Sample Pages: Painters and Sitters in Early-Seventeenth Century Rome. Portraits of the Soul

Painters and Sitters in Early Seventeenth-Century Rome:

Portraits of the Soul

Esther Theiler

Chapter One

A portrait “most rarely done full face” of a learned prelate110

The most beautiful motions of our soul are those which are least tense and most natural.111

Giovanni Battista Agucchi began a description of Annibale Carracci’s Sleeping Venus (Fig. 1) with the words:

I do not know whether any man, myself included, has ever felt as deep a regret at having failed to learn something necessary or profitable to human life in his freshest years as I did the day before yesterday at not having any knowledge of how to draw.112

Agucchi was a prelate, a man of letters, an office-holder in the highest courts of Rome, an amateur scientist, connoisseur, art theorist and antiquarian.113 He had a

lifelong fascination, almost an envious identification, with visual art and artists. That he described the act of drawing as “something necessary or profitable to human life” suggests his deep appreciation of visual art and his consciousness of the dimensions of experience to which it provides access. These words were written in the autumn of 1602. He explained that his patron, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, was away at the harvest, giving him a little spare time.114 He came upon the painting by chance while on his way to visit another by Annibale Carracci in the Farnese palace.115 So moved was he by the Sleeping Venus, by its “invention, design, and color”, he stayed to copy it in detail. He then spent the next few days putting his “pen busily to work”, stating that in his attempt to give words to its wonders he would succeed only in presenting an image seen as if through a veil, such as those used to cover precious or indiscreet paintings on the walls of private homes.116

1 Annibale Carracci, Sleeping Venus, c. 1602, oil on canvas, 190 x 328 cm, Musée Condé, Chantilly.

2 Annibale Carracci, Portrait of Monsignor Giovanni Agucchi, 1603-1604, oil on canvas, 60.3 x 46.3 cm, York Art Gallery, UK.

Those three nouns, “invention, design, and color” (invenzione, disegno, e colore), were not used indiscriminately—their significance was instantly recognisable to other artists and connoisseurs. Likewise, his interest in the paintings of Annibale Carracci was not accidental. He had probably known of the Carracci family in his youth. Agucchi had been a member of the Bolognese Accademia dei Gelati, an academy for poets and writers, while Annibale, his brother Agostino, and cousin Ludovico Carracci had formed the Accademia degli Incamminati in Bologna.117 There was a strong association between the Carracci and the Gelati. The Carracci academy taught their members to consult literary precedents for their history paintings.118 Giambattista Marino, also later patronised by Aldobrandini (and the subject of the next chapter), was one of those poets who frequented the academy during his stay in Bologna.119 In the early 1600s Annibale Carracci was at the height of his fame, having travelled to Rome in 1594 at the request of Cardinal Odoardo Farnese to decorate the walls and ceilings of his palazzo.120 Agucchi was in his early thirties, a writer and secretary to a cardinal, enjoying access to the best paintings Italy could offer in the galleries of his patron and his associates, and forming the concepts he would later express in his Trattato della pittura, a text that famously informed Giovanni Pietro Bellori’s influential Idea of Beauty. 121

Agucchi is memorialised in a portrait noteworthy for its immediacy and lucid beauty (Fig. 2).122 This image in the York Art Museum has been the subject of much scholarship and speculation from the moment it emerged onto the public stage in London in the late 1930s. It is attributed to either Annibale Carracci or his student Domenichino. The portrait was produced in the early formative years of the seventeenth century in Rome, when innovations introduced by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci astounded and confounded viewers and patrons of art. It provides a fitting introduction to the portraits featured in this book—portraits that reveal a growing interest in the inner nature of a subject and find new ways to present identity. To appropriate a word normally used to describe history paintings and closely related to the affetti, these images are concerned with the costume of their subjects; they display “a kind of movement and a kind of life”.123

This chapter will also be concerned with Agucchi’s interpretation and projection of his identity. His letters

and other texts expose the development of his ideas on art and the intimate way in which these were entwined with his inner life. His letters also reveal attitudes of his contemporaries, who numbered among the most seminal and influential thinkers and artists of the period. While in appearance it is a “quiet” portrait, its authorship by either the artist who arguably brought about a seismic shift in art practice in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, or alternatively his student and close collaborator, makes it highly significant for a period in which most portraits followed sixteenth-century conventions. The restrained movement and inner life rendered in the portrait allude to relatively new concerns in visual art. A close examination of this fascinating image will reveal early signs of innovations that brought new life to portraiture.

Early seicento portraiture in Rome

What was the state of portraiture in Rome in this period?124 The pre-eminent portraitist in the latter part of the previous century had been Scipione Pulzone (1540/1542-1598).125 Pulzone is described as contributing a clear, direct and faithful portrait style that accorded with the later sixteenth-century rejection of Mannerist tendencies, but demonstrated, particularly after 1590, idealizing and proto-classical components.126 His portraits of women feature stiff lace ruffs, pale oval faces, porcelain skin, and even features and dark hair dressed elaborately in the late cinquecento style. He painted many of the royal families of Italy, and in Rome was particularly patronised by the Colonna. His portrait of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, while stiff in pose, superbly renders the sumptuous colours and textures of his mozzetta, the curtains, and the plush velvet of the tablecloth (Fig. 3).127 Giovanni Baglione said that this portrait was so accurate that the reflection of the windows in the room could be seen in the cardinal’s pupils.128 Baglione stated that in his time Pulzone had no equal as portraitist and praised the artist’s diligence, accuracy and expressiveness.129 Both Raffaello Borghini and Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo singled out Pulzone as an exponent of the ritrarre dal naturale—the portrait from nature.130 Pulzone’s precise portraits responded to perceptions of excessive distortion in Mannerist portraiture by returning to the stillness of the Renaissance. These images acted to eternalise the prestige of their subjects, to preserve it as if in enamel. The sophisticat-

ed collector, Cardinal Francesco del Monte, had four paintings by Pulzone in his collection.131 The abbot Luigi Lanzi later stated that some called him the Van Dyck of the Roman School, due to his prolific portraits of the nobility and his exceptional illusionistic skills.132 His stiff poses and “licked” surfaces however do not compare with the fluidity of line of Anthony van Dyck, nor did he come close to the theatrical intimacy of Van Dyck’s self-portraits and friendship portraits.133 Nevertheless, a glint of awareness can be detected in the eyes of some of his subjects.

The “accomplished Titianesque manner” of the Mannerist painter El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos, 1541-1614), according to Giulio Mancini, won him many portrait commissions during his stay in Rome from 1570-1577.134 The earliest of his portraits in Rome is that of the miniaturist at the Farnese court, Giulio Clovio.135 His Portrait of a Man and the Portrait of Vincenzo Anastagi both display an inclination to magnify the trunk and limbs of the subject in comparison with the head (as can be seen for instance in portraits by Agnolo Bronzino and Parmigianino).136

The painter who rode the wave of commissions that had been initiated by Clement VIII from the late 1500s into the 1600s was Giuseppe Cesari, known as the Cavaliere d’Arpino (1568-1640). Described by Bellori as an artist who “looked at nature not at all but followed the freedom of instinct”, civic authorities and the pope fought over obtaining his work, and he was knighted by Clement viii.137 This is the artist who challenged Annibale Carracci to a duel upon hearing that he had criticised his painting. Annibale characteristically responded by challenging him with his brush.138 Cesari produced only a few portraits. His most well known is the 1607 portrait of the lawyer Prospero Farinacci (Fig. 4).139 Farinacci had famously defended Beatrice Cenci and also Cesari after his property was confiscated by Pope Paul V Borghese.140 It is a stiff and formal image, but according to Giulio Mancini laudable for its realistic depiction of the lawyer’s scars and sightless left eye.141

Ottavio Leoni, born in Rome in 1574, was described by Giovanni Baglione as an eccellentissimo portraitist who portrayed the popes, cardinals and noblemen of his time, and all with the highest quality and lively naturalness, all “alla macchia”, or quickly sketched.142 His prints and drawings provide an invaluable chronicle of these dec-

ades, but less is known of his early painted portraits.143 In 1599 a letter from Vincenzo I Gonzaga of Mantua reveals that Leoni had been working in his court and wished to return to Rome.144 Soon afterwards he was closely associated with Cardinal del Monte and was the artist probably described by the latter as his young student who worked better, with more diligence and veracity than that poor Scipione (Pulzone).145 Leoni’s career as a portraitist took off properly a decade or so later and will be examined in more detail below.

Progressive elites were beginning to commission the new wave of artists who had arrived with the influx of the 1590s. However, the radical stylistic elements that made their work unique did not always filter through to their portrait work. The known portraits by Caravaggio, for instance, lack the drama and immediacy of his other

3 Scipione Pulzone, Portrait of Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici c. 1593, oil on canvas, 185 x 119.3 cm, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.

Painting as silent poetry: portraits of Giambattista Marino

Your theft is worthy of the highest eloquence . . .

The early seventeenth-century Neapolitan poet, Giambattista Marino, declared:

You, who in such a rare manner miraculously stole my face, and took me from myself, your theft is worthy then of the highest eloquence of a famous wit.574

This is an extract from a verse that responded to a superb portrait of Marino painted by Frans Pourbus in Paris around 1619 (Fig. 25).575 Marino lists and probes some of the important tropes invoked in the process of painting a portrait. The artist has skilfully captured the poet’s face and, in doing so, removed Marino from himself. He gazes on the image pinned to the canvas as if looking at another. He marvels at the artistry that forges this likeness but also makes it strange. The poet praises the artist’s eloquence, comparing it to that of a “great wit” or genius when he says, “d’alta facondia di famoso ingegno”. The Italian terms he uses—facondia, or eloquence, and ingegno, akin to wit, an innate capacity to construct meaning—were expressions that reverberated within the arts in the seicento

These are words that connect painters with poets. The terminology, taken from the art of rhetoric, refers to a process of composition that originates in thoughtful contemplation and proceeds to invention. These associations confer high praise on a visual artist. In this madrigal, the portrait not only springs from rational thought but, through a deeply creative process, the artist has bestowed life or soul with his brush. This is perceived via the sense of sight. The threshold between the visual language of painting and the verbal language of literature has been breached. As Marino expressed it, “The many analogies between canvases and pages, colors and ink, brushes and pens make painting and poetry inseparable twins . . . Poetry is speaking painting, and painting is taciturn poet-

ry.”576 It is as if he admits that, in this case, the brush has succeeded where the pen might falter.

Every court employed poets in the seicento. They were essential propagandists for public functions and their lyrics provided the words for popular songs and the libretti for the first operas. They often doubled as secretaries, lawyers, diplomats and courtiers. Their academies were highly respected and membership was a sought-after privilege. Their interpretations of myth, religion, allegory and history were harnessed as important didactic tools for religious establishments and as iconographic sources for the visual arts. Appearance and personality were part of their fascination: in the rooms of the Palazzo Mancini, home of the prestigious literary academy in Rome, the Accademia degli Umoristi, the walls were covered from head to foot with portraits of its members.577

Marino was a court poet, relying on the patronage of men like Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini and later the queen of France, Maria de’ Medici, for his living. The publication of his poetry was his main concern and at times he stayed at a court (for instance, at Paris) long beyond the period in which it was comfortable to do so, in order to obtain the necessary funds and space in which to work. Many portraits were painted of Marino, some in a traditional style and a few in a style that allowed inner tensions to breach the surface conventions of court portraiture. He left a large body of verses and prose on the subject of visual art; these allow an insight into his thoughts about painting and portraiture from tangential viewpoints.578 He also enjoyed an association with many of the most important princes, artists and poets of the first part of the seventeenth century, and his correspondence offers insight into these men and women and also into the commissioning of works of art.

There are few accounts in English of the portraits of Giambattista Marino. This chapter will focus on Marino and include portraits of other poets for comparative purposes. For instance, Ottavio Leoni’s series of portrait engravings of writers forms an important record of 1620s Rome. Relatively few significant oil portraits of poets practising in Rome in this period exist, but Anthony van Dyck’s portrait of Virginio Cesarini, a

25 Frans Pourbus the Younger, Portrait of Giambattista Marino, c. 1621, oil on canvas, 81 x 65.7 cm, Gift of James E. Scripps, 89.52, Detroit Institute of Arts.

darling and favourite of Pope Urban VIII, will provide a useful point of comparison with those of Marino. Cesarini’s significance for this chapter lies in the fact that he represents a classicist movement that countered Marinism and flourished in the work of many of the poets who gathered around Urban VIII. They promoted a more didactic and decorous style and, in their view, Marino and Marinism stood for a decadent and morally suspect practice.579 Despite the fact that Cesarini and Marino stood for different approaches, a comparison of Van Dyck’s portrait of Cesarini with the portrait of Marino by Simon Vouet, both painted in the 1620s, will reveal similar innovations in portrait representation.

This chapter will examine the relationship between Marino’s verses on portraits and the portraits themselves. How does his poetry comment on contemporary portrait practices that aspired to produce an improved version of the individual? I intend to examine the portrayal of Marino by artists as diverse as Caravaggio (disputed), Ottavio Leoni, Simon Vouet and Frans Pourbus, and to consider alongside these works the verses

Marino published for some of them. Marino said that painting imitates principally the external, the physical features, while poetry can reveal the inner, the emotions of the soul; the one understands with the senses, the other feels with the intellect.580 The evidence, however, suggests that this was changing in these decades; painting was challenging the privileged access provided by poetry to the inner condition of men and women and was striving to suggest the psychology of its sitters.

What does a portrait of a poet look like? Traditionally poets were portrayed in dignified and reserved compositions, sometimes holding a book and occasionally wreathed with laurel. Palma Vecchio’s poet, sometimes thought to be Lodovico Ariosto (1474-1533), stands before a laurel shrub (Fig. 26).581 His cloak is romantically askew, revealing finely pleated linen, chains around his neck and richly brocaded sleeves. He has an aristocratic and perceptive face that remains aloof. The Venetian poet Gaspara Stampa, wreathed in laurel, gazes soulfully from

26 Palma Vecchio, Portrait of a Poet, c. 1516, oil on canvas, transferred from wood, remounted on wood, 83.8 x 6 3.5 cm, The National Gallery, London.

27 Anonymous, Frontispiece for Gaspara Stampa, Rime di Madonna, Plinio Pietrasanta, Venice, 1554.

Chapter Three

Portrait of a buffoon

I sup with any one who likes, if he Has only got the good sense to invite me; And with each man who makes a marriage feast, Whether I’m asked or not, there I am witty; There I make others laugh, and there I praise The host, who gives the feast.

These words were spoken by the parasite in Ploutos, a play by Epicharmus of Kos from the fifth century BCE.1056 In this chapter I examine the portrait of a man

whose mode of living in the seventeenth century has many affinities with that of Ploutos’ parasite. A portrait by Valentin de Boulogne of Raffaello Menicucci depicts an individual whose demeanour is anything but buffoon-like (Fig. 58).1057 In contrast to the jovial or foolish expressions in early buffoon portraits, that of Raffaello Menicucci is humourless. His eyes are dark, unreflecting pools beneath flaccid lids. His mouth is grimly set into a pout that, together with the lift of his chin, expresses a challenge. His hand performs the classic gesture of rhetoric, its fingers curled, his thumb

59 Annibale Carracci, Hairy Harry, Mad Peter, Tiny Amon and Animals, 1597-1600, oil on canvas, 101 x 133 cm, Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples.

58 Valentin de Boulogne, Portrait of Raffaello Menicucci, c. 1628-1630, oil on canvas, 80 x 65.1 cm, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis.

and palm open to the viewer, signalling candid communication.1058

The persona of the seventeenth-century Italian buffoon was relatively fluid. He moved between high and low cultural spaces. This important painting demonstrates seventeenth-century interest in the essential humanity and social aspirations of subjects in portrait practice. It is far from the typical caricatured depiction of a buffoon, but also distinct from an idealised sixteenth-century image. Chriscinda Henry, in her dissertation on low genre painting in Venice, states that “the buffone appears in multiple guises but never as ‘himself’” and that this “undermines a fundamental principle of Renaissance portraiture”, which sought to depict a stable identity.1059 The buffoon portrait has traditionally been a counter-portrait. However, the portrait at the centre of this section subverts this counter-model—it seeks instead to project a wholly self-driven image. It is still a performance, but one in reverse, a performance that resists the iconography associated with the buffoon persona.

It will be helpful to examine Raffaello Menicucci’s career as a buffoon and his self-fashioning as an aristocrat. Archival material will attest to at least one early trip to Rome and a recently published document will confirm his presence at the papal court. Given that the buffoon portrait is a type with its own tradition and iconographical features, I will examine the historical associations of the buffoon and parasite, beginning with their origin in Greek theatre and literature. I will also include visual and literary representations from the Renaissance in order to locate this portrait within a European tradition and distinguish it in the context of developments in buffoon imagery.

Only a small number of representations of buffoons can be categorized as individualised portraits. Many are generic comical or allegorical images. Others position the buffoon as an actor performing a particular role. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a few images emerged that could be described as portraits and some of these will be discussed in order to establish precedents. However, the primary focus of this chapter will be the seventeenth century. The early portrait of Hairy Harry, Mad Peter, Tiny Amon and Animals (Fig. 59) draws on traditional buffoon imagery but demonstrates a tender sympathy with its subjects. The later portraits of Raffaello Menicucci and Domenico Fetti’s Portrait of an Actor (Fig. 60) are of a more sober ilk. These embody a complex treatment that reflects emerging themes in early modern portraiture.

The upside-down world

The function of the buffoon was to make people laugh. Humour has been essential to festivals and carnivals for millennia, from the ancient Saturnalia to the medieval festival of fools, providing both a self-regulating foil to the stresses of developing civilisation and an alternative world view.1060 Mikhail Bakhtin likened this to a “renewal” that enables people to enter into a “utopian realm of community, freedom, equality and abundance” for a prescribed period. The clowns and buffoons of history were the agents of this renewal—they “were the constant, accredited representatives of the carnival spirit”.1061 Clowns, with their comic acrobatic antics, and men and women with physical abnormalities, were ciphers for metamorphosis and transformation and a confirmation of the relativity of life.1062 They represented a disruption of the quotidian world. Their subversive humour

60 Domenico Fetti, Portrait of an Actor, c. 1621/1622, oil on canvas, 105.5 x 81 cm, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

Among the depictions of barons, archbishops, countesses, dames and notaries are portraits of Triboulet, of the fool Le Greffier, of the dwarfs Càtherine, Dominé and Thonin, the “spoilt pet” of respectively Henry II, Francis II and Charles IX.1155 The portraits of Thonin, Le Greffier and Dominé are by Jean’s son François Clouet.

The faces of all the fool subjects are beautifully modelled in black and red chalk or pencil and wash. The portraits are virtually indistinguishable in tone and dignity from those of their noble companions, except that the images are smaller and their clothing is less sumptuous. Triboulet has a reserved expression and gazes at the viewer from a turned head. His brow is furrowed and smile lines crease his temples. Càtherine wears the colours of her king (Fig. 67).1156 Dominé, who held the office of port-manteau or valet to Henry III, wears a floppy velvet cap (Fig. 68) and Le Greffier (“the clerk”) wears a costume described by

Alexandra Zvereva as “anachronistic” because it was old-fashioned (Fig. 69).1157 Thonin is the most recognisable as a fool, with his cap with ass’ ears and his shrewd expression (Fig. 70).1158

The terms Zvereva uses to describe these individuals perpetuate the kinds of exaggerations that can occur on knowing that the images are of “fools”. She remarks on Le Greffier’s “badly shaved beard, his unfocused eyes, his sickly face”, all intended to produce a comic effect.1159 Dominé’s velvet cap, she feels, is much too large or grand for him (“il semble âgé sa toque de velours ‘à la gentilhomme’ est beaucoup trop grande”) and his hair, unaccountably, is too long and “ne sont pas coiffé”.1160 The slightly mocking “à la gentilhomme” in her description of his hat does not take into account the dwarf’s role as valet to the king and belies the dignified tone of the drawing. There is neither exaggerated humour nor grotesque expressions in these depictions. Their

66 Jean Clouet, Le Férait, Called Triboulet, Fool of Louis XII and Francis I, c. 1535, black and red chalk, 30 x 20 cm, Musée Condé, Chantilly.

67 Jean Clouet, Catherine, Called Chàtelot, c. 1537, black and red chalk with watercolour, 27 x 20 cm, Musée Condé, Chantilly.