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Giovanni Andrea Gilio
Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters
Edited by Michael Bury, Lucinda Byatt and Carol M. Richardson
Translated by Michael Bury and Lucinda Byatt
Los Angeles, The Getty Research Institute, 2018
Review by Giovanni Mazzaferro. Part Two
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| Michelangelo, The Last Judgement, 1536-1541, Vatican City, Sistine Chapel Source: https://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/m/michelan/3sistina/lastjudg/1lastjud.html via Wikimedia Commons |
Go back to Part One
Against Mannerism?
The Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of
Painters has almost always been considered by XX century’s art criticism as
an expression of a wave of revolt against the excesses of Mannerism and in favour
of a simpler aesthetic, more comprehensible to the public, more effective in
directing the power of images towards the nourishment of authentic religious
sentiment. In this sense, the passages stigmatizing the 'excess of effort' in the
representation of the figures with respect to their readability would be revealing:
“It appears to them [note of the editor: the uncultivated
painters] when they have created a saint, that they have done everything required if they have expendend all their ingenuity and care of twisting his legs or arms or neck, forcing him into a strained pose that is both inappropriate and ugly; and then without further thought, they set to work with the brush” [13]. These painters were
those who Gilio defined - with a particularly happy expression – as the 'anatomists
of frenzy': “it happens that in their figures of whatever shape or size, the new anatomists of frenzy attribute to men, weapons, and horses alike such awkward movements, flexions, and actions that nature weeps and the art laughs at seeing so many blunders, barbarisms, and errors being made all the time” [14]. He
considered Michelangelo as the greatest expression of this type of painters. He
felt his errors and abuses be, moreover, particularly serious, because he was
unanimously recognized as the 'prince' of the painters, the one who brought
painting back to the beauty of the ancients and whose example is then followed
by all modern artists. To speak of an 'attack on Michelangelo', however, would
not be entirely correct. The attack did not focus on the stylistic aspects, but
rather on the appropriateness of the images. Gilio wrote: “For truly he [Michelangelo] deserves eternal praise for having restored the art to its decorum, and for having elevated it and rendered it illustrious, thus equaling the ancients and surpassing the moderns” [15]. At
the same time, speaking of the resurrection of the dead in the Last Judgment, he let Ruggiero
Corradini, the only religious of the group of dialogues, say: “I certainly believe that Michelangelo, as was asserted earlier and is indeed public knowledge, did not err through ignorance but rather because he wished to embellish his brush and satisfy the art [of painting] rather than the truth. I am certain that he would have gained more approval and been more admired if he had painted the mistery as history demanded, rather than as he has shown it” [16].
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| Michelangelo. The Last Judgement (detail: Mary and Christ), Vatican City, Sistine Chapel Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michelangelo_-_Cristo_Juiz2.jpg |
In his
introductory essay, Michael Bury analysed the arguments of those twentieth
century art critics who interpreted Gilio as the source of an aesthetic taste
stigmatizing the excessive formalism of mannerism. Strangely enough, if
anything, he included among them Paola Barocchi (“and Barocchi, who herself clearly disapproves of 'formalism', co-opts Gilio to her cause”, p. 10). To be honest, this last statement might
be questioned, as neither in her commentary nor in the notes to the text
Barocchi showed a particular empathy for Gilio, at least in my view. On the contrary,
she made clear, and reiterated on several occasions, that the critical
judgements of the Fabriano priest were deprived of any stylistic foundation. As
well known, Michelangelo and especially his Last Judgment received almost
immediate censures both from the religious, the literary and the artistic world;
they were also the object of 'popular' disagreement, as witnessed in the famous
text 'pasquinata' dating back, probably, to 1544 [17]. Yet Ms Barocchi was well
aware that, while Aretino's criticisms were based on a moralism actually fed on
resentment (since Michelangelo did not follow the iconographic program proposed
to him by the writer in question), and while those of Dolce found their inner
reasons in the promotion of classicism (indeed opposed in stylistic terms to
the modern way practiced in Florence), Gilio was a 'non-artist'. Indeed, in a dialogue
populated by religious, literates and men of law, but by no painters, he carried
out a reasoning tied to the pure 'content' of the images.
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| Marcello Venusti's copy of Michelangelo's Saint Blaise and Saint Catherine in the Last Judgement before the intervention of the censorship. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Judgment_(Michelangelo)#/media/File:Marcello_venusti, _santi_biagio_e_caterina_prima_della_censura,_1549.jpg |
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| Michelangelo, The Last Judgment (detail: Saint Blaise and Saint Catherine), Vatican City, Sistine Chapel Source: Wikimedia Commons |
The art of not seeing
Gilio
totally lacked any historical evolutionary vision of Italian painting and was unaware
of making any stylistic differences between modern artists. He mentioned Raphael
in very few occasions and, all in all, always only as a colleague of Michelangelo, without differentiating among them. Within an intellectual framework centred on the concept of the rebirth
of the arts (adapted to the well-known Vasarian scheme), he simply mentioned all
of Buonarroti's predecessors as 'the painters who proceeded Michelangelo',
without distinction whatsoever. Those artists were generally referred to as
clumsy (but we do not know, for example, if he was talking about Giotto or
fifteenth-century artists), but bearers of a more sincere spirituality because
they were not giving in to the 'caprice'. Thus, when Gilio was praising the
ancients because they put wings on angels and haloes to saints, one would think
about Gentile da Fabriano’s Villa Romita
polyptych. However, although our author had praised the painted imaged of the Madonna
in his sonnet (see, in Part One, the paragraph 'The writings of Gilio'), he did
not mention one single primitive, including any of his compatriots. Neither
made he ever any reference to the question of Vasari's 'toscanocentrism' nor to
the art of Venetian origin, which was also well known and widespread in the
Marches region.
In truth, Gilio
was a non-painter who saw artworks only from a content point of view. And even
when Ms Barocchi (as she often did in her notes) spoke of a counter-reformed criticism
against Mannerism, it is clear that she meant 'Mannerism' as a chronological,
not a stylistic connotation. The 'strained' figures of the painters who yielded
to the 'caprice' (think of Battista Franco’s Adoration of the Shepards in the Gabrielli Chapel of Santa Maria sopra Minerva) were not rejected
in stylistic terms. They were considered ludicrous because an angel who seemed
to fall from the sky, like a dove whose wings have been twisted or as if it were
a human being in free fall, did not fit with a representation of history, in
terms of decorum [18].
The art of the ancients
The
ahistorical dimension of Gilio's thought found its corollary in the definition
of perfect art. The perfect art - the perfect painting, in particular - was
that of the ancient Greeks and Romans, as Pliny told us in his anecdotes. It was
the art practiced by the nobles and forbidden to the slaves, but above all it was
an art that nobody could see anymore, because it had totally disappeared. As
it was often the case, in a world in which Pliny continued to be an
indispensable point of reference to give painting a justification of nobility (obviously
shared with poetry), Gilio's art did not exist in reality, but was perfect by
definition. If - as already said - Michelangelo may have equalled the ancients,
he nevertheless failed to respect the decorum, thereby invalidating the work.
Reviewing Vasari's Lives, I wondered which
position the author from Arezzo might hypothetically ever taken in the context
of the eighteenth-century quarrel over the ancient and the modern, and I
answered, no doubt, that he would have aligned himself with the moderns.
Gilius, on the other hand, was a partisan of the old, of an ancient art which he did
not know in his artistic forms, but which was entrenched in the core thrust of
the Roman Catholic ideology against Lutheranism: the power of tradition.
The power of tradition
In the name of
tradition, when the Dialogue raised
the when the use of painting in churches had begun, Gilio took the following position: “I think that this happened right from the beginning, and I start from the argument that, since the new Christians were not yet well established in their faith, this holy custom was initiated to make them forget paganism and firmly root the new religion in their minds; by seeing the image of our Lord and the saints, they would forget their gods. This is also confirmed by the fact that at the Second Council of Nicaea and the Sixth Council of Costantinople there are some indications that painting began to be used in churches from the time of the most holy Apostles” [19]. In the essay contained in the present volume, Carol
M. Richardson insisted on the value of the tradition in the politics of
counter-reformed images: “In dramatic contrast, this memory was for Catholics the manifestation of the collective, shared experience of community, its history and identity: it was, in Rome's view, the very source of ecclesiastical authority” [20]. And
again, she stated: “In Gilio's Dialogo, it is precisely this underlying system of tradition and authority to which Ruggiero, the cleric, refers when asked to explain how sacred images should be painted: "It is a difficult matter to construct a correct and infallible argument that it should be like this and could not be otherwise, since we have no law or rule about this matter, except the evidence of what was the custom among painters prior to Michelangelo (which, as you lawyers know, is law), and except what Guglielmus Durandus wrote about it in his Rationale divinorum officiorum... [21]. […] I think painters were given rules or methods of procedure, but, in the same way that many, many books have perished, so too these [rules] have been lost. But custom is enough for us, since, as I mentioned, it has the force of law, given that it lasted for so many years before being altered and ruined by the subjective conceptions of modern painters” [22].
All of this,
obviously, had an especially theological value. According to Richardson, Gilio
chose the literary form of the Dialogue
to weigh extensively, on every single aspect, the arguments in favour of this
or that thesis and finally to allocate to the competent authority (i.e. to the
ecclesiastical top officials, whose supremacy was hierarchically recognized by
the Council) the decision on what is admissible in art. Ultimately, that of
Gilio would not be the 'local' implementation of a doctrine already decided
elsewhere, but rather a contribution to the debate for the new Tridentine
church, which would be rationalized years later with the writings of Carlo Borromeo and Paleotti [ 23].
Whether he
intentionally wanted it or, simply, he was not able to go further – as Paola
Barocchi wrote in 1961 - the results achieved by the author from Fabriano were
thin: "We would have expected a detailed
and systematic prescriptive text, like Bruno [24] had already sketched beyond the Alps and Molano [25] and Paleotti would soon do; it should have
been all the more detailed and systematic, as the casuistry that the full
throng of Italian art offered to the experience was the richest. On the
contrary, it seems that precisely this richness, with the cultural pressure
that it exercised and with the good offices of the rhetorical mediation,
hindered Gilio or triggered in him the categorical implacability proper to the
theologians, as evidenced by his own method of negative exemplification (conducted
both against abstract paradigms, and - and it is the most important and
significant part of the dialogue - on the concrete and living body of
Michelangelo's Judgment)"[26].
A laborious reading
I focused
on these aspects because, without keeping them in mind, the reading of the
dialogue might seem even more difficult and disturbing than it is. One cannot
hide behind a finger. Any art historian (or those who, like me, are carefully
following art literature) cannot help but read Gilio's writing with a sense of
annoyance, not so much for the sin of 'lese majesty' against Michelangelo, but
for the absence of any proof of artistic appreciation towards the style of this
or that other painter. One is waiting for Godot, and of course Godot does not
arrive. At most one can console himself with some colourful expression that
breaks the monotony and mediocrity of the writing: it is the case, for example,
of the passage in which Gilio blamed as "smerdacarte" (literally, somebody spreading shit on paper [27])
those who printed a very questionable version of the Last Judgment from which an unspecified painter, called Piersimone,
drew for a sacred representation in a Fabriano oratory. For the rest, we must be
extremely patient and read why the Judgment
should compulsorily depict all men and women as being thirty-three old, why all
dead shall resurrect in the same instant and therefore we shall not pretend
that there are some already judged in heaven and others that they are coming
out of the tombs, why Christ shall not be beardless, Mary shall not have
compassionate air, the angels shall have wings and not look like to make
physical efforts, the demons shall not struggle with the angels and so on.
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| Michelangelo, The Last Judgment (Detail: Charon), Vatican City, Sistine Chapel Source: Wikimedia Commons |
The decorum
The
concerns, in short, are purely of an iconographic order. From this point of
view, I feel that the initial partition between poetry painting, history painting
and mixed painting and the subsequent subdivision between the categories of 'true', 'fake' and 'fabulous' represent those 'abstract paradigms' of which Barocchi
spoke in 1961 and which I have already mentioned above. As true point of
doctrine, the art creator shall create images that respect the principles of
decorum, on which Michael Bury dwells for a long time. According to Gilio, decorum corresponds
to the 'truth of the figures', i.e. to the faithful transposition from the
texts of history to the images. First of all, what is meant by texts of history?
For Gilio, it was essentially a matter of the Holy Scriptures. History painting
would be nothing more than sacred painting. And the painter should be nothing
but someone translating from the written to the figurative form. A particularly
heavy task, of course, because while a book containing 'mistakes and abuses'
can be easily amended, images on church walls are accessible to a much larger
audience, have a much deeper effect and, if wrong, must be completely
destroyed. In his task as a translator, naturally, the painter must rely on
those who interpret the Scriptures (i.e. the theologians): “Nor would I like [the painter] to follow the opinion of the crowd in composing his histories, but rather, if he does not wish to make mistakes, the opinion of learned and wise men, of authoritative and approved writers. Because by reading good books to learn the truth about the subject matter, he will be able to know what are abuses and what are not” [28].
To be
honest, it appears clearly in the dialogue that, according to Gilio, there are
two types of decorum: the decorum of art and the decorum of stories. The decorum of art
consists of the set of technical solutions that the artists have developed over
the centuries to maximize the mimetic effect of nature. It has therefore a
technical value. Michelangelo would be the non plus ultra of the decorum of art.
But the nobility of painting is not a question of technique. It is from this
point of view that artists may commit abuses and errors: to show how good they
are in realizing their representations: “I think that they [note of the editor: the artists] do it in order to display the power of the art of painting, for that has always been what those practising it have wanted to do. For they can then represent all the muscles and all the limbs of [Christ's] beautifully constructed body, for no finer has I think ever been seen. It is for this reason that Fra Sebastiano's flogged Christ in San Pietro in Montorio has been so much praised” [29].
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| Sebastiano del Piombo. The Flagellation of Christ, 1516-1524, Rome, Church of San Pietro in Montorio Source: Peter1936F tramite Wimedia Commons |
The decorum of the stories consists instead in the total fidelity of the representation
with respect to what is revealed in the Scriptures (or, in the absence of a
clear indication, of what is transmitted through tradition, as we have seen
above). Bury sees in Gilio a clear reflection of what Leon Battista Alberti said
about the decorum expressed by in his De pictura,
and it assumes therefore that Gilio must have read it. On this aspect, I allow
myself not to be fully aligned. The idea of decorum proposed by Alberti and
even agreed by Leonardo was linked to the representation of the figure, to the
correct rendering of the proportions of the human body; in short, it was an
aspect that pertains to the 'decorum of art', from Gilio’s viewpoint. On these
things - we are rather certain - the author understood nothing, and was never
interested on them. From the dialogue it appears that, most probably, he never read
anything in artistic matters that went beyond Vasari's Lives and (perhaps) Dolce. To believe that he knew Alberti's text
means thinking of him as somebody interested in an aesthetic problem, something
not really belonging to his concerns.
The nude
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| Michelangelo. The Last Judgement (Detail: A Group of the Saved), Vatican City, Sistine Chapel Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Michelangelo,_giudizio_universale,_dettagli_33.jpg |
In reality,
within the general law that provided for the adherence of history painting to
the aural test of 'good books', there was only one exception, and it concerned
the nude. It is true - Gilio wrote - that according to the Scriptures we will
all rise naked, and when the time comes there will be no shame, because we
would be pure and perfect as before the original Sin, but it is equally true
that all of us today are afflicted and thus affected by our bodily and material
instincts. It follows that the exposure of the nude is deplorable and must be
absolutely avoided, especially within the sacred buildings and especially with
regard to male and female saints. Moreover, if Michelangelo painted naked
saints within the Last Judgment, he
did it not because of a careful reading of the 'good books' (which, once again,
cannot be a direct reading, but must be mediated through the clergy , on pain
of Protestant heresy) but due to the 'caprice' and the 'decorum of art': "I think Michelangelo wanted to imitate the ancients, who, for the most part, made their figures naked in order better to show the excellence of the art in the portrayal of muscles, veins, and other parts of the body"[30].
The ugly and the anti-classic
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| Raphael, Transfiguration (detail), Vatican City, Vatican Museum Source: https://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/r/raphael/5roma/5/10trans5.html via Wikimedia Commons |
Gilio's
analysis - as we have said - was not that of an art expert and, as such, did
not challenge Mannerism as a style. Anyone who thinks that the author stated a 'classicist'
preference will change his mind after reading about the motion of the
affections: it was a naturally fundamental argument for a counter-reformed
author, because painters communicate the message of faith to the viewer through
the rendering of the feelings of the characters in the paintings. Quite indicatively,
first of all, two works were mentioned as a positive example: one by Raphael
and the other by Michelangelo. This demonstrates that the criticisms Gilio made
in other circumstances were on the 'truth of the subject', and not on the artistic
capabilities of the two artists: “But why do I go on borrowing examples from the ancients when there are so many by Michelangelo and Raphael in Rome? Raphael, in the Transfiguration, which is now to be seen in San Pietro in Montorio, painted an old man who brings his possessed son to the Apostles. [The old man] appears hardly able to walk and shows in his face the great suffering he is going through on account of his son's illness. And the son himself, with his strained movement [note of the editor: it
is here that the ‘effort’ is absolutely congruent], swollen throat, and distorted hands, as is characteristic of those afflicted in this way, appears to refuse to approach the Apostles. What can one say about Michelangelo's bearded Saint Paul? Does he not appear to show ecstasy, terror, stupor and to be out of his mind following the great event that has happened to him?” [31]
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| Michelangelo, The Conversion of Saul (detail), Vatican City, Paolina Chapel Source: https://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/m/michelan/2paintin/4paul5.html via Wikimedia Commons |
The same
topic was addressed a few pages later, coming to support the need for the ugly,
the frightful, and the truculent, when required by the Scriptures. So, it should
be enough with painting saints who were martyred without them seem suffering,
enough with depicting the 'beautiful ideal' with body parts from different
models: “I have identified another abuse with respect to the person of our Savior, which it would no one knows hot to correct, and it is this: [painters] do not know, or do not wish to know, how to express his disfigurement at the time of the Passion, when he was beaten, when Pilate showed him to the people saying 'Ecce homo', when in such pain he remained nailed to the Cross, so that Isaiah said of him that he no longer had the form of a man. It would move people to repentance much more if he were seen bloody and deformed, rather than beautiful and delicate”
[32]. Gilio let Troilo say that he had reasoned with the painters many times
and he had heard from them that something was not suited to the decor of art.
Once again, therefore, the true dichotomy was between the decor of art (which
must succumb) and the decor of images.
The fortune of the Dialogue
Let me
please conclude briefly with some considerations about the fortune of Gilio’s Dialogue. There is no doubt about the
recent one: since Schlosser dedicated a few pages of his Kunstliteratur to the work, Gilio was quoted on every possible
occasion. Naturally, it was not a question of a 'fortune', but rather in
critical terms, i.e. of the 'misfortune' of a work considered insignificant in
itself, and merely seen as a symptom of a moralist counteroffensive aimed at
stifling the freedom of artistic practice. Ms Barocchi proposed, in her
philological note [33], a bibliographic list of the contemporary works that mentioned Gilio; in essence, they were only Raffaello Borghini's Il Riposo (1584) and Possevino’s Bibliotheca selecta (which was simply meant
to be the ‘positive’ version of the Index
of prohibited books). Bury, on the other hand, believes that the reaction
to Gilio's writing was wider and deeper than it is believed, even if it was underground
and not manifest. In this regard, he quoted Lomazzo, Armenini and, in following
years, Federico Borromeo (p.9). Difficult to say what the reality is. Gilio’s writing
enunciated ideas that - as known - were certainly not isolated in the sixties
of the sixteenth century (and not only with reference to the strict notes
addressed to the Last Judgment). It
is difficult to distinguish between direct and indirect influence.
From this point of view, however, a fact must
be acknowledged: while embracing many of Gilio's ideas (in the sense that they
were a common heritage of the religious world), Cardinal Paleotti, in his Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images of 1582 never quoted his predecessor from Fabriano. In the no doubt
most important (and far superior than Gilio’s) theoretical text of the
Counter-Reformation, the Cardinal abandoned the dialogical form. He composed an
encyclopaedic treatise, which unfortunately remained unfinished. But even here,
we must not make hasty judgments: as Carol M. Richardson wrote - see above – this
was precisely what Giovanni Andrea, after all, wished.
NOTES
[14] G.A. Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters… quoted, p. 150
[15] G.A. Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters… quoted, p. 157.
[16] G.A. Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters… quoted, p. 173.
[17] This is the text: “O you who criticize the Florentine [Michelangelo], think about the painting a bit. You will see that every figure is entirely appropriate within the chapel of the divine Jesus. There is Saint Catherine, with bowed head, naked as nature made her, and other saints standing there soberly, showing their arses to don Paolino" [Note of the editor: the Pope], Bury, p. 19.
[18] The English edition identified the painting with the Adoration of the Shepherds by Battista Franco (pp. 144-145). This interpretation seems to me preferable to that of Ms Barocchi, who attributed the painting to Filippino Lippi’s Annunciation (see Barocchi (edited by etc, p .. 589 n.2).
[19] G.A. Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters… quoted, p. 227.
[20] Carol M. Richardson, Gilio’s point of view in G.A. Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors…, quoted, pp. 45-63, particularly p. 52.
[21] Durante’s Rationale Divinorum Officiorum dated back to the end of the 13th century.
[22] Carol M. Richardson, Gilio’s point of view in G.A. Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors…, quoted, pp. 45-63, particularly p. 55
[23] This thesis is fascinating. However, I would like to point out that the dialogue ended by stating that the problems linked to the representation of sacred images would be solved if and when ‘our Francesco Agostini' would print the work he had written on painting. Francesco Agostini was a painter and sculptor born in Fabriano and active mainly in his homeland and in Rome. The remission of the solution of the problem to Agostini’s authority does not seem in line with Richardson’s thesis; if anything, it argued in favour of the exaltation of the cultural abilities of the 'small Fabriano world'.
[24] Konrad Braun (Conradus Brunus), De imaginibus in Opera Tria, Mainz, 1548.
[25] Jan van der Meulen (Johannes Molanus), De Picturis et Imaginibus Sacris, pro verum earum usu contra abusus, 1570, Leuven, 1570
[26] Giovanni Andrea Gilio, Degli errori de’ pittori… in Trattati d’arte, Vol. II quoted, p. 532
[27] More elegantly, the English translators rendered the term with the phrase “these people, who defile the paper they use”.
[28] G.A. Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters… quoted, p. 140.
[29] G.A. Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters… quoted, p. 133-134.
[30] G.A. Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters… quoted, p. 184.
[31] G.A. Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters… quoted, p. 119.
[32] G.A. Gilio, Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters… quoted, p. 133.
[33] Giovanni Andrea Gilio, Degli errori de’ pittori… in Trattati d’arte, vol II cit., p. 544
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