Revisiting the Monument Fifty Years Since Panofsky’S Tomb Sculpture
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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 4 PANOFSKY’S TOMB SCULPTURE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE EARLY RENAISSANCE FLOOR TOMB: THE TOMB SLAB OF LORENZO TRENTA BY JACOPO DELLA QUERCIA REAPPRAISED GEOFFREY NUTTALL 4.1 Donatello, Tomb slab of Giovanni Crivelli (1432- 33). Marble, 235 x 88 cm, Rome, Santa Maria Araceli. 4.2 Donatello, Tomb slab of Bishop Giovanni Pecci (after 1427). Bronze, 247 x 88 cm, Siena Cathedral. PANOFSKY’S PARADOX In Chapter IV of Tomb Sculpture, ‘The Renaissance, Its Antecedents and Its Sequel’, Erwin Panofsky encountered what he called ‘a new paradox’ that marked a significant mo- ment in the evolution of tomb sculpture.1 The paradox, Panofsky argued, appeared in Italy during the first decades of the fifteenth century, at a time of ‘artistic flux’, as the ‘medieval’ GEOFFREY NUTTALL| THE TOMB SLAB OF LORENZO TRENTA REAPPRAISED 69 4.3 Jacopo della Quercia, Tomb slab of Lorenzo Trenta (1413-16). Marble from the quarries at San Lorenzo in Vacca, near Lucca, 247 x 122 cm, Lucca, San Frediano, Trenta Chapel. gave way to the ‘modern’ and ‘iconographical innovations symptomatic of this novel at- titude’ impelled artistic development from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance.2 To il- lustrate the hypothesis, he referred to six floor tombs produced by Tuscan artists between about 1415 and 1435, and in particular two works by Donatello: the marble tomb slab of Giovanni Crivelli in the church of Santa Maria Araceli in Rome, and Bishop Giovanni Pec- ci’s bronze floor tomb in Siena cathedral, both datable to the mid 1430s (figs 4.1 and 4.2). This chapter focuses on another tomb mentioned only en passant in Tomb Sculpture, that of Lorenzo Trenta by Jacopo della Quercia, dated 1416 and still in situ before the altarpiece Lorenzo Trenta commissioned for his chapel in the church of San Frediano in Lucca (fig. 4.3). In doing so, it questions Panofsky’s interpretation of his paradox, and argues that he significantly underestimated Jacopo della Quercia’s contribution to the development of the early Renaissance floor tomb. In its discussion of the Trenta tomb in context, it also GEOFFREY NUTTALL| THE TOMB SLAB OF LORENZO TRENTA REAPPRAISED 70 provides fresh insights into the complex interplay between the material form and the spir- itual meaning of the burial chapel, a relationship ignored by Panofsky and, in the case of the Trenta Chapel, overlooked in recent scholarship.3 Panofsky’s so-called paradox was that although the effigies of Crivelli and Pecci fol- lowed fourteenth-century Italian precedent—their heads pressing down onto a cushion, their eyes closed and hands crossed—their bodies appear to stand upright, their feet firm- ly planted on the base of a ‘modern’ all’antica frame. As a result, Crivelli and Pecci seem to be ‘sleeping the eternal sleep whilst ostensibly standing upright in a niche’, lying as in death, but at the same time standing as if alive. Panofsky argued that this paradox had its origins in a ‘basic change in outlook: a re- jection of Christian concern for the future in favour of the glorification of the past’ that began in Tuscany around 1400 and is first evidenced in the floor tombs of Lorenzo Trenta and his wife in Lucca, dated 1416, and Ghiberti’s bronze floor tomb of Lorenzo Dati in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, dated between 1425 and 1427.4 In these examples, Panofsky argued, the religious imagery traditionally associated with the medi- eval floor tomb, such as angels and saints, has been removed, leaving an iconographically minimalist, essentially secular ‘representacion de la mort.’ A hundred years later this tran- sition, driven by a move away from the medieval preoccupation with the salvation of the immortal soul to the Renaissance glorification of the mortal man, led to the ‘representacion au vif ’ monuments, typified by those of the French kings Francis I and Henry II in Saint- Denis in Paris, the subjects kneeling as if in life, their deeds recounted in eulogistic sculp- tural narratives and witnessed by personifications of the Virtues whose qualities these sovereigns embodied. For Panofsky, however, the key transition works in this evolutionary process were Donatello’s tomb slabs of Giovanni Crivelli and Bishop Pecci. Donatello’s achievement, Panofsky believed, was in not just abandoning Christian ico- nography, but also introducing classical motifs, for example, all’antica shell niches and pa- gan spiritelli, into the design of the floor tomb, thus defining Crivelli and Pecci in terms of Ancient Rome rather than the Catholic church, and in doing so shifting the primary func- tion of the tomb away from the salvation of the soul to the glorification of the man. These innovations, however, created Panofsky’s paradox because, by rendering the apparently dead figure upright in an all’antica frame, the upper part of the body is represented as if horizontal whilst the lower part appears in the vertical, a clearly impossible state of being. Panofsky identified a limited solution to the paradox, ‘to the extent that it could be solved’ in the bronze floor tomb of Pope Martin V in the church of Saint John Lateran in Rome, dated around 1435 and sometimes attributed to the Florentine sculptor Simone Ghini.5 Here the artist’s introduction of ‘perspective artifice’ produced ‘a fairly convincing illusion of three-dimensionality’ apparent to the observer from a specific view point at the foot of the tomb. This allowed the flat effigy ‘to transform itself into a statue in the round reposing beneath ground level’, the Pope thus appearing unambiguously dead but still within the all’antica frame, grounded by perspective and no longer oscillating between the vertical and the horizontal. GEOFFREY NUTTALL| THE TOMB SLAB OF LORENZO TRENTA REAPPRAISED 71 PANOFSKY’S PARADOX: AN ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION Although Panofsky was perhaps the first art historian to be troubled by the paradox, he saw both the problem and its solution purely in terms of the object and its inherent ico- nography, in isolation from its context in the church or burial chapel for which it was made, and without reference to the other visual elements of the funerary ensemble such as the altarpiece, or the non-visual components of the ecclesiastical environment, for example the services conducted in the church or private chapel for the salvation of the deceased’s soul. Additionally, rather than observation of the object itself, Panofsky relied on photographs of the floor tombs taken directly from above.