Giovannino Battista: the Boy Baptist in Quattrocento Italian
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COPYRIGHT AND USE OF THIS THESIS This thesis must be used in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. Reproduction of material protected by copyright may be an infringement of copyright and copyright owners may be entitled to take legal action against persons who infringe their copyright. Section 51 (2) of the Copyright Act permits an authorized officer of a university library or archives to provide a copy (by communication or otherwise) of an unpublished thesis kept in the library or archives, to a person who satisfies the authorized officer that he or she requires the reproduction for the purposes of research or study. The Copyright Act grants the creator of a work a number of moral rights, specifically the right of attribution, the right against false attribution and the right of integrity. You may infringe the author’s moral rights if you: - fail to acknowledge the author of this thesis if you quote sections from the work - attribute this thesis to another author - subject this thesis to derogatory treatment which may prejudice the author’s reputation For further information contact the University’s Director of Copyright Services sydney.edu.au/copyright San Giovannino: The Boy Baptist in Quattrocento Italian Art Georgina Sybella Macneil, 28 August 2013 Thesis submitted in fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Department of Art History and Film Studies, University of Sydney, Australia Abstract This thesis explores the imagery of the young John the Baptist in Renaissance art. The phenomenon of John’s juvenescence has been noted but insufficiently explored by previous scholarship. The present study reassesses the figure of the youthful Baptist by means of rigorous theological exegesis of biblical, apocryphal and late medieval textual sources and a thorough investigation of the visual corpus. Beginning with the mosaics of the Florentine Baptistery, a handful of narrative cycles locate the onset of John’s prophetic career in the desert at an ever-earlier point in his life. However, it was not until the mid-fifteenth century that the boy John was released from the confines of his own narrative to become an independent figure in devotional imagery. Innovative altarpieces by Filippo Lippi commissioned by the Medici family in the late 1450s and 60s are shown to be crucial in promoting and disseminating this new vision of Florence’s beloved patron saint. The thesis demonstrates the enormous popularity of the youthful Baptist in the following decades, first in Florence and subsequently elsewhere in Italy, and interrogates the significance of his presence as infant, boy and adolescent across a wide range of pictorial and sculptural representations. One of the most famous examples of the child John, Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks, is recontextualised within this existing pictorial current, to show that this masterpiece is at once more traditional and more innovative in its treatment of subject matter than has hitherto been recognised. Key narrative moments, such as a meeting between Christ and John, and new ways of visualising the intimate bond between the two children formulated towards the end of the fifteenth century, including physical embraces and shared exposure of vulnerable infant flesh, are also investigated. Through such investigations, the thesis aims to advance understanding of the multiple and intersecting roles played by the boy Baptist in Renaissance art and devotion. Acknowledgements Thanks first to my supervisor Louise Marshall, who has been patient, knowledgeable, encouraging, disapproving, sceptical, generous and insightful at all the right moments (even though I miss all my overly long sentences, and the Oxford comma) and for being an unbelievably quick, thorough reader. She helped me refine my ideas and has brought out the absolute best in my writing. I could not have hoped for a better supervisor. Thanks to Giorgio Marini at the Uffizi, Martin Clayton at Windsor Castle, and Elena Greer and Larry Keith at the National Gallery, for all making me feel very welcome, assisting me with my search for John in Leonardo’s work, and taking the time to discuss the works with me. Special thanks to Ms Greer, who allowed me into the restoration room at the National Gallery, and made Mr Keith available to me. Thanks to my team of readers, Dr Paul Dalgleish, Dr Andrew Yip, Rebecca Kummerfeld, and especially Kate Robertson (for the reading too, but more for sharing the journey with me). Thanks to my PGARC ladies (especially the Urflasche, Schmetterling, Snowflake and MiniFlasche), for keeping me sane, or at least sharing my insanity, and lots of baklava and cups of tea. Special thanks to Mary-Liz for trying to photograph a Jacopo del Sellaio for me in Berlin. Thanks to my partner Dave Wells for the images, putting up with Times New Roman and Arial, for feeding the ferrets when I got home late from writing, and for all the cuddles. Thanks to my family, for their love, support, and cries of “Baby JBap? You LOVE baby JBap!” To Dr J W H Macneil for only once gloating that he beat me to Doctor. To Izzy, for going all the way to Glasgow, just for me, to photograph some Botticelli workshop tondi. To my mother, for only very occasionally asking me if I was nearly done, and lots of late –night calls. To my father, for his advice on the Holy Member (ewww) and saints. And most of all, to my sister, the Reverend Kate Heath, a guiding light without whose faith and passion for scholarship, this thesis surely could not have been written. Contents Abstract i Acknowledgements ii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 John the Baptist in the Bible and New Testament Apocrypha 11 Chapter 2 A City and its Patron: The Cult of John the Baptist in Florence 41 Chapter 3 The Boy Baptist Beyond the Narrative: The Adorations of Filippo Lippi 81 Chapter 4 The Iconography of Giovannino in Florence and Beyond, 1460-1500 112 Chapter 5 Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks 144 Chapter 6 Revealed and Concealed: The Nudity of the Young Baptist 168 Chapter 7 The Encounter & The Embrace 186 Conclusion 208 Bibliography 216 Appendix 1: Table of Figures 237 Image List 239 Images 244 INTRODUCTION This thesis explores the significance of the figure of the youthful John the Baptist in Italian art in the second half of the fifteenth century. In the Bible, the Baptist’s role and appearance are quite clear. In the narrative of the New Testament, he functions as a herald of Christ and performs the rite of baptism to his followers and to Christ. In a structural sense, John prefigures Christ at every juncture – from annunciation, to birth and death – and acts as a point of connection between the prophecies of the Old Testament and the fulfilment of the covenant in the New Testament. In the Bible, as in apocryphal literature and the visual arts from the Early Christian period to the Middle Ages, the Baptist’s characterisation remains fairly standard, as a gaunt, bearded adult figure, in the guise of desert prophets such as Elijah. However, in fifteenth-century Florence, there occurred a seemingly sudden and rapid growth in the popularity of the youthful Baptist as an independent figure. Removed from his narrative or historical context, the child Baptist became the constant youthful playmate and companion of the infant Christ. As the patron saint of Florence since roughly the twelfth century, John naturally had a great presence in the art and visual culture of the city. What is unique in the fifteenth century, however, is his youth and his inclusion in previously unprecedented compositions. As I will argue, a key trigger for the popularity of the young John in Renaissance art is the altarpiece of the Medici chapel, painted by Fra Filippo Lipii in 1459. In the following decades, Florence was to witness a rapid proliferation of compositions featuring the boyish Baptist, most often in combination with representations of the Virgin kneeling in adoration of the Christ child. The majority of these were destined for Florentine households, where INTRODUCTION they served as the focus of personal and familial devotion.1 Because the vast majority of Quattrocento representations of the young Baptist were made in Florence, my study concentrates primarily on the city and its patrons and artists.2 However, as I will show, during the 1480s, the popularity of compositions featuring the young John and the Madonna spread beyond Florence in a significant way. This is due in large part to Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks, the first version of which was begun in Milan c. 1482. Despite the chequered history of the altarpiece for the confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, Leonardo’s painting was extremely influential, with parts of the composition copied and reused throughout Italy. Taken up beyond the sphere of Florence and her protectorates, the figure of the boy John inevitably loses his patronal specificity as the city’s most potent and beloved protector, and begins to take on other compatible but not mutually exclusive resonances. In this thesis, I examine how the boy Baptist retains aspects of the older, desert- prophet Baptist’s character and yet is simultaneously inscribed with the Florentine republic’s idealised rhetoric regarding boys and young men. As scholars have noted, representations of John as a youth first appear in medieval narrative cycles, which show him entering the desert – and thus embracing his prophetic destiny – as a youth or even as a boy. However, it is my argument that the change in age for the Baptist is not merely happenstance and is not only related to a shift in focus to a different moment of his narrative.