Emulation X.1 The Theater of Aspirations

The Carracci and their Models I

[The Carracci’s] art was not exclusionary, but synthetic, seeking to identify various excellences, identifying their different perfections, and then to assimilate them. They did not reject the canonical status of Michelangelo, Andrea del Sarto, or Raphael, each of whom in his different way represented a classical and idealist art. They instead sought to assimilate to this canon the naturalistic and illusionistic canons of Venice and Emilia, exemplified with the examples of Titian and Correggio, and in so doing render the ideal with convincing verisimilitude.^[1]

Annibale Carracci, Pietà

Perhaps no body of artists so substantively reshaped artistic practice and discourse as the two Bolognese brothers Annibale and Agostino Carracci, along with their slightly older cousin Ludovico. The practice of emulation in the work and studies of the Carracci academy is, without a doubt, its most singular characteristic. While their reform of painting centered on drawing from life, that seemingly neutral exercise was not unmediated by artistic precedent and experience. On the contrary, their particular approach to disegno was rooted in connoisseurship, in which the ways one made contours and indicated shadow were shaped by a profound knowledge of the possibilities discovered by artists over the preceding century. The way they taught in their academy of Gl’Incamminati (those on the way) was competitive among the students, but also competitive with respect to the past and present; Agostino designed their impresa, whose motto Contentione Perfectus, ‘through competition perfected,’ suggests that the competitive aspect was an essential aspect of learning. Students were compared and evaluated vis-à-vis each other, and having one’s drawing recognized as the first, or second, or third in the group clarified without further comment what the standards were.^[2]

            [T]he stylistic polemic in which the Carracci were engaged did not revolve simply around an opposition of naturalism to idealism as such, and that indeed their art sought to incorporate within itself both terms. On the one hand their painting was conceived as an optical technique for giving the illusion of reality, and on the other as an imaginative technique for presenting an idea.^[3]

            It was in disegno that they apprehended and synthesized what they perceived to be the best of art until their time, and this mode of apprehending, a taste for particular aspects of drawing—like a firm, lively contour and nuanced hatching of shadows—gave them the tools to extend their art and potentially exceed all who had come before them. And while they trumpeted their own Emilian heroes like Correggio and among the Venetians especially Paolo Veronese, the paragons upon whom they turned these retooled artistic guns were inevitably Raphael and Michelangelo. In the Roman palace, that of the Farnese family, Annibale and Agostino had the opportunity to take on both.

            Annibale Carracci’s rivalry with Michelangelo and Raphael was not so much eristic as aspirational, in the sense that he was not interested so much in overturning as exceeding them. Part of this depended on separating out in their oeuvre those works that were exemplary by his standards from those that either went astray or led others astray; for example, with Michelengelo there was a perceptible gulf between his work before and after the Sack of Rome. Michelangelo’s own struggle with where to go with his art after a series of universally acknowledged peaks did not, for the Carracci, inevitably lead to different but equally good avenues, as modern historiography might want it. When artists achieve the stature of a Michelangelo, there is every impetus for us to justify whatever they did, even if it is not consistent with their other work and philosophy. Artists in their opinions of others are not so constrained. If one wanted a classical ideal of the figure in proportion, contour, and modeling, one found it on the Sistine ceiling but less so in the Last Judgment.

            The very clear impression created by Annibale’s Pietà is of Michelangelo’s Pietà existing in time, as though the Virgin, emotionally drained or unconscious, has released the body of Christ, allowing Him to slide from her lap. In other words, those parts of Annibale’s Christ that are different from Michelangelo’s Christ are consistent with changes occurring in real time and space: Were Michelangelo’s Virgin to relax her hold on Christ’s body, that side would fall precisely the way it does in Annibale’s Christ, and the same for the other arm and the rest of the figure.^[4]

            Annibale’s respect for Raphael and Michelangelo at their best is evident in works of his that draw directly on those heroes of Vasari’s Third Age. A clear case is his painting of the Pietà, now in Naples, which derives quite deliberately from Michelangelo’s canonical sculpture in St. Peter’s. Carl Goldstein has clearly elucidated the way in which Annibale began with the marble (or his brother Agostino’s print of it), and then activated it, or rather set the scene in motion: Christ slides off of the exhausted Madonna’s lap, and now his head rests there, facing us rather than facing up; and she, for her part, while retaining her proper left hand in a position of pleading or supplication, now adopts a more mournful pose and expression than the somewhat passionless Mary of the marble. Much changes inevitably from marble to paint: from a highly polished and deeply undercut Carrara stone to saturated hues and chiaroscuro in oil; from the unity of two figures in stone to a distinct, beautifully complementary palette of Mary’s complex blue drapery and Christ’s still warm flesh tones, which begin to give way subtly at hands and feet to a deathly pallor (reinforced by the beginnings of rigor mortis in toes and fingers). Carracci also adds two rhetorical putti, one supporting Christ’s left arm while looking toward his companion pained by the crown of thorns. The latter, oddly enough, seems to be referencing Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard, which predates the Pietà by at least three years. The dark background may as well owe something to Caravaggio’s manner, whose paintings in the Contarelli Chapel in S. Luigi dei Francesi were being painted at roughly the same time. Those references are likely to be eristic, as the two artists were already perceived as representing opposing camps in early Baroque Rome.

            What is “better” about Annibale’s interpretation of the scene, by something like his own standards, than Michelangelo’s? His Madonna’s drapery ripples, folds, and follows her body more naturally and less obtrusively, reinforcing and focusing the composition (this is something which Bernini would later develop to even greater effect). He sustains Michelangelo’s rocky outcrop (a hint of the later non finito), but turns it from something ostensibly naturalistic (the raw stone of which the figures are carved) into more severe, cut blocks of the implicit tomb: these function as clear contrasts to the supple figures, heightening their relevance both compositionally and meaningfully. Mary is slightly older than her marble model, and her mournful expression (derived in part from the study of Correggio’s ability to capture emotion) makes of her a more expressive actor and makes the painting as a whole, therefore, more expressive. At some point, likely in the seventeenth century, two bronze cherubs were added hovering over the marble group, a Baroque response to what by then must have seemed a somewhat unanimated mise en scène (and may in fact have been motivated by Annibale’s painting).

drawings by David Mayernik

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[1] Dempsey, C. 1986.  “The Carracci Reform of Painting,” in The Age of Correggio and the Carracci: Emilian Painting of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Washington: National Gallery of Art. 247

[2] Flick, G.-R. 2008. Masters & Pupils. London: Hogarth Arts. 107–108

[3] Ibid., 246

[4] Goldstein, C. Visual Fact Over Verbal Fiction. 142–3

Emulation IX.1

Typing Emulation

The idea of the type, or genre, was critical to emulative thinking. Individual images could be rivaled, but they also incurred suspicions of too overt dependence, or worse, plagiarism. The type was crucial to the whole classical framework, wherein individual expression was channeled through existing, familiar forms. Certainly this was true in the ancient world, especially for the Romans, who cultivated Greek typological forms like the temple, statues of Apollo, portraits of emperors and other famous figures, etc.; these typological forms established a framework of expectations for images, without explicitly prescribing specific images to copy. It is not, of course, that copies weren’t made, but mass production of repetitive images was far less common than free copies and emulations. This way of thinking survived the dissolution of classical culture, continuing in the medieval Christian traditions of depictions of saints and members of the Holy Family. It recovered something like its classical nature in the Renaissance, as artists sought their own unique interpretations of familiar themes. By the Baroque period, expectations of novel interpretations fostered an expansive variety of images that were both typologically grounded and formally liberated.

Imitating Images or Emulating Types: Sts. Sebastian and Andrew

Mattia Preti, S. Andrea

It is the nature of certain figures associated with powerful narrative moments, in particular martyred saints, that a standard type soon emerges that every artist who is charged with depicting the figure must acknowledge in one way or another. This is certainly true of images of St. Sebastian, tied to a tree and pierced by arrows: artists from the fifteenth century onward couldn’t avoid, or couldn’t resist, displaying their command of his partially nude body in a state of restrained agony. There was almost no way to paint or sculpt St. Sebastian without acknowledging—as scholars do with their footnotes—those precedents with which every connoisseur was expected to be familiar. Some of these successor images are more overtly imitative than others, but for the cases of those artists that History has claimed as masters, it was precisely the expectations about the form of St. Sebastian that sponsored imitative or emulative performances, in which those things that distinguished a new version of the theme asserted themselves simultaneously with those that recognized the tradition. In Rome, a similar case emerges a little later with St. Andrew, like his brother Peter crucified in a way different from Christ, and by choice. While Peter was crucified upside down, Andrew chose the diagonal cross, associating forever in Italian the X form with the croce di S. Andrea.

Like Sebastian, Andrew could be shown either appended to his tree/cross, or in some way disengaged from it, the armature more a foil than a support. The dynamism of the X accorded with the dominant Baroque compositional device of diagonal disposition of elements, in both two- and three-dimensions. In concert also with the Baroque fascination with spiritual ecstasy, Andrew and his cross in sculpture are rarely represented as a narrative scene, but rather as an icon or emblem, saint and cross bound as much by choice as suffering. Arguably, the tradition begins with François Duquesnoy’s St. Andrew in the crossing of St. Peter’s, done under Bernini’s direction as part of his combined Baldacchino and crossing piers project; one of four principle saints whose relics the basilica contains, Andrew was the only apostle of the four (the apostle Peter of course was represented by the basilica itself, and his tomb below the Baldacchino). Duquesnoy, otherwise an arch-classicist, here in an early, major commission seems to have taken on rivalry with Bernini not by emulating any existing image of S. Andrea, but imagining that if Bernini had undertaken the figure how he would have done it. While Wittkower discounts the Andrew at the expense of Bernini’s Longinus, Duquesnoy undoubtedly established himself as equal to the challenge of creating a powerful, self-contained figure that could hold its own against the vast scale of the crossing. He also wound up inventing an image of the saint whose ripple effect would propagate around Rome for more than a century.

Succeeding images of Andrew and his cross appeared in the middle of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. Of painted versions, the two most significant are those of Mattia Preti in S. Andrea della Valle, and of the Frenchman who worked mostly in Rome, Guillaume Courtois (Cortese, “Il Borgognone”), at S. Andrea al Quirinale. Both painted scenes involve complex settings, in the former case stressing the mechanics of erecting the weighty cross, emphasizing its verisimilitude, while the latter is tied to Bernini’s concetto of the church, with Andrew gazing up to a cascade of golden painted angels that are extended into gilded stucco figures spilling down from the altar’s lantern. Charged with depicting the moment of martyrdom, each artist shows the saint strapped on the cross, its timber by now as rugged as a newly cut tree trunk. While Michelangelo would sculpt his Christ holding an abstract, geometrical cross in S. Maria Sopra Minerva, something about the diagonal croce di Sant’Andrea would imply the naturalistic logs that Duquesnoy’s figure embraces—a cross in this case almost large enough to have actually supported the figure, unlike most later sculpted images.

Ercole Ferrata, S. Andrea

Ercole Ferrata’s figure in a niche on the façade of S. Andrea della Valle, following on the completion of the architectural armature, shows the saint in rapt, prayerful ecstasy in front of his cross, which acts as a compositional foil to the flame-like form of Andrew. For Ferrata the cross is a useful prop, but hardly integral to the saint’s action: it is, rather, an emblem and armature, and as a formal foil, it at once stabilizes and expands the energy of the figure. What Ferrata adds to Duquesnoy’s type is the aspect of ecstasy, a passionate posture that charges the image with Berninian rapture; the Fleming’s saint is rather in a state of wonder, expressed at the site of the baldacchino as much as the instrument of his martyrdom. Thus Ferrata, in a way, sculpts the image that Bernini in his later years might have done.

It would take Camillo Rusconi’s St. Andrew in the nave of S. Giovanni in Laterano to unite the mass of the marble figure in St. Peter’s with the rapture of the later painted figures and the ecstatic sculpture on the façade of S. Andrea della Valle. Rusconi’s saint lovingly embraces his cross, bonding him to the instrument of his martyrdom with piety and pathos. He is enraptured by it, whereas Ferrata’s figure gazes raptly up and out at heaven. Rusconi’s St. Andrew and his cross are one, a single compositional figure in two parts.

Camillo Rusconi, S. Andrea

None of these interpretations mimics the other, but they are all united by the geometry of the diagonal cross and the rustic hulk of the bearded fisherman saint. They are conscious of their predecessors, but independently conceived, each striving for the most affective representation. For a martyr whose symbolic device is so massive, it is inevitable that that symbol would function almost as a companion figure. Posture, gesture and expression alternately link and distinguish the man from the wood of the cross. One has the sense of a limited range of possibilities being explored, the most poignant exploited as the situation and medium required or permitted. But from the moment of the unveiling of Duquesnoy’s statue, the emulative field had been established. And to imitate any of them too closely was to be guilty of a poverty of invention.

Emulation VIII.1: Excerpt: The Emulative Life

Emulation as Performance

Leading up to the publication of my book The Challenge of Emulation in Art and Architecture (scheduled availability, 28 October), I will be posting some excerpts that seem relevant to some contemporary issues. Like this from the New York Review of Books on forgers:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/forgery-art-phony/?pagination=false

I make a point early in the book that forgery is decidedly not emulation, and while the forger’s ego is a particularly weird one, forgers do tend to love the art they fake, which isn’t all bad, right?

http://www.kenperenyi.com/british.htm

Giorgio Vasari, Rubens, Mantegna, and Giulio Romano

Allegory of Painting, Casa Vasari

For Giorgio Vasari, artistic ability and accomplishments furnished a kind of nobility that could blank out many other defects. It also afforded fame. In the salone of his house in his hometown of Arezzo he painted scenes of famous artists from antiquity, as a means of identity both with their accomplishments and their fame. Indeed, artists’ houses became primary points of emulative performance, where they proclaimed not only their learning but also their status. In Giulio Romano’s house in Mantova—an impressive mini-palace that inspired Vasari to build his own, albeit more modest, version—the Gonzaga’s architect-artist outwardly projected his dignity, while inside his collection of ancient coins and gems displayed his wealth and refinement, something that trumped most ancient artists by equating him with scholars and princes. Artists around Europe knew about Giulio’s house precisely because Vasari visited and wrote about it, and it is not too much of a stretch to say that the Lives themselves are a long essay on a kind of existential mimesis, a trumpeting of the arrival of artists to a stature little known in antiquity, and yet formed on those stories from Pliny the Elder and others about the most famous artists of Greece and Rome. So it is natural, then, that Rubens—who had lived in Mantova, and read Vasari—would see it as essential that he not only build his own house in Antwerp, but that it would project his status and learning in its richness, and most fully in its iconography. And do so in a way that both paid homage to his predecessors and exceeded them.

Rubenshuis, Antwerp

            Rubens’ house on the Vaart canal was at once home, studio, and gallery. Apart from its size, it proclaimed the artist’s status through its rich ornamentation, the collections it housed, and the work for international clients continually being produced there. It also, in its incremental way, contributed to the urban landscape of Antwerp as the city itself tried to recover its lost status as a commercial and cultural hub. The Genoese palazzi that Rubens’ documented and published were meant to furnish models for burgher housing in his hometown, putting the city, along with one of its most famous citizens, on the world stage. Rubens built a noble house because he and his art were noble, and his house conferred nobility on him and his city.

            The Rubens house must have looked exotically Italian, at least in the courtyard, to his fellow Antwerpians. Whether they recognized the specific sources of his house’s details may not have been important to them, but to the painter they certainly were. His richly frescoed courtyard façade would have recalled the most sumptuous frescoed facades of Rome, like those painted by Taddeo Zuccaro; they would also have recalled the relief-encrusted facades of the Palazzo Spada, Villa Medici and Villa Borghese. His gallery of precious antiquities would have called up images of the remarkable marble room and its antiquities in Venice’s Palazzo Grimani. The screen wall and garden beyond might have optimistically alluded to the vastly grander Palazzo Borghese in Rome. These allusions, while endowing a degree of prestige, also conferred a cultural lineage, and a bridge between Flanders and Italy. This same artist advocated the Genoese palazzi of the Strada Nuova as models of burgher housing in his home country. The exuberance of these models too, and their rear gardens on the uphill side of the street, find echoes in the Rubenshuis courtyard and garden. But all of it, in the end, depends on the writings of Giorgio Vasari and his success as court artist to the Medici.

…

Giulio Romano's house, Mantova

One of the most important of these early houses of Renaissance artists was the one built by Andrea Mantegna in Mantua (begun in 1476, but in which he lived only for the last ten years of his life, from 1496 to 1506). Among the advantages of being one’s own patron was that architectural quality, or indeed architectural experimentation, could be a priority in the design process. Mantegna was renowned as a studious scholar of all things all’antica, and his paintings were consistently peppered with an architecture that strove to be as philologically correct as possible. An important characteristic of the architecture in his paintings is their geometric clarity: his buildings are often evidently assembled out of Platonic solids—cubes, spheres, cylinders, pyramids—and they retain that mathematical purity even as he dresses them in classical ornament drawn from his antiquarian studies. So, when he came to design his house in Mantua he organized its square footprint around a circular interior courtyard—the kind of pristine, abstract clarity that many ordinary clients would presume to be inherently impractical. Being a painter, he filled the house with paintings and frescoes—little of which survive. It was still sufficiently impressive to have merited praise from Vasari when he visited the city for a few weeks as the guest of Giulio Romano in 1541. While there, in the company of the transplanted Roman artist-architect who dominated the Gonzaga’s building enterprises for two decades (see Chapter VIII), Vasari had the opportunity to visit Giulio’s own house which, if not marked by the same abstract rigor as Mantegna’s, was perhaps more profusely filled with all sorts of artwork: the entry door was crowned by an antique sculpture of Mercury, and Giulio (like Mantegna) was an assiduous collector of ancient coins, which he proudly displayed. This too is allied with a then-current idea of the virtuoso, someone who possessed, and was knowledgeable about, rarities of human artifice. In this and other ways Giulio was modeling himself on his mentor, Raphael, who Vasari claims was on the verge of being named a cardinal when he died.

And, speaking of performance:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=64251#.UgQbUVOvwks

Emulation: VII.2 Il Palio in Movimento

Il Giorno di San Paolino

Despite a series of vicissitudes with the fortunes of my palio that are perhaps best left to some future memoirs, the day of the feast of San Paolino (12 July) and the palio events of the evening were, for me at least, a mini-miracle. The balestrieri (crossbowmen), the sbandieratori (flag throwers), the tamburini (drummers), the dancers in costume, provided a context for the carrying of the painted palio that evocatively connected what I do with the tradition from which it comes. It is rare that art has that sort of overtly public, and portable, role, and that classical work is framed by sympathetic sounds and ceremonies. It is certainly the first time a painting of mine was accompanied by costumed guards with pikes. Of course, for the balestrieri the painted palio was their context, and for them the evening was instead all about arrows and a target. The winner was Massimo Baldocchi, of the terziero S. Martino.

the palio among its competitors

re-enacting the Miracle of S. Paolino

entering S. Paolino for the mass

the palio in procession on Via Fillungo

the palio entering the
Piazza S. Martino

Master of Ceremonies

the palio awaiting the crossbow competition

the crossbow winners and the palio

Following are some local news stories on the palio:

http://www.luccaindiretta.it/dalla-citta/item/12172-e-a-stelle-e-strisce-il-palio-di-san-paolino-2013.html

http://www.lagazzettadilucca.it/cultura-e-spettacolo/2013/07/palio-di-s-paolino-massimo-baldocchi-primo-et-meliore/

http://www.lanazione.it/lucca/cronaca/2013/07/13/919141-palio_paolino.shtml

http://www.luccaindiretta.it/dalla-citta/item/12300-baldocchi-vince-il-palio-della-balestra-di-lucca-foto.html