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Prior to this exhibition, Pareja (1608–1670) may have been known to many not as an artist, but as the subject of a stunning painting by Diego Velázquez, which was acquired by the Met in 1971. Velázquez was not only Pareja’s portraitist but also his artistic master and erstwhile enslaver. This bond is mentioned in early biographies, which also inform us of how the old master brought Pareja with him to Rome in 1650 when he was sent to purchase artworks on behalf of the Spanish king. The Met’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja was executed during this journey and, if we are to believe his biographer, Velázquez had Pareja carry his own likeness through the streets so spectators could marvel at his master’s artistic skills.

At the end of their Italian tour, Velázquez granted Pareja his freedom. In fact, one of the most moving objects in the exhibition is neither a painting nor a sculpture but the manumission document, first discovered quite by accident in a Roman archive in 1983 by Jennifer Montagu. The circumstances of Pareja’s original enslavement remain unknown, but one thing we learn from an essay by Luis Méndez Rodríguez in the exhibition catalogue is just how common such uneven relationships were in the 17th century: Caravaggio and Murillo are implicated in such exploitative practices, as are numerous lesser-known painters, sculptors, tile makers, glaziers, and other artisans who similarly kept enslaved people in their workshops and households.

The exhibition takes care to contextualize Pareja’s art. The first of four sections is devoted to a précis of the scholarly activities of the Black Puerto Rican intellectual and polymath Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874–1938) whose essays “The Negro Digs Up His Past” (1925) and “In Search of Juan de Pareja” (1927) were among the first to explore the painter’s background. The second locates Pareja in the multiracial communities of enslaved and freed Africans in early modern Seville. At one end, the section is haunted by three lavish silver vessels from the Met’s collection that were produced by enslaved artisans; at the other end are three near-identical paintings by Velázquez of an African kitchen maid, indicating an interest in such images. With this generous introduction in place, Velázquez’s portrait of Pareja and a portrait attributed to Pareja appear in the third section alongside his “donation of freedom,” while the final section assembles a grouping of large-scale religious paintings by Pareja and his Spanish contemporaries.

The artist’s 18th-century biographer Antonio Palomino described how Pareja fashioned himself “a new self and another second nature” after he was freed, and the curators take care to underline that his liberation from Velázquez had both personal and stylistic consequences. Three of Pareja’s large-scale religious works—The Flight into Egypt (1658), The Calling of Saint Matthew (1661),and The Baptism of Christ (1667)—as well as a portrait of the architect José Ratés Dalmau (ca. 1660s), make evident just how far he went beyond his master’s house. Gone is the lugubrious chiaroscuro of Velázquez’s late style, replaced now with clear lighting and a jubilant chromatic palette inspired by artists such Claudio Coello, whose shimmering Saint Catherine of Alexandria Dominating the Emperor Maxentius (ca. 1664) hangs on the opposite wall. At the left edge of The Calling of Saint Matthew, Pareja inserts an image himself holding a cartellino that bears his name and the date. The elegant subject looks out from the composition, waiting for the spectator of the future to come and acknowledge him.

If his relationship with Velázquez marks one end of a historical timeline in Pareja’s life, the other end connects him to Schomburg, the political activist, engaged essayist, radical bibliophile, Black Freemason, expert archivist, institution builder, and world traveler whose dedicated research helped recover Pareja’s identity as an Afro-Hispanic painter. Told as a child by a teacher that the “Negro had no history,” Schomburg devoted his life to proving otherwise. In the process he amassed two great collections of books, documents, and other artifacts attesting to the presence of Black excellence throughout history. The show includes personal photographs Schomburg took during a journey throughout Europe, including Spain, where he went in search of Pareja’s Calling of Saint Matthew. He wrote of his emotional encounter with the painting in the back rooms of the Prado Museum: “I had journeyed thousands of miles to look upon the work of this colored slave who had succeeded by courageous persistence in the face of every discouragement.” While Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja holds pride of place at the physical center of this exhibition, it is ultimately Schomburg’s portrait of Pareja that shines as the true heart of the story told here.

Damian Lewis, who had the monarch’s role in the show, explained to the Los Angeles Times that these unusual attachments were “a symbol of your virility, your derring-do, your sense of adventure. They were encouraged, it was a fashion, and Henry liked them.” The finely crafted attention magnets, as critic Michael Glover recounted in Thrust: A Spasmodic Pictorial History of the Codpiece in Art (2019), were not meant to be functional but to draw the beholder’s eye to the site of a man’s power. In Henry’s case, the ostentatious fashion add-ons also helped divert attention away from an ever-increasing obesity.

Codpieces were hardly alone in Renaissance fashion for augmenting the reality of male bodies. There were form-defining doublets cut from silk and figure-concealing tunics lined with fur, striped and multicolored tights that drew attention to men’s legs, body-sculpting leather and plate-metal cuirasses, embroidered garments embellished with light-reflecting gold threads, perfumed gloves trimmed with lace, velvet caps encrusted with gems, and suits of armor often chased in exquisite detail.

Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy, by Timothy McCall, University Park, Penn State University Press, 2022; 240 pages, 36 color and 50 black-and-white illustrations, $109.95 hardcover.

In the second half of the sixteenth century, an age of heightened moral, economic, and political austerity, black became the new gold and men transformed from “peacocks to penguins,” or so we are told in art historian Timothy McCall’s wonderful new study Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy. The book focuses on “aristocratic ideologies of bodily representation,” that is, on the way the “fifteenth-century glitterati” or the “Renaissance one percent” used fashion to project and consolidate their political clout.

These Italian lords were the fashionistas and influencers of their time, determining what and who was in and out. Rulers introduced “devices” and “emblems” (essentially logos) meant to be stitched on the lush robes they distributed to their followers. Families differentiated themselves through color as well. Men in the House of Este in Ferrara wore green, red, and white, while over at the House of Sforza in Milan under Ludovico il Moro, the clan favored morello (dark red), for it invoked the duke’s nickname. Renaissance rulers cultivated “brilliant bodies” because “it was a prince’s duty to exhibit and manifest extravagance, to distance himself visually from his subjects.” In contrast to the “great masculine renunciation of fashion” that would take place in modern times, a cultural shift noted by British psychologist John Carl Flügel in The Psychology of Clothes (1930), McCall lays out a prehistory of bling in elite menswear.

Readers who worry that McCall’s book might be an academic affair directed toward art historians, costume scholars, archivists, and other specialists need not fear: the chapters are beautifully illustrated, the writing is accessible, the argument is clearly developed with a critical eye toward current debates on gender, identity, and the symbolic valorization of whiteness, or “brilliance,” in the courts of early Renaissance Europe, where aristocratic men and women regularly bleached their hair blond, powdered their hands and faces white, and embellished their clothing with shimmering metallic threads and gems that made their bodies glow like the sun.

The volume illustrates a rich selection of frescoes, panel paintings, illuminated manuscripts, sculptures, prints, and surviving historical costumes, and provides a user-friendly glossary of the key Italian Renaissance fashion terms. The author explains as well the difficulties of acquiring expensive dyes, and rehearses the intricate technique of velvet and brocade production.

A painting by an unknown artist of Henry VIII, ca. 1537-62, based on Hans Holbein the Younger’s Whitehall mural, destroyed by a fire in 1698.

There is also a lot of juicy historical gossip. In the introduction, we meet Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the Duke of Milan, who refused to wear armor to church under his luxurious vestments, because he thought it made him look “too fat.” It was an unfortunate decision, for a group of assassins descended upon him with daggers in 1476, and the unprotected Sforza became what McCall describes as “a (proto)martyr for fashion and a veritable Renaissance fashion victim.”

Sforza was somewhat a fashion addict. McCall regales the reader with behind-the-scenes tales about a panicky court procurer trying to locate hard-to-find fashion accessories for an upcoming gala. In another chapter, we hear about the rampant fat-shaming that took place in Italian aristocratic circles, where a slender silhouette, glowing white skin, and shapely legs defined the ideal of masculine beauty. Sforza’s body dysmorphia was not helped by his sister Ippolita, who teased him for his weight gain.

In this he was not alone. Ludovico Gonzaga—the illustrious patriarch most famously portrayed in Andrea Mantegna’s fresco for the Camera degli Sposi in Mantua—recalled how in his childhood he was compared with a pig by his own father and later forced to diet, “eating little, drinking lots of water, and hardly sleeping.” His own son Federico would be ridiculed by his sister Barbara, who remarked that his waistline had “grown and multiplied” so much that he would soon be mistaken for a pregnant woman. Fashion was a means to mitigate, transform, and tweak the ponderous bulk of well-fed lordly bodies.

The role of fashion in the invention of European male identities is also the theme of “Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear,” currently on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The introductory wall text invites us to “stride, saunter or sashay into a world of exploring and celebrating how designers, tailors and artists, clients, models and sitters, fashion and refashion masculinities.” In this joyous show, “masculinities” and “menswear” are understood as broad, fluid terms, and some 100 items dating from the Renaissance to today are presented in three sequential thematic sections: “Undressed,” “Overdressed,” and “Redressed.”

View of the exhibition “Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear,” 2022, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

In the first room, Jean-Paul Gaultier’s 1996 trompe l’oeil blazer confronts visitors, a white jacket printed with a finely chiseled male torso. It is a perfect summary of the argument in this first section: for centuries, Western culture has purveyed an intimidating male ideal that melds strength, virility, and elegance.

This thesis is further explored through a wild diversity of objects. Plaster casts of various Classical statues tower above the displays, juxtaposed in delightful, unexpected conversations with (among other things) Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of an androgynous Patti Smith in a man’s shirt, a deconstructed Action Man figure, a treatise on ideal proportions of the body by Albrecht Dürer, the oversize fig leaf that once sheathed the replica of Michelangelo’s David in the V&A, a photograph of actor Mahershala Ali by Willy Vanderperre for Calvin Klein underwear, and a homoerotic pietá-like drawing by Tom of Finland that portrays a lifeguard holding a man’s body in his arms.

In the midst of all this evidence of how canons of male beauty have been constructed and reconstructed throughout history is Anthony Patrick Manieri’s Arrested Movement (2022), a short video that not only celebrates inclusive body positivity through the joy of dancing in the buff but lays bare, through its diversity of body shapes, sizes, and skin-tones, the illusion and delusion—the trompe l’oeil—of long-established physical ideals.

Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear, edited by Rosalind McKever and Claire Wilcox with Marta Franceschini, London, V&A Publishing, 2022; 272 pages, 208 color illustrations, $60 hardcover.

Visitors might want to read both McCall’s Brilliant Bodies and Elizabeth Currie’s essay “Braggadocio: A Brief History of Swagger” (in the “Fashioning Masculinities” exhibition catalogue) before heading over to the show’s second part, “Overdressed.” Here, we find portraits of a sixteenth-century Italian duke dressed in black and gold, and an eighteenth-century Irish earl draped in a shimmering cape made from exuberant crimson silk. Black might convey modesty, piety, honesty, religious austerity, temperance, penitence, and/or restraint, but it was also a difficult color to produce, involving complicated and very costly dyeing processes. Less is sometimes more, but more is also more.

Until modern times, pink—the subject of Valerie Steele’s 2018 exhibition “Pink: The History of a Punk, Pretty, Powerful Color” at the Museum at FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology) in New York—was a masculine color and a symbol of class and luxury. It, too, required expensive dyes, derived in this instance from the shells of the cochineal insect most commonly found in South America. The V&A curators (Claire Wilcox, Rosalind McKever, and Marta Franceschini) have creatively paired Joshua Reynolds’s bodacious 1773-74 portrait of Charles Coote with a series of short clips featuring David Bowie from a 1975 BBC interview explaining his professional use of makeup on stage, the nonbinary drag king Adam All transforming their appearance for Style magazine (2018), and an advertisement for the Boy de Chanel cosmetic line for men.

The final subsection in “Overdressed” considers the use of bright colors, pastels, and floral motifs in menswear as a sign of privilege and freedom, with examples ranging from historical garments and paintings to Kehinde Wiley’s 2017 portrait of Alexander Cassatt, in which luxuriant botanical motifs spring forth from the background and wrap themselves around the sitter’s body like the opulent gold brocade in a Renaissance doublet.

Plaster fig leaf, ca. 1857, from a replica of Michelangelo’s David at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The third part of the show, “Redressed,” highlights the change from chromaphilia in menswear to the relatively drab uniformity of modern masculinity, represented by military gear and, among civilians, the black suit and bowler hat of the respectable everyman. But things don’t end on a flat note. In a final elliptical room, the exhibition ends like a runway extravaganza with three showstopper gowns: Christian Siriano’s black tuxedo dress designed for actor Billy Porter’s Oscar appearance in 2019; Alessandro Michele’s ensemble tailored for singer Harry Styles for the cover of Vogue in 2020; and the Ella Lynch wedding dress that contestant Bimini Bon-Boulash wore in the season finale of “RuPaul’s Drag Race UK” in 2021.

A black-and-white video projection with a booming soundtrack animates the wall as you enter, while mirrors on the opposite side transport the beholder into the spectacle. The gallery’s oval shape encourages you to strut around the space, enjoying the cacophony of images, gowns, and music as if you were on a catwalk. After two years of elasticized WFH athleisure wear, this reviewer was inspired to stride, saunter, and sashay around the room and file back through the show once more to revisit the exhibition from the start.

On a second viewing, I realized that while the three sections offer a wide variety of masculinities, one “identity” left largely unexplored is that of the non-elite classes. Although “Fashioning Masculinities” strives to expand definitions of maleness by celebrating gender neutrality, fluidity, and nonconformity, fashion remains largely in the hands (and closets) of an economic minority. An exploration of urban streetwear, from the ground up rather than the top down, would be a most welcome sequel to this buoyant if not rose-tinted spring/summer collection.

“Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear” is on view at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, through Nov. 6.

A version of this article appeared under the title “House of Xtrazaganza” in the June/July 2022 issue, pp. 24-26. 

Rising from the ashes of the pandemic, though, would be a generation of artists from Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455) and Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) to Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), whom the nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt would canonize as the uomo universale or the multitalented “Renaissance man.” In the spring and summer of 2020, as the first wave of Covid-19 deaths began to ebb, this uplifting narrative of rinascità and renaissance (from the Italian and French terms, respectively, for “rebirth”) provided pundits with a reassuring model for visualizing the future. Rebirth, however, is rarely an easy affair. Alberti, for example, was the illegitimate son of an exiled Florentine banker. As a student, he suffered from extreme social awkwardness and emotional anxiety. Yet he and his contemporaries—artists born into the new century, such as Masaccio (1401–1428), Filippo Lippi (1406–1469), and Piero della Francesca (ca. 1412–1492)—would source, curate, and up-cycle the fragments and ruins of both the distant times of Antiquity and the more recent pre-pandemic past. Together, these bright young things would construct the heroic Renaissance that is still taught in college survey courses.

While the triumphalist rhetoric of this version of the myth has been rightly challenged and critiqued by feminist scholars, historians of science, social historians, and medievalists, among others, the humanist program of the Renaissance—one based on a sense of dignity attained through education and achievement rather than through blood and privilege—is worth revisiting in light of the inequitable world in which we now dwell. This might seem to be a retrograde approach upon first glance, but the possibility of reconstructing a better future from the salvaged remains of the past is perhaps the greatest artistic, philosophical, and ethical lesson that the Renaissance has given us—a lesson in resilience that matters now more than ever before.

Michelangelo Buonarroti: Studies for the Libyan Sibyl, ca. 1510–11, chalk on paper, 11 3⁄8 by 8½ inches.

The field today is surprisingly robust. Granted, a common lament from colleagues teaching Renaissance art, architecture, and visual culture has been that students, seduced by the swagger, glamour, globalism, and lucre of contemporary art, have abandoned earlier fields; that the pre-modern has lost its ability to speak to them about their lives and ambitions. But the situation on the ground among students and the general public is not as dire as some fear. In 2018 “Michelangelo: Divine Draughtsman and Designer,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was the second most visited exhibition in the world (with 702,516 visitors), just behind the same institution’s “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” (with 1,659,647), which brought together the novel alliance of fashion, Catholicism, and old master paintings. Salvator Mundi (ca. 1500), attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, remains to this day the most expensive painting ever to be sold at auction. And while the College Art Association’s annual list of PhD dissertations in progress indicates the continued predominance of twentieth-century subjects, the sixteenth century remains competitive, with twenty-six dissertations in progress compared to the twenty listed for twenty-first-century topics. Finally, if three semesters of remote instruction during a global pandemic have demonstrated anything, it is that the young, when taught on a factually grounded yet empathetic basis, can become fully invested in the wisdom afforded to them by the past. Lorenzetti’s allegories of good and bad government struck a chord with my undergraduates on both sides of the political spectrum during the elections last autumn; they saw too that Giovanni Boccaccio’s preface to the Decameron (1353) divides the plague populace into the rich who decamped from the cities, the wealthy who hoarded goods and locked their doors, the defiant who refused to quarantine, and those who were left behind to fend for themselves. These object lessons helped put human folly into historical perspective and explain the appeal of sacred art in a world without virologists and vaccines. After years of unapologetic racial, gender, and class violence, today’s activist youths, many of them drawing lessons directly from previous eras, are rebuilding and uplifting the Ben Comune. Change is in the air.

Among specialists, I can report, there is a great deal of variety—and varietas, according to Alberti, is one of the most important qualities for engaging the public, with art as with other things. “Just as with food and music,” he wrote in On Painting (1435), “novel and extraordinary things delight us for various reasons but especially because they are different from the old ones we are used to, so with everything the mind takes pleasure in variety and abundance.” There is no satisfactory way to survey such a rich field. I will highlight, therefore, a few recent publications that not only exemplify the “variety and abundance” in Renaissance art history but also speak to the urgent concerns of today.

Fabrizio Nevola’s Street Life in Renaissance Italy (Yale, 2020) opens with a discussion of Lorenzetti’s Good Government and seeks to reframe Renaissance cities as “complex urban ecosystems” full of movement, noise, dirt, stench, and all forms of essential human activity. In opposition to the old and cold classicism of the “Ideal City” that privileged geometric harmony over social interaction (and that dominated Renaissance art history for decades), Nevola guides us instead through the mean streets of Renaissance Italy, examining “nodal locations” such as street corners, city squares, taverns, apothecaries, and bathhouses, where mixed populations assembled, conspired, partied, embraced, and often fought and killed each other, leading to increased surveillance, policing, and regulation. Like Niall Atkinson’s earlier The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban Life (Penn State, 2016), Nevola’s depiction of the multisensory everyday environment of Renaissance cities should be of interest to both the Italophile tourist and the urban activist. When he points out that streets have long been a “privileged site for the performance of collective and individual acts and rituals of violence and justice,” one cannot help but think of how such historical lessons might provide perspective on contemporary political protest and urban renewal as the world emerges from isolation.

If social justice is a primary concern today, so too is ecology. Two books published in 2019 feature “green worlds” in their titles, a term that literary critic Northrop Frye used to describe the therapeutic dreamscapes in Shakespeare’s comedies. Jodi Cranston’s Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice (Penn State) surveys paintings, prints, and sculptures in which these sites of psychic renewal are visualized. Her focus is on the pastoral genre, which appealed to world-weary urban dwellers seeking imaginative solace in idyllic landscapes where saints and pagan gods sometimes appear to instill the profane with the sacred. The immersive aesthetic experience of such artworks, Cranston argues, becomes in and of itself a restorative “green world.” This thesis resonates in Green Worlds in Early Modern Italy: Art and the Verdant Earth (Amsterdam University Press), a volume of essays edited by Karen Hope Goodchild, April Oettinger, and Leopoldine Prosperetti. For brevity’s sake, I will single out Rebekah Compton’s excellent article on the use of green pigments in devotional paintings by Sandro Botticelli and Filippo Lippi as “sensorial medicine,” enhancing fertility, improving eyesight, and even revitalizing the spirit. Green, it should be noted, represents youth, hope, and rebirth in Renaissance color symbolism, and both of these studies provide historically grounded instances in which art (both secular and religious) helped assuage the fears and anxieties of Renaissance men and women dwelling in a world of plague, famine, war, extreme weather, and everyday uncertainty.

Sandro Botticelli: Primavera, ca. 1481, tempera on panel, 80 by 123½ inches.

While, as Cranston and Compton suggest, art can serve as a form of therapy, it can also be a tentative site where newly discovered natural phenomena (things, places, and even peoples) are worked out and defined through artistic imagination before they can be articulated in concrete, objective terms. For scholars and students in the interrelated fields of history, art history, literature, and philosophy of the Renaissance, along with modern and contemporary art and climate history, Christopher P. Heuer’s thought-provoking book Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image (Zone Books, 2019) is a must-read. Unlike traditional narratives of arrival and conquest in the Americas, the age of polar navigation, as Heuer demonstrates, coincided with the austere whitewashed aesthetics of Protestant iconoclasm. The objects of study here include illustrations of coastlines, navigational maps, idols carved out of driftwood, and other abstractions of the natural world. On the surface, Into the White is about the representation of the baffling emptiness that blinded unprepared European explorers. At a deeper level, it is a philosophical inquiry into confrontations with the unknown and the unfathomable. Without haranguing its reader, it touches almost effortlessly on some of the most urgent concerns we have today about global warming, identity politics, and the political ramifications of conflating science and fiction.

Jennifer Nelson picks up similar threads about the limits of scientific ratiocination and the attendant license of artistic representation in her Disharmony of the Spheres: The Europe of Holbein’s Ambassadors (Penn State, 2019). Much as Neil MacGregor was able to narrate a “History of the World in 100 Objects” on the BBC, Nelson successfully offers us here an astounding history of the Renaissance in one object. Ambassadors becomes at once a portrait of two French diplomats in their early twenties, a dizzying inventory of early modern objects, a philosophical meditation on contingency, a witness to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn’s ill-fated union (and the European crisis it set in motion), an off-kilter crucifixion scene, and a disquisition on the relationship between disharmony and freedom. Drawing from Micha Cárdenas’s notion of transreal aesthetics in contemporary art and visual culture (a view that foregrounds simultaneous realities), Nelson demonstrates how Holbein’s complex image reveals through its multiple constituent parts the plurality, inconsistency, and discrepancy of lived experience in the first half of the sixteenth century, offering what she refers to as a “microcosm of humanity’s self-dissimilar world.” Her book could stand as a veritable master class for scholars, students, and the general public in how to look at and think with images in moments of rapid historical change. The urgency of the Renaissance today lies in its ability to envision a brighter tomorrow built upon the ruins of yesterday. While Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (ca. 1481) remains one of the most beloved paintings of the Renaissance, we do well to remember that, beyond a pretty picture of gods and goddesses, it is an image about violence, death, and regeneration. As Mercury clears out the mal aria (bad air) of winter, stirring the clouds above on the left, his actions call forth the icy blue wind god Zephyr who seizes the terrified nymph Chloris on the other side of the composition. Unable to escape her destruction at the hands of this higher power, she is reborn as Flora, who, in turn, steps forth in her resplendent gown in springtime, casting the seeds that will revitalize a devastated world watched over by Venus, Cupid, and the Three Graces.

The verdant field of Renaissance art history, like the carpet of flowers that burst forth in the foreground of Botticelli’s painting, is anything but dead. In the Age of Post-Coronialism, therefore, let those of us in this “green world” no longer speak of a crisis of the Renaissance but of a renaissance of the Renaissance. Moreover, as the imperative to decolonize art history is mounted, historians and students in the field find themselves in a unique position, rife with revelations and debate.¹ While broad histories of colonialism and slavery can be traced back to ancient civilizations in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, the specific Transatlantic reconfiguration of these practices between 1492 and 1619 places scholars and students of the Renaissance at the front lines. As the preeminent fact-checkers of this period, we are tasked with the great responsibility to ensure that in the urgent push to decolonize art history, the discipline does not unwittingly dehistoricize colonialism. Viewing the challenges of today against the larger picture of the thorny structures and legacies of the past makes for a better informed and thus more revolutionary future. In place of the old universalism predicated on the privileged authority of a Eurocentric canon, let us embrace a more volatile, ever-shifting, and always-evolving universalism inspirited by the varietas inclusive of all that is found in this fragile, shared universe in which we must coexist.

Corie Mattie in front of her piece After the Plague Came the Renaissance, 2020, acrylic paint and spray paint on plywood.

The key concern, as Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez explain in the introduction to their edited volume Renaissance Futurities: Science, Art, Invention (University of California, 2020), lies in “how knowledge of the past can help us in the contemporary moment, by providing strategies to combat challenges to come.” This, too, is why an investment in the humanities, which finds its spirit in the intellectual dreams of the Renaissance, remains critical today. The term “contemporary,” after all, is largely occupied by the word “temporary,” and acute presentism causes its own malaise. To be with that which is in one’s own time is to risk not being able to distinguish the things that will survive beyond the moment from those that will become part of a more enduring history. The true “contemporary,” the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben argued in What Is an Apparatus? (2006, English trans. 2009), is the one who, “dividing and interpolating time, is capable of transforming it and putting it in relation with other times. He is able to read history in unforeseen ways, to ‘cite it’ according to a necessity that does not arise in any way from his will, but from an exigency to which he cannot not respond.” In the spring of 2020, on a boarded-up California storefront appropriately named Wasteland, the young street artist Corie Mattie (a self-described “Hope Dealer”) painted the outline of the arm of Michelangelo’s God from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, reaching across the void to touch and thus enliven the newly created Adam. Emblazoned across the top of the bright yellow mural, discussed by Hilarie M. Sheets in the New York Times on May 1, 2020, is the declaration: “After the Plague Came the Renaissance.” Indeed, in the After Times (as in Alberti’s day), the young who have studied closely the lessons of the past will be the salutary agents of change and rebirth.

¹ Two notable studies from recent years have sought to decenter the Renaissance by investigating connected histories: Cécile Fromont, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo, University of North Carolina Press, 2014, which examines the movement of ideas and peoples between cosmopolitan precolonial Kongo, Europe, and Latin America from the sixteenth century onward; and Lia Markey, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence, Penn State University Press, 2016, which traces the Medici investment in the Americas from the early missives of Amerigo Vespucci to the “Florentine Codex,” a bilingual Spanish/Nahuatl manuscript about New Spain, to Ferdinando de’ Medici’s late sixteenth-century attempt to collect the world in the form of paintings and drawings, featherworks, and specimens of flora and fauna in his galleries in Florence.

This article appears under the title “After the Plague Came the Renaissance” in the July/August 2021 issue, pp. 62–65.

Titian: Venus and Adonis, 1554, oil on canvas, 73 1/4 by 81 1/2 inches.

The first two paintings (Danaë and Venus and Adonis) were new versions of previous compositions Titian had made in the 1540s for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, and all six works figure among Titian’s most ambitious and moving inventions. In London, these canvases are accompanied by the Death of Actaeon, which was conceived as part of the initial series, but remained in the artist’s studio in Venice at the time of his death in 1576, and is now part of the permanent collection of the National Gallery. Titian was in his sixties when he received the commission in 1551; he was an old man by the time the final painting reached his patron in 1562. The National Gallery exhibition brings together Titian’s poesie for the first time in three centuries, since the series was broken up and sold from the Spanish royal collection.

“This project is a dream that is suddenly happening,” announced Matthias Wivel, curator of sixteenth-century Italian paintings at the National Gallery.² It is, indeed, a formidable triumph for Wivel and the three institutions where the exhibition will appear: the National Gallery, London; the Museo del Prado; and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. Since the show was forced to shut a few days after it debuted this past March and did not reopen until July 9, its run at the National Gallery has been extended to January 17, 2021.

Interested readers can also watch the insightful documentary short produced by the National Gallery about the artworks’ gilded neo-Renaissance frames, which were custom built for the show. Made from poplar wood sourced in Northern Italy and based on the complex period design that frames Titian’s late Pietà (1576, unfinished) in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, the nearly 164 feet of carved molding was crafted for the most part following period techniques (Titian would have been pleased, given that his father was a timber merchant, among other things). In the National Gallery, the newly commissioned casings help give the series an immediate sense of coherence. Rather than independent episodes excerpted from a literary text, the works now read as a sustained meditation on the chaos that pervades an uncertain world.

The catalogue that accompanies the exhibition provides in-depth information about the seven pictures. For painters, in particular, there is an excellent essay by the National Gallery’s Jill Dunkerton and a team of conservators from the participating institutions about Titian’s technique, detailing the transfer process he used on the first two paintings, the numerous pentimenti and surface adjustments evident on the other canvases, and the invisible archaeology of viscous layers and translucent glazes that are revealed only through expert analysis of paint cross-sections.³

Titian: The Death of Actaeon, 1556-59, oil on canvas, 72 5/8 by 77 7/8 inches.

Thomas Dalla Costa’s translations of the letters exchanged between Titian and Philip II give us insight into the complexities of negotiating with a royal client who was prone to pay his artists only after great delay (if at all). In one instance, we hear Titian asking, like an anxious art student eager for feedback, whether “His Majesty cherishes and likes” the Venus and Adonis that the painter sent to him in London. In another suite of letters, he denounces Leone Leoni (a sculptor in Philip II’s employ who tried to rob and kill Titian’s son Orazio) as a “wicked soul,” a “counterfeiter,” and even as a “Lutheran.” There is also a short dispatch from 1574, two years before Titian’s death, in which Philip is bluntly given a list of fourteen works for which, like “all the many others I do not remember,” the artist was awaiting payment. If it seems brash for Titian to prod the king in this manner, the salutations remind us of the grossly uneven power dynamics that bound the painter to his royal patron—“your humble Titian kisses Your Highness’ feet,” “I kiss your hand all the way from here,” “Your Catholic Majesty’s most humble and devoted servant,” etc.⁴ Renaissance artists may have risen from being “mere” artisans (as traditional art historical narrative insists), but this transformation was not without its share of new problems.

The exhibition itself is small: a handful of paintings accompanied by a video featuring interviews with art historians, conservators, and classicists. A skeptical viewer with little interest in Ovid, the Renaissance, or a series of paintings portraying terrible things happening mostly to women might even protest, “Why should I care?” So in an effort to make the poesie relevant to the concerns of twenty-first-century visitors, the National Gallery has tried to frame the cycle first as upscale pornography for the elite and then as images that prompt a discussion about sexual violence. “Sexy.” “Erotic.” “Naked ladies.” “Passion.” “Orgasm.” “Flirtation.” “Sex workers.” “Penetration.” “Rape.” “Ejaculation.” “Naughty.” “Buttocks.” “Bottoms.” “Aroused.” “Ecstasy.” These are just some of the provocative terms used to describe the paintings.

Viewing art nowadays is very different from what it was only four months ago. While museums and collections across the world quickly pivoted to online formats and other digitized means of content delivery, representation is simply not the same as reality. To hunch over a minuscule image glowing from the screen of a laptop, tablet, or smartphone is incommensurate with the experience of standing before a canvas measuring nearly 6 by 7 feet, much less being in a room surrounded by seven such paintings.

Even as the physical nature of museum experience has altered, so, too, has the way we receive and interpret imagery. The schizophrenic swing between frivolity and violence in the exhibition’s presentation led one critic to equate Philip II with Harvey Weinstein, but that joke isn’t funny anymore. While the initial pitch for the show sounded like “Girls! Girls! Girls!,” now the sensationalism of trying to make Titian’s nudes seem “sexy” and Philip II “a playboy” falls flat. Don’t get me wrong, there is everything in these paintings to arouse a puerile viewer—at least nineteen naked women are depicted across the seven canvases, and a letter by Titian’s friend Lodovico Dolce describes with much pleasure the view of the goddess’s butt in Venus and Adonis.⁵ The enduring power of the poesie, however, extends beyond being sexy pictures created for the eye of a highborn male. To fixate on the erotic while ignoring the stark realities of mid-sixteenth-century European geopolitics is to overlook the profound pathos and philosophical depth embedded in these scenes of domination and, in several instances, tragedy.

Titian: The Rape of Europa, 1560–62, oil on canvas, 70 by 80 3/4 inches.

These paintings are not, strictly speaking, about “love”; nor are they about “rape culture” in the contemporary sense of the term, despite what the video accompanying the show at the National Gallery suggests. Connections to today’s moral issues are not explored in any sustained manner, and to simply raise such questions without providing any answers is a pity. There are many problems with referring to the women in these paintings as “rape victims.” From a contemporary perspective, the mythological encounters do not compare with the traumatic experiences of actual targets of sexual violence. From a literary point of view, such facile rubrics misrepresent the Ovidian cosmos where men, women, boys, and girls are destroyed equally, with indiscriminate brutality. Such false analogies muddle the more nuanced significance of corporeal metaphors in Ovid’s Metamorphoses—an epic poem about the merciless forces that govern the natural world, written after the end of the Roman Republic, in the shadow of the first emperor, Augustus. Failing to carefully define “rape culture,” the exhibition also forgoes the kind of historical analysis that could move critical discussion of the poesie beyond the standard accounts of visual sources, iconography, and provenance, which art historians have been rehashing for decades now.

Since rape—and indeed assault in all its forms—is first and foremost about power, about vicious force imposed by one body upon another without consent, we might well refocus our attention on Titian’s tremendous staging of Ovid’s Metamorphoses with that uneasy dynamic in mind. Referred to also as favole (tales), a term like poesie that the painter used in his correspondence about the commission, these depictions of divine intervention and retribution are haunting allegories and admonitions that triggered the hopes and fears, the ambitions and anxieties, of viewers standing before them—or, at the very least, of their primary intended viewer, Philip II. Only a decade earlier, his aunt Mary of Hungary, governor of the troubled Habsburg Netherlands, had commissioned from Titian four towering mythological paintings for her hunting lodge, depicting the cruel punishment of Tityus, Sisyphus, Ixion, and Tantalus; it was a series her nephew knew well.⁶ Both sets of mythological “fairy tales” can be read in the context of imperial Habsburg politics, for they thematize both the crushing power that comes with being part of the largest empire in the Renaissance and the shattering burdens that accompany that position. In this regard, Philip II might not always have identified with the aggressor.

As Titian aged a decade during the painting of the poesie, so, too, did his patron. In 1550, when he was twenty-three, Philip II had been called to the imperial city of Augsburg because his father, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, was angling to have him nominated as his successor. The inexperienced prince was eventually edged out by his uncle, Ferdinand I, but during that visit he met with Titian and commissioned the poesie. In 1553, Philip II was betrothed by his father to Mary Tudor; the Queen of England agreed to the union (the second of Philip’s four marriages), after seeing Titian’s portrait of the prince. Philip II was young, fashionable, and dashing in person as well. Mary, in contrast, was described by Spanish ambassadors as “in no way beautiful,” bearing “no eyebrows,” and “older than we were told.” There was no chemistry and it was reported that Philip II “acted in this like Isaac, letting himself be sacrificed to the will of his father.”⁷ In his first year in London, however, he received Venus and Adonis. Although it was based on a painting made for a previous client, Philip II’s version is the most beautiful of the many iterations of this picture churned out by Titian’s workshop in the second half of the sixteenth century for princely collectors.

War was always on the horizon in the 1550s, and Philip II was often traveling back and forth between England and the Habsburg Netherlands to consult with the many branches of his family about military strategy and political alliances. Did the king see himself reflected in the young Adonis desperate to escape his mistress’s hold, but aware of the dangers that awaited him in the inhospitable world outside? Mary Tudor, it is said, stood by the window in tears whenever he would set off for the Continent, but she was no Venus.

Titian: Perseus and Andromeda, ca. 1554-56, oil on canvas, 72 by 78 1/2 inches.

Between 1554 and 1556, Philip II was not only the King Consort of England, but also the King of Naples and Sicily, as well as his father’s official representative in Spain and the Americas. In this last role, he found himself entangled in the intense repartimiento (distribution) debates with the Spanish settlers. Charles V had been opposed to the enslavement of Amerindians, but decades of war had emptied the royal coffers and the Habsburgs were in dire need of cash. Philip II conceded to the colonists the right to exploit Indigenous people as forced labor; they in turn sent him an astounding five million gold ducats. At about the same time, the importation of African slaves to Hispaniola began to intensify.⁸ It was also in these years that Philip received from Titian the painting of Andromeda rescued by Perseus.

While Titian was probably unaware of the king’s larger-world concerns, we can imagine that the themes of captivity and deliverance in Perseus and Andromeda would have struck a chord with Philip II. The Ethiopian princess, described by Ovid as resembling a “marble statue,” has been whitewashed here as a fair-skinned nude.⁹ The young royal was left as a propitiatory offering when her mother offended the sea gods. Did Philip II see himself as the high-flying, hero with winged sandals confronting a monstrous creature, or did he see himself as the princess, bound by her familial obligations, praying for salvation from an external force? Perhaps a little of both. These were messy, volatile times.

Titian: Diana and Callisto, 1556-59, oil on canvas, 73 1/2 by 80 inches

The next paintings in Titian’s series were Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto. The two images depict the goddess of chastity and of the chase unleashing cruel punishments upon a hapless nobleman and a duped nymph. When Actaeon makes the mistake of stumbling upon Diana at her bath in the woods, he is transformed into a stag and ultimately ripped apart and devoured by his own hunting dogs. Callisto, meanwhile, is impregnated by Jupiter, who appears to her in the guise of her mistress, Diana. Titian does not show us the scene of her entrapment, but of the vicious, nearly gleeful revelation by the other nymphs of her condition (on the left) as Diana casts her out with an imperial gesture (on the right). The two Diana paintings were begun in 1556 and delivered in 1559. While Titian spent much of this time writing to Philip II about his unpaid royal pension and about the attempt on Orazio’s life, the king was preoccupied with other weighty matters. In England, the persecution of Protestants under “Bloody Mary” (as his wife was called by some) intensified as men and women were burned at the stake for heresy. In 1556, Philip II was officially named the King of Spain, and soon after, both Charles V and Mary Tudor died. Drastic changes were about to take place again.

Titian: Diana and Actaeon, 1556-59, oil on canvas, 72 5/8 by 79 1/2 inches.

By the time he received Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto in Toledo in late 1560, the king had a new wife, Elisabeth of Valois, daughter of the French King Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici. While the variety of figures, poses, gestures, and expressions make these two of the most beloved paintings in the series, they are also the most poignant. If Philip II’s experience of the hunt for heretical enemies in Tudor England had not shaped the way he might read the pathos of Callisto’s brutal exposure, the extremism of the Spanish Inquisition surely would have—and here we move from biopolitics to necropolitics. In the second half of the 1550s, Protestant cells were being uncovered throughout the kingdom. More than 1,300 heretics were burned, hanged, or drowned in the Spanish Netherlands alone, and terrifying autos-da-fé were staged as heretics faced the choice of orthodoxy or death.¹⁰ Between 1559 and 1561, Spain was also ravaged by poor harvests, food shortages, torrential rains, floods, poverty, and starvation.

In April of 1562, Titian wrote to the king to inform him that the Rape of Europa was finished and on its way. Philip II was undoubtedly relieved that the long-drawn-out cycle was finally complete, although by the time the painting was unrolled and re-stretched in Madrid later that year, he may have identified more with Europa than with Jupiter in the form of the white bull. He was facing internal and external forces threatening to tear Europe apart, from the massacre of the Huguenots at Vassy, which would launch the French Wars of Religion, to the advance of the Ottomans in the East, where their reach was increasing by the week under the rule of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Under these circumstances, the Rape of Europa could be seen as an appropriate and compelling metaphor for real-life events.

Those resistant to the possibility of political, personal, and other forms of allegorical readings in the “great masterpieces” of the past—especially in paintings seemingly made for “pleasure”—might look to Titian and his circle for answers. The same Dolce who praised Venus and Adonis was also responsible for one of the most successful translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which was first published in 1553 and dedicated to the Holy Roman Emperor (Philip II’s father). By the sixth edition, published in 1561 and dedicated to Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle (Philip II’s personal adviser), allegorical summaries were added to explain how the Ovidian tales could be converted into Christian parables. For instance, the death of Adonis and his metamorphosis into the perennial anemone is likened to the arrival of winter and the promise of new life in the spring. Actaeon becomes a cipher for the careless man who errs and is plagued by his conscience. It is worth keeping in mind that in the decade encompassing the start and finish of the commission, Philip II had gone from being a “playboy” to the ruthless monarch of a sprawling empire wracked across its expanse by sedition, financial disaster, slavery, and war.

Titian: Religion Assisted by Spain, 1572-75, oil on canvas, 66 inches square.

It also goes without saying that nudity is not always about eroticism; sometimes it seeks to move the spectator in other ways, for instance, as a devotional aid and even as propaganda. The complex political allegory Religion Saved by Spain (ca. 1572–75), one of Titian’s final paintings for Philip II, provides a case in point. Here we find a teary-eyed female nude, a personification of Religion besieged by the Protestants (represented by the snakes of heresy on the tree stump to her right) and the Muslims (embodied by the small turbaned figure in the center). While she may be a beautifully rendered figure, her nudity signifies faith, truth, and virtue rather than anything erotic. She is a memento mori, a sign of vulnerability and of all that is at risk in the finite, fallible human body. Her savior on the left—a personification of Spain—arrives with an army of angels, holding the Habsburg coat of arms in her right hand. The political content is on the surface, but Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Titian’s poesie instruct us that surfaces are liable to unexpected, precipitous, and oftentimes extremely violent change.

This April, Peter Schjeldahl asked: “Why does the art of what we term the Old Masters have so much more soulful heft than that of most moderns and nearly all of our contemporaries?” His sense was that they possess “a routine consciousness of mortality.” In this fragile moment—when the sudden, uninvited touch of another person or of an invisible external force can cause alarm and distress, prompting us to ruminate on our own helplessness and mortality—we comprehend more than ever before not only why Titian’s moving spectacles of tragedy and fate might have mattered so much to men such as Philip II, but why they still matter today. All good artworks are palimpsests of lived experiences. They are accretions of possibilities. The poesie are about Ovid and they’re about Philip II, but like polyvalent verses, they are also about the instability, multiplicity, and simultaneity of form and meaning. In this, they are also like philosophy, for they challenge us, they make us feel uneasy, they force us to think outside our own finitude. Ovid opens the Metamorphoses, after all, with the declaration: “Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed into different bodies.”¹¹

Titian: Noli Me Tangere, ca. 1514, oil on canvas, 43 1/4 by 36 inches.

The Old Masters matter now more than ever before, but then they always have. In the middle of World War II, the Times published a letter from a reader who lamented, “Because London’s face is scarred and bruised these days, we need more than ever to see beautiful things.” Moved by the suggestion, the director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark, retrieved Titian’s Noli me Tangere (ca. 1514) from the Welsh slate mine where it had been taken for safekeeping and put it on display for a war-weary public in 1942, as the first painting in a series known as the “Picture of the Month.” The devotional image spoke of resurrection but also of uncertainty. On one side, Christ’s body hovers between life and death, between heaven and earth, while on the other side we see the Magdalene’s desire to connect with it and be transformed. Given the social isolation and physical distancing of these extraordinary past few months, we are all like the Magdalene, full of desire, not necessarily for an erotic encounter in this instance but for a more profound connection that would make us feel bonded to something beyond ourselves.

It is both strange and comforting to think that those magnificent artworks hung in the silence of the shuttered National Gallery for three months. Once, they stood in Titian’s studio in Venice, then they were mounted in Philip II’s residence, awaiting his gaze to wake them from their slumber. In early March, they appeared bold and glorious when they were reunited in London after three hundred years apart, and now they again welcome visitors to breathe life into them. When one day we have all long since turned to dust, these paintings will persist. In 1562, the year in which Titian’s final mythological painting arrived in Spain, Giovanni Battista Pittoni published a collection of emblems. Featured among the formidable pantheon of illustrious men in the Imprese di diversi prencipi, duchi, signori, e d’altri personaggi et huomini letterati et illustri was Titian, whose motto read: NATURA POTENTIOR ARS. “Art,” he knew all too well, “is more powerful than nature.”

1 In addition to holding multiple other noble titles, Philip (1527–1598) was King of England and Ireland (1554–58), King of Naples and Sicily (1554–98), King of Spain and Sardinia (1556–98), and King of Portugal (1580–98).
2 Matthias Wivel, “Acknowledgements,” Titian: Love, Desire, Death, London, National Gallery, and New Haven, Yale University Press, 2020, p. 9.
3 Jill Dunkerton, Ana González Mozo, Gianfraco Pocobene, and Marika Spring, “Modes of Painting: Titian’s Technique in the Poesie,” ibid., pp. 60–89.
4 Thomas Dalla Costa, “The Poesie in Correspondence,” ibid., pp. 192–99.
5 Discussed in Matthias Wivel, “Divine and Fatal: An Account of Titian’s Poesie,” ibid., p. 22.
6 See Miguel Falomir Faus, Las Furias: Alegoría política y desafío artístico, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2014.
7 Henry Kamen, Philip of Spain, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 58–59.
8 Ibid., p. 61.
9 The Classical tradition refers to Andromeda as being dark-skinned, but Ovid’s phrase “marble statue” was misinterpreted by subsequent generations to mean white marble statue. On this iconographical discrepancy see Elizabeth McGrath, “The Black Andromeda,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 55, 1992, pp. 1–18.
10 Kamen, pp. 75–81.
11 Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid: Twenty-Four Passages from the Metamorphoses, London, Faber and Faber, 1997, p. 3.

Both women were unusually encouraged by their families to pursue careers as painters. The Anguissola hailed from the northern Italian town of Cremona, which, as part of the Duchy of Milan, was under Spanish influence in the 1530s when Sofonisba was born, the first of six daughters and a son. The family claimed to be noble descendants of ancient Carthaginians and were well-off enough to send their two eldest daughters, beginning in 1546, to learn how to paint with local masters (Bernardino Campi and Bernardino Gatti); they were not so well-off, however, that her father, Amilcare, could resist exploiting Sofonisba’s artistic gifts for his own enrichment. By 1559, when she left Italy for the Spanish court in Madrid to serve as a lady-in-waiting to Isabel de Valois, the French queen of the powerful Habsburg king Philip II, Sofonisba was already a well-established portraitist in her own right. The artisanal Fontana family, in contrast, was a Bolognese institution. Lavinia’s father, Prospero Fontana, a successful Mannerist painter, provided artworks for numerous buildings in the city, as well as frescoes for the private residences of Pope Julius III and Francis I, king of France. In addition, he trained a roster of important artists in his studio, including Lodovico and Agostino Carracci, as well as his talented daughter. Both fathers clearly held their daughters in high esteem, naming them after illustrious women from antiquity (Sophonisba was a Carthaginian princess noted by Livy; Lavinia, the wife of Aeneas in book VII of the Aeneid). Both women came of age in the second half of the sixteenth century. Although Anguissola was seventeen years older than Fontana, she would outlive her by more than a decade.

These were decades of ridiculous prosperity bracketed between two moments of immeasurable exploitation—the “discovery” and colonization of new worlds at the one end, injecting old empires with fresh resources, and the commencement of the slave trade at the other. This influx of newly accessed wealth found its way into the visual imagination of the European elite that held political power and patronized the arts. Renaissance artists typically signaled the identity, status, and virtue of their subjects—men and women of extreme privilege—by including Latin inscriptions, coats of arms, and other heraldic symbols often lurking on the margins of religious works commissioned for churches and of the relatively modest portraits intended for private residences. The emboldened patrons of the brave new world of conspicuous consumption that dawned in the sixteenth century, in contrast, opted for grandeur and bling.

In one image by Anguissola, a teenage queen holds a small gold-framed portrait of her Spanish king in her right hand, but looks out at the spectator with the unshakable confidence to be expected from the daughter of Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici. She carries the weight of the Habsburg empire on her body garbed in black velvet enlivened by delicate lace and heavy gems—rubies, diamonds, pearls, silver, gold, and other treasures brought back from New Spain. Like the gorgeous jasper column against which she rests her hand, she is the very personification of Fortitude. In another portrait, this time by Fontana, the viewer is confronted by the icy gaze of one of Bologna’s aristocratic ladies, seated in a cavernous room that gives a view onto further rooms and external properties. Like a visual inventory, the full-length portrait records the economic status of the sitter in detail—seated on an opulent red chair decorated with gold tassels, she wears an exquisite bejewelled gown in which the voluminous undersleeves have been pulled out through the slits on the shoulder to show off the excess. She is the embodiment of material abundance. In the naturalistic light illuminating her face, the artist has made sure to underscore the woman’s soggiogaia (the double chin that Renaissance men found especially sexy).¹ Two heavy gold bracelets lie on the table, as if the sitter couldn’t be bothered to put on any more of her wealth. Even her well-groomed lapdog—a designer puppy bred to keep courtly ladies entertained, warm, and out of trouble—seems to be judging us. This is pure Generation Wealth (dir. Lauren Greenfield, 2018), the Renaissance edition.

Lavinia Fontana: Costanza Alidosi, ca. 1595, oil on canvas, 61 by 46¼ inches.

The vibrant material world of the late Renaissance provided the two “Women Painters” of the exhibition ample opportunity to showcase their talent. If Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana are not household names today, this is no fault of theirs. Anguissola holds the rare distinction of having been the most prolific self-portraitist of the Renaissance (beating out Albrecht Dürer); and Fontana is credited with around one hundred and fifty works, including numerous public commissions, and created them while producing eleven children. Anguissola painted for princes, popes, queens, and kings, was praised by Michelangelo, and received a visit from an infatuated fanboy named Anthony van Dyck, who enthusiastically recorded the meeting in his Italian sketchbook. (The Flemish artist’s portrait of the Grande Dame is on view in the final room at the Prado exhibition). Fontana, as the daughter of an established artist, was the first woman to paint large-scale altarpieces and mythological nudes and—more important—to run her own independent workshop.

In this regard, these were the best of times for highly skilled painters. However, since they were exceptional women in an aggressively hierarchical man’s world, it was also the worst of times. Despite their extraordinary capabilities—or, sadly, because of them—they were held up as freaks of nature and trolled by lesser men. In a collective biography dedicated to artists from Ferrara and Lombardy, Giorgio Vasari, for instance, could not but qualify his praise for Anguissola with a revealing rhetorical question that reduced her genius to a biological essentialism: “if women know so well how to produce living men, what marvel is it that those who wish are also so well able to create them in painting?”² Fontana, in turn, was remembered by one source “for the particularity that she was a woman” and congratulated for having “risen above the usual course of her sex, for whom wool and linen are the sole materials appropriate for their fingers and hands.”³ Oof!

It may be difficult for the modern reader to pass over these lines without a big eye roll, but one might take into consideration that it was only five decades ago that a New York City gallerist said blithely to an art history professor from Vassar College: “Linda, I would love to show women artists, but I can’t find any good ones. Why are there no great women artists?”⁴ Not too long after that encounter, Linda Nochlin transformed Richard Feigen’s glib aside into the manifesto that launched feminist art history in America and abroad. The essay, first published in 1971, laid bare the institutional prejudices and impediments—the system itself—that prevented women artists from succeeding: “Deprived of encouragements, educational facilities, and rewards,” she concluded, “it is almost incredible that even a small percentage of women actually sought a profession in the arts.”⁵

Anguissola and Fontana stand tall in a field made small by historical, social, and institutional traditions and the agents that uphold them. Nearly four centuries after their deaths, the Prado has sought to address this imbalance. In the director’s preface to the catalogue, Miguel Falomir Faus stipulates that the exhibition “makes up for a shortfall, albeit one that is not exclusive to the Prado but is unfortunately shared by all galleries of Old Master paintings: the scant presence, if not total absence, of women artists.”⁶ Anguissola and Fontana were subjected not only to the kinds of double standards that can still be found in today’s art world—where female artists suffer from far less representation in galleries, collections, and auctions, and continue to earn systematically less than their male counterparts—but they had to lay the groundwork for women to enter the profession at all. The best of times were (and remain) reserved first and foremost for the boys.

Sofonisba Anguissola: Family Portrait, ca. 1558, oil on canvas, 61¾ by 48 inches.

In light of the social and economic restrictions placed upon them because of their gender, it is no surprise that Anguissola and Fontana were especially astute observers of complex power relations. This is evident in their portraits of powerful and wealthy men and women, a category at which both artists excelled, but it comes through even in a seemingly naive scene of a chess game between siblings. In an especially charming painting, Sofonisba portrayed three of her younger sisters, dressed in sumptuous fabrics decorated with gleaming gold threads, playing outdoors. Lucia, the oldest on the left, has just defeated Minerva, who raises her hand in surprise, protest, and concession. Europa, the youngest in this scene, watches with glee as the sibling closest to her in age is trumped (anyone who has suffered the humiliations of being a young child with many clever and capable older sisters will identify immediately with Europa’s giddy expression of schadenfreude). Gazing on from the margins is the ancilla (or maidservant) who seems stumped by the erudite pastimes of the Anguissola girls. The painting is a wonderful study of both familial and social hierarchies as well as a bold, precocious example of the kind of genre scenes that would be popularized later on by big-name male artists, such as Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio.

Poor Minerva often got the short end of the stick. In the Family Portrait from some years later, it is she rather than the help who has been shuffled to the margins, as the pater familias, Amilcare, sits proudly in the center holding the hand of his beloved (and only) son Asdrubale. Conservators have gained much insight into Sofonisba’s technique from this work, which is unfinished. While the faces have been carefully painted, along with the upper portions of Minerva’s dress and the distant mountainous landscape, parts of the composition float unmoored upon a brownish-gray ground. But even in this unrealized state, it is a powerful psychological portrait. Minerva struggles to be seen by her father, but his attention is split between her younger brother (within the composition) and the unknown beholder (on the other side of the picture plane). We, the belated arrivals to this family romance, command more attention from Amilcare than Minerva. She is like the little white dog in the lower right corner, quietly waiting like a good pet, hoping for a sign of affection. At the same time, by placing her above Asdrubale and virtually on par with the father, Sofonisba grants Minerva some agency to at least look down upon her little brother. It is a subtle and ambivalent gesture, but a powerful one nonetheless.

In 1554 the Florentine painter Francesco Salviati wrote to Bernardino Campi to congratulate him on his great achievement, which he described as a “work” borne from Campi’s “beautiful intellect.” He wasn’t talking about a painting, he was talking about his prized student Sofonisba.⁷ What means did a young aristocratic female wunderkind, trying to make it in a man’s world, have to defend herself against backhanded slights? Sometimes it was better to retaliate through art. And indeed one would like to think that the devastatingly witty double portrait Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1559), painted a couple of years later, was her comeback to those supercilious remarks. To the question that would need to wait some centuries before it could be fully articulated, Anguissola responds here without flinching and without mercy: there are no “great” women “artists” because those categories have been designed by men for men. Sofonisba, however, was exceedingly skilled at ventriloquizing that masculinist discourse in painting. After all, Campi may have been her master, but he was also her social and artistic inferior. If in life women had to demure and make themselves smaller so as not to threaten the big men around them, here she has painted herself larger than life, holding a pair of gloves in her left hand, towering over him. (Despite doubts raised in the exhibition about the authorship of the painting, one cannot imagine a male artist choosing such an unusual arrangement.) The invention, however, is not cruel, for there is much humor in it, too. She depicts Campi painting, with the assistance of a mahlstick, the lace detail of her dress in the portrait within the portrait and—in a cunning twist—she has rendered her own self-portrait in an imitation of Campi’s somewhat flat, dull style while painting her master in her own energetic, glowing style.⁸

Lavinia Fontana: Mars and Venus, ca. 1559, oil on canvas, 55 by 45 5/8 inches.

Fontana, too, was capable of causing some serious gender trouble—as one of the few female artists of the Renaissance to paint large-scale nudes. We might pause for a moment to reflect upon the unruly Mars and Venus (ca. 1595). Fontana is said to have painted nudes based on the women around her; on this occasion, however, she is looking at art rather than at life. The painting is described in the catalogue in iconographical terms as “linked to a new acceptance of the depiction of the female buttocks,” following the midcentury discovery of an ancient statue in Rome known as the Venus Callipyge (the Venus of the “beautiful bottom”). The originality of Fontana’s image is further circumscribed by the suggestion that it was inspired by the mythological paintings of Venetian old masters such as Titian.⁹ No doubt, but it is also so much more. Rather than a simple imitation, it is a pointed riposte. Indeed, it would have been a bold curatorial move to include Titian’s Venus and Adonis from the Prado’s collection in “A Tale of Two Women Painters,” for it is often when Anguissola’s and Fontana’s works are juxtaposed with the paintings of their male peers that the conceptual brilliance of their inventions shines forth. This omission was in many ways a missed opportunity. A comparison of this sort makes clear what is at stake for an artist like Fontana in an image such as this. To simply equate the motivations behind the two works based on thematic similarities or as a chronology of influence would be akin to ignoring the feminist critique behind Cindy Sherman’s photographs of medical mannequins in pornographic poses (the “Sex Pictures,” 1992) and lumping them with Hans Bellmer’s fetishistic sculptures of pubescent female forms because they both happen to be twentieth-
century works about “dolls.”

Titian’s poesie or mythological paintings (commissioned by Philip II in the 1550s) will be the subject of an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, later this spring. The Venus and Adonis was one in a series of such paintings produced for elite male collectors across Europe (the first version, now lost, was for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, the grandson of Pope Paul III). They were conversation pieces and prestige fetishes. In a well-known letter to Venetian art collector Alessandro Contarini, the Renaissance art critic Lodovico Dolce describes a version of Venus and Adonis that he had just seen in Titian’s studio, noting that the painter’s brush “strokes” to life the alluring fold of flesh on Venus’s bottom and that there isn’t a man “so chilled by age or so hard in his makeup that he does not feel himself growing warm and tender, and the whole of his blood stirring in his veins” when he gazes upon Titian’s Venus.¹⁰ Locker room talk, no doubt.

Fontana’s Mars and Venus is in no uncertain terms an image of a gratuitous butt grab. Indeed, the artist has painted the offending male hand with its darker skin tone, clear contours, and subtle cast shadows in an almost sculptural manner, as if it were a real hand on the flat surface of the canvas. If in Titian’s poesie the goddess of love could be overcome by her lust for a mortal (Adonis), in Fontana’s Mars and Venus, she uses her beauty to emasculate the god of war (Mars). All the would-be phallic symbols beneath Mars—the sword on the ground and the menacing spike on the shield angled in Venus’s direction—culminate in a flaccid white sleeve drooping down from the edge of the bed. As in Family Portrait and Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola, here, too, the male figure has been positioned just below the female nude. Venus turns back to address her viewer (which would have been the artist herself in the first instance). In her hand she holds a daffodil, a complex symbol of narcissism, death, and resurrection. The placement of this flower seems momentarily to distract Mars, literally caught red-handed, as he looks up sheepishly at Venus. Rather than mirroring what previous Renaissance artists had done, Fontana’s scene subverts the machismo of the mythological tradition to say something critical about the taxing conditions of being a woman and a painter. A male viewer might misread her glance as seductive, but a female witness to this scene recognizes in Venus’s look the message: #MeToo.

Some might charge that to call Anguissola and Fontana “feminists” is anachronistic. This does not mean, however, that feminist themes are not embedded in their works. The glowing, haunted, magnificent nocturnal Judith and Holofernes, for instance, would have been received very differently by Venetian aesthetes such as Dolce and Contarini than by Laerzia Rossi Ratta, for whom the mesmerizing painting was destined. A well-connected member of the educated Bolognese aristocracy, Ratta was, like Judith, a widow, and would have appreciated the personal parallels between herself and the “emasculating warrior heroine.”¹¹ In the book of Judith, the beautiful young widow seduces the Assyrian general Holofernes in order to gain access to his private quarters and assassinate him before he can destroy her hometown of Bethulia. The lexical proximity of “Judith” (Giuditta) and “Justice” (Giustizia) in Italian made her an especially popular late Renaissance symbol for the triumph of justice over injustice. Fontana’s complete control of her art can be seen in the way she modulates her brushwork from the flat lifelessness of Holofernes’s severed head to the inspired handling of the gems and the delicate gold threads on Judith’s dress, glimmering like fiery embers in the supernatural light that comes down from above to bless her. For another version of the same subject, Fontana is said to have modeled the figure of Judith after her own likeness. Swap the sword for a brush and we can detect a certain resemblance here, too.

Lavinia Fontana: Judith and Holofernes, ca. 1595, oil on canvas, 47¼ by 36 5/8 inches.

Fontana’s Judith and Holofernes was painted some years ahead of Caravaggio’s cold, squeamish version of the same subject (now in the Palazzo Barberini, Rome) and two decades before the most celebrated of early modern “feminist” manifestos—Artemisia Gentileschi’s intense, muscular Judith and Holofernes (now in the Uffizi, Florence). Gentileschi will be the focus of a monographic show to open this spring at the National Gallery, London. While it might seem that the art world is at long last entering the “best of times” for the representation of women artists, it is important to remember that institutions must also invest in broadening the narratives around these historical figures. It is not enough to simply celebrate them, to render them “great” through inclusion. Rather (to quote the closing sentence of Nochlin’s essay) “using their situation as underdogs and outsiders as a vantage point, women can reveal institutional and intellectual weakness in general, and, at the same time that they destroy false consciousness, take part in the creation of institutions in which clear thought and true greatness are challenges open to anyone—man or woman—courageous enough to take the necessary risk, the leap into the unknown.”¹²

If the wall text and catalogue entries for “A Tale of Two Women Painters” resort on occasion to reliable old master narratives that seek to map out chains of influence (usually back to male artists, whether established or virtually unknown), to list provenance histories, and to clarify iconographical details without much consideration for the restrictive circumstances of the two women artists showcased, one must nevertheless applaud the exhibition as part of a larger sustained initiative at the Prado to stage a series of innovative and critically engaged shows. The presentation of Anguissola and Fontana serves as a respectable sequel to the 2016–17 exhibition “The Art of Clara Peeters,” co-organized with the Koninklijk Museum in Antwerp, dedicated to the seventeenth-century Flemish still life painter. It also follows the experimental show “The Other’s Gaze: Spaces of Difference,” a thematic itinerary through the collection that explored same-sex relationships, cross-dressing, and other LGBTQ issues. The historical examination of non-normative sexual identities in the art of the past, staged in conjunction with the World Pride festival during the summer of 2017, served as a fitting tribute to a city made proud and beautiful by Pedro Almodóvar (among others) and to the third European Union country to legalize same-sex marriage (in 2005). Following this thematic approach, the Prado will open this spring “Awkward Guests: Episodes on Women, Ideology and the Visual Arts in Spain (1833–1931),” which promises to undertake the kind of institutional critique of the very structures and systems made by and for men—the academy, the museum, the canon, and the monographic exhibition—that have been the traditional gatekeepers of artistic “greatness.”

¹ Agnolo Firenzuola, Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne, Venice, Giovanni Griffio, 1552, p. 40.
² Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Vol. 2, translated by Gaston du C. de Vere, London, Everyman’s Library, 1996, p. 468.
³ Andrés Ximénez quoted in Leticia Ruiz Gómez, “A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana,” A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana, ed. Leticia Ruiz Gómez, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2019, p. 28.
⁴ Richard Feigen quoted in Maura Reilly, “A Dialogue with Linda Nochlin, the Maverick She,” Women Artists:  The Linda Nochlin Reader, ed. Maura Reilly, London, Thames & Hudson, 2015, p. 15.
⁵ Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” Art and Sexual Politics, eds. Elizabeth C. Baker and Thomas E. Hess, London, Collier Macmillan, 1973, p. 26.
⁶ Miguel Falomir in A Tale of Two Women Painters, n.p.
⁷ Salviati quoted in Mary Garrard, “Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist,” Renaissance Quarterly, 47/3, 1994, pp. 560–61.
⁸ Noted by Ilya Sandra Perlingieri and discussed in Maria H. Loh, Still Lives: Death, Desire, and the Portrait of the Old Master, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015, p. 69.
⁹ Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo in A Tale of Two Women Painters, p. 222.
¹⁰ Dolce quoted in Mark Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, Toronto: University of Toronto, 2000, pp. 214–217.
¹¹ Caroline P. Murphy, Lavinia Fontana: A Painter and Her Patrons in Sixteenth-Century Bologna, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2003, pp. 151–55.
¹² Nochlin, p. 37.

This article appears under the title “Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face” in the February 2020 issue, pp. 56–63.

Media outlets around the world covered the return of this prodigal relic with much excitement and fanfare, but several months on, the bold announcement has not yet delivered any tangible results. It might be easy for cynics to write off the brouhaha as just another gimmick, a bit of well-timed publicity to kick-start a busy year of Da Vinci mania that marks the quincentenary of the famous Renaissance polymath’s death on May 2, 1519. True believers, however, can make the pilgrimage up to the picturesque Tuscan hill town, where they can marvel in the presence of Leonardo’s putative locks, permanently on display at the Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci among reconstructions and full-scale models of some of his most innovative and creative machines.

The file on Da Vinci conspiracy theories, fan fiction, and other forms of wishful thinking is a hefty one. Scientists and fantasists alike have claimed all sorts of things: that the artist suffered from ADHD; that he had ulnar nerve palsy (or “claw hand”); that he scandalously inserted the Magdalene into the company of male apostles in the Last Supper (ca. 1495–1498); that he once painted a portrait of a woman with high cholesterol who may also have been a prostitute, the love child of a Chinese slave, or perhaps a self-portrait of the artist in drag. The second female subject in question is, of course, Lisa Gherardini, better known as Mona Lisa, whose famous smile was “decoded” over a decade ago by an emotion-recognition software program as belonging to a woman who was 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful, and 2 percent angry.¹ The “silly season for the Mona Lisa,” as the formidable Leonardo scholar and Oxford professor Martin Kemp once said, “never closes.”² The same might be said for Leonardo, period.

One might blame the nonsense on novelist Dan Brown, but Sigmund Freud has much to answer for in this regard. Drawing from Leonardo’s early childhood memory in which he was attacked by a large bird, the psychoanalyst famously diagnosed the artist with extreme completion anxiety, a tendency toward neurotic fixation, repressed homosexuality, and acute mother and father issues. The neuroses of this “Italian Faust,” Freud concluded, ultimately stemmed from the artist’s illegitimate birth, but far from being the typical “nerve case,” Leonardo became that rare kind of genius who was able to sublimate his childish “play-instinct” and his erotic frustrations into his creative and intellectual activity.³ Freud’s essay not only emboldened the practice of psychobiography, in which the significance of an individual’s work is read through his or her intimate histories, but also shaped the way “Leonardo da Vinci” would be constructed for decades to come—as a fraught subject torn between femininity and masculinity, pathology and genius, and art and science (to this list of intransigent binaries, we might add, in the language of twenty-first-century viewers, the humanities and STEM subjects).

Femininity/pathology/art. Masculinity/genius/science. It is easy to see how political and problematic the divisions can get. It is also important, as we enter peak Leonardo frenzy, to acknowledge these constructions for what they are, so as to look beyond the hype and to see and enjoy the work in an informed fashion. The historical past was defined, to be sure, by extreme inequalities. Boundaries, however, often tended to be fluid, and Leonardo, one might say, was “post-binary” avant la lettre. This is nowhere more evident than in the drawings that were on view this past summer in two London exhibitions dedicated to the old master—“Leonardo: A Life in Drawing” at the Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace and “Leonardo da Vinci: A Mind in Motion” at the British Library. Leonardo’s world was atomistic, volatile, constantly in flux. At the same time, it was also surprising and oneiric, like scenes from a daydream, and this is how he depicted that world in his art. It wasn’t either/or. Leonardo was concerned, in equal parts, with science and fiction; and like all authors of science fiction, he dreamt (for better and worse) of other worlds yet to come.

It was this visionary aspect that undoubtedly appealed to Bill Gates, who purchased one of Leonardo’s notebooks in 1994 for $30.8 million. That manuscript—the Codex Leicester—was one of the centerpieces of the exhibition at the British Library. Previously, the manuscript had been on display as part of the exhibition “Water as Microscope of Nature: Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester,” which closed in January 2019 at the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence. In the London show, the Codex Leicester was paired with the Codex Arundel, owned by the library and supplemented by a few additions from other collections in the United Kingdom. This ensemble is but a tiny fraction of Leonardo’s vast corpus of writings, consisting of some twenty-odd notebooks. Brimming with detailed pen-and-ink drawings as well as sketches in red and black chalk, they contain the extensive notes that da Vinci accumulated over a lifetime for treatises on various topics including anatomy, light, water, botany, mechanics, and painting, which were left for the most part incomplete. Central to the two codices on view at the British Library is a sustained reflection on the sublime force of the elements: the dynamism of air and water, the tremulous body of the earth, and the fiery light of the sun and moon.

On one such sheet, we see Leonardo trying to understand the forces that propel the circulation of water from the seas up to mountain peaks. At first glance, it would seem we are dealing with a relatively straightforward scientific illustration, but moving closer to the detail that hovers in the upper left-hand margin of the page next to the explanatory text, one cannot help but notice that the schematic image of the earth resembles a human face. At the center of the terrestrial sphere there seems to be a single unblinking eye that gazes back out at us. At the top, rivers—rendered as three darkened inky squiggles—seem to grow like hairs from the top of one’s head.⁴ It is more like the iconic image of the man in the moon from Georges Méliès’s fantastical film A Trip to the Moon (1902) than an illustration to be found in a geology textbook. Leonardo thought of nature in distinctively anthropomorphizing terms. In his writings, soil is the Earth’s flesh, the rocks and the mountains are its bones; tufa is likened to cartilage; and the watery network of rivers, lakes, and oceans forms part of its circulatory system. “Earth,” he wrote, “has a vegetative soul” and the “heat of the soul of the world is the fire which is infused throughout the Earth.”⁵ 

In addition to painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, stage designer, anatomist, geologist, botanist, and cartographer, we might add environmentalist to da Vinci’s many titles. But above all else, he was a dreamer, and perhaps this is why he had so much trouble finishing things on time or at all. The evidence to this end is staggering in the chronological survey “Leonardo: A Life in Drawing,” which closes on October 13 before traveling to the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh on November 22 in a much-reduced version. The Buckingham Palace show is the largest exhibition of the artist’s graphic production in sixty-five years. What makes this a truly twenty-first-century da Vinci exhibition, however, is the range of new noninvasive imaging technologies that have been used to uncover previously unseen details. A fingerprint, possibly belonging to the master, was identified on the edge of an anatomical drawing of The cardiovascular system and principal organs of a woman (ca. 1509–10). Perhaps the most exciting announcement made during “Leonardo: A Life in Drawing” was the discovery of a number of “Studies of Hands for the Adoration of the Magi” (ca. 1480–81), which were revealed under ultraviolet light, upon what had appeared at first to be a blank sheet of paper.⁶ The history behind this exhibition is worth mentioning. In the run-up to the exhibition in London, twelve regional museums throughout the United Kingdom—in Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Derby, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Southampton, and Sunderland—were each lent twelve Leonardo drawings for three months, thereby enabling local residents to see the master’s works in their own towns. For a man so interested in both locomotion and fame, Leonardo would have been extremely chuffed at the idea of his creations being transported across roads and waterways in a foreign land of which he had heard, but never seen with his own eyes.

“A Life in Drawing” is organized both geographically and chronologically, covering the significant periods that Leonardo spent in Florence (ca. 1481), Milan (ca. 1481–99), Florence, Milan, and Rome (ca. 1500–16), and France (1516–19). Within these sections are thematic groups interspersed with preparatory sketches for some of his completed masterpieces such as the Last Supper and the Virgin of the Rocks (1483–86), as well as the controversial Salvator Mundi (ca. 1500), which sold at auction in 2017 for $450.3 million. Readers will no doubt be familiar with the drawings Leonardo made of the human and animal anatomy, weapons and machines, and even the numerous sketches of rocks, plants, and deluges. Among the many remarkable works in the Royal Collection is a wild drawing titled The Arno Valley with the route of a proposed canal (ca. 1503–4), in which the boundary that Freud sought to erect between Leonardo’s “scientific” and “artistic” drives seems to crumble upon the surface of the page. In the lower right-hand corner, the draftsman shows a three-dimensional view through a valley of rocky peaks and rolling hills. What might have been a simple brown ink landscape drawing is overtaken from above, however, by an aerial view down onto the winding course of the Arno River.

In the early years of the 1500s, with the support of Florentine statesman Niccolò Machiavelli, Leonardo came up with numerous schemes to divert the flow of the river in order to increase trade and to isolate the rival city of Pisa. None of these plans came to fruition, but this magnificent drawing resulted. Nervous lines map out the intricate network of diversion channels as well as the ambitious and ultimately fanciful canals Leonardo wanted to cut through the inhospitable Tuscan marshes. In some parts, especially on the left side, the sinuous forms have been pricked by a needle. Traces of black charcoal on the back of the sheet confirm that these sections were pounced in order to be copied. What appear as random splotches of brown ink wash at the heart of the drawing refer in fact to hill chains running between Pistoia and Empoli to the east and Lucca and Pisa to the west. Opaque circles indicate towns to the north and west of Florence. A set of numbers skips across the lower right-hand side, corresponding presumably to a set of measurements. While Renaissance drawings are often multilayered events filled with various studies of hands, drapery, faces, architectural motifs, etc., there is something quasi-expressionistic about Leonardo’s graphism here. Standing before the glorious mess of a masterpiece, one wonders whether the drawing was begun in earnest with a clear cartographic goal in mind, but was then overtaken bit by bit by fantasy. An inattentive eye might mistake this sheet for one of Leonardo’s many anatomical studies in which he is trying to understand the dense system of arteries, veins, and capillaries that make up the human circulatory system. At the same time, the large abstract field invokes the balletic space that we might associate with painters as diverse as Jackson Pollock and Hans Hartung.

It would seem that Leonardo often started something with one idea in mind only to get diverted, like one of his proposed canals, in another direction. Two other drawings in the Royal Collection—both thick palimpsests—demonstrate this process brilliantly. In Pictographs and an architectural plan (ca. 1490), a viable chronology of development might be discerned. The artist appears to have started an architectural plan in the lower half. The carefully rendered rooms, stairs, and corridors get quickly overwritten, however, by a mad scramble of cryptograms running from right to left accompanied beneath by Leonardo’s signature mirror handwriting. The parade of little ears, bowls, beans, creatures, a mask, a handshake, musical notes, bones, a pinecone, and other picture puzzles turn out to be a sub-Petrarchan plaint that begins in the upper right-hand corner with pictographs that ask “What can I do if the woman plucks my heart?” Another line further down laments through another suite of pictorial puns and rebuses: “Wretched me, how she triumphed over me! But still I will be” (this is Leonardo doing his best Gloria Gaynor).

An architectural allegory and designs for a stage set (ca. 1495) is just as complex. Marked by a box in the upper right hand corner is a bizarre scene in which a classical building has sprouted a tail and a monstrous skeletal head and appears to be in hot pursuit of a justifiably terrified man. Winged figures (angels?) enter from the left, but it is difficult to say why. Turning the sheet ninety degrees counterclockwise, one sees two small sketches of a figure seated on a globe and a cloudburst from which small pellets (possibly golden coins) fall. While the designs have been connected to a production of Baldassare Taccone’s Danaë that Leonardo oversaw for the Italian nobleman Gianfrancesco Sanseverino in the 1490s, the sheet achieves with graphic economy what would have been nearly impossible to accomplish in reality on the stage. Unlike Pictographs and an architectural plan, it becomes more difficult for the viewer to discern the artist’s start and end points. Did Leonardo begin by designing the backdrops for the play and then get overcome by the enormity of the task? Is he to be understood as the man being chased by the architectural monster? Alternatively, did he dream up an impossible stage set and then draw a celestial deity to whom he could plead for assistance?

Fire and earth were the elements that kept Leonardo grounded, but water and air enabled his creative mind to fly. It is no surprise then that he loved to draw wind gusts, tempests, storms, and floods. Several of the best examples of such images are on view at Buckingham Palace. These are frequently classified as “scientific studies,” but we must remind ourselves that it was impossible to see such violent and fleeting phenomena in this manner before the invention of photography. Though Leonardo’s drawings may be based in part on firsthand observation, they are necessarily condensations, extensions, and ultimately inventions born of the artist’s imagination.

Toward the end of his life, Leonardo seems to have become obsessed with climatic volatility, as a series of sublime cataclysmic storm drawings from his final years in France demonstrate. Perhaps one of the most delightful of his “storm” pictures, however, is a very small drawing in black chalk and pen-and-ink, dating from around 1506 to 1512, that shows what is called A Cloudburst of Material Possessions. As with the Pictographs and an Architectural Plan, the artist has created a pictorial inventory of early sixteenth-century objects. This time they are household goods including ladles, ladders, scissors, spectacles, rakes, rulers, hammers, and even a bagpipe. At the bottom, however, he added the line: “Oh human misery, how many things you must serve for money” (and here, Leonardo is doing his best Marie Kondo). The small sketch, measuring just over four-and-a-half-inches square, has been read as a moral allegory on account of the inscription, but one might picture Leonardo sketching a storm cloud outside his window and absentmindedly adding a single spoon falling from the sky and then drawing a shovel and then another until the nature study became an explosion of the imagination. At the left edge of the fantastical cloud formation, Leonardo inserted a small lion—leone—a pictorial signature, perhaps.

Another beloved drawing from the Royal Collection features a sheet known as Cats, lions, and a dragon (ca. 1517–18). As is often the case with Leonardo, what appears at first to be a series of studies after nature quickly reveals itself to be a less straightforward amalgamation. Cats are notoriously absent from Renaissance paintings, whereas dogs are often found posing with their masters and mistresses in some of the grandest portraits of the time. Any cat owner will tell you that, unlike dogs, cats generally do not like it when you stare at them. They get suspicious and scuttle off, or they find a high perch from which they can observe you instead. In Leonardo’s field of feline critters, there are three sleeping cats on the right, a few seen from behind and the rest for the most part are the artist’s imaginary concoctions. In the upper left-hand corner we have what might be described as a “cat-rat.” Beneath that there is a scaredy-cat on all fours with fur abristle, resembling a lamb more than a cat. Other wrestling creatures have morphed from cats into lions; and finally, sketched in on the diagonal, there is a roaring dragon with its tail twisted in a coil. Around five years before his death, Leonardo announced his intention to write a treatise on the movement of animals that walk on four feet. Martin Clayton, curator of the Queen’s Gallery exhibition, commented that this was “perhaps displacement activity for Leonardo’s stalled work on human anatomy.”⁷ In the end, neither the study on animal locomotion nor on human anatomy ever materialized.

There is no denying that Leonardo often left projects and commissions unfinished. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current presentation of St. Jerome Praying in the Wilderness (begun ca. 1483), an anguished depiction of the holy hermit, offers New York audiences access to one of the most spectacular examples of the artist’s predilection for abandoning projects. Francesco del Giocondo may have been a successful Florentine merchant and wealthy slave trader, but even he was powerless at getting the painter to hand over the long-overdue portrait of his wife, Mona Lisa. But Leonardo was hardly alone in the art of the non finito. Michelangelo notoriously failed to complete the fifteen statues promised for the Piccolomini family chapel in Siena, the twelve apostles destined for the Duomo in Florence, the Entombment altarpiece for the Bishop of Crotone in Rome, the facade of San Lorenzo, the wall tombs for the Medici, and the fresco of the Battle of Cascina for the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, the pendant for which was Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari, which he likewise failed to complete.

In Michelangelo’s case, the non finito is often read as a bold aesthetic strategy, but with Leonardo it is usually codified as a deficiency. The two hundred drawings on view at Buckingham Palace amount to less than half of the five hundred sheets in the Royal Collection—the largest single cache of works by Leonardo in the world—and only a fraction of Leonardo’s total graphic output. He was a busy man, but we shouldn’t read his hyperactivity as an inability to produce, as attention disorder, or as a mother-complex, for that matter. It was a visual index of his thought process—the downtime, the daydreaming, the dead ends, and the endless digressions and diversions. Instead of the antithetical pairings of femininity versus masculinity, pathology versus genius, and art versus science that Freud introduced to Leonardo studies, we might instead take a page from the psychoanalyst’s essay on “Creative Writing and Day-Dreaming” (1908), in which he compared the motivation of artistic activity, dreams, daydreaming, and various forms of fiction to the guiltless pleasure of child’s play. Leonardo completed only around twenty paintings in his lifetime—not a tremendous yield given the amount of paper he generated and the amount of financial backing he received from republican governments, tyrants, and kings alike. But imagine a world in which nobody was willing to invest in a day-dreamer like Leonardo! The thousands of sketches, scribbles, doodles, and drawings as well as the prodigious note-taking, however, document the laborious process of speculative research—full of obstacles, frequently tortured—that is necessary if one is to produce something as spectacular as the Mona Lisa or the Virgin of the Rocks. These paintings along with La Belle Ferronière (ca. 1490), the Bacchus (1510–15), and St. John the Baptist (ca. 1513), will be among the masterpieces at the much anticipated Louvre Museum blockbuster, opening in Paris at the end of October when readers can expect “silly season” to be in full bloom.

This article appears under the title “Science Fiction Double Feature” in the October 2019 issue, pp. 62–69.

Endnotes

1. Lucy Based on the research of Nicu Sebe, as reported in “Software Decodes Mona Lisa’s Enigmatic Smile,” New Scientist, Dec. 14, 2005, newscientist.com.

2. Martin Kemp, Leonardo, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 246.

3. Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci: A Memory of His Childhood, trans. Alan Dyson, London, Routledge, 2014, pp. 22, 89, 87.

4. This analogy is noted by Leonardo himself who pointed out that “the motion of the surface of the water” in eddying whirlpools “resembles that of hair.” Quoted in Carlo Pedretti, Leonardo da Vinci on Painting, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1964, p. 13.

5. Quoted in Leonardo da Vinci: A Mind in Motion, ed. Julia Barone, London, British Library, 2019, p. 72.

6. These and other discoveries are discussed in a publication that accompanies the exhibition by the former Head of Paper Conservation of the Royal Collection: Alan Donnithorn, Leonardo da Vinci: A Closer Look, London, Royal Collection Trust, 2019.

7. Martin Clayton, Leonardo: A Life in Drawing, London, Royal Collection Trust, 2019, p. 221.

Parallel to this love story, the reader is regaled with the homosocial rivalry between Tintoretto and Titian, with Paolo Veronese appearing as an intercessor who mediates a grandiloquent reconciliation scene in which all three masters unite to defend the honor of the Venetian state. The narrative unfolds against Tintoretto’s commission for the Last Judgment (1562–64) in Santa Maria dell’Orto. Marta’s artist was thus, in no uncertain terms, a struggling genius waiting for recognition from his fellow artists even at the height of his success. Indeed, the episode concludes with Titian’s transformative endorsement—Ora non siete più il povero Tintoretto, ma bensì il famoso Giacomo Robusti (“now you are no longer the poor ‘son of a dyer,’ but the famous Jacopo Robusti”).¹

Loosely based on actual historical personages, the tale is almost entirely fantasy. Such theatrical characterizations are nevertheless of great importance, for they help give legends the veneer of history. Giorgio Vasari’s sixteenth-century notices about Tintoretto, as well as, in the seventeenth century, Carlo Ridolfi’s biography and Marco Boschini’s various writings on the artist, were the primary sources for many of these tasty morsels, and while scholars have tried to sift fiction from reality, some myths are just too delectable to give up. We still hear repeated, for instance, the unfounded story that the young Tintoretto was kicked out of Titian’s studio. It’s not entirely impossible, but there isn’t a shred of solid evidence to confirm the tale (any more than Ridolfi’s allegation that Tintoretto dressed Marietta up as a boy so that father and daughter could wander the city streets unimpeded by society’s strict gender expectations).

The image of Tintoretto-as-rebel would culminate in Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay “The Prisoner of Venice” (1964), where the artist is reinvented as an existentialist hero, a lone wolf fighting against the stultifying rules of the system:

Fate has decreed that Jacopo unwittingly expose an age which refuses to recognize itself. Now we understand the meaning of his destiny and the secret of Venetian malice. Tintoretto displeases everyone: patricians because he reveals to them the puritanism and fanciful agitation of the bourgeoisie; artisans because he destroys the corporate order and reveals, under their apparent professional solidarity, the rumblings of hate and rivalry; patriots because the frenzied state of painting and the absence of God discloses to them, under his brush, an absurd and unpredictable world in which anything can occur, even the death of Venice.²

At the other end of the spectrum, this leitmotif is perhaps best played out for comic effect in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You (1996), in which a skirt-chaser (Allen) is overheard in the so-called Tintoretto Museum (really the Scuola Grande di San Rocco) in Venice trying to impress a Tintoretto enthusiast (Julia Roberts) by lauding the artist’s immense genius for painting “outside the academic convention of sixteenth-century Venice.”

Sometimes myths are just too powerful, and the Tintoretto myth is an extremely appealing one for modern tastes, especially in the celebratory year marking the fifth centenary of the artist’s birth. Tintoretto’s anniversary has been staged as a magnificent international banquet. The festivities began last autumn in Venice with exhibitions at the Palazzo Ducale (“Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice”) and the Gallerie dell’Accademia (“The Young Tintoretto”), as well as an excellent little show at the Scuola Grande di San Marco (“Art, Faith, and Medicine in Tintoretto’s Venice”). New York, in the fall, offered “Drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice” at the Morgan Library & Museum and “Celebrating Tintoretto: Portrait Paintings and Studio Drawings” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The fete continues in 2019 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where slightly adapted versions of the Palazzo Ducale and Morgan Library exhibitions go on view this month, fortified by a third independent show called “Venetian Prints in the Time of Tintoretto.” This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for audiences in America to see some one hundred and seventy artworks by Tintoretto and other Venetian Renaissance artists, painstakingly gathered by art historians Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman (who organized the show at the Palazzo Ducale),along with curators John Marciari (of the Morgan) and Jonathan Bober (of the National Gallery). Fans of the artist and of painting in general should take note.

IT’S HARD NOT TO get swept up in all the unbridled Tintoretto worship, but this celebration also provides us an opportunity to revisit the man, the myth, the legacy, and above all, the work. To start with the biographical elements: Tintoretto was hardly seen as a pitiful “poor dyer’s son” in the eyes of his fellow Renaissance artists, nor as a maverick who “displeases everyone.” When speaking about Titian vs. Tintoretto, one must take into account a few historical particulars. For instance, in 1519, the year after Titian installed the magnificent Assumption of the Virgin in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Tintoretto’s only achievement was to be born. In 1545, two years before Tintoretto’s first self-portrait (with which all Tintoretto exhibitions seem compelled to begin), Titian was called to Rome by Pope Paul III; in the 1550s and 1560s he was practically a court painter to the Habsburgs, while Tintoretto was painting acres of canvas to fill the walls at the Chiesa della Madonna dell’Orto, the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, and the Scuola Grande di San Marco in Venice; Titian died in 1576 during the plague, and in 1577 a conflagration devastated the Palazzo Ducale, destroying many of his paintings there, some of which would be replaced with works by Tintoretto and his assistants in the 1580s. While there was probably no love between the two men of the kind that nineteenth-century dramatists might dream up, their careers ran parallel to each other rather than in constant antagonistic competition.

Many romantic myths are dispelled in the scholarship that went into the exhibitions and the catalogue essays, but the melodrama of this rivalry still sneaks into sections such as “The Mantle of Titian,” which, at the Palazzo Ducale, was called “Dopo Tiziano” (After Titian) thereby underlining both chronological priority as well as influence. The paintings Tintoretto did after Titian’s death in 1576—large, powerful mythological pictures such as the Forge of Vulcan (1577) and the Origin of the Milky Way (ca. 1577–78)—are spectacular, but why filter these achievements once more through Titian? And why not have, instead, a section labeled “Dopo Tintoretto,” which would include El Greco, the Carracci, Caravaggio, and a host of other artists from the past five centuries who found inspiration in his stark chiaroscuro, raking perspective, extreme foreshortening, airborne saints, psychologically charged portraits, barefoot worshippers, elaborate banquet scenes, wraithlike angels and spirits, and busted-out straw chairs?

The oft-repeated trope that Tintoretto was an outsider also willfully overlooks his obvious status as a complete insider, born in Venice and fully embedded in its institutions from birth. Titian and Veronese, in contrast, were both provincials (practically foreigners by Renaissance standards), who came from the hills and plains beyond the lagoon. While a questionable seventeenth-century account suggested an aristocratic lineage for the Robusti family, more recent studies have emphasized instead the artist’s “working class” origins. The truth is somewhere in between. Stefania Mason’s essay “Tintoretto the Venetian,” from the catalogue that accompanies “Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice,” goes a long way to contextualize the precise socioeconomic conditions of the son of a Renaissance dyer or—to be more accurate—the son of a manager of a dye works married to a “well-born woman.” The Robusti were not wealthy by any means, but they were comfortable enough to give Tintoretto a basic education that enabled him later in life to befriend the circle of writers and intellectuals known as the poligrafi, including the notorious satirist Pietro Aretino (a friend of Titian and an early supporter of Tintoretto).

Like his father, Tintoretto married up. His father-in-law, Marco Episcopi, not only belonged to an influential family of Venetian cittadini, he was also the guardian of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, where Tintoretto—two years before his marriage—painted his finest early work, Miracle of the Slave (1548). The scene features St. Mark swooping in headfirst from the sky to protect a slave from being martyred for his faith. Current viewers need not be intimidated by the religious matter of the vast majority of Tintoretto’s pictures—they are gripping visual tales of life and death. According to seventeenth-century artist and critic Marco Boschini, one beholder of Tintoretto’s St. Mark cycle reported: “The terror makes me faint, and the piety liquefies my heart in such a manner that I lose heart and melt like wax and feel completely mad!”³ As much “Game of Thrones” as Catholic doctrine in pictures, these works were meant to move, delight, and instruct their audience. Indeed, one cannot help but feel that if Tintoretto were alive today, he would be an unapologetic fan of action films and special effects. Looking at Miracle, with its explosive light and tense shadows, its superhuman heroes and racially profiled villains, and its meticulous staging of powerful, muscular, controlled bodies, one might think he invented the genre. No wonder Boschini described him as a “thunderbolt” and the “cannons of a ship.”⁴

Unfortunately, Miracle of the Slave has not been allowed to cross the Atlantic. Audiences in D.C. can, however, marvel at the luminous Saint Augustine Healing the Lame (ca. 1550) and the always pleasing Creation of the Animals (1550–53), which the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once described as an image of God as a referee “at the start of a handicapped race, in which the birds and the fish leave first, while the dog, the rabbits, the cow, and the unicorn await their turn.”⁵

While Miracle has been in the possession of the Gallerie dell’Accademia for many decades now, seeing it anew, rehung next to the diminutive bronze relief of the same subject by the Florentine sculptor Jacopo Sansovino, was one of the highlights of the “Young Tintoretto” exhibition. With the works placed next to each other in a darkened room, the similarities and differences were enlightening. Designed and executed between 1541 and 1546 for the north tribune of the choir at the Basilica di San Marco, Sansovino’s glowing bronze panel reduces the scene to a compact, tactile, monochromatic field of chiaroscuro with a vibrant mass of bodies emerging from the picture plane in dynamic, agitated poses. Tintoretto, just on the cusp of his thirtieth year when he painted Miracle, clearly looked closely at the dramatic effects that could be sculpted out of gesture, form, and composition alone. To this art he would add the detail of expression, the intensity of extreme lighting, the terribilità that often comes with scale, and the incomparable power of color.

WHILE THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY audiences might think it odd for an ambitious artist to unveil a painting so closely modeled on a recent work by another artist, the reuse of motifs was a common Italian Renaissance practice, as was made clear in an insightful section of the Palazzo Ducale exhibition simply called “The Recycler.” Tintoretto and his assistants, after all, produced more square footage of painting than any other workshop in the Venetian Renaissance. In one instance, the painter salvaged an old composition from his painting Mystic Crucifixion by cutting, splitting, and reintegrating the canvas into a new picture, The Nativity (ca. 1550s and 1570s); on another occasion, he copied, pivoted, and re-costumed a previously used figure of St. Lawrence intended for the Bonomi family altar in San Francesco della Vigna, transforming the martyr into Helen of Troy. Such shortcuts were standard in most Renaissance workshops, especially prolific ones that had to turn out hundreds of altarpieces, portraits, mythological paintings, battle scenes, and other pictures.

The juxtaposition between the Florentine sculptor and the Venetian painter also underlines Tintoretto’s connectedness with other artists. He painted Sansovino’s portrait more than once, even signing one of the works as “Jacobus Tintorettus eius amicissimus” (which, if you believe the inscription, means they were Renaissance BFFs). Tintoretto was an artist’s artist. His profound sense of community comes across in a rather touching contract found in the Venetian archives and included in the small but brilliant “Art, Faith, and Medicine in Tintoretto’s Venice” at the Scuola Grande di San Marco. In this document, drafted and signed shortly after Christmas in 1585, the artist agrees to provide works and forgo any payment on the condition that the confraternity admit four people: his son Giovanni Battista Robusti; his son-in-law Marco Augusta (the real-life husband of Marietta); the tailor Bartolomeo di Lorenzo; and another man named Angelo Girardi. His dedication to his family, friends, and students is also borne out in numerous workshop drawings, which are well represented in D.C.

Offering important opportunities for artistic communion, drawing had its pragmatic as well as pleasurable purposes. In several sketches made after a copy of the ancient bust known as the Grimani Vitellius, we see multiple hands working seemingly side by side, line by line, smudge by smudge, highlight by highlight, with the goal of mastering the visible world around them. The willful way that these graphic studies dematerialize carved stone and reincarnate the male portrait head into what looks at first glance like the image of a flesh-and-blood subject is remarkable. In this sequence, note especially the Morgan Library drawing rendered by what the curator identifies as a “left-handed draftsman.” The work seems almost too bold in its deliberate, sweeping gestures to be “workshop,” but then Tintoretto was clearly a very good master with some very capable assistants.

In Tintoretto’s drawings and paintings, one often feels that he is “sculpting” with chalk, charcoal, watercolor, oil, and pigment, ignoring the flat surface of the paper or canvas. This comes across not only in the speckled black-and-white patterns of his drawings from sculptures (which he avidly collected) but in his life studies, too. His rendering of flesh frequently seems to be rippling and quivering with animal energy, as if the artist were trying to catch the living body in motion. His is possibly the most atomistic rendering of the human form in the Renaissance. The frenetic, vibrating lines in Seated Man with Raised Right Arm (ca. 1577), for instance, exemplify this stylistic peculiarity: the contours of the mythological body can never sit still but seem to be in a constant state of flex and flux. (Indeed, Tintoretto’s figural drawings make Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and every episode of “The Incredible Hulk” seem old hat when they appear centuries later.)

One of the art-historical myths destroyed—hopefully once and for all—by the exhibitions in honor of Tintoretto is that Venetians did not really draw. Some did more than others, and Tintoretto and his assistants surely drew up a storm. On various sheets we find words such as fa (make), sì (yes), fatto (made), no (no), and bono (good) scrawled across the surface; sometimes figures are singled out by an asterisk. These marks were workshop instructions on designs that had been cleared for production by the master. Sheets such as Study of a Man Climbing into a Boat (1578–79) were frequently greased and held up to the light so that forms could be retraced on the verso, offering compositional options. Many have squaring grids drawn across them. In some instances, this facilitated the transfer of the design onto a larger surface; in other cases, it assisted in the correction of foreshortening and the adjustment of figural proportions.

Of the thirty-some drawings by Tintoretto and his workshop on display at the National Gallery of Art, the majority are on the blue paper favored by Venetian artists. The dark surface of this carta azzurra provided an ideal ground upon which to map out gestural movements, tonal subtleties, and, above all, the effects of light and shadow. It might also be compared with the darkened grounds of many Tintoretto paintings. The canvas support for The Origin of the Milky Way, for example, is prepared with a brownish layer upon which the artist sketched out his composition with white lead paint (rather than using black paint on a white gessoed surface). Once a scene had been plotted out on the canvas, however, Tintoretto was prone to further editing, altering, and redrawing of figures and forms in a variety of white, black, and even red paint until the work was completed.

PAINTERS AND people interested in the way things are made will find much to consider in these exhibitions. Tintoretto’s process is revealed in medias res through the various X-rays that accompany the didactic material in the galleries and comes across most clearly in the oil sketch Doge Alvise Mocenigo Presented to the Redeemer (1571–74, a work included in the 2016 exhibition “Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible” at the Met Breuer in New York). Looking at the mannequinlike figures waiting to be dressed with flesh and clothes, one comes to appreciate the procedural logic that binds these drawings and paintings together (a topic expertly discussed in Roland Krischel’s essay “Tintoretto at Work” in the National Gallery of Art exhibition catalogue). The show reveals Tintoretto’s exploratory procedure: visceral, intuitive, yet ultimately studied and thought-through—but never entirely scripted.

Tintoretto is all gestalt. If the Marxist machismo of Sartre’s characterization of the artist as a rebel “born among the underlings who endured the weight of a superimposed hierarchy” is misplaced, one must admit that his phenomenological acumen regarding the works is often startlingly spot on. Sartre writes with great perspicacity about the narrow, vertical composition of Saint George and the Dragon (ca. 1553–55):

Everything is simultaneous in his canvas, he contains everything within the unity of a single instant. But to mask the over-harsh rift, he presents the spectator with the spectre of a succession of events. Not only is the route traced in advance, but each stage devalues the previous one and shows it up as an inert memory of things past. The corpse’s immobility is memory: it is prolonged and repeated from one moment to the next, identical and useless. . . . The time-trap works, we are caught: a false present welcomes us at every step and unmasks its predecessor which returns, behind our backs, to its original status of petrified memory.⁶

Time and space collapse in on the spectator’s embodied experience, simulating the effects of a hallucinatory drug. And indeed, as early as Boschini we find the revelatory quality of Tintoretto’s art described in pharmacological terms. Of the whirlwind of paintings on the ceilings and walls of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, he effuses: “I feel as if I am in a drugstore. Under my nose these odors have aromas that overwhelm my heart. These fragrances remain in my mind, my mind feels so utterly purged that my heart jumps for joy in my chest, and my soul feels totally jubilant.”⁷

One must be in the presence of the work in order to experience the psychosomatic force of Tintoretto’s art. A black-and-white photograph of a room filled with Tintoretto’s portraits can look like a field of dull heads, but in person these works become alarmingly ghostly presences, with hands and faces that seem capable of movement. The sketches that move from light fluffy strokes to devastating valleys of black charcoal seemingly carved with a chisel, the thick ridges of impasto that rise suddenly like waves from the surface of a canvas, the glazes and scumble that modulate color and reflect light differently depending on the angle of view, the enormity of compositions that threaten to engulf the spectator’s body—these elements simply do not translate in any form of mechanical or digital reproduction. This is true not only for Tintoretto but for Venetian art in general, with its penchant for chromatic and luminous variability and richness.

In “Drawing in Tintoretto’s Venice” the difference between Veronese’s gorgeous drawings covered in elegant, spindly figures created in a torrent of quick brown ink strokes and Jacopo Bassano’s schematic black chalk sketches marked by dusty smudges of red, white, green, pink, and brown becomes immediately clear. Domenico Tintoretto, one of the master’s sons, produced oil sketches of battle scenes that look comic in reproduction, but when one stands before the flurry of red, white, and black patches on dark brown paper, these detailed compositions dissolve unexpectedly into near abstraction.

Renaissance drawings are so fragile and sensitive to light that they can be exhibited only rarely, and many  Tintoretto paintings are so large that they have remained in situ in Venice for most of their existence. Thus the current triple exhibition is the first substantial retrospective of the old master’s work in America. It is a fitting tribute on the occasion of his five hundredth birthday—and a viewing experience not to be missed.

Endnotes

1. Luigi Marta, Il Tintoretto e sua figlia: drama in sei quadri del pittore Luigi Marta, Milan, Borroni e Scotti, 1846, p. 46.

2. Sartre quoted in Laura Lepschy, Tintoretto Observed: A Documentary Survey of Critical Reactions from the 16th to the 20th Century, Ravenna, Longo Editore, 1983, p. 185.

3. Marco Boschini, La carta navegar pitoresco, edited by Anna Pallucchini, Venice/Rome, Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1966, p. 280.

4. Ibid., p. 4.

5. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, London, Continuum, 2003, p. 7.

6. Sartre quoted in Lepschy, p. 189.

7. Boschini, p. 150.