Space, Image, and Reform in Early Modern Art

The Influence of Marcia Hall

Arthur J. DiFuria, Ian Verstegen, Arthur J. DiFuria, Ian Verstegen

• Editore: Medieval Institute Publications
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501513459
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Arte
• Categoria: Storia dell'arte rinascimentale

The essays in Space, Image, and Reform in Early Modern Art build on Marcia Hall's seminal contributions in several categories crucial for Renaissance studies, especially the spatiality of the church interior, the altarpiece's facture and affectivity, the notion of artistic style, and the controversy over images in the era of Counter Reform. Accruing the advantage of critical engagement with a single paradigm, this volume better assesses its applicability and range. The book works cumulatively to provide blocks of theoretical and empirical research on issues spanning the function and role of images in their contexts over two centuries. Relating Hall's investigations of Renaissance art to new fields, Space, Image, and Reform expands the ideas at the center of her work further back in time, further afield, and deeper into familiar topics, thus achieving a cohesion not usually seen in edited volumes honoring a single scholar.

Part 1: Historiography and Methods

Chapter 1 Raphael’s Bankers: Agostino Chigi, Bindo Altoviti, and Jakob Fugger

Ingrid Rowland

Personal Note: My debt to Marcia Hall and her support is simply incalculable. The quality of her scholarship, her generosity, and her joy in life have been a lifelong inspiration, to me as to many others.

Oddly enough, Raphael’s most illustrious portrait of a banker depicts not his great patron, Agostino Chigi of Siena (1466–1520), but rather Chigi’s young Florentine rival Bindo Altoviti (1491–1557), another Tuscan transplant to the papal courts of Julius II and Leo X. In fact, despite Chigi’s international reputation, only a single definite portrait survives from his lifetime: the obverse of a bronze medallion by an unknown artist (Figure 1.1) showing the bearded banker in profile, wearing a flat cap with ear flaps and a pleated, apparently fur-lined high-collared giornea (sleeveless overcoat).¹

Figure 1.1: Unknown artist, Portrait Medal of Agostino Chigi, this version struck in lead, ca. 1510. Diameter: 73 mm. British Museum, Department of Coins and Medals, G3.IP.436. Photo: © ARCHIVIO GBB / Archivi Alinari.

A sixteenth-century drawing by Jacopo Salviati of Chigi’s mortuary chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome, shows another portrait in bronze adorning the banker’s pyramidal tomb, but Gian Lorenzo Bernini replaced that image with his own marble version in the mid-seventeenth century.² There are other possible – even probable – portraits: one of the bystanders in Lorenzetto’s bronze relief of Christ and the Samaritan Woman, now on the chapel’s high altar, also bears a strong resemblance to Chigi, with his aquiline profile and trimmed beard; in Raphael’s original design, this element decorated the oblong cenotaph at the base of Agostino’s pyramid, and within the conventions of sixteenth-century Italian religious art it would not be surprising to find the donor of a religious commission appearing as a witness to a holy encounter. Several of the images of Hercules and Jupiter from Chigi’s suburban palazzo, now the Villa Farnesina, might also represent the fiftyish master of the house, but none of these identifications has yet been bolstered by documentary evidence.³ Instead, without an image of Chigi as he really might have looked at the peak of his financial ascendancy, posterity must imagine him in the idealized vision portrayed on the walls of his own bedroom (by Giovanni Bazzi, “il Sodoma”): as a vibrant, youthful Alexander the Great (Figure 1.2), with a classic Grecian profile rather than Agostino’s prominent Tuscan beak.⁴

Raphael’s portrait of Bindo Altoviti (Figure 1.3), by contrast, was famous from the outset. Giorgio Vasari, in his Life of the artist, reports that it was “regarded as utterly marvelous” (tenuto stupendissimo) not least, surely, because the sitter himself was so supremely attractive.⁵ When Bindo sat for Raphael just after his wedding in 1511, the young banker was all of twenty, ten years younger than the renowned painter from whom, as we shall see, he may have commissioned as many as three works to celebrate his entrance as a full-fledged adult into the cutthroat world of papal finance.

Figure 1.2: Giovanni Bazzi, “Il Sodoma,” Marriage of Alexander and Roxane, detail of Alexander. 1517. Wall fresco, Villa Farnesina, Rome. Susana Guzman/Alamy Stock Photo.

Figure 1.3: Raphael, Portrait of Bindo Altoviti, ca. 1515. 59.7 × 43.8 cm. Oil on wooden panel. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1943.4.33. Photo: Bridgeman Images.

For a wealthy banker, Altoviti is dressed in this image with remarkable simplicity. No fur lines his indigo blue giornea, which slips back to reveal only the pleated ruffle that lines his white linen undershirt and his luminous skin (while also bringing out the limpid color of his eyes). His cap and jacket are a sober black, the recommended hue for merchants, though the painting does hint at large and elaborate sleeves. The prominent position of the gold ring on the young banker’s index finger provides one of the clues that this is a wedding portrait. With his azure eyes, his rosy complexion, his silky blonde hair, and his bee-stung lips, the bridegroom needs no further ornament than his youth. That youth, however, had been anything but carefree and innocent. His father, Antonio, head of the papal mint in Rome, had died in 1507, when Bindo, the sole legitimate son, was only sixteen.⁶ Seven years before reaching the official age of legal majority, therefore, Bindo Altoviti had already assumed responsibility for his family fortunes.⁷

Art historians generally concur that the portrait’s design, with its striking pose, is certainly Raphael’s, though the actual work of painting may have been delegated, in whole or in part, to Gianfrancesco Penni or Giulio Romano.⁸ The deep shadows and oblique light source reflect the artist’s intense study of Leonardo, and in fact the conspicuously beautiful angel in both versions of Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks takes a spiraled pose similar to Altoviti’s.⁹ Raphael would further develop the combination of stark background and dramatic shading in subsequent portraits, notably the double image of Andrea Navagero and Agostino Beazzano he painted for Pietro Bembo, and the late self-portrait with a friend (most recently identified as Giulio Romano) sometimes known, wrongly, as Raphael and his Fencing Master.¹⁰ These paintings, in turn, may have provided one of the chief inspirations for the distinctive chiaroscuro style that Caravaggio would develop once he settled in Rome.¹¹

Raphael is also drawing from a contemporary fashion for painted images of young men in love, inspired by Petrarchan poetry, and by the works of Raphael’s Venetian friend, Pietro Bembo.¹² Albrecht Dürer’s early self-portraits from the 1490s belong to a similar category, showing the artist as a pensive young man, emphasizing his flowing blonde hair and a shirt open to provide glimpses of bare flesh. Raphael had never seen these marvelous images himself, though he admired Dürer’s prints, and in 1515, the two artists exchanged drawings with one another.¹³

Bindo Altoviti always identified himself as a citizen of Florence, but he was born in Rome in 1491, to Antonio, a Florentine merchant romanam curiam sequens, “following the Roman Curia” (the phrase went back to the Middle Ages, when the Curia moved frequently, but in Bindo’s own lifetime, the Roman Curia would also move, bankers and all, to Bologna and Orvieto).¹⁴ His mother, Dianora Cybò, was a niece of the reigning pope, Innocent VIII. The Altoviti had been a prominent Florentine merchant family for centuries, their capital based on the proceeds from agriculture and the cloth trade.¹⁵ From the firm’s Roman office, Antonio Altoviti lent money, leased contracts from the papal state, and managed the papal mint.¹⁶ He was also closely allied with the Florentines who had driven out the Medici in 1494 and replaced their dynasty with a revived republic – in which, however, the leading figure, Piero Soderini, was elected to an office more worthy of a lord: Gonfaloniere a vita (“Standard-bearer for life”).¹⁷

Bindo Altoviti’s betrothal in 1508 to eleven-year-old Fiammetta Soderini, Piero’s grand...

Indice dei contenuti

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Historiography and Methods
• Part 2: Space
• Part 3: Image
• Part 4: Reform
• Part 5: Back Matter
• Index