Feature Image: Flowers in a Vase and Flower Vase with Jewel, Coins, and Shells, both 1608, oil on copper, by Jan Brueghel the Elder and in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy.
Jan Brueghel the Elder (Flemish, 1568-1625) produced hundreds of paintings by his own hand and in collaboration with other master painters. His painterly skill ranged over an immense variety of subject matter including these innovative still life floral artworks of which the artist is seen as the founder of the genre. These flowers are not allegorical or imaginative accessories nor merely decorative but a stand-alone subject whose sole focus is the opportunity for a close observation of nature through the artistic lens. Brueghel’s pioneering still lifes show a bouquet bursting with a wide variety of colorful flowers seen from an elevated viewpoint that have been carefully delineated and are clearly visible. Born in Brussels in 1568, Jan Brueghel was the son of Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525–1530-1569) and younger brother of Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564-1638). Brothers Jan and Pieter were both sent to Antwerp to study oil painting. In 1568, at 20 years old, Jan Brueghel left Antwerp for Italy where he settled and worked in Naples and, by 1592, in Rome. In Rome Jan Brueghel worked for Cardinals Ascanio Colonna (1560-1608), Benedetto Giustiniani (1554-1621), Francesco Maria del Monte (1549-1627) and Federico Borromeo (1564-1631) who patronized Caravaggio and was the official “Cardinal Protector” of the Roman Accademia di San Luca, an artists’ association founded in 1593 by Federico Zuccari (1539-1609).
Ascanio Colonna (1560-1608). The cardinal enjoyed a reputation for eloquence and learning.Benedetto Giustiniani (1554-1621). The clergyman’s inventory at death included 280 paintings. Ottavio Leoni, Francesco Maria del Monte ((1549-1627) in 1616. Born in Venice of a Tuscan aristocratic family, Cardinal del Monte was an important connoisseur of the arts. Four centuries later his fame rests on his early patronage of Caravaggio and his art collection which provides detailed provenance for many important works of the period.
Federico Borromeo (1564-1631). About Flower Vase with Jewel, Coins, and Shells (discussed later below) by Jan Brueghel the Elder purchased for his Milano Ambrosiana, Cardinal Borromeo wrote in the Musaeum: “Brueghel painted a diamond on the lower part of the vase…: the author wanted to indicate that the value of his work was equal to that of the gems and this is the price we paid to the artist.”
FLOWERS IN A VASE, 1608, oil on copper, 43 × 30 cm by Jan Brueghel the Elder. Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy.
In a Römer glass vase, typical of Rhenish manufactures and often depicted in Northern European painting of this period, there are colorful blooms with tulips used to anchor his bouquet. The painting was likely the one mentioned by Brueghel in a letter dated June 13, 1608. The letter is evidence for the origin of the painting as well as that these Flemish artists, in dialogue with the Italian renaissance, practiced copying nature from life, frequently with a scientific precision. Brueghel, the younger son of Flemish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569), was a close friend and frequent collaborator with Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). Both Jan Brueghel and Rubens were the leading Flemish painters in Flemish Baroque painting of the first three decades of the 17th century.
Family of Jan Brueghel the Elder by Peter Paul Rubens. 1613-15. oil on panel, 125.1x 95,2 cm,The Courtauld Gallery, London. Jan Brueghel, painter and friend of Rubens, poses with his second wife, Catherina, and their two children, Peter and Elisabeth. Both children, along with their father, died during the cholera epidemic of 1625. see – https://gallerycollections.courtauld.ac.uk/object-p-1978-pg-362 – retrieved June 24, 2025.
The painting Flowers in a Vase is in the collection of the Ambrosian Art Gallery (Pinacoteca Ambrosiana) of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, Italy. It was in the possession of Cardinal Federico Borromeo, cousin to Saint Charles Borromeo (1538-1584), both cardinal archbishops of Milan.
Saint Charles Borromeo (1538-1584) was a cousin of Federico Borromeo. Both were cardinal archbishops of Milan, Italy. Proclaimed a saint in Rome in 1610, Charles was much loved in his diocese for his numerous good works and for his personal humility as well as a spirit of self-sacrifice that he showed during the plague of 1576 and 1577, Cardinal Borromeo was a great reformer and played an important role in the Council of Trent. There is a colossal statue of him outside Arona on Lake Maggiore. The so-called Sancarlone, it was based on a design by Giovanni Battista Crespi, known as “ il Cerano.” Its sculptors Siro Zanella and Bernardo Falconi made the copper parts to be assembled for a work that was completed in 1698. see – https://terreborromeo.it/en/about-us/history and https://www.statuasancarlo.it/la-statua/– retrieved June 24, 2025.
The colossus of St. Charles Borromeo (1698).
In May 1585 Federico earned a doctorate in theology at the University of Pavia and was sent to Rome where he was made a cardinal at 23 years old by Pope Sixtus V. Federico voted in the papal conclaves of 1590 (Urban VII, Gregory XIV), 1591 (Innocent IX), 1592 (Clement VIII), 1605 (Leo XI, Paul V) and 1623 (Urban VIII). He missed the 1621 conclave (Gregory XV). At the August 1623 papal conclave Cardinal Borromeo received 18 votes out of 54 votes but was opposed by the Spanish party, one of the church’s major factions. The church had to compromise with Urban VIII, a neutral candidate known as the first pope to actively campaign for votes.
In April 1618 Archbishop Federico Borromeo bequeathed Flowers in a Vase with his collection of paintings, drawing, and statues in his will to the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, which he founded on September 7, 1607 and opened on December 8, 1609. Conceived by the cardinal as a center for study and culture it was open to the public from the beginning. The library collections include over one million printed volumes (including thousands of incunabula and books dating from the 16th century), 40,000 manuscripts (including the celebrated Codex Atlanticus) in many languages, 12,000 drawings (including works by Raphael, Pisanello, and Leonardo), 22,000 engravings, and miscellanea including old maps and musical manuscripts. Along with the cardinal’s achievement, other institutions flourished beside it such as the Board of Fellows (Collegio dei Dottori, 1607), the Art Gallery (Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, 1618) and the Academy of Drawing for teaching painting, sculpture and architecture (Accademia del Disegno, 1620). The Pinacoteca Ambrosiana consists of some of the Italian Renaissance’s great masterpieces such as the Portrait of a Musician by Leonardo da Vinci, The Basket of Fruit by Caravaggio, the cartoon for the School of Athens by Raphael, the Adoration of the Magi by Titian, the Madonna of the Pavilion by Sandro Botticelli and the magnificent Flowers in a Vase by Jan Brueghel. The museum’s collection today includes paintings by 17th-century Lombard artists such as il Morazzone (1573–1626), Giulio Cesare Procaccini (1574–1625), Daniele Crespi (1598 – 1630) and Carlo Francesco Nuvolone (1608-1669) and 18th-century artists such as Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804), Fra’ Galgario (1655-1743), and Francesco Londonio (1723-1783). Cardinal Federico Borromeo, who lived in Rome from 1586 to 1601, was not particularly interested in politics, but focused on classical and oriental scholarship and prayer. In the Counter-Reformation, the cardinal was a great propagator of the faith using religious art, but also was an avid collector of still life. Jan Brueghel the Elder, nicknamed “Velvet,” was a contemporary artist who was erudite and innovative – he invented new types of paintings such as flower garland paintings and paradise landscapes – and his art did not escape the cardinal’s cultivated eye. The Cardinal and young artist met in Rome where the Cardinal became his patron so that the artist took up residence in Cardinal Borromeo’s palazzo.
Cardinal Federico Borromeo by Giulio Cesare Procaccini (1574-1625), Museo diocesano di Milano. The Borromeos, a prominent Italian noble family, started as merchants around 1300 in San Miniato in the province of Pisa in Tuscany and became bankers in Milan after 1370.
When Borromeo became archbishop of Milan in June 1595, Brueghel followed him and became part of the Cardinal’s household. Cardinal Borromeo was a reformer in the sense of promoting discipline among the clergy, founding new parishes and schools, as the faith flourished in the 50 years since the Council of Trent completed in 1564. The archbishop was accessible to the flock. Under his leadership, Milan underwent both prosperity and significant cultural flourishing and renewed spiritual energy for a generation. Brueghel stayed with the Cardinal for a year where he painted landscapes and flower paintings and then returned to Antwerp where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. Also nicknamed “Flower” Brueghel, the artist’s flower pieces such as Flowers in a Vase, are dominated by floral arrangements placed against a neutral dark background. Brueghel repeated these motifs in his flower pieces and yet each work was imbued with its own singular freshness and vitality.
FLOWER VASE WITH JEWEL, COINS, AND SHELLS. 1608, oil on copper, 65 × 45 cm by Jan Brueghel the Elder. Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Milan, Italy.
A lush bouquet of flowers, executed by the artist for Cardinal Federico Borromeo (1564-1631), was innovative as a stand-alone bouquet painting of its kind. The subject is composed of around one hundred different species of flowers, some of which are very rare and of great value. In addition to its execution of profuse natural beauty, the picture expressed the nature of the early 17th century culture’s encyclopedic curiosity which extended, among leading collectors, into the natural sciences. It is known by way of a letter that Brueghel was working on the picture in 1606 after he had seen many of these flower varieties in the garden in Brussels of Albert VII, Archduke of Austria (1559-1621) and Isabella Clara Eugenia (1566-1633), who jointly ruled the Spanish Netherlands (1556-1714). The artist’s picture of these flowers was, in a scientific approach, intended to “portray them from nature.” Virtually nothing today remains of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella’s Palace of Codenberg in Brussels nor of their summer retreat at the Château of Mariemont (today’s Morlanwelz in Belgium) south of Brussels which was painted frequently by Jan Brueghel the Elder nor anything of their hunting lodge in nearby Tervuren east of Brussels. In 1633, at the death of Isabella, Albert (who died in 1621) and Isabella’s magnificent collections of art works, scientific instruments, naturalia and artificialia were scattered and much of it lost.
The Archdukes Albert and Isabella Visiting the Collection of Pierre Roose, c. 1621-1623, Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hieronymus Francken II, oil on panel, 37 × 48 ½ in. (94 × 123.19 cm). see – https://art.thewalters.org/object/37.2010/ – retrieved June 21, 2025.
Some of that magnificence was evoked in a picture from 1621-23 by Jan Brueghel the Elder with Hieronymus Francken II (1578-1623) called Albert and Isabella visiting an art gallery. The large format painting (around 3 feet by 4 feet) in the Walters Art Museum depicts a private gallery (or cabinet) of Pierre Roose in Brussels being visited by the Archdukes Albert and Isabella. It includes in a foreground corner an immense vase of flowers by Jan Brueghel and depicts how these collectors are as interested in natural botany and scientific instruments as they are of paintings and sculpture.
DETAIL of above: Isabella is seated, while her husband standing to her right and their host, Pierre Roose, behind.DETAIL of above:These collectors are as interested in natural botany and scientific instruments as they are of paintings and sculpture.
Following Albert’s death, Isabella continued to rule on behalf of her nephew Philip IV of Spain (1605-1665) though it was Albert and Isabella’s reign which marked the consolidation of Catholic rule in the Southern Netherlands following severe persecutions of Protestants that ended only in 1597. Though most Protestants had left the region, in 1609 an act of toleration was granted to the Protestants that remained though they could not publicly practice their religion. Conversely, Catholic religious orders like the Jesuits, Capuchins, and Discalced Carmelites received large cash grants and endowments by the wealthy governing elite which helped fund many of these religious groups’ ambitious building and artistic programs in Brussels and Antwerp. As a widow Isabella joined the Third Order of Franciscans until her death. Though despotic and kingly, these rulers have earned a well merited reputation in art history as patrons of the arts. A most notable example is that, in 1609, one year after the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana’s flower picture was created, the Archdukes, whose gardens inspired the work in Italy, appointed Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) as their court painter. Commenting on this flower artwork in Milan, Cardinal Borromeo wrote in the Musaeum: “Brueghel painted a diamond on the lower part of the vase…: the author wanted to indicate that the value of his work was equal to that of the gems and this is the price we paid to the artist.”
Bouquet in a Clay Vase, 1609, Jan Brueghel the Elder,oil on wood, 56 x 42 cm. The National Gallery, London. see – https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/jan-brueghel-the-elder-bouquet-in-a-clay-vase – retrieved June 24, 2025. Jan Brueghel the Elder is considered the 17th century northern painter, active in the Low countries as well as Italy, who invented and mastered the genre of flower still life. While used at times as a decorative or allegorical element within a painting, there are major examples where the artist aesthetically assembled and presented an impressive bouquet from a high viewpoint based on scientific observation of rare garden species as the sole focus of the painting. Bouquet in a Clay Vase in The National Gallery in London is one such artwork.
This explanatory article may be periodically updated.
Attributed to Michelangelo Buonarotti, 1513, terracotta, Casa Buonarroti, Florence, Italy. The work is a study of a male torso, conceived to be without the head and upper and lower limbs. The work has been identified as a preparatory model for one of the figures of the Prisoners, intended to decorate the tomb of Julius II in Rome. see – https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/torso-virile/zQGx46asE5jBIg?hl=it&ms=%7B%22x%22%3A0.5%2C%22y%22%3A0.5%2C%22z%22%3A9.086882915528859%2C%22size%22%3A%7B%22width%22%3A3.3866676762513332%2C%22height%22%3A1.2375000000000005%7D%7D – retrieved March 6, 2025. Michelangelo Buonarotti, Madonna della Scala, 1490. Casa Buonarroti, Florence, Italy. Though it is small-sized the relief subject of the Madonna and child presents a monumental scope. The female figure fills the entire space. The meaning of the ladder (“scala”) in the title is ambiguous and may have reference to the children playing and holding a drape behind the Madonna. The date of the relief has been much discussed. However, a placement around 1490, before the Battle of the Centaurs, seems to be confirmed.see – https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/madonna-della-scala/xQF2nwLhAXd26w?hl=it – retrieved March 6, 2025. Michelangelo Buonarotti, Nude female, 1533, Casa Buonarroti, Florence, Italy. This figure of a female nude is linked to the New Sacristy in Florence to accompany the marble effigy of Giuliano de’ Medici. It has been linked to the figure of the Earth that, together with the Sky, was to be part of Giuliano’s marble effigy. The project of building a proper Medici family mausoleum was conceived in 1520, when Michelangelo began work on the New Sacristy upon the request of Cardinal Giulio de Medici, the future Pope Clement VII, who expressed a desire to erect the mausoleum for some members of his family including Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano assassinated in Florence’s Duomo in 1478. After completing the architectural works in 1524, Michelangelo worked until 1533 on the sculptures and the sarcophagi that were to be featured on the chapel walls. The only ones actually completed were the statues of Lorenzo, the Duke of Urbino; Giuliano, the Duke of Nemours; the four statues of the allegories of Day and Night, and Dawn and Dusk; and the group representing the Madonna and Child. see – https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/nudo-femminile/xgHfNWIKU6r13g?hl=it – retrieved March 6, 2025 and http://www.museumsinflorence.com/musei/Medici_chapels.html#:~:text=The%20project%20of%20building%20a,the%20Magnificent%20and%20his%20brother – retrieved March 6, 2025. Michelangelo, crucifix, 1493, wood, Santo Spirito, Florence. It was placed by the artist in 1493 above the lunette of the high altar and has been there since.
The Italian Renaissance artist was born in Florentine territory in Caprese in the provinces of Tuscany where his father was a government bureaucrat. The family soon relocated to Florence where Michaelangelo grew up. Becoming friends with Francesco Granacci (1469-1543) who saw Michaelangelo’s drawing talent, at 13 years old Michelangelo announced he wanted to be an artist. Despite his parents objection, they eventually yielded to their son’s aspirations, and he was apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio (1448-1494) for the next three years.
Domenico Ghirlandaio (1448-1494), Expulsion of Joachim From the Temple, fresco (detail), 1486-1490. Santa Maria Novella, Cappella Tornabuoni, Florence. In the background, the mitered high priest receives sacrificial lambs at the altar where a fire burns. Joachim, according to sacred tradition, father of the Virgin Mary and grandfather of Jesus Christ, is sent away at this time since he is childless. He is married to Anne. To the right Ghirlandaio depicts an assembled group of contemporary Florentines including, second from right, Ghirlandaio himself. In 2nd century apocryphal writings, childless Joachim left for the desert where he prayed and fasted for 40 days. Angels appeared to Joachim and his wife Anne, and promised them a child. Joachim then returned to Jerusalem and embraced Anne at the city gate, a scene popularly depicted in medieval and Renaissance art. After this, Anne became pregnant and became the mother of the Virgin Mary and Jesus’s grandmother. This apocryphal relating of Joachim and Anne to Biblical figures Elizabeth and Zechariah and the birth of their son, John the Baptist (Luke 1) and Abraham and Sarah and the birth of their son, Isaac (Genesis 21) was a popular subject depicted in Christian art until the Council of Trent (1545–1563) when the church restricted public displays of these simple stories and events from apocryphal sources in a severe reaction to the Protestant reformation.
Michelangelo’s training was erratic, likely having left Ghirlandaio before his contract was complete, and working under the city’s ruler, Lorenzo de Medici for his contracted master, Bertoldo (1420-1491). Later in life Michelangelo did not advertise his training credentials as he believed art – such as freeing subjects from stone – emerged by the sheer artistic power of the individual. In this period, as a teenager, Michelangelo learned the art of fresco painting and drawing, copying previous masters such as Giotto (1267-1337) and Masaccio (1401-1428). Michelangelo absorbed the artwork of the naturalists, such as Paolo Uccello (1397-1475), whose artwork looked to present subjects with a viewpoint like a scientist interested in objective fact rather than looking to convey some established figural attitude. Where young Michelangelo was materially as great as Giotto and Masaccio, he also possessed a new means undreamt by those previous masters, as he drunk of the art of Donatello (1386-1466), Pollaiuolo (1429-1498), Verrocchio (c.1435-1488) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Further, Michelangelo understood better than these others, that the epitome of these Renaissance artistic studies was to be expressed by one subject above all: the human nude.
Bernard Berenson described Michelangelo as “the pupil of nobody, the heir of everybody, who felt profoundly and powerfully what to his precursors had been vague instinct, who saw and expressed the meaning of it all.”
Giotto, The Arrest of Christ (Kiss of Judas ), 1304, Padua, Scrovegni Chapel.Michelangelo after Giotto, Drawing from “Ascension of the Evangelist,” 1490-1492. Louvre. see – https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl020001224 – retrieved March 6, 2025. Paolo Uccello, Sacrifice of Noah And Noah’s Drunkenness (detail), 1447-48. Uccello was not interested primarily in conveying in art the possible “artistic” intention of this story’s scene. Instead, as Bernard Berenson described it, the artist produced “nothing but the scientific intention to find out how a man swooping down head-foremost would have looked if at a given instant of his fall he had been suddenly congealed and suspended in space.” These studies of reproducing objects as they really are, in anatomy and perspective, had a great bearing for the art of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. quoted in Berenson, p.54.Masaccio, Distribution of Alms and Death of Ananias (detail), 1425-1427, Brancacci Chapel, Florence. An episode from Acts of the Apostles (4:43-37 and 5: 1-11) depicting Ananias’s wife and child whose husband withheld their tithe from the early church leaders with the outcome being that Ananias dropped dead in divine retribution. When it was painted, viewers in the 1420’s and afterwards, read it as an artistic display of a New Testament endorsement of the equitable redistribution of wealth and the divine punishment of death forthwith for those who falsely withheld their fair share. 67% 7.95mb
When the Medici fell and Florence became a theocracy under Savonarola (1452-1498), 19-year-old Michelangelo decided to leave Florence. He lamented the fall of Lorenzo the Magnificent, his artistic patron, and the young artist lived hand to mouth going to Bologna, then to Venice, and back to Bologna, and finally to Rome in June 1496. The popes’ tremendous influence in capitalist Italy started in the 13th century and augmented into the 17th century, leading to what art critic Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) called an encroachment of “soulless Vaticanism” towards modern art. But clearly Rome had no use for a firebrand friar who refused to support the pope’s troops against the invading French army. As Columbus set out to discover America, It was the unpleasant chapter of the Italian War of the 1490s that helped fill the times with ongoing brutality, duplicity, complicity, intrigue, opportunism and expedience. A looming danger of looting and violence of the invading French army were emphasized by the impassioned sermons of Girolamo Savonarola that frightened the people and led to their heightened resentment against the ruling Medici. Florence was traditionally pro-French, but Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici (“Piero the Unfortunate”) (1472-1504), son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, had deployed against them to defend Naples. Under pressure from citizens and outside French forces promising church reforms and civic transparency, the Medici was forced to flee and the city was proclaimed a Republic. The Florentines, with Savonarola in the lead, facilitated the invasion of French king Charles VIII (1470-1498) and against the pope which they considered corrupt. Pope Alexander VI (1431-1503), a Borgia and one of the most corrupt popes in history, ascended to the papal throne in 1492 and was immediately condemned in fiery sermons by Savonarola. Yet all was not well between “liberator” Charles VIII and his Florentine supporters. Immediately the French king demanded a huge sum of money, a ransom payment of sorts, from the Florentines in appreciation, as well as to pay for, the pro-French liberation. The Florentine government refused and the king threatened to loot the city. Faced with a backlash and real threat of popular revolt, the French bully relented and continued onto Rome. Charles postured, but was constantly fearful of antagonizing the European powers and announced his decision that he would not depose the corrupt old pope after all. By having kidnapped the pope’s mistress Giulia Farnese, wife of the pope’s military ally Orsino Orsini, who commanded 4,000 Neapolitan soldiers freshly landed to defend papal interests on the peninsula, Charles VIII was able to extract full entry into Rome in exchange for her release. Once in Rome the French troops looted the city. The pope, in a panic, arranged a quick safe passage for Charles VIII out of the Papal States towards Naples during which the king’s army massacred many hundreds of local inhabitants.
Charles VIII, roi de France, anonymous, c. 1550. Entering Florence in a power vacuum the invading French king demanded a huge sum of money from the citizens who refused to pay and leading to a stand-off. Public Domain. Domenico Ghirlandaio’s 15th century portrait of Piero the Unfortunate. Eldest son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medicisucceeded him as ruler of Florence in 1492. When Piero determined in 1494 to stay neutral during French king Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy, effectively defending Naples the object of the king’s campaign, he was challenged. Suffering from an abandonment of the Florentine elite under the spell of Savonarola, Piero totally capitulated to Charles VIIi’s demands. Having succeeded in alienatating everyone in Florence, Piero fled to Venice, aided by a French diplomat, in November 1494. Attempting to make a comeback several times to Florence he was constantly rebuked, Piero drowned in the Garigliano River while attempting to flee the aftermath of the Battle of Garigliano in 1503, Public Domain.Pope Alexander VI Borgia, c.1495, attributed to Spanish painter Pedro Berruguete (c. 1450-1504), Vatican Museums. Alexander Vi was a wily politician from a prominent family who practiced nepotism and sired several children by way of his many mistresses.
Savonarola played an important role in this French infiltration in Italy — and Rome did not forget. Then, in February 1497, during Mardi Gras of that year, Savonarola, whose message was a combination of religious purist and civic republican preached his most dramatic act of cultural desecration by seeking that artworks, books, clothing items and cosmetics were thrown into a bonfire of the vanities as a sign of monied and other social decadence. The flames became his final undoing: Savonarola was excommunicated for heresy and sedition by Pope Alexander VI on May 12, 1497 after the preacher called “the contemporary Church leadership…a pockmarked whore sitting on Solomon’s throne.” The pope also threatened Florence with severe interdictions if they continued to be a sanctuary for Savonarola and his ilk. Savonarola was imprisoned on April 7, 1498 after failing a literal public trial by fire (it rained). Finally, he was dragged from his prison cell and with two other contemptible friars was condemned as a heretic and schismatic and hanged and burned at the stake on May 23, 1498, with the Vatican and the Medici observing it all from a safe distance. Yet the cult of Savonarola, his person as well as his political and religious ideas, did not go quietly up in smoke. Though seen today as a sort of vile figure, his supporters around 1500 and afterwards saw him as a martyr and encouraged his veneration as a saint to which many complied. In Florence Savonarola’s disputed legacy went on until the Medici more or less permanently re-installed themselves in 1530. Yet Protestant reformers in Germany and Switzerland were intrigued and influenced by Savonarola’s ideas and, in 1558, even Pope Paul IV, who was 22 years old when Savonarola was executed, declared him not a heretic and always in communion with the Catholic Church. Saint Philip Neri (1515-1595), a Florentine established in Rome, and regularly characterized as a most relatable prelate of and for the masses, also defended Savonarola’s memory.
Francesco Rosselli (1445-1513), The Execution of Savonarola and Two Companions at Piazza della Signoria, 16th century, oil on canvas, Galeria CorsiniBernard Berenson as a young man, Berenson described Michelangelo as “the pupil of nobody, the heir of everybody, who felt profoundly and powerfully what to his precursors had been vague instinct, who saw and expressed the meaning of it all.” quoted in Berenson p. 72. Public Domain. “Donatello – David – Florença” by original file by Patrick A. Rodgers is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Verrocchio, Equestrian Statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, 1480s, Venice. Bartolomeo Colleoni (1400-1475) was an Italian condottiero, who became captain-general of the Republic of Venice. Colleoni gained a reputation as the foremost tactician and disciplinarian of the 15th century. “Bartolomeo Colleoni by Andrea del Verrocchio” by Didier Descouens is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Nude Dancers, 1470s, Fresco Arcetri, Villa La Gallina. A fresco frieze of dancing nude figures, in a villa near Florence, shows the artist’s same interest in extreme body poses. Public Domain.
Meanwhile, in Rome, Michelangelo sculpted his first major marble works. The first, Bacchus, was commissioned by Cardinal Raffaele Riario (1461-1521) in partnership with Jacopo Galli, a Roman collector, that was displayed in Galli’s garden until it was sold in 1572 to the Medici and is today in the Bargello. The second is the sublime Pietà (St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City) that was commissioned by a French cardinal in Rome and placed in the Santa Maria della Febbre. Vasari described the Pietà as “a revelation of all the potentialities and force of the art of sculpture.” Though the Pietà made Michelangelo famous in Rome, he returned to Florence following its installation to work on the David, a commission made by the Florentine republic after the expulsion of the Medici.
Michelangelo, Bacchus, marble. 1497, Bargello, Florence.Michelangelo, Pietà, marble, 1498-1499, St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome. A 24-year-old Michelangelo was all the rage in Rome as an artist in the late 1490’s and wrote his name promonently across the sash of the Blessed Mother. The artist did this after it was completed and heard a group admiring the artwork and attributing it to a different artist. Michelangelo was having none of it and one night whet into the chapel and chiseled his name for none to miss seeing. “Pieta (Michelangelo)” by elixirk is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.Michelangelo’s David, created in c. 1501-1504, has been in the Galleria dell’Accademia since 1873, The biblical figure of David came to symbolize the defense of civil liberties embodied in the 1494 constitution of the Republic of Florence, an independent city-state threatened on all sides by more powerful rival states and by the political aspirations of the Medici family.Author’s collection.
This explanatory article may be periodically updated.
SOURCES:
Bernard Berenson, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Phaidon, New York, 1959.
Ornella Casazza, Masaccio and the Brancacci Chapel, Scala, 1990.
Enzo Carli, translated by Susan Bellamy, Giotto and His Contemporaries, Crown Publishers, 1958.
Andreas Quermann, Ghirlandaio, Könemann, 1998.
A Dictionary of Art and Artists, Peter and Linda Murray, Penguin Books; Revised,1998.
Giorgio Vasari, trans. George Bull, Lives of the Artists, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1965.
FEATURE Image: Paris Bordon/e (1500-1571), Fisherman Presenting a Ring to the Doge Gradenigo, 1534, oil on canvas, 370 x 301 cm (145.7 in × 118.5 in), Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.
INTRODUCTION TO PART 1.
Venice is one of the great Italian cities for Renaissance art and its wide-ranging influences. Reflecting a city in the sea, its art is characterized by light and color. Its most remarkable artistic production was between 1470 and 1590 – the rise, height, and decline of the Italian Renaissance. Developed into a powerful maritime empire between the 9th and 11th centuries, Venice was an independent city state that rivaled all other Italian maritime empires such as Genoa, Pisa, and Amalfi; and lesser-known Ragusa, Ancona, Gaeta and Noli, and until the fall of the Republic in 1797. From its trade routes Venice inherited and fortified the coloristic tradition of Byzantium and the Eastern Mediterranean, Islamic countries and the Far East, Ravenna along the Italian coast to the south, and Aquileia near Trieste. Trade routes also included to the Free Cities of the North and its medieval Gothic culture. These activities led to a cosmopolitan culture manifested in Venice’s art and architecture. Around 1500 the Republic also had expanded its territorial holdings to a great extent across Italy, Dalmatia, the Alps, and the Aegean Sea.
The Tuscan Renaissance came to Venice starting around 1430 via Padua, a prestigious university town known for its science and philosophy departments, and part of the Venetian state. Artists such as Giotto (c.1267-1337), Filippo Lippi (c. 1406-1469), Donatello (c. 1386– 1466), Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) and Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) brought essential elements of the Early Florentine Renaissance to Venice. Since 1469 Venice was a publishing center and had been a stop since late medieval times for humanist authors such as Petrarch (1304-1374). As the Mediterranean’s dominant naval force, Venice’s cosmopolitan mercantile culture brought financial and human capital to the lagoon city whose concentration spawned technological innovation. Politically, since Venice was a Republic and not a duchy or bishopric, publications and ideas were unencumbered by censorship present elsewhere. For example, Aldine Press established in 1495 began by printing Greek and Roman classics and later worked with leading humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus (1466 – 1536), Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) and Giovanni Pico (1463-1494). The Aldine Press also produced the first proto-type of today’s lightweight and portable paperbacks. By the 16th century over 250 publishing houses operated in Venice making the city a beacon for humanist writers and artists. (see – https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190708-the-city-that-launched-the-publishing-industry – retrieved December 15, 2024).
These propitious contacts and developments led to the establishment of Venetian Renaissance art by GIOVANNI BELLINI (c. 1430-1516). From an old family of painters, Bellini established a dialogue between Florentine artistic principles of space and form and its philosophy of the natural world with man at the center with Venetian painterly practice. His major discovery was, beginning in his artwork of the 1490s, the situating of naturalistic color to replace the urbane decorative palette used in medieval painting. He also moved past the older mythological subject matter to a naturalistic presentation of religious themes.
Bellini was joined by Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina (1430-1479) who studied with Piero della Francesca (c. 1416-1492) and introduced the influential geometric design to his compositions that influenced CIMA DA CONEGLIANO (c. 1459 – c. 1517). More isolated in his work – and thereby more important for art practice – was the work of VITTORE CARPACCIO (1465-1526) who introduced his synthesis of strict realism, including a sense of space and proportion. Carpaccio captured not only Venice’s contemporary architecture in the work of classicist Mauro Codussi (1440-1504) and sculptor Pietro Lombardo (1435-1515) but its social activity as well. Following Antonello da Messina and Piero della Francesca, Carpaccio used original and expressive colors. Though Carpaccio’s output faded before 1510, Bellini’s work continued until 1516 and through him formed a continuity of style between the late 1400’s and early 1500’s in Venice.
In this first period, GIORGIONE (1478–1510), a student of Bellini, was another important figure in exploring color in Venetian art. Though influenced by Bellini, Giorgione was original in his transformation of his teacher’s stoic elite classicism to a grounding in intimacy and humanity. Many of his religious subjects are based on individualized portraits. In his unidealized landscape painting based on the realism of German Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), Giorgione replicates feelings produced in nature rather than rigid archeological reconstructions that Bellini, Mantegna and Donatello produced. Giorgione was also imbued in Flemish painting including Gerard David (c.1460-1523) and Hans Memling (c. 1433-1494). When Giorgione died at 32 years old in a pandemic in 1510, he left to others his melancholic contemplation of the natural world as a direction for Venetian painting, particularly TITIAN (1488-1576) who is to be featured in another post.
Titian was part of a family of artists who, in 13th-century and 14th century in Italy, had been civic leaders such as mayors, magistrates, and notaries. In Italian his name is Tiziano Vecellio, but in English the artist is famously known as Titian. Titian became the leading painter in Venice and an influential artist throughout sixteenth-century Italy. In the 15th century, two Vecellio brothers had children who became artists. Titian was the grandson of one of those brothers who was ambassador to Venice where the family had a timber trade. A follower of Giorgione, Titian was more intense and dominating in vision and style than the earlier master including his rich dark hues without drawing. Titian also took advantage of Germanic engraving and painting sources for his art, particularly its compositional realism, dynamism and classical references as manifest in Dürer. Though a perfunctory colorist, PARIS BORDON/E (1500-1571) was another artist who came under the influence of Titian’s imperially theatrical style and made a success of it.
There were other artists who followed Giorgione by way of his subject matter rather than, as Titian had, his color. This included artwork of SEBASTIANO DEL PIOMBO (1485-1547), particularly his early Venetian work before he departed for Rome in 1511, and JACOPO NEGRETTI, CALLED PALMA IL VECCHIO (c.1480–1528) who eventually fell into Titian’s orbit but painted arcadian subject matter inspired by Giorgione.
Prolific Venetian artist LORENZO LOTTO (c. 1480 – 1556) retained his independence and highly individual style in a prolific career influenced by Bellini’s composition, Antonello da Messina’s color, and Dürer’s realism. Lotto started in Treviso in 1503 and returned to Venice in 1525 via Recanati, Rome (where he worked with Raphael in the Vatican apartments making his drawing pliant and coloring mellow) and Bergamo. Lotto’s output was primarily deeply spiritual religious paintings and portraits which plumbed psychological depth, and were very popular. In Venice Lotto became one of the leading artists with Titian and Il Pordenone (1484-1539), painting altarpieces, devotional scenes, and portraits for wealthy patrons in the city. Lotto left Venice in 1533 to return to the papal states of the Marches where he intermittently returned to Venice. In 1554 Lotto became a lay brother at the Santa Casa in Loreto and died there in 1556.
ARTWORKS.
Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516)Madonna with the Child, 1470-1476, oil on canvas transferred from wood, 20.4 in. x 16.9 in (52 x 43 cm), Museo Correr, Venice.
Giovanni Bellini came from a family of artists and began work in his father, Jacopo’s workshop. The Bellini brothers Giovanni and Gentile (d. 1507) were greatly influenced by their contemporary Andrea Mantegna who married their sister Nicolosia in 1454. The chronology of Bellini’s paintings is challenging to definitively settle upon since he ran a large workshop of pupils and assistants whose production output was signed with his name. Bellini’s pupils and influences extended to great names of Renaissance Venetian painting: Giorgione, Titian, Palma Vecchio, Sebastiano de Piombo and had influence beyond his direct contacts and into the future. Bellini also studied Donatello so to develop his personal style in the 1450’s and 1460’s. This is manifested in this Madonna and child of which there are several which expresses in light and color harmonious formal three-dimensional beauty and human feeling.
Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516), Portrait of Joerg Fugger, 1474, oil on panel, 10.2 in. x 7.8 in., 26 cm x20 cm, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California. https://www.nortonsimon.org/art/detail/M.1969.13.P – retrieved December 17, 2024.
In the mid 1470’s, following a practice popularized by Sicilian Antonello da Messina, Bellini moved from tempura painting to oil. Bellini began to use more rounded figures, also taken from Antonello. He also adapted Piero della Francesca’s perspective system. These artistic elements were evident in Northern European artwork commissioned by Italian families from Rogier Van der Weyden (1399-1464), Hugo Van Der Goes (c.1440-1482), Jan Van Eyck (c. 1385-1441), Petrus Christus (c. 1395-1472), Dieric Bouts (c. 1415-1475) and Hans Memling (c. 1433-1494). Bellini’s oil on panel portrait is the artist’s first. The sitter is of Joerg Fugger, the 21-year-old heir to a wealthy banking family in Germany. Bellini depicts his subject with small blue blossoms in his hair, the sign of a scholar. The portrait is three-quarter length instead of profile and set against a neutral background or, later, with landscape and sky. The portrait informed a coming generation of portraiture and religious images in Italy including Raphael (1483 – 1520), Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), and Fra Bartolomeo (1472-1517).
The 1470’s saw Bellini produce his most glorious landscapes including the warm and glowing St. Francis at the Frick. Specific details about this painting’s provenance are speculative. It is presumed to have been painted in the late 1470’s for Venetian patrician Zuan Michiel, and was destined for the monastery of San Francesco del Deserto on a remote Venetian island. By 1525, the painting hung in the palace of Taddeo Contarini in Venice. (further reading- https://www.frick.org/exhibitions/bellini_giorgione – retrieved December 17, 2024.). Francis is shown receiving the stigmata in a natural mystical light surrounded by a variety of animals. Bellini’s setting for this religious event that took place in September 1224 is a valley in the Venetian countryside (it took place in Umbria), with a small hilltop town in the background and Francis standing outside his hermit’s dwelling. Saint Francis is said to have composed his Canticle of Creatures also in late 1224, considered one of the first masterpieces of Italian verse.
“Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini” on view until February 4, 2024, reunited for the first time in about four hundred years the Frick’s “St. Francis in Ecstasy” by Giovanni Bellini with Giorgione’s “Three Philosophers,” on rare loan from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum which hung in the palace of Venetian art collector Taddeo Contarini.Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516), Christ Blessing c. 1500, Tempera, oil, and gold on panel, 23 1/4 x 18 1/2 in. (59 x 47 cm), Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. https://kimbellart.org/collection/ap-196707 – retrieved December 17, 2024.
In Bellini’s long career he depicted Jesus Christ differently over time. In his early years he often depicted the dead Christ in a lonely solitude. Later he added angels, and grief-stricken figures of his mother Mary and the apostle John. Bellini developed to depict Christ as triumphant or beatified in his miraculous apparitions of the Transfiguration, Resurrection and Ascension. In Christ Blessing Bellini animatedly portrays the God-Man sent to bless the world on one hand and holding the shepherd’s rod to guide his flock in the other (it may also be logically seen, though not completely in view, as his staff with the traditional red cross on a white flag atop symbolizing his triumph over death). A devotional image presenting the Resurrected Savior, its vibrant figure is brought close to the picture plane where his level gaze and shadowed arm of blessing informs the viewer of the matter-of-fact reality of the scene in quiet harmonious colors. Yet, at the same time, golden rays of light emanate from the top and sides of his head, making thoroughly evident His Divinity. In the background Bellini depicts prolific rabbits, shepherds tending their flock and three shrouded figures who likely are the three Marys at the tomb on Easter morning. There is also a lighted church bell tower to convey the presence of Christ in his Church.
Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516), Drunkenness of Noah, oil on canvas, c. 1515, 40.5 in. x 61.8 in (103 cm x 157 cm), Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon.
In one of Bellini’s last works the master shows how he adapts his work to the developing artistic style after 1510 led by Giorgione and Titian: the composition is fluid and dynamically conceived, with dramatic realism, aqueous colors and excited brushstrokes. Its attribution to Bellini has been accepted by scholars since 1927 though it remains open to debate.
Cima da Conegliano (c. 1459-c.1518), Virgin and Child in a Landscape, 1496-99, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, oil on panel, 28 x 24 3/4 in. (71.1 x 62.9 cm). https://ncartmuseum.org/object/virgin-and-child-in-a-landscape/ – retrieved December 12, 2024.
Cima was a Venetian artist who admired Bellini’s use of color and Antonello’s style of the Netherlandish masters. In contrast to renewed classicism which appeared in Venice in its art and architecture, Cima attempted a sophisticated art reliant on the study of nature that was prevalent in the provinces. Born in Treviso in about 1459, Cima worked in Vicenza in Mantegna’s circle and then moved to Venice in 1492. He was associated with the school of Alvise Vivarini (1442/1453–1503/1505), though Cima remained linked to the gentle and rustic naturalism of the provinces. His models included Madonnas and religious figures in peaceful landscapes such as this painting of a peasant mother and her child in a landscape that includes behind them a monastery and hilltop fortification. The crystalline colors and fluid drawing indicate Antonello’s influence while its overall placidness is characteristic of Cimi’s artwork.
Vittore Carpaccio (1465-1526), Apparition of the Martyrs of the Mount Ararat in the Church of Sant’ Antonio di Castello, c.1513-14, oil on canvas, 47 5/8 x 68 ½ in. (121x 174 cm), Gallerie dell’ Accademia, Venice.
A pupil of Gentile Bellini (Giovanni’s brother), and a follower of Giovanni and Giorgione, his finest work began in 1490. The Legend of Saint Ursula and other pageant-type pictures was early and masterful Italian genre painting. Carpaccio depicted detailed episodes of sacred history and legend using the settings and minutiae of contemporary everyday Venetian society within a formal pictorial schema. This Apparition of the Martyrs of the Mount Ararat in the Church of Sant’ Antonio di Castello is a small canvas that captures the compelling simplicity and authentic emotion of a religious scene that was present in his earlier larger format cycles and series. The painting is of a vision of the prior of St. Anthony monastery kneeling at the altar on the far left. He turns to see the 10,000 martyrs of Mount Ararat he called upon in prayer during a plague that had broken out among the friars. As the martyrs process into the church, they are blessed by St. Peter, the first pope. Carpaccio depicts the interior of a Gothic Church – including an elaborate wooden screen at left and cargo ships suspended from the ceiling – that was demolished in 1807.
Vittore Carpaccio (1465-1526), Preaching of St. Stephen, 1500-1525, oil on canvas, 1.48 x 1.94m, Louvre. In place until the abolition of the brotherhood in 1806; P. Edwards, 1807; Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, 1808; entered the Louvre by way of exchange, 1812. https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010062650 – retrieved December 19, 2024. detail. detail. detail.
Preaching of Saint Stephen by Vittore Carpaccio was done on the first quarter of the 16th century. It depicts the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen, giving a sermon whose actions and words involve its audience as active witnesses. Set within a spacious landscape it reflects an ideal city view, reminiscent to Jerusalem. It is suggested that Carpaccio may have been in Jerusalem as this scene is reminiscent of life in that city and of the Haram-ash-Sharif with the Mosque of Omar.
Carpaccio’s realism in numerous portraits in his ceremonial pictures was influenced by the Flemish masters already popular in Italy in the 1490’s. This bust-length independent portrait of a woman set against a plain dark background is almost an abstract construct of eyes, mouth and hairstyle. Her large head is turned slightly in one direction while her limpid eyes look in the other direction. Her reddish hair is pulled loosely back from her face and, at the crown of her head she wears a yellow net to hold some of it. Her square-neck dress is slate blue edged in black, with a white and gold embroidered front panel. Around her neck she wears a choker of white and black beads.
Giorgione who moved to Venice around 1500 is the transitional figure between Bellini and Titian. Instead of a prevailing late 15th century practice of precise brushstrokes and sculptural composition in his art, Giorgio expressed his subject matter in studied tonal gradations of color and precise analysis of human emotional expression described in gentle brushstrokes. Vasari saw Giorgione’s painting as if having no intermediary between art and life. Painted in the same period as Old Woman (Gallerie dell’ Accademia, Venice), this Portrait of a Man epitomizes what Vasari called the “modern manner” where Giorgione sought to paint “living and natural things.” With its plain dark background and close head crop the man’s carefully observed turning gaze and ambiguous expression is wholly engaging and alive.
Giorgione (1478–1510), The Tempest, c. 1508, oil on canvas, 83 cm × 73 cm (33” × 29”), Gallerie dell’Accademia.
With Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgione is ranked as one of the founders of modern art. He was the first artist in Venice who often painted small artworks in oil of mysterious and evocative subjects for private commissions instead of public church works. The Tempest, originally commissioned by a Venetian noble of the House of Vendramin, is one of those artworks. Known as “a landscape of mood,” it has no discernable subject matter outside of expressing the tension and heat of an approaching storm. Its meaning remains elusive today. Giorgione’s career and personal life are equally mysterious. The artist is known to have shared a studio with Venetian painter Vincenzo Catena (c. 1480-1531) in Venice, worked on the Doges’ palace (though these works are lost) and on frescoes on the exterior of the German Merchants headquarters in Venice where Titian was working as well in a lesser role. Giorgione was an innovator but his known output is small, questionable, and, dying in the plague in 1510 at 32 years old, sometimes completed by others including his pupils, Titian and Sebastiano del Piombo, who were profoundly influenced by him.
Because of Giorgione’s early death in 1510 and other circumstances he did not complete many of his later paintings, making their ultimate identification difficult. That Titian completed many of these works is documented. Once in the collection of the House of Vendramin, this painting is such of jumble of painterly hands it is today attributed to the Circle of Titian though when earlier it was attributed to Giorgione the hand of Titian was apparent particularly in the figure of Christ. Titian was more aggressive in his use of colors –such as browns and grays- than Giorgione’s refined yellows and blues. X-rays reveal another composition – believed to be Giorgione-like- over the ponderous right hand of the angel painted over it.
Sebastiano de Piombo (1485-1547), Organ Shutters, Four Saints, c. 1507-09, 115.3 in. x 53.9 in., 293 cm x 137 cm Gallerie delle’ Accademia, Venice (formerly in the Church of San Bartolomeo al Rialto).
When the organ shutter doors closed they formed a single image of two martyrs: Saint Batholomeo and Saint Sebastian. These organ shutters for San Bartolomeo al Rialto are the earliest documented works of Sebastiano. Commissioned by the church’s vicar in late 1507, it was completed in 1509.
Detail of above. St. Louis of Toulouse.
St. Louis of Toulouse was a bishop of Toulouse in France consecrated by Boniface VIII in 1297. Because of his princely standing Louis won the episcopal appointment, but as bishop he turned his office and efforts to meeting the material and spiritual needs of the poor in his diocese, feeding the hungry, and ignoring his own material interests. After six months, exhausted by his labors, he abandoned the position of bishop and died at Brignoles of fever, possibly typhoid, at 23 years old. St. Louis of Toulouse is one of the inside panels inside a niche of gray stone and gold mosaic (the other is St. Sebald of Nürnberg) by Sebastiano in his first documented commission.
Sebastiano Luciani, a pupil of Giorgione who deeply influenced him, was born in Venice in 1485. He didn’t become “del Piombo” until after 1531 when he became Keeper of the Papal Seal (“Il Piombo”). After Giorgione’s death in 1510 del Piombo may have completed some of Giorgione’s work and, in 1511, moved to Rome. Working at Villa Farnesina in Raphael’s circle that included Baldassare Peruzzi (1481-1536), del Piombo fell out with Raphael and became a devoted follower of Michaelangelo (1475-1564). Both eagerly worked to outperform Raphael, an artistic rival, and Michelangelo lent del Piombo some of his drawings to work from for some of the main figures in the complex composition of The Raising of Lazarus. The gigantic painting was commissioned for Narbonne Cathedral in southern France by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (1478-1534), later pope Clement VII, who had also commissioned Raphael’s last painting Transfiguration for the same cathedral.
“The Raising of Lazarus” by Sebastiano del Piombo is introduced by curator Matthias Wivel in this talk as part of the series ‘The History of the National Gallery in Six Paintings.’Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547), Portrait of Clement VII, c. 1531, oil on slate, 105.4 × 87.6 cm (41 1/2 × 34 1/2 in.), J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103RJN – retrieved December 18, 2024.
The pope visited the artist’s studio and was pleased with his original three-quarter length portrait seated in a chair positioned diagonally, and ordered this oil copy on slate. The practice originated in Rome around 1500 in an attempt towards immortality in art. However, the material was heavy and would shatter if not handled with care. After 1531 del Piombo painted rather less and turned to making admirable portraits which combined his Venetian training in color and Roman discipline in form.
Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547), Portrait of a Man in Armor, c. 1511-15, oil on canvas, 34 ½ x 26 ¼ in (87.6 x 66.7 cm) Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford.
Sebastiano made this portrait under the influence of Giorgione in terms of its gentle, engaging expression and subtly dramatic “over the shoulder” pose. Until more recently, this painting was attributed to Giorgione and, as it is Sebastiano, it recalls the deep influence Giorgione had on his pupils who imitated him profoundly. It has been postulated that the sitter is the Florentine general Francesco Ferrucci (1489-1530) who fought in the Italian Wars.
Jacopo Negretti called Palma il Vecchio (c. 1480-1528), Diana and Callisto, c. 1525/28, oil on canvas, 30 ½ x 48 ¾ in. (77.5 x 124 cm), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie) https://www.khm.at/en/objectdb/detail/1291/?offset=34&lv=list – retrieved December 12, 2024.
Palma Il Vecchio was a Venetian painter who was a pupil of Bellini and influenced by Titian, Giorgione and Lotto. He is chiefly remembered for his paintings of female figures, particularly a blonde Venetian type of ample charm which extended even to paintings of several female saints. The subject of the naked woman located in a natural setting was pioneered by Giorgione and Titian but Palma Il Vecchio progressed the subject to work out the figure in three-dimensions and reliant on the linear curves in and of a complex assembly and interplay of naked female figures. In this painting, Palma il Vecchio adapted the poses of the sculptors of antiquity and drew on Mannerist contemporaries such as Giulio Romano (1499-1546) and Marc Antonio Raimondi (c. 1470/82–c. 1534). The sensuous surface texture typically found in Venetian art has given way to porcelain-like coolness.
Giovanni Cariani (a. 1490-1547), Portrait of a Man, 1525-30, oil on canvas, 36 1/2 x 36 1/2 in. (92.7 x 92.7 cm), National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Little is known about Cariani’s biography though it is speculated he was born in Bergamo in or before 1490. In his gentle, soft shaded subjects and arcadian elements Cariani’s early work is Venetian influenced by Giorgione. The artist was also inspired by Bellini and close to Palma Il Vecchio. He moved to Bergamo before 1520 and mastered portraiture under the influence of Lorenzo Lotto which are the highlight of his career. One of Cariani’s masterpieces is this portrait of a man of letters holding a seal that is possibly imperial or papal. The luminous colors are influenced by Palma Il Vecchio while the psychological insight of the sitter is learned from Lorenzo Lotto. The sitter is believed to possibly be Giovanni Benedetto da Caravaggio, a professor and administrator at the University of Padua.
Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480 – 1556), Fra Gregorio Belo of Vincenza, 1547, oil on canvas, 34 3/8 x 28 in (87.3 x 71.1 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436917 – December 18, 2024.
The sitter beats his fist into his chest in penance, lifts an open book of Passion meditations, and is surrounded by a brooding sky and background living scene of Calvary, all of which works for the artist to scrutinize the mental state or inner thoughts of his sitter, here a religious brother in an order of poor hermits. Lotto had studied portraits of Albrecht Dürer, who made two trips to Venice, to learn to convey these deeper psychological states. Lotto’s assertively confessional portraits under his intense handling of light and dourly earthy colors, were astutely new and sometimes rejected by clients.
Lotto, a deeply religious man and one of the most independent of the 16th century Venetian artists, had a highly singular artistic vision with penetrating insight into the human personality. This painting is a mixture of the artist’s realism and idealism. The setting is natural as are the donors who Lotto draws with a Northern European Art sensibility. The Madonna and child are not derived from models, but expressed from an artistic conception of spiritual superiority. Kneeling donors in profile with the Virgin and Child was a motif developed in Venice in the 1490’s by Bellini. From the medieval period forward, donors were frequently portrayed in artworks they commissioned and such was more popular than ever in the early 1500’s.
Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480 – 1556), Madonna and Child with Sts. Jerome and Anthony of Padua, 1521, oil on canvas, 37 1/8 x 30 5/8/ in. (94.3 x 77.8 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
While strongly influenced by Bellini at the start Lotto developed an independent chameleon-like style influenced by a range of contemporary Renaissance artists such as Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), Fra Bartolomeo, Raphael, Corregio (1489-1534), Giorgione, Titian, as well as Germans, Dürer and Hans Holbein the Elder (1460-1524). But Lotto’s well-known character of independence had as much an historical context as a personal one. About Lotto, Bernard Berenson observed that the Venetian painter was “a psychological painter in an age which ended by esteeming little but force and display, a personal painter at a time when personality was getting to be of less account than conformity, evangelical at heart in a country upon which a rigid and soulless Vaticanism was daily strengthening its hold” (quoted in Pignatti, page 66). This painting from the 1520’s is remarkable for its renewed vision of the picture plane, here with an interlocking group of figures filling a shallow foreground like a frieze and a delimited background.
Paris Bordon/e (1500-1571), Fisherman Presenting a Ring to the Doge Gradenigo, 1534, oil on canvas, 370 x 301 cm (145.7 in × 118.5 in), Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.
It was painted in Venice for the confraternity of San Marco in 1540. Bartolomeo Gradenigo (1263-1342) was the 53rd Doge of Venice for three years, from 1339 to 1342. He was born in Venice to an ancient noble family and was a rich trader who practiced politics from an early age and lived a life of luxury. The painting depicts a famous legend that occurred in Gradenigo’s reign when a storm was pushed back by the intercession of Venice’s saints. Afterwards the saints gave a humble fisherman the “Ring of the Fisherman” to present to the doge.
Accademia – Doge Bartolomeo Gradenigo by Paris Bordon/e.Paris Bordon/e (1500-1571), Portrait of a Knight in Armor, oil on canvas, 36 x 30 in. (91.4 x 76.2 cm) Frame: 44 3/4 x 38 x 3 1/2 in. (113.7 x 96.5 x 8.9 cm), North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. https://ncartmuseum.org/object/portrait-of-a-man-in-armor/ – retrieved December 13, 2024.
Paris Bordon/e was born in Treviso in 1500 and moved to Venice in 1508. where he was based his entire life until his death in 1571. His training is unknown though apparently in Venice where he listed as an independent painter in 1518. As a young professional he reflected the influence of Giorgione in his sentimental portraits and Titian in his use of bold and fluid colors. In the mid 1520s he took on a figural monumentality reminiscent of Pordenone. In the late 1530s Bordon/e was in France at the court of Francis I making realistic portraits and, in 1540, in Augsburg, where he painted for the wealthy Fuggers. Bordon/e was well known for his subjects’ delineated costumes and detailed intellectual landscapes.
Paris Bordon/e (1500-1571). Gladiator fight, c. 1560, oil on canvas, 218 × 329 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie. https://www.khm.at/en/objectdb/detail/292/?offset=0&lv=list – retrieved December 13, 2024.Paris Bordon/e.Paris Bordon/e.Paris Bordon/e (1500-1571), Portrait of a Young Woman in a Green Coat, c. 1550, oil on canvas, 40 1/8 x 30 ½ in. (102 cm × 77.5 cm), Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie.https://www.khm.at/en/objectdb/detail/288/?offset=11&lv=list – retrieved December 13, 2024.
Bordon/e’s painting is closely related to Titian’s style yet in this female figure expresses with elegance and refinement Bordon/e’s own sophisticated stylistic vision. This may be a portrait of Veronica Franco, a Venetian courtesan who played an outsized role in the social and cultural life of the city in the mid16th century.
Paris Bordon/e (1500-1571), Nymph and hunter, 1550s, 45 × 61 × 2.4 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie.https://www.khm.at/en/objectdb/detail/294/?offset=1&lv=list – retrieved December 13, 2024.Titian (c.1511-1576), The Death of Actaeon. c. 1559-75, oil on canvas, 178.8 × 197.8 cm. National Gallery London.
SOURCES: The Golden Century of Venetian Painting, Terisio Pignatti, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1979.
A Dictionary of Art and Artists, Peter and Linda Murray, Penguin Books; Revised,1998.
History of Italian Renaissance Art, 2nd edition, Frederick Hartt, Harry N Abrams. 1987.
Architectural History of Venice, 2nd edition, Deborah Howard, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2004.
FEATURE Image: El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), Laocoön, oil on canvas, 1604-1614, 55 7/8 x 76″, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. In Greek and Roman mythology, Laocoön is a Trojan priest who warned the Trojans to destroy the Trojan Horse sent by the Athenians and is punished with death by the gods for it. See the artwork again below for details about El Greco’s painting.
The Agony in the Garden, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, called El Greco, c. 1590-1595, oil on canvas, 40 1/4 x 44 3/4 in. (102.2 x 113.7 cm) Toledo Museum of Art, Gallery 15.November 2012 .1.32mb 101_0977.
From the museum label: With his intensely personal style, El Greco (“the Greek”) is one of the most original artistic visionaries of any era. Born Doménikos Theotókopoulos on the Greek island of Crete, he trained in Venice and Rome before settling in Toledo, Spain, where he painted this picture. Jesus is shown praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, outside Jerusalem, just before his arrest for his teachings (Judas and the Roman soldiers are approaching at the right). His disciples Peter, James, and John sleep at left. The consciously manipulated scale of the elongated figures, the intentionally jarring colors, and the deliberately confusing space (where exactly is the angel in relationship to the sleeping apostles?) add to the drama and emotion of the scene and capture Christ’s spiritual struggle as he agonizes over his coming crucifixion. Combining aspects from all four biblical accounts of the narrative for his own interpretation of the story, El Greco gives visual form to Christ’s metaphor in Matthew 26:42—”Oh my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.” see – The Agony in the Garden – Search el greco (Objects) – Search – eMuseum – retrieved December 10, 2025.
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), Self-Portrait or Portrait of an Old Man, oil on canvas, 52.7 cm × 46.7 cm (20.7 in × 18.4 in), The Metropolitian Museum of Art, New York.
Usually identified as a self-portrait, it is supported by the fact that the same figure appears several times in El Greco’s oeuvre and ages alongside the artist. The portrait shows the influence of Titian (1489-1576) and Tintoretto (c.1518-1594) whose artwork El Greco saw in Venice.
THE ARTWORKS:
El Greco, The Assumption of the Virgin (Church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo, Toledo, Spain), 1577-79, The Art Institute of Chicago.
Part of an altar ensemble, Assumption of the Virgin is 13 feet high and 7 feet 6 inches wide. In the painting there are two principal groups – the Virgin and angels above and, below, the 12 apostles and an empty sarcophagus. It was the first major commission for El Greco for the Bernadine Convent Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo, Spain. It was in the funerary chapel of Doña María de Silva. El Greco in Spain is first recorded on July 2, 1577 (Toledo Museum of Art, El Greco of Toledo, (exhibition catalog), Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1982, p.16). On August 8, 1577 a contract was made for the main altar series which included The Assumption of the Virgin. El Greco agreed to complete the project in twenty months for a payment of 1500 ducats. The artist signed and dated The Assumption in 1577 and was paid in full in 1578. The painting was installed in September 1579 and remained in the church for the next almost 250 years. (Ibid., p 152; Wood, James, AIC – Essential Guide, Chicago, 2003, p.131). In 1827 The Assumption of the Virgin was purchased by Infante Don Sebastián Gabriel de Borbón (“S.G.”). An inventory of S.G.’s estate lists The Assumption as #26, one of only two sixteenth century Spanish paintings in his collection of more than 200 works. The listing reads: “Otro en id de 14 pies y 5 pulgadas de alto por 8 pies y 3 pulgadas de cnaho. Su asunto, la Ascension de la Virgen, y los Apóstoles, alrededor de Sepulcro. Esta restaurado por Bueno. Tiene marco tallado y dorado…Dominico Greco.” [“Another in dimension (ideación) of 14 feet and 5 inches high by 8 feet and 3 inches wide. Its subject, the Assumption of the Virgin, and the Apostles, around the sepulcher. It was restored on the up and up. It has carved and gilt markings.” – my translation.] (Agueda, Mercedes, “La colección de pinturas del infante Don Sebastián Gabriel,” Boletín del Museo de Prado, iii/8 (1982), pp.103 and 106; 102-17; American Art News, Jan. 7, 1905, Vol. III, p.1.; Toledo Museum of Art, El Greco of Toledo, p.153). In 1837 S.G.’s collection of paintings was confiscated because of his political (pro-Carlist) activities.Along with pictures acquired from the suppression of the religious orders during the Napoleonic occupation (1800-12) his collection of paintings (including presumably #26 in his 1835 inventory) was exhibited at the Museo de la Trinidad. (Boletín, p. 103; Groveart.com, “Borbón y Braganza, Don Infante Sebastián Gabriel.”) S.G.’s property was returned to him shortly before his death in 1875. The Prado describes events until 1902 like this: “La colección…a la muerte del Infante…fue nuevamente exhibida en publico por sus herederos con motivo de una venta realizada en Pau en 1876, añadiéndose al núcleo primitivo de la colección la parte correspondiente llevada al matrimonio por su segunda esposa, Ma Cristina de Borbón. En 1890, su hijo Pedro pone en venta en el Hotel Druot de Paris parte de la colección y unos años más tarde se hace lo mismo en Madrid, bajo el nombre de la Infanta Maria Cristina. De las tres ventas sucesivas 1876, 1890 y 1902 se desprende como los colecciónistas fueron despojando del conjunto todo lo que podriamos llamar grandes piezas…”[… the collection at the death of the Infante was exhibited anew in public in a sale held in Pau in 1876 for the benefit of his heirs. Adding itself to the primitive nucleus of the collection was that respective part brought to the marriage by his second wife, Mrs. Cristina de Borbón. In 1890, her son Pedro put up for sale at the Hotel Druot in Paris another part of the collection and some years later did the same thing in Madrid under the name of the Infanta Maria Cristina. From these three successive sales of 1876, 1890 and 1902 the collectors were divesting themselves of whatever would be called the great pieces…” – my translation]. It is not yet clear at which of these three sales if any The Assumption of the Virgin found itself. What remained after the final sale in 1902 stayed in the possession of Borbón heirs. (Boletín, p. 104). In January 1905 The Assumption of the Virgin was purchased by Durand-Ruel and exhibited in his Paris gallery. (American Art News, Jan. 7, 1905, vol. III, p.1). Durand-Ruel had purchased it from the Spanish Bourbon family into whose possession it came in 1811. The painting was being exhibited at the Prado when Durand-Ruel purchased it in January 1905. Durand-Ruel was dealing in other El Grecos around that time such as acquiring his Laocoön in 1910 and selling it to Paul Cassirer in Berlin by October 1915 (today it is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.). On July 17, 1906, The Assumption of the Virgin was purchased by The Art Institute of Chicago for 200,000ff from Durand-Ruel in Paris. This purchase for an American museum reflected the daring and independent judgment of its purchasers. The painting had always been praised as the artist’s most beautiful and was considered a homage to Titian’s composition in the Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice while also expressing Roman monumentality. (Horowitz, Helen L., Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917, Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1976, p. 101; The Art Institute Chicago 28th Annual Report, June 1, 1906-June 1, 1907, pp.20 and 59; Toledo Museum of Art, El Greco of Toledo, p.153). In February 1915 Mrs. Nancy Atwood Sprague, widow of Art Institute of Chicago Trustee Arnold Sprague, gave $50,000 to defray the artwork’s purchase expenses. From the very beginning this El Greco painting was considered the Museum’s most important acquisition of the year and called the greatest work of El Greco outside Spain. (Chicago Art Institute Bulletin, Mar. 1, 1915, p. 34).
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), The Holy Trinity,1577–1579, 300 x 178 cm, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain.
The painting of the Holy Trinity was part of the altar ensemble for El Greco’s first major commission. It was above The Assumptionof the Virgin with God the Father holding the dead Christ surrounded by angels and a white dove hovering above signifying the Holy Spirit.
El Greco painted this episode of the Purification of the Temple many times, a story that appears in all four Gospels. The artist used intense colors and exaggerated gestures to express the chaos and disruption of the moment when Jesus Christ, angry that the temple was being used for sinful commerce and not prayer, makes a whip and uses it to drive out the traders selling animals for sacrifice. In the upper left corner is a painted sculpture of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden by the Angel of God reinforcing the message of sinfulness in the trader’s actions in the scene. At right in contrast, Christ’s apostles stand beneath a painted relief sculpture of faithful Abraham. The story of the Purification of the Temple told in Chapter 2 of John’s Gospel relates: “…Jesus went up to Jerusalem. He found in the temple area those who sold oxen, sheep, and doves, as well as the money-changers seated there. He made a whip out of cords and drove them all out of the temple area, with the sheep and oxen, and spilled the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables, and to those who sold doves he said, ‘Take these out of here, and stop making my Father’s house a marketplace.'” El Greco painted Christ’s body energetically twisted with his right arm raised and ready to strike the man draped in yellow cloth he is gazing at. The man in yellow mirrors Christ’s pose as he recoils, arching his back and raising his hand to protect himself. The figures behind him lean in the same direction backwards to avoid being struck in the melée. The painting shows El Greco’s debt to Renaissance art such as Titian and Michelangelo (1475-1564) whose artwork El Greco studied during his travels to Venice and Rome. The figures behind Christ are much calmer. The gray-bearded man with his hand on his knee looking up in a yellow and blue costume is identified as Simon Peter. While the foreground setting suggests a grand columned one that is only partially seen, the buildings in the background with their arched arcades were likely inspired by architecture El Greco saw in Venice in 1568.
Cathedral, Toledo. Metropolitan. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Church of San Tomé, ToledoPrado. Museum of San Vicente, Toledo. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.El Greco, Saint Martin of Tours and the Beggar, 1597-1599, oil on canvas, 193.5 × 103 cm (76 3/16 × 40 9/16 in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.1164.html – retrieved November 11, 2024.
The painting was commissioned by Martín Ramírez for the Chapel of San José in Toledo, Spain. El Greco painted miracles as matter of fact. St. Martin and The Beggar depicts a scene from a low vantage point looking up to a monumental knight sharing his cloak with an attenuated, nearly otherworldly figure of a naked beggar. St. Martin of Tours (d.397), part of the Imperial Calvary stationed near Amiens during the times of Roman Emperor Constantine, sits mounted on a magnificent white Arabian steed and is dressed in stylishly practical soldier regalia from head to foot signifying his noble role and power to survey this emerald green landscape that is Toledo and the Tagus river. Martin’s green cloak is one part of his regalia but, on a cold autumn or winter day, his heart burns to divide it with his sword so to share it with this naked bandaged stranger he meets on the road. The encounter and action are modest and profound simultaneously– a typical social setting yet not merely transactional within a rigidly conceived social order but a tender act of charity. Martin rode off with his half cloak and thought of his soldierly duties. Yet it afforded a miracle. That night, tradition relates, Christ appeared to Martin in a dream revealing that the beggar the knoght shared his cloak with was Him.
This painting shows St. John the Evangelist in a half-figure which has a clear precedent in the Venetian school where El Greco completed his training. Crete, where El Greco was born, was a Venetian possession. El Greco arrived to Venice as a teenager in the late 1550s or early 1560s where he worked with Titian (c. 1490-1576) but became the admirer and heir of Tintoretto (c. 1518-1594). El Greco, who studied icon painting in Crete, learned the medium of oil from its virtuoso Titian, but once in Venice, El Greco quite normally was attracted to Tintoretto, the city’s then-modern master. “The Greek” did not simply imitate Tintoretto’s exterior forms but very personally emulated his deeply spiritual and expressive Mannerism. In this later painting, El Greco depicts the tradition that John the Evangelist was in Rome when the Emperor Domitian (51-96) tried to assassinate Jesus of Nazareth’s young apostle by poisoning the wine in his Mass chalice. But the legend relates that the poison turned into a fabulous serpent tipping off John and his holy companions and doing them no harm. Like Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480-1556), El Greco depicts this story’s externals surrounding John – be it the heavy chalice, poisonous serpent exorcised from it, or the expressive hands of the apostle holding the cup of sacrifice and motioning towards it – to scrutinize the inner conviction or character of the sitter, the young author of the Johannine corpus of a gospel, three letters, and the book of Revelation. On John’s Gospel Cornelius à Lapide (1567-1637) wrote that the Evangelist was indeed the eagle (inspired by a description in Ezekiel) who soars skyward and swoops down to earth for his prey. John wrote the last canonical gospel in 99 with combatting that day’s Christian heresies in mind, specifically those that denied Christ’s divinity – whom in his epistles he called “anti-Christs.” John conveys sacred ideas with a rusticity of style. The 17th century theologian and biblical scholar Cornelius à Lapide affirmed that “John was most like Christ” and that the disciple loved the master supremely and the master held the disciple most dear. Because of the relationship of Jesus and John, the biblical scholar claimed, “when you read and hear John [in his gospel, letters, and book of Revelation] think that you read and hear Christ.” He quotes St. Jerome who claimed that Christ transfused his own spirit and his own love including “the purest streams of Jesus Christ’s Doctrines” into Saint John. This relationship is signaled by John’s reclining on the breast of Christ at the Last Supper. John, now in old age, was pressed by all the bishops in Asia and many others to write a “breakthrough” account claiming of the deepest things of the Divinity of the savior. John agreed with the condition that the whole church fast before he embarked on the project and when the fast ended John began: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.” Nothing is stronger to attest to the origin, eternity, and generation of the divinity of the Christ. John wrote in the Greek language because he was addressing Greeks but, again according to Cornelius à Lapide, the gospel is filled with Hebrew phrases and idioms because St. John was a Hebrew who loved his native language. Though John relates Jesus’s miracles as proof that Christ was the Messiah, God as well as man – including the singular accounts of the changing water to wine at the wedding feast of Cana (chapter 2) and the raising of Lazarus from the dead (chapter 11) – John less relates actions of Christ as found in the synoptics Matthew, Mark, and L uke who focused on his humanity and much more of the discourses and disputations that Christ had with the Jews (mostly its rulers), again with none other than the same purpose to prove his theology meant for the whole world that Christ was “God as well as man.” In John’s gospel a careful examination of contexts needs to occur because Christ speaks sometimes as man and sometimes as God. Its high theology which dealt with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, unity of the Godhead, and divine relations and attributes became that gospel in the next centuries that the bishops referenced to combat their day’s heresies such as Arianism (which denied Christ’s Divinity), the Docetists (who denied Christ’s humanity), and Nestorians (who denied Christ’s dual natures). John had favorite terms and ideas he repeated in his gospel – calling Christ “the Life” and “the Light.” Calling saints “the children of light.” Calling sin “darkness.”
Metropolitan.Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Prado. Greco Museum, Toledo. Hospital of San Juan Bautista, ToledoGreco Museum, Toledo. Greco Museum Toledo.Metropolitan.National Gallery London.National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
As mentioned in the feature image caption, Laocoön is a Trojan priest in Greek and Roman mythology who warned the Trojans to destroy the Trojan Horse sent by the Athenians by which they won the war. “I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts,” he told them (see Edith Hamilton, Mythology, p. 285). Laocoön and his two sons are punished for revealing this truth by the gods. They are attacked by giant serpents sent out of the sea by Apollo and Artemis that bit and crushed them to death and then slithered away into Athena’s Temple in the city. The Trojans, instead of heeding their priest’s warning and seeing his death for what it was — the punishment for telling them the truth of the danger of the Trojan Horse — viewed it as warning not to question the entry of the monumental wooden horse into the city. They pulled it in, set it in front of Athena’s Temple, and went to their homes believing they had won a peace that had not happened in ten years. El Greco set the artwork outside Toledo giving the ancient tale a contemporary context and unique interpretation. Though Laocoön and his two sons’ fates are sealed, the artist captures a unified centrifugal movement with individualized figures in bare-faced struggle after exercising their prudential judgment that is witnessed by dispassionate onlookers as if in a dream.
Laocoön and His Sons, 1st CE?, marble, 242 cm high, Vatican Museums, Vatican City. The classical marble sculpture was unearthed in 1506 and housed in the Belvedere in the Vatican. Its discovery aroused great excitement in the Renaissancce art world and numerous copies were made. El Greco’s painted extrapolation was taking this passion of classical suffering to the level of one’s own modern synthetic invention where the colorful sensation of upheaval is dynamic. “Laocoön and His Sons” by JuanMa is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.Metropolitan.
SOURCES:
El Greco, Leo Bronstein, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. New York, 1990. El Greco of Toledo, Jonathan Brown, William B. Jordan, Richard L. Kagan, Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez, Little, Brown, Boston. 1982. El Greco, David Davies, National Gallery Company, London, 2003. Mythology Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, Edith Hamilton, Grand Central Publishing, New York and Boston (originally published in 1942).
FEATURE Image: Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Judith Beheading Holofernes, c. 1598, oil on canvas, 56 ¾ x 76 ¾” 145 x 195cm Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome. https://barberinicorsini.org/opera/giuditta-e-oloferne/ – retrieved October 12, 2024.
Ottavio Leoni (1578-1630), Portrait of Caravaggio, c. 1621/25, red and white chalk on blue paper, 23.4 x 16.3 cm, Biblioteca Marucelliana, Florence.
INTRODUCTION.
The chalk portrait above is probably the most faithful likeness of Caravaggio. Born Michelangelo Merisi in 1571, Caravaggio became an influential figure in Italian and European art in and well after his lifetime. He revolutionized painting by his theatrical use of light, dramatic narrative, and the naturalistic physical depiction of everyday people. His depiction of figures in historical narrative using dramatic interplay of light and shadow called chiaroscuro along with its naturalistic composition was further modernized in its scenes’ inclusion of the emotional and psychological human state. These artistic qualities were admired and emulated by many young European artists going forward into the balance of the seventeenth century.
Caravaggio came to Rome around 1592 from Lombardy, where he was influenced by the works of Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo (c.1480-1548), Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480-1557), Romanino (c.1484-1566) and Moretto (c. 1498-1554?). For a while he worked in the workshop of the leading late mannerist Giuseppe Cesari (1568-1640), but soon broke away from the established course in Roman-Florentine artistic mannerism. His completely new approach of intense realism and chiaroscuro — that is, dramatic use of light and darkness to situate a scene – made him the “master of darkness” and completely revolutionized art in Rome around 1600. Along with Annibale Carracci (1560-1609), Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610) and Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Michelangelo Merisi, called Caravaggio, was one of the progenitors of 17th century painting.
Caravaggio’s Il Fruttaiuolo (“Boy with a Basket of Fruit”) presents a remarkable contrast of the detailed, colorful, and sensuous depiction of fruits of the season and the refined and delicate innocence of an adolescent boy holding its basket. The placid scene of typical everyday life is enhanced by an expressive and careful execution. The model was Caravaggio’s friend, Sicilian painter Mario Minniti, at about 16 years old. According to Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613-1696) who included Caravaggio in his Lives of the Artists, the artist learned “to paint flowers and fruit so well imitated that everybody came to learn from him how to create the beauty that is so popular today.”
Caravaggio’s Il Bacchino Malato (“The Young Sick Bacchus”), also known as Bacchino malato (“The Sick Bacchus”) or Autoritratto in veste di Bacco (“The Self-Portrait as Bacchus”), is an early self-portrait by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, dated between 1593 and 1594. The artwork dates from Caravaggio’s first years in Rome when he moved to the Eternal City from his native Milan in 1592. The painting was in the collection of Giuseppe Cesari (1568-1640), Caravaggio’s early employer. In 1607 it was confiscated from Cesari by the Pope in exchange for the Italian mannerist’s freedom following an illegal firearms charge. The pope gifted it to his nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1577-1633), together with the Boy Peeling Fruit and Boy with a Basket of Fruit (“Il Fruttaiuolo“).
The painting is a realist portrait of a young man displaying the typical attributes of Bacchus, the god of drunkenness. The sitter is turned to the viewer in a three-quarter pose, holding in his hands a bunch green grapes held next to his ailing greenish complexion. The sitter has been identified as the artist since it is documented that he was in the Ospedale della Consolazione in Rome around this time for undefined reasons. This interpretation provides the origin for the artwork’s title.
Giuseppe Cesari, Self-portrait, 1640, Accademia di San Luca. Cesari was Caravaggio’s first employer and in possession of The Young Sick Bacchus that was confiscated by the pope. Ottavio Leoni, Portrait of Cardinal Scipione Borghese. The sitter was not only the pope’s nephew and a Cardinal in the Catholic Church but the recipient of early Caravaggio paintings by gift. Such a gift was not at random: the cardinal’s growing art collection, including Caravaggio and Bernini, formed the basis of the Villa Borghese in Rome. Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Fortune-Teller (“La Buona Ventura”), c. 1594, oil on canvas, 39 x 52 3/8”, Louvre, Paris. https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010062329 – retrieved October 10, 2024Detail of above.
According to Giulio Mancini, Caravaggio painted The Fortune-Teller for a proverbial song while staying with Archbishop Fantino Petrignani (1577-1601). By 1620 when Mancini was writing, the painting was owned by Roman art collector and Catholic prelate Alessandro Vittrici (d. 1650). Later (1657) it was in the collection of Catholic Cardinal Camillo Francesco Maria Pamphili (1622-1666) who sent it with Bernini (1598-1680) to Paris as a gift to Louis XIV.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), cardsharps,1594/95, oil on canvas, 37 1/16 x 51 9/16 in. (94.2 x 130.9 cm), Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. https://kimbellart.org/collection/ap-198706 – retrieved October 18, 2024.
Playing the game of primero the player at left is oblivious to a bearded cardsharp who uses his gloved fingers to signal to the other player the content of the cards. The other cheater is reaching for a hidden card from his pants behind his back. Caravaggio’s composition is novel with a naturalistic treatment of the figures whose distinct expressions and gestures convey a realistic and hard drama of being cheated and cheating. This painting was owned and stamped by Cardinal del Monte and in his inventory of 1627 following his death. It had been lost for almost a century when it was discovered in a European private collection and purchased by the Kimbell in 1987.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Martha and Mary Magdalene, c. 1598 Detroit Institute of Arts.
“Caravaggio helped to popularize half-length religious paintings like this, made for private collectors rather than for public church settings. His greatest innovation was in depicting biblical characters as if they belonged to contemporary Roman society, basing them on studio models and dressing them in 17th-century attire, as he does here.” https://www.artic.edu/articles/1071/caravaggio-s-dramatic-life-and-paintings – retrieved October 15, 2024.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Musicians, 1595/96, oil on canvas, 36 ¼ x 46 5/8” (92.1 x 118.4 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/435844 – retrieved October 10, 2024.
The painting was commissioned by Francesco Maria del Monte (1549-1627), a Catholic cardinal and important arts patron in Rome. This is an allegory painting of music manifested by the presence of Cupid in the background, but also a depiction of contemporary performance with individualized sitters, including Caravaggio’s self portrait second from right.
Ottavio Leoni, Francesco Maria del Monte, 1616. Born in Venice of a Tuscan aristocratic family, Cardinal del Monte was an important connoisseur of the arts. Four centuries later his fame rests on his early patronage of Caravaggio and his art collection which provides detailed provenance for many important works of the period.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Lute Player, 1595/96, oil on canvas, 37 x 46 7/8” The Hermitage Leningrad.
The Lute Player was owned by Cardinal del Monte. It was sold to Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564-1637), an aristocrat Italian banker, art collector and intellectual, and appeared in his inventory in 1638. Caravaggio’s model for the painting is the same as for The Musicians.
Commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, the figure of St. Catherine of Alexandria (c. 287-c.305) is Fillide Melandroni, a Roman prostitute (or courtesan) who played a significant role in Caravaggio’s art and fortunes. Young artists turned to prostitutes as their models since other women in respectable society were unavailable to them in that role. Richly dressed in robes, and kneeling on a cushion with a palm frond, Catherine fills the picture as she poses naturally fondling a sword and leaning upon a breaking wheel — signs of the manner of her martyrdom — in a dramatically lit scene of chiaroscuro characteristic of Caravaggio. It is the qualities of a picture such as this one that had immense impact on European art in the 17th century.
Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy is Caravaggio’s first known religious composition. Acclaimed for his radical poverty and asceticism, Umbrian saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) would fast and pray in solitude for 40 days at a time carrying out literally the Bible’s examples of it. By imitating Jesus Christ in the Gospel simply Saint Francis, too, was ministered by angels. In the painting, shepherds sit in an obscured background as the angel and saint are bathed in light. The scene Caravaggio represents took place in September 1224 on Mount La Verna in central Italy. In that time and place St. Francis received the wounds of the crucified Christ, called the stigmata, one of a handful of saints to have received them. It is partially visible in Caravaggio’s artwork on the side of Francis’ tunic. Caravaggio painted Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy in Rome for the Genoese banker and art collector Ottavio Costa (1554-1639). In 1943, this painting became the first Caravaggio to enter a public collection in the United States.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Rest on the Flight to Egypt, c, 1595/98, oil on canvas, 51 ¼ x 63” Galleria Doria- Pamphili, Rome.
La fête champêtre is a musical picnic whose tradition originated in Italy. Caravaggio’s composition is lyrical and complicated. As it is in the setting of the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt in Matthew’s Gospel, the characters are dressed humbly accompanied by the presence of an angel.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Boy Bitten By A Lizard, 1596/97, oil on cavas, 27 ½ 2 22 3/8”, The National Gallery, London.Detail of above.
Mancini relates that Caravaggio painted the subject when staying with an old Catholic prelate named Pandolfo Pucci. By the end of his residence Caravaggio nicknamed his temporary benefactor Monsignor Insalata, or “Mister Salad,” for the pittance of solid food he served his artist boarder. The mock heroic painting may be allegorical with the lizard conveying its traditional meaning of lust or death joined to cherries symbolic of love and roses that of sexually transmitted disease — and warning of all three. see – https://www.britannica.com/biography/Caravaggio/First-apprenticeships-in-Rome-Pucci-Cesari-and-Petrigiani – retrieved October 15, 2024.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Bacchus, c. 1597, oil on canvas, 37 3/8 x 33 ½”, Uffizi, Florence.Detail of above. Detail of above.
Cardinal del Monte commissioned it from Caravaggio for a Medici. Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, 1597, oil on stucco, about 9/9”” x 5’11” Villa Ludovisi, Rome. https://villaludovisi.org/ – retrieved October 12, 2024.
The building and grounds of Villa Ludovisi in Rome, and their rich artwork, includes masterpiece frescoes by Guercino (1591-1666) and other leading lights of the 17th century Bolognese school. Caravaggio’s Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto is his only known oil painting on plaster. Cardinal de Monte purchased the villa and took up residence there in 1596. The cardinal sold it to the Ludovisi in 1621. Bellori relates that the subject matter for the fresco of these gods was to express the cardinal’s interest in medicinal chemistry (today’s pharmaceuticals).
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Judith Beheading Holofernes, c. 1598, oil on canvas, 56 ¾ x 76 ¾” 145 x 195cm Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome. https://barberinicorsini.org/opera/giuditta-e-oloferne/ – retrieved October 12, 2024.
The painting was made for Ottavio Costa. It was later owned by a succession of Roman families until it was acquired by the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in 1970. It depicts a famous scene from the book of Judith in the Bible. Judith, a beautiful, highly respected, prayerful and eloquent widow, is able to enter the tent of an Assyrian general whose army had surrounded Judith’s home, the city of Bethulia, certain to destroy it. Because of Holofernes’ desire for her, he allows Judith to move about freely in his camp and has her join him at a banquet in his tent where he gets drunk. “Holofernes, charmed by her, drank a great quantity of wine, more than he had ever drunk on any day since he was born” (Judith 12:20). Overcome with drink, the fearsome general passes out and is decapitated by Judith, her heroic action saving her people. The Bible tells it this way: “When all had departed, and no one, small or great, was left in the bedchamber, Judith stood by Holofernes’ bed and prayed silently, “O Lord, God of all might, in this hour look graciously on the work of my hands for the exaltation of Jerusalem. Now is the time for aiding your heritage and for carrying out my design to shatter the enemies who have risen against us.” She went to the bedpost near the head of Holofernes, and taking his sword from it, she drew close to the bed, grasped the hair of his head, and said, “Strengthen me this day, Lord, God of Israel!” Then with all her might she struck his neck twice and cut off his head. She rolled his body off the bed and took the canopy from its posts. Soon afterward, she came out and handed over the head of Holofernes to her maid, who put it into her food bag” (Judith 13: 4-10). For Caravaggio, this is his first painting depicting violent action in dramatic and realistic detail. The moment is captured as if in an eternal frieze.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Portrait of Monsignor Maffeo Barberini, c. 1603, Private Collection, Firenze.
Maffeo Vincenzo Barberini (1568-1644) became the future Pope Urban VIII whose reign began in 1623.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1599-1600, oil on canvas, 10’7 1/2 “ x 11’ 2” Contarelli Chapel, Church of Luigi dei Francesi, Rome.Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, 1599-1600, oil on canvas, 10’7 1/2 “ x 11’ 3” Contarelli Chapel, Church of Luigi dei Francesi, Rome.Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Inspiration of Saint Matthew, 1602, oil on canvas, 9’8 1/2 “ x 6’ 2 ½” Contarelli Chapel, Church of Luigi dei Francesi, Rome.
This first version of The Inspiration of St. Matthew by Caravaggio was rejected because the evangelist was considered too crude and the angel too familiar. The painting was destroyed during the Fall of Berlin in 1945 and known by photographs. Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Medusa (detail), 1600/01, oil on canvas mounted on a convex poplar-wood shield, Uffizi, Florence.
Caravaggio’s Medusa is painted on an actual parade shield.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Basket of fruit (canestra di frutta), c. 1600/01, oil on canvas, 18 1/8 x 25 3/8, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan. https://www.ambrosiana.it/opere/canestra-di-frutta/ – retrieved October 13, 2024.
This is Caravaggio’s only still life painting that has survived. Of course there are still life in his figure paintings as details. His paintings of fruit are completely diverse in terms of varieties and arrangements though sharing overall stylistic similarities. The painting was in the possession of Cardinal Federico Borromeo (1564-1631), cousin to Saint Charles Borromeo (d. 1564), and both cardinal archbishops of Milan. Archbishop Federico bequeathed it in his will to the Ambrosiana in Milan, a gallery he co-founded in 1618. The same sort arrangement in the same basket appears in Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus in the National Gallery London painted around the same time. Cdl. Borromeo lived in Rome from 1586 to 1601 and grew to become familiar with Caravaggio’s work. It is unclear whether the archbishop commissioned the painting or if it was a gift. Though the Counter-Reformation cardinal was a propagator of the faith using religious art, he also was an avid collector of still life.
Giulio Cesare Procaccini ((1574–1625), Cardinal-Archbishop Federico Borromeo, 1610, Museo diocesano di Milano.Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Supper At Emmaus, c. 1600/01, oil on canvas, 54 ¾ x 76 ¾” The National Gallery, London.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Conversion of Saint Paul, 100/01, oil on canvas, 90 ½ x 70” Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria de Popolo, Rome.Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Crucifixion of St. Peter, 1600/01, oil on canvas, 90 ½ x70” Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria de Popolo, Rome.
The chapel was purchased by Tiberio Cerasi (1544-1601) in 1600 who worked as Treasurer-General for Pope Clement VIII. Cerasi had the chapel redone by Carlo Maderno (1556-1629). In 1601 Cerasi hired Caravaggio to paint The Conversion of St. Paul and The Crucifixion of St. Paul. Notably, his paintings’ first versions were rejected. The final paintings were installed in 1605 and the chapel consecrated in 1506. The Assumption of Mary over the altar was painted at the same time by Annibale Caracci. See – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerasi_Chapel– retrieved October 14, 2024.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, 1601/02, oil on canvas, 42 1/8 x 57 ½” 118 × 156.5 cm Neues Palais, Potsdam.
Caravaggio’s depiction of this encounter of a Resurrected Christ with doubting Thomas that is found in the New Testamant (John 20: 27-31) is naturalistic with dramatic chiaroscuro. It was purchased from a Paris art dealer in 1815 after its original owners, the Giustiniani, were forced to sell their collection due to financial distress. Prussian king Frederick William III (1770-1840) bought the collection of paintings with the intention of starting a public art museum in Berlin, though this painting ended up being sorted out as “lower quality” perhaps because it shows no signs of Christ’s divinity. Of the five paintings by Caravaggio the king acquired, three ultimately ended up in the museum, including Cupid as Victorious (Berlin, Gemäldegalerie). The Doubting Thomas was hung in the Berlin Palace and, finally, in 1856 hung in the picture gallery in Sanssouci. https://brandenburg.museum-digital.de/object/11898 – retrieved October 11, 2024.
Frederick William III ruled Prussia during the Napoleonic Wars and, while shy and quiet by nature, reluctantly participated in the coalition against Napoleon in the German campaign of 1813. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, he took part in the Congress of Vienna and helped established the new postwar order in Europe. For the remainder of his reign, Frederick William III set about reforming Prussian institutions and centralizing royal control.Detail of above. Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Victorious Amor, c. 1601/02, oil on canvas, 60 5/8 x 43 ¼”, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin-Dahlem. https://recherche.smb.museum/detail/862322/amor-als-sieger?language=de&question=caravaggio&limit=15&sort=relevance&controls=none&collectionKey=GG*&objIdx=0 – retrieved October 11, 2024.
Caravaggio shows Eros prevailing over other human endeavors: war, music, science, government.
Youth With A Ram was painted for Ciriaco Mattei (d.1614), one of the foremost art collectors of his time, and given to Cardinal del Monte by his son before his death. Mattei also commissioned Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus and The Taking of Christ.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Taking of Christ, 1602, oil on canvas, 133.5 cm × 169.5 cm (52.6 in × 66.7 in) National Gallery of Ireland. On loan from the Society of Jesus, Leeson Street., Dublin.
The painting includes a self portrait of Caravaggio. Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1603, oil on canvas, 41 x 53 1/8” Uffizi, Florence.https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/sacrifice-of-isaac – retrieved October 12, 2024.
The painting illustrates the Old Testament story in which God subjected Abraham to an extraordinary test of obedience by ordering him to sacrifice his only son Isaac (Genesis 22: 1-19). Caravaggio faithfully depicts the crucial moment of this dramatic story, when old Abraham, at the very moment he is about to immolate a screaming Isaac, is blocked by an angel sent by the Lord.
The Deposition, considered one of Caravaggio’s greatest masterpieces, was commissioned by Girolamo Vittrice for his family chapel in Santa Maria in Vallicella (Chiesa Nuova) in Rome. In 1797 it was included in the group of works transferred to Paris in execution of the Treaty of Tolentino. After its return in 1817 it became part of Pius VII’s Pinacoteca.
Michelangelo Merisi, called the Caravaggio, DETAIL The Madonna of Loreto (The Madonna of the Pilgrims), circa1603-1604, Oil on canvas, 8’ 8 ½ x 4’ 11”, Cavalletti Chapel, Church of Sant’ Agostino, Rome.Michelangelo Merisi, called the Caravaggio, The Madonna of Loreto (The Madonna of the Pilgrims), circa1603-1604, Oil on canvas, 8’ 8 ½ x 4’ 11”, Cavalletti Chapel, Church of Sant’ Agostino, Rome.
The painting has been in the Cavalletti chapel in Rome since it was installed at the end of 1604.
Michelangelo Merisi, called the Caravaggio, Ecce Homo, c. 1604-05, oil on canvas, 50 ½ x 40 ½” Civic Collection, Palazzo Rosso, Genoa.
The painting was made for a competition with Domenico Passignano (1559-1638) and Lodovico Cardi (“Il Cigoli”) (1559-1613) soon after Il Cigoli first arrived in Rome. Il Cigoli won the compettion and the whereabouts of Caravaggio’s painting until it arrived to Genoa is uncertain. It may be that Caravaggio himself took it to Genoa when he visited there in 1605.
Michelangelo Merisi, called the Caravaggio, Saint John the Baptist, c. 1605, oil on canvas, 68 1/4 x 52” Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri.
The painting was made for Ottavio Costa who then had a copy made for his chapel in Liguria while the original was lost. It resurfaced in the mid 19th century in England and was acquired by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in the 1950s. Caravaggio reveals the qualities of the saint by his expression and pose. He is sober and downcast with a tense energy as his pose manifests the monumentality of the prophets on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. With his staff he quietly and contemplatively conveys zeal, passion and vitality. There is a sense of his singleness of purpose, joined even to a little madness, as a man driven by making straight the paths of the Lord.
The painting was bought by King Charles I of England (1600-1649) in 1637. After the monarch’s defeat in the English Civil War (1642-1645), he was imprisoned and executed for high treason in 1649. During the Commonwealth (1649-1660), the painting was sold in 1651 and recovered at the Restoration. Caravaggio’s painting depicts the call of the very first disciples in the very first New Testament Gospel by Mark: “As he passed by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting their nets into the sea; they were fishermen. Jesus said to them, “Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Then they abandoned their nets and followed him” (Mk 1:16-18). Caravaggio depicts Jesus without a beard as he turns back to invite them to follow him as he moves ahead. Fishermen, Simon Peter holds skewered fish on a stick while Andrew points to himself identifying the object of Jesus’s invitation.
As recently as 1987 this painting came to be attributed to Caravaggio and as the original of this painting’s subject matter. In varying copies of the work the furrow in Christ’s brow is painted faithfully though in this original it is not a painted feature but a canvas fold. There are other design features that, after recent cleaning and conservation, point to a later work of Caravaggio. Many small incisions are present in the artwork’s lower layers of paint that is an uncanny method used by the artist to lay out important points on the canvas for his design. Although the attribution can be argued to the contrary – such as the unusual use of the color blue which Caravaggio saw, according to Bellori, as the “poison of colors” – he did use the color and mostly softened as it is here. Blue, for instance, occurs in the Baptism of Christ (National Gallery of Ireland, c. 1603) and the Annunciation (Nancy, c. 1604). At the Supper at Emmaus (Brera, 1605-6) Christ also wears a robe of softened blue. In its telling broad brushwork, restrained colors, and minimal detail the painting was understood to be a Road to Emmaus painting as discussed by Giulio Mancini and Giovanni Baglione. But these early biographers’ references are likely to the Supper at Emmaus (National Gallery London, 1601). Dated stylistically by its economical, shadowed, and expressive manner, The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew appears to be from the period of 1603-1606. This would be before Caravaggio killed Ranuccio Tomassoni (c. 1580-1606) in a brawl and fled Rome in May 1606. During the first years of the 17th century, the sensuous surface detail of Caravaggio’s art had become spare, dark and expressive. Further, The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew places half-length figures interacting against a stark background, similar to such paintings as Doubting Thomas (Sanssouci, Potsdam) and the Betrayal of Christ (National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), both of 1603. Before this painting reached England, there was a broadly interpreted copy of it that is today in a private collection by Bernardo Strozzi (1582-1644). Strozzi lived and worked in Rome, Genoa and Venice where he may have seen this painting by Caravaggio. When Charles I’s buying agent was later in Italy, he visited the same places as Strozzi had been, except Genoa.
The painting was commissioned in 1605 by members of the powerful archconfraternity of the Palafrenieri who, following the renovation of St. Peter’s Basilica, asked the painter for a new work intended to replace an old painting that decorated the altar of their chapel dedicated to St. Anne. Painted within a few months, in April 1606 the work was exhibited and shortly afterwards moved to the nearby church of Sant’Anna dei Palafrenieri where, seen by Scipione Borghese, it was bought by him. For whatever reason the painting was controversial – perhaps the cleavage of the Madonna or the rendering of the nudity of the child – but Scipione Borghese proudly hung it in his own picture gallery. The painting depicts Mary as she crushes a snake – a symbol of sin – at her feet with the help of Jesus and witnessed by Anna, mother of the Virgin.
Michelangelo Merisi, called the Caravaggio, Saint Jerome writing, 1605/06, oil on canvas, 116 cm x 153 cm, Borghese Gallery, Rome.
According to Bellori, the painting was made by Caravaggio for Cardinal Scipione Borghese. The cardinal was not only an avid and refined art collector but one of young Caravaggio’s earliest and greatest admirers recognizing the Lombard’s talent despite personality flaws or lack of connections in Rome. The painting depicts Saint Jerome (c. 340s-420), Doctor of the Church, best known for his translation of the Bible from Greek into Latin as well as his commentaries on the Bible. Caravaggio depicts the priest and confessor writing and studying the Holy Scriptures as a scholar, now in old age, who has dedicated his life as a humanist engaged in the complex translation and exegesis of the Church’s sacred text. The composition is divided into large fields of color in warm tones (the saint’s complexion and reddish mantle) and cold tones (the skull and shroud-like white cloth) with Jerome’s arm outstretched with writing instrument in hand across the picture to symbolically portray the unity of the scholar-saint’s dialogue with these opposites of nature including life and death, past and present. As there are many unfinished details in the painting, the artist’s style points to his rapid execution of the work. https://www.collezionegalleriaborghese.it/opere/san-girolamo – retrieved October 13, 2024.
DETAIL Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Death of The Virgin, c. 1605-1606, oil on canvas, 12’1 ½” x8’, Louvre, Paris.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Death of The Virgin, c. 1605-1606, oil on canvas, 12’1 ½” x8’, Louvre, Paris.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Madonna of the Rosary, c. 1605-1607, oil on canvas, 11’11 ½” x8’ 4”, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Seven Acts of Mercy, 1606, Oil in canvas, 12’ 9 ½” x 8’ 6 ½” Pio Monte della Misericordia, Naples.
The Seven Acts of Mercy altarpiece was painted between September 23, 1606 and January 9, 1607 for which Caravaggio was paid 400 ducats. The commission required that the artist include the figure of the Madonna of the Misericordia and all the acts of mercy in one vertical canvas and whose overall achievement was a first in Italian art.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Salome, 1609/10, oil on canvas, 35 5/8 x 65 ¾” The National Gallery London.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Flagellation, 1607, oil on canvas, 9’ 4 ½” x 6’2” Capodimonte Museum, Naples.
The dramatic play of light and shadow throws into relief the melancholic expression on David’s face and the hauntingly lifelike head of Goliath, creating a palpable sense of guilt and redemption that resonates deeply with the viewer.
The head of Goliath is Caravaggio’s self portrait.
In addition to developing a considerable name as an artist, Caravaggio was a reputably volatile, bad-tempered and violent man. On May 29, 1606 Caravaggio killed Ranuccio Tomassoni in a fight, the cause of which is disputed, though it may have been over a Roman prostitute, Fillide Melandroni who had posed for Caravaggio several times. The capital crime forced Caravaggio to flee to Naples. A report written by the local coroner declared that the male victim died by Caravaggio’s attempt to castrate him, the code on the Roman street meriting it for a man who insulting another man’s woman. Caravaggio became a fugitive from the law though he continued to paint (Supper at Emmaus) and fled to Naples by the end of 1606. In Naples he painted Flagellation and Seven Works of Mercy, among others. He fled further to Malta and then to Sicily where Caravaggio moved from town to town across the island fearing some unnamed retribution. It was presumed that 38-year-old Caravaggio died from syphilis or perhaps malaria or the Malta Fever though there is current speculation the artist may have been murdered in revenge for his crimes by perhaps members of the Tomassoni family or the Royal Knights. see – https://www.italianartsociety.org/2018/05/on-29-may-1606-the-great-italian-baroque-painter-caravaggio-killed-ranuccio-tommasoni-in-rome/ ; https://thecinemaholic.com/ranuccio-tomassoni-caravaggio/– retrieved October 15, 2024.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Portrait of a Courtesan (Fillide Melandroni), c, 1599. Destroyed Berlin 1945. Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Supper at Emmaus,1606, oil on canvas, 141 x 175 cm, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Beheading of St John, 1608, St John’s Co-Cathedral, Valetta, Malta.Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), St. Francis of Assisi in Meditation, 1606/07, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca Civica Museo ala Ponzone Cremona.Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt with his Page, 1606/07, oil on canvas, 195 x 134 cm, Louvre.
The subject was the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta. In exchange for this grand portrait, according to Bellori and Baglione, Caravaggio became a Knight of Malta on an accelerated timetable though soon after the artist fled the island in disgrace.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Burial of Saint Lucy, 1608/9, oil on canvas, 13′ 4 1/2″ x 9′ 10″ 408 x 300 cm, Church of Santa Lucia,Syracuse in deposit at the Galleria Regionale, Palazzo Bellomo, Syracuse, Sicily.
The famous Caravaggio painting depicting the burial of Santa Lucia once hung in the Church of Santa Lucia al Sepolcro, but today is in Siracusa’s Palazzo Bellomo museum. The original church, built as early as the 6th century, was on the site of Saint Lucy’s martyrdom in the early 4th century. Beneath the sanctuary is a vast labyrinth of dark catacombs dating from the 3rd century which have never been completely explored and are closed to the public. Once containing the tomb of the decapitated saint, her remains were relocated to Venice during the Crusades and where they can be found today. This painting was made by Caravaggio between October 1608 in Malta and early 1609 in Sicily in a commission arranged by his old friend painter Mario Minniti. Caravaggio was on the run in Sicily starting in late 1608 when he arrived into Siracusa, and then onto Messina followed by Palermo. In Sicily, the exile Caravaggio painted Resurrection of Lazarus, The Adoration of the Shepherds (Adorazione dei pastori) and Ecce Homo. In late 1609 he returned to Naples and continued painting, including another St. John the Baptist and, his final artwork, The Martyrdom of St. Ursula. In Naples the artist was attacked in the street by four armed men shortly after his arrival where Caravaggio was seriously injured. see – https://www.frommers.com/destinations/syracuse-and-ortygia-island/attractions/santa-lucia-al-sepolcro; https://www.great-sicily.com/post/the-byzantine-era-in-sicily – retrieved October 15, 2024.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), Adorazione dei pastori (The Adoration of the The Shepherds), 1609, oil on canvas, 10′ 3 1/2 ” x 6′ 11″, Messina, Sicily, Museo regionale interdisciplinare.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), La Resurrezione di Lazzaro (The Resurrection of Lazarus), 1609, oil on canvas, 10′ 3 1/2 ” x 6′ 11″, Messina, Sicily, Museo regionale interdisciplinare.
In Malta Caravaggio became a Knight of Malta but got into another violent group brawl where a knight was badly injured. With a warrant put out for his arrest Caravaggio managed to flee to Sicily in October 1608. By December 1608 Caravaggio was found guilty in abstentia and removed from the Maltese order. The commission for this painting came from Giovanni Battista de’ Lazzari, a merchant of Genoese origin who had obtained permission to be buried in the choir chapel of the church of Saints Peter and Paul de’ Pisani (demolished in 1880) in Messina where Camillo de’ Lellis’ religious order, founded in 1591 and dedicated to the care of the sick, had a house. De’Lazzari’s signed contract on December 6, 1608, declared that his new altarpiece would have the Madonna and St. John with saints as its subject. But that was changed to the resurrection of Lazarus (Gospel of John, chapter 11). It is very likely the change was made by De’Lazzari in agreement with the Camillians. According to Susinno, the artwork’s 13 figures were staff members of the hospital where Caravaggio did the painting. see – https://federica90.wixsite.com/emozionearte/post/caravaggio-in-sicilia-la-resurrezione-di-lazzaro – retrieved October 15, 2024.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Denial of St. Peter,1609/10, oil on canvas, 94 x 125.4 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
The Denial of Saint Peter is generally thought to be one of the last pair of artworks by Caravaggio, the other being The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. It was probably finished at Naples in the summer of 1610.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), St. John the Baptist, 1610, oil on canvas, 159 x 124.5 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome.
Caravaggio carried this painting and others sailing from Naples to Rome hoping for a pardon from the pope. Instead, when the desperate artist landed he was arrested and the boat was sent back to Naples with the paintings. Caravaggio died on July 18, 1610 in Porto Ercole. The papal nuncio secured this painting for Cardinal Scipione Borghese. see – https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/caravaggios-martyrdom-of-saintt-ursula/ – retrieved October 15, 2024.
LAST PAINTING.
Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, 1610, oil on canvas, 142 x180 cm, Naples, Galleria di Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano.
Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula was painted in the last month of his life. It contains his characteristic and revolutionary chiaroscuro, naturalism, and depiction of psychological and physical emotion. The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula was commissioned by Genoese art patron Marcantonio Doria. The painting was finished in May and arrived in Genoa in mid-June 1610. Ursula was a venerated but almost completely legendary figure. In typical fashion Caravaggio dispels traditional religious iconography associated with Ursula — a crown, halo, palm branch, the 11,000 virgin martyr companions — for the painful moment in her story when the Barbarian king shoots the arrow into Ursula’s chest that kills her.
Caravaggio’s The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula marked a watershed in European art. His revolutionary style inspired subsequent generations of painters, such as Artemisia Gentileschi (1593—1651), Giovanni Baglione (1566-1643), and Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639), that became known as the Caravaggisti. He also influenced international Baroque artists including Spaniard Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) and Dutchman Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669). see – https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/the-martyrdom-of-saint-ursula-caravaggio – retrieved October 15, 2024.
FEATURE Image: Raphael, Portraits of Agnolo Doni and Maddalena Doni, c. 1506, oil on panel, 24 ¾ x 17 ¾” Pitti Gallery, Florence.
Raphael, Self-portrait at 23 years old, 1504–1506. Tempera on panel, 47.5 cm × 33 cm (18.7 in × 13 in), Palazzo Pitti, Florence, Italy.
INTRODUCTION.
Born in Urbino in 1483, an environment rich in the arts and humanist learning, Raphael had a remarkable capacity for personal growth and branded new incarnations of his artistic style regularly. He moved to Florence toward the end of 1504. Giorgio Vasari in his chapter on Raphael describes an episode where the artist of Urbino, already in his thirties with a reputation as a master, went back to study the nude (male) form with Michelangelo as his guide. Vasari’s admiration in telling this story goes beyond Raphael’s humility in assuming the role of student again (he studied constantly anyway) but that his learning always improved his artistic output. In the study of nudes, however, artistic growth came perhaps not as the artist expected or intended. Whether Raphael entered the workshop of Perugino at that time or, as seems more likely, many years later when he was already an acknowledged artist, he quickly mastered Perugino’s delicate, ornamental style, with its open landscapes and gentle figures. It was said that contemporaries had trouble distinguishing Perugino’s work from Raphael’s, but Raphael’s compositions were more sophisticated even when he was a young artist. While Raphael mastered Michelangelo’s (and Leonardo’s) art forms convincingly, he also realized he was no match for the creator of the Sistine Chapel and other chiseled works insofar as the nude male forms.1 Yet Raphael consolidated his strengths by testing his limits. A major strength, Vasari believed, was Raphael’s ability to draw and compose a wide range of subjects, such as landscape, architecture, draperies, and the human figure. Up to that time that had been what the artist was doing and would now unflinchingly continue to do on a grander scale, for example, in the Stanzae. In 1508 the pope called Raphael to Rome. Influenced by the idealized, classical art of the city’s ancient past, Raphael’s work took on a new grandeur. He also responded to the more energetic and physical style of Michelangelo, whose works he had already begun to study in Florence. Vasari believed Raphael had the gift to congeal the “poetic moment” by depicting in his painting the most significant gesture and force of action. With the possible exception of Leonardo, he is probably the unparalleled master of excellent design.2 The precocious Raphael Sanzio also benefited from early opportunities given to him by his father to cultivate his talent. The artist’s own determination to succeed in his métier paid off when he was summoned to work at the Vatican by the Pope in 1509, arguably the greatest art patron in an age of art patrons. 3 The early sixteenth century was an age where patrons were as luminous as their artists and the coming together of Raphael and Julius II, and later Leo X, made for a celebrity team. While Vasari meticulously tells the reader of the artist’s “judicious” character – and that Raphael was extremely “amatory” and implying it aided in his death – the chronicler describes, often from memory, his preferences in Raphael’s art work. His collective response, for example, to all four frescos in the Camera d’Eliodoro is that he is most impressed by Raphael’s interesting decorative details, beautiful movements and gestures, the sheer number of figures portrayed, and his ability to express complex ideas and stories on a two-dimensional surface.4 With Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Michelangelo (1475-1564) Raphael is one of the great masters of the High Renaissance. Raphael and his large team of assistants left behind a large body of influential work, especially in the Vatican where the artist spent the last 12 years of his life, although Raphael died at 37 years old. For most of the history of Western art, the easy grace and harmonious balance of Raphael’s style has represented an ideal of perfection. His work became widely influential through the dissemination of prints. Raphael was also the city’s leading portraitist, creating penetrating psychological images that engaged viewer and sitter with a new intensity.
ARTWORKS.
Raphael, S. Niccolo Da Tolentino Altarpiece, 1501, oil on panel, 44 x45 ¼ in., Capodimonte Museum, Naples, Italy.
The Baronci Altarpiece is Raphael’s first recorded commission. It was made for the patron’s chapel in the church of Sant’Agostino in Città di Castello, a commune between Arezzo and Urbino, north of Perugia. In 1789 the artwork was badly damaged in an earthquake and surviving fragments were acquired by the Vatican until they mysteriously dispersed in the mid-19th century and found their way into different collections. Raphael’s commission of 1501 was to paint a large altarpiece dedicated to the Augustinian saint Nicholas of Tolentino (c. 1246– September 10, 1305). Nicholas was canonized by Augustinian Pope Eugene IV in 1446. While today’s saints require 1-2 miracles, St. Nicolas Tolentino was credited at his canonization with 300 miracles – including 3 resurrections. (see – Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, Volume 2, André Vauchez, Richard Barrie Dobson, Michael Lapidge. Chicago: Fitzroy, Dearborn, 2000).
Raphael, angel, fragment Baronci altarpiece. Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, Brescia. Raphael, The Crucifixion, 1502-03, oil on polar, 283.3 × 167.3 cm, National Gallery, London.
The painting was done in 1503 for Domenico Gavari for his S. Domenico chapel in Città di Castello. Angels are poised on toes on a cloud as their cups catch Christ’s dripping blood. Mary Magdelene and St. Jerome (holding a rock) are on their knees while the Virgin Mary and St. John stand. The sun and moon in the sky was characteristic of Crucifixion paintings in Umbria (p. 13, Jones & Penny). It was bequeathed to the National Gallery in 1924. Gavari was a close friend of Andrea Baronci, for whom Raphael painted the Saint Nicholas of Tolentino Altarpiece for the church of S. Agostino, also in Città di Castello. Saint Jerome, of course, was not present at the Crucifixion but is included in this scene because the chapel was dedicated to him. The overall design is based on several versions of the crucified Christ in a landscape painted by Perugino in the late 1480s and 1490s, and is especially similar to his altarpiece of the Crucifixion for the convent of S. Francesco al Monte in Perugia, commissioned in 1502 and completed 1506. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/raphael-the-mond-crucifixion – retrieved September 5, 2024.
Raphael, Coronation of the Virgin (Oddi Altarpiece), 1503-1504, Oil on canvas, 8’9” x 5’4”, Pinacoteca, Vatican, Rome.Raphael, Coronation of the Virgin (Oddi Altarpiece), 1503-1504, Oil on canvas, 8’9” x 5’4”, Pinacoteca, Vatican, Rome. DETAIL.
Raphael painted altarpieces for the Augustinians and Dominicans and the Oddi altarpiece (above) was done for the Franciscans. It was commissioned by the Oddi family chapel in S. Francesco al Prato. The Oddi were in exile from Perugia since 1495 because of battles between families and returned in 1503. The altarpiece was part of honoring their family members. The painting is divided into an upper part depicting the coronation of the Virgin and, in the lower part, the Apostles at the time of the Assumption. In the center, the apostle Thomas holds the Virgin’s girdle that the Virgin lowered to him as a token of these supernatural events. This display of theology was precious to the Franciscans at the time who were promoting the Virgin Mary. They were likely very involved in directing the artist in its composition. (Roger & Jones, pp. 15-16).
Raphael, Spozalizio (The Engagement of the Virgin Mary), 1504, oil on panel, 67 x 46 ½” Brera Gallery, Milan.
The painting’s composition reflects the influence of Perugino, specifically the fresco done by him in the Sistine Chapel in 1484. In terms of its architectural setting, Raphael was influenced by Piero della Francesca (c.1416-1492) and Bramante (1444-1514). The painting’s architectural structure shares centrality in the painting with the foreground figures done in a perspectival arrangement. Within the figures are members of the party positioned in depth. Joseph places a ring on Mary’s finger whose positioning bisects the artwork. A tawny gold tone pervades the painting. It was commissioned by the Alberini family for a chapel in S. Francesco of the Friars Minor at Città di Castello in Perugia. (Brera Milan, p 34)
Raphael, The Madonna and Child Enthroned with Five Saints (Colonna Altarpiece), c. 1504-1505, oil on panel, 68 x 68” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
Raphael painted this altarpiece for the Franciscan convent of Sant’Antonio in Perugia. It hung in a part of the church reserved for the nuns. The pair of voluminous saints straddling each side of the throne reflect the progressive style of Leonardo da Vinci and Fra Bartolomeo (1472-1517) that Raphael was studying in Florence. The lunette above the main panel depicts God the Father holding a globe and raising his right hand in blessing situated between two angels and two seraphim. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437372 – retrieved September 5, 2024.
Raphael, The Small Cowper Madonna, c. 1505 59.5 x 44 cm (23 7/16 x 17 5/16 in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
The Cowper Madonna includes an agreeable background landscape. In a vertical painting, a haloed woman and nude child sit before an expansive grass field extending behind them to a group of trees and buildings on a hill in the distance among hazy blue hills beneath a blue sky.https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.1196.html – retrieved September 8, 2024.
Raphael, Saint Michael and The Dragon, c. 1505, oil on panel, 12 ¼” x 10 ¼” The Louvre Paris https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010060773 – retrieved September 4, 2024Raphael, Saint Michael and The Dragon, c. 1505, oil on panel, 12 1/4 x 10 ¼” The Louvre, Paris https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010060772 – retrieved September 4, 2024.Raphael, Saint George and the Dragon, c. 1506, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
These early works by the artist depict the popular subjects of St. Michael the Archangel vanquishing Satan and Saint George slaying the Dragon, each showing the martial subject of good combatting evil. These were early private commissions for the court of Urbino. Saint George was a Christian Roman soldier who, pious legend informs, subdued a dragon and, with the daughter of a pagan king, brought it to the city, where St. George killed it with his sword. These heroic actions witnessed by the king and his subjects led to their conversion to Christianity. The historic figure of Saint George was martyred around the year 290. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.28.html – retrieved September 4, 2024.
Raphael, The Three Graces, 1505-1506, oil on panel, 6 ¾ x 6 ¾” Condé Museum, Chantilly.
The panel was recorded in the Borghese collection in 1650. It accompanied the Dream of Scipio, an oil on panel, today in the National Gallery of London. The figures were derived from ancient classical sculpture and depict, likely, Chastity, Beauty and Love. Chastity’s lower torso is veiled and an arm covers her breasts from view. Amor’s breasts, by contrast, are revealed. Chastity also wears no adornment as do Beauty and Amor. While the figures are modeled similarly, the space between them is disparate and Beauty blocks Chastity’s leg. (Jones & Penny, p. 8; Beck, pp. 62-63).
Raphael, Portrait of Agnolo Doni, c. 1506, oil on panel, 24 ¾ x 17 ¾” Pitti Gallery, Florence.Raphael, Portrait of Maddalena Doni, c. 1506, oil on panel, 24 ¾ x 17 ¾” Pitti Gallery, Florence.
Agnolo Doni is the only Florentine portrait in these first years mentioned by Vasari though paired with its companion portrait of Maddalena Doni. Doni was an art collector who married the daughter of Giovanni Strozzi in 1503. Agnolo was 10 years older than his wife who was in her teens. The portraits are painted on identically sized panel and are intended to hang next to one another. Raphael took great care in depicting the corporeal reality of his subjects, particularly appreciated in their faces and hands (though Agnolo Doni’s portrait is more detailed than his wife’s.) In both Doni portraits the sitters show-off their jewelry – such as rings and, in Maddalena’s portrait, a large pearl hanging around her neck. (Roger & Penny, p. 29-30)
Raphael, The Madonna of the Granduca, c. 1506, Oil on panel, 33 x 21 1/2 “ Pitti gallery, Florence.Raphael, Lady with a Unicorn, 1506, oil on panel, 65 cm × 51 cm (26 in × 20 in), Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy.
The work was of uncertain attribution until recent times. In the 1760 inventory of the Gallery, the subject of the painting was identified as Saint Catherine of Alexandria and attributed to Perugino. A restoration of the painting in 1934 revealed a unicorn, the medieval symbol for chastity, and led to the pianting’s attribution to Raphael. In 1959 an x-ray revealed a small dog under the unicorn which symbolized conjugal fidelity.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Woman_with_Unicorn – retrieved September 7, 2024.
Raphael, The Holy Family With Saints Elizabeth and John (The Canigiani Holy Family), c. 1506-07, oil on panel, 51 ½ x 42 1/8” Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
Visible on the hem of the Madonna’s scarf is inscribed, “Rapahel Urbanas.” The fresco and easel painter was active mainly in Umbria, in Florence after 1504, and in Rome in 1509 until his death. It was painted for Domenico Canigiani where Vasari saw it later. It entered the Medici collection and when a Medici daughter married an Elector Palatine it accompanied her over the Alps to Germany. (Pinakothek Munich Great Museums of the World, Roberto Salvini, et. al., Newsweek NY 1969 pp. 126).
Raphael, Madonna del Cardellino, 1506-07, oil on panel, 42 1/8 x 30 ¼” Uffizi Gallery Florence.
The three figures are closely integrated as well as displaying a greater sense of volume. The painting is dated 1507, again on the hem of the Virgin’s garment. In the painting St. John the Baptist presents a goldfinch (cardellino) to the Christ child – a symbol of the Passion. (Roger & Penny, p. 33)
The Deposition, 1507, oil on panel, 72 ½ x 69 ¼” Borghese Gallery, Rome.The Deposition, 1507, oil on panel, 72 ½ x 69 ¼” Borghese Gallery, Rome. DETAIL.
Upon seeing Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascia in Florence Raphael’s style applied its innovative principles immediately changing the trajectory of his artwork up to that point. Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were in a pitched artistic battle for the future of modern art in the first decade of the 16th century in central Italy. Their artwork was for a fabled competition to decorate the Great Council Hall in Florence. Raphael studied closely these complex drawings of heroic violence. Though Raphael was familiar with violent combat in Perugia and elsewhere, it was its containment in these artworks in Florence that such dynamic convolutions appeared as in his own work such as The Deposition though he may have had in mind also Perugino’s work in 1495 of the Lamentation over the Dead Christ. In the finished painting the action takes place from right to left – a group of women attending to a swooning Virgin to the Magdalene grasping Christ’s hand to look into his face. (Roger & Penny, pp. 37-44).
Raphael, La Belle Jardinière, 1507-08, oil on panel, 48 x 31 ½” The Louvre, Paris.
In this painting John the Baptist kneels before the Christ child. The painting has an arched top. It was Leonardo da Vinci who formulated the pyramidal structure for the Holy Family and half-length portrait and it seems Raphael looked to explore his idea for his narrative of the Virgin Mary with cousins Jesus Christ and John the Baptist. (Roger & Penny, p. 33)
Raphael, The Madonna of the Baldacchino, 1508, oil on canvas, 9’ x7’4” Pitti Gallery Florence.
The painting was started by Raphael and finished after his death (Roger & Penny, p. 44). It was Raphael’s first major commission in Florence for the Dei family chapel in the Santo Spirito basilica (1487) and remained unfinished when the 25-year-old artist was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II, nicknamed the Fearsome, who reigned on Peter’s chair from 1503 to 1513. Pope Julius, born Giuliano della Rovere in 1443, took his name specifically from Julius Caesar (d. 44 BCE). In 1508, this “Battle Pope” as he was also known, commissioned the Raphael Rooms and Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. Raphael’s enthroned Madonna and Child is with, from left, Sts. Peter, Bernard of Clairvaux, James the Greater and St. Augustine of Hippo. The group is joined by two putti at the foot of the throne’s high pedestal steps. It is a large format painting whose size was increased when it was restored and “completed” at the end of the 17th century to meet the tastes of a Medici prince. Raphael is cited for being an imitator more than originator and this is exampled in the Christ Child playing with his toes whose pudgy type derives from the workshop of Florentine sculptor Luca Della Robbia (c. 1400-1482). The painting can be read right to left as St. Augustine, looking at the viewer, gestures, with St. James gazing in a similar direction, towards the throne and its occupants and then crosses to St. Bernard whose backward glance ends in conversation with St. Peter holding a book and large key. Once in Rome, Raphael continued these simple straight forward readings of his artworks’ often complex network of figures beginning in his famous frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura (1508-1511) yet by then with greater refinement and heroism. In 1799 The Madonna of the Baldacchino was confiscated by French forces and taken to Paris only to be returned to Florence in 1813. (Beck, pp. 78-79).
Raphael, St. Catherine of Alexandria, oil on panel, c. 1507, 71 x 56 cm, National Gallery of Art, London.
Raphael’s saint, a 4TH century mystic and martyr, is not an object for devotion but dramatizes an example of devotion. The turned figure derives from Leonardo da Vinci and expresses an emotional animation that is one of the strongest depictions in Raphael’s oeuvre. (Roger & Penny, p. 44). The portrait is joined to a landscape as the saint leans on a spiked wheel which is her symbol as it was the manner of her death. Raphael looks to capture the mystical or visionary aspect of the saint as she places her hand over her heart and gazes upwards to a golden break in the sky. The figure is very dynamic moving beyond Perugino’s influence of angelic air and distant landscapes and towards Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci whose monumentality and detailed arrangements Raphael studied in Florence. It is unknown who commissioned the artwork and for exactly what purpose it served. https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/raphael-saint-catherine-of-alexandria – retrieved September 6, 2024.
Raphael, The Niccolini-Cowper Madonna, 1508, oil on panel, 80.7 x 57.5 cm (31 3/4 x 22 5/8 in., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.27.html – retrieved September 8, 2024.Raphael, c. 1509, fresco, 47 ½ x 41 ½” Ceiling, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, Rome.Raphael, The Fall, c. 1509, fresco, 47 ½ x 41 ½” Ceiling, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, Rome.DETAIL.
At the time of the papal commission Raphael had little experience painting large frescos but would revolutionize the tradition. The basic scheme of the decoration presents four tondi of abstract ideas of Theology, Poetry, Philosophy and Law. The Fall – or Adam and Eve on the Brink of Disobedience along with the Judgment of Solomon on the ceiling relates to themes of Theology and Law as the ceiling’s admixture of pagan scenes including Urania and Apollo and Marsyas relate to Poetry and Philosophy. (Roger & Penny – pp 50-52).
Raphael, The Disputation over the Sacrament (Disputa), 1509-10, fresco, 25’3” at base, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, Rome.Raphael, The Disputation over the Sacrament (Disputa), 1509-10, fresco, 25’3” at base, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, Rome. DETAIL.
Raphael’s artwork has the effect of cinema in presenting nearly life-sized figures in space that, hoisted onto the wall like a massive theatre screen, fills the room’s field of vision. Further, as a modern-day film dispels incredulity to its medium and any message it conveys, absorbing the viewer, Raphael’s fresco makes intensely real the Catholic faith. Angels in the vault accompany God the Father as a white-robed God the Son sits enthroned before a golden disc displaying his sacrificial wounds of the Cross. On each side sit the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist while on the raised tier sits figures from the Bible. The Holy Spirit descends in the form of a dove on the monstrance holding the Eucharist. Many preparatory drawings survive for this fresco. (Roger & Penny, pp.57-58)
Raphael, The School of Athens, 1510-11, Fresco, 25’3” at base, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, Rome.Raphael, The School of Athens, 1510-11, Fresco, 25’3” at base, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, Rome. DETAIL.
Raphael creatively adapted figures or figural groupings from one fresco to another. Raphael also utilized Michaelangelo’s newly publicly accessible Sistine Chapel ceiling’s prophets and sibyls. Beyond Michaelangelo, Raphael was interested in foreshortening and also arranging numerous figures in a mathmatically constructed perspectival space. Compared to the architecture in his Spozalizio from 1504, Raphael’s architecture in The School of Athens is more massive and yet whose angular lines are softened by curvacious colossal statues in niches. One statue is Minerva above Jurisprudence while Apollo is on the left (and closest to the Parnassus fresco). The central figures below the arches, open sky behind them, are Plato with his Timaeus and Aristotle with his Ethics. Other recognizable figures include Socrates to the left of Plato and Pythagoras to the right of the door. Euclid bends down to use one of his compasses surrounded by students and disciples. (Roger & Penny p 74-78).
Raphael, Parnassus, c. 1511, fresco, 22’1 ½” at base. Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, Rome.
Raphael painted a poet’s paradise where Apollo has the central place. The window which interupts the base of the artwork looked out onto a hill in Rome called Mons Vaticanus that was known since classical times as sacred to Apollo. This fact with the fresco’s other siting challenges (window glare) Raphael was well aware of. Apollo plays the fiddle surrounded by poets and gorgeous muses with a background of laurel trees. Mortals are below on either side of the window. (Roger & Penny, pp. 68-69)
Raphael was working on the frescos in the Vatican Palace when he painted this oil on panel portrait of a “Young Cardinal.” The sitter is not known though it likely is Cardinal Francesco Alidosi (1455-1511). Cdl. Alidosi was an influential diplomat and military leader and a favorite of Julius II (1503-1513). The sitter’s expression and pose of a resting arm on the edge of the painting’s base and the slight turn of the body seems to owe much to Leonardo da Vinci. The body is monumental compared to a placid and yet almost inscrutable slightly smaller head whose depiction, while directly observed, is somewhat idealized. When Della Rovere was elected as Pope Julius II in 1503, Alidosi became his secretary and primary collaborator. He was appointed papal chamberlain and then treasurer. Though labeled “unholy” by Venetian cardinal Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), Cld. Alidosi helped guide the vocation of Bl. Elena Duglioli dall’ Olio (1472-1520), an Italian aristocrat, who wanted to be a Poor Clare nun but was forced to marry by her family and for whose endowed chapel in Bologna Raphael painted an altar-piece. In 1504 Alidosi became a bishop whose sees ranged up and down all Italy – of Mileto in 1504 and of Pavia in 1505. He occupied the seat of Pavia until he was murdered in broad daylight in 1511. There were accusations traded back and forth that Cdl. Alidosi was a traitor in a time when the French occupied parts of Italy among its warring Italian families and an independently powerful pope who acted to protect his favorite as long as possible. About Alidosi, one historian noted, ”A favorite has no friends” and there were many unconcerned witnesses to the brutal crime whose attack included blows that split open his head. (Beck, pp. 92-93; Herbert M. Vaughan, B.A., The Medici Popes (Leo X and Clement VII), Methuen & Co., London, 1910, p. 64-65; “Alidosi, Francesco, detto il Cardinal di Pavia”. Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani – Volume 2 (in Italian). Treccani. 1960.)
Raphael, The Alba Madonna, c. 1511, oil on canvas (transferred from panel), diameter 37 ¼” National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
For all his grandiose commissions for the pope and others, Raphael continued to paint Madonnas as he had in the past in Umbria and Florence and with all the creativity and variation in his powers. The Alba Madonna is clearly a Virgin of humility as she sits on the ground. The woman wears a rose-pink dress under a topaz-blue robe and a finger holds a page in a book she rests on her lap as her hair is twisted away from her face. The woman takes up most of the composition as she welcomes John the Baptist who, according to Christian theology, by his works in the desert and at the River Jordan is the figure who prepares and presents the Christ Child to the people with flowers from the fold of his loin cloth. The trio gazes at the cross held by the Christ Child, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world by his sacrifice as a proper offering to God, his Father. The rounded features of the Madonna figure are in harmony with the circular panel on which the scene is painted. Behind the figures is a wide plain of grass that edges to a body of water painted light turquoise with mountains in the distance painted a deeper shade of blue beneath a blue sky. (Roger & Penny, p. 88.) https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.26.html – retrieved September 4, 2024.
Raphael, Galatea, c. 1512, fresco, 9’8 1/8” x 7’4”, Villa farnesina, Rome.
Raphael took a poem by Florentine poet Poliziano (1454-1494) for inspiration for this fresco. The poet gives a detailed description of the Palace of Venus. Galatea is described as riding on the sea in a chariot pulled by a pair of dolphins whose reins she holds. Around her is her entourage playing amorously in the sea. In 2007, the bodies of Poliziano and philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1464) were exhumed from Florence’s Church of San Marco to determine the causes of their deaths. Forensic tests showed that both men of letters likely were poisoned but how and by whom are only speculation. (see – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6920443.stm – retrieved September 7, 2024). (Roger & Penny, p. 93).
Raphael, The Expulsion of Heliodoris From the Temple, 1512-13, Fresco, 24’7” at base. Stanza D’Eliodoro, Vatican, Rome.
The Stanza D’Eliodoro served as a Vatican audience chamber for the Pope. Each fresco depicts a story of divine intervention and the Pope felt impelled to record them like a civic authority would record an important battle scene in the town hall. The Pope had control over the message and even had himself inserted into these works and one of the best portraits of the pope by Raphael.5 Vasari believed that in the Expulsion of Heliodorus the message was clear: it was the Pope chasing avarice out of the church. Still others, more realistic perhaps, believed the theme to be the defense of the Church’s right to worldly possessions.6While Julius II kept the treasury full and spent lavishly on public works, he also formally condemned his predecessor’s self-enrichment as well as the Church practice of buying and selling its offices. Others impute Pope Julius II making a parallel between Heliodorus’ expulsion and the Pope’s battle to expel rebellious cardinals who supported the French king against Rome.7 The first fresco painted in the Stanza D’Eliodoro and the one the room is named for is also, in my opinion, the finest: The Expulsion of Heliodorus. Heinrich Wölfflin in his book Classic Art provides the most satisfying brief account of this fresco, although there are other observers who offer insight and detail. The painting is based on an account found in 2 Maccabees, a book that treats of the events in Jewish history from the time of the high priest Onias III and King Seleucus IV to the defeat of Nicanor’s army (around 170 B.C). The biblical account of Heliodorus’ attempt to profane the Temple is a rich one and, in terms of the painting’s iconography, can be synopsized as such:
“There was great distress throughout the city. Priests prostrated themselves in their priestly robes before the altar, and loudly begged him in heaven…to keep the deposits safe for those who had made them…(T)he changed color of the (high priest’s) face manifested the anguish of his soul. The terror and bodily trembling that had come over the man clearly showed…People rushed out…in crowds to make public supplication because the Place was in danger of being profaned…Women, girded…filled the streets…While they were imploring the almighty Lord to keep the deposits safe and secure… Heliodorus went on with his plan. But just as he was approaching the treasury with his bodyguards, the Lord of spirits… (struck). There appeared to them a richly caparisoned horse, mounted by a dreadful rider. Charging furiously the horse attacked Heliodorus with his front hoofs…Then two other young men, remarkably strong…beautiful…splendidly attired, appeared…they flogged (Heliodorus) unceasingly…Suddenly, he fell to the ground enveloped in a great darkness…The man who a moment ago had entered that treasury with a great retinue and his whole bodyguard was carried away helpless…” (2 Maccabees, Chapter 3:14-28)
Raphael followed the biblical text closely. He depicts the three major parties in the religious story: the divine rider, two youths and Heliodorus; the figure of the anguished priest; and the “girded” women. As he does in The Deliverance of Saint Peter, the Pope identifies with one of the major priestly characters in the art work if one detects, as some scholars do, the features of Julius II in the High Priest Onias III.8 The Stanza D’Eliodoro and its first fresco The Explusion of Heliodorus is a milestone for its scale, its composition, its form, its treatment of subject, its color, its narrative power, and its graceful draughtmanship.
Raphael, The Mass of Bolsena, c. 1512 Fresco 21’8” Stanza d’Eliodoro, Vatican, Rome.
The fresco depicts a 13th century miracle connected to the Eucharist when a traveling priest, doubting the Real Presence of Jesus in the consecrated host, is given proof of its reality when the altar cloth he uses for Mass becomes stained with blood from the Host. The cloth relic was revered by Julius II and housed in Orvieto Cathedral where it is today. From its inception, the five handsome youths in the bottom right section of the fresco have been admired for their sturdy monumentality perhaps influenced by Michelangelo as well as its colors and costumes showing Venetian influence. (Beck, pp. 100-101).
Raphael, The Mass of Bolsena, c. 1512 Fresco 21’8” Stanza d’Eliodoro, Vatican, Rome. DETAIL. Raphael, The Mass of Bolsena, c. 1512 Fresco 21’8” Stanza d’Eliodoro, Vatican, RomeDETAIL.
Giuliano della Rovere (1443-1513) was described by Machiavelli in his works as an ideal prince. Becoming pope in 1503, he took the name Julius II in honor of Julius Caesar and was nicknamed the Warrior Pope. In 1506 Julius II organized the famous Swiss Guard for his personal protection and established the Vatican Museums. He was also the pope who instigated the rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica that exists today. The pope increased the power of the Papal States and, in 1508, he commissioned the Raphael Rooms and Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel. It was Julius II who also established the first bishoprics in the New World. Although the Tomb of Pope Julius II with its famous sculpture of Moses by Michelangelo is in San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome, the ensemble, extensively abbreviated than originally planned, was not finished until 1545, long after Julius II’s death in 1520. In fact, Julius II is buried in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Raphael, The Liberation of Saint Peter From Prison, 1512-13, Fresco, 22’8” at base. Stanza d’Eliodoro, Vatican, Rome.
San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome (“St. Peter in Chains”) was Julius II’s titular church when he was a cardinal before becoming pope. It was also his uncle’s church before him, pope Sixtus IV (1471-1484). When pope, Julius II made pilgrimage to the church in 1512 after the French evacuated from Italy. The liberation in the title of Raphael’s concurrent fresco probably refers to that of the Papal States with St. Peter taking on the physical characteristics of Julius II. The fresco was being painted during the year when the pope was dying which took place in February 1513. Raphael’s use of light in this fresco is probably the boldest in art taking place at night in the whole of Renaissance art. (Beck, pp. 102-3).
Raphael, The Liberation of Saint Peter From Prison, 1512-13, Fresco, 22’8” at base. Stanza d’Eliodoro, Vatican, Rome.Raphael, The Sistine Madonna, 1512-13, oil on canvas, 8’8” x 6’5”Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden.
Raphael’s painting was made for the high altar of a newly rebuilt church of Pope St. Sixtus (d. 257) in Piacenza, Italy. St. Sixtus kneels on a cloud before the Virgin and Christ Child with a hand over his heart. The saint is interceding for the worshippers of Piacenza to whom he gestures outward with his other hand. Opposite is St. Barbara, patron of soldiers, with the symbol of a tower behind her. (Roger & Penny p. 128)
The painting also includes Sts. Paul, John the Evangelist, Augustine and Mary Magdalene. It was an altarpiece for a chapel in S. Giovanni in Monte in Bologna founded by Elena Duglioli dall’ Olio (1472-1520). The Italian aristocrat wanted to become a Poor Clare nun but was forced to marry by her family. She persuaded her husband, however, not to consummate the marrage attributed to her devotion to St. John (patron of virginity) and St. Cecilia and of which Raphael was commissioned to execute the altarpiece. Elena’s benefactor in this enterprise of her religious vocation was the influential Cardinal Alidosi. Raphael depicts St. Cecilia with an organetto slipping from her hands as she looks skyward to the preferred sound of heavenly music. Elena died on September 23, 1520 and her remains are incorrupt in her church of San Giovanni in Monte. In 1828 she was beatified by Pope Leo XII (1760-1829). Her feast day is September 23. (Roger & Penny, pp. 144-146).
On St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430):
The phrase “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” is credited to St. Ambrose, bishop of Milan, from the 4th century. Their bishop said it to Saint Monica and her son, St. Augustine, on their visit to Rome after they discovered that Saturday was a seasonal “Ember” day of abstinence and prayer which was not the practice in Milan. Saint Ambrose’s answer was to be adaptable, thus: “When in Rome,…” After St. Augustine (354-430) and his successor Boethius (c. 470-c. 525) Europe entered the Dark Ages. There was no really important thinker until the 11th century. Even in 2025 It is said that after St. Paul, there is no greater legacy of Christian thought than that of St. Augustine of Hippo. Augustine died a new man on August 28, 430, a bishop by then himself, as he witnessed his city of Hippo succumb to hordes of invading Vandals as Rome fell. It was all over by the 7th century as the cities were a wasteland and any learning moved to monasteries. One leading aspect of learning was theology and philosophy – grappling with the problems of God’s existence and who He is in relation to man. Before Christianity, Augustine tried Manicheism that explained the world in purely rational and material terms. Finding it unsatisfactory he turned to Skepticism – an old idea in popular practice in the 21st century – which distrusted or denied objective truth for subjective conviction. Finally, Neoplatonism, which had a spiritual bent but, unlike Christianity, had no Supreme Creator and saw the material world as a block to spirituality’s end. Christianity had its philosophical problems also for Augustine and others: while creation was a matter of God’s will for his creature of actual being, where and how did God and man meet? Philosophically, this relationship of Creator and creature remained the central issue for Augustine before and after his becoming a Christian at 32 years old. His battles with the Berber schism of Donatists (who denied the objective value of the sacraments) and Pelagianism (Pelagius being an Irishman who denied original sin and man’s need for grace) led to Augustine’s Doctrine of Creation and Doctrine of Grace for which he is well-known. While fallen man is limited and cannot know God, the desire to know God is itself a sign of grace on a natural level. Augustine asserts one can know God only by faith and, though he offers no formal proof for the existence of God, Augustine reasoned that before one desires or seeks to know anything one must have some idea or believes in its existence. In his battle with Pelagius Augustine determined man needed grace from the beginning – even in the Garden of Eden before the fall. Grace is what led Adam and Eve to God. After the Fall (The LORD God then called to the man and asked him: Where are you? [Adam] answered, “I heard you in the garden; but I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid.” Genesis 3: 9-10), grace is what heals man. Without grace man’s fallen nature cannot allow his free will to overcome his limitations. Grace is a way to freedom for man to give effect to his desires for good. From here Augustinianism moved beyond these things to self-knowledge and Universals; the Nature of God and the Trinity; Sin; and political philosophy (“City of God”), among other topics. One important characteristic of Augustine as bishop was his living a common “monastic” life with his clergy. Augustine believed strongly in the formation of religious communities for spiritual witness and support and material well-being among Christians.
Augustine was born in Algeria in North Africa. He was likely a Berber and grew up in a family where his mother, Monica, was a Christian and his father, Patricius, was a pagan. His father died in 371 after becoming a Christian and Monica did not remarry. St. Monica prayed for her pagan son to become a Christian and is the human being considered most responsible for that result. Augustine who loved the Latin-language Roman poet Virgil (he was less fond of Greek) followed a normal course of study for students at the time and was trained in rhetoric at Carthage. He lived with a woman for a time and had a son by her named Adeodatus with whom he had a lifelong fatherly relationship. Augustine in these early years was a Manichaean, a former major world religion that disappeared in Europe by the 6th century. To explain evil the Manicheans taught a dualistic cosmology where the spiritual world was good and the material world, uncreated by their concept of God, was bad. These beliefs made life in the world a prison to be escaped from by asceticism and intellectuality. It was directly contrary to Christianity which believed God, who created the material world, became flesh and blood man in Jesus Christ. The Manicheans rejected the Bible and taught that Christ could only be a spiritual being and not human. By the time Augustine traveled to Rome and then to Milan to teach rhetoric in 384, he gave up Manicheanism and entered a difficult period of searching. In Milan he met its great bishop St. Ambrose whose sermons showed him the unity of faith and reason in Christian teaching and an escape from skepticism as well as categorically rigid spiritualism and materialism. Augustine was baptized by St. Ambrose at 32 years old at the Easter Vigil, on April 24, 387 in Milan where he was joined by his son Adeodatus and his lifelong friend (and later bishop) Alypius of Thagaste who were also baptized. Though Augustine’s conversion was delayed when it occurred it was complete and complex insofar as integrating his many background experiences with Christianity. Augustine left teaching and went to Cassiciacum near Milan to become a writer. Adeodatus died prematurely in 390, and when Augustine returned to Africa, he was persuaded by Bishop Valerius of Hippo to become a priest. In 395 Augustine became auxiliary bishop to Valerius and soon succeeded him as bishop of Hippo. Augustine spent the next 35 years as a diocesan bishop and prolific and influential writer. He died in 430 in trying times: the Vandals had begun the destruction of the Roman Empire and invaded Africa in 429 including the sacking of Hippo. Taking it forward almost 1600 years, when Chicago-born Robert Prevost was elected as Pope Leo XIV in 2025, in addition to being a White Sox fan, he is an Augustinian friar, priest, bishop, and cardinal who takes inspiration from St. Augustine of Hippo, Leo XIV is the first Augustinianpope since Pope Eugene IV elected in 1431. see- https://dacb.org/stories/tunisia/adeodatus/ – retrieved August 28, 2025. The Saints: A Concise Biographical Dictionary, edited by John Coulson, Guild Press, New York, 1957. Medieval Thought, Gordon Leff, Humanities Press, Highland, New Jersey, 1958.
Santi, Raffaello, dit Raphaël Rencontre entre Léon Ier et Attila 1512/1513 LOUVRE https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl020101100 – retrieved September 4, 2024.Raphael, the Fire in the Borgo, 1514-15, fresco, 22’1″ at base, Stanza dell’ Incendio, Vatican, Rome.
The name of the room comes from this fresco which Raphael began work on in the summer of 1514. It depicts a newly imagined historical event from the mid-9th century when a fire broke out in Rome. The pope (Leo IV) is seen giving a blessing from the balcony of Old St. Peter’s which, the story goes, tamped down the flames. In the meantime Raphael depicted the event’s panic and drama among its foreground figures in its throes. Once more Raphael is re-inventing his art from only a couple of years earlier. As Raphael continued the practice of borrow ing certain figures and themes from previous frescos, the overall classical style of the Segnatura and Eliodoro frescos are remarkably more spatially complex and intriguing in The Fire in the Borgo. Raphael absorbed what Rome offered – from Michelangelo’s latest art to architecture, both contemporary and ancient, in the city. The Ionic columns of Old St. Peter’s are accurately rendered as are the building fragment of Corinthian columns. (Beck, p. 110).
Raphael, the Fire in the Borgo, 1514-15, fresco, 22’1″ at base, Stanza dell’ Incendio, Vatican, Rome. DETAIL.Raphael, Madonna della Sedia (The Madonna of the Chair), 1514-15, Oil on Panel, diameter 28” Pitti Gallery, Florence.Raphael, Portrait of a Nude woman (“Fornarina”), oil on panel, c. 1518, 85 x 80cm, galleria Nazionale ( Palazzo Barberini), Rome.Raphael, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (Luke 5: 1-11), 1514-15, Tempera on paper, 11’10” x 13’2” Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The Raphael Cartoons are designs for tapestries and were commissioned from Raphael by Pope Leo X (1513-21) shortly after his election in 1513. The tapestries were intended to hang in the Sistine Chapel in Rome, built by Pope Sixtus IV (1471-84). The decoration of the chapel under Sixtus addressed the lives of Moses and Christ. The tapestries continued this theme, illustrating scenes from the lives of St. Peter and St. Paul.
Raphael, La Donna Velata, c. 1514, oil on canvas, 33 ½ x 25 ¼” Pitti Gallery, Florence. Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, c. 1515, oil on canvas, 32 ¼” x 26” the Louvre Paris https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl010066418 – retrieved September 4, 2024.Raphael’s artwork inspired making copies by many later artists. This is “Etude d’après le portrait de Balthazar Castiglione par Raphaël” by Eugène Delacroix, c. 1818/1820 in the Louvre. https://collections.louvre.fr/en/ark:/53355/cl020142954 – retrieved September 4, 2024.
In La Donna Velata and Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, Raphael, the master portraitist, present near ideal depictions. Both portraits are of almost identical dimensions. The model Raphael used for La Donna Velata he used in other artworks of this period, including The Sistine Madonna. These mid 1510s’ portraits have progressively become gentler in their modeling than a tight, detailed study of corporeal features done before. Raphael begins a display of a mastery of forms and colors that had great influence on future artists such as Rubens and Rembrandt. However, Raphael’s painting does not forgo his mastery of draughtmanship exampled in the female sitter’s sleeve or the overall nobility of the male sitter. (Beck, pp. 108-09; 116-17).
Raphael. Portrait of Bindo Altoviti c. 1515:Oil on panel 59,7 x 43,8 (24 in × 17 in), National Gallery of Art of Washington, D.C. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.12131.html – retrieved September 5, 2024.Raphael, The Way to Calvary (Lo Spasimo), 1516-17, oil on canvas, 10 ½ x 7’ 6 1/2” The Prado Madrid.
Raphael, Portrait of Leo X and Two cardinals, 1517-18, oil on panel, 60 5/8 x 46 7/8” Uffizi Gallery Florence
This was an important group portrait commission for Raphael: the current Pope Leo X Medici (1513-1521) seated by his cousins, Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici on the left and Luigi de’ Rossi on the right. Giulio de’ Medici was soon to become the future pope Clement VII (1523-1534). Though highly individualized, Raphael captures a family resemblance between these three Medici – then the most powerful family in Italy – who are all about the same age. In 1517 Cardinal Giulio was an important art patron and already commissioned Raphael to do The Transfiguration, his last painting. Raphael demonstrates a wide range of artistic experience and skills so that he pulls from his tool-box whatever is required for a successful outcome of any commission. In Urbino Raphael had been exposed to Flemish art and deploys its detailed technique in the bell and manuscript which 42-year-old Leo X uses a magnifier to see. The setting of the monumental portrait, in a room in the Vatican, is subtly captured by way of Flemish art ingenuity. The doorknob in front of newly-made cardinal Luigi de’ Rossi shows the reflection of an open window while the cape and biretta of the pope are highly detailed by the artist in its natural light. The Portrait of Leo X and Two Cardinals is considered the greatest group portrait of the 16th century. (Beck, pp. 120-121)
This painting was commissioned by Giovanni Branconio, the Apostolic Protonotary, at the behest of his father, Marino Branconio, for the family chapel at the church of San Silvestre de Aquila. Marino´s choice of subject matter was undoubtedly guided by the fact that his wife was named Elizabeth and his son, John. In 1655, this work was acquired by Felipe IV (1605-1665), who deposited it at El Escorial. It entered the Prado Museum in 1837.
Raphael, The Holy Family of Francis I. 1518 Oil on canvas 81 ½ x 55 1/8” The Louvre Paris.Raphael, The Transfiguration, 1518-20, oil on panel, 13’3 ¾ x 9’1 ½” Pinacoteca, Vatican, Rome.
FOOTNOTES:
1. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, translated by George Bull (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1965) pages 316-18.
2. Ibid., page 318 and Edizioni Musei Vaticani, Michelangelo and Raphael in the Vatican, (Tipografia Vaticana, Città del Vaticano, 1995) page 169.
3. Vasari, Lives, pages 285 and 291.
4. Ibid., pages 299-302.
5. Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1983, page 113 and 17. Carlo Ludivico, Vatican Museums Rome, page 119
6. Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1983, page 117 and Vasari, Lives, page 301.
7. Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. New York, Third Edition, 1987, page 513.
8. New American Bible, (Catholic Book Publishing Company, New York) page 546 and 550; Beck, Raphael, page 98.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Brera Milan Great Museums of the World, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Newsweek NY 1970 pp. 34
Pinakothek Munich Great Museums of the World, Roberto Salvini, et. al., Newsweek NY 1969 pp. 126
Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari, translated by George Bull, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1965, pages 316-18
Michelangelo and Raphael in the Vatican, Edizioni Musei Vaticani, Tipografia Vaticana, Città del Vaticano, 1995 p. 169
Raffaello. Franzese, Paolo (2008). Milano: Mondadori Arte.
Raphael, James H. Beck, harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York, 1994.
Raphael, Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1983.
Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages, Volume 2, André Vauchez, Richard Barrie Dobson, Michael Lapidge, Chicago: Fitzroy, Dearborn, 2000.
History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, Frederick Hartt, Harry N. Abrams, Inc. New York, Third Edition, 1987.
Raphael, Beck, James H., Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, New York, 1994.
The Medici Popes (Leo X and Clement VII), Herbert M. Vaughan, B.A., Methuen & Co., London, 1908.
“Alidosi, Francesco, detto il Cardinal di Pavia”. Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani – Volume 2. Treccani. 1960.
This explanatory article may be periodically updated.
FEATURE Image: Fernand Harvey Lungren (1857-1932), The Café, 1882/84, oil on canvas. The Art Institute of Chicago. 9/2014.
Fernand Lungren, not dated, c. 1900.
The artist, born in Sweden, moved with his family to Toledo, Ohio, as a child. Lungren wanted to be an artist but his father objected, wanting him to be a mining engineer. For a brief time, in 1874, Lungren attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor to study his father’s preferred subject. But after two years—Lungren’s father still opposed to his son being an artist— saw the younger Lungren rebel and prevail. In 1876 Lungren was able to study under Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) at the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia and had Robert Frederick Blum (1857-1903), Alfred Laurens Brennan (1853-1921) and Joseph Pennell (1857-1926) as fellow students.
Thomas Eakins, self-portrait, c. 1880. The 19-year-old Lungren studied under Eakins at the Pennsyvania Academy in Philadelphia.
In winter 1877 the 20-year-old Lungren moved to New York City. With his first illustration published in 1879, he worked as an illustrator for Scribner’s Monthly (renamed Century in 1881) as well as for Nicholas (a children’s magazine) and as a contributor until 1903. He later worked for Harper’s Bazaar, McClure’s and The Outlook. Lungren’s illustrations included portraits, and social and street scenes.
Paris in the 1880’s. Lungren was largely disappointed by his visit to Paris from June 1882 to December 1883 when he returned to New York.
In June 1882 Lungren sailed to Paris via Antwerp with a group of artists. In an 18-month stay in Paris he studied informally for two months at the Académie Julian, and viewed the latest French Impressionist artworks. He found his artistic purpose in Paris in direct observation and spent the balance of his time studying Parisian street scenes in the manner of the “new painting.”
Fernand Harvey Lungren (1857-1932), The Café, 1882/84, Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee. Lungren depicts two women sitting at a dining table. The models and dresses share affinities with The Café from the same period. The cafe setting offered a myriad of elements to express modernity. La France Élégante et Paris Élégant Réunis 1882. Fernand Harvey Lungren (1857-1932), The Café, 1882/84, oil on canvas. The Art Institute of Chicago. 9/2014. Lungren paid special attention to the image presented by a woman in the details of her fashion from her hat with pom-poms, the size of her bustle, and even her shawl. Further, the bright electric lights above the woman’s head illustrate the intense competition and innovation of the late 1870’s and 1880’s in developing and marketing functional incandescent lamps. The contrast they provide to the dimmer gaslamps also depicted in the painting by Lungren are remarkable. The Café, 1882/84, (detail). The architectural space of the café opens the street. The figure on the right holds a bouquet of yellow flowers while a coachman in the background is reflected by the light of a shop window with a carriage moving to the left.
Lungren returned to New York City in 1883 and, soon afterwards, established a studio in Cincinnati, Ohio. Sponsored by the Santa Fe Railroad which wished to commission images of the Southwest to entice eastern tourists, Lungren made his first excursions west in the early 1890s. In 1892 he visited Santa Fe, New Mexico for the first time and, in the following years painted artworks inspired by his contact with American Indian culture and the desert landscape. This was the start of his lifelong association with American West and Southwest. In 1899 he showed these American desert works at the American Art Galleries in New York and afterwards at the Royal Academy in London and the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.
Fernand Harvey Lungren (1857-1932), Canyon de Chelly oil on canvas 18 3 /16 x 36″, c. 1903-1906. AD&A Museum, Santa Barbara, CA.
When Lungren was in London he made pictures of street life and met several artists, including James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903). In late 1900 Lungren traveled to Egypt with American pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Solomon Wellcome (1853-1936) and returned to New York via London in the next year. Lungren had married Henrietta Whipple in 1898 and they eventually moved to California in 1903, settling in Mission Canyon above Santa Barbara in 1906.
Theodore Roosevelt in 1906. The U.S. president and conservationist was one of the admirers of Lungren’s artwork. Fernand Harvey Lungren (1857-1932), Afterglow: Painted Desert oil on canvas 25 1/4 x 45 in.; framed: 29 3/4 x 49 3/4 x 2 in. AD&A Museum
Lungren lived and work in California—including several notable trips to Death Valley starting in 1909 —until his death in 1932. After Lungren’s wife died in 1917, the artist helped found the Santa Barbara School of the Arts in 1920 and remained on its board until his death in 1932. He became a charter member of the Santa Barbara Art League and executed two works for dioramas at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Most of Lungren’s artwork, including hundreds of his paintings (some 300 works), were bestowed to Santa Barbara State Teachers College, which became the University of California, Santa Barbara, and are part of the University Art Museum
Lungren in later life.
SOURCES:
J.A. Berger, Fernand Lungren: A Biography, Santa Barbara, 1936.
Oska Kokoschka in 1916. Photography by Marta Wolff (1871-1942), a Berlin-based photographer. On September 1, 1942 Marta Wolff was taken from her last place of residence in Wiesbaden to Theresienstadt. She died there of pneumonia on September 22, 1942. see – https://oskar-kokoschka.ch/fr/1001/Biographie – retrieved May 1, 2024.
When Oskar Kokoschka (Austrian, 1886-1980) painted Lady In Red that is in the Milwaukee Art Museum he was a starving artist living in Berlin. At 24 years old Kokoschka became associated with Berlin’s avant-garde and its writers, artists, and theatre actors. The artist knew some of the artists and others of Die Brücke and those associated with Der Sturm, the art and literary magazine. In June 1910 Paul Cassirer organized Kokoschka’s first major show. But Kokoschka’s involvement with the German Expressionists was limited as the young artist was dedicated to pursuing his own artistic ideas and forms. Commenting on this independence, Kokoschka wrote that he was “not going to submit…to anyone else’s control. That is freedom as I understand it.” (Oskar Kokoschka, My Life, translated from the German by David Britt, New York, Macmillan, 1974, p. 67). As Kokoschka developed the art of “seeing,” with his emphasis on depth perception, the local press saw young Kokoschka’s volatile unpredictability and called him “the wildest beast of all.”
Between 1900 and 1930, Berlin is the world capital of art. Paul Cassirer (1871-1926) was a dynamic tastemaker with close ties to the Paris art market, especially to Galerie Durand-Ruel. In 1910 he mounted Oskar Kokoschka’s first major show. Before that, also in 1910, he held the first major Édouard Manet exhibition in Berlin. Cassirer was secretary of the Berlin Secession, an association of renegade modern artists established in 1898 in reaction to the academic and governmental restrictions imposed on contemporary art.
Though Kokoschka studied art of the past masters to develop a unique individual style, he and Die Brücke did interact on ideas and formal problems which generated an artistic atmosphere in Berlin and Vienna. In 1912, Kokoschka started a disastrous affair with Alma Mahler (1879-1964), the widow of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). Its final ending in 1915 led Kokoschka to volunteer for the front lines in World War I and being seriously wounded in combat. The artist enlisted in the 15th Austrian Dragoon Regiment where, in 1915 on the Ukrainian front, Kokoschka was seriously wounded by a bullet to the head and a bayonet wound to the chest. In 1916 Kokoschka was wounded by grenade fire on the Isonzo Front.
Oskar Kokoschka, Die Windsbraut (The Bride of the Wind), 1913. Oil on canvas, 180.4 x 220.2 cm, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland. see – Kunstmuseum Basel – Sammlung Online – Die Windsbraut – retrieved May 1, 2024.
As its two figures bear portrait-like features of Kokoschka and Alma Mahler, the painting is interpreted as an autobiographical testimony to their relationship. Alma Mahler was the widow of composer Gustav Mahler, who died in 1911. In a letter to the Berlin art dealer Herwarth Walden, the artist described the newly completed work as “Tristan und Isolde” (Spielmann 2003, p. 153) alluding to unfulfillable quality of a difficult love. In the same year of 1914, the current title was created in conversation with the poet Georg Trakl.
Alma Mahler was the young widow of composer Gustave Mahler (1860-1911). In 1912 she and Kokoschka embarked on a tumultous affair. In 1913, they travelled together to Italy, and he depicted himself alongside her in the famous painting Die Windsbraut (Bride of the Wind) in 1914.Oskar Kokoschka (Austrian, 1886-1980), Lady In Red, c. 1911, oil on canvas, 21 11/16 × 16 in. (55.09 × 40.64 cm), Milwaukee Art Museum. Author’s photograph, 2016.
The Expressionists’ emotional involvement with world events affected each of their creative processes. In these experiences of personal and social upheaval, Kokoschka maintained that as an artist – and he viewed this role as an existential fact more than a choice – his life had less to do with often prefabricated ideologies, programs, and parties and, rather, with searching and crafting his unique outlook as a creative individual. “There is no such thing as a German, French, or Anglo-American Expressionism!” Kokoschka would argue, “There are only young people trying to find their bearings in the world.” (Kokoschka, My Life, p. 37).
Kokoschka’s individualism made him one of the supreme masters of Expressionism, an -ism he defied. His tempestuous canvases with harsh colors and disjointed angles produced compositions that were emotionally aggressive and meant to prod the viewer into discomfort and rage. As Kokoschka eschewed the main modernist movement of Expressionism for the discovery and practice of his own unique style, he became one of the few major artists (Max Beckmann is another) who will often not appear in the annals of mainstream 20th century modernism, though this exclusive outcome is likely what would satisfy “the wildest beast of all.”
FEATURE Image: Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), L’église d’Auvers-sur-Oise, vue du chevet (“The Church at Auvers”), June 1890, oil on canvas, 94 cm x 74 cm (37 in x 29.1 in), Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890), staying in Auvers starting on May 20, 1890 liked the country town with its artistic pedigree (Corot, Daubigny, Cézanne) and spoke of settling into permanent quarters in the village after renting an attic room in a local café. The artist continued about his experience at Auvers as he wrote: “[C]es toiles vous diront ce que je ne sais dire en paroles, ce que je vois de sain et de fortifiant dans la campagne” (“[T]hese canvases will tell you what I can’t say in words, what I consider healthy and fortifying about the countryside.”) During his more than two months stay in Auvers, a small farm town about 20 miles west of Paris, the post-impressionist did more than 100 drawings and paintings of local landscapes, gardens, and village scenes such as this Catholic church. On the evening of July 27, 1890 Van Gogh had acquired a pistol and shot himself in the chest near the Auvers chateau. After languishing in pain for two days, he died on the morning of July 29, 1890. Vincent Van Gogh was 37 years old. Public Domain.
The graves of both Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) and his younger brother and Paris art dealer Theo Van Gogh (1857-1891). They have been side by side in the Auvers cemetery in France since 1914. Photo: Author’s collection. May 2005.
By John P. Walsh
In a peripatetic life, the last place where Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) lived was Auvers-sur-Oise, a small commune, a short distance northwest of Paris. Since Auvers was on a rail line in the orbit of Paris, Van Gogh moved to the small town with its farming community so he could live independently yet remain close to his art dealer younger brother Theo Van Gogh (1857-1891) who lived with his wife and family in the hustle and bustle of Paris. After leaving Saint-Paul Asylum, Saint-Rémy, where Van Gogh had admitted himself as a patient since May 1889, he traveled to the French capital in May 1890 where he visited Theo and Jo. He was then onwards to Auvers where, by arrangement of Theo, the artist was under the supervision of Dr. Paul Gachet (1828-1909), a mental health physician who was also an avid modern art collector and had his house, family and practice in the town. Vincent arrived to Auvers on May 20, 1890 and stayed in the Saint-Aubin hotel until he moved into a rented attic room in a café of Arthur Gustave Ravoux and his wife, Adeline Louise Touillet, who charged him three and a half francs per night for room and board. Located in Place de la Mairie, a 5-minute walk from the train station, the artist’s daily schedule involved rising at dawn and going outside to draw and paint.
Entrance to Vincent Van Gogh’s rented room in Ravoux’s inn in Auvers. It was here that the artist lived for two months as he made more than 100 drawings and paintings in the town. The room is where Van Gogh returned after he shot himself on July 27, 1890 and died two days later surrounded by family and friends. Author’s photograph, May 2005.
After roaming the town where he made friends of villagers, visited Dr. Gachet’s, and journeyed into nearby farm fields, Van Gogh returned to Ravoux’s café for lunch that was served at noon. In the afternoon he might sometimes work in the “painters’ room” at the inn or visit with other painters staying at the inn, such as compatriot Anton Matthias Hirschig (1867-1939) and Spanish painter Martinez de Valdivielse. These acquaintances proved more significant for history insofar as they provided eyewitness testimony of Van Gogh’s death and funeral. Following dinner at Ravoux’s, Van Gogh climbed the inn’s simple staircase to his single room in the center of the attic landing and retired at about nine in the evening.
Fields of Auvers. Author’s photograph, May 2005.Vincent Van Gogh, View of Vessenots near Auvers, May 1890, oil on canvas, 55×65 cm, Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain. Public Domain.Vincent Van Gogh, Daubigny’s Garden, 1890, oil on canvas, 56 cm × 101 cm (22 in × 39.8 in), Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland. There are three versions by Van Gogh of this Auvers garden of the late Barbizon artist Charles-François Daubigny (1817-1878) who had moved to Auvers in 1860. All three paintings by Van Gogh were made between May and July 1890. Daubigny, a landscape artist who painted en plein aire, died in 1878 and his widow still lived in the house in Auvers that was a short walk from Ravoux’s inn. Van Gogh stepped outdoors into Daubigny’s garden to look back towards the house for the painting’s subject (the Church of Auvers is distinctly drawn in the painting’s upper right corner). Since the 1870’s Van Gogh admired Daubigny and mentioned him with other Barbizon painters, Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) and Camille Corot (1796-1875) (see – https://www.vincentvangogh.org/garden-of-daubigny.jsp – retrieved March 11, 2024). Public Domain.Vincent Van Gogh, Daubigny’s Garden, midJune 1890, oil on canvas, 51 cm x 51.2 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Other versions of Daubigny’s Garden are in the Hiroshima Museum of Art in Japan (see – https://www.hiroshima-museum.jp/en/collection/eu/vangogh.html – retrieved March 11, 2024) and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (see – https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/s0104V1962 – retrieved March 11, 2024.). The square-format flat decorative painting, painted on a simple tea towel that was mounted to canvas, became Van Gogh’s first painted attempt of the garden. It acts as a modernist talisman reminiscent of Paul Sérusier’s 1888 cigar box painting and looks ahead to the decorative landscapes of the Nabis in the 1890’s and of Gustave Klimt (1862-1918) 15 years later. Public Domain.Vincent van Gogh, Garden in Auvers, July 1890, oil on canvas, 64×80 cm, private collection. Though Van Gogh died in 1890 his modernist artistic influence had deep ties with the European avant-garde art movement in the 1890’s and beyond. Public Domain.Setting for, and approach to, the Church of Auvers hardly differs from the time of Van Gogh’s stay in the town in May to July 1890. Author’s photograph, May 2005.Irises and other flowering plants on the side of an Auvers road that leads to Dr. Gachet’s house. Author’s photograph, May 2005.Vincent Van Gogh, Still Life Pink Roses, June 1890, oil on canvas, 32 x 40.5 cm, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, Denmark. Public Domain.Van Gogh, Dr. Gachet (second version), June 1890, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. As a token of friendship, Van Gogh painted two authenticated versions of Dr. Gachet’s portrait in June 1890 at Auvers. Reasons that Van Gogh came to Auvers included the role played by Dr. Gachet as the artist’s therapist, as well as that the well-regarded physician contributed to his town’s modern art pedigree. Dr. Gachet was himself an avid collector and painter and participated in art circles since the 1850’s with Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). Later, Dr. Gachet saw to it that Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) came to Auvers to paint in 1873. It was Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) living in nearby Pontoise who recommended Dr. Gachet to Theo Van Gogh in anticipation of Vincent’s arrival from Saint-Rémy. Vincent Van Gogh was completely enamored with the doctor and thought of him as a brother. When Dr. Gachet visited Theo in Paris in early July 1890, he told him he believed that Vincent was “completely recovered” and “that there need be no fears of a further attack” (quoted in Complete Paintings, p. 718). As Van Gogh found Dr. Gachet to be another brand of eccentric, he painted him in these portraits as a deep thinker who reflected a sensitive nature tending to slight melancholy. Public Domain.Van Gogh, Portrait of Adeline Ravoux, June 1890, oil on canvas, 52x 52 cm, Cleveland Museum of Art. In their therapeutic and other conversations, it was Dr. Gachet in June 1890 who encouraged Van Gogh to make portraits of other sitters in Auvers. Van Gogh had done portraits of local Arlesiens in the “Studio of the South” in 1888 as well as many self-portraits. Adeline Ravoux was the 15-year-old daughter of his Auvers innkeepers, the Ravoux’s. About one month after this portrait was made, the girl was with her parents to witness Vincent’s return to the café after he shot himself. She wrote later in a memoir: “Vincent walked bent, holding his stomach, again exaggerating his habit of holding one shoulder higher than the other. Mother asked him: “M. Vincent, we were anxious, we are happy to see you to return; have you had a problem?” He replied in a suffering voice: “No, but I have…” He did not finish, crossed the hall, took the staircase and climbed to his bedroom.” (see – http://www.vggallery.com/misc/archives/a_ravoux.htm – retrieved March 11, 2024). Public Domain.Van Gogh, Young Girl Standing Against Wheat, late June 1890, 66.7 x 45.8 cm (26 1/4 x 18 1/16 in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The painting’s lack of horizon creates a flat wall behind the sitter who appears in close proximity to the picture plane as she fills the pictorial space. Van Gogh shadowed her face under her hat and gave her a “distant, unfocused” gaze, all of which works to give the portrait emotional distance. (see – Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art by Charles Harrison, University of Chicago Press, 2006). Public Domain.Van Gogh, Marguerite Gachet at the Piano, June 1890, chalk on paper, 30.5 cm x 23.8 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Marguerite Gachet was the daughter of Dr. Gachet. At the time of this drawing which resulted in a similarly composed painting, the sitter had recently turned 21 years old. In anticipation of the painting that is today in the Kunstmuseum Basel, Van Gogh made two sketches in late June 1890 of which this is one. https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/d0427V1962r – retrieved March 11, 2024. Public Domain.As in Van Gogh’s 1890 painting of the same subject, the church at Auvers (“Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption”) today is brightly lit in the sun, while the church itself sits in its own shadow. Author’s photograph, May 2005.Van Gogh, L’église d’Auvers-sur-Oise, vue du chevet (“The Church at Auvers”), June 1890, oil on canvas, 94 cm x 74 cm (37 in x 29.1 in), Musée d’Orsay. Public Domain.
Van Gogh proved quite productive in Auvers, painting several notable canvasses in and around the town and countryside, particularly landscapes and other outdoor subjects en plein aire. In these two months, the painter produced 74 paintings and 33 drawings, including the portraits of Dr. Gachet and Adeline Ravoux, The Church of Auvers, and Field of Wheat with Crows. In a letter of around July 10, 1890, Van Gogh wrote to Theo and Jo that he painted three large canvases at Auvers since visiting them in Paris on July 6, 1890. During that visit the artist also met with Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and art critic Gabriel-Albert Aurier (1865-1892). In addition to Daubigny’s Garden, these large canvasses likely included Wheatfield with Crows and Wheatfields Thunderclouds (both Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam). Van Gogh described them as “immense stretches of wheatfields under turbulent skies…searching to express sadness [and] extreme loneliness” (“immenses étendues de blés sous des ciels troublés… chercher à exprimer de la tristesse, de la solitude extreme”). See – https://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let898/print.html – retrieved March 11, 2024.
Vincent Van Gogh, Sorrowing Old Man (“At Eternity’s Gate”), 1890, 80 cm × 64 cm (31.5 in × 21.2 in), oil on canvas, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands. The painting was completed at St. Rémy shortly before Van Gogh moved to Auvers-sur-Oise.At the wheatfield in Auvers where Van Gogh painted “Wheatfield with Crows,” one of his last paintings, in July 1890. Author’s photograph, May 2005.Van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows. July 1890, oil on canvas, 50.2 cm × 103 cm (19.8 in × 41 in), Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Public Domain. Many have claimed this to be Van Gogh’s last painting.Auvers fields. Author’s photograph, May 2005.
Van Gogh, Wheatfield Thunderclouds, July 1890, oil on canvas, 50.4 cm × 101.3 cm (19.8 in × 39.9 in), Vincent Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
On July 27, 1890, Vincent, as he did each day, went into the fields to paint. Though the artist appeared to be in good spirits, the artist shot himself later that day near the chateau after going for a walk towards evening. Though able to walk the 10 minutes back mortally wounded to Ravoux’s inn, he told them nothing upon entering the café. The Ravoux’s, sensing something was wrong, called for Mazery, the village doctor and Dr. Gachet. Though these doctors bandage the wound, Van Gogh’s condition is inoperable. In the hot attic room, Van Gogh suffered into the next day, when Theo was sent for. He arrived immediately on July 28 from Paris to be by his brother’s side. Van Gogh died the next morning of July 29, 1890. This suicide sent ripples of shock through the village, as some townspeople had witnessed these events. During my visit to Auvers in May 2005, after exiting Van Gogh’s room where he died, I told the innkeeper that the story was sad (“c’est triste”). She countered, “C’est emouvante” (“It’s moving”). Vincent was buried the next day, July 30, 1890, in Auvers’ new graveyard. His funeral was attended by Theo, Dr. Gachet, the Ravoux’s, assorted villagers, and friends from Paris. These last included artists Emile Bernard (1868-1941), Charles Laval (1862-1894), and Lucien Pissarro (1863- 1944), Camille Pissarro’s son. Petit boulevard art dealer and art materials supplier Julien (Père) Tanguy (1825-1894) was also in attendance. Van Gogh’s casket was strewn with yellow dahlias and sunflowers and Dr. Gachet gave remarks as did Theo Van Gogh. Later, in a letter to his wife, Theo wrote about the proceedings: “[Vincent] was buried in a sunny spot among the cornfields, and the cemetery does not have that unpleasant character of Parisian cemeteries.” (see- Kort geluk, 1999, p. 281). The mortal remains of Van Gogh were transported to the cemetery by a rented hearse from the next town because Auvers’ Catholic priest would not allow the community’s hearse to be used. A proposed church service was also cancelled. The homiletics were left to Dr. Gachet who said: “Vincent was an honest man and a great artist, and there were only two things for him – humanity and art. Art mattered to Vincent Van Gogh more than anything else and he will live on through it” (quoted in Complete Paintings, p. 719).
Graves of Vincent and Theo Van Gogh, Auvers-sur-Oise, France. Author’s photograph, May 2005.
Three days after the funeral, Emile Bernard wrote to Aurier about “our dear friend Vincent.” Aurier had written in January 1890 about the intense fixity of Van Gogh’s art. The art critic conjectured that it may be the catalyst for change in French art. In his essay entitled Les Isolés: Vincent van Gogh published in Mercure de France, Aurier prophesied for an artist-savior figure: “A man must come, a Messiah, a sower of Truth, to rejuvenate our geriatric art, indeed perhaps the whole of our geriatric, feeble minded, industrial society” (quoted in Complete Paintings, p. 698). Van Gogh, aware of these statements, did not think he was Aurier’s man. On August 2, 1890 Emile Bernard wrote to Aurier: “On Sunday evening [Vincent] went out into the countryside near Auvers, placed his easel against a haystack and went behind the chateau and fired a revolver shot at himself. Under the violence of the impact (the bullet entered his body below the heart) he fell, but he got up again, and fell three times more, before he got back to the inn where he was staying (Ravoux, place de la Mairie) without telling anyone about his injury. He finally died on Monday evening, still smoking his pipe which he refused to let go of, explaining that his suicide had been absolutely deliberate and that he had done it in complete lucidity…. On the walls of the room where his body was laid out all his last canvases were hung making a sort of halo for him and the brilliance of the genius that radiated from them made this death even more painful for us artists who were there. The coffin was covered with a simple white cloth and surrounded with masses of flowers, the sunflowers that he loved so much, yellow dahlias, yellow flowers everywhere. It was, you will remember, his favorite color, the symbol of the light that he dreamed of as being in people’s hearts as well as in works of art….The sun was terribly hot outside. We climbed the hill outside Auvers talking about him, about the daring impulse he had given to art, of the great projects he was always thinking about, and of the good he had done to all of us. We reached the cemetery, a small new cemetery strewn with new tombstones. It is on the little hill above the fields that were ripe for harvest under the wide blue sky that he would still have loved…perhaps.Then he was lowered into the grave…Then we returned. Theodore Van Ghog [sic] was broken with grief; everyone who attended was very moved, some going off into the open country while others went back to the station…” (see – https://www.webexhibits.org/vangogh/letter/21/etc-Bernard-Aurier.htm – retrieved March 11, 2024.)
Van Gogh, Two Women Crossing the Fields, July 1890, oil on paper on canvas, Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas.
By contrast, Anton Hirschig, the Dutch artist who roomed next door to Van Gogh at Ravoux’s, wrote a letter much later, in 1911, to Albert Plasschaert (1874-1941) in which he recounted a more terrible scene following Van Gogh’s shooting himself. Hirschig wrote: “He lay in his attic room under a tin roof. It was terribly hot. It was August. He stayed there alone for some days. Perhaps only a few. Perhaps many. It seemed to me like a lot. At night he cried out, cried out loud. His bed stood just beside the partition of the other attic room where I slept: Isn’t there anyone willing to open me up! I don’t think there was anyone with him in the middle of the night and it was so hot. I don’t think I ever saw any other doctor like his friend the retired army doctor: It’s your own fault, what did you have to go kill yourself for? He didn’t have any instruments this doctor. He lay there until he died.”
Theo Van Gogh died in Holland on January 25, 1891, nearly 6 months to the day after Vincent’s death. Theo was buried in Holland but exhumed and reinterred next to his older brother Vincent’s grave in Auvers cemetery in 1914. While Vincent Van Gogh, the man, was never larger than life, as an artist he produced an explosion of life on paper and canvas. Van Gogh came to art late (30 years old in 1883) and produced incessantly for the next 7 years. His oeuvre was beautifully powerful, and none of it more remarkably for the future of modernism than that done in Auvers-sur-Oise in May to July 1890.
SOURCES –
Ingo F. Walther/Painer Metzger, Vincent Van Gogh The Complete Paintings, Benedikt Taschen, 1996.
Charles Harrison, Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art, University of Chicago Press, 2006.
FEATURE Image: Petrus Christus (c. 1395-1472), Pietà, c. 1455–60. 39 ¾ x 75 ½ inches, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.
Jan Van Eyck (or John of Bruges) (c. 1385-1441), detail, Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami, 1434; National Gallery, London.
Brief Introduction to Flemish art in the 15th century.
Flemish art, as the name suggests, originates in Flanders which includes the Low Countries (Netherlands and Belgium) as well as northeastern France. The centers of Flemish art in the 15th century are Brussels, Bruges, and, later, Antwerp as well as other cities such as Liège and Tournai. Though the area had been settled as early as the 6th century, great growth and prosperity came to the region starting in the 14th century. As an international trade center centered in Bruges and, following the silting up of Bruges’ port, in Antwerp starting around 1525, Flanders experienced an influx of tremendous wealth joined to its attendant political connections and power. Such factors led to a high demand for Flemish art locally and far beyond its borders to royal courts, churches and other public and private patrons having marked influence on the European Renaissance. These rich cultural conditions in and around Flanders provided incentive for leading Flemish art masters to perfect their art technique and create magnificent pictures, particularly altarpieces, and display the latest naturalist styles, delineated forms, and bright colors within a European context. Flemish art developed systematically including its use of oil painting. This newly discovered and controversial medium greatly affected Flemish paintings’ surface luminosity by way of its range of cool colors and its ability to be applied in smooth facile layers. Most of these noteworthy Flemish painters in the 15th century found positions at court or as officials in prosperous urban centers. They became leading citizens whose workshops trained artists and made artwork for public and private consumption which worked to assure Flemish art’s primacy for the Northern European Renaissance into the 16th century.
Hugo Van Der Goes (c. 1440-1482), Detail, Portinari Altarpiece, 1476-78, Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy.
PAINTINGS.
1 – Melchior Broederlam (c. 1350-1409), Champmol Altarpiece (The Annunciation and Meeting of Mary and Elizabeth), oil on wood, 1399, 65 ½ x 48 ¼ inches and 66 3/8 x 511/4 inches. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, France. 1 – Melchior Broederlam (c. 1350-1409), Champmol Altarpiece (The presentation in the Temple and Flight Into Egypt), oil on wood, 1399, 65 ½ x 48 ¼ inches and 66 3/8 x 511/4 inches. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, France.
This large diptych done for Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy (1342-1402) around 1399 is certainly painted over 600 years ago by Melchior Broederlam (c.1350-1409?). Broederlam was a painter in Ypres, Belgium, who entered the service as painter to Philip the Bold in 1385 and was in Paris by the early 1390’s. In the Champmol altarpiece – considered the earliest example of International Gothic in painting – Broederlam presents four stories in the life of the Virgin, some of which are contained in Luke themselves as scriptural diptychs including the Annunciation and the Birth stories of John the Baptist and Jesus. The first panel of the altarpiece presents the Annunciation (Luke 1:26–38) and the Visitation (Luke 1:39-56) while the second panel depicts the Presentation in the Temple (Luke 2:22-40) and The Flight into Egypt (Matthew 2:13-23). In the Champmol Altarpiece there is an attempt at realism by its placid gesturing figures in a landscape of crags and paths and also flowers at the foot of the picture’s imposing structures. At the same time there is a sense of unreality in the sense of it being a theatrical or stage setting in its flat, unitive display. The Presentation of the Temple is the climax of the birth narratives. Up to now Luke and Matthew recounted the annunciations of Jesus and John, the Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth, the births of John and Jesus as well as the star, the stable, the Magi, the shepherds, the angels, surrounding Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem. The Presentation in the Temple was the highly anticipated strictly required formal religious ceremony for the “redemption of the firstborn” male and the first communal recognition and capstone of all these dramatic birth events described so far in Luke. Further, the setting is the Temple in Jerusalem, the very center of Jewish worship and life. This exciting and important place is where the infant Jesus and his mother are each presented for their purification in accordance with Mosaic Law. Jesus had been circumcised eight days after his birth and is now publicly presented to Yahweh in Jerusalem and formally stamped as a member of God’s chosen people. It is through the Jews that the salvation of the world is to be achieved, and Luke’s Gospel announces such hopes as fulfilled in Jesus. Though Mary’s purification at the Temple is ceremonial, it publicly reveals its agreement with what was told to her by the angel Gabriel at the Annunciation: that she is the symbol of the Jerusalem Temple (Luke 1:35). Also featured in this episode is Simeon, a righteous and devout man living in Jerusalem who, according to Luke 2:25-35, was promised by the Holy Spirit that he would not die until he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. Guided by the Spirit into the Temple, he recognized the infant Jesus during his presentation, took him up in his arms, and praised God, proclaiming Jesus as the savior for both Gentiles and Israel, a dramatic public witness to these public events whose testimony about the child “amazed” Mary and Joseph (Luke 2:33). Also present is Anna, an old prophetess, an honorable role found in both Jewish and Christian tradition who typically was a widow in service to the community. Both Anna with Judith, a devout widow in the Old Testament, are over 100 years old. Anna “never left the temple, but worshiped night and day with fasting and prayer” (Luke 2: 37). In the Rabbinic literature seven prophetesses are recognized – namely, Sarah; Miriam (Ex. 15); Deborah (Jgs. 4); Samuel’s mother, Hannah (1 Sm. 2); David’s wife, Abigail (1 Sm. 25); Huldah (2 Kgs 2); and Esther. Isaiah’s wife is also mentioned as a prophetess (Is. 8). With Anna, all these women were recognized for at least their holy lives, sometimes speaking in God’s name, as well as often their advanced years. At the Presentation Anna “gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem” (Lk 2:35).
Philip II the Bold, anonymous, 16th century, 40 cm (15.7 in); width: 30 cm (11.8 in), Palace of Versailles, oil on wood.2 – Jan Van Eyck (c. 1385-1441), Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (or The Virgin of Autun), Oil on wood, c. 1435, 26 x 24 ¾ inches (66x 62 cm), Musée du Louvre, Paris.
From 1422 to 1424 Jan Van Eyck (or John of Bruges) worked for John III the Pitiless (1374–1425) of the House of Wittelsbach, who was bishop of Liège (1389–1418) as well as duke of Bavaria-Straubing and count of Holland and Hainaut (1418–1425). The artist was appointed court painter to Philip III the Good (1396-1467) who was born in Dijon and died in Bruges and who founded the Burgundian state that was France’s rival in the 15th century. Philip III was the most important of the Valois dukes of Burgundy.
Philip III wearing the chain of office. Copy of painting by Rogier Van der Weyden, c, 1450.
Van Eyck lived in Lille between 1425 and 1429 but relocated to bustling Bruges in 1430 where he bought a house and lived until his death in 1441. On behalf of the Duke’s business concerns (including a secret marriage), Jan Van Eyck made trips to Spain and Portugal in 1427-28, and several others into the mid1430’s. There are many authenticated paintings by Jan Van Eyck, although Madonna of Chancellor Rolin is considered highly likely. The concept of composing the work to be divided into a shadowed interior and bright exterior landscape – and unified in the picture – is original. The contrasts of light, subject and form and their relation is appealing to the eye. The figures of the Virgin and the Child are delineated gently and beautifully for the donor, who is depicted behind a prayer desk, to adore. Like Italian master Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Van Eyck had many cultural interests and talents in the service of Philip III such as studies in anatomy, cartography, geometry and perspective that created the illusion of three-dimensional space. These artists’ common preoccupations and concerns in the arts united the Northern and Italian Renaissance more closely. If Van Eyck did not actually invent oil painting, his work perfected its techniques. Van Eyck’s abilities make him the major artist of the Early Netherlandish School whose position is challenged only by the Master of Flémalle (Robert Campin). It was painted for the chancellor of Philip III, Nicolas Rolin (c. 1376/80-1462) to decorate a personal chapel (Saint-Sébastien chapel) that he decided to build in 1426-1428 (completed in 1430) in the church of Notre-Dame-du-Châtel in Autun, a church destroyed in 1793.
3 – 4 Hubert Van Eyck (c. 1370-1426) and Jan Van Eyck (c. 1385-1441), Closed (above) and open panel of The Ghent Altarpiece, also called the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, c. 1425, 53 ¾ x 93 ¼ inches, Saint Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent.St. Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent, houses the Van Eyck brothers’ Ghent altarpiece. “Saint Bavo’s Cathedral, Ghent” by Arran Bee is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Jan Van Eyck’s masterpiece is Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (1432), known as the Ghent Altarpiece, which he painted with his brother Hubert Van Eyck (c. 1370–1426). The Van Eycks’ artwork is known for its technical brilliance, intellectual complexity, and rich symbolism of which this very large (almost eight feet wide) and complex 15th-century polyptych is a prime testament. It was begun in the mid-1420s and completed by 1432. It marks a transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance in Northern European art. Its 22 panels opens and closes. When open, inside there are two rows of paintings. The middle section is Christ the King flanked by the Virgin and Saint John the Baptist. Other panels depict musicians, singing angels, and Adam and Eve. The center lower row depicts the Adoration of the Lamb with knights, hermits. judges and pilgrims who stream to behold the Lamb. In its 600-year history, there have been re-paintings, restorations and modern replacements (the original Judges panel was stolen in 1934). Little is known about Hubert Van Eyck to the point where he has been speculated in his obscurity to be a mythical figure, though this is quite unfounded. The painting was done for a nobleman’s family chapel in what become St. Bavo’s church in Ghent. The Eycks’ detail, fullness of form and luminous colors presents the mystery of the Mass whose subject is the miracle of the unity of heaven and earth in eternity. In contrast, the closed panel is beautifully calm and restrained in colors and composition. But it is just as masterful and, as it sits closed, offers a different mood for devotion.
5 – Jan Van Eyck (c. 1385-1441), Portrait of Margaret van Eyck, 12 7/8 x 11 ½ inches (41.2cm x 34.6 cm), 1439, oil on wood, Groeningemuseum, Bruges, Belgium.
The portrait is of the artist’s wife executed in Bruges. The Van Eycks married in 1439. Like his other portraits the sitter is turned three-quarters to the left. Painted 60 years before Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503), there are affinities between them – a placid enigmatic female sitter, leftward turn, hands crossed at the lap, a possible landscape background that in the Van Eyck has been repainted.
Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa (1503), Musée du Louvre, Paris.6 – Petrus Christus (c. 1395-1472), The Legend of Saints Eligius and Godeberta, 38 5/8 x 33 ½ inches, 1449, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Following the death of Jan Van Eyck, Petrus Christus became the most important modern painter in Bruges who had settled there in 1444. The artwork was commissioned by the jewelers’ corporation in Bruges and depicts seventh century Saints Godeberta being given a ring by Saint Eligius to marry the Lord God as she decided to enter religious life. Though a religious painting, it is essentially a 15th century Flemish genre painting. And while not as graceful as Van Eyck’s artwork, the painting holds interest for its bold forms of figures and objects and the authority of a well-observed still life.
7 – Petrus Christus (c. 1395-1472), Pietà, c. 1455–60. 39 ¾ x 75 ½ inches, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.
One of Petrus Christus’s most important works, the scene of the Deposition is poetically rendered in a mother’s lamentation over the dead Christ, her son, within the setting of a late afternoon landscape which is also perfectly rendered. The figures in the foreground are large and emphasize their placement in the space. The face of the Virgin constitutes the painting’s center. Holding the dead Christ in a sheet is NIcodemus and Joseph of Arimathea who asked Pilate for the body of Jesus so to bury him. The three figures who stand apart from the narrative’s central figures are depicted with equal stylistic power and whose strained grief they share.
Gustave Courbet, 1849-50, A Burial at Ornans, 315 cm × 660 cm (124 in × 260 in), Musée d’Orsay, Paris. The 19th century French realist artist made a trip to Amsterdam before he painted The Burial at Ornans and was likely influenced by Netherlandish painting he had seen on that trip. 8 – Master of Flémalle/Robert Campin (1375-1444), workshop, The Bad Thief (fragment), c. 1420, 56 ¾ x 20 3/8, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
The painterly style of the Master of Flémalle is earlier than Jan Van Eyck yet also progressing a naturalism that is realistic and of ordinary folk. The Master of Flémalle has been identified by consensus as Robert Campin whose pupils were Rogier van der Weyden (1399-1464) and Jacques Daret (c. 1404- c. 1470). Campin is known to have lived and worked in Tournai, Belgium. This imposing, cruelly exact image depicts the corpse of one of the two criminals crucified with Jesus. Executed in the workshop of Robert Campin in Tournai around 1420 – around the same time as the Van Eycks’ Ghent Altarpiece – the fragment is all that remains though copies of the rest exist that show the Deposition and John the Baptist. The painting presents the bad thief in a corporeal monumentality next to an embossed gold background which is a legacy of medieval art. The painting’s unwavering physicality, however, is 15th century modern. The well-constructed faces of the two observers are modeled by shadows as foreshortening suggests movement. The lower left of the picture at the thief’s broken legs reveals, as Delevoy states, “the perspective of a landscape that is concisely constructed, geometric, and intellectual.”
9 – Master of Flémalle/Robert Campin (1375-1444), The Nativity, c. 1420, oil on wood 87 x 70 cm, 32 5/8 x 27 ½, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, France.
The Nativity is the most famous work of the Master of Flémalle (Robert Campin). The single panel combines dreamed up images, and meticulous objective observation and rational knowledge to depict three episodes – (1) the legend of the midwives, (2) adoration of the shepherds, (3) the Nativity. The wooden stable, with its ox and ass, has a broken wall and holes in the roof. The Virgin dressed in white is kneeling with her hands held up in adoration as the Christ Child lies naked on the ground. Joseph is depicted as an old man and holds a lit candle that he shelters. The legend of the midwives is an apocryphal Gospel tale regarding Joseph’s anxiety during the birth and summoning these midwives with complicated headdresses. The stable door is swung open and three shepherds enter behind Mary and Joseph. Four angel figures hover above the scene holding strips of parchment with messages. There is an extensive, condensed, and detailed winter landscape in the background with a wide, curving road and castle perched on a hill.
10– Master of Flémalle/Robert Campin (1375-1444), Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece), c. 1427-32, The Cloisters (Metropolitan Museum of Art), New York.
St. Luke 1: 26-29. “In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary. And coming to her, he said, “Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you.” Placid depiction of the Annunciation at the moment when the angel Gabriel alights in the Virgin’s chamber. The setting is a middle-class home and Mary is, for the moment, still completely unaware of the mystery that will now be told to her. A miniature figure with a cross comes through the oculus above the angel. The objects in the room– a lily, an immaculate towel, an extinguished taper– may be symbolic but certainly work to hold realistic tactile value. The robes in the foreground, one red, the other light blue, provide focus for the painting’s harmony and color. The Master of Flémalle experiments with Renaissance applications of perspective, depth, proportion (foreshortening) with material objects such as open shutters, an open door (left panel), and an unforgiving diagonal of the room’s bench. These material objects in varying perspectival space as well as varying light sources give the painting complexity. The right panel depicts old Joseph in his carpenter workshop. The left panel shows the painting’s donors on their knees witnessing this remarkable scene through the open door. There is speculation that the Master of Flémalle had painted the center panel and, as buyers showed interest, these donors commissioned the wings that were painted by workshop artists such as, likely, young Rogier van der Weyden (ca. 1400–1464) and Jacques Daret (ca. 1404–1468).
11-Rogier Van der Weyden (1399-1464), The Deposition or The Descent from the Cross, c. 1435, oil on oak panel, 86 ¾ x 110 inches, 220 × 262 cm. El Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
Rogier Van der Weyden was a major artist in Flanders in the mid15th century. He was a pupil of Robert Campin, the Master of Flémalle, from which he imbued his realistic, ordinary naturalism with, what Murray said, was “more emotion, warmth and sensitiveness.” Insofar as the power of his artistic technique, Van der Weyden is a peer of Jan Van Eyck. Van der Weyden’s colors are cooler than Van Eyck’s and he subordinates his technical abilities to display the feelings of his paintings’ subject matter, typically religious. In terms of composition the striking difference between Van Eyck and Van der Weyden is that Van Eyck crafts a setting for his panorama of iconic vignettes while Van der Weyden paints flat-on action, often intensely emotional – all of which contributes to the artwork as a whole. Both Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb and Van der Weyden’s The Deposition or Descent from the Cross are the most influential Flemish paintings of the mid15th century. Van der Weyden’s overall oeuvre makes him, arguably, 15th century Flemish art’s most influential figure.
Van der Weyden’s The Deposition or Descent from the Cross are the most influential Flemish paintings of the mid15th century. The altarpiece was commissioned by the Grand Order of Crossbowman for the Church of Notre-Dame-Outside-the Walls of Dijon (13th century). PHOTO CREDIT: “France-003095 – Notre-Dame of Dijon” by archer10 (Dennis) is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.12- Rogier Van der Weyden (1399-1464), Triptych of the Seven Sacraments Altarpiece, c. 1445–1450, 78 ¾ x 87 ¾ inches. Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp.Van de Weyden’s painting, The Seven Sacraments, set in St. Gudule Church in Brussels, makes evident that the purpose for this grand and modern building is to manifest the presence of Jesus Christ in the sacraments. “St. Michael and St. Gudula Cathedral, Brussels” by tabula_electronica is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
Van der Weyden married a woman from Brussels and relocated to that growing and prosperous city in the marshes of Flanders in 1426. By the mid1430’s Van der Weyden was the City Painter and did work for the Burgundian Court. In 1450 the artist traveled to Rome and Florence where the early Italian Renaissance was in full swing and whose art greatly influenced the Flemish master’s art through the 1450s and into the 1460’s. The Triptych of the Seven Sacraments Altarpiece was a return to the artist’s native city as it was painted for the Bishop of Tournai whose coat of arms appear on the upper portions of each panel. Set in the impressive Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula in Brussels, the painting presents profound religious content in a finely drafted and colorful work – the left panel depicting the sacraments of initiation (baptism, confession and confirmation), the center of the Eucharist under a giant cross, and the right panel depicting the sacraments of ordination, marriage, and last rites.
13- Rogier Van der Weyden (1399-1464), Portrait of Francesco d’Este (c. 1429-1476), ca. 1460, Oil on wood, 11 9/16 x 7 7/8 inches, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Rogier van der Weyden painted several superb and sensitive portraits including Charles the Bold (Berlin), Le Grand Bâtard of Burgundy (Brussels), a Lady (National Gallery of Art, D.C.). Francesco d’Este was an Italian who received an education at the Burgundian Court. The d’Este family in Ferrara, Italy, was all-powerful when Rogier Van der Weyden visited there in 1450, though this portrait is done later. The sitter holds a hammer and ring whose significance is not explained with certainty.
14 – Dieric Bouts (c. 1415-1475), The Altarpiece of the Last Supper or Five Mystic Meals, 1464-67, 70 ¾ x 114 inches, Church of St. Peter, Louvain, Belgium.
Dieric Bouts was born in Haarlem, the Netherlands, around 1415, where little is known of his early life. Before 1448 Bouts was working in Louvain where he married a wealthy Catharina Van der Brugghen and would work there until his death in 1475. Bouts’ finest paintings are characterized by their subtle depiction of colors and light on semi-inert and dignified and emotionally calm figures in detailed and delicately beautiful landscapes. Rogier van der Weyden influenced Bouts’ earlier work (Bouts may have trained with him in Brussels) in its greater emotionalism. In the year of Van der Weyden’s death the Brotherhood of the Blessed Sacrament of Louvain commissioned an altarpiece to place in St. Peter’s Church in Louvain. The artist worked with theologians to establish an iconography for the Eucharist which he then translated to contemporary Louvain with an exceptional plasticity whose result is that it is one of 15th century Europe’s greatest artworks. Jan Van Eyck’s influence is manifest in Bouts’ elegant intellectuality (in turn, Bouts was influential on 15th century German painting). Its perspectival calculus is matched to shapes and forms that convey emotion within the work’s compositional rigor. The head of Christ whose raised hand blesses the bread occupies the center of the artwork as the apostles gather in groupings around a table which itself develops within the room’s structure. The four side panels are scenes from the Old Testament transmitted likely by those same Catholic theologians who advised Bouts as to Biblical precedents to Christ’s Last Supper – here, the Feast of the Passover, Elijah in the Desert, the Gathering of Manna, and Abraham and Melchizedek. In 1472, Bouts was appointed city painter in Louvain, an honorary title at a time when the city was undergoing massive urban development. After Bouts’ wife died in 1473, the artist remarried in 1474 but died himself in 1475. Bouts was buried beside his first wife in the Franciscan church in Louvain. His sons, Dieric and Albrecht, were artists who continued the family tradition into the 16th century.
Bouts’ The Altarpiece of the Last Supper of Five Mystic Meals was to be placed in a chapel across from Bouts’ The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus in St. Peter’s, Louvain. Both artworks are hanging in the same place where it was intended for almost 600 years. “BELGIUM – LEUVEN – St Peter’s Church (7)” by eso2 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.St. Peter’s, Louvain. Choir and ridge 15th century. “St. Peter’s Church, Leuven” by dungodung is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.15 – Dieric Bouts (c. 1415-1475), The Martyrdom St. Hippolytus Triptych, 1470 – 1475 oil on wood, 35 ¾ x 35 ¾“ Groeningemuseum, Bruges, Belgium.
Unusual for Bouts this painting depicts the torture of martyrdom. There are many figures named Hippolytus in the early church. According to Prudentius’ 5th century account, one was the martyr Hippolytus who was dragged to his death by wild horses. The account led to this Hippolytus being considered the patron saint of horses. The square format panel preferred by Bouts depicts the martyrdom from above with foreshortened horsemen shown from the front. It is the first Flemish painting to depict movement not simply by using gesture. As Delevoy assesses, “The success of the picture lies in its timeless definition, its iconographic originality, its pictorial poetry, its popular feeling, its anecdotal interest.”
16 – Dieric Bouts (c. 1415-1475), Justice of Emperor Otto III Beheading of the Innocent Count and Ordeal by Fire, 1470 – 1475. oil on wood, 127 ½ x 72 ¼ inches, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels.
This is one of two paintings that is certain to be by Bouts (the other is Five Mystic Meals). It was commissioned in 1468 by a Louvain magistrate for the new city hall and intended to be an ambitious project on the Last Judgment. But it remained uncompleted at Bouts’s death. Panels representing heaven and hell survive and these two thematically related panels illustrating an episode from the legend of the Holy Roman emperor Otto III (980-1002). A 13th century chronicle tells how the Empress falsely accused an innocent man of a crime and persuades Otto and his court to behead him (left panel). The second panel shows the beheaded man’s wife, convinced of her husband’s innocence, approaching Otto’s throne with his head and a hot iron. Calling on God as judge, the Empress’s guilt is revealed and the royal is burned at the stake depicted in the distance. There is no lack of drama in the skillfully drawn episodes with elongated bodies, fanciful clothes, and unique facial expressions. The central focus of the panels is neither Otto nor his court but the put-upon widow of the innocent man murdered by the state through duplicity.
17 – Hugo Van Der Goes (c.1440-1482), Portinari Altarpiece: The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1476-78, 96 ½ x228 Inches, Le Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy.
Hugo Van Der Goes (c.1440-1482) was the most important Netherlandish painter working in Ghent after Jan Van Eyck. A Ghent native, Van der Goes was in a guild there in 1467 and rose to its leadership between 1473 and 1475. Soon afterwards, the artist completed the Portinari Altarpiece for an Italian who was then residing in the Netherlands. The painting was sent immediately to Florence. Though not having the opportunity to have any great influence in the Netherlands, the Flemish 15th century art practice of cool colors and exquisite oil technique impressed the Renaissance Italians, notably Domenico Ghirlandaio (1448-1494). Also, its immense size – eight feet tall and 19 feet wide – and its virtuosity made an impact. By synthesizing Van der Weyden’s drama and sensuous expression and Bouts’ three-dimensional space, Van der Goes gives increased everyday tangible reality to his sacred subjects. Sharing Broederlam’s inquiries for visual appearances, Van Der Goes’ artwork creates new forms, types, and the impetus behind them based in popular sentiments and an edgy mysticism. So, in a 15th century sort of way, this is not your father’s Nativity (i.e, Master of Flémalle’s in 1420). It is ponderable, dense, significantly tactile and spatially voluminous. The Virgin, in prayer and in maternal caress, is in the exact center of the immense triptych. Also in the circle are St. Joseph, the shepherds, angels in the air and the Christ Child. The painting is a masterpiece of contrasts – between religious, secular, and rustic architectures; heavenly and earthly figures; peace and agitation; filled space and void; warm tones and cool colors.
Hugo Van Der Goes (c.1440-1482), Portinari Altarpiece (detail).18 – Hugo Van Der Goes (c.1440-1482), The Death of the Virgin, c 1472–1480. 58 ½ x 47 ¾ inches, 147.8cm x 122.5cm. Groeningemuseum, Bruges, Belgium.
Around 1475 Hugo Van Der Goes became a lay brother in an Augustinian Priory, the Roode Cloister. Founded in 1367, the cloister is on the southeastern edge of modern Brussels. The artist continued to paint and receive visitors there, traveled to Louvain and Cologne, and died in 1482.
19 – Justus (Joos) van Gent (c.1435-1475), Communion of the Apostles or Institution of the Eucharist, 1473-75, 113 x125 inches, Ducal Palace, Urbino, Italy.
Justus van Ghent was a master in Antwerp in 1460 and in Ghent four years later where he met Hugo van der Goes. By the time of his death Justus van Ghent was in Rome, a city that was increasingly attracting international artists, including from northern Europe. Van Ghent was in Urbino where he painted Institution of the Eucharist in Urbino. The commission was originally given to Italian artist Piero della Francesca (1415-1492) and its predella (the altarpiece’s painting at its lower edge) was completed by Uccello (1397-1475).
20 – Hans Memling (c. 1433-1494), The Adoration of the Magi (c. 1470), 37 ¼ x 57 inches, c. 1480, oil on panel, El Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
Hans Memling was a German, born near Frankfurt-am-Main. Memling was likely a student of Rogier van der Weyden and completely Netherlandish in his artistic style. Memling lived in Bruges and became a citizen in 1465. By 1480 the successful artist was one Bruges denizen who was paying the city’s largest amount of taxes. Though not innovative, Memling’s artwork depicts calm and peaceful figures full of piety. Memling also painted portraits successfully. Examples of his artwork are in collections all over the world.
21 – Hans Memling (c. 1433-1494), Bathsheba at her Bath, c. 1480-1485, 37 ¾ x 33 inches, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Germany.22 – Hans Memling (c. 1433-1494), The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, c. 1475, 26 ¼ x 25 ½ (67.4 x 67.7 cm), oil on wood, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels.23 – Gerard David (c.1460-1523), The Justice of Cambyses: the arrest of the Dishonest Judge, 1498, Groeningemuseum, Bruges, Belgium.
Gerard David was a Dutch painter born in Oudewater. David was in Bruges by 1484. He was the last major painter from Bruges and painted pious pictures in a gentle Netherlandish style right before the rise of a new Italianate style in Antwerp. David traveled to Antwerp in 1515 and joined the Guild but returned to Bruges and died there in 1523. Though many pictures are attributed to David, the pair of Justice paintings are certainly his.
24 – Gerard David (c.1460-1523), Altarpiece of the Baptism of Christ, 1502-1508, 52 ¾ x 73 ½ inches, Groeningemuseum, Bruges, Belgium.
SOURCES:
A Dictionary of Art and Artists, Peter and Linda Murray, Penguin Books; Revised,1998.
Early Flemish Painting, Robert L. Delevoy, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1963.
