Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D
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Verona, after a proud history of fifteen hundred years, became a
Venetian dependency in 1404, and remained so till 1796. Nevertheless
she had a healthy cultural life of her own. Her painters fell behind
those of Venice, but her architects, sculptors, and woodworkers were
not surpassed in the "Most Serene" capital. The fourteenth-century
tombs of the Scaligers, though too ornate, suggest no lack of
sculptors; and the equestrian statue of Can Grande della Scala, with
the flowing caparison of the horse so vividly portraying motion, falls
short only of the masterpieces of Donatello and Verrocchio. The most
sought-for wood carver in Italy was Fra Giovanni da Verona. He
worked in many cities, but he devoted a large part of his life to
carving and inlaying the choir stalls of Santa Maria in Organo in
his native city.
The great name in Veronese architecture was "that rare and universal
genius" (Vasari calls him), Fra Giocondo. Hellenist, botanist,
antiquarian, philosopher, and theologian, this remarkable Dominican
friar was also one of the leading architects and engineers of his
time. He taught Latin and Greek to the famous scholar Julius Caesar
Scaliger, who practised medicine in Verona before moving to France.
Fra Giocondo copied the inscriptions on the classic remains in Rome,
and presented a book on the subject to Lorenzo de' Medici. His
researches led to the discovery of the greater part of Pliny's letters
in an old collection in Paris. While in that city he built two bridges
over the Seine. When the detritus of the River Brenta threatened to
fill up the lagoons that made Venice possible, Fra Giocondo
persuaded the Signory to order, at great cost, the diversion of the
river to empty farther south; but for this procedure Venice would
not be today a miracle of liquid streets; hence Luigi Cornaro called
Giocondo the second founder of the city. In Verona his masterpiece
is the Palazzo del Consiglio, a simple Romanesque loggia surmounted by
an elegant cornice, and crowned with statues of Cornelius Nepos,
Catullus, Vitruvius, Pliny the Younger, and Emilius Macer- all ancient
gentlemen of Verona. In Rome Giocondo was made architect of St.
Peter's with Raphael and Giuliano da Sangallo, but died in that year
(1514), aged eighty-one. It was a well-spent life.
Giocondo's work on the ruins of Rome excited another Veronese
architect. Giovanmaria Falconetto, after drawing all the antiquities
of his own locality, marched off to Rome to do the same thing there,
and devoted twelve years, on and off, to the task. Returning to
Verona, he took the losing side in politics, and had to move to Padua.
There Bembo and Cornaro encouraged him in the application of classical
design to architecture; and the generous centenarian housed, fed,
financed, and loved Giovanmaria to the end of the artist's seventy-six
years. Falconetto designed a loggia for Cornaro's palace in Padua, two
of that city's gates, and the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
Giocondo, Falconetto, and Sanmicheli constituted a trio of
architects rivaled only in Rome.
Michele Sanmicheli gave himself chiefly to fortification. Son and
nephew of Veronese architects, he went to Rome at sixteen, and
carefully measured the ancient buildings. After making a name for
himself in designing churches and palaces, he was sent by Clement
VII to build defenses for Parma and Piacenza. The distinguishing
feature of his military architecture was the pentagonal bastion,
from whose projecting balcony guns could be fired in five
directions. When he examined the fortifications of Venice he was
arrested as a spy; but his examiners were so impressed by his
knowledge that the Signory engaged him to construct fortresses in
Verona, Brescia, Zara, Corfu, Cyprus, and Crete. Back in Venice, he
built a massive fort on the Lido. In preparing for the foundations
he soon struck water. Following the example of Fra Giocondo, he sank a
double cordon of connected piles, pumped the water from between the
two circles, and set the foundations in this dry ring. It was a
hazardous undertaking, whose success was in doubt to the last
minute. Critics predicted that when heavy artillery should be fired
from this fort the structure would shake itself loose from its
foundations and collapse. The Signory placed in it the stoutest cannon
in Venice, and ordered them all fired at once. Pregnant women fled
from the neighborhood to avoid premature deliveries. The cannon were
fired, the fort stood firm, the mothers returned, and Sanmicheli was
the toast of Venice.
In Verona he designed two majestic city gates, adorned with Doric
columns and cornices; Vasari ranked these structures, architecturally,
with the Roman theater and amphitheater that had survived in Verona
from Roman days. He built the Palazzo Bevilacqua there, and the
Grimani and Mocenigo palaces; he reared a campanile for the cathedral,
and a dome for San Giorgio Maggiore. His friend Vasari tells us that
though Michele in youth had indulged in some moderate adultery, he
became in later life a model Christian, taking no thought for material
gains, and treating all men with kindness and courtesy. He
bequeathed his skills to Iacopo Sansovino and a nephew whom he loved
exceedingly. When news came to him that this nephew had fallen in
Cyprus while fighting for Venice against the Turks, Sanmicheli
developed a fever, and died in a few days, aged seventy-three (1559).
To Verona belonged the finest medalist of the Renaissance, perhaps
of all time. `051151 Antonio Pisano, known to history as Pisanello,
always signed himself Pictor, and thought of himself as a painter.
Half a dozen of his paintings survive, and they are of excellent
quality; *05032 but it is not these that have sustained his name
through the centuries. Recapturing the skill and compact realism of
Greek and Roman coin designs, Pisanello molded little circular
reliefs, seldom more than two inches in diameter, combining finesse of
workmanship with such fidelity to truth that his medallions are the
most trustworthy representations we have of several Renaissance
notables. These are not profound works; they have no philosophical
overtones; but they are treasures of painstaking workmanship and
historical illumination.
Excepting Pisanello and the Carotos, Verona, in painting, remained
medieval. After the fall of the Scaligers it subsided quietly into a
secondary role. It was not, like Venice, a Rialto where merchants from
a dozen lands rubbed elbows and faiths and wore out one another's
dogmas with mutual attrition. It was not, like Lodovico's Milan, a
political power, nor like Florence a focus of finance, nor like Rome
an international house. It was not so close to the Orient, nor so
captivated by humanism, as to tincture its Christianity with paganism;
it continued content with medieval themes, and rarely reflected in its
art the sensuous zest that evoked the nudes of Giorgione and Titian,
Correggio and Raphael. In a later period one of its sons, who indeed
is known by its name, entered gaily into the pagan mood; but Paolo
Veronese became in life a Venetian rather than a Veronese. Verona
was becalmed.
In the fourteenth century its painters were still abreast of their
times; note how Padua called one of them- Altichiero da Zevio- to
decorate the chapel of San Giorgio. Toward the end of that century
Stefano da Zevio went to Florence and learned the Giottesque tradition
from Agnolo Gaddi; returning to Verona he painted frescoes that
Donatello pronounced the best yet done in those parts. His pupil
Domenico Morone advanced upon him by studying the works of Pisanello
and the Bellini; the Defeat of the Buonacolsi, in the Castello at
Mantua, emulates the multitudinous panoramas of Gentile. Domenico's
son Francesco, by his murals, helped Fra Giovanni's woodwork to make
the sacristy of Santa Maria in Organo one of the treasure rooms of
Italy. Domenico's pupil Girolamo dai Libri, at the age of sixteen
(1490), painted in the same favorite church an altarpiece- Deposition
from the Cross - "which when uncovered," reports Vasari, "excited such
wonder that the whole city ran to congratulate the artist's
father"; `051152 its landscape was one of the best in
fifteenth-century art. In another of Girolamo's pictures (New York)
a tree was so realistically portrayed that- on the word of a holy
Dominican- birds tried to perch on its branches; and the grave
Vasari himself avers that in a Nativity that Girolamo painted for
Santa Maria in Organo you might count the hairs on the
rabbits. `051153 Girolamo's father had received the name dai Libri
from his skill in illuminating manuscripts; the son carried on the
art, and came to excel in it all other miniaturists in Italy.
About 1462 Iacopo Bellini painted in Verona. One of the boys who
served him was Liberale, who later received the name of his city;
through this Liberale da Verona a touch of Venetian color and vitality
entered Veronese painting. Liberale, like Girolamo, found that he
prospered best by illuminating manuscripts; he earned 800 crowns
($20,000?) in Siena by his miniatures. Badly treated in his old age by
his married daughter, he bequeathed his estate to his pupil
Francesco Torbido, went to live with him, and died at the reasonable
age of eighty-five (1536). Torbido studied also with Giorgione, and
improved upon Liberale, who forgave him. Another of Liberale's pupils,
Giovanfrancesco Caroto, was strongly influenced by Mantegna's masterly
polyptych in San Zeno. He went to Mantua to study with the old master,
and made such progress that Mantegna sent out Caroto's work as his
own. Giovanfrancesco made excellent portraits of Guidobaldo and
Elisabetta, Duke and Duchess of Urbino. He returned to Verona a rich
man, who could afford, now and then, to speak his mind. When a
priest accused him of making lascivious figures, he asked, "If painted
figures move you so, how can you be trusted with flesh and
blood?" `051154 He was among the few Veronese painters who wandered
from religious themes.
If to these men we add Francesco Bonsignori, Paolo Morando, called
Cavazzolo, Domenico Brusasorci, and Giovanni Caroto (Giovanfrancesco's
younger brother), the roster of Veronese painters in the Renaissance
is relatively complete. They were almost all good men; Vasari has a
moral pat on the back for nearly every one of them; their lives were
orderly for artists, and their work had a placid and wholesome
beauty that reflected their natures and their environment. Verona sang
a pious and tranquil minor chord in the song of the Renaissance.
CHAPTER XII: Emilia and the Marches: 1378-1534
I. CORREGGIO
-
FIFTY miles south of Verona one comes to the old Via Emilia, or
Emilian Way, which ran 175 miles from Piacenza through Parma,
Reggio, Modena, Bologna, Imola, Forli, and Cesena to Rimini. *05033 We
pass over Piacenza and (for the moment) Parma, to note a little
commune eight miles northeast of Reggio, and sharing its name.
Correggio is one of several towns in Italy that are remembered only
through some genius to whom they gave a cognomen. Its ruling family
also was called Correggio; one member was the Niccolo da Correggio who
wrote genteel verses for Beatrice and Isabella d'Este. It was a
place where you might expect genius to be born and to die, but not
to stay, for it had no significant art, or clear tradition, to give to
ability instruction and form. But in the first decades of the
sixteenth century the house of Correggio was headed by Count Gilbert
X, and his wife, Veronica Gambara, was one of the great ladies of
the Renaissance. She could speak Latin, knew Scholastic philosophy,
wrote a commentary on patristic theology, composed delicate
Petrarchian verses, was called "the tenth Muse." She made her little
court a salon for artists and poets, and helped to spread that
romantic worship of woman which was now replacing, among the upper
classes of Italy, the medieval worship of Mary, and was molding
Italian art toward the representation of feminine charms. On September
3, 1528, she wrote to Isabella d'Este that "our Messer Antonio Allegri
has just finished a masterpiece picturing Magdalen in the desert,
and expressing in full the sublime art of which he is a great
master." `05121
It was this Antonio Allegri who unwittingly stole the name and
made the fame of his town, though his family name might have well
expressed the joyous nature of his art. His father was a small
landed proprietor, prosperous enough to win for his son a bride with a
dowry of 257 ducats ($6425?). When Antonio showed a flair for
drawing and painting he was apprenticed to his uncle Lorenzo
Allegri. Who taught him further we do not know; some say that he
went to Ferrara to study with Francesco de' Bianchi-Ferrari, then to
the studios of Francia and Costa at Bologna, then with Costa to
Mantua, where he felt the influence of the massive frescoes of
Mantegna. In any case he spent most of his life in Correggio in
comparative obscurity, and presumably he was the only one in the
town who suspected that he would be ranked among the "immortals." He
seems to have studied the engravings that Marcantonio Raimondi had
made from Raphael, and probably saw, if only in copy, the chief
works of Leonardo. All these influences entered into his completely
individual style.
The sequence of his subjects corresponds to the decline of
religion among the literate classes of Italy in the first quarter of
the sixteenth century, and the rise of secular patronage and themes.
His early works, even when painted for private purchasers, told again,
and mostly for churches, the Christian story: The Adoration of the
Magi, where the Virgin has the pretty, girlish face that Correggio
later confined to subordinate characters; The Holy Family; The
Madonna of St. Francis, still traditional in all its features; The
Repose on the Return from Egypt, freshly original in composition,
coloring, and characterization; La Zingarella, where the Virgin,
leaning fondly over her babe, is drawn with full Correggian grace; and
The Madonna Adoring Her Child, which makes the infant the radiant
source of the scene's illumination.
His pagan turn came through an odd commission. In 1518 Giovanna da
Piacenza, abbess of the convent of San Paolo in Parma, engaged him
to decorate her apartment. She was a lady of more pedigree than piety;
she chose as theme of the frescoes chaste Diana, goddess of the
hunt. Over the fireplace Correggio portrayed Diana in a splendid
chariot; above her, in sixteen radial sections converging in the
cupola, he painted scenes from classical mythology; in one a dog,
too passionately hugged by a child, expresses with a remarkably
pictured eye his fear of being choked with love, and shames by his
alert beauty all the human and divine figures scattered about. From
this time forward the human body, mostly nude, became for Correggio
the chief element in pictorial decoration, and pagan motives entered
into even his Christian themes. The abbess had converted him from
Christianity.
His success made a stir in Parma, and brought him lucrative
assignments. About 1519 he painted The Mystic Marriage of St.
Catherine (Naples); the Virgin and the saint were here unspeakably
beautiful; and yet, four years later, Correggio surpassed them when he
used the same subject for the picture that is one of the treasures
of the Louvre- lovely faces, an alluring landscape, the magic play
of light and shade upon flowing raiment and waving hair.
In 1520 Correggio accepted an arduous commission from Parma- to
paint frescoes in the cupola and over the tribune and side chapels
of a new Benedictine abbey church, San Giovanni Evangelista. He toiled
on this task for four years, and in 1523 he moved with his wife and
children to Parma to be nearer his work. In the dome he represented
the Apostles, seated comfortably in a circle on soft clouds, and
fixing their gaze upon a Christ whose foreshortened figure, seen
from below, gives an astonishing illusion of distance. The splendor of
this dome is in the superbly modeled figures of the Apostles, some
of them quite nude, rivaling the gods of Pheidias, and perhaps echoing
in their muscular splendor the figures that Michelangelo had painted
on the Sistine Chapel ceiling twelve years before. In a spandrel
between two arches a powerful St. Ambrose discusses theology with an
Apostle John who is as handsome as any Parthenon ephebus. Luscious
youthful forms, theoretically angels, fill the interstices with
angelic faces, buttocks, legs, and thighs. The Greek revival,
already old in humanism and Manutius, is here in full swing in
Christian art.
In 1522 the great cathedral of Parma opened its doors to the young
artist, and contracted to pay him a thousand ducats ($12,500) to paint
the chapels, apse, choir, and dome. On this assignment he worked at
intervals through eight years, from 1526 till his death. For the
dome he chose the Assumption of the Virgin, and shocked many of the
cathedral canons by making this culminating picture a whirling
panorama of human flesh. In the center the Virgin, reclining on the
air, floats up to heaven with arms outstretched to meet her Son;
around and beneath her a heavenly host of Apostles, disciples, and
saints- magnificent figures worthy of Raphael at his best- seems to
puff her upward with the breath of adoration; and supporting her is
a choir of angels looking remarkably like healthy boys and girls in
all the splendor of youthful nudity; these are the loveliest
adolescent nudes in Italian art. One of the canons, confused by so
many arms and legs, denounced the painting as "a fricassee of
frogs"; apparently other members of the chapter were dubious about
this melee of human flesh celebrating a virgin; and Correggio's work
on the cathedral seems to have been interrupted for a time.
He was now (1530) advancing in middle age, and longed for the
peace of a settled life. He bought some acres outside Correggio,
became, like his father, a landed proprietor, and strove to support
his family and his farm with his brush. During and after his major
enterprises he produced a series of religious pictures, almost every
one of them masterly: Magdalen Reading; The Virgin of St. Sebastian -
the fairest Virgin in Correggio; The Madonna della Scodella - "with a
bowl" and an incomparable Bambino; The Madonna di San Girolamo,
sometimes called Il Giorno or Day, in which the Jerome is worthy
of Michelangelo, and the angel holding a book before the Child is a
vision of girlish beauty, and the Magdalen laying her cheek upon the
Child's thigh is the purest and tenderest of sinners, and the warm
rich reds and yellows make a canvas worthy of Titian at his best;
and finally a companion picture, The Adoration of the Shepherds,
which fancy has called La Notte, Night. What interested Correggio in
these pictures was not the religious sentiment but the esthetic
values- the adoring devotion of the young mother, herself so comely
with oval face, glossy hair, dropped eyelids, slender nose, thin lips,
full bosom; or the masculine muscles of athletic saints; or the demure
loveliness of Magdalen, or the rosy flesh of a child. Correggio,
coming down from cathedral scaffolds, refreshed himself with composite
visions of beauties that might be.
About 1523 a series of commissions from Federigo II Gonzaga
invited the full expression of the pagan element in his art. Wishing
to court the favor of Charles V, the Marquis ordered picture after
picture, sent them as gifts to the Emperor, and received his coveted
bauble, the title of duke. For him, schooled in the paganism of
Rome, Correggio painted a succession of mythological subjects,
commemorating Olympian triumphs of love or desire. In The Education
of Eros Venus blindfolds Cupid (lest the human race should die); in
Jupiter and Antiope the god, disguised as a satyr, advances upon the
lady as she lies in naked slumber on the grass; in Danae a winged
herald prepares for Jupiter's coming by undraping the fair maid, while
beside her bed two putti play in happy indifference to the
morality of the gods; in Io Jupiter descends from his boredom in a
concealing cloud and clasps with omnipotent hand a plump lady who
hesitates gracefully and ends by yielding to the compliment of desire.
In The Rape of Ganymede a pretty boy is flown to heaven by an
eagle in haste to meet the needs of the ambidextrous god of gods. In
Leda and the Swan the lover is a swan, but the motive is the same.
Even in The Virgin and St. George two naked Cupids romp before the
Virgin, and St. George, in his flashing mail, is the physical ideal of
Renaissance youth.
We must not conclude that Correggio was merely a sensualist with a
flair for painting flesh. He loved beauty perhaps immoderately, and in
these mythologies he stressed the surface of it too exclusively; but
in his Madonnas he had done justice to a profounder beauty. He
himself, while his brush romped through Olympus, lived like an orderly
bourgeois, devoted to his family, and seldom leaving home except to
work. "He was content with little," Vasari tells us, "and lived as a
good Christian should." He is reported to have been timid and
melancholy; who would not be melancholy coming every day into a
world of deformed adults from a haunting dream of loveliness?
Perhaps some quarrel arose about payment for the work in the
cathedral. When Titian visited Parma he heard echoes of the dispute,
and gave his opinion that if the dome could be inverted and filled
with ducats they would not adequately pay for what Correggio had
painted there. In any case the payments were curiously involved in the
artist's premature death. In 1534 he received an installment of
sixty crowns ($750?), all in coppers. Carrying this weight of metal,
he set out from Parma on foot; he became overheated, drank too much
water, took a fever, and died on his farm March 5, 1534, in the
fortieth (some say forty-fifth) year of his age.
For so short a life his achievement was stupendous, far greater than
all that Leonardo, or Titian, or Michelangelo, or anyone but Raphael
could show in their first forty years. Correggio equals them all in
grace of line, the soft modeling of contours, in portraying the living
texture of human flesh. His coloring has a liquid and radiant quality,
alive with reflections and transparencies, softer- with its violet,
orange, rose, blue, and silver hues- than the glaring brilliance of
the later Venetians. He was a master of chiaroscuro, of light and
shade in their endless combinations and revelations; in some of his
Madonnas matter becomes almost a form and function of light. He
experimented bravely with schemes of composition- pyramidal, diagonal,
circular; but in his cupola frescoes he let unity slip through a
superabundance of Apostolic and angelic legs. He played too fondly
with foreshortenings, so that the figures in his cupolas, though drawn
as science might require, seem huddled and cramped and ungainly,
like the ascending Christ of San Giovanni Evangelista. On the other
hand he cared nothing for mechanics, so that many of his characters,
like Micawber, lack all visible means of support. He painted some
religious subjects with exquisite tenderness, but his prevailing
interest was in the body- its beauty, movements, attitudes, joys;
and his later pictures symbolized the triumph of Venus over the Virgin
in sixteenth-century Italian art.
His influence in Italy and France was rivaled only by
Michelangelo's. In the later sixteenth century the Bolognese school of
painting, led by the Carracci, took him as their model; and their
followers, Guido Reni and Domenichino, founded upon Correggio an art
of physical excellence and sensual sentiment. Charles Le Brun and
Pierre Mignaud imported into France, and deployed in Versailles, a