Giorgione's Tempest: The Bird on the Roof

 

Twenty years after seeing the subject of Giorgione's Tempest as "The Rest on the Flight into Egypt", I stil have found no reason to change my interpretation.  Everything I have read since 2005 has only confirmed my initial view that the the nude Woman nursing the Child is the Madonna, and that the young man with the staff is St. Joseph watching over his family. I also identified the broken columns, the city in the background, the plant in front of the Woman, and showed how they fit easily into the puzzle.

However, I must admit that originally I saw no need to identify the bird on the rooftop in the background.  I thought it too insignificant a detail, not realizing back then that every detail in a Renaissance painting is significant. It was only after an online discussion with the late Hasan Niyazi, whose Three Pipe Problem blog had become one of the leading art history sites on the web, that I decided to look into the bird on the roof.

Tempest: Detail *

It is difficult to see the solitary bird hardly visible on a rooftop in the background of Giorgione’s famous painting. Most of the many interpreters of the Tempest fail to mention the bird or attempt to explain its significance. In his 2007 catalog Wolfgang Eller could neither make a positive identification nor offer an explanation.

“A white bird with a long neck sits on the ridge of this roof. The depicted bird is probably neither a heron nor a cormorant, since both of these have a straight neck when they are seated;” **  

Never mind that the bird appears to be standing, this was all Eller had to say.

In 2004 Waldemar Januszczak identified the bird as a crane to support his rather fanciful BBC TV interpretation of the Tempest as the story of Demeter and Iasion taken from one sentence in Homer’s Odyssey. He argued that a crane is often shown with the goddess Demeter. He paid a lot of attention to this little figure in the background but failed to explain why Demeter is nursing one child although she had twins by Iasion.

Eventually, I found the source of the solitary bird in Psalm 102, one of the seven penitential psalms that were so popular during the Renaissance. All of the Psalms were recited weekly in monasteries throughout Europe. John Fisher, the ascetic English bishop and martyr under Henry VIII, had even written a treatise on the Seven Penitential Psalms. Here are the verses from the Jerusalem Bible (102, v.7-8), and the Latin Vulgate where it is Psalm 101.

I live in a desert like the pelican,
In a ruin like the screech owl,
I stay awake, lamenting
Like a lone bird on the roof

 Similis factus sum pelicano solitudinis: factus sum sicut nycticorax in domicilio.
( I have become like a pelican in solitude. I have become like a night raven in a house.)

Vigilavi, et factus sum sicut passer solitarius in tecto.
 (I have kept vigil, and I have become like a solitary sparrow on a roof.)

I was led to the Psalm interpretation after browsing the web for images of various crane like birds. The innumerable images available made it difficult, especially when trying to distinguish between cranes, herons, bitterns, storks, and even pelicans. Despite it’s curved beak even an ibis seemed possible.

Then I recalled that Giovanni Bellini had depicted a Grey Heron in his "St. Francis in the Desert", now in New York’s Frick Museum. John Fleming’s study of this famous painting demonstrated the connection between depictions of fauna and scriptural sources. 

Fleming noted that Bellini's "command of animal anatomy and vegetable forms reveals a close empirical observation, his vision of animal ecology would seem to reflect the literary sources of the Scriptures, and his desert wildlife gives visual form to the poetic diction of the Psalms, Isaiah, and Job." ***(35). 

But how can the well-known and distinctive pelican be confused with a grey heron? Fleming provided the answer.

A cursory iconographic survey of the well-known emblem of the “Pious Pelican” in the Middle Ages and Renaissance will reveal an entire aviary, birds we would be disposed to call pelicans, egrets, herons, eagles, storks, and swans, not to mention many that we would be hard pressed to give a name to at all. In ornithological terms, the “pelican” seems to be any large bird, especially any large water bird. In poetic terms, the pelican is almost any desert bird, so that the pelican and the passerus are treated as equivalents in monastic texts…. ( 42)

Of course, Fleming was discussing Bellini’s "St. Francis" and not Giorgione’s Tempest.

Nevertheless, a solitary bird on a roof lamenting the massacre of the Holy Innocents, symbolized by the storm, is certainly appropriate in a depiction of the “Rest on the Flight into Egypt.”  Even more if it is a large water bird associated with the desert and the Nile Delta. In my interpretation of the Tempest, I noted the connection.

The "Tempest” has one subject but more than one level of meaning. On a literal level it represents the escape of the Holy Family from the murderous havoc being visited on the children of Bethlehem and its environs. In the same passage of Matthew’s gospel where Joseph is warned to flee to Egypt, the evangelist records the plight of the  ”Holy Innocents,” and recalls the prophecy of Jeremiah,

"A voice was heard in Ramah, sobbing and loudly lamenting: it was Rachel weeping for her children,…because they were no more."

The solitary bird on the roof is the last piece of the Tempest puzzle. It fits very easily into an interpretation of the painting as "The Rest on the Flight into Egypt." As far as I can discover, it fits no other interpretation of the painting. 

###

* Image used by kind permission of David and Helen Orme, friends from England. When we met them in Venice in 2017, we had a chance to get as close as possible to the beautifully displayed Tempest in the Accademia. Click on the image to enlarge it and you will see that it is probably the best image of the bird available anywhere.

**Wolfgang Eller: Giorgione, Catalogue Raisonee,  p. 95.

***John Fleming, From Bonaventure to Bellini, an Essay in Franciscan Exegesis, Princeton, 1982, 42.

# For an earlier discussion of the Massacre of the Innocents and the solitary bird, see my February 7, 2013 post and note the comment by Poussin scholar David Backwood about a Poussin version.

Review. John Fleming: From Bonaventura to Bellini

                       

This year I plan to re-post some review essays that have appeared on Giorgione wt al... since its inception in 2010. Today, I repost an essay on John Fleming's study of Giovanni Bellini's St. Francis in the Desert, now in the Frick Museum. Since its original posting on 9/28/2014, it has become one of the most popular posts on this site.

******************************

For over 60 years the Frick Museum in New York City has been my favorite museum. It is a small, easily navigated site quite unlike the Metropolitan only a few blocks away on Fifth Avenue. Its magnificent collection of paintings, acquired for the most part during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by steel baron, Henry Clay Frick, spans the gamut of Western art from late Medieval to the Impressionists.*

                      

You cannot visit the Frick and fail to notice that patrons invariably stop in the great central living room to stare and wonder at Giovanni Bellini’s depiction of St. Francis.  On one occasion a museum employee confirmed my guess that this painting, despite the presence of works by the likes of Titian, Rembrandt, and Renoir, is the most popular in the whole collection.

Born in 1430 Giovanni Bellini is arguably the first great master of the Venetian Renaissance. The Venetian version of the Renaissance has long taken a back seat to the Florentine but in the last few decades it has come into its own and today most scholars would agree that Bellini and his younger successors, Giorgione, and Titian, can hold their own as painters with Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael.

Indeed, the Bellini family studio is now seen as one of the great sources of the Renaissance. Giovanni and his brother, Gentile, who at one point went to Constantinople to paint the Sultan, inherited the studio from their father, Jacopo. Andrea Mantegna, a great painter in his own right, married one of the Bellini sisters and exerted a powerful influence on the studio. Scholars also suspect that both Giorgione and Titian were apprentices at the Bellini studio before they broke out on their own.

Although he painted the St. Francis around 1480, Bellini continued to paint well into the next century. Until his death he was sought after and courted by public, religious, and private patrons. He is best known as a painter of Madonnas and groups of figures ranged around the Madonna and Child often called “sacra conversazione.” Nevertheless, the St. Francis is a unique work in the history of Renaissance art.

What is going on in the painting? St. Francis stands in the foreground a little off center wearing his familiar robe.  Behind him is a kind of wooden structure that seems to lead into a cave. The mid-ground is largely made up of a barren landscape whose primary occupant is a small horse or ass. Prominent in the upper left is an oddly shaped tree that appears to be leaning toward St. Francis. In the distant background we see a majestic towered city.

In one interpretation of the painting Francis is receiving the stigmata, the actual wounds of Christ, on his own body.  His hands are outstretched and close examination indicates barely visible wounds on his hands but traditional elements usually employed in depictions of the stigmata episode are absent. His companion, Brother Leo, is not shown and neither are Christ or an angel.

I prefer the interpretation of John V. Fleming in From Bonaventure to Bellini, an Essay in Franciscan Exegesis. In this often overlooked but extraordinary 1982 monograph Fleming argued that Marcantonio Michiel’s original description of the painting, when he saw it in the home of Venetian patrician, Taddeo Contarini, “St. Francis in the Desert,” was indeed correct.  Fleming saw the subject of the painting and every detail in it grounded in Franciscan spirituality.

The landscape in the painting is not La Verna, the site of the stigmata episode, but the desert of the Old Testament or Hebrew scriptures. In particular, it is the Egyptian desert. The prominent animal in mid-ground is the Onager or wild ass of the desert while the heron standing before it is a bird of the Nile delta.

Franciscans often associated their founder with Moses and Elijah and their life in the desert. In the background beneath the city there is a shepherd tending his flock just as Moses did before his encounter with the Lord. Indeed, the leaning tree so prominent in the upper left refers to the famous burning bush in which the Lord appeared to Moses. It is a laurel which at the time was believed to be impervious to fire. We also notice that Francis has removed his sandals and stands barefoot in the same manner as Moses in the presence of the Lord.

The wooden structure behind Francis is a Sukkoth, variously translated as tent, hut, booth, or tabernacle, a kind of portable structure used by the Israelites in their wanderings in the desert. The Sukkoth also recalls the scene of the Transfiguration when Christ was revealed in His glory accompanied by Moses and Elijah to the three apostles, Peter, James, and John. Dumfounded, Peter offered to build three booths or Sukkoth for Jesus and his guests.

If we look closely, we will see beneath the right hand of Francis a rabbit in a hole in the rock, and beneath his left hand a jug. The rabbit was a symbolic reference to Moses who hid his face from the Lord and the jug is a reference to Elijah. Indeed, the abundant vegetation sprouting around Francis is a garden or carmel, another reference to Elijah who was believed to have been the founder of the Carmelite order. Francis stands between Moses and Elijah in the same way as Christ stood between them at the Transfiguration. In Franciscan spirituality and imagery, Francis was the new Christ.

Just as Moses came to lead his people out of the slavery of Egypt, so too did Francis come to lead his followers out of the slavery of sin. The city in the background then is a place of danger and peril, both physical and spiritual. The desert is symbolic of the life of poverty and humility preached by the famous founder of the Franciscan order.

Most of the paintings acquired by Henry Clay Frick had a special meaning for him. A committed Mason, Frick admired Francis because of his love of Nature. Others who have viewed the painting since Frick added it to his collection perhaps have had their own reasons for admiring it. Even if we know nothing of Franciscan spirituality, Bellini’s painting is still an image of a human being standing open and receptive to the divine light and transforming the world because of it. **

###

* This review essay originally appeared as a guest post on Hasan Niyazi's popular Art history blog, "Three Pipe Problem." It was subsequently published on this site in September 2014, a year after Hasan's death. It has become one of the most popular posts on Giorgione et al...

** The Frick and Metropolitan Museum collaborated on a cleaning and restoration of the painting about five years ago. The effort resulted in an exhaustive study of the painting that I believe did not give as much attention to Fleming's interpretation as it deserved. See, Susannah Rutherglen and Charlotte Hale: In a New Light, Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert. The Frick Collection. New York, 2015. 

Giorgione: the Solitary Bird in the Tempest

In my interpretation of Giorgione's Tempest as "The Rest on the Flight into Egypt" I identified the nude Woman nursing the Child; the Man holding the staff; the broken columns; the City in the background; and even the plant in front of the Woman. I must confess that until a discussion at the popular art history blog, Three Pipe Problem, I had not seen the need to identify the solitary bird on the rooftop in the City. See here for the discussion on 3PP. Below is the original post dated 11/5/2010 that identified the bird on the rooftop lamenting the Massacre of the Innocents symbolized by the storm.*

The source of the bird barely visible on a rooftop in the background of Giorgione's "Tempest" can be found in Psalm 102, one of the seven penitential psalms. Here are the verses from the Jerusalem Bible (102, v.7-8), and the Latin Vulgate (101, v. 7-8). 

I live in a desert like the pelican, In a ruin like the screech owl, I stay awake, lamenting Like a lone bird on the roof; {101:7} Similis factus sum pellicano solitudinis: factus sum sicut nycticorax in domicilio. {101:7} I have become like a pelican in solitude. I have become like a night raven in a house. {101:8} Vigilavi, et factus sum sicut passer solitarius in tecto. {101:8} I have kept vigil, and I have become like a solitary sparrow on a roof. Latin Vulgate, Psalm 101. 

It is difficult to identify the solitary bird hardly visible on a rooftop in the city in the background of Giorgione’s famous painting. In his 2007 catalog Wolfgang Eller was one of the few to take notice but he could neither make a positive identification nor offer an explanation. “A white bird with a long neck sits on the ridge of this roof. The depicted bird is probably neither a heron nor a cormorant, since both of these have a straight neck when they are seated;” Wolfgang Eller: Giorgione, Catalogue Raisonee, p. 95. Never mind that the bird appears to be standing, this was all Eller had to say. 

In 2004 Waldemar Januszczak identified the bird as a crane to support his rather fanciful BBC TV interpretation of the Tempest as the story of Demeter and Iasion taken from one sentence in Homer’s Odyssey. He argued that a crane is often shown with the goddess, Demeter. He paid a lot of attention to this little figure in the background but failed to explain why Demeter is nursing one child although she had twins by Iasion.

I was led to the Psalm interpretation after browsing the web for images of various crane like birds. The innumerable images available made it difficult, especially when trying to distinguish between cranes, herons, bitterns, storks, and even pelicans. Despite it’s curved beak even an ibis seemed possible. 

Then, I recalled that Giovanni Bellini had depicted a Grey Heron in his St. Francis in the Desert, now in New York’s Frick Museum. John Fleming’s study of this famous painting provided the answer. Here is his explanation of Bellini’s pelican. “In ornithological terms, the “pelican” seems to be any large bird, especially any large water bird. In poetic terms, the pelican is almost any desert bird, so that the pelican and the passerus are treated as equivalents in monastic texts….” 

Of course, Fleming was discussing Bellini’s "St. Francis" and not Giorgione’s "Tempest". Nevertheless, a solitary bird on a roof lamenting the massacre of the Holy Innocents symbolized by the storm is certainly appropriate in a depiction of the “Rest on the Flight into Egypt.” Even more if it is a large water bird associated with the desert and the Nile Delta. 

Finally, there is the obvious connection with Franciscan spirituality. Below are some notes from Fleming’s study, From Bonaventure to Bellini, an Essay in Franciscan Exegesis. 

Giovanni Bellini’s desert is the Tuscan mountain called La Verna, but we must be prepared to discover that its flora and fauna are those of the Levant. That is to say, while the artist’s command of animal anatomy and vegetable forms reveals a close empirical observation, his vision of animal ecology would seem to reflect the literary sources of the Scriptures, and his desert wildlife gives visual form to the poetic diction of the Psalms, Isaiah, and Job. P. 35. 

[Desert hermits] “By their aspirations and deeds they join voice with the Psalmist: “I am become like to a pelican of the wilderness, I have watched, and I have become as a sparrow, all alone on the house top’” [Ps. 101: 7-8] p. 37.

[Desert birds] “ In the famous passage of Cassian’s history of the monastic life, that life’s highest form, eremitic anchoritism, is betokened not merely by a desert beast, but also by desert birds…. So masterful is Bellini’s technique that we can identify them with certainty as a grey heron and a bittern, as we would name them today. P. 40-41. 

The iconological difficulty presented by the pelicanus solitudinis is…the offspring of the word’s lexical familiarity. Unlike the unfamiliar nycticorax, a rara avis indeed, a pelican is both well known and highly distinctive. …But a pelican is not a heron; so how can his grey heron be considered a pelicanus solitudinis? The simple answer is that pelicanus/ pelican are false cognates….

A cursory iconographic survey of the well-known emblem of the “Pious Pelican” in the Middle Ages and Renaissance will reveal an entire aviary, birds we would be disposed to call pelicans, egrets, herons, eagles, storks, and swans, not to mention many that we would be hard pressed to give a name to at all. In ornithological terms, the “pelican” seems to be any large bird, especially any large water bird. In poetic terms, the pelican is almost any desert bird, so that the pelican and the passerus are treated as equivalents in monastic texts…. (p. 42) 

It is Augustine who underscored for us these associations of the pelican that are most poetically appropriate for Bellini. The pelican is a dweller of the Nile, a water bird and an Egyptian bird. Bellini gives us a wonderful rendition of a large and solitary water bird, an ancient symbol of the eremitic life…(p. 44)**

* This post is #7 on the list of page views of posts on Giorgione et al...

** John Fleming, From Bonaventure to Bellini, an Essay in Franciscan Exegesis, Princeton, 1982. 

###

Giovanni Bellini: St. Francis in the Desert

 

                      

Today, I repost a review essay on John Fleming's study of Giovanni Bellini's St. Francis in the Desert, now in the Frick Museum. since its original posting on 9/28/2014, it has become the fourth most popular post on this site.

******************************

For over 60 years the Frick Museum in New York City has been my favorite museum. It is a small, easily navigated site quite unlike the Metropolitan only a few blocks away on Fifth Avenue. Its magnificent collection of paintings, acquired for the most part during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by steel baron, Henry Clay Frick, spans the gamut of Western art from late Medieval to the Impressionists.*

                      

You cannot visit the Frick and fail to notice that patrons invariably stop in the great central living room to stare and wonder at Giovanni Bellini’s depiction of St. Francis.  On one occasion a museum employee confirmed my guess that this painting, despite the presence of works by the likes of Titian, Rembrandt, and Renoir, is the most popular in the whole collection.

Born in 1430 Giovanni Bellini is arguably the first great master of the Venetian Renaissance. The Venetian version of the Renaissance has long taken a back seat to the Florentine but in the last few decades it has come into its own and today most scholars would agree that Bellini and his younger successors, Giorgione, and Titian, can hold their own as painters with Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael.

Indeed, the Bellini family studio is now seen as one of the great sources of the Renaissance. Giovanni and his brother, Gentile, who at one point went to Constantinople to paint the Sultan, inherited the studio from their father, Jacopo. Andrea Mantegna, a great painter in his own right, married one of the Bellini sisters and exerted a powerful influence on the studio. Scholars also suspect that both Giorgione and Titian were apprentices at the Bellini studio before they broke out on their own.

Although he painted the St. Francis around 1480, Bellini continued to paint well into the next century. Until his death he was sought after and courted by public, religious, and private patrons. He is best known as a painter of Madonnas and groups of figures ranged around the Madonna and Child often called “sacra conversazione.” Nevertheless, the St. Francis is a unique work in the history of Renaissance art.

What is going on in the painting? St. Francis stands in the foreground a little off center wearing his familiar robe.  Behind him is a kind of wooden structure that seems to lead into a cave. The mid-ground is largely made up of a barren landscape whose primary occupant is a small horse or ass. Prominent in the upper left is an oddly shaped tree that appears to be leaning toward St. Francis. In the distant background we see a majestic towered city.

In one interpretation of the painting Francis is receiving the stigmata, the actual wounds of Christ on his own body.  His hands are outstretched and close examination indicates barely visible wounds on his hands but traditional elements usually employed in depictions of the stigmata episode are absent. His companion, Brother Leo, is not shown and neither are Christ or an angel.

I prefer the interpretation of John V. Fleming in From Bonaventure to Bellini, an Essay in Franciscan Exegesis. In this often overlooked but extraordinary 1982 monograph Fleming argued that Marcantonio Michiel’s original description of the painting, when he saw it in the home of Venetian patrician, Taddeo Contarini, “St. Francis in the Desert,” was indeed correct.  Fleming saw the subject of the painting and every detail in it grounded in Franciscan spirituality.

The landscape in the painting is not La Verna, the site of the stigmata episode, but the desert of the Old Testament or Hebrew scriptures. In particular, it is the Egyptian desert. The prominent animal in mid-ground is the Onager or wild ass of the desert while the heron standing before it is a bird of the Nile delta.

Franciscans often associated their founder with Moses and Elijah and their life in the desert. In the background beneath the city there is a shepherd tending his flock just as Moses did before his encounter with the Lord. Indeed, the leaning tree so prominent in the upper left refers to the famous burning bush in which the Lord appeared to Moses. It is a laurel which at the time was believed to be impervious to fire. We also notice that Francis has removed his sandals and stands barefoot in the same manner as Moses in the presence of the Lord.

The wooden structure behind Francis is a Sukkoth, variously translated as tent, hut, booth, or tabernacle, a kind of portable structure used by the Israelites in their wanderings in the desert. The Sukkoth also recalls the scene of the Transfiguration when Christ was revealed in His glory accompanied by Moses and Elijah to the three apostles, Peter, James, and John. Dumfounded, Peter offered to build three booths or Sukkoth for Jesus and his guests.

If we look closely, we will see beneath the right hand of Francis a rabbit in a hole in the rock, and beneath his left hand a jug. The rabbit was a symbolic reference to Moses who hid his face from the Lord and the jug is a reference to Elijah. Indeed, the abundant vegetation sprouting around Francis is a garden or carmel, another reference to Elijah who was believed to have been the founder of the Carmelite order. Francis stands between Moses and Elijah in the same way as Christ stood between them at the Transfiguration. In Franciscan spirituality and imagery, Francis was the new Christ.

Just as Moses came to lead his people out of the slavery of Egypt, so too did Francis come to lead his followers out of the slavery of sin. The city in the background then is a place of danger and peril, both physical and spiritual. The desert is symbolic of the life of poverty and humility preached by the famous founder of the Franciscan order.

Most of the paintings acquired by Henry Clay Frick had a special meaning for him. A committed Mason, Frick admired Francis because of his love of Nature. Others who have viewed the painting since Frick added it to his collection perhaps have had their own reasons for admiring it. Even if we know nothing of Franciscan spirituality, Bellini’s painting is still an image of a human being standing open and receptive to the divine light and transforming the world because of it. **

###

* This review essay originally appeared as a guest post on Hasan Niyazi's popular Art history blog, "Three Pipe Problem." It was subsequently published on this site in September 2014, a year after Hasan's death. It has become one of the most popular posts on Giorgione et al...

** The Frick and Metropolitan Museum collaborated on a cleaning and restoration of the painting about five years ago. The effort resulted in an exhaustive study of the painting that I believe did not give as much attention to Fleming's interpretation as it deserved. See, Susannah Rutherglen and Charlotte Hale: In a New Light, Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert. The Frick Collection. New York, 2015. 

Giovanni Bellini: St. Francis in the Desert

                      

For over 50 years the Frick Museum in New York City has been my favorite museum. It is a small, easily navigated site quite unlike the Metropolitan only a few blocks away on Fifth Avenue. Its magnificent collection of paintings, acquired for the most part during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries by steel baron, Henry Clay Frick, spans the gamut of Western art from late Medieval to the Impressionists.*

You cannot visit the Frick and fail to notice that patrons invariably stop in the great central living room to stare and wonder at Giovanni Bellini’s famous, “St. Francis in the Desert.” On one occasion a museum employee confirmed my guess that this painting, despite the presence of works by the likes of Titian, Rembrandt, and Renoir, is the most popular in the whole collection.

Born in 1430 Giovanni Bellini is arguably the first great master of the Venetian Renaissance. The Venetian version of the Renaissance has long taken a back seat to the Florentine but in the last few decades it has come into its own and today most scholars would agree that Bellini and his younger successors, Giorgione, and Titian, can hold their own as painters with Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael.

Indeed, the Bellini family studio is now seen as one of the great sources of the Renaissance. Giovanni and his brother, Gentile, who at one point went to Constantinople to paint the Sultan, inherited the studio from their father, Jacopo. Andrea Mantegna, a great painter in his own right, married one of the Bellini sisters and exerted a powerful influence on the studio. Scholars also suspect that both Giorgione and Titian were apprentices at the Bellini studio before they broke out on their own.

Although he painted the St. Francis around 1480, Bellini continued to paint well into the next century. Until his death he was sought after and courted by public, religious, and private patrons. He is best known as a painter of Madonnas and groups of figures ranged around the Madonna and Child often called “sacra conversazione.” Nevertheless, the St. Francis is a unique work in the history of Renaissance art.

What is going on in the painting? St. Francis stands in the foreground a little off center wearing his familiar robe.  Behind him is a kind of wooden structure that seems to lead into a cave. The mid-ground is largely made up of a barren landscape whose primary occupant is a small horse or ass. Prominent in the upper left is an oddly shaped tree that appears to be leaning toward St. Francis. In the distant background we see a majestic towered city.

In one interpretation of the painting Francis is receiving the stigmata, the actual wounds of Christ on his own body.  His hands are outstretched but it is hard to see if there are wounds. Moreover, traditional elements usually employed in depictions of the stigmata episode are absent. His companion, Brother Leo, is not shown and neither are Christ or an angel.

I prefer the interpretation of John V. Fleming in From Bonaventure to Bellini, an Essay in Franciscan Exegesis. In this often overlooked but extraordinary 1982 monograph Fleming argued that Marcantonio Michiel’s original description of the painting, when he saw it in the home of Venetian patrician, Taddeo Contarini, “St. Francis in the Desert,” was indeed correct.  Fleming saw the subject of the painting and every detail in it grounded in Franciscan spirituality.

The landscape in the painting is not La Verna, the site of the stigmata episode, but the desert of the Old Testament or Hebrew scriptures. In particular, it is the Egyptian desert. The prominent animal in mid-ground is the Onager or wild ass of the desert while the heron standing before it is a bird of the Nile delta.

Franciscans often associated their founder with Moses and Elijah and their life in the desert. In the background beneath the city there is a shepherd tending his flock just as Moses did before his encounter with the Lord. Indeed, the leaning tree so prominent in the upper left is the famous burning bush in which the Lord appeared to Moses. It is a laurel which at the time was believed to be impervious to fire.

We also notice that Francis has removed his sandals and stands barefoot in the same manner as Moses.

The wooden structure behind Francis is a Sukkoth, variously translated as tent, hut, booth, or tabernacle, a kind of portable structure used by the Israelites in their wanderings in the desert. The Sukkoth also recalls the scene of the Transfiguration when Christ was revealed in His glory accompanied by Moses and Elijah to the three apostles, Peter, James, and John. Dumfounded, Peter offered to build three booths or Sukkoth for the Lord and his guests.

If we look closely, we will see beneath the right hand of Francis a rabbit in a hole in the rock, and beneath his left hand a jug. The rabbit was a symbolic reference to Moses who hid his face from the Lord and the jug is a reference to Elijah. Indeed, the abundant vegetation sprouting around Francis is a garden or carmel, another reference to Elijah who was supposed to have been the founder of the Carmelite order. Francis stands between Moses and Elijah in the same way as Christ stood between them at the Transfiguration. In Franciscan spirituality and imagery, Francis was the new Christ.

Just as Moses came to lead his people out of the slavery of Egypt, so too did Francis come to lead his followers out of the slavery of sin. The city in the background then is a place of danger and peril, both physical and spiritual. The desert is symbolic of the life of poverty and humility preached by the famous founder of the Franciscan order.

Most of the paintings acquired by Henry Clay Frick had a special meaning for him. A committed Mason, Frick admired Francis because of his love of Nature. Others who have viewed the painting since Frick added it to his collection perhaps have had their own reasons for admiring it. Even if we know nothing of Franciscan spirituality, Bellini’s painting is still an image of a human being standing open and receptive to the divine light and transforming the world because of it. 

###

* This review essay originally appeared as a guest post on Hasan Niyazi's popular Art history blog, "Three Pipe Problem." After Hasan's untimely death almost a year ago, his blog has been shut down although hopefully not forever. 

Bellini, Giorgione, Titian bibliography

I would highly recommend the following three short books for anyone interested in the Venetian Renaissance. I have written about them at length in earlier posts but would just like to present a brief overview here.

The authors are Salvatore Settis, one of Italy’s leading art historians and cultural figures and the director of Pisa’s famed Scuola Normale Superiore; the late Rona Goffen, who before her death was one of America’s leading and most prolific historians of Venetian Renaissance art; and John V. Fleming, Professor emeritus of Literature at Princeton University.

Giorgione: Tempest
Accademia, Venice

In researching my interpretation of the Tempest as “The Rest on the Flight into Egypt,” no book has been of greater assistance than “Giorgione’s Tempest,” written by Salvatore Settis in 1990. In his introduction Professor Settis laid down a series of iconographical ground rules that should be used in any interpretation. *

For example,

Interpreting the Tempest means providing “a well documented explanation for each feature, and fitting all together into one persuasive framework. (2)

He argued that the famous painting must be treated like a puzzle and that any interpretation must be sure that all pieces fit, and fit easily without being squeezed into position.

He gave a very comprehensive analysis of practically every interpretation up to 1990 and included a very useful comparison chart. Even though his own very detailed and erudite explanation of the Man and the Woman as Adam and Eve was strongly criticized, his book remains today the most useful starting point for any study of Giorgione and his famous painting.

Titian: Pesaro Altarpiece
Frari, Venice

I owe a great debt to Rona Goffen. When I originally saw the nudity of the woman in the Tempest as Giorgione’s way of depicting the Immaculate Conception of Mary, I just assumed that the doctrine was important in Catholic Italy. However, it was only after a chance encounter with Goffen’s “Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice” that I came to realize just how important the Immaculate Conception was in Giorgione’s Venice. **

Goffen wrote many books and articles on the Italian Renaissance but in my opinion “Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice” was her best work. Subtitled, “Bellini, Titian and the Franciscans,” she never discussed Giorgione’s “Tempest” but her discussion of the historical background solidified my thoughts about the famous painting. Moreover, she insisted that the art of the Venetian Renaissance could only be understood by attempting to see it through the eyes of contemporary Venetians.

She studied the writings of prominent clerics like Bernardino of Siena, a patron saint of Venice, and Lorenzo Giustiniani, the saintly first Patriarch of Venice, and pointed out the importance, but also the difficulty, of seeing things through their eyes.

                 

Their influence on Venetian piety must have been as pervasive during the Renaissance as it is difficult today to gauge in any precise way. Nevertheless, their thoughts and writings constitute part--a very important part--of the original context of sacred art in Renaissance Venice. One must attempt to reconstruct that context in the historically informed imagination.

In this book Goffen concentrated her attention on the Frari and on its incomparable altarpieces. The dust jacket of her book gives a good summary.

The church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice encapsulates the history of Venetian Renaissance art as well as the histories of a patrician family, a religious order, and a city….All this is embodied in the altarpieces painted for the Frari by two of the greatest masters of Venetian art—Giovanni Bellini and Titian.

Any trip to Venice must include the Frari.

Giovanni Bellini: St. Francis in the Desert
Frick Museum, NY

Finally, I include John V. Flemings study of Giovanni Bellini’s famous “St. Francis in the Desert”, entitled “From Bonaventura to Bellini.” Fleming argued that Bellini followed an iconographical scheme based on a profound understanding of Franciscan spirituality.***

He questioned the prevailing “Stigmatization” interpretation and offered an alternative based on his knowledge of medieval Franciscan texts.

It is a painting full of ideas, ideas much in vogue among serious Christians of the later Middle Ages and almost universally ignored by modern art history. The purpose of my own study is to give some account of these ideas—that is to say, in some fashion to “explain” the painting….the more profound and difficult intention is to suggest some of the ways in which fundamental Franciscan ideas, ideas often by nature more poetic and pictorial than discursive, could find powerful expression in word and image. (5)

He argued that every detail in the painting is there by design, and proceeded in chapter by chapter to present a masterful explanation of all the iconographical elements in the painting: the city in the background, the flora and fauna, the details of the saint’s habitat, and even the tiny chartula tucked in his belt.

He realized that he had to deal with accumulated prejudice.

For critics of a certain viewpoint, the word ‘medieval’ is naughty, , and the suggestion that, for instance, Bellini might have had medieval inspiration in painting a Madonna must be advanced apologetically. By implication, his sources should be pagan and cabbalistic, not scriptural and patristic. (7)

Fleming’s book is a primer on how to look at a Renaissance painting. He did not discuss Giorgione’s Tempest but I was emboldened by his attempt to take on the prevailing interpretations. I also found a degree of similarity between the Tempest and Bellini’s St. Francis. In particular, Fleming’s analysis of the prominent bird in the mid-ground helped me to identify the mysterious bird on the rooftop of Giorgione’s painting.

The book by Settis is still available in paperback. The other two are harder to find. ###

*Salvatore Settis, Giorgione’s Tempest, Interpreting the Hidden Subject, Chicago, 1990.

**Rona Goffen, Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice, Yale, 1986.

***John V. Fleming:  From Bonaventure to Bellini, an Essay in Franciscan Exegesis, Princeton, 1982.

       

        

       

Giorgione and Giovanni Bellini

Despite obvious differences there are similarities between “St. Francis in the Desert,” painted by the young Giovanni Bellini around 1475, and the “Tempest” painted by Giorgione over 30 years later.

In both paintings there is a city in the background. In the “Tempest” the main characters have turned their backs on it, and in the “St. Francis,” the main figure is oblivious to its existence. In both cases there is a prominent iconographical element in the mid-ground. In the Bellini it is the donkey or Onager, the wild ass of the desert; in the Giorgione, it is the broken columns.

In the left foreground of the “Tempest” the young man acts as an interlocutor whose over the shoulder gaze at the woman and child draws the viewers attention to her. In the “St. Francis” the strangely bent laurel tree directs attention to St. Francis. Finally, in the foreground both painters have moved the main character away from the center and placed them on the right to emphasize that the whole narrative ends with them.

My wife and I took advantage of a lovely spring day to take the commuter line from Fairfield to New York City to view the recently restored “St. Francis in the Desert” at the famous Frick Museum on 5th Avenue and 70th Street right across from beautiful Central park.

The painting has long been a personal favorite of mine. I remember seeing it at the Frick more than 50 years ago when I first visited the Museum as a young college student. At that time I had little interest in Art, sacred or otherwise, but the building, Henry Clay Frick’s former home, and its great collection struck me with awe. Even then Bellini’s painting had pride of place in the magnificent living room where it was hung between two Titian portraits. Years later I discovered that this painting besides being one of Mr. Frick’s favorites was also the most popular with the general public.

Recently the Frick decided to collaborate with the conservation department of the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art in order to clean the painting, and subject it to extensive scientific investigation. After the cleaning the painting was returned to the Frick and placed in an exhibition gallery right off the central courtyard or garden where it will stay throughout the summer.
Online computers allowed visitors to access the results of the investigation, that can also be found on the Frick’s own website. The most striking result was the revelation of the incredibly detailed underdrawing used by Bellini. The detail is almost Van Eyckian. Especially impressive is the drawing of the Saint’s head.

Moreover, what the investigation failed to find might be of even more significance. Some have long argued that the painting depicts St. Francis in the act of receiving the Stigmata (wounds of Christ) on his body during a retreat on the mountain of LaVerna. One of the objections to this interpretation has been that the traditional signs of the stigmata episode, such as Christ or an angel in the sky, are missing. Some were apparently hoping that the new investigation would reveal that the heavenly figures had been cut or trimmed out of the painting. However, the results were negative. The painting on display in the Frick is what Bellini painted.

I must confess that I was struck by the failure of the Museum and its online analysis to pay much attention to John Fleming’s 1982 study of the painting, “From Bonaventura to Bellini.” Fleming argued that every detail in the painting is there by design, and that Bellini was following an iconographical scheme based on a profound understanding of Franciscan spirituality.
I have discussed Fleming’s interpretation in a guest post at 3 Pipe Problem. Here is an excerpt. [The painting can be explored in detail on the Frick website or on the google Art project]

The landscape in the painting is not La Verna, the site of the stigmata episode, but the desert of the Old Testament or Hebrew scriptures. In particular, it is the Egyptian desert. The prominent animal in mid-ground is the Onager or wild ass of the desert while the heron standing before it is a bird of the Nile delta.

Franciscans often associated their founder with Moses and Elias and their life in the desert. In the background beneath the city there is a shepherd tending his flock just as Moses did before his encounter with the Lord. Indeed, the leaning tree so prominent in the upper left is the famous burning bush in which the Lord appeared to Moses. It is a laurel which at the time was believed to be impervious to fire.

We also notice that Francis has removed his sandals and stands barefoot in the same manner as Moses. The wooden structure behind Francis is a Sukkoth, variously translated as tent, hut, booth, or tabernacle, a kind of portable structure used by the Israelites in their wanderings in the desert. The Sukkoth also recalls the scene of the Transfiguration when Christ was revealed in His glory accompanied by Moses and Elias to the three apostles, Peter, James, and John. Dumfounded, Peter offered to build three booths or Sukkoth for the Lord and his guests.

If we look closely, we will see beneath the right hand of Francis a rabbit in a hole in the rock, and beneath his left hand a jug. The rabbit was a symbolic reference to Moses who hid his face from the Lord and the jug is a reference to Elias. Indeed, the abundant vegetation sprouting around Francis is a garden or carmel, another reference to Elias who was supposed to have been the founder of the Carmelite order. Francis stands between Moses and Elias in the same way as Christ stood between them at the Transfiguration. In Franciscan spirituality and imagery, Francis was the new Christ.

Just as Moses came to lead his people out of the slavery of Egypt, so too did Francis come to lead his followers out of the slavery of sin. The city in the background then is a place of danger and peril, both physical and spiritual. The desert is symbolic of the life of poverty and humility preached by the famous founder of the Franciscan order.

Fleming’s book was written almost 30 years ago. How long does it take for a new theory based solidly on textual evidence to gain acceptance in scholarly circles?

###

Giorgione Tempest: The Solitary Bird

In my interpretation of Giorgione's "Tempest" as "The Rest on the Flight into Egypt" I identified the nude Woman nursing the Child; the Man holding the staff; the broken columns; the City in the background; and even the plant in front of the Woman. I must confess that until a recent discussion at the popular art history blog, Three Pipe Problem, I had not seen the need to identify the solitary bird on the rooftop in the City.

See here for the discussion on 3PP.

See below for the identification of the solitary bird on the rooftop.

The source of the bird barely visible on a rooftop in the background of Giorgione's "Tempest" can be found in Psalm 102, one of the seven penitential psalms. Here are the verses from the Jerusalem Bible (102, v.7-8), and the Latin Vulgate (101, v. 7-8).

I live in a desert like the pelican,
In a ruin like the screech owl,
I stay awake, lamenting
Like a lone bird on the roof;


101:7} Similis factus sum pellicano solitudinis: factus sum sicut nycticorax in domicilio.

{101:7} I have become like a pelican in solitude. I have become like a night raven in a house.

{101:8} Vigilavi, et factus sum sicut passer solitarius in tecto.

{101:8} I have kept vigil, and I have become like a solitary sparrow on a roof.

Latin Vulgate, Psalm 101.

It is difficult to identify the solitary bird hardly visible on a rooftop in the city in the background of Giorgione’s famous painting. In his 2007 catalog Wolfgang Eller was one of the few to take notice but he could neither make a positive identification nor offer an explanation.

“A white bird with a long neck sits on the ridge of this roof. The depicted bird is probably neither a heron nor a cormorant, since both of these have a straight neck when they are seated;” Wolfgang Eller: “Giorgione, Catalogue Raisonee,” p. 95.

Never mind that the bird appears to be standing, this was all Eller had to say.

In 2004 Waldemar Januszczak identified the bird as a crane to support his rather fanciful BBC TV interpretation of the Tempesta as the story of Demeter and Iasion taken from one sentence in Homer’s Odyssey. He argued that a crane is often shown with the goddess, Demeter. He paid a lot of attention to this little figure in the background but failed to explain why Demeter is nursing one child although she had twins by Iasion.

I was led to the Psalm interpretation after browsing the web for images of various crane like birds. The innumerable images available made it difficult, especially when trying to distinguish between cranes, herons, bitterns, storks, and even pelicans. Despite it’s curved beak even an ibis seemed possible.


Then I recalled that Giovanni Bellini had depicted a Grey Heron in his "St. Francis in the Desert", now in New York’s Frick Museum. John Fleming’s study of this famous painting provided the answer. Here is his explanation of Bellini’s pelican.

“In ornithological terms, the “pelican” seems to be any large bird, especially any large water bird. In poetic terms, the pelican is almost any desert bird, so that the pelican and the passerus are treated as equivalents in monastic texts….”

Of course, Fleming was discussing Bellini’s "St. Francis" and not Giorgione’s "Tempest". Nevertheless, a solitary bird on a roof lamenting the massacre of the Holy Innocents symbolized by the storm is certainly appropriate in a depiction of the “Rest on the Flight into Egypt.” Even more if it is a large water bird associated with the desert and the Nile Delta. Finally, there is the obvious connection with Franciscan spirituality.

Below are some notes from Fleming’s study, "From Bonaventure to Bellini, an Essay in Franciscan Exegesis."

Giovanni Bellini’s desert is the Tuscan mountain called La Verna, but we must be prepared to discover that its flora and fauna are those of the Levant. That is to say, while the artist’s command of animal anatomy and vegetable forms reveals a close empirical observation, his vision of animal ecology would seem to reflect the literary sourcesof the Scriptures, and his desert wildlife gives visual form to the poetic diction of the Psalms, Isaiah, and Job. P. 35.

[Desert hermits] “By their aspirations and deeds they join voice with the Psalmist: “I am become like to a pelican of the wilderness, I have watched, and I have become as a sparrow, all alone on the house top’” [Ps. 101: 7-8] p. 37.

[Desert birds] “ In the famous passage of Cassian’s history of the monastic life, that life’s highest form, eremitic anchoritism, is betokened not merely by a desert beast, but also by desert birds….So masterful is Bellini’s technique that we can identify them with certainty as a grey heron and a bittern, as we would name them today. P. 40-41.

The iconological difficulty presented by the pelicanus solitudinis is…the offspring of the word’s lexical familiarity. Unlike the unfamiliar nycticorax, a rara avis indeed, a pelican is both well known and highly distinctive. …But a pelican is not a heron; so how can his grey heron be considered a pelicanus solitudinis?

The simple answer is that pelicanus/ pelican are false cognates….A cursory iconographic survey of the well-known emblem of the “Pious Pelican” in the Middle Ages and Renaissance will reveal an entire aviary, birds we would be disposed to call pelicans, egrets, herons, eagles, storks, and swans, not to mention many that we would be hard pressed to give a name to at all. In ornithological terms, the “pelican” seems to be any large bird, especially any large water bird. In poetic terms, the pelican is almost any desert bird, so that the pelican and the passerus are treated as equivalents in monastic texts…. (p. 42)

It is Augustine who underscored for us these associations of the pelican that are most poetically appropriate for Bellini. The pelican is a dweller of the Nile, a water bird and an Egyptian bird. Bellini gives us a wonderful rendition of a large and solitary water bird, an ancient symbol of the eremitic life…(p. 44)

John Fleming, "From Bonaventure to Bellini, an Essay in Franciscan Exegesis", Princeton, 1982.