Thomas Edison State College | 23 16th Century Northern European Painting
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When we look north of the Alps, as we arrive toward the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century, the
time period that we have referred to as High Renaissance in Italy, south of the Alps. When we arrived to Germany
and France and the Netherlands in between, we find ourselves at that time period engaged in a number of parallel
and different visual conceptions from what we find in Italy.
The two parts of the European world share an interest in refocusing religious subject matter towards an interest
on humanity and on the human side of those elements that we associate with the other world. And if we look for
differences, one of the obvious ones will be the way in which the Northern Renaissance will be less focused on
perspective and more focused on jewel-like details on absolute accuracy of representation.
If we look at a work by Michael Pacher, the Tyrolean from the area of Austria-- both a sculptor and a painter-- a
work called the Altarpiece of the Four Latin Church Fathers that dates from about 1483 and which is entirely, in
fact, a painting. As much as his skills as a sculptor seem at first glance to be advertised, we realize that it is his
skill as a painter that gives us the fool the eye-- the Trump-l'oeil illusion-- that the figures he has presented to us
are sitting within niches. It is all Trump-l'oeil, the niches, just as the figures are merely painted figures, just as the
small grisaille-- those gray stone sculptures-- that festoon the sides of the niches are, in fact, all painted.
Just as obviously, the doves that symbolize the Holy Spirit are painted. And in the detail we see before us, we see
St. Augustine to our left. Known for having formulated the final foundations of Western Christian thinking, it is he
who ultimately delineates the underpinnings of the notion of virgin birth, of the notion of original sin, of the notion
of how to understand a god that is simultaneously onefold and threefold.
And to the other side, St. Gregory, the first major Pope who held Rome together between about 590 and 604, who
was the first Pope to take very seriously the command to protect and feed my flocks using his personal wealth, to
save the poor using his personal charisma, to save Rome by going out and talking down a barbarian chieftain.
And in this image, shown extending his hand to raise out of purgatory a barbarian-- well, not a barbarian but a
Pagan king.
What king? The emperor. What emperor? Trajan. The story has it that Gregory was so moved by a scene on the
column of Trajan-- that shows the emperor extending kindness to an old widow-- that he prayed all night long to
God to bring Trajan up out of purgatory to paradise. And the story goes on that God agreed, provided that
Gregory did not put in another request for another Pagan as long as he was around.
And so we see the image of Gregory reaching down and pulling Trajan up-- who is represented in nothing but a
loin cloth and, of course, a crown that looks very contemporary with Pacher and not with Trajan-- and of course,
smaller, insignificant perspective than Gregory himself.
The whole composition dazzles the eye and is extremely different in both subject matter and medium from the
work by Martin Shongauer dating from 1480 to 1490 or so, that shows the temptation of Saint Anthony, that
quintessential, late-second/early-third century saint associated with the beginnings of western monasticism, so
famous for his ability to withstand the various temptations that would make it difficult for a monastic to focus on
spiritual matters. And the temptations-- whether they are of boredom or whether they are of beautiful women or
whether they are of demons-- variously, verbally, and visually articulated-- are here centered for us by a figure
who floats without any kind of a background in midair, resisting those temptations, resisting the attempts to
distract him from a full meditative focus.
The artist, Shongauer, has given us what in fact is a tour de force of his skill at exercising the engravers tool-- the
burin-- which he has impressed with varying levels of pressure so as to create the textual contrasts between skin
and hair, between animal flesh and human flesh, and feather and drapery. And the whole thing balancing the
feeling of ethos-- his calm-- and pathos-- the anxiety-- to tempt him on the part of the creatures around him
between calmness and ferocity.
Yet a further contrast is offered in turning to Albrecht Durer's St. Jerome in His Study-- another of the Western
church fathers-- this work dating from 1514. Jerome was best known, of course, for having translated the Bible
into Latin. Vulgus is the Latin word for the people, and so it's called the Vulgate-- it's the same word from which we
get, of course, the pejorative word vulgar.
The Vulgate is the work in which we see him engaged in the translation from Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic to
Latin, and the image gives us a perspective that is a bit skewed. The vanishing point carries us towards the right
rather than towards the center. Is it that Durer's less interested in perspective than the Italians are, or is it that he
is interested in being original in the way he posed the perspective off-angle?
In any case, we see the sunlight pouring in through those glass bottom windows. We see the orthogonals
reaching towards the rear to the right, we see the halo delicately covering the saint's head, and beyond his head
the cardinal's hat on the window sill. The skull-- the memento mori-- the reminder of mortality which he has before
him and we have before us, the dog that is the symbol of faith, and the lion who kept him company during his
times in the wilderness as he meditated.
Now both Shongauer and Durer were very fond of using paper, itself a new medium that had come in the 12th
and 13th centuries into Europe from China, by way of the Muslim world. And which by the 15th century would be
wed to various printing processes-- the original printed Bible of Gutenberg, of course, is from the 1450s.
And if Shongauer is a bridge between early engravers and Durer, Durer himself is the personification of the
Renaissance artist in the north, the equivalent in the north to Leonardo in the south. From Germany to Italy, the
isolated genius who emulates God in being a great creator. But what differentiates Durer, let's say, from Leonardo
is that in addition by using paper and the printed medium, he was able to disseminate works of his throughout
Europe so that he became pretty much a pop star, whereas Leonardo's works are few and far between and one
at a time.
Still different from this trio of Pacher and Shongauer and Durer-- in the matter of Northern Renaissance art as it
moves from the late 15th into the early 16th century-- is the extraordinary Dutchman, Hieronymus Bosch, whose
hallucinatory visions between 1500 and 1510 or so give us a garden of earthly delights that is phantasmagorical in
the creatures that populate it.
That gives us obviously, to the left side, an image of paradise with Adam and Eve and God between them. It's as if
God has just brought Eve up out of the rib of Adam and now presents her to him. And obviously to the right, we
get visions of Hell, this closed, dark imagery with fire and brimstone, dark up toward the back whereas the left
hand image is so bright up toward the back.
And if music is throughout the Medieval and Renaissance period associated with desire, with carnality, with love-in fact, Shakespeare will later on the century, in Twelfth Night, speak about music as the food of love. If that's so,
then of course the foreground representation of all this instrumentation would suggest carnality, and that would
give us Hell and Heaven.
What about the center piece, however? That's the most difficult one-- this central panel-- to understand. Is this
simply carnality? Is this the earthbound activities that lead one toward Hell, with naked people cavorting around
and giant fruits and giant oysters-- and oysters are, in the north, a symbol of sexuality and sexual desire-- and
carnality with these birdlike creatures?
Or as some have argued, is it actually the reverse just in disguise, the elements of paradise? Was Bosch a
member of some heretical sect-- as some have argued-- and that's what is being represented here?
Others have argued he was a member of no heretical sect at all, some have argued that what we really have-and this seems to me to make sense-- if we're between Hell and Heaven, then we should be in purgatory. But
whereas purgatory is typically the struggling ascent from Hell to Heaven, here it seems that instead we have the
actions of the damned who are being drawn into Hell from Heaven.
Or put another way, if we look at the entire composition as a whole, we recognize how the horizon line most
obviously-- if it connects all three elements-- really connects the left and central more than either of them is
connected to the right. So in that case, we might argue that, from the creation of Adam and Eve and what will
follow thereafter-- the original sin-- we're led through the earthbound, profane life that is filled with sin. Those are
connected to each other, and where they ultimately lead to is the Hell that we see on the right.
The hope for salvation through Jesus is understood but not represented by Bosch, because he feels it more
pedagogically important to show the darker than the brighter elements of a twofold reality, a twofold possibility for
human behavior, and for what comes after life in human rewards and human punishments.
Perhaps the last work that Bosch created gives us a dark vision, a kind of cynical vision-- even though at the
center of it is the symbol of the opposite of cynicism, the opposite of darkness, it's Christ carrying the cross. But
we see his face with its calm, with its ethos, and we see to our lower left the light image of St. Veronica holding the
drapery which has the image of his face on it as two islands of calm, of sweetness, within a sea of ugly and
distorted faces. The ugly, distortedness of which is really more psychological-- look at the expressions on their
faces-- than physiological.
Even as the physiology that emphasizes bug-eyed and toothless and hook-nosed and unwashed skin kinds of
characters seems to suggest evil incarnate, some figures carefully-- [? Cara ?] Schiro, other figures presented in a
rather flat kind of manner. The whole image is crammed with faces, how different from the open garden in the
garden of earthly delights we saw a moment ago. There is no landscape here to relieve the horror of the image,
one must find it by digging in to find the face of Christ in the center of everything.
Durer also did an image of Christ bearing the cross about 1495, about 20 years before the Bosch image of the
same subject-- might have been a bit later, 1498 or 1499. Also figures crowd the frame, but they crowd it in a
different way. Durer surrounds these figures, surrounds the full-bodied central figure that is of Christ, who's less
tripping under the weight of his burden than pausing-- it seems-- with a kind of effortless ethos, an effortless calm.
On his knees and turning back to look at St. Veronica, he surrounds all of this with topographical detail as well as
the chaos of a riotous crowd of people and animals.
Durer has also added, of course, a frame-filling city gate, out of which the crowd starts to spill towards Golgotha,
which is then counterbalanced by that landscape in the distance that sweeps us toward the martyrdom that awaits
its victim. We can see the crosses just on the swelling of hill in the upper right.
But no work in the Western tradition is as painful as that by Mathias Grunewald in his rendering of the crucifixion,
whether in individual panel paintings or in-- of course-- the centerpiece of the exterior of the great Isenheim Altar,
done between 1510 and 1515. It was done for the hospital chapel of St. Anthony's monastery in Isenheim, which
is in Alsace on that border territory between France and Germany.
And its outer wings offer the crucifixion in the center flanked by the image of St. Anthony to our right-- the
namesake of the hospital-- and St. Sebastian to our left, the patron saint of healing associated, of course
naturally, with a hospital. And if we open the wings, then we get another series of images which offers us the
Enunciation to the left, to the right gives us the Resurrection, and a beautiful centerpiece-- a unique centerpiece-that offers us the Virgin and child with a bevy of angels playing a concert for the Virgin and child.
And if we open yet again-- because this is a complex altarpiece that opens and opens and the further in we get,
the more material we get to-- here we find images of St. Anthony meeting St. Paul the Hermit to our left, aptly
being tempted in between those two scenes an array of sculptures by Nikolaus Hagenauer. If we look at a detail of
the St. Anthony, we recognize a different and yet similar handling from what we saw by Shongauer a few
moments back-- that is, the saint being attacked and torn at by a range of very weird creatures with bodies and
faces devised of different elements that one can hardly find in the real world. But the whole thing's set into a real
landscape rather than hanging in midair.
But it is when we close back up and come to the central image on the exterior of the crucified Christ that we arrive
at the heart and soul of Grunewald, with his emphasis here on the already-present rigor mortis as we see the
twisted fingers and feet and arms and legs, only held back from twisting further by the pressure of the nails
securing them to the wood. And the over-running of the powerful and gruesome and heaving body of Christ, his
last breath sucked in with splotches of blood spurting from endless lacerations.
And this is perhaps not accidental, for the monks at the monastery of St. Anthony were specifically and particularly
known for treating sufferers of skin ailments. And so his Christ is very much a victim, so to speak, of an excess of
attention on skin wounds.
Flanking him, of course, subtly smaller figures that contrast with this horror, the Virgin and John the Evangelist on
the one side, and balancing that John the Baptist on the other with a still-smaller figure of the Magdalene with her
arms raised up, her hands twisted in grief, that echo the twisting of the hands of Christ himself. She kneels at the
foot of the cross, and she is balanced by the lamb, the Agnes De-- the ultimate Christ symbol-- her body swaying
as she stretches backwards to look up, creating a smaller echo of the Virgin swooning backwards into the arms of
John the Evangelist.
The three of these figures to the left, that is-- the Virgin, the Magdalene, and the Evangelist-- are traditionally
present at the event, they share the anguish at the human death, but the Baptist on the other side is an element
that is, of course, time out of time, space out of space, and subtly larger than they are while still smaller than the
Christ. Calmly gesturing for our benefit, for the benefit of the viewer, as on his side the Agnes stands at his feet
and he gestures to this moment of salvation.
The gruesomeness of Grunewald's style, his emotional intensity, his depiction of the terrible nature of suffering is
inherent in other related but different salvational subjects. So certainly the subject of Lucas Cranach the Elder's
Judith with the Head of Holofernes, dating from about 1530, is gruesome, but in a manner radically different from
that of Grunewald.
Cranach's style completely contradicts the moment, in fact. His Judith-- this wealthy, beautiful widow who goes out
from the besieged city of Jerusalem, possibly to seduce but certainly to kill the besieging general, the Assyrian
general Holofernes-- and so to save the city of Jerusalem, the setting would be in the late 8th, early 7th preChristian century.
Here this beautiful widow is depicted by the artist as elegantly attired. She's got a very sweet face, her clothes are
clothes of her era but the eyes are the dangerous eyes-- as dangerous as they are calm-- and she holds aloft a
sword which paradoxically is devoid of any blood while quietly resting her other hand on the head of her victim,
which is lodged on this shelf also with very little blood coming from the neck, in an extreme foreshortening
presentation. Both Judith's and Holofernes's head-- together with the sword that links them, the instrument of their
connection-- are sharply silhouetted against a dark background that therefore causes the moment to come out of
space, to transcend space. And so while Judith saves the city, she is yet a dangerous, modernist beauty, just as
while she and Holofernes are very much volumetric there in space without real space.
If we reach even further back into the depths of the Biblical narrative, we've yet a different angle of considering the
dangerous necessities of male-female relations. We might come to Lucas van Lyden's panel of Lot and his
Daughters, painted around 1509. This would've been the same year in which Grunewald began work on his
Isenheim Altarpiece.
Here the setting is dramatically lit by the explosive fire and brimstone from above, that is in the process of
destroying Sodom and Gomorrah in the distance off to the right there. Ships are beginning to sink into the sea that
rises as the earthquake consumes the city. Tiny refugees-- maybe in continuous narrative style these are Lot and
his daughters whom we actually see, maybe not-- but they're making their way across a very rickety bridge that
helps accentuate the scale of the cataclysm in comparison with those tiny bridge figures and the figures in the
foreground.
And so the figures in the foreground are Lot, engaged amorously with one of his daughters, and his second
daughter preparing more wine to keep their father drunk so that he will continue to be amorous. For otherwise, his
line will die out because as far as they know, this is the end of their world, there will be no husbands, and there will
line will die out because as far as they know, this is the end of their world, there will be no husbands, and there will
be no means of providing a future offspring that will carry forth Lot's line.
The spectacular night lighting that shapes the foreground and offers an almost-Venetian feel to it, with the tent
behind them, also recalls Piero Della Francesca's Vision of Constantine that we saw in lecture 16. With the
opening tent and the dramatic light of night that contrasts so strongly with the Ruffian background style of Lucas
van Lyden's painting over all, offering a setting that is both monumental and intimate thereby.
The Northern artists exhibit an increasing outreach for subjects not only that are Biblical and diverse in that
regard, but are Greco-Roman in both subject and style. So we might turn once again to the incomparable Albrecht
Durer and to a drawing relatively early of 1494, in which he has depicted The Death of Orpheus, in which the harp
has fallen from his hands onto the ground before him. And in which we see a tiny putto, a little arrow's cupid
fleeing-- it seems-- off the scene, that perhaps is a reminder of his daring but failed journey to the underworld to
bring back his true love, Eurydice. Fleeing the scene which is violent but not yet gruesome, for he is, of course, to
be beaten to death-- not torn apart, but beaten to death and torn apart by the [? Vacantes, ?] these women made
as dangerous as Judith and as daring as the daughters of Lot-- by consuming the liquid that is associated with
Bacchus.
We're reminded, too, of the three-figure compositions-- in relief and mosaic-- that form the Greek Classical and
Hellenistic periods, that show us Greeks against Amazons, or in the Gnosis mosaic a stag hunt. In which
symmetria-- the arrangement of figures-- balances with imbalance and so in Durer's painting, the two female
figures are balanced but imbalanced-- one facing front, the other facing back.
And both of them swathed in richly-delineated drapery that also recalls Greek visual thinking in its deliberate
contrast to the skin, the flesh, the muscled torso of Orpheus-- paradoxically, uselessly muscled, his muscles aren't
going to get him out of this situation.
Durer is surely the giant of his era in the North. He's very much the center around which High Renaissance
sensibilities circle, as in the South those sensibilities circle around a series of figures whom we have associated
with the High Renaissance, beginning with Leonardo and carrying forward to Bramante and to Giorgione and to
Rafael and to Michelangelo and to [? Tischen. ?]
Each of those figures contributes to the High Renaissance in Italy and while many figures contribute to the High
Renaissance north of the Alps, just perhaps as Leonardo is the quintessence of Renaissance in Italy, so Durer is
the quintessence of Renaissance north of the Alps. Leonardo, more because of the range and variety of his
accomplishments and the originality of the compositions of his paintings. Durer because of the originality of both
his paintings and his engravings, and because of the way in which his works transmitted-- by way of engravings
and other printed forms-- disseminated his name and his fame across Europe.
His self-portrait of about 1500 is perhaps the most awesome of a series that began when he was only 13, his first
self-portrait done back in 1484. He was already accomplished then, by now he has become an acknowledged
genius and he is the first artist to express a fascination with his own likeness.
That is, if Leonardo is the first artist to emphatically centralize thinking around the genius of the artist-- who is
Godlike in being creative, who is like a prophet in that the God enspirits, inspires works through him to create-- if
Leonardo brings that to the transformation from Medieval to Renaissance thinking in art, so Durer furthers that
idea by way of the focus on himself, who is self-portrayed again and again.
And the image we have before us articulates the notion of the artist as a self-assured genius, this notion that he
shared with Leonardo. The image glories in his luxurious hair, it glories in his carefully-trimmed beard. It glistens
with the plush garments that envelope his body, it glows with the intense, straight in the viewer's face-- the eyes,
the delicate skilled hands.
These last two elements-- the eyes and the hands, of course-- are what separate him from us. Those are the
instruments that enable him to create what you and I can only appreciate. This is what emanates out from the
paper, out from the canvas, out from the wood panel of works that Durer does toward us. It's what emanates
here.
There is a kind of rigid frontal presentation that with its studied salinity also suggests a Christ-like image, so that
we might see here a kind of secular icon. A secular icon of a self-declared sacerdotal figure, intermediating figure
between that reality and this reality, that makes him analogous not only to prophets, but also to Christ himself.
There is a hubristic quality about it, there is a proud-- overly proud-- quality about it. All of this suggests simply
how seriously he takes his responsibility to bring enlightenment to the world through his rare skill, through his
God-given skill.
And so with artists like Durer, with artists like Bosch, with artists like Grunewald, with these kinds of artists who are
carving out new visual and conceptual territory regarding art itself and its relationship to both the sacer and the
profanus-- to both the sacred and the profane, to both the focus and concern of religion and of the here and now-we enter the 16th century north of the Alps with a sensibility that is carried from Italy, the visual means to leave the
Medieval world behind in favor of a world that is increasingly human-centered and focused on the here and now.
It's a world that doesn't eliminate God, it simply pushes God to the side and the back of the stage and places
humanity in the center. When we arrive to the High Renaissance in the North and the South, it's not really
humanity but the artist himself who is at the center of the center. And with that, a whole range of new kinds of
material-- new kinds of objects-- will become the focus of the artist as we have begun to see south of the Alps,
and as in our next lecture we must see north of the Alps.
Thomas Edison State College | 24 Transformation of People, Object, Ideas
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In the expansive world of the Northern Renaissance in the 16th century, we find an endlessly detailed array of
directions taken in the representation of individuals and objects. A turn, often, from overt religious subject matter
to subject matter that reshapes religious thinking-- that is to say, moral thought, but without necessarily specific
religious references. And one can look for the context of this all around to understand why, by the 16th century,
serious questions about religion are being raised in Western Christendom.
We can backtrack to the 14th century, when, between 1309 and 1378, the papacy spends its time in Avignon-what's popularly referred to as the Babylonian exile of the papacy. Shamed by Catherine of Siena-- Saint
Catherine of Siena-- the Pope comes back in 1378.
But the great Western Schism is what is referred to over the next generation and a half when, between that year
and 1415, there was a series of popes and anti-popes in Rome and Avignon, respectively.
And so it shouldn't surprise us that in the 14th century already, we have literature like Boccaccio's Decameron,
which is satirical with respect to religion. It's a series of stories told by a series of young men and women taking
refuge up in the hills outside Florence during the time of the plague. And the stories they tell include a good
number of them that overtly satirize different aspects of formal religion.
From south to north, Chaucer, in England toward the end of the 14th century, has his pilgrims on the way to
Canterbury stopping at an inn, sharing tales. And some of those also satirize formal religion.
And if we follow from the 14th into the 15th century, we realize that the world is changing in significant external
and not just internal ways. So that we have Henry the Navigator of Portugal, in 1419, already pushing Portuguese
shipping out into the Atlantic to come around Africa.
And the culmination of the century gives us Columbus' first journey to the West-- to the New World-- in 1492. And
Vasco da Gama getting all the way to India, going East in 1498.
So it shouldn't surprise us, then, that we come, by the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century, to a
world which is both exploding because it is a world of exploration that, by the 1520s, through Magellan, will carry
circum navigation all the way around the globe. And also, of implosion because of, well, questions that are coming
to a head by the time we get to Martin Luther in 1517 and those 95 Theses-- those 95 questions nailed on the
church door at Wittenberg.
So if we see this combined with the range of new technologies which are, in fact, making some of this effective
and possible-- cartography, navigation, shipbuilding, guns, and cannonry-- it shouldn't surprise us to be facing a
face like Durer's-- which was the last image we saw in our previous lecture.
That self proclaimed artist as genius image. That facial landscape that he has given to us. This self portrait of the
individual in a natural-- not an idealized-- manner, that brings forward an idea that the Romans had first
experimented with and which now reemerges in the course of the Renaissance, as we have already begun to see.
But the exploration of self coming to a particular tension point with Durer at the dawn of the 16th century.
We might look at a second image by Durer from 1502. It's a watercolor. And its portrayal of a rabbit, or, in other
words, he has taken an element from nature and tried to render it in a two dimensional format. He is following
another aspect of that Leonardo sensibility.
Not just the artist as genius, but here, the artist, in a sense, as scientist, whose powers of observation and
analysis have led him to create this extraordinary image, an image of a mere animal. The humblest of animals-not even a person, the humblest of persons, but the humblest of animals-- in an illusion that ultimately carries us
back to the Greeks and the Romans and the classical desire to create the illusion in bronze or in marble of seeing
and feeling a sentient being.
So that's been translated here into the two dimensional terms of this watercolor. We can feel this rabbit. We can
almost sense it's heart beating. It's as if it's about to pop up and jump away in a moment, after we have had a
chance to look at it.
Quite differently, really, is the imagery of Albrecht Altdorfer's Saint George in a Wood, done about 1510. So
another German artist of the same generation as Durer. And again, as in the portrait-- as I've called it-- of the
rabbit, so a portrait here of nature in a most extreme and extraordinary and wonderful kind of way.
Our George and our dragon are almost lost within this spectacular array of trees and branches and leaves. This is
the grandeur, the mystery, the mystical quality, the mystical unity of nature as a whole. Every leaf paid attention to
by this spectacular artist. An unprecedented focus on a slice of nature. One might think to Giorgione, for example- a contemporary from Venice at around the same time-- whose work we have seen.
But this is even more intense in terms of its specifically natural focus. So that, in fact, we would be inclined to
forget Saint George. Saint George, yes, Saint George, the dragon-- that's Christian symbolism. That's good
against evil. Oh yeah, there's the dragon down there. He looks almost to be asleep more than dead. And Saint
George, well, if his horse were not such a shining white, we might miss him altogether because those symbols
have been swallowed up by the sheer joy in the forest elements.
We have Hans Holbein the Younger, another German painter from Augsburg, who carries portraiture to new
heights as we push further into the 16th century.
So before us, we see an image from about 1523 that shows us the Dutch philosopher, Erasmus of Rotterdam-one of the key shapers of Northern Renaissance thought, a clever commentator on human foibles whose
colloquies offer satires on various aspects of the world around him.
None, perhaps, more entertaining than that satire of 1526 called The Funeral , in which he contrasts, in a
dialogue. So one individual is telling another about how he witnessed the funeral of a rich man and the funeral of a
poor man. And the moral lesson at the end, of course, is the poor man died a much quieter, happier death than
the rich man because everyone was around him like a slew of vultures, hoping to get something out of him before
he dies, including representatives of all the religious orders.
So, once again, a suggestion that formal religion, in its various manifestations, leaves open spiritual questions
rather than simply answering them. And here, Holbein has given us our Erasmus in a profile form, at his desk,
writing. Or put another way, he's given him committing the actions that define what he is as a man, which is to say,
a writer.
He wears a garment with a rich fur collar and sleeves. The whole figure is set tightly against this decorative cloth
with its green and its little fleurettes and flowers of red and white and yellow. Balance between light and dark
areas. A balance between a formality of pose, and yet, a very informal pose in this relaxed profile-- writing,
focused on what he's writing and not on being represented by the artist-- kind of position that Holbein has given
us.
Holbein is most famous as a portraitist, perhaps for his classic renditions of the English King, Henry VIII, who is
very much a part of this era. We see him here, represented. It tells us, right across the top of the image, that it's
done in the 49th year of his life. And since he was born in 1491, so we know that this painting dates from about
1540, about halfway through his progression of six different marriages.
And, of course, it's that that would make him so particularly a child of his era-- the era of reformation-- in the
conflicts which, naturally, he had with the church as a consequence of his desire to be unmarried after he had
been married. Now, in fairness to Henry, two of his wives he divorced. Two of them, he executed. One died of
natural causes, or, perhaps, she was poisoned. That's Jane Seymour. And one outlived him.
So maybe he wasn't altogether so well as focused on bothering about the Church as, perhaps, he's remembered
for being. He was, in fact, the ultimate Renaissance king. He was a very successful dice player and gambler. He
was a jouster. He was a hunter. He was a tennis player. He was a poet. He was a musician. We still have
compositions he's written that are occasionally played by well known lutenists.
So there's a kind of irony about this multi-faceted king who is remembered for the fact that he began to dissolve
the monasteries in 1533. And, by the end of the 1530s, had taken over all of the territory of the Church for himself
and his followers and created his own church.
The irony within the irony, of course, is that as a writer, he began, in a sense, with a blistering attack-- back at the
end of the teens-- a blistering attack on Martin Luther. And defended and vindicated the Church's teachings on
the sacraments, the very issue about which Luther had wanted to have a debate.
So at that point, he's a defender of the church against which he turns about 15 years later. The full break would
come in 1534. And so, by the end of the 1530s, he's essentially dissolved the church in England. And by then,
he's moving from one marriage to the next.
And by then, he's posing for this portrait by Holbein, who had come from Augsburg through Basel, Switzerland, to
France, where he spent some time at the court of Francis I to arrive at the court of Henry, where he became his
court painter-- his official painter.
And here, of course, has given us this wonderfully decorated figure-- this symbol, really. It's more a portrait of
monarchic power than it is a portrait of a monarch, per se. His broad glorious attire, overrun with a range of
different kinds of materials, with his magnificent jewelry across his chest.
And that wonderful diagonal of his right arm coming down to his left hand that runs contrary to the verticals that
his left arm and the upper part of his right arm offer in the strict horizontality off his shoulders, this broad figure,
this ruthless facial expression that he has before us, and, ultimately, a very flat series of patterns that work across
his ornamented surface.
Now, Holbein probably, in passing through the court of Francis I, would have had an opportunity to see the image
painted of that king by Jean Clouet a bit earlier-- between 1525 and 30-- where, again, it seems even more
extremely that the figure offers more abstract pattern then, per se, figure. That a sense of mannerism-- and by
that, I mean startling and distorted relationships between the body and the head-- is very characteristic-mannerist stylist characteristic-- of this kind of work.
The torso, filling out. The picture frame. The fingers, so delicate. The face, so extremely delicate. The beard and
mustache, so carefully carved by the paintbrush. And that rakishly angled hat, of course, to complete the picture
of a figure who is then placed before this rather lush backdrop and very subtley, clearly, has led us into that
backdrop. If you look at the bottom of the image, there's a drapery covered shelf that stands between him and us.
And we move from that up and in, to the hands, to the torso, to the head and hat, and then, to the backdrop
behind it.
So Henry and Francis offer us two of the four figures that dominate the 16th century across Europe and the
Mediterranean. The other two, of course, are the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, and the Spanish
King, Charles I, who is, also, I remind you, the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V at the same =m that being a
complication of his mother's line and his father's line. His mother coming from Spain and his father, Philip the
Hapsburg, ultimately, from central Europe.
So we have a growing array, not only of important royal personages, but important royal patronage during the
16th century. And yet, at the same time, a growing middle class that we see represented in images like this, of a
decade earlier by Quentin Metsys, from the Netherlands, done between 1515 and 1520, of what is referred to as
the Unequal Pair.
One might, in comparing this with the Arnolfini wedding portrait, realize that we've come some distance as far as a
socioeconomic step down two or three or four rungs to this image as well as just opening up the picture to
something far more informal and down to earth than that very formalized portrait that is a wedding record of the
early 15th century that we saw many lectures ago.
This is part of what we call genre painting. This burgeoning middle and even lower class that wants itself
presented. And not just an upper class or a noble class or royal class that wants itself represented. So Durer's
rabbit, the humble member of the animal world, has, in a sense, the beginnings of his contemporary here in this
Unequal Pair, so-called.
This satire, which has a moral lesson nonetheless, which is, of course, that a fool and his money are soon parted.
The fool is, obviously, this almost toothless, leering, lascivious, not overly pleasant looking old fart to our right, one
of whose hands we see clasping the head of the beautiful young girl in the center. The other hand is lost because,
we realize, he's grabbing her breast and so the hand is blocked by her right arm.
Her right arm, of course, reaching for his chin very tenderly, but then, look at that wonderful crisscross of her
arms. And her other hand is reaching across your body to hand over a bag of money to her accomplice in the left
hand corner of the painting. So this is far from a wedding portrait. This is, rather, a negotiation portrait, one might
say. And what she is engaged in is not something as legitimate as love in marriage, but carnality outside of
marriage.
And in case anyone would have any doubt about this, in the foreground, we see a number of foods, most
importantly the oyster shells. And oysters, which have, by then, become a consistent symbol of carnal love.
So, in fact, even she, in the center, who at first glance, by contrast of flesh tone and shape of face, is so attractive
in comparison with the other two figures in the image, is morally no more attractive than they. One might say that
we have a kind of unholy trinity before our eyes here. It's the opposite of what would be either religious or even
non-religiously but moral attractiveness that we see before us.
Metsys' German contemporary, Hans Baldung Grien, from around the same time, created a series of works which
carry further the notion of moral lesson. As in his Death and the Maiden, dating from 1517, exactly the year when
Luther posted those 95 Theses on the Wittenberg church door.
In which we understand of this young woman that she could be any young woman. So the intention is to be broad,
to be universal, to speak of the human condition overall, with beautiful contrast of color, particularly and obviously
between her flesh and his. Drapery and naked flesh, drapery that is comparable, hers to his. Hair, hers and his.
The position of body parts. She, in this legs together, hands raised in a kind of prayerful mode. He, with his legs
splayed, one arm stretching down and the other reaching around to pull at her hair, gives us a marvelous
combination of contrastive visual elements. Just as we understand that the ultimate point-- what stands at the
center-- is the young girl and her voluptuousness, which so contrasts with the skeletal form behind her.
And we're reminded, perhaps, of the role of the skeleton in any number of images that function as memento
moris-- of reminders of death. One might think of Masaccio's Trinity from a century earlier, at the base of which is
a skeletal form.
But this is no skeletal form lying on the image of a sarcophagus. This is a skeletal form which is up, standing,
arrived and active in participation in the dance of life. With this young woman, with her Scopatic eyes, those deep
set eyes in that tilt of head that, ultimately, we can trace all the way back to Scopas, in the fourth pre-Christian
century in Greek sculpture.
The whole is set before a dark background that suggests the darkness of death, that of which this figure behind
her has arisen. And what we are seeing, in this last series of works then, are moral lessons without necessarily
specific religious references.
But if we turn to Pieter Aertsen from Amsterdam, who studied also in Antwerp, and so he functions as a kind of
bridge between the Dutch, or Netherlandish, and the Flemish or Belgian worlds of art during the 16th century.
And we look at his work called The Egg Dance. So we're looking at another instance of genre painting. So we're
seeing, specifically, that genre which has a kind of kitchen quality to it. In fact, Aertsen was known as the painter of
kitchens. In which we see, in the foreground, slightly to the left, this figure dancing gleefully. In fact, his right knee
pushes out towards the viewer, most specifically, pulling away from a table.
The table, on which we notice, food that has not yet been consumed. In fact, we notice one of the plates is starting
to slip off the edge of the table. A knife is starting to slip off the edge of the table. And then we see, of course, from
that full area to the open area to the right, a floor which is absolutely strewn with eggs, with leeks, with shoes-- a
sea of chaos, as it were.
And a series of figures. A second dancer, to the upper right, surrounded by other figures. And then a bagpipe
player to the upper left.
The whole thing, a cacophony of wild and woolly action. Except the young girl, towards the foreground left, who
seems to be trying to get the attention of the dancer and gestures up to the doorway in the upper right hand
corner, where we realize there are three figures-- a young boy and his mother leaning over him and a father, all
with idealized features so that we understand this to be the holy family.
This is Jesus with his parents, entering this world represented here, that is a world of chaos and even of evil. The
bagpipe player is not just a bagpipe player, since bagpipes, often by the 15th century already, and surely now in
the 16th, were shown being played by demons and so become a symbol of evil.
We, of course, are in this world, dancing wildly. Or are we taking note of the figures entering the doorway and
allowing them into our hearts?
Aertsen then gives us a moral lesson that is heavily disguised by what at first seems to be a genre scene and then
makes a very specific kind of religious allusion to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. And he was part of a dynasty. He
taught his sons. He taught his nephew. So he trained a whole bevy of Aertsen's to succeed him.
And the same is true of the Dutch born and Flemish trained Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who created a dynasty that
would carry northern painting through the rest of the 16th century with great excitement and success. In his
landscapes, he almost always eliminates religious, but not moral lessons. He eliminates individuals for a wider
focus on an encyclopedic array of figures. He plays between flatness and perspective.
In his Peasant Dance of 1566-67, we have a very high horizon. And we see large figures with large bodies and
large limbs and particularly large feet, as if they've been born to dance. Dancing raucously and singing and eating
and drinking. There's a kind of open visual wedge in the center that causes the viewer's eye-- that invites the
viewer's eye-- to move up and in to the image.
Large building to the left, leading to a landscape of buildings, diminishing toward the right. Counterbalanced by the
large couple coming into the scene-- rushing into the scene-- from the lower right, that ultimately lead us towards
smaller figures in the upper left. This is a dynamic coverage of a slice of everyday life. Every day life as it is lived
by the lower classes. And, in fact, that becomes, again and again, Bruegel's focus-- the life of the peasantry.
So The Wheat Harvest of 1565 carries us from the previous image-- which is an image of entertainment, of play-to an image which is essentially of work, or a moment within the work day at the end of the summer. A landscape
that is dominated in its distant sweep by endless meticulous details, including figures that diminish in size all the
way toward the horizon line.
The angle of grain cuts across, towards the just off center of the image, where this tree rises to bifurcate the two
parts of the painting, just off center. That rises, also, from the figure splayed at the bottom of the painting with his
legs going in two directions that kind of echo the way in which the field is moving at an angle through the painting.
So that, in effect, we get a threefold division here. We have the division between those still working and those who
are either resting or eating. We get a division between the grain that is cut and the grain that is not yet cut.
We get a division between the closed area to the right, where the landscape is filled with tree branches all the way
to the top of the image, and the open area to the left, where we get the horizon line that carries us into this distant
vista. A vista that has a soft edge to it, reflecting on the fact that we're in a late August, early September day,
where the heat is hot and where the air seems to scintillate with soft edges.
I emphasize this last element because it offers such an obvious contrast to another of Bruegel's most magnificent
images-- my personal favorite, I have to say.
This winter image that gives us such sharp edged reality. Everything about everything within this image is sharp
edged. It's called the Return of the Hunters and it dates from 1568, the year before the painter died.
It is, of course, a snow scene. Is a winter scene. And so we get naked trees and they're so dark in comparison
with the snow, which is so light. So the emphasis is on silhouettes. The emphasis is on dark, light contrasts rather
than on gradations of softness.
We have meticulous detail again. We have wonderful and subtle and modulated perspective. Look at the way,
past that network of branches, we can follow a line of trees. And then continues, in the middle ground, to smaller
trees and, ultimately, ends up where the hills rise in the right.
And note how, contrary to that, the frontal landscape-- the foreground landscape-- starts in the lower right and
works its way to the left, where it ends up rising with that building in the middle ground left. And notice how,
running against all of that, the horizontals of those swatches of land covered with snow between those stretches of
water where people are ice skating, the atmosphere is so rich.
One can feel the cold. One can sense the silence that is only interrupted by the crunch of the feet of the returning
hunters in the snow. And, perhaps, the crackle of the fire that we note in the left that they pass on their way home.
This is part and parcel of the cycle of nature, of the cycle of the universe, of which the animals, the humans, the
trees, the land, the water, even the occasional soaring bird-- that, for whatever reason, hasn't made it south-participates.
So we speak then with Bruegel, as with others, of moral lessons that take different sorts of visual shapes. And
sometimes, the moral lessons can be simple explorations of the world. Sometimes, the moral lessons can be
reminders of how we ought to be in the world. Sometimes, the moral lessons are contained in images that are
populated by scores of figures. And sometimes, the moral lessons can focus in on a series of large figures.
So another work from near the end of his life, The Parable of the Blind, gives us a series of six figures against the
high landscape background-- a high horizon-- once again. The painting is based directly, in this case, on a
passage from scripture-- from Luke 6:39.
Jesus says to those around him, a blind man cannot guide a blind man, can he? Won't they both fall into a pit?
And so that's what Bruegel has given us here, except he has tripled the blind man following the blind man into six
blind men. Six bewildered looking figures that move along this tight and undulating landscape, that are linked by
their thick walking sticks and that are linked by having a vacuous look on each and every face, even as each and
every face is individually represented with individuated details.
The series of these figures cascading in a diagonal angle that follows the figure who is already fallen on the right.
The figure who is starting to tumble next to him. And the series that can't quite figure out and yet, feel something
must have happened and just don't know what it is that's about to happen to them.
The colors that he uses, this light purple in the foreground figures-- that is to say, the figures to the right-- and the
different colors, the cooler colors in the figures further back-- that is to say, to the left-- give us a diagonal that not
only goes down but out towards us from the background. And that runs in counterpoint to the slightly diagonalized
landscape that carries us from the buildings that are large-ish in the left, toward the buildings that are smaller and
smaller as we go toward the right.
So then we have a pair of obliquely angled kind of aspects of this image. It's follow the leader. It's follow the leader
to disaster. We're in the late 16th century, the period when the religious wars have become more and more
intense. In fact, just two years before this work, in 1566, there were religious riots in Utrecht, in which radical
Protestants attacked their Catholic fellow citizens. And their anger had to do with the images in the Catholic
churches which they wished to destroy.
So Bruegel, himself, is familiar, in an intimate way, with the ugliness of the age of religious wars as it is directed in
his own world. But, of course, the images he paints are images that pertain to any time within human experience
where there is slaughter in the name of the god man who offered the parable that is represented here.
This was among Bruegel's last works. Like Aertsen, he produced a small dynasty. He had two sons-- very
successful painters-- after him. Two sons to continue to be involved in the Counter Reformation complexes and
crises that we continue to consider in our next lecture.
Thomas Edison State College | 25 The Reformation and the Mannerist Crisis
[MUSIC PLAYING]
In this lecture, let us begin by arriving once more at the crisis that is beginning to dominate Western Christendom
by the end of the second decade of the 16th century. That crisis which begins, one might say, in 1517 when
Martin Luther posts 95 Theses, 95 questions on the church door in Wittenberg, Germany. And within a few years,
instead of engaging in a dialogue with the Church at Rome finds himself excommunicated by that church,
excommunicated by Pope Leo X, the Medici Pope. Which creates a schism them in the Western church that will
lead to a reformation on the one hand and a series of protests against the functioning of the Church at Rome on
the other, so that we refer to the era as that which begins the Protestant Reformation, the Protestant Reformation
to which the church responds eventually with the Counter Reformation as from different angles we've seen thus
far.
It is a period with many layers though. It's a multi-layered struggle that in fact will continue for nearly two centuries,
Protestants and Catholics engaged in warfare in the name of the God of love. And it would be a surprise if artists
did not respond to what is going around them by responding to this crisis, since part of the job of art over the
course of the millennia is to respond to the world around the artist.
So various issues that have carried to the end of the High Renaissance period move forward first in Italy in what
we speak of as Mannerism, of which the Lutherian moment is a beginning point. But then we recall that by 1520,
four of the major High Renaissance artists are dead. Giorgione had died back in 1510 of plague. Leonardo is
dead by 1519, and both Bramante and Raphael are dead in 1520.
In the next year, 1521, the Medici Pope Leo X, the second of two major patrons of art-- Julius I, Leo X-- Leo X is
dead. And he is succeeded by Pope Adrian, who dies just two years later, probably by poison. He who came from
the north, from Utrecht in fact, who was interested in engaging in Reformation, but who disappeared more quickly
than he was able to accomplish much with those ambitions. And he's succeeded by Clement VII, another Medici in
fact.
Just a few years later in 1527, Rome itself is sacked in wars between two Catholic kings, between Charles I of
Spain, otherwise known as the Hapsburg Emperor Charles V, and Francis I of France. So we can easily
understand crisis in the world of the 1520s, and expect it to express itself in the art of the 1520s and '30s. And
that's what we speak of when we speak of a Mannerist crisis referring to stylistic changes that give us distortion,
that give us shocking and surprising forms for body and modes of movement. And above all, colors.
And we can even see such crisis in the work that comes by the 1530s by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, to
which he is invited to return in 1534 by Clement VII, the Medici Pope, in the last year that pope's life, to create the
far wall of the chapel. And on that far wall, a last judgment. And we see in this detail of St. Bartholomew whose
martyrdom was that he was flayed. And so we always see him holding his skin.
We see the image, the face of Michelangelo himself. He perceives himself and portrays himself as St.
Bartholomew Not that he is having a crisis of faith in the sense of, I'm just not sure that the church is taking things
in the right direction. From that perspective, he never wavers. The crisis is rather-- and it's reflected in his poetry,
his beautiful sonnets-- the crisis is whether I, Michelangelo, am sufficiently spiritual, and doing what I need to be
doing as a good Christian? And so places himself in this strong condition in the midst of the [INAUDIBLE], the fire
and brimstone, the extraordinary imagery that makes up his Last Judgment scene in the Sistine Chapel.
At the center of this scene, a very muscular Christ, a virgin seeming to shrink at his side at her typically symbolic
colors of blue and red and white. The Christ with his upper raised right hand decreeing justice in a fierce manner.
With his more gentle left hand, seeming to gesture down to his right, our left, where we see rising out of the Earth
itself those who are about to be judged, those who are to confront this Christ that suggests the possibility for a
terrifying fate if one fails to live up to the spiritual, to the ethical demands that Christ offers to us. An unvarying,
fierce, and severe Christ rather than the merciful Christ that is the more traditional representation of that figure.
And so we see the dead rising below. We see them rising almost wheel of fortune-wise up and around the figure
of Christ to find their fate. And either they will go to hell below where Michelangelo seems to have consigned a
number of his enemies, or we will find them in the heavens above. So to our right, we see the heavens that
include, in their lower portions, saints like Bartholomew, like Catherine of Alexandria with her broken wheel, and
soaring above them, the various elementa of the self-sacrifice of Christ being held by the angels.
So that we have a lower and upper heavens that corresponds ultimately all the way back to the Greek thinking of
the heavens as [INAUDIBLE], air below, and aither, the blazing above. A double heavens. No hierarchy, however.
For the humanity that rises from the left and that falls down into hell on the right or makes it to heaven on the
right, humanity is invariably unclothed. Everyone comes naked before the final judge. The women are modestly
garbed in delicate garments. But otherwise, nothing to indicate social or economic position in this representation.
Michelangelo's sense of emotional agony, with respect to life and death and it's concomitance within the larger
picture of the sacer and profanus, the realm of the unknown and the realm of the familiar, the realm of God and
death and dreams and the realm of humanity and life and being awake is expressed as well in his statuary,
particularly his late sculptures, particularly late images of the Pieta, which he repeated again and again in vertical
formations different from that initial Pieta of the late 15th century in Saint Peter's that is so horizontally laid out.
Here we find in the last decade of his life the frustration that he always expressed with stone at his inability to work
it. And we must imagine that as he gets into his 80s, that inability would be reinforced by gradual physical
weakening.
This eloquent mediation between that sense of frustration and sense of satisfaction, that is a mediation between
life and death. Christ here, fully human, Christ here, stone pulled down by the weight of gravity. The figure above
him desperately trying to hold him up, and soaring up and being pulled down by that gravity. The splaying of limbs
at the lower part of the sculpture that offers a dynamic variation on the clumping of elements at the upper part of
the structure.
The whole thing recalls, in a very oblique sense, the dying Gaul, that Hellenistic work of which we've seen a
Roman copy where we see just Joe Human, as it were, a warrior, about to die. About to give into the gravity that
pulls the body down to the earth in death. The same sensibility, but from a different kind of perspective, not just
visually vertical instead of horizontal, but spiritually Christian instead of pagan addresses this figure of the Christ
who is falling, held, and barely held by the figures who love him and who are soon to put him in the tomb.
The decades leading to the Michelangelo of Saint Bartholomew and the Michelangelo sculptures of the late-- late
sculptures of the Pieta are decades then of storm and occasional calm in which we see Mannerism expressed in a
number of visual terms. Rosso Fiorentino's 1521 Deposition that echoes in general idea what we saw a moment
back of Michelangelo's late Pieta, offers figures and colors that are startling.
And so we speak of Mannerism, startling colors, the green of Christ's body, the bright orange red of Mary
Magdalene below, and of Joseph Arimathea up above. The orange to the left of one of the pious women who
holds up the Virgin Mary, and the figures themselves. John the Evangelist to the right, almost falling out of the
canvas of the image frame as he hunches over in grief, [INAUDIBLE] as we've discussed before of the Virgin in
the shadows held up by figures.
The Mary Magdalene lunging in a spontaneous moment of grief to the feet, to the legs of the Virgin Mary, and
who corresponds in that diagonal horizontal to the gesture of the figure on the upper left who reaches out to a
point and warn out, watch out, as if they're about to drop the body in this complex composition with its series of
ladders that corresponds to the series of figures that in their irregular forms then contrast with the regularized
forms of the ladder.
Friend, a good friend of Rosso Fiorentino-- someone who was so introverted that he used to hide from people,
that his studio held a trap door you had to climb up to get to it, and when he got up there, he closed the trapdoor
where no one else could get in there-- this fellow, this friend of Rosso Fiorentino was Pontormo, who created
about 1525 through 1528 a stunning Entombment. So a similar scene to what we have just seen. A similar scene
to the Michelangelo Pieta, a series of these variations on the theme of gently and lovingly removing the body of
Christ from its position of self-sacrifice on the cross, and toward or into the tomb, simultaneously in grief weeping
over it.
And again, in yet a different sort of palette. Yet colors that strike us, that shock us, that we don't expect these light
pinks and these light blues and these light yellows. In particular, that figure in the front who kneels and holds the
body without much apparent effort. It's almost the opposite of the gravity pulling figure of Michelangelo's Christ,
with that sunburned look on his torso. Which, a closer look makes us realize is actually a skin-tight garment that
he's wearing in that strange color.
The swirl of figures above and around, filling out the space. Here there is neither a ladder nor a tomb. We're just
somehow hovering within a space between spaces. The whole thing has a kind of dreamlike quality, as if it's
moving in slow motion. Beautiful counter pose. The figure to the right with it's back to us. The figure with its front
to us. The strange positioning of the legs that creates this array of lines around the lower part of the composition.
Pontormo himself, we see him in the upper right. That bearded figure just to the edge of the image with those
scopatic eyes again. Deep set diagonal eyes, that turned head that again and again, we find used by artists who
want to convey a sense of emotional pathos and richness.
Most bizarre, perhaps, among images that we associate with the term Mannerism, is the Madonna with the Long
Neck of 1534, '35 by Francesco Mazzola, better known as Parmigianino, whom we see here to have given us a
Madonna with a strange not only long neck, but with a body that emphasizes her belly with its cellophane-like
covering. Of course, the belly from which the Christ child came, that gives us a Byzantine attenuated quality not
only to the neck, not only to the head, to the fingers, to every part of this composition a chilled, emotionless kind of
quality that is the opposite of the fervor we feel with Michelangelo. The Christ child as a pieta, the child stretched
across her lap with an arm hanging down, with its eyes closed, its mouth open, its bald head as if it is dead. So
that it anticipates, in a visual sense, the pieta that will come at the end of the human aspect of Christ's life cycle.
The contrast between these cold figures and the very sensuous angel children with that leg thrusting out towards
us that offers a kind of counterpoint to the headless column toward the right in the background, a headless
column that suggests Christ at the column, another element of martyrdom to come, and as part of a progression
of columns, might taken to be part of that statement of the old order that is crumbling before the new reality. And
then that small figure, disproportionately small, that figure in the lower right that has been taken by many to be the
image of a prophet crying out in the wilderness, perhaps Isaiah, to those who don't pay attention to this moment.
A fourth figure among these Mannerist geniuses is Agnolo Tori, better known as Bronzino, who was the leading
painter in Tuscany by mid-century, and the court painter to Cosimo I de' Medici. So the Medici are back in the
picture as patrons of art by the middle of the century. He was Pontormo's favorite pupil.
But in the work before us, there is more of Parmigianino's iciness than Pontormo's sweetness, this Noli Me
Tangere, do not touch me at that moment after Christ has emerged from the tomb and yet not risen when he is
met by Mary Magdalene. This work dates from about 1540. And again, rather disturbing colors and strange body
carriage as we see Mary simultaneously pulling back to get away from and reaching toward the Christ who
simultaneously puts out a hand to push back and is both pulled away and pulled towards her. Recoils and reaches
out.
Note the placement of his hand. I think that not accidental toward her breast. She was, after all, a woman of carnal
life before Christ transformed her. And note too directly below outstretched hand, the highlighted foot of Mary
Magdalene that corresponds and offers a contrast to the dark feet of Christ, those feet which she had washed with
spikenard ointment and her own hair at a time before this time. The whole then framing a rather lurid yellow
landscape with the stairs presumably leading to the tumor from which he has just come, and ultimately in the
distance to the city of Jerusalem. All of this part of a cool, calm, non-agitated response to a spiritual moment.
But Branzino didn't only deal with spiritual moments. In fact, his attenuated Byzantine sensibilities could turn as
here to a portrait of Eleonora of Toledo and Her Son Giovanni where we have even more so a sense of ice
coldness. This Mannerist painter among Mannerist painters, all of whom were court painters. So all of whom, in
fact, tended to glorify dynastic rule, court society, formal religion, and offer a chill that corresponds in opposition to
the warmth, the fervor of Michelangelo at his most extreme of spiritual crisis.
More akin to Michelangeloan passion and more yet part of the Mannerist moment is Jacobo Tintoretto, who
carries the Venetian school of painting forward from Titian toward Veronese in his representation of Christ before
Pilate in 1566, 1567. We may recognize an echo in the general forefront composition of the Pesaro altarpiece of
Titian that we saw back in lecture 22, where we see stairs sweeping from the lower left to the upper right, where
we see a figure in the center.
But whereas in the Pesaro altarpiece of Titian we're sweeping up to the Virgin and child here. We're sweeping up
to Pontius Pilate. Instead of Saint Peter in the center, we have Christ in the center. Instead of a Saint Peter sitting
on the steps, we have a Christ rising on the steps, rod thin, pencil thin, an island of scintillating white, almost
swaying like a ghost, surrounded by this agitated range of figures all around him. He as a kind of ghostly island
within this sea of agitation, he both echoing and not quite echoing the staid and sober array of architectural
columns that offer both a strong series of dark, light, shadow, and sunlight contrasts and a contrast in form to the
figures huddled up and around this isolated Christ figure.
Tintoretto's Last Supper is an astonishing work that comes from some 30 years later, 1592 to 1594, in which the
table that we understand traditionally runs horizontal and parallel to the picture plane. We have seen that in
moving from [? Costanyo ?] and Ghirlandaio to Leonardo da Vinci, how that element remains a stabilizing force
within the composition traditionally.
But here, almost a century after Leonardo's masterpiece, Tintoretto has turned the table into a diagonal that
pushes it into the upper right, out of the lower left. Or if you prefer, pulls from the upper right down to the lower
left, and which is surrounded by a series of figures once again in agitated cacophony. Even more so than in his
image of Christ before Pilate of almost 30 years earlier.
Agitated movement, the center anchor of the whole composition within this agitation, being once again Christ
whom we cannot miss because of the glow that suffuses him and offers such a contrast in its supernatural quality
with the lamp that is hanging in the upper left of the chamber itself. Christ there with the apostles, administering
the Eucharist to them, creating the Eucharist. This is not the Christ simply stating, one of you shall betray me, or
simply stating, eat this or drink that, but rather administering the Eucharist to them.
And if the apostles line the table around Christ and we can identify them by their halos, then various and sundry
everyday people, servants, cleaning up, gathering the food scraps, dominate the right hand part of the
composition and affect around the upper left as well. And offer such a strange and remarkable contrast to the
bevies of angels, those in the upper right, that swooping down, continue the diagonal of the table. Those on the
upper left that clump together correspond to the clumped figures on the right hand side of the servants picking up
the food, of the cat reaching in for some food in the dead center foreground.
All of which raises a question. Where is Judas? And if we look carefully up the table, we arrive almost exactly
where Christ is to the other side where, so to say, dressed as and among the servants is probably the figure in his
yellow garment of Judas lacking a halo, separated from everybody else.
Now our source for much of this discussion is actually contemporary. There is Giorgio Vasari, who wrote the Lives
of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in covering the period from Giotto virtually to his own
death in 1574. And who was also, at the same time, an architect. It was he who began the Uffizi, the offices of the
Florentine government, which has now, of course, become a great museum in 1560. And his students completed
it for him by 1580.
It was once again Cosimo I de' Medici who commissioned him to create that structure. And he was also a painter.
A painter, who in his Allegory of the Immaculate Conception of 1541 is also part of this question of where
Mannerism begins to lead out of itself toward the resolution of the Baroque.
So Vasari is typically associated more with Baroque than with Mannerism, just as Tintoretto, even though his work
is often later than that of Vasari, is often seen as more Mannerist than Baroque. Mannerist, Baroque. Baroque,
Mannerist. Mannerist where we find ourselves in a condition of discomfort. We, the viewer, for what is happening
to them on the image, because of the colors, because of the composition, because of the body positions. Baroque
that is dynamic, dramatic, theatrical, but somehow gives us a sense of stability.
So let's look at Vasari's Immaculate Conception, that moment when Saint Anne is pregnant with the Virgin. The
Virgin is born immaculately. This is not the Virgin birth, the Virgin giving birth to Christ as often this phrase is
misunderstood. It is Saint Anne conceiving the Virgin without sin, and therefore immaculately.
So in this image, we see the pink, plump clouds above with angels soaring around them. And hovering within
those clouds, flanked by those angels, the Virgin herself hovering above the tree. Which is, of course, the tree of
knowledge of good and evil that grew at the center of the garden from which Adam and Eve ate went and as they
were told not to do so. And the serpent, not merely wending its way around it, but somehow seeming to reach out
and encompass all of the figures at the bottom who spill towards the image of Adam and Eve, this whole series of
Hebrew biblical figures that culminate with Adam and Eve, all chained by original sin. She, immaculately born, is
free of that who hovers above.
There is a double kind of pyramidal composition that gives this stability within its dynamism. So that along the
bottom, we get a series of large figures, and then compositionally, we move up to the peak, really, of the Virgin's
head. But at the same time, where her feet are is the bottom of a pyramid that begins with the angels above and
comes down towards the tree. So we have something which is both dynamic and balanced and stable, so that we
understand this as a more Baroque than Mannerist resolution of visual surprise, as the Counter Reformation
becomes more confident in how to respond to the reformation of Protestantism. Flamboyant and theatrical, but
stable.
Vasari again created this some half a century before Tintoretto's Last Supper. And yet, he already seems to be
moving in a Baroque direction, when Tintoretto is still maintaining a sense of Mannerist crisis. Which reminds us
that this chronology isn't a simple and straightforward one. We can't just fit periods into boxes as we would prefer
to. There is overlap. The Baroque will continue until the 18th century. The Counter Reformation is at its heart in
the late 16th or 17th century.
But things don't suddenly stop and begin like a play where the curtain goes up and comes down. And so a period
or a style suddenly begins or suddenly stops. There's all of that that leads up to it. There's all that that pulls back
from it. And there are styles, crisscrossing styles, nowhere more obviously than in this crisis-ridden century and in
looking at the works of Vasari and Tintoretto here.
But as we move deeper toward the end of the 16th century and move more specifically into the shaping of
Baroque in Rome in particular, we come to the Carracci family. We come to Ludovico and Annibale Carracci.
Ludovico, in his Bargellini Madonna of 1588 offers us, once again, reminiscence compositionally of Titian's Pesaro
altarpiece. The influence of that work can obviously not be ever underestimated.
Once again, then, with this sense of diagonal sweep from lower left to upper right, culminating on the upper right
with the Virgin and Child. In this case, with saints along the lower left, with angels hovering above in the clouds,
with columns to further anchor it, with a figure-- in this case, Mary Magdalene-- to the lower right, to give a kind of
balance to the figures on the lower left. The whole thing flamboyant and theatrical, the whole thing filled with light.
The whole thing filled with an openness of heavens that the Pesaro altarpiece doesn't offer.
It's a more closed kind of presentation. It carries forth that idea of the sacra conversazione, the sacred
conversation that we first explored many lectures ago in the handling of the subject by Domenico Veneziano
where we had figures gesturing in and out toward the viewer.
Here there is an even more active interface between the figures and the Virgin. So Saint Francis in the lower left
up towards the Virgin. Mary Magdalene in the lower right up toward the Virgin. Saint Dominic towards the upper
left, gesturing in but looking out towards us. So that in fact, the figures fall between us and the angels. They
intermediate between the sacer realm within and the profanus realm without in a new kind of way. We and the
angels and these figures are all, as it were, one completed circle.
Annibale Carracci, in his Landscape with the Flight Into Egypt of 1603 gives us a view that more literally than
anything we've seen before suggests we're looking through a window out to a view. In part, of course, because of
the placement within the sort of frame in which it has been placed. And there, he's given us a beautifully and softly
lit landscape with the horizon undulating gently from the upper right down towards the lower left, in
correspondence to the river flow and the figures moving just so slightly from the lower right towards the upper left.
Softly lit landscape, Venetian inspired perhaps with its soft light.
These small figures hurrying across it, absolutely no hint of anything supernatural about them. So in fact, if we
didn't know from the title that this is a landscape with the Virgin and the Child and Joseph fleeing into Egypt, we'd
simply see figures in a landscape.
It's dominated by solid man-made structures. In the center background, a long human presence that corresponds
to the long natural presence that has human elements as well. The boat men to the right, casually rowing, and the
shepherd to the right, also leading his flocks. Perhaps classical allusions. Perhaps one would think, aha. Charon,
the boat man that carries us to that other reality. But in this case, it's just over to Egypt. And ultimately, the other
reality is the heaven to which this child ultimately can lead us. Perhaps the shepherd is an allusion to the kind of
verbal imagery that the Renaissance painters were so familiar with from Virgil, his first eclog, those fleeing the
verbal imagery that the Renaissance painters were so familiar with from Virgil, his first eclog, those fleeing the
place where they had lived before for a new place.
The Carracci would establish an academy in Bologna in 1585. So the idea of an academy-- a place away from the
[INAUDIBLE] of the streets where one can think that Plato established, which was repeated by the Medici in the
15th and 16th centuries, creating a place in Florence where one could think and one could write and one could
create art, has become, by the end of the 16th century through the Carracci in Bologna, a place where one can
create art. They taught by studying the masters. They taught by studying anatomy, by using living models. Their
goal was to save painting from the decadence into which they saw it falling. And they, of course, carry us with this
work of 1603 into the 17th century, the full Baroque as it is evolving beyond Rome.
Many roads have come by now to lead back to Rome again, and the roads lead out in all directions. In our next
encounter, we must follow the Roman road circuitously. From one end, Venice. To the other end, Madrid of the
southern Mediterranean, European, Catholic world as we continue further into the period of the Counter
Reformation.
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