Excellent scholars4 have thought that Signorelli’s fame is inadequate to his deserts; but perhaps it exceeds them. He was a facile draftsman, who amazes us with his studies of anatomy, posture, perspective, and foreshortening, and amuses us with his use of human figures in composition and ornament. Sometimes in his Madonnas he reaches a note of tenderness, and the musician angels at Loreto have charmed discriminating minds. But for the rest he was the apostle of the body as anatomy; he gave it no sensual softness, no voluptuous grace, no glory of color, no magic of light and shade; he seldom realized that the function of the body is to be the outward expression and instrument of a subtle and intangible spirit or character, and that the sovereign task of art is to find and reveal that soul through its veil of flesh. Michelangelo took from Signorelli this idolatry of anatomy, this loss of the end in the means, and in the Last Judgment of the Sistine Chapel he repeated on a larger scale the physiological frenzy of the Orvieto frescoes; but on the ceiling of that same chapel, and in his sculpture, he used the body as the voice of the soul. In Signorelli painting passed at one step from the terrors and tenderness of medieval art to the strained and soulless exaggerations of baroque.
III. SIENA AND SODOMA
In the fourteenth century Siena had almost kept pace with Florence in commerce, government, and art. In the fifteenth she exhausted herself with such fanatical factional violence as no other city in Europe could match. Five parties—monti, hills, the Sienese called them—ruled the city in turn; each in turn was overthrown by revolution, and its more influential members, sometimes numbering thousands, were exiled. We may judge the bitterness of this strife from the oath that two of the factions swore to end it (1494). An awed eyewitness describes them as gathering solemnly at dead of night, in separate aisles, in their vast and dimly lit cathedral.
The conditions of the peace were read, which took up eight pages, together with an oath of the most horrible sort, full of maledictions, imprecations, excommunications, invocations of evil, confiscations of goods, and so many other woes that to hear it was a terror; even in the hour of death no sacrament should save, but should rather add to the damnation of, those who should break the conditions; so that I… believe that never was made or heard a more awful or horrible oath. Then the notaries, on either side of the altar, wrote down the names of all the citizens, who swore upon the crucifix, of which there was one on each side; and every couple of the one or other faction kissed, and the church bells rang, and Te Deum laudamus was sung with the organs and the choir while the oath was being sworn.5
From this turmoil a dominant family emerged, the Petrucci. In 1497 Pandolfo Petrucci made himself dictator, took the title il Magnifico, and proposed to give Siena the order, peace, and gentlemanly autocracy that had been the fortune of Florence under the Medici. Pandolfo was clever, and always landed on his feet after any crisis, even eluding the vengeance of Caesar Borgia; he patronized art with some discrimination; but he so often resorted to secret assassination that his death (1512) was celebrated with universal acclaim. In 1525 the desperate city paid the Emperor Charles V 15,000 ducats to take it under his protection.
In the lucid intervals of peace Sienese art had its final fling. Antonio Barile continued the medieval tradition of the wondrous carving of wood. Lorenzo di Mariano built in the church of Fontegiusta a high altar of classic beauty. Iacopo della Quercia took his cognomen from a village in Siena’s hinterland. His early sculptures were financed by Orlando Malevolti, who thus belied his name of Evil Faces. When Orlando was banished for taking the losing side in politics, Iacopo left Siena for Lucca (1390), where he designed a stately tomb for Ilaria del Carretto. After competing unsuccessfully against Donatello and Brunellesco in Florence, he went on to Bologna, and carved over and alongside the portal of San Petronio marble statues and reliefs which are among the finest sculptures of the Renaissance (1425–8). Michelangelo saw them there seventy years later, admired the vigor of the nude and virile figures, and found in them for a time inspiration and stimulus. Returning to Siena, Iacopo spent much of the next ten years on his masterpiece, the Fonte Gaia. On the base of this Gay Fountain he cut in marble a relief of the Virgin as the official sovereign of the city; around her he represented the Seven Cardinal Virtues; for good measure he added scenes from the Old Testament, and filled the surviving spaces with children and animals—all with a power of conception and execution that presaged Michelangelo. For this work Siena renamed him Iacopo della Fonte, and paid him 2200 crowns ($55,000?). He died at sixty-four, exhausted by his art and mourned by the citizens.
Through most of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the proud city engaged a hundred artists, of any provenance, to make its cathedral the architectural jewel of Italy. From 1413 to 1423 Domenico del Coro, a master of intarsia, was superintendent of the cathedral work; he and Matteo di Giovanni and Domenico Beccafumi and Pinturicchio and many others inlaid the floor of the great shrine with marble marquetry picturing episodes from Scripture, and making this the most remarkable church pavement in the world. Antonio Federighi carved for the cathedral two handsome baptismal fonts, and Lorenzo Vecchietta cast for it a dazzling tabernacle in bronze. Sano di Matteo raised the Loggia della Mercanzia in the Campo (1417–38), and Vecchietta and Federighi faced its pillars with harmonious statuary. The fourteenth century saw a dozen famous palaces take form—the Salimbeni, the Buonsignori, the Saracini, the Grottanelli… and about 1470 Bernardo Rossellino supplied plans for the Florentine style palace of the Piccolomini family. Andrea Bregno designed for the Piccolomini an altar in the cathedral (1481); and Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini built, as an adjunct to the duomo, a library (1495) to house the books and manuscripts bequeathed to him by his uncle Pius II. Lorenzo di Mariano gave the library one of the handsomest portals in Italy; and Pinturicchio and his aides (1503–8) painted on the walls, within superb architectural frames, delightful frescoes picturing scenes in the life of the scholar Pope.
Siena in the fifteenth century was rich in painters of secondary excellence. Taddeo Bartoli, Domenico di Bartolo, Lorenzo di Pietro called Vecchietta, Stefano di Giovanni called Sassetta, Sani di Pietro, Matteo di Giovanni, Francesco di Giorgio—all continued the strong religious tradition of Sienese art, painting devout themes and somber saints, often in stiff and cramping polyptychs, as if resolved to prolong the Middle Ages forever. Sassetta, recently restored to fame by a passing whim of critical opinion, painted in simple line and color a charming procession of Magi and attendants moving sedately through mountain passes to the crib of Christ; he described in a graceful triptych the birth of the Virgin; celebrated the wedding of St. Francis to poverty; and died in 1450, “stabbed through and through by the sharp southwest wind.”5a
Only toward the end of the century did Siena produce an artist whose name, for good or evil, rang through Italy. His real name was Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, but his ribald contemporaries rechristened him Sodoma because he was so candid a catamite. He accepted the cognomen with good humor as a title that many deserved but failed to obtain. Born at Vercelli (1477), he moved to Milan, and may have learned painting and pederasty from Leonardo. He put a Vincian smile on his Brera Madonna, and copied Leonardo’s Leda so well that for centuries his imitation was taken for the Master’s original. Migrating to Siena after Lodovico’s fall, he developed a style of his own, picturing Christian subjects with a pagan joy in the human form. Perhaps it was during this first stay at Siena that Bazzi painted a powerful Christ at the Column— about to be scourged, yet physically perfect. For the monks of Monte Oliveto Maggiore he told the story of St. Benedict in a series of frescoes, some carelessly done, some so seductively beautiful that the abbot insisted, before paying Sodoma, that the nude figures should be prefaced with clothing to preserve peace of mind in the monastery.6
When the banker Agostino Chigi visited his native Siena in 1507 he took a fancy to Sodoma’s work, and invited him to Rome. Pope Julius II set the artist to work painting one of the rooms of Nicholas V in the Vatican, but Sodoma spent
so much time living up to his name that the old Pope soon turned him out. Raphael replaced him, and Sodoma, in a modest moment, studied the young master’s style, and absorbed something of his smooth finish and delicate grace. Chigi rescued Sodoma by engaging him to paint in the Villa Chigi the story of Alexander and Roxana, and soon Leo X, succeeding Julius, restored Sodoma to papal favor. Giovanni painted for the jolly Pope a nude Lucretia stabbing herself to death; Leo rewarded him well, and made him a Cavalier of the Order of Christ.
Returning to Siena with these laurels, Sodoma received numerous commissions from clergy and laity. Though apparently a skeptic, he painted Madonnas almost as lovely as Raphael’s. The martyrdom of St. Sebastian was a subject especially to his taste; and his rendering of the theme in the Pitti Palace has never been excelled. In the church of San Domenico at Siena he pictured St. Catherine fainting, so realistically that Baldassare Peruzzi pronounced the painting incomparable in its kind. While engaged on these religious subjects, Sodoma scandalized Siena with what Vasari calls his “bestial pursuits.”
His manner of life was licentious and dishonorable; and as he always had boys and beardless youths about him, of whom he was inordinately fond, this earned him the name of Sodoma. Instead of feeling shame, he gloried in it, writing verses about it, and singing them to the accompaniment of the lute. He loved to fill his house with all kinds of curious animals: badgers, squirrels, apes, catamounts, dwarf asses, Barbary race horses, Elba ponies, jackdaws, bantams, turtle doves, and similar creatures.… In addition to these he had a raven which he had taught to speak so well that it imitated his voice, especially in answering the door, and many mistook it for its master. The other animals were so tame that they were always about him, with their strange gambols, so that his house resembled a veritable Noah’s ark.7
He married a woman of good family; but after giving him one child she left him. Having worn out his welcome and his income in Siena, he went to Volterra, Pisa, and Lucca (1541–2), seeking new patrons. When these too ran out, Sodoma went back to Siena, shared his poverty for seven years with his animals, and died at seventy-two. He had accomplished in art all that a skilled hand could do without a deepened soul to guide it.
The man who superseded him at Siena was Domenico Beccafumi. When Perugino came there in 1508 Domenico studied his style. When Perugino left, Domenico sought further instruction in Rome, familiarized himself with the remains of classic art, and sought the secrets of Raphael and Michelangelo. In Siena again, he first imitated Sodoma, then rivaled him. The Signory asked him to decorate the Sala del Consistorio; he painted its walls during six laborious years (1529–35) with scenes from Roman history; the result was technically excellent, spiritually dead.
When Beccafumi died (1551) the Sienese Renaissance was finished. Baldassare Peruzzi was of Siena, but left it for Rome. Siena fell back into the arms of the Virgin, and adjusted itself without discomfort to the Counter Reformation. To this day it is contentedly orthodox, and lures tired or curious spirits with its simple piety, its picturesque annual palio or tournament of races (from 1659), and its precious immunity to modernity.
IV. UMBRIA AND THE BAGLIONI
Hemmed in by Tuscany on the west, Latium on the south, and the Marches on the north and east, mountainous Umbria lifts up, here and there, the cities of Terni, Spoleto, Assisi, Foligno, Perugia, Gubbio. We preface them here with Fabriano—across the border in the Marches—because Gentile da Fabriano was a prelude to the Umbrian school.
Gentile is an obscure but dominating figure: painting medieval pictures in Gubbio and Perugia and the Marches, feeling vaguely the influence of the early Sienese painters, and slowly maturing to such prominence that Pandolfo Malatesta, says a quite incredible tradition, paid him 14,000 ducats to fresco the chapel of the Broletto in Brescia (c. 1410).8 Some ten years later the Venetian Senate commissioned him to paint a battle scene in the Hall of the Great Council; Gentile Bellini seems to have been among his pupils at that time. We find him next in Florence, painting for the church of Santa Trinità an Adoration of the Magi (1423) which even the proud Florentines acclaimed as a masterpiece. It is still preserved in the Uffizi: a bright and picturesque cavalcade of kings and retinues, stately horses, musing cattle, squatting monkeys, alert dogs, a lovely Mary, all compellingly focused upon a charming Infant who places an explorative hand upon the bald head of kneeling royalty; it is a picture admirable in gay color and flowing line, but almost primitively innocent of perspective and foreshortening. Pope Martin V called Gentile to Rome, where the artist deposited some frescoes in San Giovanni Laterano; they have disappeared, but we may surmise their quality from the enthusiasm of Rogier van der Weyden, who, on seeing them, pronounced Gentile the greatest painter in Italy.9 In the church of Santa Maria Nuova Gentile painted other lost frescoes, one of which led Michelangelo to say to Vasari, “he had a hand like his name.”10 Gentile died in Rome in 1427, at the height of his renown.
His career is evidence that Umbria, to which he culturally belonged, was generating its own geniuses and style in art. By and large, however, the Umbrian painters took their lead from Siena, and continued the religious mood without a break from Duccio to Perugino and the early Raphael. Assisi was the spiritual source of Umbrian art. The churches and legends of St. Francis disseminated through the neighboring provinces a devotion that dominated painting as well as architecture, and discountenanced the pagan or secular themes that were elsewhere invading Italian art. Portraits were seldom asked of Umbrian painters, but private individuals, sometimes using the savings of a lifetime, commissioned an artist, usually local, to paint a Madonna or a Holy Family for their favorite chapel; and there was hardly a church so poor but it could raise funds for such a symbol of hopeful piety and community pride. So Gubbio had her own painter, Ottaviano Nelli, and Foligno had Niccolò di Liberatore, and Perugia boasted Bonfigli, Perugino, and Pinturicchio.
Perugia was the oldest, largest, richest, and most violent of the Umbrian towns. Placed sixteen hundred feet high on an almost inaccessible summit, it commanded a spacious view of the surrounding country; the site was so favorable for defense that the Etruscans built—or inherited—a city there before the foundation of Rome. Long claimed by the popes as one of the Papal States, Perugia declared itself independent in 1375, and enjoyed over a century of passionate factionalism surpassed only by Siena. Two wealthy families fought for control of the city—its commerce, its government, its benefices, its 40,000 souls. The Oddi and the Baglioni murdered one another by stealth or openly in the streets; their conflicts fertilized with blood the plain that smiled beneath their towers. The Baglioni were noted for their handsome faces and physiques, their courage and their ferocity. In the heart of pious Umbria they scorned the Church, and gave themselves pagan names—Ercole, Troilo, Ascanio, Annibale, Atalanta, Penelope, Lavinia, Zenobia. In 1445 the Baglioni repelled an attempt of the Oddi to seize Perugia; thereafter they ruled the city as despots, though formally acknowledging it to be a papal fief. Let Perugia’s own historian, Francesco Matarazzo, describe the Baglioni government:
From the day the Oddi were expelled, our city went from bad to worse. All the young men followed the trade of arms. Their lives were disorderly, and every day divers excesses were divulged, and the city had lost all reason and justice. Every man administered right unto himself, by his own authority and with royal hand. The pope sent many legates, if so be the city could be brought to order. But all who came went back in dread of being hewn to pieces; for the Baglioni threatened to throw some from the windows of the palace, so that no cardinal or other legate durst approach Perugia unless he were their friend. And the city was brought to such misery that the most lawless men were most prized; and those who had slain two or three men walked as they pleased through the palace, and went with sword or poignard to speak to the podesta and other magistrates. Every man of worth was trodden down by bravos whom the nobles favored, nor could a citizen call his property his own. The nobles robbed first one and then another of goods and land. Al
l offices were sold or else suppressed; and taxes and extortions were so grievous that everyone cried out.11
What can be done, a cardinal asked of Pope Alexander VI, with “these demons who have no fear of holy water”?12
Having disposed of the Oddi, the Baglioni divided into new factions, and fought one of the bloodiest feuds of the Renaissance. Atalanta Baglioni, being left a widow through the assassination of her husband, consoled herself with the beauty of her son Grifonetto, whom Matarazzo describes as another Ganymede. Her happiness seemed fully restored when he married Zenobia Sforza, whose beauty matched his own. But a minor branch of the Baglioni plotted to overthrow the ruling branch—Astorre, Guido, Simonetto, and Gianpaolo. Valuing Grifonetto’s bravery, the conspirators won him to their plan by deluding him into the belief that Gianpaolo had seduced his young wife. One night in the year 1500, when the dominant Baglioni families had left their castles and assembled in Perugia for the wedding of Astorre and Lavinia, the conspirators attacked them in their beds, and killed all but one of them. Gianpaolo escaped by clambering over roofs, hiding through the night with some frightened university students, disguising himself in a scholastic gown, and so passing out through the city gates at dawn. Atalanta, horrified to learn that her son had shared in these murders, drove him from her presence with curses. The assassins dispersed, leaving Grifonetto homeless and alone in the city. On the morrow Gianpaolo, with an armed escort, re-entered Perugia, and came upon Grifonetto in a public square. He wished to spare the youth, but the soldiers wounded Grifonetto mortally before Gianpaolo could restrain them. Atalanta and Zenobia came from their concealment to find son and husband dying in the street. Atalanta knelt by him, took back her curses, gave him her blessing, and asked him to forgive those who had slain him. Then, says Matarazzo, “the noble youth extended his right hand to his young mother, pressing her white hand, and forthwith he breathed his soul from his beautiful body.”13 Perugino and Raphael were painting in Perugia at this time.