Conference Same Old Things: Speakers’ Abstracts and Bios
Harry Prance read Classics at Cambridge (2010-3). His interest in Byzantine Art brought him to the Courtauld for an MA with Antony Eastmond. Harry is now in the second year a CHASE- funded PhD with Prof. Eastmond, working on Middle Byzantine Eucharistic objects, particularly the collection in the Tesoro di San Marco, Venice, and material approaches to Eucharistic experience.
Abstract:
Confrontations of Value: Bessarion, Bellini and Byzantine Materiality
Gentile Bellini’s painting of Cardinal Bessarion with the Bessarion Reliquary in the National Gallery is an astonishing document of Renaissance fascination (both artists’ and viewers’) with the material culture of Byzantium. Bellini’s reliquary fills half the picture and carefully translates the object’s agglomeration of precious stones, gilt and painted scenes into egg tempera. Its materials and figures exist awkwardly out of sight of the picture’s internal worshippers, laid out for the external viewer’s contemplation. This picture both thinks with itself and asks the viewer to think with the very stuff of Byzantine material culture. Not far from the Scuola della Carità, for which Bellini’s reliquary was painted, are the series of tenth- and eleventh-century Byzantine chalices and patens in the Tesoro di San Marco. These objects, probably plunder from the fourth crusade, are deprived of the crutches of classic art historical analysis. They exist without context – physical or documentary. The objects, their figures, forms and materials, become too the primary discursive ground.
Michel Foucault began his preface to The Order of Things with a “laughter that shattered”, a laughter prompted by a sense of unease felt when reading Borges’ description of a certain Chinese Encyclopaedia. The Encyclopaedia’s fabulous and elaborate taxonomies suggest a heterotopia, an alternate ordering of the fundamental codes of society from the comfortable scientific delineations of post-Enlightenment thought. This paper will focus upon the materials of the chalices and patens of San Marco and explore how they might elicit a similar sense of heterotopic unease and what happens when we begin to rethink these objects with that in mind. The chalices and patens are united by a luxurious and insistent materiality – each object combining a multimedia array of silver-gilt, pearls, gems, precious stones and enamels in an almost formulaic fashion. These flashing, translucent materials perform a kind of liveliness - what the Byzantines called poikilia (phenomenal presence effects experienced by the senses) - which draws attention to the physical presence of the object. Tracing this lively synthesis of materials across a range of contemporary Byzantine object types – across reliquaries, gospel book covers and phylacteries – I will examine how the shared luxurious materiality of these objects traverses and transgresses traditional art historical object taxonomies, and ask what the interpretive implications are when material memories span all these forms, when a “chalice” begins to look more like a “gospel book” and a “gospel book” more like a “reliquary”. While each of these objects had a distinct and separate religious and liturgical function, a material approach allows the art historian to see behind and across the limits of such a definition to appreciate how the shared sensory experience and coherent materiality of these objects creates mutually-defining relationships across object types.
Forthcoming publications like Alexander Nagel and Giancarla Periti’s Ravenna in the Renaissance Imagination attest to a renewed interest in the interaction between Byzantine objects on the Italian peninsular and the art of the Renaissance. This paper hopes not only to suggest a framework for thinking through materials across object categories but also to, in suggesting alternate relationships among Byzantine objects, open up new ways of considering the ways in which Renaissance artists, like Bellini, working and thinking in materials related to the physical heritage of Byzantium.
John Witty is a PhD candidate and James Laney Fellow at Emory University, where he is completing a dissertation on the workshop of Paolo Veneziano from which this presentation is adapted. Originally from Miami, Florida, John completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Printmaking at Washington University in St. Louis, completing additional majors in German and Art History. He was awarded a Masters Degree from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art. His early dissertation research was supported by a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. While at Emory, he was awarded the Mellon Graduate Fellowship in Object-Centered Curatorial Research at Atlanta’s High Museum. He is currently the Anne Poulet Fellow at The Frick Collection in New York.
Abstract:
Alternatives to Cultural Influence and Pictorial Style: an Object-Based Reassessment of Paolo Veneziano’s Workshop
Aside from the Gallerie dell’ Accademia in Venice, most museums that contain objects associated with the workshop of Paolo Veneziano (doc. 1333-1358) have just one example by the artist. This is more than a mere accident resulting from the scarcity of surviving works. Beginning with Vasari’s Vite that privileged Florence and Tuscany, artists’ pictorial styles have been perceived as intertwined with regional designations. Bernard Berenson’s writings ensured the dominance of regional schools in the Anglo-American narratives of Italian Art History. The continued dominance of regionalism in the tradition of Vasari, Berenson, and others can be read in the distribution of works by Paolo Veneziano in museum collections. The National Gallery in Washington, a collection directly influenced by Berenson’s taste, is a representative example of a dynamic encountered in collections from the Louvre to the museums of Los Angeles. In light of the Byzantinizing label applied to his workshop, one panel by Paolo Veneziano is included in the collection to serve as a foil to the central Italian masters. The dichotomy of the “maniera Greca” vs. the “maniera moderna” first articulated by Vasari continues to hold sway.
Close examination of surviving altarpieces by Paolo Veneziano’s workshop reveals a more nuanced narrative than what is represented in museum collections. Existing interpretation of the workshop tends to focus solely on the pictorial styles of the painted panels, ignoring the original frames still preserved in some examples. Drawing on my dissertation research, the proposed presentation will examine specific details in the ornamental frames and painted representations of Paolo Veneziano’s altarpieces. This analysis of ornamental devices will demonstrate how the artist realized a creative synthesis of varied sources of inspiration, including Byzantine pictorial styles and the intricate Gothic aesthetic popular in courtly centers throughout Europe. Rather than merely illustrating the late survival of Byzantine forms in a center understood as Italy’s most Byzantine city, the art of Paolo Veneziano represents a dynamic intersection of media and ornamental design that resulted from Venice’s participation in far-reaching cultural networks.
Gerd Micheluzzi is a Junior Researcher at the Department of Art History, University of Vienna. Currently, he finalizes his PhD project on “function and genesis of cast shadows in late medieval and early modern painting”, for which he was awarded a three-year scholarship for outstanding doctoral candidates from the University of Vienna. In his primary research he focuses on fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian painting, combining art and art theory with coeval natural philosophy and literature, such as Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Besides various presentations at international conferences, most recently he has authored a forthcoming paper on the murals of the Basilica of San Piero a Grado (Pisa), and co-organized an interdisciplinary conference on medieval studies.
Abstract:
“Un'invenzione dantesca, dai trecentisti non voluta intendere”? Cast Shadows in Early Modern Painting. An Attempt in Deconstructing the General Narrative.
Ever since the formalistic approaches of the late nineteenth century, cast shadows are considered as distinctive features of Renaissance painting. Medieval painting, by contrast, is regarded as cast-shadowless (Wölfflin 1899). Until today, the general narrative is described as an evolutionary progress starting with Giotto and culminating in Masaccio, where humanism, mimesis, central perspective as well as the post-classical return of cast shadows seem to coincide. Consequently, the frescoes of the Cappella Brancacci (c. 1424–27) – in particular Masaccio’s St. Peter Healing with his Shadow – are considered a landmark in this development. Referring to the real-existence of the shadow-casting pilgrim Dante and the transcendency of his shadowless guide Vergil within the Divine Comedy (Purg. III), Longhi (1950), Stoichita (1997), and Belting (2001) argued that cast shadows’ medieval absence reflects ontological intentions – a denial of physical reality, “leading towards piety and devotion” (Sharpe 2017).
However, this is challenged by a hitherto neglected, small but highly interesting set of authentic trecentesque cast shadows: to be found in Pietro Lorenzetti’s Last Supper, his illusionistic bench (c. 1320), Taddeo Gaddi’s Annunciation to the Shepherds (c. 1330), and two formerly unnoticed illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy (c. 1335/1370). While Renaissance examples have been studied extensively, remarkably little attention has been paid to these `singular exceptions ́ (Aurenhammer 2017). Hence, their specific functions as well as potential relations still remain unclear.
In a three-step process, this paper aims to (1) deconstruct the topos of cast-shadowless medieval painting, (2) redefine functional aspects of cast shadows, and, finally, (3) propose an innovative framework, which allows a critical reappraisal of the general narrative. Contrary to former approaches (Stoichita, Belting), I will argue that similar to Dante, trecentesque artists did not simply introduce cast shadows to accentuate corporeality. Rather, they purposefully used the everyday-experience of shadows to convince recipients of the accounts’ veracity, demonstrated impressively by Lorenzetti’s illusionistic bench. Simultaneously, exemplified by Lorenzetti’s Last Supper and Gaddi’s Annunciation, cast shadows depicted as singular spots of evidence were intended to emphasize the predominant transcendency of the sacral narrative, which is confirmed by the early commentaries of the Divine Comedy.
Geoff Nuttall completed his PhD at the Courtauld Institute under the supervision of Patricia Rubin in 2013. It examined aspects of Lucchese artistic patronage during the regime of Paolo Guinigi, between 1400 and 1430, and hence his interest in Jacopo della Quercia's Lucchese oeuvre. He now teaches at the Courtauld Institute and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and is currently co-editing a volume of studies on Filippino Lippi.
Abstract:
Re-telling ‘Ilaria’
Few, if any, of Vasari’s unilateral declarations of authorship has evaded critical scrutiny as successfully as the assemblage of sculpture now displayed as a free-standing monument in the sacristy of Lucca cathedral, elements of which Vasari saw in the summer of 1544, attributed to Jacopo della Quercia, and identified as the wife of the ruler of Lucca between 1400 and 1430, Paolo Guinigi. In its deconstruction of the monument and questioning of Vasari’s attribution, the first part of this paper reprises arguments made by the present author in 2012 and more recently by Annamaria Giusti in 2017, demonstrating the historical incoherence of Vasari’s account, questioning the homogeneity of its constituent parts, and its attribution to a single master. The second part of this paper proposes a reconstruction of the monument, grounded in the cultural experience and artistic preferences of Lucchese elite society at the time of the effigy’s creation during the first quarter of the fifteenth century, as an alternative to the established account born of Vasarian invention and Victorian romance. In conclusion, this paper suggests that resistance to the deconstruction of an orthodox model, exemplified in this instance by the resilience of Vasari’s narrative, is indicative of a tendency amongst Renaissance scholars, to assert attributional certainty even in the face of historical implausibility and stylistic ambiguity.
Robert Brennan is a postdoctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, where he is working in the department of Alessandro Nova on a project titled “Languages of Art History.” This summer he will take up another postdoc at the University of Sydney. His first book, titled Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy, will be published later this year by Harvey Miller. The goal of the book is to reconstruct a period-specific conception of "modern art," based on late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century descriptions of painting as an ars moderna. He is currently working on a second book project that studies the emergence of the art exhibition as an institutionalized event over the course of the 16th century.
Abstract:
The Future Behind, the Past Ahead: Raphael and Michelangelo at the Church of Santa Maria della Pace in Rome
Recent research in linguistics, cognitive science, and related disciplines has drawn attention to the spatial quality of many words and phrases that languages use to describe time. On the one hand, these studies suggest that the relationship between verbal and visual representations of time could be closer and more complex than art historians have traditionally assumed. On the other hand, scholarly understanding of such issues also stands to benefit from the unique body of non-verbal, diachronic evidence that art history could provide. This paper begins by briefly establishing a framework for such research in the Italian Renaissance, then embarks on a close reading of two works that appear to manifest such concerns: the paintings designed by Raphael and Michelangelo for two adjacent chapels in the Church of Santa Maria della Pace in Rome. Raphael's work in the Chigi Chapel has often been regarded as one of the earliest artistic responses to Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling. Less attention has been paid to the ways that Michelangelo responded to Raphael in an altarpiece he subsequently designed for the neighbouring Cesi Chapel (now lost, but known through drawings and copies). While Raphael explored the revelatory moment in which the sibyls foresaw the birth and resurrection of Christ, Michelangelo represented the Annunciation as a moment of prophetic fulfilment. In both, the turning and torsion of the figures is carefully choreographed amidst an array of novel iconographic features that consistently correlate the "past" and "future" of the revelatory message with the physical spaces "in front of" and "behind" its recipients. While contemporary texts clarify that Renaissance Italians imagined the future to lie "ahead" and the past "behind," these works conform with a number of prominent ancient sources that reverse the relationship, placing the future "behind" us because it is unknown, and the past "ahead," before our eyes. Might Raphael and Michelangelo have been guided by contemporary discussions of such texts, or did they arrive at the configuration more intuitively? By addressing these questions, the paper investigates both the relationship between visual and linguistic modes of temporal representation and the capacity of art to transform them.
Lorne Darnell is a PhD candidate at The Courtauld Institute of Art. His research focuses on architecture and architectural painting in the 17th-century Dutch Republic.
Abstract:
The Barberini Landscape: A Flemish Hoax at the Heart of Baroque Rome?
After Maffeo Barberini was elected pope as Urban VIII in 1623, his nephews set out to legitimize the family’s place in Roman society through a series of grand building campaigns. The centrepiece of these was the Palazzo Barberini. In May of 1629, an antique Roman painting was allegedly discovered on the grounds of the palace construction site. Though it was said to have quickly disappeared after exposure to light, it had been copied first by Giovanni Franchione, a painter in the Barberini employ. It depicted a large rock arch with temples and springs, later identified by Rubens as a nymphaeum.
The lost Roman painting is now known as the Barberini Landscape, and its fame stems largely from what Anthony Blunt, among others, has argued for its influence on Poussin, Rubens, and Claude. But there is perhaps a more compelling story to tell about the discovery. What I will argue is that it was in fact a hoax, and that Franchione’s copy was an original work of art. The “copy” makes both specific and general references to 16th-century landscapes by painters of the Low Countries, and while the details of his life are otherwise totally lost, the artist Franchione is indeed recorded in the Barberini inventories as “pittore fiamminghi.” While the lost painting is still considered the earliest discovered Roman landscape, I will argue that it is an important addition to the corpus of early modern art forgeries, one that may have duped some of the greatest intellects of the time, including Rubens, Peiresc, and Cassiano dal Pozzo.