Paoletti and Radke

1 Excerpts from Artists in Renaissance Italy by John T. Paoletti and Gary M. Radke Rome: Artists, Popes, and Cardinals Introduction No city in Italy could boast as rich and complex a history as Rome. A fifteenth-century woodcut emphasizes its papal and imperial monuments (Fig. 1). The palace of the popes (clearly labeled palatium pape) stands on the horizon immediately to the right of Old St. Peter's Basilica, burial site of the Apostle who was the first pope. The prominent position of these structures on the Vatican hill reflects the city's domination by the papacy. Major monuments of Roman antiquity stretch across the foreground of the print, documenting the city's former grandeur. Many of these had acquired or been given Christian significance. At the far left appears a corner of the Colosseum (sacred site of Christian martyrdom), followed by the dome and portico of the Pantheon (rededicated as a church to the Virgin Mary) and the column of Trajan (an ancient monument to one of the Roman emperors whom Christians recognized as "good"). At the far right stands the huge drum-shaped Castel Sant'Angelo, originally the mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian but later endowed with fortifications by several popes. Hefty ancient walls continued to define the city's limits. Even so, Rome was but a shell of its former self. Whereas other cities repeatedly outgrew and expanded their ancient and medieval walls, Rome rattled around inside them. Huge fields of ruins stood starkly in what once had been densely populated neighborhoods; sheep and cows grazed in the remains of the imperial fora. Most of the population lived in the neighborhood at the bend on the river Tiber where the Vatican met the old imperial city. The woodcut shows a good number of houses in front of the Vatican, along with a porticoed church-like building and enormous courtyard that made up the papal hospital of Santo Spirito, an institution committed to public charity. As effective rulers of Rome, the popes, who claimed that their temporal rulership of the state had been conferred on them by Constantine before he moved the capital of the Empire to Constantinople in the fourth century, were responsible for all aspects of life in the city. Although the Roman Senate continued to exist as the official civic government, real control over the city was exercised by the pope and a few very strong factionalized feudal families such as he Colonna and the Orsini whose histories went back to classical antiquity, or so they claimed. Artistic patronage in Rome was determined by the peculiar nature of papal authority, which was both religious and secular, local and international, and by the papacy's need to respond to the political demands of the Senate and the city's leading families. The lineage of the papacy had been continuous and unbroken since Peter, the first pope, but it was non-dynastic. A pope was elected for life by the cardinals, his major subordinates within the hierarchically organized institution of the Church. Presumably celibate, a pope had no heirs to whom the office could descend. The cardinals and the popes were not always Roman or even Italian, a situation that led inevitably to power struggles between the popes and local families who sought favorable treatment from the papacy. Thus the popes had to construct an artificial lineage, associating themselves with the histories and deeds (including artistic commissions) of their predecessors, so as to underscore the continuity of he papal office and their unbroken connections with its previous holders. Given these concerns and the imposing, ubiquitous reminders of past glory, it is not surprising that art and culture in Rome were often highly traditionalist. Within these 2 traditions, however, were some of the key elements from which artists and patrons would fashion a new art. Rome boasted unsurpassed riches of ancient and Early Christian art, including vast expanses of painting and mosaic as well as imposing architectural remains. Nicholas IV at Santa Maria Maggiore Pope Nicholas IV (r. 1288-92), a native of Ascoli and the first member of the new reforming Franciscan order to head the Church, continued the cultural policies of Nicholas III. His major focus was Santa Maria Maggiore, the papal basilica in the neighborhood controlled by the Colonna family, who effectively adopted this non-Roman pope, a redressing of urban power after the earlier Orsini pope. Nicholas replaced the old apse at Santa Maria Maggiore with a larger, more impressive structure that included a transept, enhancing its similarities to Old St. Peter's. He lined the apse with marbles and mosaics by the Roman painter and mosaicist Jacopo Torriti (active 1270-1300 Rome) depicting the Coronation of the Virgin in a star-studded blue orb (Fig. 2). Imperially clad figures of the Virgin and Christ sit upon a golden throne softened with scarlet and blue cushions. Raising his right hand to the Virgin's head, Christ completes the coronation of his Queen of Heaven while angels steady the celestial sphere. The Latin inscription below it comes from the liturgy for the August 15 feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, the anniversary of the traditional founding of the basilica. It calls explicit attention to key elements in the representation: the Virgin's assumption to the heavenly throne, the starry realm of Christ the King, the chorus of angels, and the Virgin's royal status. This depiction of the Virgin as the Queen of Heaven can also be seen as a reference to Mary as Ecclesia, or the Church, the bride of Christ, a metaphor based on the Old Testament Song of Songs. In this role Mary/Ecclesia appears as co-ruler with God, like him capable of granting salvation. It is a powerful image of the Church controlling Christian destiny and of the popes who were its head. To the left of the central image a small figure of Nicholas in a scarlet coat and papal tiara kneels as patron before standing figures of the saints Peter and Paul, who appear to be presenting the pope to the celestial court. To the left of these saints Torriti represents the plainly clad and tonsured figure of St. Francis, an appropriate inclusion for a patron who had begun his ecclesiastical career as a Franciscan. At the right a miniaturized Cardinal Jacopo Colonna kneels before another pair of saints, John the Baptist and John the Evangelist; at the far right St. Anthony of Padua, another Franciscan, completes the Franciscan "bracketing" of the scene. Torriti's full, soft forms and the poses of his figures recall the Byzantine imperial style of the mid-1260s that had abandoned the characteristically insistent linear patterns of Byzantine art. The mosaic's lush green rinceaux (stylized, scrolling vine patterns) sprout red flowers and give roost to splendid paradisiacal birds—peacocks, cranes, and partridges. These motifs and the water flowing from river gods along the base of the mosaic suggest that late classical models also formed part of the mosaicists' repertoire. Here, in fact, the artists may have been replicating or even reusing elements from the original fifth-century apse. Obviously, neither Byzantine nor late antique models had outlived their usefulness, primarily because both were still vibrant, living traditions. Patrons from the Papal Curia Commissions by two cardinals at their titular churches in Rome document the competitive spirit that prevailed among patrons at the papal court. Toward the end of the thirteenth century, at Santa Maria in Trastevere, Cardinal Bertoldo Stefaneschi commissioned the Roman painter 3 Pietro Cavallini (Pietro dei Cerroni; c. 1240/50-1330s) to renovate the church's mid-twelfth- century apse mosaic by the addition of a band of scenes from the life of the Virgin below it. Cavallini was an artist of considerable genius, who has been under-appreciated by many art historians—partly, no doubt, because he was largely unknown by Vasari, who credited many of Cavallini's innovations to the Florentine artist Giotto. Cavallini made his reputation working for Pope Nicholas III, restoring Early Christian frescoes in the papal basilica of St. Paul's Outside the Walls, works that disappeared when that church burned in 1823. There Cavallini's task seems to have been to replicate badly deteriorating Early Christian images, thus training himself to produce an essentially late Roman stylistic vocabulary at will. That experience allowed him to give Byzantine prototypes new vitality and a greater sense of movement, enhancing their three- dimensionality and heightening the human interaction among them. In one of the scenes at Santa Maria in Trastevere, the Birth of the Virgin (Fig. 3), Cavallini placed St. Anne (the mother of Mary), her attendants, and the infant Virgin in three tightly connected planes parallel to the picture surface: the maids preparing the child's bath far forward, the large reclining figure of St. Anne in the middle, and two more servants behind the bed. The parted curtain at the far right implies further space beyond this densely clustered composition, as does the space around the stage-like architecture and its receding diagonals. The effect is both noble and domestic. Intimate in its scale, the scene communicates dignity and solemnity through the strong vertical and horizontal lines of its architectural setting. Around the same time that Cavallini was working on these mosaics, the French cardinal Jean Cholet engaged him to create a larger and more extensive cycle of frescoes for his titular church of Santa Cecilia, also in Trastevere. Frescoes were cheaper than mosaic, but the scope of this project was larger. For the nave walls of Santa Cecilia, Cholet commissioned a now-ruined cycle of Old and New Testament scenes, directly imitative of established models that Cavallini knew intimately from the papal basilicas.

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