In the seventeenth century San Lorenzo, strategically located between the great aristocratic palazzi around the Pantheon and the seedy artists’ quarter to the north called Four Corners (demolished by Mussolini), provided a showcase for the artistic giants of Baroque Rome, including Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the “divine” Guido Reni (who painted the high altarpiece), Carlo Saraceni, Simon Vouet, and the architect Giuseppe Sardi. Nicolas Poussin is buried there, among many illustrious others. In 1650 San Lorenzo’s original late antique interior was entirely remodeled in the Baroque style by the brilliant architect Cosimo Fanzago, but his work was destroyed in 1858 by order of Pope Pius IX, who regarded Baroque design as ugly and licentious. (All those sporting cupids!) Only the basilica’s marble pulpit has survived the purge to remind us of what must have been a spectacular space.

Fanzago’s alterations to the ancient basilica included eliminating its side aisles, which were walled off to become a series of private chapels, available for lease and snapped up by some of the city’s most illustrious families. The “renovations” of 1858, carried out by Andrea Busiri Vici, created two more chapels for lease, one on each side of the main altar.

Responsibility for the decor of these family chapels has always involved a complex web of agreements among the lease holders, the parish, and the higher ranks of the Church. Since 1870, changes to historic properties have also involved the Italian state. Today a special Fund for Religious Buildings, a branch of the Ministry of the Interior, operates under the supervision of the Superintendency of Fine Arts, a branch of the Ministry of Culture. The early-twentieth-century superintendent Antonio Muñoz was as enthusiastic an eliminator of Baroque embellishments as Pius IX, but tastes began to change in the late 1960s; in Rome today, any artistic or architectural intervention of historical significance, in any style, is vincolato—“chained” by law to preserve its present form. But these “chains” are a relatively new development in Rome’s millennial history, and the city is so full of monuments that official procedure, in a country plagued by bureaucracy, is not always followed to the letter.

The chapel to the right of the high altar in San Lorenzo, created in the nineteenth century, was never conspicuous enough to merit particular scrutiny except for a wooden crucifix “of Michelangelesque derivation” that dates from 1590. The crucifix is vincolato. The rest of the chapel, up to now, has been too new for the designation. Busiri Vici, like every architect active in nineteenth-century Rome, employed a team of decorative painters to embellish the walls and ceilings of the chapel with floral designs, landscapes, and classical motifs, but they were craftsmen rather than artists, no matter what artistic aspirations they may have held in their hearts.

In 1985, following a suggestion by Vittorio Emanuele IV, the exiled pretender to the throne of Italy, San Lorenzo’s monarchist parish priest, Don Pietro Pintus (who tried, without success, to have Princess Grace of Monaco beatified after her death), approved a thoroughgoing renovation of the chapel housing the wooden crucifix that included transforming its western wall into a monument to Vittorio Emanuele’s father, Umberto II of Savoy, the last king of Italy. The project’s sponsor, the distinguished lawyer Carlo d’Amelio, had spent more than half his life (he was eighty-three) as a loyal citizen of the Kingdom of Italy. Guglielmo Marconi had been one of his first clients, and for both of them the Church and the royal family, along with their own aristocratic social rank, provided a certain amount of insulation from Mussolini. Under the long reign of King Vittorio Emanuele III—Umberto II’s father and Vittorio Emanuele IV’s grandfather—d’Amelio received multiple knighthoods and served Popes Pius XI and XII as Secret Chamberlain of Cape and Sword to His Holiness, one of a group of aristocratic volunteers who assisted the pontiff on ceremonial occasions.

This world was swept away in 1946 when, by popular referendum (for the first time including women voters), the Republic of Italy abolished the monarchy and exiled the male members of the House of Savoy for the family’s part in two world wars, Fascism, the antisemitic racial laws of 1938, and colonial exploitation. (The exile was confirmed by the Italian Constitution of 1948.) Nonetheless, under the new Christian Democratic government, d’Amelio and other Italian monarchists, many of them firmly entrenched in the postwar power structure, continued to carry the torch for the House of Savoy. Because the first king of Italy, King Vittorio Emanuele II, his successor, Umberto I, and Umberto’s popular wife, Queen Margherita, were buried in state in the Pantheon, the monarchists have never entirely given up hope that later generations of the Italian royal family—among them Vittorio Emanuele III, who died in exile in 1947—might attain the same honor.

The rest of Italy has not shared these aspirations: when Umberto II died in 1983, officials at every level of government, from the Socialist president, Sandro Pertini, and the Socialist prime minister, Bettino Craxi, to the Communist mayor of Rome, Ugo Vetere, and the Communist superintendent of antiquities, Adriano La Regina, saw keeping the House of Savoy out of the Pantheon as a matter of national integrity. Amid rumors that the late king’s body would be smuggled into the monument by monarchists in collusion with the Honor Guard of the Royal Tombs of the Pantheon, it was abruptly closed to visitors, ostensibly because a piece of the cornice had fallen on a German tourist’s head. By strange coincidence, however, the Pantheon reopened as soon as Umberto II had been laid to rest in France.

There was no question that the installation of a marble bust of Umberto II in San Lorenzo in Lucina and an attendant requiem Mass for the former king’s soul, two years after his death and a few blocks north of the Pantheon, were meant to provide a kind of consolation for disappointed monarchists. The inscribed marble plaque beneath the bust is positively florid:

In memory of Umberto II of Savoy, King of Italy, who, in Christian submission to the Divine will preferred exile to civil war, devoting himself to this [condition] for the love of his Fatherland, to which, up to his death, he ever directed his encouragement of concord and his filial thoughts, confirming the ideals and traditions of his house. Racconigi, 15 September 1904–Geneva, 18 March 1983. His son, Vittorio Emanuele, placed this [monument] in the hope that the exile would cease after his death in the translation of his venerated corpse to the Pantheon.

The black marble molding that frames the niche with Umberto’s bust may simply signify mourning, but black was also the color of the shirts worn by Mussolini’s Fascist militia, as everyone involved in the project was well aware.

In 2002, six years after Carlo d’Amelio’s death at the age of ninety-four, Italy, under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, revoked the exile of the male line of the House of Savoy. Vittorio Emanuele IV and his wife, Marina Doria, moved to Rome.^* For the occasion, Carlo d’Amelio’s son Antonio and his wife, Daniela Memmo, decided to spruce up the chapel at San Lorenzo in Lucina with the help of a lay volunteer at the church, Bruno Valentinetti, a self-taught painter in Rome’s long-standing decorative tradition; he had already provided painted decoration for one of Berlusconi’s many villas. Valentinetti enclosed the entire rectangular chapel in a fictive architectural scheme embellished with colorful bouquets and human figures in sepia tones, one of whom bore the features of Elettra Marconi, the effervescent daughter of Guglielmo (still effervescing today at ninety-six).

Above the bust of Umberto II, Valentinetti added a pair of winged figures hovering in the empyrean beneath a floating Savoy coat of arms. Whether they are pagan winged victories, Judeo-Christian angels, or a combination of the two, they are modestly clad in Grecian pepla. The figure on the left holds a painted crown just above the former monarch’s sculpted head and looks out at the viewer. The other, painted in profile, unscrolls a map of Italy. Initially the right-hand figure exhibited a standard classical profile: a sharply pointed nose, full, parted lips, and a prominent chin. The meaning of the assemblage was easy to discern: Umberto, King of Italy in saecula saeculorum. A plaque declares that Daniela and Antonio “restored” the assemblage in 2003.

By 2023 San Lorenzo’s eternal seepage had compromised the murals (painted a secco—on a dry wall—rather than more durable fresco, a much more difficult technique that involves painting on wet plaster), so Daniela and Antonio commissioned a new round of waterproofing and restoration. Valentinetti, today still active at eighty-three, set about repairing his own work. It was completed by 2025.

Just after Christmas, as 2025 slipped into 2026, the left-leaning Italian newspaper La Repubblica published a photograph of the restored winged map bearer’s face alongside a photograph of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni. The resemblance was beyond denial, from the shape of the figure’s profile to the distinctive shading under the eyes. As the first Italian prime minister since 1946 to come from a neofascist background, Meloni has been a controversial figure throughout her career. Valentinetti turned out to have his own right-wing credentials: in addition to working for Berlusconi, he had also run for city office in Rome in 2008 on the ticket of a coalition of two particularly hardcore neofascist parties, La Destra—Fiamma Tricolore, at the moment when one of Meloni’s longtime fellow travelers in the neofascist Italian Social Movement, Gianni Alemanno, had been elected mayor of Rome. It was easy enough to conclude that Valentinetti’s intervention lent the overtly royalist decorative scheme of the chapel a further layer of political significance, whether he acted on his own initiative, the parish priest’s, the patrons’, or a conjunction of all three.

The patrons, Count Antonio and Countess Daniela, denied any involvement in the figure’s transformation, insisting that they had only ordered waterproofing and restorations. Valentinetti and the parish priest, Monsignor Daniele Micheletti, also evaded giving any direct answers to the reporters who began to appear in droves. Besides, the priest volunteered, there was an immemorial tradition of inserting contemporary portraits into ecclesiastical paintings; had not Caravaggio used a prostitute as a model for the Virgin Mary?

At this point the Vatican intervened:

The Cardinal Vicar of His Holiness, Baldo Reina, distances himself from the declarations of Monsignor Micheletti and expresses his own displeasure at what has happened. He will set into motion the necessary investigations to verify the potential responsibilities of the various subjects involved. In renewing the commitment of the Diocese of Rome to the preservation of its artistic and spiritual heritage, let it be firmly emphasized that the images of sacred art and the Christian tradition cannot become objects of improper use or exploitation, being destined exclusively to support liturgical life, and personal and community prayer.

Cardinal Reina’s statement deliberately refers back to the Twenty-Fifth Decree, issued in 1563 by the Council of Trent, whose pronouncements between 1547 and 1563 distilled the official Roman Catholic response to the challenge of the Protestant Reformation. In the face of radical Protestants’ condemnation of images, the Twenty-Fifth Decree holds that “great profit is derived from all sacred images,” but they should not “[suggest] false doctrine,” or “[furnish] occasion of dangerous error to the uneducated,” or “be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust.” The text says nothing about inserting contemporary portraits into religious art because the practice was too ubiquitous—indeed, the faces of secular patrons have appeared in works of religious art since ancient times. In classical Athens (at least according to Plutarch), the sculptor Phidias carved his own portrait and that of his friend Pericles into the shield of Athena Parthenos, the cult statue of the Parthenon. Saintly Fra Angelico portrayed his much less saintly benefactor Cosimo de’ Medici as the haloed Saint Cosmas in his San Marco altarpiece of 1439–1441.

Not every intervention of this sort has been flattering. A later resident of Fra Angelico’s convent, the firebrand friar Girolamo Savonarola, appears in one of Luca Signorelli’s frescoes for Orvieto Cathedral as the Antichrist. (Signorelli suffered no consequences; by that time, 1504, Savonarola had been burned at the stake as a heretic.) Michelangelo’s Last Judgment places the papal master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, at the mouth of hell. Edward Burne-Jones’s mosaics in the apse of the neo-Romanesque church of Saint Paul’s Within the Walls, commissioned by Episcopalians, show the church fathers with the faces of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Junius Morgan (father of J.P.), but in Florence Carlo Dolci had already portrayed Vittoria della Rovere, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, as the Virgin Mary and the future Grand Duke Cosimo III as the child Jesus Christ.

Monsignor Micheletti was on firm ground when he declared that Caravaggio used prostitutes as models for the Virgin Mary: the painter’s stately Madonna of Loreto in the Roman church of Sant’Agostino was said to be modeled on the courtesan Maddalena “Lena” Antognetti (as well as a statue of the Roman goddess Juno), and his Death of the Virgin was rejected by the friars who commissioned it on the grounds that his model had been a drowned prostitute fished out of the Tiber. Caravaggio’s paintings show how fiercely his Christian faith convinced him of the value of every human being, even the most abject; and hence behind Monsignor Micheletti’s apparently frivolous comment lies, at least potentially, a profound matter of theology. There are those in Rome who believe that praying for Prime Minister Meloni to foster the reburial in the Pantheon of the exiled kings of the House of Savoy (together with the late pretender) also constitutes a good cause. They are, however, an exiguous minority of Romans, more a curiosity than a threat.

The one principle that has never been invoked in the whole affair is that asserted by the painter Paolo Veronese in 1573 when he came before the Venetian Inquisition, as it investigated complaints about his Last Supper. The Council of Trent’s decree had been in effect for only ten years; consequently artists and inquisitors were busily testing the boundaries of their jurisdictions. Aristocrats, rich merchants, doctors, and lawyers, then as now, could rely on the protective power of status and money. Veronese, on the other hand, took a boldly original (and extremely modern) tack, extending Plato’s idea of divine inspiration to his own profession: “We painters take the same license that poets and madmen do.” Artistic license is the conspicuous absentee in all the discussions of the portrait in San Lorenzo in Lucina.

Bruno Valentinetti is invariably described as a “restorer,” but the work he edited in the course of restoration was his own; does he not have some right as an artist to alter his own creation? Monsignor Micheletti observed that the restorer “was certainly not just a plasterer,” but neither is he exactly Paolo Veronese. In short, when does a wall painting become significant enough to be vincolato? When does decoration make the sublime step from craft to art? In Italy, with its endless layers of meaning, it all depends. It always depends.

For the story of the Chapel of the Crucifix in San Lorenzo in Lucina is also very much a story about the Roman aristocracy, whose titles were banned in 1946 along with the monarchy but whose internal rules operate unchanged among the adept, even if the Italian state no longer subsidizes the publication of their Golden Book of Italian Nobility: the baronial families of medieval pedigree like the Massimo (who trace their lineage back to ancient Rome), Colonna, Orsini, Farnese, and Theodoli; and the “black” nobility that includes the old barons but also families like the Chigi, Borghese, Odescalchi, and Pamphilj, who owe their status to post-medieval popes (many of whom, in their own day, had been promoted on the basis of ability rather than aristocratic birth). Called “black” because they affected a sober Spanish style of dress at court, the scions of the black nobility bask in the superior light of their divine chrism. The “white” nobility consists of aristocrats created by mere secular powers (the Torlonia, elevated by Napoleon, are the prime example in Roman society). Principessa Elettra Marconi inherits black nobility through her mother’s line; the d’Amelia owe their earldom to the House of Savoy and hence are white nobility, but barely.

Giorgia Meloni, on the other hand, is a Romanaccia from the working-class suburb of Garbatella and has only the nobility of the high office conferred on her by the Italian state, which is no mean distinction; Bruno Valentinetti has asserted the nobility of the workingman within the Italian state by running, however unsuccessfully, for civic office. Within the Church, Baldo Reina is a cardinal, Monsignor Micheletti is a parish priest. Blame for inconvenient events, it seems, tends to trickle downward much more reliably than money.

A swipe of gray plaster has now obliterated the offending features of the map-wielding figure in San Lorenzo in Lucina. Monsignor Micheletti said he ordered its destruction because he was tired of the parade of tourists coming into the church to snap selfies rather than to pray, and this is perhaps the most straightforward, sensible observation to emerge from the whole business. The face of Elettra Marconi remains intact. The flap about the restoration has never involved her because Valentinetti touched her up to look as she always had. Her portrait never rankled because, as a principessa, a faithful Catholic, a friend of the family, a neighbor, and a generous benefactress, she fits comfortably into the immemorial Roman scheme of things.

Selfie snappers in search of hidden portraits are advised to visit the Centrale Montemartini in Via Ostiense, a museum that whimsically juxtaposes an old power station with a marvelous collection of ancient Roman art. There they will find a portrait bust of Silvio Berlusconi, disguised as a Roman patrician of the first century BCE. The resemblance, absolutely coincidental, is no less striking than that of the erstwhile Giorgia Meloni of San Lorenzo in Lucina to the prime minister herself. You read it here first.

The post Artistic License appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The idyll ended in 2014, when the institution’s governing body decided to shift its focus, not without input from the former mayor of Florence and newly elected prime minister, Matteo Renzi, then at the crest of his brash popularity. Bradburne’s Italian-born successor, Arturo Galansino, appointed in 2015, has faithfully and competently fulfilled an evident mandate to bring in more contemporary artists, cut costs, and raise funds, but the madcap spirit of the place and, ironically, the connection with Florence went missing in the process. “Contemporary art” mostly means international art, whereas many of Bradburne’s historically oriented exhibitions had tilled, with conspicuous success, the fertile soil of Florentine art, history, and finance, not to mention the persistent impact of these forces on the city’s civic life then and now.

Perhaps this is why, between exhibitions dedicated to the young Georgian artist Andro Eradze and to the Latvian American Mark Rothko, Palazzo Strozzi once again turned its attention backward in time to an artist who began to flourish six hundred years ago. Fra Angelico, as the great Tuscan painter is known in the English-speaking world, has been Beato Angelico in Italian ever since Pope John Paul II pronounced him Beatus—blessed, one step away from Catholic sainthood—on October 3, 1982.^* A crucial requirement for beatification is an attested miracle, most often an otherwise inexplicable medical cure obtained by prayer to the candidate, but for this fifteenth-century artist the pontiff declared, reasonably enough, that his paintings, exclusively on religious themes, qualified as miraculous in themselves. And because the largest concentration of those miraculous paintings is now found in Florence, Angelico provided the perfect pretext for an exhibition that would once again tie Palazzo Strozzi to every level of local and national government, from the Commune of Florence to the Region of Tuscany, the Italian Ministry of Culture, and, far from coincidentally, the Catholic Church in the Jubilee Year of 2025. Four years in the making, the exhibition, eventually split between Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco, the former Dominican convent where Angelico lived and painted between 1438 and 1450 (the precise dates are unknown), was conceived from the outset as a grand event.

And grand it proved to be, a triumphant display of dazzling color and impeccable, microscopically detailed workmanship. The weighty catalog, edited by the exhibition’s curator, Carl Brandon Strehlke, an American-born resident of Florence, features an international list of contributors. The essays, directed toward fellow specialists, show how little we still know about many phases of the artist’s life, including who taught him; there is much about which the contributors do not agree. Individual entries discuss the adventures worthy of a picaresque novel that many of the paintings on display endured after they were uprooted from their original settings between 1808 and 1810, when Napoleon Bonaparte closed the convents of Tuscany and left residents, buildings, and contents to their fates. These religious establishments fared no better between 1865 and 1870, when Florence served as the capital of the newly created Kingdom of Italy, which was at war with the Papal States of Pope Pius IX. The Dominican convent of San Marco was deconsecrated in the nineteenth century and eventually transformed into the museum that hosted the second half of the Angelico exhibition. Palazzo Strozzi displayed the artist’s more public works; at San Marco we got a bracing glimpse into his austerely disciplined private life.

Strehlke’s opening essay reveals his own awareness that the dazzling surfaces of Angelico’s work can distract our attention from the larger artistic trajectory that took this phenomenally talented painter from the end of the Gothic era to the new, classically inspired spirit of the Renaissance. Angelico, like his younger brother, Benedetto, began his artistic career by painting miniatures for parchment manuscripts, and as his fame spread he continued to devote the same unflagging attention to detail no matter the scale at which he worked, from tiny ornamental letters on the pages of books to the lofty frescoed vaults of the Vatican Palace and Orvieto Cathedral. The lighting in Palazzo Strozzi was carefully directed to reveal that the halos of the friar’s holy figures are not only gilded with pure gold leaf but also ornamented in three dimensions through a variety of inventive techniques: some have been scored by minutely close-set rays or concentric circles so that these infinitesimal ridges create their own rainbow patterns of light and shadow. Some halos sport tiny appliqués of stucco; for others, the plaster-coated wooden panels on which Angelico normally painted have been punched with decorative dots and flowers or engraved with names (“Jesus Christ”, “Saint Thomas Aquinas”) and prayers (“Ave Maria”) in even, perfectly legible script.

The painter and his workshop lavished the same relentless detail on backgrounds of worked gold leaf and elaborate brocades, imitating textiles brought down the Silk Road to central Italy from as far away as China. The figures posed before these sumptuous backgrounds, swathed in vividly painted silks, satins, damasks, and furs, carry themselves in the early panels with an otherworldly elegance and in the later works with a stately, more physical gravitas. A preparatory drawing on parchment for the figure of Christ in his Deposition of Christ from the Cross (also known as the Strozzi altarpiece) is so finely worked that it seems to betray no trace of human effort.

From the outset, working with manuscripts accustomed the young painter to the finest pigments money could buy. Books were so costly and illuminations so small that patrons were willing to supply miniaturists with the best materials, especially for religious texts. Tuscany had its own deposits of mercury for cinnabar red (vermilion) and blue azurite, but the best blue, ultramarine, was made from powdered lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan. The gold Angelico used for gold leaf came from West Africa or present-day Slovakia (then part of Hungary). As his career progressed, his prodigious talents continued to assure him a steady supply of superior material to grind into his exquisite paints. The exhibition’s blaze of gold and rarefied colors, like the textiles he depicted, also testified to the immense wealth that Florentines had amassed in the years since the devastating plague of 1348, but such a glittering display is, in some ways, the least of the angelic friar’s achievements. The paintings, like Angelico’s life, are far more concerned with addressing, and attempting to heal, the discontents created by that wealth: pride, greed, and a brutally unequal society.

The exhibition was hardly the first time that Florentine wealth and power have turned to Fra Angelico in pursuit of redemption; for a man so austere in his personal habits, he had an uncanny ability to move comfortably among the influential magnates, prelates, popes, and scholars he met in his travels between Florence and Rome, the city where he may have created his greatest masterpieces, most of them long gone, and where he died at around the age of sixty in February 1455. These great and powerful patrons may have presented him with the earth’s most precious pigments for his palette and prestigious destinations for his finished work, but they could never buy the man himself. By the time he joined the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans, in his mid-twenties sometime between 1418 and 1423, his superiors had long since realized that his paintings preached sermons as powerful as any spoken word, just as Pope John Paul II recognized them five centuries later as miracles.

Despite the supernal delicacy of his paintings, the angelic friar was no otherworldly dreamer. In his studio, lay artists worked alongside Dominican friars in a kind of charmed middle ground between sacred and secular. He served terms both as prior of the convent of San Domenico in Fiesole, the Etruscan hill town that overlooks Florence from the northeast, and as “syndic,” or administrator, of San Domenico’s newly founded branch within the walls of Florence, San Marco—after having decorated its altars, corridors, manuscripts, professors’ chairs, and friars’ cells—and at one point he was asked, although he refused, to serve as archbishop of Florence. Furthermore, both his sober conduct and his painted homilies seem to have done an effective job of bringing people together rather than turning them against one another in times of daunting turbulence. A century after his death, Giorgio Vasari described him as “di natura posato e buono”: a good-natured man with his feet set firmly on the ground.

In a city with an exploding population, a boisterous government, and increasing disparities of wealth, he sought to calm the fears of rich and poor alike by showing them, through his painted images, that the way to Heaven, though arduous, was open to all. Jesus may have observed that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God” (Matthew 19:24; Mark 10:25; Luke 18:25), but the Three Magi, the wise men from the East who came to Bethlehem with their exotic gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, afforded living proof that the feat was not impossible. Florentine bankers like Angelico’s patrons Palla Strozzi and Cosimo de’ Medici eagerly adopted the Three Magi as their models and cultivated intellectual interests as well as financial empires.

The Strozzi were natives of Fiesole and had already established a stronghold in Florence by the twelfth century, branching out into commerce and politics with glittering success. Predictably they looked down their long, urbane noses at the emergence in the early fifteenth century of the Medici, a clan from the mountainous region of the Mugello, over the hills and far to the north of Fiesole. The future Fra Angelico was also born in the Mugello, perhaps around 1395, and fulfilled his first painting contracts, at around the age of twenty, as Guido di Piero, but he entered religious life as a Dominican friar in Fiesole and signed his later contracts as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole. Both the Strozzi and the Medici could regard him, therefore, as a neighbor.

Florence at the turn of the fifteenth century was still a republican commune governed by a system of powerful guilds, which had enabled the city to recover more quickly from the Black Death of 1348 than many of its neighbors. Traditionally the dominant members of this merchant oligarchy, a handful of families and a handful of guilds, observed a rough sense of equality and shied away from overt displays of personal wealth, but those habits were beginning to change, as commerce spread across the globe and the fortunes to be made increased exponentially.

When Palla Strozzi emerged as the richest man in Florence in the early 1400s, he swathed himself and his family in silks and turbans worthy of a sultan. The exhibition displays a tiny panel painted by Strozzi’s favorite artist, Gentile da Fabriano. It is dated 1423, the same year in which Guido di Piero signed his first known contract as a friar. The Presentation of Christ in the Temple focuses attention on a young matron extravagantly outfitted in modern dress, with a fur-lined gown and an enormous gilded turban, undoubtedly Strozzi’s wife, Marietta. On the opposite side of the Temple courtyard, we see the poorest of the Florentine poor: two ragged beggars, a starving disabled man and a stooped old woman. This little panel of tempera on wood once formed part of Gentile’s magnificent Adoration of the Magi, in which a turbaned Strozzi, clad in maroon brocade, stands just behind one of the Magi, his pet falcon perched on his yellow-gloved wrist. He is only a touch less elaborately dressed than the Three Magi. Like those wise men from the East, Strozzi was a learned man, and he invited Byzantine Greek scholars to Florence as part of a long-standing effort to reconcile Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians.

Nine years later, in 1432, Strozzi ordered another altarpiece for the family church of Santa Trinità. Gentile da Fabriano had died in 1427, so the scholarly magnate turned instead to Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, whose Strozzi altarpiece portrays him in a more muted vein. Here he stands at the foot of the Cross, his bare hands gingerly holding the instruments of Christ’s torment: the Crown of Thorns and the three nails newly extracted from the dead Messiah’s hands and feet. Rather than a turban, Strozzi wears a mazzocchio, the fashionable cap of Florentine high society, painted, like his soft boots, tights, and jacket, in brilliant shades of kermes red, a pigment ground from the bodies of thousands of tiny beetles and the most expensive textile dye on the market. His overgarment, or giornea, a sleeveless mantle bordered in cloth of gold embroidery, is a radiant violet hue composed of a mixture of kermes red, Venetian lead white, and ultramarine, sumptuous, but decidedly more subdued than Gentile da Fabriano’s Eastern finery. Another figure in modern dress, a man with a black mazzocchio, has earned a place among the group that has climbed up the Cross to carry the body of Jesus: Strehlke identifies him as Palla Strozzi’s grandfather, another Palla, Palla di Jacopo.

Angelico lavishes his gift for detail on a magnificent perspective view of Jerusalem as a snow-white (actually lead-white) walled city set on a hill, but he focuses his chief attention on the finely modeled, dramatically diagonal, limp body of Jesus. The dead man’s skin, as pale as parchment, is crisscrossed with the bruises from his flagellation, but these wounds are so fine as to be barely perceptible; what we see instead is an extraordinarily beautiful human figure. Near the base of the Cross, drops of vermilion blood stream downward and form rivulets on the ground. For Fra Giovanni, the blood of Christ, spilled at the Crucifixion, contained the essence of that eternal life his sacrifice offered to flawed humanity. Thomas Aquinas, the Dominicans’ great theologian, declared that just one drop of it could save the world. Fittingly, whenever possible, Angelico used the finest vermilion or kermes red to paint this divine substance. Its conspicuous presence in his paintings can almost be taken as a signature. According to Vasari, he never painted a crucifix without weeping.

The painter’s Dominican congregation in Fiesole belonged to the breakaway Observant branch of the order, committed to obeying their founder’s original rule, which had demanded poverty so strict that the friars could own nothing and lived only on the alms they managed to beg from day to day. Over the course of two centuries, since the Spanish priest Domingo de Guzmán had won papal approval for his order in 1216, the Dominicans, perhaps 10,000 strong by 1400, had established hundreds of convents in a dozen countries, staffed illustrious universities, carried out inquisitions and foreign missions, and, inevitably, come to manage huge sums of money. The chief Dominican congregation in Florence, Santa Maria Novella, belonged to the dominant Conventuals, who accepted these developments as a natural response to changing times. (Parallel tensions between Conventuals and Observants divided the other mendicant orders, such as the Franciscans and the Augustinians.) Despite his strongly held position as an Observant, Angelico took the missionary aspect of his vocation seriously, creating images that carefully emphasized the common religious ground uniting Christianity as a whole. He accepted commissions from Franciscans as well as Dominicans, Conventuals as well as Observants, men and women, lay and religious. His order drew its inspiration from Saint Paul’s proclamation, “We preach Christ crucified,” and that is what Angelico did through his art.

In 1436 a group of friars from the Observant Dominican congregation of Fiesole moved down the hill to take over the Florentine church of San Marco. Under the sponsorship of Palla Strozzi’s bitter rival Cosimo de’ Medici, the convent was rebuilt by the same architect, Michelozzo di Bartolomeo, who was building the sprawling Palazzo Medici a few blocks away. It is elegant but austere, with small windows blocked off by wooden shutters that reduced the daylight entering the friars’ cells to a dismal minimum; each aperture is about the size of a human hand. The only exception to the gloom was the magnificent library, its manuscripts tethered by chains to thirty-six reading desks. Not long afterward Fra Giovanni moved down from Fiesole to live in this dark abode among the friars of San Marco. With the help of his assistants, he also decorated the convent’s cells, corridors, and public spaces, developing his clear, essential theology in a series of frescoes carried out, in stark contrast to the rest of his work, with the cheapest of ingredients. (See illustration at right.) Because the sky was said to have darkened at the moment of Christ’s death, he could use charcoal rather than ultramarine to paint it in scenes of the Crucifixion. He rendered the blood of Christ in red ochre, an earth, rather than costly vermilion or kermes, but it flowed far more freely in the paintings he designed for the friars’ cells than it did in his more public paintings, just as the friars’ blood flowed when they flagellated themselves in imitation of Christ.

For the Annunciation at the top of the stairs leading to the dormitory, he crushed mica into the pigments he employed for the angel Gabriel’s wings. Only one wayward flake has straggled out of bounds. By the time he painted a Madonna and Child in one of the corridors, his style had changed dramatically from that of his earliest years. From slender, swaying late Gothic figures, he had shifted to the solid proportions favored by contemporaries like the painter Masaccio, the sculptor Donatello, and the ancient art and architecture from which these artists drew their inspiration. His Madonnas changed too, from a Byzantine standard, with prominent noses and receding chins, to strong-jawed faces inspired by ancient statues.

The altarpiece he painted around 1440 for the convent church of San Marco marks that watershed clearly. Subsidized by Cosimo de’ Medici, it was even more splendid when it was made than it is now; its travels since the early nineteenth century (which recently ended back where they started, in San Marco) have worn down its surface, especially the Madonna’s face. Angelico’s earlier altarpieces, like the Deposition painted for Palla Strozzi, fit into a traditional wooden triptych frame, rising up in spires of Gothic tracery. Cosimo, almost twenty years younger than Strozzi and his successor as the richest man in Florence, favored the new classical style, and so did the painter.

In the San Marco altarpiece, fictive golden curtains part to reveal, theatrically, a perspective tableau centered on the Madonna, who sits on a golden throne with conspicuously classical Corinthian pilasters and marble steps. (See illustration on page 12.) Behind her a dense thicket of trees, loaded with ripe fruit, cannot entirely block the glorious landscape that extends into the distance. A Persian carpet, spread at her feet in a masterpiece of foreshortening, seems all the more teasingly real because the artist has inserted a tiny, gold-backed panel portraying the Crucifixion in “front” of it, a painting within a painting. When this sturdy square panel stood on the high altar of the church of San Marco, the miniature Crucifixion, with its spurting blood of Christ, would have matched the eye level of the priests who said Mass.

In the main image, three saints stand to the right of the Madonna’s throne, their names inscribed within their halos so that there can be no confusion about their identity. Saint Dominic, in the order’s habit, a black mantle over white cassock, a white lily in his hand to signify his purity, flanks Saint Francis in a brown Franciscan robe, his feet bare and his hands joined in prayer. Characteristically, the wound on the saint’s left hand, duplicating the wounds that Christ suffered on the Cross, is signaled by a discreet reddish dot, far less conspicuous than the meticulously rendered veins on the hands of the third saint, another Dominican; his wounded skull identifies him as Peter Martyr, one of the order’s first inquisitors, who was ambushed and killed on the road to Milan before he could set up shop.

To the left of the Madonna’s throne, beneath Saints Mark, John the Evangelist, and Lawrence, the kneeling figure of the vermilion-hatted physician Saint Cosmas is clearly a portrait of San Marco’s benefactor Cosimo de’ Medici, who had his own cell within the convent of San Marco on a corridor with other laymen, close to the library. The great patriarch of the Medici clan looks out from the picture with pleading eyes, lending an unexpected poignancy to his flushed, homely face. His fur-lined red giornea and his ultramarine blue physician’s gown with its fur-lined sleeves allude, like Palla Strozzi’s ensemble in Angelico’s Deposition from the Cross, to his own worldly stature as well as to the profession of his patron saint. The physician twins Cosmas and Damian were slain by the emperor Diocletian around the year 300, and Cosimo de’ Medici had a twin, Damiano, who died in infancy; that is why Angelico shows Saint Damian with his face turned toward the Madonna and away from us, beyond mortal reach.

In 1445, Fra Giovanni received a summons from Rome to decorate the Vatican Palace for Pope Eugenius IV, who had spent much of his pontificate in Florence and knew the artist’s work firsthand. Not long afterward, the archbishop of Florence died, and Eugenius offered that position to the friar as well. This honor he refused, and instead recommended another Observant Dominican from the congregation of Fiesole, Antonino Pierozzi, whose service as archbishop in those turbulent years earned him canonization in 1523. Angelico, obliging in so many ways, was perfectly capable of saying no. Shortly after appointing Archbisop Antonino, the pope died, but his successor, Nicholas V, retained Angelico’s Vatican commissions, presenting him with a bag of the finest lapis lazuli, its superb quality still gleaming forth on the walls of the recently restored Niccoline Chapel in the Vatican Museums.

Among the ruins of Rome, Angelico’s classical style took on a more monumental quality, and his painted architecture in particular acquired a new sophistication. According to Vasari, the Chapel of the Sacrament was a masterpiece, “outstanding in that style of his,” but we will never know: Pope Paul III destroyed it in 1538, probably in the belief that all that gold and those pure primary colors were hopelessly old-fashioned. Nor can we see the paintings Angelico executed for the Dominican prelate Juan de Torquemada in Rome’s Dominican stronghold, the church and convent of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva; the altarpieces have disappeared and the frescoes perished in a seventeenth-century renovation. (The mild, respected Juan was the uncle of the notorious Tomás de Torquemada, the first head of the Spanish Inquisition.)

Fra Angelico’s other monumental assignment in these years is only half finished: in the summer of 1447 the painter took up residence in Orvieto to decorate a huge side chapel in the city’s cathedral. The theme of the Last Judgment seems to have been developed in consultation with the artist, but he and his team left after only fifteen weeks of work, never to return. Once again Friar Giovanni said no, perhaps out of sheer claustrophobia. The little hilltop town of seven thousand people, isolated on its volcanic crag, was racked by a protracted family feud that was still raging when Luca Signorelli completed the commission fifty years later. Some battles exceeded even the angelic friar’s capacity to soothe turbulent souls. Luckily, as the visitors to his exhibition in Florence will agree, his surviving legacy is radiant enough to brighten our own troubled times.

The post Painted Sermons appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

The dominant artist in 1551 was unquestionably the aging Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), then just over sixty, whose patrons included the Venetian state, the pope, and the king of Spain. Recently, however, a sensational new talent had emerged: the thirtyish whirlwind Jacopo Robusti, better known as Tintoretto—“the little dyer”—for his father’s profession, or il Terribile for his frenetic personality. For the young painter from Verona, Titian was a living idol, especially now that Tintoretto’s daring experiments with paint and perspective had driven the older master to push his own ideas about painting in startling new directions. Contemporaries marveled that Titian and Tintoretto could imitate each other’s work so closely that they could fool a casual observer. Their rivalry, an evident source of mutual inspiration, must have exerted an irresistible attraction for an ambitious painter of twenty-three.

Paolo, by every account a precocious learner, had already developed his own style in Verona, independently of what Titian and Tintoretto had been contriving in Venice. His elegant draftsmanship, precise detail, and limpid colors did, however, recall to Venetians the way Titian used to paint back in the days before his lighting turned dramatic, his backgrounds dark, and his brushwork ever more coarsely abstract.

He signed his first contracts as Paolo Spezapreda—“Paul Stonecutter”—for that had been his father’s job in Verona. Though spezapreda (Veronese dialect for spezzapietra) literally meant “rock splitter,” Gabriele Spezapreda was not a burly quarryman but a refined finisher of stone who dressed and carved—that is, sculpted—marble, snow-white local limestone, and ruddy Verona jasper for architects like the brilliant and illustrious Michele Sanmicheli. Gabriele married well: Paolo’s mother was the illegitimate daughter of an aristocrat.¹ Sanmicheli took the very young Paolo under his wing, supplying him with commissions and fostering his contacts with local scholars, artists, and aristocrats. By 1556, the year of his marriage, Paolo had taken his mother’s surname, Caliari, but at that point he already had commissions for the Venetian state, and he was so well known that his birthplace sufficed to identify him. “Paolo Veronese,” or “il Veronese,” as the Venetians called him, had become as familiar a sobriquet as “Titian” or “Tintoretto,” whose two-way rivalry he had swiftly turned into a triangle.

From the 1550s to the twentieth century, Veronese’s popularity as a painter equaled that of Titian and Tintoretto, but in more recent decades his placid personal life, the consistency and sophistication of his style, and the glittering opulence of the imaginative world inhabited by his figures have all told against him. He has been less intensively studied than either Titian or Tintoretto, let alone the antihero of our time, Caravaggio. “Paolo Veronese (1528–1588),” an exhibition at Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado curated by Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo of the University of Verona and Miguel Falomir, the Prado’s director, aims to restore him to a place of higher honor in the history of painting. For any viewer, the beauty and virtuosity of his extraordinary works reliably speak for themselves, but the exhibition also takes pains to present the artist in a way that might appeal to a contemporary public, emphasizing how bravely and inventively his paintings addressed the troubles—political, social, and religious—that had long since sent the Most Serene Republic of Venice into inexorable decline. (It has been described in these pages as “the nervous republic,” with good reason.)

Epic in scale (105 objects) and including some of the artist’s largest canvases (and a masterpiece by Tintoretto), the exhibition comes with an ambitious, bountifully illustrated catalog that stands as a scholarly benchmark but is also a delight to read, with an extensive, intriguing variety of topics. Veronese may have been, like Raphael and Rubens, a painter of impeccable manners and an expert pleaser of patrons, but along with those manners came striking sensitivity, wit, and a wicked sense of humor. Nor has every twentieth-century artist passed him over. The redoubtable painter Alex Katz (still active at ninety-eight) acknowledges that Veronese, in many ways, is his true mentor. The paintings, he maintains, project their energy vigorously outward, dominating the space in front of them—our space—rather than pulling in the viewer, a bit of magical stagecraft performed with a confidence no other painter can match: “There is no strain, it just keeps moving toward you. I still think of him as having the largest controlled gesture. The paintings are impersonal, elegant, and powerful.”²

The curators and the catalog essays also emphasize the importance of the artist’s Veronese origins—and hence his position as an outsider—to his consistently distinctive artistic development. Verona, founded as a Roman colony at the junction of several ancient roads, still nestles among Roman ruins, including a stupendously preserved arena, a theater, two city gates, and a commemorative arch. Because of its position along a major river, the Adige, in the borderland between the Po Valley and the foothills of the Alps, the city has never lost its importance as a regional center, and though by the sixteenth century it was part of the Venetians’ inland empire, it retained close contact with Rome and the papacy. In the orbit of progressive Venice, Verona was a bastion of conservatism (a reputation it retains today).

Amid such conspicuous reminders of the ancient past, the artists and architects of Verona, like their contemporaries who gravitated to Rome, sharpened their skills by drawing ancient monuments as well as living models. Veronese’s mentor Sanmicheli had moved from Verona to Rome around 1505 and after a prolonged stay in Rome and Orvieto returned in 1527, eager to impart the latest classical style to the buildings of his native city. Paolo, too, from the outset, apprenticed to the local artist Antonio Badile (his future father-in-law), learned to use drawings as the means to work out his projects at every stage of their creation, from the sketchy glimmers of an initial idea to the painstaking series of adjustments that led at last to a completed work. Veronese artists also looked south for more contemporary sources of inspiration, to the latest developments in Rome, Florence, Parma, and Bologna, as well as east to Venice, making their city the most vibrant, cosmopolitan artistic center in the region aside from La Serenissima.

The first section of the exhibition demonstrates how the young Veronese’s first efforts reflected his close study of artists like Raphael and Parmigianino, as well as the architectural drawings of a former stonecutter from nearby Vicenza, Andrea Palladio, the great architect with whom he would forge a memorable partnership designing and decorating villas on the Venetian mainland, the terraferma. Yet even these earliest works, some painted when Veronese was only eighteen or so, reveal a fully formed artistic personality (and a fully formed career, as he was already taking commissions in his own right): fair-haired women clad in sumptuous satins, as reserved as they are beautiful; elegant bearded men, often dressed as turbaned citizens of the Ottoman Empire; children and animals who go about their business oblivious to the agendas of grown-ups.

To the doings of children, dogs, cats, and horses Veronese devoted just as much attention as he did to the ponderous acts of grown-ups, and with them he invariably departs from the detachment with which he portrays the world at large, that “big and impersonal” distance that so struck Alex Katz. Take the inquisitive greyhound who sticks his pointed nose into one of the artist’s earliest known commissions, the portrait of an unidentified mother and her son, dated 1546–1548. The dog has intruded casually into the right side of the painting, so we see only a portion of his head, but already the mother’s left hand, poised protectively in front of her son’s shoulder, has begun gravitating toward the canine’s furry face, while the little boy, attention riveted on his pet, clutches the tidbit that drew the dog here in the first place.

Veronese was always the most industrious of painters, his focus never flagging from the center of a canvas right out to its corners, which often present some clever, unexpected detail. His work demands an equal intensity of concentration from his viewers. Rather than holding to a single perspective, like Vittore Carpaccio or Tintoretto, he relied, like the ancient Romans, on multiple vanishing points and kept his figures busy in the foreground, preventing us from seeing too far into his painted world. Instead, he staked his confident claim on our own time and space.

Verona may have shaped Paolo Caliari’s style, but Venice gave his work a new scale, new ideas, and a new sense of higher purpose. Whether he was ostensibly painting a portrait, a story from the Bible, or a classical myth, the city itself became one of his main subjects as the list of his clients lengthened to include patrician families, religious orders, and the Venetian state. Sixteenth-century Venice, vividly brought to life in the catalog essays, continued to regard itself as a maritime republic, the only major political unit on the Italian peninsula that was still ruled by a collective rather than a monarch, warlord, or pope. But that collective had long since become a tightly limited oligarchy, constantly threatened by the armies of other European powers as well as the expanding Ottoman Empire. Sixteenth-century warfare, powered by a Chinese invention, gunpowder artillery, had become more deadly than ever. As political fortunes shifted on the high seas, the Venetian fleet faced fierce competition from the Ottomans, Spain, Portugal, and, increasingly, England. The republic’s efforts to maintain its overseas territories in Cyprus, Crete, and Dalmatia began to falter.

Venice had built its commercial empire on contact with Germany, Constantinople, and Greece, but that contact also brought vulnerability to the spread of strong convictions as well as to military force. The Protestant Reformation swept swiftly south from the German states to the republic and its territories on the terraferma. The Italian Alps had provided refuge for Waldensian dissenters since the Middle Ages, and after 1532 they joined forces with the Reformers. Vicenza, at the foot of the Alps, became a Protestant stronghold, and several of Veronese’s early patrons, like Iseppo da Porto of Vicenza, were stout opponents of the papacy. The University of Padua, founded by rebellious students seceding from the University of Bologna, had always welcomed foreign students, Jews, and new ideas, and Venice, poised between Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy, had always insisted on its independence from the Papal States if not from the pope. When Roman Catholicism began to assert itself against the Reformation, the republic found itself caught in the middle.

To this unsettled new world of invasions, naval battles, and religious turmoil, Venetians responded by retreating into patriotic fantasy, a myth of Venice that corresponded only in part to its disturbing reality, and no one proved more adept at giving visual form to that dream than Veronese. The Prado exhibition suggests that the majesty, the serenity, and the surreal opulence of his imaginary world served both to comfort his Venetian patrons and to proclaim the vibrancy of their republic to outsiders. The gentleman of Verona, moreover, could comfort troubled souls through images on any scale, from intimate to monumental, executed with breathtaking skill.

Jesus, in Veronese’s hands, reliably exudes an imperturbable calm. He always looks as if his mind is elsewhere, as of course it was, from an early Conversion of Mary Magdalene (circa 1548), in which the Lord has only begun to notice the gorgeous, painfully young woman who has collapsed at his feet in her satin gown of powder blue and gold. He cannot see, of course, that her transformed face is a miracle of foreshortening or marvel at the way the light of his halo ignites luminous reflections from the pearls in her golden necklace. He is a sojourner on this earth.

A painting from Rome’s Borghese Gallery, Saint John the Baptist Preaching (circa 1562), focuses its attention on the ascetic saint as he replies to a curious crowd of turbaned men and satin-clad women. (In the Book of John the women do not appear; the men are priests and Levites sent from Jerusalem to discover who this strange man is.) No, he is not Elijah; no, he is not the Prophet. “Then said they unto him, Who art thou?… What sayest thou of thyself?” Gaunt John points backward with an angular arm at an oblivious Jesus, wandering quietly at the very edge of the precipitously angled painting, and says, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Make straight the way of the Lord.”

The Lord, however, pays no heed to the state of his craggy, twisting path. Unaware of the crowd gathered farther up the road, he presses on against the backdrop of a marvelous, foggy landscape, a delicate symphony of rose-tinged, sandy colors appearing through a web of leafy branches, as mysterious and evanescent as an ancient Roman wall painting. Veronese painted that enigmatic vision in smalt—cobalt blue, a piercingly bright pigment that breaks down over time to the color of sand. The landscape was once a seascape, a distant view of the Venetian lagoon standing in for the Sea of Galilee. Fortunately only one other painting in the exhibition, an Annunciation from the Uffizi, has suffered this degree of transformation. Veronese used every kind of blue pigment he could find in the emporia of Venice, and most of them have held their color.

The exhibition’s most capacious hall places a huge canvas by Veronese, Christ among the Doctors in the Temple (circa 1550–1556), directly across from an equally monumental work by Tintoretto, The Washing of the Feet (1548–1549), an endlessly revealing feast for the eyes. Christ among the Doctors shows Veronese at his most classical, the solid columnar structure of the temple clearly inspired by his long association with Sanmicheli and Palladio. Tintoretto’s Maundy Thursday scene is set in a fanciful version of a Venetian palazzo rather than ancient Jerusalem, with perspective views receding deep into high-placed vanishing points and an elegant spotted dog lounging front and center. Tintoretto painted animals with the same loving attention as Veronese.

The solemn setting of the temple compels Veronese to maintain a sense of gravitas, but another monumental canvas on display, The Feast in the House of Simon (circa 1556–1560; see illustration at top of article), complete with a dog and a voluptuous Mary Magdalene, reinforces the contrast between the two great artists: Veronese keeps his vanishing points low, his architecture solid, and the action up front. No one could paint a milling crowd with such mastery, massing multiple figures in intricate compositions, but Veronese used the same ingenuity to choreograph a series of sexy, small-scale mythological paintings, intertwining classical gods and goddesses in an endless variety of sinuous embraces, the most amusing of which shows a curious horse poking his head into the alcove where Mars and Venus have withdrawn for some private business. These images, too, provided their own form of solace for their owners, as did the small religious paintings that provided nervous Venetians with a focus for their prayers.

To achieve these effects, large and small, Veronese employed virtually every kind of color and technique available in his day, smooth, rough, finished, crude, glazed, opaque. His industry was as ferocious as Tintoretto’s, and so was his sense of humor.

The most striking example of that humor emerged, of all places, during his interrogation in 1573 by the Venetian Inquisition, which summoned him to its offices after the Dominican friars of the Basilica of Saints John and Paul (in Venetian, San Zanipolo) complained about the gigantic Last Supper he had just completed for the back wall of their cavernous medieval refectory. It was one of his enormous “banquet paintings,” with a theatrical classical setting, a cinematic cast of dozens, silken costumes, golden vessels, African servants, lords, beggars, and, of course, animals. The three inquisitors composed their report of the interview in Latin (and, unusually, in a neat humanistic script); he answered in vernacular. The Venetian Inquisition was milder than most, but it was fully empowered to condemn perceived heretics to death:

He was asked about his profession.

He replied: I paint and make figures.

He was asked: Do you know the reason why you have been summoned?

He replied: No, your lordships.

He was asked: Can you imagine?

He replied: Imagine? I certainly can.

He was asked: Tell us what you imagine.

He replied: Because of what I was told by the Reverend Fathers, that is the Reverend Prior of San Zuan Polo, whose name I don’t know, who said he’d been here and that the Reverend Fathers had ordered him to make me replace a dog with Mary Magdalene, and I’d answered that I’d do anything for my honor and that of the painting, but that I didn’t think Mary Magdalene was appropriate there for many reasons, which I will tell you if I’m given the chance.

The accused was not given the chance. The interrogation moved on to other topics, including the crowd of extra characters, human and animal, thronging what had always been portrayed as a solemn meal with only Jesus and his twelve disciples taking part:

He was asked: What are those men in German armor doing, one with a halberd in his hand?

He replied: I’ll need twenty words to tell you!

He was told: Tell us.

He replied: We painters take the same license that poets and madmen do: so I made those two Halberdiers, one drinking, and the other one eating on the stairs, and put them where they could be handy, and it seemed appropriate to me, because I had been told that the owner of the house was great and rich, and he ought to have that kind of servant.

In the end Veronese was given three months to “improve” his Last Supper, which he did by painting a fictive inscription on a balustrade reading “Feast in the House of Levi” and the biblical reference to that gathering (Luke 5:29–32). The dogs, the cat, the servants, the Germans, the man picking his teeth, the man with a nosebleed, and the dozens of extra guests remained untouched. Mary Magdalene was not painted in. As he well knew, she did not attend the Last Supper, and he was sure enough of his expertise to remind the inquisitors, implicitly, of that fact.

From 1575 to 1577, a recurrence of the bubonic plague struck Venice, carrying off a third of the population. Titian was among its victims. Veronese emerged from the experience a changed man. After forty years of remarkably consistent output, he abruptly changed his style. His bright, glittering palette veered toward greater contrasts between light and shadow. The images became more overtly religious and more overtly Catholic, focused on the importance of priests as mediators between divinity and humanity. He experimented more boldly than ever with challenging poses and odd angles. His brushwork became looser. It is tempting to see his Vision of Saint Helena (circa 1580), like a predecessor from around 1570, as a portrait of his wife, Elena, veiled, older, and executed in his new style.

When he died in 1588, probably of pneumonia, Veronese was still at the height of his formidable powers. The final section of the exhibition shows how his true heirs were not his sons and the remnants of his old workshop, who continued in his footsteps but without his prodigious talent. His legacy extended more broadly through space and time, to artists like El Greco, Diego Velázquez, Peter Paul Rubens, and Giambattista Tiepolo, for whom he provided an indispensable point of reference. As for the solace he brought his Venetian patrons through his opulent art, it is still there for the taking, a sovereign balsam for our own hard times.

The post The Gentleman of Verona appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

These vignettes, however, are little gems inserted to brighten long passages about what kind of wood to use for different parts of a building, the proportions of temples, and the marvels of waterproof concrete, as well as instructions on how to build, among many other wonders and amenities, sundials, aqueducts, water clocks, and catapults. Its storehouse of practical information helped to ensure that Vitruvius’s handbook, written around 25 BCE, was one of the few ancient Greek and Latin works to survive what the fifteenth-century pundit Leon Battista Alberti called the “shipwreck” of the Middle Ages, along with the poetry of Vergil and Ovid, the prose of Cicero, a Latin translation of Plato’s Timaeus, the Bible, and some other surprisingly durable texts. Ever since the papal printer Eucharius Silber brought out his edition in Rome in 1486, Ten Books on Architecture has never gone out of print.

One of the chief reasons for the enduring interest in On Architecture, aside from its treasury of practical instructions, is the ambitious educational program that Vitruvius puts forth in the first of his ten books (each of which originated as a single papyrus scroll, closer to the length of a modern chapter than an entire book, just as his chapters are approximately the size of a paragraph). Architects, he argues, can only complete their work properly (in his words, “perfect” it) if they are well informed about every one of the subjects that the art of building brings into play—if not as well informed as a specialist, then at least well enough to make the right decisions. A competent practitioner, therefore, must not only master drawing but also have a good grasp of literature, music, mathematics, and law. (Apparently Roman homeowners delighted in suing their neighbors for offenses like an aggressively dripping gutter.)

Because the practice of architecture requires such a store of knowledge, Vitruvius maintains that it is much more than a craft that depends on purely manual skill: it is a lofty liberal art, a pursuit that engages all the human faculties of imagination and reason no less than grammar, rhetoric, or poetry. His career included inspecting catapults for Julius Caesar and building a basilica at Colonia Julia Fanestris (modern-day Fano, on the Adriatic coast) with some radical innovations, such as gigantic two-story interior columns, that belie his popular reputation as a hidebound conservative. A man of strong, sometimes unpredictable opinions who thanks his parents in the preface to Book VI for having given him a first-rate Roman education, Vitruvius was bilingual in Greek and Latin and well read in Greek and Latin poetry, Cicero’s prose, Greek architectural pamphlets,¹ and recent developments in natural philosophy and technology.

His proposed course of study for young architects continues Cicero’s recent efforts to create a system of Roman learning comparable to that of the Greek-speaking world (a world that notably included Alexandria as well as the eastern Mediterranean), and it participates fully in the contemporary effort, fostered by the emperor Augustus, to transform Rome into a capital of distinctively Latin culture. His ambitiously comprehensive treatise is almost certainly the first of its kind for the ancient Greco-Roman world, recasting architecture not only as a liberal art but also as a natural means to extend the reach of Rome’s expanding empire. Clear and precise, his remarks on education show how the Romans of the early Augustan era tried to define their place in a rapidly changing world—both native Romans and Romans newly absorbed into the Res Publica Romana, for Roman education followed swiftly on the legions to prepare young people in conquered territories for participation in the imperial state.

It seems likely that the connection between education, architecture, and empire inspired the creation of the earliest known manuscript of Vitruvius, copied on parchment in the ninth century, perhaps for Charlemagne, perhaps by the hand of his learned adviser Alcuin of York, almost certainly as part of the Frankish king’s project of resurrecting the glories of ancient Rome in a Christian spirit. It is through this same clever wedge, education, that Vitruvius has driven himself and his treatise into the very heart of the way the contemporary world still thinks about any number of things, from human scale to beauty to liberal education to the best methods of town planning. Whether you have read Vitruvius or not, his influence is still palpable in the fabric of modern urban life, and that is why he has been translated as recently as 2017 into Chinese.

In All the King’s Horses: Vitruvius in an Age of Princes, Indra Kagis McEwen, a Canadian architect and historian, brings out a more chilling aspect of Vitruvius and his millennial tradition: his fatal attractiveness to despots. The “princes” of her title are the princes of whom Machiavelli wrote: strongmen who seized and maintained one-man rule over medieval and early modern Italian city-states by force of arms and charisma. Augustus served these princes as an inspiring model because his trajectory so closely resembled their own—except, of course, for its colossal scale. Like the Italian lords who revered him, the future Imperator rose to his august heights by doing whatever would ensure his own survival, eventually completing a process that Machiavelli attributes to Augustus’s adoptive father, Julius Caesar: supplanting the ancient Roman Republic with one-man rule.

Part of the story, of course, is the alacrity with which the Roman Republic and its institutions, after decades of turmoil, submitted to the young renegade in ever-increasing thrall to his inescapable authority. The Latin word auctoritas rooted authority in personal magnetism as well as brute power, and Augustus embodied it as no one else; his first portraits show a skinny, scowling youth with protuberant ears and a pencil neck, but in his later imagery only the hint of a wrinkle crosses his otherwise placid brow to show that the godlike commander, ears pulled in and angular features softened, still cares for his people. Vitruvius uses this same weighty term, auctoritas, to describe the commanding impression made by a successful building, an effect almost always achieved, he notes, by the deft deviation from pure principle to accommodate the challenges posed by a particular site. Architecture, like statecraft, is an art that thrives on adaptation and the judicious use of fiction.

McEwen has written acutely about Vitruvius and auctoritas in her earlier study Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture (2003), in which she shows how the word’s connection with “increase” (as in “augment”) supports the role that architecture assumed in communicating and consolidating the Roman Empire’s territorial expansion under Augustus, whose honorific name (“the divinely fortunate”), awarded by the Senate in 27 BCE, was itself an etymological relative of “augmentation” and auctoritas. All the King’s Horses concentrates on Vitruvius’s own auctoritas as what she aptly calls a “Renaissance celebrity” in the Italy that spawned Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia. Her title, with its overtones of Humpty Dumpty, suggests an intent to shatter something fragile, and on the first page she identifies the designated victim:

Key among the reasons for Vitruvius’s appeal in my view, and generally unacknowledged, is his relevance to the politics of what I have called an age of princes, the period between the mid fourteenth and late fifteenth centuries when ambitious signori throughout Italy were establishing control of cities that had governed themselves as free independent communes for, in most cases, the two hundred years and more preceding their takeover. Vitruvius’s participation in the fulfillment of that autocratic agenda is the focus of this book.

What comes crashing to the ground in All the King’s Horses, then, is our overwhelming sense, when we stand in ineffably gracious places like the Ducal Palace of Urbino or the gemlike Tuscan hamlet of Pienza, that the Italian Renaissance must have been an age in which the body politic aimed as resolutely at bettering the common good as the arts aimed at the attainment of ideal beauty, and somehow this beauty was always meant to set us free. The classically inspired architecture of the fifteenth century can certainly be seen as embodying an idea of human scale and individual worth, often brought into connection with works like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man or Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man.” That harmonious figure (which may be a self-portrait) fits, with a little judicious fudging, into both a perfect circle and a perfect square, just as Vitruvius claims for the homo bene figuratus, the “well-formed human” who anchors his discussion of architectural proportion in book 3.

Firm belief in the necessary connections among human dignity, classical architecture, and democratic institutions certainly underpins much of eighteenth-century public building in places such as Washington, D.C., and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and the University of Virginia, but the first post-antique experiments with republican government on the Italian peninsula emerged in the late Middle Ages, and thus the great works of architecture commissioned by such Italian free communes as Pisa, Venice, Padua, Rome, and Siena proclaimed that freedom according to an earlier, Gothic canon of beauty. By the fifteenth century these relatively small republican communes, as well as the Papal State, were struggling against intolerable pressure by the great powers of the era, Spain and France, which had begun to coalesce into what would soon become Europe’s predominant form of political organization: the nation-state ruled by hereditary monarchs.

In essence, then, the art, music, literature, and natural philosophy of the Italian Renaissance proclaimed the triumph of order, proportion, and human dignity at the same time as the free communes fell to militant popes and greedy warlords. The classical revival, born amid the violence of armies, made its own conquest through its irresistible new visions of beauty, but the majesty of works like Leonardo’s immense clay model for an equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza in Milan was no match for the Burgundian bowmen who used it for target practice, and the same revived classical imagery that captivated first Europe and then the globe was also used to adorn Italian weapons, suits of armor, cannons, and instruments of torture.

Thus, as McEwen argues with fearsome cogency, Renaissance readers of Vitruvius not only regarded him as an ardent imperialist rather than a nostalgic republican, but also shared his enthusiasm both for the figure of Augustus and for Augustus’s imperial urge to expand territory by conquest and to cultivate the arts in a patriotic vein. Citizen Vitruvius, through his wise words on liberal education and the cosmic origins of proportion, provided the rulers of Italy’s city-states and the pope himself with guidance on how to turn their realms, in image if not in reality, into miniature modern versions of ancient imperium sine fine—Vergil’s phrase, forged to flatter Rome’s first emperor, for empire without end. All the King’s Horses provides architectural history with the equivalent of The Prince.

The link between Italian warlords and Vitruvius is not direct; All the King’s Horses details the complex, fascinating chain of relationships that made such a connection possible in the first place. Reading Vitruvius in the fifteenth century lay beyond the reach of anyone but a professional scholar. The signori knew implicitly that his treatise was important, because the great fourteenth-century poet and scholar Francesco Petrarca, whose verse they did read and cherish, had told them so. Copies of Petrarca’s marginal notes to the text of Vitruvius survive in a fourteenth-century Italian manuscript, now preserved in Oxford’s Bodleian Library (the flyleaf of which also includes a recipe for curing hemorrhoids with a poultice of white beans and lavender water). One of these jottings declares, “He apologizes for his style. Needlessly.” It is a high compliment from this most sensitive of readers.

Petrarca had an unusually deep grasp of Latin, but even for him some parts of Vitruvius could have made no sense. No other Roman author wrote so extensively—or at all—on the nuts and bolts of building or architectural theory; many of the text’s architectural terms and words for manual activities could only be understood through educated guesswork. (Calcare, for example, can mean both “trample,” as in other Latin texts, and “throw in quicklime,” only in Vitruvius.) The ten original papyrus scrolls had contained Greek words written in Greek as well as three complete Greek poems, and they were illustrated with at least eleven images that are entirely absent from the earliest surviving manuscripts. Most medieval Latin texts, moreover, were copied by scribes who knew no Greek, so in most of the Vitruvius manuscripts produced before 1500, the Greek words and the three Greek poems have been transformed into nonsense, in a script that looks vaguely Cyrillic. It took a champion of a reader to overcome such obstacles.

In the mid-fifteenth century the best-informed among these heroic readers was surely the brilliant, prickly Tuscan Leon Battista Alberti, whose flair for writing in fluent Latin and Tuscan vernacular on a multitude of timely subjects had landed him a post in the Curia under the scholarly Pope Nicholas V. Frustration with Vitruvius and his indecipherable manuscripts, coupled with vaulting ambition, led Alberti to write his own version of the Ten Books on Architecture around 1450, De Re Aedificatoria (On the Art of Building). It was not a stance of rapt admiration. First of all, Alberti did not share Petrarca’s approval of the ancient writer’s literary style:

I’ve certainly lamented the fact that so many, and such excellent works of the ancient authors have succumbed to the injuries of times and people, so that we scarcely have a single survivor of that shipwreck: Vitruvius, a writer learned beyond doubt, but so affected by time, and so mangled, that many things are missing in many places, and in many you’d want [him to have written] more. Furthermore, he set them down in a rough state. For he spoke in such a way that the Latins would have perceived him as Greek, and the Greeks would have guessed that he was speaking Latin. The work, speaking for itself, will testify that it was written in neither Latin or Greek, so he might as well never have written for us at all, because he wrote in a way that we don’t understand.

Like his ancient predecessor, Alberti knew that expertise on architecture afforded an excellent entrée into the corridors of power. Vitruvius himself declared as much in the preface to book 1. In McEwen’s pitch-perfect translation:

When I realized that you had care not only for the common life of all men…but also for the fitness of public buildings—so that even as through you [Rome] was increased [augmented!] with provinces, so public buildings were to provide eminent guarantees for the majesty of empire—I decided not to hesitate and took the first opportunity to set out for you my writings on these matters…. It is because I noticed how much you have built and are now building, both public and private buildings in keeping with the greatness of your achievements so that these might be transmitted to the memory of posterity.

As with Augustus, she notes, grand building projects provided fifteenth-century lords, many of whom had come to power by unscrupulous means, with an instant form of legitimacy. With astonishing frequency, their consultant on these massive works turns out to have been none other than Alberti, who moved from the Rome of Nicholas V to the Pienza of Nicholas’s successor Pius II, then on to the princely states of Urbino, Rimini, and Mantua and their lords Federico da Montefeltro, Sigismondo Malatesta, and Ludovico Gonzaga, acting as a consultant to their projects and often serving as architect himself. As with nearly all his other endeavors, Alberti succeeded magnificently as a designer of buildings, and McEwen guides us with a sure hand through the genesis of some of the outstanding landmarks of fifteenth-century Italy, several, like Pienza and Urbino’s Ducal Palace, now designated as UNESCO heritage sites.

Aside from Pius, who had been an important papal diplomat and the author of a still-beguiling romance novel, The Tale of Two Lovers, before he became pope, Alberti’s other princely patrons rose to prominence as condottieri—mercenary captains. The Gonzaga of Mantua and Sigismondo Malatesta fought on behalf of the pope, at least until Pius II, in an extraordinary edict, condemned Sigismondo to Hell while he was still alive; Federico da Montefeltro served Lorenzo de’ Medici, and the targets of their brutal campaigns were normally neighboring Italian city-states. All these lords recognized that a magnificent appearance was essential to asserting authority in the city and on the battlefield: their armor glittered, their interminable, opulent parades cast fistfuls of coins to the onlookers, and their courts basked in luxury—amid vicious intrigue.

The princely court, from the days of Akhenaten and King David down to the present, has always been one of human society’s most pernicious formations. Alberti helped Renaissance Italy’s hothouse courts to concoct a vision of their warring states as guided by the conscious resurrection of ancient Roman virtues (no longer the republican virtues heralded by Cicero but virtues adapted to the conditions of empire). To proclaim their sense of this virtus rediviva, the courts of the popes and lords of the fifteenth century invented an entire style of art, music, architecture, and behavior that infused their actions with the gravitas of antiquity. The crowning image of ancient auctoritas, McEwen contends, lives again in one of the triumphant achievements of Renaissance bronze work: the equestrian statue, an ancient form revived, at tremendous expense, in the Renaissance. The legacy of that reinvention has shaped the appearance of public squares ever since, especially in the nineteenth century, when horses were still essential companions of daily life.

The version of Vitruvius that Alberti transmitted to his patrons was a Vitruvius revised according to his own biases. His religion was Roman Catholicism, a theocratic system that emanated from a single God and barred women from the priesthood. The ancient Roman deities, male and female, were a more riotous lot, and priestesses enjoyed their own auctoritas. Classical architecture since the Renaissance has borne the stamp of Alberti’s, and his era’s, systematic misogyny, a misogyny that does not exist in the Ten Books—Vitruvius openly criticizes two of Augustus’s most recent monuments, the Temple of Venus the Ancestress in the Forum of Caesar and the Temple of Divine Julius Caesar in the Roman Forum, as “defective” because the columns are spaced too closely to allow two matrons to pass between them comfortably arm in arm.

As for that homo bene figuratus Leonardo instinctively drew as the Vitruvian man, Vitruvius carefully uses the neutral word homo—“human being” rather than “man.” A central aspect of his thinking is that women, likewise children of the cosmos, must be as perfectly proportioned as men. He may have dedicated his treatise explicitly to Augustus, but it is implicitly dedicated to the Imperator’s sister Octavia, who is also mentioned in the preface to book 1 and seems to have been his most solicitous sponsor. Neither Federico da Montefeltro nor Sigismondo Malatesta seems to have shared Alberti’s aversion to women; their wives, Battista Sforza and Isotta degli Atti, governed for them in their absence and are duly celebrated as consequential persons in their own right.²

All the King’s Horses may depict these Renaissance princes as thoroughgoing rogues (though I confess an enduring fascination with the dashing Sigismondo, the most brilliantly avant-garde of them all), but at the same time McEwen’s book, with its lavish color illustrations, demonstrates, again and again, that Italy’s princes, guided by Vitruvius as filtered through Alberti, spent their disproportionate gains on some supremely elegant works of architecture—works that paradoxically lend their forms perfectly today to more egalitarian political ideals, as conference centers, museums, and public squares. So, too, the marble ornaments that survive from Augustan projects like the Temple of Mars Ultor (Mars the Avenger) in the Forum of Augustus and the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Roman Forum rank among the most beautiful architectural detailing ever created, no matter what purpose, noble or nefarious, they once served: column capitals in the shape of the divine horse Pegasus, intertwined acanthus tendrils on Corinthian capitals to symbolize the deathless bond between the twin deities Castor and Pollux. Their sheer beauty has long outlived, and transcended, their original purpose. Grandeur somehow compels us to dream of a Golden Age, however fictitious, as the only plausible setting for its birth. And we, in its presence, walk with a greater gravity, to become more beautifully immortal ourselves.

The post Vitruvius & the Warlords appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Lot 229 caught the immediate attention of experts in Italy and at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, whose director, Miguel Falomir, said, “From the start the Prado sensed that the attribution was not correct, and that probably we found ourselves in front of a lost work by Caravaggio.” Old masters in general are out of vogue with contemporary buyers, but Caravaggio has never been more universally loved than he is today, his power to communicate seemingly impervious to every barrier of time and space. And of medium: What made so many people sense his presence so insistently in the online reproduction of a dirty old canvas?

Since last spring, the general public has had a chance to make up its own mind about the fanfare. The old canvas is no longer dirty; the Prado swiftly alerted Spain’s Ministry of Culture to the presence of what began to look like a supremely important piece of national heritage, Ansorena removed it from auction, and the unassuming object became a sensation. After cleaning and restoration, it was purchased—reportedly for €30 million—by an anonymous buyer who agreed to exhibit the work for nine months at the Prado, although the museum hopes that this will result in a permanent loan.

One of the reasons for the painting’s initial low auction price may have been its somber subject: the biblical scene known as the “Ecce Homo”—“Behold the Man,” drawn from a verse in the Gospel of John. Jesus, arrested the previous night while praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, has been imprisoned in the dungeons of the palace built by Herod the Great in Jerusalem and now occupied by Pontius Pilate, governor of the recently formed, dangerously unstable Roman province of Judaea. By morning the news has drawn a crowd of both Jesus’ supporters and enemies to the citadel of Jerusalem, but in the governor’s courtyard the enemies have arrived first. Jesus, who lacks the rights of a Roman citizen, can be, and has been, swiftly subjected to the empire’s most ignominious punishments: flogging, torture, and the prospect of death by crucifixion, an excruciating public form of execution reserved for enemies of the state. Pilate’s guards have beaten the prisoner bloody, accused him of plotting with his followers to become the new king of Judaea, and mocked him by dressing him in a crimson mantle and crowning him with a wreath of thorns.

At last Pilate brings the battered prisoner to a balcony of the palace and displays him to the throng, presumably to gauge whether the safest course is to condemn Jesus as a subversive or let him go. John details the governor’s attempts to play both sides in hopes of avoiding a riot:

Pilate therefore went forth again, and saith unto them, Behold, I bring him forth to you, that ye may know that I find no fault in him. Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the crimson robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man [in the Latin of Jerome’s Vulgate Bible, “Ecce homo”].

When the hostile faction’s cries of “Crucify him!” drown out those of the prisoner’s supporters, Pilate lets the law of Rome take its cruel course. In the Gospel of Matthew, he literally washes his hands of the whole controversy.

Images of Jesus at this agonizing moment of suspense became popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as aids to Christian devotion, reminders, in a harsh world, that true faith will doubtless be tested. The great Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, for example, focused almost exclusively on the haggard face of Jesus in this extremity of pain and humiliation. According to Christian belief, he would rise from the dead three days hence and ascend into Heaven, but the price of resurrection, even for God’s anointed (this is the meaning of christos, Christ), was suffering and death. Antonello’s several versions of Ecce Homo therefore convey nothing but an all-consuming sadness at the depths of human folly. Titian’s Ecce Homo paintings, as another example, put a greater emphasis on the condemned man’s transcendent divinity by giving his body, however ravaged, a radiant dignity that counteracts the despair signaled by his bowed head.

Often, however, early modern portrayals of the scene follow John’s narrative, which strives to pin blame for the fate of Jesus on the Jewish faction that opposed him rather than on Pontius Pilate and the Roman state. Christ’s tormentors, therefore, and even Pilate himself are often portrayed by European artists as Jews rather than Romans, or Pilate wears the robes and turban of a modern ruler of the Holy Land—an official of the Ottoman Empire, an infidel Turk standing in for the agent of pagan Rome. It took until 1965 for the Catholic Church to declare explicitly that Jesus was killed by the Roman government of Judaea rather than its Jewish subjects.

On all these representations of Jesus at his most vulnerably human and of his tormentors as evidently unlike the viewer, the newly discovered Ecce Homo rings a series of startling, unprecedented changes, many of them invisible before the recent cleaning. What showed through from the Ansorena catalog was the pale figure of Christ emerging from the darkness in contrast to the black-haired, black-bearded Pilate in a pose reminiscent of other paintings by Caravaggio. The cleaning, however, has revealed a work of bold originality.

The scowling Pilate, caught in the coils of Roman law, leans over the parapet of his palace, visibly racked by doubt, the tousled hair peeking out from his velvet cap suggesting an official so confused he can no longer bother with his personal appearance—he seems to have been tearing his hair before he put on his headgear, the sign of his rank. If Pilate’s face says “Don’t make me do this,” his hands are obeying the swifter movements of his heart: his right gestures open-palmed at the hopeless conundrum, but his left has stretched out to support the bruised, swollen hand in which Jesus still clutches his mock scepter. Pilate is changing his mind, which means that we, caught in the position of the crowd gathered beneath the governor’s window, are the ones who are called upon to shout either “Crucify him!” or “Let him go!”—not the Jews, not the Romans, no one but ourselves.

Jesus, pale, beaten, bleeding, too weak to hold up his head or meet our eye, waits numbly to hear our verdict as a prison guard strips away his mantle. Behold the man; he wears nothing now but his crown of thorns and the ropes that bind his wrists, the visible signs that his condemnation is already irreversible. The violence, we know, has advanced too far to halt its momentum.

Yet the most extraordinary innovation of this Ecce Homo is the wide-eyed, open-mouthed boy who lifts the crimson robe from Christ’s shoulders, not stripping a wretched prisoner of his last shred of human dignity but rather unveiling an infinite mystery. Biblical scholars have argued whether the phrase “Behold the man” in John’s Gospel deliberately echoes the proclamation of the prophet Isaiah (40:9), “Ecce Deus vester,” but for this painter the verbal echo between John’s Gospel and the Hebrew prophet holds the key to what is unfolding before us:

O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion, get thee up on a high mountain; O thou that tellest good tidings to Jerusalem, lift up thy voice with strength; lift it up, be not afraid; say unto the cities of Judah, Behold, your God! (Super montem excelsum ascende, tu qui evangelizas Sion; exalta in fortitudine vocem tuam, qui evangelizas Ierusalem: exalta, noli timere. Dic civitatibus Iuda: Ecce Deus vester.)

So steadfastly, the painter proclaims, does divinity shine forth from the darkness. Behold the man, yes, but in his suffering, behold your Messiah.

No other Ecce Homo has dared to turn Pilate into a comforter, or one of Christ’s tormentors into a hierophant, but at least two roughly contemporary copies of this radical work have come to light, proof of its influence. If a literal play of light against darkness first suggested the hand of Caravaggio, the depth of this meditation on the Gospel of John is itself as good as a signature. Who but Caravaggio turns these ancient Bible stories so relentlessly back on their witnesses? Only one painter of the dawning seventeenth century distilled the great gulf between humanity and divinity in such an insistent play of hands: here, Pontius Pilate reaching out in unconscious obedience to the laws of basic humanity rather than the statutes of the Roman Empire, just as the praying hands of the grimy pilgrim in Caravaggio’s Madonna of Loreto nearly brush the foot of the Christ child, who bestows a personal blessing on this deserving soul (and pays no attention whatsoever to the well-dressed parishioners of the posh Roman church where it hangs, who once complained about the pilgrim’s lack of shoes); or as the thumb of the disciple in his Supper at Emmaus nearly touches the hand of the traveling companion he has just recognized as Jesus returned to life.

Falomir used the word intuir to describe the way he and his colleagues arrived at Caravaggio’s name when they examined the Ansorena catalog, a word that describes motions deeper than those of intellect alone—and of course this appeal to our deepest understanding is why Caravaggio continues to engage us so irresistibly. In the Prado, we can compare this Ecce Homo directly with the work of Ribera, to whose circle it was first ascribed. Ribera is a marvelous painter in his own right, but one who views the world with clinical detachment, from the bearded lady Magdalena Ventura to a charming Neapolitan waif with rotting teeth and a clubfoot. His Ecce Homo in Madrid’s Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando shows a red-clad Christ emerging from deep darkness to launch a look of blistering accusation. Caravaggio’s Christ, by waiting to hear our verdict, holds out a chance for us to be better versions of ourselves.

The brushwork of the Ecce Homo, and especially the treatment of the hands, is consistent with Caravaggio’s other work, and the painting’s documentation, discussed at length in the Prado’s informative catalog, presents a plausible history of its provenance. Most of the scholars who have examined the painting date its execution between 1606 and 1607, either during the artist’s last months in Rome or after his escape to Naples after impaling the local gang boss Ranuccio Tommasoni with his rapier during a game of tennis. Homicide does seem to have driven Caravaggio into sustained contemplation of mercy and forgiveness, contemplation worked out more successfully in his painting than in the conduct of his own life.

In Rome another Caravaggio painting has emerged from a private collection to be put on public display for the first time: a portrait ascribed to the artist by his great modern champion Roberto Longhi in 1963. Longhi identified the sitter as Maffeo Barberini, an ambitious Florentine prelate and future pope whose avant-garde artistic taste in the late 1590s was developing as swiftly as his ecclesiastical career. Both identifications, as a work of Caravaggio and as a portrait of Barberini, have gathered corroborating evidence over the past sixty years, providing a fascinating glimpse into the unlikely convergence of two commanding but utterly divergent personalities. Barberini is best known for his long association with the volcanically talented sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who gave his portraits of popes, potentates, and his lover the breath of life through artfully dishevelled details rather than images “incised with a skewer” (in the Italianist Walter Stephens’s vivid phrase) to reveal deficiencies of character. Caravaggio, on the other hand, went about armed with a whole arsenal of skewers, from the pair of daggers he was forced to give up to the Roman police, to the rude pen he plied against his rivals, to the blade he drove into Tomassoni’s private parts, to the paintbrush he took in hand to mark the upward trajectory of a meteor named Maffeo Barberini.

Barberini, elected pope in 1623, chose the name Urban VIII, a signal, after the strife-torn reigns of the inclement Clement VIII and his quarrelsome successor Paul V, that he would lead Rome and the Church into a new era of civility. Since the eleventh century, the family coat of arms had featured three brown horseflies, for their original name was Tafani da Barberino. (Tafano means horsefly.) By the sixteenth century, transferred to Florence, the Tafani had dropped the flies from their name in favor of their ancestral village, Barberino Val’Elsa, and changed their heraldic insects to golden bees, champions of industry and sweet rewards who also, of course, packed a sting. In 1598 Maffeo Barberini, already ensconced in the Curia as a protonotary apostolic (a high-level record-keeper), put down seven thousand scudi for a prestigious position as chierico di camera (cleric of the Apostolic Chamber)—that is, a governor of the Vatican’s financial office and close associate of the pope. It was the perfect occasion to commission a portrait, and for this wealthy cleric of thirty, money was no object. Caravaggio, a resident protégé in the palace of Barberini’s friend Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, the Florentine ambassador to Rome, was only beginning to make a name for himself and was a suitably audacious choice to paint it.

What spiky-tempered Caravaggio picks up from the preternaturally suave Barberini in this rather small seated portrait is his energy. His right hand points off into the space at our left, puncturing the picture plane, while his left hand clutches a letter in so vivacious a grip that the thick paper has begun to crumple, and beneath his iridescent black robes his up-and-down knees show that he is positively squirming on the edge of his seat. Like Raphael in his portrait of the Vatican librarian Tommaso Inghirami, Caravaggio has used Barberini’s slightly divergent eyes to reinforce the portrayal of character, as if this famously quick-witted man were keeping watch everywhere at once.

Only Barberini’s sovereign sense of decorum keeps this firestorm of lively impulses under control, and thus the calm he struggles to impose on his own posture demonstrates what iron discipline governs his easy familiarity with power. A tubular scroll at his side, tied with a green silk tassel, may contain his letter of appointment; it certainly refers to his lofty post within the Church. The sheen on his hat and blue-black robe attests that they, like the tassel, are made of silk or some other costly material, with the barest hint of crimson piping around the armholes to proclaim his status as a monsignor—a curial official. Perched on his isolated, thronelike chair against the blank wall of Caravaggio’s studio, he is both a universe unto himself and evidently posing in the way that people of his time and place assumed their positions in what they called the theater of the world. Barberini’s destination in that theater was still an open question, though his armchair and his stately posture conspire to present him as a potential pope. The aspiring great man’s averted glance suggests that he is far too busy for the likes of us, but it also gives his outward polish an evasive quality. He is being scanned, after all, by the searchlight eyes of Caravaggio, and the scrutiny makes him nervous.

As these marvels of Caravaggio’s brush return to public view, it is impossible not to hope that his best-known lost work will reappear after almost half a century: the magnificent Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence that was cut from its frame and snatched from a Palermo chapel, the Oratory of Saint Lawrence, in October 1969. Most of the painting’s subsequent story has been squeezed, bit by bit, from mafiosi who turned state’s evidence in exchange for more lenient prison terms: the so-called pentiti, “repentant” drug and arms dealers, hit men, and bosses whose tales are rarely straightforward. The thieves were two young slum-dwellers eager to ingratiate themselves with Cosa Nostra; that much seems reasonably clear, and the aim, of course, was to make money from Caravaggio’s unflinching image of Jesus lying on a stable floor adored by his parents, a shepherd, Saint Francis, and Saint Lawrence as an angel keeps watch—an image, that is, of divine love shining through the bleakest poverty.

According to the most recent findings of art historians and the Palermo district attorney’s office, the Nativity seems to have made its way into the hands of a particularly vicious hit man, Gaetano Grado. At about the same time, the chapel’s parish priest received an anonymous call instructing him to put an advertisement in the leading Palermo newspaper, Giornale di Sicilia, if he was interested in having the painting back for a price. The priest informed the local superintendent of fine arts, who published the ad. Cosa Nostra replied with an ad of its own, but the superintendent suspected that the blameless priest might be complicit in the theft, dropped the negotiation, and let the good father face an unpleasant and fruitless police interrogation. The mafiosi, in turn, had no idea of the painting’s real value until news of its theft appeared in Italian and international papers; then it passed, by hierarchical right, to Palermo’s capo di tutti i capi, Gaetano Badalamenti. This boss of bosses, faced with, among other demons, a brutish challenger from Corleone named Totò Riina and the FBI (Badalamenti died in 2004 in a US prison), appears to have placed the Caravaggio with a Swiss dealer whose initial intention was to cut the canvas up and sell the pieces, but who burst into tears, so the story goes, when he actually saw it up close.

Despite rumors that Caravaggio’s Nativity was destroyed on the night of the theft when the thieves rolled it up in a carpet, or when one of the mafiosi used it as a rug, or when it was stashed in a stable and torn apart by pigs, it was apparently intact in the 1980s, if the stories are true that an Italian art historian was taken blindfolded to see it in Sicily. Thanks to digital technology, a full-size reproduction has been installed in the Oratory, which has been beautifully restored in recent years. The only surviving photograph of the painting was in black and white, but the reproduction has been transformed into a color image through comparison with Caravaggio’s available works. Thanks to the archival investigations of the art historian Michele Cuppone, one of the greatest experts on the Nativity and its vicissitudes, we know that it was always destined for the Oratory of Saint Lawrence, but Caravaggio received the commission and carried it out not in Palermo in 1609, as scholars once thought, but in Rome in 1600, in the same studio where Maffeo Barberini had sat for his portrait a little over a year earlier.

Twenty years after the fact, the ironies of this singularly bumbling act of thievery inspired the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia’s final novel, A Simple Story, composed and published in 1989, nearly three decades before Grado’s evidence changed the details of the tawdry tale as it had been generally understood. Not that any new revelation could change the force of Sciascia’s scathing, not-so-simple story and its essential point: for all its greatness and importance to the world of culture, the stolen Caravaggio was only a minor sideline to the Mafia’s real business of drugs and arms, a business so lucrative in a poverty-stricken region that the mob’s influence, and the fear of its violence, had long since corrupted every level of society. Caravaggio’s altarpiece, known simply as “the painting,” is not only physically hidden in Sciascia’s account but, more importantly, buried beneath layer upon layer of conspiracy, complicity, the sworn silence of omertà, and brute ignorance. Masterfully, in true Cosa Nostra style, Sciascia crafts his story by oblique, menacing suggestion: “the painting” has no author; blunt words like “Mafia” and “drugs” barely appear; a stream of apparently casual conversation provides the soundtrack for a deadly duel.

And yet, in its absence, Caravaggio’s Nativity, that supposedly inert piece of painted canvas, has created a real-life story of its own: the parable of how a stolen image of divine humility turned on its thieves and robbed them of their own greatest treasures, profit and bella figura, revealing them in all their vacuity. By now its keepers might as well give this treasure back to the world. They have nothing more to gain from it—and no honor left to lose.

The post Caravaggio Lost and Found appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

In a Europe racked by war and social upheaval, Canova produced a dazzling succession of sculptures whose apparent classical perfection was almost always charged with a shiver of thoroughly modern eros. His fig leaves do not so much cover their heroes’ modesty as cling to it with preternatural impudence. The draperies in which he shrouds his men and women are so thin and sinuous that they reveal everything beneath—and then underline it all with a flourish.

Though he acquired his culture relatively late, he wielded mythology with wicked precision, especially when it came to the Bonaparte clan, which was guilty of reducing the Republic of Venice, Canova’s homeland, to a French puppet state. The exact contemporary of Francisco Goya, he responded to the same calamities that prompted Goya’s visceral Disasters of War and Caprichos by withdrawing into his own carefully calibrated version of the classical world. Convinced like Goya that “the sleep of reason begets monsters,” he clung to reason and his republican ideals. No wonder North Carolina appealed to him to carve a statue of George Washington for its statehouse. (Both the statue and the statehouse were unfortunately incinerated by a catastrophic fire in 1831.)

Canova insisted on portraying Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker in the guise known as “heroic nudity,” well aware, as the art historian Christopher Johns has gleefully noted, that viewers would compare the statue’s rugged features and toned physique with the flaccid lines of its moon-faced, middle-aged model and ponder the paradox—Canova’s own invention—of the Roman war god proffering a gilded orb on which a tiny winged figure of Peace trips like a blithe fairy. Napoleon’s agent, Dominique Vivant Denon, reported to Canova in 1811 that

His Majesty has seen with interest the beautiful execution of the work and its imposing aspect, but he thinks that the forms of it are too athletic and that you may be a bit mistaken about the character that eminently distinguishes him, that is to say the calmness of his movements.¹

Today that muscular Bonaparte lords it over the stairwell of Apsley House, the London home of Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, a trophy of war from the Battle of Waterloo.

Napoleon’s mother, “Madame Mère,” whom Canova liked better than her son, was treated to an elegant seated portrait as a Roman matron, her pose clearly based on a famous ancient statue in the Capitoline Museum in Rome. That anonymous work depicts either Agrippina the Elder, mother of Caligula, or her daughter Agrippina the Younger, mother of Nero; either way, as both Madame Mère and the artist understood, the lady had given birth to a tyrant.

The key to Canova’s survival was his incomparable ability to carve marble. By comparison, the works of his great predecessor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, though equally virtuosic, are angular and agitated, with stark contrasts in texture. Canova’s lines and bodies, even at moments of high tension, form graceful, intricately intertwined curves. Whereas Michelangelo and Bernini captured the struggle of hewing stone, Canova polished away all traces of effort. One admirer, the Duke of Bedford, praised, with a fashionable Italian flourish, “the morbidezza—that look of living softness given to the surface of the marble, which appears as if it would yield to the touch.” Lord Byron declared, “What Nature could but would not do/…Beauty and Canova can.” The supernal calm of his figures, however, is only apparent. Canova’s bust of Helen of Troy inspired Byron not simply by her downcast eyes and Grecian nose: beneath those flawless features her smile is every bit as suggestive as that of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

Canova’s creative struggle left a persistent record, however, in his drawings and above all in the clay models that stand behind every one of his sculptural works. Three lines or a scrap of clay were all this instinctive artist needed to create an illusion of space or a tiny living presence, human or animal, as full of pathos as any colossus. A fervent Catholic, he believed that God had formed Adam in the same way, as a figurine awaiting the breath of life. Modeling was probably the first form of sculpture Canova ever undertook.

He was born in 1757 in the town of Possagno, some fifty miles northwest of Venice, in the foothills of the Alps. Officially he was a citizen of the Republic of Venice, a fading version of that glittering empire but still a free republic in a Europe otherwise dominated by hereditary monarchs. After the death of his father in 1761 and his mother’s remarriage the following year, he moved in with his paternal grandparents. Pasino Canova owned a quarry in Possagno and worked as a stonemason and sculptor; in his grandfather’s studio Antonio began modeling and carving as a child, though the story that the boy carved a magnificent lion out of butter for a table decoration is only a legend. At the age of nine he had already put his hand to the translucent, fine-grained marble of Carrara, which became his favorite stone for carving.

Rumors of the youth’s prodigious talent spread quickly, and in 1768 a local senator, Giovanni Falier, secured his apprenticeship with a local sculptor, Giuseppe Bernardi, nicknamed Torretti. When Torretti moved to Venice, Canova went with him and entered the Venetian Academy of Fine Arts. Here he took classes in life drawing—or life modeling—studied the casts of ancient statues in the Palazzo Farsetti, and learned to speak a standardized vernacular rather than Venetian dialect. He opened his first studio in Venice in 1775, at the unusually young age of eighteen. In 1781 he moved permanently to Rome, where he continued his habit of life drawing and life modeling at the Roman Academy of Fine Arts while simultaneously fulfilling commissions from increasingly distinguished patrons. To improve his workingman’s education, he began to have classical literature read aloud to him as he worked. His engagement in 1781 to the daughter of the engraver Giovanni Volpato lasted only briefly; an obsessive worker, Canova was all too evidently wedded to his profession.

The proud Republic of Venice granted the sculptor an annuity in recognition of his success at promoting the fading state’s reputation abroad, as he did with the strikingly distinctive tomb of the Venetian Pope Clement XIII in St. Peter’s Basilica. Unveiled in 1792, the imposing cenotaph cemented Canova’s already soaring reputation and gave rise to another wonderful, if fictional, anecdote: fearful of how the public would react to the monument’s pioneering, austere Neoclassical style, he attended the unveiling incognito, dressed as an unassuming priest, which meant that when its weeping lions and commanding figure of Religion decked out in a spiky radiate crown (a headgear once seen on the Colossus of Rhodes and later adopted by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi for the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor) proved a triumph, no one could possibly take the shabby little figure for the great man himself.

By this time the huge number, colossal scale, and international range of Canova’s commissions required the help of a well-regulated studio, with assistants delegated to transform his clay models into larger, more finished plaster models, and eventually to reproduce full-size plaster models in stone by a process of pointing—embedding metal pins in the plaster at strategic points that could be plotted on a grid and transferred to the block of marble designated for carving by a set of plumb bobs suspended from a frame. Canova always gave these collaborative efforts the final master’s touch, but between the initial clay model and the exquisitely finished definitive artwork many hands contributed to the process of creation.

Napoleon’s conquest of Venice and then Rome in 1798 put a temporary halt to this bustling workshop. The invader’s large-scale looting of Italian libraries, archives, and artworks for transfer to Paris (not to mention the imprisonment of Pope Pius VII) threw the artist into a deep depression. He left occupied Rome for remote Possagno, traveling on to Vienna after the Austrians succeeded in wresting Venice from Bonaparte; he regarded Austrian hegemony as less odious than that of the larcenous Corsican. Canova returned to the Eternal City in 1800, his illustrious career and his loyalty honored by election to the prestigious artistic Academy of St. Luke. He became its president in 1810, and its president in perpetuity in 1814.

Like Peter Paul Rubens before him, Canova proved an accomplished diplomat, especially in his pioneering efforts to establish the concept of cultural property and defend its place in the forging of local and national identity. He argued passionately and effectively for the return of Napoleonic plunder to Italy and was brave enough to do so when Napoleon was still in power. In 1815, with Napoleon deposed and exiled to St. Helena, Pius VII acknowledged those efforts by making Canova his chief delegate to the congress that drafted the Treaty of Paris in the aftermath of Bonaparte’s fall. In 1816 the pope named the artist Marchese of Ischia, the island in the Bay of Naples that once housed Michelangelo’s dear friend the poetess Vittoria Colonna and her cultured circle. From Paris, Canova traveled on to London in 1815 to advise the British government about the Elgin Marbles, removed from the Parthenon between 1806 and 1812 by a firman (permission) granted him in 1801 by the Ottoman sultan Selim III, terrified that Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign might threaten the rest of the sultanate. Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage was not the only person to decry Lord Elgin’s actions as larceny:

Tell not the deed to blushing Europe’s ears;
The ocean queen, the free Britannia, bears
The last poor plunder from a bleeding land:
Yes, she, whose gen’rous aid her name endears,
Tore down those remnants with a harpy’s hand.

Canova, called upon to restore “those remnants,” protested that “it would be sacrilege for any man to touch them with a chisel” and exclaimed “Oh! That I were a young man, and had to begin again, I should work on totally different principles from what I had done, and form, I hope, an entirely new school.” His enthusiasm was crucial to the British government’s decision to purchase the Parthenon sculptures from the cash-strapped Elgin. On this occasion, evidently, the outspoken paladin of cultural property felt called upon to defend the intrinsic integrity of the works themselves before entering into the still-raging dispute over their provenance. At last, the “modern Phidias” returned to his workshop in Rome, where he began to suffer from an excruciating stomach ailment (caused, according to one theory, by a lifelong habit of leaning on a drill), working through the agony with his characteristic persistence. He died in Venice in 1822, the supreme sculptor of his era.

And yet—another contradiction among so many—this giant of a man cut a surprisingly diminutive figure. The art historian Elena Berti Toesca has drawn an evocative portrait of the artist and his Roman workshop:

Canova’s studio was in the narrow old Via delle Colonnette, and how many famous men and women made their way there! Madame Récamier went, introduced by Chateaubriand, not a little surprised to discover a skinny little man dressed in workmen’s clothing, who used to cover his bald forehead, radiant with genius, with a hat made of folded paper…. The master had a house nearby…. We know that he maintained a coach and horses, and that at home he dressed elegantly, in silk stockings and breeches and waistcoat of velvet, his shirts trimmed in Burano lace. His clock chimed the hours, his snuffbox was of gold with a miniature of Napoleon. His face was thin, clean-shaven, oval, with a wide mouth, large eyes, and a long nose, thick black eyebrows, a profound gaze, a vast, bald forehead. He disguised his baldness with a finely made toupée.²

Last summer a revelatory exhibition of the artist’s clay models, “Canova: Sketching in Clay,” originated at the National Gallery of Art and then traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago, bringing us up close to that skinny little man in the paper hat whose inspirations almost always took their primal form in molded earth. We can see how the unique pliability of clay lies behind the liquid suppleness of the elaborately interlaced limbs of two famously virtuosic marble sculpture groups, The Three Graces (see illustration on page 14) and Cupid Reviving Psyche with a Kiss. In its final stone version, Cupid’s lifegiving lips (like his wandering hand) hover in suspension, eternally poised on the brink of sizzling contact, but the embrace of divine Love and the human soul (psyche in Greek) is grippingly direct in the clay that Canova’s hands and imagination have rolled, pinched, poked, and slapped into lifelike form. Three pokes of a stylus, and an egg-sized lump of clay has been turned into the face of stricken Adam holding the hand of his dead son Abel—Adam whose name comes from the Hebrew word for “earth” and whose pose is an echo of Michelangelo’s Pietà. Three more stabs to a clay snake suffice to fashion Adam’s hand, enclosed around the lifeless hand of his boy. Nothing could be more essential, more moving, more modern. It is not surprising that Canova held on to his little clay models, rarely giving them away. With their insistent, intensely personal reality, they claim their rightful space in the world.

The carefully composed Grecian features of Canova’s statues were born in the clay models as stark, raw emotions: gaping mouths; brows furrowed in anguish by the actions of finger, rasp, or stylus; heads drooping by the natural force of gravity that somehow convey infinite depths of sorrow. Humility seems to rise as naturally from the ground as a rock formation; the word “humility” comes from humus, the Latin word for ground. Two versions of the Greek warrior Pyrrhus sacrificing the Trojan princess Polyxena show him aggressively pressing his body against his wilting victim, harrowing evocations of her murder as a version of sexual assault.

Canova is one kind of artist in these direct, forceful expressions of experience and quite another in the tireless self-editing through which he developed his eventual commissions. Multiple sketches of the same subject, such as the models in the exhibition for seated portraits of Madame Mère and Leopoldina von Esterházy, show how Canova adjusts posture, clothing, or the turn of a head with maniacal persistence, and how definitely those details do, indeed, matter in the end. In these portrait models the faces are schematic because the artist’s attention is fixed on pose and drapery. So, too, from the very beginning, his figure of Religion for the tomb of Clement XIII has an odd bouffant hairstyle that makes sense only when we realize that in the final marble figure that obtrusive puff of hair will be covered by that crown of gilded bronze. From the moment he puts his hand to clay, Canova is already thinking ahead to the ultimate effect.

After refining his design in clay, Canova would go on to build a larger, more finished model in plaster, a harder material and, of course, a substance much closer to the color of marble. These could be shown to the patron as a guide to the project’s final appearance. He also further refined some of his sketches in fired clay (terra cotta, Italian for “cooked earth”). A foot-high, highly finished terra-cotta model of Piety expresses her slender body through a delicate cascade of gossamer-thin drapery. The exhibition also displayed two large, highly finished fired clay portraits, one of the Doge Paolo Renier, clad in ermine and damask brocade, their textures and that of the old man’s jovial wrinkled face minutely detailed by the artist, and the other a haunting image of an anonymous curly-haired youth, which cracked in firing so that it looks today like a deliberately distressed classic by Igor Mitoraj.

As for Madame Mère, we see her at every stage of her portrait, from clay model to finished statue, a mature woman with skin that is soft rather than sagging, a lively expression, and a jaunty pose that evokes the ancient portrait of Agrippina in a much more casual vein. Her sandaled, outstretched foot breaks with classical decorum, while also testing the limits of the artist’s skill at carving projecting bits of marble without snapping them off. Her drapery traces a subtle circle around her midsection; hers is, after all, the womb that produced l’Empereur, just as the womb of Agrippina, whichever Agrippina she was, produced a monster.

Unlike Canova’s flawless marbles, which seem to have sprung into being without labor (Byron was right to claim that his Helen put him on a par with Nature), the clay figures provide eloquent evidence of how they were manufactured. A catalog essay by Anthony Sigel puts these clues into a detailed, helpful sequence, and three videos that form part of the exhibition showed contemporary artist Fred X Brownstein—in a paper hat—recreating Canova’s studio techniques with astonishing accuracy: forming a small clay model, a plaster bust of Venus, and then transferring the plaster model to marble and carving it by using Canova’s pointing technique.

In the early modern era, sculpture was normally regarded as the most humble of the arts because its practitioners got their hands so dirty, and those hands in turn spread and thickened to look like the hands of laborers. Tidy painting reigned as queen. Like Bernini before him, Canova countered that age-old prejudice by receiving visitors to his studio in working clothes, trusting his creations to speak for themselves, for his dignity, and for the self-evident nobility of his art.

The post Nature’s Rival appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Chigi married into another Sienese merchant family, like most of his colleagues, and settled with his wife, Margherita Saraceni, in an unpretentious townhouse in the same neighborhood as his fellow Tuscan bankers, directly across the Tiber from the Vatican. There he traded grain, cloth, and other commodities; farmed taxes for the papal state; and in 1499, to his father’s horror, offered a substantial loan to Cesare Borgia, the pope’s son, in support of his first military campaigns.

Up to the age of thirty-five, Chigi lived the life of a successful banker, drafting endless contracts and business letters in his profession’s distinctive and labor-saving cursive script, moving commodities and money, and providing loans to proud but overextended aristocrats. His close association with the Medici bank gave him an education in social advancement and an introduction to the mineral that would make his fortune: alum.

A desiccant used in fixing dye, alum was a crucial resource for the cloth industry, by Chigi’s day a global operation that mingled and transformed wool from the Cotswolds, silk from Xi’an, and cotton from Kerala into Damascus brocades and Flemish tapestries. Deposits of the mineral were rare, scattered across Spain, Italy, and Asia Minor, and Chigi realized that monopolizing the supply would give him control of the cloth market. With the participation of the Spannocchi firm, he spent the year 1501 obtaining the rights to all the alum mines in Italy. His father bristled once again at his propensity for huge, risky investments, but the returns were almost immediate. Applying the latest methods for extracting alum and streamlining its delivery, he charged his customers high prices and ensured huge profits for himself.

By August 1503, when the Borgia pope died, Chigi was already an exceedingly wealthy man, and his prospects improved when the cardinals elected a Sienese pope, Pius III. The Spannocchi brothers, confirmed as papal bankers, shouldered the huge expense of the pontiff’s impending coronation. But Pius III died of sepsis twenty-six days after his election, throwing the Vatican into another conclave and the Spannocchi firm into bankruptcy. Chigi promptly bought out their share of the alum business, to their eternal resentment, and still had enough cash to finance the bribes that helped elect Pope Julius II, the legendary papa terribile, in October 1503. The result of this meeting of megalomaniacs was a flowering of culture that propelled Rome into the forefront of the Italian Renaissance.

United by their outsize ambitions and volcanic energy, pope and banker became close friends, thrilled by the prospect of turning the city of Rome into a gleaming Christian capital. Thanks to the pontiff’s implacable will and the banker’s financial acumen, artists, architects, musicians, and writers began to turn a dilapidated ruin into what once again looked like the Eternal City. Along with stories about the fearsome Pope Julius, news of Chigi’s wealth spread as far as Constantinople, where Sultan Bayezid II referred to him as “the great merchant of the Christian world” and sent him a gorgeous Arabian horse that he proudly rode through the streets of Rome.

His only possible rival as Europe’s richest man was Jakob Fugger, the copper baron of Augsburg, to whom Pope Julius leased the papal mint in 1508. Too shrewd to fight, the two magnates collaborated through shared agents to create an unprecedented form of large-scale, politically active international banking. Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici had emerged as similarly public figures within the limited confines of fifteenth-century Florence, but the discovery of the New World and the maritime passage to India gave these sixteenth-century financiers a truly global reach.

Chigi’s modest house in Rome’s banking district no longer fit his status. Indeed, no existing building in Rome, ancient or modern, could quite express who and what he had become. The times were propitious for creating something completely different.

Like so many of his undertakings, Chigi’s new residence burst through all the old categories—social, architectural, and cultural—for a merchant’s house. He moved across the Tiber to participate in a project Pope Julius initiated in 1505: transforming the Via della Lungara, the road that ran from the populous neighborhood of Trastevere to the Vatican, into an elegant suburban thoroughfare. The pope encouraged cardinals in particular to build sumptuous garden retreats along its route, country houses within the ancient walls of Rome.

In forsaking the bankers’ quarter to reside among these princes of the Church, Chigi, far from emulating his illustrious neighbors, set the standard for them all with an ingenious combination of ancient Roman suburban villa, pleasure garden, medieval tower house, and Renaissance palazzo. As the poet Julius Caesar Scaliger put it, privatus superat reges (a private citizen outdoes kings). A lavish theater for his public persona, it also sheltered the most intimate aspects of his private life. The sophisticated decor and the throng of antiquities proclaimed his phenomenal wealth to the outside world, while his strong room, strategically placed between his bedroom and his office and accessible only by a hidden stairway, contained cash and jewels sufficient to sustain the Republic of Venice or the Papal States for a year. In contrast to Fugger, who built his financial empire on credit, Chigi never lost track of tangible assets, and for good reason. From the moment he took possession of his beauteous abode in 1511, he knew that a long-festering lawsuit brought that year by his former mentors, the Spannocchi, might force him to hand over a fortune in an instant.

James Grantham Turner’s magisterial study The Villa Farnesina: Palace of Venus in Renaissance Rome captures the project’s intimate link with fantasy from the very moment of its conception. It has been called the Villa Farnesina since its purchase in 1579 by the “Gran Cardinale” Alessandro Farnese, whose grandfather, another Cardinal Alessandro (later Pope Paul III), had bought the lot next door in the 1490s, years before Pope Julius campaigned to beautify the street. From their own hopelessly outmoded house, both Cardinals Alessandro must have gazed wistfully over the garden wall at their neighbor’s stupendous collection of ancient statues and exotic plants.

In Chigi’s day poets referred to his Viridario (garden house), his Suburbanum (suburban residence), and felix villula (“happy little villa,” though little it is not), and they presented it straightforwardly in their encomia as a palace of Venus—for good reason. In 1511, as a childless widower of forty-four Chigi was looking for a bride to enliven its rooms with Chigi heirs. His wife Margherita had died in 1508, just as he and Julius II began to plan a series of military and diplomatic campaigns to strengthen Rome’s hold over the Papal States. Between 1509 and 1512, Chigi emerged openly as one of the pope’s ambassadors, and therefore he needed a consort to match his privileged position.

On diplomatic service in Venice in 1511, he found a candidate: twenty-five-year-old Margherita Gonzaga, the “natural” daughter of the Marquess of Mantua. He began negotiations with her father for marriage, but the plans fizzled in 1512. Elisabetta Gonzaga, Margherita’s supercilious aunt, objected to Chigi’s “being a banker and merchant, a thing hardly becoming to our House,” and Margherita, who still hoped (in vain) to marry her onetime fiancé, resisted any other match. As Chigi waited and bargained, he never lacked for company. For some time he had subsidized the Roman courtesan Imperia Cognati, and he paid for her tomb when she died (perhaps by suicide) in 1512.

He focused most of his attention, however, on a young Venetian named Francesca, whom he brought to Rome as part of his triumphal entourage in August 1511, over her humble father’s strenuous objections. We know very little about Francesca, whose surname appears in several different versions in surviving records. Turner uses Andreana, the Villa Farnesina’s website uses Ordeaschi, and Chigi’s first biographer, his great-grandnephew Fabio Chigi, used Andreazza. (But then Chigi is also known as “Ghisi” and, in Venice, “Gixi.”) There is no evidence that she was a courtesan, although this is often stated, and we have no idea how Chigi met her. We do know that he put her in a convent for an unknown amount of time to be educated by nuns, and that he then took her into his house to live with her more uxorio, as contemporaries put it—as man and wife. He made no further efforts to contract a noble marriage. The palace of Venus was hers from the moment she moved in.

With its lavish color illustrations, The Villa Farnesina is a thing of beauty appropriate to its subject and Turner’s passion for it. It exhibits the same thoroughness, insight, and ardor that its distinguished author brought to his previous book, Eros Visible (2017). For that definitive account of Renaissance erotica, Turner scoured libraries, museums, and archives all over the world to amass an exhaustive repertory of early modern erogenous imagery, eluding the efforts of censors by looking beneath every paper pasted over a naked body and using digital enhancement to evaporate inky cancellations and bring erasures back to impudent life.

Turner is no less diligent in his minute examination of the much-remodeled and mostly inaccessible building’s three main floors, two mezzanines, two basements, and sadly reduced gardens. (More than once he wore swimming trunks under his street clothes in case he needed to wade through the flooded subbasement.) Since 1946 the property has belonged to the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the national honorific society founded in 1603, and it has undergone two important restorations. Most of the closed rooms have been used either as offices or as storage spaces, and many of them still show the signs of long neglect. (Today, one room makes a virtue of the situation: layer upon layer of shabby wall covering has been peeled back to reveal decorations in fresco, paper, cloth, and perhaps even leather, fashionable in Chigi’s day.) The mighty strong room has been turned into a bathroom for visitors.

Piecing together this complex and its half-millennium of history is a Herculean task, and Turner has consulted a vast number of drawings and scholarly publications to guide his readers through the process that turned the spark of an idea into a complex of buildings and gardens, and then adapted it to the changing circumstances of its owners. He divides the development of Chigi’s villa into two major periods of construction and decoration: the initial project of 1509 to 1512, and then, in 1518, a large-scale remodeling and redecoration that prepared it for Chigi’s marriage to the patient Francesca in 1519. The U-shaped building at the center of Chigi’s domain was designed by the young Sienese painter and architect Baldassare Peruzzi, a protégé of the Sienese architect, sculptor, painter, medalist, engineer, and treatise writer (among other talents) Francesco di Giorgio Martini. Before coming to Rome, Peruzzi had worked with Chigi’s father to create an innovative villa in the Sienese countryside, and with the painter Bernardino Pinturicchio and his talented, precocious assistant Raphael Sanzio, painted fresco decorations for the library attached to Siena’s cathedral by its archbishop (the future short-lived Pope Pius III).

Peruzzi’s design for Chigi incorporated a previous structure, hiding the irregularities of the resulting façade by covering the entire surface of the building with mythological frescoes painted in white, gray, and golden earth tones. Today only the tiniest traces of these figures survive above one portico, but Turner has used old drawings and literary sources to provide a dazzling, plausible verbal and digital reconstruction of the entire decorative scheme. The overarching theme was “the loves of the gods,” including a ribald portrayal of Mars and Venus captured in hot embrace by a golden net, the work of her cuckolded husband, the divine blacksmith Vulcan. Decorated façades were all the rage in early modern Rome, but most of them featured stately themes like ancient Roman triumphs or famous men and women from history. The Chigi villa, on the other hand, made its debut in society decked out like a party pavilion. The mood is not quite that of the sprezzatura—making difficult things look easy—praised by his ever-elegant contemporary Baldassare Castiglione. Neither is it simply an erotic romp: Chigi’s message runs more along the lines of “Work hard, play hard.”

Peruzzi’s frescoes on the interior of the villa proclaim the same gospel of success rewarded by pleasure, with a conspicuous emphasis on the figure of Hercules, the indefatigable hero who finally became a god for his efforts. Turner has devoted close scrutiny to the painted frieze that runs beneath the ceiling of Chigi’s waiting room, from its choice of mythological scenes (Hercules conspicuous among them, but also the golden river Pactolus) to its use of stucco and gold leaf to make painted plaster sparkle in three dimensions. On the ceiling of the open-air portico that served as a summer dining room, Peruzzi recorded the position of the constellations on the night of Chigi’s birth, November 29, 1466, suggesting that the great man’s greatness had been written in the stars. (In the same years, Michelangelo was making a similar statement about the divinely ordained reign of Julius II on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.) In addition to gilt stars on a deep blue background, keys to the ceiling’s celestial significance, Peruzzi portrayed the constellations as mythological figures, turning the entire loggia into a delightful pictorial riddle for guests to solve over the wine that flowed in abundance. (Meanwhile the sober Chigi picked up their unguarded comments.)

Thanks to painstaking work by the art historian Costanza Barbieri, we know that these rooms were stuffed nearly to bursting with ancient statues; the little waiting room seems to have had eight of them, and the building’s original supporting structure, which Turner has managed to reconstruct convincingly, was strong enough to permit the display of more marble figures on the upper floors. In the winter, guests gathered not in the drafty portico but in an impressive south-facing (hence sun-warmed) salon with a massive marble fireplace and an oil painting on canvas by the Venetian artist Sebastiano Lucian (later nicknamed Sebastiano del Piombo), whom Chigi had brought back from Venice along with Francesca and the Cretan printer Zacharias Kallierges, who set up a Greek press in Chigi’s basement. That space was nothing like the dreary cavern we see today: it was a well-lit semibasement, reached by a broad stairway that has since been eliminated. Most of the semiunderground area belonged to the kitchen, with a wine cellar in the subbasement, but the area directly beneath Chigi’s study contained a bath with hot and cold running water, which Turner is the first to identify. This, like Chigi’s strong room and bedroom, was accessible by a private stair, so that in effect the west wing of the villa was Chigi’s private tower. (In Siena, a tower was one of the first prerequisites for a noble house.)

Sebastiano’s monumental painting, The Death of Adonis, now hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. (The Medici got their hands on it after Chigi’s death.) It shows the hunter-paramour of the love goddess splayed in a field with the Ducal Palace of Venice in the background—perhaps the youthful alter ego of Chigi, perpetually “slain” by his domestic love goddess? The work is evidently a souvenir of the banker’s Venetian sojourn, sharpened by the artist’s own pangs of nostalgia. (Chigi had apparently tried to entice Titian to Rome before inviting Sebastiano, but Titian would never leave Venice.) The Venus in the painting, a plump brunette receiving comfort from her son Cupid, may well be a portrait of Francesca.

Sebastiano also tried his hand at frescoing the lunettes beneath Peruzzi’s astrological ceiling, but he had never wrestled before with the difficult medium, and the results display struggle rather than sprezzatura. So Chigi summoned Raphael to paint the nymph Galatea scudding across the Mediterranean in a gigantic seashell drawn by dolphins, one chewing on an octopus, like the dolphin carved on yet another of the ancient sculptures in Agostino’s collection (see illustration at beginning of article). Turner agrees with the Italian scholars Mara and Eugenio Lo Sardo that the seashell’s incongruous paddle wheel is an odometer, a distance-marking machine described in the ancient architectural treatise of Vitruvius (and there called a “hodometer”). He mounts a stout, detailed defense of the quality and versatility of Peruzzi’s fresco painting, but Raphael’s mastery of the medium is of another order entirely. Wittily, Rome’s most sought-after artist painted one brawny Triton with sea-green tails as if he had issued from the hand of Michelangelo, but Michelangelo never managed Raphael’s exquisite finesse.

With the death of Pope Julius in 1513, Chigi’s life took yet another turn. The new pope, Leo X, was the son of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and like his father spent money faster than he made it. The years of close collaboration with an active pope were over. Instead, Chigi threw himself into patronage of culture and education. Turner, following the lead of the art historian Amélie Ferrigno, shows how the great merchant furthered the education of his staff through lessons and sponsorship of printed textbooks on astronomy and mathematics.

Shortly after Leo’s election, Raphael designed a stable and guesthouse at the far end of Chigi’s property, which were inaugurated by a papal visit in 1514. The lavish structure survives now in a stretch of ruined wall and the vestige of an entrance gate. Both the guesthouse and Peruzzi’s villa building were unabashed landmarks in a rapidly developing capital city; they towered over most of the modest structures in Trastevere, which usually ran to two stories in the Middle Ages. Chigi’s complex also included a riverside dining pavilion with a lower level at the water’s edge—except when the Tiber swelled with one of its seasonal floods. This is where he famously hosted the banquets of exotic delicacies served on gold and silver dishes that were promptly flung into the Tiber (and collected by nets strung underwater—one way to keep Chigi’s noble guests from pilfering the dinnerware).

Turner sees Francesca not simply as a passive muse but as an active participant in the extensive 1518 remodeling, undertaken so that Chigi could celebrate their marriage with suitable pomp. However humble her origins, she had established a secure place in the opinion of his friends and evidently in his own heart. Their marriage contract refers to seven years of living more uxorio and four children, with a fifth conspicuously on the way. From the outset, these Chigi heirs learned to write an aristocratic humanistic script rather than their father’s mercantile cursive, one of many signs that they were regarded as nobility rather than future members of the merchant class. As their tutor wrote of them, “They are not merchants; they are gentlemen”; accordingly, Chigi expected his eldest son to marry an aristocrat and live the life of a feudal landowner. His second son, ideally, would become a cardinal. His daughters, like his eldest son, were meant to marry well (and they did). Their father could afford dowries for both of them, so neither was pushed into a convent.

In this second phase of construction, Peruzzi raised the ceiling and adjusted the walls of the upper floor to create a lofty dining room for the couple’s November wedding. It was decorated once again with a frieze that featured scenes from Pindar and shows how swiftly artistic style had changed under the attentive patronage of Julius II and Leo X. The new salon’s most stellar feature, however, was its fictive perspective scheme of marble columns framing scenes of contemporary Rome beyond the garden walls (including a “self-portrait” of the building itself). The dining room connected in turn to a formal bedroom that boasted an ebony and ivory bed and a fresco cycle by another painter active in Siena: Giovanni Bazzi, nicknamed “Sodoma” for his interest in young men.

Along with Hercules and Venus, the figures of Caesar and Augustus, as well as the poems praising them—“you are a king in spirit,” “for others, Augustus, wealth produces shining splendor/You on the other hand, are a light, a great glory to wealth”—provided a thematic focus for the frescoes in Chigi’s villa. The historical Augustus, however, notoriously met his wife Livia Drusilla when she was pregnant with the future emperor Tiberius, so Sodoma resorted to another imperial figure: the role model of that Augustus, Alexander the Great. Sodoma’s painting of Alexander’s marriage to the Bactrian maiden Roxane is guided by a description (ekphrasis) by the Greek writer Lucian of a painting by the artist Aëtion and imitates the style of ancient Roman frescoes in a brilliant display of learned allusion. The lovely young couple stand in gracefully for the fifty-two-year-old bridegroom and his pregnant bride, who were bound at last in holy matrimony by Pope Leo himself. The fresco also honors the animals of the household: the Turkish horse appears as Bucephalus, Alexander’s faithful steed, as he does on other walls of the room, and next to the fireplace Chigi’s red-and-white spotted terrier weaves its way around the legs of Alexander’s companion Hephaestion.

It would be hazardous to assume that all the learned references flying about the villa also flew over Chigi’s head—not much escaped that gimlet eye. His letters may be devoid of literary style, but his father and two of his brothers were dedicated letterati. He had erudite advice, moreover, from his chancellor, Cornelio Benigno of Viterbo, a scholar of Greek and Latin who also managed Chigi’s complex affairs. Benigno, whose office and bedroom occupied the east wing of the villa, undoubtedly drew up all its mythological programs with the artists who decorated its interior and exterior, and with the Cretan printer Kallierges he published erudite editions of Greek texts by Pindar and the Syracusan poet Theocritus on their basement printing press.

The redecoration of the villa’s entrance portico was entrusted to Raphael, who produced a beguiling fresco series recounting the ancient tale of Eros and Psyche in a sylvan bower made of exotic plants from Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The fruits are ripe to the point of bursting, and directly over the entrance to Chigi’s waiting room, Mercury, the patron god of merchants and thieves, gestures toward the kind of erotic vegetable sculpture that is still featured at weddings in southern Italy: a phallic gourd plunging into a juicy fig. The labors of Psyche—“Soul”—to be reunited with her lover, Eros, were an apt evocation of the labors endured by the bride to have her stature legitimated by the pope himself.

Despite all these exuberant depictions of hope, love, and fertility, Chigi may already have known that he was dying when Pope Leo performed what turned out to be a November marriage in more senses than one. His health had been declining for months, and on April 11, 1520, at fifty-three, he died in his splendid residence, surrounded by his wife and children, his chancellor, and the rest of his household. Three weeks earlier, almost incapable of speech, he had still been driving bargains with the Republic of Venice. A sudden fever had carried off Raphael just a few days before, on April 6, his thirty-seventh birthday. For Rome and its cultural life, the nearly simultaneous loss of the great artist and the great banker, as well as their great friendship, marked the end of an era (though unsurprisingly the Venetian ambassador regarded losing Chigi as much less of a tragedy than losing Raphael).

Six months later, almost exactly a year after her marriage, Francesca Chigi was dead, too, allegedly reeking of poison. Whether she died by murder or suicide we may never know, but Agostino’s youngest brother, Sigismondo, certainly wasted no time moving into the Roman property with his beautiful, aristocratic wife, Sulpizia Petrucci. They brought up Agostino’s five children together with nine of their own, ushering in another season for this garden paradise. What gives the Villa Farnesina its poignancy is our inevitable sense of the impermanence of all things mortal—fruits, plants, animals, people—and the enduring power, despite it all, of love and beauty.

The post ‘A Great Glory to Wealth’ appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,

And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.

And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

When Reni completed his altarpiece in 1636, Italy had recently seen its own share of apocalyptic struggles: a deadly resurgence of bubonic plague from 1629 to 1631, the eruption of Vesuvius in 1631 after centuries of quiescence, a second eruption in 1632, the eruption of Mount Etna in 1633 and 1634, and an endless stream of distressing news from the front lines of the decades-old battle between Catholics and Protestants in Germany. Pope Urban VIII quarreled with his cardinals about whether the earth revolved around the sun or vice versa and whether the Virgin Mary, like Jesus, had been born without sin. He pressed them to convict Galileo Galilei of heresy in 1633, against the advice of his cardinal nephew Francesco Barberini, and refused to pronounce on the Virgin’s Immaculate Conception, so Urban’s brother, Cardinal Antonio Barberini, endowed a new church in honor of the Virgin Immaculate and commissioned Reni, whom contemporaries called “the Divine Guido,” to depict Saint Michael’s cosmic battle in the first chapel on the right-hand side of the church, the first thing visitors are likely to see after passing through the narrow vestibule.

Reni painted his imposing Saint Michael the Archangel Defeats Satan not on canvas but on silk, spun in his native Bologna. The seams between the bolts of fabric still show through the layers of paint, along with the fine weave and luminous surface of the silk itself. A window on the chapel’s right-hand wall casts natural light on Hell’s red-hot, spiky crags as they smolder like the crater of Vesuvius, filling the vast caverns of Hades with a sooty pall. Among the flames we can just make out the bat wings sprouting from the fallen angel’s muscular back; above his dragon hips, this Satan has the physique of a Michelangelo. Prostrate, he struggles mightily to raise himself, but the back of his head has met an immovable obstacle: the archangel’s elegantly sandaled foot.

Like Lucifer’s leathery wings, Saint Michael’s grayish-brown pinions nearly blend into their mephitic background, focusing our attention entirely on his angelic body in its skintight ultramarine blue armor and the salmon-pink cloak that billows up around him on infernal winds. If one of Reni’s contemporaries had painted this scene—Caravaggio, say, or Artemisia Gentileschi, or Jusepe de Ribera—we would be thrilling to the extremity of its violence: Good holding Evil in thrall at the climax of the Apocalypse. The violence is certainly present: as Michael steps on the head of his adversary, he rattles Lucifer’s chain with his left hand, while his right hand aims a dramatically foreshortened sword straight at the Evil One’s throat. The archangel’s body twists in three dimensions, every limb, including the wings, flung outward, as his mantle, his rose-colored baldric, and the lappets of his armored skirt blow wildly around him, but the light of the chapel window, like the light within the painting itself, centers on his perfectly poised right foot, set lightly but decisively on a flat spur of infernal rock, the colors of his intricate footwear echoed by a lavender glimmer in the deep background: the path that will lead Michael, and us, back to the upper world.

In effect, Reni managed his paintbrush as masterfully as Michael manages his sword. A slash of lead-white paint on the archangel’s forehead emphasizes both the depth of his concentration and Reni’s presence as an artist—he liked to finish off his consummately polished productions with a few random strokes—but this angel, unlike Caravaggio’s gritty figures, is not one of us. He looks, if anything, like Apollo come down to earth, his imposing figure certainly influenced by the artist’s careful study of ancient sculpture as well as living human beings. Reni’s Saint Michael quickly became an image almost as famous among his contemporaries as the ancient statue known as the Apollo Belvedere.

The victorious archangel also bore a strong theological message. The twelfth chapter of Revelation, which tells of his triumph over Satan, begins with a vision: “And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.” In 1627, guided by this biblical passage, Reni had portrayed the Virgin in his Immaculate Conception as a young woman standing on a crescent moon in a burst of radiant gold, a halo of twelve stars framing her head. The painting went off to Spain, spreading both the artist’s fame and the association between the twelfth chapter of Revelation and the hotly debated doctrine. In a church explicitly dedicated to Mary of the Immaculate Conception, Reni’s painting of Saint Michael enlists the fighting forces of Heaven to endorse the doctrine of her sinless birth. Yet for all the power of his physique and the fierceness of his pose, the most impressive proof of the archangel’s authority rests in his supernal composure, in his ability to keep a swirl of titanic forces under rigorous control.

This spring Madrid fluttered with banners advertising a comprehensive exhibition dedicated to Reni at the Prado, curated by David García Cueto in an impressive debut as head of the Department of Italian and French Painting Up to 1800. (The banners may not have been woven of silk, but they brightened the city with Reni’s inimitable colors.) After an initial biographical section, the show, with nearly one hundred works on display, pursues three general themes: Reni and Spain, his study and portrayal of the human body, and his relationship with sculpture, both ancient and contemporary—his admirers included Gianlorenzo Bernini.

Reni was born to a Bolognese musician and his wife in 1575, but rather than following the family profession he apprenticed around the age of nine to Denys Calvaert, a Flemish painter residing in Bologna, a prosperous city with an important artistic tradition of its own, independent of Florence, Venice, and Rome. From Calvaert Reni absorbed the idea that drawing was fundamental to all the other visual arts, becoming such a precociously accomplished draftsman that Calvaert engaged him as a thirteen-year-old to teach drawing to the other apprentices. Still in his teens, he finally left Calvaert’s workshop around 1594 to join the Carracci—brothers Agostino and Annibale and their cousin Ludovico—whose artistic academy hosted Bologna’s most avant-garde ideas in art and literature. (The city’s university, founded in 1088, claims to be the world’s oldest.)

In 1601 Reni began traveling to Rome, where he settled in 1604 and stayed until 1614, making side trips to Bologna and Naples. Handsome, fervently religious, impeccably dressed, he never married, and even after returning to Bologna, his home until his death in 1642, he lived and conducted his illustrious international career in a series of rental properties, as restless in life as he was in art. From the outset, his exceptional technical skill afforded him an unusual degree of artistic independence; he learned as much from antique sculpture and earlier artists, especially Raphael, as he did from his mentors, Calvaert and the Carracci.

In some respects the painter, immensely popular in his own day, poses a challenge to contemporary taste. Revolutionary artists are supposed to follow the script of the magnificent rebel (to borrow the title of a 1962 film about Beethoven), transgressing the boundaries that constrain them, struggling heroically, plunging headlong into the pressing issues of their times. But Reni, like his Saint Michael, makes stupendous combat look deceptively simple. Unlike Leonardo’s failed experiments with oil paint on plaster walls or Michelangelo’s unfinished (and unfinishable) Captives, Reni’s artistic innovations usually worked: coating a copper plate with a thin layer of pewter to keep the metal from oxidizing, painting in oil on silk—anything that might increase the refinement or durability of his art. The unusually good condition of his surviving paintings shows just how successful he was in his efforts. (Aoife Brady’s catalog essay on his technique is a mine of information.) A thorough professional, he drove a fierce bargain with his patrons but was otherwise an affable soul, equally at home among artisans and aristocrats.

In other ways, Reni has a distinctly contemporary appeal: his relentless experimentation was, in fact, a perpetual struggle, and along with Caravaggio he stands out among his contemporaries for his sovereign sense of human dignity. In Rome he was struck by the gravitas of a wizened, elderly dockworker (described as a schiavo, which could mean a Slav or a slave), whose face he sketched and then modeled in clay to serve him as a model of wise old age. We see him performing the holy operation in The Circumcision of Christ (1636), as an enraptured Saint Luke (circa 1625), and transformed into an elderly woman for the monumental Triumph of Job (1636; a loan from the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris).

Reni’s devotion to the Immaculate Conception, which accorded Mary the same sinless status as Jesus, carried through in his regard for women in general. His Abduction of Helen (1631) is no abduction at all: the Spartan queen is fully complicit with the Trojan lover who prepares to sweep her across the wine-dark Aegean.

The Prado exhibition sets Reni’s Girl with a Rose (circa 1636–1637) next to Jacopo Tintoretto’s provocative Portrait of a Lady Revealing her Breast (1580–1590), possibly depicting the poet Veronica Franco—an arrangement that may repeat the way these two panels were long displayed in Madrid’s Alcázar. Tintoretto’s subject audaciously bares her breasts to the viewer while averting her head disdainfully; she seems to suggest, in no uncertain terms, that the artist has purchased access to her body, but her self, and her integrity, remain beyond his reach. Reni, who may have been celibate, paints his Girl with a Rose from the difficult vantage he had come to master—a three-quarter profile, seen slightly from below—and presents her dressed in white, an image of purity.

And then there is the timeless appeal and sheer joy of his artistry, the quicksilver variety of his drawings, and his endless adventures with paint. One segment of the exhibition is dedicated to the theme of flesh and drapery, in Reni’s hands at once the most representational and the most abstract of subjects. He probed the unpredictable ways in which the addition of green or blue paint could impart a pearly shimmer to skin, how two colors placed side by side necessarily reflect each other, and the expressive power latent in a billow of cloth. The exhibition is filled with paintings on similar themes, but not one of them exactly copies another; each new effort reveals some further variation in posture, in color, in technique, even in his later years when gambling debts forced him to speed up his production.

Because he was such a revered figure in his own day and in subsequent centuries, it is easy to see Reni today, with his cool, controlled manner, as an academic painter in the nineteenth-century sense, but the Prado exhibition convincingly dispels that idea, revealing him instead as a tireless innovator. His contemporaries may have seen his work as divine, but Reni protested that what they saw resulted from hard labor. The visual quotations from Raphael and ancient sculpture are not simply learned citations: each one has been reconceived in three-dimensional space for the entirely new composition in which it finds itself. These familiar figures are the means to an end, clues from fellow artists who have ventured down this path before. Reni applies their skill, and his, at reproducing nature and the human figure to reveal what interests him most of all: giving form to visions beyond the reach of normal sight, from the transcendent realms of Heaven to the divine potential shining within each human soul.

An early drawing by Reni, Rest on the Flight into Egypt (circa 1598–1600), places Mary, Joseph, and the infants Jesus and John the Baptist in a lush landscape that has little to do with Egypt, much to do with the forested slopes of the Apennines above Bologna, and everything to do with the magical capacity of pen and ink to suggest foliage, twisted tree trunks, and distant villages perched on cliffs. Three versions of Saint John in the Wilderness, all from the 1630s, set different figures of the saint, with different physiognomies, within variations on the same Apennine landscape, and in each one Reni experiments with the effect of using brushes of different thicknesses to portray such disparate textures as leaves, bark, rock, fur, and human skin. A sensual red chalk drawing of a young bearded man is displayed as Head of Christ (1620), but what we have before us, in marvelous foreshortening, is a vibrantly carnal human being before Reni’s brush has transmuted that carnal glow into his painted figures’ aura of divinity.

Around 1630 or 1631, the artist painted one of several versions of a favorite theme of Caravaggio’s, David and Goliath. The Prado exhibition displays this David next to the museum’s own Caravaggio painting of the same subject (circa 1600). Guido’s first encounter with Caravaggio’s dark, dramatic style impressed him deeply, most visibly in his brilliant rendering of another famous Caravaggio theme, the Crucifixion of Saint Peter (1604–1605), but his David with the Head of Goliath reflects an artist at the height of his own popularity. Caravaggio’s David is still a boy, dressed in a simple white tunic, a humble shepherd with suntanned skin, barely larger than the head of the slain giant. Reni’s David is a statuesque prince wrapped in fur, a jaunty red hat with an ostrich plume standing in for his royal crown, every bit a match for the head of Goliath.

Reni’s time in Rome also brought him into contact with Cardinal Cesare Baronio, who conceived the brilliant idea of applying archaeological methods to the study of early Christian monuments. The discovery of the body of Saint Cecilia in 1599 provided Rome with a tangible focus for the thrilling combination of archaeological exploration, spiritual renewal, and artistic inspiration that captivated the young emigrant from Bologna.

Reni’s first experience of Saint Cecilia had also been his first experience of his great model, Raphael, whose monumental painting The Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia (1516–1517) had been commissioned for a Bolognese patroness. The saint turns her head slightly upward as she listens to the heavenly music that has been miraculously granted her to hear, and the memory of this exquisite work, along with the excitement surrounding Saint Cecilia and her rediscovery, led the young artist first to copy Raphael’s altarpiece and then, around 1605, to try his own hand at rendering the challenging pose. It would become one of his trademarks, especially for women in distress, from his early paintings of Saint Apollonia enduring the removal of her teeth to legions of Cleopatras pressing asps to their snowy breasts, Lucretias plunging daggers into their hearts, and saints looking up to the empyrean—people poised on the border between life and death, mortality and eternity.

Still more daringly, monumental works like The Trinity Adored by Angels (1625) in Rome’s church of Santissima Trinità dei Pellegrini (which did not travel to Madrid) and the Immaculate Conception loaned from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (like The Triumph of Job, a remarkable coup) fly free of Earth altogether, in an effort to give visual form to the firmament itself, to the blue expanses of the lower Heaven and the amber glow of its upper reaches. Two versions of Reni’s Agony in the Garden (1607) place the anguished Christ somewhere in the same celestial realm, far removed from the earthly olive grove of Gethsemane. The only reason Reni’s heavenly visions, so luminous in their simplicity, seem unsurprising now is because they became definitive once he had painted them.

The final room in the Prado’s tribute to the questing soul of Guido Reni shows the artist locked in a struggle with his most human foible: an incurable addiction to gambling. He loved a card game, but for all his talents, he never succeeded in beating the odds. To sell more paintings, he streamlined his methods, pushing the limits of what clients would accept as a finished work, making a virtue of thin paint, shortcuts, and reliance on light and shade to define his figures rather than his coruscating color. The last painting in the exhibition shows a Blessed Soul bound for Heaven, his lithe figure remarkably similar to the ancient torso displayed in tandem with him, his arms outstretched like the praying figures painted on the walls of the catacombs of Rome (which Reni knew). Clad only in a rippling pink drape, the expectant soul stands lightly on Earth as the sunny yellow realms of Heaven open above his head. This is how David García Cueto hopes we will remember the Divine Guido: as a visionary to the end.

The post The Divine Guido appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

Many older Roman buildings, like my house, also used stubs of antique columns to support an arched open porch, once a standard touch of elegance for the ground floors of medieval houses and palazzi, both public, like the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline Hill, and private. My own porch columns—borrowed, perhaps, from the Naumachia, the great water theater that the emperor Augustus installed in Trastevere—disappeared long ago. By decree of Pope Sixtus IV (who built the Sistine Chapel), most of Rome’s columned porches were walled up in the late 1470s, but many palazzi still have their medieval façades buried inside the walls, their supporting columns salvaged from ancient monuments like the Theater of Pompey, the Naumachia of Augustus, and the Stadium of Domitian, which were already half-buried beneath layer upon layer of silt from the Tiber’s frequent floods.

These fragments were probably no more than convenient, available, and evidently durable material for the masons who built houses for medieval shopkeepers, but when Pope Innocent II decided to remodel the venerable church of Santa Maria in Trastevere in 1140, he borrowed from the monuments of ancient Rome with deliberate and spectacular intent. For him, these tangible traces of another era were charged with meaning, majesty, and beauty, telling the story of a mighty empire that once spanned all three continents of the world he knew but had been brought to heel by a new religion, toppled by invaders, reduced to a territory in central Italy, and now, in the twelfth century, was looking hopefully toward better times.

As a baron, the former Gregorio Papareschi had his own splendid Roman ruin to mine for ancient marbles: the Baths of Caracalla belonged to his family as a feudal property. Roman bathing habits had changed with the advent of Christianity (Church fathers like Jerome and Augustine took a dim view of all those bare bodies engaged in such pleasurable activity), and the severing of Rome’s aqueducts in the sixth century made bathing in Caracalla’s magnificent facility (or Trajan’s, or Diocletian’s) impossible. Instead, Innocent towed cartloads of Caracalla’s columns, lintels, and slabs of colored marble across the river to make the glorious offering of a spacious basilica dedicated to the Virgin Mary, which was supported on columns from the ancient baths, some topped by Ionic capitals bearing tiny images of the Egyptian deities Isis, Serapis, and Harpocrates, to whom Caracalla was devoted.

In part, Pope Innocent may have stripped the Baths of Caracalla for some of the same reasons that his ninth-century predecessor Paschal I took a lintel from the emperors’ palace on the Palatine Hill to grace his new chapel in the church of Santa Prassede: because such marvels lay beyond the abilities of his own stonemasons. But precisely because of projects like the remodeling of Santa Maria in Trastevere, that situation began to change: intimate contact with the ancient stones became an education in itself. By the end of the twelfth century, the stoneworkers of medieval Rome had turned into masters in their own right: carvers, designers, and architects who understood not only the physical qualities of their precious ancient materials but also their radiant beauty and something of the historical, spiritual, and symbolic significance to be found in them. Inspired by antiquity, they learned to perform their own miracles, adjusting the ancient canons to their own tastes for slimmer columns, loftier interiors, and a great freedom to invent new forms.

At the same time the judicious stripping of ancient monuments became a local Roman industry: bricks, columns, and roof tiles were cleaned and sorted to serve again as bricks, columns, and roof tiles; bronze clamps in their lead sheaths were melted down to become coins, tools, and plumb bobs; marble pavements were cut into smaller pieces and reset in new abstract patterns; statues of the pagan gods were baked in kilns to provide lime for mortar and whitewash. For these professional recyclers, the reuse of durable materials may have been no more than a matter of simple practicality, but for the artists and patrons of medieval and early modern Rome (or any other city with a long history: Cairo, Baghdad, Split, Mexico City) the reuse of ancient objects involved an intricate tangle of complex motives, not all of them conscious. Did the Florentine cobbler who used part of Leonardo da Vinci’s Saint Jerome in the Wilderness as a wedge for his bench ever really look at his treasure? The thirteenth-century Roman stonecutters who reshaped some ninth-century marble rood screens to make window frames for the glittering new façade of Santa Maria Maggiore were probably paying backhanded tribute to their less skilled but devoted predecessors, but the carved front of an ancient marble sarcophagus from Ostia Antica, the port of Rome, was probably outfitted, sculpted side up, as an early Christian toilet seat to heap the ultimate contempt on its “pagan” images.

These are some of the mysteries of use and reuse, purpose and repurpose, that the curators Salvatore Settis and Anna Anguissola and the architect Rem Koolhaas explored in “Recycling Beauty,” an exhibition at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, a former gin distillery in a seedy industrial zone transformed eight years ago into a glittering venue for contemporary art. (Literally glittering: one of its pavilions is covered in 200,000 sheets of pure gold leaf.) Together with its lavish, thoughtful catalog, the exhibition offered a wealth of viewpoints on a complex phenomenon, focusing on a choice range of objects that appeal poignantly to the eye, mind, and spirit, and addressing the urgent need of the present to conserve resources (and not just physical resources) by turning, sagely, to the suggestive power of the past.

Koolhaas and his associate Giulio Margheri outfitted the exhibition hall as a study room, placing some of the smaller objects on “cubicle-like” desks, each provided with a chair to encourage closer scrutiny. The life-size and terrifyingly realistic statue of a lion dispatching a horse stood below eye level on a dramatic black slab set within a sort of conversation pit, a sunken area just deep and broad enough for school groups to sit comfortably on all four sides of the sculpture to hear its remarkable history. We can read the same tale at beguiling length in the catalog entry. One of the exhibition’s signal virtues is this catalog, with its distinguished list of contributors, its broad range of essays, and entries that do justice to the tangled tales each one of these remarkable objects has to tell. Recycling Beauty is above all an enthralling storybook.

The lion and the horse’s body, it seems, were carved in antiquity (perhaps in the Greek world at the time of Alexander the Great as part of a much larger sculptural group), but the first records of their existence go back to the Middle Ages, when the lion, not the wolf, symbolized Rome, and Romans thought that the zigzagging perimeter of their ancient city wall traced the outline of a rampant lion. When we first hear of it, the statue stood at the top of the Capitoline Hill, in the place where the city’s magistrates pronounced capital sentences. It was a tangible symbol of Roman justice exacting its implacable toll: the lion sinks his teeth deep into the horse’s back as his claws visibly rip through the poor creature’s skin. At some point an enterprising sculptor supplied the horse with its somewhat clumsy head and legs, which lack the taut pathos and the expertly polished surface of its lacerated body.

Only later was this king of beasts replaced in Roman affections by the famous bronze wolf, long thought to be Etruscan but now definitely ascribed to the thirteenth century, and provided with figures of the infants Romulus and Remus by a Renaissance sculptor in the late fifteenth century, probably when Pope Sixtus IV opened the papal collection of antiquities to the public. (Today the lion, horse, wolf, and twins are normally on permanent display in the contemporary version of that same institution, the Capitoline Museums, the first public museum in the world, opened in 1734 by Pope Clement XII.)

As the ostensibly Etruscan Capitoline Wolf reminds us, the physical legacy of the Roman Empire was vast in its geographical extension and absorbed people and influences from all the cultures it met along the way. A bronze tabletop, inlaid in silver with Egyptian figures and hieroglyphic inscriptions, emerged from the ruins of a temple of Isis, the Iseum Campense (near today’s Piazza Venezia in Rome), sometime in the early sixteenth century. For early modern scholars, the inlaid images of Isis and the easily accessible texts promised a new key to understanding the hieroglyphs, and engraved copies of the decorations spread widely through the Republic of Letters.

Late medieval Romans were already obsessed with Egypt. The master stoneworker Pietro Vassalletto (who knew Latin as well as how to carve with angelic skill) supplied the magnificent new cloister for the cathedral of St. John Lateran with two sphinxes, complete with pharaonic nemes headdresses, probably modeled on examples from one of ancient Rome’s three sanctuaries of Isis. Saint Stephen declared to the Sanhedrin in Acts 7:22 that Moses had been initiated into all the mysteries of the Egyptians; hence sixteenth-century Christian scholars yearned to be initiated too, and scried this metal tabletop for answers. They had little else to go on: the obelisks of Rome still lay buried underground—all but the Vatican obelisk, but its surfaces were blank. Plutarch’s essay On Isis and Osiris deciphered a handful of hieroglyphs, and a late antique writer identified as Horapollo provided a few more. Unfortunately, however, the Mensa Isiaca (Table of Isis) provided no help: like the Capitoline Wolf, the Isis-themed artifact looked far older than it was. It was crafted in the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian between 81 and 96 CE, perhaps in Rome, and the hieroglyphs are meaningless.

Another sculpture long taken as ancient is a marble relief panel showing two boxers in a memorable battle described in Vergil’s Aeneid: the brash young Trojan Dares and the Sicilian Entellus, a former champion content to rest on his laurels until his companions urge him on and he throws his old boxing gear into the ring. The strapping Dares gains an initial advantage, but then the old fighting spirit seizes Entellus, who rallies with such fury that Aeneas stops the match and grants the aging boxer the prize, a beautiful bull, which Entellus dispatches for sacrifice with one well-placed punch.

The pair formed the basis for an engraving produced by Marco Dente in the early 1520s, apparently clinching its claim to antiquity, but clean-shaven Dares’s dramatically turned back is evidently inspired by the much smaller reliefs on ancient Roman sarcophagi (where the miniature scale makes such bold twists and turns less physically implausible), while Entellus holds his wrists in two graceful arcs that belong more to contemporary Renaissance maniera than the stern old Roman virtus evoked by Vergil’s tale, and his drapery flies up improbably with an uncanny resemblance to the unruly red cloak of Andrea Mantegna’s Vulcan in his late-fifteenth-century painting Parnassus. This ancient-looking relief was probably carved in the early sixteenth century. Sixteenth-century sculpted bodies, as another legacy of medieval taste, move in space with more elasticity than their ancient counterparts; we can see it not only in Dares and Entellus but also in the supple Magdalensberg Youth, a Renaissance copy of an ancient bronze, with a twist.

A red marble throne with a capacious hole in its seat is identified in the catalog as what it looks like: an ostentatiously expensive commode, made to mimic the hardest and most prestigious of all ancient stones, porphyry, a special variety of colored granite wrested from an Egyptian mountainside and shipped down the Nile and across the sea to Italy. This distinctive throne, and a twin in the Louvre, are carved instead from the blood-red marble known as rosso antico (old red), which, like porphyry, was the color of the ancient world’s most precious dye, Tyrian purple, gouged from the flesh of thousands of snails off the coast of Lebanon. (Antiquity provides examples of horrific environmental waste as well as commendable thrift—think of the animals and people sacrificed in Roman arenas, and the extinction of silphium, the Libyan swamp plant that tempted ancient palates more than any other delicacy: ice cream, white truffles, or stuffed dormice.) The two thrones, probably crafted in the age of the emperor Hadrian, who was responsible for an impressive overhaul of Roman public latrines (their walls colorfully painted with flowers or, in one case, gladiators), have also been identified since late medieval times, and by some modern scholars, as imperial birth chairs; in the past, women often gave birth sitting up, enlisting the help of gravity during labor. In support of that idea, the backs of the two red thrones are set an angle that encourages reclining rather than sitting.

A third throne, of white marble, is still preserved in the cloister of St. John Lateran (the same cloister outfitted by Vassalletto with protective sphinxes). Its seat also has a hole, but a tiny one, just enough to pass a cord through to keep a cushion from slipping. In the Middle Ages, these three pieces of furniture became part of the rituals that accompanied a pope’s formal “possession” of the Lateran Basilica, the first church to be consecrated by the emperor Constantine and still the mother church of Roman Catholicism (and thus the inveterate rival of that upstart St. Peter’s). As the pope-elect sank down onto the white marble throne, he recited the psalm “He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the needy out of the dunghill; That he may set him with princes, even with the princes of his people” and then moved on to the red thrones in a transit that symbolized the birth implicit in his new reign. Because of its connection with the ritual of the papal possessio, the white marble throne, set between coiling thirteenth-century marble spires inlaid with bands of glass mosaic, earned the nickname sedes stercoraria (shitty seat), while the two red marble thrones, which may have started life as real sedes stercorariae, were seen as evocations of the imperial purple.

The spires and mosaic inlays of the Lateran cloister and the elaborate medieval frame of the sedes stercoraria are executed in a style known now as “Cosmatesque,” a modern term derived from the Cosmati dynasty of stoneworkers—masters, like their contemporaries from the Vassalletto clan, who had learned over several generations to rework ancient marble and then, silently schooled by their ancient predecessors, to design and execute superb creations of their own (including a floor in Westminster Abbey). “Recycling Beauty” provided a sampling of Cosmatesque inlays from the cathedral at Anagni, south of Rome, where both the Cosmati and the Vassalletto families worked in the thirteenth century. (The curators suggest how the two clans might have parceled out specific tasks.)

Most of the white marble for Cosmatesque work comes from the Luni quarries in Carrara, but one glittering square on display is hewn from Greek island marble, which sparkled egregiously in the light-filled exhibition space. The finely patterned inlays incorporate precious stones from the far-flung regions of the ancient Roman Empire: bright green, immensely hard serpentine from Greece; glassy yellow giallo antico from Tunisia; porphyry from Egypt; granite from Aswan and Sardinia; and occasional touches of agate or mother-of-pearl.

Some particularly precious ancient objects have been handed down for two millennia without interruption, like the extraordinary agate cameos created in the first years of the Roman Empire and passed through generations of hands as treasures in their own right or incorporated as symbolic elements into later book bindings, crowns, and reliquaries. The most famous example of such a perennial object may be the vessel now known as the Farnese Cup. Carved from translucent sardonyx agate in cameo technique, its colors alternating between a deep, walnut-toned brown and pearly white, it displays a head of Medusa on its outer surface and a gathering of gods on the inside. The gods, male and female, mature and youthful, seem to be inspired by Egyptian as well as Greek mythology, fittingly for an object that was probably created in Alexandria for the court of the Ptolemies. (One theory holds that Cleopatra VII commissioned it during her involvement with Mark Antony.) From Alexandria it passed to Rome, perhaps in 31 BCE, when Antony and Cleopatra were defeated by the future emperor Augustus, and thence, with the rest of the imperial collections, on to the New Rome, Constantinople.

In 1204, when the armies of the Fourth Crusade decided to attack Constantinople rather than bothering to go as far as Jerusalem, it disappeared from view, but was mentioned again in 1239 as a prized possession of King Frederick II of Swabia and Sicily, the remarkable monarch known in his day as the stupor mundi, the “wonder of the world.” (Frederick, who obtained the vessel from Provençal merchants traveling through Sicily, must have understood and valued its imperial pedigree, for one portrait bust of the stupor mundi duplicates the distinctly unmedieval hairstyle of the emperor Augustus, cowlicks and all.) It may have stayed in Palermo until 1253, when it went traveling again. A Persian illustrator drew it around 1430, possibly in Herat, but in 1450 Alfonso of Aragon, the king of Naples, bought it for his own collection.

Fifteen years later, it was in Florence, the property of Cardinal Ludovico Trevisan, then in Rome with Cardinal Pietro Barbo, an avid collector of cameos who was elected Pope Paul II in 1464. At the pontiff’s death, the Barbo cameos passed to his successor, Sixtus IV, and from Sixtus to Lorenzo de’ Medici, “Il Magnifico.” Lorenzo’s “chalcedony bowl” remained in the Medici collection in Florence for several decades, but when Duke Alessandro de’ Medici was assassinated in 1537, his redoubtable widow, Margaret “Madama” Habsburg, made sure that it came with her when she fled Florence for Rome, where she married her second husband, Ottavio Farnese. She bequeathed it in her will to their son, Alessandro Farnese, from whom the Farnese Cup received its present name. From Ottavio’s stronghold in Parma the cup eventually moved, through Elisabetta Farnese, queen of Spain, to Naples, where it has remained ever since—except for a brief escape to Palermo in 1798–1806 to avoid Napoleon and his forces, and now a brief trip to Milan.

Small objects like the Farnese Cup, engraved gems, and stone cameos are better equipped to survive the millennia than colossi, as we know by hearsay from the sad collapse of the Colossus of Rhodes and can see at first hand from the full-size reconstruction in “Recycling Beauty” of the massive cult statue of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the supreme god who dominated Rome from his gigantic temple on the summit of the Capitoline Hill until Christianity put his reign to an end. The erstwhile Thunderer found his bearded head replaced by an immense marble portrait of the emperor Constantine (or perhaps the colossal face belongs to Constantine’s brother-in-law and rival, Maxentius), his jovial curls by a late antique bowl cut. His right hand, its fingers once gracefully wrapped around the orb of the world, was reset at a ninety-degree angle to aim toward Heaven, and his long, tapered index finger was replaced by a stubby digit that points stolidly skyward.

Two stories high, swathed in an endless expanse of gilded robe—but with one knee bare, a detail that may allude to his maiestas (divine majesty)—the exhibition’s reconstructed Jupiter/Constantine, housed inside a pavilion called the Cistern, cut an undeniably impressive figure, but a figure that was just as undeniably awkward. Giants have never been famous for their grace; the laws of gravity weigh too heavily on them. Furthermore, Roman emperors loved to substitute their own heads on colossi and triumphal relief, as in the case of the gigantic bronze statue of the emperor Nero that gave its name to the Colosseum. Originally designed for the vestibule of Nero’s fabled Golden House, it was meant to portray the Sun, but its divinely perfect body supported an all-too-human portrait of the emperor himself. Moved after Nero’s death to make way for the emperor Vespasian’s huge arena, the Colossus also received a new, more attractive godlike head with a radiate crown—at least until the mad, vain emperor Commodus replaced it with a bearded portrait of himself in his favorite incarnation as Hercules. Crazy Commodus lost his head in turn to the clean-shaven Sun under the emperor Septimius Severus, and some sources report that Constantine retired the Sun’s head and substituted a portrait of himself.

Rather than beauty, venustas, these re-capitated colossi were recycling the other governing criterion for art and life in ancient Rome, auctoritas (authority). For the Roman architectural writer Vitruvius, beauty itself commanded auctoritas, and if we look at the legacy of ancient beauty in these ever-adaptable objects, or in ever-adaptable cities like Rome, we can see how deeply he understood the ways of the world, then, now, and forever.

The post Mysteries of Use and Reuse appeared first on The New York Review of Books.

One evening in 2015, the writer Michael Frank rushed in late to a lecture at the Casa Italiana, the home of New York University’s Department of Italian Studies in Greenwich Village. As he plopped into the sole remaining seat around a long table, the elegant older woman next to him asked, in a thick Italian accent, “Where are you coming from that you’re in such a hurry?” A French lesson, he replied. She followed with two more questions: “Might I ask why you are studying French?” and then, “Are you interested in knowing how French served me in my life?” (Evidently the Casa Italiana observed a properly Italian sense of timing for starting its lectures.) Frank told her he was studying French to reacquaint himself with a language he’d learned in school but had since buried under layers of Italian. Stella Levi had a more complicated story to tell. Knowing French, she revealed, had not only served her but saved her:

“When I arrived in Auschwitz,” she said, “they didn’t know what to do with us. Jews who don’t speak Yiddish? What kind of Jews are those? Judeo-Spanish-speaking Sephardic Italian Jews from the island of Rhodes, I tried to explain, with no success. They asked us if we spoke German. No. Polish? No. French? ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘French I speak…’”

The program that drew them both to the Casa Italiana that evening was a discussion of museums, memory, and the atrocities committed under what Italians call nazifascismo, that infernal partnership between Benito Mussolini’s puppet Republic of Salò and the German occupation of Italy between 1943 and 1945. Frank, born after World War II, came to the lecture out of interest. Levi, born in 1923 on the island of Rhodes, came as a witness to the Nazis’ last deportation of Jews from Greece. Those deportees from the eastern reaches of the Mediterranean also took the longest road to the death camps deep in the forests of Poland, and for Frank, “When I arrived in Auschwitz” provided an unforgettable prelude to that evening’s event.

The brief conversation impressed Levi as well. At the age of ninety-two, she had decided recently to record her memories of life in Rhodes, and through a mutual friend, also present at the lecture, she eventually asked Frank to give her few pages of recollection a professional’s once-over. Instead he became, in effect, Stella’s scribe. A Hundred Saturdays distills his six years of visits to her New York apartment, as he, an exceptional listener, drew out a wealth of stories from “a woman I would come to think of as a Scheherazade, a witness, a conjurer, a time traveler who would invite me to travel with her.”

In many ways, Stella Levi seems to have furnished the ideal antidote to Frank’s harrowing youth in the company of another older woman, his flamboyant, overbearing aunt Hankie (née Harriet), a Hollywood screenwriter who embodied the Frank family’s nightmare version of Auntie Mame—stylish, imperious, dictatorial, and ultimately unbearable. In his memoir The Mighty Franks (2017), he recreated not only Aunt Hankie’s predatory pursuit of “larky” experience with her favorite nephew (an honor that came at a grueling price), but also the palmy atmosphere of Los Angeles in the era when stars still clung to the last shreds of true cinematic glamour.

That world is as long gone as Levi’s Jewish Rhodes, but both still lie latent in a cloud of living memories—memories of both mind and body. Some twenty years ago, at an exhibition of dresses from the 1930s and 1940s at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I saw old Hollywood come to life when the elderly women who entered the gallery, all dressed in what they would have called slacks once upon a time, began, unconsciously, instinctively, to move as they once had moved inside their own versions of those expertly tailored dresses, stepping smartly in their comfortable shoes with a slow sway of their hips to make the imaginary fabric of their flared skirts swirl around them. Deep down, they still carried themselves like Marlene Dietrich in Morocco.

Stella Levi’s memories also float and swoop like those gowns. What she bore inside her (and continues to bear: she will turn one hundred on May 5) was not simply the traditions of an old country—really a vibrant mixture of old countries—but also the excitement of her rebellion against those traditions, her embrace of modern life, of dresses with the same swirling skirts the Hollywood ladies remembered, of the stylish cork sandals she wore to Auschwitz and kept wearing until they broke apart. Stella’s panache proclaimed her utter rejection of her grandmothers’ heavy alla turka robes and the embroidered caps that never left their heads.

Inexorably, progress was coming for the Rhodian Jews almost as quickly as the Nazis. Levi’s grandmother Mazaltov Halfon had barely left the Jewish quarter in her entire life; Stella routinely slipped outside the old city walls to go swimming in the sea with the Italian men who shared her athleticism and her sense of adventure. From the age of fourteen she kept a packed suitcase by the door, ready for the moment when she could finally fly away to an Italian university; instead, at twenty-one, she was shipped off to Auschwitz.

Rhodes, the easternmost of the Greek islands, was conquered by Mycenaean Greeks in the Bronze Age, but its position at a strategic point in the Mediterranean forever fostered a unique, cosmopolitan culture. Today the buildings of the principal city, also named Rhodes, still reflect the presence of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John, who set up a new headquarters there in 1310 after their expulsion from Jerusalem. Catholic corsairs from a host of European nations, they stayed for two centuries, until Süleyman the Magnificent ejected them in 1522 and annexed Rhodes to the Ottoman Empire.

Jewish merchants were active in Rhodes from the Hellenistic period, but the community’s composition changed significantly in 1492, when Ferdinand and Isabella, Their Most Catholic Majesties of Spain, expelled their entire Jewish population with the help of Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada. Tens of thousands of Spanish-speaking Sephardim, with their distinctive liturgy, law, and customs, scattered from Antwerp to Alexandria, many of them scholars, doctors, and rabbis—an entire professional class.

Unfortunately for the Jews of Rhodes, the Knights of St. John, with whom they had lived side by side for centuries, decided to adopt Spain’s anti-Semitic policies, and in 1502 Grand Master Cardinal Pierre d’Aubusson decreed that Jewish Rhodians must convert to Christianity or be expelled from the island. The community was decimated. Twenty years later Süleyman seized Rhodes from the knights (who eventually moved to Malta) and settled 150 Jewish families from Salonika inside the city walls of the capital. Ensconced in their own quarter, the Juderia (tellingly, a Spanish word), free from restrictions on the kinds of trades they could pursue, free to worship according to their own Sephardic traditions, the Rhodian Jews, or Rhodeslis, lived and prospered among Orthodox Greeks, Catholics (who returned in the eighteenth century), and Turkish Muslims for nearly four and a half centuries. By the early twentieth century their population had reached almost 4,500.

In 1912 the crumbling Ottoman Empire ceded Rhodes to Italy, and the island’s prevailing—and notably tolerant—Turkish culture began to give way to the twin pressures of modern Europe and Italian Fascism. Stella’s father, Yehuda Levi, “in his clothes…language, and general sensibility, was in many ways essentially Turkish.” He still wore a djellaba at home and a fez to work with his Turkish business partner, at least until his Italian-educated children begged him to put it away. He had married, by arrangement, Miriam Notrica, the daughter of a prominent local banking family. The names of their seven children reveal a plethora of languages and cultural influences: Morris (Moshe), Selma, Felicie, Sara, Victor, Renée, Stella. Stella spoke Judeo-Spanish at home, Italian in school, learned French from her sisters, who had attended the French school in Rhodes, and picked up Turkish and Greek from her friends and neighbors. She learned English in New York when she arrived in the late 1940s.

The culture of Rhodes may have been as vibrantly international as ever around the turn of the twentieth century, but economic conditions became increasingly difficult in the Jewish quarter as the Ottoman Empire tottered and fell after World War I. Young men had already begun to emigrate in the late nineteenth century, to the United States, Buenos Aires, Rhodesia, and the Belgian Congo. Both of Stella’s brothers would eventually leave: Morris for Los Angeles and Victor for the Congo. Yehuda Levi had always made a good, if not lavish, living selling wood and coal and operating the customs scale at the port of Rhodes with a Turkish partner, but he was certainly not prosperous enough to move his family into the new Italian-built houses outside the city walls, where the Notricas and the other wealthy Jewish bankers now chose to live.

As a result, Stella grew up among the close-packed courtyards and perpetually open doors of the old Juderia, surrounded by wafting smells of pastry and pasta, swathed in a dense tapestry of song, embroidery, conversation, ritual, and family. Here Yehuda could cross the street every day to pray in the synagogue and Miriam could make a daily round of visits to family and friends. Free to wander the Juderia, sleeping at her cousins’ house or at home, Stella spent her Rhodian childhood lovingly nurtured and itching to escape. Decades later, her prodigious memory still registered the textures and colors of her early life with uncanny precision, but perhaps she always sensed that those seemingly solid traditions were as fluid as the turquoise Aegean. At some point in their conversations, Frank realizes that Stella never once saw her nuclear family all together at the same time.

Life in the Juderia was literally magical, still haunted by spirits in the first decades of the twentieth century. Every so often the rabbi would spread word through his sexton, the shamash, that an evil force, so fearsome to name that it was evasively called “the sweetness” (la dulce), was about to enter the community’s water supply. Women filled up bottles and bowls with water and covered them, and for several hours, perhaps half a day, no one washed or turned on the tap until the danger had passed. Traditionally, no one ever set the table with knives or bathed at home; instead, once a week, before Shabbat, families went to the hammam. Asthma was cured by inhaling marijuana fumes or drinking it in a tisane. Sliced potatoes applied to the head cured migraine. “Don’t say, ‘My God,’ Michael,” Stella protested one afternoon as she described some of her family’s traditional remedies. “There was a logic to these cures. They had been handed down through the generations. And, what’s more, they worked.”

All the same, she never quite believed in la dulce, nor did she ever avail herself of the enserradura, an extreme treatment her grandmother practiced on emotionally troubled adolescent girls in the neighborhood: for a week, enclosed in a silent room (her family and neighbors would be encouraged to move out of their houses if necessary), the girl rested, eating nothing but a thin broth. Creating an island of peace within the bustling, crowded Juderia might have soothed the anxiety of some Rhodian girls, but Stella disdained the idea; she would rather strike out on her own, with a good book or a swim in the sea.

Mussolini marched on Rome the year before Stella’s birth, and thus the only Italy she knew was Fascist Italy. She regarded Italy, whose language she spoke and to which she felt a profound connection, as glamorous and modern. Until 1936 the colonial grip on Rhodes was relatively benign: the Italians brought running water and electricity to the Juderia; paved roads; opened schools, a theater, and a cinema; and brought in modern medicine. They tore down the old souk and peppered the ancient city with incongruous Fascist-style buildings. They introduced taxis, buses, and motorcars, encouraged sports, drained swamps. The local governor, Mario Lago, even convinced Mussolini to found a rabbinical school.

All that changed in December 1936, when Lago was replaced by Cesare De Vecchi, Count of Val Cismon, Mussolini’s minister of education, who had specifically requested his new appointment as “governor of the Italian Possession of the Aegean Isles” after a visit to Rhodes earlier that year. At first, De Vecchi’s presence only seemed to create a change in the atmosphere; the Juderia’s life a la turka seemed more precarious, less in touch with the times, as the drive toward modernization began to show its ruthless side. But the passage of Mussolini’s anti-Semitic Racial Laws in 1938 fell on the Juderia like the blow of an axe. Yehuda lost his job; Stella and her sisters were banned from school.

A local Italian, Luigi Noferini, set up a clandestine school for Stella and five Jewish boys. She was fifteen, he was almost thirty, but the urgent conditions forged an urgent friendship. And one evening when she was seventeen, “they were sitting alone side by side at his desk. They had finished lessons for the day. Stella closed her book, and Noferini put his hand on hers. Just that, no more.” Through Noferini she met another Italian, Gennaro Tescione, a Neapolitan lawyer in his late twenties stationed in Rhodes as an army lieutenant; if Noferini stimulated her intellect, Tescione struck something in her soul. Stella met a third Italian, the Jewish businessman Renzo Rossi, on the beach one day with a group of her friends from the Juderia, and his villa became a refuge from the dread that suffused the community. Yet she recognized that the Racial Laws also bound her more closely to her Jewish friends and to their remarkable heritage.

By 1939 wealthy, well-connected Rhodian Jews were leaving the island, for Tangier, Congo, Argentina, the United States, but the residents of the Juderia, clinging together, adopted a kind of collective denial. On September 8, 1943, Italy’s Grand Council, which had deposed Mussolini in July, declared an armistice with the Allies, but much of the country, and all of its conquered territory in the Balkans and Greece—including Rhodes—passed directly to Mussolini’s former ally Adolf Hitler. Stella’s Italian friends Renzo Rossi and Luigi Noferini fled the island, Noferini to serve with the partisans in Tuscany, Rossi, as a Jew, simply to survive. Gennaro Tescione, as an officer in the Italian army, shot himself rather than obey a summons to report to Germany. The Levi family’s savings, like those of their Jewish neighbors, began to run out.

On July 23, 1944, the SS rounded up the remaining Rhodian Jews, more than 1,700 of them, and put them on a boat to Piraeus.^* During that miserable eight-day journey the ship made a single stop, at the island of Leros, to join another vessel full of Jews collected from the island of Kos and to pick up provisions (for the crew only), along with the single Jew residing on Leros. Twenty-three passengers died en route, mostly the old people crammed into the bilge without sanitary facilities, food, or water. In all, it took three and a half weeks for the Jews of Rhodes to reach Auschwitz-Birkenau: first they spent three days massed in the SS transit camp of Haidari west of Athens, and then endless days packed into cattle cars headed north. Amazingly, Stella and her sister demanded—and received—permission to step out of their car and wash their hair at a pump during a stop at a Czech railway station.

The men who finally opened the doors at Auschwitz station on August 16 were Greek Jews from Salonika. As they unloaded the Rhodians’ suitcases, they quickly whispered in Judeo-Spanish to hand babies over to the old people. They dared not explain that young women holding infants went straight to the gas chambers, but healthy young women had a chance of survival as forced laborers. These fellow Judeo-Spanish Greeks had already survived for months; they were among more than 40,000 people—nineteen trainloads—deported from Salonika to Auschwitz between March and August 1943. By December 1945 fewer than 2,000 Jews lived in Salonika, once a community of 50,000.

Of the 1,700-plus Rhodian Jews who made the journey to the death camp with Stella, 1,200 were gassed immediately, including her parents, and only 151 lived to see the liberation of Auschwitz in late January 1945. Of the fifty people left behind in Rhodes, forty-three found protection from the courageous Turkish consul, Selahattin Ülkümen, who arranged for them to get Turkish citizenship and emigrate to Turkey. (Ülkümen also saved Jews in Kos and is honored at Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.) But all these survivors had emigrated to Turkey by 1945. An ancient woman of ninety who had somehow slipped through the cracks lost her mind and wandered her deserted neighborhood until she died of starvation shortly after the cattle cars with her neighbors reached their destination in Poland. In a little more than a year, then, the Nazis extirpated Jewish life in Greece, destroying communities that had lasted for centuries in the case of Salonika, millennia in the cases of Athens and Rhodes.

Why did the Germans bother to send the Jews of Rhodes all the way to Auschwitz? Stella wondered but never found an answer. Initially, packing people off to the East had been a way to hide the evidence of the Final Solution, but by August 1944, when the Rhodeslis came to Auschwitz, the secret was out: in July the Soviet army had discovered and liberated the Majdanek extermination camp. As Nazi power eroded and then collapsed, Stella was transferred from camp to camp in an increasingly desperate effort to conceal the system from the advancing Allies. Auschwitz fell in January, but Stella, perpetually on the march from Poland to Bavaria, found freedom only on April 6, 1945. Rather than returning to Rhodes, where the properties of the Juderia had all been confiscated and its social fabric destroyed, she asked to be sent to Italy. In Florence, she was reunited with her former clandestine teacher, Luigi Noferini, and no doubt broke his heart when she moved on to New York, Los Angeles, and back to New York again.

To the last of the one hundred Saturdays we spend with her, Stella keeps the Holocaust in a separate mental compartment, a Pandora’s box she knows better than to open all the way. The trauma she allows herself to feel fully is, instead, the humiliation of the Italian Racial Laws, which sapped her self-confidence as a teenager and encapsulated the greater horror to come. The experience of the camps she relegates to another Stella: the conniving, thieving survivor who bartered potatoes and pieces of bread with male inmates through a hole in the wall that separated the men’s latrines from the women’s, and who stepped out of the cattle car to Auschwitz to wash her hair at a water pump along the way.

What ultimately pushed that Stella toward life, however, was the stubborn physical effort of her sister Renée, who shoved her forward, shivering with fever, for three days as they marched from a nameless satellite camp of Dachau to another camp at Allach, and thence to liberation. Had she stayed behind in the infirmary, she would have been taken to Dachau and gassed. In the end, every survivor, Stella insists, depends on nothing but luck.

It seems fitting that One Hundred Saturdays should be an illustrated book, for Stella Levi’s tales are profoundly rooted in sensory experience—of spaces urban and domestic, open and closed, of salt water, honey-soaked pastries, silk nightgowns, huddles of children, snatches of melody and rousing choruses, the erotic thrill of skin on skin. Maira Kalman’s paintings—based on surviving photographs of the Levi family, Stella, Noferini, and Tescione—infuse those black-and-white images with Mediterranean color to create a singularly attractive book, a tribute not only to an exceptional time and place, but also to the exceptional person charged with the task of commemorating it, a witness whose independence, integrity, and zest for life would have been irresistible at any time, in any place.

The post An Exceptional Witness appeared first on The New York Review of Books.