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Revisiting the Monument Fifty Years Since Panofsky’S Tomb Sculpture

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Revisiting the Monument Fifty Years Since Panofsky’S Tomb Sculpture REVISITING THE MONUMENT FIFTY YEARS SINCE PANOFSKY’S TOMB SCULPTURE EDITED BY ANN ADAMS JESSICA BARKER Revisiting The Monument: Fifty Years since Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture Edited by Ann Adams and Jessica Barker With contributions by: Ann Adams Jessica Barker James Alexander Cameron Martha Dunkelman Shirin Fozi Sanne Frequin Robert Marcoux Susie Nash Geoffrey Nuttall Luca Palozzi Matthew Reeves Kim Woods Series Editor: Alixe Bovey Courtauld Books Online is published by the Research Forum of The Courtauld Institute of Art Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN © 2016, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. ISBN: 978-1-907485-06-0 Courtauld Books Online Advisory Board: Paul Binski (University of Cambridge) Thomas Crow (Institute of Fine Arts) Michael Ann Holly (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute) Courtauld Books Online is a series of scholarly books published by The Courtauld Institute of Art. The series includes research publications that emerge from Courtauld Research Forum events and Courtauld projects involving an array of outstanding scholars from art history and conservation across the world. It is an open-access series, freely available to readers to read online and to download without charge. The series has been developed in the context of research priorities of The Courtauld which emphasise the extension of knowledge in the fields of art history and conservation, and the development of new patterns of explanation. For more information contact [email protected] All chapters of this book are available for download at courtauld.ac.uk/research/courtauld-books-online Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of images reproduced in this publication. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. All rights reserved. Cover Image: Detail of tomb of Jacopo de Carrara © Luca Palozzi. CONTENTS List of Illustrations 5 Notes on Contributors 8 Acknowledgements 10 Introduction 11 JESSICA BARKER Erwin Panofsky’s Tomb Sculpture: Creating the Monument 16 SUSIE NASH I. REASSESSING PANOFSKY From the ‘Pictorial’ to the ‘Statuesque’: Two Romanesque 30 Effigies and the Problem of Plastic Form. SHIRIN FOZI Memory, Presence and the Medieval Tomb 49 ROBERT MARCOUX Panofsky's Tomb Sculpture and the Development of the Early 68 Renaissance Floor Tomb: The Tomb Slab of Lorenzo Trenta by Jacopo della Quercia Reappraised. GEOFFREY NUTTALL II. MONUMENTS AND THEIR VIEWERS Petrarch and Memorial Art: Blurring the Borders between 89 Art Theory and Art Practice in Trecento Italy LUCA PALOZZI Stone and Bone: The Corpse, the Effigy and the Viewer in 113 Late-Medieval Tomb Sculpture JESSICA BARKER Competing for Dextro Cornu Magnum Altaris: Funerary 137 Monuments and Liturgical Seating in English Churches JAMES ALEXANDER CAMERON III. MONUMENTS AND MATERIALS Panofsky: Materials and Condition 155 KIM WOODS Revealed/Concealed: Monumental Brasses on Tomb Chests— 160 The Examples of John I, Duke of Cleves, and Catherine of Bourbon ANN ADAMS Veiling and Unveiling: The Materiality of the Tomb of 184 John I of Avesnes and Philippa of Luxembourg in the Franciscan church of Valenciennes SANNE FREQUIN ‘Nostre sépulture et derrenière maison’: A Reconsideration of the 201 Tomb of Jean de Berry for the Sainte-Chapelle at Bourges, its Inception, Revision and Reconstruction MATTHEW REEVES Deconstructing Donatello and Michelozzo’s Brancacci Tomb 226 MARTHA DUNKELMAN Bibliography 240 Photograph Credits 257 CHAPTER 5 PETRARCH AND MEMORIAL ART: BLURRING THE BORDERS BETWEEN ART THEORY AND ART PRACTICE IN TRECENTO ITALY LUCA PALOZZI 5.1 Pacio and Giovanni Bertini, Tomb of King Robert of Anjou (†1343), detail, before the extensive damage suffered during the Second World War. Naples, Santa Chiara. To Maria Monica Donato Erwin Panofsky was the first to re-evaluate the centrality of Petrarch (1304-74) to memorial art in the West—in his book Tomb Sculpture—crediting him in particular with the introduction of the iconography of the Liberal Arts.1 This iconography would find its best-known expression in Antonio Pollaiuolo’s tomb of Pope Sixtus IV in St Peter’s, Rome, completed in 1493. Yet, as Panofsky noted, it had already been portrayed in Giovanni LUCA PALOZZI | PETRARCH AND MEMORIAL ART 90 and Pacio Bertini’s tomb of King Robert of Anjou (†1343), in the church of Santa Chiara, 5.2 2 Pacio and Giovanni in Naples (c.1343-46, fig. 5.1). Although the epitaph that Petrarch was commissioned to Bertini, Tomb of write for Robert was never inscribed onto his monument, Panofsky conjectured that a cou- King Robert of Anjou (†1343), detail of King plet of hexameters from this text may have inspired the representation of the Liberal Arts Robert’s gisant before mourning the King’s death (fig. 5.2): ‘Bereft by Robert’s death | the Seven Arts sharing the extensive damage suffered during the their grief with the Nine Muses, wept.’3 Panofsky regarded the introduction of the ‘Arts Second World War. Bereft’ theme as one of four crucial philosophical-iconographical innovations—alongside the revival of funerary symbolism from Antiquity, the readmission of biographical ele- ments, and the activation of the effigy of the deceased—that emerged during the late- medieval period and informed the transition from medieval to Renaissance tomb sculpture. Hence his description of Petrarch as ‘the one man who so often embarrasses historians by doing or saying what should have been done or said only some hundred, or hundred and fifty, years later.’4 Recent studies on Petrarch and the arts have confirmed Panofsky’s portrayal of Pe- trarch as an innovator and a precursor of the Renaissance, with several scholars discover- ing in the latter’s work the seeds of concepts, ideas and even avant-la-page art historical theories that would only prove influential centuries later.5 Scholars have also thoroughly investigated Petrarch’s ties to coeval painters (including Giotto, Simone Martini and oth- ers who never made it into the canon), as well as the role he may have played in adapt- ing the subject matter of some of his works (e.g. his De viris illustribus, begun c.1338) to monumental contexts, namely fresco cycles (e.g. in Padua).6 Conversely, both Petrarch’s more controversial ties to the coeval sculptors and his multifaceted involvement with, and understanding of, Trecento tomb sculpture in particular have remained in the shadows.7 This chapter addresses this oversight by both complementing and challenging Panofsky’s insights. On the one hand, it seeks to offer a broader, if not exhaustive, picture of the topic and thus takes into account all known evidence of Petrarch’s activity as a memorial LUCA PALOZZI | PETRARCH AND MEMORIAL ART 91 epigrammatist by discussing the different degrees of his engagement in funerary projects. On the other, and perhaps most importantly, it proposes a revision of Petrarch’s agency as postulated by Panofsky. Specifically, it contends that Petrarch’s contribution in Naples, as elsewhere, would have gone beyond simply providing poetic subjects to be transposed literally into funerary marble. As an intellectual—at least in those cases where his con- tribution protracted over time and was therefore more substantial, as happened in Naples and Padua—he arguably participated in discussions among patrons, courtiers, and artists about the form of the tombs on which his epitaphs would be carved. Petrarch was well aware of the multi-layered interrelations (e.g. conceptual, visual and aesthetic) between in- scribed words and carved images on tombs. Most importantly, he demonstrated an under- standing of the advanced artistic and technical processes underlying contemporary tomb making. Assessing the latter in particular will bring our discussion into terra incognita. What did Petrarch and Trecento Italian intellectuals know of coeval sculptural practice and the practice of funerary sculpture in particular? And what can we learn by looking at this specific artistic production through their eyes? Finally, how porous, if at all, were the boundaries between the Latinate culture of the early Italian intellectuals and the vernacu- lar culture of Trecento sculptural workshops?8 Was there any room for useful debate and the exchange of ideas between these two seemingly distant realms? The broader theoretical implications of these questions are addressed in the pages that follow. My focus will gradually shift from Petrarch’s texts (Sections 1 and 2) to the carvings of the tombs his epitaphs were destined for (Section 3). I will move, as it were, from the poet to the sculptor(s). In so doing, I will also encroach upon some issues that are greatly debated and often controversial among today’s art historians such as: 1) late- medieval practices of commemoration, coeval concepts of memory, and anxieties about the fading of memory and forgetfulness;9 2) the increased centrality of the human body in funerary rituals in Europe during the period at hand, the techniques used to preserve distinctive individual features in dead bodies and the making and use of stand-in effigies;10 3) the revival of realistic portraiture in the West during the late-thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, its philosophical underpinnings (e.g. the rhetoric of verisimilitude, the termi- nology of likeness and lifelikeness), and its material and technical aspects (e.g. fourteenth century artists’ use of facial casts as a reproductive means).11 While I do not aim to address any of these issues at great length—not least because of editorial constraints—I suggest that we might benefit greatly from looking at them through the prism of Petrarch’s excep- tionally rich biography, breadth of interests and work. UT SCULPTURA POESIS: SCULPTURE AND POETRY While Panofsky focused exclusively on Petrarch’s epitaphs, we might find it useful to start by considering Petrarch’s most medieval text, De otio religioso (On Religious Leisure, 1347-56).12 This text in fact contains Petrarch’s most eloquent meditation on the funerary LUCA PALOZZI | PETRARCH AND MEMORIAL ART 92 culture and practices of his own day in Europe.
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