Alessandro Moretto and the Decomposition of the Painter's Art in Renaissance Brescia Kirk Nickel University of Pennsylvania, [email protected]
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University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 1-1-2016 Alessandro Moretto and the Decomposition of the Painter's Art in Renaissance Brescia Kirk Nickel University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology Commons Recommended Citation Nickel, Kirk, "Alessandro Moretto and the Decomposition of the Painter's Art in Renaissance Brescia" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1916. http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1916 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1916 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Alessandro Moretto and the Decomposition of the Painter's Art in Renaissance Brescia Abstract The er ligious paintings of Alessandro Moretto, also known as Moretto da Brescia, have endured a mixed reception from modern art historians. Certain of his paintings are routinely praised for their supposedly unaffected naturalism and their attention to the mundane details of lived experience, while many more of his altarpieces, chapel laterals, and domestic religious images have been criticized for their compositional incoherence and their overly obvious references to other artworks. Through four focused case studies covering the full extent of his career and including both domestic and liturgical images, this dissertation interrogates the relationship between Moretto’s compositional disintegration and the subject matter of the pictures where this lack of integrity is most pronounced. Moretto’s images concerning Christ’s body frequently pursued a strategy of pictorial incoherence that forcefully separated the recognition and interpretation of Christ’s physical form from a painting’s perceived ability to make absent bodies present for a beholder. In each of the cases examined, Moretto is shown to have set his pictures in opposition to one or more images—often well- known monuments of High Renaissance art—in which pictorial integrity signaled a potentially problematic relationship between the image and its maker. Contemporary publications that encouraged the discontinuous reorganization of an authored text are also identified as having encouraged the piecemeal appearance of Moretto’s highly referential pictures. Moretto’s fractured compositions distanced his paintings from the creative activities of nature and of God, making the works unsuitable as proxies for bodies but allowing them to facilitate a more complex contemplation of Christ’s body and its meaning in the era of pre-Tridentine Catholic reform. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group History of Art First Advisor Larry Silver Keywords Catholic Reform, Composition, Lombardy, Moretto da Brescia, Renaissance, Sacred Images Subject Categories History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1916 ALESSANDRO MORETTO AND THE DECOMPOSITION OF THE PAINTER’S ART IN RENAISSANCE BRESCIA Kirk Nickel A DISSERTATION in History of Art Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2016 Supervisor of Dissertation _____________________ Larry Silver Professor, History of Art Graduate Group Chairperson _______________________ Michael Leja Professor, History of Art Dissertation Committee Michael Cole, Professor, Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University David Young Kim, Assistant Professor, History of Art ALESSANDRO MORETTO AND THE DECOMPOSITION OF THE PAINTER’S ART IN RENAISSANCE BRESCIA COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirk Gregory Nickel This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ iii To my parents iv Acknowledgements While researching and writing this dissertation, I have enjoyed the generosity, encouragement, and counsel of many scholars to whom I am deeply grateful. Four stand out. Larry Silver has been a consistent source of inspiration, clarity, and good judgment—all the more so for approaching the topic with an incomparable understanding of objects and events across the Alps. I am indebted to him for deftly guiding this project through its course and for the impeccable model that his scholarship provides. In an early conversation about potential dissertation topics, Michael Cole shared my enthusiasm for Moretto. That was the first of several occasions when his infectious curiosity spurred me to delve into a thorny problem that otherwise I might have left alone. His critical insight has immeasurably benefitted this study, and his unwavering support has meant a great deal to me personally. David Kim joined the dissertation committee at a later stage, and he brought a fresh perspective that was eye-opening and invigorating. I thank him for his contributions, which allowed for timely and astute improvements to the text. And, finally, Stephen Campbell was gracious to allow me to join his seminar on North Italian painting outside of Venice. It was in that uniquely stimulating environment at Johns Hopkins that I became familiar with Moretto. Without Stephen’s generosity of spirit and path-breaking work on Renaissance Lombard painting, this dissertation would not exist. The University of Pennsylvania has been exceptional in its support. The History of Art graduate group enabled my research in Brescia with a McCoubrey/Campbell Travel Fellowship. And the university’s School of Arts and Sciences allowed me to continue those inquiries by granting me a Penfield Dissertation Research Fellowship. v Though the graduate group has been invariably helpful throughout my time at Penn, two individuals deserve special thanks. Ann Kuttner went out of her way to advocate for this specialist of Renaissance art when she did not have to. And Robert Maxwell never once complained about the amount of time I spent in his office hours struggling through medieval Latin scripts. His courses on manuscripts were among the highlights of my time at the university, and Chapter Two of this dissertation owes a special debt to his teaching and his patience. Lorenza Melli, visiting Penn from the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, taught me about Old Master drawing techniques. Over that semester, she also helped me to realize how little we still know about Moretto as a draftsman. Carl Strehlke made arrangements for me to view x-radiographs of the two portraits by Moretto in the Johnson Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Our conversations then and afterwards, when I was a fellow in the museum’s Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, made me ask new questions about the relationship of Moretto’s portraits to his religious paintings. My research in Brescia was aided considerably by Elena Lucchesi Ragni, then director of the Musei civici di Brescia. I thank her again for her interest in my project and for facilitating access to local institutions and scholars. Piera Tabaglio, at the Archivio fotografico dei Musei civici d'arte e storia, was unfailingly good-natured. She gladly procured everything I requested, including entrance to Mattia Ugoni’s studio. And Giovanna Fiorani was a good friend to a complete stranger. I presented early thoughts on Moretto’s decoration for Ugoni’s studio at the Symposium on the History of Art at the Frick Collection and to my home department at vi Penn in 2011, and at the Annual Graduate Conference for Italian Studies at Princeton in 2012. My conclusions on that material have changed substantially, and I thank those audiences for their thoughtful responses to arguments that were still in development. I presented an expanded version of the discussion in Chapter Three of Titian’s Resurrection polyptych at the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America at the Humboldt-Universtität zu Berlin in 2015. I am grateful to Chris Nygren and Giorgio Tagliaferro for that opportunity and for the valuable comments that they and others made. Friends and family have been unstinting in their support, even while suffering the demands of this dissertation through my absences and preoccupations. I am deeply grateful for their kindness, forbearance, and humor. I owe the greatest debt to Caitlin Haskell. She lived with this project from the outset, and her intelligence and practical good sense helped to see it through to the end. Words cannot convey what her love and her example mean to me. vii ABSTRACT ALESSANDRO MORETTO AND THE DECOMPOSITION OF THE PAINTER’S ART IN RENAISSANCE BRESCIA Kirk Nickel Larry Silver The religious paintings of Alessandro Moretto, also known as Moretto da Brescia, have endured a mixed reception from modern art historians. Certain of his paintings are routinely praised for their supposedly unaffected naturalism and their attention to the mundane details of lived experience, while many more of his altarpieces, chapel laterals, and domestic religious images have been criticized for their compositional incoherence and their overly obvious references to other artworks. Through four focused case studies covering the full extent of his career and including both domestic and liturgical images, this dissertation interrogates the relationship between Moretto’s compositional disintegration and the subject matter of the pictures where this lack of integrity is