Another view of Europe’s golden age
Henry VIII, Adam and Eve and Aphrodite are among the ‘stars’ of this modest yet intriguing exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
The Renaissance, as a wall label in Reimagining the Renaissance reminds us, began in Italy six centuries ago but its historiography has evolved across this time and especially from the second half of the 19th century, when it became an academic subject in the resurgent universities of western Europe and Britain. (Universities had relatively little intellectual traction in the Enlightenment and are perhaps losing ground again today except in the hard sciences.)
Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) remains a fundamental study of the period, especially for introducing a new way of thinking about his subject as a cultural phenomenon rather than a collection of data on wars, treaties, trade and so on. It was Burckhardt who first made us think about the culture of the Italian city-state – something he was shortly afterwards to extend to the study of the ancient Greek city-state – as well as the character of what we still call the “renaissance man”.
But even earlier, Giorgio Vasari’s monumental Lives of the Artists (1550), which saved countless of his predecessors from oblivion, emphasised the distinctive ethos of Florence – though the concept of culture in the anthropological sense did not appear until the late 18th century – as well as the individualistic and highly ambitious character of men such as Filippo Brunelleschi, driven by the same urge to innovate and excel that we see today in fields such as computer engineering.
Many other factors no doubt help to explain the flowering of the early modern period in Florence, including the achievements of the late medieval world from which it emerged, economic and social developments, and a new appreciation of antiquity as a benchmark against which the modern world could measure itself; as the great art historian Erwin Panofsky argued, the Renaissance could not begin until the modern world had recognised the rupture that had gradually taken place with antiquity, and was thus able to understand itself anew in relation to the past.
The Renaissance spread through Italy in the second half of the 15th century, reaching Venice via Andrea Mantegna during his time in Padua and then his marriage to the sister of Giovanni Bellini. Around the end of the century and during the High Renaissance, it began to reach further into Europe, with Albrecht Duerer’s visits to Venice and Leonardo da Vinci’s final move to the court of Francois I in France. (We can still visit the chateau in Amboise where Leonardo spent his last years.) At the same time, Renaissance ideas began to penetrate into other northern countries, including the Netherlands, whose culture in the 15th century was still late medieval, and even England.
The Art Gallery of South Australia exhibition includes some fine examples of earlier Italian art, such as the charming Virgin and Child with Sts Jerome and Antony of Padua that greets us at the entrance, and a little panel of St Francis receiving the stigmata from a crucified Christ who seems to be borne aloft in the sky by a seraph with six red wings, but it has a particular strength in English paintings of the time.
The most striking of these is a fine portrait of Henry VIII (c. 1540s) from the studio of Hans Holbein, one of several high-quality versions of the original that would have been produced for such an important painting (indeed ultraviolet examination has revealed charcoal pouncing marks showing that the design was transferred to the panel using a cartoon). Interestingly, this is accompanied in the exhibition by an engraving of the painting. Observant viewers will notice that the engraving reverses the image in the painting – most notably the king’s hat tilts in the opposite direction – because all engravings are printed in reverse.
Next to the king are two smaller but very good portraits, with a striking family resemblance, of his son Edward VI, who sadly died at the age of 15, and his daughter Elizabeth I (1533-1603; queen from 1558), who was to enjoy an illustrious reign because it was possible under British law for a woman to inherit the crown in her own right.
Here Elizabeth is still very young, but the book she carries probably alludes to her erudition as much as her piety; many years later, in 1597, she replied spontaneously in fluent rhetorical Latin to a speech by the Polish ambassador (her words, recorded at the time, are still read today by students of Neo-Latin). Of course it should be remembered that her father Henry was also an able linguist who spoke several languages and learnt to write Latin fluently as a schoolboy.
This exhibition is full of interesting works from different centres of early modern culture in Europe, but there are some pieces that are particularly intriguing because they are in various ways curious, puzzling or enigmatic. There is, for example, a marble relief, undated and unattributed, that shows the Emperor Augustus with the Tiburtine Sibyl. The sibyls were essentially the same as the oracles, priestesses of Apollo who foretold the future. In the Roman world the most famous of these was at Cumae near Naples, the site of the first Greek colony on the Italian mainland and according to Virgil the place that Daedalus alighted after the flight from Crete in which he lost his son Icarus.
Another ancient sibyl was at Tivoli, hence the adjectival form Tiburtine. According to legend, when Augustus consulted her about whether he should be venerated as a divinity, she showed him a vision of a mother holding a child in her arms and told him that this was to be the new god of the future.
A similar prophecy appears, also in Augustus’s lifetime, in Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, where he attributes the prophecy to the Cumaean Sibyl and speaks of a child who is to be born and who will inaugurate a new era, with a return to the golden age. Both Virgil’s poem and the Sibylline prophecy were taken by early Christians to foreshadow the coming of Christ, which is one reason Virgil was held in such high esteem throughout the Middle Ages, but also the reason the church effectively underwrote the veracity of the pagan oracles and that Michelangelo included the sibyls in his Sistine Chapel ceiling paintings.
Speaking of the golden age, this ancient idea that humans once lived in harmony with each other as well as with nature, and indeed that even animals coexisted in peace, has its biblical equivalent in the state of Eden before the fall. And this is the subject of the beautiful and complex woodblock print of Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach (1509). The two of them are seen in the centre of the composition, but they are surrounded by a crowd of peaceful animals. Adam indeed is seen through a screen of the antlers of the large male deer that lies in the left foreground, while the right foreground is occupied by a sleeping lion. The point is that Eve is just about to pluck the apple and to shatter this picture of harmony.
Another print, seemingly also idyllic but much more animated, is Ugo da Carpi’s chiaroscuro woodcut of Venus and cupids chasing a hare (c.1510-30). The medium is one he claimed to have invented and is a form of woodblock that, in addition to the basic block that prints the linear design, also uses one or two further blocks to print areas of monochrome tone. The subject comes from late antiquity author Philostratus, who wrote a collection of most likely fictional descriptions, or ecphrases, of paintings, the Imagines (I, 6); the cupids or amorini, lying on the ground as Philostratus describes them, have just caught the hare alive to present it as a gift to Aphrodite, since the hare is much given to the pleasures that are the special preserve of the goddess.
Aphrodite appears again in a very unusual painting that is not part of the AGSA’s holdings but a loan from a private collection in Melbourne. It is a Flemish mannerist work of the 16th or possibly very early 17th century by Hans Vredeman de Vries and it shows a familiar subject, one that goes back in narrative form to Homeric times and is best known in visual iconography in the form given to it by Raphael in the engraving that he designed and that was executed by Marcantonio Raimondi (c. 1510-20).
The episode is pregnant with consequences. At the wedding feast of Peleus and Thetis, the human and divine parents respectively of Achilles, gods and men alike are invited, but Eris, goddess of strife, is left off the guest list. She avenges herself in what proves to be the most appalling way: she throws into the middle of the party a golden apple labelled, as though in Alice in Wonderland, “for the fairest”. It is suggested that Zeus should choose among the goddesses, but he refuses and a mortal prince, Paris, son of the king of Troy, is invited to judge between Hera, Aphrodite and Athena.
Each of the goddesses offers him a bribe: Hera will make him lord of all Asia; Athena will give him wisdom and military skill; but Aphrodite will give him the most beautiful girl in the world, and that is what he chooses, awarding the apple to the goddess of love. But the most beautiful girl, Helen, is already married to Menelaus, king of Sparta. Aphrodite fills her with longing for Paris and he carries her off to Troy. This provokes the Trojan War, in which, because of Paris’s choice, Aphrodite will favour the Trojans while the other two will be their deadly enemies.
In Raphael’s famous print, Paris sits on the left, looking at the three goddesses who display themselves for his inspection; here they sit around a table as though at dinner together, while a strangely androgynous Paris enters with the golden apple on a platter. Hera (Juno in Latin), who is closest, turns towards him; in the centre Athena (Minerva) sits in armour; on the right Aphrodite (Venus) is fondling a figure of Eros (Cupid) while an angel-like figure borrowed from Christian iconography flies down from the heavens to crown her as the winner of the contest. Grim figures behind, on the right margin of the composition, may allude to bereavement and mourning; a seated figure on the lower with a halberd reminds us of war, and a final mysterious and dark-shrouded figure lurking in the gallery above may be meant to be death himself.
There are many more pieces even in this fairly modest exhibition – wild horses fighting, a portrait of Luther with his wife, a majolica dish with a view of the underworld – but the few I have discussed give some sense of how much there is to look at and ponder in the art of this seemingly familiar yet inexhaustibly rich and surprising period.
Reimagining the Renaissance, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, ends April 13.
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