Luca Signorelli's Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome

chapter 4 Luca Signorelli’s Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome and Viewers in the Palazzo Petrucci, Siena

Stephanie C. Leone

Introduction: Methodology and Renaissance Domestic Painting

With a focus on the fresco Veturia Persuading Coriolanus to Spare Rome (c. 1509–11), attributed to Luca Signorelli, this essay investigates the multiple responses of viewers to depictions of ancient Roman history and the impact of gender on spectatorship of Renaissance domestic art. Now detached from its original context, the painting was once part of a decorative ensemble in the so-called camera bella of the Palazzo Petrucci in Siena.1 The full ensemble comprised eight narrative wall paintings from ancient history, literature, and mythology attributed to Pinturicchio, Luca Signorelli, and Girolamo Genga; carved woodwork pilasters between the narrative scenes, with a carved woodwork cornice above and benches below; an all’antica stucco-framework ceiling with frescoed panels of ancient gods, goddesses and heroes by Pinturicchio; and a majolica tile floor. This reception room appears to have been decorated for the 1511 marriage between Borghese Petrucci (1490–1526) and Vittoria Todeschini Piccolomini (1494–1570).2 No satisfactory programmatic meaning

* I wish to thank Cristelle Baskins, Elizabeth Mellyn, Vernon Hyde Minor, Sarah Gwenyth Ross, and editors Alison Poe and Marice Rose for their insightful suggestions that have improved my essay. I am also grateful for the helpful comments of the participants in the Radical Readings Workshop, organized by Virginia Reinburg and Sarah Gwenyth Ross at Boston College in May 2013. 1 The history of and bibliography on the painting is available in Tom Henry and Laurence B. Kanter, Luca Signorelli: The Complete Paintings (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), 224–5. It was detached by 1876, and now resides in the National Gallery, London, inv. no. NG3929. 2 In most sources the date of marriage is given as 1509, as recorded by the contemporary historian Sigismondo Tizio (Historiarum Senensium ab initio urbis Senarum usque ad annum 1528, pub- lished as Historiae senenses [Rome: Istituto storico italiano per l’età moderna e contemporanea, 1992], vii, 152) and repeated by such early historians as G.A. Pecci, Memorie storico-critiche della città di Siena che servono alla vita civile di Pandolfo Petrucci (Siena: 1755), 241–2. The marriage contract, however, is dated 1511; see “Agnese Farnese,” Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 1995, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/agnese-farnese_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/;

132 Leone has been discerned for the complex iconography of the paintings, a problem exacerbated by the dismantling of the room. Rather than pursuing the positiv- ist aim of decoding a single programmatic meaning as intended by artist and patron, I am interested in the concept of Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (1994): how a work of art “… actively engages in organizing and structuring the social and cultural environment in which it was located.”3 Reception theory and recent studies of Renaissance domestic art offer an alternative model of interpreta- tion by privileging the responses of original viewers as conditioned by indi- vidual predispositions and preconceptions. In this essay I analyze one scene from the camera bella—the Roman matron Veturia’s intercession to save Rome from the attack of her son, Coriolanus (Fig. 4.1)—to test the value of investigat- ing the responses of sixteenth-century viewers as a means of understanding how the work of art interacts with its original socio-cultural context. Since Hans Robert Jauss coined the phrase Rezeptionsästhetik in 1967, there has been much discussion about the uses, interpretations, and adaptations of reception theory in his field of literature and in other disciplines. Across the debate, however, it is generally agreed that the “point of reception,” that is, the subjectivity of the reader, plays an essential and active role in the process of making meaning, and that as a result, meaning is not fixed and stable but rather changeable, mediated, and contingent.4 Stanley Fish has expanded the reader-response discourse by addressing the differences among readers and

and Konrad Eisenbichler, The Sword and the Pen: Women, Politics, and Poetry in Sixteenth- Century Siena (Notre Dame, in: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 59. 3 Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, “Introduction,” in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Bryson, Holly, and Moxey (Middletown, ct: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), xviii. The editors argue against a work of art as a simple mirror of its culture in which the context serves as a mere background to the work of art and instead seek to interpret the object as fully integrated into its socio-cultural context. Moxey, “Hieronymus Bosch and the ‘World Upside Down’,” in Bryson, Holly, and Moxey, Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, 104–40, offers an instructive example in his essay on Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Rather than trying to identify and interpret symbols in the painting, as scholars have done since Erwin Panofsky, Moxey argues that Bosch used the notion of “world upside down,” represented through inverting the natural scale and order of things, to satirize the very class of people, the aristocracy, for whom he worked. As such, Bosch sought to demon- strate his inimitable genius as an appeal to patrons in this educated and wealthy milieu. 4 Charles Martindale, “Introduction,” in Classics and the Uses of Reception, ed. Martindale and Richard F. Thomas (Malden, ma: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 1–13; William W. Batstone, “Provocation: The Point of Reception Theory,” in Martindale and Thomas, Classics and the Uses of Reception, 14–20.