-century changes. On the making of the model, see “The Tomb of Raphael in the Pantheon,” Factum Arte, accessed June 22, 2020, https://www.factum-arte.com/pag/1578/the-tomb-of-raphael-in -the-pantheon. For changes to the tomb during the modern era, see also Genovese, La Tomba del Divino Raffaello, 117–32. 120 The Pantheon was closed due to the COVID-19 shutdown from March 8 to June 9, 2020 and again from November 5, 2020 through February 1, 2021. 121 The day after Raphael died, Pandolfo Pico della Mirandola wrote: “His second life – his fame – will be subject neither to time nor death; it will endure forever” cited in Eugene Müntz, Raphael: His Life, Work, and Times, translated by Walter Armstrong (Boston: Longwood Press, 1977), 498. Müntz provides a translation of this letter cited in the Gazzette des Beaux-Arts (1872), 364. Della Mirandola’s letter is dated April 7, 1520. See also Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, vol. 1, 575, document 1520/17, for the full original text in Italian, which includes the quoted phrase: “ma seconda, ch’è quella de la Fama, la quale non è subietta a Tempo, nè a Morte, sera perpetua.”

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Figure 2.17: Rose left at Raphael’s grave, a daily ritual by the Italian state for the year 2020 (with exception of the COVID-related closures from March 8 to June 9 and again November 5 through the end of the year of 2020). Pantheon, Rome. Photo: Author.

exalted for its “ideality” and “harmonious” proportions).122 He not only exemplified success as an artist, but he also embodied the ideal courtier, as outlined in Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, moving in and out of noble circles with utmost ease. Raphael demonstrated the highly sought-after quality of sprezzatura on all fronts, artistic and social. And lest one forget that when he died in 1520, he held the esteemed positions of head of Roman antiquities and director of the fabric of St. Peter’s Basilica. Only with consideration of all of the factors that attributed to his renown – the imitation of his style, his business acumen, and his interest in promoting artistic authorship – can one understand the circumstances behind Raphael’s incredible rise to fame during his lifetime, which made his death all the more difficult for his followers and friends. Those who knew him well lamented his loss long after his death. Castiglione wrote to his mother Aloisia in Mantua three months after the artist died, bemoaning that “Rome is not the same without Raphael.”123 Undeniably, it never would be, especially in regard to artistic admiration of the Urbinate, “Saint Raphael.” 122 Geo Combe, “Lectures on Phrenology,” Lecture no. VI. Southern Literary Messenger 5, no. 11 (November 1839): 767, and Schaafhausen, Der Schädel Raphaels, 3. 123 Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, vol. 1, 608, document 1520/51, for the letter dated July 20, 1520 from Castiglione in Rome to his mother Aloisia in Mantua.

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Works Cited Archer, Madeline Cirillo. Italian Masters of the Sixteenth Century: Commentary. Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 28 (formerly vol. 15, pt. 1). New York, 1995. Barolsky, Paul. Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. Belli, Giuseppe Gioachino. Poesie Romanesche, edited by Roberto Vighi, 70–71, vol. 10. Rome: Liberia dello Stato, 1989–1990. Bellori, Giovanni Pietro. Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni. Edited by Evelina Borea. Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Bellori, Giovanni Pietro. Descrizione delle immagini dipinte da Raffaelle d’ Urbino. Rome: Komarek, 1695. Boorsch, Suzanne, Michal Lewis, and R. E. Lewis. The Engravings of Giorgio Ghisi. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1985. Boschino, Marco. La Carta del Navegar Pittoresco. Venice: li Baba, 1660. Britton, Piers D. G. “Raphael and the Bad Humours of Painters in Vasari’s ‘Lives of the Artists’.” Renaissance Studies, 22, no. 2 (April 2008): 174–96. Brooks, Julian. Taddeo and Federico Zuccaro: Artist-Brothers in Renaissance Rome. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007. Exhibition catalogue. Broun, Elizabeth. “The Portable Raphael.” In The Engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi, edited by Innis H. Shoemaker, 20–46. Lawrence, Kansas: Allen Press, 1981. Exhibition catalogue. Brown, David Alan, and Jane Van Nimmen. Raphael & the Beautiful Banker: The Story of the Bindo Altoviti Portrait. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Brown, David Allen. Raphael in America. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1983. Buddensieg, Tilmann. “Raphael’s Tomb.” In Sixteenth-Century Italian Art, edited and translated by Michael Cole, 10–24. Blackwell Anthologies in Art History 3. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Originally published as “Raphael’s Grab.” In Munuscula discipilorum. Kunsthistorischen Studien Hans Kaufmann zum 70. Geburtstag 1966. Edited by Tillmann Buddensieg and Matthias Winner, 45–70. Berlin 1968. Castagna, Luigi. “‘Ille hic est Raphael.’ L’epitafio latino per Raffaello al Pantheon.” Aevum 71 (1997): 617–29. Cennini, Cennino. The Craftsman’s Handbook: The Italian ‘Il Libro dell’arte’. New York: Dover, 1932. Chaperon, Nicholas. Sacrae Historiae Acta a Raphael Urbin in Vaticanis xystis ad picturae miraculum expressa. Paris: 1649. Combe, Geo. “Lectures on Phrenology.” Lecture no. VI. Southern Literary Messenger 5, no. 11 (November 1839): 766–770. Comolli, Angelo. Vita inedita di Raffaello da Urbino. Rome: Salvioni, 1790. Dempsey, Charles. “Raphael’s Legacy in Italy circa 1600.” In Late Raphael: Proceedings of the International Symposium, edited by Miguel Falomir, 156–159. Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2013. De Vecchi, Pierluigi. “Difficulty/Ease and Studied Casualness in the Work of Raphael.” In Raphael: Grace and Beauty, edited by Patrizia Nitti, Marc Restellini, and Claudio Strinati, 29.

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Di Macco, Michela. “Moments of Dialogue between Art History and Restoration in the Conservational Events of Some of Raphael’s Works.” In Raphael in Rome, edited by Antonio Paolucci, Barbara Agosti, and Silvia Ginzburg, 99–115. Vatican City: Edizioni Musei Vaticani, 2017. Ebert-Schifferer, Sybille. “Raffaello e le sue reincarnazioni.” Accademia Raffaello 1 (2006), 5–30. Ekserdjian, David. “Establishing a Norm for the High Renaissance: Raphael and the Dissemination of a Style.” In Modello, regola, ordine, edited by Hélène Miesse and Gianluca Valenti, 217–235. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2018. Emison, Patricia A. Creating the “Divine” Artist: From Dante to Michelangelo. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Emison, Patricia. “Raphael’s Multiples.” In The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, edited by Marcia B. Hall, 186–206. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Emison, Patricia A. The Italian Renaissance and Cultural Memory. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Faietti, Marzia and Matteo Lanfranconi, eds. Raffaello 1520–1483. New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2020. Exhibition catalogue. Falconieri, Carlo. Memoria intorno il rinvenimento delle Ossa di Raffaello Sanzio: con breve appendice sulla di lui vita. Rome: Nabu Press, 1833. Fedi, Roberto. “In Obitu Raphaelis,” In Studi di filologia e critica offerti dagli allievi a Lanfranco Caretti, 195–223. 2 vols. Roma: Salerno editrice, 1985. Ferrino-Pagden, Sylvia. “Post Festum: Die Raffael Forshung seit 1983.” Kunstchronik, no. 41 (1988): 194–217. Ferrino-Pagden, Sylvia. “From Cult Images to Cult of Images: The Case of Raphael’s Altarpieces.” In The Altarpiece in the Renaissance, edited by Peter Humfrey and Martin Kemp, 165–189. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Freedberg, Sydney J. Painting in the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961. Gahtan, Maia Wellington. “Epitaphs in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives.” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 5 (December 2011): 1–24. Garrard, Mary D. Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Genovese, Anna Lisa. “I Virtuosi e Raffaello nell’Ottocento.” In La collezione della Pontificia Insigne Accademia di Belle Arti e Lettere dei virtuosi al Pantheon: dipinti e sculture, edited by Vitaliano Tiberia, Adriana Capriotti, and Paolo Castellani, 116–26. Bologna: Scripta Manent edizioni, 2016. Genovese, Anna Lisa. La Tomba del divino Raffaello. Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2015. Genovese, Anna Lisa. “L’effigie di Raffaello nelle medaglie dei Virtuosi al Pantheon.” Annali della Pontificia insigne Accademia dei Virtuosi al Pantheon 16, (2016): 275–288. Ghezzi, Giuseppe. Le buone arti sempre più gloriose nel Campidoglio per la solenne Accademia del disegno nel dì 24. aprile mdcciv, presidente il Cavalier Carlo Maratti, celebre dipintore, Roma 1704, pp. 25–39. Goffen, Rona. “Raphael’s Designer Labels: From the Virgin Mary to La Fornarina.” Artibus et Historiae 24, no. 48 (2003): 123–142. Golzio, Vincenzo, and Pontificia Insigne Accademia Artistica dei Virtuosi al Pantheon. Raffaello nei documenti, nelle testimonianze dei contemporanei e nella letteratura del suo secolo. Vatican City: Gregg International Publishers, 1936.

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Goffen, Rona. “Signatures: Inscribing Identity in Italian Renaissance Art,” Viator 32 (2001): 303–370. Goffen, Rona “Raphael’s Designer Labels: From the Virgin Mary to La Fornarina.” Artibus et Historiae 24, no. 48 (2003): 123–142. Goldstein, Carl. “French Identity in the Realm of Raphael.” In Cambridge Companion to Raphael, edited by Marcia B. Hall, 237–260. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Hall, Marcia B. After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Hall, Marcia B. “Classicism, Mannerism, and the Relieflike Style.” In The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, edited by Marcia B. Hall, 223–36. New York: Cambridge University Press: 2005. Hall, Marcia B. “Introduction.” In The Cambridge Companion to Raphael. Edited by Marcia B. Hall, 1–12. New York: Cambridge University Press: 2005. Hoeniger, Cathleen. “Restoring Raphael.” In Cambridge Companion to Raphael, edited by Marcia B. Hall, 276–305. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Hoeniger, Cathleen. The Afterlife of Raphael’s Paintings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Howitt, Margaret. Friedrich Overbeck. Sein Leben und Schaffen nach seinen Briefen und andern Documenten des handschriftlichen Nachlasses. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1886. Hübner, Christine. “‘Die Exuvien einer der schönsten Menschen, in jedem Sinne’: Die Schädel Raffaels zwischen Reliquienkult und Anthropologie.” In Sterbliche Götter: Raffael und Dürer in der Kunst der deustschen Romantik, edited by Michael Thimann, 72–91. Göttingen: Georg-August-Universität, 2015. Exhibition catalogue. Kemp, Martin. “The ‘Super-Artist’ as Genius: The Sixteenth-Century View.” In Genius: The History of an Idea, edited by Penelope Murray, 32–53. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Kemp, Martin. Behind the Picture: Art and Evidence in the Italian Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Kim, David Young. The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance: Geography, Mobility, and Style. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. Kepetzis, Ekaterini. “Romantische Identitätsfindung: Zur Konstruktion des Idealkünstlers in den Viten Raffaels der Brüder Riepenhausen,” In Raffael als Paradigma Rezeption, Imagination und Kult im 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Gilbert Heß, Elena Agazzi, and Elisabeth Décultot, 3–46. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. Kline, Jonathan. “Christian Mysteries in the Italian Renaissance: Typology, Syncretism, and the Art of the Italian Renaissance.” PhD diss., Temple University, 2008. Kobi, Valérie. “Shaping Posterity: Ingres’s Violin.” In Object Fantasies: Experience & Creation, edited by Philippe Cordez, Romana Kaske, Julia Saviello, and Susanne Thürigen, 125–35. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2018. Landau, David, and Peter Parshall. The Renaissance Print 1470–1550. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Lanfranconi, Matteo. “Ille hic est Raphael. La Morte di Raffaello nelle parole dei contemporanei,” Raffaello 1520–1483, edited by Marzia Faietti and Matteo Lanfranconi, 43–53. New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2020. Exhibition catalogue. Loh, Maria. Still Lives: Death, Desire, and the Portrait of the Older Master. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

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Mantanari, Tomaso. “Bellori and Christina of Sweden.” In Art History in the Age of Bellori: Scholarship and Cultural Politics in seventeenth-century Rome, edited by Janis Bell and Thomas Willette, 94–126. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Mena Marqués, Manuela B. “Carlo Maratti e Raffaello.” In Raffaello e l’Europa. Atti del IV Corso internazionale di alta cultura, edited by Marcello Fagiolo and Maria Luisa Madonna, 543. Rome: Ist. Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, 1990. Missirini, Melchior. Memorie per servire alla storia della Romana Accademia di S. Luca. Roma: De Romanis, 1823. Muñoz, Antonio. La tomba di Raffaello nel Pantheon. Roma: Palombi, 1920. Müntz, Eugene. Raphael: His Life, Work, and Times. Translated by Walter Armstrong. Boston: Longwood Press, 1977. Nagel, Alexander, and Christopher S. Wood. Anachronic Renaissance. New York: Zone Books, 2010. Nelson, Jonathan K., and Richard J. Zeckhauser. “Raphael, Superstar, and His Extraordinary Prices,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 38, no. 1 (Fall 2018): 15–23. Nerlich, France. “Raffaels heilige Reliquie: Überlegungen zu einem kunshistorischen Ereignis.” In Raffael als Paradigma. Rezeption, Imagination und Kult im 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Gilbert Hess, Elena Agazzi, and Elisabeth Décultot, 47–81. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. Odescalchi, Pietro. Istoria del ritrovamento delle spoglie mortali di Raffaello Sanzio. Rome: Nabu Press, 1836. Orlandini, M. Volpi. “Annotazioni in margine alle tendenze classiciste e raffaellesche nella cultura romana tra 1607 e il 1672.” In Raffaello e l’Europa: Atti del IV Corso internazionale di alta cultura, 513–539. Roma: Ist. Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato-Archivi di Stato, 1992. Onofro, Stefano. “L’abate Angelo Comolli (1760–1794) e il confronto Raffaello‐Dürer,” INTRECCI d’arte 1 (2012): 65–80. Ost, Hans. “Ein Ruhmesblatt für Raphael bei Maratti und Mengs.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 27 (1965): 281–98. Pagliaroli, Stefano. “L’epitaffio di Pietro Bembo per Raffaello.” In Pietro Bembo e l’invenzione del Rinascimento, edited by Guido Beltramini, Davide Gasparotto and Adolfo Tura, 292–99. Marsilio Editore: Venice, 2013. Pasquali, Susanna. “From the Pantheon of Artists to the Pantheon of Illustrious Men: Raphael’s Tomb and Its Legacy.” In Pantheons: Transformations of a Monumental Idea, edited by Matthew Craske and Richard Wrigley, 35–55. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Passavant, J.D. Rafael von Urbino und sein Vater Giovanni Santi. 3 vols. Paris: Brockhaus, 1860. Penny, Nicholas. “Canonization and Its Consequences.” Keynote speech presented at the Reconsidering Raphael online conference, April 10, 2021. Pliny the Elder. The Natural History. Translated by John Bostock. London: Taylor and Francis, 1855. Penny, Nicholas. “Raphael in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 132, no. 5336 (July 1984): 486. Pestilli, Livio. “The Artist’s Signature as a Sign of Inauthenticity.” Notes in the History of Art 32, no. 3 (2013): 5–16. Plesters, Judith. “Technical Aspects of Some Paintings by Raphael in the National Gallery, London.” In The Princeton Raphael Symposium: Science in the Service of Art History, edited by John Shearman and Marcia B. Hall, 15–37. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

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Pon, Lisa. Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Pope-Hennessy, John. Raphael. London: Phaidon, 1970. Perini, Giovanna. “Raffaello e l’antico: alcune precisazioni.” Bollettino d’Arte 89–90 (1995): 111–44. Rijser, David. “The Practical Function of the High Renaissance Epigram: The Case of Raphael’s Grave.” In The Neo-Latin Epigram: A Learned and Witty Genre, edited by Susanna de Beer, 103–34. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2009. Rijser, David. Raphael’s Poetics: Art and Poetry in High Renaissance Rome. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012. Rosenberg, Martin. Raphael and France: The Artist as Paradigm and Symbol. University Park, Penn., The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995. Roskill, Mark, ed. and trans. Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento. New York: New York University Press, 1968. Robertson, Clare. “Raphael into the Baroque: Drawing in the Carracci Workshop.” In Raffael Als Zeichner: Die Beiträge des Frankfurter Kolloquiums, edited by Joachim Jacoby and Martin Sonnabend, 201–209. Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2015. Robertson, Clare. Rome 1600: The City and Visual Arts under Clement VIII. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015 Rosand, David. Painting in Cinquecento Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Ruda, Jeffrey. Fra Filippo Lippi: Life and Work with a Complete Catalogue. London: Phaidon Press, 1993. Ruland, Carl. The Works of Raphael Santi da Urbino as Represented in the Raphael Collection in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. London: Weimar, 1876. Santayana, George. “On the Epitaph of Raphael.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35, no. 1 (Autumn 1976): 5–6. Schaaffhausen, Hermann. Der Schädel Raphaels. Zur 400jährigen Geburtstagsfeier Raphael Santi’s. Bonn: Max Cohen and Sohn, 1883. Schiavo, Armando. La pontificia insignia Accademia artistica dei Virtuosi al Pantheon. Rome: Palombi, 1985. Schmälzle, Christoph. “Klassizismus zwischen Renaissance und Griechenkult: Raffael als Ideal.” In Raffael als Paradigma Rezeption, Imagination und Kult im 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Gilbert Heß, Elena Agazzi, and Elisabeth Décultot, 97–122. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012. Schröter, Elisabeth. “Raffael-Kult und Raffael-Forschung: Johann David Passavant und seine Raffael-Monographie im Kontext der Kunst und Kunstgeschichte.” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 26 (1990): 303–97. Scuderie del Quirinale. “Raffaello oltre la mostra.” Accessed June 25, 2020, https://www.scu deriequirinale.it/pagine/raffaello-oltre-la-mostra. “Self Portrait, Raffaello Sanzio,” Le Gallerie degli Uffizi, accessed June 23, 2020, https://www. uffizi.it/en/artworks/raffaello-autoritratto. Shearman, John. “Giorgio Vasari and the Paragons of Art.” In Vasari’s Florence: Artists and Literati at the Medicean Court, edited by Philip Jacks, 13–22. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Shearman, John. Raphael in Early Modern Sources (1483–1602). New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

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Shearman, John, and Marcia Hall, Eds. Princeton Raphael Symposium: Science in the Service of Art History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Smithers, Tamara. “Medal Dedicated to Raphael,” The British Museum, 2011, http://www.brit ishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId= 3386719&partId=1. Smithers, Tamara. “Memorializing the Masters: Renaissance Tombs Artistic Sainthood and Memorials as a Second Life and the Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo.” PhD diss., Temple University, 2012. Smithers, Tamara. The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo: Artistic Sainthood and Memorials as a Second Life. Routledge Publishing, forthcoming. Sohm, Philip. Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Sonnenburg, Herbertus von. “The Examination of Raphael’s Paintings in Munich.” In Princeton Raphael Symposium: Science in the Service of Art History, edited by John Shearman and Marcia B. Hall, 65–78. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Sparti, Donatella Livia. “Giovan Pietro Bellori and Annibale Carracci’s Self-Portraits. From the “Vite” to the Artist’s Funerary Monument.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 45 (2001): 79–83. Stack, Joan. “Artists into Heroes: The Commemoration of Artists in the Art of Giorgio Vasari.” In Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art, edited by Mary Rogers, 163–75. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. Talvacchia, Bette. “Raphael’s Workshop and the Development of a Managerial Style.” In The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, edited by Marcia B. Hall, 167–85. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Tiberia, Vitaliano. “Passato e presente del più antico sodalizio romano di artisti.” In I Virtuosi al Pantheon: 1700/1758, edited by Giuseppe Bonaccorso and Tommao Manfredi, XI–XXVI. Rome: Nuova Argos, 1998. “The Tomb of Raphael in the Pantheon,” Factum Arte. Accessed June 22, 2020, https://www. factum-arte.com/pag/1578/the-tomb-of-raphael-in-the-pantheon. Turner, Nicholas. Florentine Drawings of the Sixteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Vasari, Giorgio. La vita di Michelangelo nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568. Edited by Paola Barocchi. 3 vols. Milan: Ricciardi, 1962. Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568. Edited by Paola Barocchi and Rosanna Bettarini. 9 vols. Florence: Sansoni, 1966. Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Translated by Gaston Du.C. de Vere. 9 vols. London: Philip Lee Warner Publisher, 1912–14. Viljoen, Madeleine Claire. “Prints and False Antiquities in the Age of Raphael.” Print Quarterly 21, no. 3 (2004): 235–247. Visconti, L. Sulla istitutione della Insigne Artistica Congregazione del Virtuosi al Pantheon. Rome: Notizie Storiche, 1869. Waga, Halina. Vita nota e ignota dei Virtuosi al Pantheon: contribute alla storia della Pontificia Accademia Artitica dei Virtuosi al Pantheon. Rome: Arte della Stampa, 1992. Wallace, Catharine. “Cultivating Egyptian all’Antica Imagery as Emblems of Rome in the Sixteenth Century.” PhD diss., Temple University, 2020.

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Waźbiński, Zygmunt. “Annibale Carracci e l’Accademia di San Luca: a proposito di un monumento erretto in Pantheon nel 1674.” In Les Carrache et les décors profanes, 557–615. Collection de l’École Française de Rome. Rome: De Boccard, 1988. Weil-Garris, Kathleen. “La Morte di Raffaello e la Transfiguration.” In Raffaello e I’Europa, edited by Maria Luisa Madonna and Marcello Fagiolo, 177–87. Rome: Istituto poligrafico e zecca dello stato, 1990. Willever, Suzanne. “Raphael’s Galatea and the Villa Farnesina: Going Viral in Text, Paint, and Print in the Sixteenth Century.” PhD diss., Temple University, 2020. Williams, Robert. Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1997. Williams, Robert. Raphael and the Redefinition of Art in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Winner, Matthias. “Poussins Selbstbildnis von 1649.” In “Il se rendit en Italie”: études offertes à André Chastel, edited by Giuliano Briganti, 371–402. Rome: Edizioni dell’ElefanteFlammarion, 1987. Winner, Matthias. “‘. . . una certa idea’: Maratta zitiert einen Brief Raffaels in einer Zeichnung.” In Der Künstler über sich in seinem Werk: internationales Symposium der Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rom 1989, edited by Matthias Winner, 511–70. Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1992. Wittkower, Rudolf and Margot Wittkower. The Divine Michelangelo: The Florentine Academy’s Homage on His Death in 1564. London: Phaidon, 1964. Woods-Marsden, Joanna. Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Wolk-Simon, Linda. “All in the Family: Raphael’s Workshop and the Business of Art.” Presented at the Reconsidering Raphael on-line conference, April 9, 2021.

Ian Verstegen

Chapter 3 In the Sistine Chapel with Marcia and Leo Over the years, Marcia Hall and Leo Steinberg traded interpretations of two of the most important artistic monuments in western art, both by Michelangelo: the Ceiling and the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. Their differing views encompass the best readings of these two artistic commissions but also exemplify two different approaches. Each embodies what could be called “bottom up” (Hall) and “top down” (Steinberg) approaches to historical interpretation. The former relies on an exhaustive formal understanding of the work of art, upon which iconological ideas must stand; but the latter departs from a brilliant understanding of historical theology to find surprising applications in works of art. In a loose sense, each embodies the opposition between what I will call the “Vienna” (Riegl, Dvorak, Wilde) and “Hamburg” (Warburg, Saxl, Panofsky) approaches, the one prioritizing the image (Vienna), the other the text (Hamburg). To oversimplify, the Viennese formalist uses fundamental formal realities to resist textual idiosyncrasies, whereas the Hamburg iconologist prioritizes the authority of important (or contradiction-resolving) texts. As an example of the first approach, take John Shearman’s discussion of the iconographic significance of the unnatural color of Michelangelo’s Ancestors of Christ in the lunettes of the Sistine Chapel.1 Before resorting to ulterior meanings, Shearman points to the prevailing low lighting conditions in such contre jour settings, which require a heightened palette only visible as such with artificial lighting. A more Hamburg approach is taken by E. H. Gombrich in his short note identifying the textual source of Poussin’s Landscape with the Blind Orion (1658, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).2 It depicts the blind 1 John Shearman, “The Function of Michelangelo’s Colour,” in The Sistine Ceiling: A Glorious Restoration, ed. by Carlo Pietrangeli (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 80–89; cf. Ian Verstegen, “John White’s and John Shearman’s Viennese Historical Method,” Journal of Art Historiography 1 (2010): 1–IV/1. 2 E. H. Gombrich, “The Subject of Poussin’s Orion,” in Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972), 119–22; c.f. David Carrier, “Blindness and the Representation of Desire,” in Poussin’s Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology (University Park: Penn State University, 1993), 105–44. Personal Note: It has been my deepest honor to be Marcia Hall’s student and to have been a student and colleague witness to her practice of art history. I beg her patience for this essay, which is “the other” kind of art history that I do and may not interest her. Larry Silver was very kind to read this essay and suggest many important improvements, for which I am very grateful. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-004

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giant Orion, carrying Cedalion. This myth is known from Lucian, but in addition the picture includes strange details: Hephaestus at his feet and Diana in the clouds. Gombrich finds a complete explanation for the unusual painting in Natalis Comes’ Mythologia. Gombrich’s reading is successful because it accounts for too many common features to be wrong, yet there is nothing necessary about the link between picture and text. Conversely, Shearman’s theory is completely rational, but it lacks the specificity of an iconographic source; it could be true of all such chapels.

Figure 3.1: Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam (detail), Sistine Chapel, Vatican. Photo: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

An example of this opposition clearly emerges in Hall and Steinberg’s brief clash over the identification of the female figure under God the Father’s arm in the Creation of Adam (Figure 3.1).3 Steinberg identified her as Eve, whereas Hall argued

3 Leo Steinberg, “Who’s Who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam: A Chronology of the Picture’s Reluctant Self-Revelation,” Art Bulletin 74 (1992): 552–66; supporting his interpretation is William M. Jensen, “Who’s Missing from Steinberg’s ‘Who’s Who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam,’” in Interpreting Christian Art, ed. by Mikael Parsons and Heidi Hornik-Parsons (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2003), 107–37. For Hall’s interpretation, see Marcia Hall, “Who’s Who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam,” Art Bulletin 125 (1993): 340; Hall repeated the argument

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for a minority but compelling interpretation of the figure as Divine Wisdom. Impatient with Steinberg’s failure to take this interpretation seriously, Hall asked, “Whatever happened to the old rule, taught in graduate school a generation ago, that an iconographical interpretation should be based on a text and backed up by a source known to have currency at the time the image was created?” This seemingly conservative response contrasts two approaches to works of art: a potentially correct but unprovable interpretation versus one that is plausible and if wrong, at least “correct” by analogy with other contemporary examples. Because Steinberg flouted his way to construct a convincing argument, he in a sense had no methodology. Indeed, many would agree that Steinberg is inimitable. Consequently, Steinberg occupies an ambivalent position within Renaissance studies. For example, while Marcia Hall’s interpretation of the Last Judgment (Figure 3.2) has become all but ubiquitous, Steinberg’s study lacks sympathetic readers, with some recent exceptions.4 One can speculate about Steinberg’s status as a compelling figure, often venerated, but ultimately isolated, whom one cannot follow.5 This essay will isolate that property – the bold

of Rudolf Kuhn, Michelangelo: Die sixtinische Decke. Beiträge über ihre Quellen und zu ihrer Auslegung (Berlin-New York: de Gruyter, 1975). She was preceded in pressing the issue by Maria Rzepinska who published in Polish: “Ewa, Szechina czy Sophia? Przycznek do interpretacji freskow sykstynskich Michala Aniola,” Fermentum massae mundi: Jacakowi Wozniakowskiemu w siedemdziesiata rocznice urodzin, ed. by N. Cieslinska and P. Ruszinski (Warsaw: Agora, 1990), 414–22, and appearing later as Maria Rzepinska, “The Divine Wisdom of Michelangelo in the Creation of Adam,” Artibus et historiae 15 (1994): 181–87. For a defense of the interpretation, see Patricia Trutty-Coohil, “The Wisdom of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam,” Does the World Exist? Plurisignifcant Ciphering of Reality, edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004, 421–34. 4 For examples of support of Hall’s interpretation, see Charles Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 399; Daniela Bohde, “Skin and the Search for the Interior,” in Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, ed. by Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 10–47; Raymond Waddington, “Aretino, Titian, and ‘La Humanita di Cristo,’” in Forms of Faith in Sixteenth-Century Italy, ed. by Abigail Brundin and Matthew Treherne (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 171–98; Kim Butler, “The Immaculate Body in the Sistine Ceiling,” Art History 32 (2009): 250–89. Hall (2005) herself notes that her interpretation has been endorsed by John O’Malley, “The Theology behind Michelangelo’s Ceiling,” in The Sistine Chapel. The Art, the History, and the Restoration, ed. by C. Pietrangeli (New York: Harmony, 1986), 92–148; Loren Partridge, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: An Interpretation,” in The Last Judgment: A Glorious Restoration, ed. by Sandro Chierici (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), 8–154; Paul Joannides, Michelangelo and His Influence: Drawings from Windsor Castle (Washington and London: National Gallery of Art and Lund Humphries Publishers, 1996). 5 See the interesting discussion in James Elkins and Robert Williams, eds., Renaissance Theory (New York: Routledge, 2008), 246–49.

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Figure 3.2: Michelangelo, The Last Judgment, Sistine Chapel, Vatican. Photo: Scala / Art Resource, NY.

interpretation – that is so fascinating to readers as well as the other elements that still make Hall’s own interpretation so fundamental or, at least, convincing. To analyze both authors according to basic categories of social scientific

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explanation,6 will require deconstructive analysis in order to achieve a reflexive awareness of why we prefer one interpretation over another. Steinberg and Hall reveal that the iconological approach is better suited for portable easel paintings with private symbolism, whereas the formal approach works best with works in situ, which demand a localized observer to figure in the artistic solution. In this sense, Hall’s approach is more suited, at least superficially, to a large fresco like the Sistine Chapel. What we find, however, is that while Hall is a good follower of Riegl, Steinberg, in effect, reverses the stakes of Hamburg iconology. He exchanges visual motifs for texts and thus appears to visually out-analyze the formalist using forms to resolve Warburg-style visual idiosyncrasies. Thus, his “line of fate” (Figure 3.3) will be seen to resemble Gombrich’s text: it presents a visual element that seems to wrap up numerous details. Visual analysis functions here like the iconologist’s Ur-text.

Figure 3.3: Michelangelo, The Last Judgment with “line of fate” (after Steinberg).

6 I have reviewed the philosophy of social science and historiography in A Realist Theory of Art History (London: Routledge, 2013) and papers on Gombrich and Sedlmayr.

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Faced with this situation, Hall ironically responds with basic iconographic realities (for example, her insistence of Augustinian theology – at least as a baseline – for interpreting the Sistine Ceiling). For structural reasons, therefore, Steinberg is less a formalist, as sometimes is claimed, even though methodologically he utilizes visual analysis extensively. This unsuspected turn of methodological events is essential for understanding their respective interpretations of monuments in the Sistine Chapel.

Basic Presuppositions of the Analysis This analysis makes a few assumptions. First, it is useful to conceive the relationship between a work of art and the conditions surrounding it as a series of stratified levels of reality with interpretive consequences. Thus, to resume the Shearman example, the interface of a fresco artist with certain kinds of chapel configurations and lighting conditions is something shared by all such fresco artists working in the same manner. Its “meaning” is fundamental, based on the nature of the task. At an opposite extreme would be the conditions around the Poussin example. Comes’ text would have been known within a small circle of humanists, who have developed a closed series of symbols and meanings that need not be understood by the mass of general viewers of paintings. The meaning developed by such a group of humanists who have given a charge to an artist will presume basic ideas about the nature of the task (oil or fresco painting), in addition to common cultural knowledge about mythology or religion. But whatever more specific meanings might develop need only be relevant to that very group. Here we can begin to see how interpretive foundations develop within this stratified model. Color is common to all chapels. Iconography is only common to similar chapels with similar dedications. A work commissioned and intended to be seen only or chiefly by a small group of people could develop an even narrower meaning. In his review of Steinberg’s Michelangelo’s Last Paintings, E. H. Gombrich clearly laid out the methodological issue between over- and under-interpretation.7 Naturally, we want our explanations to be as simple as possible, without being too simple, to paraphrase Einstein. The more specific

7 Leo Steinberg, Michelangelo’s Last Paintings: The Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter in the Cappella Paolina (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); E. H. Gombrich, Reflections on the History of Art: Views and Reviews (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 86; c.f. Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation (New York: Cambridge

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an explanation, the more likely it can capture the complexity of the work, but with the risk, especially stressed by Gombrich, that an over-interpretation can make it impossible to understand a work in any new ways. Here it is useful to mention the intentional fallacy. According to this argument, advanced by William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, the stated intention of a work of art is not required to interpret it, and in fact can interfere with understanding it.8 Wimsatt and Beardsley were thinking especially of modern artists and poets, whose stated intentions can be misleading or even evasive about the work of art. Basic factors in art making overdetermine meaning, providing more secure interpretations. An intention, or in Renaissance art, a discovered iconographic program, can overturn all these facts against common sense, as we saw with Poussin above. One problem that the intentional fallacy reveals is that nothing necessarily binds formal structure to the intention/iconographic program. So, in addressing Hall and Steinberg we have to accept certain limitations about the formal meaning of the work and the stated meaning of the work. They may be in conflict. Both operate in the same way; they are translations of artistic messages into painted form. But they differ in the way in which we choose to reason about them. Because as stated all chapels have a similar configuration and the painter must deal with illumination, these insights will necessarily be more secure. A chapel has so many physical and conventional aspects that one could marshal many reasons why an individualized reading must be wrong that we would risk overturning it. A unique work with restricted iconographic models will be harder to find similar comparanda with which to reason. Even in the existence of an iconographic program, we can find that the two do not agree and we have to distinguish between the formal, presented meaning and the intended, non-presented meaning. Of course, this last model sounds a lot like the Sistine Chapel, a unique space with a unique function, if ever there was one. Even if a document exists (indicating intentionality of meaning), it cannot contradict the formal reality of the work; that is, it becomes true but trivial. Similarly, the formal configurations that Steinberg discovers may be true (and perhaps unprovable), but still trivial. Because Steinberg deals in speculative or extrapolated iconographic and formal meanings, he reduces the chances that either insight can be corroborated. This

University Press, 1992). Eco’s reference to Popper, Gombrich’s ally, points to an ethical mandate against “overinterpretation” of ethnicities, not deep beneath the surface of the text. 8 W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” Sewanee Review 54 (1946): 468–88. I am using this fallacy merely as a heuristic, agreeing with E. D. Hirsch that “Unless there is a powerful overriding value in disregarding an author’s intention (i.e., original meaning) we who interpret as a vocation should not disregard it.” See E. D. Hirsch, The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 10.

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speculation raises the question of their fruitfulness, if true, concerning single art works, but is impossible to prove or generalize to any other monuments. An iconographic reading can be correct, but the subject so obscure and made originally for a restricted audience so small that there may be no formal indications as to why it is correct. To put it another way, an artist like Taddeo Zuccaro entering the Sistine Chapel to draw might effectively miss the “documented” meaning that it putatively holds. And for the College of Cardinals in their most exclusive ceremonial space, the audience remains uniquely restricted.

Merciful Heresy? A second example to compare Hall and Steinberg is the Last Judgment. During the 1970s, many aspects of Renaissance art were based on the major interpretations by an expatriate Austro-Hungarian scholar, Charles De Tolnay. De Tolnay opined that the Last Judgment expresses penance for the Sack of Rome.9 This outlook explains the picture’s emphasis on judging and damning that would point to pessimism about life after the Sack of Rome. Thus, Christ was assumed to be actively damning, the Book of Life is being read, etc. In addition, Tolnay also gave a “mannerist” explanation of the fresco’s style. The muscled nudes, the lack of real space, perspective, etc., suggest a different mentality between the ceiling and the altar wall a generation later.10 This view was contested by both Steinberg and Hall, who wanted to take attention away from Christ’s active damning, but in very different ways.11 Essential here is how to interpret the so-called spirituali. Evidence confirms that in the 1530s Michelangelo was associated with the group inspired by the Spanish theologian Juan Valdes, which included Vittoria Colonna, the Cardinals Reginald Pole, Gaspare Contarini, and Giovanni Morone, and the Capuchin preacher Bernardino Ochino.12 Whether these figures are interpreted as religious moderates or

9 Charles De Tolnay, Michelangelo, vol. 5, The Final Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960). 10 See Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy: 1400–1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956). 11 Leo Steinberg, “Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ as Merciful Heresy,” Art in America 63 (1975): 49–63; “The Line of Fate in Michelangelo’s Painting,” in The Language of Images, ed. by W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980): 85–128; “A Corner of the Last Judgment,” Daedalus 109 (1980): 207–73. 12 On the spirituali, see Delio Cantimori, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento: Ricerche Storiche (Florence: Sansoni, 1939); Massimo Firpo, Tra alumbrados e ‘spirituali.’ Studi su Juan de Valdes

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representatives of Italian evangelism, whether their thought formed part of a general reform tendency, or was even openly sympathetic with Protestantism, has serious consequences for how we understand Michelangelo. While it is true that scholars have understood evangelism as a feature of Italian religious thought later into the sixteenth century than previously thought, they have also emphasized the anachronism of portraying its commitments as oppositional to Catholic orthodoxy, which was still fluid. For example, sympathy for justification by faith alone (sola fides) was widespread and was only condemned in 1547, after which most Catholics with the former sympathy accepted the pronouncement of the Council of Trent. Steinberg argued that Michelangelo’s omission of Purgatory and of a material Hell in the Last Judgment suggested that the artist did not believe in eternal damnation, and was sympathetic to Lutheran doctrines. For Steinberg, Michelangelo had shown that intercession was ineffective and that salvation was made possible by faith alone; those who are saved depend on conscience. In short, Michelangelo openly committed “merciful heresy” and promulgated Lutheranism in the first Chapel of Christendom. Steinberg argued that Michelangelo’s friends Vasari and Condivi used the trope of the angry Christ to hide the meaning of the fresco so that Michelangelo would escape censure. In a later elaboration of his argument, Steinberg argued that an unnoticed line significantly linked several elements: the crown of thorns in the upper left lunette, the figure of Christ, the head on St. Bartholomew’s skin, and finally Midas in the lower right corner. St. Bartholomew, he argued, stands midway on this “line of fate,” and serves to emblematize the role of the entire fresco (figure 3.3). One soul hangs in the balance: Bartholomew. The displayed skin, says Steinberg, held a hint of heresy, because the iconography of the saint holding his skin had been pioneered in the north. Noting that Michelangelo was called a “Lutheran” in 1549, Steinberg argues that Marcello Venusti (in his reduced copy of 1549, Capodimonte, Naples) dissembled the master’s features and conducted an “elaborate cover-up” and that Vasari “divulge[d] less than

e il valdesianesimo nella crisi religiosa del ‘500 italiano (Florence: Olschki, 1990); Paolo Simoncelli, Evangelismo religiosa e nicodemismo politico (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1979); and the biographies of the individual reformers. On Contarini, see Elisabeth Gleason, Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome and Reform (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993); Colonna, see Abigail Brundin, Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008); on Morone, see Adam Robinson, The Career of Cardinal Giovanni Morone (1509–1580): Between Council and Inquisition (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010); and on Pole, see Thomas Mayer, Reginald Pole, Prince and Prophet (New York: Cambridge University, 2000).

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he knew” in order to save Michelangelo’s reformist sympathies.13 In Steinberg’s account, much hangs on Don Miniato Pitti’s comment about Michelangelo’s “heresies,” among which is the discrepancy between the head and skin of Bartholomew. The fact that Michelangelo seemed to differentiate the two forcefully was significant for Steinberg, because it suggested a positive statement, confirming that the person of the skin (that is, Michelangelo, whose features appear on the skin) was not the person holding it. Steinberg had argued that the Last Judgment “embodied a heresy,” yet as Hall replied in her first article, this “implies a will on the artist’s part to flout the ecclesiastical establishment.”14 In a follow up article, Steinberg stated that he hadn’t actually called Michelangelo a heretic.15 As noted, scholars all agree that members of the Roman faith entertained ideas in the 1530s that would later be identified as reformist. If the argument emphasizes hints of doctrines that were largely irrelevant, the force of the accusation of heresy is diminished. Yet for Steinberg’s argument to work, Michelangelo has to be self-consciously and willfully pushing his sectarian beliefs – and to do so in the very core space of the Church. Ideas close to Steinberg’s have been revived by Massimo Firpo, in his study of Pontormo, and by Antonio and Maria Forcellino, and Ambra Moroncini, in their works on Michelangelo.16 While occasionally making direct reference to Steinberg’s visual arguments, they more often base a new emphasis on evangelism in Michelangelo’s artistic works in evidence from biography, theology, and poetry. Concerning the Last Judgment, Charles Dempsey points out that the possibility of heresy is denied even by one of Michelangelo’s harshest critics, Gilio.17 Gilio points out indications in the fresco of both prayer and good works. Rosaries indicate works, not solely faith. Loren Partridge also points to the appearance of John

13 Steinberg, “Line of Fate,” 424 (citing Giovanni Gaye. Carteggio inedito d’artisti dei secoli XIV, XV, XVI. Florence: Giuseppe Molini,1840, vol. 2, 500), and 426. 14 Marcia Hall, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: Resurrection of the Body and Predestination,” Art Bulletin 58 (1976): 85–92, 85. 15 Steinberg, “A Corner of the Last Judgment,” 251. 16 Massimo Firpo, Gli affreschi di Pontormo a San Lorenzo: Eresia, politico e cultura nella Firenze di Cosimo I (Turin: Einaudi, 1997); Antonio Forcellino, Michelangelo. Una vita inquieta (Bari: Laterza, 2005); Maria Forcellino, Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e gli “spirituali.” Religiosità e vita artistica a Roma, 1540–1550 (Rome: Viella, 2009); Ambra Moroncini, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: A Lutheran Belief?,” in Beyond Catholicism: Heresy, Mysticism, and Apocalypse in Italian Culture, ed. by Fabrizio De Donno and Simon Gilson (New York: Palgrave, 2013), 55–76. 17 Charles Dempsey, “Mythic Inventions in Counter-Reformation Painting,” in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, ed. by P. A. Ramsey (Binghamton, New York, 1982), 55–75; c.f. Stinger, Renaissance in Rome.

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the Baptist opposite Peter, suggesting both penitence and baptism (that is, sacraments).18 Ultimately, such arguments in relation to Steinberg become circular. The issue is precisely the freedom with which the artist could have worked, especially for such a commission and site. In any case, while Dempsey’s and Partridge’s criticism can be seen as crippling to Steinberg, more crucial is the rhetorical structure of his argument.

Constructing a Steinbergian Method Steinberg insisted on polysemy in works of early modern art, from Leonardo’s Last Supper to Borromini’s San Carlo.19 This argument formed part of his critique of traditional iconology, which he regarded as insensitive to visual factors. Perhaps in reorienting the study of early modern images, he would agree that he was seeking to overcome what philosopher David Carrier calls a humanistic assumption, that each work of art has a single, stable meaning.20 However, Steinberg claimed, like a good realist, that these very works themselves had not been understood properly, implying a lack of correspondence to reality. For example, in his discussion of the group in the Creation of Adam, the picture has a “reluctant self-revelation” to Steinberg. The meanings are present, but it has taken a bit of renegade thinking by Steinberg to recover it. Perhaps then he believes that polysemous objects are objectively polysemous. How Steinberg goes about discovering meanings, however, is unusual, because he adduces obscure formal characteristics to motivate his argument. Paul Joannides has called this method “associational formalism,” noting how Steinberg “proceeds analogically and metaphorically rather than literally, to the narrative emphases, theological statements, and private emotions that they embody.”21 Furthermore, Steinberg also presumes a very specific scenario of personal meaning being presented, attacked, and then obscured in a short range of years. Thus the significance of the head of Bartholomew is magnified by falling along the “line of

18 Partridge, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: An Interpretation,” xx. 19 This idea appears in “Leonardo’s Last Supper,” Art Quarterly 36 (1973): 297–410; “Guercino’s Saint Petronilla,” in Studies in Italian Art and Architecture, ed. by H. Millon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), 207–34; Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: A Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism (New York: Garland, 1977). 20 David Carrier, Principles of Art History Writing (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1991), 67–69. 21 Paul Joannides, review of Michelangelo’s Last Paintings, by Leo Steinberg, Burlington Magazine 118 (1976).

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fate,” running from the upper left-hand corner to Minos in the lower right-hand corner. Furthermore, taking Pitti as theologically definitive (that a saint cannot have different head and skin) he assumes that the fact that it was not recognized must be a cover-up by Venusti, Vasari, and others. This argumentative structure is both highly coincidental and strongly affirming of Michelangelo’s personal agency in the creation of the painting. The simplification of a corporately designed monument with rich Christian symbolism into the spontaneous act of a single individual is, with all due respect to Steinberg, not far from the popular press, Vatican tour guides, and sensationalizing works like The Da Vinci Code. Marc Gotlieb calls this last book “outsider art history,” In outsider art history, the researcher imagines him or herself to make not a trivial but a profound discovery – typically the exposing of a secret structure, symbol, a tomb, or an identity held to lie at the core of a work’s meaning . . . the secret is self-evident to all when at last laid bare. And yet until that moment, it lies buried or disguised, invisible to generations of professional art historians trapped within the orthodox boundaries of their disciplinary communities.22

What an artistic monument means is based on some arcane bit of evidence that wraps up a number of details together. Because the public is not conversant with the details of theology and iconography, which normally suffice for meaning, some seemingly irrelevant and personal significance brings the work to life. Thus, standing in the Sistine Chapel, the tour guide states that Michelangelo was angry at Aretino or Biagio and so depicted (the resurrected) Bartholomew or Minos, respectively, in their guises. So too, ardent in his would-be Lutheran beliefs, Michelangelo inserted these clues. Never mind the “stated” function of the work. It is tempting to link this imperative to some of Gombrich’s other observations on interpretation in general, especially in his well-known essay “Icones Symbolicae.”23 This temptation is particularly pronounced where he compares Aristotelian and (neo-) Platonic interpretation, the former based on resemblance and the latter on allegory. The Platonic interpretation is at root mystical, and has an accidental quality, hence, its allegorical nature. Gombrich doesn’t fail to link

22 Marc Gotlieb, “Our Monstrous Double: The Dream of Research in ‘Outsider Art History,”’ in What is Research in the Visual Arts? Obsession, Archive, Encounter, ed. by Michael Ann Holly and Marquard Smith (Williamstown, MA: Clark Art Institute, 2008), 86, 87. 23 E. H. Gombrich, “Icones Symbolicae: The Visual Image in Neo–Platonic Thought,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 11 (1948), 163–92; expanded in Symbolic Images (London: Phaidon, 1972). See further Eco’s comments on hermeticism in Interpretation and Overinterpretation, and Peter Struck, Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), on allegory.

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these interpretations to those of Freud as well. For example, Steinberg’s type of interpretation is largely Freudian in structure, in that surface manifestations (dreams, repressed content, etc.) conceal a deeper meaning that has to be discovered yet has no ostensible relationship to it. In making this distinction, Gombrich was seeking to remove himself from the hermetic arbitrariness of Panofsky’s method.24 The authorial positing of the reading in the absence of aspects of similarity or analogy disturbed Gombrich, and in this context Steinberg becomes a worthy successor to Panofsky. It is interesting to think through how this affects Steinberg’s “visual” method. If Panofskyan iconology cannot explain how a text is pictorialized, or what the logic of picturehood entails, perhaps Steinbergian iconology cannot explain how an image is theologized, how its forms would align with various doctrines. This condition would be true if, at heart, and like Panofsky, he really believes in the separation of form and content. Such an accusation would be laughable to describe the brave critic who once argued that the “eye is a part of the mind;” however, what one does not find are criteria to join verbal/cultural and visual logics.25 At this point it is perhaps germane to return to the earlier mention of sitespecifics. Steinberg, of course, was a pioneering discoverer of such effects, for example in his brilliant analysis of Caravaggio’s Cerasi chapel frescoes.26 But in relying on a six-foot facsimile of the altar wall, perhaps his site-specific sensitivities abandoned him, so that he treated the great wall as just another easel picture. It is extremely hard to imagine how one would negotiate a line of fate across that large expanse.27 That is a problem of making the big small. But conversely Steinberg faces the opposite problem, of making the small big, when close-up details like the way that God the Father touches the female child under his arms in the Creation of Adam – in Steinberg’s account a gesture with which a canon proffers the Eucharist wafer – must be read at a great distance from the ground. Qua fresco, that is, as a public monument, such potential personal symbolism is obliterated. More recent works on Michelangelo’s poetry have strengthened putative Lutheran themes in his personal religious conscience. For example, Ambra Marancini

24 For a discussion, see Richard Woodfield, “Gombrich and Panofsky on Iconology,” International Yearbook of Aesthetics 12 (2008): 151–64. 25 Leo Steinberg, “The Eye is a Part of the Mind,” Partisan Review 20, no. 2 (March/April 1953): 194–212. 26 Leo Steinberg, “Observations in the Cerasi Chapel,” Art Bulletin 41 (1957): 183–90. 27 For a critique of the concept of surface geometry, see James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 234.

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notes that in sympathy with Lutheran ideas Michelangelo, with his Bartholomew, could have equated nudity with sin, and shedding skin to shedding sin.28 Yet the relation between individual thematics and public art is precisely the issue. These themes have a personal significance, but do not seem to affect the meaning of the fresco. Steinberg’s heresy becomes a slippery matter. Do Steinberg’s ideas become mere personal symbolisms that are irrelevant to the consumption of the fresco? Dual meanings, one personal related to personal fallibility, and the other public and in that guise spontaneously translated into the general orthodoxy of Rome? Isn’t the figure of Paul, important for both Luther and the Pope, the key here? As Hall wrote in her original article, Michelangelo “shows himself to be constantly torn between his awareness of his own unworthiness and his hope of God’s grace. This duality between fear of damnation and hope of salvation is the essence of the scriptural message about the last day. Both are articulated: Matthew 24–25 and Revelation on the one hand; I Corinthians 15, I Thessalonians 4–5, Romans 8 on the other. This duality creates tension and it is this, I believe, that activates Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.”29

Resurrection Now we should explore the counter-position and also anatomize its argument. Marcia Hall in a number of writings shares with Steinberg a belief that the artist was turning away from damnation, but not for Lutheran reasons.30 She actually says that both Lutherans and Catholics were closely aligned on the issue of bodily resurrection.31 Theologians had already moved away from the neoplatonic notion of the incorruptibility of the soul toward a Christian view of the necessity of resurrection. Thus, like Steinberg, Hall argues that what is taking place is not “actively motivated by Christ.” However, her explanation focuses

28 Moroncini, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: A Lutheran Belief?” 29 Hall, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.” 30 Hall, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment”; After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy, 1520–1600 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 217–24; Michelangelo: The Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel (New York: Harry Abrams, 2002), 151–233; “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment as Resurrection of the Body: The Hidden Clue,” in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, ed. by Marcia Hall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 95–112; The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, el Greco, Caravaggio (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 97–115. 31 Hall, “Michelangelo's Last Judgment,” 88.

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not on heresy, but rather on different aspects of Christian doctrine that stress the bodily resurrection. In Hall’s original article, she noted her divergence from Steinberg with the idea that “the issue of heresy was not on people’s minds until the institution of the Inquisition in 1540, well after the fresco was conceived.”32 Charles Dempsey’s important discussion of Gilio included the various forms of heresy (discussed also by Gabriele Paleotti), and concluded that at most Michelangelo may have made a sin of error. More recent work on the spirituali surrounding Michelangelo puts into context the heterodoxy of the group and the fact that when the Inquisition was actually put into practice in Italy, they had much bigger fish to fry.33 Characteristically, Hall does not invoke individual theologians’ ideas on resurrection, but goes directly to doctrine contained in Scripture. This is the fact that those raised regain their perfected bodies that they were promised. The crucial passage is I Corinthians XV, 38–49. The section ends: “For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” This crucial passage focuses securely on the regaining of an imperishable body. Hall cites Cardinal Cajetan’s contemporary discussion of resurrection, in which he specifically clarifies the role of “spiritual body” (corpus spiritualis). Further, in Gilio’s discussion, the theologian cites Augustine, who notes Paul’s words in Corinthians (and says that all people will be aged 33 like Christ).34 All souls, bad and good, receive bodies at the end of the world, but the damned are not impervious to pain as are the elect. In contrast to a topical or contextualist reading in works by the spirituali, this doctrine is based on the authority of Augustine. This interpretation solves many problems. Christ looks like a Christ in a Gospel Resurrection.35 He is not angry, because he is not judging, just allowing the inevitable to occur. Mary is not afraid, and Christ is not damning; he is resigned to decisions made in the past, rather than hanging in the balance, per Steinberg. He makes reference to his wounds, showing the victory of life over death, just

32 Hall, “Michelangelo's Last Judgment,” 85. 33 Mayer, Reginald Pole, Prince and Prophet; “The Historical and Religious Circumstances of the Last Judgment,” in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, ed. by Marcia Hall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 76–94. 34 The use of Augustine is paralleled in Hall’s preference for an Augustinian key to the Sistine Ceiling (e.g., Dotson, “An Augustinian Interpretation of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling,” Art Bulletin 111 (1979): 223–56, 405–29). This is a kind of textual fundamentalism. 35 In the preparation of the modello (now lost, but reflected in the copy in the Courtauld collection), Michelangelo seems to have altered the pose of Christ between the Bayonne drawing, fully seated, and that in the Casa Buonarroti; Hall, “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment,” 89; “Introduction,” Michelangelo’s Last Judgment; Michelangelo: The Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel, 155–57.

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like the instruments of the Passion. Thus, here the emphasis is on life and not so much on judgment. Vasari and Condivi call him “angry,” and here Hall concedes that Vasari and Condivi indeed may have been covering up for Michelangelo, but about his ambiguity, not his heresy.36 What about the so-called self-portrait? If it is Michelangelo who is indeed depicted, it would not be a private joke, but rather the expression of an ardent hope, looking forward to the renewal of his own body at the final resurrection. De Tolnay assumed that a document referring to a “Resurrection” meant that the iconographic program had been changed, but if the Last Judgment is synonymous in some way with the Resurrection, then there is no contradiction. Against all the scholarly emphasis upon admonition, Paul’s words are positive, referring to the happiest day of creation. More recently, a deeper clue to the fresco has been revealed by Hall.37 Note that the whole row of martyrs that includes Bartholomew comprises those whose bodies were consumed in their martyrdoms. Mirroring Bartholomew is Lawrence, whose body was burned on the grill, and also Simon and Catherine. If predestination is taken for granted and if the goal of the fresco is to illustrate the doctrine of the corporeal resurrection, then these saints further underscore the main message, making Bartholomew just another exemplar of a larger didactic point.

Constructing a Hallian Method In Hall’s iconographic and formal approach, her method can best be called elementarist. She seeks to take account of the most basic formal facts available to analysis and to combine them with the simplest and most widespread iconographic principles available when confronting a complex work like the Last Judgment. Parallel with this commitment is the assumption that levels of facts undergird each other. In contrast, Steinberg, who might call that method the “humanistic” approach to art history, exchanges it for a view of works of art as lacking basic unity. From the perspective of the philosophy of social science, her view is nothing more than the presupposition of “lamination,” that is, the idea that strata of explanations line up (for example, what happens in an organism cannot be contrary to what happens with its biology, which in turn cannot

36 Hall, Sacred Image in the Age of Art, 104. 37 Hall, “The Hidden Clue.”

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be contrary to what happens with its cellular chemistry, etc.).38 At that point, there is not one reading that is right, but several of more or less relevance. In line with my emphasis, Hall adduces certain interpretive maxims. She is clearest in the case of the supposed self-portrait of Michelangelo in the St. Bartholomew: For an interpretation of the self-portrait to be convincing there are several requirements. It must enhance the theme of the fresco, or at least not contradict it. In terms of sixteenthcentury decorum, it would be unforgivably egotistical of the artist to insert himself so prominently unless the message was not only consonant with the religious content, but also enhancing it. Furthermore, it must be in character with the Michelangelo we know in these years, a pious and devout, thinking Christian. We must grant Michelangelo enough selfawareness to have perceived the irony of repeating Marsyas’ transgression of arrogance.39

She concludes, “The most convincing interpretation of the self-portrait would be one in which the identification of it as a self-portrait is not essential to the meaning of the fresco.”40 Hall first uses a basic interpretative rule; then she introduces conventional facts about the sixteenth century (its adherence to decorum); finally, she insists both on the historical facts of what we know of Michelangelo and a common-sense principle of charity – Michelangelo, like us, would have understood the irony. Significantly, Hall notes the larger irrelevance of the identity of Bartholomew-as-Michelangelo, except to the artist himself. Here she echoes Gombrich’s invocation of E. D. Hirsch’s hermeneutic theory, according to which structural meaning and personal significance must be separated.41 Symbolically, she quotes the Viennese-trained art historian Johannes Wilde: “Perhaps it is not wrong to see in this portrait an act of religious self-humiliation.”42 Steinberg is seemingly more “realist,” in that he believes in a correspondence between what he says and the reality he describes. He always proceeds as if he has discovered the correct interpretation. Hall, instead of insisting on maxims, seems to rely more on coherence. In Hall’s original article on resurrection, she is still dealing with De Tolnay. Opening with his suggestion that the iconography of the Last Judgment was changed from a “Resurrection of the Christ” to the present subject, she calls it a “bulky hypothesis, fraught with difficulties,” and then goes on to present her own “simpler solution.” This is

38 For this concept, see Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (London: Verso, 1993), 47. 39 Hall, “The Hidden Clue,” 108–9. 40 Hall, “The Hidden Clue,” 109. 41 Gombrich, Reflections on the History of Art, 86–87; citing Hirsch, The Aims of Interpretation. 42 Hall, “The Hidden Clue,” 109; citing Johanees Wilde, Michelangelo: Six Lectures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 165.

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classical positivism, in the sense that De Tolnay might be right, but based on economy of explanation, Hall opts for a different, simpler solution. Yet another perspective reverses the stakes. To put it in technical philosophical terms, Steinberg believes in an epistemic correspondence that confronts an irrational world (his critique of humanism), whereas Hall presents fallible epistemic statements that mask subterranean realism. From this reversal we can say that Steinberg is actually the positivist, indeed a verificationist, who is not interested in depth realism, whereas Hall is an epistemic relativist who, however, affirms realism at a deeper level. In other words, Hall’s fallibilist talk fronts depth realism, whereas Steinberg’s realist talk fronts positivism.43 Proof of this schema is suggested by Hall’s insistence that her basic formal and iconographic assumptions can robustly produce the artistic facts that she is concerned to explain. Even though she can’t prove her point of view (any better than any art historical interpretation about the past is “confirmed”), her elements are proper for making good predictions, by virtue of their simplicity and pervasiveness (the artist’s basic techniques, Augustine’s theology, etc.). Steinberg, on the other hand, may well be correct, but nothing about the deep structure of the social world can inspire confidence in his reading. Steinberg denies the humanistic principle, but the same principle in weakened form in Hall or John Shearman simply says that artists perceive spaces as unities, without suggesting that thought and life absolutely result in singular interpretations.

Conclusion Many express gratitude to Leo Steinberg for looking at things afresh. In her review of Heinrich Pfeiffer’s The Sistine Chapel: A New Vision, Hall herself notes that, “no one, except Leo Steinberg, has looked at the frescoes so closely.”44 This acknowledgment supports his defense of over-interpretation; once we rest content with restated truisms, we cease to look and hence to understand. But Steinberg’s

43 In an interview, Steinberg noted that E. H. Gombrich’s review of his Michelangelo’s Final Paintings had pained him sufficiently that, “I tried to write a theoretical essay in defense of my methodology, worked on it for a year, then tossed it away as worthless”; Leo Steinberg and Richard Candida Smith, “The Gestural Trace,” Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 2001, https://ia801707.us.archive.org/18/items/gesturaltraceleo00stei/ gesturaltraceleo00stei.pdf; accessed December 24, 2015. It would have been very interesting to read this. 44 Marcia Hall, review of The Sistine Chapel: A New Vision, by Heinrich Pfeiffer, The Catholic Historical Review 95 (2009): 348.

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approach is actually inimitable, even anti-methodological. In other words, as the brilliant interpreter, he did destabilize accepted interpretations, but nothing in his practice could make art history more open to such reinterpretations. From the other side, let us say that Hall’s interpretation continues to find wide acceptance, which then trickles down to Renaissance surveys and becomes ossified as a received dogma, repeated in introductory classes and in museums. Clearly, the correctness of an interpretation is different from what is done with it. But the nesting quality of bottom-up realism actually is amenable to institutional correction. Metaphysical realism (the fresco is the way it is) goes together with epistemological fallibilism (we still cannot guarantee that we know it). Although Hall states her interpretation as a mix of (ontological) correspondence to reality and (epistemological) warrant for belief – both truth and plausibility – it is an open-ended, potentially cumulative endeavor. Looking to the institution of art history, one is able to say – as Hall states above in regard to Bartholomew’s face – when and why a new addendum to the theory is called for. In particular, by beginning with formal givens – the chapel and basic theology and iconography – one is able, stepwise, to consider any particularizing anomalies. Gombrich responded to Steinberg’s claim in his Michelangelo’s Last Paintings that his thesis was beyond proof, indeed that proof was not asked for, but was based on historical analogies. In other words, like his positivist friend Popper, Gombrich knew that direct confirmation was impossible. Instead, one could use principles of cited analogies as the basis to warrant a historical interpretation. This critique is actually quite close to Hall’s original request for “an iconographical interpretation . . . based on a text and backed up by a source known to have currency at the time the image was created.” While it initially sounds like a blind rule, like Gombrich Hall is asking for some kind of exhibited analogy, whereby one can infer about the additional case that its interpretation is plausible. Ultimately, this interpretive stance presumes realism, because at root what one is arguing for is the fact that similar entities in similar conditions will have similar capacities, proclivities, and powers and can therefore produce similar results. The interpretive rule merely offers a methodological safeguard standing for a larger abductive (inference to the best explanation) practice. The use of prior principles does not guarantee the interpretation (absolute proof in Steinberg’s usage), and it certainly does not “predict” a similar meaning elsewhere. In a purely post hoc way, we learn that similar situations produced the same results. It is an inference to the best explanation and only that, inference, subject to varying levels of epistemic warrant. Although always erudite, Steinberg’s interpretations themselves are strangely Lutheran. His trust in his eye, guided by some basic theological concepts, leads him to a very personal interpretation. Because this type of interpretation, while

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bolstered by evidence, is mostly guided by conviction, the belief that it simply is correct, it therefore cannot trace out its steps. With perhaps less flourish, the realist argument instead reviews what we can explain, what remains troubling, and for what reasons. Although Steinberg’s call for a hiatus of the humanistic principle that works of art have organic unity sounds daring and progressive, it is proposed with positivist assumptions. Realists do not argue that the world coheres in perfect packages, only that its parts interact according to their dispositional properties. In the end, Steinberg is an absolutist, whereas Hall is a critical realist.

Works Cited Bhaskar, Roy. Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. London: Verso, 1993. Blunt, Anthony. Artistic Theory in Italy: 1400–1600. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956. Bohde, Daniela. “Skin and the Search for the Interior.” In Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, edited by Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg, 10–47. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Brundin, Abigail. Vittoria Colonna and the Spiritual Poetics of the Italian Reformation. Burlington: Ashgate, 2008. Butler, Kim. “The Immaculate Body in the Sistine Ceiling.” Art History 32 (2009): 250–89. Cantimori, Delio. Eretici italiani del Cinquecento: Ricerche Storiche. Florence: Sansoni, 1939. Carrier, David. Principles of Art History Writing. University Park: Penn State University Press, 1991. Carrier, David. Poussin’s Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology. University Park: Penn State University, 1993. Dempsey, Charles. “Mythic Inventions in Counter-Reformation Painting.” In Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, edited by P. A. Ramsey, 55–75. Binghamton, New York, 1982. Dotson, Esther. “An Augustinian Interpretation of Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling.” Art Bulletin 111 (1979): 223–56, 405–29. Eco, Umberto. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Elkins, James. The Poetics of Perspective. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Elkins, James, and Robert Williams, eds. Renaissance Theory. New York: Routledge, 2008. Firpo, Massimo. Tra alumbrados e ‘spirituali.’ Studi su Juan de Valdes e il valdesianesimo nella crisi religiosa del ‘500 italiano. Florence: Olschki, 1990. Firpo, Massimo. Gli affreschi di Pontormo a San Lorenzo: Eresia, politico e cultura nella Firenze di Cosimo I. Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Forcellino, Antonio. Michelangelo. Una vita inquieta. Bari: Laterza, 2005. Forcellino, Maria. Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna e gli “spirituali.” Religiosità e vita artistica a Roma, 1540–1550. Rome: Viella, 2009. Gaye, Giovanni. Carteggio inedito d’artisti dei secoli XIV, XV, XVI. Florence: Giuseppe Molini, 1840.

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Gleason, Elisabeth. Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome and Reform. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Gombrich, E. H. “Icones Symbolicae: The Visual Image in Neo-Platonic Thought.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 11 (1948), 163–92. Gombrich, E. H. Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance. London: Phaidon, 1972. Gombrich, E. H. Reflections on the History of Art: Views and Reviews. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. Gotlieb, Marc. “Our Monstrous Double: The Dream of Research in ‘Outsider Art History.’” In What is Research in the Visual Arts? Obsession, Archive, Encounter, edited by Michael Ann Holly and Marquard Smith, 85–102. Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2008. Hirsch, E. D. The Aims of Interpretation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Hall, Marcia. “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: Resurrection of the Body and Predestination.” Art Bulletin 58 (1976): 85–92. Hall, Marcia. “Who’s Who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.” Art Bulletin 125 (1993): 340. Hall, Marcia. After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy, 1520–1600. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hall, Marcia. Michelangelo: The Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. New York: Harry Abrams, 2002. Hall, Marcia. “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment as Resurrection of the Body: the Hidden Clue.” In Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, edited by Marcia Hall, 92–112. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Hall, Marcia. Review of The Sistine Chapel: A New Vision, by Heinrich Pfeiffer. New York: Abbeville Press, 2007. The Catholic Historical Review 95 (2009): 348. Hall, Marcia. The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, el Greco, Caravaggio. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011. Jensen, William M. “Who’s Missing from Steinberg’s ‘Who’s Who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.’” In Interpreting Christian Art, edited by Mikael Parsons and Heidi Hornik-Parsons, 107–37. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2003. Joannides, Paul. Review of Michelangelo’s Last Paintings, by Leo Steinberg. Burlington Magazine 118 (1976): 712. Joannides, Paul. Michelangelo and His Influence: Drawings from Windsor Castle. Washington and London: National Gallery of Art and Lund Humphries Publishers, 1996. Kuhn, Rudolf. Michelangelo: Die sixtinische Decke. Beiträge über ihre Quellen und zu ihrer Auslegung. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1975. Mayer, Thomas. Reginald Pole, Prince and Prophet. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Mayer, Thomas. “The Historical and Religious Circumstances of the Last Judgment.” In Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, edited by Marcia Hall, 76–94. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Moroncini, Ambra. “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: A Lutheran Belief?” In Beyond Catholicism: Heresy, Mysticism, and Apocalypse in Italian Culture, edited by Fabrizio De Donno and Simon Gilson, 55–76. New York: Palgrave, 2013. O’Malley, John. “The Theology behind Michelangelo’s Ceiling.” In The Sistine Chapel. The Art, the History, and the Restoration, edited by C. Pietrangeli, 92–148. New York: Harmony, 1986. Partridge, Loren. “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment: An Interpretation.” In The Last Judgment: A Glorious Restoration, edited by Sandro Chierici, 8–154. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997. Robinson, Adam. The Career of Cardinal Giovanni Morone (1509–1580): Between Council and Inquisition. Burlington: Ashgate, 2010.

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Rzepinska, Maria. “Ewa, Szechina czy Sophia? Przycznek do interpretacji freskow sykstynskich Michala Aniola.” Fermentum massae mundi: Jacakowi Wozniakowskiemu w siedemdziesiata rocznice urodzin, edited by N. Cieslinska and P. Ruszinski, 414–22. Warsaw: Agora, 1990. Rzepinska, Maria. “The Divine Wisdom of Michelangelo in the Creation of Adam.” Artibus et historiae 15 (1994): 181–87. Shearman, John. “The Function of Michelangelo’s Colour.” In The Sistine Ceiling: A Glorious Restoration, edited by Carlo Pietrangeli, 80–89. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992. Simoncelli, Paolo. Evangelismo religiosa e nicodemismo politico. Rome: Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1979. Steinberg, Leo. “The Eye is a Part of the Mind.” Partisan Review 20, no. 2 (March/April 1953): 194–212. Steinberg, Leo. “Observations in the Cerasi Chapel.” Art Bulletin 41 (1957): 183–90. Steinberg, Leo. “Leonardo’s Last Supper.” Art Quarterly 36 (1973): 297–410. Steinberg, Leo. Michelangelo’s Last Paintings: The Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter in the Cappella Paolina (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Steinberg, Leo. “Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ as Merciful Heresy.” Art in America 63 (1975): 49–63. Steinberg, Leo. “A Corner of the Last Judgment.” Daedalus 109 (1980): 207–73. Steinberg, Leo. “Guercino’s Saint Petronilla.” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 35 (1980): 207–34. Steinberg, Leo. “The Line of Fate in Michelangelo’s Painting.” In The Language of Images edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, 85–128. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Steinberg, Leo. “Who’s Who in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam: A Chronology of the Picture’s Reluctant Self-Revelation.” Art Bulletin 74 (1992): 552–66. Steinberg, Leo, and Richard Candida Smith. “The Gestural Trace,” Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 2001, https://ia801707.us.archive.org/18/items/ gesturaltraceleo00stei/gesturaltraceleo00stei.pdf; accessed December 24, 2015. Stinger, Charles. The Renaissance in Rome. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Struck, Peter. Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. De Tolnay, Charles. Michelangelo, vol. V, The Final Period. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960. Trutty-Coohil, Patricia. “The Wisdom of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.” Does the World Exist? Plurisignifcant Ciphering of Reality, edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, 421–34. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2004. Verstegen, Ian. “John White’s and John Shearman’s Viennese Historical Method.” Journal of Art Historiography 1 (2010), 1–IV/1. Verstegen, Ian. A Realist Theory of Art History. London: Routledge, 2013. Waddington, Raymond. “Aretino, Titian, and ‘La Humanita di Cristo.’” In Forms of Faith in Sixteenth-Century Italy, edited by Abigail Brundin and Matthew Treherne, 171–98. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009. Wilde, Johannes. Michelangelo: Six Lectures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Wimsatt, W. K., and Monroe Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” Sewanee Review 54 (1946): 468–88. Woodfield, Richard. “Gombrich and Panofsky on Iconology.” International Yearbook of Aesthetics 12 (2008): 151–64.

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Chapter 4 What Becomes a Legend: Correggio at the Crossroads of Biography and Style Best known by the name of his birthplace, the very small town of Correggio, and virtually unknown beyond Italy’s Emilia-Romagna during his lifetime, the painter Antonio Allegri da Correggio (ca. 1489–1534) was nonetheless one of the most influential artists of his generation. Like his contemporary Raphael, Correggio’s career was relatively short. Yet by century’s end, Correggio was renowned for frescoes that visually transcended their architectural settings; religious paintings that revivified the traditional formula of Renaissance altarpieces to become among the most preeminent visual prototypes for Counter-Reformation art in Italy, and legendary for his ability to represent the softness of hair and the tactile sensuality of skin. By the mid-seventeenth century, Correggio was internationally famed among Italy’s greatest painters. His name and reputation rivaled those of Raphael and, in some artistic and literary circles, exceeded Titian’s. The influence of his work was far-ranging, extending well into the nineteenth century. Yet even the most casual survey of standard art historical texts from the 1950s through today – from sweeping works like those of Helen Gardner and her ilk to recent editions of more specialized classics like Frederick Hartt’s History of Italian Renaissance Art – reveals that Correggio’s presence in the larger narrative of Western art history has dwindled and may be in danger of vanishing, his work noted only in the discourse of specialists. Why, despite centuries of admiration, has Correggio lost his reputation? It is possible, of course, that Correggio’s work no longer resonates within our tastes. As Hartt wrote in 1987: Human attraction and sacred purpose are inextricably blended in Correggio’s art. His tumultuous shapes . . . cloth that flows like melting marble, . . . male . . . female . . . or infantile flesh, or . . . torrential, honeyed hair, are swept together . . . into a sweet climax, half erotic, half religious. One might say that it is love that makes Correggio’s world go round.1

1 Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art (New York: Prentice Hall, 3rd edition, 1987), 565. Marcia Hall, After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), v, 84, 172, 271–72, and The Sacred Image in the Age of Art(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 80, 232, addresses the significant aftermath of Correggio’s exploration of religious and erotic ecstasy. I would like to thank Marcia Hall, whose example and continuing encouragement contributed to this essay, as well as Moore College of Art and Design, which has supported my work through sabbatical and grants. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-005

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Perhaps ours is an age more attuned to the transgressive dangers of the kind of love that made Correggio’s world go round. Are we less convinced that Correggio’s brilliant pictorial effacement of the boundaries between spirit and flesh promises redemption? Because Correggio’s vanishing act from such master narratives can be traced for several decades, during a period that has simultaneously witnessed some of the most extraordinary scholarship and international exhibitions devoted to the artist in Europe,2 I propose that this phenomenon results in part from our taxonomy. When Correggio’s work was labeled “proto-Baroque,” he maintained pride of place as a trailblazer; his subtle manipulations of light and color were viewed as fundamental to the development of the Carracci reform of painting, and his ability to represent the ecstatic as tangible and desirable, made the expression of those same impulses in seventeenth-century art comprehensible to modern eyes. Recent art historical constructions have produced a different teleology, framing Correggio’s achievement as a path off the main routes of Florence, Venice and, most significantly, Rome. Viewed largely through the lens of formalist critique, the complexity of Correggio’s work in the 1520s, with its intricate physical, psychological, and spatial relationships as well as its pervasive visual illusionism, is often characterized as a coda to that of Michelangelo or Raphael, impossible without Correggio’s experience of their Roman paintings.3 Accordingly, our perceptions of Correggio’s style have prompted a refashioning of his biography so that a Roman sojourn is viewed as essential to his artistic development. Substantiating that trip, however, has proven stubbornly elusive; in addition to Vasari’s premier biography presuming that the artist never visited Rome, no other early account nor any archival data support this assertion. It may not be fortuitous that claims for Correggio’s trip to Rome coincide with his diminishing role in our narrative histories. Instead, those assertions create a problem at the precise nexus of biography, historiography, and taxonomy. How do we conceive and categorize our explanation of an artist’s style? How do constructions of biography inflect our understanding of works of art – or vice versa: how 2 For example, David Ekserdjian, Correggio and Parmigianino: Art in Parma During the Sixteenth Century, exhibition and catalog (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2016); Anna Coliva, (ed.), Correggio e L’Antico (Rome: Federico Motta Editore, 2008); Carmen Bambach, Hugo Chapman, and Martin Clayton, Correggio and Parmigianino: Master Draughtsmen of the Renaissance (London: British Museum Press, 1999). 3 Most recently Ekserdjian, Correggio and Parmigianino, 2; Coliva, Correggio e l’Antico, 13; and Bambach, Chapman, and Goldner, Correggio and Parmigianino Master, 13. Genevieve Warwick, Arts of Collecting: Padre Sebastiano Resta and the Market for Drawings in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 149, and especially 255 n. 75, summarizes the history of the debate concerning Rome.

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does our understanding of a particular work of art at any given time influence how we narrate the story of that artist’s life? Did Correggio travel to Rome? Because we may never know, I propose to reframe the question. What can be learned by examining the values that several of Correggio’s early critics – some of whom were significant artists and authors in their own right – thought were at stake when appraising Correggio’s work through the lens of a Roman experience? Factual evidence for Correggio’s biography, gleaned from contracts and other legal documents, remains scant. Antonius de Allegris pictor was buried on March 6, 1534,4 in the town by whose name he is known, and left a remarkable legacy in the form of paintings, mostly in Parma but certainly nowhere beyond Lombardy during his lifetime. His birth date has been variously calculated between 1489 and 1494, with current scholarship favoring the earlier date and postulating that Correggio received his initial artistic training from his uncle, Lorenzo Allegri. Documents indicating that Mantegna’s son, Francesco, owed Correggio money in 1512, reinforce the suggestion initially made by Vasari, that he worked in Mantua.5 Other documents, starting in 1514, record what appears to be Correggio’s earliest commissions; we also know that the artist had ties to the court of the Correggeschi.6 There is, however, little to explain Correggio’s creative combustion in Parma of the 1520s. This dearth of biographical information undoubtedly results from a reputation posthumously constructed. The idea that Correggio traveled to Rome, where his exposure to contemporary trends in Roman painting both significantly changed and enhanced his artistic development, derives from the opening passage of Vasari’s biography of the artist in the Lives. More precisely, the idea that Correggio traveled to Rome before establishing himself as a painter in Parma originated in opposition to Vasari’s account. Although Vasari’s remarks about Correggio and Rome are generally dismissed today, it is important to remember that Vasari’s Vita was the earliest source of Correggio’s biography, and remained unrivaled for nearly a century and a half after its initial publication in 1550.7 Vasari not only shaped the general perception of the artist’s career but also informed the narrative arc of Correggio’s identity in unexpected ways. The second

4 Julius Meyer, Antonio Allegri da Correggio (London: MacMillan and Co., 1876), 243, and Corrado Ricci, Antonio Allegri da Correggio (London: William Heinemann, 1986), 335. 5 Rodolfo Signorini, “Un inedito su Francesco Mantegna e il Correggio,” Quaderni di Palazzo Te 3 (1996), 79–80; Ekserdjian, Correggio and Parmigianino, 15. 6 Pungileoni cited by Arthur E. Popham, Correggio’s Drawings (London: For the British Academy by the Oxford University Press, 1957), xv–xix; Ricci, Antonio Allegri da Correggio, 75–91. 7 Maureen Pelta,“Form and Convent: Correggio and the Decoration of the Camera di S. Paolo,” (PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1989) 155–67.

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edition of 1568 was accompanied by an unprecedented set of woodcut portraits that functioned as the “baseball cards” of their era. These images, viewed in tandem with Vasari’s biographies, celebrated the new stature of artists as self-made men, among the “heroes” of their age. It was no small matter, therefore, that Vasari was unable – by his own account, despite “all possible diligence” – to secure a likeness of Correggio.8 Instead, Vasari implied that perhaps there were none to be found because Correggio was so humble and self-deprecating that he never depicted himself, and refused to have other artists do so. As a result, Correggio’s biography was marked by what is often referred to as an “empty” frame, filled with an elaborate fleur-de-lis, emblematic of both the city of Florence and the volume’s publisher. At the same time, Vasari’s remarks sparked an intensive quest for Correggio’s portrait that continued unabated through the nineteenth century. Artists and cognoscenti of the seventeenth century secured Correggio’s reputation for painterly excellence.9 Master narratives from that period, largely extrapolated from Vasari, recounted that Correggio’s work – like the artist, himself – languished in Parma known only to a few discerning men, until the time of the Carracci. At the urging of his cousin, Annibale Carracci left his native Bologna in 1580, in order to study Correggio’s work in Parma. In a now famous letter dated April 18 of that year, Annibale wrote to his cousin, Ludovico, that upon his arrival in Parma the day before: I couldn’t wait to go see the famous cupola, which you had sung the praises of so many times, and I too was stunned when I saw this vast and complex work . . . so well seen di sotto in sù and all of it done with such great correctness but always with such judgment, and such grace, and with a color that seems to be of living flesh. O, God . . . not even . . . Raphael himself can stand comparison with this . . . I went this morning to see his altarpiece with St. Jerome and St. Catherine . . . I swear to God that I would not change either one of these for Raphael’s St. Cecilia. Who would deny that St. Catherine has a grace, in that gesture of placing her head so gracefully on the foot of the lovely Infant, more

8 “Ho usato ogni diligenzia d’avere il suo ritratto . . . no l’ho potuto trovare . . . Contentavasi del poco a viveva da bonissimo cristiano,” Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architetti (Florence: Giunti, 1568), 19. For Vasari’s woodcut portraits in general, see Sharon Gregory, ‘“The Outer Man Tends to be a Guide to the Inner:’ The Woodcut Portraits in Vasari’s Lives as Parallel Texts,” in The Rise of the Image, ed. R. Palmer and T. Fragenberg, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), and Azar Rejaie, “Recognizing Vasari’s Legacy on the Study of Self-Portraiture,” Word and Image 25 (2009), 354–55. 9 Cecil Gould, The Paintings of Correggio (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 150–61; Maddalena Spagnolo, Correggio. Geografia e storia della fortuna (1528–1657) (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2005), especially 244–69, and Francis Haskell, “Correggio e la sua Importanza per il Diciottesimo e il Diciottesimo e il Dicionnovesimo Secolo,” In Correggio e L’Antico, ed. Anna Coliva (Rome: Federico Motta Editore, 2008), 69–75.

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beautiful than anything in [Raphael’s] Mary Magdalen? Or that the beautiful old man, the St. Jerome, is at once grander and more tender (tenero) than [Raphael’s] St. Paul, which once seemed a miracle to me, and now seems a wooden thing, so hard (duro) and sharp? . . . even your beloved Parmigianino will have to stand aside . . . because . . . I recognize that his grace falls short of Correggio’s, because the little putti of Correggio breathe, live and laugh with a grace and truth that compel us to laugh and feel happy (rallegrarsi) along with them.10

Correggio’s art initiated a transformation in Annibale’s own by quickening his interests in naturalism and enabling him to create more vividly believable paintings because they appeared close to nature.11 Although these tendencies were most evident in Annibale’s work of the early 1580s, the qualities of “tenderness,” “judgment,” and “grace” he discovered in Correggio’s forms continued to enliven his art until the end of his life. Annibale passed the lessons he learned from Correggio’s paintings on to his pupils, who handed them on, in turn, to those artists who came after them.12 Annibale’s correspondence also introduced a lament that became another theme among Correggio’s later biographers. Writing again to Ludovico from Parma a few days later, Annibale complained: Opportunities . . . can’t be found here, and one would never have believed that [Parma] would be a country so lacking in good taste, taking no delight in painting, and so deficient in opportunities: here nobody thinks of anything else but eating and drinking and making love . . . It drives me crazy and makes me weep to think of the misfortune of poor Correggio, such a great man, if he can be called a man and not an angel incarnate in wasting his life in a country where he was not recognized and raised to the stars and where he had to die miserably.13

10 Anne Summerscale, Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci (University Park: Penn State Press, 2000), 95–96; Carlo Cesare, Malvasia, Felsina pittrice, vite de’ pittori bolognesi, ed. G.P. Zanotti, 2 vols. (Bologna: Guidi all’Ancora, 1841), 268. Paul Barolsky, Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1991), 34, and Giotto’s Father and the Family of Vasari’s Lives (University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 69–70, was the first scholar to call attention to Vasari’s literary contrapposto, contrasting Correggio’s surname and his ability to represent joyful angels, with his personal miseria; Annibale may have been striving for a similar effect here. 11 Diane De Grazia, Correggio and his Legacy (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1984), 35. 12 Spagnolo, Correggio, 194–221; De Grazia, Correggio and His Legacy; and Rudolf Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600–1750, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Pelican Books, 1973), 58, 60, 69, 86–88. 13 Summerscale, Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci, 97, April 12, 1580. The pertinent Italian passage reads: “impazzisco e piango dentro di me in pensar solo la infelicita del povero Antonio, un si grand’uomo, se pure uomo . . . perdersi qui in un paese, ove non fosse conosciuto e posto sino alle stele, e qui doversi morire infelicemente,” Malvasia, 268.

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Annibale’s words echo those in Vasari’s Vita: Antonio, like someone weighed down by [his] family, always wanted to save [money], and because of this [he] became tanto misero che più non poteva essere (could not have borne more misery).14

Vasari further suggested that Correggio’s misfortune led to the artist’s premature death: Having received at Parma a payment of sixty scudi in copper coins, and wanting to take them to [the town of] Correggio to meet some necessities, he set out on foot loaded with these [coins]; and bothered by the sun because of the great heat, he drank water to refresh himself [and] took to his bed with a raging fever, never to raise his head from it, ending his life at the age of forty, or thereabouts.15

Correggio’s miseria, as characterized by Vasari, became widely understood as meaning destitute or impoverished during the seventeenth century. In his Microcosmo della Pittura of 1657, Francesco Scanelli – who was no fan of Vasari – nevertheless wrote about Correggio’s miserable life as if Vasari’s anecdotes were fact, complaining that Correggio’s talents were obscured by his poverty.16 Annibale’s letters gained even greater currency after 1678, when they were published in Carlo Malvasia’s Felsina Pittrice. Malvasia not only owned Annibale’s letters but also possessed a drawing, seen here in a seventeenth-century copy, that further underscored the narrative of the artist’s poverty (Figure 4.1). This extraordinary image, purportedly a self-portrait of Correggio with his family, presents the artist on a crude bench, looking woefully over his shoulder as his wife searches their daughter’s hair for lice – a particularly sad irony for a painter renowned for rendering beautiful hair, “soft and feathery, with each single hair visible, such was his facility . . . they seemed like gold and more beautiful than real hair, which is surpassed by what he painted,” as Vasari remarked in both editions of the Vite.17 Correggio’s children, here depicted as three boys and a girl, are

14 “Desiderava Antonio, sì come quello ch’era aggravato di famiglia, di continuo risparmiare, et era divenuto perciò tanto misero che più non poteva essere,” Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architetti, 19. 15 “Per il che si dice che, essendoli stato fatto in Parma un pagamento di sessanta scudi di quattrini, esso volendoli portare a Correggio per alcune occorenzie sue, carico di quelli si mise in camino a piedi; e per lo caldo grande che era allora, scalmanato dal sole, bendo acqua per rinfrescarsi, si pose nel letto con una grandissima febre, né di quivi prima levò il capo che finì la vita, nell’età sua d’anni XL o circa,” Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architetti, 19. 16 Meyer, Antonio Allegri da Correggio, 11, 15. 17 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, trans. C. de Vere, 3 vols., new ed. (New York: Abrams, 1979), vol. 2, 802.

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meagerly dressed and barefoot. Yet despite the debris-strewn setting, they are cheerful; after all, their surname was Allegri.18 Further testimony to the narrative of Correggio’s wretchedness was evidenced in a widely circulated letter, written from the town of Correggio and dated March 10, 1688, by Giuseppe Bigellini, who wrote that he had visited the artist’s home and found it “more like a beggar’s hut than anything else.”19 Another seventeenth-century contemporary, the French journalist Simon-Nicholas Linguet, wrote that the artist died of misery in a small village, leaving his children prey to want and starvation.20

Figure 4.1: Correggio and his Family, artist unknown, Codex Resta, inv F261 inf 76/2, 72. Late seventeenth-century drawing, commissioned by Sebastiano Resta after a drawing owned by Carlo Cesare Malvasia. Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy.

18 Correggio had three children, one son and two daughters, see Ekserdjian, Correggio and Parmigianino, 15, among others; Paul Barolsky on allegro, Why Mona Lisa Smiles, 34. 19 In a letter sent to Sebastiano Resta, later published by Bottari, Raccolta di Lettere, vol. 3, 499: “ch’è casa più da mendico che da pittore.” 20 Meyer, Antonio Allegri da Correggio, 15–16.

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Correggio’s miseria and the continuing hunt for his portrait engaged the attention of serious men – and women – of letters at precisely the same moment that a newly discovered work by Correggio became one of the most well-known paintings in Rome. As Cecil Gould remarked: “We must bear in mind that in seventeenth-century Rome though Correggio was indeed a god, he was something of an absentee one. He was inordinately revered but the papal city housed none of his key works.”21 Queen Christina’s arrival in Rome remedied that lacuna. Known in her youth as the “Minerva of the North,” Christina of Sweden was the most famous convert to Roman Catholicism of her time. Abdicating her throne while in her early 20s, she arrived in Rome in 1655. As a distinguished guest of Pope Alexander VII, she was lodged in the Palazzo Farnese, with its celebrated Carracci frescoes. The same piazza sheltered the small church of Santa Brigida, dedicated to the fourteenth-century Swedish mystic whose house first occupied this site, and whose cult – not surprisingly – became a focus of Christina’s devotion and patronage. At the same time, the pope delegated the task of shepherding Christina in Rome to Cardinal Decio Azzolino of Fermo, who would become Christina’s lifelong friend and confidant. Christina was a major art collector, on a par with contemporaries like Cardinal Mazarin and Archduke Leopold.22 After establishing permanent residence in Rome in 1668, she rented the Palazzo Riario (now Corsini) almost directly across from the Villa Farnesina on the Via Lungo Tevere, with the assistance of Cardinal Azzolino. He also helped her manage her finances as she renovated the palace and its gardens to accommodate her growing collection of art, as well as the many books, medals, drawings, and other various artifacts she continued to amass in Rome. Inventories of her collections made immediately following her death in 1689 – ordered by her friend and heir, Cardinal Azzolino, and conducted in part by Christina’s librarian, Giovanni Pietro Bellori – listed eleven works by Correggio among her paintings.23 Most notable among them because they remain the only two works still considered authentic today were Correggio’s Danae and Leda and the Swan. Christina also owned famous copies of Correggio’s so-called School of Love, or Venus and Mercury with Cupid, and the ravishing Jupiter and Io.

21 Gould, The Paintings of Correggio, 150. 22 Carl Nordenfalk, “Queen Christina and Art,” in Christina Queen of Sweden – A Personality of European Civilization, 11th Exhibition of the Council of Europe (Stockholm: 1966), 416. 23 Bellori became Christina’s antiquarian and custodian of medals in 1677, and appears to have also overseen her collection of drawings as well; Haskell, History and Its Images, 160–61; Janis C. Bell and Thomas Willette, Art History in the Age of Bellori: Scholarship and Cultural Politics in Seventeenth-Century Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 10.

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The queen became a significant patron in Roman society as well. She routinely lent paintings to the annual art exhibition held at San Giovanni Decollato to commemorate its honorific feast day each June – one of four such major exhibitions that featured significantly in the social life of seventeenth-century Rome. These displays were not intended to showcase contemporary artists but rather to decorate the churches in which they were held and, more importantly, to showcase Old Masters’ paintings in private galleries, glorifying their owner-lenders in the process.24 Christina’s collections were thus understood as attributes of her “princely person.”25 Tomaso Montanari’s masterful research on the artistic activities of Christina and Cardinal Azzolino has shown that in 1669, soon after Pope Clement IX named Azzolino as Cardinal Protector of the Piceni in Rome (the region of the Marches along Italy’s Adriatic coast, including the Cardinal’s native Fermo), Azzolino helped them acquire the church of San Salvatore in Lauro as their national church. Azzolino also succeeded in having December 10 added to the Roman martyrology as the feast day of the Translation of the Holy House of Loreto, a particular object of Piceni veneration. By 1675, the newly rededicated San Salvatore in Lauro began celebrating its feast day with its own annual art exhibition in its adjacent cloister.26 Giuseppe Ghezzi was tasked with organizing the exhibitions at San Salvatore in Lauro in 1686.27 Ghezzi’s notes and records show the substantial number of paintings lent by Christina to these exhibitions in both 1686 and 1687. Among the objects she lent was a painting known as the insegna del Correggio – the “sign by Correggio” – later referred to as the “innkeeper’s sign,” or The Muleteers. This painting proved so popular that it was the only work from Christina’s collection shown in both exhibitions.28 Although Christina received the painting as a gift from Cardinal Nini in 1680, rumors circulated in Rome that Christina and Azzolino had discovered the

24 Francis Haskell, “Art Exhibitions in XVII Century Rome,” Studi Secenteschi 1 (1960), 116; Patrons and Painters, 127. 25 Nordenfalk, “Queen Christina and Art,” 416. 26 Haskell, “Art Exhibitions in XVII Century Rome,” and History and Its Images; Tomaso Montanari, “Bellori and Christina of Sweden,” In Art History in the Age of Bellori, ed. Janis Bell and Thomas Willette (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 77–92. 27 Ghezzi studied law and philosophy in Fermo before moving to Rome in 1651; as part of Azzolino’s circle in Rome, he became Christina’s financial and legal advisor; he became a painter in 1671, and eventually life secretary of the Academia di San Luca; see Pansecchi in Edgar Peters Bowron and Joseph J. Rishel, Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000), 367. 28 Montanari, “Bellori and Christina of Sweden,” 80, 90–91.

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work themselves.29 Riding horses together on the Via Flaminia just north of Rome, they encountered the painted sign hanging over the doorway of an inn. The painting was ascribed to Correggio, and, in the words of Corrado Ricci, Served to confirm a popular legend, according to which Allegri came to Rome almost a beggar, seeking inspiration from the sublime work of antiquity, and anxious to admire those of the great moderns who were working in the city. Exhausted by his travels, he halted at a lonely inn by the roadside, and, unable to pay the host for his board and lodging, he painted the sign in discharge of his debt.30

The insegna del Correggio was a small wooden panel (25″ × 36″), now only known in black and white reproduction (Figure 4.2).31 More seventeenth-century genre scene than High Renaissance masterpiece, the painting featured two men

Figure 4.2: The Muleteers; lot 318, Waring & Gillow, Ltd., Auction Catalogue of St. Serf’s House, Roehampton, Surrey, October 20 and 21, 1920, 30; photo by author with many thanks to the Mellon Center, London.

29 Montanari, “Bellori and Christina of Sweden,” 83. 30 Ricci, Antonio Allegri da Correggio, 65. 31 Ellis Waterhouse, with the help of Carl Nordenfolk, was able to track the painting until 1954, when it was sold at auction in France.

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leading two pack mules. Despite the fact that the painting looked unlike any other work created by the artist, the so-called Muleteers became well known, and was much discussed. More importantly, this painting initiated a biographical narrative that linked Correggio’s humility and miseria with the idea, contra Vasari, that Correggio journeyed to Rome. In other words, the impoverished artist, intent upon seeing the artistic wonders of Rome, traded his glorious art in payment for basic necessities because he was too poor to travel there by other means.32 After Christina’s death in April of 1689, this painting was acquired by Don Livio Odescalchi, among the vast assortment of items he purchased from her estate in 1692. These included “medals, paintings, statues, columns, tapestries, weapons, etc.,” as well as her gems and “tutti li Libri di disegni,” according to the contract of sale.33 It was also Odescalchi to whom Padre Sebastiano Resta dedicated and sent a small album of drawings entitled Correggio in Roma, in August of 1708.34 Sebastiano Resta was an avatar of a new profession, a connoisseur who collected drawings. Assembling these drawing as albums, he bestowed them as “gifts” in expectation of charitable, but nonetheless monetary, exchange.35 Resta was a Milanese nobleman born into the cadet branch of his family in 1635. Arriving in Rome in 1665, he joined the Congregation of San Filippo Neri, becoming an Oratorian at the church of Santa Maria in Valicella. He was, according to contemporary accounts, an amateur artist and “impassioned dilettante,” whose network of friendships soon encompassed a notable group of artists, antiquarians, and critics.36 While perhaps not an intimate of Azzolino and Christina, Resta’s network of friends included many who had significant relationships with both, like Giuseppe Ghezzi, Carlo Maratta, and Giovanni Bellori, from whom he acquired drawings. Resta’s Correggio in Roma, a scant folio of fourteen pages, was probably assembled just after 1700, and still survives intact.37 Its text not only implies the presence of an earlier album, proposing that Correggio had traveled to Rome,

32 Meyer, Antonio Allegri da Correggio, 85, and Ricci, Antonio Allegri da Correggio, 65, writing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, dismissed the painting as inauthentic. 33 Tomaso Montanari, “Il Cardinale Decio Azzolino e le collezioni de Cristina di Svezia. Gli Azzolini, gli Ottoboni, e gli Odescalchi,” Storia dell’arte 90 (1997), 250–300. 34 Warwick, Arts of Collecting, 45, 214 n. 111; Odescalchi never paid for the album, and its whereabouts until it was acquired by the British Museum in 1938 remain unknown. 35 Arthur E. Popham, “Sebastian Resta and His Collections.” Old Master Drawings 2 (1936), 13; and Warwick, Arts of Collecting, 15, 36, 55–66. 36 Warwick, Arts of Collecting, 9. 37 Correggio a Roma, British Museum, MS Resta 1938, 0514.4; and Sebastiano Resta, Correggio in Roma, ed. Arthur E. Popham (Parma: Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Province Parmensi, 1958).

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but emphatically recapitulated this idea, arguing that Correggio journeyed to Rome twice: initially in 1520,38 in order to see the works of Raphael, and again in 1530. The proposal for Correggio’s second trip was based on Resta’s own serendipitous discovery of the so-called Zitella d’Orleans, an altarpiece in the church of Santa Brigida degli Svedese, the small church on Piazza Farnese that achieved renewed prominence due to Christina’s patronage (Figure 4.3). Resta set forth additional evidence for Correggio’s presence in Rome in the manuscript page seen here, based on both oral testimony from the rector of Santa Brigida, as well as a small painting that Resta claimed Correggio left at the church in exchange for his lodgings and board there. An engraved “portrait” of Correggio is featured conspicuously in the center of this page. Resta claimed that this portrait was based on a drawing made by Annibale Carracci. He further maintained that Annibale’s drawing was itself based on a self-portrait by Correggio, found in the figure of St. Joseph in the upper right of the Zitella d’Orleans altarpiece, the painting ascribed to Correggio solely on Resta’s authority.39 Once again, the idea of Correggio’s trip to Rome was related to – if not a direct outgrowth of – the narrative of miseria that originated in Vasari’s biography. The artist’s poverty was now speciously linked to at least three works of art, as well as a copy of a drawing – itself copied from the artist’s “self-portrait” in an altarpiece – all purporting to evidence Correggio’s physical presence in Rome. Thus, the idea of Correggio’s Roman sojourn was evidently born in Rome within the circle of Queen Christina during the late seventeenth century, further promulgated by Resta by means of albums he assembled in the 1690s and early eighteenth century. For Christina and her heirs, Correggio’s “real” presence in the Eternal City would have validated the aristocratic prerogatives of her taste

38 MS Resta 1938, 0514.4. Resta insisted that Correggio traveled to Rome twice: first at the age of twenty-eight in 1520 specifically to see the work of Raphael, noting poetically that, like Roman gladiators, one hero exited the Palestra as another entered. Resta also reproduced an oil sketch of a figure of St. John that he believed Correggio copied from an altarpiece by Raphael in Parma. Having already seen Raphael’s work in Bologna, Resta then argued that Correggio set forth for Rome. In reality, the altarpiece in question was painted by Giulio Romano for the church of the monastery of San Paolo, Parma. 39 British Museum MS Resta 1938, 0514.4, fol. 2r and 3v. This rather dizzying series of attributions conveys some sense of Resta’s argumentation in Correggio in Roma. Moreover, the Zitella de’ Orleans has most recently been identified as a painting by a follower of Giorgio Gandino del Grano, now titled The city of Parma pays homage to Mary and her child, and appears to have been up for auction in Vienna on October 18, 2016: http://artsalesindex.artinfo.com/auc tions/Giorgio-Gandini-del-Grano-6516695/The-city-of-Parma-pays-homage-to-Mary-with-herchild-; Ricci, Antonio Allegri da Correggio, 326–30, addresses the sources for a number of Correggio’s so-called portraits.

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Figure 4.3: Resta’s drawings of variously attributed, purported portraits of Correggio, Resta Codex, inv F261 inf 76/2, 2. Correggio and a Woman, Imaginary Portrait of Correggio, Study for the Portrait of Correggio and Correggio and His Family/Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy / © Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana/Mauro Ranzani/Mondadori Portfolio/ Bridgeman Images.

and judgment, enhancing not only the status of her personal collections but also adding actual value with the addition of new paintings by Correggio – like The Muleteers – to the artist’s oeuvre as well as her collection. For Padre Resta, the artist’s presence in Rome could have expanded his opportunities to purvey drawings. He was well aware that his opinion could play a role in the marketplace. Attributing a painting to Correggio in 1710, he wrote that his study of the artist would “make the painting grow in fame for its erudition, and consequently in price . . . this is how [Correggio’s] virtue, his fame, and so his prices, are formed.”40

40 Warwick, Arts of Collecting, 224, n. 67.

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Correggio’s identity as an artist was thus constructed posthumously at the nexus of aesthetics and biography. Despite his fame as a painter and the increasingly high esteem in which his work was held, Correggio’s misery became the dominant narrative of his career, an idea that reified his singularity, and only helped to solidify his reputation in the minds and eyes of a seventeenth-century Roman audience. Moreover, in its presentation of an under-appreciated, and therefore underpaid and impoverished, artistic genius, Correggio’s biography became commoditized in itself, adding value even to objects of dubious provenance in Roman collections – objects as mundane as an innkeeper’s sign or portrait likenesses of questionable origins.41 Although Resta’s visual evidence may strain credibility by twenty-first century standards, his assertions nevertheless brought Vasari’s conditional “if [Correggio] . . . had left Lombardy and been in Rome” not only into question but also into the arena of public debate. With the publication of some of Resta’s extensive epistolary correspondance in the eighteenth century in works such as Giovanni Gaetano Bottari’s Raccolta di lettere sulla pittura, scultura ed archittectura of 1772, among others, Resta’s ideas concerning the question of Correggio and Rome were taken up again by no less an authority than Anton Raphael Mengs.42 Mengs was one of the most highly esteemed painter-philosophers of his age, whose reputation as an author arose from widely read and respected literary works such as his Thoughts on Beauty and Taste in Painting, of 1762. His lifelong fascination with Correggio was as evident in his writings as in his own paintings. Beginning with his Thoughts on Beauty and Taste, Mengs deliberated upon the interaction between taste and an artist’s individual style, a topic that engendered a specific line of inquiry concerning Correggio’s artistic development. Like Johannes Winkelmann, whom he befriended in Rome, Mengs conceptualized a history of taste that originated with the ancient Greeks.43 Then, not unlike Vasari, Mengs maintained that after the Greeks, there was no taste in painting until Giotto. The art of Giotto marked a new beginning that culminated in the work of three artists, each of whom excelled in a single aspect of taste: Raphael, Correggio, and Titian.

41 That the trope of Correggio’s miseria continued well into the nineteenth century can be seen in no less a figure than Michelet, who described in his monumental Histoire de France, VIII, 1855, “The Lombard peasant from the village of Correggio, the famished artist who is unable to feed his family: he records what he sees,” in Francis Haskell, History and its Images (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995), 272–73, 509 n. 81. 42 Bottari and Ticozzi, Raccolta di lettere, vol. 3, 490, 495, 502, 509. 43 Pelta, “Form and Convent,” 13–16.

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According to Mengs, Correggio also excelled in the realm of taste; Correggio’s taste set him apart from other artists, positioning him in a hierarchy above Titian and second only to Raphael within the pantheon of great modern painters. Taste constituted one of the most fundamental principles of art, no mere preference or inclination on the part of an individual artist, but a specific function of the artistic faculty related to aesthetic choice and judgment. Taste was a quality of artistic intellect, enabling art to surpass nature in beauty because it mediated concepts of ideal beauty, imitation, and the artist’s best, individual mode of working. Taste preceded style, and affected the appearance of everything an artist produced.44 In contrast to Raphael, who sought perfection in taste, Correggio sought to be pleasing.45 Mengs amplified this reasoning in his later Reflections . . . Upon the Three Great Painters, Raphael, Correggio and Titian, and Upon the Ancients. He wrote that Correggio began with little taste, but soon “freed” himself from nature and studied antiquity, probably learned from Mantegna. Correggio had then made the deliberate choice to favor “being pleasing” over the imitation of nature and was, therefore, able to discover a new taste “of design.” Observing that an evaluation of Correggio’s development was difficult because there were no intermediary works between the artist’s early, “dry style,” and his mature, “grand style,” Mengs pondered whether it was possible that Correggio’s exposure to antiquity and ancient works of art marked the moment of transition between the artist’s two manners. Acknowledging in this passage, for the first time in his writings, that there were those who argued against Vasari’s claim that Correggio had never been to Rome, Mengs wrote that his own opinion was still unresolved.46 His Memoirs of the Life and Works of Anthony Allegri called Correggio was Mengs’s last literary work, interrupted by the author’s death in 1779, and published posthumously one year later in 1780. Although Mengs’s preoccupation with the influence of antiquity on Correggio’s development can be traced throughout his writings, it was only in the Memoirs that the concept of a mediating influence shifted to that of an intermediate locale. Lamenting again about the absence of transitional works that might illuminate Correggio’s development as an artist, Mengs wrote: Who imagined a mutation so rapid as from his first to his second style, and who, not content with being equal to many great men, and superior to all in his country, abandoned notwithstanding that style, and undertook, by means of new studies and the most

44 Anthony R. Mengs, The Works of Anthony Raphael Mengs The First Painter to his Catholic Majesty Chas. III. (London: R. Faulder, 1796), vol. 1, 31, 37. 45 Mengs, The Works of Anthony Raphael Mengs, vol. 1, 24–32. 46 Mengs, The Works of Anthony Raphael Mengs, vol. 1, 176–77.

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profound meditation, to change almost the art of painting. By that I incline to believe that Correggio went to Rome.47

Mengs’s “inclination” toward Rome constituted no significant change of heart or departure in the author’s attitude. As elsewhere throughout his literary work, the contemplation of a Roman journey was occasioned by Mengs’ deliberations upon Correggio’s assimilation of ancient art and the impact of antiquity on the development of his style.48 For Mengs, a Roman sojourn signified that the best collections and exemplars of antique works on Italian soil would have been available for Correggio’s sensitive appraisal: If he had not seen them [the antiques] as one sees them at Rome, he might have seen them as one sees them at Parma, that is in little quantity and not very excellent; but to a great genius it is sufficient to show the pattern of a thing to give an idea what the piece might be. I hazard this conjecture, because one does not see any work of Correggio intermediate with his dry style, and his grand Taste . . . A piece of antiquity could make in his mind the same impression, which the works of Michelangelo did in Raphael.49

The publication of Carlo Giuseppe Ratti’s Notizie Storiche Sincere intorno la Vite e le Opere del Celebre Pittore Antonio Allegri da Correggio, a scant year later in 1781, demonstrated that Mengs was explicitly understood in this fashion by his contemporaries. The Notizie also brought these ideas into direct discourse about Correggio’s earliest work in Parma, the frescoes in the so-called camera di San Paolo (Figure 4.4). Ratti was a highly-regarded Genoese painter and academician who became an intimate of Mengs after they were introduced in Rome in 1756. Their correspondence documents their close relationship in the 1770s, when they frequented many of the same artistic, intellectual, and social circles. Although Mengs, himself, never mentioned Correggio’s camera frescoes in any of his publications, Ratti claimed that Mengs had seen them during a visit to Parma in the 1770s. Aware of Ratti’s interest in writing an account of Correggio, Mengs had shared his experience, freely and firsthand, with his friend.50 47 Mengs, The Works of Anthony Raphael Mengs, vol. 3; 7. 48 Mengs rarely speculated about the direct influence of specific works of art contemporary with the artist’s life on view in Rome, although he mentioned Perugino, Leonardo, and Giorgione, in addition to Francesco Bianchi (il Frari) and Mantegna, as possible influences on Correggio’s early career. There is only one rather ambiguous statement in a discussion of Correggio’s S. Giovanni Evangelista frescoes, Mengs: “Whoever examines this painting with attention will be induced to believe that Correggio had seen the works of Michelangelo,” The Works of Anthony Raphael Mengs, vol. 2, 17. 49 Mengs, The Works of Anthony Raphael Mengs, vol. 2, 179. 50 Carlo Giuseppe Ratti, Notizie Storiche Sincere intorno Vite e Opere del Celebre Pittore Antonio Allegri da Correggio (Finale: De’ Rossi, 1781), 11–12.

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Figure 4.4: Correggio: Ceiling Vault frescos, camera of Giovanna da Piacenza, Convent of San Paolo, Parma (1518–1520). Album/Alamy Stock Photo.

According to the Notizie, Mengs regarded the camera’s decoration as an autograph work by Correggio and was struck by their singularity. Correggio’s chiaroscuri, or grisaille lunettes, confirmed his opinion that, “the ideas of the Greeks and their ancient monuments that existed in Rome were not unknown to Correggio.” Ratti’s text then postulated a set of elements familiar from the writings of Mengs, situating Correggio’s work within the artistic ideals of the ancient Greeks, as best exemplified by monuments to be seen and found in Rome. Here, for the first time, this equation was specifically applied to Correggio’s frescoes in the camera di San Paolo, specifically ascribed to the authority of Mengs.51 Ratti’s Notizie was of enormous consequence to the first detailed account of Correggio’s camera frescoes, the Ragionamento del Padre Ireneo Affò sopra 51 Ratti, Notizie Storiche Sincere, 74–75, and Maureen Pelta, “‘If he, with his genius, had . . . lived in Rome’ Vasari and the Transformative Myth of Rome.” In Reading Vasari, edited by Anne Barricault, Andrew Ladis, and Norman Land (London: The Georgia Museum of Art and Philip Wilson Publishers, 2005), 16–18.

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una Stanza Dipinta dal Celeberrimo Antonio Allegri da Correggio nel Monistero di San Paolo in Parma, published in 1794. Padre Affò was no intellectual lightweight; although perhaps not familar today, his work as a scholar of Parma’s cultural history remains essential for studies of early modern Parma. Affò regarded Ratti’s Notizie as an authentic expression of Mengs’s judgment. The opening pages of his Ragionamento repeat lengthy passages from Ratti’s text in their entirety, particularly those that claim to quote Mengs directly. To underscore the legitimacy of the Notizie, Affò quoted additional oral testimony from a local expert, Professor Gaetano Callani, who was documented as having heard Mengs, himself, proclaim the camera a masterwork by Correggio.52 Affò cited Mengs’s assessment of the camera di San Paolo, as published in Ratti’s Notizie, to support his own attribution of the frescoes to Correggio. He ascribed their dating to 1518–1519, thereby positioning these frescoes as Correggio’s earliest work in Parma. Affò then identified the camera as the work that marked the transition between Correggio’s two styles, “la prima e la secunda maniera del gran Pittore;” that is, the monument and moment Mengs had sought as the intermediary between Correggio’s two manners. Furthermore, Correggio’s imitation of ancient Greek and Roman forms within the sixteen grisaille lunettes, painted above the cornice throughout the room, demonstrated that the artist could not have been ignorant of “le cose belle de’ Greci e de Romani,” and gave proof of Correggio’s “gran conscenza dell’antico.”53 Thus, Affò argued, the fresco decorations of the camera di San Paolo heralded a transformation in Correggio’s style that would have been impossible without the artist’s having seen Rome, that “emporio della venerabile antichità.”54 Writing in his Life of Correggio that “if he with his genius, had gone forth from Lombardy and lived in Rome, he would have wrought miracles,” Vasari’s conditional voice, “avrebbe fatto miracoli,” signaled that his role as biographer extended beyond the confines of known fact and pointed anecdote to encompass that of art critic, as well. The operations of critical judgement implicit in Vasari became explicit in the writing of Mengs, whose careful appraisal of Correggio’s work posited the first sustained questioning of the artist’s stylistic development from “dry style” to “grand manner.” Not surprisingly, in the process Mengs brought to the study of the Renaissance “modern” ideas he had developed in concert with Winckelmann: that the history of art was a history of style tied to the culture that

52 Ireneo Affò, Ragionamento Del Padre Ireneo Affò Sopra Una Stanza Dipinta Dal Celeberrimo Antonio Allegri Da Correggio Nel Monistero Di S. Paolo in Parma (Parma: Carmignani, 1794), 11, 14. 53 Affò, Ragionamento Del Padre Ireneo Affò, 22, 74. 54 Affò, Ragionamento Del Padre Ireneo Affò, 41–42.

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shaped it, and that Renaissance art was shaped by its cultural engagement with antiquity. Moreover, the best Renaissance artists had intuitively recognized the differences between the best and the worst of the ancients, selecting only the former as the basis of their art.55 The “rediscovery” of the camera di San Paolo in the late eighteenth century provided both a new piece and a new kind of evidence of Correggio’s activity and development as an artist. What fascinated its late eighteenth-century audience was not the charm of the camera’s pervasive illusionism, nor the artist’s use of color, nor the delicate softness (vaghezza and morbidezza) that Vasari viewed as constituent of Correggio’s relief (rilievo). Mengs insisted that Correggio had achieved the summit of his art in chiaroscuro, an essential component of form and a principal element of design.56 What beguiled the eyes of the camera’s new spectators were Correggio’s chiaroscuri, viewed not merely as a tour de force of the painter’s art but as a gallery of statues providing precious testimony of the artist’s “taste” for classicism. Correggio’s camera was viewed as a visual record of Correggio’s tangible interest in, and firsthand experience of, ancient sculpture. Where scholars today may look at Correggio and see reductive echoes of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel or adaptations of Raphael’s Sala di Psiche as an expression of Correggio’s experience of Rome – often citing Mengs as their authority – Mengs and his eighteenth century peers saw something akin to the statue court of the Belvedere: a reflection of ancient Greek ideals expressed by monuments seen in Rome. Correggio’s newly recovered images in the camera di San Paolo were thus transformed into a biographical “text,” evidence of the artist’s life beyond the frame of Renaissance Parma. Ultimately, it appears to have been as much a function of art criticism as a burgeoning eighteenth-century discourse that not only turned the Renaissance masters into the modern “Greeks” but also, finally, brought Correggio to Rome.

55 Winckelmann in David Irwin, Winckelmann: Writings on Art (London: Phaidon, 1972), 61. 56 “In my opinion, Correggio has surpassed all other Painters in Clare Obscure,” Mengs, The Works of Anthony Raphael Mengs, vol. 1, 182; by contrast, he viewed Correggio’s use of color as “very good . . . but not very delicate or refined,” 183; also discussed in Haskell, “Correggio e la sua Importanza,” 71. Correggio’s critical fortune seems to have paralleled that of Raphael during the course of the nineteenth century. Whereas Raphael’s reputation has now revived, in great part through the efforts of scholars like Marcia Hall, the Correggio who is viewed as imitating his Roman peers remains neglected among American scholars.

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Works Cited Affò, Ireneo. Ragionamento Del Padre Ireneo Affò Sopra Una Stanza Dipinta Dal Celeberrimo Antonio Allegri Da Correggio Nel Monistero Di S. Paolo in Parma. Parma: Carmignani, 1794. Åkerman, Susana. Queen Christina of Sweden and Her Circle. New York: E. J. Brill, 1991. Bambach, Carmen C., Hugh Chapman, Martin Clayton, and George R. Goldner. Correggio and Parmigianino: Master Draughtsmen of the Renaissance. London: British Museum Press, 2000. Barolsky, Paul. Giotto’s Father and the Family of Vasari’s Lives. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992. Barolsky, Paul. Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari. University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1991. Bell, Janis C, and Thomas Willette. Art History in the Age of Bellori: Scholarship and Cultural Politics in Seventeenth-Century Rome. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Bora, Giulio. I Disegni del Codice Resta; Schede Critiche. Milan: Silvana, 1976. Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano and Stefano Ticozzi. Raccolta di Lettere sulla Pittua, Scultura ed Architettura. 8 vols. Milan: Giovanni Silvestri, 1822–25. Reprint, 1976. Bowron, Edgar Peters and Joseph J. Rishel. Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000. Coliva, Anna, ed. Correggio e L’Antico. Rome: Federico Motta Editore, 2008. De Grazia, Diane. Correggio and His Legacy. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1984. De Grazia, Diane, ed. The Age of Correggio and the Carracci. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, 1986. Dunn, Marilyn. “Father Sebastiano Resta and the Last Phase of the Decoration of S. Maria in Vallicella.” Art Bulletin 64 (December 1982). 601–22. Dunn, Marilyn. “Art Life in Rome, 1601–1799.” In Dictionary of Art. London: Macmillan, 1996. Ekserdjian, David. Correggio. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Ekserdjian, David. Correggio and Parmigianino: Art in Parma During the Sixteenth Century. Exhibition and Catalogue. Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2016. Gregory, Sharon. “‘The Outer Man Tends to be a Guide to the Inner:’ The Woodcut Portraits in Vasari’s Lives as Parallel Texts.” In The Rise of the Image, edited by R. Palmer and T. Fragenberg, 51–86. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Gould, Cecil. The Paintings of Correggio. London: Faber and Faber, 1976. Hall, Marcia. After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Hall, Marcia. The Sacred Image in the Age of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Hartt, Frederick. History of Italian Renaissance Art. New York: Prentice Hall, 3rd edition, 1987. Haskell, Francis. “Art Exhibitions in XVII Century Rome.” Studi Secenteschi 1 (1960): 107–21. Haskell, Francis. “Correggio e la sua Importanza per il Diciottesimo e il Diciottesimo e il Dicionnovesimo Secolo.” In Correggio e L’Antico, edited by Anna Coliva, 69–75. Rome: Federico Motta Editore, 2008. Haskell, Francis. History and its Images. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 3rd printing, 1995. Haskell, Francis. Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations Between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980.

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Haskell Francis and Nicholas Penny. Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500–1900. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1982. Irwin, David. Winckelmann: Writings on Art. London: Phaidon, 1972. Malvasia, Carlo Cesare. Felsina pittrice, vite de’ pittori bolognesi. Edited by G.P. Zanotti. 2 vols. Bologna: Guidi all’Ancora, 1841. Mahoney, Michael. “Salvator Rosa Provenance Studies: Prince Livio Odescalchi and Queen Christina.” Master Drawings 3 (1965): 383–89. Mengs, Anthony R. The Works of Anthony Raphael Mengs The First Painter to his Catholic Majesty Chas. III. Translated by Don Joseph Nicolas D’Azara, Spanish Minister at Rome. London: R. Faulder, 1796. Meyer, Julius. Antonio Allegri da Correggio. Edited and translated by Mrs. Charles Heaton. London: MacMillan and Co., 1876. Montanari, Tomaso. “Bellori and Christina of Sweden.” In Art History in the Age of Bellori. Edited by Janis Bell and Thomas Willette, 93–126. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Montanari, Tomaso. “Il Cardinale Decio Azzolino e le collezioni de Cristina di Svezia. Gli Azzolini, gli Ottoboni, e gli Odescalchi.” Storia dell’arte 90 (1997): 250–300. Montanari, Tomaso. “Cristina di Svezia, il cardinale Azzolino e il mercato veronese.” Richerche di Storia dell’arte 54 (1994): 25–52. Montanari, Tomaso. “Cristina di Svezia, il cardinal Azzolino e le mostra di quadri a San Salvatore in Lauro.” In Cristina di Svezia e Fermo, Atti del Convegno internazionale “La regina Cristina di Svezia, il cardinale Decio Azzolini jr a Fermo nell’arte e la politica della seconda metà del Siecento,” edited by Vera Nigrisoli Wärnhjelm, 77–92. Fermo: Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Fermo, 2001. Mussini, Massimo. Correggio Traduto. Milan: Federico Motta Editore, 1995. Nordenfalk, Carl. “Queen Christina and Art.” In Christina Queen of Sweden – A Personality of European Civilization, 416–45. 11th Exhibition of the Council of Europe. Stockholm: 1966. Pelta, Maureen. “‘If he, with his genius, had . . . lived in Rome’: Vasari and the Transformative Myth of Rome.” In Reading Vasari, edited by Anne Barricault, Andrew Ladis, and Norman Land, 154–168. London: The Georgia Museum of Art and Philip Wilson Publishers, 2005. Pelta, Maureen. “Form and Convent: Correggio and the Decoration of the Camera di S. Paolo.” PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1989. Popham, Arthur E. Correggio’s Drawings. London: For the British Academy by the Oxford University Press, 1957. Popham, Arthur E. “Sebastian Resta and His Collections.” Old Master Drawings 2 (1936): 1–19. Ratti, Carlo Giuseppe. Notizie Storiche Sincere intorno Vite e Opere del Celebre Pittore Antonio Allegri da Correggio. Finale: De’ Rossi, 1781. Rejaie, Azar. “Recognizing Vasari’s Legacy on the Study of Self-Portraiture.” Word and Image 25 (2009): 353–62. Resta, Sebastiano. Correggio in Roma. British Museum, London: MS Resta 1938, 0514.4. Resta, Sebastiano. Correggio in Roma. Edited by Arthur E. Popham. Parma: Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Province Parmensi, 1958. Ricci, Corrado. Antonio Allegri da Correggio. Translated by Florence Simmonds. London: William Heinemann, 1986. Roden, Marie-Louise. “The Burial of Queen Christina of Sweden in St. Peter’s Church.” Scandinavian Journal of History 12 (1987): 63–70.

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Roethlisberger, Marcel. “The Drawing Collection of Prince Livio Odescalchi.” Master Drawings 23–24 (1985–1986): 5–30. Signorini, Rodolfo. “Un inedito su Francesco Mantegna e il Correggio.” Quaderni di Palazzo Te 3 (1996): 79–80. Spagnolo, Maddalena. Correggio. Geografia e storia della fortuna (1528–1657). Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2005. Summerscale, Anne. Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci. University Park: Penn State Press, 2000. Vaccaro, Mary. “Coreggio and Parmigianino: On the Place of Rome in the Historiography of 16th-Century Parmese Drawing.” Artibus et Historiae 30 (2009): 105–124. Vasari, Giorgio. Le Opere di Giorgio Vasari. Edited by Gaetano Milanese. 9 Vols. Florence: Sansoni, 1973. Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects. Translated by C. de Vere. 3 vols. New ed. New York: Abrams, 1979. Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architetti. Florence: Giunti, 1568. Warwick, Genevieve. Arts of Collecting: Padre Sebastiano Resta and the Market for Drawings in Early Modern Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Wittkower, Rudolf. Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600–1750. 3rd ed. Baltimore: Pelican Books, 1973.

Part 2: Space

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Chapter 5 The Rediscovered Iconography of Palazzo Milesi’s Façade by Polidoro da Caravaggio, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, and a New Drawing The view of Palazzo Milesi (Figure 5.1), together with all of the other façades decorated in “sgraffito,” in monochrome of terra verde or yellow-brown ocher, by Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio and by Maturino of Florence, constituted easily accessed models and a source of infinite suggestions to artists who came to Rome to assimilate all’antica figural motifs and the creations of Raphael’s school.1 Referring to the Palazzo Milesi, Vasari writes that the stories were “innumerable things of fancy so strange that mortal eye could not picture anything more novel or more beautiful . . . one is left confused by the variety and abundance of the conceptions, so beautiful and so fanciful, which issued from their minds. These works have been imitated by a vast number of those who labor at that branch of art.”2 The success of the decoration on the façade developed by Polidoro and Maturino was such that Vasari affirmed: “It has been seen

1 The bibliography on the Palazzo Milesi is vast. I refer to: U. Gnoli, Facciate graffite e dipinte in Roma (Arezzo: Casa Vasari, 1938); Carlo Alberto Petrucci, Catalogo generale delle stampe tratte dai rami incisi posseduti dalla Calcografia Nazionale (Rome: La Libreria dello Stato, 1953), 184–85; Alessandro Marabottini, Polidoro da Caravaggio. 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1969); Lanfranco Ravelli, Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio I. Disegni di Polidoro; II. Copie da Polidoro (Bergamo: Edizioni Monumenta Bergomensia, 1978); Achim Gnann, Polidoro da Caravaggio (um 1499–1543), die römischen Innendekorationen (Munich: Scaneg, 1997); Pierluigi Leone De Castris, Polidoro da Caravaggio: L’opera completa (Naples: Electa, 2001); Dominique Cordellier, Polidoro da Caravaggio (Louvre: Cabinet des Dessins, 2007); Facciate dipinte. Desenhos do Palácio Milesi, 25 de março – 12 de junho 2011, Sala do Tecto Pintado, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, ed. Ana de Castro Henriques (Lisbon: Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, 2011). The problem of cultural models of the decoration of façades in Rome in the Cinquecento, and the fundamental role of Polidoro da Caravaggio in this context, has been addressed by Marcia Hall, After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 2 Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Engineers (London: Macmillan, 1913), vol. 5, 181; Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. G. Milanesi, 9 vols. (Florence: Sansoni, 1878–1885), vol. 5, 149: “lavorate con tante bizzarrie dentro, che occhio mortale non potrebbe imaginarsi altro né più bello né più nuovo . . . https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-006

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Figure 5.1: Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio, Maturino da Firenze, Palazzo Milesi, Rome. Photo: Eugenio Gozzano.

continually, therefore, in Rome, and is still seen, that all the draughtsmen are inclined more to the works of Polidoro and Maturino than to all the rest of our modern pictures,”3 such as to constitute a true and proper open air academy, according to Marabottini.4 Leone De Castris recalls, in this vein, the names of numerous followers of Polidoro: “Beyond Vasari and Salviati, who studied the frieze of the Niobids at Palazzo Milesi, and beyond Taddeo and Federico Zuccari, Perino del Vaga, Parmigianino and Tibaldi, Gherardi and Pupini, Boscoli and Naldini, Figino and Barocci, Girolamo da Carpi and Battista Franco, the Alberti brothers, Giovanni Guerra, the Cavalier d’Arpino, Gozio, Cati, Rossetti and even more copied the façades of Polidoro in pen, pencil or in watercolor.”5

da rimaner confuso per la moltiplicazione e copia di sì belle e capricciose fantasie, ch’uscivano loro de la mente: le quali opere sono state imitate da infiniti che lavoravano di sì fatt’opere.” 3 Vasari, The Lives, vol. 5, 177; Vasari, Le vite, vol. 5, 144: “Là onde si è veduto di continuo, ed ancor si vede per Roma, tutti i disegnatori essere più volti alle cose di Polidoro e di Maturino, che a tutte l’altre pitture moderne.” 4 Marabottini, Polidoro, CLIX, 293, 368–69. 5 Leone de Castris, Polidoro, 11.

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Marcia Hall, in her important study of art in Rome after Raphael, has underlined the fundamental role of Polidoro’s painted façades in determining the canon of all’antica decoration of exteriors and in the development of a new expressive language of myriads of figures that adorn Roman façades: “Like the effective orator, they gesture with weight and significance. His compositions bear such resemblance to familiar antique formulas that it grants them an authority akin to that of the model.”6 A drawing in red chalk and heightened with white lead (413 × 275 mm.) has recently emerged from a private Roman collection, with no indication of provenience, and depicting a solemn male figure (Figure 5.2), which I hold can be connected to Polidoro da Caravaggio’s inventions for the famous façade of Palazzo Milesi in Via della Maschera d’Oro. This unpublished sixteenth-century – or beginning of the seventeenth-century – drawing after Polidoro represents

Figure 5.2: After Polidoro, Cloaked male figure, here identified as Phocion the Good, from Palazzo Milesi, red chalk heightened with white (413 × 275 mm). Private collection, Rome.

6 Hall, After Raphael, 74.

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another testimony of the fact that the fortune and fame surrounding these frescoes survive well beyond their physical destruction. The drawing under scrutiny depicts the same subject that appears on the façade of the Palazzo Milesi, according to Enrico Maccari’s engraving (Figure 5.3), and, more precisely, the last figure on the right, between the fourth and fifth windows (Figures 5.4 and 5.5). The aged character is wrapped in a large drape with a fringed border; the austere face, with a long beard, shows a serious and thoughtful expression. The accent on luminous values, which build the folds and the opposing masses, indicates the chiaroscuro element as predominant, in accordance with the monochrome execution of the fresco and its qualities of fictive relief, in the style of Polidoro identified by Hall: “Lit so that the plane is emphasized, [and] the relief seems to bulge out from the surface.”7

Figure 5.3: Enrico Maccari, The Façade of Palazzo Milesi, in E. Maccari, G. Iannoni, Graffiti e chiaroscuri esistenti nell’esterno delle case di Roma, (Rome, 1876), plate 38: “Decorazione di Palazzo Milesi, Via della Maschera d’Oro.” With kind permission of the Accademia di San Luca, Istituzione Biblioteche Centri Culturali di Rome, Biblioteca “Romana Sarti.”

7 Hall, After Raphael, 74.

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Figure 5.4: Enrico Maccari, The Façade of Palazzo Milesi (detail of figure 3).

Figure 5.5: Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio, Maturino da Firenze, Palazzo Milesi (detail), Rome. Photo: Eugenio Gozzano.

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This particular solution, which is very effective in communicating the traits of a strong personality of an austere character, has struck the imagination of many draftsmen who have practiced portraying the same subject several times: I refer to the drawing in pen and brown ink at Oxford, Christ Church (Inv. 1197);8 to that of the Louvre, Cabinet des dessins (Inv. 6203 recto, Figure 5.6),9 and finally to the design of the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, one of the most beautiful in the Nicolò Pio collection (Inv. 9112 verso, Figure 5.7),10 in addition to the seventeenthcentury engraving by Giovan Battista Galestruzzi (Figure 5.8).11 Of all the existing copies, this unusual drawing shows particular acumen in the expressive and psychological rendering of the figure, a refinement in the volumetric and chiaroscuro system, a spontaneity of stroke and an executive speed such as to suggest the hypothesis that the author might be identified from among those cited by Vasari for its refinement and technical quality, especially in the skillful hatching and in the use of white lead, with luministic gradations of great effectiveness and plastic accentuation. In fact, in this version, the mechanical and slavish aspects of the copy appear to be completely absent, while a certain freshness and spontaneity of the ductus prevail, unusual in a derivation design. The work of Polidoro closest to the sheet in a private collection is undoubtedly the analogous black chalk design of the Sammlung der Bibliothek des Kunstgewerbemuseums, Kunstbibliothek (Inv. KdZ 20743) of Berlin (Figure 5.9), a sketch more than a finished design, considered as preparatory for the little paintings for Santa Maria delle Grazie alla Pescheria in Naples,12 but clearly very close to the fresco of Palazzo Milesi, being able to serve for a dual use given the chronological proximity. The face, with its abbreviated and summary yet greatly expressive features, also returns in other

8 James Byam Shaw, Old Drawing from Christ Church Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 404; Ravelli, Polidoro, 405–6 n. 773: the author correctly identifies the companion as Cato the Younger “ancora visibile ai tempi in cui Maccari incise l’intero complesso decorativo,” but does not attempt the identification of the subject, yet recognizing the stylistic influence of Michelangelo “nell’anziano personaggio a sinistra nella lunetta di Jacob e Joseph che il Buonarroti affrescò nella volta della Sistina.” 9 Ravelli, Polidoro, 406, n. 774. 10 Ravelli, Polidoro, 406, n. 775. A similar version of the same subject is the copy in Paris, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Artes (Inv. EBA 287), published by Ravelli, Polidoro, 485, n. 1014. 11 See below, n. 17. 12 Ravelli, Polidoro, 162–63, n. 135; Marabottini, Polidoro, 328, n. 122.

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Figure 5.6: After Polidoro, Phocion, detail from the frieze of Palazzo Milesi, pen and brown wash, 244 × 106 mm (Inv. 6203 recto), Louvre, Cabinet des dessins, Paris.

examples of Polidoro of the same period, as in the British Museum drawing depicting a virile figure cloaked with a cane (Inv. Ff 1–59, Figure 5.10).13 The stance, with the arms that tighten the edges of the fabric and emerge as pure volumes from under the mantle, derives from some Michelangelesque inventions for the Sistine Chapel, in particular from the figure in green in the lunette of Josias, Jechonias, and Salathiel, which has a fringed cape similar to the one by Polidoro, and more precisely from the figure cloaked in yellow in the lunette with Jacob and Joseph, comparable for emotional concentration and visual impact. The search for expression, together with the luminous play of the heavy falling folds, creating clear and silhouetted volumes, indicate that the mastery of Michelangelo is strongly felt. In this regard, both Ravelli14 and Leone de Castris15 have pointed out that this phase of investigation on the models of

13 Ravelli, Polidoro, 165–66, n. 141; Marabottini, Polidoro, 328, n. 121; Philip Pouncey and John Gere, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Raphael and his Circle (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1962), 120, n. 207. 14 Ravelli, Polidoro, 405–6, n. 773. 15 Leone de Castris, Polidoro, 141.

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Figure 5.7: After Polidoro, Phocion, detail from the frieze of Palazzo Milesi, pen and white wash, 252 × 156 mm (Inv. 9112 verso). Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Rome.

the great Florentine corresponds to the period 1526–1527, the same moment in which Polidoro dedicated himself to the realization of Palazzo Milesi. Unfortunately, the conditions of conservation of the sheet do not allow an adequate reading due to the widespread stains of humidity and a generalized yellowing that alter the perception of the whole; perhaps a careful restoration will allow us to recover a more correct understanding of the figural details. The status of the drawing remains uncertain and various hypotheses are possible: from the attribution to Polidoro and his workshop, as a finished model, preparatory for the fresco, to the alternative hypothesis of a very early copy produced contemporary to, or just a few decades following, the decoration of the Palace. But, in addition to the problem of attribution, a more general problem arises that involves the entire decoration, and that scholars have not failed to note: the difficulty of reading the iconography of the whole façade, despite the consistency of the compositional system and the evident imprint of a wide and articulated decorative project.

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Figure 5.8: Giovan Battista Galestruzzi, after Polidoro, Cato the Younger and Phocion the Good, detail from the frieze of Palazzo Milesi, Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome. Photo: Author.

Starting from the drawing in red chalk, it is now possible both to identify the iconography and recognize the subject, and to focus on a significant part of the Palazzo Milesi decorative project, without pretension of exhaustiveness (doubts on the identification of some scenes remain) but to indicate some guidelines for a better understanding of the figurative text. The majestic figures that decorate the façade have been handed down to us by the nineteenth-century engraving by Enrico Maccari (Figure 5.3),16 which restores the whole almost in its entirety; a second precious document is that of Giovan Battista Galestruzzi, an engraver who owes his fame to the series of etchings published in 1658 that reproduce some of the subjects frescoed by Polidoro.17

16 Enrico Maccari and Giovanni Iannoni, Graffiti e chiaroscuri esistenti nell’esterno delle case di Roma (Rome: Maccari, 1876), plate 38: “Decorazione di Palazzo Milesi, Via della Maschera d’Oro.” 17 Laura Volpe, “Galestruzzi, Giovanni Battista,” in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. vol. 51 (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Treccani, 1998) Galestruzzi realized for Palazzo Milesi 23 etchings

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Figure 5.9: Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio, Phocion the Good, black and white chalk, 261 × 181 mm (Inv. K.d.Z. 20743). Sammlung der Bibliothek des Kunstgewerbemuseums, Kunstbibliothek, Berlin.

These visual documents allow us to clarify some central elements of the iconographic program of the Palace, that have not yet been recognized. The robed male figure refers to the analogous subject within the series of heroes and condottieri belonging to the mythical history of ancient Greece and Rome, one of the protagonists of the system of illustrious men occupying the spaces between the windows, immediately above the famous frieze with the Stories of Niobe, that is, the second register of the decoration, where the identity of the figures is still to be clarified. In the third decorative register subjects appear identified as the Castration of Uranus, the Rape of the Sabines, Numa and Lycurgus who Deliver the Laws, the

entitled Opere di Polidoro da Caravaggio, dated between 1656 and 1658. The prints, of different format, are dedicated to Roman history (5), to the Niobids (5), Panoplies and Vases (12); according to Volpe the sheet with Three statues of ancient Romans dated 1660 was a later addition.

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Figure 5.10: Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio, Cloaked male figure with a stick, red chalk, 193 × 89 mm (Inv. F.f. 1.59). British Museum, London.

Victory of Cyrus on Spargapses, The Continence of Scipio, and Prisoners before Magistrates, interspersed with pairs of historiated vases and panoplies. A female bust dominates the central area, at the top of the central window, already identified as the goddess Juno.18 Doubts remain about the identification of the figures of the fourth register, where the only one identified with certainty remains the first on the left, Cronus Devouring a Child (Saturn in Roman myth), while no hypothesis has been made regarding the identification of the remaining eight figures. In the attic allegorical figures are more difficult to recognize, lacking as they are in attributes that make them clearly recognizable.19

18 Partial explanation of the decorative program is in Leone de Castris, Polidoro, 497, with earlier bibliography. On the identification of the goddess as Juno, see Ravelli, Polidoro, 416–17. 19 Leone de Castris, Polidoro, 497, pinpoints that all of Polidoro’s inventions “sono documentate da un numero impressionante e in continuo aumento di copie grafiche, sin dal primo Cinquecento . . . nell’ordine, i registri meglio documentati sono il fregio di Niobe, il secondo fregio con storie e vasi, le figure ed episodi fra le finestre del secondo piano, fra quelle del primo, e infine quelle del terzo, comprensibilmente assai presto deterioratesi.”

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Yet, according to Maccari’s engraving and comparing it with those of Galestruzzi, it is possible to recognize some of the emblematic figures from ancient history – especially those juxtaposed as pairs, which allow for a more precise identification thanks to the fact that they may be connected according to the canonical text of the history of famous men: The Parallel Lives of Plutarch. There is no need to emphasize the great interest which, from the earliest Humanism, The Parallel Lives has drawn; it is sufficient to remember that in the second half of the fifteenth century the printing press gave even greater popularity to their fame, and the first Italian edition dates back to 1482.20 In 1502, the first sixteenth-century edition of the Lives of Plutarch came to light.21 From this followed many others: in 1517 in a Giuntina edition,22 in 1519 in Greek due to Aldo Manuzio,23 and in Italian in 1525,24 just in time for the decoration of the Palazzo Milesi (Figure 5.11). In 1508 Raffaele Regio edited for Rusconi, in Venice, the Apoftegmi spartani,25 bearing witness to the widespread humanist interest in the Theban’s moral and political lessons. The choice of the couples of illustrious men in the decoration of the palace is based on the text of Plutarch who, although not the only reference for the topics dealt with, constitutes a clear guide for the choice of the associated characters according to a historical, political, and moral criterion. The decoration is read from top to bottom and from left to right: the myths of the origins of the world, among which Cronos Devouring his Children and The Castration of Uranus are at the top left; then follow, between the windows of the second floor, the most significant couple, which we can easily

20 See, on this topic, the fundamental study by Gianvito Resta, Le epitomi di Plutarco nel Quattrocento (Padua: Antenore, 1962). For a modern edition see Plutarch, Parallel Lives (Cambridge, MA and London: Loeb Classical Library, 1914–1926). 21 Plutarch, Plutarchi Vitae, nuper quam diligentissime recognitae, quibus tres uirorum illustrium vitae aditae fuerunt & in fine uoluminis apositae (Venetiis: per Doninum Pincium, 1502). 22 Plutarch, Sapientissimi Plutarchi Paralellum [!], vitae Romanorum & Graecorum quadraginta nouem (Florentiae: in aedibus Philippi Iuntae, 1517). 23 Plutarch, Ploutarchou Parallela en biois Ellenonte kai Romaion Plutarchi quae vocantur Parallela. Hoc est vitae illustrium virorum Graeci nominis ac Latini, prout quaequae alteri conuenire videbatur, digestae (Venetiis: in aedibus Aldi, et Andreae soceri, menseaugusto 1519). 24 Plutarch, La prima, seconda & ultima parte delle vite di Plutarcho: di greco in latino: e di latinoin volgare tradotte: nouamente con le sue historie ristampate (Vinegia: per Nicolo di Aristotile detto Zoppino, 1525). 25 Plutarch, Plutarchi Regum & imperatorum apophthegmata Raphaele Regio interprete. Plutarchi Laconica apophthegmata Raphaele Regio interprete. Plutarchi Dialogus: in quo animalia bruta ratione uti monstrantur: Ioanne Regio interprete. Raphaelis Regii apologia: in qua quattuor hae quaestiones potissimum edisseruntur (Venetiis: opera & impensa Georgii de Rusconibus, 1508). For a recent edition see Plutarch, Le virtù di Sparta, ed. Dario Del Corno and translated by Giuseppe Zanetto. 2nd ed. (Milan: Adelphi, 2005)

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Figure 5.11: La prima, seconda & ultima parte delle vite di Plutarcho: di greco in latino: e di latino in volgare tradotte: & nouamente con le sue historie ristampate. Stampate in Vinegia: per Nicolo di Aristotile detto Zoppino, 1525 del mese di luglio. Biblioteca Casanatense, segnato B(MIN) II.3.

identify as Romulus and Theseus (Figure 5.4, IV register, second scene starting from left), the mythical founders of Rome and Athens – the first associated with the she-wolf with Remus, the Meta Romuli, and to a coclide column and the Pantheon; the second to the Parthenon and to the olive tree of Athena, triumphant over the centaurs, one of whom lies lifeless at his feet.26 After the magni viri, initiators of Rome and Athens, united by the predisposition to govern,27 there follow

26 Generally identified as “Condottieri” by Ravelli, Polidoro, 424–26. 27 Plutarch writes: “Although Theseus and Romulus were both statesmen by nature, neither maintained to the end the true character of a king, but both deviated from it and underwent a change, the former in the direction of democracy, the latter in the direction of tyranny, making thus the same mistake through opposite affections . . . But he who remits or extends his authority is no longer a king or a ruler; he becomes either a demagogue or a despot, and implants hatred or contempt in the hearts of his subjects. However, the first error seems to arise from

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other moral and symbolic examples of the ideal comparison and continuity between the Greek and Roman cultures. The following episode focuses on the themes of legislation, of justice and loyalty: the protagonist is Lycurgus, the great lawmaker of Sparta, associated by Plutarch to Numa Pompilius, the legendary king and legislator of Rome (Figure 5.4, IV register, third scene starting from left). In Polidoro’s fresco, Lycurgus is portrayed in front of an altar on the right and supports his nephew – born of his sister-in-law after the death of his brother Polydectes – to whom he guarantees the reign even against the maneuvers of his mother, proposing himself as royal guardian (“Spartans, here is your king,” he exclaims), thus demonstrating his rectitude and honesty in renouncing the role of power that the sister-in-law had offered him, revealing even the intention to eliminate the child.28 An emblematic figure of rectitude and sense of the state, Sparta’s first legislator Lycurgus is a counterpoint to Numa Pompilius, whom we may recognize in the figure beside the altar, with a radiating crown, more probably in this upper register than in the fresco immediately below, already identified as depicting The Delivery of the Laws by Numa Pompilius and Lycurgus.29 The Pantheon and the obelisk in the background offer a suitable framework for the pious ancient Roman king presented by an antique altar and with books at hands, referring to his role as legislator. Numa and Lycurgus, who is showing the baby king son of his brother, sign of his rectitude, appear more convincingly represented than the two figures in the scene below with a generic delivery of slabs of written law, which could well refer to the same Numa Pompilius or to other lawgivers as Solon, but this is hard to decipher. However, if the relationship between upper and lower registers is correct, then, as we have the Rape of the Sabine Women

kindliness and humanity; the second from selfishness and severity” (“Comparison of Theseus and Romulus,” in Plutarch’s Lives, vol. 1, Theseus and Romulus, Lycurgus and Numa, Solon and Publicola, 1914, 192–93). In the decoration of Palazzo Milesi, the author of the iconography seems to have designed an interweaving of relationships also in a vertical sense, as well as horizontal, because immediately under the figure of Romulus the scene of the Rape of the Sabines is represented, which is associated with the eulogy of Plutarch on the merits of the founder of Rome: “Romulus . . . at first, not by removing or enlarging a city which already existed, but by creating one from nothing, and by acquiring for himself at once territory, country, kingdom, clans, marriages and relationships, he ruined no one and killed no one, but was a benefactor of men without homes and hearths, who wished instead to be a people and citizens of a common city” (“Comparison of Theseus and Romulus,” in Plutarch’s Lives, vol. 1, Theseus and Romulus, Lycurgus and Numa, Solon and Publicola, 196). Ravelli publishes numerous drawings copied by this famous couple (but without proposing an identification); see Ravelli, Polidoro, 423–25, nn. 832–37. 28 Plutarch’s Lives, vol. 1, Theseus and Romulus, Lycurgus and Numa, Solon and Publicola, 39–59. 29 For copies from this compartment, see Ravelli, Polidoro, 412–16, nn. 797–808.

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under the figure of Romulus, accordingly, the figure of Numa Pompilius could be celebrated as legislator in the lower register. While the recognition of Lycurgus and Numa Pompilius is facilitated by iconographic characteristics, the succeeding scene – between the third and fourth window – is more difficult to decode because it does not present a couple but a single protagonist (Figure 5.4, IV register, fourth scene starting from left). The commander on the left, dressed in armor and surrounded by his generals, with the banners and a multitude of warriors armed with spears behind him, observes a barbarian who drinks from a cup in front of him. The leaders of Greek and Roman history are innumerable and Plutarch offers too many alternatives to be able to identify this scene with certainty. Nevertheless, ideal candidates for impersonating the protagonist are both Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, because they are magnanimous and lenient towards the losers. The presence of the amphora at the feet of the commander and the cup from which the figure dressed in oriental clothes drinks could, however, suggest that one read the scene as an episode disclosed by Arrian of Nicomedia, in which Alexander the Great offers libations and drinks wine from the same cup as the Macedonians and Persians, to seal the pact between the two peoples now allied, promote cohesion, and establish harmony.30 This too, undoubtedly, is an episode of clemency. The next scene, between the fourth and fifth window, based on Plutarch’s Lives, can be interpreted as depicting Gaius Marius and Pyrrhus, the first for the resigned appearance and in being presented as tribune to the plebian, who listens to an old man and a woman leading a girl; the second for the herd of African elephants for which he became famous (Figure 5.4, IV register, fifth scene starting from left). Gaius Marius is the homo novus, coming from a family of peasants without nobility, which supports the popular party against the conservatives and the aristocracy, irreducible enemies of Sulla, and who promotes a reform to open to all – without distinction of wealth – entry into the Roman army. Plutarch associates him for his gifts of loyalty and courage to Pyrrhus, bold and warlike king of Epirus who wages war in Rome, with elephants in tow, and who nevertheless recognizes his ephemeral victory during the Punic Wars against the Roman army led by the consul Levinus – to the point of convincing him to abandoning Italy.31 In De remediis utriusque fortunae Petrarch elects Marius as a symbol of

30 Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander, trans. E. Iliff Robson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946), 7.8–11. Ravelli, Polidoro, 426–29, nn. 842–50, publishes again several copies, documenting the celebrity of this invention. 31 Plutarch’s Lives, vol. 9, Phyrrus and Marius, 383–433. For the several copies see again Ravelli, Polidoro, 430–33, nn. 851–56.

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the inconstancy of fortune32 – from the honors of the plural consulate to extreme poverty (fleas dressed in rags in the swamps of Minturno), a destiny that also unites him to Pyrrhus in the adversity of fate, but in the face of which they remain steadfast and unshakeable. The register below presents episodes of Greco-Roman mythical history, interspersed with vases and panoplies, already identified with the Castration of Uranus, the Rape of the Sabines, Numa who Delivers the Laws, the Victory of Cyrus on Spargapses, The Continence of Scipio,33 and Prisoners before Magistrates. The lower register presents the myth of Niobe and the Niobids, where we may recognize an episode of hubris contrasted by the upper scenes of virtus. The intermediate band, instead, with statuary figures inserted between the first order of windows, is still unclear to this day. The drawing under examination pertains to this latter series also. Just as in the upper band, in this case as well it is easier to identify the paired figures over the single ones, because the few visible attributes allow by association a simpler decoding. Therefore, while the first figure on the left, with a baton in hand, appears too generic to attempt an identification (even if, considering the vertical series as myths of origin, it would make sense to hypothesize the presence of Aeneas in this panel), the pair of immediately following warriors is recognizable as composed of Marcus Furius Camillus and of Themistocles (Figure 5.4, II register, second scene starting from left). Maccari’s engraving is not accurate but thanks to a drawing, a copy of the original, kept in the British Museum (inv. 1960, 1115.4),34 it is possible to better determine the original composition: the first figure supports a statuette, while the second figure points to the prow of a ship. The first attribute refers to the statue of Juno that Marcus Furius Camillus – victorious at the siege of Veii – could bring to Rome

32 Petrarca, De remediis utriusque fortunae, I: 14. 33 Previous interpretations of this episode as Alexander and the family of Darius (Ravelli, Polidoro, 420–22) are not consistent with the scene painted by Polidoro, which presents only one young woman, her father kneeling in front of Scipio who, as indicated by the gesture of his right hand, will release the virgin to her father. The iconography of Alexander and the Daughters of Darius, instead, presents numerous young women and their kneeling mother, usually warmly received by Alexander as the one who will soon become his mother-in-law. 34 Pouncey and Gere, Italian Drawings, 171, n. 285; Ravelli, Polidoro, 403, n. 765. Besides the drawing 1960,1115.4, there exists a second version at the Jerusalem Museum, considered as a preparatory drawing by Polidoro, whereas another two copies of the same figure, here identified as Themistocles, are in the British Museum, Inv. 1960,1115.3, and at the Uffizi, Inv. 13373 F. See further Ravelli, Polidoro, 413–14 nn. 765, 766, 767; Pouncey and Gere, Italian Drawings, 171 n. 284. A late sixteenth-century copy is in the Albertina, attributed to school of Frans Floris (cat. II, 118).

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from the Veientine temple, thanks to the favor of the Gods,35 while the bow of the ship connotes the hero of Salamis, Themistocles, responsible for setting up the Athenian naval fleet which defeated the Persians.36 Furius Camillus, considered by Livy and Plutarch almost a second founder of Rome and a new Romulus – thanks to the legendary liberation of the Capital, besieged by the Gauls – unites the heroic qualities of the victorious commander with the virtue of pietas and the gifts of legislator. In the fresco, in fact, he supports a table of laws with the speaking statue of the Juno of Veii, who according to the narratives of Livy and Plutarch consents to being transferred from conquered Veii to Rome. For his primacy in Roman history as Pater patriae he is associated with Themistocles, who plays a similar role in the history of Athens. Plutarch, in fact, considers Themistocles the man who most of all contributed to the salvation of Greece from the Persian menace. His naval policies, furthermore, led to important long-term results because it allowed Athens to gain the supremacy of the sea. The pairing plays a symbolic function as servants and heroes of the homeland and is consistently placed vertically with the founders Romulus and Theseus, in strengthening the power of the state. In this perspective, the first figure on the left can be coherently interpreted as the other great founder of Rome, Aeneas (Figure 5.4, II register, first scene starting from left). More ambiguous, perhaps due to the loss of significant details, are the two central isolated figures between the second, third, and fourth windows, which display a scepter or perhaps the baton of command; it is perhaps Pericles and Augustus, the first in line with the legislators Licurgus and Numa, the second in line with the concord imposed by Alexander among the Macedonians and Persians, as a great peace maker of the empire and symbol of the pax augusta; but this remains in this case in the realm of hypothesis (Figure 5.4, II register, third and fourth scenes starting from left).37

35 Plutarch, “Camillus,” in Plutarch’s Lives, vol. 2, Themistocles and Camillus, Aristides and Cato Major, Cimon and Lucullus, 109: “After he had utterly sacked the city, he determined to transfer the image of Juno to Rome . . . The workmen were assembled for the purpose, and Camillus was sacrificing and praying the goddess to accept of their zeal and to be a kindly co-dweller with the gods of Rome, when the image, they say, spoke in low tones and said she was ready and willing.” 36 Plutarch, “Themistocles,” in Plutarch’s Lives, vol. 2, Themistocles and Camillus, Aristides and Cato Major, Cimon and Lucullus, 13, on the naval reform: “Now, whether by accomplishing this he did injury to the integrity and purity of public life or not, let the philosopher rather investigate. But that the salvation which the Hellenes achieved at that time came from the sea, and that it was those very triremes which restored again the fallen city of Athens, Xerxes himself bore witness, not to speak of other proofs.” 37 For the first of the two figures there exists a copy at the Fondation Custodia in Parigi (Inv. 9559); cfr. Ravelli, Polidoro, 404 n. 769.

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The last group on the right, to which the drawing refers, is instead identifiable with certainty (Figure 5.4, II register, fifth scene starting from left). The Cloaked Male Figure is accompanied by a second character who from a deep wound in his abdomen extracts his intestines: it is not difficult to recognize the tragic suicide of Cato the Younger, or Uticensis, to distinguish him from his elder relative Cato the Censor, who turned his rage upon himself, as described in The Parallel Lives, in his firm opposition to Caesar.38 Cato’s absolute integrity is associated by Plutarch with that of the Athenian Phocion the Good, for the latter’s irreproachable moral conduct and the contempt of wealth, despite his position of power in several missions and as a representative in the Athenian diplomacy toward Alexander, of whom he repeatedly refused gifts and money. Honesty modeled, dressed in a worn-out cloak – where he hides his hands, as Plutarch describes him, same as in our drawing – he lived in a humble home believing that frugality proved his own virtue. Of Phocion the Good and Cato the Younger (Figure 5.8), Plutarch celebrates their magnanimity and righteousness: in the first, glory and riches are not taken into account, indeed, they contrast with the task of arbitrator and mediator of great justice and integrity; eventually he was even sentenced to death by his own citizens and accepted the verdict.39 In the second, attachment to ideals is placed before life itself. To the drawing, together with the other versions copied and printed, we can finally give a title: Phocion the Good. The political and moral virtues of Cato and Phocion, their personal sacrifice for the supreme good of the state, constitute the moral exempla through which the patron Milesi illustrates his personal cultural program. Along with the various illustrious men shown on the façade, as in the case of Marius and Pyrrhus, Cato and Phocion, the adversities of fate do not undermine the ideals of the wise and strong. The salient themes are associated both chronologically, from left to right and from top to bottom, as a renewal of the glorious Greek and Roman traditions and sources of inspiration for the present. The patron, Giovanni Antonio Milesi, a jurisconsult from Bergamo and countryman of Polidoro, held important positions in the Curia: procurator of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem (later Knights of Malta), he carried out an important diplomatic action in favor of the Knights of St. John who, expelled from Rhodes in 1522, were allowed to transfer to Malta in 1530, thanks to the intermediation of Milesi and his good offices with Charles V and Clement VII.40 A passionate bibliophile, 38 “Cato the Younger,” in Plutarch’s Lives, vol. 8, 759–94. 39 “Phocion,” in Plutarch’s Lives, vol. 8, 741–59. 40 On the political and diplomatic role of Giovanni Antonio Milesi, I refer to G. Rossi Vairo, “Polidoro da Caravaggio em Roma: A decoração do Palàcio Milesi,” in Facciate dipinte, 4–25;

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erudite and a collector of antiquities, Milesi – just as Melchiorre Baldassini – must have carefully designed the decoration of the façade of his palace as an ideal mirror of the civil and moral values forged on classical and humanistic models. The complex iconographic program could hardly have been conceived without an internal consistency: Plutarch’s Parallel Lives are an evident trace – a text that is also famous and has been repeatedly published since the early sixteenth century, as we have seen – which in large part structured the decorative plan. The symbolic skeleton is represented by the couples of illustrious men responsible for the historical primacy of Greece and Rome and the rise to exemplary models of virtue and triumph over the tumult of passions represented by the famous frieze with the history of Niobe. Thus, thanks to an enlightened patron, the ideal antiquity of Greece and of Rome rises to life again on the façade of the Palazzo Milesi, forging the image of renaissance Rome and creating one of the most beloved repertoires for artists visiting the Urb. The influence of Polidoro, like that of Plutarch’s Lives, was very great and at the date of the conclusion of Palazzo Milesi the style and the language he had developed for the representation of fictive relief all’antica had already reached full formulation.41 A style and rhetoric for images that is all the more suitable to the content, because as Marcia Hall has appropriately observed, “such antique subjects were popular in Rome as an expression for the city’s past and its proper identity.”42

Works Cited Arrian. Anabasis of Alexander. Trans. E. Iliff Robson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. Byam Shaw, James. Old Drawing from Christ Church Oxford. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Cordellier, Dominique. Polidoro da Caravaggio. Louvre: Cabinet des Dessins, 2007. Facciate dipinte. Desenhos do Palácio Milesi, 25 de março – 12 de junho 2011, Sala do Tecto Pintado, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga. Edited by Ana de Castro Henriques. Lisbon: Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, 2011. Exhibition catalog.

cfr. Leone de Castris, Polidoro, 141–46, Petrucci, Catalogo generale delle stampe, 426–41; Luigi Spezzaferro, “Il testamento di Marzio Milesi. Tracce per un perduto Caravaggio.” Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte 10 (1980): 91–100. 41 Hall, After Raphael, 76: “What we do not find in Michelangelo, or in Raphael for that matter, are the conventions of the relief like style deriving from the antique. These appear to have been invented by Polidoro primarily and learned quickly by other members of the former Raphael’s bottega. It may be impossible to fix the date, but we can be sure that by 1522, when Perino went to Florence, the vocabulary was formulated.” 42 Hall, After Raphael, 76.

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Gnann, Achim. Polidoro da Caravaggio (um 1499–1543), die römischen Innendekorationen. Munich: Scaneg, 1997. Gnoli, U. Facciate graffite e dipinte in Roma. Arezzo: Casa Vasari, 1938. Hall, Marcia. After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Leone De Castris, Pierluigi. Polidoro da Caravaggio: L’opera completa. Naples: Electa, 2001. Maccari, Enrico, and Giovanni Iannoni. Graffiti e chiaroscuri esistenti nell’esterno delle case di Roma. Rome: Maccari, 1876. Marabottini, Alessandro. Polidoro da Caravaggio. 2 vols. Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1969. Petrucci, Carlo Alberto. Catalogo generale delle stampe tratte dai rami incisi posseduti dalla Calcografia Nazionale. Rome: La Libreria dello Stato, 1953. Plutarch. Plutarchi Vitae, nuper quam diligentissime recognitae, quibus tres uirorum illustrium vitae aditae fuerunt & in fine uoluminis apositae. Venetiis: per Doninum Pincium, 1502. Plutarch. Plutarchi Regum & imperatorum apophthegmata Raphaele Regio interprete. Plutarchi Laconica apophthegmata Raphaele Regio interprete. Plutarchi Dialogus: in quo animalia bruta ratione uti monstrantur: Ioanne Regio interprete. Raphaelis Regii apologia: in qua quattuor hae quaestiones potissimum edisseruntur. Impressum Venetiis: opera & impensa Georgii de Rusconibus, 1508. Plutarch. Sapientissimi Plutarchi Paralellum [!], vitae Romanorum & Graecorum quadraginta nouem. Florentiae: in aedibus Philippi Iuntae, 1517. Plutarch. Ploutarchou Parallela en biois Ellenonte kai Romaion Plutarchi quae vocantur Parallela. Hoc est vitae illustrium virorum Graeci nominis ac Latini, prout quaequae alteri conuenire videbatur, digestae. Venetiis: in aedibus Aldi, et Andreae soceri, mense augusto 1519. Plutarch. La prima, seconda & ultima parte delle vite di Plutarcho: di greco in latino: e di latino in volgare tradotte: nouamente con le sue historie ristampate. Stampate in Vinegia: per Nicolo di Aristotile detto Zoppino, 1525. Plutarch. Parallel Lives. Cambridge, MA and London: Loeb Classical Library, 1914–1926. Plutarch. Le virtù di Sparta. Edited by Dario Del Corno and translated by Giuseppe Zanetto. 2nd ed. Milan: Adelphi, 2005. Pouncey, Philip and John Gere. Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Raphael and His Circle. London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1962. Ravelli, Lanfranco. Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio I. Disegni di Polidoro; II. Copie da Polidoro. Bergamo: Edizioni Monumenta Bergomensia, 1978. Resta, Gianvito. Le epitomi di Plutarco nel Quattrocento. Padua: Antenore, 1962. Rossi Vairo, Giulia. “Polidoro da Caravaggio em Roma: A decoração do Palàcio Milesi.” In Facciate dipinte. Desenhos do Palàcio Milesi, edited by Alexandra Reis Gomes Markl, 4–25. Lisbon, 2011. Spezzaferro, Luigi. “Il testamento di Marzio Milesi. Tracce per un perduto Caravaggio.” Ricerche di Storia dell’Arte 10 (1980): 91–100. Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori. Edited by G. Milanesi. 9 vols. Florence: Sansoni, 1878–1885. Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Engineers, vol. 5, Andrea da Fiesole to Lorenzo Lotto, translated by Gaston DeVere. London: Macmillan, 1913. Volpe, Laura. “Galestruzzi, Giovanni Battista.” In Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. vol. 51. Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Treccani, 1998.

Rose Marie May

Chapter 6 San Giacomo degli Spagnoli in Rome on the Forefront of Reform: Remodeling the East End in the 1550s and 1560s The Roman church, San Giacomo and San Ildefonso degli Spagnoli (Figures 6.1 and 6.2), was founded in 1450 to provide a religious and charitable center for Castilians visiting and residing in the city.1 Beginning in the eighth century, foreigners living in Rome began to establish churches with adjacent hospitals for their fellow countrymen traveling on pilgrimage, to provide safe havens in a city that could be hostile and dangerous. These were typically modest structures sufficient for the needs of travelers and the local community. Yet in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, their membership, wealth, and significance grew and they began to be referred to as “national” churches as the city was being remade into a major European capital.2 Governing boards and patrons put considered thought into the architecture and decoration of these churches as their decisions offered a way for a foreign nation to distinguish itself and establish a carefully crafted identity. For the Spanish, San Giacomo was a venue to fashion and promote their recently unified country as a powerful Christian nation committed to religious orthodoxy and the struggle against heresy.3 When San Giacomo opened in 1450, it was a modest structure, scarcely larger than a freestanding chapel, facing the Via San Giacomo, a small, medieval street running parallel to the Piazza Navona (Figure 6.1). Over the next century, as the Spanish community in the city grew in size and prominence, the church was 1 The most comprehensive history of San Giacomo is Justo Fernandez Alonso, “Las Iglesias Nacionales de Espana en Roma, sus Origenes,” Anthologica Annua 4 (1956): 9–96. 2 Claudia Confort and Elena Sánchez de Madariaga, “Churches and Confraternities,” in Cities and Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1700, ed. Robert Muchembled and William Monter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 349–60. 3 Throughout this essay I refer to the “Spanish community” and the “Spanish nation” in keeping with the archival sources from the period which refer to the “nación española.” The historian Alessandro Serio explains, “Spanish community” and “Spanish nation” were typically used in this period in Rome to refer to a group of people who came from a common geographical or geopolitical locale, but did not necessarily have a uniform culture or language. Alessandro Serio, “Modi, Tempi, Uomini della Presenza Hispana a Roma tra la Fine del Quattrocentro e il Primo Cinquecento (1492– 1527),” in L’Italia di Carlo V: Guerra, Religione e Politica nel Primo Cinquecento, Atti del Convegno Internazional di Studi, ed. Francesca Cantù and Maria Antonietta Visceglia (Rome: Viella, 2011) 433–75. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-007

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Figure 6.1: Giuseppe Vasi, Archiginnasio della Sapienza, Plate 161 from Delle magnificenze di Roma antica e moderna . . ., 1747–1761, etching. Getty Research Institute, Muzio Collection, 88-B12976.

Figure 6.2: Dominique Barrière, Fête of the Spaniards in Rome in the Year of the Jubilee, 1650, sheet: 15 3/16 × 24 15/16 inch, etching, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 49.50.270.

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transformed into a much grander facility. It was doubled in size, several new chapels were constructed and elaborately decorated, and a second, statelier entrance was added opening onto the Piazza Navona, which was becoming a locus for grand secular and religious ceremonies in the city (Figures 6.2 and 6.3).4

Figure 6.3: Paul Marie Letarouilly, San Giacomo degli Spagnoli, 1853, 23 7/16 × 17 5/16 × 1 3/16 inch engraving, from Édifices de Rome moderne; ou, Recueil des palais, maisons, églises, couvents et autres monuments publics et particuliers les plus remarquables de la ville de Rome, Paris: Bance, 18. Photo: author.

In the 1550s, the governing board turned their attention to the east end of the church. With funding from Prince Philip, the future King of Spain, they embellished the altar, commissioning a costly tabernacle to contain the Eucharist and replaced an unassuming main altarpiece with a work by the sought-after Roman artist, Siciolante da Sermoneta.5 Subsequently, in the late 1560s, the 4 Alonso, “Sus orígenes,” 9–96; Justo Fernandez Alonso, “Santiago de Los Espanoles de Roma en el Siglo XVI,” Anthologica Annua 5 (1958): 9–122; Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro, La Renta y las Casas, el Patrimonio Immobiliario de Santiago de los Espanoles de Roma entre los Siglos XV y XVII (Roma: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 1999). 5 For more on the altarpiece see Bernice F. Davidson, “Some Early Works by Girolamo Siciolante Da Sermoneta,” The Art Bulletin 48 (1966): 55–64; and John Hunter, Girolamo Siciolante Pittore Da Sermoneta (1521–1575) (Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 1996). On the tabernacle see Gonzalo

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governing board decided to take on a much larger project – a complete remodel of the east end.6 These projects were realized in the midst of the Council of Trent (1545–1563), which had been convened to answer the calls for reform in the Church. One of the Council’s resolutions was to reaffirm the central role of the celebration of the Mass and the Sacrament of the Eucharist in the Catholic faith. This led to a change in thinking about the layout of churches. The Spanish were well represented at Trent and saw themselves as being leaders of reform as they had already started the process in Spain at the end of the fifteenth century.7 Thus it is not surprising the governing board of San Giacomo wanted to show their support for the decisions coming from Trent by leading the way in making physical modifications to their church, which was serving as a proxy for the Spanish nation in Rome. The projects for the east end of San Giacomo demonstrate a Spanish commitment to the ideals of the Counter-Reformation.8 They also reflect changes in the congregation of San Giacomo from merchants, artisans, and entrepreneurs to aristocrats and high-ranking clergy and reveal a new relationship with the Spanish monarchy.9 My discussion of these projects will be limited because the Church of San Giacomo no longer exists. After suffering from looting and damage in the early 1800s, it was deconsecrated in 1824 and the detachable furnishings and artworks were removed. The building was sold in the late nineteenth century to the French Missionaries of the Sacred Heart and subsequently remodeled. As a result, there is a scarcity of physical and documentary evidence. Only a portion of Siciolante’s altarpiece remains and the tabernacle was melted down to create

Redín Michaus, Pedro Rubiales, Gaspar Becerra y Los Pintores Españoles en Roma 1527–1600 (Madrid: Departamento de Historia del Arte, Instituto de Historia Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2007), 185–86. 6 Miguel Ángel Aramburu-Zabala, “La Iglesia y Hospital de Santiago de los Españoles: el Papel del Arquitecto en la Roma del Renacimiento,” Anuario del Departamento de Historia y Teoría del Arte 3 (1991): 31–42. 7 Helen Rawlings, Church, Religion and Society in Early Modern Spain (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 50–54; and Stanley G. Payne, Spanish Catholicism: A Historical Overview (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 37–38. 8 Gonzalo Michaus Redín, writing on the Spanish artist Becerra’s career in Italy, briefly discusses the commission of the tabernacle and suggests it is connected with the Council of Trent’s resolutions on the Sacrament of the Eucharist. Likewise, in his article on the architecture and architects of San Giacomo, Miguel Ángel Aramburu-Zabala sees a similar correspondence in the remodeling of the east end of the church. 9 For a discussion on the change in the Spanish population in Rome in the sixteenth century see Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro, “Cenni Storici Sulla Componente Spagnola della Popolazione Romana alla Fine del ‘500 Secondo I Regisri Parrocchiali,” in Popolazione E Società a Roma dal Medioevo all’Età Contemporanea, ed. Eugenio Sonnino (Roma: Il Calamo, 1998), 141–49.

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a more elaborate Baroque Eucharistic repository.10 Despite these limitations, the extant evidence is sufficient to argue that these projects are an example of the Spanish harnessing the architectural and decorative commissions of this church as a means of promoting themselves as a people with a fervent commitment to the faith and religious orthodoxy.

Reform in the Spanish Church When the Catholic Church began the process of reform and renewal at the Council of Trent, the Spanish were already on the forefront of change. From early in their reign, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel had recognized the church was a branch of their new state that needed attention as it was plagued by secularism, absenteeism, and a lack of morality and discipline. They called two Church Councils in the 1470s that developed a strategy for raising the standards for recruitment, training, and discipline of the clergy. They also lobbied the pope to win control over the appointment of high-ranking clergy and were granted this authority in their newly acquired territories in 1486 and by 1523 they were given the power to nominate all bishoprics in Spain. As a result, the Spanish crown had significantly more control over the direction of the Church in Spain as the bishops became the key agents of the reform and led the counterattack on the Protestant Reformation.11

The Council of Trent The three sessions of the Council of Trent that ran from 1545–1563 were responding to a long recognized need for change and revival in the Church, made more pressing by the rapidly growing Protestant movement in Northern Europe.12 More than two hundred Spanish bishops and theologians attended the Council and they played a significant role in the debates and drawing up the final decrees.13 The council sought to reinvigorate the Church of Rome by reaffirming the very doctrinal beliefs being questioned by the leaders of the Protestant Reformation. They addressed the Seven Sacraments, which Luther had set

10 Michaus, Los Pintores Españoles en Roma, 184–86. 11 Rawlings, Church, Religion and Society, 50–54 and Payne, Spanish Catholicism, 37–38. 12 John C. Olin, Catholic Reform: From Cardinal Ximenes to the Council of Trent, 1545–1563 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), ix–xiii and 1–46. 13 Rawlings, Church, Religion and Society, 50–55.

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out to reduce those able to be validated as being established by Christ or the Apostles. Additionally, the council proposed a program of reform for the clergy at all levels,14 which suffered from the same problems as those already being addressed in the Spanish church. In the end, the Spanish felt Trent’s proposals reaffirmed their previously established objectives of church reform.15 The Sacrament of the Eucharist had elicited much debate at Trent and was discussed in the meetings of 1547, 1551, and 1562. This was in response to the Protestant Reformers questioning the Real Presence of the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine, arguing that it was merely a symbol to remind the faithful of Christ’s sacrifice. The Council condemned the Reformers’ views and reasserted that in the sacrament of the Eucharist, the body and blood together with the soul and divinity of Christ are “truly, really, and substantially” present.16 The Council also recommended that the Eucharist be carried in triumphal processions through the streets, and that it be honored with special chapels. This effort to showcase and honor the Eucharist was no doubt to emphasize its significance in the Catholic faith.17 Numerous scholars have discussed the ramifications of the rulings of the Council of Trent for church architecture, sacred art, and liturgical objects.18 Several of the decrees emphasized the need to encourage laypersons to participate more actively in the Mass and take frequent communion.19 This resulted in changes to the layout of new churches and the dramatic remodeling of existing ones. Many churches retained an old-fashioned form, separating the clergy and the altar from the laity with rood screens and choir enclosures. More fully engaging the laity necessitated that the altar be clearly visible to the faithful attending Mass.20 The

14 Hubert. Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, trans. By Ernest Graf (London: T. Nelson, 1957–61). 15 Rawlings Church, Religion and Society, 50–55. 16 James Waterworth, The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent (London: Dolman, 1848), Session XIII. 17 Council of Trent, and Waterworth, The canons and decrees, 5:79. 18 See Marcia B. Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Sta Maria Novella and Sta Croce 1565–1577 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); “Another Look at the Rood Screen,” Journal for the Institute of Sacred Architecture 27 (2015): 11–19; The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Milton Joseph Lewine, “The Roman Church Interior, 1527–1580,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1960); Alexander, “Shaping Sacred Space in the Sixteenth Century”; and Sénécal, “Borromeo’s Instructiones Fabricae et Supellectilis Ecclesiasticae.” 19 Council of Trent, and Waterworth, The canons and decrees, Session XXII, Chapter V and Session XIII, Chapter VIII; Session XXIII, Chapter XI. 20 Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation, 1–15.

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renewed emphasis on the celebration of the Eucharist led to the tabernacle, a decorative container to display the Host, becoming an obligatory part of the altar furnishings. Church renovation became something of a trend in the second half of the sixteenth century, but the motivations varied. While some projects were prompted by a need to modernize churches that were designed to serve outmoded liturgical practices, others, like the projects at San Giacomo, were more politically motivated. Marcia Hall’s work on the renovation of the churches of Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella in Florence reveals that Duke Cosimo de’ Medici’s sponsorship was in part driven by his political ambitions.21 The governing board of San Giacomo was certainly driven by a desire to present the Spanish as being leaders on the recommendations coming from Trent, but being on the forefront of reform also reinforced their identity as a nation.

The Projects for the Altar of San Giacomo, 1550–1560 In 1550, the Spanish artist Gaspar Becerra was commissioned to design a tabernacle to contain the Host on the high altar. The following year, in 1551, the Council of Trent released a decree regarding Transubstantiation or “Real Presence.” Becerra was paid 290 escudos for the material and production of the tabernacle, a substantial amount of money considering the artist was paid only 275 escudos for the decoration of an entire chapel elsewhere in the church.22 Considering Trent’s emphasis on the significance of the Sacrament of the Eucharist, it is natural that there would be a growing demand for the tabernacle, an object that was not simply for storage, but an ornate repository for the Host and

21 Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation, 1–15. 22 Rédin, Los Pintores Españoles, 184–86. Rédin found reference to a sizable tabernacle weighing six pounds and two ounces in the church inventories from 1569 and 1586. He believes this must be the tabernacle constructed by Becerra since so much money was spent on the work; it is doubtful they would have commissioned another so soon after the first. After 1718 there is no mention of the tabernacle; he suggests it may have been melted down so that a new Baroque tabernacle could be created which was stolen in 1741. For further discussion on the Chapel of the Assumption decorated by Becerra see Chapter 6 of my dissertation “Promoting the Cult of the Virgin: Sixteenth Century Chapels Dedicated to Mary” in Rose Marie May, “The Church of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli and The Formation of Spanish Identity in Sixteenth Century Rome,” (PhD diss., Temple University, 2011).

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became a furnishing for the altar.23 San Giacomo was forecasting a new trend and even preempted Pope Julius III who commissioned a tabernacle the following year in 1552, which he donated to the sixth-century church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli, on the Capitoline Hill.24 Becerra’s tabernacle was paid for by a generous donation from Prince Philip which also supported the commissioning of a new altarpiece from Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta. Siciolante was a much sought-after artist and had worked for cardinals, members of the Roman nobility, and the French community.25 He started his career in the workshop of Perino del Vaga, one of Raphael’s collaborators and worked with his master on the frescoes in the Sala Paolino at the Castel Sant’ Angelo, which owes much to Raphael’s decorative scheme for the Sala di Costantino at the Vatican.26 Yet, Siciolante seemed resistant to the aesthetics of Raphael and Perino and the young artist developed a much more conservative style than was typically seen in Rome in the 1540s. Bernice Davidson suggested that from his youth, Siciolante’s work anticipated the Counter-Reformation style and it shares the attitudes of “dogmatic conservatism” that characterized the Roman Reformation after the Council of Trent.27 Siciolante’s Crucifixion altarpiece for San Giacomo has a sparse, restrained character that is more in common with Byzantine icons than contemporary Roman “maniera” painting (Figure 6.4). He pared down the scene to the essential figures, the Crucified Christ with two angels hovering around the cross, and Mary and John appearing as the only mourners below. The space is flattened and the figures are foregrounded and set against a mottled yellow-black background that from a distance resembles the gold ground of icons. The lack of depth in the painting and absence of distracting figures and landscape gives the sense that the Crucified Christ is far from Mary and John. This sense of distance is reinforced by a billowing grey cloud separating Christ and the two angels from the rest of the painting, suggesting they are in an otherworldly space. The composition seems to anticipate Christ’s Assumption and recalls a device Raphael used in his paintings of Saint Cecilia and the Transfiguration, creating a frame of grey bulbous clouds to separate the heavenly and earthly spaces.

23 Lewine, “The Roman Church Interior,” 82–83. Documents that tabernacles became very common in Roman Churches following the Council of Trent. 24 Rédin, Los Pintores Españoles, 184–86. 25 Hunter, Girolamo Siciolante Pittore. 26 Hall, After Raphael, 149–53. 27 Davidson, “Some Early Works by Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta,” 58, Giglio quote from Paolo Barocchi, Trattati d'arte del Cinquecento: fra manierismo e Controriforma (Rome: G. Laterza, 1960), 2:46.

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Figure 6.4: Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta, Crucifixion, originally for high altar of San Giacomo, 1560, oil on canvas, Santa Maria in Monserrato, Rome. Photo: author.

Below the Virgin and St. John are appropriately controlled in their grief as would be expected with Siciolante’s tendency toward emotional restraint in his figures. Yet, this is another element that recalls Byzantine icons. Originally, the Crucifixion was flanked by two panels depicting the patron saints of the church – St. Ildefonsus and St. James. While the two side panels have not been discovered, they were likely as simple and restrained as the central panel. The panel of the Crucifixion was relocated to Santa Maria in Monserrato and placed above the high altar where it remains today. The altarpiece seems the ideal example of the Council of Trent’s requirements for sacred art – truth, piety, simplicity, clarity – though these would not be finalized and released until the last session in 1563. Moreover, the strong resemblance to Byzantine icons seems to anticipate, yet again, another trend seen in Rome in the mid-1560s when miracle-working icons began to be reinstalled over altars. In 1565 the much-lauded Raphael Madonna di Foligno (1511) was removed from the high altar of Santa Maria in Aracoeli and replaced by an ancient icon.28

28 Hall, The Sacred Image, 2.

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Philip II and San Giacomo Prince Philip’s donation that paid for Becerra’s tabernacle and Siciolante’s altarpiece was the first recorded contribution to the church from the Spanish crown. Historically, national churches in Rome, such as San Giacomo, were founded, managed, and funded by local expatriates and did not have direct ties to the rulers of their home states or countries.29 San Giacomo was founded by a bishop from Castile, Alfonso Paradinas, and during its formative years, financed through revenue from its rental properties and by donations from Castilian clerics and laypersons living in Rome. In this way, it managed to be self-reliant and separate from the Spanish Crown. However, in the mid-sixteenth century this changed when the socio-economic composition of the Spanish community in Rome went from being predominantly middle class to aristocratic with ties to the Crown. Many Spaniards had fled the city during the Sack of Rome in 1527. When order was restored, the Spanish nobility began to be drawn to Rome in much larger numbers than previously seen.30 Spanish ambassadors also began to bring much larger courts. Many of these transplants began to frequent San Giacomo. The result was a congregation with a direct connection to the crown and therefore it was more likely that Philip would be made aware of activities within church and have more opportunity to have input, albeit indirect, in what was going on at San Giacomo.31 Among the more influential new members of the congregation were the Spanish Crown’s resident ambassadors in the city. Ambassador Juan de Mendoza became an active supporter of San Giacomo at a time when rising overheads and stagnant revenue was causing financial difficulties. Mendoza made a plea for support to Prince Philip who was preparing to take his father’s throne. The ambassador and the administrators of San Giacomo wrote to Philip on behalf of the Spanish nation in Rome, pledging their loyalty to the new king. Subsequently, Mendoza wrote a report for Philip on the history and current state of San Giacomo altering the foundation story to give credit to the Infante of Castile (though he did not name one in particular), completely disregarding the role of

29 See Chapter Two of my dissertation, “The Church of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli,” for further explanation. 30 Piñeiro, “Cenni Storici,” 141–49. 31 Piñeiro, “Cenni Storici,” 141–49. See Thomas James Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 1500–1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), for a discussion of the policy of the Spanish monarchs to manipulate decision-making in the papal court by creating a Spanish-friendly faction to lobby for their concerns.

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the church’s founder, Bishop Alfonso Paradinas in the hope that a royal foundation would ensure Philip would feel a responsibility toward the church.32 Mendoza’s ploy was successful and Prince Philip sent his majordomo to visit the church and hospital to learn of all its needs. The administrators made a plea for funding to replace the old altarpiece with one that would be “as grand as such a most Christian Prince would expect.”33 The following year, in 1549, Philip gave the substantial sum of 486 escudos for a new altarpiece.34 The gift was used to pay for Becerra’s tabernacle in 1550 and Siciolante’s altarpiece at the end of the decade. Furthermore, Mendoza established a precedent and succeeding Spanish ambassadors played a role in the administration of the church and hospital. The ambassadors, who were also procurers of art for the crown, were well aware of Philip’s conservative taste in religious art and it seems logical they would have shared this as the congregation was preparing to spend the Prince’s money on embellishing the altar.35 It is often argued that Philip transformed the architecture and arts of Spain. He was a knowledgeable, engaged, and prolific patron. While he commissioned both secular and sacred art, he had extremely contrasting expectations for these two categories. He commissioned Titian to produce a series of seven mythological paintings, many with titillating subjects and pronounced erotic compositions. In contrast, his taste in sacred art was particularly conservative; he demanded iconographic correctness and exemplary devotion.36 Philip’s strident requirements for sacred art and architecture are best illustrated in his management of the building and decoration of the Escorial, begun 1563. Yet we know he was thinking about architectural principles as early as the 1550s because he commissioned a treatise, which suggests a program for reform and articulates a pronounced Catholic style, in contrast to a pagan, classical

32 This falsehood muddied the history of the church and was not completely discounted until the work of Alonso in the twentieth century, thus in some descriptions of the church after the middle of the sixteenth century we find varying attributions of the founder. See Enrique Garcia Hernan, “La iglesia de Santiago de los españoles en Roma: trayectoria de una institución.” Anthologica Annua 42 (1995): 297–363. 33 Garcia Hernan, “La iglesia de Santiago de los españoles en Roma,” 303–4. 34 Aramburu-Zabala, “El papel del architecto,” 38. 35 For the role of ambassadors as a kind of art dealer for the crown see Michael Jacob Levin, Agents of Empire: Spanish Ambassadors in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 183–99. For Philip’s influence on the style of altarpiece see Garcia Hernan, “La iglesia de Santiago de los españoles en Roma,” 302–6. 36 Rosemarie Mulcahy, Philip II of Spain, Patron of the Arts (Dublin & Portland, Or, Four Courts, 2004).

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style.37 With the Escorial, the royal foundation comprising a palace, monastery, basilica, college, library, and hospital, Philip was fully engaged in every aspect of its design, construction, and decoration.38 There is no further evidence of Philip donating funds for renovating or embellishing San Giacomo. However, after he succeeded his father and became King of Spain in 1556, Philip expressed a desire, in 1558, to establish an archive in Rome that would house the documents pertaining to the Holy See and the Spanish Monarchy and he wanted it to be housed at San Giacomo. After much consideration, it was agreed there was not sufficient space to house an archive, and it was located in a house nearby. Once it was opened, Philip sent archivists from Spain to organize and manage the collection and they followed the ambassadors and joined the congregation of San Giacomo.39 Thus Philip now had a direct source for information regarding the church.

The Renovation of the East End, 1567 In 1567 the congregation of San Giacomo decided to completely renovate the east end of the church. The work was executed quickly; it began in January and was finished by the end of March (Figure 6.5). The only mention of this renovation is a brief reference in the work of the Spanish architectural historian Miguel Ángel Aramburu-Zabala, who explains that the remodeling eradicated earlier work done by Bramante. Many churches started renovation work in the second half of the sixteenth century after the close of the Council of Trent in 1563. While there were no directives on architecture from the Council, Carlo Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan, who played a critical role in the last session, published a treatise in 1577, Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae, describing with great specificity the best approach to church design. Borromeo’s book carried much weight though his ideas were by no means novel, a fact several scholars have noted.40 Trent’s emphasis on encouraging the layman to take a more active

37 Catherine Wilkinson, “Planning a Style for the Escorial: An Architectural Treatise for Philip of Spain.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 44, no. 1 (March 1985): 37–47. 38 Rosemary Mulcahy, “Federico Zuccaro and Philip II: The Reliquary Altars for the Basilica of San Lorenzo de El Escorial,” Burlington Magazine, 129 no. 1013 (1987): 502–509. 39 Hernan, “La iglesia de Santiago de los españoles en Roma,” 307–13. 40 See Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation, 1–15; Alexander, “Shaping Sacred Space,” 164–79; and Sénécal, “Borromeo’s Instructiones and Its Origins in the Rome of its Time,” 241–67.

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Figure 6.5: Nostra Signora del Sacro Cuore, Rome, interior, 2015. by Livioandronico2013, licensed CC by-SA 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en.

role in the Mass and its stress on the Sacrament of the Eucharist meant the altar needed to be more clearly visible to the congregation.41 Based on the fact that the congregation of San Giacomo felt a need to renovate the altar area, we can surmise that they felt it was old-fashioned even though there are no details about Bramante’s earlier work. In a hall church plan with aisles of equal height to the nave, like that of San Giacomo, framing the altar to direct a visitor’s focus is more difficult than in a church with a transept. The photograph of the sanctuary, taken from the entrance on what was originally the Via del Sapienza, illustrates the solution to this problem. The architect framed the sanctuary with sidewalls with arched openings that elevate the space several steps above the rest of the floor. The

41 Visibility had not been a concern in the past and Hall has discussed that many altars were obstructed by choirs and rood screens. See Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation, 1–15.

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altar was then visible from the side aisles and the nave but set apart by the wall and the height of the floor to emphasize it was a separate, sacred space. Originally there was also a balustrade – no longer extant – that further partitioned the nave from the sanctuary. Behind the altar, a monumental marble frame held Siciolante’s Crucifixion altarpiece with its two flanking panels of the Spanish SS. James and Ildefonsus. As a centerpiece and focal point, Becerra’s elaborate tabernacle would have been displayed on the altar. The projects commissioned at San Giacomo during the period from 1550–1567 clearly respond to the ideals of the Counter-Reformation. Considering that the Spanish had been using the architecture and decoration of the church in a consciously self-promotional manner, we can see the projects of this period in the same way. Earlier projects in the church had emphasized qualities the Spaniards wanted to stress such as orthodoxy and an evangelical commitment to the faith.42 In this period of reformation, it was necessary to show that they were leading the charge. Additionally, the nascent sponsorship of the church by Prince and then King Philip, who had been thinking about the reform of art and architecture for some time, no doubt influenced the projects to some degree. Back in Spain, Philip was creating at the Escorial what German historian Ludwig Pfandl suggests was a visual endorsement of the decisions of the Council of Trent and the ideals of the Counter-Reformation. It was everything that the Reformers rallied against: monastic life, the sacraments, the veneration of saints, the cult of relics, and the sacred arts.43 Given its location, few in Europe would get to see Philip’s monumental profession of faith, so patronage at San Giacomo offered him an opportunity to prove his commitment to the reform ideals on an international stage.

Works Cited Alonso, Justo Fernandez. “Las Iglesias Nacionales de Espana en Roma, sus Origenes.” Anthologica Annua 4 (1956): 9–96. Alonso, Justo Fernandez. “Santiago de Los Espanoles de Roma en el Siglo XVI.” Anthologica Annua 5 (1958): 9–122. Alonso, Justo Fernandez. S. Maria Di Monserrato, Le Chiese di Roma Illustrate. Roma: Arte della Stampa, 1968.

42 See my dissertation, “The Church of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli,” for a thorough discussion of these projects. 43 Alain Saint Saëns, Art and Faith in Tridentine Spain (1545–1690) (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 111, citing Pfandl, Philippe II d’Espagne, 393–94.

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Alonso, Justo Fernandez. Nostra Signora del Sacro Cuore, Gia S. Giacomo degli Spagnoli, Le Chiese di Roma Illustrate. Roma: Arte della Stampa, 1969. Aramburu-Zabala, Miguel Ángel. “La Iglesia y Hospital de Santiago de los Españoles: el Papel del Arquitecto en la Roma del Renacimiento.” Anuario del Departamento de Historia y Teoría del Arte 3 (1991): 31–42. Barocchi, Paola. Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento: fra manierismo e Controriforma. Rome: G. Laterza, 1960. Conforti, Claudia and Elena Sánchez de Madariaga. “Churches and Confraternities.” In Cities and Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1700, edited by Robert Muchembled and William Monter, 349–60. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Dandelet, Thomas James. Spanish Rome, 1500–1700. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Davidson, Bernice F. “Some Early Works by Girolamo Siciolante Da Sermoneta.” The Art Bulletin 48 (1966): 55–64. Garcia Hernan, Enrique. “La iglesia de Santiago de los españoles en Roma: trayectoria de una institución.” Anthologica Annua 42 (1995): 297–363. Hall, Marcia B. Renovation and Counter-Reformation Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Sta Maria Novella and Sta Croce 1565–1577. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Hall, Marcia B. After Raphael, Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Hall, Marcia B. “Another Look at the Rood Screen.” Journal for the Institute of Sacred Architecture 27 (2015): 11–19. Hall, Marcia B. The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Hunter, John. Girolamo Siciolante Pittore Da Sermoneta (1521–1575). Rome: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 1996. Jedin, Hubert. A History of the Council of Trent. Translated by Ernest Graf. London: T. Nelson, 1957–61. Levin, Michael Jacob. Agents of Empire: Spanish Ambassadors in Sixteenth-Century Italy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Lewine, Milton Joseph. “The Roman Church Interior, 1527–1580.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1960. May, Rose Marie. “The Church of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli and The Formation of Spanish Identity in Sixteenth Century Rome.” PhD diss., Temple University, 2011. Michaus, Gonzalo Redín. Pedro Rubiales, Gaspar Becerra y Los Pintores Españoles en Roma 1527–1600. Madrid: Departamento de Historia del Arte, Instituto de Historia Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2007. Mulcahy, Rosemarie. Philip II of Spain, Patron of the Arts. Dublin & Portland, Or, Four Courts, 2004. Mulcahy, Rosemarie. “Federico Zuccaro and Philip II: The Reliquary Altars for the Basilica of San Lorenzo de El Escorial.” Burlington Magazine, 129 no. 1013 (1987): 502–509. Olin, John C. Catholic Reform: From Cardinal Ximenes to the Council of Trent, 1545–1563. New York: Fordham University Press, 1990. Paluzzi, Carlo Galassi. Nostra Signora del Sacro Cuore, gia S. Giacomo degli Spagnoli, Le Chiese di Roma Illustrate. Rome: Arte della Stampa, 1969. Payne, Stanley G. Spanish Catholicism: A Historical Overview. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

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Rawlings, Helen. Church, Religion and Society in Early Modern Spain. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Saint Saëns, Alain. Art and Faith in Tridentine Spain (1545–1690). New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Serio, Alessancro. “Modi, Tempi, Uomini della Presenza Hispana a Roma tra la Fine del Quattrocentro e il Primo Cinquecento (1492–1527).” In L’Italia di Carlo V: Guerra, Religione e Politica nel Primo Cinquecento, Atti del Convegno Internazional di Studi, edited by Francesca Cantù and Maria Antonietta Visceglia, 433–75. Rome: Viella, 2011. Vaquero Piñeiro, Manuel. La Renta y las Casas, el Patrimonio Immobiliario de Santiago de los Espanoles de Roma entre los Siglos XV y XVII. Roma: “L’Erma” di Bretschneider, 1999. Vaquero Piñeiro, Manuel. “Cenni Storici Sulla Componente Spagnola della Popolazione Romana alla Fine del ‘500 Secondo I Regisri Parrocchiali.” In Popolazione E Società a Roma dal Medioevo all’Età Contemporanea, edited by Eugenio Sonnino, 141–49. Roma: Il Calamo, 1998. Wilkinson, Catherine. “Planning a Style for the Escorial: An Architectural Treatise for Philip of Spain.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 44, no. 1 (March 1985): 37–47.

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Chapter 7 Religious Reform, Sacred Space, and Bad Behavior in Late Sixteenth-Century Orsanmichele Marcia Hall’s reconstructions of the large-scale rood screens in Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella in Florence have radically altered the interpretation of relationships between space, access, and material culture in early modern Italian churches.1 Deftly moving between a variety of archaeological, architectural, and documentary sources, Hall demonstrated that nave screens (commonly referred to as tramezzi or ponte) had enormous visual repercussions within these sacred spaces and served a variety of functions. She also explored the motives which drove the agents of their destruction in the late sixteenth century, suggesting that these alterations publicly demonstrated Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici’s adherence to Tridentine reform, fulfilled Vasari’s desire to modernize ecclesiastical space, and heralded a new era of altar patronage.2 She later revised and expanded upon her initial Florentine findings identifying broader trends and developments throughout the Italian peninsula.3 Hall’s innovative and accessible work on Italian tramezzi sparked an entire field of inquiry into these important – yet often neglected and almost completely extinct – monumental structures.4

1 Marcia B. Hall, “The Tramezzo in Santa Croce, Florence, Reconstructed,” The Art Bulletin 56, no. 3 (September 1974): 325–41; “The Ponte in S. Maria Novella and the Problem of the Rood Screen in Italy.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974): 157–73. 2 Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation, 8, 22. 3 Marcia B. Hall, “The Tramezzo in the Italian Renaissance, Revisited,” In Thresholds of the sacred: architectural, art historical, liturgical, and theological perspectives on religious screens, East and West, ed. Sharon E. J. Gerstel (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2006), 214–32. 4 Literature on the Italian church interior is too extensive to provide an exhaustive list here. Recent research on mendicant tramezzi in Tuscany includes Frithjof Schwartz, Il bel cimitero: Personal Note: I wish to thank Erin Giffin for first introducing me to this Orsanmichele material and to Carla D’Arista and Michael Gromotka for reading an earlier version of this text. I am indebted to Art DiFuria and Ian Verstegen for their leadership of this Festschrift project and I am grateful for the continued support and encouragement of Marcia Hall. A version of this paper was delivered at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in Bruges on August 19, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-008

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Beyond the removal of tramezzi, Hall’s studies of sixteenth-century Italian architecture and painting analyzed other aesthetic changes and innovations born of the new demands for religious decorum and spiritual efficacy.5 She reinforced the notion that post-Tridentine shifts in architectural layout and religious painting were rarely mandated from above by the ecclesiastical elite: rather such changes were generally conducted on a local level, often with lay people providing significant impetus.6 Prompted by her pioneering studies of the two Florentine mendicant churches, my research focuses on other churches in the city which experienced similar alterations in the same period. They include San Marco, Santa Maria del Carmine, Ognissanti, Santa Trinita, San Pier Maggiore, San Niccolò Oltrarno, Orsanmichele, and San Pancrazio.7 In addition to reconstructing the

Santa Maria Novella in Florenz 1279–1348: Grabmäler, Architektur und Gesellschaft (Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009); Andrea De Marchi, “‘Cum dictum opus sit magnum.’ Il documento pistoiese del 1274 e l‘allestimento trionfale dei tramezzi in Umbria e Toscana fra Due e Trecento,” In Medioevo: immagine e memoria, ed. Arturo Carlo Quintavalle (Atti di Parma: Electa Milan, 2009), 603–21; “Relitti di un naufragio: affreschi di Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi e Maso di Banco nelle navate di Santa Croce,” In Santa Croce: oltre le apparenze, ed. Andrea De Marchi and Giacomo Piraz, (Gli Ori: Pistoia, 2011), 33–71; Joanna Cannon, Religious Poverty, Visual Riches: Art in the Dominican Churches of Central Italy in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Donal Cooper, “Recovering the Lost Rood Screens of Medieval and Renaissance Italy,” In The Art and Science of the Church Screen in Medieval Europe: Making, Meaning, Preserving (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017), 220–45. 5 Marcia B. Hall, After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999); The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 6 Marcia B. Hall, “Introduction,” In The Sensuous in the Counter Reformation Church (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–20. 7 For San Marco, see Sally Cornelison, “Relocating Fra Bartolomeo at San Marco.” Renaissance Studies 23, no. 3 (2009): 311–34. For the Carmine, Cécile Maisonneuve, Florence au XVe siècle: Un quartier et ses peintres (Paris: CTHS, 2012), 143–53; Nicholas A. Eckstein, Painted Glories: The Brancacci Chapel in Renaissance Florence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 26, 59–60. For Ognissanti, see Irene Hueck, “Le opere di Giotto per la chiesa di Ognissanti,” In La ’Madonna di’Ognissanti’ di Giotto restaurata (Florence: Gli Uffizi Studi e Ricerche, 1992), 37–49.; Stefano Giannetti, “La chiesa basso-medievale: il tramezzo di Ognissantim,” In La chiesa basso-medievale: il tramezzo di Ognissanti (Florence: Edifir, 2011), 49–57. For Santa Trinita, see Giovanni Leoncini, “Il Cinquecento e il Seicento in Santa Trinita,” In Alla riscoperta delle chiese di Firenze: 6. Santa Trinita Ed. by Timothy Verdon (Florence: Centro Di, 2009), 135–59. For San Pier Maggiore, see Monica Bietti Favi, “Indizi documentari su Lippo di Benivieni,” Studi di storia dell’arte 1 (1990): 243–52. For San Niccolò Oltrarno, see Anna Laghi, “La chiesa cinquecentesca: vicende e restauri,” in San Niccolò Oltrarno: la chiesa, una famiglia di antiquari, ed. Giovanna Damiani and Anna Laghi (Florence: Comune di Firenze, 1982), 87–135. For Orsanmichele, see Diane Finiello Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1996), 237. For San Pancrazio, see Riccardo Pacciani, “‘Signorili amplitudini . . .’ a Firenze. La cappella Rucellai alla Badia di S. Pancrazio e la rotonda della SS. Annunziata:

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spatial effect, aesthetic appeal, and functions of these nave choirs and screens, I investigate the circumstances of their elimination in the Grand Ducal period, assessing the agency and motivations not only of Duke Cosimo and his court artist, Giorgio Vasari, but of the lay patrons and religious communities who were affected by these architectural alterations the most. The removal of the iron tramezzo in Orsanmichele (Figures 7.1 and 7.2) is a case in point. Its dismantlement on the back of a targeted institutional reform was followed by a series of architectural interventions aimed at combatting behavioral transgressions in the church interior. The documentary sources reveal that the administrative authorities were somewhat torn between satisfying imposed reform measures – which sometimes backfired – and attempting to create the so-called “religious” atmosphere of the church interior demanded by the Council of Trent.

Figure 7.1: Orsanmichele, Florence, exterior. Photo: Joanne Allen.

architettura, patronati, rituali,” in Leon Battista Alberti architetture e committenti, ed. Arturo Calzona, Joseph Connors, Francesco Paolo Fiore, and Cesare Vasoli (Florence: Olschki, 2009), 135–79.

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Figure 7.2: Orsanmichele, Florence, interior. Photo: Joanne Allen.

The Interior Layout of Orsanmichele in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries Orsanmichele holds a unique place in the annals of Florentine history and culture. Originally a communal grain market, the building was always a space in which civic, guild, and devotional functions were held in common. Its imposing three-story construction rising from a simple six-bay ground plan has more in common with domestic palaces than traditional churches (Figures 7.1 and 7.2). The lay confraternity that administered the establishment was the wealthiest in the city for a long period and the only brotherhood not explicitly tied to a Florentine church.8 Within the oratory, the third incarnation of a miracle-working image of the enthroned Madonna and Child was painted by Bernardo Daddi in 1347, and its new marble tabernacle was signed and dated by Orcagna in 1359.9

8 Nancy Rash Fabbri and Nina Rutenburg, “The Tabernacle of Orsanmichele in Context,” The Art Bulletin 63, no. 3 (September 1981), 385. 9 On the tabernacle, see Fabbri and Rutenburg, “The Tabernacle of Orsanmichele in Context”; Brendan Cassidy, “Orcagna’s Tabernacle in Florence: Design and Function,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 55, no. 2 (1992): 180–211; Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 79–124.

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In the north-east bay, the official high altar dedicated to St. Anne received Francesco da Sangallo’s sculpted marble altarpiece in 1526.10 Given the peerless status of Orsanmichele within the city’s communal and guild life, its predominantly lay administrative system, and the building’s divergence from church architectural norms, the presence of an interior screen (referred to as a “tramezo” in the confraternity’s documentation) is rather unexpected.11 Lack of documentary evidence impedes a precise dating for the installation of this iron partition, but it likely took place in the first half of the fifteenth century when other architectural and administrative changes to the building were underway, making it relatively late compared to other Florentine examples.12 In 1415, Orsanmichele became a canonical church serviced by ten priests, although its official administration by elected members of the compagnia known as Capitani continued.13 Liturgical enhancements that included new organs and a larger choir ensemble for the performance of polyphonic compositions accompanied this elevation in ecclesiastical status and may well have prompted installation of the screen.14 By 1432 the tracery arch infills and western portals were complete, an architectural intervention that transformed the building from an open loggia into an enclosed church, a prerequisite for the division of its interior spaces.15 10 For Sangallo’s St. Anne group, see Roger J. Crum and David G. Wilkins, “In the Defense of Florentine Republicanism: Saint Anne and Florentine Art, 1343–1575,” in Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society, ed. Kathleen M. Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1990) 131–68; Joachim Poeschke, Michelangelo and His World: Sculpture of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 180–81. Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 231–34, 604–7; Collin Eisler, Abbey Kornfeld, and Alison Rebecca W. Strauber, “Words on an Image: Francesco da Sangallo‘s Sant’Anna Metterza for Orsanmichele,” in Orsanmichele and the History and Preservation of the Civic Monument, ed. Carl Brandon Strehlke (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 289–300. 11 Following the archival documentation, I will be using the term “tramezzo” to describe the screen in Orsanmichele, within the knowledge that this term can describe structures of vastly different types. 12 Even if the tramezzo was installed later, almost all confraternity records from 1438 to the end of the fifteenth century are lost. Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 209. 13 Summarizing a now lost source in the Capitani archives, Richa claimed that the foundation instituted by the Republic in 1415 provided for a college of ten priests, two chierici, and a provost. Giuseppe Richa, Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine, divise ne’ suoi quartieri (Florence: P.G. Viviani, 1754), vol. 1.1, 24–25. 14 For music in Orsanmichele, see Blake Wilson, “If Monuments Could Sing: Image, Song, and Civic Devotion inside Orsanmichele,” in Orsanmichele and the History and Preservation of the Civic Monument., ed. Carl Brandon Strehlke (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 139–68. 15 For the dating of the tracery infills, see Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 192; Gert Kreytenberg, “The Limestone Tracery in the Arches of the Original Grain Loggia of Orsanmichele in Florence,” in Orsanmichele and the History and Preservation of the Civic Monument, ed. Carl

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Income records from the sale of the tramezzo in April 1569 indicate that it was composed of three types of wrought ironwork.16 “Catenas ferreas” refers to iron beams, presumably horizontal and/or vertical bars which would have framed the tramezzo and perhaps divided it into more subsections.17 The terms “crassas” and “craticulatos” refer to lattice-work and smaller lattice-work or grating respectively.18 Although no specific form of geometric patterning is implied by these terms beyond some sort of interlocking grille, the Orsanmichele screen might have resembled other Tuscan contemporary ironwork. A parclose screen in the Bartolini Salimbeni chapel in Santa Trinita, for example, features large square panels of quatrefoil patterning framed by iron bars, surmounted by smaller rectangular panels of more delicate and densely composed filigree designs (Figure 7.3).19 Archival sources do not precisely describe the location of the tramezzo in the Orsanmichele interior. However, the March 1569 letter regarding its removal may allude tangentially to its placement. Following their appeal for the screen’s removal, the Capitani requested that the ugly and dishonorable pulpit, situated underneath the organ, should also be dismantled as it obscured a painting of Christ among the Doctors.20 Although not explicitly linked, the fact that the

Brandon Strehlke (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 111–24; Diane Finiello Zervas, “New Documents for the Oratory of Orsanmichele in Florence, 1365–1400,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 78 (2015), 298. 16 “catenas ferreas crassas et crati[cu]latos ferreos qui erant in tramezo ecclesiae oratorij.” Archivio di Stato, Florence (hereafter ASF), Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 31 bis, fol. 25r. 17 “Catena: Edil. Elemento costruttive resistente a tensione e posto a contrastare spinte prodotte da speciali strutture o da particolari condizioni statiche in cui viene a trovarsi talvolta la parte di un edificio . . . in ferro, a forma di sbarra tonda o piatta, che termina alle due estremità con due occhielli in cui vengono infilati altri pezzi di ferro fissati con cunei metallici ribattuti . . .” Salvatore Battaglia and Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (Turin: Unione tipografico-editrice torinese, 1961–2002), vol. 2, 878. 18 “craticulus, a, um, adj. dim, [cratis], composed of lattice-work, wattled . . . cratis . . . [Sanscr. Kart, to spin; cf. crassus], wicker-work, a hurdle.” Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary Founded on Andrews‘ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary Revised, Enlarged, and in Great Part Rewritten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 478. The word “craticula” was used interchangeably with the word “graticula” in a document concerning the Siena Palazzo Pubblico screen dated February 11, 1434 (stil. senese): “craticula ferrea . . . quod dicta graticula ferrea.” Paola Elena Boccalatte, Fabbri e ferri: Italia, XII – XVI secolo (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2013), 123. I am grateful to Sandro La Barbera for his help in transcribing and translating this passage. 19 Boccalatte notes that while the Santa Trinita chapel is conventionally attributed to Manfredi di Franco and dated ca. 1423 (when Lorenzo Monaco completed the fresco decoration), these facts are dubious. Fabbri e ferri, 115–16. For the Palazzo Pubblico chapel, see Fabbri e ferri, 122–25. 20 “in cambio del brutto et dishonorevole positivo pergamo che è intra di duoi usci della sagrestia sotto l’organo che occupa et toglie la vista della facciata dove è di buon’maestro dipinta

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Figure 7.3: Salimbeni Chapel, Santa Trinita, Florence. Photo: Joanne Allen.

tramezzo and the pulpit were both subjects of demolition at the same time may imply their spatial relation to one another.21 Paatz and Paatz argued that the paired organs were in the middle niches of the north and south walls, and suggested that the south instrument was depicted in Poccetti’s frescoed view of Orsanmichele in the San Marco cloister, now too badly damaged to confirm this conjecture.22 Richa confirmed that the fresco of Christ among the Doctors was beneath one of these organs.23 While Zervas argues that the tramezzo only enclosed the easternmost bays of the oratory, the possibility remains that it could

l’istoria della disputa che fece Giesu’ christo fanciullo con gl’hebrei nel tempio, habbiamo scorto si convegna fare elevato et fermo in un’ pilastro verso l’altare.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 31 bis, fol. 23v. Vasari attributed the fresco to Agnolo Gaddi. Giorgio Vasari and Gaetano Milanesi, Le vite de’più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti (Florence: Sansoni, 1878–1885), vol. 1, 640. 21 Screens and places for reading scripture or preaching were often spatially connected. In fact, the German word “Lettner” derives from “place of the sermon” (“Lesung”). The marble screen in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari is one example which incorporated pulpits. 22 Walter Paatz and Elisabeth Valentiner Paatz, Die Kirchen von Florenz, ein kunstgeschichtliches Handbuch (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1952), vol. 4, 505–6. 23 Richa did not specify where precisely the organ was: “Sotto l’organo Agnolo Gaddi pittore in que’ tempi di grido rappresentò alla parete Cristo, che disputa in mezzo a’ Dottori.” Richa, Notizie istoriche, vol. 1.1, 27.

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have divided the whole space into two equal sections, likely with some openings to afford worshippers controlled access to the altars.24

Reform of the Oratory and Removal of the Tramezzo In the 1560s, the unusually intense scheme of Florentine church renovations appear to have unfolded in three main stages: minor alterations to small churches in the first years of the 1560s (including San Marco and Ognissanti); Vasari’s high profile transformations of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce initiated in 1565 and 1566 respectively; and a series of alterations in the late decade likely influenced by the two large mendicant projects and stimulated in part by the return of exiled archbishop Antonio Altoviti (these include San Pier Maggiore, Santa Maria del Carmine, and Santa Trinita). Renovations to San Pancrazio and San Giovanni, meanwhile, took place in the mid-1570s. While documents show that Duke Cosimo intervened directly in some cases, a broad community of participants – including lay patrons, abbots and priors, leaders of religious congregations, operai members, and architects – shows the multifarious contexts and motivations behind the church renovations. During the sixteenth century, Orsanmichele gradually lost its central importance in the civic and religious life of the city. Economic and societal change lessened the need for strong trade guilds, and in 1534, the minor guilds were reorganized into four universities.25 In the spring of 1568, Duke Cosimo I ordered a reform of the oratory, which included financial, liturgical, musical, and hygienic improvements.26 Although a clear statement of reform does not appear to survive, letters from the appointed reformers and Capitani to the Grand Duke indicate some of the proposed changes. An itemized list summarizing their concerns surrounding these modifications shows that the original reform document contained at least fifty-seven chapters.27 Some changes were related to finances: for example, the requirement to keep a register of creditors and debtors,

24 Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 237. 25 Edgcumbe Staley, The Guilds of Florence (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), 62–65. 26 Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 236. 27 A document entitled “Avvertimenti fatti al Gran Duca sopra la riforma” and dated January 30, 1569 (1570 modern style) enumerated the Capitani’s concerns with specific chapters of the reform. The last chapter mentioned was “Il lvii capitolo.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 32, fols. 19r–23v.

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and the request to secure alms money in a locked chest in the sacristy. Liturgical improvements included the additional singing of the Lamentations and Benedictus on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, and the requirement that the provost complete an inventory of liturgical equipment every two months. With reference to the reform measures, the Capitani also complained that it was difficult to increase the number of chaplains to fourteen because of the low remuneration the oratory could offer; and that the two guards requested by the reform whose responsibility it was to keep the oratory and tabernacle clean should also be paid more.28 Although Duke Cosimo was clearly engaged in the process, the reform of Orsanmichele could have been related to Archbishop Antonio Altoviti’s pastoral visitation, one of his first acts upon taking control of the Florentine See after years of exile.29 The archbishop visited Orsanmichele on April 6, 1568, just one day before Ducal Secretary Lelio Torelli responded to the Capitani’s letter of complaint to the duke, possibly representing the first date associated with the reform.30 Without betraying a hint of reforming zeal and in common with other entries in the text, Altoviti’s visitation protocol itself is brief and factual, noting that a provost and chaplains perform fourteen daily masses and that lauds are sung before the image of the Virgin Mary.31 However, the close dating of Altoviti’s visitation and the beginnings of reform at Orsanmichele do suggest more than mere coincidence.32 On March 24, 1569 (modern dating), the Capitani wrote to Duke Cosimo, stating that the reform had improved the state of the oratory, but that although the building had beautiful architecture, the old tramezzo within was in need of restoration. Rather than repairing it, “the universal judgment of intelligent persons” was to remove it entirely.33 The Capitani maintained that the screen obscured the beautiful view of the tabernacle (“ostaculo che ne priva di si bella

28 “due Guardie che tutto il giorno debbono stare a’ la cura et guardia della chiesa et fare molte cose che gli comanda la Riforma.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 78, fol. 187r. no. 13 (May 20, 1569). 29 For Antonio Altoviti, see Giuseppe Alberigo, “Altoviti, Antonio,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 2 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1960), 572–73; Arnaldo d’Addario, Aspetti della Controriforma a Firenze (Rome: Ministero dell’Interno, 1972), 121–24, 177–90. 30 Lelio Torelli’s note back to the Capitani was dated April 7, 1568. ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 78, 164v. Since the Capitani minutes are lacking for the pre-1568 period (the previous volume, no. 30, covers 1527–1528), it is hard to verify whether this was the first mention of reform. 31 “In eadem oratorio quotidie celebrantur misse xiiii. Est in eadem oratorio imago virginis marie ubi decantantur laudes.” Archivio Arcivescovile, VP 09.1, fol. 19r (April 6, 1568). 32 I am investigating this possibility in more depth in my upcoming book project. 33 The Capitani also commented that the tramezzo was “fatto da chi non hebbe il vedere et giuditio qual’hebbe l’Architetto.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 31 bis, fols. 23r–v.

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vista della artificiosa base et dello oggetto del miracoloso tabernacolo della santissima Vergine”). With the tramezzo eliminated, they claimed, the oratory would be transformed from being busy and dark (“occupato et fosco”) to being free, spacious, and light (“libero ampio et luminoso”). Moreover, the sale of the extensive ironwork on the screen could fund some simple and honest benches (“semplici et honeste panche”) around the walls and piers for use during divine services. In fact, only a few weeks later, this ironwork was sold. The beams and lattice-work were valued differently – the beams at 15 lire, 10 soldi, the latticework at 13 lire, 6 soldi, and 8 denari – indicating that the tramezzo had already been dismantled into its respective sections.34 As noted above, in the same March 1569 letter, the Capitani resolved to remove an ugly and positively dishonorable pulpit (“brutto et dishonorevole positivo pergamo”), in order to erect a new version on a pier towards the altar where mass was said (“in un’ pilastro verso l’altare”). Later, also on the orders of Duke Cosimo, the two upper floors of Orsanmichele were reutilized to house the city’s notarial archives from late 1569 to December 1570.35 The removal of the iron tramezzo from the Orsanmichele interior, therefore, formed part of a broader series of liturgical and administrative reforms that also emphasized the cleanliness and architectural beauty of the oratory. With the screen removed, the Capitani eliminated what they considered to be an unappealing, poorly designed element of liturgical furnishing: an obstruction to viewing the Marian tabernacle, now regularly cleaned by the oratory guards. While the reforms may have originated with Archbishop Altoviti, they were sanctioned by Duke Cosimo, and thus represent the subjection of Orsanmichele’s independence under ducal power, a shift emphasized by the installation of the notarial archive in the building’s upper floors.

Bad Behavior Following the removal of the iron tramezzo from Orsanmichele, the Capitani periodically instituted further renovations and additions to the church interior to deal with behavioral transgressions. Although not explicitly linked to the

34 April 28, 1569: “Vendita de ferri . . . quodlibet centinarium dictorum catinarum – [lire] 15. 10 – dictorum craticulatorum et aliorum – [lire] 13.6.8.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 31 bis, fol. 25r. 35 On the archive, see Richa, Notizie istoriche, vol. 1.1, 32; Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 234–36; Federico Napoli, “La scala di Orsanmichele: un manufatto buontalentiano,” Varia: trimestrale di arte letteratura e cultura varia 13 (1995): 18–19.

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elimination of the screen, these problems might have been an unwanted byproduct of the increased openness and accessibility of the liturgical space. Certainly, indecent behavior had long plagued Orsanmichele, a result of its central location in the city, overt combination of both sacred and secular functions, and multiple entrances.36 In 1376, for example, the Capitani decreed that no undesirable women should be permitted to stay or live in the oratory.37 One of the roles of the guards, an office instituted in the 1568 reforms, was to “take care that in this church men do not have conversations with women,” perhaps implying that tramezzo had previously divided the genders.38 In the same year the Capitani posted a notice on the doors ordering worshippers – especially women – to leave immediately after services without rendezvousing with others to converse.39 Orsanmichele was also a place to report illegal behavior: in the second half of the fifteenth century the building housed boxes in which the Ufficiali di Notte e dei Monasteri could receive anonymous information concerning homosexual behavior.40 On August 11, 1575, the Capitani wrote to the grand duke explaining that an apostolic visitor had commanded that the St. Anne altar table be refashioned out of stone instead of wood (Figure 7.4).41 Although it seems that the official visitation records do not survive for Orsanmichele, this dating would correspond to Alfonso Binnarini’s visitation to Florence in 1575–1576, when he regularly recommended

36 Zervas noted that there were multiple entrances to the building. Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 239. 37 Diane Finiello Zervas, Orsanmichele: Documents 1336–1452 (Ferrara: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1996), 75. 38 “et haver’ cura che in detta chiesa huomini non faccino parlamenti con donne.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 78, fol. 298r (letter dated November 13, 1578). On the segregation of men and women in Florentine churches see Adrian Randolph, “Regarding Women in Sacred Space,” in Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, ed. Geraldine Johnson and Matthews Grieco (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 17–41; Robert Gaston, “Sacred Place and Liturgical Space: Florence’s Renaissance Churches,” in Renaissance Florence: A Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 331–52. 39 ASF, Orsanmichele, vol. 31 bis, fol. 11r. Dated November 13, 1568. 40 Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 49. The other boxes were located at San Piero Scheraggio and the Duomo. 41 Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 238. “ci è stato comandato dal Reverendissimo Visitatore Apostolico di fare di pietra l’altare maggiore di Santa Anna in esso tempio quale è di legname.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 35, fol. 17r. I am grateful to Erin Giffin for bringing these documents to my attention.

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that wooden altars be upgraded to stone.42 As explained later in the letter, the Capitani additionally wanted to push back the St. Anne altar “more towards the wall,”43 eliminating the large but unused space behind the altar to make more space available in front of the altar for those listening to the mass. The space behind the high altar had evidently been causing problems. The Capitani lamented that “as it was a hidden place and not very open, often people do disgusting things not suitable either in profane places or sacred ones like this one.”44 The euphemistic phrase “cose indegne” likely referred to sexual activities, a problem which would recur in the following decade.

Figure 7.4: St. Anne Altar, Orsanmichele, Florence. Photo: Joanne Allen.

A few days later, the Compagnia proposed to move the sculpture and its base towards the back wall, behind the altar, as far as seemed appropriate to the

42 For example, Binnarini requested that the Assumption altar in San Pier Maggiore be refashioned out of stone: “et altare prefatum lapideum fieri.” Florence, Archivio Arcivescovile di Firenze, VP 12, fol. 27r. 43 “Più presso al muro.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 35, fol. 17r. 44 “Come in luogo riposto et non aperto bene spesso si fanno cose indegne et non convenevoli ne luoghi profani non che sacri come è questo.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 35, fol. 17r.

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provost.45 The sculpture and its three steps were to be installed upon a series of brackets or corbels (“beccatelli”) rather than directly upon a precious black and white pavement.46 In addition, to either side of the sculpted group “up to the pilasters on each side” (presumably the north-east and central pilasters along the east wall of the oratory), a low wall at least one braccia high would be constructed.47 With the sculpted group further towards the back wall and parapets enclosing the space to either side, the Capitani employed physical means to preserve the sanctity of the high altar area. More changes were to follow. In January 1584, the Capitani proposed replacing the wooden steps of the St. Anne altar with stone, and a request for marble was later submitted to the Duke.48 In March 1586 (modern dating), the stone carver Jacopo di Zanobi Piccardi was commissioned to make “the steps and decoration of the altar of St. Anne in white Carrara marble,”49 Zervas concluding that the extant altar steps are indeed Piccardi’s work.50 In January 1587, the Capitani commissioned a screen or railing (“tramezo che fa coro”) from the woodworker Gabriello di Giovanni Cottoli “alla altare di detta chiesa,” therefore associated with high altar of St. Anne.51 In a series of payments dated May 9, 1587, Gabriello was reimbursed for four frames (“telai”) and two wooden pilasters; nails and glue; the disassembly of old benches in the church; and for time lost on making two designs and a wooden model of the railing.52 Later in the same month, however, the Capitani wrote to the grand

45 The proposal was dated August 24, 1575. The work was to cost 18 gold florins in total. ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 78, fol. 266r. Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 239. 46 “Si convenga et basti senza altro fare sotto li tre gradi della detta base in luogo di fondamento uno fondamento di beccatelli dispori levari sopra detti marmi bianchi et neri.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 78, fol. 266r. 47 “Et cosi fare a’ fianchi del detto imbasamento sino a’ pilastri d’ogni banda uno murretto.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 78, fol. 266r. 48 Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 239. ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 38, fol. 5r; vol. 39, fol. 4r. 49 “Che io faccio fare gli scaglioni e adornameno dell’altare di Santa Anna di marmi di carrara bianchi.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 350, loose sheet dated March 18, 1585 (1586 modern dating). 50 Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 239. An inscription on the steps reads AD. MDLXXXVI. 51 Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 240–41. This work was distinct from the improvements to the altar in the church of San Michele (now San Carlo) done in August 1587 and noted by Diane Finiello Zervas, “Niccolò Gerini’s Entombment and Resurrection of Christ S. Anna/S. Michele/ S. Carlo and Orsanmichele in Florence: Clarifications and New Documentation,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 66, no. 1 (2003), 42. This archival source refers to the “latare di samichele,” whereas the phrase “chiesa dorsanmichele” referred to Gabriello’s work in the oratory. ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 350, loose sheet dated August 5, 1587. 52 “E mostrare dua disegni e fare un modellino di legniame.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 350, loose sheet dated May 9, 1587.

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duke to complain that their new purveyor had suspended work, even though it was near completion.53 In early June, this purveyor wrote to the Duke Francesco independently, stating the reasons behind his decision, arguing that the Capitani had neglected to obtain ducal permission for the project. He added that it was a costly and unnecessary expense; that its height of 3 ¾ braccia (roughly 2.19m)54 “takes away the beauty of the oratory” and obscures the newlyfashioned marble of the high altar which had cost more than 200 scudi; and that if the confraternity wanted to make a “division between the people and the priests” it would be better to make a simple balustrade between the pilasters or even just use a curtain “when the priests are in choir.”55 It appears that work on the screen was suspended, as Zervas argues, since in a statement dated October 13, 1587, Gabriello confirmed receipt of the payment solely for the work recorded in May.56 A drawing inscribed “Disegni per cancelli per l’oratorio” is preserved adjacent to the Capitani’s May 1587 letter in which they explain that “fu dato a fare il Coro della Cappella grande di detta Chiesa a Gabriello di Giovanni legnaiolo” (Figure 7.5).57 The design shows a balustrade in three sections separated by four pilasters, with a step in front of the screen on either side. Each baluster is elegantly conceived in multiple turned sections, while the taller pilasters display the “OSM” insignia topped by a vase-shaped candelabrum.58 The proximity of this sheet to the 1587 document strongly suggests that it was associated with the project, perhaps one of the two “disegni” for which Gabriello was paid, but the lack of precise annotations does leave an element of doubt as to its date and purpose. A separate screen was proposed in 1588, this time to combat a specific problem in Orsanmichele. The Capitani noted that although the 1568 reforms required the oratory to remain open during the day, they proposed closing the building

53 “Il quale Coro hoggi si ritrova presso alla sua perfetione, et sarebbe in breve finito se il nuovo Proveditore non havere dato ordine al detto legnaiolo che desistesse dall’opera.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 350, loose sheet dated May 17, 1587. This must refer to the oratory building because “detta chiesa” succeeds the phrase “i Capitani del oratorio della vergine maria d’orsan michele di firenze,” with no mention of the church of San Michele opposite. 54 One “braccio fiorentino” corresponds to 0.583626m. Angelo Martini, Manuale di metrologia, ossia misure, pesi e monete in uso attualmente e anticamente presso tutti i popoli (Turin: Loescher, 1883), 206. 55 Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 240–41. ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 350, loose sheet dated June 2, 1587. 56 ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 350, loose sheet dated May 9, 1587 on recto and October 13, 1587 on verso. Orsanmichele a Firenze, 240–41. 57 ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 350, loose sheet. 58 I am grateful to Alexander Röstel for his insights into altar furnishings, illumination, and balustrades.

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Figure 7.5: Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 350, loose sheet. 1587 design. Photo: Courtesy of Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali e per il turismo/ Archivio di Stato di Firenze.

from half an hour after the midday Ave Maria to Vespers and, moreover, to install a walnut balustrade between the pilasters next to the holy water stoop.59 As the Capitani minutes explained, these two measures were designed “to obviate the problems of secret meetings and illicit conversations.”60 In their supplicatory letter to the grand duke, the Capitani further elucidated these problems. Orsanmichele was in a most convenient site, they noted, since it was at the heart of the city, amongst a confluence of different streets and near to the Officio dell’Onestà, the Florentine civic prostitution magistracy. In the sixteenth century, the Onestà was housed in the Butcher’s Guild building in Vicolo dell’Onestà, very near to Orsanmichele.61 This proximity led to the building being often used by those who “make illicit negotiations, especially at the hour of lunch.”62 Keeping the church closed during the day, similarly to the Duomo and San Giovanni, would

59 The mention of pilasters confirms that this document is concerned with the oratory rather than the church (which is single-aisled with no piers). 60 “Un cancello a balustri di noce da farsi da un pilastro all’altro presso alle pile dell’acqua benedetta, tutto per obviare agl’inconvenienti di conventicole et ragionamenti illecito.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 41, fol. 11v. Entry dated July 21, 1588. 61 John K. Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà and the Control of Prostitution, 1403–1680,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 24, no. 2 (Summer 1993), 274 n. 5. 62 “A’ far trattati illiciti, et massime in sul’hore del desinare.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 79, no. 10.

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help matters, the Capitani argued, since “at that time, very few come if not to do wrong.”63 But since people could carry on behaving improperly after Vespers and because “the church in itself is dark and has many hiding places,”64 a walnut balustrade should be constructed from one pilaster to another to enclose “two thirds of the church.”65 At a height of around 2 ½ braccia (roughly 1.46m) and a cost of around 80 scudi, the screen would have two doors to allow access for officiating priests at mass. When mass was over, the gates would be locked “so that whoever had a bad intent would not have a space to execute their bad inclination.”66 Ducal secretary Antonio Serguidi authorized the project ten days later with a hastily written note at the bottom of the letter: “tutto sta’ bene.” The presence of prostitutes amongst the surroundings of Orsanmichele had been documented since the late fourteenth century.67 The Officio dell’Onestà, founded in 1403, viewed prostitution as a necessary evil, insisting on publicly identifying the women it registered under male control.68 In early fifteenthcentury Florence, prostitution was concentrated near the Officio in two main zones (the area between the Duomo and Palazzo Vecchio and streets around Santa Maria Maggiore), although it had spread throughout the city by the end of the century.69 Cosimo I reduced the number of official places of prostitution, but in the 1560s the central brothel area at the Mercato Vecchio still survived.70 Notwithstanding the stricter rules on prostitutes’ fiscal rights, movement, and dress instituted by the Pratica Segreta in 1577, the practice continued to

63 “Perche in detto tempo pochissimi vi vanno, senon per fare male.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 79, no. 10. 64 “La chiesa in sè e oscura, et ha de nascondigli assai.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 79, no. 10. 65 “Ci parrebbe bene fare un’cancello di noce a’ balaustri da un pilastro all’altro che chudessi i due terzi della chiesa.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 79, no. 10. 66 “Acciò che havesti mala voluntà, non habbi luogo da exequire il mal animo.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 79, no. 10. 67 For example, in September 1397, prostitute Bernardina da Padova was fined for being in the area around Orsanmichele without wearing her identifying bell, and other offences. Romano Canosa and Isabella Colonnello, Storia della prostituzione in Italia: dal Quattrocento alla fine del Settecento (Rome: Sapere, 1989), 13 n. 2. 68 Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà,” 274–75. 69 Establishments were also in the Chiasso dei Buoi (now via Teatina) and Chiasso della Malacucina (now via Tosinghi). Canosa and Colonnello, Storia della prostituzione in Italia, 31. Maria Serena Mazzi, Prostitute e lenoni nella Firenze del Quattrocento (Milan: Saggiatore, 1991), 251–52, 287–89. 70 Nicholas Terpstra, “Locating the Sex Trade in the Early Modern City: Space, Sense and Regulation in Sixteenth–Century Florence,” in Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence:

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flourish.71 The concerns expressed by the Capitani of Orsanmichele about the building’s proximity to licentious activities, therefore, would seem to be well founded. These concerns were reflected in the ongoing debate about the position of the interior screen. While Zervas interprets the 1588 balustrade as a compromise solution to the debate over the screen installed in 1587, the distinct locations for each demonstrate that they were considered as separate projects.72 Whereas the earlier screen design was intended to enclose the high altar, the 1588 balustrade must have been positioned much closer to the entrances to the oratory. In the minutes of the Capitani, the location is described as near the holy water stoop, a church furnishing often situated at the first set of nave piers. Moreover, the Capitani stated that the balustrade would enclose two thirds of the space, verifying its position at the first set of piers. In the drawing, the absence of candelabra or spikes for candles shows that this construction was not intended to be near the high altar. In their supplicatory letter to the grand duke, the Capitani mentioned a drawing of the new balustrade,73 which was first discovered by Zervas (Figure 7.6).74 An inscription on the back of the drawing reads: “1588- Disegnio del coro anzi del Balaustro da farsi in Santo Michele.” On the drawing itself, an annotation to the right of the balustrade reads “braccia 2 ½ allto,” further confirming its relationship to the letter, which specifically mentioned this precise height. A step half a braccia high appears on either side, while in the central section vertical lines on the base and upper handrail indicate a disguised opening. The drawing provided the patrons with an aesthetic choice by presenting two slightly different designs contiguously, similar to comparable contemporary drawings of balustrade projects.75 On the left side, the balusters are slender and the pilaster displays ornamentation of overlapping disks; inverted dropped balusters appear on

Historical GIS and the Early Modern City, ed. Nicholas Terpstra and Colin Rose (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), 112, 122 n. 12. 71 Brackett, “The Florentine Onestà,” 295–96. 72 Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 241. 73 “Come Vostra Altissima potrà vedere per il disegno, che con questa segli manda.” ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 79, no. 10. 74 Zervas, Orsanmichele a Firenze, 241. ASF, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 350, loose sheet dated 1588. Zervas also claimed that a certain maestro Bastiano accepted the project and completed it together with further wooden items for the St. Anne altar. I have been unable to find the relevant document. 75 Two sixteenth-century pen drawings in the Biblioteca Marucelliana display differing designs on the right and left of a continuous balustrade. Giulia Brunetti and Rossella Todros, I disegni dei secoli XV e XVI della Biblioteca Marucelliana di Firenze: Catalogo (Rome: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, 1990), 26 (cat. 56), 27 (cat. 57).

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Figure 7.6: Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Capitani di Orsanmichele, vol. 350, loose sheet. 1588 design. Photo: Courtesy of Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali e per il turismo/ Archivio di Stato di Firenze.

the right while the pilaster presents drapery ornamentation.76 Davies and Hemsoll have shown that these Mannerist inversions of dropped balusters were popular in late sixteenth-century Florence, seen for example in Buontalenti’s theatrical combined staircase and altar balustrade originally in Santa Trinita (Figure 7.7).77 These later additions to the Orsanmichele interior reveal a desire to enclose, divide, and preserve the decorum of the sacred space: functions likely performed by the iron tramezzo before its removal. In order to combat behavioral issues associated with the inappropriate use of space – salubrious activities behind the St. Anne altar and illicit meetings possibly with prostitutes – the Capitani repeatedly sought to restrict lay access using architectural means. Although the permeable and relatively low walnut balustrade would not have obscured visual access to the Marian tabernacle, it would have still acted as a physical barrier restricting free circulation around the church interior. In the years following the removal of the tramezzo, therefore, the Capitani used church furnishings – albeit less obtrusive ones – to restore some of the functions of the lost screen.

76 Both the drapery and overlapping disk ornamentation can be seen on a walnut cupboard/ credenza dated to the second half of the sixteenth century in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Anna Maria Massinelli, Il mobile toscano (Milan: Electa, 1993), 52, figure 77. 77 Paul Davies and David Hemsoll, “Renaissance Balusters and the Antique.” Architectural History 26 (1983), 8, 15–16. The marble and sandstone structure, dated 1574, is now in Santo Stefano al Ponte Vecchio. Ferruccio Canali, “La basilica di Santa Trinita (e la chiesa di Santo Stefano al Ponte, ‘a pendant’): Il ‘problema’ delle ‘aggiunte’ (‘superfetazioni’ e ‘superedificazioni’) di Bernardo Buontalenti e del barocco durante il ripristino neomedievale (1884–1905),” Bollettino della Società di studi fiorentini 23 (2014), 193–95.

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Figure 7.7: Altar balustrade, Santo Stefano al Ponte Vecchio. Photo: Joanne Allen.

Reform and Architectural Change Scholars have not agreed upon the precise relationship between religious reform and architectural change in late sixteenth-century Italy, and indeed, many acknowledge that multiple factors were at play. Unlike its edicts on religious images,78 the Council of Trent did not explicitly promulgate rulings on tramezzi or nave choirs, and as Marcia Hall, Donal Cooper, and others have noted, changes in choir layout had already occurred in the pre-Tridentine period.79 Lay patronage of burials and private chapels, issues of aesthetics and practicality, liturgical considerations, and ecclesiastical directives all contributed to alterations of sacred space.80 Just as Trent essentially codified earlier reforming endeavors in liturgical

78 For the Tridentine decree on religious images, see Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art, 117–41. 79 Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation, 2–4; Donal Cooper, “Franciscan Choir Enclosures and the Function of Double-Sided Altarpieces in Pre-Tridentine Umbria.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 64 (2001): 1–54. See also the forthcoming article by Gromotka, “Was There Ever an Officially Sanctioned Post-Tridentine Church Interior?” 80 See in particular the contributions by Sible de Blaauw, Martin Gaier, Riccardo Pacciani, and Paola Modesti in Lo spazio e il culto.

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and disciplinary matters, the spatial disposition of new Counter-Reformation churches including the Gesù in Rome and San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice drew on previous architectural models.81 Church furnishings, such as Eucharistic tabernacles, confessionals, altars, and altarpieces, also experienced major transformations intended to express Tridentine doctrinal concepts.82 The renovation of Florentine churches during the 1560s and 1570s has long been interpreted as a prime example of architectural changes instituted at a local level through a combination of religious reform and politics.83 Isermeyer (1952) conceded that while aesthetics was certainly a significant factor, clerics were keen for the laity to have visual access to the sacrament in the wake of Trent, and absolutist political leaders like Cosimo valued the removal of Republican vestiges in the church interior.84 Waźbiński (1987) suggested that Cosimo’s visit to Rome in late 1560 – which included a tour of major early Christian churches – influenced the duke’s views on modernizing Florentine church interiors.85 Writing with a focus on Vasari, Lunardi (1988), Satkowski (1993), and Conforti (1993) related the new arrangements both to Cosimo’s desire for the grand ducal crown and to contemporary religious reform, which in its emphasis on church

81 James S. Ackerman, “The Gesù in the Light of Contemporary Church Design,” in Baroque Art: The Jesuit Contribution, ed. Rudolf Wittkower and Irma B. Jaffe (New York: Fordham University Press, 1972), 15–28. For San Giorgio Maggiore, see Tracy Cooper, Palladio’s Venice: Architecture and Society in a Renaissance Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 82 For Counter-Reformation material culture in general, see Silvia Evangelisti, “Material Culture,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation, ed. Alexandra Bamji, Geert H. Janssen, and Mary Laven (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 395–416. For Eucharistic tabernacles in CounterReformation Florence, see Antonio Paolucci, “L’arredamento ecclesiale nell’età della riforma,” in Arte e religione nella Firenze de’ Medici, ed. Massimiliano Giuseppe Rosito (Florence: Edizioni Città di Vita, 1980), 95–109. For Tridentine influence in Eucharistic tabernacles, see Michael G. Gromotka, “Transformation Campaigns of Church Interiors and their Impact on the Function and Form of Renaissance Altarpieces,” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 42 (2015/16), 94–98. For altars and altarpieces, see Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation; Timothy Verdon, “Le origini dell’altare barocco e la Contro-Riforma a Firenze,” in Altari e committenza: Episodi a Firenze nell’età della Controriforma, ed. Cristina De Benedictis (Florence: Pontecorboli, 1996), 19–27. For confessionals, see Richard Schofield, “Carlo Borromeo and the Dangers of Laywomen in Church,” in The Sensuous in the Counter Reformation Church (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 193–96. 83 These issues will be further discussed in the author’s forthcoming book, “Transforming the Church Interior in Renaissance Florence.” 84 Christian-Adolf Isermeyer, “Il Vasari e il restauro delle chiese medievali,” in Studi vasariani: atti del Convegno internazionale per il IV. centenario della prima edizione delle ‘Vite’ del Vasari (Florence: Sansoni, 1952) 229–36. 85 Zygmunt Waźbiński, L’Accademia medicea del disegno a Firenze nel Cinquecento: idea e istituzione. Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere “La Colombaria” (Florence: Olschki, 1987) 357–79.

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attendance, preaching, and frequent communication, required churches with open naves and prominent high altars.86 On a more prosaic level, Cresti (1995) noted that the restorations were a relatively inexpensive, but effective, alternative to constructing grandiose new churches. More recently, Gaston (2006) observed that in his personal engagement with church architecture, Cosimo in essence assumed the role of archbishop by asserting centralized authority.87 Van Veen (2006), meanwhile, noted that for all their modernity, Vasari’s projects also emphasized retrospection, reprising both early Christian precedents and Brunelleschi’s unified, open interiors.88 Evidently, diverse factors stimulated the Florentine renovations, and many people were involved, including Duke Cosimo, Vasari, Altoviti, individual church communities, and lay patrons. However, Orsanmichele – which has thus far not been recognized as part of the broader Florentine phenomenon – represents an important case showing that, at least in certain situations, a localized, targeted reform could accompany or even prompt church renovations. The later attempts by the Capitani of Orsanmichele to eradicate bad behavior are consistent with the Tridentine directive to maintain holiness in the church interior. Session 22 of the Council (September 17, 1562) stated: “They shall also banish from churches . . . all secular actions; vain and therefore profane conversations, all walking about, noise, and clamor, that so the house of God may be seen to be, and may be called, truly a house of prayer.”89 The widely-distributed Constitutiones from Cardinal Borromeo’s first provincial council of Milan in 1565 also admonished against walking around, lingering at the portals, communing with women or leaning against liturgical furnishings.90 Based upon the Tridentine emphasis on

86 Roberto Lunardi, “La ristrutturazione Vasariana di Santa Maria Novella: i documenti ritrovati,” Memorie dominicane, n.s., 19 (1988): 403–19; Leon Satkowski, Giorgio Vasari: Architect and Courtier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 81–97; Claudia Conforti, Vasari architetto (Milan: Electa, 1993), 209–23. 87 Gaston, “Sacred Place and Liturgical Space.” 88 Henk Th. van Veen, Cosimo I de’ Medici and his Self-Representation in Florentine Art and Culture, trans. by Andrew P. McCormick (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 117–21. 89 James Waterworth, The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent (London: Dolman, 1848), 161; John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 192. 90 Constitutiones et decreta condita in provinciali synodo Mediolanensi, 128. This was published widely in 1566 and 1567, a copy of which was sent to the papal nunzio in Florence, Mons. Cresengo, who in his letter back to Borromeo (September 25, 1566), mentioned that Duke Cosimo had also been sent the text, and he requested more copies, since the decrees could “give a good example to all prelates to do the same in their dioceses.” Enrico Cattaneo, “Il primo concilio provinciale milanese (a. 1565),“ in Il Concilio di Trento e la riforma tridentina.

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lay church attendance for mass and preaching, Borromeo’s extensive Instructiones were intended to help create a prayerful and solemn ambience in the church interior.91 Pius V’s bull “Cum primum,” issued in 1566, censured various irreverences in church (including vulgar conversations with immodest women) all of which incurred monetary penalties.92 In Florence, Altoviti’s Provincial Synod of 1573 reiterated this sentiment, censuring ambulation, crying out, playing tricks, or selling merchandise in church.93 From a functional and aesthetic perspective, the balustrade projects at Orsanmichele resonate with late sixteenth-century attitudes to church furnishings. In his Instructiones, Borromeo advised that altar railings constructed from iron, stone, marble, or wood should enclose every altar in the church, have a central lockable door, and feature closely interweaved grating near the ground to keep out dogs.94 Contemporary choir enclosures in centralized architectural spaces, for instance in Santa Maria del Fiore95 and Santo Spirito in Florence,96 and Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome,97 also comprised architectural features

Atti del Convegno storico internazionale, Trento, 2–6 settembre 1963 (Rome: Herder, 1965), n. 253. See also Waźbiński, L’Accademia medicea, 364–65, n. 35. 91 Evelyn Carole Voelker, “Borromeo‘s Influence on Sacred Art and Architecture,” in San Carlo Borromeo: Catholic Reform and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century (Washington; London: Folger Shakespeare Library; Associated University Presses, 1988), 185. 92 Pietro Tacchi Venturi and Mario Scaduto, Storia della Compagnia di Gesù in Italia (Rome: Civiltà cattolica, 1950), 211–12. For the complete text of the bull, see Bullarum Diplomatum, vol. 7, 434–38. 93 Decreta Provincialis Synodi Florentinae, 18–19 (Session 2, rub. 12, Cap. 1). 94 St Charles Borromeo’s Instructions, 43–45. These railings would have been over 4ft high. Evelyn Carole Voelker, “Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones Fabricae et Supellectilis Ecclesiasticae, 1577. A translation with commentary and analysis” (PhD diss., Syracuse University Press, 1977), 202. Balustrades were also installed as part of the renovation of churches under Borromeo’s jurisdiction, including San Prassede and Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. Maurizio Caperna, “San Carlo Borromeo, cardinale di S. Prassede, e il rinnovamento della sua chiesa titolare a Roma,” in Palladio: rivista di storia dell’architettura e restauro 12 (1993), 45, 50. 95 Bandinelli’s image laden, monumental marble choir enclosure was completed in 1572. See Francesco Vossilla, “Baccio Bandinelli and Giovanni Bandini in the Choir of the Cathedral,” in Sotto il cielo della cupola: il coro di Santa Maria del Fiore dal Rinascimento al 2000 [. . .] (Milan: Electa, 1997), 69–99. 96 The extant octagonal-plan enclosure, composed of a low wall surmounted by a balustrade, cornice and candelabra, was executed by Giovanni Caccini and his workshop in 1599–1608. Paatz and Paatz, Die Kirchen von Florenz, vol. 5, 140–41; Cristina Acidini Luchinat, “L‘altar maggiore,” in La Chiesa e il Convento di Santo Spirito a Firenze, ed. Cristina Acidini Luchinat and Elena Caprett (Florence: Giunti/Cassa di risparmio di Firenze, 1996), 337–56. 97 Possibly inspired by the Florentine Duomo, in the early 1580s, a low octagonal parapet, decorated with stucco relief figures and chiaroscuro narrative paintings, was erected around the main central altar in Santo Stefano Rotondo in Rome. Lief Holm Monssen, “St Stephen’s

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seen in the Orsanmichele drawings such as low parapets, balustrades, and candelabra. With their permeable yet commanding spatial presence, these low dividing walls represent a Counter-Reformation compromise between physical separation and visibility in the church interior.

Conclusion The presence of a tramezzo in Orsanmichele upends conventional assumptions about the function and liturgical contexts of church screens. Closely associated with civic devotion and administered by a lay confraternity and college of secular priests, Orsanmichele performed a very different religious role to the large mendicant or monastic congregations in the city. Moreover, the palazzo-style, three-storied rectangular building is architecturally unrelated to barn-like Gothic mendicant churches. Yet the tramezzo – albeit typologically and materially unusual – was still considered a vital component of the liturgical space once the open arches of the loggia had been enclosed. Its relatively late installation, in the first half of the fifteenth century, shows that the desire to segregate space persisted in a period characterized by Brunelleschian notions of unified church interiors. The Capitani’s practical and aesthetic motivations for removing the tramezzo in 1569 are consistent with other contemporary cases. They considered the screen artistically redundant and an impediment to viewing the Marian tabernacle, visual considerations that tally with concerns documented at other Florentine churches, including Santa Croce.98 Crucially, however, the Orsanmichele renovation was associated with a liturgical and administrative reform ordered by Duke Cosimo that may also have involved the Archbishop of Florence, Antonio Altoviti. Later alterations to the Orsanmichele interior reveal that these reforms did not necessarily produce the intended atmosphere of holiness. It appears that the decision to keep the oratory open during the day backfired, inviting inappropriate uses of the building that led to the need for architectural solutions to enclose the space once more.

Balustrade in Santo Stefano Rotondo,” Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia 3 (1983): 107–81. 98 In a letter to Duke Cosimo of July 21, 1566, the Operai of Santa Croce claimed that the friars’ choir stalls could comfortably fit into the cappella maggiore, rendering the church “much more beautiful and delightful to the eye.” Florence, Archivio di Santa Croce, vol. 429, fols. 27r–v. Transcribed in Filippo Moisé, Santa Croce di Firenze: illustrazione storico-artistica (Florence: n.p., 1845), 122, and Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation, 169–70 (both citing the now incorrect reference vol. 426, fol. 51).

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Marcia Hall’s groundbreaking work on the Florentine tramezzi revealed the importance of screens in reconstructing the liturgical and artistic experience of the Italian church interior. The example of Orsanmichele demonstrates the ways in which spatial dynamics intersected with both the building’s functionality and aesthetic qualities. Since church interiors were sites of negotiation and compromise between social groups, an intricate web of motivations drove architectural change. The investigation of these complexities can lead to deeper insights about the interconnections between art, religion, and society in late Renaissance Florence.

Works Cited Acidini Luchinat, Cristina. “L’altar maggiore.” In La Chiesa e il Convento di Santo Spirito a Firenze, edited by Cristina Acidini Luchinat and Elena Capretti, 337–56. Florence: Giunti/ Cassa di risparmio di Firenze, 1996. Ackerman, James S. “The Gesù in the Light of Contemporary Church Design.” In Baroque art: the Jesuit contribution, edited by Rudolf Wittkower and Irma B. Jaffe, 15–28. New York: Fordham University Press, 1972. Alberigo, Giuseppe. “Altoviti, Antonio.” In Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 2, 572–73. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1960. Battaglia, Salvatore, and Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti. Grande dizionario della lingua italiana. Turin: Unione tipografico-editrice torinese, 1961–2002. Bietti Favi, Monica. “Indizi documentari su Lippo di Benivieni.” Studi di storia dell’arte 1 (1990): 243–52. Boccalatte, Paola Elena. Fabbri e ferri: Italia, XII – XVI secolo. BAR International Series Oxford: Archaeopress, 2013. Brackett, John K. “The Florentine Onestà and the Control of Prostitution, 1403–1680.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 24, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 273–300. Brunetti, Giulia, and Rossella Todros. I disegni dei secoli XV e XVI della Biblioteca Marucelliana di Firenze: Catalogo. Rome: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, Libreria dello Stato, 1990. Bullarum Diplomatum et Privilegiorum Sanctorum Romanorum Pontificum Taurinensis Editio. Turin: Dalmazzo, 1862. Canali, Ferruccio. “La basilica di Santa Trinita (e la chiesa di Santo Stefano al Ponte, ‘a pendant’): Il ‘problema’ delle ‘aggiunte’ (‘superfetazioni’ e ‘superedificazioni’) di Bernardo Buontalenti e del barocco durante il ripristino neomedievale (1884–1905).” Bollettino della Società di studi fiorentini 23 (2014): 172–204. Cannon, Joanna. Religious Poverty, Visual Riches: Art in the Dominican Churches of Central Italy in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Canosa, Romano, and Isabella Colonnello. Storia della prostituzione in Italia: dal Quattrocento alla fine del Settecento. Rome: Sapere, 1989. Caperna, Maurizio. “San Carlo Borromeo, cardinale di S. Prassede, e il rinnovamento della sua chiesa titolare a Roma.” In Palladio: rivista di storia dell’architettura e restauro 12 (1993): 43–58.

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Cassidy, Brendan. “Orcagna’s Tabernacle in Florence: Design and Function.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 55, no. 2 (1992): 180–211. Cattaneo, Enrico. “Il primo concilio provinciale milanese (a. 1565).” In Il Concilio di Trento e la riforma tridentina. Atti del Convegno storico internazionale, Trento, 2–6 settembre 1963, 215–75. Rome: Herder, 1965. Conforti, Claudia. Vasari architetto. Milan: Electa, 1993. Constitutiones et decreta condita in provinciali synodo Mediolanensi. Venice: Paolo Manuzio, 1566. Cooper, Donal. “Franciscan Choir Enclosures and the Function of Double-Sided Altarpieces in Pre-Tridentine Umbria.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 64 (2001): 1–54. Cooper, Donal. “Recovering the Lost Rood Screens of Medieval and Renaissance Italy.” In The Art and Science of the Church Screen in Medieval Europe: Making, Meaning, Preserving, 220–45. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2017. Cooper, Tracy. Palladio’s Venice: Architecture and Society in a Renaissance Republic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Cornelison, Sally. “Relocating Fra Bartolomeo at San Marco.” Renaissance Studies 23, no. 3 (2009): 311–34. Cresti, Carlo. “Architettura della Controriforma a Firenze.” In Architetture di altari e spazio ecclesiale: episodi a Firenze, Prato e Ferrara, 7–73. Florence: Angelo Pontecorboli, 1995. Crum, Roger J., and David G. Wilkins. “In the Defense of Florentine Republicanism: Saint Anne and Florentine Art, 1343–1575.” In Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society, edited by Kathleen M. Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn, 131–68. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1990. d’Addario, Arnaldo. Aspetti della Controriforma a Firenze. Rome: Ministero dell’Interno, 1972. Davies, Paul, and David Hemsoll. “Renaissance Balusters and the Antique.” Architectural History 26 (1983): 1–23, 117–22. De Marchi, Andrea. “Relitti di un naufragio: affreschi di Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi e Maso di Banco nelle navate di Santa Croce.” In Santa Croce: oltre le apparenze, edited by Andrea De Marchi and Giacomo Piraz, 33–71. Gli Ori: Pistoia, 2011. De Marchi, Andrea. “‘Cum dictum opus sit magnum.’ Il documento pistoiese del 1274 e l’allestimento trionfale dei tramezzi in Umbria e Toscana fra Due e Trecento.” In Medioevo: immagine e memoria, edited by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle, 603–21. Atti di Parma: Electa Milan, 2009. Decreta Provincialis Synodi Florentinae; praesidente in ea reverendiss. D. Antonio Altovita Metropolitanae Ecclesiae Florentinae Archiepiscopo. Florence: Bartholomaeus Sermartellius, 1574. Eckstein, Nicholas A. Painted Glories: The Brancacci Chapel in Renaissance Florence. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014. Eisler, Colin, Abbey Kornfeld, and Alison Rebecca W. Strauber. “Words on an Image: Francesco da Sangallo’s Sant’Anna Metterza for Orsanmichele.” In Orsanmichele and the History and Preservation of the Civic Monument, edited by Carl Brandon Strehlke, 289–300. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Evangelisti, Silvia. “Material Culture.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to the CounterReformation, edited by Alexandra Bamji, Geert H. Janssen, and Mary Laven, 395–416. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. Fabbri, Nancy Rash, and Nina Rutenburg. “The Tabernacle of Orsanmichele in Context.” The Art Bulletin 63, no. 3 (September 1981): 385–405.

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Gaston, Robert. “Sacred Place and Liturgical Space: Florence’s Renaissance Churches.” In Renaissance Florence: A Social History, 331–52. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Giannetti, Stefano. “La chiesa basso-medievale: il tramezzo di Ognissanti.” In La chiesa basso-medievale: il tramezzo di Ognissanti, 49–57. Florence: Edifir, 2011. Gromotka, Michael G. “Transformation Campaigns of Church Interiors and their Impact on the Function and Form of Renaissance Altarpieces.” Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 42 (2015/16): 79–125. Hall, Marcia B. After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Hall, Marcia B. “Introduction.” In The Sensuous in the Counter Reformation Church, 1–20. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Hall, Marcia B. “The ponte in S. Maria Novella and the problem of the rood screen in Italy.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974): 157–73. Hall, Marcia B. Renovation and Counter-Reformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Sta Maria Novella and Sta Croce, 1565–1577. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Hall, Marcia B. The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Hall, Marcia B. “The Tramezzo in Santa Croce, Florence, Reconstructed.” The Art Bulletin 56, no. 3 (September 1974): 325–41. Hall, Marcia B. “The tramezzo in the Italian Renaissance, Revisited.” In Thresholds of the Sacred: Architectural, Art Historical, Liturgical, and Theological Perspectives on Religious Screens, East and West, edited by Sharon E. J. Gerstel, 214–32. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2006. Hueck, Irene. “Le opere di Giotto per la chiesa di Ognissanti.” In La ‘Madonna di’Ognissanti’ di Giotto restaurata, 37–49. Florence: Gli Uffizi Studi e Ricerche, 1992. Isermeyer, Christian-Adolf. “Il Vasari e il restauro delle chiese medievali.” In Studi vasariani: atti del Convegno internazionale per il IV. centenario della prima edizione delle ‘Vite’ del Vasari, 229–36. Florence: Sansoni, 1952. Kreytenberg, Gert. “The Limestone Tracery in the Arches of the Original Grain Loggia of Orsanmichele in Florence.” In Orsanmichele and the History and Preservation of the Civic Monument, edited by Carl Brandon Strehlke, 111–24. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Laghi, Anna. “La chiesa cinquecentesca: vicende e restauri.” In San Niccolò Oltrarno: la chiesa, una famiglia di antiquari, edited by Giovanna Damiani and Anna Laghi, 87–135. Florence: Comune di Firenze, 1982. Leoncini, Giovanni. “Il Cinquecento e il Seicento in Santa Trinita.” In Alla riscoperta delle chiese di Firenze: 6. Santa Trinita, edited by Timothy Verdon, 135–59. Florence: Centro Di, 2009. Lewis, Charlton T., and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary Revised, Enlarged, and in Great Part Rewritten. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. Lo spazio e il culto: relazioni tra edificio ecclesiale e uso liturgico dal XV al XVI secolo. Edited by Jörg Stabenow. Venice: Marsilio, 2006. Lunardi, Roberto. “La ristrutturazione Vasariana di Santa Maria Novella: i documenti ritrovati.” Memorie dominicane, n.s., 19 (1988): 403–19. Maisonneuve, Cécile. Florence au XVe siècle: Un quartier et ses peintres. Paris: CTHS, 2012.

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Martini, Angelo. Manuale di metrologia, ossia misure, pesi e monete in uso attualmente e anticamente presso tutti i popoli. Turin: Loescher, 1883. Massinelli, Anna Maria. Il mobile toscano. Milan: Electa, 1993. Mazzi, Maria Serena. Prostitute e lenoni nella Firenze del Quattrocento. Milan: Saggiatore, 1991. Moisé, Filippo. Santa Croce di Firenze: illustrazione storico-artistica. Florence: n.p., 1845. Monssen, Lief Holm. “St Stephen’s Balustrade in Santo Stefano Rotondo.” Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia 3 (1983): 107–81. Napoli, Federico. “La scala di Orsanmichele: un manufatto buontalentiano.” Varia: trimestrale di arte letteratura e cultura varia 13 (1995): 18–19. O’Malley, John W. Trent: What Happened at the Council. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. Paatz, Walter, and Elisabeth Valentiner Paatz. Die Kirchen von Florenz, ein kunstgeschichtliches Handbuch. Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1952. Pacciani, Riccardo. “‘Signorili amplitudini . . .’ a Firenze. La cappella Rucellai alla Badia di S. Pancrazio e la rotonda della SS. Annunziata: architettura, patronati, rituali.” In Leon Battista Alberti architetture e committenti, edited by Arturo Calzona, Joseph Connors, Francesco Paolo Fiore, and Cesare Vasoli, 135–79. Florence: Olschki, 2009. Paolucci, Antonio. “L’arredamento ecclesiale nell’età della riforma.” In Arte e religione nella Firenze de’ Medici, edited by Massimiliano Giuseppe Rosito, 95–109. Florence: Edizioni Città di Vita, 1980. Poeschke, Joachim. Michelangelo and His World: Sculpture of the Italian Renaissance. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996. Randolph, Adrian. “Regarding Women in Sacred Space.” In Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, edited by Geraldine Johnson and Matthews Grieco, 17–41. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Richa, Giuseppe. Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine, divise ne’ suoi quartieri. Florence: P.G. Viviani, 1754. Rocke, Michael. Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Satkowski, Leon. Giorgio Vasari: Architect and Courtier. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Schofield, Richard. “Carlo Borromeo and the Dangers of Laywomen in Church.” In The Sensuous in the Counter Reformation Church, 187–205. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Schwartz, Frithjof. Il bel cimitero: Santa Maria Novella in Florenz 1279–1348: Grabmäler, Architektur und Gesellschaft. Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009. St. Charles Borromeo’s Instructions on Ecclesiastical Building. Translated by George J. Wigley. London: Dolman, 1857. Staley, Edgcumbe. The Guilds of Florence. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967. Tacchi Venturi, Pietro and Mario Scaduto. Storia della Compagnia di Gesù in Italia. Rome: Civiltà cattolica, 1950. Terpstra, Nicholas. “Locating the Sex Trade in the Early Modern City: Space, Sense and Regulation in Sixteenth–Century Florence.” In Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence: Historical GIS and the Early Modern City, edited by Nicholas Terpstra and Colin Rose, 107–24. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016.

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Vasari, Giorgio, and Gaetano Milanesi. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architetti. 9 vols. Florence: Sansoni, 1878–1885. Veen, Henk Th. van. Cosimo I de’ Medici and his Self-Representation in Florentine Art and Culture. Translated by Andrew P. McCormick. Cambridge University Press, 2006. Verdon, Timothy. “Le origini dell’altare barocco e la Contro-Riforma a Firenze.” In Altari e committenza: Episodi a Firenze nell’età della Controriforma, edited by Cristina De Benedictis, 19–27. Florence: Pontecorboli, 1996. Voelker, Evelyn Carole. “Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones Fabricae et Supellectilis Ecclesiasticae, 1577. A Translation with Commentary and Analysis.” PhD diss., Syracuse University, 1977. Voelker, Evelyn Carole. “Borromeo’s Influence on Sacred Art and Architecture.” In San Carlo Borromeo: Catholic Reform and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century, 172–87. Washington; London: Folger Shakespeare Library; Associated University Presses, 1988. Vossilla, Francesco. “Baccio Bandinelli and Giovanni Bandini in the Choir of the Cathedral.” In Sotto il cielo della cupola: il coro di Santa Maria del Fiore dal Rinascimento al 2000: progetti di Brunelleschi, Bandinelli, Botta, Brenner, Gabetti e Isola, Graves, Hollein, Isozaki, Nouvel, Rossi, 69–99. Milan: Electa, 1997. Waterworth, James. The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent. London: Dolman, 1848. Waźbiński, Zygmunt. L’Accademia medicea del disegno a Firenze nel Cinquecento: idea e istituzione. Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere “La Colombaria.” Florence: Olschki, 1987. Wilson, Blake. “If Monuments Could Sing: Image, Song, and Civic Devotion inside Orsanmichele.” In Orsanmichele and the History and Preservation of the Civic Monument, edited by Carl Brandon Strehlke, 139–68. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. Zervas, Diane Finiello. “New Documents for the Oratory of Orsanmichele in Florence, 1365–1400.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 78 (2015): 292–313. Zervas, Diane Finiello. “Niccolò Gerini’s Entombment and Resurrection of Christ S. Anna/S. Michele/S. Carlo and Orsanmichele in Florence: Clarifications and New Documentation.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 66, no. 1 (2003): 33–64. Zervas, Diane Finiello. Orsanmichele a Firenze. Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1996. Zervas, Diane Finiello. Orsanmichele: Documents 1336–1452. Ferrara: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1996.

Part 3: Image

Sarah K. Kozlowski

Chapter 8 Matter and Meaning in Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross Piero della Francesca’s frescoes in the main chapel of the church of San Francesco in Arezzo map the movement of the True Cross through space and time by following its discoveries, rediscoveries, and transformations from living tree, to raw material, to fashioned object, to abstract form, to replica. Throughout the cycle, Piero explores the matter of the cross: its organic origins, the visual and physical properties of the wood from which it was made, its dimensionality and weight. In turn, this double focus on the cross’s materiality and on its circulation as matter, artifact, form, and copy opens onto a metapictorial investigation of the medium and practice of painting. In each of its various states, the cross structures Piero’s pictorial world. It reveals the surface of the picture plane, the armature of perspectival space, and the gaze of the imagined beholder. In effect, Piero’s frescoes model the idea of painting that the artist would set out decades later in his treatise on perspective. The continuities – and contradictions – between Piero’s paintings and his writings give us insight into the dynamics of the relationship between practice and theory in the work of this painter-mathematician.

Personal Note: I visited Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross for the first time with Marcia Hall on an August day in 1999 when we climbed the restoration scaffolding together in Arezzo. That summer between my junior and senior years in college, I worked as Marcia’s research assistant at the American Academy in Rome. Most mornings I biked up the hill to meet Marcia, where we spent the day in the Academy library. On special days we looked at paintings together. Our field trip to Arezzo was transformative. We stood on the scaffolding in the main chapel of San Francesco, inches away from Piero’s Annunciation, close enough to follow the lines of charcoal dots that Piero and his shop had pounced through paper cartoons onto the plastered wall. In retrospect, it was then that I began to understand that through a combination of close looking and art historical imagination I could enter into the story of an artwork’s making, and that that story was one worth telling. Since then, even as my research has ranged far from Arezzo, that first encounter at Marcia’s side with Piero’s True Cross has continued to inform my approach to Renaissance painting. This essay is because of and for her. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-009

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Practice and theory: the reversal of the usual phrase in the title of Marcia Hall’s landmark Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting announces the book’s primary concern with “the making of the painting.”1 Why does a painting look the way it does? In Color and Meaning, Hall’s approach to this central question moves deftly between, on one hand, analysis of how a painter’s formal choices (in this case, color) generate meaning in the particular context of a picture’s subject, function, and the artistic stakes of the project; and, on the other hand, analysis of the practical considerations of materials, techniques, and workshop tradition. Hall’s primary evidence is always the painting itself, and her narrative unfolds work by work in the painter’s shop. In the present essay on Piero’s chapel in Arezzo – both work and, at least for the period of its execution, workshop – I draw on Hall’s triangulation between form, meaning, and the materials and practice of painting. Instead of color and meaning, my concern here is the question of matter and meaning. I ask how the artist’s attunement to the materiality of the cross, the protagonist of his story, creates meaning both within the story and in Piero’s thinking about his own practice as a painter. And through a reconsideration of the complex relationship between the painter’s frescoes in Arezzo and the mathematician’s treatise on perspective, I suggest how we might begin to look afresh at his whole body of work from the point of view of the materiality of both the paintings and the writings, in the context of Piero as maker. Piero began work in Arezzo in 1452, finishing at the latest by 1466 and possibly earlier, by around 1460 (Figure 8.1).2 With crystalline clarity of composition,

1 Marcia B. Hall, Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 2 For a complete set of photographs of the chapel after the most recent conservation campaign see Anna Maria Maetzke and Carlo Bertelli, eds., Piero della Francesca: The Legend of the True Cross in the Church of San Francesco in Arezzo (Milan: Skira, 2001). The literature on Piero della Francesca and the frescoes in Arezzo is broad and rich. Particularly useful for this essay have been Filippo Camerota, Francesco Paolo di Teodoro, and Luigi Grasselli, eds., Piero della Francesca: Il Disegno tra Arte e Scienza (Milan: Skira, 2015); James R. Banker, Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Anna Maria Maetzke, “La Leggenda della Vera Croce di Piero della Francesca in San Francesco ad Arezzo: Prime Note sulle Tecniche Esecutive,” in Materiali e Tecniche nella Pittura Murale del Quattrocento: Storia dell’Arte, Indagini Diagnostiche e Restauro verso una Nuova Prospettiva di Ricerca, ed. by Barbara Fabjan, Marco Cardinali, Maria Beatrice De Ruggieri, and Marisa Dalai Emiliani (Rome: ENEA, 2010), 315–23; Christopher S. Wood, “Piero della Francesca, Liminologist,” in Bilder, Räume, Betrachter: Festschrift für Wolfgang Kemp zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. by Steffen Bogen, Wolfgang Brassat, and David Ganz (Berlin: Reimer, 2006), 252–69; Marisa Dalai Emiliani, “La Leggenda della Vera Croce restaurata: Nuove evidenze per Piero Prospettico nel Cantiere di Arezzo,” in Il Corpo dello Stile: Cultura et Lettura del Restauro nelle Esperienze Contemporanee. Studi in Ricordo di Michele

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Figure 8.1: Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross, begun in 1452, fresco, Arezzo, church of San Francesco, main chapel. Scala / Art Resource, NY.

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perfect symmetry of narrative structure, and profound humanity, the cycle presents the story of the cross, unique accretion of history, scripture, and legend, which is also the Christian story of human salvation from creation to the end of time. Jacobus de Voragine had brought together the multiple sources of the legend of the cross in two chapters of his Golden Legend, which appeared around 1270 and became a principal source for artists such as Piero charged with imagining the legend in pictorial form.3 In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, relics of the cross circulated throughout the Christian world. They were bought and sold, given as gifts, stolen and recuperated, displayed in reliquaries, kept in churches and royal treasuries, and worn on the body. Voragine’s account of the legend of the cross and visual adaptations like Piero’s organized and consolidated the back-story of these relics, reinforced their connection with deep and distant Christian history, and reasserted their authenticity and miraculous powers in the present. Piero’s program, arrayed across three registers on the left, right, and back walls of the chapel at San Francesco, is organized around the legend’s typological symmetry, which binds together events across space and time, before and after the turning point of Christ’s death on the cross.4

Cordaro, ed. by Chiara Piva e Ilaria Sgarbozza (Rome: De Luca, 2005), 65–77; Michael Baxandall, Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), Chapter 7; Roberto Longhi, Piero della Francesca, trans. by David Tabbat (Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York: Stanley Moss-Sheep Meadow Press, 2002); Maetzke and Bertelli, Piero della Francesca; Carmen Bambach Cappel, “Piero della Francesca, the Study of Perspective and the Development of the Cartoon in the Quattrocento,” in Piero della Francesca tra Arte e Scienza, ed. by Marisa Dalai Emiliani and Valter Curzi (Venice: Marsilio, 1996), 143–66; Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, ed., Piero della Francesca and His Legacy (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1995); Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, The Place of Narrative: Mural Decoration in Italian Churches, 431–1600 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Eugenio Battisti, Piero della Francesca (Milan: Electa, 1992); and Eve Borsook, The Mural Painters of Tuscany: From Cimabue to Andrea del Sarto (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). As I was preparing the final version of this essay for press, still forthcoming was Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, Piero della Francesca and the Invention of the Artist (London: Reaktion Books, 2020). See also the illuminating volume edited by Dana Prescott, Feathers from the Angel’s Wing: Poems Inspired by the Paintings of Piero della Francesca (New York: Persea Books, 2016). 3 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. by William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:277–84 and 2:168–73. On the development of the legend of the cross over time see Barbara Baert, A Heritage of Holy Wood: The Legend of the True Cross in Text and Image (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 4 On typology in Piero’s program see Wood, “Piero, Liminologist.”

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The lunettes that face each other across the chapel mark the beginning and end of the story. At right, in The Death of Adam, a branch from the Tree of Knowledge in Eden is planted over Adam’s grave and grows into the tree from whose wood the cross will be fashioned. At left, in The Exaltation of the Cross, the cross’s journey culminates in its return to Jerusalem and its celebration as a relic. The middle registers, The Meeting of Solomon and Sheba and The Finding and Proving of the Cross, pair two royal women, Sheba and Helena, who recognize and authenticate the power of the wood and of the cross into which it is made. In the lower registers, The Battle of Constantine and Maxentius and The Battle of Heraclius and Chosroes present two military engagements, one bloodless and one ferociously violent, in which the cross (or, more precisely, images of the cross) is the agent of victory. On the back wall two prophets preside over two pairs of scenes organized in a chiastic pattern: the suppression and recognition of truth, figured as a descent into and an emergence from the earth, in The Burial of the Wood and The Raising of Judas from the Well; and two encounters between the human and the divine in The Annunciation and The Dream of Constantine. To drive this narrative and to generate thematic and visual rhymes within it, Piero plots out a series of physical and ontological transformations. A living organism becomes the raw material that in turn is fashioned into an artifact. The cross then circulates and multiplies, both as an abstract shape and as physical replicas. Seth plants a sapling from Eden into the mouth of his father Adam, whose body has already begun to merge with the earth (Figure 8.2). The sapling grows into a great tree that is felled and sawn into lumber, which Piero shows as a beam (Figure 8.3) and then as a board (Figure 8.4). From that wood is fashioned the cross that we find excavated from a field outside Jerusalem and tested for its authenticity (Figure 8.5). The form of the cross appears as a vision of pure light, which a careening angel offers to dreaming Constantine (Figure 8.6). That immaterial form then takes on substance as replicas, first as a small gold cross that Constantine holds before him in battle (Figure 8.7) and then, opposite, as a military standard that bears a white cross on a red ground (Figure 8.8). Gold replica and painted cloth are the first of countless copies that the original cross generates, setting in motion the story of this powerful original’s multiplication and dissemination. Piero is picking up here, perhaps, on Voragine’s attention to the ongoing agency of the cross in its various forms in the reader’s own time. Voragine’s account includes a series of miracles in which relics of the cross raise the dead and restore sight to the blind, a gesture making the sign of the cross protects

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believers and disbelievers alike from demons, and a picture of the crucifixion secretes blood and water when it is pierced with a lance.5

Figure 8.2: Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross (detail of sapling in The Death of Adam). Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali / Art Resource, NY.

Piero’s attunement to the complex status of the cross as matter, artifact, form, and copy also could have been informed by the painted wood crucifix that hangs in the main chapel at Arezzo and that is attributed to an Umbrian painter working in the 1260s (Figure 8.1).6 Like many thirteenth-century crucifixes of its type, the panel at San Francesco flickers between artifact and copy. Its wooden

5 Voragine, The Golden Legend, 1:283–84 and 2:170–73. 6 On the painted crucifix at San Francesco see Anna Maria Maetzke, “Pittura del Duecento e del Trecento nel territorio aretino,” in La Pittura in Italia: Il Duecento e il Trecento, ed. by Enrico Castelnuovo (Milan: Electa, 1986), 364–74, 367; Edward B. Garrison, Italian Romanesque Painting: An Illustrated Index (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1976), cat. no. 541; Evelyn Sandberg-Vavalà, La Croce Dipinta Italiana e l’Iconografia della Passione (Verona: Apollo, 1929), 873–76; and Osvald Sirén, Toskanische Maler im XIII. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Cassirer, 1922), 257–60.

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Figure 8.3: Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross (detail of beam in The Meeting of Solomon and Sheba). Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali / Art Resource, NY.

support, shape, and the attending narrative figures allow the viewer to see the painting, if only for a moment, as the cross itself that stood on Golgotha long ago. At the same time, the emphatic artifice of the cross’s blue ground and foliate diaper pattern reasserts its status as a picture. In the painted wood crucifix at Arezzo, the coincidence of the medium in which it was crafted and the material composition of the artifact it represented sharpened Piero’s attention to the materiality of the cross in all its phases: its organic origins, the visual and physical properties of its wood, its dimensionality and weight. The right lunette introduces the wood of the cross as part of a natural cycle of life, death, and regeneration. The great tree that forms a canopy over the scene is both the tree from which the sapling is taken and planted in Adam’s grave, and the tree into which the sapling grows to provide the wood for the cross (Figure 8.2). Below, in The Meeting of Solomon and Sheba, the trunk of the tree has been squared, the beam’s massive dimensions emphasized by the placement of its blocky end in the near foreground and the dramatic projection of its length back into pictorial space (Figure 8.3). In its bulk and density, the beam seems

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Figure 8.4: Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross (detail of board in The Burial of the Wood). Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali / Art Resource, NY.

stronger and weightier than even the marble colonnade with which it is paired at the center of the register. On the back wall, in The Burial of the Wood, the beam has been plainsawn into a broad board bearing the distinctive grain that results from this particular cut (Figure 8.4). If the beam that Sheba discovers is pure volume and mass, the plainsawn board is a cross-section of an organic specimen, revealing the wood’s interior structure even as the plank is about to be hidden underground. On the left wall, in The Finding and Proving of the Cross, the cross becomes an archeological artifact. At left, long buried, it is unearthed and hoisted out of the ground. At right, in the scene of its authentication through the raising of a dead man, the cross is lifted with unnatural ease, the suspension of one of its physical properties signaling the miracle it is affecting (Figure 8.5). This play between lightness and heaviness continues on the back and right walls of the chapel, where Constantine dreams of a cruciform of light (Figure 8.6) – an immaterial vision compared with the plainsawn board maneuvered with great effort above – and then stretches out his arm to hold a delicate gold cross before him, directly below the bulky mass of the squared beam in The Meeting of Solomon and Sheba

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Figure 8.5: Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross (detail of cross in The Finding and Proving of the Cross). Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali / Art Resource, NY.

(Figure 8.7). Here, the cross is transformed into new substances altogether, wood to light to gold. Why does Piero attend so closely here to the materiality of the cross, to its organic origins, its physicality and visuality? In all its manifestations the cross was an endlessly generative compositional device for Piero, and became the organizing principle that structured the pictorial world he created on the walls of the chapel in Arezzo. And the insistent materiality of the cross perhaps compensated for the fact that (as far as we know) the church of San Francesco did not possess a relic of the cross. But Piero’s True Cross takes on a more specific meaning in the context of the legend of the cross as a parallel for the story of human salvation. For scholars from Aristotle and Theophrastus to Albertus Magnus and Leonardo da Vinci, wood could be aligned with the human body.7 Wood was a living material with a life

7 On the materialities and meanings of wood in the Middle Ages and Renaissance see, for example, Christina Neilson, “Carving Life: The Meaning of Wood in Early Modern European Sculpture,”

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Figure 8.6: Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross (detail of cross of light in The Dream of Constantine). Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali / Art Resource, NY.

cycle like any other organism. Like a body it comprised veins, flesh, and humors. It possessed the potential for regeneration even as it was subject to decay. It could even suffer pain. The materiality of wood thus bore special

in The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, ca. 1250–1750, ed. by Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela H. Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 223–39; Thomas Raff, Die Sprache der Materialien: Anleitung zu einer Ikonologie der Werkstoffe (Munich: Waxmann 2008); Michel Pastoureau, “Introduction à la Symbolique Médiévale du Bois,” in L’Arbre: Histoire Naturelle et Symbolique de l’Arbre, du Bois et du Fruit au Moyen Age (Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 1993), 25–40; Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980); and Mirella Levi-d’Ancona, The Garden of the Renaissance: Botanical Symbolism in Italian Painting (Florence: Olschki, 1977), 381–90. See also Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2011).

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Figure 8.7: Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross (detail of gold cross in The Battle of Constantine and Maxentius). Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali / Art Resource, NY.

meaning in sculptures of Christ like the eighth- to tenth-century Volto Santo in Piero’s hometown of Borgo Sansepolcro.8 The story of the True Cross made possible an even more precise connection between wood as organic material and the body of Christ. In The Death of Adam the tree is both symbol and agent of regeneration. The branch from the Tree of Knowledge planted in Adam’s grave grows into the tree that yields wood for the cross by which Christ redeems the first sin and promises life after the first death. Here, a powerful alignment of tree, cross, and body is made by the gesture of one of Adam’s children, who throws open his arms in grief, at once doubling the spread of the tree above and foreshadowing the position of Christ’s body on the cross (Figure 8.2). Directly across the chapel in the scene of The

8 For the meanings and materialities of wood sculpture in Renaissance Italy see Neilson, “Carving Life.”

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Figure 8.8: Piero della Francesca, The Legend of the True Cross (detail of battle standard in The Battle of Heraclius and Chosroes). Scala / Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali / Art Resource, NY.

Proving, the shape of the lifted cross echoes the body of the revived man, his arms rising to double the crossbeam. As the cycle traces the story of the cross as the story of human salvation, culminating in the scene of the Last Judgement on the chapel’s outer face, it also argues for the salvific power of the cross through a parallel with the Eucharist. In the Death of Adam, it is in Adam’s mouth that Seth plants the tree that will become an agent of salvation (Figure 8.2). In The Proving of the Cross the witnesses who kneel in wonder as the cross raises a dead man to life perform gestures associated with the reception of communion: hands folded in prayer, arms crossed before the chest (Figure 8.5). And in the same scene, the crossbeam rises to meet the mouth of one of the bystanders at far right who, in his position at the edge of the register and turned into the picture world, stands in for the viewer. To the left of the chapel, a figure of Christ stands in a fictive niche, his body superimposed with a round Eucharistic wafer inscribed with a red cross (Figure 8.1). The figure and its pendant at right date to the painter

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Bicci di Lorenzo’s initial phase of work on the chapel at Arezzo, before Piero took over in 1452. In his Legend of the True Cross in Arezzo, Piero’s thematization of the materiality of the cross and its circulation as matter, artifact, form, and copy then opens onto a metapictorial revelation of the elements of painting itself. These are paintings about how paintings are made and perceived. In each of its various states the cross structures Piero’s pictorial world, and becomes the determinant of what and how we see. The cross reveals the geometry of the picture plane, the armature of perspectival space, and the eye of the viewer. In The Annunciation, The Dream of Constantine, and The Extraction of Judas from the Well, a cruciform defines the height and width of the pictorial fields and organizes their internal compositions (Figure 8.1). In The Battle of Heraclius and Chosroes, the armies’ point of engagement, the convergence of four horses traveling from four directions, is a cruciform tilted back into pictorial space, a form repeated in the quartered design of a soldier’s shield (Figure 8.8). In The Meeting of Solomon and Sheba, the end of the raw wood beam that Sheba kneels to venerate is significant in several ways (Figure 8.3). Its rectangular face parallels and thus reasserts the picture plane.9 At the same time, the beam measures pictorial depth, its swift foreshortening carving out Piero’s middle ground. The face of the beam is the locus of the vanishing point of the register’s perspectival construction, whose main orthogonals are defined by the outer cornice of Solomon’s open portico and the marble transverse beam of the ceiling. The rectangular face of the beam even appears to be a module on which the composition of the entire register is based. At this dense site Piero thus reveals picture plane, vanishing point, and, by extension, the position of the viewer. Across the chapel in The Proving of the Cross, the two axes of the lifted cross form the armature of pictorial space (Figure 8.5). The crossbeam parallels the surface of the wall, defining the planar field of representation. The shaft of the cross makes visible one of the composition’s orthogonals, measuring the recession of the picture into depth. The eyes of the rising figure are positioned at the precise height of the register’s vanishing point, and thus stand in for the viewer’s eye, determinant of Piero’s perspectival construction. Roberto Longhi intuited the cross’s double function here as both protagonist of the narrative and organizing principle of the picture: “The [cross] rises up as if to define a large tract of space or perhaps 9 The face of the wood beam at the heart of the Meeting of Solomon and Sheba recalls nothing so much as the fictive panel painting embedded at bottom center of Fra Angelico’s altarpiece at San Marco, which Piero could have seen in Florence. Fra Angelico’s picture within the picture amounts to an exploration of the tension between fictive space and the materiality of panel painting.

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in order to transfer a mysterious burden of anonymous volume from the kneeling to the standing group. The painting thus transmits to its own spatial function the legendary miracle of the holy.”10 In effect, Piero’s frescoes are a diagram of painting itself as the paintermathematician would set out decades later in his treatise on perspective.11 “Painting comprises three principal parts, which we call drawing, proportion, and color,” Piero writes in the prologue of De Prospectiva Pingendi.12 In turn, proportion or commensuratio – that is, the proportional representation of three-dimensional objects on the two-dimensional plane of a painting as seen by a viewer at a fixed distance from the picture – comprises five parts: The first is sight, that is the eye; second is the shape of the thing seen; the third is the distance from the eye to the thing seen; the fourth are the lines that depart from the edges of the thing and go to the eye; the fifth is the plane that is between the eye and the thing seen where you intend to place things.13

In The Meeting of Solomon and Sheba and The Finding and Proving of the Cross, scenes of the recognition of the holy wood in the time before Christ and the rediscovery and authentication of the one True Cross after his death, wood and cross make visible each element in Piero’s definition of painting. Wood and cross and the pictorial sites they inhabit are at once and by turns the eye, the object seen, the distance between the eye and the object seen and the orthogonals that bridge this distance, and the mediating termine or picture plane. The 10 Longhi, Piero della Francesca, 45. In its compositional work as measure of perspectival space, the cross also makes a visual rhyme with the so-called cross staff, a surveying instrument used as early as the fourteenth century. The title page of Peter Apian’s Introductio geographica, published in Ingolstadt in 1533, shows the instrument in use in the field. On the cross staff see J. A. Bennett, The Divided Circle: A History of Instruments for Astronomy, Navigation and Surveying (Oxford: Phaidon, 1987), 19. 11 For Piero’s treatise on perspective see Piero della Francesca, De Prospectiva Pingendi, ed. by G. Nicco-Fasola (Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 2014); Piero della Francesca, De Prospectiva Pingendi: A Facsimile of Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, MS 1576 (New York: Broude, 1992); and a digital facsimile of the Reggio Emilia manuscript available online at http://panizzi.comune.re. it/Sezione.jsp?idSezione=2573. See also Camerota, Di Teodoro, and Grasselli, Piero della Francesca; Banker, Piero della Francesca, 169–80 and 185–88; J. V. Field, Piero della Francesca: A Mathematician’s Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); and J. V. Field, “A Mathematician’s Art,” in Lavin, Piero della Francesca and his Legacy, 176–97. 12 “La pittura contiene in sè tre parti principali, quali diciamo essere disegno, commensuratio et colorare.” Piero della Francesca, De Prospectiva Pingendi, 63. English translation mine. 13 “La prima è il vedere, cioè l’ochio; secondo è la forma de la cosa veduta; la terza è la distantia da l’ochio a la cosa veduta; la quarta è le linee che se partano da l’estremità de la cosa e vanno a l’ochio; la quinta è il termine che è intra l’ochio e la cosa veduta dove se intende ponere le cose.” Piero della Francesca, De Prospectiva Pingendi, 64. English translation mine.

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protagonist of the story thus reveals the mechanics of its own representation by the painter and its perception by the beholder. In other words, Piero shows us at once the cross and how we see it. From this point of view, Piero’s frescoes in Arezzo and the techniques of perspective for painting that he would set out in his treatise – practice and theory – would appear to align. Piero composed De Prospectiva Pingendi between around 1475 and 1477, while resident in Urbino. By around 1481 he had participated directly in the production of at least four manuscript copies both in his Italian vernacular, which combined elements of Tuscan dialect and the dialect of his native Borgo Sansepolcro, and in Latin translation.14 In three books, the first on planes, the second on regular solids, and the third on irregular solids, Piero sets out the elements of painting, argues for the importance of the technique of perspective, roots this technique in optics or the science of vision, and instructs the reader, whom he addresses in the familiar tu, in methods of drawing three-dimensional bodies in pictorial space as seen by the eye of the imagined viewer. The meat of the book is a series of propositions and proofs of increasing difficulty, with point-bypoint and line-by-line instructions, often excruciatingly detailed, for drawing a whole range of objects from planes to cubes to human heads and column capitals. The style of Piero’s hand in the autograph manuscript now held in the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma combines that of the merchants and civic officials among whom Piero grew up, and the humanist script that he came to know as a reader. Likewise, the language and content of the book position it uneasily between two traditions: that of workshop and mercantile manuals and that of theoretical treatises. This is Piero tending to his legacy, both transmitting practical working techniques to his fellow painters and staking out a theoretical position within the tradition of the science of optics from Euclid to John Pecham, both of whom he read. The way in which Piero’s True Cross in Arezzo reveals or models the elements of painting – the eye, the thing seen, the mediating picture plane – suggests a close relationship between Piero’s paintings and the book on perspective. Indeed, 14 Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, MS 1576 (vernacular); Reggio Emilia, Biblioteca A. Panizzi, MS Reggiano A 41/2 (vernacular); Bordeaux, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 616 (Latin); and Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS S.P. 6 bis (Latin). The codex in Parma is entirely in Piero’s hand, both text and 128 figures (figure 12). The text of the codex in Reggio Emilia was carried out by a copyist; Piero made corrections and marginal notes to the text, and drew almost all of the 142 figures. An additional three other manuscripts are known: a fifteenth-century copy in London (British Library, MS Additional 10366), and sixteenth-century copies in Paris (Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Latin 9337) and Milan (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS D 200 inf.). For catalogue entries on the surviving manuscripts see Camerota, Di Teodoro, and Grasselli, Piero della Francesca, cat. nos. I3–I9. On the dating of the treatise see Banker, Piero della Francesca, 171–72 and 185–88.

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there are particular passages in the Arezzo frescoes that seem to echo in the book’s illustrations, in column capitals and figures’ heads, for example.15 But what exactly is the relationship between this text, both practical manual and theoretical treatise, and the frescoes in Arezzo? Piero began work in Arezzo in 1452. He composed De Prospectiva Pingendi in the 1470s, more than twenty years later. The chronological interval is significant. The True Cross occasioned for Piero not only pictorial investigation of the materiality and potential meaning of wood, but also the nature of painting. It would seem that the artist worked out his theoretical model of painting first for and in the frescoes themselves and only two decades later set out these ideas in his book. Throughout the cycle in Arezzo, traces of incised and pounced contours indicate that Piero made full-scale cartoons for each scene.16 None of these cartoons survive, but they must have been preceded by working drawings in which he devised and then applied the techniques he would later explicate in the book. After he finished the project at Arezzo, these drawings would have been saved and in turn would have informed the treatise’s propositions and illustrations. For Piero, then, painting is defined in the making and only later in the writing. Practice drives theory. Again in the scene of The Finding and Proving of the Cross, we might pick up on Longhi’s observation that with Piero, theory “issues forth” from the world he sets out to represent: The viewer’s eye, led, as is fitting, to a point directly in front of the dense register formed by the moldings decorating the cornice of the little polychrome temple, sees at the left, issuing forth like some theorem from those thickly clustered axes of vision that architecture is so good at creating, a semicircular group of men within a semicircle of hills crowned by an archetypal old Italian hill town, and, at the right, the open page of the polychrome temple façade.17

Even more significantly, after Arezzo we begin to see in Piero’s work a gradual parting of the theory of perspective and its practice in painting. In his Resurrection, carried out in Borgo Sansepolcro after the completion of the frescoes in Arezzo and before the composition of De Prospectiva Pingendi, Piero undercuts the perspectival system he has meticulously plotted out. While the fictive frame and the Roman soldiers are seen from below, the body of Christ is outside this system and confronts the viewer straight on.18 And in the Nativity, which Piero

15 Marie Françoise Clergeau, “Du De Prospectiva Pingendi à la Peinture de Piero: Quel Lien?,” in Dalai Emiliani and Curzi, Piero della Francesca Tra Arte e Scienza, 65–76. 16 See Maetzke, “La Leggenda della Vera Croce” and Bambach Cappel, “Piero della Francesca.” 17 Longhi, Piero della Francesca, 43. 18 See especially Baxandall’s essay on the Resurrection in Words for Pictures, Chapter 7.

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painted toward the end of his career and possibly even after the composition of the treatise, he departed radically from the principles the book sets out, rejecting clear and unified perspectival space altogether.19 It is also worth noting that although Piero intended it in part as a handbook for his fellow painters, after his death in 1492 the book had very little direct reception as a practical workshop manual.20 Evidently few other painters shared Piero’s rigor and patience in executing point-by-point instructions on complicated geometric proofs. Granted, manuscript copies of the book were held in a few humanist libraries in the fifteenth century, and in the sixteenth century the treatise became the foundation of Albrecht Dürer and Daniele Barbaro’s own treatises, which served to disseminate, albeit belatedly, Piero’s ideas to a broader audience including painters. But in his time, the book in which Piero instructed his fellow painters in the technique of perspective reached very few painters at all. It is productive, then, to see Piero’s paintings and writings not only as mutually illuminating but also as disjointed and contradictory. To read the texts as keys or roadmaps to the paintings limits our understanding of the paintings, and indeed of the writings as well. For Piero, painting is in the making, and theory develops in tandem with practice. In some instances, the two even part ways. In Arezzo, Piero worked through the principles of perspective both in preparation for the paintings and within them, revealing them in the frescoes’ pictorial structures. In the Resurrection and Nativity, those principles are complicated and even abandoned. Apart from the extant copies of Piero’s treatise on perspective that the paintermathematician directly oversaw (as well as copies of his two other mathematical texts), no other drawings in Piero’s hand survive: not the initial working copy of the perspective treatise on which the manuscript copies were based, no preparatory drawings for the paintings, no cartoons for the frescoes at Arezzo. Instead of recognizing the manuscripts of the book on perspective as examples of Piero’s work as a draftsman, we have tended to “see through” the illustrations to the treatise as mere diagrams, instead of recognizing the materiality of the codices themselves and the techniques in which Piero executed them. This is a blind spot in the literature, due in part to the way in which the treatise was published in the twentieth century. Intriguingly, in the pages of the manuscript held in Reggio Emilia, which has just recently undergone extensive technical analysis, we find working

19 See Marilyn Lavin, “Piero’s Meditation on the Nativity,” in Lavin, Piero della Francesca and his Legacy, 126–41, 129. 20 On the reception of Piero’s De Prospectiva Pingendi see Martin Kemp, “Piero and the Idiots: The Early Fortuna of His Theories of Perspective,” in Lavin, Piero della Francesca and His Legacy, 198–211, and Thomas Frangenberg, “Piero della Francesca’s De Prospectiva Pingendi in the Sixteenth Century,” in Dalai Emiliani and Curzi, Piero della Francesca Tra Arte e Scienza, 423–36.

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techniques including incisions and pinpricked contours that are related to transfer techniques that Piero employed in his paintings.21 In Piero’s practice there is a whole world of techniques of transfer, replication, reversal, and even playful pictorial thematizations of these processes, and they occur in the frescoes, the panel paintings, and the illustrated writings. Indeed, this is a promising avenue for future research. And so, in closing, there is a way in which the paintings and the writings do illuminate each other, and together form a point of departure for new thinking about Piero, and that is when both are understood within the world of the craftsman’s workshop, a world in which Piero was completely immersed from birth to death.22 Piero came from a family of leather artisans and merchants who also traded in the blue dye woad. His painting studio might even have been in the same building in Borgo Sansepolcro that housed the family shop. The language of De Prospectiva Pingendi, with its direct and commanding address to the reader, grows out of the master-apprentice structure of the workshop. And in both the frescoes and the treatise we find a fierce, unflinching engagement with the stuff of the world. Piero’s cross is emphatically physical, organic matter with weight and volume and internal structure. At the same time, the cross insistently draws attention back to the picture plane, to the surface of the plastered and pounced and painted walls. Likewise, in De Prospectiva Pingendi a point is not an abstract concept but the smallest mark one can see.23 To establish the relationship between the vanishing point and the eye of the imagined viewer in a working drawing one should use a silk thread or a hair from a horse’s tail anchored by a needle.24 And that imagined beholder is not just a point in a geometrical diagram. Vision, for Piero, emanates from the intersection of two little nerves, or nervicini, at the center of the vitreous humor within the sphere of the eye.25

21 See Camerota, Di Teodoro, and Grasselli, Piero della Francesca, cat. nos. I3, I3a, I3b. 22 This is an evolving understanding of Piero due in great part to the archival and biographical work of James Banker. See Banker, Piero della Francesca, as well as Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), II:9–11. 23 “Dirò adunqua puncto essere una cosa tanto picholina quanto è posibile ad ochio comprendere . . . ” Piero della Francesca, De Prospectiva Pingendi, 65. 24 “Nel puncto.A. se ficchi il chiodo, o vuoli uno acho con uno filo di seta sutilissimo, siria buono uno pelo di coda de cavallo, spitialmente dove a a fermarse su la riga . . . ” Piero della Francesca, De Prospectiva Pingendi, 130. 25 In a discussion of the mechanics of sight based on an angle of vision defined by rays that emanate from the object seen and converge in the eye: “ . . . il quale occhio dico essere tondo, et de la intersegatione de doi nervicini che se incrociano vene la virtù visiva al cintro de l’umore cristallino . . . ” Piero della Francesca, De Prospectiva Pingendi, 98.

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Works Cited Baert, Barbara. A Heritage of Holy Wood: The Legend of the True Cross in Text and Image. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Bambach Cappel, Carmen. “Piero della Francesca, the Study of Perspective and the Development of the Cartoon in the Quattrocento.” In Piero della Francesca tra Arte e Scienza, edited by Marisa Dalai Emiliani and Valter Curzi, 143–66. Venice: Marsilio, 1996. Banker, James R. Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Battisti, Eugenio. Piero della Francesca. Milan: Electa, 1992. Baxandall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Baxandall, Michael. The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980. Baxandall, Michael. Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003. Bennett, J. A. The Divided Circle: A History of Instruments for Astronomy, Navigation and Surveying. Oxford: Phaidon, 1987. Borsook, Eve. The Mural Painters of Tuscany: From Cimabue to Andrea del Sarto. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2011. Camerota, Filippo, Francesco Paolo di Teodoro, and Luigi Grasselli, eds. Piero della Francesca: Il Disegno tra Arte e Scienza. Milan: Skira, 2015. Clergeau, Marie Françoise. “Du De Prospectiva Pingendi à la Peinture de Piero: Quel Lien?” In Piero della Francesca tra Arte e Scienza, edited by Marisa Dalai Emiliani and Valter Curzi, 65–76. Venice: Marsilio, 1996. Emiliani, Marisa Dalai. “La Leggenda della Vera Croce restaurata: Nuove evidenze per Piero Prospettico nel Cantiere di Arezzo.” In Il Corpo dello Stile: Cultura et Lettura del Restauro nelle Esperienze Contemporanee. Studi in Ricordo di Michele Cordaro, edited by Chiara Piva e Ilaria Sgarbozza, 65–77. Rome: De Luca, 2005. Field, J. V. Piero della Francesca: A Mathematician’s Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Field, J. V. “A Mathematician’s Art.” In Piero della Francesca and His Legacy, edited by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, 176–97. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1995. della Francesca, Piero. De Prospectiva Pingendi. Edited by G. Nicco-Fasola. Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 2014. della Francesca, Piero. De Prospectiva Pingendi: A Facsimile of Parma, Biblioteca Palatina, MS 1576. New York: Broude, 1992. Frangenberg, Thomas. “Piero della Francesca’s De Prospectiva Pingendi in the Sixteenth Century.” In Piero della Francesca tra Arte e Scienza, edited by Marisa Dalai Emiliani and Valter Curzi, 423–36. Venice: Marsilio, 1996. Garrison, Edward B. Italian Romanesque Painting: An Illustrated Index. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1976. Hall, Marcia B. Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

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Kemp, Martin. “Piero and the Idiots: The Early Fortuna of His Theories of Perspective.” In Piero della Francesca and His Legacy, edited by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, 198–211. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1995. Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg. The Place of Narrative: Mural Decoration in Italian Churches, 431–1600. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg, ed. Piero della Francesca and His Legacy. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1995. Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg. “Piero’s Meditation on the Nativity.” In Piero della Francesca and His Legacy, edited by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, 126–41. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1995. Levi-d’Ancona, Mirella. The Garden of the Renaissance: Botanical Symbolism in Italian Painting. Florence: Olschki, 1977. Longhi, Roberto. Piero della Francesca. Translated by David Tabbat. Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York: Stanley Moss-Sheep Meadow Press, 2002. Maetzke, Anna Maria. “La Leggenda della Vera Croce di Piero della Francesca in San Francesco ad Arezzo: Prime Note sulle Tecniche Esecutive.” In Materiali e Tecniche nella Pittura Murale del Quattrocento: Storia dell’Arte, Indagini Diagnostiche e Restauro verso una Nuova Prospettiva di Ricerca, edited by Barbara Fabjan, Marco Cardinali, Maria Beatrice De Ruggieri, and Marisa Dalai Emiliani, 315–23. Rome: ENEA, 2010. Maetzke, Anna Maria. “Pittura del Duecento e del Trecento nel territorio aretino.” In La Pittura in Italia: Il Duecento e il Trecento, edited by Enrico Castelnuovo, 364–74. Milan: Electa, 1986. Maetzke, Anna Maria and Carlo Bertelli, eds. Piero della Francesca: The Legend of the True Cross in the Church of San Francesco in Arezzo. Milan: Skira, 2001. Neilson, Christina. “Carving Life: The Meaning of Wood in Early Modern European Sculpture.” In The Matter of Art: Materials, Practices, Cultural Logics, ca. 1250–1750, edited by Christy Anderson, Anne Dunlop, and Pamela H. Smith, 223–39. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Pastoureau, Michel. “Introduction à la Symbolique Médiévale du Bois.” In L’Arbre: Histoire Naturelle et Symbolique de l’Arbre, du Bois et du Fruit au Moyen Age. Paris: Le Léopard d’Or, 1993. Raff, Thomas. Die Sprache der Materialien: Anleitung zu einer Ikonologie der Werkstoffe. Munich: Waxmann, 2008. Sandberg-Vavalà, Evelyn. La Croce Dipinta Italiana e l’Iconografia della Passione. Verona: Apollo, 1929. Sirén, Osvald. Toskanische Maler im XIII. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Cassirer, 1922. Voragine, Jacobus de. The Golden Legend. Translated by William Granger Ryan. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Wood, Christopher S. “Piero della Francesca, Liminologist.” In Bilder, Räume, Betrachter: Festschrift für Wolfgang Kemp zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by Steffen Bogen, Wolfgang Brassat, and David Ganz, 252–69. Berlin: Reimer, 2006.

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Chapter 9 The Netherlandish Relief-like Style in the Age of Art Overview: Northern Exposure The mid-sixteenth century’s leading Netherlandish antiquarian painters seized upon the Italian “relief-like style” and used it to richly varied, even trenchant ends. However, scholars have not explored in depth the style’s carriage north or its Netherlandish development. In After Raphael, Marcia Hall expanded Craig Hugh Smyth’s observation of Roman relief sculpture’s importance for sixteenthcentury Italian paintings.1 Hall identified works bearing relief-like effects as

1 Craig Hugh Smyth, Mannerism and Maniera (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin Publishers, 1962), 14–16; Marcia Hall, After Raphael (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), elaborates her definition of the relief-like style over the course of the entire book. The first passages establishing the style appear on page 2, where she acknowledges its proliferation “to other parts of Italy [besides Rome] including Florence, and abroad.” Hall’s elaboration of the style’s Quattrocento origins and the importance of Michelangelo for its development appear in “Classicism, Mannerism, and the Relieflike Style,” in The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, ed. by Marcia Hall (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 222–36. For her thoughts on the style’s usefulness for mid-Cinquecento Italian patrons and their artists, see “Politics and the Relief-like Personal Note: I spurned my first opportunity to come under Marcia Hall’s tutelage by leaving Temple University’s graduate art history program to pursue a “career” as an indie-rock musician. I will never forget her reaction to my trepidatious proclamation that I was withdrawing in mid-semester for a fleeting opportunity to tour Europe. “Go,” she said. “You must.” Her generosity made such a strong impression on me that when I returned to Temple, finally ready to think about Renaissance art and architecture again, I set up an appointment with her so that I could thank her. I was to write my master’s thesis under Tracy Cooper’s excellent guidance. Would Marcia serve on my committee? She closed the door to her office, looked over my academic record for what seemed like an eternity, no doubt taking notice of my fits and starts, changes of major, withdraws, delays, and returns. Finally, she fixed her gaze on me from behind the folder, her eyes peering out at me from above her omnipresent reading frames. She then lowered the folder to reveal a Mona Lisa smile and said, with a subtle but palpable hint of amusement, “you have a spotty career, young man.” I blushed, laughed, shrugged, and admitted that she was right. She laughed, too, and asked about my adventures. Then we got to work. This essay is but a meager repayment of my debt to Marcia, which began accruing in perpetuity during those early office visits. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-010

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examples of a distinct mode that prevailed in the Cinquecento’s first three decades. Images in the relief-like style allude to their sculptural sources by pictorializing antique relief sculpture’s salient spatial effects. Fundamental to relief-like works is their departure from the Quattrocento’s perspective-based illusionism. Relief-like paintings feature a tempered palette akin to grisaille, imitating the color of antique relief sculpture.2 Clusters of figures occupy shallow spaces resembling the tight groupings of antique relief sculptures. According to Hall, this “new” style manifested earliest in Andrea Mantegna’s circle. It developed and crystallized in Vatican commissions by Michelangelo, Raphael, and Giulio Romano.3 For Hall, the most complete record of the style’s emergence appears in Raphael’s rapid movement from his classic phase to works extending beyond his untimely death.4 Building on her definition, one sees transitional hybrids in paintings predating Raphael’s relief-like mode. From the 1510s, the Battle of Leo the Great with Attila and the Battle of Ostia feature tight figure groupings anticipating those in later, purer relief-like examples. Even earlier, however, indications emerge of Raphael’s interest in translating the planar horizontality of antique frieze sculpture into his all’antica style; although the School of Athens is emphatically orthogonal, the figure groups to the left and right of Plato and Aristotle comprise shallow friezes. Presenting a similarly hybridized scheme are several of Raphael’s Sistine tapestry compositions.5 The Sacrifice at Lystra is instructive.6 Before a perspective-based backdrop resembling Baldassare Peruzzi’s theatrical scenae frons formulae, the scene’s right half features an anxious clutch of figures grouped in a shallow, relief-like space.7

Style,” in The Translation of Raphael’s Roman Style, ed. by Henk Th. van Veen (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 1–20. 2 On the assimilative relation between Cinquecento art and its antique sources see E. H. Gombrich, “The Style all’antica: Imitation and Assimilation,” in Norm and Form: Gombrich on the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966), 122–28. 3 For the additional importance of Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina, see Hall, “Politics,” 3–4. 4 Hall, After Raphael, 22. 5 For Raphael’s Acts of the Apostles, see Thomas P. Campbell, Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 187–203, cat. nos. 18–25. 6 For Raphael Sanzio, Sacrifice at Lystra, ca. 1515–1516, watercolor, 350 × 560 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, inv. no. ROYAL LOANS.6, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/ O1069357/the-sacrifice-at-lystra-act-cartoon-for-a-raphael/ and Campbell, Tapestry in the Renaissance, 194–95. 7 The definitive works on Peruzzi’s theatrical formulae are Richard Krautheimer, “The Tragic and Comic Scene of the Renaissance,” Gazette des Beaux Arts 90 (1948): 328–46 and Marco Fagiolo and Maria Luisa Madonna, eds., Baldassarre Peruzzi: Pittura scena e architettura nel Cinquecento (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1987). Anne Huppert, Becoming an

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Figure 9.1: Raphael and Workshop, Battle of the Milvian Bridge, 1520–1524, fresco, Sala di Costantino, Vatican. Photo: Art Resource, NY.

In After Raphael, Hall identified the Sala di Costantino (Figures 9.1, 9.8, and 9.9) as the locus for the relief-like style’s coalescence.8 Completed by Giulio Romano and the artists of Raphael’s workshop after inheriting their master’s drawings upon his death, the Sala’s istorie appear as illusionistic painted tapestries. As Hall noted, the elongated, narrow room would not allow for the centralized compositions of the Vatican stanze. Raphael thus composed the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (Figure 9.1) to be viewed like a frieze, in procession.9 Compositional primacy thus belongs to foregrounded, crowded, flattened spaces bearing impenetrable tangles of patterned figures enacting narratives before panoramic landscapes that all but recede from view when beheld in situ. Raphael also modeled the left half of Constantine Addressing his Troops and his Vision of the Cross (Figure 9.8) on antique relief sources. Although the Donation of Constantine (Figure 9.9) extends the narrow room into a deep pictorial space, its figures comprise a relief-like cluster that northern artists later exploited. A succinct sixteenth-century expression of awareness of the Sala’s indebtedness to ancient Roman relief sculptures appears in Giorgio Vasari’s response to the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (Figure 9.1). Vasari notes the mural’s revelation of

Architect in Renaissance Italy: Art, Science, and the Career of Badassarre Peruzzi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 101–5, discusses the relation between Peruzzi’s approaches to architecture, painting, and theatricality. 8 Hall, After Raphael, 42–48. Key works on the Sala are Frederick Hartt, “Raphael and Giulio Romano: With Notes on the Raphael School,” Art Bulletin 26, no. 2 (1944): 67–94 and Rolf Quednau, Di Sala di Costantino im Vatikanischen Palast: Zur Dekoration der Beiden MediciPäpste Leon X (New York: G. Olms, 1979). 9 Hall, After Raphael, 46.

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Giulio’s having “learned much from the ancient columns of Trajan and Aurelius in Rome.” Both columns bear similarly packed figure groupings.10 Noting Raphael’s and Giulio’s prioritization of artifice over perspective, Hall identified in the Sala frescoes a selectively deployed style.11 She later elaborated the political implications in its use for the Vatican and elsewhere; by emulating relief sculptures in authoritative imperial antique monuments, especially Constantine’s, the Sala’s istorie broadcast Christianity’s importance for Constantine and his donation of Roman imperial authority to the Vatican.12 An image in the relief-like style could thus argue for its patron’s connection to antiquity and divinely sanctioned imperial authority.13 As we will see, for Netherlandish artists building a lexicon of motifs all’antica into their already varied native pictorial idiom, the relief-like style could signal an authentic antiquarianism and Roman imperial authority for local audiences harboring a complex of concerns. The appearance of relief-like effects in northern European art traces to several intertwined means of transmission from early Cinquecento Roman and Vatican sources. Thus, its development in the north resulted in a commensurate plethora of variants too numerous to describe adequately here. The tapestry industry and the dissemination of prints played most crucial roles in the style’s northern transmission.14 The Vatican’s decision to send Raphael’s Sistine Chapel tapestry cartoons to Brussels for execution carried their emergent relief-like effects to the artists working under Pieter Coecke van Aelst (1502–1550), the painterweaver who executed them.15 Subsequent tapestries and prints emanating from Coecke van Aelst and his circle, especially by his disciple Bernard Van Orley (1487/91–1541), show an awareness that emulating the cluttered figural effects of

10 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccelenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, edited by Gaetano Milanesi, vol. 5 (Florence: G.C. Sansoni, Editore, 1879), 530. Gombrich, “Imitation,” 124; and Hall, After Raphael, 46–48, have since added to Vasari’s identification of those sources, citing reliefs on the ancient Roman battle sarcophagus now in the Muzeo Nazionale and the Arch of Constantine as among those that the Raphael team may have consulted. 11 Hall, After Raphael, 49; “Politics,” 1–2, frames her discussion of the relief-like style as a “mode of representation . . . that can be put on like an overcoat . . . used consciously and selectively.” 12 For Sala’s poetics, in addition to Quednau, Sala di Costantino, see Bette Talvacchia, Raphael (London: Phaidon, 2014), 212–15. 13 Hall, “Politics,” 2, discusses the style’s ability to satisfy such patronal desires. 14 For Hall’s initial thoughts on the importance of print, see Hall, “Politics,” 11. 15 For Pieter Coecke van Aelst and the Vatican tapestries, see Elizabeth Cleland, ed., Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry (New Haven and New York: Yale University Press and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014), 30–33.

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relief sculptures could imbue tapestries with antique gravitas.16 Van Orley’s tapestry portraying the Battle of Pavia suggests the cluttered figural schemes of ancient Roman battle sarcophagi as a source for devising his monumental istoria.17 Prints could most easily find their way across Europe and thus have the broadest impact, however. Marcantonio Raimondi’s circulation of prints of antiquities must have comprised an important contribution to the relief-like style’s northern development. As the print exponent of Raphael’s workshop, Marcantonio disseminated his master’s compositions. His print of Raphael’s Massacre of the Innocents (Figure 9.2) bears a composition that is comparable to the Vatican tapestry compositions that predicted the relief-like scheme.18 Before a backdrop cursorily suggesting distance, the Massacre features a mélange of figures occupying most of the frame in a shallow space close to the picture plane. Male nudes strike combative poses, their limbs loosely patterned, effects akin to those on ancient Roman battle reliefs. A mid-century print of gladiatorial combat after Roman Fontainebleau import, Luca Penni (ca. 1500–1566), engraved in Antwerp by Philips Galle (1537–1612) (Figure 9.3), suggests the Massacre’s importance for transmitting relief-like effects north. The print portrays a generic battle between male nudes. As in the Massacre, Penni’s composition features a relief-like tangle of foregrounded figures engaged in combat. The preponderance of muscular nudes varying similar poses, mostly parallel to the picture plane, suggests Penni’s response to the Massacre’s relieflike effects. A smattering of foreshortenings witnesses Penni exploiting the pictorial realm’s potential for embellishing the flattening effects of relief-like imagery with some depth to achieve the ideal of varietas. He may have seen this effect in the Sala’s frescoes, which contain similar foreshortenings within relief-like matrices.19 Luca was well aware of the Sala’s precedent; his brother, Giovanfrancesco (1488/96–1528), worked on the frescoes as the crew’s principal painter along with Giulio. That Galle executed Penni’s composition for a

16 For example, tapestry designs emanating from Coecke van Aelst’s circle of the early 1530s portraying the life of David, particularly David’s Triumph, suggest a deliberate assimilation of a frieze-like procession into the tapestry medium. See Grand Design, 44–46, figure 7. 17 Campbell, Tapestry in the Renaissance, 316, provides evidence for Van Orley’s study of the Sacrifice at Lystra. 18 For the most recent analysis of the development of the Massacre print, see Lisa Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 118–36. 19 Other works by Giulio Romano, noted by Hall, also contain this feature. See After Raphael, 103, for a description of Giulio’s “ability to manipulate the relieflike format” by “violating the compositional principle of parallelism to the picture plane [with] elephants turn[ing] forward toward the spectators . . . threaten[ing] to thunder into our space.”

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Figure 9.2: Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael, Massacre of the Innocents, 1513–1515, 27.4 × 41.5 cm. British Museum, London. Museum Number V,5.27. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

northern audience provides concrete evidence of the relief-like mode’s migration to the Netherlands. Also conspicuous among Netherlanders is Frans Floris’s interest in relief-like effects. Edward Wouk has argued that Floris’s study of the Arch of Constantine and Polidoro da Caravaggio’s works fostered his consciousness of the relief-like style.20 In addition to his Fall of the Rebel Angels, famous for its sarcophagus-like tumble of figures, Floris’s Gathering of Manna (Figure 9.4) reveals his deftness at translating relief sculpture into pictures.21 Floris loaded his composition’s left foreground with drapery-clad figures bearing extended, repeating limbs. This

20 Ed Wouk, Frans Floris: Imagining a Northern Renaissance (Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2018), 98–108. Wouk cites Karel van Mander’s praise of Floris’s ability to paint “relief and highlighting,” which may or may not refer to the relief-like style. In context, the coupling appears to refer only to Floris’s ability to model figures to appear three-dimensionally. Van Mander makes no specific reference to antique figures in relief sculptures and does not say explicitly that Floris imitates relief sculpture. 21 Frans Floris, Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1554, oil on panel, 303 × 220 cm, inv. no. 112, Koninklijk Museum Voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp. The relief-like style’s carriage into this particular subject is also apparent in Dirck Barendz, Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1562, ink on paper, 52.2 × 32.2 cm, RCIN 907786, The Royal Collection Trust, London.

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Figure 9.3: Philips Galle after Luca Penni, Fighting Gladiators, 1562, 34 × 47.5 cm. British Museum, Number V,8.117. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum.

print resembles Perino del Vaga’s Crossing of the Red Sea (Figure 9.5), which Hall pinpointed as crucial for the relief-like style’s transmission to Florence.22 Its deep chiaroscuro vivifies a relief-like cluster of patterned limbs and bodies. Maarten van Heemskerck’s print of Apollo and the Muses (Figure 9.6) bears a composition and spatial compression that is strikingly similar to Perino’s and Floris’s images.23 Floris’s and Heemskerck’s prints suggest that they either saw Perino’s painting, or some derivative of it.24 The long chronological gap between

22 Hall, After Raphael, 68. 23 Ilja Veldman, comp., Ger Luijten, ed., The New Hollstein: Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts 1450–1700: Maarten van Heemskerck, 2 vols. (Roosendaal – Amsterdam: Sound and Vision Interactive, 1994), no. 509. 24 There is no scholarly argument for Floris in Florence. There is no sustained argument for Van Heemskerck in Florence, either. See Bart Rosier, “The Victories of Charles V: A Series of Prints by Maarten van Heemskerck, 1555–56,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 20, no. 1 (1990–1991): 36 for the suggestion that Van Heemskerck studied Michelangelo’s New Sacristy and DiFuria, “Maarten van Heemskerck’s Caritas: Personifying Virtue, Animating Stone with Paint, Imaging the Image Debate,” in Personification: Embodying Meaning and

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Figure 9.4: Cornelis Bos after Frans Floris: Gathering of Manna, ca. 1554, 30 × 38 cm. British Museum, Number 1950,0520.430. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum.

the Italian and northern images suggests the relief-like formula’s continued effectiveness for Netherlandish antiquarian audiences. Another important means of transmission of relief-like effects north at midcentury, Italian artists working for Francis I brought the style to the Fontainebleau School.25 There, too, prints played a central role. Antonio Fantuzzi served as a Raimondi of sorts for Fontainebleau’s painters. His printed oeuvre is a veritable catalog of relief-like effects.26 There is also no question of an intensive

Emotion, ed. by Walter S. Melion and Bart Ramakers (Leiden: Brill Publishing, 2016), 534–36 for the hypothesis that Van Heemskerck visited Florence’s Chiostro dello Scalzo. 25 Hall, “Politics,” 10–11. 26 For example, Antonio Fantuzzi after Rosso Fiorentino, Sacrifice, 1542, ink on paper, 27.7 × 39.4 cm, museum no. W,3.174, Collection of Prints and Drawings, British Museum, London, clearly indebted to Perino’s Crossing of the Red Sea. For Fantuzzi, see Henri Zerner, “L’Eauforte à Fontainebleau: Le Rôle de Fantuzzi,” Art de France, Revue annuelle de l’art ancien et moderne 4 (1964): 70–85; The School of Fontainebleau: Etchings and Engravings (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1969).

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Figure 9.5: Perino del Vaga, Crossing of the Red Sea, 1522–1523, 118 × 201 cm, Inventory no. 450. Photo: Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

Figure 9.6: Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, Apollo and the Muses, 1549, 29 × 21 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, object number RP-P-1952-219. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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mid-century exchange between Fontainebleau and print shops in the Low Countries. Both prints and their makers moved between these two major artistic centers. For example, Leonard Thiry (active 1530–1550s) worked in both locales.27 The flow of relief-like effects between these regions is evident in an anonymous Fontainebleau engraver’s copy of Maarten van Heemskerck’s (1498–1574) King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (Figure 9.7).28 Indebted to the Sala di Costantino’s Donation of Constantine (Figure 9.9), Heemskerck has extended the relief-like figure grouping at the fresco’s center across the print’s entire horizontally oriented frame. His composition thus collapses the fresco’s depth, heightening its relief-like effect. Heemskerck’s use of relief-like effects results from his seminal role in antiquity’s transmission to the Netherlands via the artists who followed Jan Gossart (1478–1532) and Jan van Scorel (1495–1562) to Rome to enrich their artistry by studying the city’s antiquities and contemporary Italian paintings.29 The middle decades of the sixteenth century witnessed the relief-like style’s Netherlandish coalescence. After their Roman sojourns, Heemskerck, Michiel Coxie (1499–1592), Lambert Lombard (1505–1566), Lambert Sustris (ca. 1515–1584), and Floris all went on to deploy the relief-like style selectively. Reaching their primes at mid-century, they developed relief-like effects for concerned audiences in the reform-inflected north. Their works prompted discourse from varied, polemicized audiences.

Jan Van Scorel and the Primacy of the Vatican As the Vatican played a key role in the Italian development of the relief-like style, its status as the locus for the style’s Netherlandish expansion is also beyond doubt. The artists from the Low Countries who studied the works the Vatican commissioned during the reigns of Julius II (r. 1503–1513) and Leo X (r. 1513–1521) brought relief-like effects to their homelands. Although Jan Gossart was in Rome in 1509 in Margaret of Austria’s entourage to Julius II, his visit occurred before the relief-like style’s full emergence.30 Jan van Scorel,

27 For Thiry, see Nicole Dacos, “Léonard Thiry de Belges, peintre excellent: De Bruxelles à Fontainebleau en passant par Rome,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 127, no. 1528–29 (May–June 1996): 199–212 and 128, no. 1530–31 (July–August 1996): 21–36. 28 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 116. 29 The most recent overview of the phenomenon of northerners to Rome is Maria Harnack, Niederländische Maler in Italien: Künstlerreisen und Kunstrezeption im 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018). 30 The most recent analysis of Gossart’s antiquarianism is Marisa Bass, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

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Figure 9.7: Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, 1549, 26 × 38 cm, British Museum, London. Museum Number 1869,0410.132. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum.

however, was at the epicenter of the style’s coalescence.31 While he produced no relief-like works, his True Cross triptych is deeply indebted to the Sala di Costantino’s Vision of the Cross. His study of the Sala makes him the relieflike style’s earliest carrier to the Netherlands. When Scorel entered onto the Vatican scene in early 1522 as keeper of Vatican antiquities for his childhood friend, Pope Adrian VI Boeyens (r. 1522–1523), most of the Vatican works that were important for the relief-like style’s development were complete. He was able to see the Sistine ceiling and the Vatican apartments. Scorel was also able to see Raphael’s Sistine tapestries thanks to Adrian’s recovery of them after Leo’s administration pedaled them to offset Vatican debt. And Scorel’s art makes clear that he studied the paintings in the Sala di Costantino. He could view the room in a lapsed state of progress as he served

31 The definitive source on Scorel in Rome is still Molly Faries, “Jan van Scorel: His Style and Its Historical Context” (PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1972), 56–67.

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Adrian and may have witnessed the return of activity there after Adrian’s death in September of 1523 and before his departure for home in 1524.32 Scorel’s post-Roman oeuvre comprises a veritable index of the Vatican works that were important for the relief-like style’s development in the 1510s and 1520s. Thus, his transmission to the Netherlands of the style’s sources facilitated the eventual Netherlandish development of the style. For example, motifs in his Stoning of Saint Stephen, the central panel of his Marchiennes Polyptich, indicate that he consulted and then altered his own study of the Vision of the Cross.33 The sacred event in the sky at upper left bears a foreshortened cross surrounded by heavenly light appearing within a gray cloudburst, as in the Vatican prototype. Both compositions also feature a slightly inclining mountain range directly below the cloudburst. Scorel has transformed the Vision’s pyramidal structure and foreshortened tents into rusticated buildings. He has revised Constantine’s outstretched hand into one of the Sanhedrin’s hands, gesturing to the pleading Stephen.34 Also important in Scorel’s post-Roman oeuvre for the relief-like style’s transmission north, however, are the paintings in his True Cross triptych, which features a continuous landscape across all three panels, with the left panel portraying his own version of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.35 Despite drawing on different sources for specific figures, the composition is indebted to the Sala’s relief-like effects.36 Its left panel features two sets of relief-like figures in foreground and background, which converge in the central panel to comprise a friezelike band of figures in the middle ground.

32 Faries, “Jan van Scorel,” 62–63; Bert Meijer, “An Unknown Landscape Drawing by Polidoro da Caravaggio and a Note on Jan van Scorel in Italy,” Paragone (1974): 62–73. 33 Jan Van Scorel, “Stoning of St. Stephen,” Marchiennes Triptych, ca. 1530, oil on panel, 216.6 × 150.5 cm, inv. no. D.1974.1.1, Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai; Françoise Baligand et al., La renaissance de Jan van Scorel: Les retables de Marchiennes (Paris: Fondation Custodia, 2011), especially Molly Faries’ essay, “Les retables de Marchiennes dans l’oeuvre de Jan van Scorel,” 17–36 and cat. no. 1.9. The painting’s general compositional scheme is indebted to Raphael’s tapestry portraying the same subject. For Raphael’s Stoning of St. Stephen, whose cartoon is lost, see Campbell, Tapestry in the Renaissance, 194. 34 For further evidence of the Sala’s importance for Scorel and his circle, see Circle of Jan van Scorel, Tower of Babel, 1530, oil on wood, 58 × 75 cm, inv. no. G.A. d 132, Ca’ d’Oro, Galleria Franchetti, Venice, which contains obvious revisions of the backdrop of the Vision of the Cross. For the theory that this painting is by the young Van Heemskerck or Jan Swart, see Faries “Jan van Scorel,” n. 22, 111–112. Lambert Sustris’s sojourn to the Italian peninsula followed by his time in Venice makes him a candidate as well. 35 Faries, “Jan van Scorel,” 95–98. 36 Faries, “Jan van Scorel,” 97–98 cites the Sala as a source and prints by Gimabattista Mantorano and Baccio Bandinelli and a drawing by Baldassare Peruzzi for specific figures.

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Scorel’s derivations from Raphael comprise a harbinger of a more intensive interest in the Vatican’s paintings among Netherlanders from the 1530s through 1550s. His visible interest in the Sala embedded in his post-Roman oeuvre the impetus for his successors to Rome to explore the relief-like style’s seminal locus. We cannot confirm that the Netherlanders who went to Rome after Scorel would have needed to look to his paintings broadcasting his exploration of Vatican works for a convincing prompt to do the same. But their works recommend his importance, as the 1530s through to the late 1550s represent a period of particularly fruitful exploration of the relief-like style’s possibilities by Netherlanders.

Reading Netherlandish Relief-like Rhetoric in the Age of Art At mid-century, the relief-like style’s debt to authoritative Vatican works could generate potent meanings for knowledgeable Netherlandish viewers. By the 1530s, when the first of Scorel’s successors began journeying to Italy, the Vatican’s recent commissions gained a deservedly strong reputation. In the complex northern milieu that Reform affected, they were a polarizing topic. For their basis in pagan exempla and their sumptuousness – funded in part by the sale of indulgences – Vatican works aroused ire among northern reformers.37 However, they also sparked curiosity among Netherlandish artists eager to assimilate antiquity’s visual language in order to further their careers with prestigious patrons in the Habsburg–Vatican alliance. For Scorel’s knowledgeable audience of Netherlandish antiquarian art lovers, growing in number and sophistication, his quotations of painted Italian compositions would have been apparent.38 Their quotations would have generated an array of meanings. For example, in addition to revealing his mastery of the Sala di Costantino’s paintings, his quotations of the Sala’s motifs could also contain complex, provocative revisions of their prototype’s original meanings. Consider his Stoning of St. Stephen’s reuse of the Vision of the Cross’s portrayal of Constantine’s mystical vision. The prototype visualizes the Vatican’s claim to divinely sanctioned Roman imperial authority. In the context of Reform, percolating at the time of Scorel’s execution of his St. Stephen panel, the portrayal of

37 L. W. Spitz, The Renaissance and Reformation Movements (St. Louis: 1980), vol. 2, 311–14. 38 Van Mander, Schilder-Boeck, 236v, acknowledges Scorel’s status as a learned artist capable of literary works.

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Stephen’s receipt of divine sanction via a quotation of Contantine’s vision at the very moment when Stephen challenged temple authority could resonate as an anti-Vatican prompt. Scorel’s portrayal of Stephen thus comprises a powerful pictorial antithesis, via its allusion to a Vatican-commissioned image of Constantine, the prototype of Holy Imperial authority. As a work bearing artful quotations that could prompt exegetical and spiritual discourse, Scorel’s St. Stephen paintings resolves the duality of sacred and artistic concerns in works from the “age of art” identified by Hans Belting, Hall’s point of departure for considering artistic choices in sacred art at midcentury.39 Scorel’s artistry and his knowledge of art could provoke discourse on the sacred. Indeed, questions about how to fashion the sacred via conspicuous artistry occupied the thoughts of Netherlandish artists from the 1520s on, after the image debate began.40 This must be especially so for the artists in the generation after Scorel. They matured after the Sack of Rome, which marked the first major culmination of tensions between Vatican and Holy Roman Imperial interests, conditions that Netherlandish antiquarian artists working under Habsburg rule necessarily navigated. The Reformation and the image debate, moreover, spanned their entire careers. One is able to see these concerns in the copious quotations of the Vatican’s relief-like works by the Netherlandish artists of the 1530s. For example, Bernard Van Orley’s most famous and gifted follower, Michiel Coxie, journeyed to Rome in the early 1530s.41 Many of the works he made after visiting Rome bear relieflike effects. An emphatically relief-like example by Coxie is his red chalk drawing of The Continence of Scipio (Figure 9.10).42 More rigidly relief-like than the drawing of the same subject by Perino del Vaga, which may have inspired it, Coxie’s drawing features a tight grouping of nudes crowding the composition.43 They advance on Scipio, who sits in profile, enthroned, at the drawing’s left third. He gestures with respectful refusal to the “barbarian” woman supplicant

39 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence, trans. by E. Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 40 Marcia Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 41 For Coxie and Italy, see Koen Jonckheere, Michiel Coxcie (1499–1592) and the Giants of His Age (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013). 42 See Achim Gnann and Domenico Laurenza, “Raphael’s Influence on Michiel Coxcie: Two New Drawings and a Painting,” Master Drawings 34, no. 3 (1996): 293, 298, and n. 4; Jonckheere, Giants of His Age, cat. no. 6. 43 Perino del Vaga, Continence of Scipio, ca. 1520, ink on paper, 26.2 × 42.1 cm, museum no. 1860,0616.118, British Museum, London. See Philip Pouncey and John Gere, Raphael and his Circle: Giulio Romano, G.F. Penni, Perino del Vaga, Giovanni da Udine, Tommaso Vincidor, Polidoro da Caravaggio, Baldassare Peruzzi, 2 vols. (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1962), 158.

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before him. Only a foregrounded figure at far left and some vaguely foreshortened, minimally appointed architecture near the top of the frame provide any release whatsoever from the composition’s relief-like figural claustrophobia. In this figure grouping, we see Coxie’s indebtedness to the Sala di Costantino’s Donation of Constantine (Figure 9.9), also composed around an enthroned figure at left, with a supplicant figure at right. Coxie’s conspicuous quotation of the Vatican source would also be a pointed one; northern viewers among those opposed to Vatican expenditures and the extraction of indulgences would see the portrayal of Scipio’s historically renowned restraint and mercy in the same visual framework as the Vatican’s portrayal of Sylvester I as an overturning of the divine imperial authority that the Sala’s painting asserts on the Vatican’s behalf.

Figure 9.8: Raphael and Workshop, Constantine Addressing His Troops and His Vision of the Cross, 1520–1524, fresco, Sala di Costantino, Vatican. Photo: Art Resource, New York.

Lambert Lombard’s oeuvre recommends him as an artist who was also interested in relief-like effects, able to exploit their rhetorical potential. His Esther Before Ahasuerus comprises a prime example. He has reversed the composition of the Sala’s Donation fresco (Figure 9.9). He has also further compressed the

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Figure 9.9: Raphael and Workshop, Donation of Constantine, 1520–1524, fresco, Sala di Costantino, Vatican. Photo: Art Resource, New York.

Donation’s space by focusing on the relief-like figure group at the heart of the Donation composition. With their grisaille-like affect, engravings after Lombard’s compositions further accentuate his consciousness of the gravitas in relieflike figure groupings. Engraved and published by Hieronymus Cock, the print brings the relief-like figures into a limited space before a wall at medium distance from the picture plane.44 Classically draped, the figures span the print from left to right in a frieze-like manner. In this image, too, informed or privileged viewers of the print, those who had also remembered its source in the Sala, might have reasonably construed Lombard’s quotation of the Vatican prototype as a provocative one. Ahaseurus, the Book of Esther’s Persian king, was known for his greed, overweening pride, and poor decision making, leading to the deaths of hundreds of Jews. Thus, Lombard’s substitution of Ahasuerus for the Pope would prompt discussion of the Vatican’s fiduciary recklessness and questionable statecraft.

44 Pouncey and Gere, Raphael and His Circle, cat. no. 146.

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Figure 9.10: Michiel Coxie, Continence of Scipio, ca. 1530, 22.2 × 29.8 cm, red chalk on paper, British Museum, London, Museum number, 1946,0713.151. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum.

The Rhetoric of the Relief-like Style in Maarten van Heemskerck’s Victories of Charles V Richly generative of the interpretive modes described above, prints in Maarten van Heemskerck’s Victories of Charles V (Figures 9.11, 9.12, and 9.13) bear focused and pointed applications of the relief-like style.45 Commissioned with privilege by the Habsburg emperor named in its title on the eve of his retirement from the throne, the Victories’ most important audience was Charles V himself and

45 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 524–35. For an analysis of the Victories, Rosier, “Victories,” 24–38. For initial thoughts on their relief-like effects, see Arthur J. DiFuria, “The Concettismo of Triumph: Maerten van Heemskerck’s Victories of Charles V and Remembering Spanish Omnipotence in a Late Sixteenth Century Writing Cabinet,” in Prints in Translation, 1450–1750: Image, Materiality, Space, ed. by Suzanne Karr Schmidt and Edward Wouk (London: Ashgate / Routledge, 2016), 173–76.

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the cognoscenti of his court. The series’ twelve prints visualize Charles’s universal dominance. His major military and diplomatic triumphs appear chronologically, from his victory over Francis I at the Battle of Pavia (1525) to the major episodes leading to his suppression of the Schmalkaldic League in the late 1540s. Over the entire set of images, Heemskerck embedded the relief-like style with selective but pervasive subtlety amidst myriad emulations of antiquities and motifs in the Sala di Costantino. The series’ three battle scenes are indebted to motifs from the Sala’s Battle of the Milvian Bridge, as are two equestrian scenes.46 Other prints revise the Donation of Constantine.47 Still others are more generally relief-like in nature. Read in sequence, the series presents a persistent set of visual reminders of antique reliefs and their consummation in the Sala di Costantino. The Victories thus represents the fullest expression in Heemskerck’s entire oeuvre of his study of the Sala, his most self-conscious reinvention of its pictorial rhetoric. Moreover, the Victories prints situate Charles’s historical identity within an istoria comprised of a multi-layered, referential antiquarian complex that transfers to Charles the Sala’s claims of the Vatican’s historical and spiritual universality. The series’ preponderance of motifs based on the frescoes in the Sala di Costantino suggests to viewers that they associate Charles with Holy Roman Imperial prototypes in Constantine and the papacy. Consider for example, the series’ frontispiece (Figure 9.11). Charles presides over the important European leaders he vanquished during his reign. From left to right, Suleiman the Magnificent, Pope Clement VII, Francis I, the Dukes of Saxony and Cleves, and Philip the Landgrave of Hessen occupy a relief-like space. Three to either side of Charles, their configuration resembles the relief on the north frieze of the Arch of Constantine, which portrays the emperor enthroned, distributing largesse to his subjects. Charles sits atop the imperial eagle and between the Herculean columns that formed the support for his coat of arms.48 With his right hand, he wields a sword; with his left, the globus cruciger signifying his universal authority. His legs are splayed, suggesting his dynamism and strength, his status as a mover of history. Charles’s pose may also comprise a multivalent allusion to other images.49 A most certain reference is in the figure’s echo of the Sala di Costantino’s portrait

46 The Victories’ battle and equestrian scenes are Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 525, 528, 530, 532, 533. 47 Veldman, New Hollstein, 530 and 534. 48 For Habsburg symbolism and Charles’s use of it, see DiFuria, “Concettismo of Triumph.” 49 Rosier, “Victories,” 36, notes the similarity between Charles’s pose and the ephemeral statue of Antigonus that decorated Charles’s processional route through Antwerp on his 1549 Blidje Incompst. See also Mark Meadow, “Ritual and Civic Identity in Philip II’s 1549 Antwerp Blidje Incompst,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaerboek 49 (1998): 36–67.

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of Pope Urban I (r. 222–230), which borders the Sala’s Battle of the Milvian Bridge.50 Urban was among the most important popes for the Vatican’s efforts to align its historical identity with imperial Rome. In his Sala portrait, Urban points, as if directing the monumentally important istorie surrounding him in the room’s frescoes. The frontispiece receives an echo in the series’ eighth print, which portrays William II, Duke of Cleves, kneeling before Charles. And the Victories’ final print, “The Submission of Philip, Landgrave of Hessen,” also resembles the frontispiece. Featuring an enthroned Charles flanked on either side by his six vanquished foes in the Schmalkaldic League, it provides a fitting bracketing of the series as it reasserts the frontispiece’s claims, once again echoing the Arch of Constantine’s relief of the enthroned emperor.51

Figure 9.11: Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Frontispiece,” Victories of Charles V, 1555, 15.3 × 22.8 cm, British Museum, London. Museum Number 1868,0208.57. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum.

50 DiFuria, “Concettismo of Triumph,” 174. 51 Veldman, New Hollstein, no. 535.

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Figure 9.12: Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Suleiman the Magnificent Forced to Raise the Siege of Vienna,” Victories of Charles V, 1555, 15.6 × 22.8 cm, British Museum, London. Museum Number 1868,0208.61. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum.

Among the series’ numerous inventions based on the Sala’s relief-like motifs, the most potent examples appear in prints of “Suleiman the Magnificent Raising the Siege of Vienna” and “Charles Inspecting his Troops Near Ingolstadt”52 (Figures 9.12 and 9.13). The former is strongly reminiscent of the Sala’s Battle of the Milvian Bridge. It commemorates the cessation in 1529 of Suleiman the Magnificent’s continuation of nearly a century’s worth of Ottoman advances into eastern and central Europe.53 Although bitter conflict between various European powers and the Turks continued well into the seventeenth century, Charles’s assemblage of 80,000 troops in Vienna dissuaded Suleiman from attacking the central European city, thus saving it from Turkish capture. By the time Heemskerck devised the print visualizing this event, the limits of Suleiman’s

52 Veldman, New Hollstein, nos. 528 and 532. 53 Stephen Turnbull, The Ottoman Empire 1326–1699 (New York: Osprey Publishing, 2003), 50.

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Figure 9.13: Dirck Volkertszoon Coornhert after Maarten van Heemskerck, “Charles Inspecting his Troops Near Ingolstadt,” Victories of Charles V, 1555, 15.6 × 23.3 cm, British Museum, London. Museum Number 1868,0208.65. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum.

European conquest had stabilized. By mid-century, it had become clear that Suleiman’s failed attempt on Vienna marked the northernmost extent of his imperial range. The print’s use of the Sala di Costantino’s relief-like visual language to portray Charles’s checkmate of the Ottoman emperor would suggest to viewers that his historical quelling of the Turkish “infidels” proved his status as a divinely sanctioned Holy Roman power. Charles appears at left, parallel to the picture plane, armor clad and on horseback accompanied by other lance bearing riders. That they are charging forth as if to engage in combat is a pictorial revision of the actual events, which entailed no bloodshed, only Suleiman’s retreat. One can only read such a fictive visualization metaphorically; Charles resembles Constantine as he engages his enemy Maxentius’s troops in Raphael’s and Giulio’s fresco. The gaze created by the relief-like style’s capacity to generate meaning translates Constantine’s divinely sponsored victory to Charles, via Heemskerck’s quotation of it.

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Heemskerck’s modeled his composition for “Charles Inspecting his Troops Near Ingolstadt” (Figure 9.13) on the Sala’s Vision of the Cross. Oriented in reverse, it reinvents the relief-like formula for the print medium. At right, a foregrounded Charles sits astride his horse addressing a group of figures composed in a relief-like pattern. With his scepter, Charles gestures towards the center of the composition as does Constantine in the Vision of the Cross. Heemskerck has multiplied and moved the Sala fresco’s scepters, standards, and tents. He has, moreover, amplified the Vision of the Cross’s depth with a sweeping, panoramic landscape backdrop. Figures in the middle ground, to the left of Charles, comprise a continuation of the cluttered, patterned figuration that begins at far right and culminates in an uninterrupted swarm of humanity crowding the entire composition and bearing a claustrophobic effect similar to that of the Vision of the Cross. Thus, while inventive, the print manages to issue a strong echo of the relief-like aspects of its Vatican source. Northern viewers of this print who were familiar with the Sala’s frescos and the argument they made would have seen Heemskerck’s print as a visualized argument for the translation of Holy Roman imperial sanction from Constantine to the Vatican and then to Charles. The historical moment Heemskerck has portrayed – not the battle itself but the anticipation of the battle – would have comprised an encouragement to viewers to associate Charles’s eventual victory at Ingolstadt with Constantine’s divinely inspired victory over Maxentius. Thus, we return to our original question; how would the series’ audiences receive its evocations of the Sala’s relief-like effects? Contextually speaking, visualizing Charles to align him with Constantine, the Holy Roman imperial prototype, would have resonated with Charles, his court, and collectors among elite northerners who understood the references to the Sala. Charles’s long and complicated relationship with the Vatican and his more or less steadfast allegiance to Vatican interests after his victory in Tunis in 1535 align with Heemskerck’s image of him in the Constantinian mold. For viewers who had the privilege of seeing the Sala in person, and those who possessed an intimate understanding of its imagery, Heemskerck’s deft manipulations of the Sala’s motifs and his seamless incorporation of them with his own inventions partake of a multivalent archaeology of memory. The Victories of Charles V could evoke in its viewers the experience of once having been there, prompting a complex paragone; viewers would inevitably consider what parts of the Sala they saw on display in Heemskerck’s prints, and how these visual similarities relate to the content of print and its prototype, as well as their own understanding of Constantine’s and Charles’s historical significances. We note, moreover, that the Sala’s frescoes themselves are an archaeological assemblage of motifs from antiquity. Thus, Heemskerck’s quotations of the Sala force a viewing mode that is comparative across time; they create

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a de facto supra-temporalization of Charles’s historicity.54 With these rhetorical quotations, Heemskerck’s Charles appears not as an emperor of an age, but as an emperor for the ages, a figure from history in a timeless time, wherein his decisive moments commingle with those epic events that established Holy Rome.

Conclusions: Pictorial Rhetoric and Conspicuous Quotations Without Marcia Hall’s identification of the relief-like style and her exploration of its political implications, we would not be able to fully comprehend a set of prints embedding relief-like effects as Heemskerck’s Victories do. Rather, we would rely on the historical content they visualize and view the series as illustrative of past events. However, as Hall’s work clarifies, the stylistic choices of Cinquecento artists generated their own layer of meaning, crucial for interpretation. In the example of the Victories, Heemskerck’s translation of Charles’s historical life into a stylistic matrix strongly reminiscent of the paintings from the relief-like style’s Vatican epicenter enables the prints to argue beyond the significance of Charles’s achievements within their own period. Their portrayal in a Sala-inspired relief-like style links them to other exalted histories. For a generation of elite Netherlandish antiquarian viewers who had all their lives been either beholden or opposed to Charles, Heemskerck’s relief-like stylistic choices would have comprised a rich repository of provocations, which we have only discussed in fundamental terms here. The relief-like style’s importation into the Netherlands fell within the broader currents of Netherlandish antiquarianism. Its uses and interpretations were thus not uniform with Italian ones. As we have seen, northern artists exploited the style’s status as one mode that they could select for a range of viewing contexts. The potent rhetorical use of the relief-like style that Heemskerck deployed to lionize Charles V was not the rule. Many of the other Netherlandish examples this essay cites fall under the broader, less polemical, less politically committed category of conspicuous quotation, illustrating that northern artists also used the relief-like mode as a means of proclaiming their masterful antiquarianism and appealing to antiquarian tastes. These are examples giving rise to what we should call the problem of quotation. Upon recognizing such quotations, we begin a de facto interrogation. Sydney Freedberg’s critique of Cinquecento

54 For notions of early modern supra-temporality, see Christopher Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 64.

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quotation describes such borrowings as “deliberately isolated from their sources by unseen, but felt, quotation marks.”55 We ask how the erudite viewer – John Shearman’s “informed beholder” – could view these images without bringing the significance of their sources to bear on interpretations. Did such quotations constitute yet another layer of signification by recalling antiquity, collecting, art, and artistic process? It would be difficult to try answering these questions in a holistic way; each example brings its own answers. This essay’s goal has been humbler and, I hope, more feasible. I have sought to establish the conscious adoption and revision by important Netherlandish artists of the Italian relief-like style identified by Marcia Hall, offer judicious speculation regarding its reception, and conclude by considering its implications for our vision of northern antiquarian visual culture. The preponderance of relief-like prints among Netherlanders further strengthens our notion of a Netherlandish paragone between print, painting, and sculpture. Netherlanders translated into print the Italian interest in assimilating the visual effects of triumphal arch and sarcophagus reliefs into paintings. And as we have seen, they did so conscious of the alternative viewing experience prints afford. Unlike the Sala di Costantino’s frescos, prints and drawings are never in situ. They allow a greater intimacy of viewing, closer examination, the opportunity to hold and behold, in seeming contrapposto to the monumentality of Italian relief-like murals. Thus, handheld images also afford opportunities to revise and even subvert meanings. They were third generation images, twice removed from their antique sources. And as Heemskerck’s Victories series did so masterfully, Netherlandish prints could appropriate the meanings generated in Italian relief-like paintings for further pictorial discourse. Thus, it is certain that Marcia Hall’s identification of relief-like effects emanating from the Vatican’s early Cinquecento phase is a crucial discovery that will continue to prompt further art historical thought for some time to come.

Works Cited Baligand, Françoise, ed. La renaissance de Jan van Scorel: Les retables de Marchiennes. Paris: Fondation Custodia, 2011. Barryte, Bernard, ed. Myth, Allegory, and Faith: The Kirk Edward Long Collection of Mannerist Prints. Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2015. Exhibition catalog. Bass, Marisa. Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.

55 Sydney Freedberg, “Observations on the Painting of the Maniera,” Art Bulletin 47, no. 2 (1965): 191.

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Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence. Translated by E. Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Campbell, Thomas P. Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Cleland, Elizabeth, ed. Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry. New Haven and New York: Yale University Press and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014. Dacos, Nicole. “Léonard Thiry de Belges, peintre excellent: De Bruxelles à Fontainebleau en passant par Rome.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 127, no. 1528–29 (May–June 1996): 199–212. Dacos, Nicole. “Léonard Thiry de Belges, peintre excellent: De Bruxelles à Fontainebleau en passant par Rome.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 128, no. 1530–31 (July–August 1996): 21–36. Denhaene, Godelieve ed. Lambert Lombard: Peintre de la Renaissance, Liège 1505/06–1566. Essais interdisciplinaires et catalogue de l’exposition. Salle Saint-Georges, Musée de l’Art Wallon, Liège, April 21–August 6, 2006. Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique de Belgique. Brussels: KIK/IRPA, 2006. Exhibition catalog. DiFuria, Arthur J. “Maerten van Heemskerck’s Rome: Antiquity, Memory, and the Berlin Sketchbooks.” PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2008. DiFuria, Arthur J. “The Concettismo of Triumph: Maerten van Heemskerck’s Victories of Charles V and Remembering Spanish Omnipotence in a Late Sixteenth Century Writing Cabinet.” In Prints in Translation, 1450–1750: Image, Materiality, Space, edited by Suzanne Karr Schmidt and Edward Wouk, 158–83. London: Ashgate and Routledge, 2016. Fagiolo, Marco and Maria Luisa Madonna, eds. Baldassarre Peruzzi: Pittura scena e architettura nel Cinquecento. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1987. Faries, Molly. “Jan van Scorel: His Style and Its Historical Context.” PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1972. Faries, Molly and Martha Wolff. “Landscape in the Early Paintings of Jan van Scorel.” Burlington Magazine 138, no. 1124 (1996): 725–27. Freedberg, Sydney. “Observations on the Painting of the Maniera.” Art Bulletin 47, no. 2 (1965): 187–97. Glass, Dorothy. The Sculpture of Reform in North Italy, ca. 1095–1130. London: Ashgate and Routledge, 2010. Gnann, Achim and Domenico Laurenza. “Raphael’s Influence on Michiel Coxcie: Two New Drawings and a Painting,” Master Drawings 34, no. 3 (1996): 292–302. Gombrich, E. H. “The Style all’antica: Imitation and Assimilation.” In Norm and Form: Gombrich on the Renaissance, 122–28. London: Phaidon, 1966. Hall, Marcia. After Raphael. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hall, Marcia. “Classicism, Mannerism, and the Relieflike Style.” In The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, edited by Marcia Hall, 222–36. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Hall, Marcia. “Politics and the Relief-like Style.” In The Translation of Raphael’s Roman Style, edited by Henk Th. van Veen, 1–20. Leuven: Peeters, 2007. Harnack, Maria. Niederländische Maler in Italien: Künstlerreisen und Kunstrezeption im 16. Jahrhundert. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018. Hartt, Frederick. “Raphael and Giulio Romano: With Notes on the Raphael School.” Art Bulletin 26, no. 2 (1944): 67–94.

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Huppert, Anne. Becoming an Architect in Renaissance Italy: Art, Science, and the Career of Badassarre Peruzzi. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Jonckheere, Koenraad. Michiel Coxcie (1499–1592) and the Giants of His Ages. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Keizer, Joost. “Mchelangelo, Drawing, and the Subject of Art.” Art Bulletin 93, no. 3 (2011): 304–24. Krautheimer, Richard. “The Tragic and Comic Scene of the Renaissance,” Gazette des Beaux Arts 90 (1948): 328–46. Meijer, Bert. “An Unknown Landscape Drawing by Polidoro da Caravaggio and a Note on Jan van Scorel in Italy.” Paragone (1974): 62–73. Melion, Walter S. Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander’s Schilder–Boeck. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Miedema, Hessel. ed. and trans. Karel van Mander: The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German Painters, from the first edition of the Schilder-boeck (1603 – 1604). 6 vols. Doornspijk: Davaco Publishers, 1994. Pon, Lisa. Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Pouncey, Philip and John Gere. Raphael and His Circle: Giulio Romano, G.F. Penni, Perino del Vaga, Giovanni da Udine, Tommaso Vincidor, Polidoro da Caravaggio, Baldassare Peruzzi. 2 vols. London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1962. Rosier, Bart. “The Victories of Charles V: A Series of Prints by Maarten van Heemskerck, 1555–56.” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 20, no. 1 (1990–1991): 24–38. Quednau, Rolf. Di Sala di Costantino im Vatikanischen Palast: Zur Dekoration der Beiden Medici-Päpste Leon X. New York: G. Olms, 1979. Schéle, Sune. Cornelis Bos: A Study of the Origins of the Netherlandish Grotesque. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1965. Smyth, Craig Hugh. Mannerism and Maniera. Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin Publishers, 1962. Turnbull, Stephen. The Ottoman Empire 1326–1699. New York: Osprey Publishing, 2003. Van Mander, Karel. Het Schilder-boeck. Haarlem, 1604. Van Asperen de Boer, J. R. J. “Maarten van Heemskerck and Jan van Scorel’s Haarlem Workshop.” In Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice: Reprints of a Symposium, University of Leiden, the Netherlands 26 – 29, June 1995, edited by Arie Wallert, Erma Hermens, and Marja Peek, 35–39. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori. Edited by Gaetano Milanesi. 9 vols. Florence: G. C. Sansoni, Editore, 1879. Veldman, Ilja, comp., and Ger Luijten, ed. The New Hollstein: Dutch and Flemish etchings, engravings and woodcuts, 1450–1700: Maarten van Heemskerck. 2 vols. Roosendaal, Amsterdam: Sound and Vision Interactive, 1994. Wood, Christopher. Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Wouk, Ed. Frans Floris: Imagining a Northern Renaissance. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2018. Zerner, Henri. “L’Eau-forte à Fontainebleau: Le Rôle de Fantuzzi.” Art de France, Revue annuelle de l’art ancien et moderne 4 (1964): 70–85. Zerner, Henri. The School of Fontainebleau: Etchings and Engravings. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1969.

Stuart Lingo

Chapter 10 Mannerism’s Masks The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized . . . at a moment of danger.1

For some time now, scholars approaching what might be called “the art formerly known as Mannerism” have been confronted with an aporia.2 The art historical term engages a great deal of the most ambitious art of the sixteenth century. Yet during the course of the twentieth century it came to be employed to define widely varied, even apparently opposed artistic styles and cultures. An inability to adjudicate conclusively between competing interpretations concerning the origins, meaning, and extent of Mannerism facilitated a concomitant distrust of the perceived lability and ahistoricity of the term itself, eventually effecting an impasse in which it became increasingly difficult to speak persuasively about much of this art beyond the limits of the particular work or the individual career. As is well known, Mannerism was recurrently read as an art of alienation and cultural angst by a number of early-to-mid twentieth-century scholars operating loosely within Marxist and Freudian paradigms, and then reconceptualized in diametrically opposed fashion as the “stylish style,” in John Shearman’s lapidary definition: a supremely self-confident and aristocratic court art of artifice, more invested in style than substance. Shearman’s radical reorientation of a half century of Italian culture and art was so compelling that for a time – notwithstanding a few trenchant early critiques – it effectively forestalled significant further shifts of paradigm.3 Ironically, the very force of Shearman’s thesis

1 Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, V–VI, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), PUB 255. My essay develops a paper I presented at the 2017 conference of the Renaissance Society of America in Mannerism/Maniera/Modernity: Historicizing Fifty Years of Scholarship, organized by Tiffany Lynn Hunt and Heather Graham to reconsider John Shearman’s Mannerism on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. I have retained some of the oral quality of the lecture, and the engagement with Shearman’s paradigms, in what follows. 2 See Elizabeth Cropper, “The Decline and Rise of Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: Mannerism and Modernity,” in Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: Diverging Paths of Mannerism, ed. by Carlo Falciani and Antonio Natali (Florence: Mandragora, 2014), 343–53, 347, for the ironic phrase, which she and I have both employed in lectures. 3 John Shearman, Mannerism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967). Walter Friedlaender, Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965) (containing an https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-011

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crystallized the conditions for the renunciation of “Mannerism” altogether. As art historians became increasingly frustrated with his exclusionary, polemically delimited view of the field, yet effectively blocked by it from productive reengagement with earlier perspectives, many scholars effectively began to ignore (or overtly condemn) the term and its contentious cluster of attendant concepts. For them, reading anything as “Mannerist” seemed to obfuscate more than it clarified.4 Yet in practice, dismissing the word frequently meant sidestepping pressing issues in period art and culture to which it had once pointed, and dramatically limiting the scope and potential of art historical study of one of the most absorbing and challenging half centuries of European art. This historiographic impasse has lingered for decades. In recent years the situation has finally begun to change, in large part due to pioneering work by a small cluster of scholars that includes Stephen Campbell, Michael Cole, Elizabeth Cropper, Carlo Falciani, Morten Hansen, Antonio Natali – and critically, in the current context, Marcia Hall. Yet even among these figures there is real disagreement regarding the usefulness of the term, and a significant number of art historians continue to shy away from confronting the issues that swirl around it. In a precocious essay that employed Bronzino’s Martyrdom of San Lorenzo (1565–1569) as a point of entry, however, Stephen Campbell offered perhaps the most compelling articulation to date of the manner in which a profound historiographic crisis has been provoked by the marginalization of any concept of Mannerism and the resulting inability to fashion a persuasive and integrated historical reading of the art and culture of the relevant decades. Emphasizing that “no alternative set of terms emerged in art history to address links between historical dispensations of the self and the self-conscious art of the generations who matured following Raphael’s death in 1520,” Campbell urged that “the question of Mannerism as a reaction to

essay first published in 1920s), and Arnold Hauser, Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965) are two of the leading earlier statements. For a precocious critique that distinguishes Shearman’s thesis from contemporary interventions by Craig Hugh Smyth and Sydney Freedberg – which have often been assimilated to it – see Henri Zerner, “Observations on the Use of the Concept of Mannerism,” in The Meaning of Mannerism, ed. by Franklin W. Robinson and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1972), 105–21; reprinted in Readings in Italian Mannerism, ed. by Liana De Girolami Cheney (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 227–46. Both Zerner and Elizabeth Cropper, “Introduction,” in Craig Hugh Smyth, Mannerism and Maniera (Vienna: IRSA, 1992, originally published 1963), 12–21, offer important readings of aspects of the historiography and Shearman’s place in it. 4 See for instance Hessel Miedema, “On Mannerism and maniera,” Simiolus 10, no. 1 (1978–79): 19–45. For an instance of the principle in practice, see David Franklin, Painting in Renaissance Florence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001).

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historical tensions and predicaments” called for reexamination.5 I agree that the term can still point towards a distinctive and exceptionally intelligent cluster of artistic figures, strategies, and cultures that is worth recuperating and attempting to understand afresh; what follows will offer, I hope, a few useful fragments of reflection in this direction, very much at the “inizio” of a larger project.

Figure 10.1: Attributed to Giuliano Bugiardini or Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio, Portrait Cover with Masks and Grotesques, ca. 1516, oil on panel, 73 × 50.3 cm, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.

In such a situation a good place to start is at the very beginning, the beginning here at once of my theme and of the possible chronological parameters of Mannerism, for which this portrait and portrait cover might constitute a kind of prehistory (Figures 10.1 and 10.2). Yet almost everything about this fascinating

5 Stephen Campbell, “Counter-Reformation Polemic and Mannerist Counter-Aesthetics: Bronzino’s ‘Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence’ in San Lorenzo,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 46 (Autumn 2004): 98–119, 99–100.

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Figure 10.2: Attributed to Giuliano Bugiardini or Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio, Portrait of a Lady, ca. 1516, oil on panel, 73 × 50.3 cm, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.

little pair of paintings remains at some level in doubt. They likely date to the mid-to-late 1510s, though this has been questioned; the panel with grotesques, mask, and motto likely functioned as the portrait’s cover, though we cannot be entirely sure; the young woman has been called “la monaca,” “the nun,” and indeed holds a breviary while posing before three nuns and an identifiable Florentine hospital, San Paolo, but is almost certainly not herself a nun; and the painting has been attributed to Giuliano Bugiardini, though Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio is another possibility.6 It would verge on the uncanny could the ensemble

6 Elizabeth Cropper offers a compelling reading of the panels in Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women, ed. by David Allan Brown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), cat. 36 A–B, 208–13; she gives both panels to Bugiardini and dates the pair to ca. 1516. Antonio Natali, La Piscina di Betsaida. Movimenti nell’arte fiorentina del Cinquecento (Florence: Maschietto and Musolino, 1995), 117–37, had argued for an attribution to Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio and a date of ca. 1510 (see as well Natali in L’officina della

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be definitively ascribed to Bugiardini; we would then confront a representation of attractive masks by a painter whose very name means “sweet little lies.” Masking and dissimulation are overtly thematized in the portrait cover, which pairs grotesques and an all’antica theatrical mask with a tabula ansata inscribed “to each his [or in this case her] own mask.” The cover conjoins two consummate images of artifice: the grotesque, emblematic of invention and the fantasia of the artist after 1500, and the mask, literally “theatrical,” conjuring role-playing and the artifice of performance. This panel strikes me every time I see it, for the depth of its self-consciousness about what a portrait really represents. And if the cover was indeed intended to mask this particular portrait, in which the young woman’s persona – posed in black before a pious institution yet wearing a distinctively low-cut dress – continues to challenge explanation, the ensemble might proleptically visualize the origins of Mannerism, in so far as we identify Mannerism as an art self-conscious about artifice, allusion, and ambiguity. Here the conceptual artifice and allusiveness are already exceptional. Yet they seem to mean something; we are not witnessing a meaningless game, even if it is a game nonetheless. In this regard, Bugiardini’s (?) little pictorial ensemble emblematizes much of what I want to consider. Mannerism is in many respects an art of self-conscious artifice and invention, just as Shearman, and in quite different ways Craig Hugh Smyth and Sydney Freedberg, insisted in a cluster of seminal studies some fifty years ago.7 Shearman’s particular insistence on the univocal centrality of these qualities to any comprehensive definition of Mannerism led ultimately to his radical reframing of this art as the “stylish style,” the art of courts and connoisseurs. Half a century on, a number of his fundamental insights continue to weather transformative developments in art history and Renaissance studies, and resist many of the

maniera. Varietà e fierezza nell’arte fiorentina del Cinquecento fra le due repubbliche, 1494–1530, ed. by Alessandro Cecchi and Antonio Natali (Florence and Venice: Marsilio, 1996), cat. 31–31a, 134–35). More recently, Silvia Ferino-Pagden has offered a good overview of readings of the panels in Wir Sind Maske, ed. by Silvia Ferino-Pagden (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2009), cat. I.16, 82–84. Hannah Baader, who questioned the association of portrait and cover in 1999, pursues an extensive reading of the mask motif in Hannah Baader, Das Selbst im Anderen: Sprachen der Freundschaft und die Kunst des Portraits 1370–1520 (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015), 271–96. For my immediate purposes it is not essential that the cover with its masks was designed for the portrait of the young woman. Whether read as individual panels or as an ensemble, both cover and portrait speak to the artful self-consciousness that interests me. 7 Shearman, Mannerism; Smyth, Mannerism and Maniera; Sydney Freedberg, “Observations on the Painting of the Maniera,” Art Bulletin 47 (1965): 187–97.

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critiques launched at them.8 They have made it very difficult indeed to simply recuperate the salient paradigms embraced by some earlier twentieth-century historians. But by opening with a consideration of a painting by and of “sweet little lies,” I want to raise a possibility. There are few things so “artificial” as masks. Shearman didn’t mention them overtly, though he did spend a good deal of time on masques, those extravaganzas of costume, music, and spectacular display that characterized much courtly festivity of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Yet precisely in the “stylish style’s” profound investment in the layered complexities of exceptional artifice, the potential arose for artistic style to facilitate practices of masking and dissimulation that might at once exceed the “merely” stylistic and offer images means to exceed their traditional religious or political functions. In a short essay it will be impossible to probe this contention deeply, and in any case, in his important article “Observations on the Painting of the Maniera,” Sydney Freedberg memorably wrote “in Maniera we confront a moment of the history of art for which the single most pregnant symbol may be the mask: it is inevitable that we be frustrated in some measure in our attempt to penetrate it.” In the same article, Freedberg termed Mannerism the “stylized style.”9 While a casual reader might mistake this tag as no more than a variant of Shearman’s, Freedberg’s phrase is less weighted toward the purely elegant and courtly, thereby opening a wider possible space for invention and experimentation within an art still understood as driven by artifice. In what follows, I hope to elaborate on these fundamental observations through a few striking examples. Mindful that the diverse camps in the twentieth-century Mannerism debates delineated the style’s parameters very differently, I will focus principally on the art of Agnolo Bronzino, generally read as exemplifying the phenomenon. It is worth remarking that Bronzino and his mentor Pontormo were peculiarly invested in including representations of masks in their works, masks that often appear as animate as – or even more animate than – the works’ ostensibly living figures. In a remarkable passage from Bronzino’s Budapest Venus, Cupid, and Jealousy, for instance, a mask lying at Venus’ feet assumes an evocative vitality

8 However, Cropper, “Introduction,” and Zerner, “Observations on the Use of the Concept of Mannerism,” both level important methodological critiques. 9 Freedberg, “Observations on the Painting of the Maniera,” 187, 189. Freedberg himself, as is clear from his title, preferred the Vasarian “maniera” to denote a “High” or “Second” Mannerism (ca. 1540–1580), reading the 1520s and 1530s as “Early” or “First” Mannerism (194–97). While his attempt to nuance terminology has much to recommend it, favoring “maniera” as a term from the period can blur the distinction between Vasari’s terza maniera – all of “modern art” from Leonardo forward – and the subset of this art that might be perceived as “Mannerist.”

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as drapery passes behind a portion of one of its eye holes (Figure 10.3).10 While the artist expressly alerts us that this animation is fictive, we nonetheless find the effect uncanny. Moreover, the mask exhibits a fleshy quality, accentuated by relatively loose brushwork for Bronzino, that contrasts with the marmoreal finish of the painting’s principal figures. An impression of earthy vitality is only accentuated by the mask’s lewd and knowing grin, which undermines any ability to appreciate the panel’s ostensibly ideal nudes merely as figures of art and heightens our visceral sensation that we confront an apparently inanimate object that nonetheless is possessed of a preternatural and destabilizing “life-likeness.” This sensation is ironically heightened by our very recognition that the effect is predicated on an artful deception. We will soon encounter another, more disturbing instance of an animated mask. But for the moment, the self-consciousness about masking in portraiture that the painter of “sweet little lies” could visualize by the late 1510s might induce us to turn to portraiture itself, and to one of Bronzino’s fundamental essays in the genre, the haunting Lucrezia Panciatichi of 1541–1545 (Figure 10.4). A work like this appears to exemplify why many art historical readings of Bronzino’s portraits perceive them as particularly masklike – though tellingly, Bronzino’s contemporary Giorgio Vasari read them as particularly life-like!11 Is there any way to bring these apparently opposite perceptions into some kind of fertile relation? Lucrezia appears to present a mask of aristocratic self-containment as she looks up unblinkingly from her reading in a book of Hours of the Virgin. She seems to have mastered the dissimulation prudent in the society of nascent absolutism at the still-new Medici court of Ducal Florence. There is nothing but her beauty and social position that she reveals to us. Or is there? I have noted that Lucrezia holds the Hours of the Virgin: her thumb beside the word “pulchra,” she is presented as the perfect aristocratic lady, joining piety with that beauty and poise that fashions her a poetic object of lyric, chaste desire. This conjunction of

10 For a reproduction of the entire painting after its recent restoration, and a recent general reading, see Janet Cox–Rearick in Bronzino. Painter and Poet at the Court of the Medici, ed. by Carlo Falciani and Antonio Natali (Florence: Mandragora, 2010), cat. IV.5, 210–11. It is telling that the restoration revealed that a leering and very alive satyr was initially envisioned where the playing putti now are. His burlesque presence was, in the final painting, distilled into the artfully animated mask. 11 Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. by Rosanna Bettarini, comm. by Paola Barocchi (Florence: SPES, 1966–87), vol. 6, 232. For a recent assessment of Lucrezia’s portrait and its pendant of her husband Bartolomeo, both in the Uffizi, see Carlo Falciani, “Bronzino and the Panciatichi,” in Falciani and Natali, Painter and Poet, 153–65, and in the same volume Falciani, cats. III.1–2, 166–69. Falciani lays particular stress on the manner in which Vasari consistently read Bronzino’s portraits as lifelike.

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Figure 10.3: Agnolo Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, and Jealousy (detail), ca. 1550, oil on panel, 192 × 140 cm, Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

religion and romance, piety and Petrarchan poetics, seems amplified by the gold and silver chain around her neck, which reads as a romantic gift from her husband Bartolomeo, portrayed by Bronzino in a noted pendant portrait. The chain’s silver rectangles present the inscription “Amour dure sans fin:” “Love endures without end.” This certainly seems an intimate romantic sentiment – though not strictly speaking a Petrarchan one, as the language of choice is French. The Panciatichi had indeed spent much time recently in France on family business; it would later be exposed that they had also fallen under the spell of French Protestantism. In Lucrezia’s necklace, hiding in plain sight, Elizabeth Cropper has recently discerned a reference to the highly charged, passionate religious lyrics of French reform writers such as Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples and particularly Clement Marot.12

12 Elizabeth Cropper, “Reading Bronzino’s Florentine Portraits,” in Painter and Poet, 2010, 245–55, 249–54. Cropper developed the argument in “Holy Face, Human Face: Thoughts on Bronzino’s ‘Lutheran’ Panciatichi Portraits,” in Synergies in Visual Culture: Bildkulturen im

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Figure 10.4: Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi, ca. 1541–1545, oil on panel, 102 × 83.2 cm, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

If we follow Cropper’s contention, the courtly mask of Mannerism’s “stylish style” (or “stylized style”) veils here a profound heterodox profession of faith dissimulated through the artifice of artistic codes that play with artistic and poetic expectations. Even before Cropper’s radical rereading of the work, Robert Williams remarked acutely that Lucrezia’s gaze, habitually perceived as blank and distancing, “might just as well be interpreted as direct and sincere.”13 Such repositionings of Lucrezia’s portrait find contextual buttressing in some other recent studies of Bronzino’s portraits, exemplified by Julia Siemon’s reading of the Ugolino Martelli of ca. 1537. Siemon argues that the young man’s insistent gesture to a particular passage in a Greek edition of Homer’s Iliad – the opening

Dialog, ed. by Manuela De Giorgi, Annette Hoffmann, and Nicola Suthor (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2013), 45–56. 13 Robert Williams, “Bronzino’s Gaze,” in The Beholder: The Experience of Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Thomas Frangenberg and Robert Williams (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 87–102, 92–93.

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of Book Nine, in which the Greeks conclude that they must not abandon their campaign despite grievous setbacks – registers a dissimulated republican profession of faith in the period immediately after republican hopes were raised by the assassination of Duke Alessandro and then dashed by the defeat of republican forces at the Battle of Montemurlo in 1537.14 In such a reading the famous “Martelli David” anchoring the courtyard behind Ugolino becomes not just a prized family possession – a work then believed to be by Donatello, the most renowned Florentine sculptor before Michelangelo – but a resonant image of republican sympathies. As is and was well known, the Florentine republic had long cultivated a profound investment in David as a symbol of the God-inspired underdog who triumphs over monstrous tyrants.15 Ugolino’s delicate, adolescent form casts him implicitly as a new youthful David from the House of Martelli, a David for a new age. I am not suggesting here any straightforward return to a neo-Freudian or neo-Marxist notion of Mannerism as an art of psychological angst and alienation, an approach effectively foreclosed by Shearman’s trenchant if largely implicit critique of blind spots and ahistorical investments inherent in much of this early-tomid twentieth-century historiography. But the recent rereadings of some of the portraits of the “quintessential Mannerist” do hint that we could begin to speak with more historical sensitivity and precision about a distinct sixteenth-century form of “alienation” in a place like early Ducal Florence, in which the stresses weighing on Italy from the third decade of the century were writ particularly large. An evolving court culture was violently laid over what had been a republican civic culture that had allowed space for the cultivation of a range of thought, acid polemic, and biting wit. The developing need for a new level of prudence and dissimulation in the face of intertwined political, religious, and cultural ferment in Florence could certainly create fertile ground for experiments in employing the excessive artifice of which contemporary art was capable to facilitate the excessive masking that was becoming imperative. Some of Bronzino’s enameled portraits hint that we need to renew our efforts, as Stephen Campbell wrote of the

14 Julia Siemon, “Bronzino Before the Medici,” lecture, November 4, 2015, Frick Collection, https://www.frick.org/interact/julia_siemon_bronzino_medici and soon to be published. The segment running roughly from 50–55 minutes deals most directly with the passage from Homer. The portrait is now in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; for a reproduction in an easily available source, see Maurice Brock, Bronzino, trans. by David Poole Radzinowicz and Christine Schultz-Touge (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), 125. 15 Siemon, “Bronzino Before the Medici,” acknowledges a tendency in scholarship to see David as recurrently appropriated by the Medici, but stresses that during the 1530s the figure was resolutely and exclusively republican.

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painter’s late Martyrdom of San Lorenzo (Figure 10.5), “to address links between historical dispensations of the self and the self-conscious art” of Mannerism. In the same essay, Campbell stressed that while Mannerism since Shearman has often been conceptualized as “an art of complacency, an ornament to power,” its very self-consciousness about art, its absorption in artistic discourses that did not always map seamlessly onto the religious or political narratives it was still generally tasked to represent, allowed style the potential for a new kind of agency in which the work of art could point “to a cleavage between its own processes of making meaning, its own internal theoretical concerns, and the political and religious institutions it was designed to serve.”16 More generally, Marcia Hall has underscored that style, “as much as iconography, can be a bearer of meaning. Style may be even more subtle and therefore persuasive a tool than iconography because it can operate on the viewer at a subconscious level. In the Cinquecento it became possible to choose a style to suit the occasion.”17 These observations encourage us to turn from portraiture to the Martyrdom of San Lorenzo itself. While Campbell, Carlo Falciani, and I have all recently published on aspects of the Martyrdom, it is worth revisiting a few points, for the questions I have been sketching seem crystallized and even self-consciously staged here by Bronzino.18 A ducal commission for Florence’s basilica of San Lorenzo, Bronzino’s monumental fresco was envisioned as a Medici-sponsored, Michelangelesque spectacle of sacred historia. But it has confused and disturbed observers virtually from its unveiling in 1569. In the guise of an homage to Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, Bronzino created a compositional thicket of figures that actively embody and radicalize those characteristics most critiqued in Michelangelo’s controversial fresco; figures are inappropriately nude, artifice appears valued above clarity, and sacred history is contaminated by other discourses. It is as if, as Campbell put it, “Bronzino effectively embraces and affirms some of the most negative criticism of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, and by this means the language of Michelangelo is made to serve ends not finally congruent with the academic, the institutional, and the political.”19

16 Campbell, “Counter-Reformation Polemic,” 99–100. 17 Marcia Hall, “Politics and the Relief-like Style,” in The Translation of Raphael’s Roman Style, ed. by Henk Th. van Veen (Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 1–20, 2. 18 For the current state of the question, see Campbell, “Counter-Reformation Polemic”; Carlo Falciani, “On Religious Painting, but Also on ‘sides, stomachs, etc.’,” in Falciani and Natali, Painter and Poet, 277–95, 290–93, and Stuart Lingo, “Looking Askance: Agnolo Bronzino’s ‘Martyrdom of San Lorenzo’ Between the Medici, Mercury and Machiavelli,” in Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate, n.s., 68, no. 3 (July-September 2015): 217–42. 19 Campbell, “Counter-Reformation Polemic,” 113.

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Figure 10.5: Agnolo Bronzino, The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, 1565–1569, fresco, Florence, San Lorenzo. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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In a recent essay I have argued that Bronzino discretely confirms the destabilizing nature of his intentions by means of a clue in the right background, where a knot of bystanders gawks at a colossal statue of Hercules – a symbol of the Medici – and a woman is encouraged by her male companions to observe the giant’s genitalia, ineffectually obscured by his garland of golden leaves (Figure 10.6). Based on a tradition of Florentine burlesque responses to public sculpture, this vignette hidden in plain sight offers discerning viewers a way of reading Bronzino’s other Michelangelesque nudes that could undermine the fresco’s official status as an edifying narrative for the Florentine church and the Granducal regime.20 While the ostensible historia of Bronzino’s fresco is the martyrdom of a saint, we are introduced by the peering woman and her companions into a decentering counter-narrative, in which a (mis)reading of a monumental and symbolically significant figure models an alternate, un- and even anti-official mode of engaging a highly public state-sponsored painting. Once our viewing is thus redirected, we become aware of how the straining, contorting figures throughout the fresco exhibit themselves to our gaze – and given the ostensible “historia,” we struggle to understand why so many of these figures are nude, including courtiers of the tyrannical ruler, like the muscled, thrusting figure who has donned a stylish contemporary hat and grasped his baton of command but seems to have forgotten the rest of his costume (Figure 10.7). Here Michelangelo’s ideal nude is contaminated with fashion and the everyday (and conversely the social realm is contaminated by non-quotidian nudity) and the presence of such figures in the fresco was condemned by contemporaries scandalized by the transgression of the decorum appropriate – critically – to the Medici state rather than the sacred setting. In Raffaello Borghini’s important art critical dialogue Il Riposo of 1584, which stages extended debates between a group of friends discussing the recent art of Florence, one interlocutor pointedly remarks that Bronzino’s depiction of courtiers with no clothes is “highly indecorous for those who serve great princes.”21 Bronzino’s motives for such pictorial subversion remain unclear, and it is by no means evident that overt political subversion was intended. Indeed, it might well be that the principal polemic was specifically artistic and cultural. As I have argued, Bronzino seems to have been invested in a vision of the Florentine artist – based in part on Michelangelo – that absolutely privileged the artist’s inventive

20 See Lingo, “Looking Askance,” 224–38 for further discussion, and 224–25 for assessment of a particular satirical text by Machiavelli, his “Capitoli per una compagnia di piacere.” 21 Raffaello Borghini, Il Riposo (Florence: Marescotti, 1584), 62: “il Bronzino, che sentendosi molto valere nel fare ignudi, ha fatto l’imperadore . . . intorniato da’ suoi baroni tutti nudi, o con pochi panni ricoperti: cosa molto disconvenevole a persone, che servano superbi Principi.” For further discussion, see Lingo, “Looking Askance,” 225–26.

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Figure 10.6: Agnolo Bronzino, The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, detail. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

imagination, even if this might undermine the manner in which powerful political or ecclesiastical patrons desired to instrumentalize works of art.22 In such a reading, Bronzino’s is a dramatic rearguard action, in the first post-Tridentine years, in defense of what Alexander Nagel has termed an “indeterminacy” in much sixteenth-century painting, an increasing contention since around 1500 that art is a poetry and a philosophy that demands sustained contemplation and may insist on it by defamiliarizing the conventions and iconographies through which painting heretofore made itself transparent.23

22 See Lingo, “Looking Askance,” particularly 235–38. 23 Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 30–36, 41–72, developing arguments initially advanced in Nagel, “Structural Indeterminacy in Early Sixteenth-Century Italian Painting,” in Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art, ed. by Alexander Nagel and Lorenzo Pericolo (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 17–42. Stephen Campbell, “Naturalism and the Venetian ‘Poesia’; Grafting, Metaphor, and

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Figure 10.7: Agnolo Bronzino, The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, detail. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

There remains nonetheless something unsettling to political decorum in Bronzino’s overdetermined nudes in the Martyrdom, as Borghini acutely recognized while the fresco was still new, and Carlo Falciani has detected an irreverent, even subversive quality in Bronzino’s peculiar investment in an exaggerated and histrionic Michelangelesque figural rhetoric for San Lorenzo.24 Following Campbell, one could easily read in this overwrought and often self-sabotaging rhetoric, epitomized in the naked courtier with his plumed hat, a resistance to the “academic, the institutional, and the political” – in this case the Medici project of appropriating Michelangelo’s elevated and difficult visual language to the celebration of their

Embodiment in Giorgione, Titian, and the Campagnolas,” in Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art, 115–42, probes some related issues. 24 Falciani, “On religious painting . . ., ” in Painter and Poet, 277–95, 290. By contrast, Zygmut Wazbinski, L’Accademia Medicea del Disegno a Firenze nel Cinquecento. Idea e Istituzione (Florence: Olschki, 1987), vol. 1, 197–213, reads Bronzino’s imagery as a straightforward encomium to Michelangelo.

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regime. Moreover, it may be telling that Bronzino so emphasized what I have called a “thicket of figures” in the foreground of his composition, where a frieze of interlocked nudes fills the entire lower half of the fresco and pushes forward toward the picture plane. Revisiting Craig Hugh Smyth’s reading of Roman imperial relief sculpture as critical for salient strands of maniera painting, Marcia Hall has argued that the “relief-like style,” as it reached maturity in papal Rome around the death of Raphael, often served princely political purposes, and was pointedly refused in Florence until Francesco Salviati – coming from Rome, and resisted by local artists – employed it emphatically for the Triumph of Camillus, designed to celebrate Duke Cosimo I in the Sala dell’Udienza in the Palazzo Vecchio.25 If Hall is correct, Bronzino’s distinctive insistence on employing the relief-like style in the foreground of the Martyrdom – yet framing his figural frieze as a theatrical insert by setting it before virtuoso perspectives, complicating its accustomed forms by interjecting radically foreshortened figures within it, and offering up from the depths of the painting a model of unsanctioned viewing of the heroic nude – might offer a telling instance of style “as a bearer of meaning” in the fraught cultural politics of Florence.26 We may never find ourselves entirely comfortable with such a reading, of course; that is the nature of the mannerist art of masking. Where it exists, it always finds means to dissimulate itself. Besides, and characteristically of this art, it is perhaps individual figures and interactions in the Martyrdom of San Lorenzo that offer the most provocative hints of possible counter-official understandings of the composition as a whole. While the courtier with no clothes is surely salient among such figures, Bronzino’s most evident hint about alternative means of

25 Hall, “Politics and the Relief-like Style,” 8, 14–15. Hall stresses that Camillus was a republican hero; in her argument, Cosimo, by having himself figured in the guise of Camillus yet in the style of the Roman imperium, effectively employed style to subvert iconography. Intriguing new reflections on a range of possible uses of the relief-like style in Northern Europe – from pro-imperial to reformist and anti-Papal – are found in Arthur J. DiFuria, “The Netherlandish Relief-Like Style in the Age of Art,” in this volume. 26 Bronzino’s references in the Martyrdom’s figural frieze are multivalent and cannot be easily encapsulated. Recurrent strongly foreshortened figures within a relief composition, for instance, can be found in Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina: critically, a Florentine republican image on the other side of the development and instrumentalization of the relief-like style for princely purposes in the wake of the death of Raphael, and certainly one of Bronzino’s points of reference. Furthermore, well after the full maturation of the style in the circle of Raphael, Michelangelo would insist on numerous sharply foreshortened figures in the Last Judgment, in contrast to – for instance – Salviati in the Triumph of Camillus, painted shortly thereafter. I will revisit the knot of implications Bronzino raises in his composition in my forthcoming book, Bronzino’s Bodies and Mannerism’s Masks.

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engaging institutional historie involves the misprision of the Hercules figure that towers directly behind the tyrant, a misprision that may even have prompted insightful observers to recall the satirical polemics that had greeted the Medicisponsored installation of Baccio Bandinelli’s lugubrious Hercules and Cacus in the Piazza della Signoria some decades earlier.27 Further, as Campbell and others have remarked, the pose of the tyrant himself is modeled on that of the statue generally identified as Giuliano de’ Medici from Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel, just across the church from Bronzino’s fresco. And if the contorted male figure below the tyrant represents, as Campbell argues, Justice among the other virtues,28 the extravagant impossibility of his pose – as it were attempting to sit and finding that there is no seat – may employ the exceptional artifice of Mannerist style to speak to the impossible position of Justice amidst this scene of injustice. The figure’s improbable pose is conditioned by the fact that Bronzino has fashioned it as a highly inventive, free adaptation of the pose of Michelangelo’s Night, which adorned Giuliano’s tomb (Figure 10.8). By this date, Michelangelo’s decision in a poem of ca. 1545–1546 to cast Night’s troubled sleep as a response to a “hurt and shame” many historians read as a thinly-veiled reference to Medici rule in Florence was well known, and the poems had been published by Vasari himself already in the 1550 edition of the Vite.29 This understanding – with the weight of Bronzino’s visual references – might induce us to step into the Medici Chapel itself. The iconographic indefiniteness

27 Lingo, “Looking Askance,” 224; for more on Bandinelli and the tradition of poetic responses to sculpture in the Piazza della Signoria, see John Shearman, Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 44–58. For the question of the prominence of the figure vis a vis the historia in much Mannerist art, see Stuart Lingo, “Figuring History at the End of the Renaissance: Notes on Agnolo Bronzino,” in What was History Painting and What is it Now?, ed. by Mark Phillips and Jordan Bear (Montreal, London and Chicago: McGill University Press), 2019. 28 Campbell, “Counter-Reformation Polemic,” 109. Regarding Giuliano, an alternative tradition of reading this figure as Lorenzo, crystallized in Richard Trexler and Mary Lewis, “Two Captains and Three Kings: New Light on the Medici Chapel,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 4 (1981): 91–177 has recently been reprised by James O. Ward, Hidden in Plain Sight: Covert Criticism of the Medici in Renaissance Florence (New York: Peter Lang, 2019). For more on Ward, see n. 47 below. 29 See The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation, ed. and trans. by James M. Saslow (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 419: “Caro m’ è ’l sonno, e più l’ esser di sasso, / mentre che ’l danno e la vergogna dura; / non veder, non sentir m ’è gran ventura; / però non mi destar, deh, parla basso.” The epigram was composed in 1545–1546 in response to an encomiastic quatrain in praise of Night by a Florentine letterato, Giovanni di Carlo Strozzi, which extolled the figure’s latent life. As Saslow notes, the political undertone of Michelangelo’s response seems to have been picked up immediately in the work of the strongly republican Florentine exile

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Figure 10.8: Michelangelo, Night, ca. 1524–1534, marble, Florence, Medici Chapel. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

that Michelangelo built into most figures there disturbed some commentators already in the sixteenth century, chief among them the speaker in Borghini’s Il Riposo who complained of Bronzino’s nude courtiers.30 Night alone exhibits significant iconographic attributes. Yet these may effectively decenter meaning even as they ostensibly stabilize it, for they include a grotesque mask that suddenly reveals itself to be inhabited by a shadowy, potentially monstrous face. Night’s haunted mask raises real questions about any attempt to read the frieze of screaming masks that surrounds the entire chapel as merely decorative or “ornamental,” though both mask and frieze certainly participate in that Mannerist investment in the grotesque and the bizarre as privileged sites of artifice; it is no accident the most artful figures in Bronzino’s own great Christ in Limbo of

Donato Giannotti (also a personal friend of the artist), who terms Michelangelo’s epigram “very relevant to our times” (Donato Giannotti, Dialoghi di Donato Giannotti, ed. by Dioclecio Redig de Campos (Florence: Sansoni, 1939), 44–45). For Vasari’s publication of the texts (without an ascription of the initial poem to Strozzi or any engagement with possible political valences) see Vasari, Le Vite, vol. 6, 58–59. 30 Borghini, Il Risposo, 65–66.

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1552 (Figure 10.9) include not only the ideal female beauties in the foreground but also the writhing demon spinning out of control above Christ. Nonetheless, it remains daunting to attempt any comprehensive reading of “meaning” in the Medici masks, though I find Charles Dempsey’s poetic understanding of them as linked to the larvae, the deceiving masks and phantoms of those human dreams and ambitions to which Death puts an end, particularly rich and productive.31 To read the masks in this register, however, inevitably opens possibilities for unsanctioned reflection – for why should a chapel glorifying the Medici recognize, even stress, the actual fragility of their dynastic aspirations in the 1520s and early 1530s? There is a further, and perhaps more pointed, question. As is well known, Michelangelo’s architecture for the chapel is both a transformation of and an homage to that of his great predecessor in the Florentine tradition, Filippo Brunelleschi, who had designed the initial Medici sacristy-chapel at San Lorenzo nearly a century earlier. Some striking similarities are evident in any comparison of the works. Among the evident differences, however, is a critical shift in liturgical arrangement. Brunelleschi’s altar is placed near the back wall of his sacristy’s little altar chapel, and the priest thus faces that wall to officiate, as was the norm in the later Middle Ages and much of the Renaissance. In such cases the rear wall or the back of the altar itself would generally host a sizeable altarpiece, a target both for the priest’s gaze and for the gaze of congregants behind him in the main body of the sacristy. Michelangelo transforms, indeed reverses, this arrangement in the Medici Chapel. Following Early Christian precedent, he moves the altar forward to the threshold of the altar chapel, thereby compelling the priest to enter the chapel, turn, and celebrate Mass facing out towards any congregation that might assemble. In a private funeral chapel such as this, the priest faces in the first instance the simulacra of all those for whom he is to pray (Figure 10.10). While Michelangelo’s unfinished tour de force is known today principally for the flanking wall tombs of the Medici Dukes Giuliano and Lorenzo, the original 31 Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 219–31. For an autobiographical reading of the mask in relation to Michelangelo’s complicated ties to the Medici – a reading which does not, however, perceive the mask as inhabited, viewing it simply as infused with the vitality of the artist’s self-portrait – see John Paoletti, “Michelangelo’s Masks,” The Art Bulletin 74, no. 3 (September 1992): 423–40. Dempsey, by contrast, insists on a presence behind and within the mask: “startled eyes” which led him to recall “Politian’s reference in the Stanze to sogni dentro alle lor larve, or dreams hidden behind their deceiving masks” (220–21). He concludes with a subtle poetic reading that views Michelangelo as paying the “homage of one Florentine poet to another” to his mentor Lorenzo il Magnifico while sidestepping the glorification of the dynastic ambitions of the house of Medici (231).

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Figure 10.9: Agnolo Bronzino, Christ in Limbo, 1552, oil on panel, 443 × 291 cm, Florence, Museo dell’Opera di Santa Croce. Photo: Scala /Art Resource, NY.

scheme also envisioned a massive double monument to the by-now-mythical figure of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the great Maecenas of late fifteenth-century Florence, and to his brother Giuliano, on the wall opposite the altar. As the priest looked out toward the so-called Magnifici tomb, an august Madonna and Child (Figure 10.11), flanked by the Medici patron SS. Cosmas and Damian (these latter executed by Michelangelo’s assistants Giovanni Montorsoli and Raffaello da Montelupo), would have appeared as a virtual altarpiece, with the Madonna at the center of the priest’s field of vision. So why, once Michelangelo had reconceived the chapel’s architecture to allow the celebrant’s gaze to take in all the Medici for whom he prayed during Mass, and to direct his prayers across the chapel to the Virgin and Child – why, after all that, does the Child so definitively turn away, in sharp distinction from expectations exemplified in a long tradition of Madonna Lactans imagery that runs from Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s remarkable Madonna del Latte of ca. 1330 to an altarpiece nearly contemporary with the initial planning

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Figure 10.10: Michelangelo, Medici Chapel, Florence, San Lorenzo, 1519–1534. Photo: Alinari/ Art Resource, NY.

for the Medici Chapel, the Madonna del Latte of ca. 1518 by Michelangelo’s friend Bugiardini himself (Figure 10.12)?32 One must be circumspect in posing the question in this provocative manner, not least because it is well-known that Michelangelo frequently pursued deeply felt, idiosyncratic excavations of signifying form in his recurrent explorations of fundamental themes and figures in Christian art. We will return to this point. Moreover, in the case of the Medici Chapel it has been remarked that the distinctive composition of the Medici Madonna may derive from reflection on the venerated Trecento Madonna di San Zanobi in the basilica of San Lorenzo itself, a Madonna del Latte which may have held particular significance for

32 For Bugiardini, see Laura Pagnotta, Giuliano Bugiardini (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 1987), cat. 30, 204–5, and plate II, with a dating “intorno alla metà del secondo decennio del secolo.” Bugiardini’s friendship with Michelangelo is stressed in Vasari, Le Vite, vol. 5, 279. For Lorenzetti, see most recently Antonio Buoncristiani and Marilena Caciorgna, La Madonna del latte di Ambrogio Lorenzetti (Livorno: Sillabe, 2014). For a recent assessment of the history of the image type, see Jacopo Cassigoli, Ecce mater: La Madonna del latte e le sante galattofore: Arte, iconografia e devozione in Toscana fra Trecento e Cinquecento (Florence: Nicomp, 2009).

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Figure 10.11: Michelangelo, Medici Madonna, ca. 1524–1534, marble, Medici Chapel, Florence, San Lorenzo. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Michelangelo’s patron Pope Clement VII.33 The connection is certainly plausible, and would represent yet another instance of Michelangelo’s recurrent engagement with archaic models. Yet ultimately such a filiation would only highlight the exceptional nature of Michelangelo’s composition, for even the vigorous, twisting Child of the Madonna di San Zanobi only turns into profile. The beholder can still see His face and eyes, while His mother looks directly out of the panel, if with a dreamy, distant gaze. Furthermore, the cluster of surviving drawings for the Magnifici tomb indicate a probing consideration of varied motifs before Michelangelo’s final turn toward his extreme solution.

33 Sheryl Reiss, “A Medieval Source for Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 50, no. 3 (1987): 394–400. Reiss notes (400 n. 25) that Cardinal Giulio/Pope Clement’s middle name was Zanobi and that in his tenure as bishop of Florence he would have seen himself as San Zanobi’s successor. See further Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 106.

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Figure 10.12: Giuliano Bugiardini, Madona del Latte, ca. 1518, oil on panel, 121 × 76 cm, Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.

Michelangelo’s lifelong obsession with envisioning and reenvisioning the representation of critical moments of Christ’s passion has long been a focus of art historical interpretation. A parallel if less studied preoccupation, however, involves his analogous reflection on the theme of the Madonna and Child. Already in what is perhaps his earliest surviving sculpture, the Madonna of the Steps of ca. 1492, Michelangelo took the unanticipated decision to portray the Christ Child falling asleep while turned inward to nurse at his mother’s breast. About a decade later, in a drawing generally associated with the Bruges Madonna instead of the Madonna of the Medici Chapel, Michelangelo experimented again with the idea of the inwardly focused nursing Child before elaborating the remarkable invention in which the Child exits his mother’s lap to step forward and down toward the

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altar.34 Michelangelo’s ultimate decision to have the Child move forward here, however, takes on particular weight in the context of the altarpiece. It is as if Michelangelo had a personal propensity to explore the intimacy between the Virgin and Child at the expense of Christ’s engagement with the beholder, yet accepted at a certain point in the ideation of the Bruges Madonna that a cult image called for a heightened sense of interaction and presence. The relevant drawings for the Magnifici tomb are not numerous, and most are copies by other artists. Nonetheless, a few points can be made. The initial block for the Madonna and Child was cut in 1521, when the Medici ruled Florence with a silk glove, preserving many trappings of the Republic.35 But in the years that followed, Michelangelo outlined a range of possibilities for figures within this block. As best we can tell, by April 1521 Michelangelo had arrived at a point recorded in multiple copies of a lost original drawing for the Magnifici tomb in which the Child steps forward between the Madonna’s legs as in the Bruges Madonna but turns sideways to reach for a book she holds.36 In an extended study of the surviving drawings for the Chapel, Andrew Morrogh has dated a bit later than this an autograph drawing in the Louvre that appears to register a solution more akin to the Bruges Madonna, with the rapidly-sketched Child apparently – though it is hard to be sure – advancing toward us and the Madonna’s arms and hands positioned more as they had been in the earlier sculpture. Yet another drawing (again a copy) around the same date, meanwhile, shows the Child embracing the Virgin in a rather traditional manner, and up on her lap.37 This drawing, like the 1521 conception in which the Child turns to reach for the book, presents Him from a lateral viewpoint – but certainly not actively turned away from the beholder. And then there is an intriguing sheet in the British Museum that proposes two varied ideas sketched in pen and ink in which it is clear that Michelangelo was considering – whether for the Medici Madonna or some other project – a twisting Child who nonetheless is oriented

34 Michael Hirst, Michelangelo and His Drawings (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), 33 and figure 40. 35 See Nicholas Scott Baker, The Fruit of Liberty: Political Culture in the Florentine Renaissance, 1480–1550 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2013), for extensive discussion of these years. Baker has been criticized, however, for stressing continuity over rupture in the years around the rise of the Medici duchy. For more on related issues, see n. 38. 36 Andrew Morrogh, “The Magnifici Tomb: A Key Project in Michelangelo’s Architectural Career,” Art Bulletin 74, no. 4 (December 1992): 567–98, 578, and 579, figure 11 for one example (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Parker 349). 37 Morrogh, “Magnifici Tomb,” 585, figure 19 (Stockholm, National-museum, CC 470). For the Louvre drawing, Morrogh, 1992, 583 and figure 16 (Louvre 686v).

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outward (Figure 10.13).38 Finally, the famed drawing from the Casa Buonarroti (Figure 10.14) depicts the Child now turning definitively toward His mother’s breast – though this invention may well be intended for another work, as a closely related drawing includes a sketched figure of St. Joseph (Figure 10.15), and there are further indications that Michelangelo was ruminating on compositions involving the Holy Family in drawings dated variously from the mid-1520s to 1530.39

Figure 10.13: Michelangelo, sketches for the Madonna and Child, ca. 1524–1526 (?), pen and ink, 39.9 × 26.8 cm, London, British Museum. Photo: The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY.

38 See most recently Carmen Bambach, Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), 131, who intriguingly dates the sheet fairly early, to 1523–1524. 39 See for instance the Getty Museum Holy Family (93.GB.51, recto; Bambach, Divine Draftsman, 158 and figure 140). The Getty drawing depicts the Child definitively turning away from the beholder, and is dated to either ca. 1530 (Getty) or “mid-1520s to 1530” (Bambach, Divine Draftsman, 158). Bambach, Divine Draftsman, 157, considers the Casa Buonnaroti drawing an unfinished cartoon perhaps intended for use by another artist, and the important British Museum drawing that is so close to the Medici Madonna yet includes Joseph (figure 15) as similarly intended for some untraced project.

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Figure 10.14: Michelangelo, Madonna and Child, ca. 1524–1526 (?), black and red chalk and heightening, 54.1 × 39.6 cm, Florence, Casa Buonarroti. Associazione Metamorfosi, Rome. Photo: Scala, Florence/Art Resource, NY.

Most scholars date the cluster of drawings we have just considered from the early through the mid-1520s, which is to say after Michelangelo received the block for the Madonna and Child and just before the Medici were expelled from the city and the tragic Third Republic was declared. One tacit motivation for this dating, however, seems the assumption that the Medici Madonna was definitively ideated in those years – an assumption that might benefit from further interrogation. As is well known, Michelangelo was a partisan of the Third Republic, working to shore up the city’s defenses against the inevitable coming siege, and progress on the Medici Chapel appears to have come to a virtual standstill from 1527 through much of 1530. After the city and Republic fell to Medici and Imperial forces in August of 1530, the Medici compelled Michelangelo to return to work in the Chapel. There he labored – at first intensely, then it seems fitfully – for another four years before abandoning the project to flee to Rome, leaving most of the sculptures, including the Madonna, incomplete. In the end, we cannot precisely follow (or date) the arc of thought distilled in his

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Figure 10.15: Michelangelo, Holy Family, ca. 1524–1526 (?), black chalk, 31.4 × 18.9 cm, London, British Museum. The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY.

remarkable and haunting invention in the Medici Madonna. What we can say with some confidence, however, is that the order of a block for the group early in the project did not prevent Michelangelo from continuing to think through a variety of options in successive years before arriving at his ultimate conceptions, in which not only does the Child turn away from the priest but the Madonna looks neither at the priest, nor at the Child, nor at the Medici dead. Indeed, as Charles de Tolnay noted long ago in his foundational study of the chapel, the original dimensions of the block can still be perceived in the sculpture’s base; they reveal that while Michelangelo remained close to the block’s edge on the viewer’s left side, he has cut so deeply into the right side that significant alterations in composition might be suspected.40 40 Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo, vol. 3, The Medici Chapel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), 146: “originally Michelangelo wanted to execute a quite different group.” John Pope-Hennessy, Italian High Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture, 3rd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 25, views the poses of the Virgin and Child as so incongruous for their function

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Moreover, we are not without written evidence (always dear to an art historian!) that could support and develop de Tolnay’s suggestive visual observations. There is first the well-known letter of June 17, 1526, in which Michelangelo reported on progress on the statues in a manner which indicated that much remained to be accomplished, writing: “The four figures on the tombs, the four figures on the ground which are the rivers, and the two military leaders and Our Lady, who will go in the principal tomb, are the figures that I wish to sculpt with my own hand; and of these six have been started.”41 Later, Benedetto Varchi, a republican sympathizer and friend of the artist who was with him during much of the Third Republic and the siege, indicates both that work on the Chapel was effectively suspended during the Republic and that the transformation of the sacristy into recognizable form was a product of the early 1530s. In the Storia fiorentina, Varchi writes that Michelangelo returned to the chapel after the siege “more out of sheer fear than from any desire to work, not having seen, let alone lifted, a hammer or a chisel in many years; and very soon he changed the new sacristy of San Lorenzo in a new and marvelous manner and had adorned it with many very beautiful figures.”42 Other sources clarify that Michelangelo returned to work with a vengeance and within a year or so had nearly expired from over-exertion. By September 29, 1531,

that he hypothesizes they were carved for the 1519 version of the Julius tomb and then moved to the Medici Chapel: “The focus of the Virgin’s gaze, therefore, may not, as we might now suppose, be an arbitrary point in the middle of the Chapel floor, but the dead body of the Pope.” Yet such a conclusion ignores that it would remain incongruous for the Child to turn from the Pope. Indeed, it is important that surviving drawings for the Julius tomb depict a standing Virgin with the Child who both regard the effigy of Julius (see for instance Bambach, Divine Draftsman, 94, figure 69). This is a format Michelangelo seems to have envisioned in the early planning for the Magnifici tomb as well, as in Morrogh, “Magnifici Tomb”, figure 8. 41 See Antonio Forcellino, Michelangelo: A Tormented Life, trans. by Allan Cameron (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), 177, citing Michelangelo Buonarroti, Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, 5 vols., posthumous edition of G. Poggi, ed. by Paola Barocchi and Renzo Ristori (Florence: SPESSansoni, 1965–1983), vol. 3 (1973), 227. Forcellino (179–80) argues strongly that the most significant carving on a number of the figures was carried out after the siege of Florence. See further below. Conversely, however, William Wallace, Michelangelo. The Artist, the Man, and His Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 159–60, narrates the events with a different emphasis that implies more work was accomplished between about 1525–1527. 42 Benedetto Varchi, Storia fiorentina, in Opere di Benedetto Varchi con le lettere di Gio. Battista Busini, 2 vols. (Milan: Nicolò Bettoni, 1834), vol. 2, 375, cited in Forcellino, Michelangelo, 323 n. 14. Even if critical carving occurred on the Madonna during the mid-1520s (see n. 37), Forcellino is at pains to stress that – despite some probable lingering personal loyalty to Pope Clement in these years – Michelangelo had already been associated with the ill-fated intellectual circle of the Orti Oricellari, some of whose luminaries were so anti-Medicean that they were implicated in a plot to assassinate Cardinal Giulio (who would become Pope Clement in 1523) in 1522.

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the artist appeared so reduced by ceaseless labor that his friend Giovan Battista Mini wrote with great concern: “Michelangelo seemed to me to be utterly exhausted and wasting away . . . Michelangelo will not live long, if he doesn’t do something about it. This is because he works a great deal, eats little and not well, and doesn’t even sleep.” It seems that Michelangelo’s health was becoming such a concern that even Pope Clement asked him to slow down and procure more assistance.43 This tightly imbricated cluster of suggestions and implications has never been much explored in the Michelangelo literature – though de Tolnay already remarked the distinctiveness of the ultimate solution for the Child, “unknown before Michelangelo.”44 He has been vigorously seconded by Rona Goffen. Both scholars, however, read Michelangelo’s composition in exclusively theological terms, stressing the devotional import of the Madonna del Latte as a quintessential affirmation of both Christ’s humanity and His mother’s maternal humility and charity.45 Yet even as she insists on this idea, Goffen is at pains to note that Christ turns toward an area of the Virgin’s chest that remains covered with heavy drapery, “drapery that seems more like sheets of metal than folds of fabric.”46 Thus, the very reading that emphasizes the fundamental significance of the Madonna del Latte to the chapel’s devotional and liturgical operation admits that Christ’s access to his mother’s breast remains blocked. As far as I know, no one has yet probed the political, rather than theological, implications that might attend Michelangelo’s increasingly idiosyncratic re-elaborations of this critical sculpture at the liturgical and devotional core of the Medici Chapel.47

43 Giovanni Battista Mini, letter to Bartolomeo Valori, in Barocchi and Ristori, Il Carteggio di Michelangelo, vol. 3 (1973), 329; English in Forcellino, Michelangelo, 80. On the same page Forcellino notes Clement’s preoccupation with Michelangelo’s declining health. 44 De Tolnay, Michelangelo, 71, 145. De Tolnay (144–45) points out that Benedetto Varchi, Due lezzioni (Florence, 1549), 117, links the Medici Madonna to passages in Dante’s Paradiso (23, 121–23 and 30, 82–84). While de Tolnay rightly notes the looseness of these associations, Varchi’s contention that two fleeting images from late in the Paradiso inspired Michelangelo’s distinctive invention constitutes a fascinating early instance of a perception that Michelangelo’s art was not only informed by an appreciation of Dante but by profound, fine-grained reading of particular poetic passages and images. 45 De Tolnay, Michelangelo, 71 (see further de Tolnay, Le Madonne di Michelangelo: Nuove ricerche sui disegni (Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1986), 145); Rona Goffen, “Mary’s Motherhood According to Leonardo and Michelangelo,” Artibus et Historiae 20, no. 40 (1999), 35–69. 46 Goffen, “Mary’s Motherhood,” 60. One must be circumspect here, however, given the unfinished condition of the sculpture. 47 Ward, Hidden in Plain Sight, was published after my edited text had been submitted, and I have therefore been unable to engage with it at any length. Ward does argue strongly for subversive elements in the Chapel, though he does not focus on the Madonna or the masks, concentrating rather on hypotheses regarding Lorenzo, Giuliano, and the Times of Day.

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I am fortunately out of space to investigate these problems more deeply, for I currently have little more to say; we are confronted with very open, not to say intractable, questions. But this is, perhaps, the real point I can make. Mannerism is, as John Shearman so forcefully perceived, a remarkably “stylish style,” and he persuasively linked it to developing Italian court cultures and to what the madrigal-publisher Fracesco Marcolini in 1536 memorably termed the “present more cultured age.”48 Mannerism’s artful discourses indeed initially thrived in court settings, where the “stylish style’s” spectacle of artifice, and its polished surfaces circumspect about depth, all appeared to visualize values esteemed and/or essential in courtly culture. But Mannerism’s very stylishness and sophistication gave it qualities that ecclesiastical observers frequently, and court observers occasionally, remarked with growing concern. Its artful evasion of transparency regarding official narratives and iconographies, its excessive art, worn like so many theatrical masks, did not ultimately lend itself to religious and political instrumentalization. Excessive art and its concomitant indeterminacy of content might too easily open possibilities for reflections resistant to surveillance and susceptible to dissimulation through masks of aesthetics, invention, and wit. From Night to the enigmatic figures of Bronzino’s San Lorenzo, a space was created to wonder: what were the forces that might animate those bodies of artifice, or inhabit that mask?

Works Cited Baader, Hannah. Das Selbst im Anderen: Sprachen der Freundschaft und die Kunst des Portraits 1370–1520. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2015. Baker, Nicholas Scott. The Fruit of Liberty: Political Culture in the Florentine Renaissance, 1480–1550. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2013. Bambach, Carmen. Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer. Metropolitan Museum of Art. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017. Exhibition catalog. Barocchi, Paola, and Renzo Ristori, eds. Il Carteggio di Michelangelo. 5 vols. Florence: Sansoni, 1965–1983. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Borghini, Raffaello. Il Riposo. Florence: Marescotti, 1584. Brock, Maurice. Bronzino. Translated by David Poole Radzinowicz and Christine Schultz-Touge. Paris: Flammarion, 2002. Brown, David Allan. Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Exhibition catalog.

48 Shearman, Mannerism, 137.

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Buoncristiani, Antonio and Marilena Caciorgna. La Madonna del latte di Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Livorno: Sillabe, 2014. Buonarotti, Michelangelo. The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation. Edited and translated by James M. Saslow. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991. Campbell, Stephen. “Counter-Reformation Polemic and Mannerist Counter-Aesthetics: Bronzino’s ‘Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence’ in San Lorenzo.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 46 (Autumn 2004): 98–119. Cassigoli, Jacopo. Ecce mater: La Madonna del latte e le sante galattofore: Arte, iconografia e devozione in Toscana fra Trecento e Cinquecento. Florence: Nicomp, 2009. Cecchi, Alessandro, and Antonio Natali, eds. L’officina della maniera. Varietà e fierezza nell’arte fiorentina del Cinquecento fra le due repubbliche, 1494–1530. Florence and Venice: Marsilio, 1996. Exhibition catalog. Cropper, Elizabeth. “Introduction.” In Craig Hugh Smyth, Mannerism and Maniera, 12–21. Vienna: IRSA, 1992. Cropper, Elizabeth. “Holy Face, Human Face: Thoughts on Bronzino’s ‘Lutheran’ Panciatichi Portraits.” In Synergies in Visual Culture: Bildkulturen im Dialog, edited by Manuela De Giorgi, Annette Hoffmann, and Nicola Suthor, 45–56. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2013. Cropper, Elizabeth. “The Decline and Rise of Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: Mannerism and Modernity.” In Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: Diverging Paths of Mannerism, edited by Carlo Falciani and Antonio Natali, 343–57. Florence: Mandragora, 2014. Exhibition catalog. Dempsey, Charles. Inventing the Renaissance Putto. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. De Tolnay, Charles. Michelangelo. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948. De Tolnay, Charles. Le Madonne di Michelangelo: Nuove ricerche sui disegni. Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1986. Falciani, Carlo and Antonio Natali, eds. Bronzino: Painter and Poet at the Court of the Medici. Florence: Mandragora, 2010. Exhibition catalog. Forcellino, Antonio. Michelangelo: A Tormented Life. Translated by Allan Cameron. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Freedberg, Sydney. “Observations on the Painting of the Maniera.” Art Bulletin 47 (1965): 187–97. Friedlaender, Walter. Mannerism and Anti-Mannerism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965. Giannotti, Donato. Dialoghi di Donato Giannotti. Edited by Dioclecio Redig de Campos. Florence: Sansoni, 1939. Goffen, Rona. “Mary’s Motherhood According to Leonardo and Michelangelo.” Artibus et Historiae 20, no. 40 (1999): 35–69. Hauser, Arnold. Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965. Hirst, Michael. Michelangelo and His Drawings. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988. Lingo, Stuart. “Looking Askance: Agnolo Bronzino’s Martyrdom of San Lorenzo Between the Medici, Mercury and Machiavelli.” Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate, n.s., 68, no. 3 (2015): 217–42. Lingo, Stuart. “Figuring History at the End of the Renaissance: Notes on Agnolo Bronzino.” In The Evolution of a Genre: History Painting, Traditional and Modern. A Clark Colloquium, edited by Mark Phillips and Jordan Bear. Toronto: McGill University Press, forthcoming.

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Morrogh, Andrew. “The Magnifici Tomb: A Key Project in Michelangelo’s Architectural Career.” Art Bulletin 74, no. 4 (1992): 567–98. Nagel, Alexander. Michelangelo and the Reform of Art. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Nagel, Alexander. The Controversy of Renaissance Art. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. Natali, Antonio. La Piscina di Betsaida. Movimenti nell’arte fiorentina del Cinquecento. Florence: Maschietto and Musolino, 1995. Paoletti, John. “Michelangelo’s Masks.” Art Bulletin 74, no. 3 (1992): 423–40. Pagnotta, Laura. Giuliano Bugiardini. Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 1987. Parker, Karl. Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum, 2 Vols. Oxford, 1956. Pope-Hennessy, John. Italian High Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture. 3rd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Reiss, Sheryl. “A Medieval Source for Michelangelo’s Medici Madonna.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 50, no. 3 (1987): 394–400. Shearman, John. Mannerism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967. Shearman, John. Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Siemon, Julia. “Bronzino Before the Medici.” Lecture. Frick Collection, 2015, https://www. frick.org/interact/julia_siemon_bronzino_medici. Trexler, Richard and Mary Lewis. “Two Captains and Three Kings: New Light on the Medici Chapel.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 4 (1981): 91–177. Varchi, Benedetto. Due lezzioni. Florence, 1549. Varchi, Benedetto. Storia fiorentina. In Opere di Benedetto Varchi con le lettere di Gio. Battista Busini. 2 vols. Milan: Nicolò Bettoni, 1834. Vasari, Giorgio. Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568. Edited by Rosanna Bettarini and commentary by Paola Barocchi. Florence: SPES, 1966–87. Wallace, William. Michelangelo. The Artist, the Man, and His Times. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Ward, James O. Hidden in Plain Sight: Covert Criticism of the Medici in Renaissance Florence. New York: Peter Lang, 2019. Waszbinski, Zygmut, L’Accademia Medicea del Disegno a Firenze nel Cinquecento. 2 Vols. Florence: Olschki, 1987. Williams, Robert. “Bronzino’s Gaze.” In The Beholder: The Experience of Art in Early Modern Europe, edited by Thomas Frangenberg and Robert Williams, 87–102. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006. Wir Sind Maske. Edited by Silvia Ferino-Pagden. Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2009. Exhibition catalog. Zerner, Henri. “Observations on the Use of the Concept of Mannerism.” In The Meaning of Mannerism, edited by Franklin W. Robinson and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., 105–21. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1972.

Part 4: Reform

Jonathan Kline

Chapter 11 Order and the Anagogic Approach of the Mind to God: On the Philosophers in Raphael’s Disputa Ergo et nos, Cherubicam in terries vitam emulantes, per morale scientiam affectuum impetus cohercentes, per dialecticam rationis caliginem discutientes, quasi ignorantiae et vitorum eluentes sordes animam purgemus, ne aut affectus temere debacchentur, aut ratio imprudens quandoque deliret. Tum bene compisitam ac expiatam animam naturalis philosophiae lumine perfundamus, ut postremo divinarum rerum eam cognition perficiamus.1

Some years ago, I sat in Marcia Hall’s old office, on Temple University’s Main Campus in North Philadelphia, and, with some trepidation, sought to convince her that on a recent trip to Rome I had found Plato and Aristotle standing among the theologians in Raphael’s Disputa. Marcia was then my graduate advisor and had been my undergraduate mentor, during which time she led me and five others in a senior seminar on Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura frescoes. When I had finished my explanation, and after some moments of quiet thought, Marcia said, simply, “Why has no one else seen this?” So saying, she set me to a task that, I hope, may last a lifetime – to see, but also to explain, from perspectives both historical and historiographic, why we both see and do not see what is present before us in any given work of art. I offer, here, to Marcia and to all those who will come to this volume dedicated to her and to her lifetime of scholarship, an advance on that observation that I made some years ago – the claim that Plato and Aristotle do stand among the theologians in the so-called Disputa – and some words on why it is that the syncretic themes that characterize the program of frescoes decorating the walls and ceiling of the Stanza della Segnatura have been largely overlooked in the years, the centuries, since they were first painted. Of course, it is not simply the identification of figures that will prove most significant – not simply the statement that philosophers appear together with theologians in the Disputa – but the understanding of why they are there and what their presence signifies with regard to the meaning of that fresco and in relation to the program of frescoes that decorate the Stanza della

1 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man: A New Translation and Commentary, ed. Francesco Borghesi, Michael Papio, and Massimo Riva (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 142. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-012

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Segnatura. It is, I believe, the mark of Raphael’s genius that his message is not conveyed simply through gatherings of distinct populations, arranged into novel compositions, but through the interaction of seemingly different figure types – philosophers and theologians, in the case of the Disputa – in such a way as to highlight specific philosophical practices that are essential to the understanding and application of theological principles. Raphael’s Disputa is more than a representation of Theology, more, even, than a syncretic statement on the concord between theology and philosophy. Revealed in the juxtaposition and gestures of figures is a Renaissance homily, as it were, on the importance of moral philosophy and anagogical visualization to the mind’s approach to the Divine. To be sure, a debate on syncretism and the content of Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura frescoes raged for centuries among the intellectual elite of Europe. Chief among the topics that occupied those who wrote on the School of Athens fresco from the sixteenth through the late nineteenth centuries was the question of whether saints and evangelists were to be found in that scene, interspersed among its philosophers and interacting with them in an expression of syncretic concord. This, after all, was how Giorgio Vasari had read Raphael’s intent, as he understood it, at least, from viewing the famous fresco through derivative, slightly altered prints after Raphael. Thus, Vasari claimed that the School of Athens was a representation of “the theologians reconciling philosophy and astrology with theology,” in which the Evangelists explained the figures and characters written on tablets by certain astrologers and passed to them by beautiful angels.2 Giovanni Bellori recognized Vasari’s error – that he drew his interpretation not from the Segnatura frescoes, themselves, but from Agostino Veneziano’s print after Raphael’s originals, in which certain figures had been redrawn, as it were, with different attributes – and criticized both Vasari’s interpretation and those copyists who, he claimed, had inadvertently introduced St. Mark and an angel into the population of philosophers properly found in Raphael’s original. Thus, in 1695, Bellori wrote of the School of Athens that it was the very image of Philosophy, rather than any syncretic assembly of philosophical and theological concord:

2 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors & Architects, trans. Gaston Du C. de Vere (London: Macmillan and Co. & The Medici Society, 1913), 217: “After his arrival, therefore, having been received very warmly by Pope Julius, Raffaello began in the Camera della Segnatura a scene of the theologians reconciling Philosophy and Astrology with Theology: wherein are portraits of all the sages in the world, disputing in various ways. Standing apart are some astrologers, who have made various kinds of figures and characters of geomancy and astrology on some little tablets, which they send to the Evangelists by certain very beautiful angels; and these Evangelists are expounding them.”

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The title applied to it by Vasari is incorrect: the concord of Philosophy and Astrology with Theology, inasmuch as there are neither theologians nor evangelists such as he describes at length, confusing instead this second image with the first one [the Disputa], of Theology and the Sacrament. These errors originated soon after Raphael’s death through the inadvertence of those who undertook to interpret his works, as can be clearly understood from the other print, which is incomplete, by Agostino Veneziano, published in 1524, in which the figure of Pythagoras is transformed into the Evangelist Saint Mark, and the youth who leans over beside Pythagoras with the abacus is transformed also, into an angel with the attributes of the Angelic Salutation. The title School of Athens that is commonly attributed to it is more suitable, and comes closer to the properties of the figures, since it concerns a city that is mistress of the disciplines of study. In order to form the image of Philosophy, Raphael intended to bring together the studies and the schools of the most illustrious philosopher, not of one age alone, but of the most celebrated ages of the world, making very appropriate use of anachronism or the reduction of the periods in which they lived.3

The debate over syncretism in the Segnatura frescoes survived Bellori, however, and came again to the fore in the nineteenth century, as German and Austrian scholars took up the battle with vigor. In their respective publications, Johann David Passavant (1839), Franz Wickhoff (1893), and Julius von Scholsser (1896), among others writing at mid-century, rejected any notions of concord or syncretism and argued instead for a program that was divided by faculty of knowledge.4 Opposing them, Alfred von Wolzogen (1866), Herman Grimm (1872), and Anton Springer (1878) published interpretations that were much more in line with Vasari’s reading of the School of Athens, though with interesting variations on the themes of concord and syncretism.5 Thus, where Vasari had properly identified the central figures of the composition as Plato and Aristotle, but found an Evangelist in the lower left corner, both von Wolzogen and Grimm identified the central figures of the fresco as Aristotle and Paul, left to right respectively, and the whole as a scene of the Apostle entering among philosophers of ancient Greece.6 To his 3 Giovanni Bellori, “The Image of the Ancient Gymnasium of Athens, or, Philosophy,” trans. Alice Sedgwick Whol. In Raphael’s “School of Athens,” ed. Marcia Hall (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 48. 4 Johann-David Passavant, Rafael von Urbino und sein Vater Giovanni Santi, 2 vols. (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1839), 138; Franz Wickhoff, “Die Bibliothek Julius’ II,” Jahrbuch der k. preußischen Kunstsammlungen 14 (1893), 52-56; Julius von Schlosser, “Giusto’s Fresken in Padua und die Vorläufer der Stanza della Segnatura,” Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 17 (1896), 87, 89. 5 Alfred von Wolzogen, Raphael Santi: His life and His works, trans. F. E. Bunnett (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1866), 60–62; Herman Grimm, The Life of Raphael, trans. Sarah Holland Adams (Boston: Cupples and Hurd, 1888), 87–123, and in particular 102–3; Anton Springer, Raffael und Michelangelo (Leipzig: Verlag von E. A. Seemann, 1878), 144–89. 6 Grimm, The Life of Raphael, 102; von Wolzogen, Raphael Santi, 68.

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credit, Springer properly identified the central figures, but stressed, also, a Humanist interpretation, which placed Plato in a chain of ancient theologians. Thus, even though he rejected the notion that the Evangelists were present in the fresco, Springer ultimately supported Vasari’s idea that the School of Athens was in essence a representation of the harmony of Platonic philosophy and theology. “In der Schule von Athen,” he wrote, “hat Raffael die Ideen des humanistischen Zeitalters von den aufsteigenden Stufen der Erkenntniss, von der Harmonie des Wissen mit dem religiösen Glauben, von der Einheit der platonischen Philosophie mit der Theologie verkörpert.”7 For whatever reason – probably because Vasari originally wrote of harmony and concord specifically in relation to the School of Athens fresco and, perhaps, because tradition and scholarly practice have tended to divide the respective frescoes of the program, each from the others, either as representing distinct stages in Raphael’s own artistic development or as representing distinct Facultäten that may be viewed, considered, and published separately – scholars have largely confined their investigations of syncretic themes to the School of Athens fresco and have largely foregone any real investigation into the possibility that the Disputa is a representation of theological and philosophical concord.8 Thus, while 7 Springer, Raffael und Michelangelo,185–86. 8 Already in 1839, Passavant referred to the room with regard to faculties of knowledge. Thus, Passavant, Rafael von Urbino, 138: “Um das Zimmer della Segnatura nach den darin dargestellten allegorisch-symbolischen Gegenständen mit einem Wort zu bezeichnen, so könnte man es das der Facultäten nennen. Denn in ihm ist nach vier Richtungen, durch Theologie, Philosophie, Poesie und Jurisprudenz der Umfang aller Wissenschaft und Erkenntniss des Menschen dargestellt, wodurch er Aufschluss über sein Verhältniss zu Gott und der Schöpfung, über sich selbst und über die gesetzlichen Einrichtungen erhält.” Springer may have taken the idea and term from Passavant, when he wrote, “Wir sind gewohnt, diese vier Figuren mit dem populären Namen der vier Facultäten zu bezeichnen und als die Sinnbilder der Theologie, Philosophie, Poesie und Jurisprudenz zu begrüssen.” Springer, Raffael und Michelangelo, 149. Moreover, Springer noted the similarity between Raphael’s themes, as it were, and the decoration of the library of Federigo da Montefeltro in Urbino. Springer, Raffael und Michelangelo, 156. The idea that the room was a library had been proposed by Grimm as early as 1872. It was Wickhoff, however, who proposed that the themes of the frescoes represented distinct faculties according to the divisions of a Bücherkatalog, together with a perceived hierarchy of knowledge that privileged Theology above Philosophy, Music, and Jurisprudence. Wickhoff, “Die Bibliothek Julius’ II,” 53–54, 63. Timothy Verdon has proposed an interpretation of the Stanza della Segnatura frescoes that finds concord between Theology and Philosophy in the perception that the space of the Disputa is shared by that of the School of Athens, and that the populations of each are, in fact, united before the altar that is depicted in the former – thus that the philosophers are in a Christian church. See Timothy Verdon, “Pagans in the Church: The School of Athens in Religious Context.” In Raphael’s “School of Athens,” ed. Marcia Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 114–30; “La teologia della stanza della Segnatura. ‘Dominus finis est humanae historiae’ –

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many have sought or seen theologians among the philosophers of the School of Athens, relatively few have claimed to see philosophers among the theologians on the wall opposite. Admittedly, some have flirted with the possibility. Paul Joannides described one figure in Raphael’s drawings for the Disputa as both “the scholar” and “the standing philosopher.”9 Konrad Oberhuber wrote of “disputing philosophers” in the Disputa, who “turn away from books to sink on their knees or stand in silent adoration before the mystery on the altar.”10 These are presumably among the figures to the left of Pope Gregory and St. Jerome, including Joannides’s “philosopher.” Yet while they classified the figures by type, neither Joannides nor Oberhuber named any of these “philosophers,” nor did either give the reasons for his classification or pursue the significance of such a statement, that figures of this type could be found in the scene representing Theology.11 The figure whom Joannides called “the standing philosopher” appears in the completed fresco standing to the left of center, in the foreground of the lower register, nearest to Pope Gregory, but with his back to the viewer (Figure 11.1). He is clothed in a swath of blue fabric, which falls from one shoulder, across his body, and over a green shirt, or tunic, perhaps. He is barefoot and bare headed. He has neither halo nor hat, but a crop of ruddy hair and a matching beard. There are two books at his feet, but no title or titular inscription on them. He points his right hand into the depth of the painting, and down, toward the book at St. Gregory’s feet, which is inscribed with its title along the fore edge: L. MORALIVM. A trio of younger men crouch next to him, on the side away from Gregory and the altar, and appear as if intent on his word or gesture – all three are wide-eyed; one Prima Parte: La ‘Disputa’ del Sacramento,” Arte Cristiana 86, no. 787 (1998): 241–52; “La teologia della stanza della Segnatura. ‘Dominus finis est humanae historiae’ – Seconda Parte: La ‘Disputa’nel context della Stanza.” Arte Cristiana 86, no. 788 (1998): 321–33. 9 Paul Joannides, The Drawings of Raphael: With a Complete Catalogue (Oxford: Phaidon, 1983), 187–88. The figure appears on Oxford, Ashmolean 545 verso; Oxford, Ashmolean 543; and Vienna, Albertina Bd. V, 244. 10 Konrad Oberhuber, Raphael: The Paintings (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1999), 91. 11 Others, like Timothy Verdon and Bette Talvacchia, have written on interrelation and harmony in the greater program, encompassing both the School of Athens and the Disputa. Verdon posited that the depiction of architecture throughout the fresco program was such that the philosophers of the School of Athens inhabited the same conceptual space as the theologians of the Disputa. This, however, is different from seeing philosophers actually painted into the Disputa fresco. Verdon, “Pagans in the Church,” 114–30. Talvacchia remarked that “The ‘face-off’ between [the School of Athens and Disputa] is calculated to stress the interrelation of the two schools of thought, rather than to mark their opposition. In fact, the juxtaposition of the pagan and Christians (sic) era, stressing their essential harmony, is perhaps the most eloquent statement of Julius’s dream of leading a new Rome.” Bette Talvacchia, Raphael (London: Phaidon Press, 2007), 90. Talvacchia, however, did not posit that philosophers populated the Disputa.

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Figure 11.1: Rapahel, Disputa (Detail), 1509–1510, fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

looks at the man’s pointing hand, another either at the hand or past it toward the altar, and the third, leaning over his companions, gapes in the direction of the elder man’s gesture, at Gregory or the altar’s elevated Host. The standing man features prominently in the composition. He is a mirror, or visual foil perhaps, to the figures of St. Bonaventure and the standing Pope on the right side of the Disputa. Like them, he is positioned on the steps that lead upward, as if toward the altar and the elevated Host, though he is, like them, standing below the level of the four Doctors, which can only be reached by an intermediary step cut into the very center of the scene. He did not take this place until relatively late in the conception and design of the Disputa, however. The figure does not appear, as such, in any of the earliest of Raphael’s conceptual or compositional studies. The place that he would eventually occupy is empty in the compositional study in the British Museum and the corresponding nude study of figures now preserved in the Frankfurt Städel, though it is conceivable that he is simply positioned elsewhere in the scene at that stage in the development of the composition, perhaps as the figure standing immediately behind Pope Gregory (Figure 11.2). He does appear, in place, in the Vienna modello for the lower left side of the scene, and multiple studies of his pose and drapery

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Figure 11.2: Raphael, Study for the Disputa, 1509, 24.5 × 40.0 cm, pen and brown ink, London, The British Museum, inv. no. 1900,0824.108. Photo: ©The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

exist, which may attest to the importance he eventually achieved both in the composition and in the artist’s mind (Figure 11.3).12 Though Raphael positioned the standing man prominently in the composition, he did not invest that figure with recognizable attributes or otherwise depict him in such a way that his identity would be readily comprehensible. Nevertheless, the artist may have composed or constructed this figure in such a way that he can be known. His pose, gesture, and facial features – as much as can be seen – bear more than a passing resemblance to those of Aristotle, as Raphael painted him in the School of Athens fresco on the opposing wall of the Stanza della Segnatura (Figure 11.4). Both stand in contrapposto, with the weight of the body borne on the right leg. Both reach forward with the right arm. Both have ruddy-brown hair that spreads flat from the crown, but terminates in curls at the forehead, temples, and back of the neck. Both wear a full beard. Both have high cheekbones, a strong

12 Raphael’s drawings and compositional studies are published in Joannides, The Drawings of Raphael, 19–21, 181–97. The observations described here are my own. It is my intention to publish a more extensive study of the development of the composition of the Disputa in a volume dedicated to the Stanza della Segnatura frescoes. Until that study is complete, the preliminary remarks made here may suffice.

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Figure 11.3: Raphael, Study for the Disputa, 1509, 29.9 × 43.3 cm, ink and chalk, Vienna, Albertina, inv. no. 224. Photo: The Albertina Museum, Vienna.

brow, and a sharp nose. While there are differences in their attire – the figure in the School of Athens wears a long ochre robe, trimmed in gold, and sandals, while he of the Disputa is barefoot and wears a green shirt or tunic that appears to end above the knee – both are clothed in a flowing blue robe. Both have a book, though certainly this is not an exclusive attribute in the program of the Stanza della Segnatura. Both take a position in the composition of their respective frescoes that is slightly south of center – that is, to the south side of the east-west axis of the room – which runs through the centers of the School of Athens and the Disputa, respectively. The similarities between the two figures function in place of attributes or defining motifs as a means of communicating the identity of the figure in the Disputa. Viewed in isolation – either on his own or in relation to only those other figures of the Disputa – he appears relatively nondescript and cannot be named as an individual. Viewed within the context of the greater program of the Stanza della Segnatura, however, the repetition of forms – of facial features, pose, gesture, and even of color to a certain degree – can be read as a sign that the two figures share the same identity and carry that identity throughout the extended program, as

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Figure 11.4: Raphael, School of Athens (Detail), 1510–1511, fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

would a figure repeated in a continuous narrative. Here, as in a continuous narrative, the repetition of forms may suffice as a means of communicating a shared identity, and it effectively becomes unnecessary to portray a figure, in every instance, with those attributes that may identify him when he first appears. Which is to say that Raphael, having painted, or perhaps intending to paint one Aristotle with a defining attribute – the inscribed book in the School of Athens, which establishes the identity of the figure – could rely on the repetition of facial features, pose, and gesture to convey to the viewer the identity of the Aristotle who stands in the Disputa. Because he had fixed the identity of the former with an attribute, he did not need to do so for the latter. The “standing philosopher” has been variously identified by scholars, though these have largely named him in reference to his placement in the composition and relative to the perception that the Disputa is populated exclusively by Christian theologians. Thus, scholars have proposed identities from among those in Christian history who might have some relationship to Gregory, or significant theologians who would otherwise be missing from the assembled crowd who make

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up the lower tier of figures in the Disputa. August Hagen named him John Scotus Eriugena.13 Heinrich Pfeiffer called him Origen, who, he said, was very much in favor at the time of the fresco’s painting.14 Nevertheless, Pfeiffer cautioned that this was only a hypothetical identification, and that this figure and another similarly clothed – that is, in antique garments – must be theologians from the time of the Apostolic Fathers, if one did not want to see them as philosophers.15 The latter possibility seems one that Pfeiffer was unwilling to consider, though the evidence of the fresco, itself, pointed in that direction. Pfeiffer did observe an important similarity between certain figures in the Disputa and in the School of Athens, however. He noted that the figure immediately to the right of the altar in the Disputa makes the same gesture as the Plato in the School of Athens (Figures 11.5 and 11.4, respectively). Moreover, Pfeiffer also saw a similarity between the gesture of the philosopher figure to the left of the altar of the Disputa and that made by Aristotle in the fresco opposite.16 For Pfeiffer, the similarity between these figures was essential to identifying those in the Disputa and to understanding the significance of their action. As Plato and Aristotle were Princes among philosophers (“den Fürsten der Philosophen”), their counterparts in the School of Athens could only be the Princes of the Apostles (“die Apostelfürsten”), Peter and Paul.17 As the gestures of Plato and Aristotle in the School of Athens signified the realms of invisible and visible knowledge, respectively, so the gestures of their counterparts in the Disputa could signify that the revelation of the Trinity was a fulfillment of intelligible insight and that the appearance of the sacrament on the altar was a fulfillment of the knowledge of the senses.18 Pfeiffer’s interpretation is as beautiful as it is erudite, and particular aspects of his argument have gained traction among scholars and in subsequent publications. Some, if not all, have followed his identification of the figures in the Disputa as Peter and Paul.19 There are problems with such a reading, however. Peter

13 August Hagen, Raphael’s Disputa (Leipzig: Weigel, 1860), 141. 14 Heinrich Pfeiffer, Zur Ikonographie von Raffaels Disputa: Egidio da Viterbo und die christlichplatonische Konzeption der Stanza della Segnatura (Rome: Università Gregoriana Editrice, 1975), 67–68. 15 Pfeiffer, Zur Ikonographie von Raffaels Disputa, 67–68: “Daß es sich um Theologen der Zeit der apostolischen Väter oder der sogenannten Kirchenschriftsteller handeln muß, darauf verweist ihre antikische Gewandung, wenn man nicht in ihnen Philosophen sehen möchte.” 16 Pfeiffer, Zur Ikonographie von Raffaels Disputa, 44. 17 Pfeiffer, Zur Ikonographie von Raffaels Disputa, 67. 18 Pfeiffer, Zur Ikonographie von Raffaels Disputa, 44. 19 See, for example, Lasse Hodne, “The Renaissance Ideal of Philosophical Concord and Raphael’s School of Athens,” in Ashes to Ashes: Art in Rome between Humanism and Maniera, ed. Roy Eriksen and Victor Plahte Tschudi (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 2006), 81–101. Alexander

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Figure 11.5: Rapahel, Disputa (Detail), 1509–1510, fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

and Paul appear elsewhere in the Disputa – they sit to either side of the enthroned saints and prophets in the upper register of the scene, and are easily identified there by recognizable attributes. Peter, to the far left, holds a book and the gold and silver keys of Heaven. Paul, at right, holds a book and the sword with which he was beheaded, the instrument of his martyrdom (Figure 11.6). Both have haloes. Though both are bearded and balding, neither bears any significant resemblance to the figures that flank the altar, below.20 Indeed, it is rather difficult

Nagel and Christopher Wood name the figure to the right of the altar Peter, without explaining the reasons for such an identification. It may well be that they are following in the tradition begun by Pfeiffer. See Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 353. 20 Pfeiffer was aware of these issues and addressed them in Pfeiffer, Zur Ikonographie von Raffaels Disputa, 69–70. He sought to explain the fact that his Paul, on the lower level, did not look like the Paul on the upper level by attributing differences to changes introduced during the execution of the frescoes.

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Figure 11.6: Rapahel, Disputa (Detail), 1509–1510, fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

to imagine how Raphael might have intended that his viewer recognize Paul, standing between the altar and St. Ambrose, if that figure was not only divested of any individual attributes, but also appeared with different facial features and different clothing, stripped of his halo, and given a gesture that the viewer might properly associate primarily with Plato, from the fresco opposite. Rather than Paul, rather than any neo-Platonic theologian in the Christian tradition, the figure to the right of the altar may be none other than Plato, himself.21 Like his counterpart – his other self – in the School of Athens, this figure

21 Giovanni Reale, for example, noted that the figure holds “la mano destra alzata verso il cielo, proprio come Platone nella Scuola di Atene,” but followed Braun in identifying him as Justin Martyr, here presented as a neo-Platonic foil to Plato, himself, in the School of Athens. Giovanni Reale, Raffaello, La “Disputa”: Una interpretazione filosofica e teologica dell’affresco con la prima presentazione analitica dei singoli personaggi e dei particolari simbolici e allegorici emblematici (Milan: Rusconi, 1998), 65–67. My interpretation shares certain particulars with Reale’s, including an emphasis on Plato’s importance with regard to the idea of a relationship

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is gray-haired and balding, with a long and somewhat stringy beard. Like the other Plato, this figure raises his right arm and points his index figure as if toward Heaven. He is without a halo and dressed all’antica. What is more, he is positioned just to the right of the center of the composition, and thus maintains the repetition of figures in corollary placement that is established by the twin Aristotles of the School of Athens and Disputa. In both frescoes, Aristotle stands to the south of the room’s east-west axis. In both frescoes, Plato stands slightly to the north of that same dividing line. Admittedly, there is more differentiation in appearance between the two Platos than there is between the two Aristotles. The latter differ only in certain particulars of their clothing – that the Aristotle in the School of Athens wears sandals and an ochre robe under his blue cloak, while the Aristotle in the Disputa is barefoot and wears a green tunic beneath a loosely draped blue cloth. The two Platos wear costumes that are almost entirely different one from the other. In the School of Athens, Plato is dressed in a lavender purple robe beneath a pink cloak. The colors here are high in value, with highlights tinted toward white. His twin on the opposite wall wears a deep blue cloak over a hunter-green robe, and the shape and the volume of each is represented primarily with folds shaded down toward black. These differences in color, however, may have more to do with the placement of the figures—both in the overall composition of their respective scenes and in relation to those other figures placed near to them, with whom they interact – than with any attempt or intention to signify the identity of a figure through the appearance of his clothing. In the School of Athens, Plato stands in the center of the composition, and, because of his high value and tint, stands out against both a recession into depth and a background which, because of strategically placed clouds and an atmospheric perspective, blends to a brilliant sky behind him. Had he been clothed in dark and shadowy blues and greens, he would lose not only the definition that his actual coloring allows, but also the prominence that he maintains in relation to those other figures that surround him and his most famous pupil. They, the figures immediately to the left of Plato and to the right of Aristotle, are painted in lower values and in shades, and as a result seem to take their proper positions around and behind the true protagonists of the drama which unfolds. In the Disputa, it is Plato who stands behind. He is positioned next to Ambrose, but further into the depth of the painting, and his dark cloak provides a

between material and immaterial worlds and the reception of this idea by subsequent Christian theologians, though there are significant differences in our studies, as well.

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suitable background for the splayed hands of the saint. Indeed, had he worn here the same clothes that he wears in the School of Athens, that gesture would not have been as easy to discern. The difference between the high value of the flesh of Ambrose’s fingers and the low value of Plato’s garments makes the former stand out. This consideration may have been of greater importance to Raphael than any attempt to communicate the identity of the figure through the color of his clothing, which, nevertheless, may well be that of a philosopher and does not necessarily obscure or conceal his identity. In both the School of Athens and the Disputa, Plato makes the same gesture, and he may be known in the latter because he does there what he does, also, in the former. In the School of Athens, his identity is established by the titular inscription on the book he holds – it is the Timeus, and he must therefore be the author of that text. Though he holds no book in the Disputa, though there is no accompanying inscription, the similarity of facial features and the repetition of his distinctive gesture – that is, the repetition of a significant characteristic, which then becomes a recognizable attribute – shows him to be the same person in both frescoes. Of course, Plato’s characteristic gesture is more than an indexical sign to his identity. Even as it indicates his identity, the upraised finger directs the viewer also to the method and subject of his philosophical study. In the School of Athens, Plato, whose philosophies treat of the ideal and find reality in the unworldly realm of pure Form, points upward, away from physical earth. Aristotle, who favored empirical method over pure dialectic and wrote of moral rather than theoretical philosophy, points outward, toward the world of experience and ethical practice. The same gestures in the Disputa have the same significance. In that painting, however, the figures of Plato and Aristotle are not as neatly juxtaposed as in the School of Athens. Rather, they are more fully integrated into the crowd of theologians, standing among them, interacting with them. Their respective gestures are no less significant in such a context, but do take on additional or other meanings. In the Disputa, Plato stands next to St. Ambrose and, with his upraised hand, directs the Church Father to look up, toward the assembled host of Heaven who are enthroned above. Ambrose is positioned in such a way as to suggest that he had been previously unaware of those figures painted in the upper tier of the scene. He not only lifts his eyes, but also throws open his hands, as if in wonder or surprise. The implication, then, is that it is this figure – Plato – who leads Ambrose to see God, not only in a figurative sense, but in a manner that is real and direct. This action, and what is meant by the interaction of the figures of Plato and Ambrose, may have its inspiration in Augustine’s Confessions, or derive ultimately from various portions of the Confessions. There, in the narrative of books

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five through seven, Augustine described how he, himself, came to understand the nature of spiritual substance from the philosophies of Plato and the sermons of his own teacher, Ambrose – how, in his words, he “clearly saw [the] invisible things which are understood through the things which are made.”22 In the thirteen books of his Confessions, Augustine details his life from infancy, his intellectual growth, and his eventual conversion to Christianity. Among the various themes that run throughout the narrative are his struggles with various philosophies. Thus, he describes how he adopted the beliefs of the Manichaeans, but worried over the ramifications of their views on the substance of God.23 Augustine seems to have been particularly troubled with an idea that he gleaned from both Manichaean and Stoic philosophy that God was material, or corporeal.24 This idea complicated Augustine’s understanding of Scripture, in particular his ability to reconcile the Old and New Testaments, as various essential aspects of the theology described in the latter were incompatible with the notion of a deity who was of physical substance, as described in portions of the former.25 It was not until he traveled to Milan and heard the sermons of Ambrose that he saw the possibility of reading the Old Testament according to a “spiritual,” rather than a literal sense, which gave him the necessary method of countering the “errors” of the Manichaeans.26 There, also, he read the books of the Platonists and, admonished to seek incorporeal truth, learned to see an invisible Divine, which is understood “through that which is made” – literally per ea quae facta sunt – but is not itself corporeal.27 These same ideas lie at the very heart of the larger scene that is the Disputa. The Christian godhead – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – is arranged on the central axis over the elevated wafer of the Eucharistic Host. The Trinity is invisible to the greater number of those who populate the lower, earthly register, but may be understood through its physical manifestation on the altar, in the midst of that population; incorporeal truth will be understood through that which is manifest. Moreover, the invisible Divine may be seen by those who follow the admonition 22 Augustine, Confessions, 7.20.26. Aurelius Augustinus, Saint Augustine Confessions, trans. Vernon Bourke (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1953), 190. 23 See, for example, Confessions, 5.10.20–21. Augustinus, Saint Augustine Confessions, 119–23. 24 See Carl Griffin and David Paulsen,“Augustine and the Corporeality of God,” The Harvard Theological Review 95, no. 1 (January 2002): 97–118. 25 On anthropomorphism in Judaism and Christianity, Griffin and Paulsen, “Augustine and the Corporeality of God,” 98–101. For Augustine’s difficulty in reconciling the idea of a physical God with concepts expressed in the New Testament, Augustine, Confessions, 5.10.19–20, as in Augustinus, Saint Augustine Confessions, 120–22. 26 Augustine, Confessions, 5.14.25. Augustinus, Saint Augustine Confessions, 126–27. 27 Augustine, Confessions, 7.20.26. Augustinus, Saint Augustine Confessions, 190–92.

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of the Platonists and, recognizing that the material is a means toward realizing the immaterial, turn their eyes upward toward the spiritual substance of God. In the Disputa, however, it is not Augustine, but Ambrose who gazes upward from the consecrated Eucharist, which is here the corporeal manifestation of the Christian Godhead, and sees the same represented in its spiritual substance, the invisible Divine. Though Augustine described the practice of anagogical visualization in his Confessions, he learned the method of anagogical interpretation from Ambrose, who demonstrated the process in his own works, as when, in the Exposition of the Christian Faith, he read the immaterial in the material with his discovery that the stones of Aaron’s breastplate described the nature and qualities of the Trinity.28 This, presumably, is the manner of expounding the Law and Prophets, in a “spiritual sense,” which Augustine learned from Ambrose, and which permitted him not only to reconcile the Old and New Testaments, but also to think of spiritual substance.29 Indeed, Augustine offers in the Confessions a metaphysical model that follows both the anagogical mode of Ambrose’s expositions and, in its essentials, the Platonic theory by which material objects have their very existence from a relationship to ideal, and intangible forms.30 It is a lesson learned ultimately from Plato, and in succession by Ambrose, first, and only later by Augustine. In the Disputa, then, Raphael presents the first stage of transmission, whereby Ambrose learns from Plato that he may see that which is real and immutable represented in and above that which is material and made. Just as Plato’s gesture and interaction with Ambrose have significance within the Christian context of the Disputa, so also the gesture of Aristotle and his interaction with the figures nearest him bear a meaning that is essential to the greater subject of the fresco. Plato’s gesture is directional, even didactic: he directs Ambrose to see God. So, also, is Aristotle’s. He directs those nearest to him – youths, or perhaps initiates – to see the Moralia of Gregory, presumably to recommend that they follow its dictates. In the Christian context of the Disputa, Plato’s gesture may read as a representation of the means by which one such as Ambrose or Augustine achieves the realization of the Divine – the method, or perhaps a

28 Ambrose, Exposition of the Christian Faith, 2.1–14, as in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Second Series Volume X – Ambrose Select Works and Letters, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wallace (New York: Cosimo, 2007), 223–25. 29 Augustine, Confessions, 5.14.24–25. Augustinus, Saint Augustine Confessions, 126–27. 30 Augustine, Confessions, 7.11.17: “I looked closely at the rest of things below Thee and saw that they are neither wholly in existence, nor wholly out of existence: they exist, indeed, for they are from Thee, but they do not exist, for they are not what Thou art. For that truly is which endures immutably.” Augustinus, Saint Augustine Confessions, 182.

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method by which one may approach the Divine, through a philosophical understanding of the relationships between material and immaterial. Aristotle, as he is posed in the Disputa, offers an alternate method. He directs his attendant pupils to approach the Divine through the practical application of moral philosophy. Aristotle’s companions are young; being newly instructed in the Aristotelian method, they have the rest of their lives to put his teaching into practice. Others around them, though, are the very models of that practice. The left side of the Disputa is populated by mendicant friars and mitered bishops, anonymous all, but identifiable by type. They are those who have taken holy orders, who restrict or modify their behavior according to the precepts of moral philosophy and Christian ethics, or those who are charged with leading the flocks of Christian believers to follow those same precepts. St. Gregory, author of the Magna Moralia, sits here, and St. Jerome, who has the Bible and his own Epistles at his feet. Among other things, Jerome’s Epistles offer extensive commentary on Christian morality, including his praise of virginity and rules of life for the clergy.31 The right side of the Disputa, in contrast, is peopled by theologians, in the true sense of the word – those who engage in the study of God, or those who seek to approach the Divine through understanding, rather than the ordering of the will. Here, Ambrose and Augustine are joined by SS. Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure (Figure 11.7). Like the Church Fathers, the latter two are named in inscriptions within their haloes, an honor and/or signifier which not only sets them apart from those others who populate the lower register of the Disputa, but also from the saints enthroned above, who, though they have haloes, lack identifying inscriptions. It would seem, then, that the individual identity of these two figures was of considerable importance to Raphael, to a patron, or to the very subject of the fresco. Indeed, these are two of the greatest scholastic theologians. The primary works of each – Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae and Bonaventure’s Commentaria in Quatuor Libros Sententiarum – are written in the dialectic style of scholastic theology, characterized by a succession of questions, objections, arguments, and replies, which is itself derived from the philosophical approach modeled by Plato in his Socratic dialogues. It is not only the dialectic style of his Commentaria or other theological studies, however, which explains the prominence and placement of St. Bonaventure in the Disputa. His Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum describes a path and process by which the mind may rise to God. His excursus is more detailed than the relatively few passages in Augustine’s Confessions describing the latter’s journey from a

31 See epistles 22, to Eustochium, and 24, to Marcella, on virginity and epistle 52, to Nepotian, for the rule of life, among others which treat of moral themes.

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Figure 11.7: Rapahel, Disputa (Detail), 1509–1510, fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Manichaean materialism to the recognition of the immaterial Divine, but follows a similar progression of stages. Thus, after refraining from sin, one embarks on a series of prayers, meditations, and contemplation, beginning with the recognition of God’s invisible attributes as they are made manifest in material vestiges, leading ultimately to a mystical union with the crucified Christ, in the model of St. Francis beholding the Seraph of God.32 As one approaches this final state, one

32 On the necessity of avoiding sin, see Bonaventure, Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum, 1.8, as in Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, The Tree of Life, The Life of St. Francis, trans. Ewert Cousins (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), 63. On the anagogical representation of the invisible by means of the sensory and material, see chapter 2, in particular 2.13: “From all this, one can gather that from the creation of the world the invisible attributes of God are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made.” Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, 77. On the mystical union with God, chapter 7, in particular 7.2–3. Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, 110–16.

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passes also through a stage in which he lifts the eyes of his intelligence to look upon the blessed Trinity, and in so doing becomes like one of the cherubs that flank the Mercy Seat of God.33 Indeed, this is how Raphael depicts Ambrose in the Disputa – he lifts the eyes of his intelligence to look upon the blessed Trinity – and inasmuch as Bonaventure describes the very process by which this may be achieved, he belongs on the side of Ambrose and those theologians who approach the Divine through dialectic and the activity of the mind. Bonaventure does not reject the path of moral philosophy as a means of approaching the Divine. Rather, he instructs his reader to put the body in order, and only then to progress through the stages of contemplation leading to mystical union with God. Thus, he cautions, in the preamble of his treatise: [T]he mirror presented by the external world is of little or no value unless the mirror of our soul has been cleaned and polished. Therefore, man of God, first exercise yourself in remorse of conscience before you raise your eyes to the rays of Wisdom reflected in its mirrors, lest perhaps from gazing upon these rays you fall into a deeper pit of darkness.34

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola issued the same directive in his De Hominis Dignitate, and these works, together, may represent a greater body of mystical literature which is reflected in Raphael’s Disputa and over in the entire program of the Stanza della Segnatura frescoes. Like Bonaventure, Pico maintains that the greatest goal of human endeavor is to ascend to the status of the highest of the angelic hierarchies, the seraph, which is one with God through love.35 However, Pico asserts that man, on earth, may best aspire to the status of the seraph by preparing himself as a cherub – that is, while he lives, he may prepare for the perfected love of God by coming to know God through contemplation and the pursuit of knowledge.36 As Bonaventure cautioned in his Itinerarium, so Pico directs in his Oratio that the intellectual approach toward God must also involve a process of purgation – the ordering of the soul through the practical application of moral science – after which one may

33 Bonaventure, Itinerarium, 6.1, 4. Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, 102–6. 34 Bonaventure, Itinerarium, Prologue: 4. Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, 56. See also 1.8: “Whoever wishes to ascend to God must first avoid sin, which deforms our nature . . . Just as no one comes to wisdom except through grace, justice, and knowledge, so no one comes to contemplation except by penetrating meditation, a holy life and devout prayer.” Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, 63. 35 Pico, De Humanis Dignitate, 62, as in Pico, Oration on the Dignity of Man, 138–39: “Magna Thronorum potestas, quam iudicando; summa Saraphinorum sublimitas, quam amando assequimur. / Great is the power of the thrones that we may reach by judging; supreme is the height of the seraphim that we may reach by loving.” 36 Pico, De Humanis Dignitate, 65–72, as in Pico, Oration on the Dignity of Man, 140–43.

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be imbued with the light of natural philosophy and, ultimately, seek perfection in the knowledge of divine things. Thus, Pico wrote that passage which is transcribed at the beginning of this chapter and, translated, reads: So too, emulating the cherubic life on Earth, curbing the drive of the emotions through moral science, dispersing the darkness of reason through dialectics (as if washing away the squalor of ignorance and vice), may we purge our souls, lest our emotions run amok or our reason imprudently run off course at any time. Then may we imbue our purified and well-prepared soul with the light of natural philosophy so that afterward we may perfect it with the knowledge of things divine.37

Surely it is not coincidence that Plato, himself, described the very same idea in his Phaedrus, where he wrote of an angelic end to the life of those who restrain their actions through ordered behavior, but free the mind through philosophical reasoning. Thus, in Phaedrus, 256.5: Well, then, if the better elements of their minds get the upper hand by drawing them to a well-ordered life, and to philosophy, they pass their life here in blessedness and harmony, masters of themselves and orderly in their behavior, having enslaved that part through which evil attempted to enter the soul, and freed that part through which goodness enters it; and when they die they become winged and light, and have won the first of their three submissions in these, the true Olympic games – and neither humanity nor divine madness has any greater good to offer a man than this.38

This idea is the very thing which is portrayed in the Disputa, as a whole. The scene is far more than a simple representation of Theology, as a faculty or discipline, more than a simple assembly of theologians, as a partial contribution to a cycle of uomini famosi. Rather, it is a depiction of the parallel and necessary paths by which one approaches the Divine and seeks to emulate the life of a cherub, to become winged and light, through the practical application of moral philosophy, which is the ordering of desire, and through a process of philosophical reasoning, which is to see God with the eye of the mind when it is opened to the true light of natural philosophy. The former is represented to the left of the altar in the Disputa, where are depicted those who order their behavior and lead others according to the rules of God. Aristotle stands in their midst, not merely as a representative author or exemplar, but as an active participant in the discourse that transpires in that space. He directs the young initiates to consider the Magna Moralia of St. Gregory the Great, and thus sets them on a path which leads ultimately to God.

37 Pico, De Humanis Dignitate, 71–72, as in Pico, Oration on the Dignity of Man, 143. 38 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. C. J. Rowe (Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1986), 81.

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Those to the right of the altar represent the latter path, which approaches the Divine through the understanding that the fullness of the Trinity is represented anagogically in that which is material and has substance. This philosophical approach, variously described by Ambrose, Augustine, Bonaventure, and other Christian mystics ranging from Dionysius to Pico della Mirandola, is the beginning of the mind’s ascent to the highest levels of angelic experience. Here, the most perfect stage of that process open to the contemplative man is shown in the interaction of Plato and Ambrose – the philosopher, who taught anagogy in his theory of Forms, directs the Church Father to see the immaterial and invisible which is present symbolically in that which is material and visible, and the latter lifts his eyes from the consecrated Host to behold the very Trinity manifest above. Indeed, similar themes and a similar division of philosophical-theological approaches characterize the greater program of frescoes that decorate the Stanza della Segnatura. Freed from the prevailing and restrictive view that the frescoes of the walls are defined, to a distinct faculty and by its representatives, it is both possible and proper to see and understand the Stanza della Segnatura frescoes as a grand homily, exquisitely rendered in visual form, on the equal importance of dialectic and moral philosophy in a Christian’s approach to the Divine. Just as the representation that is the Disputa is divided on its axis between the shared paths of dialectic and moral philosophy, so also the greater program of frescoes is divided on that same axis. Thus, on the north side of the room, a portion of the Disputa, the so-called Parnassus, and half of the School of Athens represent the greater tradition of prisci theologii and theologicae poetae – those from the classical tradition who were divinely inspired to know the Christian God, either directly or through the veil of allegory, and who approached Him through their knowledge of Christian Truth.39 In the Stanza della Segnatura frescoes, they include in their number Orpheus in the Parnassus, Pythagoras and his disciples in the School of Athens, and Plato, at the center of that scene. On the south side of the room, Aristotle, Justinian, and Gregory IX, together with their respective courts of associates, represent the essentials of moral philosophy as described in the Nichomachean Ethics, that virtue constitutes an intermediate of behavior respective to each individual and that the act of Justice, correspondingly, is

39 On the Renaissance concepts of theologicae poetae and prisci theologii, see Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Williard Trask (New York: Bollingen Foundation, Inc., 1953), 203–27, 474–75; Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought (London: Constable & Co., 1970), 683–760.

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to render to each his due. This concept is defined by Aristotle, repeated by Justinian, and confirmed, explicitly, by Thomas Aquinas.40 Like so very many things in the program of the Stanza della Segnatura, it is not simply a classical or philosophical concept, not only a Christian or theological principle, but an idea fundamental to both classical philosophy and Christian theology, and presented in the frescoes of the Stanza della Segnatura as such. To be sure, Raphael represented these ideas, in each respective scene, in the same manner as he expressed them in the Disputa – through carefully considered choice of characters, through the particular details of their representation, through aspects of their position or pose, in the interaction of figures and in their relative positions in and around the greater composition. Raphael, of course, was master of composition and of color. We see his genius also, however, in this invenzione – his ability to craft and convey an idea through an appropriate artistic form. In a longer study, I may hope to show, through a careful consideration of details in the Parnassus, the School of Athens, the Jurisprudence fresco, and the frescoes of the ceiling of the Stanza della Segnatura, that the program of the whole is syncretic and dedicated to expressing the concord of Platonic and Aristotelean philosophies with Christian doctrine and the mind’s approach toward God. In the present study, it may suffice to introduce these themes through the example of the Disputa, where we may see and comprehend what others, it would seem, did not truly recognize: philosophers among the theologians; Aristotle exhorting his charges to follow the precepts of the Church Fathers Gregory and Jerome; Plato directing Ambrose to turn the eye of his mind from the material of the Host, before him on the altar, to the fullness of the Christian Godhead, above; the philosophical-theological statement that both moral philosophy and dialectic are necessary to the process of ordering the soul and seeing in the light of natural philosophy, so that one, ultimately, may approach the Divine.

Works Cited Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiæ. 60 vols. Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1975. Augustinus, Aurelius. Saint Augustine Confessions. Translated by Vernon Bourke New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1953.

40 For Aquinas, see Summa Theologiae, 2a2æ, 58, 10 and 11, as in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ (Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1975), 46–51.

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Bellori, Giovanni. “The Image of the Ancient Gymnasium of Athens, or, Philosophy.” Translated by Alice Sedgwick Whol. In Raphael’s “School of Athens,” edited by Marcia Hall, 48–56. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Bonaventure. The Soul’s Journey into God, The Tree of Life, The Life of St. Francis. Translated by Ewert Cousins. New York: Paulist Press, 1978. Curtius, Ernst. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Translated by Williard Trask. New York: Bollingen Foundation, Inc., 1953. Griffin, Carl and Paulsen, David. “Augustine and the Corporeality of God.” The Harvard Theological Review 95, no. 1 (January 2002): 97–118. Grimm, Herman. The Life of Raphael. Translated by Sarah Holland Adams. Boston: Cupples and Hurd, 1888. Hagen, August. Raphael’s Disputa. Leipzig: Weigel, 1860. Hodne, Lasse. “The Renaissance Ideal of Philosophical Concord and Raphael’s School of Athens.” In Ashes to Ashes: Art in Rome between Humanism and Maniera, edited by Roy Eriksen and Victor Plahte Tschudi, 81–101. Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 2006. Joannides, Paul. The Drawings of Raphael: With a Complete Catalogue. Oxford: Phaidon, 1983. Nagel, Alexander and Christopher Wood. Anachronic Renaissance. New York: Zone Books, 2010. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Second Series Volume X – Ambrose Select Works and Letters. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wallace. New York: Cosimo, 2007. Oberhuber, Konrad. Raphael: The Paintings. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1999. Passavant, Johann-David. Rafael von Urbino und sein Vater Giovanni Santi. 2 vols. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1839. Pfeiffer, Heinrich. Zur Ikonographie von Raffaels Disputa: Egidio da Viterbo und die christlichplatonische Konzeption der Stanza della Segnatura. Rome: Università Gregoriana Editrice, 1975. Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. Oration on the Dignity of Man: A New Translation and Commentary. Edited by Francesco Borghesi, Michael Papio, and Massimo Riva. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by C. J. Rowe. Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1986. Reale, Giovanni. Raffaello, La “Disputa”: Una interpretazione filosofica e teologica dell’affresco con la prima presentazione analitica dei singoli personaggi e dei particolari simbolici e allegorici emblematici. Milan: Rusconi, 1998. Springer, Anton. Raffael und Michelangelo. Leipzig: Verlag von E. A. Seemann, 1878. Talvacchia, Bette. Raphael. London: Phaidon Press, 2007. Trinkaus, Charles. In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought. 2 vols. London: Constable & Co., 1970. Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors & Architects. Translated by Gaston Du C. de Vere. 10 vols. London: Macmillan and Co. & The Medici Society, 1913. Verdon, Timothy. “Pagans in the Church: The School of Athens in Religious Context.” In Raphael’s “School of Athens,” edited by Marcia Hall, 114–30. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Verdon, Timothy. “La teologia della stanza della Segnatura. ‘Dominus finis est humanae historiae’ – Prima Parte: La ‘Disputa’ del Sacramento.” Arte Cristiana 86, no. 787 (1998): 241–52.

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Verdon, Timothy. “La teologia della stanza della Segnatura. ‘Dominus finis est humanae historiae’ – Seconda Parte: La ‘Disputa’ nel context della Stanza.” Arte Cristiana 86, no. 788 (1998): 321–33. von Schlosser, Julius. “Giusto’s Fresken in Padua und die Vorläufer der Stanza della Segnatura,” Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 17 (1896): 13–100. von Wolzogen, Alfred. Raphael Santi: His Life and His Works. Translated by F. E. Bunnett. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1866. Wickhoff, Franz. “Die Bibliothek Julius’ II.” Jahrbuch der k. preußischen Kunstsammlungen 14 (1893): 49–64.

Larry Silver

Chapter 12 Painting the Invisible God at Sinai For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen . . . Because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. – Romans 1: 20–21

Religious persecutions against what was generically described as “Lutheranism” began already in the Low Countries under edicts of Emperor Charles V as early as 1520,1 and visual repercussions of the influential new creed also appeared later in that same decade. Painter-printmaker Lucas van Leyden (active ca. 1505–1533) began to engage actively with the newly aroused problems of making any religious art during a period that already included charges of idolatry in Luther’s Wittenberg home and even provoked acts of iconoclasm there in response to some of the more zealous reformers, such as Karlstadt. Near the end of his quarter-century career of art-making, Lucas van Leyden produced a small, portable triptych, in a form and scale that suggest a more private visual access to personal devotion. Lucas’s Dance around the Golden Calf (ca. 1530; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Figure 12.1) ultimately offers a visual paradox – a pious picture about an act of idolatry.2 Old Testament scenes in Dutch paintings were rare before the sixteenth century, yet this work crowds a multitude of figures across its foreground, acting out the Exodus text (32:6), where the Children of Israel “sat down to eat and drink, and then rose to dance.” Their energies, however, are fully inappropriate, because despite his delay up on the Sinai mountaintop, Moses at that very moment is engaged in receiving the sacred tablets of the Ten Commandments directly from the hand of God. The people below are expressly condemned by God to Moses as a “stiffnecked people” who have “acted basely” (Exodus 32:7, 9). Still worse, they compound their offense, even abetted by their high priest Aaron, Moses’s brother, by making a

1 Alastair Duke, “The Netherlands,” in The Early Reformation in Europe, ed. Andrew Pettegrew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 142–65 especially 142–46; Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (London, Hambledon, 1990), especially 29–59. 2 Jan Piet Filedt Kok, The Dance around the Golden Calf by Lucas van Leyden (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2008), 39–42, 64–68, 106–9, no. 11; Lawrence Silver, “The ‘Sin of Moses’: Comments on the Early Reformation in a Late Painting by Lucas van Leyden,” Art Bulletin 60 (1973): 401–9. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-013

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golden calf after which they “bowed low to it and sacrificed to it” (Exodus 32:8) in an express act of idolatry. Their apostasy leads an enraged Moses to smash the precious tablets of the Decalogue and to burn the idol, then to force the people to drink from its pulverized powder (Exodus 32:20). Moses charges the people with “a great sin” (Exodus 32:30); nevertheless he undertakes to revisit the mountaintop. While presenting himself to Moses in direct speech God will still not reveal his face to the prophet (Exodus 33:17–23), but appears as a pillar of cloud (Exodus 34:5).3 Most important, God tells Moses to command the Children of Israel to extirpate idolatry locally: “tear down their altars, smash their pillars, and cut down their

Figure 12.1: Lucas van Leyden, Dance Around the Golden Calf, ca. 1530, oil on panel, center: 93.5 × 66.9 cm; left wing: 91.7 × 30.2 cm; right wing: 91.8 × 30.2 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, object number SK-A-3841. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

3 But see Numbers 12:8, perhaps from a different tradition, “With him [my servant Moses] I speak mouth to mouth, plainly and not in riddles, and he beholds the likeness of the Lord.”

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sacred posts; for you must not worship any other god because the Lord . . . is an impassioned God” (Exodus 34:13–14).4 The earlier biblical recounting of the encounter at Sinai (Exodus 19), sets the scenario for the presentation of the Ten Commandments, which are then itemized in the following chapter (Exodus 20), beginning with “You shall have no other gods besides Me” (Exodus 20:3). That injunction is immediately followed by the express second commandment about imagery: “You shall not make for yourself a sculpted image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them.” (Exodus 20:4–5) The severity of the offense of idolatry is indicated by its prime placement at the outset of the Ten Commandments.5 All these events are conflated into the small triptych by Lucas van Leyden. The narrative proceeds by layers, starting from the dense foreground of feasting, drinking, and courting, where the Children of Israel act out their hedonism

4 The radiance of Moses’s face after he descended from the mountain was the mark of his encounter with the Lord (Exodus 34: 29–35). However, Jerome’s unfortunate Vulgate mistranslation of the Hebrew karan (“radiant”) as if it were keren (“horn”) resulted in Christian Latinists assuming that Moses returned with horns, a frequent attribute of the prophet in medieval and Renaissance art, including sculptures by Claus Sluter and Michelangelo. Ruth Mellinkoff, The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 184–98. 5 According to Jewish tradition (The Jewish Study Bible, 148–51), the first five Commandments are phrased variously, whereas the final five all begin with “You shall not . . . ” This division of the Decalogue was adopted in the Netherlands by the Calvinists of the Dutch Reformed Church later in the sixteenth century, and it appears in the text substitutes for painted images – possible temptations to idolatry – in Dutch churches, as discussed by Mia Mochizuki, The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566–1672 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 251–67, especially 254 for Calvin’s reorganization of the Decalogue ordering. She also notes the relevance of this image-phobic period as a foundation for Rembrandt’s own painted Moses with the Tablets of the Law (1659; Berlin; Mochizuki, Netherlandish Image After Iconoclasm, figure 5.2), which also divides the Decalogue into the same two groups of five but also shows the prophet with red hornlike curls on his forehead. For the tradition of showing Jews as redheads, Ruth Mellinkoff, “Judas’s Red Hair and the Jews,” Journal of Jewish Art 9 (1982): 31–46; Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 145–59. See also Shelley Perlove and Larry Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2009), 336–42, observing how this arrangement accords with Jewish scholars, 338 nn. 34–35, that the orthography of the Hebrew letters on Rembrandt’s canvas is essentially correct. In fact, the tablets of Rembrandt accord with the tablets installed on the ark (hechal) in the Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam, a building only completed in 1675 (after the 1669 death of the artist). See also remarks and references in Alexander-Knotter, Hillegers, and van Voolen, The ‘Jewish’ Rembrandt, 47–49, and Vlaardingerbroek, De Portugese Synagoge in Amsterdam, 136–39.

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across all three continuous panels. Significantly, the center foreground shows a woman with a child on her arm reaching out to exchange a fruit with a seated man beside her, as if reenacting the temptation of Original Sin (though here he seems to offer the fruit to her). Sexuality reappears in the couple of the right wing, where a young woman sits on her lover’s lap and freely embraces him. Many women are dressed in flat, turban-like headdresses that signified exotic Egyptian costume, related to “gypsy” (Roma) dress from early fifteenth-century Flemish biblical panels, used both to signify the geographical origin of these figures and also their alien character.6 In the middle distance of the central panel the Golden Calf itself stands on a tall pedestal, and the Israelites dance around it to the sound of shawms and drums. Some figures here also wear turbans and other exotic headgear.7 In contrast, even to find the underlying religious core of the painting requires careful scrutiny. Amidst a descending cloud in the top left of the center panel upon the heights of Mount Sinai, a tiny figure of Moses kneels in prayer, silhouetted against an extended crag of the peak as he personally encounters the voice and presence of God. Almost as obscure, an intervening scene appears lower down the mountain; there Moses and his companion Joshua (Exodus 32:17) descend in order to present the stone tablets to the people. Directly above the Calf Moses already has upraised the tablets to smash them in anger, since he perceives the idolatry and sensual indulgence below. Lucas uses this layered composition to present the unfolding narrative as a process as well as a spiritual progression for the viewer. After seeing the initial luxuriance across the entire foreground, the more specific biblical events unfold

6 Elise Lawton Smith, The Paintings of Lucas van Leyden (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 66–68; Erwin Pokorny, “The Gypsies and Their Impact on Fifteenth-Century Western European Iconography,” in Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence, ed. Jaynie Anderson (Melbourne: Miegunyah, 2009), 597–601; “Das Zigeunerbild in der altdeutschen Kunst. Ethnographisches Interesse und Antiziganismus,” in Menschenbilder. Beiträge zur Altdeutschen Kunst, ed. Andreas Tacke and Stefan Heinze (Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2011), 97–110; also Charles Cuttler, “Exotics in Fifteenth Century Art: Comments on Oriental and Gypsy Costume,” in Liber amicorum Herman Liebaers, ed. Frans Vanwijngaerden (Brussels: Gemeentekrediet van België, 1984), 419–34. Compare the purported ethnographic images of different peoples of the Middle East from the 1486 pilgrimage book (Mainz, 1486) by Bernhard von Breydenbach; Elizabeth Ross, Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2014), 68, figure 26 (“Saracens”). 7 Lucas had earlier used a similar turban to show the sleeping Muhammed in his first dated engraving (1508), Muhammed and the Monk Sergius; Larry Silver, “Muhammed, Mandeville, and Maximilian: Construction of a Muslim Nemesis,” in Image of the Prophet between Ideal and Ideology, ed. Christiane Gruber and Avinoam Shalem (Berlin, De Gruyter, 2014), 223–40.

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around the middle scene with the Golden Calf. But only the most discerning viewer will observe the climax and true spiritual message: the unseen God bestowing the tablets of the Law atop the peak. Yet one must realize, together with the lonely figure of Moses, that individual faith and personal commitment to the covenant are truly at stake, threatened by the outright idolatry of the masses. The significance of the Dance around the Golden Calf in Christian teaching is linked to the Ten Commandments themselves and to that primary prohibition against idolatry. Already in the era of incunabula, it appears in visual catechisms about the Decalogue.8 Inevitably it also appears as the first image of ten chosen biblical scenes about transgressions against the Ten Commandments; for example, Lucas Cranach used it both before and after his crucial connection with Martin Luther in Wittenberg: in a 1516 painting for the Town Council Hall of Justice in Wittenberg and in his 1527 woodcuts for a Lutheran catechism devised by Philipp Melanchthon, prints that likely predate Lucas’s Golden Calf triptych. These pictorial concepts contrast the firm boundary between idolatry and true faith, a topic of heightened significance in the early years of the Reformation, particularly after the publication of Martin Luther’s Exposition of the Ten Commandments, sermons that he delivered in 1516.9 The critical importance of the First Commandment for Luther’s theology is there made patent: “The purpose of this commandment, therefore, is to require true faith and confidence of the heart.” Lucas van Leyden painted another Old Testament scene, again featuring Moses with the Children of Israel in the wilderness. This event draws on two different biblical texts – but with two different valences: Moses Striking the Rock in the Wilderness (Figure 12.2; 1527; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).10 The right center of the image features Moses, whose horns appear in the guise of vertical

8 Veronika Thum, Die Zehn Gebote für die ungelehrten Leut. Der Dekalog in der Graphik des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2006), 39–65, for pre-Reformation prints; for Lucas Cranach and Wittenberg, 78–87. 9 Published in Latin as a pamphlet, Decem praecepta, dated July 20, 1518. For discussion, see Euan Cameron, Enchanted Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 159–64, emphasizing how Luther gave a wide interpretation of “idolatry” as a “superstitious” form of personal use of rites for protection, reward, or gain. See also Bernd Wannenwetsch, “Luther’s Moral Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther, ed. Donald McKim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 121–24, quoting Luther on the First Commandment, 123. 10 Silver, “The ‘Sin of Moses,’” 401–3; Lawton Smith, Paintings, 72–75, 101–3, no. 7. The painting is on a canvas support, painted in the medium of tempera and watercolor, a distinctive painted medium in early modern Netherlandish art; see Diane Wolfthal, The Beginnings of Netherlandish Canvas Painting, 1400–1530 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 79–80, no. 77.

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Figure 12.2: Lucas van Leyden, Moses Striking the Rock in the Wilderness, 1527, glue tempera on linen, 181.9 × 237.5 cm. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Acc. No. 54.1432. Photo: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; www.mfa.org.

curls; he also wears a golden chain of leadership.11 Beside him stands his brother, Aaron, the chief priest (and abettor of the making of the Golden Calf for the people), but the precise identification of Aaron remains ambiguous between Moses’s two main flanking companions. At his right, one figure wears a splendid brocade and turban, while the other turbaned figure to his left also has bells on his garment.12 All three figures stare at Moses’s hand, holding the rod he used to open a spring of water for the thirsty people from a rock.

11 On golden chains, Julius Held, Rembrandt’s Aristotle and Other Rembrandt Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 32–38; John Peacock, The Look of Van Dyck (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 177–215. 12 According to Exodus 28:33, Aaron’s priestly garb includes bells; however, it also includes other, explicit, complicated elements of a breastplate and ephod (Exodus 28:6–31), not shown, plus a robe, fringed tunic, headdress, and sash, as well as a gold frontlet (28:36). But the figure with bells also carries a sword, inappropriate weaponry for a priest. Other candidates for the

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As noted, two texts, Exodus 17:1–6, and Numbers 20:1–13, recount the event. Both agree that the miracle occurred at a site called Meribah (“strife”) in the wilderness of Sin, after the mutinous people had complained against both their leader and divine providence, crying out for water (as they had earlier cried out for food and were soon delivered both quail and manna; Exodus 16). In the first account (Exodus) God commands Moses to use the same rod with which he struck the Red Sea/Sea of Reeds. The Lord claims to be standing before Moses and commands him to strike the rock to release water. But in the other version of the same story in the Numbers account, the Lord commands Moses to “order” the rock to yield its water (Numbers 20:8). Instead, Moses angrily denounces the people as “rebels” (Numbers 20:10), then strikes the rock twice, only to be rebuked by God for his own lack of trust or faith; therefore, it is decreed, “you shall not lead this congregation into the land that I have given them” (Numbers 20:13). This then is the basic sin by Moses – disobedience and lack of faith – for which the prophet is condemned to see the Promised Land only from distant Mount Nebo (Deuteronomy 34:1–12); in the meantime (Numbers 20:22–29) Aaron also dies on Mount Hor for the same offense. According to the Numbers version, then, the same issues of obedience, trust, and faith in the Lord and His providence infuse this miracle of the rock at Meribah, and Moses sins as an individual but also as a leader, shortly before the climax of the covenant with Moses and the people at Mount Sinai (Exodus 19) beneath thunder, lightning, and the divine presence in a cloud. Thus, the two scenes are linked not only in their Old Testament text sources and wilderness locations but also in their challenges to faith in an invisible, jealous God who demands obedience to His divine commands and bestows the Ten Commandments on his chosen people. Lucas van Leyden, a prominent Leiden citizen, was married after June 11, 1526, to Elysabeth van Boschuysen, daughter of a wealthy noble family; her father served as both burgomaster and schout (“bailiff”). Karel van Mander remarks that he belonged to the “wealthy and noble” before his death in 1533 and a (conventional Catholic) burial in the Pieterskerk.13 Thus Lucas is quite unlikely to have been even a crypto-Lutheran, since he was very much in the public eye. However, his choice of pictorial themes suggests reformist religious ideas, whether

third figure include Joshua, evident on the Amsterdam triptych beside Moses, or Caleb (Joshua 14:6–15), but the figure of Hur is mentioned shortly afterwards, assisting at the moment when Moses’s hands are held up while the sun is in the sky to ensure divine-sanctioned victory over the Amelekites (Exodus 17:10). 13 Franz Dülberg, “Die Persönlichkeit des Lucas van Leyden,” Oud Holland 17 (1899): 65–83, especially 71–72; Jeremy Bangs, Cornelis Engebrecht’s Leiden (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1979), 4, also indicating marriage alliances with the van Swieten family (Last Judgment).

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Figure 12.3: Marten de Vos, Moses Showing the Tablets of the the Law to the Iraelites, with Portraits of Members of the Panhuys Family, their Relatives, and Friends, 1574–1575. Oil on panel, 153 × 237.5 cm. Mauritshuis, The Hague. Inv. No. 249. Photo: Mauritshuis, The Hague.

stimulated by liberal Christian humanists like Erasmus of Rotterdam or even by the widespread discussion of ideas prompted by published ideas from the circle of Martin Luther. Such issues in the works of the painter might suggest that he considered the importance of internalized, individual piety as well as the importance of unquestioning obedience to God’s commands. Another, later Netherlandish painting uses Moses imagery to show affiliation with the prophet as well as the Children of Israel, here obediently accepting the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. This large single panel by Marten de Vos (active 1558–1603, Figure 12.3)14 was made for the Antwerp family of Peeter

14 Rudie van Leeuwen, “Moses and the Israelites by Maerten de Vos: The Portrait Historié of the Panhuys Family from 1574.” In Example or Alter Ego? Aspects of the Portrait Historié in Western Art from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Volker Manuth, Rudie van Leeuwen, and Jos Koldeweij (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 173–90; Armin Zweite, Marten de Vos als Maler (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1980), 288–89, no. 59; see also for the context, R. P. Zijp, Ketters en papen onder Filips II (Utrecht: Museum Het Catharijneconvent, 1986), 86, where other identifications of sitters are offered; Koenraad Jonckheere, Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm. Experiments in Decorum 1566– 1585 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 75, figures 57–58.

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Panhuys (1529–1585). Its original frame presents a modified Dutch version of Exodus 34–35: When Moses came down for the second time after receiving the tablets of the Law from the Lord on Mount Sinai and gathered all of Israel, he held the Commandments of the Lord before them, so that they should make all decorations of the tabernacle which the Lord had bidden Moses.15

In the center of the panel before the distant peak and glowing cloud of Mount Sinai sits Moses with the Decalogue, also spelled out in Dutch, but with the more traditional, lengthy first commandment. In the foreground the glittering gold and jewels of the people have been gathered in order to ornament the tabernacle, as commanded (Exodus 35:4–29) – in utter contrast to the use of such riches to fashion the idol of the Golden Calf before Moses’s first descent from Sinai. But it is clear from facial features and from costumes that among the Children of Israel contemporary portraits are distributed, making this an early example of a celebrated Dutch seventeenth-century phenomenon, the portrait historié.16 Many figures cannot be identified any longer, but members of the Panhuys family are labeled with their names on their garments, led by Peeter Panhuys, age 46 according to the inscription with his name on his red tunic; he stands second from the right with his son Peeter, above his wife Margaretha Hooftman and their children in the lower right. Thus, members of this group clearly want to associate with the Jews as chosen people, given a special covenant with God, confirmed by the transmission of the Ten Commandments, here arranged in accord with the Lutheran translation of the Bible, with the first two verses as the First Commandment. Significantly, Panhuys was the son-in-law of a major overseas merchantbanker and religious lay leader of Lutheranism in Antwerp, Gillis Hooftman (shown with his wife Margaretha van Nispen in a 1570 de Vos double portrait; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam); Hooftman thus is identifiable as the prominent figure in the group at left, also wearing a red Spanish cloak while standing above 15 ALS MOYSI DEN TWEEDEMAAL DIE TAFELEN DES WEETS VAN DEN HEERE OP DEN BERCH SYNAI ONTFANGEN HADDE IS NEDER GHECOMEN EN HEEFT GHEHEEL ISRAEL VERGAERDERT ENDE HEEFT HAER DIE GHEBODEN DES HEEREN VOER GHEHOVDEN OPDAT SY MAKEN SOVDEN ALLEN SIERATEN DES TABERNAKELS DIE DE HEERE BEVOLEN HADDE MOYSI TE DOENE. 16 Rudi van Leeuwen, “The Portrait Historié in Religious Context and its Condemnation,” in Pokerfaced. Flemish and Dutch Faces Unveiled, ed. Bert Wateeuw and Katlijne Van der Stighelen (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 109–24; Peter Sutton, “Rembrandt and the Portrait Historié,” Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits, ed. Arthur Wheelock, Jr. (Washington: National Gallery, 2005), 57; Ann Jensen Adams, Public Faces and Private Identities in Seventeenth-Century Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 158–210.

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his wife in the lower left corner.17 Hooftman’s international interests led him to finance the 1570 Antwerp map atlas publication by Abraham Ortelius, the Theatrum orbis terrarum. And he was well connected with William of Orange, leader of the Dutch Revolt, as well as with English financier Thomas Gresham, who borrowed money from him for Queen Elizabeth. He was also denounced vaguely as a “Calvinist” by spies for regent Margaret of Parma, though he also publicly professed Catholic and royal loyalties until 1579. Moreover, in light of the Calvinist aversion to religious images, both Panhuys and Hooftman seem securely identified in this painting as Lutherans. Panhuys and his wife would emigrate to Amsterdam in 1584. Included in the group (ninth from the right; head only) is Christopher Plantin, renowned book publisher in Antwerp, who never officially converted away from Catholicism but is loosely associated (along with Ortelius) with the temporizing religious group called the “Family of Love.”18 The painter himself, Maarten de Vos stands at the far right. He had earlier (1568) painted five panels for Hooftman’s dining hall, based on episodes from Acts recounting the life of St. Paul, including three extant works: Paul and Barnabas on Lystra, Paul on Malta and Paul in Ephesus, the latter especially hostile to idolatry because the apostle destroys silver shrines devoted to the local pagan goddess Diana (Acts 19:24–27).19 The figure on the far left is the major painter of vistas from the Ortelius circle, Joris van Hoefnagel. Regardless of their true affiliation (which has remained secret for many), surely this larger depicted religious community is clearly to be distinguished from traditional Catholic image worship and ritual practice, defined in this Mosaic context of Exodus by contrast as idolatrous in its Golden Calf fetish figure. Surely in this case they all distinguish themselves clearly from image worship and current Catholic practice, defined in this Mosaic context by contrast as idolatrous. Thus this painting as a whole identifies its sitters with the saving remnant of the Jewish people, pursuing their own destiny under divine protection while in flight from a tyrannical pharaoh. 17 Zweite, Marten de Vos, 67–84; no. 111; Zijp, Ketters en papen, however, identifies that figure as Hooftman’s business partner Johan Radermacher, and he sees Hooftman at the left above his seated wife. 18 Alistair Hamilton, The Family of Love (Cambridge: James Clarke and Co., 1981); B. Rekers, Benito Arias Montano (1527–1598) (London: Warburg Institute, 1972). Calvin attacked this religious temporizing and secrecy as Nicodemism; Perez Zagorin, Ways of Lying (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), especially 68–82; Carlos Eire, War against the Idols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), especially 195–281, including discussion of Calvin’s iconoclastic attacks on idolatry. 19 Zweite, Marten de Vos, 67–84, 267–69, nos. 14–16.

Chapter 12 Painting the Invisible God at Sinai

Figure 12.4: Hendrick Goltzius, Moses with the Tablets of the Law, 1583, ink on paper, 58.3 × 42 cm. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, object number RP-P-OB-10.403. Photo: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

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Marten de Vos provides a curious case of an artist who pursued a prominent career in Antwerp by shifting like a weather vane to accord with the changing dominant religious culture at any moment. Early in his career he produced decorations (1565–1570) for a Lutheran court chapel in Celle for Duke Wilhelm II of Braunschweig-Lüneburg, and in 1568 made a set of five large panels (two extant; Brussels, Louvre) of the career of St. Paul for Hooftman’s home.20 In 1572 he became dean (dekan) of the Antwerp painters’ guild. However, already beginning in 1574 and increasingly after the fall of Antwerp to the Spanish army forces in 1585, de Vos recanted his earlier religious orientation and spent the rest of his career restoring the lost Catholic altarpieces for confraternities and guilds in Antwerp Cathedral, destroyed during the Iconoclasm of 1566. This production trend climaxed with his commission (1602, a year before his death) from the Antwerp painters’ guild itself for its altarpiece, whose center panel celebrates St. Luke Painting the Virgin (Royal Museum, Antwerp).21 One further image, a print, points to the significance in Dutch art of Moses and the Ten Commandments at a time close to the political split of the North from the Spanish Netherlands in 1585. That engraving, Moses with the Tablets of the Law by Hendrick Goltzius (1583; B.2; Figure 12.4) shows the prophet in frontal half length behind the tablets of the Decalogue. As he holds his staff in his right hand, his traditional horns, now properly depicted, glow as flames (see note 4 above) issuing from either side of his head.22 Behind Moses, the presence of God is depicted, but only in the properly fashioned Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton, in a glowing aureole emitting rays of sunlight, rather than in any figural representation. Significantly, the Ten Commandments are now printed in Dutch, designating that this print is made for a Protestant, more specifically Calvinist, audience.23 And their ordering corresponds carefully to both the

20 He also painted the double portrait of Antonius Anselmo and his wife Joanna Hooftman with their children Gillis and Johanna in 1577 (Royal Museums, Brussels). 21 Ria Fabri and Nico van Hout, eds., From Quinten Metsijs to Peter Paul Rubens (Antwerp: De Kathedraal, 2009), 149–59; the wings were executed by Otto van Veen and Ambrosius Francken, respectively. 22 Walter Strauss, Hendrik Goltzius 1558–1617. The Complete Engravings and Woodcuts (New York: Abaris Books, 1977), 286–87, no. 168; Peter van der Coelen, Patriarchs, Angels, and Prophets. The Old Testament in Netherlandish Printmaking from Lucas van Leyden to Rembrandt (Amsterdam: Rembrandt Information Centre, 1996), 102–3, no. 24. The print is actually made from three plates: the main image, a frame, and an elaborate calligraphic text of the Ten Commandments in Dutch. 23 The plates were taken over by Aegidius Sadeler in Antwerp and reprinted there with a German text. Sadeler, a member of the Antwerp guild in 1589, left the city in 1590 and went to Munich to join his uncle Johannes, court printmaker for Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria. Jan Piet

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Jewish and Calvinist organization of the Commandments (see note 5 above). Miya Mochizuki notes that Goltzius’s hometown of Haarlem did not suffer the initial depredations of Iconoclasm in 1566 and again in 1573, but instead endured its own wave of religious image destruction shortly before this print was created (1578).24 Afterwards, the Calvinist Reformed Church placed a board with the words of the Ten Commandments (lost) atop the choir screen in Haarlem’s great church of St. Bavo. Surviving versions (for example, in Leiden St. Peter’s, where Lucas van Leyden is buried) show the same kind of calligraphic flourish and the same Calvinist numeration of the Law. This post-Reformation presentation of religious boards with words accords not only with the Goltzius print but also with the Decalogue tablets included with that other Calvinist representation of God as a glowing cloud above Mount Sinai: de Vos’s large panel for Peeter Panhuys and his circle as a community of the faithful. In such ways, religious Reform found its distinctive pictorial form for an invisible Godhead in Dutch art across the sixteenth century.

Works Cited Adams, Ann Jensen. Public Faces and Private Identities in Seventeenth-Century Holland, 158-210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Alexander-Knotter, Mirjam, Jasper Hillegers, and Edward van Voolen. The ‘Jewish’ Rembrandt. The Myth Unravelled. Amsterdam: Jewish Historical Museum, 2008. Bangs, Jeremy. Cornelis Engebrecht’s Leiden. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1979. Cameron, Euan. Enchanted Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. van der Coelen, Peter. Patriarchs, Angels, and Prophets. The Old Testament in Netherlandish Printmaking from Lucas van Leyden to Rembrandt. Amsterdam: Rembrandt Information Centre, 1996. Exhibition catalog. Cuttler, Charles. “Exotics in Fifteenth Century Art: Comments on Oriental and Gypsy Costume.” In Liber amicorum Herman Liebaers, edited by Frans Vanwijngaerden, 419–34. Brussels: Gemeentekrediet van België, 1984. Duke, Alastair. Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries. London, Hambledon, 1990. Duke, Alastair. “The Netherlands.” In The Early Reformation in Europe, edited by Andrew Pettegrew, 142–65. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Dülberg, Franz. “Die Persönlichkeit des Lucas van Leyden.” Oud Holland 17 (1899): 65–83. Eire, Carlos. War against the Idols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Filedt Kok, “Hendrick Goltzius – Engraver, Designer and Publisher 1582–1600,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 42–43 (1991–1992), 163 n. 25. 24 Mochizuki, Image after Iconoclasm, especially 105–8, 251–67 for Ten Commandments boards in churches.

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Fabri, Ria and Nico van Hout, eds. From Quinten Metsijs to Peter Paul Rubens. Antwerp: De Kathedraal, 2009. Exhibition catalog. Filedt Kok, Jan Piet. “Hendrick Goltzius – Engraver, Designer and Publisher 1582–1600.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 42–43 (1991–1992): 159–218. Filedt Kok, Jan Piet. The Dance around the Golden Calf by Lucas van Leyden. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2008. Hamilton, Alistair. The Family of Love. Cambridge: James Clarke and Co., 1981. Held, Julius. Rembrandt’s Aristotle and Other Rembrandt Studies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Jonckheere, Koenraad. Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm. Experiments in Decorum 1566–1585. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. van Leeuwen, Rudi. “The Portrait Historié in Religious Context and Its Condemnation,” in Pokerfaced. Flemish and Dutch Faces Unveiled, edited by Bert Wateeuw and Katlijne Van der Stighelen, 109-24. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. van Leeuwen, Rudie. “Moses and the Israelites by Maerten de Vos: The Portrait Historié of the Panhuys Family from 1574.” In Example or Alter Ego? Aspects of the Portrait Historié in Western Art from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Volker Manuth, Rudie van Leeuwen, and Jos Koldeweij, 173–90. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016. Mellinkoff, Ruth. The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Mellinkoff, Ruth. “Judas’s Red Hair and the Jews.” Journal of Jewish Art 9 (1982): 31–46. Mellinkoff, Ruth. “More about Horned Moses.” Jewish Art 12–13 (1986–87): 184–98. Mellinkoff, Ruth. Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Mochizuki, Mia. The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566–1672. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Peacock, John. The Look of Van Dyck. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Perlove, Shelley, and Larry Silver. Rembrandt’s Faith. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2009. Pokorny, Erwin. “The Gypsies and Their Impact on Fifteenth-Century Western European Iconography.” In Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence, edited by Jaynie Anderson, 597–601. Melbourne: Miegunyah, 2009. Pokorny, Erwin. “Das Zigeunerbild in der altdeutschen Kunst. Ethnographisches Interesse und Antiziganismus.” In Menschenbilder. Beiträge zur Altdeutschen Kunst, edited by Andreas Tacke and Stefan Heinze, 97–110. Petersberg: Michael Imhof, 2011. Rekers, B. Benito Arias Montano (1527–1598). London: Warburg Institute, 1972. Ross, Elizabeth. Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2014. Silver, Larry. “Muhammed, Mandeville, and Maximilian: Construction of a Muslim Nemesis.” In Image of the Prophet between Ideal and Ideology, edited by Christiane Gruber and Avinoam Shalem, 223–40. Berlin, De Gruyter, 2014. Silver, Larry. “The ‘Sin of Moses’: Comments on the Early Reformation in a Late Painting by Lucas van Leyden.” Art Bulletin 60 (1973): 401–9. Smith, Elise Lawton. The Paintings of Lucas van Leyden. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1992. Sutton, Peter. “Rembrandt and the Portrait Historié,” Rembrandt’s Late Religious Portraits, edited by Arthur Wheelock, jr., exh. cat., 57-67. Washington: National Gallery, 2005.

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Strauss, Walter. Hendrik Goltzius 1558–1617. The Complete Engravings and Woodcuts. New York: Abaris Books, 1977. Thum, Veronika. Die Zehn Gebote für die ungelehrten Leut. Der Dekalog in der Graphik des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2006. Vlaardingerbroek, Pieter, ed. De Portugese Synagoge in Amsterdam. Zwolle: W Books, 2013. Wannenwetsch, Bernd. “Luther’s Moral Theology.” In The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther, edited by Donald McKim, 121–24. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Wolfthal, Diane, The Beginnings of Netherlandish Canvas Painting, 1400–1530. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Zagorin, Perez. Ways of Lying. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Zijp, R. P. Ketters en papen onder Filips II. Utrecht: Museum Het Catharijneconvent, 1986. Exhibition catalog. Zweite, Armin, Marten de Vos als Maler. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1980.

Anne H. Muraoka

Chapter 13 A Question of Faith: “Making Strange” in Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew Marcia Hall’s long engagement with post-Tridentine sacred images has opened up new avenues of research and dialogue that departs from the simplistic reduction of late Cinquecento and early Seicento sacred works into the neat categories and stylistic labels of Renaissance or Baroque. Instead, Hall’s research examines works of art through a historical lens. She does not subscribe to the idea of creating yet another overarching category or stylistic label, such as Counter-Reformation art, or that post-Trent sacred style evolved in a monolithic fashion. Her nearly four decades of research seeks rather to identify how individual artists maneuvered and sought personal solutions to the seemingly dichotomous precepts of art and devotion that reached a head in 1563; a year that marked the foundation of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence and the closing of the final session of the Council of Trent.1 In her 2011 book, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art, Hall explores how the materiality of color, the bravura handling of brushstrokes, compositional devices and iconographical choices manifests as individual explorations in reconciling art and devotion into something meaningful to its purpose as sacred images in the post-Trent years. This essay not only highlights Hall’s contributions to our understanding of Counter-Reformation art (here utilized in reference to sacred art produced post-1563, not as a designation of style), but also underscores the new avenues of discourse born out of her own methodology that have been pivotal to my own work on Caravaggio (1571–1610).2 In the introduction of a 2014 volume of essays on Caravaggio, the editors Lorenzo Pericolo and David Stone describe the current discourse on Caravaggio and his work as circuitous and unfruitful.3 In terms of the artist’s sacred images, no

1 Marcia B. Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 5–8. 2 Anne H. Muraoka, “Il fine della pittura: Canon Reformulation in the Age of Counter-Reformation – The Lombard–Roman Confluence.” PhD diss., Temple University, 2009); The Path of Humility: Caravaggio and Carlo Borromeo (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2015). 3 Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone, eds., Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014), 1. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-014

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concrete documentation establishes Caravaggio’s position on Counter-Reformation ideology or his personal faith, yet studies abound that label him as the “radical master of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.”4 The question at hand, however, is not whether the artist felt or possessed faith, as many post-Tridentine theorists suggested was requisite for any “Christian painter,”5 or that the artist subscribed to a particular brand of Counter-Reformation rhetoric, but rather how does Caravaggio’s formal and iconographical choices reflect or respond to external historical phenomena. Exploring what we see in Caravaggio’s sacred canvases against the backdrop of Tridentine reform enables us to understand them with greater nuance. This essay is inspired by Marcia Hall’s research and observations of Caravaggio’s artistic choices. In examining the artist’s formal and iconographical choices in his 1599–1600 Calling of Saint Matthew (Figure 13.1) and the ongoing debate of the identity of St. Matthew – Giovanni Pietro Bellori’s traditional bearded man or the young man at the far left of the customs table – Hall suggests that the artist purposefully left the identity of Matthew open ended: “The painter has left room here for the viewer to identify himself with the well-dressed, intelligent man, but also for the humble sinner who sees himself in the worldly youth who doesn’t even know it when he is called.”6 Hall’s interpretation of two Matthews suggests that Caravaggio has democratized the viewers’ experience. Following Hall’s astute reading, this essay approaches Caravaggio’s Calling in a similar manner, but rather proposes one St. Matthew and four companions at different stages of conversion. In this reading, Caravaggio’s sacred works participates in the dialogue central to the Protestant-Catholic debate about faith and images.

4 Pericolo and Stone, “Introduction: The Caravaggio Conundrum,” 1. 5 The “faith” or “pure intention” of a painter of sacred images is particularly referenced in Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti’s 1582 Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane, part of a planned five-book treatise, of which only two were written and published. In book 1, chapter 7, Paleotti notes that the exterior form of sacred images, meaning its style, is meaningless if “they were not attended by the pure intention to serve God and were not offered to him as a sacrifice from our hands.” See Gabriele Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, trans. by William McCuaig (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012), book 1, chapter 7, 76. In the following chapter, Paleotti describes such Christian painters throughout history who practiced art in a “Christian spirit.” He begins with examples from the Old Testament and ends with modern times with artists such as Pietro Cavallini, Fra Giovanni of Fiesole (Fra Angelico), Fra Bartolomeo, and Albrecht Dürer. Paleotti, Discourse, book 1, chapter 8, 78–81. 6 Hall, Sacred Image in the Age of Art, 256. For Bellori’s description of Caravaggio’s Calling, Giovanni Pietro Bellori,“Michelangelo da Caravaggio,” in Caravaggio, ed. Howard Hibbard. Reprint (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985), 365.

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Figure 13.1: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599–1600. Oil on canvas, 322 cm. × 340 cm. Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

“Making Strange” In The Sacred Image in the Age of Art, Hall borrows from Russian Formalism the term “making strange” as a phenomenon in post-Tridentine sacred images in which unexpected pictorial devices are utilized to engage the viewer.7 These “strange” devices are departures from the expected, traditional norms of sacred image making, which arrests the attention of viewers, and prolongs the viewers’

7 Hall, Sacred Image in the Age of Art, 8–15.

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contemplation on the image. Hall points to broad manifestations of this phenomenon in the Renaissance. Hall describes, for instance, how sacred images of the maniera confront viewers with an inherent paradox. Artists of the maniera often combined visual barriers such as repoussoir figures that prevent rather than facilitate viewers’ access to the painted space, while simultaneously appealing to their senses with sophisticated and beautiful ornament.8 In the late Cinquecento, in the broad period of the Counter-Reformation, many artists began to seek out alternative means to engage the worshiper that moved away from the paradoxical approach of the maniera. Rather than engaging the viewer solely by means of the senses via beautiful ornament, artists working in the post-Tridentine years also appealed to their emotions.9 The methods of “making strange” in post-Tridentine Rome are diverse, but the sacred work of Caravaggio is of particular note here.10 Hall proposes that Caravaggio’s pictorial method of “making strange” manifests in his unique method of dramatizing his sacred scenes. He accomplishes this in number of ways. Foremost in his unique arsenal was his naturalism. Although there are many discrepancies in the early biographers’ accounts of the artist, Caravaggio’s practice of painting alla natura remains consistent across all the artist’s biographies published from 1604 to 1792.11 According to Hall, the unconventional and mundane portrayal of sacred events makes the miracle portrayed on Caravaggio’s canvases more powerful. The manner in which Caravaggio composes his scenes is also of fundamental value to the drama of his sacred images. In his book Pittura e Controriforma, Federico Zeri broadly characterized post-Tridentine sacred painting in Rome as art senza tempo (art without time or timeless art).12 He centered his study primarily on the Neapolitan painter Scipione Pulzone (1544–1598) who was active primarily in Rome. Hall notes that this approach marked an attempt to “recapture the appeal of traditional icons and avoid the excesses and pitfalls of maniera.”13 It was not a method singular to Pulzone, but rather part of a larger exploration among the artist and his circle in finding a suitable post-Trent style

8 Marcia B. Hall, After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 268. 9 Hall, After Raphael, 268. 10 Hall, Sacred Image in the Age of Art, 248–67. 11 Van Mander (1604), Mancini (ca. 1617–1621), Baglione (1642), Bellori (1672), Scaramuccia (1674), Von Sandrart (1675), and Susinno (1792). See Hibbard’s Appendix II for the primary early biographies of Caravaggio (Italian–English parallel text); Hibbard, Caravaggio, 343–87. 12 Federico Zeri, Pittura e Controriforma (Venice: Neri Pozza, 1997). 13 Hall, Sacred Image in the Age of Art, 249.

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that responds to the religious objectives of the Catholic Church.14 Sacred art treatises began to emerge shortly after the closing of the Council of Trent that nostalgically looked back to the origins of the Christian Church. The urgency to reinvest sacred imagery with the devotional function of early Christian icons is clearly established in Giovanni Andrea Gilio’s Dialogo nel quale si ragiona degli errori e degli abusi de’ pittori circa l’istorie (1564).15 Gilio wistfully longed for the custom of frontal facing sacred portraits and the honest and sincere devotion of ancient art, proposing that artists practice a regolata mescolanza (measured mixture), combining artistry with ancient devotion.16 Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti’s Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane (1582) similarly looks back to the tradition of icons by underscoring the obligation of artists to build a tangible, affective communication between painting and viewer by pairing religious truths with a tangible and natural painting style.17 Paleotti draws from the traditional notion of the function of icons described by St. John of Damascus who noted, “We are led by perceptible Icons to the contemplation of the divine and spiritual.”18 Unlike Gilio, it was not the archaic and honest devotion of icons themselves that Paleotti promotes, but rather how icons facilitate and encourage meditation. In book one of his Discorso, Paleotti explains that through the vehicle of “delight” painters can persuade viewers to embrace the religious content represented, and encourage them to piety, virtue, and obedience to God. Paleotti divides the vehicle of “delight” into three subcategories: sensuous (animale), rational (razionale), and supernatural (sopranaturale).19 In order to explain the function of each delight, Paleotti frames the delights within a narrative of a man looking at the night sky. Paleotti describes the man’s viewing experience in 14 Zeri also notes the “timeless” quality in the work of Marcello Venusti, Girolamo Siciolante, and Giuseppe Valeriano. The latter was a Jesuit painter, with whom Pulzone collaborated in 1588 in the chapel of Santa Maria della Strada in the Gesù. 15 Giovanni Andrea Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters, ed. Michael Bury, Lucinda Byatt, and Carol M. Richardson, trans. Michael Bury and Lucinda Byatt (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2018). For the modern Italian translation of Gilio, see Paola Barocchi, ed. Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento: Fra manierismo e controriforma, 3 vols. (Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1960–62), 2:3–115. 16 Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors, 161. See also Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), which further investigates the idea of presence and in particular the significance of frontality or prosopopeia in imbuing authenticity and piety in sacred images. The discussion of Gilio’s regolata mescolanza is on 14–15. 17 Paleotti, Discourse. For the modern Italian translation of Paleotti, see Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, 2:117–517. 18 Translation from Constantine Cavarnos, Orthodox Iconography (Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1977), 32. 19 Paleotti, Discourse, book 1, chapter 22, 111–14.

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steps; he is first moved by his sense of sight (sensuous delight), which leads to mental discourse (rational delight), and culminates in spiritual transformation (supernatural delight).20 In this anecdote, Paleotti merges the process of looking at paintings with that of meditation popularized by monastic tradition, which was revived and amplified during the late Cinquecento and early Seicento. Although we cannot directly connect the recommendations of Gilio and Paleotti to the many permutations of post-Trent sacred style, their ideas point to the importance of establishing a connection between image and viewer that permeated this period; and in particular, a connection that would activate some kind of emotional and spiritual transformation. As Hall acknowledges, Caravaggio approaches his painting in a manner senza tempo.21 The combination of a pared down composition, often without visual anchors to time or place and the pedestrian approach to his figures, allows Caravaggio to position his sacred historical dramas between the past and the present. Although his chapel laterals and altarpieces were not icons, they functioned in a manner similar to them by focusing the worshipers’ gaze and meditation on the figures, who in turn directly address viewers through their corporeal presence. Caravaggio accomplishes this by employing darkness as opposed to distinctive settings. The dark backgrounds function as modernized versions of early Christian gold grounds, which facilitate the worshipers’ attention on the figures portrayed while creating an iconic stillness.22 Caravaggio’s method of sacred image making thus acknowledges the exigency of combining devotional (iconic) modes of imaging and narrative content, a pictorial imperative that developed in the wake of Tridentine prescriptions for painting. Caravaggio’s dark, pared down, and tangible sacred images, which combined devotio and istoria, were ultimately conducive to the “silent dialogue” between

20 Paleotti, Discourse, book 1, chapter 22, 112–13. 21 Hall, Sacred Image in the Age of Art, 253. 22 Caravaggio’s early biographers note the artist’s deficiencies in narrative. In speaking of Caravaggio and his followers, Mancini describes these artists’ canvases as using light that is “very strong and the shadows very deep, they give powerful relief to the painting, but in an unnatural way . . . As a result the figures, though they look forceful, lack movement, expression, and grace.” Baglione, in a similar context blames these artists’ reliance on painting from life, “without studying the rudiments of design and the profundity of art . . . therefore these painters were not able to put two figures together, nor could they illustrate a history because they did not comprehend the value of so noble an art.” In describing Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of Saint Peter and the Conversion of Saint Paul in the Cerasi Chapel, Bellori describes them as “completely without action.” See Giulio Mancini, “On Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio,” in Caravaggio, ed. Howard Hibbard. Reprint (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985), 350; Giovanni Baglione, “The Life of Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Painter,” in Hibbard, Caravaggio, 355; and Bellori, “Michelangelo da Caravaggio,” 371.

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viewer and image, required for inciting devotion. The artist positions his work somewhere between icon and narrative, the past and the present. In most instances, Caravaggio removes all indications of setting and clothes his figures in both historical and contemporary garments, making the past inextricably cast into the present. Despite the dramatic tenor of his backgrounds, Caravaggio maintains unity by using desaturated colors.23 The colors appear as if they are in full saturation, but he achieves this through placing a color’s complement beside it.24 By doing so, Caravaggio avoids the vain and ornamental beauty of maniera color for its own sake. Caravaggio’s signature method of “making strange,” however, centers on how he intensifies the tangible reality of his scenes by employing his exaggerated chiaroscuro (what has come to be called tenebrism). The artist’s tenebrism contributes to the focalization on the subject and dramatic tenor of the scene, which together encourages the viewer to linger: “The very darkness encourages us to linger, even just to read the image, but eventually to become involved in the silent dialogue among the actors.”25 It is in his public debut for the Contarelli Chapel, in the French mother church San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, where Caravaggio introduces these “making strange” devices.

Where is St. Matthew? The Debate on His Identity in the Calling of Saint Matthew Implicit in all of Caravaggio’s paintings, both public and private, is a novel “making strange” formula that melds or reconciles the exigency between icon and narrative, light and dark, and the artificial and the real, ideally suited for a

23 Hall, After Raphael, 279. 24 Hall, After Raphael, 279; and Hall, Sacred Image in the Age of Art, 264. Caravaggio’s color was among the few qualities of the artist’s canvases that many of his biographers praised. One of his harshest contemporary critics, Bellori, in fact acknowledged (however, reluctantly) that Caravaggio advanced painting with his realism, which “was not much in vogue and figures were made according to convention and maniera, satisfying more a taste for beauty than for truth.” Bellori in particular notes that Caravaggio avoided “all pettiness and falsity in his color . . . [He] did not use cinnabar reds or azure blues in his figures; and if he occasionally did use them, he toned them down, saying they were poisonous colors.” See Bellori, “Michelangelo da Caravaggio,” 371. See also Janis C. Bell, “Some Seventeenth-Century Appraisals of Caravaggio’s Coloring,” Artibus et Historie 14, no. 27 (1993): 103–29; “Light and Color in Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus,” Artibus et Historie 16, no. 31 (1995): 139–70. 25 Hall, Sacred Image in the Age of Art, 253.

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Counter-Reformation climate. Beginning with his public debut for the lateral paintings and altarpiece for the Contarelli Chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi, Caravaggio further develops his unique formulation of sacred images. He deepens his contrast of light and dark and pares down the details of the setting in order to arrest the scenes in a frozen moment, and to make the past appear present. In 1599, Caravaggio received the commission to complete two lateral paintings depicting the Calling of Saint Matthew (Figure 13.1) and the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew for the Contarelli Chapel.26 As he would do for both his private and public commissions, Caravaggio departs from traditional representations of the scene. In both Northern and Italian examples, the story of the spiritual awakening of Levi, a tax collector who abandons his unsavory profession to become a follower of Christ (thus becoming St. Matthew), takes place either indoors or outdoors. Caravaggio, however, makes the location indeterminable, largely a symptom of the darkness that enshrouds the particulars of the space. The window (interpreted as an indoor view of the window or outdoor one) is the only element that marks the space, other than the table and benches on which Levi and his companions sit. The raking light that enters the pictorial space from an unseen source on the right beyond the picture frame punctures the inky blackness, highlighting the left profile of Christ’s face as he approaches from the right with St. Peter. The light continues along a path from right to left to illume primarily the heads of the three men closest to Christ: an older bearded man dressed as a dandy, and two youths dressed in contemporary page garments. Standing to the left of the bearded dandy is an older man who adjusts his spectacles in order to better observe the transaction occurring before him. Seated at the far left is a young man absorbed in the counting of coins. But which figure is Levi? The identification of Levi rests largely on Bellori’s designation of the figure in his biography of the artist: “Christ Calling St. Matthew to the apostolate is on the right side of the altar. He portrayed heads from life, among them the saint’s, who, stopping to count coins, with one hand on his chest turns toward the Lord.”27 Most scholars have largely taken Bellori at his word that the bearded man behind the table, the face of which the Divine light brightly illumes, is Levi/Matthew (Figure 13.2). In 1982, however, Nicholas DeMarco wrote a short, but provocative article that established the young man at the far left (Figure 13.2), bent over counting coins, as the real St. Matthew.28 DeMarco noted that the gesture of Bellori’s “Matthew” is not self-referencing, but rather points to the seated youth bent over 26 The commission for the altarpiece would come later in 1602. See n. 66 below. 27 Bellori, “Michelangelo da Caravaggio,” 365. 28 Nicholas DeMarco, “Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew,” Iris: Notes in the History of Art 1 (1982): 5–7.

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Figure 13.2: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, detail, Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599–1600. Oil on canvas, 322 cm. × 340 cm. Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

the table. Since DeMarco’s proposed reidentification of St. Matthew, scholars remain divided on the matter. Some subscribe to DeMarco’s proposal, most reaffirm the traditional identification made by Bellori, while others suggest a purposeful indeterminacy.29 Hall’s intriguing reading finds its place in the latter group. 29 The following is only a selection of the scholarship addressing the identity of St. Matthew. For studies in agreement with DeMarco’s identification, see Andreas Prater, “Wo ist Matthäus: Beobachtungen zu Caravaggios Anfängen als Monumentalmaler in der Contarelli-Kapelle,” Bruckmanns Pantheon 43 (1985): 70–74; Angela Hass, “Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew Reconsidered,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 51 (1988): 245–50; Thomas Puttfarken, “Caravaggio’s Story of St. Matthew: A Challenge to the Conventions of Painting,” Art History 21, no. 2 (1998): 163–81; Alice Sedgwick Wohl, “Light and Dark in the Contarelli Chapel: A Reconsideration of Caravaggio’s Images of Saint Matthew,” Studi secenteschi 50 (2009): 229–58. For studies that sustain Bellori’s traditional identification for St. Matthew, see Hildegard Kretschmer, “Zu Caravaggios Berufung des Matthäus in der Cappella Contarelli,” Bruckmanns Pantheon 46 (1988): 63–66; Herwarth Röttgen, “Da ist Matthäus,” Bruckmanns Pantheon 49 (1991):

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The scholarship on the issue of Matthew’s identity is immense and beyond the scope of this essay to review in its entirety and in full detail. A general overview of some of the key arguments made against and in favor of St. Matthew’s identity in the bearded man is, however, necessary. DeMarco is the first to posit the young man at the far left of the table (Figure 13.2) as Levi the tax collector, noting he is the only likely candidate. Of the five figures seated around the table, it is only the youth absorbed in counting coins, who is oblivious to the presence of Christ and his disciple Peter.30 He clutches a sack of coins, hidden beneath his right arm and the darkness of the left side of the canvas, as he draws coins to himself in complete absorption. DeMarco notes that not only has the bearded dandy’s pointing gesture been misread as pointing to himself, but that his clothing is far too elegant and does not befit a tax collector.31 Moreover, the bearded man is clearly paying out coins with his right hand and the juxtaposition of the hands – bearded dandy and the young man at left – visually explicate paying and receiving/counting respectively.32 Short and long articles soon appeared both supporting and challenging DeMarco’s identification.33 In articles and monograph studies of the last decade,

97–99; Pamela Askew, “Caravaggio: Outward Action, Inward Vision,” in Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: La vita e le opere attraverso i documenti, edited by Stefania Macioce. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Rome, 5–6 October 1995 (Rome: Logart, 1996), 248–59; Troy Thomas, “An Augustinian Interpretation of Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew.” Studies in Iconography 27 (2006): 157–91; Sebastian Schütze, Caravaggio: The Complete Works (Köln: Taschen, 2009), 105; Rossella Vodret, Caravaggio: The Complete Works (Milan: Silvana, 2010), 102; Andrew GrahamDixon, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2010), 195; Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, Caravaggio: The Artist and His Work (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), 128. There are only a handful of studies that place a particular emphasis on indeterminacy. Burgard argues that for the purposes of Baroque performance in ambiguity, the artist purposefully made it impossible to single out St. Matthew. Hall takes a more historically grounded approach in terms of religion by proposing two Matthews. In this scenario, Caravaggio allows viewers to select the best candidate for “Saint Matthew” (the bearded, older man or the young, sinful youth) according to whom they can most relate. To some extent, Askew proposes two Matthews as well. Although she clearly identifies the bearded dandy as St. Matthew, in proposing that Caravaggio includes a double-drama, Askew identifies the bearded man as the “historical Saint Matthew,” while the youth at the left is the “contemporary Saint Matthew,” meaning a contemporary tax collector who sees himself like a St. Matthew. See Peter J. Burgard, “The Art of Dissimulation: Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Mattthew,” Pantheon 56 (1998): 95–102. Hall, Sacred Image in the Age of Art, 253 and 256; and Askew, “Outward Action, Inward Vision.” 30 DeMarco, “Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew,” 6. 31 DeMarco, “Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew,” 6. 32 DeMarco, “Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew,” 6. 33 Among those who have challenged DeMarco include: Prater, “Wo ist Matthaüs,” 70–74; Kretschmer, “Zu Caravaggios Berufung des Matthaüs”; Röttgen, “Da ist Matthaüs”; and Thomas,

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however, scholars have largely devoted little space to questions about the identity of the tax collector-soon-to-be-apostle. In 2009, Sebastian Schütze argued for the traditional identification of the saint, emphasizing that the composition of the canvas, the staging of the scene and the pointing gesture of the bearded man unequivocally identifies him as the tax collector.34 In 2010, both Rosella Vodret and Andrew Graham-Dixon without hesitation identified the bearded man as Matthew.35 In her 2012 monograph on the artist, Sybille Ebert-Schifferer emphatically supported the traditional bearded dandy as the tax collector, noting the self-referencing gesture and, in particular, the shaft of light “that enters the room with Christ and Peter, falls on the bearded man, and picks out the summoning hand of Christ.”36 These scholars largely center their advocacy for the saint’s identity in the bearded man based on the seemingly overt visual clues and the expectations of traditional compositional formulas: 1) the bearded man is roughly in the center of the composition; 2) the light strikes his face most directly and forcibly; 3) and his left-hand gesture can be read as potentially pointing to himself, particularly when paired with his questioning expression. Thomas Puttfarken importantly notes, however, that if Caravaggio hides Christ in the shadows and partially obscures him by the addition of his disciple St. Peter, then we cannot expect Matthew to be visually apparent.37 What Puttfarken references here is not ambiguity for the sake of obscurity, but rather the employment of a pictorial means of encouraging the viewer to search the canvas for its meaning, specifically the second protagonist of the scene. One can understand Caravaggio’s canvas as a visual parallel to meditation – a journey from darkness to light, from confusion to revelation38 – the meaning, I argue, is about faith.

“An Augustinian Interpretation.” Scholars who have upheld DeMarco’s identification include: Hass, “Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew Reconsidered”; Puttfarken, “Caravaggio’s Story of St. Matthew”; and Wohl, “Light and Dark in the Contarelli Chapel.” 34 Schütze, Caravaggio, 105. 35 Vodret, Caravaggio, 102; and Graham-Dixon, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, 195. 36 Ebert-Schifferer, Caravaggio, 128. 37 Puttfarken, “Caravaggio’s Story of St. Matthew,” 171. 38 Hall, Sacred Image in the Age of Art, 265–67. Hall notes the relationship between Caravaggio’s tenebrism and the positive reassessment of darkness in the writings of John of the Cross and Ignatius of Loyola in which darkness facilitated the exercitant’s meditation. See also Joseph F. Chorpenning, “Another Look at Caravaggio and Religion,” Artibus et Historiae 8, no. 16 (1987): 149–58; Maria Rzepińska, “Tenebrism in Baroque Painting and Its Ideological Background,” Artibus et Historiae 13 (1986): 91–112.

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Pictorial Ambiguity as a Means to Different Ends Several scholars have also focused on Caravaggio’s pictorial ambiguity in arriving at different conclusions. In her 1996 essay “Caravaggio: Outward Action, Inward Vision,” Pamela Askew notes that Caravaggio does not narrate his historical dramas. In other words, they do not unfold in time and space: “Nothing proceeds. Caravaggio’s drama is held in the present moment.”39 The non-action of the artist’s sacred canvases is secondary to Askew’s argument. The lack of unfolding or action concentrates the viewers’ attention on the figures. Askew proposes that Caravaggio integrates a double-drama into his works. Askew supports the traditional identification of Matthew as the bearded dandy, but notes the oft-argued youth at the end of the table clutching a moneybag as the tax collector (Figure 13.2). She explains that this debate derives from ambiguity; an ambiguity fueled by Caravaggio’s introduction of a secondary drama.40 In other words, the bearded man represents historical Matthew, while the youth, a contemporary tax collector, is “bowed over in profound thought, realizes his spiritual vocation which has followed the pattern of the vocation of Matthew.”41 Askew’s essay points to a democratizing function to Caravaggio’s canvases, but one that does not implicitly address the viewer. They witness the doubledramas or, more appropriately, double-conversions – one historical, the other consonant with the viewers’ time – but they do not necessarily participate in the sacred narrative. At minimum, Caravaggio facilitates the viewers’ understanding that conversion is not historically bound. Matthew’s calling can and should be reexperienced and relived. Puttfarken emphasizes that Caravaggio’s devices – such as his tenebrism and the realism of his figures – are all part of a purposeful “compositional strategy” or a “controlled process of selection” that drives meaning. Caravaggio is not working along traditional guidelines of picture making, particularly in terms of narratives. We expect narratives to be clear, to have a recognizable center where the heart of the meaning resides. This expectation draws our eye to the center of the canvas, but in Caravaggio’s Calling that center is not occupied (Figure 13.1). Instead, the artist places the bearded man slightly left of center, but flanked symmetrically by two companions, the youth and bespectacled older man at left, and two younger pageboys at right. The viewer has an unobstructed view of this bearded fellow, his head is looking toward the right in the direction of Christ and the Divine light that

39 Askew, “Caravaggio: Outward Action, Inward Vision,” 248. 40 Askew, “Caravaggio: Outward Action, Inward Vision,” 249. 41 Askew, “Caravaggio: Outward Action, Inward Vision,” 250.

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enters just above his head, which hits the bearded man’s face at full force. Pictorially, Caravaggio leads viewers to identify the bearded man as Matthew, but according to Puttfarken, it is after careful examination of the details that the true protagonist materializes. Puttfarken does not use the term “making strange” in reference to the artist’s pictorial methods, but they function, as Hall describes, as devices to engage viewers and invite or, more appropriately, compel them to linger. The tenebrism, the non-idealized figures and the unorthodox composition work in concert with one another to convey that this is not art, but reality. The scene does not appear planned, ordered, and straightforward as what we expect art to be, but rather unplanned, disordered, and obscure like reality.42 The decision to cover Christ in a cloak of shadow and physically obscured by the figure of his disciple Peter serves as a visual clue that one also must search for the other protagonist of the story: Matthew. It is only after lingering upon the canvas that viewers notice the details noted by DeMarco and others that identify the youth at the far left of the table as Matthew. The visual clues include the moneybag clutched in his hand, the action of his right hand drawing coins, and that he is the target of the bearded man’s pointing gesture (Figure 13.2). Puttfarken notes other details that further support the youth’s identity as St. Matthew. He observes that the bearded man and his two companions are elegantly dressed and all wear hats. All three look toward the source of Divine light and Christ. The youth, on the other hand, is more modestly dressed and his head is bare. His bespectacled companion beside him likewise has a bare head and is equally absorbed in the transaction occurring before him. He represents a traditional personification of avarice.43 His placement beside the youth further underscores the profession of tax collecting exhibited by the youth. Caravaggio has thus differentiated his characters to point to the second “obscured” protagonist of the Calling.44 Here, the devices of “making strange” do not highlight a doubledrama as suggested by Askew, but it intricately links the pictorial anomalies as a means to engage the viewer. According to Puttfarken, the bearded man, like the viewer, represent those who have not been “called,” and “if the divine events do not reveal themselves to us, it becomes our task to work them out.”45

42 Puttfarken, “Caravaggio’s Story of St. Matthew,” 164. 43 For instance, see Hibbard, Caravaggio, 100: “The shortsightedness of those blinded by money is often represented in northern paintings by eyeglasses, worn by usurers or misers. So too in the Calling of St. Matthew a man peers through his spectacles at the money, unaware of Christ’s call.” 44 Puttfarken, “Caravaggio’s Story of St. Matthew,” 172. 45 Puttfarken, “Caravaggio’s Story of St. Matthew,” 179.

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In 1998 (the same year of Puttfarken’s article), Peter Burgard similarly concentrated his study on Caravaggio’s “strange” pictorial methods, but arrives at an altogether different reading.46 Burgard reads Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew as a Baroque performance “of tension and fundamental ambiguity” that functions as art and its capacity to “articulate undecidability, to create illusion, to dissimulate.”47 For Burgard, Caravaggio’s decentralization of the two protagonists (Christ and Matthew), his anachronistic approach to figures, and his employment of interpictorial quotations, all serve to impress the performance of ambiguity and uncertainty; it thematizes dissimulation (Figure 13.1). The “undecidability of Matthew’s identity”48 is part of the performance, thus “there can be no winner in this debate.”49 Alice Sedgwick Wohl challenges Burgard’s reading in her 2009 article, importantly noting ambiguity would not have been acceptable in a public, religious decoration during this period, let alone a commission50 that was part of a comprehensive renovation and decoration program in Rome to prepare for the Jubilee of 1600.51 Moreover, San Luigi dei Francesi was a significant church and one

46 Burgard, “The Art of Dissimulation,” 95–102. 47 Burgard, “The Art of Dissimulation,” 95. 48 Burgard, “The Art of Dissimulation,” 101. 49 Burgard, “The Art of Dissimulation,” 95. 50 The commission originally was not intended for the Jubilee of 1600. The French Cardinal Matthieu Cointerel (Italianized to Matteo Contarelli) acquired the chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi in 1565. The same year (contract dated September 13, 1565) the Brescia-born Lombard painter Girolamo Muziano received the commission to decorate the chapel with scenes from the story of St. Matthew. At Cardinal Contarelli’s death in 1585, however, the chapel had not been decorated. Contarelli had left an endowment and explicit instructions for the chapel to be decorated with scenes from the life and death of his name saint. On October 25, 1587, the executor of his will, Virgilio Crescenzi, commissioned Flemish sculptor Jacob Cobaert to complete within four years a sculptural group of St. Matthew and the Angel, to be placed on the high altar. On May 27, 1591, the Cavaliere d’Arpino was commissioned to paint frescoes on the vault, the Calling of Saint Matthew and the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew on the side walls of the chapel and the altarpiece, which although commissioned from Cobaert in 1587, by 1591, the sculptural group still had not been delivered. D’Arpino managed to complete only the vault frescoes. In 1602, two payments were made for the transport of Cobaert’s sculptural group from his home to the Contarelli Chapel; but on January 30, 1602, Cobaert was released from the responsibility of the commission. A week later, on February 7, 1602, a contract was drawn up between Giacomo Crescenzi (the current executor of Cardinal Contarelli’s will) and Caravaggio for the execution of the altarpiece of St. Matthew and the Angel. The altarpiece, according to Baglione and Bellori, did not meet the satisfaction of the priests of San Luigi and was taken down. It was not too long after that the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani acquired the altarpiece for his collection. Caravaggio executed a second version of the altarpiece, which now still stands above the altar. 51 Wohl, “Light and Dark in the Contarelli Chapel,” 238.

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situated along the pilgrimage route to St. Peter’s Basilica. The decree “On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints, and on Sacred Images,” composed in the final session of the Council of Trent on December 4, 1563, clearly states “such zeal and care should be exhibited by the bishops with regard to these thing that nothing may appear that is disorderly or unbecoming and confusedly arranged.”52 Up to this point, most scholars fall within two camps: those who support the traditional identity of the bearded man as Matthew and those who subscribe to DeMarco’s suggestion that the youth at the left edge of the table is the saint (Figure 13.2). Depending on their position, the theme of ambiguity is read to suit their identification or, in the case of Burgard, none at all. Although Marcia Hall acknowledges that the question of St. Matthew’s identity is unresolved, she proposes that this is how Caravaggio wished it to be.53 According to Hall, “The mystery of the call, and of the response, is deepened when the question of who is called, and to what, is left hanging, as it was when Christ’s call was initially issued.”54 Hall proposes that Caravaggio left the identity of St. Matthew purposefully ambiguous in order to allow the viewer to identify himself with the older, bearded, well-dressed man or for the “humble sinner who sees himself in the worldly youth who doesn’t even know it when he is called.”55 Broadly speaking, Hall’s reading endorses Askew’s double-drama, but is more purposeful in its application. She does not differentiate between a historical Matthew (bearded man) and a contemporary one (youth at left), but rather argues that both can function as the tax collector-soon-to-be-apostle depending on the individual status (or potentially, age) of the viewer. It is a more holistic reading that opens new avenues for rethinking what we are seeing.

Democratizing Faith in the Calling of Saint Matthew Hall’s idea that anyone, regardless of age, social standing and literacy can relate to one of the Matthews is a novel, democratizing reading that fully aligns with the universality of the function of images as articulated in the Tridentine decree on sacred images. According to the decree, it is through images that “people are 52 Rev. H. J., OP Schroeder, ed. and trans. Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (Charlotte, NC: TAN Books, 1978), 220. 53 Hall, Sacred Image in the Age of Art, 253. 54 Hall, Sacred Image in the Age of Art, 253. 55 Hall, Sacred Image in the Age of Art, 256.

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instructed and confirmed in the articles of faith . . . salutary examples are set before the eyes of the faithful . . . [and people] are moved to love God and cultivate piety.”56 The decree does not define images as solely for one social section of the Catholic faithful. There is, however, special mention of the benefits that “the stories and narratives of the Holy Scripture are portrayed and exhibited” have on the illiterate.57 In considering the desire to reach the general populace during the Counter-Reformation, could there be more to Hall’s democratizing reading? Regardless of the status of the viewer, Caravaggio draws the viewer’s eye toward the bearded man, who is seemingly pointing to himself, looks toward the Divine light and at Christ, who gestures generally in his direction (Figure 13.1). The recognition of the bearded man as Matthew is upon first glance explicit. The viewer’s eye focuses in on this bearded man, but like a “slow fuse,”58 the “strange” aspects of Caravaggio’s rendition of the Calling lead to a visual meditation of the subject, ultimately culminating in realization. As numerous scholars have noted, the unusual pictorial construction of the scene encourages the viewer to linger. Upon further examination of the canvas, one notices that the bearded man has just placed coins on the table and the hunched youth draws them to himself. Further investigation of the youth reveals he is also clutching a moneybag in his right hand. The moneybag is a traditional attribute of St. Matthew and considering the importance of clarity at this time, especially for the illiterate, this attribute solidifies his identity as the tax collector Levi-soon-to-be-Matthew. Angela Hass references Leonardo’s Last Supper (Figure 13.3) in not only explicating why the gesture of Caravaggio’s bearded man is not self-referencing, but also in supporting the artist’s youth as Matthew. Hass notes that Leonardo’s Last Supper “provides precisely this type of Matthew – young, with a strong square face, in profile, short-haired and clean shaven.”59 What Hass (and others) neglects to acknowledge, however, are the broader similarities between Leonardo’s wall mural and Caravaggio’s canvas. As in Caravaggio’s canvas, Leonardo’s Last Supper also includes pictorial anomalies or “making strange” devices. Paramount to Leonardo’s version of this oftportrayed event is his decision to place the betrayer Judas on the same side of

56 Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 218–19. 57 Schroeder, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, 219. 58 According to John Shearman, the “slow fuse” effect can be experienced in those images that are “structurally complex in self-reference, and wide-ranging, memory-challenging in external reference and imitation – decorations, in other words, with very slow fuses.” These images not only facilitated the slow unfolding of recognition and delight, but encouraged it. See John Shearman, Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 250. 59 Hass, “Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew Reconsidered,” 247.

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Figure 13.3: Leonardo da Vinci, Last Supper, 1495–1498. Oil and tempera on plaster, 460 × 880 cm. Refectory, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan. Photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY.

the table as Christ and the other disciples, departing from long-established tradition. Leonardo omits halos altogether and the inscriptions of the apostles’ names beneath their feet, thus requiring viewers to seek out the betrayer among the group; a requirement also made of viewers of Caravaggio’s Calling. Viewers must carefully scan the group of figures for details that reveal the betrayer. It is only after careful scrutiny does one notice that there is a figure (second figure to the left of Christ) whose left hand reaches seemingly toward the same dish as Christ (Figure 13.4). The coinciding movement toward the dish reflects the related passage of Christ’s announcement of the betrayer in the Gospel of Matthew: “He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, he shall betray me” (Matthew 26:23). Although difficult to see in the current state of the painting, this disciple is the only one who leans forward on the table, resting his right elbow on its surface and as a result, knocks over a saltcellar. More importantly, however, is the moneybag clutched in the right hand of this figure. There is no question that this is the betrayer Judas. The moneybag clutched in his grasp serves as a key attribute of Judas, referencing once again a description from the Gospel of Matthew: “And [Judas] said to them [chief priests]: ‘What will you give me, and I will deliver him unto you?’ But they appointed him thirty pieces of silver” (Matthew 26:15). Attributes provide clarity in the identification of saints, a necessary inclusion particularly for the illiterate. The Tridentine decree and postTridentine treatises on sacred art are replete with comments regarding the fact

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Figure 13.4: Leonardo da Vinci, detail, Last Supper, 1495–1498. Oil and tempera on plaster, 460 × 880 cm. Refectory, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan. Photo: HIP/Art Resource, NY.

that the uneducated populace were the ones most in need of images to facilitate their devotion. This is where Hall’s “making strange” helps in framing what viewers saw and how they experienced Caravaggio’s public sacred narratives. Judas’s attribute is present; however, one must seek out the attribute, as they must in Caravaggio’s Calling in identifying Matthew. In both Leonardo’s Last Supper (Figure 13.3) and Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew (Figure 13.1) the respective artists encourage, even demands that viewers linger on the scene. In each case, outward difference facilitates the identification of Judas and Matthew respectively: Judas is the only figure leaning on the table – Matthew is the only one actively counting coins. Then one notices the other details, and in particular the attribute; in both cases a moneybag clutched in their hand (Figures 13.2 and 13.4). It represents their identity explicitly – Judas’s greed and complicity in Christ’s arrest and Matthew’s greed and profession as tax collector. The parallels, however, do not end there. Among the disciples and companions in the Last Supper and Calling of Saint Matthew respectively, the faces of both Judas and Matthew are in shadow. In both paintings, the artists position the heads of both Judas and Matthew lower in height in comparison to the

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figures around them. Caravaggio seems to draw directly from Leonardo’s example in signifying the identity of his protagonist. Hall’s conclusion that Caravaggio has offered two candidates for Matthew is true only upon first glance. There is, however, a clear Matthew in the figure of the youth at the left edge of the canvas. What is important here is Hall’s explanation for the ambiguity. According to Hall, the bearded Matthew and the youthful Matthew provide means to which viewers of different social standing or age can relate to the one that most resembles him. The viewer can thus identify himself “with the well-dressed, intelligent man, but also the humble sinner who sees himself in the worldly youth.”60 It seems less about the ability to relate to a particular “Matthew,” but rather how the “making strange” devices require you to seek out Matthew. Once viewers identify the youth at left as Matthew and realize their initial error in singling out the bearded man, they notice another particular detail. While the bearded man looks directly toward the Divine light and at Christ, the true Matthew does not. The pictorial construction of the scene purposefully directs our gaze and identification of Matthew initially to the bearded man. The man must see in order to believe. After lingering on the canvas, the identity of Matthew in the youth becomes clear. Unlike his bearded companion, Matthew does not look up. He does not look towards the Divine light or at Christ, but dawning awareness is evident in his expression.61 Matthew does not see, but already believes. Here Caravaggio includes viewers into the polemics about faith, and ultimately images.

Addressing the Popolo: Faith in Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew In July 1599, Caravaggio signed the contract for the two lateral paintings in the Contarelli Chapel. He was to produce them by the end of the year in anticipation of the Jubilee of 1600. The decoration of the Contarelli Chapel was one of many projects of renovation, construction, and decoration under Pope Clement VIII (r. 1592–1605) that would establish the triumph of the Church. The Church expected an unprecedented number of pilgrims to descend upon the Holy City and, in fact, they did. Estimates range from between half a million to 1,200,000 pilgrims that attended the Jubilee of 1600.62 These projects also served as a 60 Hall, Sacred Image in the Age of Art, 256. 61 See DeMarco, “Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew,” 7. 62 Clare Robertson, Rome 1600: The City and Visual Arts under Clement VIII (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 27.

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decisive proclamation of the value and transformative power of art for the popolo. At a period when Protestantism continued to flourish in Northern Europe, the Jubilee marked the Church Triumphant, where art could not only bolster faith, but also restore faith. Scholars have long argued over the identity of St. Matthew, while simultaneously reading Augustinian, Oratorian, and anti-Lutheran messages or influences within its liminal space. Despite the extraordinary amount of scholarship the Calling has seen, the painting has not been adequately considered within the context of its function within the Jubilee, and more specifically, its placement in San Luigi dei Francesi, the French National Church in Rome. The owner of the chapel, the French Cardinal Contarelli had died in 1585, leaving the burden of completing the decoration of his chapel to his executor, Virgilio Crescenzi and his heirs. When the chapel’s decoration under Giuseppe Cesari (Cavaliere d’Arpino) stalled, the priests of San Luigi appealed to Pope Clement VIII in late 1596 or early 1597. Clement then transferred the authority of the decoration to the Fabbrica di San Pietro. Among the members of the Fabbrica was Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, Caravaggio’s first major patron. The artist’s biographers and modern scholars have long suggested that Del Monte played a significant role in obtaining this commission for Caravaggio. By 1595, Caravaggio was part of Del Monte’s household, living in the Palazzo Madama, which was located next to San Luigi. By this date, however, Wohl suggests that Francesco Contarelli, the son of Cardinal Contarelli, was directly involved with the chapel, and in fact commissioned the lateral canvases from Caravaggio.63 This does not discount, however, the involvement of Del Monte. Francesco Contarelli was a ward of Virgilio Crescenzi (died in 1592), Del Monte was the executor of Virgilio Crescenzi’s will, and they were neighbors. Regardless, both Del Monte and Francesco Contarelli invested in the success of this decoration. Francesco, after all, was French and Del Monte’s ties with the Medici family placed him in the proFrench camp. The story of Matthew’s calling to the apostolate is fundamentally a conversion. The subject, while tied to the theme of the decoration honoring Cardinal Contarelli’s name-saint Matthew, also connects significantly to issues of conversion and ultimately faith. Although the Calling of Saint Matthew figured into the original contract drafted in 1585 with Girolamo Muziano, by 1599 the topic had a deeper resonance for the patron and executors, San Luigi, and the French pilgrims. It was only a mere six years earlier in 1593 that Henry of Navarre (Henry IV of France) abjured his Protestant faith and converted to Catholicism.

63 Wohl, “Light and Dark in the Contarelli Chapel,” 254.

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It is not surprising that skepticism surrounded Henry IV’s conversion, many, including Clement VIII, questioned the sincerity of his decision. One of the leading members of the Roman Inquisition, the Spanish Dominican Francesco Peña, distrusted the motivations of Henry and staunchly declared that the Church should not grant him absolution nor readmit him into the Roman Catholic Church.64 Although Clement and his advisors may have sympathized with Peña’s position, there were larger political and even religious issues at stake. In order to avoid potential costly political-religious consequences for rejecting the request, while simultaneously to assuage Peña’s position on the matter, Clement sought assistance from his confessor and Oratorian Cesare Baronio (1538–1607).65 Clement requested that Baronio draft a document “in which all of the examples of relapsed heretics received by the Roman Church were collected, even those who were suspected of falsity, and who were still not excluded.”66 This document, the Apologeticus, served the dual purpose of fully convincing Pope Clement VIII to grant the absolution, while providing historical exempla of similar instances of heretics or relapsed Catholics who were welcomed back into the Catholic fold. Baronio’s Apologeticus was widely disseminated and convincing. In a ceremony on September 17, 1595, in St. Peter’s Basilica, Henry of Navarre’s abjuration of Calvinism by proxy occurred, resulting in the acceptance of his abjuration and his readmission into the Catholic fold.67 What followed was a relaxation of the Catholic Church’s repressive, threatening, and coercive policies and practices in handling heretics, and in particular Protestants, in addition to a new understanding of conversion. According to Peter Mazur, “Protestants were recognized for their potential as spokesmen for the Catholic Church, whose religious transformation made them into powerful symbols of the truth of Catholicism.”68 After the abjuration ceremony of Henry of Navarre on September 17, 1595, the French representatives processed from St. Peter’s Basilica to the French National Church of San Luigi dei Francesi where further celebrations honoring the king and pope occurred.69 It would be nearly four years later that Caravaggio would begin painting his Calling of Saint Matthew. The canvas, which was part of a larger decorative program begun under the Cavaliere d’Arpino, would thus

64 Peter Mazur, “Searcher of Hearts: Cesare Baronio’s History of Conversion,” Journal of the History of Ideas 75, no. 2 (2014), 214. 65 Mazur, “Searcher of Hearts,” 214. 66 Borelli, “Memorie Baroniane dell’Oratorio di Napoli,” 166–67; cited and translated in Mazur, “Searcher of Hearts,” 214–15. 67 Mazur, “Searcher of Hearts,” 215. 68 Mazur, “Searcher of Hearts,” 216. 69 Mazur, “Searcher of Hearts,” 215.

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form an integral part in this narrative of religious tolerance, clemency, and above all conversion. Caravaggio was to complete the canvas by the end of 1599, in time for the Jubilee of 1600, when Catholic pilgrims and, notably, Protestant pilgrims would enter Rome in hopes of experiencing the more moderate policy outlined in Baronio’s Apologeticus.70 One must read Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew (Figure 13.1) within the context of this historical backdrop. On the one hand, it speaks directly about conversion. The viewer’s eye is first directed to the bearded man, the traditional LeviMatthew, who seemingly points to himself as he looks toward his left toward the Divine light that bathes his face and Christ who has just called Levi to the apostolate. His expression (Figure 13.2) displays hesitation and confusion, but it is not one of denial. He is unsure, but seemingly receptive, as the angled position of his right leg seen beneath the table is suggestive of movement. His companion, who leans his right arm on his shoulder, also looks toward the Divine light and Christ, but firmly planted in his seat, he is still ignorant of the import of these visitors. The fact that Caravaggio has chosen to bathe his face with Divine light, however, is suggestive of the promise of conversion. Divine light also picks up the profile, the right leg, and the white satin sleeve of the seated youth with sword, with his back facing the viewer. However, he is not looking at Christ, but rather Peter, who appears to point at him (Figure 13.5). The figure of Peter was a later addition by Caravaggio, but one that fully relates to Catholic agenda and the more recent developments that emerged in the wake of Henry of Navarre’s reentry into the Catholic fold. Peter nearly mirrors Christ’s gesture and appears to call this youthful page, who leans toward him, ready to rise and follow him. Peter is the first pope and thus represents the papacy. His inclusion here establishes the monarchical hierarchy of the papacy and their right to bring non-believers into the Catholic fold. All three figures – bearded man, the companion to his left, and the sword-bearing youth seated across of them – bear hats on their heads and look toward and at the divine presences. The older, bareheaded, bespectacled man to the left of the bearded dandy does not look. He is ignorant of the visitors and the call, as his attention is riveted on the monetary transaction that is occurring beneath his gaze. Like the youth to the right of the bearded man, Divine light also picks out this older man, but he is several steps removed from his youthful counterpart. He does not yet look, mired as he is in earthly pursuits. The youth at the end of the table also has a bare head and does not look up and toward the Divine light and Christ. He is seemingly too absorbed in drawing the coins to himself, just paid by the bearded man. The

70 Mazur, “Searcher of Hearts,” 222.

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Figure 13.5: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, detail, Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599–1600. Oil on canvas, 322 × 340 cm. Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Divine light that significantly hits his hunched shoulders noticeably picks up the brilliant yellow of his doublet, and the edge of his white upper sleeve, while illuminating the top off his head, the lower part of his face, and his right hand. He is not actively looking, yet his gaze, while directed downward, appears unfixed as if deep in thought. What I suggest here is twofold: one, Caravaggio’s Calling visually demonstrates different stages of conversion; second, it references how one achieves conversion or faith. On the one hand, Caravaggio has purposefully shown the five figures at the table at different stages of conversion. This ties into, yet expands on, Marcia Hall’s observation of two Matthews that allows viewers to identify with either the bearded dandy or the youth counting coins at the left depending on their own status and potentially age. Hall’s reading is important as it addresses the two candidates equally – meaning they are both contemporary-clad figures and thus tied to the viewers’ time. This corrects the more problematic reading of Pamela Askew, who suggests there is one Matthew but a double conversion, one

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historical, one contemporary.71 Askew supports the traditional identity of the bearded man as Matthew and identifies it as the historical conversion, while the youth at the end of the table represents a contemporary conversion. Yet, how one can distinguish one as historical and the other contemporary when all five figures seated at the table are dressed in modern clothing is unclear. Caravaggio’s employment of light signifies that Divine Grace is freely given, but also that conversion does not occur in a monolithic manner nor is it obtainable by only certain individuals. The bearded man, dressed in elegant garments, appears of a higher social status than his companions at the table. Scholars have noted that the youths to the right of the bearded man are types seen from Caravaggio’s early genre work such as The Cardsharps and The Fortune Teller. Caravaggio also visually explicates how one obtains faith, something that ties into the story of the Apostle Thomas. Only the Gospel of John recounts the story of the Doubting Thomas. Caravaggio, in fact, painted this very subject (Incredulity of Saint Thomas, ca. 1602, Sanssouci, Potsdam) for the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani and his brother Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani, not too long after he completed the Calling.72 According to John 20:19–29, the resurrected Christ appeared to his disciples, with the exception of Thomas who was not with them. When the disciples told Thomas of Christ’s appearance, Thomas replied, “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails and put my finger into the place of the nails and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25). After eight days, Christ appeared to his disciples once more and this time Thomas was present. Christ then said to Thomas “Put in thy finger hither and see my hands, and bring hither the hand put it into my side. And be not faithless, but believing” (John 20: 27). Thomas then responded with “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). It is Christ’s final words to Thomas that speak directly to the ProtestantCatholic divide between “faith alone” and “faith and good works.” In response to Thomas’s acknowledgment of Christ’s resurrection, Christ utters these profound words: “Because thou hast seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed: blessed are they 71 Askew, “Caravaggio: Outward Action, Inward Vision,” 250. 72 The Incredulity of Saint Thomas is recorded in the 1638 inventory of Vincenzo Giustiniani. Silvio Danesi Squarzina, however, has succeeded in connecting several of Caravaggio’s works to Benedetto as patron rather than to his lay brother, Vincenzo – largely through her discovery of two early inventories relating to Benedetto’s collection, plus his will and other documents. Although the Incredulity does not appear in any of the cardinal’s documents, Squarzina believes it should be added to works Benedetto commissioned, as the subject was in line with his religious ideas and early evidence shows many copies of the painting in the Bologna area, which might suggest that Benedetto took the canvas with him to decorate his legate’s residence there, the Palazzo Accursio. See Silvia Danesi Squarzina, “The Collections of Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani: Part I.” Burlington Magazine 139, no. 1136 (1997), 773. Erin E. Benay’s

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that have not seen and have believed” (John 20:29). This is ultimately a story about faith. Thomas did not believe until he had seen and then touched his wounds. Christ’s response after Thomas’s revelation was that “blessed are they that have not seen [my emphasis] and have believed.” Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew addresses this very difference. Three of the figures – bearded figure and his two companions at the right side of the table – see Christ and they respond according to their stage of conversion. The older, bespectacled man does not see, as he is too preoccupied with the money transaction before him. The seated youth beside him also does not see. He does not look up. Yet his facial expression betrays interior awareness. This is how viewers are to recognize Matthew. He is the exception. He does not see, but believes. Caravaggio has cleverly merged within his pictorial construction a message of the universal accessibility of conversion and Divine Grace, while at the same time addressing one of the most contentious issues between Protestants and Catholics. The Protestants’ embracement of sola fide left no room for exterior forms of devotion that required the application of the senses, and in particular sight. The Catholics, on the other hand, stood firm in their doctrine of faith and good works. Some could rise to the divine with faith alone, others, however, needed an external vehicle to scale the ladder to the divine. Even those who embodied inherent faith used prayer before images to further enflame their hearts with Christ, to facilitate their meditations. The history of the Catholic Church abounds with such examples: St. Francis of Assisi, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and contemporary to Caravaggio’s lifetime, Archbishop of Milan Carlo Borromeo. Moreover, in the years leading up to, during, and following Caravaggio’s execution of the Calling of Saint Matthew, images were vehicles for conversion. Caravaggio does not posit not seeing over or as superior to seeing other than as a means to identify St. Matthew. There are more figures actively looking at Christ and Peter. In fact, Caravaggio highlights sight as paramount. The viewers’ sight requires them to work through the image. While their sight initially betrays them into identifying the bearded man as Matthew, active viewing brings about their revelation. It underscores the importance of sacred images, a concern

recent study on the Incredulity draws interesting parallels between Caravaggio’s canvas and the contemporary devotion to St. Thomas in Rome, which included the Giustiniani and the Oratorians. See Erin E. Benay, “Touching is Believing: Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas in Counter-Reformatory Rome,” in Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions, ed. Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014), 59–82. As this story is about faith and seeing, there may be some parallels with Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew that are worth exploring. However, I will need to leave those for a later study.

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central to the French delegates at the final session of the Council of Trent, which prompted the decree on images. Caravaggio created a sacred work in which the act of viewing becomes a performance in itself. It brings the viewer to various stages of awareness and emotions not dissimilar to exercises in meditation. It visually explicates that conversion is possible for everyone, a point of primary concern during the post-Tridentine period and particularly for the Jubilee of 1600. It is Marcia Hall’s reading of Caravaggio’s Calling of Saint Matthew that led me to revisit and rethink this famous canvas. Although I do believe the youth at the left of the canvas is Matthew, Hall is correct in noting how Caravaggio’s “making strange” devices (both formal and iconographical) functions as a means to invite the viewers’ contemplation and participation. It is through these devices that Caravaggio presents five figures at different stages of conversion and poses a direct question to the viewer: “How would you have felt and responded?”73

Works Cited Askew, Pamela. “Caravaggio: Outward Action, Inward Vision.” In Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: La vita e le opere attraverso i documenti, edited by Stefania Macioce, 248–59. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Rome, 5–6 October 1995. Rome: Logart, 1996. Baglione, Giovanni. “The Life of Michelangelo da Caravaggio, Painter.” In Caravaggio, edited by Howard Hibbard, 351–56. Reprint, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985. Barbieri, Costanza. “Invisibilia per visibilia: S. Filippo Neri, le immagini e la contemplazione.” In La regola e la fama. San Filippo Neri e l’arte, 64–79. Museo Nazionale del Palazzo Venezia, Rome, October–December 1995. Milan: Electa, 1995. Exhibition catalog. Barocchi, Paola, ed. Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento: Fra manierismo e controriforma. 3 vols. Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1960–62. Bascapè, Carlo. Vita e opera di Carlo, Arcivescovo di Milano, Cardinale di S. Prassede. Milan: Veneranda Fabbrica del Duomo. 1965. Bell, Janis C. “Light and Color in Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus.” Artibus et Historiae 16, no. 31 (1995): 139–70. Bell, Janis C. “Some Seventeenth-Century Appraisals of Caravaggio’s Coloring.” Artibus et Historiae 14, no. 27 (1993): 103–29. Bellori, Giovanni Pietro. “Michelangelo da Caravaggio.” In Caravaggio, edited by Howard Hibbard, 360–74. Reprint, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985. Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

73 Hall, Sacred Image in the Age of Art, 256.

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Benay, Erin E. “Touching is Believing: Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas in Counter-Reformatory Rome.” In Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions, edited by Lorenzo Pericolo and David M. Stone, 59–82. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014. Borghini, Raffaello. Il Riposo. In Raffaello Borghini’s “Il Riposo.” Edited and translated by Lloyd H. Ellis Jr. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University Toronto Press, 2007. Burgard, Peter J. “The Art of Dissimulation: Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Mattthew.” Pantheon 56 (1998): 95–102. Cavarnos, Constantine. Orthodox Iconography. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1977. Chorpenning, Joseph F. “Another Look at Caravaggio and Religion.” Artibus et Historiae 8, no. 16 (1987): 149–58. Comanini, Gregorio. “The Figino; or On the Purpose of Painting”: Art Theory in the Late Renaissance. Translated by Ann Doyle-Anderson and Giancarlo Maiorino. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2001. DeMarco, Nicholas. “Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew.” Iris: Notes in the History of Art 1 (1982): 5–7. Ebert-Schifferer, Sybille. Caravaggio: The Artist and His Work. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012. Freedberg, David. The Power of Images; Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Friedlaender, Walter. Caravaggio Studies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Gilio, Giovanni Andrea. Dialogo nel quale si ragiona degli errori e degli abusi de’ pittori circa l’istorie. In Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento: Fra manierismo e controriforma, edited by Paola Barocchi, 2:3–115.3 vols. Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1960–62. Gilio, Giovanni Andrea. Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters. Edited by Michael Bury, Lucinda Byatt, and Carol M. Richardson. Translated by Michael Bury and Lucinda Byatt. Texts and Documents. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2018. Giussano, John Peter [Giovanni Pietro] . The Life of St. Charles Borromeo. Translated by Cardinal Henry Edward Manning. 2 vols. New York: Burns & Oates, 1884. Giussano, John Peter [Giovanni Pietro]. Vita di S. Carlo Borromeo, Prete Cardinale del titolo di Santa Prassede, Arcivescovo di Milano [Rome, 1610]. Rome: Nella Stamperia della Camera Apostolica, 1610. Graham-Dixon, Andrew. Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2010. Hall, Marcia B. After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Hall, Marcia B. The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2011. Hall, Marcia B., and Tracy E. Cooper, eds. The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Hass, Angela. “Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew Reconsidered.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 51 (1988): 245–50. Hibbard, Howard. Caravaggio. Reprint, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985. Kretschmer, Hildegard. “Zu Caravaggios Berufung des Matthäus in der Cappella Contarelli.” Bruckmanns Pantheon 46 (1988): 63–66. Lavin, Irving. Past-Present: Essays On Historicism in Art from Donatello to Picasso. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

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Macioce, Stefania, ed. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: La vita e le opera attraverso i documenti. Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Rome, 5–6 October 1995. Rome: Logart, 1996. Mancini, Giulio. “On Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.” In Caravaggio, edited by Howard Hibbard, 346–51. Reprint, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985. Mangrum, Bryan D., and Giuseppe Scavizzi, eds. and trans. A Reformation Debate: Karlstadt, Emser, and Eck on Sacred Images – Three Treatises in Translation. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria University, 1991. Mazur, Peter. “Searcher of Hearts: Cesare Baronio’s History of Conversion.” Journal of the History of Ideas 75, no. 2 (2014): 213–35. Michalski, Sergiusz. The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Muraoka, Anne H. “Il fine della pittura: Canon Reformulation in the Age of CounterReformation – The Lombard–Roman Confluence.” PhD diss., Temple University, 2009. Muraoka, Anne H. The Path of Humility: Caravaggio and Carlo Borromeo. Renaissance and Baroque Studies and Text, vol. 34. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2015. Nagel, Alexander. Michelangelo and the Reform of Art. New York: Cambridge University Press,2000. Nicolai, Vincenzo Fiocchi. “San Filippo Neri, le catacombe di S. Sebastiano e le origins dell’archeologia cristiana.” In San Filippo Neri nella realtà romana del XVI secolo, edited by Maria Teresa Bonadonna Russo and Niccolò del Re, 105–30. Miscellanea della Società Romana di Storia Patria, vol. 39. Atti del convegno di studio in occasione IV centenario della morte di San Filippo Neri (1595–1995), Rome, 11–13 May 1995. Rome: Presso la Società alla Biblioteca Vallicelliana, 2000. O’Malley, John W. “Trent, Sacred Images, and Catholics’ Senses of the Sensuous.” In The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, edited by Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper, 29–48. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Paleotti, Gabriele. Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane [Bologna, 1582]. In Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento: Fra manierismo e controriforma, edited by Paola Barocchi, 2: 117–517.3 vols. Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli, 1960–62. Paleotti, Gabriele. Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images [1582]. Translated by William McCuaig. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2012. Pericolo, Lorenzo, and David M. Stone, eds. Caravaggio: Reflections and Refractions. Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014. Prater, Andreas. “Matthäus und kein Ende? Eine Entgegnung.” Bruckmanns Pantheon 53 (1995): 53–61. Prater, Andreas. “Wo ist Matthäus: Beobachtungen zu Caravaggios Anfängen als Monumentalmaler in der Contarelli-Kapelle.” Bruckmanns Pantheon 43 (1985): 70–74. Puglisi, Catherine. Caravaggio. London: Phaidon, 1998. Puttfarken, Thomas. “Caravaggio’s Story of St. Matthew: A Challenge to the Conventions of Painting.” Art History 21, no. 2 (1998): 163–81. Robertson, Clare. Rome 1600: The City and Visual Arts under Clement VIII. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Röttgen, Herwarth. “Da ist Matthäus.” Bruckmanns Pantheon 49 (1991): 97–99. Rzepińska, Maria. “Tenebrism in Baroque Painting and Its Ideological Background.” Artibus et Historiae 13 (1986): 91–112.

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Scavizzi, Giuseppe. Arte e architecttura sacra: Cronache e documenti sulla controversia tra riformati e cattolici (1500–1550). Reggio Calabria and Rome: Casa del Libro, 1981. Scavizzi, Giuseppe. The Controversy on Images from Calvin to Baronius. Toronto Studies in Religion. New York: Peter Lang, 1992. Schroeder, Rev. H. J., OP, ed. and trans. Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent. Charlotte, NC: TAN Books, 1978. Schütze, Sebastian. Caravaggio: The Complete Works. Köln: Taschen, 2009. Scribner, R. W. Religion and Culture in Germany (1400–1800). Edited by Lyndal Roper. Leiden, Boston, and Köln: Brill, 2001. Shearman, John. Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance. A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1988. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Squarzina, Silvia Danesi. “The Collections of Cardinal Benedetto Giustiniani: Part I.” Burlington Magazine 139, no. 1136 (1997): 766–91. Thomas, Troy. “An Augustinian Interpretation of Caravaggio’s Calling of St. Matthew.” Studies in Iconography 27 (2006): 157–91. Vodret, Rossella. Caravaggio: The Complete Works. Milan: Silvana, 2010. Wohl, Alice Sedgwick. “Light and Dark in the Contarelli Chapel: A Reconsideration of Caravaggio’s Images of Saint Matthew.” Studi secenteschi 50 (2009): 229–58. Zeri, Federico. Pittura e Controriforma. Venice: Neri Pozza, 1997.

Part 5: Back Matter

A Bibliography of Marcia Hall’s Works After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. “After Trent: The Catholic Reform of Paintings.” In Reforming Reformation, edited by Thomas F. Mayer, 219–39. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. “Another Look at the Rood Screen in the Italian Renaissance.” Sacred Architecture 27 (2015): 11–19. “Art.” In A Cultural History of Color in the Renaissance, edited by Sven Dupré and Amy Buono, 149–65. A Cultural History of Color Series, vol. 3, General Eds. Carole P. Biggam and Kirsten Wolf. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. “Art of the Counter-Maniera in Florence: The Renovation of S. Maria Novella and S. Croce, 1565–1576.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1967. Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance. Series editor, Marcia Hall. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005–2017. The Cambridge Companion to Raphael. Edited by Marcia Hall. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Color and Technique in Renaissance Painting. Edited by Marcia Hall. Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1987. “Colore e significato nella volta della cappella sistina.” In Michelangelo, la cappella sistina, Documentazione e interpretazioni, III: Acts of the International Conference on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, edited by Gianluigi Colalucci, 189–94. Vatican: 1990, Novara, 1994. “El Greco’s Conception (Thyssen) and the Prado Altarpiece: Light and Color.” In Emil Bosshard, Paintings Conservator (1945–2006): Essays From Friends and Colleagues, edited by Maria de Peverelli, Marco Grassi, and Hans-Christoph von Imhoff, 91–108. Lugano, ThyssenBornemisza Foundation. Florence: Centro Di, 2009. “From Modeling Techniques to Color Modes.” In Color and Technique in Renaissance Painting, edited by Marcia Hall, 1–29. Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1987. Introduction and Co-editor with John Shearman. The Princeton Raphael Symposium: Science in the Service of Art History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. “The Italian Rood Screen: Some Implications for Liturgy and Function.” In Essays presented to Myron P. Gilmore, edited by Sergio Bertelli and Gloria Ramakus, 213–19. Villa I Tatti, vol. 2. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. [Forthcoming] “The Role of Art in the Theological Discourse of the Reformation.” In Cambridge History of Reformation Era Theology, edited by Kenneth Appold and Nelson H. Minnich. New York: Cambridge University Press. Michelangelo. The Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 2002. Michelangelo: The Sistine Ceiling Restored. New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993. Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ (Masterpieces of Western Art). Edited with Introduction by Marcia Hall. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. “Michelangelo’s Last Judgment; Resurrection of the Body and Predestination.” Art Bulletin 58 (1976): 85–92.

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Naples (Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance), edited by Marcia Hall and Thomas Willette. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. “The Operation of Vasari’s Workshop and the Design for Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce.” Burlington Magazine 115 (April, 1973): 204–9. “Politics and the Relief-like Style.” The Translation of Raphael’s Roman Style, edited by Henk Th. van Veen. Leuven: Peeters, 2007: 1–20. “The Ponte in Santa Maria Novella: The Problem of the Rood Screen in Italy.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974): 157–73. Raphael’s School of Athens (Masterpieces of Western Painting). Edited with Introduction by Marcia Hall. New York: Cambridge University Press. The Power of Color: Five Centuries of European Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. “Reform after Trent in Florence.” In Art After Trent, edited by Jesse Locker, 93–110. London: Ashgate, 2019. Renovation and Counter-Reformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce, 1565–77. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. Rome (Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance), edited by Marcia Hall. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. “La Resurrezione di Lazzaro di Sebastiano e la sfida al colore di Raffaello.” In La Pietà di Viterbo. Storia e tecniche a confronto; Acts of the Conference, Università di Tuscia, 10 June, 2005, edited by Costanza Barbieri, Enrico Parlato, and Simona Rinaldi, 27–42. Rome: Nuova Argos, 2009. “The Tramezzo in the Italian Renaissance, Revisited.” In Thresholds of the Sacred; Dumbarton Oaks Papers, edited by Sharon E. J. Gerstel, 215–33. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio. London: Yale University Press, 2011. “Savonarola and the Patronage of Art.” In Christianity & the Renaissance, edited by Timothy Verdon and John Henderson, 493–522. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990. Science in the Service of Art History. Edited by Marcia Hall and John Shearman. Princeton Raphael Symposium. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. [Forthcoming] “Sacred Art.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Council of Trent, edited by Nelson Minnich. New York: Cambridge University Press. “Sebastiano del Piombo fra innovazione e sperimentazione.” In Notturno Sublime. Sebastiano e Michelangelo nella Pietà di Viterbo, edited by Costanza Barbieri, 43–48. Rome: Viviani, 2004. Exhibition catalog. The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church, edited by Marcia Hall and Tracy Cooper, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. “Sixtus V: A Program for the decorum of images.” Arte Cristiana 96 (1998), 41–48. “The Tramezzo in Santa Croce, Florence, and Domenico Veneziano’s Fresco.” Burlington Magazine 112 (1973): 797–99. “The Tramezzo in Santa Croce, Reconsidered.” Art Bulletin 56 (1974): 325–41. “Twenty-first Century Versus Twentieth Century Methodologies.” In Michelangelo in the New Millennium, edited by Tamara Smithers, 226–34. Leiden: Brill, 2016. “Wisdom in God’s Embrace: Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.” Letter to the editor. Art Bulletin 75 (1993): 340.

Notes on Contributors Joanne Allen is Senior Professorial Lecturer in Art History at American University in Washington DC. She received her MA from the Courtauld Institute and her PhD from the University of Warwick. Her doctoral thesis investigated wooden choir stalls in Venice and Northern Italy, and her current work focuses on alterations to liturgical space in Italian churches during the Renaissance. She has published widely on churches in Venice, Florence, Vicenza, Padua, and Rome, in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association, The Antiquaries Journal, Renaissance Studies, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and various edited volumes. She has received research fellowships from the Society of Renaissance Studies (UK), the British School at Rome, and the Dutch University Institute for Art History in Florence. Her forthcoming volume, Transforming the Church Interior in Renaissance Florence, will be published by Cambridge University Press. Costanza Barbieri Costanza Barbieri is a faculty member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. She received her Ph.D. from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, as well as from “La Sapienza”, University of Rome. In 2004 she curated the first exhibition on Sebastiano del Piombo (Viterbo, Museo Civico); in 2008 she was on the committee for the first monographic exhibition in Rome and Berlin; in 2017 she participated in the organization of the exhibition Michelangelo & Sebastiano, A Meeting of Mind in the National Gallery of London. She has published in The Burlington Magazine, Bollettino d’Arte, Artibus & Historiae, Venezia Cinquecento, and Ricerche di Storia dell’àrte. She has published several books: Notturno sublime. Michelangelo e Sebastiano nella Pietà di Viterbo (ed.), 2004; Michelangelo e la Sistina, Università Europea di Roma, 2013. Santa Maria in Vallicella. Chiesa Nuova (co-ed.), 1995; Specchio di virtù. Lorenzo Lotto in San Michele al Pozzo Bianco a Bergamo (2000); Sebastiano, i ritratti. Committenti, artisti e letterati nella Roma del Cinquecento (2012); Le “Magnificenze” di Agostino Chigi. Collezioni e passioni antiquarie nella Villa Farnesina (Accademia dei Lincei 2014); Dall’iconologia al Gender (ed.) Festschrift in honor of Rona Goffen (ed.), 2018. Forthcoming publications include a monograph on the Loggia della Galatea, which will be published by L’Erma di Bretschneider. She is on the scientific committee of the journal Roma nel Rinascimento. Dr. Tracy E. Cooper (PhD, Princeton University) is Professor of Art History at Temple University in Philadelphia. She co-edited with Marcia Hall The Sensuous and the Counter-Reformation Church (Cambridge, 2013), and is best known for Palladio’s Venice: Architecture and Society in a Renaissance Republic (Yale, 2006), winner of the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize from the Renaissance Society of America. Her current book project, The Glass Palace, is on women’s networks and control of family legacy in sixteenth- through early eighteenth-century Venice. Tracy has a forthcoming chapter in The Network of Cassinese Arts, on “Intermediality: Text & Image” (Officina Libreria, 2020). She also recently contributed entries to the interactive exhibition, Merlo’s Map: The Religious Geography of Venice, part of interdisciplinary multimedia project Religious Change: 1450–1700, at the Newberry Library in Chicago. She is on the Advisory Board of the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton and a member of the Board of Directors of Save Venice, Inc.

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Arthur J. DiFuria is Chair and Professor of Art History at Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA, specializing in early modern northern European art. While at Savannah, he has been a recipient of the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence (2015) and a SCAD Presidential Fellow (2011). The Historians of Netherlandish Art and the Kress Foundation have also funded Art’s research. He has published essays in the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, Brill’s Intersections series, and the Intellectual History Review. He is the editor of Genre Imagery in Early Modern Northern Europe: New Perspectives (2016; an Ashgate book on Routledge Press). Art’s book, Maarten van Heemskerck’s Rome: Antiquity, Memory, and the Netherlandish Cult of Ruins, appeared on the Brill imprint in 2019. Jonathan Kline holds a PhD from Temple University. Working under Marcia Hall, he wrote a dissertation on classical/Christian syncretism in the art of the Italian Renaissance. Dr. Kline taught Medieval and Renaissance Art History at Temple University for ten years before moving to Bryn Athyn College, where he teaches Art History and serves as Chair of the Arts Department. He has published on Botticelli’s Primavera, on aspects of Luca Signorelli’s frescoes in the Cappella di San Brizio, Orvieto, and Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, and on the much-earlier fresco cycle in the monastic church of Santa Maria Inter Angelos, near Spoleto, executed ca. 1300. Sarah K. Kozlowski (BA Wheaton College, MA Williams College, PhD Yale University) is Associate Director of the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas and Director of the Centro per la Storia dell’Arte e dell’Architettura delle Città Portuali, housed at the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples. Her research centers on late medieval and Renaissance Naples in its broader geographic and cultural contexts, exploring in particular how artworks’ mobilities, materialities, and formats generate meaning. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled The Painted Panel at and Beyond the Angevin Court of Naples: Mobility and Materiality in the Fourteenth-Century Mediterranean. Also in progress are a special issue of the journal Convivium dedicated to the architecture of medieval port cities in Italy and the Mediterranean (co-edited with Kristen Streahle) and a project called The Court Diptych in Fourteenth-Century Europe. Stuart Lingo is Donald E. Petersen Professor in the Division of Art History at the University of Washington. He is the author of Federico Barocci. Allure and Devotion in Late Renaissance Art (Yale University Press, 2008). “Mannerism’s Masks,” his essay in the current volume, introduces issues developed in his forthcoming book, Bronzino’s Bodies and Mannerism’s Masks. In the book, Lingo argues that the long-standing scholarly inability to agree on the nature or even existence of “Mannerism” has been generated by a self-conscious elusiveness in much of the art itself. Masking, dissimulation, and irony haunt Mannerist art, engendering a poetics of style that frequently appears calculated to exceed its ostensible political and religious functions. Lingo’s work has been supported by The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery in Washington, and by Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. Rose Marie May is the Director of Curatorial Affairs and Audience Engagement at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. She received her PhD in Art History, with a specialization in Renaissance Art from Temple University where Marcia Hall was her dissertation advisor. She has worked in the museum field for more than 15 years at museums around the country

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including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Philbrook Museum of Art. She has lectured and taught widely on Renaissance and Baroque Art at institutions such as the Newberry Library, the Art Institute of Chicago, and several colleges and universities. Anne H. Muraoka is an Associate Professor of Art History at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. She earned her PhD in art history at Temple University in Philadelphia in 2009. As a recipient of a one-year J. William Fulbright Fellowship in Rome, Italy, she completed her dissertation, Il fine della pittura: Canon Reformulation in the Age of Counter-Reformation, under the direction of Marcia Hall. In 2015, she published her first book, The Path of Humility: Caravaggio and Carlo Borromeo, and in 2018 contributed an essay entitled “Quella inerudita semplicità lombarda: The Lombard Origins of Counter-Reformation Affectivity” for the volume Art and Reform in the Late Renaissance: After Trent, published by Routledge. She has contributed several articles for Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation, and regularly presents her research at the Renaissance Society of America and Sixteenth Century Society conferences. Alexander Nagel teaches art history at New York University. Maureen Pelta is a Professor of Art History and Curatorial Studies at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has written and lectured on the culture of Renaissance Italy, with topics ranging from Correggio, Donatello, and Vasari to the lives of religious women in the sixteenth century and Italian garden history. Ingrid Rowland is a Professor of History and Architecture at the University of Notre Dame’s Rome Global Gateway, and contributes frequently to the New York Review of Books. Her books include The Culture of the High Renaissance (1998), Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture (with Thomas Howe, 1999), The Scarith of Scornello (2004), Giordano Bruno, Philosopher/ Heretic (2009), Giordano Bruno, On the Heroic Frenzies (2013), From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town (2015), The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art (with Noah Charney, 2017), and The Divine Spark of Syracuse (2018). Larry Silver is the Farquhar Professor of Art History, emeritus, at the University of Pennsylvania. He first met Marcia Hall while serving on the College Art Association Board of Directors, and has enjoyed her friendship and collegiality across almost a quarter-century in Philadelphia. He previously taught at Berkeley and Northwestern as a specialist in early modern Northern European paintings and graphics, particularly of Reformation-era Germany and the Netherlands. Author of monographs on Massys, Dürer, Bosch, Bruegel, Rembrandt, and Rubens and Velázques as well as the art patronage of Emperor Maximilian I and studies of religious art and early genre imagery, he has also co-organized major print exhibitions on professional engravers and on oversized print ensembles. Service to the profession has included time as President of the College Art Association and the Historian of Netherlandish Art as well as being the Founding Editor of caa.reviews. Tamara Smithers, Professor of Art History at Austin Peay State University, received her PhD from Temple University, where she had the pleasure of studying under Marcia Hall. Her scholarly interest lies in the artwork and legend of Michelangelo. Past publications include an

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edited volume entitled Michelangelo in the New Millennium: Conversations about Artistic Practice, Patronage, and Christianity (Brill Publishing, 2016), in which she authored two essays. Forthcoming publications include a popular interest biography on the life of Michelangelo as part of Benna Books short biography series, and an academic book entitled The Cults of Raphael and Michelangelo: Memorials for Artists as a Second Life, forthcoming with Routledge Publishing. Research for the latter was externally supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities, Friends of Princeton Library, and the University of Tennessee Marco Institute. In February 2020, she was a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome, Italy. Ian Verstegen is the Associate Director of Visual Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a specialist on early modern and modern art, theory, and historiography. He was Marcia Hall’s second PhD student and wrote his dissertation on Federico Barocci. He has published two books on Barocci, Federico Barocci and the Oratorians (Truman State Universtiy Press, 2015), and Federico Barocci and the Science of Drawing in Early Modern Italy (Heidelberg University Library, 2019).

Index Aaron (Old Testament, brother of Moses) 295, 300 Adrian VI (Boeyens) 221 Alexander VII (Chigi) 108 Altoviti, Antonio (Archbishop) 168–170, 181–183 Altoviti, Bindo 5, 17–30 Ambrose of Milan 286, 291 Acquinas, Thomas 292 – Summa Theologiae 287 Arezzo – San Francesco in Arezzo 10, 191–210 Aristotle 12, 199, 212 – in Disputa 271–292 Askew, Pamela 322, 323, 325, 333–334 Augustine 93, 285–286, 291 – theology of 84, 96 Baldassini, Melchiorre 143 Bandinelli, Baccio – Hercules and Cacus 253 Barbaro, Daniele 207 Baronio, Cesare – Apologeticus 331–332 Bartholomew, St. 87–91, 94, 95, 97 Bartolini (family of Florence) 22 – Leonardo di Zanobi 22, 24 Battle of Montemurlo 246 Bazzi, Giovanni (“Il Sodoma”) 19 Becerra, Gaspar 151, 155 Bellori, Giovanni Pietro 35, 39, 40, 58, 62–63, 108, 272–273, 312, 318 Belting, Hans 224 Bembo, Pietro 21, 46, 48, 50, 52, 55 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 18 Bigellini, Giuseppe 107 Binnarini, Alfonso 171 Bonasone, Giulio 52 Bonaventure (Saint) 289 – Commentaria in Quatuor Libros Sententiarum 287 – Itinerarium 290 Bondone, Giotto di (see Giotto)

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781501513480-017

Borghini, Raffaello – Il Riposo 249 Borromeo, Carlo 156, 181–182, 335 Borromini, Francesco – San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane 89 Bramante, Donato 45, 156 Bronzino, Agnolo 1, 11, 237–266 – Christ in Limbo 254–255 – Lucrezia Panciatichi 243–244 – Martyrdom of San Lorenzo 238, 247–249, 252 – Ugolino Martelli 245–246 – Venus, Cupid, and Jealousy 242–243 Brunelleschi, Filippo 183, 255 Brussels 214 Bugiardini, Giuliano 240, 241 Buonarotti, Michelangelo (see “Michelangelo”) Calvinism (see also Reformation) 307, 311 Campbell, Stephen 238, 247, 251 Carracci, Annibale 35, 39, 57 – on Correggio 104–106 Carracci, Ludovico – Correggio and 104–106 Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio) 13, 311–336 – biographies of 314 – Cerasi Chapel 91 – Contarelli Chapel 317 – Calling of Saint Matthew 312, 318, 335 – Martyrdom of Saint Matthew 318 – and Counter-Reformation 311–312 – tenebrism 317 Carrier, David 89 Cellini, Benvenuto 50 Cesare, Giuseppe (see d’Arpino, Cavaliere) Chaperon, Nicolas 55–56 Charles V (see also Habsburg Dynasty) 28, 142, 227–233, 234, 295 Cheron, Charles Louis 60 Chigi, Agostino 5, 17, 22–24, 27 – death of 29

350

Index

Christina, Queen of Sweden 108–110, 112 Clement VII (Medici) 143, 228, 259 Clement VIII (Aldobrandini) 329–331 Clement IX (Rospigliosi) 109 Cock, Hieronymus 226 Coecke van Aelst, Pieter 214–215 Colonna, Vittoria 86 Comes, Natalis – Mythologia 80, 84 Comolli, Angelo 40, 62 Condivi, Ascanio 94 Contarelli, Francesco 330 Contarini, Gaspare 86 Cooper, Tracy – The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation 3 Cottoli, Gabriello di Giovanni 173–174 Correggio, Antonio Allegri da 6 – Camera di San Paolo 116–119 – Danae 108 – Jupiter and Io 108 – “inkeeper’s sign” (The Muleteers) 109 – Leda and the Swan 108 – reputation of 101–119 – Raphael and 101 – Rome and 102 – School of Love 108 – where active 103 Council of Trent (see Counter Reformation) Counter-Maniera 10, 39 Counter-Reformation 1, 6, 7, 9, 12, 39, 101, 158, 314 – Council of Trent 148, 149–151, 156, 158, 336 – church interiors and 163, 179, 181 – requirements for art 153, 316 – transubstantiation and 151 – Protestant-Catholic debate 312 Coxcie, Michiel 220 – Continence of Scipio 224–225 Crescenzi, Virgilio 330 Cropper, Elizabeth 238, 244–245 d’Arpino, Cavaliere (Cesare, Giuseppe) 126, 330 Decalogue 296, 299 Del Monte, Francesco Maria 330 DeMarco, Nicholas 318–321 Dempsey, Charles 88, 93, 255 Dionysius (Christian mystic) 291

Donatello 48, 246 Dürer, Albrecht 207 – Raphael and 21 Dvorak, Max 79 Erasmus of Rotterdam 302 Escorial Library 156 Florence 21, 22, 29, 102, 104 – Accademia del Disegno 311 – Borgo Santi Apostoli 22 – Ducal era 243, 246 – “Duomo” (see Santa Maria del Fiore) – “Florentine Maniera” 11 – government of 24, 246, 260 – humanism in 47 – Mendicant churches in 162 – Mercato Vecchio 176 – Ognissanti 162, 168 – Orsanmichele 9, 162, 163–168 – Capitani di 165–166, 169, 171–173, 176–178 – Palazzo Vecchio 176, 252 – Piazza della Signoria 253 – prostitution in 176 – republican sympathies in 246 – San Lorenzo 255 – Madonna di San Zanobi 258–259 – San Marco 162 – cloister of 167 – San Niccolò Oltrarno 162 – San Pancrazio 162, 168 – San Paolo 240 – San Pier Maggior 162, 168 – Santa Croce 7, 151, 168 – Santa Maria del Carmine 162, 168 – Santa Maria del Fiore 46, 176, 181 – Santa Maria Novella 7, 151, 160, 168 – Santa Trinita 162, 168 – Salimbeni Chapel 166 – Santo Spirito 182 – and Siena 25 Floris, Frans 220 – Fall of the Rebel Angels 216 – Gathering of Manna 216–217 Fantuzzi, Antonio 218 Firpo, Massimo 88

Index

Fontainebleau School 218 Forcellino, Antonio and Maria 88 Francis I 218, 228 Francis of Assissi (Saint) 288 Freedberg, Sydney 1, 5, 233, 241 Friedlaender, Walter 5 Fugger, Jakob 5, 22, 23, 27 – death of 29 Galestruzzi, Giovan Battista 130, 132 Galle, Phillips 215 Ghezzi, Giuseppe 109 Ghisi, Giorgio 42 Gilio, Giovanni Andrea 316 – Dialogo nel quale si ragiona degli errori e degli abusi de’ pittori circa l’iostorie 315 Giorgione 28 Giotto 46–47, 50 Girolamo da Carpi – Portrait of Bindo Altoviti 30 Giulio Romano 20, 29, 212, 214, 231 – in Mantua 41 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 66 Goffen, Rona 8, 265 Goltzius, Heindrick 307 – iMoses with the Tablets of the Lae Gombrich, E.H. 1, 79–80, 84, 90 Gossart, Jan 220 Gresham, Thomas 304 Gould, Cecil 108 Gregory I (Anicius) (see Gregory the Great (Saint)) Gregory IX (di Conti) 291 Gregory the Great (Saint) – Magna Moralia 290 Grimm, Herman 273 Haarlem – St. Bavokerk 307 Habsburg dynasty 11 – and Vatican 223 Hall, Marcia

351

– After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century 2–3, 5, 8, 9, 10, 57, 126–127, 211–212 – The Cambridge Companion to Raphael 33, 40, 41 – On Disputa 271 – on Caravaggio 312, 316, 320, 325–326, 333 – career trajectory 1–13 – on the Carracci 57 – on church renovations 151, 161–162, 179, 184 – Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting 2, 8, 9, 192 – Mannerism and 7, 238 – methodology 94–96 – on Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, Sistine Chapel 81–83, 86–88, 92 – on Perino del Vaga 217 – on Polidoro da Caravaggio 128 – on post-Tridentine art 311 – The Power of Color 4 – on Raphael 33, 38–39, 41 – on “relieflike style” 40, 211–214, 233–234, 252 – on the Resurrection 92–93 – and Russian Formalism 313–314 – The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Titnoretto, Barocci, el Greco, Caravaggio 4, 10, 12, 13, 224, 311, 313 – on sgraffito 128, 143 – The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation 3 – on style 247 Heemskerck, Maarten van 220 – Apollo and the Muses 217 – King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba 220 – and Sala di Costantino 230–233 – Victories of Charles V 227–233, 234 Hooftman, Gillis 303 Hooftman, Margaretha 303 Ingres, Jean-August Dominique 35 Innocent VIII (Cybo) 23 Jerome (Saint) – Epistles 287

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Index

Joannides, Paul 89, 275 Joshua (Old Testament) 298 Julius II (della Rovere) 12, 17, 23, 24, 212 Julius III (del Monte) 152 Justinian (Byzantine Emperor) 291–292 Karlstadt, Andreas 295 League of Cambrai 24, 26 Leonardo da Vinci 199 – Last Supper 326–329 – Virgin of the Rocks 20 Leo X (Medici) 17, 24–27, 45, 220, 222 Lippi, Fra Filippo 47, 50 Livy 141 Lombard, Lambert 220 – Esther Before Ahaeuerus 225 Loraine, Claude 35 Lorenzetti, Ambrogio – Madonna del Latte 256 Lucas van Leyden 295–307 – Dance Around the Golden Calf 12, 295 – Moses Striking the Rock in the Wilderness 299 Luther, Martin (see also Reformation) 26, 27, 299 – Lutheranism 295, 303 Maccari, Enrico 128, 133 Magnus, Albertus 199 Mander, Karel van 301 Mannerism 40, 238–266, 178 – artifice in 39 – debate over 5 – end of 10 Mantegna, Andrea 212 Mantua – Giulio Romano in 41 – San Andrea 44 Maratti, Carlo 35, 56–58, 62–63 Margaret of Austria 220 Margaret of Parma 304 Maturino da Firenze 8, 125 Maximilian I 28 Mazzola, Girolamo Francesco Maria (see Parmigianino)

Medici, Alessandro de’ 246 Medici, Giuliano de’ 24, 253, 255 Medici, Cosimo de’ 29, 151, 163, 168–169, 181, 252 Medici, Lorenzo de’ (“Il Magnifico”) 47, 256 Melancthon, Philipp 299 Mendoza, Juan de 154–155 Mengs, Anton Raphael 60, 114–118, 119 Michelangelo 6, 48, 131–132, 212, 249, 251 – Bruges Madonna 259–260 – Madonna of the Steps 259 – Medici Chapel 253–259 – Medici Madonna 257, 262–263 – Night 253–254 – Reformation and 88, 90 – Sistine Chapel 119 – Ancestors of Christ lunettes 79 – Creation of Adam 6, 89, 91 – Last Judgment 6, 79, 81, 86–87, 92–95, 247 – Lunettes 131 – St. Peter’s Pieta 43 Milan 285 Milesi, Giovanni Antonio (see also, Rome; Palazzo Milesi) 142 Mini, Giovan Battista 265 *Mirandola, Pico della 291 – De Hominis Dignitate 289 Monroe, Giovanni 86 Montanari, Tomaso 109 Montelupo, Raffaello da 256 Montosorli, Giovanni 256 Moroncini 88 Moses (Old Testament) 295–296, 298–306 Mount Hor 301 Mount Nebo 301 Mount Sinai 298, 301 Nagel, Alexander 250 Naples 23 – Santa Maria delle Grazie all Pescheria 130 Navarre, Henry of 331–332 Oberhuber, Konrad 275 Ochino, Bernardino 86 Odescalchi, Don Livio 111 Orange, William of (see William of Orange)

Index

Orley, Bernard van 214–215 – Battle of Pavia Tapestry 215 Ortelius, Abraham – circle of 304 Paleotti, Gabriele – Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane 315–316 Panhuys, Peeter – family of 302–304 Panofsky, Erwin 79, 91 Parmigianino 126 Partridge, Loren 88 Passavant, Johann David 273 Paul III (Farnese) 29 Peña, Francesco 331 Penni, Gianfrancesco 20, 29, 215 Penni, Luca 215 Pericolo, Lorenzo 312 Perino del Vaga 53, 57, 126 – Continence of Scipio 224 – Crossing of the Red Sea 217 Peruzzi, Baldassare 45, 57 Petrucchi, Borghese 26 Philip II, King of Spain 147, 152 – San Giacomo degli Spagnoli and 154–156 Piero della Francesca 10 – De Prospective Pingendi 204–205, 208 – Nativity 206, 207 – Resurrection 206, 207 – True Cross fresco cycle 10, 191–208 – The Annunciation 203 – The Battle of Harclius and Chosroes 203 – The Burial of the Wood 198 – The Death of Adam 201–202 – The Dream of Constantine 203 – The Extraction of Judas from the Well 203 – The Finding and Proving of the Cross 198, 202, 203–204, 206 – completion of 192 – The Meeting of Solomon and Sheba 197–198, 204 – narrative 194–195 Pius V (Ghislieri) 182 Plantin, Christopher 304 *Plato 291 – Phaedrus 290

353

Plutarch – The Parallel Lives 136–138, 143 Pole, Reginald 86 Polidoro da Caravaggio 8, 125, 131–33 Poliziano, Agnolo 47–48 Poussin, Nicolas 35, 55 – Landscape with Blind Orion 79 Prince Philip of Spain (see Philip II, King of Spain) Pulzone, Scipione 314 Puttfarken, Thomas 32, 322–323 Raimondi, Marcantonio 42, 218 – Massacre of the Innocents 215 Raphael 3, 5, 6, 11, 12, 17, 18, 20, 212, 271–292 – Albrecht Dürer and 21 – Battle of Leo the Great with Attila 212 – Battle of Ostia 212 – burial of 45 – Canigiani Holy Family 43 – death of 29 – Madonna dell’Impannata 24 – Madonna di Foligno 154 – Massacre of the Innocents 215 – Portrait of Bindo Altoviti 17–19, 20 – portrayals of 43–44 – reputation of 33–70 – Saint Ceclia 152 – Sacrifice at Lystra 212 – Sala di Costantino – Battle of the Milvian Bridge 213–214, 222, 228 – Donation of Constantine 213, 220, 225–226, 228 – Constantine Addressing his Troops and His Vision of the Cross 213, 221–223, 232 – Sala di Psiche 119 – Sistine Chapel tapestry cycle 214, 221 – Stanza della Segnatura 271–292 – Disputa 12, 38, 271–292 – Jurisprudence 292 – program of 278, 292 – Parnassus 292 – School of Athens 12, 43, 212, 272, 274, 278, 280, 283–284

354

Index

– Transfiguration 152 – tomb of 37, 43, 45, 49 Ratti, Carlo Giuseppe 116 Reformation (see also Luther, Martin) 12, 87, 223, 295, 330–331 – Michelangelo and 88, 90 – Protestant-Catholic debate 312 – sola fide 335 Relief-like Style 11, 40, 211–234, 252 – in Florence 217 – in Northern Europe 214–215, 217, 223 Resta, Padre Sebastiano 111, 113 Reynolds, Joshua 35 Riegl, Alois 79, 83 Romano, Giulio (see Giulio Romano) Rome 19, 22, 28 – Accademia di San Luca 35, 58 – Arch of Constantine 228–229 – as artistic center 5 – Compagnia dei Virtuosi al Pantheon 35, 53 – Founding of 141 – French painters in 55 – Palazzo Madama 330 – Palazzo Milesi 8, 125–143 – Palazzo Riario (now Corsini) 108 – Pantheon 45 – Piazza Navona 145–147 – Sack of 154, 224 – San Giacomo degli Spagnoli 9, 145–158 – San Luigi dei Francesi 317–318, 330–331 – San Salvatore in Lauro 109 – San Stefano Rotondo 181 – Santa Maria del Popolo 17 – Santa Maria dell’Anima 22, 29 – Santa Maria della Pace 29 – Santa Maria in Aracoeli 154 – Santa Maria in Valicella 111 – Sistine Chapel frescoes (see Michelangelo) – Spanish Community in 145–147 Rubens, Peter Paul 35 Salamanca, Antonio 42 Salviati, Francesco – Triumph of Camillus 252 Salviati, Jacopo 17, 126 Sangallo, Francesco da 165

Sanzio, Raphael (see Raphael) Savonarola, Girolamo 12 Saxl, Fritz 79 Schlosser, Julius von 273 Schmalkaldic League 228, 229 Scorel, Jan van 220–223 – Marchiennes Polyptich – Stoning of Saint Stephen 222, 223, 224 – and Sala di Costantino 222–223 Sebastiano del Piombo 28 Sermoneta, Siciolante da 147, 152, 154 – Crucifixion Altarpiece 152–154 sgraffito 125 Shearman, John 2, 5, 34, 45, 79, 84, 237–238, 241, 246 *Siena 17, 26 – Florence, rivalry with 25 – Spannocci 22 Smyth, Craig Hugh 5, 212, 241 “Il Sodoma” (see Bazzi, Giovanni) Soderini, Piero 24 Springer, Anton 273 Steinberg, Leo 6, 79–98 Stone, David 311 Strozzi (family of Florence) 22 Suleiman the Magnificent 230–231 Sustris, Lambert 220 Ten Commandments (see Decalogue) Theophrastus 199 Thiry, Leonard 220 Tolnay, Charles de 86, 263–264 Theophrastus 199 Titian 28 Valdes, Juan 86 Varchi, Benedetto – Storia fiorentia 264 Vasari, Giorgio 6, 7, 18, 38, 48, 50, 62, 94, 180 – as architect 168 – as a painter 126, 163 – on Bronzino, Agnolo 243 – on Correggio 103–104, 106, 112 – on Polidoro and Maturino 125 – on Raphael 272, 274 – on Sala di Costantino 213–214

Index

Vatican 11, 223 – College of Cardinals 86 – and Habsburg dynasty 223, 224 – Jubilee of 1600 329, 330, 336 – “Raphael’s Logge” 53 – “relief-like style” and 220 – Sala di Costantino (Raphael, Giulio Romano, Heemskerck, Maarten van, Scorel, Jan van) 11, 213, 228 – Sistine Chapel (see Michelangelo) – St. Peter’s Basilica 27, 331 – Stanza della Segnatura (see Raphael) Warburg, Aby 79 Vecelli, Tiziano (see Titian) Venice 28 Voragine, Jacobus de – Golden Legend 194, 195

Vos, Marten de 302, 303, 306 – Paul and Barnabas on Lystra 304 – Paul in Ephesus 304 – Paul on Malta 304 West, Benjamin 35 Wickhoff, Franz 273 Wilde, Johannes 79 William of Orange 304 Wincklemann, Johann Joachim 40 Wölfflin, Heinrich 40 Wolzogen, Alfred von 273 Zeri, Federico – Pittura e Controriforma 314 Zuccaro, Federico 8, 35, 39, 53, 126 Zuccaro, Taddeo 8, 35, 53, 55, 86, 126

355