The Pictorial Art of El Greco: Transmaterialities, Temporalities, and Media (Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700) 9462989001, 9789462989009

Citation preview

The Pictorial Art of El Greco

Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies. Series Editor Dr. Allison Levy, an art historian, has written and/or edited three scholarly books, and she has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Association of University Women, the Getty Research Institute, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library of Harvard ­University, the Whiting Foundation and the Bogliasco Foundation, among others. www.allisonlevy.com.

The Pictorial Art of El Greco Transmaterialities, Temporalities, and Media

Livia Stoenescu

Amsterdam University Press

This book is published with support from the Research Fund at the College of Architecture, Texas A&M University, College Station.

Cover illustration: El Greco, Christ as Savior, 1612. Oil on canvas, 99 x 79 cm © Casa y Museo del Greco, ­Toledo Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Newgen/Konvertus isbn 978 94 6298 900 9 e-isbn 978 90 4854 141 6 doi 10.5117/9789462989009 nur 685 © L. Stoenescu / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Contents List of Illustrations

7

Acknowledgments 15 Introduction 17 1. Prototypal Images Reaffirmed in Early Modern Painting

25

2. Spanish Miraculous Images, Sacred Narratives, and Aesthetic Goals

99

3. El Greco’s The Purification of the Temple 137 4. Reinventing the Nude in an Age of Censorship

172

5. The Dialogue of Classical and Devotional Cultures in El Greco’s Laocoön of Toledo

248

Bibliography 295 Index 311

List of Illustrations Fig. 1: El Greco, Christ as Savior, 1612. Oil on canvas, 99 x 79 cm © Casa y Museo del Greco, Toledo Fig. 2: Icon of Christ Pantocrator, sixth century. Encaustic icon painting, 84.5 x 44.3 cm. Mount Sinai, Monastery of St. Catherine. Photo: Princeton Sinai Archive Fig. 3: Christ Pantocrator, fifth century. Apse Mosaic. Rome, Santa Pudenziana Basilica. Photographic credit: Sixtus, Wikimedia Commons Fig. 4: Akra Tapeinosis (Man of Sorrows), second half of the twelfth century. Icon painted on both sides; on reverse, the Hodegetria type of icon depicting the Virgin with Infant Child. Tempera on panel, 115 x 78 cm. Kastoria, Byzantine Museum. Photographer: Web Gallery of Art Fig. 5: Carlo Crivelli, The Dead Christ Supported by Two Angels (Man of Sorrows), c. 1470-1475. Tempera on panel, 72 x 55 cm © The National Gallery, London Fig. 6: Jacopo Tintoretto, Crucifixion, 1568. Oil on canvas, 341 x 371 cm. San Cassiano, Venice. Photo Credit: Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/Art Resource, NY Fig. 7: Titian, Man of Sorrows, 1560. Oil on canvas, 73.4 × 56 cm © National Gallery of Art, Dublin Fig. 8: Titian, Christ Carrying the Cross, c. 1560. Oil on canvas, 89 x 77 cm © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo by Leonard Kheifets Fig. 9: Vittore Carpaccio, St. Ursula Talking to her Father (detail from The Reception of the English Ambassadors), mid-1490s. Tempera on canvas, Venice, Gallerie dell’ Accademia. After Angeliki Lymberopoulou, “Audiences and markets for Cretan icons,” Viewing Renaissance Art, eds. Kim Woods at al. (Yale University Press and The Open University, 2007), p. 188 Fig. 10: Benedetto da Maiano, Monument to Giotto, 1490. Marble and Mosaic. Florence Cathedral © Opera di S. Maria del Fiore/Nicolò Orsi Battaglini Fig. 11: Sebastiano del Piombo, Christ Carrying the Cross, c. 1532-1535. Oil on Slate Technique (cut to the right), 43 x 32 cm © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado Fig. 12: Sebastiano del Piombo, Ubeda Pietà, 1539. Oil on Slate Technique, 124 x 111.1 x 35 cm © Seville, Fundación Casa Ducal de Medinaceli (Madrid, Museo del Prado) Fig. 13: Sebastiano del Piombo, Christ Carrying the Cross, c. 1537. Oil on Slate, 104.5 x 74.5 cm © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo by Leonard Kheifets Fig. 14: Eugenio Cajés, The Virgin Embracing Our Lady of El Sagrario, c. 1616-1620. Drawing, red chalk and red wash on yellow laid paper. © Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Dib/15/1/19

8

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

Fig. 15: Federico Zuccari, The Encounter of Christ and Veronica on the Way to Calvary, 1594. Oil on panel. Rome, Santa Prassede Basilica, Olgiati Chapel © Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, reproduced with permission of S. P. S. A. E. e per il Polo Museale della Città di Roma Fig. 16: El Greco, St. Veronica’s Veil, c. 1580. Private Collection Fig. 17: El Greco, Saint Veronica with the Sudarium, c. 1577-1578. Oil on canvas, 84 x 91 cm © Museo de Santa Cruz, Toledo Fig. 18: El Greco, The Veil of St. Veronica, c. 1579. Formerly Madrid, Colección Maria Louisa Caturla. Current location unknown. After Fernando Marías, El Greco: Life and Work – A New History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 148 Fig. 19: Antoniazzo Romano, Holy Face, central panel from Triptych with SS. John the Baptist, Peter, and Holy Face, c. 1495. Tempera on panel, 94 x 132 cm © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado Fig. 20: Santo Rostro of Jaén (The Holy Face of Jaén). Jaén Cathedral, Spain. Photo: Cabildo de la S.I. Catedral de Jaén Fig. 21: Mandylion, thirteenth century. Cloth on panel, 28.8 x 17.6 cm. Genoa, San Bartolomeo degli Armeni. After Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), p. 206 Fig. 22: El Greco, The Holy Face, c. 1590-1595. Oil on canvas, 71 x 54 cm. Madrid, Museo del Prado. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY Fig. 23: El Greco, Escutcheon with the Veil of St. Veronica, c. 1577-1579. Oil on wood, oval, 90 x 130 cm. Madrid, Spain, Private Collection. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY Fig. 24: Diego de Aguilar the Younger (attributed to), The Holy Face, early 1600s. Toledo, San Clemente el Real © Renate Takkenberg-Krohn Fig. 25: The Veil of St. Veronica, early fifteenth century. Marble sculptural relief. Toledo, Monastery of San Juan de Los Reyes. Photo: Antonio Velez, Wikimedia Commons Fig. 26: Pantocrator and Angels, detail of the vault, ninth century. Mosaic. Rome, Santa Prassede Basilica, S. Zeno Chapel. Photo: Sailko, Wikimedia Commons Fig. 27: Christ Pantocrator, detail of the vault, late eleventh century. Mosaic. Daphni, Church of the Dormition. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY Fig. 28: Albrecht Dürer, Sudarium Held by Two Angels, 1513. Engraving. Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Fig. 29: Francisco de Zurbarán, The Veil of St. Veronica, c. 1635. Oil on canvas, 69.9 x 51.1 cm. Stockholm, National Museum. Photo: Art Resource, NY Fig. 30: Christ Carrying the Cross, end of the fifteenth century. Woodcut. London, Colnaghi’s. Photograph reproduced with permission of P&D Colnaghi Ltd., London

List of Illustrations

9

Fig. 31: Enea Vico, Jesus Christ, c. 1548. Engraving, 18.8 x 13.9 cm. After The Illustrat­ ed Bartsch, vol. 31: Italian Masters of the Sixteenth Century, eds. Suzanne Boorsch and John Spike (New York: Abaris Books, 1985) Fig. 32: Cornelis Cort after Zuccari, Lament of Painting, 1579. Engraving, upper plate 36.2 x 53.7 cm, lower plate 37.3 x 53.4 cm. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen. Photo: Joerg P. Anders, provided by Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz Fig. 33: Donatello, Madonna dei Pazzi, c. 1420. Marble, 74.5 x 69.5 cm. Berlin, Staatliche Museen. Photo: Joerg P. Anders, provided by Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Fig. 34: Miraculous Image of the Santissima Annunziata, c. 1340. Fresco. Florence, Church of the SS. Annunziata. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY Fig. 35: Virgil Solis, Bust of Christ in Profile, c. 1550s. Engraving. After The Illustrated Bartsch, vol. 15: Early German Masters (New York: Abaris Boks, 1987) Fig. 36: El Greco, Saint Ildefonso, 1603-1605. Oil on Canvas, 187 x 102 cm. Illescas, Church of the Hospital of Charity. Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY Fig. 37: Our Lady of Illescas, wooden miniature. Illescas, Church of the Hospital of Charity. Photo: Fernando Marías Fig. 38: Interior of the Church of the Hospital of Charity, 1588-1600. Illescas. Photo: Fernando Marías Fig. 39: El Greco, The Virgin Presenting the Chasuble to Saint Ildefonso, 1585-1587. Polychrome sculptural relief. Toledo, Toledo Cathedral, Sacristy. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY Fig. 40: El Greco, The Disrobing of Christ (El Espolio), 1577-1579. Oil on canvas, 285 x 173 cm. Toledo, Toledo Cathedral, Sacristy. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY Fig. 41: El Greco, Saint Ildefonso, c. 1610. Oil on canvas, 222 x 105 cm. Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY Fig. 42: El Greco, View and Map of Toledo, 1610-1604. Oil on canvas, 132 x 228 cm © Casa y Museo del Greco, Toledo Fig. 43: El Greco, The Apparition of the Virgin to St. Lawrence, c. 1578-1581. Oil on canvas, 119 x 102 cm. Spain, Galicia, Monforte de Lemos, Colegio del Cardenal. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY Fig. 44: Guido Reni, Saint Philip in Ecstasy Contemplating the Virgin Mary, 1614. Rome, Chiesa Nuova (S. Maria in Vallicella), Camere di San Filippo. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY Fig. 45: Jean Pucelle, Miracle of Sardenay, Miracles of Notre Dame, c. 1333-1334. After Jeffrey Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998), p. 296

10 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

Fig. 46: Giulio Clovio, The Farnese Book of Hours, Adoration of the Shepherds (f.26v) and the Fall of Man (f.27). 1546. Manuscript, 172 x 108 mm (each page). Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum/Art Resource, NY Fig. 47: Vittore Carpaccio, Saint Augustine in his Study, 1502-1503. Oil and Tempera on canvas, 141 x 120 cm. Venice, Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. The Yorck Project; copyright Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH (GNU Free Documentation License) Fig. 48: Raphael, The Vision of Ezekiel, 1518. Oil on wood, 40 x 30 cm. Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY Fig. 49: Alonso Cano, The Apparition of Christ Salvador to St. Teresa, c. 1629. Oil on Canvas, 99 x 43.5 cm © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado Fig. 50: El Greco, The Apparition of the Virgin to St. John on Patmos, c. 1580-1585. Oil on canvas, 236 x 118 cm. Toledo, Museo de Santa Cruz. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY Fig. 51: El Greco, The Purification of the Temple, c. 1610. Oil on canvas, 106 x 104 cm. Madrid, Spain, Parish Church of Saint Ginés. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY Fig. 52: Jacopo Bassano and workshop, The Purification of the Temple, c. 1580. Oil on canvas, 160.5 x 267.5 cm © The National Gallery, London. Presented by Philip L. Hinds, 1853 Fig. 53: Marcello Venusti (after Michelangelo), The Purification of the Temple, c. 1550. Oil on Wood, 61 x 40 cm © The National Gallery, London Fig. 54: Titian, Pietà, c. 1570-1576. Oil on canvas, 350 x 390 cm. Venice, Gallerie dell’ Accademia. Photo: Mauro Magliani, 1998. Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, NY Fig. 55: El Greco, Christ Cleansing the Temple, c. 1570. Oil on panel, 65.4 x 83.2 cm. Samuel H. Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Fig. 56: El Greco, The Purification of the Temple, c. 1570-1575. Oil on canvas, 116.8 x 149.9 cm. Minnesota, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY Fig. 57: Jacopo Sansovino, Loggetta, Venice, Piazza S. Marco, c. 1537. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY Fig. 58: Camerlenghi Palace, Venice, Rialto, 1525-1528. Façade by Guglielmo Grigi il Bergamasco © Fondo Paolo Monti, Milan, Civico Archivio Fotografico Fig. 59: El Greco, The Miracle of Christ Healing the Blind, c. 1570. Oil on canvas, 119.4 x 146.1 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 1978 Fig. 60: El Greco, The Purification of the Temple, c. 1600. Oil on canvas, 41.9 x 52.4 cm © The Frick Collection, New York, Henry Clay Frick Bequest Fig. 61: El Greco, Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple, c. 1600. Oil on canvas, 106.3 x 129.7 cm © The National Gallery, London. Presented by Sir J.C. Robinson, 1895

List of Illustrations

11

Fig. 62: Juan de Juanes, St. Stephen in the Temple, c. 1565. Oil on canvas, 160 x 123 cm © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado Fig. 63: Titian, St. Jerome, c. 1570-1575. Oil on canvas, 137 x 97 cm © Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid Fig. 64: Albrecht Dürer, The Mass of St. Gregory, 1511. Woodcut. Rosenwald Collec­ tion, Washington DC, National Gallery of Art Fig. 65: Michelangelo, Entombment, c. 1500. Tempera on panel, 162 x 150 cm © The National Gallery, London Fig. 66: Federico Barocci, Institution of the Eucharist, 1603-1607. Oil on canvas, 290 x 177 cm. Rome, Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY Fig. 67: El Greco, The Risen Christ, 1595-1598. Polychrome wood, height 47 cm. Toledo, Tavera Hospital, Church of the Hospital of Saint John the Baptist © Seville, Fundación Casa Ducal de Medinaceli Fig. 68: Domenico Fontana, Fountain of the Acqua Felice, 1585-1588. Rome, Quirinale District, Piazza di San Bernardo © Vanni Archive/Art Resource, NY Fig. 69: El Greco, Epimetheus, c. 1600-1610. Polychrome wood, 43 cm high © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado Fig. 70: El Greco, Pandora, c. 1600-1610. Polychrome wood, 43 cm high © Photograph­ ic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado Fig. 71: Tintoretto, Study after Michelangelo’s Giorno, c. 1550-1555. Drawing. Black and white chalk on blue paper, 35 x 50.5 cm. After Le Siècle de Titien, L’Age d’or de la peinture à Venise, exh.cat. (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1993) Fig. 72: El Greco, Study after Michelangelo’s Giorno, c. 1570. Black crayon, white wash, blue paper on a frame of brown ink, blue wash and inscription ‘Domenico Greco’ by Vasari, 59.8 x 34.5 cm. München, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung Fig. 73: Titian, St. Margherita, c. 1565. Oil on canvas, 209 x 183 cm © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado Fig. 74: El Greco, The Assumption of the Virgin, 1577-1579. Oil on canvas, Inscribed on paper at lower right in Greek ‘Domenikos Theotokopoulos’, 403.2 x 211.8 cm. Chicago, The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Nancy Atwood Sprague in memory of Albert Arnold Sprague, 1906.99. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY Fig. 75: El Greco, The Holy Trinity, 1577-1579. Oil on Canvas, 300 x 179 cm © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado Fig. 76: Michelangelo, Prophet Daniel, c. 1508-1512. Fresco, 390 x 380 cm. Vatican City, Vatican Palace, Sistine Chapel. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY Fig. 77: Michelangelo, Pietà for Vittoria Colonna, early 1540. Black chalk on paper, 29.5 x 20 cm. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Fig. 78: El Greco, Pietà, c. 1575. Oil on canvas, 66 x 48 cm. Courtesy of the Hispanic Society of America, New York

12 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

Fig. 79: Federico Barocci, Entombment, 1579-1582, revised and restored in 1606-1608. Oil on canvas, 295 x 187 cm. Senigallia, Confraternità della Croce e Sacramento in Senigallia. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY Fig. 80: El Greco, St. John the Baptist, 1577-1579. Oil on canvas, 212 x 78 cm. High altar, Toledo, Santo Domingo el Antiguo. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY Fig. 81: El Greco, The Baptism of Christ, c. 1567-1570. Tempera and oil on wood, 23.6 x 18 cm. Heraklion, Historical Museum of Crete © The Municipality of Heraklion Fig. 82: El Greco, Modena Triptych, front panels, Adoration of the Shepherds (left, 24 x 18 cm), Christ Crowning the Christian Soldier (center, 37 x 23.8 cm) and Baptism of Christ (right, 24 x 18 cm), c. 1566. Modena, Galleria Estensi © Ministerio dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo, Archivio fotografico delle Gallerie Estensi Fig. 83: Titian, St. John the Baptist in the Desert, c. 1542. Oil on canvas, 201 x 134 cm. Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia. Photo: Mauro Magliani, 1998. Photo Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY Fig. 84: El Greco, Saint John the Baptist, 1577. Pen and brown ink with brown and gray wash, heightened with white on paper, 13.6 x 5.5 cm. After David Davies, El Greco, exhibition catalogue, London, 2003 Fig. 85: Michael Damaskinos, St. John the Baptist, c. 1565. Egg tempera on panel, 111 x 60 cm. Zakynthos, Museum. After El Greco: Identity and Transformation, Crete, Italy, Spain, ed. Jose Alvarez Lopera (Skira: Milano, 1999), p. 227 Fig. 86: El Greco, The Resurrection (the Altar of the Epistle), 1577-1579. Oil on canvas, 210 x 128 cm. Toledo, Santo Domingo el Antiguo. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY Fig. 87: Bartolomé Carducho, Descent from the Cross, 1595. Oil on canvas, 263 x 181 cm © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado Fig. 88: Agnolo Bronzino, Descent into Limbo, 1552. Oil on wood, 444 x 293 cm. Florence, Church of Santa Croce, Zacchini Chapel. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY Fig. 89: El Greco, St. Jerome in Penitence, 1610-1614. Oil on canvas, 168 x 110.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Gift of Chester Dale 1943 Fig. 90: Titian, St. Jerome in Penitence, c. 1575. Oil on canvas. Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Nuevos Museos. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY Fig. 91: El Greco, St. Jerome in Penitence, 1595-1600. Oil on canvas, 104.2 x 96.5 cm © National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh. Photo: Antonia Reeve Fig. 92: El Greco, St. Sebastian, 1577-78. Oil on canvas, 191 x 152 cm. Palencia, Cathedral Sacristy. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY Fig. 93: El Greco, The Martyrdom of St. Maurice, c. 1580-1581. Oil on canvas, 448 x 301 cm. Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Chapter House. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY

List of Illustrations

13

Fig. 94: El Greco, Christ on the Cross Adored by Donors, c. 1577-1580. Oil on canvas, 260 x 178 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY Fig. 95: Federico Barocci, Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John the Evangelist, and Saint Sebastian, 1596. Oil on canvas, 500 x 318.5 cm. Genoa, Cathedral of San Lorenzo © DeA Picture Library/Art Resource, NY Fig. 96: Titian, Polyptych of the Resurrection, 1520-1522. Oil on panel, 278 x 122 cm. Brescia, Church of Santo Nazaro e Celso. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY Fig. 97: El Greco, St. Sebastian, c. 1600. Oil on canvas, oval, 88.9 x 67.9 cm. Private Collection. Photo: Album/Art Resource, NY Fig. 98: El Greco, St. Sebastian, c. 1610-1614. Oil on canvas, 201.5 x 111.5 cm © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado Fig. 99: Agnolo Bronzino, St. Sebastian, c. 1533. Oil on panel, 87 x 76.5 cm © Fundación Colección Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid Fig. 100: El Greco, Laocoön, c. 1610-1614. Oil on canvas, 137.5 x 172.5 cm. Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Fig. 101: El Greco, The Funeral of the Count of Orgaz, c. 1586-1588. Oil on canvas, 480 x 360 cm. Toledo, Parish Church of Santo Tomé. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY Fig. 102: El Greco, Saint Martin and the Beggar, c. 1597. Oil on canvas, 193. 5 x 103 cm. Widener Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Fig. 103: Nicolò Boldrini (attributed), Caricature of the Laocoön (after Titian), c. 15201560. Woodcut, 36.2 x 49.2 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art 22.73.3-125, Rogers Fund, 1922 Fig. 104: El Greco, The Vision of St. John, c. 1608-1621. Oil on canvas, 222.3 x 193 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, inv. 56.48 Fig. 105: Titian, Tythus, c. 1565. Oil on canvas, 253 x 217 cm © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado Fig. 106: Giovanni Battista Fontana, The Trojan Horse, c. 1560-1579. Copper engraving, 300 x 438 mm. Photo: Wikimedia Commons Fig. 107: Jean de Gourmont I, Laocoön, c.1550. Engraving. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Fig. 108: Hans Brosamer, Laocoön Troia, 1538. Engraving. London, The British Museum Fig. 109: El Greco, Saint Peter in Tears, c. 1580-1589. Oil on canvas, 108 x 89.6 cm. England, County Durham, Barnard Castle. © The Bowes Museum Fig. 110: Icon-portrait of St. Peter, sixth century. Encaustic technique, 93.4 x 53.7. Mount Sinai, St. Catherine Monastery. Photo: Princeton Sinai Archive

Acknowledgments The idea for a book on El Greco captured my imagination long ago, when I was read­ ing Counter-Reformation literature and ecclesiastical treatises written during the Council of Trent (1545-63) for my doctoral dissertation. It stunned me at the time – as much as it does presently, in the aftermath of manuscript completion – that El Greco demonstrated a measure of compliance with regulations that was matched only by his originality. I found his extraordinary creative force in challenging the overarching concern with the religious culture of his time exciting and worthy of examination. At the same time, I decided that his twofold artistic personality – Eastern background and Western formation – should be my primary focus. As I participated in the El Greco symposium held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. in 2014 and had the good fortune to receive an invitation from Nicos Hadjinicolaou to attend the works of the El Greco International Congress he organized in Greece at Athens’ Benaki Museum, my conversations with El Greco scholars from around the globe inspired my thinking. As I organized two sessions on the reception of El Greco at the Renaissance Society of America’s annual meetings in 2014 and 2015, I explored his involvement in the world of religious thought in Italy and Spain. As a new hire at Texas A&M University, I promptly offered a seminar on the pictorial art of El Greco in light of new methodologies in temporality, typological reference, and imagined visual realities. All these lectures, conversations, and debates have continued into the present day and have informed the current shape of this book. The writing of this book has involved more people than I can possibly remember. My deepest gratitude will always go first to my University of Toronto professors, to Philip Sohm and, more especially, to Alexander Nagel, who in addition to sharing his ideas helped with photographs. I benefited from the astute observations and immense knowledge of Fernando Marías, who also helped with photographs generously. I am very pleased to acknowledge many friends and colleagues for their contributions to this book. Thanks are due to Ian Muise, Alexandra Matheny, Richard Kagan, Luis Alberto Pérez Velarde, Andrew Casper, Yannis Hadjinicolaou, Michiaki Koshikawa, Robert Philips, Miriam Cera Brea, José Riello, Giles Knox, Karin Hellwig, Cloe Cavero de Carondelet, Aneta Georgievska-Shine, Piers Baker-Bates, Alin Moşoiu, Ann Kellett, Luis Rueda, and Vivian Atwater. I would also like to thank Erika Gaffney at Amsterdam University Press for her tremendous support, guidance, and skill, and the anonymous reader for their many insightful suggestions on improving the manuscript. My gratitude extends to Chantal Nicolaes for ushering the book towards publication. I am grateful to my home institution, the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University, for a grant from the research fund, which allowed me to acquire high-quality photographs, pay the permission fees, and help offset the press’s expenses in

16 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

­ roducing the lengthy text and numerous illustrations. I gratefully acknowledge the p support of Dean Jorge Vanegas, Associate Dean Dawn Jourdan, Assistant to the Dean Tommie Ward, and Business Coordinator Faith Stringer. I am particularly indebted to the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University. Besides being a congenial environment to present my research and receive feedback from talented faculty, the Glasscock Center and its interim director, Laura Mandell, offered me the publication support grant, which allowed further defrayment of related expenses. Throughout my work on this book, I have benefited primarily from the resources and assistance offered by the Sterling C. Evans library at Texas A&M University. I owe a special debt of gratitude to our librarians, who offered unstinting assistance. Finally, but not least, I am grateful to my father George, who first introduced me to El Greco and the Spanish Baroque. Without the model of his unprecedented intellectual caliber and fine connoisseurship, I could never have aspired to write an El Greco monograph. In more recent years, Ana Sofia Stoenescu, Agripina Iribarne, and Gabriela Flanagan deserve special thanks for their patience, love, and support.

Introduction Temporalities, Transmaterialities, and Media in the Pictorial Art of ­ reco El G This book draws on several published articles, conference presentations, and an edited volume in order to develop a new reading of El Greco’s pictorial art, one that aims to reframe the assumptions and paradigms that have constrained understandings of this major Early Modern artist. Although El Greco (Heraklion, 1541 – Toledo, 1614) has in recent years garnered an increase in critical attention, approaches to his painting have so far addressed only a mere fraction of the challenges he brought to the perception of sacred art in the late sixteenth century. This book interrogates the broader ways in which El Greco reconfigured Christian art both as artistic agency in early modernity and as a last bastion of engagement with the traditional boundaries of premodern art from Byzantium. This approach not only reevaluates El Greco’s stature as a major modernist – who should, I argue, be discussed in association with the Carracci reform of art, Federico Zuccari’s ideas about artistic practice at the Roman Academy, and the most accomplished Spanish modernists – but also critically reflects on the processes of reformation, renovation, and transformation that radically changed the institutional boundaries of Western Christianity during his lifetime. El Greco has been consistently portrayed as a bizarre and extravagant artist, and consequently art historical commentary on his creativity acquired a vehemence commonly reserved for the atypical, uncanny, mystical, and the like. It is my belief, and a premise of this book, that El Greco appears more typical than atypical and that the question of his originality cannot be convincingly argued on atypical grounds alone but must be addressed in the context of an inquiry into the Early Modern age. I argue for a portrayal of El Greco that is singular because of his unique background; by the same token, however, such a portrayal is not so singular as to be cut off from the vital questions that affected cultural production generally in early modernity. The debates concerning the theory of imitation and the competing claims of the fine arts, as well as the period’s criticisms and reassessments of sacred art, consistently preoccupied El Greco. From a historically informed interpretative framework, El Greco’s re-conceptualizations of the traditional notions of image, icon, and prototype constitute a fervent contribution to a period rife with theological and ideological concerns. El Greco’s conception – not only his innovative narrative structure but also his interpretative stance – took into consideration the array of patronal modes and tastes and the institutional contexts of Counter Reformation Spain within which he functioned. He also took into account how such concerns were mediated at a level closer to pictorial art, through such issues as media and the transfer from architec-

18 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

ture and sculpture to painting. Painting – constructed in the Counter Reformation as the watchdog for decorum, function, and format – represented for El Greco the arena in which he formulated his most elaborate figurative representations and dynamic patterns of abstraction. This book thus frames El Greco in a manner which is at variance with decades of scholarship, aiming to augment our understanding of his creativity as having been consistently preoccupied with the reception of tradition and also self-consciously fluent in the principal characteristics that informed the artistic culture in early modernity generally and in Spain in particular. I depart from the common refrain that El Greco was a unique painter distanced from the mainstream and instead demonstrate the breadth and depth of his thinking as a painter aligned with the major artistic trends of his time. This book focuses primarily on El Greco’s work from the 1570s through the end of his life in 1614 in order to reconsider his experimental aesthetic and representational practice as a complex set of responses to early modernity as it transpired in the specific context of Spain. El Greco’s modernism is distinct from many innovative Spanish paradigms and also from the work of such leading artists as Pellegrino Tibaldi (1527-1596), Gaspar Becerra (1520-1568), Miguel Barroso (1538-1590), Alonso Berruguete (1490-1561), Juan de Juni (1507-1577), and even El Greco’s mentor Giulio Clovio (1498-1578), all of whose expressions were shaped primarily by the art of Michelangelo. The pictorial art of El Greco is deeply embedded in the most advanced expressions of late sixteenth-century art, even as it is permeated by Byzantine tones and simultaneous critical dialogue with Michelangelo’s interests in the tradition of the Man of Sorrows. I offer new insights and concepts for understanding El Greco’s thinking about his artistry and the application of his artistic outlook to the production of sacred imagery. Consequently, I investigate El Greco’s art-making practice and his interest in the materiality of painting. His preoccupation with the Eastern icon bridges a broad span between artists and antiquarians to advance pictorial art by reactivating the coloristic effects once employed in the wax medium of encaustic, of which Pliny’s Historia Naturalis had originally spoken. Remarkably, El Greco interpreted the antagonistic comparison between painting and sculpture as a debate fully resolved within the medium of oil painting, which he advanced to the level of a platform for the unfolding of sacred truth and for transubstantiating into perpetual presence the icon. This interpretation of El Greco hinges on the comprehensive ways in which art historical studies have expanded theoretical analysis into considerations of temporalities and transmaterialities. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood’s Anachronic Renaissance (2011) maintains that a substitutional chain of references connects an artifact back to its origin while concomitantly updating on tangible and modern thought in the production of the new work. Nagel and Wood pose the distinction between objective time and multi-layered temporality as a new basis for the authenticity of painting in the fifteenth century and beyond. This distinction is critical in

Introduction

19

my examination of El Greco, helping to contextualize his Byzantine background and to refine our perception of his originality within a modern Western context. Nagel’s emphasis in The Controversy of Renaissance Art (2011) on the determinant role of historical authenticity has been instrumental in my approach to El Greco’s interest in the historicity of icons and the formal solutions he applied to curtail the specific historical and aesthetic circumstances behind religious painting. My methodology develops an interpretive framework that also draws on Hans Belting’s pivotal scholarship on religious images, but I adjust his schema to show that the cult image ­becomes a retrospective myth invented by El Greco’s cultivation of the sacred materiality of icons. El Greco’s seminal contribution to the traditional functions of images in the Early Modern period raises serious objections to Hans Belting’s view, namely, that the artistic developments of Early Modern art threatened a break with the tradition of the Christian image altogether. In this regard, Aby Warburg has asserted that notwithstanding the crude character of historical artifacts, they deserve attention not only for the light they shed on the history of Christianity but also as a repository of models imitated in Italian Renaissance painting. My work concurrently examines the implications of Georges Didi-Huberman’s anthropology of the historical artifact to study how icon reactivation, in conjunction with portraiture and the altarpiece, enabled the unprecedented creativity of El Greco’s painting. El Greco engaged the traditional grounds of Christian art as an icon painter from Crete, yet upon relocation to Spain he adapted devotional and iconographical meaning by exploiting underappreciated techniques. He was the only artist in Spain to have reinforced the late brushwork of Titian, establishing borrones as a hybrid between the Italian macchia and Spanish borron. Challenging the Italian Renaissance theory of imitation in the annotations to his copy of Vasari’s Lives (1568), he situated his artistic practice within broader cultural contexts while taking issue with contemporary theoretical positions from Spain. Francesco Pacheco’s influential Arte de la Pintura (Seville, 1649 first edition) recognizes El Greco as being ‘the philosophical painter’ aligned with the greatest talents of Italian Renaissance art, but at the same time decries the Cretan’s interests in the tactility of brushstrokes and the animation of the canvas. In fact, El Greco’s art-making process transmitted fundamental elements in how painters and critics alike talked about painting in the wake of Titian’s pictorial effects. In contrast to Pacheco’s view, which sees Early Modern painting as a period culminating in harmony and classical perfection, El Greco reveals a restless and insatiable pictorial art which consequently casts a sharper light on the new forms of artistic and historical self-awareness that mark the Early Modern period as a whole. El Greco mobilized the tensions that arise from the aesthetic gap between prototype and his creative artistry applied to sacred imagery. The similarities he thus forged are less formal than substantial and conceptual; to echo Yannis Hadjinicolaou, El Greco’s borron is the ontological mark of shaping a form from matter alone (‘Ein borron ist die Spur der Formwerdung aus dem Chaos’).

20 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

My focus has led me to pay a good deal of attention to the work of Fernando Marías. In El Largo Siglo XVI: Los usos artísticos del renacimineto español (1989), Marías’s ideas of the Spanish Renaissance as an idiosyncratic approach to traditions and institutions evaluate the modern conditions of religious art production in Spain. The most significant difference, one that concerns Marías particularly, is that Spanish Christian humanism did not overestimate the Classical norm, which in Italy came to predominate over the fine arts discourse. I interpret and use Marías’s vast literature on El Greco, including his recent El Greco: Life and Work – A New History (2013), to analyze the artist’s response to the license allowed to painters in the contexts of Spanish Christian traditions from the Counter-Reformation. The question of the relation between El Greco and Cretan culture was addressed by Nikolas M. Panagiotakes’s El Greco: The Cretan Years (2009). Drawing on textual evidence about El Greco’s Cretan period, Panagiotakes focuses on the array of Byzantine modes and tastes within which El Greco evolved in his early years in Heraklion. This book also takes into account authoritative positions that expressed serious disbelief in El Greco’s formal continuity with the Byzantine tradition, after his assimilation into and adaptation of Western painting. Robin Cormack’s Painting the Soul: Icons, Death Masks and Shrouds (1997) maintains the stylistic influence of contemporary Venetian vocabulary as being influential on El Greco’s remodeling of the new Western forms of spiritual and cultural involvement. Marcia Hall notes in The Sacred Image in the Age of Art (2011) that the Byzantine tradition is a mere distant echo for El Greco’s stylistic choices, which were more fully shaped by the austere spirit of the Counter Reformation than by his Cretan period. At the same time, this book studies the role of icons in Spain in relation to consistent preoccupations with Byzantium, as discussed in Angeliki Lymberopoulou and Rembrandt Druits’s Byzantine Art and Renaissance Europe (2013). The unprecedented significance of El Greco’s creative act in reconciling the Byzantine icon with Western aesthetic positions on sacred images was formulated brilliantly by Andrew R. Casper’s Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy (2014). Interpreting the Byzantine icon, Counter-Reformation theology, Venetian and Roman altarpieces, and Renaissance art theory, Casper contends that El Greco’s saintly figurations are ‘artful icons’ revealing and showcasing Byzantine artistic excellence for Western eyes. The first chapter studies the Museo y Casa del Greco Christ as Savior and the acheiropoietic portrait of Christ, which by the late sixteenth century had become a proving ground for ambitious painting. El Greco’s Christ as Savior encapsulates the eternal quality of the acheiropoieton as the outcome of technical virtuosity, vigorous brushwork, and coloristic materiality. In Spain, El Escorial’s accessibility to an environment of Italian and Spanish interrelated art paradigms, as well as Toledo’s receptivity to multiculturalism, enabled El Greco to progress beyond his Cretan, Roman, and Venetian influences. He taps into the imaginative potential of painting – the art in which he so strenuously believed – to adapt the acheiropoieton in ways markedly

Introduction

21

different from the tradition at Mount Sinai’s St. Catherine Monastery, where the first encaustic portrait of Christ was carried out in the late sixth century. El Greco’s Christ as Savior, produced in the oil-on-canvas technique, additionally distinguishes from the ‘Spanish taste’, most especially revealed through Sebastiano del Piombo’s painting on stone for the portraits of Christ commissioned by Spanish patrons. Further, El Greco’s authorial interpretation departs from the Renaissance artists who traveled to Rome to see the miraculous Sancta Sanctorum icon in Rome’s Lateran Basilica, dedicated to Christ the Redeemer. Francisco de Hollanda adapted the image he saw in Rome, and so did Giotto, to whom Benedetto da Maiano paid homage in a mosaic tondo in Florence, pointing to the centrality of the mosaic medium for the retranslation of prototypal images into virtuoso modern compositions. The redistribution of the media attracted powerful responses to the cult image in Early Modernity. Federico Zuccari’s The Encounter of Christ and Veronica (1594) interprets the Veil of Veronica as the restaging of Christ’s portrait, as authentic as the famous relic because of its status as metaphorical recreation in the oil-on-canvas medium. The second chapter draws on Spanish medieval texts regarding the Virgin’s apparition as a sculpted image that provided the historical basis for the aesthetic strategy of El Greco’s St. Ildefonso painting, in which the miraculous image of Our Lady of Illescas shows as a carved image in the right margin. The seventh-century Our Lady of Illescas stands in for the miraculous attributes of Mary’s legendary visit to the St. Ildefonso oratory, as recounted in the writings of El Greco’s patron, Salazar de Mendoza’s El glorioso San Ildefonso, Arzobispo de Toledo (Toledo, 1618). Exploiting the indexical properties of the medieval image, El Greco recasts the old within new media in a modern composition laden with multiple layers of time. In the late sixteenth century, the wooden carved image of Our Lady of Illescas became especially popular as part of a comprehensive family of venerable artifacts that underwent a process of metamorphosis and material transformation. The revitalization of beliefs and devotional practices about Marian sculpted images dovetailed with El Greco’s interest in the production of wax and clay modelli in his studio as studies for his paintings. Like Tintoretto, El Greco adapted the post-Tridentine departure from live models to the specifics of his artistic license. The sacred materiality of the St. Ildefonso painting reinforces the sacred character of the architecture at the Illescas shrine, where El Greco acted as architectural designer for the encasing of Our Lady of Illescas at the high altar. Chapter three studies the associations between architecture and painting in El Greco’s Saint Ginés edition of The Purification of the Temple, one of the last major undertakings of his Spanish period. Through an array of cross-references, the Saint Ginés Purification interprets the Gospel narrative of the Cleansing of the Temple in accordance with Venetian architecture, and with the ideas of Jacopo Sansovino, ­Sebastiano Serlio, and Andrea Palladio. The praise of Palladio is intrinsic to the annotations that El Greco made to his own copy of De architectura, the edition of ­Vitruvius

22 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

by Daniele Barbaro (1556). Principles of temporal displacement and s­ emantic possibilities are most radically expressed in the Saint Ginés Purification, including the replacement of the biblical temple with Venetian architecture, a recollection of ­Titian’s last Pietà, of Michelangelo’s approach to the classical order, as well as the post-­Tridentine significance of the sacrament tabernacle as a work of sculpture. Chapter four contends that El Greco’s nudes distill what was excessive in the work of Michelangelo to demonstrate that artistic excellence could be congruent with Christian practice. El Greco confronted Michelangelo’s art through transformation, rather than imitation or assimilation. I argue that El Greco departed from the heroic quality of Michelangelo’s nudes to embrace instead a highly personalized search for elongated anatomy, spiritual beauty, and gracile aestheticism. The clay and wax modelli that El Greco made in his studio as studies for his paintings are a notable feature of his responsiveness to Michelangelo as a topic of study. I also argue that El Greco’s nudes embody a series of reflections on the Spanish emulation of Michelangelo in the work of Alonso Berruguete, Pablo Céspedes, Gaspar Becerra, and Miguel Barroso, Becerra’s student whom Fray José de Sigüenza called ‘a new Michelangelo’. The Spanish receptivity to Michelangelo was a matter of transmission through modelli, as Gaspar Becerra transplanted from Rome to Spain the language of Michelangelo he acquired in the workshop of Daniele da Volterra. In Toledo, El Greco reinvented the nude as a work of art for devotional purpose in the Santo Domingo retable. In the top panel of the Trinity, Western and Eastern traditions fuse into an exquisite marriage between aesthetic taste and spiritual sensibility. On the one hand, El Greco refers to Michelangelo’s Pietà in the full-figure of the beautiful Christ but concomitantly removes altogether the heroic actions of the angels that unleashed Gilio’s criticisms of the Last Judgment; on the other hand, El Greco employs the pricked cartoons from Crete – the anthivola – to depict God the Father, whose features recall The Ancient of Days, a pricked cartoon used by the icon painter Theodoros Poulakis (16201629). Also from the Santo Domingo altarpiece, St. John the Baptist demonstrates the evolution from El Greco’s drawings of the Baptist in grisaille to the use of dramatic borrones to describe the emaciated body. After examining El Greco’s editions of St. Jerome and the reevaluations of Titian’s self-reflective engagement with the hermit saint, chapter four concludes with El Greco’s St. Sebastian from Palencia Cathedral. With the life-size nude St. Sebastian, the subject conventionally recognized as the testing ground of figural expertise, El Greco advances the search for the highest goals of art applied to the purposes of religious images. The final chapter concentrates on El Greco’s painting Laocoön and his effort to create a countermodel of the Vatican Laocoön statuary group: one imbued with El Greco’s own genius and originality. This countermodel departed from Classical pre­ cedent by inscribing the history of Toledo onto the scene and by eliminating the criteria imposed by Classical aesthetic values. As the painter’s invention, the painting mobilizes a series of narrative ideas that circulated in prints and which dispensed

Introduction

23

with classicist aesthetics, inspiring El Greco to interpret the Laocoön according to the inexhaustible mysteries of devotional art. Simultaneously, as a rhetorical exercise performed in analogy with the prints, the painting incorporates ideas then circulating in Toledo’s humanist circles that proposed a renewed emphasis on Christian subjects by means of classical references. The French Renaissance engraver Jean de Gourmont (1483-1551) intensified the mythological overtones by emphasizing Laocoön’s deformed physicality and transforming his death into an act of sacrifice before the altar of Apollo. The German engraver Hans Brosamer (c. 1500-1554) produced in 1538 his own version of Laocoön Troia, which juxtaposes death with deformity, young children’s playfulness with drama, and horror with architecture. One of the most influential interventions belonged to Cornelis Cort (1536-1578), who created a new engraving conception based on Titian’s painting that would soon become highly valued and copied by other artists. Early modern engraving exhibits marked discrepancies between the classical norm and the engraver’s approach to mythology. El Greco demonstrates an intense preoccupation with the psychology of reception and perception of his subject matter. His ability to mark his own counter-model of Laocoön with his genius and originality lessens the significance of classical aesthetics to instead depict the traces of a history of relocations, embedding, and interactivity among works of art and environments. The Christian Mediterranean world made a propitious ground for the translation of classical into devotional works of art. My analysis sheds light on El Greco’s Laocoön as his intervention in a culture of exchange and renewal.

1. Prototypal Images Reaffirmed in ­Early ­Modern Painting This first chapter studies El Greco’s conceptualization of sacred prototypes within his paintings of Christ as Savior and several editions of the Veronica. I argue that he took these iconic prototypes and advanced their sacred implications according to his dual identity: as an artist who was both inescapably attached to his Byzantine heritage and simultaneously self-consciously infatuated with his ascendancy as a Spanish modernist. In the historically informed age of the Counter Reformation, the premium placed on referential efficacy provided a basis for innovative narrative structures on the part of artists. With his overwhelming creative force and imagination, El Greco acquitted himself more typically, rather than atypically. His interpretation of the traditional notions of icon and prototype reflects upon a retrospective mode of image production and fleshes out his painting’s material quality. The effort to transmit to his contemporaries the likeness of the icon collapses linear time and reauthorizes the icon for the West, implicitly contributing to the call for authenticity which was the general tenor of Counter Reformation art production. This chapter contends that he restaged the icon as a work of art with reinforced devotional efficacy and aesthetic meaning to respond to new parameters of the artifact’s materiality; concomitantly, he addressed the temporal claim to authenticity that was advised by Counter Reformation scholars and ecclesiastical patrons, who regarded the authority of icons as a historical document. In Rome and Venice, where El Greco was apprenticed, and in Toledo, where he matured following his permanent relocation to Spain in 1577, motivation for the creation of devotional art departed from the principles of Byzantine art that informed El Greco in his homeland of Crete. Western religious painting seldom used indistinguishable likeness as the principal criterion for the depiction of sacred characters from Byzantium. Notable exceptions were the popular replications of Christ’s acheiropoieta (the miraculously produced icons of Christ such as the Mandylion of Edessa and the Veil of Veronica) within novel compositions using various media and materials. In the West in particular, painters shifted from a Byzantine focus on verisimilitude to a focus on aesthetic attitudes for achieving illusionistic effects, the representation of beauty, and the relative merits of form and color. This chapter concentrates on El Greco’s critical response to the Italian and Spanish painting traditions, the historical vocabularies against which he pitted a reconciliation between Byzantine message and Western style. Albeit unprecedented, his pictorial choices and theoretical views aligned him with the artistic mainstream,

26 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

inspiring El Greco’s active dialogue with Federico Zuccari and manifested affinities with the Carracci.

The Icon of Christ in the Pictorial Art of El Greco In El Greco’s Christ as Savior (1612), the referential ability of painting to recapture the essence of the earliest images of Christ from Mount Sinai, Byzantine mosaics, and icons is overriding (fig. 1).1 The post-Tridentine context in which Christ as Savior was created dictated the restaging of Christian prototypes to counteract accusations of idolatry that were mounted whenever images of a sacred protagonist were deemed inauthentic.2 Painters adapted sacred models and compositional templates to create new depictions which were recommended by ecclesiastical patrons; Cardinal-Archbishop Federico Borromeo (1564-1631) was a notorious adviser for the creation of new Marian iconographies for Milan’s Ambrosiana Academy, and Filippo Neri (1515-1595) renewed the emphasis on cult images in Rome’s Oratorian circles.3 With ecclesiastical patrons placing a premium on hermeneutics so as to preserve the theological and didactic senses of religious images, painters chiefly abided by Dominican theologian Giovanni Andrea Gilio’s regolata mescolanza to eliminate the errors of their art.4 El Greco’s ability to generate new meaning out of the Byzantine tradition went hand in hand with the era’s sustained interest in the material character of the images he restaged in his painting. Christ as Savior, executed in the oil-on-canvas technique, reinforces and expands on El Greco’s demonstrated conviction that painting was the prevailing medium for recreating the icon of Christ for Early Modern audiences. Christ appears in the iconic form of the blessing Christ Pantocrator, or ruler of the universe, derived

1 There exist two versions of Christ as Savior: one preserved in Toledo, at the Museo del Greco, dating to 1612 and belonging to a complete series of Christ and the Apostles, known as Apostolado; the other, at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, is from about 1600 and bears El Greco’s signature (D[omenikos] T[heotokopoulos]) on the right, above Christ’s shoulder. David Davies, ed. El Greco (London: National Gallery Company, 2003), pp. 188, 192. 2 Alexander Nagel, ‘Structural Indeterminacy in Early Sixteenth-Century Italian Painting’, in Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art, ed. by Alexander Nagel and Lorenzo Pericolo (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), p. 29. 3 Pamela Jones, Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana: Art Patronage and Reform in SeventeenthCentury Milan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 84 on the Madonna and Child in a garland of flowers, the genre painting that Borromeo himself helped to create, and p. 24 on the importance of Filippo Neri and his Oratorian Order. 4 Giovanni Andrea Gilio, Dialogo nel quale si ragiona de gli errori de pittori circa l’historie, in Trattati d’Arte del Cinquecento, ed. Paola Barocchi (Bari: Laterza, 1960-1962), 3 vols, II, p. 56: ‘[P]erò sarebbe bene di quel poco e di questo molto fare regolata mescolanza e cavare un mezzo che suplisse al difetto degli uni e degli altri.’

Protot ypal Images Reaffirmed in ­E arly ­Modern Painting

27

Fig. 1: El Greco, Christ as Savior, 1612. Oil on canvas, 99 x 79 cm © Casa y Museo del Greco, Toledo

from Byzantine domes, resting his hand on the orb of the cosmos. His tunic is a rich, royal purple with a blue overcoat and, as a further sign of his divinity, El Greco places a square nimbus around Christ’s head. As an icon-based portrait created in Toledo, Christ as Savior registers the Western fascination with the half-length format of Eastern icons and the appeal of the acheiropoetic image to carry forward Christ’s archetypal portrait for Early Modern painting. Western eyes associated the bust-length portrait with Greek icons and Christian antiquities of various media. Prompted by the explicit, formal similarities between the bust portrait and acheiropoieta, thirteenth-century Western ecclesiasts praised the format’s moral rectitude

28 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

and corroboration with the ‘effigies a pectore superius’ of the Veronica in Rome’s St. Peter.5 El Greco integrated his pictorial art into the visual transmission of Christian antiquities imported, collected, and promoted by artists and scholars alike. In his annotations to Daniele Barbaro’s edition of Vitruvius’s On Architecture (Venice, 1556), El Greco credits painting with the power to evaluate or ‘judge’ all form and color, to speculate, and to discover the truth otherwise obscured by commonness. His praise for the insightfulness of painting reads as follows: ‘Painting is the only art that can judge everything: form, color. Its aim is the invention of everything. In sum, painting […] is so universal [that] it becomes speculative; it never lacks the scope of speculation, because there is always something to discover, even in mediocrity and obscurity […].’6 To affirm painting’s interpretative and concurrently imaginative capabilities was to refer back to the establishment of painting as the preeminent medium for representing the icon in Byzantium. Following the restoration of icons to Byzantine worship in 843, authors, copyists, and artists alike took up the visual component of their various activities in earnest, beyond all considerations of utilitarian function.7 Byzantine iconophiles ­interpreted the icon as artistic, calling attention to its significance as artifact and fabricated object. Moreover, painting was recognized as the essential medium for ­reproducing Christ’s features. Patriarch Nikephoros, in his defense of the icon as a work of art, contends that painters ought to be concerned solely with the art alone, or, in his words, ‘the scrutiny of the visible alone’.8 El Greco, as an artist trained in the Byzantine visual experience, mediates tradition with modernity. By advancing his deep-seated Byzantine conviction that painting advances the art object beyond the theological subject of representation, El Greco assimilates the icon-portrait of Christ

5 Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting (Doornspijk, Netherlands: Davaco, 1984), pp. 39–40. The observation that the Veronica kept in St. Peter’s was an ‘effigies a pectore superius’ was made by Gervasius of Tilbury around 1211, see Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), p. 103. 6 El Greco. Il miracolo della naturalezza: Il pensiero artistico di El Greco attraverso le note a margine a Vitruvio e Vasari, eds. Fernando Marías and José Riello, trans. M. De Pascale (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2017), p. 189: ‘[…] y así, la pintura es la única que puede juzgar todas las cosas, forma, color, como la que tiene por objeto la imitación de todas; en resumen, la pintura tiene un puesto de prudencia y modeladora (moderadora?) de todo lo que se ve y si yo pudiera expresar con palabras lo que es el ver del pintor, a la vista, parecería como una cosa extraña por lu mucho que la vista tiene en particular de muchas facultades; pero la pintura, por se tan universal, se hace especulativa, donde nunca falta el content de la especulación puesto que nunca flata algo que se pueda ver, pues hasta en la mediocre oscuridad se ve y se goza y tiene que imitar.’ 7 Robin Cormack, Painting the Soul: Icons, Death Masks, and Shrouds (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), pp. 136–151, esp. 151. Cormack identifies the Triumph of Orthodoxy with the triumph of art production in Byzantium and with ‘an identity expressed through and with icons’. 8 Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 113.

Protot ypal Images Reaffirmed in ­E arly ­Modern Painting

29

to the pictorial materiality of his composition. He reproduces the acheiropoieta, even though the colorful tones recall the aesthetic properties of painting. He employs color, lighting, and modeling from the mainstream Italian Renaissance experience while reformulating the Byzantine mode of frontal presentation to liken his practice to the Byzantine artisans who, especially after the tenth century, depicted the corporeality of Christ’s icon with the means of painting. The emphasis placed on painting’s techniques as a channel for devotional communication was outlined in the preceding centuries, beginning with the fifth­century writings of the theologian Cyril of Alexandria (376-444) and culminating in the eight-century with the exegetical interpretation that John of Damascus (675-749) gave to color in relation to the Old and New Testaments.9 For the Byzantines, the analogy of sketch and color was the fulfillment of the law into the corporeal aspect of color represented by the New Testament. In his essay on the term figura and figural interpretation in the Western tradition, Erich Auerbach mentions figura’s relationship to ancient modelling and copying theories that link the word to the material structure of the image.10 Within such connotative meanings for figura and the metaphorical potential inherent in the art-making process, El Greco argues in Christ as Savior that to ‘speculate’ is to reveal the icon within his pictorial art. He maintains the archetype within the novel composition of Christ as Savior, while also investing Christ’s portrait with the technical potential intrinsic to the medium of painting. The Byzantine recognition that painting upholds a metaphorical and material force for applying the icon to representational ends lay behind El Greco’s look into the history of icon making. The sixth-century encaustic portrait of Christ from the Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai, Egypt, is a compelling example of icon fabrication (fig. 2). El Greco’s Christ as Savior is a calculated resemblance to this earliest Byzantine panel painting of Christ as teacher. It also recalls the majestic Christ in royal purple found in the earliest surviving example of a monumental apse mosaic in Rome, at the Church of Santa Pudenziana, securely datable to the early fifth century (fig. 3).11 El Greco fully projects his Early Modern idea of Christ’s

9 Henry Maguire, The Icons of their Bodies: Saints and their Images in Byzantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 48. 10 Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Manheim (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 11–49. Auerbach observes that the etymology of the figura was first used to describe plastic forms and, later, connoted more general and abstract forms; he uses the terms simulacra, effigies, and imagines. 11 Jennifer Awes Freeman, ‘The Good Shepherd and the Enthroned Ruler: A Reconsideration of Imperial Iconography in the Early Church’, in The Art of Empire: Christian Art in its Imperial Context, ed. by Lee M. Jefferson and Robin M. Jensen (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), pp. 159–195. Christ in the Apse Mosaic at Santa Pudenziana is a conflation of the Good Shepherd and the enthroned Christ, a perspective on early Christianity that interprets the Good Shepherd as a dimension of imperial iconography.

30 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

Fig. 2: Icon of Christ Pantocrator, sixth century. Encaustic icon painting, 84.5 x 44.3 cm. Mount Sinai, Monastery of St. Catherine. Photo: Princeton Sinai Archive

portrait back to the Byzantine formal and aesthetic conventions that allow identification of the image both with its sacred model and with traces of human fabrication. The sixth-century Sinai icon was executed in the encaustic technique that was largely employed for icon production in the early Byzantine period. The encaustic technique became popular for the crafting of icons with extensive use of colors

Protot ypal Images Reaffirmed in ­E arly ­Modern Painting

31

Fig. 3: Christ Pantocrator, fifth century. Apse Mosaic. Rome, Santa Pudenziana Basilica. Photographic credit: ­Sixtus, Wikimedia Commons

mixed with wax, heated, and applied in this fluid state to the wooden support.12 The Sinai portrait was popular in the sixth century, as confirmed by the Roman replica from the Pontian catacomb and by the portrait of Christ on Emperor Justinian II’s (685-695) coins from Byzantium.13 The theological basis or the problem of authority for the Sinai icon stemmed from the celebrated account of Christ’s appearance, a letter attributed to Publius Lentulus and later printed with insignificant variations in both Byzantine and Latin texts.14 Subsequent letters about Christ’s appearance, dated to the second period of the Iconoclast movement (829-843) not only reinstated the cult of the icon but also established a notable Christology, with crucial implications for visual expressions. 12 See ‘A Brief History of Encaustic’, in Joanne Mattera, The Art of Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2001), pp. 15– 29. Mattera observes that encaustic as a viable medium for the extension of Greek portrait painting in the Byzantine icon would fall out of favor by the seventh century, p. 18. 13 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 133–134. 14 Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), especially pp. 245–247.

32 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

The associations between the description of Christ’s physical features and the acheiropoetic image are latent in these texts, yet they nevertheless draw on the common tradition originating in the mystery of the Incarnation. In the Letter of the Three Patriarchs – ascribed to the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, and addressed to the Byzantine Emperor Theophilos (829-842) – there is aprecise description of Christ’s features intended as a blueprint for a new generation of Christ portraits. At the same time, the letter provides unimpeachable proof that the fullness of the Incarnation manifests within the materiality of icon fabrication.15 The letter concludes with the words of Pseudo-Damascene’s Letter to Emperor Theophilos that Christ’s features manifest the reality of the Incarnation within the visual portrait: ‘[F]or the truth is shown in the likeness, the archetype is the icon, each in the other with the difference of essence.’16 The theological support codified by the patriarchs’ letter lent unprecedented credibility to the icon as made object and an artisan’s fabrication. In the assessment of Patriarch Nikephoros’s First Refutation, written about 820, the icon is an artistic thing: ‘[A] likeness of an archetype […] or an imitation and copy of an archetype […] or an artifact completely formed in imitation of an archetype.’17 Patriarch Nikephoros concludes his encomium of the icon with statements informed by the Byzantine practice of art: ‘An icon is a likeness and representation of things being and existing.’18 The Byzantine perception that the icon is an art object became the driving force behind El Greco’s reiteration of the acheiropoetic image within Christ as Savior.

Theological Receptivity for Prototypes and the Enlightened Artist In the post-Tridentine decades, burgeoning interest in the Apostolic age went hand in hand with retrospective positions on the role of figurative arts in the reform agenda of Federico Borromeo (1564-1631), Cardinal-Archbishop of Milan and founder of the Ambrosiana library and museum. Aware of the decline of sacred art, Borromeo proposed a return to the acheiropoieta, and devoted the second chapter of Book II in De pictura sacra (1624) to devotional representations of the Savior from Roman catacombs and images not made by human hands, which he calls ‘antheroposita’

15 The Letter of the Three Patriarchs to Emperor Theophilos and Related Texts, ed. Joseph A. Munitiz et al. (Camberley: Porhyrogenitus, 1997), pp. 31–33, lines 14-4 with the following description of Christ’s appearance: ‘On the lordly portrait of our Lord Jesus Christ (only in so far as the ancient historians have written of him): good height, knitted eyebrows, beautiful eyes, long nose, curly hair, bent, good complexion, with a dark beard, the color of ripe wheat, resembling the form of his mother, long-fingered, sweet-voiced, sweet-spoken, most gentle, still, patient, long-suffering and bearing similar virtuous properties.’ 16 Ibid., pp. 148–149, lines 10-20. 17 Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness, p. 110. 18 Ibid., p. 111.

Protot ypal Images Reaffirmed in ­E arly ­Modern Painting

33

or ‘acheroposita’.19 Thus, Book II introduces for ‘the benefit of painters’ Nikephoros Kallistos’ description of the likeness of the Savior in the hope that ‘painters who are making portraits of Christ [and the Mother of God] remember this one thing’.20 Such advice stemmed directly from Borromeo’s interest in the Mandylion of Edessa and the sudarium of Veronica, the relics on which he focuses in De pictura sacra.21 Borromeo owned a copy of the Mandylion, which he revered as proof of Christ’s Incarnation and which prompted him to acquire devotional portraits of Christ by Italian Renaissance artists for the Ambrosiana Museum.22 Borromeo’s conversance with Renaissance art practice influenced his choices as art collector, fueling his ambition to reform sacred art in response to ecclesiastical theories, and also to artists addressing artistic decline; Federico Zuccari was an influential voice in the revitalization of sacred art by recourse to prototypal images.23 Notably, Borromeo reveals a critical awareness of the theory of imitation, remarking on the necessity to study directly from nature and to embed all the refinements of art in the replication of acheiropoieta. In both De pictura sacra (1624) and Museum (1625) he employs the words imitatio, similitudo, and effigies to indicate that artists depict the subject matter in kinship with the artistic practice and theory of the day.24 Interest in effigies became a mainstay of ecclesiastical structures across the Western kingdom, taking on dramatic visual expressions in the sacred history of Spain. Integral to the theological conventions of early seventeenth-century Spain, simulacros (semblances) and prototipos (­prototypes) designated images as imbued with supernatural principles, steeped in visionary experiences, and crafted by angels or other miraculous interventions.25 Cardinal Federico Borromeo’s ideas regarding art’s derivation from divine prototypes seconded theoretical positions on the spiritual nature of artistic practice that contemporary painters formulated in their treatises. Federico Zuccari and Giovanni 19 Federico Borromeo. Sacred Painting, Museum, ed. and trans. Kenneth S. Rothwell, Jr. (Massachusetts and London: The I Tatti Renaissance Library, 2010), Sacred Painting, Book 2, Chapter 2, p. 71. Hans Belting elucidates the meaning of acheroposita from Liber Pontificalis (Book of the Popes) as being a corruption of acheiropoieton. Acheroposita was used in the Book of the Popes to refer to the icon of Christ the Redeemer (Santa Sanctorum Icon) in Rome’s Lateran Basilica, and to point to the Eastern origin of the image. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, pp. 64–65. 20 Ibid., p. 75, lines 10 and 11. 21 Ibid., p. 71, lines 7 and 8. 22 Pamela Jones, Federico Borromeo and the Ambrosiana: Art Patronage and Reform in Seventeenth-Century Milan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 120. 23 Federico Zuccari is appears repeatedly throughout Borromeo’s treatises, appearing in his roster of artists addressing artistic decline such as Giorgio Vasari, Giampaolo Lomazzo, and the artist-priest Giovanni Battista Armenini. Zuccari is mentioned individually in Museum, p. 151. 24 ‘The form of imitation I have in mind resembles how art tries to catch up with nature, though lagging far behind’, Federico Borromeo, Museum, p. 149; ‘The Greeks […] far surpassed other nations in the care they devoted to saving portraits and portrayals […] after they became Christians (conservasse Heroum suorum effigies et simulacra)’, Federico Borromeo, Sacred Painting, line 2, p. 102. 25 Manuel Arias Martinez, ‘Religious Sculpture in Golden Age Spain’, in The Spanish Golden Age: Painting and Sculpture in the Time of Velázquez (Munich: Hirmer, 2016), p. 62.

34 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

Paolo Lomazzo advanced especially heady theories, defining painting as a divine enterprise passed down to the artist for material manifestation.26 In the Trattato dell’arte della pittura (1584) and Idea del tempio della pittura (1590) Lomazzo articulates the aim of painting as the depiction of beauty descending from God through the hierarchy of being. These theories of spiritual beauty elide with Lomazzo’s concept of a divinely motivated painter capable of expressing the ‘divinity of Christ’.27 Lomazzo emphasizes the painter’s skill, preparation, and insight in mediating abstract and invisible realities; in other words, fleshing out spiritual meaning by referring to the indwelling divinity, ‘by means of which one makes things that do not occur except to the imagination of him who understands their nature and significance’.28 Lomazzo’s comprehensive judgments showcase the superiority of the artist’s ingenium in a progressive age of reform that idealized the painter’s talent to unravel the spiritual and expressive features of art production in the late sixteenth-century.29 That the ‘spark of divinity’ (scintilla della Divinità) resides within the artist is unequivocally conveyed in the notion of disegno from Federico Zuccari’s L’Idea de’pittori, scultori, ed architetti (Turin, 1607).30 In Zuccari’s etymological reading, disegno signifies the capacity for producing art that is literally ‘the true sign of God in us’ (vero segno di Dio in noi).31 On the proposition that the artist’s disegno confers the full power of representing all things and penetrating visible and invisible matter, Zuccari singles out painting, which gives us ‘a true portrait of all the concepts that one can imagine’ and ‘represents invisible things, and thus by means of it the intellect is helped to ascend to the contemplation of divine things’.32 In Rome in the early 1570s El Greco met Zuccari, whose ideas resonated deeply with his own preoccupation with painting as divine enterprise. El Greco may have received further confirmation from the Portuguese painter Francisco de Hollanda’s (1517-1584) example that painters representing divine prototypes were responsible for the creation of a new generation of sacred images. Francisco de Hollanda was commissioned by the Queen of Portugal to copy the Sancta Sanctorum icon from Rome’s Lateran Basilica. Hollanda painted this miraculous image of Christ in a 26 Andrew Casper provides an inspired discussion of this topic in the subchapter ‘The Angelic Arts’, in his Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), especially pp. 26–28. 27 Robert Williams, Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 133. 28 Ibid. 29 Philip Sohm, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 113. 30 Robert Williams, Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne, p. 136. 31 Zuccari, L’Idea de’pittori, scultori, ed architetti (Turin, 1607), in Scritti d’arte, ed. Detlef Heikamp (Firenze: Olschki, 1961), pp. 300–303. 32 Robert Williams, Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne, p. 144, note 97.

Protot ypal Images Reaffirmed in ­E arly ­Modern Painting

35

period dominated by a pronounced interest in religious authenticity, which intended to restore devotion and depict purer spiritual forms by using sixteenth-century aesthetics.33 Hollanda recorded his project of making a painted copy of the celebrated acheiropoieton in Book I, Chapter 27, of his Da pintura antigua (1548), which includes a description of Christ’s physical beauty according to the Lentulus letter, as well as commentaries on other miraculous images of the Virgin from Rome’s Santa Maria del Popolo and Santa Maria Maggiore.34 Hollanda’s emphasis on the artist’s technical prowess to translate the acheiropoieton into a new painted medium builds on Michelangelo’s experimental approach to disegno and the drawings he executed in the cult image tradition of the imago pietatis. Michelangelo, the preeminent divinely inspired artist, set a pattern for the illuminated engraver Giulio Clovio (1498-1578) and the spiritual painter Francisco de Hollanda to effectively demonstrate technical mastery within shared sixteenth-century interests in replicating the acheiropoieta.35 El Greco’s Christ as Savior affirms the relevance of prototypal images as worthy models for the painting practice of early modernity. By centering the image’s principal conceit on the icon of Christ, El Greco assimilates Byzantine concerns about sacred images articulated with a peculiar interest in the aesthetic properties of painting after 843, the year of the official and definitive reestablishment of the veneration of icons after more than a century of controversy and sporadic persecution in Byzantium. At the same time, the structures of early modernity are central to El Greco’s pictorial strategy. Like those of his contemporaries Zuccari and Lomazzo, his pictorial imagination stemmed from inspirations and reasons received from above and permeated by the divine energies the painter was to depict. El Greco demonstrates a profound understanding of his role as mediator engaged in linking pictorial art to divine inspiration. Remarkably, El Greco relates mastery to an unabashed reliance on archetype and maintains the historical likeness of Christ’s portrait; equally, he underscores that the prototypal Christ is not subject to the painter’s intervention.

From Encaustic Technique to the Descriptive Brushwork of El Greco The Byzantine practices of Cretan painters fueled the Venetians’ receptivity for the icon. In the fifteenth-century altarpieces of Giovanni Bellini and Carlo Crivelli inspired by the Man of Sorrows image tradition, aspects of Byzantine art are detectable in the strong formal affiliation with the Eastern iconographic type, known as 33 Alexander Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 13. 34 Francisco de Hollanda, On Antique Painting, trans. Alice Sedgwick Wohl (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), Chapter XXVII, ‘On Painting Sacred Images, and First, Images of Our Savior’, pp. 118–119. 35 Elena Calvillo, ‘Authoritative Copies and Divine Originals: Lucretian Metaphors, Painting on Stone, and the Problem of Originality in Michelangelo’s Rome’, Renaissance Quarterly, 66 (2013). 453–508.

36 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

Fig. 4: Akra Tapeinosis (Man of Sorrows), second half of the twelfth century. Icon painted on both sides; on reverse, the Hodegetria type of icon depicting the Virgin with Infant Child. Tempera on panel, 115 x 78 cm. Kastoria, Byzantine Museum. Photographer: Web Gallery of Art

Akra Tapeinosis (Utmost Humiliation) (fig. 4). Carlo Crivelli’s Dead Christ Supported by Two Angels (c. 1470-1475, London, National Gallery) (fig. 5) adapts the hard outlines of the icon-painter to illustrate the austerity of Byzantine art.36 Crivelli depicts Christ with all the formal characteristic of the Akra Tapeinosis type: firmly shut eyes with dark lines underneath, strong eyebrows, and the typical elongated nose with a prominent bulge on the visible left nostril. Crivelli’s characterization amplifies the dramatic poignancy of the Byzantine prototype by retooling the historical evidence to make it relevant for incomparable means to reference the divine. Within the wider compass of Venetian Renaissance art, painting fulfilled and at once surpassed the 36 Angeliki Lymberopoulou, ‘Audiences and Markets for Cretan Icons’, in Viewing Renaissance Art, eds. Kim W. Woods, Carol M. Richardson, and Angeliki Lymberopoulou (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and The Open University, 2007), pp. 171–206, especially 203–204.

Protot ypal Images Reaffirmed in ­E arly ­Modern Painting

37

Fig. 5: Carlo Crivelli, The Dead Christ Supported by Two Angels (Man of Sorrows), c. 1470-75. Tempera on panel, 72 x 55 cm © The National Gallery, London

historical image. The Lentulus letter and the portrait referenced by Crivelli support each other, their textual and iconic sources lending the Venetian portrait of Christ an authority comparable to the pictorial evidence provided by the icon’s material source. Renaissance painters taking the precaution of seeking historical evidence reduced their risk of criticism, mounted whenever the bounds of visual and verbal document failed to meet the evidentiary goal of devotional images. El Greco’s restaging of the Christ portrait formulates an intense preoccupation with referential work, as advised by learned scholars and ecclesiastical patrons who recognized the persuasive devotional power of icons as a historical document with unimpeachable claims to authenticity.

38 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

In Christ as Savior, El Greco made eminently lucid claims about his Byzantine source and the hierarchy of images in an age of reform. His technique reveals the full capacities of the medium itself to become both object and agency for the icon of Christ. The encaustic technique of the oldest known, sixth-century Christ portrait – located at the Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Mount Sinai, Egypt – materializes the image of Christ already present within the prototype. The sixth-century artisan links the power of the acheiropoieton directly to a fabricated medium of resemblance: an image produced through human making. The Greek enkaustikos designates burning and executing painting by means of heat, wax, and colored pigments. The technique enabled the transmission of a distinguishable likeness, making it a reliable source for preserving individual portraits. In Book 35 of Natural History, Pliny the Elder (c. 23-79 AD) discusses the encaustic technique and the most illustrious practitioners of the ancient method of painting in which pigments are bound by wax: Aristides, Praxiteles, Polygnotos, Pausias of Sicyon, and Pamphilus, the teacher of Apelles.37 In Egypt, experimentation with encaustic painting as the most durable form of painting led to the coloristic effect and virtuosic brushwork in the Fayum portraits, the funerary images which preserved the effigy of the deceased.38 Enkaustikos involved the application of heated beeswax and colored pigments between layers of brushstrokes.39 Prior to the paint’s cooling, the artisan used metal tools and special brushes to extract the portrait from the surface support into which it was set originally. After the wax cooled into the surface, he intervened again with heated metal tools to reinforce the lines. Using hot sticks or brushes to model the encaustic wax-paint and distribute pigment, the artisan scraped, creating a glaze color, modulating different surfaces, and combining various media onto the painted surface. Despite recognized technical difficulties, the use of the encaustic medium led to the creation of three-dimensional and luminous color effects in painting. In the Sinai icon, color dominates the visual tension between the richly textural portrait and the dimensionality of the wax, creating flesh-like skin tones and ornamental effects that signify Christ’s station. The acheiropoietic portrait is carefully modeled with expressionistic brushwork to acknowledge a timeless spiritual existence. The brushwork diligently follows the relief of the acheiropoietic portrait, 37 Pliny also mentions that portrait-artists used wax emulsion or Punic wax consisting of beeswax boiled with seawater and potassium carbonate, then bleached by the sun. For a short history of encaustic painting in Pliny’s Natural History and Leonardo’s interest in reviving the medium of encaustic in the Battle of Anghiari mural in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, see Sarah Blake McHam, Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 51, 168–169. 38 Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 98–101. 39 Joanne Mattera, The Art of Encaustic Painting: Contemporary Expression in the Ancient Medium of Pigmented Wax (New York: Watson Guptill Publications, 2001), p. 9. Mattera observes (p. 18) that the encaustic practice, an extension of Greek portrait painting into Byzantine icons, would fall out of favor by the seventh century.

Protot ypal Images Reaffirmed in ­E arly ­Modern Painting

39

intertwining encaustic mastery and historical portraits of Christ validated by textual and iconic evidence. The dominant metaphor in the Sinai portrait is of the impress or cast, allowing for iterations that flow backward to an authentic image of Christ. Hans Belting’s resistance to the notion that early portraits of Christ are his true likeness stemmed from views disconnected from the imprinting and casting practices in Byzantium in the wake of the iconoclastic controversy.40 What impressed the icon painter most about encaustic, based on numerous encaustic portraits from St. Catherine’s Monastery, was the union of form and content in pigmented wax, making this an incomparable vehicle for expressing the relation of image and prototype. Just as the sixth-century artisan evolved the Sinai portrait of Christ through the use of encaustic, so, too, did El Greco tap into the technicality of painting to relay the icon of Christ for early modernity. In Christ as Savior, he incorporates what he felt was central to the creation of an image of Christ poised between representation and abstraction. His brushwork highlights the symmetrical frontal pose and physiognomy of the Byzantine image of Christ. Accretions of oil paint allow the brushwork to move easily over the portrait outline, retaining the prototypal contour and fusing texture with luminous effects. El Greco’s composition is rich with strokes that create layers between ground and substrate to exploit chromatic variations, detectable on Christ’s blue overcoat, the textural surface of his red cloak, and the interplay of light intensity and dark figuration around Christ’s head. It is noteworthy that Francisco Pacheco’s Arte de la Pintura (completed in 1638; published posthumously in 1649) commends El Greco for his demonstrated ability to paint with ‘lifelikeness’ (cosas de su mano tan relevadas y tan vivas) and relief; in other words, El Greco achieved an impression of the third dimension by means of color, or what Pacheco called relievo (relief). Pacheco further refers to relievo in his investigations of Caravaggio, Jacopo Bassano, and Jusepe de Ribera, who assert color as an exquisite aesthetic experience.41 In an age of sustained interest in the three-­ dimensionality of painting as a prevailing theme of Spanish art, El Greco proves himself to be in full control over the medium in creating an impression of depth and harmony of textural trace, color, and brushwork. Inventiveness and material combine to flesh out the acheiropoieton, which El Greco represents with an intentional effort to maintain aspects of the ‘not made by human hands’ status, perceivable in the unfinished and sketchy brushwork on the left hand of Christ. By applying his 40 Hans Belting, ‘In Search of Christ’s Body: Image or Imprint?’ in The Holy Face and the Paradox of Representation, eds. Herbert L. Kessler and Gerhard Wolf (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1998), pp. 1–11. 41 ‘Las mas importante de las tres partes en que dividimos el colorido es esta postrera, que es el Relievo […] Porque muchos valientes pintores pasaron sin la hermusra y suavidad, pero no sin el relievo, como el Basan, Micael Angelo Caravacho y nuestro español Jusepe de Ribera; y aún también podemos poner en este número a Dominico Greco […] viendo algunas cosas de su mano tan relevadas y tan vivas (en aquella su manera), in Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la Pintura, ed. Bonaventura Bassegoda I Hugas (Madrid: Cátedra, 2009), p. 404.

40 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

notorious borrones, El Greco references the origin and creation of the acheiropoieta while concurrently speculating on the immaterial character of Christ’s divinity with brushwork that is both figurative and amorphous.42 The transition from divine nature to human, and from acheiropoieton to the painted portrait, resides in the sketchiness of the borron’s quality reminiscent of abozzo or draft, even in the finished work, and demanding deliberation, rather than haste, as an explanation for the execution of Christ as Savior. In El Greco’s Christ as Savior, the image background is closed and the impression of depth is limited to the square nimbus above Christ’s head. El Greco heightens the narrative meaning in the foreground, exploiting the icon with overtones and undertones and with the greater difficulty of his oil painting technique revealing the material quality of the object’s surface. The characteristics of his preparation and execution provided deeper context for the creation of three-dimensionality in representations of Christ’s body from seventeenth-century Spanish painting. The trompe l’oeil effect illustrates the fictional representation of a polychrome sculpture projecting its shadow on a painted background, yet close inspection of El Greco’s pictorial art broadens such a view.43 As may be gleaned from Pacheco’s observations, the general function of El Greco’s relievo (relief) was to unify the painting as a whole by accentuating the tension between colors, while concurrently overcoming the importance of contour in achieving depth. In Christ as Savior, the transformation of this practice into a principle of style rooted in diligent brushwork and borrones is intimately connected with optical impression. The recognized material potential and attraction of color to model a sacred composition was integral to the elevated status of color in the theoretical discourse of El Greco’s context. Many of Vicente Carducho’s observations from Diálogos de la Pintura (1633) adopt the same interest in the extensive analysis of color that Lomazzo stresses in Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (1584). Lomazzo’s ideas about new aspects of color in relation to workshop experience, technical significance, and various textures exercised an immense influence on Carducho’s commentary on Titian and the Venetian school of painting.44 Carducho’s thoughts that

42 An in-depth examination of borrones or pittura di macchia in El Greco’s narrative compositions is provided in Yannis Hadjinicolaou, ‘El Greco von Nah und Fern: Die Europäische Dimension eines Topos in der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Formwerdung und Formentzug, eds. Franz Engel and Yannis Hadjinicolaou (Berlin and Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 2016), pp. 77–101, especially 88–89. 43 Karin Hellwig, ‘Theory and Practice: The Fine Arts in Seventeenth-Century Spain’, in The Spanish Golden Age: Painting and Sculpture in the Time of Velázquez, ex. cat., Gemäldegalerie Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 2016, pp. 31–39, esp. 36–37. 44 Serraler argues that Carducho crystalized the theoretical art line of thought established by Lomazzo and also advanced Vasari’s position on the superiority of Titian and the Venetians in matters of color at the expense of disegno. Francisco Carlo Serraler, La Teoria de la Pintura en El Siglo de Oro (Madrid: Cátedra, 1981), pp. 303–304.

Protot ypal Images Reaffirmed in ­E arly ­Modern Painting

41

Venetian painting looks ‘acabadísimo y perfilado’ recognize Titian’s mastery of borrones to achieve ‘perspectiva cantitativa, luminosa, y colorida’ – in other words, the expressive meanings of Venetian painting was rooted in the materiality of brushwork application.45 The paintings and themes mentioned by Lomazzo, especially his selection of biblical subjects and discussion of the Veil of Veronica, appealed to El Greco’s preoccupation with revealing forms and structures that illustrate the portrait of Christ. The undertaking of the ‘not made by human hands’ prototype accommodates pictorial conventions that stress the complex problem of depicting the material quality of the sacred subject. Lomazzo identifies lume divino as the coloristic splendor surrounding the holy figures and angels in the paintings of Raphael, Leonardo, Correggio, and Titian, whose techniques attenuate physicality to make light dominant in revealing the forms of sacred bodies.46 El Greco gives an original treatment of Lomazzo’s conceits of ricepzione dei lumi, composizione, and disposizione of materials and bodies. In Christ as Savior, the actual depiction points to the premium placed by Lomazzo on rilievo and qualità delle materie in religious narratives.47 El Greco investigates color as a property of Christ’s body and emanation of the acheiropoieton, making his brushwork visible to help the viewer distinguish various materials from the coloristic complexion of Christ’s face. The expressiveness of color in Christ as Savior fulfills the painter’s overriding task as a ‘true imitator of nature and eminent in his art’.48 The preservation of this particular aspect is the most original part of Christ as Savior and constitutes a significant development in the Early Modern approach to the retooling of prototypal images. In the age of the Counter-Reformation, the prevailing devotional character of Tintoretto’s and Titian’s works reflected the emphasis on Christocentric themes that ecclesiastical patrons and theorists advised. The focus on Christ went hand in hand with new demands for reputable pictorial documentation or evidentiary status of images. In the San Cassiano Crucifixion (1568) (fig. 6), Tintoretto transcended the spatially and temporally confined narrative to infuse an iconic function reminiscent 45 Ibid., p. 304. 46 ‘[…] d’effeti che fa la luce co’l colore furono miracolosi et eccellenti Rafaello d’Urbino, Leonardo Vinci, Antonio da Coregio e Tiziano, I quali con tanta sagacitâ, prudenza et arte imitaraono il colore, insieme con la luce, che le figure loro paiono piú tosto naturali che artificiali’, Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arti, ed. Roberto Paolo Ciardi, 2 vols., II, Tratatto dell’Arte della Pittura, Scoltura et Archittetura, Milan, 1584 (Firenze: Centro di Dio, 1974), p. 33. Moshe Barasch, Light and Color in the Italian Renaissance Theory of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1978), ch. 4 ‘Lomazzo: The Milanese Theory of Art’, especially. pp. 148–149. 47 In Idea del Tempio della Pittura, chap. 22, Lomazzo mentions qualità delle materie and rilievo: ‘[P]er diporre questi lumi bisogna a due cose aver occhio [….] e alla qualitâ delle materie. […] E dal dispensar questi lumi con tal risguardo della natura de I corpi si viene a generar nelle pitture il rilievo’, Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Scritti sulle arti, ed. Roberto Paolo Ciardi, 2 vols., I, Idea del Tempio della Pittura, p. 305. 48 ‘[…] avendosi il pittore proposto sempre d’imitar il naturale et avvicinarvisi quanto piú può’, Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Tratatto dell’Arte della Pittura, Scoltura et Archittetura, p. 105.

42 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

Fig. 6: Jacopo Tintoretto, Crucifixion, 1568. Oil on canvas, 341 x 371 cm. San Cassiano, Venice. Photo Credit: ­Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/Art Resource, NY

of the vertical emphasis on the crucifix that releases the drama from a single, spatial location.49 For the Scuola Grande di San Roco, he recreated the same atemporal quality by turning to compositional prototypes, northern devotional woodcuts, and Albrecht Dürer’s Small Passion cycle to capture a feeling of animated spiritual commitment.50 In his description of Tintoretto’s style, the Venetian art theorist Cristoforo Sorte stresses in Osservazioni nella pittura (1580) that Tintoretto expressed his temperament in the creative act.51 Philip Sohm has studied the axiom that ‘Tintoretto’s 49 David Rosand, Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice: Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 148–149. 50 Tom Nichols, Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), pp. 149–173. 51 ‘[C]om’ io osservato in M. Giacomo Tintoreto, il quale, come ne’ gesti, nella faccia, nel mover degli occhi e nelle parole e pronto è presto nel ragionare, cosi, condotto da una naturale e celeste inclinazione, con perfettissimo guidico nei ritratti e piture ch’egli fa dal naturale in un subito mette a suo luogo i sbattimenti, l’ombre, le mezze tente, i rilevi e le carni benissiomo imitate, e con così fatta gagliarda prattica, velocità e

Protot ypal Images Reaffirmed in ­E arly ­Modern Painting

43

personal style intrudes’ as the mark of interdependence between ingenium (talent) and ars (art) and their profound relevance to Tintoretto’s eccentric pictorial style.52 Vasari associated Tintoretto with Michelangelo’s creative fury (terribilità) when he characterized Tintoretto as ‘the most terrifying brain that painting had ever seen’ (il più terribile cervello che abbia avuto mai la pittura).53 This portrayal of Tintoretto as ‘terribile’ was integral to the semantics of Italian theoretical discourse on the basis of which Spanish art critics formulated their most astute observations. Pacheco considered El Greco to have a disruptive influence on the pictorial tradition because of his ‘crueles borrones para afectar valentia’ (cruel stains in an affectation of boldness),54 and Jusepe Martínez documented El Greco’s princely style of living in Toledo with the words ‘de extravagante condición, como su pintura’ (he was extravagant, like his painting).55 However, the links that the Spanish historiographer forged with the Italian connotations of stravaganza, which the detractors of Tintoretto and Caravaggio used defamatorily, were clearly intended to highlight that El Greco’s achievements confirmed all expectations.56 Just as Pacheco critiqued El Greco’s impetuous borrones, so, too, did he unhesitatingly position him as belonging to the pantheon of venerable masters who exalted the grand profession of the painter.57 prestezza, ch’ e una meraviglia vederlo operare’, Osservazioni nella pittura di M. Christoforo Sorte al Magnifico et Eccellente Dottore et Cavaliere il Signor Bartolomeo Vitali, con privilegio (Venice, 1580), in Barocchi, Paola, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento (Bari: Laterza 1960-1962), 3 vols, I, p. 299–300. 52 Philip Sohm, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 40–41. 53 Giorgio Vasari, ‘Vita di Battista Franco’, in Le vite de più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Rosanna Bettarini, with comments by Paola Barocchi (Florence: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1966-1987), 8 vols., V, pp. 468–469. 54 Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la Pintura, ed. Bonaventura Bassegoda I Hugas (Madrid: Cátedra, 2009), p. 483: ‘Quien creerá que Dominico Greco traxese sus pinturas muchas veces a la mano, y las retocase una y otra vez, para dexar los colores distintos y desunidos y dar aquellos crueles borrones para afectar valentia’ (Who would believe that Dominico Greco often brought his paintings before his hand and retouched them again and again in order to leave the colors distinct and lacking in union and to give them cruel stains [crueles borrones] in an affectation of boldness?). 55 José Álvarez Lopera, El Greco. Estudio y Catálogo (Madrid: Fundación de Apoyo, 2005), vol. 1, pp. 445: ‘Entró en esta ciudad [Toledo] con gran crédito, en tal manera, que dio a entender no había cosa en el mundo más superior que sus obras; y de verdad, hizo alunas cosas digns de mucha estimación, que se puede poner en el número de los famosos pintores: fue de extravagante condición, como su pintura” (He entered this city with great credit and with such a manner, that he gave the impression that there was nothing in the world superior to his works […] he was himself extravagant like his painting […]’ (Jusepe Martínez, Discursos practicables del nobilísimo arte de la pintura, 1675; published in Madrid, 1866). 56 On stravaganza and the defamatory usage of the term stravagante by Tintoretto’s and Caravaggio’s biographers, see Maria M. Loh, ‘“Huomini della nostra età”: Tintoretto’s Preposterous Modernity,’ in Jacopo Tintoretto, Proceedings of the International Symposium Jacopo Tintoretto, ed. Miguel Falomir, (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2009), pp. 188–195. 57 Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la Pintura, p. 349: ‘Dominico Greco[…] ser en todo singular, como lo fue en la pintura’, and p. 537: ‘Micael Angel, […] Leonardo de Vinci, el Bronzino, Jorge Vasari, Dominco Greco, que fue gran filósofo de agudos dichos y escribió de la pintura, escultura y arquitectura; Pablo de Céspedes […]; Miguel Barroso, pintor del Escorial; el gran Alberto Durero’.

44 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

Fig. 7: Titian, Man of Sorrows, 1560. Oil on canvas, 73.4 × 56 cm © National Gallery of Art, Dublin

With seventeenth-century theorists confessing their appreciation of stravaganza, El Greco emerged as an authoritative figure. His ingenium (talent) declared that matters of free invention may contradict the painting of historical events, and that his painterly brushwork is unrestrained when distilling into his compositions all painterly excess. His reference to Titian suggested an essential coherence across his entire work. El Greco’s brushwork affirms the historical compatibility between his response to tradition and his ability to expose the macchie or borrones that intensified the meaning of Titian’s late paintings. In the Man of Sorrows (Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland, 1560) (fig. 7), Titian employed a characteristically fluid technique with passages of brushwork smeared onto the canvas, and extended this practice to his Prado Christ Carrying the Cross, painted in the 1560s (fig. 8). The abstract formulations of Titian’s transformation of pigment into light in his Martyrdom of St. Lawrence at the Escorial, painted in the year of Titian’s death, stresses the material quality of light in the dramatic effects of burning torches and open-altar fires, and intimately relates to the devotional meaning of the work of art. With his late painterly technique, Titian

Protot ypal Images Reaffirmed in ­E arly ­Modern Painting

45

Fig. 8: Titian, Christ Carrying the Cross, c. 1560. Oil on canvas, 89 x 77 cm © The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. Photo by Leonard Kheifets

advanced painting on epistemological, literal, and material grounds, and at once explored with his most radical experiments the ability of paint to embody, rather than merely represent, the physical.58

The Medium Integral to the Portrait of Christ As the oldest image tradition in Christian art, the portrait of Christ posed particular representational difficulty for the artist’s hand to preserve the authorless image within a contemporary work of art. El Greco’s Christ as Savior reproduces the 58 Philip Sohm, The Artist Grows Old: The Aging of Art and Artists in Italy, 1500-1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 97.

46 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

acheiropoieton and affirms the fundamental questions that enabled this archetype to relay the traditions and aesthetic properties of painting. In the fifteenth century, a peculiarity of the Western artist interested in Byzantine artifacts was to record a venerable image by integrating an icon into a newly authored work. One revealing example is Vittore Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula Talking to her Father (fig. 9), a detail from The Reception of the English Ambassadors (mid1490s, Accademia, Venice) which contains a Byzantine icon with a gold background. Carpaccio, like Giovanni Bellini and others, extended the reception of Greek icons after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and intensified Western interest in the visual records of the earliest Christian history. The icon of Christ remained consistent with the original function of the Byzantine original in distributing the Holy Face across time and space. Notably, Western icon-based pictures not only faithfully transmitted the original Christian imago, but also provided historical evidence about the micromosaic, silver, ivory, panel, or related material ground. The Western practice emphasized icons as antiquities and shed light on the medium of their fabrication. A number of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century micromosaic icons of Christ acquired fame in the West as acheiropoieta, with examples being the micromosaic Christ as Man of Sorrows from the monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai given to Rome’s Santa Croce in Gerusaleme in 1380, and the micromosaic Christ Pantocrator donated by Pope Sixtus IV to Philippe de Croÿ, count of Chimay, in 1475.59 The mosaic medium as container of the acheiropoieta held a special significance for Lorenzo de Medici’s interest in reviving the ancient mosaic technique in Florence. All eleven of the Byzantine icons he owned were in mosaic, several from a collection previously owned by Pope Paul II, and had been passed down to Medici upon the Pope’s death in 1471.60 The mosaic revival that Lorenzo de’ Medici inspired was considerable, with quickening effects on the Florentine painter’s practice in the antique mosaic, Medici directed Domenico Ghirlandaio and others in the mosaic craft, revitalizing a mode of art-making that allowed the image to remain integral to the medium, rather than disappear under the painter’s brush. Ghirlandaio’s early apprenticeship with Alesso Baldovinetti (1425-1499), according to Vasari a master in painting and mosaic, testifies to the prominence attached to mosaic in the training of young Florentine painters.61 Jean Cadogan has provided 59 Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, p. 97. In the fifteenth century, the micromosaic Christ as Man of Sorrows from the monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai given to Rome’s Santa Croce in Gerusaleme was held to be the very image that St. Gregory commissioned eight centuries earlier to commemorate a miraculous appearance of Christ on the altar during the saint’s officiating of the Mass. 60 Ibid., p. 107. 61 ‘Alesso Baldovinetti, […] insegnò il magisterio de’ musaici a Domenico Ghirlandaio, che lo ritrasse poi accanto a se stesso nella cappella de’ Tornabuoni’, Giorgio Vasari, ‘Vita di Alesso Baldovinetti’, in Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. R. Bettarini with comments by P. Barrochi (Florence: Sansoni, 1966), 8 vols., III, pp. 316–317.

Protot ypal Images Reaffirmed in ­E arly ­Modern Painting

47

Fig. 9: Vittore Carpaccio, St. Ursula Talking to her Father (detail from The Reception of the English Ambassadors), mid-1490s. Tempera on canvas, Venice, Gallerie dell’ Accademia. After Angeliki Lymberopoulou, “Audiences and markets for Cretan icons,” Viewing Renaissance Art, eds. Kim Woods at al. (Yale University Press and The Open University, 2007), p. 188

48 

THE PIC TORIAL ART OF EL GRECO

documented evidence in support of Ghirlandaio’s reputation as a mosaicist in 1486, the year in which he was requested to appraise mosaics in the Baptistery restored by Baldovinetti, having being requested to restore the mosaics on the façade by the Florence Cathedral authorities the year before.62 Vasari included the argument that the enduring quality of a mosaic outlives the ephemeral quality of painting in the Introduction to his Lives: ‘[W]hereas painting on its own is consumed, mosaic due to its long life can almost be called eternal.’63 Vasari stressed the analogy of painting and mosaic in the Life of Domenico Ghirlandaio, affirming Ghirlandaio’s skill in the timeless mosaic art: “Domenico enriched […] the art of painting with mosaic that was eternal.’64 A painting with origins in the property of mosaic was credited with the highest capacity for fulfilling the work of icons, namely, the faithful transmission of the original Christian imago ‘made without human hands’. In Medici’s collection, the Christ Pantocrator icon represents a micromosaic, bust-length portrait of Christ that reconfigures the acheiropoieton by means of tiny tesserae interlaid with shinning gold and reflecting glass. The monument to Giotto by Benedetto da Maiano (1442-1497) on the south wall of the interior of Florence Cathedral reveals the crucial role played by mosaic in translating the acheiropoieton into durable and transmittable form (fig. 10).65 Benedetto da Maiano’s tondo, which Lorenzo de’ Medici commissioned to celebrate the great artist, depicts Giotto at work as a mosaicist on a Mandylion icon of Christ. The monument stands out as a recollection of Giotto as author of the Navicella mosaic in Rome’s St. Peter’s that turned the first great modern painter into a master of mosaic, as art theorist Antonio Filarete confirms.66 Giotto’s reliance on the ancient technique reactivated the ancient traditions about the origins of sacred images for early fourteenth-century painting. Michele Savonarola’s commentary on Giotto as ‘the first to make from ancient and mosaic images modern ones, in marvelous fashion’ reflects the reception of Giotto’s painting as material building block for the resuscitation of archetypes.67 62 Jean K. Cadogan, Domenico Ghirlandaio: Artist and Artisan (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 30. 63 Giorgio Vasari, Le vite, Introduction to the Lives, I, ch. 29, p. 148: ‘E certo è che il musaico e la più durabile pittura che sia, imperò che l’altra col tempo si spegne e questa nello stare fatta di continuo s’accende, et inoltre la pittura manca e si consuma per se medesima, ove il musaico per la sua lunghissima vita si può quasi chiamare eterno’. 64 Ibid., III, p. 494: ‘Usava dire Domenico la pittura essere il disegno e la vera pittura per la eternità essere il musaico’; p. 496: ‘Arricchì Domenico l’arte della pittura del musaico più modernamente lavorato che non fece nessun tosccano d’infiniti che si provorono, come le mostrano le cose fatte da lui, per poche ch’elle si siano’. 65 On Giotto’s monument, see the influential Chapter 12 ‘Author and Acheiropoieton’, in Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, pp. 123–134. 66 Filarete mentions also Pietro Cavalini in his discussion of Giotto’s connection to antiquity and mosaic technique. See Antonio Filarete, Tratatto di Architettura, vol. 2, ed. Anna Maria Finoli and Liliana Grassi (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1972), 2 vols., II, pp. 671–672. 67 Michele Savonarola, Coomentariolus de laudibus Patavii, ed. L. A. Muratori, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, vol. 24 (Milan, 1738), col. 1169, as cited by Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, note 17, p. 399.

Protot ypal Images Reaffirmed in ­E arly ­Modern Painting

49

lllE EG0 S\IM PER.QVEM PICTVM EXllNCTA MVIXIT CVI Ql"v'v\ RECTA MAN\IS TAM FVrr ET FACIUS

NATVR.AE OOR.AT NOSTRAE Q\100 OOVlT ARTI I'LVS UCVIT NVW PINGERE Ne