Arti Poveri, Michael Cole
Arti Poveri, Michael Cole
Michael Cole
I
N HIS BOOK Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity, Tom Nichols drew out
connections between the Venetian artist’s pictorial manner and the
economics of his practice. As contemporary writers regularly noted,
Tintoretto worked unusually quickly. His paintings, to quote Pietro
Aretino, ‘were finished in less time than normally might have been
devoted to the mere consideration of the subject’.1 And by his late career,
Tintoretto’s employers at San Rocco were taking advantage of that, con-
tractually requiring the artist to produce large amounts of work in short
order. This commitment, in turn, encouraged Tintoretto to break from
traditional techniques. He rejected, for example, the time-consuming
gesso preparations other artists used and began to paint directly on a
dark ground.2 In a painting like the Baptism of Christ (Figure 11.1), from
the Sala Superiore, the gloom has the same motivation as the quick
handling.
By delivering more painted canvas in less time, Tintoretto could
charge less for individual works than his contemporaries did. Using
inexpensive pigments – Nichols speculates that Tintoretto procured his
red lakes from the local dying industry, in which his family worked –
cheapened his production still further.3 Such cost-cutting might have
helped any artist anywhere win commissions, but the look that resulted
from Tintoretto’s approach also lent itself particularly well to the nature
of his assignments at San Rocco, where he was painting for a confratern-
ity dedicated to the care of the poor, and where many of the scenes he
depicted take place in a dilapidated world. As Nichols sees it, however,
Tintoretto’s manner was not just an index of a competitive market or
pictorial function but also a distinctive, personal response to a broader
tradition. When Tintoretto nodded to Michelangelo’s Day in his depic-
tions of the miracles of Saints Augustine and Roch, this humbled a
Roman (we might rather say ‘Medicean’) sort of magnificence.4 When
Tintoretto rejected colour in favour of light–dark drama, he cast himself
11.1. Tintoretto, Baptism of Christ, 1579–81, oil on canvas, Sala Superiore, Scuola Grande di
San Rocco, Venice
It still has the lines and shapes and colours of ‘My birds’ [an earlier video]
and you’re still looking at it through the camera obscura of the past. I
realized that what I had to do was impoverish the image. I had to give up
all the things that I thought were my strengths – the vibrant colour, the
brutal clarity of line that comes from digital animations, the sort of depth
I got by almost putting the foreground and the background together. If
you’re willing to impoverish, you can go on to something else.6
Here is the ancient Roman historian Pliny, writing on the Greeks who
preceded his own people:
It was with four colours only that Apelles, Echion, Melanthius, and
Nicomachus, those most illustrious painters, executed their immortal works;
melinum for the white, Attic sil for the yellow, Pontic sinopis for the red,
and atramentum for the black; and yet a single picture of theirs has sold
before now for the treasures of whole cities. But at the present day, when
purple is employed even for colouring walls, and when India sends to
us the slime of her rivers and the corrupt blood of her dragons and her
elephants, there is no such thing as a picture of high quality produced.
Everything, in fact, was superior at a time when the resources of art were
so much fewer than they now are.8
11.2. Giotto, Miracle of the Crucifix, fresco, Upper Church, San Francesco, Assisi
11.3. Giotto, Christ Preaching before Honorius III, Upper Church, San Francesco, Assisi
11.5. Michele Giambono, Man of Sorrows, c. 1430, tempera and gold on panel, Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York
11.6. Gentile da Fabriano, Coronation of the Virgin, c. 1420, tempera and gold on panel,
J. Paul Getty Museum
the blood that flows from Christ’s wounds. This amplifies the Franciscan
dimension of the Pietà form, since it is from the same wounds that the
rays effecting Francis’s stigmatization emerge. Yet historically considered,
the picture exhibits a replacement, blood taking over for gold.
Paintings like this point to a fundamental question that the makers
and patrons of Renaissance art confronted: should paintings of the
Virgin and Christ elevate them with regal splendour or humble them
with saintly poverty? Surely such a dilemma was felt at the court of the
single Franciscan Pope of the Quattrocento, Sixtus IV, who in summon-
ing a group of Florentine masters to paint the Sistine Chapel brought
something like the Assisi cycle to Rome itself. Its type–antitype pairs
include, for example, one between the followers of Moses, who worship
an idol cast from golden earrings, and the good Christians who listen
to Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, which begins, ‘blessed are the poor’.
It also included a ceiling of ultramarine and gold.
Perhaps the most pointed confrontation with the Franciscan ideal in
those years, however, is the bronze tomb Giovanni de’ Medici commissioned
from Antonio Pollaiuolo to honour Sixtus after his death (Figure 11.7).
The inscription at the foot of this announces Sixtus’s membership in
the Franciscan order and also nods to the fact that Sixtus had asked to
be buried in the floor rather than in a wall tomb, as a sign of humility.17
Such a gesture was, by this point, a familiar one: Andrew Butterfield,
picking up on an earlier argument by Julian Gardner, has noted that
when early Renaissance cardinals rejected the option of a wall tomb in
order to be buried in the floor, their wills typically specified that that
tomb was to be humile, and more recently Ingo Herklotz has given us
a history of the medieval tomb that turns on the opposition between the
‘sepulchre’ and the ‘monument’.18 Yet the gesture to humility in this case
must have seemed ironic, since the bronze tomb Giovanni ordered was
more costly than many a wall monument. Surely he would have been
familiar with conflicting sentiments like those of Maffeo Vegio, who
asserted that the expense of Eugenius IV’s tomb greatly displeased the
pope. The tension provides context for the remarkable additional inscrip-
tion on Sixtus’s own monument, which insists that Cardinal Giovanni
erected that moment ‘with more piety than expense’. As Alison Wright
has observed, this formula ‘neatly draws attention to, rather than veils,
the cardinal’s munificence in paying for it’.19
Do we take the phrase ‘MAIORE PIETATE QVAM IMPENSA F[ECIT]’
to mean that the patron’s piety exceeded even the tomb’s mammoth
price, or does it deny that the work cost as much as it appears to? Giovanni
must have known that such denials had a good Medici tradition. To
follow Vasari, Cosimo I de’ Medici – Giovanni’s great grandfather – had
mitigated the risky ostentation involved with building the grandest private
palace in Florence by circulating the story that the patron had rejected
a still more lavish proposal from Brunelleschi on grounds that it ‘was
too sumptuous and magnificent, and more likely to stir up envy among
his fellow citizens than to confer grandeur or adornment on the city’.20
More relevant still is another work of bronze, Donatello’s Judith and
Holofernes, which Giovanni’s grandfather Piero had outfitted with the
11.7. Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Tomb of Sixtus IV, 1484–93, bronze, St Peter’s, Vatican
desired to retouch some portions of the work a secco, as had been done by
the older masters who had painted the stories on the walls; he would also
gladly have added a little ultramarine to some of the draperies, and gilded
other parts, to the end that the whole might have a richer and more striking
effect. The Pope, too, hearing that these things were still wanting, and finding
that all who beheld the Chapel praised it highly, would now fain have had
the additions made, but as Michelangelo thought reconstructing the scaffold
too long an affair, the pictures remained as they were, although the Pope,
who often saw Michelangelo, would sometimes say, ‘Let the Chapel be
enriched with bright colours and gold; it looks poor.’ When Michelangelo
would reply familiarly, ‘Holy Father, the men of those days did not adorn
themselves with gold; those who are painted here less than any, for they
were none too rich; besides which, they were holy men, and must have
despised riches and ornaments.25
11.8. Tintoretto, Annunciation, 1583–87, oil on canvas, Sala Inferiore, Scuola Grande di San
Rocco, Venice
Or perhaps it is art itself that could not quite resolve such conflicting
demands. Vasari’s Michelangelo conveys a double sense of art’s potential:
its depictions of poverty can signify holiness, but glorious art can just
as well give a holy aura to magnificence. Tintoretto’s patrons may have
accepted his way of painting and appreciated his low prices, but they
also placed his paintings in gilded frames. Nor are the paintings of the
Scuola di San Rocco themselves always straightforward. Among the most
derelict of Tintoretto’s depicted spaces is the chamber in which the
Annunciation takes place (Figure 11.8): everything is dingy, the chair at
the edge of the room is broken, and the whole exterior of the building
seems to have collapsed. Yet the depicted interior is also an obvious
extension of the architecture of the Scuola itself, picking up both the
marble floor and gilded, coffered ceiling. How is it that the Virgin
could occupy such a house unless she was of the same privileged social
class as Tintoretto’s patrons? Perhaps the point is related to that in
Giotto’s depiction of San Damiano: the confraternity’s reform mission
includes the rebuilding of the Church. But it is also possible to read
Tintoretto’s setting as an intentional impoverishment, even a ‘soiling’,
of the space it was meant to decorate. The painting might work against
11.11. Michelangelo Merisi, called ‘Caravaggio’, The Fortune Teller, 1595, oil on canvas,
Louvre, Paris
Notes
My initial thinking on this topic owed much to my collaboration with Stephen Campbell on
our book Italian Renaissance Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2011). Readers will find my
discussions of Fra Angelico, Pollaiuolo, and Tintoretto take up themes we addressed there.
Diane Bodart drew my attention to Giambono’s use of pastiglia. I presented an earlier version
of this chapter in 2010 at the University of St Andrews. I thank Fabio Barry and Alistair Rider
for the invitation and for helpful comments.
1 Tom Nichols, Tintoretto: Tradition and Identity (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), p. 38.
2 Nichols, Tintoretto, p. 200.
3 Nichols, Tintoretto, p. 202.
4 Nichols, Tintoretto, p. 210.
5 Nichols, Tintoretto, p. 214.
6 Calvin Tomkins, ‘Shadow player: The provocations of Paul Chan’, The New Yorker, 26 May
2008.
7 Georgio Vasari, Le opera di Giorgio Vasari, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence, G.C. Sansone,
1906), vol. 1, p. 54: quando i cittadini vi erano rozzi ed il commune povero, dove ebbero
molte imagini di quelli Dei, che essi adoravano, di terra cotta; e ne’ sacrificj appresso di
loro furono in uso i vasi di terra. E molto piu si crede che piacesse alli Dei la semplicita
e povera di quei secoli, che l’oro e l’argento e la pompa di coloro li quali poi vennero.’
8 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1938), p. 299.
9 Jan Białostocki, ‘Ars auro prior’, in Aesthetics in 20th-Century Poland: Selected Essays (Cranbury,
NJ: Associated University Presses, 1973), pp. 270–85, here p. 276.
10 Donal Cooper and Janet Robson, ‘“A great sumptuousness of paintings”: Frescoes and
Franciscan poverty at Assisi in 1288 and 1312’, The Burlington Magazine 151 (2009),
pp. 656–62, here p. 659.
11 Thomas of Celano, St Francis of Assisi: First and Second Life of St Francis with Selections from
The Treatise on the Miracles of Blessed Francis, trans. Placid Hermann (Chicago, IL: Franciscan
Herald Press, 1988), p. 144.
12 For the importance of clothing as a metaphor in this period, see the excellent article by
Philine Helas, ‘The clothing of poverty and sanctity in legends, and their representations
in Trecento and Quattrocento Italy’, in Kathryn M. Rudy and Barbara Baert (eds), Weaving,
Veiling, and Dressing: Textiles and their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols,
2007), pp. 245–87.
13 Cooper and Robson, ‘A great sumptuousness of paintings’, p. 659.
14 Lorenzo Ghiberti, I commentarii, ed. Lorenzo Bartoli (Florence: Giunti, 1998), pp. 83–4.
(English trans.: Christie Knapp Fengler, ‘Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Second Commentary: The trans-
lation and interpretation of a fundamental Renaissance treatise on art’ (unpublished PhD
dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1974), pp. 17–18.)
15 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculpters and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere
(New York: Everyman’s Library, 1996), vol. 1, p. 108; cf. Vasari, Le opera, vol. 1, p. 393.
16 William Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University
Press, 1993), p. 236. When, in the following decade, Paolo Uccello began painting frescoes
in terra verde, he enacted a different kind of ‘disrobing’ of the painting, first in the Olivetan
San Miniato al Monte, then in the Dominican S. Maria Novella. Later viewers regularly
identified Uccello’s reduction of pictorial means with his modernism.
17 Alison Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers: The Arts of Florence and Rome (New Haven, CT, and
London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 377.
18 Andrew Butterfield, ‘Social structure and the typology of funerary monuments in early
Renaissance Florence’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 26 (1994), pp. 47–67, esp. p. 58;
Ingo Herklotz, ‘Sepulchra’ e ‘monumenta’ del medioevo: Studi sull’arte sepolcrale in Italia
(Naples: Liguori, 2001), p. 337.
19 Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers, p. 373.
20 Vasari, Lives, vol. 1, p. 379.
21 Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social
History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 15.
22 Hood, Fra Angelico, p. 236.
23 For a relevant example of this as a theme in Renaissance printmaking, see Madeleine
Viljoen, ‘Paper value: Marcantonio Raimondi’s “Medaglie Contraffatte”’, Memoirs of the
American Academy in Rome 48 (2003), pp. 203–26. Cristina Acidini Luchinat has observed
that the blue Andrea della Robbia began to achieve in his terracotta glazes would previ-
ously only have been obtainable ‘solo con stesure pittoriche costose’, the use of the
rare pigments like lapis lazuli. The art that aligns with impoverishment is in this case an
alchemical one. See ‘Del blu in città’, in Giancarlo Gentilini (ed.), I Della Robbia e l’arte
nuova della scultura invetriata (Florence: Giunti, 1998), pp. 9–16.
24 Paula Barocchi and Giovanni Poggi (eds) Il carteggio di Michelangelo (Florence: Sansoni,
1973), vol. 3, pp. 8, 11: ‘dissi al papa come facendovi gli Apostoli soli, mi pareva che
riuscissi cosa povera . . . perché furon poveri anche loro.’
25 Vasari, Lives, vol. 2, p. 668.
26 Paola Barocchi and Giovanna Gaeta Bertelà (eds), Collezionismo mediceo Cosimo I, Francesco
I e il Cardinale Ferdinando (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 1993), p. 181: ‘Egli è poi la
migliore personcina che si possa trovar mai, non punto avaro, come dimostra l’esser egli
poverissimo e in tutto e per tutto volto alla gloria, avendo una ambizione estrema d’arrivare
Michelangelo et a molti giudiziosi par già che l’abbi arrivato e vivendo sii per avanzarlo
e tale opinione ha il Gran Duca ancora.’
27 Ghiberti, Commentarii, p. 92: ‘Et io, o excellentissimo, non ò a ubbidire la pecunia, diedi
lo studio per l’arte.’
28 Vasari, Lives, vol. 2, p. 152; cf. Vasari, Le opere, vol. 5, p. 587.
29 Rudolf and Margaret Wittkower, Born Under Saturn (New York: Random House, 1963),
p. 263.
30 For the Leoni medal, see the discussion in Andreas Schumacher, ‘Leone Leonis Michelangelo-
Medaille: Porträt und Glaubensbekenntnis des alten Buonarroti’, in Georg Satzinger (ed.),
Die Renaissance-Medaille in Italien und Deutschland (Münster: Rhema, 2004), pp. 169–94;
also Tom Nichols, The Art of Poverty: Irony and Ideal in Sixteenth-Century Beggar Imagery
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 242.
31 This aspect of Rosa’s career – though not its relevance to the Genius etching – had already
been noted by Francis Haskell, Painters and Patrons: A Study in the Relations between Italian
Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University
Press, 1980), p. 15.
32 Haskell, Painters and Patrons, p. 22, note 1: ‘io non dipingo per arrichire mà solamente
per propria sodisfazione.’
33 See the still fundamental discussion in Marc Fumaroli, L’Âge d’éloquence (Geneva: Droz,
1980).
34 One provocative take on the themes of this essay as it bears on Rossellini and De Sica is
André Bazin’s. See, for example, ‘An aesthetic of reality: Cinematic realism and the Italian
school of the liberation’, in What is Cinema? Vol. 2, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and
London: University of California Press, 1971), esp. p. 29 (on the realism that resulted
from the technical limitations Italian directors faced) and p. 31 (on what he terms ‘modal
poverty’).
35 Paul Fréart de Chantelou, Diary of the Cavaliere Bernini’s Visit to France, ed. Anthony Blunt,
trans. Margery Corbett (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 239: ‘I after-
wards discussed with him the pictures that Prince Pamphili had sent to the King. I said
that they were all mediocre, the one by Albani being among his least successful pictures;
the landscapes by Carracci are remarkable only for the freedom with which they are
painted; they lack nobility; the Gypsy by Caravaggio is a poor work, lacking originality or
spirit.’ Cf. Chantelou, Journal de voyage du cavalier Bernin en France, ed. Milovan Stanic
(Paris: Macula, 2001), p. 212: ‘J’ai parlé, après, de ces tableaux que le prince Pamphili a
envoyé au roi . . . la Cingara du Caravage un pauvre tableau, sans esprit ni invention.’