MATTER(S) OF IMMORTALITY: OIL PAINTINGS ON STONE AND METAL IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By BRADLEY JAMES CAVALLO AUGUST 2017 Examining Committee Members: Tracy E. Cooper, Advisory Chair, Department of Art History Marcia B. Hall, Department of Art History Ashley D. West, Department of Art History Stuart Lingo, University of Washington © Copyright 2017 by Bradley James Cavallo All Rights Reserved ii ABSTRACT By the second decade of the twenty-first century, the preponderance of scholarship examining oil paintings made on stone slabs or metal sheets in Western Europe during the early modern period (fifteenth–eighteenth centuries) had settled on an interpretation of these artworks as artifacts of an elite taste that sought objects for inclusion in private collections of whatever was rare, curious, exquisite, or ingenious. In a cabinet of curiosities, naturalia formed by nature and artificialia made by man all complemented each other as demonstrations of marvelous things (mirabilia). Certainly small-scale paintings on stone or metal exhibited amidst these kinds of rarities aided in aggrandizing a noble or bourgeois collector’s social prestige. As well, they might have derived their interest as collectables because of the painter’s fame or increased capacity for miniaturization on copper plates, or because the painter left a slab of lapis lazuli, for example, partially uncovered to reveal its visually arresting stratigraphy or coloration. Nonetheless, while the lithic and metallic supports might have added value to the oil paintings it was not thought to add meaning. A totalizing theory about this type of artwork, based on a perception of them as if they had only served as conspicuous consumables, therefore overlooks that in other circumstances the stone and metal supports did contribute to the iconographic substance of the paintings. As this dissertation will argue, the introduction of metal and stone supports allowed patrons and painters literally to add another layer of meaning to an oil painting’s imagery. These materials mattered not just as passive receptacles of meaning but as active shapers of significance. Evidence for this hypothesis exists in the historical record in at least three identifiable contexts: Leonardo da Vinci’s Portrait of Ginevra de’Benci iii (ca. 1474–1478) in relation to the epistemological debate known as the Paragone; funerary monuments in Roman churches inclusive of painted portraits in relation to theories about color and lifelikeness; medallion-shaped, chest plates known as Escudos de monjas (Nuns’ Shields) worn by nuns of some religious orders in Colonial Mexico in relation to pre-Hispanic sacral materials. All three of these case studies ultimately concern the paradoxical materialization of the immaterial fame of the painter, the soul of the deceased, and the Christian divine. Observing them in tandem provides an outline of the origins and development of the technique of painting with oils on stone and metal, and consequently broadens our understanding of this wider, early modern phenomenon. iv To My Parents and To My Brother, In gratitude for all of your patience, lentils, optimism, herring, and love. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Completing a PhD cannot be done alone. People alive but absent, and people dead but present have all made it possible for me to conduct the living, thinking, research, and writing necessary to earn a doctoral degree from Temple University. The dissertation text that I have compiled after many years of conversations and emails bears the imprint of, above all, the professionals who have guided me in the development of a scholarly outlook grounded in the rigorous discipline of object- and logic-based argumentation that avoids intellectual fads and theory-driven, ahistorical narratives of the past but engages with its material survivals. Because I am an historian, I would wish to express my gratitude chronologically: To Dr. Elizabeth Bolman, Dr. Marcia Hall, and Dr. Tracy Cooper, who all took a chance on me and that my ideas portended my ability, accepted me into the Department of Art History, and thereby granted me access to an education the excellence of which I could not have foreseen. To Dr. Bolman, too, for explaining clearly and specifically the department’s expectations for me in terms of the coursework, and number of publications and presentations to be sought before graduation; these benchmarks continually inspired me to excel. To the cohort of classmates with whom I entered the program, and to the friends and peers who held me accountable through my classes and exams or who held me to higher and higher standards, or who offered time and emails and guidance and kindness, ‘though they are all now dispersed I will recall them and keep them as colleagues: Aliza Benjamin, Jasmine Cloud, Robin Craren, Erin Downey, Bethany Farrell, Michelle DiMarzo, Liz Duntemann, Danielle Abdon Guimaraes, Amy Gillette, Monica Hahn, Kaelin Jewell, Lauren Rosenblum, Brian Seymour, and Cate Wallace. vi To the Department of Art History, the Tyler School of Art, and Temple University from whom I received the generous financial assistance of multiple Tyler School of Art Dean’s Grants, a Summer Programs Scholarship, a Therese Dolan and Gunter Haase Travel Grant, the Rome Art History Fellowship, a Center for the Humanities at Temple (CHAT) Digital Scholars Program Fellowship, and a Dean’s Art History Doctoral Research Fund. Further, and above all, to all those in the Department whose decisions made it possible for me to teach art history classes in the Tyler School of Art (and Temple University’s Ambler Campus) as an Instructor of Record and thereby gain invaluable experience managing and organizing university-level courses while simultaneously earning a living wage to support myself rather than incurring life- burdening debt. To all those with whom I had the opportunity to learn from in their classes, Dr. Cooper, Dr. Hall, Dr. Ashley West, Dr. Jonathan Kline, Dr. Therese Dolan, and who facilitated learning environments in which I could learn from the scholarship of scholars past and present, and also from classmates, and wherein I could converse trusting in well-intended criticism. To Dr. Jane Evans for sharing her Sacred Spaces coursework (and for allowing me to adapt it for my own class), to Dr. Ian Verstegen for his good humor, advice, and keen perceptions, and to Dr. Jamie Higgs of Marian University for her support over many years in Indiana and back again. To all those who attended my practice talks, and thereby helped me to refine my ideas and presentations before a hospitable audience. To all those who aided me in the fastidious work of accumulating the details of my dissertation’s research: Jill Luedke, art librarian at the Temple University Samuel L. Paley Library; Mark A. Castro, Project Assistant Curator at the Philadelphia Museum of vii Art; William Wierzbowski, Keeper of the American Section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology; to Dr. Judith W. Mann, curator of European Art to 1800, St. Louis Art Museum; to Julie Wilson Frick, Mayer Center Program Coordinator/Jr. Scholar, New World Department, Denver Art Museum; to Dr. Seonaid Valient (Ayer Reference Librarian), Dr. Lia Markey (Director of the Center for Renaissance Studies), Dr. Suzanne Karr Schmidt (George Amos Poole III Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts), D. Bradford Hunt (Vice President for Research and Academic Programs), Kristin Emery (Fellowships and Seminars Manager), and Jessica Weller (Senior Program Assistant for Research and Academic Programs) all for supporting and encouraging my research at the Newberry Library of Chicago thanks to a Renaissance Society of America (RSA), and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for a RSA- Kress Short-Term Research Library Fellowship. To my inimitably estimable advisors, Dr. Cooper, Dr. Hall, and Dr. West: You have all given to me more than I can possibly ever repay you in the grit that you’ve demonstrated repeatedly in helping me prepare and complete the most arduous task that I have hitherto undertaken. By your gracious and strong direction I have achieved more than I could have possibly foreseen when I began in 2010; by your superb examples, I have grown confident but not proud, assured but not obnoxious, ambitious but not elitist. I could never have imagined being able to work with better mentors, and I hope that in the years to come you will look upon me as someone you will be pleased to recall as having initiated into the arts of this discipline. I have and will continue to emulate you all in the classes that I teach, in the texts that I write, in the presentations that I deliver, and in the scholar and professor that I become. viii A special thanks to Dr. Stuart Lingo of the University of Washington’s School of Art + Art History + Design, for agreeing so selflessly to advise and aid me as the outside reader of this dissertation project. To my closest friends, Heather Castro, Colin and Mary May, Brooke Lanier and Jim Rocco, and Lily Bonga, you have been there with and for me through some tumultuous years of growth; I hope that I have been able to give to you as much as you’ve given to me in a companionship of Zeitgenossen. And to my family…how can I express adequately or earnestly enough how thankful I am for your years of patience with and love for me? My Mother and Father, my Brother, and to all my kindred. I owe to you more than a lifetime of gratitude; you have given me everything without asking anything in return during a period of my life in which you never let me quit, never let me despair, never let me forget that “The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence.” ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................................