Book review of: Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf, Fate, Glory, and Love in Early Modern Gallery Decoration: Visualizing Supreme Power (Ashgate, 2013), in: Renaissance Quarterly 68/1, Spring 2015, 259-261 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Hubert Robert – a painter who represented ancient ruins, but also buildings of his own time and imaginary architecture which is difficult to situate temporally – has left us many works which relate to the past. A painting in Dijon has been known for two centuries as “l’intérieur d’un temple antique” and has often been compared to the Pantheon or to the Palazzo dei Conservatori. In fact, the interior represented is neither antique nor Renaissance: it is the Chapelle des Catéchismes of the church of Saint-Louis in Versailles. Although this chapel was built by Louis-François Trouard in the 1760s, shortly before a drawing by Robert which served as a model for the painting, it is not altogether paradoxical that it should have been thought to be an antique temple: Trouard would probably have been proud that his chapel had been mistaken for such a building, and the painter transformed the interior to make it look more antique, as can be seen through a comparison with a view of the same interior by his main rival, Pierre-Antoine Demachy. Most importantly, in his drawing, Robert places figures in ancient dress, an antique statue and a seemingly pagan ceremony in this eighteenth-century catholic chapel. The subsequent painting is temporally less clear, as modern clothes have appeared on some figures. However, other antique elements remain, including the libation, making this picture somewhat ambiguous. This discussion is further complicated by the fact that the picture has a pendant representing the Roman baths in Paris used as stables in the eighteenth century: Robert thus shows us both a Roman interior as it was used in his own day, and its opposite, a contemporary interior set in Roman times. Thus our painting has a very complex relation to temporality, and our proposal is to develop and clarify the themes which have been briefly exposed here, so as to reach conclusions which may be more generally applicable to other works by Robert and other artists of his day.
review of Claudia La Malfa, Raphael and the Antique, 2019
Renaissance Quarterly, 2021
Jupiter Dolichenus in Rome in light of archaeological findings, and shows that, despite past doubts, Pirro proves to be a reliable source. Ligorio's interest in the antiquities of Southern Italy is assessed by Federico Rausa, who reconstructs his knowledge of ancient sites in Sicily, and Anna Schreurs-Morét, who studies his archaeological explorations in Naples, focusing on the representation of sirens. In the third section, "Pirro Ligorio and the Renaissance Villa," Carmelo Occhipinti starts with the reuse in the Casino of Pius IV of the twelfth-century pavement originally in the choir of Old St. Peter's Basilica, and studies the cultural context of a growing interest in Christian archaeology, especially in the circle around Carlo Borromeo. The Casino is also the subject of Arnold Nesselrath's essay, a refreshing hands-on analysis of the building that, somehow against the general trend of the volume, turns out to be quite critical of Ligorio's skills as an architect. George Hugo Tucker analyzes two texts about the iconographic program of Villa d'Este: Uberto Foglietta's Tyburtinum and, more importantly, the poems of Marc-Antoine Muret, whose humanistic conceptions influenced Ligorio's project. One of the most important contributions of the volume is the last section, "Pirro Ligorio and the Visual Arts." Ligorio's production as a painter and draftsman, which was his main activity for a long time, still needs to be properly addressed. Ian Campbell analyzes the so-called Oxford Album, assembled after Ligorio's death, which includes reproductions of contemporary buildings. Ginette Vagenheim establishes a corpus of autograph drawings that will be the starting point of any future contribution to the topic. Patrizia Tosini presents a reassessment of Ligorio's activity as a painter and architect. Fernando Loffredo shows the influence of Ligorio's ideas on the contemporary use of statues in colored marble and in the general attempt to recreate the ancient world, mixing modern decoration, ancient pieces, and imitations of classical art.
Renaissance Quarterly, 2019
pages goes, "Liefde baart kunst" (Love gives birth to art [364, 384]), but other powerful motives were fame and wealth (391-92). Much attention is paid to the last of these. Italian and Japanese erotica are explained as products of capitalism (103). The final essays focus on the marketplace: Woodall discovers economic motives in an album amicorum; Lisa Rosenthal compares kinds of possession in Frans Francken's cabinet painting with the episode of Odysseus discovering the boy Achilles; Natasha Seaman represents "desire by candlelight" via Honthorst's avaricious Old Woman with Coins-identifying her as a procuress and supplying a context of lewder images. Here and elsewhere, the technique might be called invisible iconography, supplying the absence of attributes and characters common in other treatments of the theme. Rodney Nevitt interprets Vermeer's Milkmaid as a biblical Martha (though Jesus and Mary are nowhere to be seen), as a Madonna Lactans, and as a Caritas (though she is preparing bread-and-milk pobs rather than breastfeeding). Readers can make interesting connections among the twenty-one essays. For example, Marco Aurelio Severino said of inflamed lovers that "a trunk, a rock, a twig, a tree may appear to them to be the beloved woman" (32, cited by de Boer), which throws additional light on Melion's epic study of the "anthropomorphic" faces that he sees in drawings and a print by Hendrick Goltzius. Odell's figure 4.9, a woodcut of the Visitation designed to convert the Chinese, is copied exactly from Chorpenning's figure 14.3, an engraving by Hieronymus Wierix. These useful essays take us deep into the details of Dutch material culture, and into multiple disciplines: Margit Thøfner's study of a devotional print includes a musical score by Cornelis Verdonck. The volume moves centrifugally away from "the related themes of lovemaking and image-making in the visual arts" (rear cover), but the distance is made up by the breadth of local knowledge and insight.
The Role of Painting in the Definition of Spaces in Medieval Art
Following Forms, Following Functions: Practices and Disciplines in Dialogue, 2018
Mural paintings play a fundamental role in the definition of the architectural spaces. Far from being a mere a container/contained kind of relationship, they deeply interact with the architecture by simulating spaces not existing in the physical reality and by suggesting mental and spiritual spaces thanks to the allusive function of the images. In a well-known article published in 1979, the scientists S. J. Gould and R. C. Lewontin, used the images in the spandrels in St. Mark in Venice as a starting point for a criticism to the evolutionist and adaptationist theories: in their interpretation, the spandrels became a metaphor of biological characters which were originally born for other functions ¬¬- or which had no function at all ¬- and that only subsequently were used in an adaptationist way. Starting from this article and as part of an attempt to find an objectual function of mural painting, we will present some case-studies from many geographical areas and centuries, aiming to show how Medieval mural painting did not limited to an “exaptive” function, forcing itself into the dimensions of the architectural container, but it will be shown how it could even “manipulate” the form of the spaces housing it.