1. The High Renaissance in Italy
Italy during the Renaissance

2. Chapter 13: The High Renaissance in Italy
OUTLINE
Popes and Patronage
Raphael
Michelangelo
The New Saint Peter's
The High Renaissance in Venice
Giorgione
Titian
Tintoretto
Mannerism
Sofonisba Anguissola
Music in the Sixteenth Century
Music at the Papal Court
Venetian Music
Contrasting Renaissance Voices
Castiglione
Cellini
Outline Chapter 13

3. Timeline Chapter 13: The High Renaissance in Italy
Columbus reaches America
Manutius establishes Aldine Press in Venice
Bramante commisioned by Pope Julius II to rebuild St. Peter's Basilica
Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel ceiling
Raphael, School of Athens
Pope Leo X (reigns until 1521)
Castiglione, The Courtier
c Pontormo, Deposition
Michelangelo, Last Judgment
Titian, Venus of Urbino
Vesalius, Seven Books on the Structure of the Human Body
Cellini, Perseus
Sofanisba Anguissola, Self Portrait

4. Patronage and the High Renaissance
Art follows patronage, as we have noted. The "high"
Renaissance is summed up in the lives and works of three artists:
Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci.
The first two did their most famous work in the Vatican in the
sixteenth century while Leonardo, true to his restless spirit,
sojourned there only for a time before he began his wanderings
through the courts of Europe.
It is their work that gives full meaning to the summation of
Renaissance ideals

5. Pope Julius II
Julius II (1443 – 1513) – Pope (1503 – 1513)
Born Giuliano della Rovere, in 1443, in Liguria, Italy. Son of a noble but poor family, he was tutored by his uncle, Francesco della Rovere, of the Fransiscan order. After his uncle's election to the papacy as Pope Sixtus IV in 1471, he received many posts and preferments. In December, 1471, he was created Cardinal Priest of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome. Thereafter, he received many benefices and held several sees, from which he collected a sizeable income.      After the death of Sixtus IV in 1484, Giuliano, who had little chance of becoming Pope himself, had a hand in bribing electors to elevate a Cardinal Cibo to the papacy as Innocent VIII. Cibo, of weak character, and gravely indebted to Cardinal della Rovere, was but a puppet to him for the next eight years. When Innocent VIII died in 1492, Giuliano aspired to become Pope, but the cardinals resented him for the power he had held, and chose instead Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia. Borgia, who ascended to the papacy as Alexander VI, was a personal enemy to Giuliano. Fearful of his safety, Giuliano stayed away from Rome during his papacy, mostly in France and Northern Italy, until Alexander's death in      As his successor, the cardinals elected Pius III who, already sick and feeble, died only 26 days after his ascendancy. This time, Giuliano della Rovere intended finally to be Pope. He bribed the cardinals both with money and with promises of preferment, and was elected in October 1503 as Julius II.      Julius, who was of warlike bent, first proceeded to extend the papacy's temporal power. He directed his attention to extending the Papal States, and went to war with powerful Venice. He was able to restore to the Papal States most of the territories in Romagna, and also Perugia and Bologna, but in 1509, had to eventually join the League of Cambrai to get military support against Venice. The Republic of Venice lost the battle of Agnadello in May 1509, and had to make concessions to the Pope, including the return of Rimini and Faenza.      Next, Julius set his sights for freeing the whole of Italy from the French. To this effect, he formed the Holy League ( ), which included the Venice, Spain, England, the Swiss Cantons, and the Holy Roman Empire. The Swiss won over the French in Novarra (1513), but it was a short-lived victory. Julius II, whose health had been failing for some time, died peacefully on February 21, The Holy League dissolved, and the French victory at Marignano (1515) reestablished French rule in Lombardy.      Although Julius ran the Pontifical States first and foremost as a Prince would, he never neglected his duties as a leader of the church. He issued a bull against simony at papal elections, made various monastic reforms, founded a school for ecclesiastical chant, and convened the Fifth Lateran Council, for the eradication of corruption and schisms from the church and the Roman Curia.      Yet perhaps his most lasting legacy was as a patron of the arts. It was Julius who hired, some would say bullied, Michelangelo, a reluctant sculptor, to repaint the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. Julius, who commissioned four exquisitely painted rooms from Raphael (now known as Stanze di Raffaello, in the Vatican). And, it was Julius who hired Bramante to construct an impressive new basilica in place of old St. Peter's. Julius, who himself laid the cornerstone, had wished to be buried there, and had even commissioned an imposing tomb from Michelangelo. However, he never lived to see St. Peter's Basilica finished, nor was he laid to rest there. The tomb of Julius II now resides in the church where a young Giuliano della Rovere first became Cardinal—in San Pietro in Vincoli, on the hills above the Colosseum.
The warrior pope who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Raphael to paint the Stanze di Raffaello in the Vatican, and Bramante to begin the new St. Peter's Basilica.

6. Papal Patronage vis-a-vis the Reformation
When we look at the work of Raphael and Michelangelo under the
patronage of the popes, we should not forget that this explosion of
art and culture was taking place while a new and formidable revolution
was in the making: the Protestant Reformation. While it would be overly
simplistic to think that the Renaissance caused the Reformation,
it certainly must be seen as a factor-as we will see in the next chapter.
Even so, there is a marked shift in the atmosphere in which
Michelangelo worked in Rome before 1521 and afterward,
when the full force of the Protestant revolt in the North was
making itself felt in Rome.

7. The Venetian Renaissance
The artistic work in Rome can be profitably contrasted with that which took place in Venice during roughly the same period. The Roman Renaissance was under the patronage of the church. Venetian art and music enjoyed the same patronage source as did Florence in the preceding century: commerce and trade. Venice made its fortune from the sea: The shipping of its busy port looked to both Europe and the Middle East. It was fiercely protective of its independence (including its independence from papal Rome) and proud of its ancient traditions. Even the religious art of Venice had a certain freedom from the kind of art being produced in Rome in the same century because Venice had less contact with the seething ideas current in the century.
Giorgione
Titian
Tintoretto

8. Socio-cultural and Historic Limitations of Renaissance Humanism
Renaissance ideas had also penetrated other areas of Italy.
Florence still had its artistic life (although somewhat diminished
from its great days in the fifteenth century) but provincial cities
like Parma and Mantua were not without their notables.
Much of this artistic activity rested in the courts of the nobility
who supplied the kind of life and leisure that made possible the
courtier and the court lifestyle immortalized in the book by Castiglione.
The insufficiencies of this court culture would become clear when
the religious wars of the sixteenth century broke out and
humanism had to confront the new realities coming from the
increasingly Protestant North

9. Raphael Crucifixion 1502-03 Oil on wood
The Three Graces Oil on panel
RAFFAELLO Sanzio
Italian painter (b. 1483, Urbino, d. 1520, Roma)
Biography
Raphael (his full name Raffaello Sanzi or Santi), Italian painter and architect of the Italian High Renaissance. Raphael is best known for his Madonnas and for his large figure compositions in the Vatican in Rome. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur.
Early years at Urbino
Raphael was the son of Giovanni Santi and Magia di Battista Ciarla; his mother died in His father was, according to the 16th-century artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari, a painter "of no great merit." He was, however, a man of culture who was in constant contact with the advanced artistic ideas current at the court of Urbino. He gave his son his first instruction in painting, and, before his death in 1494, when Raphael was 11, he had introduced the boy to humanistic philosophy at the court.
Urbino had become a centre of culture during the rule of Duke Federico da Montefeltro, who encouraged the arts and attracted the visits of men of outstanding talent, including Donato Bramante, Piero della Francesca, and Leon Battista Alberti, to his court. Although Raphael would be influenced by major artists in Florence and Rome, Urbino constituted the basis for all his subsequent learning. Furthermore, the cultural vitality of the city probably stimulated the exceptional precociousness of the young artist, who, even at the beginning of the 16th century, when he was scarcely 17 years old, already displayed an extraordinary talent.
Apprenticeship at Perugia
The date of Raphael's arrival in Perugia is not known, but several scholars place it in The first record of Raphael's activity as a painter is found there in a document of Dec. 10, 1500, declaring that the young painter, by then called a "master," was commissioned to help paint an altarpiece to be completed by Sept. 13, It is clear from this that Raphael had already given proof of his mastery, so much so that between 1501 and 1503 he received a rather important commission - to paint the Coronation of the Virgin for the Oddi Chapel in the church of San Francesco, Perugia (and now in the Vatican Museum, Rome). The great Umbrian master Pietro Perugino was executing the frescoes in the Collegio del Cambio at Perugia between 1498 and 1500, enabling Raphael, as a member of his workshop, to acquire extensive professional knowledge.
In addition to this practical instruction, Perugino's calmly exquisite style also influenced Raphael. The Giving of the Keys to St Peter, painted in by Perugino for the Sistine Chapel of the Vatican Palace in Rome, inspired Raphael's first major work, The Marriage of the Virgin (1504; Brera Gallery, Milan). Perugino's influence is seen in the emphasis on perspectives, in the graded relationships between the figures and the architecture, and in the lyrical sweetness of the figures. Nevertheless, even in this early painting, it is clear that Raphael's sensibility was different from his teacher's. The disposition of the figures is less rigidly related to the architecture, and the disposition of each figure in relation to the others is more informal and animated. The sweetness of the figures and the gentle relation between them surpasses anything in Perugino's work.
Three small paintings done by Raphael shortly after The Marriage of the Virgin - Vision of a Knight, Three Graces, and St Michael - are masterful examples of narrative painting, showing, as well as youthful freshness, a maturing ability to control the elements of his own style. Although he had learned much from Perugino, Raphael by late 1504 needed other models to work from; it is clear that his desire for knowledge was driving him to look beyond Perugia.
Move to Florence
Vasari vaguely recounts that Raphael followed the Perugian painter Bernardino Pinturicchio to Siena and then went on to Florence, drawn there by accounts of the work that Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were undertaking in that city. By the autumn of 1504 Raphael had certainly arrived in Florence. It is not known if this was his first visit to Florence, but, as his works attest, it was about 1504 that he first came into substantial contact with this artistic civilization, which reinforced all the ideas he had already acquired and also opened to him new and broader horizons. Vasari records that he studied not only the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Fra Bartolomeo, who were the masters of the High Renaissance, but also "the old things of Masaccio," a pioneer of the naturalism that marked the departure of the early Renaissance from the Gothic.
Still, his principal teachers in Florence were Leonardo and Michelangelo. Many of the works that Raphael executed in the years between 1505 and 1507, most notably a great series of Madonnas including The Madonna of the Goldfinch (c. 1505; Uffizi Gallery, Florence), the Madonna del Prato (c. 1505; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), the Esterházy Madonna (c ; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest), and La Belle Jardiničre (c. 1507; Louvre Museum, Paris), are marked by the influence of Leonardo, who since 1480 had been making great innovations in painting. Raphael was particularly influenced by Leonardo's Madonna and Child with St. Anne pictures, which are marked by an intimacy and simplicity of setting uncommon in 15th-century art. Raphael learned the Florentine method of building up his composition in depth with pyramidal figure masses; the figures are grouped as a single unit, but each retains its own individuality and shape. A new unity of composition and suppression of inessentials distinguishes the works he painted in Florence. Raphael also owed much to Leonardo's lighting techniques; he made moderate use of Leonardo's chiaroscuro (i.e., strong contrast between light and dark), and he was especially influenced by his sfumato (i.e., use of extremely fine, soft shading instead of line to delineate forms and features). Raphael went beyond Leonardo, however, in creating new figure types whose round, gentle faces reveal uncomplicated and typically human sentiments but raised to a sublime perfection and serenity.
In 1507 Raphael was commissioned to paint the Deposition of Christ that is now in the Borghese Gallery in Rome. In this work, it is obvious that Raphael set himself deliberately to learn from Michelangelo the expressive possibilities of human anatomy. But Raphael differed from Leonardo and Michelangelo, who were both painters of dark intensity and excitement, in that he wished to develop a calmer and more extroverted style that would serve as a popular, universally accessible form of visual communication.
Last years in Rome
Raphael was called to Rome toward the end of 1508 by Pope Julius II at the suggestion of the architect Donato Bramante. At this time Raphael was little known in Rome, but the young man soon made a deep impression on the volatile Julius and the papal court, and his authority as a master grew day by day. Raphael was endowed with a handsome appearance and great personal charm in addition to his prodigious artistic talents, and he eventually became so popular that he was called "the prince of painters."
Raphael spent the last 12 years of his short life in Rome. They were years of feverish activity and successive masterpieces. His first task in the city was to paint a cycle of frescoes in a suite of medium-sized rooms in the Vatican papal apartments in which Julius himself lived and worked; these rooms are known simply as the Stanze. The Stanza della Segnatura ( ) and Stanza d'Eliodoro ( ) were decorated practically entirely by Raphael himself; the murals in the Stanza dell'Incendio ( ), though designed by Raphael, were largely executed by his numerous assistants and pupils.
The decoration of the Stanza della Segnatura was perhaps Raphael's greatest work. Julius II was a highly cultured man who surrounded himself with the most illustrious personalities of the Renaissance. He entrusted Bramante with the construction of a new basilica of St. Peter to replace the original 4th-century church; he called upon Michelangelo to execute his tomb and compelled him against his will to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; and, sensing the genius of Raphael, he committed into his hands the interpretation of the philosophical scheme of the frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura. This theme was the historical justification of the power of the Roman Catholic church through Neoplatonic philosophy.
The four main fresco walls in the Stanza della Segnatura are occupied by the Disputa and the School of Athens on the larger walls and the Parnassus and Cardinal Virtues on the smaller walls. The two most important of these frescoes are the Disputa and the School of Athens. The Disputa, showing a celestial vision of God and his prophets and apostles above a gathering of representatives, past and present, of the Roman Catholic church, equates through its iconography the triumph of the church and the triumph of truth. The School of Athens is a complex allegory of secular knowledge, or philosophy, showing Plato and Aristotle surrounded by philosophers, past and present, in a splendid architectural setting; it illustrates the historical continuity of Platonic thought. The School of Athens is perhaps the most famous of all Raphael's frescoes, and one of the culminating artworks of the High Renaissance. Here Raphael fills an ordered and stable space with figures in a rich variety of poses and gestures, which he controls in order to make one group of figures lead to the next in an interweaving and interlocking pattern, bringing the eye to the central figures of Plato and Aristotle at the converging point of the perspectival space. The space in which the philosophers congregate is defined by the pilasters and barrel vaults of a great basilica that is based on Bramante's design for the new St Peter's in Rome. The general effect of the fresco is one of majestic calm, clarity, and equilibrium.
About the same time, probably in 1511, Raphael painted a more secular subject, the Triumph of Galatea in the Villa Farnesina in Rome; this work was perhaps the High Renaissance's most successful evocation of the living spirit of classical antiquity. Meanwhile, Raphael's decoration of the papal apartments continued after the death of Julius in 1513 and into the succeeding pontificate of Leo X until In contrast to the generalized allegories in the Stanza della Segnatura, the decorations in the second room, the Stanza d'Eliodoro, portray specific miraculous events in the history of the Christian church. The four principal subjects are The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple, The Miracle at Bolsena, The Liberation of St Peter, and Leo I Halting Attila. These frescoes are deeper and richer in colour than are those in the earlier room, and they display a new boldness on Raphael's part in both their dramatic subjects and their unusual effects of light. The Liberation of St Peter, for example, is a night scene and contains three separate lighting effects - moonlight, the torch carried by a soldier, and the supernatural light emanating from an angel. Raphael delegated his assistants to decorate the third room, the Stanze dell'Incendio, with the exception of one fresco, the Fire in the Borgo, in which his pursuit of more dramatic pictorial incidents and his continuing study of the male nude are plainly apparent.
The Madonnas that Raphael painted in Rome show him turning away from the serenity and gentleness of his earlier works in order to emphasize qualities of energetic movement and grandeur. His Alba Madonna (1508; National Gallery, Washington) epitomizes the serene sweetness of the Florentine Madonnas but shows a new maturity of emotional expression and supreme technical sophistication in the poses of the figures. It was followed by the Madonna di Foligno (1510; Vatican Museum) and the Sistine Madonna (1513; Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), which show both the richness of colour and new boldness in compositional invention typical of Raphael's Roman period. Some of his other late Madonnas, such as the Madonna of Francis I (Louvre), are remarkable for their polished elegance. Besides his other accomplishments, Raphael became the most important portraitist in Rome during the first two decades of the 16th century. He introduced new types of presentation and new psychological situations for his sitters, as seen in the portrait of Leo X with Two Cardinals ( ; Uffizi, Florence). Raphael's finest work in the genre is perhaps the Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (1516; Louvre), a brilliant and arresting character study.
Leo X commissioned Raphael to design 10 large tapestries to hang on the walls of the Sistine Chapel. Seven of the ten cartoons (full-size preparatory drawings) were completed by 1516, and the tapestries woven after them were hung in place in the chapel by The tapestries themselves are still in the Vatican, while seven of Raphael's original cartoons are in the British royal collection and are on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. These cartoons represent Christ's Charge to Peter, The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, The Death of Ananias, The Healing of the Lame Man, The Blinding of Elymas, The Sacrifice at Lystra, and St Paul Preaching at Athens. In these pictures Raphael created prototypes that would influence the European tradition of narrative history painting for centuries to come. The cartoons display Raphael's keen sense of drama, his use of gestures and facial expressions to portray emotion, and his incorporation of credible physical settings from both the natural world and that of ancient Roman architecture.
While he was at work in the Stanza della Segnatura, Raphael also did his first architectural work, designing the church of Sant' Eligio degli Orefici. In 1513 the banker Agostino Chigi, whose Villa Farnesina Raphael had already decorated, commissioned him to design and decorate his funerary chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo. In 1514 Leo X chose him to work on the basilica of St Peter's alongside Bramante; and when Bramante died later that year, Raphael assumed the direction of the work, transforming the plans of the church from a Greek, or radial, to a Latin, or longitudinal, design.
Raphael was also a keen student of archaeology and of ancient Greco-Roman sculpture, echoes of which are apparent in his paintings of the human figure during the Roman period. In 1515 Leo X put him in charge of the supervision of the preservation of marbles bearing valuable Latin inscriptions; two years later he was appointed commissioner of antiquities for the city, and he drew up an archaeological map of Rome. Raphael had by this time been put in charge of virtually all of the papacy's various artistic projects in Rome, involving architecture, paintings and decoration, and the preservation of antiquities.
Raphael's last masterpiece is the Transfiguration (commissioned in 1517), an enormous altarpiece that was unfinished at his death and completed by his assistant Giulio Romano. It now hangs in the Vatican Museum. The Transfiguration is a complex work that combines extreme formal polish and elegance of execution with an atmosphere of tension and violence communicated by the agitated gestures of closely crowded groups of figures. It shows a new sensibility that is like the prevision of a new world, turbulent and dynamic; in its feeling and composition it inaugurated the Mannerist movement and tends toward an expression that may even be called Baroque.
Raphael died on his 37th birthday. His funeral mass was celebrated at the Vatican, his Transfiguration was placed at the head of the bier, and his body was buried in the Pantheon in Rome.
The Annunciation
Oil on canvas,
RAFFAELLO Sanzio, The School of Athens,
1509, Fresco, 770 cm, Vatican

10. Michelangelo (later work)
Interior of
the Sistine
Chapel , ,
Moses 1515 Marble, 235 cm
Tomb of Pope Julius II
MICHELANGELO Buonarroti(b. 1475, Caprese, d. 1564, Roma)
Biography
Michelangelo (full name: Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni) was born at Caprese, a village in Florentine territory, where his father, named Ludovico Buonarroti Simoni was the resident magistrate. A few weeks after Michelangelo's birth the family returned to Florence, and, in 1488, after overcoming parental opposition he was formally apprenticed to Domenico Ghirlandaio for a term of three years. Later in life Michelangelo tried to suppress this fact, probably to make it seem that he had never had an ordinary workshop training; for it was he more than anyone else who introduced the idea of the 'Fine Arts' having no connection with the craft that painting had always previously been. His stay in the Ghirlandaio shop must also have coincided with his beginning to work as a sculptor in the Medici Garden, where antiques from their collection were looked after by Bertoldo. Although this connection drew him into the Medici circle as a familiar, the account by Vasari of an established 'school' is now discredited. It must, however, have been Ghirlandaio who taught him the elements of fresco technique, and it was probably also in that shop that he made his drawings after the great Florentine masters of the past (copies after Giotto and Masaccio; now in the Louvre, in Munich, and in Vienna). Michelangelo produced at least two relief sculptures by the time he was 16 years old, the Battle of the Centaurs and the Madonna of the Stairs (both , Casa Buonarroti, Florence), which show that he had achieved a personal style at a very early age.
In 1492, Lorenzo de' Medici died. Michelangelo then studied anatomy with the help of the Prior of the Hospital of Sto Spirito, for whom he appears to have carved a wooden crucifix for the high altar. A wooden crucifix found there (now in the Casa Buonarroti) has been attributed to him by some scholars. The next few years were marked by the expulsion of the Medici and the gloomy Theocracy set up under Savonarola, but Michelangelo avoided the worst of the crisis by going to Bologna and, in 1496, to Rome. He settled for a time in Bologna, where in 1494 and 1495 he executed several marble statuettes for the Arca (Shrine) di San Domenico in the Church of San Domenico.
In Rome he carved the first of his major works, the Bacchus (Florence, Bargello) and the St Peter's Pietŕ, which was completed by the turn of the century. It is highly finished and shows that he had already mastered anatomy and the disposition of drapery, but above all it shows that he had solved the problem of the representation of a full-grown man stretched out nearly horizontally on the lap of a woman, the whole being contained in a pyramidal shape.
The Pietŕ made his name and he returned to Florence in 1501 as a famous sculptor, remaining there until During these years he was extremely active, carving the gigantic David (1501-4, now in the Accademia), the Bruges Madonna (Bruges, Notre Dame), and beginning the series of the Twelve Apostles for the Cathedral which was commissioned in 1503 but never completed (the St Matthew now in the Accademia is the only one which was even blocked in). At about this time he painted the Doni Tondo of the Holy Family with St John the Baptist (Florence, Uffizi) and made the two marble tondi of the Madonna and Child (Florence, Bargello; London, Royal Academy).
After the completion of the David in 1504 he began to work on the cartoon of a huge fresco in the Council Hall of the new Florentine Republic, as a pendant to the one already commissioned from Leonardo da Vinci. Both remained unfinished and the grandiose project of employing the two greatest living artists on the decoration of the Town Hall of their native city came to nothing. Of Michelangelo's fresco, which was to represent the Battle of Cascina, an incident in the Pisan War, we now have a few studies by him and copies of a fragment of the whole full-scale cartoon which once existed (the best copy is the painting in Lord Leicester's Collection, Holkham, Norfolk). The cartoon, which is known as the Bathers, was for many years the resort of every young artist in Florence and, by its exclusive stress on the nude human body as a sufficient vehicle for the expression of alt emotions which the painter can depict, had an enormous influence on the subsequent development of Italian art - especially Mannerism - and therefore on European art as a whole. This influence is more readily detectable in his next major work, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In fact, however, the Battle of Cascina was left incomplete because the Signoria of Florence found it expedient to comply with a request from the masterful Pope Julius II, who was anxious to have a fitting tomb made in his lifetime.
The Julius Monument was, in Michelangelo's own view, the Tragedy of the Tomb. This was partly because Michelangelo and Julius had the same ardent temperament - they admired each other greatly - and very soon quarrelled, and partly because after the death of Julius in 1513, Michelangelo was under constant pressure from successive Popes to abandon his contractual obligations and work for them while equally under pressure from the heirs of Julius, who even went so far as to accuse him of embezzlement. The original project for a vast free-standing tomb with forty figures was substantially reduced by a second contract (1513), drawn up after Julius's death; under this contract the Moses, which is the major figure on the extant tomb, was prepared as a subsidiary figure. Two others, the Slaves in the Louvre, were made under this contract but were subsequently abandoned. The third contract (1516) was followed by a fourth (1532), and a fifth and final one in 1542, under the terms of which the present miserably mutilated version of the original conception was carried out by assistants, under Michelangelo's supervision, in S. Pietro in Vincoli (Julius's titular church) in Michelangelo was then 70 and had spent nearly forty years on the tomb.
Meanwhile, the original quarrel of 1506 with Julius was made up and Michelangelo executed a colossal bronze statue of the Pope as an admonition to the recently conquered Bolognese (who destroyed it as soon as they could, in 1511). In 1508, back in Rome, he began his most important work, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican for Julius, who, as usual, was impatient to see it finished. Dissatisfied with the normal working methods and with the abilities of the assistants he had engaged, Michelangelo determined to execute the whole of this vast work virtually alone. Working under appalling difficulties (amusingly described in one of his own poems), most of the time leaning backwards and never able to get far enough away from the ceiling to be able to see what he was doing, he completed the first half (the part nearer to the door) in The whole enormous undertaking was completed in 1512, Michelangelo being by then so practised that he was able to execute the second half more rapidly and freely. It was at once recognized as a supreme work of art, even at the moment when Raphael was also at work in the Vatican Stanze. From then on Michelangelo was universally regarded as the greatest living artist, although he was then only 37 and this was in the lifetimes of Leonardo and Raphael (who was even younger). From this moment, too, dates the idea of the artist as in some sense a superhuman being, set apart from ordinary men, and for the first time it was possible to use the phrase 'il divino Michelangelo' without seeming merely blasphemous.
The Sistine Ceiling is a shallow barrel vault divided up by painted architecture into a series of alternating large and small panels which appear to be open to the sky. These are the Histories. Each of the smaller panels is surrounded by four figures of nude youths - the Slaves, or Ignudi - who are represented as seated on the architectural frame and who are not of the same order of reality as the figures in the Histories, since their system of perspective is different. Below them are the Prophets and Sibyls, and still lower, the figures of the Ancestors of Christ. The whole ceiling completes the chapel decoration by representing life on earth before the Law: on the walls is an earlier cycle of frescoes, painted in , representing the Life of Moses (i.e. the Old Dispensation) and the Life of Christ (the New Dispensation). The Histories begin over the altar and work away from it (though they were painted in the reverse direction): the first scene represents God alone, in the Primal Act of Creation, and the story continues through the rest of the Creation to the Fall, the Flood, and the Drunkenness of Noah, representing the human soul at its furthest from God. The whole conception owes much to the Neoplatonic philosophy current in Michelangelo's youth in Florence, perhaps most in the idea of the Ignudi, perfect human beauty, on the level below the Divine story. Below them come the Old Testament Prophets and the Seers of the ancient world who foretold the coming of Christ; while the four corners have scenes from the Old Testament representing Salvation. The Prophet Jonah is above the altar, since his three days in the whale were held to prefigure the Resurrection. On the lowest parts - and very freely painted - are the human families who were the Ancestors of Christ. There can be no doubt that the splendour of the conception and the size of the task distracted Michelangelo from the Tomb, but he at once returned to it as soon as the ceiling was finished, from 1513 to 1516, when he returned to Florence to work for the Medici. (For details on the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel take a guided tour.)
His new master was Pope Leo X, the younger son of Lorenzo de Medici, who had known Michelangelo from boyhood; he now commissioned him to complete the façade of S. Lorenzo, the family church in Florence. Michelangelo wasted four years on this and it came to nothing. In 1520 he began planning the Medici Chapel, a funerary chapel in honour of four of the Medici - two of them by no means the most glorious of their family. The chapel is attached to S. Lorenzo. Leo X died in 1521 and it was not until after the accession of another Medici Pope, Clement VII, in 1523 that the project was resumed. Work began in earnest in 1524 and at the same time he was commissioned to design the Laurenziana Library in the cloister of the same church. Both these buildings are turning-points in architectural history, but the sculptural decoration of the chapel (an integral part of the architecture) was never completed, although the figures of Giuliano and Lorenzo de' Medici set over their tombs, eternally symbolizing the Active and the Contemplative Life, above the symbols of Time and Mortality - Day and Night, Dawn and Evening - are among his finest creations. The unfinished Madonna was meant to be the focal point of the chapel.
In 1527, the Medici were again expelled from Florence, and Michelangelo, who was politically a Republican in spite of his close ties with the Medici, took an active part in the war against the Medici up to the capitulation in 1530 (although in a moment of panic he had fled in 1529) and supervised Florentine fortifications. During the months of confusion and disorder in Florence, when he was proscribed for his participation in the struggle, it would appear that he was hidden by the Prior of S. Lorenzo. A number of drawings on the walls of a concealed crypt under the Medici Chapel have been attributed to him, and ascribed to this period. After the reinstatement of the Medici he was pardoned, and set to work once more on the Chapel which was to glorify them until, in 1534, he left Florence and settled in Rome for the thirty years remaining to him.
He was at once commissioned to paint his next great work, the Last Judgement on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, which affords the strongest possible contrast with his own Ceiling. He began work on it in In the interval there had been the Sack of Rome and the Reformation, and the confident humanism and Christian Neoplatonism of the Ceiling had curdled into the personal pessimism and despondency of the Judgement. The very choice of subject is indicative of the new mood, as is the curious fact that the mouth of Hell gapes over the altar itself where, during services, stands a crucifix symbolizing Christ standing between Man and Doom. It was unveiled in 1541 and caused a sensation equalled only by his own work of thirty years earlier, and was the only work by him to be as much reviled as praised, and only narrowly to escape destruction, though it did not escape the mutilation of having many of the nude figures 'clothed' after his death. Most of the ideas of Mannerism are traceable implicitly or explicitly in the Judgement and, more than ever, it served to imprint the idea that the scope of painting is strictly limited to the exploitation of the nude, preferably in foreshortened - and therefore difficult - poses. Paul III, who had commissioned the Judgement, immediately commissioned two more frescoes for his own chapel, the Cappella Paolina; these were begun in 1542 and completed in They represent the Conversion of St Paul and the Crucifixion of St Peter.
Michelangelo was now 75 years old. Earlier. in , plans were under way for the remodeling of the buildings surrounding the Campidoglio (Capitol) on the Capitoline Hill, the civic and political heart of the city of Rome. Although Michelangelo's program was not carried out until the late 1550s and not finished until the 17th century, he designed the Campidoglio around an oval shape, with the famous antique bronze equestrian statue of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in the center. For the Palazzo dei Conservatori he brought a new unity to the public building façade, at the same time that he preserved traditional Roman monumentality. However, since 1546 he had been increasingly active as an architect; in particular, he was Chief Architect to St Peter's and was doing more there than had been done for thirty years. This was the greatest architectural undertaking in Christendom, and Michelangelo did it, as he did all his late works, solely for the glory of God. <
In his last years he made a number of drawings of the Crucifixion, wrote much of his finest poetry, and carved the Pietŕ (now in Florence Cathedral Museum) which was originally intended for his own tomb, as well as the nearly abstract Rondanini Pietŕ (Milan, Castello). This last work, in which the very forms of the Dead Christ actually merge with those of His Mother, is charged with an emotional intensity which contemporaries recognized as Michelangelo's 'terribilitŕ'. He was working on it to within a few days of his death, in his 89th year, on 18 February There is a whole world of difference between it and the 'beautiful' Pietŕ in St Peter's, carved some sixty-five years earlier.
Unlike any previous artist, Michelangelo was the subject of two biographies in his own lifetime. The first of these was by Vasari, who concluded the first (1550) edition of his 'Vite' with the Life of one living artist, Michelangelo. In 1553 there appeared a 'Life of Michelangelo' by his pupil Ascanio Condivi (English translations 1903, 1976 and 1987); this is really almost an autobiography, promoted by Michelangelo to correct some errors of Vasari and to shift the emphasis in what Michelangelo regarded as a more desirable direction. Vasari, however, became more and more friendly with Michelangelo and was also his most devoted and articulate admirer, so that the very long Life which appears in Vasari's second edition (1568), after Michelangelo's death, gives us the most complete biography of any artist up to that time and is a trustworthy guide to the feelings of contemporaries about the man who can lay claim to be the greatest sculptor, painter and draughtsman that has ever lived, as well as one of the greatest architects and poets. He is the archetype of genius.
Pure fresco was his preferred painting technique; he despised oil-painting, though the now authenticated unfinished Entombment (London, National Gallery) is in oil over a tempera underpainting. The Doni Tondo is in tempera. In sculpture, his usual method was to outline his figure on the front of the block and, as he himself wrote, to 'liberate the figure imprisoned in the marble', by working steadily inwards, with perhaps a few more finished details. Occasionally he made drawings for parts of a figure, and a few small wax models survive as well as one large one, made for the guidance of assistants working on the Medici Chapel figures. The four abandoned Slaves intended for a later version of the Julius Tomb (Florence, Accademia) and the two marble tondi left unfinished in 1505 provide fine examples of his direct carving technique and his consistent use of various sizes of claw chisel. No modelli exist for any paintings or frescoes, and only one cartoon (London, British Museum), made to help Condivi, has survived.
Apart from the works mentioned above, there are others in Florence (Bargello, Santo Spirito - the house of his family, which contains relics of him - and Palazzo della Signoria) and in Siena, Rome (Santa Maria sopra Minerva), and St Petersburg (The Hermitage). There are also some 500 drawings by him, the majority of which are in Windsor (Royal Collection), Florence (Casa Buonarroti), and Paris.
Sistine Chapel
The ceiling Fresco, Vatican

11. Giorgione Pastoral Concert 1508-09 Oil on canvas Venetian
GIORGIONE Italian painter, Venetian school (b. 1477, Castelfranco, d. 1510, Venezia)
Biography
Venetian painter (real name Giorgio Barbarelli or Giorgio da Castelfranco). Almost nothing is known of his life and only a handful of paintings can be confidently attributed to him, but he holds a momentous place in the history of art. He had achieved legendary status soon after his early death (probably from plague) and through succeeding centuries he has continued to excite the imagination in a way that few other painters can match. The extraordinary discrepancy between his enormous fame and the tiny scale of his oeuvre is explained by the fact that he initiated a new conception of painting. He was one of the earliest artists to specialize in cabinet pictures for private collectors rather than works for public or ecclesiastical patrons, and he was the first painter who subordinated subject-matter to the evocation of mood - it is clear that his contemporaries sometimes did not know what was represented in his pictures. Vasari, who says that Giorgione earned his nickname - meaning 'Big George' - 'because of his physical appearance and his moral and intellectual stature', ranked him alongside Leonardo as one of the founders of 'modern' painting.
Giorgione was born in Castelfranco, about 30 km. north-west of Venice, and according to Vasari he trained with Giovanni Bellini (although it has also been suggested that Carpaccio may have been his teacher). He had two important public commissions in Venice: in he worked on a canvas (now lost without trace) for the audience chamber of the Doges' Palace; and in 1508 (assisted by Titian) he painted frescoes on the exterior of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi (the German warehouse), now known only through engravings and ruinous fragments. Apart from this, the only contemporary documentation on any of his surviving paintings is an inscription on the back of a female portrait known as Laura (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), which says it was painted by 'Master Zorzi da Castelfranco' in 1506; it also records that Giorgione was a colleague of Vincenzo Catena, a partnership about which nothing else is known. The main document for reconstructing Giorgione's oeuvre is the notebook of the Venetian collector and connoisseur Marcantonio Michiel, written between 1525 and Michiel, who is a scrupulous and reliable source, mentions a number of paintings by Giorgione, four or five of which can be plausibly identified with extant works: The Tempest (Accademia, Venice), The Three Philosophers (Kunsthistorisches Museum), Sleeping Venus (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), Boy with an Arrow (a copy?, Kunsthistorisches Museum), and (an oblique and less explicit reference than the others) Christ Carrying the Cross (S. Rocco, Venice). He says The Three Philosophers was finished by Sebastiano del Piombo and the Sleeping Venus (the work that founded the tradition of the reclining female nude) was finished by Titian. The problem of attribution was, then, complicated from the start by the fact that some of Giorgione's paintings were completed after his death by other hands, and confusion soon arose; in the first edition of his Lives (1550) Vasari attributed the S. Rocco painting to Giorgione, but in the second edition (1568) he gave it in one place to Giorgione and in another to Titian, even though 'many people believed it was by Giorgione'. Distinguishing between the work of Giorgione and the young Titian continues to be one of the knottiest problems in connoisseurship, the celebrated Concert Champetre in the Louvre being the picture most hotly disputed between them.
Among the other paintings given to Giorgione are the Castelfranco Madonna, in the cathedral of his home town (first mentioned by Ridolfi in 1648 and accepted by almost all critics), and several male portraits, including a self-portrait in the Herzog-Anton-Ulrich Museum in Brunswick (perhaps a copy).
Giorgione is said to have been handsome and amorous, and he initiated a type of dreamily romantic portrait that became immensely popular in Venice. The powerful influence that his work exerted in the generation after his death (even the venerable Bellini succumbed to it) is one of the main factors in making the construction of a catalogue of his work so difficult, for there are scores of paintings of the period, particularly pastoral landscapes, that can be described as Giorgionesque, and many are of high quality. The problems of iconography that Giorgione's paintings present are sometimes every bit as difficult as those of attribution. The most famous instance is The Tempest. Michiel saw it in 1530 and described it as a 'little landscape with the tempest with the gipsy and soldier', so he evidently did not know what subject, if any, was represented. X-rays have shown that Giorgione radically altered the figures in a way that suggests he was here indulging his imagination rather than illustrating a particular theme, although many ingenious attempts have been made to unravel a subject. This development of the 'landscape of mood' was, indeed, his great contribution to the history of art - an innovation of great originality and influence.
Apart from the artists already mentioned, Palma Vecchio and Dosso Dossi were among the outstanding contemporaries who fell under the Giorgionesque spell, and among later artists Watteau was his most sensitive heir.
Pastoral Concert Oil on canvas
Venetian
Self-Portrait Paper on wood

12. Titian (TIZIANO Vecellio b. 1490, Pieve di Cadore, d. 1576, Venezia)
Sacred and Profane Love 1514 Oil on canvas
Titian (TIZIANO Vecellio b. 1490, Pieve di Cadore, d. 1576, Venezia)
Biography
The greatest painter of the Venetian School. The evidence for his birthdate is contradictory, but he was certainly very old when he died. He was probably a pupil of Giovanni Bellini, and in his early work he came under the spell of Giorgione, with whom he had a close relationship. In 1508 he assisted him with the external fresco decoration of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Venice, and after Giorgione's early death in 1510 it fell to Titian to complete a number of his unfinished paintings. The authorship of certain works (some of them famous) is still disputed between them.
Titian's first major independent commission was for three frescoes on the life of St Antony of Padua in the Scuola del Santo, Padua (1511), noble and dignified paintings suggesting an almost central Italian firmness and monumentality. When he returned to Venice, Giorgione having died and Sebastiano having gone to Rome, the aged Bellini alone stood between him and supremacy, and that only until 1516 when Bellini died and Titian became official painter to the Republic. He maintained his position as the leading painter in the city until his death sixty years later.
In the second decade of the century Titian broke free from the stylistic domination of Giorgione and developed a manner of his own. Something of a fusion between Titian's worldliness and Giorgione's poetry is seen in the enigmatic allegory known as Sacred and Profane Love (Borghese Gallery, Rome, c. 1515), but his style soon became much more dynamic. The work that more than any other established his reputation is the huge altarpiece of The Assumption of the Virgin (Santa Maria dei Frari, Venice, ). It is the largest picture he ever painted and one of the greatest, matching the achievements of his most illustrious contemporaries in Rome in grandeur of form and surpassing them in splendour of colour. The soaring movement of the Virgin, rising from the tempestuous group of Apostles towards the hovering figure of God the Father looks forward to the Baroque. Similar qualities are seen in his two most famous altarpieces of the 1520s: the Pesaro altarpiece (Santa Maria dei Frari, Venice, ), a bold diagonal composition of great magnificence, and The Death of St Peter Martyr (completed 1530), which he painted for the church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, having defeated Palma Vecchio and Pordenone in competition for the commission. The painting was destroyed by fire in 1867, but it is known through copies and engraving; trees and figures together form a violent centrifugal composition suited to the action, and Vasari described it as 'the most celebrated, the greatest work... that Titian has ever done'. Titian had important secular as well as ecclesiastical patrons in this energetic period of his career, one of his most important commissions being three mythological pictures ( ) for Alfonso d'Este — the Worship of Venus, the Bacchanal (both in the Prado, Madrid), and the Bacchus and Ariadne (National Gallery, London). Outstanding among his portraits of the time is the exquisite Man with a Glove (Louvre, Paris, c. 1520).
About 1530, the year in which his wife died, a change in Titian's manner becomes apparent. The vivacity of former years gave way to a more restrained and meditative art. He now began to use related rather than contrasting colours in juxtaposition, yellows and pale shades rather than the strong blues and reds of his previous work. In composition too he became less adventurous and used schemes which, compared with some of his earlier works, appear almost archaic. Thus his large Presentation of the Virgin (Accademia, Venice, ) makes use of the relief-like frieze composition dear to the quattrocento. During the 1530s Titian's fame spread throughout Europe. In 1530 he first met the emperor Charles V (in Bologna, where he was crowned in that year) and in 1533 he painted a famous portrait of him (Prado) based on a portrait by the Austrian Seisenegger. Charles was so pleased with it that he appointed Titian court painter and elevated him to the rank of Count Palatine and Knight of the Golden Spur - an unprecedented honour for a painter. At the same time his works were increasingly sought after by Italian princes, as with the celebrated Venus of Urbino (Uffizi, Florence, c. 1538), named after its owner, Guidobaldo, Duke of Camerino, who later became Duke of Urbino. The pose is based on Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (Gemäldegalerie, Dresden), but Titian substitutes a direct sensual appeal for Giorgione's idyllic remoteness.
Early in the 1540s Titian came under the influence of central and north Italian Mannerism, and in he made his first and only journey to Rome. There he was deeply impressed not only by modern works such as Michelangelo's Last Judgment, but also by the remains of antiquity. His own paintings during this visit aroused much interest, his Danae (Museo di Capodimonte, Naples) being praised for its handling and colour and (according to Vasari) criticized for its inexact drawing by Michelangelo. Titian also painted in Rome the famous portrait of Pope Paul III and his Nephews (Museo di Capodimonte). The decade closed with further imperial commissions. In 1548 the emperor summoned Titian to Augsburg, where he painted both a formal equestrian portrait (Charles V at the Battle of Muhlberg, Prado) and a more intimate one showing him seated in an armchair (Alte Pinakothek, Munich).
He travelled to Augsburg again in 1550 and this time painted portraits of Charles's son, the future Philip II of Spain, who was to be the greatest patron of his later career. Titian's work for Philip included a series of seven erotic mythological subjects (c c. 1562): Danae and Venus and Adonis (Prado), Perseus and Andromeda (Wallace Collection, London), The Rape of Europa (Gardner Museum, Boston), Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto (National Gallery of Scotland), and The Death of Actaeon (National Gallery, London). Titian referred to these pictures as 'poesie', and they are indeed highly poetic visions of distant worlds, quite different from the sensual realities of his earlier mythological paintings.
Titian ran a busy studio, his assistants including his brother Francesco Vecellio (c /60), his son Orazio, and his cousin Cesare. Of these only Francesco seems to have had any individual substance as a painter, but his oeuvre is not well defined. During the last twenty years of his life Titian's personal works, as opposed to those produced under his supervision and with his intervention, showed an increasing looseness in the handling and a sensitive merging of subdued colours, so that outlines disappear and the forms become more immaterial. With this went a growing emphasis on intimate pathos rather than external drama. His interest in new pictorial conceptions waned but his powers remained undimmed until the end, his career closing with the awe-inspiring Pieta (Accademia, Venice, ), intended for his own tomb and finished after his death by Palma Giovane.
Titian was recognized as a towering genius in his own time (Lomazzo described him as the 'sun amidst small stars not only among the Italians but all the painters of the world') and his reputation as one of the giants of art has never been seriously questioned. He was supreme in every branch of painting and his achievements were so varied — ranging from the joyous evocation of pagan antiquity in his early mythologies to the depths of tragedy in his late religious paintings — that he has been an inspiration to artists of very different character. Poussin, Rubens, and Velázquez are among the painters who have particularly revered him. In many subjects, above all in portraiture, he set patterns that were followed by generations of artists. His free and expressive brushwork revolutionized the oil technique: Vasari wrote that his late works 'are executed with bold, sweeping strokes, and in patches of colour, with the result that they cannot be viewed from near by, but appear perfect at a distance... The method he used is judicious, beautiful, and astonishing, for it makes pictures appear alive and painted with great art, but it conceals the labour that has gone into them.' His greatness as an artist, it appears, was not matched by his character, for he was notoriously avaricious. In spite of his wealth and status, he claimed he was impoverished, and his exaggerations about his age (by which he hoped to pull at the heartstrings of patrons) are one of the sources of confusion about his birthdate. Jacopo Bassano caricatured him as a moneylender in his Purification of the Temple (National Gallery, London). Titian, however, was lavish in his hospitality towards his friends, who included the poet Pietro Aretino and the sculptor and architect Jacopo Sansovino. These three were so close that they were known in Venice as the triumvirate, and they used their influence with their respective patrons to further each other's careers.
Assumption of the Virgin Oil on canvas Venice
(detail of Assumption)
The Venus of Urbino, 1538 Oil on canvas

13. Tintoretto Judith and Holofernes 1550s Oil on canvas Christ
and the Woman Taken in Adultery Oil on canvas
Tintoretto
Biography
TINTORETTO, Jacopo (b. 1518, Venezia, d. 1594, Venezia)
Venetian painter, originally named Jacopo Robusti. His nickname derives from his father's profession of dyer (tintore). Although he was prolific and with Veronese the most successful Venetian painter in the generation after Titian's death, little is known of his life. He is said to have trained very briefly with Titian, but the style of his immature works suggests that he may also have studied with Bonifacio Veronese, Paris Bordone, or Schiavone. Almost all of his life was spent in Venice and most of his work is still in the churches or other buildings for which it was painted. He appears to have been unpopular because he was unscrupulous in procuring commissions and ready to undercut his competitors. By 1539 he was working independently, but the little that is known of his early work suggests that he was not precocious.
The first work in which he announced a distinctive voice is The Miracle of the Slave (Accademia, Venice, 1548), in which many of the qualities of his maturity, particularly his love of foreshortening, begin to appear. To help him with the complex poses he favoured, Tintoretto used to make small wax models which he arranged on a stage and experimented on with spotlights for effects of light and shade and composition. This method of composing explains the frequent repetition in his works of the same figures seen from different angles. He was a formidable draughtsman and, according to Ridolfi, he had inscribed on his studio wall the motto 'The drawing of Michelangelo and the colour of Titian'. However, he was very different in spirit from either of his avowed models, more emotive, using vivid exaggerations of light and movement. His drawings, unlike Michelangelo's detailed life studies, are brilliant, rapid notations, bristling with energy, and his colour is more sombre and mystical than Titian's.
Tintoretto's greatest works are the vast series of paintings he did for the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice from 1565 to scenes from the life of Christ in the upper hall and scenes from the life of the Virgin in the lower hall. The complicated scheme was probably not conceived by Tintoretto himself, but he interpreted it with a vividness and economy of colour and detail that give a wonderful cohesion to the whole scheme. Its personal conception of the sacred story overwhelmed Ruskin, who devoted eloquent pages to it, and Henry James wrote of the stupendous Crucifixion (1565): 'Surely no single picture in the world contains more of human life; there is everything in it, including the most exquisite beauty.' The unorthodox rough brushwork of such paintings incurred the censure of Vasari, but later generations recognized it as a means of heightening the drama and tension.
As well as religious works, Tintoretto painted mythological scenes and he was also a fine portraitist, particularly of old men (a self-portrait in old age is in the Louvre). Some of the weaker portraits that go under his name may be the product of his large workshop. His son Domenico (c ) became his foreman and is said to have painted many portraits, although none can be attributed to him with certainty. Another son, Marco ( ), and a daughter. Marietta (c ), were among his other assistants. The later paintings can thus be divided into those which are largely studio productions on the one hand and the visionary inspirations from Tintoretto's own hand on the other. A prime example of the latter is The Last Supper (S. Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, ), the culmination of a lifetime's development of this subject, from the traditional frontal arrangement of his youth to this startling diagonally viewed composition.
Tintoretto had great influence on Venetian painting, but the artist who most fruitfully absorbed the visionary energy and intensity of his work was El Greco.
The Discovery
of St Mark's
Body Oil on canvas
Crucifixion (detail) 1565 Oil on canvas, 536 x 1224 cm
Scuola di San Rocco, Venice

14. PARMIGIANINO(b. 1503, Parma, d. 1540, Casal Maggiore) Biography
Mannerism
Pontormo
Supper at Emmaus 1525 Oil on canvas, 230 x 173 cm Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
Mannerism
Europe, Mid to Late 16th Century Mannerism, the artistic style which gained popularity in the period following the High Renaissance, takes as its ideals the work of Raphael and Michelangelo Buonarroti. It is considered to be a period of tecnical accomplishment but of formulaic, theatrical and overly stylized work. Mannerist Art is characterized by a complex composition, with muscular and elongated figures in complex poses. Discussing Michelangelo in his journal, Eugène Delacroix gives as good a description as any of the limitations of Mannerism: "[A]ll that he has painted is muscles and poses, in which even science, contrary to general opinion, is by no means the dominant factor... He did not know a single one of the feelings of man, not one of his passions. When he was making an arm or a leg, it seems as if he were thinking only of that arm or leg and was not giving the slightest consideration to the way it relates with the action of the figure to which it belongs, much less to the action of the picture as a whole... Therein lies his great merit; he brings a sense of the grand and the terrible into even an isolated limb." Prominent Members   In addition to Michelangelo, leading Mannerist artists included Rosso Fiorentino, Pontormo, and Parmigianino. By the late 16th century, there were several anti-Mannerist attempts to reinvigorate art with greater naturalism and emotionalism. These developed into the Baroque style, which dominated the 17th century.
PONTORMO, JacopoItalian painter, Florentine school (b. 1494, Pontormo, d. 1557, Firenze)
Biography
Florentine painter (original name Jacopo Carrucci), who broke away from High Renaissance classicism to create a more personal, expressive style that is sometimes classified as early Mannerism.
Pontormo was the son of Bartolommeo Carrucci, a painter. According to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, he was apprenticed to Leonardo da Vinci and afterward to Mariotto Albertinelli and Piero di Cosimo. At the age of 18 he entered the workshop of Andrea del Sarto, and it is this influence that is most apparent in his early works. Pontormo was precocious (he was praised by Michelangelo whilst still a youth) and by the time he painted his Joseph in Egypt in about 1515 (National Gallery, London), one of a series for Pier Francesco Borgherini, he had already created a distinctive style - full of restless movement and disconcertingly irrational effects of scale and space - that put him in the vanguard of Mannerism. In 1518 he completed an altarpiece in the Church of San Michele Visdomini, Florence, that also reflects in its agitated - almost neurotic - emotionalism a departure from the balance and tranquillity of the High Renaissance.
Pontormo was primarily a religious painter, but he painted a number of sensitive portraits (he was a major influence on his pupil and adopted son Bronzino) and in 1521 was employed by the Medici family to decorate their villa at Poggio a Caiano with mythological subjects (Vertumnus and Pomona according to Vasari, but the identification is disputed) in which an apparently idyllic scene reveals a strong undercurrent of neurosis. In the Passion cycle ( ) for the Certosa near Florence (now in poor condition), he borrowed ideas from Albrecht Dürer, whose engravings and woodcuts were circulating in Italy. The emotional tension apparent in his work reaches its peak in Pontormo's masterpiece, the altarpiece of the Entombment (c ) in the Capponi Chapel of Santa Felicità, Florence. Painted in extraordinarily vivid colours and featuring deeply poignant figures who seem lost in a trance of grief, this is one of the key works of Mannerism.
Pontormo became more and more of a recluse in later life. A diary survives from 1554 to 1557, but the important frescoes in San Lorenzo on which he worked during the last decade of his life are now known only from drawings (best represented in the Uffizi); in these the influence of Michelangelo is apparent. The diary tells us much of his neurotic character - melancholy and introspective, dismayed by the slightest illness. Numerous drawings survive, and paintings are to be found in various galleries in Europe and America, as well as in Florence.
PARMIGIANINO
Italian painter, Parma school (b. 1503, Parma, d. 1540, Casal Maggiore)
PARMIGIANINO(b. 1503, Parma, d. 1540, Casal Maggiore) Biography
Italian Mannerist painter and etcher (real name: Girolamo Francesco Mazzola), born in Parma, from which he takes his nickname. He was a precocious artist, and as early as painted accomplished frescoes in two chapels in S. Giovanni Evangelista, Parma, showing his admiration for Correggio, who had worked in the same church a year or two before. The originality and sophistication he displayed from the beginning, particularly his love of unusual spatial effects, is, however, most memorably seen in his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), in which Vasari said he looks 'so beautiful that he seemed an angel rather than a man'.
In 1524 Parmigianino moved to Rome, possibly via Florence, and his work became both grander and more graceful under the influence of Raphael and Michelangelo. The Vision of St Jerome (National Gallery, London, ) is his most important work of this time, showing the disturbing emotional intensity he created with his elongated forms, disjointed sense of space, chill lighting, and lascivious atmosphere.
Parmigianino left Rome after it was sacked by German troops in 1527 and moved to Bologna. In 1531 he returned to Parma and contracted to paint frescoes in Sta Maria della Steccata. He failed to complete the work, however, and was eventually imprisoned for breach of contract. Vasari says he neglected the work because he was infatuated with alchemy — 'he allowed his beard to grow long and disordered ... he neglected himself and grew melancholy and eccentric.' His later paintings show no falling off in his powers, however, and his work reaches its apotheosis in his celebrated Madonna of the Long Neck (Uffizi, Florence, c. 1535). The forms of the figures are extraordinarily elongated and tapering and the painting has a refinement and grace that place it among the archetypal works of Mannerism.
Parmigianino's range extended beyond religious works. He painted a highly erotic Cupid Carving his Bow (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 1535), and was one of the subtlest portraitists of his age (two superb examples are in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples). The landscape backgrounds to his religious works have a mysterious and visionary quality that influenced Niccolo dell' Abbate and through him French art. Parmigianino, whose draughtsmanship was exquisite, also made designs for engravings and chiaroscuro woodcuts and seems to have been the first Italian artist to produce original etchings from his own designs.
PARMIGIANINO
Madonna with Long Neck
Oil on panel, 216 x 132 cm Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

15. Sofonisba Anguissola
Sofonisba Anguissola ( ) Sofonisba was one of the first women to gain a international reputation as a painter. She studied under Campi until he moved away and this established a precedent of encouraging male painters to take on female students. Michelangelo even sent her some drawings, which she copied and sent back to him for criticism. She was a prolific painter: more than 30 signed pictures survived from her years in Cremona, with a total of about 50 works that have been securely attributed to her. Late in her life she was visited by a young painter Anthony van Dyck. A drawing of her appears in his sketchbooks, along with excerpts of the advice she gave him about painting. Nevertheless it is clear that she was an innovative portraitist, whose international stature inspired many young women to become painters.
Sofonisba Anguissola Self Portrait 1554 oil on canvas

16. Music in the 16th Century
(See Text, page 330 – 332 and Musical Selections – in class)