Thomas Edison State College | 19 Toward High Renaissance in Central Italy
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A number of lectures back, we talked about the scientific direction into which painters like Piero della Francesca
and Uccello in an almost obsessive way take Florentine work into-- and general central Italian work-- into the
middle of the 15th century, the Quattrocento, the 1400s. Their interest in dissecting perspective so as to give a
very carefully delineated sense on a flat surface of volumetric space. But there's another direction in Florence, in
particular, which we can see painting to take as we move into the third quarter of the Quattrocento that we
associate, in particular, with artists like Sandro Botticelli, which we may see in retrospect having been begun with
artists like Filippo Lippi and Fra Angelico. And that's the poetic direction.
Now Botticelli is the quintessential neurotic poet-painter. He had some problems with his neighbors because one
of them was a weaver. And the sound of the loom was too much noise for him. And he threatened a lawsuit.
And another story that's told about him is how he woke up in the middle of the night with a dream that he was
married and spent the rest of the night walking the streets because he was afraid to go back to sleep lest that
dream come back to him. That's not to say he wasn't crazy about women. We'll see that in just a few moments.
But Botticelli is surely the neurotic poet, par excellence.
And yet if we look at his 1482 composition, The Adoration of the Magi , it's not that he wasn't interested in
perspective. We surely get a sense of that as we look at this structure in which the Virgin and child and Joseph are
placed, where the roof line carries us into the depths of the painting. And, in fact, we see the way the sidelines of
the roof carry diagonals from outer up toward inner center and are met but subtly with counter diagonals coming
from the figures disposed left and right where the lines move from lower out to upper towards center in. So
everything meets where the Virgin and child are in a kind of X composition.
At the same time, we realize that he's subtly organize those figures so they really curve around a bit at the bottom,
leaving, in essence, an oval shape with the bottom empty. And that, of course, is where you and I stand. So it's
another of those symptoms of giving us the opportunity not only for our eyes to travel into where the Virgin and
child are found in the center of the X, but inviting us to complete the circle of those around the Virgin and child.
And, of course, we see that Botticelli has done what other artists have done and will do. He's given us this
structure built within the ruins of a very dramatic and dynamic Roman kind of structure so as to suggest, in other
words, the new reality growing out of this crumbling old reality. And he's given us contrasts to either side of the
painting between foliage on trees and trees that are without foliage or no trees at all, so as also to suggest very
subtly the notion of winter and spring, past and future, death and rebirth.
His interest in symbolism is part, interestingly enough, of this poetic inclination, which in turn is connected to his
mystical inclinations. And Botticelli stands out among painters who takes an apparent pagan direction for his
subject matter wherein the pagan direction actually conceals Christian symbolism.
So if we look at his 1478 spring, his Primavera, we recognize that Petrarchian interest in synthesizing pagan and
Christian symbolism and his strong interest in philosophy as well as mysticism, as they were both being sponsored
by the Medici, the court of the young Lorenzo de Medici, to be precise. And this painting was commissioned by
Lorenzo's cousin, Lorenzo di Pietro Franco di Medici, and hung in his village just outside Florence.
We see at its center the image of Venus of Aphrodite. But you notice, of course, not only above her head, her son
Eros, Cupid, who's shooting arrows at the three graces to our left, to her right. But also the trees are disposed to
give the sense of a halo around her, already therefore suggesting to us that this embodiment of love should not
be taken simply to be pagan love, the goddess Venus, Aphrodite, in the pagan Christian Roman sense, but rather
in a sense in which Marsilio Ficino, one of the outstanding philosophers of the Medici circle, referred to Venus as
the embodiment of humanism, of the centering of human beings on the stage of our own historical reality as
opposed to centering God on that stage.
God, remember, is not off the stage. But God is pushed a little bit to the back end the side. And we become more
responsible for shaping the reality of our own stage. The symbol of that is Venus, is Aphrodite, whom we see
framed by the halo, whom we see placed hovering almost rather than standing on the marvelous paradise-like
garden below her, whom we see flanked to one side by the graces, to the other side by an interesting scene which
gives us Zephyrus, the wind god, gently blowing and pursuing the nymph Cloris, who is in the act of actually being
transformed into Flora. That is the embodiment of spring. We see, in fact, flowers coming out of Cloris' mouth that
become the garments that surround her embodiment as Flora.
So a kind of continuous narrative throwback to Medieval thinking where we see stages in a story line that are all
being shown to us in the same frame rather than in separate frames, as if they're happening all at the same time.
She is Flora. She is Cloris. There's no separation between those two identities. We see them both at the same
time as she strews flowers on the carpet of grass before her.
And, of course, at the far side-- that is our left, her right-- we see the figure of Mercury. We see him raising his
caduceus. But you notice that his caduceus does not have a serpent attached to it. This is a paradise garden from
which the serpent is missing.
You'll also notice that he's raising them towards a little bit of cloud because Mercury is the one who dispels the
clouds. He also raises them to the trees where we also see that Cupid, towards which we also see the hands of
the graces raised, those trees filled with oranges. And no contemporary of this painting could have failed to
recognize those oranges as coming from the coat of arms of the Medici.
Moreover, they would have realized that Mercury, who is the guide, is also the patron of physicians. And after all,
what is the name Medici? Mediccina, it's medicine. And the doctors are the patrons of the Medici. So Mercury is
also an allusion to the patron of the painting who is Lorenzo di Pietro Franco, the uncle of Lorenzo di Medici, part
of that same circle.
And, in fact, if we look even more closely, we realize that the beautiful red garment of Mercury is covered with little
flames. We also find flames around the garment, around the breast area of Venus. We find flames here and there
throughout this image. And, of course, flames are not only associated with Mercury, but associated in Christian
symbology with Saint Lawrence, San Lorenzo. Aha! Lawrence, the name of Lorenzo, the name of Lorenzo di
Pietro Franco, the patrons of this Botticellian painting.
So when all is said and done, what do we have here? This symbol of Lorenzo and Lorenzo di Pietro Franco di
Medici, the patrons, as it were, of the painting, this symbol at the center who is the embodiment of humanism, who
gestures with one hand up like the graces do to her right, with one hand it down, like [? Clora-Floris ?] do to her
left. And so she stands between heaven and Earth. Who stands between heaven and Earth, between sacer and
profanus realities? Of course, Christ, who is the embodiment of Christian love as Venus is of pagan love. So
Venus is a stand-in for Christ. So interwoven with pagan imagery is Christ symbolism, is symbolism that pertains
to the Medici.
And in the villa where this painting stood, across from it hung another one that Botticelli had created, with Zephyr
now at the opposite side from that in the Primavera, with the light source coming from the opposite direction from
that in the previous painting. So we can imagine them two opposite sides of the same room, opposite walls, where
the ventilation is coming from one direction. The light is coming from the other direction in this villa of Lorenzo di
Pietro Franco di Medici.
And here we have The Birth of Venus painted maybe four or five years after the previous one in 1482, 1483. As
much as in the previous image we hover on grass, here we hover on water. And where we had the covered
Primavera in the moment before, in this moment, we have the naked Primavera, the naked Venus, the naked
spring, the naked truth hovering over the waters as the spirit of God is said to do in chapter 1 and versus 1 of the
book of Genesis of the Bible.
And so we have Venus, Aphrodite, the spirit of God hovering, naked truth. Of course, she looks just like those
images of the Venus of which the first was Praxiteles' Venus Rising from the Bath that the Romans emulated
again and again. But in a sense, he's simultaneously copied the traditional pagan representation but taken her
from the bathroom, placed her rising out of the sea.
And we observe Zephyr blowing gently from one side. We observe the spring coming from the other side to strew
her. And we see roses falling from the sky. And so even the father, even heaven, showers rose petals in approval
of her birth, this child of celestial love, who was born of paradox from an act of strife and sacrifice.
Remember, Cronos had castrated Uranus, the sky god, and strewn his genitals down below. And, according to
Hesiod's story, the sea foam, afros is the Greek word for foam, gathered around. And out of that was born, out of
that act of strife, was born afros dite, Aphrodite, the foam-born.
But here we have the father as the sky scattering rose petals in approval. So in this twist and turn, what we have,
of course, is another stand-in for Christ who is the self-sacrificing son of the father who offers his son as a
sacrifice. His son, after all, is himself in the triune concept of God.
So, in short, a very complicated, layered, symbolic painting that on the surface is just an exquisite rendition of a
girl with a beautiful face, so beautiful that you don't even notice the skill that seems to be lacking for Botticelli with
regard to physiognomy. Look at her shoulders. They don't seem to have bones. Look at her left arm. It looks like it
was stung by 1,000 bees. It's swollen out of proportion. We don't notice that because of the poetic beauty of her
face. And his audience would have been even more concerned with the layers of symbolism that attach
themselves to this apparently simple image and its twin that we saw a moment back.
Now in sculpture, a very Botticellian kind of sweetness is exuded by the work of work of Luca della Robbia, one of
the younger contemporaries of Donatello who took up the slack of prominence during the decade when Donatello
was busy, remember, up in Padua and elsewhere. Luca had made his mark early on in the 1430s with his very
sensitive rendering of singing angels carved in marble and very reminiscent of Roman reliefs at their best. But he
found his stride in a completely different direction, eventually, working in color-glazed terracotta. And that's the
sort of work for which he is best known.
So his Madonna and angels, such as we see here, that dates from about 1460 or so, and thus falls chronologically
into the gap between Donatello's Mary Magdalene and works by Pollaiuolo and Verrocchio, which we'll discuss
shortly. Gives us, this image does, Luca at his best. We've got very restrained colors. We've got white for the
figures and for the frame that creates kind of an impression of marble. We've got blue for the background and
otherwise various kinds of colors for the flowers giving a very sweet and serious sense to the work.
It's difficult to understand. Are the Virgin and child rising out of the sea like the Botticellian Venus just was? Or are
they rising out of the heavens? Or are they simply rising out of a kind of space-less space which they share with
angels, creating a kind of window for us between ourselves and our reality, and that other reality to which
attachment to them connects us.
The interesting thing about Luca is that his medium made him less respected by those who thought, well, work in
terracotta isn't real sculpture. Real sculpture is stone. Real sculpture is bronze. Real sculpture is wood.
But he was so skilled at the same time it almost didn't matter. And he spawned a whole dynasty of sculptors who
worked in this medium. So that eventually after his demise-- he lived a long life. He was born in 1400. He died in
1482. After his demise, the workshop continued, but it became more and more like a factory, producing everyday
works that probably would be called, had the word existed at the time, kitsch by the end of the 15th century.
Now quite different is the work of an artist I mentioned a moment ago, Antonio Pollaiuolo who reflects a very
powerful interest that reminds us Piero and particularly of Uccelo, an interest in rendering the inner physiological
core of the human body. His interest, Pollaiuolo's is, to be more precise, in reviving the ancient and particularly the
Greek focus on the male nude. This is something we've seen variously demonstrated in works by Ghiberti, in
whose workshop he trained, and, of course, by Donatello, who exerted a strong influence on him.
And that influence is very much reflected in this a dynamic rendering in bronze of Hercules and Antaeus that
coincides with another aspect of Renaissance mentality. By the 15th century, cultured Florentines were beginning
to assemble collections of ancient statuary. So in response to that Petrarchian idea of reaching back to antiquity,
it's not just the artists who are trying to create, but it's the collectors who are trying to collect and so bring antiquity
forward into the present.
And so, with that in mind, we see this rather small 1475 bronze, about 18 inches high, as emulating and really to
be placed side by side with the small antique bronzes that were available for collection at the time, and offers, of
course, a very dynamic rendering of the physical body under stress. As you may recall, Antaeus is that giant who
cannot be wrestled to the ground and defeated because his mother is the Earth herself. And so every time he's
thrown to the ground, he's rejuvenated.
So in one of his labors, when Herakles has to destroy him, the only way he can do it is by holding him aloft and
then gradually strangling him or breaking his back. Well, Pollaiuolo has given us the latter. Herakles very slowly
and rather calmly breaks the back of this giant who could only be defeated this way, by being held aloft. And
Antaeus rises in agony. His head twists back as he cries out. With his arms, he struggles to try and get away, his
leg flying out.
So, by the way, Pollaiuolo is breaking an old, longstanding rule of statuary, that everything falls pretty much within
the frame of the block of wood or the block of stone or a block imagined of bronze. And he is one of the first artists
to break in dynamism out of that block we see here. And as Herakles is calm, the Antaeus flailing is filled with
emotion. So a kind of contrast then between pathos and ethos such as we've seen exhibited any number of times
in the history of art and the history of sculpture. The meeting point of these two deadly wrestlers is their waists in
this unprecedented work as the lion skin from Herakles' shoulders has slipped down to his rear.
Now this is a subject that obviously Pollaiuolo-- pun intended-- wrestled with a number of times before we got to
this statue. We look here at a painting of tempera on wood of the same subject done probably a good 15 years
earlier, about 1460. And we see that the Antaeus is virtually the same as in the later sculpture with the leg flailing
out, with the very squared kind of handling of the two arms, with those elbows pointing out, with the head twisting
back.
And the positioning of Herakles body is fairly the same with his legs firmly planted and his back twisting back. But
we see his garments slipping even further down. And we see his face as ferocious as that of his antagonist. Or,
put another way, whereas in the statue Herakles is this embodiment of calm, cool, collected ethos with respect to
his clean-shaven expression, and Antaeus is this wild and woolly pathos-bound figure, in the painted version that
he did 15 years earlier, both of them partake of this same sort of anguished emotion. And, in fact, Herakles, if
either of the two of them is to look more [INAUDIBLE], it's perhaps Herakles with his hair and beard that looks the
more so than does Antaeus.
Now by the time of Donatello's death, the key sculptor in Florence for much of the middle two-thirds of the 15th
century, by the time of his death, Andrea Verrocchio, a goldsmith like Ghiberti had been, a sculptor and a painter,
who may have been inspired by Pollaiuolo to his own extreme focus on physiological verisimilitude-- although
Verrochio, I think, was more successful than was Pollaiuolo in giving a sense of reality-- he started to come to the
fore. And he may also have been apprenticed to Donatello, although there's no absolute evidence of that.
By about 1473, 1474, 1475, around the same time as Pollaiuolo's sculptural version, small version of Herakles, or
Hercules, and Antaeus, we have Verrocchio creating a small David. If Donatello's David was one shoe dropping,
this is the second shoe dropping as we move from the end of the first third to the end of the second third of the
15th century. This is an even younger David, however, than Donatello had created, modestly clothed rather than
nude, either out of a desire for greater mainstream acceptance by rather prurient Florentines, or perhaps it was to
give him another opportunity to demonstrate his goldsmith's skill at rendering variant textures.
In any case, we have a very goldsmith-like, very careful handling of the surface here, and a David who is very
tense and alert. The veins on his skinny little arms, especially his right arm, just pulsating. The sword still firmly in
his grasp. In fact, a nice diagonal of the lower part of his left arm completed or continued by the sword held out his
right arm.
So a different sense of how to create dynamism from that that Donatello had to play in his handling of simmetria of
contrapposto with his David as we've seen before. If Donatello's is, well, oblivious to the consequences of having
killed-- so we might call him a juvenile delinquent in our terms-- yet we get with Verrocchio a challenging pride in
what he's accomplished with that hand on his hip and the way his hips are shocked out.
But Verrocchio's sculptural masterpiece probably is his equestrian portrait of the Venetian condotiere, the
mercenary general Bartolomeo Colleoni, which he created in 1483, or began then. And it was finished somewhat
after his death in 1488, five years later. This was clearly designed to challenge the visual supremacy of
Donatello's Gattamelata. So we see the greater technical skill Verrocchio exhibits in offering a horse with his
raised fore leg not supported as Donatello's was, by an orbis mundi, that is a sphere that represents the world that
one controls, as we will recall from Padua. His legs and his ramrod straight back his torso twisted in a swagger
completed by a frowning face.
So Donatello's Gattamelata has a very grim, but calm expression on his face. [INAUDIBLE] has this cruel look on
his face. He's also larger relative to his horse than was true of Gattamelata vis-a-vis his, as if he is more physically
in controlling and needs physicality to be in control of the horse that Gattamelata controlled merely by the grim
expression on his face. So similar and dissimilar, if as a master sculptor Verrocchio saw as his primary competitive
direction Donatello, he was, remember, also a painter. And as a master in his own right, he had a range of rather
fascinating and extraordinary students.
As a painter, Verrocchio produced a Baptism of Christ around 1472 which, upon reflection, has a kind of
strangeness to it. Well, we have elements we would expect-- naturalistic landscape, the way in which the sun
seems to be about to rise in the background so that we have the dawning of a new day, the way in which Christ's
body coincides with the landscape and his head rises above the landscape into the sky, the way in which the
figure of John gently pours water over the head of Christ. And at the same time, we have a beautifully modeled
body of Christ. We have new handling of water, such as we saw in the north with Konrad Witz, when we saw
Christ walking on the water. Here we see his feet ankle deep into water and one foot of John in the water, one foot
out.
But then we observe John's body, that his torso is a little bit strange and his right arm reminds us almost of
Botticelli the way it's kind of distorted as he throws the water over Christ's head. And, of course, both of them have
very antiquated halos. And even more antiquated than that is the dove of the Holy Spirit being let go by the hands
outstretched of God the Father at the uppermost reaches of the image.
And we realize that Verrocchio probably didn't do all of this himself. In fact, all of the work is out-shone by that
spectacular little angel there to the lower left. And the story has it from Vasari that among Verrocchio students that
included Botticelli and Ghirlandaio and Perugino was Leonardo da Vinci, the father of the High Renaissance. He
was the one who as a 20-year-old apparently painted that angel and may have completed the very atmospheric
sky, and may even-- I think he probably did. The final disposition of Christ's body, face, and hair may have been
done by the young Leonardo. Well, who knows? Who knows whether the story that after Leonardo participated in
this painting, Verrocchio gave up painting altogether because he felt if he couldn't compete with his own intern, so
to speak, then he should just stick with sculpture.
Be that as it may, Leonardo is the beginning of something altogether new in a whole range of different directions.
Leonardo was born in the little town of Vinci not far from Florence in 1452. This is, by the way, why he's called
Leonardo da Vinci.
Which is, by the way, da Vinci Code not withstanding, you don't want to walk away from this series referring to
Leonardo as da Vinci. That's like saying "from New York." You don't call Leo from New York "from New York." You
call him Leo. And everybody knew Leo. So Leonardo was all you had to say. And da Vinci was just telling you
where he came from. So you can call it the da Vinci Code, but don't call the Florentine painter da Vinci or I'll hear
about it and you'll be sorry.
In any case, it was Leonardo, perhaps, who completed when still studying in Verrocchio's workshop that beautiful
baptism. And it is he whose first independent work may well have been this spectacular little Annunciation.
Leonardo, himself, at this point, is in his mid 20s. And I remind you that he is not only the father of the High
Renaissance with respect to painting, but the very word Renaissance when we apply it to an individual comes
from our sense of Leonardo, a Renaissance man because he was so accomplished in so many different
directions.
He was not just a painter. He was a designer of building. He was a designer of armaments. He was a musician.
He could do so many different things that, in fact, when he presented himself for employment to the Dukes of
Sforza at one point, he way down on the list says, oh, yes, and by the way, I can paint better than anyone else.
But that's after he's already said seven or eight things that are more important to him that he thinks he can do.
Well, "painted better than anyone else" is an interesting turn of phrase. And Leonardo did. And Leonardo painted
so well because for him the line between science and poetry, between science and seeing, between science and
painting doesn't exist. It is the eye, he says that is the ultimate instrument of the painter. It's really looking at
reality, trying to see how it works, and then translating that onto the canvas that makes the painting real.
And so in his Annunciation, this combination of what in his notebooks he calls sight and insight, of combining
meticulous, on-the-spot observation with an analysis of what makes objects function as they do, that's what we get
here. The angel has swooped gently in for a landing. And this very calm ethos-bound virgin does not but lift a
hand, a gesture in a very magisterial and upper-crust kind of manner to acknowledge his arrival. She sits, after all,
before a very expensive villa. This is the first time we've seen this kind of a setting for the Annunciation. She sits
between the opening into the villa on the one hand, and on the other hand this very clearly Roman-styled urn that
Leonardo has seen somewhere with its swag and added into the painting to give it another element.
We recognize in the exquisite handling of her lap, of her knees, of the shadows that fall between her knees that
offer paradoxic highlighting of the belly that is obviously at issue, since this is Annunciation, an Annunciation of her
soon-to-be pregnancy. And Leonardo always said dark before light. So the shadows between her legs lead up to
the belly, which is suffused with light. And we know from his notebooks how he studied drapery, drapery, drapery-how it falls to give us a sense of that.
We also understand with respect to light and dark from his notebooks how the ideal way to paint a figure was to
first place that individual in a courtyard that you've painted black, all four walls. And then you string white linen
across the four walls, and then place your model against the linen so that you get a kind of indirect light, a
morning kind of light, not a harsh light.
And, of course, look at the faces of the Virgin and the angel. There is not a harshness. There is neither shadow
nor bright light. It's just a suffused with softness kind of light that one would imagine at dawn or at dusk.
And, of course, the angel comes soaring in onto a lawn every bit and detail of which comes out of his study of
flowers and every blade of grass, just as he studied the wings of dead birds again and again. And so for the first
time, we have an enunciating angel with bird-like wings.
All of this combination of science and poetry that makes for Leonardo we see, whether we look at an exquisite
little panel such as this, or whether we look at a 1510 pen drawing of an embryo in the womb, which drawing is
really part of the birthing process, pun intended, of scientific illustration, combining both Leonardo's very careful
and perceptive observations with all of the diagrammatic clarity that pertains to them, surrounded by some such
drawings and verbal explanations. So painting and science are part of the same process for Leonardo, whom we
recognize as the genius pushing us out of the 15th toward the 16th century.
When we move, indeed, through the last decades of the 15th century, we find an array of scientific and poetic and
mystical and philosophical issues and ideas that suffuse the wide range of virtuoso sculpture and painting. And
we've really only encountered the tip of the iceberg. That will come into full efflorescence in the 16th century. That
efflorescence will have Florence as the heart and Leonardo as the beat in that heart. And that efflorescence would
carry us into what we speak of as the High Renaissance and beyond.
Thomas Edison State College | 20 High Renaissance in Central Italy
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The phrase, High Renaissance, as I began to point out at the end of our previous lecture, is associated directly
with, it's synonymous with, the name of Leonardo da Vinci, not only because his middle period really marks the
onset of the High Renaissance, but because he is himself the Renaissance man par excellence. And we recall that
barely out of his teens, he was already thinking in new visual directions as he served as an apprentice in the
workshop of Andrea Verrocchio so that by the time he walked out of that workshop in his early 20s, he was very
much an accomplished painter, a measure of the accomplishment of which can be seen by looking at one of his
early works, unfinished, the Adoration of the Magi , commissioned by a monastery outside Florence. The
monastery no longer exists. And the work was never finished.
In fact, even the under-painting, even the sketch beneath the under-painting, was not finished. And still we can
see it. And it was already being acknowledged well before our own time as one of the important works of the late
Quattrocento.
So we see here in this image the problem that he has solved of how to create a stable and an ordered scene that
encompasses a spectacular and dynamic gathering. And he's done that by creating a kind of dialogue between
the pyramidal composition of his central series of figures, which gives us at the apex the head of the Virgin Mary
and the Christ child, who leans towards the oldest of the Magi, who leans up towards him and so completes that
side of the pyramid. And moves the pyramid does in the opposite direction down to encompass the other main
figures, while around the periphery a whole series of others stir and wrestle and turn in space.
He accomplishes it by creating a dialogue between the pyramid of human forms and the architecture, the
phantasmagorical architecture of the background, in which we see-- and we see in his sketchbooks how we was
pushing towards this-- an unprecedented series of ruins that suggest the old order that is in the process of being
replaced by the new order symbolized by the Christ child. We see growing, as it were, directly from the peak of the
pyramid, a palm tree that as a symbol of eternal life symbolizes the Christ child over which, in turn, grows this
overwhelming tree that perhaps suggest the tree of paradise. So within paradise, the new tree, the pyramidal
series of figures, and outside it a crowd of creatures trying to gather in to the main action.
And we can see among these figures also details that reflect some of the influences on Leonardo. We might find
Hugo van der Goes' Portinari Altarpiece with those shepherds crowding in as an influence. We might find
Verrocchio or [INAUDIBLE], whose work we've seen in previous lectures, as an influence as far as figures turning
in space. We even can see him looking as far back for details as Masaccio. For look at the figures crowding in
from the right, and we see this beautiful young beardless face among all of the older, more interesting faces
leaning in. And we may recognize it as the face of John the Evangelist that has been reversed from where it had
been on Masaccio's fresco of The Tribute Money done so much earlier in the century.
Leonardo, therefore, draws from a range of different sources to create what he creates. Perhaps he never
finished his magi piece, this enormous composition, because he was too busy. He left Florence in 1482 to come
into the employee of the Duke of Sforza, the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, who received an application for
employment from Leonardo in which Leonardo spoke of himself as a military engineer, as a designer of
armaments, and only as an afterthought-- I suggested this in my previous lecture-- mentioned, ah, yes, that he's
also an architect, a sculptor, and a painter, who in that last medium can do as much as anyone whoever he may
be. That's what Leonardo claimed.
So, anyway, he left into the employ of Ludovico in 1482 and perhaps never got back and never got around to
finishing that magi composition. But there in the north, he created in 1485 the first version, of which there are two
that we know of, of the Virgin of the Rocks, this one which is the version in Paris similar to, but not identical to the
later version that about 20 years later he created, which we can find in London today.
In it, once again, he starts with an oblique kind of pyramidal composition, only this one is even more complicated
than in the previous work. If one looks from the back of the angel in the lower right and moves from that in a
diagonal up to the head of the Virgin, and then moves down to the back of John the Baptist, one has a kind of
pyramid. And one can encompass the Christ child in the lower right within that pyramid. But one can also see the
Christ child as actually starting the creation of a fourth side into what would become then a diamond configuration,
which leaves, therefore, the fourth point of the diamond open. And that's where you and I are supposed to be
standing who would complete the image.
In fact, we see that because the angel looks out at us. And the angel points to John, whom we see on bended
knee adoring the Christ child, whom we see offering a benedictory gesture towards John. So we are enjoined by
the angel to do what John does, be on bended knee before the Christ child and therefore be blessed by the Christ
child.
So the pyramid is at the same time a diamond. And at the same time as well, one observes this very subtle
column that carries us up the body of the Christ child to the hand of the angel, to the outstretched almost spiderlike enormous hand of the Virgin that hovers over those two figures. The elements of light and dark, which are
part and parcel of Leonardo's vocabulary, he who said darkness comes before light, are never more eloquently
represented in all of this as we observe of the Virgin, that she is largely ensconced in darkness, except her head,
as the bodies of the Christ child and John and the face of the angel are scintillating pools of light within that
darkness are joined in brightness by that one area of her body, the womb area, which is illuminated.
And the interesting thing about this composition is that the figures in the foreground have certain echoes for the
mysterious landscape in the background. So, again, an intense dialogue between light and dark. And, in fact, the
light areas seem to correspond very nicely to the light areas of the figure to foreground. So over the angel and the
Christ child, we see that rising column of brightness. And over the Virgin and the kneeling John the Baptist, we see
another pool of light that we peer through. In other words, a beautiful landscape, a mysterious landscape. On the
other hand, light, the light of salvation, into which we peer in the distance that comes out of the darkness. Out of
the darkness in the foreground in the person of Christ, out of the darkness in the landscape background to give us
a correspondingly background, foreground, landscape, and figure kind of composition.
Leonardo was an innovator from end to end. This notion of the mysterious landscape that in Italian is referred to
sfumato, that is a kind of smokey kind of landscape, is part of his growing arsenal of visual elements. And it's even
more marvelously rendered in what is one of his most famous of paintings, that of the wife of Francesco del
Giocondo, known as La Gioconda or otherwise Mona Lisa, painted around 1503 to 1505.
And so we see scintillating sleeves, these perfect shadow-and-light formed hands, very gentle face, moist eyes,
high forehead uninterrupted by brows, a style of the time to create a sense of a higher forehead and, therefore, a
larger [? carapace ?] for the soul and the mind, which are within. And, at the same time, highly individualized and
yet reminiscent in that mysterious smile of archaic Greek eternalizing smiles than we've seen in earlier lectures.
It is also the kind of smile that reflects the class of which she is part. So the Italians of Leonardo's day understood
such an expression to suggest not mere ethos, but the specific ethos of "I can't be concerned with the little things;
they don't bother me because everything is really under control because of who I am, because of what I come
from, because of my family."
Leonardo places his figure in what is a new way-- not a short portrait from the chest up, but a 3/4 length portrait.
This mode of representation would continue into the 19th century emulated by painter after painter. And, of
course, as always, we recognize both this dynamic dialogue between the foreground figure and the background
landscape and its mystery. And we also recognize in the way in which the skin of his sitter is so beautifully
modeled as if to suggest a gentle light, not merely his notion of sfumato so as it applies to the face, but his
discussion and his description in his notebooks of how to create the right light to create the right sense of face by
placing one's sitter in an outer courtyard where one has painted all the walls black and then covered those walls
or stretched across them white linen, and then placed one sitter within that so as to give a sense of diffused light.
Once again, Leonardo is engaged in originality. This is part of what shapes the High Renaissance that we speak
of as the heartland of the Cinquecento, the 1500s, the 16th century.
Now more than a generation younger than Leonardo-- born in 1483 and he lived only until 1520, Raphael-- as
Raphael Sanzio is commonly known in English-- is understood by most art historians to have apprenticed early on
in the workshop of Perugino, about whom more later on, up in Umbria. But by early in the century, he had arrived
in Florence, where he studied the work of Leonardo and Michelangelo. And we certainly get a sense of the
influence of both Perugino and Leonardo in work such as the Madonna of the Goldfinch painted in 1505-1506,
where we have John, in this case, holding a goldfinch, a bird that is the symbol of the soul toward which the Christ
child reaches, reaching in a dynamic gesture, an energized gesture, across the lap of his mother so that the
pyramidal composition that gives us stability is at the same time not a static composition because of the way in
which the bodies twist and turn across the picture plane.
We recognize from Perugino the delicate trees and the open horizon line-- as later on we will have a chance to
discuss-- as fingerprints of his style. We recognize the gradual sfumato of the landscape moving into background
as symptoms of the way in which Leonardo worked. We recognize this dynamic pyramid as absolutely part of
Leonardo. And, of course, we recognize the symbolic colors-- the red of blood and sacrifice, the blue of the sky
and truth-- as a continuum that goes back into the mid-Medieval period and continues in a lively manner deep into
and beyond the Renaissance.
We also recognize in the goldfinch a specific symbol not only of the soul, but because of a tradition that the
goldfinch prefers thorns as a diet, therefore an association with the crown of thorns. And thus what John is
offering to the Christ child is his martyrdom in advance of its arrival in adulthood.
We see in Raphael again and again his own contribution to the humanism of the High Renaissance, that is the
recasting of figures who are divine or have a divine connection as fully human. And so in The Small Cowper
Madonna, we observe very much an Umbrian mother and child. We see this plump baby. You can almost feel the
flesh on his rear end as her fingers press against that flash, this contact between them. Notice the way their heads
each tilt away from each other in a kind of winsome direction that we will recall as found in Botticelli two
generations earlier, that Venus on the half-shell, so to speak, is offered with her head tilting to the right. And so as
the Primavera presented that way.
So this is one of some 17 mother-and-child images that Raphael did between 1504 and 1508 in Florence. And
most of them were probably not direct commissions. There seems to have been a market for virgin-and-child
paintings as wedding gifts. And so he presumably was not only doing commissions, but painting them so as to
have them available for would-be buyers to serve as such gifts.
If we turn to the third of the three great Florence-associated High Renaissance painters-- Leonardo, Raphael, and
Michelangelo-- so Michelangelo's holy family is a completely different kind of representation from what we get
Michelangelo-- so Michelangelo's holy family is a completely different kind of representation from what we get
from Raphael or what we get from Leonardo, where the emphasis is so much on this gradation of smokey
coloration and transition from foreground to background. With Michelangelo, his painting is much more strident
both in color and in line.
He was born outside of Florence about 1475, which makes him actually eight years older than Raphael and
makes him a generation younger than Leonardo. But, of course, he lived until 1564, well beyond when Raphael
had died. This panel, which is the only one painted by Michelangelo, was down about 1506 or so. And so we have
this handling of light, this very sharp-edged difference between his work and that of Raphael. Everything about his
figures is strident and bold. Everything about Raphael seems to be quiet and soft-edged.
So on the other hand, we have the way in which he has subtly in a manner reminiscent of Greek vase painting
managed to carve his figures into the shape of the tondo that required the curve coming around the heads of
Joseph and the Christ child, and coming around the outstretched legs of the Virgin. At the same time, very
unusual is the energized way in which the Virgin twists around and across herself to reach for the child held in
Joseph's arms. And the child himself in a kind of contrapuntal way twists back across himself toward the Virgin.
All of these features stretch the balance between stability and dynamism almost to the breaking point. We'll see
later in retrospect how they anticipate the disintegration of High Renaissance ideals into the different forms of
Mannerism by the 1520s.
But the beautiful muscularity of Michelangelo's figures recalls the work of one more of these painters who was a
kind of stepping stone to the High Renaissance, who pushes toward, but doesn't quite arrive there. And that's
Luca Signorelli.
Signorelli's beautiful fresco of The Damned, down right at the turn of the century, 1499 to 1500 or so, in a San
Brizio chapel of Orvieto, the cathedral there, offers a brilliant handling of the human body twisting and turning in
space. We see angelic figures above to the right. We see demonic figures to the left. But many more demonic
than angelic figures. As below, we see demons pulling at humans, dragging them down into hell.
But the interesting thing about the demons, of course, is while they've got funny colored bodies, funny colored
torsos, funny colored rear ends sometimes, but otherwise-- and occasional weird heads-- they look like us. In
other words, the idea seems to be that the demons who drag their victims off to hell are really ourselves whose
actions drag us off there.
Luca's obsession with anatomy is really a bridge from Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello toward
Michelangelo. But he doesn't quite get to Michelangelo.
Now, the shaping of the High Renaissance, the shaping of its visual thinking, of which Michelangelo is such an
important part-- and, of course, we will get to him shortly-- may be seen the shaping of it to culminate, the arrival
towards its to culminate with Leonardo's Last Supper, a fresco that he painted for a convent in Milan around
1495, 1498, so a few years before Signorelli's fresco of The Damned up in Orvieto. And it's this work that brings
us really to the border of the High Renaissance. If the Annunciation and the adoration of the Magi were the first
instances of Leonardo's originality as he was becoming an independent adult painter in his early '20s.
So this work takes us through his early work towards the period when he's carrying us to the High Renaissance, in
part, for reasons of technique that he uses a new fresco medium, one of his own invention, a kind of oil tempera,
which it turns out did not adhere very well to the wall. So it began to deteriorate a few years after its completion.
So, again, we're imagining this completed work not quite as extremely as we had to for the Adoration of the Magi ,
but still imagining it as it might have been.
And, by the way, of course, the fact that he was experimenting with techniques is part and parcel of this is a
scientist, this is a painter, at one and the same time. It was placed on the convent's refectory, that is to say, it's
dining room wall. So that every monastic meal would be eaten as if in the company of Christ and the apostles at
the Last Supper, every monastic meal becomes, as it were, part of the Last Supper. The painting perspectivally
continues the walls and ceiling of the refectory, as you can see, leading down and into a trio of windows with a
landscape beyond, and through which light emanates to the interior.
These windows then function simultaneously as reminders of the role of architectural apertures going all the way
back to the Roman Pantheon where that oculus is a connective between the soul of the universe and the souls
within the structure. We saw that carried to the Hagia Sofia, carried to the rose windows of Gothic cathedrals,
carried here to Leonardo's Last Supper. That which is within is connected to that which is without. And it's light as
the agent of connection between, as it were, the soul of the universe-- God-- and those who are within.
It's, of course, symbolic in that there are three windows of the triune nature of God. And the way in which the
center one is placed over the head of Christ and above it is a pediment that is semi-circular also gives us a sense
of halo without, of course, the need for a halo.
The moment that Leonardo chose is not the typical moment when the betrayal is already in action. It's the
moment when Christ has said, one of you will be betray me. No action has yet happened except the action of
responses. Each apostle says, Lord, is it I?
And in his Florentine Renaissance Medician sense of how the world works, how math and music and poetry and
mysticism and painting all come together, the natural rational, emotional response of these apostles is to clump
into groups of three, of course, which is to say groups of three-- three being the number of the theological virtues,
three being the number of the Trinity. But, of course, four groups of three-- four being the number of the
directions, four being the number of the Gospels, four being the number of the rivers of paradise.
And, of course, three plus four gives us seven. And seven is the number of gifts of the Holy Spirit, the number of
the joys and sorrows of the Virgin. We multiply the three back by four to 12 and, of course, we get the hours of the
day, the hours of the night, the month, the zodiac signs, the gates of the new Jerusalem. All of this intricate
arithmetic thinking, as in a different way we earlier learned for Botticelli, is, in this way, part of Leonardo's thinking
as he groups these figures in their groups.
Within the group to Christ's right, of course, opposite the luminescent figure of John, the only figure in shadow is,
of course, Judas, the betrayer. So for the first time, instead of having Judas on the opposite side of the table, he's
on the same side with everybody else. But he's the only one in shadow. This moment reminiscent of the way in
which the head of John the Baptist was dropped onto Herod's table in that bronze rendition in 1425, the relief
done by Donatello in Sienna. And there was this pulling away from it. So Judas pulls away who realizes that, of
course, he's the man in question.
Now, the level of Leonardo's originality becomes more obvious when we compare this work with the same subject
by Andrea del Castagno from about 1445, 1450, and that of Domenico Ghirlandaio from about 1480, both of them
in Florence, and in both of which the architectural continuation of their respective refectories is spectacular and
overbearing. In Andrea's fresco, the figures are a series of individual figures across the space. And in
Ghirlandaio's we have here before us loose pairs rather than grouped the way Leonardo had done it. And, of
course, Judas is here singled out by being in front of the table as was traditional. It's not that Ghirlandaio isn't
interesting. Look at the way he's given us this leap into the distance and gives us landscape over the wall, as it
were, in a manner reminiscent of the way in which in that sacra conversazione of Domenico Veneziano he had
done it. Only Ghirlandaio takes it to an even greater extent. And he's got all kinds of elements, like the peacock to
our right that has important symbolism, as we know.
And if we turn the clock further back from about 1480 to 1445-1450 to Castagno, again we have an interest in
creating trompe l'oeil, fool-the-eye architectural continuation of the refectory in which this fresco is placed. So we
have the ceiling, the floor, the walls. Once again, as with Ghirlandaio, we have Judas on this side of the table. But
the interesting thing that Castagno, of course, has done is to give us a series of pseudo marble panels that form
the backdrop. And one of them stands out, this one panel with its blazing amalgam of color, the whites in which
give a sense of lightning-like configuration that falls exactly over the heads of Peter and Judas and Jesus, of
course.
So each of these artists in his own way has worked with this idea in an original manner. But neither Ghirlandaio in
1480 nor Castagno going further back to 1445 comes close to Leonardo in terms of originality of conception.
From the issue of how he groups the apostles, to the issue of where Judas is placed, to the issue of the moment
he's chosen to depict, to the way in which he so successfully continues the room into the Last Supper scene
toward the windows and the landscape beyond, all of this creates a new reality.
And the word create is so important here. It's the story of Leonardo's painting his Last Supper in which the
individual in charge, the prior at the monastery, kept getting annoyed because Leonardo, it seemed, would come
in in the morning. And he'd sort of look around. He'd throw on a few brush strokes. And then he'd back off, stroke
his chin, then go away for a few hours.
And the prior would say, when are you going to finish this thing? And Leonardo would say, look, if you want me to
rush, I could use your face for Judas. And then the prior let him alone.
But the point, you see, is how is Leonardo acting? He's acting as the solitary genius. He's acting as not just the
artist who is fulfilling a commission, but as someone who is understood as prophets and priests are understood,
as kings and pharaohs are understood-- to be a conduit through which great creative things come about for the
rest of us. And in that sense, as well, that little story about the Last Supper is part and parcel of a beginning
mentality that we associate in general with the Renaissance and, in particular, with the High Renaissance, the
beginning of which is seen with that very painting the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci.
Now, we can see how others explored High Renaissance principles, in particular by turning to Raphael, not only in
his Madonnas, in which we saw an influence from Leonardo on the one hand and from others, such as his master,
Perugino on the other, not only in such beautiful small works, but in the grandiose frescoes that he did in the
Vatican for Pope Julius II, large architectural compositions accomplished in the Vatican between 1508 and 1511 or
so. And surely his masterpiece among these, the embodiment of High Renaissance principles, is the work that
came later on to be referred to in the 18th and 19th centuries as The School of Athens.
It's not the School of Athens. It's really the whole array of Greek philosophy that he has captured on a wall that is
across from a wall in which he embodied theology by way of the painting known as The Disputa. But in looking at
this magnificent work, we see the center of a composition that offers Plato-- and it seems to be Leonardo's head
that served as a model-- in dialogue with Aristotle, Plato pointing up because Plato thinks upward. He thinks of the
forms in that world beyond our world when he thinks of ultimate reality. Aristotle thinks of ultimate reality is to be
found in our reality on Earth. And so he gestures downward because it's from observing how the world works that
you learn about ultimate reality. Plato, holding in his hand the book Timaeus, one of his dialogues that deals with
how the universe works, and Aristotle, the Nicomachean Ethics
And then spread out below them, a whole range of other figures. We see to our left the figure of Socrates, who is
discussing and discoursing with a callow Athenian youth demonstrating on his fingers. We see in the lower right
from our perspective with a globe near him, the figure of Ptolemy. And we see Pythagoras towards the lower left
with his board in his hand indicating what is going on in the world around by way of proportion.
And we recognize in the lower right near Ptolemy the image of Euclid, who bends over to show some
mathematical idea. And the model for that figure was Bramante, another of the great Renaissance figures, an
architect. We see Diogenes sprawled on the steps, the cynic, the figure who said I can't really find an honest man
very easily. And isolated in the foreground leaning on a kind of cube and looking at a work by himself is someone
whom we can identify as Michelangelo.
And the interesting thing is that in his initial drawings for this, that image is missing. That is to say, in Raphael's
drawings. It seems that when Michelangelo had finished painting the Sistine ceiling right next door to these rooms
in 1511, that Raphael, like others, went to see that work and was so blown away by it, that he thought, I've got to
make a tribute to Michelangelo as well. And so he added the figure of Michelangelo on the steps together with all
of these other figures, including perhaps romantic and Leonardo to fill out the figures that give us philosophy
personified.
Philosophy personified in a setting whereby just as the floors and stairs sweep up from our viewing point toward
the center, so from the outer upper arch, layers of barrel-vaulted ceiling interspersed with arches and the
suggestions of a cupola, sweep down to come to the same point where we find Plato and Aristotle, where we find
Leonardo. And on this, we find a direct descendant from Masaccio's Trinity that we saw in Lecture 16, transmitted
less obviously through Piero della Francesca and others, and, in turn, through Leonardo, and ultimately also
through the contemporary influence of Michelangelo and Bramante, who was making his designs for the new
church of Saint Peter's even as Raphael was working on this.
This idea of meeting above and below, helping to articulate the illusion of spatial perspective that Raphael used so
effectively here in this fresco and that Leonardo used so effectively in The Last Supper is a part of a pattern of
thinking that had first been articulated back in the 15th century by Brunelleschi and Alberti.
And when we come to our next lecture, we will see how Brunelleschi and Alberti would lead to this moment by way
of architecture as architecture takes its place alongside painting and sculpture as one of the foundational
elements of High Renaissance thought.
Thomas Edison State College | 21 The Rebirth of Classical Dynamism
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We arrive by the end of our last lecture toward the High Renaissance, primarily in the realm of painting. And when
we use that phrase High Renaissance, again, in rough terms, we're speaking about a time period between about
1495, 1496 and 1520, perhaps beginning with Leonardo's Last Supper and ending with the death of Raphael, and
coinciding approximately with the papacies of Julius II from 1503 to 1513 and Leo X from 1513 to 1521.
But, after all, the phrase is ultimately a convenience. It's not as if we suddenly arrived into or suddenly exit from
the High Renaissance. There's build-up to. There's departure from. It's a convenience that centers and focuses
on a number of artists-- particularly, at the moment, for our purposes, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo
Buonarroti, Raphael Sanzio-- who are perceived by us to offer work that is quantitatively and qualitatively more
impressive from that that we get from other artists who lead up to the Renaissance at its height, like Ghirlandaio
and Castagno as we saw in our last lecture, or like Luca Signorelli whose work we also saw, whose time period
coincides with the High Renaissance, but whose talents seemed to be weaker than those of Leonardo and
Michelangelo and Raphael.
And the period also offers for us a kind of culmination of visual thought processes that pass and extend from and
between painting and sculpture and architecture as we shall now see often interwoven with each other, the one
medium influencing or being influenced by the other. So one might consider as a starting point a work by
Perugino, whom we remember is the teacher of Raphael when Raphael studied in Umbria, in Perugia with
Perugino, and who came to Rome at the end of the 1470s, beginning of the 1480s to take over the process of
transforming the Sistine Chapel by way of a series of frescoes that would wrap around its interior walls, the artists
for which frescoes included people like Botticelli and Ghirlandaio. But Perugino was put in charge of the whole
project.
And by 1482, he had created perhaps the most magnificent of his works, certainly the most important, here in the
Sistine Chapel, the Presentation of the Keys to Peter by Christ. Again, the year is 1482.
And so we see, when we look at this frescoed image, the presentation happening in the foreground in the dead
center of the composition. And we see a space between them that isolates and emphasizes the key, that
important note that the papacy, which has descended linearly from Peter, is therefore from God, from Christ itself,
given religious spiritual authority over Christendom. That's what is being shown here. So it is both a spiritual and a
political kind of statement.
The key leads our eye backwards into the interior of the painting towards the architectural element that dominates
it. So if in the foreground we have a series of figures that, by the way, includes Perugino on the right looking out at
us as one among the various contemporaries whom he has represented as part of this moment, if in the
foreground, we have these large figures like chess pieces on a board so as our eyes move back by way of the
carefully perspectivally placed tiles of the temple courtyard, we also see the figures shrinking radically in space so
as to suggest an inward movement of depth until we arrive ultimately at the background architecture.
Framed left and right by a pair of arches that are modeled on Roman arches, most specifically on the Arch of
Constantine, that emperor so important to Christian thought because he marks a transition point in Roman history
from its pagan towards its Christian identity. And framing left and right, the central element which, of course, is a
domed structure that is to suggest and represent the temple in Jerusalem, a domed structure which is probably
most precisely modeled on the dome that Brunelleschi had built in Florence some 30 years earlier or 40 years
earlier-- and we will come back to that don't in a few moments-- but which even more importantly is part and
parcel of the emerging 15th century Renaissance sense in Italy of the dome as a kind of ideal structure for a
church or, by extension, for the temple in Jerusalem.
This articulated by Alberti and Brunelleschi both. Again, more about them in a few moments. But, ultimately, with a
visual reference point that carries to Jerusalem itself by way of our old friend the Dome of the Rock, ironically
enough a Muslim structure built by Abd al-Malik back in 691, but which so dominated, as it continues to dominate,
the Jerusalem landscape that for generation after generation of Christian and Jewish European visitors to
Jerusalem, the dome would come to suggest the form of the temple in Jerusalem.
So that in Perguino's image, we have the temple in Jerusalem as a domed structure flanked left and right by
arches that are Roman. Or, put another way, we have Rome and Jerusalem coming together as Christian Rome
now dominated by the papacy to which the keys are being offered by God itself in this image.
Now, Perugino's pupil, Raphael is one of the key figures of the High Renaissance. And Raphael in 1504 did a
beautiful panel of the Wedding of the Virgin. So we're dealing now not with a wall painting, a fresco, but with a
panel. And we're dealing compositionally with something that is much more vertical than the horizontality that we
saw for the Perugino work. But we recognize the same interest, of course, in perspective. And we see the same
dialogue between figures in the foreground by way of figures in the middle and background, and the dominating
structure in that background.
Here, the figures are fewer in the foreground. And they're much larger relative to the whole composition than was
true of Perugino. And here, the open space converges entirely on a figure which is domed in a much more
absolute sense than was true of the Perugino dome, although a close look shows that even this dome has
elements that separated from the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Its lower part is divided into 12 sides
corresponding in symbolic vocabulary, of course, to the number of the apostles, the number of the Israelites'
tribes, and, of course, to the number of the figures who flank the high priest in the center of this momentous
moment.
Raphael influenced by Perugino. And both Raphael and Perugino had been influenced by those who came before
them, most importantly in this regard, Leon Battista Alberti, who is the man who, par excellence, writes in his
treatise on architecture in the middle of the 15th century about the importance of the dome form, whose
inspirational writing was part and parcel of what would create for Raphael that's marvelous interior arched domed
combination of spaces that we saw in his fresco called The School of Athens in our previous lecture.
Alberti himself design buildings as well, of course. Most of his projects didn't make it to completion while he himself
was alive. But we can see some of them as they were being conceived by him if we look at the Church of San
Francesco done about 1450 or so, done for Sigismondo Malatesta, the Lord of Rimini, and really intended to be a
kind of personal mausoleum wrapped around an earlier church structure that would serve for the Lord Sigismondo
and his wife both. We get a sense here of how Alberti follows the Petrarchan principle enunciated, as we keep
reminding ourselves, back in the 14th century of the Renaissance to emulate the classical Greco-Roman style, but
to carry beyond that style and not simply imitate it.
Note the way we have in the front facade a pair of kind of coffers that suggest the space in which a pair of coffins
might be placed-- this is, after all, in part, intended to be a mausoleum-- that have become blind arches, and how
those blind arches are iterated around the entire periphery in a manner recalling the way the Romans didn't follow
with blind arches around the periphery of their structures, but with pilasters, attached columns, how the whole
structure here is in a kind of sense raised on a platform, but not the way a Roman temple is truly raised on a
platform. Rather, he's created by way of relief carving the sense of a platform around the entire structure except
where the main doorway is concerned.
And that main doorway pushing in from the facade is in dialogue with the two arches left and right of it that are at
the same level as the facade. And the whole front facade gives us a kind of triple arch in a manner reminiscent of
the Arch of Constantine as a triple arch.
So once again we see a combination of different kinds of issues and ideas. And had this been finished, this
structure would have been surmounted by a dome, which, because it's not, it never was.
If we look by comparison to another work by Alberti, that of the Church of San Andrea in Mantua done around
1470 and also unfinished, then we recognize here, too, an interest in the dialogue between convex and concave,
between that which pushes in and that which pulls out, as in the relationship between the central archway over the
central doorway that pushes in, and the arches to left and right, which are flat against the facade, as well as this
kind of organic relationship between the shaping of that central arch that is gigantic and the shaping to echo it of
the side arches that are fragments of itself, proportionate to itself. And then the way that frontal arch is echoed by
this arched form above the fronton, and how that fronton intermediates between these two arched forms by way
of its triangular shape giving us, therefore, a kind of dialogue between rectilinear and curvilinear kinds of elements
as well.
So that the entire facade that we see before us is at one and the same time perfectly stable and serene, and yet
not dull, not stagnant. It's active by this range of different issues that are in visual dialogue with each other. The
pilasters, the arches, the curved elements, the rectilinear elements, the flat sense of the facade, and yet the sense
that it's not flat at all because there are so many different ins and outs that make it up.
So we see once more this Petrarchan principle of emulating and exceeding, in a sense, classical models that
Alberti would draw together both visually. . And it was he who verbally articulated this in his treatises as ideas that
not only he had been working on, but even before him, Brunelleschi had. So we come back to Florence. And we
come back to the dome that Brunelleschi was called upon to create.
Now, I remind you that Brunelleschi had lost the competition to do the door reliefs for the baptistery in Florence to
Ghiberti back at the beginning of the century in 1401 or 1402. And immediately thereafter, he seems to have gone
on a kind of pilgrimage down to Rome with Donatello. And there, it is said, that he developed his program of
scientific perspective from his observation of all the Roman ruins he saw there, and the kind of measurements that
he made around these monuments to give a sense of how visually one could get them in space, that he came
back to Florence.
Another competition was being held in 1417 and thereafter to create a super structure for a cathedral that was
more or less otherwise already done. And he beat Ghiberti this time. So he must have had some sense of
satisfaction. Mind you, Ghiberti is busy at work on those doors for another couple of decades. So he can't have
complained too much.
But Brunelleschi here creates between about 1420 and 1436 what amounts to the first post-Medieval work of
architecture in Europe, which is centered literally on the reemergence of the dome idea, which he has
octagonalized. It's not a pure sphere. It's a dome that is made up of eight facets.
Brunelleschi also-- barely had he begun on this project. And he was called upon to work on others that he could
do from scratch. The Church of San Lorenzo he was asked to work upon. We see a kind of throwback to familiar
architectural form when we look at the front of the exterior, its threefold doorway that corresponds to its basilica
form with its roof actually going from the nave above to the side aisles below. And we recognize the blind arches
form with its roof actually going from the nave above to the side aisles below. And we recognize the blind arches
around the side that we can just discern that push forward toward the Renaissance by way of reaching back to
Roman kind of thinking.
And when we turn to the interior, we find again a kind of classical vocabulary that is in use here. We're no longer
dealing with Gothic arches, are we, with their ogive points. Nor are we dealing with Romanesque attenuated
rounded arches. We're dealing with arches that, in fact, are conceived as having a kind of harmonious balance in
the relationship between the vertical and the horizontal, four to three, offers a larger sense of harmony that for
Brunelleschi and, in turn, Alberti, and in turn all the way up to Leonardo, would be so essential to their
architectural thinking that harmony from proper proportions comes ultimately from God.
Feeds into arithmetic. Feeds into music. And feeds ultimately into architecture or, as you may recall, in Leonardo's
Last Supper, even feeds into the composition of a painting. So here we have this marvelous array of columns in
this complex lead-in toward the apse and an arch form that echoes and completes those to lead us from the
doorway in that direction.
Now, most a Brunelleschi's projects, as those of Alberti, remained unfinished at his death in 1446. One work was a
small chapel for the Pazzi family in Florence. That was the family that was the primary competition with the Medici.
And there was a lot of blood spilled between the two sides of that argument in the course of the 15th century.
And, again, one can see even more obviously than in some of our previous images the way in which the facade
gives us a sense of an arch of triumph, that deep-set arch that leads into the structure beyond the facade and that
functions in a kind of dialogue with a dome of yet a different sort that rises above the roof line. That dome gives us
both a sense of the arch, its roundedness, and a sense of the horizontal sweep across the facade that because of
the way the walls of this cupola rise in a very narrow band echoes that horizontality and, at the same time, echoes
of columns to columns that are part and parcel of this kind of arch of triumph that is the tomb of a wealthy family.
That gives us a very quiet and dynamic minimally adorned architectural front, soothing geometric contrasts, and,
ultimately then, drawing from Greek and Roman sources but going different directioned from those sources and
beyond where those sources lead, about which Alberti would write after this word by Brunelleschi that would
inspire on the one hand and be inspired by painting like Masaccio in the Trinity that we saw many lectures back in
Lecture 16 and, in turn, inspire Raphael in his painting of The School of Athens as we discussed at the end of
Lecture 20.
If, in sum, we think of Brunelleschi and Alberti, we think of architecture that is organized around the principle of
space, not the principle of the interest in the wall itself. Medieval architecture focuses on the wall and its decor.
Roman, remember, Roman architecture focused on interior space. Brunelleschi and Alberti are bringing this
principle of space back into play, but carry it in their own direction by way of the emphasis on the dynamic wall that
has convex and concave, inward pushing and outward pulling elements, that turn it into an exercise not in wall but
an exercise in space.
And meanwhile, the dome, which is, in a sense, the take-off point for this whole discussion is a process of its own
that carries from Perugino's painting to Raphael's painting back to the Dome of the Rock. And by way of the Dome
of the Rock, of course, to the Hagia Sofia and to the Pantheon and that whole history of the dome that leads up
toward the Dome of the Rock. And carries, on the other hand, to Brunelleschi in the middle of the 15th century in
Florence, and ultimately by way of that imagery not only to the painting by Perugino in 1482, or the painting by
Raphael at the beginning of the 16th century, but ultimately to Michelangelo's design for the crown of Saint Peter's
that he effects about 1546 and which would be completed after his death by Giacomo Della Porta. That domed
form that carries us historically from Pantheon to Hagia Sophia to Dome of the Rock and so on is a domed form,
again, that is perceived to be associated with the temple in Jerusalem and at the same time associated with Rome
in its august past. And the two then come together for Michelangelo and Saint Peter's where the new temple is
Saint Peter's, where the new Jerusalem is Rome, where particularly in a world of the Reformation-counter
Reformation, increasing Catholic-Protestant conflict, the notion of the roots of Rome, of its papal leadership, and
of the structure that defines that, are articulated visually by this magnificent dome that Michelangelo comes up
with.
And, in fact, his design for the church would have been a Greek cross with the nave no longer than the transepts
and the apse so one could really get a sense of the soaring quality of the dome. The transformation subsequent
to Michelangelo of the nave into this elongated affair creating a Latin cross would undercut that principle, as we'll
have an opportunity to see in the subsequent lecture.
As for Michelangelo, his architectural innovation is not limited to his experiments with domes. He is renowned for
what he accomplished in the Campidoglio where he redesigned the facades of the three primary structures
around the periphery to not only echo each other, but to offer a dynamic relationship between pilasters that pull
out and niches that push in, between larger pilasters and small, and most emphatically in the Palazzo di Senatore
of about 1545 at the rear of the Campidoglio, we see in dialogue with the vertical rhythms and the horizontal
rhythms of the building, this innovative idea of a double staircase that leads up from the two sides toward the
center giving us a double diagonal.
Michelangelo had come to Rome from Florence back around 1496 around the beginning of the High Renaissance
period, around the time of Leonardo's Last Supper. And here he found patronage by a French cardinal who in
1498, 1499 commissioned a Pieta from the young master where he has solved the problem of proportion of how
to place a man on his mother's lap without the man looking like he's crushing her lap. And if you think back to the
Pieta in wood from Bonn from the 14th century that we have earlier seen, or the painted Pieta from Avignon in the
15th century, you recognize that problem that he solved here in an astonishing way.
Look carefully. The mother is enormous. Her lap is huge. Her torso is huge. But one is not conscious of the
disproportion so complexly, completely, and delicately has he rendered the figure of Christ across that lap, the
rhythm of his limbs, this nice series of legs and arms and the contrapposto between her left arm extended with its
palm up and his right arm extended with its hand faced backwards and down, the mood that she expresses of
acquiescence as opposed to a mood of grief.
All of this done while he's barely 21 and clearly already fully accomplished as a sculptor who now goes back to
Florence a few years later in 1501-1504 creating this magnificent statue of David as a young man in his prime.
And we think back by comparative direction to Donatello and to Verocchio, each of whom in his own way gives us
a young David, a child-like David, one completely nude, the other clothed. And we realize the body position has
inspired Michelangelo. But the inspiration as far as the time period for his figure is really further back. It's the
Polykleitos Doryphoros, or the Roman copy of it, that Michelangelo could have seen that gives us an athlete in his
prime.
But Michelangelo has given us his athlete in his prime with a different sense of proportion in part designed to
reflect the angle from which the viewer will look up and see this figure, in part just reflecting a different sense of
how to do surface and how to create idealized musculature. This figure with one arm up and one arm down, with
the sling in his left hand, with that rock in his right, he's like a baseball pitcher, kind of just relaxing, eyeing the
batter before he flings his baseball. And looking over his shoulder whereas, of course, the Doryphoros looks
ahead because he's moving forward. That's what Polykleitos has wanted to capture. Whereas Donatello,
Verocchio, and Michelangelo, in turn, are interested in a figure really at rest, either in the case of the two younger
figures having accomplished the deed, or in the case of David, before he's about to accomplish the deed that he
looks at with such intense focus and such calm.
Michelangelo would be summoned back to Rome by Pope Julius II in 1508-1512 to create the magnificent series
of frescoes that would crown the Sistine Chapel with which the walls by then had been covered by Perugino and
others, with a ceiling series of frescoes that offer us a story of the biblical creation, the very centerpiece of which is
the creation of man. Of course, that's the ultimate humanistic statement. Man, as the center of things, is literalized
on the Sistine ceiling.
And here we see God about to animate Adam, that is give him a soul, anima. And so we see this wonderful
contrast between Adam's hand, which is so unmoving and so flaccid, and the rich rigidity of God the Father, who
is about to impose that activity on the passive hand of Adam. And Adam that is marvelously muscular in a manner
that should remind us of the works by Jacopo della Quercia at Bologna, which as we know inspired Michelangelo,
as the contrast between the naked Adam and the clothed God can be found also earlier in Jacopo della Quercia's
work. Except Michelangelo has broken new ground by giving us a god whose muscularity we can also see
beneath the garment that in the whoosh as he rushes towards Adam is starting to pull back, revealing part of his
legs, creating an almost sexy god, which is unprecedented in this world into which we enter.
The aftermath of the creation is the fall. And so right nearby we see but differently conceived from heretofore that
moment that combines by placing the tree of knowledge at the dead center of the frame, the eating from the tree
and the expulsion from the garden. So we see Adam and Eve on the one side reaching both at the same time.
And in the up reach of her arm, we see the echo of his up-reached arm. And in the combination of his arm and the
arm of the serpent reaching back towards her, we see a dynamic balance, a symmetria, a contrapposto with the
outstretched figure of that marvelously foreshortened angel on the other side of the tree that expels Adam and
Eve whom we see moving back, his arm pushing back in a dialogue with the way his arm had pushed forward
toward the tree on the other side.
So all of these very clever and subtle ways of giving us a dynamic balance of imbalances. The emotion of Adam
and Even as they go forward recalls Masaccio's expulsion of a century earlier that clearly has inspired
Michelangelo as well. He created an entire sweep across the Sistine ceiling that moves from the begetting of light
on the first day that is the beginning of the order of the universe. God said, let there be light. And there was light.
And that starts the order of things. And culminates with the story of Noah, which is the story of the return to chaos,
to moral chaos, which requires a restoration, a salvation, and the aftermath of the flood that would obviously have,
for Christian thinking, a tremendous significance as a forerunner of re-creation and salvation that is brought about
by the figure of Christ.
And so, indeed, around the periphery of this narrative are not only Hebrew biblical prophets, many of whom
predict disaster and redemption, but even Roman pagan symbols who are understood to have predicted the
coming of Christ, so that we have synthesis between pagan and Judeo Christian ideas as well. You may recall that
in 1511 or so, Raphael saw all this and then decided I've got to honor Michelangelo, and so placed him in his
painting that is known as The School of Athens as we saw in our previous lecture.
By 1513, in any case, Julius II is dead. And Leo X, the Medici pope, has dispensed, at least for the time being,
with the services of Raphael and Michelangelo. Raphael is already by then engaged in portraits, and not just the
myriad virgin and child images that he'd begun the decade before in Florence. By 1516, he's created this
wonderful image of Baldassare Castiglione, known later on for his writing of The Book of the Courtier in 1528.
And you note that Baldassare's image is a 3/4 one so that Raphael has emulated the Mona Lisa composition than
Leonardo had brought into play in the previous decade or so. And we recognize an irony as well, that Baldassare
wrote in his book of The Courtier a kind of ode to a court of the Duke of Montefeltro at Urbino that had been
destroyed by Leo X, the Medici pope, who had once taken refuge in that court when he was thrown out of
Florence when the Medici were on the outs, and now back in power, disposses the Montefeltro dukes of their
court and hands it over to his nephew.
Raphael's Baldassare is ethos-bound. He's calm. He's restrained. He's elegant. He's the model of the gentleman
courtier about which in a decade and more he would be writing.
In any case, by 1521, Leo X would himself be dead. Raphael was dead by 1520. So Bromante. Leonardo had
died in 1519. In 1527, Rome would be sacked by the forces of Charles V, the Hapsburg emperor and Spanish
King, in his war against Francis I. And so we might imagine that new directions would be obvious in this world that
pull away from the stable, dynamic, classically inspired High Renaissance.
One artist who stands out as influenced from the High Renaissance but also anticipating the Baroque is
Correggio. Quiet, calm in his Io and Jupiter done in the early 1530s. Passion-- and the line is blurred here
between spiritual and physical ecstasy. She's carried off by a cloud. Here we see marvelous contrast between her
skin, her body parts, the pinwheeling of her upper body, and the skin, so to speak, of this bear-like cloud, her
head thrown back in what looks like the acquiescence of ecstasy, not the acquiescence that we saw earlier on in
this lecture in the Pieta of Michelangelo.
Now, Correggio seems to have studied with Mantegna, the master of perspective in Padua. And that means that
aside from needing to see where we move out of the High Renaissance forward in Italian painting, we have to
move north to Padua and Venice, and even over the Alps, to see first what's been happening in painting and
sculpture around the other parts of Europe.
Thomas Edison State College | 22 The Light of the Veneto
The world of the northern Italian Renaissance comes to center in and around Venice. The whole area referred to
commonly as the Veneto. And we might note, at least three elements of that world that will affect the development
of painting there at the end of the 15th on into the 16th century.
In the first case, of course, this is a series of islands, further subdivided by canals, and then connected by a series
of bridges-- hundreds of them-- where ultimately, and originally, the Venetians took shelter during the time of the
barbarian invasions of the fifth century, when the Roman Empire was falling apart, to find a safe haven, which
ultimately became the center of a world that started to take a kind of concrete political shape by the eighth
century, which is the second issue.
That by the eighth century the governmental infrastructure of Venice included its Duke-- in Venetian dialect, the
word for Duke is Doge-- its Doge and his governing council. So politically, a state that never functioned under the
authority of an individual, but always functioned under the authority of an aristocracy. A state that was coming to
shape on a series of islands, and therefore surrounded and suffused by the effects of and the sense of water. Mist
and fog on the one hand, light reflecting from the water on to buildings on the other.
And the third element, of course, is that the location of the Veneto is on the edge of the Italian, and indeed the
European, Christian worlds. That edge of which becomes more emphatic and obvious when Constantinople falls
to the Muslims-- to the Ottoman Turks-- in 1453. So that Venice becomes often a bridge between the European
Christian world and the Ottoman Muslim world that is centered in what came to be called Istanbul.
If we look at the history of Venetian painting as it carries us toward the end of the 15th century, we arrive at the
sons of Jacopo Bellini, himself a well known painter of religious images, of whose work very little currently
remains, but whose two sons are really the quintessence of Venice as it carries from the end of the 15th into the
beginning of the 16th centuries.
The older, Gentile, born about 1429, was in fact sent by the Venetians in 1478 to Istanbul, where he engaged with
the Ottomans and created a whole new way of thinking of art for them. The portraits of the Ottoman Sultan
Mehmed II, that he either created or inspired, being a turning point for them and bringing back from that part of
the world among other issues the marbling of paper as a new skill that would entered Italy and Europe through
Venice.
And Gentile himself, as a painter back in Venice, was renowned for images of processions taking place in the
piazzas and across the canals, over the bridges that defined the Venetian world. Such as his wonderful
procession of the relic of the true cross, done about 1496, which gives us a very typical Bellini Venetian cityscape,
sometimes swollen with crowds.
In this case, neither empty nor swollen, but a solemn and somber procession that brings back a fragment of the
cross that ultimately Constantine's mother Saint Helen, is said by tradition to have found in Jerusalem, and pieces
of which stayed in Jerusalem. Pieces of which came to Rome. Pieces of which came to Constantinople. One piece
of which from Constantinople came to Venice when Constantinople became Istanbul.
And so we see a procession that is leading toward the great church of San Marco, the glories of which were a
function in part of the fourth crusade, and the looting of what was then Constantinople by the Latin crusaders in
the year 1204. San Marco, with its scintillating gold mosaics, forms the background for this exquisite piazza
through which the procession moves.
Gentile's younger brother, Giovanni, born perhaps 1430-- about a year after Gentile-- and who lived to an old
age-- until 1516-- is better known for other kinds of works, turning the sacra conversazione, the idea of a virgin
and child flanked by a series of different saints from different times and places, as if engaged with each other in a
conversation that is taking place in time and space out of our ordinary profane-- profanos-- time and space.
These kinds of sacra conversazione pieces he turned into magnificent altarpieces, as in his San Giobbe
altarpiece, of about 1480 to 1485, the earliest of these from his hand that has survived, in which he has placed his
figures within a complicated architectural setting that recalls, in its ambitions, the interest in the coffered dome that
we can carry backwards to Masaccio in Florence in the 1420s, and through Alberti in Brunelleschi in Florence, all
the way to the early 16th century, and Raphael down in Rome giving us the School of Athens with a more
complicated coffered ceiling.
Here, Bellini, Giovanni Bellini, has tried that same sort of idea, carrying us into an apse-like formation that has
mosaics as its primary decoration. And within that architectural framework, we have the figure, of course, of the
Virgin and child seated high on a thrown. She in an exquisite blue and red contrast of colors that, as always,
symbolizes blue, the sky, and the truth of God, red, blood and the color of sacrifice.
And on her lap this charming Venetian baby. And they're flanked left and right by a series of figures, in a kind of
contrapposto summatria organization. So we have two naked figures and two clothed figures.
The naked figures are St. Sebastian on the right, our right that is. And St. Giobbe on our left. The clothed figure
St. Dominic on our right. And St. Francis on our left. But St. Sebastian and St. Francis are outer figures. And St.
Giovanni and St. Dominic are the inner figures. So we have this kind of rhythm, clothed, unclothed, clothed,
unclothed.
Of course, Venice was, more than most cities, subject often to plague because of its proximity to water and the
problem, as a practical matter, of what one does with the garbage and the creation of sewage and therefore the
problem of hygiene and therefore the problem of plague. And so any number of structures were built to
commemorate the saving, this salvation from plague.
And among the figures associated with such salvation is, of course, St. Sebastian, who is understood to be a
patron of healing in any case. Because he who was shot through with arrows and then is cured of those wounds
becomes such a patron. But also St. Giovanni, specifically and particularly in Venice, because the figure of Giobee
in the Hebrew Bible, who is ultimately covered with wounds in the course of the trials that he endures, becomes a
symbol also of plague, and therefore of the salvation from plague.
And that's why we have these two figures here presented to us in a kind of contrapuntal formation as Saints
Francis and Dominic are represented in a contrapuntal formation. And, of course, the anchor below the throne for
the composition is these angels, which we recognize are shown smaller than the other figures. So significance,
perspective, is still somewhat operative within a context that is extremely modernist in the sense of real
perspective, the perspective of space.
Now, earlier in his career, Giovanni Bellini created a work, The Agony in the Garden-- about 1465-- which offers
another aspect of his specifically and uniquely Venetian genius. And that is his use of light.
So that we see in this scene Christ kneeling in the garden of Gethsemane, and dawn is just coming over the
horizon beyond him. So it's as if he's got an extensive halo that sweeps from one end of the horizon to the next.
And the landscape itself is soft edged, as if its sharp edges have been erased by the repeated flow of water that
reflects the water sensibilities of Venice.
So Christ kneels and he sees before him in the sky the one supernatural element of this composition, this very
delicate angel who offers him his trial to come. And figures in the middle landscape-- small but unavoidable in the
dead center, in fact, of the composition, are the figures streaming out of the Jerusalem that we barely see off in
the distance led by Judas bringing them to the garden.
The figures in the foreground scattered and spread in different stages of discomfort as they uncomfortably sleep,
who can't stay awake through the night with Christ. In particular, the figure to the right has an intriguing
foreshortening, as he faces body wise towards us, that suggests and perhaps reflects the influence on Giovanni
Bellini of his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna, who had married the Bellini sister, Nicolosia Bellini, back in 1454.
Mantegna did an agony in the garden the following year in 1455. In other words, a decade before Giovanni's
exploration of that theme. And we see a very different, even as we see a very similar, kind of work of art. We see
a composition which is much less spread out, which is much tighter. We see a much sharper edged handling of
the landscape elements. And a darker kind of sky in which the light of dawn is confined to the right hand side most
obviously, and the rest of the sky has a much more night like quality to it. The clouds within it are much sharper
edged than was true of Giovanni's rendering of this scene.
And, of course, most obviously as a difference, the angels come soaring in on a kind of surfboard of a cloud, who
bring all of the different elementa that will make up the sacrifice that will follow a few moments later, as we see in
counterpoint to these angels, in the middle ground to the right, that series of figures led by Judas coming out to
the garden-- a much more dominant series of figures than was true for Giovanni's rendering. Just as we have a
dominant series of angels here in counterpoint to the single evanescent angel of Giovanni.
The whole subject has been turned around. Christ facing this way rather than that. The image of Jerusalem is
much more dominant as part of the landscape. So that Christ is almost lost within it. Whereas we could not miss
him standing out within the Giovanni rendering.
And, of course, another obvious difference is the handling of the figures in the foreground, which Mantegna has
gathered together in a tighter clump, in an equally awkward formation, with another exercise in unusual kinds of
body positions perspectively oriented toward the viewer. Mantegna has given us a kind of close up, where
Giovanni Bellini has given us a more distant sight, a different perspective, on the same image, the same idea.
By 1460-- that is to say five years after this work, six years after he had married into the Bellini family-- Mantegna
had left. He had come from Padua, he had hooked up with these Venetians. He'd left now and gone to Mantua,
where he came under the employ of the Gonzaga clan. And where in their palace, particularly the room known as
the Camera degli Sposi-- the chamber of the bride and groom, the wedding chamber-- around 1474, he created a
most extraordinary exercise in the whole matter of perspective and the placement of bodies on a flat surface to
give the viewer the illusion that he or she is viewing something that is three dimensional. The crown of this
composition is the first fully and truly illusionistic imagery in the Renaissance period, and recalls in its own way not
just the Roman penchant for painting away the walls that we've discussed in an earlier lecture, but the fulfillment
of that notion that Petrarch-- who coined the word Renaissance in the 14th century-- offered that one must seek
not really to emulate the Greeks and Romans but to excel them.
And so if Roman wall painting paints away the walls, what Mantegna has done has not merely to paint away the
walls but to paint away the ceiling. So we're looking up here in the Camera degli Sposi at a ceiling that opens up to
the sky-- a bright beautiful sky with plump clouds-- and a complete exercise in fool the eye trompe l'oeil visual
virtuosity. In which through that opening, through that Oculus, we see figures peering down at us, including
members of the Gonzaga family.
We see a large container with a pot of plants which is balancing on a crossbeam hovering over our heads. And we
see, of course, putti, little erotis, little cupids. Some of them outside, some of them actually as if they are inside the
dome peering down at us in this magnificent exercise in out of whack perspective.
Now Mantegna would die about 10 years before Giovanni, in 1506. And there would be no follower of this kind of
genius, of this kind of exercise in outlandish prospective, for another half century. In his studio, at his death, was
found a small painting that he must have taken with him wherever he went, and which has thought to have been
painted somewhere in the early 1490s, which carries the issue of perspective in another extraordinary direction.
It's his image of the Dead Christ, whom we see from the feet to the nose. Our eyes cannot avoid the wounds in
the hands and the feet, even as those wounds are free, as it were, of blood. The feet, in fact, hang out over the
edge of this sharp edged bed on which the body has been placed.
And just off to the left, crowding into the composition, we see a virgin who is not the young eternally unchanging
virgin that we conventionally see her as in most renderings of her up to this time, but rather, an old woman who is,
indeed, grief struck by the death of her son. And she is flanked closer to us by John the Evangelist and beyond
her, just in the shadows, a pious woman to complete the composition.
So these kinds of works, by these kinds of artists-- Gentile Bellini, Giovanni Bellini, Andrea Mantegna-- really set
the foundations for what will become the High Renaissance mastery in the northern parts of Italy, in Venice in
particular, that comes into focus when we move from them to the figures of Giorgione and Titian.
If in thinking about the Bellinis, particularly Giovanni, we think of the handling of light as so delicate and typical of
the Venetian world, and if in turning to Mantegna we think of prospective carried to such an interesting extreme,
then when we turn to Giorgione, we think of mystery. Because he is the mystery man par excellence of the
Renaissance.
He dies of plague in 1510. He's barely 33 at the time. There are those who believe that he created an enormous
number of paintings. There are those who say, no he only created six or seven. So there's a good deal of
controversy about what he did and what he did not paint.
In addition to which every painting that everyone agrees was done by Giorgione is filled with mystery. So The
Tempest of about 1505 is an example of that. We see a woman nursing her child and a soldier identified by his
uniform, not by any armor that he carries.
And at first glance, we might say this must be the rest on the road into Egypt. This must be a rendering of Joseph,
although younger than usual, and the Virgin and child. And yet, there is nothing per se and in particular that would
suggest that.
We find broken architecture, the columns there, that recall any number of instances in which such architectural
elements suggest the breaking down of the old order in favor of the new. We see a city in the background. And
there is a dome structure, which perhaps is intended to suggest Jerusalem.
Most obviously, however, we see a landscape, which gives us in the foreground trees and bushes in which not a
leaf is yet stirring. While in the background, one of the more stunning instances of a storm crashing over a city,
that we understand is about to come forward towards this compositional group. The whole remains mysterious.
X-rays have shown that originally the figure to the left, the soldier, was a nude female. So whatever it is that
Giorgione had in mind to do, he changed his mind at some point. And has left us with possibilities rather than
certainties.
Is the bridge that is in the dead center simply a bridge connecting parts? Or is the bridge, because it's wood, a
symbol of the cross, and therefore in the dead center because it connects the past to the future? Because it
connects the Old to the New Testaments? Because it connects the figures of the Virgin and child. And that soldier,
cum Joseph, cum, perhaps, the good thief.
Giorgione leaves us with mystery after mystery. His concert in the field, the Concert Champetre, of around the
same time period gives us a beautifully swollen landscape. And again, a very sultry kind of sky.
And a pairing of males with a pairing of females, which two pairs seem to have very little to do with each other in
an obvious and direct sense. The two males have musical instruments, are in the shadows, are clothed, are
engaged in intense conversation it seems together.
And the two females, who parenthesize them, so to speak, are variously naked or almost naked. One beginning to
play a flute, the other turning away from us and gracefully pouring water out of a crystal pitcher. The two women
suffused, in particular, by a very golden kind of light. The two women with a very Georgianeque kind of
plumpness-- a plumpness that seems typical of northern Italian painting, as opposed, for example, to Botticelli
down in Florence, whose figures are somewhat more svelte.
There are those who say that this work was finished by Titian. And ce...
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