The Italian Renaissance - Subjects &Symbols in Tuscan Painting

cultură – societate – educaţie

Victor PopescuScoala Gimnaziala Nicolae Iorga, Iasi21 nov. 2021

Among the remarkable people in my life, I should like to thank in particular Mr Alasdair McMorrine and Mr Vittorio Santoianni for their expertise and precious advice on countless matters of Renaissance art. The Italian Art has always been a subject of vivid interest to me. It was in my parents’ library that I first came across the works of Leonardo da Vinci. Since then, I have been under the spell of the angelic Madonnas wrapped in the mysterious sfumato atmosphere. Leonardo’s invisible caduceus gave birth to masterpieces such as Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, an unfinished mystical painting that can be contemplated in the Musei Vaticani in Rome. The Latin Father of the Church is portrayed as a penitent, dishevelled and partly naked hermit, holding a stone with which he may beat his breast. The lion, his devoted friend, rests in the foreground. Leonardo’s Saint Jerome is depicted as a wilderness ascetic abandoning the ways of civilization and humanity, turning his back on all comforts and community. He is on the lookout for solace and enlightenment in nature. For Leonardo, nature and art were constructed in what he called a ‘harmonious ensemble’. If Leonardo epitomises the Vitruvian Man in art, Paolo Uccello is best remembered for the discovery of perspective in painting. He was namely one of the first artists to attempt the mathematical representation of space in The Battle of San Romano portrayed in a cycle of three panels. Over five centuries ago, all three hung together in Michelozzo’s chef d’oeuvre, the Medici Palace in Florence. London‘s National Gallery version of ‘The Battle of San Romano’ is a monument to the military leader, Niccolo´ Mauruzi da Tolentino. Uccello portrays the Italian condottiere wearing a magnificent hat of red and gold velvet brocade. In his most influential book, ‘One Hundred Details from the National Gallery, London’, Kenneth Clark states that The Battle of San Romano is no more than a glorified nursery picture. It is not only one of the finest pieces of colour and design in the Gallery but shows that Uccello was capable of creating a world more vital than the classical painting of the next century and no less authentically ideal. Leonardo Bruni, Florence’s official speaker, declared that Tolentino possessed all the virtues of a great military leader:’courage in the midst of danger, perseverance, an overview of all operations and the gift of foresight.’ In those times, Italy was a theatre of war. Like most flags in the Middle Ages, Tolentino’s pennant is not rectangular, but ends in two long tongues. The emblem of the mercenary leader is a ring of rope with knots. He may have chosen this himself, or it may have been awarded to him. The knot is a symbol of union and was also the impresa of Francis I (1494-1547), king of France. Flags, like coats of arms became particularly important following the introduction of visors. Since knights could no longer be recognized by their faces, they needed other forms of identification. The Battle of San Romano is like an allegorical tsunami of lancers, horses, helmets and broken lances. Tuscherus Katamantane! Festive processions were extremely popular in Renaissance Italy. Combining lavish display, fancy dress and self-publicity, they offered a welcome distraction from everyday life. Florentines, in particular, adored such spectacles, and the processions through their city. Benozzo Gozzoli, one of the most esteemed and prolific artists of the Renaissance, is known today as an illustrator of fifteenth-century Florentine life with a taste for ceremonial and pageantry. When the art-loving Medici family commissioned him the chapel of the present-day Palazzo Medici Riccardi with a series of frescoes, it had almost reached the summit of power in Florence. The artist, who started work on the frescoes in 1459, used the Christian legend of the Procession of the Magi to create a magnificent monument to the proud and ambitious dynasty of bankers. The subject of the Three Kings (Three Wise Men) was a favourite for the rich mecena, who wanted to show their financial status through the lavish display of gold ornaments and expensive colours. In the summer of 1459, Benozzo Gozzoli wrote to his ‘distinguished friend’ Piero de’ Medici asking for an advance, so that he could negotiate a better price for the large quantities of gold and ultramarine that he needed to buy. Beautiful horses with scarlet and golden bridles, bearded types in exotic costumes and strange headdresses mingle in Gozzoli’s fresco with smooth-shaven Florentine merchants. At the head of the procession rode the Byzantine basileus John VIII Palaeologos, accompanied by Joseph, patriarch of the Orthodox Church. The Orient came to Tuscany. In the face of the youngest of the Magi – so tradition has it – Benozzo di Lese di Sandro (on his real name) painted a portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449 – 1492), who represented the third generation of Medici rulers. Escorted by six armed young men (condottieri), the Magnificent rides a horse whose bridle bears the family devices of golden balls and ostrich plumes. Lorenzo himself appears against a laurel bush – a play upon the Latin word laurus, from which his name was derived. The small-leaved Laurus nobilis, was that from which the victor’s crown was made. It is a symbol of glory and the attribute of Apollo. The laurel bush was an impresa of Lorenzo de’ Medici, with the motto ‘Ita ut virtus’, ‘Thus is virtue’, id est evergreen. That Cosimo de’ Medici chose to have himself depicted as a penitent in the Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem was a powerful expression of the Medici’s quest for redemption. Wishing both to make vivid restitution for his sins and to show off his piety and humility, this dimension of his portrait was entirely in keeping with his family’s development of a long-standing trend among Florence’s shady bankers, and wholly reflective of his awareness of the perceived immorality of his usury.7 Portraiture and self-portraiture were primarily expressions of Renaissance humanism and hubris. Portraits, in particular, grew more numerous as social conventions trickled down from the upper classes, extending the reach of the genre beyond princes and cardinals to include bankers, businessmen, and even members of the artisanal class. As far as the evidence suggests, many years would pass before cooks would be commemorated in this fashion, but painters began to include themselves as bystanders in narrative paintings as early as the 1420s. Among the first to do so was Masaccio (1401-1428), one of the founding fathers of Renaissance pictorialism. In ‘The Rising of the Son of Theophilus’, one of the frescoes he painted in the Brancacci Chapel in Chiesa del Carmine in Florence – a commission that proved to be the most important of his brief career – Masaccio favored his Carmelite patrons and the public at large with a portrait of himself and four shadowy associates standing in the company of St. Peter. I cannot end this artistic journey through the golden pages of Tuscan Renaissance painting without paying my homage to one of the greatest artists of the period, Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, called il Botticelli (1445-1510) Sandro Botticelli was made famous by his ‘Primavera’ (formerly known as ‘The Garden of the Hesperides’), his sweetly-smiling Madonnas, images of seraphic peace and harmony, and his unforgettable Venus. With the Renaissance, the attitudes changed. The Florentine humanists were able to regard Voluptas, that is, sensual gratification and an aspect of Luxury, as a virtuous pursuit. Lust tends to shade off in the person of Venus. In Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’ (Spring), the Roman goddess of love and fertility is the focal point. Venus stands at the center of the painting. Zephyrus, a wind god, the figure on the right, blows pleasant breezes that bring eternal spring. The goddess Flora scatters her scented flowers (hyacinth, iris, anemone, pheasant’s eye), while on the left, the god Mercury keeps watch, sheltering the garden against threatening clouds. Venus’s golden apples are here painted as oranges known in antiquity as the ‘health fruit’, medica mala. The vision of a Venus humanitas informed the ideal of womanhood in15-th century Italy. The Florentine ideal of womanhood demanded not only beauty, but education. Noli cedere cognoscere.

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