THE EVOLUTION OF LANDSCAPE IN VENETIAN PAINTING, 1475-1525

Microsoft Word - JEWITT_FINAL_ETD_Pitt version_BOOKMARKS.docxby
BA in English, Hartwick College, 2006
MA, University of Pittsburgh, 2009
Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
The Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
University of Pittsburgh
This dissertation was presented
C. Drew Armstrong, Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture
Kirk Savage, Professor, History of Art and Architecture
Jennifer Waldron, Associate Professor, Department of English
Dissertation Advisor: Ann Sutherland Harris, Professor Emerita, History of Art and Architecture
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James R. Jewitt, PhD
University of Pittsburgh, 2014
Landscape painting assumed a new prominence in Venetian painting between the late fifteenth to
early sixteenth century: this study aims to understand why and how this happened. It begins by
redefining the conception of landscape in Renaissance Italy and then examines several ambitious
easel paintings produced by major Venetian painters, beginning with Giovanni Bellini’s (c.1431-
36-1516) St. Francis in the Desert (c.1475), that give landscape a far more significant role than
previously seen in comparable commissions by their peers, or even in their own work.
After an introductory chapter reconsidering all previous hypotheses regarding Venetian
painters’ reputations as accomplished landscape painters, it is divided into four chronologically
arranged case study chapters. Three of these focus on the artists identified during their own
lifetimes as specialists in landscape painting in northern Italy—Tiziano Vecellio (c.1485-90-
1576), Girolamo Savoldo (fl.1506-48), and Dosso Dossi (c.1486-1542). Working from a more
historicized definition of landscape, my study shifts focus from questions of landscape’s origins
and status to a more nuanced examination of its function in private residences. Bellini’s St.
Francis is considered anew in light of humanist-inspired aesthetics as a precursor to Venetian
poesie that celebrated an artistically self-conscious approach to image-making. Titian’s youthful
Flight into Egypt (c.1507) is analyzed for the first time in regard to its original presentation in the
main reception hall of its patron Andrea Loredan’s palace. Savoldo’s Temptation of St. Anthony
(c.1520) is reconsidered, on the basis of unpublished technical analysis, as a document of the
artist’s presence in Venice and his adaptation of Flemish landscape to suit the tastes of local
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clients. Finally, a reevaluation of Dosso’s Jupiter Painting Butterflies centering on the landscape
and its theoretical implications is proposed. Dosso’s painting of atmospheric phenomena
embodies theories published decades later advocating painting’s superiority over sculpture and
the painter’s god-like ability to portray all of Nature’s creation. These focused analyses suggest
that landscape achieved a new position in Venice from 1475-1525. Ultimately, this dissertation
proposes that the goals of virtuoso landscape painting were two-fold: to enhance both the
doctrinal message and delight audiences absorbed from a picture.
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1.2 GOMBRICH AND THE HUMANIST RECOVERY OF LANDSCAPE........9
1.3 LANDSCAPE’S IMPORTANCE IN VENICE.................................................16
1.4 DISSERTATION STRUCTURE AND SCOPE................................................27
2.0 GIOVANNI BELLINI’S FRICK ST. FRANCIS AND THE HUMANIST POETICS
OF QUATTROCENTO LANDSCAPE PAINTING....................................................35
2.2 CLASSICAL PARADIGMS RENEWED.........................................................48
CONTEXT FOR TITIAN’S FLIGHT INTO EGYPT....................................................71
3.1 ANDREA LOREDAN’S PATRONAGE AND THE CA’ LOREDAN...........80
3.2 THE VENETIAN PORTEGO AND ITS CONTENTS.....................................84
3.3 SAFE ARRIVAL AND RETREAT IN THE PORTEGO.................................90
4.0 IMITATION AND INNOVATION: GIROLAMO SAVOLDO’S BOSCHIAN
TEMPTATION OF ST. ANTHONY................................................................................97
4.2 PROVENANCE.................................................................................................105
4.5 GRIMANI’S BOSCHIAN TRIPTYCH TRANSFORMED..........................116
4.6 LANDSCAPE EXOTICA IN PRIVATE COLLECTIONS............................122
5.0 PAINTING THE PARAGONE: DOSSO DOSSI’S JUPITER PAINTING
BUTTERFLIES AS AN ALLEGORY OF PITTURA.................................................130
5.1 JUPITER AS DEUS ARTIFEX........................................................................138
BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................................................................................192
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PREFACE
I am grateful to the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of
Pittsburgh, and the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, for the generous support I
received over the course of my graduate career. In particular, I would like to thank my
dissertation committee for their invaluable feedback, support, and encouragement of my work
and project: Ann Sutherland Harris, Jennifer Waldron, Drew Armstrong, and Kirk Savage. Their
comments have been invaluable for shaping it into what it is today. Dennis Looney kindly served
as an unofficial fifth member and I wish to express my gratitude to him for both stepping in at
key moments and offering, as always, exceptional insights into the nuances of Italian literature
and culture. As my advisor, Ann Harris deserves special thanks and recognition. This dissertation
developed in response to her course on European landscape painting I took my first semester as a
graduate student. Ann has gone above and beyond to help me in formulating my PhD topic and
furthering my professional development. My two article publications thus far are indebted to her
admirable example as a scholar. She has tirelessly encouraged my writing, read drafts, and
provided keen feedback every step of the way. I also appreciate the continual encouragement of
Jen Waldron, who graciously lent her expertise at several crucial moments. I am also grateful to
Kirk Savage and Drew Armstrong for their enthusiasm for my project and kind advice. Early on,
Kathleen Christian offered essential inspiration and suggestions as I developed my ideas.
Additionally, I would like to thank others at the University of Pittsburgh for their friendship and
assistance in this process: my graduate colleagues Aaron Tacinelli, Saskia Beranek, Courtney
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Long, Amy Cymbala, Rachel Miller, and Sara Sumpter; the staff of the Frick Fine Arts Library,
particularly Marcia Rostek; and the staff in the Department of the History of Art and
Architecture, Natalie Swabb, Linda Hicks, and Veronica Gazdik.
Over the course of my graduate career, and especially in the writing and research done in
preparation of this dissertation, I received generous funding from a number of sources. I wish to
thank the Centro Vittore Branca of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, in particular Marta Zoppetti and
Massimo Busetto; the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation; the Friends of the Frick Fine
Arts/Wilkinson Travel Fund; the Newberry Renaissance Consortium; and the University Center
for International Studies/European Union Center for Excellence at the University of Pittsburgh.
Several individuals kindly responded to my inquiries regarding various details about painting in
Venice in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as the paintings that form the case studies
of this project. I wish to thank Chriscinda Henry, Susannah Rutherglen; Brooke McManus and
Megan Schwenke at the Fogg Museum; Becky Hawketts Compeau at the Balboa Art
Conservation Center; Kristina Rosenberg at the Timken Museum of Art; and Sabina Potaczek-
Jasionowicz at Wawel Royal Castle.
I would not have become an art historian without the guidance and backing of Betsey
Ayer. During my undergraduate career at Hartwick College, Betsey convinced me to add Art
History as a second major after I was captivated by her Italian Renaissance Art course my
sophomore year. Her boundless enthusiasm, humor, and true passion were and continue to be an
enduring source of inspiration in my own teaching and scholarship. I am grateful to Betsey for
the rigorous training I received in the analysis of art—always with an eye to sound historical
methodologies and visual experience—in her Baroque, Ancient, and Senior Seminar art history
courses. I am thankful for her mentorship during and after my time at Hartwick.
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Over the past seven years my family has supported me in countless ways. My parents
Catherine and Charles Jewitt encouraged my appreciation of art, art history, and nature from my
earliest days. Their constant love and encouragement, along with that of my brother Scott Jewitt,
has helped make this PhD possible. My interest in landscape painting is owed to my grandmother
Cecelia Phillips, a gifted landscapist, conservationist, gardener, and botanist in her own right.
Her sensitive paintings of the Maine wilderness were my earliest experience of landscape
pictures and invested me with a profound affinity for images of the natural world. Finally, I
would like to thank my wife Caitlin Jewitt. This process would have been unimaginable without
her. I am thankful to her, in addition, for her intelligent comments during a trip to the
Minneapolis Institute of Art in the summer of 2007, at the exhibition, A Mirror of Nature:
Nordic Landscape Painting 1840-1910, when she asked why it never rained in landscape
paintings. This earnest question ultimately provided the inspiration for my M.A. thesis. Because
of her unflagging encouragement, patience, generosity, sacrifices, love, and belief in me, it is to
her that I dedicate this dissertation.
James R. Jewitt
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1.0 INTRODUCTION
In 1525 the Venetian writer, collector, and art connoisseur Marcantonio Michiel visited the home
of a nobleman in Venice where he observed an easel painting on display that he described as:
“The panel of St. Francis in the wilderness in oil was the work of Giovanni Bellini, begun by him
for M. Zuan Michiel and it has a landscape nearby marvelously composed and detailed.”1
Michiel’s entry is preserved in his manuscript of Notizie describing art he saw throughout
Northern Italy from 1521-43. His diary is a fundamental source for our knowledge of private
Venetian collections and the above lines are the first known record of Giovanni Bellini’s
celebrated St. Francis in the Desert (c.1475), now in the Frick Collection in New York (fig.1.1).
Although it may not appear so, his terse report of its “landscape marvelously composed and
detailed” constitutes high praise since the Notizie are notoriously laconic. Of the eighteen entries
in which he uses the Italian word “paese” to refer to an image, his description of the St. Francis
is the most evocative.
Art historians have made much of Michiel’s use of the term paese to label a painting of
natural scenery, particularly his designation of a small picture painted by Giorgione seen in
another Venetian palace as, “the small landscape on canvas with the storm, with the gypsy and
1 Marcantonio Michiel, Der Anonimo Morelliano (Marcantonio Michiel’s Notizie d’Opera del Disegno), ed., Theodor Frimmel (Vienna: Carl Graesar, 1896), 88: “La tauola del San Francesco nel deserto a oglio fo opera de Zuan Bellino, cominciata da lui a M. Zuan Michiel et ha un paese proprinquo finite e ricercato mirabilimente.”
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the soldier, made by the hand of Giorgio of Castelfranco.”2 Viewing Giorgione’s picture today
we might agree that the lush outdoor surroundings do predominate over the soldier and gypsy,
thereby inverting the usual hierarchy between figures and setting existing in easel paintings at
this time (fig.1.2). In his influential essay “Renaissance Artistic Theory and the Development of
Landscape Painting,” E. H. Gombrich pointed to Michiel’s Notizie as the genesis of landscape as
an independent genre of painting.3 Following Gombrich, studies of landscape in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries have been dominated by debates over its precise origins and causes for them,
many critics identifying Giorgione and his circle in Venice as inventors of what would become
the modern landscape genre, even locating its roots in a single picture such as the Tempest
(c.1507).
As Charles Hope contended, “Giorgione was one of the first artists to work almost
exclusively for connoisseurs, extending the narrow range of subject matter to include new picture
types such as landscapes.”4 From her inspired analyses of Michiel and his Notizie, Jennifer
Fletcher similarly underscored Michiel’s aesthetic appreciation for landscape painting as a sign
of its status as a separate category of picture.5 Likewise, Nils Büttner in his recent survey of the
history of landscape asserted that through Giorgione, “the painted landscape became an aesthetic
object.”6
This tendency to emphasize the budding role of art connoisseurship—perilously close to
modern art historians’ agency—as a motivating factor for the rise of landscape painting as a
2 Michiel, 106: “El paesetto in tela cun la tempesta, cun la cingana et soldato, fo de man de Zorzi da Castelfranco.” Recent literature on the painting is summarized in Marco Paoli, La ‘Tempesta’ Svelata. Giorgione, Gabriele Vendramin, Cristoforo Marcello e La 'Vecchia’ (Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi Editore, 2011). 3 E. H. Gombrich, “Renaissance Artistic Theory and the Development of Landscape Painting,” Gazette des Beaux- Arts 6, 41 (May-June, 1953), 335-360. 4 Jane Martineau and Charles Hope, ed., The Genius of Venice 1500-1600 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983), 19. 5 Jennifer Fletcher, “Marcantonio Michiel’s Collection,” Burlington Magazine, 36 (1973), 384; Jennifer Fletcher, “Marcantonio Michiel: His Friends and Collection,” Burlington Magazine, 123, 941 (Aug., 1981), 465. 6 Nils Büttner, Landscape Painting—A History (New York: Abbeville, 2006), 74.
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distinct category is problematic. These models imply that an anachronistic and modern art-for-
art’s-sake interest existed for sixteenth-century viewers. Studying landscape in Renaissance
Venice one must come to terms with its ambiguous status. It was unappreciated by art theorists
until the middle of the century but collected with enthusiasm by a number of well-educated
patrons. It remains difficult to define landscape as an independent genre when it barely existed as
such, except in hindsight to the art historian who is able to isolate a few small paintings in which
figures play a minimal or even nonexistent role compared to the wilderness setting. Reindert
Falkenburg recently concluded that “Landscape as an acknowledged ‘institution’ of art—at least
in the sixteenth century—is a myth imposed upon the archives.”7
Landscapes evidently played a relatively minor role even for private collectors. By far the
most common images found in Venetian homes across all social classes during this period were
small devotional ancone, or Greek-inspired icons of the Virgin.8 Bertrand Jestaz has compiled a
database of nearly 1,400 pictures listed in Venetian inventories throughout the sixteenth century,
of which only 110 are identified as landscapes. In other words, they were 3% of total images. In
comparison, a database of similar inventories made for Antwerp listed landscapes as 3% of all
pictures solely for the twenty year period from 1565-1585.9 Moreover, Isabella Cecchini has
found landscapes nearly absent from Venetian inventories she consulted prior to 1520.10
Landscapes occurred more frequently in the 74 inventories made between 1523-91 that Monika
Schmitter consulted in her recent study of pictures made for the reception halls of Venetian
7 Reindert L. Falkenburg, “Landscape,” Kritische Berichte: Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften 35, 3 (2007), 45-50. 8 Isabella Palumbo-Fossatti, “L’interno della casa dell’artigiano e dell’artista nella Venezia del Cinquecento,” Studi Veneziani, n.s., 8 (1984), 132. 9 Michel Hochmann, “Le collezioni veneziane nel Rinascimento: storia e storiografia,” in Michel Hochmann, Rosella Lauber, and Stefania Mason, ed., Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Dalle origini al Cinquecento, vol. II (Venice: Marsilio, 2008), 30. 10 Isabella Cecchini, “Collezionismo e mondo materiale,” in Hochmann, et al., 165-192.
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palaces.11 By mid-century they were the most popular image-type displayed in Venetian homes,
to judge from archival evidence.12
The rise in the popularity of images with detailed outdoor settings coincided with more
focused theoretical consideration of them. Not until 1548 with the publication of Paolo Pino’s
Dialogo di pittura did serious discussion occur of landscape’s role in the visual arts in Venice
(fig.1.3). A year later Anton Francesco Doni’s Disegno (1549) framed its relation to sculpture.
Lodovico Dolce’s painting manual (1557) hardly mentions this branch of imagery at all, beyond
a few patches of greenery Titian painted. For example, he calls the forest setting of Titian’s
acclaimed St. Peter Martyr altarpiece (c.1527-29) for SS. Giovanni e Paolo, “a patch of
landscape with several elder trees” (“una macchia di paese con certi arbori di Sambuco”).13
Dolce exhibits slightly more enthusiasm in a letter to Alessandro Contarini appended to the
published text of his treatise. He recounts how Titian managed to paint such a lovely “plot of
landscape” in a picture of Venus and Adonis (1554) and marvels at “the sun’s wonderful rays and
reflections that illuminate and gladden the whole landscape.”14 Dolce is clearly praising these
wooded backdrops, though viewed them as pleasing accompaniments to the principal action. An
extended commentary on landscape did appear in Venice later in the cartographer Cristoforo
11 Monika Schmitter, “The Quadro da Portego in Sixteenth-Century Venetian Art,” Renaissance Quarterly 64, 3 (Fall 2011), 708. Despite conceding their important role, Schmitter does not investigate landscapes: “I will not address here the many images of the Madonna, Christ, and individual saints, nor will I focus on the many portraits, maps, and landscapes, although this is not to imply that such images could not also be ideological.” Cf. her appendix, 744-46. 12 Chriscinda Henry, “What makes a picture?: Evidence from sixteenth-century Venetian property inventories,” Journal of the History of Collections 23, 2 (2011), 258. 13 Mark W. Roskill, Dolce’s Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento (Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the Renaissance Society of America, 2000), 190. 14 Roskill, 216: “Trovasi ancora nel medesimo quadro una macchia d’un paese di qualità, che’l vero non è tanto vero: dove al sommo d’un picciol colle non molto lontano dalla vista v'è un pargoletto Cupido, che si dorme all'ombra; la quale gli batte diritto sopra il capo; & al d’intorno v’ha splendori e riflessi di Sole mirabilissimi, che allumano, & allegrano tutto il paese”; [One also finds in the same picture a blot of landscape of such a quality that the reality is not so real: where at the summit of a small hill not very far in the distance is seen a little baby Cupid who sleeps in the shade falling directly upon his head; and around him are seen the sun’s wonderful rays and reflections that illuminate and gladden the whole landscape]. As Roskill points out, Dolce was alluding to the Venus and Adonis now in the Prado.
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Sorte’s Osservazioni nella pittura (1580). Sorte’s manual gives detailed instructions on how to
paint a proper landscape vista (“come si possa imitare un paese”), as well as the more difficult
painterly phenomena of sunsets, night scenes, and fire landscapes.15 This increasing fascination
with the naturalistic depiction of outdoor settings by mid-century is evident if we compare the
frequency of Vasari’s use of the term “paese” between the two editions of his Lives of the
Artists: in the 1550 text the word appears 89 times, increasing in the 1568 edition to 207.16
Similarly, in 1584 G. P. Lomazzo wrote an entire chapter on the “Compositione del pingere &
fare i paesi diversi.”17 By the early seventeenth century, Karel van Mander would devote a
lengthy didactic poem to the principles of landscape painting in the Grondt der Schilder-Const,
which he appended to his more famous Schilder-Boeck (1604).18
1.1 THE RENAISSANCE CONCEPTION OF LANDSCAPE
A significant advance in our understanding of the complex views toward landscape that existed
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was made by Karen Goodchild in her Ph.D. thesis,
“Towards an Italian Renaissance Theory of Landscape.” Unjustly overlooked by art historians,
Goodchild’s study clarified the often competing ideologies that simultaneously relegated
landscape to a low position in the hierarchy of genres but celebrated its sensuous appeal and
15 Cristoforo Sorte, Osservazioni nella pittura (Venice, 1580), 9r: “Hora c’habbiamo trattato del colorire sù la carta, veggiamo come si possa imitare un paese in tela à guazzo, & in prospettiva, & incominciando da i confini della notte & del giorno, veggiamo quando la bellissima Aurora, lasciato ne’ liti dell’Oceano a giacere Titone il vecchio suo marito, adorna di rose, di bianchissimi gigli, & di viole, & co’capelli di finissimo oro, se ne viene innanzi à prepare il viaggio al sorgente Sole, il quale à l’Orientale Orizonte auicinandosi, & trahendo dal mare i bagnati cavalli incomincia co’raggi i vicini nuvoletti à ferire, & indi à poco à poco à dimostrare per le vicine tenebre ancora della fuggiente notte, le nascose bellezze della terra.” 16 Karen Goodchild, “‘A Hand More Practiced and Sure’: The History of Landscape Painting in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, Artibus et Historiae 32, 64 (2011), 25. 17 Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell’arte de la pittura (Milan, 1584), bk.6, ch.61, 473-75. 18 On this text, see Hessel Miedema, “Karel Van Mander’s Grondt Der Edel Vry Schilder-Const: (‘Foundations of the Noble and Free Art of Painting’), Journal of the History of Ideas 34, 4 (Oct.-Dec., 1973), 653-68.
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technical difficulty. A…