The preeminent Mannerist sculptor in Italy during the last quarter of the 16th century was Giambologna, also called Giovanni da Bologna, or Jean Boulogne. First trained under Jacques Dubroeucq, a Flemish sculptor who worked in an Italianate style, Giambologna went to Rome about 1550, where his style was influenced by Hellenistic sculpture and the works of Michelangelo. Settling in Florence (1552), where he spent the rest of his life, he attracted the notice of Francesco de’ Medici, for whom many of his most important works were made.
Among his earliest Florentine works were a bronze Bacchus, later placed on a fountain in the Borgo San Jacopo, and a bronze Venus, made for the Villa di Castello and now at the Villa Medicea della Petraia, near Florence. The Fountain of Neptune at Bologna (1563–66), which emulated Michelangelo’s Victory, established his reputation. The full-scale plaster model of this work, initially set up with the Victory in the Palazzo Vecchio, was replaced in 1570 by the marble version, now in the Museo Nazionale. His Samson and a Philistine (1567) displays violence and anguish in a masterfully contrived composition that recalls such complex Hellenistic pieces as the Laocoön. Rape of a Sabine (1579–83), while uncluttered and monumental, is even more complex.
The composition is subtly designed so that it can be viewed from any side with equal effect. In his fountain Mercury (c. 1580) Giambologna uses the shimmering play of light on the figure’s smooth surface to enhance the effect of fleetness. His bronze equestrian portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici (1587–94) is also notable .Giambologna enjoyed great popularity as a maker of garden sculpture for the Boboli Gardens, Florence (Fountain of Oceanus, 1571–76; Venus of the Grotticella, 1573), and for the Medici villas at Pratolino (the colossal Apennine, 1581), Petraia, and Castello.
He was also a prolific manufacturer of bronze statuettes. In addition to his secular commissions, Giambologna was responsible for a large number of religious sculptures, which include (in marble) the fine Altar of Liberty in Lucca Cathedral (1577–79) and several bronze reliefs. An Italian sculptor in all but birth, Giambologna transformed the Florentine Mannerism of the mid-16th century into a style of European significance. His ability to capture fleeting expression and the vivacity and sensual delight of his mature style anticipate the Baroque sculpture of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. For three centuries his work was more generally admired than that of any sculptor except Michelangelo.
Monday 20 December 2010
Lavinia Fontana
Italian Mannerist Lavinia Fontana was one of the most important portraitists in Bologna during the late 16th century. She was one of the first women to execute large, publicly commissioned figure paintings. Fontana studied with her father, Prospero Fontana ( c. 1512–97), a minor painter of the school of Bologna, who taught his daughter to paint in the Mannerist style. By the late 1570s she was known in Bologna for painting fi ne portraits, including Self-portrait at the Harpischord and the very formal Gozzadini Family (1584). The attention to detail in her portraits is reminiscent of the work of another northern Italian Renaissance painter, Sofonisba Anguissola. Fontana’s works were admired for their vibrant colour and the detail of the clothes and jewelry that her subjects wore. Fontana also produced many religious paintings; among her best was Noli me tangere (1581).
Some of her most famous works are large altarpieces executed for the churches of her native city. In addition, in 1589 she painted the altarpiece Holy Family with the Sleeping Christ Child for El Escorial in Madrid. After about 1600—when she executed Vision of St. Hyacinth , a work commissioned by the cardinal of Ascoli—Fontana’s work was introduced to Rome; she moved to Rome three years later and continued painting portraits and altarpieces. In 1604 she painted her largest work, the Martyrdom of St. Stephen , an altarpiece for San Paolo Fuori le Mura in Rome, a basilica that was destroyed in the fi re of 1823. Her Visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon is her most ambitious surviving narrative work. She was elected a member of the Roman Academy, a rare honour for a woman.
In 1577 Fontana married the minor painter Gian Paolo Zappi . He was willing to subordinate his career to her own; he also became her agent. After her marriage, Fontana sometimes signed her work with her married name. She enjoyed the patronage of the family of Pope Gregory XIII and painted the likenesses of many eminent people. In addition to her career as an artist, she was the mother of 11 children.
Jan van Eyck
Flemish painter Jan van Eyck is notable for having perfected the newly developed technique of oil painting. His naturalistic panel paintings, mostly portraits and religious subjects, made extensive use of disguised religious symbols. His masterpiece is the altarpiece in the cathedral at Ghent, the Adoration of the Lamb (1432; also called Ghent Altarpiece). Jan van Eyck must have been born before 1395, for in October 1422 he is recorded as the varlet de chambre et peintre (“honorary equerry and painter”) of John of Bavaria, count of Holland. He continued to work in the palace of The Hague until the count’s death in 1425 and then settled briefly in Bruges before he was summoned, that summer, to Lille to serve Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, the most powerful ruler and foremost patron of the arts in Flanders. Jan remained in the duke’s employ until his death. On behalf of his sponsor he undertook a number of secret missions during the next decade, of which the most notable were two journeys to the Iberian Peninsula, the first in 1427 to try to contract a marriage for Philip with Isabella of Spain, and a more successful trip in 1428–29 to seek the hand of Isabella of Portugal. As a confidant of Philip, Jan may have participated directly in these marriage negotiations, but he also was charged to present the duke with a portrait of the intended. In 1431 Jan purchased a house in Bruges and, about the same time, married a woman named Margaret, about whom little more is known than that she was born in 1406 and was to bear him at least two children. Residing in Bruges, Jan continued to paint, and in 1436 he again made a secret voyage for Philip. After his death in 1441, he was buried in the Church of Saint-Donatian, in Bruges. Securely attributed paintings survive only from the last decade of Jan’s career; therefore, his artistic origins and early development must be deduced from his mature work.
Traditionally, Jan has been acclaimed the founder of Flemish painting, and scholars have sought his artistic roots in the last great phase of medieval manuscript illumination. It is clear that the naturalism and elegant composition of Jan’s later painting owe much to such early 15th-century illuminators as the anonymous Boucicaut Master and Pol, Herman, and Jehanequin de Limburg (the “Limburg Brothers”), who worked for the Burgundian dukes. A document of 1439 reports that Jan van Eyck paid an illuminator for preparing a book for the duke; but central to the discussion of his ties to manuscript illustration has been the attribution to Jan of several miniatures, identified as Hand G, in a problematic prayer book known as the Turin-Milan Hours. So long as these “Eyckian” miniatures were dated in the 1420s or even earlier, Jan’s authorship seemed indubitable; but recent investigations strongly indicate that these miniatures were painted at least 20 years later and, hence, that they are by an imitator. With the elimination of the Turin-Milan Hours from Jan van Eyck’s early oeuvre, his connections with International Gothic style illumination appear to have been less direct than had been thought. Certainly as important for Jan’s artistic formation were the panel paintings of Robert Campin (c. 1378–1444), a Tournai painter whose important role in the history of Flemish art has only recently been reestablished. Jan must have met Campin at least once, when he was feted by the Tournai painter’s guild in 1427, and from Campin’s art he seems to have learned the bold realism, the method of disguised symbolism, and perhaps the luminous oil technique that became so characteristic of his own style. In contrast to Campin, who was a Tournai burgher, Jan was a learned master at work in a busy court, and he signed his paintings, the first Flemish artist to do so. The majority of Jan’s panels present the proud inscription “IOHANNES DE EYCK,” and several bear his aristocratic motto, “Als ik kan” (“As best I can”). It is small wonder that Campin’s reputation faded and his influence on Jan was forgotten, and it is of little surprise that many of Campin’s achievements were credited to the younger master. Despite Jan van Eyck’s having signed 9 paintings and dated 10, the establishment of his oeuvre and the reconstruction of its chronology present problems.
The major difficulty is that Jan’s masterpiece, the Adoration of the Lamb altarpiece, has a probably reliable inscription that introduces another painter, Hubert van Eyck, as its principal master. (Hubert van Eyck is believed to have been Jan’s brother.) This has caused art historians to turn to less ambitious but more secure works to plot Jan’s development, including, most notably: the Portrait of a Young Man (Leal Souvenir) of 1432, the wedding portrait Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami of 1434, the Madonna with Canon van der Paele of 1434–36, the triptych Madonna and Child with Saints of 1437, and the panels of St. Barbara and the Madonna at the Fountain, dated, respectively, 1437 and 1439. Although they fall within a brief span of seven years, these paintings present a consistent development in which Jan moved from the heavy, sculptural realism associated with Robert Campin to a more delicate, rather precious, pictorial style. On stylistic grounds there seems little difficulty in placing the Ghent Altarpiece at the head of this development as indicated by the date 1432 in the inscription, but the question of Hubert’s participation in this great work has yet to be completely resolved. The inscription itself is definite about this point: “The painter Hubert van Eyck, greater than whom no one was found, began [this work]; and Jan, his brother, second in art [carried] through the task . . .” On the basis of this claim, art historians have attempted to distinguish Hubert’s contribution to the Ghent Altarpiece and have even assigned to him certain of the more archaic “Eyckian” paintings, including The Annunciation and The Three Marys at the Tomb. The confusion concerning Jan’s relationship to Hubert, the doubt about his activities as an illuminator, and the reemergence of Robert Campin as a preeminent master do not diminish the achievement and significance of Jan van Eyck. He may not have invented oil painting as early writers asserted, but he perfected the technique to mirror the textures, light, and spatial effects of nature.
The realism of his paintings—admired as early as 1449 by the Italian humanist Cyriacus D’Ancona, who observed that the works seemed to have been produced “not by the artifice of human hands but by all-bearing nature herself”—has never been surpassed. For Jan, as for Campin, naturalism was not merely a technical tour de force, however. For him, nature embodied God, and so he filled his paintings with religious symbols disguised as everyday objects. Even the light that so naturally illuminates Jan van Eyck’s landscapes and interiors is a metaphor of the Divine. Because of the refinement of his technique and the abstruseness of his symbolic programs, the successors of Jan van Eyck borrowed only selectively from his art. Campin’s foremost student, Rogier van der Weyden, tempered his master’s homey realism with Eyckian grace and delicacy. In fact, at the end of his career, Campin himself succumbed somewhat to Jan’s courtly style. Even Petrus Christus, who may have been apprenticed in Jan’s atelier and who finished the Virgin and Child, with Saints and Donor after Jan’s death, quickly abandoned the intricacies of Jan’s style under the influence of van der Weyden.
During the last third of the century, the Netherlandish painters Hugo van der Goes and Justus van Gent revived the Eyckian heritage, but, when such early 16th-century Flemish masters as Quentin Massys and Jan Gossart turned to Jan’s work, they produced pious copies that had little impact on their original creations. In Germany and France the influence of Jan van Eyck was overshadowed by the more accessible styles of Campin and van der Weyden, and only in the Iberian Peninsula—which Jan had visited twice—did his art dominate. In Italy his greatness was recognized by Cyriacus and by the humanist Bartolomeo Facio, who lists Jan, together with van der Weyden and the Italian artists Il Pisanello and Gentile da Fabriano, as one of the leading painters of the period. But Renaissance artists, as painters elsewhere, found him easier to admire than to imitate. Interest in his painting and acknowledgment of his prodigious technical accomplishment have remained high. Jan’s works have been copied frequently and have been avidly collected. He is referred to in the Treaty of Versailles, which specifies the return of the Ghent Altarpiece to Belgium before peace with Germany could be concluded after the end of World War I.
Traditionally, Jan has been acclaimed the founder of Flemish painting, and scholars have sought his artistic roots in the last great phase of medieval manuscript illumination. It is clear that the naturalism and elegant composition of Jan’s later painting owe much to such early 15th-century illuminators as the anonymous Boucicaut Master and Pol, Herman, and Jehanequin de Limburg (the “Limburg Brothers”), who worked for the Burgundian dukes. A document of 1439 reports that Jan van Eyck paid an illuminator for preparing a book for the duke; but central to the discussion of his ties to manuscript illustration has been the attribution to Jan of several miniatures, identified as Hand G, in a problematic prayer book known as the Turin-Milan Hours. So long as these “Eyckian” miniatures were dated in the 1420s or even earlier, Jan’s authorship seemed indubitable; but recent investigations strongly indicate that these miniatures were painted at least 20 years later and, hence, that they are by an imitator. With the elimination of the Turin-Milan Hours from Jan van Eyck’s early oeuvre, his connections with International Gothic style illumination appear to have been less direct than had been thought. Certainly as important for Jan’s artistic formation were the panel paintings of Robert Campin (c. 1378–1444), a Tournai painter whose important role in the history of Flemish art has only recently been reestablished. Jan must have met Campin at least once, when he was feted by the Tournai painter’s guild in 1427, and from Campin’s art he seems to have learned the bold realism, the method of disguised symbolism, and perhaps the luminous oil technique that became so characteristic of his own style. In contrast to Campin, who was a Tournai burgher, Jan was a learned master at work in a busy court, and he signed his paintings, the first Flemish artist to do so. The majority of Jan’s panels present the proud inscription “IOHANNES DE EYCK,” and several bear his aristocratic motto, “Als ik kan” (“As best I can”). It is small wonder that Campin’s reputation faded and his influence on Jan was forgotten, and it is of little surprise that many of Campin’s achievements were credited to the younger master. Despite Jan van Eyck’s having signed 9 paintings and dated 10, the establishment of his oeuvre and the reconstruction of its chronology present problems.
The major difficulty is that Jan’s masterpiece, the Adoration of the Lamb altarpiece, has a probably reliable inscription that introduces another painter, Hubert van Eyck, as its principal master. (Hubert van Eyck is believed to have been Jan’s brother.) This has caused art historians to turn to less ambitious but more secure works to plot Jan’s development, including, most notably: the Portrait of a Young Man (Leal Souvenir) of 1432, the wedding portrait Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami of 1434, the Madonna with Canon van der Paele of 1434–36, the triptych Madonna and Child with Saints of 1437, and the panels of St. Barbara and the Madonna at the Fountain, dated, respectively, 1437 and 1439. Although they fall within a brief span of seven years, these paintings present a consistent development in which Jan moved from the heavy, sculptural realism associated with Robert Campin to a more delicate, rather precious, pictorial style. On stylistic grounds there seems little difficulty in placing the Ghent Altarpiece at the head of this development as indicated by the date 1432 in the inscription, but the question of Hubert’s participation in this great work has yet to be completely resolved. The inscription itself is definite about this point: “The painter Hubert van Eyck, greater than whom no one was found, began [this work]; and Jan, his brother, second in art [carried] through the task . . .” On the basis of this claim, art historians have attempted to distinguish Hubert’s contribution to the Ghent Altarpiece and have even assigned to him certain of the more archaic “Eyckian” paintings, including The Annunciation and The Three Marys at the Tomb. The confusion concerning Jan’s relationship to Hubert, the doubt about his activities as an illuminator, and the reemergence of Robert Campin as a preeminent master do not diminish the achievement and significance of Jan van Eyck. He may not have invented oil painting as early writers asserted, but he perfected the technique to mirror the textures, light, and spatial effects of nature.
The realism of his paintings—admired as early as 1449 by the Italian humanist Cyriacus D’Ancona, who observed that the works seemed to have been produced “not by the artifice of human hands but by all-bearing nature herself”—has never been surpassed. For Jan, as for Campin, naturalism was not merely a technical tour de force, however. For him, nature embodied God, and so he filled his paintings with religious symbols disguised as everyday objects. Even the light that so naturally illuminates Jan van Eyck’s landscapes and interiors is a metaphor of the Divine. Because of the refinement of his technique and the abstruseness of his symbolic programs, the successors of Jan van Eyck borrowed only selectively from his art. Campin’s foremost student, Rogier van der Weyden, tempered his master’s homey realism with Eyckian grace and delicacy. In fact, at the end of his career, Campin himself succumbed somewhat to Jan’s courtly style. Even Petrus Christus, who may have been apprenticed in Jan’s atelier and who finished the Virgin and Child, with Saints and Donor after Jan’s death, quickly abandoned the intricacies of Jan’s style under the influence of van der Weyden.
During the last third of the century, the Netherlandish painters Hugo van der Goes and Justus van Gent revived the Eyckian heritage, but, when such early 16th-century Flemish masters as Quentin Massys and Jan Gossart turned to Jan’s work, they produced pious copies that had little impact on their original creations. In Germany and France the influence of Jan van Eyck was overshadowed by the more accessible styles of Campin and van der Weyden, and only in the Iberian Peninsula—which Jan had visited twice—did his art dominate. In Italy his greatness was recognized by Cyriacus and by the humanist Bartolomeo Facio, who lists Jan, together with van der Weyden and the Italian artists Il Pisanello and Gentile da Fabriano, as one of the leading painters of the period. But Renaissance artists, as painters elsewhere, found him easier to admire than to imitate. Interest in his painting and acknowledgment of his prodigious technical accomplishment have remained high. Jan’s works have been copied frequently and have been avidly collected. He is referred to in the Treaty of Versailles, which specifies the return of the Ghent Altarpiece to Belgium before peace with Germany could be concluded after the end of World War I.
Correggio
Correggio was the most important Renaissance painter of the school of Parma, and his late works influenced the style of many Baroque and Rococo artists. His first important works are the convent ceiling of St. Paolo (1519), Parma, depicting allegories on humanist themes, and the frescoes in St. Giovanni Evangelista, Parma (1520–23), and the cathedral of Parma (1526–30). The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine (c. 1526) is among the finest of his poetic late oil paintings. Correggio was born Antonio Allegri. His father was a tradesman living at Correggio, the small city in which Antonio was born and died, and whose name he took as his own. He was not, as it is often alleged, a self-taught artist.
His early work refutes the theory, for it shows an educated knowledge of optics, perspective, architecture, sculpture, and anatomy. His initial instruction probably came from his uncle, Lorenzo Allegri, a painter of moderate ability, at Correggio. About 1503 he probably studied in Modena and then went to Mantua, arriving before the death in 1506 of the famed early Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna. It has traditionally been said that he completed the decoration of Mantegna’s family chapel in the church of St. Andrea at Mantua after the artist’s death. It seems certain the two round paintings, or tondi, of the Entombment of Christ and Madonna and Saints are by the young Correggio. Although his early works are pervaded with his knowledge of Mantegna’s art, his artistic temperament was more akin to that of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), who had a commanding influence upon almost all of the Renaissance painters of northern Italy.
Where Mantegna uses tightly controlled line to define form, Correggio, like Leonardo, prefers chiaroscuro, or a subtle manipulation of light and shade creating softness of contour and an atmospheric effect. It is also fairly certain that early in his career he visited Rome and came under the influence of the Vatican frescoes of Michelangelo and Raphael. Leaving Mantua, Correggio’s time was divided between Parma and his hometown. His first documented painting, an altarpiece of the Madonna of St. Francis, was commissioned for St. Francesco at Correggio in 1514. The best known works of his youth are a group of devotional pictures that became increasingly luscious in colour. They include the Nativity, Adoration of the Kings, and Christ Taking Leave of His Mother. Correggio’s mature style emerged with his first commission for Parma, the ceiling of the abbess’ parlour in the convent of St. Paolo, which was probably executed about 1518–19. Although there are echoes in this work of Mantegna’s murals in the Castello at Mantua (1494), it was wholly original in conception. The abbess Giovanna de Piacenza secured for Correggio another important appointment, to decorate the dome of the church of St. Giovanni Evangelista at Parma. The dome fresco of the Ascension of Christ (1520–23) was followed by the decoration of the apse of the same church, of which only the segment entitled Coronation of the Virgin survives, the remainder having been destroyed in 1587.
This work was still in the High Renaissance tradition and owed much to Michelangelo. The fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin in the dome of the cathedral of Parma marks the culmination of Correggio’s career as a mural painter. This fresco (a painting in plaster with water-soluble pigments) anticipates the Baroque style of dramatically illusionistic ceiling painting. The entire architectural surface is treated as a single pictorial unit of vast proportions, equating the dome of the church with the vault of heaven. The realistic way the figures in the clouds seem to protrude into the spectators’ space is an audacious and astounding use for the time of foreshortening. The remainder of Correggio’s most famous works, the dates of few known with certainty, fall into three groups: the great altarpieces (and a few other large religious compositions); exquisite small works of private devotion; and a handful of mythological subjects of a lyrically sensuous character.
Many of the altarpieces became so well known that they acquired nicknames. The Adoration of the Shepherds (c. 1530) is called Night (La Notte), and the Madonna of St. Jerome is popularly known as Day (Il Giorno). The late altarpieces are generally characterized by an intimate and domestic mood sustained between idealized figures. This intimate and homely poetry also distinguishes the small devotional works, such as the Madonna of the Basket or The Virgin Adoring the Child Jesus, while the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine is a visual essay in the mid-16th-century aesthetic of ideal feminine beauty. In these late works Correggio fully exploited the medium of oil painting. He was intrigued with the sensual beauty of paint texture and achieved his most remarkable effects in a series of mythological works, including the Danae, The Rape of Ganymede, and Jupiter and Io. The sensuous character of the subject matter is enhanced by the quality of the paint, which seems to have been lightly breathed onto the canvas. These pictures carry the erotic to the limits it can go without becoming offensive or pornographic. Although his influence can be detected in later Parmese painting, especially in the Mannerist style of Parmigianino (1503–40), Correggio had many imitators but no direct pupils who deserve mention. His decorative ideas were taken up by the Baroque painters of the 17th century, particularly in the ceiling painting of Giovanni Lanfranco (1582–1647), himself a native of Parma. Correggio became almost a tutelary deity of the French Rococo style, and his great altarpieces were among the works most abundantly copied by the travelling artists of the 18th century during their years of study in Italy.
His early work refutes the theory, for it shows an educated knowledge of optics, perspective, architecture, sculpture, and anatomy. His initial instruction probably came from his uncle, Lorenzo Allegri, a painter of moderate ability, at Correggio. About 1503 he probably studied in Modena and then went to Mantua, arriving before the death in 1506 of the famed early Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna. It has traditionally been said that he completed the decoration of Mantegna’s family chapel in the church of St. Andrea at Mantua after the artist’s death. It seems certain the two round paintings, or tondi, of the Entombment of Christ and Madonna and Saints are by the young Correggio. Although his early works are pervaded with his knowledge of Mantegna’s art, his artistic temperament was more akin to that of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), who had a commanding influence upon almost all of the Renaissance painters of northern Italy.
Where Mantegna uses tightly controlled line to define form, Correggio, like Leonardo, prefers chiaroscuro, or a subtle manipulation of light and shade creating softness of contour and an atmospheric effect. It is also fairly certain that early in his career he visited Rome and came under the influence of the Vatican frescoes of Michelangelo and Raphael. Leaving Mantua, Correggio’s time was divided between Parma and his hometown. His first documented painting, an altarpiece of the Madonna of St. Francis, was commissioned for St. Francesco at Correggio in 1514. The best known works of his youth are a group of devotional pictures that became increasingly luscious in colour. They include the Nativity, Adoration of the Kings, and Christ Taking Leave of His Mother. Correggio’s mature style emerged with his first commission for Parma, the ceiling of the abbess’ parlour in the convent of St. Paolo, which was probably executed about 1518–19. Although there are echoes in this work of Mantegna’s murals in the Castello at Mantua (1494), it was wholly original in conception. The abbess Giovanna de Piacenza secured for Correggio another important appointment, to decorate the dome of the church of St. Giovanni Evangelista at Parma. The dome fresco of the Ascension of Christ (1520–23) was followed by the decoration of the apse of the same church, of which only the segment entitled Coronation of the Virgin survives, the remainder having been destroyed in 1587.
This work was still in the High Renaissance tradition and owed much to Michelangelo. The fresco of the Assumption of the Virgin in the dome of the cathedral of Parma marks the culmination of Correggio’s career as a mural painter. This fresco (a painting in plaster with water-soluble pigments) anticipates the Baroque style of dramatically illusionistic ceiling painting. The entire architectural surface is treated as a single pictorial unit of vast proportions, equating the dome of the church with the vault of heaven. The realistic way the figures in the clouds seem to protrude into the spectators’ space is an audacious and astounding use for the time of foreshortening. The remainder of Correggio’s most famous works, the dates of few known with certainty, fall into three groups: the great altarpieces (and a few other large religious compositions); exquisite small works of private devotion; and a handful of mythological subjects of a lyrically sensuous character.
Many of the altarpieces became so well known that they acquired nicknames. The Adoration of the Shepherds (c. 1530) is called Night (La Notte), and the Madonna of St. Jerome is popularly known as Day (Il Giorno). The late altarpieces are generally characterized by an intimate and domestic mood sustained between idealized figures. This intimate and homely poetry also distinguishes the small devotional works, such as the Madonna of the Basket or The Virgin Adoring the Child Jesus, while the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine is a visual essay in the mid-16th-century aesthetic of ideal feminine beauty. In these late works Correggio fully exploited the medium of oil painting. He was intrigued with the sensual beauty of paint texture and achieved his most remarkable effects in a series of mythological works, including the Danae, The Rape of Ganymede, and Jupiter and Io. The sensuous character of the subject matter is enhanced by the quality of the paint, which seems to have been lightly breathed onto the canvas. These pictures carry the erotic to the limits it can go without becoming offensive or pornographic. Although his influence can be detected in later Parmese painting, especially in the Mannerist style of Parmigianino (1503–40), Correggio had many imitators but no direct pupils who deserve mention. His decorative ideas were taken up by the Baroque painters of the 17th century, particularly in the ceiling painting of Giovanni Lanfranco (1582–1647), himself a native of Parma. Correggio became almost a tutelary deity of the French Rococo style, and his great altarpieces were among the works most abundantly copied by the travelling artists of the 18th century during their years of study in Italy.
Lucas Cranach the Elder
Lucas Cranach the Elder was a leading painter of Saxony and one of the most important and influential artists in 16th-century German art. Among his vast output of paintings and woodcuts, the most important are altarpieces, court portraits and portraits of the Protestant Reformers, and innumerable pictures of women—elongated female nudes and fashionably dressed ladies with titles from the Bible or mythology. Lucas Müller was born in a village approximately 55 miles (90 km) north of Nürnberg. Although only a year younger, he survived Albrecht Dürer, the great genius of German art, by 25 years and, in fact, outlived all the significant German artists of his time. Lucas’s teacher was his father, the painter Hans Müller, with whom he worked from 1495 to 1498. He is known to have been in Coburg in 1501, but the earliest of his works that have been preserved date from about 1502, when he was already 30 and living in Vienna. It was in that city that he dropped the surname of Müller, calling himself Cranach after his hometown, which is now spelled Kronach. In Vienna, Cranach made an important contribution to the painting and illustrations of the Danube school, the art of the Austrian Danubian region around Vienna and other towns.
He also came in contact with the humanists teaching at the university, and did portraits of the scholars Johannes Stephan Reuss (1503) and Johannes Cuspinian (c. 1502–03). Presumably while Cranach was still in Vienna, he received news of his appointment as court painter to the elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony. Cranach must already have been a famous artist, for he was given two and a half times the salary paid to his predecessor. In spring 1505 he arrived in Wittenberg, a university town on the Elbe River and seat of the electors, where he remained for 45 years, until 1550, as court painter. He became a prominent citizen, serving as a member of the town council in 1519–20 and as burgomaster three times in the years 1537–44. Through Cranach, who received important commissions from three successive electors and caused many young artists to come to Wittenberg, the town became an art centre. The Protestant Reformation had begun in 1517 in Wittenberg with Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. Cranach was on friendly terms with Luther, who had been a teacher at the University of Wittenberg since 1508. Cranach painted portraits of Luther, his wife, Katherina von Bora, and his parents. Through these and other portraits, he helped form today’s image of Luther’s circle. Indeed, apart from his other duties as court artist, Cranach became the chief pictorial propagandist of the Protestant cause in Germany, multiplying the images of the Reformers and the Protestant princes in innumerable painted, engraved, and woodcut portraits. The scope of this activity is indicated by a single payment in the electoral accounts (1533) for “sixty pairs of small paintings of the late Electors.” Cranach also did altarpieces and paintings for Lutheran churches. His works were sought after by Protestant and Roman Catholic patrons alike, and hundreds of pictures now in museums and private collections testify to his exceptional productivity. Aside from his paintings, there are more than 100 separate woodcuts by him. Cranach did not sign his works with his full name. The early ones, before 1504, were unsigned; from 1504 to 1506 his signature consisted of an entwined “LC”; from 1506 to 1509, it consisted of the separated initials “LC”; from 1509 to 1514, it consisted of these spaced initials and his coat of arms, the winged serpent, which became his sole signature in 1515. All works, even those that had issued from his large workshop or studio (in which he often employed 10 or more assistants), henceforth carried this device, which was also used by his son Lucas the Younger, until the latter’s death in 1586. This gave rise to many problems of attribution that still remain unsolved. The fact that so few works bear any date further complicates the establishment of a Cranach chronology. It is certain, however, that Cranach’s style was fully formed and underwent little development after about 1515, and the highly finished, mass-produced paintings after that date suffer by comparison with the more individual works he painted in early adulthood. The paintings the 30-year-old artist did in Vienna were of a profoundly devotional kind set in the wild landscapes of the Alpine foothills, with ruins and windswept trees. These pictures show Cranach as an avantgarde artist of considerable emotional force, and one of the initiators of the Danube school. Notable among them are a Crucifixion (c. 1500) and St. Jerome in Penitence (1502). The first decade of Cranach’s stay at Wittenberg was marked by a series of experiments in which he adapted his style to suit the demands of the Saxon court. The right wing of the St. Catherine Altarpiece (1506) already shows a radical break with his earlier style; there is exquisite detail in the realistic portrait heads, but courtly decorum has purged the scene of all emotion and given it a decorative bias, with strong emphasis on the patterns of dress. Following his visit to the Netherlands in 1508, Cranach experimented with Italo-Netherlandish ideas of spatial construction and with monumental nudes, but his true talent lay elsewhere, as is shown by the splendid full-length portraits of Duke Henry the Pious and Duchess Katharina von Mecklenburg (1514), which mark the establishment of his official portrait style. Here, space and volume are annihilated; magnificent clothes, set off by a featureless backdrop, are topped by faces reduced to their essential, typical features. Cranach was a pioneer of the frigid state portraiture of the 16th century, but he fell short of the icy reserve of his successors—Hans Holbein the Younger and Bronzino— because his abiding Gothic taste invariably led him to exaggerate a feature or elaborate a beard or dress for the sake of linear rhythms or calligraphic effects. With male sitters his method sometimes yields an image of startling power—e.g., the Portrait of Dr. J. Scheyring (1529). His female portraits are uniformly vapid, however.
The resurgence of Gothic linear rhythms is fundamental for the whole of Cranach’s later work, in which the borderline between sacred and mundane art is blurred. He represented female saints as beautiful and elegant ladies in fashionable dress and covered with jewelry. His Reclining River Nymph at the Fountain (1518) shows with what assurance he translated a Renaissance model—Giorgione’s Venus— into his personal language of linear arabesque. This work inaugurated a long series of paintings of Venus, Lucretia, the Graces, the judgment of Paris, and other subjects that serve as pretexts for the sensuous female nude, in which Cranach appears as a kind of 16th-century François Boucher. The naive elegance of these ladies, whose slender, sinuous bodies defy basic principles of anatomy, were clearly to the taste of the German courts and have an enduring charm. But in conception and style they look back to the International Gothic style of a century before. Thus from a historical viewpoint Cranach’s work was a backwater in European art of the 16th century. Though he was the dominant figure in the painting of northeastern Germany during his lifetime, his influence was confined to his immediate circle. Cranach is called Pictor celerrimus (“swiftest of painters”) on his tombstone, and his contemporaries never ceased to marvel at the speed with which he worked. But this very speed also suggested the limitations of his art, for his strength lay not in reflection, composition, and construction but in an impulsive creativity that was nourished by his imagination and fancy, particularly in unheroic and idyllic scenes.
His art was especially popular in that period of great political upheavals, perhaps because his contemporaries, who in public life were the protagonists of embattled ideologies, yearned for beauty in man and in nature and for a peaceful refuge from the world’s turmoil. Both of Cranach’s sons were members of his studio. The elder, Hans Cranach, who died in 1537, left a few signed works that are indistinguishable in style from those of his father. Lucas Cranach the Younger (1515–86), whose part in the joint production of the studio became important from about 1545, continued to work in the family style long after his father’s death in 1553.
He also came in contact with the humanists teaching at the university, and did portraits of the scholars Johannes Stephan Reuss (1503) and Johannes Cuspinian (c. 1502–03). Presumably while Cranach was still in Vienna, he received news of his appointment as court painter to the elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony. Cranach must already have been a famous artist, for he was given two and a half times the salary paid to his predecessor. In spring 1505 he arrived in Wittenberg, a university town on the Elbe River and seat of the electors, where he remained for 45 years, until 1550, as court painter. He became a prominent citizen, serving as a member of the town council in 1519–20 and as burgomaster three times in the years 1537–44. Through Cranach, who received important commissions from three successive electors and caused many young artists to come to Wittenberg, the town became an art centre. The Protestant Reformation had begun in 1517 in Wittenberg with Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. Cranach was on friendly terms with Luther, who had been a teacher at the University of Wittenberg since 1508. Cranach painted portraits of Luther, his wife, Katherina von Bora, and his parents. Through these and other portraits, he helped form today’s image of Luther’s circle. Indeed, apart from his other duties as court artist, Cranach became the chief pictorial propagandist of the Protestant cause in Germany, multiplying the images of the Reformers and the Protestant princes in innumerable painted, engraved, and woodcut portraits. The scope of this activity is indicated by a single payment in the electoral accounts (1533) for “sixty pairs of small paintings of the late Electors.” Cranach also did altarpieces and paintings for Lutheran churches. His works were sought after by Protestant and Roman Catholic patrons alike, and hundreds of pictures now in museums and private collections testify to his exceptional productivity. Aside from his paintings, there are more than 100 separate woodcuts by him. Cranach did not sign his works with his full name. The early ones, before 1504, were unsigned; from 1504 to 1506 his signature consisted of an entwined “LC”; from 1506 to 1509, it consisted of the separated initials “LC”; from 1509 to 1514, it consisted of these spaced initials and his coat of arms, the winged serpent, which became his sole signature in 1515. All works, even those that had issued from his large workshop or studio (in which he often employed 10 or more assistants), henceforth carried this device, which was also used by his son Lucas the Younger, until the latter’s death in 1586. This gave rise to many problems of attribution that still remain unsolved. The fact that so few works bear any date further complicates the establishment of a Cranach chronology. It is certain, however, that Cranach’s style was fully formed and underwent little development after about 1515, and the highly finished, mass-produced paintings after that date suffer by comparison with the more individual works he painted in early adulthood. The paintings the 30-year-old artist did in Vienna were of a profoundly devotional kind set in the wild landscapes of the Alpine foothills, with ruins and windswept trees. These pictures show Cranach as an avantgarde artist of considerable emotional force, and one of the initiators of the Danube school. Notable among them are a Crucifixion (c. 1500) and St. Jerome in Penitence (1502). The first decade of Cranach’s stay at Wittenberg was marked by a series of experiments in which he adapted his style to suit the demands of the Saxon court. The right wing of the St. Catherine Altarpiece (1506) already shows a radical break with his earlier style; there is exquisite detail in the realistic portrait heads, but courtly decorum has purged the scene of all emotion and given it a decorative bias, with strong emphasis on the patterns of dress. Following his visit to the Netherlands in 1508, Cranach experimented with Italo-Netherlandish ideas of spatial construction and with monumental nudes, but his true talent lay elsewhere, as is shown by the splendid full-length portraits of Duke Henry the Pious and Duchess Katharina von Mecklenburg (1514), which mark the establishment of his official portrait style. Here, space and volume are annihilated; magnificent clothes, set off by a featureless backdrop, are topped by faces reduced to their essential, typical features. Cranach was a pioneer of the frigid state portraiture of the 16th century, but he fell short of the icy reserve of his successors—Hans Holbein the Younger and Bronzino— because his abiding Gothic taste invariably led him to exaggerate a feature or elaborate a beard or dress for the sake of linear rhythms or calligraphic effects. With male sitters his method sometimes yields an image of startling power—e.g., the Portrait of Dr. J. Scheyring (1529). His female portraits are uniformly vapid, however.
The resurgence of Gothic linear rhythms is fundamental for the whole of Cranach’s later work, in which the borderline between sacred and mundane art is blurred. He represented female saints as beautiful and elegant ladies in fashionable dress and covered with jewelry. His Reclining River Nymph at the Fountain (1518) shows with what assurance he translated a Renaissance model—Giorgione’s Venus— into his personal language of linear arabesque. This work inaugurated a long series of paintings of Venus, Lucretia, the Graces, the judgment of Paris, and other subjects that serve as pretexts for the sensuous female nude, in which Cranach appears as a kind of 16th-century François Boucher. The naive elegance of these ladies, whose slender, sinuous bodies defy basic principles of anatomy, were clearly to the taste of the German courts and have an enduring charm. But in conception and style they look back to the International Gothic style of a century before. Thus from a historical viewpoint Cranach’s work was a backwater in European art of the 16th century. Though he was the dominant figure in the painting of northeastern Germany during his lifetime, his influence was confined to his immediate circle. Cranach is called Pictor celerrimus (“swiftest of painters”) on his tombstone, and his contemporaries never ceased to marvel at the speed with which he worked. But this very speed also suggested the limitations of his art, for his strength lay not in reflection, composition, and construction but in an impulsive creativity that was nourished by his imagination and fancy, particularly in unheroic and idyllic scenes.
His art was especially popular in that period of great political upheavals, perhaps because his contemporaries, who in public life were the protagonists of embattled ideologies, yearned for beauty in man and in nature and for a peaceful refuge from the world’s turmoil. Both of Cranach’s sons were members of his studio. The elder, Hans Cranach, who died in 1537, left a few signed works that are indistinguishable in style from those of his father. Lucas Cranach the Younger (1515–86), whose part in the joint production of the studio became important from about 1545, continued to work in the family style long after his father’s death in 1553.
Martin Schongauer
The finest German engraver before Albrecht Dürer was the painter and printmaker Martin Schongauer, who was the son of Caspar Schongauer, a goldsmith of Augsburg. In 1465, Martin Schongauer registered at the University of Leipzig but apparently remained there only for a short time. It is not clear whether he was there as a student or as a visiting artist enjoying the university’s protection from interference by the local painters’ guild. No work of his has ever been discovered that could with certainty be dated earlier than 1469, and the wide distribution of his work did not get under way until the late 1470s. In 1469 his name is mentioned for the first time in the Colmar register of property.
The same date appears also on three of his early drawings, but these dates and signatures were added by Albrecht Dürer, who may have received them from Schongauer’s brothers. According to contemporary sources, Schongauer was a prolific painter whose panels were sought in many countries. Few paintings by his hand survive. Among these, the Madonna in a Rose Garden (1473), altarpiece of the Church of Saint-Martin in Colmar, ranks first in importance. This work combines monumentality with tenderness, approaching the manner of the great Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden, by whom Schongauer was profoundly influenced. Other paintings by Schongauer include two wings of the Orliac altar; six small panels among which the Nativity and the Holy Family are the most mature; and finally the murals of the Last Judgment in the cathedral of Breisach, probably his last work (uncovered in 1932). It is as an engraver that Schongauer stands without rival in northern Europe in his time. He was influenced by and may have studied with the master engraver who signed his work simply “E.S.” Schongauer’s engraved work, consisting of about 115 plates, all signed with his monogram, is a final, highly refined and sensitive manifestation of the late Gothic spirit. Technically he brought the art of engraving to maturity by expanding its range of contrasts and textures, thus introducing a painter’s viewpoint into an art that had been primarily the domain of the goldsmith.
The larger and more elaborate engravings, such as the Temptation of St. Anthony or the Death of the Virgin, belong to his earlier period. In his later years he preferred smaller plates, even for such subjects as the Passion of Christ, a set of 12 engravings. Some of his most eloquent plates are single figures, such as the Madonna in a Courtyard and St. Sebastian. Within the diversity of trends in German art in this period, Schongauer represents the most idealistic and aristocratic element, devoting his art mainly to Christian subjects and shunning the crude and often humorous realism of some of his fellow engravers. The grace of his work became proverbial even in his lifetime and gave rise to such names as “Hübsch [“charming”] Martin” and “Schön Martin” (“Bel Martino” in Italian), whereby the German adjective schön (“beautiful”) often became confused with the artist’s family name. In 1488 Schongauer left Colmar and moved to Breisach, in Baden, where he died.
The same date appears also on three of his early drawings, but these dates and signatures were added by Albrecht Dürer, who may have received them from Schongauer’s brothers. According to contemporary sources, Schongauer was a prolific painter whose panels were sought in many countries. Few paintings by his hand survive. Among these, the Madonna in a Rose Garden (1473), altarpiece of the Church of Saint-Martin in Colmar, ranks first in importance. This work combines monumentality with tenderness, approaching the manner of the great Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden, by whom Schongauer was profoundly influenced. Other paintings by Schongauer include two wings of the Orliac altar; six small panels among which the Nativity and the Holy Family are the most mature; and finally the murals of the Last Judgment in the cathedral of Breisach, probably his last work (uncovered in 1932). It is as an engraver that Schongauer stands without rival in northern Europe in his time. He was influenced by and may have studied with the master engraver who signed his work simply “E.S.” Schongauer’s engraved work, consisting of about 115 plates, all signed with his monogram, is a final, highly refined and sensitive manifestation of the late Gothic spirit. Technically he brought the art of engraving to maturity by expanding its range of contrasts and textures, thus introducing a painter’s viewpoint into an art that had been primarily the domain of the goldsmith.
The larger and more elaborate engravings, such as the Temptation of St. Anthony or the Death of the Virgin, belong to his earlier period. In his later years he preferred smaller plates, even for such subjects as the Passion of Christ, a set of 12 engravings. Some of his most eloquent plates are single figures, such as the Madonna in a Courtyard and St. Sebastian. Within the diversity of trends in German art in this period, Schongauer represents the most idealistic and aristocratic element, devoting his art mainly to Christian subjects and shunning the crude and often humorous realism of some of his fellow engravers. The grace of his work became proverbial even in his lifetime and gave rise to such names as “Hübsch [“charming”] Martin” and “Schön Martin” (“Bel Martino” in Italian), whereby the German adjective schön (“beautiful”) often became confused with the artist’s family name. In 1488 Schongauer left Colmar and moved to Breisach, in Baden, where he died.
Sandro Botticelli
Sandro Botticelli, creator of The Birth of Venus and Primavera, is one of the greatest painters of the Florentine Renaissance.
His works are often said to epitomize for modern viewers the spirit of the Renaissance. Botticelli was born Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi. The name by which he is best known was derived from that of his elder brother Giovanni, a pawnbroker who was called Botticello (“The Little Barrel”). As is often the case with Renaissance artists, most of the modern information about Botticelli’s life and character derives from Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, as supplemented and corrected from documents. Botticelli’s father was a tanner who apprenticed Sandro to a goldsmith after his schooling was finished. Because Sandro preferred painting, his father then placed him under Filippo Lippi, who was one of the most admired Florentine masters. Lippi’s painterly style, which was formed in the early Florentine Renaissance, was fundamental to Botticelli’s own artistic formation, and his influence is evident even in his pupil’s late works. Lippi taught Botticelli the techniques of panel painting and fresco and gave him an assured control of linear perspective. Stylistically, Botticelli acquired from Lippi a repertory of types and compositions, a certain graceful fancifulness in costuming, a linear sense of form, and a partiality to certain paler hues that is still visible even after Botticelli had developed his own strong and resonant colour schemes. After Lippi left Florence for Spoleto, Botticelli worked to improve the comparatively soft, frail figural style he had learned from his teacher. To this end he studied the sculptural style of Antonio Pollaiuolo and Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painters of the 1460s, and under their influence Botticelli produced figures of sculptural roundness and strength. He also replaced Lippi’s delicate approach with a robust and vigorous naturalism, shaped always by conceptions of ideal beauty.
Already by 1470 Botticelli was established in Florence as an independent master with his own workshop. Absorbed in his art, he never married, and he lived with his family. These transitions in Botticelli’s style can be seen in the small panels of Judith (The Return of Judith) and Holofernes (The Discovery of the Body of Holofernes), both c. 1470, and in his first dated work, Fortitude (1470). Botticelli’s art from that time shows a use of ochre in the shadowed areas of flesh tones that gives a brown warmth very different from Lippi’s pallor. The forms in his paintings are defined with a line that is at once incisive and flowing, and there is a growing ability to suggest the character and even the mood of the figures by action, pose, and facial expression. About 1478–81 Botticelli entered his artistic maturity; all tentativeness in his work disappeared and was replaced by a consummate mastery. He was able to integrate figure and setting into harmonious compositions and to draw the human form with a compelling vitality. He would later display unequaled skill at rendering narrative texts, whether biographies of saints or stories from Boccaccio’s Decameron or Dante’s Divine Comedy, into a pictorial form that is at once exact, economical, and eloquent. Botticelli worked in all the current genres of Florentine art. He painted altarpieces in fresco and on panel, tondi (round paintings), small panel pictures, and small devotional triptychs. His altarpieces include narrow vertical panels such as the St. Sebastian (1474); small oblong panels such as the famous Adoration of the Magi ( c. 1476) from the Church of Santa Maria Novella ; medium-sized altarpieces, of which the fi nest is the beautiful Bardi Altarpiece (1484–85); and large-scale works such as the St. Barnabas Altarpiece ( c. 1488) and the Coronation of the Virgin ( c. 1490). His early mastery of fresco is clearly visible in his St. Augustine (1480) in the Church of Ognissanti, in which the saint’s cogent energy and vigour express both intellectual power and spiritual devotion. Three of Botticelli’s fi nest religious frescoes (completed 1482) were part of the decorations of the Sistine Chapel undertaken by a team of Florentine and Umbrian artists who had been summoned to Rome in July 1481. The theological themes of the frescoes were chosen to illustrate papal supremacy over the church; Botticelli’s are remarkable for their brilliant fusion of sequences of symbolic episodes into unitary compositions.
Florentine tondi were often large, richly framed paintings, and Botticelli produced major works in this format, beginning with the Adoration of the Magi ( c. 1473) that he painted for Antonio Pucci. Before Botticelli, tondi had been conceived essentially as oblong scenes, but Botticelli suppressed all superfl uity of detail in them and became adept at harmonizing his fi gures with the circular form. His complete mastery of the tondo format is evident in two of his most beautiful paintings, The Madonna of the Magnificat (1482) and The Madonna of the Pomegranate (c. 1487). Botticelli also painted a few small oblong Madonnas, notably the Madonna of the Book (c. 1480), but he mostly left the painting of Madonnas and other devotional subjects to his workshop, which produced them in great numbers. In his art the Virgin Mary is always a tall, queenly figure wearing the conventional red robe and blue cloak, but enriched in his autograph works by sensitively rendered accessories. She often has an inner pensiveness of expression, the same inwardness of mood that is communicated by Botticelli’s saints. Botticelli is the earliest European artist whose paintings of secular historical subjects survive in some number and are equal or superior in importance to his religious paintings. Nevertheless, much of his secular work is lost; from a working life of some 40 years, only eight examples by him survive in an already well-established genre, the portrait. One of these, the portrait of a young man holding a medal of Cosimo de’ Medici (c. 1474), is especially significant because in it Botticelli copied the Flemish painter Hans Memling’s recently invented device of setting the figure before a landscape seen from a high vantage point. This is the earliest instance of the influence on Botticelli of contemporary Flemish landscape art, which is clearly visible in a number of his landscape settings. Perhaps it was Botticelli’s skill in portraiture that gained him the patronage of the Medici family, in particular of Lorenzo de’ Medici and his brother Giuliano, who then dominated Florence. Botticelli painted a portrait of Giuliano and posthumous portraits of his grandfather Cosimo and father Piero. Portraits of all four Medici appear as the Three Magi and an attendant figure in the Adoration of the Magi from Santa Maria Novella. Botticelli is also known to have painted (1475) for Giuliano a banner of Pallas trampling on the flames of love and Cupid bound to an olive tree. This work, though lost, is important as a key to Botticelli’s use of Classical mythology to illustrate the sentiment of medieval courtly love in his great mythological paintings. After Giuliano de’ Medici’s assassination in the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, it was Botticelli who painted the defamatory fresco of the hanged conspirators on a wall of the Palazzo Vecchio.
The frescoes were destroyed after the expulsion of the Medici in 1494. Lorenzo certainly always favoured Botticelli, as Vasari claims, but even more significant in the painter’s career was the lasting friendship and patronage of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, head of the junior Medici line and from 1494 an open opponent of the senior line. Tommaso Soderini, who secured for Botticelli in 1470 the commission for the Fortitude, and Antonio Pucci, for whom he painted his earliest surviving tondo, were both prominent Medicean partisans, as was Giovanni Tornabuoni, who about 1486–87 commissioned Botticelli’s most important surviving secular frescoes. Many of the commissions given to Botticelli by these rich patrons were linked to Florentine customs on the occasion of a marriage, which was by far the most important family ceremony of that time. A chamber was usually prepared for the newly married couple in the family palace of the groom, and paintings were mounted within it.
The themes of such paintings were either romantic, exalting love and lovers, or exemplary, depicting heroines of virtuous fame. Botticelli’s earliest known work of this kind was commissioned by Lorenzo de’ Medici for the marriage of Antonio Pucci’s son Giannozzo in 1483. The set of four panels—The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti—narrates a story from Boccaccio. Mythological figures had been used in earlier Renaissance secular art, but the complex culture of late Medicean Florence, which was simultaneously infused with the romantic sentiment of courtly love and with the humanist interest for Classical antiquity and its vanished artistic traditions, employed these mythological figures more fully and in more correctly antiquarian fashion. A new mythological language became current, inspired partly by Classical literature and sculpture and by descriptions of lost ancient paintings and partly by the Renaissance search for the full physical realization of the ideal human figure. Among the greatest examples of this novel fashion in secular painting are four of Botticelli’s most famous works: Primavera (c. 1477–82), Pallas and the Centaur (c. 1485), Venus and Mars (c. 1485), and The Birth of Venus (c. 1485). The Primavera, or Allegory of Spring, and The Birth of Venus were painted for the home of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici. All four of these panel paintings have been variously interpreted by modern scholarship. The figures certainly do not enact a known myth but rather are used allegorically to illustrate various aspects of love: in Primavera, its kindling and its fruition in marriage; in Pallas, the subjugation of male lust by female chastity; in Venus and Mars, a celebration of woman’s calm triumph after man’s sexual exhaustion; and in The Birth of Venus, the birth of love in the world. The Primavera and The Birth of Venus contain some of the most sensuously beautiful nudes and semi-nudes painted during the Renaissance. The four paintings’ settings, which are partly mythological—that of the Primavera is the Garden of the Hesperides—and partly symbolic, are pastoral and idyllic in sentiment. Botticelli’s frescoes from a chamber in the Villa Lemmi, celebrating the marriage of Lorenzo Tornabuoni and Giovanna degli Albizzi in 1486, also draw on Classical mythology for their subject matter. In these frescoes, real personages mingle with mythological fi gures: Venus, attended by her Graces, gives fl owers to Giovanna degli Albizzi, while Lorenzo Tornabuoni, who is called to a mercantile life, is brought before Prudentia and the Liberal Arts. The infl uence of the Renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti’s art theories is apparent in Botticelli’s Classical borrowings and his meticulous use of linear perspective. The work that best illustrates Botticelli’s interest in reviving the glories of Classical antiquity is the Calumny of Apelles ( c. 1495), a subject recommended by Alberti, who took it from a description of a work by the ancient Greek painter Apelles. Botticelli also drew inspiration from Classical art more directly. While in Rome in 1481–82, for example, he reproduced that city’s Arch of Constantine in one of his Sistine frescoes. Three of the fi gures in Primavera are taken from a Classical statue of the Three Graces, while the fi gure of Venus in The Birth of Venus derives from an ancient statue of Venus Pudica . An incipient mannerism appears in Botticelli’s late works of the 1480s and in works such as the magnifi cent Cestello Annunciation (1490) and the small Pietà (late 1490s) now in the Poldi-Pezzoli Museum. After the early 1490s his style changed markedly. The paintings are smaller in scale, the figures in them are now slender to the point of idiosyncrasy, and the painter, by accentuating their gestures and expressions, concentrates attention on their passionate urgency of action. This mysterious retreat from the idealizing naturalism of the 1480s perhaps resulted from Botticelli’s involvement with the fiery reformist preacher Girolamo Savonarola in the 1490s. The years from 1494 were dramatic ones in Florence. The city’s Medici rulers fell, and a republican government under Savonarola’s dominance was installed. Savonarola was an ascetic idealist who attacked the church’s corruption and prophesied its future renewal. According to Vasari, Botticelli was a devoted follower of Savonarola, even after the friar was executed in 1498. The spiritual tensions of these years are reflected in two religious paintings, the apocalyptic Mystic Crucifixion (1497) and the Mystic Nativity (1501), which expresses Botticelli’s own faith in the renewal of the church. The Tragedy of Lucretia (c. 1499) and The Story of Virginia Romana (1499) appear to condemn the Medici’s tyranny and to celebrate republicanism. Botticelli, according to Vasari, took an enduring interest in the study and interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He made some designs to illustrate the first printed edition of 1481 and worked intermittently over the following years on an uncompleted set of large drawings that matched each canto with a complete visual commentary. He was also much in demand by engravers, embroiderers, and tapestry workers as a designer; among his few surviving drawings are some that can be associated with these techniques. Although Vasari describes Botticelli as impoverished and disabled in his last years, other evidence suggests that he and his family remained fairly prosperous. He received commissions throughout the 1490s and was still paying his dues, if belatedly, to the Company of Saint Luke, the Florentine painters’ guild, in 1505. But the absence of any further commissions and the tentativeness of the very last Dante drawings suggest that he was perhaps overtaken by ill health. Upon his death in 1510 he was buried in the Church of Ognissanti. About 50 paintings survive that are either wholly or partly from his own hand. The Uffizi Gallery’s magnificent collection of his works includes many of his masterpieces.
His works are often said to epitomize for modern viewers the spirit of the Renaissance. Botticelli was born Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi. The name by which he is best known was derived from that of his elder brother Giovanni, a pawnbroker who was called Botticello (“The Little Barrel”). As is often the case with Renaissance artists, most of the modern information about Botticelli’s life and character derives from Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, as supplemented and corrected from documents. Botticelli’s father was a tanner who apprenticed Sandro to a goldsmith after his schooling was finished. Because Sandro preferred painting, his father then placed him under Filippo Lippi, who was one of the most admired Florentine masters. Lippi’s painterly style, which was formed in the early Florentine Renaissance, was fundamental to Botticelli’s own artistic formation, and his influence is evident even in his pupil’s late works. Lippi taught Botticelli the techniques of panel painting and fresco and gave him an assured control of linear perspective. Stylistically, Botticelli acquired from Lippi a repertory of types and compositions, a certain graceful fancifulness in costuming, a linear sense of form, and a partiality to certain paler hues that is still visible even after Botticelli had developed his own strong and resonant colour schemes. After Lippi left Florence for Spoleto, Botticelli worked to improve the comparatively soft, frail figural style he had learned from his teacher. To this end he studied the sculptural style of Antonio Pollaiuolo and Andrea del Verrocchio, the leading Florentine painters of the 1460s, and under their influence Botticelli produced figures of sculptural roundness and strength. He also replaced Lippi’s delicate approach with a robust and vigorous naturalism, shaped always by conceptions of ideal beauty.
Already by 1470 Botticelli was established in Florence as an independent master with his own workshop. Absorbed in his art, he never married, and he lived with his family. These transitions in Botticelli’s style can be seen in the small panels of Judith (The Return of Judith) and Holofernes (The Discovery of the Body of Holofernes), both c. 1470, and in his first dated work, Fortitude (1470). Botticelli’s art from that time shows a use of ochre in the shadowed areas of flesh tones that gives a brown warmth very different from Lippi’s pallor. The forms in his paintings are defined with a line that is at once incisive and flowing, and there is a growing ability to suggest the character and even the mood of the figures by action, pose, and facial expression. About 1478–81 Botticelli entered his artistic maturity; all tentativeness in his work disappeared and was replaced by a consummate mastery. He was able to integrate figure and setting into harmonious compositions and to draw the human form with a compelling vitality. He would later display unequaled skill at rendering narrative texts, whether biographies of saints or stories from Boccaccio’s Decameron or Dante’s Divine Comedy, into a pictorial form that is at once exact, economical, and eloquent. Botticelli worked in all the current genres of Florentine art. He painted altarpieces in fresco and on panel, tondi (round paintings), small panel pictures, and small devotional triptychs. His altarpieces include narrow vertical panels such as the St. Sebastian (1474); small oblong panels such as the famous Adoration of the Magi ( c. 1476) from the Church of Santa Maria Novella ; medium-sized altarpieces, of which the fi nest is the beautiful Bardi Altarpiece (1484–85); and large-scale works such as the St. Barnabas Altarpiece ( c. 1488) and the Coronation of the Virgin ( c. 1490). His early mastery of fresco is clearly visible in his St. Augustine (1480) in the Church of Ognissanti, in which the saint’s cogent energy and vigour express both intellectual power and spiritual devotion. Three of Botticelli’s fi nest religious frescoes (completed 1482) were part of the decorations of the Sistine Chapel undertaken by a team of Florentine and Umbrian artists who had been summoned to Rome in July 1481. The theological themes of the frescoes were chosen to illustrate papal supremacy over the church; Botticelli’s are remarkable for their brilliant fusion of sequences of symbolic episodes into unitary compositions.
Florentine tondi were often large, richly framed paintings, and Botticelli produced major works in this format, beginning with the Adoration of the Magi ( c. 1473) that he painted for Antonio Pucci. Before Botticelli, tondi had been conceived essentially as oblong scenes, but Botticelli suppressed all superfl uity of detail in them and became adept at harmonizing his fi gures with the circular form. His complete mastery of the tondo format is evident in two of his most beautiful paintings, The Madonna of the Magnificat (1482) and The Madonna of the Pomegranate (c. 1487). Botticelli also painted a few small oblong Madonnas, notably the Madonna of the Book (c. 1480), but he mostly left the painting of Madonnas and other devotional subjects to his workshop, which produced them in great numbers. In his art the Virgin Mary is always a tall, queenly figure wearing the conventional red robe and blue cloak, but enriched in his autograph works by sensitively rendered accessories. She often has an inner pensiveness of expression, the same inwardness of mood that is communicated by Botticelli’s saints. Botticelli is the earliest European artist whose paintings of secular historical subjects survive in some number and are equal or superior in importance to his religious paintings. Nevertheless, much of his secular work is lost; from a working life of some 40 years, only eight examples by him survive in an already well-established genre, the portrait. One of these, the portrait of a young man holding a medal of Cosimo de’ Medici (c. 1474), is especially significant because in it Botticelli copied the Flemish painter Hans Memling’s recently invented device of setting the figure before a landscape seen from a high vantage point. This is the earliest instance of the influence on Botticelli of contemporary Flemish landscape art, which is clearly visible in a number of his landscape settings. Perhaps it was Botticelli’s skill in portraiture that gained him the patronage of the Medici family, in particular of Lorenzo de’ Medici and his brother Giuliano, who then dominated Florence. Botticelli painted a portrait of Giuliano and posthumous portraits of his grandfather Cosimo and father Piero. Portraits of all four Medici appear as the Three Magi and an attendant figure in the Adoration of the Magi from Santa Maria Novella. Botticelli is also known to have painted (1475) for Giuliano a banner of Pallas trampling on the flames of love and Cupid bound to an olive tree. This work, though lost, is important as a key to Botticelli’s use of Classical mythology to illustrate the sentiment of medieval courtly love in his great mythological paintings. After Giuliano de’ Medici’s assassination in the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, it was Botticelli who painted the defamatory fresco of the hanged conspirators on a wall of the Palazzo Vecchio.
The frescoes were destroyed after the expulsion of the Medici in 1494. Lorenzo certainly always favoured Botticelli, as Vasari claims, but even more significant in the painter’s career was the lasting friendship and patronage of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, head of the junior Medici line and from 1494 an open opponent of the senior line. Tommaso Soderini, who secured for Botticelli in 1470 the commission for the Fortitude, and Antonio Pucci, for whom he painted his earliest surviving tondo, were both prominent Medicean partisans, as was Giovanni Tornabuoni, who about 1486–87 commissioned Botticelli’s most important surviving secular frescoes. Many of the commissions given to Botticelli by these rich patrons were linked to Florentine customs on the occasion of a marriage, which was by far the most important family ceremony of that time. A chamber was usually prepared for the newly married couple in the family palace of the groom, and paintings were mounted within it.
The themes of such paintings were either romantic, exalting love and lovers, or exemplary, depicting heroines of virtuous fame. Botticelli’s earliest known work of this kind was commissioned by Lorenzo de’ Medici for the marriage of Antonio Pucci’s son Giannozzo in 1483. The set of four panels—The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti—narrates a story from Boccaccio. Mythological figures had been used in earlier Renaissance secular art, but the complex culture of late Medicean Florence, which was simultaneously infused with the romantic sentiment of courtly love and with the humanist interest for Classical antiquity and its vanished artistic traditions, employed these mythological figures more fully and in more correctly antiquarian fashion. A new mythological language became current, inspired partly by Classical literature and sculpture and by descriptions of lost ancient paintings and partly by the Renaissance search for the full physical realization of the ideal human figure. Among the greatest examples of this novel fashion in secular painting are four of Botticelli’s most famous works: Primavera (c. 1477–82), Pallas and the Centaur (c. 1485), Venus and Mars (c. 1485), and The Birth of Venus (c. 1485). The Primavera, or Allegory of Spring, and The Birth of Venus were painted for the home of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici. All four of these panel paintings have been variously interpreted by modern scholarship. The figures certainly do not enact a known myth but rather are used allegorically to illustrate various aspects of love: in Primavera, its kindling and its fruition in marriage; in Pallas, the subjugation of male lust by female chastity; in Venus and Mars, a celebration of woman’s calm triumph after man’s sexual exhaustion; and in The Birth of Venus, the birth of love in the world. The Primavera and The Birth of Venus contain some of the most sensuously beautiful nudes and semi-nudes painted during the Renaissance. The four paintings’ settings, which are partly mythological—that of the Primavera is the Garden of the Hesperides—and partly symbolic, are pastoral and idyllic in sentiment. Botticelli’s frescoes from a chamber in the Villa Lemmi, celebrating the marriage of Lorenzo Tornabuoni and Giovanna degli Albizzi in 1486, also draw on Classical mythology for their subject matter. In these frescoes, real personages mingle with mythological fi gures: Venus, attended by her Graces, gives fl owers to Giovanna degli Albizzi, while Lorenzo Tornabuoni, who is called to a mercantile life, is brought before Prudentia and the Liberal Arts. The infl uence of the Renaissance humanist Leon Battista Alberti’s art theories is apparent in Botticelli’s Classical borrowings and his meticulous use of linear perspective. The work that best illustrates Botticelli’s interest in reviving the glories of Classical antiquity is the Calumny of Apelles ( c. 1495), a subject recommended by Alberti, who took it from a description of a work by the ancient Greek painter Apelles. Botticelli also drew inspiration from Classical art more directly. While in Rome in 1481–82, for example, he reproduced that city’s Arch of Constantine in one of his Sistine frescoes. Three of the fi gures in Primavera are taken from a Classical statue of the Three Graces, while the fi gure of Venus in The Birth of Venus derives from an ancient statue of Venus Pudica . An incipient mannerism appears in Botticelli’s late works of the 1480s and in works such as the magnifi cent Cestello Annunciation (1490) and the small Pietà (late 1490s) now in the Poldi-Pezzoli Museum. After the early 1490s his style changed markedly. The paintings are smaller in scale, the figures in them are now slender to the point of idiosyncrasy, and the painter, by accentuating their gestures and expressions, concentrates attention on their passionate urgency of action. This mysterious retreat from the idealizing naturalism of the 1480s perhaps resulted from Botticelli’s involvement with the fiery reformist preacher Girolamo Savonarola in the 1490s. The years from 1494 were dramatic ones in Florence. The city’s Medici rulers fell, and a republican government under Savonarola’s dominance was installed. Savonarola was an ascetic idealist who attacked the church’s corruption and prophesied its future renewal. According to Vasari, Botticelli was a devoted follower of Savonarola, even after the friar was executed in 1498. The spiritual tensions of these years are reflected in two religious paintings, the apocalyptic Mystic Crucifixion (1497) and the Mystic Nativity (1501), which expresses Botticelli’s own faith in the renewal of the church. The Tragedy of Lucretia (c. 1499) and The Story of Virginia Romana (1499) appear to condemn the Medici’s tyranny and to celebrate republicanism. Botticelli, according to Vasari, took an enduring interest in the study and interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He made some designs to illustrate the first printed edition of 1481 and worked intermittently over the following years on an uncompleted set of large drawings that matched each canto with a complete visual commentary. He was also much in demand by engravers, embroiderers, and tapestry workers as a designer; among his few surviving drawings are some that can be associated with these techniques. Although Vasari describes Botticelli as impoverished and disabled in his last years, other evidence suggests that he and his family remained fairly prosperous. He received commissions throughout the 1490s and was still paying his dues, if belatedly, to the Company of Saint Luke, the Florentine painters’ guild, in 1505. But the absence of any further commissions and the tentativeness of the very last Dante drawings suggest that he was perhaps overtaken by ill health. Upon his death in 1510 he was buried in the Church of Ognissanti. About 50 paintings survive that are either wholly or partly from his own hand. The Uffizi Gallery’s magnificent collection of his works includes many of his masterpieces.
Jean Fouquet
Jean Fouquet was a preeminent French painter of the 15th century whose work consistently displays clear, dispassionate observation rendered with intricate delicacy and alternates accurate perspective with a flat, non-illusionistic sense of space. Little is known of Fouquet’s early life, but his youthful work suggests that he was trained in Paris under an artist (or group of artists) known as the Bedford Master (or Master of the Bedford Hours) for his work illuminating a Book of Hours for the duke of Bedford. Fouquet’s portrait of Charles VII (c. 1447), though a panel painting, displays the use of brittle, incisive line characteristic of miniature painting. This work must have helped to establish his international reputation for, before 1447, he executed in Rome the portrait of Pope Eugenius IV.
While in Italy he absorbed the progress that such painters as Masaccio, Fra Angelico, and Piero della Francesca had made in the handling of central perspective and foreshortening and in the rendering of volume. Upon his return to Tours, Fouquet created a new style, combining the experiments of Italian painting with the exquisite precision of characterization and detail of Flemish art. For the royal secretary and lord treasurer, Étienne Chevalier, he executed between 1450 and 1460 his most famous works: a large Book of Hours with about 60 full-page miniatures, 40 of which are among the great treasures of the château of Chantilly; and the diptych from Notre Dame at Melun (c. 1450) with Chevalier’s portrait on one panel and a Madonna with the features of Agnès Sorel, the king’s mistress, on the other. Also to this period of the reign of Charles VII belong the two richly illuminated manuscripts of a French translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (“On the Fates of Famous Men”) and De claris mulieribus (“On Famous Women”), Cas des nobles hommes et femmes malheureux (1458), and a copy of the Grandes Chroniques de France; and finally, the large altarpiece of the Pietà discovered in the church at Nouans, his only monumental painting.
In 1469 King Louis XI founded the Order of St. Michael, and Fouquet illuminated the statutes of the order. In 1474 he worked with the sculptor Michel Colombe on the design of the king’s tomb and in the following year received the official title of royal painter. About the same time he completed the illustration of two volumes of a French translation of Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews, in which he broadened the range of miniature painting to include vast panoramas of architecture and landscape, making brilliant use of aerial perspective and colour tonality to achieve compositional unity.
While in Italy he absorbed the progress that such painters as Masaccio, Fra Angelico, and Piero della Francesca had made in the handling of central perspective and foreshortening and in the rendering of volume. Upon his return to Tours, Fouquet created a new style, combining the experiments of Italian painting with the exquisite precision of characterization and detail of Flemish art. For the royal secretary and lord treasurer, Étienne Chevalier, he executed between 1450 and 1460 his most famous works: a large Book of Hours with about 60 full-page miniatures, 40 of which are among the great treasures of the château of Chantilly; and the diptych from Notre Dame at Melun (c. 1450) with Chevalier’s portrait on one panel and a Madonna with the features of Agnès Sorel, the king’s mistress, on the other. Also to this period of the reign of Charles VII belong the two richly illuminated manuscripts of a French translation of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (“On the Fates of Famous Men”) and De claris mulieribus (“On Famous Women”), Cas des nobles hommes et femmes malheureux (1458), and a copy of the Grandes Chroniques de France; and finally, the large altarpiece of the Pietà discovered in the church at Nouans, his only monumental painting.
In 1469 King Louis XI founded the Order of St. Michael, and Fouquet illuminated the statutes of the order. In 1474 he worked with the sculptor Michel Colombe on the design of the king’s tomb and in the following year received the official title of royal painter. About the same time he completed the illustration of two volumes of a French translation of Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews, in which he broadened the range of miniature painting to include vast panoramas of architecture and landscape, making brilliant use of aerial perspective and colour tonality to achieve compositional unity.
Michelangelo
The influence of Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet Michelangelo on the development of Western art is unparalleled. Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist in his lifetime, and ever since lifetime was that his career was more fully documented than that of any artist of the time or earlier. He was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive—in fact, there were two rival biographies. The first was the final chapter in the series of artists’ lives (1550) by the painter and architect Giorgio Vasari. It was the only chapter on a living artist and explicitly presented Michelangelo’s works as the culminating perfection of art, surpassing the efforts of all those before him. Despite such an encomium, Michelangelo was not entirely pleased and arranged for his assistant Ascanio Condivi to write a brief separate book (1553); probably based on the artist’s own spoken comments, this account shows him as he wished to appear. After Michelangelo’s death, Vasari in a second edition (1568) offered a rebuttal. While scholars have often preferred the authority of Condivi, Vasari’s lively writing, the importance of his book as a whole, and its frequent reprinting in many languages have made it the most usual basis of popular ideas on Michelangelo and other Renaissance artists. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti was born to a family that had for several generations belonged to minor nobility in Florence but had, by the time the artist was born, lost its patrimony and status. Nevertheless, it was something of a downward social step to become an artist, and Michelangelo became an apprentice relatively late, at 13, perhaps after overcoming his father’s objections. He was apprenticed to the city’s most prominent painter, Domenico Ghirlandaio, for a three-year term, but he left after one year, having (Condivi recounts) nothing more to learn. Several drawings, copies of figures by Ghirlandaio and older great painters of Florence, Giotto and Masaccio, survive from this stage; such copying was standard for apprentices, but few examples are known to survive. Obviously talented, he was taken under the wing of the ruler of the city, Lorenzo de’ Medici, known as the Magnificent. This good fortune gave him access not only to leading poets and intellectuals but to the Medici art collection. The bronze sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni, a Medici friend who was in charge of the collection, was the nearest he had to a teacher of sculpture, but Michelangelo did not follow his medium or in any major way his approach. Still, one of the two marble works that survive from the artist’s first years is a variation on the composition of an ancient Roman sarcophagus, and Bertoldo had produced a similar one in bronze. This lively and powerful composition is the Battle of the Centaurs (c. 1492). Florence was at this time regarded as the leading centre of art, producing the best painters and sculptors in Europe, but many of the leading Florentine-born artists, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Leonardo’s teacher, Andrea del Verrocchio, had moved away for better opportunities in other cities. The Medici were overthrown in 1494, and even before the end of the political turmoil Michelangelo had left. In Bologna he was hired to carve the last small figures required to complete a grand project, the tomb and shrine of St. Dominic (1494–95). The three marble figures are original and expressive. His first surviving large statue was the Bacchus, produced in Rome (1496–97) following a brief return to Florence. It relies on ancient Roman nude figures as a point of departure, but it is much more mobile and more complex in outline. The conscious instability evokes the god of wine and Dionysian revels with extraordinary virtuosity. Made for a garden, it is also unique among Michelangelo’s works in calling for observation from all sides rather than primarily from the front. The Bacchus led at once to the commission (1498) for the Pietà, now in St. Peter’s Basilica. The name refers not (as is often presumed) to this specific work but to a common traditional type of devotional image, this work being today the most famous example. Extracted from narrative scenes of the lamentation after Christ’s death, the concentrated group of two is designed to evoke the observer’s repentant prayers for sins that required Christ’s sacrificial death.
The patron was a French cardinal, and the type was earlier more common in northern Europe than in Italy. The complex problem for the designer was to extract two figures from one marble block, an unusual undertaking in all periods. Michelangelo treated the group as one dense and compact mass as before so that it has an imposing impact, yet he underlined the many contrasts present—of male and female, vertical and horizontal, clothed and naked, dead and alive—to clarify the two components. The artist’s prominence, established by this work, was reinforced at once by the commission (1501) of the David for the cathedral of Florence. For this huge statue, an exceptionally large commission in that city, Michelangelo reused a block left unfinished about 40 years before. The modeling is especially close to the formulas of Classical antiquity, with a simplified geometry suitable to the huge scale yet with a mild assertion of organic life in its asymmetry. It has continued to serve as the prime statement of the Renaissance ideal of perfect humanity. On the side Michelangelo produced in the same years (1501–04) several Madonnas for private houses, the staple of artists’ work at the time. These include one small statue, two circular reliefs that are similar to paintings in suggesting varied levels of spatial depth, and the artist’s only easel painting. While the statue (Madonna and Child) is blocky and immobile, the painting (Holy Family) and one of the reliefs (Madonna and Child with the Infant St. John) are full of motion; they show arms and legs of figures interweaving in actions that imply movement through time. The forms carry symbolic references to Christ’s future death, common in images of the Christ Child at the time. They also betray the artist’s fascination with the work of Leonardo. Michelangelo regularly denied that anyone influenced him, and his statements have usually been accepted without demur. But Leonardo’s return to Florence in 1500 after nearly 20 years was exciting to younger artists there, and late 20th-century scholars generally agreed that Michelangelo was among those affected. Leonardo’s works were probably the most powerful and lasting outside influence to modify his work, and he was able to blend this artist’s ability to show momentary processes with his own to show weight and strength. The resulting images, of massive bodies in forceful action, are those special creations that constitute the larger part of his most admired major works. The Holy Family, probably commissioned for the birth of the first child of Agnolo and Maddalena Doni, was a particularly innovative painting that would later be influential in the development of early Florentine Mannerism. Its spiraling composition and cold, brilliant colour scheme underline the sculptural intensity of the figures and create a dynamic and expressive effect. After the success of the David in 1504, Michelangelo’s work consisted almost entirely of vast projects. He was attracted to these ambitious tasks while at the same time rejecting the use of assistants, so that most of these projects were impractical and remained unfinished. In 1504 he agreed to paint a huge fresco for the Sala del Gran Consiglio of the Florence city hall to form a pair with another just begun by Leonardo da Vinci. Both murals recorded military victories by the city (Michelangelo’s was the Battle of Cascina), but each also gave testimony to the special skills of the city’s much vaunted artists. Leonardo’s design shows galloping horses, Michelangelo’s active nudes—soldiers stop swimming and climb out of a river to answer an alarm. Both works survive only in copies and partial preparatory sketches. In 1505 Michelangelo began work on a planned set of 12 marble Apostles for the Florence Cathedral, of which only one, the St. Matthew, was even begun. Its writhing ecstatic motion shows the full blend of Leonardo’s fluid organic movement with Michelangelo’s own monumental power. This is also the first of his unfinished works to fascinate later observers. His figures seem to suggest that they are fighting to emerge from the stone. This would imply that their incomplete state was intentional, yet he undoubtedly did want to complete all of the statues. He did, however, write a sonnet about how hard it is for the sculptor to bring the perfect figure out of the block in which it is potentially present. Thus, even if the works remained unfinished due only to lack of time and other external reasons, their condition, nonetheless, reflects the artist’s intense feeling of the stresses inherent in the creative process. Pope Julius II’s call to Michelangelo to come to Rome spelled an end to both of these Florentine projects. The pope sought a tomb for which Michelangelo was to carve 40 large statues. Recent tombs had been increasingly grand, including those of two popes by the Florentine sculptor Antonio Pollaiuolo, those of the doges of Venice, and the one then in work for Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I. Pope Julius had an ambitious imagination, parallel to Michelangelo’s, but because of other projects, such as the new building of St. Peter’s and his military campaigns, he evidently became disturbed soon by the cost. Michelangelo believed that Bramante, the equally prestigious architect at St. Peter’s, had influenced the pope to cut off his funds. Michelangelo left Rome, but the pope brought pressure on the city authorities of Florence to send him back. He was put to work on a colossal bronze statue of the pope in his newly conquered city of Bologna, which the citizens pulled down soon after when they drove out the papal army. Then he began work on a less expensive project— painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508–12). The Sistine Chapel had great symbolic meaning for the papacy as the chief consecrated space in the Vatican, used for great ceremonies such as electing and inaugurating new popes. It already contained distinguished wall paintings, and Michelangelo was asked to add works for the relatively unimportant ceiling. The Twelve Apostles was planned as the theme—ceilings normally showed only individual figures, not dramatic scenes. Traces of this project are seen in the 12 large figures that Michelangelo produced: seven prophets and five sibyls, or female prophets found in Classical myths. The inclusion of female figures was very unusual, though not totally unprecedented. Michelangelo placed these figures around the edges of the ceiling and filled the central spine of the long curved surface with nine scenes from Genesis: three of them depicting the Creation of the World, three the stories of Adam and Eve, and three the stories of Noah. These are naturally followed, below the prophets and sibyls, by small figures of the 40 generations of Christ’s ancestors, starting with Abraham. The vast project was completed in less than four years; there was an interruption perhaps of a year in 1510–11 when no payment was made. Michelangelo began by painting figures and scenes that allowed him to reuse devices from his earlier works, such as the Pietà. These first figures are relatively stable, and the scenes are on a relatively small scale. As he proceeded, he quickly grew in confidence. Indeed, recent investigations of the technical processes used show that he worked more and more rapidly, reducing and finally eliminating such preparatory helps as complete drawings and incisions on the plaster surface. The same growing boldness appears in the free, complex movements of the figures and in their complex expressiveness. While remaining always imposing and monumental, they are more and more imbued with suggestions of stress and grief. He got about halfway through before his work was interrupted. When he painted the second half, he seemed to repeat the same evolution from quiet stability to intricacy and stress. Thus, Michelangelo worked his way from the quietly monumental and harmonious scene of the creation of Adam to the acute, twisted pressures of the prophet Jonah. Yet, in this second phase he shows greater inward expressiveness, giving a more meditative restraint to the earlier pure physical mass. The Medici Chapel - The immediate occasion for the chapel was the deaths of the two young family heirs (named Giuliano and Lorenzo after their forebears) in 1516 and 1519. Up until 1527, Michelangelo gave his chief attention to the marble interior of this chapel, both the very original wall design and the carved figures on the tombs. The latter are an extension, in organic form, of the dynamic shapes of the wall details. The result is the fullest existing presentation of Michelangelo’s intentions. Windows, cornices, and the like have strange proportions and thicknesses, suggesting an irrational, willful revision of traditional classical forms in buildings. Abutting these active surfaces, the two tombs on opposite walls of the room are also very original, starting with their curved tops. A male and a female figure sit on each of these curved bases; these are personifications of Day and Night on one tomb, according to the artist’s own statement, and, on the other, Dawn and Dusk, according to early reports. Such types had never appeared on tombs before, and they refer, again according to Michelangelo, to the inevitable movement of time, which is circular and leads to death. The figures are among the artist’s most famous and accomplished creations. The immensely massive Day and Dusk are relatively tranquil in their mountainous grandeur, though Day perhaps implies inner fire. Both female figures have the tall, slim proportions and small feet considered beautiful at the time, but otherwise they form a contrast: Dawn, a virginal figure, strains upward along her curve as if trying to emerge into life; Night is asleep, but in a posture suggesting stressful dreams. These four figures are naturally noticed more immediately than the effigies of the two Medici buried there, placed higher and farther back in wall niches. In his late years Michelangelo was less involved with sculpture and, along with painting and poetry, more with architecture, an area that did not require much physical labour.
He was sought after to design imposing monuments for the new and modern Rome that were to enunciate architecturally the city’s position as a world centre. Two of these monuments, the Capitoline Square and the dome of St. Peter’s, are still among the city’s most notable visual images. He did not finish either, but after his death both were continued in ways that probably did not depart much from his plans. While remaining head architect of St. Peter’s, Michelangelo worked on many smaller building projects in Rome. He completed the main unit of the Palazzo Farnese, the residence of Pope Paul III’s family. The top story wall of its courtyard is a rare example of an architectural unit fully finished under his eye. His last paintings were the frescoes of the Pauline Chapel in the Vatican, which still is basically inaccessible to the public. Unlike his other frescoes, they are in the position normal for narrative painting, on a wall and not exceptionally high up. They consistently treat spatial depth and narrative drama in a way that brings them closer to other paintings of the age than to the artist’s previous paintings. Among the artists Michelangelo came to know and admire was Titian, who visited Rome during the period of this project (1542–50), and the frescoes seem to betray his influence in colour. There are only two late sculptures, which Michelangelo did for himself, both presenting the dead Christ being mourned, neither one finished. Assessment and Influence - For posterity, Michelangelo has always remained one of the small group of the most exalted artists who have been felt to express, like Shakespeare or Beethoven, the tragic experience of humanity with the greatest depth and universal scope. In contrast to the great fame of the artist’s works, their visual influence on later art is relatively limited. This cannot be explained by hesitation to imitate an art simply because it appeared so great, for artists such as Raphael were considered equally great but were used as sources to a much greater degree. It may be instead that the particular type of expression associated with Michelangelo, of an almost cosmic grandeur, was inhibiting. The limited influence of his work includes a few cases of almost total dependence.
The most talented artist who worked in this way was Daniele da Volterra. Otherwise, Michelangelo was treated as a model for specific limited aspects of his work. In the 17th century, he was regarded as supreme in anatomical drawing but less praised for broader elements of his art. While the Mannerists utilized the spatial compression seen in a few of his works, and later the serpentine poses of his sculpture of Victory, the 19th-century master Auguste Rodin exploited the effect of unfinished marble blocks. Certain 17th-century masters of the Baroque perhaps show the fullest reference to him, but in ways that have been transformed to exclude any literal similarity. Besides Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the painter Peter Paul Rubens may best show the usability of Michelangelo’s creations for a later great artist.
The patron was a French cardinal, and the type was earlier more common in northern Europe than in Italy. The complex problem for the designer was to extract two figures from one marble block, an unusual undertaking in all periods. Michelangelo treated the group as one dense and compact mass as before so that it has an imposing impact, yet he underlined the many contrasts present—of male and female, vertical and horizontal, clothed and naked, dead and alive—to clarify the two components. The artist’s prominence, established by this work, was reinforced at once by the commission (1501) of the David for the cathedral of Florence. For this huge statue, an exceptionally large commission in that city, Michelangelo reused a block left unfinished about 40 years before. The modeling is especially close to the formulas of Classical antiquity, with a simplified geometry suitable to the huge scale yet with a mild assertion of organic life in its asymmetry. It has continued to serve as the prime statement of the Renaissance ideal of perfect humanity. On the side Michelangelo produced in the same years (1501–04) several Madonnas for private houses, the staple of artists’ work at the time. These include one small statue, two circular reliefs that are similar to paintings in suggesting varied levels of spatial depth, and the artist’s only easel painting. While the statue (Madonna and Child) is blocky and immobile, the painting (Holy Family) and one of the reliefs (Madonna and Child with the Infant St. John) are full of motion; they show arms and legs of figures interweaving in actions that imply movement through time. The forms carry symbolic references to Christ’s future death, common in images of the Christ Child at the time. They also betray the artist’s fascination with the work of Leonardo. Michelangelo regularly denied that anyone influenced him, and his statements have usually been accepted without demur. But Leonardo’s return to Florence in 1500 after nearly 20 years was exciting to younger artists there, and late 20th-century scholars generally agreed that Michelangelo was among those affected. Leonardo’s works were probably the most powerful and lasting outside influence to modify his work, and he was able to blend this artist’s ability to show momentary processes with his own to show weight and strength. The resulting images, of massive bodies in forceful action, are those special creations that constitute the larger part of his most admired major works. The Holy Family, probably commissioned for the birth of the first child of Agnolo and Maddalena Doni, was a particularly innovative painting that would later be influential in the development of early Florentine Mannerism. Its spiraling composition and cold, brilliant colour scheme underline the sculptural intensity of the figures and create a dynamic and expressive effect. After the success of the David in 1504, Michelangelo’s work consisted almost entirely of vast projects. He was attracted to these ambitious tasks while at the same time rejecting the use of assistants, so that most of these projects were impractical and remained unfinished. In 1504 he agreed to paint a huge fresco for the Sala del Gran Consiglio of the Florence city hall to form a pair with another just begun by Leonardo da Vinci. Both murals recorded military victories by the city (Michelangelo’s was the Battle of Cascina), but each also gave testimony to the special skills of the city’s much vaunted artists. Leonardo’s design shows galloping horses, Michelangelo’s active nudes—soldiers stop swimming and climb out of a river to answer an alarm. Both works survive only in copies and partial preparatory sketches. In 1505 Michelangelo began work on a planned set of 12 marble Apostles for the Florence Cathedral, of which only one, the St. Matthew, was even begun. Its writhing ecstatic motion shows the full blend of Leonardo’s fluid organic movement with Michelangelo’s own monumental power. This is also the first of his unfinished works to fascinate later observers. His figures seem to suggest that they are fighting to emerge from the stone. This would imply that their incomplete state was intentional, yet he undoubtedly did want to complete all of the statues. He did, however, write a sonnet about how hard it is for the sculptor to bring the perfect figure out of the block in which it is potentially present. Thus, even if the works remained unfinished due only to lack of time and other external reasons, their condition, nonetheless, reflects the artist’s intense feeling of the stresses inherent in the creative process. Pope Julius II’s call to Michelangelo to come to Rome spelled an end to both of these Florentine projects. The pope sought a tomb for which Michelangelo was to carve 40 large statues. Recent tombs had been increasingly grand, including those of two popes by the Florentine sculptor Antonio Pollaiuolo, those of the doges of Venice, and the one then in work for Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I. Pope Julius had an ambitious imagination, parallel to Michelangelo’s, but because of other projects, such as the new building of St. Peter’s and his military campaigns, he evidently became disturbed soon by the cost. Michelangelo believed that Bramante, the equally prestigious architect at St. Peter’s, had influenced the pope to cut off his funds. Michelangelo left Rome, but the pope brought pressure on the city authorities of Florence to send him back. He was put to work on a colossal bronze statue of the pope in his newly conquered city of Bologna, which the citizens pulled down soon after when they drove out the papal army. Then he began work on a less expensive project— painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508–12). The Sistine Chapel had great symbolic meaning for the papacy as the chief consecrated space in the Vatican, used for great ceremonies such as electing and inaugurating new popes. It already contained distinguished wall paintings, and Michelangelo was asked to add works for the relatively unimportant ceiling. The Twelve Apostles was planned as the theme—ceilings normally showed only individual figures, not dramatic scenes. Traces of this project are seen in the 12 large figures that Michelangelo produced: seven prophets and five sibyls, or female prophets found in Classical myths. The inclusion of female figures was very unusual, though not totally unprecedented. Michelangelo placed these figures around the edges of the ceiling and filled the central spine of the long curved surface with nine scenes from Genesis: three of them depicting the Creation of the World, three the stories of Adam and Eve, and three the stories of Noah. These are naturally followed, below the prophets and sibyls, by small figures of the 40 generations of Christ’s ancestors, starting with Abraham. The vast project was completed in less than four years; there was an interruption perhaps of a year in 1510–11 when no payment was made. Michelangelo began by painting figures and scenes that allowed him to reuse devices from his earlier works, such as the Pietà. These first figures are relatively stable, and the scenes are on a relatively small scale. As he proceeded, he quickly grew in confidence. Indeed, recent investigations of the technical processes used show that he worked more and more rapidly, reducing and finally eliminating such preparatory helps as complete drawings and incisions on the plaster surface. The same growing boldness appears in the free, complex movements of the figures and in their complex expressiveness. While remaining always imposing and monumental, they are more and more imbued with suggestions of stress and grief. He got about halfway through before his work was interrupted. When he painted the second half, he seemed to repeat the same evolution from quiet stability to intricacy and stress. Thus, Michelangelo worked his way from the quietly monumental and harmonious scene of the creation of Adam to the acute, twisted pressures of the prophet Jonah. Yet, in this second phase he shows greater inward expressiveness, giving a more meditative restraint to the earlier pure physical mass. The Medici Chapel - The immediate occasion for the chapel was the deaths of the two young family heirs (named Giuliano and Lorenzo after their forebears) in 1516 and 1519. Up until 1527, Michelangelo gave his chief attention to the marble interior of this chapel, both the very original wall design and the carved figures on the tombs. The latter are an extension, in organic form, of the dynamic shapes of the wall details. The result is the fullest existing presentation of Michelangelo’s intentions. Windows, cornices, and the like have strange proportions and thicknesses, suggesting an irrational, willful revision of traditional classical forms in buildings. Abutting these active surfaces, the two tombs on opposite walls of the room are also very original, starting with their curved tops. A male and a female figure sit on each of these curved bases; these are personifications of Day and Night on one tomb, according to the artist’s own statement, and, on the other, Dawn and Dusk, according to early reports. Such types had never appeared on tombs before, and they refer, again according to Michelangelo, to the inevitable movement of time, which is circular and leads to death. The figures are among the artist’s most famous and accomplished creations. The immensely massive Day and Dusk are relatively tranquil in their mountainous grandeur, though Day perhaps implies inner fire. Both female figures have the tall, slim proportions and small feet considered beautiful at the time, but otherwise they form a contrast: Dawn, a virginal figure, strains upward along her curve as if trying to emerge into life; Night is asleep, but in a posture suggesting stressful dreams. These four figures are naturally noticed more immediately than the effigies of the two Medici buried there, placed higher and farther back in wall niches. In his late years Michelangelo was less involved with sculpture and, along with painting and poetry, more with architecture, an area that did not require much physical labour.
He was sought after to design imposing monuments for the new and modern Rome that were to enunciate architecturally the city’s position as a world centre. Two of these monuments, the Capitoline Square and the dome of St. Peter’s, are still among the city’s most notable visual images. He did not finish either, but after his death both were continued in ways that probably did not depart much from his plans. While remaining head architect of St. Peter’s, Michelangelo worked on many smaller building projects in Rome. He completed the main unit of the Palazzo Farnese, the residence of Pope Paul III’s family. The top story wall of its courtyard is a rare example of an architectural unit fully finished under his eye. His last paintings were the frescoes of the Pauline Chapel in the Vatican, which still is basically inaccessible to the public. Unlike his other frescoes, they are in the position normal for narrative painting, on a wall and not exceptionally high up. They consistently treat spatial depth and narrative drama in a way that brings them closer to other paintings of the age than to the artist’s previous paintings. Among the artists Michelangelo came to know and admire was Titian, who visited Rome during the period of this project (1542–50), and the frescoes seem to betray his influence in colour. There are only two late sculptures, which Michelangelo did for himself, both presenting the dead Christ being mourned, neither one finished. Assessment and Influence - For posterity, Michelangelo has always remained one of the small group of the most exalted artists who have been felt to express, like Shakespeare or Beethoven, the tragic experience of humanity with the greatest depth and universal scope. In contrast to the great fame of the artist’s works, their visual influence on later art is relatively limited. This cannot be explained by hesitation to imitate an art simply because it appeared so great, for artists such as Raphael were considered equally great but were used as sources to a much greater degree. It may be instead that the particular type of expression associated with Michelangelo, of an almost cosmic grandeur, was inhibiting. The limited influence of his work includes a few cases of almost total dependence.
The most talented artist who worked in this way was Daniele da Volterra. Otherwise, Michelangelo was treated as a model for specific limited aspects of his work. In the 17th century, he was regarded as supreme in anatomical drawing but less praised for broader elements of his art. While the Mannerists utilized the spatial compression seen in a few of his works, and later the serpentine poses of his sculpture of Victory, the 19th-century master Auguste Rodin exploited the effect of unfinished marble blocks. Certain 17th-century masters of the Baroque perhaps show the fullest reference to him, but in ways that have been transformed to exclude any literal similarity. Besides Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the painter Peter Paul Rubens may best show the usability of Michelangelo’s creations for a later great artist.
Giovanni Bellini
The increasing interest of the Venetian artistic milieu in the stylistic innovations and concerns of the Renaissance is clearly reflected in the work of Giovanni Bellini. Although the paintings for the hall of the Great Council in Venice, considered his greatest works, were destroyed by fire in 1577, a large number of altarpieces (such as that in the church of Saints Giovanni e Paolo in Venice) and other extant works show a steady evolution from purely religious, narrative emphasis to a new naturalism of setting and landscape. Little is known about Bellini’s family. His father, Jacopo, a painter, was a pupil of Gentile da Fabriano, one of the leading painters of the early 15th century. Jacopo may have followed him to Florence. In any case, Jacopo introduced the principles of the Florentine Renaissance to Venice before either of his sons. Apart from his sons Gentile and Giovanni, he had at least one daughter, Niccolosa, who married the painter Andrea Mantegna in 1453. Both sons probably began as assistants in their father’s workshop. Giovanni Bellini’s earliest independent paintings were influenced by the late Gothic graceful style of his father, Jacopo, and by the severe manner of the Paduan school, and especially of his brother-in-law, Mantegna.
This influence is evident even after Mantegna left for the court of Mantua in 1460. Giovanni’s earliest works date from before this period. They include a Crucifixion, a Transfiguration, and a Dead Christ Supported by Angels. Several pictures of the same or earlier date are in the United States, and others are at the Correr Civic Museum in Venice. Four triptychs, sets of three panels used as altarpieces, are still in the Venice Accademia, and two Pietàs, both in Milan, are from this early period. His early work is well exemplified in two beautiful paintings, The Blood of the Redeemer and The Agony in the Garden. In all his early pictures he worked with tempera, combining the severity and rigidity of the Paduan school with a depth of religious feeling and human pathos all his own. His early Madonnas, following in his father’s tradition, are mostly sweet in expression, but he substituted for a mainly decorative richness one drawn more from a sensuous observation of nature. Although the pronounced linear element—i.e., the dominance of line rather than mass as a means of defining form, derived from the Florentine tradition and from the precocious Mantegna—is evident in the paintings, the line is less self-conscious than Mantegna’s work, and, from the first, broadly sculptured planes offer their surfaces to the light from a dramatically brilliant sky. From the beginning Bellini was a painter of natural light, as were Masaccio, the founder of Renaissance painting, and Piero della Francesca, its greatest practitioner at that time. In these earliest pictures the sky is apt to be reflected behind the figures in streaks of water making horizontal lines in a mere strip of landscape. In The Agony in the Garden (c. 1465), the horizon moves up, and a deep, wide landscape encloses the figures, to play an equal part in expressing the drama of the scene. As with the dramatis personae, the elaborately linear structure of the landscape provides much of the expression, but an even greater part is played by the colours of the dawn, in their full brilliance and in the reflected light within the shadow. This is the first of a great series of Venetian landscape scenes that was to develop continuously for a century or more. To a city surrounded by water, the emotional value of landscape was now fully revealed. A comparison with Mantegna’s treatment of the same subject matter reveals the subtle yet fundamental differences in the styles of the two masters. The great composite altarpiece with St. Vincent Ferrer, which is still in the church of Saints Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, was painted perhaps 10 years later, toward the mid-1470s. But the principles of composition and the method of painting had not yet changed essentially; they had merely grown stronger in expression. It seems to have been during a voyage down the Adriatic coast, made probably not long afterward, that Bellini encountered the influence that must have helped him most toward his full development: that of Piero della Francesca. Bellini’s great Coronation of the Virgin at Pesaro, for example, might have reflected some of the compositional elements of Piero’s lost Coronation of the Virgin, painted as the central panel of a polyptych. Christ’s crowning of his mother beneath the effulgence of the Holy Ghost is a solemn act of consecration, and the four saints who stand witness beside the throne are characterized by their deep humanity. Every quality of their forms is fully realized: every aspect of their bodies, the textures of their garments, and the objects that they hold. As with work by Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, the perspective of pavement and throne helps to establish the group in space, and the space is enlarged by the great hills behind and rendered infinite by the luminosity of the sky, which envelops the scene and gathers all the forms together into one.
At this time in his life, Giovanni Bellini also met Antonello da Messina, who traveled to Venice about 1475. The encounter was to prove influential for both painters. The changes in Giovanni’s work from his earlier, Mantegnesque style to the more mature, independent, and versatile manner of his later works are already visible in the San Giobbe Altarpiece. It is the painter’s way of using the medium that makes the difference, and that depends upon his intentions and his vision. It was Bellini’s richer and broader vision that determined his future development. Unlike tempera paint, which was the medium of Bellini’s early career, oil paint is inclined to be the more transparent and fusible and therefore lends itself to richer colour and tone by allowing a further degree of glazing, the laying of one translucent layer of colour over another. This technique and the unprecedented variety with which Bellini handled the oil paint give his fully mature painting the richness associated with the Venetian school. Giovanni’s brother, Gentile, was chosen by the government to continue the painting of great historical scenes in the hall of the Great Council in Venice; but in 1479, when Gentile was sent on a mission to Constantinople, Giovanni took his place. From that time to 1480, much of Giovanni’s time and energy was devoted to fulfilling his duties as conservator of the paintings in the hall, as well as painting six or seven new canvases himself. These were his greatest works, but they were destroyed when the huge hall was gutted by fire in 1577. Contemporary students of his work can now gain only an approximate idea of their design from The Martyrdom of St. Mark in the Scuola di San Marco in Venice, finished and signed by one of Giovanni’s assistants, and of their execution from Giovanni’s completion of Gentile’s St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria after his brother’s death in Venice in 1507.
Yet a surprisingly large number of big altarpieces and comparatively portable works have survived and show the steady but adventurous evolution of his work. The principles and the technique of the Pesaro Altarpiece find their full development in the still-larger altarpiece of the Madonna from San Giobbe in the Venice Accademia, where the Virgin enthroned in a great apse and the saints beside her seem ready to melt into the reflected light. This seems to have been painted before the earliest of his dated pictures, the half-length Madonna degli Alberetti (1487), also in the Venice Accademia. While for the first 20 years of Giovanni’s career he limited his subject matter mainly to traditional religious subjects (Madonnas, Pietàs, and Crucifixions), toward the end of the century it began to be greatly enriched not so much by the wider choice of subjects as by the development of the mise-en-scène, the physical setting of the picture. He became one of the greatest of landscape painters. His study of outdoor light was such that one can deduce not only the season depicted but almost the hour of the day. Bellini also excelled as a painter of ideal scenes—i.e., scenes of primeval as opposed to individualized images. For the St. Francis in Ecstasy of the Frick Collection or the St. Jerome at His Meditations, painted for the high altar of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Venice, the anatomy of the earth is studied as carefully as those of human figures; but the purpose of this naturalism is to convey idealism through the realistic portrayal of detail. In the landscape Sacred Allegory, now in the Uffizi, he created the first of the dreamy enigmatic scenes for which Giorgione, his pupil, was to become famous. The same quality of idealism is to be found in his portraiture.
His Doge Leonardo Loredan in the National Gallery, London, has all the wise and kindly firmness of the perfect head of state, and his Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1505; thought to be a likeness of the Venetian writer and humanist Pietro Bembo) in the British royal collection portrays all the sensitivity of a poet. Both artistically and personally, the career of Giovanni Bellini seems to have been serene and prosperous. He lived to see his own school of painting achieve dominance and acclaim. He saw his influence propagated by a host of pupils, two of whom surpassed their master in world fame: Giorgione, whom he outlived by six years, and Titian. The only extant description of Giovanni’s personality is from the hand of the great German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, who wrote to the German humanist Willibald Pirkheimer from Venice in 1506: “Everyone tells me what an upright man he is, so that I am really fond of him. He is very old, and still he is the best painter of them all.”
This influence is evident even after Mantegna left for the court of Mantua in 1460. Giovanni’s earliest works date from before this period. They include a Crucifixion, a Transfiguration, and a Dead Christ Supported by Angels. Several pictures of the same or earlier date are in the United States, and others are at the Correr Civic Museum in Venice. Four triptychs, sets of three panels used as altarpieces, are still in the Venice Accademia, and two Pietàs, both in Milan, are from this early period. His early work is well exemplified in two beautiful paintings, The Blood of the Redeemer and The Agony in the Garden. In all his early pictures he worked with tempera, combining the severity and rigidity of the Paduan school with a depth of religious feeling and human pathos all his own. His early Madonnas, following in his father’s tradition, are mostly sweet in expression, but he substituted for a mainly decorative richness one drawn more from a sensuous observation of nature. Although the pronounced linear element—i.e., the dominance of line rather than mass as a means of defining form, derived from the Florentine tradition and from the precocious Mantegna—is evident in the paintings, the line is less self-conscious than Mantegna’s work, and, from the first, broadly sculptured planes offer their surfaces to the light from a dramatically brilliant sky. From the beginning Bellini was a painter of natural light, as were Masaccio, the founder of Renaissance painting, and Piero della Francesca, its greatest practitioner at that time. In these earliest pictures the sky is apt to be reflected behind the figures in streaks of water making horizontal lines in a mere strip of landscape. In The Agony in the Garden (c. 1465), the horizon moves up, and a deep, wide landscape encloses the figures, to play an equal part in expressing the drama of the scene. As with the dramatis personae, the elaborately linear structure of the landscape provides much of the expression, but an even greater part is played by the colours of the dawn, in their full brilliance and in the reflected light within the shadow. This is the first of a great series of Venetian landscape scenes that was to develop continuously for a century or more. To a city surrounded by water, the emotional value of landscape was now fully revealed. A comparison with Mantegna’s treatment of the same subject matter reveals the subtle yet fundamental differences in the styles of the two masters. The great composite altarpiece with St. Vincent Ferrer, which is still in the church of Saints Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, was painted perhaps 10 years later, toward the mid-1470s. But the principles of composition and the method of painting had not yet changed essentially; they had merely grown stronger in expression. It seems to have been during a voyage down the Adriatic coast, made probably not long afterward, that Bellini encountered the influence that must have helped him most toward his full development: that of Piero della Francesca. Bellini’s great Coronation of the Virgin at Pesaro, for example, might have reflected some of the compositional elements of Piero’s lost Coronation of the Virgin, painted as the central panel of a polyptych. Christ’s crowning of his mother beneath the effulgence of the Holy Ghost is a solemn act of consecration, and the four saints who stand witness beside the throne are characterized by their deep humanity. Every quality of their forms is fully realized: every aspect of their bodies, the textures of their garments, and the objects that they hold. As with work by Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, the perspective of pavement and throne helps to establish the group in space, and the space is enlarged by the great hills behind and rendered infinite by the luminosity of the sky, which envelops the scene and gathers all the forms together into one.
At this time in his life, Giovanni Bellini also met Antonello da Messina, who traveled to Venice about 1475. The encounter was to prove influential for both painters. The changes in Giovanni’s work from his earlier, Mantegnesque style to the more mature, independent, and versatile manner of his later works are already visible in the San Giobbe Altarpiece. It is the painter’s way of using the medium that makes the difference, and that depends upon his intentions and his vision. It was Bellini’s richer and broader vision that determined his future development. Unlike tempera paint, which was the medium of Bellini’s early career, oil paint is inclined to be the more transparent and fusible and therefore lends itself to richer colour and tone by allowing a further degree of glazing, the laying of one translucent layer of colour over another. This technique and the unprecedented variety with which Bellini handled the oil paint give his fully mature painting the richness associated with the Venetian school. Giovanni’s brother, Gentile, was chosen by the government to continue the painting of great historical scenes in the hall of the Great Council in Venice; but in 1479, when Gentile was sent on a mission to Constantinople, Giovanni took his place. From that time to 1480, much of Giovanni’s time and energy was devoted to fulfilling his duties as conservator of the paintings in the hall, as well as painting six or seven new canvases himself. These were his greatest works, but they were destroyed when the huge hall was gutted by fire in 1577. Contemporary students of his work can now gain only an approximate idea of their design from The Martyrdom of St. Mark in the Scuola di San Marco in Venice, finished and signed by one of Giovanni’s assistants, and of their execution from Giovanni’s completion of Gentile’s St. Mark Preaching in Alexandria after his brother’s death in Venice in 1507.
Yet a surprisingly large number of big altarpieces and comparatively portable works have survived and show the steady but adventurous evolution of his work. The principles and the technique of the Pesaro Altarpiece find their full development in the still-larger altarpiece of the Madonna from San Giobbe in the Venice Accademia, where the Virgin enthroned in a great apse and the saints beside her seem ready to melt into the reflected light. This seems to have been painted before the earliest of his dated pictures, the half-length Madonna degli Alberetti (1487), also in the Venice Accademia. While for the first 20 years of Giovanni’s career he limited his subject matter mainly to traditional religious subjects (Madonnas, Pietàs, and Crucifixions), toward the end of the century it began to be greatly enriched not so much by the wider choice of subjects as by the development of the mise-en-scène, the physical setting of the picture. He became one of the greatest of landscape painters. His study of outdoor light was such that one can deduce not only the season depicted but almost the hour of the day. Bellini also excelled as a painter of ideal scenes—i.e., scenes of primeval as opposed to individualized images. For the St. Francis in Ecstasy of the Frick Collection or the St. Jerome at His Meditations, painted for the high altar of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Venice, the anatomy of the earth is studied as carefully as those of human figures; but the purpose of this naturalism is to convey idealism through the realistic portrayal of detail. In the landscape Sacred Allegory, now in the Uffizi, he created the first of the dreamy enigmatic scenes for which Giorgione, his pupil, was to become famous. The same quality of idealism is to be found in his portraiture.
His Doge Leonardo Loredan in the National Gallery, London, has all the wise and kindly firmness of the perfect head of state, and his Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1505; thought to be a likeness of the Venetian writer and humanist Pietro Bembo) in the British royal collection portrays all the sensitivity of a poet. Both artistically and personally, the career of Giovanni Bellini seems to have been serene and prosperous. He lived to see his own school of painting achieve dominance and acclaim. He saw his influence propagated by a host of pupils, two of whom surpassed their master in world fame: Giorgione, whom he outlived by six years, and Titian. The only extant description of Giovanni’s personality is from the hand of the great German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer, who wrote to the German humanist Willibald Pirkheimer from Venice in 1506: “Everyone tells me what an upright man he is, so that I am really fond of him. He is very old, and still he is the best painter of them all.”
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