Palma Vecchio: Allegory

 This year I have been re-posting my interpretations of some mysterious Renaissance paintings by Giorgione and his contemporaries. Here is another, a painting, identified as "Allegory" in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, that bears a striking resemblance to Giorgione’s Tempest, even though there is no trace of a storm.

Palma Vecchio: Allegory

Edgar Wind, who identified the subject of the Tempest as “Fortezza e Carita,” pointed out the resemblance in his 1969 study, "Giorgione’s Tempesta."

This subject. Fortezza e Carita, was trivialized, inevitably, by some of Giorgione’s disciples. A Giorgionesque painting in the collection of the Marquess of Northampton and a painting by Palma Vecchio in the Philadelphia Museum omit the ominous character of the storm-swept landscape but retain the easy contrast between a soldier leaning on his lance and a woman seated on the ground, with a child or two. (p. 3)

In a footnote, Wind elaborated.

In Palma Vecchio’s tame conversation piece, which might be called ‘The Peaceable Warrior (ex bello pax)’, the children play like Eros and Anteros, whose mythological parents were Mars and Venus....The lethargic guardsman in this picture is a surprisingly weak invention, particularly if compared with the fine paraphrase of Giorgione's soldier in the altarpiece for Santo Stefano in Vicenza... (p, 21, n.13).

In the Philadelphia Museum website the painting is given the title “Allegory,” and is attributed to “a follower of Palma il Vecchio.” It is dated 1510. Over ten years ago, a curator at the Museum very kindly allowed my wife and I to view this spectacular painting that was in a basement studio under restoration. It is a very large canvas, much larger than the Tempest, and despite the need for restoration it is still a beautiful painting. 

I believe that this painting is a version of an episode deriving from the brief scriptural account of the   "Flight into Egypt.” The man is St. Joseph, dressed as a young Venetian patrician, standing watch over the Madonna who is seated on the left. The two children are the Christ child and John the Baptist, who is also identified by the lamb in the background. John is often introduced into the Flight into Egypt legend when he meets the Holy Family in the desert on their return from Egypt, a very common subject at the time.

The other painting mentioned by Wind is now on loan to the Fogg Art Museum. Attributed by Wind to a “Follower” of Giorgione, there are three figures in a landscape. In the foreground a fully clothed plainly dressed woman sits on the ground with her infant son standing beside her supported by her arm. She is left of center and looks to the right in the direction of an armored soldier standing guard. He leans not on a staff but on a formidable looking halberd. For Wind the subject of the painting was an allegory, “Fortezza and Carita,” the same subject he claimed for the Tempesta.

Follower of Giorgione: Rustic Idyll

This painting should also be recognized as a version of "The Rest on the Flight into Egypt." The only objections would be the plainly dressed Madonna and the armed virile Joseph.

In each painting Joseph’s traditional staff has become a halberd, the weapon of choice of the famed Swiss soldiers who had been introduced into Italy a few years earlier by Pope Julius II. Why is Joseph now being presented as an armed and armored protector of the Madonna and Child? Perhaps the Cambrai war required Joseph to take on a more martial aspect. It seems that it would be easier to answer that question than to try to fit these two paintings, which bear a striking resemblance to the Tempest, into an allegorical interpretation.

Another question arises about the plainness of the woman's attire in each painting. It is so plain that viewers have argued that the women are gypsies. When Marcantonio Michiel, a Venetian patrician and art collector, saw the Tempest in 1530 in the home of patrician Gabriele Vendramin, he described it as "the little landscape on canvas, representing stormy weather and a gipsy woman with a soldier..."* 

Giorgione Tempest

Of course the woman in the Tempest is nude but in the twenty years following Giorgione's death in 1510, paintings like the two discussed above might have led to Michiel's faulty description. 

Why did Marcantonio Michiel mistakenly identify the nude woman and the man in the Tempest as “a gipsy woman with a soldier”? After all, the nude woman nursing an equally nude infant does not resemble contemporary descriptions of a gypsy. Moreover, the young man’s posture might resemble that of a soldier but he is neither armed nor armored.

It seems obvious that Michiel’s notes were hastily drawn and fragmentary but why did he guess “a gipsy woman with a soldier” for the two characters in the famous landscape? I would like to offer the following as an hypothesis that would also apply to the two paintings mentioned above.

In one of his sermons Savonarola criticized the artists of his time for depicting the Madonna dressed in splendor and finery. He said, “think ye that the Virgin should be painted, as ye paint her? I tell ye that she went clothed as a beggar.”

This quotation from Savonarola’s “Prediche sopra Amos e Zaccaria,” is found in Professor Pasquale Villari’s monumental biography of Savonarola, originally published in 1888 after years of research in original sources, many of which he discovered hidden in Florentine archives. In his work Professor Villari devoted a few pages to the famous or infamous Dominican friar’s views on art and poetry. **

Villari disputed the notion, popular in his time and even more popular in ours, that Savonarola was a reactionary opponent of Art, Poetry, and Learning. Although known to popular history as the moving force behind the “Bonfire of the Vanities,” Savonarola was respected and admired by contemporary artists and philosophers including Botticelli and Michelangelo, "who, in his old age, constantly read and reread the Friar’s sermons, and never forgot the potent charm of that orator’s gestures and voice.”

In the beginning of the sixteenth century it would appear that attempts were made to portray the Madonna as a poor beggar especially in paintings depicting scenes from the Flight into Egypt. So even though Giorgione did not paint a “gypsy” woman or a soldier in the Tempest, the similarity of this painting with depictions of a Madonna dressed like a beggar in the desert with a protector standing guard might have led to Michiel’s mistake 20 years later.

Although most art historians have rejected Michiel's description, in 1995 Paul Holberton argued that the woman in the Tempest really was indeed a gypsy and offered a number of arguments and illustrations to prove his point. He went so far as to argue that some images, usually taken for the Madonna, were actually gypsy women. **

Holberton came so close. If he could only have seen the Tempest as Giorgione’s version of the "Rest on the Flight into Egypt", so much of his evidence would have fallen easily into place. Instead of claiming that identifications of images of the Madonna were mistaken, he should have asked why the Madonna came to be depicted wearing a gypsy headdress in some of the paintings he describes.

De' Barbari: Holy Family

For example, at one point he argued that a de’ Barbari drawing could not be a Holy Family because of the gypsy headpiece of the woman. Yet, Correggio painted a Madonna and Child where the Madonna appears with a similar headpiece, and it is commonly called La Zingarella.

Correggio: Madonna and Child

Edgar Wind was correct to see the similarity between the Tempest and the "Allegory" in the Philadelphia Museum, and "The Rustic Idyll" in the Fogg Art Museum, but we can now see them all as derived from the Flight into Egypt, one of the most common sources in the art of the Venetian Renaissance.

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*The Anonimo, Notes on Pictures and Works of Art in Italy made by an Anonymous Writer in the Sixteenth Century: ed. By George C. Williamson, London, 1903, p. 123.

**Professor Pasquale Villari, Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola, New York, tenth edition, 1909. pp. 495-499.

***Paul Holberton: “Giorgione’s Tempest”, Art History, vol. 18, no. 3, September 1995. (Holberton has posted the article on his website with a slide show.) 

Titian: Flora or Mary Magdalen

 The following post originally appeared on Giorgione et al... on March 14, 2012. Since the beginning of this year, I have been revisiting my original interpretations of famous but mysterious Renaissance paintings. In an earlier post I argued that Giorgione's "Laura" was actually Mary Magdalen. Below I argue that Titian's "Flora" is also Mary Magdalen.

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Is it possible that Titian’s so-called “Flora” could be a representation of Mary Magdalen? In my interpretation of the Sacred and Profane Love I argued that  Titian represented Mary Magdalen in two guises: first, as a beautiful courtesan contemplating the error of her ways, and second, as the penitent sinner of the apocryphal gospels. 

Titian: Flora, c. 1515-20, Uffizi

Titian painted many versions of the Magdalen during his long career reflecting not only his own regard for the saint as a personal intercessor, but also the demands of his patrons for beautiful images of the female saint who was second only in popularity to the Madonna.

In his study of Titian’s early career Paul Joannides discussed a painting of a young woman “often thought to be a portrait of a courtesan,” and noted “an obvious link of mood and gesture with Giorgione’s Laura.” He wondered about the ambiguity of the action. Was the woman “opening her dress to reveal her breast, like Laura, or closing it in modesty”? He speculated that the woman might be “ a Magdalene in a Mary and Martha,” a subject “that would certainly have appealed to Titian, allowing him to contrast female types.”* [95-6]

Joannides failed to note that the “courtesan” wore a multi colored shawl that was the same as the one worn by one of Titian's Magdalens painted much later. 

The similarities between this “courtesan” of the early Titian, Giorgione’s “Laura”, and the “Flora” are remarkable. All three have been seen as courtesans and all are disheveled or in the process of shedding their finery. Scholars agree that their exposed breasts make them idealized images rather than portraits. Also, any erotic aspects are offset by symbols of modesty and chastity.

No one has ever been able to make more than a guess about the subject of the “Flora”. It was only in the mid-seventeenth century that a commentator attached the name of the Roman goddess of flowers to the beautiful woman in the painting. Although the name has stuck, modern commentators have brought forth objections and offered their own hesitant interpretations.

 In 1980 Charles Hope introduced the painting in his catalog by noting that Titian “painted virtually no mythological pictures based in this way on ekphrastic texts, and none at all of comparable scale or importance.” He added that while Venetian patrons might have been interested in erotic subjects, “they were relatively indifferent to classical precedent.” **(61-2)

Hope looked in another direction for the meaning of the “Flora.”

But there was also a distinctive and more pervasive local tradition of pictures in portrait format of anonymous pretty girls, either clothed or partially nude, which were no more than elaborate pin-ups…. The identity of the girl as Flora is established both by the flowers in her hand and by her costume, which is of the type worn by nymphs in contemporary stage productions….(61-2)

Although he remarked that the subject was treated with “extreme sensitivity and discretion,” the painting was still a pin-up whose erotic implications are “central to its meaning.” (62)

In a 2003 catalog of an exhibition at London’s National Gallery, David Jaffe described the painting in this fashion.***(cat. # 11)

Flora is perhaps the supreme example of a genre developed in early sixteenth-century Venice showing ‘belle donne’, beautiful women, for the sake simply of their beauty. They were neither portraits—as such they would have seemed improper—nor did they usually have allegorical significance or mythological references….Titian did not invent the type, but developed the tradition represented by works such as Giorgione’s ‘Laura’….

The painting is a magnificent evocation of sensuality. The tumbling locks of hair, sometimes minutely described, trail down across her cheek and shoulder to her undergarment, which laps her breast and shoulder in undulating waves…before ebbing into the barely supported rose cloth which she gathers, or is perhaps discarding…

The image may be read as a generalized ‘Venus’ type. The flowers, perhaps roses, suggest identification with Flora. 

In the catalog of the 2006 Bellini, Giorgione, Titian exhibition jointly sponsored by Washington’s National Gallery and Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, Sylvia Ferino Pagden considered the Flora “the finest and most successful of all sensuous half-length female figures in sixteenth-century Venetian painting….” She noted its “Venus-like sensuousness” but pointed out the ambiguity of the subject. 

If it was Titian’s intention here to depict Flora, was he thinking of Ovid’s goddesses or Boccaccio’s courtesan? Or is his portrait an artistic blending of the two?...yet his Flora has more the demeanor of a goddess….her lack of attention to the viewer makes him aware of his own insignificance….

Titian’s re-creation of the classical goddess, however, lacks any reference to antiquity, even in the drapery….Flora’s chemise—usually seen merely peeking out from under a gown at the neck and sleeves but here serving as her main article of clothing overlaid by a cloth of brocade or damask—does not correspond to that of any classical figure and certainly not a Venetian bride,…# (226)

It should be noted that Titian’s “Flora” bears little resemblance to the goddess of flowers. There are no flowers tumbling from her hair and her dress was depicted by Ovid as adorned with many colors. 

Ferino-Pagden did identify the flowers in the hands of Flora as rose, jasmine, and violet and claimed that they provide “a key to interpreting her.” However, she provided no further explanation. 

In her study, Nature and Its Symbols, Lucia Impelluso noted that “the jasmine has often been considered a flower of Heaven or a symbol of divine love.” While usually associated with the innocence and purity of the Virgin Mary, it can often be seen “woven into garlands adorning the heads of angels and saints.” Moreover, “if associated with roses, it can connote faith.” ## (101)

The wild rose is also associated with Mary Magdalen. As far as the violet is concerned, Impelluso noted: 

In the popular imagination, the little, strong-scented violet is a symbol of modesty and humility, and it was interpreted likewise by the Fathers of the Church as well.

I realize that the jasmine, rose, and violet that “Flora” holds in her hand could refer to some one else, but one should certainly at least suspect Mary Magdalen.

Giorgione’s “Laura,” Titian’s early “courtesan,” and the “Flora” could all be considered versions of Mary Magdalen, and not just pin-ups. One significant objection, however, is the absence in each instance of the jar of ointment that is always associated with the Magdalen. Later, Titian displayed it prominently in the “Sacred and Profane Love,” as well as in his more obvious Magdalens. 

Perhaps in this brief moment in time Venetian artists had come to believe that they could depict the essence of the Magdalen without resort to obvious iconographical symbols. Earlier, Giovanni Bellini had painted a Madonna and Child surrounded by two female saints. One is obviously Mary Magdalen but she is only recognized by her flowing red hair. ###

Giovanni Bellini: Madonna and Child with Female Saints

* Joannides, Paul: Titian to 1518, Yale, 2001. The painting is in the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena whose website now identifies the courtesan as a young woman and attributes it to Giorgione.

** Hope, Charles: Titian, NY, 1980.

*** Titian, catalogue edited by David Jaffe, London, 2003.

# Brown, David Alan, and Ferino-Pagden, Sylvia, Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting, Washington, 2006.

## Impelluso, Lucia: Nature and Its Symbols, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, Los Angeles, 2003.

Giorgione: Three Philosophers or Magi

                      

This year on Giorgione et al... I have been reprising my interpretive discoveries on Giorgione and other Renaissance masters. I am not the first to claim that the three men in the so-called Three Philosophers are the Magi, but I believe I am the first to point out the significance of the colors of their garments. My first post on the subject was back on 9/20/2010, and the post below is an update from 11/18/2018. 

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The Giorgione painting known as The Three Philosophers is one of a handful now definitively attributed to the great Venetian Renaissance master. It depicts three men on a hilltop overlooking a beautiful valley with the sun setting in the West behind a range of mountains. They are dressed in colorful robes and face a dark rock formation or cave. They and the cave are illuminated by another source of light. Who are they and what are they doing there?

Giorgione: Three Philosophers

 

In 1525 Marcantonio Michiel, a Venetian patrician and connoisseur, listed the paintings in the collection of Taddeo Contarini, another Venetian aristocrat, and described this one as "three philosophers in a Landscape." Two hundred and fifty years later the painting had found its way to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, its current home. In a 1783 catalog it was called, "Three Magi." Since then, scholars have debated whether the men are philosophers, astronomers, surveyors, representatives of the three ages of man, representatives of three religions, or the Wise Men or Magi of the Biblical account.

Today, most scholars accept the "philosopher" interpretation even though they find it difficult to identify which ones. However, recent findings suggest that the Magi are making a comeback.

In the catalog of the unprecedented Giorgione exhibition in 2004, Mino Gabriele argued that in this painting Giorgione depicted the Magi not at the end of their journey but at the beginning, when they first saw the Star of Bethlehem. His most compelling point had to do with the lighting of the painting. If we look carefully, we can see the sun setting in the West behind the mountains, but the three men and the rock formation in the foreground are being illuminated by another source. According to the medieval legend the light of the Star, which rose in the East, was even brighter than the sun at midday. *

Moreover, at the conclusion of a symposium, that ended the “Bellini, Giorgione, Titian” exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington in 2006, Salvatore Settis offered a striking piece of evidence in support of the Magi. 

The exhibition itself had done an excellent job of educating the public on the value of using scientific techniques to evaluate the "underpainting" of some of these Renaissance masterpieces. X-rays and other techniques show many "pentimenti" or changes of mind on the part of the artists. When working with oils, the artists would frequently alter their paintings by painting over the original. 

In the original version the old man on the right dressed in gold is wearing an elaborate headpiece crowned with a kind of solar disk. For some reason Giorgione decided to discard it in favor of a simple hood. Nevertheless, when Settis projected an image on a huge screen of a painting by Vittore Carpaccio of the Magi on horseback approaching the Holy Family, the old man in that painting was wearing the kind of headpiece discarded by Giorgione. 

Carpaccio: Holy Family with Magi in Background
detail provided by Dr. Settis

In a 2010 post at Giorgione et al… I added my two cents to the question and argued that the colors of the garments of the three men are symbolic of the gifts of the Magi: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. The most obvious, but usually overlooked, feature in the painting is the brilliant color of the costumes. In the medieval legend, the oldest of the Magi was the bearer of the gold; the middle-aged man carried the myrrh; and the youngest brought the frankincense. The golden garment of the oldest man needs no explanation. In my encyclopedia the color of myrrh is a dark red, while the color of frankincense can be white or green, the colors of the clothing of the sitting young man. 

In other versions of the Adoration of the Magi, gold is almost invariably the color of the oldest man’s garb, but there is no one color scheme for the other two. However, there is a version of the Adoration of the Magi done around 1499 by Francesco Raibolini, known all over Italy as Francia, where he used a similar color scheme for the three Magi. In Francia’s painting, that I believe is now in the Dresden Gemaldegalerie, the eldest man is clothed in gold, the middle-aged one in red, and the youngest in green.

Francia: Adoration of the Magi

I also believe that The Three Philosophers was not the only instance in which Giorgione used colors symbolically to identify his religious figures rather than resorting to stock symbols. In the so-called Three Ages of Man, that now hangs in the Pitti Palace, the colors of the garments of the three men are more than enough to identify them. St. Peter, in particular, is identified by his bright red robe; red being the color of martyrdom. The green of Christ’s garment is the color of the vestment used by a priest during most of the liturgical year, and the purple and gold of the young man are a sign of his wealth.

Giorgione also used red for the tunic of the young man in the so-called Boy with an Arrow. Red should help to identify this mysterious figure holding an arrow as the martyr, St. Sebastian. ** 

Perhaps Giorgione, Carpaccio and Francia took their inspiration from the elaborate public processions honoring the Magi, which were common in the later Medieval world. Nowhere were they more elaborate than in Venice. More than any other city, Venice was aware of the styles and costumes of the Orient. 

Could it be that Giorgione hid his subject by making it obvious? I think it more likely that most contemporary Venetians would have seen the Magi in this great masterpiece. 

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*Mino Gabriele, “The Three Philosophers”, the Magi and the Nocturnal.” Giorgione, Myth and Enigma, ed. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden and Giovanna Nepi Scire, 2004. Pp.79-85.

** Discussions of both of these Giorgione paintings have already been posted this year on this site.

Addendum:

Credit must be given here to Anna Jameson, the popular British art maven of the nineteenth century. Neglected today by most art historians, I believe that she was one of the few who worked to restore the original meaning and significance of Medieval and Renaissance art from the ignorance of the Enlightenment. In her discussion of the Adoration of the Magi she paused to discuss Giorgione’s painting. 

I must mention a picture by Giorgione in the Belvedere Gallery, well known as one of the few undoubted productions of that rare and fascinating painter, and often referred to because of its beauty. Its significance has hitherto escaped all writers on art, as far as I am acquainted with them, and has been dismissed as one of his enigmatical allegories. It is called in German, Die Feldmasser (the Land Surveyors), and sometimes styled in English the Geometricians, or the Philosophers, or the Astrologers. …I have myself no doubt that this beautiful picture represents the “three wise men of the East,” watching on the Chaldean hills the appearance of the miraculous star, and that the light breaking in the far horizon, called in the German description, the rising sun, is intended to express the rising of the star of Jacob.” #

In a footnote, Jameson mentioned a print by Giulio Bonasoni, “which appears to represent the wise men watching for the star.” 

#Anna Brownell Jameson, Legends of the Madonna, as Represented in the Fine Arts, Boston and New York, 1885, pp. 347-8. 

Giorgione: Laura

 

I have argued on this site that Giorgione’s Portrait of a Young Woman, commonly called Laura, could actually be his version of “The Conversion of Mary Magdalen.” I believe that I am not the first to suggest Mary Magdalen but a number of distinguished catalogs do not even consider the possibility. 

Giorgione: Portrait of a Young Woman (Laura)
Oil on canvas, mounted on panel, 51 x 33.6 cm
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

While scholars are unanimous in attributing the Laura to Giorgione, they have not been able to agree on the subject of this painting of a partially nude young woman. Most agree that Laura is a misnomer and that the painting has nothing to do with Petrarch's lover. All do point out the paradoxical iconographic symbols. On one hand, there are the robe and bared breast of a Venetian courtesan, but on the other, there are symbols of chastity and conjugal love such as the laurel leaves and head scarf.

Only one person fits this description and that is Mary Magdalen. This most famous female saint of the Middle Ages was generally regarded in the Renaissance as a prostitute who after her encounter with Jesus became a true and virtuous bride of Christ. After her conversion she discards her courtesan's finery and is often portrayed with breasts bared.

After I first interpreted Giorgione's Tempest as “The Rest on the Flight into Egypt,” back in 2005, I began to suspect that some of his other inexplicable or mysterious paintings might actually be sacred subjects. Shortly after I began Giorgione et al… in the fall of 2010, I put up a brief post on the Laura that explored the Magdalen interpretation. Three years later I put up a more expansive post that discussed its similarity with other mysterious paintings of beautiful women by Titian. [Giorgione’s Laura,Titian’s Flora, and Mary Magdalen. 8/19/2013.]

Giorgione’s Laura has been recognized as a revolutionary turning point in the development of the art of the Venetian Renaissance. In his magnificent 2009 Giorgione catalog, Enrico dal Pozzolo devoted nine pages to the Laura in a section entitled, “a sense of beauty.” He described the little painting in almost poetic terms.*

Imagined up against an impenetrable, dark background…, the painting has the power to suddenly brighten up the room where it hangs through a light that would appear to shine forth from her snow-white skin. She turns to her viewer sideways, and bares her right breast; her eyes trained on something or someone outside,…[291]

He called the Laura “one of the most astonishing paintings of the European Renaissance,” and claimed that it had a profound impact on artists who followed Giorgione. [291] He drew comparisons between the Laura and Giovanni Cariani’s Judith, Boccaccio Boccacino’s Portrait of a Girl, and even Albrecht Durer’s Portrait of a Young Woman that also hangs in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. He argued that Giorgione’s painting was a revolutionary departure.

There is no question that a work of this kind broke completely with previous Venetian portraiture. It was a turning point, if not a breaking point, which described a manner of conceiving the pictorial medium that was not just unprecedented, but actually elevated the descriptive datum to a metaphorical level. [297]

Nevertheless, the painting could also mark a revolutionary departure in depictions of Mary Magdalen. After Giorgione, painters such as Titian and Correggio would paint versions of an emotionally charged Magdalen with symbols representing both sinner and saint. Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, painted shortly after Giorgione’s death, should be seen as one example.

In earlier posts I have also agreed with those who interpret Giorgione’s Three Philosophers as the Three Magi when they first see the Star of Bethlehem. I have also agreed with those who see his Boy with an Arrow as St. Sebastian.

Coincidentally, an English friend back from a visit to Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum sent me an image (taken I suspect while the guards were looking the other way) of the three paintings hanging side by side. In the few years left to me I don’t expect the famed Museum to change the labels but what would we think of Giorgione and the Venetian Renaissance if we could stand before these paintings and see Mary Magdalen and St. Sebastian flanking the Three Magi at the first sign of the Incarnation?

Giorgione wall, Kunsthistorisches Museum.
Image courtesy of David. Orme.

* Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo: Giorgione,  Milan, 2009. Page numbers in brackets.