Tag Archives: Renaissance

November 27, 2012 · 10:42 am

Raise Your Glasses

Today is the anniversary of the death of Jacobo Sansovino, who was born in Florence in 1486 and died in Venice in 1570. You may not be familiar with his name, gentle reader, but because of one single piece of art he created, he helped spur on the development of the Renaissance in Western Art, which of course had a far greater impact on world history than simply serving as decoration.  In one sculpture, Sansovino helped convince his contemporaries that not only had they managed to rediscover the knowledge of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, but in fact they were reaching the point at which they would be able to surpass those who had come before them – and for this he certainly deserves a memorial toast.

In 1510 Sansovino was commissioned to sculpt a statue of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, for the Florentine aristocrat Giovanni Bartolini.  It was to be placed in a niche in the classically designed gardens of the latter’s home, the Palazzo di Valfonda, alongside statues of other gods and heroes from Greek and Roman mythology.  Fortunately for us, ever since the sculpture was later acquired by the Medici family, it has been housed in a museum for many centuries.  If the statue had been left outside, what makes this particular sculpture so special might very well have been lost, as a result of exposure to the elements.

When the work was completed in 1512, it astonished viewers because of a single factor, which may not be apparent unless you think about what you are looking at.  We see the figure of a nude young man, crowned with a wreath made out of grapevines.  He is striding forward, while at his lower right a small faun is trying to snatch a cluster of grapes from his hand.  All of this seems very ordinary at first, if we have seen Greek and Roman sculptures before.  Yet what is truly remarkable about this particular piece is that the figure of the young god holds his left arm aloft, bearing a drinking vessel, and that left arm has no visible means of support.

Up until this time, sculptors were extremely reluctant to attempt this type of carving in stone, since they had little or no remaining evidence from the past that such a thing could be done successfully.  Typically, when they were carving limbs that would be held away from the body, ancient sculptors would carve the arms of their statue separately and attach them later, since the weight of the heavy marble arms and the lack of support would tend to cause this part of the sculpture to crack and fall off, were it carved from a single block.  For example, in the famous example of the now-armless “Venus de Milo” in The Louvre, on the right side of the torso one can see a hole, which originally held a metal strut to support the now-vanished right arm of the statue, carved separately and attached later in situ.

Moreover, not many patrons would be willing to pay for such a feat, which would likely end in failure.  In a lightweight material such as wood, where things could be hollowed out or pinned together, gravity was not such a significant issue, but when it comes to stone, its heavy weight can be its undoing.  Thus it was considered so difficult and risky to attempt to carve a statue with an arm held aloft in a single piece of carved stone, that until Sansovino made this bold attempt most sculptors – including Michelangelo – simply avoided the challenge altogether.

The arm alone is not the only innovation however,  for here Sansovino is not simply copying his artistic forebears.  He is portraying a classical subject in stone, of course, which would have been familiar to the ancients, but there is a more natural sense of motion and fluidity in the body than one would often find in classical sculpture.  Admittedly this is not a universal observation, and there are notable exceptions, particularly from the Hellenic period.  Yet here we have a sense of movement in the pose of the figure, and indeed of boldness on the part of its sculptor, to create a sense of liveliness caught in a split second, rather than portraying someone standing still or at rest, which is what Classical sculptors tended to do.

In his later career Sansovino moved to Venice, where he became an engineer and a brilliant architect, helping to spread the aesthetic ideals of High Renaissance Florence and Rome to that city.  In fact, this native Florentine became so beloved by the Venetians, that when he died he was buried in the great Basilica of San Marco.  Yet this single work from when Sansovino was only an up-and-coming artist in his mid-20′s, competing with dozens of other young sculptors in the artistic hotbed of Renaissance Florence, can be admired not only on its own merits, but more importantly as part of a whole.

Achievements such as this in the arts, sciences, literature, and so on, had a profound impact on the thinkers and writers of the Renaissance.  These people became convinced that they were on the right track to achieve an even greater civilization than the ancients, to whom they had previously felt so inferior.  As we are all aware, in the end this change of attitude had a profound impact on the entire history of humanity.

“Bacchus” (detail) by Jacobo Sansovino (c. 1510-1512)
The Bargello, Florence

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April 19, 2012 · 11:42 am

A New Bonfire of the Vanities

My friend Margaret Perry over at Ten Thousand Places sent me an article last evening about a rather bizarre form of protest taking place in Italy at the moment.  The director of the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum in Naples has begun burning works of art from that collection, to complain about government funding cuts due to financial austerity measures. This is being done with the support of the artists involved, and took place again today.

This kind of excessive, histrionic behavior is not the exclusive purview of the left, as students of art history are well aware. The reader may have heard the term “bonfire of the vanities”, which refers to a practice that was particularly popular during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Preachers would invite their listeners to bring sinful objects, or objects which might lead one into sin, to a public place. These objects would be burned, as a sign of contrition and repentance.

The most infamous exponent of this practice, though he himself did not invent it, was the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498). For a brief period at the end of the 15th century, Savonarola established what was effectively a right-wing theocracy in Florence, at the very height of the Italian Renaissance. It was perfect timing for him, given that the ruling Medici had been banished for their excesses and heavy-handedness in ruling the Florentine people. Of course, what replaced them arguably turned out to be even worse, in what came to be almost a trial run of the Reign of Terror in France three centuries later.

Savonarola sponsored numerous bonfires of the vanities during his period of influence over Florence, but perhaps the most famous was the one which took place on Mardi Gras in 1497, when hundreds of works of art, books, and other objects were burned in the Piazza della Signoria, the large square in front of the city hall. During this conflagration, and in the ones which preceded it, we can assume that many bad things were destroyed, which were indeed occasions of sin for some people: objects associated with gambling, pornography, drunkenness, and so on. Yet many beautiful things which were not evil in themselves were also destroyed, including secular works by some of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, as well as Greek and Roman antiquities, musical instruments and compositions, and works of poetry, drama, and literature.

True, not everything was destroyed that could have been; some objects remained out of the hands of the contrite artists who created them, or the mobs which Savonarola sent about the city finding this sort of kindling were not able to locate as many of these things as they might have liked. Imagine the loss to Western Civilization for example, if Botticelli’s iconic “Birth of Venus”, or his glorious procession of Greek gods in “La Primavera” had been destroyed, as they surely would have been if Savonarola had gotten his hands on them. Yet we do know that the great painter Fra Bartolomeo burned just about everything he had painted that was not of a sacred subject, and the loss to our culture of secular work from the hand of this brilliant draftsman is an incalculable one.

I have always loathed Savonarola, not because he was actually wrong about many of the excesses of the church and society in his day, but because of his arrogance and his methods, particularly with regard to encouraging the destruction of art.  It strikes me that something similar is going on in Naples at the present time.  The thinking behind Savonarola’s actions, and that behind the actions of the Casoria gallery, appear to be quite different, superficially. The former is ostensibly about conversion from sin, while the latter is about government funding of the arts. Yet ironically enough, both are expressions of personal vanity on the part of those advocating these extreme measures.

Rather than being what he ought to have been, an inspiring, fiery preacher, with a sense of his own personal humility as a created being and remembering his vow of religious obedience made before God, Savonarola set himself up as the ultimate arbiter of Christian orthodoxy, which he must emphatically was not. In the process of consolidating his temporal power and encouraging his followers to adhere more closely to his personal cult, he fostered a kind of reverse iconoclasm, where the only acceptable art was Christian in nature. And as devout a Christian as I am, I cannot imagine a world without portraits by Sargent, landscapes by Corot, still lifes by Zurbarán, and so on. The result was a cultural disaster, more designed to show the personal power of Savonarola over his subjects – who later rebelled and executed him – than to encourage a universal good.

In the case of the Casoria gallery, a museum director who genuinely cared about the art under his care would not be setting that work on fire, were he in fact acting selflessly in this matter. I suspect that this sort of stunt does nothing to tug on either the heart- or purse strings of the average, rational Italian citizen. The man in the street probably finds most of the type of art shown at the Casoria rubbish anyway, and is more concerned about not being able to pay his rising utility bills, or that his children cannot find a job, given the poor state of the economy at present.

These actions on the part of the Casoria are a perfect embodiment of the maxim against cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Chances are a pencil-pushing, number-crunching government bureaucrat in Rome, who has to make decisions about budgetary matters for a living, is not someone who is going to care very much if some ugly works of art are burned in the street by a publicity hound in Naples. If the goal is somehow to hold the Italian government hostage until it finds more money which it does not have, then I suspect a great deal more art will be burned at the Casoria before something is done.

At the end of the day, this bizarre publicity stunt is a new, fully secular incarnation of the age-old bonfire of the vanities as practiced by Savonarola and his regime. The stated intent of the old practice was to encourage the sinner to reform his life; the stated intent of the new is to encourage funding of the arts: both are good ends in and of themselves. Yet the means by which these ends are being sought say more about the egos and desire for personal fame of those coordinating these efforts, than about the causes which they claim to be advocating.


“The Execution of Savonarola” by Unknown Artist (1498)
Museum of San Marco, Florence.

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March 29, 2012 · 10:42 am

Behold, The Power of Blue

This morning I have been reading with great interest reports about the unveiling of the recently-restored Leonardo da Vinci painting “The Virgin and Child with St. Anne” at The Louvre in Paris. Leonardo has been in the news a great deal lately; indeed, I cannot recall a time when there was so much fascinating, legitimate (i.e., non-Dan-Brown-related) news about the Renaissance master in the headlines. And I am beginning, if only slightly, to rethink some of my views on him, in part because of his surprising use of the color blue.

In addition to today’s reporting on the “St. Anne” from Paris, recently there have been multiple stories about other Leonardo works. Much of these seem fortuitously tied to the fact that there have been two major exhibitions of late: the first in London from November to February, and the second which opens in Paris today, and continues until summer. There have been stories about Leonardo’s “Lady with an Ermine”, which traveled to the London show; the astonishing restoration of the Madrid version of “La Gioconda” aka the “Mona Lisa” ahead of its trip to the Paris show, which I blogged about; and the very exciting possibility I shared with you that the remnants of Leonardo’s lost fresco “The Battle of Anghiari” may have been rediscovered in Florence, hidden behind a wall.

As reported in many of the articles on the “St. Anne” painting, one of the first visitors to the Leonardo exhibition at The Louvre is quoted as being shocked by the brightness of the blues used by Leonardo. This is presumably as a result of having become accustomed, as indeed most of us have been, to thinking of his work as dark and muddled. “Now you have that same feeling as when you enter Michelangelo’s restored Sistine Chapel. Look at the blue!”, this visitor reportedly exclaimed. A similar reaction occurred when the contemporary copy of the Mona Lisa in Madrid, which experts believe was painted by one of Leonardo’s assistants side-by-side with the master in order to study his technique, was cleaned of layers of black overpaint and darkened varnish, to reveal the bright colors beloved by Italians of the Renaissance and beyond.

It is interesting to consider the possibility that Leonardo loved color as much as he loved light and shade, though perhaps not in the way that most of his fellow Italians did at the time he was working. On a common-sense level, we have to recognize that Renaissance Italians loved bright, often gaudy colors. We see this in how they decorated everything from their public and private buildings, to their everyday household items such as tin-glazed dinnerware, to how they dressed themselves in patterned silks and flashy velvets with plenty of gold jewelry. In fact one could argue that we can still see this today, in the way that some Italian fashion houses such as Missoni, Pucci, and Versace, among others, carry on this historic tradition of the Italian love for bold color.

Even when his work is cleaned and restored, Leonardo is a painter clearly more interested in subtle tonalities, than in creating a kind of bold, almost plastic quality in his work. His “St. Anne” of 1508, even if brighter and more colorful than it was before, is still nowhere near as colorful as the type of work done by many of his contemporaries. For example, take a look at this “Madonna and Child with Saints” by Lorenzo Lotto, or the young Raphael’s “Deposition from The Cross”, both of which were also painted in 1508.  Of course, Leonardo continued working on the “St. Anne” until his death, so the comparison is slightly unfair, but we do have to recognize that  the dreamy quality of the colors, bright though some of them may be, was somewhat atypical of the tastes of his day.

Given all of this media attention, expert opinion, and public scrutiny, I wonder whether future art historians will look back at this time period and consider it an important moment in both the study and critical appreciation of Leonardo’s work. This would not be the first time that such a thing took place. While Leonardo has always been treasured by those fortunate enough to own something by him, other artists have benefited from later exhibitions re-opening the assessments made on their work by their contemporaries or those who later supplanted them in popularity.

In the case of Leonardo, truth be told, I am not a fan of much of his work – nor of much of Michelangelo’s work for that matter. I recognize the contributions of these men to the development of Western art as being monumental in importance, but that does not mean that I necessarily warm to them as others do. It is a little bit like recognizing that a musician or an actor has a great deal of talent and ability, but turns you off in some other way, which would make you eschew the chance of having them over to the manse for cocktails. Intellectual honesty demands that I recognize achievement, but that does not mean I actually have to like it.

And yet now there is, as The Louvre visitor points out, that truly engaging, misty, captivating use of blue. It simply washes through the entire picture, bringing the piece a more intensely spiritual quality, almost like the effect when incense is used at mass, and the sanctuary becomes temporarily clouded in smoke. It is really something to see this, after so many years of thinking that Leonardo was interested almost exclusively in weird and colorless things.

Does this mean that I am about to become a convert to the cult of Leonardo? Not quite: there are many things about his work that I do not like, which will not change based on a re-assessment of his use of color. However one does have to recognize that sometimes, a creative individual can indeed surprise you with their talent, just when you thought you had figured them out.

I will certainly be thinking and reading more about Leonardo’s work, as a result not only of the many news stories about him, but also by the emergence of this surprising application of the color blue in his work – work which, in my ignorance of his palette, I had for such a long time dismissed as being unappealing, dirty, and dark.

A visitor at The Louvre admiring the newly-restored
“The Virgin and Child with St. Anne” by Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1508-1519)

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March 5, 2012 · 11:28 am

Parting the Veil: A Renaissance Masterpiece Turns 500

I was very pleased to read that Germany has issued a commemorative postage stamp celebrating the 500th anniversary of the creation of one of the most beautiful paintings in the world, Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna”.  This painting, or at least the lower part of it, is probably well-known to many of my readers who are not Catholic or familiar with art history because of the two small angels in the picture, who are resting their arms on the edge of the frame.  They have been adapted and used in all kinds of advertising campaigns and commercial products over the years, and have become something of an iconic image in themselves.  That being said, it is the main portion of the work itself, that of Mary holding Jesus, which is of singular importance.

The “Sistine Madonna” was commissioned in 1512 for the Benedictines of the Monastery of Saint Sixtus – hence the term “Sistine” – in the town of Piacenza, to be placed above the high altar there in the center of their monastic church.  Since 1754 however, this magnificent and highly influential work of art has been – apart from a ten-year-period after World War II when it was stolen by the Soviets – the pride of the city of Dresden.  In that year, it was purchased from the monastery by Augustus III, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, who placed it in his palace in Dresden, and ever since it has drawn a crowd.  Indeed, Augustus apparently rearranged his throne room so as to be able to better see and display the painting.

Raphael is one of the “Big Three” of the Italian High Renaissance, along with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.  He is something of a Mozart-like figure in art history, having produced seemingly effortlessly a large number of important works of art before he died in his 30′s, leaving the world wondering what he might have gone on to achieve had he lived longer.  While he could paint insightful portraits and magnificent frescoes, without question Raphael has always been best-loved as THE painter of scenes of the Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child.  Over the course of his comparatively short career, Raphael took this seemingly simple theme, and came up with an almost infinite number of variations on it.

The image of Mary cradling her Son in her arms is an ancient one in Christian art.  The first known artistic representation of it dates from about 200 A.D., in the form of a wall fresco located in the Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome.  Once Christianity was no longer outlawed, it became more and more common to portray the Mother and Child in a very regal setting, crowned and seated on a throne.  One can find examples of an emotional interplay between Mary and Jesus in the first thousand years or so of Christian art, but generally speaking these were exceptions rather than the rule. With the arrival of the Renaissance, and its focus on portraying realism and linear perspective, artists began to try to make their images of the Madonna and Child more realistic and accessible, while still retaining some element of the Divine; some succeeded better than others.

While he was a part of this movement, what Raphael did in his own work was to bring three key characteristics together, to create something that had a profound impact on the viewers of his day, as well as on other artists right down to the present. He recognized, first of all, that the more beautiful the figures he portrayed in his picture, the more the viewer could reflect on the beauty of God’s creation: Mary, the young woman chosen by God to bring the Messiah into the world, and Jesus, God Himself made flesh.  Raphael not only knew that people like to look at beautiful things more than they like to look at ugly things, naturally enough, but also that beauty is a reflection of Divine Perfection.

Raphael also understood that portraying an emotional connection between Mary and her Son, rather than an unapproachable, regal formality, would be more likely to evoke the sympathy of the viewer.    If the beauty of the figures drew in the eye, the realistic interaction between them made the eye linger.  In seeing the relationship between the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child as analogous to that between his own mother and himself, the viewer would not only be able to relate more closely to the individuals the picture portrays, but more broadly to reflect on the love God has for mankind.

Finally, Raphael’s technique became better and better as he painted more, meaning that his somewhat cartoonish early Madonnas, mimicking the style of his master, Pietro Perugino, were gradually replaced by a careful study of nature that invited the viewer to immerse himself in the painting.  The curve of Mary’s neck with a lock of hair trailing down it, or the sun and high clouds of a Tuscan landscape bathing the countryside behind the figures in light, or the interplay between Jesus’ baby fingers with the folds of a piece of cloth, were aspects Raphael could use to keep the viewer lost in thought, and hopefully in prayer.

In the “Sistine Madonna”, Raphael quite literally pulls back the veil of Heaven, to reveal a vision of the Madonna and Child walking across celestial clouds, flanked by Pope St. Sixtus and St. Barbara, and with the aforementioned two little angels at the bottom. Both Mary and Jesus are shown as very beautiful figures, which pleases our eyes, but we soon become caught up in how the two cling to one another, as we have so often seen mothers and children do.  Here however, the symbolic importance of this emotional reaction on the part of both Mother and Child comes from what is not shown in the picture: the crucifix above the high altar that the figure of Pope Saint Sixtus is pointing to, which would have been opposite the painting in its original setting at the monastic church.

The Madonna and Child in this picture are very simply portrayed, with no crowns, thrones, or jewels.  Yet the celestial surroundings make this more than just an image of motherhood: they make us reflect on how a humble Jewish girl from Nazareth and her Divine Son went on to change the world.  Christ does so by promising forgiveness and redemption through His Passion, Death, and Resurrection; Mary by setting the example for all Christians of the importance of obedience to God’s Will, no matter what.

This was the last image of the Madonna and Child which Raphael painted in his long career of thinking about this subject, and also the last painting which he himself fully finished.  At the time of his death a few years after completing this painting, he was working on an altarpiece of the Transfiguration now kept in the Vatican, and which Bible story we heard just yesterday in the Gospel reading at mass.  That painting was carried at the head of his funeral procession to St. Peter’s Basilica.  However from my perspective, given how much it encapsulates Raphael’s unique understanding of the relationship between Christ and His Mother, his artistic talent, and his beautiful vision of Heaven, it might have been more fitting had they borrowed his “Sistine Madonna” from the monks in Piacenza for this purpose.


The “Sistine Madonna” by Raphael (1512-1513/4)
Gemäldegalerie, Dresden

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November 8, 2011 · 5:33 pm

Rethinking Our Legacy

Those of my readers who at least take a glance through the “Culture” or “Lifestyle” section of their daily newspaper – you do read at least one daily newspaper, don’t you? – may have spotted some rather odd stories from the art world yesterday.  First there was the cleaning lady who polished up what she thought was just a dirty bucket, but which was part of a pricey art installation.  Then the hucksters known professionally as Christo and (the late) Jeanne-Claude gained Federal approval yesterday to install their latest art project in the United States, which will see a nearly 6-mile stretch of the Colorado River covered with a giant piece of silver polyester.

The popular, common-sense reaction to the types of work at issue can generally be summed up in the assertion: “It’s not art,” an assertion I have always had a problem with.  Sometimes popular opinion is right in pointing to a painting or sculpture and rejecting it for being bad. This is often true of contemporary art, for example, which frequently embodies a kind of zero-sum-game in which there is no art TO the art, or no sense of the creative process coming to a healthy fruition.  Rather we are presented with a mish-mash of the discarded and often tired ideas of others, sewn together into some sort of Frankenstein monster.

However at other times the man in the street rejects something because he assumes, if he does not care for it, that therefore it must not be art.  Yet the question he is really asking himself in such instances is not the grand, philosophical one, i.e. “What is art?”, but rather, “Is this really any good?” And the difficulty is, particularly when those of a more traditional sense of values are the ones asking this question, that in many cases they are not capable of forming a sound opinion on the subject.

The perception of the relative worth or merit of a piece of art can change over time. Take, for example one of the most legendary pieces of sculpture in the history of Western art, Michelangelo’s “David” in the Academia in Florence, which was completed in 1504.  Today, this idealized image of the young shepherd who later grew up to be the King of Israel and a human ancestor of Jesus, is so familiar to us that we do not stop to think about what an incredibly radical piece of art it was at the time.  We make fun of it by turning photographs of it into dress-up magnets for the fridge, or printing greeting cards putting David on a surfboard wearing sunglasses as a sort of Renaissance-era California dude.

Yet to create such a gigantic piece of public sculpture, and one that was completely nude, at that, was considered not only somewhat shocking at the time, but also a technological folly and a waste of money. As work progressed, the critics came out of the woodwork to take pot-shots at Michelangelo for trying to carve something which had not been seen in the West since the days of the Roman Empire. There were complaints that the nose was too big, that the neck was too long, that the left leg was out of proportion to the right, and so on. And yet here we are, five centuries later, and it would be difficult to find a reasonably-educated person in the Western world who could not identify this somewhat controversial work of sculpture, made long ago for a small Italian city, as being emblematic both of that city and indeed of the entire Renaissance as a whole. It almost certainly appeared either on the cover or inside the pages of any textbook on the history of Western civilization that you may have studied in school.

Of course, to compare the work of Michelangelo to the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude is to be fundamentally unfair for many reasons, which is something that the aforementioned man in the street does not quite perceive. We can accept the work of the former as being that of a genius, and reject the work of the latter as being that of a pair of hustlers, but we need to understand why that is. It is not solely a question of whether or not we like what we are looking at, but rather a combination of many different questions that we should be considering: is there actual art (i.e. trained skill or technique) that has gone into creating the work? What is the artist’s point of view on the subject he is representing? Does he speak to universally accepted truths, pleasant or unpleasant as they may be? Is his work inspirational, or is it a condemnation?

It distresses me that my near-contemporaries in their 20′s and 30′s are often incapable of discussing subjects such as art, architecture, arthouse films, and so on, because in many cases they have been ruined for further inquiry into the subject by those on the left, who as educators used the very brief exposure they may have had in primary and secondary school to such subjects to try to indoctrinate their pupils with a leftist or flat-out Marxist understanding of Western history and culture. This drives the common-sense student who still has some remaining interest in art running to the hills, or possibly to collecting the work of Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade, which is even worse. It may also drive him away completely from any sort of art that is non-representational or non-academic, when there is still much of value that can be found in these types of artistic expression.

In effect, the left has done such a good job acting with malpractice in the study of the arts, that the patient is now on life support.  And if we have a rotten, sickly culture in wide swaths of the art world – and I would argue that we do – then the way to cure that is by cutting off the bad bits, rather than continuing to allow those who caused the gangrene in the first place to be the ones to diagnose what the problem is. For if we do nothing, and fail to educate ourselves about our culture and the way it expresses itself artistically,then the long decline of Western art which we have witnessed over the past several decades will only continue to accelerate.

Art matters in the long run because it eventually comes to represent, symbolically, the people and the societies which made that art in the first place. Michelangelo’s David represents the Renaissance for millions of people around the world who have never seen him, and that even though there were many other works of art created at the same time. We should be asking ourselves what, 500 years from now, our descendants will think of the art that has come down to them from us. And given the types of art mentioned in the beginning of this post, we should be very concerned about what we will be leaving to them.


Detail of “David” by Michelangelo (1501-1504)
Academia, Florence

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