Revisiting two Queens!

 

The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon, c1890, by Edward John Poynter;

oil on canvas, 234.5 x 350.5 cm. The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

While visiting Sydney recently, I reacquainted myself with an old favourite of mine at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW): The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon. This large canvas, an academic 'machine', was painted by the English artist Edward John Poynter (1836-1919); it dates, after a prolonged gestation, from around 1891 and was purchased by the gallery in 1892. Seeing this tremendous picture again reminded me that it was this painting and another of the same subject which got me writing this blog, or at least in part. The other version was painted in about 1455 and, unlike Poynter's oil on canvas, is a fresco; it is part of a very well-known cycle of frescos called the Legend of the True Cross, in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo, Italy.

Piero della Francesca is the author of the large fresco showing first, the Queen of Sheba as she recognises the holy wood on which, much later, Christ will be crucified (the whole story is quite involved and is not relevant to our purpose here); and secondly, the scene next to this and attached to it is the Visit of the Queen of Sheba, the two scenes forming a kind of diptych. This version and that of Poynter, painted some 435 years later, could hardly be more different - not only in technique but also, and particularly, in treatment or attitude.

The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon, c1455 (?) by Piero della Francesca

Fresco, approx. 350 x 370 cm. The basilica of San Francesco, Arezzo, Italy. 

Now, even a casual glance at the images above will be enough to show that the two treatments of this one subject are entirely different; a more careful study will reveal that completely divergent approaches have been taken by the two painters concerned; let's start with the Poynter in the AGNSW.

Edward Poynter was what we might call a typical academic artist of the late 19th century. Academic painters were highly skilled, especially in drawing, were often well-educated, at least in classical mythology, and were serious students of archeology, a blossoming science at the time. Discoveries of ancient cities, ruins, tombs and so on were grist for the academic painter's mill. We should perhaps recall here that Impressionism had already been developed by this time (1891) and that post-Impressionism was also under way; whereas the Impressionists were looking at the life around them, including the landscape, academic artists on the other hand were focused on a kind of intellectual nostalgia for the by then long-gone Greco-Roman past, even if their work itself, particularly that of the painters, bore almost no resemblance to the art of the periods they admired. What they sought to portray was a re-imaging of that past supported by their knowledge of history and archeology; they were not especially interested in the artistic styles of the ancient world - except for Greco-Roman sculpture - although they included imitations of them in their narratives, for instance, as decoration on the wall of a painting set in ancient Egypt.

This love of history and archeology produced paintings which were erudite assemblages of sometimes discordant elements drawn from readings of history and archeology and the latest finds from digs happening throughout the Mediterranean basin. In Poynter's magnificent conjuring we have a wonderful example of just this attitude; historical accuracy - as far as possible - illustrating Biblical legends, Christian stories, pagan myth or actual historical events (battles and so forth), sometimes combined with first-hand experience from trips to Italy, Greece or north Africa. Poynter has apparently based his magnificent palace on contemporary discoveries in Iran and Iraq as well as other elements from Egyptian culture and so on. And naturally, some invention of his own, such as in some of the costumes and what he imagines might have been the ceremonial aspects of such an encounter. The Queen of Sheba - thought by modern scholars to have been in either present-day Ethiopia or Yemen - visited the King of Israel, Solomon, famous for his great wisdom (I Kings, 10). She is supposed to have taken a large caravan of costly gifts for Solomon and to have posed a number of difficult questions to him, eventually returning home convinced of his famed wisdom.

So Edward Poynter's painting is effectively an immense stage on which the Queen enters from the left, accompanied by some of her retinue, and begins to ascend a low marble staircase, a sort of ramp, on which Solomon is descending to greet her. Both are dressed as one might imagine such princes to be clothed at that time. The enormous palace-courtyard in which the event occurs is crowded with courtiers, soldiers, royal women - behind the throne and looking quite Egyptian - and presumably numerous servants. The great and wonderful columns supporting the surrounding arcade are decorated in red paint and gold or bronze adornments. In short, the scene is grandiose and spectacular. Interestingly, the artist's thought process is revealed to some extent by the addition of extra figures, now discernible as having been painted over the lower parts of at least two of the columns, that is, after their paint had dried, a not uncommon circumstance in older pictures where later additions were painted-in too thinly and, with time, have revealed the original thought underneath.

Now let's turn our attention to the Piero della Francesca fresco; to begin, that fact, that it is a fresco, means that it is technically a substantially different animal: generally the colours dry lighter than in many oil paintings and the image, due to the fresco technique, becomes a part of the wall on which it is painted; under normal conditions therefore, frescos can't be moved. Oil paintings on wood or canvas of course can be relatively easily moved and canvas even rolled-up. Oil pictures can and do suffer from a darkening of the oil in the paint and I suspect the Sydney picture has thus suffered. Piero's painting in Arezzo has been cleaned recently and is a bright and luminous image. But how does his version of the event differ from Poynter's? Well, in several extremely important respects; the first being that Piero has made no attempt whatever to stage his retelling in a historically 'accurate' setting. His only concession to any historical time - and not the one of Sheba and Solomon - is the Greco-Roman room, with its Ionic fluted columns and multi-coloured marble walls; his figures on the other hand are absolutely contemporary with his own time. There is not a single Egyptian hair style, or other (pseudo-) Biblical reference; there are no guards and no weapons; there are no wives or slaves; there is no reference to the near-East, the Levant. In other words, Piero has set his Visit in a contemporary Renaissance environment, even the clothes, or rather, especially the clothes are what one might have seen in 15th century Florence or Arezzo, worn by princes and the well-to-do: note the now unfortunately somewhat degraded cloak of Solomon. Also, the Queen and Solomon are on the same level, not, as in Poynter's picture, the one ascending to meet the other. In so far as historical fact is considered, we might mention the somewhat olive tone of both Solomon's and Sheba's skin - and her sub-Saharan African assistants - which Poynter has correctly included in his narrative; Piero's actors are all mid-fifteenth century Italians!

The determining psychology of these painters is to transform historical-mythological stories into 'actual' events but their approaches are quite different. Poynter has opted to create, before our very eyes, as though in a photograph or theatrical scene, an imagined 'reality'; he has tried to make a historical event a matter of flesh-and-blood and therefore something more than 'merely' words on a page. Piero della Francesca has attempted the same thing but his 'reality' is the one of his own period, the daily life of Renaissance Tuscany. He has set his re-telling in 'modern day' Arezzo - and, in one of the other scenes, has even included portraits of living contemporaries - thus making a story from the bronze-age an event occurring in a Renaissance court. In both cases, at least to some extent, both painters were fulfilling the expectations of their respective audiences although, with one particular difference: Piero was also indulging his own love of perspective and his theories of how to 'construct' human beings, in paintings. Piero's 'quiet' or stillness is due to this approach; his images are not simply retellings, they are equally demonstrations of his Renaissance rationality.

Given these quite marked differences in the psychological handling of the same event, a distinct divergence in approach, one might ask: which picture is, to our eyes, the more modern one? As splendid an imagining as Edward Poynter's is, I think the verdict has to be on the side of the Piero della Francesca. Not only is it, was it, absolutely up-to-date in terms of its setting at the time he painted it, but remarkably, it still seems, to my eyes, a completely modern picture even today. Amongst other things, the apparently casual circumstance of the Queen and the King, the woman and the man, being on the same level - even if the Queen is showing due respect to her host - makes it chime with our own contemporary attitudes to parity among the sexes. It is true that the ancient setting, as far as it goes, is a reference to Greco-Roman culture, that is, a time long before Piero's own but one which was, at his time, the model of contemporary 'modern' architecture in Italy. The apparent straightforwardness of his depiction of the event, the clarity of the effect, the 'statement' quality of the image, all combine to give Piero's painting a somehow 'modern' look.

Another obvious difference is in the treatment of light. Poynter has imagined a hot Mediterranean place, such as Palestine, and has covered the open space of the reception area with an enormous sun-shade, elements of which are visible in the top right of his painting; the arcade formed by the double rows of columns also provides shade for the multitude of participants in his retelling. The effect is one of shaded heat, also suggested by the blue sky seen through the tops of the left-hand columns. Piero's forecourt is also shaded but we can see that the light falling on all the participants in his image is entering through the gaps between the large columns on the left. His light not only illuminates the scene but actually forms the solid bodies of the King and Queen and their respective retinues; light here is not simply a pictorial necessity, it is the 'thing' which forms the physical masses.

A view of Poynter's painting and its impressive frame in the AGNSW.

Another not unimportant difference between the two pictures is their framing, or, in the case of Piero's fresco, lack of it - in so far as it is not surrounded, and thus isolated, by the 'normal' wooden frame. The Edward Poynter in Sydney has a splendid large gilt frame, typical of those into which were mounted such 19th century pictures; such a frame, a virtual work-of-art itself, is designed to replicate or support the era portrayed in the painting. The effect of the wooden frame is also to isolate the painted image from its surroundings and, to borrow the analogy adopted by L.B Alberti in about 1435, to create a kind of window through which the illusionistic picture is seen. Easel painters, that is, painters whose work is made on an easel or something similar - as opposed to fresco painters - consciously or not anticipate this effect when painting their pictures: the frame will eventually add to the illusion. Piero della Francesca's frescos in Arezzo are normally separated, one from the other and level from level - there are three levels of fresco pictures here, not counting the ceiling images - by a painted faux marble cornice although the two frescos concerning the Queen of Sheba are neatly separated by the large columns which mark the left wall of the room in which the meeting takes place (making it a kind of patio or forecourt). 

Detail of the Queen of Sheba in the Sydney painting

First, apologies for the poor quality of this photo which is a detail, a close-up, of the Queen of Sheba as imagined by Edward Poynter. In this photo we can see, in addition to the Queen herself, in the background, some of the many figures which crowd the scene, including courtiers, one or two soldiers, some slaves (?) and so on, as well as the splendid gold or bronze lions guarding the marble staircase on which the queen is walking - and the silken carpet thrown over those stairs. The Queen herself is fittingly beautiful in a late-19th century 'orientalist' way and, as is typical of this sort of painting, there is a hint of eroticism in her breasts being bare! The clearly obvious extraordinary level of skill of these academic artists is demonstrated by the rendering of the many different materials in this detail alone: apart from the human figure, the marble, marble inlay, silk, jewels, a flower and so on and on. Piero della Francesca's version is what we might call today 'minimalist' by comparison and that pared-back quality imbues his telling with an intellectual restraint and clarity which I feel is lacking in the albeit splendid Poynter.

*All photographs are the author's who reserves copyright.

Caravaggio, Ludovico and Orazio

 

The following observations are simply that, observations which stimulate questions; they are not based on detailed art historical research but rather on visible similarities in the works of several masters of the Baroque period.

Did Caravaggio pass through Bologna on his way to Rome? I have no idea; in fact, although I have never read any attempt to retrace that journey, Caravaggio's passage to Rome from Milan - or at least the area of Lombardy, possibly via Venice - may well have taken him, like modern travellers today from either place (Milan or Venice), through Bologna. This question occurred to me while studying and admiring the canvases of Ludovico Carracci, the older cousin of the generally better known brothers Agostino and Annibale Carracci.

My curiosity was pricked by one of Ludovico's paintings in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, the Probatica Piscina, a large canvas painted in 1595-96. This picture shows Christ healing a man who is waiting at the Pool of Bethesda (the Probatica Piscina or Sheep's Pool) to be cured by its miraculous waters; on the occasion when an angel descends and stirs the waters of the pool, people who enter in the water could be cured of their physical ailments.

The Probatica Piscina, 1595-96, oil on canvas by Ludovico Carracci (1555-1619)

Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna

Two details of Ludovico's painting (above) showing first, the angel with arms and wings spread wide, and then the reclining nude figure.

Ludovico's image, apart from its intrinsic value, has two elements which reminded me immediately of works by Caravaggio: the large angel descending from the top of the painting and the large (reclining, rising?) male nude in the lower right corner. These figures appear in the works of many painters and, so, although not by any means peculiar to Caravaggio, they do also appear in several paintings by him. Should he indeed have passed through Bologna on his way to Rome, it is possible that he might have seen Ludovico's painting in one of the local churches (San Giorgio in Poggiale).

But let's now take a short detour to Milan, where Caravaggio was from, and visit the wonderful museum of the Brera (the Pinacoteca di Brera). Here is a startling picture made in about 1606 by a painter of Pisan origin (therefore Tuscan), Orazio Gentileschi, the father incidentally of the equally important painter, Artemisia Gentileschi. 

The Holy Martyrs Cecilia, Valeriano and Tiburzio visited by an Angel (or, The Vision of Santa Cecilia) 1606-07 by Orazio Gentileschi (1563-1639).   Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Orazio is important in his own right but also because he was a friend and early follower, in Rome, of Caravaggio himself. In relation to angels, there is a story that Gentileschi at one point loaned to Caravaggio his studio props of a pair of (eagle's? swan's?) wings and a Franciscan monk's habit so that he could use them in his own paintings. Caravaggio and other painters would attach such real wings to the backs of their 'angelic' models so as to obtain the correct fall of light when painting them.

The Seven Works of Mercy, 1606, oil on canvas by Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi, 1571-1610)

The church of Pio Monte della Misericordia, Naples.

The photo above shows the Seven Works of Mercy, painted by Caravaggio in Naples in 1606; to note here are the angels supporting the Virgin Mary in the top third of the painting and the reclining male nude in the lower left. The left-hand angel has darkly-feathered (eagle's) wings (difficult to see in the photograph) and open arms, whereas the right-hand one has open white wings, also possibly modelled on the original set loaned to Caravaggio by Orazio Gentileschi. If Caravaggio had been stimulated by these elements in the work of Ludovico Carracci, he has done more with the wings which, in Ludovico's painting, in fact look more like those of a dove, and he has reversed the pose, with other alterations, of the nude figure in Ludovico's picture.

Orazio Gentileschi's painting, made in Rome around 1606-07 (Christiansen, 2025 1), has a marvellously developed angel with splendid open wings and arms, as does Caravaggio's left-hand angel above. However, Orazio, as far as is known, never visited Naples and his Brera painting was painted it seems in the same year as Caravaggio's in the Pio Monte (1606); meaning that Orazio never saw Caravaggio's painted wings in Naples and, vice versa, Caravaggio never saw Orazio's in Rome. If the story about Orazio lending 'his' wings to Caravaggio is true, the similarity in the posing of wings by the two friends, even when many kilometres apart, suggests the use of the same model, viz. the pair of real wings owned by Orazio Gentileschi; the posing of the angel, if not the wings, may originally have been stimulated in Caravaggio, if he had passed through Bologna, by his viewing of Ludovico Carracci's angel in his Probatica Piscina! Importantly, the open-armed gesture of Ludovico's angel is one favoured by Caravaggio  and is clearly very significant in Gentileschi's picture.

As already said, the use of descending angels, angels in flight as it were, was a prerogative  neither of Ludovico Carracci nor of Caravaggio, and neither was the device of a reclining nude figure in the lower foreground of works of art, a theme dating back to classical times. What stimulated the present observations was the similarity of these elements in the works of these three masters in particular, as well as the (possible) physical proximity - in a broad sense - of each of the painters to one of the others. In the case of Gentileschi and Caravaggio, their friendship is documented fact and, in the case of Ludovico Carracci and Caravaggio, the influence of the older painter, Carracci, on the younger is merely a plausible, hypothetical possibility. 

Both Ludovico Carracci and Orazio Gentileschi were older than Caravaggio and both outlived him. Although Caravaggio had mistresses it is unknown whether or not he fathered any children; Ludovico, as mentioned, was the cousin of two famous painters, the brothers Agostino and Annibale Carracci; and Orazio, the son of a painter, was the father of the very famous painter Artemisia Gentileschi; interestingly, she sometimes signed her work Artemisia Lomi, her grandfather's surname - for example, in her presumed portrait of her father of 1639-40: Artimisia [sic] Lomi 2; Orazio used his mother's family name, Gentileschi.

1 Keith Christiansen, essay Il viaggio di Gentileschi oltre Caravaggio in Orazio Gentileschi - Un pittore in viaggio, p 23; catalogue published by Moebius, 2025, edited by Annamaria Bava and Gelsomina Spione, on the occasion of the Gentileschi exhibtion at the Musei Reali di Torino, November 2025 - May 2026

2 Un pittore in viaggio; p 72 Judith W. Mann, essay Orazio Gentileschi: venticinque anni dopo.

The Backgound

 

The background of medieval religious paintings (those painted on wood as opposed to frescos), most usually being of gold leaf, has a particular significance. While the human or divine figures and their setting, if any, were normally painted in tempera (coloured pigments suspended in a solution made with egg), the background (lo sfondo in Italian), whether flat or, in the case of haloes, having a punched or indented pattern, was very often made of extremely fine sheets of pure gold (gold leaf). This background, once applied, was highly polished and therefore glowed with a sparkling, flickering light, especially when on an altar lit with candles.

The significance of this costly gold background was that, whatever the scene being represented, the image was imbued with a sort of 'divine' otherworldliness, a quality of being outside time, of timelessness, and in a symbolic way, separate from our normal space. Gold could also be applied to salient points or objects in a picture, for instance, an angel's wings as is the case in Beato Angelico's glittering Annunciation at Cortona.

Annunciation, 1434 by Beato Angelico (Guido di Piero, aka Fra Giovanni da Fiesole), 

c.1395-1455. Tempera on panel

Museo Diocesano del Capitolo, Cortona, Italy

The photo above shows the work of an extraordinary painter, a monk, who is technically regarded as a Renaissance artist although, as this work demonstrates, Beato Angelico maintained some of the traditions of late medieval painting, in this particular case, amongst other things the use of gold leaf: around the dove above Mary's head, in the fabric covering her chair, in the stars decorating the ceiling of her apartment, in the words issuing from the mouth of the angel, in the decorative elements of his clothing and, most spectacularly, in the angel's wings. The use of gold in the haloes of sacred figures continued, as here, even as it declined as a standard background. The effect of the gold in the wings is amazing, at least for me, as, when I first saw this painting in Cortona, it was dazzling; the picture had been restored and the gold undoubtedly exerted its power on me as a viewer of this profound image. Despite having by that time seen many other paintings where gold leaf had been used, especially as the 'flat' background, its force in this case was extraordinary.

Annunciation, by Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) 

Tempera on panel, 1489-90. Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence.

By way of contrast, as the Renaissance got into full swing, a painting of the same subject, the Annunciation, made about 56 years later, has almost no gold at all and depends entirely on its suggestion of reality for its effect. Note incidentally, that here we are observers, definitely not participants (discussed later).

The function of the gold background however, apart from the, so to speak 'mechanical' one of making certain things 'precious', as in the Angelico above, was to intimate the sublime, the divine, the other world of a paradise. In the Beato Angelico work just discussed, the entire ambience of the scene is painted in great detail - which could and did happen in medieval painting, especially in manuscript illumination - with no gold background and, through Angelico's use of the then 'new' perspective techniques, is rendered physically-spatially plausible in a way unknown to medieval artists. 

The Mourning over the Body of Christ by Giottino (Giotto di Stefano or Tommaso di Stefano, 

1324-69). Tempera on panel, c. 1360-65

Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

In this exquisite painting (above) by Giottino we have an example of the late medieval use of a flat gold-leaf background. Although the individual figures are convincing in their 'realism' (they are solidly modelled, they have space both as individual actors and between them), and a sense of the tragedy is evident especially (and dramatically) in the figure of Mary Magdalen in the lower right corner, the extent to which the foreground action is based on (earthly) reality is, so to say 'contradicted' by the flat gold background. As if to say, yes, we are dealing with a human tragedy but one which at the same time is taken into the sublime world of divinity. A reminder here that, as twenty-first century viewers of medieval artwork we need to keep in mind not only the much-changed attitudes concerning religious devotion and belief, but also that, as with so many works of this age, the effect of the gold has diminished considerably and the colours used in the figures have also undergone various changes. In other words, this picture does not look as it did when it left its maker's workshop and its present collocation, in an art gallery, is not that for which it was made.

But it has occurred to me (as perhaps to others) that, with the various changes in subsequent periods of art history - as we have already seen, by the time Botticelli was working, gold leaf had almost entirely disappeared from 'modern' painting - ultimately, we may say, a 'substitute' was found. Throughout the Renaissance proper the aim was to make one's images resemble as near as possible observable reality, what was referred to as Nature, a concept which referred as much to human bodies as to anything else 'natural'; Nature, under the stimulus of Greco-Roman art, was seen as the perfect model, even if, in fact, Nature idealised was often the ultimate result. Until that point, much religious art was produced by repeating given 'types' even if an artist's individual personality was still discernible; with the advent of the Renaissance, Nature and the Greco-Roman past became the guides for and the aspirations of contemporary artists. So Nature itself, that is, the landscape, differing weather and light conditions, rivers, the pastoral life and so on were all included in the images contrived by those artists, both painters and sculptors. And, incidentally, the personality of the artist actually became much more obvious, seemingly, at least in part, as a by-product of their 'liberated-scientific' observation of Nature (both landscape and the human figure).

Slowly then, the divine - and the sublime - were conveyed in painting by means other than by a gold background; this is perhaps most easily seen in the study of nature (independently of the human figure) in Venetian painting where the landscape and effects of light, particularly the twilight, introduced a readily appreciated 'poetical' element understood as mirroring the divine. But following these developments, Italian art arrived at the period known as the Baroque, a period and a style which also followed great upheaval in the Catholic Church, upheaval which required a different attitude in art.

Sacred and Profane Love, c.1515 by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio, 1488-90 - 1576)

Oil on canvas. Galleria Borghese, Rome

This painting is a good example of what is stated above concerning the 'poetry' of the twilight landscape; as well, note the position of the 'subject' in relation to the viewer of the picture: we are observers, not participants. This is a relatively early Titian compared with his image below.

Baroque painting made no use of gold even if individual pictures, especially in churches and religious houses, might be framed in various materials, including gold; but gold was not used as an expressive element in the paintings themselves. However something else was: black. As a result of political and religious changes and requirements, deep emotional expression became a hallmark of the religious painting of the period; Caravaggio, bringing a kind of synthesis of earlier masters along with his own artistic temperament, gave this period a cue as to how to express the new attitudes of the Church. One important change was that the subject of a given image might be placed so close to the viewer that he or she became a quasi participant in the event portrayed; not merely or usually an outside observer, as with most Renaissance work. Parts of bodies seemed to protrude into the 'real' space of the people looking at these pictures; in the case of sculpture, figures almost stepped out of their frames (The Death of Saint Cecilia by Antonio Raggi, in Sant'Agnese in Agone, Rome) or were suspended into our shared space (Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Therese in Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome).

The Death of Santa Cecilia by Antonio Raggi (1624-86), high-relief marble sculpture. 

The church of Sant'Agnese in Agone, Rome.

As we can easily see, the figures on either side of this wonderful work overlap the frame of the scene and 'exist' in our space, the real space of this beautiful church situated in the Piazza Navona. The high relief of those two figures in particular projects this event further into 'our' space. Obviously, no dark background here but the proximity of the foreground sculpted actors to their viewers (us) is marked.

Venus blindfolding Cupid, c.1560 by Titian

Oil on canvas. Galleria Borghese, Rome

This picture by Titian, painted about 45 years later than his work above, exemplifies the tendency to bring the actors in the narrative very close to the viewer; here we see half-figures, not full figures, suggesting that we are virtually participants in the action, not merely observers of it.

And the background in paintings, no longer the gold of preceding ages, was dark, very dark tending to black. A black which often ate-up the background, consumed the ambient space in anonymous darkness out of which figures emerged as though being drawn into life out of a nebulous nothingness. No longer the clear brilliance of light-reflecting precious metal, no longer the sheer symbolic splendour of sublime divinity; rather, the abstraction of an ill-defined, mysterious ambivalence - sometimes a 'space', often a void. The actors thrown into 'our' space, into our reality; bodies no longer simply admired or pitied, now so close as to be touched. The emotionally neutral gold, replaced first by the natural world of the Renaissance, is now superseded by an active presence in the background of many pictures, a (possibly malevolent) darkness enveloping time and space to sharpen and deepen our emotional response while simultaneously being part of our world; and reflecting not a divine light but perhaps the incomprehensibility of the divine together with the dark spaces of our inner life. In other words, from the change in focus begun in the Renaissance - a focus on Man as creator and discerner - , artists gradually incorporated more of Man even into their religious images, that is, a perception of Man (and his psychological life) as a deliberate actor and not merely subject to the divine.

Mary Magdalen contemplating Death by Domenico Fetti (1589 - 1623)

Oil on canvas. Galleria Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, Rome.

We might remind ourselves at this point that half-figures and dark backgrounds were not 'invented' in the Baroque period but we can say that these elements and others were brought together at that time to serve particular purposes. Nor were all paintings as dark as late Caravaggio and many did in fact have some kind of setting, usually architectural. But the proximity to the viewer of one or more actors in a religious drama was very common, even in pictures where there are full figures. The use of dark shadows, strengthening the modelling of both figures and clothing, was however ubiquitous during the Baroque. We should also remember that the extreme darkness utilised in oil paintings on canvas was not technically possible in fresco which means that in certain places, churches and convents mostly, the discrepancy in tone between Baroque frescos and Baroque oil pictures is marked. The small painting above by Fetti is a good example of several Baroque tendencies, especially the fact that the 'background' in a sense 'absorbs' the figure, enwraps it rather than 'staying put' so to speak, in the actual background, in the space behind the figure. The saint's book and elbow particularly are very close to us, the viewers, as are her left hand and the skull she holds in it. Here Fetti has allowed the strong contrasting light to fall mainly on Magdalen's face and right arm and the book it rests on.

Here I would once again remind readers that my observations are those of a painter and not those of a trained art historian. My interest is, for the most part, in the ways painters and sculptors worked, the way they saw things and how that changed, and the way they dealt with (mainly) religious imagery. Allowing for the vast diversity of artistic expression, that is to say, that while discussing certain trends in the continuous movement of art, we need to keep in mind the fact that beside the major schools and periods of art history there were always those artists working on the fringes, those who worked in somewhat older styles and those who were virtually unique in their expression. In the specific case here under discussion, that there is a discernible trend or propensity in Baroque oil painting to favour dark, often enveloping backgrounds, without doubt there are many instances, even in oil pictures (as opposed to the fresco technique), where the same artists and others did not use a dark background, and we will conclude with just such an image, painted by the Spanish-by-birth but Neapolitan-by-choice artist, Jusepe de Ribera.

Saint Januarius (Gennaro) emerges unscathed from the Furnace, 1646 by Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652). Cappella del Tesoro in the Cathedral of Naples

As is obvious, this large masterwork is not in any sense particularly dark and certainly does not have a dark background, on the contrary; in fact the sky-blue background in this painting is actually at odds with the bulk of the Spanish master's output, often concerning ageing hermit saints immersed in or emerging from a near black background.

All photographs were taken by the author who reserves copyright.

Vertical versus ... not so much!

  As usual, I hope the reader will be aware that these observations, like others made in these articles, are to be taken as general and that they do not pretend to definitively describe or define the objects and movements referred to. In attempting to 'read' the artworks of the past, particularly those of subtle styles such as the multi-levelled, multi-facetted Renaissance, interpretations are difficult and specifically definitive statements are best avoided. In the case of the present writer, an initial, one might say 'devotion' to the Renaissance has gradually broadened into a much more complex understanding of what the term 'Renaissance' might actually mean; once this occurred, appreciation was opened into the extraordinary off-shoot that is Mannerism which then led into the Baroque, a period I had not grasped at all. The remarks that follow are based on a much greater exposure, both in Rome and Naples, and in Sicily, to the work of that period, the Baroque, but the comparison suggested here may be simply the result of an unrefined eye finally seeing the obvious; I hope though it's a bit more than that. Incidentally, dates regarding the beginning and 'end' of periods in art history are moot.

The title of this article sums up some observations which occurred to me while considering the differences between Renaissance painting and sculpture and those of the Baroque period. Although, as previously discussed, the triangle is a common structural form governing the composition of much Renaissance work, so too is verticality: that is, an arrangement of vertical elements (usually figures but also architecture) sometimes frieze-like, reading across the image, at others supporting the perspective depth (the recession) as understood from the implied central position of the viewer. In 15th century Florence, the epicentre of the most influential cultural changes then taking place on the Italian peninsula, clear, candid and straightforward presentation of observable fact (nature) and the confident 'statement' of concept and idea (religious, political, pragmatic) reflected the enthusiasm for and influence of the 're-born' culture of an almost-lost past: the 're-birth' of or openness to various branches of knowledge either abandoned or deliberately suppressed during the medieval period: the study of antique Greek and Roman art, classical literature (ad fontes), the development of humanism, perspective illusion, and so on.

The Holy Trinity, 1425-27? by Masaccio (1401-28) in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence

In this very large fresco (above) we can see, combined, the surface triangle element and the vertical element; the first is formed by the two figures of the donors on either side at the base and, following lines from them through the Madonna and Saint John on ether side of the Cross, we arrive at the apex which is Jesus' head and finally God the Father; each figure is however also vertical as are the Cross itself and the pilasters and columns of the 'triumphal arch' framing the divine figures. Horizontal elements are the architrave above the arch, the arms of the Cross (and Jesus), the ledge on which the donors are kneeling and the sarcophagus beneath containing a horizontal skeleton 1. This painting is typical of much Renaissance work in which many of the problems associated with representing the human body are gradually overcome, together with the difficulties of the convincing suggestion of three-dimensional space; and note also the arch and barrel vault in this image which are heavily influenced by ancient Roman architecture.

Verticality was not though an invention of the Renaissance as this compositional device may be observed in much medieval art, for example in the strongly vertical (and elongated) decorative figures of saints and biblical personages on Gothic buildings, and in much pictorial art produced over that long (and varied) historical period. In a sense then, the common vertical disposition of the actors in Renaissance paintings and sculpture was merely a continuation of an already established mode. What the Renaissance did however, was to look back to a much earlier period, the classical one, that of ancient Greco-Roman culture; Gothic art, on the other hand, at the risk of over-simplification, may be seen as a kind of development of the Byzantine rejection of 'pagan' styles.

Baroque Rome was beset by serious disturbance, both religious and, as ever, political, given the now challenged power of the Catholic Church: prior to but including Luther's protests (1517) and, in any case, a widespread awareness of the corruption within the Church, it was forced to make substantial changes, generally known as the [Counter] Reformation (a debated term), of variable duration and efficacy, not least in the field of art. The narratives in painting and sculpture, so as to refine the message of the (Catholic) Church, were to be clear, relatively straightforward in their content, and were to have an easy emotional appeal to the 'average' member of the congregation; and to be much less 'seasoned' with the abstruse references which certainly only appealed to an intellectual elite (this last not applying however to private secular work which was often loaded with such erudite material!). Is it possible that the fairly obvious frequency of painted images dependent upon a diagonal, as opposed to or combined with verticals, might be seen as reflecting a change in the general climate, in Rome at least?

What I would like to do now is look at some examples of how the painting produced during these two periods (Renaissance and Baroque) commonly made some use of two 'structural' elements: in the first case verticality, in the second, the diagonal line - with or without the structural triangle. To do this we are going to look at the work of two major painters, that is, Piero della Francesca (c1412-1492) -  Florentine Renaissance, and Michelangelo Merisi - known  to the world as Caravaggio (1571-1610) - proto-Baroque.

 The Baptism, 1442 (?) by Piero della Francesca, tempera on panel. National Gallery, London

The image above is of a painting by Piero della Francesca, his Baptism, which is in the National Gallery in London. The image below is also a painting by that same sublime master, the Flagellation, which is kept in Urbino, in Italy; the one below that is a detail of this latter, an enlargement of the left side which is where the Flagellation is actually taking place. What I would like us to notice is the 'verticality' which is common to both paintings.

In the Baptism, verticality runs across almost the entire foreground of the picture: reading from the left, the three attendant angels, the large white-trunked tree, the column-like figure of Christ himself, and then the equally up-standing figure of his cousin, John (the Baptist) are all vertical elements; even the acolyte further back is half vertical, taking the viewer to the other side of the picture plane (and into the middle distance). The verticality is 'contradicted' as it were, by the opening of the Jordan River at the bottom of the painting, at first only a dry river-bed occupying more than half the immediate foreground; its meandering banks take us then, with their articulate watery-blue reflection, into the middle ground; after, their serpentine course leads our eye further and further into the painting's illusionistic depth. The distant background hills provide with their (horizontal) wavy undulations another counterfoil to the 'still' verticality of the actors in the foreground 'frieze'.

The Flagellation, 1452 by Piero della Francesca, tempera on panel. Palazzo Ducale, Urbino.

The Flagellation, detail of the left side.

This verticality appears again throughout Piero's Flagellation even if, in this extraordinary painting, the putative subject (the Flagellation of Jesus) is set back from the foreground into what could be understood as a secondary or minor place. Be that as it may, the verticality here, again, begins at the left edge of the image: the great column of the portico and within that the four standing figures - apart from Pilate who is however sitting upright; here, two more columns, including the one Christ is tied to, and the door-frames; then, in the foreground, the other front column of the portico, the foremost of several, which also divides the narrative in two; and, very obviously, the three standing (and mysterious) men on the right side - supported by the various verticals of the background architecture of the street. Again, in this composition, there are elements which 'contradict' the vertical parts, most obviously the orthogonal lines running from the lower and upper edges on the left of the image - the floor and the ceiling (with their respective horizontal shapes) - and the roofs on the right. With this architecture on the left of the picture, Piero has contrived a series of box-like shapes which recede in a geometrically diminishing series beyond Christ to the rear wall; a geometry of straight lines, horizontal and vertical, which contains and complements the vertical but human forms. 

Thus, in this particular painting, Piero has managed an extremely unusual manipulation of the principal spatial elements of the architecture into which or across which he has placed his human actors; which elements however allow or rather, encourage movement, the eye being drawn immediately back into the (dimly-lit) fictive space of the portico before 'emerging' into the (brightly-lit) open foreground on the right: that said, the dependence on or dominance of the vertical elements is clear. As well, in comparison with the image below, Piero's pictures are filled with natural light, a representation of physical reality - as well as of theological significance. 

The Flagellation, 1607 by Caravaggio, oil on canvas. Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.

At first glance, the painting in the photo above may also seem to be basically vertical in structure; but, if we recall that column-like verticality of the figure of Christ in Piero's Baptism and then look at Caravaggio's Christ, we can't help but be struck by the pathetic crumpled figure He has become as the (once) centre of this picture 2. In fact, the difference is stark: the bent knees of Christ and that of the torturer on the right, together with the folded limbs of the one crouching in the lower left, all contribute (soft) angles to the misleading initial impression of verticality. Christ's body indeed, from the hanging head, through the strongly angled shoulders and down along his torso, creates a long curve, his left leg moving in the opposite direction; movement and counter-movement: no longer the steady equilibrium of, for instance, a Piero della Francesca.

What has happened, at least in art, in painting, to cause it to move from the stability of such compositions as Piero's Baptism to the convulsed emotion of a Caravaggio? In purely formal terms, one answer might be found in another Michelangelo: Michelangelo Buonarroti, a Florentine, who with his tormented 'Slaves' and contrapposto-filled Last Judgement, introduced into modern Italian art the troubled 'question mark' of the passionate intellectual - the 'anima sconsolata' to use Petrarch's phrase (the 'disconsolate soul'). Struggling with relentless pressure, constant self-abnegation to conform with an all-powerful hierarchy, self-doubt struggling with a clear awareness of his own genius, a never-ending battle between his religious beliefs and his personal inclinations, all these, due to his almost universal influence, at least in Italy, found contemporary expression first in the appearance of Mannerism, and later, in the 'rationalised' Baroque 'simplicity' of painters like Caravaggio: he, Caravaggio, actually a kind of bridge linking the three-island chain of Renaissance-Mannerism-Baroque.

Whereas Piero della Francesca's upright Baptism Christ of 165 years earlier is clear, candid and set into an easily comprehensible space, the open space of the Italian countryside doing sunny duty for 1st century Palestine, Caravaggio's question here - not an answer - has little or no time for anything but the deep unknowable space of dark human emotion, a space without a setting, as determined by the Florentine Michelangelo: almost no landscape, almost no architecture; and what there might be, for instance in Caravaggio's Calling of Saint Matthew in Rome, is little more than a kind of necessary minimal theatrical backdrop. 

Not in his Flagellation however! A vague hint at a straight-line vertical column, barely visible in the nothing-space of this horrific event, but scattered round with bent and angular forms, the struggling-to-stay-upright, stoic victim warmly and lovingly lit, the monstrous executioners unable to hide their grim work in spite of the darkness which is always trying to swallow them back in! Here, although the crown of thorns is in its place, there is no blood, there are no signs of a beating; as often occurs in Baroque pictures, the very 'normal' male body (neither especially muscular nor especially ascetic, elderly desert-dwelling saints excepted) is, it might be argued, the 'real' subject of the painting: from a painter's point of view, a chance to make a study of the male nude. Not as it happens, a new chance, as such use of both religious and mythological themes dates to not only the Renaissance itself but actually much further back, again to ancient Greece and Rome. Baroque painters such Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652) and Luca Giordano (1634-1705, later Baroque-Rococo) both painted the scene of Saint Sebastian tended by Saint Irena which, apart from the required presence of this female saint and her assistant removing the arrows from Sebastian's body, is as well an 'excuse' or opportunity to paint the male (almost) nude body - and incidentally, the part of the composition in the strongest light.

A Renaissance fresco  of the Annunciation, 1428-31 by Masolino da Panicale (1383-1440). The Cappella di Santa Caterina in the Basilica di San Clemente, Rome

Detail of a Baroque Saint Sebastian tended by Saint Irena, c1653 by Luca Giordano

The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.    

As is clear from the two images immediately above, the principal observation of this article concerning the (gradual, occasional) introduction of the non-vertical as a structural device in Baroque painting is demonstrable; the earlier example by Masolino (perhaps assisted by Masaccio) is strongly vertical 3 (both the figures and the columns), while the later Giordano is (typically) structurally diagonal - at least, not vertical. It is important to keep in mind that circumstances had changed, both for the Church and for painters: for the Church politically and theologically; for artists because, apart from a 'natural' progression (not to be understood as improvement) in art theory and formal interests, their patrons, particularly the Church, required them to express new religious attitudes in a new way. Moving out of the somewhat confused and confusing modes of Mannerism and into the relative 'clarity' of Baroque imagery, painters were asked to make pictures which were clearly and immediately comprehensible as well as emotionally stimulating. 

1 I have here referred to the triangle as a 'surface triangle' meaning that, if we were to draw a triangle onto the image following the lines suggested, it would trace a triangular shape on the surface of the picture; however, it should be understood that that same triangle actually takes us simultaneously 'into' the depth of the illusion, moving from the kneeling donors into the space of Mary and John and then deeper to where Jesus is and then His Father. Another large inverted triangle begins in the depth of the painting, around the base of the Cross, and follows, 'upwards' the external diagonals of the vault as well as its main lines.  

2 This canvas has apparently been widened on the right side, possibly due to one or both of two events. Scientific analysis has shown that beneath the figure on the right there was initially a kneeling figure, possibly a donor (a person who commissioned the work); but, since we know that Caravaggio visited Naples twice, once fleeing a death sentence in Rome and once fleeing a serious problem in Malta - and probably ultimately heading for Rome - it is possible that, on his return, he reworked the original design, perhaps necessitating that addition of a strip of extra canvas on the right side (thereby shifting the figure of Christ from the centre of the canvas slightly to the left). Certain historians (e.g. Longhi) have suggested that he may have begun the painting in 1607 but left it unfinished when he went to Sicily and then Malta; according to this thesis, he then completed the picture on his return to Naples between 1609 and 1610, the year of his death.

3 As a final and somewhat tangential comment, while Masolino has in this Annunciation shown himself to have fully grasped the then new 'science' of perspective illusion with the 'correctly' receding ceiling and colonnades, the three actors (including God the Father) are however shown as though seen from directly in front, that is, not from a point of view looking up; this painting is on the high arch above the entrance to this chapel and therefore the view of the buildings in the image, as if seen from below, is coherent with our real point of view. But the two figures of the angel and the Virgin Mary (less so God, in the tondo between them) are not represented as if seen from below. Masolino is by no means unique in this, let's say, confusion of points of view; even during the Baroque period, when such views looking up from below (from the floor of a church for instance) into an imagined heavenly realm were perfected, this confusion occasionally persisted perhaps due, in the case of the Baroque, to the extreme foreshortening required by the logic of the viewpoint which would in fact render some figures - usually the principal ones - quite illegible! Whether or not Masolino inadvertently confused the two viewpoints we do not know but it is possible that he made a pragmatic decision concerning the three figures: given that his viewpoint for the architecture is extreme, and thus so would the view of the actors have had to be - making them appear distorted - he instead painted them from a different viewpoint. As far as the influence of this fresco's architecture is concerned, a compositional similarity is discernible in another Piero della Francesca painting, his Annunciation at the top of the Sant'Antonio polyptych altarpiece (before 1468) in Perugia! Although handled very differently by Piero, the general layout of the architectural spaces is not unlike Masolino's in San Clemente.

All photos taken by the author who reserves copyright.