High Renaissance Art in Rome
Early Renaissance: (1420-1495/1500)
--Theological vision to realism.
--Classical forms recuperated
--Narrative and historical painting
--Mathematics, perspective, rules
--Changing status of artist (liberal arts)
High Renaissance: (1495/1500-1520/27)
--Classic Art (classic repose)—H. Wölfflin
--More monumental and aristocratic forms
--Harmonious unity over decorative detail
--Neoplatonist beauty over rational beauty
--Artistic capital shifts from Florence to Rome
Popes: Julius II (1503-1513)--warrior pope,
“terribilità,” associated with Julius Caesar. Aggressive artistic program for Rome.
Clement VII (1523-34)—sack of Rome in 1527
Paul III (1534-1549): Council of Trent initiating
Counter-reformation, M’s Last Judgment.
Artists: Donato BRAMANTE (1444-1514)
--architect (New St. Peter’s)
RAPHAEL (Raffaello Sanzio) (1483-1520)
--painter (Papal apartments in Vatican)
MICHELANGELO Buonarroti (1465-1564)
--sculptor (Tomb of Julius II)
--Heinrich Wofflin, Classic Art, 1898: Running narratives in painting cease after 1500, now the story is told with a minimum of figures, giving only the dramatic climax of the story with any descriptions. The subject is taken seriously and genre-like embroideries are not tolerated, for the aim is to grip the spectator, not to amuse him. The emotions are the main preoccupation and the interest in humanity swallows up all other things in the world. Only the truly relevant is now allowed to find its way into pictures. A strong interest in the psychology of events results in elimination of gaily colored miscellanies in favor of a severe compression.
--This art consists of nothing but the human body—large bodies which fill the whole of the picture space. A feeling for the solemn and noble begins to crystallize in a way which makes the ‘400 appear timid and limited in its range of gesture.
--Side by side with the desire for unencumbered figures exists a tendency to minimize the expression of passion. This restraint is a “classic repose” of the figures. This restraint is in M’s first pieta.
--Castiglione, Cortegiano. The conception of good breeding was first set out in Italy in the 16th century and a great many gestures and movements disappear from pictures because they were felt to be too commonplace [aristocratic conception]. The gulf between popular and noble was fixed and the whole Christian cosmos, saints and heroes, had to be restyled into aristocrats. The search for restraint and dignity of demeanor, Castiglione “sprezzatura.”
Classic Renaissance art is compared to 5th century classical Greek art for its calm and monumentality.
Bramante Born in Urbino, trained as a painter, went to Milan in 1481 and like Leonardo stayed there until the arrival of the French in 1499, arrives in Rome that same year. In Milan, he abandoned painting to become the greatest architect of his generation. San Pietro in Montorio, “Il Tempietto.” Bramante developed the High Renaissance form of the central-plan church. The Tempietto, of about 1502-10, was commissioned for the cloister of S. Pietro in Montorio by Ferdinand and Isabella, the monarchs of Spain, with the support of the Spanish pope, Alexander VI. It was erected on the spot were St. Peter was thought to have been crucified. The Tempieto became the perfect prototype of Classical, domed architecture for the Renaissance and subsequent periods. Here Bramante used classical architecture more convincingly than ever before, but also brilliantly demonstrated how ancient art could be imaginatively adapted to serve papal ideology. He chose as his model for the lower story, the classical temple of Hercules Victor, excavated in Rome during the reign of Sixtus IV. This was the only known round temple with a colonnade of 16 Doric columns on a circular stylobate base, as here. Bramante’s choice was logical: a centrally planned church was a traditional memorial to a martyr; Vitruvius had written that the Doric order was especially appropriate for male deities; Hercules, the mortal who achieved immortality through his self-sacrificing labors, was often allegorized in the Renaissance as a Christ type. Bramante had at his disposal 16 ancient Roman granite columns, and, following classical practice, used their diameter as the design module. For ex, he spaced the columns four diameters apart and set them two diameters from the walls. These harmonic ratios joined with the circular and hemispherical forms to express the perfection and centrality of St. Peter. The building relies for its effect on the composition of volumes and masses and on a sculptural handling of solids and voids that set it apart from anything built in the preceding century. .
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 architect, 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 and a subsequent architect Sangallo wanted to move to a Latin cross model. M was appointed head architect in 1546 by Paul III, scraped Sangallo’s plans and created a lucid barrel-vaulted Greek cross plan with terminating apses and fronted with a double-columned portico. Cross, circle, square. You can see this Greek cross plan when you look at St. Peter’s from the rear. The exterior reads as a unified sculptural block with an extremely compact solidity as if carved from a single mountain of travertine, a truly indestructible rock of St. Peter. When Giacomo della Porta modified Michelangelo’s design in 1586 under Sixtus V, he raised the profile of both the dome and lantern, emphasizing the dramatic upward surge of energy and its release into the sky as Michelangelo had originally intended it. Giacomo’s reasons were probably the same ones that had impelled Brunelleschi to use an ogival section for his Florentine dome; greater stability and ease of construction. The result is that the dome seems to be rising from its base, rather than resting firmly on it. The extension of the front arm of the church and the monumental high facade by Carlo Maderno added in 1606-1612, counteracts the dome’s majesty by making it difficult to see at close range from the front of the church.
Raphael: Vasari calls him the Prince of painters. ‘R as talented as he was gracious, goodness and modesty, pleasing manner, courteous behavior [the painter as the perfect courtier]—Unlike artists before him he had no
RAPHAEL: SISTINE MADONNA (1513—now in Dresden). 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. She conveys all the human warmth, softness, and sensuousness of Raphael’s mistress, on whom she was modeled, yet she also looms above the viewer sublimely lovely and loving, suffused with an otherworldly light. 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. The inclusion of St. Sixtus II honors Julius II’s uncle, Sixtus IV, who took the martyred pope as his namesake. But Sixtus II is also a portrait of Julius II still wearing his beard of 1510-12 as penance for his initial losses at the hands of the French. The donor here is not shown as a witness to sacred history but is in heaven as a part of it. He is depicted as a penitent, supplicant and sanctified intercessor mediating between spirit and matter. On the sill, the threshold between heaven and earth, the 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. But the 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 literture under the fresco of Parnassus, the mount of Apollo playing his lyre, w/ the classical muses and the famous poets. TheTWO MAIN WALLS TAKEN UP BY 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, not Greek, 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 to his pupils.
--At the core of the picture stand Plato (depicted as Leonardo da Vinci) on the left and Aristotle on the right. It has been suggested the Raphael’s interpretation of Platonic and Aristotelian thought was taken directly from the Florentine Marsilio Ficino. 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. It remained a hot debate. 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 of intonaco 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. Compact and weighty like a sculpture.
--Rise of the status of the artist. Raphael and Michelangelo represent two faces of the High Renaissance: Raphael is the artist as the harmonious and beautiful High Renaissance work of art. MICHELANGELO INSTEAD, in Vasari’s description, IS DIVINE: A CHRIST OF THE ARTS SENT FROM GOD TO EARTH: “God decided to send into the world an artist who would be skilled in each and every craft, whose work alone would teach us how to attain perfection in design, sculpture and architecture. Moreover, he determined to give this artist the knowledge of true moral philosophy and the gift of poetic expression, so that everyone might admire and follow him as their perfect exemplar in life, work, and behavior and in every endeavor, and he would be acclaimed as divine. Michelangelo had achieved in the three arts a perfect mastery that God has granted no other person, in the ancient or modern world, in all the years that the sun has been spinning round the whole.” But Michelangelo was also “terribile” like Julius the II, difficult, brought to Rome to execute Julius’s monumental tomb, his Moses captures the divine terribilita’ of both pope and artist.
--Michelangelo lived to a great age, dying at 89 years old, and his views were constantly developing and changing, so that it is impossible to treat his theories on art as a single consistent whole. Born in 1475, he was trained under masters who still belonged to the ‘400. His earliest works in Rome represent the full blooming of the High Renaissance, but before he died in 1564 Mannerism was firmly established.
--BACCHUS AND DETAIL: (1496-97) Michelangelo’s first encounter with Rome was due to a sleeping Cupid that he had sculpted and had passed off as an antique, (Vasari uses the episode to state that “other things being equal, modern works of art are just as fine as antiques; and there is no greater vanity than to value things for what they are called rather than for what they are,” for the other side to the Renaissance artist’s fascination with the antique was not just to imitate it, but to better it). As a result Michelangelo was called to Rome where he sculpted one of his earliest surviving works, an ancient Bacchus for a Roman gentleman name Jacopo Galli. From the time of his earliest works Michelangelo had been fascinated with antique sculpture and felt impelled to compete with it. The work in form and bearing in every part corresponds to the description of the ancient writers--his aspect, merry; the eyes squinting and lascivious, notice how the body is soft and fleshy, like those of people excessively given to the love of wine. He holds a cup in his right hand, like one about to drink, and looks at it lovingly, taking pleasure in the liquor of which he was the inventor. For this reason he is crowned with a garland of vine leaves. On his left arm he has a tiger’s skin, the animal dedicated to him, and one that delights in grapes; in his left hand he holds a bunch of grapes, which a merry and alert little satyr at his feet furtively enjoys. The satyr furnishes the support needed by a stand marble statue, but his body’s torsion compels the view to move about the statue with his/her eyes. The figure is standing in a traditional art-pose of antiquity, the contrapposto stance, in which weight-bearing leg is countered by the flexed arm, and flexed leg by straight arm, but it is undermined since the classical stability of the contrapposto stance appears distinctly wobbly so as to underscore the god’s drunkenness. The work in some ways foreshadows a major theme in Michelangelo’s later work, for the sense that loss of balance may be imminent is a key to the meaning of the work, which is the conflict between license and restraint, the struggle of the soul to free itself from domination by man’s physical nature and desires. M treated this subject for the first time in the Bacchus and it became a major theme in his art.
--PIETA’(1497-1500). Here instead we have idealization of beauty, for in what is a subject that traditionally emphasized death and despair M has daringly infused classical grace and idealism as signs of divine perfection and beauty, the serenity and beauty of the Virgin and the muscular and radiant grace of Christ. Represented as a young and beautiful bride with the idealized features of an ancient goddess and seated on an outcropping of marble, the over-lifesize Virgin symbolizes the regenerative potential of the church wedded to Christ, the cornerstone, who founded his church on Peter, the rock. Christ’s left foot rests against the severed stump of a young tree, which represents life cut off in its prime. Yet the served tree also promises renewed life, since it is also the tree of the cross, upon which the salvation of mankind has been set so that whence came death, thence also life might rise again. Christ’s body wraps around the Virgin in an embracing serpentine pose. The torso is muscular and pliant, with an inner vitality like that of a classical hero. The Virgin has a deep but composed inner grief expressed by her bowed head and lowered, nearly closed eyes. With one hand she frames Christ’s wound, with the other she offers her dead son to the worshiper with a gesture recalling a priest about to elevate the host; it is the tradition gesture of the reception into heaven. Signature across Virgin’s breast: Michael Angelus Bonarotus Florentinus faciebat. To form a base of sufficient visual strength to support a gown man, M has spread the Virgin’s knees to support her grown child: again she is not a real figure but an idealized figure. While the Virgin is both suffering for Christ’s passion and expressing the promise of renewed life, she is essentially spiritual, constructed of abstract drapery patterns that undercut a sense of her underlying anatomy. At every point spirit and matter are in tense balance, expressive of the central paradox of the Christian faith—
--Tomb of Julius II. Two stories with some 28 figures, eventually became a wall tomb with one third the amount of figures. Moses [typus papae] completed in 1513. He has just received the 10 commandments on Mount Sinai, but down below, the people of Israel give themselves up once more to idolatry. The turned head concentrates the expression of awful wrath that now begins to stir in the mighty frame and eyes. One must study the work closely to appreciate M’s sense of the relevance of each detail of body and drapery in forcing up the psychic temperature. The muscles bulge, the veins swell, the great legs begin slowly to move. If this titan ever rose to his feet, says one writer, the world would fly apart. The holy rage of Moses mounts to the bursting point, yet must be contained
--SISTINE CHAPEL CEILING: The first plan was to decorate the ceiling with 12 apostles thereby continuing the theme of the Petrine succession, but instead scenes from Genesis complement the three times of the Bible (creation, old Testament and New Testament). The narrative proper is made up of 9 episodes of Genesis divided into three parts: Creation of the Universe, Creation of Adam and Eve, Story of Noah. And climbing from the windows up, we have the ancestors of Christ, the Holy Families of the Bible, Sibyls and Prophets, Ignudi. (Michelangelo continued in next lesson).
These notes come in large part from the following two texts which are excellent resources on the High Renaissance in Rome.
Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy: 1450-1600.
Loren Partridge, The Art of Renaissance Rome.