Two Renaissance Tabernacles (Conspicuously Expensive)

Tabernacle for the Crucifix of St John Gualberto
1448
marble
Basilica di San Miniato al Monte, Florence
commissioned by Piero de' Medici (1416-1489)
probably designed by Michelozzo (1396-1472)

"For the same year of 1448 we can at last point to a surviving monument which testifies to the same love of splendour: the marble tabernacle over the miraculous crucifix in San Miniato al Monte.  The documents show that there was the familiar tug-of-war over the Medici arms: in June 1447 the Guild of the Calimala reports that a 'great citizen' (cittadino grande) has offered to build such a tabernacle with great splendour and cost and that permission would be granted provided no other coats of arms were shown except those of the guild.  A year later the great citizen had his way.  Piero was granted the express permission to add his own coat of arms to those of the guild.  He did not choose the offensive palle but rather his private impressa, the three feathers and the diamond ring with the device semper.  This type of private heraldry was in itself in tune with the taste for chivalrous display, which Piero may well have acquired in his contacts with his Burgundian customers."

Tabernacle of the Annunciation
ca. 1450
marble
Basilica della Santissima Annunziata, Florence
commissioned by Piero de' Medici (1416-1489)
probably designed by Michelozzo (1396-1472)

"It was probably in the same year, or soon after that he commissioned another tabernacle over a miraculous image, this time in SS. Annunziata.  Its sumptuous structure, no doubt originally gilt, carries the truly astounding inscription Costò fior 4 mila el marmo solo; the marble alone cost 4,000 florins.  This is worthy of remark by those who still believe that this type of announcement was invented by American tycoons.  If the general assumption is right, that the two tabernacles were designed for the Medici by Michelozzo, who was also Cosimo's right-hand man, it becomes even clearer how far in works of these kinds the patron rather than the artist expressed himself."

– E.H. Gombrich, from the essay The Early Medici as Patrons of Art, originally published in 1960, reprinted in the author's essay collection Norm and Form (London: Phaidon Press, 1966)

Precious Gems and Less Precious Paintings

The Tazza Farnese
2nd century BC
Hellenistic Egypt
cameo cup of four-layered sardonyx agate
carved with allegorical figures representing Egypt's prosperity under the Ptolemies
purchased in Rome by Lorenzo de' Medici in 1471
National Archaeological Museum, Naples

"We have a pen portrait of Piero [de' Medici] in Filarete's treatise which brings out this atmosphere with a particular vividness.  Filarete knew that Piero was smitten with arthritis and, so he tells us, he inquired from Nicodemi, the Medicean ambassador to Milan, what such a sick man could do all day, the implication being that all the noble pastimes, such as hunting or war, are barred to him. 

He tells me that Piero takes great pleasure in whiling away his time by having himself carried to his studio . . . there he would look at his jewels and precious stones, of which he has a marvellous quantity of great value, some engraved in various ways, some not.  He takes great pleasure and delight in looking at those and in discussing their various powers and excellencies.  The next day, maybe, he inspects his vases of gold and silver and other precious material and praises their noble worth and the skill of the masters who wrought them.  All in all when it is a matter of acquiring worthy or strange objects he does not look at the price . . . I am told he has such a wealth and variety of things that if he wanted to look at each of them in turn it would take him a whole month and he could then begin afresh, and they would again give him pleasure since a whole month had now passed since he saw them last.  

In our present context the famous collections of the Medici are of relevance only as rivals to their patronage of art.  It is too easily assumed sometimes that the two activities are one.  But contemporary and past history knows of many cases in which artists complained about collectors who spent all their money on precious antiques and had nothing to spare for the living.  The valuations attached to precious tableware and stones in the inventory of the Medici collection must indeed make one pause.  The scribe or notary who drew up this inventory may not have been a great expert, but he must have known the correct order of magnitude.  He valued the engraved gems of the Medici collection between 400 and 1,000 florins each, the Tazza Farnese [above] even at 10,000 florins.  Now the average painting by a master of the rank of Filippino Lippi, Botticelli or Pollaiuolo would range between 50 and 100 florins, and even a huge fresco cycle such as Ghirlandaio's Story of St John in Santa Maria Novella only cost about 1,000 florins."   

– E.H. Gombrich, from the essay The Early Medici as Patrons of Art, originally published in 1960, reprinted in the author's essay collection Norm and Form (London: Phaidon Press, 1966)

Reproduced below, an array of small treasures from antiquity resembling those that consoled the afflicted Piero, each one worth roughly as much on the contemporary Renaissance market as a dozen painted panels by Botticelli. 

The Gonzaga Cameo
3rd century BC
Hellenistic Egypt
sardonyx cameo
Portraits of Ptolemy II and Arsinoe II
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

The Nymph Galene
 3rd century BC
Greece
aquamarine intaglio
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Perseus and Andromeda
1st century BC
Rome
sardonyx cameo
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Aphrodite and Eros
4th century BC
Greece
gold signet ring
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Head of Medusa
1st-2nd century AD
Rome
amethyst cameo
British Museum

Trajan and Plotina
AD 117-138
Rome
sardonyx cameo
British Museum

Augustus, Livia, young Nero
AD 50
Rome
sardonyx cameo
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Nero as the god Helios
1st century AD
Rome
rock crystal intaglio
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Triptolemus and Demeter in chariot drawn by winged serpents
1st century AD
Rome
sardonyx cameo
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

The Blacas Cameo
AD 14-20
Rome
sardonyx cameo
Portrait of Augustus
British Museum

Hercules and Cerberus
1st century BC - 1st century AD
Rome
chalcedony cameo
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

An Emperor as Hermes
4th century AD
Rome
amethyst intaglio
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Hermaphroditus with Cupids
1st century BC
Hellenistic Egypt
onyx cameo
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

"Elusive Lorenzo [de' Medici] certainly was.  It was not for nothing that Machiavelli, in his famous character sketch, described him as harbouring two persons – what we today would call a split personality.  The contradictions of this fascinating mind have presented a perpetual challenge to his biographers, whether they resisted his charm or succumbed to it.  The student of his patronage of art is confronted with the same perplexities.  The very name of Lorenzo the Magnificent has come to stand for posterity as the embodiment of princely magnificence; indeed it has all but eclipsed the fame of his ancestors.  It comes as a shock of surprise to realize how few works of art there are in existence which can be proved to have been commissioned by Lorenzo.  . . .  We have come to suspect that such moneys as he had to spend on art went into the buying of precious antique gems.  Lorenzo certainly knew their value in social life; when Giovanni [de' Medici], the future Leo X, went to Rome as the youngest cardinal, Lorenzo wrote to him: A man of your kind should use silk and jewellery with discretion.  Rather have some exquisite antiques and beautiful books." 

– E.H. Gombrich, from the essay The Early Medici as Patrons of Art, originally published in 1960, reprinted in the author's essay collection Norm and Form (London: Phaidon Press, 1966)

Mannerism Redeemed in 1920

El Greco
St John the Evangelist
ca. 1605
oil on canvas
Prado, Madrid

El Greco
St John the Evangelist and St John the Baptist
ca. 1600-1610
oil on canvas
Prado, Madrid

El Greco
Laocoön
ca. 1610-14
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

El Greco
Christ on the Cross
ca. 1600-1610
oil on canvas
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

El Greco
Portrait of Cardinal Fernando Niño de Guevara
ca. 1600
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

El Greco
St Ildefonso
ca. 1603-14
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

El Greco
St Andrew and St Francis
ca. 1595
oil on canvas
Prado, Madrid

El Greco
Christ healing the Blind
ca. 1570
oil on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

El Greco
Burial of the Count of Orgaz
1586-88
oil on canvas
Iglesia de Santo Tomé, Toledo

"Not many words are needed to explain why Greco was bound to be increasingly forgotten in the subsequent two centuries, the centuries dominated by natural science, materialist thought, belief in causality and technical progress, when civilization was a matter of mechanization, of eyes and brain but no heart.  Today this materialist civilization is approaching its end.  It is less the external collapse I have in mind, for this was only a symptom, than the internal one that has been discernible for a generation now in all fields of life: in philosophy and intellectual life, where the humanities have again taken the lead, and where even in science the foundations of that old positivism, which were considered so firmly grounded, have been thoroughly shattered; literature and the arts have turned toward spiritual absolutes, as they did in the Middle Ages and in the period of Mannerism, and have turned their backs on fidelity to sensuous nature.  There is a uniformity in all these events, which the mysterious law of human destiny seems to guide towards a new, a spiritual and anti-materialist age.  In that eternal struggle between matter and spirit, the scales are inclining towards a victory of the spirit, and it is to this turn of events that we owe our recognition of Greco as a great artist and prophetic mind whose glory will continue to shine brightly."

– Max Dvořák (1874-1921), from On Greco and Mannerism, a lecture delivered in October 1920, quoted (in translation) in Norm and Form by E.H. Gombrich (London: Phaidon Press, 1966).  In 1920, intelligent observers like Dvořák were still able to believe that humanity had actually learned something from the ghastly futility of World War I, and must inevitably perform better in the dawning future. One generation later his "victory of the spirit" expressed itself in Auschwitz and Hiroshima. But he was right about El Greco.   

El Greco and workshop
Holy Visage
ca. 1586-95
oil on canvas
Prado, Madrid

El Greco
Portrait of Julián Romero and his patron saint
ca. 1594-1604
oil on canvas
Prado, Madrid

El Greco
Annunciation
ca. 1590-1603
oil on canvas
Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan

El Greco
Madonna and Child with St Martina and St Agnes
ca. 1597-99
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

El Greco
The Trinity
1577-79
oil on canvas
Prado, Madrid

Principle of Sacrifice

Raphael
Madonna with the Fish
ca. 1513
oil on panel
Prado, Madrid

Caravaggio
Madonna of Loreto
ca. 1604
oil on canvas
Basilica of Sant' Agostino, Rome

"I hope I need not stress here that I do not think this highly schematic mental diagram can ever do justice to the richness of historical development.  I have dwelt on it mainly as an example of what I propose to call the principle of sacrifice, in contrast, that is, to what I have called the principle of exclusion.  It will be remembered that the principle of exclusion is a very simple, not to say primitive, principle that denies the value it opposes.  The principle of sacrifice admits and indeed implies the existence of a multiplicity of values.  What is sacrificed is acknowledged to be a value even though it has to yield to another value which commands priority.  But the mature artist will never sacrifice more than is absolutely necessary for the realization of his highest values.  When he has done justice to his supreme norm other norms are allowed to come into their own."

"I think these two principles which I have here contrasted are so often confused because the partisans of movements in art tend to be terribles simplificateurs. Radical exclusion is something everyone can understand.  Relative sacrifice is a more complex and more subtle matter.  For all critics of the past both Beauty and Truth were acknowledged values.  What Caravaggio was accused of – to take up the previous example – was to have sacrificed Beauty to Truth, while the academic tradition was attacked for sacrificing Truth to Beauty.  The true accusation in both cases was perhaps that both sacrificed more of the rival value than was absolutely necessary to do justice to their supreme norm."

Nicolas Poussin
Triumph of David
1630
oil on canvas
Prado, Madrid

Peter Paul Rubens
Adoration of the Magi
1609 & 1629
oil on canvas
Prado, Madrid

"The historian will frequently find that opposing camps of critics have more in common than they admit.  Rubénistes and Poussinistes, Delacroix and Ingres, Wagner and Brahms, shared so much common ground that their differences concerning certain priorities of value loomed all the more largely.  Seen from a distance these differences partly disappear."

Eugène Delacroix
Greece on the ruins of Missolonghi
1826
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Portrait of Madame Moitessier
1851
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

"The same cannot be said of a true principle of exclusion such as the absence of ornament in functionalism or the absence of symmetry from abstract expressionism.  Such extremes may be amenable to a purely neutral morphological description.  They could be noticed by an archaeologist from Mars even when life on this planet was extinct.  Most stylistic changes have more to do with the mutual adjustment of conflicting norms which can perhaps be understood but never measured by any objective formal criterion."

Eugène Delacroix
Mademoiselle Rose
ca. 1820
oil on canvas
Louvre, Paris

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Small Bather
1826
oil on canvas
Phillips Collection, Washington DC

– E.H. Gombrich, from the essay Norm and Form, first delivered as a lecture at Turin University in 1963, reprinted in the author's essay collection Norm and Form (London: Phaidon Press, 1966)

Principle of Exclusion

Alberto Burri
Composizione
(from the series Sacchi begun in 1949 from burlap bags)
1953
burlap, thread, synthetic polymer paint, gold leaf
Guggenheim Museum, New York

Salvador Dalí
Publisher's proof for cover of La Limite by Maurice Sandoz
1950
chromolithograph
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"It was the classical tradition of normative aesthetics that first formulated some rules of art, and such rules are most easily formulated negatively as a catalogue of sins to be avoided.  Just as most of the Ten Commandments are really prohibitions, so most rules of art and of style are warnings against certain sins.  . . .  Do not overcrowd your pictures, do not use too much gold, do not seek out difficult postures for their own sake; avoid harsh contours, avoid the ugly, the indecorous and the ignoble.  Indeed it might be argued that what ultimately killed the classical ideal was that the sins to be avoided multiplied till the artist's freedom was confined to an ever narrowing space; all he dared to do in the end was insipid repetition of safe solutions.  After this, there was only one sin to be avoided in art, that of being academic.  In our exhibitions today [1963] we see the most bewildering variety of forms and experiments.  Anyone who wanted to find some morphological features that united Alberto Burri with Salvador Dalí and Francis Bacon with Capogrossi would be hard put to it, but it would be easy to see that they all wanted to avoid being academic; they would all have displeased Bellori and would have welcomed his condemnation."

Francis Bacon
Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne
1966
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

Giuseppe Capogrossi
Surface 210 (Superficie 210)
1957
oil on canvas
Guggenheim Museum, New York

"It is no accident, therefore, that the terminology of art history was so largely built on words denoting some principle of exclusion.  Most movements in art erect some new taboo, some new negative principle, such as the banishing from painting by the impressionists of all 'anecdotal' elements.  The positive slogans and shibboleths which we read in artists' or critics' manifestos past or present are usually much less well defined.  Take the term 'functionalism' in twentieth-century architecture.  We know by now that there are many ways of planning or building which may be called functional and that this demand alone will never solve all the architect's problems.  But the immediate effect of the slogan was to ban all ornament in architecture as non-functional and therefore taboo.  What unites the most disparate schools of architecture in this century is this common aversion to a particular tradition."

"Maybe we would make more progress in the study of styles if we looked out for such principles of exclusion, the sins any particular style wants to avoid, than if we continue to look for the common structure or essence of all the works produced in a certain period."

– E.H. Gombrich, from the essay Norm and Form, first delivered as a lecture at Turin University in 1963, reprinted in the author's essay collection Norm and Form (London: Phaidon Press, 1966)

Why the Fine Arts are not Progressive

Correggio
Jupiter and Io
1531-32
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

"Nothing is more contrary to the fact than the supposition that in what we understand by the fine arts, as painting and poetry, relative perfection is only the result of repeated efforts, and that what has been once well done constantly leads to something better.  What is mechanical, reducible to rule, or capable of demonstration, is progressive, and admits of gradual improvement: what is not mechanical or definite, but depends on genius, taste, and feeling, very soon becomes stationary or retrograde, and loses more than it gains by transfusion.  The contrary opinion is, indeed, a common error, which has grown up, like many others, from transferring an analogy of one kind to something quite distinct, without thinking of the difference in the nature of the things, or attending to the difference of the results." 

Peter Paul Rubens
St George and the Dragon
ca. 1606-08
oil on canvas
Prado, Madrid

"To use the distinction of a technical philosophy, science depends on the discursive or extensive – art on the intuitive or intensive power of the mind.  One chemical or mathematical discovery may be added to another, because the degree and sort of faculty required to apprehend and retain them are in both cases the same; but no one can voluntarily add the colouring of Rubens to the expression of Raphael, till he has the same eye for colour as Rubens, and for expression as Raphael – that is, the most thorough feeling of what is profound in the one, or splendid in the other – of what no rules can teach, nor words convey – and of what the mind must possess within itself, and by a kind of participation with nature, or remain ever destitute of it.  Titian and Correggio are the only painters who united to perfect colouring a degree of expression, the one in his portraits, and the other in his histories, all but equal, if not equal, to the highest.  But this union of different qualities they had from nature, and not by method.  In fact, we judge of science by the number of effects produced – of art by the energy which produces them.  The one is knowledge – the other power."

Raphael
The Miraculous Draught of Fishes
ca. 1515-16
bodycolor on paper, mounted on canvas
Royal Collection, Great Britain

"The arts of painting and poetry are conversant with the world of thought within us, and with the world of sense without us – with what we know, and see, and feel intimately.  They flow from the sacred shrine of our own breasts, and are kindled at the living lamp of nature.  The pulse of the passions assuredly beat as high, the depths and soundings of the human heart were as well understood three thousand years ago, as they are at present; the face of nature and "the human face divine," shone as bright then as they have ever done."

Titian
Portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti
ca. 1545
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

– Why the Fine Arts are not Progressive, from an essay by William Hazlitt first published in The Morning Chronicle, January 11, 1814

European Images of Ancient Non-human Beings

Bartholomeus Spranger
Cupid and Psyche
before 1611
drawing
British Museum

Jonas Umbach
Pan pursuing Syrinx through the reeds
before 1700
etching
British Museum

Balthasar Bernaerts after Jan Goeree
Apollo bestowing laurel wreath on bust of Horace
(title-page for Richard Bentley's edition of Horace)
1713
etching, engraving
British Museum

Arnold Houbraken
Priapus in a landscape
before 1719
engraving
British Museum

"Priapus, standing in a landscape, holding a knife in his right hand; has fruit and vegetables in his garment; on his head a corn-plant . . . from the second part of a series of figures depicting emblems and symbols."

– curator's notes from the British Museum

Domenico Cunego after Domenichino
Landscape with Apollo and Hyacinthus 
(after a fresco in the Loggia del Giardino of Palazzo Farnese, Rome)
1771
etching, engraving
British Museum

Salomon Gessner
Women approach Herm of Pan in a landscape
1787
watercolor, bodycolor
British Museum

"Salomon Gessner (1730-1788) was a Swiss writer who achieved international fame during his lifetime for idyllic poetry and prose based on the classics.  This sheet [directly above] is a fine example of his pastoral landscapes, which he drew in watercolor and bodycolor primarily during the last decade of his life.  The drawing was etched in 1805 by a German printmaker of the next generation, Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, whose evocative landscape prints [example directly below] have much in common with Gessner's pastoral works.  . . .  Most of Gessner's pastoral watercolors are in the Graphische Sammlung Kunsthaus Zürich."

– curator's notes from the British Museum

Carl Wilhelm Kolbe
Satyr carrying Nymph on his back in a landscape
ca. 1810-20
etching
British Museum

Bartolomeo Pinelli
Tearful Venus standing before Jupiter
(illustration for The Aeneid)
ca. 1811
etching
British Museum

Bartolomeo Pinelli
Venus emerging from a cloud of sacrificial smoke to prevent Aeneas from killing Helen
(illustration for The Aeneid)
ca. 1811
etching
British Museum

Bertel Thorvaldsen
Pan teaching pipes to child Satyr
1831
drawing
British Museum

"Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844) - Danish Neoclassical sculptor; spent most of his working life in Rome, where he first arrived in 1797.  A museum, where he is also buried in the courtyard, is devoted to his work in Copenhagen."

– biographical note from the British Museum

François-Joseph Heim
Study for attendants at the Toilet of Venus, squared for transfer
before 1865
drawing
British Museum

Charles Conder
Pan and Nymphs in woodland setting
1904
colored chalk on green paper
British Museum

Herbert Cole
Vignette of Centaur with bow
before 1931
drawing
British Museum

"Herbert Cole (1867-1931) - Painter, draughtsman and illustrator working in London; illustrated volumes of poetry, literature and children's books for John Lane, J.M. Dent, and other publishers, 1890s-1920s; exhibited at the Royal Academy; taught at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts."

– biographical note from the British Museum

Cyril Goldie
Landscape composition with Centaur
before 1942
watercolor
British Museum

"Cyril Goldie (1872-1942) - Printmaker.  Based for some time in Liverpool.  Taught etching at the Central School of Arts and Crafts.  Exhibited at the New English Art Club and at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool."

– biographical note from the British Museum