Art of Renaissance Rome by John Marciari

(New York: Laurence King Publishing, 2017), 213

Fr. Raymund send us this book ahead of our pilgrimage to Rome: I can't wait to see it! I appreciated this author's style more than that of Art of Renaissance Florence. If anything, I would benefit from an even more zoomed out view to get the bigger context before this much detail on the Renaissance specifically. Yet the zoomed in view does give tangible examples of the interplay between art, politics, ecclesial power, etc.

Notes

Contents

Introduction: Seeing Renaissance Rome

"Rome is rightly known as the Eternal City, for few other places preserve so many major monuments from so many different ages." (9)
Much of Rome is either Ancient or Baroque (rather than Renaissance), yet the Raphael rooms and Sistine chapel are "perhaps the supreme expression of Italian Renaissance art." (9)
Rome is "that great palimpsest of a city where past, present, and eternity collide." (10)
"Holy Years became an incitement to urban renewal, and conversely, the pilgrims brought money that helped pay for such projects." (11)
"The Renaissance began, one might say, with the dawning conviction that the centuries between antiquity and the present had been dark ages. Scholars who embraced this idea, the humanists, turned to the surviving literature of antiquity as their guide, believing that a change in patterns of thinking would bring a rebirth, a Renaissance, of classical glory." (13)
"The seldom-visited choir of Santa Maria del Popolo is a perfect microcosm of the Roman Renaissance." (19)

Chapter 1: Noble Sparks—The Birth of a Renaissance Ideal

The Roman Renaissance begins in the 1330s—just prior to the popes departure for Avignon—with Cavallini, de Cambio, and Giotto. (23)
The Sancta Sanctorum chapel at St. John Lateran was used by Pope Nicholas III to demonstrate his spiritual and temporal power. (24)
The ancient style of the Arnolfo di Cambio's bronze St. Peter is a deliberate means of liking the modern Pope back to St. Peter and the Roman emperors. The toes of the statues are rubbed away by pilgrims over the centuries. (27-28)
Celestine V (a former hermit) was elected Pope, but resigned after several months, the last to do so until Benedict XVI. Next came Boniface VIII who imagined himself as a new emperor. He established the first Jubilee in 1300, potentially with worldly motives given the money collected from pilgrims. His heavy-handedness against the French contributed to the Avignon papacy and the subsequent decline of Rome. (31-32)

Chapter 2: The Popes Return and the City is Reborn

Western Schism: Gregory XI returns to Rome, Urban VI is elected as his replacement but he disgruntles the French who elect anti-Pope Clement VII in Avignon, resulting in a schism for 40 years until Constance (1414-1418) and Martin V, who set about rebuilding Rome after a century of neglect: "Martin understood that the state of the city of Rome served as a commentary on the state of the Roman papacy, and moreover that the state and status of Rome was always evaluated with an eye to the city's glorious ancient past." (40)
Inspired by Martin, Cardinals started commissioning works for their titular churches, a sign of confidence in the papacy remaining in Rome. (41)
Martin's successor Eugenius IV was in exile in Florence for 10 years, during which time Ghiberti's bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery inspired his commission of bronze doors for St. Peter's. (42)
Nicholas V was the "first humanist Pope" who conceived the Vatican Library and fostered the creation in his court of the polymath Renaissance Man. (45)
Sant'Agostino has one of the few Gothic-vaulted naves in Rome (55)
Bessarion and d'Estouteville worked closely together to promote the reunion of East and West, and both commissioned chapels dedicated to St. Michael the Archangel, in Santa Maria Maggiore and Santi Apostoli (56)
Rome "includes in its mix a fascination with history, an awareness of historical distance, and perhaps an attempt to see the past and present as one. These ideas condition much art of the Renaissance, but they were particularly strong in the Renaissance of Rome, the city where all eras coincide as they do nowhere else on earth." (58)

Chapter 3: Caput Munti—Roma Sistina

The return of Rome as caput mundi accelerated under Sixtus
IV who, despite his nepotism, reinvigorated the city through his Hopsital of Santo Spirito in Sassia and Ponte Sisto bridge, and built the Sistine Chapel (named after him). The paintings alongside the walls of the Sistine Chapel illustrate complementary scenes from the lives of Moses and Christ.

Chapter 4: A Golden Age—The Rome of Julius II and Leo X

Michelangelo was the "Renaissance artist par excellence" (94)
Mary's proportions are off in the Pieta (she would be impossibly tall if she stood up), but for Michelangelo, "the natural world was forever also subject to the requirements of art." (96)
Pope Julius II was the "paradigmatic Roman patron" of the arts, who commissioned Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, Raphael's rooms, and the new St. Peter's. (98)
Raphael's Disputation: St. Gregory the Great and St. Jerome are seated to the left of the altar (110)
Leo X, who mishandled Martin Luther's protests, was "unquestionably worldly, a fat man dedicated to life's pleasures." (114)
The division of labor in Raphael's workshop allowed him to complete a large number of works still seemingly "by" him. (117)

Chapter 5: New Directions, the Sack of Rome, and a Reawakening

Raphael's ever-evolving style suggests he was never satisfied with his own work. His followers developed various of his interests into the style of Mannerism, a "highly artificial and self-conscious style" or "stylish style" (134). Mannerist art was an "insider's game" and similar to poetry was "drawing attention to conventions and then subverting them" or "style for the sake of style" (140).
Clement VII (r. 1523-1534) flip flopped in allegiance between France and the Holy Roman Empire, with the Imperial army sacking Rome in 1527 and pillaging churches and monasteries. This was seen as divine punishment for the excesses of a worldly Church (142).
Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel was painted after the Sack and illustrates the shift in perspective within the Church in light of the Reformation. Also, the figures were all originally nude, but another painter was hired to add some drapery after the fact. (146)
Michelangelo presented his friend Vittoria Colonna (who introduced him to a circle of church reformers) a drawing of the pieta inscribed with a line from 2022-02-16-Paradiso: "There they don't think of how much blood it costs" (Non vi si pensa quanto sangue costa) (146)

Chapter 6: Villa Culture

"A central tenet of Renaissance humanism was the attempt to recapture the spirit—and to an extent, the lifestyle—of the ancient Roman world, and nowhere was that more nearly attained than in the villas and gardens built in Rome and in the surrounding countryside." (167)
Villa d'Este in Tivoli had a water-powered organ by Luc de Clerc: "the organ created air pressure as water plunged down a tube to a collecting chamber; the displaced air provided wind for the organ pipes. Although there was a keyboard, the organ could also play three songs automatically—and at the end of performances the built-up water would be released, unleashing the roaring cascade and high jets below, which then quickly settled into the placid waters of the fish ponds." (174)

Chapter 7: Counter-Reformation Rome

"The reform movements within and without the catholic Church were the defining events of sixteenth-century Europe" and Trent's direction on church decoration inspired new directions for art and architecture. Trent "confirmed the place of sacred art in worship, but it emphasized that art's primary function was to instruct." (184)
The Counter-Reformation was concerned with historical accuracy, as shown for example in the Flagellation paintings being at a short column. (194)
Sixtus V added the "Sixtine chapel" to St. Mary Major with his tomb in "perpetual adoration" of the tabernacle, which sits above the crypt holding the relic of the manger. (204)
St. Peter's dome sat unfinished for decades after Michelangeo's death. Perhaps the giant wooden structure used to move the obelisk reinvigorated the project by inspiring a similarly huge wooden scaffolding to support construction of the dome in 1588-1590 (208). "The cupola of St. Peter's dominates the Roman cityscape, the enduring symbol of a triumphant Roman Church, and the crowning achievement of Sixtus V's remarkable era of urban improvement."
"Maderno's St. Cecilia seems a perfect summation and celebration of all we have seen in Roman Renaissance art." (212)
The Renaissance in Rome closes—and the Baroque begins—with the nave and facade of St. Peters. (213)

Topic: Travel-Rome, Art

Source

Fr. Raymund 2024-09-26-Thu

New Words

palimpsest: An object or area that has extensive evidence of or layers showing activity or use (10)

Created: 2024-09-27-Fri
Updated: 2025-04-12-Sat