A Final Visit to Carafa.

It is the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas.  We are in Rome and visiting Santa Maria sopra Minerva.  We kneel at the balustrade of the Carafa Chapel to honor the saint to whom this magnificent, meditative prayer niche is dedicated.  As our gaze is drawn up above the altar and Eucharist, beneath a monumental arch, we see the conclusion of Filippino Lippi's thematic renderings:  The Annunciation and The Assumption.

These two frescoes relate to the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas in his Summa theologica  whose prologues tells us, "Forasmuch as our Saviour the Lord Jesus Christ, in order to save His people from their sins, ...showed unto us in His own Person the way of truth, whereby we may attain to the bliss of eternal life by rising again..."   In her book, Filippino Lippi's Carafa Chapel:  Renaissance Art in Rome, Gail L. Geiger reminds us that "while many scholars view the Renaissance age in Rome as a period of crisis and tension between the values of the classical past and the Christian present, it should be remembered that many late fifteenth-century people believed deeply in the regenerative force of Christian humanism for the church and it's reform."

The biblical story of the Annunciation tells the mystery of the Incarnation with it's theme of Redemption.

The Archangel Gabriel arrives before the Virgin.  His robe twists around him as if we've caught the moment of his arrival.  He carries lillies.  Light beams pierce the dark background as the Holy Spirit hovers above. The Virgin has been interrupted from reading.  She turns towards Cardinal Carafa who is kneeling in the foreground.  He gazes at the Archangel Gabriel while Saint Thomas Aquinas comforts him with his left hand. The Virgin is seen in her role as "man's mediator for divine grace" and as the "instrument of the Incarnation (Santa Maria, ora pro nobis).  (Geiger)

Filippino Lippi's father, the famous painter Fra Filippo Lippi, painted The Annunciation in 1466 for Jacopo Bellucci.  Like his father, Filippino places the Virgin in the middle between the Archangel Gabriel and the patron.  Cardinal Carafa, however, is not segregated from the Virgin by a ballustrade.  There is more intimacy between the the religious figures and the patron.  This is somewhat unusual for Quattrocento paintings however this may show the influence the powerful Cardinal Carafa had in depicting himself as important.  The everyday objects depicted above the Virgin show her human activities and may allude to the late Quattrocento artists interests in Netherlandish still life.

As we look above The Annunciation we see Filippino Lippi's The Assumption.

Flanked by saints, Filippino Lippi depicts the Virgin in a central and frontal manner as she is pushed up by angels and surrounded by a mandorla of cherubims.  It is thought that Filippino was inspired by Sandro Botticelli's Punishment of Korah (1480) which we studied earlier in the semester.

The energetic, flowing figures in the foreground and the landscaped background set the scene in both paintings.  Filippino Lippi's The Assumption has a series of angels playing musical instruments.  The angels surround the Virgin with bursts of energy.  Their instruments are typical of those used in military bands at the time.  This alludes to Cardinal Carafa's successful naval campaigns that brought him such immense notoriety.

 In Saint Thomas Aquinas' Summa theologica, he states that in  the Rite of the Eucharist "the wine of the chalice signifies Christ's risen body, namely Christ Himself, and the Blessed Virgin, and the other saints...who are already in glory with their bodies."  This makes the Virgin's assumption an integral part of the theological theme of the chapel.

We see the Virgin is centered in the curve of the monumental, triumphal arch.  She is beneath the Cumaean Sibyl who sits over the keystone of the arch.  The apostles are below watching the glorious event.  The Virgin appears to be praying as three angels push her up to heaven.  She is glancing down toward Cardinal Carafa depicted in The Annunciation below.  There is billowing motion to the drapery and fluid motion of the figures.  The putti-filled cloud is very theatrical, a concept known to Filippino.  Visari, our seventeenth-century art critic, remarked, "Filippino had no equal in the talent and imagination he displayed in decorations for public festivals and masks."  (Geiger)

There are cherubs who peer from beneath the Virgin's cloak.  A series of stars form the Virgin's halo.  We have two groups of apostles awed by the events above.  The scene recedes towards a rolling landscape.

In the Carafa Chapel at Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Filippino Lippi beautifully lays out the thematic devotion to the Virgin of the Annunciation and to Saint Thomas Aquinas.  There is a visual and conceptual unity that provided a meditative environment for the Dominicans in Quattrocento Rome who prayed there.

Rona Goffen:Venus of Urbino

In 1863, Manet shocked and awed the world with Le Dejeuner Sur l'Herbe and Olympia.

Le Dejener Sur l'Herbe c1863

Olympia c1863

A naked woman reclines in a pose of continuous movement on a bed.  She is attended by servants.  She does not hide her breast but, rather, her right arm props her up to better display her nude physique.  She is looking right at us.  The gaze is not judgmental or submissive.  He gaze is engaging and inviting.   

What you may not realize, is that I am not speaking of Manet's Olympia.  I am describing a painting of  "shock and awe" painted over three hundred years earlier by the master Venetian painter, Titian.  It's his Venus of Urbino.

Venus of Urbino c1538

Titian was born around 1488 in the foothills of the Italian Alps.  He moved to Venice and joined the studio of Giovanni Bellini, the most famous painter of his generation.  He worked with the older Giorgione on a commission at the German merchants residence in Venice.  He later received a commission from the Paduan Friars for the high altar of S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari.

Assunta c1518

Titian dominated painting in Venice.  He influenced many other Venetian painters such as Tintoretto, Veronese, and Bassano and elsewhere with Velazquez and Rubens.  Titian's fame brought him life-long commissions from Charles V and Philip II of Spain, the early Hapsburg kings who followed the reconquista and reigned during the Counter-Reformation.  These courtly commissions were likened to Alexander the Great's court commissions to Appelles.  Titian was called Apelles redivivus, Apelles reborn.

Titian's Venetian patrons preferred sacred works like Assunta.  His wide-range of patrons outside Venice, however, were interested in secular pieces which Titian described as poesie, or poems.  These works almost always included beautiful woman and had a theme of love.  With the Venus of Urbino, there is no reference to a classical or allegorical story.  We have a reclining, awake, nude woman with two servants.  She is not shy and is "beholding the beholder" (Goffen) with her sublime gaze.  The colorito (exploiting color and light to unite a composition) combines complementary colors (red and green) with white and the sensuous flesh tones of the nudes underlies Titan's concept of the beautiful woman.  The composition is asymmetrical.  The small-rendered background is cut off by the bolder, larger foreground forms.  The bed is in disarray, suggesting that our beautiful Venus is in a post-lovemaking haze.  There is a tension between art and nature in the depiction of flowers on both the cushions of the bed and real flower falling from her right hand.

Was Titian mysogynistic?  Did he have a choice since this was a centuries-old accepted view of woman?  Was his rendering of our beautifully sublime Venus influenced by the writer Aretino who describes his fictional prostitutes as "exploiters and manipulators of men"?  Is this pornography (porne meaning "whore" in Greek)?

In 1510, Titian completed Giorgione's Sleeping Venus.  We see so many similarities that we must believe Titan's concept of a beautiful woman was begun 30 years earlier to his creation of the Venus of Urbino.

Sleeping Venus c1510

Venus of Urbino c1538

The Lunette at Carafa

Beneath the Hellespontine Sibyl in the Carafa Chapel in Rome, on the west side, Fillipino Lippi has painted a miracle of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the patron saint whose feast day is celebrated in the chapel.  "When god works miracles, He does supernatural wonders above the common order, raising the minds of some living in the flesh beyond the use of sense even up to the visions of His own essence," wrote Saint Thomas.  So, was the miracle depicted by Fillipino Lippi that of the Miracle of Chastity or the Miracle of the Speaking Cross?  Much argument has been written on the subject.  Let's explore this and then view this beautiful, frescoed lunette.

Humanists categorized Saint Thomas Aquinas by his virtue and his learning.  In 1243, Thomas decided to live a life of chastity and became a Dominican friar.  His prominent family fiercely opposed this.  His domineering mother arranged for Thomas to be kidnapped and brought back to the family palace at Roccasecca.  For over 15 months the family tried to get Thomas to break his vows.  His brother brought in a prostitute, whom Thomas threw out.  (No, that's not the miracle.)  The miracle tells us that two angels appeared with a Girdle of Perpetual Chastity.  They placed it on Thomas.  The best known painting of this is by Bernardo Daddi.  We see the story clearly in his work.

In 1273, Thomas was engrossed in theological writings that were devoted to the Eucharist.  While praying in the monastery beneath a crucifix, the miracle tells us that the crucifix spoke to Thomas saying, " You have written well of me, Thomas.  What will you accept in gratitude?"  Thomas answered, "Nothing but Yourself, Lord."

Now, let's decide which of these miracles Fillipino Lippi, under the guidance of his patron, Cardinal Carafa, chose to portray.  We see Saint Thomas on the left kneeling beneath a cross with a very elaborate Christ.  There are two lilly-bearing angels at his side.  The lilies represent virginity and, therefore, chastity.  There are epigraphic elements to Fillipinos chapel frescoes however there is none in the lunette fresco.  Why would he omit the words spoken by God in the miracle?  There is a book on the floor beneath the crucifix.  Could this be the writings of Thomas about which God honored him with praise?

Let's take the popular view and say that this is the Miracle of Chastity and not the Miracle of the Speaking Cross.  With this approach, we can identify the other figures in the scene as family members in the Aquinas palace.  The two woman are the sister, Marotta,  and mother, Donna Theodora, of Saint Thomas Aquinas.  Donna Theodora is depicted with limited emphasis due to her negative role in the miracle.

The vibrant, swirling young man is Ruinaldo, the chief conspirator in the abduction.  Here we see evidence of Fillipinos access to Masaccios Tribute Money in Brancacci Chapel.

The youth entering from the loggia is the brother of Thomas, Landolfo, who helped in the abduction.

 Although his father, the Count Landolf, was deceased at the time of the miracle, we have to believe that the old man with the white beard is meant to represent him.  Or, could it just be a blatant reference to evil?  In the center of the painting is a child and dog.  This may reflect back to the infant Hercules struggling with a snake, symbolizing virtue overcoming vice.

The child and the dog seem to link the left side of the painting (Thomas and the angels) with the right side of the painting (the frenzied, conspiring Aquinas family).

Fillipino Lippis basic, meditative narrative transports us into a dramatic, colorful experience of  visual contrasts as the tension lures us from the right and we focus on Thomas.

The Sibyls at Carafa

"Filippino made the grandest work in Rome for the Neopolitan Cardinal, Oliviero Carafa, at the warm request of Lorenzo de' Medici, his friend."  -Visari 1568

Cardinal Carafa selected a chapel that already existed in Santa Maria sopra Minerva and enlarged it.  The chapel had significant importance in the celebration of the feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas.  When he commissioned Filippino Lippi (1488), the artist was already under commission to Filippo Strozzi in Florence (we will visit that chapel next week).  Strozzi did not oppose putting his project on hold as Carafa held significant prestige and power among the Dominican churches as it's Cardinal Protector.  At this time, we see Masolino, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Rosselli, and others all working on paintings in chapels.

The Carafa Chapel is dedicated to the Virgin and Saint Thomas.  The first figures painted were on the main vault and are four sibyls, seers of the ancient world.  The vault was painted sotto in su (from below) perspective.  Sibyls play a prominent role in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans, which Cardinal Carafa and his Humanist friends knew well.  The sibyls' prediction of Christ's birth link them to the Annunciation (the Virgin) and to man's knowledge of God (a theme of Saint Thomas Aquinas).  The sibyls were symbols of wisdom and knowledge.  They are seen in the Carafa Chapel holding cartouches with Saint Thomas Aquinas statements.

In the center of the vault is the coat of arms for the Carafa family.

Lippi's four sibyls include the Cumacan Sibyl, the Tiburtine Sibyl, the Delphic Sibyl, and the Hellespontine Sibyl (unattributed artist).  Filippino Lippi's new sibyl style has been attributed to the Pollaiuolo brother's innovations of their reclining ten Arts and Sciences bronze figures on the sides of the tomb of Sixtus IV. Filippino Lippi used ancient Roman models (figures from classical sources) and rotates them from left to right with the torso at various angles to the hips.  The arms are in a variety of poses, the legs are bent, and they are very gestural.  There is a strong sense of unity throughout.

Panel from Tomb of Sixtus IV

Close-up of the Four Sibyls at Carafa:

The Delphic Sibyl (Apollo's oracle) who prophesied the Trojan War.

The Cumean Sibyl who points up towards the divine origin of Christ's incarnation.

The Tiburtine Sibyl refers to Rome.

The Hellespontine Sibyl's prophecy foretells Christ's birth of a virgin.

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.