This article is about a painting which hangs in the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples, the principal picture gallery of that city. As readers of my recent articles will have understood by now, I have a little one-man crusade going, aimed at stirring-up interest in the painting of Giorgio Vasari, or, perhaps I should say, revitalising that interest since, during his lifetime, he was extremely busy and much sought-after. Although receiving a lot of criticism from later scholars because of perceived inaccuracies in the biographies of various artists, his monumental literary work, the Lives 1, remains a fundamental text for anyone studying the Renaissance; his own pictorial works however are generally not so well regarded.
My own 'discovery' of Giorgio's painted work, that is to say, of its particular quality, was the result of a slow, gradual exposure to more and more of it, and a concomitant letting go of received prejudice (from my reading of art history). This exposure occurred while looking at some of his smaller works and particularly during a visit to his house in his native Arezzo, the so-called Casa Vasari. There he was responsible for almost the entire decoration of the rooms, including the ceilings, with his own paintings, many of which are relatively small; 'relatively' because he is also responsible for the massive - and I mean 'massive' - murals (c. 1570) in the enormous room known as the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.
Shortly before commencing the mural decoration, Vasari had been commissioned, as architect and engineer, to redesign the huge room itself (the Italian word 'salone' simply means 'big room'), in the process of which, amongst other things, he raised the ceiling height by seven metres! For these public and very large frescos Vasari naturally had a team of assistants to help him. I say 'naturally' because nearly all professional artists maintained a workshop which functioned also as a school for young artists; as these young apprentices (garzoni) worked their way through the various levels of their craft, some gradually became assistants as opposed to students. Very large campaigns, such as that in the Salone dei Cinquecento, and even smaller individual works, were quite normally carried out by the 'workshop', under the supervision of the master of course; in fact, this being so often the case, contemporary contracts for artworks sometimes specified that the work was to be done entirely by the master of the shop, and not with the aid of assistants.
These huge frescos are rhetorical, to say the least, intended and indeed functioning as self-congratulatory propaganda, both for Duke Cosimo I (Medici) and for Florence itself. It is possibly this rhetorical aspect which bothers some historians about Giorgio as he did quite a lot of this kind of thing, and was very much attached to the courts of the Medici in Florence and the Papacy in Rome. But in fact, standing in front of this fresco particularly (photo above), his ability as a painter, as an artist, is what struck me. This amazing scene is set at night and the 'choreography' of the composition, the idea itself of using the lanterns so as to lead us deeper and deeper into the depth of the scene, are examples of Giorgio's brilliance. Oddly though, the lanterns add a sort of whimsical quality to the drama, recalling Japanese prints in which lanterns play a similar, lighthearted role. Actually, the two central horsemen in the foreground with their apparently white armour, the battle-ready dwarf carrying a lantern, the strange shifts in proportion (the gunner in the left foreground for instance), as well as the lanterns themselves, tend to turn what is ostensibly a battle scene into a kind of fairy story. Further back in the picture however, on the walls, we do see some of the more gruesome aspects of real war, not to mention the burning city in the background!
In any case, paintings such as this were Vasari's 'stock-in-trade' but he also did smaller allegorical scenes (in his house for example) and many works for churches up and down central Italy, some of which have been remarked upon in previous articles. Here I would like to discuss one of his works, as said, in the museum of Capodimonte in Naples: it is a Resurrection and, to all intents and purposes, looks like a 'typical' Vasari although - and here is the clue - on the label beside the painting it gives the work to Vasari and to Raffaellino del Colle, with the date 1545. Raffaellino is mentioned a number of times in Vasari's Lives and he would have been at this time a fully-fledged 'master' possibly working as an assistant to Vasari, certainly not as an apprentice; that is, they were more or less on an equal footing professionally, even if Vasari was the younger artist (the commissions were Vasari's after all).
Although I don't actually like this painting, it has many elements which can be described as typical of Vasari's Mannerist style: a scene more-or-less crowded with large muscular figures in, often, odd poses, a certain 'unrealistic' spatial composition, as well as what might seem to modern viewers, a highly-contrived main protagonist (the Christ): that is, despite the 'realistic' nude study, the action of the figure is almost bizarre. These characteristics, it should be remembered, are also typical of Mannerism itself, where a high degree of Renaissance-derived 'realism' was mixed with a rejection of substantial elements of that same 'realism'. Renaissance space, especially its dependence on mathematical perspective, was basically thrown out or ignored, as was relative proportion or size: figures could appear almost gigantic and not only in the foregrounds 2; emotional drama, crowding of figures and spatial ambiguity were to the fore, as opposed to Renaissance order, poise and stability (in other words, a rejection of certain 'classical' elements).
Vasari's painting is full of energy, with the guards falling almost out of the painting, and the Christ striding across the middle of the scene; compare this with the same subject (above) by Piero della Francesca for instance! In the middle of the Capodimonte scene however are two quite unusual things, both seemingly being crushed by the fallen stone of the risen Christ's tomb: one is the screaming figure, clearly not a soldier, looking directly at us; the other - and certainly the strangest thing (an anticipation of Henry Fuseli!) - is the figure beside that one, clothed in whites and greys. To me, it appears that Vasari has included, under that fallen stone, first the devil (in the centre) and to our left, Death itself, both things conquered by Christ's victory! Note that the 'devil' figure is not dressed as a soldier and is, as said, 'screaming', while the other figure, also not dressed as a soldier and clothed in greys (that is, no colour), seems to hide its face: one diabolical figure which screams at its defeat, the other which ruled until this moment, also defeated, clasps its head. Brilliant conceptions added to the iconography of this, by now, standard composition.
So what is the problem? The problem is that the drawing of all the figures, including the Christ, is weak, so weak and so lacking in detail as to make one question its authorship; some parts of the composition are almost certainly by Vasari, but the execution raises some doubts. And this execution is problematical in many parts of the drawing of the figures, especially so in the fallen guards. For example, the doll-like right arm and hand of the soldier on the viewer's left of the foreground group of three; the arms and hands of the foremost figure in that group; the extremely weak arm of the helmeted figure in the right middle-ground; and finally, the figure of Christ; all these lack the muscle insertions typical of the drawing style of Vasari, and the hands and feet are too generalised to be by the master. Vasari's anatomy is typically, yes, exaggerated, but also detailed; his idol was Michelangelo, one of the greatest draughtsmen alive, and Giorgio, who often solicited his opinion, was not about to let the side down with sloppy drawing (Giorgio Vasari actively collected drawings, many of which are now kept at the Uffizi).
The photo above demonstrates quite clearly the drawing of the human figure typical of Giorgio Vasari; in this detail, in the forearm of the standing figure in the right foreground (thought to be a self-portrait), the insertions of the muscles at the elbow are detailed and precise, they are not generalised; the arm itself is fully and strongly formed, it is not that of a doll; the figures in this panel all show the typical hands of Vasari, in which he delights in showing the knuckles and the tendons; the soles of the feet of the foreground figure (in yellow) also demonstrate his eye for detailed realistic representation. These qualities are absent from the Capodimonte Resurrection.
It would therefore seem that, although Vasari may have been the designer of the Capodimonte picture, the execution was, at least in great part, by Raffaellino del Colle. Vasari himself, in his Lives, while discussing his own work, describes the Badia panel (above) explicitly but - pardon the pun - brushes over his Resurrection with just one line; in fact, he returned to Rome to finish his Neapolitan commissions, having run into a bit of trouble when in Naples 3.
To conclude, below is a photo of another Resurrection, this one attributed solely to Raffaellino del Colle (1490 - 1566); it is in the cathedral of Sansepolcro, the town where Raffaellino (and incidentally, Piero della Francesca) was born. Although painted almost twenty years prior to his working with Vasari in Naples (1544 - 45), there are clear similarities between the two versions (Capodimonte and Sansepolcro), particularly in the figure of Christ, notably in the pose itself, but also in the face; if we put photos of the two Resurrections side by side, it is immediately apparent that the two Christs, with minor changes, are from the same cartoon (preparatory drawing), only reversed! This fact suggests that the attribution of the Capodimonte picture to both Vasari and Rafaellino is, how to put it, overstated! Perhaps this is based on the claim made by Vasari himself, that he had painted a Resurrection while in Naples (see Note 3); and perhaps the inclusion of the name of Rafaellino del Colle is based on the clear resemblance just described between the two Christ figures.
As with Vasari, the influence of the work of Raphael - and Michelangelo - is obvious and not surprising, as Raffaellino had worked with Raphael when he, Raphael, was painting the celebrated Vatican (or, Raphael) Stanze frescos (from 1508-09 onwards) which of course meant that he experienced Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel being painted at the same time (1508 -1512). Raphael died very young (at 37 in 1520) and in fact, the Stanze frescos were completed after his death by his assistants, including Raffaellino. The influence of Raphael on Rafaellino may be seen in the figure of the soldier-guard in the right foreground of the Sansepolcro Resurrection (below), for this figure is a very close adaptation - not to say direct transcription - of the figure of Heliodorus in Raphael's fresco, The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple in the Stanza di Eliodoro at the Vatican; it is such a thorough borrowing that, quite apart from the pose of the figure, even elements of the costume of the Stanze Heliodorus survive in the Resurrection (the leather straps of the 'skirt' of the Roman-style armour, for instance).
1 Giorgio Vasari (1511 - 1574): painter, architect (of the Uffizi in Florence amongst other things), engineer and author of the first 'modern' work of art history: the so-called Lives (for short), that is, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, the title of the revised and enlarged 1568 edition.
2 See for example, Michelangelo's two large frescos in the Cappella Paolina in the Vatican: the Crucifixion of Saint Peter for instance, contains numerous changes of scale amongst the many figures.
3 In the chapter of the Lives entitled Descrizione dell'Opere di Giorgio Vasari (Description of the Works of Giorgio Vasari), Vasari gives a long summary of his own artistic life, his own biography; at one point, discussing a rather brief stay in Naples, he says this: "Et in un altro quadro per l'abate Capeccio feci la Resurrezione" ('And in another picture for the Abbot Capeccio I did the Resurrection'). In exactly the same paragraph, in discussing the fact that he left Naples for Rome because compromised by a street brawl, he says: " ... aiutati da circa 15 giovani, che meco di stucchi e pitture lavoravano, ..." [speaking of certain monks under attack who were] (' .... helped by about 15 youths, who were working with me on plasters [statues, mouldings] and pictures, ...'). Here Vasari states explicitly that he works with assistants, be they apprentices or more skilled craftsmen; these particular young men had apparently scattered after the brawl and Giorgio returned to Rome with only one or two of them.
Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, Vol V, p 428, Edizioni dell'Orso, 2021
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