Paolo Farinati: A Master of Verona

Paolo Farinati - The Mystic Marriage of St Catherine - n.d. - Oil on slate - 30x23 cm - Private Collection (click photo for larger image)Paolo Farinati (1524-1606) was an Italian Mannerist artist of the Veronese school. Indeed, he was one of the leading 16th-century painters at Verona. Most of his vast output of paintings was completed for churches in Verona and its environs, where much of it has survived. He was strongly influenced by his younger contemporary Paolo Veronese (1528-1588) and also by Parmigianino (1503-1540), among others. He executed a few engravings, some architectural projects (which apparently included work on the Castello San Felice at Verona), and a great many drawings. 

In the work featured here, painting on slate the artist exploited the oil medium to add prominence to the figures, thrown into relief against the dark background and foliage. The highlights in the drapery of the figures, with shimmering touches of white, is reminiscent of Paolo Veronese. Typically favoring line over color, a strong chiaroscuro effect emerges from this work.

Maniera — Style!

Sebastiano del Piombo - Portrait of Cardinal Reginald Pole - 1540s - Oil on canvas, 112 x 95 cm - The Hermitage, St. Petersburg (click photo for larger image)Mannerism, the artistic style which gained popularity in the period following the High Renaissance, takes as its ideals the work of Raphael and Michelangelo. Mannerist Art is typically characterized by a complex composition, with muscular and elongated figures in intricate, sometimes convoluted poses, and a “pushing” of color boundaries. 

Michelangelo (1475-1564), who is covered extensively on this website is widely credited with beginning the Mannerist movement (thought not formally). Other leading Mannerist artists included Rosso Fiorentino, Pontormo, and Parmigiano.

By the late 16th century, there were several anti-Mannerist attempts to reinvigorate art with greater naturalism and emotionalism. These developed into the grand Baroque style, which dominated the 17th century and coincided with the Counter-Reformation. It was Mannerism, however, that was indeed much more modern and forward thinking. While the public loved the style however, the Church did not. And the Church, continued to be art’s greatest patron during this era.

A perhaps lesser known but nevertheless important Mannerist was Sebastiano del Piombo (c. 1485-1547). An Italian painter of the Venetian School (who actually began his professional life as a musician) he was the only major artist of the period to combine the coloring of the Venetian School with the monumental forms of the Roman school.

The subject of the painting featured here—Reginald Pole (1500-1558)—was an English prelate, a Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, and the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury during the Counter Reformation against the Church of England. You’ll notice that his pose is somewhat awkward—that there is nothing in the space behind him—and that the colors are somewhat “bumped up” in this work. This is all typical of Mannerism.

Beccafumi: Mystical Rapture in a Modern Sense

Beccafumi - The Appearance of St Michael on the Castel Sant’Angelo - c. 1528 - Tempera on panel, 23 x 36 cm - Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (click photo for larger image)Domenico di Pace Beccafumi (c. 1486–1551) was a leader in the post-Italian Renaissance style known as Mannerism. Active predominantly in Siena, Beccafumi is also regarded as one of the last undiluted representatives of the Sienese school of painting—which bears remnants of the decorative qualities and elegant beauty of the late Gothic period.

Beccafumi’s more Mannerist works are characterized by elongated forms, and by the contrapposto revived and advanced by both Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Beccafumi used “soft colors, sometimes said to be primal in tone, and a fluid composition” in contrast to many of his contemporaries. The artist’s paintings embody a “jarring, emotional feel” that might stimulate an almost “mystical rapture”.  Beccafume’s brilliant synthesis of the past and present, combined with his own innovations, are part of what render Mannerism a far more modern style than the Baroque that would follow it. 

The panel featured here is one of the surviving two predella paintings which belonged to the altarpiece commissioned for the church of San Niccolò al Carmine, in Siena. The predella depicted scenes from the legend of St Michael. Beccafumi abandoned the use of oils in this work, for the less flexible medium of tempera (by his time considered “old fashioned”). The influence of newly discovered ancient Roman frescoes in the Baths of Titus, which Beccafumi had seen in Rome, might be a possible explanation for this choice.

Summer!

Guiseppe Arcimboldo - Summer - 1563 - Oil on panel, 67 x 51 cm - Kunsthistorisches Museum, ViennaWhat About Art? will be on vacation from July 18th through July 31st. Enjoy the rest of your July and we’ll see you in August. In the meantime…

Guiseppe Arcimboldo (1526-1593) was an Italian Mannerist painter whose odd (some would say grotesque) compositions of fruits, vegetables, animals, books, and other objects were arranged to resemble human portraits. In the 20th century these double images were greatly admired by Salvador Dali and other of the Surrealist painters. 

The following description of “Summer” has been excerpted from the Web Gallery of Art….

“The painting featured here is part of a cycle dedicated to the Four Seasons. [The artist created several other versions of the series, held in other museum collections.] Summer is the only dated picture of the series (1563). For the first time, Arcimboldo composes heads from all kinds of objects, whose selection gives meaning to the allegory. This compositional method was certainly not invented by Arcimboldo, but the sophistication and imagination with which the painter applies the themes in the picture-puzzles are a very personal achievement.

In the profile bust of Summer the cheek and neck area are composed of a large peach, quince, garlic, white young onions, yellow beets and white eggplant; the mouth and lips are formed of cherries and the open pea pod within imitates a row of teeth. The nose is a young wild cucumber and the chin is a pear; the eye shines as a glassy sour cherry between two small pears. The bulge of the forehead seems to be made of brown-skinned onions; even the eyebrows - a curved grain-ear - are not overlooked. On the temple are three hazelnuts in their covers, and in the place of the ear is a dried corncob. 

The ensemble is completed with a head covering, effectively a cap or a hat made of fruit and vegetables bedded in greenery, from which emerge oat spikes resembling a hat feather. The clothing in woven straw has a single artichoke and the woven signature and date are integrated into the composition as jewelry.” 

Madonna of the Harpies

Andrea del Sarto - Madonna of the Harpies - 1517 - Oil on wood, 208 x 178 cm - (83.2 x 71.2 in.) Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (click photo for larger image)Perhaps the most famous work of Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530) is the altarpiece painted for the nuns of San Francesco dei Macci, known as the “Madonna of the Harpies”. The work shows St John the Evangelist and St Francis on either side of the Madonna and Child, on a high polygonal pedestal, decorated at the corners with the so-called Harpies. In the center, beneath the artist's signature, are the opening words of a hymn to Our Lady of the Assumption. This painting is truly a milestone in the career of Andrea del Sarto, and bears witness to the level of maturity of the most significant artistic experiences of the early 16th century: the "atmospheric" painting of Leonardo, the meditation recently infused with a new freshness in the "grandiose" manner of Michelangelo, the elegant and solemn classicism of Fra Bartolomeo endowed with a new intensity of color after his stay in Venice, and the experience of Raphael's work in Rome. These are all motifs that come together in a single stylistic solution, the greatness of which was immediately recognized in Florence and elsewhere. The figure of the Madonna, wrought into a composed chiasmus (crosswise arrangement) in order to balance the weight of the Child, lights up the center of the picture with the intense rose color of her robe, tempered by harmony with the pale blue of her mantle, and with the brilliant yellow of the light fabric draped over her shoulders, beneath the beautiful drapery of the white veil covering her head. For centuries—ever since a judgment by Vasari—the work was considered to be the prototype of classicism instilled into religious subjects, a refined synthesis of Leonardesque `sfumato', Raphaelesque balance, and plastic monumentality in the style of Michelangelo. Andrea del Sarto, who Vasari dubbed the "painter without errors", gives us here a typical example of intellectual religiousness of clear neo-Platonic derivation.