Geiger: Filippino Lippi's Carafa Chapel

To visit Renaissance art in Rome is to visit the frescoes of Filippino Lippi in the Carafa Chapel in the Dominican church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.  Lippi left Florence for Rome in 1488 to meet Cardinal Oliviero Carafa regarding his chapel.  The meeting was encouraged by Lorenzo de Medici as he lauded Filippino's mastery of frescoes.

Cardinal Carafa was a powerful man, both as a cardinal and as a diplomat.  In 1472, he was admiral of a papal fleet and led a successful battle for Pope Sixtus IV against the Turks.  This afforded him great notariety.

Cardinal Carafa had a personal devotion to Saint Thimas Aquinas, an austere priest from the Dominican order.   He may have been a distant relative of his, further enhancing this devotion. The cardinal also surrounded himself with Humanist theologians who occupied themselves with translating ancient Greek and Roman writings.  They pursued their deep belief in man's moral and intellectual education, a belief also held by Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Before we tour the frescoes in the chapel, let's revisit the technique of buon fresco, or wet fresco.  Fresco painting dates back as early as 1500BCE in the Near East.  It was used by the ancient Greeks and Romans and is seen subsequently throughout history.  To create a buon fresco, an underlayer, or arriccio, is applied.  It is on this layer that most artists sketched their compositions with a red pigment called sinopia.  A later techniques used paper tranfers with soot.  Then, pigment mixed with room-temperature water was applied to a thin layer of fresh, wet plaster.  A binder was not required because the pigment soaked right in.  After a number of hours, the plaster dries and reacts with the air.  This reaction fixes the pigment particles within the plaster.  Some artists, like Michelangelo and Rafael, scraped into the plaster to create more depth.  Once dried, no more pugment could be applied.  This forced frescoes to be created in sections under time constraints.

Soon, we will view the wonderful frescoes of the Carafa  chapel.

Martines' Humanism

Humanism was for the dominant social groups in Quattrocento Italy.  Its ideals of education could only be realized in a society of priviledged elites.  Humanisms technical foundation was grammar.  The Studia Humanitatas put grammar, history, and rhetoric as essential to power and position.  The Humanists called for a heightened nurturing of rhetoric.  It was the tool that would lead men who were destined to lead in social positions.  Latin was the root of this educational approach.  With that, poetry was considered a guide and an insight into the human condition.  It was felt that nothing ignited passion more thsn the use of language,

Perfect speech was seen as goodness and wisdom.  Men in politics needed to pursuade others to their way of thinking,  The Humanist approach, therefore, had a civic function.  It saw history as an insight to the present and gave man a "practical worldliness".  (Martines)  Cultivating worldly men meant cultivating the ruling classes.  All Humanists had an overt relationship with power.  They used history as a model.  Their relationship with the study of history was quite selective.  They chose Greek and Roman history and ignored the cultural inactivity of the Middle Ages.  Their views focused on the virtues of civic life and of education.  Eloquence was the highest manifestation of this, a skill achieving more recognition than philosophy.  Eloquence became a way of life and made "the complete man, the citizen".  (Martines)

Until the later part of the Quattrocento, Humanists enjoyed a secure role in their urban environments. The French invasion of 1494CE shook this authority along with the Humanists belief in man's dignity, most certainly the elite man.

Blunt's Artistic Theory

Born 23 years apart and having been the most revered artistic masters of their time, Leonardo and Michelangelo approached their artistic theories (influenced by High Renaissance Humanism and NeoPlatonism and, perhaps, Mannerism) with different aesthetics.

Leonardo was born in 1452 and studied under Verrocchio.  He strongly felt that painting was a science which produced material works of art by imitating nature.  He relied on experimentation and observation and was opposed to speculation that was not based on experiment.  This involved mathematical perspective and the study of nature.  Leonardo felt that experiment was the "common mother of all the Sciences and the Arts."  (Blunt)  Realism had proportions that produced an academic uniformity in the human figure.  Leonardo felt that it was necessary to have a variety in proportion to best mimic nature. 

 Born in 1475, Michaelangelo had a allegiance to beauty rather than to scientific truth.  He did not like exactness in art but beauty in art.  Michelangelo felt that an artist inspired by nature must transform what he sees to an ideal standard in his mind.  He felt that beauty was the light which eminates from the face of God.  Therefore, he focused on more spiritual qualities than physical qualities.  Following the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Michelangelo developed more of a mysticism in his work as a way of escaping from the crumbling world around him.  His images of the human form became more exaggerated and distorted.

Leonardo felt that the highest form of art was painting.  He thought of painting as knowledge with a certainty of methods and a completeness of knowledge represented by the end result.  Leonardo felt painting had more artistic truth than that of poetry or sculpture.  Which better reflects the essence of God, a word or a painting?


                                                                             GOD

 Sculpture, Leonardo felt, was limiting in that it didn't produce color or aerial perspective.  Michelangelo, as we know, was a master of marble sculpture.  In sculpting, he thought of himself as cutting away until he "reveals or discovers that statue within" a piece of marble.  Michelangelo was opposed to the mathematical methods and approaches evidenced in Leonardo's theories.

Both artists studied the human form.  Both artists felt that a painter must be a great and skillful master.  Michelangelo felt that they should also have piety.