The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance

The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance

Geography, Mobility, and Style

David Young Kim

Publication of this book is made possible by grants from the University of

Zurich and the University of Pennsylvania.

Copyright © 2014 by David Young Kim.

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

yalebooks.com/art

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014930820

ISBN 978-0-300-19867-6

epub ISBN 978-0-300-21224-2

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Jacket illustrations: (front) Detail, Lorenzo Lotto, Saint Christopher Between Saint Roch and Saint Sebastian, ca. 1535. Santuario della Santa Casa (Holy House), Loreto, Italy. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY; (back) Detail, Federico Zuccaro, Artists Drawing after Michelangelo in the Medici Chapel (fig. 8.1).

In memory of my father

Phillip Kyu Hwan Kim

1936–1993

Is it lack of imagination that makes us come

to imagined places, not just stay at home?

Or could Pascal have been not entirely right

about just sitting quietly in one’s room?

Continent, city, country, society:

the choice is never wide and never free.

And here, or there ... No. Should we have stayed at home,

wherever that may be?

—Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel,” 1956 (excerpt)

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I. MOBILITY IN VASARI’S LIVES

Chapter 1. Mobility and the Problem of “Influence”

Chapter 2. Contamination, Stasis, and Purging

Chapter 3. Deluge, Difference, and Dissemination

Chapter 4. Artifex Viator

PART II. THE PATH AND LIMITS OF VARIETÀ

Chapter 5. Varietà and the Middle Way

Chapter 6. The Domain of Style

Chapter 7. The Mobile Eyewitness

Chapter 8. Mobility, the Senses, and the Elision of Style

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustration Credits

Acknowledgments

Like traveling artists, art historians too are mobile. Like few others, our profession demands long periods of displacement and solitude to reach distant objects of study, to look and write, and look again. For encouragement over years of moving about here and there, I happily acknowledge the following colleagues, friends, and institutions. My greatest debt is to my advisor and friend Alina Payne at the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University, who encouraged me to weave imagination and intuition with hard evidence, to construct, dismantle, and rebuild my arguments so as to see more clearly their architectonic structures and fissures. To her I give heartfelt thanks. For their insights and advice, I would like to thank Ann Blair, Tom Cummins, Deanna Dalrymple, Julian Gardner, Jeffrey Hamburger, Ewa Lajer-Burchart, Gülru Necipoğlu, Jennifer Roberts, David Roxburgh, Victor Stoichita, Hugo van der Velden, Irene Winter, and Henri Zerner. I had the opportunity to immerse myself in art literature as a Graduate Fellow in Renaissance Studies in the idyllic surroundings of Villa I Tatti, and I am grateful to Joseph Connors, then director of the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and to my fellow appointees and academic staff, among them Nicholas Eckstein, Morten Steen Hansen, Wendy Heller, Valerio Pacini, Michael Rocke, Maude Vanhaelen, and most of all, Estelle Lingo. The impulse to explore traveling artists in the Italian peninsula is due to my first teacher, Nicola Courtright, and the issue of Lorenzo Lotto as a “problem artist” emerged from conversations at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with Alan Chong. The work of Philip Sohm has long provided an example of how to delve into the relations between word and image, and I thank him for his intellectual generosity.

At the Kunsthistorisches Institut of the University of Zurich I found a second home. For this I am deeply grateful to my mentor and friend Tristan Weddigen for engaging me as his wissenschaftlicher Assistent and providing me with innumerable opportunities to participate in the vibrant intellectual German-speaking world of art history. Wolfgang Brückle, Julia Gelshorn, Mateusz Kapustka, Stefan Neuner, Julia Orell, and Martino Stierli discussed various aspects of this project, and this book is in many ways a token and souvenir of our time in Switzerland and elsewhere. I was able to present sections of this book to students and faculty at the Universidade Federal de São Paulo, and I acknowledge Cássio da Silva Fernandes, Angela Brandão, André Luiz Tavares Pereira, and most of all, Jens Baumgarten, who organized my stay in Brazil as a visiting faculty member as part of the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative.

This book would not have been possible to write without a fellowship at the Kunsthistorisches Institut–Max Planck Institute in Florence. I am deeply grateful to the directors of the KHI, Alessandro Nova and especially Gerhard Wolf, for giving me the chance to wrestle with a manuscript over an entire year and for setting an example of how a scholar might invigorate early modern studies by asking cross-cultural questions in a historically responsible manner. At the KHI, I benefitted from interactions with Hannah Baader, Giovanni Fara, Corinna Gallori, Jana Graul, Galia Halpern, Ashley Jones, Fernando Loffredo, Emmanuele Lugli, and Susanne Pollock. Nicola Suthor discussed the project with me at its earliest stages and has been a steadfast friend and interlocutor. Stuart Lingo has been a stimulating partner in discussions and I have benefited from his deep knowledge and visual acuity.

I would also like to acknowledge the comments on the scope and aims of this project offered by my colleagues in the hallmark Colloquium series in the Department of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, among them Karen Beckman, David Brownlee, Julie Davis, André Dombrowski, Renata Holod, Ann Kuttner, Michael Leja, Robert Ousterhout, Holly Pittman, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Larry Silver, and Kaja Silverman.

For conversations and accommodation on both sides of the Atlantic, I am grateful to Edgar Ortega Barrales, Michael Becker, Chanchal Dadlani, Dina Deitsch, Peter Karol, Kaori Kitao, Penny Sinanoglu, and Mia You. Special thanks to Maria Loh and Edward Wouk for their patient reading and meticulous commentary. At Yale University Press I would like to thank Michelle Komie for her initial interest in this project and Heidi Downey, Katherine Boller, Mary Mayer, and Amy Canonico for their oversight of this project and commitment to art historical scholarship. Noreen O’Connor-Abel read the manuscript with care and a sharp eye. I would like to thank my family, Won Soon Kim, Sue Ann Kim and Adrian Lewis, and Chang-Kun Lee. Finally, Ivan Drpić has been an unflagging supporter whose rigor and clarity of thought have inspired every page of this book.

Introduction

I.

My topic is the mobility of artists, chiefly in early modern Italy. Simply put, I understand mobility as a cultural practice that comprises an artist’s displacement, either voluntary or unwilling, from a homeland; confrontation with and work within an alien environment; and finally, the reception of that mobility by both foreign counterparts and compatriots. Mobility provoked commentary, censure, praise, reflection, and ultimately debate by sixteenth-century writers on art and by artists themselves. At stake in these confrontations was that significant index of subjectivity, that personal quality which could secure fame or precipitate oblivion—an artist’s style. And these disputes have implications for our understanding of a historically contingent conception of artists, geography, and works of art, how they were imagined to coexist, how they functioned.

II.

Now these claims are both broad and dense, and it is my task in the forthcoming pages to unpack them, to present arguments for and, more important, against my assessment of the vast and therefore elusive discursive process of mobility. But first, a few qualifications: it would be absurd to claim that artistic mobility, as we might call it, was somehow exclusive with respect to two coordinates: historically, to the early modern era; and geographically, to the loose conglomeration of city-states, duchies, principalities, and kingdoms constituting the Italian peninsula. We only need to think of well-worn labels such as “International Gothic,” the Wanderjahre of the craftsmen, or the drawings of the itinerant Villard de Honnecourt to see that mobility was an especially powerful feature of medieval visual culture. The many oltremontani artists originating north of the Alps—Albrecht Dürer, Frans Floris, and Maerten van Heemskerck, to name but a few—who traveled great distances to reach Italy could fairly be described as more mobile than their Venetian or Florentine counterparts. To entertain the political philosopher Carl Schmitt’s transhistorical and global perspective, humans may be land beings but they are also land crawlers, standing, going, and moving to and fro upon the stable earth.[1]

What endures, however, is the deeply rooted perception that early modern Italian society was one relentlessly on the move. “The true discoverer ... is not the man who first chances to stumble upon anything, but the man who finds what he has sought.” So declared the Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt in his monumental The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Borrowing fellow historian Jules Michelet’s phrase “The Discovery of the World and Man,” Burckhardt would describe the longdistance achievements of those Italians who had discovered what they had sought. From Crusaders approaching the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, to Marco Polo at the throne of the Great Khan, to Christopher Columbus venturing into distant seas, Burckhardt identified mobility as a key cultural phenomenon of early modern Europe. Notwithstanding a vein in Western intellectual traditions that criticized physical travel as a distraction against the more worthy pursuit of Stoic and Christian interior reflection, mobility in the wake of Burckhardt’s words would emerge as a topic of rigorous academic pursuit in its own right. And the current preoccupation with “globalization” has galvanized ever greater concern with mobility’s historical origins. While some may decry that cross-cultural approaches endanger emphasis upon local history and the power of tradition, encounters with the foreign repeatedly confronted agents of cultural production within a given tradition, even if those elements of alterity have in the end been willfully suppressed or discarded.[2]

We need, of course, to revisit Burckhardt’s notion of the Renaissance as a triumphal parade of achievements realized by the Italians, “the first-born among the sons of modern Europe.” Also notable is that some early modern sources themselves, such as Polydore Vergil’s encyclopedic On Discovery (1499), pay little attention to travelers’ landfalls, favoring instead the invention of things that facilitated mobility, among them footwear, the navigational compass, horsemanship, and vessels. And yet, producers of a wealth of material taking advantage of the printing press would distribute the news of the New World throughout the European continent. From the late fifteenth-century woodcut pamphlets recounting Columbus’s arrival to the “Indies” to Theodore de Bry’s multivolume folios (1590-1634) with their sumptuous engravings of the Americas, early modern books and authors were keen to point out that mobility and mobile individuals were distinguishing events and figures of their time. In his Delle navigationi et viaggi (1550-59), a compilation of travel accounts both ancient and modern, the Venetian humanist and diplomat Giovanni Battista Ramusio commended Columbus “as a man who has made born to the world another world.”[3]

III.

Such discoveries and their reception in the sixteenth century applied pressure on the concept of mobility, bringing it into prominence as an artful, puzzling, and controversial process. Of course mobility bore a rich semantic import since its inception in classical usage. Mobilitas referred primarily to the athletic qualities of speed, agility, and vivacity. Yet the word’s connotations could also diverge to take on opposing meanings. “What is more shameful,” Cicero demands in his Philippics, “than inconsistency, fickleness, and levity [inconstantia, levitate, mobilitate]?” All the same, the Roman architect Vitruvius in his treatise on building expects the architect to possess a quick and versatile mind (ingenio mobile), particularly in respect to the design of theaters. In medieval Christian sources, this tension persisted, as witnessed in the requirement of stabilitas loci, or physical restriction within the monastery’s walls as set forth in the Rule of St. Benedict. By contrast, there existed the class of wandering monks and the virtuous homo viator, the Christian who understands life on earth as a laborious yet meritorious pilgrimage. As Augustine declares, heaven is the city of saints, “though here on earth ... Citizens ... wander as though on a pilgrimage through time looking for the Kingdom of Eternity.”[4]

To see within mobility a push and pull, a dialectic between the positions of praiseworthy or censorious movement is tempting for the purposes of easy comprehension. Yet in the Italian and broadly defined early modern sources under examination here, mobility is more properly characterized as an iridescent concept, a flickering semantic surface whose hue constantly changes according to the speaker’s disposition, sympathy, or prejudice. Mobility is a term that elicited commentary and gained a wide currency in a number of genres, not least of which was art literature. Fra Giordano’s claim that of all things only God remained immobile underscores the extent to which mobility was understood to pervade all of creation. This included even the heavens, as seen in the concept of the primo mobile, or first movable sphere, which traveled from East to West within a day’s span. Mobility could also assume a more allegorical register to describe the disorder and fickleness of fortune, fame, and female behavior. “Woman is by nature changeable [cosa mobile],” the speaker in Petrarch’s Sonnet 151 laments. Even so, mobility favorably describes a sensibility that adapts itself and quickly reacts as seen in the expression fantasia mobilissima. In others words, mobility could be synonymous with creativity, even cunning. The fifteenth-century poet Feo Balcari in a sonnet addressed to Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici implicitly compares his ingenious mente mobile to the Medici-sponsored baldacchino, grills, and ornament of the Florentine church Santissima Annunziata in an attempt to win patronage. The variability, portability, and creativity nested within the concept of mobility percolates in the representations of traveling artists in art literature. The sixteenth-century Tuscan artistic impresario and man of letters Giorgio Vasari, a central figure in the present study, calls mobility one of the “secrets of nature” and declares that “experience teaches us that very often the same man has not the same manner and does not produce work of equal excellence in every place, but makes it better or worse according to the nature of the place.” As Vasari intimates, an artist’s style, his manner of working, compels the viewer to establish differences, both temporally and regionally. Place is not just a designated point of a schematic map, but rather an entity loaded with agency, either a creative stimulus or stumbling block.[5]

IV.

However much Vasari’s comments might sound like a self-evident precept, mobility was far more than a phenomenon that elicited cut-and-dried description. Nor did the travel book remain in exclusive dialogue with the solitary reader, reading silently in his study. Rather, the book with mobility as its subject could also be a nerve center and hub of discussion among a community of participants. Consider one of the first Italian group portraits, Sebastiano del Piombo’s depiction of the Genoese Cardinal Bandinello Sauli along with several companions, including the historian Paolo Giovio to the extreme right with a pointed finger and, next to him, Giovanni Maria Cattaneo, the cardinal’s secretary (fig. I.1). Commentators have noted this work’s disjointed character—“a unity neither in design nor in sentiment.” Reinforcing the painting’s rambling and loose composition is the handbell resting upon the carpet, an objet d’art that alludes to a suite of rooms and those waiting in service at some remove. Yet what binds the cardinal and his companions to some degree is the open geographic manuscript, perhaps an isolario, or book about the world’s islands. The cardinal’s hands along with those of his companion immediately behind him are part of a circuit that includes Cattaneo’s fingers upon the book and Giovio’s oratorical pointed finger, an allusion to a gesture recurring in Leonardo’s work. As for the manuscript itself, Sebastiano momentarily diverts his attention away from the self-contained portraits half-cast in shadow, contrasting blocks of color, and the carpet’s rigid and repetitive motifs. The artist modulates his painterly register to convey the aesthetic particular to this travel treatise. Fluidly rendered are the cursive black script, red marginalia, rubrics, and the blotches of watercolor denoting the islands floating in the sea (fig. I.2). The impulse of Sebastiano’s facture is to represent the bookishness of the book and the longdistance knowledge contained therein. What is more, this receptacle of mobility that attracts a particular mode of brushwork emerges as a center of gravity, if there can be one, in this meandering group portrait, a protagonist in its own right in debate. As such, the book recounting tales of travel can give rise to discourse that occupies the middle ground between word and image, enriching the complex symbiotic rapport between these two incommensurable media.[6]

FIGURE I.1 Sebastiano del Piombo, Cardinal Bandinello Sauli, His Secretary, and Two Geographers, 1516. Oil on panel (121.8 × 150.4 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Samuel H. Kress Collection.

FIGURE I.2 Detail from Sebastiano del Piombo, Cardinal Bandinello Sauli, His Secretary, and Two Geographers, 1516. Oil on panel (121.8 × 150.4 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Samuel H. Kress Collection.

V.

The voyagers whose long-distance exploits were recounted in such books as the isolario were hardly the only mobile individuals in the early modern era. Consider the words of the virtuoso painter Federico Zuccaro, as found in his Il passaggio per Italia (1608), one of the first autonomous travel accounts penned by an artist: “Having always been in continuous motion either here or there (as has my mind moved me to travels)... I have consumed two thirds, no, four fifths of my life in travel.” The early modern artist was a particularly itinerant figure in a society that included other such mobile persons as soldiers, merchants, pilgrims, diplomats, and missionaries who journeyed throughout the Italian peninsula, Europe, and beyond. True, this is a standard observation in the scholarly literature; scholars from Michelet to Burckhardt, Rudolf and Margot Wittkower to Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann have identified the artist as a significant practitioner of mobility. However, one aspect of artistic mobility continues to present a thorny art historical problem. From the case of Raphael and Sebastiano del Piombo in Rome to van Gogh in Arles, it is a widespread convention to state that the event of mobility plays an instrumental role in modifying that most faithful companion and midwife of the connoisseur—an artist’s personal style. Granted, mobility can be only part of the story, because their styles often changed and evolved even when artists were stationary. Nonetheless, the concept that recurs to account for the causality thought to link mobility and stylistic change is one of the more notorious terms in the art historical lexicon—“influence.” This examination is an attempt to disentangle the origins of this term, seek out historically precise lexical alternatives, and, more important, map out the streams of discourse that associate that term with the representation of mobility in sixteenth-century art theory and practice.[7]

Through close readings of several key instances in sixteenth-century art literature, namely the publications of Giorgio Vasari, Lodovico Dolce, Giovanni Battista Armenini, and Federico Zuccaro, I advance the claim that stylistic change, as effected under the circumstance of mobility, encountered a particularly fraught and ambivalent reception via figurative language, often rooted in organic metaphors. Artists receiving prestigious commissions at distant princely courts were portrayed as “germinating” and planting the seeds of their style. At the same time, when artists entered into dialogue with foreign styles, artworks, artists, and environments, the tropes of contagion, illness, and amnesia come to the fore. As such, these descriptions function as a bridge that widens the domain of art theory beyond the usually cited disciplines of rhetoric and poetics to include other fields of inquiry such as astrology, geomancy, geography, medicine, natural history, and religious allegory. In particular, stylistic variety gained while abroad arises as a significant concept that takes stock and inflects in a positive way the phenomenon of mobility. This interpretation thus posits mobility as a locus of meaning, an epicenter of a network of cultural references rather than simply as the uncomplicated movement from point A to point B as is often posited in art historical works adamantly positivistic in their orientation.

The argument follows moments of high density when the problem of mobility elicited praise and censure, willful reticence, and vehemence on the part of its interlocutors. Part I (“Mobility in Vasari’s Lives”) begins with a historiographic study of mobility in art historical literature. The focus here is a critique of the misguided use of “influence” (an astrological term which in origin has more to do with fixity than mobility) to describe the rapport between displacement and stylistic change (Chapter 1). Having identified the current anachronistic deployment of “influence” as it pertains to mobility, the subsequent chapters investigate what figurative language Giorgio Vasari, the most significant writer on art in the sixteenth century, drew upon to represent artists’ travels. Themes include the corruption of style as effected through Barbarian, Byzantine, and Gothic arrivals (Chapter 2); artists in exile and the germination of style (Chapter 3); and the “reduction” or cleansing of style and the emergence of varietà/variare as a contemporary term that favorably bridges mobility and stylistic change (Chapter 4). Part II (“The Path and Limits of Varietà”) traces varietà’s critical fortune and the waxing and waning of style in the representation of mobility in Vasari and his respondents. Topics explored are the variability of varietà as it relates to Vasari’s Lives of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Perino del Vaga (Chapter 5); Dolce’s anxiety toward the mobility of Titian, Lotto, Sebastiano del Piombo, and other artists coming to and from Venice (Chapter 6); the advent of the first-person narration of mobility and the confusion that varietà can pose to the traveling artist in Armenini’s treatise (Chapter 7); and finally, Zuccaro’s travel account in which style and varietà become eclipsed in favor of depicting travel as an exercise in pleasing the senses—vision, taste, and hearing—so as to align artistic mobility as an aristocratic and non-manual undertaking (Chapter 8). Mobility, as an “external” force acting upon a society, realigns the bonds among artist, patron, competitors, audience. It lays down a route by which art history can open itself to humanistic disciplines and even to esoteric concerns, those about health, astrology, even food. By implication, mobility repositions works of art from exclusively representing the end product of patronage and artistic labor to mediating ideas about the physical self in the world, standards of behavior between that self and others, and the function of art within a natural environment.

VI.

A few caveats and parameters: although writers on art often represent artists moving at will, they were not, of course, free agents. Permission had to be granted to travel, especially in the case of artists in the employ of a princely court. We might even go so far as to say that part of the honor of receiving commissions from abroad was the liberty granted to work elsewhere, beyond one’s ambient. In this respect, the social and economic forces conditioning mobility represent a major strand in the phenomenon of artists’ travels. Still a desideratum is a comprehensive study of this topic, along the lines of the economic lives of artists recently undertaken by Philip Sohm and Richard Spear. This book, however, does not narrate a social history of artists’ mobility, as valuable as such as investigation would be. Rather I have placed emphasis upon the perception of mobility in period thought with the hope that further scholarly work might converse with my claims from a variety of approaches, be they microhistorical or synthetic. The cluster of interests borne by social histories of art is in part based upon properties and categories founded upon the discourse of the period. When artists such as Titian, Signorelli, or Barocci received compensation for their work abroad, hard monetary payment was but part of a larger package of honors they received, with such recognition dependent on specific cultural expectations that emerge in both art literature and notarial documents alike. This study maps out this constellation of expectations, supported by analysis of period texts and images.[8]

This leads me to another qualification: a further aim of this study is to lay out systematically how mobility was conceived, represented, repressed, and controlled, in all of its complexity and confusion in a corpus of text and works of art. Such an approach raises the issue of the complex rapport between word and image: though this examination focuses heavily on texts, it is nevertheless an art historical enterprise, and as such, is rooted in a visual problem. As Chapter 1 will make plain, a significant topic in this book is Lorenzo Lotto as a traveling artist and the problem of regional “influence” upon his idiosyncratic style. Yet in confronting the secondary literature on Lotto, I soon realized that the issues of his unruly style and mobile career were not only nested within the works of art themselves. Also at stake was discerning how art historians employed language to make sense of Lotto’s paintings, using the terms consciously, or as is more often the case, inadvertently, to insert an artist and his oeuvre within a taxonomy consisting of seemingly airtight regional categories. True, some have cautioned that scholarship on art literature has, for all of its best intentions, widened the rift between theory and practice in early modern art history. Nonetheless, this study concurs with scholars such as Leonard Barkan, Michael Baxandall, Thomas Frangenberg, Alina Payne, Philip Sohm, and Robert Williams that art history involves writing about works of art, proceeding with the awareness that language can be both an instrument in the art historian’s conceptual toolbox and a trap. How works of art elicit discourse is itself a cultural product not divorced from images themselves, but rather constitutes part of their power.[9]

VII.

There cannot be, nor should there be, a single history of artistic mobility. A wish for one is only a testament to mobility’s capacity to elude taxonomy’s restrictive clamp. Early modern thinkers themselves often felt puzzled and threatened by artists’ mobility, and these anxieties undergird the more intriguing comments on the subject. Although this book does not propose a complete or geographically global vision of mobility, we may lay down some coordinates which the following chapters aim to reveal:

1. Portrayals of how and why artists travel is prescriptive, not descriptive. Aside from being documentary reportage, the depiction of mobility is an exercise in judgment.

2. The representation of artistic mobility reveals one’s domestic sympathies and regional prejudices.

3. Before an artist is allowed to become mobile, his point of origin must be determined, often indicated by his name. This is expressed through his place of birth, paternal or master’s lineage, or a toponymic designation (e.g., Giottus Fiorentinus). Strong origins diffuse style. Obscure origins predestine disorderly or diverse style (e.g., Perino del Vaga).

4. The foreign is that which exists outside the confines of an artist’s origin insofar as difference is perceived by the artist, his colleagues, or his publics. Nonetheless, a different neighborhood or different city-state can both be foreign. This is a matter of degree, not kind.

5. Mobility is a form of allegorical pilgrimage. Consequently, the mastery and development of style becomes figured as a pilgrim’s progress.

6. When traveling to an artistic center, such as Rome, the traveling artist often enters a community of artists in which differences in nationality and medium specialization can be momentarily elided. Nonetheless, there is often the attendant result of competition and/or collaboration.

7. The emotional and cultural import of artistic mobility occupies a wide spectrum: the joy of triumph and princely patronage, curiosity toward the antique, indifference toward the local vernacular and the retardataire, boredom, or pain and nostalgia in the face of exile and failure.

8. Historical flow is accelerated by the event of the traveling artist’s arrival. Conversely, lack of mobility deprives a locale of progression, historically and stylistically.

9. An artist’s style is defined via the encounter with place. Conversely, place is defined via the portrayal of the traveling artist’s confrontation with foreign artworks, local colleagues and audiences, local history, climate (aria), and food. This interaction posits a mode of selfhood beyond intellection and manual labor to include the senses. Repatriation often indicates the extent of stylistic difference or foreign impact.

10. The artist’s body and somatic reaction register the encounter with the foreign, with varietà conceptualizing the visual manifestation of this refining and rejection process.

11. The reception of the traveling artist, be it hostile or hospitable, demonstrates the artistic merit of that place and the sophistication of local audiences.

12. Mobility is a key barometer by which early modern thinkers measure an artist’s significance, fame, and legacy through his pupils. Immobile artists are only valued insofar as they demonstrate an unflinching allegiance toward a regional style.

In sum, we might say that mobility can be a forceful event that potentially disrupts the order, habits, and regulations of an artistic society. But by doing so, mobility casts a raking light, revealing the imaginary structure and parameters of that very order, forcing early modern thinkers and artists to articulate how a community of people, place, and things ought to coexist. This book maps out, however roughly, the workings of those minds who created that delicate mental landscape.

PART I

Mobility in Vasari’s Lives

Lorenzo Lotto, St. Lucy Altarpiece, detail of fig. 1.8

1 Mobility and the Problem of “Influence”

15 August 1554. The Feast of the Assumption in Loreto at the Santa Casa, the Virgin’s birthplace miraculously transported from Nazareth to this city on the Adriatic coast. Here in this pilgrimage site, where as Montaigne described, ex-votos from so many places and princes cover the Holy House’s walls with silver and gold, the itinerant painter Lorenzo Lotto has decided to end his peripatetic existence. He inscribes the following entry in his account book: “Item, so as not to have to travel anymore in my old age, I have resolved to end my days in this holy place, having made myself an oblate for the rest of my life.” It is ironic, or entirely appropriate, that in a location where so many vectors of mobility converge (portable cult object, crowds of foreign pilgrims, a city fortified against Ottoman forays) that Lotto comes to rest. However prosaic, the entry in his Libro di spese diverse registers, as Peter Humfrey has noted, “an undeniable pathos, as well as a sense of exhaustion” due to a career spent in frequent mobility.[1]

Just how itinerant Lotto was can be gleaned by a brief summary of his life. Born in Venice, about 1480, Lotto consistently describes himself as a “pictor veneziano” in the many notarial acts, wills, and letters that document his artistic activity. Early on in his career, he departs for the nearby town of Treviso, where he signs an altarpiece as “LAURENT LOTU’S IUNIOR,” a self-declared testament to his relatively young age. Although Treviso as a dependent in the Venetian empire may not qualify as thoroughly foreign territory, it was from here that Lotto’s mobility would accelerate: in 1506 he leaves for the town of Recanati in the Marche, part of the Papal States, before working in fresco at the Vatican Palace in Rome three years later. Lotto returns to the Marche and from there ventures north to Bergamo, staying there from 1513 to 1525. Thereafter Lotto returns to Venice for almost a decade, only to recommence a peripatetic existence in his fifties, an age approaching the life expectancy of sixteenth-century artists. Lotto returns to the Marche in 1533, undertaking commissions in Jesi, Ancona, Macerata, and Cingoli. From 1540 he changes residences between Venice and Treviso and declares in 1546 his plan to spend the rest of his life in “my native Venice,” expressing a wish to be buried in the cemetery of the Dominican Santi Giovanni e Paolo, “according to their rite, and dressed in their habit.” Despite this intention to stay put, Lotto becomes increasingly mobile during the last decade of his life. He repeatedly moves house in Venice before departing in 1549 for Ancona, then Jesi, and finally Loreto, where he inscribes the aforementioned entry declaring his intention never to move again.[2]

True, Lotto was hardly the only artist of his generation to have a mobile life trajectory. His compatriot Sebastiano del Piombo, three years his junior, left the lagoon in 1511 to pursue a career in Rome. Raphael, also three years younger than Lotto, had a peripatetic path, moving from Urbino to Florence to Rome. Pordenone, also probably born in 1483, moved through a circuit of northern Italian towns—Spilimbergo, Villanova, Mantua, Cremona, Piacenza, and Cortemaggiore among them—and traveled to Alviano in Central Italy. Even Titian, so closely identified with Venice and the aesthetic of colorito, came to that city as a child from the town of Pieve di Cadore and counted Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, Bologna, Augsburg, and Rome among his destinations. The majority of painters, sculptors, and architects of the early modern period in the Italian peninsula could easily be classified as itinerant, given that mobility, receiving commissions, and spreading one’s reputation often went hand in hand. In Martin Warnke’s estimation, the history of Italian art from the fourteenth century onward could be understood in terms of artists moving between two entities, the city-state and princely court. The sack of Rome by Imperial troops in 1527 and the siege of Florence approximately three years later destroyed artists’ careers and works of art. But these tumultuous events also pollinated artistic styles—think of Giulio Romano in Mantua, Sansovino in Venice, and Polidoro da Caravaggio in Naples—owing to artists fleeing Rome.[3]

Lotto, then, is not remarkable for having mobility as a leitmotif in his biography. What is unusual, however, is the tone of volition, at times insistence, regarding an intention to depart from a particular location. According to a contract dated 17 July 1517, Lotto stipulates that his apprentice, Marcantonio Cattaneo di Casnigo, be prepared to follow his master in whatever city or land, be it “throughout Italy or outside Italy, the Gallic parts, or Germany.” The artist repeatedly expresses his intention to travel in a series of letters dated 1524–32 written from Venice to the governors of the Consorzio della Misericordia in Bergamo. Most likely wishing to expedite completion and payment for the intarsia panels he designed for the high altar of Santa Maria Maggiore, Lotto draws upon a language of obligation and urgency. To take letters from one year, 1527: “I, having to go to the Marche” (3 February); “time being wanting, I, having for some days to travel to the Marche to bring my work to completion” (22 February); “it has become incumbent upon me to go to the Marche” (15 July). Almost a year and a half later, in November 1528, Lotto declares he might abandon Italy entirely.[4]

Art historians have drawn a connection among three circumstances: Lotto’s perpetual and willful mobility, his exposure to a plethora of regional stylistic idioms, and his proclivity to mutate his style because of, or in some cases, in spite of, his physical displacement. Humfrey observes that “Lotto’s extensive travels in the Italian peninsula meant that he had a wider experience of different pictorial cultures than did the majority of his Venetian colleagues.” Some works display an interest in Netherlandish painting, while others demonstrate Lotto’s scrutiny of Dürer, Raphael, and Leonardo. Luigi Chiodi expresses a similar sentiment: “Antonello, Correggio, Carpaccio, Titian, Giorgione, Raphael, the Lombards, artists from the Veneto, Northerners, Tuscans, Romans, archaic religious painting, Grünewald, Altdorfer, Bellini, Melozzo, the Dutch, the Mannerists: was Lotto all of this?” Alexander Nagel comments that Lotto’s work sheds light on “how the very question of center and periphery took shape in the artistic culture of sixteenth-century Italy” and asks “what this question had to do with the emerging historical and regional awareness of artistic tradition that marks the period.”[5]

LOCATING LORENZO LOTTO

These observations become more concrete if we examine them in relation to a selection of Lotto’s works. In any diachronic cut through an oeuvre, we would hardly expect an artist’s style to remain the same. What distinguishes Lotto, however, is his tendency to transform his manner of working even in those paintings completed at relatively tight chronological proximity to one another. In those works from vastly different periods, Lotto’s style remains markedly more elusive and difficult to categorize according to region or school. It is not a coincidence that for the supreme connoisseur of the twentieth century, the American art historian Bernard Berenson, Lotto posed an appealing challenge. As we shall see through the following “motivated descriptions” of just a few of Lotto’s works, the artist’s propensity to modulate his style can often, though not always, be understood in light of his change in place. More important, focusing upon Lotto as an extreme case study of a traveling artist in relation to his unruly style allows us to zero in on a more global issue. This artist’s approach to painting raises the larger problem of determining how art historical thinking might assess and interpret the causal link between the biographical fact of an artist’s travels and the effect of stylistic change. The proverbial elephant in the room is one of the building blocks of art history—the concept of “influence” as it pertains to mobility.

First to the works themselves: at the outset of his career Lotto would, as we might expect, strongly adhere to the stylistic conventions of his native Venice. The paintings from this period testify to Lotto’s training, in all probability in Alvise Vivarini’s workshop, and his awareness of stylistic trends in the lagoon. These include a precise, almost lapidary definition of facial features, an interest in landscape, and an exploration of tonality, light, and meteorological effects via the oil paint medium. Take, for instance, St. Jerome in the Wilderness, a panel signed and dated 1506 (fig. 1.1). To be sure, the fact that this work was executed not in Venice but in nearby Treviso raises the question of Lotto’s activity in the “periphery.” All the same, Treviso is located only about thirty kilometers to the north of Venice, about a day’s journey away, either by horseback on the ancient via Terraglio or by barge floating on the Sile River that feeds into the lagoon. The sixteenth-century architect Michele Sanmicheli compared Treviso to a limb attached to the body of the metropolitan lagoon. Treviso was not so much the periphery, but rather an extension of the center itself, or to put it another way, slightly “off-center.”[6]

Correspondingly, Lotto’s Trevigian panel might reasonable be described as Venetian. He follows the fifteenth-century Venetian workshop practice of applying successive layers of oil paint upon a well-gessoed panel. Lotto also adheres to the compositional formula deployed by his predecessors such as Giovanni Bellini and Cima da Conegliano (fig. 1.2). St. Jerome, deep in penance and meditation in his oratory, occupies the foreground. Behind him is the view toward relinquished civilization. Through a number of compositional decisions, Lotto firmly anchors Jerome’s body and book in the surrounding wilderness. These include the saint’s domelike head that resounds in the boulder’s rounded ends and the open folios with their bindings which are the formal origins of the fractures in the rock face.[7]

Of course, closer observation of the panel restrains the impulse to apply the regional label of “Venetian.” For if by “Venetian” we mean the stylistic priorities of only those artists born or active in Venice and the Veneto, then such a designation fails given Lotto’s recourse to the German artist Albrecht Dürer’s engraving St. Jerome (1496) (fig. 1.3). But we might also expand the definition of Venetian to include not only what was produced there, but also what was readily available via transport of goods in Venice. This enlarged designation, then, would account, as Humfrey suggests, for Lotto’s “small-scale Düreresque landscape,” due to its “sudden contrasts of scale,” “the breaks in spatial recession,” and “jagged silhouettes.” Now the problem of Dürer’s activity and reception in Venice is complex and cannot be delved into here. Dürer himself was present in Venice executing his altarpiece Virgin of the Rose Garlands for the church of San Bartolommeo the very year Lotto’s panel was completed. Suffice it to say that Lotto was not alone in employing Dürer’s landscape formulas as model, a trend that corroborates the painter and art theorist Paolo Pino’s observation that northern artists excelled at landscapes due to their exposure to the wilderness of their homelands. In light of Lotto’s close examination of Dürer, his panel could loosely be considered a colored version of the German artist’s engraving. In a practice not unlike watercolor applied to black-and-white prints, it seems as though Lotto has applied delicate tonal transitions within the swerving contours of Dürer’s incisions.[8]

However much Lotto’s engagement with Dürer complicates what we mean by “Venetian,” his allegiance to that school of painting seems unshakable when compared to his version of the subject executed approximately three years later during his sojourn in Rome (fig. 1.4). Retained is the landscape background, albeit with the inclusion of St. Jerome adoring the cross, with its anthropomorphic rocks and tree trunks that recall Lotto’s coloristic elaboration of Dürer’s engraving. Yet in lieu of the Treviso panel’s dense vegetation are trees with feathery leaves and a sunlit rolling countryside, all evocative of landscape backgrounds in Umbrian painting. Replacing the castle in the first St. Jerome is a structure reminiscent of the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. Most dramatically, instead of an emaciated ascetic, we confront a classicizing muscular saint. The figure testifies to Lotto’s examination of Roman art, be it sculptures of river gods or, in the Vatican Palace, Raphael’s Diogenes in the School of Athens or Sodoma’s vault paintings above. It is as though Jerome’s Trevigian physique has now in Rome been inflated and swollen, transformed from mortified flesh to monumental body.[9]

FIGURE 1.1 Lorenzo Lotto, St. Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1506. Oil on panel (48 × 40 cm). © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Gérard Blot. Louvre, Paris.

FIGURE 1.2 Giovanni Bellini, St. Jerome Reading in a Landscape, 1480–85. Egg tempera and oil on wood (47 × 33.7 cm). National Gallery, London.

FIGURE 1.3 Albrecht Dürer, St. Jerome in the Wilderness, 1496. Engraving (32.4 × 22.8 cm). British Museum, London.

Many art historical narratives describe and implicitly favor those artists who, on arriving in Rome, adapted their style according to the taste for all things antique. Raphael is often championed for having developed his human figures from their harmonious proportions in Urbino to weighty, even exaggerated monumentality in Rome. Lotto, however, stands in contrast to those artists who relentlessly elaborated while in Rome the expressive possibilities of the monumental nude. He moves at either extreme of standard classical proportions, at times exaggerating the figure, other times restraining or abandoning it altogether. And it is no accident that these modulations occur in conjunction with his comings and goings to and from central Italy, his activity in destinations at some remove from artistic centers.[10]

To restrict ourselves for the moment to Lotto’s paintings of St. Jerome, take one of his depictions of Jerome executed while in Bergamo around 1513–15 (fig. 1.5). In this devotional panel, Lotto’s departure from Rome raises compositional opportunities for combining figure and background which otherwise might be atypical. There can be, in other words, a geographical component to artistic license. First, regarding the lunging Jerome, the shift from the calm monumentality of the seated figure in the Roman version is utterly striking. Lotto stretches a protean Jerome in either direction, from tensed toe to the hand grasping the cross. The position of the cerulean book echoing his cloak and the diagonal landscape further emphasize the body’s pulled and elastic proportions. To be sure, Lotto’s representation does not mark a complete rupture with classicizing prototypes: among his models for his strung-out Jerome may have been one of Michelangelo’s reclining nudes painted above the Erythrean Sibyl. The elongation of a nude figure is also a distinctive feature in Raphael’s Stanza dell’Incendio, particularly in the muscular youth hanging from the wall in The Fire in the Borgo (1514). More generally, St. Jerome could be linked to a victory encased in a commemorative arch’s spandrel, an iconographic parallel that might lend triumphal associations to the saint’s ascetic devotion.[11]

FIGURE 1.4 Lorenzo Lotto, St. Jerome in the Wilderness, c. 1509. Oil on panel (80.5 × 61 cm). Museo Nazionale di Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome.

FIGURE 1.5 Lorenzo Lotto, The Penitent St. Jerome, c. 1513–15. Oil on panel (55.8 × 40 cm). Muzeul National de Arta al României, Bucharest.

And yet, less expected in Rome would be the coupling of Lotto’s elastic quasi-nude with this landscape. For Lotto’s portrayal of this wilderness displays both stylistic regression and incorporation of foreign models. Retained from the Roman panel is the architectural structure in the distance which alludes to Castel Sant’Angelo and, by consequence, to knowledge of that city. Nonetheless, Lotto reverts to the miniature-like handling of paint and delicate tonal transitions he pursued in the Treviso panel to render the lush landscape. Still-life details such as the bird’s skeleton, snakes, and the trompe l’oeil grasshopper exhibit his awareness of the emphasis placed on such details in painting north of the Alps. It is as though Lotto, having located himself northward, relocates in turn his style with Venetian and Lombard painting practice. This is not just the product of stalwart artistic agency. Lotto’s stylistic modulation reflects most likely a dialogue with the expectations of this panel’s Bergamask patron, still to be identified.[12]

THE DIALECTIC OF STYLE: GEOGRAPHIC LICENSE VERSUS SITE SPECIFICITY

These stylistic maneuverings, Lotto’s calibrations according to place, do they show verve, virtuosity, or self-critique? The question becomes all the more pressing if posed in relation to the first major work Lotto executed in Bergamo, an altarpiece commissioned by Alessandro Colleoni Martinengo (fig. 1.6). With its architectural representation and disposition of saints, Lotto’s altar-piece marks a return to ideas about composition that harken back to his Venetian training. Yet we also see the tempering of the Central Italian idiom Lotto exhibited in the Roman St. Jerome panel as well as in other works executed in the Papal States of the Marche. For in reverting to the compositional formulas set out by Giovanni Bellini and his contemporaries, the Colleoni Martinengo altarpiece in Bergamo diverts and redirects a prominent art historical narrative. This scholarly perspective sees the major stylistic priority of sixteenth-century artists as reviving antique ideals of monumental human form and proceeding later in the century to elaborate them into a mannerist aesthetic. To name but one foreign artist in Rome who exemplifies this viewpoint, Sebastiano del Piombo’s work increasingly exhibits his response to the heroic muscular human form proposed by Michelangelo. Lotto did not entirely relinquish ideas gleaned from the antique he encountered in Rome and Central Italy. The lurching figures that stone St. Stephen are citations from the Laocoön group, for instance (fig. 1.7). But these references to the antique human form are located in the predella, absent from the altarpiece’s main field. Furthermore, Lotto’s use of the crowning angels has been linked to the agitated flying cherubs in the altarpieces of Fra Bartolommeo, possible evidence of a sojourn by Lotto in Florence. Yet this “foreign” stylistic reference is accompanied with allusions to more local models, based as they are on Milanese prototypes. St. Sebastian and the shadowy grottolike space recall elements from Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks. The coffered barrel vault and pilasters encrusted with ornament are reminiscent of Bramante’s architecture in Milan or, more locally in Bergamo, Amadeo’s jewel-like Colleoni Chapel, erected to honor the memory of Bartolommeo Colleoni, the adoptive father of Lotto’s patron.[13]

FIGURE 1.6 Lorenzo Lotto, Colleoni Martinengo Altarpiece, 1513–16. Oil on panel (520 × 250 cm). San Bartolomeo, Bergamo.

FIGURE 1.7 Lorenzo Lotto, The Stoning of St. Stephen, 1516. Oil on panel (51.2 × 97.1 cm). Accademia Carrara di Belle Arti, Bergamo.

If forced to extract the principles governing Lotto’s stylistic change under the circumstance of mobility, we might articulate them through the following dialectic. On the one hand there is the geographic dimension of license. Arriving in a place as a foreign artist grants, or in fact demands, at times the performance of novelty. Clauses “with skill and ingenuity” or “as best as he can” in artists’ contracts stipulate a certain degree of quality. But these phrases may also be interpreted as offering artists room for pursuing pictorial solutions which differed, and surpassed, preexisting local models. On the other hand of this dialectic is site specificity. By this term, I am referring to Lotto’s tendency to couch his novelty in compositional settings native and particular to a painting’s destination. This impulse toward spatial or topographic familiarity in turn has the potential to enlarge the work of art’s field of references. Lotto himself commented upon artists’ practice of “understanding the place and site and light and every other respect” for a commission. Thus in the case of the Colleoni Martinengo altar-piece, there is the literal framing of frenetic angels in the process of rigging up banners and wreaths within an architectural setting that draws upon Veneto-Lombard models. The otherworldly manifests itself in the here and now.[14]

FIGURE 1.8 Lorenzo Lotto, St. Lucy Altarpiece, 1532. Oil on panel (243 × 237 cm). Pinacoteca Communale, Jesi.

The dialectic between license and site specificity also seems at work in Lotto’s altarpiece that he completed in 1532 for the Confraternity of St. Lucy in Jesi (fig. 1.8). Prior to overseeing the shipment of this panel, Lotto had spent nearly a decade in Venice. While there, Lotto’s work for his native city adapted to the compositional formats and modes of coloring practiced by artists active there. A case in point is Lotto’s St. Nicholas altarpiece (1527-29), which in its tonal transitions and figures with their grand rhetorical gestures and expressions responds to Titian (fig. 1.9). Yet in the St. Lucy altarpiece for Jesi, some three hundred kilometers south of Venice not far from the Adriatic coast, Lotto departs from the Venetian custom of formulating a congregation of saints in a shared architectural space. He demonstrates instead a license to play with, even defy, accepted Venetian conventions of arranging figures. For one, he transposes a narrative episode of St. Lucy’s life and martyrdom from its expected position in the predella below to the altarpiece’s principal field above. Furthermore, unlike in the St. Nicholas altarpiece, also dedicated to a particular saint and commissioned by a confraternity, St. Lucy does not frontally address the viewer. Dressed in a vibrant yellow that clashes with surrounding blocks of color, Lucy defiantly stands in profile with a Leonardesque finger thrust in the air. In contrast to the tranquil assemblies in Venetian altarpieces, Lotto’s St. Lucy is an inert figure amidst an agitated crowd of at least fifteen panders who are attempting to remove her. Another instance of Lotto’s license may consist in the inclusion of a black slave. A drawing most likely taken after the preparatory sketch for the main panel shows two running putti, a compositional decision that follows the pattern by Bellini and others of placing such accessory figures in the foreground (fig. 1.10). In the final version, however, Lotto imports the exotic element of a black attendant whose dark flesh contrasts with the skin of the running child and Lucy’s bright complexion.[15]

FIGURE 1.9 Lorenzo Lotto, St. Nicholas in Glory with Sts. John the Baptist and Lucy, 1527–29. Oil on canvas (335 × 188 cm). Santa Maria dei Carmini, Venice.

FIGURE 1.10 Copy after Lorenzo Lotto, St. Lucy before Paschasius. Black chalk, brown ink, pen (drawing), wash with brown (20.8 × 19.4 cm). © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Gérard Blot. Louvre, Paris.

But along with this geographic license Lotto exhibits an impulse toward site specificity. The contract indicates that the patrons expected the altarpiece to be of greater “beauty and facture” than his panel of the Entombment, also located in San Floriano, which he had completed previously for another Jesi confraternity. The dense narrative scene in the St. Lucy altarpiece’s main panel may thus recall and attempt to surpass the multifigural composition of his Entombment. That a brotherhood was Lotto’s patron could account for the artist’s decision to insert Lucy within a varied group of male figures. In addition, the black attendant with her delineated facial features, hair, and dangling earring attests to nearby Ancona’s status as a location for the slave trade.[16]

FIGURE 1.11 Lorenzo Lotto, St. Lucy before Paschasius and St. Lucy Harnessed to Oxen, 1532. Oil on panel (32 × 69 cm). Pinacoteca Civica, Jesi.

FIGURE 1.12 Lorenzo Lotto, Teams of Oxen, 1532. Oil on panel (32 × 69 cm). Pinacoteca Civica, Jesi.

Furthermore, Lotto cites Jesi’s urban fabric and setting. The cityscape in the central predella panel resembles components of the city’s architecture. The arcade with its Corinthian columns, echoed in the main panel, recalls the loggia designed by Andrea Sansovino in 1519–25 for the Palazzo della Signoria (fig. 1.11). The buildings in the third predella panel can be seen as variations on the brick constructions, crenellation, and window treatments that Francesco di Giorgio Martini conceived for civic and private palaces throughout the city (figs. 1.12, 1.13). And the coastline visible in the distance suggests Jesi’s vicinity in the Adriatic littoral. Lotto’s architectural structure and ornament may even refer not just to a particular place, but to specific construction events. Notarial documents contemporary with Lotto’s contract indicate that stonemasons were paid for the shipment of stone from Dalmatia and the manufacture of columns, bases, and capitals for the loggia of the Palazzo della Signoria. Lotto’s site specificity also applies to the cultural use of this topographic space. While the church interior pictured in the first predella panel may not be able to be linked definitively with the interior at the altarpiece’s destination, the some forty hanging ex-votos and lit candles allude to devotional ritual (fig. 1.14). Lotto’s altarpiece, then, registers a degree of decorum to temper his license, an attempt to locate inventive narrative solutions within credible and appropriate settings.[17]

FIGURE 1.13 Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Andrea Sansovino, Palazzo Communale, Jesi. 1486–1551. Lala Aufsberg, Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.

FIGURE 1.14 Lorenzo Lotto, St. Lucy at the Tomb of St. Agatha, 1532. Oil on panel (32 × 69 cm). Pinacoteca Civica, Jesi.

GEOGRAPHIC ANACHRONISM

How much Lotto would adapt his style is perhaps best revealed by looking at the work he executed in Venice after periods of time away from his native city. Upon his return, Lotto would at times adjust his mode of painting to what could have been considered “Venetian.” But Lotto’s realization of this stylistic label was out of sync with current ways of composition and coloring. Like an emigrant who returns to his homeland only to find his native language has evolved, leaving his way of speaking frozen in the past, Lotto’s style was what might be termed geographically anachronistic, having become archaic during his absence. His approach to the task of painting was out of place since it was out of joint with time.

These observations are best exemplified in a significant commission Lotto received in Venice, the altarpiece depicting St. Antoninus distributing alms (1542) in Santi Giovanni e Paolo (fig. 1.15).[18] Lotto did not shun all stylistic tendencies then current in the city. Take, for instance, the crowd of petitioners in the foreground—veiled women seeking dowries for the unmarried or assistance for the blind, the indigent in tattered clothing, the poveri vergognosi, decent folk too ashamed to beg. In a remarkable entry in his account book, Lotto records that he had studied paupers from life to portray this impoverished crowd. All the same, the painter drew on relatively recent figural models to assemble a lively and agitated company. The faces in profile, outstretched arms and grasping hands, upturned necks and twisting torsos bring to mind the lunging bodies in Titian’s Assumption (1515-18) and, more immediately, his St. Peter Martyr altarpiece, completed in 1530 and installed just across and down the nave. Lotto also makes effective use of the convention of the curtain suddenly parted by flying putti to reveal the scene before the viewer. Most memorably deployed by Raphael in the Sistine Madonna (1512-13), this dramatic device was also used by artists active in the Veneto and nearby Lombardy, as seen in Moretto’s altarpiece for San Giovanni Evangelista in Brescia.[19]

FIGURE 1.15 Lorenzo Lotto, St. Antoninus Altarpiece, 1541–42. Oil on canvas (332 × 235 cm). Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice.

In spite of these concessions, several elements render the St. Antoninus altarpiece out of sync with tendencies in Venetian altarpiece compositions. The hierarchical figural arrangement, with the saint at the summit of a triangular schema, is a system Lotto repeatedly employed throughout the course of his career. This formula, while expected in the first decades of the sixteenth century, must have appeared archaic by the time Lotto completed his altar-piece in 1542. The same is true regarding the architectural representation coextensive with the altar frame and the viewer’s space. It is revealing that when Titian executed a composition that also portrayed the distribution of alms, his altarpiece for the church of San Giovanni Elemosinario (1545-47), he dissolved the hierarchical formula altogether, putting the saint in direct contact with petitioner (fig. 1.16). Such is the similarity in subject matter between the two altarpieces that Titian’s work implicitly critiques, even rebukes, Lotto’s recourse to a style more suited to at least a generation or two earlier. Also seemingly retardataire in the Sant’Antoninus altarpiece is the meticulous attention to objects—sacks full of coins, the golden and crystal crozier, the silk miter, leather-bound books, perhaps among them the saint’s Summa theologica, and most noticeably the Anatolian and Para-Mamluk rugs with their intricate field patterns draped over the stone parapets. Lotto retained the approach to style that was to be increasingly obsolete in the wake of Titian’s innovations and the arrival of Central Italian artists such as Giorgio Vasari and Francesco Salviati to the lagoon in 1541–42. This lends a geographic dimension to anachronism, a phenomenon most often considered exclusively in historical terms but in Lotto’s case provoked by his displacement.[20]

FIGURE 1.16 Titian, San Giovanni Elemosinario, 1545–47. Oil on canvas (264 × 156 cm). San Giovanni Elemosinario, Venice.

ANOTHER EXCURSUS AGAINST “INFLUENCE”

We would be better served with an examination of Lotto’s entire oeuvre so as to have a better grasp of his propensity to modulate his style while on the road. Also wanting is consideration of the visual currents and possible points of artistic contact Lotto encountered in Treviso, Rome, Bergamo, and the Marche, the smorgasbord of his many destinations. Desirable as well would be probing into the cultural circles Lotto frequented, be it Bernardo de’ Rossi’s Trevigian humanist entourage, his Bergamask mercantile patrons, or Venetian Dominican friars. Such an investigation would establish whether texts or other artworks composed in these milieus might have any bearing on Lotto’s physical and stylistic vagabondage.

But there is a concern more pressing than carrying out these interpretative strategies, commendable, tried, and true. More urgent and critical is reflection on the thought processes that have buttressed the foregoing discussion of Lotto. Our analysis has pursued the following chain of logic. First, we have broached the event of Lotto’s mobility, his travel from one place to another. As a result of this displacement, we have posited there transpired an exposure to a style that was local, and therefore foreign and different from Lotto’s own mode of painting. Finally, we have suggested that Lotto’s own style, his painterly facture and way of composing, responds, adapts to, or manipulates that artistic “otherness.” In other words, we understand style as a function of mobility.

This process is not strictly linear or progressive. In the case of Lotto’s return to Venice, the artist regresses or retains a way of painting more in tune with the late fifteenth century than with his own time. All the same, we have imputed meaning to this interaction between change in place and a subsequent change in style. What is more, great liberty has been taken to apply words to this interaction, be it in pairs of opposition (geographic license versus site specificity), or single terms (adaptation, calibration, geographic anachronism). In using these words, we are paying homage, unconsciously or not, to one of the most fundamental yet problematic constituents of art history. It is known by a term that is so frequently used and obvious so as to become almost invisible. That term is “influence” as it pertains to mobility.

How innocuous “influence” appears as a term can be detected in a letter written by the art historian Erwin Panofsky to his colleague Fritz Saxl. Dated 22 March 1948, the letter responds to Saxl’s comments on a lecture Panofsky delivered on “Illustrated Pamphlets of the Reformation” while a visiting professor at Harvard. Panofsky wrote: “You may be very right in assuming that there may be some Raphael influence involved in Dürer’s Apostles (after all, they did exchange drawings and stuff); but it is difficult to put one’s finger on a specific figure. Do you know anything specifically similar?” And to Saxl’s suggestion that humanists’ distinctions between Latin rhetorical style affected Renaissance artists’ adaptation of classical forms, Panofsky countered, “perhaps it is not even necessary to assume a direct ‘influence’ of the humanists upon the artists in this matter: it may be that there is a kind of spontaneous revival . . . that manifested itself in the literary and visual sphere without any direct influence.” And finally, informing Saxl of his current research, Panofsky wrote, “I am trying to find more Italianisms in Roger van der Weyden after his trip to Italy in 1450 which I still firmly maintain to have taken place, ‘trotz Kantorowitz, Kaiser und Reich.’”[21]

Fritz Saxl never responded; by an uncanny coincidence, “Pan” wrote to “dear old Sassetto” on the very day of the latter’s death. Yet the letter shows that for these two figures who shaped much of the art historical lexicon, “influence” was a malleable term. It might refer to exchanges between artists and artistic traditions (Raphael and Dürer; south and north); the relationship between antiquity and the fifteenth century; or the dialogue between writers and artists (Bruni’s stylistic criticism), not to mention the impact of an artist’s travels on his style (Rogier van der Weyden’s “Italianisms”). Moreover, the letter alludes to the difficulty of detecting and proving the existence of such “influences.” Indeed, to read that Panofsky, an almost canonized figure in art history, asked the question “Do you know anything specifically similar?” is heartening.

But if Panofsky felt at liberty to deploy “influence” in referring to a wide range of cultural interactions, later art historians would find this term difficult to stomach. A case in point is Michael Baxandall’s “Excursus Against Influence,” a section of an essay on Picasso and Cézanne published in Patterns of Intention (1985). Calling “influence” a “stumbling-block” and “curse of art criticism,” Baxandall condemned our keyword on two grounds. First, the term is misleading, confusing the roles of each actor in a given historical circumstance. The statement “artist or culture X influenced artist or culture Y” implies that the latter was a passive and indiscriminate recipient. In fact, Baxandall reasons, this statement most likely intends to suggest that Y exploited X as a resource. Furthermore, by divesting player Y of any agency, the phrase “X influenced Y” removes the necessity of asking for what reasons and under what circumstances Y interacted with X in the first place. “Influence” cloaks the need to account for cause and effect. In lieu of the word, Baxandall proposes a cloud of other terms that runs over nine lines of his text, “remodel, ape, emulate, travesty, parody.” In a tone of exasperation, he remarks, “It is very strange that a term with such an incongruous astral background has come to play such a role, because it is right against the real energy of the lexicon.”[22]

Other scholars have probed this broad and treacherous term. Exploring the “anxiety of influence” and the quest for originality, Maria Loh has demonstrated that painters’ strategic repetition of sixteenth-century styles and iconography constituted a crucial aspect in later art theory and practice. Whereas Loh takes a vertical cut in looking at the reception of Renaissance style, it is my intention to take a horizontal slice through the material, looking at “influence” as it pertains to traveling artists, their encounter with stylistic alterity, and their adaption and/or rejection of that alterity. This is not to discount artistic tradition and history. As will be discussed, mobility and art of the classical past become entangled for artists traveling to seats of antiquity. In addition, an artist’s arrival or departure was at times seen to jump-start the progression or decadence of historical time and style. But for the remainder of the present chapter I want to explore how “influence” smooths over debates on mobility, place, and style, and for that matter, the nature of cause and effect.[23]

To flesh out this claim, I will briefly discuss those instances when art historians and artists felt compelled to employ “influence” or its lexical alternatives to describe cross-cultural encounters, this last expression itself being an updated term for the concept in question. These commentators often availed themselves of the diagram as an explanatory instrument. Like a butterfly net, the diagram has the capacity to collect different species of information within its free-flowing and flexible mesh. It permits a set of relationships which otherwise might remain buried in ponderous prose to emerge almost instantaneously at the moment of viewing. These technical images allude to the chaos of influence as it pertains to mobility yet at the same time suggest the desire to order that very chaos. The diagram personifies several of the coordinates mentioned at the outset of this book: the prescriptive quality of mobility’s representation, the impulse to fix an artist’s origins, the collision of different styles, and the impact of that collision upon the flow of history. The diagrams under examination chaperon when, where, and how the tryst between mobility and style should take place, if at all.

DIAGRAMS OF INFLUENCE

First, to return to Panofsky and Saxl. In using “influence” as he did, Panofsky was acknowledging the assumptions underpinning the ancient concept of astral influence, a system that sought to elaborate ex post facto the mechanics of cause and effect. The classical Latin influxus and medieval Latin influentia refer to the fluid streaming down from the stars partly responsible for determining the birth, disposition, and destiny of human beings. In his handbook on child rearing, the fourteenth-century Dominican friar and cardinal Giovanni Dominici describes the force of influence as a chain effect: “The heavens influence the body, and according to such influence, the body bends the soul to a certain passion.” Influence could also elucidate the world’s variety. In the Mathesis, an astrological treatise written by the fourth-century mathematician Julius Firmicus Maternus and printed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the speaker contends that the colors, traits, customs, and characters we witness in a crowd of persons “are distributed to us by no other thing than the perpetual movement of the course of the stars.” As will be discussed, Cavalcanti, Pino, Vasari, Dolce, and especially Lomazzo deployed astrological influence to demystify the reasons underpinning artists’ different styles. But we should underscore the following: in the early modern period astrological influence does not operate as the chief term to describe artists’ mobility and the impact of that mobility on their style. Influence might deal with the vertical axis between stars and humankind and those predispositions that come with birth; and travelers did at times coordinate their voyages according to the propitious alignments of the stars. Yet influence in the thinking of the period rarely accounts for the stylistic effects of artists traversing space.[24]

In later centuries, however, influence as a causal notion would expand. It might explain the causes underlying a region’s artistic style or become a synonym for “foreign influence.” In his Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), Johann Joachim Winckelmann dedicated two sections to the “influence of the heavens.” As he states in the introductory section, “just as visible and understandable as the influence of the climate on appearance is, secondly, its influence on ways of thinking.” Francesco Milizia stated in his Dizionario delle belle arti del disegno (1787) that “nature acts upon people, a people on men, and men upon the arts. The arts receive, therefore . . . an influence more or less through the natural causes that create the essential character of each country.”[25] Closer to our interests regarding cultural mobility, “influence” could signal arrival of the foreign. In Der Stil (1860-63), Gottfried Semper mentions that the grill form maintained its importance for “the Christian architectural style of the Middle Ages partly from antique traditions, partly through Oriental influences.” Semper’s remarks on this decorative form are not limited to these cultures alone. In explaining the tectonics of trelliswork, he compares and contrasts within just a few lines of text places, peoples, and civilizations—New Zealand, China, Arabia, and Byzantium, not to mention the Greeks, Romans, and Etruscans. The rapport between these dissimilar elements compressed within a few paragraphs can be compared to the impulse that propels a noteworthy example of diagramming “influence.”[26]

The diagram in question appears in Heinrich von Geymüller’s Die Baukunst der Renaissance in Frankreich (1893). Geymüller argued for recognizing “the diversity of Italian influences on the French Renaissance.” Comparing the French Renaissance to a child, Geymüller called the French Gothic style the mother; “the New, that which was not there before, the Italian, the Foreign, is the Father!” How Italian Formensprache transformed France’s “national Gothic architecture” was proposed in fifteen different interactions, among them “plaster casts sent from Italy to France,” “Italian readings of Vitruvius,” or simply “the influence of Italian paintings.” Geymüller suggested these influences could be not only described, but also charted over time. The graph “Perioden und Phasen des Renaissance-Stils in Frankreich von 1475–1895” illustrates this flow of “influence” (fig. 1.17). Packed within the diagram’s frame is a panoply of elements: chronological scale; Italian and French monuments; tendencies toward the bizarre, the Baroque, Nature, and the Gothic; and events such as the discovery of Pompeii. The forces that correlate these dissimilar entities are architects’ styles. What propels their interpenetration is the mobility of their ideas, designs, or these very individuals. Like a comprehensive index, the diagram offers a global view of Geymüller’s argument, allowing a feedback loop of reading and looking that moves from styles or monuments to their overall position within the sweep of history and eventually back to the particular detail.[27]

The diagram makes plain that the rapport between foreign and native artists, and thereby mobility as a whole, is critical for the development and progression of style. The scheme refers specifically to traveling artists for the waxing and waning of influence. The cluster of Italian artists such as Rosso Fiorentino, the Giusti and Serlio (letters A, B, and C, respectively, on the diagram) bring about the first crest of Renaissance style in Phase One. Like a map of a metropolitan transport system or water system, this diagram offers points of contact and exchange between disparate entities, distant in both time and place. The viewer is invited to register the influence of Bramante’s first manner on the Place de la Concorde, Bernini, and the façade of Saint-Sulpice. But if this chart suggests mobility’s role in the shaping of style, it also alludes to the intensely complex nature of travel when it reaches the difficult boiling point of representation. It is not happenstance that the author affixes the classicizing signature “H. V. GEYMÜLLER, Archit., inv. et del.” onto the diagram, thus suggesting a comparison with a masterpiece, and by extension, the intellectual labor involved in its conception. The diagram shows the intricacy of influence and its networks, but by the same token it allows mobility to travel only along certain preset routes. The pink stream leading from Pellegrino Tibaldi must lead toward the style of Louis XIII, the blue avenue of Maderno to the Louvre colonnade. Such prescriptions disallow connections to occur if they stray beyond these established highways. Mobility may be allowed and identified, but it must be directed.[28]

FIGURE 1.17 “Graphische Darstellung der Entwicklung der Perioden und Phasen des Renaissance-Stils in Frankreich von 1475–1895.” From Heinrich Adolf von Geymüller, Die Baukunst der Renaissance in Frankreich, 1898.

FIGURE 1.18 “Umbrien Marken.” From Karl Ludwig Gallwitz, Handbuch der italienischen Renaissancemaler, 1998.

OTHER DIAGRAMS

Geymüller’s attempt to chart influence is not a singular moment, preceded as it was by chronographs by Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, Franz Mertens, and others. More recent art historical endeavors reveal the compulsion to categorize influence, and by doing so demonstrate the difficulty of restraining it within a diagram. Take, for instance, the sculptor and writer Karl Ludwig Gallwitz’s Handbuch der italienischen Renaissancemaler (1998). A vade mecum for the traveler or museum visitor, the handbook indicates the “dependencies and influences” among regional schools in the Italian Renaissance, 1410–1590. Any promise for clean categorization dissolves when the reader consults the turbulent maps of influence (fig. 1.18). A glance at chart III (Umbria and the Marche) evokes the sensation of being, as one reviewer put it, “afflicted with vertigo” due to the “labyrinth of arrows that connect various artists’ names and cities.” Along the vertical axis, Gallwitz maps out the rapport among masters such as Gozzoli, Perugino, Raphael, and Barocci. Foreign artists and cultures influence and are in turn influenced by the painters who occupy the diagram’s columnar spine. Squinting at the arrows, we see that Raphael influences Giulio Romano while in Rome and that Lotto’s arrival in the Marche influences the local painter Durante Nobili. Gallwitz himself acknowledges the problem of classifying artists who belong to various regions due to their mobility. Where to put Carlo Crivelli, justifiably a member of the Venetian, Paduan, and Marchigian schools? Gallwitz as a collector of Oriental carpets and a student of the arabesque form may have been partial to such intricate patterns. Yet the sensitivity to these loops and contours does nothing to diminish our impression that mobility and stylistic influence seem to call for chaotic representation.[29]

Do the diagrams of Geymüller and Gallwitz, though a century apart, exemplify a modernist aesthetic of angst and upheaval, a schematic equivalent of, say, Picasso’s Guernica or Ad Reinhardt’s satiric cartoon collages? The confusion arising from the colliding factors of mobility and stylistic influence has transhistorical, if not transgeo-graphic, dimensions. Observe the diagram, albeit pared down in comparison with our two previous examples, found in a margin in the 1550 edition of Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite de’ piú eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani (henceforth referred to as the Lives). Although a prolific painter, architect, and all-around artistic impresario attached to the ducal Medici court in Florence, Vasari is best known as the author and compiler of the Lives, multivolume biographies ranging from fourteenth-century artists such as Cimabue to those of his own time, foremost among them being Michelangelo. Delicately colored so as to enliven the monochrome engraving, the title page with its view of Florence hardly conceals Vasari’s emphasis on that city and Tuscany more generally (fig. 1.19). Indeed, Vasari’s polemical view of artistic behavior and the merits of various regions in the Italian peninsula elicited the commentary of other artists and men of letters—including Federico Zuccaro, Francisco da Hollanda, El Greco, and Annibale Carracci—directly in the margins.[30]

FIGURE 1.19 Title page in Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri, 1550, Cicognara iv. 2390, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

FIGURE 1.20 Annotations by Padre Sebastiano Resta in Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri, 1550, Cicognara IV.2390, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

The owner of this edition and the composer of the miniature diagram within its pages was no exception. This was the Oratorian, collector, and connoisseur Padre Sebastiano Resta whose life spanned the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As a compiler of artists’ drawings and avid reader of their biographies, Resta was no stranger to artistic mobility and their shifts in style. He was the author of a brief manuscript, Aggiunta e supplemento al Correggio in Roma, which speculated on the Emilian artist’s supposed travels to that city. This sensibility to categorize artists according to location, while also acknowledging their mobility from place to place, may have spurred Resta to configure this diagram in the margins of his Vasari. Here Resta clarifies for himself in the biography of Antonello da Messina how this artist facilitated the transfer of the oil painting technique from the Netherlands to Italy (fig. 1.20).[31]

In the time of King Alfonso

Gio. Da. Brugia [Jan van Eyck]

Ruggieri da Brugia [Rogier van der Weyden]

Ansse [Hans Memling]

Antonello went to Flanders to learn coloring from Gio.

Da Brugia

As is told in Vasari

M[esser] Domenico di Venetia

How Antontello taught coloring

Andrea dal Castagno[32]

Resta’s diagram sprouts next to a key sentence mentioning that the desire to acquire the secret of painting in oil “was held not only in Italy among the most elevated minds who practiced painting: but also still in France, in Spain, in Germany, & in other provinces in which Art was prized.” We first read that Jan van Eyck’s supposed discovery of the oil medium was prompted by a wish for a method to allow paintings to dry in the shade. (As though to retain the recipe’s ingredients in his memory, Resta draws a vase in the margin and writes “the invention of linseed and walnut oil.”) Van Eyck then instructs this secret to his pupil Rogier van der Weyden, who in turn hands down this knowledge to Hans Memling. Antonello while in Naples first witnesses oil painting in the work of van Eyck in the collection of King Alfonso. Impressed by “the liveliness of the colors and the beauty and harmony” of painting in oil, he ventures north to learn this skill from “Giovanni da Brugia” himself. Vasari informs the reader that Antonello returns to Italy to communicate this secret to his compatriots, in particular to Domenico Veneziano. The diagram distills the narrative that recounts the invention and transmission of the oil painting technique from master to student, from one location to another. It works as a set of tentacles that ramble over the scattered passages in Vasari’s text. Ultimately, the diagram as instrument reveals the inherent complexity of mobility and, what is more, the desire to contain that complexity within the cage of words and lines.[33]

GIORGIO VASARI’S LIVES AS TRAVELOGUE

What is it in the nature of mobility and style, that slippery “varnish from foreign parts” which calls for clarification via the diagram? How does mobility and stylistic “influence” become figured in the early modern imagination? “Influence” was most often an astrological concept dealing with the vertical relationship between the heavens and beings on earth. What, then, were the historically specific terms exploited to describe the horizontal relationship between an artist’s mobility across space and his artistic practice? How would such a lexicon inform our understanding or, simply put, our looking at works of art?

We could do worse than to follow Padre Resta’s lead and begin to answer these questions by interrogating the text he himself consulted, Vasari’s Lives. To take Vasari as a target to consider events in an artist’s life, particularly his mobility, may at first seem regressive, even radical. The Lives is, after all, a beguiling mix of fact and fiction. One of Vasari’s most fervent admirers, Julius von Schlosser, pointed out the Tuscan’s tendency to embellish his narrative with fictive anecdotes, dialogues, and epitaphs. This is no less true when it came to artists’ travels: “The itineraries of his artists almost all artificially constructed ad hoc and often contrary to true circumstances.” The enterprise of amending errors of fact in Vasari’s Lives would come to nourish a scholarly industry. Yet this insistence on verification has created a blind spot in scholarship, particularly in regard to artists’ travels. For when we triumphantly report that X artist was in Florence in year Y and not Z, we overlook a field of discourse which has the potential to unearth notions of style and artistic identity, among the very issues for which Vasari endures as a historical source.[34]

Instead of considering the Lives as a tracking device, I understand this text as an interlocutor that speaks to how mobility and style were in dialogue with the thinking of its time. I examine how Vasari and his fellow writers and artists depicted mobility, the tone and texture of their prose, the ornament of tropes and metaphors. This mode of analysis could be called several things—“close reading,” “explication de texte,” “thick description”—and indeed several of these approaches underline the emphasis I have decided to place on Vasari’s words and the texture of his prose. In this regard one particular issue concerns which edition of the Lives deserves the bulk of our attention. The second edition, published by the Giunti in 1568 and considered “definitive,” is the version most often consulted by scholars and indeed is analyzed in the present account. Vasari’s vision is often more crystalline in the first 1550 edition published by Lorenzo Torrentino insofar as the narrative culminates more straightforwardly in the artistic achievements of Michelangelo. Given that this book examines, in part, how the traveling artist’s encounter with place becomes a historical event in its own right, it seems reasonable to undertake an analysis of mobility in the edition where historical progression and narrative are at their most lucid and coherent. Furthermore, in the 1568 edition Vasari routinely excised the opening paragraphs of an artist’s biography in favor of supplementing more thorough information about an artist’s commissions. Yet these opening paragraphs, often neglected, provide fascinating glimpses into Vasari’s more proverbial thoughts and musings about mobility and artistic behavior. Finally, while the 1568 edition may provide more content, it is the 1550 edition where Vasari’s skill as a chronicler of the artistic process and style is at its most brilliant. Von Schlosser went so far as to say that Vasari’s capacity as a writer appears “purer and more artistic” in the first edition, a view reiterated by Luciano Bellosi, Aldo Rossi, and Rosanna Bettarini, who along with Paola Barocchi, the dean of Vasari studies, edited the authoritative editions of the Lives published by Sansoni beginning in 1966.[35]

As a man of letters and artist frequently on the road himself, Vasari is a voice that is tuned to how the performance of style exists in a symbiotic relationship with the practice of travel. What he has to say on the subject is relevant not only for the bookish fields of art theory and historiography. Attending to how mobility becomes represented informs that most basic yet significant art historical task, the act of looking and interpreting works of art. For when we diagnose the assumptions and logical consequences constituting Vasari’s portrayal of mobility we are refining a contemporary linguistic lens that scrutinizes an artist’s style. Even by itself, this instrument would be valuable, giving as it would an insight upon the discursive function of mobility in art literature. But also coming into focus are the parameters and, more important, justification for commenting upon artistic behavior and works of art in a historically plausible manner.[36]

What emerges from peering through this lens is how style becomes an instrument through which an artist can intensify, compile, or reject his understanding of place, both native and foreign, in its subtle degrees. Place—a thorny and historically contingent concept—raises questions in relation to other domains where style plays a role: artistic tradition and rivalry, master-pupil relations, humanist or vernacular learning, the devotional function of images, and politics, to name but a few. To phrase it another way: in broaching style’s rapport with place, mobility widens the horizons of our effort to interpret works of art. That location is the stage where human action occurs, thereby playing a role in attempts to understand those actions, is only part of the reason why this is so. Mobility as a dramatic event in an artist’s biography and career demands its depicter to question afresh the very nature of artistic experience, the relation of the self with the world at large.

STUPEFIED IN ROME

In a compelling passage in the Life of Rosso Fiorentino, Vasari comments upon mobility’s disorienting effects. Up to this point in the biography, Vasari praises the Florentine artist’s bold draughtsmanship and graceful manner. It is all the more surprising, then, that Rosso meets failure after departing from Florence with his assistant Battistino and pet ape and arriving in Rome in 1524. There, he receives a commission to decorate the Cesi Chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Pace. According to Vasari, this work was the worst Rosso had ever painted. Speculating upon this fiasco, Vasari writes that Rosso was not the only artist to have suffered a decline on changing his location. Such metamorphosis in the face of mobility is, as Vasari calls it, “an extraordinary thing, and one of the secrets of nature” (cosa mirabile et occulta di natura).[37]

Seeking to make sense of artists’ transformation when on the move, Vasari proposes the following axiom: “He who changes his country [muta paese] or place of habitation [luogo] seems to change his nature [natura], talents [virtù], character [costumi], and personal habits [abito di persona] insomuch that he seems to be not the same man but another, and all dazed and stupefied [stordito e stupefatto].” Vasari’s principle sets forth a conception of the self that can be unsettled and transformed when subject to mobility. The texture of his prose conveys this destabilization, the tone and voice struggling and shifting from indicative declaration to more hesitant speculation in the subjunctive. Mobility’s profound effect is also evident on the philological level in Vasari’s rich stock of words. Closely reading this set of terms suggests how mobility can uproot implanted personal qualities. Mutar paese, for instance, not only signifies deserting one’s native place but also jettisoning a way of being and acting in the world. Natura speaks to the essence and reason behind the form of things. Virtù refers to the “habit of the mind, ordered to the manner of human nature, suited to reason”; costumi designates the “habit of the spirit”; abito is an “acquired quality due to the frequent use of operations that one can move from the subject only with difficulty.” If, as the adage goes, ogni dipintore dipinge se (every painter paints himself), this se, according to Rosso’s case at least, is beholden to movement.[38]

Vasari’s constellation of personal concepts is important for unearthing contemporary attitudes toward artistic mobility. It also leads to a passage that frames how taking mobility as a factor might inform an approach to looking at works of art. This is not to advocate the use of verbal discourse as scaffolding upon which to hang our observations in the air. The passage does, however, suggest a range of priorities and associations an informed viewer had in mind when looking at the work of a transplanted artist. Vasari’s conjecture as to why Rosso experienced such a transformation sets up a manner of looking according to a series of comparisons and foils: “This may have happened to Rosso in the air of Rome and on account of the stupendous works of architecture and sculpture that he saw there, and the paintings and statues of Michelangelo, which may have thrown him off his balance; which works also drove Fra Bartolommeo di San Marco and Andrea del Sarto to flight, and prevented them from executing anything in Rome. Whatever the reason, Rosso never did worse; and what is more, this work has to bear the comparison with those of Raffaello da Urbino.”[39]

FIGURE 1.21 Rosso Fiorentino, The Creation of Eve, 1524. Fresco. Santa Maria della Pace, Rome. © 2013. Photo Scala, Florence.

FIGURE 1.22 Rosso Fiorentino, The Fall of Man, 1524. Fresco. Santa Maria della Pace, Rome.

Vasari bases his explanation upon the frescoes The Creation of Eve and The Fall of Man, the only part of the Cesi Chapel commission Rosso completed (figs. 1.21 and 1.22). Given the frescoes’ condition—eighteenth-century visitors speak of mortar raining down from the church’s upper stories—these stylistic observations are a matter of delicate judgment. Even so, we can still discern an emphasis on the monumental nude and expressive facial features, interest in interlocking figures, and stretching limbs that couple figures but accent the border separating the painting’s fictive world from the viewer’s space. On a practical level, Rosso’s hyperbolic aesthetic in this upper lunette facilitates its contemplation for the visitor standing several meters below. We might also expand upon the sources of these exaggerated forms by suggesting parallels with the antiquities owned by the chapel’s patron, Angelo Cesi, an avid collector of books and classical sculpture. Alternatively, we could understand this hyperbolic aesthetic as a grand prelude, both formally and theologically, to the chapel’s dedication to the Annunciation, the subject that Rosso was to have painted for the altar.[40]

Vasari’s commentary calls for considering Rosso’s style in other terms, his displacement from Florence to Rome. More specifically, style becomes a function of establishing difference, with difference understood in terms of collisions in time, personal relationships, and most significantly geography. Svetlana Alpers may have quipped that “style is what you make it.” But as Philip Sohm observes, Alpers’s criticism of style’s inherent vagueness allows a degree of “semantic mutability.” And for Vasari writing on traveling artists, style is “what you compare it with.” As a narrative act that demands change in time, place, persons, and customs, mobility necessarily demands on the part of the depicter an examination of these changes. Mobility thus posits difference as style’s ontological foundation, unstable as quicksand as that foundation may be.[41]

Temporal difference—the narrative of Rosso before, during, and after Rome—occupies the background of Vasari’s remarks. Vasari builds up suspense by stating that Rosso was held in “the greatest anticipation” owing to the several drawings that had been circulated in Rome before his arrival. Next comes the story of his artistic failure. Supplementing Rosso’s reversal of fortune are several first-hand accounts that attest to his conflict with his fellow artists. One of these, Cellini’s autobiography, states that Rosso, “being a man given to backbiting, he spoke so ill of Rafaello da Urbino’s works, that the pupils of the latter were quite resolved to murder him.” Cellini goes on to say that Rosso even quarreled with Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, the intermediary who had procured for him the commission for the Cesi Chapel in the first place. Due to his disagreement with da Sangallo, Rosso was stripped of his commission and brought to the brink of starvation. Finally, we come to Rosso’s redemption. Vasari informs us that on leaving Rome, Rosso painted a Deposition in Sansepolcro reputed to be “very rare and beautiful,” while the rest of his biography recounts his achievements in Italy and, eventually, his triumph at the court of Francis I in France. The anticipation surrounding Rosso’s arrival in Rome, his momentary lapse, and consequent redemption invite the reader to take a temporal approach to his style, contrasting different stages of his career. We might compare the frescoes in the Cesi Chapel with his previous work on one hand. The figure of Adam in the lunette’s left side, for instance, recalls a reclining youth in the foreground in his Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well, a lost panel sent to England but known through copies. On the other hand, the interlocking figures in the Cesi Chapel anticipate his Deposition from the Cross (Sansepolcro, San Lorenzo, Convent delle Sorelle delle Orfanelle) begun three years later, in 1527.[42]

Personal difference emerges as another category by which Vasari’s remarks about Rosso in Rome conceive the traveling artist’s style. We hear of the disorienting effect of Michelangelo’s work upon the newly arrived painter. This statement asks the reader to consider in what way Rosso may have been looking at the older master’s style to formulate his own version of the monumental nude. To take once again the reclining Adam, his pose is reminiscent of several figures on the Sistine ceiling, especially that of the Ancestor of Christ in the now destroyed Phares-Esron-Aran lunette. Furthermore, the Adam on the Cesi Chapel lunette’s right side is a similar though inverted rendering of the twisting form in Michelangelo’s Expulsion from the Garden. Such formal parallels corroborate Rosso’s defense against accusations that he ridiculed and wished to distance himself from Michelangelo’s style. As Rosso wrote to Michelangelo, “I understand that you have been told when I arrived here and entered the chapel you painted, I am supposed to have said that I would not adopt that manner [of painting]. It must be self-evident how silly that is.”[43] Nonetheless, Vasari imagines Michelangelo as a magnetic force that simultaneously attracts and repels artists who come into his orbit, not only Rosso, but other Florentine artists such as Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto. Writ large, mobility involves the encounter with a community of artists, both harmonious and contentious, with style signaling personal differences, acceptance, indifference, or concord.

The categories of difference outlined thus far are not distinct; they run and bleed into one another. We might interpret Vasari’s comments about Rosso’s negative comparison with the Raphael as personal difference (recall Cellini’s remarks about Raphael’s pupils wanting to murder Rosso). But Vasari states that what provokes the comparison is the proximity between the artists’ frescoes. Raphael’s Sibyls for the Chigi Chapel neighbors Rosso’s depictions of Adam and Eve for the Cesi Chapel. We therefore run into the category of locational difference. The fact that these two chapels are adjacent to one another fosters an examination of their dissimilarities and affinities as well. In this case, the stylistic differences between Raphael and Rosso are more pronounced than any parallels. Raphael links the members of his multifigure composition by repeating gestures, color schemes, and shapes of falling drapery (fig. 1.23). By contrast, Rosso’s nude figures are blocky discrete units, the left side of the lunette interacting little with its companion on the right. Vasari’s passage suggests that one of the tasks of a traveling artist, or any artist for that matter, is to establish a rapport, be it one of emulation or antithesis, in locational terms with other artists’ work.[44]

Geographic difference, that between Florence and Rome, is the major category into which these other varieties of difference are nested. The contrast extends beyond the wit of Tuscan proverbs which mocked the ancient capital (“Roma Roma ogni pazzo doma”: “Rome Rome where every madman reigns”). Vasari’s speculation upon Rosso’s failure in the Eternal City comprises a larger question: how does the traveling artist grapple with the interlocking components that constitute destinations, components that are often themselves in conflict with one another—the duration of a sojourn, other artists, their works and pupils, the location of a commission? Do artists calibrate their style in relation to these components? In turn, how should a writer on art such as Vasari represent this confrontation with geographic difference? Does this verbal representation have any bearing on an art historical consideration of style, and at that, an artist’s oeuvre and selfhood? Terminology is also at stake. For while we might use the words “geography” or “place” to describe the plentitude of experience the traveling artist faces, Vasari deploys the historically specific metaphor of Rome’s aria, loosely translatable as climate, to portray the interaction of various elements that make up a place. Consequently, we are led down another rabbit hole of interrogation: is this an isolated use of the term, and if not, where else and how does it manifest? What are the other metaphors current in the early modern imagination to enact the traveling artist’s style?[45]

FIGURE 1.23 Raphael and workshop, Sibyls, c. 1511. Fresco. Chigi Chapel. Santa Maria della Pace, Rome.

It has been my aim to point out how problematic “influence” regarding mobility can be, how this building block of art history is in need of examination. The pathway to this diagnosis has been tortuous. A discrete sample of paintings executed by the itinerant Lotto demonstrates the necessity of fashioning language to account for an artist’s change in place along with a corresponding change in style. “Influence,” however, puts a convenient lid upon the tumultuous relations between the biographical event of an artist’s travel, the performance of style, either in a foreign locale or upon repatriation, and the representation of these two preceding two in contemporary art literature. Diagrams, such as those plotted by Geymüller, Gallwitz, and Resta, attempt to depict the winding trails of “influence” in an orderly manner, but in doing so, they only reinforce the concept’s chaotic complexion. Early modern writers on the visual arts and artists themselves point out the baffling nature of mobility and the transformation of an artist’s way of working, even selfhood. Vasari’s speculation on Rosso’s unsuccessful Roman stay, for instance, offers one set of possible parameters—stylistic difference in respect to time, location, personal relations, and geography—to contemplate his work in the Cesi Chapel. But given this passage’s position in the Life of one individual artist, one wonders whether Vasari’s remarks are applicable to other artists and circumstances. Is it legitimate to cull this exceptional consideration of how mobility modifies an artist’s “nature, talents, character and personal habits” and transpose them to, say, the case of Lotto’s style? Does such a reading rooted in a voice and terms of the period neutralize the dialectic between “geographic license” and “site specificity” we identified in Lotto’s altarpieces? What these questions indicate, then, is the urgency to read Vasari’s depiction of mobility not pellmell in a few scattered instances, but throughout the course of the entire Lives. Considering the fact that his comments on artists are specific to a certain era, be it the Trecento or his own time, it seems reasonable to proceed in sequential order from the beginning, the Proemio, where the very origins of the arts unfold at the inception of history.

2 Contamination, Stasis, and Purging

If Vasari’s legacy is his fashioning of a history for the visual arts, then it seems reasonable to begin an analysis of artistic mobility where that history begins, namely the Proemio delle Vite. This is not to say that the preceding sections—the dedication to Duke Cosimo I, the initial Proemio, and the technical treatise—do not raise the issue of mobility. Nevertheless, it is in the Proemio delle Vite, henceforth referred to as the preface, where the reader first encounters sustained attention to the movement of artists, objects, and techniques. The product of collaboration between Vasari and members of the Florentine Academy such as Pier Francesco Giambullari and Cosimo Bartoli, the preface is crucial if we are to understand the Lives’s prejudices and proclivities toward mobility. At the inception of Vasari’s history of style, mobility is far from being a heroic act of discovery and conquest. It is a cataclysmic event. The erratic transmission of artistic techniques from region to region menaces precise knowledge of arts’ origins. Barbarians invade and destroy. The arrival of foreign artists along with the corrupting force of aria brings about stasis, corruption, and contamination. It is in the preface that we encounter mobility’s dark side, an antagonist against which Vasari will eventually define his triumph of (central Italian) style via diffusion throughout Italy and the world at large. Only by probing this fragile construction can we appreciate how Vasari’s writing on art guides and proscribes the perception of works of art, our appreciation and esteem of artists, and their behavior.[1]

ORIGINS, MOBILITY, AND MEMORY

In the preface, Vasari depicts the movement of artists, objects, and ideas as a problem that can hinder the launch of his narrative. He first presents a seemingly reassuring catalogue of art forms and their purported places of origin: “I do not doubt at all that nearly all writers share the widespread and most certain opinion that sculpture together with painting were naturally and first found by the people of Egypt, and that others attribute to the Chaldeans the first sketches in marble and the first sculptural reliefs, just as they also give to the Greeks the invention of the brush and of coloring.” As the preface continues, however, techniques, objects, and peoples wander in a dizzying fashion between Babylon, Chaldea, Egypt, Greece, and Rome.[2] Vasari does acknowledge the classical past common to Mediterranean civilizations. However, in contrast to contemporary maps of seas that link these cultures in a littoral chain, Vasari attempts to establish distinctions among places (fig. 2.1). Sculpture’s beginnings are initially associated with Babylonian idols, yet Vasari immediately contradicts this ascription in favor of Egyptian and Chaldean statuary. But then he states that Ethiopians, in fact, created the first sculptures, the technique of which was transferred to the Egyptians, and from them to the Greeks. Yet Vasari, reading Pliny erroneously, also claims that sculpture arrived in Egypt through the Greek artist Gyges the Lydian. Vasari’s description of Roman art further frustrates any attempt to establish firm links between art and region: as its armies ransack the world for spolia, Rome “becomes more ornate with foreign works of art than with native ones.” Befitting Vasari’s promotion of Tuscany, Etruscan civilization provides firmer ground. Unlike other objects and techniques moving frantically through space, Etruscan objects emerge reassuringly sottoterra.[3]

FIGURE 2.1 Giorgio Sideri, called Calopodio da Candia, Nautical Map of the Center East Mediterranean, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, mid-sixteenth century. Parchment (40.3 × 60 cm). Museo Correr, Venice.

Vasari names two factors to account for this uncertain paternity test of the arts: time, which consumes all things, and the absence of notizie or written sources, which, if they existed, might silence debate over the question of origins. Vasari is here being disingenuous, for he makes ample use of both written sources, such as Pliny filtered through Ghiberti’s Commentarii, as well as visual evidence, citing for example the famous bronze Etruscan chimera found in his native Arezzo to reinforce Tuscany’s antique origins. The confusion over origins lies not in the existence of sources, but in the nature of those sources. The sporadic mobility of art and artists from one region to the next complicates and weakens the link between a specific art form and a specific people or geographic region. Mobility threatens memory[4]

The menace that mobility poses to recollection is understandable given that early modern thinkers inherited a highly locational notion of memory. Well known are the scores of medieval and later treatises which, following the widely used rhetorical textbook Ad Herennium, recommend that students store information according to location. As Albertus Magnus stated, “Place is something the soul itself makes for laying up images.” While pastness was common to all things, only distinctions in place distinguished between those things. The thirteenth-century professor of rhetoric Boncompagno da Signa, for instance, advised that those desiring to memorize “the names of provinces, cities, rivers, and places should inspect a mappa mundi, in which are depicted all the regions of the world ... with their names written underneath.” This technique of arranging information appears centuries later in Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogo del modo di accrescere e conservar la memoria (1562). There, a woodcut of a city accompanies the recommendation to organize topics to be memorized—grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics, among others—into distinct places, such as an abbey, a library, or slaughterhouse, which are themselves in alphabetic order (fig. 2.2).[5]

FIGURE 2.2 “Topics to Be Memorized Organized as a City,” 1562. Woodcut (28 × 18.5 cm). From Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo del modo di accrescere e conservar la memoria, 1562, Typ 525 62.332, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Due to the emphasis placed on associating knowledge with fixed locations, several writers on memory warned against storing information in imaginary places characterized by a high level of traffic. As Jacobus Publicius stated in The Art of Memory (1482), “The approach and return, the wandering and frequent coming of people leads our thought astray.” Moreover, Abba Nesteros advised students wishing to forget to dislocate their memories, evicting them from their normal seat of residence. Likewise, Vasari may say it is the antiquity of things Greek or Ethiopian which render the origins of art in doubt. However, all of these civilizations and art forms share the quality of having origins in the past. As the sources depict one art form migrating from one place to another, distinctions in place, and consequently fixed memories, are lacking. Were we to depict the peregrinations of sculpture or painting from one origin to another presumed origin, we would more likely have the frenzied twists and turns of Geymüller’s map of “influence” in lieu of the crisp order of memory theaters.[6]

THE RHETORIC OF NEGATION

Leaving the origins of the arts unresolved, Vasari announces the temporal scheme that will guide the narrative of the preface and the Lives as a whole—the “perfection and ruin and restoration or to put it better, the renaissance” of the visual arts. In this organic process, which Vasari famously likens to a body that is born, grows, becomes old, and dies and is eventually reborn, the destructive presence of Barbarian invaders and Byzantine artists functions as a catalyst. The very notion of an eventual rinascita is predicated on the existence of the preceding “Dark Ages,” which is synonymous with the existence of foreign intruders and the rise of the Gothic and Byzantine styles, in Vasari’s terminology, the maniera tedesca and maniera greca, respectively. Yet is this interim period just a prelude to the inevitable rise of the Renaissance? Does mobility, here figured as the interaction between barbarian foreign and oppressed native artists, have larger ramifications on Vasari’s historical scheme and conception of style?[7]

Asking such questions challenges a tendency to understand Vasari’s depiction of “the medieval” and the “Middle Ages” as a period of artistic cessation and death. Such an assumption risks overemphasizing Vasari’s definition of artistic death as an irreversible condition of nothingness. As Patrick Geary remarks, in a social culture of memoria where the living undertook commemorative deeds for the souls of the departed, “death marked a transition, a change in status, but not an end.” While biblical images of dry bones (Ezekiel 37) or dust (Genesis 2.19; 3.7) characterize the dead, the dominant Christian metaphor for the body awaiting resurrection is the seed, as St. Paul declares in Corinthians 1:15: “So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it shall rise in incorruption.” Likewise, the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (1612) defines death simply as “the separation of the soul from the body,” thus referring to the belief that physical death marks but one stage in the process culminating in eventual resurrection or damnation. “Death (rot, decomposition),” notes Caroline Walker Bynum in her study on the Christian resurrection of the body, “can be a moment of fertility, which sprouts and flowers and gives rise to incorruption.” Death can thus represent a particular state of being, rather than the utter absence of being per se.[8]

At first glance it may seem that the Barbarians’ arrival precipitates nothing less than expiration for the arts. Rovina recurs through the preface, and reinforcing the impression of destruction are the word’s synonyms and related terms that Vasari shapes in alliterative phrases (“sotterrate e sommerse fra le miserabili stragi” or “col ferro e col fuoco”). Also presented to the reader is an inventory of destroyed public buildings which recalls a Vitruvian table of contents: “anfiteatri, teatri, termi ... sepulture.” This emphasis on public buildings as opposed to private ones seems consonant with the Barbarians’ disregard for laws and public institutions as asserted by Tacitus and Thomas Aquinas, among others. The catalog of the destroyed objects amounts to a textual disintegration of “Rome,” pulverizing the city into a series of verbal fragments. Representing destruction through listing also occurs in Vasari’s depiction of early Christian church construction. The physical displacement of antique fragments (“colonne, pietre, incrostature”) to build S. Pietro, S. Paulo, and S. Maria Maggiore is equally, if not more, damaging to the arts. In this respect, Rome’s decline, especially in the 1568 edition, is linked to both internal and external factors: the Empire’s decline, Constantine’s departure, Barbarian arrival, and in particular the advent of Christianity. Most prominent in this narrative of destruction is a language of negation: “no longer finding neither a vestige nor a sign of anything good, the men that came afterwards, seeing themselves coarse and rough, particularly in paintings and sculptures, incited by nature and sharpened by the air, gave themselves to create not according to the rules of previous arts, which they did not have, but according to the quality of their minds: and in this way was born from their hands that clumsiness and awkwardness that in old things still appear today.”[9]

A litany of negative particles (non trovandosi, né vestigio, né indizio, non secondo le regole, non le avevano) emphasizes the utter lack of worthy exempla in this artistic wasteland. Earlier, Vasari had also framed the cultural decline that ensues after Emperor Constantine’s departure from Rome in negative terms: “Having changed laws, habitation, names, and languages ... every beautiful spirit and elevated mind became very ugly and base.” Buildings rise in an age where “completely erased [were] the form and good way due to dead architects and due to destroyed and ruined works.” Consequently, these buildings possess “neither grace, nor design, nor any reason whatsoever.” Negative particles also shape Vasari’s depiction of painters: they see “neither goodness nor a better perfection in things” in the ruined capital.[10]

This language of negation was not unique to Vasari: in a letter to Pope Leo X in which he envisions an architectural reconstruction of Rome, Raphael wrote that the Barbarian migrations had reduced the city “to a manner in keeping with misery, without art, measure, or any grace.” Such negation also appears in ethnographic and biographic writing, genres in which alterity becomes defined in negative terms against an observing self. Formulated since antiquity, this notion defines Barbarians in negative terms, whether it is their inability to speak a language, their nonadherence to the Christian faith, or their nonresidence in the civilized world. Thus Tacitus in his Germania describes northern tribes by their lack of temples, anthropomorphic deities, cities, and military techniques. Petrarch declared in his Invective against a Detractor of Italy: “We are not Greeks or Barbarians; we are Latins and Italians.” In his description of Americans, the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci offers a particularly vivid account of this principle of negative self-definition: “They have no cloth, either of wool, flax, or cotton. . . . They live amongst themselves without a king or ruler, each man being his own master, and having as many wives as they please. . . . They break marriages as often as they live and observe no law in this regard. They have no temples and no laws, nor are they idolaters. What more should I say?”[11]

It has been suggested this rhetoric of negation “implies the existence of a culture as a tabula rasa, waiting to receive (European) inscription.” Thus, when Ghiberti describes the age of Constantine and Pope Sylvester left “all temples white,” we might interpret this statement not only as a description of early Christian iconoclasm, but also as a comparison to the arts as a blank sheet, ready for the imprint of artistic sensation and experience. The messianic figures of Cimabue and Giotto do not, however, lead art out of its dark ages by inscribing new styles upon a completely blank slate. Instead of utter blankness, the leitmotif of “not ... not” describes artistic production that transgresses prescribed stylistic qualities. When the sixteenth-century French cosmographer André Thevet describes Brazilians as being “bêtes, brutes, sans foi, sans loi, sans religion, sans civilité aucune,” his list of negatives does not describe a cultural blank slate. Though naked, the New World body is scored, scarred, tattooed, pierced, and painted. Comorbid with explicit nakedness are the ornaments and tattoos that run rampant over skin and flesh (fig. 2.3). Correspondingly, the peoples inhabiting Rome in the wake of Barbarian invasions do not function within an artistic vacuum; what they paint, sculpt, and build is “incited by nature,” unfettered expressions of nature’s dynamic force. Given the nonexistence of classical objects, artisans are prompted by another substance—aria—an altogether different, and noxious, stimulant.[12]

FIGURE 2.3 “Icon Regis Quoniambec,” 1642. Woodcut (43 × 22 cm). From Ulisse Aldrovandi, Monstrorum historia, 1642, f *51–897, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

ARIA

The term aria is frequently discussed as a stylistic concept that designates personal bearing, the external, often facial, expression of an interior psychological state to the observer. This connotation derives from Petrarch, who, as Leo Spitzer observed, understood aria as an individual’s “atmosphere, a kind of secular halo, round the person.” That Vasari exploits aria as a conduit of expression is indisputable. A statistical analysis, however, calls into question whether aria exclusively bears this connotation. In the 1550 edition, Vasari uses the term aria or the plural arie a total of 102 times. Just less than half of the sum—49—refer to personal expression. The remainder refer to aria as the natural element of air. In this latter sense, aria is the substance that destroys works of art and corrodes sculpture; the painted medium through which birds fly and dark and light manifest themselves in paintings; or as mal’aria, an unhealthy environment. It is this natural historical connotation of aria which Vasari deploys when he describes the rise of the bandit maniera tedesca and maniera greca.[13]

With few exceptions, scholars have tended to dismiss Vasari’s use of this strain of aria to explain the origins and characteristics of artistic styles as an empty literary conceit. A closer examination reveals that aria is in fact a powerful term in the early modern imagination because it explains why and how regions vary in respect to character, human morphology, and, by extension, artistic style. In the preface, aria is figured as an element symptomatic of Barbarian invasion. Artists left in the wake of the sack of Rome confront and imbibe the aria of their ruined city. This natural force is then held partly accountable for the degeneration of classical style and the spawn of the Gothic. Like an invasive species whose tendrils take hold and choke, the maniera tedesca spreads throughout the Italian peninsula, its progress providentially halted due to the opposition of Tuscan artists nourished themselves by the salubrious aria of their homeland. We might dismiss such figurative language as mere rhetoric. Nonetheless, these tropes deserve unpacking since they ultimately point to how he and other writers on art understand the associations between art and place, artistic creation and stylistic diffusion. To grasp the workings of that network, and how mobility puts stress upon and manipulates it, we must briefly observe the currency of one of its building blocks—aria—in classical and early modern thought.[14]

In the ancient world, air was also understood as a causal force, responsible for disease as well as the mental faculties and personal characteristics of animate beings. In Hippocrates’s treatise Airs Waters Places, air as a natural element becomes increasingly synonymous with the notion of climate, which in turn was held responsible for human diversity. Living beings, Hippocrates argues, are subject to a location’s climate in respect to health (chapters 1–11) and character (12-24). Such a deterministic view of climate served as a tool for ethnographic description. Hippocrates reports that the inhabitants of Phasis on the Black Sea live in a “hot, wet, and wooded” environment; as a result, they also have the deepest voices of any humans because “the air they breathe is not clear” and the fruits that grow there are deformed. By contrast, Asia’s temperate climate is responsible for plentiful harvests, flourishing cattle, men of fine physique, and prolific mothers. Hippocrates also speculates on the relation between climate and techne. Where the land is well watered, hot in summer and cold in winter, the inhabitants are lazy and drowsy and, correspondingly, “as the arts are concerned they are thick-witted and neither subtle nor sharp.” Equally significant is how Hippocrates stresses the importance of arriving duly prepared to contend with the air of alien locations. A good physician “will not, on arrival at a town with which he is unfamiliar, be ignorant of the local diseases, or of the nature of those that commonly prevail.” Climate may be deterministic, but it can also be understood and controlled.[15]

Roman authors perpetuated and expanded upon Greek philosophical thinking on air to explain illness, a location’s attributes, and an individual’s shortcomings. Numerous passages in Lucretius’s De rerum natura discuss the role of air in the spread of disease. Cicero ascribes Athenian wit and the Theban stout constitution to the different air in these peoples’ homelands. Although acknowledging air’s potential as a powerful natural force, Cicero left room for individual agency: “The rarefied air of Athens will not enable a student to choose between the lectures of Zeno, Arcesilas and Theophrastus, and the dense air of Thebes will not make a man try to win a race at Nemea rather than at Corinth.” The discourse concerning air also penetrated the thinking on the visual arts. Vitruvius in his treatise on architecture advised that architects should take into account climate’s impact upon a site’s salubrity: “We must diligently seek to choose the most temperate regions of climate,” he urges, “since we have to seek healthiness in laying out the walls of cities.” No building can be healthy without taking climate, whose chief elements are the air and water of a place, into account.[16]

Nancy Siraisi observes that Hippocratic climate theory and, more generally, the deterministic conception of environment became “a standard part of the cosmological theory in western Europe from the twelfth to the seventeenth century.” The sixteenth-century astrologer and polymath Girolamo Cardano, for instance, applied Hippocrates’s observations to the various peoples and regions of the Italian peninsula: Florentines are superior in mathematics due to their climate; aridity produces the stubborn inhabitants of the author’s hometown, Cardano. Another early modern thinker who perpetuated Hippocratic notions of climate and its effect upon the domain of human activity, including the arts, was Cardano’s contemporary, the French natural historian and political theorist Jean Bodin. In his Six livres de la République (1576), translated into English in 1606, Bodin recommends that architects situate their buildings according to the “diversitie of places.” Bodin also speculated that climate could affect the visual arts: “Those arts which consist in handie works are greater in the people of the North than in any other, and therefore the Spainards and the Italians admire so many and so divers kinds of works made with the hand, as are brought out of Germanie, Flanders, and England.” Aria also appears in the travelogue genre, for example, throughout Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigationi et viaggi, a compilation of voyage accounts published in the same year as Vasari’s Lives. A document supposedly written by Amerigo Vespucci claims that the “temperanza dell’aere” in the lands he encounters in his journeys westward generates dense woods, ferocious animals, “fruit in the greatest abundance,” and “infinite herbs and roots.” By contrast, Leo Africanus in his Descrizione dell’Africa describes the results of the noxious Egyptian aere: devastating outbreaks of plague (at one time more than 12,000 dead), a great number of crippled people, and a swelling of the testicles “in a way that is marvelous to see.”[17]

Lest we think that aria was restricted to the expositions of the esoteric and fantastic, the term also made its way into the correspondence and first-hand accounts of artists themselves. Aria appears as a protagonist in a letter Michelangelo wrote to his brother on 2 July 1508. The artist introduces a young Spanish painter who has come to Florence “to learn how to paint” and informs his brother that Giovan Simone will return to Florence soon “because the air here does not seem to me to be made for him.” Benvenuto Cellini too employs aria in this sense. In his autobiography, the artist recounts how his lodgings in Ferrara were of “aria cattiva,” causing him and his company to fall ill. To remedy his illness, Cellini consumes peacocks, known for their incorruptible flesh.[18]

Given that aria was understood as a powerful natural force in a number of contexts, it is no surprise that it emerges as a theme in treatises on architecture, often defined as a second order of nature. In De re aedificatoria, Alberti deals repeatedly with aria, and in the 1550 translation by Cosimo Bartoli the term appears twelve times in the index, a testament to its status as a locus of discussion. Echoing Vitruvius, Alberti defines aria in book 1.3 as a crucial factor when selecting appropriate building sites. He reinforces this view with the following rhetorical question: “Who can have failed to notice the extensive influence that climate [aria] has on generation [generare], growth [producere], nourishment [nutrire] and preservation [mantenere]?” The rhythmic list of substantive verbs emphasizes the sense of a biological process unfolding over time. Indeed, the phrase sounds uncannily similar to Vasari’s famous statement that the arts, like a human body, undergo “birth, growth, aging, and death” as well as a rebirth. Alberti also holds aria responsible for a location’s agricultural produce and inhabitants: “I myself have seen cities ... in which there is not a single woman who when giving birth does not realize that she has become the mother of both man and monster. I know of another town in Italy where there are so many born either with tumors, squints, and limps, or who are crippled, that there is scarcely a family that does not contain someone deformed or handicapped in some way; and it is a sure indication, when many marked discrepancies are to be seen in bodies or their members, that the climate [aria] is at fault.”[19]

Vasari’s notion of air as a force that gives rise to the maligned forms of the Gothic is strikingly similar to Alberti’s use of the concept. Just as Alberti sees aria as the cause of monstrous forms in nature, Vasari declares that the aria of a ransacked Rome gave rise to monstrous artistic styles. The latter figures these styles as living beings, generated by and feeding on natural elements. The most gifted architects flee from the maniera tedesca because “monstrous and barbarous, forsaken of all that comprises order, it should rather be called confusion and disorder.” Like those who, in Alberti’s account, are deformed from poor aria, buildings without a sense of composition, according to Vasari, “would represent lame men, halt, distorted, and maimed.”[20]

The aria of a sacked Rome, in combination with other key factors such as the lack of appropriate models and internal decline, generates styles that violate the rational proportions of the human body. The maniera tedesca follows a “rampant nature,” characterized by a paperlike fragility, intertwining vines and leaves, and an excess of seemingly superfluous ornament. Raphael, in his letter to Pope Leo X, also declares that architecture built in this manner exhibits “strange animals and figures and leaves outside of every reason.” Vasari’s maniera tedesca is epidemic, infecting an infinite number and all manner of buildings—from churches to private residences. Reaching as far as Milan, Venice, Padua, and Bologna, while also closer to home in Siena, Lucca, and even Arezzo and Florence, the corrupt style is found “per tutta Italia.” The vines of Vasari’s Gothic ensnare together such wildly disparate buildings as San Marco in Venice and the Duomo in Arezzo. Though they are distant in respect to chronology and style, Vasari crams them into the same taxonomic class. More concretely, the metaphors of aria and what it spawns may account for the intertwining vegetal and figural ornament almost choking the architectural structures which Vasari observes (fig. 2.4). This maniera even comes to besiege ethnic identity, as it does for the Italian architect Arnolfo, whom Vasari refers to at times as “Arnolfo tedesco.”[21]

There was no lack of art theoretical discussions, both in archival and published accounts, concerning aria in Vasari’s wake. Vincenzo Danti’s Trattato delle perfette proporzioni (1567) refers to aria as a causal factor for the diversity and imperfection of human beauty. Preserved in a manuscript entitled Lettione nell’Accademia del Disegno, a lecture delivered to the Florentine Accademia del Disegno sometime in the third quarter of the sixteenth century discusses at length Hippocrates’s Airs Waters Places as well as other works on climatic thought by Aristotle, Plato, and Galen.[22] This climatic theory of the arts would continue well into the twentieth century. But the larger issue at stake is that in mentioning aria as a cause for the rise of good or bad styles, Vasari considers artists as subject to certain environmental conditions. The implications of this observation are twofold. First, if maligned styles are a result of aria, it follows that works of art and artists themselves are understood to exist beyond the confines of the workshop and studio. Art and its maker are physical beings, thus susceptible to the processes of the natural world. Second, the concept of style draws upon assumptions aside from those nested in rhetorical theory. Art historians have been right to stress Vasari’s engagement with rhetorical topoi expounded by Cicero and Quintilian in composing his lexicon of stylistic terms. However, recognizing aria as a causal force suggests that style becomes a living organism, a part of the natural world, and therefore, is subject to the workings of that world. In terms of aria’s relevance for this specific inquiry into mobility and style, the traveling artist over the multivolume span of the Lives will have to confront the aria of a foreign location. Aria becomes a byword for a general artistic environment, with an artist’s response to that environment not only social and intellectual, but somatic as well. And this environmental contagion becomes a historically specific synonym for one of several current connotations of “influence.”[23]

FIGURE 2.4 Main portal of the Pisa Baptistery. Detail of Apostles, Baptistery, Pisa.

CONTAMINATION

Vasari’s assertion that the corrupt Roman air engenders monsters casts mobility’s impact on style in relation to the natural environment. Yet he also represents mobility in terms of foreign and native artists interacting with one another: “There had remained in Greece the remnant of artists, who were old, who made images of earth and stone, and painted other monstrous figures with but an outline and a field of color. And these, being alone in the profession, brought to Italy the art of painting along with that of mosaic and sculpture, which they coarsely taught to the Italians as they knew. Such that the men of those times, not being accustomed to seeing anything good or of better perfection in these works, seeing only these things, marveled at them, even though they were disfigured, and nevertheless understood these to be the best.”[24]

The pedagogical rapport between these obsolete “Greeks,” by which is meant Byzantine artists and their Italian pupils, results in artistic contamination. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas observed in her seminal account on pollution, the idea of contamination often connotes instances when a society’s boundaries and classification systems are transgressed. The dangerous effect of natives consorting with foreigners is also an ancient topos. Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero were among those classical authors issuing injunctions against seaports, locations where the frequent coming and goings of foreigners could corrupt indigenous inhabitants. This xenophobia continued well into the early modern era and penetrated writing on art of the time. Declaiming against the “Gothic” style, one speaker in Filarete’s architectural treatise states outright: “I think that only barbaric people could have brought it into Italy.” Of course, foreign presence was not always synonymous with contamination. Filarete’s contemporary, the humanist Flavio Biondo, heralds the arrival of Byzantine scholars, such as Manuel Chrysoloras of Constantinople, for instructing Greek to students in Venice, Florence, and the Roman Curia.[25]

FIGURE 2.5 Florentine School, Madonna del Popolo, c. 1260–80. Tempera on panel. Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence.

FIGURE 2.6 Byzantine, Virgin and Child, 1192. Fresco. Church of Panagia tou Arakos, Lagoudera, Cyprus.

Vasari, however, largely characterizes the advent of the Byzantine artists as a corrupting force, issuing terrifying artistic consequences. And like the Gothic, the maniera greca spreads from Rome outward, even penetrating the confines of Tuscany, the heartland of salubrious artistic style. An example of stylistic contamination Vasari may have had in mind is the venerated Madonna del Popolo (c. 1260–80), variously called imago, icona, and tabula in early sources and placed from about 1460 in the Brancacci chapel in S. Maria del Carmine. Surrounded by Masaccio’s fresco cycle narrating the Life of St. Peter, a paragon according to Vasari of the good “modern” style, the Madonna del Popolo undeniably alludes to Byzantine prototypes (fig. 2.5). The icon’s format—the enthroned Virgin Mary, flanked by angels and holding the Christ child in her arms, along with the elongated lines articulating her drapery and the gestures of tilted heads and blessing hands—harnesses the pictorial authority of earlier exemplars (fig. 2.6). Identifying such parallels assists the modern art historian in speculating on origins, continuity, and function of devotional imagery. But for Vasari, who is observing works according to preordained stylistic criteria, finding visual correspondences is more akin to diagnosing a set of signs, symptoms, and causes. Just as a physician would, for example, understand swollen, pus-filled lymph glands and the darkening of the body as a visual indication of plague, so too does the observer of art comprehend hieratic composition, abstracted facial features, and application of gold foil as evidence of the maniera greca. The infiltration of Byzantine artists or their pictorial models is the cause of this malady.[26]

FIGURE 2.7 Attributed to Meliore di Jacopo, Christ in Judgment, 1260–75. Mosaic. Baptistery, Florence.

FIGURE 2.8 Michelangelo, St. Bartholomew from The Last Judgment, 1534–41. Fresco. Sistine Chapel, Vatican.

True, Vasari does not liken maniera greca outright to disease. But it is significant that one of Vasari’s principal sources, his contemporary Giovanni Battista Gelli’s biographies of artists, repeatedly deploys mescolare—a term with charged biological connotations—to describe the interaction between foreigners, both Greeks and Germans, with the Italians. This word according to early modern usage could signify not only “mixing,” but also sexual coupling. Appropriately, Gelli’s depiction of such intercourse between native and stranger carries organic overtones: strangers “began to mix with us, such that the noble and genteel Italian blood began to coarsen and become rough.” Gelli also specifically cites the mixing between “barbarous people” for the decline of the arts. As in the exposure to corrupt aria, results of mixing with foreigners are described as monstrous. The infected Italian artists erect buildings in the maniera tedesca with figural ornaments that “have more the air of monsters than of men.” Their sculptures “bear more resemblance to every other thing than men.” And drawing once again upon the metaphor of abnormality, Gelli likens the figures in Byzantine painting to flayed victims and states once again, that their foreheads and wide open eyes “appeared more of monsters than of men.” Gelli’s criticism recalls so-called Italo-Byzantine works such as the mosaic of Christ in Judgment that display the characteristics of flatness, frontality, and wide open eyes (fig. 2.7). The lack of subtle contours and modeling which Gelli condemns finds a ready parallel in contemporary depictions of skinned figures, the most famous of these being Michelangelo’s St. Bartholomew (fig. 2.8). The monstrous flatness in the maniera greca mosaics and Michelangelo’s flayed skin is antithetical to morbidezza, or fleshiness, one of the prime aesthetic qualities of the good and modern manner of painting.[27]

Vasari, in turn, describes the maniera greca’s figures as “mostruose.” He also condemns Byzantine art with the unusual word baronesche. The term is a play on the name of the less than comely Baronci family, ridiculed in several fifteenth-century Florentine novellas. In Boccaccio’s Decameron (6.6) the comical Michele Scalza declares that while some have faces that are “well composed and duly proportioned,” in the members of the Baronci family “you will see one with a face very long and narrow, another with a face inordinately broad, one with a very long nose, another with a short one, one with a protruding and upturned chin, and great jaws like an ass’s.” Through the term baronesche Vasari does more than craft an analogy between the maniera greca and the Baroncis’ misshapen faces; he is also implicitly stating that the maniera greca is a regressive style. Scalza quips that when God created this family, he “began to learn how to paint.” Scalza charitably concludes his description of the Baronci by stating: “Their faces resemble those that children make when they begin to learn to draw.”[28]

The link between artistic instruction and misshapen forms constitutes the backdrop for Vasari’s depiction of the rapport between Byzantine artists and their Italian charges. In this respect, we should recall that imitatio was a cornerstone yet also a contentious issue in Renaissance treatises on education in the liberal arts. Pedagogical treatises frequently urge caution in choosing appropriate teachers, as they would provide the exempla for pupils to follow. Unlike its synonyms, such as docere, insegnare with its etymological origins in the process of making an impression in wax seals connotes a student’s receptiveness, and therefore vulnerability, to a teacher’s “stamp.” The fifteenth-century humanist Battista Guarino stated: “And it is of capital importance not to hand over beginning pupils to coarse [rudibus] and uneducated [indoctis] teachers.” Cennino Cennini echoes this view when he exhorts the reader of Il libro dell’arte: “But I give you this advice: take care to select the best one [i.e., teacher] every time, and the one who has the greatest reputation.” As Cennini declares, he was spared exposure to maniera greca as he traced his artistic lineage to Giotto, who “changed the profession of painting from Greek back to Latin.” The warning to stay away from foreign teachers was in fact a widespread classical and early modern topos. On the Education of Children, once believed to be written by Plutarch, warns that children educated by “the wicked and barbarian might carry off something of their lowness.”[29]

Fifteenth-century writers on education such as Gaurino, Vergerius, Palmieri, Alberti, and Vittorino da Feltre reiterated Quintilian’s claims that the purpose of Renaissance education was not to acquire knowledge for its own sake; knowledge ought to be applied, specifically through exercising the skill of oratory, in public affairs. As foreigners do not share the same notions of law and order, their presence, as Aristotle stated in his Politics, threatens the integrity and stability of the state. When read against such views, Vasari’s hostility to Byzantine art takes on another dimension. In following the baronesche style of foreign models, the Italian artists in this distant era are not only usurping wholesome aesthetic principles via recourse to an ethnic manner of working. They also endanger civic ideals insofar as their artistic creations, products of contamination, transgress the once pristine stylistic norms of a native and insulated populace.[30]

ARRESTED TIME

Alongside diagnosing the mixture of the alien with the indigenous, Vasari plots style on another axis, that of time. For the Renaissance viewer, the maniera greca was, according to Anthony Cutler, “simply the past, a past whose superannuation was proved by the fact that the building and painting of his own day were different.” However, this past as conceived by Vasari was not the past in the sense of elapsed time. What characterizes Vasari’s notion of maniera greca is its absence of chronological progression. Maniera greca does not just function as an index of decline, but also designates a condition of interminable stasis.[31]

Vasari’s language shares much with the concepts of temporality that underlie much ethnographic writing. In his insightful account Time and the Other, Johannes Fabian argued that anthropological narratives often exhibit a “denial of coevalness,” a refutation that observer and object of study exist in a state of shared historical time. Such disavowal of coevalness manifests itself in the belief that “primitive” peoples exist in a timeless, unchanging world. The temporalization of the Other, frozen in a state of unchanging pastness, is not unique to twentieth-century ethnography. In Germania, Tacitus declared that the clothing of northern tribes is identical to that worn by the first Romans, thus equating cultural remoteness with temporal distance. Vitruvius, furthermore, suggested that fire was responsible for forcing the earliest humans as well as the barbarians living on the Empire’s fringes to emerge from the forest and to congregate. Early modern commentators on Vitruvius extended this analogy to present circumstances. Cesare Cesariano, for instance, posited a similar function of fire for both early humans and the peoples discovered by the voyages undertaken for the Spanish and Portuguese crown. Reinforcing this parallel is the accompanying woodcut (fig. 2.9). The dense groups of barely clothed figures merge with the lush vegetation in the background, a pictorial gesture that makes a parallel between early humans and primordial nature. This stylistic and semantic collapse between figure and ground, body and wilderness resembles later depictions of New World peoples. In a woodcut commemorating the tableau Brazilian village erected for the procession of Henry II in Rouen in 1550, naked figures are lost in the morass of trees, bushes, and flames (fig. 2.10).[32]

FIGURE 2.9 “Discovery of Fire in the Golden Age.” Woodcut (20.9 × 18.3 cm). From Cesare Cesariano, Di Lucio Vitruvio Pollione De architectura libri dece, 1521. Warburg Institute Library, London.

FIGURE 2.10 “Brazilian Village.” Woodcut. From Cest la deduction du sumptueux ordre, plaisantz spectacles et magnifiques theatres dresses, et exhibes par les citoiens de Rouen . . . a la sacree maiesté du treschristian roy de France, Henry Seco[n]d . . . et à tresillustre dame, ma dame Katharine de Medicis, 1551, Typ 515.51.272, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Linguistically, such denials of coevalness often manifest themselves in the use of the historical present. When Amerigo Vespucci states that the inhabitants of the New World “are familiar and gentle ... they have very well-formed bodies,” his descriptions in the present tense suggest that these peoples were, are, and will forever appear that way. This temporal distancing also manifests itself in the contrast between the one-time task of observing, placed in the remote past tense, with the inhabitants’ actions, put into the imperfect. In a passage on cannibalism, Vespucci states: “I beheld a certain city, where I resided for perhaps twenty-seven days, where human flesh was being hung up near the houses, just as we show butcher’s meat.” Whereas Vespucci represents his supposed presence in the Americas as single events, measured concretely in temporal units (twenty-seven days), it seems as if human flesh hangs over the longue durée, suspended forever.[33]

In describing Byzantine artists, Vasari also suggests a parallel between temporality and stylistic alterity. First, his designation of artistic inertia is coupled with the notion of regression. The Byzantine sparse mode of painting, with its outlines and fields of color, recalls the primordial stylistic elements of Egypt and Greece. Furthermore, Byzantine artists execute their works of art in the imperfect tense, suggesting that their methods will continue indefinitely: “facevano imagini di terra e di pietra”; “dipignevano altre figure mostruose.” In the technical treatise, the use of the imperfect tense also describes tempera painting in terms of continuity: Greeks were always working in tempera; these “old masters” were laying gesso (usavano) on panel; they were mixing (temperavano) the colors with egg yolk. Gelli inflects this temporal continuity as stylistic uniformity among any number of Byzantine artists: “you will see that the figures of those times to be of almost the same manner. . . . They resemble themselves in the bust, indeed, are almost the same.” By contrast, in Gelli’s time, “there is not found two [artists] that resemble each other” such that one could never be mistaken for another.[34]

Vasari’s construction of an “ethnic narrative” for style is not unique to the maniera tedesca and maniera greca. As Alina Payne has shown, the notion that style is frozen also applies to Vasari’s conception of the architectural orders. Once invented and codified, the Doric continues to be the Doric, the Corinthian will be recognized as the Corinthian in perpetua, freely available for use according to the dictates of decorum. Drawing their authority from Vitruvius’s status as a classical writer, the orders represent a solidified and thus stationary body of classical knowledge. By contrast, in tension with their timelessness and uniformity, Byzantine and Gothic styles do, in fact, develop over time, although this evolution does not follow an upward trajectory. The fact that Vasari explicitly states that the maniera greca is not antica, but vecchia, draws comparisons between Byzantine style and an organic being. Its eventual demise is thus foreshadowed and, as we shall see, the mobility of artists plays an active role in its extermination.[35]

THE YEAR MCCL AND PURGING

Vasari states how and when Barbarian modes of artistic production become annihilated in the following passage: “And yet the spirits of those who were born, aided in some localities by the purity of the air, purged themselves such that, in 1250, Heaven, through piety moved by the beautiful talents that the Tuscan soil was producing every day, brought them back to their initial form.” Like an iron branding flesh, the punches MCCL inked and pressed onto paper mark identity—in this case, when and where style achieves its resurrection, and who accomplishes this feat. Other Roman numerals printed in the 1568 edition of the preface carry some weight, demonstrating as they do Vasari’s use of epigraphic and manuscript sources. But these dates—among them, CCCCXXXVIII (ecclesiastical construction in Ravenna), DCCCCLXXIII (rebuilding of San Marco in Venice), MXIII (rebuilding of S. Miniato al Monte)—represent the crests and troughs of rogue artistic styles, ultimately leading to 1250 as a year of reckoning. The year 1250 may refer to a specific historical event—the death of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II—thus signaling the end of a period when imperial authority asserts itself throughout the Italian peninsula. This significant date may equally allude to a year of civil unrest but also to the rise of political conditions which would eventually culminate in the Medici regime. This view thereby implies a rapport between the Lives and other contemporary publications, such as Cosimo Bartoli’s Italian translation of Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, Giambullari’s Il Gello, Carlo Lenzoni’s spirited defense of the Tuscan dialect, and Paolo Giovio’s Historiarium sui temporis, all of which in varying degrees promoted Cosimo I de’ Medici’s cultural and political standing.[36]

Historical narrative and by extension the objective “dates” contained therein constitute an exercise in what Hayden White has called “emplotment,” the procedure by which facts are encoded as part of larger plot structures. Although White’s larger typological categories—tragic, comic, romantic, and ironic—may seem reductionist to some, his argument does bring up the question of how the seemingly innocuous Roman numerical sequence MCCL figures in Vasari’s history of style and how it relates to the depiction of mobility in general.

We should recall that Vasari’s MCCL occurred earlier in the preface, functioning as the end bracket of the Dark Ages that began with the fall of Rome and of painting and sculpture into ruin. This use of Roman numerals to commemorate an end of something is consonant with their appearance elsewhere in the Lives, as Vasari often employs this typographic convention to indicate the date of an artist’s death. In the life of Antonello da Messina, Vasari also mentions MCCL to signal the advent of oil painting and unifying colors. In the preface, the sequence MCCL could be said to encompass both of these functions—a liminal figure signifying both ends and beginnings. It closes the era in which artists practice the maniera tedesca and maniera greca, while at the same time signaling the commencement of stylistic transformation. Vasari not only figures MCCL as a discrete point that combines with others to form a whole and solid spatial structure of time. Like an eruption that overturns tectonic layers, this date breaks the spell of timelessness and duration characterizing the age of rogue styles. MCCL proclaims a change in the dynamic, location, and effects of the stylistic intercourse between Italian artists and their Barbarian invaders.[37]

“Purging themselves” (purgare/purgarsi)—the verb that describes the specific action occurring at 1250—is significant. The word can refer variously to the act of exonerating oneself of criminal charges, the cleansing of the soul in purgatory, or the retouching and correcting of works of art.[38] Yet in the case of artistic revival, the term draws on the act of purging in the medical sense, that is the ingestion of a purgative to remove that which is thought to provoke infection or disease. The purgative in question is aria, no longer the aria of a corrupt Rome but rather that of the flourishing Tuscan landscape. Vasari would later draw on the vivid and sensuous metaphor of aria as an effective purgative in the dialogue Ragionamenti (1588) in which he depicts himself explaining to Ferdinando de’ Medici the allegories and histories he and his workshop have painted in the Palazzo Vecchio. There, Vasari employs the phrase purgazione dell’aria to depict a force that potentially should remove the “seeds” of the poor building style left by the Barbarians who inundated Italy. Furthermore, Vasari declares that the ways of building, “barbarous and different” from classical methods, were refined by the local air and time, thus marking a return to construct buildings in the Tuscan order, equal in prestige with though not strictly imitative of antiquity.[39]

While the air of Rome after the Sack by Vandals, Visigoths, and other Barbarians once gave rise to monsters, now aria functions as a cleansing agent of style. What is different about this aria’s quality is its location, the terren toscano. Here Vasari was drawing on not only medicinal notions of aria, but also the discourse of civic encomium. As the fourteenth-century chronicler Dino Compagni wrote: “This city of Florence is very populous and its good climate promotes fecundity [generativa per la buona aria]. Its citizens are well-bred and its women lovely and adorned; its buildings are beautiful and filled with many useful crafts, more than any other city in Italy. For these reasons many people from distant lands come to see Florence—not because they have to, but because of its crafts and guilds, and the beauty and decoration of the city.”[40] By stating that the purging of style takes place in Tuscany, and specifically in Florence, Vasari establishes the location and intimates its characteristics—artistic, civic, natural—which the artist will have to either forsake or contend with upon traveling. The mobility of appointed and select artists will eliminate the last vestiges of the Barbarian legacy, replacing in its stead the style of Cimabue, Giotto, and their followers.

3 Deluge, Difference, and Dissemination

Vasari concludes the preface by announcing, “Now the time has come for the life of Giovanni Cimabue; who, as was said, gave the beginning to the new way of painting.” This proclamation promises much to the reader. We might expect an account of how invasive mobility and styles will be vanquished, how the Tuscan air will restore the visual arts to their former glory. Such a confrontation, by consequence, would present and legitimize a genealogy of native artists quarantined from the foreign. Just how fraught this conflict can be surfaces in annotations on Vasari’s printed text. In his own copy of the Lives, El Greco would push back against the negative perception of the maniera greca, writing deliberately with his pen how on this matter Vasari was confused. If Vasari truly knew anything about the manera griega, El Greco asserted in the margins of the Life of Agnolo Gaddi, “he would have commented on it differently.” For between Giotto’s style and Byzantine painting practice, the maniera greca, El Greco claims, “is the one that can teach us constructive difficulties.”[1] Such a strong contemporary response to Vasari is telling. The prima maniera of Part I is conventionally understood as part of the inevitable progression to the maniera moderna of Vasari’s own time. But the Trecento is more properly understood as a contested middle ground, with artists’ movements representing significant battle campaigns. Cimabue, Giotto, and their worthy followers suppress rogue foreign styles and diffuse in their stead naturalism derived from the Tuscan terrain. But how Trecento works of art themselves resist Vasari’s insistence upon the differences between native and foreign is a testament to his artful historical narrative and beguiling rhetorical maneuvers.

DELUGE

Part I opens by reiterating Vasari’s condemnation of Barbarian invasions. The metaphor of the flood conveys the effect of destruction: “Due to the infinite deluge of evils that had brought down and drowned miserable Italy, not only were ruined that which one could call buildings, but—what was of more importance—all number of artists were extinguished. When, as God wished, was born in the city of Florence in the year 1240, to give the first lights to the art of painting, Giovanni named Cimabue, of the Cimabuoi family in that time noble, who, growing up, was known not only by his father but by infinite others for the acumen of his talent.”[2]

Like the fall of a baton, the adverb quando, the historical date, and the historical past tense dramatically announce the arrival of the messianic Cimabue into the world. His birth, placed a decade before the pivotal MCCL, breaks the malignant foreign inundations, framed through the imperfect tense as incessant waves. As in the preface, Vasari casts the Barbarians and Italy into their respective roles as aggressor and subdued victim. Yet here, artistic decline is not framed as unhealthful exposure to aria, mixtures, or pedagogy. This new figure of the flood understands the dynamic between foreign and native artists mediated through another natural element, the destructive force of water that dilutes and dissolves. It brings forth another set of oppositions, contrasting the torrent of invaders against the stable geographic entity of Italy. In his Storia fiorentina, the sixteenth-century man of letters Benedetto Varchi referred to the onslaught of Imperial troops sacking Rome in 1527 as “such a flood of such strange peoples” that verged on submerging all of Italy. This not only speaks to a shared currency of terms between Varchi and Vasari, both of whose works propagated Cosimo I’s political aims. It also reveals once again the negative perception, understandably so given its status as invasion, toward the arrival of foreign elements. Yet the metaphor of the flood implies more than just destruction of man and beast, “from the creeping thing even to the fowls of the air” (Genesis 6:7). In dismantling all forms, the cataclysm of a flood, as Mircea Eliade observed, “purifies and regenerates because it nullifies the past, and restores ... the integrity of the dawn of things.” The flood that introduces the life of Cimabue refers to annihilation and, at the same time, a baptism that creates the possibility for artistic renewal.[3]

This deluge does not guarantee an immediate rebirth. Any messianic savior will have to contend with Greek artists “summoned ... for no other purpose than to reintroduce the art of painting in Tuscany.” How, then, does Vasari characterize Cimabue’s interactions with these foreign artists? He reports that Cimabue escapes his school lessons to observe the Byzantine painters at work in the Gondi Chapel (Santa Maria Novella), an ersatz bottega where the young artist begins his training. Despite suggesting a pedagogical rapport between foreign teacher and native apprentice, Vasari seems reluctant to depict this relationship as a hierarchical one between master/pupil, with its overtones of obedience and submission. Cimabue learns from yet surpasses his “Greek” masters. Vasari fashions this tension into a temporal, spatial, and ethnic matrix. A sense of stasis, even unwillingness to change, exemplifies what is called the maniera ordinaria of the Byzantine artists. By contrast, Cimabue advances upon their work “in a short period of time.” Employing the figurative language of spatial distance (pass÷ di gran lunga, avanzo), Vasari likens Cimabue’s progression in the arts to a journey, a theme that will find more sustained articulation in Part II. Vasari also puts style in the service of stressing ethnic differences and patriotic allegiance: “And although he imitated the Greeks, he executed many works in his patria, honoring it with the deeds he did there, and acquired for himself both name and profit.” Painter and painting constitute part and parcel of the patria’s social and physical makeup.[4]

DETECTING DIFFERENCE

Does Cimabue himself function as a mobile agent in his biography? Like earlier commentators such as Villani, Landino, and the author of the so-called Ottimo Commento, Vasari stresses the artist’s ties to Florence through designating a toponym (Cimabue pittore fiorentino) and announcing his birthplace and his family’s lineage. Nevertheless, Vasari also recounts that Cimabue is active outside his native city, for instance, in Pisa, where he executes the panel for the church of San Francesco, now known as the Louvre Madonna (fig. 3.1). This work “was considered by those people a most rare thing, recognizing [conoscendosi] in his style [maniera] a certain something which was new and better, in the expression of the heads and folds of the cloth which those masters, spread already throughout Italy, up to then had not done.”[5]

The maniera greca, as practiced in Pisa and Lucca by such artists as Berlinghiero, acts as a foil against which Vasari can pinpoint the attributes of the more modern manner (fig. 3.2). To some viewers, the similarities between Berlinghiero’s approach to painting and that of Cimabue may in fact greatly outweigh the differences. The correspondences between Berlinghiero’s Hodegetria panel of the Virgin and Christ and the Louvre Madonna go beyond iconography, gesture, materials, and supports employed. Present in both works are the Virgin’s elongated nose, her expression of concern about Christ’s impeding suffering, and the slight application of color that animates the cheeks. Vasari’s priorities, however, lay in identifying what distinguishes Cimabue from his predecessors. What accomplish the “expression of the heads” (aria delle teste) are the subtle transitions that render the modeling of the flesh, combined with the direct gaze toward the viewer (fig. 3.3). So too is there a great deal of tonal variety in Cimabue’s description of drapery, a wide spectrum of light to dark blues alluding to the body underneath, which stands in marked contrast to the chrysography more standard in Italo-Byzantine works of art (fig. 3.4).

FIGURE 3.1 Cimabue, The Madonna and Child in Majesty Surrounded by Angels, c. 1280. Tempera on panel (4.27 × 2.8 m). © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Hervé Lewandowski. Louvre, Paris (formerly in San Francesco, Pisa).

FIGURE 3.2 Berlinghiero, Madonna and Child, c. 1230. Tempera on wood, gold ground (80.3 × 53.7 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of Irma N. Straus, 1960 (60.173).

Further heightening this contrast in the realm of text against the masters of the maniera greca is Cimabue’s physical displacement from Florence. When staged abroad, the exhibition of the differences between styles occurs as a dramatic event. Vasari places Cimabue on a stage where a public (que’ popoli) acknowledges his difference from the maniera greca. What is more, this public, while Tuscan, is foreign insofar as it is not Florentine, thereby suggesting regional prejudice has not swayed its opinion. In fact, throughout the Lives, Vasari states that a work received the admiration of both “natives and foreigners” to lend the impression that an artist has received universal and unbiased appreciation.[6]

FIGURE 3.3 Detail from Cimabue, The Madonna and Child in Majesty Surrounded by Angels, c. 1280. Tempera on panel (4.27 × 2.8 m). © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Hervé Lewandowski. Louvre, Paris (formerly in San Francesco, Pisa).

FIGURE 3.4 Detail from Cimabue, The Madonna and Child in Majesty Surrounded by Angels, c. 1280. Tempera on panel (4.27 × 2.8 m). © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Hervé Lewandowski. Louvre, Paris (formerly in San Francesco, Pisa).

Elsewhere in Part I, the mobility of things can rouse the mental activity of setting out distinctions. Take, for instance, Vasari’s description of the antiquities gathered around the Cathedral and the Campo Santo in Pisa. These fragments have been “destroyed by fires, ruins, the fury of wars and transported to a variety of places.” Despite the arduous journey of these artifacts, “one recognizes nevertheless the differences in the styles [maniere] of all countries.” As in his discussion of Cimabue’s distinction from the maniera greca, Vasari catalogues these differences according to ethnicity: Egyptian slenderness, Greek nudity, Tuscan rusticity, and the superiority of the Romans, who “took the beautiful from all of these provinces and gathered them in a single style.” The collocation of various artifacts in one setting makes differences more apparent. Though no doubt vastly changed from the appearance that conjured Vasari’s taxonomy of difference, Méaulle’s print of the Camposanto displays how a motley collection of artifacts calls for the viewer to make sense of this bricolage (fig. 3.5). Pillage, war, and a desire for commemoration brings these objects to a concentrated point where close looking can take place, where distinctions are able to be drawn.[7]

Mobility also informs the recognition of stylistic differences in another significant monument of Tuscan artistic topography, the Florentine Baptistery. The key individual here for Vasari is the Florentine Andrea Taffi. Though Taffi’s biographic details remain obscure, his inclusion is meaningful as he functions as the conduit for bringing the “old way of the clumsy Greek manner” in Florence. Andrea, holding the art of mosaic in high esteem, departs from Florence for Venice. There, he encounters Byzantine artists active at San Marco, and “with pleas, with money and with promises” persuades these practitioners of the maniera greca to move to Florence. Andrea imports a certain “Apollonio pittore Greco,” who instructs artisans in the Tuscan city in mosaic making and application onto walls. The Baptistery was the location of interventions in mosaic from about 1225 through the fifteenth century. Due to these long-term campaigns, viewers witness various styles compressed and juxtaposed within a single site of dense visual forms. Vasari explains: “But when the works of Giotto, as will be said in its own place, were set in comparison with those of Andrea, of Cimabue, and of the others, people recognized in part the perfection of the art, seeing the difference between the early manner of Cimabue and that of Giotto, in the figures of the one and of the others and in those that their disciples and imitators made.”[8]

Giotto’s involvement in the design for the Baptistery mosaic is generally doubted, despite a number of eminent adherents who assert that the artist furnished cartoons. For his own part, Vasari does not make good on his promise to recount Giotto’s work on the Baptistery in any detail. When read with hindsight, it appears that the act of comparing the work of these artists does not literally mean side-by-side analysis in the Baptistery per se. Vasari’s statement implies instead the viewer’s awareness of Giotto’s other work in Florence and, by extension, a mental juxtaposition of that work with the maniera greca. Indeed, when encountered in this specific passage, Giotto’s name serves more as a placeholder for the more advanced style in Florence, a manner that is placed in opposition to a foreign Byzantine style and those archaic artists held under its sway (Taffi, and even to some extent Cimabue).[9]

What may have facilitated the impulse to mention the collision of ethnic and temporal styles is the composition of the Baptistery vault itself. The different zones may break down to distinct iconographic registers, among them the hierarchy of angels, scenes from the lives of Joseph, Christ, and St. John the Baptist, and the Last Judgment. But these running bands also make the vault into a diagram in mosaic, a table of sorts that lends itself to the making of contrasts and comparisons (fig. 3.6). Due to their placement directly on top of the other, we cannot fail to correlate and yet distinguish aspects of gesture, stance, and expression in two disparate scenes such as The Expulsion from Paradise and Joseph Led into Egypt (figs. 3.7 and 3.8). While modern specialist art historical studies might have trepidations considering in the same glance mosaics that differ in iconography, authorship, and style, Vasari and the publics he mentions evidently had no such qualms.

FIGURE 3.5 F. Méaulle, “Les chaines de l’ancien port de Pise et la statue de Jean de Pise au Campo Santo,” from Eugène Müntz, Le tour du monde: I. A travers la Toscane. Pise (Pisa, 1882).

FIGURE 3.6 Side of dome with hosts of angels: Archangels. Byzantine mosaic. Baptistery, Florence.

FIGURE 3.7 Circle of Cimabue, The Expulsion from Paradise, c. 1280–85. Mosaic. Baptistery, Florence.

FIGURE 3.8 Circle of the Master of the Magdalene, Joseph Led into Egypt, c. 1280–90. Mosaic. Baptistery, Florence.

The absence of any hesitancy may be due to the cognitive gains promised by diagnosing differences. For, as Vasari suggests, the act of witnessing distinctions in style is the means by which knowing excellence is possible. He was not alone in forging a link between seeing differences and the faculty of knowing. Benedetto Varchi defined the faculty of “cogitativa” as knowing the difference between “what is benign and harmful ... enemy from friend, relatives from strangers and a thousand other differences.” This exercise of distinguishing between things was particularly employed when encountering the foreign, as attested by a wide range of early modern sources concerned with mobility, both within and beyond Italy. As Richard Trexler observed, a task for visiting ambassadors to Italian city-states was to sort out differences in a foreign public’s nonverbal behavior. The purpose was to uncover the intended political message beneath the “skillful veneer” of spectacles mounted to celebrate their arrival. Further afield, Leo Africanus’s introductory description of Africa is essentially a catalogue of the differences between white and black Africans, in pronunciations in languages, and in dress. Traveling artists such as Albrecht Dürer explored the issue of visual difference in the graphic realm. His drawing of two women, one dressed alla veneziana, the other like a citizen of Nuremberg, exemplifies an interest in accentuating ethnic characteristics through visual discrepancies (fig. 3.9). The almost architectural solidity of Venetian dress, resembling a fluted column, as Panofsky once observed, becomes emphasized when seen against the Nuremberg Hausfrau’s elliptical and curvilinear folds. Graphically comparing and contrasting within the span of a single sheet facilitates the faculty of discernment.[10]

That travel accounts diagnose difference in respect to either one’s native viewpoint or a variety of foreign phenomena raises a significant issue. The recurrence of difference as a key term in both travel and art literature suggests the possibility of understanding these two genres, often quarantined, in terms of one another. When we read, for example, that the Anonimo Magliabechiano, a topographical and biographic compiler of notes on Florentine artists (c. 1537–42), concludes his account of Donatello’s works in Padua by stating that “one recognizes his style is different from the others,” primarily for the liveliness (vivacità) of the sculptor’s works, we see his remarks go beyond neutral or objective aesthetic criteria. A certain visual attribute, in this case the lack of liveliness, comes to characterize a certain region. In turn, the style of the traveling artist clashes with what is considered to be a geographic standard. This and previous examples suggest that whether ambassador, antiquarian, explorer, artist, or writer on art, difference emerges as a crucial trait if the foreign is to be grasped and controlled, and if knowledge is to be achieved.[11]

FIGURE 3.9 Albrecht Dürer, Lady in Venetian Dress Contrasted with a Nuremberg “Hausfrau,” c. 1495. Pen and dark grayish brown ink (24.5 × 15.9 cm). Städelisches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt, Inv. No. 696.

Cimabue’s work in Pisa and the Baptistery mosaics may have brought to the fore the matter of detecting artistic differences. However, it would be misleading to suggest that Vasari’s notion of style is polarized and organized according to a set of fixed dichotomies. For Cimabue’s style contains within it a “difference within,” a concealed set of internal tensions that reveals itself when juxtaposed against more modern artists. Vasari is aware that the artistic innovations of Cimabue and his followers do not obliterate all of their evident stylistic parallels to Byzantine painting. Nor are Cimabue’s works, however exemplary, equal in merit to those demonstrating the third and most complete maniera.[12]

CONCESSIONS AND DIFFERENCES WITHIN

To describe this uncomfortable cohabitation, Vasari draws upon the language of concession. His rhetoric cedes ground to a particular claim, yet then opposes the very truth of that claim by marshaling morphological evidence or emotion to support a contrary view. Of the Madonna Rucellai, now ascribed to Duccio but which Vasari attributes to Cimabue, he writes: “Although it had the old Greek manner, one sees that it bears the way and line of the modern.” Likewise, although Margaritone’s paintings were worked alla maniera greca, “one recognized in them a good judgment and the greatest love.” Duccio “applied himself towards the imitation of the old manner and with the healthiest judgment gave truthful forms to his figures.”[13]

Gaddo Gaddi in particular represents an artist whose style is posed as a confrontation between the maniera greca and the maniera moderna. This is surprising, considering that Vasari opens his Life of Gaddo by declaring how the artist is exposed to the “the subtle air of Florence,” which removes every remnant of “rust and grossness.” Even so, Gaddi’s style exists in a halfway house. “Gaddo ... demonstrated more disegno in his works executed in the Greek style” than Andrea Taffi and others. After executing the mosaics of the prophets in the Florentine Baptistery, Gaddo continues “to study the maniera greca accompanied with the [style of] Cimabue.” Of the mosaic façade in Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, Vasari notes some progression: Gaddi “somewhat improved his style, and distanced himself a little from la maniera greca.”[14]

FIGURE 3.10 Attributed to Gaddo Gaddi, Coronation of the Virgin, 1310. Mosaic. Cathedral, Florence.

FIGURE 3.11 Jacopo Torriti, Coronation of the Virgin, apse extended in 1292. Mosaic. Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome.

One prominent target for Vasari’s rhetoric of concession is the Coronation of the Virgin mosaic, located on the counter façade of the Florentine Cathedral (fig. 3.10). This work’s attribution to Gaddi, and even its original placement within the cathedral itself, remains in doubt. But as Alessio Monciatti has observed, the mosaic could not remain anonymous due to its noteworthy location—an attribution on Vasari’s part had to be made. As much as scholars have puzzled over the identity of the mosaic’s maker, Vasari’s motivation behind his attribution was ideological, not positivist. This specimen that alludes only generically to Byzantine prototypes needed to be reconciled with its eminent position in the city’s topography. No matter that the mosaic bears similarities in both style and technique to other prime examples of the maniera greca such as the apse mosaics in San Miniato al Monte, the Pisa Cathedral, or Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore (fig. 3.11). The work of “Gaddi” is deemed to have “more disegno, more judgment, and more diligence” than any other work in mosaic then in Italy, and correspondingly, less and still less evidence of stylistic otherness. Vasari enlists the Coronation to help define the traits of an interregnum, the effects of foreign invasion gasping their final yet still audible last gasps.[15]

Quintilian had recommended the use of concession “when we pretend to admit something actually unfavorable to ourselves by way of showing confidence in our cause.” He cites Cicero’s discussion of prejudice against his client: although someone may be accused in public assembly, such opinions must remain silent in the courts of law. Recalling these juridical origins of concession emphasizes the fact that Vasari is making an argument when he designates mixed styles with concessive terms. Furthermore, the presence of a reader is implied, one whose skepticism and response Vasari might be said to anticipate. In the end, acknowledging the presence of the maniera greca in Cimabue is a battle that Vasari is willing to lose, for the thrust of his argument brings the progression of styles forward to the work of Giotto.[16]

FIGURE 3.12 Giuseppe Sabatelli, Cimabue and Giotto as a Child, nineteenth century. Oil on canvas. Palazzo Pitti, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Florence.

THE COUNTRY AND THE CITY

As in the Life of Cimabue, mobility comes into view in Giotto’s beginnings. Unlike his predecessor, however, Giotto becomes a mobile agent rather than a subject encountering foreign artists. Based in part on Ghiberti, the anecdote narrating Giotto’s origins is well known, memorialized in several nineteenth-century historical paintings (fig. 3.12): Cimabue, traveling through the Mugello, comes upon Giotto, who draws portraits of the sheep he is tending. Astonished by the boy’s precocity, Cimabue asks his father if he can take him on as an apprentice. Giotto’s father, ever gracious, concedes. Giotto goes to Florence and achieves renown as Florence’s most famous artist.[17]

This tale of discovery has evoked diverse, even inconsonant interpretations. Rumohr called it “too beautiful to be true” as well as “more charming than informative.” Gaetano Milanesi even disputed that Giotto’s origins were to be found in the Mugello, citing archival sources that placed the Bondone family in the quarter of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz in their psychological study of artistic anecdotes approached the story as an archetype of the rural shepherd boy as artist. According to Enid Falaschi, the story of Giotto’s origins reads “like a conventional fairy tale—only lacking the initial ‘c’era una volta.’” Hayden Maginnis commented that “a sixteenth-century audience, almost as much as a twentieth-century viewer, was unlikely to see naturalism in the Trecento depiction of sheep.” For Patricia Rubin, the anecdote expresses the precept of art as the imitation of nature and, at the same time, the classical notion that nature’s gifts can be superior to noble—and largely urban—origins. Paul Barolsky also sees the story in terms of the narrative of “the rise of the artist,” depicting Giotto as a lowly shepherd boy who will eventually exchange jokes with the likes of the King of Naples.[18]

We might also read this vignette and, more specifically, its characters, in terms of place, the story as a tale of moving from country to city. Cimabue, as a Florentine artist, might represent the metropolis, which in Vasari’s own words is where one can learn and acquire “the sciences and noble arts that give both fame and profit.” Giotto and his father (whom I will refer to as Bondone) exemplify the country: Bondone is a “lavoratore delle terre,” synonymous with contemporary terms that describe peasants, such as “contadino.” Giotto is fully immersed in this bucolic landscape. At the age of ten, he wanders “sometimes in one place, other times in another” with “the sheep of the farm,” set to pasture.[19]

While Cimabue and Giotto (and his father) may represent the dichotomy of “city” and “country,” Giotto’s journey to Florence to acquire skills as an artist suggests that these characters represent the interdependence between an artistic center and its environs. Giotto is not the sole figure in Part I of the Lives to journey to Florence for his artistic education: Antonio Veneziano goes with Agnolo Gaddi to Florence “to learn painting”; Taddeo Gaddi brings Jacopo da Casentino to the same city “to learn draughtmanship and coloring,” and who in turn brings Spinello Aretino. As the Lives progresses, the number of artists who travel to Florence, as well as to Rome, increases. These instances of immigration underpin Florence’s position as an artistic center. As formulated by Castelnuovo and Ginzburg in their seminal essay on the topic, among a center’s aspects can include a concentration of educational institutions and workshops, industry for the import and export of works of art, and a discriminating public and clientele, to name but a few.[20]

Yet in locating a high density of artistic activity in centers, Castelnuovo and Ginzburg’s argument could be understood to suggest that artistic styles are generated exclusively in the centers, with peripheries functioning solely as passive recipients. One critique of this model raises the possibility of periphery and center existing in a more dynamic relationship, even to the point where the periphery informs the art of the center. Indeed, the case of Giotto’s first journey to Florence does not affirm any dichotomy of Vespignano (periphery) and Florence (center); rather how Giotto traverses space and stylistic boundaries destabilizes the seemingly solid foundations supporting these two poles. To be clear: the movement between country and city, the interdependence between these two zones, and the stylistic implications of that interdependence should be the focus of attention.[21]

First, while Vasari’s language does allude to the distinctions between “city” and “country,” it also intertwines these seemingly opposing categories. Giotto’s origins are not found solely in the contado, but more specifically in the contado di Fiorenza. Contado and Fiorenza, country and city, exist in the genitive of possession, a relationship that underscores the rapport between the two entities. Furthermore, this contado is “close to the city by 13 miles,” an adverbial phrase of location that emphasizes the geographic proximity between country and city. To be sure, that Vasari describes Bondone’s home as the villa di Vespignano where he practices the “art of agriculture” would seem to confirm the thoroughly rural character of Giotto’s homestead. However, how Bondone works his land suggests to the reader a specific type of rural landscape, namely the pastoral. As William Empson noted in Some Versions of Pastoral, what characterizes the pastoral landscape is its irony: there is an elision of social differences in this locus amoenus, complexity is simplified. Giotto’s father exemplifies this meeting of contradictions in his handling of tools. Bondone wields the instruments of his profession “rather than seeming to be barbarously [rusticalmente] applied”; instead his hand is called gentil and compared to a “skillful goldsmith or engraver.”[22]

Such a favorable characterization of Bondone contrasts with accounts by Ghiberti and the Anonimo Magliabechiano which refer to Giotto’s father, respectively, as poverissimo and un povero contadino. While it is true, as Rubin claims, that Vasari attributes to Bondone “the dexterity appropriate to an artist,” the comparison between farmers and artists runs against the grain. Early modern sources usually portrayed the peasant as an uneducated and possibly socially disruptive figure. The English pejorative word “villan” has its etymological roots in villano, the farmer employed at a villa. Machiavelli alludes to the latent violent nature of peasants in L’arte della guerra, stating that above all other professions, contadini are the most disposed by nature to serving in armies. The Florentine playwright Giovanmaria Cecchi disparaged the peasant in his prose comedies, published the same year as the Torrentino edition of the Lives. Himself a villa proprietor, Cecchi depicted contadini in the Mugello as a treacherous lot who stole wine, garlic, chestnuts, and beans from the estates where they were employed. Later treatises on villa life warned readers, presumably owners of villas themselves, of peasants’ rapaciousness. Giuseppe Falcone’s La nuova vaga, et dilettevole villa (1559) warns: “When the contadino brings material into the granary, take care, since if he sees nobody in the house, he will easily rob you—of bread, wine, or other things.”[23]

Vasari’s characterization of Bondone bears none of these inimical attitudes. Giotto and his father are more akin to shepherds in a pastoral romance. It is not just the individual elements of, say, a rustic landscape, boulders, and sheep that conjure the image of the Mugello as a bucolic place. As Paul Alpers has claimed, what evokes the mood particular to the pastoral genre is the discontinuity between being and doing. Such discontinuities saturate the anecdote: though a farmer, Giotto’s father employs his tools as an artist; though nestled in the “periphery,” Bondone’s skill and Giotto’s precocity are known nella villa e fuori, rendering this periphery into a center of its own; though born in the country, Giotto is endowed with “a certain liveliness and readiness of extraordinary talent,” in contrast to the typical boorish peasant; and though a shepherd, Giotto renders portraits of his sheep, even with the roughest materials. In like manner, the shepherds in pastoral poetry such as Theocritus’s Idylls or Virgil’s Eclogues sing their plaintive songs with the most unpolished of instruments, the lowly wooden panpipes. In Sannazaro’s Arcadia, the poet describes his reeds as “rustic and rural panpipes, worthy because of your lowness to be sounded by a shepherd not more cultured, but more fortunate, than I.”[24]

While the arrival of the urban Cimabue may accentuate the contrast between center and periphery, those very distinctions and the roles of the characters are hardly secure. Cimabue, by virtue of traveling through the Mugello, becomes an artistic judge, “marveling” at the portraits in stone. Thanks to this recognition by the city traveler, Bondone, too, is transfigured, from farmer to birth father to an artistic dynasty. His encounter with Cimabue alters Giotto from shepherd to apprentice and, eventually, to renowned artist. Giotto also disrupts and in fact reverses the conventional artistic flow from center to periphery: “And having arrived together to Florence, not only in little time did the child equal the style of Cimabue, but became such an imitator of nature, that in his time he banished [sbandì] in fact that awkward Greek manner, and resuscitated the modern and good art of painting, and introduced portraying living people from life, which for hundreds of years was not done.” The shepherd’s journey to Florence occupies a key moment in Vasari’s narrative. It accounts for the resuscitation of an artistic genre (portraiture) and style (modern vs. Byzantine). This resurrection occurs in the most universal terms—note that it is not specifically Giotto’s style that becomes transformed upon his arrival to the metropolis, but more generally the art of painting.[25]

What is more, the language Vasari uses to describe the impact of Giotto’s entry into Florence’s artistic scene is significant. He is said to banish (sbandire) the Byzantine style. Sbandire as a concept may be most readily associated with Adam and Eve’s fall from grace. Dante in the Paradiso (7.34-39) states that Man’s nature “was expelled from Eden [sbandita di paradiso] because it turned from truth and life.” But regarding the passage under discussion, sbandire resonates more with the connotation of political expulsion insofar as it evokes a scenario in which the “native” (the style of Florence and its environs) banishes the “foreign” (the maniera greca). Sbandire could also describe the more general conflict between natives and foreigners. Giovanni della Casa, in a speech upon Charles Vs restitution of Piacenza, praised the Holy Roman Emperor’s policy of dispersing and banishing Barbarian princes and Saracens from his realm. In addition, it is possible that the word’s related terms that designated political exiles (sbandito; fuorusciti) would not be without political import in the milieu of Florence under the rule of Cosimo I. In his Storia Fiorentina, Benedetto Varchi repeatedly speaks of the political threats posed by the sbanditi and fuorusciti toward the political stability of the Republic and the Medici regime.[26]

Furthermore, when Vasari contends that Giotto reintroduces the art of portraiture, examining from where this bringing in occurs reveals an agenda in the realm of domestic and regional politics. For when Cimabue conducts Giotto to Florence, what is implied is the “import” of an element from the Mugellese countryside. While the anecdote could be seen as a reversal of the more usual situation in which the center radiates artistic style outward, in Giotto’s case, the center is, in fact, appropriating the periphery for the center’s benefit. In other words, Giotto’s naturalism originates from the countryside, and by extension, from nature herself.

That Giotto hails from the Medicean territory of the Mugello adds an ideological dimension to his naturalistic style, often thought of as benign and apolitical. As Zeffiro Ciuffoletti has argued, the Mugello countryside where Vasari places Giotto’s birthplace served the Medici in a number of ways: as the location from which they could trace their ancestry, a retreat in times of political unrest, and an area of significant financial investments, demonstrated above all by their working villas at Trebbio and Cafaggiolo (fig. 3.13). Cimabue’s import of the rustic Giotto is but one of several instances in the Lives in which the city intervenes and, at times, even transforms the countryside. As early on as the Life of the thirteen-century painter Margaritone, we read that the Badia of San Clemente in Arezzo is no longer standing due to Cosimo I’s decision to renovate “not only in that place, but around the city,” rendering the city’s walls and other structures alla moderna. The Medicean renovation and fortification of Arezzo is mentioned again in the Life of the miniaturist Lo Abate di San Clemente. Regarding Giuliano and Antonio da Sangallo, Vasari highlights the architect’s role in establishing fortifications to aid Cosimo I’s military campaigns in the outskirts of Florence, including Castellina, Poggio Imperiale, and Livorno, as well as a bridge to defend the Arno from Pisan attack. While these examples indicate Florence’s capacity as a political center to intrude in its territories, Giotto’s arrival to the city and what he brings represent a reversal of sorts. His naturalistic style that renders Florence an artistic center traces its origins from the periphery, signifying interdependence between these supposedly distinct entities.[27]

FIGURE 3.13 Giusto Utens, View of Il Trebbio, c. 1599. Tempera on canvas (143 × 242 cm). Museo di Firenze com’era, Florence.

And yet, the “simple” aspect of Giotto’s name registers how the city can blot out the artist’s bucolic provenance. Julius von Schlosser declared Vasari the “godfather” of art history: despite the many erroneously named artists in the Lives, his designations have endured. As Monique Bourin and other social historians have argued, naming is not simply family policy, but rather a form of “social management,” submitted to complex rules. Giotto’s name reflects this observation in that it differs from the more usual conventions that characterize artists’ names. Though his family name is “Bondone,” Giotto is not referred to with the hereditary patronymic (“Giotto Bondone”) as are other artists such as “Giovanni Cimabue,” “Taddeo Gaddi,” or “Andrea Taffi.” Nor does Giotto bear an appropriate toponym—such as “Giotto da Vespignano” or “Giotto da Vicchio”—as do artists with names such as Andrea Pisano or Antonio Veneziano. Giotto’s name remains singular, only specified with the designation “Pittore, Scultore et Architetto Fior.[entino]” that rests beneath his woodcut portrait (fig. 3.14). Roots to both family and place are erased, this absence filled in by the titles of his profession and adopted city. Nor is this Vasari’s invention alone. Several of Giotto’s own works, some destined for foreign export, prominently bear the name of his foster city: OPUS IOCTIFLORENTINI.[28]

FIGURE 3.14 “Giotto Pittore, Scultore, et Architetto Fior.,” from Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ piv eccellenti pittori, scvltori, e architettori, 1568.

GIOTTO’S FAME

Given that Vasari depicts Giotto as a messianic figure, we might think his works in Florence and abroad would attest to evolution of style. This, however, is not the case. Describing Giotto’s portrait of Dante in the Palazzo del Podestà, Vasari appears more interested in linking these two personalities rather than delineating the portrait’s stylistic properties. This lack of detail is also present in Vasari’s figuring of Giotto’s Annunciation in the Badia where he writes of the Virgin’s “shock and fear” as well as “the greatest trepidation, almost putting her in flight.” These are stock phrases, evoked in his characterization of Donatello’s Annunciation in Santa Croce and in Vasari’s own execution of the theme for the convent of Le Murate. Even of the Coronation of the Virgin (Baroncelli Chapel, Santa Croce), Vasari places more emphasis upon the signs of Giotto’s authorship: the description focuses on how the artist inserted his name “in golden letters.” And aside from bringing up the panel’s “greatest number of small figures” and how the work demonstrates the artist’s “diligence,” Vasari remains silent about style proper.[29]

Reticence also characterizes Vasari’s description of Giotto’s works executed beyond Florence. To be sure, he unwraps a banner of key words (ordine, proporzione, vivezza, facilità) when discussing Giotto’s frescos in Assisi. Yet his analysis of these works concentrates more on hailing Giotto’s journey to the pilgrimage site to complete Cimabue’s unfinished works, thus highlighting the bond between Cimabue and his successor, master and pupil. Also laconic is Vasari’s account of the Navicella in Rome whose attributes are explained with an abstract, if not generic, catalog of terms (disegno, ordine, perfezzione). The same restraint is true for Giotto’s commissions in Arezzo, Naples, Padua, Milan, and Ravenna, with a fresco cycle in Rimini the only work receiving an extended account, a work not even by Giotto himself.[30]

Yet if Vasari does not stress style, what is accentuated is the recognition that Giotto receives through his commissions scattered throughout the Italian peninsula. Like a domino effect, each successive work brings ever greater renown. While Giotto ostensibly travels to Assisi merely to finish Cimabue’s fresco cycle, his work there brings him “the greatest fame.” The Navicella mosaic in Rome is “praised universally by artists and other ingenious connoisseurs,” while his work in Padua and Milan bestow upon Giotto “much honor.” Giotto then supposedly executes a series of frescoes in Ravenna in San Giovanni Evangelista which are “much praised.” The fresco cycle in Rimini that Vasari attributes to him “makes known to those that look at it that he was born to give light to the art of painting.” After this campaign of work and ensuing success, Giotto returns home a conquering hero, coming back “with the greatest honor and privilege to Florence.”[31]

In linking Giotto’s travels and his rise as an artist, Vasari was perpetuating a tradition conveyed in earlier commentators. Already in the first decades of the fourteenth century, Riccobaldo da Ferrara, author of a world chronicle, noted that Giotto painted works in Assisi, Rimini, and Padua, a sizable geographic spread. Villani states that Giotto, “wanting to extend his reputation ..., painted something in prominent places throughout almost all the famous towns of Italy.” Ghiberti proclaims that Giotto “executed the most distinguished works, especially in the city of Florence and many other places.” Cristoforo Landino declares the artist furnished “Italy with his works,” stressing in particular the Navicella mosaics with their “lively and prompt gestures.” The Anonimo Magliabechiano states, “Italy is full of his works,” and after mentioning Giotto’s commissions in Florence, Assisi, Rome, and Naples concludes, “he painted still in many other places in panel and in fresco.” The twin notions that Giotto’s fame was universal and that he had spread a renewed manner of painting to the world were continued after the first publication of the Lives in 1550. In his account of the pageants celebrating the ill-fated nuptials between Joanna of Austria and Ferdinando de’ Medici in 1565, Domenico Melli describes a tableau vivant “closest to the eyes of the spectators” in which Cimabue and Giotto hold lanterns, symbolizing how they both brought back painting “from below the earth,” rebirthing it “to the world.”[32]

The yoke binding travel and increasing fame, while most articulated in Giotto’s Life, also presides over his predecessors and descendants. Cimabue’s supposed work in Santa Croce launches his successive commissions in Pisa and Assisi. Vasari’s portrayal of Duccio’s work displays this link between success in one locale and employment in another: “He made in Siena several panels on gold ground, and in particular one in Florence in Santa Trinita. He then painted many works in Pisa, Lucca, and Pistoia for different churches, which were all praised in the said cities, such that they acquired him name and gave him the greatest profit.” What is emphasized in the travels of these artists is not any particular stylistic evolution—indeed, forging a link between journey to regions outside Tuscany and improvement in style would be antithetical to Vasari’s project of promoting Florence as the cradle of the arts’ rebirth. Vasari does not indicate that the artist is in any way “influenced” by or even looks at the sights in Rome, Ravenna’s mosaics, or the courtly art in Naples. In this respect, Giotto’s style is as valuable for what it does not represent. Its worth lies in refutation, in its ability to exclude. Yet while Vasari remains silent on the impact of Giotto’s travels on his own style, these journeys do, in fact, affect the style of his time. In the Life of Margaritone we learn that the praise Cimabue and Giotto receive are in turn responsible for the loss of fame once held by “vecchi maestri,” thus suggesting the demise of maniera greca. Decline in style exists in a proportional relationship with decline in fame.[33]

As Rubin has observed, “geography and esteem were [the] guiding principles” of Vasari’s Life of Giotto. The operative concept here is fama. The “Preface to the Entire Work” declares that great actions of distinguished minds ensure that “eternal fame of each of their rare excellences” will endure. Yet fame for Vasari also connotes the diffusion of an artist’s reputation over a geographic area. In the same passage, he states that those distinguished minds “render them [their works] stupendous and marvelous throughout the entire world.” In justifying his intention to guard the written deeds of artists that are “prey to dust and food for moths,” Vasari stresses that the Lives will treat “the names of many ancient and modern architects, sculptors, and painters together with their infinite and most beautiful works in various parts of Italy.” That geographic diffusion was the handmaiden to fame was a well-established notion. In his Convivio Dante writes: “Fame lives to be mobile and increases in moving.” Boccaccio’s Teseida delle Nozze depicts fame as a figure that “runs throughout the entire country.” Dino Compagni reports in his Cronica delle cose occorrenti how in the summer of 1303, Uguccione da Faggiuola was removed from power in Arezzo and replaced by Federigo da Montelfeltro, “whose gracious fame flew throughout the entire world.” Vasari himself illustrates the link between fame and worldwide promulgation in his Chamber of Fame, a fresco cycle painted for his house in Arezzo. There, the foreshortened allegorical figure of Fame is seated upon a globe while holding two trumpets, attributes indicative of her status as a disseminator of reputation (fig. 3.15). This figure corresponds to that described in Vasari’s Zibaldone, in which he prescribes at least three times how to portray the allegorical representation of Fame, who in all cases is to be seated on a globe. Vasari recommends that if a motto be listed underneath, it should read: “SEMPER UBIQUE”—always everywhere.[34]

FIGURE 3.15 Giorgio Vasari, Fame, 1542. Fresco. Casa Vasari, Camera della Fama e delle Arti, Arezzo.

GIOTTO’S “O”

The trumpets of Fame that broadcast universal praise resonate in the well-known story regarding Giotto’s “O.” This tale indicates how an artist’s execution of cryptic forms and a viewer’s perception of those forms can traverse geographic boundaries. As Vasari recounts, Pope Benedict, having heard “so much fame and cheers about this marvelous artist [Giotto],” desired to engage him for the decoration of St. Peter’s. The Pope sends a courtier to procure drawings by Giotto and other artists in Florence and Siena. Arriving one morning at Giotto’s workshop, the courtier requests a drawing by the master’s hand. He receives instead an unusual verbal and visual response: Giotto merely draws a circle on a piece of paper with orders to “send it to Rome together with the others and see whether it will be understood.” The befuddled courtier delivers to the Pope the drawings he has collected on his journeys. Of Giotto’s tondo he describes how the Florentine artist executed the drawing in one fell stroke, without a moment’s pause. From this specimen, it was “thus understood by the Pope and many other knowledgeable courtiers how much he [Giotto] surpassed in excellence all the other artists of his time.”[35]

Vasari’s anecdote echoes a number of sources, the tale of Apelles’s line as recounted by Pliny and the verses on Giotto written by the fifteenth-century poet Burchiello. The circular and harmonious O-shape also operates as a frequent design principle in Giotto’s compositions. In the Wedding at Cana (Master of the Feast), the rounded shapes link the narrative’s participants and also allude to the tondezza, or the stupidity, of the master of the feast who cannot grasp that water has now been turned into wine (fig. 3.16). For the more elevated characters in this scene, the coordination of figures and vases according to this O-shape may register the pursuit of Neoplatonic ideals. Other associations with the O might be in currency, from Fame’s globe, terrestrial glory, to the trumpet’s rounded mouthpiece that spreads an artist’s name. But what is most striking about the tale in Vasari’s rendition is the emphasis placed upon the perception of such forms, the contrast between the mystified and unseeing versus those in the know. The O functions as a password of sorts that allows the artist to gain entry into the exclusive cadre of the papal court. This typographic sign is paradoxical, on one hand understood in a variety of places (Florence/Rome), yet not legible to everyone, a mark that is geographically disseminated, though not to the uninitiated.[36]

FIGURE 3.16 Giotto di Bondone, The Wedding at Cana, 1303–6. Fresco. Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.

FIGURE 3.17 Woodcut. From Leonbattista Alberti, Dello scrivere in cifra, 1568.

Giotto’s “O” could thus be said to function as a cipher, a device that masks the customary significance of language. In his treatise Dello scrivere in cifra, translated by the Florentine Academician Cosimo Bartoli in 1568, Alberti pioneered a method of writing in code in which letters and numbers stood in for one another on a rotating basis by means of two circumscribed disks (fig. 3.17). Alberti stressed that this system would be particularly useful for communicating messages across distances: “With a tactful use of these tables ... it will be possible to he who is besieged and many miles away to communicate. . . . What is more extraordinary than having a way to scramble information, even to the furthest region?” These methods should be limited to a chosen few: “I would like that my little work be kept among our friends, such that it doesn’t fall into the hands of the public at large, profaning a subject that is appropriate to men of state given to the most important transactions.” Alberti’s recommendation that correspondence dealing with affairs of state ought to be restricted was not far from actual diplomatic protocol. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ambassadorial correspondence regularly employed ciphers to conceal information of a sensitive nature. The earliest surviving diplomatic records that display the use of ciphers in the Venetian archives are from 1411, while those from Florence, Genoa, and Milan date from 1414, 1454, and 1481, respectively. That ciphers were implemented in delicate diplomatic situations is attested by a document from the Venetian Senate to the first diplomat to venture to Constantinople after the Byzantine Empire’s fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. As the letter states: “We are sending you here inserted a cipher with which you might wish to write something secretly.” Varchi reported that a letter dated 10 December 1527 and written in cipher to Pope Clement VII managed to be intercepted, subsequently decoded in Venice by a secretary of the Republic, and publicly displayed in the Piazza San Marco. Varchi’s retelling of the incident suggests that what impressed the public more than the contents of the letter itself was the demonstration of the “science of deciphering.”[37]

Giotto’s “O” also may be understood to function as a cipher comparable to the secret characters used in diplomatic correspondence. His drawing is dispatched across a geographic distance and is intelligible only to its intended recipient, Pope Benedict and his cadre of sophisticated courtiers (cortigiani intendenti). At the same time, this vignette demonstrates that disegno, as embodied in Giotto’s “O,” is a universal language, transcending the particularities of regional speech and dialect. Yet this language alone does not elicit admiration. While the papal court marvels at the physical appearance of the O, supplementing their appreciation is the courtier’s description of the artist’s dexterity, “the way in which he had turned it [the tondo] without moving his arm and stopping.” Underlying this statement, then, is the acknowledgment that words as well as images are responsible for the recognition of Giotto’s skill. The inscription on Giotto’s “O” implicitly advances Vasari’s own project. Written language underscores the fact that what generates artists’ fame is the account of their deeds via the Lives, the printed page diffused to a potentially extensive audience.

MOBILITY AND SELFHOOD

In addition to spreading the artist’s fame, mobility holds consequences for an artist’s social bearing. Giotto’s sojourn at the Angevin court in Naples is instructive on this account. After being called to the papal court, Giotto receives a charge from yet another sovereign, King Robert of Naples, to execute a number of works, among them a fresco cycle in the royal church of Santa Chiara. Parallel with his movement from Vespignano to Florence to Naples is Giotto’s transformation from shepherd boy to city artisan to “court artist.” Vasari recounts that King Robert loved Giotto for more than just his painting; the ruler appreciated the artist’s witty bantering. For Martin Warnke, the historical incident of Giotto in Naples—as opposed to Vasari’s portrayal—and especially the artist’s designation as a familiaris of the Angevins, exemplifies the rise of the artist’s social status when migrating from city to royal or princely court. Francis Ames-Lewis qualifies this claim. The title of familiaris or valet de chambre offered the artist “a position from which he could aspire to become a courtier, but he did not yet rank intellectually alongside the courtiers.” What is, in fact, so striking about Vasari’s account is how the artist’s behavior is distinct from that of a courtier. This is made clear in the anecdote in which King Robert states that if he were Giotto, he would stop painting on account of the hot weather: to the king’s statement the artist replies, “If I were you, I would do the same.” It could be argued that the reflexivity of these statements (“if I were you—if I were you”) linguistically demonstrates the equality between patron and artist, if only temporarily, during their exchange. However, if Giotto catapulted to the status of courtier, would not the language of formal address and deference characterize his speech? Instead, Giotto’s repartee resonates with what Bakhtin called the “carnivalesque,” a mode of speech that counters established social hierarchy through laughter and parody. Contrast this to Vasari’s own complaint about working in hot weather in the opening lines of his Ragionamenti which comprises but a prelude to a learned explanation of Palazzo Vecchio’s allegorical program. Giotto’s “wit,” as it has been called, does not acknowledge the infallibility of King Robert’s utterances. The artist parrots royal words to create the effect of deadpan humor. Giotto resembles less the nobleman and more the jester, along the lines of a Buffalmacco, less a courtier and more a trickster.[38]

Qualifying the notion of the “rise of the artist” does not imply that mobility has no bearing on artists’ social standing in Vasari’s account. On the contrary, Part I of the Lives is littered with examples in which traveling artists receive recognition, from both their destinations and place of origin. The artist Jacopo di Casentino, whose name indicates his roots in the northeastern Tuscan town, gains recognition for the works he paints in Arezzo “per tutta la città.” He also earns praise there for conveying the principles of painting to the native resident Spinello Aretino, who in turn instructs Bernardo Daddi. Andrea Pisano receives Florentine citizenship and serves as a magistrate. Vasari also indicates that artists receive incentives to become immobile, to establish familial and blood ties once abroad. To prevent him from leaving Florence, Gaddo Gaddi is given a wife of noble extraction with whom he has several children, among them Taddeo Gaddi, who became “a good master of painting.”[39]

The most extensive description of mobility and social standing in Part I occurs in the prelude to Gherardo Starnina’s Life, here rendered in Gaston du C. de Vere’s translation in almost biblical prose: “Verily he who journeys far from his own country, dwelling in those of other men, gains very often a disposition and character of a fine temper, for, in seeing abroad diverse honourable customs, even though he might be perverse in nature, he learns to be tractable, amiable, and patient, with much greater ease than he would have done by remaining in his own country. And in truth, he who desires to refine men in the life of the world need seek no other fire and no better touchstone than this, seeing that those who are rough by nature are made gentle, and the gentle becomes more gracious.”[40]

So does travel abroad furnish Starnina with social polish. Though rough in manners in Florence—we read that his behavior caused him to attract several enemies—after having journeyed and worked in Spain, he returns home to win the affection of many. “So thoroughly,” Vasari writes, “had he become gentle and courteous.” In his commentary on this passage, Bottari understood Starnina’s journey as an escape from the highly competitive and malicious atmosphere of Republican Florence, a situation upon which Dante had memorably remarked. Close attention to the terms Vasari uses can also demonstrate that time spent abroad acts as a sort of mollifying agent, changing a personality that is “hard” and “rough” (duro, rozzo), rendering it instead “courteous” and “kind” (gentile, cortese). Vasari forges an alchemical and metalworking metaphor to describe this conversion, comparing travel that refines (affinare) Starnina’s temperament via “fire” and “experiment” (fuoco, cimento). These terms have their roots in texts dedicated to either alchemy, forging, or casting metals. Astrological and magical treatises routinely list sulfur as one of the ingredients that will “refine and purify gold” (aurum purificat et affinat). The terms cimento, affinare, and fuoco appear throughout Cellini’s treatise on goldsmithery. Vasari himself uses these terms in his Ragionamenti: in the hall dedicated to Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, Vasari’s frescoes celebrate this condottiere with an allegorical figure of Military Virtue, which has “a crucible full of gold with burning coals at her feet. Through that test [cimento] the gold refines itself.”[41]

In describing Starnina’s Spanish sojourn, Vasari likens travel to the flame that, in the alchemical procedure, speeds up the organic process that renders lower metals (such as lead and copper) into their higher, purer counterparts (such as silver and gold). Evoking this metallurgical metaphor to explain spiritual purification or social polish is not unique to Vasari. In canto 26 of the Purgatorio, the Occitan poet Arnaut Daniel is depicted “weeping and singing” as he repents for the sin of lust; upon concluding his verses, “he then enters the fire, which refines him.” Commenting on this passage, Vellutello remarked that these flames “purified him [Autin], as it does to gold and all other metals.” In turn, the speaker in Petrarch’s Canzone 360 declares that the divine part of human nature “like gold, refines itself in the fire.” Lodovico Dolce compares the alchemical flame to learning, which refines judgment of various things, “most of all, that of painting.” Ripa in his Iconologia construes the quality of valor to “gold that refines itself in the flame,” emerging as a man approaches maturity.[42]

For Vasari, the artist’s journey to Spain has little artistic consequence, aside from his rendering of “Spanish dress which in that time [was] used in that country” in the now destroyed fresco cycles in the Chapel of St. Jerome in Santa Maria del Carmine. What travel does stimulate is a process of refining artists socially. In this respect Vasari is consonant with other early modern discussions that conceive travel as a means of increasing worldliness, erudition, and strength of character. In Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorik (1553), one topic suggested for an oration is the situation in which “I would counseil my frende to trauaile beyond the Seas for knowlege of the tongues, & experience in forein countries.” Wilson’s sample oration speaks of travel as “Profitable,” “Praise worthie,” and “Necessarie.” In one of the first published books dedicated to how one ought to travel, The Traveiler (1575), Hieronymus Turler claims he has written “in the behalf of such as are desierous to traveill, and to see foreeine Cuntries, & especially of students. For since Experience is the greatest parte of humane wisdome, and the fame is increased by traveil: I suppose there is no man will deney, but that a man may become the wiser by traveiling.”[43] Travel, therefore, affords social polish and opportunity not offered by the accidents of birth.

Turler’s adages on travel draw heavily upon ancient authors; his gathering together of classical views on journeys from “sundrie Books” testifies to how often ancient Greek and Roman writers discussed this theme, frequently in regard to the two epic literary voyagers, Ulysses and Aeneas. Horace praises in his Epistles (1.2.17-22) the “worth” and “wisdom” of Ulysses, a voyager who had “looked with discerning eyes upon the cities and manners of many men” and overcame adversity “for a return across the broad seas.” In his treatise on morals (De finibus bonorum et malorum), Cicero lauds Pythagoras, Plato, and Democritus “for they, we are told, in their passion for learning travelled through the remotest parts of the earth.” Cicero himself was praised by Quintilian for having traveled to Rhodes to “refashion and recast” his oratorical style.[44] Vasari’s more immediate predecessors also undertook the subject of travel’s benefits. Dante’s Ulysses proclaims, “neither the sweetness of a son, nor compassion for / my old father, nor the love owed to Penelope ... could conquer within me the ardor that I had to gain experience of the world and of human vices and worth.” When his crew becomes hesitant as they approach the Pillar of Hercules, Ulysses persuades them to endure, declaring, “you were not made to live / like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.” Glossing this passage, Landino understood Ulysses’ speech as an exhortation to “train oneself in virtue and investigate truth.” Petrarch, in turn, compared Ulysses’ wanderings with his own travels throughout the Italian peninsula, France, and Germany. “Compare my wanderings to those of Ulysses,” he states in Familiares 1.1; “if the reputation of our name and of our achievements were the same, he indeed traveled neither more nor farther than I.”[45]

TRAVEL / TRAVAIL

Although Vasari sees travel in positive, if not heroic terms, he also interprets this act in the sense true to its etymological roots, that is, travail, a word synonymous with “labor,” “toil, “suffering,” and “trouble.” Exemplifying Vasari’s equivocal stance toward mobility is the prelude to the Life of Ambrogio Lorenzetti: “A painter, or any other rare talent is certainly greatly pleased, [when] called outside his homeland to honor another; and if by chance [that other country] is more noble in customs, mind, and ability, he, once unhappy, is filled with joy in seeing himself awarded, embraced, and largely honored. Because he can truly consider himself most happy, given that many in their own homeland, however excellent they may be, are little esteemed and almost many times villainously neglected without receiving recognition or seeing any sign of honor, and remain poor, humble, without any reputation due to their poor misfortune, enduring everything contrary to their merit.”[46]

The passage affirms at first travel as a means to acquire honors and fame, the assertion of a self upon the world. But success is conditional, not guaranteed. Upon arrival in a foreign country, the migratory artist will be awarded only if circumstances there are appropriate, namely if that country is endowed with “customs, talent, ability.” It is more frequently the case that artists are “little appreciated.” Vasari’s language, through the repeating preposition senza, negative particles (alcuno), and oppositional words (contrario), emphasizes an absence of honors.

The acknowledgment of an artist’s worth, then, does not occur a priori—rather such recognition is contingent upon his displacement. This tension between the artist’s intrinsic value and local reception echoes Christ’s sermon on the book of Isaiah found in the Gospels: “I say to you, that no prophet is accepted in his own country.” In a gloss on this passage the chronicler Franco Sacchetti extended Christ’s words with examples from both Roman history and those more immediate in Florence’s past: “Truly the world ... has always little esteemed those from their own homeland. Who does not believe me, look at Rome and how she accepted Scipione Africanus and Asiaticus and Furius Camillus and many others. But Rome also brought to herself many valorous ones from diverse parts of the world such as Virgil, Horace, Seneca, Lucian, Tullius, and Statius, and many others: that which her daughter [Florence] has not done, which did little accept Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and their remains at the present prove this.”[47]

Vasari’s variation on the nemo propheta in patria trope would seem to valorize the traveling artist. In the Life of Andrea Pisano, he remarks how the sculptor was “esteemed in that profession the best man that the Tuscans had had until their time.” His works “were so honored and rewarded, and most of all by the Florentines.” Yet the identity of Andrea’s audience—Fiorentini or the more encompassing Toscani—cannot obscure the fact that the platform where he gained such praise was outside his native Pisa. Due to receiving fame abroad, Andrea “did not regret changing his homeland, family, colleagues, and friends.” While a customary reaction to migration might be remorse, Andrea does not lament relinquishing his ties. Here Vasari takes a more moderate stance on the pain of mobility than other traveling artists who commented upon displacement’s effects. Ghiberti, supported by the authority of Vitruvius, had categorically declared: “Only he who has learned everything is nowhere a stranger; robbed of his fortune and without friends, he is yet the citizen of every country, and can fearlessly despise the changes of fortune.”[48]

For Ghiberti, then, an artist’s skill is a means to overcome the adversity of travel. By contrast, in the Life of Antonio Veneziano, Vasari conceives such acumen as a liability, the very cause of an artist’s ostracism. Antonio, after having acquired in Florence the art of painting, returns to Venice to allow his native city to harvest “the fruit of the long labors endured by him.” Elsewhere in Part I, the theme of repatriation is generally celebrated. Simone Martini, after “copying the style of Giotto” in Rome and executing while in Avignon “many paintings in fresco and panel,” enjoys the benefits of his experience abroad: “And having returned to Siena his homeland, he was much esteemed there ... and having worked in fresco he also wanted to show the Sienese that he was a most worthy master in tempera.” Ambrogio Lorenzetti, “desirous to see the praised works of the new Florentine artists,” goes to that city, and these same artists in turn are “curious to see his way of working.” Again, this journey is framed in positive terms. Ambrogio’s works “confirmed his name and increased his reputation infinitely.”[49]

Antonio, however, does not enjoy a triumphant return home. Having acquired training in tempera and fresco in Florence, he returns to Venice to paint a wall in the Great Council Hall. Though he conducted the work “excellently and with much majesty,” such was the hostile reception to his work that “poor Antonio found himself so beaten and dejected that for the better, having left Florence, he returned there with the intention of never wanting to ever return to Venice.” Antonio’s travail not only alludes to the pain of mobility. The tale of his repatriation also serves to portray the artistic community of both Florentines and Venetians, patrons and artists alike. While in Florence, Antonio is “not only esteemed and admired by Florentines, but appreciated still greatly for his virtue and his other good qualities.” By contrast, Vasari unleashes a torrent of grave terms—invidia, ambizione, tirannia, maledicenza, ingratitudine—to depict the native son’s reception in Venice.[50]

The portrayal of this Venetian public is more subtle than a simple snub. It differs from Petrarch’s famous dismissal of those ignorant and unable to understand the beauty of Francesco da Carrara’s painting by Giotto. Vasari makes a distinction between observers/patrons of art (alcuni gentiluomini) and artists. The former, who generally show favor to foreign painters, have eyes “blinded” to the truth. More complex is Vasari’s characterization of Antonio’s fellow Venetian artists. The word invidia, or envy, expresses their reaction to Antonio no less than four times and is accompanied by emulazione, a contemporary term that refers to ambition and competitiveness. This atmosphere of envy in Venice’s artistic scene contrasts with the more collegial working environment in Florence. Unlike some painters, who “due to envy and malice defraud ideas,” Gaddo Gaddi, Cimabue, and Andrea Taffi collaborate to finish the mosaics in the Florentine Baptistery with mutual “generosity” (carità). The Venetian artists’ envy of Antonio reveals their awareness of the supposed superiority of his artistic skills honed abroad. Implicit within the very word invidia, literally “looking upon” with an evil eye, is the visual recognition of an adversary’s advantages. As Francis Bacon commented in his Essays, “There seemeth to be acknowledged, in the act of envy, an ejaculation, or irridation of the eye.” The figurative blindness of the Venetian noblemen serves as a counterpoint to the artists’ coveting eyes. And it is no accident that the artists who exemplify the hardship of travel originate from Siena, Pisa, and Venice—in other words, from locales other than Florence.[51]

DISSEMINATION

Yet to overemphasize Vasari’s ambivalent stance toward travel would be to neglect another and perhaps more salient type of travel in Part I, the dissemination of Giotto’s style throughout the Italian peninsula via his students. Itinerant artists are not, of course, the only agents of mobility. As a number of instances in Part I make plain, the export of works of art enable the diffusion of artists’ style and their reputations: Margaritone’s works are transported throughout Arezzo and Tuscany; Ugolino “executed many panels and infinite chapels throughout Italy ... and many more [panels] outside Italy”; Ambrogio Lorenzetti sends a panel in tempera to Volterra, which became “a highly praised thing in that city.” Yet for the first two artists, Vasari notes that this export spreads the maniera greca: Margaritone’s Crucifix is “lavorato a la greca”; Ugolino paints “many great panels throughout Italy ... with a good execution without leaving, however, the style of his master at all.” Vasari does not care to dwell on these works, since Ugolino’s masters themselves “always held on to the way of the old ones” (al modo de’ vecchi).[52]

Giotto’s journey throughout Italy, while ostensibly having no impact on his own style, according to Vasari, combats the deluge of Byzantine style that was once practiced and distributed by his predecessors and less illustrious contemporaries. The starting point for this narrative of dissemination occurs toward the end of Giotto’s biography in the list of his students. This catalog indicates succession from master to pupil, thus fueling the historical progression of style. At the same time, the roll call demonstrates how much Giotto’s style is transmitted through geographic space: “His disciples were the above mentioned Taddeo and Puccio Capanna, who painted in Rimini in the church of San Cataldo of the Preaching Friars. . . . And also his pupil was Ottaviano da Faenza, who in San Giorgio di Ferrara . . painted many things, and in Faenza his homeland. . . . And Guglielmo da Forlì, who executed many works, and particularly in the chapel of San Domenico in his city. Also students of Giotto were Simone Sanese, Stefano Fiorentino, and Pietro Cavallini Romano, and infinite others who approached his style in imitation of him.”[53]

Despite Giotto’s strong ties to Florence, the various toponyms and locations stress the reach of his style toward all points of the compass. The geographic spread of Giotto’s family tree almost resounds with the words of the Messianic Christ: “Go ye into the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15). Place names, scattered like seed in a field of prose, constitute a linguistic attempt to account for those stylistic patterns witnessed in works inhabiting the peninsula. Giotto and the Giottesque are everywhere. A Pietà by the Neapolitan painter Roberto d’Oderisio demonstrates the consequences of Giotto’s lengthy sojourn and the presence of his followers abroad (fig. 3.18). Several aspects of this panel immediately recall the figural depiction and portrayal of emotions particular to the Florentine master. The draped sculptural bodies of St. John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalene, application of gilt ornament, clasped hands, anguished faces, and lamenting angels echo extant details from Giotto’s work in the convent of Santa Chiara in Naples. Further afield and better preserved, Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua also provide stylistic analogies to d’Oderisio’s panel (fig. 3.19). “Magistro Iotto pictore de Florentia,” as he was described in one Neapolitan notarial document from 1332–33, had his style perpetuated far afield from his place of origin.[54]

Another idea at play in the catalogue of Giotto’s descendants is that of a Florentine commodity that becomes widely exported. And unlike Andrea da Pisano’s pupils, who execute “infinite awkward things on the façade of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Pisa, Venice, Milan and throughout Italy,” Giotto’s disciples maintain or improve upon the style of their master. Puccio Capanna, “having adopted the working method and style of Giotto,” takes the design of Giotto’s crucifix in the Ognissanti “throughout Italy.” After Giotto’s death, Stefano Fiorentino “advanced him in style, invention, and design” such that he appeared a miracle “throughout Tuscany.” Pietro Lorenzetti painted frescoes in Siena “imitating the style of Giotto, already diffused [divulgata] by infinite masters throughout Tuscany.” Pietro Cavallini, whose name bears the additional designation Romano, was “the most perfect master of mosaic, which art together with painting he learned from Giotto ... he was certainly of the greatest profit to his city.” Simone Martini, “copying the style of Giotto,” worked in Rome, Avignon, and Siena. Taddeo, among the “true and good imitators in the style of Giotto,” worked with great diligence in Pisa’s Camposanto. In turn, the generation who comes after Giotto’s students or those “influenced” by him further perpetuates this geographic dissemination. Thus Pietro Lorenzetti leaves “his disciple Bartolomeo Bolghini Sienese, who painted many panels in Siena and throughout Italy.” Ambrogio Lorenzetti works in Massa, making known there “his judgment and talent in art.” Agnolo Gaddi leaves pupils who work in Urbino, Città di Castello, Verona, Mantua, and Siena.[55]

FIGURE 3.18 Roberto d’Oderisio, Saint John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalene, c. 1350. Tempera on wood, gold ground (58.4 × 39.7 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.102).

FIGURE 3.19 Detail from Giotto di Bondone, Lamentation over Christ, 1303–6. Fresco. Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.

Bringing to the fore the metaphor of germination, Vasari declares that Jacopo Casentino’s works are “sown [seminate] in various places through Casentino as one can still see.” Furthermore, Jacopo in Arezzo trains Spinello Aretino, who in turn works so much that “in that city and beyond there is not a church, nor hospital, nor chapel, nor maestà that was not worked by him in fresco.” The appearance of the key term seminare offers an exception to the proverbial swallow who alone does not a summer make. The previous train of unremitting examples suggests that although this figure of latent growth had not yet explicitly reared its head until now, it nonetheless courses through the sequence of Vasari’s writing, in the field of place-names and germs of the modern style deposited by mobile artists and artworks. The analogy of artist to sower and style to seed underscores how artist and artifact are not instruments of dry cognition, in spite of a longstanding convention to see this period as the rise of the artist-intellectual. As seen in the discourse surrounding aria, contamination, and purging, they act in and are subject to the natural world at large. The metaphor of sowing posits style as an organic, almost animate entity whose behavior must be described and controlled by the critic.[56]

FIGURE 3.20 Master Venceslao, Month of April, c. 1400. Fresco. Torre dell’Aquila, Castello del Buonconsiglio, Trento.

“The one who sows [semina] good seed [buono seme] is the Son of Man,” Christ explains in the Parable of the Weeds, “and the field is the world” (Matthew 13:37). The implications of the dissemination metaphor that describes the mobility of Giotto and artists in his wake would not be lost on the many early modern readers and viewers attuned to the agricultural labor. Just as the farmer must plow fields and spread seeds over vast tracts of land, so too must the traveling artist in Part I promulgate the beginnings of good style. Portrayals of the act of sowing and the tilling of fields, such as those seen in the fresco of the months in the Castello del Buonconsiglio, convey the sense of travail and duration involved in these tasks. The caravans of man and beast trudge across the winding and multi-tiered farmland (fig. 3.20). But bearing the produce from dissemination is not immediate. It adheres instead to the exigencies of the seasons, cycles of farming, and ultimately nature itself.[57]

Correspondingly, when read with a perspective that focuses upon artistic mobility, Part I of the Lives hardly emerges as an immediate transition to the seconda maniera. There are no uncomplicated “fusions” or “hybrids” between the maniera greca and the nascent modern style. Instead, Vasari presents the interaction between physical displacement and stylistic impact as one involving struggle. Giotto’s triumphant fame counteracts and dissipates the deluge of Byzantine art and artists. In addition, a focus on artistic mobility reveals both the political and social dimensions of artistic geography and selfhood. In the guise of Giotto’s migration from the country to the city, Vasari underscores Florence’s domination and simultaneous dependence upon its territories. Furthermore, the triumph of Giotto’s travel contrasts with the hardship of movement and repatriation for artists originating outside the favored city walls of Florence. Part II, by contrast, will recount the artistic achievements of Florentine artists in Florence—Brunelleschi’s dome, Ghiberti’s Doors of Paradise, Massaccio’s Carmine Chapel, Donatello’s Prophets. And whether mobility can penetrate this intensely regional focus on style is the debate that lies ahead.

4 Artifex Viator

As Vasari recounts in Part I of the Lives, the mobility of Giotto and his pupils eradicates monstrous styles, disseminating the modern manner in their stead. Presumably the reader can now witness the upward trajectory of central Italian style undisturbed. Artistic achievements, and not place with its attendant connotations of potentially harmful or salubrious aria, would seem to take center stage. It was not his intention, Vasari declares, “to discover their [artists’] numbers, their names, and their countries, and to tell in what cities, and exactly in what places in those cities, their pictures, or sculptures, or buildings were now to be found.” Such a dry inventory would lack that element quintessential to historical writing—the author’s judgment. Vasari might appear, then, to relegate the significance of geography. And yet, the 1568 edition exhibits those very tables that Vasari would seem to belittle. Compiled by Vincenzo Borghini, the indices for artists’ names designate regional origin and place of employment: “Iacopo dalla Quercia Scultor Sanese,” “Tiziano da Cadore. Pittore,” “Tofano Lombardino Milanese. Architetto.” Borghini’s longest index is the “Table of places where works described are located” (fig. 4.1). Columnar lists over sixteen pages set in elegant type cover at least fifty-eight cities along with outlying areas, these subsumed under the category “fuor d’arezzo,” or “fuor di fiorenza,” for example. Indices along with other paratextual material such as tables of contents often served as a selling point for early modern printers, and the compilers of lists boasted of their diligence in gathering entries. Indices and other instruments like commonplace books accelerated consultation for the reader coping with “information overload.” But the index of place-names in the Lives might also have provoked a method of reading based not only on speed but also on the experience of location. Flipping through Borghini’s index, a reader could engage in virtual travel throughout the Italian peninsula, moving from inspecting the smallest and most private spaces, such as a collector’s cabinet or chapel, to perusing more public spaces, such as piazzas or church façades. The index serves as a roadmap of sorts to the Lives, charting the works artists leave in the wake of their itineraries within and beyond urban centers.[1]

FIGURE 4.1 “Tavola de’ luoghi, dove sono le opere descritte.” From Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ piv eccellenti pittori, scvltori, e architettori, 1568. Typ 525 68.864, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

PATRIA

While compiling these indices, Borghini had encouraged Vasari to widen the geographic scope of the Lives, “to have a greater number of things from Genoa, Venice, Naples, Milan and in sum, from those principal cities.” In addition to calling for a universal history of the arts, Borghini’s recommendation draws attention to the importance of location for the writing of history. Cicero, other classical authors, as well as fifteenth-century humanists, such as Flavio Biondo, made frequent reference to history’s relation to geographic representation. The yoke binding place and narration of events appears in a revealing passage in Alessandro Lionardi’s Dialoghi dell’invenzione poetica (1554). When discussing historical protagonists, Lionardi claims, “two things need to be considered, its parent and the other, the place where someone was begot. As far as place concerns it ought to be considered the site and the nature and the quality, and the origin, might, nobility and customs of those who live there.” The speaker even goes so far as to state that the parent is both “father and fatherland, a common starting-point of procreation.”[2]

Lurking beneath Lionardi’s stress on patria as a generative force is the assumption that place plays a key if not determining role in shaping the dispositions of historical figures, a brand of geographic essentialism shared by the discourse on aria. Patria is thus not only an indicator of birthplace; it is also the point of origin for an individual’s public manifestation of personal traits. A parallel strand of thinking can be found in the realm of natural history, where patria informs the qualities of plants. According to Pliny, the various types of wine produced in Italy demonstrate that “it is the country [patriam] and soil [terrain] that matter and not the grape ... since the same wine has a different value in different places.” The claim that patria is a significant factor in agriculture also appears in works closer to Vasari’s own time, such as in Luigi Alamanni’s poem La coltivazione (1546). The proficient gardener, as the speaker of Alamanni’s verses sees it, searches for the patria most dear to his plants, be it “arid terrain, valleys or mountains.” In early modern horticultural practice, natural historians were keenly attuned to the exigencies of patria, devising elaborate schemes to replicate the appropriate conditions of foreign species’ original habitats.[3]

Vasari likewise designates patria as a causal force giving rise to artists’ talents. In the “Preface to the Entire Work,” he claims that the Tuscan soil (terren toscano) brings forth “beautiful talents every day,” a sentiment already expressed in the dedication to Cosimo I, where the artists to be discussed “are almost always Tuscan, and for the most part Your Florentines.” In the preamble to his compatriot Parri Spinelli, Vasari affirms: “At times, nature, being a benevolent mother, makes born in a patria an extraordinary talent, which honors it, glorifies it, and gives it fame.” Patria nourishes rivalry, as Vasari avows in regard to Siena: “It is clearly seen throughout ages past that in a patria never flowers one artist with whom many others ... do not compete.” Vasari states that Florence produced at the same time and place eminent individuals—Brunelleschi, Donatello, Ghiberti, Paolo Uccello, and Masaccio—who in competing with one another benefited the art of later generations. Furthermore, the diversity between homelands explains the incongruence of talent in the Italian peninsula. Vasari’s praise for extraterritorial, non-Tuscan artists is thus often backhanded: “Although in Tuscany talents in painting marvelously flowered in all times, nevertheless in other provinces in Italy ... there came to be awakened always some person that made art in those places held to be excellent. . . . But when in such cities some become excellent, they are admired and esteemed by those people due to the small number that that country produces, as was Ercole da Ferrara the painter, who was a student of Lorenzo Cossa, truly admired and considered excellent.”[4]

URBS AND CIVITAS

As much as Vasari asserts the reciprocity between artist and patria, he acknowledges the need for artists to leave their places of birth to receive specialized training elsewhere. The prelude to the life of Niccolò d’Arezzo is among the passages in Part II that receive the most sustained attention to this theme. Vasari dwells on the causes of his compatriot’s departure from Arezzo, with the city, specifically Florence, emerging as a community of artists willing to instruct others in specialized knowledge: “Not always true is the old proverb of we Tuscans: ‘sad is the bird who is born in a mean valley,’ because even though the majority of men ordinarily remain more than willingly in the country where they are born, it is often that many still go elsewhere to learn what at home they could not, it being common (aside from large cities, of which however are not many) that each particular place poorly is furnished for their needs, and most of all in the sciences and in those bright and distinguished arts that give profit and fame to he who endures labor.”[5]

Although bursaries awarded by princes largely enabled artists to travel for study purposes, Vasari’s language depicts Niccolò’s mobility as self-directed. Underscoring migratory artists’ forthrightness is the eventual and necessary severing of ties with one’s patria. For Niccolò, Fortune gained him fame, but this glory caused him to be “injured by his family, such that he was forced to go elsewhere.” Vasari’s suggestion that Arezzo is a backwater is surprising, given that, as a native Aretine, he reveals a favorable stance toward the two Aretine painters described in Part I—Margaritone and Spinello Aretino. Yet the very reason why Arezzo is praised in Part I becomes in Part II a liability. Although the maniera greca disappears from that city, little else is said to replace it. To be sure, Vasari claims that “Giotto and Taddeo and Jacopo di Casentino had executed there [Arezzo] many things.” In a letter written to his compatriot Pietro Aretino in 1539, Vasari appears more forthcoming about the state of the arts in Arezzo, along with his ambitions to advance it: “Don’t doubt that, provided heaven grants me the energy, I will struggle to such a degree ... just as Arezzo (where up to now there have only been mediocre painters), has flourished in arms and letters, could, through me, make its breakthrough as I pursue the studies I have begun.”[6]

What makes, then, a city a viable artistic center in Vasari’s eyes is not only the existence of distinguished artworks, but also the presence of a notable artistic community. His insistence on the città as a place where “masters might teach him [Niccolò] and lead him to his goal” recalls the etymological roots of città in the classical notion of civitas, an association of individuals living together under shared laws. It is in this vein that medieval city encomia praise alongside the urbs of a place—its walls, palaces, and streets—the city’s congregation of eminent individuals. Later sources that aggrandize cities also stress a locale’s inhabitants. Cristoforo Landino’s preface to his commentary on Dante’s Commedia (1481) pays tribute to Florence’s collection of citizens distinguished in fields such as doctrine, theology, eloquence, music, trade, law, painting, and sculpture. Likewise Michelangelo Biondo’s Della nobilissima pittura (1549) aligns the city not just as an epicenter of physical works of art, but also as the habitat of artists. After citing the famous anecdote in which the city of Rhodes is spared due to its possession of a painting by Protogenes, the speaker states: “I say that a good painter in every case ought to be honored as a good citizen, since he is as much as a part of a city as he is a citizen.”[7]

As for the realm of images, a fifteenth-century Florentine engraving represents an urban setting in which sculptors, goldsmiths, astrologers, and musicians engage in their respective arts, all of whom are subject to the astral influence of Mercury who proceeds overhead in his chariot (fig. 4.2). In this piazza, artists see and are seen, unified by both work and a network of mutual glances. The Dome of the Florence Cathedral on the left, along with the dense conglomeration of buildings such as churches, crenellated palaces, loggias, and workshops make up the urban stage. Indeed, this city backdrop resembles Sebastiano Serlio’s later designs for theatrical productions (fig. 4.3). The assertion of a city as an assembly of learned individuals also manifested itself in pageantry, as for example in one of the displays constructed for the entry of Joanna of Austria in Florence. In addition to representing learned individuals such as Machiavelli, Bruni, and Palmieri, at the bottom of the image were putti “bearing books, globes and compasses, reading and listening, demonstrating the natural attitudes and dispositions of the talents of this city towards the study of letters and sciences.”[8]

For Vasari, then, the concentration of eminent individuals and artistic activity in the city is a sine qua non for a young artist’s education. Cennini also had suggested this, remarking: “If you are in place where many good masters have been, so much the better for you.” Yet while the very term “education” connotes a process of “leading” or “bringing forth,” the words Vasari employs in the passage concerning Niccolò—imparare and apprendere—suggest via their etymological roots the actions of “obtaining,” “seizing,” or “acquiring.” Artistic instruction leads to further gains, such as profit, fame, greatness, and immortality, though not without toil. Vasari tightens this link between learning in a city and gain by imagining the consequences if Niccolò had not gone to Florence: “If these tricks of the world had not fallen upon Niccolò di Pietro Aretino, he would never have left Arezzo, nor would have ever acquired glory or fame: in fact, like a pod of some excellent seed left from forgetfulness inside a crack in a wall, he would have been lost forever.” Here Vasari draws on the widely diffused metaphor comparing instruction to biological growth, as when Lionardi likens education to “nourishing and raising well a plant or any other thing produced by nature.”[9]

Yet what of gain in terms of style? On this account Vasari is more reticent. In the 1550 edition, he does not discuss with whom Niccolò trained or the results of apprenticeship, only declaring that “upon arriving in Florence and following the instinct of nature, he applied himself to the art of sculpture.” The impact of having come to Florence is compressed into one line: assessing a marble statue of an Evangelist he attributes to Niccolò, Vasari states: “And he was praised for this since no better relief in the round was seen, as is seen later in those masters who follow the maniera moderna, and also he changed towards it [la mutò] completely.” This evaluation is not without significance: it suggests that coming to Florence entailed a conversion, from one particular style (which Vasari does not specify) to the maniera moderna. Furthermore, Niccolò imports “good grace” and buona maniera upon returning to Arezzo. In the 1568 edition Niccolò’s repatriation has further implications since Vasari claims that he brought a sculpture “having been begun before in the German manner [d’ordine tedesco]... to completion perfectly,” thus suggesting the purifying effects of the Florentine maniera moderna specifically in the provinces. But in relation to Niccolò’s other work in Florence (which included the competition for the Baptistery’s doors) and his activity in Milan, Borgo San Sepolcro, and Bologna, Vasari refrains from elaborating on any link between mobility and style as he had done with such intensity in the preface. Niccolò’s Life emphasizes not so much the stylistic consequences of relocating to cities. Rather, it underscores the importance of an urban environment for an artist’s instruction, with Florence representing the paradigm of the city.[10]

FIGURE 4.2 Attributed to Baccio Baldini, The Children of Mercury, c. 1465. Engraving (25.8 × 18 cm). British Museum, London.

FIGURE 4.3 Sebastiano Serlio, “Scena Comica.” Woodcut. From Il primo [-secondo] libro d’architettura, 1545.

THE VALLEY OF COMPETITION

It is not only due to education that Vasari recommends that young artists migrate to urban centers. The notion of civitas implicit in his conception of the city also implies habitation in a restricted spatial setting, a situation that breeds competition. In the Life of Perugino, Vasari alludes to such competition taking place in intense spatial proximity. As a youth, the Umbrian artist is said to have asked “any man whom he knew to have seen the world, in what part of the world the best craftsmen in that called were formed.” The response to Perugino’s question was invariably Florence, where “more than in any other place ... men became perfect in the arts.” Among the reasons for that city’s preeminence, Vasari cites the atmosphere of struggle: “If a man wishes to live there, he must be industrious, which is nothing else than to say that he must continually exercise his intelligence and his judgment, must be ready and adroit in his affairs, and finally, must know how to make money, seeing that the territory of Florence is not so wide and abundant as to enable her to support at little cost all who live there, as can be done in countries that are rich enough.”[11]

This is civitas stretched to its limit; while the city may be an ideal location for an artist’s training, that very density of artistic talent can also become a stumbling block. Florence is not unique in being a locus for competition; the Sienese praised their competitive artists, and Venice is described as a place where artists “exercise the same profession, imitating one and another in competition.” Vasari also depicts Venice as a city that allows style to be formed in the course of training, yet also fragmented when individual personalities disperse in pursuit of their respective careers. As examples, he offers “Vittore Scarpaccia, Vincenzo Catena, Giovan Battista da Conegliano, Giovannetto Cordelliaghi, Marco Basarini, il Montagana, who were Venetians, and had been dependent upon the style of Giovanni Bellini.” Though splintering into a list of names, these artists ultimately come to be identified with an encompassing entity, be it an individual (Bellini) or a location (Venice). The title of the chapter in which this passage occurs—“Vittore Scarpaccia et altri pittori viniziani e lombardi”—emphasizes this impulse toward grouping along personal and regional lines. It could be argued that this classificatory scheme diminishes the individual style of each of these northern Italian (i.e., non-Florentine) practitioners. Yet of Ghirlandaio’s pupils, Vasari states: “Left were his disciples David and Benedetto Ghirlandai, Bastiano Mainardi da San Gimignano and Michele Agnolo Buonarotti Florentine, Francesco Granacci, Niccolò Cieco, Iacopo del Tedesco, Iacopo dell’Indaco, Baldino Baldinelli and other masters, all Florentine.” Despite the varying regional origins of these artists, the city emerges as a classificatory tool that contains within its walls the identity of artists who practice therein. Vasari’s narration of mobility to the city, then, is paradoxical: for while emigration suggests the permeable barriers between geographic entities, the process of training and working within a city seems to restrict the ex post facto classification of an artist, and by extension his style, in respect to that urban center.[12]

That movement accentuates Vasari’s qualitative sense of geography becomes especially apparent when he ascribes travel not as a conscious undertaking but as the result of celestial influence. In the prelude to Niccolò’s Life where he remarks on artists’ births in places ill-suited to their needs, Vasari explains how they are removed from their provincial origins: “These men, not due to nature, but to that celestial influence [influsso] that wants to take them to the summit, are taken from their unhappy countries and led to those places where they might easily make themselves immortal. Wanting to guide, the heavens adopt such diverse ways that one cannot assign them a rule, inducing some [to leave] due to friends or relatives, others to exile or crimes committed by themselves, others due to poverty and for infinite strange reasons to absent themselves from their patria.”[13]

Whereas Vasari had considered artists’ journeys an assertion of self-will, here they are wholly subject to influence, their actions recounted in the passive voice (sono cavati . . . condotti), while astrological force assumes the agency of volition (vuol conducere al sommo). Influence acts in regard to location, making distinctions between “unhappy countries” and places where artists can achieve enduring fame. This locational, as opposed to personal, influence is also present in early modern astrological thought, as when Ficino, in Book III of De Vita, states: “It would be worthwhile to investigate exactly what region your star and your daemon initially designated you to dwell in and cultivate, because there they will favor you more.” Given this presumed correspondence between microcosm (earth) and macrocosm (celestial bodies), mobility in the world was also subject to the travel of the stars and planets above. Some voyagers might consult such authorities as Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos 4.8, which discussed advantageous or unfavorable planetary signs for embarkation. But more than making a specific allusion, Vasari is subscribing generally to the idea of astral influence, wielding it as yet another metaphorical tool in his arsenal to explain how artists gravitate toward cities. Even so, Vasari undercuts himself, suggesting that for all of the order and prognostication astrology might promise, mobility seems to follow “no rule.” This openness, while perhaps beguiling for the modern reader, has its merits. It permits Vasari to navigate in and through a discursive field spacious enough to deal with the complexity inherent in mobility’s causes and their effects. What emerge clearly enough are favored targets of mobility, Florence chief among them.[14]

BRUNELLESCHI: DISORDER AND SELECTION

Departing from Arezzo and traversing northwest over the Arno floodplain, Niccolò’s journey reinforces Florence’s standing at the apex of regional hierarchy. The artist’s descent into that valley of rivalry, where he must be “ready and adroit in his affairs,” is hardly untroubled. Greeting him will be fierce competition, with the acquisition of the maniera moderna a potential gain. For Vasari, this innovative style is a homegrown Florentine phenomenon. Paolo Uccello’s experiments with perspective, Ghiberti’s sculptural relief, and Masaccio’s figural and spatial illusionism combined with wrenching emotional expression are among the episodes in the art historical narrative for which the Lives provided the master blueprint. Vasari also acknowledges the almost magnetic pull another metropolis has on artists and their ways of making and thinking about the visual arts: Rome.[15]

In crafting the story of artists migrating to Rome, Vasari confronts profuse though often contradictory traditions and perceptions about the Eternal City. Rome with its walls, gates, bridges, and palaces is the city of infinite marvels, as reported in medieval pilgrimage accounts. But Rome is also a decrepit body, immersed in corrupt air and “gnawed away by old age” due to its decadence. On an even more physical level, the plethora of miraculous icons and relics in the city invite moments of pause, worship, and veneration through touching and kissing. Yet the sheer number of these objects and other monuments to be beheld compels incessant movement, even wandering and misdirection, a sense conveyed by the sinuous curves, open walls, and undulating Tiber in fifteenth-century cartographic representations (fig. 4.4).[16]

FIGURE 4.4 Piero del Massaio, “Roma,” from Ptolemy, Cosmographia, c. 1472. LATIN 4802, folio 133, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

Vasari certainly contends with these and other notions about Rome. But in the case of the artist traveling there in Part I, Rome emerges as a field of artistic labor, a construction site of sorts. The city with its riot of classical ruins calls for the implementation of skills, both physical and mental, to make sense of this disordered toolkit and eventually employ its parts for artistic composition. The artist contemplates and measures, performs acts of divination and digs into the earth, draws antiquities from afar and inspects details. Perhaps the most evocative early modern image of this idea of working with pieces of Rome, using the city as a source material is Herman Posthumus’s Landscape with Roman Ruins (1536). Drowned in layer after layer of architectural fragments, dislodged sculptures, and mural paintings, the figure in the foreground nonetheless assiduously studies this morass, extracting principles of design with his triangle and compass with eye and hand (fig. 4.5).[17]

Several of the most important Florentine artists in Part I undertake the hard, often perilous journey over the Apennines to reach the caput mundi. Like Niccolò d’Arezzo, they gravitate toward a major city for the purposes of learning. In the case of Rome, things, and not just a community of artists, constitute the source of knowledge. Masaccio, “stimulated by his affection and love for art,” travels to the city “to learn and surpass others; and this he did.” Donatello goes to Rome “to imitate the antiques to the best of his ability.” But it is in the Life of Brunelleschi, based largely on Antonio Manetti’s biographical account from the 1480s, that Vasari pays the most sustained attention to the pivotal sojourn in Rome. Confronting an unstable landscape and capsized ruins, Brunelleschi undertakes a journey in Rome itself, a voyage that moves from a wonder at beholding ruins, a tactile engagement with them, and finally a shearing of all traces of the maniera tedesca to purify architecture. A Florentine protagonist is placed on the ground, on the battlefield of style to convert disorder into order.[18]

At first glance, Brunelleschi’s initial impression of Rome may appear nothing more than a rhetorical flourish. After selling a small farm in Settignano to fund his journey, Brunelleschi arrives in Rome and is awestruck: “Seeing the size of the buildings and the perfection of the bodies of the temples, he was absorbed [astratto] and seemed out of sorts [fuor di se].” Even so, one of the terms that characterizes Brunelleschi’s response—astratto, referring to the act of drawing away—is significant and polyvalent. Vasari at times deploys astratto to depict artists who diverge from social norms, the example par excellence being the eccentric Piero di Cosimo. Vasari also mines another vein of meaning that courses through astratto, the sense of being taken up in contemplation. Botticelli’s fresco of Saint Augustine in the Ognissanti demonstrates “that profound cognition ... that only exists in persons sensitive and withdrawn continually in the investigation of the most lofty and difficult things” (fig. 4.6). Though surrounded by instruments of scientific learning such as an armillary sphere, geometric diagrams, and a clock, Augustine is taken up in consideration of another and higher realm, having just become aware of Saint Jerome’s death in Bethlehem. This meditative connotation of astratto is consonant with the term’s appearance in devotional literature, as when Saint John Chrysostom declares, as stated in a Latin translation of the Greek father, that “the soul desires to withdraw [astraere) from worldly things and convert them to spiritual exercises.”[19]

FIGURE 4.5 Herman Posthumus, Landscape with Roman Ruins, 1536. Oil on canvas (96 × 141 cm). Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna.

FIGURE 4.6 Botticelli, St. Augustine, 1480. Fresco (152 × 112 cm). Chiesa di Ognissanti, Florence.

What is striking about Vasari’s decision to dramatize Brunelleschi’s reaction to Rome as astratto is that instead of withdrawing from the world, the architect becomes absorbed in the flotsam of ruins. He is taken up in meditating on the skeletal buildings before his very eyes. Vasari periodically deploys astratto to suggest an almost obsessive drive to undertake a journey in the pursuit of seeing works of art. Thus Amico Aspertini, “as a person distinct [astratto) from others, went throughout Italy drawing and portraying everything, good and bad, in relief and painted.” Because Lorenzo Luzzo, also known as Morto da Feltro, “was as taken up [astratto) in the innovation ... of the grottesche,” he went to Rome in his youth, searching for every example of that art form he could find. In other period texts, the quality of being astratto delineates the thoughtful viewing of art aroused in the course of a journey. Dolce’s L’Aretino, the subject of Chapter 6, opens with Fabrini, a Florentine visitor to Venice, defined as being “all absorbed in that contemplation” of Giovanni Bellini’s Saint Thomas Aquinas in Santi Giovanni e Paolo.[20]

Brunelleschi, however, remains neither stationary nor spellbound in the face of Rome’s urbs. Roused from meditation, he pursues a more active encounter with ruins. The reader learns that along with his traveling companion Donatello, he measures cornices and projects ground plans. Paying no heed to time or expense, the two Florentine artists work incessantly. “There was no place,” Vasari states, “either in Rome or beyond in the Campagna, that they left unvisited, and nothing of the good that they did not measure, if only they could find it.” Brunelleschi’s approach to these architectural fragments occurs on a number of spatial and topographic levels: vertically (to examine the cornices), horizontally (to examine buildings’ layout), both within the historic center and outside the city walls. Manetti in his rendering of the episode states that Brunelleschi saw ruins existing in a number of positions, “both standing or fallen down for some reason or other—which had been vaulted in various ways.” It is this fervor to examine the ruins in all of its dimensions that accounts for early antiquarians’ tendency to represent architecture and ornament from a variety of angels and positions. In one folio in the Codex Barberiano, Giuliano da Sangallo depicts such elements as though rotated in space, ready to be put to a variety of uses for the enterprising artist (fig. 4.7).[21]

In addition, Vasari contends that Brunelleschi’s probing into these ruins is both all-consuming and selective. “And since Filippo was free from domestic cares,” Vasari recounts, “he gave himself over body and soul to his studies, and took no thought for eating and sleeping.” Architecture was Brunelleschi’s only intent, and by this term Vasari understands a particular species of building practice: “I mean the good ancient Orders, and not the barbarous [barbara] and German [tedesca], which was much in use in his time.” This ascetic behavior underscores the status of these antiquarian studies as akin to a spiritual or philosophical investigation. As the Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella would later claim, it was through such fasting, which “served to awaken and order drowsiness” that prophets, such as Elias and Daniel, “acquired sharpness in spirit.”[22]

FIGURE 4.7 Giuliano da Sangallo, “Pulley, Structural Details,” 1465. Ink on parchment (45.5 × 39 cm). Cod. Vat. Barb. Lat., fol. 70r, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

Though Brunelleschi immerses himself in ruins, he rejects the Gothic. Vasari reiterates this refusal even to dialogue with this building style toward the end of the architect’s Life. “He is all the more worthy of praise,” Vasari declares, “because in his time the Gothic [maniera tedesca] was held in veneration throughout all Italy and practiced by old craftsmen.” As evidence of the Gothic’s diffusion, Vasari provides a list of significant buildings, both within and beyond Florence. In naming one of these—the Certosa in Pavia—the polemical nature of the modern manner becomes all the more apparent. For with its sumptuous façade, encrusted with figural and grotteschi ornament in marble, porphyry, and serpentine, the Certosa would seem difficult to shun and discount (fig. 4.8). Montaigne, for one, would describe this surface as “all of marble, richly worked, of infinite labor and impressive appearance.” But Brunelleschi’s exclusion of the Gothic demonstrates that travel also involves choosing what not to see.[23]

Some further points of comparison: Raphael’s letter to Pope Leo X in which he imagines a Rome stripped of architecture alla maniera tedesca and restored to its antique grandeur offers another example of such a discriminatory vision. Guidebooks to Rome published during the Counter-Reformation prioritizes sites from the “purer” Early Christian past, while overlooking those buildings that evoked the criticism of Reformation protest. Further afield, Coecke van Aelst’s depiction of Constantinople in his woodcut series Moeurs et façons des Turcs (after 1553) documents this selective viewing. While depicting classical and Ottoman monuments, such as Theodosius’s obelisk and the Firuz Aga mosque, the print does not represent Byzantine-era churches, thus lending the impression that the span between the fifth and fifteenth centuries failed to exist (fig. 4.9). While van Aelst’s print has been called an instance of reportage, “the act of reporting, the content of a report, depend upon a decision as to what is worth reporting.” The ideological import of this selective viewing is of course historically specific. Yet a common thread in this array of examples is the notion that the act of looking is rarely empirical or all-encompassing. For Vasari, Brunelleschi’s decision to ignore the “Gothic” shapes his ethnic and historical identity as an agent who resists the prevailing style of a certain people and time.[24]

If Brunelleschi’s investigation of Roman monuments is selective, it is also profound in the sense of embracing ruins in the depths of the Roman soil. Vasari recounts that when Brunelleschi along with Donatello came upon “pieces of capitals, columns, cornices, and bases of building buried underground,” the pair would not pass over the chance to examine these precious remnants. Instead, “they would set to work and have them dug out, in order to examine them thoroughly.” Leonard Barkan has stressed how the labor of unearthing statues in early modern Rome provided a stimulus for artistic production that served as an alternative to religious devotion, observation of nature, or documentation of historical deeds. Brunelleschi’s archaeology focuses especially upon the hunt to reach antique fragments. The journey to Rome not only demands a horizontal motion through space, but also a vertical penetration to release embedded fragments. Here too Vasari highlights the tactile rapport between traveling artist and ruin, between body and stone.[25]

So esoteric and potentially profitable is the labor of extracting ruins that it becomes likened to the art of divination. In Rome, Brunelleschi and Donatello dress eccentrically and are popularly known as treasure hunters. According to a rumor spreading throughout the city, the pair “studied geomancy to discover treasure; and this was because they had one day found an ancient earth ware vase full of medals.” Brunelleschi and Donatello seem to come upon the vase full of medals by chance, employing them for the practical purpose of making money. But to some, their activities appear to be one of divination. Like the geomancer who casts points, draws figures, and extrapolates to perceive a hidden order or someone’s fortune, proceeding through the Roman cityscape involves the exercise of surveying and discerning the meaning of scattered fragments. Akin to the discourse surrounding the term astratto, this passage associates the material engagement with concrete vestiges with exploration that demands the mental exercise of foretelling. Significantly, Vasari comments that appreciating Brunelleschi’s own physical appearance necessitates an act of divination: though “most haggard in person,” his virtue and talent are hidden like “veins of gold” beneath the earth’s surface.[26]

The correlation between antiquarian investigation and geomancy lasts only momentarily. Vasari recounts that Donatello returns to Florence, leaving Brunelleschi alone among the ruins. Far from weakened, the architect’s desire to inspect antiquities now almost reaches a fever pitch. Adding one clause onto another, Vasari’s prose conveys a sense of relentless interrogation, one that involves observation, endurance, and touch. Brunelleschi refuses to rest until he has drawn “every sort of building—round, square, and octagonal temples, basilicas, aqueducts, baths, arches, colossea, amphitheaters, and every temple built of bricks.” From his drawings, he grasps the intricacies of construction techniques, ways to bind and clamp with ties, how to encircle vaults. Brunelleschi discovers how to connect stones with iron bars and dove-tailing. He even goes so far as to penetrate into stones themselves. Beneath each of these great blocks, he uncovers drilled holes “meant to hold the iron instrument, which is called by us the ulivella, wherewith the stones are drawn up, and this he reintroduced and brought into use afterwards.”[27]

FIGURE 4.8 Bernardo da Venezia; façade by Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, Antonio Mantegazza, Cristoforo Mantegazza, and others, Certosa di Pavia; detail view of the façade, begun in 1396; façade, 1473–1540.

FIGURE 4.9 After Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Procession of Sultan Süleyman through the Hippodrome. From Moeurs et façons des Turcs (Customs and Fashions of the Turks), 1553. Woodcut (29.8 × 38.9 cm). Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1928 (28.85.7a, b), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

FIGURE 4.10 Giorgio Vasari and workshop, Brunelleschi and Ghiberti Presenting a Model of San Lorenzo to Cosimo, 1556–58. Fresco. Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.

Brunelleschi’s inspection is comprehensive, embracing the gamut of building typology in respect to shape (round, square, octagonal), function, material components (brick and stone), comprising as well the machines necessary to insert these elements to form a vault. In their seminal account of artists’ behavior, Rudolf and Margot Wittkower compared the encounter with such powerful models as antiquities to conversion or epiphany, the result being the eradication of the artist’s former style. Brunelleschi’s exposure to ancient buildings, however, does not supplant his prior training. In his account, Manetti contends that the architect draws upon his experience as a goldsmith in Florence to understand how architectural units cohere into an integral whole. In the past, Brunelleschi had crafted “clocks and alarm bells with various and sundry types of springs.” He applies this understanding of minute timepieces to monumental structures, conceiving “different machines for carrying, lifting, and pulling.” In one of his frescoes for the Palazzo Vecchio, Vasari collapses the architect’s engagement across a range of scales into one scene (fig. 4.10). Along with Ghiberti, Brunelleschi is portrayed presenting a model of San Lorenzo to Cosimo il Vecchio. Artists and patron point to miniature naves, roof, pilasters, and façade, holding the handcrafted object within the palms of their hands. In the background, artisans and apprentices execute the “full-scale” work of assembling a colonnade, sculpting capitals, and lifting material up several stories with pulleys and manpower. Whereas this fresco locates this compression of small- and large-scale labor firmly within the ambient of Medici Florence, in the textual realm, the origin of this work takes place amid the cityscape of ancient Roman antiquities.[28]

DIFFERENCE IN SPECIES

Brunelleschi as a traveler in Rome assumes different roles, digger and diviner, discriminating observer, handcrafter, and abstract thinker. However, the architect’s ultimate contribution to style in light of his mobility is his acuity in establishing differences between the architectural orders. As Vasari recounts in the preface to Part II of the Lives, architects before Brunelleschi who practiced the maniera tedesca committed the crime of creating injudicious mixtures. “Their ornamentation was confused and very imperfect,” he condemns, “for they did not ... distinguish one Order from another, whether Doric, Corinthian, Ionic or Tuscan, but mixed them all together with a rule of their own that was no rule.” From Vitruvius onward, architectural theorists such as Alberti, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Serlio, Palladio, and Scamozzi censured these mixtures, comparing them to monsters. As is apparent in illuminated editions of Horace’s Ars Poetica, the combination of incongruous parts, a human head, horse’s neck, feathered torso, and fish tail, engenders strange creatures (fig. 4.11). Brunelleschi disentangles these monsters. Vasari announces that the architect “distinguished the different Orders from one another—Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian.” This clarity becomes a refrain in architecture’s revival: it appears in Brunelleschi’s Life (“He recovered the ancient moldings and restored the Tuscan, Corinthian, Doric and Ionic Orders to their original forms”); the preface to Part II (“one Order was distinguished from another, and it was shown what differences there were between them”); and the preface to Part III (“Order was the separating of one kind [genere] from another . . . with no more interchanging between Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Tuscan”).[29]

FIGURE 4.11 Initial from Quintus Flaccus Horatius, Opera, 1501. Ms. D’Elci 516, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence.

Mobility beckons the traveler to create order from unfamiliar disorder. This notion enjoys currency beyond the domain of art literature. In early modern natural history, scientists undertook arduous expeditions to make and analyze distinctions between various botanical species. In his Histoire des plantes (1557), the Flemish botanist Rembert Dodoens declared that the hardships of his profession included “the diligent and timely examination of all plants and the careful reading of many ancient authors: that is, much work, long travel, and constant devotion.” The famed botanist Carolus Clusius (1526–1609) traveled throughout Spain, Portugal, and the Alps and was compared by his contemporaries to a modern-day Ulysses, though without the vices of the classical hero. In describing the hundreds of plant species he examined during his journeys, Clusius relied on establishing differentiae, whose categories included the morphology of leaves, stems, petals, color, geographic distribution, taste, and smell. Despite the fact that some prominent naturalists such as Conrad Gessner (1516-65) claimed that words, not images, best conveyed differences between plants, some botanical treatises did deploy illustrations to show foreign species and the distinctions among them. Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia general de las Indias (1552) and Mathias Lobelius’s Kruydtboeck (1581) align plants together in a format that enables the reader to compare and contrast (fig. 4.12). The juxtaposition of specimens finds a parallel in architectural treatises that pack the orders and capitals one against the other within a single folio page, ready for observation and discrimination (fig. 4.13).[30]

FIGURE 4.12 Colored woodcuts. From Matthias Lobelius, Kruydtboeck oft Beschrijvinghe van allerley Ghewasser, Kruyderen, Hesteren ende Gheboomten, 1581. Museum Plantin-Moretus, Antwerp.

Mobility can go only so far in highlighting differences in two incongruous bodies of learning such as architectural theory and natural history. Over the early modern period, botanists’ work in cataloging differentiae greatly increased the number of known plant varieties. The some four hundred species recognized in antiquity expanded to several thousand by the year 1600. By contrast, Brunelleschi’s identification of the differences between the architectural orders reduces the number of their combinations and permutations. In his view, according to Vasari, an Ionic volute added to the Corinthian order is not a new variety of acceptable Corinthian. It is a hybrid monstrosity that should be discarded. As much as Brunelleschi’s stylistic priorities take place in the polemical arena of the Lives, the aesthetic of restraint also appears in his built work and that of his followers. To take but one instance, the Pazzi Chapel, with its rhythmic and disciplined Corinthian capitals and pilasters along with limited ornament, could be read as a battle cry against the riotous excess of the maniera tedesca as seen in the Certosa in Pavia (fig. 4.14). The designer further asserts a hierarchy of the orders, calling on the delicate Corinthian to carry the architrave above, while below the Ionic occurs in the balustrade. While these statements may ring as platitudes, locating their relation to the problem of mobility is critical. Artists such as Niccolò d’Arezzo journey to Florence and experience a gain in style. Brunelleschi in Rome, authorized by his intimate handling of ruins, takes the license to reduce and refine style. With body and hand he sorts, categorizes, and eventually eliminates. Mobility when executed by the appropriate (Florentine) protagonist achieves order and purification.[31]

FIGURE 4.13 “Six Types of Columns and Capitals (Masculine Doric, Feminine Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Attic, and Tuscan).” Woodcut. From Cesare Cesariano, Di Lucio Vitruvio Pollione De architectura libri dece, 1521, c. 62r. Warburg Institute Library, London.

FIGURE 4.14 Design traditionally attributed to Filippo Brunelleschi; design also attributed to Michelozzo di Bartolomeo; completed under Bernardo Rossellino, detail from front elevation of Pazzi Chapel, design c. 1423/24–29; construction 1442–c. 1465. Santa Croce, Florence.

DONATELLO AND UNIVERSAL STYLE

Rome is not the only major artistic center the traveling artist confronts. The Venetian mainland territory of Padua, famed throughout Europe for its university, constitutes another site in Vasari’s topographic imagination. As one sixteenth-century Venetian governor remarked, “Without the studio Padua would not be Padua.” Even so, a tradition of civic encomia also noted the city’s artistic life and monuments. Michele Savonarola’s Libellus de magnifics ornamentis regie civitatis Padue (c. 1446) praises artists once active in Padua, among them Guariento, Giusto, Giotto, and Altichiero. He also portrays the Basilica of Sant’Antonio, commonly known as the Santo, in evocative detail, comparing the interior to a labyrinth due to its intricate network of staircases, corridors and pathways. As described in Bernardino Scardeone’s Historiae urbis Patavii (1560), a work whose readers included Vasari and Philip Sidney, Padua boasted copious ancient statuary, classical inscriptions, places of worship and relics, aside from illustrious painters, sculptors, architects, goldsmiths, and calligraphers. Conveying this sense of cultural abundance is the frontispiece’s view that tightly compresses lead roofs, domes, and towers within a seal-like oval frame (fig. 4.15).[32]

FIGURE 4.15 “PATAVIUM.” Woodcut (200 × 167 mm). In Bernardino Scardeone, De Antiquitate Urbis Patavii, 1560.

It is to this dense artistic and urban milieu that “Donatello da Fiorença,” as he was called in contemporary documents, would journey in 1443. Among the significant commissions he executed for the Santo were a bronze crucifix (1444-49) and a complex ensemble for the high altar composed of life-size statuary and relief panels (completed 1450). Just outside the basilica, Donatello realized the Gattamelata (1444-53), a bronze equestrian statue that commemorated the captain general of the Venetian forces Erasmo da Narni (fig. 4.16). These works would after their completion eventually penetrate Paduan cartographic representations. In a city view printed in Jacopo da Foresti’s world chronicle, Donatello’s equestrian monument assumes a prominence and scale comparable to that of a civic palace (fig. 4.17). The Florentine artist’s contribution to this northern Italian cityscape also appears in local sources. Even before the Santo altar complex was finished, records dated 23 April 1448 note payments for a temporary wooden construction “to show the design of the altar to foreigners,” a statement that refers to the Santo’s importance as a destination for pilgrims. In turn, Savonarola compares Donatello’s equestrian statue to a triumphant Caesar, while Scardeone reproduces the artist’s signature located beneath the horse’s front hooves in his collection of the city’s noteworthy inscriptions (fig. 4.18). Although Vasari had portrayed in Part I northern Italian connoisseurs possessing outmoded taste, the Paduans in Donatello’s Life now express distinct appreciation for his style and more generally, the modern manner. Amazed by the Florentine artist’s skills, the Paduans “did their utmost to make him their fellow-citizen, and sought to detain him with every sort of endearment.”[33]

FIGURE 4.16 Donatello, Gattamelata, 1444–53. Bronze statue, marble base on limestone pedestal, statue (340 × 390 cm). Pedestal and base (780 × 410 cm). Piazza del Santo, Padua.

FIGURE 4.17 “Padoua citta preclarissima.” Woodcut (141 × 81 mm). In Jacobus Philippus Forestus Bergomensis, Supplementum, Supplementi delle Croniche . . . , 1553.

FIGURE 4.18 Transcribed inscriptions from Bernardino Scardeone, De antiquitate urbis Patavii, 1560.

Given how closely these sources attempt to bind Donatello and Padua, how is the artist’s experience in the Veneto elaborated in the Lives? If mobility to a city establishes an intimate bond with both artists and monuments, how then does Vasari shape Donatello’s rapport with a region that lies far beyond Tuscany and by implication, positive stylistic norms? Embarking on this path of inquiry does not presuppose that Vasari diminishes Donatello’s presence in Florence. In fact, Vasari duly notes the artist’s ties to the city, as if the artist’s allegiance needs to be confirmed before he is allowed to wander. His Life forthrightly begins: “Donato was born in the year 1383 in the city of Florence, and by its citizens and its artists was for the most part called Donatello, and in many works he signed himself in this way.” The brief statement fastens Donatello’s ties with Florence on several levels: it announces his birthplace; embeds him within a Florentine community of citizens and artists, a move reinforced by the presence of possessive pronouns; and finally, it declares that he assumed the diminutive sobriquet of “Donatello” conferred by that community through the public announcement of his signature.[34]

Later on in the biography, Vasari further accentuates the inhabitance of Donatello’s works in Florence. They are spread throughout the city, in S. Croce, the Baptistery, the Mercato Vecchio, Or San Michele, and the Cathedral, along with its bell tower. In identifying the location of Donatello’s sculptures, Vasari draws heavily upon Albertini’s guidebook Memoriale di molte statue e picture sono nella incylta cipta di Florentia (1510). In his dedication, Albertini states that he has organized his guidebook according to the city’s four quarters to spare the time of those who have come to see la bella patria. Vasari, by contrast, adopts a different method for his topographical rendition of Donatello’s sculptures. He guides the reader from the city’s eastern end at S. Croce to the Cathedral, and from these public monuments proceeds to describe the works found in the private residences of the Medici, Pazzi, and Martelli families. This virtual itinerary demonstrates the extent to which Donatello’s work has saturated the urban space of Florence, from outskirts to the city center, from façades into the interiors of private homes.[35]

Donatello might thus be said (or accused) to have not one, but two or several patrias, one where he was born, trained and works (Florence), others where he achieves further honors (Padua). Citing Cicero, Scardeone declared that this dual allegiance was often seen in distinguished men: Cato was a Roman citizen but also a native son of Tusculum. But the apparent tension between Donatello as a Florentine sculptor active in Padua dissolves upon closer inspection. Unlike Brunelleschi, who peruses and touches the physical vestiges of ancient Rome, Donatello has virtually no interaction with Paduan artistic life or monuments. In Vasari’s account of the Gattamelata, the commission, technical execution, and realization of stylistic aspects in bronze occur in speedy succession. Surging like a battering ram in Vasari’s prose, these deeds are due to Donatello and him alone. Even in the rare instance when the sculptor does look at local works of art, he cannot but fail in departing from their stylistic guidelines. A chaplain requests Donatello to execute a St. Sebastian in wood, offering as the prototype a sculpture that was “old and awkward” (vecchio e goffo). Striving to imitate the subpar exemplum to placate the patron’s wishes, Donatello nonetheless realizes a superior version with “his goodness and usual skill.”[36]

FIGURE 4.19 Lombard illuminator, “Artisans in Their Workshops,” fifteenth century, from Libro De Sphaera, Ms a.X.2.14=Lat.209, Biblioteca Estense, Modena.

Looming large in Donatello’s Life is what is left unspoken, what Wolfgang Iser refers to as blanks, those “unseen joints of the text ... that prompt ideation on the reader’s part.” A curious examiner then might seek to lay bare the mortar between the sculptor’s journey and the spontaneous, unaided realization of bronze works. Donatello’s self-sufficiency, his indifference to the Paduan artistic landscape comes into conflict with an array of typological models and comparative material. For the Gattamelata monument, Donatello most likely relied on northern Italian examples of equestrian statuary, the Este Monument in Ferrara, Pisanello’s drawings and medals that represent horses, not to mention antique examples of the genre, the Regisole in Pavia, or the bronze horses gracing the façade of San Marco in Venice. During his decade-long sojourn in Padua, Donatello himself may have assembled a study workshop of sorts which brought together coins, drawings, gemstones, and casts, and humanist circles possibly congregated to discuss these small-scale antique objects. The reader also must disbelieve that Donatello, as Vasari implies, single-handedly cast enormous bronze works. As an illuminated miniature makes plain, northern Italian centers, particularly Padua, possessed a long tradition of manual expertise in metalwork which included casting, surface finishing, and embellishing (fig. 4.19). According to records documenting the progress for the Santo sculptures and Gattamelata, Donatello drew upon and interacted with an extensive team of craftsmen of differing nationalities and expertise. They included not only the local Paduans Niccolò Pizzolo, Bartolommeo Bellano, and Giampiero da Padova. The very names of the other craftsmen and specialists indicate their diverse points of origins and professions: Zuan da Pixa (Pisa), Urbano da Cortona, Polo de Antonio da Raguxi (Ragusa), Luixe de la Zuecha spizial (apothecary), Zuan Magnan ferarulo (ironworker), to name but a few. As the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli would remark around a century later, Donatello always had some eighteen to twenty assistants on hand; otherwise “he would never have completed the altar of St. Anthony in Padua, together with other works.”[37]

If Vasari passes over in silence Donatello’s link to a network of artistic and personal associations, it does not follow that he is an insensitive viewer. The authority that Vasari so beguilingly holds is due to his apt language that captures the more salient aspects of Donatello’s style. In the Santo panels he underscores their “beautiful and varied compositions with such variety [copia] of fantastic figures and diminishing perspectives.” Prominent indeed in these works are figural abundance, variety, and perspectival constructions. In the composition The Miracle of the Newborn Child participants in profile, three-quarters, and inverted poses converge toward the hanging canopy as they listen to the baby declare his parentage out loud (fig. 4.20). The contrast between gilding and bronze scatter light and accent the depth of the foreshortened ceiling’s coffers and arches. Spatial representation becomes even more pronounced in other panels, such as in the Miracle of the Wrathful Son whose perspective construction verges on the didactic. Of course, aside from mentioning figural variety and diminishing perspectives Vasari does not go into any further detail about these bas-reliefs. Had he not examined these works, he may have simply been extrapolating from Donatello’s other relief compositions that demonstrate a similar concern with dense figural groups and foreshortening (fig. 4.21).[38]

FIGURE 4.20 Donatello, High Altar of the Santo, Relief Showing the Miracle of the Newborn Child, 1446–50. Bronze (57 × 123 cm). Santo, Padua.

FIGURE 4.21 Donatello, The Ascension with Christ Giving the Keys to St Peter, 1428–30. Carved marble in low relief (40.9 × 114.1 × 60.5 cm). Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Vasari’s tantalizingly brief though favorable assessment of the Santo narrative panels reiterates the dilemma that pits regional sympathies against historical progression. Aside from the sculptor’s work in Florence, Donatello is active on a relatively wide geographic stage. A Genoese patron requests a bronze bust sufficiently light so as to facilitate its transport. Vasari also recounts that Donatello exports sarcophagus sculptures to Naples, executes the famous pulpit in Prato, carves a tabernacle in Rome, and realizes panels for the Baptistery in Siena, among other locations. That Donatello achieves these works outside Florence raises questions about Vasari’s localization of style. In principle, the visual arts should progress steadily over time toward the terza maniera. Donatello’s Life is placed after the biographies of “lesser” sculptors such as Jacopo della Quercia and Niccolò d’Arezzo. The position in the sequence suggests greater proximity to the maniera moderna, embodied above all by Michelangelo. Yet within Donatello’s Life, this onward march toward a more perfect style becomes endangered. Taking the assumption that later works demonstrate more artistic maturity, it would follow that Donatello’s works in Padua would be more stylistically advanced than those in Florence. The possible inference that Donatello’s more exceptional works are found outside Florence would challenge the bond between work of art and patria, a union that Vasari takes great pains to uphold.[39]

Due to this three-way struggle between style, historical progression, and place, Vasari repeatedly claims that Donatello exists outside his time. In the preface to Part II, after delineating the characteristics of the artists of the second age, he states: “But although he was in their times, I have not completely made up my mind about Donato, whether I desired to place him among those of the third [age], since his works compare with the ancient good ones: I will say that in this respect one can call him the rule [regola] for the others, for having only in himself all the parts that are scattered piecemeal among many; since he brought motion to his figures, giving them a certain liveliness [vivacità] and immediacy [prontezza] that can exist in modern works and similarly, as I have said, in ancient ones.”[40]

Donatello’s anomalous temporal position enforces rather than weakens the scheme of ever advancing style since he is “a normative figure, a rule [regola] for his age.” Yet by extending the relevance of his style beyond the boundaries of his time, Vasari suggests that Donatello’s style is universal, applicable to all historical epochs. The very term universale characterizes Donatello, along with Giotto, Brunelleschi, and Masaccio toward the end of the latter’s Life. Vasari also employs the term universale to comprehend artistic worth in respect to time and space alike, a usage consonant with the growing genre of universal histories in the early modern period. Donatello’s privileged status that allows him to surpass the boundaries of historical epochs correspondingly permits him to transcend the bonds of geography as well. Exceptional figures are granted the license to extend beyond their expected frames of reference. Their contributions to art pertain to all ages and places.[41]

To stress the universal acceptance of Donatello’s style, Vasari describes the reactions of audiences in Florence and Padua with similar terms. In the Calvacanti Annunciation in Santa Croce, Donatello “demonstrated so much facility and mastery in that work that it does not fail to amaze.” Astonishment (stupore) also circumscribes the Paduan response to the equestrian statue of Gattamelata: Donatello “not only amazed he who saw it then, but every person who can see it at the present.” So too does Donatello’s altar in the Santo in Padua evoke the reaction of wonder: “The stories of S. Antony of Padua, which are in low relief, [were] executed with so much judgment that the excellent men in that art remained marveled and amazed.” The concept of stupore crosses geographic boundaries, flattening any differences in regional response to works of art to create a broad plane that coordinates appreciation of Donatello’s style.[42]

IMITATION AND AMNESIA

Donatello reigns supreme, irrespective of time or place, immune from local “influence,” be it in the form of persons or works of art. Vasari does, however, acknowledge the Florentine artist’s impact on the Paduan sculptor Bartolomeo Bellano. Imitation characterizes the relationship between foreign master and native pupil: “So great is the force of copying [forza del contraffare]... that things copied well often appear to be those of the master.” Likewise, Bellano, or Vellando of Padua, as he is called, studied so much the style and method (la maniera e il fare) of Donatello that “he remained in Padua, his patria, heir to Donatello’s skill [virtù].” In the first statement, model and copy, the act of imitation and its effects, are the chief characters. In the second, foreign master (Donatello) and native student (Bellano) stand in, respectively, for these roles. Bellano’s subscription to the foreign model renders him subordinate to his Florentine master, an “heir”—another term that emphasizes the act of receiving—who remains tied to his artistically inferior patria. As Vasari elsewhere states, the act of contraffare is certainly necessary. But it is in and of itself insufficient “to arrive at the perfection of art.” Yet Bellano fails in even equaling the style of Donatello. Deploying a spatial metaphor of ascent, Vasari claims the viewer can recognize in Bellano’s works “an extreme desire to arrive to the level of Donatello, to which nevertheless he did not arrive, it being a place too lofty with a most difficult art.” The man of letters Pomponius Gauricus put it more bluntly in his treatise on sculpture (1504): Bellano was ineptus artifex, a clumsy artist.[43]

FIGURE 4.22 Donatello, David with the Head of Goliath, begun c. 1459. Bronze, height (185 cm). Museo nazionale del Bargello, Florence.

FIGURE 4.23 Bellano, David with the Head of Goliath, c. 1470–80. Gilt bronze, height (28.6 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of C. Ruxton Love Jr., 1964 (64.304.1).

This is not the sole instance when Bellano the Paduan concedes to a Florentine counterpart. Later in his Life we read that along with Verrocchio, Bellano receives the commission in Venice to realize the equestrian statue commemorating the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni. But Verrocchio, “knowing himself, as indeed he was, a better master than Bellano,” becomes infuriated at the news of the shared commission: the work should be his and his alone. Like his forebear Donatello, who dropped and smashed a bronze bust in a thousand pieces due to the ignorance of a foreign Genoese patron, Verrocchio destroys his model due to the Venetian authorities’ presumption. The Florentine artist returns home only to regain the commission and return to Venice, his payment doubled. By contrast, a highly displeased yet resigned Bellano leaves Venice “without making a fuss or being resentful in any way.” He returns to Padua, content “with the works he had made and with being loved and honored, as he always was, in his homeland.”[44]

Vasari reinforces the dichotomy that pits superior center and its mobile artists (Florence / Donatello) against inferior periphery and stagnant pupils (Padua / Bellano). Or so it seems. When taken from a broader perspective, the rapport between regions and their artists is more intricate. Bellano may indeed be a Paduan beyond all measure, forever in Donatello’s shadow. Even Scardeone with his strong Paduan affiliations calls Bellano the Florentine master’s dilectus discipulus, his “beloved student.” It does not follow, however, that Bellano remains tethered to his native city. As Vasari himself relates, Bellano executed prestigious commissions far beyond the Veneto. He supposedly travels to Rome during the reign of the Venetian Pope Paul II, realizing there a bust of the pontiff and designing a staircase for the Palazzo Venezia. In Perugia, he casts a monumental full-length statue of the Pope, once placed outside the cathedral of S. Lorenzo. Documents external to the Lives chart Bellano’s wide-ranging mobility. In October 1456 he was probably in Florence because payments made in connection with Donatello’s bronze group Judith and Holofernes refer to “Bartolomeo di Belano da Padova.” Further afield, Bellano along with Gentile Bellini journeyed to the Ottoman court in response to Sultan Mehmet II’s request for a component painter and sculptor. His testament dated 7 September 1479, drawn up before his departure, forthrightly states, “I, Bartolommeo Bellano . . . sculptor of Padua will go to Constantinople.” Given the Veneto’s ecclesiastical, mercantile, and diplomatic links throughout the Italian peninsula and the larger Mediterranean basin, a “peripheral” artist such as Bellano lead a cosmopolitan career.[45]

As for Bellano’s failure to approach Donatello’s style, here too does Vasari’s regional polemic stand on unstable ground when confronted with visual evidence. Due to irretrievable losses of such monumental works as the statue of Pope Paul II, Bellano’s critical reception necessarily depends upon his surviving oeuvre that includes, among other pieces, small bronzes. Their scale and undeniable reference to Donatello have often reinforced the perception of Bellano as a derivative and lesser imitator. Yet what one discerns in these objects is an accentuation of certain features in Donatello’s prototypes (figs. 4.22 and 4.23). Though alluding to the Florentine artist’s rendition of the subject, Bellano in his David adorns the hilt with volutes and greatly widens the blade’s width. The sword’s enhanced presence relative to the David’s contrapposto figure emphasizes all the more the biblical narrative of the giant’s death. Cast, sharpened, and gilded, the sword may even point to the craft of metalwork itself. Amplification recurs in Bellano’s Old Testament relief panels for the Santo (fig. 4.24). In the Samson destroying the temple, Bellano takes the spatial representation and figural diversity Vasari identified in Donatello’s compositions one step further. Degrees of relief and, most prominently, the running frieze of dolphins, “the swiftest of all other creatures,” as Pliny the Elder described them, tumble down, disintegrating and therefore alluding to a once coherent spatial structure. Bellano shrinks the size of figures, thus increasing the number and variety of men, women, and children in diverse postures. Focusing on a particular dramatic moment, Bellano agitates and animates this diversity that provokes the expression of utter panic.[46]

FIGURE 4.24 Bellano, Samson Destroys the Temple of the Philistines, 1484–90. Bronze. Basilica del Santo, Padua.

No matter how much Bellano pursues a style of aggregation, in Vasari’s view it would be inconceivable for an artist in Padua even to approximate Donatello’s work. But Donatello himself is vulnerable, especially when separated from his homeland. He may be immune to foreign “influence,” but this resistance has limits. In Padua, Donatello is “held as a miracle and praised by every intellectual.” But in spite of this continual praise, the sculptor decides to repatriate. If he stayed away longer, “all he knew he would have forgotten.” In Florence, the city Dante famously censured in the Inferno due to her malicious citizens, Donatello receives incessant criticism (biasmo). And such criticism, Vasari reasons, “would give him reason to study, and consequently, greater glory.”[47]

Mobility’s detrimental effects upon memory arise once again. In the preface to the Lives, the commotion of artists and objects around the Mediterranean hinder the writing of a secure history record. In Donatello’s case, protracted time away from Florence triggers amnesia that threatens memory of his acquired knowledge. Like the cutting of Samson’s hair, removal from Florence is debilitating. A Florentine artist, Vasari suggests, must maintain ties to his homeland since there and only there does the act of making work in beneficial dialogue with responses of praise and blame. The artist’s workshop is not an insulated place where handiwork is executed in silence. The doors of the Florentine bottega are open to critical appraisal instrumental in achieving stylistic excellence. The episode of Donatello’s mobility thus offers an occasion to discern Vasari’s mnemonic topography. If Rome and Florence are the locations where great deeds of the past are revived and remembered, then places beyond this focal point are where Lethe, that mythical river of forgetfulness, meanders and flows.

TRIUMPH, RIDICULE, MURDER

The honors that a Florentine artist such as Donatello enjoys are not restricted to the Veneto. Like an epicenter of a cataclysmic event, Florence is the origin of seismic waves that propagate throughout Europe. This is certainly true in the case of movable works of art. In an expanse of text that stretches from the Lives of Jacopo della Quercia to Luca Signorelli, Florence and Tuscany emerge as a bustling export hub. Michelozzo sends architectural designs to Jerusalem and Rome along with objects in marble and bronze to Genoa; Filarete and Antonio Rossellino dispatch their works to France; Perugino’s paintings “filled not only Florence and Italy, but France, Spain and many other countries,” much to the profit of merchants. So frequently does Vasari mention these portable goods that the preeminence of Florentine art might be said to depend on the mobilization of “home-grown” products.[48]

When the Tuscan artist himself works abroad, the rhetoric of propagation becomes all the more marked. At the Neapolitan court, for instance, artistic activity is largely a Florentine affair. Never mind that King Alfonso I patronized the Spanish artist Jacomart and the Dalmatian sculptor Francesco Laurana in addition to possessing works by the Netherlandish painters Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden. In Vasari’s account, Florentine artists shape the urban fabric of Naples ex nihilo. Giuliano da Maiano designs for Alfonso I the now-destroyed Palazzo del Poggio Reale along with its fountains and courtyards. His compatriots whom Vasari calls Pietro del Donzello fiorentino and his brother Polito paint “the entire palace inside and outside with histories of the said King.” Outside the palace’s confines, Giuliano designs for public squares and noble residences fountains that punctuate the city’s subterranean waterways. In other built work attributed to him, Giuliano exports domestic architecture characteristic of his native city. The Palazzo Como, highly reminiscent of the Palazzo Strozzi with its rusticated and ashlar façade and monolithic structure, seems to have been lifted from Florence and inserted directly within the Neapolitan cityscape (fig. 4.25).[49]

Aside from fashioning Naples’s metropolitan face, Giuliano is responsible for Alfonso I’s architectural language of triumph. Not only does Vasari mention the architect’s design of the Porta Capuana with its “many trophies, varied and beautiful.” Giuliano is erroneously credited with the most significant fifteenth-century monument in the city, the white marble triumphal arch that adorns the Angevin Castelnuovo fortress (fig. 4.26). It was in fact the Catalan Guillermo Sagrega, not Giuliano, who was the protomagister for the Castelnuovo arch. Sagrega also oversaw a team whose members’ names indicate their diverse geographic origins: Pietro da Milano, Paolo Romano, Isaia da Pisa, and Andrea dell’Aquila. Nonetheless, Vasari attributes to Giuliano alone the arch’s ornamental excess, the “infinite number of figures” that narrate the “marble histories and several victories of that king” (fig. 4.27). So grateful is Alfonso I to Giuliano for these services that upon his death in Naples, the monarch bestows elaborate obsequies that include fifty men in mourning and a marble tomb.[50]

FIGURE 4.25 Circle of Giuliano da Maiano, Palazzo Como, c. 1485–90. Naples.

FIGURE 4.26 Pere Joan, Pietro di Martino da Milano, Francesco Laurana, and others, detail of the lower half of the Triumphal Arch of Alfonso I of Naples, c. 1452–58 and 1465–71. Marble. Castelnuovo, Naples.

FIGURE 4.27 Pere Joan, Pietro di Martino da Milano, Francesco Laurana, and others, detail of soldiers from the Triumphal Arch of Alfonso I of Naples, c. 1452–58 and 1465–71. Marble. Castelnuovo, Naples.

From crafting triumphal imagery for a ruler, the Florentine traveling artist himself arrives at a foreign court in triumph. Vasari recounts that Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, hears Florentine artists in his employ praise the work of their compatriot, Benedetto da Maiano, Giuliano’s brother. Corvinus summons Benedetto, who while still in Florence on behalf of the monarch executes a pair of chests “inlaid with wood with the most difficult mastery and incredible labor.” Artist and works of art then undertake the journey to the Hungarian court and, akin to a ruler arriving in triumph, they are duly commended. Not only does Benedetto receive royal honors befitting “a skillful person of fame” from Corvinus himself. When the chests arrive, the king goes to see them “disembarked according to his wishes and desire, and with trumpets and other sounds holds a festive celebration.”[51]

The artist and work of art receiving a public celebration had surfaced previously in the Life of Cimabue. Admiring crowds of people bear the Rucellai Madonna (actually by Duccio) in procession “with much rejoicing and trumpets.” Even a visiting foreign monarch, Charles of Anjou, is brought to see the enormous panel along with “all the men and women of Florence, with the utmost rejoicing and in the greatest crowd in the world.” In Benedetto’s case, Vasari displaces this public celebration to a foreign court. Mobility from afar combined with the quality of artworks enhance the renown accorded to the artist and his creations. The dimension of sound, from oral reports that diffuse reputations to the heralding fanfare, further heighten the physical presence of artist and object in the reader’s imagination.[52]

Despite the strain of heady triumph, the trumpet blast of fame is hardly everlasting. This is especially so when the mobile artist repatriates. The Life of the Florentine artist Dello Delli demonstrates that honors won abroad are at times disregarded and give rise to mockery. Though he came from humble circumstances, Vasari relates, Dello’s fortunate employment at the Spanish court gains him both wealth and a knighthood. He returns to Florence “only to show his friends how from so much poverty that had once tormented him he rose to such grand riches.” Yet the Florentines fail twice to recognize Dello’s honors. The first snub occurs when the general Filippo Spano de gli Scolari, victorious against the Ottoman Turks, protests that honors received abroad should remain exclusive to himself. Next, Dello undergoes public humiliation when, wearing luxurious brocade, he rides a horse and preens around the Vacchereccia, the goldsmiths’ quarter, only to receive the scorn of those artisans who were once his friends in youth. “Envy was no less active against him in his own country,” Vasari explains, “than malice had been formerly when he was very poor.”[53]

The lambasting of Dello’s privileges won abroad recalls the mockery directed against Gentile Bellini in the aftermath of his sojourn at the Ottoman court. Sultan Mehmet II granted the Venetian artist honors that included a knighthood and a golden chain, a mark of prestige usually awarded to persons of high ranks such as ambassadors. Gentile’s full-length portrait, executed by either himself or Giovanni Bellini, proudly depicts him wearing the golden chain and scarlet toga with the maniche dogali, wide sleeves with linings usually worn by the patrician class (fig. 4.28). It was due to such aggrandizement that Gentile’s contemporary the satirical poet Andrea Michieli called the painter an “ignoramus” and “the arrogant knight of the Golden Spur.” Vasari colludes in this pattern of grudging behavior, though in his case, the sultan is the target of slight disdain. Drawing upon the widespread and erroneous notion that Islamic civilizations forbade all pictorial representations, Vasari claims that Gentile Bellini’s realistic style overwhelms Mehmet II, “unable to believe that a mortal man [could] represent the objects of nature so vividly.” The sultan’s inexperience with figural representation and astonishment recalls other “primitive” viewers of Western art, such as the North African pirates who release Fra Filippo Lippi from his captivity due to his realistic portrayal of them. Mehmet II, who bestows the greatest honors to a Venetian painter, is a patron who ultimately lacks knowledge of painting altogether.[54]

FIGURE 4.28 Detail from Gentile Bellini and Giovanni Bellini, Saint Mark Preaching in Alexandria, c. 1504–7. Oil on canvas (347 × 770 cm). Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

For both Florentine and Venetian artists, triumph abroad can be met with derision, either at home or later in the harsh arena of their fortuna critica with its attendant regional biases. However caustic the domestic reception of honors received at foreign courts, this response seems benign when compared to the mortal consequences for artists who transmit foreign artistic techniques into Florence. An exception to the rule that Tuscan artists are shielded from foreign “influence” is the introduction of oil painting. The absorption of this technique into Italy appears at first to be a case of untroubled mobility and smooth acquisition of alien knowledge. As Vasari recounts, Netherlandish artists were the first to develop the skill of applying onto panel successive layers of pigments bound with oil which achieve the effects of vivid coloring, beauty, and harmony. Patrons such as the Medici, the Duke of Urbino, and King Alfonso I prized paintings by Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling, Dieric Bouts, Petrus Christus, Justus of Ghent, and Hugo van der Goes, and their works populated the collections in Florence, Urbino, and Naples. Vasari calls the technique a “secret,” and despite the oils’ pungent odor, other artists could not decipher or replicate the process. It is only when the Sicilian artist Antonello da Messina journeys to Bruges that the knowledge of painting in oils can be released to an Italian artist. The artist must travel and be on site to loosen what Pamela Long has termed “proprietary attitudes towards craft knowledge.” Antonello’s behavior affirms the sixteenth-century physician Paracelsus’s defense of wandering for the pursuit of learning. “The arts are not all confined within one’s fatherland,” Paracelsus reasoned, “but they are distributed over the whole world ... hence they must be gathered together, sought out and captured, where they are.”[55]

As Vasari and later interpreters of Antonello’s mobility suggest, van Eyck graciously conveys these secrets to his Italian counterpart. The nineteenth-century Belgian historian painter Joseph-François Ducq’s rendition portrays a harmonious encounter between the two artists: van Eyck dressed in elegant robes and painting the Van der Paele Madonna receives Antonello who, as Vasari claims, brings “presents of many drawings in the Italian manner and other things” (fig. 4.29). The studio becomes a trading zone of sorts where native artist imparts skills, while foreign visitor offers his host examples of the presumably higher knowledge of disegno.[56]

FIGURE 4.29 Detail from Joseph-François Ducq, Antonello da Messina in the Studio of Jan van Eyck. Oil on canvas (37 × 47 cm). Inv. 991.22, Musée de Brou, Bourg-en Bresse.

Like Padre Resta’s diagram that deliberately charts the transmission of the technique, Vasari proceeds to chart the successors to the art of oil painting. Antonello returns to Italy to “allow [his] country to participate in this useful and beneficial secret.” While in Venice, he transmits the skill to Domenico Veneziano. In turn, during a stay in Florence, Domenico instructs Andrea del Castagno “in the order and method of coloring in oil, which in Tuscany was not in use.” Painting in oils does not pass exclusively to Florence: Vasari states that Galasso Ferrarese learns the technique in Venice and “brought it to Ferrara, such that later he made infinite figures in that style, that is spread throughout Ferrara in many churches.” Even so, it is in Florence where this smooth chain of transmitting technique breaks, and what is more, ends in dramatic fashion. The incident in question is Andrea del Castagno’s supposed murder of Domenico Veneziano. Though highly proficient in disegno and the difficulties of art, such as foreshortening, Andrea lacks the skill of painting in oils. Feigning friendship, though envious in reality, he secures the oil technique thanks to Domenico’s tutelage. Shortly thereafter, Andrea hides behind a street corner waiting to ambush his rival. With weapons made of lead, he smashes Domenico’s lute and stomach, beats his head, and leaves his colleague on the ground to die.[57]

Vasari’s anecdote is fabricated: Domenico, in fact, outlived his murderer by four years. But there were certainly documented instances when artists were murdered out of envy. In the autumn of 1577, the engraver Michelangelo Marrelli, formerly in the employ of the renowned print-maker Antoine Lafréry, stood accused of killing his colleague Gerolamo da Modena due to professional jealousy after the latter’s disfigured corpse was found in the Tiber River near the Ponte Sisto. The physical conflict between Andrea and Domenico, however, is best understood not as a matter of historical error. As has often been noted, the fatal altercation is a metaphor for the regional polemic between Florentine disegno and Venetian colorito. The brutal result of this conflict, Domenico’s murder obliterates oil technique’s association with a foreign location. Foreign craft becomes absorbed in a native artistic repertoire. Vasari observes, for instance, that in his paintings for the chapel of the hospital Santa Maria Nuova, Andrea the Florentine artist demonstrates his ability “to handle colors in oil as well as Domenico, his rival.” Furthermore, the painters “acquiring and amplifying the skill” of oil painting are either Florentine or central Italian: Perugino, Leonardo, and Raphael.[58]

ARTIFEX VIATOR

Vasari modulates his portrayal of artists’ travels such that the act of mobility takes on highly inflected forms and patterns. The traveling artist competes, makes sense of the chaos of ruins, instructs local pupils, and escapes from overly prolonged sojourns away from his homeland. Artists experience a variety of responses—from acclaim, to mockery, to physical harm—when active abroad. In Part II, Vasari offers a further type of travel, that of allegorical pilgrimage. As always, he selects a character, in this case the fifteenth-century painter Benozzo Gozzoli, to personify this strain of mobility. With the brevity and tone of a biblical parable, he introduces the artist’s Life: “He who walks with toil upon the road of virtue, although it is (as they say) rocky and full of thorns, at the end of the ascent, finally finds himself upon a wide plain, with all longed-for happiness. And looking down below, seeing the mean passages taken by him with peril, he thanks God for having led him to safety .... In this way, restoring past troubles with the joy of the present good, he strains without labor to make known to those who look at him how heat, ice, sweat, hunger, thirst, and discomforts that torment him in acquiring virtue, free others from poverty and lead to that secure and tranquil state, where the weary Benozzo with great satisfaction rested.”[59]

Highly reminiscent of Petrarch’s arduous climb up Mount Ventoux, this convoluted passage with its intertwining clauses and deviating gerundive phrases befits the traveler’s tortuous progress. In figuring artistic practice as a journey, Vasari draws on a metaphor that extends back to the origins of theoretical discussion about artistic invention. Ancient texts such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric represented artistic invention as a trajectory through metaphorical space. The discourse on techne (craft, art, or skill) was enmeshed in a web of spatial metaphors: poros (means, passageway), hodos (way, road), and topos (place). Vasari’s predecessors made ample use of this imagery. Cennini asserts that what leads the artist through a metaphorical gate of triumph is the practice of copying from nature, described as “the most perfect guide you might have and the best helm.” Leonardo continues this comparison between imitation and a journey, yet adds knowledge of science as the crucial element of the artist’s equipment: “Those who devote themselves to practice without science are like sailors who put to sea without rudder or compass and who can never be certain where they are going.” Specifically, he cites perspective as “the guide and portal, and without this nothing is done well.” At the far end of the early modern spectrum, the simile between painting and a journey reaches an explicit form in Marco Boschini’s La carta del navegar pitoresco (1660). As the title and subtitle explain, Boschini’s work professes to be “the map of pictorial navigation. Dialogue ... divided into eight winds which lead the Venetian boat across the high seas of painting.”[60]

Artists even fashioned themselves as voyagers. Notably, the most evocative examples pertain to artists north of the Alps, perhaps due to the accomplishment of undertaking the difficult and costly rite of passage to the Italian peninsula. Maarten van Heemskerck’s Self-Portrait with the Colosseum (1553) in which the painter commemorates his sojourn in Rome counts among the best-known portraits of “artist-as-voyager.” The phenomenon of artists representing or being represented as travelers in other regions also occurred in the printed book. The architect and ambassador Jean Pélerin refers to himself in his De artificiali perspectiva (1505) as Viator, an epithet that alludes to his extensive travels throughout France. The woodcuts in his treatise replicate monuments in Angers and Paris, among other places. In the print showing the courtyard of his own home stands a “Carreta Pelegrina” with a verse inscription on the hardships and pleasures of travel (fig. 4.30). The theme of the artist as wayfarer through both geographic and allegorical space is especially acute in Hendrick Goltzius’s print of the Tabula Cebetis (1591-92). The engraving saturated with figures ostensibly represents a Stoic interpretation of life as a journey winding between virtue and vice. Goltzius inserts portraits of himself and those of his workshop amidst the print’s many protagonists. Included as well are volcanic landscape features that refer to his own southern Italian journeys, envisioned as remedies for poor health, to the Solfatara volcano in Pozzuoli. Interweaving personal travel account and meditation upon moral pilgrimage, the print becomes what Tristan Weddigen has called a “biotopography.”[61]

FIGURE 4.30 Jean Pèlerin, “Carreta Pelegrina.” Woodcut. From De artificiali perspectiva, 1505.

Why the portrait of the artist as traveler especially manifests itself in northern visual culture merits further investigation. And yet, the vita hominis peregrinatio or homo viator, the idea of human life as a pilgrimage culminating in heavenly rest upon death, is a pan-European phenomenon, crossing the domains of both word and image. Vasari’s description of Gozzoli resonates with the “cammin di nostra vita” from Dante’s Commedia in addition to Christian interpretations of Ulysses as a wandering soul longing to return to heaven, the lost patria. As Hugo Tucker has shown, this idea of the homo viator pervades early modern literature and printed editions of earlier works: the Tabula Cebetis (1490s), Guillaume Du Bellay’s Peregrinatio humana (1509), Guillaume de Deguileville’s Le roman des trois pèlerinages (c.1515), and Marguerite de Navarre’s Les Prisons (1547) are but a few instances that interpret the homo viator from Christian, Stoic, or Neoplatonic perspectives.[62]

The theme of the homo viator was hardly confined to the textual realm. The sequence of woodcuts in Fra Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) portrays the dream journey of the main protagonist, Poliphilo, traveling through a landscape littered with fantastical architectural ruins as he attempts to reunite with his love, Polia. In one of the first woodcuts (fig. 4.31), a dense conglomeration of gnarled branches conveys Poliphilo’s immersion within “a woodland full of briars and brambles,” while the rhythmic repetition of tree trunks enhance his motion through the forest. The imagery of the homo viator also appears in the scores of emblem books printed throughout the sixteenth century, such as in Gilles Corrozet’s Hecatomgraphie (1540) and Georgette de Montenay’s Emblemes, ou, Devises chrétiennes (1571) that includes an engraving showing a wayfarer in pilgrims’ garb journeying to “the celestial city” (fig. 4.32). Ripa’s Iconologia overo Descrittione dell’Imagini universali (1593) recommends the theme of Errore be illustrated with wayfarer bearing a staff since “all the works either of the body or of our intellect are a voyage or a pilgrimage, after which, not bending, we hope to arrive towards happiness. This Our Lord Christ showed us.”[63]

In likening artists’ labor to a spiritual journey, Vasari modulates the homo viator into artifex viator. To enhance the comparison, he applies the topographic metaphor to the progress of style. In the very passage where he likens the arts’ rebirth to a resurrected body, Vasari states that the arts “from a small beginning lead to the summit [la somma altezza] and from this so noble level fell into extreme ruin.” But eventually they “rose again [risalita] in our time.” The image of style’s difficult yet successful ascent pervades the Lives. In the preface to Part II, the arts depart “from a humble beginning ... and finally arrive at the climax of perfection.” Toward Brunelleschi, Donatello, Ghiberti, Uccello, and Masaccio, artists from Vasari’s own time have “a singular obligation to these first ones, who through their labors showed us the true path to reach the supreme level.” Likewise, Vasari begins the preface to Part III by declaring that these exemplars allowed artists from the third age to “rise and lead themselves to the highest perfection [la somma perfezzione], where we have modern works more celebrated and of great value.” A testament to the power of this figurative language a generation later is Raffaele Borghini’s Il Riposo (1584). Here, the sculptor or painter progresses after years of study to the “mountaintop” (alla cima d’un monte), rendering Vasari’s metaphor even more explicitly topographic.[64]

FIGURE 4.31 “Poliphilo in the Hercynian Forest.” Woodcut. From Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499.

FIGURE 4.32 Pierre Woeiriot, “Wanderer.” Engraving. From Emblemes, ou, Devises chrétiennes, 1571.

The summit of this pilgrimage is not a place of superior isolation. True to its etymological origins in the Latin summus, the summit represents the quantity generated from the addition of numerous stylistic terms. Shortly after Vasari declares that the arts have reached their summit in his own day, he defends this claim by enumerating the stylistic qualities—regola, ordine, misura, disegno, grazia—present in the terza maniera. Vasari employs sommo to describe Michelangelo, attributing to the divine artist greatness in all disciplines. Since in Michelangelo the three arts “appear united together, he is revered greatly [sommamente]... such that he deservedly ought to be called singular sculptor, great painter [pittore sommo], and most excellent architect.” Characteristically, Vasari locates this mountaintop in his favored region. God confers Michelangelo upon Florence since “Tuscan minds have always been among other [peoples] highly elevated and great [sommamente]... they being most devoted in their labors in all disciplines above any other people of Italy.” By contrast, artists originating outside of central Italy need to travel to achieve greatness. If they fail to do so, this immobility leaves an indelible stain on their reputation. Correggio would have attained “the highest of levels” (al sommo de gradi) if he had left Lombardy and come to Rome, where he would have improved his style by studying both antiquities and distinguished modern works.[65]

THE SUM OF EXPERIENCE: VARIETÀ

When figured as an allegorical voyage, an artist’s mobility leads him to a summit, the culmination of various stylistic features. In Gozzoli’s case, toils (fatiche) refer not only to the many paintings he realized over his life’s journey. Fatiche also alludes to the diversity of subject matter within those works, a quality signaled through the terms copia or coposità. We might most readily association copia with Gozzoli’s frescoes, begun in 1459, of the Journey of the Magi for the Palazzo Medici’s private chapel. For a more public manifestation of stylistic abundance we must turn to Pisa. Gozzoli’s twenty-four frescoes of the Old and New Testaments in the Camposanto (1468-84), destroyed during World War II, exhibit a plethora of figures, still-life objects, and landscape backdrops. As photographs of the frescoes demonstrate, an ordered compositional framework sets the stage for an almost unruly excess in variety. In The Curse of Canaan, the rhythmic intervals of trees, columns, and pilasters guide the viewer from scene to scene, while myriad groups of men, women, and children in diverse costumes along with animals animate the foreground (fig. 4.33). Diane Cole Ahl has noted how Gozzoli adheres in both dimension and figural saturation to the Camposanto’s existing decorative cycles executed by Piero de Pucci, Taddeo Gaddi, Antonio Veneziano, and Spinello Aretino (fig. 4.34). Gozzoli might thus be understood as accentuating, if not surpassing, the quality of profusion set down by these predecessors and rough contemporaries, notably Ghiberti in the east doors of the Baptistery and further afield, the frescoes of Ghirlandaio and Rosselli in the Sistine Chapel.[66]

Completing these works, Vasari declares, would have required an “army of painters.” But Gozzoli alone brought the paintings—“very abundant (molto copioso) in animals, perspectival renderings, landscapes, and ornaments”—to their finished state. Vasari observes that Gozzoli’s fresco depicting the Flood and Noah’s Ark displays “the most beautiful compositions and abundance offigures [bellissimi componimenti e coposità di figure].” And to underscore Gozzoli’s display of copia, Vasari cites an epigram inscribed on the scene representing Joseph and His Brothers. The verses urge the beholder to look upon the many “birds, fish, and fierce monsters,” and “children, youths, mothers and aged parents / whose faces breathe always with apt expression.” The artist, proclaims the speaker, not nature, “created this resemblance of such varied figures,” declaring that “what Benoxus painted, now lives.”[67]

By interrelating allegorical mobility with copia, Vasari discloses a period way of thinking that stands as an alternative to passive “influence.” In other words, the result of Gozzoli’s pilgrimage through life is his abundance of pictorial knowledge. And as we will see, the relationship between allegorical mobility and copia will extend to include actual travel as well. But for now, a few remarks regarding the parameters of copia as an art critical term: while copia in Gozzoli’s case carries the burden of the traveling artist’s load, this charged word relates to a family of similar concepts. Alongside copia/copiosità, Vasari employs varietà and diversità to signal multifariousness in subject matter and styles. There is, of course, a key difference in these concepts: copia is quantitative, whereas varietà/diversità is qualitative. Nonetheless, the two concepts constitute a pair of fraternal twins. Alberti recognized this when he evoked varietà and copia as a united couple in defining good composition: “That which first gives pleasure in the istoria comes from copiousness and variety of things. In food and in music, novelty and abundance please. . . . So the soul is delighted by all copiousness and variety.” Variety, of course, must temper copiousness. Otherwise, Alberti warns, “it is not composition but dissolute confusion” which painters would create. Even so, the very fact that Alberti deals with the pair copia/varietà in the same compressed passage testifies to their mutual dependence.[68]

FIGURE 4.33 Benozzo Gozzoli, The Curse of Canaan, 1470. Fresco. Camposanto, Pisa.

FIGURE 4.34 Antonio Veneziano, The Return of Saint Rainerius to Pisa, 1384–86. Camposanto, Pisa.

Likewise, in the preface to Part III, the passage where Vasari takes more pains than anywhere else in the Lives to define resonant terms such as regola and ordine, varietà and copia are used in close association. Enumerating the stylistic attributes lacking in the artists of the prima maniera, he includes “the copia of beautiful costumes, the varietà of many bizarre things, grace in colors, the universal knowledge of buildings, and distance and vari età in landscapes.” Copia and varietà function similarly, referring grosso modo to pictorial diversity. There is, of course, no overt suggestion in this passage that copia/varietà is connected the mobility of artists and/or objects. As is often the case in the Lives, certain attitudes toward mobility rise, subside, and reemerge intermittently over the span of Vasari’s opus. We are not encountering period logic or philosophy, but rather a burgeoning field of art criticism about works of art and artistic behavior. Vasari, therefore, predictably resists a degree of logical rigor or consistency in his application of critical terms. The alliance between pictorial diversity and mobility will reach its most explicit articulation only in Part III, specifically with regard to the careers of Raphael and Perino del Vaga. Even so, Vasari tills the ground for this partnership in Part II. He begins to carve out conceptual room within copia/varietà to foreshadow how a style of heterogeneous abundance might be a sanctioned outcome of an artist’s travel.[69]

FIGURE 4.35 Filippino Lippi, Bracket Supporting Marine Creatures Sustaining a Tablet, c. 1488. Black chalk, pen and brown ink, and brown wash (191 × 120 mm). Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence.

What most characterizes Filippino Lippi, the son of the painter Fra Filippo Lippi, for instance, is “his copious invention in painting.” This artist, according to Vasari, was the “first who showed to the moderns the new way of varying costumes which embellished his figures ornately with antique costumes.” Aside from bringing to light grotesques and creating strange caprices, Filippino “never wrought a work in which he did not employ with great study the antique things of Rome.” Vasari enumerates these classical objects and costumes in a dizzying list: “vases, leggings, trophies, banners, helmets and ornaments from temples, headdresses, strange draperies, armor, scimitars, swords, togas, mantles, and many other diverse and beautiful things.” By embedding such variety in his paintings, Filippino “is owed the greatest and perpetual debt for having increased in that area the beauty and ornament of that art.”[70]

Filippino’s fertile imagination is in part responsible for the endless variety in his decorative schemes. At the same time, Vasari intimates this diversity is not only a result of the artist’s mental inventiveness. Intertwined with the production of these many all’antica details is a multifaceted terrestrial mobility. On the most immediate level, the very mention of cose antiche di Roma suggests Filippino had a firsthand knowledge of classical ruins, or he acquired an antique vocabulary by studying such portable media as drawings, prints, medals, or coins. Be it travel abroad or exposure to the foreign at home, Filippino’s approach to the otherness of classical ornament is to consume it whole. Here Vasari draws a distinction between Brunelleschi’s attempt to refine and weed out unruly variations in antique forms and Filippino’s free-wheeling and personal extrapolation from them. With the maniera tedesca safely out of the way, physical displacement can now whet the appetite for wholesale ingestion and expression of variety. Filippino’s drawings after the antique demonstrate an aggregation of figural, ornamental, and architectural details, all executed with a speed that attests to his fluency in this classical language (fig. 4.35). Inserted into an architectural framework of vases, scrolls, and shells, the artist’s drawings in Vasari’s own Libro de’disegni accentuate Filippino’s performance of variety in subject matter, composition, technique, and medium. At the nucleus of these diverse Christian and mythological scenes in ink, pen, and wash is the artist’s woodcut portrait (fig. 4.36).[71]

Departing from the generalities that open Filippino’s Life, Vasari offers specific instances of the artist’s mobility and its aftermath. The artist and his works are among the more mobile protagonists in Part II, with Spoleto, Lucca, Genoa, Bologna, and Hungary cited as destinations where his paintings can be found. Yet predictably enough, Vasari associates none of these locations with the rise of Filippo’s varietà. Instead, Rome is identified, albeit obliquely, as the wellspring of the artist’s diverse style. Unlike in the Life of Brunelleschi, Vasari does not state outright that Filippino investigated and studied antique ruins. Nor does Vasari acknowledge how Filippino embellished his major commission there, the Carafa Chapel in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, with a plethora of grotteschi and all’antica ornament, this despite clear visual evidence that he did (fig. 4.37). It seems at this point, deep in the fifteenth century, that study of classical forms and depositing them in compositions is taken for granted as a key component of an artist’s journey to Rome.[72]

FIGURE 4.36 Giorgio Vasari, page from the Libro de’ disegni, framing and decoration, pen and brown ink and brown wash (597 × 465 mm). Oxford, Christ Church Picture Gallery.

FIGURE 4.37 Filippino Lippi, St. Thomas of Aquinas Confounding the Heretics, 1488–93. Fresco. Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome.

Consequently, the work that exhibits Filippo’s varietà at its utmost, the frescoes for the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, materializes in the wake of the Roman sojourn. To portray the Strozzi Chapel frescoes with their abundant heterogeneity, Vasari resorts to a seemingly interminable list to praise the frescoes, described as “so well executed with art and design that it makes every artist marvel to see the variety of its bizarre things, armed [figures], temples, vases, helmets, armor, trophies, spears, banners, costumes, leggings, head dresses, sacerdotal garments, wrought in such a beautiful way that he deserved the greatest recognition.”[73]

Brunelleschi had restored order and purity to classical ornament; what Filippino draws from the antique is bizzarie, a term that likens the cose antiche di Roma to the realm of the foreign (fig. 4.38). To be sure, Vasari often employs the word bizzaro to indicate a style that goes beyond the boundaries of realistic depiction. This resonant term, however, also applied to unfamiliar visual phenomenon. In 1542, Vasari’s close associate, the humanist and historian Paolo Giovio, requested an intermediary to ask the conquistador Hernán Cortés for a “bizarre idol from Temistitan [Mexico City] to display in my museum, alongside his portrait.” Furthermore, in his compilation of voyage accounts, Ramusio calls Aztec hieroglyphic images as bizzarrie due to their combinations of alien animals, flowers, and peoples “executed in diverse acts and ways.” Granted, each individual element in the Strozzi Chapel—a cornice, capital, or mask—may not seem in and of itself exotic. But in mixing these ingredients in unexpected combinations into a sort of grotesque, Lippi orchestrates a motley variety. He blends textures and media (stone, cloth, metal, ceramic), function (military and religious), and size (from vases to temples). It is tempting to compare Filippino’s bricolage with the additive nature of New World hieroglyphs, available to viewers in Vasari’s own time through such specimens as the Mixtec Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I, once owned by Pope Clement VII, or the Codex Zouche-Nuttall (figs. 4.39 and 4.40). The discourse of bizzaria unexpectedly brings together such highly disparate visual phenomena and underscores how unsettling the fruits of transcultural encounter might be. Moreover, the conceptual tent under which these two images stand—varietà—functions as an index of the biographical and mental event of moving persons and things.[74]

FIGURE 4.38 Filippino Lippi, Saint Philip Driving the Dragon from the Temple, 1497–1502. Fresco. Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence.

FIGURE 4.39 Detail from Filippino Lippi, Saint Philip Driving the Dragon from the Temple, 1497–1502. Fresco. Strozzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence.

The labor of assembling varietà not only wins Filippino’s reputation in his own time. In heralding the artist as “the first who to the moderns showed the new way of varying,” Vasari claims that the value of a collection of these items lies in its status as an encyclopedia or commonplace book designating sources for future generations of artists. In this respect, Vasari’s description of the Strozzi Chapel evokes the long tradition of artists compiling taccuini di viaggi, or travel notebooks. Those of Gentile da Fabriano and Jacopo Bellini and the Codex Escurialensis, for example, contained patterns and models for study, recycling, or adaptation within new compositions. The critical move that Vasari makes is likening the work of art as a supplementary or ersatz “model book.” This, in turn, implies that the work of art might be a site of virtual travel for the stationary viewer as he hunts for motifs and ideas culled from abroad.[75]

Varietà, then, does not function as a static concept whose only worth lies in its pedigree in “high” art theory or dry classical rhetoric. Nor does this word solely refer to diversity in respect to subject matter, color, or gesture. Vasari expands the semantic boundaries of varietà such that it can also refer to the dynamic process of traveling, seeing, studying, collecting, and importing the foreign. There are, however, a number of restrictions imposed upon this process: classical models and/or precedents are permissible points of departure, while those sources originating from lesser artistic regions are deemed inappropriate. This brand of varietà also emerges deep in Part II, suggesting that it will only gain further strength as the Lives progress. Indeed, the biographies which follow Filippino’s Life could to an extent be understood to exemplify anti-models and models of varietà: Vasari criticizes Perugino for his repetitive and dry manner, Pinturicchio paints landscapes alla maniera de’ Fiamminghi in the Belvedere, and Luca Signorelli, after going to Florence to “see the works of masters then alive and those from the past,” proceeds to fresco his famous Apocalypse “with bizarre and capricious invention.”[76]

FIGURE 4.40 Leaf from the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, 1200–1521. Painted deer skin (113.5 × 23.5 cm). British Museum, London.

As Part II comes to a close, varietà emerges as a marked feature of the traveling artist’s style. The path to this term has been tortuous rather than straightforward. From asserting the importance of patria and its generative force, Vasari acknowledges only certain cities possess the resources necessary for artists to realize accredited styles. For artists born outside metropolitan locales, emigration is compulsory. Even when the traveling artist arrives in an approved urban site, such as Brunelleschi in Rome, he may be compelled to adopt a literally hands-on approach to sort through and discard the chaos of visual phenomenon. The establishment of differences between these forms can constitute a usable thesaurus. Yet the act of making distinctions is equally occupied with pointing out what must not be the subject of pictorial imitation. Varietà enfolds within itself this collection of differences. The question, then, becomes how long and to what extent art literature will permit this term to define mobility and its most accomplished effects.

PART II

The Path and Limits of Varietà

Raphael, Prophet Isaiah, detail of fig. 5.3

5 Varietà and the Middle Way

For Giorgio Vasari and his contemporaries, the mobility of artists functions as a brokering agent, placing artistic behavior, works of art, and topographic and natural environments into proximity and dialogue. Criticism, justification, impassioned debate, and sometimes confusion characterize this network of interactions. Varietà is a key term that points to the potentially beneficial effects of travel upon an artist’s thinking process, manner of working, and execution. But what happens to varietà? Does it endure, or does it wax, wane, and mutate over the span of Part III of the Lives? If so, what other concepts might Vasari introduce to supplement or even contradict varietà? How might these concepts exert force upon the narrative biographies of such renowned artists as Raphael and Michelangelo?

As we shall see, Vasari in the concluding section of his monumental enterprise will highlight different connotations of varietà, from varietà as the inclusion of a wide range of depicted elements, the styles of other artists, to the diversity of destinations and their regional pictorial traditions. Vasari expands the interpretative spectrum of varietà to its limits so as to explain the complexity of the maniera moderna and its central protagonists: an artist such as Raphael, born in the provinces (though from the noble and cultivated if isolated Urbino), must travel to realize varietà in his style and achieve artistic greatness. But this necessity of travel does not apply to all: born in the favored domain of Florence and benefitting from propitious astrological influence, Michelangelo travels to undertake prestigious commissions while remaining immune to the pedagogical advantages of mobility, or by its potential for contamination. In contrasting these epic careers, Vasari’s perception of mobility’s significance, and his circumspection, even uncertainty, about its appropriate status, come to the fore, as does the question of what constitutes “influence.” And in the biography of Perino del Vaga and in fact in his own career, Vasari will propose that the acquisition of varietà and appropriate “influence” entails study, physical hardship, and the hardwon mixture of stylistic differences within an apparently harmonious and bravura composition.

RAPHAEL’S JOURNEYS

With Part III of the Lives, the reader encounters the age that reaches, as Vasari declares, “the ultimate perfection.” Before elaborating upon this assessment, Vasari distills the second age’s contributions into key terms: rule (regola), order (ordine), measure (misura), design (disegno), style (maniera). Varietà here does not come into sight. Instead, the concept surfaces in relation to Part III’s exemplary artist—Raphael. True, Michelangelo is the artist who carries the palm of victory, “transcending and eclipsing all others.” Also praiseworthy are Leonardo’s breathing figures, movement in Giorgione’s paintings, and Fra Bartolommeo’s coloring. Yet Raphael occupies a distinguished seat in this pantheon of artists. His itinerant career guides those artists who wish to pursue the path to good style: “But above all others [was] the most gracious Raphael of Urbino, who, studying the works of old and modern masters, took the best from all, and having gathered them together, enriched the art of painting with that complete perfection.” The viewer of his istorie can witness sites and buildings, “the appearances of our people and foreigners and costumes ... the gift of grazia of heads, young, old, and female, reserving modesty for the modest, lasciviousness for the lascivious, and for the putti the mischief in their eyes and playfulness in their expressions.”[1]

The texture of prose, with its chain of verbs flitting back and forth between gerunds and past participles, and imperfect and remote past tenses, underscores Vasari’s assertion that Raphael’s formation as a painter is a process that takes place over the long term rather than the result of an instantaneous stroke of genius stemming from inspiration or astral influence. Although Vasari does not explicitly refer to varietà as the outcome of the painter’s study, his delineation of the elements in Raphael’s works—buildings, peoples, costumes, expressions, draperies—incarnates the sense of the term. Granted, mention of Raphael’s mobile career, which took him from Urbino to Rome, is absent. Yet even if mobility does not come forth, the nature of Raphael’s studies and production allude to an encounter with the foreign. Given that Vasari locates suitable models in Florence and later in Rome, we must infer that Raphael, as a native of Umbria, examined “the works of old and modern masters” thanks to his own travels or the export of objects. More explicitly referring to awareness of otherness is Raphael’s depiction of alien peoples in contrast to “our own” (strane vs. nostrali).[2]

It is in Raphael’s Life proper, however, that Vasari explores the artist’s itinerancy and its ties to varietà. Unlike in his other accounts of artists’ travels in which displacement involves fraught encounters with a locale’s aria or native artists, Vasari represents Raphael’s mobility as a harmonious, profitable, yet selective interaction with a place’s most distinguished inhabitants or works of art. Crowe and Cavalcaselle noted as early in 1882 that between the two poles of his life—Urbino and Rome—Raphael “wandered with but one apparent purpose in life, the purpose ... of studying everything that had been done by others before him, of assimilating the good and eliminating the bad.” More recently, Tom Henry and Carol Plazzotta have admirably presented documentary evidence along with acute stylistic observations concerning the artist’s movement from and between these geographic poles. What deserves closer examination is how Vasari incorporated Raphael’s Bildungsreise into the narrative impulse of the artist’s biography, how his style, or more precisely his styles, are a barometer that measures the impact of these encounters.[3]

Vasari recounts that Raphael, born in Urbino on Good Friday, begins his studies in the art of painting with his father, the artist Giovanni Santi. On account of his son’s precociousness, Santi realizes he can teach him little else and therefore places him with Pietro Perugino in Perugia, some one hundred kilometers south. After only a few months, Raphael “studying the maniera of Pietro ... imitated him to such an extent in all things, such that one could not know his portraits from the originals of his master, and between his works and those of Pietro one could not distinguish them for sure.” Eventually, Raphael executes a panel in Città di Castello, the Mond Crucifixion, “which if there were not his name written upon it, no one would believe it to be the work of Raphael, but in fact that of Pietro.” Vasari is most likely incorrect in portraying Raphael as a formal apprentice in Perugino’s workshop. Yet his recourse to the trope of master-pupil indicates the close stylistic similarities between Raphael and Perugino, a correlation upon which an observer as astute as Michelangelo commented. In fact, the Urbinate Raphael’s work resembles that of his master (active throughout central Italy) so as to raise a conundrum: how is it possible to distinguish Raphael’s style from Perugino’s? The constellation of verbs signaling the act of knowing—conoscere, sapere, discernere, credere—in the above citations implies the presence of an outside witness, the discriminating viewer whose focus is directed solely to the works of art by Raphael and Perugino. Raphael had on at least one occasion depicted a view of Perugia, executing with deliberate vertical strokes in pen and brown ink the Sobborgo Sant’Angelo with its fortifications, gates, churches, and palaces (fig. 5.1). And yet for Vasari, “external” factors such as Perugia’s Fontana Maggiore and the many paintings by Domenico Veneziano, Pisanello, and Piero della Francesca scattered in the Cathedral, San Domenico, Sant’Antonio da Padova, and Sant’Agostino—to name a few of the artists and monuments in Perugia discussed throughout the Lives and reiterated in its index—play no role in Raphael’s topographic experience. Any potential interference brought about by place—its climate, envious native artists, and overwhelming (or for that matter underwhelming) monuments—these are all eclipsed in favor of staging a pristine relationship between Raphael, Perugino, and the evaluating viewer.[4]

FIGURE 5.1 Raphael, St. Jerome with a View of Perugia, c. 1504. Pen and brown ink over traces of black chalk (24.4 × 20.3 cm). Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Vasari also figures another of Raphael’s destinations—Siena—in terms of personal rapport. The young artist provides Pinturicchio, despite the disparity of almost thirty years in age and experience, with compositional drawings for the fresco cycle in the Piccolomini Library, connected to the Duomo. In Perugia and Città di Castello, Raphael had equaled and eventually surpassed Perugino’s style. Now in Siena, he subverts the conventional hierarchical structure—and indeed the very terms of the contract—which would normally dictate that Pinturicchio, not Raphael the junior associate, provide preparatory drawings. Yet in the case of Raphael’s subsequent travels in Tuscany, this pattern of framing mobility in terms of establishing professional contacts changes. In the course of assisting Pinturicchio, he hears of the famed cartoons of Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina, executed in 1503–4 for the Sala della Signoria in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. “Having been spurred by the love of art more than of profit,” Vasari says of Raphael’s enthusiasm, “he left that work and came to Florence.” One document dated October 1504, a letter written by Giovanna Feltria della Rovere, sister of the Duke of Urbino, Guidobaldo da Montelfeltro, states that “Rafaelle, painter of Urbino, who having a clever mind for his craft [buon ingegno nel suo esercizio], has determined to spend some time in Florence to learn.” Several scholars, John Shearman among them, have declared this letter of introduction a fake, its having been published in 1754 and then “lost” among the archives of the Casa Gaddi. Still, the letter does not distract from the prominence in the Lives of artists’ fugues, their sudden abandonment of obligations in their burning desire to behold and study notable works of art located elsewhere.[5]

In his haste to see the cartoons, Raphael resembles Brunelleschi, who on hearing from Donatello about an antique sarcophagus in Cortona became “enflamed by a desire to see it,” and immediately departed for that city “as he was in cloak, hood and clogs, from the desire and love he held towards art.” Raphael’s rush toward Florence also continues the topos of foreigners journeying to study that city’s works of art. Luca Signorelli had also come to Florence “to see the maniera of those masters who were modern.” Of course, there exist works of art in locations other than Florence that attract a journeying audience: of Jan van Eyck’s paintings in Naples, Vasari states that “the entire kingdom rushed to see this marvel due to the beauty of the figures and the novelty of that invention in coloring.” Yet these incidents are few and far between. And in studying in particular the cartoons of Leonardo and Michelangelo, Raphael is but one member of his and future generations of artists to do so: ever diligent, Andrea del Sarto “on feast days and in his leisure went to draw in the company of many youths in the Hall of the Pope, where there was the cartoon of Michelangelo and likewise that of Leonardo.” Perino del Vaga too drew “in the company of other youths, Florentine and foreign from the cartoon of Michelangelo.” In Michelangelo’s Life, Vasari informs the reader that “from that cartoon studied Aristotile da San Gallo, his friend, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Francesco Granacci, Baccio Bandinelli and Alonso Berugotta, the Spaniard; followed by Andrea del Sarto, Francia Bigio, Jacopo Sansovino, Rosso, Maturino, Lorenzetto, Tribolo, still a child, Jacopo da Pontormo and Perino del Vaga, all of whom were and are the best Florentine masters.” The cartoon’s capacity to pull together this heterogeneous mixture of artists crossing regional and generational boundaries could be interpreted as a call for consensus concerning which models were worthy of study. As Cellini would later declare, these full-size and monumental drawings by Leonardo and Michelangelo were la scuola del mondo—“the school of the world.”[6]

Vasari had up to this point conceived mobility’s positive effects as replacing or eliminating a style of excess. Giotto’s travels throughout the Italian peninsula result in the demise of the maniera greca; Brunelleschi tames the maniera tedesca and restores the architectural orders to their classical purity. Raphael, by contrast, is said to increase his stylistic range thanks to studying Florentine art. In articulating the impact of these cartoons and other works in Florence upon Raphael’s style, Vasari stresses the availability of a plurality rather than a restricted set of visual forms: “Raphael studied in Florence the old works of Masaccio, and saw in the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo such things that they were for him the cause of augmenting his study in maniera, for the sight of such works, that great improvement and grace grew in his art.” The term with which Vasari describes the growth in Raphael’s style—augumentare—befits the plethora of forms under his inspection. Taking up an entire page in the 1550 edition, Vasari’s figuring of Michelangelo’s cartoon is profuse, praising its “many grouped figures sketched out in various maniere,” soldiers drying themselves as they leave the water, others stretching to put on their leggings, some who hear the sounds of the tambourines, others reclining on their side. The cartoon’s dense composition of myriad figures, at least as revealed by an incomplete copy attributed to Bastiano (Aristotile) da Sangallo, would merit such a prolix description (fig. 5.2).[7]

FIGURE 5.2 Bastiano (Aristotile) da Sangallo, Copy after Michelangelo’s Cartoon “Battle of Cascina,” 1542. Oil on wood (76.5 × 129 cm). Holkham Hall, Norfolk. The Earl of Leicester and the Trustees of the Holkham Estate, Norfolk.

Vasari maintains the claim that Raphael augments his style thanks to exposure to Florentine art, even when the artist departs for Rome. For all of the fame garnered for the frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, Raphael “had still not given his figures a certain greatness and majesty,” this despite his assiduous study of Rome’s many specimens of antique statuary. He then reworks his fresco in Sant’Agostino of the prophet Isaiah, which “because of having seen the things of Michelangelo, extremely improved [migliorò] and enlarged [ingrandì] his maniera and gave it more majesty [maestà].” With its massive proportions, even seen on a smaller scale in the muscular Hebrew script, the Isaiah seems to be an enlarged or swollen version of the already monumental figures in the Stanza (fig. 5.3). In explaining this shift in Raphael’s style, Vasari not only refers to the circumstance of seeing Michelangelo’s works, notably the frescoes for the Sistine Chapel ceiling; he underscores the factors of secrecy and manipulation of access which permitted Raphael to see his Florentine rival’s work. With Michelangelo having fled Rome because of Pope Julius II’s wrath, Bramante subsequently possesses the key to the Sistine Chapel and by extension, admission to the ceiling frescoes normally kept from public view. Out of friendship, Bramante grants Raphael entry to the chapel so that he “could understand the methods of Michelangelo.” Vasari further states that Bramante afforded Raphael this opportunity, which he refers to as an “ill deed” toward Michelangelo, in order to give Raphael both profit and fame. Spying on works of art in St. Peter’s before their completion and official unveiling continued well into the seventeenth century. Wooden scaffolding concealed, perhaps with cloth curtains, large altarpieces of the Petrine cycle which because of their enormous scale were painted on site. Such anecdotal and documented incidents point to another assumption concerning mobility. The artist’s presence in Rome is not sufficient in and of itself to effect stylistic conversion. Access to an otherwise reserved site offers the crucial viewing and study experience which makes Raphael’s amplification of style possible.[8]

FIGURE 5.3 Raphael, Prophet Isaiah, 1513. Fresco (205 × 155 cm). Sant’Agostino, Rome.

VARIETÀ AND THE MIDDLE PATH

The metaphor of augmenting the human figure would seem to be a period-specific notion to characterize Raphael’s mobility to Rome. More generally, this amplification effect might describe the positive “influence” of works of art outside of one’s ambience. Yet this figurative language has a brief shelf life. In a summary of Raphael’s achievements, Vasari does not stress the depiction of heroic bodies. Unable to equal Michelangelo in representing the nude, Raphael pursues an alternative goal. Painting demands mastery in a wide field of subjects and techniques: “It was possible, he reflected, to enrich his works with a variety of perspective, buildings and landscapes, a light and delicate treatment of the draperies, sometimes causing the figure to be lost in the darkness, and sometimes coming into the clear light, making living and beautiful heads of women, children, youths, and old men, endowing them with suitable movement and vigor. He also reflected upon the importance of the flight of horses in battle, the courage of the soldiers, the knowledge of all sorts of animals, and, above all, the method of drawing portraits of men to make them appear life-like and easily recognized, with a number of other things, such as draperies, shoes, helmets, armor, women’s headdresses, hair, beards, vases, trees, caves, rain, lightning, fine weather, night, moonlight, bright sun, and other necessities of present-day painting.”[9]

From pursuing the singular goal of depicting the nude on par with Michelangelo, Raphael and his style shift in a different direction, with varietà as the target. The term is the first in this anthology of over forty-seven pictorial elements and techniques, a catalog which itself illustrates Alberti’s recommendation of employing varietà as a means to avoid monotonous repetition. This is not to say that Vasari considers the task of representing the nude to be without diverse aspects to comprehend. Excellence in painting the nude, he states, resides in understanding its complexity—its soft and fleshy parts, turning and twists, the network of bones, nerves, and veins. Yet these aspects fall within the parameters of a discrete visual task, whereas the varietà undertaken by Raphael demands the study and representation of a much larger repertoire. At issue is not only the challenge of variety in kind, in the objects to be represented. Subject matter in early modern thinking was often elided with style, be it personal, period, or regional. For example, artistic or art literary interpretations of a reclining nude in a landscape referred, if only to eventually disavow, the prototype of the donna nuda established by Titian and more generally by Venetian sixteenth-century art. Correspondingly, when Vasari mentions the subject matter of lively heads, weather effects, or armor, the reader in conjuring his own musée imaginaire might associate these genres respectively with Raphael’s recourse to Venetian portraiture, Flemish depictions of sunsets, or all’antica drawings. What is implied in the above catalogue of variety is variety in respect to style itself.[10]

The long-winded list is hortatory and demanding, as though instructing painters—to which this passage is addressed—what elements ought to fall under their domain of activity. But how is such varietà to be achieved? One well-established approach to this question would first outline the extensive literature on the combination of styles in art and literary theory. Such thinkers as Paolo Pino and Leonardo on imitation engaged with prescriptions laid down by the authority of classical and humanist rhetorical texts. In Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria the varieties of styles (simple, grand, and florid), of tones of voice, of composition, and of different types of eloquence compared with painting and sculpture are among the many passages dedicated to the issue of varietas. Quintilian’s commentary on varietas itself refers to Cicero’s discussion of the subject in De oratore. In his exposition on style (3.25-37), the speaker Crassus argues that through our senses we experience delight in the variety of ways, the pleasing dissimilarity between the sculptors Myron, Polyclitus, and Lysippus or between painters such as Zeuxis, Aglaphon, and Apelles. So too in oratory, “the ones admittedly deserving of praise nevertheless achieve it in a variety of styles.” Furthermore, in his De inventione rhetorica (2.1.1) Cicero rendered prescriptions concerning varietas via the anecdote of the painter Zeuxis, who travels to Croton to paint a representation of Helen not from one model but from a selection of the best attributes of five virgins from that city. This story was repeated or alluded to, ad nauseam as Panofsky quipped, in disparate early modern sources, such as Alberti’s De pictura and De statua, Raphael’s famous letter to Castiglione in which he described his method of composing his Galatea, and Vignola’s Regola delli cinque ordini where the architect justifies his version of the columnar orders.[11]

Zeuxis’s confrontation of variety upon arrival at his destination brings to mind the tendency for classical and early modern sources to interweave mobility, geographic encounter, and varietà. Pliny the Elder, for instance, examined the varietas of natural phenomena throughout the monumental encyclopedia of the Naturalis Historia—the remarkable cases of variety in fortune, the various modes of birth, the grafting of various fruits, the different colors of leaves as well as the varieties of earth used for pottery and construction. Even Pliny’s language itself was a motley assortment of tongues, for he declares in his preface that he will employ “rustic terms or foreign, nay barbarian, words that actually have to be introduced with an apology.” In travel accounts, writers grappled with portraying and explaining the world’s variety of places, peoples, customs, flora, and fauna. The theme of diversity, a concept synonymous with variety, pervades Marco Polo’s Merveilles du monde. Franciscan missionary friars such as John of Pian di Carpini and William of Rubruck eschewed such diversity, their journeys being undertaken to implant a singular devotion to the Catholic faith. By contrast, for merchants such as Marco Polo, the world’s variety represented its bounty and therefore potential for commerce and profit. While Polo proclaimed that emperors, kings, and dukes would find “all the greatest marvels and the great diversities” of the East described in his book, other writers rhetorically questioned the possibility of ever representing the plethora of sights that they encountered, whether fictional or true, in the course of their journeys. Likewise, in his Fifth Letter addressed to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, Amerigo Vespucci stated that “to write about the numerous kinds of animals and their great numbers, I would grow too prolix with a matter so vast.” Alluding to the paragon between word and image, Vespucci further stated that “with such great diversity of forms and colors even Polykleitos, master of painting in all its perfection, would have failed to depict them adequately.” The historian of the Americas Gonzalez Ferdinando d’Oviedo in his Della naturale e generale istoria dell’Indie questioned: “What mortal mind could comprehend such diversity of languages, costumes, and customs that one sees in the peoples of these Indies? Who could explain such variety of animals, both domestic and wild?”[12]

If writers conveyed the wealth of variety nature provided, then natural historians journeyed in order to capture it through what Paula Findlen has called “pilgrimages of science.” The Bolognese polymath Ulisse Aldrovandi wrote in his On Animal Insects (1602) that he incurred no little expense in venturing out into the countryside in all seasons of the year to procure a “vast variety of specimens.” In a parallel gesture, Vasari conceives Raphael’s achievement of varietà as the fruit of evaluating artists and their works encountered in the course of his travels. While certainly alluding to physical journeys, Vasari modulates the descriptions of these voyages such that they bear figurative resonance: “Raphael, therefore, having made this resolution, and having known that Fra Bartolommeo di San Marco had a rather good way of painting, disegno well established, and a pleasing maniera of coloring, although at times he used too many dark tones to achieve a greater impression of relief, took from him that which seemed to him according to his need and caprice, that is to say, a middle way [modo mezzano] of doing, both in disegno and in colorito.”[13]

Mobility and style here become transposed to a personal and allegorical key. In lieu of directly alluding to place itself, Vasari allows Fra Bartolommeo to stand in pars pro toto for Florence, a move that apprehends Raphael’s mobility as an interaction with persons. More significantly, the artist’s navigation between the poles of disegno and colorito is figured in spatial terms as a modo mezzano, that is a “middle manner, or more idiomatically, “middle way” or “path.” Raphael’s biography is the only instance in which this expression occurs in the 1568 edition of the Lives; it does not appear at all in the 1550 edition, nor is it found in Vasari’s other significant publication, the Ragionamenti (1588). Modo mezzano is also absent in art treatises preceding the Lives, such as those penned by Cennini, Leonardo, Alberti, and the Anonimo Magliabechiano. The expression, however, is hardly a neologism on Vasari’s part. The term appears in a motley range of sources contemporary to the Lives, from medieval theology, philosophical thoughts on the state of man (between animal and man), Machiavelli’s vision of the ideal Republic (strictly following the Roman model instead of a modo mezzano between this and other republics), and musical performance techniques that combine singing and speaking.[14]

In spite of this flexibility, modo mezzano consistently refers to the principle of avoiding extremes in pursuing a path of action. Commentators on Vasari’s usage of this expression have not failed to relate it to Raphael’s synthetic style. Modo mezzano has even been interpreted as a “mean style,” a gloss upon the Aristotelian notion of moral virtue as an average between the extremes of excess and deficiency. This suggestion in turn leads to the concept’s relation with the middle style in rhetoric, expounded upon by Cicero (De oratore, 91–96), Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria, 12:10:58-68), and subsequently commented upon by early modern writers such as Speroni and Vives. Yet in its incorporation of a range of varying styles, Raphael’s pursuit of a modo mezzano might also be profitably associated with the translator’s task. St. Jerome, for instance, specifically compared translation to a journey, the translator a wayfarer keeping the via media between verba and res. Later translators perpetuated this metaphor, as when Oratio Toscanella stated that his intention in rendering Quintilian in the vernacular was to take a strada da mezzo, a path that would not stray too far in favoring words’ literal or figurative meanings. Significantly, accompanying this metaphor of mobility was one that likened translation to the act of painting. In his De Interpretatione Recta (1426), Leonardo Bruni prescribed that the translator should work like a painter, transforming the figure, stance, and movements in a composition. Giannozzo Manetti developed Bruni’s metaphor, stating that the foremost principle at stake in translation was achieving a balance between the form of bodies as well as line and color.[15]

Linking painting with a thoroughfare, Vasari’s modo mezzano correlates Raphael’s aggregate style with an allegorical form of mobility. Notwithstanding his supposed excess in carnal pleasures, Raphael stands as a professional ideal in following the modo mezzano. Following the right path entails selecting appropriate models to imitate as well as frequenting the social company of worthy artists. Some but by no means all artists in Part III are successful at these tasks. Artists such as Vincenzo Tamagni, who according to Vasari imitated Raphael throughout his career, “abandon past errors, and following the traces of those who found the right path, bring their works to perfection with a beautiful maniera.” Those born in Florence, such as Francesco Granacci, are most fortunate. Immediately from birth, they enter the “company of those men that Heaven has elected for distinction and superiority over others ... such that seeing other styles, ways, and difficulties, [they] are put on the road without looking for it.” By contrast, Vasari portrays Bolognese painters as being so full of envy and arrogance that “they deviated from the good path, which brings eternity to those virtuous ones who fight more for their name than merely for the sake of competition.” The injudicious and haphazard choice of models can also cause artists to err. Isolating himself from his peers, Amico Aspertini “went throughout Italy drawing and copying everything, good and bad, both relief and painting; for which reason he became a poor practitioner and inventor.” Vasari speculates that “if the works that he [Amico] did and the designs in that art had been undertaken according to the right path and not by chance, it would have been possible that he would have passed infinite ones considered rare and expert.”[16]

In drawing abstract principles from biographical details, Vasari interprets physical mobility as an entry to a labyrinth with differing outcomes—professional, stylistic, and moral. For instance, despite being related to the renowned Domenico Ghirlandaio, Davide and Benedetto do not achieve artistic excellence: Benedetto goes wandering in France as a soldier, while Davide deviates from the preferred medium of painting to, as Vasari disparagingly puts it, “dally [ghiribizzare] in mosaic.” Artists’ amorous and/or conjugal relations also play in a role in their mobility, and by consequence, their work and reputation. Andrea del Sarto forgoes his chance of achieving greatness at the French court because of his appetite for a woman “that always kept him poor and lowly.” Giulio Romano cannot return to Rome to accept the prestigious commission of overseeing the building of St. Peter owing to hindrances of the Cardinal of Mantua, his wife, and children. Severely disappointed, he fails and dies days later. Reminiscent of the mythological tale of Hercules choosing between Virtue and Vice at the crossroads, Antonio da Sangallo on his way home from Rome to Florence sights “a woman of the Deti family with the most beautiful appearance, and becomes inflamed due to her beauty and grace.” Refusing to heed the counsel of his friends and relatives who point out the woman’s baseness and lowly station, Antonio marries her, a union which results in the disappointment, ruin, and death of several of his family members, his father among them.[17]

To digress further for a moment, another thread in this interweaving of biography and mobility is the impact of actual historical events. The sack of Rome demonstrates “how violent occurrences strongly detour fantastic minds [pellegrini ingegni] from their first objective, and make them twist backwards from the road.” Vasari’s statement contrasts two types of mobility, one effected by the advent of Imperial troops, the second the imaginative wandering of the artistic mind, denoted by pellegrino, a term that bears associations with pilgrimage and the foreign. Yet for all the power attributed to the artist’s ingegno, it cannot withstand war’s dire circumstances. This implicit dictum requiring the condition of peace for the arts to flourish is not, however, universally valid and irrespective of place. Although once exposed to the company of great artists and the nourishing aria of Rome, Vincenzo Tamagni regresses into mediocrity upon returning to his patria of San Gimignano as a result of the sack. Another artist, Schizzone, becomes a soldier, “deviates from his art,” and dies shortly thereafter.[18]

Seeing modo mezzano as akin to a strand of discourse running throughout Part III and throughout the Lives is useful insofar as it offers an alternative reading of style—not only as an innate and static personal attribute or product of organic growth, but as a dynamic process that undergoes progressions and regressions, deviations, and straightforward advances. As the above examples demonstrate, not all artists pursue the correct path during all or most of their careers; some engage in the wrong road altogether. To be sure, Vasari does not consistently state what is the desired end of these journeys, although his position can be inferred as he employs allegorical mobility to state the stylistic characters of the terza maniera which leads the arts to their “highest perfection.”[19]

MIXING, VARIETY, AND THE DANGERS OF MOVABLE OBJECTS

Vasari remains silent on how the concept of a modo mezzano might lead to the formation of Raphael’s varietà. Instead of resorting to a figure of speech associated with mobility, he calls upon the resonant term mescolare. In the same passage in which he alludes to Raphael’s modo mezzano, Vasari states that by “mixing [mescolando] with that way some others chosen from the best things of other masters, [Raphael] made of many maniere a single one, that was then always held to be his own, which was and will always be infinitely esteemed by artists.” Here, then, is a positive use of mescolare, in contrast to its negative connotations of corruption, as seen in Vasari’s criticism of Tuscan artists “mixing” their style with the maniera greca. Furthermore, mescolare comes to describe the process by which Raphael formed his style, the fruit of his sojourns in Perugia, Florence, and Rome.[20]

That mixing could result in varietà was not found in Vasari alone; medieval and early modern thinkers also used this term when describing the gradations of similarities and differences of phenomena which composed variety found in the world. In his De vulgari eloquentia, Dante explained the presence of distinct vernaculars in Trento, Turin, and Alessandria by affirming that the language of these border regions was not Italian, but derived from the mixing (commistionem) with other ways of speaking. The metaphor of mescolare to account for variation that exceeded unilateral categories is also present in the travel treatises collected in Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi. Defying a simplistic bifurcation between Arabs and Africans, Leo Africanus commented that Arabs who settled in African lands “remained citizens of that country and mixed with Africans, who at that time, because they were ruled for many years by Italians, retained this language, and for this reason by using it ... corrupted their native Arab little by little.” At one point in his translation of the Greek historian Flavius Arrian’s description of the lands from the Red Sea to India, Ramusio characterizes the diverse population of one island near the promontory of Siagro by stating that “the inhabitants are very few, they are foreigners, mixed of Arabs, Indians, and a part also of Greeks, who navigate in order to trade.” This is not to say that these travel writers understood the process of mixing as creating variation in all respects. Gonzalez Ferdinando d’Oviedo seemed to argue for the essentially base nature of Indians when he declared that “the mixed children born of Christians and Indians, although raised with the greatest effort in good manners, [neither] their vices nor mean inclinations can be removed.”[21]

These examples point to the generally incoherent nature of the variety that arises from mixing. Likewise, Raphael’s mixed style itself is contradictory, simultaneously diverse and unified: “He made of many maniere a single one, which was then always held to be his own.” In addition to being able to mix, Raphael resists allowing this plethora of modes to surpass his personal style. A case in point would be Raphael’s rapport with Dürer. Vasari informs the reader that the German artist sends Raphael a self-portrait in watercolors as “a tribute,” a term that intimates Dürer’s acknowledgment of his Italian counterpart’s artistic superiority. Raphael as well sends drawings to Dürer, yet instead of referring to these works as “tribute,” Vasari places emphasis upon Dürer’s appreciation of them (“they were most dear to Albrecht”). Although it is known that Raphael borrowed a number of motifs from Dürer’s prints, most notably testified by figures and landscapes in the Vatican Logge, Vasari’s portrayal of the relationship is one of distant and mutual respect. Other works by Raphael, such as the Vision of Ezekiel, contain echoes of particular motifs from Dürer’s Landauer Altarpiece or Nemesis print, notably the triadic hierarchy of a monumental towering figure, swirling cloud formations, and landscape view below (figs. 5.4 and 5.5). Furthermore, Vasari implies that Raphael’s followers, such as Marcantonio Raimondi, studied directly from Dürer’s works, yet this interaction remains on the level of replicating the German artist’s technique in prints. But absent from Vasari’s characterization of the interaction between the northern artist and his Italian counterpart is the concept of imitation or emulation. There is no suggestion of any rapport resembling that between teacher and pupil.[22]

FIGURE 5.4 Raphael, The Vision of Ezekiel, c. 1518. Oil on wood (40 × 30 cm). Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

FIGURE 5.5 Albrecht Dürer, Nemesis (The Great Fortune), c. 1501–2. Engraving (33.3 × 22.8 cm). British Museum, London.

In this respect, Raphael’s capacity to appreciate Dürer’s works, yet retain his own facture, stands in distinct contrast to Jacopo Pontormo. After a great number of the German artist’s prints arrived in Florence, Pontormo decided to implement some of their inventions for his frescoes in the cloister of the Certosa del Galluzzo. The Florentine artist determined to imitate the German artist’s figures and facial expressions along with their liveliness and varietà. But Pontormo takes this imitation to an extreme. He assumes Dürer’s style so thoroughly “that the gracefulness [vaghezza] of his first maniera ... was altered by that new study and labor.” In fact, in Vasari’s assessment, Pontormo’s manner was “so much damaged [offesa] by coming upon that German [style], that one did recognize in all these works, however beautiful they all were, little of that goodness and grace that he had once imparted to all of his figures.” Later art historians have borne out Vasari’s observations, though in more measured and generous terms. Despite their damaged state, several of the Galluzzo frescoes betray Pontormo’s use of motifs and compositional strategies from Dürer’s prints. The Christ before Pilate adapts from Dürer’s Passion cycle woodcut of Christ before Herod the tall, wiry, and hand-bound Christ, the witnesses’ outstretched hands and expressive faces and, more generally, the elongated and vertical series of figures (figs. 5.6 and 5.7).[23]

Pontormo’s mimicry reaches such an extent that Vasari states that his fresco of Christ before Pilate could be mistaken to be by the hands of “oltremontani,” an artist from north of the Alps. Mutation of style, then, becomes equivalent to deterioration in style and transformation of identity. On Vasari’s score, Pontormo loses both his dolcezza and grazia in addition to forsaking his ethnic self as a Florentine artist. Of course, imitation in and of itself is not a fault, for Vasari clearly states, “Let no one blame Jacopo for imitating Albrecht Dürer, since many painters have done so and still do so.” Rather, Vasari faults Pontormo for his indiscriminate and all-encompassing imitation of Dürer “in everything, in draperies, in the expressions of heads and attitudes.” The issue thus becomes the overreliance on a model such that its style pervades all parts of a composition.[24]

While Vasari faults Pontormo for his ill-advised imitation of Dürer’s prints, his criticism also alludes to the phenomenon of movable objects, their diffusion, and at times, their disturbing effects. In the technical treatise, Vasari refers to the ubiquity of Italian and German engravings “that we can today see throughout Italy.” It is also noteworthy that the index of places to the 1550 edition Lives ends with “CARTE STAMPATE” of or after Raphael, Mantegna, Rosso, and Perino del Vaga as though to allude to the ability of these objects to travel to all topographic locations. At various points in the Lives, Vasari also discusses the role of mobile objects in shaping both the style and key life events of artists. For instance, Raphael’s St. Cecilia altar-piece, transported to Bologna in San Giovanni in Monte, is responsible for the death of Francesco Francia. The terrifying beauty of Raphael’s painting plunges Francia into a profound melancholy, causing him to fall ill and eventually pass away. In a like manner, Dürer’s prints have debilitating consequences for Pontormo, though at least these are not fatal.[25]

In listing those aspects imitated by Pontormo—draperies, expressions, and attitudes—Vasari’s language loops back to the issue of varietà and its limits. Although Vasari praises Raphael’s varietà and his discovery of a middle path, these virtues reach a breaking point. As the supreme example of Raphael’s synthetic style crafted from details of other artists, Vasari offers the artist’s frescoes of the Sibyls and Prophets in Santa Maria della Pace (see fig. 1.23). Once again, Michelangelo’s paintings in the Sistine Chapel vault are cited as the chief supplementary aid. But Raphael goes one step too far: if he had “held [fermato] his style there and neither sought to aggrandize it nor to vary it to demonstrate that he understood nudes as well as Michelangelo he would not have partly taken away that good name that he had acquired for himself.” As evidence of Raphael’s excess and overwrought ambition, Vasari refers to the fresco Fire in the Borgo, with its robust muscular nudes and drawn-out limbs (fig. 5.8). These nudes, Vasari determines, fail to be excellent in all respects.[26]

FIGURE 5.6 Pontormo, Christ before Pilate, c. 1535. Detached fresco (321 × 320 cm). Certosa di San Lorenzo al Monte al Galluzzo, Pinacoteca, Florence. Photo Scala, Florence, courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att.

FIGURE 5.7 Albrecht Dürer, Christ before Herod, 1509. Woodcut (126 × 97 mm). British Museum, London.

In using the word perfetta to characterize Raphael’s style in the Pace, Vasari is not only performing a value judgment, but also describing a state of completion. If Raphael has achieved a maniera perfetta, it follows then that any change in style would be superfluous. Yet this aggrandized transformation is precisely what Raphael attempts. Varying his style such that the stamp of personal ownership fades produces a watered-down and inevitably inferior version of Michelangelo’s representation of the nude. Other elements in the Fire in the Borgo such as its lighting effects, architectural ornament, perspectival constructions, and still lifes do not redeem Raphael’s focus on the nude. Varietà can thus be stretched too far, causing the viewer to focus unduly on one element as opposed to the composition as a whole. The mobility that led Raphael to Rome where he witnessed Michelangelo’s unsurpassed portrayal of the human figure does not result in an instantaneous conversion of style; rather, Raphael’s stylistic transformation requires the artist’s tempered intervention. Note that Vasari places Raphael’s deeds in the active tense—he sought to aggrandize, to vary, to demonstrate—thereby suggesting that his paintings were the result of a deliberate process and not one of passive “influence.” Deploying the verb fermare to indicate what Raphael choose not to do, Vasari broaches that style is a flexible instrument, beholden to the artist’s agency—in this case, one that is misguided.[27]

FIGURE 5.8 Raphael, Stanza dell’Incendio di Borgo: Fire in the Borgo, 1514. Fresco (width at base: c. 770 cm). Vatican Palace, Vatican City.

MICHELANGELO’S VARIETÀ

Raphael alone cannot claim varietà as an attribute of his personal style. As Vasari testifies, Michelangelo’s frescoes on the Sistine Chapel’s vault offers future painters “novelty and inventions of poses, draperies for figures, new ways towards expression, and the ferocity of things variously painted.” The Last Judgment too is identified with varietà. Along with depicting the horror of the end days, Michelangelo “portrayed the entire Passion, having in the air diverse nude figures to carry the cross, the column, the lance, the sponge, the nails, and the crown, with diverse and various poses.” Furthermore, one cannot “imagine how much varietà there is in the heads of those Devils, in truth, monsters from hell.” As is evident in the drawing studies that bend, twist, and contort the human figure, the viewer will come to see how Michelangelo “came to vary so many poses in the strange and diverse gestures of youths, the elderly, men, [and] women” (fig. 5.9). As though diffusing varietà throughout the city, works derived from the Last Judgment display this hallmark feature. Across the Tiber, frescoes based on Michelangelo’s drawings and sketches in the Trinità dei Monti exhibit “a certain variation and terrible might in the poses and groups of those nudes that rain from the sky and fall upon the center of the earth, converted in the diverse forms of devils, very terrifying and bizarre.”[28]

Despite what might appear to be a plethora of varietà on Michelangelo’s part, Vasari makes it plain that the artist restricts his pursuit of it to the human figure: “One sees that it was the intention of this singular man not to want to engage in painting anything but the perfect and most proportionate composition of the human body in the most diverse poses.” Vasari goes so far as to criticize those artists whose engagement in varietà does not, or more precisely, cannot concentrate upon the human figure. He chides those who, “not well established in disegno, have sought to gain themselves a place among the first masters with the varietà of tints and shadows of colors, and with bizarre, various and new inventions.” Significantly, Vasari does not pinpoint the origin of Michelangelo’s varietà and, more generally, his artistic ability in mobility. Nature itself is the source of the artist’s talent: Michelangelo was accomplished in all tasks, however difficult, “having had from nature a very able talent [ingegno] and applied to these most excellent virtues of disegno.”[29]

As in his Life of Giotto, Vasari attributes to mobility little bearing on Michelangelo’s style. Michelangelo is, of course, in line with other artists who undertake the pilgrimage to Rome to view antique ruins. To Michelangelo “came the desire to move to Rome, due to the marvels of the ancients about which he heard.” Yet when Vasari describes specific works of art which Michelangelo executed in Rome, the artist is hardly a disciple of the antique. Despite its mythological subject matter and Heemskerck’s sketch that shows it in the midst of ruins, the Bacchus placed in Jacopo Galli’s garden is not a slavish imitation of classical sculpture (fig. 5.10). The statue is Michelangelo’s own hybrid invention in which “one recognizes that he had wanted to maintain a certain mixture of marvelous members, and particularly to have given it the svelteness of a male youth and the fleshiness and roundness of a woman.” Michelangelo even seems exempt from the task of studying and imitating the antique. His Sleeping Cupid, executed in Florence and buried in a vineyard, passes for an antique sculpture in Rome, winning him a considerable sum. Whereas Donatello and Brunelleschi prowled Rome in their reverent hunt for craggy ancient ruins, Michelangelo’s works surpass the boundaries of the stone medium and verge on becoming animate. Of the Pietà commissioned by the French Cardinal Jean Villiers de La Grolais, Vasari exclaims, “Certain is the miracle that a rock, that in the beginning is without any form at all, is brought to that perfection that Nature in her labor forms only in flesh.”[30]

FIGURE 5.9 Detail from Michelangelo, Studies for the Last Judgment, 1534. Black and red chalk on paper (384 × 252 mm). British Museum, London.

FIGURE 5.10 Maarten van Heemskerck, The Garden in the Casa Galli, with Michelangelo’s statue of Bacchus, c. 1532–36. Pen and brown ink, brown wash (13 × 20.5 cm). From the Roman Sketchbook I, inv. 79 D 2, fol. 72 recto.

If Rome has any effect on Michelangelo’s artistic production, it seems limited to providing him with noble or papal patronage—and given the artist’s famed outbursts and tirades, Vasari frequently relegates or discounts this support altogether. This indifference toward a local artistic milieu, whether in the form of works of art, artists, or patrons, only becomes exacerbated in Vasari’s representation of Michelangelo’s travels to other non-Florentine Italian regions. Vasari does acknowledge that Michelangelo, fleeing Florence around the time of the expulsion of the Medici in 1494, received the assistance and patronage of Giovanni Francesco Aldrovandi in Bologna. With reference to style, however, Vasari does not mention the concepts of imitation or decorum according to place, despite the fact that Michelangelo’s sculptures for the Ark of St. Dominic conform to Nicola Pisano’s and Niccolò dell’Arca’s earlier works for the ensemble. Rather, Vasari employs superlative language to characterize Michelangelo’s sculptures, declaring flatly that “they are the best figures there.” Vasari is also silent regarding Michelangelo’s study of Jacopo della Quercia’s reliefs on the façade of St. Petronius, whose monumental figures have often been taken as sources for the compositions in the Sistine Chapel. Instead, Michelangelo’s sojourn in Bologna becomes an occasion to assert his identity as Tuscan artist and intellectual. Aldrovandi, Vasari asserts, loved Michelangelo “because of his disegno and the pronunciation of Michelangelo’s reading as a Tuscan being pleasing to him, willingly listened to the works of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and other Tuscan poets.”[31]

Vasari continues the thematic thread of Michelangelo’s indifference to location in depicting the artist’s stay in Ferrara. Stopping in that city after fleeing a Florence besieged by Imperial troops in 1529–30, Michelangelo coolly responds to Duke Alfonso’s attempts to retain him in service. The artist refuses offers of lodgings in the ducal palace, horses, and other gifts, reassuring his traveling companions that he has brought 12,000 scudi with him to Ferrara, a sum which he would gladly avail if need be. In narrating Michelangelo’s resistance to the duke’s hospitality, Vasari reiterates and modulates the claim made in the Life of Andrea Pisano: though mobility may occur under harsh circumstances, a skillful artist can be self-sufficient.[32]

Vasari articulates this position most clearly in Part III in the prelude to his Life of Guglielmo de Marcillat, an itinerant artist with whom he had once trained as a painter: “The benefit that one draws from virtù is truly most great, and is yet not found in one country alone, but is equally common to all; because whatever strange and far region or a barbaric and unknown people a man be from, if he has a spirit ornamented with virtù and does ingenious work with his hands, appearing new in every city where he trods and demonstrating his worth, such force does the virtuous work have that from tongue to tongue he makes his name ... and his qualities become most esteemed and honored.” In the 1568 edition, Vasari appends a statement that suggests that these traveling artists, recognized and cherished abroad, can find a new homeland: “They forget the country of their birth and choose a new one for their last resting place.”[33]

Vasari does not waver on his view of travel as travail and hardship. Charged words such as strana, lontana, barbara, and incognita indicate the adversity of foreign origins, adversity that the artist with his exercise of virtù can overcome. This claim places emphasis on the artist, as opposed to the patron, as responsible for successful mobility. Of course, such a view is hardly historically representative, and the extensive and important literature on Renaissance patronage has done much to qualify perceptions of the heroic artist winning merit by toiling alone. Vasari’s point is instead critical and perhaps even argumentative, pushing back against the socioeconomic realities of artists that were highly dependent upon the taste and indulgence of patrons: in an ideal scenario, the artist and his skill occupy primary roles, whereas patrons and audience, local artists and works of art, are secondary, existing to praise the artist so as to render him immortal.[34]

Michelangelo stands in contrast to Raphael concerning the part played by mobility in the formation of their styles. Raphael’s travels throughout the Italian peninsula are a necessary first step in his procedure of mixing a variety of styles to forge his own. In contrast, Vasari professes that Michelangelo’s journeys to Rome, Bologna, Ferrara, and Venice have little or no effect on his method of painting. As the opening passages of his Life reveal, Michelangelo’s varietà in depicting the human figure as well as his excellence in other areas such as architecture, moral philosophy, and poetry—the wide range of which could be conceived as yet another type of varietà—is due to celestial influence. Borrowing from both Ascanio Condivi’s 1553 biography of the artist and Benedetto Varchi’s funeral oration in 1564, Vasari evokes the horoscope to describe the specifics and consequences of Michelangelo’s birth. The divine artist was born under a “fateful and happy star in the Casentino,” with the astrological configurations of Mercury and Venus in the second house of Jupiter auguring that “one ought to see in his deeds marvelous and stupendous works through the skill of his hand and talent.” Furthermore, this celestial influence falls on Michelangelo in a specific location. Vasari declares that God has chosen to bestow this universal genius to Florence “as his patria, as most deserving above all other cities, to bring all her talents to perfection through one citizen.” The implication, then, is that Michelangelo’s talent as an artist originates and is localized in but one place, thus undermining the necessity of mobility for the development of his style.[35]

If mobility plays any role in the reception of Michelangelo’s biography, it manifests itself allegorically. Leone Leoni’s portrait medal depicts the artist as an indigent pilgrim with staff, rosary, and flask, wandering through a stony landscape with a guiding dog (fig. 5.11). The portrayal of a pilgrim is a play on words, pointing to a wide-ranging mind that possesses the creativity of an ingegno pellegrino. The muscular quasi-nude may also allude to the pictorial sources—Ghirlandaio’s frescoes in the Tornabuoni Chapel among them—that Michelangelo drew on throughout his long career. But the inscription, taken from Psalm 51:13, also depicts Michelangelo as a moral and artistic guide on a journey through life: “Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; and sinners shall be converted unto thee.” However intricate the medal’s layers of meaning, it indicates ex negativo the relative indifference of biographers toward Michelangelo’s recourse to alien artistic topographies. More than anything in Rome and certainly more than the works of art in Bologna or in Venice, Florence and its monuments such as Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel and the ambience of the Medici sculpture garden in San Marco provide ample pedagogical models on which Michelangelo could draw. In sum, varietà can but does not exclusively arise from mobility.[36]

FIGURE 5.11 Leone Leoni, portrait medal of Michelangelo. Obverse: Michelangelo as pilgrim, 1561. (Diameter: 5.9 cm). Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.

FRA BARTOLOMMEO AND THE ARIA OF ROME

Though Michelangelo can afford to be nonchalant toward ancient and modern works of art in Rome, the journey there is still sine qua non for other artists. Here the idea of aria remerges to underscore the city’s potent impact on artists’ styles, health, and constitutions. Previously in the Lives, the aria of Rome gave rise to the maniera tedesca in architecture, while Florence’s climate eliminated the maniera greca’s roughness in painting. In Part III, Rome’s aria becomes a positive force, while still retaining its potential as a carrier of infectious disease. Wielding once again this concept in his arsenal of terms, Vasari underscores both the benefits and hazards of travel. Aria, then, becomes a byword for a general artistic environment, emphasizing its effect on the displaced artist. The artist’s body and health become the barometer by which the impression of the foreign is filtered, absorbed, rejected, or appropriated. This bifurcation in aria’s nature is not unique to Part III. Already in Part II, Vasari informs us that Ghiberti related in his own I commentarii that “in the year 1400 a certain corruption of pestilent aria came to Florence,” prompting his departure to Romagna in the employ of Pandolfo Malatesta. In contrast, Masolino flees from Rome, where he had gone to study and paint a cycle of famous men in the Orsini residence on Monte Giordano, “due to the aria that was causing him pain in the head.” Befitting Vasari’s habitual vaunting of Florence, it is immediately after this escape from Rome’s climate that Masolino paints the scenes of St. Peter’s life in Santa Maria del Carmine, a work that demonstrates the seconda maniera’s departure from Giotto’s style. These statements might be interpreted to imply that aria, healthful or harmful, is an entrenched characteristic of a certain place; at the same time Vasari recognizes the possibility of modifying the aria of a location through the art of architecture. In the Life of Alberti, he praises the erudition that enables the architect “to site buildings to avoid the heaviness of pestilent winds, the insalubrities of aria, smells, vapors of crude and unhealthful waters.”[37]

FIGURE 5.12 Marcantonio Raimondi, after Raphael, Detail from Plague in Crete, 1512–16. Engraving (original size 194 × 250 mm). British Museum, London.

While aria is certainly present in Part II, its currency becomes increasingly diffused in Part III, as though Vasari is attempting to reiterate and develop this natural historical metaphor that so penetrated the discourse in the preface. Notably, the concept’s counterpart—mal’aria— emerges in contemporary imagery, as in Marcantonio Raimondi’s print Plague in Crete after a design by Raphael (fig. 5.12). To the far right in the engraving, the bending or crouching male figure covers his mouth and nose so as to protect himself from the foul smells emitted by the plague victim. But Vasari’s recapitulation of aria affirms the benefits of Rome’s climate, whereas previously Tuscany’s air alone was conducive toward artistic creation. Granted, Vasari reports that Michelangelo, joking with him, declares that any good quality of his mind was due to being born “in the pure air of your country in Arezzo.” Yet this statement runs alongside others which indicate the beneficial aria of Rome. In the prelude to the Life of Vincenzio da San Gimignano, Vasari exclaims: “How much obligation do sculptors and painters owe to the air of Rome and to those few antiquities that the voracity of time and the gorging of fire, despite themselves, have remained there!” Through recourse to the term “obligation [obbligo],” Vasari binds artists and aria in a rapport akin to the ties that constrain creditor and debtor. Framing this analogy as a rhetorical question, marked by the interrogative quanto, he also points to the impossibility for artists to repay their debts to Rome and its treasures. Alluding to the natural historical properties of climate, Vasari then adds that aria “forms in the body another spirit, and converts the appetite to another taste.” The artist’s metaphysical state and bodily constitution are in dialogue with, and indeed can be manipulated beneficially by, location.[38]

FIGURE 5.13 Fra Bartolommeo, Approach to a Mountain Village, c. 1501. Pen and brown ink, traces of black chalk (original 290.8 × 200.6 mm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975.1.270).

Thus, despite acquiring the maniera moderna from Giorgione, Sebastiano del Piombo is persuaded by his patron Agostino Chigi to follow him to Rome, “having understood how much the aria of Rome was propitious to painters and to all talented persons.” As for Vincenzio, the artist paints façades near the Curia di Pompeo and the Campo di Fiore in addition to “infinite works throughout that city [Rome], which thanks to the aria and the site continually made beautiful talents to work there.” From these specific examples, Vasari promulgates a more general maxim in the 1568 revision of this passage. “Experience teaches us,” he states, “that very often the same man does not have the same manner and or produce work of equal excellence in every place.” Instead, the traveling artist “improves and worsens according to the nature of the place.” Vincenzio exemplifies this principle. Upon returning to San Gimignano in the wake of the sack of Rome, he can no longer execute works worth mentioning because he was “no longer among such divine talents and outside the aria [fuor dell’aria] that nourishes beautiful minds and makes them create rare things.”[39]

Vasari, however, also lets it be known that Rome’s aria is not always beneficial. In fact, when combined with intemperate behavior it can lead to death. The master of stained glass Claudio Franzese, whose name points to his Gallic origins, eats and drinks excessively, “as is the custom of that nation,” and this habit being “a pestilent thing in the aria of Rome,” brings on a fever and death within six days. Michelangelo spends the summer months in Florence when he organizes the shipment of marbles for the Tomb of Julius II in order to flee from the mal’aria afflicting Rome at that time. Even if records do not indicate that the summer in question was pestilent, mal’aria in Rome was common enough. On 14 July 1532, G. M. della Porta wrote to Michelangelo urging him to remain in Florence in August due to “the danger in the mutation of the air in every place this season.” Vasari himself reports in his autobiography that he received authorization one summer to depart from Rome, which in retrospect he ought to have accepted because “between the heat, the aria, and exertion I fell ill in sorts, such that in order to recover I was forced to be carried by litter to Arezzo.”[40]

While Rome’s mal’aria accounts for outbreak of illness, it also acts as a touchstone to test artists’ merits or shortcomings. Vasari’s portrayal of Fra Bartolommeo’s journey to Rome is a case in point: “Having heard much about the distinguished works of Michelangelo in Rome as well as those of the graceful Raphael, prompted by the cry that he heard continually of the marvels done by the two divine artists, with the prior’s approval he went to Rome, where, received by Fra Mariano Fetti, Friar of the Piombo, he painted there two paintings of Peter and Paul at his convent of S. Silvestro at Monte Cavallo. But since he did not succeed well in that aria, as he had done in the Florentine [aria], considering the ancients and modern works that he saw, and in such quantity, stupefied in such a way that the virtue and excellence he seemed to have diminished, he decided to depart.”[41]

As indicated from his biography and work, Fra Bartolommeo does not seem to have been averse to travel per se. Hundreds of landscape studies, often drawn spontaneously in pen and brown ink, testify to the artist’s journeys around Tuscany, with Prato, Siena, and Bibbiena among his destinations. Mobility itself emerges as a subject in one of these sketches that shows an approach to a village on a crest of a hill, with groups of travelers on horseback and foot proceeding up and down along the path (fig. 5.13). But arrival in Rome, at least in Vasari’s view, is an event that disturbs this mode of observing bucolic settings. For in the city, Fra Bartolommeo must contend with a formidable series of pairs: Michelangelo and Raphael, ancient and modern works—even his commission of painting Saints Peter and Paul takes the form of a couple.[42]

Unlike Vincenzio, who flourishes in Rome, Fra Bartolommeo, like his compatriots such as Rosso Fiorentino and Andrea del Sarto, languishes. In that city’s aria, here an umbrella term that signifies the natural element of air as well as daunting stylistic models, the artist becomes stunned (stordí), as though taking numbing blows to the body. Vasari’s statement that the Florentine did not succeed well in the aria of Rome may show an awareness that Fra Bartolommeo departed due to illness, as attested by a document that places him in July 1514 at the Ospizio della Maddalena, a convent for elderly friars or those suffering from ill health. However, whether referring to a medical condition or not, when considered within the broader context of the Lives, Vasari’s account of Fra Bartolommeo’s exposure to aria performs an analytical function. It registers the confrontation between artist and geographic location, and in doing so, explains the qualitative stylistic differences between artists and their performance in a variety of places.[43]

Fra Bartolommeo had, for instance, succeeded in the Florentine air, only to falter miserably upon venturing south. To exemplify this claim, Vasari offers the specific example of the full-length figures of Saints Peter and Paul (figs. 5.14 and 5.15). Scholarship has taken Vasari’s statement that Raphael completed the St. Peter to account for the stylistic differences between these two works—the pronounced shading of Peter’s face and especially his rigorous anatomical structure contrast with Paul’s less extreme tonal shifts and more coherent volumetric pose. Yet when read in the context of aria, these differences in style take on further significance. They recount a narrative of journey, progression, regression, and ultimately failure. Aria explicates what is lacking, what is not present in St. Paul.[44] Rather than visually assessing the individual work of art, aria has a more global valence, commenting on the interactions between groups of objects, pinpointing their affinities and divergences. Aria is not witnessed within works of art in an iconographic sense, but between works of art. Finally, while imbibing the aria of Rome seems necessary to achieve artistic greatness, its effects are available only to a select few. Hippocratic thought proposed that the aria of a certain place was fixed and therefore determined a degree of uniformity in individuals originating from a set locale. Vasari, however, manipulates aria’s supposed stable characteristics to shape his narrative that privileges key artists. What is ironic is that the highest of the elect, Michelangelo, does not seem to be nourished by Rome’s aria, his talent preset by celestial influence. Nor does aria enter into Vasari’s discussions of Raphael, whose interactions with place occur in terms of allegorical mobility. The assumption common to these strategies is that representations of mobility unearth multifaceted aspects of artists’ personhood and style, be they subject to astral fluid, the characteristics of geography, or the vicissitudes endured by the pilgrimage of the soul.

FIGURE 5.14 Fra Bartolommeo and Raphael, St. Peter, 1513–14. Oil on panel (209 × 107 cm). Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City.

FIGURE 5.15 Fra Bartolommeo, St. Paul, 1513–14. Oil on panel (209 × 107 cm). Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City.

Does aria, in sum, have fixed parameters of signification? How can we reconcile the contradiction between Rome’s once insalubrious climate and its current (in Part III) status as the epicenter of ancient monuments and capital of modern works of art? Over the course of the Lives, Vasari exploits nuances of aria’s connotation to serve his narrative goals. Aria explains ex post facto the rise, fall, and resurrection of styles. And that aria stands at the intersection between art theoretical, geographic, and scientific thought reveals a further implication: given that mobility exposes artists to a foreign environment, artworks by extension constitute a key appendage of place, a component of a city’s representational apparatus wielding powerful natural historical valence. This holistic view of the arts not only challenges distinctions between media and discipline; through aria, the natural world is intrinsic to the definition and significance of cultural production.

PERINO DEL VAGA AND WANDERING VARIETÀ

A protagonist in Part III who personifies these kaleidoscopic aspects of nature, place, and mobility is the Florentine artist Perino del Vaga. In this biography, one of the longest in the Lives, Vasari transposes mobility from the realm of prestigious patronage to the domain of the artist’s own self-agency. Whereas Raphael and Michelangelo display the results of their travel, be it physical or allegorical, Perino exhibits his varietà in several locales, for the most part in Rome, thereby bringing to the fore the differences between regional styles. Part of Perino’s mutability in style and locale is due to his status as someone born outside the institutions of courtly and papal sponsorship. An interloper with few allegiances to respect, Perino is free to acquire a variety of styles and exhibit them where and how he sees fit.

We become immediately aware in the opening lines of Perino’s Life that the artist shares none of the noble parentage or ties to a princely court that Michelangelo and Raphael enjoy. Abandoned by his relations and left an orphan, Perino is an “impoverished spirit.” How the artist is wet-nursed makes his humble origins abundantly clear: Perino is first raised in misery at a farm where he was suckled by a goat and then fed on the plague-infected milk of his father’s second wife. Along with astral and sanguine fluids, breast milk was thought to explain the spread of personal characteristics, and in some cases, disease, Perino’s earliest nutrition would hardly seem to augur for survival, let alone the attainment of an illustrious artistic career. According to the Tuscan fourteenth-century moralist Paolo da Certaldo, children nourished on animal milk “do not have perfect wits as one fed on women’s milk, but always look stupid and vacant and not right in the head.” In his De re uxoria (1416), a treatise on the ideal wife and mother, Francesco Barbaro exhorted mothers that if they could not breastfeed their own children, a wet nurse should be well mannered and dignified in speech. “In this way,” Barbaro reasoned, “the young infant will not imbibe corrupt habits and words and will not receive with his milk, baseness, faults and impure infirmities.” Thus, when Michelangelo in a well-known anecdote claimed that by being wet-nursed by the wife of a stone-cutter, he “sucked in the hammer and chisels I use for my statues,” he was drawing on a widely held notion that traits could be transmitted to infants through breast milk. As a newborn, Raphael was not sent out to a wet nurse as was often done, but was “breastfed continually” by his own mother, thus accounting for his “good and excellent manners.” By contrast, Perino’s consumption of diseased and animal breast milk foretells his miserable childhood circumstances.[45]

Perino’s journey to Rome also differs from the more exalted path of Raphael and Michelangelo, both of whom arrived in that city under papal or other ecclesiastical auspices. His is a tale of exploitation and hardship. Vaga, a painter active in Toscanella, persuades Perino to leave Ridolfo Ghirlandaio’s workshop in Florence. What convinces the apprentice to relinquish this dynastic bottega is Vaga’s assurance of a Roman sojourn. “Such was the desire for Perino to reach an excellent level in his profession,” Vasari narrates, “that when he heard Rome mentioned, all was softened within him [tutto si rintenerí].” This expression attests to the power of the mere prospect of journeying to Rome. Elsewhere Vasari uses the word rintenerire to describe environmental agents that soften otherwise durable substances, as, for instance, when water or humidity weakens gesso. Likewise, mobility can dissolve civic and professional links, however fast or appealing. Fittingly, Perino assumes the name “il Vaga,” not only a reference to his teacher or the quality of gracefulness (vaghezza). The moniker alludes to the vagabondage involved in achieving his arrival in Rome. In fact, the name may also pithily comment on Perino’s way of painting, a style that wanders among a variety of styles.[46]

In Rome, Perino collects the elements of his diverse style. The city’s initial impact on the young artist is powerful, with an arsenal of superlatives and adverbs of quantity conveying the encounter: the artist sees “the most marvelous buildings of edifices”; he is beside himself “most admiring of the valor of so many famous and illustrious men” who created these works, now reduced to ruins. Further reinforcing Perino’s passionate response is a network of words—desire (desiderio), inflaming (accendendosi), longed for (ardeva)—which suggest his will to equal the monuments which he observes. Yet Vasari also draws a distinction between the greatness of Rome and Perino’s “infinite lowliness and poverty,” a gap that the artist breaches by moving from one workshop to the next, “like a day laborer,” to provide himself with the means to survive. He establishes a rigorous schedule, spending half the week working for others, the other half devoted to disegno. In spite of these adverse conditions, Perino greatly enlarges his pictorial stockpile: he draws from classical statuary and the vault of the Sistine Ceiling, follows Raphael’s maniera, acquires the craft of executing grotteschi in stucco under Giovanni da Udine, and grasps the representation of ignudi in all of their difficulty. As a sketch of grotesques and nude figures demonstrates, Perino retained and exploited this multifaceted repertoire years after his hard-won Roman sojourn (fig. 5.16). For decorative schemes of the Palazzo Doria del Principe in Genova, the artist calls into service decorative motifs culled from the Domus Aurea, Logge, and Cardinal Bibbiena’s Loggetta along with manipulated citations after Michelangelo’s Cascina cartoon. Despite the prestige of this later commission, Vasari stresses that the acquisition of the visual lexicon hardly took place under favorable circumstances. The industrious artist alone compiled this variety.[47]

Perino proceeds to exhibit his versatile style for a cosmopolitan clientele, patrons both “Italian” and foreign, mercantile and ecclesiastical. And to emphasize that Perino’s activity encompasses the entire city of Rome, Vasari provides a series of topographic cues that call upon the reader to locate and visualize the painter’s works. The topographical rhetoric that Vasari deployed to place Donatello’s sculptures in Florence in Part II is now marshaled for the benefit of Perino’s paintings in Rome. Perino paints a chiaroscuro façade upon a residence “across from the house of the Marchese of Massa, near Maestro Pasquino,” a phrase that presupposes prior familiarity with the speaking statue and its location near Piazza Navona. Alluding to location, but not specifying it in detail, is a pattern in Vasari’s portrayal of Perino’s Roman works. For the archbishop of Cyprus who possesses “a house near the Chiavica,” Perino adorns the garden walls with “diverse poesie aside from painting there a loggetta with small figures, various grotteschi and many landscape paintings.” The eminent Fugger banking family constructs a house near the Banchi, which Vasari reminds us is “on the way to the church of the Florentines.” Perino covers the Fuggers’ courtyard and loggia “with many figures ... in which one sees a beautiful maniera.” For the tabernacle attached to a house, known locally as the “Imagine di Ponte” due to its proximity to the Castel Sant’Angelo bridge, Perino executes a scene of the Coronation of the Virgin along with a choir of seraphim, angels, “and other putti of great beauty and variety.” Lorenzo Pucci, the Cardinal Santiquattro, assumes “in the Trinità [dei Monti], a convent of Calabrian and French friars ... a chapel to the left hand side of the high altar” where Perino paints the prophets Isaiah and Daniel, putti holding the cardinal’s insignia as well as numerous architectural scenes. He also paints for the hall of Marchionne Baldassini’s house, “near S. Agostino,” various figures of philosophers between the niches, scenes from Roman history spanning from Romulus to Numa Pompilius, and “various ornaments imitating various pieces of marble.” Significantly, one of the surviving fragments from this fresco cycle reflects upon the Roman cityscape itself. The backdrop of the scene depicting the augur Attius cutting a stone includes generic classical buildings and specific monuments, among them the Pantheon, which root the istoria in its local urban setting (fig. 5.17).[48]

FIGURE 5.16 Perino del Vaga, Grotesques with Nude Figures, c. 1528–32. Brown ink and wash on paper (284 × 421 mm). Biblioteca Reale, Turin.

Variety in location thus accompanies Perino’s pictorial variety in subject matter, medium, and patronage. The faculty of imagining place that Vasari’s topographic language demands is shared by the growing number of guidebooks to Rome in the sixteenth century. These volumes ranged from vernacular translations of Flavio Biondo’s De Roma instaurata (1446), Francesco Albertini’s Opusculum de mirabilibus novae et veteris urbis Romae (1519), Bartolomeo Marliani’s Topographia antiquae Romae (1534) to Lucio Fauro’s Delle antichita della citta di Roma (1548). Enriching this engagement with the representation of place via text would be the rise later in the century of print albums and plans portraying Rome, a trend that would culminate in Antoine Lafréry’s publishing enterprise of the Speculum romanae magnificentiae (1547-77). While such guidebooks and print albums could presumably be read and flipped through by the proverbial armchair traveler, Vasari’s prose demands the reader’s prerequisite knowledge of the Roman cityscape, be it through lived experience or encounter via verbal or oral means.[49]

The plague that struck Rome in 1523 stops short Perino’s frenetic activity. Vasari matter-of-factly states that “in the year MDXXIII began the plague, which was of such kind, that if he wished to survive, it was best for him to intend to depart from Rome.” This dispassionate language, written at a generation’s remove, radically differs from contemporary accounts of the rapidly spreading disease that beset the city. Baldassare Castiglione in a letter to Gian Giacomo Calandra on 23 October 1523 describes in harrowing terms the turmoil afflicting Rome. “Death seems to stare one in the face,” he writes, “and I am here in the Vatican, where there is no guard, excepting in the Pope’s rooms, so all I can do is to wash in vinegar, carry perfumes in my hands, and commend myself to God—at home, not in church. The Angel of the Castello stands with his sword drawn.” He sketches a pathetic scene in the street in which he passes a girl, about ten years old, “whose father and mother were both dead, and who was left, without another creature in the house, alone with these dead bodies.” Less sympathetically, Cellini relates in his autobiography that during this plague he would walk around ruins armed with a musket to avoid contact with the infected.[50]

Vasari’s description of the 1523 Roman plague in Perino’s Life carries none of this dramatic import. When he announces that Perino decides to leave Rome and return to Florence, it is not due to the latter’s famed salubrious aria, as extolled from Villani to Vasari himself. Perino’s manner of deliberating whether he should go to Florence suggests a tempered patriotic allegiance. The goldsmith nicknamed Piloto, a close friend of the artist, persuades him to leave Rome and return to his native city. Perino had not been home for years, Piloto reasons, and “it would be a great honor for him to make himself known and to leave in that [city] some sign of his excellence.” Of course, the couple who had raised and trained him, Andrea de’ Ceri and his wife, were now dead. Even so, Perino, “having been born in that country, although he had nothing there, had love for it.” Like their French counterpart “il Viator,” Perino’s given name (“Il Vaga”) as well as that of his companion, “Il Piloto,” or “the Pilot,” testifies to a wayward behavior that diverges from the lure of regional roots. Up to this point in the Lives, Florentine artists such as Giotto and Donatello long to return to their city after prolonged periods of absence. But Perino’s consideration of why he ought to return exhibits a more measured affection for his patria. The anecdote’s immediate setting is not a city withstanding a cataclysmic plague but a nonchalant breakfast scene. His many years away from Florence, which might appear to be reason enough, rank alongside a desire to gain honor for himself. The justification recalls Dello Delli’s wish to return to Florence, not from homesickness but from a yearning to demonstrate his rise from poverty. Perino’s mobility to Rome and his many commissions embedding him in that city’s artistic life have shifted and destabilized the monolith of civic identity.

FIGURE 5.17 Perino del Vaga, Tarquinius Priscus and the Augur Attius, c. 1520–22. Detached fresco transferred to canvas (132 × 158 cm). Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

When Perino does return to his native place, Vasari presents a vignette that depicts the artist sorting through a complex set of reactions, one that involves the rekindling of memory, yet estrangement as well: “And having arrived in that [city], [Perino] had the most pleasure in seeing the old works having been painted by past masters, which were already a school for him in his boyhood, and likewise even those of those masters who were then living. . . . It came to pass that having found himself one day with many craftsmen, painters, sculptors, architects, goldsmiths, and carvers of marble and wood to honor him, that according to the timeworn custom they were gathered together, some to see and accompany Perino and hear what he was saying, and many to see what difference there was between the artists of Rome and those of Florence in practice, and the majority [of them] to hear the criticisms and praises that artists often tend to level at one another.”[51]

The passage’s opening—arrivati in quella città—anticipates Perino’s posture concerning Florence, an attitude of remoteness in respect to time and place. Note that Vasari does not say “in his city” or “in our city,” or more neutrally “in Florence”; rather the distal demonstrative—that city—foreshadows a lack of proximity, even a sensation of alienation. To be sure, that Perino revisits the works of those masters he studied in his youth testifies to his ties to the city. Yet the very necessity of reseeing assumes a period of absence combined with direct contact at the present. Terms and phrases such as “cose vecchie,” “maestri passati,” and “sua età puerile” further suggest that what Perino beholds does not have currency for him now. These works belong to an past age. Even contemporary works of art of Perino’s own time are minimized, for the Florentine masters (whom Vasari does not bother to name) are only considered praiseworthy “in that city,” as opposed to surpassing chronological or geographic boundaries.

Disentangling the ties between Perino and his homeland does not provoke lament, as in the rhetoric of exile. Nor does the “Florentine” artist endure censure upon his return, as does Antonio Veneziano after having demonstrated in Venice the knowledge he acquired while abroad. Perino enjoys the honor conferred by a multitude of artists ranging from painters to wood carvers. The flocking company of artists, their willingness to see, hear, and accompany Perino indicate a position far above his origins as an impoverished child suckled by a goat. Other period authors and Vasari elsewhere in the Lives register the performance of comparable ritualistic gestures of reception and hospitality on occasions such as artists’ obsequies or ceremonies for visiting dignitaries. Further attesting to Perino’s standing is his ability to unify, if only momentarily, the otherwise fractious assembly of artists specializing in differing media. Only in rare instances such as Michelangelo’s funeral or the nuptials of Francesco de’ Medici does Vasari describe a similarly ecumenical gathering.[52]

The rationale for Perino’s enthusiastic reception, however, does not lie in his having wielded a Florentine style abroad. Nor does his recognition consist solely in having related to the crowd of artists what he has witnessed in Rome, as does, for instance, the Florentine architect Simone del Pollaiuolo. Vasari narrates that Simone, after a period observing and measuring the antiquities in Rome, returns to Florence and “due to having become a great spinner of tales recounted the marvels of Rome and other places with such accuracy, that he was from then on called il Cronaca, it seeming to everyone that he was a chronicler of things in his conversation.” Nor does Perino in Florence ostentatiously exhibit his knowledge of the antique, as does Baccio d’Agnolo, in whose Palazzo Bartolini the imitation of classical ornament verges on the ludicrous. Vasari quips that its cornice, copied from the frontispiece of Monte Cavallo in Rome, resembles a cap on a small head, and the Florentines themselves criticize the building, loaded as it is with square windows, pediments, portals, and columns, as appearing more a temple than a palace.[53]

Perino’s knowledge, Vasari suggests, and by consequence his working procedure occupy a position between the polar extremes of Florentine and Roman. His origins in Florence combined with his sojourn in Rome permit him to convey what incongruities, what differenza, to use Vasari’s precise term, exist between those two cities’ artistic practices. In the case of Cimabue, Brunelleschi, or Donatello, mobility evokes an awareness of the distinctions between styles: maniera moderna vs. maniera greca; Ionic vs. Doric vs. Corinthian; Florentine vs. Venetian, and so on. Yet for Perino, that destination he encounters is hardly foreign. At the same time, his time spent in Rome renders Florence no longer the exclusive fountainhead of his stylistic and civic identity. Vasari now allows differenza to function in an additive, as opposed to an oppositional, mode. Differenza becomes varietà.

But how does Perino expostulate this difference? After stating the Florentine artists’ wish to see the differenza between Florentine and Roman practice, Vasari inserts another vignette that narrates how Perino’s explication unfolds. The artists “discoursing together of one thing and another, and examining the works, both ancient and modern, in the various churches, came to the Carmine to see Masaccio’s chapel.” The paintings prompt analytical conversation in that compressed space: “There, inspecting the paintings and multiplying in various discussions praise of that master, all marveled that he possessed so much judgment so as to be able in his time to work with so much of the modern manner in the design [disegno], invention [invenzione], and coloring [colorito].”[54]

The first few lines’ principal verb—pervennero—is surrounded by a satellite of gerunds (ragionando, guardando, moltiplicando), suggesting that the act of moving involves the complementary acts of seeing and discussing. Yet this discursive realization of space—what Michel de Certeau would call the “tour”—quickly shifts from being a wide-ranging visit to old and modern works in churches to zero in on Masaccio’s frescoes. Distillation of urban space into a single chapel is then accompanied by a reduction in the historical register. The chronology and merits of Florentine artists preceding and working alongside Masaccio become elided, with Giotto alone remaining the artist’s sole model. This impulse toward reduction continues when Perino declares to the company of artists that by painting just one figure next to another in the Carmine he would be able to demonstrate that the works of artists of his own day “do not lack liveliness and are, in fact, more beautiful.” Perino’s challenge thus advances the claim that the essence of style can be distilled and discerned in a single figure. Regarding Vasari’s narrative, restricting the number of elements for comparison could possibly expedite Perino’s explication of differenza. And this strategy eschews the need for drawn-out descriptions which already populate the artist’s biography, certainly among the most prolix in the Lives.[55]

Perino’s commentary on the Carmine and the possibility to surpass Masaccio reiterates the notion of differenza as distinctions in style plotted along the axes of ethnicity and history. Masaccio personifies the “Florentine” style, standing in contrast to what Perino embodies—the Roman style, which doubles as the modern as well. This is a reversal of sorts given that Florence typified the maniera moderna in contrast to the timeless Byzantine world whose maniera greca was static, bereft of stylistic development. Whereas Giotto diffused Florence’s style through his mobility and pupils, the city must now import the modern style from abroad, albeit through the acceptable vehicle of a native son. Perino’s brief repatriation suggests that the arts of Florence have not experienced smooth chronological development. Intercession of a mobile figure is needed to jump-start the historical progression of time.[56]

It is through a demonstration piece, and not through verbal or oral communication alone, that Perino sets out to indicate the differenza between Florentine and Roman modes of painting. Aside from the figure of St. Andrew juxtaposed next to Masaccio’s St. Paul, a project that never reached completion, Perino undertakes another ambitious commission to incite the paragone between styles. The stage of this confrontation was a free wall in the meeting place of the Confraternity of the Martyrs located at the monastery of San Salvatore di Camaldoli, a few hundred meters south of the Carmine. According to Vasari, the challenging subject to be executed, the ten thousand martyrs sent to death by two Roman emperors, provides Perino with the opportunity to display his powers of invention.[57]

In agreeing to carry out an iconographic theme which demands a dense and complex composition, Perino redirects the tactic of exhibiting differenza. As one version of the modello connected to the lost cartoon shows, the artist counters an emphasis on the singular, formulating instead a work that has varietà as its hallmark (fig. 5.18). Vasari’s first-hand description employs the conjunction oltre che in succession to emphasize the plethora of bodies, postures, and ornament. Kneeling, upright, and bowed, the martyrs are “all nude and bound in diverse ways, twisting with woeful gestures in various attitudes.” The textures of the bodies themselves range from exposed muscles swelling to cold sweat breaking out on the skin. In their facial expressions one sees “the constancy of faith in the elders, the fear of death in the youths, in others the pain of torture.” The soldiers lead the captives with ferocity, “terrible, most impious and cruel.” Varietà also extends to the emperors’ and soldiers’ “most ornate and bizarre” all’antica costumes—leggings, shoes, helmets, shields and other types of armor, “having been realized with all that copia of the most beautiful ornaments.”[58]

FIGURE 5.18 Perino del Vaga, Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand, 1522–23. Ink, brown wash, white heightening, black chalk on paper (35.8 × 33.9 cm). Albertina, Vienna.

Vasari delineates the elements that make up this varietà, though he does not elaborate on how the composition might exemplify the differenza between regional styles. We might infer that the diversity in bodily movement and emotional expression has parallels with Roman sources: classical sarcophagi and reliefs, Raphael’s Sea Victory at Ostia in the Stanze, antique ornaments in the Logge, or Polidoro da Caravaggio’s method of applying white highlights on figural groups. Yet for every Roman prototype of varietà in Perino’s work, a possible Florentine counterpart exists as well. The most obvious analogues are Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina, a cartoon that Perino studied assiduously in his youth, along with Pontormo’s drawing of the Victory and Battle of the Ten Thousand Martyrs, both works that share a preoccupation with the variations possible in the contorted and multiplied human figure. As for costumes and ornament, a similar wealth of sources pervades Filippino Lippi’s frescoes in the Strozzi Chapel.[59]

Cutting through this quarrel between regions, however, is Perino’s own personal style. The artist’s rendition in the Logge of the passage from the book of Joshua (10:11-13) that narrates the sun standing still contains a figure with outstretched arms and fluid arrangement of bodies which bears a resemblance to the Martyrdom modello (fig. 5.19). And yet, for the Florentine artists and connoisseurs inspecting Perino’s work, Vasari explains, Michelangelo’s cartoon becomes the most salient point of comparison. This may of course be a case of viewing new or strange works of art in terms of others that are more familiar. Nonetheless, the Florentine reaction calls into question just how much romanità Perino’s style contains. What does seem at work is that artists’ mobility, be it Perino’s travel to Florence or Michelangelo’s move to Rome, blurs the distinctions between ethnic styles. The purpose of Perino’s composition may have been to relate the differenza between Florentine and Roman style. But the modello’s elaborated character indicates that differenza here does not depend upon a fundamental opposition of ethnic styles. The otherwise impassable confrontation resolves in the combination of regional pictorial modes, transposed and embodied in the concept of varietà. Heterogeneous yet amalgamated, varietà is not exclusive to a particular geographic location, but rather is mobile itself.[60]

FIGURE 5.19 Attributed to Perino del Vaga, The Sun Stands Still, c. 1517–20. Fresco. Vatican Logge, Vatican City.

The portability of varietà to locales far from the artistic centers of Rome and Florence manifests itself in Perino’s many frescoes, stuccowork, and oil paintings for the Palazzo Doria del Principe in Genoa (fig. 5.20). An impresario overseeing a team of painters and sculptors, Perino executes work extending from the palace’s façade to its innermost chambers and back out into the city’s urban fabric. Francisco de Hollanda, after spending a week in Genoa in June 1538, would remark that due to such interventions “almost the entire city is painted inside and out.” As Vasari recounts Perino’s decoration for the Doria palace, “there is no room there that has not something by his hand and is not full of ornaments.” Perino’s production there included designs for the exterior; marble portals with architectural ornament, grotesques, and masks on staircases and ceilings; frescoes in the entrance atrium, the Loggia degli Eroi; and monumental ceiling paintings and triumphal arches for the ceremonial entry of Emperor Charles V. He was even reportedly responsible for designing standards for the admiral Andrea Doria’s galleys. Of several of these works, Vasari declares, “no one could imagine the beauty, abundance, the variety and the great numbers of the little figures, animals, foliage, and grotesques that are in them, all executed with lively invention.” Varietà even inflects the regional makeup of his assistants, originating from locales that range from Tuscany to Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy. Just as Giulio Romano had brought the diversity in style, media, and genre of Raphael’s workshop to the Gonzaga court, turning Mantua into a miniature Rome of sorts, so too did Perino saturate Genoa with imported pictorial ideas.[61]

FIGURE 5.20 Perino del Vaga, La Loggia degli Eroi, 1521–33, Palazzo Doria, Genoa.

FIGURE 5.21 Perino del Vaga, The Shipwreck of Aeneas: Neptune Saving Aeneas and His Crew, c. 1528–29. Ink, wash, white heightening on paper (186 × 349 mm). Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Gérard Blot.

Focusing on one painting, The Shipwreck of Aeneas, as the center of gravity for Perino’s sojourn at the Doria court, Vasari reiterates how mobility, differenza, and varietà are nodes in a delicate conceptual network. The deteriorated and lost fresco, whose appearance is preserved in a bravura ink-and-wash drawing, presents “nude figures, living and dead, in attitudes of infinite variety,” not to mention ships, galleys, turbulent waves, cloud bursts and contorted sea creatures (fig. 5.21). For traveling artists such as Perino or traveling viewers such as Francisco de Hollanda en route from Portugal to Rome, the very theme of the Trojan hero’s travails on the Eastern Mediterranean must have borne a degree of personal resonance as it certainly did for the seafaring Andrea Doria. But even before setting brush to canvas, Perino confidently conveys his compositional ideas with a cartoon, only finished in parts and executed in a motley spread of techniques—chiaroscuro, charcoal, black chalk, some figures shaded, others only outlined. Girolamo da Treviso, whose mere name identifies him as the mouthpiece for colorito and northern Italian painting, objects: “Cartoons, and nothing but cartoons!” he decries, “I have my art at the tip of my brush.” When Perino publicly exhibits his cartoon and all of Genoa rushes to see it, the central Italian artist and by extension, central Italian sources and emphasis upon disegno, are vindicated. However, the distinction implied in this case between disegno and colore or, for that matter, regional modes in general is extreme; the surviving modello shows how painterly Perino’s drawing process could be; Dürer’s print of the Sea Monsters with its delineated agitated waves is also a compelling point of comparison; and as opposed to being in the traditional Florentine medium of buon fresco, the mural of the Shipwreck was executed in oil, a technique heavily associated with the north, the most famous example being Leonardo’s Last Supper in Milan. Perino’s style, in addition to exposing difference by rubbing against an ethnic antagonist, embeds a set of differences within itself. Varietà is a historically contingent and historically rooted concept that can be used to take stock of these stylistic confrontations. And mobility provides the stage where these theoretical, regional, and personal debates can unfold.[62]

FIGURE 5.22 Giorgio Vasari, Copy after Perino del Vaga’s Compositional Study for “The Death of the Ten Thousand Martyrs,” sixteenth century. Brown ink, brown wash, and white gouache on paper prepared with gray-brown wash, drum-mounted to cream wove paper (36.9 × 34.4 cm). Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Bequest of Charles A. Loeser, 1932.265.

The traveling artist and the locomotion of varietà destabilize and uproot the entrenched notions of place, identity, and style which Vasari otherwise seeks to maintain. The mobility of artists to, from, and between regions necessarily constrains him, making him adopt the sharply patriotic tone for which he has been subsequently criticized by generations of art critics and historians. But Vasari may allow these tensions between geography and mobility to persist over the course of the Lives given the differences within his own selfhood. For Vasari himself embodies a number of contradictions, a go-between among disciples, regions, and skills, a traveling writer who paints and a traveling artist who writes. “During the time when I rewrote and reprinted the work,” he declares in the epilogue, “I broke off my writing more than once ... either for journeys or because of a superabundance of labors, works of painting, designs, and buildings.” Transposing this labor into an allegorical mode, Vasari also states that never did he expect “to write such a large volume or to embark on such a wide sea.”[63]

Vasari as a mobile individual is best discussed in relation to the traveling artist’s autobiography, the subject of the final chapter. However, it is worth briefly noting by way of conclusion how the act of mobility, varietà, and his somatic presence in the text acted in dialogue with his style as a painter, architect, designer, and court impresario. Vasari himself copied that exemplar of varietà he upholds, Perino del Vaga’s cartoon of the Ten Thousand Martyrs (fig. 5.22). Whereas his predecessors strove to collect and diffuse pictorial models, work that could take years, Vasari’s task is to quickly cover lengths of wall space within a matter of days. The physical labor of mobility in the past translates into today’s fast execution. Armed with the varietà of inventive architectural settings, costumes, fictive sculptures, and contorted figures, he decorates the Sala dei Cento Giorni in the Cancelleria in Rome within a mere one hundred days, a span of time that explains the hall’s name. Certainly for his commission for the Salone del Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, Vasari undertakes excursions to portray the meters of landscapes and battlegrounds—“all of which I had to copy from nature on the actual site and spot.” Nonetheless he suggests that his depictions of the “varieties of bodies, faces, vestments, habiliments, casques, helmets, cuirasses, various headdresses, horses, harnesses, caparisons, artillery of every kind, navigations, tempests, storms of rain and snow, and so many other things, that I am not able to remember them” are owed to years of study and experience abroad in his youth (fig. 5.23). The designs for his own house in Arezzo visually manifest this claim, because there “I depicted ... all the places and provinces where I had labored, as if they were bringing tributes, to represent the gains that I had made by their means.” The description could apply equally well to the landscape capricci which surround Diana of Ephesus in the Chamber of Fortune; or below more poignantly, to the artist seated in a bay window who examines the drawing of the building he has just studied outside the grate. The view from behind seems exhortatory, urging the viewer or future artists to follow in the footsteps of Vasari’s industriousness (figs. 5.24 and 5.25).[64]

FIGURE 5.23 Giorgio Vasari and Assistants, The Taking of Siena, 1563–71. Fresco. Palazzo Vecchio (Salone del Cinquecento).

Such mobility demands the exertion of labor, manifesting itself somatically in the artist’s sweat, as Vasari so often declares. This can also take the form of metaphorical perspiration, as when Gozzoli climbs the allegorical mountain of style. But it is most often literal, as when Maturino da Firenze and Polidoro da Caravaggio sweat as they hunt for antique motifs throughout Rome or when Vasari himself pauses in the heat of August from painting in the Palazzo Vecchio. All the same, mobility can be restorative, as when Vasari narrates that, exhausted from work, he receives leave from court such that “I might go about for some months to divert myself, and so setting out to travel, I passed over little less than the whole of Italy, seeing again innumerable friends and patrons and the works of various excellent.” Be it for study or work, the maintenance of social bonds or freedom from patrons’ obligations, Vasari in his own words alludes to the multifaceted act of displacing oneself. What he has accomplished in the Lives is to elevate mobility as an artistic behavior that demands reckoning with, providing the ample fodder that so incited subsequent generations of commentators to affirm, dispute, and elaborate upon his text.[65]

FIGURE 5.24 Giorgio Vasari, Chamber of Fortune, 1542–48. Casa di Vasari, Arezzo.

FIGURE 5.25 Giorgio Vasari, Detail from Chamber of Fortune, 1542–48. Casa di Vasari, Arezzo.

6 The Domain of Style

For all of its emphasis on varietà as a theoretical bridge that spans the gap between artists’ mobility and stylistic change, Vasari’s Lives locates the fountainhead of that varietà by and large in central Italian artists and artworks. Raphael acquires his varietà primarily in Tuscany and Rome, thus underscoring Vasari’s claim for these regions’ artistic superiority. With an arsenal of concepts such as patria, aria, contagion, and exile, his language reveals the tension and dilemmas that arise when artists travel beyond locales to which they have pledged allegiance. And this stress on central Italy raises the question of whether writers on art who take another region as their focus offer similar or varying conceptions of mobility.

There was no lack of art literature originating from regions other than Tuscany or the Papal States. To venture momentarily south: in fifteenth-century Naples, the scholar Bartolommeo Fazio dedicated several chapters of his De viris illustribus (1456) to painters, sculptors, and, most notably, to the Flemish works of art present in the King Alfonso I’s collections. In the next century, around 1524, Pietro Summonte, a civil servant and university lecturer, would compose an epistle that recounts the migration of artists and objects that characterized the cosmopolitan patronage of Neapolitan sovereigns who ruled a kingdom that stretched from Sicily to Catalonia. Like Fazio, Summonte also calls attention to the strong presence of Flemish objects, such as the tapestries after Rogier van der Weyden’s designs and the small-scale oil paintings by Petrus Christus. He even recognizes that Colantonio, whom he calls “nostro napolitano,” followed “the work of Flanders and the coloring of that country.” The infiltration of foreign cultures is not wholly embraced in the epistle, however. Summonte decries the fact that “for a certain time in this country, as in other parts, one did not make but Pisan works, German works, French and Barbarian [works].”[1]

The wax and wane of interest in artistic mobility within Summonte’s single epistle also characterizes much of the art literature produced in northern Italy, notably in the Republic of Venice. By the early to mid-sixteenth century Venetian authors and artists themselves would compose a body of work that calls for comparisons to Vasari’s monumental enterprise. Summonte had, in fact, addressed his letter to the Venetian patrician Marcantonio Michiel, who may have had the intention of using the notices on artists in Naples as part of a larger undertaking to collect biographies of painters and sculptors, the Vite de’ pittori e scultori moderni. However, an anonymous commentator in one manuscript copy of Summonte’s letter remarked that Michiel ultimately abandoned his project “due to a very large and complete book having been printed in Florence,” a reference to the publication of Vasari’s Lives in 1550. Michiel’s other works include a description of Bergamo’s artistic monuments (Agri et urbis Bergomatis, 1516) and the Notizie del disegno, an inventory of artworks in Padua, Cremona, Milan, Pavia, Bergamo, and Venice. At one point in the Notizie, Michiel refers to “Barberino Veneziano [Jacopo de’ Barbari] who went to Germany and Burgundy, and having adopted the art of those countries, executed many things.” Yet aside from this tantalizing instance, the heavily topographical focus of Michiel’s surviving work oriented his attention to recording artworks in specific locales rather than speculating on the subject of artists’ mobility.[2]

Another Venetian work predating Vasari’s Lives is Paolo Pino’s Dialogo della pittura (1548). A pupil of Savoldo, Pino portrays in his work a learned conversation between two painters, the Venetian “Lauro” and his Florentine counterpart “Fabio.” The former mentions the Lives before its publication: “Giorgio da’ Rezzo ... as a true son of painting, has united and collected in his book ... all the lives and works of the most famous painters.” However, the centerpiece of the dialogue is painting’s relation with the qualities of disegno, invenzione, and colorito, with the issue of artists’ mobility raised only briefly toward the end. A young painter’s life, Fabio states, should include “going to the most noble parts of the world ... making with the marvels of his works his wide road to immortality, giving his paintings to lords and great men, who can and should sustain such virtue.” Like Vasari’s characterization of Giotto’s travels around the Italian peninsula, Fabio’s conception of mobility would seem to result in distribution, rather than exchange, of an artist’s style with artistic milieus in foreign destinations. Admittedly, the Dialogo’s well-known declaration that “if Titian and Michelangelo were in one body ... one could call this the god of painting” refers to the process of mescolanza and the concept of varietà which Raphael undertook and achieved in his formational journeys. Yet how mobility plays a role in composing such a body that unites disegno with colore is not set out in any explicit manner.[3]

In the wake of Michiel’s and Pino’s writings comes the Venetian work that most considers mobility, style, and geography as topics of interest. This is Lodovico Dolce’s Dialogo della pittura (1557), also titled L’Aretino in homage to the author’s close friend Pietro Aretino, himself a prolific critic of the arts. (To avoid confusion and repetition between names and the historical personage and character both named Aretino, I will henceforth simply refer to this work as Dialogo, though it is more frequently called L’Aretino.) Unlike Vasari, who considered himself foremost as an artist making a foray into the realm of letters, Dolce was a prolific, if highly derivative, author. His output, typical of polymaths of his time, embraced a diverse range of subjects: translations of classical works (among them La poetica d’Horatio, 1536, and Ovid’s Le trasformationi, 1553); the proper status and behavior of women (Dialogo della institution delle donne, 1545); memory treatises (Dialogo . . . nel quale si ragiona del modo di accrescere e conservare la memoria, 1562); the properties of colors (Dialogo nel quale si ragiona della qualità, diversità e proprietà dei colori, 1564); and the types of stones and gems (Libri tre . . . nei quali si tratta delle diverse sorti delle gemme che produce la natura, 1565). Also part of Dolce’s oeuvre, which consists of more than one hundred volumes, are tragedies, comedies, emblem books, scores of narrative poems, sacred verse, and sonnets, as well as biographies of Dante, Boccaccio, and Charles V. It was not without reason that the most common epithet applied to Dolce in his day was “l’infaticabile”—the tireless one.[4]

Dolce’s catholic interests, however, did not preclude him from participating in the regional polemic incited by Vasari’s unabashed championship of Tuscan and Roman artists. Part of the Dialogo’s extensive title (Dialogo . . . nel fine si fa mentione delle virtù e delle opere del Divin Titiano) borrows the moniker of “divine” that Vasari so assiduously applied to Michelangelo, and bestows it instead upon Titian (fig. 6.1). The format of the Dialogo itself betrays the quarrels between regions: like Pino’s own Dialogo, Dolce’s work stages a debate between a Venetian and a Florentine, in this case the naturalized Venetian “Aretino” against the Tuscan literary figure Gian Francesco Fabrini. Even the work’s first historiated initial, depicting two players with racquets volleying a ball, suits the dialogue format’s polemical nature (fig. 6.2).[5]

Dolce’s promotion of Venetian artists and artworks broaches the question of how, if at all, he reconciles this allegiance with artists from the Republic frequently traveling from and pursuing careers beyond its borders. Gentile Bellini, Lorenzo Lotto, Sebastiano del Piombo, and Titian, for instance, all spent time in varying degrees away from Venice. Their absence, whether brief or extended, also raises the issue of whether certain stylistic ideals are attainable regardless of place, or whether a locale’s particularities, such as aria, trump artistic agency. As we shall see, Dolce makes pains to contain Venetian artists within the geographic and stylistic confines of the lagoon. The main protagonist here is Titian, whose works and physical person become firmly associated with the city’s civic halls, palaces, and even façades. Titian’s time away from Venice only underscores this city’s artistic superiority, even in Rome. And when artists of lesser caliber venture onto the terra ferma and beyond, they must prepare themselves for a critical reception of their wandering. How does Dolce police the borders of his chosen territory and how does mobility potentially challenge the integrity of that domain?

FIGURE 6.1 Title page from Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo della pittura di m. Lodovico Dolce, intitolato L’Aretino, 1557. *IC5 D6874 557d, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

FIGURE 6.2 Initial from Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo della pittura di m. Lodovico Dolce, intitolato L’Aretino, 1557. *IC5 D6874 557d, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

MAKING VENICE

It seems moot to question the art historical commonplace that Dolce’s Dialogo serves as the Venetian rebuttal to Vasari’s emphasis on central Italian art. Yet so entrenched is this conviction that the means by which Dolce places Venice on center stage in his treatise—literary tone, narration, allusions, argumentation—is often overlooked. In this respect, consider the thread that runs through the widely diverging theoretical speculations of Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefebvre, and Pierre Bourdieu: the apparently neutral category of “setting” is never an unmediated entity; space comes into being as a social and discursive construction by those who build, inhabit, move, and converse within a given place. Likewise, the Venice as represented in Dolce’s Dialogo serves as far more than a backdrop. From the dialogue’s rambling turns, digressions, and repetitions emerges a portrayal of Venice as a highly dense and interconnected network of artists, artworks, and critics. The city’s self-representation, furthermore, materializes via the exclusion and erasure of those native artists that become mobilized and dare to wander unduly beyond its confines.[6]

FIGURE 6.3 After Cesare Vecellio, View of Piazza San Marco, 1520–1600. Woodcut (377 × 581 mm). British Museum, London.

Just as the woodcut view of Florence on the title page conveys to the reader the chief geographical setting of Vasari’s Lives, the beginning lines of Dolce’s Dialogo immediately identify Venice as the focal point that orients the speakers’ discussion. The protagonist Pietro Aretino initiates this process in his address to his counterpart Giovanni Fabrini: “Just two weeks ago, my dear Fabrini, I happened to be in the beautiful church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. I had gone there in company with the learned Giulio Camillo for the mass of St. Peter Martyr. It is celebrated daily at the altar which has over it that large canvas telling the saint’s story: a divine depiction, painted by the delicate hand of my distinguished friend Titian. So I saw then what appeared to be you looking all intently at that other painting—the one of St. Thomas Aquinas which the Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini carried out in tempera many years back, along with other figures of saints. And had it not been that both of us were diverted by Messer Antonio Anselmi, who took us to the house of Monsignore Bembo, we would then and there have made a surprise descent upon you, with the intention of holding you prisoner with us for the whole of that day.”[7]

Maps of Venice such as Jacopo de’ Barbari’s monumental print offer a view from an elevated distance, as if the city were seen from the towering mast of a ship anchored in the lagoon. And later prints such as a woodcut after Cesare Vecellio further dramatize the virtual visual experience of seeing Venice from afar: a Turkish acrobat gingerly walks a tightrope strung from the bell tower of San Marco, with the piazza and indeed the entire city a hundred meters below (fig. 6.3). By contrast, the opening lines of the Dialogo immediately pinpoint and insert the reader within a specific location. The sites in this initial scene progress like a stack of dolls nested within one another with an ever increasing specificity. The locational focus zooms from Venice (as stated in Dialogo’s dedication) and Santi Giovanni e Paolo to the altar of St. Peter Martyr, then to Titian’s painting of the subject and finally to Bellini’s altar-piece of St. Thomas Aquinas. Enmeshed are the speakers’ observations of these paintings: Aretino looks at Fabrini, who, in turn, is looking at Bellini’s painting. The speakers’ actions and statements also underscore the Dialogo’s intense focus on Venice. Aretino’s knowledge that mass is held every day at the altar of St. Peter Martyr demonstrates a familiarity with the city’s liturgical rhythms. Despite an itinerant career that took Dolce to Urbino, Ferrara, and Rome, the reference to the casa di Bembo— perhaps an illusion to the imposing Gothic palazzo near the Rialto bridge—is a concrete reminder of Cardinal Pietro Bembo’s and his family’s centuries-long association with Venice. Even Fabrini, a foreigner in the city, is described as being wholly absorbed (“tutto astratto”) in contemplating Bellini’s painting, an expression that evokes a posture of immobility and rootedness in Santi Giovanni e Paolo.[8]

In intensifying his focus on specific altarpieces, Dolce removes from his purview other significant Gothic and early Renaissance works inside and outside the church: Tullio Lombardo’s tomb of Doge Andrea Vendramin and Andrea Verrocchio’s equestrian sculpture of Bartolomeo Colleoni. But while Dolce shaves away a plethora of now canonical monuments, at the same time he saturates the city with a slew of letterati. Their works are not described at any length, perhaps an impediment for a dialogue that begins in media res. But this very lack of explanation speaks to the existence of at least some readers who would be familiar with their names, if not their oeuvres. The squad of literary figures includes Aretino himself, the author of the famous six volumes of the Lettere, hundreds of which concern art and artists. His counterpart in the Dialogo and recipient of at least two of his letters, Giovan Francesco Fabrini, wrote works on the Tuscan dialect, the interpretation of Latin, and the vernacular, in addition to translating and writing commentaries on the works of Virgil, Horace, and Terence. Giulio Camillo, also mentioned in Aretino’s Lettere, composed the Idea del Teatro. This was an exposition of “all things that are in the world ... that pertain to all sciences and all the noble and mechanical arts,” published in 1550 by Torrentino, incidentally the same year and press as Vasari’s Lives. A collector of portraits, medals, and figurines, Cardinal Pietro Bembo was another correspondent of Aretino’s and composed treatises on models for the vernacular (the Prose della volgar lingua) along with the famed Gli asolani, a series of Neoplatonic dialogues taking place in the bucolic court of Queen Caterina Cornaro of Cyprus. Bembo’s secretary Antonio Anselmi, too, was addressed in Aretino’s Lettere.[9]

This portrayal of Venice as a hub of literati is consonant with one of Dolce’s sources, Francesco Sansovino’s Dialogo di tutte le cose notabili e belle che sono in Venetia, first published in 1556 and subsequently edited and enlarged through the course of the sixteenth century. As the title indicates, this guide stages a dialogue between a Venetiano and a Forestiero, a foil that resembles that between the naturalized Venetian Aretino and the Florentine Fabrini. Aretino’s reference to his intellectual coterie is also reminiscent of one of the chief themes running throughout Sansovino’s work, namely portraying Venice as being saturated with prominent citizens. The title page announces that the book’s two volumes “fully and with every truth” contain descriptions of Venice’s huomini letterati, in addition to those of “famous senators,” “princes and their lives,” “all the patriarchs,” “sculptors and their works,” and “painters and paintings” (fig. 6.4). Within the Dialogo itself, the Forestiero declares that Venice “is a country of virtuosi,” to which the Venetiano replies, “in fact, the copiousness of excellent men here is great.” The Venetiano proceeds to go through a roll call of these notable citizens, naming the city’s musicians, literati, and craftsmen of silk and wool and proclaiming along the way that “there are more illustrious men in Venice than in ten other cities.” However, this very impulse to categorize the citizenry according to a given activity would seem to preclude the possibility of Burckhardt’s “universal man” of the Renaissance, let alone any crossovers from one category to another. This scheme of classes may also reflect Venice’s guild system, whose rigidity, according to some scholars, endured longer than in other Italian city-states. In this respect Dolce differs from Sansovino: Aretino identifies Titian as “my illustrious friend,” a phrase which bespeaks a rapport that facilitates transactions across categories, in this case, between painters and writers. In Venice, the Dialogo suggests, the visual arts can constitute a magnetic point that brings literary figures and artists themselves into discursive relation with another.[10]

FIGURE 6.4 Title page from Francesco Sansovino, Delle cose notabili che sono in Venetia, 1570. *IC5 L2358 548ce, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

HALLS OF POWER

As the Dialogo unfolds, this civic encomium converges on one particular site, the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, or Great Council Hall. The assembly point for all Venetian patrician men aged over twenty-five years, the Sala also functioned as a de facto gallery of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venetian narrative painting until a disastrous fire in 1577. A view engraved several years after the fire shows that the chamber continued to bring a legislative body, painted histories, and portraits of the Doges together within one location (fig. 6.5). The crowds of patrician men seated in rows that follow the print’s rough perspectival construction seem to rival the numerous figures saturating Tintoretto’s Paradise (1588–1592) hanging above the Doge and his party.[11]

Aretino and Fabrini arrive at the topic of the Great Council Hall via a discussion of painting’s various uses. These include devotional veneration, navigation, and battle plans. Aretino also declares that painting on palace façades, provided it is executed “by the hand of a master of quality,” offers more delight than incrustations of precious materials such as marble and porphyry. In addition, painting can ornament the interior of such buildings, and as examples, Aretino cites the following halls: “It was not without reason, then, that the Popes I named earlier commissioned from Raphael the frescoing of the apartments in the Papal Palace, and from Michelangelo that of the Sistine Chapel and the Pauline Chapel; and in the same way this illustrious Government of ours had the Sala del Gran Consiglio painted by various artists who were more or less skillful, even as the style of the times was rough, and not yet capable of producing pictorial excellence. Subsequently it called on Titian to do two canvases there. And would to God that his brush had done the painting in its entirety; for then perhaps this same Sala today would be one of the most beautiful and respected sights in Italy.”[12]

The Sala’s importance as the epicenter of Venetian art becomes all the more emphasized when it is compared to other monumental painting cycles. Aretino makes these comparisons with a battery of conjunctions (six in this passage alone). The grouping together of Raphael’s Stanze, Michelangelo’s Sistine and Pauline Chapels, and Titian’s work in the Sala points to a logic that regional and patronage-focused art historical studies may not sufficiently stress. Such monumental painting cycles across a geographic expanse could evoke comparisons with one another; they were hardly isolated incidents in which a patron sought to express political and cultural aims to a local audience alone. Vasari wrote in a letter to Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici that his decorations for the Salone dei Cinquecento would “surpass all the halls constructed by the Venetian Senate and those of all the kings and emperors and popes who ever were.” Although these rulers may have had numerous treasures, Vasari explained that “not one of them would have in their territories a body of murals so great and magnificent.”[13]

FIGURE 6.5 Published by Giacomo Franco, Il gran Conseglio dell’eccelsa Republica Venetiana, nel quale si riducono i nobili col Sern. Principe a creare magistrati, di bellissime pitture ornato, 1580–1620. Engraving (200 × 246 mm). British Museum, London.

The Venetian Sala is not only a forum of artistic achievement. This prestigious location also witnesses the accelerating flow of stylistic development, with Titian as chief catalyst. Titian is the harbinger of a new stylistic age that supersedes those painters who worked “according to those rough ages” (secondo quelle età rozze), namely painters of the Trecento and Quattrocento. Note that in his other writings, Dolce did not always negatively assess fifteenth-century painters. In his treatise on gems, he includes Giovanni Bellini among those artists to rival the ancients. Nevertheless, the Dialogo relegates the Bellini to advance the notion of Venice as a possessor of her own progressive history of the visual arts. Such an assertion clashes with Vasari’s history of style which took central Italy as its chief geographic setting, leaving other regions frozen in a stylistic stasis, bereft of history and therefore artistic achievement.[14]

The Dialogo may endow Venice with its own history of stylistic acceleration, yet this history itself is hardly comprehensive. Notably absent is any mention of how the Byzantine icons, relics, and architectural fragments proliferating in Venice might figure in the history that Aretino posits. This blind spot is a far cry from Cardinal Bessarion’s declaration made in 1468 that on entering Venice, he and his fellow Greek exiles felt as though they were entering “another Byzantium” (quasi alterum Byzantium). The bronze horses taken from Constantinople’s Hippodrome, the Tetrarchs, and the Pillars of Acre were among the prominent Byzantine spolia embedded in San Marco, not to mention other Byzantine precious objects populating the church’s treasury, the cycle of mosaics, and the highly venerated Nicopea icon kept in the sacristy.[15] In one of his inventories Michiel describes the panel cover of a relic of the True Cross which Bessarion donated to his Venetian confraternity as displaying figures “alla Grecca,” and the work on the whole as “opera Costantinopolitana.”[16] Despite the unmistakable presence of Byzantine works of art in Venice, one of the few instances in which the Byzantine world is mentioned equates that civilization with iconoclasm. Aretino states: “Certain emperors, especially Greek ones—laid an embargo on the use of images.” He does mention Titian’s supposed early training with the mosaicist Sebastiano Zuccati, who executed several mosaics for the façade of San Marco. Yet Aretino declares that Zuccati immediately sent Titian to the Bellini workshop, thus denying the possibility that Titian might acquire the principles of art via a medium associated with the Byzantine world. Instead, the protagonists of Venetian art are limited to the triad of Bellini, Giorgione, and Titian, the last of whom leads style’s ascent through his work in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio.[17]

Yet the Sala cannot completely embody this history, for as Aretino laments, Titian did not paint the hall in its entirety. Painters since at least the fourteenth century had been contributing to the Sala’s pictorial cycle, which depicted Doge Sebastiano Ziani’s mediation in 1177 of a conflict between Pope Alexander III and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. In the early fifteenth century, such painters foreign to Venice as Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello were commissioned by the Republic to execute the history in fresco. In 1474, Gentile Bellini had begun another rendition of the cycle in canvas, as his predecessors’ frescoes were already falling into disrepair. In his guide to the city, “De origine, situ et magistratibus venetae,” the Venetian chronicler and diarist Marin Sanudo referred to this series of campaigns in the Sala as a renewal (renovatio) of a well-established pictorial tradition. Aretino acknowledges these paintings anterior to Titian only to disavow their worth. And yet he concedes that Titian contributed but two canvases to the Sala, the first showing the emperor kneeling before the pope (1523) and the second the so-called Battle of Cadore (also known as the Battle of Spoleto, 1538). His language makes plain that his wish for Titian to have painted the entire cycle in the Sala remains just that, an unfulfilled yearning. Here Dolce’s topographic focus enters a hypothetical city space, speculating on what might have been.[18]

FIGURE 6.6 Title page from Laudivio de Vezzano, Lettere del gran Mahvmeto imperadore de’Tvrchi: scritte a diversi re, prencipi, signori, e repvbliche, con le risposte loro; ridotte nella volgar lingva da m. Lodovico Dolce, 1563. Ott 251.1.15*, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

BARBARIAN PRACTICE

Disappointment, however, is relative. That the Sala does not completely manifest Aretino’s visions pales in comparison to the prohibition in those cultures to eschew images altogether. Aretino concludes his speech on the Sala and on the use of painting in general by stating: “In the present context I refrain from saying anything else, except only that, amongst the barbarous customs of the infidel races, the one which is the worst is their refusal to allow the making in their country of any painted or sculpted image.” Without painting, Aretino claims, “we would not possess either a place to live in or any of those things which are associated with civilized custom.”[19]

Aretino makes his point with a forceful turn of phrase. He emphatically repeats the “che” introducing his damning observations (“che non comportano, che in fra di loro”) and points to the cultural divide with the glaring demonstrative “them.” His condemnation is based on the widespread assumption that in the Ottoman Empire—the Islamic culture with the closest ties to Venice—images were forbidden. It does not follow, however, that Dolce the author was indifferent toward the Turks. He had published the Lettere del gran Mahumeto imperadore de’ turchi, a translation of Laudivio Zacchia de Vezzano’s compilation of epistles supposedly written by the Ottoman sultan. The title page layout is so similar to the Dialogo that the two works—one on Renaissance art theory, the other on the Ottomans—could be mistaken for one another on first glance (fig. 6.6).[20]

Yet in the passage cited above, the speaker Aretino fashions once again a curtailed historical version of Venetian painting and Ottoman patronage. Passed over in silence is Gentile Bellini’s diplomatic mission in 1479–81 to the Ottoman court for the purpose of painting Sultan Mehmet II’s portrait. Even Vasari mentions this commission. The Lives does acknowledge that painting “was prohibited by Mohammedian law,” but in the same sentence Vasari describes the sultan’s favorable reaction to Bellini’s naturalistic style as one of “great stupor.” The Venetian historical record, furthermore, did not neglect Gentile’s voyage to Constantinople and Sultan Mehmet II’s appreciation of painting. Sanudo recorded in 1479 that the sultan requested the Venetian state send him “un bon pytor.” After Gentile was selected and completed his mission, Sanudo later noted that the artist “was well regarded by the Signor Turco and was made a knight; and he had him paint some things, especially a Venice.” Other fifteenth-century witnesses such as Maria Angiolello, Francesco Suriano, and Domenico Malipiero also commented on the sultan’s wish for a painter to be sent to the Ottoman court. The last of these, in fact, reported that Mehmet II sought “a good painter who knows how to make portraits.” In the 1490 edition of his history of the world, the Supplementum chronicarum, Jacopo Filippo Foresti da Bergamo recounted that “when the emperor [i.e., Mehmet II] beheld the image so similar to himself, he admired the powers of that man [Gentile] and said that he surpassed all other painters who ever existed.”[21]

The sultan’s patronage of Gentile continued to be reported well into the sixteenth century. Francesco Sansovino related in numerous editions of his Venetia città nobilissima et singolare that beneath one of the paintings executed for the Sala, Gentile inserted an inscription that called attention to the honors he received from the Ottoman sultan: “Gentilis patriae dedit haec monumenta Belinus / Othomano accitus, munere factus Eques” (Gentile Bellini has given these monuments to the fatherland / Having been summoned by the Ottoman and made a Knight as a reward). Furthermore, medals based on Gentile’s portrait of the sultan and perhaps even a version of the portrait itself circulated in both Venice and the Italian peninsula as a whole, thus challenging the notion that the “infidels” placed a universal ban on images and image-making (fig. 6.7).[22]

The Dialogo was not alone in repeating the myth of Islamic aniconism and hostility against the arts. Like Vasari, Michelangelo Biondo implies that restrictions are attached to the choir of the Muses “in the extremes of Arabia.” In Sansovino’s exposition on Turkish laws and customs, Dell’historia vniversale dell’origine et imperio de tvrchi (1560), the narrator opens the section entitled “Of Their Temples” (“De Tempii loro”) by stating, “They have rather large and sumptuous temples called in their language (Meschit), in which I did not see any images at all, aside from these words written in the Arabic language.”[23] Yet the narrator in his description of Constantinople acknowledges that the Ottoman capital is hardly bereft of images. He observes in the Hippodrome, for instance, the so-called snake column, the bronze Hercules taken as spolia from Hungary, and the obelisk of Theodosius engraved with scenes in relief. Aretino’s statement regarding the Ottoman use of images is less subtle and more polemical: the customs of the “infidels” serve as a convenient foil against which to assert the prominence of painting in Venetian civic life.[24]

FIGURE 6.7 Designed by Gentile Bellini, Portrait Medal of Sultan Mehmet II, 1480. Bronze, diameter 9.4 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

TITIAN IN VENICE

For all of his focus on Titian’s canvases in the Sala, Aretino does not fail to mention Titian’s paintings found elsewhere in Venice. Toward the conclusion of the Dialogo, Aretino recounts Titian’s biography to Fabrini. The painter’s curriculum vitae evokes a mental map and a virtual tour of the painter’s work through the city’s streets, squares, and canals. As Dolce suggested in his treatise on memory, if one is unable to travel, reading about places is a worthy substitute, for this activity allows one to visualize locations in the imagination. Likewise, Aretino’s narration of Titian’s paintings solicits a “bookish” engagement with topography. The excursion begins with the façade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the building directly on the Grand Canal that housed Venice’s sizable German merchant colony, where Titian paints a Judith “most wonderful in design and coloring.” Aretino then transfers the reader to the Grand Canal’s other side, to Titian’s altarpieces in the church and cloister of the Franciscan order. In the Church of San Nicolao, he paints an altar-piece of that saint, whose garments reflect “the glint and harshness of the gold, which seems genuinely woven in.” Further afield toward the southwestern edge of the city, the church of Santa Maria Maggiore displays the painter’s St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness. The conversation then returns to the setting of the Dialogo’s opening scene, the Dominican church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Aretino describes Titian’s St. Peter Martyr altarpiece at length, after which he assures Fabrini with suitable rhetorical flourish that “I refrain from going on further and telling you about the beauties of the invention, the design and the coloring; for they are known to you and to everyone.” Yet in spite of these references to points scattered across the city, Aretino’s tour terminates and culminates in the Sala. He acknowledges he has mentioned the civic hall more than once; nevertheless, he describes once again Titian’s battle and historical scenes, this time focusing all the more on details in these works. In the Battle of Cadore he mentions the hordes of contorted soldiers and galloping horses depicted “in a variety of forms” (fig. 6.8). But the focal point of his description is the young woman in the far right foreground. Having fallen into a ditch, she is attempting to free herself, her limb fast against the rock that “gives the impression not of painting, but of actual flesh.” Two copies after Titian’s battle piece—a painting in the Uffizi and an etching—render this telling detail. In both, the woman’s knee appears severed from the body and endowed with an agency of its own, penetrating into the very space of the viewer. So significant is Titian’s contribution in the Sala that the topographical survey that ranges throughout the wide breadth of Venice’s tract can conclude with commentary on a lone female figure, and a bodily fragment at that. It is as though a single limb is sufficient evidence of Titian’s contribution to the city and to the history of the visual arts.[25]

FIGURE 6.8 After Titian, Copy of the Battle of Cadore, sixteenth century. Oil on canvas (121 × 134 cm). Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

ARTIST AS ORNAMENT AND MOBILE GOOD

The Dialogo’s identification of Titian’s istorie as the hallmark of Venetian painting was reiterated in a range of genres. In Sansovino’s Delle cose notabili, the Venetian guide declares to the Florentine visitor that in Titian’s paintings the viewer witnesses “the miracles of his divine intellect.” Venetia, citta nobilissima e singolare (1581), Sansovino’s expanded version of his guidebook, repeats this praise of the canvases. According to the narrator, the painter’s rendition of the emperor humbling himself before the pope “has been considered the rarest painting that was ever in this place [i.e., the Sala].” In the 1568 edition of the Lives, Vasari states that Titian’s battle scene, “taken all from life, is held to be the best of those histories that are in this hall and the most beautiful.” In a different vein, geographically oriented works also singled out the Sala’s pictorial cycle and Titian’s reputation. Venice occupies a major role in Tomasso Porcacchi’s account of the world’s islands, the L’isole piu famose del mondo (1572), which describes the Sala as the hall where “the major council of the nobility congregate: where there are paintings by the hands of the most excellent painters.” Under the section Huomini illustri di Vinetia, Titian is the only painter specified by name and is said to have surpassed nature itself. Notably, Dolce is included among the city’s illustrious literary figures, praised as one whose “labors and industry can more likely be admired than ever equaled.”[26]

Running alongside the axis that plots Titian’s reputation over time and across genres is another line within the Dialogo that plots the painter’s diffusion of fame through space. Aretino attests that “Titian’s fame did not confine itself within the bounds of Venice, but spread far and wide through Italy, and made many nobles eager to have him work for them—including Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, Federico, Duke of Mantua, and also Francesco Maria, Duke of Urbino, and many others.” However, this renown that reaches far and wide threatens to unfasten the bond between painter and the city that claims him as its own. Aretino recounts that Titian’s fame eventually reached Rome, leading Pope Leo X to invite the painter to that city such that the pontiff might possess “something divine from his hand.” Yet Aretino then suggests that Navagero along with his powers of eloquence prevented Titian’s acceptance of the papal invitation. For in losing Titian, Aretino explains, Venice “would be despoiled [spogliata] of one of its greatest adornments [d’uno de’ suoi maggiori ornamenti]”[27]

Vasari had often adopted a favorable posture toward artists’ journeys to undertake commissions for distinguished patrons. The Dialogo, however, celebrates Titian’s immobility and his adhesion to Venice. This stance is made manifest, in part, by designating the painter as one of the city’s chief ornaments. The Dialogo is, of course, not alone in employing the topos of artist as a place’s ornament. In the “Preface to the Whole Work,” Vasari states that part of his enterprise involves evaluating how much artists were “ornament and commodity to their countries.” The Latin epitaphs that conclude the biographies of Spinello Aretino and Antonello da Messina also hail these artists as ornaments to their fatherlands. While Vasari and Dolce both recognize the value of an artist to a patria’s reputation, Aretino’s speech especially emphasizes Venice’s almost binding ownership toward her chief ornamento, Titian. Titian’s presence via his paintings is built into the very urban fabric of Venice, especially given the painter’s work in the civic heart of the Republic (the Sala) and throughout the city as a whole.[28]

But is the artist as ornament merely an ancillary, though surely welcome, feature of a place? Period dictionaries, after all, define ornamento as an additive, an embellishment “that is added to what there is, to make it graceful and beautiful.” One of the chief architectural treatises of the early modern period, Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, says as much (6.2): “Ornament may be defined as a form of auxiliary. . . . Rather than being inherent [it] has the character of something attached or additional.” Still, the question of whether an artist as ornament is a necessary part of the whole may itself be misguided. In employing the topos in question, Vasari and Dolce both seem less concerned with assessing whether the artist as ornament is integral to their patria. Instead, they perceive ornament as part of a locale’s apparatus of display. As Hans-Georg Gadamer has argued, the ontological role of ornament does not consist in its auxiliary status, but rather in its capacity to represent. Although made in a context removed from the early modern period, Gadamer’s remarks resonate with Vasari’s and Dolce’s conception of ornament insofar as it addresses and generates a reaction on the part of the spectator. Vasari recounts in Fra Filippo Lippi’s Life that the citizens of Spoleto urge Lorenzo de’ Medici to allow them to keep the artist’s body, since their city had a dearth of “ornaments,” while Florence had a superfluity of famous men. In this case, the ornamento (Fra Filippo Lippi’s remains) is detached from its homeland, but nevertheless serves to display Florence’s cultural supremacy over its neighbors. Likewise, Aretino’s appellation of Titian as ornamento impresses the foreign visitor, Fabrini, and shows him a particular version of Venice, a place replete with paintings in the maniera moderna, with other artistic styles (the Bellini and the fifteenth century) and traditions (Byzantine/Islamic) pushed aside. Fabrini’s tour through the city, furthermore, demonstrates the efficacy of this representational apparatus. His sojourn in Venice has been consumed with viewing the city’s collection of Titians: “I have seen all of these works several times and they are divine; no other hands could have created them.” Thus, while some period sources might note ornament as additive, they stress its importance for a locale’s ultimate beauty and perfection.[29]

Given Titian’s instrumental role in Venice’s self-presentation, it comes as no surprise that his potential departure induces anxiety. Describing Titian’s possible mobility is the term spogliata, a word laden with connotations of booty seized during war. Of course, the other instance in the Dialogo where the word occurs bears milder associations, referring as it does to the comic situation of undressing someone in a masquerade. Elsewhere in Dolce’s oeuvre, specifically his treatise on the proper behavior of women, the expression spogliare ornamenti takes on a more sober tone: it refers to the situation in which a widow must indicate her bereft status by dressing in black and removing the ornaments she wore while her husband was alive. And when pertaining to the enforced physical displacement of persons or objects, spogliare’s darker connotations do come through. Varchi, for instance, employs the phrase spogliare ornamenti to describe the removal of works of art from Florence while the city was under siege in 1529. Working in the service of King Francis I of France, Battista della Palla, an enemy of the Medici, “removed from [spogliò] Florence many sculptures, paintings, medals and other antique ornaments [ornamenti antichi]... and sent them to King Francis, who ... enjoyed them marvelously.” While the term spogliata could be used lightly—Dolce employs it in the comic context of undressing someone—even here, the very meaning of “undressed” raises the specter of stripping, of nakedness, and other associations link it directly with the spolia taken from conquered cities. Titian risks becoming war booty, stripped from Venice by a rapacious Rome.[30]

Subsequently, it is with a tone of wariness that Aretino recounts the possibility of Venice losing one of her own ornaments, Titian, an incident averted thanks to Navagero’s persuasive powers. The triumph of the humanist’s eloquence may itself refer to the power of speech, and by extension, to the Dialogo itself. Such an allusion might inscribe the work within the well-worn analogy ut pictura poesis as well as within the culture of exchange between poets and painters which writers on art and artists themselves so often took pains to accentuate. However, the very fact that such eloquence needed to be deployed is in and of itself telling: while artists could be likened to the ornamenti encrusting a façade, they could wrest themselves from the bonds of civic rhetoric, or for that matter, from the city itself when faced with alluring prospects.[31]

This is perhaps why Aretino continually raises the competing issues of the geographic diffusion of Titian’s fame and the artist’s long-standing ties to Venice. Soon after the analogy of artist as ornament appears, he states: “His fame [Titian’s] passed into France as well, and King Francis the First did not fail to importune Titian with every sort of lofty stipulation, in order to attract the artist to him; but Titian never wanted to give up Venice, having come there as a small boy and chosen it for his home.” There may be some historical grounding to this, though no documentation of an official invitation from Francis I to Titian survives. More significantly, Aretino emphasizes the artist’s connection to Venice by exploiting the metaphor of the artist as a mobile good for whom various regions compete. As we might recall, Vasari draws upon this trope at several points: Gaddo Gaddi’s mosaic of the Coronation of the Virgin so impressed his fellow Florentines that to retain him in Florence and fertilize that city’s artistic scene with his offspring, he was given a wife of noble birth with whom he had several children, among them the painter Taddeo Gaddi. Donatello’s works in Padua so impressed the inhabitants that they “sought every way and every type of affection to make him their citizen.” And Pordenone’s works in Piacenza received the praise of its citizens such that “in order to better reward him these gentlemen wanted to give him a wife, so as to enable him to honor again and embellish their city with his works.”[32]

Vasari, however, drew upon this notion of the artist as a mobile good only in those instances when the artist was working in foreign locales. As much as he proclaims Florence and Tuscany as the cradle of the arts, Vasari nevertheless clearly states that due to intense competition, these places cannot comfortably sustain all artists born there. Calling on the nemo propheta adage, he also stressed the need for artists to relinquish their homeland to receive due recognition. By contrast, Dolce’s representation of Venice does not exhibit a similarly fluid qualitative conception of place as that laid out in the Lives. The reference to patrons’ unsuccessful attempts to woo Titian underscores how much the artist is tethered to Venice. It is a union which cannot be rent asunder.

TITIAN AT COURT

But for all of its attempts to keep Titian within the confines of the lagoon, the Dialogo does not suppress mention of Titian’s occasional journeys away from Venice. The physical labor of mobility and creating works of art abroad are set aside. Underscored instead is Titian’s presence before prestigious patrons and his capacity to attract audiences. Of course compared to some of his predecessors and contemporaries such as Carlo Crivelli, Lotto, and Sebastiano del Piombo, Titian is by no means an itinerant painter. This consummate master of Venetian painting, while enjoying foreign patronage at the highest levels, deftly avoided being pressed into work at courts abroad. Still, Titian’s biography was punctuated by intervals away from the Republic, with journeys undertaken in Padua, Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, Bologna, Milan, Augsburg, and Rome. Aretino also remarks, albeit briefly, that Titian was not a native Venetian but rather born in the terraferma town of Cadore. Although acknowledging the painter’s brief sojourns in these locations, the Dialogo pushes the problem of mobility aside, focusing instead on Titian’s receipt of noble, papal, and imperial patronage. Indicative of this attitude is Aretino’s portrayal of the painter’s summons by Charles V to Bologna and Augsburg. The Holy Roman Emperor, Aretino recounts, bestowed on Titian a bevy of honors, granting him “privileges, subsistence, and rewards on a tremendous scale, even ordering a payment of a thousand scudi for a single portrait done for him at Bologna.”[33]

Titian encountered the emperor on at least four occasions, but Aretino here refers to two visits in particular, the first taking place in Bologna late in 1532, the second in Augsburg from January to October 1548. The speaker’s compressed remarks do not allude to the great tracts of land that separate Venice and Bologna to the south or the Alpine mountain ranges to be crossed en route to Augsburg. For all of its focus on Venice, the Dialogo bears none of the topographical sensitivity evident in works from other genres such as Flavio Biondo’s fifteenth-century Italia illuminata, of which a vernacular edition was published in Venice in 1548. Biondo describes, for instance, the rivers, marshes, towns, villages, and castles one passes in traveling to and around Bologna, along with an historical account of the city in Etruscan and Roman times. Distinct as well is Pius II’s Commentarii (1458-64), in which he recounts his journey along the Po and how the river “empties into the Adriatic, through three mouths.” Nor would it be reasonable to expect from the Dialogo the romantic prose of Goethe, observing as he does the snow, pulsating atmosphere, and the elasticity of the air in the Brenner Pass during his journey from Carlsbad to Verona. Compared to other topographically oriented books, Aretino’s complete silence regarding the act of traveling dissolves the boundaries that define the shifting mosaic of European political entities. Instead, the symbolic currency of imperial honors and gifts, as well as the actual sums of money, function as a vehicle that bridges the distances between Venice and the courts that surround it on various points of the compass. If mobility is treated at all, it merely serves as the backdrop to stage an encounter between imperial patron and Venetian painter, with topography, alien artists, and artworks falling by the wayside. The issue of style, too, becomes eclipsed, an omission that is all the more remarkable given the likeness of the emperor which Titian executed in Bologna (fig. 6.9). In a nod to Venetian pictorial tradition, Titian exploits the canvas and oil medium to emphasize the surface textures of cloth, encrusted jewels, and fur. However, Titian’s full-length portrait of Charles V and a dog (1533) ultimately derives from that of Jakob Seisenegger, a German artist attached to the retinue of the emperor’s brother, Archduke Ferdinand, painted the year before (fig. 6.10).[34]

Titian’s travels to another court, that of the Gonzaga in Mantua, offer yet another example of how the artist’s mobility does not modify, subjugate, or enrich his own style. Instead, the execution of style jump-starts the mobility of an admiring audience that travels to behold the artist’s handiwork. After hailing the diffusion of Titian’s fame to the imperial court and even as far as England, Aretino turns to the patronage of Duke Federico II of Mantua. The speaker does not wish to pass over “how Titian painted in Mantua for Duke Federico, the features of the twelve Caesars, deriving them [trahendogli] in part from coins and in part from antique marbles.” Such is the perfection of these painted Caesars, Aretino claims; “countless people visit that city only to see them, in the belief that they are setting eyes on the real Caesars, instead of on paintings.”[35]

FIGURE 6.9 Titian, Emperor Charles V and Dog, 1533. Oil on canvas (192 × 111 cm). Museo del Prado, Madrid.

FIGURE 6.10 Jakob Seisenegger, Portrait of Emperor Charles V, 1532. Oil on canvas (205 × 123 cm). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Aretino’s remarks may give the impression that Titian’s work for Federico was a brief and one-time occurrence. In fact, his contact with the ducal court began as early as 1519, and after a number of sporadic meetings with Federico, the painter was regularly in the duke’s employ from 1529 until the ruler’s death in 1540. The execution of the Twelve Caesars series itself occurred over a span of time, from 1537 to 1540, with Titian either sending the paintings from Venice by ship or gondola, or traveling to Mantua himself to supervise the various stages of the cycle’s installation. Aretino notably does not allude to the other major cycle in Mantua depicting an ancient Roman subject, Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar (begun 1486). The variety which Titian imparted to his figures—depicted in profile and three-quarters, rotated at different angles and with assorted types of drapery—shares much with the fifteenth-century artist’s work. A print engraved and etched by the Flemish artist Aegidius Sadeler II after the painting of Titus imparts the visual dynamism that Titian’s now destroyed series may have conveyed (fig. 6.11). A half-length serpentine figure seen from the side, Titus vigorously twists his head and trunk, the curled ribbons falling from his hair replicating in miniature the movement of his entire body. Both fists firmly grasp the baton that cuts through the composition at roughly the same angle as the unfurling drapery and sword. Even the armor, with the scales washing over this Caesar’s back, appears animate. True, to speculate on the painting’s aesthetic qualities via a print, even one as competently executed as that of Sadeler, is a matter of delicate judgment. But the Dialogo at least credits a revitalization of the antique to Titian’s skill, marshaling the trope of the artist animating otherwise inert matter. Titian, Aretino declares, enlivens his classical sources to such an extent that he dissimulates the paintings’ status as objects: the audience, or so we are told, judges them to be the actual Caesars.[36]

FIGURE 6.11 After Titian, print made by Aegidius Sadeler II, D. Titus Vespasian, c. 1585–1629. Engraving and etching (348 × 242 mm). British Museum, London.

Titian’s style begets actions themselves, mobilizing an audience of near-infinite number who travel to Mantua to behold the effigies of Roman rulers. The vignette of Titian in Mantua testifies to the artist’s capacity to transform a location into a forum of spectatorship. Vasari, too, deployed this convention of an artist creating a work that attracts a foreign audience. Those instances in the Lives, however, involved Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Michelangelo, and others who carry out works in their patria, thereby rendering Florence an artistic center. The Dialogo elaborates on this commonplace: in Titian’s case, style effects mobility on the part of others in lieu of mobility “influencing” the artist’s style. Once displaced, the artist stands as the calm eye in a storm of movement that involves patrons, viewers, and objects alike. Charles V and his court travel to Bologna, ambassadors observing Titian relay reports, the paintings themselves are transported—and, in some instances, are damaged en route to their destinations. Even Titian’s sources—diminutive and static, coins and medals fitting in the palm of a hand—might be considered mobile media. To move from the particular to the general: an artist’s itinerant behavior can point, in turn, to mobile aspects of social context, an art historical category all too often considered local and static.[37]

THE JOURNEY TO CORINTH

The difficulty of understanding mobility itself as a context in its own right can partly be attributed to ambivalence in early modern sources toward artists’ travels. On this count, the Dialogo is hardly innocent. We have already mentioned Navagero’s successful attempts to dissuade Titian from traveling to Rome in 1513. This negative stance toward a Roman journey also occurs in Aretino’s narrative of Titian’s early days as a junior painter. He accounts for the unenthusiastic reaction to the painter’s first major public commission—the Assunta in the Frari—by explaining that “the clumsy artists and dimwit masses ... had seen up till then nothing but the dead and cold creations of Giovanni Bellini, Gentile, and Vivarino.” Eventually, public opinion turns. “The truth, little by little,” Aretino explains, “opened people’s eyes, so that they began to marvel at the new style found in Venice by Titian.” That the painter was able to formulate his style only within the confines of the lagoon is held as a miracle. Titian had not witnessed firsthand “the antiquities of Rome, which were a source of enlightenment to all painters.” Instead, Aretino locates the Titian’s greatness in preeminently local origins: “purely by dint of that tiny little spark which he had uncovered in all the works of Giorgione, Titian discerned and apprehended the Idea of painting perfectly.”[38]

While acknowledging the worth of studying ruins, Aretino’s praise of Titian’s ability to discover a new style (nuova maniera) without seeing Roman antiquities contrasts with a recurrent assertion in the Lives: artists failing to make the journey to Rome fail as well in their artistic endeavors. In assessing Correggio, Vasari declares: “If Antonio’s talent had left Lombardy and had come to Rome, he would have performed miracles and would have challenged many who in his time were held to be great.” If Correggio had only studied antiquity, “he would have improved his works infinitely, and growing from good to better would have arrived at the highest level.” Vasari does not, however, universally condemn all artists who fail to make the pilgrimage to Rome, or immobility more generally. In his complimentary remarks on Cola dell’Amatrice, Vasari describes the architect as one who “stayed in Ascoli, never caring to see Rome or another country, living joyfully with his wife of a good and honored family.” The ironworker Caparra is “a person of the soundest body and religion, with a fantastic and stubborn mind; nor did he ever want to leave Florence, in spite of all the offers made to him, but in that [city] lived and died.” Nevertheless, it is thanks to those artists of the highest caliber, Vasari states, who studied antiquities that style reached its climax in the terza maniera.[39]

Titian, by contrast, performs miracles without even setting foot beyond the Venetian Republic. He is not beholden to witnessing antiquity, a claim affirmed by a quip uttered by Fabrini: “It does not fall to everyone’s lot to make the journey to Corinth.” This proverb bears a range of intricate connotations, but in this instance it indicates the futility, for Titian at least, of making the often mandated artistic pilgrimage to Rome. The origin of this proverb is explained in Strabo’s Geography as well as in Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights, classical works which Dolce most likely knew through their editions printed in Venice over the course of the century. Both authors recount that the courtesans of Corinth, famous throughout Greece for their beauty, were highly coveted. Yet due to their exorbitant prices, not everyone could travel to Corinth and afford their services. Hence, the proverb conventionally referred to unattainable extravagance. Dolce’s contemporaries, such as Benedetto Varchi, employed the saying in this way. Yet attributing this particular sense to Fabrini is perplexing. On one hand, it would fit the Dialogo’s deemphasis of Rome to associate it with Corinth, a city known for its wealth and debauchery as testified by Strabo, Gellius, and St. Paul in his letters to the Corinthians. Sixteenth-century Rome, like Venice, was famous for its courtesans, whose numbers were bolstered by the many clerics who inhabited the city. At the same time, the proverb taken in its original sense would inevitably imply a lack of wealth on Titian’s part, a claim not borne out by the references to the thousands of scudi he received for his paintings.[40]

It should be noted, however, that Horace also cited this proverb in his Epistles (I, 17:36), a work that Dolce himself translated in the vernacular (I dilettevoli sermoni, altrimenti satire, e le morali epistole di Horatio, 1559). In Dolce’s rendering, the proverb takes on a different meaning, comparing the task of impressing princes to the futility of undertaking a lone voyage to Corinth to prove one’s valor. This use of the proverb fits in with the general subject of the epistle, which, as Dolce explains, argues for the need to acquire tranquility before forging relations with great men. Likewise, Fabrini’s use of the proverb may indicate that traveling to Rome was not required to achieve greatness as an artist. Titian avoids this arduous journey, and, moreover, the path he does take cannot be easily followed. As Aretino puts it, those artists who attempt to imitate Titian’s style are utterly disoriented, “outside their own road,” and “lost” (smarriti). The Dialogo’s representation of mobility draws together the discourses of physical journey and its allegorical counterpart, only then to discount the very worth of travelling in favor of affirming that which can be “found in Venice” (trovata in Vinegia).[41]

TITIAN IN ROME

The Dialogo, then, minimizes the value of a journey south and the significance of style whose origins lay outside the Venetian Republic. And yet, the historical fact of Titian’s journey to Rome in September 1545 is not passed over in silence. While contemporary accounts testify to Titian’s enthusiastic impression of the city, the Dialogo represents Titian as a visiting marvel and critic. The historical Aretino and Pietro Bembo both left accounts of the painter’s entry into the city, where he was accompanied by an impressive escort of seven riders and an entourage provided by the Duke of Urbino. Upon his arrival, Titian was received at the Vatican, where, according to Bembo, he “never saw so many beautiful antiquities, which filled him with wonder, and made him glad that he had come.” Aretino proper also reported that Titian wished he had visited the city twenty years ago. In the same letter, Aretino urged the painter not “to lose yourself in contemplation of [Michelangelo’s] Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.” Also noteworthy is Titian’s customs form from his journey through the Papal States, which indicates that he returned to Venice with an assortment of classical marbles and casts, most likely gifts from the Farnese family, his patron in Rome. Despite the long trail of reportage penned by Dolce’s own associates, the Dialogo being as it is a treatise and not a biography conveys none of these events which testify to Titian’s interest in Rome. The impact of Titian’s mobility consists not in the transformation of the Venetian artist’s style, but rather in its recognition. According to the protagonist Aretino, Titian “was honored by [Pope Paul III] during his time in Rome by painting the Pope’s portrait and that loveliest of nude figures for the Cardinal Farnese, which Michelangelo saw with amazement more than once.” Thus, while Titian was purported by contemporary observers to have marveled at the sights in Rome, the Dialogo reverses this rhetoric of marveling: Titian and his painting of the Danae are the object, and not the subject, of a gaze of wonderment.[42]

Titian also emerges as an art critic in Rome, one who disparages his emigrant compatriot, Sebastiano del Piombo. Fabrini recounts that during the sack of 1527 Imperial troops had lit fires in the Vatican Palace, releasing smoke which damaged the figures in Raphael’s frescoes. Pope Clement VII subsequently commissioned Sebastiano del Piombo to repair the heads in Raphael’s paintings. Fabrini’s succinct remarks certainly gloss over the enormously destructive impact of the sack on Rome’s cultural and political life. Numerous orations and eyewitness accounts alike bewailed “the murder of priests, the scattering of martyrs’ bones, and the violation of the will of God,” as one humanist, Pietro Alcionio, declared in his speech Among the Greatest Anguishes, written while held prisoner in the Castel Sant’Angelo. However much contemporaries lamented the mutinous pillaging of their city, the Dialogo exploits this cataclysmic event to demonstrate Titian’s prowess as a critic of the visual arts, and at that a critic of his own compatriot, the Venetian turncoat Sebastiano del Piombo: “Now when Titian came to Rome, and was passing through these rooms one day in Sebastiano’s company, he concentrated his thoughts and his eyes on a study of the Raphael frescoes, which he had never seen before; and when he reached the part where Sebastiano had restored the heads, he asked the latter who the presumptuous and ignorant fellow was who had put daubs on these faces—in ignorance, of course, that Sebastiano had reworked them, and seeing only the unbecoming contrast between the other heads and these.”[43]

The breezy tone of the gerunds (trovandosi, andando) that open this passage suggests a nonchalant walk through the papal chambers, with none of the elaborate machinery of papal etiquette that might restrict the two painters’ leisurely tour. The casual mood of this visit, however, changes abruptly once Titian turns his attention to Raphael’s works. With the word “fiso,” which indicates a halt in motion, Fabrini relates the depth of Titian’s concentration, emphasized all the more when we read that he looks with the dual faculties of thought and vision (col pensiero e con gli occhi). Titian’s ensuing question that demands the identity of the restorer is less of an interrogative than a value judgment, as the battery of critical words (presontuoso, ignorante, imbrattati) makes clear. He pays little regard to courtesy, a noticeable contrast to the declaration later in the Dialogo that Titian is “extremely modest; he never assesses any painter critically, and willingly discusses in respectful terms anyone who has merit.”[44]

What captures Titian’s eye and elicits his disapproval is a term that Vasari also employed to characterize mobile artists’ perceptions of style, namely differenza. In this case, the word registers an objection to Sebastiano del Piombo’s faulty restoration. Titian’s disparaging question seems particularly pointed since it implies that Sebastiano’s intervention has done more damage to the frescoes than the marauding forces of imperial troops. The implication of Titian’s detection of differenza is worth noting. In the Lives, the recognition of differenza functioned as a preliminary step toward artistic creation. Brunelleschi’s voyage to Rome allows him to grasp the distinctions between the orders, thereby allowing him to reduce architectural ornament to a pristine state. Donatello is made aware of the difference between his own style and that of northern Italian sculpture, which he rejects in his execution of a St. Sebastian. By contrast, Titian’s very role as spectator in this vignette conceives the acknowledgment of differenza, and thereby of style as an end in and of itself. The leisurely tour through the Vatican and commentary on style liken an artist’s travel to something other than a frantic chase after commissions. We are somewhere between the Wanderjahre of the craftsman and the gentleman’s Wanderlust. In Fabrini’s account, the most distinct part of Titian’s body—his hand—is absent, while other parts, such as his eyes and legs, are alluded to, a representation that momentarily masks the mechanical aspects of Titian’s profession. Titian’s comments suggest that one outcome of travel might be the detection and critique of stylistic difference. And this difference pertains not only to “before and after” effects of restoration. Also implied is the observation of difference between artists by an external, though hardly objective, bystander. The traveling artist becomes traveling art critic.[45]

A FEATHERED VAGRANT

Notably, the artist who provokes Titian’s derision is Sebastiano del Piombo, the Venetian painter who abandoned his patria in 1511 to accept the patron Agostino Chigi’s invitation to journey south. Dolce’s evaluation of Sebastiano serves as yet another example of the ways in which varying attitudes toward regional origin and mobility shape the highly qualitative conceptions of style in early modern art literature. Along with a transport across horizontal geographic space, mobility can result in a downward plunge, a slide through the tight warp and weft of regional origin and style, the safety net that ensures an artist’s reputation. In other words, traveling artists can risk falling outside regional categories and slip into the acid bath of censure. Sebastiano was relinquished by his homeland and never fully adopted by his destination, and his fortuna critica was caught between the polemical stances of both Venetian and central Italian art literature.[46]

In the Lives, Sebastiano emerges as a painter active in Rome who nonetheless can never erase the Venetian imprint from his style. Sebastiano, Vasari recounts, leaves Venice because he had understood “how much the aria of Rome was propitious to painters and all talented persons.” Even so, aria’s potency fails to act immediately, since Sebastiano retains the style of painting he acquired under the tutelage of Giovanni Bellini and Giorgione. In the Villa Farnesina, he “executed poetic works in that maniera that he had brought from Venice, much different [disforme] from the one those worthy painters in Rome were using.” The cause of Sebastiano’s “deformity” is, of course, his lack of conformity. Disforme can at times carry a charged tone; the word alludes to poor painting and sculptural practice in Vasari’s technical treatise as well as to physical unsightliness and moral turpitude in physiognomic and poetical works. Yet in this particular passage, Vasari uses disforme more to signal Sebastiano’s dissimilarity, perhaps even in a positive sense, from established painting practice in Rome. Vasari clearly states that the works Sebastiano painted using the “soft way of coloring” learned from Giorgione were much appreciated in Rome. Furthermore, Michelangelo draws on Sebastiano’s coloring to trump Raphael, whose works with respect to color were held to be superior.[47]

FIGURE 6.12 Michelangelo, The Risen Lazarus, Supported by Two Figures, c. 1517. Red chalk on paper (25.2 × 11.9 cm). British Museum, London.

FIGURE 6.13 Sebastiano del Piombo, The Raising of Lazarus, c. 1517–19. Oil on canvas, mounted on board, transferred from wood (381 × 289.6 cm). National Gallery, London.

Michelangelo also provides designs for Sebastiano, thus rendering the latter’s works a middle ground between two regional aesthetics. Vasari states, for instance, that the figure of the chief protagonist in Sebastiano’s Raising of Lazarus (1519) “was copied and painted with the greatest diligence, according to the order [ordine] and design [disegno] of Michelangelo.” Michelangelo’s two drawings, one of a seated male nude supported by kneeling and bent figures and another depicting a male figure partially wrapped in a shroud, offer pictorial evidence for the close collaboration with his Venetian colleague and friend (fig. 6.12). While clearly a painted translation of Michelangelo’s elongated nude figure, Sebastiano’s rendition of Lazarus places emphasis on his sallow flesh tones and the gleaming white gravecloths that lace between his limbs (fig. 6.13). In contrast to the “healthier” appearances of Michelangelo’s male nudes, Sebastiano’s stark chiaroscuro modeling calls attention to Lazarus’s transition between life and death, to the dramatic resurrection just achieved. Beyond any regional polemic between Venetian colorito and Tuscan disegno, regional specialties are here deployed in the service of depicting a heightened narrative moment.[48]

But for all of Sebastiano’s personal and artistic relations with central Italian painters, Vasari’s notion of style adheres to a rigid set of distinctions. Notably, the terms in which this scheme is expressed are not only regional. Rather, they occur in relation to gender and sexual difference, categories that express more forcibly the essential variance between things. Michelangelo insists that the Last Judgment be executed in fresco, since painting in oil, a technique heavily associated with Venice and the north, was the practice of women. Later writers on art would reiterate and thereby give further weight to Michelangelo’s prejudicial claim. In his Idea del tempio della Pittura (1590), Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo deemed oil painting appropriate for giovani effeminate—“effeminate youths.” By contrast, Vasari declares in his technical treatise that fresco is the most virile and resolute of all painting methods. Gender also colors, so to speak, Sebastiano’s artistic practice. The Venetian transplant is figured as passive, subservient, and therefore feminine because he was dependent on Michelangelo for drawings for his compositions. Vasari then transfers this gendering of artistic practice to artistic persona. Awarded the sinecure of Keeper of Papal Seals, Sebastiano displays the personality of idleness, indolence, and waywardness so often associated with women. Eventually, the metaphor of mobility intermingles with this rhetoric of gender to reinforce all the more Sebastiano’s errant effeminacy. At leisure and ease in the Papal Curia, Sebastiano grew satisfied with himself, his talent and hand “diverging” (sviando), leaving the path of good style.[49]

While Vasari employs metaphors of gender and errancy to decry Sebastiano’s vagabondage, Dolce likens the painter’s travel and subsequent stylistic mutation to a masquerade. Aretino remarks: “Everyone knows, moreover, that Michelangelo did designs for Sebastiano; and the man who garbs himself with the feathers of another is left, when they are subsequently taken off him, looking like that absurd crow which was described by Horace.” The allusion is to Horace’s “Epistle to Julius Florus” (1.3), translated by Dolce in the vernacular and published in 1559 in his compilation of the Roman poet’s works. The image of the crow bedecked with another’s feathers describes Celsus, a writer criticized for his imitative verse. He is warned to acquire his own literary riches instead of stealing others’ poems, “lest diverse birds come to take back their stolen feathers, and he, at that point, is like the crow, left nude from his stolen colors, and for whom nothing remains but mockery and ridicule.”[50]

FIGURE 6.14 “Vili” from Andrea Alciato, Diverse imprese accommodate a diverse moralità, 1551. Princeton University Library.

The metaphor of being bedecked with feathers to refer to wavering and laughable imitation was current in many other sources. Most famously in Aesop’s Fables, the uncomely crow struts around in borrowed peacock feathers only to alienate himself from other peacocks as well as members of his own species. The iconographic convention of depicting fools either crowned or covered with feathers ranged from episodes in monumental fresco cycles, as seen in Giotto’s Stultitia, or Folly, in the Arena Chapel, to smaller-scale formats, such as Bonifacio Bembo’s illuminated tarot cards. This tradition extended well into the sixteenth century. In Andrea Alciato’s emblem book (Emblematum Libellus), which reached its definitive edition around 1550, one of the aspects of sloth is exemplified by two figures, a man-bird and a falcon with a ridiculous expression flying in the air above a landscape of classical ruins (fig. 6.14). The text indicates these figures refer to Ardelio, the lazy slave whose feathers indicate his deception and lack of intellect. While the woodcutter has rendered the landscape with the barest of lines, dense zones of hatching draw attention to the feathers in both the man-bird and the falcon itself. Ripa’s entry on “Leggierezza,” or frivolity, is represented by a “woman that has wings on her hands, feet, shoulder and head and will be clothed in the finest feathers.” Finally, Cellini in his treatise on gems employs the Horatian expression to refer to the practice of enhancing the color and value of rubies. To three duped old jewelers, he identifies a ruby whose base has been smeared with dragon’s blood, “like the crow that dressed itself in the feathers of a peacock.”[51]

Sebastiano’s adoption of Michelangelo’s style, in particular his disegno, is thus likened to an act of superficial masquerade. The event causing Sebastiano’s descent into this risible masquerade is his move to Rome. While neither Horace nor Dolce’s translation states so, the crow is a supremely mobile creature due to its otherwise ungainly feathers. Or as Vincenzo Danti observes in his treatise on proportions, “nature wanted to dress [birds] with feathers, to the end that, by flying they can with brevity transfer themselves from place to place.” In flying to Rome and donning the feathers of disegno, Sebastiano violates the nature of his species. There is, of course, no geographic/ethnic referent explicitly at play in Horace’s mockery of Celsus. However, in the Dialogo’s case, the interchange between different animal species implied by Aretino’s allusion echoes the wary stance toward the mixing of ethnic identities which runs like a basso continuo. Dolce does not defend Sebastiano against Vasari’s regional and polemical depiction. He is not called “Sebastiano Viniziano,” but rather is firmly entrenched within the Roman milieu. Sebastiano is neither here nor there, neither Venetian nor Roman, censured by both sides, and weighed down by his office of lead seals in the artistic region of a nether land.[52]

LORENZO LOTTO: ABOLITIO MEMORIAE

Sebastiano is tarred and feathered for his mobility and ensuing masquerade of disegno. By contrast, an itinerant artist such as Lorenzo Lotto largely meets indifference, though with a telling moment of criticism flashing through. The different paths these artists’ journeys took may partly account for this discrepancy: Sebastiano was active in the recognizably pivotal artistic center of Rome, while Lotto pursued a “provincial” career largely in the Marches and Bergamo. Lotto’s work in locations removed from the triumvirate of Venice-Florence-Rome thus did not become hefty weapons or targets in the regional debates which evaluated the merits and shortcomings of central versus northern Italian styles. Instead, the Dialogo brushes Lotto off, ostracizing him from that preeminently Venetian stylistic domain—coloring and brushwork. This dismissive stance contrasts with that of Vasari, who presumes Lotto’s excellence in coloring, given his Venetian origins. These differing attitudes toward Lotto betray tacit assumptions concerning the bond between regional identity and regional style and, moreover, how mobility can put stress on that bond.[53]

The sole reference to Lotto in the Dialogo appears after an extended discussion of coloring. “When the painter produces a good imitation of the tones and softness of flesh,” Aretino observes, “he makes his painting seem alive.” Later in this passage, he reiterates the necessity of keeping the eye fixed on tones, “primarily those of the flesh areas, and on softness.” To emphasize these qualities, Aretino evokes stone and minerals as counterexamples. Some errant painters render flesh “such that they seem made of porphyry, both in color and hardness.” Other misguided artists portray lips that appear to be of coral, with faces that look like masks. Interjecting, Fabrini offers Lotto’s altarpiece St. Nicholas of Bari in Glory (c. 1529) as a specific negative example: “It seems to me that a notable enough instance of these pernicious tones is to be seen in a painting of Lorenzo Lotto’s, which is here in Venice in the Church of the Carmine” (see fig. 1.9).[54]

To take Fabrini’s comment at face value is a sensitive matter; after all, the Dialogo’s ultimate goal was to praise Titian to the detriment of his foreign rivals and compatriots. Even so, stylistic features, such as a rather outmoded polished brushwork and a hieratic compositional format derived from northern models, may have motivated the criticism against Lotto’s altarpiece. Although painted on canvas, Lotto’s work reveals his training as a painter deeply conversant with fifteenth-century modes of coloring on panel. Much like his predecessors such as Giovanni Bellini and Cima da Conegliano, Lotto executes the detailed texture of St. Nicholas’s damasks, cloth of gold, and jeweled pendants in discrete passages of carefully applied paint layers and white highlights. Of course, the striking combination of the colors—violets, greens, and oranges—is more indicative of Lotto’s own idiosyncrasies rather than any indebtedness to Venetian pictorial tradition. Even so, Lotto’s controlled brushwork differs markedly from his contemporaries’, notably Titian. Already in such large-scale compositions as that of the Ca’ Pesaro Altarpiece (1519-26) and earlier in the Assumption of the Virgin (1515-18), Titian had exhibited a bravura handling of paint and the ability to convey a sense of rough tactility by exploiting the weft and warp of the canvas support. By contrast, Lotto’s altarpiece achieves an impression of lacquered pellucidity, not only in the rendition of the fabrics but even in the nude figure of St. John the Baptist, the saint’s flesh appearing to the viewer in person more polished than corporeal or rough. And whereas Titian might have attempted to integrate the chief protagonist saint into a narrative scene encompassing the entire altarpiece—as he famously had done in the St. Peter Martyr (1526-30; destroyed 1867)—Lotto separates the pictorial field into different registers. Previously seen in his altarpieces and fresco in Asolo, Recanati, and Bergamo, the landscape occupying the lower zone recalls northern works of art, Dürer’s Nemesis, and the Large Fortune print as well as panoramic views by Scorel and Patinir. The foreign origins for this device may indirectly account for the Dialogo’s prejudicial view against Lotto. Nonetheless, the dramatic portrayal of travelers with their mules ferrying goods toward a stormy harbor would have surely resonated with the altarpiece’s patrons, the Scuola dei Mercanti, a lay confraternity of Venetian merchants (fig. 6.15).[55]

However the mercantile public may have responded to the altarpiece’s iconography of mobility and sought the protection of St. Nicholas—the patron saint, along with St. Christopher, of travelers and merchants—the Dialogo itself bears an equivocal and at times hostile stance toward artists such as Lotto who venture beyond the Republic’s borders. In this respect more than a bald pronouncement of Lotto’s coloring, Fabrini’s observations on style may be a subtle decoy for denouncing this artist’s tenuous ties to Venice. Ironically, a non-Venetian work such as the Lives happily considers Lotto foremost as a Venetian artist. Presumption, not stylistic campanilismo, characterizes Vasari’s assessment of Lotto’s work in the 1550 edition. His brief mention of the artist comes toward the end of Palma Vecchio’s Life: “His [Palma’s] companion and household companion was Lorenzo Lotto, the Venetian painter, who painted a work in Ancona in oil in Sant’Agostino and executed infinite paintings in Venice. He painted the portrait of Andrea Odoni, who in Venice has his house adorned with paintings and sculptures. He also executed a work in the Carmine church of the said city, in the chapel of San Niccolò; and in Santi Giovanni e Paolo a painting of Sant’Antonino, the bishop of Florence, and infinite other things that one sees throughout Venice. He was held to be most capable in coloring, and clean in his youth; and enjoyed finishing his works.”[56]

What comes through in this passage is an assumption of Lotto’s venezianità. Vasari textually inserts Lotto within the life of Palma Vecchio, whose epithet is Veniziano Pittore. Vasari later outright calls Lotto pittor veneziano. The phrase amico e domestico suo underscores Lotto’s physical proximity to Palma and Venice as a whole. Further emphasizing Lotto’s ties with the city is the hyperbolic remark that an infinite number of the artist’s works are spread throughout Venice, in both private and public locations. This, we know, is not the case at all, as Vasari himself knew, because he had visited the city in 1541–42. Far from being comprehensive, Vasari lists but two of the three altarpieces Lotto executed for Venetian churches. And aside from the famous portrait of Andrea Odoni, a visitor to Venice in the mid-sixteenth century would only be able to add few other works, among them the Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1527), now in the Accademia. To be sure, Vasari’s phrase “infinite other things one sees throughout Venice” may be a generic filler to substitute for lack of concrete knowledge. However, Vasari also employs this rhetorical flourish of “infinite works” to describe more familiar artistic terrain. For instance, of his fellow countryman Spinello Aretino, Vasari writes, “With good practice and grace he made an infinite number of things” as he was “called by heaven to kindle in his fatherland an art so spirited and beautiful.” Appealing to the metaphor of infinitude is not necessarily an indication of descriptive stuffing, but rather a tactic to emphasize an artist’s ties to his homeland.[57]

FIGURE 6.15 Lorenzo Lotto, detail from St. Nicholas in Glory with Sts. John the Baptist and Lucy. Oil on canvas (335 × 188 cm). Santa Maria dei Carmini, Venice.

Vasari’s assumption of Lotto’s venezianità also informs his stylistic assessment of the artist’s work. Simply by virtue of being Venetian, Lotto is judged to be skilled in coloring, yet no substantial reasons justify this blanket assessment. This correlation between artistic products or techniques and a specific geographic location is hardly unique to Vasari; this was a notion of old, as seen, for example, when Vitruvius associates the Corinthian order with the peoples of Corinth or when the Sophist Kritias correlates excellence in bronze and gold work with the Etruscans. So too does the Urbanite Polydore Vergil connect his townsman, Raphael, with the restoration of the art of painting. In a similar way, Vasari forges the well-known link between colorito and Venice. Yet unlike his essentialist claim that something inherent in the “sottile aria di Firenze” gives rise to artistic greatness, a set of restrictive human relationships lies beneath the connection between colorito and Venice. For instance, referring to the technique of oil painting as a “secret” given from Antonello da Messina to Domenico Veneziano implies the existence of a select company privy to this method. The transmission of colorito also seems limited to dynastic relationships, both father to son and teacher to student. Although Jacopo Bellini prefers to work alone, he lovingly passes on the “difficultà della pittura nel colorire” to his sons, Gentile and Giovanni. Thus, far from being a static stylistic label, colorito in Vasari’s view travels through a dynamic set of social networks propagating yet at the same time controlling this artistic practice.[58]

Against Vasari’s association of Lotto with Venice, Venetian coloring, and that city’s dense artistic network, the Dialogo’s one-line critique of the artist can be read as a polemical instrument to dispute his regional identity. The pithy reference to Lotto in isolation excludes him from the lineage of Venetian painters. Why single out Lotto when, as Aretino remarks, there is no lack of painters erring from the principles of coloring? The Dialogo’s disparagement of Lotto, in addition to its scorn toward Sebastiano, affirms Titian’s status as the sole heir to the dynasty of Venetian painting. A painter such as Lotto who has abandoned the Republic early on in his career, only to return intermittently, disappears from Dolce’s map of Venetian painters. It is in this context of allegiance to or departure from the Venetian Republic that we can better understand Fabrini’s censure of Lotto’s coloring. Vasari’s commendation of Lotto was based not only on direct observation, but also on the act of equating regional origin (Venice) with style (coloring). In light of Lotto’s haphazard ties with Venice, Dolce responds by ostracizing the painter from Venice and the domain of colorito. Thus, the Dialogo’s relative silence might be understood as an example of abolitio memoriae, not a complete eradication of Lotto’s presence, but a residual trace which bespeaks a negative disposition toward his work. Indeed, it is not a coincidence that Paolo Pino excluded Lotto from his list of painters active in Venice; nor that later in the early modern period, Boschini and Ridolfi both consider him not as a fellow citizen, but as “Bergamasco,” from the city of Bergamo, some two hundred kilometers from the lagoon.[59]

OTHER ARTISTS

Given that the Dialogo places such a premium on Venetian artists maintaining their residency in Venice, do painters foreign to the city adopt the favorable stylistic mores of the Republic? On this count, the Dialogo is equivocal. Aretino mentions that one of the two Dossi brothers of Ferrara came to Venice to learn under Titian; yet the young painter diverged from such an auspicious tutelage, eventually preferring “a style so awkward” that he did not merit the praise he received at the pen of his compatriot Ariosto. Pordenone, who, as his name suggests, hails from that northern Italian city, receives a more generous assessment. Aretino praises him for his foreshortened figures, battle scene, and horse on the façade of the Casa dei Talenti as well as for his work in San Rocco. Dolce himself may have known Pordenone well, as the artist had designed the frontispiece for the author’s Il primo libro di Sacripante (1536). Even so, in the Dialogo Aretino remarks that Pordenone, “having to compete with our Titian, always remained a long distance behind.”[60]

This ambivalent attitude toward foreign painters becomes even more pronounced in the case of Dürer. No mention is made of the artist’s sojourn in Venice (1505-7), nor of his execution of the Virgin of the Rose Garlands (1506), a work which refuted, according to Dürer himself, Venetians’ claim that he did not know how to handle colors. Aretino does concede that the German artist’s prints “have the look of being not drawn, but painted; and not painted, but alive.” The comparison of monochrome prints to colored and lively works of art notably echoes Erasmus’s own commendation of Dürer in the Dialogues on the Proper Pronunciation of Latin and Greek (1528). In his prints, states Erasmus, Dürer is able to depict such visual phenomena as fire, thunder, and lightning, sensations “he places before the eye in the most pertinent lines—black ones, yet so that if you should spread pigments you injure the work.” But despite this praise north and south of the Alps, what marks Dürer for the Venetian Dialogo are his origins as a German artist. “If the same man [Dürer] had been born in Italy who was born in Germany,” Aretino comments, “it pleases me to believe that he would not have been inferior to anyone.” The knot that intertwines artistic merit and ethnicity remains unbound. At the same time, native origin, as the cases of Sebastiano and Lotto demonstrate, must be preserved in situ if it is to retain its potency. Of course, unaddressed is the worth of a painter native to Venice or the Veneto who remains geographically static through his entire career. The Dialogo’s stance toward mobility and style reduces to but one principle or goal, affirming Titian as a Venetian painter, one who is “divine and without equal.”[61]

A TURBAN FOR CAESAR

Titian as a severe judge, Sebastiano as a crow in a masquerade, Lotto as an unwelcome prodigal son: these episodes indicate that Dolce largely conceives the transformation of style under the condition of mobility in terms of disparagement or indifference. Does the Dialogo offer any figurative language that portrays mobility and stylistic change in a positive light? What of varietà, Vasari’s chief term to represent favorably the traveling artist’s encounter with diverse pictorial idioms? Does varietà penetrate Dolce’s discourse on mobility, or does this concept remain isolated from the potentially malignant effects of travel?

Throughout the course of the Dialogo, the speakers frequently invoke varietà as a necessary component of the ideal painter’s repertoire. Aretino calls it “so indispensable an element that without it beauty and artistry become fulsome. Therefore, the painter ought to vary heads, hands, feet, bodies, actions and any part of the human body.” Varietà is not to be implemented without caution, however. Quoting Horace’s Ars poetica, Fabrini states that the poet who varies his composition without restraint does as “one who paints dolphins in the forest and boars in the sea.” Yet like a melodic refrain, the call for varietà is repeatedly made—in posture, movement, color, emotional expression, among other respects. Varietà provides the ammunition for one of the Dialogo’s chief attacks, namely the blinding acceptance of Michelangelo as the supreme artist. Consequently, Aretino declares that whereas the Tuscan artist’s figures and compositions are uniform, Raphael “has produced figures of every type, both agreeable ones and also fearsome and elaborate ones.” Later on, he exclaims that Raphael “practiced such a marvelous variety in all of his works that there is no figure which is like any other, either in expression or in movement.” This praise of varietà—with Raphael as its paragon—is also found in Dolce’s other writings on art. In his epistle to Gasparo Ballini, Dolce writes that “among nature’s most beautiful products, the one best loved and most pleasing to the eye is variety.” Furthermore, he states that Raphael sought varietà in his figures—men and women, young and old, all of diverse sizes and shapes—which themselves varied in pose and costume as well.[62]

In the Lives, Vasari delicately connected varietà and mobility, the latter concept taken either in the allegorical sense or as actual physical travel undertaken to incorporate a range of skills in one’s repertoire. Dolce is more evasive. The Dialogo links mobility and the acquisition of varietà only by means of implication rather than through straightforward declaration. In one instance, the connection is broached via a negative example. Aretino charges that Dürer, being a German artist, portrays the Virgin and saints in German costume. In depicting Jews, he also gave them Germanic features, “including those mustaches and bizarre hair styles that they [Germans] wear and the clothes they use.” Aretino identifies this uniformity as a breach of decorum (convenevolezza). Yet when read in the context of the Dialogo as a whole, this homogeneity in features, hairstyles, and costumes also demonstrates a lack of varietà. Raphael’s varietà, for instance, is praised and placed in contrast to the uniformity of Michelangelo’s figures. The culprit of Dürer’s uniformity is an immutable cultural schema, a mode of being, making, and perceiving which determines his figures to represent nothing but German features. If, as the adage goes, every painter paints himself (ogni dipintore dipinge se), then Dürer, or so Aretino claims, can only graphically portray in terms of his own ethnicity. Furthermore, this lack of varietà is, by implication, tied to a lack of mobility. As previously mentioned, Aretino states that if Dürer had been born in Italy, he would have been inferior to none. This musing on Aretino’s part does not, of course, preclude the possibility (and historical event) that Dürer traveled to Italy and encountered figure types other than Germanic ones. Yet combined with the fact that Dürer’s sojourn in Venice is passed over in silence, Aretino’s speculation about Dürer’s hypothetical greatness perceives him above all as a German artist, no matter how itinerant in reality he may have been. The chain of inferences indicated by Aretino’s remarks leads to a consequential hypothetical statement: Dürer’s physical displacement from Germany would have dislodged his fixed mode of ethnic execution, which would have, in turn, endowed his compositions with the varietà necessary to paint Jews as Jews and Virgins as Virgins proper. In other words, if varietà cannot be realized by adhering to one’s patria, then it follows that the artist’s mobility to gain knowledge of the foreign would be in order. Typical of the Dialogo’s stance on mobility, these conclusions exist as gleaned suggestions rather than chiseled precepts. It also goes without saying that mobility as a prerequisite of varietà is relative according to national origin, as in the case of Titian, for whom exposure to Roman antiquities and other regional styles is deemed unnecessary. Aretino notes that in one of Titian’s earliest works, the Assunta in the Frari, “the grandeur and awesomeness of Michelangelo, the charm and loveliness of Raphael and the coloring proper to nature are contained [si contiene]”. Yet by what means Titian was able to display such varietà remains unstated, leaving the impression that it arose ex nihilo or, as Aretino himself states, due to a miracle or spark.[63]

In those instances in which Dolce makes the kinship between varietà and mobility more apparent, varietà itself becomes absorbed into other theoretical concepts. Urging the need for decorum (convenevolezza), Aretino maintains: “[The painter] should consider the qualities of his subjects; and he should consider to the same degree questions of nationality, dress, setting and period. If, for instance he should be depicting a military action of Caesar or Alexander the Great, it is inappropriate that he should arm the soldiers in the fashion of the present. And he should put one kind of armor on the Macedonians and another kind on the Romans. . . . If he wanted to represent Caesar, it would be ridiculous if he placed on his head a Turkish turban or, one of our caps, or indeed a Venetian one.”[64]

The passage’s future imperatives, admonitory negatives, and list of specifications constitute Aretino’s pressing tone, reinforcing the impulse toward order. While the principal theme is decorum and appropriateness, the very intelligibility of the passage in the first place depends on knowing what constitutes, for instance, a Turkish turban and, furthermore, how this headdress might differ from a Venetian cap. And to some degree, the mobility of persons and objects facilitates this knowledge of otherness. The Ottomans depicted in the works of Gentile Bellini, Mansueti, and Carpaccio, cast medals and portraits of the sultans, costume books, pilgrimage narratives, the Fondaco dei Turchi where Turks were permitted to engage in trade: these are but a few of the instances and locations that testify to the physical displacement of Venetians and Turks alike, along with their representations. As previously mentioned, there is even some reason to believe that Gentile’s portrait of Mehmet II, once thought to have remained in Istanbul, was in fact brought back to Venice as a visual diplomatic reportage of the sultan’s physiognomic appearance and state of health. Titian had even executed a copy of a portrait of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (albeit destined for the Gonzaga court in Mantua). Early modern interlocutors themselves repeatedly testify to the cosmopolitan appearance of Venice’s works of art, population, and speech. As Giulio Ballino stated in his De’disegni delle più illustri città (1569), a compilation of urban views, Venice was “inhabited by an infinite multitude of people who come together for commerce from various nations, in fact from the entire world. . . . They use all languages and are dressed in different ways.”[65]

Yet it is through such declarations that we can detect a divergence between prescriptive art criticism and topographic literature. For whereas Ballino heralds the presence of the foreign in Venice, Dolce restricts that which is alien in the pictorial field. This discrepancy between genres may also intersect with a historical thread related to changing attitudes toward alterity. Through the intervention of such merchants and patrons as Alvise Gritti and the grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha, a fluid exchange in pictorial idioms characterized fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century Venetian and Ottoman visual culture alike. Yet with increasingly rigid distinctions between state boundaries and ethnic identity in the second half of the sixteenth century, this cross-cultural dialogue and “eclectic syncretism” became more tempered.[66] To offer but one example of this diluted fascination with the foreign: in the pictorial narrative cycle for the Scuola Grande of San Marco, fifteenth-century painters such as Gentile Bellini, Mansueti, and Vittore Belliniano regularly juxtapose turbaned Mamluks, exotic animals, and foreign architectural ornament alongside “traditional” Venetian protagonists (fig. 6.16). By contrast, in the later canvases by Palma Vecchio and Paris Bordone for the same cycle, the interest in mixing various modes and in depicting the alien diminishes. Mansueti’s canvas of course has Alexandria as its setting, thus making the inclusion of foreign peoples and costumes more appropriate than Bordon’s composition, which is set in Venice. And Bordone does depict a turbaned figure from behind along with the doge seated above a “Star Ushak” textile from west Anatolia, an indication of the continuing trade in carpets and silks from the East. Nevertheless, compared to fifteenth-century canvases set in Venice which portray abundant numbers of foreign visitors, ambassadors, and merchants within the city, Bordone’s composition places more emphasis placed on “local” artistic practice: rough, painterly brushwork, a dynamic spatial construction reminiscent of Titian’s Ca’ Pesaro, and a Serlian architectural backdrop (fig. 6.17). One might speculate further whether there is a political dimension, at least as it pertains to otherness, to the presence of fantastic varietà. Notably, later writers on art reiterate the need to temper varietà in reference to the pictorial inclusion of foreign peoples. These comments, however, do not make any explicit reference to the political implications of mobility and varietà. Instead, their criticism seems nestled firmly within the strain of aesthetic discourse that prohibits the mixing of types, a precept of old that harkens back at least to Horace’s Ars poetica. As one of the speakers in Gilio da Fabriano’s Dialogo nel quale si ragiona degli errori e degli abusi de’ pittori circa I’istorie (1564), a dialogue on the errors in painting, declares: “It would not be good if [the painter] gave the costume of a Turk to the Pope, and to the Turk the Pope’s costume.” Another speaker criticizes those painters who “have confused costume, such that one does not recognize any longer the Greek from the Latin, the Turk from the French, nor the Spanish from the Arab.” Such observations find a ready precedent in the call for stylistic order announced in the Dialogo.[67]

FIGURE 6.16 Giovanni Mansueti, St. Mark Healing St. Anianas in Alexandria, c. 1527. Oil on canvas (376 × 399 cm). Accademia, Venice.

For Dolce and like-minded writers on art, varietà must be subsumed and governed by decorum, safely placing the term’s affiliation with mobility and its potential to unload a cornucopia of elements under quarantine. This restriction testifies to a more general attitude of reluctance to adopt varietà as a notion that might cast a favorable light on the impact of mobility upon style. While mobility and varietà are present in the Dialogo, they take separate paths, intersecting rarely, and when they do, assume a posture of admonition. If Vasari’s Lives opens up the discourse of mobility to account for its effects on style, both beneficial and noxious, Dolce’s Dialogo seizes on its potential only ex negativo. Shriller than Vasari’s promotion of Tuscany and Rome, Dolce’s patriotic allegiance to Venice limits him to representing ventures beyond the lagoon and stylistic change as phenomena to be treated cautiously or passed over in silence. And this discretion and reticence demonstrate even more how mobility emerges as an issue with which to be reckoned.

FIGURE 6.17 Paris Bordone, The Fisherman Presenting St. Mark’s Ring to the Doge, 1534. Oil on canvas (370 cm × 300 cm). Accademia, Venice.

7 The Mobile Eyewitness

Coursing throughout the bedrock of regionally oriented art literature are contesting veins of discourse. For Dolce and his Dialogo, varietà culled from various locales and artists can potentially be praiseworthy because it exhibits the painter’s knowledge of the foreign. Yet judgment and the sense of decorum which control varietà can easily falter, pushing an artist’s style into the domain of the ridiculous. And like Vasari, Dolce installs a steadfast surveillance of geographic borders, with the mobility of artists carefully regulated. It is no surprise, then, that the discourse concerning mobility and style does not form a crystalline theoretical structure. On the contrary, these discursive strands run in tantalizing parallel and, when they do cross, set off moments of high electric charge that elicit the passionate debate and memorable figurative language pronounced by the Dialogo’s interlocutors.

There was no lack of art literary counterparts to Dolce published in the mid- to late sixteenth century which brazenly asserted the artistic merit of their authors’ regions of origin. These texts appeared throughout the Italian peninsula, following one another in regular succession. Mention has already been made of Francesco Sansovino’s Delle cose notabili che sono in Venetia, first printed in 1556 and then expanded into the more comprehensive Venetia città nobilissima et singolare descritta (1581). Also discussed has been Bernardino Scardeone’s De antiquitate urbis Patavii et claris civibus Patavinis (1560) with its description of Padua’s antiquities and artists and frontispiece city view. Dated to the same decade, Pietro Lamo’s unpublished Graticola di Bologna, a guidebook in the local dialect, praises the city’s tradition in terracotta work, antiquities found in the environs, and private art collections for the benefit of foreign visitors. Further afield, the Urbinate mathematician Bernardino Baldi compiled a description of his patria’s ducal palace as part of his Versi e prose (1590). Commentary on Neapolitan artists can be found in the fragmentary notes left by the Sienese artist Marco da Pino (died 1587). The year 1595 witnessed the publication of the Jesuit P. Paolo Morigia’s Nobiltà di Milano. Book Five of his work furnishes notices on that city’s artists working in varied media, such as armor, gold, precious gemstones, and crystal. And as might be expected, Florence was no stranger to this celebration of local artistic patrimony. In his Disegno partito in piú ragionamenti (1549), Anton Francesco Doni indicated he had laid plans for a Firenze illustrata. Composed of six books, this unrealized volume would have described Florence’s principal buildings, monuments, memorable civic festivals, and inscriptions, along with urban views. A successor to Doni’s project which did see print was Francesco Bocchi’s Bellezze della Città di Fiorenza (1591), which takes the reader on a fixed itinerary through the city, pointing out along the way significant works of art. Bocchi’s other major contribution to early modern art literature was even more topographically specific, consisting as it does of an extended ekphrasis of Donatello’s St. George installed upon Florence’s Orsanmichele (Eccellenza della statua di S. Giorgio di Donatello scultore fiorentino ..., 1584).[1]

It would be misleading, however, to assume that regional patriotism was endemic to all art literature written at this time. A notable exception in this regard is Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Idea del tempio della pittura, published in Milan in 1590. As previously discussed, this treatise is significant for its exposition on astrological influence as it pertains to artists’ style. The planet Venus, for instance, holds sway over Raphael, thus informing his mastery of proportion. The Idea also rejects the regional polemic between Vasari and Dolce: it acknowledges the merits of central Italian artists such as Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael, while northern Italian artists-Titian, Gaudenzio Ferrari, and Polidoro da Caravaggio—receive their due as well. In spite of its ecumenical stance toward a panoply of regional styles and artists, Lomazzo discusses little that pertains to the issue of artistic mobility. His overwhelming drive to classify artists according to an intricate astrological and metaphysical scheme is ultimately antithetical to prompting discussion of the movement of artists, a phenomenon which challenges the boundaries safeguarding the integrity of fixed categories, be they geographic, stylistic, or both.[2]

Another work that ostensibly has its origins in a locale apart from the Venice/central Italy dyad is Giovanni Battista Armenini’s De’ veri precetti della pittura, published in Ravenna in 1586 (fig. 7.1). A painter from Faenza who abandoned the profession to take religious orders, perhaps unwillingly due to family pressure, Armenini envisioned his work as a guide that might lead the art of painting from what he perceived to be its present ruinous state of decline. Even before encountering Armenini’s preface, the reader is made aware of the treatise’s didactic nature. Homiletic terms such as abusi, avertimenti, biasimo, diffetti, errori, ignoranza, and malignità stream down the double columns of the index (“Tavola delle cose piu notabili”) (fig. 7.2). The keyword of the book’s title itself—precetti—was employed in works of a similarly pedagogical nature, from Luca Baglione’s treatise on the art of preaching (L’arte del predicare ... secondo i precetti rhetorici, 1562) and Girolamo Ruscelli’s manual on military science and artillery (Precetti della militia modern, 1568) to Giovanni Mario Verdizotti’s Cento favole morali . . . nelle quali si contengono molti precetti alla prudenza (1599).[3]

FIGURE 7.1 Title page from Giovanni Battista Armenini, De’ veri precetti della pittura, 1586.

FIGURE 7.2 “Tavola delle cose piu notabili” from Giovanni Battista Armenini, De’ veri precetti della pittura, 1586.

The didactic precepts that Armenini lays out are not wholly abstract, however. Instead, he illustrates and reinforces their veracity with a substantial number of anecdotes, sayings, and observations—firsthand testimonies based on some six years he spent in Rome, where he arrived at the age of fifteen to study ancient and modern works of art. Armenini’s examples also venture beyond Rome as well, for as he informs us, he was compelled to leave the city due to competition and political unrest and “went wandering alone throughout almost all of Italy for about nine years.” Armenini thus draws on the memory of his journeys to outline a hypothetical itinerary, in both the physical and allegorical sense, for the promising young painter. This marks a shift in the representation of mobility in sixteenth-century art literature. While Dolce and Vasari, with the exception of the latter’s autobiography published in the 1568 edition of the Lives, accounted for the mobility of other artists, Armenini shifts the register from the third to the first person. As such, his text designates a moment in which the portrayal of mobility’s impact upon style enters the realm of lived experience. Consequently, the figurative language that describes the causality between travel and stylistic change takes on a different inflection. Once used to exhort artists to journey to a particular locale and therein adopt a particular manner of working, this language now embraces a stern tone of eyewitness description.[4]

PREFACE: THE CONFUSION OF MOBILITY AND THE PRECEPTS AS GUIDE

Armenini hardly abandons the prescriptive stance toward mobility adopted by his predecessors. Following in the vein of Ghiberti, Filarete, and Raphael’s famed letter to Pope Leo X on the ruins of Rome, in the preface to the Precepts he attributes the decline of the arts to foreign invasion. Artists must bring the quality of the visual arts forward. Otherwise, Armenini asks, “what can be expected but that someday art will fall back into the simplicity and awkwardness in which it had been piteously buried ... by the barbarism of the Goths, Vandals, Longobards, and other foreign nations?” The arts of these invaders, he continues, demonstrate “simplicity and awkwardness ... manifest in countless strange paintings on the walls of many old churches and in those badly made puppets outlined on fields of gold which are seen scattered on many panels throughout Italy.”[5]

Underscored by verbs of motion and adverbs of direction (conducendo, torni, ricadere, avanti), Armenini here posits a spatially conceived historical scheme, one according to which the arts can progress, yet are in danger of regressing as well. Foreign arrival menaces the arts. Vasari had elaborated on this claim in his own preface, and in the 1568 Lives the Barbarian invasions are portrayed in even more specific detail: the Visigoths with their king Alaric ransack Rome twice, the Vandals and their ruler Genseric enslave the Roman empress Eudoxia, and the Ostrogoths then arrive, only to be defeated by the Narsenes, who live among the ruins of the city. Sufficient for Armenini, however, is a running series that names these foreign groups: “Barbarie de’ Goti, Vandali, Longobardi.” The majuscule lettering punctuates the typography of the opening page’s terminating lines and augurs the presence of mobility as a key issue in De’ veri precetti.[6]

Armenini does not desist after decrying how the advent of Barbarians have buried the arts, a major topos in early modern art literature. He specifies the particular effect foreign invasion has had on the art of painting, invoking the standard charge that medieval art displays nothing but “simplicity and awkwardness” not to mention the anachronistic use of gold. Armenini draws on the vivid metaphor that likens figures in these paintings to puppets (fantozzi/fantocci), a reference to their lack of naturalism and movement. And though awkward and infantile, these figure puppets are not bound to a fixed location. Armenini exploits terms alluding to quantity (infinite, molte chiese, in molte tavole) and long distance (per tutta Italia) to impress on the reader the extent to which “simplicity and awkwardness” have inundated the peninsula. Vasari had also made this negative comparison between poorly executed figures and puppets. From the hands of artists left in the wake of the Barbarian sack of Rome “were born those fantocci and awkwardness that still appear in old works of art.” In the Life of the architect and engineer Cecca, fanciful and unbecoming creations created by vulgar painters are called fantocci da ceri, or wax puppets. Vasari also mentions an incident in which Michelangelo competed with his friends to draw a figure “similar to those fantocci that those who know nothing scrawl upon the walls,” a difficult feat for someone “so full of disegno.” At the other end of the early modern spectrum is Baldinucci’s definition of a voto as an “image that one places in churches by one who has vowed ... also fantoccio, for those votive images which are the most poorly made.”[7]

For Armenini, fantocci are not instruments of diverting humor. Instead, they refer to the childlike and primitive state into which the arts can fall. Likewise, in the Lives, the only permissible manufacture of fantocci is given to precocious artists in their youth. Fra Filippo Lippi as a child refuses to study, scrawling instead scores of fantocci on his notebooks and those of his fellow students. At a young age, the sculptor Pierino da Vinci, Leonardo’s nephew, took up drawing and creating fantocci di terra without a master, thus demonstrating how much nature and celestial inclination disposed him to the pursuit of an artistic career. In a letter to Annibale Rucellai, dated 30 March 1549, Giovanni della Casa advised a course for the study of Latin authors and encouraged him by stating, “Even Michelangelo in the beginning painted fantocci.” Armenini employs fantocci in this sense of undeveloped style elsewhere in the treatise, where he lambasts the figures of “many of those ancient painters in the time of Pietro Perugino and some years earlier.”[8]

To advance in the arts from this infantile puppet stage, the young painter must move. In fact, immobility runs counter to one of Armenini’s opening recommendations: “Do not think that anyone by himself, whether through study, natural inclination, acuteness of talent, or any other means can find or possess fully the knowledge and the practice of all the things that we have set forth; for it is difficult, as it is, to learn from others, it being necessary to visit different countries and artists and endure long servitude, one must believe that it is impossible to learn them by oneself.” Casting his dictate in the imperative voice, Armenini challenges the notion that the creation of art can ever be an independent and self-sufficient enterprise. Put into question is the autonomy suggested by the reflexive pronouns that frame this passage (da se stesso ... da se medesimo). Compare this with Vasari, who proposes that innate personal qualities and solitary work habits can achieve artistic greatness. The “inclination of nature” disposes Cimabue to attend to filling his notebooks with drawings of “leaves, men, horses, houses and other diverse fantasies,” a sign of his precociousness and future achievement. Disappointed with the bottega he brought from Florence to fresco the vault of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo “decided to do the entire work by himself ... with the utmost attentiveness towards labor and study.”[9]

Talent and industry alone, Armenini counters, are never sufficient. Instead, the painter must encounter—literally “practice” (praticare) in the sense of frequenting or associating with—a variety of places and persons. It may seem more standard to the modern ear to understand pratica as the exertion of a particular skill, craft, or trade. This transitive use of the word is, of course, found in early modern sources as well, as when Cennino Cennini entitles the thirteenth chapter of his technical handbook “Come si’ de praticare il disegno con penna” (How one should practice drawing with a pen). In drawing on the peripatetic connotation of praticare, Armenini declares that the domain of pratica extends beyond the confines of the studio to the wider world. This sense of praticare, which has its origins in the Greek praxis (doing or action), impresses on the reader that mobility does not simply comprise travel to a destination, but involves the acquisition of learning. Similarly, it is in this nuance of the term that Cristoforo Sorte in his Osservazioni nella pittura (1580) recommends that maps display rivers, cities, castles, and villas so that the “experts [prattici] in their countries can know the places without reading the letters of their names.” Likewise, Varchi declares that the hunt aids the mastery of military prowess, for by withstanding labors, rain, wind, and other inconveniences, one can gain knowledge of many “countries and places and passes, having been acquired by a long and enduring pratica.” So too does Armenini imply that pratticare paesi e persone, though difficult, is in fact a mode of actively gaining knowledge.[10]

But how does one put such knowledge acquired abroad to use? While Armenini suggests that objects of study encountered there are necessary, their overwhelming multitude can cause confusion as well. Without a set regiment, students “have found themselves in a confusion of pillars, statues, histories, models, and objects of nature. . . . They filled their heads not with good style or invention, but with a thousand confusions and foolishness.” This lament is a far cry from the tone of such works as the anonymous Antiquarie prospetiche romane or the Lives itself, which both hail the discovery and availability of antique models for study. For Armenini, this cornucopia, from the inanimate pillars to the animate works of nature, from single figure sculptures to complex compositions, induces confusione—literally a pouring together, “mixing without distinction or order.” Not only does mobility bring about a displacement in geographic terms; movement to a foreign location and an encounter with a plethora of sights, along with an attendant departure from routine cultural patterns, results in the perception of disorder.[11]

Some early modern thinkers, such as Giovan Battista della Porta, even equated those disposed to travel with instigators of chaos. People inclined to journey beget “labors, hardships and thefts, offending the poor and enjoying the shedding of blood” as they follow the ways of thieves, liars, bandits, and forgers. It is hardly surprising, then, that travelers in this period often invoke the term confusione to describe their vertiginous experience of alterity, or the very act of being en route. In his biography of his father, Ferdinand Columbus relates that the pilots of the ships carrying the crew across the Atlantic were thrown into great “disquiet and confusion” due to the unfamiliar configuration of the stars and the “voyage into such strange and distant regions.” In their journeys through Ethiopia, Francisco Alvarez and his companions are “confused in seeing the diversity of planted fields,” some destroyed by an excess of water, others dying as a result of drought. And in his account of his travels through Russia, the Florentine merchant Raffaello Barberini’s impression of the intricate dining rituals at the court of Ivan the Terrible, with prescribed moments to sit, stand, and eat, is one of “no small confusion.” Note that Barberini at the end of his report apologizes that his narration is organized “confusedly, poorly said and without order,” but he claims that it directly transcribes what he has seen and heard. This excuse, however gratuitous, exemplifies the disorientation that mobility can effect, no matter how faithfully recorded.[12]

To counter such confusion in the face of mobility, Armenini proposes his treatise as a guide for young painters. True, some of them through their own initiative may study models such as engravings, portraits from nature, or ancient sculpture. Even so, without proper direction, Armenini argues, their efforts are in vain. Illustrating his point via the mode of allegorical travel, he declares that independent-minded students simply “remain far from the true way.” Armenini decrees: “He who sets out without rules on such a long and tiring journey is bound to fall into obsolete styles and intricate tangles, not unlike the blind who go walking without a cane.” Lacking proper direction, students lose their youth “in their attempt to pursue this overly broad and obscure common path without a guide ... left with all their hopes betrayed.” In depicting himself and his book as overseeing the young painter’s progress, Armenini was of course invoking the trope of authors as guides. Perhaps the most memorable of these is the figure of Virgil, who leads Dante on his journeys through the Inferno, Purgatory, and up to Earthly Paradise. “I will be your guide,” the Roman poet assures Dante toward the beginning of the Inferno, “and will take you from here through an eternal place” (I:112-117). Fearful of shipwrecks, Petrarch composed his Itinerarium ad sepulcrum domini nostri Yehsu Christi (1358) to take his place as a guide for his friend Giovanni Mandelli’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land. “I shall be with you in spirit,” Petrarch addresses Mandelli, “and since you have requested it, I will accompany you with this writing, which will be for you like a brief itinerary.” Vasari states that the field of history, by implication, his own Lives, is the “true guide, mistress of our actions.” It is in this lineage that Armenini inserts his treatise. He presses the importance of his precepts all the more by speculating on the consequences of undertaking the journey of style alone. The preposition senza is a refrain in this passage, conveying a tone of admonition: without instruction from someone who has traveled the correct path, the road leading to praise and honor will remain hidden; without these rules, the young painter will have to endure a long, tiring, and ultimately fruitless voyage; without a walking stick, he will become trapped in outmoded styles; and finally, without a guide, he will find his hopes have been deceived. Such statements intimate that Armenini will not attend to the vagabondage of wayward artists. Awaiting the reader is a program, a fixed itinerary.[13]

BOOK ONE: THE WINDING PATH TO ROME

The path, as all proverbial roads do, leads to Rome. Never mind that for certain medieval writers, such as Chaucer, the saying referred to the more general notion that all avenues of thought lead to the one and same truth rather than alluding to an actual journey. For Armenini, the proverb literally designates Rome as caput mundi. As he declares at the opening of Book One: “In our times infinite youths from almost every part of the world went to Rome.” These students, Armenini continues, traveled there “to learn good disegno together with painting, which they hoped to do in that city.” He reiterates these statements in more assertive terms: “It is true that Rome surpasses all other [cities] for the number of foreigners who go there” for the purpose of learning painting. The praise escalates even further: “Rome is truly the light of these arts of design.” And toward the end of the treatise itself, Armenini insists: “Finally, I conclude that Rome is the true haven for skillful painters.” Nor was he, of course, alone in portraying Rome as an artistic center. Nearly a century previously, the Milanese author of the Antiquarie prospetiche romane announces that in his poem he will “rise up to describe the beautiful works of the Romans.” Armenini’s contemporary, the Portuguese artist and writer Francisco de Hollanda, maintains in his Tractato de pintura antigua (1548) that “neither painters and sculptors nor architects can produce works of significance unless they make the journey to Rome.” Likewise, Pietro Bembo in his Prose della volgar lingua affirms that Rome “sees many artists from parts near and far come to her every day.” And Vasari, ever self-effacing, contends in his autobiography that he was so absorbed in studying and drawing the city’s paintings, sculptures, and buildings, both ancient and modern, that he often consumed his morning meal standing up.[14]

Such commentary might be taken to indicate that the journey to Rome is an end in and of itself, that simply being in Rome acts as an efficient artistic stimulant. And yet Armenini makes it clear that arrival in the city does not necessarily prompt an immediate transformation in style for the traveling artist. This is not for want of diligence on the part of young artists. As Armenini reports, these eager youths on arriving in Rome are fully engaged: they busy themselves with drawing from the best paintings, they imitate in clay or wax the works of excellent sculptors, they reproduce on paper the designs of temples and ancient palaces. However, the path to artistic greatness is far from being straight or narrow. Armenini draws once again on the trope of allegorical mobility to impress upon the reader just how treacherous this path can be. Once in Rome, many students’ enthusiasm often dissipates. “I do not know of anything else that could have been the cause of this,” Armenini states, “except the lack of a true order and a means,” a program in other words that would shorten the path to artistic excellence. Even so, he underscores the virtue of struggle while on this journey: “Much greater are they who have overcome all obstacles and suffering and, with obstinacy and patience, have traveled over so steep and long a road to arrive at the supreme degree of perfection.”[15]

The arrival in Rome may complete a physical movement through space, but it also begins another type of mobility, one transposed into the allegorical realm. And if it is the lack of “true order” which causes artists to struggle, then Armenini intends to marshal young artists while on this path. But before proceeding to his prescriptions, it is worth briefly pointing out that early modern sources often perceive Rome as being incoherently littered with antiquities and modern works of art. Artists such as Brunelleschi and Donatello, at least according to Vasari’s account, who immediately grasp how to make sense of the flotsam of columns, capitals, and foundations, are the exception rather than the norm. Even the authors of the burgeoning genre of guidebooks to Rome or writers knowledgeable about the city admitted their inadequacy at offering a completely lucid and organized urban portrait. Take, for instance, Rabelais, who in an epistle opening Bartolomeo Marliani’s Liber urbis Romae topographia (1534) boasted that “no one, I believe, knows his own home better than I know Rome.” And yet, Rabelais’s plan to write a detailed account of the city was never realized due to the mass of conflicting information. He explains: “Even though the subject itself was not difficult to conceive, it seemed to me, however, not easy to lay out with clarity, aptness and elegance a pile of material heaped together pell-mell.” Or consider Lucio Fauno’s popular guide to the city, the Compendio di Roma antica (1552). At first glance, the Compendio appears to be a straightforward account of the city—one section dedicated to each of the seven hills lists of the principal monuments, temples, churches, bridges, and ruins. And yet, Fauno periodically defends himself against attack for possible inaccuracies in his text, stating that conjecture is at times necessary (“Coniecturas seque necesse est”). In the realm of cartographic images, maps such as those designed by Giovanni Antonio Dosio in the 1560s certainly offer an expansive and ordered urban view (fig. 7.3). Guiding the eye through the city are meandering and forking pathways which originate in the Via Flaminia and the Porta del Popolo, the usual point of entry for travelers, positioned toward the bottom of the print. And yet, the density of buildings and monuments in the city proper, rendered in tightly knit strokes of the engraver’s burin, convey the morass with which the virtual armchair traveler or student of artworks would have to contend.[16]

Hence the need for guidance on how to navigate through the density of monuments that is Rome. For this reason Armenini lays down a concrete program of study for the initiate: “There [in Rome] students usually proceed on this course: First they give themselves to imitating the works in chiaroscuro, and among the first of which are the paintings of Polidoro and Maturino, who were truly begot by nature for this task. Thus, they took the true and antique style from marbles and bronzes around Rome and by imitating them in their façades, they became so great and marvelous and were so prolific in every type of work and so beautifully inventive and so universal that their pictures due to the diverse riches and copiousness of costumes that were in them were so desired by painters and so necessary to them, that everyone ran there to make copies of them, because they are no less beautiful and virtuosic in figures as in grotesques, buildings, animals, and landscapes, in such a way that one can truly say that such a style is a textbook of art.”[17]

Polidoro and Maturino provide a compendium of knowledge, a “book” as Armenini calls it, which spares the novice from foraging through the Roman cityscape. Available for public view, the façades transport and condense the bronzes and marbles scattered around Rome into digestible categories of forms (fig. 7.4). They are an exercise in translation, from the medium of sculpture into painting, from three-dimensionality to two-dimensionality, from color to the monochrome of chiaroscuro. As such, they offer the student the possibility to imagine the various configurations that the antique manner might assume. And as if to silence possible dissent, Armenini prolongs his recommendation with clause after clause, with an interlocking series of conclusive conjunctions (conciosiacosaché, che, perché, di modo che) that aim to convince the reader of his prescriptions. But in spite of the authority ascribed to these façades, he also acknowledges their fragility, their susceptibility to the elements, and their inevitable oblivion: “I urge all young men to imitate these works as long as any trace of them remains.”[18]

Studying the works of Polidoro and Maturino is only the first stage on the path laid out for the novice artist. “Next,” Armenini counsels, “beginners should set themselves towards copying the best works in color, which are those of Raphael, Brother Sebastiano, Perino, and others already mentioned.” For all of his rhetoric that his treatise will guide young painters on the road to artistic excellence, these words of advice are remarkably succinct. In its pithiness, this information implies the beginning rather than completion of discourse surrounding Armenini’s text. For what immediately comes to mind is the question of which works, or more important, where such works are to be located in Rome. The Precepts does not direct the reader/artist-in-training to places where paintings by these artists might be consulted: the Villa Farnesina, San Pietro in Montorio, and the ceiling frescoes in the Vatican Logge, among others. Instead, by merely listing the names of artists whose works are held as exemplars in coloring, Armenini’s text calls for a particular audience and response: a cognizant reader who is not only aware of these artists and their reputations but would also be able to locate where these works might be found. Several avenues might be possible, including printed guides or, more likely, word of mouth in the community of artist-informants in Rome or those elsewhere highly knowledgeable of the city. The written treatise due to its reticence functions as a launching pad for oral discussion for those in need of further orientation.[19]

Imitating excellent examples of coloring comprises but one half of the curriculum at this stage in the young painter’s study in Rome. At the same time, Armenini contends, “they should start to imitate ancient statues, arches, and columns.” This activity is more instructive than examining the aforementioned paintings, since antiquities “impress themselves more in the mind, for being more real and concrete, and consequently one perfects one’s style more readily.” Even though the façades of Polidoro and Maturino cull and distill the maniera all’antica into one location, Armenini still counsels the practitioner to venture out into the cityscape to behold the ruins of Rome. More significantly, he likens the action of seeing statues, arches, and columns in situ, in all of their three–dimensionality, to the process of pressing information into the mind (“si imprimono piú nella mente”). In this, Armenini resorts to a metaphor that differs from Vasari’s salubrious aria di Roma or Dolce’s feathered crow. The encounter with the foreign is not experienced through respiration or camouflage. Rather, at work here is the commonplace of memory as an assortment of wax tablets upon which information has been imprinted. As Socrates remarks in Plato’s Theaetetus, Memory, the gift of the Muses, is a block of wax which we hold “under the perceptions or ideas and imprint them on it as we might stamp the impression of a seal ring.” But while memory treatises located this metaphor in the realm of the imaginary, Armenini suggests that mobility and being in Rome performs the task of placing antique forms in the mind. He was not alone in this regard. Francisco de Hollanda states that it is only by being in Rome that painters can apply and mentally retain the antique style. And Ripa depicts the figure of Usanza (custom) as a man traveling with a stick, since his time en route represents hard-won experience that is imprinted onto the mind.[20]

FIGURE 7.3 Giovanni Antonio Dosio, Roma, 1561. Engraving with etching (350 × 554 mm). From Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, [A2], Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library, Chicago.

FIGURE 7.4 Polidoro da Caravaggio and Maturino da Firenze, Episodes from a Roman History, 1520–27. Fresco. Palazzo Ricci, Rome.

Elsewhere in the treatise Armenini is more forthcoming about where exactly the student might examine classical works of art. After comparing their style to a “true light emanating from Rome,” he goes on to specify which works the novice might expect to find upon arriving in that city: “The Laocoön, Hercules, Apollo, the great Torso, Cleopatra, Venus, the Nile, and some others also of marble, all of them [are] to be found in the Belvedere in the Papal Palace in the Vatican. Some others are scattered throughout Rome and among the foremost is that of Marcus Aurelius in bronze, now in the square of the Campidoglio. Then there are the Giants of the Monte Cavallo, and the Pasquino, and others not as good as these. Also well-known because of the histories depicted thereon are those in the arches with a very beautiful manner of half and low relief as in the two columns, the Trajan and the Antonine. . . . I shall not speak further of the infinite number of tombs, animals, columns, and other various fragments of very rare things since they are familiar to those who study there.”[21]

The opening sentences are, at least, promising to the foreigner in Rome who searches for ancient statuary. Armenini lists the particular courtyard (Belvedere), residence (Papal Palace), and general location (Vatican) where a substantial collection of antiquities might be found. As a pen and ink drawing attributed to Maarten van Heemskerck attests, the Belvedere indeed offered a dense glossary of ancient statuary forms for the visitor (fig. 7.5). Seated upon parallel stone plinths incised with the Medici coat of arms, the facing Tiber and Nile river gods seem to converse with one another and by extension, with the Laocoön group and other sculptures in the niches and along the side. Armenini also identifies the whereabouts of the Marcus Aurelius equestrian statue (Campidoglio) and that of the Dioscuri horsemen Castor and Pollox (Monte Cavallo, i.e., the Quirinal).[22]

Hereafter, Armenini’s discourse on antiquities is more casually referential than topographically specific. Where would one find Pasquino? What of the Trajan and Antonine columns, with their reliefs? The disavowal of any concrete direction to the reader comes to a head in the passage’s final sentence. With the salvo “I will not speak of ...,” Armenini employs a variation of paralipsis, the rhetorical figure in which an orator both draws attention to yet passes over a given subject. True, later on he mentions that the houses of the Massimo and della Valle families contain antiquities. Discussion of these is omitted, however, “for the sake of brevity.” He also contends that the “palaces, gardens and yards of many cardinals” yield statuary worthy of study—yet here too Armenini forgoes specification. These objects, he reasons, cannot be pinned to any one locale, since they move frequently from place to place upon the death of their owners. Furthermore, and in what is a surprising statement for a treatise that claims to be pedagogical in nature, he claims that these objects “are not kept hidden from the masters [professori] who study them.” But how, the reader might object, would a novice gain access to such collections reserved for professori? As Kathleen Christian has pointed out, Latin inscriptions posted outside collections of the Cesarini, Carafa, and de’ Rossi families indicate that access to sculpture gardens was largely restricted to aristocratic visitors. Some collections such as those in the Palazzo Medici or the Belvedere had separate entrances which facilitated entry to a wider “public,” provided that the caretaker was offered a tip. But on the whole, it seems unreasonable to consider Armenini’s discourse on the statuary in Rome as a cicerone on par with the guides of Albertini, Palladio, and others. His catalogue of antiquities appears to be more of an authorial gesture, proof of his acquaintance with Rome and its sights, rather than a proper virtual escort through the city’s courtyards, gardens, and palaces.[23]

FIGURE 7.5 Attributed to Maarten van Heemskerck, The Belvedere Tiber and Nile, c. 1532–37. Pen and brown ink, with gray-brown wash (231 × 360 mm). British Museum, London.

Lest we mistake the Precepts for being focused on Rome entirely, it should be pointed out that Armenini acknowledges a sojourn in that city is not a universal possibility. “Not everyone can stay in Rome at length,” he admits, “laboring long and at great expense.” There is, however, a feasible substitute for the experience of contemplating antiquities in situ. Students can also examine three-dimensional copies after the antique executed in chalk and other materials. Offering a specific example, Armenini states that he has seen “a wax copy of the Roman Laocoön, no larger than two spans, but one could say that it was the original in small size.” Such reproductions are highly convenient and practical, because “they are light and easily handled and transported to every country.” As proof of his claim, Armenini refers again to his journey throughout Italy: “I have seen studios and chambers in Milan, Genoa, Venice, Parma, Mantua, Florence, Bologna, Pesaro, Urbino, Ravenna, and other minor cities full of such well-formed copies.” While these copies are widely diffused, they convincingly refer to the original in its point of origin: “Looking at these, it seemed to me that they were the very works found in Rome.”[24]

Here again Armenini asserts his authorial presence rather than conveying practical information to the student traveler. His repetition of the first-person singular pronoun “io” resounds as consistently as a cantus firmus, dictating the passage’s rhythm and flow. As much as the reader is ready to accept that a miniature model of the Laocoön perfectly conveys the stylistic features of the original, where and how such models might be procured is left unanswered. In fact, substantial collections of casts, such as those found in Turin, Bologna, or Venice, were few and far between. Only toward the end of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries did extensive groupings of models make their way into Roman and Milanese art academies. And while Agostino Veneziano’s engraving of Baccio Bandinelli’s Academy is often evoked as an illustrative aid to substantiate Armenini’s remarks, the setting of this print, which depicts students furiously studying from models, is Rome (fig. 7.6). Compositionally, the scene of students working late into the night with the room’s low ceiling and compact grouping around a lone candle anchor this vignette in that city. It is true that Armenini decenters the focal point of classical style in Rome by praising copies found in Milan, Pesaro, Urbino, and Ravenna. But when read in the context of the program proposed to the painter, this excursus on the merits of wax and chalk models is a momentary concession amidst an exhortation to journey directly and exclusively to Rome.[25]

FIGURE 7.6 Agostino Veneziano after Baccio Bandinelli, The “Academy” of Baccio Bandinelli, 1531. Engraving (274 × 298 mm). British Museum, London.

That Rome is the setting for the path the artist must follow is brought to the fore in the next prescribed model of study, one that marks the climax of Armenini’s curriculum. Those “deeming themselves capable of greater achievements,” he reports, “proceed to the study of the nudes in the Chapel, among the first of which are all those of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.” Yet the path is beset with snares: “I remember that when I, as a young man, was in the Chapel drawing various things from Michelangelo’s Last Judgment I used to listen willingly to some who were there, for they seemed very strange creatures.” To his amusement, these students conducted discussions among themselves “upon some trifling bone [ossessino] or highlight [berlume], and wasted most of their time inventing new difficulties. Thus, they were ever entangled in worthless novelties and in figments of the imagination, all of which would take a lifetime to consider.” The path toward excellence reaches its most treacherous point when the student confronts the pinnacle of style that is Michelangelo’s nudes. Recall that earlier in Book One, the novice had been advised to study the frescoes of Polidoro and Maturino so as to reap the benefits of learning to paint across genres, from figures to grotesques to landscapes. But now, Armenini demonstrates that his notion of detail is manifold. The focus on detail in the case of grotesques is reasonable since this genre is inherently made up of many parts bound together. By contrast, fixation on anatomical detail misses the larger picture. The dilemma facing students contemplating Michelangelo’s Last Judgment nudes is particularly apparent in those figures toward the bottom of the composition climbing out of their graves. Closest to the chapel floor and highly visible to the viewer, these resurrected bodies received intense attention from Michelangelo in respect to their pose, contour, and modeling (fig. 7.7). Drawings indicate the artist’s calibration of the figure seen from behind emerging from the earth with a pair of foreshortened hands, one rendered from up close, the other palm from a distance (fig. 7.8). However alert Michelangelo may have been to such details, Armenini’s language derides fixating on the part at the expense of the whole. Perhaps a play on the word obsession, the diminutive ossessino indicates the skeletal obsession that afflicts some students, while the term berlume (glimmer) instead of the more conventional luce signals others’ misdirected attention. The stress on his personal observation, how he in the first person notices, hears, and smirks at the actions of other painters, creates both a linguistic and qualitative distance between Armenini and a confused community of artists.[26]

FIGURE 7.7 Francesco Bartolozzi after Michelangelo, The Last Judgment in Outline, 1801. Engraving and etching (565 × 421 mm). British Museum, London.

FIGURE 7.8 Michelangelo, A Male Nude Seen from Behind, c. 1539–41. Black chalk on paper (233 × 293 mm). British Museum, London.

To impress upon the reader the hazards of imitating Michelangelo incorrectly, imagery associated with the trope of allegorical mobility surfaces once again. Specifically, Armenini employs the image of being “entangled” (intricati) to describe students’ hair-splitting. The Florentine Academician Pier Francesco Giambullari had evoked this term in his commentary (1538-48) on the Inferno. There, he remarks how Dante marvels at “the dangerous road or difficult and entangled labyrinth of the horrible forest.” So too does Armenini implement intricare to designate impeded movement. “By being so entangled” in minutiae, he warns, “one is diverted from a good and resolute style.” “Flee from labyrinths,” he counsels, for the intellect will be “wasted and entangled” with overly subtle thinking. Many who have tried to imitate Michelangelo’s style, he cautions, “have succeeded only in appearing awkward.” He explains that “because some concentrate on one part alone and some another, some transform Michelangelo’s style or entangle it with others,” creating “motley and strange styles.”[27]

Confronting the works of Michelangelo does not induce artistic paralysis and flight from Rome, as Vasari recounts in the Lives of Fra Bartolommeo, Leonardo, and Rosso Fiorentino. But studying the master’s works in situ is no guarantee. What determines good style is an innate quality, the faculty of judgment. “I believe that no one can ever acquire such a style,” Armenini asserts, “unless one is endowed by nature with excellent judgment.” Of course, he does say that judgment can be improved, chiefly through two means, “by studying assiduously and exercising proper care in learning and imitating what is good as seen in the works of the most masterful painters.” Nonetheless, Armenini rebuts, “the ability to express in a fine and learned style what the imagination has conceived is granted only to a few.” Thus, however close one may be to the finest models in Rome, lack of judgment and resultant self-delusion can cause young painters to mistakenly esteem an ill-begotten style. “The more one lacks judgment, the truer this is,” he states. Evoking yet again the topos of allegorical mobility, he declares: “Those who are studious and have a finer intellect acquire more insight as they progress, so that if as they proceed they stray from the right way, they open their eyes and find the correct path.”[28]

BOOK TWO: EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY

Though Rome in Armenini’s personal topography remains the principal destination, he also recommends journeys to other locales. Just as poets must become acquainted with many volumes of verse, he contends, so too must painters “know and distinguish the different styles of works painted by the most excellent of our modern masters.” What is more, these works are not in one place alone: “And because these paintings are scattered throughout many countries and cities, it is necessary to go to different places to consider them in detail at the cost of much time and hard work.” Armenini then recommends the student to imitate these works with various materials, either paints or crayons, on panel or on paper. Most important, mobility enriches the artist’s repertoire: “Travel in different countries is helpful in that the student will see other paintings and strange, exotic, and new things that will consolidate his mind and fill it with a greater store of proper material for the painting of both nudes and all other subjects.”[29]

Mobility is an action that bears consequences both mentally and physically for the painter. Travel, Armenini suggests, expends much time and labor; this recalls his earlier counsel that the young ought not to undertake the profession of painting “if they are so delicate or have such a weak constitution that every little effort or discomfort harms them.” Armenini further implies that viewing works of art in foreign locales goes beyond an uninformed act of appreciation, approaching instead an analytical operation. Paintings can be considered according to their individual parts or as entire wholes. He unfurls a list of tools and media by which the confrontation with paintings can be registered, therein proposing the possibility of a variety of responses. In addition, mobility is instrumental. The consideration of paintings extends far beyond the initial or singular moment or moments in which painter, place, and artwork confront one another. The media of crayons and colors, the ground of panel and paper record that moment for future use. Armenini even goes so far as to suggest that mobility can modify the state of one’s mind which he portrays in spatial terms, an entity capable of being made firm and compact, or supplied to the brim through seeing bizarre and fantastic inventions.[30]

This passage does not demonstrate the defensive or hostile attitude toward mobility so often manifest in the writings of Vasari and Dolce. Nor is there a triumphalist conception of travel; Armenini overlooks the outside chance that the student might have an impact on or even dominate the artistic scene that is his destination. As Giambullari so eloquently said in relation to Dante’s journey through the Inferno, a voyage “is nothing but a profound contemplation or speculation.” Mobility, then, becomes equated with the pursuit of knowledge itself. That artists must travel to acquire skills or see works unavailable in their immediate surroundings is a standpoint of old. Apelles traveling to Rhodes to meet Protogenes, the wanderings of Villard de Honnecourt, Dürer riding to Bologna to learn the secrets of perspective are only some of the more celebrated instances of this mindset. Previously discussed has been Vasari’s account of Raphael learning coloring from Fra Bartolommeo, while also studying figural compositions from Michelangelo and antique works in Rome. What distinguishes Armenini’s remarks is that they elevate the need for travel from biographical anecdote to the level and authority of precept, or rule. This manifests itself in the very structure of his prose, particularly in his use of impersonal clauses (è necessario ... è giovevole) to frame the mandate to travel. And as such, Armenini’s comments constitute part of the early modern background that would eventually come to the fore in the later eighteenth-century conception of the Bildungsreise, or educational travel, as a necessary part of a young person’s intellectual formation.[31]

But why would the reader trust these directives concerning mobility? Given that Armenini confesses that he himself failed in his pursuit to become a painter, what gives his counsel any legitimacy? This concern preoccupies Book Two of the Precepts. As though to bolster his prescriptions on where the young painter ought to go, what he should see, and why, Armenini’s own voice, framed in the first-person singular, penetrates the text, advancing the claim that he has personally witnessed the sites. Of course the rhetorical move of the author presenting himself as eyewitness is found in a number of literary genres. Already in The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides discloses that “either I myself was present at the events which I have described or else I heard of them from eyewitnesses whose reports I have checked with as much thoroughness as possible.” Yet another and particularly vivid representative of the eyewitness mode is the travel narrative. For instance, in Il milione, the narrator Rusticello opens his account by describing Marco Polo as “a wise and learned citizen of Venice, who states distinctly what things he saw and what things he heard from others. For this book will be a truthful one.” And in the book’s conclusion, the voice dramatically shifts to the first person, as the speaker triumphantly announces to the reader: “And now ye have heard all that I can tell you about the Tartars and the Saracens and their customs, and likewise about the other countries of the world as far as my travels and my knowledge extend.”[32]

In a comparable manner, Armenini employs his own authorial voice in the first person, not only to report what he has seen, but also to convince the reader of his account’s veracity. Take, for example, the first chapter of Book Two, which discusses lighting effects, from the light of the sun, moon, and stars to the artificial lights of lamps and fires in nocturnal fantasies. “The only way,” Armenini contends, “whereby one can become skilled in the imitation of the effects of different lights is the study of their natural effects.” Following this statement, however, is not a prescription concerning how one might study the effects of lighting in nature. Instead, the reader is informed that “there are some panels and paintings in oil done in this fashion by Titian, Correggio, Parmigianino, and Marcarino, insofar as I have been able to see on my travels throughout Italy, and they are indeed most beautiful, but little appreciated today.” This statement posits Armenini as a knowledgeable viewer, one whose vision is comprehensive, encompassing the whole of the Italian peninsula so as to solicit and eventually win the trust of the reader seeking guidance. However, where specifically the young painter might discover these works—most likely, Venice, Parma, or Siena—goes unmentioned. The eyewitness mode demonstrates Armenini’s awareness of major stylistic proponents, but offers little help on how one might replicate his journey and attain this knowledge. The impact on mobility is thus only implied, cast as a potential effect, with the procedure that might realize these aims passed over in silence. Alternatively, Armenini’s own travels might also be seen in more positive terms as a provisional blueprint, a template on which the reader can construct his own itinerary if he so desires.[33]

This journey to a destination involves not only contemplating a celebrated work of art. The voyager can expect to confront and participate in a community of fellow artists which discusses and debates how best to reap the stylistic benefits from the mutually examined object of study. For instance, in his counsel on figural compositions, Armenini returns to Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Here he juxtaposes his own assessment concerning the artist’s working process against the opinions of other observers: “Is there anyone who does not yet know that simply by turning one or two figures in round relief in different ways, one can derive many diverse models for one’s paintings? By looking at Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, one can see that he followed the procedure I have described. Nor have there been lacking those some who have said that he used wax models he had made himself and that he would first immerse the joints in hot water to soften them and would then twist the limbs to suit his needs. I leave the proof of the possible success of this method up to you.”[34]

Opening this passage is a forceful rhetorical question that aims to cast shame on or silence any who might have been ignorant of the compositional possibilities of contorting figures. Next, Armenini calls upon the example of the Last Judgment to lend authority to this working method. This interpretation of the fresco is not his alone. Via forms of indirect speech (“né ci sono mancati c’hanno detto che”), Armenini indicates the presence of others who have discussed Michelangelo’s working method in relation to the fresco and, moreover, with himself. Federico Zuccaro’s drawing of his brother Taddeo studying the Last Judgment may have depicted the young artist alone in the Sistine Chapel, accompanied only by materials and foodstuffs to sustain him in his solitary exertion (the latter perhaps bearing Eucharistic connotations given the sacred nature of the subject matter) (fig. 7.9). Yet as Victor Turner has observed in his seminal work on the social dimensions of pilgrimage, groups of travelers to a destination often form a communitas, a body of like-minded individuals who momentarily put aside distinctions in class or even, at times, nationality, focusing instead on the sites that await them on their journey. Armenini’s statements point toward the genesis of such a communitas bound together by an attempt to derive lessons in style from the Last Judgment, or for that matter from antique models, as seen in Bandinelli’s nocturnal academy (see fig. 7.6). This communitas is not, however, uniformly cohesive. Roman artistic life was, after all, notoriously competitive. Furthermore, recall that Armenini had scorned his fellow students who, in his view, concentrated on minutiae in the fresco at the expense of discerning its larger compositional principles. Armenini also portrays Michelangelo himself lamenting the errancy of such artists. “Oh, how many men this work of mine wishes to destroy,” the artist supposedly declared. Even so, what Armenini suggests is that style is locally specific, a badge of membership to a community of witnesses.[35]

The reportage of the communitas gathered in the Sistine Chapel can be misleading. Armenini declares: “I know well that on seeing the Last Judgment and perhaps becoming aware of this procedure, Leonardo da Vinci had the courage to say, according to what one of his pupils in Milan told me, that he was displeased by the Last Judgment only because too few figures had been used in too many ways.” This statement is inaccurate: Leonardo had died more than fifteen years before Michelangelo even began the Last Judgment. Yet this blend of fact and fiction, direct observation, indirect speech, and hearsay only further emphasizes the extent to which the traveler enters a discursive space upon achieving his destination. Mobility can bring about not only the performance of facture according to norms, but also the acquisition of anecdotes that link a set area with renowned personalities working and viewing within that space.[36]

At its most practical level, this quotation of celebrated artists in celebrated spaces announces all the more forcefully the impact of mobility upon the artist. This is partly so because travel implicates a multisensory experience of works of art. Throughout Book Two, Armenini states that mobility employs sight, hearing, and speech. Consider his description of constructing and implementing cartoons: “And these are the ways I have seen and studied several times in the drawings and cartoons of Raphael, Perino, Giulio, Daniele, Taddeo Zuccaro, and other living skillful painters, who all affirm that what has been said is most true.” So too does he preface his examination of brushes and colors with a statement that registers his visual observation and auditory reception of technique: “We shall deal first with the materials of colors, then with the way to use, match, and unite them so they remain beautiful and vivid. All of the preceding I have derived from the customs and practices of the most worthy and skilled artists who came before us, as I have heard and seen.”[37]

FIGURE 7.9 Federico Zuccaro, Taddeo Zuccaro in the Sistine Chapel Drawing Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment,” c. 1595. Pen and brown ink and brown wash over black chalk and touches of red chalk (41.9 × 17.6 cm). J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

It is with respect to this issue of coloring that Armenini sets his sights beyond Rome to northern Italy. He instructs the reader that for the white which painters use in frescoes, “one takes, as one knows, the best of the whitest lime, usually found in Genoa, Milan, and Ravenna.” Of miniver brushes, he states that few craftsmen make them “because they are sold everywhere in little shops and apothecaries; among the best are those which come from Venice.” Armenini then takes the reader from the apothecary to observe the spectacle of the artist at work. Admiring those painters who use just three colors to represent the flesh of nudes, he singles out one painter, Luca Cambiaso, for praise. Among the many painters he has known, Armenini narrates, “there was a certain Luchetto da Genova, who in my time painted in S. Matteo, the church which belonged to Prince Doria.” Cambiaso, he continues, uses both his hands to paint. This artist holds “a brush full of color in each, and is so skilled and decisive that he paints his works with incredible speed. I have seen more works by him in fresco than ten other men could produce.”[38]

Reiterating the phrases “I have known” and “I have seen,” Armenini stages a scene of Cambiaso at work. True, he begins this passage with references to walls and inkpots, both general allusions to an artist’s tools and site of employment. But immediately in the next sentence, we are taken from this generic setting to a series of precise topographical and other indications: a city (Genoa), church (San Matteo), its patron (Andrea Doria), and later on genre (religious narrative) and even Luca’s supposed competitor, who was in reality his collaborator, Giovan Battista Castello, known as “Il Bergamasco.” And to express all the more vividly Cambiaso’s novel way of painting, Armenini shifts from the imperfect and perfect tenses (dipingeva; ho visto) to the lively present (dipinge; fa le opere sue). Dramatic too is the image that favorably compares Cambiaso’s speed to the manpower of ten painters combined. Celebrating speed of execution is a common enough trope in early modern art theory, though rapid execution could also be criticized as symptomatic of cultural decline. But what fascinates Armenini most is coming face to face with an artist who performs the mechanics of his style, with two hands no less, before the traveler’s own eyes.[39]

Mobility, then, can entail close observation of specific techniques as well as communication with artists in or from a foreign locale. For example, in his description of the use and processing of colors as practiced north of the Alps, Armenini reports that “there are some Flemish painters whom I have seen mix white lead with one-third as much soaked gesso. They add one-third soaked gesso to the orpiment as well, and even though it is changed into a paler shade, in their works it comes out well-integrated, light, and remarkable.” These lines go well beyond Vasari’s aloof characterization of northern artists as inventors and competent practitioners of coloring. Nor do they echo Francisco de Hollanda’s citation of Michelangelo’s negative assessment of Flemish painting, deemed “without reason [razão] or art [arte]... without substance [sustancia] or vigor [nervo].” With a more measured, if not objective tone, Armenini offers a step-by-step rendition of Flemish technique, a recipe of sorts that the reader might even replicate. Such a performance of style is often accompanied by interaction with those very performers. Thus in relation to the application of varnishes in northern Italy, we learn that artists there blend “with their hands the mixture of oils while still warm, they spread it uniformly over the work, which had been previously heated in the sun. . . . I have seen it used in this manner by the most skillful artists throughout all of Lombardy.” Armenini also reveals, though not without a note of caution, that “I was told that Correggio and Parmigianino used this type of varnish in their works, if one believes their disciples.”[40]

The traveler who seeks out works of art abroad also encounters through a community of local artists private collections that provide opportunities for additional viewing and comprehension. Armenini praises those artists who take pains to bring a complete finish to their works, be they in fresco, oils, or drawings. He singles out the frescoes of Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, a reference no doubt to the Last Supper. While also in that city, he recounts that “certain old painters showed me some small drawings from Leonardo’s hand which, besides his marvelous paintings, were finished in a manner so extraordinary because of the lights and shadows.” Scholars from previous centuries, from Carlo Bianconi to Luigi Lanzi, decried Armenini’s pithy comments on the Last Supper and Leonardo’s other works in Milan. However, when seen from the perspective of mobility, his statement implies that travel to a foreign destination can accomplish more than just bringing a voyager to behold a work of art. Mobility can also bring to the traveler’s attention objects directly relevant to the examined monument and immerse him in a stream of conversation that has flowed on well after the work’s completion.[41]

FIGURE 7.10 Perugino, Crucifixion with the Virgin and Sts. Mary Magdalene, Bernard, John the Baptist, and Benedict, 1493–96. Fresco (812 × 480 cm). Santa Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, Florence.

In the aforementioned examples, Armenini has associated a particular location with a specific artwork, style, or technique, northern Italy and Flanders with coloring, Milan with the Last Supper and Leonardo’s drawings, and so on. At times, however, he also groups together a variety of places and monuments found throughout Italy to make a broader statement about style. In the last chapter of Book Two, Armenini discusses storia, a genre through which “a judicious man can endeavor with ease to depict with all the power of his genius everything he knows and possesses.” After such a preamble, we might next expect exemplary storie that Armenini has witnessed in person. But instead, he reverses his usual rhetorical strategy and offers a series of works which are not to be held as paragons: “We have seen the last and most important works of men of great fame condemned, such as Pietro Perugino’s work painted in Florence and Domenico Beccafumi’s in the chapel of the Duomo of his native Siena; and even more in the work of Jacopo da Pontormo in San Lorenzo, also in Florence.” Armenini declares that in these paintings, these artists “showed themselves inferior to all those works they had done before.”[42]

As Philip Sohm has demonstrated, the thread that connects these painters is old age, their works showing “ignominious ends to illustrious careers.” True, at first glance, one would also be hard pressed to find visual parallels among the three artists. Perugino’s clear perspectival schemes and balanced figural compositions, such as those seen in his frescoes for the Cistercian convent of Santa Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi in Florence, are a far cry from the dense cluster of bodies and indefinite spatial settings which can be gleaned from the preparatory drawings for Pontormo’s now destroyed frescoes in the choir of San Lorenzo in the same city (figs. 7.10, 7.11). These works, in turn, differ markedly from Beccafumi’s frescoes of scenes from the New Testament for the apse of the Siena Cathedral, notable as they are for their agitated figures, translucent fabrics, and dramatic contrasts in coloring and lighting effects (fig. 7.12). All the same, Armenini identifies a common denominator in these highly disparate works, namely a stylistic strategy of excess and speed. The three artists are called “strange masters of confusion,” accused of “amassing many figures without regard for the limits of the composition.” Armenini then goes one step further, likening these artists’ styles to an uncontainable fluid. “Because by chance they may have served some great personages,” he reproves, “these artists are tolerated and are summoned and employed to splatter [schicazzare] major works in the most important places in Italy.” These remarks point to disillusionment with the overabundance of figures found in late sixteenth-century painting, a feature of the aesthetic that art history would later term Mannerist. Vitriol aside, Armenini’s remarks also imply, in an echo from Vasari, that reflecting on works of art while en route can become an exercise in comparison. The viewer mentally juxtaposes and finds analogies among paintings not immediately in purview, located either one square or one city away.[43]

FIGURE 7.11 Attributed to Jacopo da Pontormo, Study for “Deluge with the Benediction of the Seed of Noah,” before 1557. Black chalk (26.8 × 41.0 cm). British Museum, London.

That the act of travel can stimulate the faculty of making analogies between works of art both present and distant from the voyager’s eye leads to another aspect of Armenini’s representation of mobility. In his view, the mind of the traveler is not a tabula rasa with regard to a work of art located in a foreign destination. Travelers, Armenini suggests, arrive at a destination already equipped with knowledge relevant to a work of art, style, or technique. Consequently, this mental knowledge and the physical work of art enter into dialogue and, at times, come into conflict. Consider, for instance, how Armenini raises the issue of how to construct a perspectival scheme: “Leon Battista, in his treatise on painting, wants this point [i.e., the central vanishing point] to be placed as far from the base line as the height of the figure which is to be painted nearest the view on the aforementioned plane. But I find, through what I have considered and known, that the measure of this distance as painted in the storie and drawings of Raphael, Giulio [Romano], Baldassare [Peruzzi] da Siena, and Daniele [da Volterra] is the previously stated measure, the length of a man. These masters place the point near the head of the figure that is set before the others, but a degree or two above the base line, and since the point is higher, it seems to create a better effect.”[44]

“Bookish” knowledge and firsthand experience of works of art abroad are at loggerheads in this passage. Of course, grasping the nature of this conflict is limited to cognoscenti—Armenini does not mention Alberti by his surname so as to identify him explicitly. Nor does he mention whether he consulted the work in its original Latin or through the publications in the vernacular which became available in the mid-sixteenth century, Lodovico Domenichi’s translation published in 1547 being one example. Note as well that Armenini does not repeat or even summarize Alberti’s method of designing a perspectival construction: it is implied that the reader already is familiar with the process of designating squares along a quadrangle’s base line, drawing orthogonals to a vanishing point, and adding a distinct side elevation to assist controlling measurements. Yet as evident as this method may be to his readers and himself, Armenini only alludes to it in order to immediately discount it. Boldly asserting his presence in the first person, he rebuts Alberti’s formulations through a brisk alliterative phrase (“per quello c’ho considerato e conosciuto”) which proclaims the primacy of his personal vision. Where these works might be is suppressed, though we can safely assume the majority of them to be in Rome, given these artists’ association with Raphael’s workshop. Even so, the thrust of this passage posits the following extrapolation: mobility and seeing works of art in situ can complicate, and even contradict, prescriptions as found in books.[45]

FIGURE 7.12 Beccafumi, Glory of Angels, c. 1535–44. Fresco. Duomo, Siena.

And yet, true to the protean nature of representing mobility and its effects, Armenini concludes his discussion of perspective with counsel not to travel, but to consult information to be gained from a published book: “Sebastiano Serlio,” he informs us, “has dealt clearly with perspective and has written about and shown in drawings so much of both this practice and architecture as is sufficient for any apt beginner.” He further reasons that “it seems to me that all you have to do is to take up his books and with their aid become as skilled as need be.” Thus, the eyewitness mode undergoes yet another permutation, combining not only with the discourse to be found in a community of local artists or mental exempla but also with the Republic of Letters. Armenini’s ultimate resuscitation of the medium of the printed book and its ability to reach a large number of readers is perhaps a testament to ambitions he harbors for his own work. “By means of the written word, which spreads throughout the world,” he proclaims, “not only are the arts rendered easier and less wearisome, but they are also preserved more firmly and alive in the memory of posterity.” And to state the obvious, the reader is only made aware of Armenini’s eyewitness accounts through the quarto format and italic type of his own printed book.[46]

BOOK THREE: BEYOND ROME AND THE LOCATION OF DECORUM

If Book Two asserts the authority of eyewitness, then the Precepts’s concluding book hones that vision. What types of painting are appropriate to specific locations? Works of art made for state institutions, Armenini reasons, differ from those commissioned by private citizens. “Similarly,” he declares, “a different approach and skill are needed for works which are to be displayed in a noble city and for those to be displayed in a castle or a small town.” Too often, he observes, artists follow their own inclinations. They fail to adjust their manner of working according to the wishes of the commissioner or what is fitting to the place of a painting’s display. Furthermore, there arises the conflict between a traveling artist and a “native” patron’s appreciation of foreign style. Armenini reports: “When I was in Umbria, I witnessed such an incident. Some excellent young men from Rome, as a consequence of their work, had fallen into these errors and asked me to help them by estimating the value of the works they had completed together with some other skilled artists from the localities there, works [executed] not without great effort and labor. The task, which I accepted because of my compassion for them, caused me annoyance and wrath, for I had to contend and quarrel with people who in no way understood the works which had required such great efforts and which deserved honors and high rewards.”[47]

No document has yet surfaced that might confirm this anecdote. But at least one archival reference attests to Armenini’s service as an arbiter. A notarial record dated 9 July 1599 from Faenza states that Armenini along with another painter, Marc Antonio Rocchetti, was called on to assess the worth of a portrait of a certain Benedetto Benedetti, commissioned by “Madonna Justina, sua madre,” to Giovanni Battista Bertucci. The two judges, “having seen and considered every which labor” that Bertucci demonstrated in this portrait, “colored and in oil,” estimated the work at three Florentine piastroni. Yet in the anecdote cited above, instead of Florentine currency, the more intangible qualities of an artist’s reputation and comprehension are at stake. The conflict centers on the regional attitudes toward the execution and reception of style. Roman style of painting, even when combined with the labor of local painters, fails to win the appreciation of the Umbrian audience. The terms used to depict this confrontation are not monetary or even art theoretical, but emotional and highly charged. Armenini feels compassion for the young Roman painters, and disdain for the local patrons, a brew of feelings that can only result in disputes.[48]

The disdain a traveling artist can hold toward an ignorant local audience is not restricted to his era. Armenini offers ancient precedents for this antagonism in an episode from the life of the ancient Greek Epimenides. This painter from Rhodes, wanting to follow the true path, set out for Asia and only after the absence of many years did he return to his homeland. After having repatriated, he refrained from relating “what he had heard or seen or done.” Curious about the artist’s journey, his countrymen asked him to relate some of what he had experienced abroad. Exasperated, the artist replied: “I certainly traveled two years by sea to become accustomed to suffering. I stayed in Asia ten years to learn the art of painting and for six I studied in Greece to learn how to be silent, and now you want me to chat and relate news. O Rhodians! In my house, one comes to see the excellence of my paintings and not to hear news from me.”[49]

That mobility endows the traveler with a surplus of knowledge and experience not available to all is reiterated in Armenini’s rendition of the Rhodians’ plea for just “something” (“qualche cosa”) of what Epimenides had seen or undergone. While seemingly neutral, this indefinite pronoun indicates information withheld from the imploring audience who only ask for a shred of a tale. Epimenides’ response to their requests, now framed as direct speech, does not forgo details of his itinerary. The combined number of years en route, a total of eighteen years, rivals Ulysses’ absence from Ithaca, as does the distance covered. Epimenides also recounts the subjects studied during his voyages, which put painting on par with the philosophical and moral enterprises of suffering and silence. Yet the fact that Epimenides withholds from his audience the content of his voyages points to several previously noted consequences of mobility. First, as in the examples of Antonio Veneziano, Donatello, and Rosso in Vasari’s Lives and the case of Sebastiano del Piombo in Dolce’s Dialogo, mobility can cause a change in self such that one can become alienated from one’s native people. Though Epimenides is called “pittore rodiano” at the beginning of the passage, at its end, his exclamatory address (“O Rodiani!”) indicates a momentary cleave in identity between himself and his compatriots. Second, Epimenides’ reaction indicates that although painting represents visual phenomena, the mode of execution can allude to the traveler’s experience and gain in knowledge. A wanderer’s maniera becomes the instrument through which he conveys the biographical, even psychological dimensions of lived experience. But paintings, not words, should speak for and of a journey.

Audiences outside Rome are not consistently backward in Armenini’s account. And he praises artists who transport the pictorial intelligence they have gained in that city elsewhere: “I maintain that Rome is the true haven [ricetto] for skillful painters, even as I have maintained it to be for students. Although through changes in the courts some are elevated who, having become lords and princes, are at times little inclined to these noble arts, there are always some lords somewhere who take worthy artists from this inn [albergo] and, with ample rewards, bring them to their various provinces. And from these skillful men, the lords receive benefit, beauty, comfort, and ornamentation for their provinces and their subjects.”[50]

In Book One, Armenini had portrayed Rome as a focal point toward which “countless youths from almost every part of the world” gravitated to acquire the fundamentals of disegno. Now the city becomes likened to a way station, an intermediate place on the artist’s trajectory that culminates in employment at court. Rome is a ricetto, a refuge or collecting site. It is in this sense of the word that the sixteenth-century northern Italian court poet and diplomat Girolamo Muzio describes Venice as a “ricetto for pilgrims and loving minds,” a reference to that city’s standing as an intellectual center and spot en route to the Holy Land. Rome is not a permanent domicile for any of these constituents, an assertion made plain by Armenini’s comparison of the city to an albergo, a place of lodging for those in transit. This allusion to Rome as an inn surely refers to the painter’s progress on the road of style. While the qualities these artists bring—utilità, bellezze, commodità, and ornamenti—trace their origin in Rome, they are portable and can be favorably received, provided that the local audience is discerning enough.[51]

Indeed, artists who have trained and lived in Rome become messianic figures, evangelizing the style current in that city throughout the whole of Italy and beyond. Armenini cites the instance of Giulio Romano, whom he credits with transforming the low-lying northern Italian city of Mantua from a “swamp ... to another Rome.” His designs and plans establish buildings all’antica “inside and outside the city” as well as “throughout his [Federico Gonzaga’s] entire dominion.” Perino del Vaga in the employ of Prince Andrea Doria also transports a Roman style to Genoa. Both patron and artist “concluded together a building ought to be constructed ... in the guise of the worthy ancients, as once done in Rome.” There is a noticeable disjunction between foreign and native styles, Armenini observes, adding that the palace constructed after Perino’s designs was “very different in comparison with others made earlier.” The Doria palace serves as a beacon that “illuminated” the Genoese aristocracy, who in turn emulate the building in their own architectural projects.[52]

Armenini does grant that adverse political circumstances, such as the sack of Rome, can displace an artist from Rome in lieu of a direct summons to court, as seen in the career of Jacopo Sansovino. Even so, he poses to the reader the following rhetorical question: “And what perhaps would Venice still be if Jacopo Sansovino, who was a very skillful sculptor and architect in his time, had not used his art there?” This query seems justified, because it is this central Italian, and not a native Venetian, who successfully carries out the necessary repairs “with infinite expense and danger” of the apse of San Marco, the city’s chief religious monument. Moreover, Sansovino instructs the local populace in good style, setting them on “the true road to all that is graceful, superb, and good there.” Another refugee from the sack of Rome is Polidoro da Caravaggio, who settles in Messina. As though creating an oasis in the midst of a desert, the immigrant artist “makes appear there all the best that the good ancients had ever achieved in painting, sculpture, and architecture.” This conception of mobility as diffusion of style continues unabated in the cases of Parmigianino and Baldassare Peruzzi. Both having fled Rome for Bologna, Parmigianino “put into use the graceful and excellent art of painting and design,” while Peruzzi, as if a beacon, “revealed the ancient light of good architecture.”[53]

As Armenini’s catalogue of traveling artists progresses, their journeys extend farther west, reaching as far as the Spanish court. As if to render more vivid the mobility of these artists and to further his claims that such mobility is not a tissue of fiction, Armenini portrays himself conversing with colleagues on their way to the Iberian peninsula at their point of disembarkment: “Nor have there been few young men who have been brought to Spain with very good commissions. Among these was Cristofano da Argenta, whom I saw in Genoa in the street. We recognized each other, and thus he stayed with me to rest for some days, while awaiting a ship for Barcelona, and left once it arrived. And, not long before, the Spaniards Roviale and Bizzero passed through Genoa. Due to many announcements, they knew how much their great king was inclined to this art and how much he would reward skillful men. Their services were solicited with letters and money from the first barons of the Spanish court. There were many others of lesser name who left Rome, having been offered large salaries by the persons who were charged to lead them to their lords.”[54]

Despite the encouragement and praise that underlie this catalogue of artists who receive honors at these foreign courts, Armenini cautions against a permanent residence abroad: “It is better to be commissioned and brought by others to any place whatsoever than to go on one’s own, facing unknown dangers. For, if I said elsewhere that it is permissible for young men to travel alone to see the various works and styles of good artists, I did not say, however, that they should stay in distant places to work. When the journey is over, you must return to the fountainhead, since too much of one’s art is lost by living in other places.”[55]

After the pages which commend artists who turn provincial marshes into second Romes or illuminate the local gentry, the recommendation for fixity comes as a surprising about-face. Any valiant penetration into unknown territory and circumstances (“l’andar a ventura”) is deemed ill advised. In presenting the risk of losing one’s sense of good style, the costs of adventure far outweigh the benefits. In addition to subscribing to this notion that displacement can lead to memory loss, Armenini introduces the metaphor of the fountainhead (fonte) to refer to the artist’s ideal headquarters. Here he dispenses with the convention that associates a font of knowledge with a specific person, as when Dante asks if the figure he sees in the vast desert is Virgil, “the font that pours so full a stream of speech” (Inferno 1.79-80). He draws in part on the humanist refrain ad fontes and identifies the font not as a source text but as a particular place, which is Rome. Not only is this Armenini’s particular way of designating the coordinates of “center and periphery”; he also conceives of the artist and, by extension, style itself as fragile, in perpetual need of replenishment and nourishment.[56]

If an extended time away from the font that is Rome has a deleterious impact on an artist’s style, it also takes its physical and emotional toll: “Nor shall I ever advise anyone to be inquisitive [curioso] about leaving Rome in the hope of finding important commissions elsewhere, unless he is first known there and considered good and is strongly entreated by those who want him or by their city. But those who pursue commissions by themselves, even though they finish their works and do them well, will still suffer disillusionment and be deceived in every respect. There is no doubt that in wandering this way or that young men sacrifice the benefits of travel for wrath [sdegni] and sorrows [dolori] in their souls and extreme discomfort [disagii estremi] in their bodies; for cities to visit are many, but few are they who recognize good work and reward it.”[57]

Opening with a battery of negative particles (né, mai, nessuno), Armenini’s language here is categorically imperative. The author draws a distinction between purposeful travel to see works of art and impetuous wandering after commissions, an undertaking described with the term curioso. While having a positive connotation in modern usage, the quality of curiosità was described in the early modern era as a “disordered wandering after knowing.” It is against such futile vagabondage that Armenini warns. He even goes so far as to order that artists ought to travel only after their reputations have been firmly established in Rome. Armenini does not allow for concession on these points—whatever path artists take, they will be deceived “in every way” if they do not heed his counsel. The consequences span the gamut of emotions, from anger to pain, and even extend to include the fatigue of the artist’s body itself.[58]

Armenini, however, is aware that political circumstances can necessitate departure or exile from Rome. This is not only true in the case of such artists as Sansovino, Polidoro da Caravaggio, and others who fled in the aftermath of the sack of 1527. Displacement from the caput mundi applies to Armenini’s own biography as well. “But if circumstances [varii accidenti] force one to interrupt one’s studies,” he states, “one can do nothing but to mourn a cruel fortune.” Armenini then offers a personal gloss: “It befell so in my time in that way, due to the wars waged by the Carafa against Naples.” The historical background to which he refers is Pope Paul IV Carafa’s antagonism toward the Spanish Hapsburg presence in Italy, hostilities that came to head in 1556–57 when the Duke of Alba, Ferdinando Álvarez de Toledo, advancing from Naples, threatened Rome with some twelve thousand Spanish troops. Armenini relates the consequence of the political crisis in terms of his own compulsory departure from Rome: “I set my heart on traveling to many places, and so I did for many years, such that infinite incidents and various events came upon me.” He does not portray himself as Fortune’s victim, crushed beneath its maliciously rotating wheel. Armenini becomes a keen traveling observer of local artistic practice. He depicts the effect of mobility not on the execution, but on the evaluation of style.[59]

With contempt, Armenini remarks that the young Milanese he encounters were “more dedicated to adorning themselves with clothes or fine shining arms than to handling pens or brushes with application.” In Milan, he makes the acquaintance of a young artist who in the home of a wealthy merchant executes a fresco not by his disegno fantasia, but through the perfunctory manual procedure of implementing stencils, drawing from prints, and tawdrily applying fine gold everywhere, including on wax pellets. “Considering the great expense that had gone into it,” Armenini huffs, “one could say that it had been thrown away on a vile thing, for there was nothing of importance in that work or anything that approached a semblance of form.” The patron’s taste is disparaged as well. Upon being asked what he would prefer for the subject of a great frieze in fresco, the merchant replies, “Make it like a pair of multicolored trousers which nowadays are in fashion.” For another component of the fresco, the young Milanese artist composes some designs taken after prints of Raphael’s Loves of Psyche, a subject of which Armenini cautiously approves, provided that it is well painted. Yet the merchant dismisses the idea altogether, since with such designs, “fine colors do not come out well.” And upon hearing the patron’s deficient rationale, Armenini states: “I quickly made up my mind never to return, once I had taken leave.”[60]

Not all persons in the provinces beyond Rome are ignorant, Armenini concedes. A certain Count Guido da Galera is described as “a knowledgeable man and experienced at the great courts.” However, the count does not give a Roman painter his due and this experience only provides more fodder to reinforce the admonition never to depart from Rome without a guarantee of suitable patronage: “I believe that this was due to the Count’s meager knowledge of good paintings, since they appear only too rarely in similar places. This is the sort of adventure we have when we depart at too young an age and seek our fortune elsewhere. Therefore, I say once again that no one should ever leave Rome unless summoned by persons of position and rank.”[61]

Armenini’s representation of place and style thus depends on a community of artists and patrons knowledgeable about the manufacture and meaning of style. He makes this clear in a nostalgic reminiscence: “I remember well when in my youth I arrived in Rome and, drawing the facades of Polidoro, I was asked to make designs by Ponzio and Bartolommeo, both French sculptors, who lived together. They took me to stay with them so I could copy works of all types for them. One evening Francesco Salviati came there and gave them a sketch he had drawn, asking that one of them make in soft wax the nude, which in the sketch was two palms high. Ponzio, who was younger, agreed willingly. Since Ponzio was then modeling with great skill some nudes in wax, Salviati remained a while and said to them, ‘This faculty of relief, which you possess so skillfully and which I lack, was in truth so much in the power of Michelangelo that because of it he greatly surpassed other painters.’”[62]

Rome imbricates artists in a highly charged environment of labor and discussion. Armenini is the paragon of diligence, on double duty, as it were, as he draws from Polidoro’s façades and executes designs for Ponzio and Bartolommeo. While it is true that he indicates the foreign nationality of these two sculptors—amidue franzesi—more emphasis is placed on their proximate contact with one another and how they both pull Armenini himself into their orbit of work and domesticity. Salviati’s arrival heightens the vignette’s drama. Not unlike Alcibiades, who stumbles in to join the discussion in Plato’s Symposium, Salviati drops by one evening, raising the consideration and activity of art making to another pitch. The epicenter of attention is an object, soft to the touch (di cera morbida) and graspable with the hand (due palma di altezza). The figurine conjures artistic memory, not the recollection of images, but the evocation of words and received wisdom by an artist of no less stature than Michelangelo himself.

The rapport between geography, language, and style comes to a head in the closing pages of Book Three. Armenini recounts that while in the service of Prince Andrea Doria, Perino del Vaga sought to demonstrate his worldliness by speaking with his patron in the Genoese dialect: “When conversing familiarly with the prince, Perino liked to speak Genoese. Having heard this many times, the prince became annoyed one day and said, ‘Perino, from what country are you?’ Perino answered that he was Florentine. ‘Well, speak to me in Florentine,’ he replied, ‘if you wish to speak with me; it seems that you are mocking us when you try to speak Genoese the way we who were born here do.’ Perino blushed at this reproach, but, realizing his error, he never committed it again or needed to be reprimanded. It is praiseworthy and more than useful to be able to speak properly in one’s native language when conversing with gentlemen.”[63]

The scattering of personal pronouns (tu, meco, noi, ci, egli) points to the distinctions between Florentine and Genoese, foreigner and native, the self and other. The ability of both Prince Doria and Perino to speak and understand their respective native dialects demonstrates “code-switching” or the sociolinguistic situation of diglossia. At the same time, the prince deflates the foreign artist’s desire to perform an assumed identity. Armenini ultimately posits a disjuncture between one’s pictorial style (ideally acquired in Rome) and one’s linguistic self (optimally faithful to native origin). Artists can exhibit a heterogeneous skill set, one that draws on recognized regional specialties, be it language (Tuscan) or pictorial manner (Roman). Consequently, the image that concludes the Precepts does not draw on the dualistic conception of corruption/purification as encountered in Vasari’s Lives or on Dolce’s metaphors concerning camouflage/authenticity.[64]

Instead, the figure Armenini evokes is the journey of the artist’s style and self, a path open to pitfalls, twists and turns, and forking paths: “My intention has been to demonstrate the proper beginnings and then the necessary means and the true ways whereby one arrives at these excellent ends, thus making clear the path I have followed for many years. I have trodden this path like a person who has lost his way and, in doubt, hurries, seeks, asks, and calls so many times and with so many gestures. Yet in the end, having gained experience and having noted the strange places, he enjoys showing wayfarers the path which, once difficult and steep, is now broad and level.” Like a melodic refrain, tropes associated with pilgrimage resurface: the reassuring guide, the journey’s duration, the struggle to stay on the right path conveyed through a breathless sequence of present active verbs (“si affatica, corre, cerca, adimanda e chiama”). Though Armenini states that the purpose of the Precepts is to spare future travelers from undergoing similar hardships on a steep path, his own tribulations amount to a representation of himself as a heroic wayfarer.[65]

Are there any underlying points to be teased out of Armenini’s winding path? The Precepts offers a grab bag of advice: while travel to Rome is necessary, any ambitious artist must arrive with a degree of judgment lest the plethora of works overwhelm and confuse him. When an artist, having studied in Rome, travels abroad, he should be sensitive to local taste. Yet the artist should leave Rome only under particular circumstances, such as courtly patronage. Tuscans are “the most knowledgeable about the power and excellence” of painting, while northern Italy is the real place to understand the subtleties of color. Do these anecdotes, proverbs, and recommendations add up to any underlying principles?

More than offering rules with logical consistency, Armenini offers a model of behavior and direct observation in which mobility plays a defining role. Comprehending precepts must come through firsthand experience. It is Armenini’s own travels, his actual journeys throughout the topographical space of the Italian peninsula, that infuse his account with legitimate currency. As he declares in the opening paragraph of the conclusion: “I came to study in Rome at the age of fifteen. After a time I left, for the reasons I have mentioned, and went wandering alone throughout almost all of Italy for about nine years. . . . At the end of this period, it seemed to me that experience had shown me the need for a book such as mine.” And again, toward the very end he states: “Having considered how much good precepts could do in this case, my deliberations gave me cause to become a wanderer in the aforementioned places and to investigate these ways.” Ultimately, it is this eyewitness mode, the shift from representing the traveling artist to depicting oneself as a traveling artist, that marks the Precepts as a significant contribution to the theory and history of mobility. And this autobiographical vein of writing about travel would eventually extricate itself from the art literary frames of biography, anecdote, treatise, and parable to emerge in the latter part of the sixteenth century as an autonomous genre in its own right.[66]

8 Mobility, the Senses, and the Elision of Style

If Armenini’s Precepts is notable for circumscribing the discourse of mobility within an autobiographical framework, it certainly was not without precedent. As an event instrumental in providing commissions and extending knowledge of the world beyond the confines of one’s patria, travel was a recurring theme in artists’ first-person narratives. We might hazard that the first-person narration of mobility would generate straightforward reportage, of distances covered shorn of the rich figurative language that so characterizes the descriptions of other traveling artists by writers removed from their subjects by one or more degrees. But as James Amelang has observed, travel “is so important a subject in artisan autobiography that one can properly refer to it as literature of displacement.”[1] In a number of autobiographical sources, traveling artists elaborate on the physical and psychological effects of mobility; they conceive the self at tension between artistic labor and leisure, between the fulfillment of responsibilities and the enjoyment of autonomy. An account that especially favors the latter categories and merges travel narrative with memoir is Federico Zuccaro’s Il passaggio per Italia (1608), the subject of the present chapter. In his other writings, notably in L’idea de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti (1607), Zuccaro had elaborated a highly esoteric vision of the artistic process rooted in Jesuit theological concerns and the writings of Thomas Aquinas. Yet in its focus on the mundane though pleasurable world of travel, gastronomy, and entertainment, Il passaggio emerges as a counterpart or antipode of sorts to L’idea. By stressing sensuous experiences aside from the production of art, Zuccaro’s travel account raises complex questions regarding the art historical enterprise, what methodological instruments we employ, and to what sources they are applied. How does one make sense of an artist’s activity outside the workshop or studio? How does the describer experience the flow of time in a foreign landscape? Finally, what constitutes an art historical account, its boundaries, contours, and limits? Or, put another way, how much can quotidian concerns intrude on a source before it slips from the art historian’s grasp and enters more properly into other disciplines or falls into oblivion?

Zuccaro’s mobility and the problems it raises find parallels in earlier sources, and it is worth considereing these briefly before pursuing his intricate representation of the traveling self in the world. For instance, already in Ghiberti’s I commentarii (c. 1447–55) the portrayal of physical displacement exploits a wellspring of tropes and literary conventions. One of these is the triumph of repatriation, as when Ghiberti returns to Florence from Pesaro to compete for and eventually secure the commission for the Florentine Baptistery’s bronze doors. “To me was conceded the palm of victory by all the experts and all who competed with me,” he unabashedly exclaims, “to me was universally conceded the glory without any exception.” Such autobiographical accounts lean toward the positive aspect of mobility—the self-aggrandizement that comes with having one’s style acclaimed at princely courts and undertaken by pupils—disregarding the darker aspects of physical displacement, such as illness, amnesia, and mockery, which also figure prominently in biographical narratives.[2]

Fanfaronade while on the road is certainly present in a later autobiographic work of note, Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita, written between 1558 and 1567, a picaresque work avant la lettre. Translated by Goethe and made into an opera by Berlioz, Cellini’s life story more than embodies the traveling virtuoso who moved between various European courts during the latter part of the sixteenth century. The Florentine artist’s journeys take him not only on the central Italian circuit, particularly in Rome, where he enjoyed a number of papal commissions, but also to Naples, Ferrara, Mantua, Padua, Venice, and eventually to the French court as well. Francesco Podesti’s historical composition of Francis I and entourage in the studio to inspect the artist’s Jupiter is but one of many nineteenth-century works that sought to visualize Cellini’s vagabond life and the skills he carried in his hands to distant locales (fig. 8.1). A series of stone arches evoke the sculptor’s Parisian rive gauche studio located in the castle of Petit Nesle, with a distant view of Notre Dame enhancing the scene’s setting in France. While the painting draws on the trope of the ruler visiting the artist immured and at work for the moment in his atelier, Cellini’s Vita portrays the artist as a figure difficult to restrain: this rogue artist impetuously flees Florence due to his aversion to playing the flute at his father’s insistence, and reaches Rome where he studies the city’s antiquities and achieves a degree of monetary success by carrying out a commission for a silver casket. Throughout the rest of the work, Cellini’s travels are more suited to those of a knight errant than a journeyman in desperate need of employment. The number of violent scrapes and adventures he endures is prodigious: he defends himself against men on horseback while at Selciata; he escapes the machinations of a Corsican assassin and outwits belligerent Florentine exiles in Ferrara; he survives a perilous journey on the Swiss waterways, narrowly escaping drowning; he wins the upper hand in a brawl with a postmaster in Siena. While Cellini certainly admired the sights he witnesses on these journeys, such as the Camposanto in Pisa and the city of Zurich, whose cleanliness he likens to a jewel, he rarely acknowledges any impact these voyages may have had on his working process. The same applies for Cellini’s many and often unfulfilled vows to undertake pilgrimages either to Loreto or to the Holy Sepulcher itself.[3]

FIGURE 8.1 Francesco Podesti, Francis I in the Studio of Benvenuto Cellini, 1839. Oil on panel (98 × 136 cm). Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome.

The traveling artist recounting his own voyages can even display contempt for the local artistic idioms he encounters at his destination, as is the case in Vasari’s own autobiography, which appears in the 1568 edition of the Lives. Of course, he repeatedly mentions his diligence in studying key artistic monuments. “There remained not a single notable work then in Rome, or afterwards in Florence, and in other places where I dwelt,” Vasari boasts, “which I in my youth did not draw, and not only paintings, but also ancient and modern sculptures and architectural works.” But otherwise, when style enters his discourse on mobility, it is limited to the roles of diffusion, correction, or observation, eschewing any semblance of dynamic interaction. A case in point is his intervention in Naples in the vaulting for the refectory of the monks of Monte Oliveto. He resolves to transform this “old and awkward” architectural space into an exhibition of the maniera moderna. Vasari considers his paintings of Old and New Testament scenes and allegorical figures in this stuccowork of ovals, squares, and octagons as a stimulant for improved stylistic norms, otherwise not present in the southern Italian city. “It is a curious thing,” he muses, “that after Giotto, there had not been in such a noble and grand city masters who in painting did anything of importance, though there were some things by the hand of Perugino and Raphael taken there; thus, I endeavored as far as my little knowledge could reach, so as to awaken the minds of that country to carry out grand and honorable works.”[4]

Vasari does remark that he takes advantage of Pietro Aretino’s invitation to come to Venice to observe the works of his near contemporaries. “I went willingly,” he writes, “to see on that journey the works of Titian and other painters; which I in fact did, for in a few days I saw in Modena and Parma the works of Correggio, those of Giulio Romano in Mantua, and the antiquities of Verona.” This examination of works in situ would inform the portions of Vasari’s Lives on these northern Italian artists, albeit biased and supplemented by his extensive network of informants in the second edition. Yet Vasari’s work in Venice, as seen in the painted ceiling for the residence of Giovanni Cornaro and a panel depicting the Holy Family with St. Francis for Francesco Leoni (fig. 8.2), is adamantly central Italian in its emphasis on seated monumental figures, well-delineated contour lines, stark contrasts in coloring, and absence of rough brushwork. And as in Cellini’s autobiography, Vasari depicts his mobility as an activity that goes well beyond the usual dyad of work/study that accounts for much of early modern artists’ travels. At one point in his Life, Vasari states that recreation alone was chief cause for a voyage. Exhausted by the numerous enterprises undertaken for the ducal court in Florence, Vasari is granted a leave by Cosimo I, “so that I might depart for several months. Such that having set myself on a voyage, I sought little less than all of Italy, seeing infinite friends and my masters, and works of diverse excellent artists.”[5]

FIGURE 8.2 Giorgio Vasari, Holy Family with St. Francis in a Landscape, 1542. Oil on canvas (184.15 × 125.1 cm). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.

EARLY TRAVAILS

It is this conception of mobility as diversion and recreation that comes to the fore in the first treatise from the sixteenth century that has an artist’s own travel as its chief subject, Federico Zuccaro’s Il passaggio per Italia. Like a roman par lettres, the book is composed of a series of epistles to such cultural figures as the erudite theologian Pierleone Casella, friend of Cesare Ripa and member of the Roman Accademia degli Incitati, as well as to the artists Giambologna and Federico Barocci. These letters from Federico provide their illustrious recipients, as the title announces, a “copious narration of the various things experienced, seen and done in his leisure in Venice, Mantua, Milan, Pavia, Turin, and other parts in the Piedmont.” Or as Federico himself declares in the opening epistle: “I will compose not a letter, but an account of the many things seen and visited ... various places of devotion as well as those of entertainment [spasso] and pleasure [piacere].” Among the northern Italian sights he promises to describe are “palaces, gardens, and fountains that do not envy those in Rome and Florence” in addition to other delights such as “sleigh rides on frozen snow, dances, parties, and royal dinners.” These various activities and sights which Federico professes to have experienced are not devoid of artistic and, more specifically, stylistic interest. Yet here and indeed throughout Il passaggio, Federico stages himself more as a traveler enjoying the spectacles he witnesses at his destinations—and in fact the term godere frequently appears—and less as an itinerant artist needing to exert his style according to royal or princely demand. The artist’s time abroad becomes less of an interaction with style, stimulating instead auditory and gustatory taste, less strictly artistic and more aesthetic.[6]

To be sure, the equation of mobility with leisure was not the sole vein in which Federico expressed his views concerning artists’ travels. Perhaps the most vivid exposition on mobility to survive from the latter part of the sixteenth century, Federico’s Early Life of Taddeo Zuccaro represents the travel of his older brother as inculcating both diligence and long-suffering in the face of adverse circumstances. This cycle of twenty biographical drawings was most likely intended as models for an unexecuted decorative cycle in Federico’s home. Now the Biblioteca Hertziana, Federico’s former residence was originally planned as an auberge to host young artists without means who arrived in Rome to follow a program of study. Portraying exemplars for its audience, the Early Life illustrates the travails and eventually triumph which issue from Taddeo’s decision to depart from his homeland, the Marchigian town of Sant’Angelo in Vado, and pursue an artistic career in Rome. Several of the drawings offer compelling visual counterparts to Armenini’s recommendations to study a prescribed set of works of art—the façades of Polidoro da Caravaggio, antique sculptures, Raphael’s frescoes in the Villa Farnesina, and Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Yet the Early Life also explores the emotional and psychological turmoil that was mobility’s handmaiden, a coupling to which Vasari, Dolce, and Armenini all make allusion and occasionally bewail and even condemn in their writings. The series’ fifth drawing—Taddeo Rebuffed by his Kinsman Francesco Il Sant’Angelo (fig. 8.3)—bears an inscription that conveys the hardship that was so often considered to accompany displacement from one’s homeland: “He who goes far from his Patria / hopes in God alone, not in any relative, / because there the lowly one aches and fears.” The drawing itself portrays Taddeo presenting a letter of introduction to his cousin, the painter Francesco Il Sant’Angelo, who summarily refuses to accept him. The scene could even be taken as a warning never to venture to Rome if interpreted without awareness of Taddeo’s eventual success as he unveils his frescoes gracing the façade of the Palazzo Mattei.[7]

The drawing’s reversed continuous narrative, which calls for the work to be read from right to left, posits the drawing as a conclusion rather than as an intermediate part of a sequence. Of course, the figure in the background studying façade frescoes may be a visual commentary on Vasari’s remarks in his Life of the resilient Taddeo, thus promising the continuation of the series: “But for all that, not losing heart and not being dismayed, the poor boy contrived to maintain himself ... at times also drawing something, as best he could.” Yet the drawing’s perspectival scheme, one which places the vanishing point beyond the open portal at the very center of the work, emphasized all the more by the strong fall of shadows, also advances the possibility of Taddeo’s departure from Rome, an escape from this scene of cold rejection and rebuttal. Federico reiterates the theme of hardship endured due to residence in a foreign locale in a number of other drawings in the series, such as those that show his brother employed as a menial laborer at the house of the painter Giovanni Piero Calabrese. An artist with Greek roots (whose real last name was Condopulos) from southern Italy, Calabrese himself is a foreign artist, though he bears no sympathy toward Taddeo’s plight. This is perhaps an indication of the fierce competition between artists in sixteenth-century Rome, or, more concretely, the exploitation of young artists in the bottega system to which Armenini makes frequent allusion.[8]

FIGURE 8.3 Federico Zuccaro, Taddeo Rebuffed by His Kinsman Francesco Il Sant’Angelo, c. 1595. Pen and brown ink, brush with brown wash, over black chalk (17.9 × 41.4 cm). J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Accompanying these depictions of suffering are other travel topoi, among them the conflation of physical and allegorical mobility. One drawing, for example, depicts Taddeo greeted at a gate leading to the city of Rome by the figures of Toil, Servitude, and Hardship, along with the Ass and Ox that allude to the qualities of obedience and patience (fig. 8.4). What is more, the placement of Taddeo in the foreground and relatively low on the picture plane recalls the convention of the artist’s pilgrimage through style leading ever upward. The journey on the “road of virtue” is “rocky and full of thorns,” as Vasari states in the Life of Gozzoli, and those accomplished painters who, according to Armenini, “have overcome all obstacles and suffering and, with obstinacy and patience, have traveled over so steep and long a road to arrive at the supreme degree of perfection.” The image of the mountainous landscape of toil and diligence finds concrete expression in the decoration in the Palazzo Zuccari itself (fig. 8.5). The central panel in the frescoes’ vaulted gallery on the ground floor shows, behind a reclining hero figure, at times identified as Hercules, a towering cliff and the arduous ascent toward the Temple of Virtue. Two travelers, possibly Dante and Virgil holding the laurel branch, trudge upward, while to the left, unfortunate voyagers who have misstepped plunge into the abyss. Reinforcing Federico’s personal associations with this theme are the panel’s prominent position in the home and the sugar loaves and zucchini flowers in the yellow frame, plays on the word zucchero (sugar) and fiori di zucca that served along with comets as part of his family crest. Even the Palazzo Zuccari’s topographical position may have transformed the subject of allegorical mobility into an actual physical experience for its visitors. Located above the Spanish steps, the palace requires guests to ascend the Pincian Hill to reach its premises.[9]

FIGURE 8.4 Federico Zuccaro, Taddeo at the Entrance to Rome Greeted by Servitude, Hardship, and Toil and by Fortitude and Patience (the Ox and Ass), c. 1595. Pen and brown ink, brush with brown wash, over black chalk (41 × 17.5 cm). J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

FIGURE 8.5 Federico Zuccaro, known as The Deeds of Hercules, 1590/1600. Fresco (650 × 230 cm). Palazzo Zuccari, Rome.

TRAVEL AS RECREATION

Given that the Early Life of Taddeo forges mobility with hardship and diligence, it is all the more surprising that Federico in Il passaggio associates travel with leisure. The terms ricreatione/ricreazione (recreation) and ozio / otio (leisure), diporto (ambling, pastime), godere / godimento (enjoyment), along with activities such as touring and dancing, recur like a refrain in Federico’s account. “È un diporto per certo, / (Zuccaro) il tuo viaggio” (“It is certainly a pastime / (Zuccaro) your voyage”) declares the first of several poems attributed to Giovan Luigi Collini, the Venetian literary figure, which preface Il passaggio. Federico himself opens the first letter to Casella with an image of cozy repose and a tone of intimacy characteristic of the epistolary genre: “Having a bit of leisure time in these days during Carnival, while I am close to the fire ... instead of seeing masques, going to parties or plays as the joyful youth do, it pleases me to spend a bit of time with you.” Further on, he declares outright, “In this, my voyage, I have seen and experienced various and diverse ricreazioni.” Federico narrates that at one of his destinations—Pavia—he stays for no less than nine months, stating, “I took a number of ricreationi in diverse places, within and beyond the town,” such as to the nearby Certosa and Milan. On the Lago Maggiore, the body of water between Lombardy and Piedmont, he spends fifteen days of pleasure, “enjoying various fishing trips and pastimes of that place.” Cardinal Federico Borromeo, his host there, takes him to an island “full of cedars, orange, and lemon trees with gardens of a singular beauty” which also possesses “un Palazzo di molta ricreatione.” Turning his attention to his time in Piedmont, he informs his addressee that the people in that region “are especially and much given to parties, dances, and music,” a trait giving rise to the proverb: al popol di Turino / pane, e vino, e tamburino (“for the people of Turin / bread, wine and tambourine”). Just as the Romans constructed theaters and stadiums for their people, Federico observes, in Turin “there is not a Villa, nor a Castle, or a City that does not have a public place for festivals and dances ... and throughout the year the people enjoy themselves, dancing and dancing [ballando e danzando].” Nor in his letters to his fellow artists does he shy away from recounting the pleasures experienced while on tour. He assures Giambologna that his letter will apprise the sculptor of the “many diverse things of enjoyment and pleasure which were seen, experienced and done in this tour and time that I have been away from Rome,” in particular the diporto of the hours spent in the gardens of Turin. To Barocci, Federico justifies such leisure, stating that “it is fitting at times to allow some ricreazione and not to leave oneself too occupied continually by our studies.” This concession toward recreation stands in contrast with the sweat and diligence Taddeo and Federico himself demonstrated during training in their youth.[10]

Federico’s preoccupation with recounting the numerous ricreazioni he enjoys during his tour of northern Italy does not lead to an absolute neglect of works of art. He describes, for instance, the tableaus in the various chapels that constitute the Sacro Monte in Varallo, a site founded by the Franciscan Observants in the late fifteenth century which re-created the atmosphere of pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulcher. Federico, in fact, counts his visits to the dozens of these chapels as “spiritual recreation,” devotional exercises comparable to the acts of meditation he practiced while in Rome as a participant in the Congregazione dei Nobili which met at the Professed House of the Gesù. In each of the Sacro Monte’s chapels is portrayed “a mystery of the Life, Passion and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, in imitation of the Holy Land.” The realistic effects conveyed through the mixture of polychrome sculpture, painting, and fabrics induce a response of “singular devotion through seeing in those [chapels] represented al vivo all the figures and mysteries in relief and in colored terracotta that appear real and living.” He pauses momentarily to praise the frescoes of Gaudenzio Ferrari and states that the polychrome sculpture of the Murder of the Innocents “cause[s] all women universally to cry.” Federico also turns his attention to works of art that portray mythological subject matter. Later in Il passaggio in describing his journey to Mantua, Federico admires the paintings of Giulio Romano in the Palazzo del Te. In a synesthetic vein, he comments on how the musical concerts held in the Sala di Psiche and the Sala dei Giganti convey “harmony and suaveness.”[11]

It is this multisensory mode, a grasp of a variety of media, that is one of Il passaggio’s most distinctive traits. Federico dedicates, in fact, the bulk of his prose to sensory phenomena usually kept at arm’s length from the artistic trinity of painting, sculpture, and architecture. He describes at length, for instance, the “inventions of hairdressing” at the Savoyard court. Punctuating this ekphrasis is an etching that depicts Turinese aristocratic coiffure with heads in profile and frontal view surrounded by starched cartwheel ruffs (fig. 8.6): “First, [there is] a large palmo of a clump of hair, that most of [the ladies] wear smooth and laid flat. Then above this, there is another veil fringe from which emerges another palmo [of hair], and in the middle of this veil upon the summit there is placed a jewel in the guise of a rosette with pearls, rubies, and diamonds, held with a ribbon that binds the said veil above the tuft of hair, and this veil is strewn with I do not know what of black flies, crickets, butterflies, or insects of glass ... and in respect to those veils, there are some who wear them white, as white cotton, others yellow, blue, peacock blue, or some other color that pleases their taste.”[12]

FIGURE 8.6 Federico Zuccaro, Coiffure at the Savoy Court. Etching (90 × 88 mm). From Federico Zuccaro, Il passaggio per Italia, con la dimora di Parma del Sig. Cavaliere Federico Zuccaro, 1608.

FIGURE 8.7 Andrea del Verrocchio, Head of a Woman, c. 1475. Black chalk heightened with white chalk (325 × 272 mm). British Museum, London.

Federico’s attention to hair is not unusual in and of itself in the context of early modern art theory. Leonardo, for instance, dedicates a number of passages in his treatise on painting to the proper depiction of hair: flowing in the wind to express the glory of victors in a battle scene, manipulated to be “rich and flat, long and short” to introduce varietà in a composition, “torn and scattered” to convey desperation. Artists’ drawings from the early modern period place a great emphasis on studying and arranging strands, knots, and curls of hair, as seen in Andrea del Verrocchio’s Head of a Woman (c. 1475) to give but one eminent precedent (fig. 8.7). Federico’s interest in coiffure, however, seems intrinsic rather instrumental, a sight to be seen for itself instead of a stylistic component to be mastered for a convincing figural representation. The accompanying print is more illustrative ethnography than primo pensiero of a design for eventual inclusion in a composition. Nowhere in Il passaggio does Federico acknowledge that this spectacle of coiffure may have informed his depictions of the Savoyard princesses for the chief project executed while abroad, the painting decoration for the Galleria Grande of Carlo Emanuele I.[13]

FIGURE 8.8 Francesco di Giorgio Martini, “Ionic column,” Codex Saluzziano 148, f. 14v. Biblioteca Reale, Turin.

This does not mean that hair occupies a rank of secondary visual allure for Federico. Baldinucci in his dictionary on the visual arts may have strictly associated invenzione with the capacity of artists to represent their compositions with “clarity and appropriateness.” Even so, Federico borrows this term so often employed in the fields of rhetoric, art, and music to characterize the ornate ensemble of hairstyles. His intricate prose, the layering and interweaving of one relative clause into another, mimics the complex constructions themselves. Federico’s language even verges on conceiving Turinese coiffures as architectural pieces in their own right. His use of terms such as sommità (summit) and palmo—the standard unit of measurement based on the palm of a hand—point toward a notion of hairdressing as an architectonic structure. The sequence of temporal adjectives that assist the reader to envision the makeup of the hairpieces (primo, poi, talhora) recalls the language of Vignola, among other theorists, as he describes the processes step by step by which the eye and hand scan and construct volutes. Furthermore, the likening of architectural ornament to coiffure was an analogy of old. Vitruvius likens the ornament of the Ionic column to “graceful curling hair” (4.1.7), a comparison made manifest in a drawing found in one of Francesco di Giorgio’s many architectural manuscripts, the Codex Saluzziano 148, which makes an explicit connection between volutes and hair (fig. 8.8). The capitals as seen in Vignola’s exposition of the Ionic order might even be understood as bearing a resemblance to curls of hair (fig. 8.9). It is in this vein that at the far end of the early modern spectrum, Francesco Eugenio Guasco in his Delle ornatrici, e de’ loro uffizii (1775), a catalogue of classical Roman hairstyles, announces that his work will provide the reader with “the innumerable ways of building [architettare] the head ... the bizarre method of capillary architecture [architettura capillare]” as practiced by the ancients.[14]

BEYOND SIGHT AND GASTRONOMIC PLEASURES

The associations between coiffure and architecture stubbornly remain at the level of suggestion, never reaching definitive declaration. Federico’s metaphorical thinking betrays his background in the visual arts, yet at the same time hair maintains its status as observed phenomenon rather than as an aspect for future inclusion in his artistic repertoire. This implicit disavowal of mobility’s impact on style constitutes a novel and extreme form of artistic subjectivity, a move away from an exclusive focus on the artist’s eyes and hands in favor of emphasizing the existence of his other senses and bodily operations. Granted, in the wake of humanist commentary on Aristotle’s On Sense and Sensible Objects, Federico’s art literary predecessors had located the core of the artist’s intellect, and for that matter his very selfhood, within the power of sight. Leonardo argues for the supremacy of vision over hearing to bolster his assertion for painting’s command over poetry. Vasari in the technical treatise on architecture famously states that the correct arrangement of the orders relies foremost on the eye, “which, if it has judgment, can hold the true compass and measurements, since by it alone works are praised and criticized.” Armenini declares that the “eye is the most perfect among the exterior senses,” and repeats the statement that the artist’s compass exists in his eye rather than in his hand, a dictum which he attributes to Michelangelo, thus giving his opinion a measure of authority. But what of the other senses identified by Aristotle in On the Soul, the sensorial faculties of hearing, touch, smell, and taste?[15]

FIGURE 8.9 Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, “Ionic Order.” From Regole delli cinque ordini, 1572.

In the Lives, Vasari praises the musical talents of Leonardo, Giorgione, Fra Bartolommeo, Pordenone, and Sebastiano del Piombo, among others. But in respect to other senses, such as that of taste, the Lives often assumes a less than favorable posture toward the consumption of food. Vasari takes the painter Mariotto Albertinelli as an example of an artist with “a most restless character and carnal in matters of love and of the good time [to be had] in the affairs of living.” Wounded by the attacks lodged upon him by his fellow artists, Albertinelli abandons painting to open an osteria and tavern. Having racked his brains imitating flesh and blood, he now made both, and along with enjoying these, partook of wine and heard only praise. Albertinelli, however, soon grows ashamed of the baseness of this calling and returns to pursue the course of painting. Not all artists are saved from their appetites. Vasari describes a collaborator of Guillaume de Marcillat, a certain Claudio Franzese, as “much disordered in eating and drinking, as is the custom of that people.” Due to these insalubrious habits, the Frenchman becomes afflicted with a fever and dies within a span of six days. In contrast to such gluttonous figures, Vasari’s paragons of living, such as Brunelleschi, are frequently abstemious, “not caring for sleep or drink,” devoting themselves wholeheartedly to their art.[16]

Federico, however, exhibits no qualms about taking food and drink as a major theme in Il passaggio. Directly addressing Casella as the recipient of his letter, he describes the elaborate culinary display he witnesses, and presumably also samples, at the festivities held at the Savoy court. As a sort of virtual aperitif, Federico offers his recipient “to nibble upon something sweet” and partake some wine, white or red, malvasia, or moscatello, or perhaps something local, the “appetizing, odiferous, and gracious wines that here in Piedmont are most excellent.” He then invites Casella to enter the site of the feast itself: “See how these tables are full and covered with confections, take some as you wish; and with things such as pastries, pies, a thousand types of tarts, gilt and silvered, and a sumptuously decorated table at the head, middle, and sides, it is truly worthy of a royal celebration. See these whole veals, goats, large roasted venison, and how large they are, in the antique manner of the Greeks and Romans, look at the sumptuous and curled horns, gilt on this deer, the silvered ones of this goat, and of that calf, and all stuffed with cloves and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon; see these beautiful oranges and citrons that these great beasts have in their mouths, does it not whet your appetite to see them?”[17]

Far from being a famished wayfarer in the Land of Cockaigne, Federico manifests an interest in food on par with that seen in firsthand accounts by Bronzino, Pontormo, Andrea del Sarto, and Cellini, some of whom even remark on their eating habits or culinary specialties sampled in the course of their travels. Yet Federico does not demonstrate a stake in the construction and design of these foodstuffs. This indifference to the labor of assembling these displays stands in contrast to the widespread practice of commissioning court artists to assemble displays of food at festivals and celebrations. In his treatise on gastronomic celebrations, Banchetti (1549), the master of ceremonies at the Ferrarese court, Cristoforo da Messisbugo, notes that at a dinner Alfonso I hosted in honor of his sister, Isabella d’Este, the dessert spread featured twenty-five sculptures made out of sugar, “gilded and painted, with complexions that seemed alive.” While these statues, some two feet high, remained standing on the banqueting table, other sugar sculptures could fall apart in the hand of the spectator. At one reception during his visit to Venice in 1574, King Henry III of France sat down at table, only to realize that the “table linens, plates, knives, forks and bread” were all made of sugar, to the delight of the monarch and his entourage. Also eliciting a wealth of description were the sugar sculptures designed and crafted by Giambologna and Pietro Tacca for the nuptials of Marie de’ Medici and Henri IV of France on 5 October 1600. During the celebratory feast, sugar sculptures representing mythological subject matter and measuring some four feet high filled the Salone del Cinquento in the Palazzo Vecchio. Tacca himself was well aware of the manual labor such delicate ephemeral works of art required. On being asked to execute once again sugar sculptures for the festivities held to celebrate the marriage between Cosimo II de’ Medici and Maria Maddalena of Austria in October 1608, Tacca hesitated. In a letter dated months before, on 28 July, the sculptor wrote the Grand Duchess Christina that realizing these works was no easy task. Selecting and supervising the appropriate workers to fashion these objects was not enough. Tacca pointed out that “to achieve clean and beautiful results it was also necessary to work with his own hands with not a little diligence.”[18]

By contrast, exhibiting his social standing and awareness of luxury, Federico’s appreciation of the buffet is that of an invited spectator and participant. His observations are centered on the pleasure offered not only to the sense of sight, as the repetition of the imperative veda makes clear, but to the sense of taste as well. The number of wines listed exhibits his awareness of the regional varieties available in Piedmont in addition to their diverse flavors and aromas. He is rapt at the savory, sweet, and spicy, in the game flavored with cloves, cinnamon, and sugar, combinations suited to Galenic regulation of the humors and particular to aristocratic tables. Even so, Federico’s ekphrasis also calls attention to the blurry distinctions between sight and taste that inform his act of perception and being. While he celebrates the abundant number of baked goods, his exclamation also seems to issue from the fact that their multitude defines the shape of the table itself (“in capo, in mezo, et dai lati”). And as the question that ends the passage makes clear, the act of seeing is understood to stimulate the very act of eating.[19]

THE MICROCOSM OF STYLE

But what of Federico’s response to his foreign destinations and its possible imprint on his style, the query that has guided the present investigation up to this point? Given that the discourse of mobility in the writings of Vasari, Dolce, Armenini, and others consistently speculated on the question of style, are we not justified in expecting Federico in turn to enter the fray? Yet for all of his interest in visual phenomena such as hairpieces or triumphant displays of foodstuffs, Federico remains intriguingly taciturn concerning the relevance of being abroad on his mode of painting. If we reconsider the tone of the sixteenthcentury discourse surrounding mobility, some patterns underlying Federico’s reticence emerges.

Recall, for instance, the generally negative attitude toward mobility and stylistic change Vasari exhibits in the Lives. The advent of both the maniera greca and maniera tedesca is likened to foreign invasion, infection, and catastrophic deluge. Giotto disseminates rather than adapts his style in the locations where he is employed. Donatello flees Padua due to fear of amnesia, and even one of his contemporaries remarked that the sculptor desired to return to Tuscany for fear of dying among “Paduan frogs.” True, Vasari hardly censures travel to Rome and Florence, but in the case of the greatest artists, such as Michelangelo, the journey to Rome has little bearing on his style, as his genius is determined by celestial influence. Furthermore, varietà—the term that most favorably accounts for the link between mobility and stylistic change—reaches its most articulate formulation more in regard to allegorical movement, as in the case of Raphael’s modo mezzano, and less in respect to actual journeys to geographically specific locations, though the two types of mobility are intertwined. This same ambivalence toward mobility and subsequent metamorphosis of style, an ambivalence that often tilts toward disapproval of physical displacement, has also been diagnosed in Dolce’s Dialogo, particularly regarding the ridiculously “befeathered” manner of Sebastiano del Piombo. And however much Armenini stresses the requisite journey to Rome, he does not guarantee that the plethora of works both ancient and modern to be studied will not overwhelm, confuse, or entrap the young artist. It goes without saying how often these writers delve into the distressing consequences of and reasons for mobility. Recall Vasari’s Life of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, which depicts the Sienese artist having to relinquish his homeland to receive due recognition, or Armenini’s own biography, where he reports having to depart from Rome due to adverse political circumstances.[20]

These writers who bewail the misfortune of traveling are a far cry from Federico, who journeys, according to the author of the dedication to Il passaggio, “with so much applause of the world.” This firsthand travel account would have been moving into uncertain lexical territory if Federico had in fact chosen to broach the issue of style, the manual action of his hand and brush, in relation to his own celebrated voyages. Nor would the web of keywords surrounding the concept of imitatio apply to the particular stage of his career. As the Early Life of Taddeo demonstrates, imitatio’s semantic cousins, terms such as studio, studiare, imparare, and osservazione, occur in relation to the case of the elder brother’s early education and apprenticeship. Il passaggio, however, represents the traveling artist writing at an advanced age, published one year before Federico’s death in 1609. That Federico is taciturn regarding style does not mean that he passes over the works he executes in the course of his northern Italian journey in silence. He offers an extensive description of his activity in Turin, where in 1605–7 he frescoed the gallery linking the palace of Carlo Emanuele I and the Palazzo Madama. As in the passages portraying the foodstuffs to be had at the banquets held at the Savoy court, Federico directly addresses the reader of this description, almost as though to render all the more vividly the abundance of his decorative work:

Now what remains is to tell you the subject [soggetto] of this most noble Gallery, and how much it pleases His Highness that it is done. Know, therefore, that in the vault which is constructed in a barrel form, are 48 celestial images with their stars arranged in order; below these are astronomical histories in a compartment in which I executed many things gathered together: figures, imprese, grotesques, histories that render rich and graceful this compartment along with some backgrounds with fictive perspectives, where the 48 celestial images are placed; on the sides below the cornice ... that line the entire Gallery are placed in the 32 spaces between the 32 windows 32 Princes on horseback from that most serene household of Savoy, and each of these spans between window to window measures 37 palmi and half of a Roman canna, and the breadth of the Gallery, is 34 palmi.[21]

Federico’s description of the gallery’s decorations with their myriad genres, the organization of the prose into lists, the focus on the measurements and the expanse covered shifts the emphasis of this passage from initially informing the reader about a discrete soggetto to demonstrating instead a pictorial cornucopia. This visual profusion continues in the subsequent pages: Federico specifies that the princes depicted on horseback are accompanied by landscapes and the imprese of the cities and castles that constitute their domains, together with identifying inscriptions. On the opposite ends of the gallery, he paints two more princes on horseback “with their portraits, costumes and their armors, according to the times and customs.” Along the cornice, he also executes representations of pontiffs and emperors with “trophies, candelabra, and other things on the sides of the said Pontiffs and Emperors, and everything [being] copious and full of majesty which is befitting.” Meanwhile, the rest of the gallery comprises a veritable microcosm. Mathematical diagrams cover the mosaic pavement, the windows depict a cosmography of the world, and in the lower zones near these windows are portrayed “all sorts of four-footed animals, and birds here and there spread over the niches and festoons, in addition to sea creatures depicted in the mosaic in the pavement.” Federico concludes, “In truth I do not know with what other [things] one could equal the noble ideas and the variety of the subjects to nourish the eye and the mind.” Elsewhere, in his Idea, Federico described the gallery in similar terms, as “a compendium of all the things in the world.” As Julian Kliemann has shown, Pompeo Brambilla in the Relatione delle feste ..., his account of the nuptials between Margherita of Savoy and Francesco Gonzaga, called the gallery a “little world” replete with “histories, stories, books, sculptures, and paintings.” Yet another report from the wedding celebrations also mentions the abundance of paintings, the polychrome incrustations, and books “collected from all parts of the world, Greek, Latin, vernacular, French, Spanish, and other idioms.”[22]

But what of style, not what is depicted, but how Federico draws upon his knowledge of visual idioms practiced throughout the Italian peninsula such that, as James Mundy has put it, his style can be compared to “a visual form of Esperanto ... equally at home in Rome, Venice, or Madrid”? Testaments of his response and adherence to Venetian style can be seen in his work for the Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Palazzo Ducale, his Barbarossa Making Obeisance to the Pope recalling the coloring, dense figural composition, and architectural representation of Paris Bordone’s contributions to the hall (see fig. 6.17; fig. 8.10). In a number of so-called Reisezeichnungen, or travel drawings, he executed works after Giorgione, Raphael, Barocci, Correggio, and others during his journeys across Italy and Europe throughout his career. His drawing after Giulio Romano’s Fall of the Giants in Mantua makes use of the black chalk’s softness to dissolve boundaries between collapsing architecture and bodies, creating a blurry heap of figures. An intimacy between artist and object of study characterizes the drawing of Michelangelo’s New Sacristy of San Lorenzo: here members of the Accademia del Disegno discuss, draw after, and even climb on and touch the divine artist’s monumental sculptures (fig. 8.11). But in Il passaggio itself, Federico is taciturn about wielding his drawing implements on the road. To be sure, Federico briefly informs Casella about the working conditions in Turin to convey a fleeting impression of diligence: the painter has been able to work on the gallery for the three months leading to the Christmas celebrations with help brought from Rome, drawing designs and cartoons next to the fire due to the cold, snow, and ice that besiege the Piedmont region. In the letter to Federico Barocci, he even complains about the quality of the local assistance available: “I go continuing this work with the help that one can have in these parts, who often increase the toil rather than lighten the burden.”[23]

If looking for Federico’s manner of execution, extant visual evidence in the form of preparatory drawings does offer a sense of the gallery’s appearance before the frescoes were destroyed in a fire that consumed the palace in 1659. A drawing of the vault which shows heavily foreshortened figures of astronomers peering over an illusionistic cornice testifies to a rapport with the fictive dome par excellence, that of Mantegna’s Camera degli Sposi in Mantua, one of the Federico’s destinations on his northern Italian journey (fig. 8.12). Furthermore, sketches for the ducal equestrian portraits have also been likened to painted versions of the equestrian statues designed by Verrocchio and Donatello, or analogues with other representations of monarchs on horseback that existed in a variety of media—wooden sculpture, paintings, drawings, and prints—with which Federico may have well been familiar (fig. 8.13). Closer to Federico’s own time, Giambologna’s workshop provided a bronze statuette that most likely served as a model for an equestrian statue Carlo Emanuele I had planned to erect of himself near the main gate of the Piazza Castello.[24]

FIGURE 8.10 Federico Zuccaro, Barbarossa Making Obeisance to the Pope, 1582. Fresco, Sala del Maggior Consiglio, Palazzo Ducale, Venice. Department of Graphic Arts, Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre).

FIGURE 8.11 Federico Zuccaro, Artists Drawing after Michelangelo in the Medici Chapel. Black chalk and sanguine (20 cm × 26.3 cm). © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre).

Yet the question persists—why does Federico remain stubbornly reticent about maniera, so frequent a theme in the tradition of art literature, which he employs during his sojourns abroad? One possible response might play to the expectations of audience. As previously mentioned, Pierleone Casella, the addressee of the longest epistle in Il passaggio, was a friend of Cesare Ripa and a savant familiar with erudite subject matter. Correspondingly, Federico’s emphasis on the soggetti in the gallery would have befitted the interests of this recipient. However, by the same logic, we would expect Federico’s letters to Federico Barocci and Giambologna to display a marked concern for style. Yet in his letter to Barocci, Federico is largely occupied with declaring the need for recreation in his advanced age, the magnificent views from his accommodations in Turin, and the delight he derives from the court’s instrumentalists: “We eat and sleep to the sound of perpetual music.” Similarly, the letter to Giambologna takes otium, and not negotium, as its primary subject. Here, mobility is valued for its own sake, shorn of instrumental valence for the diffusion, rejection, or incorporation of style. Federico even delights in the sensation of movement itself as when he describes a sleigh guided by horses “flying like the wind.” The accompanying etching shows the sleigh in profile, described as being half the size of a Venetian gondola’s prow, with the needle pricked into the wax ground to indicate the swirls of the sled’s path in the ice (fig. 8.14).[25]

FIGURE 8.12 Federico Zuccaro, Constellations and Other Astronomical Figures for the Vault of the Galleria Grande in Torino, c. 1605. Pen and brown ink. Castello Sforzesco, Milan.

Federico’s stay in Turin also begets the experience of virtual travel, as evoked by the view from his room of the gardens that conjure meditations on cartography on a global scale: “At the window of my Paradise ... I embark hour by hour on one of these rivers, and at my ease I now find myself in the Great Sea towards the East, now in the North, and now in the Tyrrhenian to the South and towards the West, and sometimes I even progress towards the East through the Adriatic Sea, and in this way, enjoying myself by thinking of the diversity of the peoples and countries of the world, I travel far without departing from where I am.” Federico goes on to invite Giambologna to enjoy “the taste and pleasure I feel in this place adorned with beautiful and singular views.” Toward the end of the letter itself he reiterates the offer—“Here I would like [you] Giambologna to be able to enjoy yourself at your leisure”—and even extends the proposal to a contingent of artists including Domenico Passignani, Giovan Maria Casini, and Santi di Tito.[26]

Through such passages, Federico modifies the terms of the question that writers on art and artists themselves had heretofore probed with insistence. Instead of considering the impact of mobility on style, Federico seems more engaged with narrating the role of travel in enhancing his status as a universally praised artist, “to so much applause of the world.” The question of any possible correlation between mobility and stylistic change assumes the representation of the traveling artist as a working artist, as a practitioner whose purpose in displacing himself is the execution of style. However, Il passaggio, in refraining from the overly manual aspects of maniera, or maniera itself, conceives Federico as a traveling gentleman. As though following the directives of manuals that instructed early modern aristocrats how to travel, Federico limits his optic to observe visual phenomena and engage his other senses, without stating through verbal means how he might have converted what he has witnessed into stylistic currency. How Federico mentions in passing the wide range of sights he enjoys is akin to the descriptive method in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), which breezily recommends the diverse places available to the traveler’s purview: “The sight of such a Palace as that of Escuriall in Spaine . . . the Popes Belvedere in Rome . . . a Gundilo through the grand Canale in Venice, to see those goodly Palaces, must needs refresh and give content to a melancholy dull spirit.” And as was advised to gentlemen on the road, Federico observes the spectacles that take place in his destinations while at the same time avoiding any semblance of modifying style or even his behavior to such foreign destinations. The humanist Justus Lipsius stated as much in his De ratione cum fructu peregrinandi, a brief though widely diffused sixteenth-century treatise on the art of traveling. “We do not mock but once,” he declares, “this sort of clown, who having freshly returned from France and Italy, ridiculously intertwines antics with preciousness.” The self, not style alone, occupies the subject of Federico’s letters. True, he ends his work by evoking the concept of varietà through recourse to the proverb per molto variar Natura è bella (Nature is beautiful due to varying much). But in this case, varietà remains a sight seen at a distance rather than a term with stylistic import. It is also no surprise that the portrait Federico composed of himself at this time displays the three medals and golden chains he received during his northern Italian tour, like so many souvenirs collected on a voyage (fig. 8.15).[27]

FIGURE 8.13 Federico Zuccaro, Study for an Equestrian Portrait, c. 1605. Pen and brown ink (15.5 cm × 17.0 cm). Department of Graphic Arts, Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Madeleine Coursaget.

FIGURE 8.14 Federico Zuccaro, “Sleigh Ride,” 1606. Etching. From Federico Zuccaro, Il passaggio per Italia, con la dimora di Parma del Sig. Cavaliere Federico Zuccaro, 1608.

FIGURE 8.15 Federico Zuccaro, Self-Portrait, 1604. Oil on canvas. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

In the account most suited to delving into the thorny pact between mobility and style, Federico in Il passaggio subdues the emergence of a contemporary vocabulary for “influence” which had up to this point so often reared its head. Shifting attention from the mechanics of the hand to the sensorial body, Federico locates the cultural activity of the traveling artist in a moving, breathing, and consuming body. He and his text thus propose a method for thinking about works of art and the artist in an enlarged cultural spectrum, one that considers not only style, but also individual aesthetic taste. Significantly, this “transport” calls for the deployment of methods and conversation with disciplines not conventionally at the disposal of the art historian. The consequences of mobility are displaced from the domain of artistic labor proper and transferred to the arena of the everyday and human subjectivity at large.

Epilogue

In Il passaggio per Italia, Federico Zuccaro establishes mobility as a theme in and of itself voiced in the first person. But his work also reveals mobility’s uneasy and ambivalent rapport with the concept of style. The elliptical stance on maniera, the almost willful suppression of travel’s impact on the mechanics of Federico’s eye and hand, had ample precedent in the writings of Vasari, Armenini, and Dolce. Travel as aesthetic experience and leisure instead of the hard and weary path, be it in terms of actual physical displacement or the allegorical journey, is the resounding leitmotif. Like a bravura sketch of ink and wash, the shades of difference between mobility for learning, leisure, commissions, or curiosity blur into one another, difficult to extricate in their complexity.

But if mobility continued to be unruly in Zuccaro’s thinking and work, there would emerge a space where it would eventually find standardization and control: the Accademia di San Luca, the famed organization for artistic instruction established in Rome in 1593. Active in the academy’s inception and early management, Zuccaro attempted to codify the fruits of mobility, or mitigate its potentially distracting effects, within this institution’s teaching program. Granted, the travels of artists and objects played a critical role in galvanizing the Accademia di San Luca’s most significant precedent, the Florentine Accademia del Disegno. After Michelangelo’s death in Rome on 18 February 1564, Vasari and representatives of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici swiftly made arrangements to have the divine artist’s corpse transported back to his native city. Designated an honorary rector of the Accademia del Disegno just a year before, Michelangelo and his obsequies assembled the institution’s competing factions of painters, sculptors, and architects in a public show of unity. Repatriated to Florence, Michelangelo’s body was a “great treasure” to his city, as Vasari declared, and would be honored and celebrated as a relic. An episode approximating furta sacra, clandestine relic theft and removal to a new location, constituted a major public event in the Florentine Accademia del Disegno’s early institutional history.[1]

Documents related to the constitution of the Roman Accademia di San Luca also stressed the significance of mobility, though in more practical terms than the furtive transport of prized artist remains. Pope Gregory XIII’s foundational brief of 1577 stated that the Accademia di San Luca was to serve those talented youths “who from every part of the earth arrive in Rome to dedicate themselves to exercise their arts.” Federico Zuccaro, in a gesture similar to his fellow artists Girolamo Muziano and Tomasso della Porta, made provisions in his will, dated 1603, to establish a foresteria, or lodging house, for these young artists. Though these plans were never realized, Zuccaro expressed the desire that rooms in his own home “should serve as a hospice for poor young students of the profession, strangers [coming from] across the mountains as well as the Flemish and [various] foreigners, who often arrive without a home base.” The hardships of relocation, which Zuccaro’s will hoped to mitigate, were necessary if young artists were to gain artistic knowledge and skills not available in their homelands. Students had conventionally reaped the benefits of mobility—varietà—through self-directed study and travel. As Vasari’s biography of Raphael suggested, the courtly artist’s residence in different cities, each with its particular regional idiom and specialty, contributed greatly to his synthetic style. Even within the deposit of diverse stylistic modes that was Rome, roaming was necessary. Zuccaro’s Life of his older brother visualized how young artists had to assemble an education by fits and starts. Taddeo wanders between the façades of Polidoro da Caravaggio, sculptures in the Cortile Belvedere, and frescoes by Raphael and Michelangelo while at the same time eking out a living as a day laborer artist. In meaningful contrast, the precepts of the Accademia di San Luca offered, at least in theory, the efficient acquisition of varietà in one locale. Through the publication Origine e progresso dell’Accademia del Disegno a Roma (1604), Zuccaro and his mouthpiece Romano Alberti envisioned a wide-ranging curriculum: drawings and cartoons of reliefs, heads, feet, and hands; studies after the antique and Polidoro’s frescoes; landscape views; animals; examinations of life nudes (warm weather permitting); the production of models in wax and clay; and representations of architecture and perspective. Rome was certainly “a studio stuffed with the best masters,” as the seventeenth-century painter and critic Giovanni Baglione put it. But their different and competing sets of skills, their performance of mobility and the positive effect of varietà, needed to be organized if the visual arts were to replenish and renew themselves for further generations of young artists. Furthermore, according to the Origine e progresso, “virtuous men of letters and lovers of our profession” would be present at theoretical discussions of the Accademia “to season and perfect each proposed discourse and our argumentation.” These interested “gentlemen, art lovers, and men of letters” external to the profession stressed the importance of “formation” for artists in the sense of inculcating certain social mores and worldliness. The intellectual and social impact of mobility, then, would constitute the very walls of this place of intense instruction. The Accademia, once called the Università dei Pittori, promised a universal education.[2]

However lofty the Accademia’s ideals, the manifesto that is the Ordine e progresso describes the institution’s beginnings in rooms within and nearby the church of Santi Luca e Martina beneath the Campodoglio. The minutes from the first meeting, 14 November 1593, refer to the “seats, benches, tables, desks, and similiar other things . . . with an image of the glorious Virgin and St. Luca”—the bare and essential equipment for the classroom setting. Francesco Alberti’s etching A Painter’s Academy (c. 1625) remains a vivid visualization of the Accademia’s teaching ambitions (fig. E.1). A skeleton placed on a pedestal constitutes a stationary focal point in an otherwise animated pedagogical field. To the far left, in what might be a visual pun, an older teacher and students look at a series of eyes and anatomical pupils, part of the ABCs of disegno that also include drawings of “noses, mouths, heads, hands and feet.” In a reference to Raphael’s School of Athens, a huddled team examines with a compass various geometric shapes, an important skill for understanding the boundaries of forms. Further to the right, youngsters mold figures of equally youthful appearing and gesticulating models. More advanced students inspect the innards of a cadaver. Other pairs and trios of students measure a foreshortened archway with a straight edge and draw after casts of a limb hanging from a nail. And on the back wall hang paintings of the Crucifixion, a half-length portrait, landscape along with additional casts above of busts, hands, feet, and a torso. Alberti’s print represents not only the progressive stages of this studio’s curriculum, from the alphabet of painting to dissection. The scene also points to the desire to contain the lessons of mobility within a unified setting. No longer, the print argues, must students migrate to acquire training in different specialties. Dürer may have planned to ride to Bologna to learn the secrets of perspective, Raphael to Florence to learning coloring from Fra Bartolommeo, and Perino del Vaga and Vasari himself throughout Italy to acquire flexible and swift compositional skills. At the very least, the academy as institution writ large provides the foundation and points of comparison for artists who supplement their academic training with travel. A figure in the background of the print also demonstrates that mobility can regenerate the Accademia’s student body in an ongoing process. A new pupil trying to gain entry arrives with a letter of introduction, an artist in the making. Rome, as Armenini declared, and more specifically its hosting institutions, render the city an inn (albergo) and haven (ricetto) for eager artists.[3]

FIGURE E.1 Pietro Francesco Alberti, A Painter’s Academy, c. 1625. Etching (40.5 × 52–58 cm). ETH Graphische Sammlung, Zurich.

The Accademia, then, administrates and institutionalizes mobility to serve specific ends. This space of control and ordered progression on the path of style belies the potentially chaotic effects travel might have for artists and their pupils. Of course, the frequent dismissal of the impact of an artist’s mobility on his style, manifest through either outright hostility or passing over the issue in silence, might be entirely expected given the campanilismo (an anachronistic, though still convenient term) of sixteenth-century writers on art. That artists traveled, studied, and received recognition outside their homelands presents an uncomfortable biographical fact for writers whose patriotic allegiances constitute one of the major assumptions in their works. The obvious cultural parallel at this time that one might turn to would be the questione della lingua, the fierce debates which erupted throughout the Italian peninsula over which regional dialects ought to achieve supremacy and standard usage. The anxiety and disregard in relation to the effects of an artist’s travels upon his style were hardly eradicated with the close of the sixteenth century. A hundred years after the appearance of Vasari’s Lives, even during an epoch when the aesthetic of eclecticism increasingly appears in the works of artists and art theorists, a measure of uneasiness regarding mobility and stylistic change endures. Take the example of Carlo Cesare Malvasia’s Felsina pittrice (1678), a history that underscores the significance of Bolognese tradition conveyed through the biographies of such artists as Francia, the Carracci, Guido Reni, and Domenichino. A careful reader and critic of Vasari, Malvasia decries the arrival of the maniera greca in Italy, especially “certain Madonnas, painted on panel in Constantinople,” which due to popular devotion ruin the good taste of artists and viewers alike. Rectifying this flow of foreign style that causes painting to regress, Bologna as the “true school of artists” and homeland of such painters as Franco, Marco Zoppo, Pellegrino Tibaldi, Primaticcio, and Niccolò dell’Abate provides Rome, Padua, Spain, and France with praiseworthy works of art. In addition, one well-known sonnet in praise of Nicolò dell’Abate published in Malvasia’s volume is often taken as a manifesto of catholic regional taste, and would correspondingly seem to advocate for an artist to travel throughout Italy so as to acquire the best of the peninsula’s regional styles. The poem’s speaker declares that the good painter will have at his hand the disegno of Rome, the movement and shading of Venice, as well as the coloring of Lombardy. All the same, such a rigid and totalizing taxonomy operates under the assumption that Venetian or Lombard painters are somehow inextricably bound to their region’s stylistic specialty, a view that disallows the possibility, say, for a Venetian painter to surpass his Roman counterpart in disegno. Nonetheless, this taxonomic system is useful insofar as it contains the uncomfortable historical phenomenon of artists changing their style as they traveled. However fragile it may be in reality, the dyad that binds an artist’s ethnic identity (e.g., Venetian) with a corresponding regional style (colorito) functions as a seemingly reassuring constant in the often haphazard chain of events coloring the narrative flow in artists’ biographies.[4]

This is not to say that seventeenth-century writers on art did not acknowledge the “influence” of mobility upon style. In his Abrégé de la vie des peintres (1699), the French critic and diplomat Roger de Piles notes that “one has seen some painters who, having followed the Taste of another Country, have passed from one style to another, changing this way and that.” All the same, de Piles suggests that this phenomenon is not altogether favorable. As a result of such stylistic vacillation, he concludes, “thus are made some very ambiguous Paintings for whom it is difficult to determine the Author.” This uneasiness toward artists who crossed regional and national boundaries of style did not remain restricted to the art theoretical realm. The methods of display in galleries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often allowed the question of mobility and stylistic “influence” to fall literally between the frames of paintings hanging upon the wall. The Electoral Gallery of Düsseldorf, as indicated in a catalogue of that collection compiled by Nicolas de Pigage and issued in 1778, demonstrates that Italian, Flemish, and Dutch paintings were displayed according to their regional schools. This display method found precedent in the cabinet pictures of David Teniers II, dating to the 1640s, which represent the collection of Archduke Leopold William. These portable pictures, settled upon the gallery’s walls, have reached the end of their journey and constitute a three-dimensional atlas of style (figs. E.2 and E.3).[5]

FIGURE E.2 Christian von Mechel, La Salle Italienne, Trosième Salle. Engraving. From Nicolas de Pigage, La Galerie Électorale de Dusseldorff, 1778.

Early modern writers on art subdue or overlook the role of mobility as they attempt to formulate a notion of style as a discrete regional and national entity. It is no surprise, then, that the burgeoning genre of art history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries inherited this selective method of representation. Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764) is an early instance of conjoining the concepts of Art and History in a book title. Winckelmann relied on the idea of the Einflüsse des Himmels, the influence of the heavens, to explain the conformity of appearance, language, and artistic style among peoples (Greeks, Romans, Etruscans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Persians) and, consequently, the variation of style among these diverse ethnic groups. Nor does he limit his speculations on ethnic style to the ancient world. He observes that even in later times, “German, Dutch, and French artists, when they do not depart from their lands or their Nature, are, just like the Chinese and the Tartars, recognizable in their paintings.” Moreover, this adherence to a certain style of painting applies in the case of the traveling artist. “Rubens,” Winckelmann declares, “even after a sojourn of many years in Italy, painted his figures as though he never left his homeland.” The essentialist notion that culture and climate were firmly linked was perpetuated by thinkers as diverse as Kant, Montesquieu, Taine, and Lanzi. Yet this theory of environmental/geographic determinism would also inform later art historical texts. A work no less seminal than Heinrich Wölfflin’s Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915) predicts that “the time will soon come when the historical record of European architecture will no longer be merely subdivided into Gothic, Renaissance, and so on, but will trace out the national physiognomies which cannot quite be effaced even by imported styles.” Furthermore, Wölfflin concludes his book by equating the consequences of artists’ journeys with confusion in styles, which in turn “brings with it elements which are not understood and remain foreign.”[6]

FIGURE E.3 David Teniers II, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (with Teniers’ Self-Portrait) among His Works of Art in the Archduke’s Gallery in Brussels, 1653. Oil on canvas (70 × 86 cm). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

Thus, the uneasiness or reticence which Vasari, Dolce, Armenini, Zuccaro, and others adopted toward mobility and stylistic change penetrates through the bedrock of later art theory, and eventually art history itself. If this discourse follows the straight and narrow path in its negative and laconic stance toward mobility, by the same token the representation of artists’ travels opens up the discourse surrounding artistic subjectivity. Early modern writers on art conjure a plethora of subject matter as they grapple with the task of representing an artist’s progression through geographic space. Mobility emerges as a threshold onto a remarkably wide expanse of subjects that complement those of rhetoric, poetics, and other disciplines conventionally considered in art historical scholarship to be the sole neighbors to art literature. Indeed, the frequent recourse to topics as diverse as astronomy, geomancy, medicine, climate, food and drink, dancing, memory, costume, germination, and religious pilgrimage demonstrates the extent to which mobility facilitates traffic in words, and thereby ideas between art literature and the liberal arts. And the very fact that mobility evokes a motley assortment of topics conceives the traveling artist or the artist in general as much more than a synecdoche for the eye and hand; mobility embraces the possibility of positing the traveling artist as a breathing, eating, drinking, moving, in other words, organic ensemble. Leon Battista Alberti declared the artist to be “almost another god among mortals.”[7] Yet in contrast to artifex deus, artifex viator transpires in sixteenth-century art literature as a fraught character, at times praised in foreign courts, germinating the seeds of his style, other times in flight or beset by mal’aria. This representation not only complicates the narrative of the “rise of the artist” that so often colors art historical scholarship. It also bears critical consequences for understanding works of art as products of a creator coming to terms with an ethnic, geographic, and natural historical environment.

Notes

The following abbreviations are used in the notes.

AG

Armenini, Giovanni Battista. 1988. De’ veri precetti della pittura. Edited by Marina Gorreri. Turin: Einaudi.

AO

———. 1977. On the True Precepts of the Art of Painting. Translated and edited by Edward J. Olszewski. New York: Burt Franklin.

DR

Dolce, Lodovico. 2000. Dolce’s L’Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento. Translated and edited by Mark W. Roskill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

VBB

Vasari, Giorgio. 1966. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori: nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568. Edited by Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi. Florence: Sansoni.

VBR

———. 1991. Le vite de’ più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri: nell’edizione per i tipi di Lorenzo Torrentino, Firenze 1550. Edited by Luciano Bellosi and Aldo Rossi. 2 vols., continuously paginated. Turin: Einaudi.

VDV

———. 1996. Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Translated by Gaston du C. de Vere. Edited by David Ekserdjian. 2 vols. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

VG

———. 1568. Le vite de’ piv eccellenti pittori, scvltori, e architettori / scritte da m. Giorgio Vasari pittore et architetto aretino. Di nuouo dal medesimo riuiste et ampliate con i ritratti loro et con l’aggiunta delle vite de’ viui, & de’ morti dall’anno 1550. insino al 1567. 3 vols. Florence: Giunti.

VT

———. 1550. Le vite de piv eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scvltori italiani, da Cimabve insino a’ tempi nostri: / descritte in lingua toscana, da Giorgio Vasari . . . ; Con vna sua vtile & necessaria introduzzione a le arti loro. 2 vols. Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino.

ZR

Zuccari, Federico. 2007. Il passaggio per Italia. Edited by Alessandra Ruffino. Lavis: La Finestra.

INTRODUCTION

1. Campbell and Milner 2004; Schmitt 2001; Nuttall 2004; Wouk 2011.

2. Burckhardt 1860, 280–82. On Michelet, see Febvre 1973, 261ff. On the critique of mobility, see Petrarch 2002. On globalization informing historical inquiry, see Hoerder 2003; Forman 2003; Sebek and Deng 2008; Casale 2010; Walker 2012.

3. Gilbert 1990; Farago 1995, 3–5, 14, 67–70; Vergilius 2002, xii, 393–408, 237, 263, 463–71. Grafton 1992; Ramusio 1978–88, 5: 15: “ma fu un uomo il quale ha fatto nascer al mondo un altro mondo, effetto in vero incomparabilmente molto maggiore del detto di sopra.”

4. Cicero 1969, 342–45; Vitruvius 1983, 1: 286–87; Benedict 1982, 29, 83. On stabilitas loci, see Gollnick 1993; Herman 1955; Nicol 1985. Sennett 2002, 193.

5. Giordano da Pisa 1867, 313: “Imperò sono le cose mobile, perché hanno parti: ma Iddio, imperocché non ha parte nulla, ma è semplice, però non può essere in alcuno modo mobile.” On primo mobile, see Grant 1994; Binggeli 2006. Petrarch 1960, 231: “Femina è cosa mobile per natura.” Belcari 1833, 157: “Duo laude ho fatte con la mente mobile, / Perché ‘l comune a torto mi pericola.” For commentary on this poem, see Leuker 2007, 80–81. Vasari 1568, 2: 112: “e l’esperienza fa conoscere che molte volte uno stesso uomo non ha la medesima maniera, né fa le cose della medesima bontà in tutti i luoghi, ma migliori e peggiori secondo la qualità del luogo.”

6. Strinati and Lindemann 2008, 170; Hirst 1981b, 99–100; Davis 1982. On handbells and interior domestic space, see Dennis 2010. On the isolario genre, see Kim 2006.

7. ZR, 8; Wittkower and Wittkower 1963; Kaufmann 2004; Rees 2010; Sohm 2001.

8. Spear and Sohm 2010; Bolard 2012.

9. Elkins and Williams 2008; Baxandall 1995, 2003; Frangenberg 1990, 2003; Frangenberg and Williams 2006; Payne 1999; Sohm 1991, 2001; Williams 1997.

CHAPTER 1

1. Grimaldi 2001; Montaigne 1983; Humfrey 1997, 151.

2. Dillon 1980; Mozzoni 1996; Mozzoni 2009; Contardi and Gentili 1983; Nesselrath 2000; Milesi 2004. On average mortality rates of artists in the early modern period, see Sohm 2007, 15. See Humfrey 1997, 179–81, for Lotto’s burial wishes.

3. Warnke 1993; Chastel 1983.

4. Mascerpa 1980; Lotto 1969, 269, 271, 274, 288.

5. Humfrey 1997, 2; Chiodi 1998, 16; Nagel 1998, 742.

6. Gilbert 1956; Guarino 1981; Wilde 1950; Brown et al. 1997, 90; D’Andrea 2007, 5–10; Pigozzo 2007; Puppi 1971, 81.

7. On the panel, see Aikema and Brown 1999, 268–81. Lotto’s work has been connected to a depiction of the saint listed in the inventory of Lotto’s chief patron in Treviso, Bishop Bernardo de’ Rossi. The panel has also been proposed to function as a portrait cover for humanist members in de’ Rossi’s circle, among them Giovanni Aurellio Augurelli and Girolamo Bolognani, the latter having had Jerome as a namesake and penned verses regarding the saint’s proper depiction. See Rice 1985; Dillon 1980, 25–27; Lattanzi 1983.

8. Humfrey 1997, 12, 16–17. On Dürer’s reception in Italy, see Fara 2007. On Northern expertise in landscape, see Pino 1960, 133; Gombrich 1966, 107–21; Wood 1993. On coloring monochrome prints, see Dackerman 2002. Lotto purchased several prints to serve as compositional models. See Lotto 1969, 244.

9. For discussions of this panel, see Contardi and Gentili 1983; Brown et al. 1997, 94–96. On anthropomorphic forms in Dürer’s engraving, see Möseneder 1986.

10. On artists’ engagement with classical sculpture, see Christian 2010.

11. Brown et al. 1997, 104.

12. Reminiscent of Crivelli’s use of trompe l’oeil, Lotto employs a similar illusionistic device in his Christ Bidding Farewell to His Mother, with Elisabetta Rota (1521). See Brown et al. 1997, 121–24.

13. On the commission, see Lotto 1969, 259; Matthew 1988, 323–25; Humfrey 1997, 45–47. On artistic culture in Bergamo, Brescia, and Venice, see Bayer 2007. On Venetian style and Bergamo’s reincorporation into the Republic, see Cortesi Bosco 1983. On mannerism, see Shearman 1977; Cheney 1997; Sohm 2001. On Lotto’s reception of the antique, see Brown et al. 1997, 108–12. On Lotto in Florence, see Humfrey 1997, 46. On Lotto and Leonardo, see Massi 1987, 56–57. On parallels between Lotto’s barrel vault and Bramante’s design for the apse of Santa Maria presso San Satiro, see Cleri 2009. On the Colleoni Chapel, see Kohl 2004.

14. On contracts which stipulated that artists surpass works in the vicinity of their commission, see Matthew 1988, 220–26; Glasser 1977; O’Malley 2005. On “bizarreries” in Lotto’s altarpiece, see Arasse 1981. For Lotto’s comments about adapting works according to site and local lighting conditions, see Lotto 1969, 283.

15. On the commission, see Annibaldi Jr. 1980; Matthew 1988, 364–66. Lotto’s St. Nicholas altarpiece indicates awareness of Titian’s altarpiece dated 1520–25 depicting St. Nicholas in San Niccolò ai Frari (or della Lattuga), now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana. On Venetian narrative altarpieces, see Humfrey 1993, 220–29. On Lotto’s narrative technique, see Humfrey 1997, 116–18; Capriotti 2009. On the preparatory drawing, see Pouncey 1965, 22–23; Rearick 1981.

16. On the stipulation to surpass Lotto’s previous work, see Annibaldi Jr. 1980, 149. Kaplan 2010, 124. On slaves in Ancona, see Paci et al. 1982.

17. On the loggia, see Brown et al. 1997, 181; Mascherpa 1984. Pietro Paolo Agabiti’s nativity scenes (1528, Jesi, Pinacoteca Civica) also depict Sansovino’s loggia. On the designs of Francesco di Giorgio Martini for the Palazzo and payments for stone, see Agostinelli and Mariano 1986. In later histories of Jesi, Lotto’s altarpieces for the city are mentioned among the city’s cultural possessions. See Baldassini 1765, 349.

18. See Mazza 1981; Matthew 1988, 60–61, 424–31; Aikema 1989; Howard 1995; Matthew 1997; Zucchetta 2008.

19. Lotto 1969, 236; Humfrey 1993, 314–18; Meilman 2000. On curtains and veils in painting, see Krüger 2001; Hills 2006. On Moretto’s altarpiece, see Dugoni 2008.

20. Terribile 1997; Howard 1995; Mack 1997; Hochmann 2004.

21. Panofsky 2003, 2: 912–15.

22. Baxandall 1985, 58–62.

23. On art historical “influence,” see Baader 2003; Lowden and Bovey 2007; Loh 2007.

24. Bender and Marrinan 2010, 7. On astrology, see Copenhaver 1988; Culianu 1987; Ebstein 1903; Garin 1990; Grafton 1999a; North 1989; Walker 1985. On models of causality, see Joy 2006. On astral fluid, see Dominici 1860, 3; Firmicus Maternus 2002, 65–66; Kemp 1987.

25. Winckelmann 1776, 2: 883, 2: 8; Winckelmann 2006, 120; Milizia 1822, 159.

26. Semper 1860–63, 2: 228–30.

27. Geymüller 1898, 31–34, 57–58. On Geymüller’s architectural historical oeuvre, see Ploder 1998, 342–70.

28. On the diagram as a culmination of Geymüller’s engagement with the French Renaissance, see Heck 2009.

29. Heck 2009, 62n7; Gallwitz 1998, 7, 13; Lobbenmeier 1999; Gallwitz 1998b.

30. On modernist paintings and diagrams, see Peiffer 2010; Schmidt-Burckhardt 2005. On diagrams in art historical inquiry, see Bogen 2005. On marginalia in editions of Vasari, see Ruffini 2009; Spagnolo 2005a.

31. On Resta, see Warwick 2000.

32. Cicognara IV.2390 (Vatican Library), 1: 380: “al tempo del Re Alfonso / Gio. Da Brugia / Ruggieri da Brugia / Ansse / Antonello andò in Fiandra ad imparare il colorire di Gio. Da Brugia / Come si narra in Vasari / M. Domenico di Venetia / Così Antonello insegnò il colorire Andrea del Castagno.”

33. VBR, 359–64.

34. Schlosser 1964, 311.

35. Rubin 1995; VBR, vii–viii.

36. On the application of the term “thick description” to analyze texts, see Geertz 1973. On the concept of “close reading” deployed to interpret images, see Elkins 2007.

37. VBB, 4: 474–80. On the Cesi Chapel commission, see Franklin 1994, 305–6, 125–26; Gnann 1996.

38. VBB, 4: 480. Crusca 1612, s.v. “paese”; “natura”; “virtù”; “costumi”; “abito.” On the proverb, see Kemp 1976; Zöllner 1992.

39. VDV, 1: 903–4; VBB, 4: 481.

40. Franklin 1994, 122–33. Richardson 1722, 104. Note that the most reliable dated inventories of the Cesi family’s collection of antiquities date from after the sack of Rome. See Bentz 2003, 299–354; Christian 2010.

41. Alpers 1987; Sohm 2001, 3.

42. Cellini 1983, 95; Haitovsky 1994; Franklin 1994, 130; Franklin 1990; Franklin 1994, 161–74.

43. Franklin 1994, 130; Carroll 1987, 22–23.

44. Hirst 1961.

45. Giusti 1871, 217.

CHAPTER 2

1. VBR, 7, 16, 10; Frangenberg 2002.

2. VBR, 89. Compare Alberti’s exposition on painting’s origins in De Pictura. Alberti 1973, 46.

3. VBR, 92; VBB, 2: 11; Becatti 1971; Blake McHam 2011.

4. VBR, 94; Kallab 1908; Gáldy 2009.

5. Carruthers and Ziolkowski 2002, 7, 103, 113; Dolce 2001, 73; Bolzoni 2001, 254.

6. Carruthers and Ziolkowski 2002, 236; Carruthers 1998, 199.

7. VBR, 94–95; Gombrich 1985; Pomian 1984; Didi-Huberman 2000, 9–55.

8. Geary 1994, 2; Crusca 1612, s.v. “morte”; Bynum 1995, 38–39.

9. Sapegno 1986; VBR, 96; Thierry 1976, 357; VBR, 97–98.

10. VBR, 97–98.

11. Rowland 1994, 101; Di Teodoro 2003; Gyatso 1998; Tacitus, Germania 43.3, 9, 16; Petrarch 2003, 454; Vespucci 1978, 674–75; Todorov 1991.

12. Egmond and Mason 1997, 184; Ghiberti 1998, 83; Thevet 1557–58, 51; Whatley 1986, 322.

13. Spitzer 1963, 62; Summers 1989, 21; Sohm 2001, 12–13, 68, 74, 89, 94, 185, 188, 276n43; Feser and Lorini 2001, 148–49.

14. Le Mollé 1988; Wright 1996.

15. Glacken 1967, 80–115; Niebyl 1971; Cook 2006; Hippocrates 1923, 72–73, 105, 115, 137.

16. Glacken 1967, 101–15; Vitruvius 1.4.8, 1.1.10.

17. Siraisi 1997, 128–29; Siraisi 2001, 321–22; Bodin 1606, 561; Bodin 1583, 689–90; Ramusio 1978, 657–58, 393.

18. Michelangelo Buonarroti 1965, 1:70; Cellini 1973, 284.

19. Lazzaro 1990, 8–19; Payne 2006; Genette 1997; Alberti 1550, 11–18.

20. VBR, 35–42.

21. Sankovitch 2001; Rowland 1994, 101.

22. Danti 1960. The manuscript of the lecture is preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence (MAGL. XVII, 7 Lettione nell’Accademia del Disegno). The speaker explains how the climate of particular locations is able to shape humors and appearances. Aria generates differences between Asians, Germans, French, Spanish and Italians in their humors and manners of speaking. This theoretical grounding in human diversity can assist his audience of painters and other artists in representing a variety of subjects in their compositions. See also Barzman 2000, 172–74.

23. Kaufmann 2004, 63–64, 84–85, 348–49; Wood 2004.

24. VBR, 99.

25. Panofsky 1955, 220; Douglas 1992; Aristotle, The Politics 7.5.3–4; Glacken 1967, 102. The negative perception of seaports is repeated in Alberti 1550, 19. Filarete 1972, 228; Biondo 2005, 302.

26. Gardner von Teuffel 2007.

27. Crusca 1612, s.v. “mescolare”; Gelli, in Mancini 1896, 35–37; Payne 1998; MacPhail 2003; Cf. Varchi, who cites Aristotle, who states that a being whose body parts cannot be “mixed” easily results in monsters. Varchi 1841, 69. Vasari 2004, 304–5.

28. Vasari 1929–30, 1: 175n35; VBR, 342; Boccaccio 1956, 509–10. On the bizarre appearance of the Baronci and the culture of laughter, see Ladis 1986, 585.

29. Hugh of St. Victor was one of many medieval thinkers who employed the figurative language of stamping on waxen seals to describe moral education. In his De institutione he states: “In good men the form of the likeness of God is engraved, and when through the process of imitation we are pressed against that likeness: we too are molded according to the image of that likeness.” Bedos-Rezak 2000, 1526; Guarino 2002, 265; Cennini 1960, 15; Atherton 1998, 231.

30. On the civic uses of humanist education, see Woodward 1967; Grafton and Jardine 1986; Grendler 1989; Black 2001; Aristotle, The Politics 5.2.9–10, 7.5.3–4.

31. Cutler 1995, 24.

32. Fabian 1983; Egmond and Mason 1997, 164; Cesariano 2002, 19–20.

33. Ramusio 1978, 1: 673–75 (my emphasis).

34. VBR, 91, 66; Gelli, in Mancini 1896, 40. On “di maniera” as a term to describe the repetitive Byzantine style, see Sohm 2001, 93–95.

35. Payne 2001, 63–65; Pomian 1984, 46–51.

36. Thierry 1976, 364–65; Machiavelli 1988; Pitti 2007, 24; VBR, 99; Kallab 1908; Plaisance 1974; Zimmermann 1995, 229–44; Payne 2001, 71–76; Elam 2005; Moyer 2006.

37. VBR, 99. For Roman numerals to refer to artists’ deaths and births, see VT, 126, 129 (Cimabue), 132 (Andrea Taffi), 135 (Gaddo Gaddi).

38. On connotations of purgare, see Dante, Purgatorio 1.5; VBR, 677; VBB, 2: 45.

39. Vasari 1832–38, 1323–24. On the “seed” theory of contagion, see Nutton 1990.

40. In his Le immagini con la spositione dei Dei degli antichi, Vincenzo Cartari suggests that air could be a source of either infection or health. Cartari 1556, XXr. Compagni 1986, 5; Compagni 2000, 4–5. In his encomium of c. 1330, Opicino de Canistris described Pavia as “the most noble of Italy, the flower of Liguria,” and declared that the city had “the most healthy and subtle air.” Cited in Waley 1988, 103.

CHAPTER 3

1. VBR, 102; Salas and Marías 1992, 75–122: “Si supieralo que es verdadermanete aquella manera griega de la que habla, de otra suerta la trataría en lo qu dice, digo que comparándola con lo que hizo Giotto, esta es simple en comparación de aquella, por lo que la manera griega enseña de dificultades engañiosas.” Pagiavla 2006.

2. VBR, 103.

3. Plaisance 1974; Varchi 2003, 95; Eliade 1958, 194.

4. VBR, 103–5.

5. Benkard 1917; Baxandall 1971; VBR, 105.

6. Of a mosaic of the Coronation of the Virgin in the Life of Gaddo Gaddi, Vasari states, “la quale da tutti i maestri, e forestieri e nostrali, fu giudicata la più bella opera che si fusse veduta ancora per tutta la Italia di quel mestiero.” VBR, 113.

7. Lingo 2007; VBR, 139.

8. VBR, 109; Boskovits 2007; VDV, 1: 86–87; VG, 1: 109.

9. Ragghianti 1969; Boskovits 2007, 206–9.

10. Varchi 1841, 213: “Conosciamo questi esserci amico e quegli nemico, distinguiamo i figliuoli dagli altri, i parenti dagli strani, e mill’altre differenze così fatte.” Trexler 1980, 285–89; Ramusio 1978–88, 1: 15: “Adunque, qual sia la differenza tra gli Africani bianchi e tra i neri. . . . Hanno ancora qualche differenza tra loro non solo nella prononzia, ma eziandio nella significazion di molti e molti vocaboli.” Pasztory 1989, 22–24.

11. “Notizie,” 1891, 366–67.

12. On the distinction between “the difference between,” i.e., binary oppositions, and the “difference between,” likened to Derrida’s différance, see Johnson 1980.

13. VBR, 105–6, 114, 180.

14. VBR, 112–13; VG, 1: 112.

15. VBR, 113; Mather Jr. 1932. While certain iconographic and formal features in the Coronation mosaic have Byzantine precedents, the theme of the Coronation of the Virgin is not found in Byzantine works of art. Vasari’s identification of this work and others like it as exemplars of the maniera greca rests on the fact that they are executed in mosaic. Monciatti 1999, 15–29.

16. Quintilian 1921, 404–5. The locus classicus of the rhetorical tool of concession occurs in Cicero’s Against Verres 2.5.44. Nitsch 1994.

17. Luciani 1981; Baldini 1944.

18. Rumohr 1988, 77; Procacci 1967; Kris and Kurz 1979, 22–38; Falaschi 1972, 17; Maginnis 1993, 387; Rubin 1995, 299–306; Barolsky 1992, 20–21; Schwarz et al. 2004–8, 1: 14–18.

19. VBR, 222; Borghini 1808, 114: “quelli che noi propriamente diciamo Lavoratori, e cosi parlavano i nostri padri, ma da non molti anni in qua si son comunemente chiamati Contadini.” VBR, 118.

20. VBR, 182, 185, 189; Castelnuovo and Ginzburg 1979.

21. Hadjinicolaou 1983; Kaufmann 2004, 97–98, 156–58.

22. Empson 1986; Crusca 1612, s.v. “rusticamente”: “Con modo rustico. villanamente.”

23. Schwarz et al. 2004–8, 1: 291, 297; Barolsky 1992, 20–21. The Crusca defines “villano” as “huom della villa, che sta alla villa, lavorator di terra, contadino” and “zotico, scortese, di rozzi costumi.” In his Geneologia degli Dei, Boccaccio contrasts the ignorance of the lavoratore delle terre to poets’ erudition. Boccaccio 1547, 248r. Machiavelli 2001, 64: “E per questa cagione i contadini, che sono usi a lavorare la terra, sono piú utili che niuno; perché di tutte l’arti questa negli eserciti si adopera piú che l’altre.” Brunet 1976, 204. On Cecchi’s works and the ducal bureaucracy, see Radcliff-Umstead 1986. Ackerman 1990, 118. G. M. Bonardo’s Le richezze dell’agricoltura (1590) admonishes the reader to be wary of unscrupulous peasants.

24. Alpers 1996; VBR, 118; Rosand 1988.

25. Barolsky 1992; VBR, 118.

26. Della Casa 1960, 488; Samuels 1976, 349–86; Shaw 2000.

27. Ciuffoletti 1990; Ackerman 1990, 63–88; Friedman 1988; VBR, 114, 455, 597–609.

28. Schlosser 1964, 313; Bourin 2002. Inscriptions designating Giotto and Florence appear in two works: OPUS IOCTI FLORENTINI (Stigmatization of St. Francis, Paris, Louvre); OPUS MAGISTRI IOCT I DE FLORENTI A (Virgin and Child with Saints, Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale). Skaug 1971.

29. Gombrich 1979; VBR, 119; Rubin 1995, 307.

30. VBR, 119–21.

31. VBR, 121–27.

32. Two manuscript editions of Riccobaldo’s Compilatio Chronological state: “opera facta per eum in ecclesiis Minorum Assisii, Arimini, Padue ac per ea que pinxit palatio Comunis Padue et in ecclesia Arene Padue.” Gnudi 1959; Hankey 1991; Larner 1971, 280; Ghiberti 1998, 84: “Et fecionsi egregiisime opere et spetialmente nella città di Firence et in moltri altri luoghi.” Morisani 1953, 270: “E refertissima Italia delle sue picture, ma mirabile la nave di musaico a sancto Pietro di Roma de’ dodici apostoli: ne’ quali ciascuno ha gesti vivi et prompti.” “Notizie,” 1891, 357: “E piena l’Italia delle sue pitture ... Dipinse ancora in molti altri luoghi in tavole et in fresco.” Mellini 1566, 21: “Assai fec’egli nondimeno, che la cavò et la trasse di sotto terra, facendola rinascere al mondo.”

33. VBR, 181; Ginzburg 1998; Campbell and Milner 2004; VBR, 114.

34. Rubin 1995, 313; VBR, 8; Dante 1964, 3: 10; Boccaccio 1941, 1: 85; Compagni 2000, 83–84. Vasari depicted the allegorical figure of Fame in the Palazzo della Cancellaria, Sala dei Cento Giorni, Rome (1546), Casa Vasari, Florence (1560), and Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (1560). Cheney 1985; Cheney 2006. In his autobiography Vasari described the Chamber of Fame. VG, 2: 991: “Nel mezzo è una Fama, che siede sopra la palla del mondo e suona una tromba d’oro, gettandone via una di fuoco, finta per la Maledicenza.” Vasari 1938, 68–69: “Fama. La tromba in boca quella di fuoco in mano el mondo sotto.”

35. VBR, 121–22. In the 1550 edition Vasari misidentifies the Pope as “Benedetto XII da Tolosa.” In the 1568 edition Vasari states instead that the pontiff is Benedict XI (r. 1303–4). See VBR, 121n18. Romano 2008, 251–52.

36. Pliny, Natural History 35.36; Rubin 1995, 309–10. Burchiello’s verses read: “Al tuo goffo buffon darò del macco, / Che più che l’O di Giotto mi par tondo, / E da qui innanzi più non gli rispondo / Per non gittar le margarite al ciacco.” Ladis 2005, 4, 42–44; Löhr 2011; Biermann 1991.

37. Alberti 1994, 23–24: “Con un uso avveduto di queste tavole, in effetti, sarà possibile a chi è assediato e distante parecchie miglia, comunicare che cosa si debba fare, non spedendo missive, ma mediante segnali fatti con le luci o il fumo.” Queller 1967, 96n, 140–41n71; Lamanskii 1892, 198–99, 250–53; Varchi 2003, 454–55. Machiavelli and Varchi mention the use of ciphers to create an exclusive community of speakers and listeners and to communicate in times of crisis. Varchi 1995, 635; Machiavelli 2001, 272.

38. The 1568 edition specifies how Giotto received the commission, but Vasari maintains the general theme of the artist obtaining royal recognition. VG, 1: 125. Giotto was in Naples for four years from 1329, painting a series of mythological and biblical heroes and their wives. The program was devised by Petrarch, who recommended that one ought “not to fail to visit the royal chapel, in which my compatriot, the prince of our age, has left considerable evidence of his hand and ingenuity.” Warnke 1993, 8–16; Ames-Lewis 2000a, 61; Barolsky 1992, 21. VBR, 123: “Et un’altra volta, dicendogli il re: ‘Giotto, s’io fusse in te, ora che fa caldo tralasserei un poco il dipignere,’ rispose: ‘Et io, se fussi in voi, farei il medesimo.’” Bakhtin 1984, 73; Vasari 1832–38, 1323; Ladis 2005; Tietze-Conrat 1957.

39. VBR, 186, 113; Ames-Lewis 2000a, 64–65.

40. VDV, 1: 224; VBR, 193.

41. VDV, 1: 224; VBR, 193; Bottari 1822, 1: 23; Pingree 1986, 221; Cellini 1971, 748–49; Vasari 1832–38, 1396: “ed in quest’altro angolo è la Virtù militare, la quale in altro modo non ho meglio saputa dimostrare che farle fra i piedi un correggiuolo pien d’oro ne’carboni di fuoco, che in quel cimento s’affina.”

42. Dante, Purgatorio 26.148; Vellutello 1544, 26.139-148; Petrarch 1960, 433; Dolce 1960, 156; Ripa 1603, 492.

43. VBR, 194; Wilson 1553, 16r; Turler 1575, n.p. Turler’s work was first published in Latin in 1574 with the title De peregrinatione et agro Neapolitano. Stagl 1995, 60–70.

44. Tucker 2003; Horace 1926, 262–64; Cicero 1914, 450–51: “A quibus propter discendi cupiditatem videmus ultimas terras esse peragratas.” Quintilian 1921, 419–20.

45. Dante 1996, 94–99: “né dolcezza di filgio, né la pieta / del vecchio padre, né ’l debito amore / lo qual dovea Penelopè far lieta, / vincer potero dentro a me l’ardore / ch’i ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto / e de li vizi umani e del valore / Considerate la vostra semenza: / fatti non foste a viver come bruti, / ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.” Landino 1999, Inferno 26.112-20: “Nè a vivere secondo la sensualità che niente altro appetiscie che chose terrene momentanee et corruptibili, ma per exercitarsi nelle virtù et per investigare el vero.” On Petrarch’s conception of travel and geographic knowledge, see Petrarch 2002.

46. VBR, 136.

47. Sacchetti 1938, 183–84.

48. VBR, 138; Burckhardt 1878, 1: 187; Ghiberti 1998, 91: “Lo amaestrato di tutte le cose solo è [né] pellegrino nelli altrui luoghi e, perdute le cose familiari e necessarie, bisognoso d’amici et essere in ogni città cittadino, alli difficili casi della fortuna sanza paura potere dispregiare; e quello il quale non dalli presidii ma in inferma vita essere confitto.” Cf. Vitruvius 1999, 75.

49. Starn 1982; Shaw 2000; VBR, 182–83, 150–56.

50. VBR, 182–83.

51. Baxandall 1971, 60; VBR, 112–13; Dwyer 1998, 283; Bacon 1885, 29: “We see likewise, the Scripture called Envy, An Evill Eye: And the Astrologers, call the evill Influences of the Starrs, Evill Aspects.”

52. VBR, 115, 135, 149.

53. VBR, 128 (my emphasis).

54. Leone di Castris 2006, 65–113, 239. The document, relevant to the time span between 1 September 1332 and 31 August 1333, records that Giotto and the notary Amico de Viczinis had an argument with Giovanni da Pozzuoli: “Iohannes de Putheolo litigat cum noario Amico [de Viczinis] et magistro Iotto pictore de Florentia.”

55. VBR, 125–26, 130–31, 136, 151: “Costui fu dipintore e chiamossi Pietro Cavallini Romano, perfettissimo maestro di musaico, la quale arte insieme con la pittura apprese da Giotto nel lavorare che aveva fatto con essolui nella nave del musaico di San Pietro, e fu il primo che dopo lui illuminasse questa arte.” VBR, 161, 137, 148–49, 177.

56. VBR, 185–86, 191. Seminare also occurs as a term in Vasari’s description of Giulio Romano, who is described as sowing the seeds of style in Mantua and Lombardy. VG, 2: 558: “Quanto agl’artefici delle nostre arti mantoani, oltre quello che se n’e detto insino a Giulio Romano, dico che egli seminò in guisa la sua virtù in Mantoa e per tutta Lombardia.”

57. See Marmocchini 1546, 373: “Quello che semina buono seme, è il figliuolo de l’huomo. Et il campo è il mondo.”

CHAPTER 4

1. VDV, 1: 245. Cf. VT, 223. Borghini mentions the index for the 1550 edition in a letter to Vasari, dated 16 January 1550. See Frey 1930, 1: 254; Rubin 1995, 111, 220–23. On the utility of early modern indices, see Blair 2000, 79–80, 88n37; Blair 2003; Blair 2010.

2. Frey 1930, 2: 98: “Voi vorrej vedessi haver di Genova, Venetia, Napoli, Milano et in somma di queste citta principali piu numero di cose.” Cicero 1948, 244–45; Biondo 2005, 4–5. Lionardi 1970, 222–23: “si consideranno due cose, l’una il generante, l’altra il luogo ove alcuno sia generato. In quanto al luogo si verrà a considerare il sito e la natura e qualità di questo e l’origine, potenza, nobilità e costumi di coloro che vi abitano.” On Vasari’s notion of history and Lionardi’s dialogue, see Sohm 2000.

3. Pliny, Natural History 14.70; Alamanni 1546, 14: “Fatto questo ciascun cercando vada / Qual han le piante sue patria piu chara, / Qual haggian qualità, chi brame il Sole, / Chi cerchi l’Aquilon, chi voglia humore, / Chi l’arido terren, chi valle, o monte, / Chi goda in compagnia, chi viva sola.” See Ogilvie 2006, 157–59.

4. VT, 122–23, 281, 425, 284, 442–43.

5. VT, 239.

6. Warnke 1993, 105–6; VT, 420, 204–5. On Vasari’s letter, see Frey 1930, 1: 47; Rubin 1995, 62.

7. Waley 1988, 88–116; Morisani 1953; Baxandall 1971; Wohl 1993; Biondo 1549, 8v–9r: “dico che’l bon pittore non altrimente si debbe honorare che un savio Cittadino, perciochè gli è di tanto alla città di quanto gli è il detto cittadino.”

8. Rubin 2007; Hind 1938–48, 1: 82; Mellini 1566, 13.

9. Cennini 1960, 15; VT, 240; Lionardi 1970, 223: “L’educazione vien poi, la quale tanto è piu difficile, quanto quella è facile, perciò il nudrire e ben allevare una pianta o altra cosa della natura prodotta è gran fatica.”

10. VT, 240–41; VG, 1: 254. Vasari’s silence may reflect uncertainty, given that he conflates the Florentine Niccolò di Pietro Lamberti, called il Pela, with the Aretine Niccolò di Luca Spinelli. See VBR, 222n2.

11. VDV, 1: 584; VG, 1: 508.

12. VBR, 406, 523, 470.

13. VT, 239–40: “Se già non volessimo noi dire che questi tali non dalla natura, ma da quello influsso celeste che gli vuol conducere al sommo, sono cavati degli infelici paesi loro e condotti ancora in que’ luoghi dove e’ possino comodamente farsi immortali. II che volendo condurre il cielo, adopera sì diverse vie che e’ non si può assegnarne regola, inducendo alcuni per via di amicizie o di parentadi, altri per esilii o per villanie fatteli da’ suoi medesimi, altri per la povertà e per infinite cagioni strane ad assentarsi da la patria.”

14. Locational influence also appears in Part I, when Vasari laments how il maligno influsso can place deserving works of art in obscure places so as to conceal an artist’s skills. VT, 217; Ficino 1989, 370–73; Means 2000.

15. VDV, 1: 584; VG, 1: 508. On the maniera moderna, see VBR, 214–15, 540–41.

16. Schudt 1930; Miedema 1996. Pier Paolo Vergerio describes Rome in a letter dated 1398: “In ruined cities—those which have been destroyed by some violent act, or those that have been gnawed away by old age—the air is not healthy.” See Christian 2010, 1. On relics and icons in Palladio’s guidebook Descritione de le chiese, stationi, indulgenze & reliquie de corpi sancti (1554), see Palladio 2006. On the map of Rome, attributed to Piero del Massaio, see Scaglia 1964; Laffitte 1987.

17. Dacos 2004, 17–30.

18. On the dangers of travel to Rome, see Parks 1954, 179–216. VDV, 1: 320; VDV, 1: 371. Bartuschat 2004; Manetti 1970; Battisti 1981, 14, 339–40; Saalman 1993.

19. VT, 299; VT, 492, 586; Waldman 2000; Geronimus 2006, 1–10. Crusca 1612, s.v. “astraere.” Cf. Dante’s assertion that “the noble soul, being to God rendered, withdraws itself from worldly things and worries.” Dante 1990, 4.28.5.

20. VT, 828, 833; Dolce 2000, 83–84.

21. VDV, 1: 330–31. VT, 299; Manetti 1970, 52–53; Payne 2011.

22. VDV, 1: 331. VT, 300; Bynum 1987; Bell 1987; Campanella 1925, 199.

23. VT, 330; Bugini 2010; Montaigne 1983.

24. Rowland 1994; Hunt 2006; Cutler 1995, 27.

25. VT, 300; Barkan 1999.

26. Charmasson 1980; Burnett 1996; VT, 291.

27. VDV, 1: 331–32. VT, 301.

28. Wittkower 1963. Manetti 1970, 50–52; Payne 2009.

29. VDV, 1: 248–49; VT, 227; Payne 1998; Dillon Bussi 1989, 189–92; VDV, 1: 332; VT, 301; Manetti 1970, 54–55; VT, 331, 231, 551.

30. Ogilvie 2006, 142, 189–99; Pauwels 1989; Payne 1999.

31. Ogilvie 2003a; Trachtenberg 1996; Klotz 1990.

32. Tagliaferri 1975, 25; Woolfson 1998, 6, 30; Giovanni da Nono’s Visio egidii regis Patavie (c. 1314–1318) describes the Basilica of Sant’ Antonio’s domes and sculptures and the saint’s tomb. Fabris 1939, 8–9; Pope-Hennessy 1993, 194–95; Savonarola 1901, 13; Collareta 1999; Kallab 1908, 354–57.

33. Ghironi 1988. In documents dated from 1444–54, Donatello is referred to as “Maistro Donatello da Firencie,” “Donatello da Fiorença,” or “Donato da Fiorenza.” See Sartori 1976, 87–94. Sartori 1976, 91: “Per oto colone con li suo capiteli per far uno altaro el dí del Santo per demonstrar el desegno de la pala over ancona ali forestieri ave maestro Donato, L. 14.” Discussed in Johnson 1994, 220. Savonarola 1902, 32–33: “Is enim eneus configuratus est super eneum equum sua cum magnitudine decorum apud angulum temple Antonii nostri occidentalem: veluti Cesar triumphans non parva cum magnificentia sedet.” VDV, 1: 370. Cf. VT, 343: “Per la qual cosa cercarono i Padovani con ogni via di farlo lor cittadino e con ogni sorte di carezze fermarlo.” A document dated 14 December 1448 lists honors and benefits accorded to skilled foreigners in Padua “for the profit of the city and with the highest honor.” Sartori 1961, 321.

34. VT, 334; Rubin 2006; Goffen 2001; Wang 2004; Nordmann 2006.

35. Murray 1972, n.p.: “Essendo la nostra Cipta in quattro parti principali separata con quattro belli Ponti lapidei sopra il regale fiume Arno: farò di questo Memoriale quattro divisioni: et in ciascheduno quartieri ponerò quelle picture si aspectono alle chiese et lochi di decto Quartieri: acciò non perda in tucto il tempo in questi giorni, che son venuto a rivedere la bella patria.” Kallab 1908, 166–71.

36. See Scardeone 1560, 57 who cites Cicero, De legibus 2.5: “Numquid duas habetis patrias, an est una illa patria communis? Nisi forte sapienti illi Catoni fuit patria non Roma sed Tusculum.” VDV, 1: 370; VT, 344; Pfisterer 2002.

37. Iser 1978, 183ff; Beilin and Reghitto 2001; Baldassin Molli 2000; Greenhalgh 1982, 132–47; Bergstein 2002; Pope-Hennessy 1993, 202–4; Sartori 1961, 327; Sartori 1976, 87–90. Bandinelli’s comments appear in a letter addressed to Cosimo I dated 7 December 1547. See Bottari 1822, 1: 70. Pope-Hennessy 1993, 339n17.

38. VT, 343.

39. VT, 341. Though Donatello is described as working for the Genoese patron in Florence, the arrival of a foreign patron on the scene might imply the spread of his reputation outside the city. See VT, 342, for Vasari’s description of Donatello’s monument, executed in collaboration with Michelozzo and dated 1425–33, for Cardinal Rainaldo Brancacci in Sant’ Angelo a Nilo, Naples. Esposito 2010; Eliason 2004; Butzek 1995; Watts 1995.

40. VT, 233, 350–51.

41. Rubin 1995, 321; VT, 290–91; Cochrane 1981, 361–81; Griggs 2007.

42. VT, 336, 343; Shearman 1992, 42–58.

43. VBR, 369–70; VT, 438; Sohm 2001, 103–5; Bettini 1931, 102–3.

44. VDV, 1: 434–35; VG, 1: 384, 484. The trope of sculptors destroying their own works can be traced back to the ancient sculptor Syllanion, who, according to Pliny (Natural History 34.19), smashed his pieces due to an “unrivalled devotion” to his craft. See Rubin 1995, 336.

45. Scardeone 1560, 374; VG, 1: 384; Corti and Hartt 1962, 165; Krahn 2001, 71; Meyer zur Capellen 1985, 16–18, 110–11; Bode et al. 1911, 12: “Cum ego Bartolommeo Bellan quondam Bellani aurificis sculptor de Padua iturus sim Constantinopolim, et volens in omnem mortis eventum res meas ordinatas relinquere.”

46. Krahn 1988, 116–65; Krahn 2001, 69–72; Avery 2009, 211–12, 146–61.

47. VT, 344: “Onde essendo per miracolo quivi tenuto e da ogni intelligente lodato, si deliberò di voler tornare a Fiorenza, dicendo che se più stato vi fosse, tutto quello che sapeva dimenticato s’averebbe, essendovi tanto lodato da ognuno, e che volentieri nella sua patria tornava per esser poi colà di continuo biasmato: il quale biasmo gli dava cagione di studio, e consequentemente di gloria maggiore.”

48. VBR, 530. Other examples include Donatello’s execution of a tomb for Sant’Angelo a Nilo in Naples (VBR, 319); Michelozzo sending works to Genoa (VBR, 318); Filarete and Antonio Rossellino sending works to France (VBR, 335, 412); Gherardo’s shipment of illuminated manuscripts to Corvinus’ court (VBR, 472); Benedetto da Maiano’s sending works to both Italian and foreign princes (VBR, 488). On art exports, see Goldthwaithe 1993; De Marchi and Van Miegroet 2006. Yet another way in which Florence is portrayed as an artistic center is Vasari’s representation of the city as a destination for antiques exported from Rome. See VBR, 323.

49. VT, 356; VG, 1: 351; Driscoll 1964; Baxandall 1964; Hersey 1969; De Rose 2001, 225–30. A notarial document dated 18 August 1490 records that Francesco di Filippo da Settignano, Ziattino de Benozzis da Settignano, and Domenico de Felice da Firenze promised to adorn the residence of Angelo Como with four windows of pietra busica, six doors of pietra azzura, a fireplace, and three windows in the palace’s interior. Transcribed in Capasso 1888, 42–44.

50. VT, 355–56; VBR, 331; VG, 1: 352.

51. VT, 505.

52. VDV, 1: 55; Dunlop 2013; VT, 406–7.

53. VBR, 227; VDV, 1: 269. VT, 244; Nemeth 2006; Vasari 1998, 2: 151.

54. VT, 450, 394; Campbell and Chong 2005; Meyer zur Capellen 1985, 121; Newton 1998.

55. VT, 85; VG, 1: 51–52; Wright 1980; Dunkerton et al. 1991, 193–204; Nuttall 2004. VT, 381–82. On odor of oil paints, see VG, 1: 376. Long 2001, 89; Paracelsus 1996, 24. Paracelsus’s remarks occur in his “Defensiones” (1538) in which he advocates an itinerant way of life. Cited and discussed in Long 2001, 163.

56. VDV, 1: 427; Barbera 2006; Davis 2010; Long 2001, 243–46.

57. VT, 384, 414, 427.

58. Von Einem 1962; VT, 412–13; Horster 1980, 14; Spencer 1991, 4; Rubin 1995, 177; Witcombe 2008, 293–301.

59. VT, 421: “Chi camina con le fatiche a la strada della virtú, ancora che ella sia (come e’ dicono) e sassosa e piena di spine, a la fine della salita si ritruova pur finalmente in un largo piano, con tutte le bramate felicità. E nel riguardare a basso, veggendo i cattivi passi con periglio fatti da lui, ringrazia Dio che a salvamento ve lo ha condotto, e con grandissimo contento suo benedice quelle fatiche che già tanto gli rincrescevano. E cosí ristorando i passati affanni con la letizia del bene presente, senza fatica pur si affatica per far conoscere a chi lo guarda come i caldi, i geli, i sudori, la fame, la sete e gli incomodi che si patiscono per acquistare la virtú, liberano altrui la povertà e lo conducono a quel sicuro e tranquillo stato, dove con tanto contento suo lo affaticato Benozzo si riposò.”

60. Petrarch 1975, 172–80; Atwill 1998, 48–69; Cennini 1859, 17; Leonardo 1974, 54, 124, 151; Sohm 1991.

61. DiFuria 2010; Woodall 1989. The epithet of Viator may allude to Pèlerin’s travels as well as to his surname (Pèlerin, Peregrinus). Pèlerin also demonstrates his knowledge of painters “decorans France, Almaigne et Italie” in a poem found on the title page of the second edition of the De artificiali perspectiva (1509). Brion-Guerry 1962; Montaiglon 1861, 11–19; Weddigen 2003.

62. Klauser 1963; Ladner 1967; Petrarch 2002; Tucker 2003.

63. Salomon 1936; Ladner 1967, 251–52; Harms 1970; Schmeiser 2003; Tucker 2003, 72ff; Adams 2000; Ripa 1593, 69.

64. VT, 124–25, 225–26, 284, 555. Borghini 1584, 196: “Perciò doverebbe ogni scultore e pittore che in gioventù ha studiato e nell’età virile ha con laude operato, nella vecchiezza ritirarsi dal fare opere publiche e volger l’animo a disegni celesti e lasciare i terreni, conciosiacosaché tutte l’azzioni umane salgano insino a un certo segno, al quale essendo l’uomo arrivato, quasi come alla cima d’un monte, gli conviene, volendo più avanti passare, scendere in basso.”

65. VT, 556–57, 20, 948, 582–83; Spagnolo 2005b.

66. Gozzoli employed a technique combining fresco and tempera, thus rendering his works in the Camposanto more vulnerable to damage. By the seventeenth century the dire condition of these frescoes was already recognized, and in 1812 Carlo Lasinio, curator of the Camposanto, published his Pitture a Fresco del Campo Santo di Pisa to record the frescoes’ debilitated state. See Ahl 1996, 157–98; Caleca et al. 1979; Borsook 1980.

67. VT, 421–23. The epigram is cited in toto in Vasari’s Life of Gozzoli (VG, 1: 407.) For other epigrams appended to the frescoes, see Ahl 1996, 244. Gozzoli’s contemporary, Michelangelo di Cristofano da Volterra, wrote a lengthy poem praising the frescoes, emphasizing in particular their liveliness. Supino 1896, 310–15.

68. Alberti 1966, 74–75. Varietà becomes a more prescriptive term in that Alberti elaborates upon variety in hues and figural expressions. See Baxandall 1971, 87–96, 134–37, and 1988, 133–35.

69. VT, 557: “la copia de’ belli abiti, la varietà di tante bizzarrie, la vaghezza de’ colori, la universalità ne’ casamenti, e la lontananza e varietà ne’ paesi.”

70. VG, 1: 493: “Onde fu maravigliosa cosa a vedere gli strani capricci che egli espresse nella pittura; e che è più, non lavorò mai opera alcuna nella quale delle cose antiche di Roma con gran studio non si servisse, in vasi, calzari, trofei, bandiere, cimieri, ornamenti di tempii, abbigliamenti di portature da capo, strane fogge da dosso, armature, scimitarre, spade, toghe, manti, et altre tante cose diverse e belle, che grandissimo e sempiterno obligo se gli debbe per avere egli in questa parte accresciuta bellezza e ornamenti all’arte.”

71. Cecci 1997; Rubin 2008; Shoemaker 1997. A leitmotif in Part II is the relative paucity of antiquities in Florence and correspondingly, the need for artists to study them in Rome or to transport them from elsewhere. It was due to Donatello’s intervention, Vasari recounts, that Cosimo de’ Medici began assembling his collection of antique objects. VT, 347. On small-scale objects in late Medicean collections, see Conticelli 2007. For a discussion of the leaf from Vasari’s book of drawings, see Goldner and Bambach 1997, 298–305.

72. VBR, 500; Shoemaker 1975; Goldner and Bambach 1997.

73. Vasari manipulates events to stress the Roman pedigree of Filippino’s varietà in the Strozzi Chapel. Documents show that Filippino was engaged in the Strozzi Chapel by 21 April 1487, more than a year before he received the commission for the Carafa Chapel on 26 August 1488. As though to assert the artist’s familiarity with antiquity, Vasari stresses Filippino’s presence in Rome before his return to Florence to execute the Strozzi Chapel. See Borsook 1970; Sale 1976, 148–64; VT, 518.

74. Le Mollé 1988, 153–208; Giovio 1956, 280: “e prometta la penna mia al clarissimo signor Hernando Cortese, se si degnara farmi informazione de sue stupende vittore; né altro voglio se non una qualche cosa bizarre de idolo di Temistitan per ornarne il mio Museo, col suo ritratto.” Cited in Markey 2008, 101. On Giovio and Vasari, see VG, 2: 996; Zimmerman 1995, 214–15; Sohm 2001. Ramusio describes these images in relation to Gonzalo Ferdinando d’Oviedo’s Sommario della naturale e generale istoria del’Indie occidentali. Ramusio 1985, 5: 1709: “la forma e modo come essi con alcune imagini ieroglifice descrivono le loro istorie e notano le memorie dei loro re del Messico, che sono certe figure d’animali, flori e uomini fatti in diversi atti e modi: sí come s’è veduto in quei libri che ‘l detto signor Gonzalo mandò a donare a V.E. e a me, gli anni passati, pieni di varie figure e bizzarrie.” See Heikamp 1972, 9: on the codex’s place in the collections of Pope Clement VII. On the provenance of the Codex Zouche-Nuttall, most likely sent to Emperor Charles V and uncovered in the monastery of San Marco in 1854, see Troike 1987. As recounted in his Historiarum sui temporis (1530), Paolo Giovio possessed a Mexican codex which he described as made of tiger skin. See Giovio 1556, 394; Markey 2008, 100.

75. Blair 2003; Blair 2010; Ames-Lewis 2000b, 71–76, 93–94.

76. VG, 1: 514. On the lack of variety in Perugino’s style, see Sohm 2001, 93–95. VG, 1: 499: “dipinse una loggia tutta di paesi, e vi ritrasse Roma, Milano, Genova, Fiorenza, Vinezia, e Napoli alla maniera de’ Fiaminghi, che come cosa insino allora non più usata piacquero assai.” VG, 1: 528: “Nella Madonna d’Orvieto, chiesa principale, finì di sua mano la cappella che già vi aveva cominciato fra’ Giovanni da Fiesole, nella quale fece tutte le storie della fine del mondo con biz[z]arra e capric[c]iosa invenzione.”

CHAPTER 5

1. VT, 555–60; Sohm 2001; Vasari 2004, 109–20, 164–73.

2. Davidson 1985; Cantelli 2006; Dacos 2008. Vasari employs the term strano to indicate the foreign when describing Rosso’s Città di Castello altarpiece: “a Christ ascending venerated by four figures, and moors, gypsies and the foreign [strane] things of the world.” VT, 802.

3. Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1882–85, 1: 4–5; Henry and Plazzotta 2004, 61n10.

4. VT, 637; Hiller von Gaertringen 2006; Henry and Plazzotta 2004, 9; Shearman 2003, 2: 1029; Ferino-Pagden 1981; Henry 2004.

5. VG, 2: 66; Milanesi 1854, 10–12; Henry and Plazzotta 2004, 23; VT, 638.

6. VT, 285, 506, 361, 734–35, 850, 959; Cellini 1973, 21.

7. VT, 640; VT, 958; Wilde 1944; Gould 1966; Hirst 1986; Keizer 2011.

8. VT, 648–49; Spagnolo 2010, 281.

9. VDV, 1: 742; VG, 2: 85.

10. Baxandall 1971, 87–96, 134–37; VG, 2: 85; Loh 2007, 17–52.

11. VG, 2: 84. Another list of subjects that are depicted in painting appears in the “Preface to the Entire Work” (VT, 17–18) but here the discussion occurs in the context of the para-gone between painting and sculpture. In the Life of Raphael the list relates to a specific artist’s capacity and skill. On variety in art literary texts, see Gombrich 1960, Baxandall 1971, Summers 1981, Goldstein 1991, Williams 1997, van Eck 2007. On varietas in Quintilian, see 12: 10, 69–72, 11: 3, 43–52, 9: 4, 138–41; 12: 10, 1–9. Varietas is a point of discussion in early modern treatises, both in the Latin (Erasmus’s De duplici copia verborum ac rerum [1512]) and the vernacular (Du Bellay’s Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Française [1549]). See Bizer 1995. On the reception of the anecdote featuring Zeuxis and the maidens of Croton, see Lee 1940, 204n40; Panofsky 1968; Baxandall 1971, 35ff; Barkan 2000; Kliemann 2006; Mansfield 2007. As recounted in his Letter to Lucilius, Seneca’s metaphor of the bee rounding the garden for flowers to make honey which is wholly unlike any single source is also pertinent. See Seneca 1970, 227–29; Panofsky 1968, 15, 49, 58, 157, 161, 189n. Raphael’s evocation of a Zeuxisian method of assemblage occurs in reference to his Galatea: although he wishes that he would be able to choose from the best, the lack of appropriate models caused him to rely on a mental idea. See Bottari 1822, 116–17; Shearman 2003, 1: 734–41.

12. Pliny 1949, 1: Preface, 13. See Pliny, Natural History, 7.43 (“varietatis exempla mirabilia bis proscriptus”), 7.50 (“de varietate nascendi”), 7.51 (“in morbis exempla varia”), 15.17 (“de insitorum varietate et fulgurum piatione”), 16. 35 (“quibus foliorum varii colores”), 35.47–58 (“terrae varietates”). On the Roman notion of varietas, see Beagon 1992, 89–91; 2003, 84–85. On the reception of Pliny in the Renaissance, see McHam 2013. Crusca 1612, s.v. “varietà”: “Astratto di vario, diversità. Latin. varietas, diversitas.” Cf. ibid., s.v. “diversità”: “astratto di diverso, varietà, differenzia, distinzione. Lat. diversitas, differentia, discrimen.” Park 1997; Polo 1938, 73; Formisano 1992, 52. Ramusio, 5: 460: “Percioché quale ingegno mortale potrà comprendere tanta diversità di lingue, di abiti, di costumi, che nelle genti di queste Indie si veggono? Chi potrà esplicare la tanta varietà d’animali, cosí domestici come salvatichi?”

13. Findlen 1994, 155–92; Ley 1968, 158; Jeanneret 1997, 195; VG, 2: 85–86: “cioè un modo mezzano di fare, così nel disegno come nel colorito; e mescolando col detto modo alcuni altri scelti delle cose migliori d’altri maestri, fece di molte maniere una sola, che fu poi sempre tenuta sua propria, la quale fu e sarà sempre stimata dagl’artefici infinitamente.”

14. In the vernacular rendering of the twelfth-century Tuscan poet, Arrigo da Settimello’s elegy upon Fortune (Arrighetto ovvero Trattato contro all’avversità della fortuna), the speaker laments his inability to sleep as he tosses and turns, never to know a “modo mezzano.” Settimello 1929, 222: “Io / mi volgo e rivolgo, e il letto mio bene morbido con agute / spine pugne i tristi membri. Ora è il primaccio troppo alto / ora è troppo basso; giammai non sa avere modo mezzano.” Such a middle way did not always connote a desirable situation. Machiavelli, in his Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, discusses the possible models for an ideal republic, declaring, “I believe it to be necessary to follow Roman order, and not that of other republics, because I believe one cannot find a modo mezzo between one and the other.” Machiavelli 1531, 49. The Paduan philosopher Sperone Speroni employed the expression in a different context in his Dialogo della rettorica, published in 1542 in Venice along with his better known Dialogo delle lingue. There the speaker, Antonio Brocardo, explains that the nature of man “is in between the animals and the Intelligences, and therefore he knows himself in a modo mezzano between the earthly knowledge that he has of the animals, and the faith, with which he adores God.” Speroni 1912, 136. Modo mezzano also designated performative practices, as revealed in a setting for a song performed in conjunction with the play Alessandro, held at the palace of the Marchese del Vasto in Naples in 1558. The singer and composer Sciopione de Palla’s canzone featuring the character of Cleopatra instructed the performer to execute the piece “con un modo, mezzo tra cantare e recitare,” perhaps the first known documented instance of the singing style arioso. Pèrcopo 1914, as cited in Brown 1981.

15. Chastel 1959, 498; Rubin 1995, 397; Brassart 2000, 165; Winterbottom 1989; Rebhorn 2000, 87, 120ff; Norton 1984, 39–47. L’institvtioni oratorie di Marco Fabio Qvintiliano (Venice: Appresso Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1566), 4V: “che anche in ciò ho voluto seguire il giudicio di quei medesimi, che m’hanno indotto a far questa fatica, tenendo una strada, che non passa a pieno per li confini della opinion mia.” As cited in Pon 2004, 35; 175n103.

16. VT, 697–98, 855, 825, 828, 827.

17. VT, 690, 733, 892–93, 874.

18. VT, 699; Sohm 2001, 187, who demonstrates that pellegrino in Agostino Mascardi’s treatise Dell’arte istorica (1636) refers to style as foreign, i.e., different from all others and therefore one’s own. Mascardi compares style to an indescribable quality one perceives upon hearing a foreigner speak (un non so che di pellegrino). VT, 699.

19. VT, 555.

20. VG, 2: 86: “e mescolando col detto modo alcuni altri scelti delle cose migliori d’altri maestri, fece di molte maniere una sola, che fu poi sempre tenuta sua propria, la quale fu e sarà sempre stimata dagl’artefici infinitamente.”

21. Dante 1996, 36; Ramusio 1978–88, 1: 29, 2: 525, 5: 474.

22. VG, 2: 78, 85–86; Fiore 2007; Kleinbub 2011, 171n75; Pon 2004.

23. VG, 2: 484–85; Smith 1974; Costamagna 1994, 168–76; Fiore 2007, 302–3; Gregory 2009.

24. VG, 2: 485–86.

25. VT, 106, 537.

26. VG, 2: 86: “E se Raffaello si fusse in questa sua detta maniera fermato, né avesse cercato di aggrandirla e variarla per mostrare che egli intendeva gl’ignudi così bene come Michelagnolo, non si sarebbe tolto parte di quel buon nome che acquistato si aveva; perciò che gli ignudi che fece nella camera di torre Borgia, dove è l’incendio di Borgo Nuovo, ancora che siano buoni, non sono in tutto eccellenti” (my emphasis).

27. The notion of “perfection” stands in contrast to imperfetta, or “unfinished,” as when Vasari states that Bramante’s designs for the loggia and stairs in the Vatican Palace remained imperfetta upon the architect’s death. VT, 664–65.

28. VT, 975; VG, 2: 747–48; VT, 984; Barnes 1998; Schlitt 2005; VG, 2: 744.

29. VG, 2: 746, 774.

30. VT, 953–54.

31. VG, 2: 720–21; Beck 1991; Klebanoff 1994. On pronunciation as a marker of regional identity, see Doni 1928, 52: “quando mettano su’ lor libri tradotti in lingua volgare, a dire ‘tradotto in lingua italiana,’ perché ci darebbono un gran carico, se dicessero ‘in lingua toscana’ o ‘fiorentina’; perché coloro che gli leggessero, crederebbono che qua a Fiorenza si parlassi cosí e scrivessi, onde noi staremmo male.”

32. Wallace 2001; Hatfield 2003.

33. VT, 674; VG, 2: 90; VDV, 1: 749.

34. Goldthwaite 1993; Kent 2000.

35. VG, 2: 716; VT, 988–89; VG, 2: 716; Emison 2004; Lippincott 1989; Briggs 1995. Along with that of Mantegna, Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Titian, Michelangelo’s horoscope was published in Luca Gaurico’s Tractatus Astrologicus (Venice, 1552). Ragionieri 2008, 94.

36. Helas 2007; Ragionieri 2008, 92–93; VG, 2: 769.

37. VT, 259. Cf. Ghiberti 1998, 92. Mode 1972; VT, 279–80, 375.

38. Parker 1996; VT, 697. Vasari employs appetito to refer specifically to an artist’s lust for women in the biographies of Fra Filippo Lippi (VT, 396; 402) and Andrea del Sarto (VT, 733). See also Britton 2008; Pfisterer 2008. On mal’aria in Rome in later centuries, see Wrigely 2013.

39. VT, 896, 698–99. VG, 2: 112; VT, 699.

40. VG, 2: 91, 727; Michelangelo Buonarroti, 3: 417–18: “Non di meno, considerato il pericolo che è della mutazion de l’aere per ogni luogo di questa stagione, e molto più dall’una sproporzionata a l’altra, come sarebbe dal vostro sottile a questo grosso, non solamente ve exorto, ma pregovi a non vi mover di costà per il mese di agosto, accioché ne l’intrata di settembre potiate con più sigurezza della sanità vostra porvi in camino.” VG, 2: 983.

41. VT, 604–5: “E perché non gli riuscí molto il far bene in quella aria, come aveva fatto nella fiorentina, atteso che fra le antiche e moderne opere che vide, et in tanta copia, stordí di maniera che grandemente scemò la virtú e la eccellenza che gli pareva avere, deliberò di partirsi.”

42. Fischer 1989, 1990.

43. VG, 2: 207; Crusca 1612, s.v. “stordire” on connotations of bodily assault: “Sbalordíre, rimanere attonito, o per romore, o per colpo, che t’ habbia rintronato il capo.” As noted in the discussion of Donatello, Vasari’s use of stordire is not always negative; the word favorably describes the viewer’s astonishment upon beholding Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. VT, 985: “E mentre che si guardano le fatiche dell’opra sua, i sensi si stordiscono.” On Fra Bartolommeo’s convalescence, see Libro Debitori e Creditori dell’Ospizio di S.M. Maddelena in Pian di Mugnone, 112r as cited in Marchese 1878–79, 2: 610–11: “Ricordo oggi X di luglio 1514 si finì di fare dipignere la Madonna della cappella del monte, et questa apiè della scala del Convento per Frate Bartholomeo nostro pictore, per suo spasso essendo qui a ricreatione et per sublevarsi dalla sua intermità, con dua sua discipuli, e quali dipinsono quell’historie de’ Sancti Padri.” This document led to the speculation that Fra Bartolommeo fell ill in Rome. See Scott 1881, 49: “His reason for leaving it imperfect was that of ill-health, the air of Rome not agreeing with him. It seems he brought home malaria, which never entirely left his system, the low fever returning every year, and being only mitigated by a change to mountain air.”

44. Borgo 1987; Baldini 1992, 270ff. Upon his return to Florence, Fra Bartolommeo demonstrates he has recovered to depict the human figure by executing a Saint Sebastian, whose beauty induces women to sin upon seeing it. See VT, 605.

45. VT, 906. In contrast to Vasari’s depiction of Perino’s family as indigent, archival documentation indicates the artist’s family belonged to a dynasty of apothecaries of some financial and social standing, with a shop located on the via degli Speziali, near the Mercato Vecchio. Perino himself was born not in Florence, but in Carmignano, to which his family had escaped due to the plague. See Cecchi 2001, 39; VBR, 849. On Francesco Barbaro’s treatise and breastfeeding practices, see Grieco 1991, 21–28; VBR, 611.

46. VT, 909, 918; Lingo 2008, 125–42.

47. VT, 910–11; Parma 2001, 259.

48. VT, 914–19; Wolk-Simon 2002, 13–18; Cecchi and Natali 1996, 266–67.

49. Schudt 1930; von Schlosser 1956, 209–23; Murray 1972; Marshall 2002; Rossetti 2000; Corsi and Ragioneri 2004; Miedema 2003; Accame 2004; Frangenberg 1994; Zorach 2008. In his L’antichità di Roma (Rome: Vincenzo Lucrino, 1554) Palladio mentions that the composition of his work drew upon several previously composed texts, among them a mistake-ridden Le cose maravigliose di Roma, and classical authors as well as his direct experience of the city, in particular his own hands used to take measurements: “Ne mi son contentato di questo solo, che ancho ho voluto vedere, et con le mie proprie mani misurare minutamente il tutto.”

50. VT, 920. On Castigilione’s comments, see Pierantonio Serassi, ed., Delle Esenzioni della Famiglia di Castiglione (Mantua, 1780), 43, as cited in Ady 1908, 182. Cellini 2002, 42–48.

51. VT, 920–22. For a reading of this passage that focuses on Perino’s rapport with the Florentine tradition, see Cecchi, Natali, and Sisi 1996, 44–45.

52. Vespasiano 1970, 50: “i dua cardinali si partirono dalla sua Sanctità, acompagnati alle case loro da tutti e’ cardinali et ambasciadori v’erano, con quegli medesimi che gli avevano accompagnati a l’intrare in Roma.” Of the dignitaries attending the nuptials between Francesco de’ Medici and his consort Bianca Cappello, Gualterotti writes: “Erano gl’Oratori il Clarissimo Signor Giovanni Micheli e ‘l Clarissimo Signor Antonio Tiepolo, accompagnati da molti e molti di quei Signori Clarissimi.” Gualterotti 1579, 7. Of Donatello’s funeral, Vasari writes: “gli fecero esequie onoratissime nella predetta chiesa, accompagnandolo tutti i pittori, gli architetti, gli scultori, gli orefici e quasi tutto il popolo di quella città.” VT, 349. Michelozzo is “accompag-nato da’ suoi più cari a la sepoltura, ebbe onorate esequie e grandissimo onore per le sustanzie ch’aveva lasciate.” Ibid., 354. Likewise, Giuliano da Maiano is honored by the King of Naples at his death by fifty men who accompany him to his tomb. Ibid., 356. Desiderio da Settignano was also “da’ parenti e da molti amici accompagnato nella chiesa de’ Servi, continuandosi per molto tempo alla sepoltura sua di mettersi infiniti epigrammi e sonetti.” Ibid., 436. On Michelangelo’s funeral as an event serving to unite the various factions making up the Florentine Academy, see Wittkower and Wittkower 1964; Goldstein 1975; Wazbinski 1987; Barzman 2000; Cole 2000; Ruffini 2004; Payne 2006.

53. VT, 684; VG, 2: 98, 280.

54. VDV, 2: 164. VT, 921: “e così ragionando insieme d’una cosa in altra, pervennero, guardando l’opere e vecchie e moderne per le chiese, in quella del Carmine per veder la cappella di Masaccio dove guardando ognuno fisamente, e moltiplicando in varii ragionamenti in lode di quel maestro, e che egli avesse avuto tanto di giudizio che egli in quel tempo, non vedendo altro che l’opere di Giotto, avesse lavorato con una maniera sì moderna nel disegno, nella invenzione e nel colorito, che egli avesse avuto forza di mostrare, nella facilità di quella maniera, la difficultà di questa arte.”

55. De Certeau 2002, 118ff; VT, 921.

56. The proverbial elephant in the room is Michelangelo’s absence from Florence, a circumstance that did not go unnoticed by Vasari’s contemporaries. At one point in Doni’s I marmi, a native Florentine and a foreign visitor tour the Medici Chapel. After appreciating Michelangelo’s sculptures, the visitor mocks the native Florentine about the absence of the city’s eminent citizens, both dead and alive, asking, “Il vostro Dante, dove è? Il vostro Petrarca? Il Boccaccio come si sta? . . . dove Michel Angelo?” See Doni 1928, 164. Cited in Pon 1996, 1015.

57. Perino’s rendition of the story of the Ten Thousand Martyrs can be viewed in light of the version related by Petrus de Natalibus in his Catalogus sanctorum (1493). See Merritt 1963; Wolk-Simon 1992.

58. VT, 923–24; Wolk-Simon 1992; Holm Monssen 1983.

59. Parma 2001, 115. A drawing by Pontormo which represents the Ten Thousand Martyrs in an arched format has led to the suggestion that Pontormo received the commission for the wall in San Salvatore di Camaldoli after Perino departed from Florence. See Merritt 1963; Merriman 1989; Wolk-Simon 1992, 74, 81n39; Parma 2001, 98.

60. VT, 924.

61. VDV, 2: 173–74; Deswarte-Rosa 2004; Sborgi 1976; Parma Armani 1976; Parma Armani 1986, 128–29.

62. VG, 2: 362; Quinci 2004. Giulio Bonasone’s engraving The Shipwreck of Aeneas done after the fresco (Bologna, Gabinetto Nazionale dei Disegni e delle Stampe, inv. 1709) conveys the appearance of the lost work in addition to the drawing of Triumphant Neptune (Oxford, Ashmolean Museum; inv. 1950.19). See Parma 2001, 208–11, on this and Perino’s emulation of designs after Michelangelo and Polidoro da Caravaggio. On the personal relevance of marine imagery for traveling artists and parallels between Neptune and Andrea Doria, see Boccardo 1989; Deswarte-Rosa 2004, 49. On Perino’s technique employed in the Palazzo Doria, see Wolk-Simon 1992; Parma Armani 1986, 150n68.

63. Dempsey 1991. VDV, 2: 1065; VG, 2: 1011; VT, 992: “non pensava io però da principio distender mai volume sì largo, od allontanarmi nella ampiezza di quel gran pelago.” Discussed in Rubin 1995, 106.

64. On the attribution of the drawing after Perino to Vasari and its place within sixteenth-century Florentine drawing practice, see Franklin 1995, 198. Compare Vasari’s observation in the prelude to Part III, which states that whereas in the past, artists took six years to execute one work, the artists of his own time, thanks to the achievements of his predecessors, can execute six paintings within the span of a single year. See VG, 2: iv, discussed in Williams 1995, 519. Vasari describes the feat of executing the hall within one hundred days throughout Part III, including in his autobiography. See VG, 2: 466, 543, 995. On the program of the fresco cycle, see Robertson 1985; Kliemann 1994; Cheney 1995; Grasso 2004. On Vasari’s urban depictions in the Palazzo Vecchio, see Gregg 2009. VDV, 2: 1057–58; VG, 2: 1005; VDV, 2: 1046; VG, 2: 998: “Nei quali disegni feci fra l’altre cose tutte le provincie e ‘luoghi dove io aveva lavorato, quasi come portassino tributi, per i guadagni che avea fatto con esso loro, a detta mia casa.” On the seated figure in the bay window and the landscape capricci in the Sala della Fortuna, see Cheney 2006, 36–37, 140–41.

65. VT, 421; VG, 2: 201 for the unfulfilled rewards of Polidoro da Caravaggio’s sweat due to the sack of Rome. Vasari describes the heat of August in the opening lines of his Ragionamenti: “Questo caldo vi debbe dar fastidio, come fa ancora a me, che non dormendo il giorno mi sono partito delle stanze di là per il caldo e sono venuto in queste vostre che voi avete dipinto, per passar tempo e vedere se ci è più fresco che in quelle di là.” See Draper 1973, 84. VDV, 2: 1059–60; VG, 2: 1007.

CHAPTER 6

1. Baxandall 1964; Baxandall 1971, 97–120; Cole 1995, 22, 45–65; Nicolini 1925, 158–67.

2. Nicolini 1925, 146n3; Schmitter 1997; Williamson 119. Cf. Michiel 1800, 77: “Sono ancora ivi opere de lacomo de Barberino Veneziano, che andò in Alemagna e Borgogna, e presa quella maniera, fece molte cose.” Fletcher 1981; Shearman 1972, 38, 138–40.

3. Pino 1960, 126–27, 136; Pardo 1984.

4. Cicogna 1862; Gengaro 1941; DR, 5–61; Bareggi 1988; Romei 1991; Terpening 1997; Neuschäfer 2004; Melczer 1980; Hochmann 2001.

5. Dolce’s reference to Titian as a “divine” artist predates Vasari’s Lives. See his dedicatory letter to Titian published in his paraphrases of Juvenale’s satires in Dolce 1538. Wright 1987; Nativel 2002. Note that the historiated initial depicting ball players appears in other works printed by Gabriel Giolita de’ Ferrari.

6. DR, 46–49; Rosand 1970; Freedberg 1980; Mendelsohn 1982; Puttfarken 1991; Jacobs 2000; Ruffini 2009; Soja 1989.

7. DR, 84.

8. Romanelli and Biadene 1999; Balistreri-Trincanato 2009; Kidwell 2004, 277; DR, 84.

9. Aretino 1957–60; Palladino 1981; Land 1986, 128–50; Land 1994; Freedman 1995; Busch 1999. Schlosser 1964, 244–45; DR, 220–24.

10. Bonora 1994; Concina 2002; Carrara 2002; Sansovino 1561, 31r; MacKenney 1987; Favaro 1987; Rosand 1982, 9ff. The vignette of figures discussing the visual arts bears similarities to Vasari’s anecdote in his own biography about a most likely fictional banquet in the Farnese Palace in 1546. See Sohm 2001. On Vasari’s dealings with Aretino, see Rubin 1995, 110, 129, 179.

11. In Francesco Sansovino’s Delle cose notabili, the Venetian speaker describes the council as “la base di questo Stato, percioche in questo si creano tutti i magistrati, d’alcuni pochi in fuori, che son propri del Pregadi.” He also comments on the spectacle witnessed on the days when the council meets: “Et ogni volta vi si dispensano nove voi, ch’è bellissima cosa a vedere. Entrano finita ch’è la trottiera poco dopo mezzo dì, & stanno vi fino a 22 hore, poco piu o meno secondo ch’è di verno o di state, e per l’ordinario vi vanno da 1300 gentil’huomini.” Sansovino 1561, 45. On the deliberations of the council, see Cessi 1970–71. On the painted istorie in the Great Council Hall executed before and after the fire of 1577, see Brown 1988, 272–79; Martindale 1995; Wolters 2005; Wamsler 2009.

12. DR, 112–17.

13. Starn and Partridge 1992; Courtright 2003; Vasari 1923–40, 1: 722–23: “et perche tutta questa inventione nasciò tutta, dico, dagli alti concetti di Lei, insieme con la richezza delle materie, che non solo superaranno tutte le sale fatte dal Senato Vinitiano et di tutti e re et imperatori et papi che furon mai.” The letter is dated 3 March 1563 and addressed to Duke Cosimo de’ Medici in Pisa. See also Muccini 1990, 53–54.

14. Dolce 1565, 67v-68r.

15. Chambers, Pullan, and Fletcher 1992, 357–58; Fiaccadori 1994. Note that the so-called Pillars of Acre were spolia from the sixth-century church of St. Polyeuktos in Constantinople. On the historical, economic, social, and cultural relations between Byzantium and Venice and the presence of the Venetian Empire in former Byzantine territories, see Beck 1977; Furlan 1974; Geanakoplos 1962; Geanakoplos 1973; Layton 1994; Laiou 1982; Nicol 1988; Pincus 1992; Thiriet 1977; Tiepolo and Tonetti 2002. On the presence of Byzantine works of art in San Marco, see Demus 1960; Demus 1984, Deichmann 1981; Jacoff 1993; Hahnloser 1965–71. On Byzantine icons in Venetian churches, see Rizzi 1972; Rizzi 1980; Schulz 1998. On the reception of Byzantine icons in the Bellini workshop, see Goffen 1975 and Campbell and Chong 2005, 36ff.

16. Michiel 2000, 73r: “El quadretto della Passion col nostro Signor con tutti li misterii in più capitoli a figure piccole alla Greca, con el tempo delli Èvangelii Greco sotto, fu opera Constantinopolitana.” Michiel also describes a Byzantine illuminated text in the collection of M. Leonico Thomeo in Padua as “opera Constantinopolitana, dipinta già 500 anni.” Michiel 2000, 7v.

17. DR, 184–85, 112–13; Brubaker 2001; Chastel 1978; Merkel 1980; Zanetti 1797, 576.

18. Muir 1981; Brown 1988, 30–31, 272–79; Rosand 1997, 2–5; Tafuri 1989. Titian’s paintings for the Sala del Maggior Consiglio were destroyed along with the rest of the cycle by the fire that engulfed the Doge’s Palace in 1577. See Tietze-Conrat 1945; Wethey 1982; DR, 264–66.

19. DR, 116–17.

20. Hankins 1995; Bisaha 2006; Freedberg 1989, 54–81; Babinger 1960; Terpening 1997, 11; 265.

21. VT, 450; Campbell and Chong 2005, 78–79; Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, Cod. It. VII 125 (=7460), 372v: “e dal Signor turco chel fu fo ben visto, et fatto cavalier, et si feze dipinzer alchune cosse maxime una veniexia.” Cited in Brown 1988, 55, 247n26. Meyer zur Capellen 1985, 109: “un bon depentor che sapia retrazer.” Foresti 1490, 258v: “cuius quidem imaginem sibi simillimam cum imperator conspexisset: admiratus viri virtutem dixit illum cunctos pictores qui unquam fuere excedere.” Cited in Chong 2005, 108.

22. Sansovino 1581, 127v; Spinale 2003; Campbell and Chong 2005, 66ff.

23. Biondo 1549, 4v. Sansovino 1560, 73v; Scavizzi 1992, 149ff.

24. Sansovino 1560, 112v; Mango 1963; Bassett 2004. The French traveler Pierre Gilles noted in his 1561 travel account that the statue of Hercules in the Hippodrome was vandalized, since the Turks were “acerrimis hostibus statuarum.” Tinguely 2000, 130.

25. Terpening 1997, 147; DR, 186–91; Puppi and Franzolin 2010; Tostmann 2008.

26. Sansovino 1561, 18r; Sansovino 1581, 333; VG, 2: 810. Gerstenberg 2004, 273, 278, 279.

27. DR, 190–93.

28. VT, 20, 209; Rubin 1995, 179; Biondo 1549, 4v; Dolce 1960, 157, 161, 163.

29. Crusca 1612, s.v. “ornamento”: “Abbellimento, e si dice propriamente di cosa materiale, che s’ aggiunga intorno a che che si sia, per farla vaga, e bella.” Alberti 1988, 156. Discussed in Payne 1999, 74–75, 266n24, which also mentions passage 9.8: “The work ought to be constructed naked, and clothed later; let the ornament come last.” Alberti 1988, 312. Criticos 2004, 195; VT, 402; DR, 190–91.

30. DR, 94–95; Dolce 1545, iii; Varchi 2003, 1136; Elam 1993. Boccaccio also uses the expression in his redaction of Ovid’s tale of King Athamante of Thebes and his wife, Ino. Boccaccio 1547, 241r: “non solamente oltraggiava con parole Athamante c’havesse spogliato il reame di tesoro et d’ornamenti reali, ma ancho havea infiammato tutti i baroni del regno contra lui, come rovina-tore dello Stato.”

31. Ames-Lewis 2000, 141–76; Campbell 1997.

32. DR, 192–93, 332; Cox Rearick 1995, 248–51. Cited in Bodart 1998, 159. VT, 135, 343, 790.

33. Spear and Sohm 2010, 291; DR, 184–85; Mazza 2007; DR, 108–9. Cf. VT, 779.

34. DR, 250–51; Biondo 2005, 335; Pius II 2003, 367–77; Goethe 1992, 17–18; Wethey 1980; Becker 2004; Ferino-Pagden 1981; Beyer 2005. Aretino frames Titian’s journeys to court in terms of the honors bestowed by the emperor. Aretino 1957–60, no. 379: “Neither Apelles nor Praxiteles along with many others who sculpted or painted images or statues of a prince or king can boast of ever having received the award of gold and of gems that in part add to what your virtue receives from his Highest Majesty.” Dolce mentions Titian’s portraits of Charles V in his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. See Ovid 1553, iii: “perche il nostro moderno Apelle, e senza alcun pari M. Titiano, habbia due volte ritratto CESARE, rimangono perciò glialtri Dipintori di riddure il Cesareo aspetto ne i loro esempi.”

35. DR, 194–95.

36. Braghirolli 1881; DR, 330–38; Bodart 1998, 151–58; Bourne 2008; Hope 1992; Wethey 1975, 3: 43–47.

37. It seems the portrait of the empress that Titian had executed and sent to Charles V in October 1545 had been damaged en route to its destination. See DR, 250. On 6 September 1554, Philip II wrote to his ambassador serving in Venice, Francisco Vargas, that Titian’s painting of Adonis had arrived but “is disfigured by a crease running across the middle in such a way that it now needs an extensive restoration.” Cloulas 1967, 227. Cited in Chambers, Pullan, and Fletcher 1992, 421. Bal and Bryson 1991.

38. DR, 188–89. That Titian can grasp “the Idea of painting” from an unassuming particle of light may be a variation on the classical saying ex ungue leonem—the lion may be known from its claw. See Kris and Kurz 1979, 93; VG, 1: 43.

39. VT, 582; Spagnolo 2005b; VG, 2: 99, 229; VDV, 1: 619; VT, 557–58.

40. Rhein 2008, 311; DR, 188–89; Besso 1971, 115–17. Latin translations of Strabo published in Venice included: Strabonis Geographi Europ[a]e a Guarino Veronensi translat[a]e (1472); De situ orbis (1495); De situ orbis (1510); Strabōn peri geōgraphias (1516). On Strabo in sixteenth-century Italian cartography, see Fiorani 2005. Venetian editions of Attic Nights included: Auli Gelii Noctum [sic] Atticarum commentarii (1493); Auli Gellii Noctium Atticarum libri undeviginti (1515); Avli Gellii lvcvlentissimi scriptoris Noctes Atticae (1544). Gellius 1544, 16–17: “Hinc ait natum esse illud frequens apud Graecos adagium: ‘ou pantos andros es Korinthon esth’ho plous’ quod frustra iret Corinthum ad Laidem, qui non quiret dare, quod posceretur.” Strabo 1927, 189–91: “It was also on account of these women that the city was crowded with people and grew rich; for instance, the ship captains freely squandered their money, and hence the proverb, ‘Not for every man is the voyage to Corinth.’” Varchi 1841, 753: “Dicono anche che le cortigiane di Corinto, quando un va alla volta loro e che sia povero, non vogliono né udirlo ancora, ma se vi va un ricco, gli volgon le schiene di subito.” 1 Corinthians 6:9; 2 Corinthians 12:20–21; Kidwell 2004, 153–55.

41. Horace 1559, 228: “Ma a ciascun navigar non puo a Corintho. / Colui, che teme, che’l viaggio a voto / Non gli succeda, a non vi va, si stia. / Ma quei, che senza tema vi perviene, / non dimostra valor d’huom forte e saggio?” DR, 188–89. On Titian’s knowledge of the antique via Jacopo Bellini’s notebooks, Mantegna’s prints, and the Bembo and Grimani collections, see Brown 1996. On the Hellenistic bronze Falling Gaul as a source for Titian’s Martyrdom of St. Lawrence (Gesuiti, Venice), the Gloria (Prado, Madrid), and the Rape of Europa (Gardner Museum, Boston), see Perry 1980. On Titian’s recourse to non-Venetian visual sources, especially Fra Bartolommeo’s drawings, see Gilbert 1980; Borgo 1987.

42. Aretino 1999, 317; Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1878, 2, 47; Crowe and Cavalcaselle 1877, 113; Aretino 1957–60, no. 265. On the customs form, see Zapperi 1992, cited in Hochmann 2004, 328. On 19 March 1546, Titian was honored with Roman citizenship. Hochmann 2004, 325. DR, 110–11. In the 1568 edition of the Lives, Michelangelo offers a more tempered, if not critical, evaluation of the reclining nude due to its lack of disegno. VDV, 2: 813.

43. DR, 6; Gouwens 1998, 45–72; DR, 94–95: “Trovandosi adunque Titiano in Roma; & andando un giorno per quelle camere in compagnia di Bastiano, fiso col pensiero e con gliocchi in riguardar le Pitture di Rafaello, che da lui non erano stato piu vedute, giunto a quelle parte, dove havea rifatte le teste Bastiano, gli dimandò, chi era stato quel presontuoso & ignorante, che haveva imbrattati quei volti, non sapendo però, che Bastiano gli havesse riformati: ma veggendo solamente la sconcia differenza, che era dall’altre teste a quelle.”

44. Burchard 1963; DR, 194–95.

45. Chard and Langdon 1996, 5; DR, 190–91.

46. Rowland 2005; Strinati and Lindemann 2008. DR, 235.

47. VT, 896, 52–53, 72; Alessi 2007. On disforme and physical unsightliness, see Della Porta 1988, 485: “Lodovico Re di Pannonia e di Boemia, uscendo del ventre della madre venne così disforme, e senza li dovuti lineamenti del viso, che rassembrava più tosto parto di orso che di uomo.” See Dante 1827–29, Inferno 34.34-36: “la sua disformitade e turpitade mostra bene, che ogni male dee procedere da lui.”

48. VT, 899; Gardner von Teuffel 1984; Dunkerton, Foister, and Penny 1999, 60–63; Dunkerton and Howard 2009, 35.

49. Sohm 1995; Jacobs 2000. VT, 904; VG, 2: 347. On Lomazzo, see Sohm 1995, 786n70: “E questi modi di lavorare [tempera and oil], eccetto il fresco, sono propriamente da giovani effeminati, massime quello de l’oglio.” VT, 82, 895. Sebastiano himself wrote to Michelangelo of his appointment to the post of piombatore. See Michelangelo 1965–83, 3: 242; Hirst 1981b, 122n2.

50. DR, 94–95. The letter generally admonishes wandering. Horace asks in what grassy fields of Asia Claudius, the adopted son of Augustus, is waging war, an indirect criticism of his military campaigns. See Horace 1994, 125n2. Horace 1559, 179: “A ripigliarsi le involate penne, / Egli in quel punto, come la Cornice, / De’ furtivi color restando ignudo, / Non rimanesse altrui favola e giuoco.”

51. Bjørnstad 2008; Fiorenza 2008, 127–60. Other examples of Folly represented with feathers include a fourteenth-century mural in the Casa Minerbi, Ferrara. On the Stultitia, see Ladis 2004, 225. See Schwarz and Theis 2004, 1: 152–53, for the inscription in Giotto’s scene, “GEREN PENNAS FATUU’S” (“The fool dresses in feathers”). On the cycles of Virtues and Vices, see Jacobus 2008, 186–88. On Bonifacio Bembo’s tarot cards, see Moakley 1966. Given the chivalric connotations of falconry, it may seem surprising that Alciato’s woodcut satirizes the bird. However, falcons were also associated with sloth, gluttony, lust, and inconstancy. See Oggins 2004, 128ff. Alciato 1551, 82: “Lo stellato Ardiol dinota a pieno / La natura de’ servi, et il costume, / Che di servo, di vitii e inganni pieno, / Del medisimo uccel veste le piume. / Così l’huom vile e ignudo d’intelletto / Ardelione è da’ Poeti detto.” Cf. Alciato 1546, 13r. For further commentary, see Alciato 1996. Ripa 1593, 148; Cellini 1971, 634.

52. Danti 1960, 259.

53. Oldfield 1984; Humfrey 1997. On Lotto in Bergamo, see Mascherpa 1971; Galis 1980; Humfrey 1997, 43–86; Agazzi 1998; Colalucci 1998; Rossi 2001; Zanchi 2001; Milesi 2004. On Lotto’s career in the Marches, see Zampetti 1953; Dal Poggetto and Zampetti 1981; Mozzoni and Paoletti 1996.

54. DR, 152–55; Villa 2011, 124.

55. Humfrey 1997, 96. On Lotto’s altarpiece Assumption of the Virgin with Sts. Anthony Abbot and Louis of Toulouse (1506), painted for the Asolo Cathedral, see Dal Pozzolo 1995. On Lotto’s work in Recanati, see Castellana 2009. For the most recent literature on Lotto’s altarpiece of the Trinity (1523-24) painted for the Bergamask church Santissima Trinità (now displayed in Sant’Alessandro della Croce), see Villa 2011, 120. On the presence of northern painting in Venetian collections, as indicated by the inventories compiled by Marcantonio Michiel, see Humfrey 1997, 96; Aikema and Brown 1999, 82–91. Roskill proposes that in light of the Dialogo’s ambivalence toward Dürer, Dolce may have been censuring the “Germanic color scheme” of Lotto’s panel. Yet the criticism of Dürer is based on the artist’s impropriety in invention, and there is no mention of Dürer’s handling of tones, or of colors in general. See DR, 300; Morassi 1953, 290. Once inscribed on the frame were the names of the two patrons of the altarpiece, Giovanni Battista Donati and Giorgio de’ Mundis. The inscription explains the presence of St. John the Baptist and St. George in the act of slaying the dragon in the landscape below. A relic of St. Lucy’s tooth was conserved in the church of the Carmine, thus accounting for her inclusion in Lotto’s altarpiece. See Humfrey 1997, 96; Villa 2011, 124; Matthew 1988, 418–22. The Scuola dei Mercanti was known in the fourteenth century as Scuola di Santa Maria e San Cristoforo dei Mercanti, a designation indicating that St. Christopher was also considered the patron saint of the organization, apparent in the illuminated frontispiece to the confraternity’s mariegola (Venice, Archivio di Stato, Scuole piccolo e suffrage, B. 403, frontispiece). On Palladio’s involvement in the design of its headquarters attached to the church of Madonna dell’Orto, see Cooper 2005, 262–71.

56. VT, 855.

57. Rubin 1995, 11, 134–37, 322. In the Life of Gherardi, Vasari disparages the artistic scene in Venice, stating: “dicendo che non era bene fermarsi in Vinezia, dove non si tenea conto del disegno, né i pittori in quel luogo l’usavano, senzaché i pittori sono cagione che non vi s’attende alle fatiche dell’arti, e che era meglio tornare a Roma.” VG, 2: 464. Vasari does not mention the altarpiece, dated 1546, in San Giacomo dell’Orio that depicts the Virgin, Christ, and saints, including the titular saint of the church. See Matthew 1998, 432–36; Humfrey 1997, 152–53. VBR, 189. The metaphor of infinite works emphasizes Donatello’s close ties to the Martelli family and the geographic diffusion of Michelozzo’s works. See VBR, 318, 329.

58. Payne 2001; Kaufmann 2004, 19; Vergilius 2002, 347; VBR, 67–68, 363. Vasari’s statement that Luca della Robbia divulged the “secret” of producing terracotta sculpture only to his heirs indicates familial control of this technique. See VBR, 232, 432–33, Long 2001.

59. DR, 154–55; Varner 2004; Humfrey 1997, 156; Ridolfi 1648, 1: 126; Boschini 1660, 303. The designation of Lotto as Bergamasque held in the eighteenth century, as testified by Tassi’s Vite de’ Pittori, Scultori ed Architetti Bergamaschi (Bergamo, 1793), 1: 116. Discussed in Morassi 1953, 290.

60. DR, 92–93. Cf. VT, 786, for the source of Dolce’s information and the unequivocal association of the Dossi with Ferrara. See Franceschini 1995 for a document that indicates that at the time of Dosso Dossi’s birth, his father’s residence was in Mirandola, situated on the border between Manuta and Ferrara. See DR, 318–19, for the sources of comments on Pordenone. On the Sacripante, see Rhein 2008, 307n268. Dolce mentions Pordenone and Michelangelo in flattering terms in his dedication. Dolce 1536, Aiii: “che fin qui nessuno artefice o dipintore ha saputo spiegar quella grandezza & divinità nel disegno, che a nostri tempi è proprio & solo dono di Michele Agnolo: & pochi o quasi niun pare in Italia sanno trovare i pittori al tanto mirable, quanto gentile M. Giovan’ Antonio da Pordenone.” Cf. Dolce n.p. (Canto X): “ne tal forsene haria fatto a penello / Titian, che cosi ben il vivo espone: O chi appar di Michel, di Raphaello / Dimostra arte e disegno; il Pordenone.” DR, 182–83: “Né bisognava ch’egli fosse punto minore, avendo a correr con Tiziano nostro, dal quale rimase sempre di gran lunga lontano.”

61. In a letter dated 8 September 1506, Dürer famously wrote to Willibald Pirckheimer: “I have stopped the mouths of all the painters who used to say that I was good at engraving but, as to painting, I did not know how to handle my colours. Now everyone says that better colouring they have never seen.” Conway 1889, 55. On Dürer’s artistic activity in Venice, with emphasis on his painting technique, see Luber 2005. Erasmus of Rotterdam, De recta Latini Graecique sermonis pronuntiatione (Basel, 1528), 55: “Durerus quanqaum & alias admirandus, in monochromatis, hoc est nigris lineis, quid non exprimit?” As cited and discussed in Dackerman 2002, 11–12. DR, 120–21, 194–95.

62. DR, 144–47, 154–57, 172–77, 202–3, 204–5.

63. DR, 120–21, 187–89. On the adage of painters “painting” themselves, see Kemp 1976; Zöllner 1992.

64. DR, 118–19.

65. On the possible transport of the portrait of Mehmet II back to Venice with Gentile Bellini, see David Young Kim, “Gentile in Red: Artist as Ambassador in Fifteenth-Century Venice” (forthcoming). Raby 1982; Campbell and Chong 2005; Carboni 2007 and especially Wilson 2003. On Ballino, see Wilson 2004, 221: “[E] da infinita moltitudine di gente habitate, che vi concorre da varie nationi, anzi di tutto il mondo, ad essercitarvi la mercatantia. Usanvisi tutti i linguaggi; & vestevisi in diverse maniere.”

66. Necipoğlu places the tempering of exchange between Venice and the Ottoman court, once facilitated through the intervention of the cosmopolitan grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha, from c. 1550 at which point Ottoman military ambitions became more restricted and delineated geographic borders effectively halted the flow between East and West. See Necipoğlu 1989; Necipoğlu 1992.

67. Denny 2007; Schmidt Arcangeli 2007; Gilio 1961, 20: “Però il prudente pittore deve sapere accomodare le cose convenevoli a la persona, al tempo et al luogo: perché non sarebbe bene che al Papa si desse l’abito del Turco, né al Turco l’abito del Papa.” Gilio 1961, 50: “e molti, pensando dar vaghezza a l’opere loro, hanno tanto confuso l’abito, che non si conosce più il Greco dal Latino, né ‘l Turco dal Franzese né lo Spagnolo da l’Arabo.”

CHAPTER 7

1. Schlosser 1964, 247, 365–80. On Sansovino’s precedents, notably Marin Sanudo’s Cronachetta (1484) and Sabellico’s De Venetae urbis situ (1502), and perceptions of Byzantine and Gothic architecture, see Bonora 2000; Concina 2002; Maltezou 2005; Carrara 2002. On Scardeone’s biographies and the city view of Padua, see Agosti 1995; Collareta 1999; Mazzi 1980. On Lamo, see Perini 1981; Pedretti 1982; Lamo 1996. Baldi composed essays on building techniques as described by Vitruvius (M. Vitruviani Pollionis architecti vita, 1612; Scamilli impares vitruviani, 1612). On Baldi’s description of the ducal palace, see Eiche 1990. On Marco Pino, see Santoro and Zezza 2003. On Lombard art literature, see Rovetta 2004. On Bocchi, see Komorowski 1981; Gampp 1998; Butters 2001; Schroder 2003; Bocchi 2006. Of local interest is Bocchi’s discussion of the miraculous image in SS. Annunziata (Opera sopra l’immagine miracolosa della SS. Annunziata di Firenze, 1592) and his Epistola seu opusculum de restitutione Sacrae Testudinis Florentinae (1604), which contains a woodcut of the cathedral’s dome.

2. Kemp 1987.

3. Valgimigli 1871, 123–45, Grassi 1948; Schlosser 1964, 383–86; Frantz 1965; Blunt 1978, 148–50; Ruurs 1983; Quednau 1984; Bernardez Sanchis 1992; Williams 1995; Nardmann-Stoffel 1998; Galassi 1999; Costa 2000; Heck 2001; de Mambro Santos 2002; Gheroldi 2004. See Wegner 1987 for the rapport between Armenini’s theoretical prescriptions and the Sienese artist Francesco Vanni’s recourse to prints as a basis for his compositions. To date, few works can be securely attributed to Armenini, among them the Ascension of the Virgin (Faenza, Pinacoteca Communale) and an album of watercolors after Raphael’s Logge. See Colombi 1982; Pingitore 1998; Davidson 1983; Privitera 2005.

4. AO, 297.

5. AG, 10n3; AO, 71; AG, 9.

6. VG, 1: 74ff; McKenzie 1999.

7. VG, 1: 73–74. Cf. Francesco Patrizi, who states that Barbarian invasion buried the art of oratory. See Patrizi 1562, 17r: “Morta poi dal ferro, et dal fuoco de Barbari, dopo lunghi secoli, all’età nostra risorta da sepoltura, et nelle dette due provincie si ritrova, et in Francia, et nella Magna, et in Polonia, et in Ungheria, et in Inghilterra.” On Vasari’s equation of the Gothic with goffezza, see Sankovitch 2000. Even so, Vasari at times views simplicità in a more positive light regarding Michelozzo and Desiderio da Settignano. See VG, 1: 32, 339, 416. On puppets, see VT, 122; VG, 1: 444, 2: 778; Baldinucci 1681, s.v. “voto.” Nunziata, a friend of Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, is mildly rebuked as a “dipintore di fantocci.” VG, 2: 571.

8. VG, 1: 386, 2: 416; Della Casa 1978, 83; AO, 228–29; AG, 186.

9. AO, 77; AG, 16: “essendo necessario pratticare diversi paesi e persone et usar lunghissima servitú, è da credere che sia impossible impararle da se medesimo.” VG, 1: 83; VT, 963.

10. Crusca 1612, s.v. “praticare”; Cennini 1859, 9; Wood 2004; Sorte 1960, 283: “ho alcuni siti disegnati in modo che i prattici de’ loro paesi possono conoscere i luoghi senza leggere le lettere de’ loro nomi.” Varchi 1841, 719: “quanto ancora per la cognoscenza di molti paesi e luoghi e passi, acquistata da una lunga e ferma pratica.”

11. AO, 74; Agosti and Isella 2004; VT, 557; Crusca 1612, s.v. “confondere”: “mescolare insieme senza distinzione, e senza ordine. Lat. confundere, permiscere.”

12. Della Porta 1614, 32: “Altri dicono, facilmente prenderanno a viaggiare, nel che gli accascaranno fatiche e travagli, e rubbamenti, volontieri offenderanno i miseri e quei che potranno, godono de lo spargimento di sangue.” Colombo 1571, 29; Ramusio 1978–88, 2: 205; Barberini 1996, 11, 17.

13. AO, 74. AG, 13; Kallendorf 2007; Dante 1996, 32; Petrarch 2002; VT, 21.

14. Chaucer 2002, 106–7; AO, 81, 127, 283–85. Armenini refers to Rome as a “ricetto,” a term designating a refuge for pilgrims or foreigners. Cf. Crusca, s.v. “ricetto”; Varchi 1841, 182: “dico, se quest’Accademia (onoratissimo ridotto, ed onestissimo ricetto di tutta la nobiltà fiorentina, e di tutt’i forestieri o letterati o amatori delle lettere) è lodevole per sé stessa.” Agosti and Isella 2004, 5: “Donde per Vinci dire in alto saglio / scrivendo de’ Romani el bel lavore.” Hollanda 1983, 77–78: “Porém n’esta cousa da pintura nunca crerei que pode alguem alançar cousa que não seja pouca, nem menos na architectura e statuaria, se não peregrinar d’aqui a oma e por muitos dias e studo não frequentar suas antigas e maravilhosas reliquias no primor das obras, e como eu isto alcançei, fui-me a Roma.” Hollanda 1983, 78m188. Cf. Wittkower and Wittkower 1963, 46. VG, 2: 983.

15. AO, 81–82.

16. McGowan 1994, 250–52; Frutaz 1962, 1: 176; Maier 2007; Zorach 2008.

17. AO, 127–28.

18. AO, 128.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid. On memory compared to inscriptions on wax tablets, see Carruthers 2008, 18–34. Hollanda 1983, 72–75: “Por onde deve aprender o pintor.” While asserting the primacy of Rome, Hollanda also declares that genius itself can be born anywhere. See ibid., 77, n187: “digo que engenhos em toda parte podem nascer, como diz o outro: vervecum in patria crassoque sub acre nasci.” The verse citation is from Juvenal’s Tenth Satire. Ripa 1593, 299: “L’Uso imprime nella mente nostra gli habiti di tutte le cose.”

21. AO, 131–32.

22. Christian 2010, 265–75.

23. AO, 131–32; Kelly 1977; Christian 2010, 196–201, 383–88, 330–32; Schudt 1930; Zorach 2008.

24. AO, 132.

25. Haskell and Penny 1981, 16–22; AO, 137n11; AG, 79n16; Thomas 2005; Ames-Lewis 2000, 59–60.

26. AO, 128, 131–34; Chapman 2005, 246.

27. AG, 80; Giambullari 1890, 1:22-27: “a riguardare o per riguardare et considerare lo passo, il periglioso cammino o difficile et intricato laberinto della horribil selva.” AO, 134–37.

28. AO, 129–30.

29. AO, 120; AG, 64.

30. AO, 119. On the impact of a voyage upon the mind of the traveller, see Boccaccio 1547, 187v, where the speaker recounts the journey to Crete clears clouds from his mind, thus enabling him to envision the god Jupiter all the better.

31. Giambullari 1544, 9; Pliny, Natural History 35.36; Cicero, De oratore 3.74-77; Rubin 1994, 309–10; Wittkower and Wittkower 1963, 44–46; Ames-Lewis 2000, 31; VG, 2: 86; Erdmannsdorff 2001.

32. See AO, 297, where Armenini states that a change in his profession, most likely to the priesthood, thwarted his ambitions to become a painter. Thucydides 1962, 24; Campbell 1988, 18–20, 36, 38–39, 93–95; Polo 2001, 3, 295.

33. AO, 153–54.

34. AO, 169.

35. Turner 1978; Goffen 1992; AO, 134–38.

36. AO, 169–71.

37. AO, 173–75.

38. AO, 177–84.

39. AG, 134n18; Rotondi 1964; Biavati 1985; Kris and Kurz 1979, 94–95; Williams 1995.

40. AO, 189; VBR, 67–69; Hollanda 1983, 235–36; Hollanda 1998, 77; AO, 195.

41. AO, 198.

42. AO, 201–2.

43. Sohm 2007, 150; AO, 202; AG, 154nn3-5; Luchs 1977; Sohm 2001, 90–95; Torriti 1998, 167–72; Cole 2003a.

44. AO, 206 (my emphasis); AG, 158.

45. Blair 1997, 14–20; Genette 1997; Alberti 1966, 56; Payne 2006.

46. AO, 206, 94.

47. AO, 216.

48. Ballardini 1907, 62: “A dì 9 di luglio 1599. / Noi m. Gio. Batt.a Armenini et Marc’Anto Rochetta eletti dal molto Illustre Sig.r Governatore con il consenso di ambe le parti circa in giudicare la fattura fata da m. Gio. Batta Bertucci nell ritratto di m. Benedetto Benedetti hordinatoli da Madonna Justina sua madre, così havendo ben visto et considerato ogni qualunque faticha, cominciando dall pronto dell predetto morto et il disegno fatto sopra il detto morto et il ritratto colorito a olio sino al termine che si trova et cosi giudicamo et concludemo che meriti la somma di tre piastroni fiorentini da soldi 88 l’uno et in fede dell vero ho scritto et sottoscritto di mia propria mano.” Other artists working abroad also expressed contempt towards local artistic environments. Michelangelo faced less than exalted circumstances while employed in Bologna to design, cast, and install the bronze statue of Pope Julius II. On 19 December 1506, he wrote to dissuade a visit from his brother Giovan Simone as he was “in an unpleasant room and I only have purchased one bed alone, in which four people sleep,” without any means to properly host him. Michelangelo Buonarroti 1965, 1: 13. Vasari in his Life of Polidoro da Caravaggio states that the artist decided to leave Naples, described as a place where “men thought more of a horse that could jump than of a master whose hands could give painted figures the appearance of life.” See VT, 822; Rubin 1995, 142–43.

49. AO, 276; AG, 235.

50. AO, 284. AG, 242.

51. AO, 81; Muzio 1985, 90: “Vinegia, ricetto di pellegrini e di amorosi ingegni.” Less generously, Lottieri Castrucci, a character in the playwright Francesco d’Ambra’s Il Furto (1544), laments that although Rome was once a “ricetto of virtuosi and good men,” the corrupt clergy has transformed the city into a “bilge of vices and cheaters.” D’Ambra 1858, 24: “Perchè già soleva esser un ricetto di virtuosi e buoni; oggi è una sentina di viziosi e bari.” Dante 1995, 4.12.15: “E sì come peregrino che va per una via per la quale mai non fue, che ogni casa che da lungi vede crede che sia l’albergo, e non trovando ciò essere, dirizza la credenza all’altra, e così di casa in casa, tanto che all’albergo viene.”

52. AO, 284. AG, 243.

53. AO, 286. AG, 244.

54. AO, 287–88. On the Ferrarese sculptor Cristoforo d’Argenta and the Spanish court painter Gaspar Becerra, see AG, 246n51–52.

55. AO, 288; AG, 246.

56. This stance recalls that of Donatello, who after being in Padua for some time, in Vasari’s words, “decided to return to Florence, saying that if he stayed there any longer, all that which he knew he would have forgotten.” VT, 344. Dante 2000, 1.79-80: “Or se’ tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte / che spandi di parlar sì largo fiume?”

57. AO, 288; AG, 247.

58. For this definition of curiosity, see the edition of the fourteenth-century Dominican friar Jacopo Passavanti’s Specchio di vera penitenza published the same year as the Precepts in Passavanti 1856, 200.

59. AO, 288–89; AG, 247. On art and the sack of Rome, see Chastel 1983; Hall 1999; Hook 2004. On the papacy’s negotiation of the Hapsburg conflict with the Republic of Venice, see Santarelli 2008. Note that in Milan, Armenini did execute a preparatory sketch for a representation of the Assumption for the Cremonese painter Bernardo Campi, work for which he was awarded an unspecified percentage of one hundred gold scudi.

60. AO, 290. Compare Vasari’s contempt for Pinturicchio’s application of gold: VT, 526.

61. AO, 291.

62. AO, 293.

63. AO, 294; AG, 251–52.

64. On bilinguism and diglossia, see Head 1995; Celenza 2004; Vester 2008. On the questione della lingua, see Migliorini 1949; Vitale 1986. For the controversy as inflected in the “ironic” style of northern Italian painters such as Romanino, see Nova 1994.

65. AO, 298; AG, 257.

66. AO, 256, 297, 300.

CHAPTER 8

1. Amelang 1998, 124.

2. Ghiberti 1998, 93.

3. Gallucci 2003; Gallucci and Rossi 2004; Schlosser 1964, 311; Herding 2003; Olson 1992, 155–56; Cellini 1973, 18, 21–23, 142, 153–55, 201, 205.

4. VG, 2: 982–83, 992–93.

5. VG, 2: 990, 1007; Rubin 1995, 129–47, 215–25.

6. On Casella’s Elogia illustrium artificum (1606), see Tiraboschi 1812, 882–83; Gombrich 1987. On Zuccaro’s decorative schemes for festivities, see Acidini Luchinat 1999, 1: 241–44, 107–8. ZR, xxii, 10: “Farò non una lettera, ma una narrazione di più cose viste e passate, che non seranno, secondo me, se non di gusto e trattenimento suo e de’ amorevoli amici: poscia che in questo mio viaggio ho visto e passato varie e diverse ricreazioni, cose degne tutte da essere intese, sì in soggetto di aver visto varii luoghi di devozione, come di spasso e di piacere: palazzi, giardini e fontane che non invidiano quelle di Roma o di Fiorenza, paesi con laghi deliziosi, caccie selvatiche e domestiche, pésche di più sorti, comedie e spassi diversi, correre la slizza per l’agghiacciata neve, danze, feste e conviti regi.”

7. Strunck 2007; Brooks 2007, 29: “Chi va lontan’da la sua Patria, speme / in Dio sol ponga, ne in alcun’parente, / Per cui quivi il meschin’si dole, e teme.” Federico, in his Origine, et progresso dell’Academia del dissegno de pittori, scultori e architetti di Roma (1604), however, disparaged Armenini’s Precepts for what he perceived as an incorrect and ultimately simplistic understanding of the faculty of disegno. See Zuccaro 1961, 30.

8. VDV, 2: 599; VG, 2: 687; Brooks 2007, 29–31. See AO, 72, for masters’ refusing to convey the precepts of the visual arts to their apprentices.

9. Brooks 2007, 28; VT, 421; AO, 81; Hermann-Fiore 1979; Leuschner 2000; Waźbiriski 2001; Fehl 1999, 288–90. Filarete and Antonfrancesco Doni were among early modern writers on art to place the appropriate location of the ideal artist’s home of virtue atop a mountain. See Leopold 1979, 281–82.

10. On the early modern recreation, see Vickers 1990; Arcangeli 2003, 128–32. ZR, 3, 7: “Havendo un poco di tempo otioso in questi giorni di Carnevale, mentre io ne sto così presso il fuogo neccessitato da cotanti gran freddi ... mi piace passarmela un poco con esso lei.” Ibid., 10: “poscia che in questo mio viaggio ho visto e passato varie e diverse ricreazioni.” Ibid., 14: “io pigliarci molte ricreationi, in diversi luoghi dentro, et fuori della Città, come alla Certosa non molto lontana da Pavia, più volte a Milano, et all’incontro a certe solennità, et feste.” Ibid., 20: “sul Lago Maggiore, distante da Varalo 15 in 18 miglia, ove lo trovammo, et qui si fermammo quindici giorni a spasso, godendo con varie pesche, et diporti quel luogo.” Ibid., 26, 75: “e per quello intenderà molte cose diverse di gusto e di piacere, viste, passate e fatte in questo giro e tempo che io sono fuori di Roma.” Ibid., 100: “per la conservazione di essa conviene tal ora ammettere qualche ricreazione e non si lasciare tanto occupare dalli continui nostri studi.” Despite the discourse of leisure, Federico executed commissions while abroad for Cardinal Borromeo. See Acidini Luchinat 1999, 2: 247ff.

11. Nova 1995; Barbero and Spantigati 1998; De Filippis 2006; Göttler 2012; Imorde 2000, 167n65. ZR, 16, 18–19, 45.

12. ZR, 27–28.

13. Leonardo 1914, 68, 75, 120. Given that Federico’s work perished in a fire that consumed the Galleria Grande in 1659, it is difficult to assess any correspondence between the hairstyles as seen in the engraving and the portraits of the Savoyard female line. Note, however, that Frans Pourbus’s portrait of Margherita of Savoy (San Carlo al Corso, Rome) depicts the daughter of Carlo Emanuele with a coiffure similar to that seen in Il passaggio. On the Galleria Grande, see Kliemann 1999, esp. 322n13.

14. Baldinucci 1681, s.v. “invenzione”; Vignola 1635, XX; Payne 1999, 107–10; Guasco 1775, 4–5: “Chi raccogliesse le innumerevoli maniere di architettare la testa ... potrebbe disporsi a formare un grosso volume.” See Baldini and Baldini 2006, 55.

15. Leonardo 1914, 25; VT, 52; AO, 106, 167; Quiviger 2010.

16. On artists as musicians, see VT, 563, 581, 794, 895, 619–20; Winternitz 1992. On Mariotto, see VT, 611–12. On Claudio Franzese and Brunelleschi, see VT, 676, 299–300.

17. ZR, 35: “veda come sono queste tavole piene, et coperte di confetti, ne pigli a suo gusto, come ancora cose di paste, pasticci, crostate di mille sorti, indorate, et inargentate, che come mensa addobbata tanto sontuosamente in capo, in mezo, et dai lati, degna è veramente di una Real festa, veda quelle Vitelle intiere, Capri, Cervi arrostiti grandi, et grossi come sono, all’usanza antica de’ Greci, et de’ Romani, veda le corna altiere, et fronzute indorate di questo Cervo, et innargentate di questo Caprio, et di questa Vitella, et tutti lardati con garofali, zuccaro, et canella sopravia; veda quei bei Naranci, et Cedri, che tengono in bocca questi Animaloni, non le mettono appetito a vedergli?”

18. On Pontormo’s eating habits, see Nigro 1988, 81–111. On how the consumption of peacock cured Cellini of illness induced by the mal’aria of Ferrara, see Cellini 1973, 284. On Andrea del Sarto’s model of the Florentine Baptistery made of sausage pilasters, see Löhr 2007. On Messisbugo and receptions held for Henry III in Venice, see Messisbugo 1549, 15r–19v; Mazzarotto 1961, 311, as cited in Varriano 2009, 190–91. On Tacca’s sugar sculptures, see Watson 1978. On displays of food at feasts and festivals, see Strong 1984; Bjurström 1966.

19. Paolini 2007.

20. Milanesi 1854, 2: 299–300, no. 210, Rome, 14 April 1458. Letter from Leonardo Benvoglienti to cav. Cristofano Felici Operaio del Duomo di Siena: “Et salutate el maestro delle porti, maestro Donatello, da mia parte ... avendo esso grande affectione d’essere a Siena, per non morire fra quelle ranochie di Padova; che poco ne manchò.” Cited in Bergstein 2002, 865. On Sienese artists’ travels, see VBR 136. On Armenini’s departure from Rome, see AO, 288–89.

21. ZR, 5: “rappresentandole in questi pochi scritti molte cose, varie, e diverse, e tutte quelle feste, e trionfi particolari, ch’a’ giorni passati, con tant’applauso del mondo, furono celebrati dall’Altezze di Mantoa.” Brooks 2007, 35 (cat. no. 20): “Amore vole studio, e i’ntelligentia / e senza questo rare volte, o mai / serve fatiga assidua e diligentia.” Ibid., 30 (cat. no. 8): “Ecco ch’il tempo gl’e tolta a costui / Ch’a di studiar, e di virtù desio / Ma come ei sel’racquisti osserva lui.” Ibid., 32 (cat. no. 13): “Desio d’imparar lo va adducendo / Su l’aggiacciate pietre, ch’a se stesso / Fura molti anni non se n’accorgendo.” Ibid., 33 (cat. no. 17): “Ecco qui, o Giuditio, osservando / Va de l’antico, e Polidoro il fare / E l’opre insiem di Rafael studiando.” ZR, 66–67: “Hora resta dirvi il soggetto di questa nobilissima Galeria, et quanto S. A. si compiace che in essa si faccia. Sappiate dunque che nella volta ch’è fatta a botte vi vanno principalmente le 48 imagini celesti con le loro Stelle per ordine compartite, appresso le loro historie Astronomiche in un partimento ch’io ho fatto di molte cose unite; figure, imprese, grottesche, historie, che rende ricco, et vago in partimento con alcuni sfondati di prospettiva finti, nei quali sfondati vanno le 48 imagini celesti, nelle facciate a basso sotto la cornice, e imposta della volta, che reccinge tutta la Galeria, vi vanno in 32 vani tra 32 fenestre 32 Prencipi a Cavallo di questa casa Sereniss. di Savoia, et ciascuno di questi vani tra fenestre, et fenestre, è palmi 37 e mezo di canna romana, et la larghezza della Galeria, è palmi 34 cioè 3 fanne, et 4 palmi.”

22. ZR, 68–69; Zuccaro 1961, 136: “[La Galeria] sarà un compendio di tutte le cose del mondo e un ampio specchio.” Brambilla 1608, 14: “dove quasi in un picciolo mondo si scorgono nel soffitto le quaranotto imagini celesti, al canto del muro nel più alto in bellissime tavole tutta la descendenza di questa serenissima Casa.” Cited in Kliemann 1999, 329. Relazioni delle nozze di Savoia celebrate in Torino nel mese di Marzo 1608, Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Ms. 870356, fol. 162v–163r. Published in Kliemann 1999, 345.

23. Mundy 1989, 15; Heikamp 1999. Despite his recourse to Venetian pictorial conventions, Federico did not unequivocally emulate or admire painters from the lagoon. His Lamento della pittura (1605) expresses disdain for the work of Jacopo Tintoretto. See Zuccaro 1961. ZR, 69, 102: “vado seguitando questa opera con quelli aiuti che si possano avere in queste parti, i quali molte volte accrescono la fatica più che alleggeriscono il peso.”

24. Acidini Luchinat 1999, 2: 253. On Federico’s study of Giulio Romano’s Sala dei Giganti, as testified, see Heikamp 1999, 354. Precedents for these equestrian images include Barent van Orley’s preparatory sketches for portraits of the Count of Nassau and his wife (1531); Adrian Collaert’s prints, based on designs by Stradano, of the Twelve Caesars; the genealogical cycle of ten wooden sculptures of figures on horseback by Vespasiano Gonzaga in 1587 for his residence in Sabbioneta; and Antonio Tempesta’s etching of Henry IV on a galloping horse (1593). See Kliemann 1999, 331–37.

25. ZR, 104.

26. ZR, 92: “Tutto ciò sto considerando sovente stando alle finestre del mio Paradiso et essendo co’l pensiero sopra quel monte, io m’imbarco ora in uno, et ora in un altro di quelli fiumi, e con questa comodità ora mi trovo nel Mar Maggiore verso Levante, ora nel Settentrione, et ora nel Tirreno a Mezzo giorno e verso Ponente, e tal volta ancora me ne passo all’Oriente per il Mare Adriatico, e così godendomi co ‘l pensiero la diversità de’ popoli e paesi del Mondo, vado lontano senza partirmi di dove sono.” Ibid., 95.

27. ZR, 5; Burton 1989–2000, 2:73, as discussed in Arcangeli 2003, 40. On Lipsius’s De ratione cum fructu peregrinandi, see Doiron 1995, 207. ZR, 123: “sì come i diversi gusti fanno varie le vivande, e varie foggie diversi ornamenti: e però si vede verificare quel detto che per molto variar Natura è bella.” On the attribution of this proverb to Leonardo or Serafino Aquilano, see Campana 1997; Venturelli 1998. On Federico’s portrait, which displays the medals Federico received from Philip II, the Venetian Republic, and Cardinal Borromeo, see Acidini Luchinat 2: 250.

EPILOGUE

1. On the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, see Lukehart 2009 and resources available at http://www.nga.gov/casva/accademia/intro.shtm. On Michelangelo’s funeral, see Wittkower and Wittkower 1964; Ruffini 2011. On the transport of Michelangelo’s body to Florence, see document “Spese d’ultima malattia e trasporto funerario di Michelangelo,” noting “a’di 29 ditto, per incerare tela, cera libreo dodici, per involtare la cassa per portare il corpo a Fiorenza ... 2 Scudi 40.” Gotti 1876, 2: 158–59. On Michelangelo’s body as relic, see the letter addressed to Lionardo Buonarroti, 10 March 1564, published in Frey 1930, 2: 48: “il corpo di quell santissimo vechio, splendore delle nostre arti; dicendovi, che se voi avessi mandato a questa citta un gran tesoro, non saria stato maggior dono, quanto e parso questa reliquia tanto celebrate et honorata.” On the hagiographic trope in Michelangelo’s biographies, see Pon 1996. The reburial of Pontormo’s body was one of the first major public events of the Florentine Academy. Barzman 2000, 23–27, 182–85.

2. Lukehart 2009, 348–58; Lukehart 2007, 35; Marciari 2009, 201; Gage 2009, 248, 275 n9; Grossi and Trani 2009.

3. Alberti 1604, 14–17; Lukehart 2007, 107; Alberti 1604, 17; AO, 284; AG, 242. On travel alongside academic study in the formation of eclectic style, see Dempsey 2000, 16–17, 78. The scene is a counterpart to Taddeo Rebuffed by His Kinsman Francesco II Sant’Angelo, in which Taddeo Zuccaro presents a letter of introduction to his cousin, only to be sent away. See Brooks 2007, 29.

4. Migliorini 1949; Vitale 1986; Nova 1994; Sohm 2001; Loh 2007; On Malvasia and traveling artists and styles, see Cropper 2012, 16, 29; Malvasia 1841, 1: 129: “Chi farsi un buon pittor cerca, e desia / II disegno di Roma habbia alla mano, / La mossa, coll’ombra Veneziano, E il degno colorir di Lombardia. / Di Michelangiol la terribil via, / II vero natural di Tiziano, / Del Correggio lo stil puro e sovrano, / E di un Rafel la giusta simetria.” Discussed in Dempsey 2000, 60.

5. De Piles, 1715, 96; Sohm 1999; Puttfarken 1985; de Bürger 1996; Claerbergen 2006; Thomas 2004.

6. Winckelmann 1764, 20; Kaufmann 2004, 63–64, 84–85, 348–49; Wölfflin 1932, 235.

7. Alberti 1966, 64.

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Index

All index entries shown here correspond to the page numbers within the printed edition only. Within this digital format these page numbers allow for cross referencing only.

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations.

Abate, Niccolò dell’, 238

Accademia del Disegno (Florence), 39, 45–46, 201, 234

Accademia di San Luca (Rome), 234–35, 236–37, 238

Adam and Eve, 35, 36, 66

Aelst, Pieter Coecke van, Moeurs et façons des Turcs, 92, 93

Aeneas, 74, 155, 155

Aesop, Fables, 181

Aglaphon, 131

Agostino Veneziano, The “Academy” of Baccio Bandinelli, 200, 200

Ahl, Diane Cole, 114

air. See aria

Alamanni, Luigi, La coltivazione, 83

Alaric, King of the Visigoths, 191

Alba, Duke of (Ferdinando Álvarez de Toledo), 213

Alberti, Leon Battista, 49, 94, 114–15, 130, 132, 141, 208–9, 241; Dello scrivere in cifra, 71–72, 71; De pictura and De statua, 131; De re aedificatoria, 45, 52, 171

Alberti, Pietro Francesco, A Painter’s Academy, 235, 236–37

Alberti, Romano, 235

Albertinelli, Mariotto, 225–26

Albertini, Francesco, 200; Memoriale di molte statue e picture sono nella incylta cipta di Florentia, 100; Opusculum de mirabilibus novae et veteris urbis Romae, 148, 200

Albertus Magnus, 41

Alciato, Andrea, “Vili,” Emblematum Libellus, 180, 181

Alcibiades, 214

Alcionio, Pietro, Among the Greatest Anguishes, 177–78

Aldrovandi, Giovanni Francesco, 138, 139

Aldrovandi, Ulisse: “Icon Regis Quoniambec” (Monstorum historia), 43; On Animal Insects, 132

Alexander III, Pope, 167

Alfonso I, Duke of Ferrara, 139, 171, 226

Alfonso I, King of Naples, 32, 33, 109, 161; Triumphal Arch, 106, 107, 108, 108

alienation, 1, 211

allegorical mobility, 2, 132, 140–41, 143, 177, 193, 194, 201, 234; conflation with physical mobility, 220–21; copia and, 114; mountains as metaphors for, 113; as pilgrimage, 7, 14, 111–14, 140–41, 141, 214, 220; varietà and, 227

Alpers, Paul, 66

Alpers, Svetlana, 35

Alps, 111, 173

Altichiero, 98

Alvarez, Francesco, 193

Amadeo, Giovanni Antonio, Certosa di Pavia façade, 93

Amelang, James, 216

Americas (New World), 2; hieroglyphics, 119, 120; indigenous people, 42, 43, 43, 50, 52, 131, 134; varietà and, 131–32, 134

Ames-Lewis, Francis, 72

amnesia, 106

ancient world: air connotations and, 44, 46; artistic origins in, 39–41; literary voyages and, 74; style variation and, 239–40; travel to sites of, 26; varietà prescriptions, 131

Ancona, Lotto and, 11, 12, 21, 182

Andrea de’ Ceri, 148

Andrea del Castagno, 32, 110–11

Andrea dell’Aquila, 108

Andrea del Sarto. See Sarto, Andrea del

Angevin Castelnuovo fortress, 106, 197

Angevin court (Naples), 72

Angiolello, Maria, 168

Anonimo Magliabechiano, 61–62, 65, 69, 132

Anselmi, Antonio, 164, 165

Antiquaria prospetiche romane (anon.), 193, 194

antiquities, 15, 18, 40, 88, 90, 138, 150, 160, 190, 219; Barbarian destruction of, 42, 43, 191; Brunelleschi and, 92, 94, 97, 116, 119, 194; ethnic differences in, 58; Filippino and, 116, 118, 119; importance to artists of, 176, 177; as study models, 193, 195, 198–200, 203, 204

Antonello da Messina, 32, 33, 53, 171; travel to learn oil technique, 109–10, 110, 183

Antonio Veneziano, 65, 75, 114, 150, 211; The Return of Saint Rainerius to Pisa, 115

Apelles, 131, 203

Apelles’s line, 70

Arca, Niccolò dell’, 139

architectural orders, 50, 128, 131; Brunelleschi and, 94–95, 96–97, 96, 119; coiffure likened to, 224, 225; distinction between, 178; hierarchy of, 97

architecture, 139; aria and, 44, 45, 141; Brunelleschi and, 89–97, 128

Aretino, Pietro, 162, 164–72, 176, 177, 180, 181, 184–86, 218; on decorum, 186; Lettere, 165; on varietà, 185

Aretino, Spinello. See Spinello Aretino

Arezzo: aria and, 141; artists from, 62, 65, 67, 69, 73, 76, 78, 84, 86, 114, 171, 183; Etruscan bronze chimera, 40; Gothic style and, 45; Medici renovation of, 67; Vasari house in, 69, 157, 158, 159. See also Margaritone d’Arezzo; Niccolò d’Arezzo

aria, 43–46, 80, 133, 161, 163, 179; artists and, 141–42, 143, 241; art theory and, 45–46; bifurcated nature of, 141; climatic theory of arts and, 44–46, 141, 240; connotations of, 43, 45, 143; as disease carrier, 45, 141, 142, 148; metaphoric use of, 45, 48, 53; as stylistic cleansing agent, 53

Ariosto, 184

Aristotle, 46, 132; On Sense and Sensible Objects, 225; On the Soul, 225; Politics, 49; Rhetoric, 111

Armenini, Giovanni Battista, 3, 6, 194–215, 216; on benefits of foreign travel, 202–3; on exploitation of bottega system, 220; eyewitness mode of (see De’ veri precetti della pittura); on Flemish techniques, 206; journey throughout Italy of, 200, 214–15, 219; on mobility, 202–15, 219, 227, 234, 240; model of behavior and, 214–15; recommended Roman study curriculum, 200–201, 219; on Rome, 194–202, 211, 212–13; on sensory supremacy of vision, 225; on storia, 207

Arnaut Daniel, Purgatorio, 73

Arnolfo, 45

Arrian, Flavius, 134

art history, 4–6; importance of location and, 83, 240; influence and, 4, 13, 25–33, 37–38; methodological questions, 216; mobility-style linkage and, 6, 13, 239–41; regional focus of, 166, 239–40; representation of mobility and, 34; on Roman antiquities, 15; theory vs. practice and, 6; Vasari as “godfather” of, 67

artifex viator, 112–13

artistic contamination. See contamination

artistic death, Vasari’s definition of, 41

artistic greatness, qualities of, 192

artistic mobility. See mobility

artists’ names, 67–68

art literature, 2, 3, 4, 132, 161–62, 230, 241; regional patriotism and, 189–90

Asiaticus, 75

Aspertini, Amico, 90, 133

Assisi, 68, 69

astratto, 89–90, 92

astrological influence, 5, 26–27, 33, 44, 73, 125, 239, 241; Michelangelo’s genius and, 139, 143, 227; style and, 190, 227; travel and, 87

Attic order, 96

Attius, 148, 149

Augsburg, 12, 173

autobiography. See eyewitness mode

Avignon, 75, 78

Aztecs, 119

Babylonia, 39, 40

Baccio d’Agnolo, 150

Bacon, Francis, Essays, 75

Baglione, Giovanni, 235

Baglione, Luca, L’arte del predicare, 190

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 72

Balcari, Feo, 3

Baldassini, Marchionne, 148

Baldi, Bernardino, Versi e prose, 189

Baldinelli, Baldino, 87

Baldinucci, Federico, 192, 224

Ballini, Gasparo, 185

Ballino, Giulio, De’disegni delle più illustri città, 186

Bandinelli, Baccio, 101, 128; Academy, 200, 200, 204

Barbarian invasions, 39, 41–46; aria as symptom of, 43, 45; and artistic decline, 5, 43, 46, 48, 191–92; and Dark Ages onset, 53; purging of artistic effects of, 50, 52–53; Vasari’s flood metaphor for, 54–55. See also sack of Rome

Barbaro, Francesco, De re uxoria, 145

Barberini, Raffaello, 193

Barberino Veneziano (Jacopo de’ Barbari), 162, 164

Barbeu-Dubourg, Jacques, 30

Barkan, Leonard, 6, 92

Barocchi, Paola, 34

Barocci, Federico, 6, 30, 34, 218, 228, 230

Barolsky, Paul, 64–65

Bartoli, Cosimo, 39, 45, 52, 71

Bartolommeo, Fra, 18, 35, 36, 126, 132, 142–43, 201, 203, 225, 235; Approach to a Mountain Village, 142, 143; St. Paul, 142, 143, 144; St. Peter (and Raphael), 142, 143, 144

Bartolozzi, Francesco, The Last Judgment in Outline (after Michelangelo)

Basarini, Marco, 86

Basilica del Santo (Padua). See Santo

Bastiano Mainardi da San Gimignano, 87

Battista della Palla, 172

Baxandall, Michael, 6; “Excursus Against Influence,” 26; Patterns of Intention, 26

Beccafumi, Domenico, 207, 208; Glory of Angels, 208, 209

Bellano, Bartolomeo, 101, 103–6; David with the Head of Goliath, 104, 105; Samson Destroys the Temple of the Philistines, 105–6, 105

Bellay, Guillaume Du, Peregrinatio humana, 112

Bellini, Gentile, 105, 162, 167, 168, 169, 172, 186; coloring technique transmitted from father to, 183; Ottoman honors and, 108–9; Portrait Medal of Sultan Mehmet II, 169, 186; Saint Mark Preaching in Alexandria (detail), 109

Bellini, Giovanni, 13, 16, 21, 86, 109, 167, 176, 178, 182; coloring technique transmitted from father to, 183; St. Jerome Reading in a Landscape, 15; Saint Mark Preaching in Alexandria (detail), 109; Saint Thomas Aquinas, 90, 164, 165

Bellini, Jacopo, 120, 183

Belliniano, Vittore, 186

Bellosi, Luciano, 34

Belvedere (Rome), 199, 199, 200, 235

Bembo, Bonifacio, 181

Bembo, Pietro, Cardinal, 164, 165, 177; Gli asolani, 165; Prose della volgar lingua, 165, 194

Benedetto da Maiano, 108

Benedict XI, Pope, 70, 72

Berenson, Bernard, 12

Bergamo, 7, 12, 15, 16, 18, 24, 162, 181, 182, 184

Berlinghiero, 55, 57; Madonna and Child, 57

Berlioz, Hector, 217

Bernardo da Venezia façade, 93

Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 27

Bertucci, Giovanni Battista, 210

Berugotta, Alonso, 128

Bessarion, Basilios, Cardinal, 167

Bettarini, Rosanna, 34

Bianconi, Carlo, 206

Biblioteca Hertziana (Rome), 219

Bigio, Francia, 128

Bildungsreise, 203

Biondo, Flavio, 46–47, 83; De Roma instaurata, 148; Italia illuminata, 173

Biondo, Michelangelo, 169; Della nobilissima pittura, 84

bizzarie, 119–20

Boccaccio, 75, 139, 162; Decameron, 49; Teseida delle Nozze, 69

Bocchi, Francesco, Bellezze della Città di Fiorenza, 190

Bodin, Jean, Six livres de la République, 44

Bologna, 12, 86, 116, 135; Dürer travel to, 203, 235; Gothic style and, 45; guidebook to, 189; Michelangelo and, 138, 139; painters from, 133, 238; refugees from sack of Rome in, 212; Titian and, 173, 176; as “true school of artists,” 238

Boncompagno da Signa, 41

Bondone. See Giotto

Bordone, Paris, 186; The Fisherman Presenting St. Mark’s Ring to the Doge, 188, 228

Borghini, Raffaele, Il Riposo, 113–14

Borghini, Vincenzo, indices of place-names, 81, 82, 83

Borromeo, Federico, Cardinal, 221

Boschini, Marco, 184; La carta del navegar pitoresco, 111

botanical classification, 95–96, 96

Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano, 73

bottega system, 229

Botticelli, St. Augustine, 89–90, 90

Bourdieu, Pierre, 163

Bouts, Dieric, 109

Bramante, 27, 129

Brambilla, Pompeo, Relatione delle feste . . . , 228

“Brazilian Village” (woodcut), 52

Bronzino, 226

Brunelleschi, Filippo, 83, 89–97, 94, 128; abstemious lifestyle of, 226; achievements of, 94–95, 119, 128; classical orders and, 94–95, 96–97, 119, 178; dome and, 80; Pazzi Chapel design (attrib.), 97; Roman ruins exploration, 90, 92, 94, 100, 116, 121, 138, 178, 194; universal style and, 103

Bruni, Leonardo, 84; De Interpretatione Recta, 132

brushes, source of, 206

brushwork, 3, 181, 182

Bry, Theodore de, 2

Burckhardt, Jacob, 3; The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 2, 165

Burton, Robert, Anatomy of Melancholy, 233

Bynum, Caroline Walker, 42

Byzantine Empire, 72

Byzantine style (maniera greca), 5, 41, 43, 57–63, 134, 227; Berlinghiero and, 55, 57, 57; characteristics of, 48–49, 50; critics of, 48–49, 50, 54, 168–69, 238; demise of, 50, 53, 54, 66, 80, 84, 128, 141; dissemination in Italy of, 46–48, 55, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 63, 76; last gasps of, 62–63; as stasis, 49, 50; Venice and, 47, 167, 172; Virgin and Child and, 47–48, 47

Calabrese, Giovanni Piero, 220

Calandra, Gian Giacomo, 148

Calopodio da Candia. See Sideri, Giorgio

Cambiaso, Luca, 206

Camera degli Sposi (Mantua), 230, 231

Camillo, Giulio, 164; Idea del Teatro, 165

Camillus, Furius, 75

Campanella, Tommaso, 90, 92

Camposanto (Pisa), 58, 59, 114

Cancelleria, Sala dei Cento Giorgi (Rome), 157

capitals. See architectural orders

Carafa Chapel (Rome), 118

Carafa family, 200, 213

Cardano, Girolamo, 44

Carlo Emanuele I, Duke of Savoy, 224, 227, 230

Carmine Chapel. See Santa Maria del Carmine

“carnivalesque” speech mode, 72

Carpaccio, 186

Carracci, Annibale, 32, 238

Casa di Vasari (Arezzo), 69, 157, 158, 159

Casella, Pierleone, 218, 221, 226, 228, 230

Casentino. See Jacopo di Casentino

Casini, Giovan Maria, 231

Castello, Giovan Battista (“Il Bergamasco”), 206

Castello del Buonconsiglio fresco of months (Trento), 79, 80

Castelnuovo, Enrico, 65

Castel Sant’Angelo (Rome), 13, 16, 148, 178

Castiglione, Baldassare, 131, 148

Catena, Vincenzio, 86

Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, 165

Cato, 100

Cattaneo, Giovanni Maria, 3, 4

Cattaneo di Casnigo, Marcantonio, 12

Cavalcanti, Giovanni, 27

Cavalcaselle, G. B., 126

Cecca, 192

celestial influence. See astrological influence

Cellini, Benvenuto, 36, 45, 73, 128, 148, 181, 217, 226; Jupiter, 217; Vita, 217–18

Celsus, 180, 181

Cennini, Cennino, 84, 111, 132, 192; Il libro dell’arte, 49

central Italy, 16, 18, 24, 163, 167; disegno and, 137, 155; merits of artists of, 190; northern Italian style vs., 181; oil technique and, 111; style of, 218; varietà and, 161

Certeau, Michel de, 151

Certosa di Pavia façade, 92, 93, 97

Cesariano, Cesare, 50; “Discovery of Fire in the Golden Age” (woodcut), 50, 51 Cesi, Angelo, 35, 39

Cesi Chapel frescoes, 28, 34, 35, 35, 36

Cézanne, Paul, 26

Chaldea, 39, 40

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 66, 162, 173, 174, 176

Charles of Anjou, 108

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 194

Chigi, Agostino, 142, 178

Chigi Chapel frescoes, 10, 36, 37, 135

Chiodi, Luigi, 12

Christ, 76; Parable of the Weeds, 80; sermon on book of Isaiah, 74–75

Christian, Kathleen, 200

Christianity, 2, 42, 43, 112

Christ in Judgment mosaic, 48, 48

Chrysoloras, Manuel, 46–47

Chrysostom, John, St., 90

Cicero, 44, 46, 63, 83, 100; De finibus bonorum et malorum, 74; De inventione rhetorica, 131; De oratore, 131, 132; Philippics, 2

Cieco, Niccolò, 87

Cimabue, Giovanni, 30, 75, 108; discovery of Giotto by, 64, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69; fame of, 69; signs of artistic greatness and, 192; style and, 43, 54–55, 57–58, 61, 62, 63; The Expulsion from Egypt, 61, 62; The Madonna and Child in Majesty Surrounded by Angels, 55, 56, 57, 57

Cima da Conegliano, 13, 182

ciphers: diplomatic, 72; Giotto’s style related to, 71–72

city, 83–87; as artist identifier, 87; country interaction with, 64–68, 80; mobility to, 65, 80, 121

Ciuffoletti, Zeffiro, 66–67

civitas, 84, 86

classical forms, 15, 26, 39–40; Armenini on

Roman sites for study of, 198–200; degeneration of, 43; ornamentation and, 116, 118; timelessness of, 50. See also antiquities; architectural orders

Clement VII, Pope, 72, 120, 177

climate, 44–46, 141, 240

Clusius, Carolus, 95–96

code. See ciphers

“code-switching,” 214

Codex Barberiano, 90, 91

Codex Saluzziano, 224, 225

Codex Zouche-Nutall, 120, 121

coiffure, 222, 223, 224–25

Colleoni, Bartolomeo, 18, 165

Colleoni Martinengo, Alessandro, altarpiece commission, 16–17, 17, 18

Collini, Giovan Luigi, 221

Colonna, Fra Francesco: Hypnerotamachia Poliphili, 112, 113; “Poliphilo in the Ercynian Forest,” 113

coloring (colorito), 111, 155, 162, 179–84, 203, 235, 238; artist exemplars of, 12, 195; disegno vs., 132, 137, 155; Flemish techniques, 206, 207; northern Italy and, 206, 207, 208, 214. See also oil technique

Columbus, Christopher, 2, 193

Columbus, Ferdinand, 193

community (communitas), 204, 206, 214

Compagni, Dino, 53; Cronica delle cose occorrenti, 69

competition, 73, 86–87, 204, 220

concession, 62–63

Condivi, Ascanio, 139

confusione, 193

Conegliano, Giovan Battista da, 46

Constantine, Emperor of Rome, 42, 43

Constantinople, 47, 92, 105, 169, 238; Hippodrome, 167, 169; van Aelst print of, 92, 93; Venetian diplomat to, 72

contamination, 4, 46–49, 80, 125, 161

copia/coposità, 114–15

copying. See imitation

Cordelliaghi, Giovannetto, 86

Corinth, journey to (proverb), 176–77

Corinthian order, 22, 50, 94, 95, 96, 97, 183

Cornaro, Giovanni, 218

Correggio, 113, 176, 203, 206, 218

Corrozet, Gilles, Hecatomgraphie, 112

corruption of style, 4, 5, 46–49, 134, 214

Cortés, Hernán, 119

Cosimo I. See Medici, Cosimo I de’

Cossa, Lorenzo, 83

Counter-Reformation, 92

courtesans, 177

courtiers, 72

Crassus, 131

Cristoforo da Messisbugo, Banchetti, 226

Crivelli, Carlo, 30, 173

Crowe, J. A., 126

Cutler, Anthony, 59

Cyprus, Archbishop of, 148

Daniele da Volterra, 209

Dante, 73, 74, 139, 162; Florence and, 75, 106; Giotto portrait of, 68; Virgil as guide for, 193, 212, 220; works: Commedia, 84, 112; Convivio, 69; De vulgari eloquentia, 134; Inferno, 106, 193, 201, 203, 212; Paradiso, 66

Danti, Vincenzo, 181; Trattato delle perfette proporzioni, 45–46

Dark Ages, 41, 43; MCCL as end of, 52–53

death, meanings of, 41–42

decorum, 186, 187, 189

Deguilleville, Guillaume de, Le romant des trois pèlerinages, 112

della Porta, G. M., 142, 235

della Porta, Giovan Battista, 193

della Porta, Tomasso, 235

Delli, Dello, 108, 150

deluge metaphor, 54–55, 80, 114

Democritus, 74

design. See disegno

detail, hazards of study of, 201–2

De’veri precetti della pittura (Armenini), 190–215, 191, 216, 219, 220, 227, 238

dialects, 238

Dialogo. See Dolce, Lodovico

difference (differenza): ethnicity and, 61–62; between Florence and Rome, 151, 153; place and, 36, 38, 210; style and, 35–37, 151–52, 155, 156, 178, 210–11; temporality and, 36, 38, 49–53, 103; travel accounts of, 61; as travel writing focus, 61

diffusion: of fame, 171, 172, 173; as germination, 79, 80; of style, 44, 79, 80, 92, 151, 212, 218, 227

diglossia, 214

Dioscuri horsemen statue (Rome), 199

disease, aria carrier of, 45, 141, 142, 148

disegno, 114, 126, 162, 228, 238; central Italy and, 137, 155; colorito vs., 132, 137, 155; feathers metaphor and, 180–81, 227; Giotto’s “O” and, 72; travel to Rome to learn, 194, 211

diversity. See varietà

Dodoens, Rembert, Histoire des plantes, 95

Dolce, Lodovico, 4, 6, 73, 198; extensive oeuvre of, 162; literary counterparts to, 189; mobility and, 203, 211, 219, 227, 234, 240; regional polemic of (see Venice);

works Dialogo della pittura (L’Aretino), 89, 162–78, 163, 180, 181, 182, 184–88,189, 198, 211, 219, 227; Il primo libro di Sacripante, 184; Lettere del gran Mahumeto imperadore de’ turchi, 168; “Topics to Be Memorized Organized as a City,” 41, 41, 169

Domenichi, Lodovico, 209

Dominici, Giovanni, 26

Donatello, 80, 97–106, 176, 211; bas-reliefs, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103; Bellano copyings of style of, 103–4, 105–6; Florence and, 83, 100, 103, 145, 150; Padua and, 61–62, 98–104, 172, 227; Rome and, 89, 90, 92, 128, 138, 178, 194; self-sufficiency of, 101; style and, 102–3, 178, 227; works: The Ascension with Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter, 102, 103; Calvacanti Annunciation, 68, 103; David with the Head of Goliath, 104, 105; Gattamelata equestrian statue, 98–99, 99, 100, 101, 103, 230; High Altar of the Santo, Relief Showing the Miracle of the Newborn Child, 101, 102; Judith and Holofernes, 104–5; Miracle of the Wrathful Son, 101; St. George, 190

Doni, Anton Francesco, Firenze Illustrata (planned), 189–90

Doria, Andrea, 155, 206, 211, 214

Doric order, 50, 94, 95, 96

Dosio, Giovanni Antonio, Roma, 195, 196–97

Dossi brothers, 184

Douglas, Mary, 46

Duccio, 62, 69, 108

Ducq, Joseph-François, 109; Antonello da Messina in the Studio of Jan van Eyck, 110

Dürer, Albrecht, 1, 12, 13, 25; Germanic style and, 185; Pontormo mimicry of, 135; Raphael rapport with, 134–35; travel to Bologna of, 203, 235; Venetian stay of, 13, 184, 185; visual difference and, 61; works: Christ before Herod, 135, 136; Lady in Venetian Dress Contrasted with a Nuremberg “Hausfrau,” 62; Nemesis (The Great Fortune), 134, 135, 182; St. Jerome in the Wilderness, 13, 15; Sea Monsters, 155; Virgin of the Rose Garlands, 13, 184

education, 84, 86, 87, 227; in Rome, 195, 198, 211, 219, 234–35; from travel, 203

Egyptians, 39, 40, 45, 50

Einflüsse des Himmels (influence of the heavens) concept, 239

Electoral Gallery (Düsseldorf), 238

Eliade, Mircea, 55

Empson, William, Some Versions of Pastoral, 65

environmental determinants, 44, 46, 141, 145, 240. See also aria; place

envy (invidia), 75–76, 108–9, 110–11, 111

Epimenides, 210–11

epistolary genre, 218, 221–25

equestrian statuary, 104, 199; Donatello and, 98–99, 99, 100, 101, 103, 230; Federico Zuccaro and, 230, 232

Erasmus, Dialogues on the Proper Pronunciation of Latin and Greek, 184

Este Monument (Ferrara), 101

Ethiopians, 40, 41, 193

ethnicity, 58, 61–62; artistic merit and, 184; cross-cultural dialogue and, 186; stylistic variation and, 153, 181, 239–40; writing on, 49–50

Etruscans, 40, 183

Eudoxia, 191

exile, 5, 66, 161

Eyck, Jan van, 106, 128; oil technique, 32, 33, 109–10, 110; Van der Paele Madonna, 109

eyewitness mode, 6, 200, 201, 203–15, 216–33, 234

Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other, 49

Fabriano, Gentile da, 167, 185

Fabrini, Giovanni Francesco, 90, 162, 164, 165, 166, 169, 171, 176, 177, 178, 181–82

Falaschi, Enid, 64

Falcone, Giuseppe, La nuova vaga, et dilettevole villa, 66

fame, 68–72, 73, 74, 75, 80, 84; allegorical representation of, 69, 70; diffusion of, 171, 172, 173; mobility as handmaiden of, 69, 108

fantocci, 192

Farnese family, 177, 179

fatiche, 114

Fauno, Lucio: Compendio di Roma antica, 194–95; Delle antichita della citta di Roma, 148

Fazio, Bartolommeo, De viris illustribus, 161

feathers metaphor, 180–81, 198, 227

Federico II, Duke of Mantua, 171, 173–74

Federico Zuccaro. See Zuccaro, Federico

Federigo da Montelfeltro, 69

Ferrara, 12, 45, 101.139, 171, 173, 184, 217, 218, 226; oil technique, 110

Filarete, 46, 106, 190

first-person narrative. See eyewitness mode

Flemish painters, 161; coloring techniques, 206, 207; transfer of oil technique to Italy, 32–33, 109

flood. See deluge metaphor

Florence, 3, 172, 207; Accademia del Disegno, 39, 45–46, 201, 234; aria (climate) and, 45, 141, 142; artisan envy and, 108–9; as artistic center, 14, 65, 75, 76, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 97, 104, 106, 109, 128; artists born in, 125, 132–33; artist travel to, 65, 75, 86, 87, 88, 128; artist travel to Rome from, 36, 88–89, 90; art literature on, 189–90; Bellano and, 104–5; buon fresco medium and, 155; Byzantine style and, 47–49, 47, 58, 60, 61, 61, 66; Cellini expatriation from, 218; Cimabue and, 54–55, 57–58, 65, 75; competitive atmosphere of, 73, 86; cultural supremacy of, 172; diplomatic ciphers and, 72; Donatello and, 83, 100, 103, 106, 145, 150; Giotto and, 64–69, 76, 150, 151; Gothic style and, 45, 92; guidebook to, 100; Michelangelo and, 138, 139, 141, 142; Michelangelo’s body brought back to, 234; modern style and, 86, 87, 151; oil technique and, 109, 110–11; Perino and, 143, 148, 150–51; as political center, 67; Raphael and, 12, 128–29, 134, 190, 235; repatriation to, 150, 217, 234; Rome contrasted with, 36–37, 151, 153; Rosso displacement from, 34–37; siege of (1529-30), 12, 139, 172; style and, 53, 80, 87, 97, 151, 152, 153; Vasari and, 30, 53, 69, 86, 157, 162, 164, 218. See also Medici listings

Florence Baptistery: bronze doors, 86, 217; Donatello and, 100; mosaics, 58, 60, 61, 61, 62, 63, 75

Florence Cathedral: Coronation of the Virgin mosaic (Gaddi attrib.), 63, 63; Dome, 84, 85; Donatello sculptures, 100

Floris, Frans, 1

Fontana Maggiore (Perugia), 126, 128

food and drink, 225–27, 241

foreign, definition of, 7

France, 36, 106, 111–12, 133, 172, 238; Cellini studio in, 217–18; Renaissance in, 27, 28–29

Francesco da Carrara, 75

Francesco di Giorgio Martini, 94, 225; Codex Saluzziano, “Ionic Column,” 224, 225; Jesi palaces, 22, 23

Francia, Francesco, 135, 238

Francis I, King of France, 36, 172

Franco, Giacomo, Il gran Conseglio dell’eccelsa Republica Venetiana, 167

Frangenberg, Thomas, 6

Franzese, Claudio, 142, 226

Frederick I Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor, 167, 171

Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, 52

Fugger family, 148

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 171

Gaddi, Agnolo, 54, 65, 78

Gaddi, Gaddo, 62–63, 73, 75; Coronation of the Virgin (attrib.), 63, 63, 172

Gaddi, Taddeo, 65, 67, 73, 76, 84, 114, 172

Galasso Ferrarese, 110

Galen, 46

Galli, Jacopo, 138

Gallwitz, Karl Ludwig: Handbuch der italienischen Renaissancemaler, 30, 30; “Umbrien Marken,” 30, 38

Gaudenzio Ferrari, 190, 222

Gauricus, Pomponius, 104

Geary, Patrick, 41–42

Gelli, Giovanni Battista, 48, 50

Gellius, Aulus, Attic Nights, 177

gender, 180

Genoa, 72, 83, 102, 106, 116, 206, 212; Perino and, 153, 154, 155, 214

Gentile da Fabriano, travel notebook, 120

geographic license, 18–21, 23–24, 25, 38

geography. See place

Georgette de Montenay, Emblemes, ou, Devises chrétiennes, 112, 113

germination, 79, 80, 241

Gerolamo da Modena, 111

Gessner, Conrad, 96

Geymüller, Heinrich Adolf von, Die Baukunst der Renaissance in Frankreich, 26–27, 28–29, 30, 32–33, 38, 41

Ghiberti, 43, 64, 65, 69, 75, 83, 87, 94, 94, 114, 176, 190, 217; Doors of Paradise, 80; I commentarii, 40, 141

Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 87, 114, 133, 140

Ghirlandaio, Ridolfo, 128, 145

Ghirlandaio, Benedetto and Davide, 87, 133

Giambologna, 218, 222, 226, 230–31

Giambullari, Pier Francesco, 39, 201, 203; Il Gello, 52

Giampiero da Padova, 101

Giants of the Monte Cavallo (Rome), 199

Gilio da Fabriano, Dialogo nel quale si ragiona degli errori e degli abusi de’ pittori circa l’istorie, 187

Ginzburg, Carlo, 65

Giordano, Fra, 2

Giorgione, 126, 128, 142, 167, 179, 225

Giotto, 43, 49, 53, 54, 64–72, 75, 84, 98, 103, 141, 150, 151, 218; background of, 64, 65, 66, 67; dissemination of style of, 76–80, 128, 162, 227; fame of, 68–72, 80; and Florentine Baptistery mosaic, 58; mobility of, 68–69, 76, 80, 81, 128; and Navicella mosaics, 69; “O” of, 70–72; students of, 76; woodcut portrait of, 68; works: Annunciation, 68; Coronation of the Virgin, 68; Lamentation over Christ, 78; Stultitia, 181; Wedding at Cana (Master of the Feast), 70, 71

Giottus Fiorentinus, 7

Giovanni da Udine, 145

Giovanni da Brugia, 33

Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, 73

Giovanni della Casa, 66, 192

Giovan Simone, 45

Giovio, Paolo, 3, 4, 5, 119; Historiarium sui temporis, 52

Girolamo de Treviso, 155

Giuliano de Maiano, 106, 108; Palazzo Como, 107

Giulio Romano, 12, 30, 133, 155, 204, 209, 211, 218, 222; Fall of the Giants, 228

Giunti (publisher), 33

Giusto, 98

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 173, 217

Goltzius, Hendrick, Tabula Cebetis, 112

Gonzaga, Federico, 211

Gonzaga, Francesco, 228

Gothic style (maniera tedesca), 5, 27, 41, 50, 53, 116; Brunelleschi rejection of, 89, 92, 94, 97, 128; diffusion of, 43–44, 45, 92, 227; dislike of, 46, 227; Roman aria and, 141

Goths, 191

Gozzoli, Benozzo, 30, 111, 112, 114, 160, 220; The Curse of Canaan, 114, 115; Joseph and His Brothers, 114; Journey of the Magi, 114

Granacci, Francesco, 87, 128, 132

Greco, El, 32, 54

Greece, 39, 40, 44, 46, 50, 74

Greek style. See Byzantine style

Gregory XIII, Pope, 234–35

Gritti, Alvise, 186

grotesques, 145, 146–47, 148, 201–2

Guarino, Battista, 49

Guasco, Francesco Eugenio, Delle ornatrici, et de’ loro uffizii, 225

Guglielmo da Forlì, 76

guidebooks, 92, 100, 148, 194–95

Guillaume de Marcillat, 139, 226

hair, 222, 223, 224–25

Hapsburgs, 213

health, climate and, 43, 45, 141, 143, 241

hearing, 6, 225

Heemskerck, Maerten van, 1; The Belvedere Tiber and Nile (attrib.), 199; The Garden in the Casa Galli, with Michelangelo’s statue of Bacchus, 138, 138; Self-Portrait with the Colosseum, 111

Henry, Tom, 126

Henry II, King of France, 50

Henry III, King of France, 226

Henry IV, King of France, 226

Hercules, 220, 222

Hippocrates, Airs Waters Places, 44, 45, 143

Hollanda, Francisco de, 32, 153, 155, 194, 198, 206; Tractato de pintura antigua, 194

Holy Land, 211

Honnecourt, Villard de, 1, 203

Horace, 75, 165; Ars Poetica, 94, 95, 185, 186; Epistles, 74, 177; “Epistle to Julius Florus,” 180, 181

horoscope, 139

human body, 18, 45, 152; Michelangelo depiction of, 137, 138, 139, 204

Humfrey, Peter, 11, 12, 13

Hungary, 108, 116

Iacopo dell’Indaco, 87

Iacopo del Tedesco, 87

Ibrahim Pasha, 186

iconoclasm, 167

illusionism, 87

imitation (imitatio), 49, 103–4, 105, 111, 121, 131, 135; of antiquities, 200; art studies in Rome and, 195; bedecked with feathers metaphor, 180–81, 198, 227; Federico Zuccaro and, 228; of Michelangelo’s style, 201

indices, of place-names, 81, 135

influence: as art historical term, 4, 13, 25–33, 37–38; as astrological concept, 5, 26–27, 33; diagrams of, 26–27, 28–29, 30, 32–33, 32, 38, 41; environmental contagion as, 46; locational vs. personal, 87; as malleable term, 25–26, 125; misguided use of, 5; mobility and, 13, 25–33, 37–38, 233, 238; rejection of “foreign,” 109

Ionic order, 94, 95, 96, 97, 224, 225

Isabella d’Este, 226

Iser, Wolfgang, 101

Islamic culture, 109, 168, 169, 172

Italian Renaissance. See Renaissance

Jacobus Publicius, The Art of Memory, 41

Jacopo da Foresti, “Padoua citta preclarissima,” 98–99, 99

Jacopo de’ Barbari (Barberino Veneziano), 162, 164

Jacopo della Quercia, 102, 106, 139

Jacopo di Casentino, 65, 73, 78, 84

Jacopo Filippo Foresti da Bergamo, Supplementum chronicarum, 168–69

Jerusalem, 106

Jesi: architecture, 22, 22, 23; Lotto and, 11, 12, 19, 21–23

Joanna of Austria, 69, 84

John of Pian di Carpini, 131

journey. See mobility

Julius II, Pope, 129

Julius Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis, 26–27

Justus of Ghent, 109

Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta, 3

Kliemann, Julian, 228

knowledge, 41, 49; from mobility, 109, 186, 192–93, 195, 203, 210–11

Kris, Ernst, 64

Kritias, 183

Kurz, Otto, 64

labor (travail), 74–76

Lafréry, Antoine, 111; Speculum romanae magnificentiae, 148

Lamo, Pietro, Graticola di Bologna, 189

Landino, Cristoforo, 55, 69, 74, 84

landscape painting, 13, 16

language: “code-switching,” 214; figurative, 4, 5; of negation, 42–43; regional dialects, 238; translation, 132; vernaculars, 132, 134, 165

Lanzi, Luigi, 206, 240

Laocoön group, 18, 200

Laudivio Zacchia de Vezzano, 168; Lettere del gran Mahumeto imperadore de’ Turchi, 168, 168

Lefebvre, Henri, 163

leisure activity. See recreation

Lenzoni, Carlo, 52

Leo X, Pope, 42, 45, 92, 171, 190

Leo Africanus, 61, 134; Battle of Anghiari cartoon, 128; Descrizione dell’Africa, 44–45

Leonardo da Vinci, 3, 12, 126, 131, 132, 190, 192, 201, 225; on artistic invention, 111; cartoons by, 128; Last Supper, 155–56, 206, 207; and Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, 204; and oil technique, 111; on proper depiction of hair, 224; on supremacy of sight over hearing, 225

Leoni, Francesco, 218

Leoni, Leone, portrait medal of Michelangelo, 140–41, 140

Leopold William, Archduke of Austria, art collection of, 238–39, 239, 240

Lionardi, Alessandro, Dialoghi dell’invenzione poetica, 83, 84

Lippi, Filippino, 116–20, 152; Bracket Supporting Marine Creatures Sustaining a Tablet, 116; Saint Philip Driving the Dragon from the Temple, 119, 120; Saint Thomas of Aquinas Confounding the Heretics, 118; Strozzi Chapel frescoes, 118, 119, 119, 152

Lippi, Fra Filippo, 109, 116, 171, 192

Lipsius, Justus, De ratione cum fructu peregrinandi, 233

Lives (Vasari), 5, 30–51, 32, 125–60, 162, 238; Barocchi authoritative edition, 34; deluge metaphor and, 54–55; editions, 1550

and 1568, 30–31, 33–34, 52–53, 60, 132, 139, 165; geographic scope of, 83, 176; index of place-names, 81, 82, 83, 135; other contemporary publications and, 52; preface (Proemio delle Vite), 39–53, 54, 69, 83, 86, 106, 171; Roman numerals in, 50, 52–53, 55; significance of, 39; temporal scheme of, 41–43; Title Page, 31, 164; as travelogue, 33–37

Lobelius, Matthias, Kruydtboeck, 96, 96

Loh, Maria, 26

Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo, 27, 190; Idea del tempio della pittura, 180, 190

Lombardo, Tullio, 165

Lombardy, 16, 18–24, 206, 238

Long, Pamela, 109

López de Gómara, Francisco, Historia general de las Indias, 96

Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, 74, 75, 76, 78, 227

Lorenzetti, Pietro, 80

Lotto, Lorenzo, 11–38, 173, 181–94; background/life of, 11–12, 13, 181, 184; coloring and, 181, 182, 183, 184; geographic license and, 18–21, 23–24, 25, 38; mobility of, 6, 11–25, 30, 162; regional style and, 6, 12, 37; site specificity and, 18–19, 22–23, 38; stylistic modulations of, 6, 12–24, 38; works: Colleoni Martinengo altarpiece, 16–17, 17, 18; Entombment panel, 21; Libro di spese diverse, 11; The Penitent St. Jerome, 16; Portrait of a Young Man, 182; St. Antoninus altarpiece, 23–24, 25; St. Jerome in the Wilderness, 13, 14, 16; St. Lucy altarpiece, 19, 19, 21; St. Lucy at the Tomb of St. Agatha, 23, 24; St. Lucy before Paschasius and St. Lucy Harnessed to Oxen, 22; St. Nicholas in Glory with Sts. John the Baptist and Lucy, 19, 20, 21, 181, 182, 183; The Stoning of St. Stephen, 18, 18; Teams of Oxen, 22

Louis XIII, style of, 30

Lucca, 45, 55, 116

Luchetto da Genova, 206

Lucian, 75

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 44

Luzzo, Lorenzo (Morto da Feltro), 90

Lysippus, 131

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 84, 132; L’arte della guerra, 65

Maginnis, Hayden, 64

mal’aria, 43, 141, 142, 241

Malatesta, Pandolfo, 141

Malipiero, Domenico, 168

Malvasia, Carlo Cesare, Felsina pittrice, 238

Mandelli, Giovanni, 193

Manetti, Giannozzo, 90, 94, 132

maniera. See style

maniera all’antica. See antiquities

maniera greca. See Byzantine style

maniera moderna. See modern style

maniera tedesca. See Gothic style

Mannerism, 18, 208

Mansueti, Giovanni, 186; St. Mark Healing St. Anianas in Alexandria, 187

Mantegazza, Antonio and Cristoforo, Certosa di Pavia façade, 93

Mantegna, Andrea, 135, 230; Triumphs of Caesar, 174

Mantua, 12, 78, 211, 217, 218, 222; Titian and, 171, 173–74, 176; Zuccaro and, 219, 228, 230

Marche, 7, 12, 16, 24, 30, 181

Marco da Pino, 189

Margaritone d’Arezzo, 62, 67, 69, 76, 84

Margherita of Savoy, 228

Marguerite de Navarre, Les Prisons, 112

Maria Maddalena of Austria, 226

Marliani, Bartolomeo: Liber urbis Romae topographia, 194; Topographia antiquae Romae, 148

Marrelli, Michelangelo, 111

Martini, Francesco di Giorgio. See Francesco di Giorgio Martini

Martini, Simone, 78

martyrdom modello, 152, 152, 153

Martyrs, Confraternity of the, 151–52, 152

Masaccio, 83, 87, 89, 129, 141, 176; Carmine Chapel frescoes, 47, 80, 151; Life of Peter fresco cycle, 47; St. Paul, 151; universal style and, 103

Masolino, 141

Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, 108

Maturino da Firenze, 128, 160, 195; fresco, Palazzo Ricci, Rome, 198

MCCL (1250), significance of, 50, 52–53, 55

Méaulle, F., “Les chaines de l’ancien port de Pise et la statue de Jean de Pise au Campo Santo,” 58, 59

Mechel, Christian von, La Salle Italienne, Trosième Salle, 239

Medici, Cosimo I de’, 39, 52, 55, 66, 67, 83, 166, 218, 234

Medici, Cosimo II de’, 226

Medici, Ferdinando de’, 53, 69

Medici, Francesco de’, 150

Medici, Lorenzo de’, 171–72

Medici, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’, 131

Medici, Marie de’, 226

Medici, Piero di Cosimo de’, 3

Medici family, 30, 52, 67, 100, 109, 172; expulsion from Florence of, 138; sculpture garden, 141

medieval period, 2, 41, 84; art of, 191–92; Vasari’s depiction of, 41

Mediterranean Sea, 39–40, 40

Mehmet II, Sultan, 105, 108–9, 168–69; portrait medal, 169, 186

Meliore di Jacopo, Christ in Judgment, 48, 48

Melli, Domenico, 69

Memling, Hans, 32, 33, 109

memory, 214, 241; mobility as threat to, 40–41, 106; topical organization as aid to, 41, 41

Mertens, Franz, 30

mescolare, 48, 133–34

Michelangelo, 5, 30, 33, 126, 87, 136–43, 150, 176, 177, 213, 214, 225, 228, 230; aria usage by, 45, 141; celestial source of genius of, 139, 143, 227; death in Rome of, 234; as divine, 162; Dolce’s view of, 185; effect on other artists of, 35, 36; fantocci and, 192; on Flemish painting, 206; Florentine homeland of, 139, 190, 234; hazards of imitating style of, 201; Leone portrait medal of, 140–41, 141; mobility and, 125, 138–39, 140, 144; modern style and, 102; nudes and, 15–16, 18, 130, 201–2, 201; oil technique prejudice of, 180; patrons of, 138; Pauline Chapel and, 166; Raphael and, 128, 129, 135–36, 203; return of body from Rome to Florence, 234; in Rome (see under Rome); Sebastiano and, 179–80, 179, 181; supremacy of, 113, 126, 137, 139, 192; varietà and, 136–41, 185; wet nurse of, 145; working model, 204; works: Battle of Cascina cartoon, 128, 129, 129, 152, 153; Erythrean Sibyl, 15; Expulsion from the Garden, 36; Last Judgment, 177, 180, 201, 201, 204, 205, 219; A Male Nude Seen from Behind, 201; Pietà, 138; The Risen Lazarus, Supported by Two Figures, 179–80, 179; St. Bartholomew from The Last Judgment, 48–49, 48; Sistine Chapel frescoes, 36, 129, 135–37, 139, 166, 204; Sleeping Cupid, 138; Studies for the Last Judgment, 137, 137

Michel de Certeau, 163

Michelet, Jules, 2, 3

Michelozzo di Bartolomeo, 106; Pazzi Chapel design (attrib.), 97

Michiel, Marcantonio, 161–62, 167; Agri et urbis Bergomatis, 162; Notizie del disegno, 162; Vite de’ pittori e scultori moderni, 162

Michieli, Andrea, 109

middle path. See modo mezzano

Milan, 18, 68, 83, 86, 156, 173, 190, 213, 219; copies of classical style and, 200; diplomatic ciphers and, 72; Gothic style and, 45; Leonardo’s Last Supper and, 206, 207

Milanesi, Gaetano, 64

Milizia, Francesco, Dizionario delle belle arti del disegno, 27

Mixtec Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I, 120

mobility, 1–7, 75, 80, 86, 202–15, 217, 234; Accademia di San Luca and, 234–35, 238; as aesthetic experience, 36, 233, 234; alienation resulting from, 211; allegorical (see allegorical mobility); ambivalence toward, 176; area-specific anecdotes and, 204; aria and, 44–46, 141–43; artist as ornament and, 171–73; artistic centers and, 7, 162–63; artistic decline from, 34; as artistic necessity, 192; artistic reasons for, 83–84, 202, 206, 208–9, 235, 236; artist’s reception and, 7, 74–75; astrological influence and, 87; author guides and, 193; beyond Italy, 106, 108, 109, 110–11, 168–69, 202–3, 206; biography interwoven with, 132–33; characterizations/connotations of, 2–3; to city, 64–65, 80, 121; contamination and, 4, 46–49, 125; definition of, 2; disorientation/displacement from, 1, 7, 22, 34–37, 74, 193, 211, 219; eyewitness accounts of, 6, 156–57, 190, 200, 201, 203–34; fame from, 69–72, 73, 74, 75, 80, 84, 108; favored targets of, 87; foreign interactions and, 46–48, 54, 55, 106, 108, 109, 186, 203–7, 210; guidebooks and, 148; hardship and pain of, 74–76, 139, 220, 221, 227; historical origins of, 2; influence and, 13, 25–33, 37–38, 233, 238; intricacy and networks of, 27, 28–29, 30; inventions facilitating, 27; knowledge acquired through, 109, 186, 192–93, 195, 203, 210–11; as locus of meaning, 55; memory loss from, 40–41, 106; for patronage, 139, 171, 212–14; physical labor of, 157–58, 160, 173; as pilgrimage, 2, 133; political impetus for, 213; psychological effects of, 211, 216–20; purposeful vs. wandering, 212–13; as recreation, 6, 217, 218, 219, 221–25, 230–31, 233, 234; selfhood and, 38, 72–74, 80, 156, 225; self-sufficiency and, 139, 144; as sensory experience, 6, 204, 222–23, 225–27, 233; social standing and, 72–74; standardization and control of, 234–41; style linked with (see style); topography and, 111, 173; varietà as bridge between style and, 125–60, 161, 185–86, 187, 235; virtual, 81, 120, 231; war’s impact on, 12, 133, 211–12, 213

modern style (maniera moderna), 86, 87, 102, 141, 142, 151, 172, 218; dissemination of, 78, 80, 81; varietà spectrum and, 125

modo mezzano, 227; meaning of, 132–33, 135

Monciatti, Alessio, 63

Montagna, 86

Morigia, P. Paolo, Nobilità di Milano, 189

Morto da Feltro (Lorenzo Luzzo), 90

mountains, as metaphors, 113

Mundy, James, 228

Muziano, Girolamo, 235

Muzio, Girolamo, 211

Myron, 131

Nagel, Alexander, 12

Naples, 12, 32, 33, 83, 102, 106, 128, 189, 217, 218; art patronage and, 161; Giotto and, 69, 72; oil technique and, 109; Triumphal Arch, 106, 107, 108, 108; war displacement from, 213

Narni, Erasmo da, 98, 98

natural history, 83, 95–96, 141, 142, 143; varietà and, 131, 132

Navagero, 171, 172, 176

Navicella mosaic (Rome), 68, 69

nemo propheta in patria trope, 75

Neoplatonic thought, 112

Nesteros, Abba, 41

New World. See Americas

Niccolò d’Arezzo, 83–84, 86, 87, 88–89, 97, 102

Nobili, Durante, 30

northern Italy: artistic mobility and, 12; central Italian style vs., 181; coloring and, 206, 207, 208, 214; merits of artists of, 190; oil technique and, 155–56; Vasari on, 218; Zuccaro travel in, 219, 221–22, 227

nudes, 15–16, 18, 36, 130–31, 136, 180, 206; study of, 201–2

Oderisio, Roberto d’, Saint John the Evangelist and Mary Magdalene, 76, 77

Odoni, Andrea, 182

oil technique, 155–56; lighting effects, 203; Lotto and, 181, 182; MCCL as advent of, 53; Raphael and, 111, 183; and gender, 180; Titian and, 173, 203; transfer to Italy of, 32–33, 109–10, 110, 183; Venice and, 13, 110, 180

orders. See architectural orders

ordine, 113, 115, 126

ornament, artist as, 171–73

Ostrogoths, 191

otherness, 49, 186

Ottaviano da Faenza, 76

Ottoman Turks, 105, 186; images and, 168, 169; Venetian contacts with, 72, 108–9, 168–69, 186. See also Constantinople

Oviedo, Gonzalez Ferdinando d’, Della naturale e generale istoria dell’Indie, 131–32, 134

Padua, 30, 61–62, 68, 69, 97–104, 172, 173, 189, 217, 227, 238; artistic and urban milieu of, 98; Gothic style and, 45; metalwork expertise, 101, 101

Palazzo Bartolini (Florence), 150–51

Palazzo Como (Naples), 106, 107

Palazzo della Signoria (Jesi), 22, 22, 23, 23

Palazzo del Podestà (Florence), 68

Palazzo del Poggio Reale (Naples), 106

Palazzo Doria del Principe (Genoa), 145, 153, 154, 155

Palazzo Ducale (Venice). See Sala del Maggior Consiglio

Palazzo Mattei frescoes (Rome), 219

Palazzo Medici (Florence), 114

Palazzo Medici (Rome), 200

Palazzo Ricci frescoes (Rome), 198

Palazzo Vecchio (Florence), 53, 73, 160; Sala della Signoria, 128; Salone del Cinquecento, 152, 226; Vasari fresco, 94, 94

Palazzo Zuccari (Rome), 220–21, 222

Palladio, 94, 200

Palma Vecchio, 182, 186

Palmieri, 49, 84

Panofsky, Erwin, 25–26, 61, 131

Pantheon (Rome), 148

Paolo da Certaldo, 145

Papal Palace. See Vatican

Papal States, 7, 16, 161, 177

Paracelsus, 109

Parmigianino, 203, 206, 212

Passaggio per Italia, Il. See Zuccaro, Federico

Passignani, Domenico, 231

pastoral genre, 65, 66

patria, 121, 139, 161, 176; artist as ornament and, 171–73; artist reciprocity with, 83, 84, 102; connotation’s of, 83; severed ties with, 84

patronage, 6, 75, 138, 161, 166; importance of, 139; mobility and, 171, 214; oil technique and, 109; Ottoman, 109, 168, 169; Titian and, 173–74

Paul II, Pope, 104, 105

Paul III, Pope, 177

Paul IV, Pope, 214

Pavia, 101, 219; Certosa façade, 92, 93, 97

Payne, Alina, 6, 50

Pazzi Chapel (Florence), 97, 97

Pèlerin, Jean : “Carret a Pelegrina,” 111–12, 112; De artificiali perspectiva, 111–12

Perino del Vaga, 5, 7, 116, 125, 128, 135, 143–57, 195, 204, 235; honor’s and, 150; humble origin’s of, 144–45; linguistic “code-switching” and, 214; personal style of, 152–53; return to Florence of, 148, 150–51; Roman style and, 151, 211; self-sufficiency of, 145; varietà and, 144, 148, 151–52, 153, 155, 156–57; works: Grotesques with Nude Figures, 145, 146–47; La Loggia degli Eroi, 153, 154, 155; Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand, 151–52, 152, 156, 157; The Shipwreck of Aeneas: Neptune Saving Aeneas and His Crew, 155, 155; The Sun Stands Still (attrib.), 152, 153; Tarquinius Priscus and the Augur Attius, 148, 149

perspective, 87, 111, 203, 208–10, 220, 235

Perugia, 104, 120, 126, 127, 128, 134

Perugino, Pietro, 30, 86, 106, 111, 126, 128, 218; Crucifixion with the Virgin and Sts. Mary, Magdalene, Bernard, John the Baptist, and Benedict, 207, 207

Peruzzi, Baldassare, 209, 212

Pesaro, 200, 217

Petrarch, 43, 74, 75, 111, 139; Canzone, 73; Familiares, 74; Invective against a Detractor of Italy, 42; Itinerarium ad sepulcrum domini nostri Yehsu Christi, 193; Sonnet 151, 2

Petrus Christus, 109, 161

Picasso, Pablo, 26; Guernica, 30

pictura poesis, 172

Piedmont, 219, 221, 226–27, 228

Pierino da Vinci, 192

Piero della Francesca, 128

Piero del Massaio, “Roma,” 88

Piero de Pucci, 114

Piero di Cosimo, 89

Pietro Cavallini Romano, 76

Pietro del Donzello, 106

Pieve di Cadore, 12

Pigage, Nicolas de, 238, 239

Piles, Roger de, Abrégé de la vie des peintres, 238

pilgrimage, 2, 11, 99, 133, 186; allegorical, 7, 14, 111–14, 140–41, 141, 214, 220; community formation and, 204; religious, 211, 222, 241

Pino, Paolo, 13, 27, 131, 184; Dialogo della pittura, 162

Pinturicchio, 120–21, 128

Piombo. See Sebastiano del Piombo Pisa, 55, 58, 62, 69, 75, 78; Gozzoli’s twenty-four frescoes, 114, 115

Pisa Baptistery, 114; Main Portal, 245, 246

Pisa Cathedral mosaics, 58, 63

Pisanello, 101, 128, 167

Pisano, Andrea, 73, 75, 139

Pisano, Nicola, 139

Pius II, Pope, Commentarii, 173

Pizzolo, Niccolò, 101

place: aria and, 44–46, 141, 143; art associated with, 44; artist as ornament of, 171–73; artistic techniques linked with, 183, 240; artwork suited to, 210–14; differences of, 36, 38, 210; history in relation to, 83; influence and, 26; memorization of names, 41; mobility tensions with, 156–57, 189; painting cycles and, 166; regional dialects and, 238; regional patriotism and, 189–90; style intersection with, 6, 7, 12, 34–37, 38, 62, 86–87, 102, 155, 156, 168, 210–14, 235, 238, 239–40; table of names, 81, 82, 83, 135; varietà and, 131, 140, 156; visual representations of, 61, 62, 185, 186. See also patria

plague, 45, 141, 148

Plato, 46, 74; Symposium, 214

Plazzotta, Carol, 126

Pliny, 40, 70, 83

Pliny the Elder, 106; Naturalis Historia, 131

Plutarch, On the Education of Children (attrib.), 49

Podesti, Francesco, Francis I in the Studio of Benvenuto Cellini, 217, 217

Poggio, 67

Polidoro da Caravaggio, 12, 152, 160, 190, 195, 213, 214, 219, 235; Palazzo Ricci frescoes, 198, 198, 201, 235; as refugee from sack of Rome, 212, 213

pollution. See contamination

Polo, Marco, 203; Merveilles du monde, 131

Polo de Antonio da Raguxi (Ragusa), 101

Polyclitus, 131

Pontormo, Jacopo da, 128, 135, 207, 226; Christ before Pilate, 135, 136; Study for “Deluge with the Benediction of the Seed of Noah” (attrib.), 208; Victory and Battle of the Ten Thousand Martyrs, 152

Ponzio, 213, 214

Porcacchi, Tomasso, L’isole piu famose del mondo, 171

Pordenone, 12, 108, 172, 225

portraiture, 66

Posthumus, Herman, Landscape with Roman Ruins, 88, 89

Prato, 102

Precepts. See Armenini, Giovanni Battista

prima maniera, 115

Primaticcio, 238

printing press, 2, 210

proportion, 190

Protogenes, 84, 203

Ptolemy: Cosmographia, 88; Tetrabiblos 48, 87

Pucci, Lorenzo, 148

puppets (fantocci) and primitive style, 192

purging, 53, 80

Pythagoras, 74

Quattrocento, 167

Quintilian, 46, 49, 63, 74, 131; Institutio Oratoria, 131, 132

Quirinal (Rome), 199

Rabelais, 194

Raffaello da Urbino, 35, 36

Raimondi, Marcantonio, 135; Plague in Crete (after Raphael design), 141, 141

Ramusio, Giovanni Battista, 119; Navigazioni e viaggi, 2, 44, 134

Raphael, 3, 5, 12, 25, 30, 116, 125–36, 195, 204, 218; allegorical mobility and, 132, 140–41, 143, 227; astrological influence on style of, 190; on Barbarian destruction of Rome, 42, 45; coloring and, 179, 203, 235; diverse workshop of, 155; formation as painter of, 126, 128–30; Fra Bartolommeo and, 143, 144; letter to Pope Leo X by, 42, 45, 92, 190; maternal breastfeeding of, 145; mobility of, 12, 15, 126, 128, 129–30, 134, 139, 143, 144, 162, 203, 235; modo mezzano and, 132–33, 135, 227; oil technique and, 111, 183; perspective and, 209; proportion and, 190; Rome and (see under Rome); Rosso compared with, 36; Sebastiano restoration of Vatican frescoes of, 177, 178; style development of, 126–30, 132–36, 139, 235; varietà and, 125, 126, 130–36, 161, 185; works: Galatea, 131; Loves of Psyche, 213; Mond Crucifixion, 126; Prophet Isaiah, 124, 130; St. Cecilia altarpiece, 135; St. Jerome with a View of Perugia, 126, 127; School of Athens, 15, 235; Sea Victory at Ostia, 152; Sibyls, 10, 36, 37, 135; Sistine Madonna, 23; Stanza della Segnatura frescoes, 129, 166; Stanza dell’Incendio di Borgo: Fire in the Borgo, 16, 136, 137, 166; Villa Farnesina frescoes, 219; The Vision of Ezekiel, 134, 135

Ravenna, 52, 68, 190, 200, 206

recreation (ricreazione), 6, 217, 218, 219, 221–25, 230–31, 233, 234

regional style. See place

regola, 113, 115, 126

Reinhardt, Ad, 30

Reisezeichnungen (travel drawings), 228

Renaissance: Dark Ages preceding, 41; diagram of, 27, 28–29, 30, 30; and first crest of style, 27; Florence seen as cradle of, 69; patronage and, 139; purpose of education and, 49; Quattrocento and, 167; Trecento and, 54; “universal man” of, 165

Reni, Guido, 238

repatriation, 7, 80, 86, 108, 150, 234; rewards of, 75, 217

Resta, Padre Sebastiano, 110; Aggiunta e supplement al Correggio in Roma, 32–33, 32

rhetoric, 46, 132

Rhodes, 74, 84, 203, 210–11

Riccobaldo da Ferrara, 69

Ridolfi, Carlo, 184

Ripa, Cesare, 198, 218, 230; Iconologia, 73

Robert, King of Naples, 72, 73

Rocchetti, Marc Antonio, 210

Roman arches, 199, 225

Roman numerals and significance of typography, 50, 52–53

Romano, Giulio. See Giulio Romano

Rome, 30, 106, 173, 194–202, 209, 222; Accademia di San Luca, 234–35, 236–37, 238; antiquities of, 15, 18, 40, 88, 90, 92, 97, 116, 119, 138, 150, 160, 176, 177, 190, 194, 195, 198–200, 203, 204, 219; aria (air) of, 44, 46, 53, 133, 141–43, 179; Armenini and, 190, 194–202, 211, 213–15, 227, 238; artist-as-voyager and, 111; as artistic center, 194, 204, 211, 212–13, 217, 218; artistic competition in, 204, 220; artistic superiority of, 161; artists’ travel to, 75, 87–88, 104, 116, 118, 141, 142–43, 176–77, 194–205, 211, 214; Brunelleschi and, 89–97, 100, 116, 121, 138, 178, 194; contradictory traditions/perceptions of, 87–88; copies of works in, 200; displacement from, 211–13; Donatello and, 89, 90, 92, 102, 128, 138, 178, 194; façades of, 195, 198, 213, 214, 219, 235; Florence contrasted with, 36–37, 151, 153; Fra Bartolommeo’s dislike of, 142–43; Giotto and, 68, 69, 78; guidebooks to, 92, 148, 194–95; Lotto and, 7, 13–14, 16, 16, 18, 24; mal’aria of, 142; map of, 195, 196–97; Michelangelo and, 35, 36, 129, 135–36, 138, 139, 142, 143, 153, 227, 234; Perino and, 145, 146–48, 151, 153, 211; pillage of (see Barbarian invasions; sack of Rome); plague (1523), 148; provincial style vs., 213; Raphael and, 12, 15, 92, 126, 129–30, 134, 135–36, 142, 143, 161, 203, 219, 235; reception of visitors to, 75; Rosso’s failure in, 34–38; Sebastiano and, 12, 177, 178, 179, 181; statuary of, 199–200; study in, 195, 198, 200–201, 211, 219, 234–35, 236–37, 238; stylistic modes of, 151, 152, 153, 210, 211, 213, 227, 235; Vasari commissions, 157. See also Vatican; specific landmarks

Rossellino, Antonio, 106

Rossellino, Bernardo, Pazzi Chapel, 97

Rossi, Aldo, 34

Rossi, Bernardo de’, 24

Rosso Fiorentino, 27, 34–37, 38, 128, 135, 143, 201, 211; The Creation of Eve, 35, 35, 36, 38; Deposition from the Cross, 36; The Fall of Man, 35, 35, 36, 38; Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well, 36

Rovere, Giovanna Feltria della, 128

Rubens, Peter Paul, 240

Rubin, Patricia, 64, 65

Rucellai, Annibale, 192

ruins. See antiquities

rule (regola), 113, 115, 126

Ruscelli, Girolamo, Precetti della militia modern, 190

Rusticello, Il milione, 203

Sabatelli, Giuseppe, Cimabue and Giotto as a Child, 64

Sacchetti, Franco, 74–75

sack of Rome (1527), 12, 43, 55; aria of, 45; destructive cultural impact of, 177–78; effect on mobility of, 12, 133, 211–12, 213

sacks of Rome (410, 455, 456, 546). See Barbarian invasions

Sadeler, Aegidius, II, print of Titian’s Titus Vespasian, 174, 175, 176

Sagrega, Guillermo, Triumphal Arch of Alfonso I of Naples, 106, 107, 108

St. Augustine, 89–90, 90

St. Lucy, confraternity of (Jesi), 19, 21

St. Peter’s Basilica, 70, 129–30, 133. See also Sistine Chapel

St. Peter the Martyr, altar of, 164, 165

St. Petronius, façade reliefs, 139

St. Thomas Aquinas, 15, 42, 90, 118, 164, 216

Sala del Maggior Consiglio (Great Council Hall, Venice), 75, 166, 167–68, 167, 169, 170, 171, 188, 228, 229

Salviati, Francesco, 24, 213, 214

Sangallo, Antonio da, 67, 133

Sangallo, Antonio da, the Younger, 36

San Gallo, Bastiano (Aristotile), 128; Copy after Michelangelo’s Cartoon “Battle of Cascina,” 129, 129

Sangallo, Giuliano da, 67; “Pulley, Structural Details,” Codex Barberiano, 90, 91

San Gimignano, 87, 133, 141, 142, 143

San Giovanni Evangelista (Brescia), Moretto altarpiece, 23

San Giovanni Evangelista (Ravenna), Giotto frescoes, 68

San Marco (Venice), 72, 141; bronze horses façade, 101; Byzantine art, 167; repairs to, 21–22, 52

Sanmicheli, Michele, 13

San Miniato al Monte (Florence), 63

Sannazaro, Jacopo, Arcadia, 66

Sansoni (publisher), 35

Sansovino, Andrea, Pallazzo della Signoria, 22, 22, 23

Sansovino, Francesco, 12; Delle cose notabili che sono in Venetia, 171, 189; Dell’historia vniversale dell’origine et imperio de tvrchi, 169; Dialogo di tutte le cose notabili e belle che sono in Venetia, 165–68, 166; Venetia città nobilissima et singolare descritta, 169, 171, 189

Sansovino, Jacopo, 128, 211–12, 213

Santa Chiara fresco cycle (Naples), 72

Santa Croce (Florence): Cimabue and, 68, 69;

Donatello and, 68, 100, 103; Pazzi Chapel design, 96, 97

Sant’Agostino (Rome), Raphael fresco, 129, 130

Santa Maria del Carmine (Florence): Brancacci Chapel, 47, 47, 141; Chapel of Jerome fresco cycles, 74; Lotto altarpiece, 181; Masaccio frescoes, 47, 80, 141, 151; Masolino scenes of St. Peter’s life, 141

Santa Maria della Pace (Rome): Cesi Chapel frescoes, 26, 34, 35, 35, 36, 38; Chigi Chapel frescoes, 10, 36, 37, 135

Santa Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (Florence), 207, 207

Santa Maria Maggiore (Rome), 12, 43; mosaic façade, 63, 63

Santa Maria Novella (Florence), 55, 64; Strozzi Chapel, 118, 119, 119, 120, 152

Santa Maria Nuova (Florence), 111

Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, Carafa Chapel (Rome), 118

Sant’Angelo, Francesco Il, 219, 220

Sant’Antonio Basilica. See Santo

Santi, Giovanni (Raphael’s father), 126

Santi Giovanni e Paolo (Venice), 164, 165, 169, 182; Lotto altarpiece, 23, 25; Lotto burial in cemetery of, 11

Santissima Annunziata (Florence), 3

Santo (Padua): Bellano bronze relief, 105–6, 105; Donatello altar, 98, 99, 101, 102, 102, 103

Sanudo, Marin, 167, 168

Sarto, Andrea del, 35, 36, 128, 133, 143, 226

Sauli, Bandinello, Cardinal, 3, 4

Savonarola, Michele, Libellus de magnifics ornamentis regie civitatis Padue, 98, 99

Savoy court, 224, 226, 227–28, 230; coiffure at, 222, 223

Saxl, Fritz, 25–26

sbandire (expulsion), 66

Scalza, Michele, 49

Scardeone, Bernardino, Historiae urbis Patavii, 98, 98, 99, 100, 100, 104, 189

Scarpaccia, Vittore, 86–87

Schlosser, Julius von, 33–34, 67

Schmitt, Carl, 1

scientific knowledge, 95–96, 111

Scipione Africanus, 75

Scolari, Filippo Spano de gli, 108

Scorel, Jan van, 182

sculpture, 86; Donatello and, 100–106, 178; Michelangelo and, 139, 228; relief, 87; Roman antiquity, 199–200, 219. See also equestrian statuary

Sebastiano del Piombo, 3, 18, 142, 173, 177, 178–81, 184, 195; Dolce’s view of imitative work of, 180–81, 227; mobility of, 6, 12, 162–63, 178–79, 181, 211; musical talent of, 225; restoration of Raphael frescoes by, 177, 178;

works Cardinal Bandinello Sauli, His Secretary, and Two Geographers, 3, 4, 5; The Raising of Lazarus, 179, 179, 180

seconda maniera. See modern style

Seisenegger, Jakob, 173; Portrait of Emperor Charles V, 174

selfhood, 38, 42, 72–74, 80, 156, 225

self-sufficiency, 144

Semper, Gottfried, Der Stil, 27

Seneca, 75

senses, 6, 7, 204, 222–23, 225–27, 233

Serlio, Sebastiano, 27, 94, 210; “Scena Comica,” 84, 86

Shearman, John, 128

Sideri, Giorgio (Calopodio da Candia), Nautical Map of the Center East Mediterranean, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, 40

Sidney, Philip, 98

Siena, 69, 75, 83, 203, 207, 227; Baptistery, 102; Cathedral, 128, 209, 210; Giotto disciples in, 78

sight. See vision

Signorelli, Luca, 6, 106, 120, 128; “Apocalypse” fresco, 121

Simone del Pollaiuolo (Il Cronaca), 150

Simone Sanese, 76

Siraisi, Nancy, 44

Sistine Chapel, 36, 129, 135–37, 139, 145, 166, 192; communitas gathered in, 204; Last Judgment, 177, 180, 201, 204, 205; varietà of frescoes, 114, 136–37

site specificity, 18–19, 21–23, 25, 38

smell, sense of, 225

Sobborgo Sant’Angelo (Perugia), 126, 127

Sohm, Philip, 6, 35, 207

Sorte, Cristoforo, Osservazioni nella pittura, 192

space, 151

Spain, 73–74, 106, 108, 212, 213, 238

Spear, Richard, 6

Spinelli, Parri, 83

Spinello Aretino, 65, 73, 78, 84, 114, 171, 183

spiritual journey. See pilgrimage

Spitzer, Leo, 43 spogliata/spogliare ornamenti, 172

Spoleto, 116, 171–72

Starnina, Gherardo, 73–74

Statius, 75

Stefano Fiorentino, 76

Stoics, 112

Strabo, Geography, 177

Strozzi Chapel (Florence), Filippino Lippi frescoes, 118, 119, 119, 120, 152

style, 5, 18, 126, 161–215; arbiter of, 210; aria relationship with, 43–46, 53, 143; artistic subjectivity and, 225; astrological influence on, 190, 227; center and periphery and, 65–66; classification by place, 86–87 (see also place); cleansing of, 5; confrontations and, 156; corruption of, 4, 5, 46–49, 134, 214; dialectic of, 18–25, 38; difference and, 35–37, 38, 61–62, 151–52, 155, 156, 178, 210–11; diffusion of, 44, 79, 80, 92, 151, 210, 212, 218, 227; dissemination of, 76–80, 81, 162; ethnicity and, 50, 58, 153, 181, 239–40; Florentine focus on, 80, 87; gender and, 180; geographic license and, 18–21, 23–24, 25, 38; imitation of, 103–4, 105, 135; influence and, 26, 33, 46; mobility’s effects on, 3–5, 12–16, 24–25, 27, 34, 44, 76–80, 81, 84, 86, 92, 132, 139, 151–210, 214, 227, 233, 234, 238, 239, 240–41; modo mezzano, 132–33, 135, 227; mutation of, 135; as organic, 80; origins and, 7, 178; personal differences and, 36; place intersection with, 7, 34–37, 38, 210–14; regional variants of, 6, 12, 155, 178, 210–14, 235, 238–39; significance of year MCCL to, 50, 52–53; site specificity and, 18–19, 21–23; speed and excess and, 208; as spiritual journey, 111–14; study of models of, 204; subject matter elided with, 131; temporality and, 36, 38, 49–53, 103; terza maniera qualities, 113; varietà as bridge betwwen mobility and, 121, 161; Vasari’s lexicon of terms, 46

Süleyman the Magnificent, Sultan, 186

Summonte, Pietro, 161–62

Suriano, Francesco, 168

Sylvester, Pope, 43

Tacca, Pietro, 226

Tacitus, 42; Germania, 42, 49–50

Taddeo. See Gaddi, Taddeo

Taffi, Andrea, 58, 63, 67, 75

Taine, Hippolyte, 240

Tamagni, Vincenzo, 133

taste, 6, 225–27

tempera, 50, 75, 76

temporality, 36, 38, 49–53, 103

Teniers, David II, 238–39; Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (with Teniers’ Self-Portrait among His Works of Art in the Archduke’s Gallery in Brussels), 240

Terence, 165

terza maniera, 113, 176

Theocritus, Idylls, 66

Theodosius, obelisk of, 169

Thevet, André, 43

Tibaldi, Pellegrino, 30, 238

time. See temporality

Tintoretto, Paradise, 166

Titian, 6, 19, 165–76, 178, 182, 218; birthplace of, 173; brushwork and, 182; differenza and, 178; diffusion of fame of, 171, 172, 173; as divine, 162, 184; donna nuda prototype and, 131; as hallmark of Ventian style, 171 (see also Venice); journey to Rome (1545) of, 177; mobility and, 6, 12, 171, 173, 174–77; mosaic training of, 167; new style and, 167, 176, 177; oil technique and, 173, 203; and Sala del Maggior Consiglio, 166, 167–68, 167, 170; varietà of, 185;

works Assumption of the Virgin (Assunta), 23, 176, 182, 185; Battle of Cadore (Battle of Spoleto), 167, 170, 170, 171; Ca’ Pesaro, 182, 186, 188; Charles V and Dog, 173, 174; Danae, 177; St. John the Baptist in the Wilderness, 169; St. Peter the Martyr altarpiece, 23, 164, 170, 182; San Giovanni Elemosinario altarpiece, 23–24, 24; Süleyman the Magnificent portrait, 186; Titus Vespasian, 174, 175, 176; Twelve Caesars series, 173–74

Torrentino, Lorenzo, 33, 65, 165

Torriti, Jacopo, Coronation of the Virgin, 63

Toscanella, Oratio, 132

touch, sense of, 225

Trajan Arch, 199

translation, 132

travail, 74–76; meanings of, 74, 139

travel accounts, 2, 3, 4, 5, 119, 173, 233; aria and, 46–47; artists’ notebooks, 120; difference as key term of, 61; eyewitness, 6, 200, 201, 203–15, 216–33, 234; as memoir, 216, 218–41; mescolare metaphor and, 134; varietà and, 131; Vasari Lives as, 33–37; visualization and, 169; on wisdom gained, 74

traveling artist. See mobility

Treviso, 11, 13, 15, 16, 24

Trexler, Richard, 61

Trinità dei Monti (Rome), 137, 148

Triumphal Arch of Alfonso I of Naples, 106, 107, 108, 108

Tucker, George Hugo, 112

Tullius, 75

Turin, 134, 219, 221–24, 227–31; Zuccaro frescoes, 227–28

Turler, Hieronymus, The Traveiler, 74

Turner, Victor, 204

Tuscan order, 94, 95, 96

Tuscany, 30, 40, 44, 52, 76, 214; aria benefits of, 141; artistic superiority of, 161; Byzantine style and, 47; export of art works from, 106; Fra Bartolommeo travels in, 143; mescolare and, 134; Michelangelo and, 139; Raphael’s travels in, 126, 128, 161; restoration of visual arts and, 50, 53, 54, 55; Vasari’s pride in, 83. See also Florence

Uccello, Paolo, 83, 87

Uguccione da Faggiuola, 69

Ulysses, 74, 95, 112, 211

Umbria, 86, 210

universal style, 103

urban center. See city

Urbano da Cortona, 101

Urbino, 12, 171, 173, 183, 189; classical style copies in, 200; oil technique and, 109; Raphael and, 12, 15, 125, 126

Urbino, Duke of (Guidobaldo da Montelfeltro), 109, 128, 171, 177

Utens, Giusto, View of Il Trebbio, 67

Van der Goes, Hugo, 109

Vandals, 53, 191

Varchi, Benedetto, 61, 72, 139, 177; Perino and, 144–60; Storia fiorentina, 55, 66

varietà, 5, 6, 7, 114–21, 125–60, 162, 185–87, 189; Accademia di San Luca and, 235; allegorical movement and, 227; as benefit of mobility, 125–60, 161, 185–86, 187, 235; central Italy as fountainhead of, 161; decorum and, 186, 187; definition of, 125, 185; difference and, 151–52, 155; Dolce’s praise for, 185; expanded semantic boundaries of, 120–21; Michelangelo and, 136–43, 185; mixing and, 119–20, 134; political implications of, 186; portability of, 153, 155, 156; positive effects of, 235; Raphael and, 125, 126, 130–36, 161, 185; Zuccaro on, 233

varnish, 206

Vasari, Giorgio, 4, 5, 24, 98, 166, 168; Arezzo home of, 69, 157, 158, 159; aria and, 43–46, 53, 80, 133, 141–43; on artistic corruption, 47–49, 50; on artistic greatness, 192; on artists’ appetites, 225–26; Chamber of Fame fresco cycle, 69; contradictions of, 156; Dolce’s Venetian work and, 163; fictive embellishments of, 33; flood metaphor of, 54–55; on Islamic view of images, 168, 169; legacy of, 33–34, 39; on Lorenzo Lotto, 182; modo mezzano and, 132, 133; on oil technique, 109–11; on patria, 83, 102; patriotic tone of, 156; pride in Florence of, 69; return of Michelangelo’s body to Florence and, 234; on senses, 225–26; significant dates and, 50, 52–53; spogliare ornamenti and, 172; on study in Rome, 176, 194, 201; on stylistic concessions, 62–63, 167; on stylistic contamination, 47–48; on stylistic distinctions, 180; stylistic terms lexicon, 46; temporality conception of, 49–53; texture of prose of, 33; on travel as travail, 74–76; on universale, 103; varietà connotations and, 114–21, 125–60, 185

works: autobiography, 218; Brunelleschi and Ghiberti Presenting a Model of San Lorenzo to Cosimo (workshop), 94; Chamber of Fortune, 158, 159; Copy after Perino del Vaga’s Compositional Study for “The Death of the Ten Thousand Martyrs,” 156, 157; Fame, 69, 70; Holy Family with St. Francis in a Landscape, 218, 219; Libro de’disegni, 116, 117; Ragionamenti, 53, 73, 132; The Taking of Siena (and assistants), 157, 157

See also Lives

Vatican, 135, 148, 199; Giotto’s “O” and, 71, 72; Lotto and, 7, 13–14; papal commissions, 166; Raphael’s frescoes, 129, 166, 177, 178; Titian received at, 177, 178

Vecchio, Cosimo il, 94, 94

Vecellio, Cesare, View of Piazza San Marco, 164, 165

Vellando of Padua. See Bellano, Bartolomeo

Vellutello, 73

Venceslao, Master, Month of April, 79

Vendramin, Andrea, tomb of, 165

Veneziano, Domenico, 33, 128; transmission of oil technique and, 110–11, 183

Venice, 12, 30, 58, 83, 104, 161–87, 206, 217; altar-piece composition and, 23–24; artistic travel to and from, 6, 75, 86, 162–63, 177, 184, 203, 218, 219; art literature and, 161–62; atmosphere of artistic competition, 86; atmosphere of artistic envy, 75–76, 110–11; brushwork and, 181; Byzantine contacts with, 47, 167, 168–69, 172; coloring and, 12, 111, 181, 183, 184; cosmopolitanism of, 186; diplomatic ciphers and, 72; Dolce’s allegiance to, 161–73, 188; Dürer in, 13, 184, 185; Gothic style and, 45; guidebook to, 167; illustrious citizens of, 165–66; as intellectual center, 165, 171, 211; lavish banquets, 226; Lotto and, 11, 12, 13, 16, 18–19, 21, 23–24, 181–82, 184; maps of, 164; Michelangelo and, 139; modern style and, 172; nude prototype and, 131; oil technique and, 13, 110, 180; Ottoman contacts with, 108–9, 168–69, 186; prints of, 164–65, 164, 165; repatriation to, 75, 150; as ricetto (collection point), 211; Sala as epicenter of art, 166, 167–68, 167; San Marco rebuilding and, 52; Sansovino and, 12, 165, 211–12; Sebastiano and, 178–79; style and, 13, 16, 162, 167, 181, 228, 238; Titian’s ties to, 12, 162–76, 184, 190; woman’s dress, 61, 62. See also Padua

Verdizotti, Giovanni Mario, Cento favole morali, 190

Vere, Gaston du C. de, 73–74

Vergerius, 49

Vergil, Polydore, 183; On Discovery, 2

vernaculars, 132, 134, 165

Verona, 78, 218

Verrocchio, Andrea del, 104, 165, 230; Head of a Woman, 224

Vespucci, Amerigo, 42, 44, 50, 131

Vignola, Giacomo Barozzi da: “Ionic Order,” 225, 225; Regola delli cinque ordini, 131, 225

Vincenzio da San Gimignano, 141, 143

Virgil, 75, 165, 193, 212, 220; Eclogues, 66

virtual travel, 81, 120, 231

Visigoths, 53, 191

vision, 6, 225, 226, 227, 233

Vitruvius, 2, 42, 45, 50, 75, 76, 94, 183; on Ionic column, 225

Vittorino da Feltre, 49

Vivarini, Alvise, 13, 27

voyager, artist as, 111–12

Warnke, Martin, 12, 72

Weddigen, Tristan, 112

wet nurses, 144–45

Weyden, Rogier van der, 25, 26, 30, 106, 161; oil technique and, 32, 33, 109

White, Hayden, 52

William of Rubruck, 131

Williams, Robert, 6

Wilson, Thomas, The Arte of Rhetorik, 74

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, 27, 239–40

wines, 83, 226–27

Wittkower, Rudolf and Margot, 3, 94

Woeiriot, Pierre, “Wanderer,” 113

Wöfflin, Heinrich, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 240

Zeuxis, 131

Ziani, Sebastiano, 167

Zoppo, Franco Marco, 238

Zuan da Pixa (Pisa), 101

Zuan Magnan, 101

Zuccaro, Federico, 32, 204, 218–33, 234, 235; Accademia di San Luca and, 234; on food and drink, 226–27, 230; parallels with earlier mobility accounts, 216–17; silence on style, 227–33, 240; on travel as exercise of pleasure, 6, 217, 218, 219, 221–25, 230–31, 233; works: Artists Drawing after Michelangelo in the Medici Chapel, 228, 230; Barbarossa Making Obeisance to the Pope, 228, 229; Coiffure at the Savoy Court, 222, 223; Constellations and Other Astronomical Figures for the Vault of the Galleria Grande in Torino, 231; The Deeds of Hercules, 222; Early Life of Taddeo Zuccaro, 219–21, 227, 235; L’idea de’ pittori, scultori ed architetti, 216, 228; Origine e progresso dell’Accademia del Disegno a Roma, 235; Il passaggio per Italia, 3, 6, 216, 218–33, 234; Reisezeichnungen (travel drawings), 228; Self-Portrait, 233, 233; “Sleigh Ride,” 231, 232; Study for an Equestrian Portrait, 232; Taddeo at the Entrance to Rome Greeted by Servitude, Hardship, and Toil and by Fortitude and Patience (the Ox and Ass), 220, 221; Taddeo Rebuffed by His Kinsman Francesco Il Sant’Angelo, 219, 220; Taddeo Zuccaro in the Sistine Chapel Drawing Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment,” 204, 205; Turin gallery frescoes, 227–28

Zuccaro, Taddeo, 204, 205, 219–20, 220, 221, 222, 227, 235

Zuccati, Sebastiano, 167

Illustration Credits

AKG: fig. 8.15

AKG/Electa: fig. 7.12

AKG Images/Andrea Jemolo: fig. 4.37

Albertina: fig. 5.18

Alinari: figs. 3.12, 4.25, 4.33, 4.34, 5.20, 7.4

Alinari/Art Resource, NY: figs. 4.20, 4.24, 5.11 (photo by George Tatge, 2000, Museo Nazionale del Bargello)

AKG: fig. 1.6

Joerg P. Anders, Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Art Resource, NY: fig. 5.10

Richard Anderson and David Winfield, Courtesy of Dumbarton Oaks, Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives, Washington, D.C.: fig. 2.6

Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford: fig. 5.1

Lala Aufsberg, Bildarchiv Foto Marburg: fig. 1.13

© Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana: figs. 1.19, 1.20, 4.7

Biblioteca Estense: fig. 4.19

© Bibliotheca Hertziana: fig. 8.5

Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana: fig. 4.11

By concession of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Direzione Regionale per i Beni Culturali e Paesaggistici del Piemonte—Biblioteca Reale di Torino: figs. 5.16, 8.8

By concession of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali—Soprintendenza per i Beni A.P.S.A.E. di Arezzo—photo by Alessandro Benci: figs. 5.24, 5.25

Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris: fig. 4.4

The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford: fig. 8.14

Bridgeman Art Library: figs. 3.14, 5.2

© Trustees of the British Museum: figs. 4.2, 4.40, 5.5, 5.7, 5.9, 5.12, 6.3, 6.5, 6.11, 6.12, 7.5-7.8, 7.11, 8.7

Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/Art Resource, NY: fig. 1.9, 1.15, 1.16, 3.16, 3.19, 6.15-6.17, 8.10

By permission of The Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford, Christ Church Picture Gallery: fig. 4.36

Civico Gabinetto dei Disegni, Castello Sforzesco, Milan: fig. 8.12

Alfredo Dagli Orti/Art Resource, NY: fig. 2.1

Gianni Dagli Orti / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY: figs. 3.20, 8.1

© U. Edelmann—Städel Museum—ARTOTHEK: fig. 3.9

Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich: fig. 9.1

Grenville Kane Collection, Rare Books Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library: fig. 6.14

Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Charles A. Loeser, 1932.265, Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College: fig. 5.22

Philippe Hervouet, Bourg-en-Bresse, musée du monastère royal de Brou: fig. 4.29

Houghton Library, Harvard University: figs. 2.2., 2.3, 2.10, 4.1, 4.30, 4.32, 6.1, 6.2, 6.4, 6.6

ICCD E 40214. Reproduction authorized by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation: fig. 1.22

The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles: figs. 8.3, 8.4

Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY: figs. 1.5, 1.7, 1.11, 1.12, 1.14, 3.7, 3.8, 3.11, 4.5, 4.38, 6.9, 9.3

Filippino Lippi, Saint Philip: fig. 4.39

Digital image © 2014 Museum Associates/Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art. Licensed by Art Resource, NY: fig. 8.2

Metropolitan Museum of Art: fig. 3.2, 3.18 (image source Art Resource, NY); 4.9 (image source Art Resource, NY); 4.23 (image source Art Resource, NY), 5.13

Mondadori Portfolio/Electa/Art Resource, NY: figs. 1.8, 3.10

Museum Plantin-Moretus: fig. 4.12

National Gallery of Art, Washington: figs. 0.1, 0.2

National Gallery, London: fig. 6.13 © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY: fig. 1.2

Nimatallah / Art Resource, NY: fig. 6.10

© Antonio Quattrone: fig. 2.5

© RMN: figs. 3.1, 3.3, 3.4

© RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Gérard Blot: figs. 1.1, 1.10, 5.21

© RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Madeleine Coursaget: fig. 8.13

© RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Droits réservés: fig. 8.11

Scala/Art Resource, NY: figs. 1.23, 2.4, 2.7, 2.8, 3.6, 3.13, 4.6, 4.8, 4.10, 4.14, 4.26-4.28, 5.3, 5.4, 5.8, 5.19, 7.10

Scala, Florence © 2013: figs. 1.21, 4.16, 5.6 (courtesy Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali), 5.17 (courtesy Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali), 5.23, 6.8

Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY: fig. 1.4, 4.22

Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della Città di Firenze: fig. 4.35

Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg: fig. 9.2

Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library: fig. 7.3

Vatican Museums: figs. 5.14, 5.15

Victoria and Albert Museum: figs. 4.21, 6.7

© The Warburg Institute, University of London, School of Advanced Study: figs. 2.9, 4.3, 4.13