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Here’s a link to the next painting in the PCP series: San Francisco’s Golden Calf.
Note the departure from usual procedure; it makes sense to consider problematic pictures with the same subject, even if they’re not on the PCF BBC website. So, we go from Northamptonshire to California, but we’ll be back in the U.K. in the next instalment.
So we move to Northamptonshire from Leicestershire, to consider a copy of Poussin’s troubled masterpiece in London- The Adoration of the Golden Calf.
“The view thence of Florence is most beautiful--far better than the hackneyed view of Fiesole. It is the view that Alessio Baldovinetti is fond of introducing into his pictures. That man had a decided feeling for landscape. Decidedly. But who looks at it to-day? Ah, the world is too much for us." E. M. Forster, A Room with a View
In the next sentence a character declares that she has never heard of Alessio Baldovinetti, ignorance of the painter that is still common today. Trawl through the usual journals: a few articles. Look in vain for a significant representation in books and monographs; hardly any volumes devoted to him. There was a monograph written on him by Ruth Wedgwood Kennedy in 1938, but as far as I know there has been no major study of him undertaken. And are we surprised to learn that Baldovinetti doesn’t make the renaissance team in Beck’s survey of Italian painting; he’s relegated to the ignominy of an appendix, along with other cruelly overlooked artists left to languish on the touchlines. Somebody’s got to root for Baldovinetti, so here I am again, putting the case for yet another marginalised artist in the mould of Tura and Francia.
| Possible Self-portrait. Fragment of destroyed frescos in Gianfiliazzi chapel (Bergamo, Accademia Carrara) |
A few facts are known about Baldovinetti, although much remains in the realm of speculation. Born in Florence in 1427 to a family of wealthy merchants, he was a member of the Guild of St Luke. Vasari tells us that Alessio was trained by Domenico Veneziano, who’s only slightly more recognized than his pupil. Most of Baldovinetti’s work is documented and we even have a “Libro di Ricordi” in which he gives us details of kinds of colours he has purchased for commissions. His favourite method was to paint a secco with a mixture of yolk of egg and varnish. He seems to have been an experimenter in the mould of Leonardo; his frescos like the great Florentine’s haven’t fared well over time.
| Alessio Baldovinetti, (previously att. to Piero della Francesca)Madonna with Child, Musée du Louvre, Paris, tempera on wood, 106 x 75 cm, |
There’s another reason for this post: to link Baldovinetti with Berenson’s ideas on Florentine landscape and spectatorship, an idea I’m using in a course I’m currently teaching on Central Italian art. It was actually Berenson who was the first to take the artist seriously. In an article written in 1902, Berenson challenged an attribution to a painting acquired by the Louvre. A Madonna and Child set against a magnificent landscape with cliffs, rivers, pools, bridges and hamlets, it had been purchased as a Piero della Francesca, and Berenson was quite rightly determined to re-attribute the painting to Baldovinetti. This was comparatively easy; there are distinctive stylistic elements in Alessio’s art which help the connoisseur to identify him, and to disentangle him from the cluster of mid quattrocento painters like Piero, Veneziano, Andrea da Castagno and others. Compare the two Madonnas below: the colour scheme is uniform, lapis and vermillion for the Virgin; a pearly tone for the sky. But the dead giveaway is the landscape. In the words of Vasari, this artist “delighted in drawing landscapes from nature exactly as they are, whence we see in his paintings rivers; bridges, rocks, plants, fruits, roads, fields, cities, exercise grounds, and an infinity of other such things." Piero paints similar landscapes, but as Berenson pointed out, Piero’s landscape are more descriptive, cartographical; but Alessio’s use space in a different way; almost as an envelope surrounding the Madonna, wrapping round her like a kind of atmospheric garment. Berenson called it the “poetry of space.”
| Alessio Baldovinetti, Madonna with Child, 1460-65, Musée du Louvre, Paris, tempera on wood, 106 x 75 cm, | Alessio Baldovinetti, Madonna with Child, 1455-60, Jacquemart-André Museum, Paris, tempera on canvas, 90 x 74 cm |
After Berenson completed his essay on Venetian painters in 1894, he embarked on the most famous essay in the series- Florentine painters, published in 1896. Unlike the Venetian essay, which suffers from being too much in the shadow of Ruskin, Berenson used his Florentine essay to launch a number of ideas, most notably tactile values and the spectator- which we’ll look at another time. Then, the concept was linked with the figurative: the two dimensional character of painting being supplemented by a third dimension, which the viewer could imagine, if he or she looked as Berenson looked. However, Berenson didn’t confine himself to figurative art; he also extended his concept to landscape.
| Antonio Pollaiuolo, Tobias and the Angel, 1460, tempera on wood, Galleria Sabauda, Turin, dimensions unknown. |
“Before Verrocchio, his precursors, first Alessio Baldovinetti, and then Pollaiuolo, had attempted to treat landscape as naturalistically as painting would permit. Their ideal was to note it down with absolute correctness from a given point of view, their subject almost invariably the Valdarno, their achievement a bird’s eye view of this Tuscan paradise. Nor can it be denied that this gives pleasure, but the pleasure is only such as is conveyed by the tactile values. Instead of having the difficulty we should have in nature to distinguish clearly points near the horizon’s edge, we here see them perfectly and without an effort, and in consequence feel great confirmation of the capacity for life. Now if landscape as most people vaguely believe, is a pleasure coming through the eyes alone, then the Pollaiuolesque treatment could be equalled by none that has followed, and surpassed only by Rogier van der Weyden, or by the quaint German “Master of the Lyversberg Passion,” who makes us see objects miles away with as great a precision and with as much intensity of local colour as if we were standing off from them a few feet. Were landscape really this, then nothing more inartistic than gradation of tint, atmosphere, and air, all of which help to make distant objects less clear, and therefore tend in no way to heighten our sense of capacity. But as a matter of fact the pleasure we take in actual landscape is only to a limited extent an affair of the eye, and to a great extent one of unusually intense well-being.”
What’s notable from the above passage is the idea that renaissance landscape can fill the spectator with a sense of immense well-being, hope even. For Berenson, landscape is linked with pleasure, not scientific abstraction, although the precise rendering of natural objects in space, conveying distance or proximity is important. Pleasure is less allied with the sense of rational sight, but instead with depth psychology: landscapes create the feeling in the spectator that anything can be achieved, a sort of therapeutic working through of problems through viewing landscape. This is an example of what Berenson calls the “life-enhancing” or “life-confirming” function of art, an idea that he developed from reading the philosophy of Nietzsche at Harvard, individuation achieved through aesthetic means,- a far cry from the traditional connoisseurship for which he is known.
| Masaccio and Masolino di Panicale, The Tribute Money (and others), Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria della Carmine, Florence, 1426-7, fresco. |
Sometimes, Berenson’s prose takes on a decidedly Nietzschean tone, as when, for example, he describes Christ and the Apostles in Masaccio’s Tribute Money as a race of supermen fit to inhabit the new earth (actually Masolino’s mountainous landscape) that the painter has prepared for them. “Then what strength to his young men, and what gravity and power to his old! How quickly a race like this would possess itself of the earth, and brook no rivals but the forces of nature”! The exclamation marks have a Nietzschean flavour about them too!
| Alessio Baldovinetti, The Nativity, 1460-62, Santissima Annunziata, Florence, Fresco, 400 x 430 cm. |
The opposite of “life-enhancing” is “life-denying” when the horizon of expectations is closed down leaving the spectator closed up in a confined space. Perspectives of hope are narrowed, and consequently that capacity Berenson talks of is diminished. It is the painter’s function to convey “the consciousness of an unusually intense degree of well-being.” To demonstrate this in Baldovinetti’s case, Berenson presents the wonderful landscape in Baldovinetti’s Nativity, a fresco in Santissima Annunziata. This landscape contains a horizon which could symbolise hope, the future, the salvation of the world, an appropriate idea because of the presence of Christ himself born into the world.
| The “immense well-being” of landscape. |
Perhaps we could identify with the figure looking into the depth of the picture, out across the Tuscany landscape. We can follow his gaze out over the valley patterned by snaking paths and rivers that wind with a mazy motion under bridges, until our eyes reach further to the distant mountains. This landscape suggests the beginning of a new day, a new era of Chris, and the morning of the world. Baldovinetti’s painting opens up to the spectator with the result that the pleasure of looking is transmuted into potential. The spectator is uplifted- not in a moral- but in an aesthetic and psychological sense. The promise of a better world becomes visible, made manifest through Baldovinetti’s naturalistic skill and his poetic evocation of the Italian countryside.
Sources.
Bernard Berenson, “Alessio Baldovinetti and the New “Madonna” of the Louvre, in The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, (1902).
Bernard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance: Florentine and Central Italian Schools (Oxford, 1952).
E.M. Forster, A Room with a View, 1908, and appendix, "A View without a Room” (1958).
Roger Fry, “Three Pictures in the Jacquemart-André Collection”, Burlington Magazine, Vol. 25, No. 134 (May, 1914), 78-85
Herbert P. Horne, “ A Newly Discovered “Libro di Ricordi” of Alessio Baldovinetti”, Burlington Magazine, Vol. 2, no. 5, (1903), 164-174.
Ruth Wedgwood Kennedy, Alessio Baldovinetti, (New Haven, 1939).
Yesterday, somebody pressed a copy of this magazine into my hands. I quite liked it: good production values, diverse in content; good illustrations. I gather it’s been going for some time- but I’ve lost touch with a lot of high street art publications.
The current edition has quite a lot of interesting material. The accent is mainly on exhibition reviews. There are reviews of the Impressionism and Gainsborough exhibitions at Compton Verney; a review of the Ashmoleon Capture of the Westmoreland show; the Zoffany exhibition, a lot of modern art, plus gallery talk and a Gallery Review.
I used to review for an Arts magazine, so I’m fully supportive of this kind of informed, but not strictly academic type of publication.
Details can be found here. Recommended.
There's no doubt that the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris is a controversial painting. The series of posts started last year have examined every aspect of it. AHT has attempted to reconstruct its stylistic milieu, identify the context in which the picture was received, and tried to unravel its technique and iconography. Att. to Raphael, previously att to Giorgione, The Judgement of Paris, Private Coll., 1512.
The dispute revolves around whether this disregarded picture was painted by Raphael. But even if we discount that attribution, I think we have to face the fact that the composition, models and sources are connected with Raphael’s workshop. I won’t repeat all that has been written in the lost four posts; but I did ask Graeme Cameron if he had anything else to add, or wanted to indicate material that had got left out of the previous posts. I’m quoting GC verbatim here:
1. Dating and Style.
“To assist with the scientific verification of both the date and style of the dress depicted within the "JoP", as worn by Raphael, it can be actually scientifically proven as certainly deriving from the years 1500 to 1520 in the High Renaissance. Most fortunately,my research is also dealing with yet another significant work from this period on an oak panel, which concerns "Three Saints", which has been accurately dated by leading Dendrochronologist, Prof. Dr. Peter Klein, to the 1500 to 1510-20 period.
| Attribution to be advised, St James from “Three Saints”, oil on oak, dimensions not known. |
The Saint depicted here, "St. James" ( with the Scallop Shell), wears the same White Hose and Slashed Doublet/Tunic style, and even more so, the same soft style Suede Boots/Shoes, as does Raphael in the "JoP". In this composition, St.James like Raphael, has likewise been updated to the contemporary early 1500's Renaiisance dress, for this purpose, rather than retaining his actual Biblical Garb. It is worth noting this important fact for definitive dress dating purposes of the "JoP."
2. Monogrammes. I didn’t get a chance to show images with the Raphael monogramme “"Rv", reproduced in GC’s book- so here they are.
| Monogrammes from GC’s book. |
| Ditto |
3. Physiognomy and Identification.
“It's perhaps worth adding to the remarks on physiognomy, that proof of the difficulty of rendering on a small scale an accurate likeness of young "Fornarina" was a very skilled task for Raphael, as some of the poorly rendered faces of some of the versions in these images attest. In the case of the versions, it is clear the Malmesbury prototype alone has these pivotal physiognomies of Fornarina and Raphael, whilst they all vary in both the quality and "type" of their respective renditions, but obviously have all derived from it, either as a versions or variants.
| These images are "Age & Date Specific" with Fornarina's the youngest known image of her. |
| Raphael's Physical Concordances at various ages. |
The comparisons show clearly "Age/Date Specific Physiognomic Concordances" which are entirely unique to the Malmesbury work, providing both dating confirmation and direct evidence of the 1512 evolution of this composition and of Raphael's certain involvement in its "original" creation in Rome at that time. These are in fact actual portraits of both Fornarina and Raphael, albeit small, yet so accurate in their Age and Date features, they could only have been painted from "life" sittings in Rome in 1512. The Fornarina is clearly a more naive and youthful portrayal than any previously known image of her and is therefore neither a copy nor any "chance resemblance", but a unique visage of her in 1512. It is self evidently an "Age and Date specific portrait, which most accurately records her actual physiognomy at that time, which may well include her naked countenance, from this original sitting. Accurate portraits are difficult enough to create, yet both these are finely wrought, true to life renditions and dateable to Rome in 1512. Likewise Raphael's countenance, which as proven by its subsurface pentimenti, was added into the composition to join that of Fornarina, and is also a unique portrayal, in that it is not a copy of any previously known image of him, either in its dress or "type", It too is an "Age and Date specific "original" portrait like Fornarina's of 1512. His physiognomy is consistent with with that of "Stanza" version, with the garb datable to this period, however he is clearly younger and in better health than seen in the 1519 joint portrait. None of these could be claimed as "chance" likenesses but were purpose created portraits for this painting.In the case of the versions, it is clear the Malmesbury prototype alone has these pivotal physiognomies of Fornarina and Raphael, whilst they all vary in both the quality and "type" of their respective renditions, but are obviously all derived from it, either as a versions or variants.”
| Three Graces, J of P and Farnesina nudes. |
4. Poses, Sources and Copies.
“This image above shows Raphael's unique "Contrapposto" pose shared between all three compositions, from the earlier 1508 Venus, to the 1512 JoP. These anatomical pose Hallmarks are quite distinctive to his oeuvre. “
| J of P and Entombment sketch |
A further "Raphael "cut & Paste compositional source for the painting showing direct links & concordances evident between his earlier 1508 'discarded' Entombment Sketch and the later 'recycled' 1512 'JoP' figure group.”
| Copies. See post 1 for details. |
“Comparison with the Copies & Versions show the precedence of The Malmesbury original viz a viz the versions.”
5. Quality Issues and Connoisseurship.
“Not just Waagen & Eastlake, but other great connoisseurs, Ridolfi, Passavant, Sir Martin Conway, and Millions of admirers at two major National Art Treasures Exhibitions at Manchester & Leeds, & in was singled out for praise in subsequent Press Reviews. Also at the two Royal Academy Exhibitions it was greatly admired as a Giorgione and even given the privilege of a Full Page Engraved Plate. Its qualities were so self evident, as indeed they still are today, that The Louvre was honoured to exhibit it in Paris, and later many visited Lord Mamesbury's Mayfair mansion just to admire it as well. Therefore those who are unable to appreciate its inherent beauty are obviously in the minority, as the majority always appreciated its qualities.”
6. VegaScan and “Vested Interests.”
I did ask Graeme Cameron if he had anything further to add on the VegaScan issue amid concerns about “vested interests.” He referred those concerned back to the technical blog's images, “where the capabilities of the VegaScan process, in regard to the effectiveness of its image penetration, compared with Infra-reds, provides the most self evident demonstration".
In response to concerns expressed about the “vested interest” issue, GC said:
"How it (VegaScan) achieves this is presently subject to confidentiality provisions, whilst the necessary proprietary measures are being determined".
This is the situation at the present- that’s all I can report.
7. The Next Book.
Finally, Graeme tells me that in Volume 2 of his series, “that not only will an important new direct link back to Raphael and his "Judgement of Paris composition be revealed, confirming it has everything to do with Raphael and Rome, with only its palette and Piombo/Macantonio's ( Giorgione) "influence" representing its earlier explained Venetian elements, but not its actual origin”.
AHT’s Final Thoughts.
For myself, I think this case raises four important questions:
1. If this wasn’t painted by Raphael, then why are there physiognomic, stylistic and iconographic links between the Malmesbury painting and designs produced by his own hand, e.g. the Adam and Eve, and now as we can see above, the Entombment sketch?
2. Can we accept that Raphael- with all his exposure to Venetian painting- may not have sought to fashion a personal, erotic subject based upon some of Giorgione’s pastoral mythologies?
3. Leaving aside the issue of its authorship, and turning to the issue of quality: why was it endorsed by connoisseurs of the first rank like Waagen and Eastlake, not to mention good enough to go in the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition? See GC’s comments above.
4. How do we explain the facial resemblance between the left goddess in the Judgement of Paris and portraits of Fornarina; the same goes for portraits of Raphael and the “Paris” figure? Again, see above.
As for the attribution, the main bone of contention, I fully understand that people are protective of Raphael, but I’m a huge fan of the painter too- and I would never do anything to harm his reputation. I appreciate that it’s important to give a balanced, objective view of a painters development, weeding out the copies and variants from the true originals, which I’ve started with the Poussin project. In my own speciality as Poussin scholar I’m learning all the time, especially about the question of Poussin copies, which is clearly an emerging concern over at the PCP. We don’t yet have the “full picture” of Raphael too, which is a point that I’ve stressed again and again throughout the series of posts.
Perhaps the Malmesbury case illustrates the adversarial nature of attribution culture, and I’ll put my hands up and say that I've been guilty of rubbishing somebody’s attribution in the past. This time I’ve used my knowledge and judgement to try to negotiate between those who agree with the attribution and those who resist it. Everybody is entitled to their view, but I have to say that I think this case should be less a judgement on Graeme Cameron’s connoisseurship and the technology he uses, and more about the issues it raises for studying Raphael in the 21st century.
Stressing the positive, which I’d rather do, it’s interesting that the appearance of the Malmesbury picture has set some scholars on new paths of investigation. Though wisely keeping out of the attribution debates, Frank DeStefano has incorporated the Malmesbury painting into his thinking on Giorgione. I think that is the spirit in which to approach the problems surrounding this controversial canvas.
Many thanks for reading the posts and commenting on them.
Thanks of course to Graeme, and Norm Cameron for plentiful material,images and supplying answers to all my queries.
We now wait for GC’s new findings in the next volume of his research.
The next entry on the Poussin Catalogue Project is up. This time I’m considering whether a Holy Family in the Leicester Art Gallery was painted by the master.
I don’t usually post twice on the same day- but it was great to hear via Bendor about the recovery of the stolen Poussin Midas. The genuine article.
Meanwhile, that other “Poussin” Baptism, along with the other recovered “old masters” is the subject of a short article in the Art Newspaper, “Experts have doubts about the “Poussin” and other old masters seized in Rome.” Sorry, it’s not on their website. I only heard via a press release sent to Warwick University. Sorry again- but I don’t know how to get the text off the PDF.
Both Bendor and I are quoted on the “Van Dyck” and “Poussin” respectively. What I glean from this article is that the carabinieri are refusing to comment on claims about the worthlessness of this hoard; and the Superintendent of Rome museums, Rossella Vodert says through Il Giornale dell’Arte that “the attributions of several of the works are uncertain and need to be verified.” Several! They all look dodgy to me. As for the Baptism, no expertise needed there- it’s a Poussin no-brainer! I’m not reassured by what I hear. A few posts back I identified an 18th century painting attributed to Poussin in the Capitoline, which was obviously a misattribution.
One of the problems that I face when I teach survey courses on renaissance art is this: what model should I adopt, especially with this year’s course where I’ve been trying to trace the growth of art over most of renaissance Italy. Map of Italy, 1500
There are several options open to me. I can choose to divide Italian painting up into “schools” tied to geographical regions. Alternatively I can try to match styles, and their subdivisions, to specific painters in centres like Venice and Milan. Or I can do a form of close analysis focusing on specific, “canonical” works that are representative of the renaissance, bringing out their importance to the society and culture of the time. Michael Baxandall’s great book Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy is a good example of this.
| Summit of Mount Ventoux. |
Last term when teaching a course on Northern Italian art, I experimented by creating a hybrid of travelogue and stylistic analysis based loosely on Crow and Cavalcaselle, Berenson, and Freedberg. I read somewhere that Berenson had in his mind a mental image of the whole of renaissance art as it unfolded: every artistic trend observed; every connection noted; every picture memorized. You could call this a synoptic view of the renaissance, everything seen broadly at a specific point in time, like looking down from a high peak. Petrarch’s clear vista from the summit of Mount Ventoux in 1336 comes to mind.
From his mental vantage point, Berenson oversaw the landscape of renaissance art with the eye of memory, and later the artificial eye of photography. In teaching my courses I tried to attain this view from the summit by studying survey texts of renaissance art. This led me to Sydney Freedberg, an acolyte of Berenson, but the pupil's view from the top of the peak was much more complex than the mentor’s.For a start, Freedberg favours a more variegated scheme based on geographical schools and a stylistic chronology that includes such difficult concepts as “Late Counter Maniera.” Though bursting with wonderful observations and insights across a broad range of artists, I found the model too complex, certainly for teaching purposes. The view from the summit was obscured by clouds.
| The view from Beck’s Peak. |
“No special effort has been made to create a balanced coverage among painters from Italy’s various regions. A situation of natural selection gives Tuscany, and especially its main centre, Florence, a decided edge over other places during that time when the first generation flourished. Much as the Florentine dialect became the literary language of Italy by the fifteenth-century, so the artists of Florence- sculptors and architects as much as painters- had an unmistakeable impact on the entire peninsular. No representatives from Milan are to be found in this book, although it was the capital of Lombardy, a region of immense wealth and political and military power. That region failed to produce a painter of first rank. Nor have the number of representatives from the lyric and monumental currents been artificially equalized.”
Beck obviously doesn’t neglect northern seminal painters like Titian and Giorgione, but he makes it plain that certain geographical areas of Italy are out of bounds for a survey of the whole country’s art, since the art produced there is of an inferior quality compared to the Tuscans. Whilist I wouldn’t disagree that the quality of Florentine painting and sculpture was of a very superior quality compared to Milan, I do think that a balance needs to be kept, whatever one’s bias towards certain schools. However, Beck didn’t go as far as Berenson in damning whole schools; he still covers artists like Tura. Beck was too knowledgeable and canny not to take into account the contributions of artists from northern Italy, some of whom travelled south, although he strove hard to shift perception away from the idea of “schools” of painting: Florence, cradle of the Renaissance.
“It would be short-sighted to underestimate the powers of local habits and preferences, but for a broadly based treatment of Italian Renaissance painting, division into schools can be overly limiting. Artists travelled widely; virtually every major painter of the period moved from his place of birth and training, that is from his “school,” to accept assignments elsewhere. Such interchange took place in many directions constantly, often obliterating the “school” as a center of style.”
Nevertheless, Beck’s criticism of Lombard art reflects the influence of Berenson who as stated previously on this blog was highly suspicious of artists who came from centres such as Ferrara, Milan and other cities in the north. Quite simply, painters from Emilia, Verona and similar centres didn’t measure up to the very high standard set by the Tuscans. To give one example, Padua is only saved by the fact that Donatello and other Florentines visited it and influenced the artists there. Like Beck, Berenson regarded the Tuscans, especially the Florentines, as the pinnacle of Italian renaissance art. And even when Berenson came to write his essay on Central Italian Painting (1897), it is significant that it comes after his essay on Florentine art (1896), and precedes his essay on Northern Italian Painting and the Decline of Art (1907). Though Berenson acknowledges the achievements of Central Italian painters, you get the impression that he’s not entirely convinced by them, despite their undeniable achievements. This is not exactly a ringing endorsement:
“The consistent pursuit of the Florentine painters was form and movement; of the Venetians, splendour and harmony of colour: what did the Central Italians contribute to the magic of Renaissance art? Rarely does colour penetrate the senses and warm the heart more quickly than in certain frescoes or panels of Simone Martini or Gentile da Fabriano, of Perugino or Raphael. Yet even these great masters could be at times indifferent, or indeed harsh, while their inferiors have slight merit as colourists. Seldom have problems of form and movement been better solved than by Signorelli; but he had few, if any, followers. It is not with the magicians in colour and the creators in form that the Central Italian painters, as a school, hold high rank. What is it, then, that gives them their place not only with the greatest, but with the most popular names in art? Our present quest, if successful, will yield an answer.”
I’m not so sure that Berenson ever solved that conundrum of why the Central Italian painters should be high up in the hierarchy of renaissance art. The very last paragraphs of his book consign Raphael’s pupils to oblivion- and the mannerists that followed them- while creating a pantheon of Central Italian artists stretching from Duccio and Simone Martini, Piero della Francesca and Signorelli and culminating in Perugino and Raphael. This is close to the Central Italian model favoured by art historians today. Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi, (Strozzi Altarpiece), 1423, Florence, Uffizi, tempera on panel, 303 x 282 cm.
| Gentile da Fabriano,Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 1423, Florence, Uffizi, tempera on wood, 32 x 110 cm. |
Beck wasn’t keen on Berenson’s “rise” and “decline” paradigm dependent on “early” to “high” periods in renaissance art. creating a chronological model tied to style; neither was he interested in formulating a complex evolution of style like Freedberg. Though Friedberg tried to nuance the development of renaissance art from its classical youth to its “senility” in mannerism, he ended up with a historiography detoured by too many stylistic signposts. When conceiving his own methodology, Beck took style into account, but made his system elegantly simple. He divided the art in his book into the “lyric” and “monumental” currents.” As Beck admitted though, this was similar to later stylistic oppositions as “romanticism” and “classicism” and though it had its limitations, it was a model of clarity compared to Freedberg’s convoluted model of styles. The “lyric” was probably easier to detect, especially in the early quattrocento, because it was heavily influenced by the International Gothic style. Consisting of graceful movement, delicacy, curvilinear design, and an emphasis on contours, it may be discerned in artists such as Masolino, Fra Angelico, Lorenzo Monaco and Gentile da Fabriano. Beck also tied the lyric current in with naturalism, particularly depiction of the natural landscape, as with this predella panel from Gentile’s Strozzi’s altarpiece; the depth of realism is astonishing for such an early work.
Monumental however constituted gravity of forms, volumetric three-dimensional modelling, figures shown full-face or in sharp profile; included here were artists like Masaccio, Fra Lippo Lippi and DomenicioVeneziano.| Example of Beck’s “lyric current.” Masolino, The Fall,, Santa Maria del Carmine, Brancacci Chapel, Florence, 1426-7, fresco. | Example of Beck’s “monumental current.” Masaccio, The Expulsion, Santa Maria del Carmine, Brancacci Chapel, Florence, 1426-7, fresco. |
There were problems with this, as with any arbitrarily devised system. Take colour for example: both Angelico and Lorenzo fall into the “lyric” group, but their colours could hardly be more dissimilar. Of the two, Monaco’s palette is more “lyric”, in Beck’s definition, colour “used for its own sake rather than as a vehicle to produce readability” of the story. Angelico’s seem more decorative too, though his powdery blues might be associated with natural conditions than Lorenzo's shimmering yellows and pinks which seem the product of the artist’s imagination.
| Fra Angelico, Descent from the Cross, 1436-40, Florence, Museum of San Marco, tempera on panel, 176 x 185 cm. | Lorenzo Monaco, Adoration of the Magi, 1420-22 Florence, Uffizi, (?), tempera on panel, 144 x 177 cm. |
What makes Beck’s approach so distinctive- and why I’ve chosen to use it- is that he tried to deploy a generational model that can be mapped onto individual careers as well as the evolution of Italian painting as a whole. Beck again:
“The birth dates of the principal painters of the Italian Renaissance do not fall neatly into acceptable units, but it is still possible to organize them into three generations that roughly span the period. The first generation consists of those masters born in an arc of years around 1410, that is, who emerge as independent painters in the 1420s and 1430s when the artistic vocabulary in Italy was expanding radically in the hands of sculptors and architects.The second generation is made up of painters born around 1445, and the third generation of artists was born around 1480. In every case as many as fifteen years on either end of the central are sometimes needed to round out each generation”
This chart shows the grouping of artists along a timeline running from 1200 to 1600. I don’t know if the unknown creator of this graph based this data on Beck’s book (probably not), but I really wish I could credit them as it’s a cool tool- it's proving a great hit with my students. Age Graph of Renaissance Artists, 1200-1600. Take a bow whoever did this!
Notice the gap between the first and second clusters. I don’t know if this graph was influenced by Beck’s thinking, but both separate the first generational cluster from that of the group composed of artists like Cimabue, Giotto, Duccio and others. Whilist thoroughly respectful of this group, Beck wanted to separate the two clusters because he believed that the renaissance really began with this first generation of innovators, particularly Masaccio. In order to do this, Beck identifies a transitional “moment” before the first generation of renaissance painters get into their stride. Artists like Lorenzo Monaco (not shown on the chart), Gentile da Fabriano, and Masolino da Panicale who had their artistic training and apprenticeship before 1400. Concluding his opening chapter on his renaissance framework, Beck makes his intentions and beliefs clear:
“Any division of the material will cause some inconveniences. What should be recognized is that Masaccio, Fra Angelico,, and some other leading painters of the first generation, whether characterized as lyric or monumental were together responsible for the first phase of Renaissance painting. Some of the artists were simply greater, more imaginative, or painted pictures that were more beautiful than some of the others.”
| Giotto, The Lamentation, c. 1305, Padua, Arena Chapel, fresco, 185 x 200 cm. |
Of course this raises the question of whether we should begin any survey of Italian renaissance art with Giotto’s generation, but that brings us to Berenson and his idea of “tactile values”, which I’ll leave for another post.
Meanwhile, it’s forward to the 16th century and back to the Malmesbury Judgment of Paris………
Sources.
James Beck, Italian Renaissance Painting, (New York, 1981).
Bernard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance: 2, Florentine and Central Italian Schools, (Oxford, 1952). These essays first appeared around the turn of the 19th century, Venetian (1894), Florentine (1896), Central Italian (1897), Northern Italian and the Decline of Art (1907). They were combined into two volumes (Venetian Painting and Northern Italy, Florence and Central Italy by Phaidon Press in 1952. The paperback version has the same text and plates as the original.
Sydney J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy, 1500-1600, (Pelican History of Art), 1993.
