Patrick Bade
Art in Florence and North Italy, Part 2
Patrick Bade - Art in Florence and North Italy, Part 2
- Right. Thanks, Wendy, thanks, Judy. Good morning, good evening to everyone, wherever you are in the world. And so, I’m beginning with this very wonderfully strange image of an egg suspended from the shell-shaped ceiling of an alcove by a gold chain. This is by Piero della Francesca, and it’s a detail from the Brera Madonna, it’s in the Brera Gallery in Milan. And this strange image of an egg, has of course, a symbolic meaning, as virtually everything has in these paintings of the 15th century. It symbolises fecundity and birth, or rebirth. So it has the same kind of symbolic meaning as the exchange of eggs at Easter, which are connected with the resurrection of Jesus. Although, as we’ll see in a minute, it had a very specific personal meaning for the Duke of Urbino who commissioned this picture. So Piero della Francesca, he’s born in 1415, dies 1492. So he’s a generation on from Masaccio, Uccello. And he’s built on their achievements. And also this egg, he’s showing off. He’s showing off his skill, this newly acquired skill that Italian artists had in creating an illusion of three dimensionality. Here is the Duke, kneeling, in his armour. He was a condottiere. That is, he was a mercenary, a professional soldier. You could hire him. And he was very successful at that, and he won himself a dukedom in Urbino, which was considered to be one of the most cultured and civilised places in 15th century Italy. He commissioned this painting, 1472, to celebrate the birth of his son and heir, the future Duke Guidobaldo of Urbino. So there he is, as the donor of the picture, kneeling before this very, very solemn looking virgin. And she’s surrounded by saints who can all be identified by their attributes. Saint John the Baptist, of course, he’s always shown with very scruffy hair. He’s the patron saint of bad hair, you could say.
So he’s already, always very easily identifiable. You can see St. Francis, who had his stigmata, sort of sympathetic wounds in simulation of Christ and so on. So when you see this, the seated virgin, surrounded by standing saints, the term for this is sacra conversazione, a sacred conversation. Now, Piero continued to be obsessed with perspective, and the representation of the real world and three dimensionality. And he wrote a number of illustrated theses that have survived, showing how to convincingly represent three dimensions, and here are two pages from his theses. And this was, it was a craze and it was an obsession. And I suppose you could compare it to the impact of computers, computer graphics and visuals in recent years. And the Duke of Urbino was particularly taken with this craze for illusionistic perspective. And this is his studiolo, which is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. And this technique used here is intarsia. Intarsia is inlaid wood. It’s different from veneer. Veneer you have a skin of wood, intarsia, the wood is a thicker piece of wood or actually inlaid into the base wood. And you can see all the clever, tricky, illusionistic effects here, which would’ve been stronger originally, ‘cause of the contrasts of light and dark. You know, if you have veneer or intarsia, because of the effect of light tends to fade the darker things, and polishing and dirt tends to darken the lighter areas. So I think it would’ve been even more startling the 3D when it was created in the 15th century. Here we are back again with Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino.
And as I said, his court was the model court for the Renaissance, in its highly civilised atmosphere, cultured atmosphere. And the famous book, “The Courtesan” of Baldassare Castiglione was written, inspired by the ideals of the court of the Duke of Urbino. And here we come up to a close, a detail of his head. He had this very extraordinary profile, which actually was created in a rather gruesome way. He lost an eye in battle. And of course that was very dangerous for a professional soldier, he needed to be able to see, to swivel his eyes and see on both sides. And apparently had the bridge, the top of his nose, surgically removed to enhance the field of vision of the one eye that was left to him. Now here are two, two medals that show the good boy and the bad boy of the early Renaissance. This I think is a little bit of a 19th century conception, 19th century historians like Burckhardt and so on, who look back to the Renaissance, and they idealised the Duke of Urbino, as I said, of this highly gentlemanly cultivated character. And his counterpart, the bad boy out of the Renaissance was Sigismondo Malatesta who you see on the right hand side, who’s believed to have murdered two of his wives and committed all sorts of, he’s also condottieri, but he was a very unscrupulous and extremely brutal character. Now, medals. A medal is actually an invention of the Renaissance. In some ways you could say it is the most characteristic art form of the Renaissance, one that completely encapsulates the ideals of the Renaissance.
As I told you last week, Renaissance means rebirth of classical culture, suddenly everybody’s very interested in everything from the ancient world, everybody’s digging in their back gardens, hoping to find sculptures, evidence of the ancient world. And the one thing you can, anywhere where the Romans went, including this country, and most of Europe, this country, I mean Britain, where I am at the moment. If you dig around or if you go around with a metal detector, you are very likely to find Roman coins. And so another aspect of Renaissance, I know Trudy’s talked about this and I touched on it last time, is the enhancement of the individual. You know, it’s interesting for instance that we know all the names of the artists and we know about them. And so you have a rebirth of portraiture as an art form. And I showed you last week a portrait of Dr. Chellini by Rossellino. So people, and also there is this concept of fame and immortality. People want their likeness recorded, and they want to be remembered by future generations. And actually the best way to do this is with a coin. So we know what all the Roman emperors look like, because their likenesses are on the coin. And also a coin is something that’s obviously, it’s a multiple, and so is a medal usually. So, you know, if Trudy or Wendy or Judy want to be remembered by future generations, they want people, their reputation, to survive whatever disasters are in store for us, global warming, atomic war, whatever it is, terrible wars. If they have, say a thousand coins struck with their likeness and their name on it, and an inscription with their virtues and achievements on the other side, and you can scatter 'em around the world, you can bury them around the world, they will be sure of being known to future generations. So a medal is essentially a coin, but that has no monetary value and its purpose is commemorative rather than to be exchanged for goods.
Here again is the wicked, the bad boy, the wicked, Sigismondo Malatesta in a fresco by Piero della Francesca in a church which he built in Rimini called the Tempio Malatestiano. I’ll show you an image of it in a minute, which was another thing that really shocked people. Because it was really, the church was less built in glorification to God. It was very clearly built in self-glorification, and flaunting his mistress, Isotta. Here is the church. One of the key buildings of the early Renaissance by the great architect, theorist Alberti. And here is Alberti also, he wants to get in on this game of being remembered. So he made this medal of himself with his very handsome profile. And here you see, it’s a strange idea when you come to think of it. This is a church. But actually, it’s the facade of the church is in the shape of a Roman triumphal arch. Here again, two portraits by Piero della Francesca of these two very different patrons that he had, Sigismondo on the left and Federico on the right. And here Federico with his wife, paired portraits with this wonderful bird’s eye view of a central Italian landscape in the background. Now this is one of the most compelling and enigmatic pictures by Piero della Francesca. It shows the flagellation of Jesus, his torture before his crucifixion. But what is going on in this picture? It’s like a scene from a movie.
Once again, of course, he’s showing off his skill with perspective. And as with so many early Renaissance paintings, the whole scene seems to be taking place on a giant chess set that helps your eye to move into the space of the picture. So we have a very classical looking building, which is fair enough of course, because Jesus lived and died under the Roman Empire. But on the right hand side, we have what looks like a rather typical Italian urban scene, street scene from the 15th century. And we have these three strange figures that I’ll talk a little bit more about in a minute. So here we were honing in on the flagellation section of this picture. And on the left hand side, we have Pontius Pilate, who is of course a Roman official. As I’m sure Trudy has said to you many times, it’s really kind of bizarre that it’s the Jews that got blamed for the torture and death of Jesus. It was actually the Italians, the Romans who carried it out. But I suppose it was more convenient for them to blame the Jews. And so we have the figure of Pontius Pilate, and interestingly, Piero has signed it in Latin, “Opus Petri.” This is the work of Peter from Borgo San Sepolcro, which was where he was born. He signed it underneath the chair of Pontius Pilate. Why? Well, possibly this may, this you quite often find in scenes of crucifixions that the artist will include themselves as a witness, but also saying, of course, according to Christian belief, Jesus died to save us from our sins, so the artist is saying, look, I’m a sinner. I am actually responsible for the death of Jesus.
It’s a strangely frozen scene. He’s not a, so when you get action in Piero della Francesca, it’s frozen action. Note that the man who’s whipping Christ, he’s in a, they look like sculptures. They look like coloured sculptures. And the whip just hangs limply from his hand. It looks like he’s not actually moving to hit Christ. And so he’s so concerned with this desire to make something look volumetric, to make it look 3D. And so the drapery of the figures, the clothing of the figures looks very much like it’s carved out of wood or stone. And in fact, he may have followed a method that we know that Leonardo did a little bit later in order to help himself paint the folds of drapery. He may have soaked it in plaster and let it dry. And then effectively you have a solid 3D version of the drapery to draw from. And you get the same, very much the same effect with three figures on the right hand side. So who are these three figures? Well, two, the ones on the other three, the two outer figures are in contemporary clothing.
But the one on the left is in Byzantine closing. This is from the Eastern Empire. So when this was painted, of course the Byzantine empire was under grave threat from the Ottomans, from the Muslims. And they sent delegations to Italy to beg for help to fend off the Ottomans. And it was a big issue at the time. And much discussed, in fact, in the end, the help wasn’t forthcoming, and as you know, in 1452, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. So the man on the right is wearing, he’s, you can tell he’s a very important man because he’s wearing this wonderfully rich damask textured robe, and his face is very individualised. So it’s somebody. And the most widely held theory is that it’s a man called Francesco Sforza, who was another mercenary soldier who eventually became Duke of Milan. And that he was involved in these negotiations with the Byzantines. The person in the middle is actually not wearing contemporary 15th century clothing. And it’s of an idealised face. It’s not an individualised face. So the figure in the middle is probably meant to represent an angel who is there to benignly overlook the negotiations and to bless them. Here’s the detail of the Byzantine, the detail of the angel, and Francesco Sforza. Now here are two definite portraits of Francesco Sforza, a medal and a profile portrait. So I mean, it’s up to you.
Do you think, do you think this could be the same man? I’m not totally convinced that the facial likeness is sufficient to be convincing evidence. Now, Piero della Francesca’s greatest masterpiece is a series of frescos in a church in Arezzo, close to where he was born. And these were carried out over quite a long period, from 1447 to 1466. And they have a narrative, they tell the story of the inverted cross, the true cross. And this is, the story is based on a 13th century manuscript called “The Golden Legend” by Jacobus de Voragine. And it’s an elaborate, I suppose one has to say imaginary history of the cross on which Jesus was crucified. I’m just showing you some images here of the chapels in fresco. Fresco is, the artist paints into the wet plaster, in some ways, of course, it’s a rapid technique. It has to be because you have to, you put on an area of wet plaster and you have to get everything into it before the plaster dries. So you have a day’s work for a section of the fresco. Now, according to “The Golden Legend,” the wood from which the cross came, on which Christ was crucified, came from the tree of knowledge, the very same tree that from which Adam and Eve ate the fatal fruit leading to their expulsion from paradise. And so chronologically, the earliest of the frescos in this series shows the death of Adam. You see him reclining in the bottom right hand corner here, and you see the tree of knowledge in the background. And here is the death of Adam. And you can see Eve now as a very old woman, with her sort of desiccated drooping breasts.
The chapel has undergone a very extensive cleaning and restoration in recent years. So I’m showing you two details here. Well, it’s the same detail before and after restoration. This shows, the next big episode is when the Queen of Sheba arrives in ancient Israel to visit Solomon. And she, according to this legend, recognises the tree, which was the… And she knows that this is the tree that from which the wood will be cut from which the cross will be made. So she kneels down to worship the tree, and she tells this to Solomon, and he doesn’t like this, so he has the tree cut down. Here is the Queen of Sheba kneeling to worship the tree. And here is the meeting of Solomon and Sheba. And oh yes, now I think it’s kind of disappointing and disturbing that Piero della Francesca, we think of him as his art, as representing everything that is most rational, most humane, most advanced about the early restoration. But of course there are aspects of this story, of the true cross and inverted cross, which now just strike us as very distasteful. But of course, he wasn’t in a position to choose or to object certainly, even if he’d wanted to, despite the improved status of artists in the fifties, not until much later the artists would initiate a big work.
They’re working to the command of a client. I’m telling you all of this because a rather unpleasant scene in this series is of the torture of a Jew. Now the next big episode is when St. Helena, mother of the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine, she goes on a mission to the holy land to track down the true cross. Now this is fourth century, so you have to imagine, I mean, it’s highly unlikely that the wood from Jesus’ cross will have survived for four centuries. But anyway, she goes looking for it and she knows it still exists. And of course, those pesky, wicked Jews have hidden it. And so she takes a Jew and/or she orders him to be taken and tortured and thrown down a well. And he then reveals where the tree, the true cross is, and she finds it and takes it. So of course, I’m sure you know, the famous John Knox already in the 16th century joked about the true cross that there was enough true cross spread across Europe to build a battleship. And there was of course a huge trade in fake relics in the Middle Ages. So nowadays it’s quite easy, there’s a true cross all over the place. There’s a big lump of it in Notre Dame. There were worries when Notre Dame caught fire that it would be destroyed, but no, it’s still there. Nowadays, of course, it’s very easy to test the age of wood by various scientific methods. And of course, they’ve all turned out, all these true cross things turned out to be mediaeval fakes. And here this is again part of the true cross series.
This is the dream of Constantine. He had a dream the night before a crucial battle which really established him as the emperor. That if he fought the battle under the banner of the cross, that he would win the battle. Now we move on to another very extraordinary monument of the early Renaissance. This is the Camera degli Sposi. And this is by Andrea Mantegna. And he was, starts off his career in Padua, where he painted frescos in a church there that was sadly destroyed in the Second World War, one of the great artistic losses of the Second World War. But he then moved to Mantua, and he became court artist in Mantua. This is another small dukedom that is ruled by a mercenary soldier. And this was Ludovico Gonzaga. And he commissioned this room, which is the called the Camera degli Sposi, the Betrothal Room. And it shows the court of the Gonzaga. And so Mantegna is an artist again who he, he’s got this twin obsessions, one with reviving ancient culture. He was considered to be the most learned artist of his age. Everybody was going around, you know, measuring maker, ancient monuments, reading everything they could that had survived from the ancient world in Latin or Greek. And excavating for sculptures or fragments of frescos or whatever. That’s one obsession. And he also shared this obsession with trying to give you an illusion of space and reality. And he takes this further than any other artist up to this time.
He’s very interested in effects of an extreme foreshortening like this, the highly original, it must have been very provocative image at the time of the dead Christ, not seen sideways, laid out, not seen sideways, but seen steeply foreshortened. Now he certainly, in fact, they had problems with this. And because I suppose we are used to photographic images, we know that if you had a photograph of somebody from this angle, the the feet would be absolutely enormous and the head would be tiny. And I’m sure he knows this because they, you know, they’ve done all their mathematical calculations and so on. But I think he realises that you, that he couldn’t get away with representing it like that. So he has to make certain compromises. But his most spectacular piece of illusionism is the ceiling of the Camera degli Sposi. And his effect, the Italians call it di sotto in su, where you are beneath and you are looking directly up, and again, you have extremely foreshortened effects of these little putti standing around the aperture. So this would’ve been simply staggering, simply amazing to anybody going into this room in the 15th century, and see all the figures leaning over and looking down at us.
And this shows here, here we see Ludovico Gonzaga he’s the husband of course, of, oh no, he’s the father-in-law of Isabella d'Este. And there you see him on the right in his throne, his chair, turning to consult his secretary. And in his hand he has a document. That document is certainly very significant, but art historians can’t agree about what it contains, and various different theories about what it might be. Here we see wonderfully, sharply characterised faces. These are really, these are individuals, you know, these are characters that you would recognise on the bus or in the underground if you saw them opposite. And wonderful details that show us the life of the time, dogs. And his other very ambitious work, which survives, perhaps his most ambitious work, but it survives in a very parlour state, is “The Triumph of Caesar.” These were tremendously famous and celebrated. And they were considered a great treasure. And unfortunately they were much used really as big banners and they were carried through the streets of Mantua and so on, and suffered a lot of damage. And they’ve also been very radically restored several times over the centuries. They were sold by the Duke of Mantua, a later Duke of Mantua in the 1620s to King Charles I of England. And when his collection was dispersed by Oliver Cromwell, they were retained as were the Raphael cartoons, because they were thought to be useful and that they could serve as cartoons for tapestries.
And so when Rubens was in Mantua, he studied them and he actually saw them again when he came to England in 1629. And he made very free copies of them. Rubens of course a very different kind of artist who probably wouldn’t have been interested in Mantegna from an aesthetic point of view, but was interested in his reputation for being very knowledgeable about the ancient world. And you know, all the things, like the torches, the candelabras, and clothing and so on, were all based on close study and knowledge of the ancient world. His last major work is for Isabella d'Este, the Duchess of Mantua. At the end of the 15th century, beginning of the 16th century. And I mentioned last week that she had her studiolo. She had her humanists who worked out an incredibly elaborate and learned iconography. And Mantegna did the first paintings for her studiolo, and then he died in 1506, and other artists like, I’m just trying to think who they are, names will come to me in a minute. Peregino, Piero di Cosimo, painted later pictures in series. These are now all in the Louvre. And there are extremely fascinating and strange, rather dreamlike images, these wonderful trees coming to life as you see on the left hand side. Now I’m going to deal with three, back to Florence now, and dealing with three artists active in Florence in the second half of the 15th century.
Domenico Ghirlandaio, left. Antonio Pollaiuolo, the sculpture in the middle, and Sandro Botticelli. And again, it’s very interesting that we know what they look like. The two painted images are actually figures from the backgrounds of religious works. But we certainly know, I mean, as soon as you look at these, you know that these are real people, that they are painted from real people. And the tradition going right back to Vasari is that these are self-portraits, and I think they’re generally accepted as such. Now this is Antonio Pollaiuolo. He and his brother Piero Pollaiuolo were, like so many Renaissance artists, they were multi-talented, you know, goldsmiths, sculptors, architects as well as painters. And this is a woodcut print by Antonio Pollaiuolo, that is one of the earliest prints, maybe the earliest print by a great artist. I mean, think how recently printing had, I won’t say invented, because the Chinese knew about it long before, but in Europe, printing was invented in the middle of the 15th century. So it was only a decade or so since you had printing at all in Europe. So this is a very, very pioneering print. And it’s always called the “Battle of the Nude Men.” We don’t really know what it represents, if it’s a specific battle, but it does unite two of the obsessions of Pollaiuolo. First of all, violence. There’s a lot of violence and cruelty in his work. And secondly, anatomy.
And again, he’s not alone in this. The artists in 15th century Florence who want to have a better understanding of the human body. They’re partly inspired by nude statues, excavated nude statues from the ancient world. But they’re also cutting up bodies to understand, they’re dissecting bodies to understand how the body works, how it’s put together. Of course, we know, I’m sure you all know the amazing anatomical drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, which I’ll be talking about in my next talk to you. This is the most important painting by Pollaiuolo that survives, it’s in the National Gallery in London. And again, it unites all these themes and interests of the period. It’s a very violent image of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian. The martyrdom of Sebastian is one of the most popular subjects in Christian iconography, Catholic Christian iconography. And again, it’s one of those subjects you think, why is this quite so popular? Why do we see this so often in Catholic churches? And I suppose there is a basic human, a sort of fascination with cruelty and violence. And also for those with those kind of inclinations, I think the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian panders to a certain homoeroticism, and sadomasochism. he’s always depicted as a very beautiful young man being shot through with arrows, with a facial expression, which might be agony, or it might be ecstasy. And so we see a greatly, greatly improved understanding of human anatomy and how to represent it. And also, very sophisticated use of foreshortening.
I mean, rather amazing. In the middle of the picture at the bottom, one of the executioners is bending over and he’s pointing his bottom out of the picture at us. Now, another slightly strange aspect of the picture, I think to modernise, is that the two halves of the picture are mirror images of one another. So you’ve got exactly the same poses, but reversed on either side. And you have this a pyramidal composition. The whole composition is based on geometry. You can, if you want to, you can draw sorts of lines all over the composition to demonstrate the underlying geometry of the composition. I think this is, again, something you find in a lot of Renaissance pictures. And I think they are compensating for, as I said earlier on, when pictures were flat, you could put the figures wherever you wanted them in the picture. Now the figures have to obey the laws of nature, the laws of gravity. But you want to nevertheless have a picture which has a coherent composition and pattern. So perspective, well, we can see that we’re well into the second half of the 15th century. Artists are still in a way struggling with perspective. Pollaiuolo very clearly hasn’t solved the problem of the middle ground, which I talked about last week in connection with Uccello.
If you stand in front of this picture, it’s a huge picture with life size figures. And you imagine walking into the picture or running into the picture, there’s something like an English ha-ha behind the little hillock. You know, there’s, how do you get from this little hillock where the martyrdom is taking place to the middle ground? There’s a very ambiguous area here. He hasn’t resorted to the device that Botticelli and some other artists did of putting a hedge or a wall across the middle of the picture to hide the fact that he really doesn’t know how to go from the foreground to the background. You’ve got some details you can see better. This is so, as I said, we’re into the second half of the century. I think this picture is basically tempera, but with some layers of oil painting as well. That’s something that comes into Renaissance painting in the later decades of the 15th century. There’s the interest in ancient architecture. We have a ruined Roman building, well you might say, well that’s a bit strange, ‘cause this, Sebastian was actually martyred under the Roman empire. So there’s actually no reason why a Roman building should be shown in a ruinous state 'cause it would still have been quite a new building. And then you have this wonderful view off into the distance of an Italian landscape. Here you can see rather better the executioners, and you can see my point about the poses being identical but reversed on either side of the martyrdom. And here we have a nice detail of the ruined Roman building and the view into the far distance. Now we come to Domenico Ghirlandaio. His dates are 14… Where is his dates? 1448-1494, so it’s not a very long lived artist.
This is perhaps his most famous work, which is in the Tornabuoni Chapel in Florence. And it shows the birth of the virgin, in that famous holy house of the virgin that I’ve talked about in previous lectures. That according to a mediaeval belief, was airlifted to safety to escape the invading Muslims and landed at Loreto in North Italy after stopping over in Zagreb and across the Adriatic. And once again, you see that the virgin is depicted, she obviously comes from a very well-heeled family who have a house in the absolute latest fashionable Renaissance style, extremely lavishly decorated. Here’s a detail of the water being poured to bathe the new baby. And for comparison, I show you this picture, which is also in the National Gallery in London, which is around the same date. But this is by Carlo Crivelli. And this shows the virgin now grown to womanhood, and she’s still in the, once again, in the holy house of the virgin. And here again, once again depicted as super luxurious, all sorts of wonderful luxury items like oriental carpets and peacocks and so on. And here we see the enunciation, the angel announcing this. Also witnessing is Judeus, who was a patron saint of the town that commissioned this altarpiece. And we see the actual impregnation of the virgin by the Holy Spirit.
It’s rather weird really, 'cause you could see the Holy Spirit is a little kind of cloud in the sky. And then you see these, the rays of the Holy Spirit, this nice little aperture made in the wall. Can you see that? So the Holy Spirit or holy sperm or whatever it is that’s impregnating her. And you can see the little dove. It comes down on this ray through that little hole in the wall, before it reaches the virgin. So this is a detail of an adoration with, again, the young man might be a generalised idealised portrait, and as might the older man with a beard. The two men in between them are certainly individualised faces, portraits of particular people. And usually when you have, there’ll be one face in these pictures where the, a person is making eye contact with the viewer. And this is often assumed to be a self-portrait, of course if you are painting a portrait from a mirror image, you will have eye contact. And here are more faces from the same picture by Ghirlandaio which once again seem to be very individualised, and are probably portraits of important Florentine citizens. But he also made commissioned portraits. We could see this very idealised portrait of an extremely richly and fashionably dressed young Florentine woman on the right hand side. And he, I’ve talked about this in many lectures before, that the easiest trick to flatter somebody is to add a couple of inches to their neck.
I suppose there are people with very long necks. I’m totally fascinated by Ivanka Trump and her husband, 'cause they both have extraordinarily long necks. They actually wouldn’t need much flattery from that point of view. And on the left hand side, this very touching portrait, an old man with, I’m sure there will be doctors listening who can, I remember I used to go to museums with Miriam Stoppard quite a lot, and I always benefited it from it hugely 'cause she would give me diagnoses of all the people in the pictures. She’d tell me what they were suffering from, what was wrong with them. And I know it’s a particular disease that this man had. And I’m sure in the comments at the end, there’ll be a few doctors who will remind me what that disease was. An incredibly touching picture that’s in the Louvre. So Wendy, you could go and see it if she wants to. Now we’re going to finish with Sandro Botticelli, and again, Wendy will be lucky enough to go, I suppose, a wonderful show of Botticelli at the Jacquemart-Andre Museum in Paris at the moment. I’ve been to it twice already. Here are two portraits by Botticelli. One on the left is of Giuliano de Medici, the brother of Lorenzo, who was murdered in the Pazzi Conspiracy that Trudy talked about. And the the one on the right is believed to be an idealised portrait of his great love, and a woman who certainly fascinated Botticelli, called Simonetta Vespucci. And she was the cousin, first cousin of Amerigo Vespucci, who gave his name of course, to the Americas. Two more portraits of young men.
We don’t know who they are, but again, very individualised, maybe not quite so realistic. Botticelli there’s always a certain idealisation in his work. Now, he was the pupil of Filippo Lippi. We know initially he trained as a goldsmith, and then he moved into the studio of Filippo Lippi. That’s Filippo Lippi on the left hand side. And a very early painting by Botticelli, which is closely based on the Filippo Lippi. Although even at this early stage, I think you can see his individual personality, rather more aesthetic type of beauty for the virgin than the the pleasingly plump virgin of Filippo Lippi. Two more portraits, but I’m going to move on. Now, everything I’ve shown you so far last week and this week I think has been connected to religion. But once you get to the middle and later part of the 15th century, finally there’s this interest in the classical world. We find artists depicting classical subjects like this. And also for the first time since the ancient world, depicting the female nude. And they have the authority to do this because of the huge respect that everybody has at the time for ancient culture and ancient art. So this is one of the two greatest masterpieces of Botticelli. It’s “The Birth of Venus.” We know it was commissioned by a member of the Medici family, but we don’t know which particular one, it was certainly in their possession. And it’s a painting which like so many paintings in the Renaissance is actually based on a verbal description of a lost ancient painting by Apelles. But I think one of the interesting things about it is that the proportions of the, oh, here, this incredibly beautiful face that she has. But it’s the face of Madonna rather than the face of I think a pagan goddess.
The pose is based on the so-called, the Medici Venus or the Venus Pudica. Traditionally it said that her gesture is one of modesty. But I remember Kenneth Clark saying about this statue, “No, no, no, it’s not that she’s covering up the naughty bits, she’s actually drawing attention to them with her hands.” But if you compare the two, you can see that Botticelli, with its elongated proportions, sloping shoulders, is actually more gothic than classical in its ideal of beauty. This is of course the other great masterpiece on a pagan subject. “Primavera,” most exquisitely beautiful picture. Got some nice quality details to show you. Very kind of Laura Ashley, really, this love of patterning, and decorative patterning, which is actually really a hangover from the gothic style. And in some ways you could say that Botticelli is a throwback. He’s looking back to pre-Renaissance gothic styles, and it is wonderful stylized painting of foliage, which look a little bit like gothic tapestries. This picture is in the National Gallery, and it’s “Mars and Venus,” and its elongated format suggests that it was once part of a piece of furniture. It might have been part of an enormous cassone, a marriage chest like the one you see underneath it. Or it might have been part of a cassapanca, going over a unit of seating.
In any case, it’s very likely to have been made to celebrate a marriage. And possibly it’s been suggested, the marriage of Simonetta Vespucci. Again, it may be an idealised portrait of her. But it’s “Mars and Venus.” Again, she looks to me a very gothic Venus rather than the Greek Venus. So it’s like, she’s like the Virgin Mary on a day off, you could say. And exquisitely graceful, very balletic. I love where the foot comes up with the grace of a ballet dancer. It has quite a raunchy meaning, this image, because this is Mars and Venus, of course, they had an illicit extramarital affair. She, Venus was married to Vulcan. But she had this affair with Mars, and she has exhausted him. They have had, you know, obviously wonderful, wonderful sex. And she’s still up for it I think, but he’s completely out for the count. He’s totally exhausted. When you have these naughty little foreign figures in the background, one of them is blowing a loud conch into Mars’s ear, but he’s so exhausted that he doesn’t wake up. Got some nice details. You can see Botticelli is the ultimate, what you call linear. I’ll be talking a lot when I get to Venice about the difference between linear and painterly. The Venetian artists are painterly, I think, in terms of colour and paint and the marks you put on the surface with the brush. And the Florentine artist is what Vasari called disegno. They’re really linear.
I mean, if you go to this painting in the National Gallery and you wiggle your head around, get the light reflecting off it, you’ll see that the contours are actually incised into the surface. Now all this actually painting is wonderfully pagan, hedonistic pictures in the 1480s. And then along comes Savonarola. He coincides or he predicts actually the French invasion of Italy. And this causes a huge panic, and a kind of moral hysteria really. And he denounces the Florentines for being sinful and pleasure-loving and so on. Botticelli is clearly deeply affected by this religious crisis and by the ideas of Savonarola, and apparently he actually burnt some of his own pictures, nudes and so on, bonfires of the vanities. I think Trudy’s talked more about Savonarola, so I don’t think I need to tell you too much about him. He was denouncing the corruption of the Catholic church. He was a proto-reformer, and he actually predicted that a great reformer would come from the north. So he got his prediction right there. He got his prediction there right in that case. But eventually he was denounced and there was a trial by fire that he failed and he was tortured, executed by the Catholic church. But from this point on, which we see a big change in Botticelli’s work. That hedonism, that wonderful decorative quality disappears.
These are late works, “Miracles of Saint Zenobius,” and they’re neurotic. There’s a sort of sense of agitation and anxiety about these works. Very, really quite disturbing, in this slightly nightmarish quality. And this is one of his last works, dated around 1500, by which time of course he is really passe, because the high renaissance has happened. Leonardo has come, if you compare this with Leonardo, it looks very, very old fashioned indeed. He lived long enough actually to be on the committee that was to decide on the positioning of Michelangelo’s “David.” But by this time he must have seemed very much a figure of the past. So I’m going to finish now and see what we’ve got in questions and comments. Nothing’s coming up, is it? I can’t see. Can’t see the questions.
[Moderator] The Q&A Patrick, can you see the Q&A button?
No, it’s disappeared.
[Moderator] Just move your mouse a little bit to the bottom, it should pop up again.
No.
[Moderator] Right. Let’s have a look, Patrick.
Nothing’s coming up.
[Moderator] So Valerie’s asking where the shell, where the shell was, you know the shell right at the beginning of your set, where is that?
Q&A and Comments:
- Yes, that’s in the “Brera Madonna” by Piero della Francesca and it’s in the Brera Museum. I still can’t see the comments. Oh yeah, no, yeah, Q&A. Yeah, good. Thank you.
Can you all come in November? You know, actually I know quite a few listeners are going to come in to a tour that I’m taking in early November. So look forward to meeting with them.
That’s interesting. Jews take eggs to the house of people who’ve lost a family member. But that’s not the meaning in this particular case. I think it’s connected with the birth of an heir.
Is it not odd that all, yes, it is quite odd, isn’t it, that the Piero, the figures are not only expressionless, they’re motionless. That is a strong feature of his work, and it certainly does give a sense of gravitas and solemnity. There is a studio, I think there’s, Federico da Montefeltro commissioned several of these intarsia rooms. And there’s certainly, I’ve never been to Urbino, but I know there, in fact that the Botticelli exhibition, they wanted to borrow some of the intarsia from Urbino. And in fact it wasn’t lent.
Is there a big enough coin for a recognition of lockdown or medals, I suppose medals are still. A Trudy gold coin. Yes, I think that’s, and a Wendy one, I think Wendy definitely deserves a big medal.
Q: Were the medals made by carving?
A: No, they were made by casting. You can’t, well actually that’s not true 'cause in Germany, they carved medals out of wood. But in Italy they are cast. Style of the clothes worn by Pontius Pilate. I think probably, like Mantegna, that Piero had done a bit of homework to try and find clothing that he thought was correctly classical.
Q: Were any of the Medici Jewish?
A: You have to ask Trudy that. I mean, it’s possible, but I don’t know that for sure. I mean The Borgias of course, an important family who are partly Jewish ancestry.
Yeah, thank you Joe, give us a break, yeah, I’m sorry about that, couldn’t resist it, but they are amazing looking. They also look like they’ve stepped out of a horror movie. And somebody’s saying, ah, yes now this is rhinophyma and rosacea are the diseases from which that elderly man suffers.
Thank you very much Dennis Glauber for telling me that. But Botticelli was an adept of several, hence, anti-Medici. Are we sure about that? I’m not absolutely sure. He certainly worked for the Medici before, but he may have turned against them as many people did when Savonarola came along.
Simonetta, she certainly wouldn’t have modelled for Botticelli’s Venus, that would’ve been a very scandalous thing. Although you probably know the story about Pauline Bonaparte, who posed for the Venus of Canova. And somebody was very scandalised by this, and said to her, “You surely didn’t take your clothes off in the studio?” And Pauline Bonaparte said, “Well, why not, it was heated.”
Q: Was homosexuality illegal in this period?
A: Sodomy was illegal. I don’t think they had any concept of homosexuality. I think the concept of homosexuality is really an invention of the 19th century. And that’s why people get in such a twist about Caravaggio. Was he homosexual or not? Caravaggio was sexual. My guess is he was one of those men who would bonk anything that moved and had an orifice. But what we do know about Florence in the 15th century is that what we would consider homosexuality and sodomy also was extremely, extremely widespread in Florence. We had a brief discussion of this last time. That’s why I’m not convinced that homosexuality is something inherent, because you’ll find it in some societies very prominently, very openly, a lot of it, and much less in others. So I think there’s a very, I’m sure it is inherent to a degree, but I think there’s a sort of societal, you know, it’s nature and nurture. I think the nurture part is quite important as well.
Q: Let me see. What happened to idealise?
A: I think a lot, well certainly, when we get to high Renaissance, I think there is a lot of idealisation in Italian painting altogether as compared with the north. We’ll see it’s very different when we get to the north. It was much less idealisation. And thank you for your very kind comments. I have to tell you, I’m a little bit out on a limb here 'cause, you know, I’m more of a modernist and 19th century specialist. I’ve enjoyed putting these lectures together, but they’re not essentially my specialty. Botticelli, St. Francis in fric. I’d so long since I’ve seen it, I don’t really think I can tell you about it. My future tours where you can go, MRT, Martin Randall, you can ask them. And I’ve just been booked, I’m thrilled about it, by Kirker, that’s K-I-R-K-E-R. I’m going to do a tour to Munich for them in August. God willing. Somebody else telling you, rhinophyma, I dunno how you pronounce that, is the disease old man is suffering from. I’m not going to tell you every single time, every museum. I’d never get through the lectures and the lectures would just be so boring. But I think I put quite a few locations on the list so you can, I can’t remember whether I did or not this week, but usually I do. So if you go on the list, you’ll find the information, and you’ve certainly got the titles and you could easily look them up.
Q: Do you regard his crucifixion?
A: Which I mean, I’m not sure which one you mean, the crucifixion by Mantegna. Do you mean “The Dead Christ?” It is certainly a masterpiece. It’s a very extraordinary painting. Sandra Bernstein saying it’s that, well nowadays, yes, you could say that gay people are attracted to certain cities and that was certainly true with gay women who were attracted to Paris, because Paris was very tolerant towards gay women. But I don’t think that’s the whole answer.
Q: What are the putti there for?
A: They’re partly a reference to the antique. Because you find them in antique art. And I think they’re there for decoration and pleasure. Pauline Bonaparte’s house is now, yes, the British ambassador’s residence, yes, I’ve been there actually. It’s wonderful empire style. The two companies I work for, Martin Randall and Kirker. K-I-R-K-E-R. I usually work for Martin Randall. I do lots of Paris trips for them. And I have the most, I’m doing one as, as I said, early November and another one at Christmas. And when I did go to Paris, I have the most fabulous tour manager, she’s so great. I want her to be Prime Minister. Janet Sweet saying, Aldous Huxley thought Piero’s “Resurrection” was the greatest picture ever painted. Well, I didn’t include it in this tool, that’s a bit naughty, but that’s interesting. Mantegna’s “Crucifixion” in Verona. Yeah, I haven’t been to Verona in 30 years, so I can’t really comment on that. And, yeah, do you know, Sharon, Lewis, thank you, I love the questions. And of course, you know, with a Jewish audience, you always get the best and the most challenging questions. And for me it really is a lot of fun, and I really love doing it.
And that seems to be it for today. And so my next talk to you will be on, I’ll begin the high Renaissance next time, and I’ll talk about Leonardo da Vinci. So thank you. Bye-bye.
- [Moderator] Thank you Patrick. And thank you to everybody who joined us. See you soon. Take care.