Tournus Abbey has never been analysed otherwise than by the formalist method. A change in approach will permit to uncover new secrets relating to this monument. A study of the political context – not an easy matter – reveals a very close relationship between Italy and Burgundy around the year 1000, and the twinning of the two construction sites: of Saint-Bénigne in Dijon and that of Saint-Philibert in Tournus.
Almost ignored by historians, the putsch in 1002 at least partially explains the ‘white mantle of churches’, a vast reconstruction movement which Rudolf Glaber believed to have started in that year. Dijon and Tournus are the chefs-d’oeuvre of a co-ordinated wave of construction with a focus on political separatism.
The evocation of Constantine’s accession to power permeates the whole conception of galilee. This is the only part of the abbatial structure analysed here. Several monuments constructed between 310 and 320 served as inspiration to the architect; they are here reproduced in a reduced size. This evocation seems to be connected to Constantine’s Vision of the Cross, an event which, according to an ancient tradition, took place in the Tournus area. This episode is certainly related to the life of Saint Valerien, the evangelist of Tournus, in the second century. This is the first time that such a long legitimising tradition has been described.
The study also reveals that the architect of this abbey can be no other than Guillaume de Volpiano, and the commissioner Otte-Guillaume, duke of Burgundy, his second cousin.
Going beyond the violent imagery conventional to Italian representations of the subject, Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Massacre of the Innocents (1485–1490) presents an unsettling mixture of dazzling beauty and graphic violence. The fresco, located in the high chapel of the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella, juxtaposes sumptuous fabrics and gleaming metal surfaces with bloodied and broken infant bodies. While representations of the Massacre often featured piles of mangled corpses, the prominent inclusion in the fresco of pieces of the Holy Innocents – severed heads and arms – was a highly atypical divergence from the established iconography of the scene. This article considers how the depiction of body parts in the Ghirlandaio fresco – and in a related painting of the same subject by Matteo di Giovanni – shaped the viewing experience. I argue that in their original devotional context, these paintings would have fostered a ‘reliquary mode of seeing’ by combining formal features characteristic of reliquaries with the representation of relic-like body fragments. Furthermore, the relationship with reliquary devotion was made exceptionally palpable and immediate by the presence of relics of the Holy Innocents in the churches were both paintings were located. The body parts in the paintings thus would have served as metonyms for the relics themselves: the depicted heads and limbs framed with painted signs of material splendor, the actual relics encased in precious materials.
The picture now in Antwerp depicting Jacopo Pesaro, the bishop of Paphos, and Pope Alexander VI before Saint Peter is sometimes referred to as Titian’s earliest painting. In writing about it Panofsky suggested ‘there is hardly any trace of blue: St. Peter is clad in a red mantle (Titian did not as yet know, or chose to disregard, the tradition according to which St. Peter should wear a yellow mantle over a blue coat)’. But did such an iconographic cannon of color exist during the Renaissance and if so, was Titian simply too young to know better when he put Peter in red? A quick look at other North Italian paintings by artists such as Mantegna, Girolamo Dai Libri and Giovanni Bellini suggests that Titian was probably well aware of a tradition of dressing Saint Peter in red and yellow. No doubt, he was also fully aware that certain colors were given moral meanings in emblem books and contemporary poetry. Red, for example, was a color of the liturgical calendar marking Christ’s Passion and the blood of the martyrs and was specifically associated with papal authority. Saint Peter, we might posit, is shown in pontifical red because he represents the divinely sanctioned authority of the Church. This authority is underscored by the red and gold papal banner being presented to him, by the pope and Jacopo Pesaro before the papal fleet sailed into battle against the Turks. From at least the eleventh century, popes had personally bestowed specially blessed banners on warriors leading military expeditions. It is hard simply to dismiss Titian’s choice of red in the Antwerp picture as a youthful misstep when one realizes that around 1526 he again used red and yellow for Peter’s garments in the San Nicolò della Lattuga altarpiece. Titian, it seems, was not too young to know that within different contexts, Saint Peter’s role and hence the color of his drapery might change.
GIORGIO TAGLIAFERRO - A New Agony in the Garden by Titian and His Collaborators, and the Problem of Originality in Late Titian (pp. 107-126)
A New Agony in the Garden by Titian and His Collaborators, and the Problem of Originality in Late Titian
Throughout his career, and especially in the last three decades of his life, Titian issued from his workshop a sizeable number of variants and replicas of compositions of any subject and format. The circulation of so many paintings was boosted by a huge request from collectors across Europe, and helped Titian to establish himself as a widely celebrated artist. Over the years, the master developed an unconventional working method that privileged the unevenness of the pictorial surface over uniformity and homogeneity, thus emphasising the process of art-making. Indeed, it is especially for his peculiar, idiosyncratic handling of the brush that he was renowned, and his paintings sought after. Furthermore, this technique matched up with the cult of the personality that Titian himself fostered. At the same time, however, several of the variants and replicas produced in the late years raise the problem of how the collaboration with assistants affected the notion itself of authorship and originality. How did his innovative technique, which highlighted his virtuosity and individuality, go with the documented, extensive contribution by his collaborators? Moreover, if each variant or replica received a unique, distinctive pictorial treatment, can we still draw a clear line between originals and derivations?
By presenting a previously unpublished version of Titian’s Agony in the Garden, whose composition is known through a painting executed for Philip II and now in the monastery of San Lorenzo del Escorial, this study seeks to discuss and establish a new theory of the nature of authorship in Titian’s late collaborative works. The new painting is here acknowledged as a joint work by the master and his collaborators, and stands as an example of how the novel aesthetics developed by Titian tolerated and perhaps even encouraged the incorporation of different hands into many of his late works.
The ‘Loggia della Galatea’ in the Villa Farnesina has a long history among iconographers. We know that the subjects were selected to convey themes involving the Four Elements in order to celebrate the patron Agostino Chigi: Fire in relation to the vault painted by Baldassarre Peruzzi, Air for Sebastiano del Piombo’s lunettes, Earth and Water for the main frescoes on the wall, Sebastiano’s Poliphemus and Raphael’s Galatea. But whereas Chigi’s horoscope has been recognized as a perfect clockwork of astrology, with the mythological gods associated with the planets, and Chigi’s marital plans are alluded to by the Galatea, symbolizing Neoplatonic love, there has been no explanation concerning the Ovidian themes painted in the lunettes, an embarrassing assembly of baleful events, ranging from rape to abduction, violence, betrayal and death. This author provides specific new readings of them, explaining the violent stories taking place in the realm of Air as symbols of the passions according to the sixteenth-century moralizing commentaries on the Metamorphoses (up to now never considered in this context, but crucial to the understanding the overall organization of the decorative programme of the Loggia), closely connecting them to Agostino’s microcosm. Thanks to this newly discovered system of meanings, which allows for the identification of previously misunderstood subjects, such as the Cumaen Sibyl and Apollo, the lunettes can be now firmly placed into a tightly structured and consistent iconographic programme of the Loggia.