Giorgio Vasari - A Life

Notes, documents and records that he had collected "infin da giovanetto per un certo mio passatempo e per una affezione che io aveva a la memoria de' nostri artefici", ( ... since my youth as a sort of pastime and for the affection that I had for the memory [i.e. to preserve the memory] of our artisans [artists]. So wrote Giorgio Vasari in discussing the 'why' of his Vite (i.e. The Lives). Giorgio Vasari was born in 1511 in Arezzo, a city in Tuscany which since 1384 had been under the control of Florence; he died in Florence in 1574. Giorgio was a painter, an architect and, for many, most importantly, an art historian: Don Miniato Pitti, in a letter to Vasari addressed him as  "pittore, istorico e poeta" (painter, historian and poet)1 while slightly earlier Pietro Aretino had similarly described him as "istorico, poeta, filosofo, e pittore" (historian, poet, philosopher, and painter)2, the former a friend and early patron and the latter, also from Arezzo and also a friend, the famous (or infamous) poet and writer of Orlando Furioso.

Giorgio Vasari, The Assumption of the Virgin (detail, see below)

The Badia delle Sante Flora e Lucilla, Arezzo.

After some initial training in Arezzo as a painter, Vasari moved to Florence - at the time a powerful centre, both artistically and politically - where he continued his training under various masters, including for a short time, Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530). A time of delicate political alliances and wide suspicion - even within the same family, in this case the Medici -, Giorgio became persona non grata in Florence due to the murder of his 'patron', the Duke Alessandro de' Medici (1510-37); this murder led to a period of depression for Giorgio and with it his rejection of courtly intrigue, and for several years he conducted a peripatetic life  (including lengthy stays at the monastery of Camaldoli) which included working visits to Rome, Bologna, Naples and Venice, among other places.

This wandering life, forced on him by his disfavour in Florence and a need to make a living, nevertheless stood him in good stead when it came to writing art history. As Giorgio moved from city to city and from court to court, he naturally - and deliberately - became familiar with much of the art produced in those cities; this information was later to be a significant part of the source material for his major art historical contribution: The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, the first edition of which was published in Florence in 1550 (with a slightly different title, see below) followed by the second edition (1568), also published in Florence.

Giorgio Vasari, The Assumption of the Virgin, oil on multiple panels, 1567

in the church of the Badia delle Sante Flora e Lucilla, Arezzo

A massive altarpiece which includes, not unusually, a self-portrait of Vasari, the standing figure on the extreme right of the central panel. This painting is for me interesting as it demonstrates the high-Mannerism of Giorgio, in the lower register, together with his, so to say, more personal religious side, the beautiful Virgin Mary in the top section of this work (see detail above)

Vasari was first and foremost a painter and in his literary magnum opus he in fact states that he is writing as a painter and in some places, for painters. There are major pictures by him in his birthplace Arezzo - to which he remained very closely attached during his life, building there a house which he decorated himself (the Casa Vasari, now a museum) - as well as in Florence and Rome, not to mention other cities such as Naples. He was a proponent and exponent of a style which came to be known as Mannerism and most of his mature paintings can be understood as belonging to that idiom.

As a painter his two most 'illustrious' works - if not necessarily his best - are to be found in Rome and in Florence. In Rome, in a huge building known now as the Palazzo della Cancelleria (ex Palazzo San Giorgio), he painted in fresco a very large room famously called the Sala dei Cento Giorni (1545-46), or the Room of a Hundred Days. This stupendous work was commissioned by cardinal Alessandro Farnese (through Paolo Giovio) with the caveat that it had to be completed post-haste, so Giorgio and his assistants worked furiously to get the four very large walls covered with scenes from the life of Pope Paul III (amongst other references) within the span of a hundred days (whence the name). Due to this extraordinary speed and, according to Giorgio the poor work of his assistants, the result was not a great public success, a judgement shared by Vasari himself (if not by the present writer).

Giorgio Vasari, Pope Paul III Supervises the Building of the New St Peter's in Rome, fresco,

the Sala dei Cento Giorni in the Palazzo della Cancelleria, Rome. 

A very large fresco with the compositional device of the illusionistic staircase leading from the real floor into the picture space. One of the characteristics of Mannerism was the horror vacui which meant that those painters tended to overfill or crowd their works. The pictures here are an exciting mix of rhetorical propaganda, symbolism, clear references to classical art, and much else. 

The other grand enterprise was the decoration of the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence; in this enormous room, Vasari and other artists under his direction had the job of painting the ceiling (1563-65) and the walls (revealed in 1572) with various subjects including some (on the walls) which celebrated the victories of Cosimo I Medici over the Tuscan cities of Pisa and Siena. Again, a huge task generally seen today as almost completely rhetorical or, if you prefer, propagandistic. It must be remembered that in that period, such self-congratulatory works of art, commissioned by very powerful people, were not at all unusual, however 'obvious' they may seem to us today.

At this point, I would like to stand-up as a supporter of Giorgio Vasari as a painter; yes, his work is perhaps not to our contemporary taste, perhaps too obviously rhetorical, too 'busy', but it is also at times, especially in his religious pictures, extremely beautiful, technically subtle - not to mention highly accomplished - and very forceful. It is important I think when viewing Giorgio's paintings to be always aware that he was a product of his times and a highly regarded exponent of the then dominant style, Mannerism. While admitting in his Lives his unbounded admiration for Michelangelo, whom he knew personally, Vasari was it seems also influenced to some degree by Raphael; both of these 'giants', as it were, 'grew up' during the Renaissance and Michelangelo's independent enquiries in fact anticipated the next style, that which became known as Mannerism. That style was followed by the Baroque which has, in a sense - being in some ways antithetical to certain Mannerist conventions - diminished and overshadowed Mannerism's (at least initially) innovative aspects, causing it be mis-understood as a kind of 'bastard son' of Renaissance painting, out of which it had developed. Early Baroque artists are seen as reacting against the 'mannered' and over-fanciful 'ideal' realism of especially later Mannerism; Caravaggio's 'bridging' naturalism helped to bring about such changes. 

Giorgio Vasari, The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew, oil on panel, c1563

The Badia delle Sante Flora e Lucilla, Arezzo

This photo unfortunately does not capture the very beautiful blue of Christ's garment but it serves as an example of the influence of Raphael, especially in the figures of the fishermen-apostles.

As an architect, Vasari is responsible for the initial project for the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, originally designed as the administrative offices (hence the name 'Uffizi') for the Duchy of Tuscany; the so-called Corridoio Vasariano (1565), a passage-way linking the Uffizi across the Ponte Vecchio and the Arno with the Pitti Palace; as well as generally less well-known works such as the Loggia Vasariana in Arezzo, the cupola of the church of the Madonna dell'Umiltà in Pistoia and various alterations to the Palazzo Vecchio itself, including major work in the Salone dei Cinquecento.

As mentioned in other articles, I have learned to appreciate the painting of Giorgio, in part I suppose because of a gradually developing appreciation of, or gradually declining prejudice against, Mannerism in general. Early Mannerists such as Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino (an acknowledged early influence on Vasari) brought to the fore some of the hallmarks of later Mannerism, many of which became somewhat exaggerated as the style progressed and spread. Such things as the above-mentioned horror vacui, the resultant crowding of almost all the picture-space with figures, the disregard for, or rejection of consistent scale, the overblown anatomy, are all heralded in the work of second-decade 16th century Florentines - under the influence of the 'giant' Michelangelo - but are, so to speak, 'pushed to the limit' by later practitioners, even to the point of sometimes becoming ridiculous. However, admitting all these things, so different from the guiding principles of the Renaissance, and accepting what the best Mannerists were doing, Vasari's painting becomes comprehensible and even great! Even the most rhetorical, such as the scenes painted on the walls of the Salone dei Cinquecento, contain moments of brilliant skill and charming originality, for example the night scene there of The Attack on Siena.

Ever since boyhood, according to Giorgio, as noted in the opening paragraph here, he had jotted down notes about famous artists (and collected their drawings) and these, and those observations he made during his peregrinations around the Italian peninsula, became the basis for his enormous history of art - painting particularly - the so-called Lives as its short-hand title is. Vasari relates (some say 'concocted') a delightful little story, involving other real people and himself in an after-dinner conversation, about the origin of his several volumes of artists' biographies; however, it is a fact that he had been putting together such biographical information for some years prior to the time (of the literary device) of the dinner and his claim that the monumental task had been 'forced' on him by his well-placed friends. 

Be that as it may, the first edition (known in Italian as the Torrentiniana after the name of the Duchy's printer) was published in Florence in 1550 under the title: Le vite dei piu (sic) eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a' tempi nostri; descritte in lingua toscana, da Giorgio Vasari pittore aretino. Con una sua utile & (sic) necessaria introduzzione (sic) a le arti loro. In Firenze M D L 3[The lives of the most excellent Italian architects, painters, and sculptors, from Cimabue up to our times; described in the Tuscan language, by Giorgio Vasari painter from Arezzo. With a useful and necessary introduction to their arts, Florence 1550]. Several interesting aspects of Vasari's approach to writing history appear already in this long title.

The first is that in the title of the second edition of The Lives (1568), the order of the arts is altered so that 'painters' precede sculptors who precede architects; this is interesting because Giorgio's obvious heroes were Michelangelo and Raphael, both of whom, like him, were painters and also, like him, architects (neither Giorgio nor Raphael were noted sculptors). Whether or not we may read into this change in order a possible intended hierarchy is not clear, keeping in mind of course that Michelangelo, apart from being a painter and architect, was also (and according to himself, principally) a sculptor.

The second aspect to note is that Giorgio begins his history with the Tuscan painter - and supposed master of Giotto - Cimabue (c1240 - 1302). This is interesting, for me at least, as both these painters are mentioned in Dante's La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy):

"Credette Cimabue nella pintura                                   'Cimabue believed he held

tener lo campo, e ora ha Giotto il grido,                       the field in painting, and now Giotto

sì che la fama di colui è scura:"                                     is on everyone's lips,

                                                                                       so that his (Cimabue's) fame is now

                                                                                       obscured.'

Purgatorio, Canto XI v 94-96                                     

(Dante Alighieri, 1265  Florence - 1321 Ravenna)      

As is clear from the dates, Dante had already evoked the established fame of Cimabue well before Vasari decided to begin his history with him - even if, in The Divine Comedy, Dante's comment was pointing out the ephemeral nature of fame (v.91"Oh vana gloria dell'umane posse!"); a concept incidentally also addressed by Vasari as a motivation for his literary excursus: writing about art and artists, both of the past and of the present day, was a way of continuing to keep their memory alive, even in the face of death and the forgetfulness of time.

The third point to consider is the phrase: "descritte in lingua toscana", written in the Tuscan language. This is extremely important as both contemporary (with Vasari) and subsequent critics have accused The Lives of being too Tuscan-centred, not to say Florence-centred. At that time, that is in the 16th century, Italians spoke a wide variety of dialects, many mutually incomprehensible, and a 'standard' Italian as such did not exist; Giorgio specifies that he is writing in the Tuscan language (or dialect), the one used by Dante in fact, and the one which would soon be chosen to be the model for 'standard' Italian. In addition, by specifying in the Tuscan language, he was also saying: not in Latin. Before Vasari's time, many scholarly books were published in Latin, in part because it was a kind of literary common language throughout Europe; but by his time, the Italian tongue, in whatever dialect, was becoming more popular in Italian writing. Even so, Vasari himself remarks on the odes, written in Latin, in praise of some of his pictures, at the time and for some time to come, a still-common custom among literate gentlemen!

Related to this interesting specificity is the next phrase where Giorgio identifies himself as both a painter and as coming from Arezzo. Arezzo had once been an independent city-state as were many places in medieval Italy; it had sometime beforehand (1384) come under the sway of Florence and was no longer an independent city. Giorgio however, proudly states on the title-page his birthplace - Arezzo - which, by that time, as mentioned, was part of the Duchy of Tuscany which was controlled by the Medici in Florence. Being a painter writing mainly about painters is also important because he was stating openly and plainly that he was not a literary man - at least, by trade - but rather one 'in the trade' (of painting), writing, perhaps better than 'professional' historians, about his 'trade'. I should here point out briefly that by Giorgio's time, painting was no longer regarded as a 'trade' per se, as painters and others had been promoting it for some time as a liberal art as distinct from a 'manual' art or trade (or craft). Giorgio mixed with the rich and powerful and, as it were, had to 'hold his own' in their company, a class of people acutely aware and jealous of their social status. Related to the social status of artists in general, Giorgio Vasari was instrumental in the foundation of the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence, the first of its kind in the world; other Academies or Confraternities or Compagnie existed but were literary or scientific in nature. Vasari's Accademia, supported by the Grand Duke Cosimo I, was a sort of modernization of the, by then, almost defunct Compagnia di San Luca, which had been formed in 1339.

The final point in the title is the inclusion of a 'useful and necessary introduction to their arts'. Being a painter himself, and frequenting other painters as well as sculptors and architects, Vasari was well aware that many 'educated' historians and intellectuals actually knew precious little about the 'craft' aspect itself; Giorgio as a painter was uniquely placed to be able to analyse and explain what painters were actually doing - from a painter's point of view!

The second edition of The Lives, published in 1568, again in Florence, but this time by the printer called Giunti - and therefore in Italian known as the 'Giuntina' edition - has a title-page containing notable differences from that of the first edition (1550), as follows:

Le Vite de' piu eccellenti Pittori, Scultori, e Architettori 

Scritte 

Da M. Giorgio Vasari Pittore

 et Architetto Aretino, 

Di nuovo dal Medesimo Riviste 

et Ampliate 

Con i Ritratti Loro 

Et con l'aggiunta delle Vite de'vivi, & de'morti Dall'anno 1550. infino al 1567

Prima, e Seconda Parte. 

Con le Tavole in ciascun Volume, Delle cose piu Notabili, 

De'Ritratti, Delle vite degli Artefici, Et dei 

Loughi dove sono l'opere loro. 4

As noted above, the order of the 'professions' is different from that on the title page of the first edition: now the painters (Pittori) come first and the architects (Architettori) come third (interestingly, also the spelling of the Italian word 'architect' has been changed). At this point, Giorgio states his profession as previously but now, not simply a painter but also an architect! He then points out that the biographies have been reviewed and amplified (Riviste et Ampliate) by him (Dal Medesimo); and then comes a major difference, and innovation, that of including the portraits of the individual artists (Con i Ritratti Loro). At the opening of nearly all the major biographies is a printed portrait - sometimes of dubious likeness - of the artist concerned, an almost complete novelty at the time.

Another major change is the omission of the statement of the original scope of the work, that is, the reference to Cimabue, even if the second edition still begins with his biography. In addition, Giorgio states that his volumes contain the lives of artists (or, as he calls them artefici) both living (de'vivi) and dead (& de'morti), updated from 1550 to 1567. And finally, in the last line of a long sub-title (not at all unusual at the time) Giorgio informs his readers of where they might find the works of the artists referred to in the text (Loughi dove sono l'opere loro).

Even before opening the first page of the actual text we are able to discern certain changes in attitude from a comparison of the title-pages alone, that is, of the 1550 edition and the 1568 edition. By the time of the submission of the text to the printer Giunti in 1567, Vasari seems to have gained in self-confidence and omits the statement, made on the title-page in 1550, about writing in the Tuscan language although he still insists on the point that he is from Arezzo - as if to say, and NOT from anywhere else (in this case, Florence!); great pride in one's birthplace is still today a special characteristic of modern Italians. 

But I think there was a double significance here: on the one hand, Giorgio is stating that he is a writer from the (Grand) Duchy of Tuscany and, indeed, the second edition (as was the first) is dedicated to the Illustrissimo et Eccellentissimo Signor Cosimo Medici, Duca di Fiorenza e Siena (the most Illustrious and most Excellent Signor Cosimo Medici, Duke of Florence and Siena). At the same time however, he is asserting that he is NOT from Florence but rather from Arezzo: he is proud of the fact - and aware now of his high standing in the eyes of various princes and nobles - that he is 'Aretino' and not Fiorentino; that this famous work (The Lives) was written by a painter and architect from Arezzo, an 'artefice' who was by then the 'go to' reference for major works of building and decoration in Florence itself - the dominant power in that part of central Italy.

Apart from the enormous and undoubted authority which Vasari's Lives has still today among art historians dealing with his periods - the early Renaissance, the Renaissance itself, and Mannerism - , being the initial reference for research into the lives of many artists, it is also studied for its more general historical influence and information. The Dediche (Dedications), the Proemio di Tutta l'Opera (the Preface to the Whole Work), the Introduzione alle Arti del Disegno (Introduction to the Arts of Drawing), the section Degl'Accademici del Disegno Pittori, Scultori et Architetti e dell'Opere Loro, e Prima del Bronzino (Concerning the Academicians of Drawing: Painters, Sculptors and Architects and their works, and first about Bronzino), and finally the Descrizione dell'Opere di Giorgio Vasari (the Description of the Works of Giorgio Vasari [his autobiography]): these more general passages are full of important art-historical and socio-historical facts and opinions which make them almost indispensable sources for scholars researching those periods, and especially the period of Giorgio's own life.

A remark here about the word disegno, a word much used by Vasari. Disegno in 16th century Florence seems to have had a double significance, at least as far as we might understand it today; it means 'drawing' in the conventional sense of the word and it should be stressed that for Giorgio - and Michelangelo apparently - all the visual arts, that is painting, sculpture and architecture, were ultimately, and intimately, dependent on drawing. But the word disegno seems also to have meant what we today would call 'design' (see the article Giorgio Vasari and 'Che cosa sia disegno' in this blog for a discussion of this topic).

Although Giorgio Vasari is the person always referred to as the author of The Lives, in fact he was considerably aided and to some extent guided by the erudite people with whom he associated, people such as Vincenzio Borghini (1515 - 1580), a slightly younger and especially learned  scholar; in addition, he consulted the works of other authors and actual documents relating to the commissions and payments made to some of the artists he was writing about. Borghini for instance was instrumental in this aspect of the preparation of the biographies. 

Vasari was not the first, nor the last, painter (or sculptor) to write art history from the point of view of an artist. Other articles in this blog discuss the work of Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) whose book On Painting (Della Pittura, 1436) was also written by a painter for painters: see the quote which is the motto of this very blog. In fact, Vasari includes a relatively brief biography of Alberti in his Lives and it seems he knew Alberti's book from a somewhat later edition. Oddly, although Alberti's book was critical for the spread of the theory of the newly re-discovered rules of perspective, especially among painters, he himself is better known as an architect and theorist, writing books on many other subjects not immediately related to art: De familia, La villa, Rime, etc.

Lorenzo Ghiberti, The Gates of Paradise (made between 1425 and 1452) detail, gilt bronze; a scene in high and low (or bass) relief showing the story of Jacob and Esau. The border under this panel contains Ghiberti's signature and to the right, portrait heads of both him and his son Vittorio. The original panels are now kept in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence and have been substituted with copies at the Baptistry.

Another contemporary writer on art matters was the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378 - 1455), a Florentine, most famous for his two sets of doors for the Baptistry of Florence and especially for the east doors, the so-called Gates of Paradise. Ghiberti wrote a book known as I commentarii (The Commentaries; probably not his own title); in this book, divided into three parts - Arte antica, Arte moderna and Teoria della visione, anatomia, teoria della proporzione, this third part by far the longest section - he discusses antique or classical art, then what was for him modern art and finishes with a long compilation of information on optics, anatomy and perspective. At one point, Ghiberti says the following:"io come scultore parlo": 'I speak as a sculptor'. This statement and those of both Vasari and Alberti concur in the assertion of their right as it were (the position from which they speak), to comment on, to recount and to analyse matters concerning art.

While Vasari's Lives is a comprehensive survey of (particularly) painting from the time of Cimabue up to his own, it also has a guiding hypothesis driving the approach which the author takes: Giorgio saw art as a constantly evolving and developing field, aiming at an ultimate pinnacle of perfection which he recognized in the art of Michelangelo. Alberti however did not attempt such a wide-ranging task but instead took-on the role of teacher and disseminator (of perspective theory), giving sound advice to fellow painters and students; as a sort of companion to Della Pittura he also wrote Della statua, thereby contributing to sculpture as well. Ghiberti, whose comments on both classical and 'modern' art are relatively brief, also does not attempt the same 'universal' overview that Giorgio Vasari proposed but his 'comments' and his included autobiography give our contemporary students and historians much valuable information.

Notwithstanding the fact that at various times all three authors have been criticised for elements of their history-writing, the literary expression of well-established artists regarding their vocation, their job, the history of their art and so on, remains for us today an indispensable tool for establishing a well-rounded understanding of their times - not to mention of their own art works.

1 Barbara Agosti, Giorgio Vasari, Loughi e Tempi delle Vite, 2024, published by Ex Officina Libraria Jellinek et Gallerani; p 32 and note 88. This most interesting text, which is possibly not available in English, is the source of many relevant facts, some of which have been incorporated into the present article.

2 Idem, p 26 and  Note 65

3 Text found on various online sites; the wording here of the title-pages of both editions is copied directly from the internet and (my own) contemporary copies of the Vite (Note 4): in both cases, some of the spelling and punctuation are different from contemporary Italian usage and I mention this so as to avoid the constant repetition of '(sic)'. 

4 This text taken from the title-page (of the 1568 edition) reproduced on p62 in Giorgio Vasari Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, Volume 1, 2018, published by Edizioni dell'Orso, a cura di Enrico Mattioda.

Painting versus Illustration

 

   To be frank, I'm not at all sure of how to justify the general thesis of this article: the difference between painting, understood as art, and illustration, understood as literal description or imitation - in particular of photographs of human faces - which, together with the Italian art historian Roberto Longhi, I don't see as art as such. In the broad sense in which the term 'art' is today used (and abused) of course illustration and related fields such as design are arts; but in the specific sense in which the work of Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Vasari, Bernini and Caravaggio and many others are classed as 'art' as opposed to other appellatives, illustration is not included. It is therefore hoped that in what follows, the gist of what I mean will become evident even if, as I suspect will be the case, many readers will not agree with me.

 Many young painters start-off, as children or teenagers, copying from photographs, whether those images are of other artists' paintings or drawings, or are photographs per se, for instance, of fashion models. Today, perhaps more than ever since their development, photographs are a ubiquitous source of images for artists, young and old (including the present writer).

 Photographs of models, that is, of subjects for portraits, are commonly used today as this relieves the hapless sitter of sometimes hours of tedium while, on the other hand, providing the painter with a perfectly fixed pose; no need for breaks so that the model can relax and stretch their legs, no need for the sometimes difficult task of getting the model back into exactly the same position. Many painters will make use of photos and then perhaps, when the picture is nearing completion, get the model, the subject, back into the studio for the finishing touches.

 Using photographs is fine providing the painter in question already has experience with working from the live model, has already some knowledge of anatomy and is aware that photographs not only distort what they represent but, for a number of reasons, do not 'reveal all'. This is particularly so with regard to anatomy; due to what photographs do (register light), important indicators of the underlying bone structure for example, clearly visible in the live model, are often obscured or missed altogether in photographs.

  This aspect of picture making has, as it were, come into sharp focus recently, at least for me, as I am daily receiving (unwanted) promotions on social media for art schools and art classes of all sorts. One of the things that the more skills-orientated of these have in common is their use of the photograph. Although some do seem to offer 'traditional' (read: academic) drawing techniques as a foundation to their courses, the photograph also is often to be seen, somewhere in the promotion, sometimes indeed pinned to the easels of painting students, or otherwise displayed, for them to copy from. Why is this a problem?

 Not too long ago I happened to wander into an exhibition of portraits all, or nearly all, of which were clearly derived from photographs. While trying to work out why there was something unsatisfactory about those paintings the answer suddenly struck me: the figures as represented in the paintings had no bones! The painter had copied more or less exactly what could be seen in the photographs used, ending up with, especially as far as the body was concerned - as opposed to the face - a sort of stuffed puppet effect. Most things were in their right places, the lights and shadows had been copied adequately well, but there was no underling structure, no skeletal scaffolding to those figures.

 And here is the problem, one which incidentally had been observed a good 400 years before the advent of photography: this because the problem is often not the photograph per se but rather the use of an already resolved 2-dimensional image. When Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) published his treatise Della Pittura (On Painting) in 1436, he warned students against copying from other paintings: this is because the difficult work of translating 3-dimensional reality into 2-dimensions on a flat surface has already been solved by the author of the painting being copied. All the student has to do is put all the marks in the right place on the canvas and he or she will end-up with a faithful copy of the original. The difficult job of really seeing and understanding what one is looking at (the same subject in real life) has already been done by someone else! In fact, for Alberti, it was better for a student to copy a mediocre sculpture than a good painting; at least here, copying a 3-dimensional sculpture, the student still had to grapple with that fundamental problem.

 As a result of the growing dependence on photographs, therefore, we today see many pictures of the human face and figure which are substantially flat - in effect - like the photo from which the image was copied. Another related problem is one which is fairly typical of the work of students who rely on photos and that is the tendency towards a graphic representation as opposed to a painted picture. Many young and autodidact painters admire, quite rightly, the work of their art heroes and do their best to imitate the pictures of these usually older artists. Naturally they use photographs from which to copy; in many cases however, it is extremely easy to get a quite erroneous idea of what a given (old master) painting or drawing actually looks like 'in the flesh'. One of the problems with photos of artwork in books say, is that they give an entirely false impression of the size of works of art while at the same time, especially as regards paintings, fusing the colour transitions and the brush strokes, giving the unfortunate copyist a quite misleading idea. 

                             

                                 

   

Above are two photographs of the same detail taken from the supposed Caravaggio called Narcissus, c1597, kept at the Gallerie Nazionali Barberini in Rome. The one on the left is from an art book while the one on the right was taken by me last year (at the Barberini in Rome); note the clear difference in the colour and clarity between the two images: the left one, a reproduction in a book, has an overall brownish tinge whereas the right-hand one has no such tinge. In fact, the right one shows very well the independent functioning of the various areas of colour. Admittedly, my photo may also be influenced by external factors such as the lighting in the museum, and so on, but the point is that relying solely on reproductions in art books - or on the Net - can lead to quite wrong impressions. The photo on the right by the way happens to be quite accurate in terms of the colour.

 In the Renaissance period, beginning around 1400 in Tuscany, drawing - which of course included the outline - was of paramount importance and, due to this Tuscan predilection for the outline, it became a sort of common-place that the difference between Florentine painting and that of Venice for example, was that in Venice colour was the more important thing. To my mind this has always seemed a questionable dichotomy or distinction, because of course, in both cities, colour and line were important and the weight given to each depended on the attitude and aims of a given painter. There are many examples of absolutely beautiful colour-work in Florentine painting of the 15th and 16th centuries just as there are examples of beautiful line-work in Venetian painting. Nevertheless, in a sense there is a technical difference between the work that was being done in these two cities and this is due not so much to the preponderance of line over colour or vice versa, but instead it is due to the method of applying the paint itself. 

 The use of canvas was particularly common in Venice, perhaps less so in Florence where there was a strong tradition of fresco painting and also the persistence of transportable images being painted on wood as opposed to canvas; this is a generalization of course as both fresco and wood panels were used in Venice as well. But once canvas took over, the Venetians made particular use of its being a fabric with a warp and weft which meant a texture, one quite distinctly different from the completely smooth surface of a wall, or a prepared wooden panel. This natural texture of the sometimes heavy weave of Venetian canvas allowed painters such as Titian and Tintoretto to drag their paint-laden brushes across the weave, thus enabling subtlety and texture of brush-stroke (impasto) quite different from the often smoothly painted surfaces of their Florentine colleagues.

 What I have observed in the many figurative works now available on the internet, both from painters promoting themselves as well as in publicity for art classes, is the very common leaning, deliberate or unconscious, towards basically flat areas of 'filled-in' colour: filled-in because there is obviously a careful drawing made before starting with the paint to which the 'neophyte' painter then adheres as though their very life depended on it. In fact, in relation to a 'painted' picture and a 'coloured-in' drawing, it may be noted that many artists, as they age - Titian being a prime example - become less and less concerned with 'colouring-in' and more and more involved with (the pleasure of) manipulating the stuff, the paint, and with allowing the real materiality of that paint to speak, giving thereby their pictures yet another layer of meaning and intensity, related to but independent of the 'illustrative' or narrative function of their images.

Venus Blindfolding Cupid by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, c1488 - 1576)

Oil on canvas, c1560-65. Galleria Borghese, Rome

A late work in this master's long life in which the dragging of the paint across the woven texture of the canvas is clearly visible, especially in the white garments and in the background; this technique may be compared with Titian's own early works in which the outline is still a controlling element.

The kind of work one so often sees on the internet is, generally speaking, illustration by another name, illustration 'dressed-up' as what used to be called 'fine art'. The fact that a painted (or drawn) artwork simply looks like the photo from which it derives does not therefore qualify it as 'painting' in the art sense: unless there is more to it, it is and remains an illustration. Painting is as much about the stuff itself, the material paint, the belle matière; that substance has a life of its own, a life quite different from its illustrative capacity or usefulness. If that is all that the paint is doing, that is, merely illustrating a photograph, then the result falls into the category of 'illustration', or design work, or graphic art, but, in my opinion, should not be misunderstood as 'painting' as the term is used in an art historical sense. Of course, art history contains many ways of painting including Western book illumination, Japanese and Chinese ink painting, fresco painting on the walls of Pompei, and the sublime illuminations of the holy works of Islam - and many more. A close study of the wall decorations at Pompei indeed, will perhaps point-up the difference between illustration and painting in the sense in which it is used here; a great number of the wall paintings at Pompei are in fact illustrated narrative - of architecture, mythological stories, nature - but the way of applying the paint itself (although, being in fresco it has no active texture) - is 'painterly' as opposed to being coloured-in drawing. These pictures in fact resemble in their looseness and dexterity certain types of Japanese work, with an obvious 'feel' for the flow of the brush-stroke.

Artist unknown, Jason and Pelias (detail), wall painting (fresco) from the House of Jason at Pompei,   25(?) BC. Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli.

A beautifully made image of a man (Jason) skilfully using a minimum of expertly placed brush-strokes; in all likelihood this artist was merely repeating an image which he (or she) had made many times before. That notwithstanding, the concise confident brush-strokes, while being to some extent illustrative, are also painterly.

 I do not wish this opinion to be mis-interpreted; I, since my beginnings as a young boy drawing pictures without any guidance, and later at art school (with minimal guidance!), have fallen into these traps myself, many times. I have made drawings especially, which I was very happy with only to look back on them some years later and realise their shortcomings in 'art' terms. Some were actually passable efforts, some still work as illustrations but they're not, so to say 'real' painting. To understand this, it is extremely important to see, in person, as many recognised (old) master paintings as possible, which means visiting serious public art galleries and museums, getting away from art books and reproductions (as useful as these might be at the right time), and learning to 'separate the wheat from the chaff' amongst the thousands and thousands of pictures which we might encounter in local art shows, in art classes, on the internet and, especially, in museums of contemporary art. 1

A small painting by the author, Athletes, oil on canvas. This little painting, a cut-down detail from a larger original, was derived from - copied from - a photo in a sports magazine. This is an example of what is described in this article as a somewhat flat, graphic image, albeit that there is some illusion of depth; the sense of its being a 'coloured-in' drawing is very strong.

 Some might here object that, for instance, much of what is called Pop Art is in fact flat - and derived from photos - and deliberately so (as was much early 20th century art); this is completely true and so it can be said that Pop Art relies on the currency, in magazines, posters, commercial art, of the flat images used; in other words, the public knows how to read the source images even if they are assembled in novel ways by the artist. So yes, generally, one of the peculiar technical/formal qualities of this kind of art is its flatness, this quality being directly derived from the source material (various forms of graphic art and photography), nearly all of which was flat - which therefore goes to my point! For me, some of the least successful modernist images are, for example, the screen prints - as flat as you like - of the Pop artist Andy Warhol, no more 'art' than the photographs from which he made them; and not to be mentioned in the same breath as Titian, Velazquez, Rembrandt, et al!

 Discussing the taste and influence of the Grand Prince Ferdinand de' Medici (born 1663) in his wonderful book on Baroque painters and patrons, Francis Haskell says that the painters Crespi and Ricci had in common " - a looser brush stroke, a more painterly and spirited manner, a greater display of individual temperament ... ."2 In this quote are mentioned two of the elements - apart from my theme of painterliness - I feel are often missing from the type of 'illustrative' work this article is discussing, and those are a 'spirited manner' and 'a display of individual temperament'. Very frequently, this kind of, so to say, 'default illustration' is marked by the absence of just these qualities: little or no 'spirited manner' or individuality (that is, the independent character of the painter). One of the hallmarks of commercial graphic design and illustration is that they are produced more or less despite the personality of the particular artisan 3; much graphic work is obsessed with the accuracy of fine detail and, usually, this trait is the only one also ascribable to the maker of the work. It is this insistence on the graphic skill of copying 'exactly' what one sees (in a 'fine art' context) which is, to my mind, a major part of this problem.

 It would also appear that the common opinion of this type of painter, visible on the Net, is that the more one's paintings resemble the object or image (photo) in front of them, the better artisan they are and so the better their work is; a point of view perhaps related to the mistaken art historical notion of 'perfection'. Simply because the appreciation of art is such a personal matter, the concept of perfection is redundant; certainly, in the terms just mentioned, a given painting or drawing may be more or less similar to its model, in the same way that a given piece of paper may be perfectly rectangular or not. But that perfection has nothing at all to do with the 'art' aspect of a 'work of art'. Works of art have within them the character of the painter (or sculptor for instance) and that character is one of the ingredients which help to distinguish one work from another, one painter from another, one style from another and so on. But 'perfect' illustration of a given object, whether from a physical model or from a photograph, is the same whenever and wherever it is made; there is little or no personality there - as excellent illustrators and copyists are to be found the world over - if the measure of excellence is the exactness of the reproduction, of the imitation.

 Interestingly, recognised 'great' artists did not draw or paint 'perfect' pictures; their paintings and drawings are admired, yes because of the great skill they embody, but more because the artist in question has given us a point of view which is not only unique but also instructive. Painters who aim at a sort of technical perfection, by which I mean an ability to exactly imitate what they see - a residual of academicism -, are I think often misled by the admiration of those who view their work. Still today, even after the revolutions of the first part of the twentieth century, many lay people admire this ability to imitate - certainly worthy of admiration, agreed - but mistake that ability for art 4; unfortunately, so do many artisans skilled in this type of imitation.

  The use of the living model enjoys the imprimatur of historical tradition and of great artists, portraitists and history painters alike. Even leaving aside the ancient Greeks, the Greek painting tradition may be at least intuited from the so-called Fayum portraits of Hellenistic Egypt, most obviously painted from the living model; contemporaneous these with ancient Roman portrait sculpture. After the fall of that empire and a rather long gap, during which portraiture as such was so stylised as to be something quite different from our modern understanding of the word, it (portraiture) was revived in Italy as the Renaissance approached, from which point it has continued to be an important branch of the figurative art of the West. Modern portraitists include such people as Lucien Freud, Alberto Giacometti, and Graham Sutherland for instance; these three all worked with the live model (with results that are all quite different) and the first two are famous - or infamous - for having required the model to sit on dozens and dozens of occasions; Giacometti especially working and re-working his faces, be they in paint or clay, scrubbing off his day's work only to start all over again - possibly to the immense frustration of the model in question!

 The great Baroque sculptor, architect and painter, Gianlorenzo Bernini, in discussing his attitude to the live model, is reported as saying that " ... tenne un costume dal comune modo assai diverso, e fu che nel ritrare alcuno non voleva ch'egli stesse fermo, ma ch'e' si movesse, e ch'e' parlasse; perche in tal modo, diceva egli ch'e' vedeva tutto il suo bello, e lo contraffaceva com'egli era; asserendo che nello starsi al naturale immobilmente fermo egli non è mai tanto simile a se stesso quanto egli è nel moto, in cui quelle qualità consistono che sono tutte sue e non d'altri, e che danno la somiglianza al ritratto."5 [' ... (he) maintained a habit that was very different from the usual, and that was that in portraying someone he didn't want him to keep still, but (rather) that he should move and speak; because in that way, he said that he saw all his (the sitter's) beauty, and he portrayed him as he was; asserting that in keeping motionlessly still he is never so similar to himself as when he is moving, in which (movement) those qualities consist that are his and no-one else's, and which give the likeness to the portrait.' (translation my own and bracket insertions)].

Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini (1598 - 1680), Cardinal Scipione Borghese, marble, h. 78cm. 

Galleria Borghese, Rome. 

As must be obvious, this wonderful portrait bust was (originally) made from the live model, that is, the cardinal himself, most probably as well from at least one (known) drawing and a clay model. As it happens, there are two versions of this bust, both at the Galleria Borghese, because, as the finishing touches were being made to the first version, a crack appeared in the marble, across the forehead; so Bernini 'secretly' made another (above), based on the first.

 Here we should note that Bernini was principally a sculptor (and architect) and really an 'amateur' painter and so his remarks apply perhaps more to making a portrait sculpture than to painting a portrait and for that reason are even more pertinent. One imagines that when making a portrait sculpture he first started, apart from drawings, by making a clay model of his sitter rather than risk ruining a piece of marble; compared with making a mistake on the marble, repairing or changing something on a piece of clay is a hundred times easier (although not impossible, witness the substantial changes made by Michelangelo to his marble statue of Moses)! Be that as it may, the point of the remarks quoted above is that, not only is the living model to be in front of the artist but also that the model is to move and talk more or less freely (things a photo cannot do) while the artist works (note that this procedure is described as being quite unusual for the time). It is for this reason that the works of artists as different as Bernini, Giacometti and Freud have in common certain qualities of life-likeness which are almost impossible to achieve by the use of photos alone. As must be obvious, an artisan working from a photograph is at least one step removed from the living model and the more that artisan depends on the photo - that is, attempts to imitate exactly what can be seen in the photo - the less the finished work is going to be a painting with 'life' and the more it will simply resemble, so to say, a hand-made photo.

 From my own experience I would say that the use of photographs is quite alright so long as they are regarded as guides and not as a 'canon', that is, it is neither necessary nor desirable that they should be slavishly copied; the result of slavishly copying a reference photo is very often a 'dead' image; unfortunately, this is not to say that portraits painted from 'the life' cannot also be quite 'dead' or, ironically, 'lifeless'. And yes, the copied result may look exactly like the photo but, in that case, if that is the finished product, why bother copying it? The use of photographs as stimulus, as guides, as reference points is I think acceptable and useful, even if one is painting a portrait of a living person, but the living person must be the ultimate reference, not the photo. 

 To some extent, this can be explained more clearly by looking at Renaissance techniques; these involved, especially when painting pictures of historical, mythological or religious subjects, the use of studies of real people made from life, that is, drawings of living models: these drawings, very often quite small, were then scaled-up to the required size of the painting in hand. Such drawings from life would most usually be quite definitely generalized or stylized in the finished panel-picture or fresco as portraits as such in a religious or historical picture were not the point - unless of course, an actual portrait was required, possibly in the portrayal of an historical event in which a certain individual had really taken part. This was so much the case that when a genuine portrait appears in say, a mythological painting, it is at once obvious. Sometimes actual portraits were included in religious pictures and these represented the donors, the (rich) people who paid for the religious icon; however, in these cases, the donor(s) was nearly always set apart somehow, commonly positioned in one of the corners or at the very bottom, away from the main subject of the image 6. But if a portrait of a living person appears as a protagonist in such a picture it is, shall we say, painfully obvious. This is, again, a generalization as artists did sometimes insert their own likeness, or those of colleagues or important locals, into all sorts of pictures (Filippino Lippi, Botticelli, Vasari, etc.) A glaring example of this is Ghirlandaio's Sassetti Chapel frescos in the church of Santa Trinita, in Florence: there are in fact several obvious portraits in his ahistorical rendering of Saint Francis Receiving the Approval of His Order from Pope Honorius; the artist has set the scene in Florence with members of the Medici family present, whereas in fact the event took place in Rome, and certainly not with Lorenzo de' Medici in attendance!

Artist unknown, Head of a Bearded Man, Ptolemaic Period (Egypt), second half of the 2nd century BC, stone. Museo di Scultura Antica Giovanni Barracco, Rome.

Artist unknown, Head of Aphrodite, Roman copy of a Hellenistic original, marble. Museo di Scultura Antica Giovanni Barracco, Rome.

The two photos above (taken at an almost totally ignored once-private collection in the centre of Rome) demonstrate the difference between portraiture as generally understood and a stylized human face, typical of formal public and private sculpture in the ancient world. The first is of a sculpted head in black diorite and is obviously a portrait (made at roughly the same time as the Fayum painted portraits); it is clearly the result of direct observation of a living individual and this fact is immediately apparent when one comes upon the head in this remarkable collection (kept in what has substituted the original museum donated to the state by this late-19th century collector, Giovanni Barracco, still a public museum, the so-called Farnesina ai Baullari). The second head, as beautiful as it is, is very typical of many classical and Hellenistic female sculpted heads and cannot in any way be mistaken for a 'portrait' of a living individual.

And here possibly is the crux of the matter, portraits suggest the reality of an individual experience, they fix a point in a given person's life, their time here revealed by the signs of that life lived as a human being and therefore influencing a personality; other images of the human face, and I would include much of what was described at the beginning of this article, as well as heads such as the Aphrodite above, suggest a form of what we all know to be a human likeness but without a personality: expression, emotion perhaps, but no internal life. Both the black stone sculpted head above and the painted portrait below have a personality, and a strong one at that.

Carlo Maratta (1625 - 1713), Pope Clement IX, oil on canvas, 1669. Musei Vaticani.

 At this point, let's have a look at a portrait from the Vatican Museums, the extraordinary portrait of Pope Clement IX by the portraitist Carlo Maratta. This portrait of the Pope was clearly made from the living model, so much so that we have the sense that the Pope is listening to the artist while he talks and works and is possibly about to say something in response. The very lively gaze of the sitter supported by the equally lively and beautiful handling of the clothing (and hands) contribute to our impression of having the man sitting in front of us! Maratta lived during the Baroque period at the height of Bernini's fame and virtual domination of the Roman scene; both artists were influenced by the naturalistic realism of Caravaggio's revolution. This revolution consisted, partly, in his insistence on painting directly from live models in a sort of, for the time, 'warts-and-all' approach; this contrasted and collided with the time-worn concept - from the early 1400s onwards - of 'selection'. That is to say, from at least the time of Leon Battista Alberti, artists were encouraged to 'select' the best parts of their models and so to speak, 'cobble them together' so as to create an ideal face or figure, this ideal stemming from an adherence to neo-Platonic theories, classical canons of beauty, and from stories about the working methods of famous ancient artists.

 The distinction I am attempting to make in this article is a difficult one to express as it depends on a certain awareness of and familiarity with a wide range of Western art, and to a large extent, art history. There have been many great graphic designers and illustrators, in the normal sense of the word, the commercial sense let's say, and there have been many wonderful artists who worked in various graphic mediums in the 'fine art' sense; people such as Dürer and Rembrandt, although it should be remembered that both of them were also painters. 

 Many artists at the beginning of the 20th century were in fact also commercial designers, the Bauhaus for instance being a kind of hot-house of graphic design of a very high level, as well as fostering the overlap of various fields of artistic production. Photography was also important there and in early 20th century art of various kinds, Dada for example. If a work of painting in particular is avowedly illustrative - as were many of the public murals made in the 1930s and '40s - I see no problem with that; but, on the other hand, if a work of painting is pretending to the status of 'fine art' while obviously being in reality a work of cold hubris merely demonstrating the artisan's skill, then that is where I see a problem. The scene is further complicated by the common confusion of functions or results; in the just-mentioned murals of the 1930s and '40s there is clearly a high level of technical 'fine art' skill and a broad awareness of art history put to the illustrative purpose - especially in the US and the USSR - of propaganda of one sort or another. The astute reader will of course remark that much of the art produced in Europe, and in Italy and Spain particularly, in times gone by was also (religious) propaganda. At this point however, we might compare, using our favourite art history books (the ones with the great photos), the Renaissance or Baroque periods with some of the things I have discussed here, those things to be found on the internet, and ask ourselves: is there a qualitative difference, is there a function difference?

 As an aside, by now that same reader will have noticed my use of the terms artisan or painter as opposed to the more conventional - and ubiquitous - artist; this is because that word, the description 'artist', is nowadays a much abused term. So much so that it seems to me that we need to invent another expression for those people contriving all manner of installations full of political and social messages - and for those practising the illustrative forms discussed here - and perhaps reserve the term 'artist' for those still working in the methods and with the materials and aims of the 'traditional' painter (sculptor, printmaker, etc.), keeping in mind that technical ability equals neither understanding - nor art! 

 At the very beginning of this article I mentioned the name of Roberto Longhi; in his book entitled simply Caravaggio, he discusses the difference between Caravaggio and some other painters working in Rome at that same time (early 17th century), saying: "In the over-fastidious and morbidly refined description of the 'ecclesiastical and civil portraits' of (Scipione) Pulzone, perhaps even with the window (of the studio) depicted in the pupil (of the sitter); ... it is always an almost mystical form of mental abnegation before the (tiny) detail, the particular, ... ." 7 (insertions in brackets my own). In this passage Longhi was contrasting the meticulousness of certain contemporary Baroque painters with the, may I say, more genuine, the more ad hoc realism (or naturalism?) of Caravaggio. The distinction between these two terms, realism and naturalism, is one of the themes of Longhi's book and need not concern us here; what is relevant is the observation that certain forms of figurative art are obsessed with an accumulation of detail at the expense of a more solid, robust and 'natural' depiction of the real world; a distinction the present article is also at pains to illuminate.

 To conclude, a note to the beginner: using photos once you can already paint without them is fine but relying on them before you know what you're doing is a trap. And if an art class or school bases its teaching on the use of photographs then you know you're in the wrong place!

1 "... esercitare l'occhio, preferendolo ai libri." [ '... exercise the eye, preferring it to books.'] So said Guglielmina (Mina) Gregori, highly respected Italian art historian who has just celebrated her 101st birthday. She further told how: "... she had learned to pass whole days in museums and art galleries, looking for hours at the works on view ..." (translations my own). Both quotes taken from an internet article regarding in fact her recent birthday. (March, 2025).

2 Francis Haskell, Patrons and Painters - Art and Society in Baroque Italy, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1980; p237.

3 A distinction needs to be made here: in this article we are not discussing graphic work as understood in the manner of someone such as Dürer or Rembrant or Piranese or even Picasso; their work was graphic art in the 'art' sense, not in the imitative sense in which those words (graphic, illustration, illustrative, etc.) are being used in this article.

4 I realise that I am potentially wading into deep waters here as, for some, as a way of course of derailing the argument, such statements introduce the (as they know) unanswerable question: what is art? At this point, in my experience, such people enjoy side-tracking the argument at hand with that all-winning rejoinder thus, in their humble (?) opinions, destroying the validity of the points being made in the said argument. If, on the other hand, they feel that their 'art' is being belittled or dismissed, perhaps they might offer the much-sought answer to that vexed question, what is art? By what definition is their work automatically 'art'?

5 Tomaso Montanari, La libertà di Bernini - La sovranità dell'artista e le regole del potere, published by Einaudi, 2016, p179. The quote apparently comes from one of the well-known biographies of Bernini written by the Florentine Filippo Baldinucci: Vita del Cavaliere Gio. Lorenzo Bernino, Scultore,  Architetto, e Pittore, MDCLXXXII.   N.B. Bernini's surname was often spelled Bernino as opposed to Bernini in texts written at that time, that is, during the Baroque period and later.

6 As if to confute all that has just been said, I should here mention a picture painted by Giorgio Vasari (about whom see various articles in this blog) in which a large number of portraits made from life - as well as one based on a papal portrait (of Clement VII, 1531) by Sebastiano del Piombo, and another based on an earlier portrait by Vasari himself of (then dead) Duke Alessandro Medici - feature in what is ostensibly a religious subject: The Feast of Saint Gregory the Great (c1540) which is in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna. The Pope Clement portrait did work in this picture as the face of Pope Gregory while the numerous other portraits were of people somehow connected with the commission itself (monks, abbots, etc.).

7 Roberto Longhi, Caravaggio, 1968 Editori Riuniti, the second edition of his book originally published in 1952 under the title Il Caravaggio. The quotation is to be found on pp12 and 13 of Caravaggio (1968) and the translation is my own; "Nella preziosa e accurata descrizione dei 'ritratti ecclesiastici e civili' del Pulzone, magari con la finestra ricamata nella pupilla; ... è sempre una forma, quasi mistica, di abnegazione mentale di fronte al particolare, ... ."

 

Alessio Baldovinetti at the Chiostro dei Voti

 

This article was prompted by a question from an Australian friend who lives in Italy (and has lived there for decades); she had remarked that she and a mutual friend had recently visited the wonderful church of the Santissima Annunziata in central Florence. The enclosed entrance atrium (known as the Chiostro dei Voti) of this beautiful place has Renaissance frescos on all four walls, all of which frescos have suffered over the centuries and so, despite recent restorations, are clearly not as the various artists had left them, they are no longer in their pristine state.

These artists by the way include Andrea del Sarto and his students Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino. One of the others who also worked in the Chiostro was Alessio Baldovinetti (1425 - 1499) and it is his fresco which I would like to have a look at today. This fresco has already been briefly cited in reference to still-life painting in the article Some Remarks about Still-life Painting (on this blog), but let's look at it again from a couple of different points of view.

The photo above shows Alessio's complete painting as it appears (albeit slightly distorted by the camera) in the Chiostro dei Voti, situated to the left of the entrance door of the church proper; it is painted on the wall between two arches and has a semi-circular top. It is bordered by a design which includes portrait heads, something which we see also on the sculpted frame of Michelangelo's Doni Tondo (The Holy Family, Uffizi) and, in a similar way, on Ghiberti's so-called Gates of Paradise, the east doors of the Florentine Baptistry.

The painting shows the Nativity, the birth of Christ, before a tumble-down structure with a make-shift roof; the principal characters in the narrative are of course the baby Jesus and his mother Mary and father Joseph. The supporting actors, so to speak, are  some shepherds - both in the foreground and in the left middle-distance -, the ox and ass, or donkey, as well as a flock of sheep and five rejoicing angels hovering above (one delivering the good news to the shepherds on the left). Because of the photo here, the ruined building appears somewhat oddly-shaped but in fact it is a simple, normally vertical box. This building occupies slightly more than half of the width of the image, from the right. It is, as it were, balanced on the left by a vast panoramic view of what we may assume to be either the Tiber Valley or, if closer to Florence, the Arno Valley: in either case, the man-made contrasted with, or complemented by, the natural.

A detail of the landscape view on the left of Alessio's Nativity, 1460-62

This juxtaposition of the solid, comparatively dark stone structure and the light, airy expanse of the sun-lit landscape fulfils at least two purposes: first, it provides, on the right, a setting for the stated subject of the image, the Nativity of Jesus Christ, and contains all the requisite elements, as listed above; and secondly, the contrast between the overall darkness of that right side with the clear open brightness on the left is symbolic of the advent of the Light of the World, that is, the birth of Jesus. This is an important departure from the usual symmetry in Italian painting of the Nativity scene, with the adoring mother and her child firmly the central focus. In Alessio's version however, while Mary is still almost the centre of the composition, the vast, highly naturalistic landscape panorama on the left constantly draws one's eye to that side of the picture.

And this landscape is astoundingly compelling as a verifiable space; it recedes ineluctably towards the hazy mountains in the far, far distance, taking us, almost like the flight of a bird, down from the high-point of the Nativity building, across the broad plain of the Arno (or Tiber) River and, following its meandering course, past outlying farmhouses and other structures, past a distant walled-city at the base of that mountain range and finally into the ethereal transformation at the meeting of 'fluid' solidity and moist sky. It reminds one of nothing so much as Alessio's contemporary, Piero della Francesca (1412 - 1492), a painter noted, amongst other things, for just this kind of limpidly lit airy spaciousness. *

Another detail, distorted in the photo, of the right side of the Nativity

In the detail above we see part of the stone building where the young couple has taken shelter, two shepherds (?) on the right, and Saint Joseph on the ground in the centre, reclining on a saddle; it is this small area I would like to examine now. First, it should be mentioned that certain parts of this fresco have suffered substantial losses of colour, in particular almost the entire figure of the shepherd on the left here and certain parts of his companion on the right. I say 'substantial losses' but it does seem possible that in fact various parts, especially of the shepherd on the left, may have been left unpainted! The underpainting seems to be complete but almost all the colour is missing; this applies as well to the canteen or water-bottle just in front of Joseph: the outline form is clear but again, absolutely no colour! Similarly, while Joseph's cloak could be white - if so, a unique invention - it too appears to have been left at an earlier stage and is missing its final colour. Where the colour itself does seem to have suffered over time is the blue of Joseph's tunic; the colour is there but all the modelling has apparently worn off. This could be due to certain technical problems with the application of the paint in the fresco technique, or to weather or rubbing; the same could be said of the ass in the background here, which also looks as though it is without (final) colour. In addition, apparently, Alessio, like Leonardo da Vinci, devised his own experiments with paint, many of which (in both cases) were unsuccessful.

Interestingly, a similar situation exists in Piero della Francesca's fresco cycle in the church of San Francesco, in Arezzo. In this series of related narrative scenes there are two battle paintings and in both - unless the colour has actually dropped off (unlikely if 'buon fresco' [true fresco] had been used) - various parts appear to have never had colour. In this case however, the areas in question are so much part of the whole that they function almost as though they were actually coloured; some of the lances in the scene of the Battle of Constantine and Maxentius for example or, perhaps the most obvious, a trumpeter in the Battle of Heraclius and Chosroes: his large 'eastern' hat seems to me to have never been painted-in and exists as an uncoloured abstract shape which, within the context of the scene, works perfectly well (and generally unnoticed) as a kind of 'neutral' colour. This same type of hat is featured three times in the lunette above (The Exaltation of the True Cross), at the top of the same wall, in which at least one is unpainted as well as a section of its wearer's cloak.

A detail of the Battle between Constantine and Maxentius, by Piero della Francesca, c 1452-55 (?), fresco in San Francesco, Arezzo. Note the apparently unpainted lance held by the rider of the brown horse on the left and the limpid landscape between the combatants. The large lacuna above the rider on the right is where an entire section of the plaster has been lost.

The already remarked similarity between Alessio's treatment of landscape and that of Piero della Francesca may be exemplified here as well, that is, in the scene of the Battle between Constantine and Maxentius (see photo above); in the central space which separates the two belligerent forces, Piero has placed a view of a bend in a distant river, a river also, like Alessio's, in a broad plain, with a few houses and small figures along it banks and even a couple of swans, a scene so tranquil and mundane which thus contrasts dramatically with the battle frieze in the immediate foreground! The pale summer blue of the sky and its candid clouds, the brilliantly clear light of Tuscany, painted on various occasions by Piero della Francesca - and by Alessio Baldovinetti at Santissima Annunziata - are true and real observations of fact; whether or not one painter was aware of the work of the other is not known at present. The supposed dates of Piero's work at Arezzo (1452-55) would suggest that he had painted his magnum opus prior to Alessio painting his (1460-62) but it should be pointed out that scholars have great difficulty in agreeing on the dates of many of Piero's works. However, so as not to fall into a common error, and as a painter myself, I may observe that it is more than possible that these two painters knew nothing of each other and simply, because of the similar time and place - mid-15th century Tuscany - arrived at very similar perceptions of the world around them. Both artists indeed are recorded as having worked with Domenico Veneziano whose understanding of this particular quality of light may have contributed to this common outlook.

In the Chiostro dei Voti it is possible that artists such as Andrea del Sarto might attract more attention - as they did with me initially - and especially so since his students, Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, also became extremely important painters in their own right. There is something a little awkward in the drawing of the two shepherds(?) in Alessio's Nativity although the figure of Saint Joseph in repose and other objects - the saddle for instance - make it perfectly clear that he knew what he was doing; often his figures do not have the kind of Renaissance 'gravity' about them which is perhaps more obvious in some of the other frescos in this cloister. The slightly more 'illustrative' look of this painting may dissuade closer scrutiny by some visitors: I admit it took me some visits before I really 'tuned in' to Alessio!

Annunciation by Alessio Baldovinetti, c 1457, in the Uffizi.

To finish, I have included the photo above so as to show an example of Alessio's 'easel painting' as opposed to the fresco we have been discussing; incidentally, note the beautiful bright colours, giving us an idea of what his Santissima Annunziata fresco may originally have looked like. This largish picture is kept in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and demonstrates two things about Alessio's work: first and perhaps most obviously, his complete command of perspective drawing - in fact, some might argue, and I amongst them, that the real protagonist of this picture is actually illusion created by perspective, together with the beautiful colour; and secondly, it further exemplifies the earlier observation that Alessio's figures have an anachronistic quality, in this case, an adherence to the earlier courtly style known as International Gothic. Their graceful elongated bodies and static gestures are out of keeping with the very 'modern' perspective-derived setting: not only the perspective construction itself but the 'modern' rounded arches as well. It should be remembered that at this point, about 1457, we have already seen major works by not only Masaccio, but also Donatello, Mantegna and Andrea del Verrocchio, all of which have a robust vigour about them; even Lorenzo Ghiberti, with whom Alessio shares the qualities of his figures to a certain extent, can be quite robust when so inspired.

For the present writer at least, the work of Alessio Baldovinetti was an 'an acquired taste' but once I gave him the time he deserves, I was rewarded with some wonderful moments notwithstanding some reservations. But, in fact, it may be (naively) asked, in the Western tradition, do 'perfect' pictures actually exist? A kind of nonsense question! My response to Alessio's work would seem to suggest that the answer lies more within the viewer than in the objects themselves; does the perfect viewer exist, subject as we are to moods, temper, our culture (education) and so on, even to the effects of the weather? We bring all of ourselves to the act of gazing at art works, including our age, our maturity, and for this reason it is necessary, and fulfilling, to look again and again at not only our favourite works but also at those for which, perhaps, we may have little initial sympathy.

* Indeed, Piero della Francesca also painted a very famous Nativity, unfinished, damaged and apparently a very late work (perhaps 1475), so, later than Alessio's it would seem (now in the National Gallery, London).

Note the distant but clear panoramic river-valley view on the left and also other 'coincidences' such as Saint Joseph, on the right, seated on a very similar saddle. Alessio's and Piero's paintings are not the same but similarities nevertheless exist. Apologies for the poor-quality photo.

 

Note: all photos in this article taken by the author who reserves copyright.