Art Archives - The Patroclus

March 3, 2024March 31, 2024

The Frescoes of Fra Angelico in San Marco

Fra Angelico was a humble monk who happened to be a great artist. In this post we look at his works in the Monastery of San Marco in Florence – this will be a short piece to complement my recent longer post on the Signorelli frescoes in the duomo of Orvieto in which I briefly introduced Fra Angelico.

To recap, the artist and Dominican friar known to his contemporaries as Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, to modern Italians as Il Beato Angelico and to Anglophone art historians as “Fra Angelico” was a talented artist of great piety and personal simplicity. In terms of the periods we ascribe to art history, he straddled late-medieval “International Gothic” and the Renaissance, and painted in both styles as the occasion demanded.

When Fra Angelico was executing commissions for important and wealthy clients, he painted in a formal style, and used the most brilliant and expensive colours. We saw an example of that in my photograph of the two ceiling panels which were all he completed in the Cappella Nuova in the Orvieto Duomo. I will reproduce the photograph again here to save you going to look for it.

Fra Angelico Orvieto — The Fra Angelico panels in the ceiling of the Cappella Nuova in Orvieto, an example of his formal style. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm lens (click to enlarge).

But there is another aspect to his painting, simpler in style, reflecting his own subject choices, and giving us a bit of an insight into the character of someone who Vasari described, a hundred years later, as not only rarely talented, but humble and modest (in contrast with some of Vasari’s other subjects). To see this side of Fra Angelico, you must visit the monastery of San Marco in Florence (nowadays officially the “Museum of San Marco” – you can buy tickets online at its website).

The Monastery of San Marco

Map of Florence showing the location of the Monastery of San Marco at the top right (click to open in Google Maps).

There had been a monastery, or a series of monasteries, in this location on the northern side of the city for a least a couple of hundred years when, in the 1430s, the previous order was evicted for their laxity. The property was made over to a group of Dominicans from nearby Fiesole, which included Fra Angelico. But the buildings were in poor condition and the new proprietors had to live in makeshift accommodation at first.

San Marco was in the part of Florence known as the “Medici quarter” and it was the head of that wealthy family and the de facto ruler of Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici, who decided to finance the rebuilding of the monastery in contemporary Renaissance style. And at some point it was decided that Fra Angelico and his assistant, Benozzo Gozzoli, would paint frescoes in various communal areas of the monastery and also in the monks’ cells.

Fra Angelico Judas — Fresco in San Marco, *Judas kisses Christ* by Fra Angelico. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).

Probably the most famous of these is his Annunciation, which is a very simple scene compared to what he would probably have painted had he been commissioned to do something for a great cathedral.

Fra Angelico Annunciation — Fresco in San Marco, *Annunciation* by Fra Angelico. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).

No doubt in gratitude for his generosity in financing the reconstruction of the monastery, Cosimo de’ Medici was granted a cell there, as a peaceful retreat from the pressures of running Florence while pretending to be just a normal citizen. It is about twice the size of the rest of the cells, but just as austere inside. For this, Fra Angelico put in a special effort. His Adoration of the Magi is very beautful – there is no gorgeous and complex background such as might be seen a similar work by Perugino, but the figures are elegant and richly dressed. Below that is a space for a little altar with an image of Christ.

Fra Angelico Adoration — Fresco in Cosimo de’ Medici’s cell in San Marco, *Adoration of the Magi*. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back, two images merged in Photoshop (click to enlarge).

It is a special experience to visit Cosimo’s cell and imagining him there in silent contemplation, or perhaps reading letters brought to him from Popes and princes.

But despite the beauties of the Annunciation and Adoration of the Magi, the impression that stayed with me was that of a naive, almost cartoon-like literalness in his depiction of gospel scenes. In this Nativity the ox and the ass don’t quite take centre stage, but they certainly do not want to be just minor characters.

Fra Angelico Nativity — Fresco in San Marco, *Nativity* by Fra Angelico. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).

In this scene of the women at Golgotha on Easter Sunday, they are rather theatrically peering into the empty sarcophagus, while an angel points upward as if to say “he went that-a-way”.

Fra Angelico Resurrection — Fresco in San Marco, *Resurrection* by Fra Angelico. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).

And I will finish with my favourite, a picture of the medieval tradition of The Harrowing of Hell, according to which Jesus descended into Hell, bashed up a few devils and released various worthy souls – prophets who had had to wait until the resurrection before being admitted to heaven. I can recognise John the Baptist, and I think the chap with the forked beard is probably Moses, but I can’t place the others. Perhaps the one grasping Jesus’s hand is Isaiah.

Fra Angelico Harrowing of Hell — Fresco in San Marco, *The Harrowing of Hell* by Fra Angelico. Note the flattened devil. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50C digital back (click to enlarge).

But the best parts are the devil hiding round a corner to the left, and the one who has been squashed flat when Christ smashed the door down. It makes me think of the coyote in the Bugs Bunny cartoons.

February 24, 2024April 28, 2024

The End of the World – The Duomo and Signorelli Frescoes in Orvieto

In a pretty location in Umbria you may visit an artistic masterpiece of the Renaissance: Signorelli’s frescoes in the cathedral of Orvieto.

Orvieto is a town in western Umbria with a spectacular situation – the area abounds in outcrops of “tufa” – rock formed from volcanic ash, around which the softer rock has eroded away. This makes such sites good choices for defensibility, and it seems that there has been a settlement here from before Etruscan times. The name itself is said to derive from the Latin Urbs Vetus, meaning “the old city”.

Although in the region of Umbria now, Orvieto is located west of the Tiber River and so it would not have been part of the ancient territory of the Umbri, nor, for the same reason, would it have been part of the ancient Roman province of Umbria. The modern region of Umbria, with several other regions, was created when the Papal territories were annexed by the Kingdom of Piedmont during the unification of Italy, and its modern area only approximates that of its ancient one. So Orvieto doesn’t feel particularly Umbrian – the landscape and architecture have more in common with northern Lazio towns like Montefiascone and Caprarola.

Map showing the location of Orvieto, between Rome and Florence (click to open in Google Maps).

As the map shows, Orvieto is approximately halfway between Rome and Florence, and on both the main north-south motorway and the high-speed railway line. This means it is well-placed to receive a lot of tourists, which it does – but there has to be a reason for them to want to come. That reason is an artistic and architectural heritage that seems out of proportion to a place of such modest size. But some important things have happened here. Thomas Aquinas lectured at the university, and from the mid-1200s Orvieto was one of the cities to which Popes removed themselves when conflicts in Rome became too dangerous.

These days the attraction of Orvieto is largely based on the extraordinary duomo, or cathedral. While the duomo dominates the town when seen from a distance, you don’t actually see it as you walk along the narrow streets from the funicular which brings visitors up from the station and the car park. Then you suddenly turn a corner and there it is – and it is breathtaking.

Next to the duomo is an impressive medieval building – the Papal Palace, used as a residence when the Pope was in town. These days it houses the tourist office where you buy your ticket to visit the duomo.

The Duomo

Towards the end of the 13th Century, the town authorities decided to build themselves a magnificent church, to be dedicated to Santa Maria Assunta, and built of alternating layers of white and black stone, like a giant liquorice allsort – a style common in Tuscan cities like Siena and Pistoia. Progress was a bit slow; the town kept running short of money, and every now and then plague and war interrupted things. In fact it took about three hundred years, so it started in the Romanesque style, most of it was Gothic, and there were some Renaissance bits towards the end.

Orvieto Duomo showing the gothic façade and the black and white stripes. Horseman 45FA large format camera, Fujinon-W 125mm lens, 4×5-inch sheet film back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film, rising front to correct perspective (click to enlarge).

Apparently one of the more serious problems first encountered was that the structure didn’t appear to be strong enough to carry its own weight – a Sienese architect was brought in who added buttresses and other features based on the duomo at Siena.

And it was that Sienese architect – a chap called Maitani – who designed the first of the cathedral’s masterpieces – the magnificent Gothic façade.

The façade is the most prominent architectural feature in Orvieto and it can be seen clearly in the distant view of the town in the first photograph above. Sometimes, when the setting sun hits its golden mosaics, it shines like a beacon far into the distance. The mosaics date from the late 14th Century, but most were replaced and redesigned in the 15th, 18th and 19th Centuries.

At the base of the four piers of the façade are a series of bas-reliefs depicting stories from the old testament, and a Last Judgement with gruesome-looking devils carrying away the souls of the damned. It is thought that some of the work was by Maitani himself, but that three or four other master sculptors must have worked on it. My favourite part of it is a “Jesse Tree” which was a favourite motif in Christian iconography, showing various ancestors of Christ, starting with Jesse, the father of King David, in the branches of a tree. This has been compared to a medieval manuscript illumination, but carved in marble – I would certainly agree with that description.

Around the door you will see some of the most extraordinarily delicate carving, of marble inlaid with beautiful mosaics. This sort of portal carving is very common in Gothic cathedrals, but seldom is it as elegant as this.

The Interior and the Cappella Nuova

Once inside the “liquorice allsort” one tends to be struck by the comparative simplicity. I like this, as it is probably close to the original impression one would have had in the Middle Ages. Some writers seem to find it too stark a contrast to the glories of the façade, and if you agree with them, then be patient, because the best is yet to come.

And the best – which is what you have come to see – is one of the most memorable works of the 15th-16th Centuries, which is saying something. On one side of the nave is a chapel referred to variously as the Chapel of the Madonna of San Brizio or simply the Cappella Nuova, or “New Chapel”. “New”, in this case means that it was commissioned in 1408, a bit over a hundred years after work on the cathedral commenced, but consideration about how to decorate it did not begin until the mid-1400s. Perhaps it was a question of money, because that certainly turned out to be a constraint in the decades to come.

In 1446 negotiations were started to secure the services of one of the most famous artists of the day, the Dominican monk born Guido di Pietro, later called Fra Giovanni da Fiesole, but known to anglophone art history as Fra Angelico (NB: not Frangelico – that is a hazelnut-flavoured liqueur). In Italy he is usually called Il Beato Angelico, the blessed Angelico. The title eventually became official in 1982 when Pope John Paul II formally beatified him. I have some photographs of his frescoes from the monastery of San Marco in Florence, which I will make the subject of another post one day.

In 1447 the cathedral authorities signed a contract with Fra Angelico, and he did spend one summer in Orvieto, preparing designs and executing a couple of ceiling panels – in which he was assisted by the young Benozzo Gozzoli. A combination of papal demands on Fra Angelico’s time and possibly the difficulty of finding the money to pay him meant that he did not return, although apparently Gozzoli stayed on and continued the work for a while.

Fra Angelico died in 1455, and for the rest of the 15th Century no real work was done on the chapel, although the scaffolding remained in place. Orvieto itself went through some hard times with a period of civil disorder caused by the usual conflicts between rival wealthy families, which cannot have helped with the civic revenues.

Every now and then as finances permitted, attempts were made to find a painter to carry on the work, including the great Perugino, who characteristically kept the Orvietans hanging for a decade or so before finally turning them down. At that point, the choice fell on Luca Signorelli.

Signorelli came from the town of Cortona on the border of Tuscany and Umbria. In 1499 he was around 50 years old and presumably at the height of his powers. He had contributed to the decoration of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and also to the famous paintings in the monastery of Monte Oliveto Maggiore near Siena, but it was this work in Orvieto that established his reputation in art history. As part of the contract he undertook to complete those parts of the chapel for which Fra Angelico had left drawings, but these were only for the rest of the ceiling panels. Since Fra Angelico’s work featured a Christ in Judgement, Signorelli proposed to continue the theme of the Apocalypse and Last Judgement, in keeping with Fra Angelico’s intent, but also picking up the eschatological tone of the carvings on the cathedral façade.

I have seen a tourist website which states that the Orvieto Last Judgement is based on that of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. This is completely the wrong way round! Signorelli was first, and Michelangelo came after. Any similarities – which there are – are the result of Michelangelo drawing inspiration from Signorelli, and not vice versa.

The Frescoes

Let’s start with the ceiling, which is the only place you can see any work by Fra Angelico. These are the two panels featuring Christ in Judgement and The Prophets.

Orvieto Cappella Nuova — The Cappella Nuova, ceiling panels by Fra Angelico – *The Prophets* (centre) and *Christ in Judgement* (left) Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm lens (click to enlarge).

The rest is all by Signorelli. The upper walls contain several scenes, drawn from the biblical account of the apocalypse and medieval works. In (I think) chronological order, they are The Rule of the Antichrist, The Apocalypse, The Resurrection of the Flesh, The Damned in Hell and The Elect in Paradise. You may find them given slightly different names in different sources.

The Rule of the Antichrist

The central figure in this panel is the false Christ preaching. He is rather shockingly depicted as similar to the real one, but with the devil whispering in his ear. Our old friend the art historian Vasari claimed to have identified real people in the crowd around him, including the young Raphael as the well-dressed long-haired chap in red tights with his hands on his hips. However some modern sources cast doubt on this.

It had not occurred to me until I started writing this article, but this fresco was painted very shortly after the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola was convicted of heresy and executed in Florence. Savonarola preached a Taliban-like message of radical asceticism, and for a while was the effective ruler of Florence, declaring it to be the new Jerusalem and the world centre of Christianity. Savonarola was famous for his “bonfires of the vanities”, in which rich Florentines offered their treasures for destruction, and sure enough, on the ground in front of the Antichrist is a pile of such offerings. It seems very probable that people would have made the connection, and moreover that the church authorities would have wanted them to. Then I noticed that behind the Antichrist Signorelli has depicted a group of disputing clerics, prominent among whom are several in the black and white Dominican habit that Savonarola would have worn. I wonder if that was part of the message as well? Not that Savonarola had been the actual Antichrist, but that this sort of puritanism was dangerous heresy.

Elsewhere in the scene, bad stuff is happening all over the place. People are being persecuted and executed for not following the Antichrist. and in the central background the Antichrist is performing bogus miracles. At the top left is the end of this particular part of the story, where the Antichrist has dared to attempt to ascend into heaven, but is quickly dispatched by the Archangel Michael. A group of people below, presumably the Antichrist’s followers, are killed in the collateral damage.

At the lower left stand two men dressed in black, solemnly observing the scene. These are Signorelli himself and Fra Angelico. Signorelli cannot have met his predecessor, and I do not know on what the likeness was based, but it was a generous gesture on Signorelli’s part to include him.

In this as in the other main scenes, you will notice a clever artistic trick by Signorelli – at the bottom of each scene some of the characters look as if they are actually standing on ledges that are part of the structure of the cathedral. It is quite a skilful bit of false perspective, given that you are looking at it all from below. It is not the only part of the chapel where he plays these sorts of games.

The Apocalypse

This scene is painted over the archway that divides the chapel from the nave of the duomo. On the right, in the foreground the Old Testament King David and a Sibyl are predicting the end of the world. Behind them, someone is escaping from a collapsing building, and people are being led to execution. In the distance, a city is in ruins and ships are borne high on huge waves.

On the left, flying devils are laying waste to the earth with fiery breath, while people below flee in panic.

As elsewhere, the foremost figures – David and the Sybil on the right, the terrified refugees on the left, have been painted as if they have come out of the paintings and are standing on the actual architecture of the cathedral.

The Resurrection of the Flesh

In this scene the Last Trumpet is sounded, and the dead emerge from the earth – some already restored to flesh, others still as skeletons. I’m not sure why they did not all come back in complete form straight away.

Signorelli specialised in nude figures, in particular powerfully-muscled males, at a time when this was still a fairly novel thing in a sacred setting (as we have seen, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes came later). I’m not aware of whether the cathedral authorities thought he was being too daring.

The Damned in Hell

Signorelli definitely went to town on this scene. At the top right three armed archangels prevent any escape, while devils seize the damned souls and bear them into the fiery gate of hell at the lower left. There is a heaving mass of bodies below, but it is easy to distinguish the figures from each other – assisted, as one source points out, by the fact that Signorelli gives the devils grotesquely-coloured skin.

There is apparently a tradition that the naked woman being carried off on the back of a flying devil is a depiction of a former girlfriend of Signorelli’s who had jilted him. This would make it an early example of revenge porn, but I have not seen this in any serious discussion of the frescoes so it can probably be discounted.

The Elect in Paradise

The final large scene is a complete contrast to The Damned in Hell – obviously, because it is The Elect in Paradise. The raised dead stand around – most now decorously draped – while angels welcome them with crowns. More angels provide entertainment in the form of a chamber orchestra.

The Zoccoli

All of the main pictures start about two and a half metres above floor level. The walls below that are painted to look like pedestals (Zoccoli in Italian), which gave Signorelli the opportunity for some more trompe l’oeil showing off. As we have already seen, he painted an apparent flat surface on top of the Zoccoli, which allowed some of the action to appear to spill forward out of the pictures. The Zoccoli are ornately decorated in the “grotesque” style, which in this context does not mean ugly but rather in a style based on the art seen in the ancient Roman ruins that were starting to be excavated. The classical theme is continued by the fact that in the centre of each Zoccolo there is a portrait, not of some saint or elder of the Church, but a poet.

By tradition these poets are Homer, Empedocles, Lucan, Horace, Ovid, Virgil and Dante, although some of these are now disputed. Dante is obvious, so no argument there. Ovid is surrounded by illustrations from his Metamorphoses, and Virgil with illustrations from his Georgics and Aeneid.

In medieval legend, the ancient poet Virgil acquired a second career as a magician and prophet. He therefore appears twice here, once in each persona – at least the wild-haired fellow below is thought to be him.

What they all have in common is that they wrote about visits to the underworld. Another feature that they share is that apart from Dante they are reacting to the apocalyptic events happening above them. They look at each other in alarm, or peer out of their little windows at the scenes above. It brings the biblical prophecies and classical literature together in a very Renaissance-humanist way, but it is also a little joke on Signorelli’s part.

Signorelli worked in Rome and elsewhere in central Italy, but I think this is his unquestioned masterpiece. It’s all quite an extraordinary experience, and one that we have yet to tire of repeating. When we first visited I was just impressed by the scale of it all. It was only later that I realised firstly how revolutionary it was in artistic terms, but also how elements of it would have resonated with recent history. We’ve been there a few times over the years, and Orvieto is one of our favourite places to take visitors. It helps that there is an excellent restaurant (Trattoria Vinosus) in the piazza next to the duomo.

A note on sources

These frescoes are an important landmark in Renaissance art, and the Duomo a major example of Gothic architecture, and as such you will find many references to them in art histories and online articles. There are references in Philip’s Travel Guides: Umbria by Jonathan Keats, which was particularly helpful in identifying which of the façade mosaics are later restorations. Much of what I have found on the frescoes comes from Signorelli’s Orvieto Frescoes, A Guide to the Cappella Nuova of Orvieto Cathedral, by Dugald McLellan, 1998. We bought our copy in Orvieto in 1999.

A note on the Photography

In some of the pictures of the Signorelli frescoes, I used a wide-angle lens from below, which introduced some distortion. I have attempted to correct the perspective in software, but only up to a point because of course some of the foreshortening was put there on purpose by Signorelli. If you want to get the full effect of his false-perspective tricks, you will just have to go there yourselves!

September 3, 2023November 19, 2023

Paleochristian Churches IV – Santa Maria Maggiore, Santa Pudenziana and Santa Prassede

Welcome to the fourth instalment in this series, in which we look at Santa Maria Maggiore, one of Rome’s most famous churches, and two smaller but very interesting ones nearby – Santa Pudenziana and Santa Prassede.

My interest in this subject is historical and secular rather than religious, but it is not possible to discuss European history in the first millennium without reference to the evolution and controversies of Christian doctrine. I try my best to consider these issues objectively, but hope not to offend the devout.

Esquilino — Map of the Esquiline district of Rome. Santa Maria Maggiore is at the centre-right, Santa Prassede immediately below, and Santa Pudenziana is at the upper left. (*Source: Google*, click to open in Google Maps)

Santa Maria Maggiore

On a spur of Rome’s Esquiline Hill, not far from the Termini railway station, is the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore – Saint Mary the Great. These days the word “basilica” means a church that has been granted special privileges by the Pope, but in ancient Rome a basilica was just a large public building, built to a standard pattern on a rectangular plan, with a large central hall and side aisles divided from the central area by rows of columns. Santa Maria Maggiore is a basilica in both senses.

One interesting point about the special status of Santa Maria Maggiore is that when you step into it you are no longer in Italy, in a jurisdictional sense. Under the terms of the Lateran Treaty of 1929, in which the Catholic Church finally recognised the existence of the Italian state, the basilicas of Santa Maria Maggiore and St John Lateran remained little exclaves of Vatican City, analogous to the way that diplomatic premises are granted special status under international conventions. But my purpose here is to talk about the most ancient aspects of the building.

As is often the case, the exact origins of the building are a bit obscure, but it seems to have been built in the mid-400s on the site of another church which was about a century older. There is a legend about a miraculous summer fall of snow which indicated where the church should be built, but versions vary as to whether that refers to the older or the newer church.

What is known is that the central structure of the present church is that of the 5^th-Century building. The church has been repaired, modified and extended several times over the centuries, with the most dramatic change being the addition of the huge baroque façade in the 1740s. That, added to the late medieval campanile and the domes, has the result that on first sight it really does not look very ancient at all.

Santa Maria Maggiore from Via Carlo Alberto, not looking very ancient at all. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

But you have to look a bit closer. Unlike many of the terribly destructive modernisations of the 16^th and 17^th Centuries, this 18^th-Century one left the 12^th-Century mosaics on the original façade intact. So while that’s not paleochristian but medieval, it’s a good start.

Before we examine the insides, let us consider the fact that the church was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. This doesn’t sound particularly unusual to us now, but in the mid-400s, it was. Why is that? The answer begins with the fact that the Council of Ephesus had just concluded.

Some of the – for me anyway – more tiresome aspects of the history of the early Christian era are the endless controversies over Christology – the nature of Christ. Was he human, or divine? Or did he have both human and divine agency? If so, was his divine agency separate from that of God’s? How could his human agency not have been tainted by original sin? And so on, and on, and on, literally for centuries. Attempts to resolve these questions by reasoning led to all sorts of abstruse doctrines with no basis in scripture, including the Trinity, the immaculate conception of Mary and more, all of which just spawned additional disagreements. Well-meaning emperors, popes and patriarchs tried – when they were not active disputants themselves – to resolve the issues by convening councils, but those councils usually ended up with enraged clerics hurling anathemas at each other, and sometimes furniture.

One such council, and an important one, was the Council of Ephesus in 431 which was called by the Emperor Theodosius II. I’ll spare you the details of all the issues in dispute (although if you are interested there is a fairly comprehensive summary on Wikipedia) but one of the outcomes was that Mary was now officially designated “Mother of God” and that led rapidly to her promotion to the important position she has since occupied in both the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. The Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, one of the first to be dedicated to the Virgin, was erected to commemorate this decision, which you will agree was a momentous one given the focus of intense veneration which she quickly became.

Now let us step inside. The first impression is of yet another large baroque church. There is an immense 16^th-Century gilded ceiling which is “over the top” figuratively as well as literally. There is a huge baldacchino (canopy) over the altar, and at the rear of the nave over the door is a mock Roman temple façade with columns and tympanum, papal crest and a couple of angels. Above the altar is a dome and arches with every available surface covered with baroque wedding-cake style decoration.

But look at the columns that line the nave – although the capitals are more recent, they are real ancient Roman columns, recycled either from the church that stood on the site before this one, or from an earlier pagan temple (maybe both).

Above the frieze is a series of 5^th-Century mosaic panels telling the story of Moses on the eastern side, and various other Old Testament stories on the western.

The Red Sea — The Egyptians are drowned in the Red Sea, Santa Maria Maggiore. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).

I’m assuming this one depicts the Battle of Jericho. Santa Maria Maggiore. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).

But the real glories of Santa Maria Maggiore are the 5^th-Century mosaics on the arch separating the nave from the apse, and the 13^th-Century mosaics in the apse itself. And they make a real contrast in Marian iconography.

Let’s do this backwards in time and look at the apse first. It is a magnificent example of a very conventional medieval image – Christ crowning His mother as Queen of Heaven. Christ has long dark hair and a beard. Mary wears her conventional shawl and outer blue cloak. Angels, saints, popes and cardinals are in attendance.

Now let us go back eight hundred years before that and look at what may be the earliest-surviving representations of Mary in western religious art, on the so-called triumphal arch. Remember, this was just after she had been proclaimed Mother of God by the Council of Ephesus. Here is a series of illustrations from the life of the Virgin – the annunciation, the nativity, and so on. But where is Mary? You would be forgiven for not noticing her at first – she’s not dressed in her normal blue cloak, but is the one dressed as an aristocratic lady from the late Roman period – complete with silk dress, necklace and tiara. Nor does she seem to have a halo (although, weirdly, Herod does). Nothing like the later representations of her.

Triumphal arch mosaic — Santa Maria Maggiore, detail of the triumphal arch, with the Annunciation at the top, Adoration of the Magi immediately below. In the Annunciation, Mary is said to be piously weaving a new veil for the temple. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF100-200mm R LM OIS WR lens (click to enlarge).

And look for the three kings who appear in the adoration of the magi on the left side of the arch, and before Herod on the right. With their brightly-coloured tights and their Phrygian caps, we’ve seen those guys before, in the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, built about fifty years after Santa Maria Maggiore. I had thought that version of them was unique to Ravenna, but clearly it was a conventional representation at the time. This stuff is really fascinating to late-Roman history nerds like me.

When we visited the church I was very pleased to see, as is often the case with the grand Roman basilicas, that the nave was empty of pews or chairs. This gives a sense of space and a much better idea of how the original must have felt (churches did not have seating until the late Middle Ages; before that you stayed standing or knelt on the floor).

Note: The original version of this article featured photographs of the arch mosaics taken with a high ISO and a short zoom lens and heavily cropped. The results were unsatisfactory and in October 2023 when I was next in Rome I took new ones with a longer lens with image stabilisation, which have replaced the earlier ones. It was still quite a challenge to process them.

Santa Pudenziana

The next church on our little itinerary is that of Santa Pudenziana, quite close by (see the map above). It is a very different sort of experience to Santa Maria Maggiore. The church is in a location described as the oldest place of Christian worship in Rome (although it is not the oldest surviving church building) and there seem to be reasonable grounds for making the claim. However the fabric of the building itself dates from the mid-4^th Century which still makes it very old indeed.

Pudenziana (Latin Pudentiana) and her sister Prassede (Latin Praxedis or Praxedes) are supposed to have been the daughters of an early Christian convert in Rome called Pudens. Pudens probably existed – St Paul sends a cheerio on his behalf in 2 Timothy 4:21. There is a suggestion from linguistic evidence that Pudentiana might not have been a real person, and that her existence has been wrongly inferred from the phrase domus Pudentiana, which could have meant the “house (or family) of Pudens”. Whether she was real or not, a tradition sprang up that Pudentiana and Praxedis went around collecting the blood of martyrs before being martyred themselves in due course.

The church is on the site of a 1^st-Century Roman house, so it is by no means implausible that the house was the home of a convert to Christianity (whom we may as well call Pudens) which in due course became an unofficial, then an official, place of worship.

Approaching the church of Santa Pudenziana from the street. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

It is hard to get a good sense of the building as you approach it – it is surrounded by other buildings including hotels and apartment blocks, and sits some way below the current street level, showing how much higher the ground level is in Rome these days (you can see a video explaining this phenomenon here). When you do get to it you see an architectural mish-mash which visually owes more to medieval and 19^th Century renovations than to anything from the 4^th Century.

Inside it is initially a bit disappointing as well – plaster-covered arches and a baroque altarpiece do not convey any sense of antiquity.

There is a notionally 4^th-Century mosaic in the apse, showing Christ and the apostles and once described as the most beautiful in Rome, but it was heavily restored in the 16^th Century, losing much in the process. The background, featuring an idealised Jerusalem and, in the sky the symbols of the four evangelists, looks original, and some of the faces of the figures on the left may be.

The rest of the decoration in the church is mediocre stuff from the 16^th Century and later. I have to admit that the first time I visited here a few years ago I took a quick look around, sniffed disapprovingly at the redecorations, and quickly left.

But the evidence of the building’s antiquity is there in front of you – not in the decorations, but between them. Stuck unobtrusively between the plaster arches are the original Roman columns that support the nave, and – unusually for a redecorated church – the walls of the nave are the original unrendered Roman brickwork. At the top of the picture below you can see the herringbone pattern that is very characteristic of the era.

So, as it often turns out, it is worth pausing, looking carefully and thinking about what you see. You may then also reflect that during the weekly Sunday services (the church has been adopted by Rome’s Filipino community), the walls that look down on the congregation are the same ones that looked down on congregations over 1600 years ago.

Santa Prassede

The final church we are visiting today is on the other side of Santa Maria Maggiore and is dedicated to Pudenziana’s sister Praxedis/Prassede. Although I don’t believe there is any evidence for Prassede’s existence other than tradition, I have not come across any explicit doubts about whether she existed, as there are in her sister’s case.

From the street, Santa Prassede is a bit unprepossessing. The first time we visited was an “are you sure this is the right place?” moment – but go inside, because you will be rewarded.

The church is later than the other two in this article, dating from the 700s, although there was a church on the same spot a couple of centuries earlier, and legend has it that the land was originally owned by the family of Pudens. It was commissioned by Pope Hadrian I to house the supposed bones of Prassede and Pudenziana. Shortly after it was built, around 820, the church was enlarged and redecorated on the instructions of Pope Paschal I, and it is these decorations on the arch and apse that – if you look past the inevitable baroque stuff lower down – make an overwhelming first impression.

Old Paschal wanted to make sure that he got the credit for this – under the both the triumphal arch and the apsidal arch you will see his monogram. And in the apse itself you will see him on the left of the group of figures surrounding Christ, holding a model of the church – since he was alive at the time of the depiction, by convention he is given a square halo. Either side of Christ, two female martyrs, presumably Prassede and Pudenziana, are being presented by Saints Peter and Paul. I don’t know who the saint on the far right is.

It’s a bit difficult to get a decent photograph of the apse mosaic from floor level, thanks to the ornate baroque baldacchino over the altar, so I had to take it in sections.

The church and its decorations are very impressive by 21^st-Century standards, but must have been breathtaking indeed in the 800s. Shortly after it was built it was visited by a couple of pilgrims from a distant northern land – King Æthelwulf of England and his young son, the future Alfred the Great. At a time when most buildings in England would have been made of timber, you can imagine the effect this must have had.

For me one of the highlights of the church is the little chapel of San Zeno, built by Paschal to contain the tomb of his mother Theodora. Inside it is covered in mosaics – not to the same standard as in the main church, but they are charming and intimate. A lady labelled as Theodora is presumably Paschal’s mother, and since she too has a square halo she must still have been alive at the time.

Cappella San Zeno — Santa Prassede, Cappella San Zeo. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

In the photographs above the lady on the left is Theodora, Paschal’s mother, followed by probably Santa Prassede. Then comes the Virgin Mary, by now (400 years after Santa Maria Maggiore) conventionally dressed in a blue cloak with her head covered. I don’t know who the saint on the right is – it could be Santa Pudenziana, but if it were one would expect her to be wearing a martyr’s crown like her sister.

Cappella San Zeno, ceiling mosaic. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Also in the church is part of an antique pillar of polished stone – said to be that to which Jesus was tied when scourged in front of Pilate. This was identified in situ by Saint Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine. Helena made a trip to the Holy Land during which, in addition to the pillar, she also managed to identify pieces of wood from the True Cross, parts of Jesus’s crib and various other relics which sparked a lucrative trade in such things for the next millennium or so. She also confidently indicated various sites mentioned in scripture such as Golgotha, the location of the Last Supper, and so on.

July 16, 2023January 27, 2024

Renaissance Exuberance in Perugia

A visit to two different, but memorably-decorated churches in Perugia – the Oratory of St Bernardino, and the Basilica of San Pietro.

There are many excellent things to see in Perugia, and other reasons to visit too: good restaurants, not too crowded, parking fees that are not extortionate by Italian standards, and free escalators and lifts from car parks up to the historic centre. The Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria has fine examples of Umbrian Art, and the Museum of Archaeology (to be the subject of a future post) has fascinating Etruscan artefacts.

But for most historically-minded visitors to Perugia, one of the main impressions they take away with them is of the group of magnificent gothic public buildings[1] which together form the Palazzo dei Priori, at the end of the Corso Vannucci, near the duomo (cathedral) and the Fontana Maggiore. As I discussed in my post on The Buried Streets of Perugia, one reason this part of town is so well-preserved is because of the Papal conquest in the early 16^th Century, and the subsequent expropriation of most revenue to Rome. The architecture stayed as it was because there was no money to change it – the money went to Rome where many fine old buildings were “modernised” in the baroque style. In architectural history, the hard times of earlier ages can sometimes be posterity’s gain.

All that being so, today I would like to talk about a couple of – in my view under-appreciated – buildings which are covered in exuberant Renaissance decoration, one on the outside, and one all over the inside. Both are in easy walking distance from the historic centre, but because the centre has so much to offer, many visitors never get to them and you can admire them in peace.

The Oratory of St Bernardino of Siena

Let us start with the one that is decorated on the outside. It is the Oratorio di San Bernardino, part of a complex which includes the larger church of San Francesco al Prato, nowadays associated with Perugia University.

Although he came from Siena, Bernardino preached all over central Italy, and was particularly active in Perugia, where you can see a special pulpit they built for him on the side of the duomo. I don’t know if non-Catholics are supposed to have favourite Catholic saints, but if I were allowed to, Bernardino would definitely not be one of mine. He preached fiery sermons against Jews, homosexuals and gypsies, sometimes leading to violence against them, and his views on women seem to have been regressive even by the standards of the early 15^th Century. He is associated with the start of a period of witch-burnings that was a stain on European history for over two hundred years.

In iconography, he is always rather appropriately represented as having a pinched, disapproving face, and since this seems to be based on contemporary portraits, that must indeed be what he looked like. Anyway, I don’t want to give offence, so let us move on to the charming little oratory that the Perugians started building in his honour in 1452, only eight years after his death and two years after his canonisation.

It seems that Bernardino is credited with having pacified the warring factions in Perugia (see my post on Tough Guys in Art – the Baglioni of Perugia) and it is for this reason that he was popular there.

To complete the building, the Perugians commissioned a Florentine sculptor called Agostino di Duccio to create a façade in polychrome, showing The Glory of St Bernardino.

Oratorio di San Bernardino, Perugia — The Oratory of St Bernardino, Perugia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

And glorious it is, with cream and pink marble, and blue lapis lazuli creating a most agreeable pastel effect. Apparently there was gold there too once, but whether this was deliberately removed or just flaked off I don’t know. It must have been magnificent when new.

At the top there is a Virgin and Child, below which you can see the words AUGUSTA PERUSIA, the title given to the city in antiquity by the Emperor Augustus (see my post on The Ancient Gates of Perugia) and the date 1461, when the façade was completed.

In the centre, we see the saint surrounded by angels, below which is a frieze commemorating the attested miracles that would have been needed for his canonisation. That is also where the sculptor signed his name – OPUS AUGUSTINI FLORENTINI LAPICIDAE.

My favourite parts are the panels either side of the two doors, where there are several angel musicians. Most of the musicians are showing the expected decorum, but one seems to be auditioning for the role of lead guitarist in a thrash metal rock band.

Inside the church is a complete contrast; very simple and austere. I don’t know if it has always been thus, or whether, as in so many cases, a modern restoration has removed baroque accretions to bring back the dignity of the original. But if baroque excess is your thing, there is a chapel behind the altar you should visit.

The altar itself is a Christian sarcophagus of the late Roman period. It was re-used to house the remains of Giles of Assisi, one of the companions of St Francis.

On the wall you can see hanging a gonfalone or banner, commemorating the deliverance of Perugia from an outbreak of plague in 1464. The Madonna is shown protecting the city from divine wrath in the form of two armed angels and a particularly angry-looking Christ. At the bottom, another armed angel (I think it is the Archangel Michael) is driving away the figure of death with a spear. The interceding saints are on either side of the Madonna, with St Bernardino at the lower left. You can see what I mean about his pinched face.

Gonfalone, Oratorio di San Bernardino, Perugia — *Gonfalone* (banner) of St Francis, Oratory of St Bernardino, Perugia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

The Abbey Church of San Pietro

This basilica, to the south-east of the historic centre of Perugia, is most definitely not a Renaissance building. Parts of it date from the 10^th Century, replacing a 4^th-Century church which was in turn erected on an Etrusco-Roman religious site. It was the church of a wealthy and powerful monastery (now the department of agriculture and environmental science at the university).

Monastery cloister, San Pietro, Perugia, now part of the university. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

It has a distinctive tower on a 12-sided base, dating from the 13^th Century, long a Perugian landmark. In fact in the National Gallery of Umbria there is a series of 15^th-Century paintings by Benedetto Bonfigli showing incidents in the life of the Patron Saint of Perugia, St Herculanus, ending with the transfer of his remains to San Pietro. Despite Herculanus having been an historical figure from the 6^th Century, Bonfigli charmingly paints it all as having occurred in the Perugia of his own day, in which the tower of San Pietro is easily identified.

Bonfigli Sant'Ercolano — Transfer of the body of St Herculanus, by Benedetto Bonfigli (ca 1420-1496) showing the tower of San Pietro. Galleria Nazionale Dell’Umbria, Perugia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

It seems that like many powerful monastic establishments, the Abbey took sides in secular conflicts, which sometimes saw it being attacked, damaged and restored. In the 16^th Century a period of reconstruction and decoration of the basilica began which continued into the 18^th, and in the course of this every single available surface was covered in frescoes, oil paintings and wood carvings. Although the quality of the art is variable, the overall effect is overwhelming.

Basilica di San Pietro, Perugia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

Behind the altar, the choir stalls are of intricately carved and inlaid wood, with many grotesque – and distinctly non-religious – subjects.

Choir stalls, Basilica di San Pietro, Perugia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

The church also holds a collection of manuscript volumes of Gregorian Chant, some beautifully illuminated.

Music book, Basilica di San Pietro, Perugia — Music book, showing the *Agnus Dei* from the end of one mass, and the *Kyrie eleison* from the start of another. The reason they were so big is that the singers didn’t have their own copies, so had to be able to read them from a distance. Basilica di San Pietro, Perugia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

In 2022 we attended a performance here of Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespers of 1610 by a group from Monteverdi’s home town of Cremona. It was beautifully performed, and in a most evocative setting.

[1] Note: in architectural terms, “gothic” refers to the style of the late Middle Ages, characterised by pointy window arches and other decorative features. It has nothing to do with the Goths, confusingly.

June 30, 2023April 1, 2024

Paleochristian Churches II – A Return to Ravenna

More photography of the UNESCO sites in Ravenna, and an introduction to an intriguing lady – Galla Placidia.

Back in 2020 I posted this article on Ravenna at the Fall of the Empire and illustrated it with photographs I had taken in 2008. I won’t repeat too much of that content here, so I do recommend you have a look at that article if you are interested in the history of Ravenna, and how it came to contain so much extraordinary late-Roman art.

But for those who don’t want to, here is a very short version: Ravenna became the capital of the Western Roman Empire shortly before it fell. It was ruled by the Goths for a while, then retaken by the Eastern Empire, under the Emperor Justinian and his general Belisarius.

There are some new historical subjects covered in this post, so feel free to scroll past the photographic stuff.

Photography Stuff (feel free to skip)

Those 2008 photographs were taken with a Hasselblad 501C/M camera with a 120 rollfilm back, on slow ISO 50 Fujichrome Velvia film. When I got back to Australia I scanned the 6x6cm positives on a Nikon Coolscan 9000 film scanner. All of that presented some challenges, due mainly to the slow film in dark indoor settings. I needed to use exposures that were on the long side for hand-held photography (tripods are of course not permitted in the Ravenna UNESCO sites), which limited me to places where I could brace the camera, for example against a column. It also tended to produce colour casts, as Velvia is a film that was developed for outdoor light conditions.

Recently (June 2023) we revisited Ravenna, and this was an opportunity to re-take some of those photographs, and to take new ones in places where photography had been impossible last time due to the slow film and poor light. This time I took my Fujifilm GFX 50R medium-format digital camera, which gave me some advantages. One is that, unlike with a roll of film, one can change the ISO with every image, thus being able to shoot in low light. And while high ISO will produce electrical noise (a bit like grain in film, but in this case variation between adjacent pixels), the large sensor reduces the effect of that, simply by having smaller and more numerous pixels relative to the image size. I also used software called Topaz DeNoise AI to reduce the amount of noise further. In post-processing I was also better able to manage the colour balance.

All that being said, there are some very interesting historical things to talk about in this post, so let’s get started.

The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia

On your way into the Basilica of San Vitale, you pass a small rather nondescript building which might have passed for a public lavatory or electricity substation, had they had such things in the 420s. It is the “Mausoleum” of Galla Placidia, although her body never lay here.

Mausoleo di Galla Placidia — The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

In my earlier post on Ravenna I made a comment that a lot of the late emperors were gormless nonentities. That was a bit of a generalisation, but quite a few of them were. One of the stronger characters of this era, though, was not an emperor but the daughter of one, the half-sister of two others, the wife of a fourth and the mother of a fifth, in whose name she ruled the Western Empire as regent during his childhood. Her name was Galla Placidia.

Placidia’s father was the emperor Theodosius I, who was not gormless, He was the last to rule both the western and eastern halves of the empire, and did a creditable job militarily despite having been given a very challenging strategic environment to work in.

Born in Constantinople, as a young teenager Placidia was summoned to her father’s court in Mediolanum (Milan), shortly before his death.

On Theodosius’s death, the empire was divided in two and he was succeeded in the west by his son Honorius, who was definitely one of the gormless ones. Faced with a military situation as bad as that faced by his father, Honorius managed to make it worse by falling out with and then executing his most competent general, Stilicho. That left Alaric, king of the Goths, as the main military force in the West. Alaric could have ended up as Rome’s greatest ally and its saviour – all he wanted was land for his people and to command Rome’s armies, which on the evidence he would have done very well. But Honorius managed the relationship so badly that Alaric ended up as its implacable enemy.

Alaric invaded Italy and laid siege to Rome, where the eighteen-year-old Placidia was then living. Somehow – perhaps while trying to escape – she was captured by the Goths and kept as a hostage in their camp. Alaric then besieged Ravenna, where, during a truce for negotiations, Honorius treacherously ordered an attack. Alaric, clearly deciding that he had had enough, returned to Rome, where he captured and sacked the city. Then, loaded with booty and even more hostages – but still including Placidia – the Goths continued south, hoping to settle in Sicily.

That would have had momentous consequences for Italian history, but instead Alaric soon fell ill and died, and was replaced by his brother-in-law Athaulf (or Ataulf). Athaulf decided instead to leave Italy and led his army, hostages and all, into what is now France and Spain where in one of the more surprising developments in an age of surprises, Placidia married him.

Why? Was it a forced marriage? It does not appear so. Was she a headstrong young woman following her heart? Was it a negotiated arrangement between Athaulf and Honorius to create a dynastic link? It seems unlikely. Was she, as an emperor’s daughter, placing herself in a position of power? History is frustratingly silent, which of course has allowed some modern writers to project their own preferences onto that partly-blank canvas.

Placidia and Athaulf had a son, who died in infancy – another fascinating what-if, for what might have become of a child with Roman imperial and Gothic royal blood? Before long Athaulf himself was murdered, and after a period of turmoil she was lucky to survive, his widow was returned to Honorius under the terms of a treaty. Honorius forced her into a marriage with his general Constantius, who shortly after was raised to the status of co-emperor. Placidia bore him two children, a girl and a boy, but was soon widowed again.

In due course her son Valentinian was declared Emperor of the West, and Galla Placidia became regent until he came of age, ruling skilfully. Indeed she has been described as the last competent ruler of the Western Empire (Valentinian having inherited the gormless gene). Her daughter Honoria became notorious in her own right for opening a correspondence with Attila the Hun (and even possibly contemplating marriage with him).

In her later years Placidia was known for commissioning churches, and one of those, of course, was the little chapel in Ravenna, now known incorrectly as her mausoleum.

What is beyond doubt is that inside the modest exterior is a little jewel box. The ceiling is covered in stars with the symbols of the four evangelists in the corners, there is a youthful beardless Christ (typical of the 5^th Century) as a shepherd, and an image of St Lawrence, to whom the chapel was probably dedicated, with his gridiron.

St Lawrence, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

It is not known who was buried there, but it certainly wasn’t her – she died and was buried in Rome. Nonetheless the medieval tradition that she was buried there was very strong. Someone even invented a story to explain the lack of her body in any of the sarcophagi – supposedly some children accidentally set fire to it! But the chapel definitely has a connection with her, and so we can think about her as we contemplate it.

Mausoluem of Galla Placidia — Christ as Shepherd, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

There is no artificial light, and very little light enters – the tiny windows are covered in sheets of translucent stone – alabaster, I read somewhere. It takes a while for your eyes to become accustomed to the darkness, and even pushing the GFX50R to ISO 12800 produced some very marginal images that required a lot of post-processing. But at least I got some photographs – it was far too dark for my ISO 50 Velvia film back in 2008.

Apparently there is archaeological evidence that the little chapel was once part of a larger complex of religious buildings associated with the imperial palace.

The Basilica of San Vitale

Emerging blinking into the sunlight, I had a brief conversation with the attendant who, it turned out, was a camera enthusiast and another Fuji user. From there it was a very short walk to San Vitale – built more than a hundred years after Galla Placidia’s Mausoleum.

I don’t propose to repeat everything I said in the original article but the very short version is that the building of the basilica was funded by a wealthy Ravennate starting in 526, by which time the Western Roman Empire had gone, never to be restored. It contains many extraordinary mosaics, but the two most important historically are one of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian and his retinue, and on the opposite wall one of the Empress Theodora, and hers.

San Vitale Justinian — San Vitale; Emperor Justinan and his retinue. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens, colour balance and perspective corrected in Capture One software (click to enlarge).

We know that the bald chap is Bishop (later Saint) Maximianus, because it says so. It is also believed that the bearded fellow with the mod haircut to Justinian’s left is the great general Belisarius, hero of the first Gothic War. I have seen a few illustrations of Belisarius, doubtless all based on this mosaic, and they always manage to make him look a bit like Pete Townshend from The Who. According to the Wikipedia article, the wealthy Ravennate who funded the building of San Vitale – one Julius Argentarius – may appear as one of the courtiers in the Justinian mosaic. If that is true, then my bet, based on no research whatsoever, is that he is the thickset fellow with a five-o’-clock shadow between Justinian and Maximianus. I have also seen this described as a portrait of Justinian’s other general Narses, but find that a bit implausible, because Narses was a eunuch and unlikely to have a moustache.

San Vitale Theodora — San Vitale; Empress Theodora and her retinue. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens, colour balance and perspective corrected in Capture One software (click to enlarge).

I can’t remember seeing anything that suggests identifications for Theodora’s attendants, but looking at them it seems likely that the two men and two women on either side of her are intended to be actual people, given the individuality of their portraits, while the ladies off to the right are all a bit generic.

Congratulations to Lou for noticing that on the hem of Theodora’s cloak you can see a version of the Three Kings from the Church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo (see below). I had not noticed that before.

One thing that I hadn’t really thought through before was the chronology of the building of San Vitale relative to that of the Gothic Wars. When the building was commissioned, Ravenna (and indeed most of Italy) was ruled by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, albeit notionally as a fief of the Eastern Empire. By the time that the mosaics of Justinian and Theodora were created, the first Gothic War was over and direct imperial rule had been established in the form of the Exarchate of Ravenna. Justinian was now the actual rather than the nominal ruler, and it was all thanks to Belisarius, so it is no surprise to see them both commemorated in this way. Nor is it a surprise to see Theodora there as well, as she added quite a bit of steel to Justinian’s already fairly hardline regime.

Alas, the Goths revived under the leadership of Totila, and as I have described elsewhere, the Second Gothic War, along with a couple of natural disasters, saw the complete devastation and impoverishment of Italy.

Compared to my 2008 pictures, these show the advantages of having been shot with higher ISO, and better colour balancing.

Sant’Apollinare Nuovo

From San Vitale we walked to the great church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo. Again, I won’t repeat the full description in the earlier article but this large church, like San Vitale, was started under Ostrogothic rule and was probably attached to the palace of Theodoric. As such it contained various portraits of Theodoric and churchmen who, like the rest of the Goths, adhered to the Arian version of Christianity which was later suppressed as heretical by the Catholic Church (the argument was over just how human or divine Christ actually was). At that time the “heretical” portraits in Sant’Apollinare were covered over, although they missed a few bits.

The glory of Sant’Apollinare is the two long mosaics down either side of the nave. On one side a procession of female martyrs leads to an adoration of the magi, but this is nothing like the Three Kings we are used to from later ages. They are in extraordinary exotic garments, and by some accounts are actually dressed like contemporary Gothic nobles.

I had thought that this picture of the Three Kings with their fancy tights and their Phrygian caps was unique, but I was wrong, as I discovered on visits to the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore and the Basilica of Santa Sabina in Rome.

On the other side is a procession of male martyrs, leading to an enthroned Christ. Leading the procession is St Martin of Tours, a vociferous opponent of Arianism, to whom the church was rededicated after the suppression of Arianism under Justinian. St Martin’s portrait must therefore have been added as part of the other redecorations, which explains his different costume.

Sant'Apillinare Nuovo — Male Martyrs, St Martin of Tours, enthroned Christ. Sant’Apollinare Nuvo, Ravenna. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens, perspective corrected in Capture One software (click to enlarge).

One can only speculate how glorious the apse decoration behind the altar must have been, given that this was where they usually put the best bits. Apparently though this too was subject to redecoration under Justinian. But in any case the area was later disastrously redecorated in a 17^th-Century wedding-cake style, so we will never know.

The Neonian (Orthodox) Baptistery

This is one place we didn’t get to in 2008. There are two ancient baptisteries in Ravenna. One, featured in my earlier article, is the “Arian Baptistery” which was built by Theodoric for the use of his fellow Arians. The other, known as the Neonian (after a bishop Neon) or “Orthodox” Baptistery is about fifty years older, from the end of the 300s or beginning of the 400s. This makes it older even than Galla Placidia’s mausoleum, predating the fall of the Western Empire by seventy years or so.

Battistero Neoniano — Neonian Baptistery, Ravenna. It is the small hexagonal building to the right of the centre. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Inside, in the centre of the dome, is Christ being baptised. The River Jordan is represented as a sort of pagan river-god, and Christ himself is shown as youthful and blond, although bearded, unlike the clean-shaven Christ of the Arian Baptistery.

Around the dome are the twelve apostles, and beneath them are what look like classical buildings, with seats and tables, which in the case of the evangelists are bearing their gospels.

The quality of these depictions of the apostles is extraordinary, better even than the near-contemporary mosaics in the Mausoleum of Santa Costanza in Rome. It is dangerous to generalise about an era from the work of (presumably) a single artist, but based on what has survived, stuff as good as this would not be seen again for many hundreds of years.

The Chapel of Sant’Andrea

Our final visit was to the little chapel of Sant’Andrea, part of a complex of ancient buildings which is now the archiepiscopal museum. There is not as much information available as for the other Ravenna UNESCO sites, but I have found that it dates from the time of Ostrogothic rule in Ravenna. It was not however Arian. As I observed in my earlier post on Ravenna, the Goths were a tolerant lot and were happy to allow the orthodox Catholics to worship unmolested – a tolerance that Justinian’s regime obviously did not reciprocate when he took over again.

Like the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, it is very dark inside, so one has to push the ISO a bit, and do some corrective work in post-processing.

Cappello di Sant'Andrea — Chapel of Sant’Andrea, Ravenna. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

The association with Saint Andrew is due to the fact that the saint’s alleged remains were relocated to Ravenna from Constantinople in the 6^th Century. Possession of such remains by a city was both prestigious and lucrative, so people went to a lot of trouble to acquire them, and if that failed, then a convenient miracle often occurred to reveal a substitute set.

Two things are memorable about this chapel. One is that Christ is represented dressed in late-Roman military costume (indeed at first I assumed the picture was of the Archangel Michael). The other is a ceiling covered in cheerful-looking birds. Birds are a feature of early Christian art, but these ones seem to have more character than most.

Cappella di Sant'Andrea — Chapel of Sant’Andrea, Ravenna, with Christ in military costume. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

May 7, 2023November 19, 2023

Perugino Comes Home

An exhibition in Perugia, marking the 500^th anniversary of the death of Perugino, Umbria’s most famous Renaissance artist, brings together paintings from all over the world.

Perugino self-portrait — Perugino, self-portrait. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge)

We met the painter Perugino in my post on Tough Guys in Art – the Baglioni of Perugia. In that article I made the observation that he deserves to be more famous, and blamed the Tuscan chauvinism of the art historian Giorgio Vasari. Contemporary accounts certainly show him to have been held in very high regard, and no less a person than Isabella d’Este of Mantua, that most demanding of art patrons, worked very hard to get him to accept a commission, of which more later.

Of course the Umbrians are just as parochial as the Tuscans, and are very loyal to their boy – especially the Perugians. “Perugino” means “the guy from Perugia”, which isn’t quite true but he was from a town not far away and certainly spent a lot of time working in Perugia.

Perugino died in 1523, and to mark the occasion the National Gallery of Umbria in Perugia has assembled an exhibition, not just from their own collection, but with works on loan from many other Italian galleries, as well as galleries in France, Britain and America.

The exhibition also features artists who were influenced by Perugino and developed the “Umbrian Style” further, such as Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, Pinturicchio and Signorelli. And of course the most famous of Perugino’s pupils, Raphael.

For me, the exhibition gave a somewhat different appreciation of Perugino’s work. This is because most Perugino works that one sees in Umbria are frescoes – paintings on fresh plaster just after it has been applied to a wall. But in this exhibition the loaned works are mostly oil paintings, or egg tempera. Painting in oils was a technique which Perugino was instrumental in introducing to Italy after its development in Flanders.

And therein lie a few insights (for me at least; I’m obviously not an art historian). Apart from the different materials, there are fundamental differences between fresco and oil. Firstly, the audience. Something that is fixed to the wall of a church is very much a public piece; obviously intended to generate reverence. Hence the beauty of Perugino’s frescoes, the clear pastel colours, the idyllic landscapes and the characters in stereotypical poses.

Perugino Adoration, Montefalco — A very conventional Perugino fresco – *Adoration of the Shepherds* in the Museo di San Francesco, Montefalco, Umbria. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

An oil painting, depending on the circumstances in which it is commissioned and displayed, can be less formulaic, more individualistic, more cerebral.

Perugino Portrait of a Young Man — Perugino, *Portrait of a Young Man*. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).

Even when using oils to paint devotional paintings, there is a difference. When painting frescoes, you have to work fast, before the plaster dries. An oil painting can be done more slowly with more consideration, and even altered halfway through if the painter changes his mind. To me, all this explains the fact that the oils in the exhibition show greater individuality, and better demonstrate just how good Perugino really was.

Perugino Altarpiece — Perugino *Altarpiece with Saints Jerome, Francis, John the Baptist, Mary Magdelene and the Blessed Giovanni Columbini*. *Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens* (click to enlarge).

Furthermore – and rather prosaically – by definition an oil painting on canvas or wood is more portable than something painted directly onto a wall. This explains why an exhibition such as this is an unusual opportunity to appreciate the breadth of Perugino’s talent. Many of the finer works have been dispersed over the last five hundred years – either sold to wealthy collectors and then re-sold or donated to foreign galleries, or in the case of Napoleon, simply looted.

Perugino Galitzin Triptych — Perugino, “Galitzin” Triptych. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).

I love the background detail in many of Perugino’s paintings. The landscape in the Galitzin Triptych above is beautiful, as is the one in the Prayer in the Garden, below. There is also a lot of other business going on – on the left, Judas approaches with soldiers and priests, while more reinforcements arrive from the right. I’ve seen Perugino’s idea of Roman soldiers elsewhere, notably in a Martyrdom of St Sebastian in the town of Panicale above Lake Trasimeno. They are rather strange, but in a way the feathers and curly bits do actually remind me of some ancient Roman decorative illustrations.

Perugino Prayer in the Garden — Perugino, *Prayer in the Garden*. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).

One thing I learned is that Perugino’s later and uniformly beautiful Madonnas are supposedly all portraits of his own wife. If that is true he was a lucky fellow, but he would not have been the only Renaissance artist to marry one of his models. At least, unlike the wife of Filippo Lippi, Perugino’s wife wasn’t an absconded nun, as far as I know.

Perugino Madonna della Consolazione — Perugino, *Madonna della Consolazione*. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).

Perugino Marriage of the Virgin — Perugino, *Marriage of the Virgin*. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).

I mentioned Isabella d’Este earlier. She apparently pestered Perugino for ages for a painting. Eventualy he agreed to a commission, then tried to explain missed deadlines with various poor excuses. Eventually he produced something which is easily the weakest piece in the exhibition. The Lotta tra Amore e Castità (struggle between love and chastity) is a group of separate illustrations of stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses – just figures in a landscape with no visual unity. It was also painted in tempera (egg-based paint) rather than oils, so it lacks punch. Isabella was not pleased.

Perugino Lotta tra Amore e Castità — Perugino, *Lotta tra Amore e Castità*. Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, Fujifilm XF 16mm lens (click to enlarge).

A note on the photography

As in many exhibitions, this one had very subdued lighting to protect the artworks. The appropriate way to photograph them would therefore be to set up a tripod and take long exposures; obviously that was not going to be permitted.

So I needed to use a hand-held camera and high ISO settings, which introduces digital noise. I was also using my small Fujifilm X-Pro3 camera, which while nice and light was a less suitable camera for the task than my medium-format Fujifilm GFX 50R would have been. Since noise in digital photography at high ISOs is partly random variations between one pixel and the next, a larger sensor equals smaller pixels relative to the size of the image, so noise is less obvious.

There were some workarounds available. I underexposed each shot by a few stops then applied exposure compensation later in Capture One software – I’m not sure how successful that was (edit: actually it was a bad idea). During post-processing I also used an external program called Topaz DeNoise AI which tries to smooth out the parts that should be smooth while retaining sharpness where sharpness is intended. Below is a screenshot showing a before and after comparison from that software.

Topaz DeNoise AI screengrab — Screenshot from Topaz DeNoise AI showing before and after treatment (click to enlarge).

Here is a link to the National Gallery of Umbria’s web page on the exhibition. I don’t know how long it will stay up after the exhibition closes though.

April 3, 2023March 30, 2024

Palazzo Te – Romantic Trysts and Doomed Giants, but No Tea

Just outside Mantua is the Palazzo Te, built by the first Duke of Mantua as a pavilion for leisure, and love.

When I first heard of the Palazzo Te (I think it might have been on TV) I came away with the impression that the name actually meant “Palace of Tea”, implying its use as a retreat for graceful pursuits. Only later did it occur to me that there were two problems with this interpretation. One is that the Italian for tea is not Te but Tè (with the accent). A more substantial objection is that the palace predates the introduction of tea into Europe by several decades at least.

A more plausible etymology is that the land on which it was built was an island in the swampy land around the River Mincio. The island was called Tejeto, shortened to Te. I gather that even this explanation lacks corroboration, but I think we can all agree that it has nothing to do with tea.

After our visit to the Ducal Palace, we made a separate trip into Mantua to see the Palazzo Te, as it is a fair way south of the centre of the city. As it transpired the day of our visit was very hot and we were glad of the opportunity to park close by. The map below shows the location of Palazzo Te.

Map of Mantua showing the location of Palazzo Te relative to the Ducal Palace, and also the location of the house supposed to have belonged to the painter Mantegna (source: Google)

We met the ruling family of Mantua, the Gonzagas, in my post “Mantua – Grumpy Old Artist, Charming Painting” which was mostly about the famous paintings by Mantegna on the walls and ceiling of the Camera degli Sposi in the Ducal Palace.

Federico Gonzaga

The head of the Gonzaga Family at the time they employed Mantegna was Ludovico III, the second Marquis. His great-grandson was Federico II, the fifth Marquis and, from 1530, the first Duke of Mantua, and it was Federico that built Palazzo Te. Federico’s mother was the formidable Isabella d’Este of Ferrara, who was a noted art collector and who was no doubt responsible for that part of his education.

Although what comes later in this article might suggest that Federico was no more than a dissolute lover of pleasure, he was a soldier and an active military player in the campaigns of Popes and Emperors.

Federico Gonzaga — Federico II Gonzaga, 1st Duke of Mantua, by Titian (public domain; click to enlarge).

Although Federico came three generations after Ludovico, he assumed the title only 22 years after Ludovico’s death; it seems that most of the male Gonzagas were not long-lived. That may have had something to do with the malarial environment of Mantua, but in fact both Federico and his father Francesco died of syphilis, only recently introduced from America but already spreading rapidly.

Perhaps not unrelated to the syphilis, the male Gonzagas were highly philoprogenitive, indeed priapic. Ludovico had had ten legitimate surviving children, his son and grandson six each, and Federico had five. And that was just with their wives.

Federico had several mistresses in his youth, but the one to whom he became attached for most of his life was a lady called Isabella Boschetti, known as “La Bella Boschetta”. At a time when rulers’ wives were chosen for dynastic and diplomatic reasons, it was quite common for them to take mistresses as well; not just casual affairs but long-term attachments which, as in Federico’s case, might pre-date their marriages. Frequently the children of such relationships were raised in the father’s household alongside their legitimate children, which was fairly sporting of the real wives, to whom custom did not extend the same latitude.

Federico had two children by Isabella, a boy who went on to become a state councillor in Mantua, and a girl who married a distant relative of Federico’s.

The picture below, referred to boringly by art historians as Portrait of a Lady with a Mirror, is also by Titian and is thought to be of Isabella Boschetti.

Portrait, possibly of Isabella Boschetti, by Titian (public domain; click to enlarge)

The New Palace

Some time around 1524 Federico decided to build a new palace, which would be both a separate household for him and Isabella, and a pleasant retreat outside the city. The site was still surrounded by water, and the suburban buildings which now surround the Palazzo Te and its grounds all look to have been built in the last century or so, which suggests that the area around was reclaimed relatively recently.

The artist and architect that Federico commissioned to design, and decorate the Palazzo Te was Giulio Romano (born Giulio Pippi in Rome, so when he left there he was called “Giulio the Roman” in that imaginative way they had in those days). In his youth in Rome he was apprenticed to Raphael and worked with him both in the Vatican and the Villa Farnesina, and took over those projects after Raphael’s early death.

Giulio’s fame thus grew, and in due course Federico persuaded him to come to Mantua as court artist. In those days there was considerable overlap between artists and architects, so it was not unusual for Giulio to be awarded the brief for the Palazzo Te. His work lacks the finesse of his predecessor Mantegna and his master Raphael, but there is no doubt that when it came to a big project like the Palazzo Te, he was up for it.

The Palazzo is in what is known as the late-Renaissance “mannerist” architectural style – where the earlier attempts to replicate classical styles had become a bit more like “riffing on a classical theme”. As you can see in the photograph below, the various columns, friezes and architraves perform no load-bearing function – they are just decorations.

The Palazzo Te isn’t quite as over-the-top as the Cavallerizza in the Ducal Palace from a generation later, which looks a bit as if the architect was taking mind-altering substances. A photograph of the Cavallerizza is in my earlier post on Mantua.

The Interior

Inside is where the Palazzo Te starts to get really memorable. There are a couple of very large frescoes which illustrate the sort of purposes that Federico had in mind for the place. HONEST IDLENESS AFTER LABOUR reads one inscription, and since such honest idleness seems to involve Bacchus, wine, naked women and priapic satyrs, one gets the general idea.

In my earlier post on Mantua I mentioned that the place was famous for breeding warhorses – a lucrative state business of which Henry VIII of England was one of many customers. No surprise then to see several of them celebrated in the frescoes in the Sala dei Cavalli.

Palazzo Te Sala dei Cavalli — Palazzo Te, Sala dei Cavalli. Warhorses, plus Hercules and two of his labours. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).

Many of the other frescoes are of classical and biblical themes, which despite their supposed propriety nonetheless manage to maintain the general air of lubriciousness. There is a room devoted to the story of Cupid and Psyche, and their illicit love, possibly a reference to Federico and Isabella.

In another room dedicated to Ovid’s Metamorphoses there is a giant picture of Polyphemus the Cyclops. To his left there is what I take to be Zeus seducing Persephone in the form of a dragon, and to his right, Daedalus helping Queen Pasiphae of Crete to disguise herself as a cow in order to have sex with a bull (of which union came the Minotaur). I assume that the two figures at the lower right might be Acis and Galatea.

Palazzo Te, Cyclops — Palazzo Te: gosh, what a big club you’ve got there. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).

And of course what could possibly be improper about a scene from scripture such as David and Bathsheba?

Palazzo Te, Susannah and the Elders — Palazzo Te: David and Bathsheba. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).

A typical feature of Renaissance palaces is the glorification of the owner. Sometimes this is explicit, such as in the slightly nauseating “Room of the Farnese Deeds” in the Villa Farnese at Caprarola. In general though these things tend to be done a bit more subtly, with famous scenes depicting classical virtues. The strong implication is that such virtues just happen to be exemplified by the boss, who is therefore a Decent Chap.

One such picture in the Palazzo Te depicts the occasion when Caesar was presented with letters and papers stolen from his rival Pompey. Despite the fact that they would have revealed the names of Pompey’s co-conspirators, Caesar refused to look at them because he did not wish to profit from underhand tactics, and instead angrily directed that they be burned unread.

Palazzo Te: Caesar directs that Pompey’s papers be burned unread. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).

This became an exemplary story about honour in warfare, with which of course Federico as a condottiere would wish to be associated. (I read somewhere that Caesar’s successors in antiquity would emulate him by ceremonially burning the papers of vanquished rivals – although not before making private copies for future reference!)

The Sala dei Giganti

The most memorable part of the interior decorations of the Palazzo Te is the Sala dei Giganti – the “Room of the Giants”. Giulio Romano’s fresco, which covers the entire surface of the walls and ceiling, illustrates the story of the giants who had attempted to build a tower reaching to Olympus, and who were destroyed by Zeus with thunderbolts.

While you couldn’t really describe the painting as refined, what Giulio lacked in elegance he certainly made up for in energy and scale. The grotesque and ugly giants are being crushed by the collapsing masonry, while the Olympian gods and demigods are looking down on them. In all the excitement some of the goddesses have managed to have wardrobe malfunctions.

The gods react in various ways to the giants, some in alarm, some in anger. Hera is standing beside Zeus, handing him more ammo in the form of thunderbolts.

I saw somewhere a suggestion that the cupola and circular balustrade at the very top of the picture is supposed to represent the Christian heaven, above the pagan one. This is a nice idea but there does not seem to be any obvious Christian iconography and no other sources mention it, so it can probably be disregarded.

Leaving the building, you find a small artificial grotto in a courtyard. Inside it is pleasant enough, but my principal memory of it is the motion sensor alarm which was too sensitive and went off before one got anywhere near the frescoes it was there to protect.

Magnificent as Federico’s reign might have appeared, his death in 1530 marked the start of the decline of Mantua. As I mentioned in my post on the life of Claudio Monteverdi, by the beginning of the 17th Century the Gonzagas were no longer a significant military force, were living well beyond their means, and were drifting into strategic and political irrelevance.

But the reigns of Ludovico and Federico bookended a glorious period in Italian history. While the Mantua that Federico ruled may have lacked the intellectual energy of Florence, the culture of Urbino or the sheer wealth of Venice, he certainly knew how to have a good time.

September 27, 2022March 10, 2024

The Cloister of Santa Chiara in Naples

Right in the chaotic centre of Naples there is a beautiful and peaceful convent garden – the Cloister of Santa Chiara.

In August 2022 we fulfilled a long-delayed ambition to return to Naples. Our first visit over ten years earlier was only a short day trip by train from Sorrento, so this time we wanted to do it properly. That meant staying in downtown Naples for a few nights. Which meant driving into central Naples – in terms of risk something akin to skydiving in many people’s view, including that of northern Italians.

The traffic on a Naples city street, if it is wide enough, resembles a sort of slow-motion version of F1 cars weaving about for advantage as they leave the starting grid. There was a fair bit of hooting and gesticulation but I just kept going and we reached our destination without incident. The receptionist at the hotel said something to the effect that in Naples traffic, “they all do what they want and you let it happen around you”. That was good advice. In any case taxis are cheap in Naples and we were able to leave the car in the hotel garage until it was time to go home.

There are many stereotypes about Naples in addition to the traffic, and most are in some degree true. It is louder there, and more chaotic. The colours are brighter. The architecture – from later eras – is exuberant. There’s a big volcano across the bay. People genuinely seem more cheerful and demonstrative than they are further north – we noticed this in a few different situations. It is undeniably dirty, with the corruption in local government evident in rubbish collection contracts let to criminal groups that just dump stuff in random locations, or don’t bother collecting it at all. And as I said, the traffic is a bit crazy, although in our experience it is scarier in Palermo.

We read somewhere that if visitors to Italy find Rome dirty and disorganised, they should not go to Naples, because they will find those things worse there. If on the other hand they enjoy the energy and spectacle of Rome then they should keep going south because they will love Naples. We are in that latter category.

We were there in late August, and along the Lungomare and in the water the locals were soaking up the late summer sun.

Naples Castel dell'Ovo — Naples, Castel dell’Ovo. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Naples Lungomare — Naples *Lungomare* with Vesuvius in the background. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

We took a most enjoyable day trip to the island of Procida – although that is not the subject of today’s post. I will also do a separate post one day celebrating street life in Naples. But now I will get to the point of this one.

Santa Chiara

One morning we woke to steady rain – welcome in a way after a particularly long, hot, dry summer, but not the best for sightseeing. Nonetheless we stuck to the plan, and after a breakfast of coffee and pastries at a bar we caught a taxi to our destination: the church, convent and cloisters of Santa Chiara, bang in the middle of the old city. As we zoomed up and down hills, ducked through narrow alleys, and negotiated one hairpin bend so tight that our little Fiat taxi had to do a three-point turn to get round, Lou observed that if there is a Naples equivalent of “The Knowledge” that London taxi drivers need to demonstrate, it would be challenging indeed. Needless to say the driver dropped us right at the front gate of our destination, and charged us very little.

In the photograph of central Naples below, taken from Castel Sant’Elmo, the church of Santa Chiara is the large green-roofed building on the right.

Santa Chiara is described on the maps as a “monumental complex” and since it includes a church, a convent, an archaeological site and a museum, that describes it fairly well.

Like many convents, there is a square cloister, decorated with religious frescoes, surrounding a central open area.

Chiostro di Santa Chiara — Cloister of Santa Chiara. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

The large Gothic church, commenced in 1313, dominated the view of Naples for centuries. At the time Naples was ruled by the French Angevins, who had succeeded the Hohenstaufens of Frederick II. The picture below, painted 150 years later by which time the ruling dynasty was Aragonese, shows just how it dominated.

Aragonese fleet — Detail from “The Aragonese Fleet returns to Naples after the Battle of Ischia, 6 July 1465” (public domain)

Meanwhile, back in the 1300s, the Angevin King Robert and his wife Sancha of Majorca were extremely devout followers of the Franciscans, the movement started by St Francis only about a hundred years earlier. The female version of the Franciscan order was started by St Clare (Santa Chiara) and in Italy they are called Clarissans after her. In England they were called the “Poor Clares” due to their vow of poverty. Queen Sancha took a particular interest in the Clarissans, joining the order after her husband’s death, so it is not surprising that the church and convent she and Robert established was dedicated to Santa Chiara.

Death of Santa CHiara — Death of Santa Chiara, fresco from the cloisters. Not sure what role the little devils at the foot of the bed are playing. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Fast forward to the 18th Century and another queen of Naples (by now it was ruled by the Spanish branch of the Bourbons) started taking an interest. The central area of the convent, surrounded by cloisters, was being used by the nuns as a vegetable garden. The queen, Maria Amalia of Saxony, thought it would be a good idea to smarten it up and decorate it with scenes which allowed the nuns to contemplate the life outside which they had renounced. She therefore commissioned an architect to convert the space into a formal garden crossed at right angles by two arcades of benches and columns, all decorated with maiolica tiles. I don’t know what the nuns thought of the idea but the result would certainly have been a very pleasant place for them to sit.

Catastrophe arrived in August 1943 when a raid by American B-17 Flying Fortresses started a fire which destroyed the inside of the church and its roof, although the adjacent cloister seems to have mostly survived.

Photographs from the historical gallery of the Campania Fire Brigade, showing the church of Santa Chiara immediately after the bombardment, and seventy years later. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

While many types of stone can survive a fierce fire, marble often doesn’t, and the photo below shows the remains of a marble frieze from the church, now displayed in the museum above a pre-war photograph of the original. Looking carefully at the remains of the original, it seems that there was an attempt to repair the frieze before they gave up.

However soon after the end of the war, and despite all their other problems, the Neapolitans set about rebuilding their beloved church, completing the job in 1953. To modern eyes there is some small compensation for this. The interior had been redecorated in the 17th Century with some of the worst excesses of the baroque period, and without significant architectural merit. Pre-war illustrations of the interior show something like a wedding cake as imagined by Walt Disney. On acid.

The architects responsible for reconstruction took the courageous decision to revert the church to its original austere Gothic nobility. One gets the impression that this was a bit controversial; not surprisingly many Neapolitans would have been wanting their old church back exactly as it was. But the Gothic restoration would certainly have been closer to Robert and Sancha’s Franciscan vision, and if it is over-the-top baroque that you want, you need only go to the church of Gesù Nuovo just down the road, which escaped damage in the air raids.

The Cloister

It was still raining quite hard when we got to the cloister, which was disappointing in a way, but it did at least mean that we could take pictures of the arcades without people in them.

And then later the sun started to come out again so we got the best of both worlds.

The maiolica pictures on the backs of the benches are charming. There are a few with mythological or literary themes, but most show an idealised version of real life – country scenes with peasants dancing, people working in the fields or unloading ships.

Several of the characters wear carnival-style masks and are doubtless supposed to be specific characters such as Pulcinella from the Commedia dell’Arte, especially in the scenes of rustic celebration. As I said, I don’t know how the nuns felt about it, but to me it does seem a bit mean to suggest that the life they had forsworn was one of continuous revelry.

Unlike the frescoes in the surrounding cloister, the pictures that line the arcades are not religious at all, unless you count one of Santa Chiara herself, feeding cats. A lady we know in Umbria likes to feed the stray cats round about so in the museum shop we bought a bookmark showing Santa Chiara feeding the cats and presented it to her on our return. We were a bit nervous that she might think it frivolous, but she roared with laughter.

There was a restaurant near Santa Chiara, part of the Slow Food Movement, that we had selected for lunch, but Google was a bit optimistic about its opening time so we found we had an hour to kill. We therefore headed to a nearby bar for a pre-lunch aperitivo. That proved to be a rather Neapolitan experience. The Bar Settebello was small, full of cheerful people, and very noisy. But while in most Italian bars the noise would be coming from a TV playing pop videos or a football match, here the TV was tuned to RAI 5 (a bit like Channel 4 in the UK, alas no equivalent in Australia) and it was pumping out a performance of Rossini’s opera La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie).

Bar Settebelli — Bar Settebello, Naples (phone camera).

Update: I have now posted the promised articles on Procida and street life in Naples.

August 17, 2022November 19, 2023

A Little Place in the Country – The Villa Farnese at Caprarola

Intended as a fortress, then converted into a palace, the Villa Farnese in Caprarola is above all a monument to one of the most powerful families in Renaissance Italy.

The Farnese family accumulated a fair bit of real estate. If you have been to central Rome there is a good chance that you will have seen the massive Palazzo Farnese (now the French Embassy), or the beautiful Villa Farnesina across the Tiber, with Raphael’s famous frescoes. If you have visited Parma you might have seen the elegant “Palazzo del Giardino”, also a Farnese palace. This post is about one of the most remarkable, in the town of Caprarola north of Rome.

The Palazzo Farnese in Rome, August 2022, somewhat disfigured by scaffolding and hoardings. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Villa Farnesina in Rome. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, CFV-50c digital back, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens (click to enlarge).

Parma Ducal Palace — The “Palazzo del Giardino” (Ducal Palace) in Parma. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, CFV-50c digital back, Zeiss Distagon CF 60mm lens (click to enlarge).

The Farnese Family

We met the Farnese family when they were the villains of the story, violently subduing the city of Perugia. This time they get to be the heroes – which is not really surprising since they are telling this story themselves.

Although claiming ancient origins, the Farnese family first came to the notice of history in the 12^th Century, with a power base north of Rome. In the interminable Guelph versus Ghibelline wars of the Middle Ages, they generally turned up on the Guelph side, ie the side of the Papacy. It seems they knew where the family’s future fortunes lay.

And stupendous fortunes they were, built on acquisition of noble titles and huge estates, mercenary soldiering on behalf of the popes, and shameless simony and nepotism. “Simony” refers to the buying and selling of ecclesiastical offices and anticipated rewards in the afterlife, like Papal indulgences. “Nepotism” comes from the Latin word for “nephew” and was coined to refer to the practice of Popes granting lucrative high offices – ecclesiastical or secular – to their (ahem) “nephews”.

There were other ways to power. Alessandro Farnese, later Pope Paul III, owed his Cardinal’s hat to his sister Giulia. She was the mistress of Pope Alexander VI, and persuaded him to make her brother a cardinal.

Caprarola

In 1504 Cardinal Alessandro Farnese splashed out on the purchase of the estate of Caprarola in northern Lazio, in the heart of his family’s historical power base. He then commissioned his favourite architect Antonio Sangallo to design and build a large fortress on the site.

We have already met both Alessandro and Sangallo, later in their careers. Forty or so years later, Alessandro was by then Pope Paul III, and, having ordered the subjugation of Perugia by his ~~nephew~~ son Pierluigi, he commissioned Sangallo to build a huge fortress at the south of the town, to keep it that way. All this is described in my earlier post on The Buried Streets of Perugia. But for now the Papacy lay in the future for Alessandro Farnese.

Alessandro’s brief to Sangallo for Caprarola, it seems, was for a military structure, similar to that which he would one day build in Perugia. It was to be a pentagonal fortress in a good defensive position, with bastions that could provide raking fire on attackers. That a prince of the Church thought it prudent to design such a building tells you a bit about 16^th-Century Italian politics. When things in the city got a bit awkward, it was time to head to the country estate and pull up the drawbridge.

In any case the fortress was never completed as planned. In 1556 Pope Paul’s grandson, another Alessandro Farnese and another cardinal, had the half-built fortress converted into a lavish country villa by an architect named Giacomo Vignola. It seems that the mood was a bit less bellicose half a century later, but the bastions are still visible at the lower level, and the finished villa retains the pentagonal shape of Sangallo’s original project. And the villa was still used as somewhere to retreat to whenever the Farnese found themselves on the losing side of papal politics.

The Villa

The villa is in the late Renaissance, or “Mannerist” style, and sits on a slope, with formal Renaissance gardens up the hill behind. The front of the building faces south-east, in the direction of Rome. This aspect of the building was doubtless dictated by the topology of the site. It is nonetheless rather appropriate that while the Farnese were enjoying breakfast on their balcony, they were looking towards the city that would always be at the front of their minds – the source of their power, and of threats from rival families. Immediately in front of the building is a massive piazza.

Villa Farnese from the piazza. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Walking up to the front entrance across the piazza, we were not accompanied by a ceremonial guard, so we felt pretty small. Actually, you would probably feel fairly small even with a medium-sized ceremonial guard, which was presumably the intention.

Looking south-east from the Villa Farnese, in the direction of Rome. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Once inside you realise that the pentagonal shape is hollow, and that each floor has a gallery around the edge of the central space.

Ground floor gallery, Villa Farnese. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

Inside, the rooms are lavishly decorated, with every square metre of wall and ceiling put to use. As is frequently the case in Renaissance palaces, each room has a theme. Sometimes the theme is obvious and sometimes it would need fairly recondite knowledge to spot all the references. Fortunately for those who are not Renaissance humanists, these days there are plenty of explanatory panels.

Villa Farnese Winter Apartment — Winter Apartment, Villa Farnese. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Villa Farnese Room of Jupiter — Room of Jupiter, Villa Farnese. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Villa Farnese Spring Room — Spring Room, Villa Farnese. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

The Royal Staircase

You access the upper floors by means of the “Royal Staircase”. In this period staircases were an opportunity for architects to show off their skill. The mathematical complexities of their design, the combination of strength and delicacy, and the visual attractiveness of curves and spirals, could come together to show both technical and aesthetic mastery. Vignola seems to have hit all the marks on this occasion.

Villa Farnese Royal Staircase — Royal Staircase, Villa Farnese. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

And of course the walls and ceiling of the stairwell provide more real estate for decoration.

Deeds and Maps

Upstairs the decoration gets even more impressive, and when you enter “The Room of the Farnese Deeds” you realise you are in a Farnese family theme park. Enormous frescoes show great world events in which the family took part. Here the Farnese Pope Paul III and the Emperor Charles V wage war on the Lutherans, accompanied by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and his brother Ottavio Farnese, Duke of Parma and Piacenza.

Villa Farnese Room of Farnese Deeds — Room of Farnese Deeds, Villa Farnese. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

Here the French King Francis rides out from Paris to meet Charles V on the way to chastise the Belgians (or something), accompanied naturally by Cardinal Farnese, the “ambassador of great affairs”.

Room of Farnese Deeds, Villa Farnese. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

It would be a bit nauseating were it not for the sheer pomposity of it all which renders it a bit ridiculous to modern eyes. Freud would no doubt have said that Alessandro was compensating for something. Here is the ceiling, in which almost every panel is a Farnese doing deeds, or angels cheering them on.

The Room of the Maps contains maps of the whole world as it was known in the 16^th Century. So no Australia and New Zealand, obviously. It apparently so impressed one of the Popes that he commissioned a similar thing for the Vatican.

Villa Farnese Room of the Maps — Map of the World in The Room of the Maps, Villa Farnese. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Vatican Gallery of Maps — The “Gallery of Maps” in the Vatican. The Farnese thought of it first. Hasselblad 501 C/M camera, Zeiss Planar C 80mm lens, 6x6cm film back, Fujichrome Velvia 50 film (click to enlarge).

The Gardens

As you complete the tour of the villa, you find yourself in the lower of the two gardens – a formal and symmetrical Renaissance garden which is presumably similar to the 16^th-Century original. You can imagine the younger Alessandro strolling here, in quiet conversation with some confidential envoy bringing news of developments in the Vatican.

Villa Farnese Lower Gardens — The Lower Gardens, Villa Farnese. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

From the lower garden you wander uphill through a chestnut wood. I don’t know what was planted here 450 years ago but the absence of buildings or landscaping suggests that it was intended to simulate a wild landscape. Then you get to the something called the “Secret Garden”, presumably because it was invisible from the main villa. The Secret Garden is approached through a corridor of some pretty exuberant Mannerist waterworks and statuary, starting with a catena d’acqua or “chain of water” which leads up to a pair of colossal statues of river gods.

Villa Farnese Secreet Garden — The “Catena d’Acqua” leading up to the Secret Garden, Villa Farnese. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Villa Farnese Secret Garden — The Secret Garden, Villa Farnese. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Beyond the statues are another pair of gardens and a charming building called the “casino”. By most standards this would be considered a substantial dwelling but in the context of the Villa Farnese it is obviously just a little summer house.

After the Farnese

Unusually for a Farnese cardinal, the younger Alessandro left no direct heirs. The villa passed to his relatives, the Dukes of Parma and Piacenza. In the 18^th Century the Farnese line died out and their property passed through marriage to the Bourbon kings of Naples.

After the unification of Italy in the 19^th Century the villa became the property of the Italian state. For a while the villa was used as a residence for the heir to the Italian throne, but under the Republic it is now a museum.

The “casino” in the upper garden is used as a residence for the President of the Italian Republic. I don’t know if President Mattarella gets to use it very much, but I hope he does. It would be a nice place to get away from the complexities of political life in Rome for a while, just as it was five centuries ago.

August 5, 2022November 19, 2023

The Palazzo Trinci in Foligno II – More Jewels of the High Middle Ages

In addition to its secular artistic gems, the Palazzo Trinci in Foligno contains some wonderful religious art and a “Gothic Staircase”.

In my first post on the Palazzo Trinci I gave some of the history of this remarkable building and its contents, particularly the allegorical frescoes in what is known as the “Hall of the Liberal Arts”.

When contemplating works like these, dating from the late 1300s and early 1400s it is obvious that, whatever the simple stories they once taught schoolchildren, Lorenzo de’ Medici didn’t wake up one day in Florence in the 1470s and decide to start the Renaissance. That intellectual awakening had been under way for at least a century, and it wasn’t just in Florence, or even in Italy. As with most things in history it was a gradual process, and the glories of Leonardo and Erasmus didn’t appear out of the blue. Real historians have always known that, but things tend to get simplified for the rest of us.

For now, let us just admire the art. And if the Hall of the Liberal Arts were the only thing to see in the Palazzo Trinci it would be well worth the visit. But it isn’t the only thing to see.

The “Gothic Staircase”

Let us start with the extraordinary internal gothic staircase. I’m not sure if the famous 20th Century Dutch artist M.C. Escher ever visited Foligno, but I’m sure that we are not the only visitors who thought that this looked like something in one of his prints.

Palazzo Trinci Gothic Staircase — The “Gothic Staircase” in the Palazzo Trinci, Foligno. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

Palazzo Trinco "Gothic Staircase" — The “Gothic Staircase” in the Palazzo Trinci, Foligno. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

As I said in the earlier article, the Palazzo was not designed as a single building, but had its origins as a number of smaller separate dwellings that were consolidated into a greater one. One effect of this was to leave a large internal space that would once have been an external courtyard. Ugolini III Trinci decided to fill the space with the staircase. The decorations – under the Gothic arches and the trompe l’oeil decorations on the walls – make it clear that this is not merely a prosaic means to access the higher floors, but the focal point of the Palazzo.

The Private Corridor

Like many important families in Italy, the Trinci arranged private access to the duomo (Cathedral) – in their case in the form of an elevated corridor. You can see it in the photograph below.

Trinci Private Corridor — External view of the private corridor linking the Palazzo Trinci with the Duomo, Foligno. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

Inside, the decorations are a little confusing. This is because there was originally a fresco depicting The Ages of Man – a common theme. This was later covered by a new fresco depicting The Nine Heroes (or The Nine Worthies) – another common 14th Century theme, but the former Ages of Man fresco was recreated on the opposite wall. Then at some point part of the Nine Heroes fresco has fallen away, exposing part of the original Ages of Man.

The Nine Heroes theme comes from a French text from 1312 – the first three are from the Bible, being Joshua, David and Judas Maccabeus. The next three are from the Greek and Roman world – Hector of Troy, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. The final three are called the “Heroes of Christendom” and are King Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey de Bouillon.

I must admit that I had to look up who Godfrey was, but he was one of the leading knights in the First Crusade, who became King of Jerusalem at the conclusion of the crusade. I can’t show you a photograph of his likeness in the Palazzo Trinci because it has been completely destroyed. Instead here is one in which I think the first is Caesar, the second may be Hector, and the third is definitely King Arthur. Identification is hindered by the fact that they were all portrayed in contemporary 14th Century armour, and one is expected to recognise them from the heraldic devices on their shields.

The Chapel

I’ll finish with the best bit; the chapel in the Palazzo Trinci is a little jewel box. It has been fortunate to avoid as much earthquake damage as was suffered elsewhere in the building, and being a consecrated place probably helped it avoid some of the vandalism perpetrated by papal authorities on some of the secular decorations.

Palazzo Trinci Chapel — The chapel, Palazzo Trinci, Foligno. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

The chapel is dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and every inch of walls and vaulted gothic ceiling is covered with frescoed scenes from the Virgin’s life (with Saint Francis getting a brief appearance as well).

As with much art of this period, a constant pleasure is the way everyone is in wildly anachronistic but gorgeous contemporary costume.

July 1, 2022February 15, 2024

Foligno: The Palazzo Trinci and the Hall of the Liberal Arts

The Palazzo Trinci in Foligno has a chequered history but preserves some of the greatest examples of late Medieval humanist art.

If you are in Umbria visiting towns like Perugia, Assisi or Spoleto, you might not consider adding Foligno to your itinerary. It doesn’t sit prettily on top of a hill, to start with, and with its valley-floor location it is surrounded by industrial areas. So for us at first Foligno was somewhere we went when we needed shops. This turned out to be a mistake – the historic centre has some wonderful medieval buildings, and as I posted here it hosts one of the more impressive historical re-enactment festivals. It also features a remarkable building and museum in the Palazzo Trinci, of which more later.

Being flat gives Foligno a different character to that of its Umbrian neighbours. The locals get around the historic centre on bicycles, and this makes it feel a bit like a northern Italian town – say Cremona or Treviso. Its being flat might also give your calf muscles some relief after a series of visits to Umbrian hill towns.

Foligno duomo — Foligno Duomo. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

A brief History of Foligno

Like many other towns in Umbria, Foligno – ancient Fulginium, or Fulginiae – was founded by the Umbri in prehistory and absorbed into the Roman state in the Third Century BC. It was the point where the eastern and western branches of the Via Flamina reunited after passing either side of the Martani hills, and would also have been where the road from Perugia joined the Flaminia, so it would have been at an important crossroads.

Foligno Palazzo Trinci — Part of a mosaic floor from the Roman town of *Forum Flaminiae*, on display in the Palazzo Trinci museum, Foligno. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

After suffering the usual despoliation at the hands of invaders in the Dark Ages, Foligno recovered and for a while became an independent player in the Guelph vs. Ghibelline power politics of Central Italy. In due course it was absorbed into the Papal States like every other town in the region.

The Trinci Family

From the 12^th to the 15^th Centuries, political evolution in central and northern Italy often took the same sort of path. Towns and cities developed the institutions of self-government – administration, courts, a militia or army. In many places one or more families would become wealthy and powerful, but would exercise that power through domination of those institutions and patronage rather than assuming power formally.

Families would seek advantage over rival families, and cities over rival cities, by allying themselves with one of the two “superpower” factions – the Papacy (the Guelphs) or the Holy Roman Empire (the Ghibellines).

Events in Foligno followed that conventional course. In the early 1300s the Trinci family were rivals with the Anastasi family for control of Foligno. Originally Ghibellines, the Trinci switched sides to the Guelphs in order to gain the assistance of Perugia and Spoleto to run the Anastasi out of town. For the next century and a half the Trinci ran Foligno until they fell out with the Papacy, at which point a papal army took the town, the last of the Trinci line was imprisoned and murdered, and a papal governor took over.

The Palazzo Trinci

Like other de facto Italian rulers at the time such as the Medici, the Trinci built an imposing palace in town, right next to the “official” city government buildings.

Or rather they didn’t exactly build it. They acquired an existing palace which had been created by merging several existing residential buildings, and then they renovated it. And what renovations they were. A grand gothic façade (unfortunately replaced by a neoclassical façade after earthquake damage in 1832), an absolute jewel box of a chapel, a private covered passage linking the palace to the Duomo (cathedral) next door, and a magnificent Gothic style internal staircase linking three floors of the building. All of those I will deal with in another post, because today I propose to talk about the so-called “Hall of the Liberal Arts”.

A Miraculous Survival

But first I should observe how miraculous it is that the Palazzo Trinci and its artworks should have survived at all, after the damage it received from war, the violence of nature and the malice and ignorance of humanity.

Major earthquakes damaged the building in 1477, 1703 and 1832. The roof fell in during a storm in 1899. And in 1944 bombs fell on the buildings at the rear of the complex, and on the town hall just in front.

More damage came through deliberate actions. After Foligno was brought under direct papal rule the Palazzo Trinci became the seat of the papal governors, and many of the frescoes associated with the Trinci were defaced. In the 1470s Pope Sixtus IV moved his residence to the palace during an outbreak of plague in Rome – and ordered that all surviving references to the Trinci be removed and replaced with references to him. Not only that but in one inscription he even claimed that the splendour of the palace was his own doing!

Worse was to come. In the late 18^th Century the papal governor – a man of obvious taste and discrimination – decided that the place was looking a bit old-fashioned and had all the frescoes whitewashed over. Part of the building was converted to a jail, with inadequate sewage. Items from the archaeological collection were sold to wealthy foreigners. Even after Italian reunification and the end of Papal rule the building was to suffer further insult, being allowed to deteriorate further while housing shops, a theatre, the police headquarters and the Guardia di Finanza.

Rehabilitation of the building started towards the end of the 19^th Century and the frescoes were uncovered and partly restored in the 1930s and 1950s. However in the 1980s the roof fell in again and it was only after the 1990s that a decade-long restoration brought the building to its current state in which it became the municipal museum.

The Hall of the Liberal Arts

The high point of the Trinci fortunes came at the end of the 1300s and the beginning of the 1400s when the head of the family was Ugolini III Trinci. After conducting successful campaigns in central Umbria on behalf of the Papacy he received many honours and rewards, and life in the Palazzo Trinci started to look a bit more like that of a court.

Men of letters and artists were attracted there – people who think the Renaissance started later and in Florence might say it was a bit early to call them “humanists”, but the whole thing has a Renaissance feel to it. Two particularly noteworthy associates were the poet Federico Frezzi and the artist Gentile da Fabriano.

Frezzi wrote a laudatory poem called Quadriregio which praised Ugolino and made references to the Trinci’s claims, made by all great families at the time, to origins in mythological antiquity. In particular the Trinci traced their line back to Romulus, and the story of Romulus was illustrated by Gentile da Fabriano in one of the halls, including the story of the Trojan woman and Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia who was made pregnant by the god Mars and bore the twins Romulus and Remus (and was then executed for betraying her Vestal vow of chastity).

Execution of Rhea Silvia — The execution of Rhea Silvia, Palazzo Trinci, Foligno. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

In the photograph above, the ochre drawings visible where the plaster has fallen away (known as “sinopia”) have not been added by modern restorers. They are the drawings by the original artist before the wet plaster was applied, over which they would then quickly paint. They only become visible if the plaster is damaged and falls away.

The traditional execution method for an unchaste vestal was suffocation by being buried alive, hence the pit to which she is being dragged. It seems an odd way to celebrate a woman one is claiming as one’s ancestress, by having a large picture of her execution in the house, but tastes change. In any case the artist’s depiction of everyone in contemporary late 14th-Century dress makes it very interesting.

Gentile da Fabriano was a leading exponent of the late-Medieval style known as “International Gothic”. He was employed to decorate a large hall in the Palazzo – then the library, it is now known as the “Hall of the Liberal Arts” after his frescoes. Although Frezzi’s Quadriregio is lost, it is thought that much of Gentile’s work is derived from the poem.

The main feature of the hall is seven portraits – personifications of the seven liberal arts. These were divided into two groups. The early arts (known as the Trivium, or three paths) were Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric. The later arts (the Quadrivium, or four paths) were Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy.

Palazzo Trinci Rhetoric and Mathematics — Palazzo Trinci, Rhetoric (L) and Arithmetic (R). Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

By the way, when the Quadrivium was introduced, there was some resistance from older scholars. Younger scholars responded by suggesting that the Trivium was superficial and lightweight in comparison. “Trivial“ therefore became a term of intellectual abuse. The Palazzo Trinci frescoes do not weigh in to the debate other than to put the Quadrivium closer to the centre of the composition, implying that they are further up in the hierarchy.

But in the centre of the composition, and therefore queen of all the disciplines, was Philosophy. This, alas, was damaged beyond repair at some point. We are fortunate that in the 1770s a scholar called Ludovico Coltellini sketched various parts of the frescoes, including the head of Philosophy – a beautiful crowned woman – and his notebook survived.

Palazzo Trinci Filosofia — Sketch of Philosophy by Ludovico Coltellini, 1770s. Phone camera (click to enlarge)

The fact that Philosophy was still intact in the 1770s suggests that the damage probably occurred in the earthquake of 1832.

Palazzo Trinci Astronomy — Palazzo Trinci, Astronomy (detail). Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Each liberal art is represented by a female figure, sometimes attended by another figure, either a student or practitioner.

Palazzo Trinci Geometry — Palazzo Trinci, Geometry (detail). Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Below are Music and Logic. Music is playing a portative organ and a chime of bells, and she is clearly getting into it, or as a former conductor of ours used to say, “giving it some welly”. Logic is an older woman holding snakes. Not sure why, although Cristina Galassi (see “further reading”, below) suggests that this suggests the sophisticated deception of words. Maybe using logic to defeat deception is like wrestling with snakes.

Palazzo Trinci Music — Palazzo Trinci, Music. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge)

Palazzo Trinci Logic — Palazzo Trinci, Logic. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Grammar is a teacher instructing a child, holding the book for him as he traces the words on the page.

Palazzo Trinci Grammar — Palazzo Trinci, Grammar. Fujifilm GFX 50R camera, Fujifilm GF32-64mm R LM WR lens (click to enlarge).

Tough Guys in Art – the Baglioni of Perugia

Renaissance Perugia was as violent and as full of art as was Florence. But it doesn’t occupy the same hallowed place in art history. One reason is that it is admittedly hard to compete with Donatello, Michelangelo and Botticelli. Another is that Florence (as part of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany) stayed independent, more or less, up to the Risorgimento, and its rulers kept on collecting art, while Perugia finally fell to Papal domination and suffered an inevitable decline.

And a further subtle but influential reason is that the story of Italian Renaissance art which most of us absorb, from whatever source, is essentially that first told by a bloke named Giorgio Vasari in the 16^th Century. And old Giorgio, who was from Tuscany, was as parochial as any Italian. So to be admitted to membership of the pantheon he created in his seminal Lives of the Artists, it helped a lot to be Tuscan. Others tended to be damned with faint praise, even someone like Raphael, who had the poor judgement to have been born in Urbino and trained in Perugia, and who then compounded the offence by moving to Rome. And if other Italians weren’t good enough for Vasari, it’s not surprising that he understates the profound affect on Italian art of Flemish painters like Van Eyck.

Note: I had been contemplating writing this post for some time, but could not proceed because the Baglioni Chapel in Spello was closed for post-earthquake repairs for three years. The chapel reopened in late 2019 and I was able to take some photographs, but now I have the problem that a couple of the reference books I really ought to consult are in our bookcase in Umbria, and we are stuck in Australia because of the coronavirus. I might also need to revisit the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia to check a couple of things. So I’ve decided to forge ahead with what I have to hand and make a few sweeping assertions from memory. When in due course I can return to Italy and check those sources, I will update this post.

Note, May 2022. I am back in Italy now, but the gallery in Perugia is closed for renovation. I have at least managed to correct the attribution of the painting about Saint Bernardino, below.

Note, August 2022. The gallery is finally open again, and much improved by the renovations.

Perugia’s most famous painter was named Pietro Vannucci, but he is so closely associated with the place that he is referred to in art history as “Perugino”, which means “the guy from Perugia”. This is cause for a certain amount of resentment to this day in the place he actually came from, a town a bit further west near the border with Tuscany, called Città della Pieve.

Perugino was a major influence on what is often referred to as “The Umbrian School” of painting, with serene-looking saints and Madonnas in pastel colours set in idyllic landscapes. While most of his surviving pieces are frescoes, he was a pioneer of the use of oil paints in Italian art. It is one of the wonderful things about Umbria that you can stop at a local parish church and see, unprotected on the wall, a work of art that, were it to be the centrepiece of an exhibition in Australia, would be behind an inch of toughened glass and cost $50 to see.

Perugino – Adoration of the Magi (fresco), Church of Madonna delle Lacrime, Trevi, Umbria. Nexus 6P phone camera, perspective corrected in Photoshop (click to enlarge).

After beginning his career in Perugia – where he trained the young Raphael – Perugino worked in Florence and Rome before returning to his native Umbria. While in Florence he had a feud with Michelangelo which would have set Vasari even more against him (although the list of contemporaries with whom Michelangelo did not feud would be short). Vasari also accuses Perugino of atheism, for which there does not appear to be any other evidence.

Perugino is sometimes criticised for the uniformity of his work, and it is also true that some of his stuff, particularly the backgrounds, was probably done by his apprentices. But much of his work that survives was for local Umbrian churches. Compared to the sort of thing they might have been able to acquire before then, Perugino’s beautiful faces in beautiful landscapes, and his geometrically accurate perspective, would have been breathtakingly modern and exactly what they wanted their parishioners to see and be uplifted by. However as we shall see below, when working for a wealthy patron (and doubtless being paid accordingly) Perugino was capable of producing very individual pieces.

Now for the violence promised earlier. Even by the standards of those days, the Perugians were famously bellicose, having long-standing quarrels with many of their neighbouring towns. During the endless rivalries between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines in the Middle Ages, those towns sometimes chose the opposite of whichever faction Perugia happened to adhere to at the time, just so they could be on the other side. When Perugia switched sides, so did they, in the other direction.

It cannot be unrelated that paintings of the era, whatever religious event was being depicted, often had bands of armed men or even acts of violence occurring elsewhere in the picture. The picture below, probably by Pierantonio del Niccolò del Pocciolo, is notionally about Saint Bernardino healing a young man who had been gravely wounded in an attack. But the attack takes up much of the canvas, with the saint and his patient visible in the distance through a window.

Bonfigli — Detail of “Saint Bernardino Restoring Giovan Antonio Tornano to Health After He Was Wounded in an Ambush” by Pierantonio del Niccolò del Pocciolo, Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia. Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).

In the 15^th and 16^th Centuries, the dominant family in Perugia was the Baglioni, whose behaviour sounds like something out of Game of Thrones, right down to one half of the family massacring the other half at a wedding. At this point I will quote from one of my favourite books on Umbria, the result of a collaboration between an excellent writer and an outstanding landscape photographer.

“Perugia’s story during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is almost a parody or a pastiche of our wildest fantasies of violence and passion in Renaissance Italy… The ne plus ultra of savagery, egoism and tyranny was reached with the rise, during the early 1400s, of the Baglioni family. Everyone was afraid of them, but even the many who hated them admired their physical courage, and their beauty was a legend throughout Italy. Where they walked, crowds gathered to marvel at their handsome faces and lofty stature. Their very names – Gismondo, Astorre, Grifonetto, Atalanta, Zenobia – have the dimension of romance. Many were put to death in the appalling sequence of murders and revenges known as il gran tradimento (‘the great betrayal’) which took place in 1500, when Grifonetto tried to wipe out his entire clan and was himself killed by order of his cousin Gianpaolo.” – Jonathan Keates, Philip’s Travel Guides – Umbria, 1991, with photography by Joe Cornish, p.52.

Gianpaolo Baglioni (1470-1520) was a condottiero (mercenary captain) and Lord of Perugia who, like several nobles in the Romagna, fought for Cesare Borgia on the grounds that it was better for them to be on his side than not. When it became obvious that being on his side was no protection from his ambitions, Gianpaolo and the others changed sides. Unlike most of the others, Gianpaolo survived the experience.

If you are visiting Perugia there are a great many excellent things to see – I shall make them the subject of another post one day – but one thing that no-one should miss is the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria which, not surprisingly, contains some fine specimens of the Umbrian School. One large and grand painting in oils is an Adoration of the Magi, attributed to Perugino. It is known to have been commissioned by the Baglioni family, and given both that and the very individualistic depictions of the three kings and their attendants, it has been plausibly speculated that they are actual portraits of members of the Baglioni. One youthful face at the far left of the group, looking straight out at the viewer, is thought to be a self-portrait by Perugino, and it certainly looks similar to an authenticated self-portrait of an older, pudgier Perugino in the Collegio del Cambio, just down the street.

Perugino Adoration — Perugino, Adoration of the Magi (oil painting), Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia. Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c digital back (click to enlarge).

In the detail below, it certainly looks as if the principal king is someone used to giving orders, and given that no-one else in Perugia would have been doing so at the time, the idea that these are indeed members of the Baglioni family is an attractive one.

Perugino adoration detail — Detail of Perugino’s Adoration of the Magi. Those depicted are believed to include members of the Baglioni family, with the exception of the young man in a red cap at the extreme left, thought to be a self-portrait of Perugino. Photographic data as above (click to enlarge).

Self-portrait of Perugino, Collegio del Cambio, Perugia. Fujifilm X-Pro3 Camera, Fujifilm XF 35mm lens (click to enlarge).

The ancestral lordship of the Baglioni family included the pretty town of Spello, a bit further south from Perugia along the Central Umbrian Valley, between Assisi and Foligno. The old town spills down the hill towards the valley floor in a most picturesque way, and you get a delightful view of it to the left as you head down the SS75 towards Spoleto. It has nice restaurants and bars, some with excellent views of the gap in the mountains through which our old friend the Via Flaminia heads northeast.

One of the most remarkable places to visit in Spello is the Baglioni Chapel in the Collegiate Church of Santa Maria Maggiore. The church was damaged in the 2016 earthquakes and only reopened in late 2019 – even then you had to pick your way through scaffolding to get to the chapel.

The chapel is decorated with frescoes by another painter of the Umbrian school – Pinturicchio, both a contemporary and student of Perugino. Naturally, that’s not his real name. He was born Bernardino di Betto, but was called Pinturicchio (“little painter”) because he was short, and he was a painter. Those names are so inventive, it beats me how they came up with them. But since he signed a couple of works with that name he was presumably at least resigned to it. He did quite a bit of work in Rome, and probably his most famous work is in the Piccolomini Library in the duomo of Siena.

Pinturicchio Annuciation — Pinturicchio, Annunciation, Cappella Baglioni, Spello. Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c Digital Back (click to enlarge).

There are three superb frescoes by Pinturicchio in the chapel – an Annunciation, an Adoration of the Shepherds (with the Three Kings queueing up to wait their turn in the background) and a Christ at the Temple.

Pinturicchio Adoration — Pinturicchio, Adoration of the Shepherds, Cappella Baglioni, Spello. Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c Digital Back (click to enlarge).

Off to one side in the Annunciation, Pinturicchio has included a framed self-portrait hanging on the wall of Mary’s cloister.

Pinturicchio Adoration detail — Pinturicchio, Adoration of the Shepherds (detail), Cappella Baglioni, Spello. Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c Digital Back (click to enlarge).

The chapel was commissioned by the local bishop, Troilo Baglioni of that ilk. I have seen a reference to the commission supposedly having been to commemorate the end of the period of conflict within the family which featured the gran tradimento, and the dates would certainly fit. And there are features of the frescoes which further support the hypothesis – if you look past the beauties of the main subjects, in the background there is a Renaissance Italian countryside ravaged by war. Bands of armed men wander the countryside. On a distant hilltop a corpse hangs from a gibbet. It is beautiful, but there is a slightly nightmarish quality to it as well.

Pinturicchio Annunciation detail — Pinturicchio, Annunciation (detail), Cappella Baglioni, Spello. Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c Digital Back (click to enlarge).

Many of the characters playing bit parts – shepherds, kings and the like – are depicted with such individuality that it seems almost certain that they are portraits of real people. And among the crowd observing Christ at the Temple, we find Troilo Baglioni himself. He may have been a churchman, but he was also a Baglioni, and in an age when bishops, cardinals and even popes led armies and despatched assassins (let’s face it, the Pope at the time was Alexander VI Borgia) Troilo looks like someone who could take care of himself.

Pinturicchio Troilo Baglioni — Pinturicchio, Christ in the Temple (detail showing Troilo Baglioni), Cappella Baglioni, Spello. Hasselblad 501C/M, Zeiss Distagon 60mm lens, CFV-50c Digital Back (click to enlarge).

Eventually the Baglioni fought each other to exhaustion, and in 1535 the Papacy saw its chance and took Perugia by force, beginning a period of severe authoritarian rule, and three hundred years of intellectual, economic and artistic impoverishment. There are other interesting stories to tell about Perugia, and more photographs to show, so this will not be my last post on the subject. (Note: it wasn’t. “The Buried Streets of Perugia” was added in June 2022.)

But standing before the Pinturicchio frescoes in the Baglioni Chapel in Spello (and the Perugino in the gallery in Perugia) is a many-layered experience. You are looking at art of great beauty and undoubted piety. But it also depicts real people who were players in desperate and violent personal and political dramas, and the landscapes in which they fought. And it was painted by people who were there at the time. And you are standing where they stood.

May 12, 2019February 14, 2024

The Garden of Livia Drusilla

I started writing this post in Rome, where I had to go and visit the Australian Embassy to cast a vote in the forthcoming federal election. We decided to make a trip of it and chose a place to stay in walking distance of the embassy, near the Piazza Bologna metro station.

On previous visits to Rome we have always stayed in the Centro Storico, but this time we had a car with us and we didn’t want to go anywhere near the dreaded Zona Traffico Limitato (ZTL) – the permit zone that can see hapless tourists cop several expensive fines within a few minutes as they desperately try and find a way out. We too have had the unpleasant experience of finding ourselves in a one-way street, surrounded by surging traffic, being swept inexorably into the ZTL. In that case we got away with it – maybe because it was during one of the short periods that the ZTL does not operate, or maybe the camera was not working. But I wouldn’t want to repeat it, so we chose somewhere at a safe distance.

The area near the Piazza Bologna is called Nomentana (named after a gate in the late Roman era city wall) and turned out to be a cheerful bustling district with much to recommend it, not least a Sicilian cafe called Mizzica where we had a cheap but excellent breakfast both mornings, of coffee and Sicilian pastries. Learning to eat the latter without getting sticky sweet mascarpone all over my chin remains a work in progress. In the evening we went back for aperitivi and snacks, sitting at a table outside and watching the world go by.

A bit further away we tried a restaurant recommended to us by the hotel, called Hostaria “Al Monumento” da Giulio which promised typical Roman cuisine. Going by the presence of tripe on the menu, this was probably true, as Romans are great offal-eaters. There were however other options, and it being spring, I had Carciofi alla Giudia which is Jewish-style deep-fried artichoke. Lou had abbacchio which is roasted milk-fed lamb.

Being close to a metro station it was fairly simple to get into the centre of Rome, which was its usual self, heaving with tourists and touts. In the evenings, we found we preferred just hanging around Nomentana, where the voices around us were mostly speaking Italian, rather than – as they would have been in central Rome – Mandarin, Japanese, German or Dutch, or English in the various accents of Tucson, Toronto, Tunbridge Wells and Toowoomba.

The next morning we travelled in to Termini to visit a nearby museum called Museo Romana Palazzo Massimo alle Terme. The terme in question are the baths of Diocletian, close by.

Rome, not surprisingly, has a lot of museums. I do my best, but I have to confess that my heart sinks a bit when we turn a corner and see yet another corridor lined with several dozen marble busts, all helpfully labelled either Portrait of a Man or Portrait of a Woman (gosh thanks, I would never have guessed). I usually manage to give the first few a conscientious examination, after which it all becomes increasingly cursory. Strange – if any one of them were the only surviving example, one would sit and stare at it for hours.

The reason we were going to this museum is that it offers more than statuary – it features mosaic floors and, even better, frescoed walls from various excavated buildings.

I always find it a bit miraculous when I see a surviving fresco from ancient times – plaster being inherently brittle and friable – but I must admit that when good conditions and good luck combine, the results can be startling, especially in the case of some Etruscan tombs.

One of the highlights of the museum is a set of restored frescoes recovered from a Roman villa near the site of the existing Villa Farnesina on the western bank of the Tiber between the Gianicolo and Trastevere areas of Rome. Then as now in a very desirable area, the villa may have been built by Octavius (later the Emperor Augustus) for his daughter Julia, and was abandoned at some point due to flooding from the river. It was buried and forgotten for centuries until rediscovered at the end of the 19^th Century when the modern river embankments were being built. The frescoes are displayed in representations of the original rooms.

I regret that the only photos here were taken on our smartphones – museums in Rome usually insist on bags of any size going into a cloakroom and I’m reluctant to risk my Hasselblad equipment in there, so I didn’t take it.

Museums in Rome - Fresco from the Villa Farnesina in the Museum Palazzo Massimo — Fresco from the ancient Villa Farnesina, with trompe-l’oeil effect. (click to enlarge)

Fresco from the Villa Farnesina in the Museum Palazzo Massimo — Is this a contemporary view of the the Tiber outside the villa? (click to enlarge)

Impressive as they are, those frescoes were not the high point of our visit to the Palazzo Massimo.

When I was at university two of my favourite books were I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves. I remember devouring them when I should have been wading through my set texts. Graves’s story is not short of villains, but surely the worst is the evil, scheming, murdering Empress Livia, the wife of Augustus and grandmother of Claudius. Then a couple of years later we were treated to the superb BBC adaptation with Derek Jacobi in the title role, and many other brilliant actors. One of the best of them was Siân Phillips as Livia, who demonstrated the truth of the old theatrical adage that it is more fun to play villains than heroes.

Graves was a highly educated man who based his historical novels on classical sources – ancient historians like Suetonius who inevitably had their own axes to grind. Needless to say there are modern historians who advance plausible arguments as to why Livia probably wasn’t as bad as she is made out to be by those sources. One such article is here.

Of course historical fiction needs villains and heroes and it would not have made such a good story otherwise. I note that Graves’s other great villainess, the Empress Theodora from Count Belisarius, had a similarly bad rap from contemporary sources, but both she and Livia still sound pretty scary. Theodora looks scary too, in the mosaic portrait from Ravenna. Something else for the list of future posts (edit: I have now posted on Ravenna and Theodora).

Livia Drusilla was a wealthy aristocrat and had property of her own before she married Augustus (her second husband), including a country villa. It was a few miles north of Rome on the Via Flaminia, on a hill looking back down the Tiber towards the city. The villa was rediscovered in the 16^th Century, but not recognised as the Villa of Livia and properly excavated until the 1860s. These days the site lies near the flyovers of the junction between the Rome Ring Road and the Strada Statale 3 (SS3), the latter still called – bless the Italian Ministry of Transport – the Via Flaminia.

One room, south-facing and thus probably intended for use in winter, was decorated with beautifully realistic frescoes of trees and birds. A fresh breeze agitates the leaves and birds fly to and fro. These frescoes, after cleaning and restoration, were moved to the Palazzo Massimo where they are on display in a room of the same size as the original. If there were nothing else in the museum, I would recommend you go there and see them. We will definitely go there again.

Museums in Rome - The garden of Livia — The garden of Livia (click to enlarge)

The garden of Livia: opposite wall (click to enlarge).

Not only are they beautiful, but it is almost certain that those actual frescoes were looked upon by Livia and Augustus. They could have strolled about in front of them discussing affairs of state. If you believe Graves’s depiction of Livia, she might have despatched her poisoners from there.

We got to the museum relatively early and had the luxury of a period alone in Livia’s garden, and a relatively undisturbed visit to the rest of the exhibits. Then, around mid-morning, that scourge of Italian museums arrived, in the form of several school groups. The younger children did at least seem to be partly listening to their teacher. The adolescents behaved as they always do – after fanning out to occupy every single seat in the place, they then stared at social media on their smartphones, while ignoring everything the teacher was saying. At least it keeps them quiet, I suppose. Doubtless when the time comes to write a report on their visit, they will use those same smartphones to share material cut and pasted from Wikipedia.

In my post on The Paradox of Old and New Italy I criticised the implicit attitude of Grand Tourists of the 18^th and 19^th Centuries that “Italy is wasted on the Italians”. Nevertheless, it is a bit depressing to see young people so determinedly impervious to their own culture. Hopefully it’s just a phase they are going through.

February 18, 2019November 19, 2023

Vicenza Virgins

I don’t know why it took us so long to get around to visiting Vicenza.

Actually, I do. It was ten years ago when we were first in those parts, and we were in the grip of a bad case of medieval snobbery, and weren’t prepared to look at anything built after about 1450. I blame John Ruskin.

Nowadays we are much more broad-minded and are prepared to embrace quite modern stuff, up to about 1600. And Vicenza is essentially a late-Renaissance city. In fact it is irrevocably associated with one great architect – Andrea Palladio – who gave his name to a whole style of architecture. Palladian architecture takes the idea of a classical Roman temple and applies it to churches, country houses, council chambers, bank offices, you name it. And since his architecture was much admired by British gentry doing the “Grand Tour” of Italy, he influenced many British architects such as Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones.

Palladio was a local boy who got his big start when he won a competition to design a new façade for the basilica in Vicenza. Over time he more or less cornered the market – in Venice he got commissions to design churches like the very famous San Giorgio Maggiore which features in a million gondola shots, and in Vicenza he did palazzi in town and villas (i.e. large country houses) in the surrounding countryside.

In those days Vicenza was in one of the wealthiest parts of Italy (indeed it still is) and wealthy Venetian families built villas round here to spend time in summer or during disease outbreaks. They got Palladio to design them, or if they couldn’t afford him, one of his cheaper imitators.

The Euganean Hills – Hasselblad 501C/M with CV50c digital back, 60mm Distagon CF (click to enlarge)

We were staying in the hills south of Vicenza. To the north, the alps rise up quite suddenly, steep and rugged. To the south is the flat Po Valley, but there are a couple of lumps which are outliers of the alps. One lump is the Euganean Hills which are reasonably well-known in English literary writing, partly because the Italian medieval poet Petrarch retired there. You can still visit his house, which we did; rather bizarrely it contains a mummified cat which is claimed to have been Petrarch’s own pet. The other reason the Euganean Hills are a bit famous is that the poets Byron and Shelley, during their time in Venice, repaired there in summer when the heat and stinks got too much. In those hills, Shelley wrote a magnificent elegiac poem about the state of Italy as seen through early 19^th-Century Romantic eyes, with hope for its regeneration. Byron, more practically, sent his illegitimate daughter to live there in the healthier climate.

Beneath is spread like a green sea
The waveless plain of Lombardy,
Bounded by the vaporous air,
Islanded by cities fair;

Percy Bysshe Shelley – “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills”

The other lump of leftover alps is the Berici Hills, and it was there that we were staying, in the grounds of an old manorial farm which still produces its own wine and oil. The air is clearer and cooler up above the plain (Byron and Shelley were right!) and it is a pretty, rolling landscape which produces a lot of fruit and some impressive wine. Apart from a sprinkling of Palladian villas, a distinctive feature of the landscape is that most of the villages possess very tall and slender campanili, usually in pastel colours. The overall effect is of tidy elegance and discreet wealth. There are a good many cherry orchards, and since we were there in season, there were lots of signs saying vendita ciliegie (cherries for sale). We stopped at a particularly picturesque one where a couple of friendly old ladies were sorting cherries into punnets beneath a campanile on the hill behind. Lou bought some cherries and declared them a memorable experience, for all the right reasons.

Getting into Vicenza by car was not hard – we found an underground car park on the edge of the old town, and continued on foot. We wandered down the main street (now somewhat unnecessarily renamed the Corso Andrea Palladio) which has some excellent cafes, and took a detour down to the main square to see the basilica that started it all, now renamed the Basilica Palladiana – anyone would think they were proud of the chap. This looks onto an extensive piazza surrounded by more excellent cafes, where locals meet and chat on Saturday mornings.

Basilica Palladiana, Vicenza – Hasselblad 501C/M with CV50c digital back, 60mm Distagon CF lens (click to enlarge)

There are quite a few Palladian and sub-Palladian places in the town, but also a good bit of older Venetian Gothic that Palladio didn’t get to modernise. Vicenza was part of the Venetian Empire for a long time so not only is some of the architecture very reminiscent of Venice, but there are winged lions of St Mark in various places, including on a column in the main square. Napoleon took most of the lions down as a symbol of liberation from servitude, however as soon as he had gone the citizens put many of them back, which shows how they felt about it.

We had a major objective in mind – the celebrated Teatro Olimpico (Olympic Theatre). Note that this has nothing to do with the Olympic Games which had to wait another four hundred years to be revived. No: its name, and its fame, derive from the fact that (a) it was the first attempt in the Renaissance to create a space for theatrical performance as a form of high art as in Ancient Greece, (b) it was the first covered theatre ever built, (c) it was designed by the boy himself, Palladio, although he died before it was completed, and (d) it has a celebrated false-perspective stage set designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi to represent a street in Thebes – doubtless in order to put on the plays of Sophocles. This, although only a few feet deep, looks to be much longer than that. If you were to walk to the back of the “street”, you would be walking up a slope and when you got to the end you would look like a giant. The Renaissance was fascinated by perspective, in pictures and in sculpture, because it was the first time (again, since antiquity) that it was possible to show that you could describe the real world through mathematics, thereby suggesting that there was an underlying natural order waiting to be discovered. It is not a coincidence that the first name for Physics, when it emerged as a distinct academic discipline, was “natural philosophy” – the description of nature by the application of intellectual theory.

Teatro Olimpico, Vicenza — The false-perspective stage in Teatro Olimpico – Hasselblad 501C/M with CV50c digital back, 60mm Distagon CF (2 images, stitched in Photoshop) (click to enlarge)

Just how advanced all this stuff was is brought home forcibly when you look at this highly sophisticated building and reflect that it is contemporary with, or even slightly predates, the half-timber and thatch affair that was Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London, with which we are all familiar from schoolbook illustrations, and the modern replica.

As we approached the main theatre we were just congratulating ourselves that we had beaten the crowds, when a side door opened and a tour group of elderly Italians speared in, led by a voluble tour guide. Since most of the group were in their late hundreds it was relatively easy for us to pick our way through them and climb up to a clear space where we could enjoy the view while the guide held forth below.

After a while another tour group arrived – this one a group of Italian adolescents led by an equally determined tour guide – one moreover who was inspired by the sacred calling of pedagogy and who obviously considered herself a cut above a mere tourist-wrangler. As the first tour guide continued her peroration and the adolescents checked their phones, the second guide stood by, looking at her watch and adopting increasingly theatrical poses of impatience. It was clear that things were going to get ugly and Lou and I started edging for the exit. Eventually guide #2 enlisted the aid of one of the museum officials who intervened loudly – guide #1 responded not by curtailing her spiel but by redoubling the speed and volume of delivery, which had a few of her charges checking their hearing aid settings. We made our escape.

Our next port of call was the nearby Palazzo Chiericati – a museum of art and sculpture run by the city council in an authentic 16^th-Century Palladian building. Our initial impressions of the collection were a bit qualified – there was some late 17^th-Century sub-Caravaggio chiaroscuro stuff on biblical themes and a few so-called veduta di fantasia paintings. This was a genre which specialised in pictures of imagined ruins, usually with a few people in the foreground striking poses. These pictures got churned out in their hundreds to sell to wealthy tourists, and like statue-busking, the first person to do it was pretty original, and the rest weren’t. After that there was – inexplicably – a collection of unremarkable books and amateur photographs left to the city by a 20^th-Century aesthete. As we left each room we tried to head for the exit, only to be intercepted by an enthusiastic official and ushered on to the next part of the tour. The guards took their responsibilities very seriously and were keeping in touch with walkie-talkies: “two tourists heading for the top floor: make sure they don’t escape without seeing the collection of 1960s road maps”. In the basement there was some anodyne modern sculpture.

Palazzo Chiericati, Vicenza – Hasselblad 501C/M with CV50c digital back, 50mm Distagon C lens (click to enlarge)

These impressions, however, did not do full justice to the place, as we were shortly to find. When we finally made it back to the foyer we were making a beeline for the exit but the chief attendant leapt out from ambush and with an air of triumph shepherded us into the last couple of rooms. And we were very glad she had, because it was by far the best bit: rooms with very elaborate ceiling frescoes of mythological scenes, all painted from a bottom-up perspective which is an apt description as it was often an excuse to show the rude bits. The obvious pride in the collection shown by the attendants proved quite justified, and is something we have seen many times in Italy.

A summer thunderstorm broke and, umbrellas up, we dodged from arcade to arcade to get to the next museum which is the official Palladio Museum and which might a bit too funky and edgy for some tastes. There are lots of lighting displays and wall projections, clearly intended for the short attention-spans of the social-media generation. Nonetheless it had a number of very excellent plywood scale models of Palladio’s villas, palaces and churches, some with cutaways, which explained quite a bit about his design principles and gave one the sense of having collected a larger set than we had seen in real life.

There are many excellent places to eat in Vicenza, but one place we returned to was “Osteria Al Ritrovo” which is in Piazzetta del Duomo. Lou had one of the house specialties: saor dishes of prawns, cuttlefish and sardines, followed by a fish called orata, cooked with olives, tomatoes and potatoes, which she pronounced to be excellent. I had asparagus and local cheese on toast with prosciutto, followed by pasta with finferli (chanterelle mushrooms). Earlier we had aperitivi in the “Gran’ Caffè” in the Corso Andrea Palladio, which is grand indeed, with elegant pale green décor and many equally elegant old ladies.

Vicenza Paneficio – Hasselblad 501C/M camera, CV-50c digital back, 60mm CF Distagon lens (click to enlarge)

Elegance is something of a theme in Vicenza – elegance and self-confidence. Not unlike the architecture of Palladio, come to think about it.

The Monastery of San Marco

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The Duomo

The Interior and the Cappella Nuova

The Frescoes

The Rule of the Antichrist

The Apocalypse

The Resurrection of the Flesh

The Damned in Hell

The Elect in Paradise

The Zoccoli

A note on sources

A note on the Photography

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Santa Maria Maggiore

Santa Pudenziana

Santa Prassede

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The Oratory of St Bernardino of Siena

The Abbey Church of San Pietro

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Photography Stuff (feel free to skip)

The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia

The Basilica of San Vitale

Sant’Apollinare Nuovo

The Neonian (Orthodox) Baptistery

The Chapel of Sant’Andrea

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A note on the photography

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Federico Gonzaga

The New Palace

The Interior

The Sala dei Giganti

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Santa Chiara

The Cloister

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The Farnese Family

Caprarola

The Villa

The Royal Staircase

Deeds and Maps

The Gardens

After the Farnese

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The “Gothic Staircase”

The Private Corridor

The Chapel

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A brief History of Foligno

The Trinci Family

The Palazzo Trinci

A Miraculous Survival

The Hall of the Liberal Arts

Further Reading

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