Renaissance Art in Rome

Renaissance 1420-16th century
Baroque 17th century
Neoclassicism 18th century

Early Renaissance 1420-1500c
High Renaissance 1500-1520/1527
Late Renaissance (Mannerism) 1520/27-1600

Renaissance in Rome—Cultural Politics

Roman (Curial) Humanism
Affirmation of Papal primacy and the petrine succession vs. conciliarists

Matthew 16: “You are Peter (petrus) and on this rock (petram) I will build my Church and the Gates of Hell will not prevail against it.  I will give to you the keys to the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, whatever you loose on earth with be loosed in heaven.”

Archeological rediscovery of both ancient and paleo-Christian Rome in the service of propaganda of restoration

Flavio Biondo:  Roma instaurata/Rome restored (1444-46): the correct identification and classification of the city’s ancient buildings and sites of Christian martyrdom [topography, epigraphy -- writing on stones]

Dual Apostolate: Linking Roman Empire’s historical mandate and Church’s divine mandate
     Popes as Christian Caesars restoring Rome

Biblical and patristic exegesis as prefiguration
•         Moses the law-giver prefigures Christ and becomes a typus Papae
•         Jerusalem as a sacred capital and Solomon’s Temple prefigure Rome and St. Peter’s

HUMANISM IN PAPAL ROME:

--For the Renaissance to emerge in Rome, two things need to occur:
1) A REUNITED PAPACY had to be restored in Rome (patronage). 
2) The HUMANISTS drawn to Rome by patronage to make their intellectual and cultural influence felt; Latin language ability was central i for the secretarial and diplomatic needs of the papal court.  --HUMANIST revival used by the papacy for political ends; the humanists help to convey message of the Petrine succession or papal supremacy.  The Popes become the protectors, guardians and continuators of the inheritance of classical Rome, another way of reinforcing papal claims to universal authority. 

With the return of the Popes from Avignon, pilgrimage to Rome increased and helped to produce economic revitalization: from 17,000 during Avignon papacy to 100,000 by 1600.  Papal patronage also attracted some of the brightest minds and best artists from all over Italy and the new building projects were accompanied by humanist treatises. In the literature of the period the Popes are frequently compared to Christian Caesars who are refounding the city.  The pope Sixtus IV, the most energetic of the 15^th century papal patrons, was compared to Augustus who found a city in stone and left it in Marble.  He was responsible for the layout and wall decorations of the Sistine Chapel (to be completed by his nephew Julius II) and lays the foundation for Rome’s artistic hegemony during the High Renaissance. 

--1) The imposing presence of ruins helps to explain why Roman humanism tended to dwell on an archeological treatment of antiquity.  Flavio Biondo, Roma instaurata, 1444-46: The ruins of Rome represented for him not the remnants of a destroyed civilization but valuable sources for restoring ancient Roman culture and values.  He wrote it upon his realization that not just the ignorant multitude but also the cultivators of learning defiled and defamed the extant remains of classical buildings with false and barbarian appellations.  Archeology provided the key to the humanistic enterprise of recovering the wisdom of ancient Rome, and critical to this archeological research was correct identification and classification of the ancient buildings.  Besides studying the ruins themselves, Biondo also searched classical texts for clues to Roman topography.  He did not actually engage in any archeological digs—no Renaissance humanist did—but paid attention to ancient artifacts accidentally unearthed during building projects, etc.

--2) Closely tied to the meaning Rome held for its Renaissance inhabitants was the meaning of the Roman Church, the 2^nd main element determining the central features of the Roman Renaissance.  The Roman Renaissance accentuated the Church’s Roman foundations: it imparted special significance to Rome as the Church’s enduring capital; and it stressed the ties between the Roman Empire’s historical importance and the Church’s divine mission.  Rome’s twin apostolate, so to speak.   Thus Biondo in his Instaurata argues that not only ancient Rome is a valuable legacy that needs to be restored but also the Rome of the early Christian martyrs, who, in the end, provided the more solid foundation for the glorious majesty of the city of Rome since they are proof that Rome through the will of God is the seat and citadel of the eternal Christian religion. 

--3)  The Renaissance movement took hold earliest not in Rome, but in Florence.  In Rome, however, basic Renaissance notions that had first emerged elsewhere acquired distinctive characteristics.  For instance, the aspirations of empire, not the ideals of Republics, was the model for Roman humanism.  Moreover the relevant past included Hebraic and Christian, as well as classical antiquity.  In Biblical exegesis, the relation of past to present often presented as a “figural” one.  The present had an antetype in the past, and the past prefigured the present.  Thus Moses, whose career and powers prefigured Christ’s, was seen as a typus papae, and Jerusalem as sacred capital foreshadowed Rome (these images will become very present in the art works of the time).

Renaissance in Rome – Artistic
--Patronage of popes and cardinals of artists from Florence and central/northern Italy
--Focus in painting shifts from a theological/doctrinal symbolism to a humanistic realism
--The recuperation of classical forms
–        Study of classical architecture and statuary; recovery of texts such as Vitruvius’ De architectura
--The application of mathematics to art and the discovery of single point perspective

–        L. B. Alberti—1436 Della pittura:  “vision makes a triangle, and from this it is clear that a very distant quantity seems no larger than a point”
--Changing status of the artist from an artisan (mechanical arts) to intellectual (liberal arts)

1)     EARLY RENAISSANCE ART: running narratives, in filling up the picture with the minutiae of reality, a joyful tone with light figures and a lithe interpretation of Roman architecture [the slender column] and natural backdrops.  Drama and emotion expressed in human terms. 

2)     --Like humanism, early Renaissance art has to do with the recuperation of classical art forms, and with the rise of attitudes that seem to have their closest correspondence in the art of classical antiquity, including the foregrounding of humankind as the dominant theme [rise of the individual].   In the Middle Ages the approach to art was mainly theological.  The scale of values emphasized the spiritual with less interest in the material (reality or realism).  Medieval art theorists made few demands that artists should imitate the outside world.  Their duty was to evoke the appropriate symbol to convey the moral and religious lessons of the Church.  The Renaissance artists are influenced instead by the architectural forms of the ancients and by newly discovered ancient statuary such as the Belvedere Apollo, the Laocoon, and the Belvedere Torso (Augenti 58-59). 

3)     PERSPECTIVE (technical discovery) a grounding of art on mathematical principles.  Linear Perspective: illusion of perceptual volume and space are based on observations that objects appear to the eye to shrink and parallel lines and planes to converge to a infinitely distant vanishing point vanishing point (one-point perspective) as they recede in space from the viewer.  Florence is the center of the early Renaissance:   Brunelleschi first works out some basic principles, including the concept of the vanishing point, Masaccio is one of the first artists to employ the principle.  Linear perspective dominates Western painting from then on; it is a cornerstone of Western art that only receives challenges at the end of the 19^th-century and in the twentieth century.

4)     RISE IN STATUS OF ARTIST.  During the Middle Ages the painter = craftsman or ARTIGIANO, performs a PRACTICAL function (religious decoration) under direction of CHURCH and is organized into GUILDS, like other craftsmen.

--Leon Battista Alberti instead emphasizes arts as: 1) rendering of the outside world and humanity in that world according to the principles of human reason based on a humanist education [painter as a scholar], 2) Art based on scientific and mathematical bases with linear perspective as its root.

--Painting/sculpture/architecture now come to be seen as LIBERAL ARTS and not a MECHANICAL ARTS.  Painters are more closely aligned with humanists rather than manual craftsmen.  Following Vitruvius the artist must be a polymath and design becomes the medium for all knowledge. 

5)  Early Renaissance artists come to Rome to do work but then move on; it is not until the 16^th century that we have artists remaining in Rome at length and creating true schools.

ART UNDER TWO EARLY RENAISSANCE PONTIFICATES:

1) MARTIN V (1417-31): Oddone Colonna, enters Rome in 1420.  Goal of re-establishing spiritual and temporal authority of the Church by restoring Christian monuments of Rome; central policy of 15^th C. Popes.  

Masolino da Panicale (Florentine) The founding of Santa Maria Maggiore (1423-25)
Painting shows Pope Liberius (352-366), with the face of Martin V, traces the outline of the church’s plan with a hoe in the summer snow of 352 AD.  By tracing the plan of church in shape of Cross the pope performs an imitatio Christi (imitation of Christ), showing the church is controlled and shaped by Christ’s vicar.  The pope’s supremacy is highlighted by his visual prominence, the hierarchal arrangement of the clergy behind him.  The clergy is in the favored location to Christ’s right, yet the blessing by the Virgin of the laity to the left implies harmony and union between the two groups.  These were all urgent messages from Martin V returning to an unreceptive Roman populace after a long period of absence and schism, when the authority of the church and the prestige of the pope were at an all-time low.  Uses he recently discovered system of one-point perspective: the architectural edges, when extended, come together at the center of the middle-ground (the vanishing point).  This is the first time Masolino employs a single centralized vanishing point.    Material world of space and time is separated from heaven above, connected or mediated by the pope and the Roman church.  A unique feature of this painting is that the topography in the background includes the Testaccio mount, the Aurelian walls, and pyramid of Cestius (the so-called Tomb of Remus), the Sabine hills.  A link is created between Rome’s founding and the church’s founding, between the Roman Empire and Christendom. 

--Masolino also did the frescos for the CHAPEL OF THE SACRAMENT IN SAN CLEMENTE (1428-32; the first important Roman chapel decoration after the return of Pope Martin V.  The central fresco of the crucifixion behind the altar achieves panoramic breadth by a high point of view, tall crosses, and deep landscape.  Crosses of the good and bad thieves (good one higher) have been canted to increase the sense of depth.  Christ is completely above the distant horizon and silhouetted against a broad expanse of sky.  Equally remarkable is the human drama.  A demon takes the soul of the bad thief, an angel carries the soul of the good thief to heaven.  The Roman commander to the right gives orders.  Horsemen to the left ride up an down the hill.  Having just pierced Christ’s side with his lance and been converted, the Roman soldier Longinus adores Christ near the cross of the good thief.  Mary Magdalene (loose hair) passionately caresses the cross, Virgin Mary swoons, John the Evangelist holds his head mourning.  Judas with fellow conspirators under horse’s posterior, appropriately enough, holding the bag of silver from which he betrayed Christ.

2) SIXTUS IV (Francesco della Rovere) (1471-1484).  For the ideology and culture of Roman Renaissance, Sixtus’s long rule was very significant.  He took up Nicholas V’s legacy , resuming projects left partially in abeyance, founding a Vatican library, and expanding the Vatican palace through the construction of the Sistine Chapel.  The  emphasis on Rome as a religious capital was further underscored in the declaration of 1475 as a jubilee year and in Sixtus’s rebuilding of many ancient churches. His nepotism was also notorious.

--Sixtus was responsible for the decoration of the old Vatican library and in 1480 the artist Melozzo da Forlì commemorates the event in a fresco entitled “Pope Sixtus IV nominates Bartolomeo Platina Prefect of the Vatican Library”: portrait of papal nepotism as we see Sixtus surrounded by his various nephews, including Giuliano della Rovere, the future Julius II.   There is an imposing classical architecture in this piece which helps to create the vanishing parallels lines in a full Renaissance depiction of single-point perspective, albeit with spatial recession is curtailed by the back wall and non-transparent windows and the blocking column in the middle pushing us back into the foreground.   At the bottom of the fresco we read the inscription:-- “Rome, once full of squalor, owes to you, Sixtus, its temples, foundling hospital, street squares, walks, bridges, the restoration of the Acqua Vergine at the Trevi fountain, the port for sailors, the fortifications on the Vatican Hill, and now this celebrated library.”

--From 1475-1482 Sistine Chapel: designed to accommodate papal large papal ceremonies; a marble screen [cancellata] divides the chapel in half.  From 1480 to 1483 the Chapel walls were frescoed by a group of central Italian artists, mostly under the direction of Pietro Perugino.  The group included Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Pinturicchio, Signorelli and Perugino.  Above the figures of early popes from Peter to Marcellus of 308 are placed in niches to convey the Petrine succession of the popes.  Two narrative bands on either side depict eight scenes from the Old Testament Life of Moses, on the left, illustrating the world under law; and eight scenes from the life of Christ, on the right, illustrating the world under grace.  

--The most important of the parallel scenes are the 6^th scenes, which represent unsuccessful challenges to Moses’s and Christ’s authority: The Punishment of Korah by Botticelli, and the Christ Consigning the Keys to St. Peter by Perugino.  Each of the scenes is a life sized tableux vivant divided into 3 parts.  The first is topped by a Latin inscription which reads:  “Challenge to Moses bearer of the written law.”  At the right a mob of Israelites rebels against Moses and prepares to stone him.  At the left Moses causes the ground to swallow up the Jewish schismatics.  In the Center Moses smites the sons of Aaron who are performing an illicit sacrifice.  Architecture is classicized but ruined.  The inscription on the Arch of Constantine:  “Let no man take this honor [of priesthood] upon himself unless called by God as Aaron.” Since Moses was always understood as a Christ type, and since his successor Asron wears a papal tiara, the scene prefigures Christ consigning authority over the priesthood to Peter, confirms the doctrine of the Petrine Succession, and warns schismatics against challenging papal authority.  The punishment of Korah was one of the most frequently cited Scriptural justifications for pro-papalist condemnations of the conciliarists and of conciliar theory.  

--On the opposite side, Christ consigns the keys to St. Peter.  Latin inscription above:  “Challenge to Christ the Lawgiver.”  The similarity in titles of the two frescoes emphasizes that the Old Testament scene has prefigured the new.  At the left Christ pays taxes to a Roman soldier, an attempt to subordinate Christ to temporal authority; on the right, is the stoning of Christ as he taught in the temple.  But whereas in the Old Testament scene all is tumult, in the New Testament scene, all is subordinated to the central foreground scene of Christ serenely consigning the keys to heaven to St. Peter and to the Papacy.  There is an elaborate architectural backdrop with an enormous piazza with a monumental, domed temple [the Temple of Jerusalem] flanked by two Constantinian triumphal arches (intact and thereby indicating the supremacy of the new dispensation to the old).  On the arches is written: “You, Sixtus IV, unequal in riches but superior in religion to Solomon, have consecrated this vast temple.” Together these details depict the Sistine Chapel as a new Temple of Jerusalem and Sixtus IV as a new Solomon and a new Peter.  Christ’s transmittal of the keys provides the triumphal foundation of the Church and the Temple of Solomon will move west to Rome with Peter.   That is the temple we see in the middle and it is the building on which the perspective lines converge.  The triumphal arches also express the union of church and empire under Constantine and the universality of the pope’s power.  Compared to the early 15^th-century paintings of Masolino the geometrical and mathematical clarity of the one-point perspective, the grandeur of the architecture, and the solemnity of the main action impart a dignity and majesty that make this scene one of the great landmarks of Western art.  It is also a work in which the artist is no longer outside the picture but has come into the picture itself.  On the right side of Christ after the Apostles one sees contemporaries, the architects of the Sistine Chapel and Perugino himself in a black robe who looks directly at us the audience in acknowledgment in an affirmation of Renaissance individualism and the rising stature of the artist.  

High Renaissance in Rome

•         Pontificates of Julius II (Giuliano della Rovere, 1503-1513) and Leo X (Giovanni dei Medici, 1513-1521)

•         Donato Bramante (1444-1514): architect of new St. Peter’s basilica

•         Raffaello Sanzio (Raphael, 1483-1520): painter of papal apartments in Vatican, Stanze di Raffaello

•         Michelangelo Buonarroti (1465-1564): sculptor of the Tomb of Julius II

Some Features of High Renaissance Art

Classic Art –Heinrich Wolfflin

            Running narratives give way to more monumental and ‘aristocrat’ forms; harmonious unity (only the truly relevant) dominates over decorative detail; the human body is exalted; the emotion is intensified yet restrained—classic repose

-Neoplatonist beauty over rational (Aristotelian) beauty:

            --Alberti: the artist chooses the most beautiful things from nature: the identification of the beautiful with the best in nature; nature’s rules must be adhered to.

            --Michelangelo: beauty is an absolute idea, a divine emanation captured by the intellect and the imagination more than by rules; the artist is inspired by nature but he must make it conform to the divine Ideal in his mind.

The greatest and most controversial monument begun in Renaissance Rome was the new Saint Peter’s.  Julius II laid the cornerstone for the new church on April 18, 1506.  The spiritual and pilgrimage center of the church was thus transformed into a chaotic construction site and would remain so for the next 150 years.  More than a thousand years old, St. Peter’s was in bad repair and cluttered with nearly a hundred tombs, altars, and chapels added over the centuries.   There had been plans for renovating it, but Julius, at Bramante’s advice, boldly decided to destroy old St. Peter’s, the most revered church in Christendom, and to build a colossal new centralized church designed according to the latest Renaissance architectural ideals with St. Peter’s tomb as its focus.  Donato Bramante, the pope’s architect for the site proposed a Greek cross plan within a square.  The cross symbolizes the sacrificial Christ; the encompassing square, the perfection of the Church Militant.  The massive dome capped by a lantern, which he called a temple in the sky, symbolized the Church Triumphant.  At the four corners of the square were 4 towers, perhaps symbolic of the four evangelists and the four gospels.  The cross had equal arms terminating in apses with another set of four domes set into the flanks behind the towers.  The colonnaded drum over the crossing raised the dome to make it visible from the exterior.  Underneath the dome was the high altar over Peter’s tomb.  Bramante, who drew his inspiration from classical architecture, supposedly said that he wished “to place the dome of the Pantheon over the vaults of the Basilica of Constantine.”  And the dome’s stepped exterior and the 40 m interior diameter were reminiscent of the 42m dome of the Pantheon, architectural symbol of the Roman cosmos and now of the imperial papacy.  Underlying the whole plan was the recent recovery of the Roman technique of poured concrete, formed and cast on site, faced with cut masonry or stucco.  Julius died in 1513 and Bramante in 1514, with little more than the central piers in place. 

Raphael:   Vasari calls him the Prince of painters.  R as talented as he was gracious, goodness and modesty, pleasing manner, courteous behavior.  He is the painter as the perfect courtier.

            RAPHAEL: SISTINE MADONNA (1513).    This work was commissioned by Julius II for the high altar of the church of S. Sisto in Piacenza, in part to commemorate Julius’s expansion of the Papal State northward to this city.  Raphael chose S. Sixtus II (r. 257-58) and St. Barbara to accompany Madonna and Child  Here the Madonna and Jesus are infused with humanity but at the same time everything is infused with divinity.  Cherubim-filled clouds and two angels leaning on the window sill at bottom of the painting and gazing heavenward, mark the division between the spiritual and material worlds.  But these divine figures are immediately approachable and humane.  At the same time Raphael is mature enough not to be slavishly constrained by demands of realism and the larger angel has only one wing so as not to clutter the bottom center.  Here we have the representation of divinity which is solemn, firm (omnipotent) but at the same time human, loving and compassionate.  The Virgin walks forward and downward along a slight diagonal toward the worshiper, her drapery swinging in response to her movement, her weight-bearing right leg providing visual support for the innocent and somewhat disheveled Christ child (sign of prophecy), whom she holds up and displays (as the priest does the host).   Christ looks directly out at the worshiper, his eyes conjure up the maturity and knowledge of the ages.  His expression and hers have an introspective and poignant aspect to them as she sadly anticipates the coming sacrifice of Christ reenacted in the Mass below.  The motion of the gazes is circular linking all parts of the picture while reaching out to the audience as well.  Sixtus II is a portrait of Julius II.  Julius here is depicted as a penitent, supplicant and sanctified intercessor mediating between spirit and matter.  On the sill, the threshold between heaven and earth, the papal tiara symbolizes his universal authority, endorsed by the Virgin and Christ Child whom he adores.  The positioning of the fingers of the hand, as if the hold the host, links the pope and his authority with the celebration of the mass going on below him.  Finally the open curtains lend the picture a spectacular framing effect, a glimpse into heaven not normally allowed, simple depth of perspective achieved through placement of figures.    

--Raphael’s  SCHOOL OF ATHENS.  Painted for Pope Julius II papal quarters in the Stanza della Segnatura because it was the room in which the Pope put his signature to official documents.  Tthe room had been designated by Julius for his official library and the four frescos on the four walls of the room were meant to sit over low lying book shelves that would house books of law, under the fresco of Justice and the Cardinal virtues, poetry and literature under the fresco of Parnassus, the mount of Apollo playing his lyre, w/ the classical muses and the famous poets.  The two main walls display THE DISPUTA (1509-1510) and THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS (1510-1511):  Books of theology under the so-called Disputa, in which the fathers of the Church gather to discuss the mysteries of the faith around the central figure of the Eucharist, and books philosophy, natural science and other forms of knowledge under a fresco depicting the most famous philosophers of the ancient world were to be shelved under the School of Athens.  Taken together the decorations of room depict the world of knowledge, Christian and pagan. 

            --The tradition from which the School of Athens descends is that of the “Famous Men” (Uomini Famosi) or the heroes of antiquity, frequently and appropriately chosen to decorate libraries especially because the ancient Romans are known to have decorated their libraries in this manner. What Raphael does in this fresco though is to transform the static and isolated images of most Famous Men sequences into a series of dramatic events in which the actors are presented in dialogue with one another, and in this he borrows from a religious tradition, that of the sacra conversazione.  For the School of Athens, Raphael created a noble classical antique architecture, built by man, like philosophy itself, to contrast with he invisible holy architecture of the Disputa on the opposite wall.  The architecture is Roman, and it recalls the ruined baths and basilicas of Rome but most of all is a tribute to Bramante’s vaulted arches of St. Peter’s that were going up in Rome to support his monumental dome.  Bramante himself is depicted in the painting as the geometer Euclid demonstrating  o his pupils.

--At the core of the picture stand Plato (depicted as Leonardo da Vinci) on the left and Aristotle on the right.  Artistotle’s gesture pointing outward symbolizes the arrangement of the world according to ethics; Plato’s gesture pointing upward symbolizes the motions of cosmological thought, which rises above the tangible world to the world of ideas.    The painting also seems to be part of the humanist debate both in Florence and Rome, following the lead of Pico della Mirandola, of the doctrine of the “Concord of Aristotle and Plato.”  According to Pico, any proposition in Plato could be translated into a proposition in Aristotle, provided one took into account that Plato’s language was that of poetic enthusiasm whereas Aristotle spoke in the cool tone of rational analysis.  And Pico had also attempted to demonstrate to an assembly of scholars the concord of all philosophies and of all faiths for the spiritual peace of humankind. This meaning of the School of Athens is a sub-theme of the theme of the entire Stanza, where the various disciplines, particularly philosophy and theology, are presented as complementary intellectual endeavors. 

            --Significant in the painting is the figure identified with Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic philosopher who argued that everything in the world is balanced by its opposite, so that what is at conflict is at harmony with itself.  Technical examination of the plaster has shown that Heraclitus was inserted on a separate patch after the surrounding area had been completed.  Furthermore the style and scale of this figure differ from those surrounding it and his features could be said to resemble Michelangelo’s.  It seems that  Raphael added the figure after viewing the unfinished Sistine vault as a homage to his colleague and rival.  Like Michelangelo’s own figures he is much broader and more muscular than the other figures in the painting.  Raphael here puts him in not as a painter but as a sculptor.  He wears a mason’s outfit.  True to Michelangelo’s character and reputation he’s brooding—contemplative.  He writes down his thoughts on a block of marble that props him up.  He is depicted on the Neoplatonic side of the fresco while Raphael and Bramante appear on the Aristotelian (rationalist) side.

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