Original subtitles

Good afternoon.

The last two lectures together are devoted to a retrospective glance at the territory

covered in this course, a sketch of the political, sociological, and theological events of the

early sixteenth century that altered Italy and the rest of Europe, and a summary of the

artistic developments that issued from that much-changed culture.

We will begin with a backward glance.

Because I find summation even more difficult than introduction, I want to begin this penultimate

lecture by simply comparing several works of art to remind us of the distance we've traversed

from the early to the high Renaissance.

Looking back in order to understand how we've reached our current position is a necessary

method.

To borrow a simile from Plutarch, both artists and students of art are like oarsmen who look

astern while they row the boat ahead.

First, it's instructive, and I hope fascinating, to compare Masaccio's Trinity with Raphael's

School of Athens.

We'll look first at the Trinity.

I remind you it was painted in 1428, a fresco in the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

In the Trinity, Masaccio first established the principle of linear perspective as a means

of creating the illusion of a consistent three-dimensional space on a flat surface.

As we saw, he did not hesitate to take liberties with the system, or depart from it for practical

or expressive reasons.

The theological mystery of the Trinity is his subject.

As you look at it for just one more minute, I remind you that while he has a clear perspective

system created by the lines in the vault of the receding vault, and his figures step back

in space, nonetheless, his figure of God the Father departs from that system.

The feet of the Father are on a shelf at the back, but the figure floats forward to join

the crucified Christ in the front plane.

It is that kind of expressive departure from the system, in this case, in the service of his

subject, of his theological subject.

Raphael, in the School of Athens, used the same principle of perspective, of spatial perspective,

to create a much deeper and much wider space populated with a multitude of figures.

His subject is less focused and more general, concerned with philosophy as discussed by Renaissance

humanists in a very generalized fashion here.

But he has given us a tremendously deep space, far deeper than was attempted by Masaccio.

And we go back through these barrel vaults to a very distant space, which at the same time,

these receding arches get smaller and smaller on the surface of the composition, and they frame the central two figures

in the fresco.

But this is a tremendous expansion of Masaccio's Trinity, in a way.

You could, let me show them to you together.

You could imagine placing the Trinity fresco within the central arcade of the School of Athens.

It would probably fit, too, in terms of the actual size, but I'm thinking of it in another sense.

It is as though Raphael had added wings to Masaccio's concept.

It is, instead of a single barrel vault, a system of vaulting and a much broader and wider and more thorough-going spatial

construct that Raphael has created here.

We have already spent a lot of time talking about the altarpiece with altarpieces with Madonnas and saints, the so-called Sacred Conversazione,

gathered together in a single space.

The Sacra Conversazione, the Sacred Conversation, was a significant innovation of Renaissance painting, and we've talked a good deal about it.

I just want to make the development clear in one more, one final, as it were, comparison of Domenico Veneziano's St. Lucie altarpiece of about 1445,

and, in a moment, Giovanni Bellini's San Zechariah altarpiece, painted 60 years later.

Domenico Veneziano, in his altarpiece, gives us smaller-than-life-size figures.

They are placed in a shallow space, which does not disrupt the two-dimensional flow across the surface.

They still read very much as a frieze, a lineup of figures across the surface.

The pastel hues and even the nuanced fall of light tend to unite all the elements as surface pattern.

The arcade, the tripartite arcade, considered as surface design, also tends to separate the figures into cells, at least to some degree,

to separate them one from another.

In the painting we've seen much more recently, Bellini's San Zechariah altarpiece of 1505,

the life-size figures inhabit a space that's not merely larger, but continuous, continuous inside, from one fictive space to another,

from the actual frame of the altarpiece itself into the painted architecture within,

and to some degree a continuous space with that in which we stand.

Its depth in this picture is created by greater contrasts of light and dark expressed through strong color,

very different than we saw in Domenico Veneziano, and this simultaneously produces a feeling of an enveloping atmosphere.

This compelling space also, as I say, incorporates the real space of the church and the real light of the altar that falls upon the altar and that falls from the church window.

Let me show you these together as well.

A great difference between these two related subjects, but a great difference in treatment.

Although Bellini's figures don't interact with each other any more than do Domenico's, in fact, perhaps even less,

and may make even less eye contact with the viewer.

After all, in the Domenico Veneziano, John the Baptist looks right at us,

and here we have only the small angel and the Bellini who makes any eye contact.

But Bellini's figures carry much more conviction as real figures in a real space.

There's also a difference in relative physical presence.

Domenico's saints, in this comparison, are demure, almost recessive in their twilight space.

Giovanni's saints are monumental.

Even though they are solemnly posed and very quiet, magisterial, they take possession of their space.

It's the difference between the early Renaissance of the Quattrocento and the High Renaissance that gradually superseded it in the Cinquecento in the 16th century.

Next, with Michelangelo as the measure of the change which came over Italian art in the 1520s,

we will enumerate the key political and religious events which strongly affected the cultural climate not only in Italy but throughout Europe.

That sounds like an awfully big thing to try to do in a short time.

However, we'll give you a sketch.

When Michelangelo's Pietà, the 1498-99 famous Pietà in St. Peter's, is compared with Michelangelo's later tomb of Giuliano de' Medici about 1526-33,

one quickly perceives that the unified, concentrated grief of the former has been displaced by an unfocused and profound malaise.

To demonstrate, first, the Pietà.

Among other things, this magnificent sculpture is an expression of the ideal High Renaissance compositional design of a stable pyramid.

The artist managed to establish this form despite the problem of positioning the large body of Christ on the lap of his mother.

The sculpture also encapsulates deep grief in a restrained, even a lyrical way.

One could spend a long time analyzing the composition of this piece, but always coming back to its unity and to its profound feeling.

Now, we have not looked at the Medici tombs in the so-called New Sacristy of San Lorenzo in Florence.

The tomb of Giuliano de' Medici is one of the two tombs in that space, and he worked on this between 1526 and 1533.

Here, also, we have a pyramidal composition, but a very different one.

For one thing, it's in different spatial planes.

The two reclining figures in the foreground are close to us.

The duke statue sits back in a niche, the tomb forward below.

The tomb is surrounded, or rather surmounted, by two enormous allegorical statues.

One of night, that is the female nude on the left, and one of day, the male nude on the right-hand side.

Unlike his Pietà, in his Pietà, the tomb is an unstable pyramid, not a stable pyramid.

It's unstable for several reasons.

First of all, the two spatial planes that I pointed out.

Secondly, the uncertain poses, shall we say, of the allegorical figures.

They find themselves in odd and difficult to sustain positions.

And the curved sarcophagus on which the nudes recline, and from which they appear all too likely to slip.

They're too big for it.

They overlap the ends of the sarcophagus.

They are not settled there.

This is not a, instead of a broad architectonic base, we have a shifting foundation.

The psychological expression of the nudes is also disquieting.

Night is shown in a pose not conducive to sleep, and which would be remembered, by the way, by Rodin in 1880,

when he designed the famous Thinker.

Next time you see it, the Thinker, just look at the right arm of the Thinker crossed over to the left leg,

and you'll see that he was looking long and hard at Michelangelo, as he always did.

The body of day, on the other side, is likewise twisted and, shall we say, emerging from sleep with hesitancy and difficulty.

Let me show you the two together.

Ha!

You could hardly imagine a more profound difference between these two works that are only a quarter century apart.

The explanation for this profound, stylistic, and expressive shift is at once historically complex and fundamentally simple to perceive.

From the 1490s to the 1520s, Italy had experienced a series of destabilizing events.

Many of the city-states were often at war with one another in a shifting series of alliances.

Florence, the Papal States, Milan, Venice, all were involved in these actions which were debilitating to the stability of the peninsula.

In addition to their respective military powers, they used what diplomatic weapons they had.

Bribery, promises of territory, dynastic marriages, excommunication was a good one.

A pope could excommunicate entire cities, and he did.

These intra-preninsular struggles obviously invited foreign intervention, especially from France and from the Holy Roman Empire.

When Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, invited Charles VIII of France to invade Italy in 1494,

he did it because he wanted to counterbalance the threat of Naples under imperial control, the Holy Roman Empire control in the south.

And when he invited that intervention from France, it was a fateful turn in Italian Renaissance history,

because when he tried to expel the French, he couldn't, and he died in a French prison.

The French also expelled the Medici from Florence in 1494, and the French remained in Italy until 1512,

when the papal armies of Pope Julius II drove them from Italy and returned the Medici from exile.

Julius II also fought to regain territory for the papal states, mainly at the expense of Venice,

which was briefly deprived of its mainland territories by the papacy-led league called the League of Cambrai.

At the same time, in his zeal to rebuild St. Peter's from the ground up,

the Pope raised money through the sale of indulgences, forgiveness of sins,

a practice which continued under his successor, the Medici Pope Leo X.

That led more or less directly to Martin Luther's famous 95 Theses posted in Wittenberg in 1517.

This, and the 1521 excommunication of Luther at the Diet of Worms,

were foundation stones in the Protestant Reformation, which shook the Roman Church.

At this point, another Medici became pope. He was Clement VII.

He was a weak pope who failed to grasp the threat of the Reformation,

and he lost the English Church by mishandling Henry VIII's annulment.

He allied himself with the French, and he argued with the Emperor.

Two bad ideas.

All this precipitated an unprecedented attack on the Vatican itself

by a cabal of Roman nobles gathered around the ancient Colonna family.

And that gave Emperor Charles V the opportunity to invade Rome.

What followed was, in a sense, a matter of chance.

The Emperor's mercenary troops, some 20,000 Germans, Spaniards, and Italian irregulars,

were unpaid and turned upon the city, upon the city of Rome.

The sack of Rome in 1527 was horrific.

Massacres and physical destruction left the city desolate.

Much art was destroyed as well, of course.

The city nearly ceased to be habitable, and the pre-sack population of about 100,000 persons dwindled.

It was more than half a century before the city of Rome, during the papacy of Sixtus V,

began to recover and to rebuild.

Well, let's continue with a look ahead.

To fully comprehend the sea change that came over art following the sack of Rome,

we need only to look at the next great creation of Michelangelo,

the Last Judgment, frescoed on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel between 1535 and 1541.

We shall look at it in direct contrast to the Sistine ceiling of three decades earlier.

Here is the ceiling, 158-1512.

For all of its variety and all of the changes that we saw that occurred during the creation of the Sistine ceiling,

it is a measured, unified, harmonious, and humane composition.

It is an expression of the High Renaissance in its confidence, its optimism, and its heroic expression of both the human and the divine.

The Last Judgment was painted by Michelangelo, as I said, between 1535 and 1541.

It is, of course, the immense altar wall of the Sistine Chapel.

There had been two frescoes from the 1482 fresco cycle.

There they had to be destroyed to make way for this.

Nothing could be a greater contrast to the Sistine ceiling than this in the same chapel.

The Last Judgment is an oppressive juggernaut.

It is a very great juggernaut.

The depth of the artist's pessimism is felt in every detail and in the whole,

but even after restoration revealed a brighter palette that very few people expected.

Its huge forms, its relentless rhythms,

the unendurable weight of its figures and of the whole appall the viewer.

Painters of this subject, of the Last Judgment, and they'd been doing it from the Middle Ages onward,

usually stress damnation.

Damnation is an alluring pictorial subject, and literary as well.

Milton knew that.

It always comes off better than salvation somehow.

But Michelangelo paints salvation with as much cheerlessness as he paints damnation.

The greatness of this Last Judgment, of this fresco, is not in question,

but you must realize that it is an achievement diametrically opposed to the achievement of the Sistine ceiling.

Form and content are unanimously express the near certainty of damnation.

Michelangelo's vocabulary is still that of the human body.

His entire vocabulary is the human body.

But his last judgment suggests that it's going to be a titanic struggle for anyone to get into heaven.

This is the unleavened pessimism of Jeremiah magnified a hundredfold.

Look for a moment at it.

Just stop and look for a moment at it and realize that this side, the left as we look at it,

is the side of the saved, and realize that these figures are being hauled up literally by ropes

and by a strong arm up.

They're not rising up in salvation.

They're being, when they get there, they're being heaved out of the earth here below

and with great effort up to the elect above.

On this side, the damned really don't look that much different than do the blessed on the other side.

Just to locate you, remember here at the very top we have,

and we saw this when we finished the Sistine Chapel,

here we have Jonah, the great prophet, representing resurrection,

looking upward at the scene on the ceiling of the creation of the world,

in a sense the separation of light and dark,

and then the last judgment and here the altar below it.

What an extraordinary vertical iconographic thrust this has.

Let me compare two figures only.

Adam, from the creation of Adam on the Sistine ceiling,

together with one of the damned in this painting.

Here is Adam.

The utter innocence, blankness of the face, of the, as we could put it this way,

the yet-to-be-fully-created Adam.

He is a potential life waiting to be infused with the life force.

Compare it with one of the damned.

On the altar wall, this enormous figure with one eye staring in stark horror,

while the other is covered with his hand as demons drag him down to hell.

A life lived and a soul lost and all the muscular life within his mammoth body cannot prevail

over the force of death and damnation.

Let me show you them together.

They are both an expression through the human body to totally different ends.

The innocence of the blameless and the haunted expression of one who knows his awful fate.

One artist imagined and painted these emotional extremes and every emotion in between.

It is hard to disagree with Vasari's verdict when he wrote that

Michelangelo portrayed all the emotions that mankind can experience.

Michelangelo's figures reveal thoughts and emotions that only he has known how to express.

It's hard to disagree with that.

There is one other figure where the artist himself may be seen on the ceiling.

It's in the central portion of this terrifying fresco, just below Christ and to the right of Christ,

and it's Saint Bartholomew.

Here he is, Saint Bartholomew, holding a knife in his right hand.

The saint was martyred by being flayed alive.

Now, in Christian Neoplatonic thought, and that joining a conjunction of Christian thought and Neoplatonic thought drove Michelangelo,

the sloughing off of the human skin was a release of the soul from the corporal prison.

And here Bartholomew holds the knife of his martyrdom in his right hand and his skin in his left,

and the face on the skin is the face of Michelangelo.

It was not only in the art of Michelangelo that the psychological damage inflicted by the events of the age was evident.

In most of the artistic centers of Italy, a new style arose that radically replaced that of Renaissance humanism.

In English, it's called mannerism, a title that seems appropriate but is nonetheless misleading.

It's appropriate because the style includes distortions of drawing, space, color,

that are the antithesis of the norms of the Renaissance, and the English word mannered seems to fit the result.

But it's misleading because its derivation is quite different.

Mannerism derives from the Italian word maniera, and that is shorthand for a phrase maniera della antica, manner of the antique.

That is to say, the artists who practiced and codified mannerism found their justification and sometimes their sources in ancient art.

In their case, however, in late Hellenistic art, the art of the Greek diaspora, typified by the Laokouon, which we have seen earlier.

That style was dynamic and expressive, and it frequently departed from the norms of proportion and composition

that had been known in the classical period of Greek art in the 5th century BC.

In other words, one could and can find a model and a justification for almost any style in the long history of ancient Greek art.

Mannerism had already emerged by the time Raphael died.

His pupils, and it seems Raphael himself, had already begun to subvert the principles of the Renaissance

in the designs for the last rooms, the last stanzai in the Vatican.

This new anti-classical style, a response to the massive social disorder, was essentially already in place before the 1527 sack of Rome.

Evidence that the High Renaissance had ended is found in paintings by Rosso Fiorentino before the sack of Rome and Jacopo Pontormo afterwards.

Rosso Fiorentino was among the leading practitioners of the first phase of mannerism.

He was Florentine, as his name attests. He was born in 1495 and died in 1540.

He visited Rome to see the Sistine ceiling for himself, and he borrowed many of its figurative inventions.

His art immediately makes apparent the other aspect of mannerism, its content.

Its extreme emotion and violent action, psychological expressions of neurosis or psychosis

that seem strikingly modern in the post-Freud era are all to be found somewhere in mannerist art,

and Rosso's great deposition, or if you prefer descent from the cross of 1521,

in Volterra, which is some 40 miles southwest of Florence, is one of the most remarkable.

Look at it a moment. Spidery, angular, anguished, with an incredible void at its center.

Look at all this. This is all left empty between the knees of Christ and the Magdalene at the bottom,

and St. John to the right and the figures grouped to the left is emptiness.

The center where you depend upon the balance, the anchoring element to be, has been abandoned,

and everything is built up around it. The figures are angular in many cases,

kind of spidery in the way they are designed. Look at the one at the top of the cross,

probably Nicodemus here, long beard, angular arms, and an angularity which continues on down.

The figure which is perhaps most extraordinary here is this great figure of John the Evangelist,

who looks like he's been carved from wood somehow, that this yellow, light yellow robe over green,

and his head in his hands. He is an enormous and yet unweighty figure.

He is an unanchored figure. This is a deeply moving painting, but it is utterly anti-humanistic.

Pontormo, born in 1494 and lived until 1557, an artist in the immediate post-sac period,

and he produced this entombment in 1528, just after the sac, in Florence, in the Church of Santa Felicità,

which is just across the Ponte Vecchio from the center, from the center of the city with the Palazzo Vecchio

and with the Uffizi and so forth. This painting is just as memorable as Rosso's masterpiece that we just saw,

but it's created in an utterly different vocabulary. It's weightless, but in a different way.

These are balloon-like figures that somehow support Christ while walking or crouching on tiptoes.

Look at the bottom here. And everything seems to be inflated with helium here.

The painting seems about to dissolve in puffs of pink-white smoke and pink-white draperies.

It's not even clear whether this is an entombment or a deposition, because there's not a tomb and there's not a cross.

So it's not even clear what the precise subject is, except that it presents the dead body of Christ.

An astonishing pair of paintings to represent all by themselves the great change in style that mannerism represented

when the 1520s came to fruition.

In our next lecture, which unhappily is our final lecture, we will conclude with a look at the changed art of post-Sac northern Italy,

specifically in Parma and in Venice.

And as has been the case, had been the case during the Quattrocento and the early Cinquecento,

the artistic situation in the north developed in strikingly idiosyncratic ways, and so we shall treat it separately.

Thank you for your attention.