G.B. Moroni, Titian’s “Schoolmaster”, late 1560s, National Gallery of Art, Washington, oil on canvas, 97 x 47 cm.
Bernard Berenson is well-known for hatchet jobs on painters, but he really excelled himself with his dismissal of the Brescian portrait painter, Giovanni Battista Moroni. The “only mere portrait painter that Italy had ever produced,” Berenson thundered before going on to condemn Moroni for not being able to paint without the model in front of him. For Berenson, Moroni’s Brescian characters were too realistic, too “uninterestingly themselves.” However, the sage of I Tatti grudgingly conceded that Moroni’s painting “Titian’s Schoolmaster”- so called because Titian is said to have studied it- was worthy of Velasquez, though not Titian himself. Given the excellence of Moroni’s portraits, including this one which was actually mistaken for a Titian by Van Dyck, Berenson’s negative judgment is completely unforgivable. That’s absolutely the case, but I don’t want to ponder Berenson’s prejudices in this post; instead, I want to dwell on realism in Moroni and float some ideas that have been generated in my teaching of the North Italian painters course. This can be seen as the third section of my “triptych” of lesser known northern Italian painters, the other “panels” being Tura and Il Pordonone.
G.B. Moroni, Abbess Lucrezia Agliardi Vertova, c. 1556, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Oil on canvas, 91 x 69 cm. Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man, c. 1540, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, oil on wood, oil on wood, 96 x 75 cm. G. B. Moroni, Portrait of Antonio Navagero, 1565, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, oil on canvas, 115 x 90 cm. G. B. Moroni, Portrait of a Gentleman, (Conte Faustino Avogadro(?), c. 1560, National Gallery, London, oil on canvas, 202 x 106 cm.
Anybody coming to Moroni must be struck by his enhanced realism. It’s partly achieved by strict graphic delineation; the outline is fairly sharp, drawing the eye to lines and contours. The demeanour of the sitters is calm, the expressions grave, indications of self-absorption and the contemplation of an inner world. Moroni’s portraits owe much to his mentor Moretto di Brescia, who combined northern portraitists like Titian and Lotto with the aloofness of Florentines like Bronzino.
Bronzino also comes to mind when studying the portraits of Moroni himself, although there are differences between the Brescian and Florentine masters. Moroni’s portraits lack the forbidding, cold arrogant stare of Bronzino’s subjects; they are reserved, but not unapproachable. Moreover Bronzino’s subjects seem intact and immune from the ravages of time. Contemplating Moroni’s portraits, I sense decline, and in some of them Moroni actually places his subjects next to ruined buildings. This seems to me a collective portrait of a tarnished aristocratic class; one individual, though attired in splendid garb has his foot in a brace; another sumptuously dressed in furs occupies a space with dilapidated walls.
It’s almost as if the idea of ruin permeates the whole portrait; the portrait becomes a ruin in the sense that it undermines the illusion of prosperity and wellbeing that these pictures are supposed to completely convey. And this is Moroni’s preference- such ruins are never seen in Moretto’s portraits where this decaying grandeur is absent. This is something unheard of in Bronzino’s portraits where not a wall is defaced, not a surface is besmirched with the signs of age- many of Moroni’s ruins have wild plants growing on them, and his walls are usually stained with brown paint.
G.B. Moroni, A Gentleman in Adoration before the Madonna, 1560, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Oil on canvas, 60 x 65 cm.
According to Sydney Freedberg, Moroni’s “verism”, that is his truth or extreme naturalism, might be linked with the problem of religious art, particularly the creation of an art that conformed to the Counter-Reformation in its combination of “verism” and an old-fashioned style, the latter easily absorbed by the viewer. This stark pairing occurs in a number of canvases that Moroni produced for unidentified patrons in Brescia. Take an example in Washington, this painting juxtaposes a sombrely clad donor, realistically portrayed, next to an apparition of the Virgin and Child. The Madonna is executed in a retardataire style, she looks back to the quattrocento. She also looks back towards Moretto’s own anachronistic use of quattrocento modes which his pupil adopted in tandem with his realistic proclivities, which if Freedberg is right, are keyed towards both a local religious sensibility as well as a more orthodox one in line with mainstream religion.
G. B. Moroni, The Baptism of Christ with a Donor, 1550s, Private collection, Oil on canvas, 104 x 113 cm. Lorenzo Lotto, Assumption of the Virgin, 1506, Duomo, Asolo (Treviso), oil on wood, 175 x 162 cm.
A similar donor picture that juxtaposes verism with deliberate anachronism, in a private collection in Milan, provides an even more striking example of how Moroni’s aesthetic works. Here, he places a similar donor with praying hands before a scene of John baptizing Christ in the wilderness. Although Freedberg has placed these paintings in the context of aesthetics and religion, to me they have great potential in thinking about the role of the spectator in Moroni’s portraits. Where is this donor supposed to be? Is he indoors, or is he outdoors? Is he part of the scene and therefore within the landscape where Christ is baptized? The adjacent ruins are rendered in the same veristic way as the figure; they seem to be part of his physical world, yet they are still part of the landscape. Moroni has painted the picture in such a way that this could be viewed as a baptism contemplated by a donor in the same scene, or a painting of the baptism of Christ witnessed by donor outside the picture. But there’s no clear-cut opposition between inside/outside to conform either of these viewing positions; pictorial space in relation to viewing space is problematized. The donor, presumably the commissioner, could actually be looking at a picture he has bought, since a framed picture is implied by the vertical wall running up from the praying hands, though admittedly it doesn’t run to the top- Moroni leaving room for ambiguity? This man could be contemplating not only the baptism of Christ, but the painting- the Baptism of Christ on a wall in his home. A colleague of mine, Maaike Dirkx, pointed out to me that if it is a painting on the donor’s wall, he has so identified with the scene that he’s “in” it. This seems to make good sense to me. In the Washington picture, the donor has so reached a pyscho-religious condition that he “sees” the Virgin, possibly in his mind- the austere cell could suggest a mental state.
However, what jars with me is the realist mode in all these donor portraits, the verism which undermines the idea of enthrallment in the presence of the divine. I can see it in artists like Lotto who infused their saints with the look of devotion, like St Basil in Lotto’s Assumption- but that look seems to be absent in Moroni.
Adding another layer of complexity brings us back to Moroni’s relationship with Moretto. In a discussion of the latter’s John baptizing Christ (National Gallery, London, c. 1520), Nicholas Penny says that another scholar, Cecil Gould, argued that this landscape “may originally have featured a half-length or bust-length portrait of a figure on the right, hands joined in prayer and viewing the episode within the landscape.” Penny agrees with Gould’s proposition, though he points out these unusual donor portraits, meant to be viewed in a context of private devotion, do not appear before Moroni. It seems that Moroni ingeniously transposed his master’s religious compositions whilst pioneering a completely unique type of donor portrait that united modes of realism geared towards a sophisticated viewing subject. As an amusing coda, Penny states, presumably with his tongue in cheek, that the donor within Moroni’s Portrait of a Man Contemplating the Baptism of Christ, may have had the name Giovanni Battista. These of course are Moroni’s Christian names, and it would be typical of this playfully inventive artist to introduce yet another level of interpretation into his imaginative pictures.
Berenson should really have persevered with Moroni, especially as the connoisseur was fascinated by the idea of becoming one with the work of art through contemplation. What better example could there be than Moroni’s Portrait of a Man Contemplating the Baptism of Christ? As Berenson wrote in 1948, subsequently published in Aesthetics and History in 1950: The Sage of I Tatti, 1903.
“In visual art the aesthetic moment is that flitting instant, so brief to be almost timeless when the spectator is at one with the work of art he is looking at, or with actuality of any kind that the spectator himself sees in terms of art, as form and colour. He ceases to be his ordinary self, and the picture or building, statue landscape, or aesthetic actuality is no longer outside himself. The two become one entity; time and space are abolished and the spectator is possessed by one awareness. When he recovers workaday consciousness, it is as if he has been initiated into illuminating, exalting, formative mysteries. In short, the aesthetic movement is a moment of mystic vision.”
Perhaps Moroni’s verism worked to prevent that “aesthetic moment” and “mystic vision” in Berenson’s eyes.
Sources
Bernard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance: Venetian and North Italian Schools. Phaidon, 1968, first pub. 1952
Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics and History, (Constable, 1950).
S.J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500-1600, (New Haven and London, Yale University Press), 1993.
Nicholas Penny, the Sixteenth-Century Italian Paintings, Vol 1: Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona, (National Gallery, 2004).
