Original subtitles

Good afternoon. In this lecture, I want to further introduce you to the art of Antonello

da Messina. We looked at one of his works last time, St. Jerome, in his study, and closed our

discussion in that lecture of the early Giovanni Bellini with the introduction of Antonello.

Today, he's here for his own sake, for part of the lecture, for the exquisite beauty of his paintings,

and also for his transforming impact upon Venetian art in general, and Giovanni Bellini in particular.

It would be nice to give much more time to Antonello, but I am, because of the Venetian

connection, confining myself to the works that he did in Venice and that had such a marked impact.

There, and they include many of his most famous works. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say

that it was the the wedding, the melding of the lessons of Antonello to the generous and ardent

spirit of Giovanni Bellini that made Bellini become one of the greatest masters of the Renaissance. Bellini

was a great painter. That was obvious from the earlier things we've seen, but the lessons of Antonello,

as we will see them, liberated him to become a greater painter, a painter who is among the

finest in Italian art. But back to Antonello. Born in Sicily, now we haven't discussed any painters

from the south of Italy. Antonello was born in Sicily, presumably in or near Messina, from which he gets

his name, but he probably trained in Naples. Antonello was born about 1430. He's the only southern Italian artist

of significance during the Quattrocento. He exhibits the strong influence of Flemish painting of Jan van Eyck

and his followers, and we talked about that in looking at the St. Jerome in the last

lecture. That model, the Flemish model, sometimes inspired Antonello's interest in descriptive detail,

as it did in that painting of Jerome in his study. But even more importantly, it introduced him to the

inclusion of landscape backgrounds in his paintings, and most importantly of all, to the adoption of the

oil medium for his paintings. The oil medium has Flemish origins. His encounter with Flemish art was

almost certainly in Naples. There is no evidence that he ever went to northern Europe. The 19th century

literature and so forth assumed that he had, but he does not seem to have, nor did he need to, because

in Naples there were Flemish-trained painters, and there were many Flemish paintings, including some

by Jan van Eyck himself. We know that to be the case. So Antonello's training in Naples is posited

between, in the decade between about 1445 and 1455. He traveled widely, including to Rome and to Venice,

and he returned often to Messina, where he died in 1479. Antonello was apparently invited to Venice

by the Venetian consul in Tunis, Pietro Bon, B-O-N. Pietro Bon must have met him in Naples,

and we know that he offered him a major commission for a large painting on the main altar in the Church

of San Cassiano in Venice, where the Bon family had strong connections. The resulting painting

was revolutionary, and we will discuss it, but I want to reserve it to hold it back until we've looked

at other works by Antonello first. As I have already stressed, the example that Antonello gave to the

Venetians of the artistic possibilities of the oil medium proved revolutionary for Venetian painting.

He was not the first to introduce oils into Venice, but his skillful use of the oil medium,

richly nuanced, atmospherically translucent, coloristically vibrant, all the things you can

do with the oil medium, done so well by Antonello, caused many other Venetian painters to adopt oils in

place of the older medium of tempera or in conjunction with it. The luminosity that the oil medium made possible

was masterfully utilized by Antonello to model his faces with a minimum of line and with an effect of

light in shadow, half lights, light in shadow, that resembled Leonardo's sfumato technique.

Antonello's softly voluminous figures appeal to the eye and to the tactile sense. Oil painting originated in

Flanders, modern Belgium, and Antonello certainly learned it from Flemish artists and Flemish art, the

example of looking at the paintings themselves, in Naples, as I say, where paintings from that school

and artists are known to have been. I might interject to say that there is a long tradition

in the 15th century and before of connections between the Netherlands, between Flanders,

and the south of Europe, not only in Naples, but in Spain. In fact, the connection between Spain and

Naples has a lot to do with the fact that Naples was a center as well. There was trading,

that lots of art was commissioned or purchased by the Spanish king to go into the collections

in Spain. There's a lot of connection through the decades and the centuries, so it's not surprising to

find Antonello encountering Flemish art there. We make too much sometimes of how they knew Flemish

painting. If we had a list of all the Flemish paintings that the Italians had seen, we'd be

astonished, I think. Excuse the digression. In 1475, Antonello painted two small versions of the

crucifixion that are quite similar at first glance, but contrast markedly in expressive intent. The first

one in London today in the National Gallery was painted, as I say, in 1475, and in it Antonello isolates

the crucified Christ against the sky with a cup-like horizon below him and the arms of the cross nearly

touching the sides of the frame. Below, the Madonna and Saint John the Evangelist sit upon the ground,

their backs also nearly touching the frame. It's a silent, iconic presentation. Look at it a little

further. This cup-like horizon is one of the keys to it, it seems to me. That and the partially,

the almost arched top, you see the top the frame was angled in, so you had a bending in of the top of

the composition. And then the cup of the horizon echoed, and there's a distant mountain, possibly even

distant water. Hard to say. And then in the middle ground, there is a lake, again a flat circular shape

with some medieval turreted buildings on it. Then we move into a greener area here in the foreground,

a kind of green background for the, for Golgotha itself. And then the place of Golgotha is marked

clearly by the skulls on the ground, the skull on the ground, the place of the skull in front of it.

Yet this is not a narrative scene. This is, except for John and Mary, we don't have any of the other

actors in this. This is not the Crucifixion as a story. It is the crucified Christ in a landscape

with the Madonna and John, and they're seated in the most original way, especially the Madonna. Seated

with legs crossed, it seems, almost under her, on the ground. I don't know, outside of Antonello,

anyone who did this. And it has not only a sense of humility, but a tremendous sense of weariness to it.

The way she sits there, it's just an emptying quality of the body, an emptied quality of the

body. And that cup shape, by the way, of the rising is here as well, in the two bodies, here in these two

figures. They also form a cup shape at the bottom of the cross. It is a striking, a striking interpretation.

Now the other version is today in Antwerp, in the Royal Museum there, done at the same time. We don't

know who commissioned these two, I don't think. And this one is more complete because the two thieves,

on their crosses, have been brought in. And yet, we don't have anyone else. We don't have the, we don't

have those who put him on the cross. We don't have the Centurion. We don't have any of these figures at

all. So we have a slightly more complete cast, but it's still not a narrative crucifixion in the usual

sense. The Madonna again is seated in that way on the ground, but now in the picture a little more. And

John kneels, and he too is into the picture a bit more. And we have not merely one, but a number of

skulls on the ground marking the place as Golgotha. The whole of the landscape appears to be much drier,

more barren, less, less appealing in, in that sense, in the green sense, and in the fertile sense,

than in the previous, in the previous version. We do have this cup at the background again. This time

it's the lake moved a little further back into the, into the picture. It seems to me that he included

the thieves almost solely for their expressive potential, because he's placed them on the most

remarkable crosses. Not a cross like Jesus is crucified upon, which is a finished cross, very,

very high, very high, but one which is a carpentered cross, which is a true cross. Whereas the two

thieves are on trees, which have been fashioned into crosses, they've had their limbs lopped off,

and the artist makes crosses of them in, again, a very original, very imaginative fashion. But what

is most intriguing and most powerful here is that those trees on either side that the thieves are

crucified on are arched outward like a drawn bow and arrow, like a drawn bow, and as though to just

snap those bodies into space. It's, it's, it is so much, so much tension in that small detail,

that it infuses the scene with an almost unbearable sense of tension and of pain. The contrast between

those arched tensed bodies and the straight vertical central body is really quite remarkable. I don't

know whether there's any meaning symbolically between these two, the contrast between these tree

crosses and the carpentered cross or not. I haven't encountered it before. Landscape became even more

significant in Giovanni Bellini's paintings, where they often depicted the Venetian mainland territory that

the Venetians called terra firma. We know that word well enough, and terra firma were their mainland

possessions. Interestingly, it's not even documented that Giovanni Bellini met Antonello, but it's impossible

that he did not. He could not have failed to have met this phenomenal young painter who'd come to town.

And despite the difficulty of dating Giovanni Bellini's paintings, it's equally unlikely that his art could

have developed as it did without the intervention of Antonello's example. Two of Bellini's paintings from

the early 1480s provide evidence of that in influence. One of them is the Transfiguration,

probably painted between 1480 and 85, but as I say, these dates are not fixed. It's in Naples today,

in the Capodimonte Museum. The Transfiguration shows an increased interest in landscape painting, to be sure,

for Giovanni, and broad structural brushwork made possible by the oil medium. And both of these,

I think, may be traced to Antonello and his example. The Transfiguration is an unfamiliar

theme to many viewers. Indeed, it's often only partially understood theologically.

In the Transfiguration, in this event, Jesus, together with Peter and John and James, goes to a mountaintop to pray.

The disciples, on this occasion, witnessed Jesus, quote, transfigured before them, and his face did

shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light. And then they saw Moses and Elijah talking with

him. By invoking the law, Moses, and the prophets, Elijah, the Gospels here confer a very significant authority.

Upon Jesus. Bellini plays down the visionary quality of the narrative, whereas Raphael,

I didn't show it to you, but a late Raphael plays up the visionary. Here, it's played down. His figures

are on a modest rise, not even a mountaintop, as we would think of it, a modest rise with a rocky

enscarpment at the near edge here, quite a dramatic one, even though it's just tucked in at the front.

The Old Testament visitants who have come, Moses and Elijah, are given immense dignity,

flanking him here, standing on either side of Jesus. They're very powerful, dignified figures,

but human, very human. They are solid, and they don't look at all visionary. They look absolutely

credible and real. Bellini did follow the text in giving Jesus magnificent white robes.

The Gospels, by the way, make it clear when you read this event that the Apostles saw Moses and

Elijah, who is called Elias frequently, and did not turn away from the sight, and yet you see that they

seem to be turning away here. So what they're turning away from is the voice of God. It was because of the

voice of God saying, this is my beloved son, issuing, quote, out of the cloud, that they fearfully

fell on their face and were sore afraid. This scene, whose mystical ecstatic potential made it

popular in Byzantine art, was given a very different interpretation by Giovanni. It has often been observed

that he had a pantheistic response to religion, that he expressed the divine through nature. Jesus's head

here, for instance, and hands are in the sky. They're above the horizon. And the voice, which all of them

hear, is from the sky, a benediction over the serene landscape. In Giovanni's St. Francis in Ecstasy,

the breathtaking landscape becomes the true Franciscan protagonist. Pantheism suffuses this painting.

It is one of the most breathtaking evocations of light as a spiritually transforming force

to be found anywhere in painting. It's set on the mainland, of course, since Venice itself offered no

such landscape vistas. The saint, arms outspread, face fully into the radiant daylight. He has already

received the stigmata. One has to look close at the picture to see them, but he has received the

stigmata. And the subject is therefore a less common one. Usually we see St. Francis receiving the stigmata,

and in the sky, a seraphim holding the crucified Christ, a small cross, or the vision of Christ,

who, from whose wounds the stigmata are transferred to Francis. We don't see that here. And so there is a

kind of communion with creation, a sort of hymn to nature in this painting that is in fact a hallmark

of the story of Saint Francis, of his life. His mouth, in fact, is open here as if he were in song or

prayer to, as he said, brother-son. And yet, it may be, there may be a, a, a, a reception of the stigmata,

or just have been here, because there are two different kinds of light in this picture. A lower

light, it all comes from the left, and it floods the picture, but the lower light, the more natural one,

moves across, graces the landscape and the figure here, and then there's a brilliant light from the

upper left-hand corner because of the way it strikes the figure of the saint, strikes the lectern in the

background, strikes the rock. They, that more brilliant light seems to be a light of a different

order. And so one light is the morning light, and the other one is this brilliant supernatural light,

which could be argued, and has been argued, to reflect the experience of the stigmatization.

This is obviously an almost mystical approach to it at that, if that is the identification. But you see,

the animals and birds hear a crane, hear the ass, are turning toward the light. They too are aware of it.

This tree seems to be blown to the right by the force of that brilliant light, sort of quivering in the

light. It's a, it's an amazing descriptive catalog of nature, not merely the crags and crevices in the

rocks here, but all of the trees and plants and animals, rabbits, all sorts of, of objects, his wooden clogs,

the saints under the lectern at the lower right-hand side, the reading book, the, the Bible, and the,

the, um, and the skull on top of it, but just an entire catalog of such things back into the landscape

where we have, uh, where we have architecture situated on the hill as well.

This naturalism obviously reflects Flemish naturalism, the kind that Antonello is thought

to have introduced. But the spatial development is more cohesive than anything found in Antonello,

and it also, this landscape in cohesive spatial construction, surpasses that that we just saw

in his own transfiguration. As I said at the outset, Antonello's arrival in Venice was apparently the

result of an invitation. The Venetian consul in Tunis, who must have met Antonello in Naples, gave him the

commission that I mentioned earlier, uh, for a major altarpiece in the church of San Cassiano in Venice.

That and his other paintings, uh, that we've looked at were all produced during the nearly two years stay,

the years that he stayed in Venice. But it was the San Cassiano altarpiece that revolutionized Venetian

painting, which is a fact difficult to explain and to understand when one confronts the mere fragment

that is left today, uh, in a museum in Vienna, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Instead of the altarpiece

as it was made, we have now three panels, three fragments from it, which have been mounted together and

put on the wall in Vienna, and as beautiful as they are, they speak to hardly at all to what was made

originally. Antonello responded to the challenge of the prominent placement of this picture of the high

altar by demand, by designing a painting which broke the mold for such altarpieces. He started with the

established type of the enthroned Madonna with saints, accompanied by saints, with which we've become

familiar, the so-called sacred conversation, the Sacra Conversazione. This type, this sacred conversation

type, has its origins in northern European painting, but it was no longer new in Italy, but it was still

being developed. It was still undergoing change. And there were two major precursors in Venice and the

Veneto of this subject type, which we have seen. Let me show you the San Cassiano altarpiece to the left,

the fragment together with Vivarini's polyptych of 1446, in which a unified space was created for the

saints and the Madonna and the angels. It's all one space, but it's a highly artificial and unlikely one,

with its sense of a stage here, like a little drama, and also with its open top. The whole thing

has a sense of fantasy to it rather than reality. More important was Mantegna's 1459 San

Zeno altarpiece, in which the real frame, you see them together here now, the real frame,

was continued by the architecture of the painted space. And I mean all parts of the of the real frame,

the columns, all four of them, have columns painted just behind them, moving us into the space. It's

continuing and making the frame part of the space, but it's still, in the Mantegna, it still divides the

surface of the painting into three parts. It's still a strong, separate, tripartite painting in

the older Gothic and Byzantine manner. Should I, I wonder, re-emphasize the reason that the development

of the sacred conversation type of altarpiece was significant? Otherwise it sounds like art historical

jargon. Instead of saints and Madonnas occupying isolated niches of space, belonging to another world,

with no interaction with us or with their fellow saints, the innovation of the Sacra Conversazione

placed them all together in a unified space that was a reflection, sometimes even a continuation,

of the space that we stand in. The potential for interaction, even if these saints don't necessarily,

quote, converse, means that we find in these painted figures a human relationship to ourselves,

that they are real to a greater degree. Real human figures, however sacred, standing or sitting

together in a real space, the degree of identification enhances the empathetic response

of you and I to the painting. In short, this is not just an academic or artistic device. It's part of a

fundamental shift in the presentation of the sacred scenes to the faithful or simply to the viewer.

Back to the San Cassiano altarpiece alone. It was later radically cut down, dismembered, savaged,

really, in the early 17th century, and only a small portion still exists. Based on these three

fragments, which make up what you see, and copies of other fragments that were subsequently lost,

and above all the evidence of other paintings that were immediately influenced by Antonello's painting,

it is generally accepted that this painting in its full state was of decisive importance for Venetian art

at this moment. Its innovations survive in the rich legacy of emulation by other artists. His design involved

unifying the painted space inhabited by the enthroned Madonna and child, and originally eight, not four,

eight, life-size standing saints, and coordinating that space and the figures with the actual frame of the altarpiece.

This pictorial solution was similar to Mantegna's painting, but without the tripartite division of the frame.

Therefore, Antonello's altarpiece offered something significantly new. It discarded the old three-part

format and provides a continuous progression from the viewer's space through the frame's door into the

contiguous painted space. Notice—I'm being redundant for a purpose. I think reiterating this may help—notice

that the viewpoint, the eye level, is that of the saint's eyes, the standing saint's eyes, and just below

the knees of the seated Madonna. Extend the saints in your imagination full length. Add two more on either

side, add a domed niche behind the throne, and enclose the saints in an architectural space,

and voila, you have the reconstructed altarpiece. Well, well, yes, very hard to visualize, I agree.

Much, much easier instead to look at the most famous altarpiece that was inspired by the San Cassiano

altarpiece, Giovanni Bellini's San Giobbe altarpiece.

Giobbe, G-I-O-B-B-E, the name of the altarpiece and the church from which it came, is simply Job,

J-O-B. San Giobbe altarpiece painted about 1488, perhaps, now in the Academy Gallery. I've saved this

painting in Antonello's painting, the San Cassiano altarpiece, which was in progress from the time that he

arrived in Venice for this moment in order to make this essential comparison with Bellini at this point.

This is Bellini's greatest surviving altarpiece from the 1480s, and it documents the influence of

Antonello while showing Bellini's increasingly monumental designs. It's such a great painting,

I hardly know where to begin. It's a radiantly calm painting, which continues the innovative spatial

unity of Antonello's now fragmentary painting. This is, in a sense, one step from the Antonello,

so let it stand for it. With a fictive barrel vault, this is all painted, all flat, with a fictive barrel

vault leading to an apse-like chapel with a half dome, the painted space continued the architecture of

the altar frame, which, by the way, the frame still exists in the church that this painting came from,

in the church, on the same altar with another painting in it, while the painting, leaving the

frame behind, went to the museum. But we know what it looked like and looks like. Remarkably,

the fictive architecture is given its true size in relation to the enthroned Madonna and Six Saints.

In other words, you see how big this fictive chapel is. Usually, in such paintings,

it was a much reduced space to let the figures dominate. Not now. He allows the figures to be

life-size and the architecture, as well, to be life-size. Unhappily, by the way, this painting,

removed from the church in which it was, is squeezed into an utterly inadequate gallery space in the

academia. The subtle and varied effects of light in this painting are capped by the imitation of a

Byzantine mosaic in the half dome, which is certainly a direct reference to the interior of San Marco.

From left to right, let me go run through the saints quickly. The saints are Saint Francis,

facing us with the stigmata, looking at us to establish contact, bring us into the painting. John

the Baptist, just a head here next to Francis, and then Saint Job, and then on the other side of the

altar, Saint Dominic with a prayer book, and Saint Sebastian prominently, and then the bishop saint, Saint Louis

of Toulouse. This Saint Louis of Toulouse is a 13th century Saint Louis who renounced the throne of

Naples to become a Franciscan. He became bishop of Toulouse and died at the age of 23, and he occurs in a number of

Renaissance works of art. Saint Sebastian and Saint Job are mostly nude, and the light from the right glides

across these figures, just glides eloquently across their bodies. Venetians took interesting liberties

with the hagiography. Despite their Old Testament lives, both Job and Moses are sainted in Venice.

They each have churches of their own. Both of these saints are invoked for their curative power, by the

way, Saint Job and Saint Sebastian. Sebastian for the plague, and Job because of his many sufferings,

more generally for illness. And the church of Saint Job from which this came was associated with a

hospital. So it had a connection, a very direct one. The nobility of this painting, its unity, its powerful,

unified construction of surface and space, mark it as a painting of the High Renaissance, created in the

same years that Leonardo was producing his own High Renaissance masterpieces in Milan.

Finally, although not without precedent, the trio of musical angels, so persuasively and charmingly

rendered by Bellini at the foot of this altarpiece, were emulated and echoed, as it were, in Venetian

painting and elsewhere in Italy from the time this painting was first seen. Perhaps it's fair to give

Fantanello the last word in this lecture. While in Venice he had also painted a noble life-size Saint

Sebastian. This painting, as you see, the Sebastian is framed by architecture which is in the background

and a soaring sky, a marvelous sky behind that, strong perspective thrust, a beautifully poised

figure in the foreground and wonderfully elegant pose, one that was strongly echoed in the Saint

Sebastian in Bellini's Saint Job altarpiece, which we've just seen. Thank you.