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Longing for the lost: ekphrasis, rivalry, and the figuration of notional artworks in Italian Renaissance painting

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02666286.2011.555087

1943-2178

Jodi Cranston,

Aesthetic Perception and Analysis

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 – Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 109–12. 2 – John Hollander, ‘The poetics of ekphrasis.’ Word & Image 4/1 (Winter 1988), pp. 209–19, first characterized the description of a nonexistent artwork as a ‘notional ekphrasis,’ and further discussed the concept in his later book, The Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also James A.W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 91. Robert W. Hanning notes in his review of David Cast, The Calumny of Apelles: A Study in the Humanist Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) [in Art Bulletin 67/4 (December 1985), p. 691] that ekphrases of imagined works of art ‘always contain a dimension either of the paragone or a self-conscious reference to the fiction that frames the example.' Some critics consider all ekphrases to be notional: W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 157, no. 19; Valentine Cunningham, ‘Why ekphrasis?,’ Classical Philology 102/1 (January 2007), pp. 57–71. The bibliography on ekphrasis has swelled in recent years as scholars grapple with not only the various definitions of the term, but also its narrative properties and relationship to discursive time. The following list of recent studies, by no means comprehensive, includes studies not cited specifically in this essay but that were nonetheless important for my thinking: Don Fowler, ‘Even better than the real thing: a tale of two cities,’ in Art and Text in Roman Culture, ed. Jas Elsner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 57–74; Raymond A. Macdonald, ‘Ekphrasis, paradigm shift, and revisionism in art history,’ Res 24/3 (Autumn 1993), pp. 112–23; Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Grant F. Scott, ‘The rhetoric of dilation: Ekphrasis and ideology,’ Word & Image 7/4 (1991), pp. 301–10; Bryan Wolf, ‘Confessions of a closet ekphrastic: literature, painting, and other unnatural relations,’ Yale Journal of Criticism 3/2 (Spring 1990), pp. 181–94. Fundamental for a consideration of ekphrasis in Renaissance art history is the article by Svetlana Leontief Alpers, ‘Ekphrasis and aesthetic attitudes in Vasari's Lives,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (1960), pp. 190–215, even though the designation of the descriptions in Vasari's Lives as ekphrases is debatable. 3 – Richard Förster offered some of the earliest scholarly considerations of ancient ekphrasis in the Renaissance. For his bibliography, consult a more recent contribution to the subject: Michaela J. Marek, Ekphrasis und Herrscherallegorie: antike Bildbeschreibungen im Werk Tizians und Leonardos (Worms: Werner'sche Verlagsgesellschat, 1985), p. 142. Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), p. 31, notes how modern archeologists treat ekphrases as informational sources about ‘lost’ monuments. On the importance of the recovery of the ‘correct’ original for literary historians, see Sean Gurd, ‘On text-critical melancholy,’ Representations 88/3 (Autumn 2004), pp. 81–101. 4 – Marek, Ekphrasis und Herscherallegorie, pp. 156–58. Thomas M. Greene refers to this as the ‘potential paralysis of pieties’ in Renaissance imitation. See his foundational discussion in The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 30–31. Philipp P. Fehl (review of Cast, The Calumny of Apelles [in Renaissance Quarterly 36/2 (Summer 1983), pp. 239–43]) asserts that ekphrasis limited the invention in Renaissance painting. 5 – In the preface to the third part of his Lives, Giorgio Vasari compared the perfection of the paintings by Raphael to that in the works by Apelles and Zeuxis, adding ‘nay, even more (perfect), if we may be so bold to say it, as might be proved if we could compare their works to his.’ Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, trans. Gaston du C. de Vere, ed. Philip Jacks (New York: Random House, 2006), p. 224. 6 – Cast, Calumny of Apelles, pp. 29–68. 7 – The red chalk drawing in the Albertina is often attributed to Raphael, but might be a copy. See A.Y. Hayum, ‘A new dating for sodoma's frescoes in the Villa Farnesina,’ Art Bulletin 48 (1966), pp. 215–7, here p. 215. 8 – David Rosand, ‘Ekphrasis and the generation of images,’ Arion, Third Series, 1/1 (Winter 1990), pp. 61–105; Marek, Ekphrasis und Herrscherallegorie, pp. 1–37. 9 – Ruth Wedgwood Kennedy, ‘Apelles redivivus,’ in Essays in Memory of Karl Lehmann, ed. Lucy Freeman Sandler (Marsyas supplement, New York, 1964), pp. 160–70. 10 – Edgar Wind wrote, on the evocation of Apelles's ‘lost’ Venus Anadyomene by Botticelli's Birth of Venus, that ‘Botticelli's painting must be classed among those attempts at antiquarian revival by which the vision of a lost painting of antiquity is conjured up before the beholder’ (Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968), p. 132). I am suggesting in this essay that the operation is more complicated than a revival. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood characterize Botticelli's Calumny of Apelles as ‘a reinstatement of a lost original achieved through a process of reverse engineering from textual sources’ that exemplifies the ‘substitutional theory of image production’ (‘The Authors Reply,’ Art Bulletin 87/3 (September 2005), p. 430) framed by the authors in ‘Toward a new model of renaissance anachronism,’ Art Bulletin 87/3 (September 2005), pp. 403–15. Although their work does not deal directly with the phenomenon of ‘reverse engineering'as I consider it in my essay, their essay, and subsequent book, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), nonetheless offers an important framework for considering the complex interplay between chronologies and authorship in the Renaissance that affect the conception of the ‘lost’ artworks considered presently. 11 – Adrian Rifkin characterizes ekphrasis as a ‘figure that straddles mourning and melancholy,’ in ‘Addressing ekphrasis: A prolegomenon to the next,’ Classical Philology 102/1 (January 2007), pp. 72–82. 12 – The recent books on the subject include: Rona Goffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Frederick Ilchman, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, exh. cat. (Boston: MFA, 2009). 13 – For the role of rivalry in Vasari's Lives, see James Clifton, ‘Vasari on Competition,’ The Sixteenth-Century Journal 27/1 (Spring 1996), pp. 23–41. 14 – For the misperception of formalism and context (whether social, political, etc.) as incompatible methods, see Yve Alain-Bois's critique of the (idealist) formalism practiced by Clement Greenberg, ‘Whose formalism?,’ Art Bulletin 78/1 (March 1996), pp. 9–12. 15 – Tamar Yacobi, ‘Pictorial models and narrative ekphrasis,’ Poetics Today 16/4 (Winter 1995), p. 610. 16 – Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press (2nd ed.), 2006), pp. 139–66, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (1st ed.), 2002); Diana Shaffer, ‘Ekphrasis and the rhetoric of viewing in Philostratus’ imaginary museum,’ Philosophy and Rhetoric 31/4 (Winter 1998), pp. 303–16. 17 – The description of the ‘Cupids’ continues: ‘But listen carefully, for along with my description of the garden the fragrance of the apples will come to you’ (Imagines, trans. Arthur Fairbanks (London and Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1931), pp. 21–29). 18 – Mitchell, Picture Theory, p. 157. 19 – For this literary tradition, see Leonardo da Vinci, Paragone: A Comparison of the Arts, trans. Irma A. Richter (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1949); Claire J. Farago, Leonardo da Vinci's Paragone: A Critical Interpretation with a New Interpretation of the Text in the Codex Urbinas (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1992). 20 – Junius's text has been given an English translation by Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl, and Maria Raina Fehl, eds, The Literature of Classical Art. Vol. 1. The Painting of the Ancients (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991). On the letter specifically, see Jeffrey M. Muller, ‘Rubens's theory and practice of the imitation of art,’ Art Bulletin 64/2 (June 1982), p. 19; Elizabeth McGrath, ‘The painted decoration of Rubens's house,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 41 (1978), pp. 245–77; Rosand, ‘Ekphrasis and the generation of images,’ pp. 96–7. 21 – Franciscus Junius, The Painting of the Ancients, pp. 325–29. For a slightly different translation, see Ruth Saunders Magurn, trans., The Letters of Peter Paul Rubens (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955), p. 241. 22 – Ovid, Metamorphoses X. 1–85; Virgil, Georgics IV. 453–527; On Orpheus as a poetic figure of loss, see the title essay in Maurice Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis, ed. P. Adams Sitney (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1981). For the necromantic metaphor in discussions of imitation, see Greene, The Light in Troy, pp. 32–33. 23 – Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Penguin, 1991), ¶26, p. 61. The bibliography on Alberti's Narcissus is extensive. Among the more relevant studies for the scope of this essay, see Gerhard Wolf, ‘ “Arte superficiem illam fontis amplecti”: Alberti und die Erfindung der Malerei,’ in Diletto e maraviglia. Ausdruck und Wirkung in der italienischen Kunst von der Renaissance zum Barock, ed. Christine Gottler (Emsdetten: Edition Imorde, 1998), pp. 10–39; Cristelle Baskins, ‘Echoing Narcissus in Alberti's Della Pittura,’ Oxford Art Journal 16/1 (Winter 1993), pp. 25–33. For the use of Narcissus in later Renaissance art theory, see Norman E. Land, ‘Narcissus pictor,’ Source 16/2 (1997), pp. 10–15. 24 – Post-structuralist and psychoanalytic criticism have focused on the idea of loss in representation. See Richard Stamelman, Lost Beyond Telling: Representations of Death and Absence in Modern French Poetry (Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 1990); Peter Schwenger, The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). For the idea of loss in visual representation and the discipline of art history, see Michael Ann Holly, ‘Mourning and method,’ Art Bulletin 84/4 (December 2002), pp. 660–69. 25 – Alberti, On Painting, ¶25, p. 60. 26 – On ekphrasis and the Renaissance education in rhetoric, see Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350–1450 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 78–96. 27 – Italics mine. Alberti, On Painting, ¶53, p. 88. See also Rosand, ‘Ekphrasis and the generation of images,’ pp. 62–4. 28 – Dominick La Capra, ‘Trauma, absence, loss,’ Critical Inquiry 25/4 (Summer 1999), pp. 696–727, here pp. 701–02. One could characterize Vasari's approach to history in his Lives through this conflation of absence and loss, especially his repeated insistence that artistic techniques and methods were ‘lost’ but not dead. See, for example, the preface to the Lives and also the scattered references in the ‘Life of Giotto’ (p. 53) and the ‘Life of Brunelleschi’ (p. 107). 29 – Vasari begins his Lives with the recognition of the loss of artists and artworks over time (p. 15) and also mentions the destruction and misplacement of many artworks, including portraits of popes in old St. Peter's (Bramante, p. 259), a model by Ghiberti for the Baptistery doors lost by descendants (p. 93), a model by Brunelleschi for the cupola of the Duomo in Florence lost by the Office of Works (p. 129), distemper panels by Masaccio that suffered damage (p. 101), among others. 30 – La Capra, ‘Trauma, absence, loss,’ pp. 707–08. 31 – ‘….Ella è espressa cosi bene, che potrebbe venire in dubbio, se Rafaello l'havesse tolta da libri di Luciano; o Luciano dalle Pitture di Rafaello: se non fosse, che Luciano nacque piu secoli avanti. Ma che è perciò? Anco Virgilio discrisse il suo Laocoonte tale, quale l'haveva prima veduto nella statua di mano de i tre artefici Rhodiani: laquale con istupor di tutti hoggidì ancora si vede in Roma. Et è iscambievole, che i Pittori cavino spesso le loro inventioni da i Poeti, & i Poeti da i Pittori. Il simile vi potrei dire della sua Galathea, che contende con la bella Poesia del Policiano, e di molte altre sue leggiadrissime fantasie … ’ (Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo della pittura in Dolce's ‘Aretino’ and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, trans. Mark W. Roskill (New York: New York University Press, 1968), pp. 168–69). Roskill (pp. 307–08) also speculates on Dolce's ownership of Raphael's cartoon and its whereabouts. 32 – On literary imitation and anachronism, see Greene, The Light in Troy, pp. 28–53. A. Kibédi Varga, ‘Criteria for describing word-and-image relations,’ Poetics Today 10/1 (Spring 1989), pp. 31–53, attends to how the sequence in image/text relations depends on a position of production or of reception. 33 – Barkan, Unearthing the Past, p. 4, notes Dolce's use of the term ‘cavare’ in a larger discussion of exchange between an ancient artwork and ancient discourses that refer to the rediscovered object. 34 – Nagel and Wood, ‘Toward a New Model,’ pp. 404–8. Paula Findlen discusses this substitutional logic in the context of Renaissance collecting in ‘Possessing the past: the material world of the Italian Renaissance,’ The American Historical Review 103/1 (February 1998), pp. 83–114. 35 – Rosand, ‘Ekphrasis and the generation of images,’ pp. 69–70; James A.W. Heffernan, ‘Alberti on Apelles: Word and image in De Pictura,’ International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2/3 (Winter 1996), pp. 345–59. 36 – Lucian, ‘On not believing rashly in slander,’ in Lucian of Samosata from the Greek, trans. W. Tooke, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1820), vol. 2, pp. 551–52. For Lucian in the fifteenth century, see David Marsh, Lucian and the Latins: Humor and Humanism in the Early Renaissance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). 37 – On the varied literary sources for the camerino pictures, see Rosand, ‘Ekphrasis and the generation of images,’ pp. 72, 89–91; Cecil Gould, The Studio of Alfonso d'Este and Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne (London: National Gallery, 1969). 38 – Rosand, ‘Ekphrasis and the Generation of Images,’ pp. 71–100. 39 – Maria Loh, Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), pp. 61–84; Bacchanals by Titian and Rubens: Papers given at a Symposium in Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, March 18–19, 1987, ed. Görel Cavalli-Björkman (Stockholm: National Museum, 1987); Marek, Ekphrasis und Herrscherallegorie, pp. 38–73; Cast, The Calumny of Apelles. 40 – John Walker, Bellini and Titian at Ferrara: A Study of Styles and Taste (London: Phaidon Press, 1956), pp. 105–21; Loh, Titian Remade, pp. 64–65. 41 – Stephen J. Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros. Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella D'Este (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 262. 42 – On the relationship between these female figures and the striding nympha-type identified by Aby Warburg in earlier Florentine paintings, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Ninfa moderna: Essai sur la drapé tombé (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). I am currently working on a longer study on the female figure and narrative painting in the early Cinquecento. 43 – ‘to go into comparison with many others’ (quoted in John Shearman, ‘Alfonso d'Este's camerino,’ in ‘Il se rendit en Italie’: Etudes offertes à André Chastel (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), pp. 209–29, here p. 216. 44 – David Bull, ‘The Restoration of Bellini's-Titian's Feast of the Gods,’ in Bacchanals by Titian and Rubens, pp. 9–16; and Dana Goodgal, ‘Titian repairs Bellini,’ in Bacchanals, pp. 17–24. See also Edgar Wind, Bellini's Feast of the Gods: A Study in Venetian Humanism (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1948). 45 – Louisa C. Matthews, ‘The painter's presence: Signatures in Venetian Renaissance pictures,’ Art Bulletin 80/4 (December 1998), pp. 616–48. 46 – Jodi Cranston, The Muddied Mirror: Materiality and Figuration in Titian's Later Paintings (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), pp. 61–66. 47 – Paolo Pino, Dialogo di pittura, ed. Rodolfo Pallucchini and Anna Pallucchini (Venice: Edizioni D. Guarnati, 1946), pp. 139–40. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. Paola Barocchi, 5 vols (Florence: Sansoni, 1966–2002), vol. 3, p. 46) mentions the painting in his 1568 edition only. 48 – Goffen, Renaissance Rivals, pp. 61–64, raises the possibility that Giorgione's painting was only a theoretical invention, but finds confirmation of its existence through cinquecento paintings, such as Savoldo's Portrait of a Man in Armor, also known as the so-called Gaston de Foix (Louvre, Paris), which seem to have been influenced by Giorgione's ‘lost work.’ Jaynie Anderson, Giorgione: The Painter of ‘Poetic Brevity (Paris and New York: Flammarion, 1997), p. 66, considers the two different accounts by Vasari and Pino to reflect an actual painting. Mary Pardo questions this view in ‘Paolo Pino's ‘ “Dialogo di pittura”: A Translation with Commentary,’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1984, p. 265. Farago, Paragone, p. 21, notes that the paragone tradition rarely includes specific mention of actual artworks. 49 – Michael Baxandall, ‘Bartholomaeus Facius on painting. A fifteenth-century manuscript of the De Viris Illustribus,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964), pp. 90–107. On the picture itself and its possible correspondence to a copy of a painting by Willem van Haecht of The Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest (Antwerp) and a picture in the Fogg Art Museum (Cambridge, MA), see Peter Schabacker and Elizabeth Jones, ‘Jan van Eyck's Woman at Her Toilet: Proposals concerning its subject and context,’ Fogg Art Museum Annual Report no. 1974/1976 (1974–1976), pp. 56–78; Julius Held, ‘Artis pictoriae amator,’ in Rubens and His Circle (Princeton, 1982), pp. 43–51; Rudolf Preimesberger, ‘Zu Jan van Eycks Diptychon der Sammlung Thyssen-Bornemisza,’ Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 54 (1991), pp. 459–89. 50 – In an informal and unscientific search in journal databases, I found that nearly all of the journal articles written on the topic of ‘lost’ pictures that had been found in the twentieth century were published between 1920 and 1940, or in years that coincided with the rise of connoisseurship and an expanding art market. 51 – Michael Ann Holly, ‘The melancholy art,’ Art Bulletin 89/1 (March 2007), pp. 7–17. 52 – Michael Ann Holly, ‘Cultural history, connoisseurship, and melancholy,’ in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Allen J. Grieco, Michael Rocke, and Fiorella Giofreddi Superbi (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2002), pp. 195–206, here, p. 200.