Moroni: The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture

Moroni and the Invention of Portraiture Aimee Ng

In Pliny the Elder’s account of the invention of portraiture, a young woman in love with a young man about to depart on a journey traces the outline of his profile from its shadow on a wall.1 Many portraits produced in Renaissance Italy centered on the desire to capture a person’s likeness so that, in absence, he or she could seem present.2 The trope of portraits that are so lifelike as to seem alive is invoked throughout the Italian Renaissance. Baldassare Castiglione, for instance, celebrated Raphael’s portrait of him (Louvre, Paris) as the closest thing to his being present in the flesh; his family was compelled to speak to it, nearly expecting it to respond.3 But likeness and evident artistic mediation are not mutually exclusive. Overtly stylized portraits—like those by Bronzino that transform, through a highly individualized manner, human subjects into attenuated ivory creatures—were also praised for being lifelike.4 Indeed portraiture without “art,” without the intercession of style and adherence to ideals of beauty, has been viewed since antiquity as a lesser achievement, as merely copying nature.5 Giorgio Vasari lauded Sofonisba Anguissola, for example, for being able to both imitate and invent,6 while in Michelangelo’s art, invention prevailed. When critics recognized that ­Michelangelo’s sculptures of Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici were not faithful to their models, the artist reportedly declared that in a thousand years no one would remember that they looked any different; the images he invented, however, would endure.7 Scholars have long characterized the portraits of Giovanni Battista Moroni by their apparent truthfulness to life, a quality perceived both negatively and positively. The artist’s first biographer, Carlo Ridolfi, claimed that Moroni displayed little invention in his art because he devoted himself to portraiture and thus to the imitation of models,8 and Bernard Berenson famously disparaged Moroni as an “uninventive” portraitist who “gives us sitters no doubt as they looked.” 9 By contrast, Roberto Longhi celebrated the artist’s “fidelity to the human document” in portraits “without stylistic mediations,”10 and Mina Gregori, whose 1979 catalogue raisonné remains the authoritative source, lauded Moroni’s “‘reification,’ his ability to convey

31

30

tangible reality.”11 Subsequent scholarship has upheld the positive perception of Moroni with no significant revisions to well-established notions of his portraiture as centered on, indeed defined by, its naturalism.12 In early modern portraits, the concept of likeness to a model is itself suspect. With words such as “documents,” “without mediation,” and “physical truth,” Moroni’s portraits are described in ways that suggest that the appearances of sixteenth-century subjects can be known definitively, which, with the possible exception of life masks and death masks, is simply untrue. The precise distance between Moroni’s art and “reality” is impossible to ascertain. In his work, the appearance of direct study from life can be so convincing that it is easy to forget that it is constructed through a series of artistic decisions. Scholars have addressed the same issue in the work of Jan van Eyck and Johannes Vermeer.13 Cinquecento artists commonly used mannequins and stand-ins. Thus, the bodies wearing the clothes in Moroni’s portraits—indeed the hands that grip sword hilts and armrests—are not necessarily those of the subject. Heads in Moroni’s portraits at times seem out of proportion, appearing slightly too large for the bodies.

This suggests that the heads were independently studied from life and then combined with the rest of the figure.14 Moreover, Moroni’s subjects often appear in ambiguous settings. They are imagined against shadowy gray walls illuminated by conveniently directed sources of light and within ostensibly allegorical settings in which stones crumble, vegetation sprouts, and streaks of moisture connote age, decay, and the passage of time.

Precise representation of light and shadow on flesh and fabric and the complex foreshortening of hands may have only been possible through direct study of a model, but Moroni also enhanced the effects of vivacity, immediacy, and apparent truth to life through the use of close crops, dynamic poses, nuanced facial expressions, and dramatic lighting. In some instances, these strategies precipitated later interventions. In the nineteenth century, for example, the Bust Portrait of a Young Man with an Inscription (cat. 11) was “corrected.” Canvas was added to increase the space between the sitter’s head and the edge of the canvas (this remains today), and, to make his turned shoulders appear to face more frontally, they were overpainted to broaden their width (this was removed in the last century).15 Though such interventions are not uncommon for Renaissance paintings, a significant number of Moroni’s portraits have been altered in similar ways.

The language used to discuss Moroni’s portraiture runs the risk of obscuring the fullness and complexity of his creativity. It is true that among the nearly one hundred twenty-five portraits attributed to him today are many seemingly formulaic works—countless busts, for example, of bearded white men in black, the common objective of which appears to be to capture the individuality of each sitter’s facial features in a highly naturalistic key. But there is

32

much more to his portraiture. The essay by Simone Facchinetti and Arturo Galansino in this publication surveys the variety of formats he pursued, and the catalogue entries explore the complexities of some of his best-known portraits. This essay focuses on aspects of Moroni’s practice that have received little, if any, attention in an attempt to question dominant notions of his portraiture. Moroni occasionally deviated from his most common practices and revealed himself to be an artist for whom naturalism was not only a typical and representative quality but also, at times, something to probe and manipulate.

As it is known today, Moroni’s corpus of portraits is generally consistent in style. That is, though stylistic groupings have been proposed to map phases of his three-decade career, his portraits do not present the kind of dramatic evolution that polarizes, for example, the early and late portraits of Rembrandt. This essay explores works that may be considered exceptions in Moroni’s oeuvre: the so-called “sacred portraits” (three works that represent a new type of portrait and devotional image); his few portraits that demonstrate unusual handling—distinct from his most familiar techniques—in the portrayal of sitters and objects; and the single drawing that has been connected to his portraiture. Such a focus provokes questions about the extent to which outliers in an artist’s corpus can modify the assessment of an entire career, about the degree to which such works court inquiries about range versus attribution, and about how accidents of survival—what is left of an artist’s corpus today—shape notions of “usual” and “unusual” in an artist’s output. Like, for instance, El Greco’s few known sculptures, which are far less familiar to modern audiences than his paintings, and Manet’s rare pastels, these works by Moroni have the potential to shift prevailing notions of the artist’s creative capacity in new directions.

Beyond the small selection of works at the heart of this essay, there are other singular and significant portraits in Moroni’s corpus that compel consideration of the artist’s role in a larger history of European portraiture, though his status and impact in this broader context have not been sufficiently probed. For example, The Tailor (cat. 23), Moroni’s most famous painting, is unique in his oeuvre (and unusual in the mid-Cinquecento) insofar as the subject enacts his livelihood, blurring the boundary between portraiture and genre painting. It finds more corollaries in Rembrandt’s “narrative” portraiture of the following century than in its own age. Pace Rivola Spini (cat. 37), Moroni’s only full-length independent portrait of a standing woman, is arguably the first of its kind painted in Italy.16 It represents a type used relatively sparingly by European artists (and most often for men of high station and power) until Anthony van Dyck adapted the format to portray a number of women in the seventeenth century. These experiments in genre and format raise the question of how Moroni’s innovations can be understood in the context of his career: working outside of major art centers like Venice, Florence, and Rome, did he take advantage of occasional and relative freedom to explore new genres and

33

formats? With regard to style, underlying this investigation is curiosity about the constraints on an artist like Moroni, who served a local market with a style of portraiture that was in demand and for which he became best known. He may have had limited opportunities to deviate from this norm; if so, when he did, we should look more closely. ∙ ∙ ∙ Though only three of Moroni’s sacred portraits survive, these works (cats. 1, 3, 6) represent his invention of a portrait type—derived from the long tradition of donor portraits—in which naturalistic depictions of contemporary sitters dominate the composition and confront abstracted and stylized sacred beings; the latter are often modeled on earlier sources and in many ways run counter to the effects of his portraits.17 In Gentleman in Adoration before the Madonna and Child (fig. 16 and cat. 1), for example, the figures of the Madonna and Christ Child are derived from a 1516 engraving by Albrecht Dürer (cat. 2). The sacred figures amplify, by contrast, the lifelike qualities of the portraits. These somewhat dichotomous constructions display the fiction of Moroni’s art and dispel any notion that his portraiture is unmediated by style.

In these works, the effects of naturalism are appropriate to the portrayal of individuals the artist had seen with his own eyes but not for depicting things unseen and known by faith alone. An entirely different mode of painting substantiates the sacred. Moroni represents the higher beings with an atemporal abstraction distinct from the treatment of the human subjects, whom he depicts as if present before the beholder in this moment, in quotidian life.18 These paintings center on the understanding that style carries significance in Moroni’s art and underscore the importance of recognizing the occasional and subtle stylistic variations in his other portraits.

While they emphasize the sitters’ piety—a significant aspect of social respectability in these communities—the sacred portraits also attest to a dimension of Moroni’s portraiture that goes beyond the objective of recording appearances and shaping an individual’s identity.

They may portray the sitters practicing the kind of meditative exercise popularized by St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Exercitia Spiritualia (1548), in which devotees are called to imagine the sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell of the divine in an intense, transportive experience more powerful than vision alone (cat. 7 is a first edition of the text).19 As they represent an elevated form of communion with the divine that is far richer than the comparatively limited act of looking, the pictures call into question the very place of visual art in a hierarchy of experience.

Moroni and his sitters were immersed in the varied religious contexts surrounding and shaped by the Council of Trent and related reforms.20 The sacred components of the portraits

34

Fig. 16. Giovanni Battista Moroni, Gentleman in Adoration before the Madonna and Child, ca. 1555 (cat. 1)

were presumably also perceived by contemporaries as autonomous devotional images. Under these circumstances, it is fair to recognize in Moroni’s majestic Gabriele Albani (cat. 26) an evocation of the frontal format traditionally reserved for representations of the enthroned divine, such as one pictorial tradition of God the Father.21 Remarkably, Moroni also applied this format to his depiction of a female sitter, Angelica Agliardi de Nicolinis (fig. 17), who confronts the viewer almost straight on, an effect emphasized by the turn of her chair, which appears disjointed from her.22 There may be no more commanding portrait of an Italian Renaissance woman. The religious context of Moroni and his sitters is not limited to explicitly religious images, and though the sacred portraits operate to some degree on the force of oppositions,

35

the boundary between Moroni’s religious and secular paintings is far from absolute.23 ∙ ∙ ∙ It is tempting to speculate about the extent to which Moroni considered the applications to portraiture of conventions of sacred images like acheiropoieta (“images not made by human hands”), the miraculous icons central to practices of the Catholic faith.24 In Renaissance Italy, such images—the Holy Face of Christ, for instance, on the Veil of Veronica—were powerful because of their presumed divine making and the sacred presence they were believed to embody. Moroni minimized marks of facture in the vast majority of his portraits—smoothly blending paint to articulate skin; limiting the number of visible brushstrokes mainly to create the illusion of fur or hair, the texture of walls, sometimes a wrinkle or two on a face; and subordinating his physical role in the portrait’s making to the vivid illusion Fig. 17. Giovanni Battista Moroni, Angelica Agliardi de Nicolinis, ca. 1565. Oil on canvas, 385⁄8 × 317⁄8 in. (98 × 81 cm). Musée Condé, of the sitter. More than any of his predecessors Chantilly (PE 54) and contemporaries in Italy, Moroni insisted on the presence of his sitters before the beholder.

The effect is especially pronounced in comparison to the portraits of contemporaneous painters such as Titian, whose visible brushwork was a hallmark of his art.

One significant exception to this approach is Moroni’s portrait of the poet Giovanni ­Bressani (fig. 18 and cat. 20).25 Prominent brushstrokes articulate the face, which, compared to many of his other portraits, is less expressive (fig. 19). The subject sits farther from the picture plane than in any other portrait by the artist and is further removed by the numerous objects on the table before him. An inscription on the base of a foot-shaped inkwell evidently explains the portrait’s appearance: io: bap. moron. pinxit quem non vidit (Giovanni Battista Moroni painted him whom he did not see). The “unseen” subject appears to have been painted posthumously, his likeness derived from a portrait medal (cat. 21). This status is corroborated by

36

Fig. 18. Giovanni Battista Moroni, Giovanni Bressani, 1562 (cat. 20)

37