‘Know Thyself’: Daniele da Volterra’s Contested Subject
2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1467-8365.2012.00900.x
ISSN1467-8365
Autores Tópico(s)Visual Culture and Art Theory
ResumoDetail from Daniele da Volterra, Assumption of the Virgin, c. 1553–58 (plate 8). When Parmigianino was in Rome before the sack in 1527, it was said of him that Raphael’s soul had entered his body.1 The rumour flourished, so Giorgio Vasari tells us, because the young artist appeared to follow the older one not only in his art but also in his habits, which, like Raphael’s, were gentle and gracious. From Giulio Romano to Taddeo Zuccaro, socially ambitious artists would emulate Raphael as the perfect artist-courtier. Such imitations of Raphael, both branching artistic matters and ideals of comportment, were universally praised. The situation was different, however, when Michelangelo was the chosen model as will be seen below. From the mid-1540s onwards the overriding concern of Daniele Ricciarelli, also known as da Volterra, was to appear as Michelangelo’s elect follower, artistic inheritor, and eventually as the one surpassing him. The present study examines how that came across in his portraits – to Daniele a particularly self-reflexive genre – and three Roman chapel decorations, in which he engaged with Michelangelo’s volatile reputation as a painter of New Testament history. The construction of artistic persona that emerges from Daniele’s oeuvre has been obscured by two factors. One is Vasari’s particularly damaging account of the artist, the other a scholarly approach dominated by notions of influence. Writings on imitation in Italian Mannerist painting largely operate with influence as a critical category, despite the fact that Michael Baxandall among others noticed that it takes agency away from the artist by presupposing that the imitator is always a semi-passive recipient of someone else’s force or authority.2 Influence as an analytical tool, in other words, cannot come to terms with the discursive and even polemical nature of imitation. The most benign ruler of heavens turned mercifully his gaze down towards earth and saw the futile infinity of efforts, the most ardent but fruitless studies, and the presumptuous opinions of men who were farther from the truth than night is from day. He decided to save us from our errors by sending a soul to earth who would be skilful in every art and profession, and who would show wherein lies the difficulty of the science of lines and painting, of the judgment of sculpture, and of truly pleasing architecture. God also wanted to give him knowledge of true moral philosophy with the ornament of sweet poetry so that the world would admire and choose him for their singular mirror of life, work, good habits and all other actions. Hence we deem him to be more of heaven than of earth.3 In light of such artist-hagiography it comes as a surprise when Vasari eighteen years later in the ‘Life’ of Raphael warned against a one-sided imitation of Michelangelo for painterly style. Describing Raphael’s development through the emulation of different artists, the last being Michelangelo, Vasari wrote that Raphael realized he could not surpass the older artist with respect to the human figure but was content with the fact that he excelled in so many other ways. And if many artists of our time had done like Raphael instead of only studying Michelangelo and not be able to add to what was perfect, they would not have laboured in vain by making a maniera that was very hard and full of difficulty without charm, good colouring, and of poor invention. Instead they could have aimed for universality by imitating other parts, and they would have benefitted themselves and the world.4 This was not Vasari giving in to Counter-Reformation criticism of Michelangelo, nor had he come to set Raphael above him. His aim was strictly at those who took Michelangelo for their only model and were doomed to failure because of his insurmountable greatness. It seems that Michelangelo had become a kind of taboo for single model imitation, exactly because it formulated in a powerful way a singular and privileged relationship to a predecessor.5 In the narratives of Vasari and Ascanio Condivi his excellence, unlike that of Raphael, was strangely independent of the works of his predecessors and contemporaries (which of course it was not), as if this inimitable guiding light of future generations of artists had come into the world like Athena from Zeus’s forehead.6 The biographers made clear that no late-coming artist could hope for a similar destiny since there could be just one saviour of the arts of disegno, foreclosing the possibility of a second Michelangelo. Not only did Daniele da Volterra pose as Michelangelo’s second self, but throughout their long friendship the older artist repeatedly lent or gave Daniele drawings and used his influence to gain prestigious commissions for him.7 This was discomfiting not only to Vasari but also aroused the professional envy of Guglielmo della Porta, and each in their writings would seek to degrade Daniele’s reputation to posterity. When Michelangelo arranged that the commission from Queen Dowager Catherine de’ Medici was passed on to Daniele for a bronze equestrian monument to the late Henry II to be sent to France, the enraged Della Porta composed a Discourse against Daniele the painter who wrongly took it upon himself to be considered of the profession of sculptor and caster.8 Rehearsing arguments against Daniele’s ability to succeed in a profession, in which he had not worked before, he compared the painter’s ambition to an Ovidian metamorphosis, ‘and Ovid, who made these, is dead’. Importantly, the vengeful sculptor also mentioned Daniele’s wish that it be said of him that he would be taking Michelangelo’s place.9 Unlike Della Porta’s attack, which remained in manuscript form, Vasari’s ‘Life’ of Ricciarelli, published two years after his death, remains the single most important source for the artist. Describing Daniele’s early training, the writer thought he had first worked for Sodoma and then for Baldassare Peruzzi. But for all that, to tell the truth, he for the time being did not make great results. And this, because when he made efforts and studies, pushed by a strong will and trying to improve his skills, he on the contrary was little served by his talent and hand. Whence in his first works that he executed in Volterra one recognizes enormous and almost infinite labours but neither a beautiful and great style, nor charm, nor grace, nor invention, as it is seen early on in many others who are born to be painters. They have shown also in their first beginnings facility, energy, and knowledge of a good style. Rather, the first works by him show themselves to have been truly executed by a melancholic, being full of effort and conducted with much patience over long periods of time.10 What matters here is not whether one agrees or not that Daniele’s early works did not show much promise, to which the Sodoma-like fresco of Justice in Volterra lends some credence.11 With that introduction, the repeated references to Daniele’s slow working method and melancholy disposition reminded the reader that he was not among the elect born to practice the arts of disegno. The generous praise that Vasari also lavished on Ricciarelli, whom he even described as his friend, was therefore modified to say the least, and whatever claims the artist might have made for a spiritual harmony between him and Michelangelo were put to rest. The extent to which Vasari’s account of the artist until recently has been taken for a fair assessment speaks of his success in damaging the reputation of a competitor.12 Recognizing the attack behind the narrative makes it possible to approach other historical assessments of the artist’s production. Condivi’s and Vasari’s eulogies of Michelangelo countered a critical discourse against him as a painter of religious subjects that had flourished since the unveiling of the Sistine Last Judgment in 1541. His detractors accused him of having set his art above the sacred truth it should have served, effectively making an idol out of his art. Art-historical surveys of Roman Cinquecento painting have rightly noticed how the critique of Michelangelo towards the end of the century resulted in Raphael being set forth instead as the ideal to follow.13 There were, however, painters who despite the onslaught of Counter-Reformation criticism insisted on Michelangelo’s exemplarity to Christian art, and in their works imitation played the part of a defence. Daniele da Volterra introduced this kind of polemical imitation.14 His role as defender of Michelangelo culminated at the end of his life when he executed the first campaign of censoring additions to the apocalyptic fresco under Pius IV, thereby saving it from total destruction.15 The commission from Elena Orsini for her chapel in Trinità dei Monti marked a turning point for Ricciarelli. It was here that he introduced a maniera which primarily and demonstratively evoked Michelangelo in contrast to his previous independent work. In the painted frieze from the end of the 1530s with scenes from the life of Fabius Maximus in Palazzo Massimo alle Colonne, Daniele with respect to figural sources and stylistic motifs did not set Michelangelo above Raphael, Perino del Vaga, Francesco Salviati, and Domenico Beccafumi. Of the chapel in the church of the Minim friars, only the detached fresco with the Deposition has survived (plate 1). This formerly ‘dispossessed ghost’ has recently been transformed with a debatable restoration.16 Around 1545 Elena Orsini changed the dedication of the chapel to the True Cross, the eponymous saint of the patron.17 The relic, to which the chapel was dedicated, figured prominently on the altar wall, though the subject with the lowering of Christ’s body also accommodated the preferences for Eucharistic imagery above the altar characteristic of the age of Catholic Reform.18 The decorations included Michelangelesque sibyls, and at the entrance stood on the left St Francis of Paola, the founder of the Order of the Minims, and on the other side St Jerome. Between them and the base were two gesso reliefs, which pictured programmatically and in allegorical form Daniele’s artistic poetics (plate 2 and plate 3). Daniele da Volterra, Deposition, c. 1545–47. Detached fresco transferred to canvas, 360 × 280 cm. Rome: Trinità dei Monti. Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY. Anonymous, Michelangelo, Sebastiano del Piombo, and an allegorical figure standing inside the Orsini Chapel, late sixteenth century. Black chalk and brown wash on paper, 28.3 × 21.3 cm. Rome: Biblioteca Angelica (MS 1564, f. 287v (originally numbered as 288v)). Photo: On Concession from the Ministry for Arts and Culture. Anonymous, Satyrs picking limbs from the altarpiece in the Orsini Chapel to measure them, late sixteenth century. Pencil or black chalk on paper, 28 × 41 cm. Rome: Biblioteca Angelica (MS 1564, ff. 285v-286r (originally numbered as ff. 286v-287r)). Photo: On Concession from the Ministry for Arts and Culture. Writing at the beginning of the eighteenth century, François Raguenet perceived that the Deposition was organized so that the altar table corresponded with the ground level of Mount Calvary, leaving only the sky as the background for the cross.19 Monumental figures in the close foreground enact the tragedy with great pathos. Their arrangement against the empty sky, the dramatic action, and the powerful sense of movement and presence evoke the Sistine Last Judgment (plate 4). The ‘beautiful and difficult foreshortenings’ of the Deposition, described by Vasari, created further ties to the Vatican fresco.20 Considering how strongly Daniele’s fresco gestured towards the Sistine Last Judgment and the controversy which that fresco had sparked, the Deposition amounted to a defence of the master on whom Daniele had founded his new maniera. The criticism levelled against the Last Judgment is too familiar to be rehearsed in detail, but in short it pertained to the pervasive nudity, the compositional complexity said to run the risk of confusing the ignorant, the ambiguity and unorthodox representation of individual figures including the beardless Christ, and the mixing of genres: to biblical history Michelangelo had added poetic fictions including allegories of the Deadly Sins and Charon transporting the dead souls.21 The most detailed attack on the work came in Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano’s dialogue of 1564. To his long list of objections came the weather: draperies were blowing even though winds would cease to exist on the last day.22 Daniele’s judicious response to the Sistine fresco does not court controversy. As in the Last Judgment fabrics billow since stormy weather was deemed appropriate at the darkest hour of Christian history. Flesh is only displayed in the muscular male figures (in the sixteenth century in sacred settings always less controversial than unclothed females and youths), and their state of undress is motivated by functions and identity. The women’s bodies are covered carefully in majestic draperies recalling ancient statuary, and Christ has grown a beard. Michelangelo, Last Judgment, 1537–41. Fresco. Vatican: Sistine Chapel. Photo: © Vatican Museums. Daniele da Volterra had the Virgin Mary lie flat on her back with separated legs in the direction of the cross. Her swoon remained controversial in the sixteenth century on theological grounds, since she was thought to understand the mystical meaning of the sacrifice, precluding her emotional and physical disarray.23 The commonplace of the pictorial motif in art was tied to another theological argument, that of Mary’s compassion – hence her death-like state – and by extension her status of co-redemptrix in a strongly ecclesiological argument. Mary’s spasimo at the cross in later medieval art typically showed her standing, supported at the chest by one of the attending Marys acting like a midwife, and it has been argued that it was metaphoric of childbirth. The idea had theological support, exemplified by St Bonaventure among others: ‘Mary suffered no pains in giving birth to Christ, for she did not conceive out of sin like Eve, who was cursed; but now, under the cross she gives birth in pain.’ About Mary at the cross he also stated that ‘the whole body of Christians has been brought forth from the womb of the glorious Virgin’.24 With reference to St Bonaventure, Leo Steinberg saw in Mary’s odd pose in the Deposition a symbol of her painful birthing.25 Because Daniele’s interpretation of the fainting Virgin was unprecedented it would have demanded special attention. One might think of it as an equivalent to the equally novel poetic embellishments with which Michelangelo adorned his New Testament narrative, but because the metaphor utilized in the Orsini Chapel had a long pre-history it did not run the risk of turning the artist into the introducer of unwanted novelties in Christian history. The Deposition is the first work that we know of in which the artist worked from a drawing by Michelangelo (plate 5). Considering how sought after these were and how jealously he guarded them, the rumour of their use by Daniele communicated their friendship.26 The fresco shared with Michelangelo’s drawing the density of sculptural bodies, the sense of heaviness of the dead Christ being lowered, the Virgin fallen to the ground in the left corner, and the women rushing towards her. The way in which Daniele utilized the drawing remained symptomatic throughout his career. Typically he developed a large-scale composition from a small sketch, as if a pensiero by Michelangelo had caught the fire of his friend’s imagination, resulting in monumental works of art. Such working procedures had the character of an exchange between kindred spirits, unlike Michelangelo’s collaborations with other painters. When Jacopo Pontormo painted the Venus in the Accademia in Florence after Michelangelo’s cartoon it reinforced a hierarchic understanding of disegno and colore, the latter playing the part of practise. Honouring Michelangelo, Pontormo served as his extended hand by materializing his disegno with paint.27 Michelangelo, Studies for a Deposition, c. 1523. Red chalk on paper, 27.2 × 19.1 cm. Haarlem: Teylers Museum. Photo: Teylers Museum, Haarlem, The Netherlands. But because paintings that are made in that way always have something hard and laboured about them, this work misses a certain delightful loveliness and ease. Therefore Daniele, admitting the fatigue that this work had cost him, and fearing the blame that he did receive, made below the feet of those two saints [Sts Francis of Paola and Jerome], to please himself [per suo capriccio] and as a sort of defence, two little scenes of stucco in low relief, in which he sought to show that even though he had worked slowly and with effort, his imitation of his friends Michelangelo Buonarroti and Fra Sebastiano del Piombo (whose precepts he observed) should be enough to defend him from the biting words of envious and malignant persons, whose evil nature is bound to be revealed, even though they may not think so. In one of these little scenes he made many satyrs that with a steelyard are weighing legs, arms, and other members of figures in order to put to the side those that are correct in weight and satisfactory, and to give those that are bad to Michelangelo and Fra Sebastiano, who are holding a conference over them. In the other scene Michelangelo is looking at himself in a mirror, the significance of which is very clear.28 If we are to believe Vasari, then Daniele knew that his work was lacking in grace as a result of his melancholic deficiency that resulted in an unnecessarily prolonged working process (Vasari mentioned seven years), and he therefore decided to defend it against his critics. This was obviously part of the writer’s poorly disguised polemics. If the artist downplayed a particular kind of pictorial grace, which figured abundantly in his work in stucco from the 1540s in the Farnese Palace and the Sala Regia, then it must have been motivated by the desire to add gravitas to the solemn subject matter. Decorum, in other words, decided painterly style. Because the allegories on the dados contained Greek inscriptions, a language which Daniele almost certainly did not know, the inventions must have been conceived in collaboration with a humanist (see plate 2 and plate 3). Vasari stated that apart from the affection lavished on him by Cardinal Alessandro, the Farnese courtier Annibale Caro also favoured him.29 If the allegorical reliefs in the Orsini Chapel were produced towards the end of work on the chapel, as suggested in the Vite, then Caro becomes a likely candidate for Daniele’s collaborator. Vasari confused the two scenes, known from copies in a late sixteenth-century manuscript.30 The Vite none the less helps to identify details of the sketchy drawings. Each relief showed actions taking place inside the chapel itself, seen from two different angles. In the left a standing female figure draped all’antica is holding a pair of scales in her left hand, and the context suggests that she is giudizio.31 Michelangelo, who is standing with his back turned and wearing a hat, is holding a mirror in front of him reflecting his face. The man on the right is likely Sebastiano del Piombo in a friar’s robe, and he is holding up in front of him what looks like a large compass.32 From top to bottom are three Greek inscriptions, of which the first and last are continuous. Based on the wording on a statue of Nemesis with a source in the Greek Anthology, they read: ‘My advice to all is that nothing is beyond measure’ ().33 This is a variation on a famous sentence written on the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Above Michelangelo can be read the dictum ‘Know thyself’ (), which also originated from the temple in Delphi. Erasmus included the dictum in his Adagia as one of the sayings of the Seven Sages, and accompanied by a mirror it also appeared in Andrea Alciati’s Emblematum Liber.34 Plato identified the saying with Socrates, who in the Phaedrus exclaims: ‘I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself.’35 The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, then available in Italian translation, described how Socrates recommended young men to contemplate their features in a mirror that they might perfect themselves in accordance with their outer beauty, or compensate for the lack thereof through virtuous accomplishments.36 Considering that Michelangelo at the centre performs the symbolic act of self-knowledge, it is he who plays the part of a modern Socrates. The linkage between Socrates and Michelangelo reappeared in Condivi’s biography of 1553. He described Michelangelo’s frugality with respect to eat and drink, his sexual abstinence, and his disregard for worldly goods and personal appearance. Diogenes Laertius told how Socrates wore the same cape all year round, and Michelangelo, this being confirmed by both Vasari and Condivi, had the habit in his older days of sleeping in his boots over long periods of time with the result that skin peeled off his legs ‘like a snake’s’ when he finally undressed.37 The inscriptions once on the temple of Apollo are now engraved inside the Christian church, making the Orsini Chapel a place for philosophical contemplation. Daniele’s art leads to knowledge of one’s self (or at least to that of the artist).38 Pietro Aretino in a letter published in 1539 is an example of a contemporary writer who connected artistic judgment, a quality commonly thought to be inborn, with philosophical self-knowledge. ‘The one who does not have judgment does not know himself, and the one who does not know himself is not known by others, and who is not known by others annihilates his existence.’39 The presence of Sebastiano in the relief tied into a saying later identified with Michelangelo.40 In Vasari’s letter to Martino Bassi, included in the architect’s malicious attack on Pellegrino Tibaldi of 1570, the Tuscan reframed a point already made in the Vite: Whence the great Michelangelo said that it was necessary to have the compasses in the eyes and not in the hand, that is, to have judgment; and for this reason he sometimes made his figures of 12 or 13 heads, according as they made groups sitting or standing and according to attitude; and so with columns and members and other components, he always went after grazia rather than misura.41 In the drawing after the relief the Venetian is holding the compasses precisely at eye level. Considering that he is interacting with Michelangelo and an allegory of Judgment inside the Orsini Chapel, his non-utilitarian handling of the tool makes it metaphoric of ‘compasses in the eyes’. Nothing is beyond measure, but true judgment cannot be reduced to a question of numbers or mechanically measured entities. One is here reminded of Vasari’s somewhat paradoxical formulation of a non so che of la terza maniera, which had a licence within rule which was not part of that rule and yet was ordered by it, and a right judgment of measurements producing a grace which exceeded measurements.42 The image of Michelangelo gazing at a mirror while conversing with Sebastiano, ‘compasses in his eyes’, together with the personification of Judgment inside the Orsini Chapel may be read in the following way: knowledge of ideal measurements, the source of artistic perfection, is buried within the artist’s soul, to be known through the understanding of one’s self. In Michelangelo’s mirror Daniele da Volterra has found his true self and ideal art, as if these were two sides of the same coin. His style approaches that of Michelangelo because his inborn judgment is shaped in ways similar to that of the Florentine. This natural propensity has led him to study Michelangelo, whose works he systematically copied,43 and a spiritual concordance has brought them together in friendship. The relief announced their amicable relationship to the world, emphasized by the probably posthumous portrait of Sebastiano (d. 21 June 1547), once Michelangelo’s friend and collaborator, which suggests that Daniele now held a place in the Florentine’s life comparable to that once held by Sebastiano. Daniele himself is absent from the allegorical relief: such disappearance was an act of reverence when confronted with Michelangelo in keeping with the imprint that Daniele’s works carried from the older artist. And yet the relief is open to a reverse reading. Standing inside a chapel space created by Daniele, it is Michelangelo who is reflected in Daniele’s art. The simultaneous self-effacement and self-aggrandisement on Daniele’s part can be seen as yet another expression of his imitation of Buonarroti, whose correspondence and poetry give the impression of a man deeply modest about his own abilities, an image elaborated upon by his biographers. And yet he endorsed Condivi to represent him as the unsurpassable culmination of art for all times to come. By elevating artistic judgment to Socratic self-recognition, Daniele produced one of the more ambitious claims for the nobility of painting during the Renaissance. The idealization of his profession becomes even clearer when the left allegory from the Orsini Chapel is compared to the stucco reliefs, which could be said to be its prototype. Raphael’s Vatican Loggia includes three images of artists and garzoni at work in reference to the making of the monument (plate 6).44 Daniele, on the other hand, repressed the physical labour involved in the production of art in favour of an allegorical and philosophical gathering taking place inside an already completed chapel. Raphael and Workshop, Artists at Work, 1518–19. Plaster. Vatican: Loggia. Photo: © Vatican Museums. Centred on the idea of judgment, the right relief stood as a contrapposto to the left.45 Satyrs have crawled up on the altar table and are picking limbs apart from the Deposition while others are weighing them. A Greek inscription above, ‘We laugh at life, but now life is really laughable’ () is a variation on an epigram by Palladas from the Greek Anthology, which reads ‘If we do not laugh at life the runaway, and Fortune the strumpet shifting with the current, we cause ourselves constant pain seeing the unworthy luckier than ourselves.’46 The relief can then be read as an admonition to laugh at the wreckage caused by the satyrs, or else things would be too painful. The satyrs play on the idea of satire, which can be read directed against both art and its critics. The plucking limbs apart subverted the famous story of Zeuxis and the maidens of Croton.47 It also parodied Michelangelo and Michelangelesque painting, considering its association with knowledge gained through dissections. More pertinently, the satyrs’ handling of the altar fresco enacted the doings of ignorant critics, mistaking judgment (and the story of Zeuxis) for definable rules to be applied to the individual parts of a work of art while ignoring its larger unity. Each limb of a figure is assessed in isolation and even weighed, whereby the work of art is destroyed. Here art is judged strictly according to misura, in contrast to those having the compasses in the eyes. Giovanni Battista Armenini in De’ veri precetti della pittura of 1587 may have been inspired by that relief when, in a section on Michelangelo’s sayings on art, he let Daniele da Volterra defend the works of Taddeo Zuccaro in Santa Maria della Consolazione against foolish critics, who only considered the different parts individually.48 Vasari would have it that the allegories were a much needed defence of Daniele’s art and working procedures, but what Daniele defended was rather Michelangelo and the Last Judgment.49 That the reliefs allegorize judgment makes a further allusion to the Sistine fresco, considering that it pictured the divine prototype of all judgments, including that involved in the making and contemplation of art.50 That point was made in the frontispiece to the 1550 edition of the Vite, showing the three arts of disegno resurrecting perfected bodies from the ground. In the aftermath of the sack of Rome, when Lutheran troops in Imperial service pillaged Roman churches, the image of the half-bestial satyrs amusing themselves on the altar table would have held special resonance. It is hinted that those condemning modern painting are comparable to the heretical iconoclasts. Daniele thereby subverted one of the attacks on Michelangelo flourishing in his day, because some even had accused the artist of having painted heresies in the pope’s chapel.51 In his next chapel commission Daniele again made claims for a deep spiritual and artistic accordance with the older artist (plate 7). Lucrezia della Rovere, the niece of Pope Julius II, received in 1548 the rights of patronage for the chapel in Trinità dei Monti on the right of the nave, exactly opposite that of Elena Orsini. Work on the frescoes lasted well into the second part of the 1550s after the patron’s death in 1552.52 As in the Orsini Chapel, the painter strove for an engaging and powerful sense of presence in imitation of Michelangelo, this time enhanced by devices connecting represented and real space, such as St Peter conversing with an apostle while both lean on a surface bordering the altar table (plate 8). The frescoed columns bracketing the altar wall seem to support both the architecture of the physical space and the fictive structure with the airborne Virgin at centre. Following the thread from the Orsini Chapel, Daniele in the Presentation in the Temple on the right wall below the cornice cast controversial aspects of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in ways that would have been deemed decorous (plate 9). Amidst temple-goers two completely naked beggars appear on the wide steps leading up to the temple.53 By introducing these in a religious setting, where nudity was justified by abject poverty, Daniele again made an argument for the exe
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