Drawn to Perfection:
Annibale Carracci
Works on Paper

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[slide 1:  Title]

[slide 2:  Self-Portrait [Autoritratto col cappello “a quatre’acque”] (April 17, 1593, oil on canvas, 9½ x 7? in [24 x 20 cm]).  Galleria Nazionale, Parma, Italy.]

Legend has it that when Annibale Carracci was a young boy returning to Bologna with his father from a trip to Cremona and they were set upon by robbers, the lad’s precocious ability to render in line what presented itself to his eye aided in the apprehension of the criminals.  The youthful Annibale sketched the culprits from memory so accurately that they were easily recognized and brought to justice quickly enough to ensure return of his father’s stolen money.¹

While that and other stories that grew up around the famed artistic family of Carracci might well be apocryphal, the existence of these tales of artistic prowess do bear witness to the high regard in which the two brothers and their cousin were held, and in particular to Annibale’s prodigious drawing skills.  Born in 1560 in Bologna, the youngest of the triumvirate that included Agostino (his older brother by three years) and their older cousin Ludovico (born in 1555), Annibale was characterized by one of his early biographers as a scruffy, introverted, envious and financially naive prankster.²

Never one to be ashamed of his social standing, Annibale often chided the scholarly, upwardly-striving Agostino–who was far more educated than his younger brother–on the way he hobnobbed with courtiers and the like.  To put Agostino in his place, one day in Rome where they were working in the Palazzo Farnese, Annibale handed his pompous brother a letter while they were in the midst of a well-bred group that then eagerly awaited the unveiling of its contents.  Much to Agostino’s embarrassment, the opened missive contained a drawing of their parents: father in his spectacles threading a needle and mother holding a pair of scissors,³ a not-so-gentle reminder of the brothers’ humble origins.

For Annibale, drawing trumped speech when it came to personal expression, a stance he made quite clear in another face-off with his loquacious brother who was going on at length about the antique marvels he was discovering after his recent move to Rome to help out at the Farnese.  When Agostino made the mistake of taking to task the silent Annibale for not joining in the erudite conversation, accusing him of lacking appreciation for the ancient works, Annibale once again got the better of his older brother with charcoal.

Unbeknownst to Agostino until too late, on a nearby wall Annibale had begun a drawing designed to communicate his reverence for the Roman art he was discovering.  When done, he stepped aside to display a perfect rendering from memory of the Laocoön.  The onlookers praised the younger artist.  Agostino fell silent, and Annibale walked away triumphant–but not before laughingly admonishing his brother, “Poets paint with words; painters speak with works.”⁴

From very early on, reaching for a drawing implement had been Annibale Carracci’s first impulse and it continued to be throughout his life even into his last few years, when the heavy toll that illness took on his expressive abilities left him unable to do much else.  From the pleasurable exercise of sketching his surroundings to the serious study of posed studio models, this master draftsman always looked first to his teacher nature for whatever answers he needed, supplementing it with metaphorical (and sometimes actual) forays into the studios of other artists to draw from their work.  Not only did Annibale “speak with [his] works,” he also thought with them–evident in the many surviving pages of preliminary ideas for compositions that he hatched and developed, and often later discarded.  Ultimately, these various aspects of his drawing practice would coalesce into a full-size cartoon used for transferring his final design onto wall, canvas or copper plate.

[slide 3:  A Man Weighing Meat (c. 1582-83, red chalk on beige paper, 1015/16 x 61/16 in [278 x 170 cm]).  Collection Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
The Butcher Shop (1583, oil on canvas, 73 x 105 in [185 × 266 cm]).  Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford, UK.]

By the time he drew A Man Weighing Meat (c. 1582-83), the twenty-something-year-old Annibale had already been drawing for many years, but now his interest in depicting everyday life found expression in genre paintings of a type unlike the pastoral idylls of his contemporaries.⁵  Here he has posed his model, probably a workshop apprentice,⁶ in the garb of a butcher and given him props–a balance (stadera) for weighing meat along with a stand-in for a slab of flesh–that find their way into The Butcher Shop (1583), one of his earliest known paintings.

The bare-elbow study to the right of the figure in the red-chalk drawing reflects a rethinking of the pose that will appear in the final composition; Annibale angled upward the forearm and rolled back the sleeve.  Highlighting the artist’s selection of an expedient rather than exact model, the character of the butcher shop worker in the painting differs from the assistant in the studio; he is older with a neatly trimmed beard, taller stature and somewhat slimmer build.  His hat, of a different style, sits back on his head rather than forward as in the drawing.

Early on in the absence of significant commissions for the Carracci shop, genre paintings, like small devotional pictures, provided a quick and relatively easy way for the three young men to churn out work that they could sell on the open market and that would also advertise their skills.⁷  For Annibale, who had been sketching from life for years, it provided a natural extension of his artistic interests, “demand[ing] little more than a direct and forthright approach to the visual material.”⁸

[slide 4:  A Domestic Scene (1582-1584, pen with brown and gray-black ink, brush with gray and brown wash, over black chalk, 12⅞ x 9¼ in [32.8 x 23.6 cm]).  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.]

In a very different kind of scene as well as medium, Annibale assembled three figures and a cat around a fire.  A young woman, holding a cloth or garment, leans over the flame and looks back toward a young girl, vaguely indicated in line and wash, while a much younger child merges visually with his caretaker’s skirt.  A close look at the actual drawing revealed a lack of spontaneity in the manner in which the ink wash was applied, especially in the woman’s skirt, where Annibale–instead of drawing the brush down the form and guiding the pool of diluted ink–seems to have attempted to blend it as he would have done with oil paint, resulting in a somewhat overworked appearance and mild abrasion of the paper.  It would not be long before he began to produce far more accomplished ink drawings.

[slide 5:  The Virgin and Child Resting Outside a City Gate (n.d., pen and brown ink, brush with traces of brown wash, on light brown beige paper; traces of framing outlines in pen and brown ink,  7⅜ x 8½ in [18.8 x 21.6 cm]).  The  Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.]

A small, undated compositional sketch of The Virgin and Child Resting Outside a City Gate contrasts in ink handling with the earlier genre scene.  Here evenly spaced, parallel hatching designates shadow while sure lines pick out the landscape and architectural features.  Schematic rays of the sun–which reappear in a very late pen drawing⁹–disappear behind horizontal bands of clouds, and figures diminishing in size create a feeling of recession into space.  A discreetly contoured area of thinned ink on the shaded side of the Virgin’s head has been applied without any fuss, first a middle-value wash and then a much darker band in the deeper shadow on the periphery of the head–no attempt being made to blend the two.  The Virgin’s face, redolent with Correggio sweetness,¹⁰ also suggests a date later than the domestic scene.

Not only did Annibale borrow from the output of other artists, he thought deeply about the differences in their styles, forming definite opinions about their work, a fact that runs contrary to the impression of him given by his early biographers as someone uninterested in the theoretical aspects of art.  The postilles (marginal notes) in his copy of Vasari’s Lives demonstrate this awareness.  Lauding Andrea del Sarto and Michelangelo, Annibale disparaged the “mannered tradition of Florentine painting,”¹¹ noting too the uselessness of comparing Michelangelo with Titian.  “Titian’s things are not like Michelangelo’s; they may not be totally successful but they are more lifelike than Michelangelo’s; Titian was more of a ‘painter’…and if Raphael was superior in some parts to Titian, Titian nonetheless surpassed Raphael in many things.”¹²

Apparently no less contemplative than his scholarly brother or intellectual cousin, Annibale joined them both in their first major commission–two rooms in the Palazzo Fava in Bologna, secured through family connections and their willingness to work at a discounted rate, beginning the project about 1583.  The smaller room, which was to contain a frieze about the myth of Europa, was assigned to Annibale and Agostino, while Ludovico, the older and at that time accepted head of their workshop, tackled the larger one, which would tell the story of Jason and the golden fleece.  Before all the frescoes were completed, the brothers would join their cousin in the more important space.¹³

[slide 6:  The Meeting of Jason and King Aeëtes (c. 1584, fresco).  Palazzo Fava, Bologna, Italy.
The Meeting of Jason and King Aeëtes (c. 1584, pen and black ink with gray-brown wash over black chalk, squared twice in black and red chalk, 10 x 12⅜ in [25.4 x 31.5 cm]).  Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, Germany.]

Annibale’s small ink drawing squared twice for transfer that illustrates The Meeting of Jason and King Aeëtes (c. 1584) shows the composition in a well advanced state as probably presented to the patron, Count Filippo Fava.  On the verso containing one of the earliest studies, Annibale had inked figures in their respective perspectival planes, including the accompanying termine,¹⁴ those illusionistically painted statues that framed the fresco panels.

[slide 7:  The Meeting of Jason and King Aeëtes (c. 1584, pen and black ink with gray-brown wash over black chalk, squared twice in black and red chalk, 10 x 12⅜ in [25.4 x 31.5 cm]).  Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, Germany.
Orpheus Holding a Lyre (before 1584, oiled black chalk over black chalk, heightened with white chalk, on gray-blue laid paper, mounted on wove paper, 16⅓ x 9⅓ in [41.5 x 23.8 cm]).  National Gallery of Art, Ontario, Canada.]

Following such compositional imaginings and before the construction of the modello for his client, the artist would research individual poses,¹⁵ using not just models from the studio but also from his recollections of previously observed persons and/or sculpture.  Annibale’s Orpheus Holding a Lyre (before 1584) shows how well stocked his pictorial memory bank already was.  Too general to have been a life study, it might also have been based on one already executed, or refer to some other two-dimensional image.

Lauded for his visual memory, Annibale was reported to have told a friend that “he never–except once, with certain bas-reliefs–had to record for purposes of future recall anything he had looked at carefully.”¹⁶  As a group, the Carracci made a regular practice of honing their ability to mentally retain what they had observed.  Upon returning home from life drawing sessions and before doing anything else, they would each pick up a scrap of paper and endeavor to commit to it what they had just recently seen, enlivening it with more animation than the original pose.¹⁷

[slide 8:  Polyphemus (early 1590s, black chalk with traces of white heightening on blue-gray paper, laid down, 1611/16 x13⅞ in [42.4 x 35.2 cm]).  Galleria degli Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Florence, Italy.]

Another good example of Annibale’s drawing from his internal image bank, the black-chalk drawing of Polyphemus for a later cycle of frescoes at the Palazzo Fava sets an almost caricatured head on a rippling mass of torqued muscle and bone, about to catapult the small boulder gripped by the one-eyed giant.  Pentimenti in the hand suggest final figural considerations in an image already close to the painted one, including reflections on the play of light and shadow to be used in the fresco.

[slide 9:  Sheet of Caricatures (c. 1595, ink on paper, 7⅞ x 5⅛ [20.1 x 13.9 cm]).  British Museum, London.]

Drawn to facial features, Annibale joined his cohorts in exaggerating them in a form of art that derives its name from theirs: caricature.  Playful by nature, known for their love of practical jokes,¹⁸ always looking to exploit drawing’s potential to distill essence from reality, the artists had fun deliberately distorting the appearance of certain individuals.  In a sheet of these faces, Annibale has sketched in the upper left an ordinary looking profile of a man and in the lower right has riffed on this, opening the eyes wider and hooking the nose more.  The receding mouth of the man is exaggerated in several of the profiles on the sheet.  Such exercises are to be distinguished from the creation of grotesques–products of the imagination.¹⁹

Quite opposite in emotional tone, Annibale’s portrait drawings have a quiet intensity, especially those of children, the models for which he drew from youngsters around the studio–“assistants and friends or relatives who frequented the Carracci shop and academy.”²⁰  As with his other subjects, these young people furnished handy objects to study, though Annibale seems to have had a special affinity for the “serious and meditative”²¹ interiority that children often manifest in their quiet moments.

[slide 10:  Profile Portrait of a Boy (1584-1585), red chalk on ivory paper, 813/16 x 6⅜ in [22.4 x 16.2]).  Galleria degli Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, Florence, Italy.]

In the early red-chalk drawing Profile Portrait of a Boy (1584-1585), the artist has posed the lad in strict profile and taken considerable care to sculpt his form with light and shadow, gently blending strokes on the smooth-skinned cheek and distinctly denoting the direction of hair strands.  Annibale deftly reserved the ivory of the page for the glittering highlights of the hair and the prominent helix of the ear.

[slide 11:  Head of a Boy (c. 1585-1590, black chalk on reddish brown paper, laid down, 227/16 x 915/16 in [316 x 252 cm] including a 2 cm horizontal strip added at the top).  Musée du Louvre, Départment des Arts Graphiques, Paris, France.]

A similarly finished portrayal, the black-chalk Head of a Boy (c. 1585-1590) captures the tension of the neck muscle as the child strains to look with wide-eyed concern at something on his right.  The down-turned corners of the mouth impart a melancholy mood, suggesting that whatever is outside the viewer’s field of vision might not be welcome.  As with the earlier portrait, here too Annibale is far less interested in the clothing than in the boy’s head.

[slide 12:  Head of a Smiling Young Man (c. 1590-92, black chalk on gray-blue paper with added strips at top and bottom, laid down, 153/16 x 97/16 in [358 x 240 cm]).  Musée du Louvre, Départment des Arts Graphiques, Paris, France.
Madonna and Child in Glory with Six Saints (c. 1591-92, San Ludovico Altarpiece).  Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, Italy.]

Identified as a preparatory sketch for a subsequent altarpiece,²² Head of a Smiling Young Man (c. 1590-92) has been so named because of its perceived happy expression.  Yet the face of Saint John the Baptist in the San Ludovico altarpiece, for which it is a study, tells a more complex story of the triumphant validation of miracle that the apparition of the Madonna and child provides, a look for which Annibale was searching in this particular drawing, one unlikely to have been taken from life.

[slide 13:  The Lutenist Mascheroni (c. 1593-1594, red chalk heightened with white chalk on reddish brown paper, the lower left corner slightly cut, 163/16 x 113/16 in [411 x 284 cm]).  Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna, Austria.
The Lutenist Mascheroni (c. 1593-1594, pen and brown ink on cream paper, laid down, the lower left corner cut and made up, 77/16 x 415/16 [188 x 126]).  Collection Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
Portrait of the Lutenist Mascheroni (c. 1593-1594, oil on canvas, [305/16 x 253/16 in 77 x 64 cm]).  Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden, Germany.]

For The Lutenist Mascheroni (c. 1593-1594), another preparatory drawing, Annibale picked up his red chalk again and using much the same approach as he did for the earlier Profile Portrait of a Boy, brought the picture to a high level of finish, perhaps to serve as an immediate model for the painting.²³  That the eyes are similarly out of convergence in all three versions implies that Annibale deliberately arranged Mascheroni’s facial features to block eye contact with the viewer.  Posed stiffly, the disengaged lutenist reveals little about himself–a common feature of this artist’s portraits²⁴–but a lot about Annibale’s own interpersonal style and his tendency to treat people as objects rather than subjects.

The studies of male nudes for the herms and ignudi that adorn the haunches of the Palazzo Farnese’s barrel vault, however, seem far more animated, exuding sensual energy.  When the newly appointed nineteen-year-old Cardinal Odoardo Farnese decided to decorate various rooms in his palazzo in Rome, he would have none other than the Carracci.²⁵  Annibale as the first to become available, arrived in the antique city to begin work in November 1595,²⁶ the beneficiary of what seemed like an unparalleled opportunity but one that ultimately led to disappointment, despair and death.

[slide 14:  Project for the Decoration of the Farnese Gallery (1597-98, red chalk with pen and brown ink on cream paper, 15 ¼ x 10⅜ in [38.8 x 26.4 cm]).  Musée du Louvre, Départment des Arts Graphiques, Paris, France.]

After first completing the Camerino (the Cardinal’s study), Annibale was joined in 1597 by his brother Agostino to assist him with the much larger project of the ceiling of the Farnese gallery.²⁷  After playing with various concepts in a series of ink drawings, Annibale settled on an illusionistic array of framed paintings covering two-dimensional architectural elements supported by herms, and a frieze of scenes framed by ignudi, eschewing a single point of view for the entire project.

[slide 15:  Palazzo Farnese Ceiling (fresco, 1597/98-1601).  Rome, Italy.]

When Agostino “pressed for a unified illusion based on one-point perspective,” Annibale mocked his brother’s idea by suggesting they install a sumptuous chair at the only spot in the huge room from which the paintings would be viewable in a way that made spatial sense to the onlooker.²⁸  The result of the lead artist’s decision was a design that could be read from any place in the room, but one that would always include some upside-down images.

[slide 16:  Atlas Herm with Arms Raised (1598-99, black chalk heightened with white on gray-blue paper, 189/16 x 14¼ in [47.2 x 36.3 cm]).  Biblioteca Reale, Turin, Italy.]
Atlas Herm (1598-99, red chalk on cream paper, laid down, 13⅝ x 713/16 in [34.5 x 19.8 cm]).  Musée du Louvre, Départment des Arts Graphiques, Paris, France.]

To create the three-dimensional architectural illusion of his intentions, Annibale had to turn flesh into stone.²⁹  Atlas Herm with Arms Raised (1598-99), the end drawing result of one such attempt, shows how he enhanced an original male nude study by pumping up the muscles and juxtaposing bright highlights with lower-value black chalk to impart a marmoreal quality to the form.  Highly unusual for Annibale is the come-hither direct eye contact the herm makes with the beholder–originally the artist.  The turned-away head in the lower left might represent some second thoughts but in the fresco Annibale kept to his original idea.

In returning to red-chalk in a different Atlas Herm (1598-99), at a time when he favored black and white chalk on blue paper,³⁰  Annibale might have wanted to take advantage of the medium’s potential for rendering the warmth of flesh.  In comparison with the Atlas Herm with Arms Raised, this herm would then represent an earlier stage in the transformation of the living model into a marble sculpture.

[slide 17:  A Seated Ignudi with a Garland (1598-99, black chalk heightened with white chalk on gray paper, 16¼ x 16⅛ in [41.2 x 41 cm]).  Musée du Louvre, Départment des Arts Graphiques, Paris, France.
Detail of Ignudi and Herms, Palazzo Farnese Ceiling (fresco, 1597/98-1601).  Rome, Italy.]

Inspired by Michelangelo’s male ignudi on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican,³¹ Annibale populated his Farnese vault with analogous figures.  Lightly sketched construction lines and first-thought contours in A Seated Ignudi with a Garland (1598-99) provide a window into the artist’s drawing process.  Among other changes, he reduced the size of the proper right lower leg, further accentuating the tapering of the massive torso toward the pelvis and legs.  In making that choice, Annibale further demonstrated his preference for design over accurate perspective.

[slide 18:  Study of a Recumbent Nude, Lying on his Side (n.d, black chalk with white and pink heightening, on gray-blue paper, 14½  x 19⅔ in [36.8 x 49.9 cm].  Royal Library, Windsor, England.
Study of a Recumbent Nude, Viewed from the Head (n.d., black chalk with white heightening on gray-blue paper, 8½ x 15½ [21.5 x 39.5 cm]).  Musée du Louvre,  Cabinet des Dessins, Paris, France.]

Very different in overall appearance are two black-chalk life studies executed during Annibale’s Roman sojourn,³² each a Study of a Recumbent Nude, one Lying on his Side and the other Viewed from the Head.  In the former, the artist has faithfully observed the unadorned truth of the effect of gravity on muscle and skin, particularly noticeable where the bones jut out along the uppermost contour of the rib cage, pelvis and greater trochanter.  Unlike in Annibale’s imaginative male nudes, here only the left biceps is rounded, accurate for a flexed position, the right one being flat as appropriate for extension.

Annibale was less satisfied with reality in Study of a Recumbent Nude, Viewed from the Head, thickening the left thigh considerably and, less so, the right arm.  This drawing might have started out as a life study and accrued revisions along the way, including a slight change in pose for better effect.  Both drawings bear witness to the artist’s intense absorption in the task at hand.

Content in the practice of his art, Annibale never adjusted to the rarified atmosphere and courtly trappings of the Palazzo Farnese, preferring instead the solitude of his room and the company of his students.  Minimally attentive to his physical presentation and melancholic in disposition, he actively avoided any unnecessary association with nobility.  On an evening stroll when caught carrying a knife, Annibale’s chosen silence about his service to the Cardinal led to time in jail.  Likewise, at another time on learning of an impending personal visit from the Pope’s nephew, he escaped through a side door.³³

[slide 19:  An Execution (1600-03, pen and brown ink on dark cream paper, laid down, 7½ x 119/16 in [19 x 29.3 cm]).  Collection Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.]

In Rome, Annibale’s idiosyncrasies stood out far more than they did in Bologna,³⁴ causing no small distress to an already sensitive soul.  No wonder, then, that he would be drawn to the ritual of a public hanging, capturing the salient details with brown ink in An Execution (1600-03).  In the pictured narrative, as an audience peers over the back wall, exercising its communal responsibility in a purification rite designed to ensure the conversion and repentance of the condemned, a friar holds up a devotional image for the criminal to ponder as he is dragged up the ladder to the gallows,³⁵ his fate foretold by the hanging corpse nearby.  Another instrument of death awaits employment on a table to the right.

For Annibale, life soon imitated the morbidity of a hanging when the payment he received for eight years of loyalty to the Farnese projects failed to meet his expectations and in fact, proved to be more of an insult than a reward.  The five hundred gold scudi brought on a saucer to the artist’s quarters, perhaps the result of the machinations of a sycophant at court, plunged Annibale into a depression from which he never recovered.³⁶

In the summer of 1605, before tackling the Cardinal’s next project–the decoration of the great hall of the Palazzo Farnese–Annibale fled permanently from the court bustle, seeking seclusion in lodging behind the vineyards of the Farnesina across the Tiber.  Later he took up residence on the Quirinal Hill, where the open air and pleasant view could have been more conducive to recovery.³⁷  By 1606 he was in yet another area of Rome some distance from the Palazzo.³⁸

The nature of his illness was such that Annibale experienced intermittent periods of productivity during which he produced a few paintings, supervised and assisted with projects by his students–especially his favorite, Domenichino³⁹ –and continued to draw.  He even began to experiment with a new technique, using a thick-nibbed pen (perhaps made of reed) and skipping any ink wash.⁴⁰

[slide 20:  Danaë (1604-05, pen and brown ink on cream aper, laid down, upper right corner cut, 7⅝ x 10⅛ in [19.4 x 25.7 cm]).  Collection Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
Titian, Danaë (1545, oil on canvas, 47.2 × 67.7 in [120 × 172 cm]).  Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy.]

After a hiatus of four years during which he had resigned from painting, Annibale resumed activity for a few years beginning in 1604,⁴¹ accepting a commission from Camillo Pamphilj to paint a Danaë.  Perhaps challenged by the presence of Titian’s painting of the same subject in the Palazzo Farnese,⁴² the artist borrowed the general idea from the Venetian painter of a reclining female nude, on a bed, in a landscape setting, along with the voluptuous form of her body, changing the pose of the princess and the position of Cupid to make the composition his own.  Manipulating the thick-nibbed pen to produce both fat and thin lines, Annibale has his Danaë (1604-5) eagerly reaching for the gold coins as they descend from above and come to rest on her left inner thigh.

[slide 21:  Self-Portrait on an Easel and Other Studies (c. 1604, pen and ocher-brown ink on cream paper, 9¾ x 7⅛ in [24.8 x 18.1 cm]).  Collection Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
Daniele da Volterra (Daniele Ricciarelli), Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) (c. 1544, oil on wood, 34¾ x 25¼ in [88.3 x 64.1 cm]).  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.]
Self-Portrait on an Easel (c. 1604, oil on canvas).  The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia.]

The period of relative inactivity was bracketed by two self-portrait drawings, the later one a meditation on portraiture in general and perhaps more specifically, on the artist’s own legacy.  In a picture related to the painting Self-Portrait on an Easel (1604),  Annibale has positioned a bearded, older man resembling Michelangelo to the right of his arrangement of images that strike poses similar to that of a portrait of this revered forebear (Ricciarelli’s oil on wood) that resided at the Palazzo Farnese from 1600 onward.⁴³  In addition, a similar profile portrait of a seventy-one-year-old Michelangelo introduced a biography of him that had been circulating in Rome since 1553.⁴⁴

Multiplying his own image, Annibale suggested mirrors, windows, picture frames and the interior of a studio inhabited by a painted canvas on an easel, accompanied by a small menagerie of household pets.  Again, inked lines vary in thickness, and darks are indicated by overlapping and hatched lines.  The self-portrait in the finished painting is all eyes, wide open, looking out at the viewer, while the mouth disappears into a blur of shadow, an apt representation of an artist not known for eloquence.

[slide 23:  Self-Portrait (c. 1600, pen and brown ink on buff paper, laid down on another sheet on which is drawn a decorative border in pen and black ink with gray wash over graphite, 5¼ x 4 [13.3 x 10.2 cm]).  The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California.]

Although done about 1600, the earlier of the two self-portrait drawings from this period resonates well with Annibale’s last days.  Depicting himself leaning on the picture frame, the artist rendered his visage in fading brown ink, cast a shadow over eyes with lowered lids of sadness, turned down the corners of his mouth in a frown, and darkly superimposed over the top of the cartouche a suggestion of a skull.⁴⁵

Both self-portraits portend death, undoubtedly reflecting Annibale’s deteriorating physical and mental condition.  On July 16, 1609, he “died miserably.”⁴⁶  Since then writers have made much of Annibale’s melancholic disposition⁴⁷ and its link to his ultimate demise.⁴⁸  Most likely he died from tertiary syphilis.  In his biography of the artist, Bellori asserted that his “death…was hastened by amorous maladies of which he had not told his doctors”⁴⁹ and in fact, the artist’s symptoms as described by Mancini⁵⁰ and Agucchi⁵¹ conform to those of end-stage syphilis.⁵²

Though the world lost a master draftsman when Annibale Carracci died prematurely at the age of forty-nine, it gained a treasure trove of drawings, cherished enough to survive the centuries.  Among those who looked to the Bolognese artist for inspiration was a certain Dutch painter living in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century.  The owner of a drawing of people swimming in a landscape penned by Annibale was none other than Rembrandt himself.  Unfortunately, the exact identity of the scene has yet to be determined.⁵³

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¹ Giovanni Pietro Bellori, The Lives of Annibale & Agostino Carracci, trans. Catherine Enggass (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), 7.
² Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Malvasia’s  Life of the Carracci, Commentary and Translation, translated and annotated by Anne Summerscale (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press), 250–51, 254.
³ Ibid., 251.
⁴ Bellori, 16.
⁵ Donald Posner, Annibale Carracci: A Study in the Reform of Italian Painting Around 1590, Vol I (New York: Phaidon Publishers, 1971), 9.
⁶ Daniele Benati, et al, The Drawings of Annibale Carracci (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1999), 49.
⁷ Posner, 23.
⁸ Ibid., 24.
⁹ See Landscape with the Setting Sun (1605-09) in Benati, et al, 289.
¹⁰ The Metropolitan Museum of Art online object label.  Accessed April 9, 2015: http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/ search/338420?rpp=30&pg=1&ao=on&ft=annibale+carracci+drawings&pos=7&imgno=0&tabname=label.
¹¹ John Gash, “Hannibal Carrats: The Fair Fraud Revealed,” Art History 13:2 (June 1990), 245.
¹² Ibid.
¹³ Posner, 53-54.
¹⁴ Benati, et al, 58.
¹⁵ Benati, et al, 44-45.
¹⁶ Malvasia devoted many pages to describing Carracci pranks.  See 274-289.
¹⁷ Malvasia, 290.
¹⁸ Ibid., 267.
¹⁹ Posner, 66.
²⁰ Ibid., 20.
²¹ Ibid., 21.
²² Benati, et al, 96.
²³ Ibid., 25.
²⁴ Posner, 21.
²⁵ Gail Feigenbaum in Benati, et al, 109.
²⁶ Posner, 78.
²⁷ Feigenbaum in Benati, et al, 110.
²⁸ Ibid, note 22.
²⁹ Benati, et al, 190.
³⁰ Ibid., 193.
³¹ Ibid., 194.
³² Carl Goldstein, Visual Fact over Verbal Fiction (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 98-100.
³³ Bellori, 58-59.
³⁴ Posner, 146.
³⁵ Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 145.
³⁶ Bellori, 52.
³⁷ Malvasia, 222-223.
³⁸ Kate Ganz in Benati, et al, 204.
³⁹ Posner, 148.
⁴⁰ Ganz in Benati, et al, 205.
⁴¹ Posner, 147.
⁴² Benati, et al, 278.
⁴³ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, catalog entry for Daniele da Volterra (Daniele Ricciarelli), Michelangelo Buonarroti.  Accessed April 21, 2015.   http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/436771?rpp=30&pg=1&ft=Jacopo+del+Conte&pos=1&imgno=0&tabname=object-information.
⁴⁴ Engraving by Giulio Bonasone, Bust Portrait of Michelangelo at Seventy-One, Facing Right (1546), used by Ascanio Condiri in his biography of Michelangelo, published in Rome 1553. On view April 23, 2015 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
⁴⁵ Benati, et al, 143.
⁴⁶ Malvasia, 226.
⁴⁷ Bellori, 55.
⁴⁸ Ganz in Benati, et al, 204.
⁴⁹ Bellori, 63.
⁵⁰ Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (New York, Random House, 1963), 114.
⁵¹ Malvasia, 227.
⁵¹ Wikipedia, Tertiary Syphilis.  Accessed April 21, 2015.  http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Syphilis#Tertiary.
⁵² Catherine Loisel Legrand in Benati, et al, 25.

City House, Country House:
A Tale of Two Madrasas

After 9/11, many Americans came to associate the religion of Islam with terrorism, and madrasas with the recruitment and training of future terrorists.  The early history of these “collegiate mosques”¹ or “theological colleges”² (as they have been called) demonstrates their importance as purveyors of propaganda, a common function of all educational institutions.  As developed and deployed by the Seljuks of Anatolia, they served as front-line institutions in the battle to restore Sunni orthodoxy, which had all but disappeared by the time Nizam al-Mulk became vizier and de facto ruler of the Seljuk empire³ in the mid-eleventh century, and embarked on his madrasa-building campaign.

Begun with more modest objectives, the earliest madrasas probably operated out of a teacher’s house.  Eventually these places of learning grew in size to provide rudimentary lodging for students (all male, of course) as well as space for daily prayers.⁴  Under the generous patronage of Nizam al-Mulk and his regime, madrasas sprang up in many of the major urban areas in the Near East to counter the significant advances that had been made by the rival Shi’i who practiced a different brand of Islam.⁵

In addition to consolidating power through the imposition of Sunni state-sponsored institutions of religion, the newly built madrasas provided training for bureaucrats who would then go on to faithfully serve their government.  In this way, Nizam al-Mulk transformed what began as a building for study and prayer into one that was used to train “individuals to maintain order and enforce control and power.”⁶

By 1146 another ruler, Nur al-Din, was in control, having established his base of operations in Aleppo in northern Syria after political and military maneuvers that arrested and repelled the advance of the Crusaders, contained the Seljuks in the north, and consolidated his authority over an ethnically diverse Near-Eastern population.  Himself a Turk from Anatolia with a largely Kurdish following, Nur al-Din turned to the already-established notion of jihad (the political and spiritual struggle against non-believers–in this case the Crusaders) to rally this variegated Islamic populace around shared goals.⁷

Perhaps inspired by the work of his predecessors the Seljuks, Nur al-Din positioned himself as the commander of the jihadist cause and began a building campaign to restore and erect orthodox Sunni structures throughout his territory, deploying religious education as a glue to hold his lands together.⁸  In Aleppo, a predominantly Shi’i city, he waited three years before building his first madrasa, al-Halawiyya in 1149, initially avoiding a heavy-handed approach that would jeopardize his popularity and control.⁹  When he was ready to challenge the Shi’is hegemony, he did it openly, situating this new Sunni madrasa opposite the Great Mosque in the madina, the center of the city.¹⁰

At the same time, by choosing to erect his madrasa on the skeleton of the Byzantine cathedral St. Helena–already retrofitted for use as a mosque in 1124–Nur al-Din could further triumph over Christianity.¹¹  While nothing is known about the original plan of the church or the changes made to convert it into an Islamic house of worship, at the time of its conversion into a madrasa (or later) changes must have been made to its physical structure.¹²

The current appearance or even the continued existence of the al-Halawiyya madrasa remains a mystery.  A Syrian civil war attracting foreign combatants has already claimed the lives of many important monuments in Aleppo and elsewhere.¹³  Tourist reports accompanied by photographs from as recently as 2012 documented a building in use as a mosque, no longer functioning as a madrasa, and in need of serious conservation and restoration work.¹⁴

Reports, ground plans and photographs from the 1970s and earlier¹⁵ describe a building entered through a portal leading to a long corridor that opened into a courtyard with a pool at its center.  Across this modest-size open space, a floor-to-ceiling window topped by an arch faced with alternating black-and-white stones demonstrated the inventiveness and skill of Northern Syrian masons.¹⁶

Through the door to the left of the large window lay the remains of the Byzantine church–the main section of the madrasa–beneath a pendentive dome (one of the first of its type in Aleppo), the fine construction of which suggested the architects might have modeled it on what was left of the one for the cathedral.¹⁷  Two iwans (rectangular spaces walled on three sides and open on the fourth) branched off the space under the dome to its left and right.  Opposite the entrance in a semi-circular apse stood six vintage columns crowned with acanthus-leaf capitals–vestiges of the previous structure.

On the southern wall of the madrasa interior, an intricately carved wooden mihrab–the locus of all prayers–became the object of intense activity in October 2013 when the Syrian Association for the Preservation of Archaeology and Heritage walled it off behind a protective barrier.  Dating to the time of Nur al-Din and renovated one hundred years later by an Ayyubid king, it includes verses of the Qu’ran.¹⁸

Much later (in 1660), the Ottoman rulers left their mark on madrasa al-Halawiyya with their renovation of the courtyard façades, commemorating that activity with an  inscription over the door to the prayer hall.¹⁹  Nur al-Din’s own carved calligraphy, lining three sides of the vaulted corridor leading to the courtyard, was left in place.

Across town and time, another madrasa took shape, one whose fortunes were as affected by its extramural location as al-Halawiyya’s was by its center-city one.  Unlike the madrasa in the madina, which was wedged into an already crowded commercial district, al-Firdaws was designed to be a reminder of the paradise promised to the devout,²⁰ with enough space afforded by its southern suburban siting to include several gardens, flowing water and pools.²¹

Commissioned early in her regency by Dayfa Khatun, an Ayyubid queen who ruled for her young grandson from 1236 until her death in 1244,²² madrasa al-Firdaws reflected its sponsor’s deep and abiding devotion to Sufism,²³ a mystical practice that combined physical deprivation, ingestion of psychotropic agents and dancing.  The Qur’anic verses inscribed along the building’s exterior and in a band of text that snaked around three of the courtyard interior walls reminded these worshipers of the vision of God awaiting them as the reward for their asceticism and religious zeal.²⁴  By sponsoring a madrasa that as a center of Sufism functioned as a khanqah²⁵ (“monastic mosque”²⁶), Dayfa Khatun continued the work of a predecessor, Nur al-Din, who during his reign built nine of these Sufi monasteries in Aleppo.²⁷

The eleven domes of madrasa al-Firdaws and its lengthy inscription along the eastern façade distinguished it from other contemporary Ayyubid religious buildings²⁸ in a way that its otherwise unadorned exterior walls did not.  From a distance, the relatively small portal tucked away in the eastern wall seemed insignificant in comparison to the massive rectangle of stone blocks into which it was inserted, but its triple-tiered muqarnas vault capped by a scalloped half-dome²⁹ atop a tall, narrow space, imbued it with a monumentality designed to inspire a sense of awe.

Architects in the Near East developed the “stalactite pendentive”–or muqarnas vault– to solve the problem of mounting a round dome on a square room.  Initially using a single squinch arch across each corner to transition from rectangle below to polygon above–and then to dome–architects later used four in a pyramidal configuration.  It wasn’t long before these arches proliferated and the muqarnas vault was born.³⁰  In Syria, adept masons carved each separate stone block into shapes destined to fit snugly into place when assembled and to support the weight above them.³¹  What began as functional evolved into highly decorative multi-tiered constructions, as could be seen in the portal of al-Firdaws.

Once through the doors of this madrasa, visitors encountered a long vaulted corridor leading to an exterior wall of the back-to-back iwans.  A turn to the left brought a worshiper to the entrance corridor of the now enclosed iwan that once opened up into “a walled garden with a pool, whose waters were piped into the madrasa.”³²  A turn in the other direction quickly revealed the interior courtyard, in its design a symphony of mathematical ratios.³³

Islamic architects and artists relied almost exclusively on the science and art of geometry in both construction and ornamentation, using grids in the layout of buildings and in the containment of decorative elements.³⁴  Deploying repetitive, symmetrical and continuously-generated patterns³⁵ (as in fractals), they created designs like that on madrasa al-Firdaws’s mihrab (or prayer niche) with its overlapping and interlacing, multi-colored stonework.

Divided horizontally into three approximately equal sections, the front of that mihrab contained red porphyry, green diorite, and white marble with veins of various colors.  Within the semicircular top third, a band of Qur’anic inscription³⁶ wrapped around a circle segment, the innermost part of which was an organized riot of interwoven white lines framing red and green shapes.

In the lower third of the mihrab’s facing, supporting the niche were two granite columns with muqarnas capitals³⁷ echoed by vertical stripes of alternating dark and light marble to their left and right, and continuing into the prayer alcove.  Sandwiched between the facing’s top and bottom sections, in a rectangle encompassing the arch of the mihrab’s vault, thick bands of yellow and white marble curved and angled above and below each other; the left side mirroring the right but for the reversal of the overlapping colors, resulting in a not-quite-symmetrical design.

Before entering the mosque (that section of the madrasa that housed the mihrab), devotees first availed themselves of the waters of an octagonal courtyard pool, a complex construction of three layers–an eight-pointed star sandwiched between two octagons–unique to the architecture of Aleppo.³⁸  The stone of the inner perimeter of the basin was carved into scallops alternating with right angles; curves resonated with the hemispheres of the many domes and corners with the surrounding pavement–an arrangement of light and dark masonry in square-based patterns.

Located on opposite sides of the courtyard, column-supported pointed arches opened into vaulted corridors beyond which domed rooms might have hosted gatherings of students and teachers.  Perpendicular to these were the prayer hall on one end and on the other, the yawning entrance to the interior iwan, with its evenly spaced niches that at one time could have held books.³⁹

Flanking the back-to-back iwans were two-story residential annexes, each with its own courtyard and pool, though of somewhat different configurations.  Not visible from the madrasa’s interior space, these areas–since fallen into disrepair–were accessed from the vaulted corridors running alongside the exterior iwan.⁴⁰  Uncommon in Syrian madrasas, student dormitories⁴¹ at al-Firdaws probably reflect that institution’s monastic functions.  The minaret rising from this section ensured that calls to prayer could be heard by sleeping devotees, waking them in time for their long nighttime vigils.

Unlike in downtown Aleppo, where madrasa al-Halawiyya kept company with the Great Umayyad mosque and busy commercial structures, al-Firdaws had for its nearest neighbors pistachio trees and tombstones.  Within walking distance, however, residents and their visitors could, if needed, purchase provisions in a nearby populated area and further away, at the souk (market) of Bab al-Maqam, one of the gates to the city.⁴²

Isolated as the madrasa was, it remained for some time in an active area thanks to the Mamluks–the next rulers of the Near East.  As part of the process of restoring Aleppo after the 1260 Mongol invasions destroyed much of the city,⁴³ this new dynasty capitalized on the connection between the center of the city and its extramural neighborhoods.  One such focus was a corridor linking the shrine of Abraham on the Citadel with the one South of Bab al-Maqam in the district just north of al-Firdaws, along which they added their own monuments.⁴⁴

When the Ottomans arrived in 1516, the central and northwestern parts of the city benefited⁴⁵ from their penchant for erecting expansive complexes encompassing mosque, madrasa, public kitchen, souk and accommodations for travelers⁴⁶ in those parts of town.  This concentration of construction and trade around the al-Halawiyya madrasa helped it maintain its significance, evident in the Ottomans’ seventeenth-century renovations of its courtyard façades.

The emphasis on parts north proved far less advantageous to the madrasa in the southern suburb, which saw the depopulation of its surroundings; even the area cemeteries migrated elsewhere, leaving just al-Firdaws’s own, one of the largest in Aleppo and in the twentieth century, the predominant feature of the immediate environment.  What was once a verdant reminder of a paradise to come found itself in a poor, industrial area that profited little from later urban renewal projects.⁴⁷

In the early twenty-first century, combatants waging war in Syria and its neighboring states have taken the cultural heritage of those countries hostage, already executing too many of the monuments they captured.  Air strikes by the United States to drive back an especially malignant faction in the conflicts added to the wreckage.⁴⁸

Differences in location, function, appearance and history of al-Halawiyya, al-Firdaws and other Aleppian madrasas have ultimately no bearing on their fates.  In a corner of the world that has through the ages been in the cross hairs of many conflicts, it remains to be seen what will survive this one and whether restoration and renewal will again be possible.

[For latest updates, click here.]
______________________________
¹ Ernest J. Grube, “What is Islamic Architecture?” in Architecture of the Islamic World: Its History and Social Meaning, edited by George Michell (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1978), 37.
² Yasser Tabbaa, Constructions of Power and Piety in Medieval Aleppo (The Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania, 1997), 7.
³ Grube, 38.
⁴ Ibid., 39.
⁵ Tabbaa in Constructions of Power and Piety, 125.
⁶ Ibid., 126.
⁷ Nikita Elisséeff, “The Reaction of the Syrian Muslims after the Foundation of the First Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem” in The Medieval Mediterranean: Peoples, Economies and Cultures, 400-1453, Volume I: Crusaders and Muslims in Twelfth-Century Syria, edited by Maya Shatzmiller (New York: E. J. Brill, 1993), 165-67.
⁸  Ibid., 168.
⁹ Yasser al-Tabba, “The Architectural Patronage of Nur al-Din” (PhD diss., New York University, 1982),182.
¹⁰ Ibid., 263.
¹¹ Ibid.
¹² Ibid., 50-52.
¹³ “Provinces: Aleppo,” APSA (Association for the Preservation of Syrian Archaeology), accessed November 16, 2014, http://www.apsa2011.com/index.php/en/provinces/ aleppo/monuments.html.
¹⁴ “Madrassa Halawiyya, Aleppo,” Virtual Tourist, accessed November 16, 2014, http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/Middle_East/Syria/Muhafazat_Halab/Aleppo-1814607/Things_To_Do-Aleppo-Madrassa_Halawiyya-BR-1.html#.
¹⁵ al-Tabba, “The Architectural Patronage of Nur al-Din.”
¹⁶ Ronald Lewcock, “Architects, Craftsmen and Builders: Materials and Techniques” in Architecture of the Islamic World, 135-136.
¹⁷ al-Tabba, “The Architectural Patronage of Nur al-Din,” 53.
¹⁸ “Aleppo: Protecting the Halawiyeh wooden niche 10.06.2013,” APSA, accessed November 18, 2014, http://www.apsa2011.com/index.php/en/provinces/aleppo/monuments/591-alhalaoya-aleppo-2.html.
¹⁹ Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, “The Image of an Ottoman City: Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th Centuries” in The Ottoman Empire and its Heritage: Politics, Society and Economy, Volume 33, edited by Suraiya Faroqhi and Halil Inalcik (Boston, Massachusetts: Brill Academic Publishers, 2004), 183.
²⁰ Yassar Tabbaa, “Geometry and Memory in the Design of the Madrasa al-Firdows in Aleppo,” Chapter 3 in Theories and Principles of Design in the Architecture of Islamic Societies (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, 1988), 32.
²¹ Ibid., 28.
²² Tabbaa, Constructions of Power and Piety, 165.
²³ Ibid., 176.
²⁴ Ibid., 171-180.
²⁵ Ibid., 8.
²⁶ Graube, 40.
²⁷ Tabbaa, Constructions of Power and Piety, 164.
²⁸ Ibid., 168, 170-71.
²⁹ Ibid., 168.
³⁰ Graube, 124 and 141-142.
³¹ Tabbaa, Constructions of Power and Piety, 147.
³² Ibid., 169-70.
³³ Tabbaa in Theories and Principles of Design, 24-27.
³⁴ Graube, 164.
³⁵ Ibid., 169.
³⁶ Ibid.
³⁷ Ibid.
³⁸ Tabbaa, Constructions of Power and Piety, 152.
³⁹ Ibid., 169.
⁴⁰ Ibid., 159.
⁴¹ Robert Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture: Form, function and meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 188.
⁴² Rana Chalabi, “Madrassa Al Firdaus al-‘Alā” (masters thesis, n.d.), accessed October 17, 2014, http://ranachalabi.com/Chalabi_MA_Thesis.pdf.
⁴³ Ibid., 27.
⁴⁴ Watenpaugh, 32-33.
⁴⁵ Ibid., 52.
⁴⁶ Ciğdem Kafescioğlu, “In The Image of Rūm: Ottoman Architectural Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Aleppo and Damascus,” Muqarnas 16 (1999): 71.
⁴⁷ Chalabi, 28-29.
⁴⁸ “Aleppo – Aïn al-Arab-Kobane: US airstrike against ISIS militants on hill of Tell Shair 24.10.2014,” APSA (Association for the Preservation of Syrian Archaeology), accessed November 27, 2014, http://www.apsa2011.com/index.php/en/provinces/aleppo/sites.html.

The Power of Music &
The Madness of Art

[To view the slide show in a separate tab while reading the text, place the mouse pointer over the first slide, right click, select <This Frame>, then <Open Frame in New Tab>.]

[slide 1:  Title.]

[slide 2:  Detail, Émile Wauters, Le Peintre du Rouge-Cloître (1872, oil on canvas, 6 x 9 ft [1.86 x 2.75 m]).  Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels.]

Pity poor Hugo van der Goes.

[slide 3:  Émile Wauters, Le Peintre du Rouge-Cloître (1872, oil on canvas, 6 x 9 ft [1.86 x 2.75 m]).  Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels.]

He fell into a funk, and his prior and fellow monks tried to cheer him up with “a melody…and other recreative spectacles.”¹  While it can’t be known what music they chose, perhaps success would have been theirs had they performed something decidedly more upbeat.

[for slide 4, click here on Flashdance-What a Feeling.]

[slide 5:  Émile Wauters, Le Peintre du Rouge-Cloître (1872, oil on canvas, 6 x 9 ft [1.86 x 2.75 m]).  Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels.]

In his 1872 painting, Le Peintre du Rouge-Cloître (known in English as The Madness of Hugo van der Goes), Belgian artist Émile Wauters illustrated the legendary story of an artist who, around 1475 at the age of about 39, checked himself into a monastery–the Red Cloister outside Brussels–and became “a brother conversi, a rank between a lay brother and a monk.”²  Within the space of about five years, he had what would now be called a nervous breakdown or psychotic break.³

[slide 6: Melancholy Healed by Music in Aldobrandino of Siena, Livres pour la santé garder (Régime du corps) (late 13th century).  The British Library, London.  Sloane MS 2435, fol. 10v.]

As perhaps the only extant case study (of sorts) from the early modern period (or any other time) of an artist’s descent into madness, Gaspar Ofhuys’s description of van der Goes’s malady has often been cited in discussions of melancholia and creativity, and music’s healing powers,⁴ two areas of interest that have extensive histories.  Each has also been a favorite subject of artists over the course of time.

[slide 7:  Detail, Émile Wauters, Le Peintre du Rouge-Cloître (1872, oil on canvas, 6 x 9 ft [1.86 x 2.75 m]).  Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels.]

As Ofhuys relates the story, when van der Goes–a renowned late 15th century Northern European painter–was returning from an excursion to Cologne accompanied by a couple of fellow monks, “he incurred a strange mental disease…[H]e kept saying that he was a lost soul and was adjudicated eternal damnation; furthermore he was intent on injuring himself physically and committing suicide” and had to be “forcibly restrained by those who were standing by to help.”⁵

Based on that meager description of symptoms and the sparse biographical data available for van der Goes, attempts to reach a reliable diagnosis or even to discern precipitating factors are by necessity entirely conjectural.  In plunging into his suicidal state, however, the Flemish artist provided future writers (including Ofhuys, who made his own–mostly moralistic–guesses about causes and consequences) ample fodder for ruminating about the link between genius and insanity, and creativity and melancholia.

[slide 8:  Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath (1609-10, oil on canvas, 49¼ x 39¾ in [125 x 101 cm]).  Rome, Museo e Galleria Borghese.]

As far back as Classical Antiquity, descriptions of artists emphasized their peculiarities.⁶  In writing about a particular Greek sculptor, Pliny the Elder made sure to mention not only the artist’s nickname of “the Madman,” but also an “unrivaled devotion to the art” that led him to be a “severe critic of his own work” and to break his statues into pieces upon completion, “his intense passion for his art making him unable to be satisfied.”⁷

[slide 9: Michelangelo Buonarroti, restored and completed by Tiberio Calcagni, Bandini Pietá (1550-55, marble, height 7⅜ ft [2.26 m]).  Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence, Italy.  Photo © Marie-Lan Nguyen.]

Michelangelo followed suit almost two millennia later when, unhappy with the sculpture, he took a mallet to a late-in-life Pietá.⁸  Shortly before he died, this great Renaissance man torched “a large number of his own drawings, sketches and cartoons to prevent anyone from seeing the labours [sic] he endured or the ways he tested his genius, for fear that he might seem less than perfect.”⁹

[slide 10:  Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear (1989, oil on canvas, 23⅓ x 19⅓ in [60 x 49 cm]).  The Courtauld Gallery, London.]

In more modern times at the end of the nineteenth century in the hills around Aix-en-Provence, a fortunate hiker might have chanced upon an unfinished painting by Paul Cézanne, hanging from a tree.  A brilliant colorist, Cézanne lamented near the end of his life that “even though I am already old, I am only a beginner.”  About his paintings he said, “they are imperfect things…I don’t capture the local colors.”¹⁰

That kind of driving passion was noted by Plato but ascribed only to those who practiced what he considered the higher art forms of poetry and music.¹¹  As painters achieved more status during Hellenistic times, they were granted the same “inspired madness of which seers and poets are possessed.”¹²

[slide 11:  Adam Elsheimer, Minerva as Patroness of Arts and Sciences (c. 1600-1605, oil on copper, 3⅜ x 5¾ in [8.6 x 14.6 cm]).  The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK.]

According to the humoral theory of personality, artists could reach feverish states of creativity (Plato’s divine/creative mania¹³), energized by internal fires that when spent, left behind “remains [that] resembled black coals and polluted smoke,” plunging them into their more characteristic melancholic state.¹⁴

Adam Elsheimer, in his small copper painting, Minerva as Patroness of Arts and Sciences (c. 1600-1605), depicts Minerva in the emblematic pose of the melancholic, complete with shadowed eyes, and head resting wearily on her left arm and hand.  She bears a downturned, burned-out torch–of little use to the artist and scholars toiling away in the darkened interior, each with his own meager source of illumination.  The fire in the horizontally-centered brazier, now reduced to smoldering embers, adds a final touch to this representation of the cold, dark, blackness of the melancholic artistic temperament.¹⁵

Henry James’s short-story character knew well of this place when he exclaimed, “We work in the dark–we do what we can–we give what we have.  Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.  The rest is the madness of art.”¹⁶

A committed and acclaimed artist, Hugo van der Goes suffered similar “passions of the soul” and “was seriously weighted down by them…exceedingly worried about how he was to carry out the paintings he had undertaken.”¹⁷  In wondering about the origins of the artist’s breakdown, Ofhuys mentioned his ingesting “melancholy-inducing foods” and imbibing strong wine, “which burns the humors and turns them into ashes.”¹⁸

[slide 12:  Hugo van der Goes, The Portinari Altarpiece (1475, oil on wood, 8¼  × 4⅔ ft [2.53 × 1.41 m]).  Uffizi Gallery, Florence.]

Ofhuys also made much of Hugo’s exceptional status at the Red Cloister and the high esteem in which the artist was held.¹⁹  When the painter joined the monastery soon after completing The Portinari Altarpiece in 1475, he was allowed to bring his studio practice with him.  Granted special dispensation to receive devotees of his art–many of high rank like the Archduke Maximilian, the artist would join his aristocratic guests in luxurious suites built specifically for their convenience.²⁰

Hugo’s special situation contrasted sharply with that of his fellows, who lived a far more austere life in an environment devoid of instrumental music, particularly that of the organ–all forbidden by monastery statutes.  Not surprising then, when Prior Thomas heard about the artist’s distress and ordered a musical remedy, he had it applied offsite, in advance of the brother’s returning home.²¹

[slide 13: Queen Mary Psalter, early 14th century.  British Royal Library.
Bible of Duke Borso d’Este, mid-15th century.  Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, Modena.]

The prior upon hearing of Hugo’s illness, left the cloister and caught up with the traveling party in Brussels.  “[A]fter confirming everything with his own eyes and ears, [he] suspected that [the artist] was vexed by the same disease by which King Saul was tormented.  Thereupon, recalling how Saul had found relief when David plucked his harp, he gave permission that a melody be played without restraint in the presence of brother Hugo, but also that other recreative spectacles be performed.”²²

Prior Thomas had in mind the short passage in the Bible that describes the magic of David’s harp:

“And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand; so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.”  (Italics in the original.)²³

[slide 14:  Whistles Made of Reindeer Bones, Petersfels, Germany (c. 15,000 BP).  Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe, Germany.  Photo © Don Hitchcock.
Flute Made of Mammoth Ivory, Ulm, Germany (c. 30,000-37,000 BP, 7⅔ in [18.7 cm] in length).  Photo: © H. Jensen, University of Tübingen.]

While that might be the earliest documented use of music as an agent of healing, archeologists have unearthed an assortment of musical instruments from as far back as between 43,000 and 67,000 years ago that certainly had the potential to be used in a similar way.  The original context might have been their use in magical rituals to conjure up and control spirits.²⁴

[slide 15:  Oinochoe with the Myth of Orpheus (ceramics, red figure).  Tuscania, Italy: Museo Archeologica.  © 2006, Scala, Florence / Art Resource, NY.]

Fast forward to classical antiquity and mythological texts to find references to incantations (perhaps closer to spells than songs) used for healing.  Although the music of Orpheus is reputed to have had great power, “there are no stories of his acting as a healer of the sick.”²⁵

Seventh century BCE saw the deliverance of Sparta from plague through the music of a noted composer of paeans.  Several hundred years later, on the advice of an oracle, the possessed women of a couple of localities in southern Italy began to intone daily a great number of paeans in their quest for relief.  Communal holy songs, these verses acted by appeasing the angry gods behind the afflictions rather than affecting the person directly.²⁶

[Slide 16:  Raphael, School of Athens (c. 1510-12, fresco, 19 x 27 ft [5.8 x 8.23 m]).  Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican Palace, Vatican State.  Erich Lessing / Art Resource, N.Y. & Detail of Pythagoras, School of Athens.]

It wasn’t until his disciples started handing down stories about the mathematician and mystic Pythagoras (who left nothing in writing) that using music to influence a distressed person’s mood came into its own.  As the tale went, the great teacher–accompanying himself on a lyre–sang paeans to his pupils in order to soothe them.  At times they all sang as one.²⁷  By the fifth century BCE, much had already been written about the power of music to not only affect emotions but also to impact a developing young boy’s character.  Aggressive, frenzied music was suspect and proscribed.

[slide 17: Pier Francesco Mola, Mercury Putting Argus to Sleep (c. 1645-55, oil on canvas, 23⅛ x 39⅛ in [58.7 x 99.4 cm]).  Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH.]

Not long after that, Plato (that great ascetic) picked up on the theme of music as character building or destroying, and issued some guidelines:

“Attunement, having motions akin to the circuits in our soul, has been given by the Muses to the intelligent user of the arts not for mindless pleasure, as it is fashionable to assume, but as an aid to bringing our soul-circuit, when it has got out of tune, into order and harmony with itself.  And rhythm likewise, in view of the unmeasured and graceless condition that comes about in most of us, was bestowed by them for the same purpose.”²⁸

[slide 18:  Boethius, De Institutione Musica (early 6th century CE).]

Plato’s ideas about music’s potential for altering mood and behavior inspired other Greek and Roman writers to pick up on the theme,²⁹ but it was the treatise De Institutione Musica by sixth century CE Roman philosopher Boethius that systematized all the previous material, making it readily accessible for later scholars.  By the Middle Ages, his manuscript on the subject had become compulsory reading for anyone studying at a higher educational level, where it constituted one quarter of the quadrivium along with the other mathematical disciplines of arithmetic, geometry and astronomy.³⁰

In his medico-astrological treatise De Triplici Vita (The Three Books on Life) published in 1489, theologian, astrologer, physician, musician and magician, Marsilio Ficino, picked up where Plato left off.  With Saturn in a dominant position in his horoscope, this Renaissance man was highly motivated to find a system for overcoming his “seal of melancholy.”³¹

Believing in the magic of music, Ficino developed an astrologically based therapy founded on his idea that “sound and song easily arouse the fantasy, affect the heart and reach the inmost recesses of the mind…Nearly all living beings are made captive by harmony.”  Playing his lyre and singing helped him “banish vexations of both soul and body”³² and he endeavored to share his discovery with others.  For Ficino, earthly music intently played could connect the performer and the listener to the music of the heavenly spheres, completing a circuit that had power to heal body and soul, two entities not yet separated conceptually at that time.

While it’s possible that De Institutione Musica–with all its classical allusions–provided an additional frame of reference for Prior Thomas (besides the Bible) when he came up with a musical solution to the problem of his conversi’s critical imbalance, his adding to the prescription “other recreative spectacles”³³ also indicates an awareness of the benefits to the melancholic of not just music, but also attractive diversions.³⁴

[slide 19:  Gonzales Coques, The Artist in His Studio (1650, oil on canvas, 25½ x 32¼ in [65 x 82 cm]).  Staatliches Museum, Schwerin, Germany.]

When Gonzales Coques conceived the idea for his painting The Artist in His Studio (1650), Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy had already been published (in 1621, first in English) and widely referenced as the compendium of two millennia worth of knowledge and experience on the malady of melancholy.  Integrating the physical with the spiritual,³⁵ it offered recommendations for treatment, among which music had a leading role.  “He advised students and scholars ‘to refresh their wearied minds with some sort of melody.  For so shall they drive away the dumpes [sic] of melancholie [sic] and make their spirits more lively to learn.’”³⁶

Burton’s prescriptions for curing melancholy singled out pleasant surroundings like gardens and the viewing of Dutch maps, globes and landscape art as ways to lighten the burden on the intellect’s soul.³⁷  Painters like Coques adopted those recommendations as subjects for their pictures.  In The Artist in His Studio, he placed in the artist’s hands a string instrument and situated him in front of a large landscape painting, scattering around the composition other music-making objects: a lute face down on the cabinet against the back wall, and a violin-cello leaning against a  keyboard.  Fruits of the vine and other produce rest on the floor nearby, symbolizing the pleasures of wine and nature as other popular remedies for the relief of melancholia.

[slide 20:  Frans van Mieris the Elder, The Artist in His Studio (1659, oil on panel, 23⅔ x 18½ in [60 x 47 cm]).  Staatliche Kunstammlungen, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Germany.]

Similarly, Frans van Mieris the Elder in The Artist in His Studio (1659) included in the easel painting a lounging figure with a lute by his side in a romantic classical setting of arches and columns.  In the studio foreground, a globe and a cello refer to additional anti-melancholy devices, and a statue further back of a writhing figure shows Hercules–one of the patron saints of melancholics–battling a snake.³⁸

[slide 21:  Unknown (formerly attributed to Paul Bril), Self-Portrait of an Artist (c. 1595-1600, oil on canvas, 28 x 30¾ in [71 x 78 cm]).  Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island.]

In an anonymous Self-Portrait of an Artist (c. 1595-1600), the protagonist has put aside the tools of his trade, the fires of his creativity having been depleted by the effort to produce the large bucolic landscape that rests on his easel, and avails himself of some musical diversion in an attempt to combat the cold, bilious darkness of his melancholia.

[slide 22:  Marie-Louise von Motesiczky, The Old Song (1959, oil on canvas, 3⅓ x 5 ft [1.02 x 1.53 m)].  Courtesy Galerie St. Etienne, NY.  © The Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Trust.]

Music’s power to soothe has never gone out of fashion in artists’ studios, appearing on the canvases of such diverse Northern Europeans as the German expressionist Marie-Louise von Motesiczky and the great Dutch realist Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn.  Motesiczky in the touching portrayal of her mother in old age, The Old Song (1959), invites into her mother’s room a close friend and neighbor to play a harp for the bedridden woman.

[slide 23:  Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Saul and David (1655-60, oil on canvas, 4¼ x 5⅜ ft [1.3 x 1.64 m]).  Mauritshaus, The Hague, Netherlands.]

In one of Rembrandt’s paintings of the biblical story of Saul and David (1655-60), David concentrates intensively on his musical production, bending and turning his head to better catch the sounds emanating from his harp, while Saul dabs at his eye as if to wipe away a tear, his upset temporarily assuaged by the magic of the melody.  The ancients knew intuitively what contemporary neuroscience has begun to bear out, that music can have a salutary effect on mood.

[slide 24:  From Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music, © 2006.]

Advanced techniques of brain imaging have provided modern-day scientists with an increasingly more intimate understanding of the structures and functions of that mysterious organ between the ears.  Researchers, fascinated by the age-old importance of music to the human species, have determined that “musical activity involves nearly every [known] region of the brain…and nearly every neural subsystem.”³⁹

Briefly stated, the processing of the sound of music begins with the auditory cortex, which sorts through its components.  Regions of the frontal cortex attend to the cognitive aspects of the experience, dealing with musical structure and expectations.  In the mesolimbic system, a part of the emotional center of the brain, the production of opioids and the reward neurotransmitter dopamine activates the nucleus accumbens, critical to the experience of pleasure, resulting in an uplifting state of arousal.  Meanwhile, in the cerebellum–the body’s keeper of the beat–and the basal ganglia (also involved in the brain’s reward system), rhythm and meter get registered.⁴⁰

(slide 25:  Jan Steen, The Doctor’s Visit (c. 1660-65, oil on panel, 18⅛ x 14½ in [46 x 36.8 cm]).  Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA.]

Seventeenth-century doctors did not wait for the advent of neuroscience and its attendant revelations to include music in their medicine bag for not just melancholic men, but also for hysterical women who suffered from that long-ago-identified affliction known as the wandering womb, or hysteria.⁴¹  Dixon’s feminist approach to the study of melancholia invites viewers to consider gender-specific distinctions that artists made in their portrayals of women suffering the blues–reflections of the intellectual milieu of their times.

While the status of the enervated man was elevated to that of suffering genius, the symptomatic woman was understood as little more than a passive vessel for her uterus, “an independent animal capable of appetites and movements beyond the control of body or mind.”⁴²  In his The Doctor’s Visit (c. 1660-65), Netherlandish artist Jan Steen captured perfectly the medical lore of the time as expressed in theme of the “lovesick maiden.”⁴³

In the picture, a young woman in the iconic head-resting-listlessly-on-hand pose, turns her glazed eyes expectantly in the direction of the doctor who–still holding his gloves (an indication that he has just arrived to deal with the emergency) takes her pulse.  A far more alert young woman plays a harpsichord nearby while staring intently at the painting’s subject, watching to see if the music was having any effect.  No glow emanates from the foot warmer in the foreground, a symbol of the spent fires of melancholia.

To potentiate the musical medicine, Steen added a young male caller (the love antidote) who is welcomed in by a servant, and a jokester (the mirth remedy) dangling a fish behind the sick woman.⁴⁴  A contemporary audience would have recognized allusions to other medical practices, and physicians would have enjoyed even more.⁴⁵

[slide 26:  Copy after Jan Steen, Lady at a Clavichord (after 1661 or 1664, oil on canvas, 25¼ x 21¾ in [64.1 x 55.2 cm]).  Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA.]

The same artist, in Lady at a Clavichord (after 1661 or 1664–a copy of a lost original), explored again the role of music as a balm for melancholia associated with lovesickness, though this time the victim is a man.  Holding a less-than-half-full glass of wine, and supporting the weight of his head in that now familiar position, he looks longingly at the woman meeting his eyes as she turns the page of a score with one hand and rests the fingers of her other on the keys of a clavichord.  In the near background, another young man (or boy) reaches up to retrieve a lute from the wall, perhaps to hand the sufferer so he can respond to the songs of his love.

[slide 27:  Hugo van der Goes, Portrait of a Man (c. 1475, oil on wood, 12½ x 10¼ in [31.8 x 26 cm]).  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.]
Hugo van der Goes, A Benedictine Monk (c. 1478, oil on wood, 9⅞ x 7⅜ in [25.1 x 18.7 cm]).  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.]

Love’s painful longings pale in comparison with suicidal ideation, and it’s unknown just how effective was the “melody…played without restraint…[and] other recreative spectacles”⁴⁶ in the face of Hugo van der Goes’s severe distress.  Ofhuys, amid his sermonizing about God’s compassionate nudge of the painter in the direction of more humility, describes how “[t]he brother, realizing this himself abased himself very much as soon as he regained his health, leaving the table at our refectory…and abjectly obtaining his meals with the laiety [sic].”⁴⁷  In the end, the renowned converso relinquished his privileged position and probably ceased his entertainment of aristocratic admirers in refined quarters.

[slide 28:  Hugo van der Goes, Death of a Virgin (c. 1470–80, oil on panel, 4 × 4¾ ft [1.23 × 1.48 m]).  Groeningemuseum.  Bruges, Belgium.
Hugo van der Goes, Trinity Altarpiece (c. 1478-79, oil on panel, each panel: 6⅔ x 3¼ ft [2.02 x 1.01 m]).  National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh, Scotland.]

It’s uncertain whether Hugo painted again after the breakdown he suffered a couple of years before he died in 1482.  Writers have been unable to resist the temptation to retrospectively identify in his masterpieces indicators of a troubled personality.⁴⁸  But that type of analysis belongs to the field of art not music therapy, a project for another time.
_____________________________
¹ Gaspar Ofhuys, “Extract from Originale Cenobii Rubeevallis in Zonia Prope Bruxellam in Brabancia,” translated by William A. McCloy in “The Ofhuys Chronicle and Hugo van der Goes” (PhD diss., State University of Ohio, 1958), 20.
² Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (New York, NY: Random House, 1963), 108.
³ Ibid., p. 109.
⁴ See for example: Peter Murray Jones, “Music Therapy in the Later Middle Ages: The Case of Hugo van der Goes” in Peregrine Horden, ed., Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity (Hants, England: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2000), 120-144; Laurinda S. Dixon, The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art, ca. 1500-1700 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 2013), 121; and Wittkower,108-13.
⁵ Ofhuys in McCloy, 19-20.
⁶ Wittkower, 7.
⁷ Pliny the Elder, Natural History, translated by D. E. Eichholz (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and London: William Heinemann, 1949-54), Vol. 10, Book XXXIV, 14.
⁸ Anna Mazzanti, The Art of Florence in Its Great Museums (Florence, Italy: Scala, 1997), 97.
⁹ Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, translated by Julia Conaway and Peter Bondanella (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998), 472.
¹⁰ Michael Doran, ed., Conversations with Cézanne, translated by Julie Lawrence Cochran (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 20.
¹¹ Wittkower, 4-5.
¹² Wittkower, 98.
¹³ Ibid., 103.
¹⁴ Dixon, 14-15.
¹⁵ Ibid., 119.
¹⁶ Henry James, “The Middle Years,” Scribner’s Magazine 13:4 (April 1983), 620.
¹⁷ Ofhuys in McCloy, 22.
¹⁸ Ibid., 21.
¹⁹ Ibid., 16-17.
²⁰ Ibid., 18.
²¹ Peter Murray Jones, “Music Therapy in the Later Middle Ages: The Case of Hugo van der Goes” in Peregrine Horden, ed., Music as Medicine (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publish Ltd., 2000), 123.
²² Ofhuys in McCloy, 20.
²³  “I Samuel 17:23,” The Holy Bible, King James Version (New York: The World Publishing Co., n.d.), 216.
²⁴ Martin West, “Music Therapy in Antiquity” in Music as Medicine, 51.
²⁵ Ibid., 54.
²⁶ Ibid., 54-55.
²⁷ Ibid., 55.
²⁸ Plato, Timaeus, 47d, quoted in West, “Music Therapy in Antiquity,” 58.
²⁹ West, “Music Therapy in Antiquity” in Music as Medicine, 59-66.
³⁰ Peregrine Horden, “Commentary on Part II, with a Note on the Early Middle Ages,” in Music as Medicine, 104.
³¹ Angela Voss, “Marsilio Ficino, the Second Orpheus,” in Music as Medicine, 156.
³² Ibid., 161.
³³ Ofhuys in McCloy, 20.
³⁴ Dixon, The Dark Side of Genius, 143-178.
³⁵  Ibid., 3.
³⁶ Robert Burton quoted in Dixon, The Dark Side of Genius, 148.
³⁷ Dixon, The Dark Side of Genius, 152.
³⁸ Ibid., 154 and 156.
³⁹ Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York, NY: Penguin Group Inc., 2006), 4.
⁴⁰ Ibid., 187.
⁴¹ Laurinda S. Dixon, “Together in Misery: Medical Meaning and Sexual Politics in Two Paintings by Jan Steen” in Jane L. Carroll and Alison G. Stewart, eds., Saints, Sinners, and Sisters: Gender and Northern Art in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2003), 250-51.
⁴² Ibid., 250.
⁴³ Ibid., 246.
⁴⁴ Ibid., 256.
⁴⁵ Ibid., 249.
⁴⁶ Ofhuys in McCloy, 20.
⁴⁷ Ibid., 23.
_⁴⁸ Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, Volume I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 330-343.  He identifies “somber pathos” as “the very signature of Hugo’s genius.” (342); McCloy sees the 1902 attribution of The Death of the Virgin to van der Goes as inevitable. (115).

The Tomb of Ipuy:
Monument as Self-Portrait

With something like awe, the scientists gazed at the still figure from the past, while in turn the little biped stared back at them with its characteristic expression of arrogant bad temper.

For the rest of time it would symbolize the human race. The psychologists of Venus would analyze its actions and watch its every movement until they could reconstruct its mind. Thousands of books would be written about it. Intricate philosophies would be contrived to account for its behavior…

Its secret would be safe as long as the universe endured, for no one now would ever read the lost language of Earth. Millions of times in the ages to come those last few words would flash across the screen, and none could ever guess their meaning:

“A Walt Disney Production.”

[Conclusion from “History Lesson” by Arthur C. Clark in The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, Volume 1: History Lesson (Originally written in 1949).  Cited in Patrick F. Houlihan, Wit & Humour in Ancient Egypt (London: The Rubicon Press, 2001).]

[To view the slide show in a separate tab while reading the text, place the mouse pointer over the first slide, right click, select <This Frame>, then <Open Frame in New Tab>.]

Mention Ancient Egypt and most likely images come to mind of the four colossal statues carved out of the cliffs at Abu Simbel, the towering lotus-topped columns of the Temple of Karnak, the rock-cut tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and/or King Tut’s dazzling tomb furnishings, among the many other examples of imposing monuments built to aggrandize their sponsors.

[Image 1: Edifice as Self-Image Enhancement vs. “Man Behind the Curtain.”]

To believe that these structures represent the total character of the Egyptian people would be like imagining that the National Mall in Washington, DC, depicted everything there was to know about the inhabitants of the United States.

[Image 2: Presentation title slide: Ipuy’s tomb as cleared and repaired by the exhibition.]

[Image 3: Map of Thebes.]

A corrective to that lopsided view of early Egyptian life can be found tucked away between the cliffs overlooking the mortuary structures of the New Kingdom and the tilled land on the west bank of the Nile–opposite modern Luxor–

[Image 4: Village of Deir el-Medina.]

where ruins of a workers’ settlement lie exposed under the relentless Egyptian sun.  Known today as Deir el-Medina, the village probably began its life during the reign of Thutmose I (c. 1506-1493 BCE) as a collection of mud-brick houses surrounded by a wall of bricks in a small valley, reaching its maximize size and population during the long tenure of Ramesses II (19th dynasty, 1290-1224 BCE).¹

[Image 5: Map of the Village of Deir el-Medina.]

Not representative of ordinary Egyptians, the residents belonged to a special class of artists, artisans, administrators and others employed to construct the tombs and chapels for the royal family and its close associates in the Valleys of the Kings and Queens.  Of sufficient means, many of these “servant[s] in the Beautiful Place of the mighty king” (their official job title)² could afford to build respectably sized tombs of their own.

[Image 6: Tomb of Ipuy, Lower Part of North Wall-Workers Crafting Structures for a Tomb & Tomb of Ipuy, Upper Part of North Wall-Preparation of the Funeral Equipment of Ipuy.]

One among those was that of the sculptor Ipuy, whose long-buried funerary structure was originally unearthed in the late 1800s and further explored in 1911.³   Its painted walls contain many scenes of daily life and, of special interest, several showing workers building and decorating structures, furniture and other objects destined for the royal tombs.  In much the same way that the king and his cohorts sought to portray themselves as models of maat (truth, balance and order) with images of their divine authority, unimpeachable devotion and exemplary living, a craftsman like Ipuy would naturally choose to represent himself engaged in his own life’s work.

In that way he wasn’t all that different from later-day artists whose self-portraits show them either among their creations,

[Image 7: Nicolas Poussin, Self-portrait.]

as in Nicolas Poussin’s Self-portrait (1650, oil on canvas),

[Image 8: Deborah Feller, Reflections on Self.]

or in the act of painting, like this writer’s Reflections on Self (2003, oil on linen).

[Image 9: Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting.]

Artemisia Gentileschi, in her Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1638-9, oil on canvas) made a bold statement by picturing herself as painting personified, a role only a woman could play.

[Image 10: Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio (L’Atelier du peintre): A Real Allegory of a Seven Year Phase in my Artistic and Moral Life.]

Along the lower part of the north wall of Ipuy’s tomb, the scenes of “Workers Crafting Structures for a Tomb” bring to mind Gustave Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio (L’Atelier du peintre): A Real Allegory of a Seven Year Phase in my Artistic and Moral Life (1865, oil on canvas), a cross-section of the artist’s milieu.

Before they were self-representations, however, the images in Ipuy’s tomb were part of an overall program that served the critical function of ensuring safe passage to the good part of the netherworld and guaranteeing a heavenly afterlife through the establishment of an ongoing cult of worship and offerings.

[Image 11: Village of Deir el-Medina & Necropolis.]

Cut into the cliffs overlooking the large swath of real estate that was the village necropolis,

[Image 12: Deir el-Medina Necropolis, Showing Pyramidion.]

Ipuy’s tomb was originally topped by a pyramidion, standard fair for the mortuary structures he and his fellow non-elites could well afford to build.

[Image 13: Approach to Ipuy’s Tomb Entrance.]

Visitors would first enter the courtyard,

[Image 14: Plan and Section of Ipuy’s Tomb (detail-left half).]

encountering a garden and perhaps an adjoining pool (1), and notice–abutting the tomb’s façade to the left of the entrance–a bench for offerings and a stela identifying the owner, either painted on the wall behind it or erected nearby.  They would see the pyramidion, now missing along with its surrounding cliff rock that long ago collapsed.

Stepping inside, they then would walk through a dark, narrow, vaulted, brick passageway and come upon a white contour painting of Ipuy on his way out of the tomb.

[Image 15: Interior of Ipuy’s Tomb, Southwest Corner of Chapel.]

As they continued, they would enter the vaulted chapel–the only decorated room in the tomb–with its mud-coated brick walls covered in yellow pigment, the ground over which all images would be painted.

In the chapel, on either side of the opening that led beyond through another vaulted passageway, they would notice on two low pedestals, statues of Ipuy and his wife Dowesmiset.  Attached to the wall, each was crafted from brick and mud, then covered with layers of linen, white stucco and paint.  The one of Ipuy included the standard prayer for “all the offerings on the altar [of the god].”⁴

[Image 16:  Plan and Section of Ipuy’s Tomb (detail-right half).]

Passing the statues and entering the hallway between them led first to a slightly higher and wider vaulted corridor (II) and then to a flat-roofed continuation of it (III) at the end of which a brick wall belied the presence of the undecorated rooms behind it, reachable via a five-foot deep pit in the floor.  The rooms beyond were little more than cavities dug out of the cliff.

Unearthed during the excavations, stoneware and various objects hint at the contents and functions of the tomb, but the paintings that covered the walls of the chapel reveal the most about the life of its owner, providing a portrait of not just him but also of the community to which he belonged.

Ipuy lived with about 47 other men and their families, occupying about seventy houses within the original town plus another forty or fifty outside its wall.  Arranged on a grid, the homes opened onto the main thoroughfare and were all similar in layout, variations reflecting the wealth and social status of the inhabitants.  Paralleling the larger Egyptian society, the “men of the gang”⁵ had clearly defined positions that by Ipuy’s time had become largely hereditary, excepting the occasional usurpation of the choicest ones through bribery and intrigue.

[Image 17: Workforce Division at Deir el-Medina.]

Men were assigned to either the left or right side of the tomb under construction, with a foreman (“chief of the gang in the Place of Truth”⁶) overseeing each half.  Of equal clout, “the scribe of the Tomb”⁷ (appointed directly by the vizier) was the bean counter, tracking workers’ attendance, accounting for all items leaving or entering the royal storehouses, and disbursing wages mostly in the form of emmer wheat (for grinding into flour) and barley (for making home brew).

Foreman and scribe served as captains of the village, links between the community and the central government’s vizier and its overseer of the treasury.  In addition to their usual responsibilities, they could make recommendations when vacancies opened in the workforce, providing additional opportunities to generate income.  Because of their power, they could also draft crew members for work on their own tombs and accept private commissions from outside the village.  Wealthy as they were, they remained integral parts of the community, with their families living among and intermarrying with ordinary workers.

Nonetheless, nepotism was standard fare.  The foreman’s deputy was selected from among his own family, usually his oldest son or another close relative, and was generally next in line for the highly lucrative position of chief.  Till then, however, he was paid just like other workers.

One step down in the hierarchy, the “guardian of the Tomb”⁸ controlled the royal storehouses, under close scrutiny of the foreman and scribe.  Other jobs included the three guards at the entrance to the royal tomb (“door-keeper[s] of the Tomb”⁹)–musclemen who also did the village dirty work as bailiffs and debt-collectors.  The police (Mediay) kept order and also had a hand in safeguarding the royal tombs, with the two chiefs participating on local courts and involved commercially with workers.

Then there were the actual tomb builders–stonemasons, carpenters and chief carpenters, sculptors and draftsmen–their apprentices, usually drawn from their own families–and their wives and children.  By Egyptian law, women were accorded rights equal to those of their husbands, including property rights that could sometimes be manipulated to their good advantage.

At the lower rung of the economic ladder were “servants of the Tomb,”¹⁰ support staff–woodcutters, watercarriers, fishermen, gardeners, washermen and sometimes potters–who commuted to work from down near the Nile and could hope to become full workmen if positions became available.  For additional assistance, the central government allocated to the workers the services of female slaves for grinding wheat into flour, any unused portion of which becoming another commodity that they could save, swap, share or sell.

During their free time, villagers found ways to entertain themselves.  They especially enjoyed a good party, celebrating religious and other occasions like weddings, births and anniversaries with home brew flowing and young men getting into mischief.

Artists, during break time or other idle moments, could reach for potsherds or small chips of limestone from the nearby cliffs on which they could doodle, practice their drawing,

[Image 18: Sketch from Life Ostracon.]

copy already existing images that moved them,

[Image 19: Animal Ostraca.]

devise compositions for current or future projects, and/or create amusing

[Image 20: Sex Ostraca.]

and sexual cartoons to delight their friends.

When Ipuy was ready to design, dig and decorate his tomb, he didn’t have far to go for a pool of skilled craftsmen well versed in the artistic trends of the times.  As the head sculptor, he could have called upon his fellow crew members to sculpt and carve the required images, yet other than the two portrait sculptures of his wife and himself, all the surviving decorations are paintings.

[Image 21: Nineteenth Dynasty Royal Tomb Painting.  Painting from Queen Nefertari’s Tomb, Wife of Ramesses II.]

Post-Amarna painting–about to slide into a steep decline–still had its exciting moments.  In the royal tombs of the early nineteenth dynasty, notably in the paintings of Ramesses II’s wife Queen Nefertari, painters had even begun to experiment with using darker pigments to indicate shading.¹¹  In private tombs, the new emphasis on black-outlined, primary-colored forms against a bright yellow ground could produce either a garish display of images or the lively, expressive figures that scamper around the walls of Ipuy’s tomb.

Despite touches of humor, the chief sculptor’s tomb was serious business, designed to guarantee the transformation of his human essence into an akh being with full citizenship rights in the netherworld and the celestial realms of the cosmos.  An integral part of that process was the establishment of statue and offering cults, the practice of which ensured continuous rebirths and renewals into the infinite future.¹²

[Image 22: Ipuy & His Wife Adore Anubis & Ptah-Sokar.]

Upon entering the chapel, the worshiper saw opposite on either side of the entrance to the inner rooms, images of the tomb owner Ipuy and his wife Dowesmiset in the act of honoring several gods.  In the interest of maintaining a certain height and overall size for the figures, and to accommodate the resulting lack of sufficient space, the wife’s picture had to be painted on the adjacent walls.

On the left of the rear wall, Ipuy wears a leopard skin with the cartouche of the deified king, Amenhotep I, attesting to his function as a priest in the then popular cult.  The god immediately in front of Ipuy is Anubis and behind him, Ptah-Sokar.

[Image 23: Ipuy & His Wife Adore Osiris & Hathor.]

On the other side of the far opening, Ipuy makes an offering of flowers and fruit to Osiris and his eternal supporter Hathor, perhaps a comment on the relationship between Ipuy and Dowesmiset.  The mortal couple’s daughter is pictured standing beside her mother, tucked inside the older woman’s skirt.

[Image 24: Frieze of Relatives.]

A frieze of seated couples marches around the upper perimeter of the remaining three walls, originally topped by an accompanying band of text.  At the ends, dressed similarly and identified only by their names, tomb owner and wife lead the throng.  The theme of conjugal pairing finds expression in the grip each woman has on the arm of her man, though from the looks of the squawking bird and attentive cat under one woman’s chair, all might not be as harmonious as pictured.

[Image 25: Presentation of Food to the Dead Pair by Their Children.]

On the south wall to the left of the scenes of worship, Ipuy and Dowesmiset receive offerings of food and flowers from attendants who carry gifts, including painted jars capped with green vegetation.  Arrayed on the table, loaves of bread, a plate of fruit and a bouquet of flowers add to the colorfully festive quality of the scene.  In a nod to Egyptians’ affection for their pets, Ipuy’s lap hosts a kitten playing with the hanging fabric, and under Dowesmiset’s chair, an adult cat looks out at the viewer.

Of particular interest in this painting, what looks like reddish-brown shading on the robes has been explained as staining from ointment that has run down from the celebrants’ heads where it had been poured as part of a pleasurable ritual.  The greater the area covered, the more generous the host had been with the provision of unguent.  Realizing the artistic potential inherent in adding lines of oil stain that would gather in the deeper folds of garments, artists exploited this effect to add color that delineated form where before only lines on white had been used.  Brown hatching follows the edge of the women’s robes all the way to the bottom hem even though the stains stop much further up.

Continuing the tour of the chapel, the visitor next encountered scenes from Ipuy’s life, though at the time of Davies’s excavation, the east wall south of the entrance had fallen into ruin except for certain remnants.  His reconstruction of the paintings was based on previous verbal descriptions, one particular drawing of officials in front of the palace window, and a color copy of Ipuy’s house and garden by the earlier explorer.

[Image 26: Ipuy Receives Award from King Ramesses II.]

In the upper register of the wall, a scene of the king reaching out from his palace’s window of appearance to interact with the sculptor Ipuy continues the defining Amarna practice of close contact between Akhenaten and his people.  Although the actuality ended with the fall from grace of the rebel pharaoh, the idea appeared sporadically in tomb images of this period.  Here the figure in front wears vizier attire while the one behind him, lifting his fan to the king’s face, sports that of a gentleman or official (presumably Ipuy).  The vizier, having recommended the chief sculptor for the reward, presents him to his ruler.  Fragments of text described the other recipients–shown wearing their newly gifted golden collars–as scribes, soldiers and temple servitors, a group to which the sculptor would certainly have belonged.

[Image 27: Burial of Ipuy.  His House & Garden.  His Functions as Priest of the Cult of a Dead King.]

Below the scene at the palace window were pictures that charted the progress of Ipuy’s coffin from embalmer’s workshop on the right to the transport of it on its bier to its final resting place in his tomb on the far left.  Across that register are pictured various rituals performed during funerals: mourners’ sprinkle sand over their heads (signaling their grief) and carry papyrus flowers (expressing hope for the dead), and women raise their arms (praising a deity).

Beneath the funeral narrative, servants draw water from a garden pond to irrigate the lush vegetation that surrounds a building resembling Amarna tomb images of houses, though not that city’s actual structures.

[Image 28: Ipuy’s House & Garden (Drawing Water from the Pond).]

In the Davies painting with one of the servants pictured, the original Egyptian artist detailed a variety of identifiable plant life, deploying cool greens and green-blues (assuming Davies’s fidelity to pieces with intact original color) to offset the warm red-browns and yellow ochers.  He also enlivened the action by turning the head of the servant, who looks behind him rather than to the task at hand.

[Image 29: Burial of Ipuy.  His House & Garden.  His Functions as Priest of the Cult of a Dead King.]

On the far right, in a fragment of a slaughterhouse a butcher weighs out portions of meat, perhaps payment to the workers for jobs well done, while beneath him in the laundry room others toil at cleaning the white robes indispensable for a feast.  Moving left from there, four figures (perhaps Ipuy’s family members) pray at an altar–piled high with offerings–to three barks decked out with images of the Amon-Ra ram’s head, each boat with its own small shrine, not unlike a burial catafalque.

[Image 30: Agriculture Operations with an Aquatic Scene.]

In preparation for that other-worldly journey, on the wall to the right of the entrance a full range of food-producing activities guarantees an eternal supply of provisions for the dearly departed.  In the top register on the left, Ipuy and Dowesmiset sow a field and harvest flax together, something they would not have done in their earthly lives.  The grain that grows is winnowed on the right, adjacent to a scene of date gathering.

Below, an offering ritual tops an open-air grain storehouse where a couple of youths fight a losing battle against marauding birds that include a marsh duck.  In the center of this very busy level, workers simultaneously load onto and empty from two boats, the portion of harvested grain destined to be exchanged in town for urban products.  On shore, market women sit before their enticing wares, ready to relieve sailors of their in-kind pay for wine, beer, treats and trinkets at seriously inflated prices.

Further afield, goats frolic

[Image 31: Goats Led to Pasture.]

and otherwise go about their pleasurable business of cleaning up behind the harvest, mowing down stubble, vacuuming up stray pieces of grain and chaff, and pruning the lower branches of trees.  One of the herd looks directly out at the visitor, another touch of the whimsy so prevalent throughout the chapel.

[Image 32: Agriculture Operations with an Aquatic Scene.]

As other sources of nature’s bounty, the marshes provided aquatic fowl, and the river supplied food fish.  In the old style duck-hunting scene that takes up a large swath of wall, a cat rustles the reeds while a falcon intently eyes the proceedings.

Encapsulated by a thick frame of black, water fills the lowest level, background for two boats jointly engaged in netting a representative sample of each of the available species.

[Image 33: Vintage & Fishing.]

The cool blue-greens offset the warm tones in the register above where vintners gather and press grapes in the already time-worn ritual of making intoxicating beverages.

[Image 34: Agriculture Operations with an Aquatic Scene.]

Elsewhere on the same level, servants pluck and butcher geese, prepare fish and mend netting under the watchful eyes of the bird of prey perched above.  Animals–both pet and prey–pervaded every aspect of Egyptians’ lives, appearing everywhere in their art.

[Image 35: A Catch of Fish.]

Around the corner on the north wall, the lower register theme of fishing and other river views continues.  Young men haul in a netful of fish, load and carry baskets filled with their catch, and deposit them on a table, where preparations for their consumption are underway.

[Image 36: Preparation of Funeral Furnishings & Fishing.]

On the rest of that wall, sandwiched between the frieze of seated guests above and the water below,

[Image 37: Preparation of Funeral Furnishings.]

Ipuy’s crew chisels and paints the furniture and other paraphernalia their boss will install in his tomb.  As head sculptor, this tomb owner had a special interest in the quality of the items produced.  They would signal both his high-ranking status and the proper discharge of his duties in keeping with the principals of maat.

[Image 38: Workers Crafting Caskets, Funeral Craft & Tomb Furnishings.]

Devoted to work for Ipuy’s tomb, the narrower register above (reading from right to left) depicts the chief sculptor and one of his sons surrounded by an assortment of tomb furnishings.  The younger man is displaying the fine pectoral that will grace his father’s mummy.  To their left, work proceeds apace on the decoration of the coffin.  In the earlier stage, a sculptor carves the wood that has been chopped from the tree behind him.  Later, a painter will decorate the coffin’s surface with brushes made from the same plant.

Beneath the scene of an apprentice tending the fire under a large glue pot, Ipuy’s oldest son Any, a sculptor himself, practices reading “the service of the opening of the mouth,”¹³ standing before a table piled with the ritual objects he will need on the day he performs the rite.  On the far left, the funeral craft in which Ipuy’s remains will be carried to his tomb receives its finishing touches.

[Image 39: Workers Crafting Structures for a Tomb.]

Befitting his role as supervising sculptor in the Place of Truth, Ipuy devoted a significant portion of the north wall to images of his crew laboring in his workshop on a project for the refurbishing of the temple and/or tomb of the long-dead but deified necropolis patron, Amenhotep I.  On the left, sculptors defying gravity work diligently on a structure destined for the king’s mortuary temple shrine.

[Image 40: Workers Crafting Structure for a Tomb.]

On the right, the artist (perhaps with instructions–or at least approval–from the tomb owner) pictures not just the sanding, hammering and painting, but also the shenanigans that are part of any workplace.  On the roof of what appears to be a portable catafalque in the form of a canopied bedchamber, one man attempts to rouse his sleeping friend while another tired soul takes a break on the steps in the lower right.  Across from him on the other steps, a kohl-painter tests his eyeliner on a willing subject while above them a hammer is about to land on the foot of someone shouting directions.

Although difficult to discern, Ipuy strides onto the stage from the upper right, ready to exercise his god-given authority as chief sculptor by restoring order.  In so doing, he demonstrates for eternity the proper discharge of his duties in full compliance with the principles of maat, thus ensuring his safe passage through the duat, the Egyptian land of the dead.
_________________________________
¹ Unless otherwise indicated, all information about Deir el-Medina comes from Morris Bierbrier, The Tomb-Builders of the Pharaohs (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1989).

² Ibid., 27.

³ Unless otherwise indicated, all information about the tomb of Ipuy comes from Norman deGaris Davies, Two Ramesside Tombs at Thebes (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1927).

⁴ Davies, 37.

⁵ Ibid., 47.

⁶ Bierbrier, 27.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Ibid., 32.

⁹ Ibid., 38.

¹⁰ Ibid., 39.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² W. Stevenson Smith, The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt, Revised Edition  (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 213.

¹³ David O’Connor, “Society and individual in early Egypt” in Order, Legitimacy, and Wealth in Ancient States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 25.

¹⁴ Davies, 71.

Beauty is a Woman:
Raphael, Michelangelo and Titian
Construct the Nude

In 1557, the great Venetian aggregator Ludovico Dolce published The Dialogue on Painting, Entitled Aretino, less than a year after the death of the volume’s eponymous interlocutor.¹  A literary man more than a connoisseur of the visual arts,² Dolce gathered his information from a variety of sources including the letters of Pietro Aretino, Part Two of which he had assisted in preparing in 1542.³

Positioning the Central Italian art proponent, Tuscan grammarian Giovan Francesco Fabrini (1516-1580) as the foil to the poet and reigning Venetian literary personality, transplanted Florentine Pietro Aretino (1492-1556), Dolce explored contemporary debates about the nature of art.  In keeping with his own intellectual interests, he structured the conversation along the lines of a classical rhetorical device in which he “takes advantage of all the tricks and strategies of formal oratory,”⁴ including a few ad hominem swipes at Fabrini by Dolce’s favorite, Aretino.⁵

Viewed as the Venetian answer to Giorgio Vasari’s first edition (published in 1550) of Lives of the Artists, which elevated to godhood the Central Italian artistic giant Michelangelo Buonarroti, omitted Giorgione da Castelfranco completely and had little to say about Tiziano Vecellio di Gregorio (Titian) and his other cohorts, Dolce’s Dialogue covers a lot of theoretical territory before concluding with a partly mythological biography of Titian⁶ that establishes his superiority over Michelangelo and Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (Raphael).⁷

Along the way, Dolce–through his mouthpiece Aretino–offers praise for Michelangelo’s draftsmanship and Raphael’s delicacy and restraint, intending to use the two artists as protagonists in his description of the elements of fine painting.⁸  When Fabrini rightfully challenges his adversary on his qualifications to judge beautiful art, he is told that such a skill is within the capacity of anyone with “both eyes and intellect.”⁹  Aretino draws an analogy between the ability to recognize beauty and the capacity to know good from evil; both are “implanted” by nature and cultivated by learning.¹⁰  Beauty, avers the poet, is epitomized by the “harmony of proportion [that] resides in the human body.”¹¹

Having established his bona fides, Dolce’s Aretino eventually uses them to hurl invectives at Michelangelo’s renderings of the nude by using the Last Judgment as primary evidence.  “He is supreme…in only one mode…making a nude body muscular and elaborated, with foreshortenings and bold movements…[H]e either fails to recognize or else is unwilling to take into account those distinctions between the ages and the sexes.”¹²  In a change of heart probably motivated by his earlier unsuccessful attempts to pry some drawings from the object of his criticism, the real-life Aretino (in a letter to Michelangelo) turned against the artist he had previously venerated.¹³  Despite his pique and reasons for it, the poet scored some legitimate points in his observations about his former idol’s female nudes.

The great sculptor Michelangelo, who carved a paean to homoeroticism with his monumental David (1504, marble, Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence) and composed a beautifully seductive drawing called The Dream (c. 1533, black chalk on laid paper, Courtauld Gallery, London) for a beloved young male friend,¹⁴ never displayed the delicacy needed for rendering lovely women.  His female figures look suspiciously like men with strategically placed anatomical alterations, exuding masculine power rather than feminine grace.

When Michelangelo borrowed the pose of his sculpture Night (1524-27, marble, Medici Chapel, Florence) for his painting of Leda and the Swan (c. 1529-31, known only from copies), he created an erotic composition whose impact comes from both the swan’s bill penetrating Leda’s lips and the bird’s feathers caressing the skin between her enveloping legs.¹⁵  Less compelling is the woman’s body, constructed of large masses of muscles (e.g., the left deltoid and adjacent biceps) reminiscent of a well-built man rather than an alluring woman.

In contrast, Titian in his Danaë and the Shower of Gold (1544-46, oil on canvas, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples) has covered the muscles and bones of his object of desire “smoothly with flesh” and “charge[d] the nude figure with grace,” painting “a tender and delicate nude…naturally more pleasing to the eye than a robust and muscular one.”¹⁶  Danaë reclines on a bed of rumpled sheets and fluffed pillows, looking contentedly at the cloud of gold that spits coins at her, in a position reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Night and Leda, either or both of which Titian could have seen on his stay in Rome (1545-46).¹⁷

Dolce’s Aretino rarely touches on Titian’s nudes, approaching the subject of the ideal depiction of the unclothed female via laudatory observations about the refined and delicate figures of Raphael in contrast to those of Michelangelo, who “painted porters.”¹⁸  He briefly mentions Raphael’s Galatea (1511, fresco, Villa Farnesina, Rome) but goes on at length about his cartoon for the Coronation of Roxana who, though “completely naked…maintain[s] decency [with] a rather soft little piece of drapery conceal[ing] those parts of her which should keep themselves hidden.”¹⁹  Indeed, Raphael’s marmoreal La Fornarina (c. 1520, oil on panel, Palazzo Barberini, Rome) looks a paragon of virtue despite the position of her right forefinger–invitingly close to her left nipple–and the suggestively isolated position of her left middle finger in the vicinity of her crotch.  Perhaps it’s the mask-like, idealized facial features and the shrubbery behind her that interfere with the erotic potential of the image.

While rightfully stressing Raphael’s “propriety and modesty,”²⁰ the compiler of The Dialogue in a report to Alessandro Contarini on his experience of Titian’s Venus and Adonis (c. 1554, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid),²¹ goes on at length about the raison d’etre for its composition–the rear-view pose of the love goddess.²²  Moved to “sweet and vital” feelings, Dolce “recognizes in the hindmost parts here the distension of the flesh caused by sitting,” likening Titian’s brushstrokes to those of nature.²³  He ends the letter to Contarini with a reference to Pliny the Elder’s story of a young man who “left his stain” on a statue of Venus,²³ mere marble compared to Titian’s Venus, “made of flesh, which is beauty itself, which seems to breathe.”²⁵

Adonis’s Venus pales in comparison with a much earlier painting that by 1538 resided in the bedroom of Guidobaldo II della Rovere, duke of Urbino,²⁶ and which was Titian’s first depiction of a sexy nude woman without pretense of poetic narrative.²⁷  Though plenty has been written attempting to dress her up in deeper meaning, usually as a blessing for a marriage,²⁸ the Venus of Urbino (1538, oil on canvas, Uffizi Gallery, Florence) remains a tribute to its creator’s genius, not just in his ability to distribute oil colors strategically around a canvas but also in his imaginative composition that practically throws the viewer onto the bed with the young woman.²⁹

When Dolce’s Aretino declared that “[p]ainting was invented primarily…to give pleasure,”³⁰ neither poet nor author had in mind Titian’s Venus of Urbino, tucked away in a duke’s private bedchamber.  For surely if either of them had encountered the seductive lady, she would have had a starring role in the Dialogue.

Borrowing from Giorgione’s painting of a Sleeping Venus (1508-10, oil on canvas, Gemaldegalerie, Dresden) on which the surviving artist had worked after the untimely death of his colleague, Titian in the much later Venus of Urbino opened the eyes of the somnambulant goddess³¹ and trained them on the implied visitor entering the room.

Dividing the canvas between a frontally lit foreground interior and a background bathed in daylight from a rear opening onto the sky, Titian contrasted the reclining nude’s warm, uncreased and otherwise flawless skin against a quadrant of cool green fabric hanging behind her on a dark, bluish vertical drape (or wall).  Suggestive of the cloth of honor backdrop to many a Madonna, this visual trope reprises the artist’s previous use of it in his Madonna and Child with Saints Catherine, Dominic and a Donor (1513, oil on canvas, Fondazione Magnani-Rocca, Parma).  In the earlier, religious work, a dark wall behind Mary, her baby and Catherine partitions the canvas into feminine/indoor and masculine/outdoor spheres, the latter consisting of Dominic and a male donor kneeling in front of a deeply receding landscape under a cloudy but brightly lit sky.

In the equally reverential Venus of Urbino, Titian’s squarish upper-right portion of the canvas could almost pass for a picture hanging on the wall or a mirror reflecting activity within the viewer’s space, so dramatic is the composition’s discontinuous perspective and aberrations of scale.³²  Under these visual circumstances, the activity of the maidservants who rummage around in a cassone for an ensemble befitting a noblewoman (or, more likely, a courtesan) constitutes an entirely distinct realm from the one inhabited by the luscious beauty positioned so close to the picture plane.

Reclining on a white sheet that ineffectively covers the bed on which it is spread (perhaps ruffled by recent action or hastily laid down in anticipation of some), this lovely young woman tenderly holds in her right hand a corsage of pink flowers, a rose from which has escaped and fallen onto the exposed portion of the underlying red mattress.  The beauty’s left arm gently snakes over her abdomen and ends in a hand that possesses her mons pubis where, with thumb and forefinger, it busily engages in self-pleasurable behavior.

Whatever socially acceptable function the Venus of Urbino was purportedly created to fulfill, first and foremost it is a tour de force of erotica performed by Venice’s premier artist of the time.  The middle-aged Titian must have spent more than a few pleasurable hours vicariously caressing with his brush on canvas the sexy female model with the come-hither eyes.

The painting that emerged from that encounter conveys “the thoughts and feelings of [his] spirit,”³³ epitomizing Dolce Aretino’s venustà (charm)–the non so che (literally, I don’t know what) that defines great works of art.³⁴  Neither Michelangelo nor Raphael ever achieved in their art the beauty that Titian could in his paintings of female nudes.

_________________________

¹ Mark W. Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 219.
² Ibid., 7.
³ Ibid., 34.
⁴ D. R. Edward Wright, “Structure and Significance in Dolce’s L’Aretino,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 45, no. 3 (Spring 1987): 275.
⁵ For example, on p. 34 of Roskill’s translation of the Dialogue, when Fabrini admits ignorance about “painters who [fooled] birds and horses,” Aretino begins his explanation with, “Even young children know…”  Roskill., 151.  On p. 44, Aretino decides that Fabrini’s wrong-headed convictions stem from his letting his “affection” sway his opinions.  Ibid., 171.
⁶ Roskill, 320-324.
⁷ Ibid., 185-195.
⁸ Ibid., 99.
⁹ Ibid., 101.
¹⁰ Ibid., 103.
¹¹ Ibid., 101.
¹² Ibid., 171.
¹³  Erica Tietze-Conrat, “Neglected Contemporary Sources Relating to Michelangelo and Titian,” The Art Bulletin 25, no. 2 (June 1943), 154-156.
¹⁴ For Michelangelo’s poems for, and letters to and from, Tommaso de’ Cavalieri, see Stephanie Buck, ed., Michelangelo’s Dream (London: Courtauld Gallery, 2010), 76-97.
¹⁵ Fredrika H. Jacobs, “Aretino and Michelangelo, Dolce and Titian: Femmina, Masculo, Grazia,” The Art Bulletin 8, no. 1 (March 2000), 55.
¹⁶ Roskill, 143.
¹⁷ For other possible sources, see Paul F. Watson, “Titian and Michelangelo: The Danaë 1545-1546, Collaboration in Italian Renaissance Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 245-254.
¹⁸ Roskill, 173.
¹⁹ Ibid., 169.
²⁰ Ibid.
²¹ Ibid., 215.
²² In a letter to his patron Philip II of Spain, Titian wrote, “Because the figure of the Danaë, which I have already sent to your Majesty, is seen entirely from the front, I have chosen…to…show the opposite side, so that the room in which they are to hang will seem more agreeable.”  Quoted in Jacobs, 61.
²³ Roskill, 215.
²⁴ Ibid., 217 and 351.
²⁵ Ibid., 217.
²⁶ David Rosand, “So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch,” Titian’s “Venus of Urbino,” ed., Rona Geffen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 42.
²⁷ Daniel Arasse, “The Venus of Urbino, or the Archetype of a Glance,” in Geffen, 92.
²⁸ Rona Geffen, “Sex, Space, and Social History in Titian’s Venus of Urbino, in Geffen, 63-90.
²⁹ Arasse, 98.
³⁰ Roskill, 149.
³¹ Arasse, 93.
³² Geffen, 83.
³³ Roskill, 97.
³⁴ Ibid., 175 and 176.