Art History Today

Italian & Bohemian Baroque: Art of Catholic Europe. Slides

Slides

1. Michelangelo, The Last Judgement, c. 1536-1542, fresco, Vatican, Rome.

2. Sebastian del Piombo, Clement VII, about 1531, oil on slate, 05.4 × 87.6 cm, Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

3. Raphael, Sibyls and Prophets, c. 1514, fresco, Santa Maria della Pace, Rome.

4. Same: The Sibyls.

5. Bartholomeus Spranger, Last Judgement, c. 1570, oil on copper, 116×148 cm, Galleria Sabauda, Turin.

6. Anonymous artist, Portrait of Gabriel Paleotti, 16^th century, University of Bologna.

7. Annibale Carracci, Venus and Adonis, Oil on canvas, 217×246 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

8. Michelangelo, Charon and Minos in Hell.

9. Annibale Carracci, Butcher’s Shop, Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford, 1580s, oil on canvas, 185×266 cms.

10. Annibale Carracci, A Man Weighing Meat, Royal Collection, Windsor, 1582-3, red chalk on beige paper.

11. Rosso Fiorentino, Pietà, 1537-40, oil on wood transferred to canvas, 125×159 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

12. Alexander Colijn, Façade of the Otto Heinrich Wing, 1557-1558, stone, Castle, Heidelberg.

13. Georg Pencz, Portrait of Count Palatine Ottheinrich, Portrait of Count Palatine Ottheinrich, c. 1550, oil on panel, 94×73 cm, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

14. Hans von Aaachen, Portrait of Emperor Rudolf II, 1590s, oil on canvas, 60×48 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

15. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Two portraits of Rudolf II with crown, 1575, black pen and ink on paper, 165×165 and 155×155 mm, Národní Galerie, Prague.

16. Adriaen de Vries, Victory of Rudolph II over the Turks, 1609, bronze, height 71 cm, Hofmuseum, Vienna.

17. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Self-Portrait, 1571-76, Pen, blue wash, 231×157 mm, Národní Galerie, Prague.

18. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Vertumnus, (Portrait of Rudolf II), c. 1590, oil on panel, 68×56 cm, Skoklosters Slott, Bålsta (Stockholm)

19. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Summer, 1563, oil on panel, 67×51 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

20. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Winter, 1563, oil on panel, 67×51 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

21. Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Librarian, c. 1566, oil on canvas, 97×71 cm, Skoklosters Slott, Bålsta (Stockholm).

22. Hans Vredman de Vries, Architectural capriccio, 1596-98, oil on panel, 65×89 cm, Private collection.

23. Titian, Jacopo Strada, 1567-1568, oil on canvas, 125×95 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

24. Georg Pencz, Portrait of Martin Luther, 1533, oil on panel, 41×32 cm, Private collection.

25. Francesco Borromini, Oratorio dei Filippini, Rome, 1637-1650.

26. Guido Reni, The Virgin Appearing to St Philip Neri, c. 1675, oil on canvas, 343×197 cm, Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence.

27. Carlo Marratti, The Virgin Appearing to St Philip Neri, c. 1675, oil on canvas, 343×197 cm, Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence.

28. Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome.

29. Annibale Carracci, Assumption of the Virgin, Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, 1600-1601, oil on canvas, 245×155 cms

30. Caravaggio, The Conversion of St Paul, Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, 1600, oil on canvas, 230 x 175 cms.

31. Caravaggio, The Crucifixion of Saint Peter, 1600-01, oil on canvas, 230×175 cm, Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome.

32. Peter Paul Rubens, Madonna Adored by Angels (Madonna della Vallicella), 1608, oil on slate, 425×250 cm, Santa Maria in Vallicella, Rome.

33. Peter Paul Rubens, The Ecstasy of St Gregory the Great, 1608, oil on canvas, 477×288 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Grenoble.

34. Domenichino, Saint Ignatius of Loyola's Vision of Christ and God the Father at La Storta, 1622, oil on canvas, 166.1×98.1 cm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

35. Giacomo Barozzi da VignolaIl and Giacomo della Porta, IlGesù, Home of the Jesuits, Rome, consecrated 1584.

36. Andrea Pozzo, Altar of St Ignatius Loyola, 1695-99, marble, bronze, Il Gesù, Rome

37. G.B. Gaulli, Il Gesù, Dome, Triumph of Jesus.

38. Detail of ceiling showing the trompe l'oeil effect

39. Andrea Pozzo, The Worldwide Mission of the Society of Jesus, 1691-1694, Church of St Ignatius, Rome.

40. Same, closer view.

41. Cornelis Bloemart, after Jan Miel, engraved frontispiece to Danielo Bartoli, Della Vita e dell’Istituto di S. Ignatio fondatore della Compagnia di Gesù, Rome 1659.

42. Andrea Pozzo, Tomb of St Ignatius, Gesù, Rome.

43. Abbey of Montserrat, Spain.

44. Diego Velásquez, Portrait of Portrait of Juan Martínez Montañés, 1635–1636, oil on canvas, 109 cm × 107 cm (43 in × 42 in), Museo del Prado, Madrid.

45. Juan Martinez Montanes, Saint Francis Borgia, about 1624, polychromed wood and cloth, 174×68×51 cm.

46. Juan Martínez Montanes, St Ignatius Loyola, c. 1610, polychromed wood, Chapel, Seville University.

47. Detail: Head of St Ignatius.

48. Theodore Galle, re-engraved after anonymous engraving, Pedro de Ribadeynera with portrait of St Ignatius.

49. Alonso Sanchez Coello, St Ignatius, 1585, oil on canvas, formerly Madrid Jesuit College.

50. Peter Paul Rubens, Miracles of St Ignatius, 1615-20, oil on canvas, 400×275 cm, Chiesa del Gesù, Genoa.

51. Bernini, First Bust of Scipione Borghese, 1631, marble, 78 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome.

52. Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1622-25, Carrara marble, height 243 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome.

53. Detail: Daphne.

54. Bernini, St Teresa Group, 1647-1652, marble, life-sized, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome.

55. Same.

56. Same.

57. Alonso Cano, St Teresa’s Vision of the Resurrected Christ, about 1624-1630, oil on canvas, Coleccion Forum Filatelico, Madrid.

58. Balthasar Permosa, Marsyas, 1680-85, marble, height 69 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

59. Marsyas, different view.

60. Bernini, Damned Soul, c. 1619, marble, Palazzo di Spagna, Rome.

61. Balthasar Permosa, Apotheosis of Prince Eugene, 1718-21, marble, height 230 cm, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.

62. Karel Škréta, Self-Portrait, 1647, oil on canvas, 210×247.5 cm, National Gallery in Prague, Prague.

63. Karel Škréta, Portrait of a Painter (possibly N.Poussin), c. 1635, oil on canvas, c. 1635, 83×70cm, National Gallery, Prague.

64. Karel Škréta, The Mathematician and his Wife, 1640-1650, oil on canvas, 93.5 × 73.5 cm, National Gallery in Prague, Prague.

65. Karel Škréta, Portrait of the gem-cutter Dionysio Miseroni and his Family, 1653, oil on canvas, 185×251 cm, National Gallery in Prague, Prague.

66. Detail: Gem cutting workshop, on the left are heads of Dionysio's wife Marie Ludmila and daughter Marie Laura .

67. Detail: Dionysio with his older sons (on left) Jan Octavius and Ferdinand Eusebius.

Italian & Bohemian Baroque: Art of Catholic Europe. 10

Bohemian Baroque.

To end this session on the Counter-Reformation, we go back to northern Europe, especially Bohemia, which though a long way from the centre of Catholic power in Rome, proved a stronghold for the style’s northward advance. To get some idea of the high baroque’s influence on baroque art of Northern Europe one simply has to look at the Marsyas of the Dresden born Balthasar Permoser (1651-1732). Here, the spirit of Italian baroque art is evident since Permoser has based his figure on Bernini’s Damned Soul from earlier in the century. In painting we have the little known and intriguing Czech baroque painter Karel Škréta (1610-1674) who emerged from the Protestant nobility in southern Bohemia, but moved to Kutna Hora, and then to Prague where he became a royal painter for the court.¹ However, he had to flee Prague to Saxony in 1626 as the Czech city was taken by the Catholics. Then Škréta came to Italy where he studied Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese in Venice before arriving in Rome in 1634 where he could have met famous artists like Sacchi and Poussin who he may have painted.² Four years later, Škréta would return to Prague, become a Catholic and continue to produce broadly realistic single and group portraiture (above) in the style of Velásquez, as well as occasional altarpieces for the Jesuits who consecrated a few churches in Prague. He opened a studio in 1645 and joined the artists' guild, serving as its chairman from 1651 to 1661. Škréta’s career throws an interesting sidelight on the European baroque, showing how the style could move as far north as Bohemia where the major lights of Europe would shine through the Czech art produced there.

1Information from Oldrich J. Blazicek, Baroque Art in Bohemia (Paul Hamlyn, 1968)

2According to Blazicek, the subject might be Poussin who had settled in Rome in the late 1620s; Karel Škréta was in Rome 1634-5, so he could have painted the French master, ibid, plate 11.

Italian & Bohemian Baroque: Art of Catholic Europe. 9

Bernini & the High Baroque in Rome.

Bernini was born in Naples to a Mannerist sculptor, Pietro Bernini, originally from Florence, and Angelica Galante, a Neapolitan. At the age of seven he accompanied his father to Rome, where his father was involved in several high profile projects. There, as a boy, his skill was soon noticed by the painter Annibale Carracci and by Pope Paul V, and Bernini gained the patronage exclusively under Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the pope's nephew. His first works were inspired by antique Hellenistic sculpture; and, under the patronage of the Cardinal Borghese, young Bernini rapidly rose to prominence as a sculptor. Among the early works for the cardinal were decorative pieces for the garden such as The Goat Amalthea with the Infant Zeus and a Faun, and several allegorical busts such as the Damned Soul and Blessed Soul. Scipione's collection in situ at the Borghese gallery chronicles his pagan sculptures, with a series of masterpieces such as the precociously brilliant Apollo and Daphne. But when one turns away from paganism towards representations of the Christian saints, it is easy to agree with Kenneth Clark’s remark that the sculptor went “very far” compared to the realism of the Spanish masters who showed St Teresa – and indeed St Ignatius- in a fairly resigned way; compared to the performative, hyper-theatricality of Bernini’s stupendous St Teresa group which summarises how the sculptor married Spanish mysticism – in the form of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises and St Teresa’s visions - to his knowledge of seicento theatre to produce one of the most iconic groups of the Counter-Reformation (above).¹ In this work Bernini attempted to translate Spanish mysticism into sculptural form, a translation that depended upon rendering the occurrence through the aesthetics of the flame, which actually brings us back to Michelangelo’s impact on Mannerism since the style’s flame aesthetic originated with Buonarotti, which the movement developed throughout the sixteenth-century, but mainly in civic and private contexts rather than religious ones until Bernini brought them together in the unqualified success of the St Teresa group.²

1Kenneth Clark, Civilisation, (BCA. 1969, rep. 1972), 134.

2On translating mysticism through visible, sculptural form, Mieke Bal, “Ecstatic Aesthetics: Metaphoring Bernini” in Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art In and Out of History (eds) Claire Farago and Robert Zwijnenberg (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1-30.

Italian & Bohemian Baroque: Art of Catholic Europe. 8

The Jesuits in Spanish Art.

While fighting for Antonio Manrique de Lara, 2nd Duke of Nájera, Ignatius Loyola was hit by cannonballs at the fortress of Pamplona in 1521. During his convalescence, Ignatius underwent a visionary experience, which led him towards a religious life. After reading such books as Ludolphus of Saxony’s De Vita Christi, Loyola composed his Spiritual Exercises which would affect not only theologians but some of the art produced during the Counter-Reformation, such as Bernini who drew heavily upon it for some of his ideas in art such as the St Teresa. Obviously, in Spain, Loyola had his adherents; some of these commissioned artists to commemorate the soldier- priest in painting and sculpture. One of the most famous was the sculptor Juan Martínez Montañés,- the “God of the wood”- who created polychrome statues of Loyola (above) and other saints such as the Spanish Jesuit, St Francis Borgia (1510-1572). Montañés’ polychromed statues of these individuals represented “imagen de vestir,” namely, that a sculpture in which only the heads and hands were carved; the bodies were covered with “simple cassocks of sized cloth” and “made in the form of manikins so that they could be dressed in elaborate liturgical dress on solemn occasions.”¹ The statue of Loyola would have been influenced by prints given to Montañés by the Jesuits themselves who always sought to make such images “doctrinally correct.”² The image of Loyola was based on his death mask, now preserved in the Gesù in Rome. Other Jesuit Spanish artists such as Juan de Roelas influenced more famous painters like Velásquez who based his Christ after the Flagellation contemplated by the Christian Soul on one of Roelas’s works.³

1Xavier Bray (ed), The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting and Sculpture 1600-1700, National Gallery, 2009), nos 14 & 15.

2Ibid. For a summary of the biographies of Ignatius, Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque, 118.

3The Sacred Made Real, no. 19.

Italian & Bohemian Baroque: Art of Catholic Europe. 7

The Protestants Lose Ground & the Catholics Regain Power: The Society of Jesus.

Unlike the Oratorians the Jesuits were a more powerful and authoritarian organisation dedicated to bringing the Christian message directly into the world. Led by their founder St Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), a sixteenth-century soldier, the Jesuits pursued the military rather than the exclusively monastic option.¹ Built on the pillars of broad theoretical knowledge, complete subservience to the Society’s aims of distributing Christian teaching throughout the world, and an uncompromisingly iron discipline, the Society’s headquarters was the Church of the Gesù in Rome, where eventually the remains of their founder would be taken and entombed. There was also the Church of St Ignatius (above) which boasted a huge ceiling decorated and designed by the lay brother artist Andrea Pozzo (1642-1709); the whole effect was meant to visually and coextensively overpower the visitor by the conveyance of how Ignatius spread the light of Christ throughout the wide world, a spectacle in which gravity seems to disappear.² To adopt a contemporary view, scholars have even seen a link between modern authoritarian regimes and the Jesuit style: according to this view, the Jesuit used a form of ‘crowd control.’ Much of the animosity towards the Jesuits in the nineteenth-century was directed towards the Gesù, which was described by Hippolyte Taine in 1866, in his Voyage en Italie, as a structure inspiring submission to the Roman Church. A few years earlier in 1845, Jacob Burckhardt, had stated that the Gesù, particularly its vault, was a device used to dazzle the congregation into a state of compliance. Burckhardt’s account was sprinkled with phrases such as ‘playful splendour’, ‘great pomp’ and ‘wonderful flourishes’, a vocabulary referring to ornament, seemingly the governing characteristic of ‘Jesuit’ architecture, though that label is seldom used these days.³ Thus, Jesuit architecture functioned as a kind of ideological mechanism, creating a physical view, the depiction of the heavenly host on the ceiling which stupefied the viewer, and thus made of him or her a convert. In effect, the Jesuits practiced a kind of ‘crowd control’ using sight as an aid to control the emotions of the congregation.⁴ In addition to outstanding theological scholars, the order included eccentric scientists like Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) and the sculptor Bernini (1598-1680), - who is said to have visited both the Jesuits and the Oratorians, and the Swiss architect Carlo Fontana (1634/38-1714) who created a tomb for Loyola at the Gesù.⁵ And it should be pointed out that many of the leading artists of this period like Rubens, Bernini and Domenichino were avid Catholics and duly worshipped before beginning their labour, so this was more a case of painting as a vehicle for Ad maiorem Dei gloriam (for the greater glory of God”) an inscription which ornaments St Ignatius’s tomb.

1 Ignatius was beatified in 1609 and ordained in 1622.

2On the ceiling’s programme. Evonne Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque, (University of California Press, 2004), 150f. Pozzo wrote: “My idea in the painting was to represent the works of St Ignatius and of the Company of Jesus spreading the Christian faith worldwide. In the first place I embraced the entire vault with a building depicted in perspective. Then in the middle of this I painted the three persons of the Trinity; from the breast of one of which, that is the Human Son, issue forth rays of light that wound the heart of St Ignatius, and from him they issue, and a reflection spread to the four parts of the world depicted in the guise of Amazons...”

3 Francis Haskell, History and its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past, (Yale University Press, 1993), 199.

4On crowd psychology and the Jesuit aesthetic, Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque, 53f.

5 Howard Hibbard, Bernini, 115.

Italian & Bohemian Baroque: Art of Catholic Europe. 6

The Protestants Lose Ground & the Catholics Regain Power: The Oratorians

By the 1570s Protestantism was in retreat and the instruments of the Catholic Church began to regain the power that they had lost. In the following decades all of Poland, Austria, southern Germany, France, and parts of Switzerland would consolidate their Catholic positions.¹ Catholic power wasn’t exclusively concentrated in Rome; but the two most forceful movements were to be found there during the age of the baroque: St Philip’s Oratory and St Ignatius Loyola’s Society of the Jesuits which despite seeming antipathetic, nevertheless had much in common. St Philip’s grew out of the meeting of lay brothers who “preached and discoursed spontaneously,” and despite the strangeness of their assembly, the order was ratified by in 1575 by Pope Gregory XIII; also, in that year the order was moved to St Maria della Vallicella which would be heavily decorated by sculptors and artists. Despite their theological elevation, the Oratorians managed to preserve their democratic nature supposedly running down from the pope to the man in the street. We can view this populism in the art of a number of painters, for example Caravaggio who brings the action down to street level in such masterpieces as the Calling of Matthew which can be compared with the more traditional art of the Carracci on the opposite wall. Many painters from Guido Reni to Carla Marratta represented the vision of St Fillipo when he saw the Virgin appear to him; but perhaps the most famous Oratorian painter was Peter Paul Rubens who r (above)eally had to work hard on one of the most difficult commissions of his early career. Neri died in 1575 leaving, in the words of Wittkower, a group of “voluntary priests tied together by voluntary obedience and charity.”²

1 Rudolf Wittkower, Art & Architecture in Italy 1600-1700, (Pelican History of Art, Yale University Press, 1958, rep. 1982), 23.

2 Ibid.

Italian & Bohemian Baroque: Art of Catholic Europe. 5

Painting at the Court of Rudolph II

One key aspect of mannerist art is the garden; many wealthy patrons kept gardens, e.g. the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612). This ruler was actually painted as the god of Gardens- Vertumnus- (above) by his wildly talented and completely eccentric Italian artist Giuseppe Archimboldo. By constructing the emperor’s head of autumn fruits, a strange metamorphosis, Arcimboldo alloyed not only nature and human, but the two sexes also: Vertumnus became the “symbolic figure of the interchangeability of the sexes.” ¹ Rudolf was crowned emperor of Germany in 1575, and perhaps it was not unusual that he chose such an artistic oddity as Arcimboldo as his chief painter because the ruler was deeply introverted, suffered from fits of depression, and wisely marked a fresh ducal style by preferring connoisseurship to politics.² Fascinated by the ancient and the arcane, Rudolf spent many years in the company of not only artists, but also scholars and alchemists. Rudolf’s oeuvre of painters reflected the elegance and distortion of mannerism: artists such as the German architectural painter, Vederman de Vries, the Italian Arcimboldo, the mannerist Bartholomeus Spranger from Antwerp who actually painted whilst in Rudolf’s company, and a variety of other architectural and optical painters. In addition to attracting this field of bizarre talent, Rudolf also collected art treasures and coins; he employed as his keeper the numismatist Jacopo Strada- painted brilliantly by Titian- from Mantua who also dabbled in painting.³

1 Wurtenberger, Mannerism, 196.

2Ibid, 42.

3 Ibid, 24.

Italian & Bohemian Baroque: Art of Catholic Europe. 4

A Short Note on Mannerism.

With the reaction of the Counter-Reformers, artistic style becomes less a litmus test of discovering new forms, and more a way of elaborating on existing ones, which leads Blunt to compare the Mannerists as closer to the artists of the Middle Ages rather than their immediate predecessors: the Church was so powerful then that it could afford to be lax towards artistic innovation; hence the acceptance of populist forms like the Miracle Plays and Gothic sculpture with its abrupt realism.¹ Within the renaissance this latitudinarianism, or broad-mindedness, prevailed in the humanist climate; but with the Papacy on a more defensive footing, it was clear that horizons would narrow and experimentation would fall out of favour. This would mean that mannerism art is seen less in churches because of its radicalism in form, structure, and indeed subject matter, and more within the culture of the humanist friendly court, such as those of the Elector Palatine Ottheinrich at Heidelberg (above) or Rudolf II of Prague, men who have been called “dilettante artists.”² The Italian word “maniera” means style in English, though it is difficult to tie it down to a specific definition.³ Though mannerism was a movement that spread across Europe, its origins can be found in Florence, especially in the art of Pontormo and Rosso, the latter pioneering the new style of the School of Fontainebleau in France. According to Freedberg, Pontormo and Rosso “inverted the accepted sense of classical form or warped it to their new ends, and made new inventions of aesthetic devices or borrowed them from sources that were geographically or chronologically outside the sphere of reference of classicism.”⁴Later in the century, Freedberg argued for a formation of what he called the “high maniera”, the blossoming of the early phase in the work of such artists as Bronzino, Salviati, and Vasari, in the time of Cosimo di Medici who founded the Florentine Academy. Florentine mannerism eventually gives way to the so called “eclectic” style of the Carracci and the Bolognese Academy previously mentioned.

1 Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, 109.

2 Franzsepp Wurtenberger, Mannerism: The Style of the Sixteenth Century, trans Michael Heron (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963), 40.

3 The best introduction is John Shearman’s Mannerism, (Penguin, 1967).

4 S.J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500-1600, Pelican History of Art ( Yale, 1993), 175-6.

Italian & Bohemian Baroque: Art of Catholic Europe. 3

Realism & the Academic Style in Bologna.

As Carl Goldstein remarks, most scholars have been reluctant to view the Butcher’s Shop at Christchurch (above) as “a glimpse into a butcher’s stall in sixteenth-century Bologna.”¹ Some have seen it as an “allegorical puzzle, connected with the program of natural realism” drawn up in the Carracci studio. Far from the Christchurch picture being an example of naturalism, it has been seen as artificial; why else does it have quotations from other celebrated works like Noah’s family in Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling as well as Raphael’s Sacrifice of Noah, itself borrowing in turn from Michelangelo. The butcher on the right, hanging a carcass with difficulty, comes from Michelangelo’s Crucifixion of St Peter, according to Goldstein. The same figure was also connected with the action of raising the cross, as well as handling the figure of Christ in the descent from the cross. Only one of the four butchers is unconnected with a renaissance source; this is the man in the white apron weighing meat, which Annibale studied and drew from a live model. In this drawing the features of the butcher are younger than the one in the final painting. It’s also interesting to see Annibale’s study of an arm, exactly as it would appear in the final version. The scales that have been studied carefully are actually stadera, on which the meat is hung in such a way that the counterweight (romano) running the length of the horizontal pole, registers the weight. According to a recent catalogue of 2000, the allegorical interpretation has been set aside- and the “butcher’s Shop” is now seen as a realistic representation of the butcher’s trade in sixteenth-century Bologna.² Obviously, another aspect of the picture to consider is the links between medical anatomy and the butcher’s trade. The Carracci may not be implying such an association here, but painters did sometimes see their studios as abattoirs.

1 Carl Goldstein, Visual Fact over Visual Fiction: A Study of the Carracci and the Criticism, Theory, and Practice of Art in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988, 185.

2 Various, The Drawings of Annibale Carracci, (Washington, National Gallery, 2000), no. 1.

Italian & Bohemian Baroque: Art of Catholic Europe. 2

Gabriele Paleotti and the Carracci in Bologna.

One of the most important churchmen in the time of the Counter-Reformation was Gabriele Paleotti (1522-1597), the Bishop of Bologna, Annibale Carracci’s city of origin. Paleotti is significant for the Counter-Reformation because he wrote a treatise on how sacred images should and should not be used by painters; it was entitled Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane of the 1570s which was written after consulting Prospero Fontana and Pirro Ligori. Paleotti considered artists “mute preachers”, who conveyed the message of the teachings of the Church via the silent medium of their art. Although there is no evidence that Annibale and his brothers read Paleotti’s book, or indeed applied his ideas to their paintings (above), the treatise did have some influence on the way artists painted sacred scenes. Paleotti was most concerned to advise the artists to eradicate nude figures from pagan mythology, since according to him, they could occasion impure and salacious thoughts in the mind of the beholder, although the situation was far more complex than this.¹ As Anthony Blunt says, up until the middle of the sixteenth-century, the Church was prepared to allow some romantic interest in antiquity and mythology so long as it was not used to seriously question the doctrines of the Church.² Incredibly, Michelangelo’s introduction of Charon into the bottom part of his Last Judgement was greeted with derision by some because the boatman was a pagan invention; but it was decided that because Dante had not been challenged in his use of the figure in the Inferno, it would not be right to do so in 1560.³ Nudity had also been an issue since Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgement was painted between 1537-1544; his nudes had been seen as indecent in the context of the religious wall painting by the master of ceremonies to Paul III, Biagio da Cesena; luckily the Pope stood with Michelangelo, and would only permit the painting over of some nudes- not the destruction of the whole painting. Michelangelo took his revenge by painting his opponent as Minos in Hell.

1Paleotti said that anything “superstitious, apocryphal, false, idle, new, or unusual” should be banned, Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, 110.

2Ibid, 114-115.

3Ibid, 114.