It could have been worse. (A total mis-use of Durer's image of Melancholy)

So. Life for a woman in modern Italy may mean having to deal with more traditional gender roles than in North America, may mean always being the one doing the laundry; it may mean 50% unemployment and total inequality of pay, but just think: it was worse, much worse, 500 years ago.

This month, the Italy Blogging Roundtable tackles the difficult topic of ‘Women in Ialy,’ and this time I have gotten out of the trap of having to write about a difficult topic that would result in me complaining about something I can’t do anything about. Rather, with this short survey of womens’ roles in the past, perhaps we can illuminate some of the sources of present gender roles in Italy.

Disclaimer: the following is not a scholarly paper nor does it contain proper citations or bibliography; rather it is intended as a somewhat sarcastic though thoroughly researched summary of the life of the Renaissance woman in my own words. Think of it as everything you’ve always wanted to know about life in the Renaissance in 1000 words or less.

Whose fault is it anyway?

Christian teaching had a lot to do with the way gender roles were constructed in Early Modern Italy, and unfortunately, women got the brunt of the deal in Genesis, marking us for centuries to come. The evil female serpent that tempted the weak woman resulted in expulsion from the Garden of Eden and the punishment that women would, from then on, bear children in pain and slave as mothers.

Detail of Masaccio's Explusion of Adam and Eve

In the 2001 book Virtue and Beauty, David Alan Brown remarks that the frequently represented images from Mary’s life – Annunciation, pregnancy, the Nativity, Madonna and Child, and finally the Lamentation – mirror society’s expectations for women and provide a model for their behaviour. The only difference is that most women were supposed to be married first! If we look at the lifecycle of women in this pre-modern period, she is at the height of her importance in her childbearing years, and everything revolves around this.

Marriage

Most of what we know about women in Renaissance Italy comes from documents, paintings or other visual evidence that tell us much more about the patrician lifestyle than that of peasants. The lower classes are more often referred to incidentally or we know about their lives through records of institutions. Most of these documents and paintings are by the hand of men, so contain a certain dose of chauvenism that has to be interpreted to find a measured version of reality.

Documents do, however, correctly tell us facts like the average age of marriage. In Renaissance Florence, girls from nice families were usually married to a man of her family’s choice when she was about 16 years old and he might be going on 30, since he should already be established in business. The peasant classes tended to marry between subjects of about the same age who were permitted a certain amount of courting contact to ensure compatibility, since the priority here was a reliable working partner.

Sebastiano Mainardi, engagement portrait, c. 1500, Berlin

Amongst the wealthy, marriage was a business transaction. Her family paid a dowry to his, consisting of money and household objects (a chest full of linens and other items), while he usually gave her bethrothal jewelry before the big day – if you ever see a portrait of a young girl with an important necklace, that’s probably an image exchanged during bethrothal. The dowry that a woman brought into the marriage technically remained hers, but was put in the hands of the man for management. Rather often in this merchant society, a man married when he needed the influx of cash for a major commercial venture like a sailing to Asia, and rather often one reads of dowries lost in this way.

The actual wedding process in this period was not that of the modern church wedding but more of a domestic process of exchange, in which a ring exchanged at home did symbolize, as it does today, a promise. Processions and parties were just as important, as they spread word of the marriage to the whole neighbourhood or city. At the end of it all, the new couple was ushered into a bedroom and expected to perform, while in some cases the festivities continued next door – and in France, the man’s rowdy friends sang lewd songs below the window.

Childbirth and child raising

Bernardino Licinio, Arrigo family, Galleria Borghese, Rome

As mentioned above, patrician women were supposed to produce healthy male heirs – as many as possible, since many of them died young. Licinio’s portrait of a matriarch and her family, the youngest still in swaddling cloths, is a good way of imagining what this family should have looked like on a good day.

To help this result along, there was imagery that scholars believe might have been used to help envisage a happy outcome of a pregnancy, like painted birth trays that show naked little boys (below, one of my favourite exemplars from the Palazzo Davanzati). These were sometimes included in a woman’s dowry, or commissioned at marriage, rather than given as gifts after birth.

Lo Scheggia, birth tray, Palazzo Davanzati collection, Florence

About childbirth and child raising there were as many written manuals then as there are today, including a series of interesting vernacular midwife manuals from the mid sixteenth century onwards that were, at least ideally, intended to also be perused by regular women (not just midwives). The birthing room was a woman’s domain. Birth took place on a horseshoe-shaped chair to help gravity do its job. Men stayed outside, at most consulting the stars to make sure the birth time is a lucky one as in the illustration below from 1583. After the birth, the woman stayed in bed for the laying in, visited by gift-bearing female neighbours.

A seated woman giving birth aided by a midwife. Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images

Sometimes, in images of birth scenes, one also sees the wetnurse, ready to take on the newly arrived babe. Nursing one’s own child was considered inappropriate for the upper classes, in part because it was believed (as some still believe now) that breastfeeding diminishes fertility, while these women had to get pregnant again as soon as possible. The practise of wetnursing (not to mention the presence of another young and attractive woman in the house) brought its own set of social problems that have been the subject of numerous articles. For families that could not afford an in-house nurse, children were sent out to the countryside for nursing and returned – if they survived – at weaning.

As you might imagine, taking care of the kids was up to mom (and her servants). Girls remained in her realm until marriage, docilely practising needlework, while little boys from the age of seven were abruptly removed from their mother’s care lest they end up effeminate, and given a strict formal education.

The rest of the time

When not overly pregnant or lying in, women were supposed to keep control of the household, which for a wealthy family meant tightly managing a budget and keeping staff honest and hard at work. Occasional complaints have come down to us of how hard it is to find good household help. Women actually had a large responsibility, and being a good household manager was a desired quality in a wife. With the husband often away for business – and sometimes in political exile – some women were also stand-ins for their husbands to a certain extent.

In the ideal sense, though, women were to stay home and do needlework; some also produced textiles in the home, spinning and weaving for the family’s needs or even beyond. Other time was intended to be spent praying using simple illustrated prayer books made specifically for women. Probably in reality more women spent time getting the massive fires going for cooking, and doing craploads of laundry for all those babies, even if servants were hired to do this. Only servants went to the market – proper ladies went out chaperoned only to church and to visit other ladies lying in, ensuring a good stream of visitors on these occasions which must have been a welcome time out to exchange gossip.

Italy roundtable: Women in Italy

So. Although the role of women today, in Italy as anywhere else, is difficult, when I feel laden town by the pseudo-medieval laundry hanging process here or when I spend a day looking after the house, I try to be thankful that I married a modern man and live in a modern world. Had I been born in 1476 instead of 1976, would I have had the knowledge, courage, or even ability to go against the grain? to not have children, to choose my life? to be educated, highly?

On the real topic of what it is like to be a woman in Italy, we knights of the monthly Italy Roundtable have been planning to write for some time. Here’s our chance to read lots of female opinions on the matter. But lately the topic has also inspired two other Florentine bloggers, so I would like to name them honourary knights for this month and have linked their posts below, too.

• Kate: This Woman’s World
• Jessica: Being a Woman in Italy: It’s Complicated
• Rebecca: In memoriam
• Gloria: Wonder Women of Tuscany
• Melanie: also coming soon

• Liz Petrosian in Letters from Florence (part I and part II)
• Michelle Tarnopolosky in Maple Leaf Mamma here

A short bibliography

For a scholarly bibliography of women and art, from a senior level university course I taught on the topic, see here.

For some nice general reading, try the following books that I have selected on Amazon.com as the best of scholar-written general public information on this topic:

Agnolo Gaddi, the official heir to the school of Giotto (son of Taddeo Gaddi, who was Giotto’s godson), received the commission to paint the high chapel at Santa Croce around 1380 from the Alberti family. Although the chapel is the largest and arguably the most important in the church, it was the last to be painted – around it were 5 chapels painted by Giotto and his school. Why it was done last remains a mystery. The topic is the Legend of the True Cross, as told in the Golden Legend by Jacopo da Veragine. It is told in eight scenes, reading from top to bottom, first on the right side (looking at the altar), then on the left. The artist followed the text closely, guided likely by the Franciscans, while also working to satisfy the Alberti patrons and, as much as possible, to satisfy his own interests in running a large workshop. That the huge fresco was used as grounds for teaching may begin to explain the inclusion of numerous features that otherwise would appear to be “art for art’s sake” – the details mentioned above, that could not be seen from the ground.

High Chapel, Santa Croce - diagram of frescoes (source: Opera di Santa Croce)

In 2005, scaffolding was erected in the high chapel, so view from the ground has been blocked for almost seven years, but since Easter 2011 and until approximately June 2013, the structure has remained installed while restorers complete final work on the wooden crucifix above the altar and on scenes on the exterior of the chapel. The restoration of the frescoes inside the chapel is complete, thanks to funding by a Japanese patron of the arts, Tetsuya Kuroda, who donated 1.2 million euro; the rest has been financed by the Opera di Santa Croce and a small amount by the state (MiBAC provided 285,000 euro). The restoration involved consolidation of the frescoed surface, including removal of dangerous inserts of gesso and metal that had been used in the past to fill cracks that naturally occur with ground shifting; cleaning of the entire surface from centuries of dirt, using water and some neutral chemicals; and conservative neutral infilling of large lacunae in the iconography.

Our guide, Marco

When Gaddi and his workshop set out to paint this massive chapel, of course they first planned the iconography (along with the patrons) and decided what was going to be painted where. Cartoons were drawn (and probably approved). And perhaps at the same time, he thought about how he would reach the walls, and planned the design accordingly. Each scene, which is delimited by decorative borders, is divided into an upper and lower part, usually consistent with landscape or architecture in the upper/background and figures in the lower/ foreground, with the top right lunette as the only real exception. Gaddi set up his scaffolding at the division between these areas. The modern restorers did the same, when possible using the same anchor holes made over 600 years earlier. In the photo above, you can see one such dividing line near Marco’s feet; below is another example, shot downwards where the scaffolding floor has been lifted – the upper scene is of a hospital, and the lower scene shows the Cross being sawed to pieces.

Note the line that divides upper and lower scenes

From this angle, the upper and lower scenes seem very abruptly divided, but from below I honestly would have never noticed how rigidly those heads are lined up. Of course, the “giornate” or days of work of the fresco are also very easy to note in these massive divisions of space. You can see these outlines around the heads of figures or groups of figures, such as around the beard and nose in the image below. (If you need a refresher, see my article on how to paint a fresco the Renaissance way, and relevant vocabulary.)

Note the "giornate" division around his nose and beard

Of the other things that can be seen from up close, three involve what is now (mostly) lost: blue pigment, wax relief, and gold and brass applications. As you may know, blue pigment and fresco don’t get along, so ultramarine or less expensive blue pigments were applied “a secco” – dry, at the end of the process. Where blue was to be applied, they put a dark red base so help set off the colour (it was more effective, ie. cheaper, to paint blue over red than on white plaster). Over time, fresco remains, but a secco does not. The only blue left at all in this chapel is in the vault frescoes depicting the four Evangelists, plus Saints Francis and John the Baptist.

The vault

Saint John the Baptist

In the rays coming off Saint John here, you can see a bit of gold leaf, which was also used in decoration on clothing throughout the frescoes. In some cases this is intact or has been helped along by previous restorations, and the presence of gold is altogether to be expected in a commission of this sort. An element that one sees less of, unless one spends a lot of time up on scaffolding I suppose, is wax applications that were subsequently gilded. These provided relief and thus were more visible from below – I think later artists built up using gesso rather than wax, as I seem to recall seeing this on a scaffolding tour of the Lippi frescoes in Prato (years ago, pre blog!). On the left side of scene photographed below, see how the horses’ apparel were decorated using this relief technique.

The dark dots on the horses' reins are wax that was gilded

The third lost element in these frescoes is the application of brass “gilding” rather than gold, which was used amply in the battle scene on the left wall, where robbers are stealing all sorts of things (incense holders, reliquaries, etc.), and all of these things once shone with metallic splendour. Now, we don’t have the bling, but we do have… underdrawings.

Where brass is lost, drawings are gained. See the stuff under the robbers' arms?

The other great marvels of this fresco cycle are: the delicate technique used, the variety of facial types, and the unusual details that nobody would ever see until they climbed up as we have.

For example, the ear of Queen Helen. If you’ve ever tried painting in fresco, you will have discovered that transparency is not something easily achieved. That’s why they invented oil painting (just kidding, sort of). So to see a transparent veil, and under it, a perfectly shaped ear, somewhere near the top of a chapel is certainly spectacular. Marco, our guide, suggested that this is one place where Gaddi used the fresco to teach his pupils the secrets of the trade. In the case of the head of one of the major figures in the painting, which probably took a day to paint, I presume that the master painted it himself. (The crown also included gilding and relief.)

Queen Helen

... and the Queen's ear.

In the case of other details, the Master’s hand may not be present: little things painted far up in the fresco, representing details of the landscape background, were probably added by students. These adorable scenes of animal life indicate that very few people in a 1380′s city had seen a squirrel in real life. The ducks are cute, though one looks somewhat like a mini dromedary.

Finally, a quick nod to another feature that is very present, though not so unusual for a fresco of the Giotto school: every face is different. Well, that is, except for a few that were done with the same cartoon. Like Giotto, Agnolo Gaddi characterized every figure with facial shape, intricate hairstyles, clothing, and gesture. Here are just a few examples of such detailed figures in the “crowd” parts of the fresco.

Of course, the regal figures received even more attention…

And at the end, Gaddi included his own portrait, something that was to become common in the Renaissance – but does anyone know if, in the 1380s, other artists had done so?

Portrait of Agnolo Gaddi

This video by my colleague Brenda Dionisi at The Florentine for LdM news includes an interview with the director of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, responsible for the restoration, and points out some of the work’s unusual features.

To find out more about the restoration of this work, or to zoom in and study the frescoes if you can’t go in person, you can use the Modus Operandi online interactive documentation system.

If you’re visiting Florence before June 2013, put this tour on your schedule. It runs almost daily, is available in English or Italian, and costs only 10 euros per person for a once in a lifetime experience.

To reserve a tour

Contact Opera di Santa Croce – the tour costs 10 euros per person and includes access to the entire church.
Book by phone – Monday to Friday (9.30-17.00), Tel. +39 055/246 6105 (ext. 3)
Book by email – booking@operadisantacroce.it
For questions in English, you can ask Paola Vojnovic at vojnovic@santacroceopera.it
Website: www.santacroceopera.it

PHOTO RIGHTS: All photos COPYRIGHT arttrav.com 2013, used by permission of Opera di Santa Croce. Photos may not be reproduced.

If you wish to obtain copies of any of these photos for educational use, only for classroom projection, please write to info @ arttrav.com.

Patrick Mimran, Medici billboard, www.mimran.com

The French artist Patrick Mimran, who is currently showing at the Museo Alinari in Florence, has been printing large advertisement-like signs with provocative statements about art for the past decade. Right now, outside the museum, is a sign that says “Today’s rich and powerful collectors are unfortunately not as tasteful as the Medicis”. Grammar aside, I would say that he may be in part right, but that he is missing at least half the story behind Medici (and their contemporaries’) patronage. It is not about taste (which is relative, and a modern construct), but about function, and about how the concept of art and artists has evolved in the past five decades, to the point that we may ask ourselves if the Renaissance model of patronage is at all viable – or desirable – in the 21st century.

As some of you know, I am involved in the promotion of a call for bloggers to be part of a team, with me, at Florens 2012 Cultural and Environmental Heritage Week next November (yeah, you can win a trip to Florence). This means that I spend a lot of time thinking about the connections between culture and economy, since the foundation running this major event is concerned with promoting best practises that demonstrate that culture can generate economy, and hopes to force policy change to help this take place.

We have assigned bloggers a few challenging themes that they are supposed to jam about on their blogs, and the nexus between the arts and economy is one of them. It would not be fair if I did not attempt this myself. We have asked bloggers to reflect on whichever themes are closest to their interests or knowledge, and what came to mind to me was my knowledge of Renaissance art production and patronage and how this differs from the current economic structure of the arts.

I am clearly not able to resolve all the world’s art funding problems in one blog post, but it is worth taking the opportunity to raise some issues, no? Feel free to extend my thoughts by writing essay-length comments below.

Renaissance patron vs. modern collector

Lorenzo de' Medici. He was a good patron, but if you were an artist, would you ally yourself with him now?

I was thinking about what the difference is between say, a patron like Lorenzo de’ Medici and a collector like Francois Pinault when it comes to relationships with artists and how they might benefit. I don’t know what kind of relationship Mr. Pinault establishes with ‘his’ artists, if any. Is he a mentor, does he guarantee any form of return business? I assume that he commissions, and purchases, and leaves the artists to do their thing. Lorenzo de’ Medici, of course, had a different approach, putting young artists like Michelangelo in his ‘garden’ for training, and, as other Renaissance patrons, dictating subject, meaning, and probably execution to a certain extent. As far as I know, there is no contemporary patron with a method similar to the Renaissance model. The closest we get are the ‘good’ collectors.

We can also play down the contrast between past and present by remembering that not all visual or other arts was created and consumed through direct patronage of a single artist. The annals of art history are full of “the master of” this and that, precisely because there were many lesser or workshop artists who produced rather standard items that might, at most, be customized upon the request of the buyer who liked the model but wanted his own face tacked on. The fact that every patrician home in Florence had a Madonna in it dictated a market for standard Madonnas that were sometimes made in gesso, sometimes produced serially, and also often sold secondhand. This Lo Scheggia is one of the better of this type.

Madonna by Lo Scheggia in the Zeri collection, Bologna

But when we speak of Renaissance patronage now, we usually have in mind the single wealthy patron and single genius artist model, so that’s the one I’m contrasting with the modern situation. And I wonder: would we even want (what we think of as) Renaissance patronage now? Contemporary artists and their Renaissance predecessors are two totally different beasts. If he could get a position at court, the Renaissance artist had a full time job and was paid, in some cases, a salary independent of what he produced – like Mantegna in Mantova and Leonardo at the French court.

Now, I don’t know many artists who would want to be tied down like this. Few artists would want to end up having to design stage sets for ephemeral events and paint flattering portraits of ugly patrons. (Those that do are called graphic designers, ha ha!) Perhaps the closest we can get to an updated and useful version of this patrician patronage model nowadays is the artists’ residence – usually underwritten by some private foundation, they provide brief but idyllic situations in which to produce in liberty.

Reasons for patronage then and now

Damien Hirst's shark. Investment art?

The aims of each century of collectors or patrons is also different. In the Renaissance, spending was a sign of magnificenza, which was considered a good thing, and was both about your family’s image and about giving a gift to your city. Pinault, in reality, seems to be thinking along similar lines since he gave back to the world by opening a museum in Venice. In both cases, this spending on the arts reflects well upon the image of he who spends.

Personal spending in large sums now is called conspicuous consumption, and is negative despite it being not that far off from magnificenza. Especially in a crisis atmosphere, spending even by the state is frowned upon.

Mimran – the artist whose quote is illustrated at the top of this post – brings in the factor of taste. What is good taste, anyway? It is the collective western academy-learned sense of beauty, a 19th-century construct. (Chinese taste is different, and they think it is perfectly good taste.) Ed Goldberg tells me that in the Renaissance the closest concept to this might have been judgement (giudizio), a kind of level-headed decision making skill that merchants and bankers had to have in everything.

What makes the Medici’s tastes better than that of collectors now? Nothing. Just history.

What I think might play into this issue of motivation is art as investment (now) vs art as edification and enjoyment (then). We have a few testimonies to conversation in front of works of art (real or imagined) in Cinquecento literature. For example, we know people admired historiated maiolica plates and used them as conversation pieces; the story represented was inscribed often on the backside, intended to be turned over and revealed. I wonder if anyone really enjoys embalmed sharks, or if they just figure a Damian Hirst will have good resale value. The investment in art has come to extremes in the creation of Art Mutual Funds, where you become part owner of some art that a consultant says is worth something. Where is the edification in that? To paraphrase what Ed Goldberg has said about Hirst in an email: “you don’t ever get to hang it over your couch.”

Potential future models

Some givens. It is a given that aritsts (not just visual, but in any of the arts) need funding to work, and it is also a given that a civilized culture is defined by its cultural production. Let’s add to this that the arts are considered a luxury, which means they flourish in situations in which there is disposable income.

We have not seen a whole lot of disposable income in the past ten years, and to say that there have been cuts to the arts would be to state the plainly obvious. Apart from all the problems this causes, it shows a shortsightedness about the potential for the arts to – not just to educate, to edify, to delight but to – make money, plain and simple. To make money and thus to create jobs, to support families, to contribute to the economy.

In Italy, art seems to be taken for granted rather than understood as a resource; it is a burden on the state rather than an opportunity. I don’t just mean that art is an opportunity to sell more tickets or to employ more bored state employees; rather it is a chance to properly preserve, manage and promote in order to educate and generate more cultural production in the largest sense of ‘culture’ beyond just the visual arts.

In the United States, the concept of crowdfunding has taken off, with platforms such as Kickstarter leading the way in terms of number of projects presented, though there are others dedicated more to the arts. An interesting article on ArtLog describes the phenomenon of using Kickstarter to fund contemporary art projects, and I was surprised to see some projects actually earn more than their set goal. While positive for some artists, turning to the crowd means that those projects that have the greatest mass appeal are more likely to get funded and get visibility, which may not be the best thing for culture as a whole.

Not a conclusion

I, of course, have no solution. Do you? If nobody is going to fund the arts, are the arts going to have to change (unrecognizably)? We have yet to find the balance between economically viable arts, artists’ needs, what the public wants, and reasonable quality as judged by the cultural and aesthetic needs of our time.

With HUGE thanks to Hasan Niyazi and Ed Goldberg for their reflections on this material by email – what was a terrible rant is now a slightly more structured one.

If these questions interest you, you can follow the adventures of the Team Florens bloggers and I on twitter with the hashtag #Florens2012, follow @fflorens official account on twitter, and during the event watch it in streaming. And if you have a blog, apply to be part of it all!

Pieter Bruegel the Elder's depiction of sloth in the Land of Cockaigne (1567) is much more entertaining than Italian Renaissance depictions.

Any art history 101 student comes across the virtues and vices, but if asked to name them one by one, is liable to fail the test. Myself included… I always have to look it up. And when I see the list, I am reminded of when Carrie, my wonderful friend in the Masters’ program at SUF, and I looked it up and spent time trying to come up with examples of each, which resulted in hours of hilarity then and giggles still now every time we think of… sloth, or accidia. We admit to being rather odd.

So for the record: There are seven virtues and seven vices, and each of these are divided into sub-groups of 3+4 – which are all significant numbers in the Christian tradition. The three Theological Virtues are faith, hope, and charity. Being theological they are more important (at least in religious circles). The four Cardinal Virtues derive from Plato’s Republic and are somewhat more difficult to interpret: temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude.

The vices are three spiritual: pride, envy, and wrath; followed by the much more fun corporal sins of sloth (also called accidia, which for some reason makes me giggle), avarice or greed, (which is slightly different from) gluttony, and finally, good ol’ lust.

Imaging these virtues and vices in Medieval and Renaissance art served to remind viewers what to do and what not to do, like a menu of behaviour. But there are times in which it was more popular to use them – especially in their more traditional, catalogue-like form, and other moments that they are not so present, perhaps due more to the evolution of artistic style than to society’s lack of need of a reminder of how to behave.

In late Medieval and early Renaissance Italy, we see allegorical female figures lined up and with attributes to represent each action. A century and a half later, we’re hard pressed to find examples in Italy, while in Northern Europe the virtues and vices were quite popular, but it was common to represent them acted out by people, metaphorically rather than through the stricter form of the allegorical figure. This can be related to the North’s penchant for genre painting that was forced by Lutheran rejection of representational religious images.

In chronological order, some of the first virtues and vices in Italian art are by Giotto – groundbreaker that he is. In Padova’s Arena Chapel (1306), we often concentrate on the narrative scenes, and forget to study the grisaille allegorical figures that catalogue human action, good and bad, that are paired off against each other. For reasons that I do not know, he eschews the traditional 7 vices and… makes up his own? They are Despair, Infidelity, Envy, Injustice, Folly, Inconstancy and Anger. Perhaps they better contrast with the virtues.

Charity vs Envy - Giotto, Arena Chapel. Image source: www.endegor.com

Hope vs. Desperation - Giotto, Arena Chapel. Image source: www.endegor.com

In Florence, we have allegorical representations of virtues in the most dogmatic of all paintings in the city, the frescoes in the Spanish Chapel at Santa Maria Novella. This period, alternately associated with post-plague depression and Dominican zealousy, loved to catalogue things as black or white (pun intended).

Left wall of Spanish Chapel: The triumph of st. Aquinas

Above the enthroned St. Thomas of Aquinas in this fresco we can see the three theological virtues in red, white and green, and the four cardinal ones below them (Dominicans also loved numbers and hierarchic order).

Around the same time, while not exactly a virtues and vices series, we get the representation of some of the undesireable actions performed by humans in the hell scene of the Strozzi Chapel painted by Nardo di Cione (Orcagna’s brother; Orcagna did the altarpiece) in the Church of Santa Maria Novella. You will have to go see for yourself since detail photos are hard to come by (and they do not permit photography inside the church any more).

Nardo di Cione, hell scene in Strozzi Chapel, SMN

In fact, vices do appear acted out in other hell scenes, too, and are rather more fun to look at than virtues, and certainly than straight allegorical figures in general. For example, the gluttons being forced to eat in Hell in Taddeo di Bartolo’s fresco in San Gimignano is similar to the later, Northern European image of sloth pictured above.

Taddeo di Bartolo, Gluttons in Hell, San Gimignano

As Renaissance style evolved towards naturalism, lining up any kind of allegorical figures, including those of virtues and vices, went out of style. Occasionally you will see an allegory of one or another virtue, or a metaphorical representation of a vice. Usually these are very complex panel paintings that get art historians spilling ink for centuries. Perhaps the public, after centuries of learning the standard representations, was deemed ready to deal with more difficult interpretations.

Mantegna did some crazy allegories while under the employ of Isabella d’Este. His drawing in the British Museum of Virtues and Vices is an allegory of the fall of humanity, beautifully explained here. In the glory of full colour is the Louvre painting entitled ‘Minerva expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue’ in which a cast of shady, deformed characters are shooed out of Minerva’s virtuous hot tub, which has recently been explicated on the fun website WTF Art History.

Mantegna, Minerva Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue, circa 1500 (Louvre)

The strangeness of this image comes nowhere near that of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, which incidentally is one of the paintings that got me so into art history as a teenager.

Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights. Image: wikimedia

Vices, unquestionably, are more fun than Virtues, which we must not forget were essentially represented in just about all Renaissance Italian art. For example, every portrait of a woman was, either explicitly or not, a portrait of virtue through beauty and chastity. The representation of each, either in metaphorical or allegorical form, served its social purpose in this period, at least until art, and society, decided to focus on other topics.

Or… where did this iconography go? Anyone got a better conclusion?

Italy Roundtable posts on virtues and Vices

• Gloria gets us giggling with Maledetti Toscani and her reflections on her own peoples’ character traits.
• Jessica admits to some guilty character vices in her love of cheesy Italian music in ‘What the hell am I listening to‘
• Rebecca is, to date, as remiss as I am in producing a post this July. I think we are all too busy!

The Roundtable will be back in September 2012. In the meantime why don’t you get a kick out of past posts?

The term Japonisme (Japonism in English and Giapponismo in Italian) was coined in 1872 in France, by which time there had been almost twenty years of contact between Western Europe and the Eastern country; enough time for some of the European artists to go quite crazy for the essential and spiritual style found in Japanese decorative and fine arts.

Giuseppe De Nittis, Pioppi nell’acqua, 1878 circa, Firenze, Uffizi, Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe

The movement was strongest in France, so some of the first Italian artists to be “afflicted” were those studying in Paris. Meanwhile, back in Florence, the eccentric Frederick Stibbert seems to have been an influential collector of Japanese decorative arts, starting in 1870, to the point that villa owners imitated him. Shopping at the antiquarian Janetti, they decorated whole rooms in a Japanizing style (to various degrees recognizable as such).

The exhibit at Palazzo Pitti is divided into seven small sections, of which I wish to highlight just a few.

Italians in Paris

A decidedly Japanese feel can be intuited when looking at the china ink drawing of poplars in water by Giuseppe De Nittis (1846-1884), pictured above, friend of Monet and a decade-long resident of Paris. The French Impressionist painter did 24 canvases of the same trees in 1891; one from the Musée d’Orsay is displayed next to the De Nittis. Both are vertical and asymmetrical, though the monochrome work by the Italian perhaps better captures an Oriental feel.

Monet, Poplars, Private collection, photo: wikipedia

Japan on the skin – the kimono

The kimono becomes an object of great interest to Europeans and Americans at the end of the nineteenth century and a de-riguer accessory for anyone who considered him or herself “into Japan” at the time. Thus it shows up on women in paintings and even in a self-portrait by a female artist, Elisabeth Chaplin (1892-1982). Actually a “red shawl”, the fabric is reminiscent of that used for traditional red-based, floral kimonos, and the artist juxtaposes this fabric with a pose that recalls Bronzino’s portraits, a strange mix of eastern and Florentine. The artist (though not necessarily this painting) was quite well appreciated by the Society of Belle Arti of Florence.

Elisabeth Chaplin, self portrait with red shawl, 1912 circa, Firenze, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria d’arte moderna

Mario Cavaglieri’s portrait of a woman in a sitting room captures an essence of Japan in its vertical orientation and in the mass of folded fabric that extends beyond the seated female figure, recalling the seated geishas of Ukiyo-e prints.

Later, in the 1920s, Japanese influence mixes with Art Deco very nicely, resulting in a fashion that combines elements from both, as can be seen in a design for a dress by the Florentine Thayat, a good friend of Bernard Berenson’s incidentally (catalogue no. 51).

Mario Cavaglieri, Figura femminile in salotto, 1920, Piacenza, Galleria d’arte Moderna ricci Oddi

Japonism in Tuscany

Of the Tuscan artists influenced by Japonism there’s Vito D’Ancona, Telemaco Signorini and a little bit of Giovanni Fattori - two famous Macchiaioli names. The most interesting of these is, in fact, a small Fattori from a private collection (no photo, sadly, has been provided in the press kit). An image of fisherman on the seafront fixing their nets, the strange perspective and limited colours appear to be influenced by manga images by Hokusai, which impact one also sees on Fattori’s contemporary, Signorini. The latter’s oil on cardboard sketch of a bare tree in Settignano, just steps from my own home, also shows an essentialism that seems sympathetic to a Japanese point of view.

Japonism did not exactly die out, but the vogue seems to have slowly dwindled. The exhibit ends with a painting by Mario Cavaglieri from 1955 that is labeled as the “masterpiece of Italian Japonism”. The large oil, as with so many of the works in this exhibit, takes Japanese objects and themes and renders them with flattened volumes and a strong sense of outline, but either the medium or the mindset of the European artist nonetheless lacks the still beauty and magnitude found in just one, tiny, Hokusai print.

Exhibit information

Giapponismo – Suggestioni dell’Estremo Oriente dai Macchiaioli agli Anni Trenta
part of Giappone, Terra di Incanti

Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Palazzo Pitti, Florence
April 3 to July 1 2012

Titian’s Baptism of Christ

A strong diagonal dominates this vertically-oriented painting, with Christ in the center, standing, receiving the gift of baptism from St. John the Baptist.  A devout, elderly patron with a beard at the bottom right is participating in the event. A typical Titianesque landscape extends in the background; a very blue sky is populated by pairs of cherubim. Seeing the work in person allows one to observe the rich colours and the interesting details such as the figure and animals in the background along the line of the river.

This painting is recalled by Marcantonio Michiel in 1531:

“in casa de M. Zuan Ram” nella parrocchia di Santo Stefano: “La tavola del S. Zuanne che bapteza Christo nel Giordano, che è nel fiume insin alle ginocchia, cun el bel paese, et esso M. Zuan Ram ritratto fin al cinto, et cun la schiena contra li spettatori, fo de man de Titiano.”

“In the house of M. Zuan Ram in the parish of Santo Stefano: the painting of S. Zuanne (John) who baptizes Christ in the Jordan (river), who is in the river up until his knees, with a nice landscape, and said M. Zuan Ram depicted until his waist, and with his back to the spectator, by the hand of Titian.”

Based on the will of Giovanni Ram in 1511, and with the help of stylistic comparison, the painting has been dated to between 1511 and 1513, so exactly 500 years ago. This makes it a very early work by the great Venetian artist, who had just recently finished the frescoes at the Santo in Padova.

The painting remained in the Venetian family until the end of the sixteenth century; sold to Rome, it is recorded in 1624 amongst the possessions of Cardinal Carlo Emanuele Pio, and then in 1750 ceded to the Musei Capitolini.

A loan to Siena

Siena, Baptistry

The city of Siena has taken advantage of this exceptional loan – the first time the painting has been moved from Rome – to create a dialogue between it and permanent works at Siena’s Duomo and in other locations in the city. For the occasion, they have produced multi-lingual and multi-media informational material, a video guide, made available numerous guided tours, and simplified the opening hours of all the structures (something much needed in Italy!).

Art, history and faith are the themes of this dialogue that involve works present in the Duomo complex’s crypt, baptistry, high altar and in the chapel of San Giovanni (in which is conserved a relic of the saint’s arm, inside a beautiful 15th-century reliquary!). Most of these works depict, rightly so, Baptism or Saint John; amongst them are a relief by Ghiberti and fresco by Lorenzo di Pietro.

Exhibition Information

Ex aqua et Spiritu – Siena accoglie Tiziano, “Battesimo di Cristo”
March 1 to August 31, 2012
Open daily 10:30 – 19:00
inclusive ticket: € 12,00
www.operaduomo.siena.it

Cantagallina, Scene in a Village Square with a Church, Princeton University Art Museum

Here is what Lia is able to tell us about the work:

The drawing is a typical work by the etcher and draughtsman Remigio Cantagallina (1582-1656), who produced numerous landscape drawings throughout his career. I personally love the way he inserts people in his city views and landscapes. There is almost always at least some person seated and seen from the back that seems to reference us as the viewer and creates a vantage point for the scene before us.

He was born in San Sepulcro (Sansepolcro) and this view reminds me of towns around Arezzo, and could even be his home town.

Cantagallina’s work was greatly influenced by northern printmakers like Paul Brill and in fact, the artist traveled to the Netherlands in 1612-13.  Many of Cantagallina’s drawings are composed of tight hatching recalling the work of his northern colleagues and reminding us of his print production. This work is particularly striking for its dramatic use of wash that creates chiaroscuro affects.

The Princeton sheet is dated on the wall at left next to the tree: “6 di luglio 1633.” He inscribed the date on many of his drawings indicating that they might have acted as a type of personal journal. For this reason we believe that the places represented are accurate reflections of what they looked like at the time, so the town in this drawing ought to be identifiable.

detail of church

Detail of piazza with ruined building that likely is no longer

We need to take into account that the piazza represented here may have changed over time, though the church is a likely landmark. There may be newer buildings nearby and the angle from which the drawing was made may no longer be a viable approach to the space, making it hard to identify. Lia and her colleagues hope that readers who live in the area might recognize the church, piazza and town. Please help by commenting below!

Photo used with permission, full details: Remigio Cantagallina, Italian, 1582 ‑ after 1633. Scene in a Village Square with a Church in the Center Middle Ground, Pen and iron gall ink and brush and brown wash over black chalk, 24.8 x 39.1 cm (9 3/4 x 15 3/8 in.). Princeton University Art Museum. Museum purchase, Laura P. Hall Memorial Fund x1956‑32. Photo: Bruce M. White

Designed for a general audience and with no exams or papers to worry about, the course consists of a series of thematic talks by local experts that provide a good introduction to important aspects of this topic. I will be giving one of these talks.

Some of the themes included are:

• From religious to secularized image
• The Foundling Hospital and its museum
• Emblems of  virtue, power and beauty: The female profile portrait in the Quattrocento
• Midwife manuals: early printed images of the fetus in the womb (that’s me)
• Women as patrons of art
• Sexuality and the erotic in Renaissance art
• Visits to the Uffizi, Bargello, Palazzo Vecchio, Galleria Palatina, Museo degli Argenti and the Costume Museum

My talk on midwife manuals stems from research that I presented at RSA in Venice in 2010, which gives me the opportunity to revise this for a more general public and also think about where I might publish it some time. It’s rather too long and complex for this blog, I’m afraid. Prints and books are often excluded from art history courses and may not be considered “art” in the same way as we consider a portrait painting. Yet this printed material had a large influence on the way that people perceived many things, and in this case these popular printed texts tell us something about midwifes, doctors, and womens’ bodies. For your viewing joy here is a page from one of these books.

Rueff 1554, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, all rights reserved

The course costs 450 euros and you can enroll online.

Other museums included in the initiative are the archaeological museum of Naples, Compendio Garibaldino di Caprera, Museo nazionale etnografico preistorico Luigi Pigorini di Roma, Palazzo Ducale di Mantova, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche di Urbino, Museo dei Balzi Rossi di Ventimiglia, and coming up soon in 2012, Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia, Museo d’Arte Orientale a Ca’ Pesaro in Venice, Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra in Rovereto, Armeria Reale di Torino and Museo Archeologico Santa Maria delle Monache, Isernia. There is no question that many of these museums are not just undiscovered but downright obscure, whereas Mantova, Urbino, and Perugia are a bit better known. Many Florentines have never been to Palazzo Davanzati, so this is a good opportunity to bring the museum-goers of the future to this space.

A press conference yesterday was a bit of a change from the usual monotonous presentation because 2 classes of well-behaved 10 year olds were invited, and the representative from the Mibac often spoke directly to them, which was cute. The children were asked what they liked best of the experience and one answered “the scarpetta scaldamano”, a maiolica object whose function – warming hands – was explained in the booklet. This is exactly the kind of information – how things and spaces were used – that I have always said make the museum experience, and that need to be made available in Palazzo Davanzati, a museum that has wonderful potential for families. Participants are asked to write their opinions of the museum visit online or on a handout, offering them an opportunity to reflect on and verbalize the experience. The feedback may help museums develop more projects like this in the future.

Another cute element of this booklet is a drawing of museum staff and an explanation of the people who work behind the scenes: director, conservator, curator, education services (!!), guards, security and technology staff. This reminds children that museums can potentially provide careers. It does not mention the government concorsi and complete impossibility of getting IN to a job like that, but children should be allowed to dream!

This booklet is a great idea, but it could be improved. Part (but not all) of the text from this handout is available online, but it sure would be great if Focus would make a free downloadable PDF available for posterity. Another nice thing would be if a few thousand copies were printed and given out to families for free, even after this special is over, directly at the museum front desk. Finally, I know that it is an Italian magazine, but I would like to see a similar didactic tool produced in English. Encouraging museum visits with children is important on a local and national level, but your typical Italian parent also has good visual training and may be able to guide a child better than a foreigner. Helping tourism by the provision of material in other languages is equally important, and would not have a much larger cost (for example, I would be perfectly capable of translating these twelve booklets into English for a minimal fee). That said, didactic visits to some of Florence’s museums are available upon advance reservation (see servizio didattica).

Improvements are being made in Palazzo Davanzati since I wrote about it years ago. New informative texts are available in multiple languages in most of the rooms. A welcome desk has finally been installed in the front room, with a little bookshop area, after many years of these staff members sitting at a card table in the courtyard.

With kids or not, visit Palazzo Davanzati and read along to understand the context of the early modern Italian family, a fascinating experience for adults and kids. If you can’t use the Italian material from Focus Junior, print out my guide to Palazzo Davanzati and bring it with you!

April 2011 – Official opening of Le Murate

preserved old cells at le murate

Now it's alive!

The former prison (sometimes known as “le Carceri”) has undergone a long period of restoration, and after a preview in January 2010, it opened fully and officially in April 2011. For the first three months, the superintendant of culture Giuliano da Empoli (who in December left this role, unfortunately) asked a handful of associations and media that have been close to him during the previous months to organize events. As I have been involved in le Murate from the start of Da Empoli’s position at Palazzo Vecchio, I was asked to participate with The Florentine to provide some English-language programming for this space. We had a debate called “culture clash” and 2 knit cafes, all of which were quite successful, I think.

Le Murate has been slowly taking off, rather than exploding, but it provides an interesting cultural hub at the edge of the city, along the viali, in a position that promises to become more important in the future. It takes time to populate a cultural center of this type, but the opening of a bookstore and gallery, and more recently the Literary Cafe’, are steps towards the revitalization of the space.

September to December 2011 – The Search for the lost Leonardo

For many years, my old professor Rab Hatfield (Syracuse University in Florence) has been saying that he knows exactly where, in Palazzo Vecchio, Leonardo’s famed Battle of Cascina was begun – only to be covered up by Vasari. He has in fact published a book about this. I remember a particularly impassioned talk that he gave some of us in the Salone dei Cinquecento in which he explained that certainly Vasari valued Leonardo as an artist too much to just paint over his work, so he built a wall with some space in front of it. Another art historian, Dr. Seracini, has also been working on finding the lost Leonardo for many years. Both scholars have pointed out the words “Cerca Trova” (look and you shall find) on the fresco, thought to be a hint as to where to start digging.

This year, the National Geographic Society got involved in the search, thanks to the intervention of an American photographer named Dave Yoder, who figured that using a gamma ray camera (a technology first developed by someone else) could “image” the painting behind the 12cm thick wall. His kickstarter campaign for $265,000 failed. However, National Geographic made a hefty donation to fund the work, which is going ahead without the gamma camera as far as I understand. And most importantly, Matteo Renzi, mayor of Florence, strongly wanted the research to go ahead – and for a discovery to be made.

Scaffolding went up and work commenced on November 27, 2011. The exploration team used an endoscopic probe (kinda like what they use for a gastroscopy, only finer) which they poked through very small holes (4mm) made in the painting. The only thing they determined is that there is an air space between Vasari’s wall and something behind it. Meanwhile, the Carabinieri looked on after some claimed that the research is damaging Vasari’s fresco, and an interesting polemic (it wouldn’t be italy without polemics) began. 400 signatures sit on a petition against the search behind Vasari for Leonardo, names of art historians for whom I have profound respect: Keith Christiansen, Luke Syson, Salvatore Settis, and also the vocal Tomaso Montanari and the polemical critic Francesco Bonami.

Where is all this going? I have no further updates beyond December 9th and believe that this part of the search is over. It may be stopped forever due to protests. The question remains: what would they do if they were to find Leonardo under there, anyway? Bonami says that an obsession with nostalgia and our (italians’) past keeps us from looking and moving ahead. I have to agree: Florence needs a future right now, maybe even more than more past. (On the topic of 2012 being the year Florentines find their future, read my husband’s reflections here).

December 2011 – New Opera House

The Nuovo Teatro dell’Opera di Firenze opened for a short preview at the end of December with a line up of excellent concerts to ring in the new year (unfortunately I am too cheap to have attended any of them). An attractive building designed by Paolo Desideri of Abdr Architetti Associati, it will house three concert halls when finished, including one outside ampitheatre.

2 years and 160 million euros to get to this point and it seems like a miracle, knowing how long major projects usually take around here. Unfortunately only the first phase of the works has been inaugurated, and after this “preview,” more construction is expected. The structure is expected to really open towards the end of 2012. I hope they pull it off. The Maggio Musicale, whose new home this is, says that we will see a 40% increase in programming, including laboratories aimed at children and families – which would certainly help secure the future of classical music.

December 20, 2011 – Uffizi’s Blue Rooms

Eight new rooms to hold a few hundred old paintings – the first lot of the Nuovi Uffizi restoration project that has been going on, and polemical, for as long as I can remember is complete.

Much has been made of the “sale blu“, billed as a heroic step towards a different museum display. True, the Uffizi has always had (boring) white walls and pietra serena accents in the Vasarian vision of this space. But the blue rooms are nothing new, museologically. I admit, I have not seen them yet, but having seen photos, I am immediately reminded of the Bardini museum, whose blue walls inspired Isabel Stewart Gardner. Bardini Blue was thus popular in the 19th century. Why is it, then, that in the Uffizi’s initial proposal for blue walls in 2008 – when Natalini suggested applying them to the Botticelli room (it could use some sprucing up!) – the sh*t hit the fan? This proposal was shifted to the French, Spanish, and Dutch works about which the public is apparently less sensitive.

*   *    *   *   *

So that’s 2011 art news in Florence as I saw it. A bit heavy towards December, which may be fresh in my mind, or may represent a push on the part of administration to get things done by the end of the year! Let’s hope 2012 brings even more activity and fewer polemicized debates. Happy New year, folks.

Gold Florin, 1252-1303

You’d have to have been dropped on the head when young to not notice the fortuitous timeliness of this Fall’s exhibits at Palazzo Strozzi – upstairs “Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities” and downstairs “Declining Democracy“. The headliner show addresses the beginnings of modern banking and the consequent fortune of Florence which happily resulted in the commissioning of a lot of art (mostly out of guilt or fear). Now we’re plunged in the depths of an economic recession, and Italy’s in the headlines for being the latest country that might bring down the Eurozone, a harsh downgrade that happened just days after this exhibit opened.

Whenever possible, as the director of the Strozzina, Franziska Nori, explains, the Strozzina attempts to address parallel themes in a contemporary manner. Since the economics of contemporary art was already the topic of an exhibit in 2008, curators took a step further back in time to what allowed the Medici and other banking families to make so much money in Florence: Democracy. By grouping together contemporary artists and theorists from various parts of the world and showing their visual results to the public, the exhibit contrasts positive acts of collaboration with more negative ones that embody the sensation more typical of the Italian resident: a feeling that it’s pointless to try to do anything about our current situation.

I had given myself the formidable task of trying to write a review article of the two exhibits together, but once I saw Declining Democracy and heard Dr. Nori’s answer at the press conference to the question of how the two shows are related, I realized this was a far stretch. The best I can do is this: both exhibits are equally contemporary, and they will make you reflect upon our current, collective situation whether you’re an Italian resident or a visitor from abroad.

A brief summary of the “Money and Beauty” show is in order. To kick things off, we meet the almighty florin (distant ancestor of the almighty dollar), a diminutive little sliver of 24k gold that jump-started the Renaissance in Florence. The Florentines realized that a recognized, high value currency was just what was needed to make trading possible between countries – kind of like today’s euro. Thanks to this currency, and to Florentine bankers’ and merchants’ skill at manipulating its exchange, a lot of money flowed into the city and was reinvested in beautiful things like art and architecture.

What better place than Palazzo Strozzi to address this moment in history! A statement by Giovanni Rucellai, not mentioned in this exhibit, comes to my mind. Rucellai married his ally Palla Strozzi’s daughter, and he sums up either family’s values with regard to what we would now call “conspicuous consumption:”

“I think I have given myself more honour and my soul more satisfaction by having spent money than by having earned it, above all with regard to the building I have done.”

Inside the biggest 15th-century palazzo in town, the exhibition treats the following themes: the monetary unit, usury, exchange, merchant activity, sumptuary laws, bankers and artists, beauty, and crisis. The last section refers to Botticelli’s personal crisis that led him away from Neoplatonist thought and into a personal yet very public religious crisis, not to the crisis in which we find ourselves today, though the parallel is too tempting not to draw… All the rich consumerism of the 15th century culminated in crisis in the 1490s, one of a different sort than today’s, but in neither case was crisis able to stave the flow of consumption on the part of those who could or can afford it.

We are led through the exhibit with the help of texts by the two curators. You can just imagine the discussions (fights?) that author Tim Parks and scholar Ludovica Sebregondi must have had before coming up with the unprecedented solution of giving each his or her own, signed, voice. Parks’ text remarks upon the irony that has always attracted me to both Italy and the Renaissance, while Sebregondi provides necessary historic facts. The childrens’ text is useful to get us thinking about some items from a more contemporary viewpoint.

The school of art history in which I studied is the social-historical approach, primarily associated, at its start, with Michael Baxandall in California in the 1970s. I so internalized texts like his classic Painting and Experience that many parts of this exhibit felt very familiar to me. Merchant life, religion, art and beauty co-existed in the Renaissance, each conditioning the other. Many books have attempted to illustrate this relationship in a visual manner, but none so successfully as this exhibit – with the only problem that exhibits generally don’t have extensive footnotes. Sources, however, are made rather clear, and more can be intuited by the scholarly visitor.

Botticelli, Madonna & Child, 1465, MUDI

Some items in the exhibit, and their related texts, point to the beginnings of our current crisis. A beautiful domestic Madonna and Child by Botticelli (from the Museo degli Innocenti) is of a type that might be the first true “consumer product.” It’s also product placement for the luxurious clothes and jewels that its worshippers could not wear due to sumptuary laws. Like a Renaissance version of the tv show Gossip Girl, which, along with Sex and the City was created exclusively for product placement of clothing and accessories aimed at women who would like to be able to afford them.

A document recording the creation of a Medici holding company that provides the family security from personal bankruptcy is an early example of the structure of companies today. In Italy it’s like the limited liability S.r.l. Probably the Medici were the first furbi to set the base for the “scatole vuote” that are more common in Italy than anyone knows – fake companies created in order to push around money and evade taxes.

Renaissance bankers and merchants -and those fortunate enough to be in the productive circle related to them – financed everything you see in this show, including the palace that contains them. From a taffeta belt with a precious niello on the clasp and the illustrated manuscripts from the Biblioteca Laurenziana that we call “decorative arts,” to what we call “art” – altarpieces, domestic paintings, portaits and more. The rich were great patrons of what we think is art, which they funded for two main reasons: religious works to excuse themselves from usury, and anything else (portraits of themselves, etc) to show off how smart and cultured they were.

Lorenzo di Credit, Portrait of a woman, 1485-90

The question beckons: why is there little to no funding for the arts in Italy today? (i.e. if this whole practice started here…) Should not the banks and the wealthy take it upon themselves to sponsor artists and promote culture? One reason that this does not happen as often as it should (with the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi being one lovely exception) is that “art” now is not “art” then. Renaissance “visual matter” was made almost exclusively upon the request of a patron, who had control over the content if not the style of the final “product.” Only some works were made without a specific patron, such as stock productions of birth plates and decorative items ready to be personalized for the buyer. But seldom did artists make things for themselves. Even Leonardo da Vinci, who filled sketchbooks with marvels, did not make large panel paintings of plants or rushing water. And artists on the payroll, like Mantegna, might have had a secure job but they were at the service of a master. A portrait by Botticelli, or to be specific, the one by Lorenzo di Credi of a young woman (above), serves a specific purpose – to communicate something flattering about the sitter, like one’s facebook stream might do today if well curated.

Michael Bielicky & Kamila Richter, Garden of Error and Decay, 2010

Hop on downstairs with me for a moment, to the Strozzina, where what is on display is a far cry from the eye candy upstairs. It is difficult to imagine who – especially a bank – would want to fund a cartoon wall of ideograms based on a twitter stream that you can shoot, but in which you cannot make a real difference. Or video art (so in fashion), or a website that encourages you to smile at Berlusconi for sixty seconds. All of these works are striking and interesting, but they are produced by independent-thinking artists. This is the hallmark of art today: the creativity of the single person or the group (which actually started in the Renaissance…). Art in the service of corporate interests verges on advertising, and is frowned upon. Yet everything we saw upstairs was advertising. Advertising for patrons’ piety, intelligence, generosity and beauty.

When Damien Hirst titled his diamond-encrusted skull “For the Love of God,” did he know that most Renaissance Florentine account books are prefaced with the phrase “in the name of God and profit”? Perhaps it was not what his mother uttered when she found out what he was doing, but a literary reference to the intrinsic themes of both exhibits – when the day of reckoning comes, what will YOU have done that makes you a (good) citizen?

The right question (interactive exhibit).

Exhibit Info

Money and Beauty. Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities
Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze, September 17 2011 to Jan 22 2012
Tickets: 10 euros max, 8 euros reduced – and remember the foursquare 2×1 special!
The catalogue is available in Italian from Amazon.it: Denaro e bellezza. I banchieri, Botticelli e il rogo delle vanità. Catalogo della mostra.

And

Declining Democracy. Rethinking democracy between utopia and participation
CCC Strozzina, Firenze, September 22 2011 to Jan 22 2012

Opening hours
Tuesday–Sunday 10.00–20.00
Free Thursdays 18.00–23.00
Monday closed

This autumn the BIF is launching a range of short courses of 4 or 5 days on specific themes. As with all our art history course offerings, these are open to all ages and backgrounds, from the interested traveller to the seasoned art buff, local resident, or gap-year student.

First up in September (5th-9th) we have Experiencing the Renaissance Workshop. Through a mix of site visits, lectures and, above all, studio-based hands-on sessions, you can get to grips with the nitty-gritty of an apprentice’s training, learning the main drawing techniques (silver-point, pen and ink, chalk), as well as egg tempera painting with gold leafing, and fresco painting. The great thing is that no previous artistic training is necessary, and actual talent is an optional ! Dr Alan Pascuzzi, art historian and professional artist, has you copy for each technique a Renaissance image, and you get to take your masterpiece home with you. One of the sessions looks at the history of forgeries from antiquity to the Renaissance, and the hands-on class has you putting into practice forgery techniques in drawing and painting. The BIF, naturally, declines any responsibility for what you might do with these skills !

The Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi has gained a reputation for some stunning exhibitions in recent years. The must-see show this autumn – Money and Beauty – Bankers, Botticelli, and the Bonfire of the Vanities – examines the birth of the modern banking system and the relationship between art, power and money in Renaissance Florence. We have created a 4-day course, over a long weekend, which connects with the main themes of this cross-disciplinary exhibition which is already creating such a buzz that we will be running the course twice. Exploring Money and Beauty (29th September-2nd October, and 28th- 31st October ) through tours and lectures will concentrate on the great Florentine banking families and their tastes, collecting and cultural sponsorship. The visit to the exhibition will include an informal talk by Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi Director General, James Bradburne.

For almost 100 years The British Institute of Florence (affectionately known as “the BIF”) is noted above all for its stunning library of some 50,000 volumes housed in the Palazzo Lanfredini overlooking the Arno, its archive of 19th and 20th century Anglo-Italian resident literati, its eclectic cultural programme of lectures and concerts open to all comers on Wednesday evenings, and for its language centre for the teaching of Italian and English. It is perhaps less well-known for its art history department, although this was recently given some airing because it was here that the Duchess of Cambridge (a.k.a. Kate Middleton) attended the classic trio of art history courses spanning the Middle Ages to the High Renaissance. The professors are of high caliber and the BIF provides adults with an opportunity to go “back to school”.

Prices: Experiencing the Renaissance Workshop: € 470,00; Exploring Money and Beauty: € 425,00
For further information on these courses, and if you wish to enrol please contact alspollen@britishinstitute.it
For more information on our art history offerings and language courses please see www.britishinstitute.it

The purpose of this article is to affront something huge – the internet – with another huge thing – the printing press – to show how some of the problems of the present have been dealt with in the past. This is an article that I submitted in 2009 to Wired Italia, who neglected to send me a rejection letter; when I came across it today while cleaning house I thought it was still pretty good and worth sharing here on my own information channel. (NB: long post, 2500 words, 10 minutes reading time.)

In preparation for an undergraduate lecture on Renaissance prints, I was looking over the standard texts for a “take” on the material. I paused upon William M. Ivins Jr.’s characterization, back in 1953, of the fifteenth century as a moment in visual communication in which the “road block” was finally broken. The printing press, thus, was a kind of paving machine for the transmission of text and image. It occurred to me, not very originally, that in the infancy of our theorizing about it, the internet was also a kind of road – the “information superhighway”. In fact, a youthful Bill Gates hinted at this metaphor by posing on “The Road Ahead” for his 1995 bestseller, in which he also observes that “the information highway will transform our culture as dramatically as Gutenberg’s press did the Middle Ages” (p. 9).

The web is now more an intergalactic space travel route than a two lane highway in Arizona, but the printing press versus internet comparison deserves a deeper look. When each of these technologies hit the market, we faced two main interrelated issues: creation and control. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europeans grappled with the legal and social issues created by the printing press on the local and personal level that was available to them before our unified countries and continent. After the initial growing pains, they developed positive solutions to deal with their new technological products. Some of these solutions may not be applicable in the internet age for a range of reasons, but we can learn from their approach.

Creation

We all know that on the internet everyone’s an author, and some of us question whether or not that’s a good thing. With both the printing press and the internet, the ease, speed, and low cost of technology produced first an explosion of material, and soon, concerns about accuracy and quality of content. While the new types of books to hit sixteenth-century shelves were not quite as offensive as badly spelled blogs on medieval fairs or as obscure as niche-market sites, the sudden availability of perhaps a few hundred titles in a range of subjects was a lot to handle for a market previously dominated by hand-copied Bibles and medieval scholastic texts. And that’s just to speak of books! Images, too, were reproduced in great numbers with inexpensive, wide distribution. The printing press also permitted the development of new subject matters not found in other media due to functional or cost restraints, like board games and humorous or erotic scenes, which were created by a new category of content-producers called printmakers and print-publishers.

The much hyped February 2007 ban on Wikipedia by the Department of History at Middlebury College in Vermont [i] is a concrete response to a legitimate concern about the accuracy of information made available through a technology that encourages authorship. If everyone’s an author, everyone is also a scholar and a teacher, so we have finally fulfilled the 1564 prophesy of Leonardo Fioravanti that, thanks to the press, “forse un giorno verrà tempo, che tutti saremo Dottori a un modo”.[ii] The Middlebury history professor in question was, however, worried that said “doctors” were unqualified, as was Filippo da Strada, who already in the 1470s lamented the decline in quality of Latin instruction thanks to book-learning: “ora gentaia che ignoran’ [i]talliano / te insegnaranno il parlare Tuliano?” Some professors suggest a pro-active solution to misinformation on the internet – one that I have employed myself – by having students craft correct information to be posted on Wikipedia and other popular sites like YouTube. This is the 21^st-century version of the errata corrige slip that takes advantage of the speed and flexibility of the internet.

The new generation – and that’s all of us – simply needs to learn how to recognize reliable information. Banning Wikipedia is a good rule of thumb, but it does not teach a skill that can be applied five years from now when there is a new, presently unimaginable type of information-diffusing network. With greater access to material comes the opportunity to develop analytic and evaluative skills that are not unlike those formed by our predecessors. Early Modern readers could easily determine the type of a book “by its cover”, through paratextual elements such as size, paper quality, typographic font, and layout. The sixteenth-century essentially had its equivalent of the Harmony Romance with a hunky guy on the cover, printed tightly on cheap paper. Inside the book, unlike now, the interpretation of any given title would differ quite a bit between editions. Astute readers knew that for quality they could rely on certain publishers, like Aldus Manuzio of Venice, more so than on others; in fact, applicants for permission to publish already extant texts often cited the need for a corrected version due to errors in earlier ones. The skills developed to recognize a quality book have remained pretty constant, although we may now be more easily fooled by slick cover designs. As for quality publishers, education and experience helps us prioritize university presses and peer-reviewed journals while also forming the critical skills to evaluate other types of sources.

When it comes to knowing if a book is reliable, we’re not doing too badly. So why can’t we apply similar tactics to websites? We can, both in terms of written and visual content. Students and researchers can take advantage of the opportunity to evaluate both the qualification of the author of a site and the correctness of its content through cross-reference. They can assume that, until further notice, they may only cite known authorities. Meanwhile, the casual browser searching for information on how to store tulip bulbs may find the information provided by a range of site types to be perfectly logical and thus acceptable regardless of author bias and qualification. Enforcing our evaluative capacities, like the book-buyer, the “surfer” learns to instantaneously read graphic cues that help differentiate and qualify the information provided. We can now easily distinguish a corporate website from a personal blog by the cleanliness of its layout, choice of font, and lack of animated GIFs on busy backgrounds. And while the internet regularly evolves to provide us with new information within new design templates, in the end those templates aren’t all that different from the textual versions that preceded them. Our experience with books, newspapers, and magazines has prepared us with interpretative codes for the visual and informational onslaught of the internet.

Control

All this information makes us want to control it in some way. Two of the issues we currently face are control of moral content and protection of authorship. Not surprisingly, sixteenth-century Italians had the same problems. Print widely spread lascivious, anti-Christian, low grade reading like Ovid’s Metamorphosis, the Arthurian Romances, and Boccaccio’s Decameron – oh how our standards have changed! Savonarola begged Florentines to burn their copies of these books back in 1497. Some decades later, in a speech given in Perugia in 1567, Giuliano de’ Ricci blamed the printing press for filling the world with the licentious books that ended up on the Index of Prohibited Books of 1559.[iii] While our predecessors tried to remove offensive books from the market through censorship, modern society’s free speech prohibits this, relying thus upon social pressure and correct judgment on the part of consumers. Technology, however, assists us by electronically shielding our web-browsing eyes from the pornographic content that the majority of society considers inappropriate.

Beyond protecting consumers, we also face the problem of protecting producers, a concept that derives from an inherently modern corporate model of production and revenue that began during the Renaissance. The German printmaker and painter Albrecht Dürer was mightily pissed when the young Italian engraver Marcantonio Raimondi ripped off his woodcuts of the Life of the Virgin in 1506, just one year after their production. In the ensuing litigation, which was one of the earliest “copyright trials,” Marcantonio was prohibited from using Dürer’s signature on his own works, but not from reproducing the images. Dürer issued a second edition of his prints in 1511 with a nasty warning to “envious thieves of the work and invention of others,” demonstrating his proprietary sense of authorship in a world that did not respect it.[iv] Artists today in visual, audio, and written fields copyright their work and expect fair retribution for its sale. The law is on their side, which is why iTunes is booming and Napster is dead.

But technology twins multiple resources with ease of production, resulting in a difficult to enforce grey area with one stunning advantage: both the printing press and the internet encourage creative, interactive forms of reception that range from personalization to reappropriation.

Interaction and intervention

image source: Parshall, Origins of European Printmaking

The internet offers seemingly new opportunities for the personalization of information. You can subscribe to a news aggregator or personalize your Google homepage at the click of your mouse, thus guaranteeing that you get what you want and eliminate the superfluous. Pre-digital consumers had similar desires that they resolved with less technological but more active solutions. Some literate men of the Renaissance approached printed images with an eye to pasting them into manuscripts either as embellishments or as illustrations, as was the case with the notary Jacobo Rubieri in the 1470s and 80s (see photo: Biblioteca Oliveriana, Pesaro).

Furthermore, early modern readers aggregated information in commonplace books, a collection of notes on readings kept under category headings for quick reference and later re-use or quotation. Sometimes these books were published in print, which rather defeated the educational purpose of compiling one yourself. By the seventeenth century, some other types of printed books specifically indicate their fitness to be chopped up and reconstituted into commonplace books, like A Brief Method of the Law, Being an Exact Alphabetical Disposition of all the Heads Necessary for a Perfect Common-Place. Printed in this Volume for the conveniency of Binding with Common-Place-Books (London: Richard and Edward Atkins, 1680).[v] Readers who cut up text and categorized information in loci communes trained themselves in the highly regarded practises of recognition, quotation, and imitation.

It’s only a small step from commonplace book to Creative Commons, the less restrictive copyright license that helps identify works available “for free and legal sharing, use, repurposing, and remixing” by an active public (http://creativecommons.org). While certain artists like Dürer and various early publishers must have lamented the economic loss (as well as artistic damage) of a lack of copyright control, the age of the printing press was by definition an age of copying that not only accepted but encouraged creative reappropriation of printed text and image. Sixteenth-century artists frequently cited each other through stylistic or more direct means, and audiences enjoyed feeling clever when they identified these references.

Xanto Avelli, Innondazione del Tevere

The greatest master of Renaissance cut and paste is the maiolica artist Xanto Avelli da Rovigo, active in Urbino from 1530-42. His skillfully painted plates successfully adapt elements from multiple sources, re-combined to create new meaning. A large plate of 1531 depicting the Innondazione del Tevere now in the Civiche Raccolte d’Arte Applicata di Milano would, in fact, have been recognized by contemporaries as a humorous re-presentation in classical guise of some very smutty prints designed by Giulio Romano, cut by Marcantonio Raimondi, and explicated verbally by Pietro Aretino.

I Modi, image source Talvacchia, Taking Positions

The original engravings of twenty explicit sexual positions, called I Modi, were successfully purged by papal decree in 1525. A daring Venetian printer ignored the threat of death in order to produce the surely lucrative clandestine volume illustrated with woodcuts that comes down to us today. Two figures in the foreground of Xanto’s plate are clearly extracted from the composition that illustrates Sonetto Terzo: the man on the left thrusts into a void as his sexual partner lies separately in empty receipt at the base of the orange column at the right. The thin veil of classical subject matter and the more controlled audience of the maiolica plate (versus the wider distribution of print) allowed Xanto to totally flaunt his references, while the owner of this plate must have gotten a kick out of the fact that he could get away with displaying this splendidly coloured, remixed lascivia in his home.

Renaissance consumers really appreciated – and paid for – works in a recombinant or derivative style, and artists working in this mode were praised, not punished. Xanto read obscure Latin texts which he cited proudly in his art, and was in close contact with the Duke of Urbino, for whom he wrote a long collection of ingratiating sonnets. Maestro Giorgio Andreoli, another important maiolica artist who often copied motifs from Marcantonio Raimondi, was praised by Pope Leo X as “an excellent master in the art of maiolica and without equal in it… whose work brings honour to the city, lord and people of Gubbio…”.[vi] In 2004, Danger Mouse’s recombinant Grey Album encouraged a lawsuit, but was also called “ingenious” by Rolling Stone.[vii] Well, ingenio, along with invenzione, is perhaps the highest praise available to a work of art in the language of early modern art criticism.

image: wikimedia commons

Have we finally evolved, or digressed, to the point that we can again appreciate intelligent re-use and reappropriation of motifs? Like Xanto Avelli, mashup artist Girl Talk (Greg Gillis) “blurs the boundary between creator and consumer,” and his audience, recognizing each citation, “Diggs it”.[viii] This audio example is the poster child for remix approaches in various media in the film RiP! A Remix Manifesto, a documentary about the practise of mash-up that also encourages viewers to actively participate in its re-production.[ix]

While we currently laud the interactive nature of the internet, which allows every person to feel involved to a certain degree through commenting, producing, or remixing, these examples from the past put our experience into historical context. It would be tempting to say, at the expense of printed text, that internet is the technology with greatest potential for human interaction. But the way we treat the book, the newspaper, the printed informative flyer of today is a result of twentieth-century individualism and commodification that has almost entirely overridden earlier centuries’ understanding of this medium as a point of encounter, development, and creativity. Get out your scissors, your journal, your wordpress blog; by remixing your multi-media, you participate in the past, present, and future.

Footnotes

(sorry, despite my best coding efforts, the links don’t actually work.)
[i] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/education/21wikipedia.html

[ii] This and the quotations that follow are drawn from Brian Richardson, “The Debates on Printing in Renaissance Italy,” Anatomie Bibliologiche (Firenze: Olschki, 1999).

[iii] Richardson 1999, p. 146.

[iv] See Alexandra M. Korey, “Creativity, Authenticity, and the Copy in Early Print Culture” in Paper Museums (University of Chicago, 2005), pp. 31-50; and Lisa Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi. Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print (Yale University Press, 2004), p. 39.

[v] http://www.adam-matthew-publications.co.uk/collections_az/RenCpbks-BL/editorial-introduction.aspx

[vi] Patricia Collins, “Prints and the Development of istoriato”, pp. 224, 312.

[vii] http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5937152/dj_makes_jayz_meet_beatles

[viii] Larry Hardesty, “Bootleg Battle Lines” in Technology Review, Feb 2009, p. 70. (Available online: http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/21843/)

[ix] Written about at www.wired.com/underwire/2009/05/brett-gaylor-talks-rip-remix-manifesto/. Download and purchase at www.ripremix.com,

Art education and art history train viewers in a vocabulary and critical framework designed to substitute unlearned affinity with capable analysis. In some subjects, it may be possible to replace all emotions and enthusiasm with an analytic approach. After 14 years of study, I succeeded in reaching this level of art historical nirvana and am only now starting to recover as I have stepped away from that field. Some anonymous nighttime sessions have helped to make me feel that it is okay to just like something with my gut and not explain why in terms of art historical relevance, technical expertise, or stylistic or thematic innovation, backed up with abundant footnotes.

Warning: some these books may cloud your vision.

Nonetheless, my recovery program sponsor believes that, in the context of this assignment from the Italy Blogging Roundtable, it would be appropriate to name not one “my favorite work of art in Italy,” which is impossible for someone afflicted as I am, but three, one in each of the above-mentioned categories.

Masaccio, Trinity, SMN

There are works that deserve our admiration for being turning points in art history. These are often the most famous exponents of any given period – Picasso’s Guernica, Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling, Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia. For the early Renaissance I have to acknowledge Masaccio’s Trinity, located inside the church of Santa Maria Novella, as a first in the use of perspective and one of the earliest exponents of this period’s fascination with mathematics. The coffered vault over the space in which the crucified Christ is depicted allows the viewer to precisely calculate the volume of that space, a party trick nowadays but a common ability for Florentine merchants who had to be able to determine the value of a barrel of wine (at that time not a standard size) with a single glance. (About this, see the fascinating art history classic Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy by Michael Baxandall, idol of my undergraduate years). My appreciation for Masaccio is an intellectual one, not an emotional one, and perhaps this is appropriate for an artist who had such a scientific approach to the study of nature that he was the first to paint shadows under his people.

There is a geographically limited moment, not a single work or artist, that for me represents the greatest technical advancement in the Italian Renaissance. Perhaps not coincidentally, paintings from the early Venetian Renaissance are also the ones to which I have the strongest emotional reaction, even during the worst throes of my neutrality disease. Giorgione, the Giorgionesque works of Giovanni Bellini, and, although later and somewhat different, certain paintings by Lorenzo Lotto share a characteristic that make me stop in my tracks and exhale. (Some might attempt to add the young Titian to this list but he doesn’t have this effect on me.)

Bellini, Madonna of the Meadow 1505, National Gallery of London

Despite the fact that Giorgione and his closest followers did away with line in favor of hazy sfumatura, there is a calming solidity to the best of these works. In Bellini’s Madonna of the Meadow and Lotto’s Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, this solidity derives from their triangular composition (hence comforting, thanks to its wider base). We see successful experiments with mixing oils into tempera paint, and excellent chromatic choices. But one by one these factors do not logically add up to generate whatever it is that attracted me so strongly to these two works when I saw them in person (for this is an effect that I don’t get from reproductions). I did not choose to specialize in the Venetian Renaissance, and I am glad, for I prefer this sensation to remain a mystery to me.

What we study as the “progress” of art history is made up of a series of visual innovations, in the same way as our life these days is affected by a series of technical innovations, such as the one that permits me to write this post on an iPad on the beach. Some steps in stylistic or thematic change are pretty obvious, like all of a sudden the Impressionists were making fields of blotchy out of focus flowers, Hellenistic sculptors introduced drama to marble, or round arches replaced pointed ones and heralded the Renaissance.

Gentile da Fabriano

But it is the small steps towards these changes that fascinate me more. Of course, we see these things in retrospect. One of my favourite paintings in Florence is Gentile da Fabriano’s Procession of the Magi (the Strozzi Altarpiece) at the Uffizi. What appears to be pure International Gothic style has these really exciting infiltrations of modernity. In the predella below the main scene is what we think might be the first night scene in Renaissance art. Mary and the manger are illuminated in a *consistent manner (*and that’s the relevant part here) by the light that emanates from the baby Jesus. In the main panel, Gentile also experiments with the angles of the heads of figures in the crowd. Meanwhile, this painting also has the tooled gold leaf decorative elements typical of patrons’ wishes, making this altarpiece a transitional one that successfully integrates new and old – no small challenge.

Detail of left predella

I am continuing on my path to recovery and approaching contemporary art because, having not studied it, I judge it by other factors, one of which is “would I put this in my house?” which doesn’t apply well to things like altarpieces, for obvious reasons. Traveling to cultures whose art lacks references to Western history as I know it is also helpful. But no matter what I do or where I go, I will always look at art like an art historian. It is part of who I am.

Italy blogging roundtable

This post is part of a series in which five of us challenge each other to write on the same topic, once a month. If you’ve missed them, read about why I blog about Italy and Driving in Italy. The other posts on the topic of “my favourite work of art in Italy” are:

• Gloria at At Home in Tuscany – Why I Love Tuttomondo, Keith Haring’s Mural in Pisa
• Rebecca at Brigolante – Italy Roundtable: Sliding Doors, What-ifs, and the Cross of San Damiano
• Melanie at Italofile – Five Fabulous Art Works in Rome You May Have Missed
• Jessica at WhyGo Italy – My Favorite Work of Art in Italy

Museo del Novecento - central ramp

The new Museo del Novecento (20th century art) in Milan opened December 6 2010 and admission is free until February 28 2011. The combination free + new museum made me take a trip to Milan to check it out. I brought my most critical eye with the intention of writing a useful review for anyone interested in visiting this museum, or for readers who are curious about the latest museology in Italy.

The Novecento museum must have been a major architectural challenge for Italo Rota and his team, since it involved the restoration and adaptation of existing structures — in Piazza Duomo’s Palazzo dell’Arengario and the Palazzo Reale next door — to house Milan’s civic collections of modern art. As we move through these spaces we see the architecture evolve in connection with its contents, from Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s 1898 “Quarto Stato” (in its own niche off the central ramp, see photo) to Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Arte Povera. The museum path (percorso museale) was studied and developed by an impressive scientific committee comprising Massimo Accarisi (Direttore Centrale Cultura), Claudio Salsi (Direttore Settore Musei del Comune di Milano), Marina Pugliese (Direttore del Progetto Museo del Novecento) and advised by professors and museum directors from around Italy and England.

Pellizza da Volpedo's Quarto Stato, one of the collection's masterpieces, is impossible to approach due to crowds.

With the latest studies and technology available to them, you’d think that this star-studded team would take advantage of an opportunity to develop the perfect museum in which users would easily move through the space while experiencing a personal and educational path of growth thanks to discreetly presented information. Rather, the Museo del Novecento is a useful example of things not to do if you’re designing a new museum. This is not to say that it is all bad – I do like the aesthetics of some of the spaces and think that some parts of the collection are very interesting. But certain elements of museum design are very important to me (and probably to most museum-goers, even if they’re not completely conscious of them), and when these are not properly treated, the overall potential of the museum is greatly diminished. Below is my analysis of this museum’s flow, signage, and use of technology.

Crowd control and flow

people looking at art

The Museo del Novecento is experiencing unprecedented interest, in part probably because it is free at the moment. There have been long lines to get in ever since its opening in December. But as this is a city that frequently sees lines of half an hour or more to get into blockbuster exhibits like Miro (just closed), organizers might have predicted these crowds, or at least adapted to them with time.

In its location in what has been called Piazza Duomo’s B-side, the Palazzo dell’Arengario sits between the Duomo itself and the courtyard in front of Palazzo Reale. A line forms that blocks direct access to Palazzo Reale. Surprisingly, Italians have chosen to line up along a strip that is defined by a pattern in the pavement. But as I waited for just over one hour outside the museum (thankfully not in that city’s interminable rain), I had plenty of time to think about how they might have entertained me, educated me, or at least informed me while I waited. It seems minimal to ask that they might put out cords to create a line that loops back upon itself (like at an airport), with signs indicating how long the wait is from that point. But waiting is also a time that could be taken as an opportunity, upon which I shall reflect on my museum marketing blog.

Beware, it is getting late.

We entered the museum already tired and obtuse, picked up a map/pamphlet from an information desk (why not hand those out as we walked in, or while we waited?) and headed in the only possible direction – up the circular ramp. This ramp is very pretty, with greenish blue floors, black barriers, and a white underside, with the path clearly signaled by small white LED lights embedded in the ground. Areas of intersection and the presence of emergency devices are indicated by red or green lights. Larger passages, such as those into individual galleries, are indicated with very bright lights in the doorway that I find more threatening than useful (I wonder if they’re x-raying me). Other passageways are black and indicated with oddly out-of-place clocks. I felt like Alice in Wonderland.

The layout of this museum is complex. And it takes a degree in architecture or engineering to understand the exploded map provided for its navigation. Luckily I had my husband, an engineer, to read it for me and to help us navigate through the spaces to the areas that most interested us. As is, we still almost missed the two sections that we liked best. This is in part because we were put off by the extreme crowds at the two mezzanine levels which comprise monographic rooms dedicated to De Chirico and another artist. An escalator leads you up to each of these rooms; you move through the small room to the other side, expecting a further escalator that will go, once again, UP. Rather, at the other side is the escalator DOWN, so to continue through the museum path, you have to go back through the room. And through the crowd.

Moving through the spaces of this museum is kind of like a treasure hunt, with a competitive crowd-pushing factor inserted. At capacity thanks to the long line outside, the artworks are at risk of damage. There is no bleeping alarm system to stop you from getting close to works, which is nice, but they really ought to be protected from massive crowds by a distancing device such as a soft-angled, unobtusive base.

Signage

Signage in museum display is the topic of extensive studies and reflections. What is the perfect place to put signs? What is the right amount of text? How large should font be? What is the perfect balance between information and invasion? I have something to say both about the signs (indications on walls) and labels (indications relative to single works of art).

Labels at knee height (not only on this sculpture, see wall behind)

Sometimes, one can apply objective values to the signage inside a museum. The labels for single works at the Museo del Novecento are placed too low. Sure, being at knee-height might be useful for wheelchair patrons, children, or the chronically growth-impaired, but the rest of us have to break our backs and squint to read them. As my back had already pretty much seized up during the one-hour wait outside, I was not in the mood to bend down with crowds of other patrons to read these labels. As a result, I have pretty much no idea what I was looking at.

Here is another objective value: Consistency. The information on labels is a kind of code. This is the artist. This is the title. This is the date, and here is some extra information (in some cases provided, in others not… hey you should know how important this work is without other information). There are symbols, such as the number to insert in an audioguide. There are symbols to indicate the provenance from one or another collection. Or wait… are there?

The logo of the Museo del Novecento is a stylized number 900 that, in all print material and online, is a shade of medium grey. So why is the 900 logo reproduced on the museum labels in a range of colours – blue, orange, green… Does this indicate the provenance from one of the multiple locations or donors that make up the collection? Quick, check the map/handout to find out… no information provided. (Later I found someone to ask; she told me it was entirely random (casuale). And another interesting aside – the logo and other choices are explained in a video with Brand Designer Massimo Pitis in which he says that in his vision, the museum is a space that is born with the architecture, that is closed, protected; at the same time it’s also an open space for exhibitions. But to me this is the wrong approach – shouldn’t the museum be first born of the works, not of the container? Isn’t the era of the archistar museum officially over?)

And one more objective value: Font size. Guy Kawasaki suggests that, when preparing a powerpoint talk, you calculate the average age of your audience and never use a font that is less than half that number. So, for an audience of retirees, your presentation should have a 30-35 point font size. For teenagers you can use 10 point arial. The same should apply to museum labels. If a 35-year-old wearing glasses cannot see your signs, they are written TOO SMALL!

Wall text in a doorway blocks flow.

The thematic room descriptions in the Museo del Novecento are placed at the doorway to each room (sometimes in the preceeding room, sometimes in the doorway, sometimes just after it). These are written in Italian, with English text below in italics. Other than the title of the room, the text is one block, undefined by bold or paragraph breaks. The font size is probably 18 point. Whatever it was, I could not read it. You have to get quite close to read this block of text, but if you do so, you are blocking the doorway. Politely standing to one side, you are too far away to read. So once again, I had no idea what I was looking at, nor why. And I suspect that it’s not just me.

Use of technology

The Museo del Novecento, being brand new, could take advantage of all sorts of new and not so new technologies to provide extra information about artworks as well as to encourage passive viewers to become active participants. In fact, it has chosen Bluetooth technology to push information (images and text) to your cell phone. This is a good, low-cost solution that is relatively democratic (much of the population has a bluetooth-enabled cell phone) and that does not require internet connection. Too bad it doesn’t work.

Having read how to use the bluetooth system on their website, in the museum’s first room I activated bluetooth on my smartphone and waited for the permission request from Arengario. I saw 7-8 other devices with personal names (indicating that others were trying to use this service), but Arengario or Museo del Novecento were not present. I figured it would be wise to ask museum staff for help.

In any institution, it is important to train one’s staff about the services offered within. This should be even more the case when you hire brand new staff for a brand new museum. I approached a 40-something female guard and asked her “Excuse me, could you tell me how does the bluetooth technology that I read about on your website work?”. She snarled: “The what? I don’t know.” I suggested that she should probably inform herself about this service offered by the museum, to which her response was “That is not my job.” Harried, I resolved to test 3-5 museum staff members with this and other questions.

Later, I found a smiling young woman guard who was explaining something about an artwork to another museum patron, so I asked her about the bluetooth. She said unfortunately it was not yet working, despite the fact that the place had been open for almost three months. As she seemed well informed, I asked her about another thing that had perplexed me – the colours on the signage mentioned above – and she responded knowledgeably. She probably is a new hire with a phd in art history.

Visitors using (paid) audioguides

For the moment, the museum does not seem to integrate any other kind of information or interaction technology into the visit. Traditional audioguide headsets are available (for a fee), as are guided tours. A section of the website dedicated to “podcasts” are not podcasts but video interviews (only in Italian). Too bad – it would be nice to be able to download a podcast to use in the museum for free. No other easy to produce technology is provided, like an iphone app (sure could be useful to geolocalize myself in that museum, I’d have been less lost) or online/mobile catalogue… nor a mobile website for that matter. Need we not point out that said museum is not present on any social media, so they will probably never read this review. Too bad.

Final thoughts

In conclusion, perhaps had the museum been almost empty I might have been able to better appreciate the discreet way that the architecture leads me through the history of 20th-century Italian art, and I might have taken the time to focus on that tiny text and learn this part that is essentially missing from my art history education. I doubt that this museum will ever be so empty. And even if it were, a large onus would be upon the viewer to find and read about (on an external device using wikipedia?) the works within. A new museum has the opportunity to provide new means by which visitors of all levels can reflect upon art, as well as to target new experiential viewers and young people. There is no denying that a lot of planning and thought has gone into this project, and that it is not easy to open a museum of this scale, but I feel that the Museo del Novecento does not provide these essential tools necessary to fulfill the museum’s stated mission: “To encourage, through work on various levels, an intercultural approach and involve a public that ranges from specialists to children and passing visitors.”

Photos

One good thing about this museum is that it appears permitted to take photos. As I wasn’t sure of this permission, at first my photos are taken “illegally from the hip”, so those from the first rooms are a bit odd. The photo gallery below takes you through the whole space from start to finish. Enjoy!

A family interacts with art at the MART in Rovereto. Photo: MART used by permission.

Italy is not known for its contemporary art – at least not lately, and not in Italy itself. Recently a Tripadvisor member posted a question about where to see contemporary art in Tuscany and Italy and I realized that I’d never summarized it all in one post.

There was an interesting article in the New York Times in 2008 about how stalled the Contemporary art scene is here thanks to a lack of a larger organizational structure for it – as well as a lack of funding and in general of interest. While in recent years we’ve seen the openings of more structures for contemporary art, and some move on the part of regional or local governments in the encouragement of the arts (I’ve observed this here in Florence), the overall scene still lacks coordination. One problem is a lack of attention to arts marketing (I blog about that too) even at it’s most basic form like a list or calendar of what’s on.

Leaving reasons aside for the moment, given that nobody else has done it, I want to create a working list of contemporary art museums and large galleries that might be of interest to the common visitor. I’m not going to list every single art gallery but only those that I’d personally feel comfortable entering. To supplement what I could gather on my own, I consulted Luca Melchionna — he works in communications at the MART and is a freelance journalist whose opinions on contemporary art I respect very much.Further additions to this list are welcome in the comments of this blog post!

Contemporary art in Tuscany

"All art has been contemporary" installation on Uffizi Gallery by Maurizio Nannucci , 2010. Photo: Carlo Cantini

Florence - The Strozzina inside Palazzo Strozzi is your best bet for a good contemporary art exhibit in this city. The rotating exhibits are usually related to the theme being explored in the larger space upstairs. Strozzina brings an international touch to the city, often with emerging or established artists from Germany, the USA, and elsewhere. Weekly talks inside the space (in Italian) are part of it’s outreach to the city.

Florence’s EX3 contemporary art center is also worth a mention; they offer exhibits on a rotating basis and are located in a residential area. Their exhibits are of mixed quality though the latest, Suspended Sculptures (until May 8 2011) is visually exciting and of a truly international quality.

Prato - the Centro Pecci opened 15 years ago and has offered good quality temporary rotating exhibits since that time. Now it’s undergoing a massive expansion scheme that will make it THE reference center for contemporary art in Tuscany. The new spaces will permit the exhibition of the permanent collection. The expected date of 2012 has been extended to 2013 and I expect it to be extended again. Parts of this collection have been traveling worldwide, especially to China, as part of an innovative scheme to make Italian contemporary art known abroad.

Pistoia - In this smallish town, Palazzo Fabroni has some pretty innovative exhibits, but it’s hard to find out what’s on since it doesn’t have a dedicated website. As I occasionally receive their press releases, your best bet is to check my list of what’s on in Tuscany.

San Gimignano – this super touristy town has some of the best contemporary art in this part of Italy at Galleria Continua (which also has branches in Beijing and France and is a regular lender to exhibits Italy-wide). Their artist roster includes important international artists like Chen Zhen, Kendell Geers, Anish Kapoor, and Subodh Gupta.

Lucca - The Lu.C.C.a. (Lucca Center for Contemporary Art) offers rotating exhibits of varying quality. The main gallery shows better known artists while the Lounge and basement areas have emerging artists or very small exhibits, with the bonus being that these are usually free. There is also a cafe in this space.

Luca adds: “One curious thing about Tuscany is the concentration of galleries, some of them rather good (Enrico Astuni, Barbara Paci), in Marina di Pietrasanta.” Also the area in and around Carrara – thanks to its marble – hosts a lot of sculptors, especially during its Biennale, which Luca says “under a new director (Fabio Cavallucci), the Biennale opened itself to contemporary sculpture”.

For a list of current exhibitions see Tuscany Arts.

Umbria

Brufa

Arttrav’s guest writer Rebecca in Umbria has written an excellent post about contemporary art in Umbria in which she mentions some of the following locations:

Palazzo Lucarini Contemporary is the permanent space developed out of the Flash art fair in Trevi.

Scultori a Brufa is a series of sculptures installed in the landscape near this tiny hamlet.

The Burri Foundation owns over 250 works by Alberto Burri (Citta di Castello, PG)

The brand-new CIAC Museum in Foligno opened in 2010.

Rome

When you are in Rome, check out the two new spaces MACRO and MAXXI:

MAXXI - Opened May 30th 2010. Controversy still surrounds the design of the building by architect Zaha Hadid, but one thing’s for sure: there is a new, international feeling in and around this building. Personally, I found the architecture tiring and disorienting and the content poor (I think they ran out of money during construction and forgot to buy art.). For my slightly more polite impressions see my review “MAXXI-mum space in Rome” on illywords blog.

The new MACRO is an expansion project with a new building by Odile Decq that just finally opened fully at the start of December 2010 (it’s been in the making since 2001). Part of the city museums of Rome, it usually offers about 5-6 exhibitions at once across its two locations in Rome. NB there is also a branch of the macro at Testaccio.

The Gagosian Gallery is apparently one of the most innovative in Rome (perhaps in Italy?), known for displaying large-scale projects. Their artist roster is impressive and includes some artists of international standing, such as Jannis Kounellis or Cy Twombly, who have lived or do live in Rome. The gallery has branches in New York and Geneva, and just now (Feb 2011) is inaugurating its Hong Kong branch with an exhibition by Damien Hirst.

Luca adds: “The Istituto Svizzero di Roma, thanks to a smart sicilian curator (Salvatore Lacagnina) produces surprisingly good exhibitions.”

And Buzz-in-rome adds (from the comments below): the exhibitions of Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Museo Carlo Bilotti and the private gallery Edieuropa

Milan

My personal knowledge of the Milanese art scene is… zero! So this part relies totally on tips from Luca, who says he’s probably forgetting a lot. But I’d say this is a good place to start.

The new Museo del Novecento (20th century art) just opened in Piazza Duomo [editor's note: Arttrav will be visiting and reporting on that in 2 weeks.]

The Triennale (design museum) has rotating exhibits and a really cool internet section dedicated to art & technology.

Other exhibition spaces include PAC (Padiglione delle arti contemporanee) and Palazzo Reale (current show – until 28/02/2011 – by Iranian artist Shirin Neshat).

The leading galleries in Milan are:

• www.massimodecarlo.it
• www.giomarconi.com
• http://www.liarumma.it/
• http://www.francescaminini.it/
• http://www.galleriatega.it
• http://www.cardiblackbox.com

Emerging Pop artists can be discovered at Antonio Colombo Arte Contemporanea.

We should also note the non-profit Via Farini which has exhibitions, artists workshops and other programmes to support emerging artists.

Southern Italy

Sign the petition to save MADRE

Naples: Galleria Lia Rumma (A Milan branch opened recently too) has an important roster of international artists including Marina Abramovic.

Naples MADRE - this amazing contemporary museum currently risks closing for lack of funds (click the photo above to sign a petition to save it). This museum has a strong permanent collection with an amazing virtual tour narrated in english, and has hosted temporary exhibits by literally ALL the most important contemporary artists.

Matera: MUSMA - I haven’t seen it myself but a friend of mine (who runs a small museum in the States) says it’s one of the best contemporary sculpture museums she’s seen. Right there in a prehistoric town!

Northern Italy

The real contemporary art scene in Italy takes place north of center where industrial riches have combined with social responsibility.

Bologna: MAMBO – 9500 square meters of exhibition space with a permanent collection and some rotating shows. Particularly useful is the section “Focus on Contemporary Italian Artists” from Arte Povera to now. (www.mambo-bologna.org)

MART – Trentino and Rovereto. The main building of this two-sided contemporary art museum is in the smallish (and boring!) town of Rovereto. It’s building by Mario Botta is an attraction unto itself. Inside, find the permanent collection as well as a few rotating exhibits. One of the few museums in Italy to have a cafeteria and bookshop (american-style!) as well as a good education department.

Luca M. also recommends Museion Bolzano, the museum of modern and contemporary art in Bolzano (which is about as far North as you can get in Italy). They have temporary exhibitions on rotation.

Torino: Fondazione Re Rebaudengo

Biella: Citta dell’Arte – The Foundation established by Michelangelo Pistoletto in Biella just north of Torino is both exhibition space and creative workshop (www.cittadellarte.it)

Fabio Paris Gallery in Brescia is THE place in Italy for the digital art scene.

Torino: Fondazione Re Rebaudengo – Opened in Turin in 1995 by contemporary art collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and with the collaboration of curator/critic Francesco Bonami, the foundation has a strong mission that combines exhibition and education.

Torino: Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art – An ancient medieval castle is the perfect place to house a permanent collection (opened 1984) and exhibitions of contemporary art, no?

Pordenone: the PARCO, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Pordenone, opened in November 2010

Art Fairs

Throughout the course of the year there are high points in Italy’s art scene, fairs that last a few days to a few weeks that demonstrate the country’s ability to innovate on a global level. These are:

• Torino Artissima (November)
• Bologna Arte Fiera (January)
• Biennale di Venezia
• Emiko (on the arttrav facebook page) adds: Lucca Digital Photo Fair

Contemporary Art Day – not a fair but a country-wide day dedicated to the contemporary arts in October, during which access to all contemporary museums and galleries should be free, and some special events are planned.

This course situates the role of women in Renaissance and Baroque Italian art: as persons depicted, as patrons, and as producers. Topics covered are (1) the moral, social, and religious models for women as they were constructed both implicitly and explicitly through visual art and literature. (2) female patronage – the limits to which women were subjected in this field of public expression. (3) biographies of and works by female artists. The bibliography below this reflects these three branches of the field.

Women and art bibliography

Primary Sources:

Alberti, Leon Battista, I tre libri della famiglia/ The Family in Renaissance Florence (written 1434-7), ed. Trans. Renée Watkins (University of South Carolina Press, 1969).

Cereta, Laura, Collected letters of a Renaissance Feminist, Ed. Trans. Diana Robin (University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Firenzuola, Agnolo, On the Beauty of Women (written 1541), ed. Trans. Konrad Eisenbichler (Univerity of Pensylvania Press, 1992).

Strozzi, Alessandra. Selected Letters, ed. Trans. Heather Gregory (University of California Press, 1997).

Various topics

Bernstein, Joanne, “The Female Model and the Renaissance Nude: Durer, Giorgione, and Raphael,” in Artibus et Historiae Vol. 13, No. 26, (1992), pp. 49-63.

Cohen, Elizabeth S., “Courtesans and Whores: Words and Behavior in Roman Streets,” in Women’s Studies 19 (1991): 201-8.

Emison, Patricia, “Truth and Bizzarria in and Engraving of Lo Stregozzo,” Art Bulletin 81:4 (Dec. 1999), pp. 623-636.

Ferino-Pagden, Sylvia, “Pictures of Women, Pictures of Love” in Bellini Giorgione Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting (exhibition catalogue, 2006), pp. 190-235.

Joan-Kelly Gadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” in Becoming Visible (1987).

King, Catherine E. Renaissance Women Patrons: Wives and Widows in Italy 1300-1550 (Manchester University Press, 1998).

Matthews-Grieco, Sara and Geraldine Johnson, Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (Cambridge UP, 1997).

Musacchio, Jacqueline Marie, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (Yale University Press, 1999).

Neave, Dorinda, “The Witch in Early 16^th-century German Art,” Woman’s Art Journal 9:1 (1988), pp. 3-9.

Radke, Gary. “Nuns and Their Art: The Case of San Zaccaria in Renaissance Venice,” in Ren Quart 54:2 (Summer 2001), pp. 430-59.

Randolph, Adrian, “Performing the bridal body in 15^th-century Florence” in Art History 21 (1998), 182-200.

San Juan, Rose Marie, “The Court Lady’s Dilemma: Isabella d’Este and Art Collecting in the Renaissance” in Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1, (1991), pp. 67-78.

Simons, Patricia, “Women in Frames: The gaze, the eye, the profile in Renaissance portraiture,” in History Workshop 25 (Spring 1988), pp. 4-30.

Stefaniak, R. “Correggio’s Camera di S. Paolo: An Archaeology of the Gaze,” Art History 16(1993): 203-238.

Tinagli, Paola. Women in Italian Renaissance Art. Gender Representation Identity (Manchester University Press, 1997).

Trexler, Richard, The Women of Renaissance Florence (Power and Dependence, Vol. II) (SUNY Binghamton, 1993; reprint of earlier articles).

Joyce de Vries, “Caterina Sforza’s Portrait Medals: Power, Gender, and Representation in the Italian Renaissance Court,” in Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring – Summer, 2003), pp. 23-28.

Women artists

Bal, Mieke (ed.), The Artemisia  files: Artemisia Gentileschi for Feminists and other thinking people (University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Bohn, Babette, “The antique heroines of Elisabetta Sirani” in Renaissance Studies 16: 1 (2002), pp. 52-79.

“   “Female Self-Portraiture Renaissance Studies 18:2 (2004), pp. 239-286.

Cohen, Elizabeth S. “The Trials of Artemisia Gentileschi: A Rape as History,” in Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 47-75.

Garrard, Mary D. “Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist,” Ren Quart XLVII: 3 (1994): 556f.

“   Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art (Princeton UP, 1989).

“   Artemisia Gentileschi around 1622: The shaping and reshaping of an artistic identity (University of California Press, 2001).

Gaze, Delia (ed.), Dictionary of Women Artists 2v. (London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997).

Jacobs, Fredrika H., “Woman’s capacity to create: The unusual case of Sofonisba Anguissola,” in Ren Quart XLVII: 1 (1994): 74f.

Lincoln, Evelyn, “Making a Good Impression: Diana Mantovana’s Printmaking Career”, in Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Winter, 1997), pp. 1101-1147.

Markey, Lia, “The Female Printmaker and the Culture of the Reproductive Print Workshop” in Rebecca Zorach (ed.), Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe (Chicago, Smart Museum, 2005).

Murphy, Caroline P., “Lavinia Fontana and Le Dame della Città: understanding female artistic patronage in late sixteenth-century Bologna”, in Renaissance Studies 10:2 (1996): 190f.

“   “Lavinia Fontana and female life cycle experience in late sixteenth-century Bologna”, in Sara Matthews-Grieco and Geraldine Johnson (eds.), Picturing Women.

“   Lavinia Fontana. A painter and her patrons (Yale University Press, 2003).

Nelson, Jonathan (ed.), Suor Plautilla Nelli (1523-1588): The First Woman Painter of Florence – Symposium, May 27, 1998 (Edizioni Cadmo, 2000).t]

“   Plautilla Nelli (1524-1588): The Painter-Prioress of Renaissance Florence (Syracuse University Florence Press, 2008). [I own this book, you can borrow it]

Robin, Diana, Anne Larsen, and Carole Levin (eds.), Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance (Oxford, ABC Clio, 2007).

Strinati, Claudia and Jordana Pomeroy (eds.), Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque (Skira Editore, 2007).

This is the largest instance of private sponsorship for restoration in Italy as far as I know. It’s also got a really interesting communication plan. Tod’s will be permitted to call itself the “single sponsor for the restoration of the Colosseum” and will be able to use information about the restoration in its stores and website. On site, I doubt that we’re going to see a giant shoe on the side of the building – unlike the obscene placement of advertising of the Bridge of Sighs in Venice. While clearly this sponsorship is in part being undertaken because it’s good for corporate image, it will be communicated in good taste. Tod’s will establish a foundation called “Amici del Colosseo” (friends of the Colosseum) that will communicate information about the restoration to the press and public.

Source: MIBAC press release

I am not inclined to believe anything without reading and seeing proper scientific evidence. Newspapers are quick to jump on news about famous artists – like the “new Caravaggio” found in Rome last year that lasted about 2 days before it was demoted to the substandard imitation that it is. Now this latest announcement about Leonardo is being marketed to the general public as “something out of the pages of a Dan Brown book” (yahoo news). In these cases it helps to turn to the always honest Vittorio Sgarbi, who, with regard to the eyeball-initials, said they’re “Assolute insensatezze” – totally crazy.

It is Silvano Vinceti who sustains to have found letters in Mona Lisa’s pupils – the letters L V and a group that could be either B, or CE. This “clearly” identifies the sitter as Bianca Giovanna Sforza. The same Vinceti was responsible for the display of Caravaggio’s bones at Porto d’Ercole this summer. This kind of publicity around famous artists doesn’t please Sgarbi who said “Sono forme di “vampirismo”: queste persone si attaccano a un autore importante soltanto per far parlare di sé“  – it’s a form of vampiricism; these people deal with a famous author just to turn attention to themselves. [source]

Now art historian Carla Glori claims to have identified the low stone bridge above the figure’s left shoulder as the 7th-century Ponte del Diavolo over the Trebbia river at Bobbio (comune of Piacenza). In case you’re as clueless as I about this location, here it is on a map.

View Larger Map

Bobbio's Ponte Gobbo or Devil's Bridge

The number 72 discovered near the bridge by Vinceti nicely coincides with the year that this bridge was “washed away” and then replaced (we think the painting is from the 1490s). Bobbio, for all its present obscurity, was apparently a pretty important town in the Renaissance, and was under the rule of Bianca Sforza’s father (she was illegitimate) Ludovico il Moro.

I may swallow my sarcasm a few years from now but Martin Kemp also disagrees (and he’s one of my heroes). I end with a quote from him borrowed from the Daily Mail.

The portrait is almost certainly of [Italian noblewoman] Lisa del Giocondo however unromantic and un-mysterious that idea might be. There have been many attempts to identify the landscape as a specific location and I do not find the resemblance to the Bobbio bridge all that close. I have great reservations about all attempts to find some obscurely hidden meaning in Renaissance works of art.

Also in the past few days, Queen’s University professor Ross Kilpatrick has made the news with his much more art-historically traditional proposal in which he proposes three poems from Horace and Petrarch that he believes informed Leonardo’s famous painting (see ctv.ca and artsblog.it); here is one of them.

“Mandami in aride pianure, senza un albero che venga ristorato dalla brezza estiva, un angolo di mondo oppresso dalle nebbie e dall’avversità di Giove; mandami in una terra desolata, dove troppo vicino ruota il carro del Sole, Lalage continuerò ad amare, lei che sorride dolcemente e dolcemente parla” (Horace, Ode 1:22)

What do you think? Should we continue to look for new revelations in old paintings? Is any of this anything but… BS?

Arte.it is a powerful vertical search engine that resolves the problem of returning irrelevant search results when you’re looking for something like “Leonardo da Vinci”, which might be an airport or be referred to in a number of non-art-related documents. It is also much more than just search. Nexta has realized that the future of web content is to harness existing good material, not just to produce new content. While their other vertical channels (turismo.it, stile.it) contain custom-written articles related to each topic within the blog format most favoured by emotion-based marketing companies these days, arte.it is the next step.

Search for art history

When you search for an artist or art-historical related content, you often turn up either unrelated material or plain crap. Arte.it gets around this by using semantic search, which means that, based on a geometric model (Latent Semantic Analysis or LSA) it looks at relations between words and concepts inside a document; these are analyzed as a vector and given a score that determines the document’s rank in the search engine. Technically this is great; in practise it needs refining by human editors. The Italian language version is already more refined than the English side of the website, and the folks at Nexta are apparently working on it – it’s still in Beta. Furthermore, arte.it depends on crowdsourcing so we can all make it better.

The problem of low quality search results is one that we art history bloggers have been discussing, and H.Niyazi has recently built a search engine that enables us to search for articles in a list of approved blogs that he is gathering: the art history database. While this list is limited, it’s growing, and there’s the benefit of knowing pretty much where your answers are coming from.

While AHDB and we “#arthistory” bloggers are interested in privileging content from each others’ quality blogs, Arte.it CEO Piero Muscarà repeatedly emphasized in his eloquent presentation that their search engine recognizes and prioritizes “reliable editorial content”. This means that wikipedia is not the first result for everything as it is on google, and that’s admirable. On the other hand, arte.it seems to ignore blogs entirely in favour of certain much more staid editorial products (especially on the Italian side). It also does not seem to include material for which you need a subscription – none of my test searches pulled up answers from JSTOR. While it can be frustrating to click through to material that you then have to pay for, any serious research in the humanities online should include results from journals.

Other features

Arte.it features pages about artists, semantic diagrams, a map that locates works by an artist in Italy, and even itineraries.

An artist summary on arte.it

• The Artist summaries (they call it artist info – schede in Italian) are manually created by the editors and include a blurb of text that is pulled from another external website that is then linked (“read all”) at the bottom of a few lines. This is without doubt a good driver of traffic to the chosen website! Users can also create new artist pages after first making sure they’re not duplicating work already done.
• On the artist pages there’s a map that shows the location of that artist’s works in Italy.
• 

  Semantic diagram on arte.it

  For all search terms there’s a semantic diagram that shows suggested related terms. (Google has a further step: image swirl, here tested with the word “titian”).

• Registered users can rate articles or notify admins of “wrong” (they mean irrelevant) links, thus helping generate more relevant results.

• Perhaps the coolest feature is the way that arte.it connects art to place through itineraries – this is relevant for anyone interested in traveling to see art (my favourite topic, obviously). These are a little hard to find – in fact I haven’t found one yet on the site, but it was demonstrated at the conference and I’m sure they’ll show up more prominently soon. These are suggested itineraries based on the location, in one city, of various works of art related to the one you’ve searched.
• Another nice way the website connects to reality is through the changing images on the home page. These feature famous works of Italian art; if you click the + symbol on the bottom bar, a window comes up telling you where that work is located, with opening hours of the institution and its website.

Opportunities for bloggers

It seems to me that the folks at arte.it are open to suggestions – and their platform most certainly is too. Being crowdsourced means we can help them – and their users – find our writing. Material produced in English seems especially lacking and getting in there early on would probably give us a competitive edge. I would be careful not to spam this search engine but, as a registered user, only suggest good and specific articles related to a topic. For example, if you’ve written about a specific work by Giorgione, insert your article under the terms Giorgione + name of work. If you have an article about Matisse, insert it under that artist’s name. You can also suggest an entire website to be spidered.

Room for improvement

A little help is needed with the English language section – the term “notify web page” should be changed to “suggest web page”. The “news” section on the English side is still in Italian, and various pages are missing or not yet translated. As mentioned, it’s in Beta testing so they’ll be finishing and fixing these things soon.

One bug I noticed is that the English side rigorously takes English words in the search, even when an Italian word (like the name of a place) would turn up English language results. For example, a search of “Ospedale degli Innocenti” produced zero results; I had to search “Hospital of the Innocents” – which is not the building’s common name – to find information about Brunelleschi’s loggia and the orphanage written in English. And none of that information was truly relevant.

Second bug: the artist’s names are too rigorously defined, so that “Brunelleschi” does not bring up the “scheda artista” (artist info or summary); I did get the scheda by searching “Filippo Brunelleschi”, but I challenge the average university student, or member of the general public, to know the architect’s first name.

Third, using the English search engine, a lot of the results are from hotel or ticket reseller websites which I do not consider good or reliable sources (I’d go as far as to call these spam results). If I were the programmer I’d exclude any url with the word “hotel” in it, as well as the urls related to posters and horrible oil reproductions.

One feature I’d like to see is a bit more social integration. While you can share pages on facebook, user registration to this site does not use facebook connect or any other universal login system. I don’t have percentages for this but I am quite sure that users are more likely to register if they don’t have to create yet another password – especially as the login on this site doesn’t have a “remember me” check-box and cookie (my browser, firefox, remembers me, but when I leave the site I have to log in each time). As a registered user, there’s really nothing I can do to improve my public profile. You can insert a photo, but right now that feature doesn’t work. I can’t write who I am, what education I have, or provide links to my websites. Registered users are likely to be “influencers” (bloggers or other people serious about content) who like to be recognized. This recognition ought to be tangible: using a system of points and levels, users would feel rewarded and more inclined to participate by rating links, an action that actually causes a page reload so takes time and thus will only be done by people who feel strongly about participating.

Finally, while arte.it can be used to find general articles in the field of art history, it seems to prioritize biography. This is certainly the case in the structure of the pages headed up by an artist’s photo and bio, followed by links to biographies, and then to other websites. This seems to be a solution born out of Italian art history which still focuses on monographical production and connoisseurship type study, while Anglo-Saxon art history has, since the 1970s, been interested in social art history, feminist, pyscho-anlaytical and other branches of the discipline. I may be wrong, but it seems that there is room given here to biographies, works of art, current news, and sources, but little space given to identifying good resources for the analysis of artists and their works. Analysis can be found in academic journals available online and in the ongoing discussion on some art historians’ blogs and websites.

This mild criticism is all written in the true spirit of collaboration for I hope the folks at arte.it will take these points into consideration and that all together we can make this an even better search engine. They’ve identified a problem on the web and developed an innovative solution that is clearly expandable to other verticals that might have earning potential; in the meantime their product (with no apparent gain through advertising, just an important corporate sponsor) is a gift to us all.

San Zeno Chapel - photo: flickr @Lawrence OP

One of my all-time favourite spots in Rome is the church of Santa Prassede on the Esquiline Hill. Tucked down a side-street a stone’s throw from Santa Maria Maggiore, it offers some of the very finest medieval mosaics in the city, and the most complete project of its period in the glorious jewel of the Chapel of Saint Zeno.

In 817, three years after the death of Charlemagne, Pope Paschal I was elected. Charlemagne’s support for the beleaguered Roman Church had been invaluable. He had been hailed as the new Constantine, and the city inherited by Paschal was one of optimistic ‘renovatio’, a sort of mini-Renaissance which sought to echo the glories of the early Church. Thus Pope Paschal planned Santa Prassede as small-scale copy of the Constantinian basilica of St Peter’s in the Vatican, complete with an internal courtyard between the main entrance and the internal façade.

Both the church and the tiny chapel of Saint Zeno in the right-hand nave were to be decorated in mosaic. On the one hand this reflected the ‘renovatio’ of the ancient Roman art of mosaic, on the other it was made possible by the arrival in Rome of Byzantine mosaic artists fleeing the reintroduction of iconoclasm in Byzantium. The mosaics at Santa Prassede can thus be considered both as the revival of the ancient art of mosaic, and of its survival, by way of the Byzantine world, the heir to the Eastern Roman Empire; this revival of the Early Christian age in Rome is felt, in part directly from Roman models, in part filtered through the Byzantine Empire.

Entrance to San Zeno Chapel

The small cross-vaulted chapel dedicated to St Zeno (one of the martyrs whose relics were brought here from the catacombs by Paschal and about whom little is known) was intended as the funerary chapel for Paschal’s mother Theodora. The chapel’s entrance gives an idea of the splendid mosaic decorations which lie within: the Virgin and Child, Saints Prassede, her sister St Pudenziana and their brother Saints Timothy and Novate are represented in the inner ring of medallions. The outer ring shows Christ and the apostles.

Put some coins in the meter by the entrance to the chapel before going in, and surround yourself in the richly enveloping gloom. As your eyes move around the chapel, the undulating forms of gilded tiles laid by hands dead for over a millenium offer varied reflections of your fifty cent illumination. The chapel is cross-vaulted, the vault’s support indicated by the recycled ancient columns. However the columns are almost free-standing, barely supporting anything, just the sort of thing that would have had Vitruvius, the Roman architect par excellence, with his stress on functionality, spinning in his grave.

From the three-dimensional gilded capitals spring two-dimensional angels, reaching up to support the image of Christ Pantocrator (from the Greek, ‘all powerful’). These are a splendid example of current scholarly discussion about the stylistic origins of these mosaics; i.e. whether they demonstrate the revival, or the survival of the antique. Whilst they have been seen as depending on the 6th-century mosaics executed during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian at San Vitale in Ravenna, in turn the mosaics at San Vitale can be interpreted as being dependant on Roman floor mosaics. If this theory is accepted then the mosaics at San Zeno can be placed in a context which wends its way back to the Roman antique.

Christ Pantocrator - photo: flickr @Lawrence OP

The Byzantine influence also immediately makes itself felt as one enters the chapel. Opposite the entrance wall the figures of St John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary indicate the (east-facing) window between them. This is thought to represent the Byzantine iconographical tradition of the deesis. From the Greek meaning ‘entreaty’ the deesis shows the John the Baptist and the Virgin Mary gesturing towards an image of Christ. In this case the image of Christ isn’t present, or rather he is above them (and indeed upside down on the ceiling).

However if we interpret the light of the window as heavenly light – St John the Evangelist says Christ described himself as the “Light of the World; he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12) – then the window itself stands for the figure of Christ. This reading would have been well-known by the artists, and of course by the papal patron: in the 4th century, St Augustine had referred to this quotation, and added weight to it, by saying that Christ should not be considered as a simply metaphorical light; by the 5th century the description of Christ as “Lumen de lumine” had entered the Mass.

St John the Evangelist is shown on the right wall as one enters the chapel, holding his book. He is on the left hand side of the other window which illuminates the chapel particularly splendidly in the morning. Across the window from him are Saints James and  Andrew.

hetoimasia - photo: flickr @prof zucker

On the entrance wall, and opposite the deesis, is the representation of another eastern iconographical theme, the hetoimasia. The Greek term means “preparation of the throne”; an empty throne is that which awaits Christ’s return for the day of Judgement. In this case the throne is indicated by Saints Peter and Paul, protectors of the Roman church. The charming flowers at their feet are a reminder of the eternal spring. On the seat of the empty throne is a cross that is reminiscent of the Roman Imperial representation of the Emperor’s rule by his insignia resting on an empty throne; once again reminding of the renovatio here at play.

On the left wall as one enters the chapel, are the almost identical female saints, Agnes, Pudenziana (Prassede’s sister), and Prassede herself. In appearance somewhere between Roman ladies and Byzantine princesses, they again evoke the blend of Roman cultures the chapel represents. Beneath the arch the agnus dei, the lamb of God, stands on the source of four springs from which deer drink. Below, the Virgin dressed in blue is shown with Prassede and Pudenziana on either side, and to their left is Theodora, mother of Paschal for whom the chapel had been built. The blue ‘nimbus’ around her head indicates she was still alive when the chapel was decorated.

Theodora with the Blue Nimbus - photo: Flickr @sacred destinations

To the right of the female saints is the scene of the descent of Christ into Limbo, its lower part damaged by the later and rather brutally created doorway. Known in the East as the Anastasis, it is not mentioned in the scriptures but was a solution postulated regarding the problem of what happened to just people who had died before the coming of Christ. This theme first appears in the 8^th century and was a creation of the Byzantine world; another reinforcement of the role of Byzantine influence on the chapel’s decoration.

As well being fabulously beautiful, the chapel offers a view into the hybrid of the revival of Constantinian Rome and the survival of the ancient art of mosaic filtered through the lens of the Byzantine world. Like any great work of art it is inextricably of its time; the tiles speak of the brief relief from the Church’s relentless struggle provided by Charlemagne’s support, the politicising desire to represent this through the evocation of the early glory of the established church at the time of Constantine, and the contemporaneous abolition of religious images in Byzantium which all came together to create this gem sandwiched between a kebab shop and an Irish pub.

For other mosaics sponsored by Pope Paschal visit Santa Cecilia in Trastevere and Santa Maria in Domnica on the Celian Hill.

Agnes Crawford has a Master of Arts degree in Architectural History from Edinburgh University and is a licensed tourist guide in Rome. Her company is Understanding Rome.

The sinuous and curvy open-backed seat is billed as a “summa stilistica” of famous design classics: a space-age version that superimposes Jacobsen’s “7-series”, Saarinen’s “Tulip Armchair” and Eames’s “Eiffel Chair”.

I’d be curious to get a closer look at this seat – made of polypropylene (Kartell plastic), is it comfortable? I narrowly missed a mistaken purchase of 4 ghost victoria’s after they proved unstable and too narrow for my liking – this chair looks like it would be neither of those things… In fact it’s not a chair for the dining room or kitchen table but is intended for the “Living” area. I could see it as an “occasional” or accent chair in my living room, in fact – and it’s available in a range of warm or neutral colours (white, 2 greys, black, red, yellow). But how much does it cost? Guess we’ll just have to go to the launch and find out.

There will also be a display of other new products that were presented at the 2010 Salone del Mobile, like Laviani’s Bloom Lamp, other furniture by Starck, and a few smaller proposals for your Christmas list.

Event location: KARTELL FLAG FIRENZE  - Borgo Ognissanti, 50-52/r
Giovedì 5 novembre 2010  Cocktail dalle ore 18,30
Tel. +39 055-288921

I started with the premise that what I associated with Naples was basically mafia, pizza, and garbage crises (the latter inconveniently rekindled this past week) and that this was thanks to the media, so my impression was likely to coincide with that of most people, unless they had the opportunity to become better informed than I.

NAPLES is a city of great historic wealth, in an area of unparalleled natural beauty. It is also the city with the highest unemployment rate in all of Italy, and the city from which hundreds of thousands of people have emigrated, often to the United States and Canada. These Italo-Americans brought with them the values that helped set up our stereotypes about Italians – in particular, the olive-garden like family brought together through pasta. This is an Italian value that is impractical in the modern age (like the ad below in which a family is reuinited at home for lunch), but still practised whenever possible.

While Barilla pasta is made up north in Parma, in Naples they invented the Margherita Pizza. They also seem to have invented the concept of “casino”, crazy noise, busyness, that we associate with much of Italy.

In 2008 Naples made the news a lot, in a negative sense, and now (in Fall 2010), it’s back. I’ve been trying to reconcile the political, social, and physical reality of this region with the happy stereotypes and the rich history of its past.

Naples in the media

Summer 2008 saw a massive garbage “strike” that caused garbage to pile up in the city and on the streets of the whole region; this was a complex event that was caused, essentially, by the presence of special interest groups controlled mainly by the local mafia, called Camorra, which had dominated the garbage collection business.

A daring young author, Roberto Saviano, published a best selling exposé of the Camorra in which he denounces the violence of the city that he witnessed personally as a police sponsored spy. He’s been under police protection since october 2006 since his book had huge success, he admitted to being a spy, and he received death threats from the mob. The extremely violent movie Gomorrah won the grand prix at Cannes.

The movie’s trailer opens with an arial shot of the dangerous suburb of Scampia, a fascinating testimony to the urban growth and degradation of the 1980s. I have always been interested in housing projects, and in monolithic concrete architectural “solutions” in general; for years I’ve wondered how anyone could ever think this was a good idea. Don’t worry, should you go to Naples as a tourist you will never visit this area. You can’t even wander into those areas by mistake.

So, I got to asking myself: how did Naples end up with areas like this; how did dishonesty and poverty overcome so much of this rich culture? Naples is now an urban sprawl with over one million people, with a current 31% unemployment level according to official sources (some less official ones say 40%). For comparison, Rome has 2,700,000 inhabitants and the Italy-wide unemployment rate is currently 6.2%. The answer, of course, is not straightforward, but the history of Naples and its growth gets me closer to an answer.

Super brief history of Naples and its visual consequences

Naples has Greek origins; conquered by the Romans who were interested in absorbing the Greek culture located there but not in improving the city in practical terms – it was an area for villas, parties, and intellectual discussion, not for average citizens who needed things like ampitheatres. Poor Naples, in the middle ages and renaissance it always ruled by outsiders (byzantine, french, spanish…) who imported artists from their own countries or from parts of Italy that were best known for their art. There’s not much left to see from before the mid-15^th century; rulers had to focus on defensive castles and urban planning more so than churches and art, and many things were destroyed in subsequent battles.

King Alfonso I of Aragon ruled in the mid 15^th century and did much to beautify the city by importing artists like Laurana who he hired to add a famous marble trumphal arch to the existing 13^th century castle. Conquered by the Spanish in 1506, spanish artists started to develop a local style hand in hand with real local artists.

Two visits by Caravaggio in 1606 and 1609 were decisive for neopolitan art, and is when it really came into its own. Caravaggio set up a workshop here that was carried on by his main disciple Caracciolo. The 17^th and 18^th centuries were successful times for Naples, and a time when Baroque art flourished there. There was a succession of Kings from the major European dynasties that attracted all sorts of courtiers and aristrocrats whose money poured into the city’s building projects. In the mid 18^th c they discovered the ruins of Pompeii and this attracted tourism to the area. The city grew to a population of 500,000, one of the largest cities in Europe, with all the consequent social problems of a city that size, but in part under control by the strong local government.

The downfall of Naples seems to start mainly with the unification of Italy in 1860. The capital was Torino, then Florence then Rome, and Naples seemed so far away and south – out of sight out of mind. The large population, which had caused the city to expand haphazardly, suddenly had nothing to do!! No agriculture, no industry… These people were administrators and the whole government body of a kingdom that was no longer. So they finished some building projects that had already started, but suddenly there was a lack of close control as the administrators of the kingdom proved inefficient on a local level. Poverty was rampant and nothing was done to help the poorest members of society; bad hygeine caused outbreaks of disease; there was desperate need for a new port and transportation system to bring Naples into the modern age.

From 1889-1918 there was a controversial project to clean up the city by tearing down old popular areas and building impressive boulevards and buildings. This did not entirely solve the problem, and perhaps caused more problems. Meanwhile, population continued to grow and despite some efforts, degradation continued.

Only in the past 20 years have both central and local governments taken an iron fist approach to crime in Naples and have done so much to improve every aspect of the city. In cleaning up the city they have made it safe and accessible for tourists. The brand new subway system works great. A new museological system has signs and visitor facilities that were not there when I first visited 10 years ago. The unique cultural background of Naples shows through in contemporary art and music that maintains a strong local and traditional base.

Conclusions?

So I have answered my question somewhat: Naples prospered in the past under strong local administration, but has suffered since unification and the presence of a centralized government that did not want to deal with it. Finally it is improving again as these entities are working together and the local government is strong and imposing.

Naples is no longer too dangerous to visit as long as you keep your wits about you as you would in any other city. And although we’re seeing piles of garbage featured on all the news channels, I can’t help but think that it’s exaggerated. I visited during the last garbage crisis; it was also August and so you’d think it would have been hot and stinky. Frankly it wasn’t much worse than Florence; in downtown Naples I did not see piles of burning garbage or feel that my health was threatened. There’s no question that there is a problem there – with garbage and not only – and I don’t know the solution.

For my own visits, first with my family and then with 50+ students, I found it helpful to break down the city’s history in order to get at the reasons behind my own stereotypes. In the process of this research I also found out what to see in the area. Good planning is essential when you’re visiting a city that does have a bit of a dark side, especially if you’re responsible for the safety of others. If you’re intrigued by Naples but not sure you’d go on your own, consider using Context Travel’s Naples tours to get yourself oriented. (PS this is not a paid post!)

What do you think? Have you been to Naples? Was it scary? garbage-filled?

Exterior of Laurentian Library seen from courtyard of San Lorenzo

It’s high time I write something about the Laurentian Library as this post has been in my drafts folder for over a year! Perhaps it has remained there because Mannerist architecture is not exactly an easy topic, and it’s even more difficult when you’re not in situ (and when photos are prohibited in this location!). But for anyone who has had, or will have, the fortune of stumbling into the oddly silent courtyard beside the church of San Lorenzo, I think this information needs to be available… just for you.

The Laurentian Library was named in honor of Lorenzo de’ Medici (aka Il Magnifico), who was a great collector of ancient and modern texts and who greatly expanded Medici library at end of 15^th century. He had a famous collection of books that was seized during Medici exile in 1494; it was later recovered and moved to Rome under Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici.

The  idea for a library at San Lorenzo in Florence seems to go back to 1519 along with creation of the Medici Chapel by Michelangelo in the same complex, but the plan only really took off in 1523 when Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici became Pope Clement VII. As part of his plan to glorify the Medici in the area of Florence traditionally dominated by this family, he wished to bring the Medici book collection back to Florence and unite it under one roof.

Between 1524 and 1527, Michelangelo worked steadily on this wonderfully well-documented commission: letters between M and the Pope are about everything from lighting, site, cost, structural issues, design of doors, tabernacles, reading desks, ceiling decoration, etc. He was helped by a large workshop and the easy availability of local building materials (a rare moment that he was not using Carrara marble). Then in 1527 the Medici were exiled; work came to a halt and was finished after the artist moved to Rome, with the execution more or less to his plans and with some involvement via courier.

Surpassing Structural Challenges

At the Laurentian Library, Michelangelo had to surpass interesting structural challenges: the monastic complex already exisited (with monks’ dormitories and adjacent church) and the rest of the neighbourhood was already built up so there was only one place to put the library, and that was above the extant structure. For this reason he had to make it particularly light. The location on the third floor also accommodated certain other necessary aspects of library construction such as being high up in case of floods and being near the monks’ dormitories so that it could be easily accessed (think of the placement of the library at San Marco, for example).

In the photo above of the exterior, you see a long area on the left – that’s the “reading room” – and a taller space on the right, which is the “vestibule”. The latter is a kind of ante-chamber that contains a staircase (built by Ammannati in 1559) that leads into the other room.  Have you ever seen a room just for a stairwell before? Probably not.It’s a particularly tall and weird space! It’s also a little dark, since the pope didn’t agree with Michelangelo’s plan to install skylights here – he said you’d need two monks to work full-time just to clean the dust.

Mannerism in the Laurentian Library

Laurentian Library Vestibule stairway and entrance

This space is one of the most discussed architectural spaces of the Renaissance, and this discourse is focused on Michelangelo’s bold architectural innovations, in which he breaks with normal Renaissance usage. As John Shearman writes in his 1967 Mannerism: “The principal development here is an application of licence to all architectural members, major and minor. It is the first building that seems to have been turned outside in, for the massive treatment of the interior walls belongs by tradition to exteriors.”

One of the examples of this licence is the use of columns, which are in fact here in pairs. Contrary to logical usage, they are actually embedded into the wall (as are the pilasters in here, but that’s a bit more normal). For Shearman the resulting effect is that “it seems that the wall is squeezed forward by the order, or as if the architecture had become organic, capable of movement.”

Below these double columns are giant volutes (scrolls) that seem to hang there like tongues – they, too, serve no purpose. And in fact they are rather too large for the space, so that in the corners they, as James Ackerman says, “seem to mate rather than meet“.

The stairway itself is also particularly impractical and unusual. I have always felt that it looks like the flow of lava spilling down onto the terracotta floor. Did you know that Michelangelo wanted to make the stairwell in walnut wood like the reading desks in the room next door, but this idea was discarded… because the squeaks would have been distracting to the studious monks!

View of stairway from above (source: from a book)

In the current pietra serena version, if you walk up the central area, the curved fronts finish in curly cues that are extremely effective in catching shoes. There is a “hand rail” of sorts down the center, but there is no rail or protection at the sides – there is no way this would pass ANY building code nowadays! These dysfunctional elements are intentional because the staircase was conceived of as a freestanding work of sculpture rather than functional architecture.

Michelangelo was generally praised by contemporaries for his “good judgment” in breaking the rules of ancient architectural theory in this space, while other architects were heavily criticized for following his example. Vasari worried that misunderstanding Michelangelo’s example could lead to bad architecture and said: “Certain plebeian and presumptuous architects lacking in disegno have in our times produced all their monstrous things, worse than the German.”

Laurentian Library interior

By contrast, the adjacent reading room constitutes an independent architectural system that totally does not relate to the vestibule and has a much more calming, normal, and warm effect thanks to the traditional layout, regular windows, and beautifully designed walnut furniture.

How to visit the Laurentian Library

This space is not normally open to the public except when a special exhibit is curated in an adjacent space, which fortunately has been more and more often in recent years. At the moment there is an exhibit called “Díaita. Heath rules in the manuscripts of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana” – from Sept 6 2010 to Jan 5 2011.

Opening hours: Monday – Saturday: 9,30 am -1,30 pm; closed on the first Saturday of the month and on State holidays. See official website.

Frizzi is part of a series called “Living Objects“, and this made me pause to reflect on the shapes that appeal to us right now. What makes this “living” and “cute”? Why did I stare at it with a happy doggy face and have to have it as soon as I saw it (despite its price tag)? Pure visual analysis tells us:

1) The fan’s body and the lamp below forms one sinuous curved line that we read as “appealing” and “human”.
2) The light cover is affixed by a shapely pin that creates a dimple in the glass, but avoids the “boob” effect common to ceiling lamps. Dimples are friendly.
3) Its retro shapes are built from high-tech, functional materials, so it’s comforting (1950s) but also new.

Design aside, it’s also functional. Its three long arms create a galeforce wind when set at high speed; kept on low it’s an energy-efficient way to keep our bedroom cool all summer long. The remote control, evocative of early television controls, is satisfyingly heavy and makes loud beeps while we are visually rewarded with LED feedback from the object’s body.

Tommaso says it wasn't too hard to install

Frizzi, already five years old, anticipated a lot of design trends that are being named this year and predicted for the coming decade, in particular “retro high-tech“. We’re seeing a lot of nostalgia for the 1950s and 60s, the great era of Italian design and the beginning of domestic convenience. Conversely, we are seeing a drive towards smart homes, energy saving devices, and high technology, but ideally we should not SEE this technology because it’s a bit scary. In the R&D departments of robotics companies they’ve conducted studies of human-robot interaction to see what designs people respond to best, and they find rounded shapes and friendly big eyes to be appealing and effective (see for example the robot named Nao). Machines can now be “adorable”. They are Living Objects.

Writing this post made me realized I don’t have a category called “design”! Maybe I should make one and write more about design that I love – what do you think?

April 17 2010 is international Slow Art day. In cities around the world, all at the same time, people will be individually looking at art slowly, then meeting as a group to talk about it over food and drink. This is a casual approach, not a lecture. But you’ll learn something. And you’ll be taking part in a worldwide movement.

Is your city participating? check the list of cities.

In Florence, I am hosting Slow Art day at the Church of Santa Croce at 4pm on Saturday April 17, followed by a buffet aperitivo at Brac, a contemporary art bookstore and vegetarian cafe. If you want to read more about slow art before signing up, here’s my article about it on TuscanyArts. If you’re already convinced, sign up on Eventbrite.

If you can’t make it on the 17th, do something slow art this week. In Florence that’d be easy – stop in any piazza (like the contest winners who wrote about piazza ssma Annunziata and Piazza della Signoria did) and contemplate the space, its architecture, the flow of people, the public art. If you live somewhere in the States or anywhere with less obvious art and history, find a park with public art! You don’t need to go to a museum to experience art; there are sculptures at street crossings, graffiti art in underpasses, a myriad of opportunities.

All I can say to this is UGH! Having gotten over my initial disgust I’d like to provide a small rebuttal. Dear Professor Franco, I don’t go around diagnosing corpses with illnesses so why are you diagnosing paintings? The CONTEXT of artistic production is essential to our understanding of works. If we know something of the artist in question, we can evaluate visual diagnosis of pathology.

For example, art historian Jonathan Nelson and a friend of his who is an oncologist (Stark) published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine back in 2000 about the breasts of Michelangelo’s Night whom they observed have all the evidence an advanced case of breast cancer. Nelson knows a little something about Michelangelo and about this period of art history (he teaches High Renaissance at Syracuse University in Florence and has published on Michelangelo, Filippino Lippi, and Botticelli). While the oncologist diagnosed the breast cancer, Nelson was able to back up this diagnosis information with what we know about Michelangelo as an anatomist - that he dissected corpses and could have had access to an old woman with this condition. With this article and also through later works, Nelson has disproved the old criticism that Michelangelo never saw a naked woman (since he was apparently homosexual), a really preposterous comment that has made its way into a lot of art history books.

Back to Dr. Vito now. I’d love to know what evidence allows him to give the poor baby Sleeping Cupid at the Pitti rheumatoid arthritis, although my diagnosis of said Cupid by Caravaggio is worse: he’s dead. I argued this in a paper about 10 years ago – the baby’s bloated with rigor mortis and he’s got a greenish hue. My diagnosis is as ridiculous as Dr. Vito’s except one thing: we know that Caravaggio got in trouble once before by basing a major figure in a painting on a corpse (the Death of the Virgin for Santa Maria della Scala in Rome was refused by its patrons for this reason) . We need art historical precedence before iconodiagnostics.

Piero's Madonna del Parto: do you see a lump on her neck? I don't.

Similarly, consider Piero della Francesca‘s Madonna del Parto. A lump on her neck diagnoses her with a thyroid disease. But what of Piero’s creative process? We all know that Piero’s figures are highly idealized and that he uses the same figural and facial types across his works – he was not an anatomist (if you think his people are funny, you should see his horses). The same female figure appears in the chapel of the Holy Cross in Arezzo – is this one model with a thyroid problem or one idealized female and some problems with shading? What might look like a lump to one person – and I don’t see it – could easily be the result of the tragic history of this fresco that has had to be removed from the wall upon which it was originally painted since the building no longer exists; the practise of fresco removal may cause the loss of detail and make close analysis of the painting impossible.

For each of these works of Renaissance art, a medical diagnosis needs to be backed up with a thorough study of the artist’s practise, style, and other social-historical elements.

In order to resolve this problem and to provide a valuable resource to scholars coming to Florence for research, I have created a public, user-editable map of Libraries in Florence.

View Libraries in Florence – Biblioteche Firenze in a larger map

Me with author Jane Fortune at her book launch

Folks! my comprehensive book review of Jane Fortune’s “Invisible Women” is now online and in the paper! Read the article in The Florentine and see below to win your own copy!

Short summary: Invisible Women is an expression of love for the female artists of Florence’s past. Jane Fortune has dug through the archives of the Florentine museums in search of women’s names and their works, which are often in storage and away from the public eye. The book is well written and engaging, and has broad appeal. It makes a great gift for the art-lovers on your holiday list, or really for any woman!

Win a copy of the book!

The prize is one copy of Jane Fortune’s book, generously supplied by The Florentine Press. You must provide arttrav with your snail-mail address upon notification of winning. The book will be shipped in a timely manner by The Florentine Press anywhere worldwide.

From now until Thursday December 17 at midnight European Time, the following actions EACH give you one chance at this random draw (you may do all three).

1) retweet this post (there’s a convenient retweet button at the bottom!). Make sure to include @arttrav in your tweet so I know you tweeted it. You will be contacted by DM if you are the winner.

2) share this post on Facebook (there’s an easy “share” button at the bottom of the post, or just cut and paste the link). Tag @arttrav.com or @Alexandra Korey so that I know you shared it. (If you’re not a fan on facebook, become one! click the heart-shaped fb icon, top right.)

3) Write a comment on this post (preferably after reading the article in The Florentine ) and include your email address in the email field (will not be shown).

The extended writing contest deadline is September 27 2009. 

It’s not hard to write a short “post” – don’t be shy! You do not need to be a writer, or even speak English as your first language! Send in your entry now and take a shot at great Italy-related prizes (books, coffee, saffron! and a grand prize worth up to 180$ from Context Travel).

Three reasons to enter the contest:

1) direct personal gain: you have a good shot at winning one of 8 great prizes.

2) gain for your company or exposure for your blog: winners can have a link to their business or blog, and a short bio blurb that mentions these things, included in the publication of their winning submission. Hey, that’s a quality backlink, folks.

3) Pure altruism: what you write will help others enjoy the same location in the future. If you loved it, why not share it?

As many of you know, I do not have kids, but I’ve used this book in its digital download form to come up with ideas to keep younger visitors to Florence occupied. Now I have the print version in my hands because it’s one of the prizes for the arttrav writing contest, and I felt it deserved a full review.

Let me make clear that you can order this book in either download or print form. The download is a great deal, but it takes time because you have to print it out, cut it to size, and bind it. The advantage to this is that you can customize it yourself. This can be a pre-trip activity with the kids, OR can be done by adults to edit out things that are not age-appropriate or relevant to where you are visiting in Italy. Also, if you’re like me, you might be inspired to come up with some more activities, print them in the same style, and add to the book. For example, inspired by the “Vehicle Variety” checklist on page 96, I came up with a bunch of pictures of the newest 50cc engined and electric vehicles to invade the city, and a list of related questions.

The printed form comes spiral bound so it easily lies flat for optimum reading, writing, and colouring in. It is half A4 size and light enough to carry around all day so that you can whip it out when the kid gets bored.

The table of contents is divided topically into some of the most important aspects of Italian life. Food and Gelato is first on the list and was much appreciated by my 11 and 13 year old half brother and sister, who endeavoured to sample all the flavours on the gelato checklist found on page 8. Other categories are: shopping, churches and religion, every day life and popular culture, art and architecture, history, geography, cars and road fun, and then some specific exercises and local activities.

Most of the observations on Italian culture are bang on, and bringing them to kids’ attention helps them understand and deal with something different. As someone who lives here, I forget how weird it must be to an American child that time is read on a 24 hour clock, that the evil eye is still a concern, or that people talk with their hands… all points brought up by this book.

Pat Byrne knows all the tricks to get kids looking at and interested in what’s around them. Frankly, these tricks work on my university students too. Her activities ask children to observe (look at the euros and make a list of the denominations) and compare (in the USA, green is equated with money. Does that work here?). This book helps remind us that while adults might visit a place like Florence for the museums, for kids everything around them is new and worth observing. We can try to direct their attention to what we think is most important, but in understanding a culture, we might best combine our observation of architectural styles (page 72) with that of how Italians line up for the bus (page 53).

If you bring your child to Italy, make it a learning and fun experience with this book. Arttrav has other book recommendations for travel with children – please see the Arttrav Bookstore section dedicated to KID STUFF!

For more information, see Kids Europe: www.kidseurope.com

The book can be purchased on Amazon.com:

First pages of Giovio's 1574 Dialogo on the Internet Archive

Art historians are able to do more and more research from home with the availability of many articles on JSTOR and many books at least in part on Google Books and even on Amazon.com’s “search inside” feature. Even more than new books, old books – really old books – are often digitalized both for conservation and accessibility reasons, and for the fact that they are far beyond copyright restrictions. There are numerous resources online for early printed books or Renaissance texts that should be brought to the attention not just of specialist scholars but of all interested “students” of the past. If you have never had the chance to browse a rare old book, this is your chance, albeit virtual.

Looking at books online not the same as touching and smelling the real books, but these amazing research tools can provide a first exposure to early modern printed books. This can be exciting for undergraduates or for anyone with a general interest in history. Graduate students may find these collections useful to establish which works they need to travel to see while preparing grant applications.

Today I was amazed to find various editions of a sixteenth-century Italian printed book that I need for research in the Internet Archive Text Collection project. Frankly, it would be very difficult, if not impossible for me to view this many editions of the same book in any one city, and I am able to compare editions on my screen.

The internet archive’s goal is to digitize libraries in order to “change the content of the Internet from ephemera to enduring artifacts of our political and cultural lives” and they have been doing so since 1996. Some books are available in a very nice flip-format (see below), while others (such as the “Project Gutenberg”) are in text format. I found my 1574 first Italian illustrated edition of Paolo Giovio’s Dialogo delle Imprese on this website! As this system does not have an effective full text search, you have to have a decent sense of what you are looking for, but be patient and you are likely to turn up something useful. If you’re just a browser, the most popular books are listed under each collection.

Here is an example of a very useful book for identifying iconography in Renaissance art – Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia - an illustrated version of 1603 published in Siena and digitized by the Getty Research Institute. The woodcut illustrations and the text describe the attributes of allegorical figures such as plentitude or intelligence.

As digital research is so very important for art history, I think I will post more articles on this in the future – please let me know if you find this useful or interesting.

Those in attendance are invited to follow along on their iphones (arttrav uses an iphone wp plugin to make that easy). This text is slightly expanded and includes links by which you can follow up on some of the things mentioned only briefly. If you enjoyed something in particular or would like to comment or expand on something, you are again encouraged to write a comment on this post.

If you can’t make it to the talk but enjoy reading this, please participate by leaving comments!

First encounters

Last year I had the fortune of teaching art history at the University of Georgia Study Abroad program in Cortona. Like most study abroad programs, students come for one semester in Italy, which is three or four months. When they first arrive, they grapple with culture shock, they question why things are different here, and they sometimes complain about the lack of certain conveniences like being able to order coffee to take out in tall paper cups. In the first weeks, some of my favourite students worked hard to fit in, and asked me things based on their observations. They asked if it was okay to drink beer in the streets since that is in fact legal here but not at home; or if it was okay to go to a church service even if they’re not Catholic. Over time they figured it out and came to love many things about life in Italy, even perhaps prefering cappuccino standing at a bar instead of walking around with a gigantic cup from Starbucks.

A profound effect

Three months in Italy will have a profound effect on anyone, student or adult traveler. Most of the students I taught were artists, so aspects of their Italian experience were particularly evident in the art that they produced here and continue to produce at home. For example, AJ Weiss made an album of music in Italian inspired by Jovanotti (our school was literally his neighbour in Cortona). Jewelry artist Miriam Rowe created necklaces inspired by what she saw at local markets. The visiting professors also incorporated bits of Italy into their works; my colleague Katerina Burin saw beauty even in those small napkins in bars, which she reproduced in large scale prints.

Miriam is home in Georgia now and she recently posted a list on her blog: “Things I miss about Italy” from which I’m going to loosely quote. This includes:

• Fresh, locally-grown fruit and vegetables any time I want them, and paying next to nothing for it.
• Saying “ciao” all the time – it’s so easy.
• Being in places that were built before Jesus was born.
• Playing the “Look Like An Italian” game – which involves wearing dark colors, boots, and funky hair and seeing if people speak to me in Italian before they speak to me in English.

By wearing all black and walking in that unapproachable way of Italian women, Miriam was hoping to fit in, but was probably never mistaken for an Italian, just as in ten years here I seldom have been.

Mediating cultural exchange

So, When Laura asked me to come up with a theme for tonight’s debate, I thought of my own, as well as my students’, struggle to fit in to Italian culture. But I also thought of what I’ve come to love about life in North America and my desire to transfer some of those positive elements to life here in Italy.

The idea behind the title “Mediating Cultural Exchange” incorporates both the taking and the giving aspects that happen when an anglophone comes to Italy, or really in any case of two cultures meeting. This is an opportunity to confront one culture with another; to consider our norms from the point of view of an outsider; to weigh out differences and similarities; and perhaps to choose which aspects of our own culture we prefer to keep, and those that we wish to alter.

I do not wish tonight to offer a list of what’s better here or there. Rather, I’d like to briefly provide some examples of the positive ways that I see Anglophone and Florentine culture interacting. The first, the working world, will be expanded upon in the talks by Suzi, Nina, and Lynn. I will look at three manifestations of the American love for Italy: study abroad, volunteerism, and tourism. Given time limits I’ll have to just suggest a few statistics, names, and websites for further reading.

Study abroad

Study abroad is considered essential preparation for work in a globalized world. Here are some interesting numbers:

• Italy is the number two destination for US study abroad students, with about 27,000 students (2006/7 data from IIE.org)
• AACUPI (Association of American College and University Programs in Italy) currently has 50 member programs in Tuscany alone, for about 8000 students per year, mostly in Florence.

Study abroad brings measurable benefits to the host country. There is direct revenue for Italian economy to the tune of 400 million euros per year (396,832,000.00 euros to be precise). Beyond this, there is indirect revenue of about 691M, which includes the extra tourists who visit young people here for the semester. Furthermore, study abroad also creates a degree of loyalty to Italy that tends to promote return visits by those people who had come here to study.

UGA Cortona Fall 08 Mostra

To quote directly from a report published by the AACUPI, study abroad creates “a context within which it is possible to develop real cultural exchange between academic tourists and Italian residents.” The British Institute is a perfect example of this since it serves both foreign and local populations. Some other examples include conversational language exchange between Italian and American young people, and art shows and symposia put on by various programs. Syracuse University in Florence has a permanent art exhibition space and has an annual art history symposium (in which I participated as a MA student in 1999). From its inception in 1974, UGA Cortona puts on a semestral “mostra” or art show of student work. This exchange can certainly be increased, which brings me to my next point…

Volunteerism

I knew as I started writing this talk that I would not have time to talk about volunteerism, so for the presentation I’m going to flash a slide on the screen and hope that you’ll look at the written version later. If you’re reading this from home, what I wanted to point out was that there are many examples of American associations that give back in some way to Florence. These include some of the larger study abroad programs, as well as other organizations.

I think it’s important to highlight how American study abroad programs contribute in a positive way to Florentine society in the light of recent tragedy and ridiculous behaviour. Of schools that “give back”, the two biggies, Syracuse University and New York University, come to mind. Both of these have volunteer programs that get their students out and working in needy sectors of the community. In NYU’s community service program, students work alongside locals coaching sports, serving food at a church, etc.; SUF has volunteer as well as internship programs and also contributes to the arts in Florence, collaborating with the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, putting on operas and translating childrens’ books. When I worked at UGA I was impressed with the program that puts UGA students into the local elementary school to teach art. These are examples from my own experience; I am sure that there are many more and invite you to post them in the comments section of this article.

Some organizations help bridge the gap between anglo and tuscan life, like the Tuscan American Association. And many give back in a substantial economic way to the art and culture of the city. The two of which I know are the Jane Fortune Foundation and the Friends of Florence. Both of these non-profit foundations fund and carry out restoration projects on important, or sometimes lesser known, works of art.

Cultural / Sustainable Tourism

As the study abroad numbers and volunteer associations demonstrate, Americans have always had a particular love of Florence, which shows up in tourism too. About 5 million american tourists come to italy each year which make up about 8.5% of the country’s visitors (source: enit.it). That is a great MASS of people – which contrasts with one of the latest buzzwords in the tourism industry: “sustainable tourism”. This can be defined basically as the opposite of “mass tourism”. The idea is to avoid having a negative impact on the country being visited. This is most often cited in relation to the impact of tourism on environments like rainforests, and less often considered in relation to Italian cities like Florence. A case in point is that neither the provincial nor regional official websites for tourism seem to address this topic, while it is those very organizations that ought to advise tourists on what they can do to be responsible visitors to our city.

What I’d call informed, cultural, or sustainable tourism is in some ways the adult counterpart of study abroad, but the onus of learning is on the self rather than on professors. You probably already participate in this trend if you research, and are sensible to, the social customs and histories of countries you visit.

Riding on the interest that Americans have for travel in Italy, some tour operators have developed sustainable options. For example, Context Travel offers small group seminars to introduce tourists to themes like the “Artisans of the Oltrarno”, or the “Ecology of the Venetian Lagoon”.

As a compliment to my work as a professor on study abroad programs, I like to think that I make a small contribution to “Informed Travel” with my online magazine, arttrav.com. I seek to provide information about art, travel, and life in Italy at a level of analysis more typical of university programs than of websites. So my short talk comes full circle: by posting arttrav articles on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, I have been able to keep in touch with some of my students who have returned to the States, like AJ and Miriam whom you met just minutes ago. In this way, while their direct cultural encounter has come to an end, I hope that I am extending the benefits of their Italy education by virtual means.

It’s the end of term and you have to study for your art history exam…
Make like Dewey the Library Cat and hit the books…

The classic art history test and exam format is the dreaded two-slide comparison. Your professor is asking you a leading question about two works in order to get you to prove that you paid attention in class. The following are slide exam study tips that I wrote upon the request of my students of Italian Renaissance art, but these concepts can apply to any period. Please note that each instructor has different exam rules and advice, so these are guidelines only.

How to study?

• Start early and review often.
• Make flashcards with artist, title, date, and relevant facts/points. What was said about the work in class may be relevant to developing your conclusion. If you do this, you’ll come up with a better conclusion than if you just base your statement on visual elements.
• Think about which images will show up as comparisons (see below).
• Try to practise these comparisons by thinking about similarities and differences between the works.
• If you have trouble memorizing dates, think about works in relation to each other, and/or in relation to a few “key” dates. If you’re familiar with style, you can often deduce date based on this information. Make a timeline.
• Find out what your professor accepts in terms of date range. In my classes, for most questions, rounding date to the DECADE is acceptable.

What two images make a good comparison?

• Two works of the same subject so you can see subject matter treated differently in two artists or two media.
• By the same artist at different points in his career.
• Similar composition but different subject.
• Works by artists who are closely related for one reason or another (for example, teacher/student).
• Works with something in common like perspective or naturalism or theory or ???
• Two works that permit you to learn something about one or both of them — for example the image that is the source of another that might determine date or artistic influence.

How to develop a conclusion
Larger conclusions are better than smaller conclusions. These are some examples of what I mean:

• What these 2 works tell you about the period of art history studied.
• What they tell you about one artist’s oeuvre, like changes within his career in terms of style, or x is earlier than y. NB: if you conclude this, your dates in the slide ID MUST correspond to your conclusion!!
• Relationships between 2 artists on a larger scale (x was influenced by y)
• Regional or time differences.
• Sometimes the conclusion might be about a specific piece of information, like x is the source of y (and hence is the earlier work).
• There are many more types of answers – think for yourself and try to relate the comparison to the course as a whole.

Artist: Linda Apple. Image source: http://tinyurl.com/kidptg

Exposing children to art from a young age develops cognitive and verbal skills, arguably good things. But it may be daunting to enter a museum with kids: they may be easily bored, they probably won’t resist long, and you may not be sure what to do to help them approach the works. I have recently had the pleasure of talking about teaching art history with a colleague of mine in art education, and we have found that some of the tricks I use in my university classes are the same as those recommended for use in elementary and middle schools. The following are some ideas for approaching art with school-age children that apply also to adults. While classroom techniques are similar, the points below are designed with the museum setting in mind.

A note before we begin: Be aware that not all museums are very child friendly. In the USA, almost every museum, from smaller university art museums to the biggies like the Washington National Gallery, the HIGH in Atlanta, and the Art Institute of Chicago have family programmes that make art accessible. The National Museum in London is wonderful for this. In Italy, this is rarer. The Uffizi is crowded and has no signs specific to children, little place to sit down and rest, and no place to eat, drink, or pee until you get to the end. Oddly enough, the Museo Archaeologico Nazionale in Naples has really fun signs for kids! When travelling, it may be better to try one of the smaller private museums. [There will be a future post under "Museums" about child-friendly options in Florence.]

1) Watch your child! what is he/she interested in looking at? Rather than picking out the masterpiece of art history that you know everyone should learn about, follow your kid’s eyes. He or she may be more interested in another piece (or in some lint on the ground…). If the child is NOT looking at the art, now’s the time to try to direct his or her attention to the wall, leading perhaps to the pieces you wish to discuss.

2) Ask for a reaction: Depending on age, your child may have more or less sophisticated reactions to art, but from an early age should be able to express like and dislike. Ask questions such as: do you like this painting? is it scary? is that a pretty colour? Sometimes, childrens’ answers will naturally lead you to discuss the work: why do you like it? what makes it scary, is it because it’s dark?

Raphael's Portrait of Maddalena Doni (Pitti Palace, Florence). Image in the public domain.

3) Pick pieces with people in them – they are easier to discuss:
Representational art has two main benefits when it comes to interpretation. First, it can tell us about the culture that produced it – what those people wore, what their ideals were. Second, we can more easily relate to quasi-timeless aspects like body language, facial expression, and gesture.
The portrait of Maddalena Doni (left) by Raphael kicked off a really fun conversation in my Italian Renaissance art history class. Someone immediately commented that she looked unhappy. This is in fact a double portrait; to the left of Maddalena, in a separate frame, is her husband Agnolo, and this is a wedding commemoration. Not exactly a joyous bride! I asked “who would want to go on a two week cruise with these people?” – and there were not a lot of takers. I asked why we know she is unhappy, which lead to a discussion of facial expression and body language or pose. But I also asked what else we can know about this couple from this painting; what information the clothing and landscape convey about the couple’s social status and gender roles.
My colleague in art education, Carole, said she used a similar approach with grade school children by showing them a reproduction of Wood’s American Gothic, asking the kids who would want to go spend a week on their farm. One boy said that the man holding a pitchfork was a devil-worshipper, which could lead to a conversation with older students about the manner in which we interpret symbols.

4) Make it relevant: Often, ideas or things represented in art are still part of our life today. A toddler will recognize another toddler (real or painted), point, and say “baby”. Objects and people in Renaissance paintings are sometimes recognizable as objects in our own homes, making for good conversation – how is that bed different from yours? Look, that lady is sewing just like your grandma does!
Sculpture and architecture might seem less accessible, but if you can discuss the object’s contemporary function, you can ask your young student to play-act how people might have reacted to this work in the past. For example, take Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio (see post here). Ask the child what message the government is trying to project with this building! how do they know that?
Furthermore, the function of much art is not that different from the function of personal propoganda or advertising today. Teenage girls might respond favourably to comparisons between portraits of women in the Renaissance and current magazine ads, which present very different ideals of beauty and sexuality.

5) Talking about style… building comparisons: One of the goals of art history is to develop an ability to recognize stylistic differences between works, generally in order to place works into a chronology that demonstrates a sequence (not so much a progression!) of stylistic change. Young children probably don’t care about this at all. But you can attune them to subtle as well as obvious differences between pieces that will enhance their critical skills. Not all museums make it easy for you to develop comparisons between works in a single room, as it is traditional to group works from the same time period or artist together, and it is more difficult to compare these than to compare works that are more disparate. (An exception to this is the newly rennovated Art Gallery of Ontario, where I spent my early years, now arranged thematically!) Here are some types of works that are easily comparable:

• two objects that depict the same subject, like two images of a Madonna and Child, two portraits, etc.
• Two works by the same artist, early and late in the artist’s career. How has the artist evolved? what is the artist’s range of style and subject matter?
• two pieces that might have the same function, like two big altarpieces.

6) Buy postcards: I still have a book into which I pasted postcards purchased on every museum visit before the age of ten. It’s a pretty full book. My mother had me write down the artist and title of the work pictured. I also pasted in postcards received in the mail. An even more interactive idea is to go to the museum shop FIRST and allow your child to pick one card to buy, then look for it in the gallery. Watch out though – if you’re in Italy, chances are that will be the one work taken away for restoration, or on loan somewhere else.

Other online resources:

• There are podcasts on this website to listen to in the first three rooms of the Uffizi Museum in Florence. These are for children old enough to guide themselves with a digital music device (ipod).
• Fun art-related online games from the National Gallery of Art (Washington)

Further reading:

• The Come Look with Me Series introduces art thematically or by region.
• For travel in Italy, I own a copy of this fun, self-published activity book that keeps kids looking not only at art, but around town at people, streets, cars, gelato, and everything else. Great way to keep them busy while waiting for slow restaurant service. See: Kids Europe Italy Discovery Journal
• The Phaidon Art Book for Children is perfect for practising at home before you go to the museum, or for reinforcing concepts afterwards. The large illustrations are tempting while the text boxes prompt young minds (and give parents more ideas about how to approach art with your kids!).

Sofonisba Anguissola, Old Woman studying the alphabet with laughing girl (Florence Uffizi)

Students in my advanced seminar on “Women and the Arts in Early Modern Italy” have been assigned the production of a short film biography on a female artist of the Renaissance or Baroque period. They were asked to produce an informative, scholarly, and factually correct interpretation of an artist whose presence on the internet is minimal – hence not Artemisia Gentileschi. With this project we hope to increase awareness of the activity of female artists in the early modern period by making films and related resources available to the general public.

 The three groups’ films on Lavinia Fontana, Sofonisba Anguissola, and Elisabetta Sirani can be viewed in separate posts.

Bibliographies are provided for further research and reading; we also highly recommend the resources available through the National Museum of Women in the Arts website.

Lavinia Fontana, Self Portrait in Studiolo, Vasari Corridor, Uffizi, Florence

This video and article are part of the Female Artist biographical film project described here.

Summary: Lavinia Fontana was born into an artistic and middle class family in Bologna in 1552. Her talent and promise as an artist was recognized early in her childhood, for while Lavinia had numerous brothers, her father Prospero, himself a successful artist in Bolognese society, understood that among his children, it was Lavinia who had inherited his skills as an artist. She is the first female artist to paint nude figures; and she may be one of the first female artists to train apprentices. Lavinia Fontana died in Rome in 1614. Through her unique education, talent, and artistic development, Lavinia Fontana was able to redefine perceptions of female artists, and the potential of a woman’s success and greatness in Renaissance culture.

Authors: Alexandra Goodman, Amy Smoler, Andrew Webster, Blair Hartman, Brenna Crothers

Select Bibliography:
“Fontana, Lavinia.” Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Accessed: 21 March 2009 [http://0-www.oxfordartonline.com.luna.wellesley.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/].

Fortunati, Vera. Lavinia Fontana of Bologna 1552-1614 (Milan: Electra, 1998), 13-32.

Fortunati, Vera. Italian Women Artists From Renaissance to Baroque (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2007).

McIver, Katherine A. “Lavinia Fontana’s “Self Portrait Making Music,” Women’s Art Journal 19 (1998): 3-8.

Murphy, P. Caroline. “Lavinia Fontana,” chapter x in Italian Women Artists From Renaissance to Baroque, ed. Claudio Strinati (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2007), 165.

Murphy, P. Caroline. “Lavinia Fontana and Female Life Cycle Experience in Late 16th Century Bologna.” Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, eds. Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Murphy, Caroline P. “Fontana, Lavini,.” Dictionary of Female Artists, ed. Delia Gaze (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997), 534-537.

Murphy, Caroline P. “Lavinia Fontana and Le Dame della Citta: understanding female artistic patronage in late sixteeth-century Bologna.” Renaissance Studies 10 (1996): 190-208.

Ross, Sarah Gwyneth. “Fontana, Lavinia (1552-1614),” Encyclopedia of Women in the Arts, (Oxford: ABC Clio, 2007), 147-150.

If you liked this film you may also like the students’ take on Elisabetta Sirani.

Elisabetta Sirani, Portia wounding her Thigh, Houston, Miles Foundation

The Funerary Procession of Elisabetta Sirani

Summary: Elisabetta Sirani was a 16th century female painter from Bologna. She exceeded the expectations for her sex by painting scenes atypical for a female artist. Unfortunately, not much is known about her; what is known is that after her tragic death at age 27 Bologna held a lavish funeral in her honor. The procession was attended by many of her contemporaries who are portrayed in this film to express the little information available on the life of Elisabetta Sirani.

Authors: Jessica Snow, Sean Brice, Margaret Rancourt, Michaele Maddox

Select Bibliography:

Bohn, Babette. “The Antique Heroines of Elisabetta Sirani,” Renaissance Studies Vol.16 Issue 1 (March 2002):

“Elisabetta Sirani.” Encyclopedia of World Biography. Thomas Gale. 2004. Accessed 29 Mar. 2009 [http://www.encyclopedia.com]

“Elisabetta Sirani; Italian, 1638-1665.” National Museum of Women in the Arts. Accessed 20 Mar. 2009. [http://www.nmwa.org/collection/profile.asp?LinkID=417]

Sofonisba Anguissola, Bernardino Campi painting her, Siena: Pinacoteca Nazionale

Sofonisba Anguissola: More than a Woman

Summary: Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625) surpassed the expectations of women during the Italian Renaissance. She was well educated and trained under the tutelage of Bernardino Campi from 1545 to 1549 and thereafter with Bernardino Barri. With the help of her father, her works were well marketed and dispersed within the influential social circles of Florence. A letter between Sofonisba’s father and a Roman general described the presentation of two drawings, one by Sofonisba and the other by Michelangelo Buonarroti, to Cosimo Medici around 1562. Within this letter, a story is told of Michelangelo asking Sofonisba to draw a more difficult expression of sadness; her reply was the image, “Boy Bitten by a Crayfish.” Her ability to create highly animated portraits allowed her to have a long flourishing career as an artist and created a lasting legacy that made her “more than a woman”.

Authors: Carol Telesky, Kendra Hunt, Rebecca Rastegar, Alexandria Covert. Actor: Jim Woglom.

Links: There is an excellent biography of Sofonisba and list of works here! You may also read about her at the National Museum of Women in the arts website.

Select Bibliography:

Fulmer, Betsy, “Sofonisba Anguissola: Marvel of Nature,” Academic Forum 23 (2005-06) : 20-34.

Garrard, Mary D, “Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist,” Renaissance Quarterly XLVII, 3 (1994) : 556-622.

Jacobs, Fredrika H. “Woman’s Capacity to Create: The Unusual Case of Sofonisba Anguissola,” Renaissance Quarterly 47, 1 (Spring 1994), 74-101.

Ross, Sarah Gwyneth. “Anguissola, Sofonisba,” entry in Encyclopedia of Women in the Arts: Italy, France, and England, eds. Diana Robin, Anne R. Larsen, Carole Levin (ABC Clio, 2007), 14-18.

1) Sarah Dunant: In the Company of the Courtesan describes the imagined history of a set of lascivious images known as “i modi”, which are brough to Venice by a courtesan escaping the Sack of Rome.

2) Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus: A Novel is actually quite historically accurate in its details of Savonarolian Florence, although its female heroine is rather modern in her outlook.

3) The Ruby Ring by Diane Haeger is a “historical” romance about the love affair between Raphael and his peasant “model”.

4) The Rule of Four: Students discover a text that really exists (Hypnerotomachia Poliphili), and dumb it down for us to read.

5) The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert Hellenga: a mud angel book restorer (Florence after the great Flood of 1966) comes upon a book of erotic engravings and sonnets, and has an affair.

6) Any book in the Iain Pears series with Flavia di Stefano of Rome’s Art Squad (for mystery lovers- written by an art hisorian): Books by Pears

7) The SECRET BOOK OF GRAZIA DEI ROSSI: It’s been a while since I’ve read this one but I remember being enchanted by it as an undergraduate, as it addresses Jews in Mantova and Isabella d’Este.

Donna Leon, Death at La Fenice: A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery (also in the same series, Blood From a Stone, Doctored Evidence, Uniform Justice, and soon to be published Dressed for Death).

9) The Passion of Artemisia by Susan Vreeland is surprisingly well researched and presents a relatively balanced impression of the artist’s life.

10) Umberto Eco’s murder mystery set in a 14th c Italian monastery: The Name of the Rose

Altarpiece: a painting of religious nature that sits upon an altar.
Apse: The semicircular or polygonal far end (usually East) of a church, at which the high altar is placed.
Arch: a structure that spans a space and supports weight. In gothic art, pointed arch; in Renaissance art, rounded arch.
Cathedral: Church that is the seat of the Bishop.
Capital: the “head” of a column, has a decorative function.
Chapel: a consecrated space containing an altar, freestanding or within a larger church
Chapter House: in monastic/conventual context, a meeting room. Usually a square room lined with benches, accessed off the cloister.
Chiaroscuro: An Italian word meaning “light-dark”, used to describe the dramatic contrast of light and dark in painting to create effects of three-dimensionality.
Cloister: a courtyard, usually in a monastic setting, with a covered collonade that goes around it. (Similar to a loggia, but square or rectangle, like 4 loggie combined.)
Coffer/ Coffering: recessed panels, square or polygonal, that decorate a vault, ceiling or the underside of an arch. Example: Masaccio’s Trinity.
Column: a round, freestanding architectural element that functions to support a structure above it. (see also pilaster)
Confraternity: Voluntary association of men who unite for religious and/or social purposes.
Contrapposto: Italian for “set against”. Bodily posture in which most of the weight is placed on the “engaged” leg, causing the upper body to turn and fall off axis. Makes representations of the body to look more natural and relaxed. Developed by Renaissance artists though deriving from Ancient art.
Crenellation: Pattern of open notches built into the top parapets and battlements of fortified buildings. Characteristic of Medieval hilltop towers and urban defense structures. Example: Palazzo della Signoria (Florence).
Entablature: horizontal element in architecture that sits above columns, composed of cornice, frieze, and architrave.
Fresco: A wall painting technique that involves applying colored pigments to wet plaster. Italian word literally means wet/fresh. Additional pigment applied on dry plaster is “a secco”.
Frieze: The flat middle division of an entablature, often containing sculpture, or more generally a horizontal element in architecture.
Guild: Professional association of men with obligatory membership. Has role of protecting and promoting that profession.
Impost Block: A decorative block placed between a capital and the entablature, often used in Romanesque art to add height to columns taken as spolia (re-used from other buildings). Used by Brunelleschi in the nave at San Lorenzo.
Loggia: Italian term for an architectural space, open on one side, with a series of arches on columns or piers. (Different from a cloister.)
Mathematical/ Scientific Perspective: Method of rendering a credible, deep three-dimensional space (reality) in two dimensions (painting), based on a scientific system in which lines converge at a vanishing point which lies on a horizon line. [Note: Can only be applied to two-dimensional arts (painting and drawing), not to architecture or sculpture!]
Nave: The long central portion of a basilican-shaped church, before the transept.
Niche: A concave opening in a wall, often used to house statuary.
Mendicant Order: a category of religious community of friars who (originally) follow apostolic example in poverty and teaching. Examples: Dominican, Franciscan.
Pendentive: An inverted, concave, triangular area of wall that serves as transition from a square support to the circular base of a dome.
Pilaster: A decorative flattened column that projects slightly from the face of the wall, but is engaged, not freestanding. Has no supportive function.
Polyptych: a painting (often religious) composed of multiple panels, either hinged together or united by a frame. Also: diptych (2 panels), triptych (2 panels).
Predella: A long platform upon which an altarpiece is set, usually painted or sculpted with small scenes related to the main scene.
Refectory: Dining room in monastic/conventual context. Usually a long rectangular room lined with tables in a U-shape on 3 walls, with a door on the other wall and hand-washing basins nearby.
Rilievo Schiacciato: very low relief sculpture technique invented by Donatello, that treats lines in the marble like drawing.
Rood Screen: an architectural division placed in the nave of a church, serving to divide the space between lay and religious practitioners. Often the locus of art, like large crucifixes.
Roundel: a circle in architecture, often placed in the empty space between columns or on pendentives. Sometimes contains sculpture or painting. (NB: different from a tondo!)
Sacra Conversazione: Italian term for “sacred conversation”, in painting when the Virgin and saints are depicted in the same space (invented by Fra Angelico).
Sacristy: A room in a church (usually off the transept) that is used to store vestements and sacred vessels. A kind of priests’ changing room.
Tabernacle: (1) the container for the sacred host, central mystery of the Catholic faith; (2) [street ~ ] a niche, often on street corners or walled into buildings, containing a sacred image.
Tondo: a circular painting popularized in the mid quattrocento for domestic art.
Transept: arms of a church that divide the nave from the apse
Usury: A deadly sin for Catholics caused by charging interest on loans.

I really encourage travelers to enrich their experience by also reading other types of books about aspects of Italy that interest them. After the guide, you might consider an art history textbook, some historical fiction, something about italian history… There are posts on arttrav with reading lists that might help you choose something fun to read before or during your trip.

Guide books: All Italy
TIP: If touring much of Italy, pick up a general guide and supplement it with regional ones.

Touring Club of Italy in English!!: Seriously, I can hardly contain my excitement about this new series of travel books for Italy and its regions, published by the long-standing Italian institution, the Touring Club. I have relied for many years on its Italian-language travel books (their red hard covers distinguish locals from tourists), but these are not accessible to English speakers. Finally, this information, including an excellent summary of Italian culture, is available in English.

Michelin the Green Guide Italy (Michelin Green Guides) : It’s hard to find a perfect guide to all of italy. This isn’t it, but the nice thing is that it lists all locations alphabetically, and you can find them on their excellent maps.

Italy (Eyewitness Travel Guides): OK. I generally don’t like eyewitness guides because they are too basic in terms of historical information. However, if you really don’t know where you want to go, this is a good place to start. The nice pictures get you interested in certain regions and give you an idea of how much there might be to see. Once you’ve looked at it though, it is necessary to go beyond, by buying regional guides like the Blue Guides. Many towns have much more to offer (or are not even listed) than what is written here. This is a first-time traveller’s book.

The Guide to Jewish Italy: Jewish-specific information, beautifully presented

Guide books to Florence

For most cities, I find it’s fine to rely on the Blue Guide (see Rome, below). The Blue guide is not for hotel planning; it contains detailed walks for the city, and good historical information. As such it is also not important to have the most updated guide.

The companion guide to Florence: This is a classic book to read before you come to florence. So classic, it’s out of print, so you’ll have to buy it used. You’ll get a fantastic historical base and an idea of all the things to see BEYOND the uffizi and the “david”! The author is a respected art historian, and I often use her book to check facts and plan lessons.

The Food Lover’s Guide to Florence: With Culinary Excursions in Tuscany: You’re not likely to starve to death in Florence, but with Emily’s book, you’ll actually eat well. This really is a must-have.

Rome

Blue Guide Rome, Ninth Edition
The most complete guidebook available in English for this complex city.

Augenti’s art and archeology of Rome An art history textbook with sections on the museums of Rome. A great approach to the city that puts works into their chronological perspective.

Other cities/regions

Venice: Companion Guide to Venice  An oldie but goodie.

Naples: Cadogan’s Bay of Naples and Southern Italy  : one of the few guides available

Naples: In the Shadow of Vesuvius: A Cultural History of Naples: Not technically a guide book, but an excellent historical introduction (due to come out in a second, paperback edition, soon – Jan 2009).

Sicily: Blue Guide Sicily

Marche: The Marche (Heritage Guides): The Touring Club Italy’s older guide book series in the english language is the Heritage Guides. If you’re going to the Marche, you’re going to need a non-american guide to hit up some smaller towns, so this might be a good one to pack.

Fra Angelico annunciation fresco in San Marco

Fresco was used in the Ancient world but fell out of favour in the Middle Ages, when they tended to use more mosaic. It came back around 1300 as it was the best form of painting for monumental architecture, much of which was being built at this time (especially in Florence). It could be done quickly and quite cheaply, it could cover vast surfaces AND it is relatively permanent.

FRESCO (affresco in italian) means WET. The paint is applied to wet plaster. This term thus should not be applied to just any wall painting. Some parts of the fresco are applied A SECCO, which means DRY. Frescos are mostly permanent because of their chemical composition:
1) The active ingredient in fresco is LIME PASTE, which is produced by heating CALCIUM CARBONATE with limestone.
2) LIME PASTE + AIR changes back into calcium carbonate, hard crust (carbonatation). If pigment is applied to this when wet, it becomes trapped into the wall and is fairly permanent because it is very chemically stable.

Cennino Cennini, who wrote an artists handbook around 1400, describes exactly how frescoes were made at his time.

STEP 1: scaffolding. In small space like chapels, scaffolding is built across space, with wooden poles stuck into the walls. These parts are then filled in; if you see square holes in the wall, chances are this is a place where the scaffolding has been, and some plaster has fallen out.

STEP 2: prepare the wall. You’re going to apply plaster to the wall and you want it to stick, so you rough up the surface with a small pick-axe.

STEP 3: ARRICCIO
Arriccio is a layer of rough plaster made of a mixture of lime paste and large granules of sand. You smear it onto the wall and let that dry overnight.

STEP 4: MAP OUT THE DRAWING
The 14th century artist would sketch out the major outlines of his painting with a reddish-brown paint directly onto the arriccio. This part is called the SINOPIA, an underlayer of the fresco that can sometimes be uncovered through restoration and is sometimes displayed in museums. Sometimes you may actually see sinopia on walls where the top layer of the fresco has been ruined. This preparatory drawing in sinopia is a handy guide for the artist and also a way to show patron what he’ll be getting. Later in the 15th century, the practise of direct sinopia painting was used less often. As drawing became more important in the practise of the visual arts, many artists made a series of preparatory designs culminating in a CARTOON, a life-size drawing on paper. They pricked the cartoon with a needle and held it up to the arriccio; this page was then “pounced” with a sack of carbon so that a black outline was made. There were other ways to transfer drawings and to keep them in mind during the process, though these are the two most popular.

STEP 5: INTONACO
The day to paint has arrived. Obviously it’s not all done at once – each day’s work is called a GIORNATA. This corresponds to a plaster patch that is the amount of work the artist could do in one day. You prepare your intonaco plaster, which is made of the same lime and sand as the first layer, but the sand is a finer grain and there is more lime. This mixture is then spread onto the space you intend to work on that day. Interestingly, this covers up the underpainting (or charcoal outline), which the artist had to keep in his mind! If you look closely, sometimes you can see the giornata divisions in a fresco; these were applied judiciously to try to hide the lines but are usually around major shapes.

STEP 6: PAINT
The paint is applied directly to the plaster while it is wet, which is only a 2-4 hour window of opportunity, after which the plaster starts to dry and it gets very difficult to paint. You work from the top down (because the paint drips!) and try to do large areas like sky all at once because it’s very difficult to match colours the next day. This process is very difficult because once you apply the paint, it’s there and you can’t make mistakes. In fact, paint layers are thin to transparent, so the pigment was added in layers. Colours could also be mixed by doing this.

Only certain types of colours are good for fresco painting. These are chemically stable EARTH PIGMENTS like terraverde, yellow ochre, red, white, charcoal black. Other pigments would react with air and discolour – lead white turned black over time, azzurite blue turns green.

STEP 7: A SECCO
Finishing touches were applied after it all dried and tend to be less permanent and fall off with time. Blue pigment was applied often over red underpainting, while gold leaf was applied last, being stuck on with fish glue. Sometimes the finest details in faces and other sections were done a secco. This means that if you see a red sky or a face with no detail, chances are you are looking at a fresco that has lost its a secco treatment.

PRESERVATION
Because of their chemical composition, frescoes are permanent unless they are affected by damaging outside forces. The main one is sulfur, which turns limestone and marble into dust. Sulfur attacks frescoes through air pollution and water. Water also causes blistering and mold. Of course, the ravages of time can also be damaging. The fashions of later centuries meant that often perfectly good frescoes that we would admire today were overpainted or simply white-washed! Vasari did this to Giotto’s frescoes in Santa Croce, which is why they are not in great condition now. Bombings, in Italy mostly from WWII, caused serious damage in other areas, as did the flood of 1966.

Fresco required great skill and speed. The process required artists to plan ahead, to think of space as subdivided into sections, and to think of design in terms of strong shapes. This leads to a new appreciation, especially in early Renaissance Florence, of the monumental, of powerful and large forms.

Birth of “venus”?

Winning the “what the heck is that” prize in the ”Horrible modern references to Renaissance art” category… this really awful photomontage on canvas on display on a street in Orvieto.

Shrew Businessmen and Compliant Women: the gender roles of happy contigues in renaissance art.

Way back in the Renaissance, things were different for women, but not different enough. As men created the Renaissance, therefore it was then dedicated to the focus and domination of men. The ideal Renaissance man was a shrew businessman and warrior. He was depicted as a free-ranging man of multifaceted excellence.

By and large, the female was depicted as being completely defined by her husband’s affairs and exploits. The wife was “taught how to be obedient” (Alberti, Della famiglia, 212); house-trained, like a dog. Women were shown as chased figures with chastidy. The most common virtuous role for a woman was to marry and have babies to a well-to-do man on earth: they were the children barriers in the marriage. A virtuous woman was expected to have chastidy, compliance [what, ISO 9000?], and modesty. Her role is based on and delegated by male ideals. This delegation may be seen as necessary for a couple to be happy contigues [sic] when laurel is just not enough.

Renaissance art shows some of the sexual roles assigned to woman. A popular painting subject of the time is the sensuous female figure. Sensous, that is, for the anonymous viewer. Bellini and Giorgione had to paint a nude female as unaware of her lack of clothing. Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” is shown as an object of a chased marriage. In Bellini’s “Lady with a Mirror” from 1515, there is a bit of fabric that covers her somewhat but also serves to lead the eye to the swimsuit regions. Venetians invented the “one boob portrait”. [Venetian sensuality is different from Tuscan linearity.] Indeed, modern female body builders often look like they are smuggling oranges beneath their bikini’s much in the way breasts look on Michelangelo’s women.

In conclusion, women were glorified in paintings for their magnificent virtues and demoralized for acts that were not accepted. Enforcement of ideals met with widespread passiveness.

*for privacy purposes, of course this is totally anonymous…

(Madonna wears Jewels courtesy of www.icedoutgear.com)

  In 1420, MASACCIO painted his Explosion of Adam and Eve.He is also famous for his Trinity, which shows God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Grey Pigeon.

Masaccio's Explosion

Many do not notice the holy grey pigeon in this fresco

BOTTICELLI’S style is different from Giotto’s and all the other artists we have seen in many facets, because these types of private commissions have all been designed with the same type of Christian idolatry in mind. Botticelli’s main innovation is his direct copying of classical antiquities.

  LEONARDO takes us into the High Renaissance with his painting of an often-repeated subject matter: the Annotation of Mary. 

  Architecture  

Brunelleschi's Santo Spirito

The purpose of looking at Santo Spirito is to show the
progress of architecture under Brunelleschi. The shape and length
of windows, the large columns, and the pointed arches of the church
all suggest that Brunelleschi was influenced by the Gothic
Style [uh... sic!]. Santo Spirito sucks the viewer in through
the architecture!

pisa

The Pisa Duomo complex was built by bad architects who didn’t consider foundation.

 Sculpture 

This competition panel shows Abraham who is told by God to sacrifice his only son Isaac but is stopped in the knick of time by an angel who brings good tidings and a relieving “just kidding” from the passive-aggressive God of the Old Testament.

by Ghiberti shows a saint followed by angels healing a starving man. This shows the great humility and good nature of saints.Ghiberti, Creation of Adam”]

Ghiberti, Competition panel sacrifice of isaac From a Slide ID test... This panel [Creation of Adam scene, the Gates of Paradise

 The walls of Lucca were useful [for defense] because planes were not invented yet.

Lucca - plan of walls