Grimani Breviary

 

In my interpretation of Giorgione's Tempest as "The Rest on the Flight into Egypt" I argued that Giorgione depicted the Madonna as nude because of her Immaculate Conception. In researching I was surprised and emboldened when I discovered that the last two images in the famous "Grimani Breviary" juxtaposed the Immaculate Conception with a version of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt. There they are. On the left the artist has placed the "Woman, Clothed with the Sun" from the Book of Revelation in the sky, and symbols of the "Woman, without stain or blemish" from the Song of Songs on the ground below. In the next image the Madonna sits with her child in a landscape always used in depictions of the Rest. Joseph and the Ass can be seen in the background.

The Grimani Breviary is famous for its depictions by Northern Renaissance miniaturists of ordinary life. Nevertheless, the last two images depart from that scheme and depict Mary. The owner of the Breviary was Cardinal Domenico Grimani, not only an important figure in the life of Venice and the Church but also one of the major art collectors of the early sixteenth century. Was there a connection between the owner of the Breviary and Giorgione? The editor of the beautiful facsimile edition of the Breviary  published by Levenger Press raised the possibility. 

"Outside Flanders this manuscript could not have found a more suitable home than Venice. The natural world is depicted in the Grimani Breviary with a care paralleled only in Venetian painting, which at this time was turning to an ever deeper study of nature, and this Flemish masterpiece must have aroused the curiosity of the Venetian painters, whose formation and sensitivity were quite different from those of their Tuscan counterparts. Certain of it meticulous landscapes must have aroused the interest of masters such as Giorgione and the young Titian…" ["The Grimani Breviary": Levenger Press, DelRay Beach, Florida, 2007, p. 38.]

In the catalog of the 2010 Giorgione exhibition in the artist's hometown of Castelfranco Veneto, Enrico dal Pozzolo also speculated about the connection between Grimani and Giorgione. After summarizing Cardinal Grimani's collection, Pozzolo wrote:

"here we have a number of elements that would lead us to wonder whether behind this manifest connection between Cardinal Grimani’s interests and some of the themes developed by the artist there were an actual, if unrecorded, patron-artist relationship—which might have been at the root of the mix of cultures that defined the young artist."[Enrico Maria dal Pozzolo: "Giorgione", Milan, 2009. pp. 210-212]

In an earlier post I have written about the connection between the work of Luca Signorelli in the S. Brisio chapel in Orvieto's cathedral and Giorgione's Tempest. On a visit to Orvieto I discovered that Signorelli's broken columns in his depiction of the end of the world bore a close resemblance to the ones Giorgione depicted in the Tempest.

In a study of the S. Brisio chapel Creighton Gilbert argued that Grimani played a key advisory role in its iconography.

"Grimani too visited Orvieto in 1493 and 1495 with Farnese, Borgia, and the rest. More of interest is that in 1505 he built himself a vacation house below the city walls, at the abbey of Santa Trinita.”
[Gilbert, Creighton E.: "How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World", Penn State, 2003. p. 81.]

Below find notes from the introduction to the Levenger Press beautiful facsimile edition of the Grimani Breviary.

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p. 10. The Breviary is for Franciscan use and consists of some 832 parchment folios.

p. 10. Some hold that work on the manuscript started some time after 1480 and continued until about 1520; as far as we can see, however, it was completed in about a decade.

p. 13. The naturalism in the Grimani Breviary clearly derives from the Ghent and Bruges masters of the latter half of the fifteenth century.

p. 23. …the last miniature in the manuscript, the symbols of the Virgin.

p. 27. …while in the penultimate miniature in the manuscript the Madonna and Child are akin to the graceful figures of David’s Von Pannwitz Virgin and the landscape recalls the later manner of the first illuminator.

p. 29. Later the broad dating of 1481 to 1520 was narrowed down to the decade 1510 to 1520, and the predominant presence of three major illuminators was clarified.

p. 35. …the Breviary is the product and the expression of a stage in the history of Flemish miniature-painting, a lofty synthesis between the school of Ghent…and the school of Bruges.

In the opening pages of this introduction we emphasized how exceptional was the fact that the Grimani Breviary had been purchased in Italy by an Italian, even though the purchaser was a member of an illustrious family and himself high up in the Church….So Flemish paintings found their way into Italy to embellish the castles and palaces of the various ruling families…In addition, rare works came to decorate bourgeois homes—especially in Piedmont, Liguria, and Venice.

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Levenger Press, fascimile edition published in 2007, Delray Beach, Florida. 

Signorelli, Giorgione and Cardinal Grimani

 The broken columns and ruins in Giorgione's Tempest must be discussed in any plausible interpretation. In my interpretation I showed that they were commonplace in depictions of the "Rest on the Flight into Egypt." After delivering my paper at a conference in Venice in 2010, my wife and I stopped over in Orvieto before proceeding on to Rome. We wanted to revisit the famous cathedral of the beautiful hill-top city. In particular, we wanted to see the St. Brisio chapel with its frescoes by Fra Angelico and Luca Signorelli. 

Imagine my surprise when I noticed the columns depicted in the above image. Scholars have pointed out the connection between the work of Luca Signorelli in the S. Brisio chapel in Orvieto and the work of Michelangelo and Raphael. Perhaps, there is also a connection between Signorelli and Giorgione. Begun in the middle of the fifteenth century by Fra Angelico, the frescoes of the famous chapel were completed by Signorelli between 1499 and 1504. The “outer bay” of the chapel contains Signorelli’s version of the end of the world. 

Among the many iconographical details in this section are three prominent broken columns that bear a striking resemblance to the broken columns in the Tempest. Here is Creighton Gilbert’s description of this section:

 “One may take these to be the tribulations that Luke had described just before in the same chapter, where people are told to flee and are led away as captives, while no stone is left on another. These are precisely the motifs Signorelli shows us, with people running from a ruined colonnade, a nearby building showing cracks, and soldiers tying people up.” p.139. 

The ruined colonnade is actually three truncated white columns standing erect surrounded by rubble. In his book on the Tempest Salvatore Settis provided a number of broken column images but none were as similar to Giorgione’s or as close in time as the ones in the S. Brisio chapel. Signorelli’s use of the broken columns could not be clearer. It indicates the destruction of the World.

In "How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World" Creighton E. Gilbert tried to identify the sources for Signorelli’s whole iconographic scheme in the S. Brisio chapel. He argued that two prominent churchmen, both associated with Orvieto, might have played pivotal roles. One was the young Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, the future Pope Paul III, and the other was a famous Venetian cardinal.

 "In this scenario a second powerful name should be mentioned, that of Cardinal Grimani, whose connection both with connoisseurship and with the Borgia group in control of Orvieto have been observed. It would be logical to see him seconding a proposal by Farnese." p. 115. 

Domenico Grimani was the son of the famous Doge as well as the Patriarch of Aquileia. He was also an avid art collector who is perhaps most well known for the magnificent illustrated Grimani Breviary. Gilbert points out that Grimani had strong ties to Orvieto.

 "Grimani too visited Orvieto in 1493 and 1495 with Farnese, Borgia, and the rest. More of interest is that in 1505 he built himself a vacation house below the city walls, at the abbey of Santa Trinita." p. 81.

 Signorelli’s work was completed in 1504 and the Tempest painted in 1509. It is not difficult to imagine Grimani describing Signorelli’s justly famous frescoes to eager Venetian hearers. Certainly, Giorgione’s use of the broken columns to symbolize the Fall of the Egyptian idols on the Flight into Egypt is strong evidence for the Grimani connection. On the other hand, the idea could have been conveyed to Signorelli by Grimani. 

Another sign of the connection between Signorelli and Giorgione is in the use of nudity. The following quotes from Gilbert’s work point out the novelty of Signorelli’s approach to nudity, 

“These saved are innovative in their nudity, surely unlike what Angelico had projected. All previous Judgments in this tradition contrasted the clothed saved with the naked damned,…This innovation, as such, seems not to have interested writers. Perhaps they found it only what one would expect in 1500, in the emerging High Renaissance, especially from a painter praised as an anatomist. Yet a closer look is surely warranted. At this period the saved appeared nude, outside a High Renaissance context, in the great sequence of Judgment paintings in northern Europe. …This was a time when the theme did not flourish in Italian painting. The nudity was logical in that the souls were regularly seen emerging naked from their tombs… Mainstream theology always affirmed that they would then be perfect bodies…." p. 80. "The nude saved do appear in Italy before Signorelli in various less noticeable contexts, presumably under northern influence…. The saved appear nude more conventionally in a large Venetian woodcut around 1500, possibly later than Signorelli…" p. 81. 

In the S. Brisio chapel Signorelli also depicted a nude Judith. This famous Jewish heroine was commonly regarded as a precursor of the Virgin Mary. Gilbert noted this unique portrayal as well as a northern equivalent.

 "Also about 1508, he [Niccolo Rosex da Modena] engraved a nude Judith, inscribed with her name. She is the only one in Italy of this period other than Signorelli’s monochrome found in this same outer bay of the chapel." p. 147. 

About five years after Signorelli completed his work in the S. Brisio chapel, Giorgione painted a nude woman nursing her child in the Tempest. Is it really that unimaginable to consider that she might be the Madonna?

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Gilbert, Creighton E.: How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World, Penn State, 2003.

Note: This post is a slightly revised version on the one published here 15 years ago.

Fra Bartolomeo and Giorgione

 The following post was originally published in the early days of Giorgione et al... on 4/30/2011. I re-post it here in somewhat more readable form, and add a link to paintings by Paris Bordone and Lorenzo Lotto depicting younger, vigorous St. Josephs.

Baccio della Porta, a noted Florentine artist, had been so moved by the death of Savonarola that he gave up his painting career and entered the Dominican order himself. He was given the name Fra Bartolomeo. In 1504 his superiors convinced him to take up his brushes again and become a kind of official Dominican artist in residence. A little while later the young Raphael began his sojourn in Florence and the two unlikely personalities became friends and associates. It is generally believed that Raphael helped Fra Bartolomeo in developing his craft, but if we look at the latter’s 1499 version of the "Rest on the Flight into Egypt" now in the Borghese Gallery, we can see that Raphael could just as well have learned from the friar. 

Fra Bartolomeo: Rest on the Flight into Egypt
1499, Borghese Gallery

In 1508 Fra Bartolomeo was sent to Venice to do some work for the Dominican house on the isle of Murano. It would have been hard for him not to have become acquainted with the work of Giorgione, another young genius. Besides his great reputation, Giorgione had just completed his spectacular frescoes on the façade of the newly rebuilt Fondaco dei Tedeschi. At the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Venice in 2010, Alessio Assonitis presented a paper entitled “Fra Bartolomeo and San Pietro Martire at Murano.” He noted the following:

 "As a friar-painter…Fra Bartolomeo was exempt from conventional pastoral duties.… His travels to the other two major centers of Italian painting were nothing but artistic sabbaticals which consented the friar to keep up-to-date with recent artistic developments.... Indeed, following his brief sojourn in Venice, Fra Bartolomeo was able to integrate elements of Bellini and Giorgione’s pictorial lexicon soberly and harmoniously….he also showed no reservations about borrowing compositional elements from Venetian artists like Carpaccio, Bellini, Giorgione and Titian." 

If we look again at Fra Bartolomeo’s version of the “Rest” in the Borghese Gallery and compare it with another version done after the visit to Venice we will see a striking change. 

The Borghese painting was done around 1499 and while it is often called an “Adoration” or a “Holy Family,” it is really a depiction of the “Rest on the Flight into Egypt.” There are the three figures in a landscape so characteristic of “Rest” images, as well as the monumental ruins representative of the fall of the Egyptian idols as the Infant Christ entered Egypt. Artists sometimes just used rocks and rubble to depict the destruction of the idols, but Fra Bartolomeo liked to emphasize the ruins. I would like to draw attention, however, to the figure of Joseph whose prominent position in the foreground represents his increased importance in Renaissance devotion. He is no longer a small figure off to the side or in the background. He is still portrayed as a very old man with a gray beard. 

Ten years later, after the trip to Venice, Fra Bartolomeo did another version of the Rest that is now at the Getty in Los Angeles. This painting depicts the encounter of the Holy Family with the young John the Baptist on the return from Egypt. Now there are four figures in the landscape but Fra Bartolomeo still features the ruins. However, Joseph now appears to be much younger. The beard is gone and he is middle-aged. He is certainly physically capable of protecting his Family. 

In my paper on Giorgione’s Tempest I interpreted that famous painting as “The Rest on the Flight into Egypt.”  I argued that the young man in the painting is St. Joseph. In the paper I also discussed an earlier Giorgione painting which has been mistakenly called “The Discovery of Paris.” This lost Giorgione only exists in seventeenth century copies but it is taken almost literally from an apocryphal account of the encounter of the Holy Family with robbers on the Flight into Egypt. In that early work Giorgione depicted Joseph as a very old graybeard. In the Tempest, done at the end of his short career, Giorgione chose to portray Joseph as a youthful, virile Venetian patrician.

What was going on in Venice at the beginning of the sixteenth century? Had artists finally caught up with the demands of religious reformers like Jean Gerson? In a study of Gerson, Brian Patrick McGuire noted that in the early fifteenth century the famed Chancellor of the University of Paris had called for a different artistic approach to Joseph. 

"The chancellor imagined Joseph as a young man, full of energy and potency, able to take care of his wife and son by hard work, and not the broken-down, tired figure of popular imagination…." "Gerson wanted a man who was virile and chaste, loving and affectionate, happy and fulfilled in his vocation….Such themes are expressed in greatest detail in Gerson’s Considerations on Saint Joseph, written between August and late September 1413. The text takes up more than thirty pages in the Glorieux edition and provides the basis for his later poem, the Josephina." Brian Patrick McGuire, “Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation,” Penn State, 2005. Pp. 236-7.

Girolamo Savonarola, another reformer interested in naturalistic depictions of sacred art, might have also played a role in this new approach to Joseph. In the paper mentioned above Alessio Assonitis referred to the work of scholars on Savonarolan influence in Venice.

 "Tafuri and Scapecchi have pointed out how certain religious circles in Venice had favorably accepted the Frate’s reformational program; Leathers Kuntz went so far to claim that Savonarola’s sermons had reinvigorated the reformational zeal of the Venetian nobility and popolani….Precisely due to the Serenissima’s relative tolerance, many of Savonarola’s works were published in Venice. Quite frequent were communications between Savonarolans and Venetian presses…." 

Whatever the reason, both Giorgione and Fra Bartolomeo changed their approach to St. Joseph in the first decade of the sixteenthth century. In the next decade Paris Bordone and Lorenzo Lotto would also paint a young, virile Joseph in depictions of the Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine. 

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