EARLY RENAISSANCE HUMANISM IN ROME
--REUNITED PAPACY IN ROME
--Great Schism (1378-1417)
--Conciliar Movement (1409-1438)
--Martin V enters Rome in 1420
--PAPALISM v. CONCILIARISM
--(Primatus Petri)
--ROMAN HUMANISM (CURIAL HUMANISM)
--Ruins / Archeological treatment of antiquity
--Flavio Biondo: Roma instaurata (1444-46)
--Philology and Rome
--Dual apostolate: Empire and Church
--instauratio Ecclesiae Romanae (restoration
of the Roman Church)
--Hebraic and Christian antiquity as well as Latin
--historical (painting of historical narratives) and figural exegesis
--Moses as typus Papae
--Rome as New Jerusalem
--first-class classical and patristic library
--HUMANIST RHETORIC:
--Deliberative (legislative)
--Judicial (forensic)
--Epideictic (ceremonial)
--“optical vocabulary”
EARLY RENAISSANCE ART IN ROME
--Early Renaissance Art (1420-1500)
--High Renaissance Art (1500-1520)
--Late Renaissance Art (Mannerism) (1520-1600)
1) Theological (spiritual) perspective gives way to realist perspective (reason)
--Man occupies center stage
--Classical forms recuperated
2) Mathematics and Perspective
--Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura, 1436): “vision makes a triangle, and from this it is clear that a very distant quantity seems no larger than a point”
3) Changing Status of the Artist
--Mechanical Arts vs. Liberal Arts
--studia humanitatis
--study of science and mathematics
HUMANISM IN PAPAL ROME:
Martin V (Oddone Colonna) arrives in Rome on September 28, 1420.
--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 had to be drawn to Rome by that patronage to make their intellectual and cultural influence felt. The humanists’ expertise in Latin were recognized as important by the Popes for the secretarial and diplomatic needs of the papal court. --HUMANIST revival of Rome is co-opted by the papacy for political ends. The Popes become the protectors, guardians and continuators of the inheritance of classical Rome, another way of reinforcing papal claims to universal authority (an attitude which is maintained up through the Italian Risorgimento in the 19th century). With the return of the Popes and the income they represent, pilgrimage to Rome increases and helps to produce economic revitalization: from 17,000 during Avignon papacy to 100,000 by 1600. Papal patronage also attracts some of the brightest minds and best artists from all over Italy and the new building projects are accompanied by humanist treatises. In the literature of the period the Popes are constantly being compared to Christian Caesars who are refounding the city. The pope Sixtus IV, the most energetic of the 15th century papal patrons, is 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. Triumph, glory, and imperial dominion replaced martyrdom and holiness as themes for praise in humanist writing, and Rome’s populace witnessed ever grander and more lavish spectacles. By 1500 Rome had supplanted Florence as the cultural capital of the peninsula.
--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 carefully 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 2nd 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, emphasis was laid on fall literal and historical meanings. The painting of historical narratives was preferred since the “lessons of history” could be brought to life. Biblical narrative nevertheless contained for Renaissance Romans a “prophetic” meaning. The Old Testament history foreshadowed New Testament events, and both could be interpreted as revealing the inner meaning of present historical developments. The relation of past to present was a “typological” or “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).
4) Also important for the humanist endeavor in Rome was the increasing emphasis given to epideictic or panegyric rhetoric (the ceremonial rhetoric of praise and blame) over deliberative or legislative rhetoric (to exhort or dissuade) and judicial or forensic rhetoric (to accuse or defend). The orator dealt with matters that could be visualized; he was expected to create within his address an extended visual image, and his intent was to move his audience to gaze upon the works and deeds his words evoked. Both oratory and the arts, then, produced pictorial images as part of the emerging visual culture of the Renaissance.
--EARLY RENAISSANCE (1420-1500)
--HIGH RENAISSANCE (1500-1520)
--LATE RENAISSANCE (Mannerism 1520-1600)
1) EARLY RENAISSANCE ART: a delight in 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 [Tuscan and Umbrian landscapes]. An opening up to different thematics: portraiture and classical/mythological references (less in Rome where because of the papacy art remains much more religion bound) and to new motifs and interests within religious art. Drama and emotion are now expressed in human terms. The Madonna enthroned with the Christ Child is pulled down from its heavenly solitude and expressed in an earthly setting peopled by mortals.
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.
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. Leon Battista Alberti codifies the concept in his 1436 Della pittura [On painting]: “vision makes a triangle, and from this it is clear that a very distant quantity seems no larger than a point.” Linear perspective dominates Western painting from then on; it is a cornerstone of Western art that only receives challenges at the end of the 19th-century and in the twentieth century.
4) RISE IN STATUS OF ARTIST. 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 16th century that we have artists remaining in Rome at length and creating true schools.
ART UNDER THREE EARLY RENAISSANCE PONTIFICATES:
1) MARTIN V (1417-31): Oddone Colonna—Council of Costance, enters Rome in 1420.
One of Martin’s aims to reestablish the spiritual and temporal authority of the Church was to restore the Christian monuments of Rome. This would become a key feature of the policy of the majority of popes in the 15th century. Restorations in St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, San Giovanni Laterano, and Santa Maria Maggiore. Martin brought Masolino da Panicale (1383-1440) (Florentine) to Rome to execute several commissions.
--High altar piece for Santa Maria Maggiore. An altarpiece gives visual form to beliefs about the Mass or Eucharist. The essential core of Mass is the consecration and elevation of the host and chalice, when the bread and wine were mystically transformed into the body and blood of Christ (transubstantiation) an held aloft as an offering to God for adoration by the faithful. At this moment the altar was believed to be flooded with the divine spirit joining the terrestrial rites with a parallel rite celebrated perpetually in heaven by angels and saints. On the central altar piece for Santa Maria Maggiore we have two themes (the refoundation of the Universal Church in Rome and the Assumption to its ultimate triumph). It is the conjunction of the Churches Militant and Triumphant, spirit and matter, which altarpieces always expressed in some form, was based on the Renaissance belief in the dual nature of God and humankind.
--Assumption of the Virgin (1425). Predominately late Gothic style. Painting represents her assumption into heaven by her son and court of angels. The painting expresses the triumph of the Church Militant. The resurrected Christ welcoming his mother into heaven with open arms symbolized the Church Triumphant. Depiction of angels of Heavenly hierarchy follows the homilies and gospels of Gregory the Great. Christ’s status as the invisible church is indicated by his strong foreshortening and billowing sky blue robe. By contrasts, the Virgin is frontal and massive, a sign of her status as the visible church; he white robe and gesture evoke purity and sanctity. As a whole, the altarpiece constructs an image of the hierarchical church mediating between heaven and earth. Much of this painting is still inspired stylistically by the High Gothic.
--On the other side of the altar piece we have the founding of Santa Maria Maggiore (1423-25): 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, generated by Christ from a dark cloud above. The miraculous snow and its cruciform shape signify the church as divinely ordained and founded on Christ’s redemptive sacrifice. By tracing the plan the pope performs an imitatio Christi, connoting that 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. Masolino heightens the topographical realism of the landscape by using the recently discovered system of one-point perspective: the architectural cornices, 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. The perspective decisively separates the materials world of space and time from heaven above. The hieratic expressions and gestures of Christ and the Virgin, the radiant gold ground etched with light rays, and the encompassing rainbow define an immeasurable, infinite, and unchanging spiritual world. Thus, the altarpiece, like the Mass visually mediates between heaven and earth, spirit and matter, here and hereafter. The agent of mediation is shown to be 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—another pyramid near St. Peter’s was called the tomb of Romulus), the Sabine hills. Thus 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 BRANDA 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) NICHOLAS V (1447-1455). A Tuscan humanist who maintained close contact with Tuscan humanist circles; from them he received plaudits for his discoveries of classical and patristic texts. Helped to restore papacy in Rome after exile of Eugenius IV through an ambitiously planned and implemented renovatio urbis and in his intensive promotion of the arts and sciences. He worked to assemble a first-rate classical and patristic library and paid leading humanist scholars to produce Latin translations of major texts by ancient Greek authors and patristic fathers who wrote in Greek. He encouraged pilgrimage to Rome by declaring 1450 a Jubilee Year. He also engaged in the rebuilding of Rome’s ancient churches and conceived ambitious ideas for the remaking of the Vatican as a new sacred city, moving the seat of the papacy from the Lateran palace to the Vatican. Living near St. Peter’s also reinforced the popes’ claims to legitimacy as the successors to St. Peter. In each of these ways he inaugurated trends that continued to influence the culture of the Roman Renaissance through to the end of the period.
--Nicholas’s private chapel in the Vatican was frescoed by FRA ANGELICO (from Florence) in 1448-1449. The frescos depict the Lives of Saints Stephen and Lawrence, set in Jerusalem and Rome respectively. They are arranged in two rows and are treated in a parallel way to underline the close ties between the two cities. When Stephen’s body was transferred from Jerusalem to Rome in the sixth century, it was buried with Lawrence’s in S. Lorenzo fuori le mura. Nicholas had their tomb opened in 1447, and both bodies were found to be well preserved. Their common burial was seen as a sign of the church’s universality, East and West. The frescoes seek to indicate this merger. Stephen is being ordained by St. Peter himself in the Temple of Jerusalem depicted in the guise of what was to be Nicholas’s remodeled St. Peter’s, so the linkage of the New Jerusalem in Rome is stressed. The double ordination of Stephen and Lawrence implies a continuous ministerial succession from the apostolic origins in the first Christian community in Jerusalem to the Roman ministerial Church; an unbroken succession from the first of the apostles, Peter, down to Sixtus II and by implication forward to Nicholas V.
3) SIXTUS IV (Francesco della Rovere) (1471-1484). For the ideology and culture of Roman Renaissance, Sixtus’s long pontificate 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.” It is a stunning and shameless 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 pieces which helps to create the vanishing parallels lines in a full Renaissance depiction of single-point perspective. point perspective but spatial recession is curtailed by the back wall and non-transparent windows and the blocking column in the middle push us back into the foreground. The men are fully portrayed in their realistic details as individuals. 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” [a humanistic immortality or gloria].
--From 1475-1482 Sixtus IV has his architect Baccio Pontelli rebuild the old Palatine Chapel of Nicholas III which would be called the Sistine Chapel. The chapel was designed to accommodate papal large papal ceremonies and 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 altarpiece depicted the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin, symbolically the triumph of the church Militant.
--The most important of the parallel scenes are the 6th scenes, which represent unsuccessful challenges to Moses’s and Christ’s authority: In the Moses cycle The Punishment of Korah by Botticelli, and the Christ Consigning the Keys to St. Peter by Perugino. All of the scenes are life sized tableux vivants divided into 3 parts. Each scene states the general theme: “Challenge to Moses bearer of the written law.” The bearded Moses three times with light rays shining from his head. 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, but protecting the sons of Korah. 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 the keys 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 narratives of Masolino or Fra Angelico, the geometrical and mathematical clarity of the one-point perspective, the breadth and depth of the ace, 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.
Bibliography: notes for this lecture were compiled in large part from the following texts which make for excellent reading on the Early Renaissance in Rome:
--Blunt, Anthony. Artistic Theory in Italy: 1450-1600.
--Partridge, Loren. The Art of Renaissance Rome: 1400-1600.
--Stinger, Charles. The Renaissance in Rome.
--Wölfflin, Heinrich. Classic Art.