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Metamorphic Heads: A Footnote on Botticelli’s and Pollaiuolo’s Mercanzia Virtues

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/695754

2328-207X

Emanuele Lugli,

Renaissance Literature and Culture

Previous articleNext article FreeMetamorphic Heads: A Footnote on Botticelli’s and Pollaiuolo’s Mercanzia VirtuesEmanuele LugliEmanuele Lugli Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreSometime between 1471 and 1472, Piero Pollaiuolo put the finishing touches on an allegory of Prudence (fig. 1). It is a remarkable painting, suspended between invitation and withdrawal. Prudence opens her arms and splays her legs: her body—covered in shimmering fabrics when it is not wrapped in gauze—is an object of display. And yet, her eyes, pensive, look away, toward the mirror she holds and whose diaphanous reflection brings us back to her head. Her exquisitely intricate coiffure claims scrutiny. From their central parting, her locks become progressively longer and, after a tidal élan along her ears, gather in two braids that join in an ample fold behind her neck. Their roots are fastened by a transparent veil that, draped over her head, hangs between two golden brooches. Not a hair is out of place, and as Pollaiuolo renders each strand with a brushstroke, he couples mastery in composition with painterly exactitude.Fig. 1. Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo, Prudence, 1471–72. Oil on wood; 167 cm × 88 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.Just such a degree of bravado was required if Pollaiuolo wanted to keep the commission of the seven panels of the virtues, which were to be hung, as large as altarpieces, in the Tribunale Della Mercanzia—the commercial court of Florence. As Ronald Lightbown and Alison Wright have reconstructed the story, many painters had set their sights on the prestigious commission.1 Verrocchio, then also on the Mercanzia’s pay list for casting the Orsanmichele Saint Thomas, tried to step in, but it was Botticelli who snapped up the job after Pollaiuolo presented the first panel of Charity and painted Fortitude (fig. 2). Botticelli could count on the help of Tommaso Soderini, one of the Mercanzia commissioners, and because of his intrusion, the painters’ guild amended their statutes to protect its members from other breaches.2Fig. 2. Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (Sandro Botticelli), Fortitude, 1470. Tempera on wood; 167 cm × 88 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.With the scandal long forgotten, Fortitude is today regarded as Botticelli’s first masterpiece, the work through which he emancipated himself from his master, Filippo Lippi. Both continuity and rupture are particularly evident in Botticelli’s handling of hair. Fortitude’s hair gathers in small strands on each side, reminiscent of the crimped veils that Lippi tiered over the temples of his Uffizi Madonna. Botticelli admired that painting. He took it as the prototype for his Madonnas that are now in Florence’s Ospedale degli Innocenti and in Ajaccio’s Musée Fesch. Yet, it is Fortitude that reveals how carefully he studied it. Fortitude’s braids, sprouting from behind her neck, edge the neckline of her armor similarly to the way Lippi’s veil tucks under the rope-like trimming of the Virgin’s mantle.It is Lippi who taught Botticelli to treat headgear as loci of pictorial prowess. The pearl band that Lippi depicts emerging out of the Uffizi Madonna’s creased bonnet abruptly pivots at the center of her forehead. It is an impossible construction, which reveals how little consideration Lippi had for realism when he came to coiffures. Following his lead, in this short essay, I also consider the headgear of Botticelli’s and Pollaiuolo’s virtues as fields for experimentation. I do so to make a simple point: that, contrary to old-fashioned, connoisseurial assumptions about hair as routinely rendered, and parallel to socioeconomic studies that see hair as cooperating in the construction of gendered and class stereotypes, hair triggered a process of associative thinking quite unlike that provoked by any other element in a painting.3Of course, Fortitude’s refulgent hairstyle was not completely indifferent to reality. Botticelli’s nesting of three massive pearls around her forehead must have struck Florentines as fabulous, because the pearls deliberately contradicted the current ban on them—both as solitaires and as clusters decorating a headband, then known as a vespaio.4 Unlike her classicizing coronet and golden ribbons, Fortitude’s pearls were not just markers of aristocratic beauty at a time when authority was the effect of materially outshining everyone else.5 Rather, they were longed for. Botticelli’s female knight in shining armor, contrary to Pollaiuolo’s veiled and Virgin-like Charity, struck Florentines—affluent, law-abiding, male Florentines—because she cut hard through an open wound.Botticelli’s Fortitude, however, hurt as much as she captivated. Her braided, complex coiffure drew directly from the nymphs’ hairstyles in Boccaccio’s very popular Comedia delle Ninfe Fiorentine: tresses that its protagonist, Ameto, contemplates at length rather than listening to the nymphs’ moralistic tales.6 When he encounters Lia, he cannot help but observe how “most of her hair is gathered, by a masterful hand, in long coils over each ear, while he notices how the rest falls into broad, regular braids on each side of her neck, which then cross each other over the back and climb to the top of her blond head, only to fall down, again, and fold under their roots. And he also notices how the ends of each braid remain in place thanks to a shimmering gold band, rich in pearls, and how not a single hair falls out of that controlled order.”7 Boccaccio’s descriptions of hair go on and on, taking the reader on roller coasters around the women’s heads that exude a pleasure for the capacity of words to conjure up visual intricacies while also conveying Ameto’s amazement. Those labyrinthine manes, whose twists and folds Ameto sometimes fails to decipher (“non so come legati”),8 found their visual counterparts in the bewildering hairstyles of Botticelli’s later nymphs and Venuses, whose hair is both shapeless matter and disciplinary knot.9 Yet, despite these harmonies, it is in Fortitude that Botticelli first reveals that he is reading Boccaccio.But this is not how Botticelli’s coiffures have been interpreted. Like Lippi’s headgears, his depiction of hair has been read as an effect of the cultural bearing of Ovid, the classical cantor of hairdos.10 In the Fasti, Ovid applauded women’s labors at hairstyling, which he reminded men to praise, and in the Metamorphoses, he infused hair with an animistic force that made it a prime agent of transformation.11 In Ovid’s verse, hair becomes leaves, snakes, and tears; it falls down and curls up in the blink of an eye. While dazzlingly intricate, Botticelli’s hair is hardly Ovidian: it never becomes anything other than itself. If there is a painter of Ovidian coiffures, that is Pollaiuolo.In Prudence, the veil spiraling around the golden brooches mimics the saggy hammock-like band between the volutes of an Ionic capital, giving the virtue-figure the solidity of a caryatid. Pollaiuolo must have taken the idea from Vitruvius, whose treatise on architecture describes capitals as carved after women’s hairstyles. “On the right and on the left of the capital,” he writes, “the Ionians placed volutes that looked like hanging hair curls. They also decorated the front with inward-looking volutes and festoons so as to simulate coiffures.”12Pollaiuolo thus made a reference to one of the reference books of his time. Or, probably, it was his brother Antonio, more learned and better connected, who made it when coming to his rescue after Botticelli’s intrusion in the competition. Antonio probably painted it too, as the outlines are more confident (look at that twisting serpent), the brushwork ranges from evocative to exact, and the materials are rendered with an opulence that no other panel of the series displays, Fortitude included. It is, however, Antonio’s invention for Prudence’s headgear that must have met the jury’s favor, as while ornament and virtuoso drawing decrease in the following panels, most of the virtues’ heads alluded to architectural elements. In Justice (fig. 3), her hair curls in volutes that support a turban-shaped abacus, the slab between capital and architrave. Piero—as it is Piero who painted it this time—even went as far as using a type of hairpin, known in Florence as brocchetta da testa, to simulate the flos abaci, the flower that marks the center of the upper side of Corinthian capitals. He then repeated the idea for Hope’s headgear.Fig. 3. Piero Pollaiuolo, Justice, c. 1471. Oil on wood; 167 cm × 88 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.The Pollaiuolo brothers’ use of veils, brooches, and hairpins that Florentine women actually wore brings their efforts close to Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, which also presented architecture through the filter of contemporary hairdressing. “In Tuscany,” Alberti wrote, “we call ‘nastro’ a tiny ribbon which young ladies wrap around their heads to fasten their hair. For this reason let me call ‘nastro’ the ring-shaped band which can be found at the end of the column.”13 In suggesting a term for what we today call the “astragal”—part of his ambitious plan to produce a more precise vocabulary for architecture—Alberti did not translate Vitruvius but reenacted his approach.14 Vitruvius’s technical treatise was, after all, notoriously difficult to understand. Some of the Latin words he employed were, as they still are, unique; their meanings puzzled even the most erudite philologists. But even more puzzling were long-lost cultural references, such as those to Ionian women’s hairstyle. A decade before Francesco di Giorgio laid the silhouette of a woman’s face over the profile of a capital, the Pollaiuolo brothers tried to work out the connection with their architectural headgear.15Hairstyles—elaborate, distinctive hairstyles—are of crucial importance for thinking through virtues in 1470s Florence. In Prudentius’s Psychomachia, an allegorical poem on the battle between virtues and vices that could be found in several Florentine libraries at the time, all fighters are identified uniquely by their hairdos.16 Thrift covers her hair with a veil, Faith leaves it untrimmed, Discord puts olive branches on her head to disguise herself among the virtues, and Pride adds a wig atop her coils of braids so that “there might be a lofty and more imposing peak above her haughty brows.”17 The attention that Botticelli and the Pollaiuolo brothers bestowed on the headgear was excited by Prudentius. Yet, while the former looked at Boccaccio and the latter at architecture, they both recognized the analogical possibilities of hair to enthrall as well as to explore compositional concepts of direction, movement, and form.AcknowledgmentsResearch for this article has been made possible thanks to the Intellectual History of Connoisseurship project, funded by the British Academy. I also thank Pat Rubin for her encouragement on an earlier draft of this essay and John Gagné for his tremendously useful insights and observations.Notes1. Ronald Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli, 2 vols. (London: Paul Elek, 1978), 1, 31–33; Alison Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers: The Arts of Florence and Rome (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 230–31. On artistic competition, see Michelle O’Malley, “Finding Fame: Painting and the Making of Careers in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Studies 24, no. 1 (2010): 9–32.2. Alessandro Cecchi, “Piero o Antonio? Considerazioni sulle Virtù del Tribunale della Mercanzia e le altre opere degli Uffizi alla luce dei restauri,” in La stanza dei Pollaiolo: I restauri, una mostra, un nuovo ordinamento, ed. Antonio Natali and Angelo Tartuferi (Florence: Centro Di, 2007), 41–53.3. On hair in connoisseurship, see G. Morelli, Italian Painters: Critical Studies of Their Work (London: Nabu, 1982), 107, 155, 181, 193, 230n. On hair as a marker of gendered beauty, see Patricia Simons, “Portraiture, Portrayal, and Idealization: Ambiguous Individualism in Representations of Renaissance Women,” in Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, ed. Alison Brown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 262–311; Jennifer Craven-Madani, “A New Historical View of the Independent Female Portrait in Fifteenth-Century Florentine Painting” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1997), 87–88; Joanna Woods-Marsden, “Portrait of the Lady, 1430–1520,” in Virtue and Beauty: Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci and Renaissance Portraits of Women (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2001), 63–87. The notion of hairstyles as fantasie is also reductive, as it is limited to drawing. André Chastel, “Les capitaines antiques affrontés dans l’art florentine du XVe siècle,” Mémoires de la Société nationale des Antiquaires de France 3 (1954): 279–89; Françoise Viatte, “Verrocchio et Leonardo da Vinci: à propos des ‘têtes idéales,’” in Florentine Drawing at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent, ed. Elizabeth Cropper (Bologna: Nuova Alpha, 1992), 45–53.4. For the sanctions against pearls, dated from 1464 to 1472, see C. Mazzi, Due provvisioni suntuarie Fiorentine (Florence: Aldino, 1908), 5–7; Ronald Rainey, “Sumptuary Legislation in Renaissance Florence” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1985), 516–19. See also Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, “Reconciling the Privilege of a Few with the Common Good: Sumptuary Laws in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39, no. 3 (2009): 597–617. On the vespaio, see Rainey, “Sumptuary Legislation,” 450–53; Elisabetta Gnignera, I soperchi ornamenti: Copricapi e acconciature femminili nell’Italia del Quattrocento (Colle val d’Elsa: Protagon, 2010), 181–200.5. Timothy McCall, “Brilliant Bodies: Material Culture and the Adornment of Men in North Italy’s Quattrocento Courts,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16, no. 1/2 (2013): 445–90. Fortitude’s winged diadem is reminiscent of Roma’s helmet in Republican denarii. See R. Ross Holloway, “The Lady of the Denarius,” Numismatica e Antichità Classiche 24 (1995): 207–16.6. On its popularity, see Jane Tylus, “On the Threshold of Paradise (Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, or Ameto),” in Boccaccio: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works, ed. Victoria Kirkham et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 133–45.7. Giovanni Bocaccio, “Comedia delle Ninfe Fiorentine,” in Opere, vol. 8, ed. E. Bianchi, C. Salinari, and N. Sapegno (Milan: Riccardi 1952), 934: “vede i suoi capelli … e di quelli grandissima parte, sopra ciascuna orecchia ravvolti in lunga forma con una maestrevole mano, riguarda; e degli altri ampissime trecce composte vede sopra l’estremità del collo ricadere; e quindi, l’una verso la destra parte e l’altra verso la sinistra incrocicchiata, risalire al colmo del biondo capo; i quali, ancora avanzati ritornando in giù, in quello medesimo modo nascondere vede le loro estremità sotto le prime salite; e quelle, con fregio d’oro lucente e caro di margarite [that is, pearls] strette stanno ne’ posti luoghi; né d’alcuna parte un sol capello fuori del comandato ordine vede partire.”8. Ibid., 945: “i biondi capelli da velo alcuno non coperti mostrava, de’ quali, non so come legati, ricadeva sopra ciascuna tempia bionda ciocchetta.”9. That is how Teogapen’s coiffure is described. See ibid., 931–32: “lunghissimi, parte ravvolti alla testa nella sommità di quella, con nodo piacevole d’essi stessi, vede raccolti.”10. Paul Barolski, “As in Ovid, So in Renaissance Art,” Renaissance Quarterly 51, no. 2 (1998): 451–74.11. Ovid, Amores 1.14; Ars Am. 3.3, 3.4; Tr. 1.1, 3.1; Met. 1.550, 5.431–34, 6.26 and 141, 12.274–75.12. Vitruvius 4.1.7: “Capitulo volutas uti capillamento concrispatos cincinnos praependentes dextra ac sinistra conloceverunt et cumatiis et encarpis pro crinibus dispositis fronte orneverunt.”13. Alberti, De re aedificatoria 6.13, vol. 2, ed. Paolo Portoghesi (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1966), 524–25.14. Ibid.: “We must create some words as we cannot rely on the customary ones.” Even if published in 1485, Alberti’s treatise was somewhat completed by the mid-fifteenth century, as argued in Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), 266.15. Turin: Biblioteca Reale, codex Saluzzianus 148, fol. 15r. See Massimo Mussini, “La trattatistica di Francesco di Giorgio: un problema critico aperto,” in Francesco di Giorgio architetto, ed. Francesco Paolo Fiore and Manfredo Tafuri (Milan: Electa, 1994), 378–99.16. These are Florence: Bibl. Ricc. MS 418, Bibl. Med. Laur. MS Pl. 91, and Bibl. Med. Laur. AD 343, which belonged to Francesco Nelli. See Robert Black, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy: Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 225–32. At the time, Prudentius’s poem was read moralistically. See Jennifer O’Reilly, Studies in the Iconography of the Virtues and Vices in the Middle Ages (New York: Garland, 1988), 1–59.17. Prudentius, Psychomachia, 183–85. 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