74 González Mozo

Chapter 2 Painted Stone: Idea and Practice in

Ana González Mozo

… blue will be more beautiful when there is greater darkness below1 ⸪

Background and Arguments

Years after his arrival in Rome in 1511, Sebastiano del Piombo laid the founda- tions of the method for painting on stone supports. Although there have been differing opinions among scholars about the motivation and influence of his method, this essay proposes that Sebastiano’s visual and technical background in greatly influenced the solutions that he adopted. The success of the invention is testified to by Titian’s emulation in 1545 and later by Daniele da Volterra’s adaptation, which indicates a reinterpretation according to Roman aesthetics. The technique and appearance of polychromy on stone were described by the authors of classical treatises and philosophers in antiquity,2 always linked to sculpture, and perfectly suited to the debate on the paragone, which was a topic of interest in the Roman environment in the mid-16th century. The art of painting and sculpture were pitted one against the other, as were mural and oil painting, each trying to justify their supremacy according to the principles of durability, or persistence over time, and the difficulty of the particular medium. Stone seemed the place to represent this dispute in easel painting, but an attentive look at the practice, through a theoretical lens, suggests that there were other substantive reasons linked to the artistic challenges in question. Stone provided a particular support that seemed stable and able to reproduce

1 , Meteorologica, 2.239. The black in antiquity was the negation of color, invisible, Melan, darkness, related to the idea of the blue. See Homer, Iliad, 14.191, and Odyssey, 11.93; Virgil, Aeneid, 6.134, 237, and 267. 2 Pliny, Natural History, 35.61, 149, and 133, and Pausanias, Description, 1.22.6-76.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004361492_005 Painted Stone: Idea and Practice 75 nuances inspired by a new perception of the world and its propietà,3 concepts that had their highest level of excellence in the Veneto. The recovery of the ancient world played an important role in this process. Decisions in painting are seldom spontaneous; requiring favorable condi- tions to register ideas and give shape to experience. In the first decades of the 16th century, it was in Venice where a series of factors converged to inspire Sebastiano’s development: on the one hand, the coexistence of polychrome stone and murals on Venetian facades, and, on the other hand, the city’s posi- tion as an important center of the collecting of antiquities and as a receptacle of materials and visual sources coming from the East.4 The printing in the Serenissima and in nearby of many classic texts and of ancient works, whose descriptions suggest a pictorial mode of thinking, would have awak- ened interest in the technique of Greek artists.5 The physical properties of slate and marble, the focus of this essay, favored a special oil absorption. These surfaces allowed the chromatic and lighting effects codified by Aristotle or Plotinus,6 and especially by Pliny in his Natural History, to be reproduced. Their qualities made them an ideal material for real- izing certain Greco-Roman ideals of painting: the diffused bodies, chiaroscuro, transparent and homogeneous dark, halftones control, and glare. These an­­ cient concerns were adapted to Venetian taste and its sensual conception of art, although neither Sebastiano, the principal innovator of this method, nor Titian painted on stone for the Republic of Venice. Of considerable impor- tance were the relations between Venice, Padua, Mantua and Ferrara where

3 A term coined by Paolo Pino in reference to the material nature of the represented object. Paolo Pino, Dialogo di Pittura, ed. Susanna Falabella (Rome, 2000), pp. 116ff.. This concept concerns the texture of the surfaces and the relationship between colors, in the sense of the nuances reached by the artists through their handling of color materials. It also concerns the effect produced by the painted surfaces according to how the light is received and reflected. Boschini, in his Breve Instruzione, held Giorgione up as an example, writing that “in coloring, he invented the impasto of the soft brush.” In this regard, see Moshe Barasch, Light and Color in the Italian Renaissance Theory of Art (New York, 1978), p. 97. 4 Promoted by Ciriaco of Ancona and his travels. Many pieces were acquired by Ludovico Trevisani and Pietro Barbo (later Pope Julius II). 5 In Ferrara, Guarino da published in 1433 the Natural History by Pliny. The first edition of Pausanias’ Description was done there in 1516 (Printing House of ). The two texts considered as a prelude to the Venetian art theory: De Sculptura and Hypnerotomachia Poliphili were written by scholars who had a very close contact with the classical world: the first by Pomponio Gaurico, who had, according to Marcantonio Michiel many works of an- cient sculpture and maintained relationship with Mantegna, and the second by Francesco Colonna, who demonstrates his passion for the “hoary and venerable Antiquity.” 6 Aristotle, Meteorologica, and Plotinus, Enneads, 1.6.