Painting with Demons: The Art of Gerolamo Savoldo 9781789143195

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Introduction
Part One
1. Death of St Peter Martyr
2. Hands
3. Faces
4. Magic
5. The Brescia Adoration of the Shepherds
Part Two
Breathing the Same Air
Savoldo and the Self-portrait
Faces, Masks, Northern Art
‘Magic’, ‘Influence’, Demons
Who, then, was Savoldo?
Savoldo and Caravaggio: the Inescapable Relation
Afterword
References
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

Citation preview

pai n ti n g w i t h de mon s

2

painting with dem ons

michael fried

pa i n t i n g wi t h dem on s the art of gerolamo savoldo

reaktion books

for joseph mari oni and frank stella

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd Unit 32, Waterside 44–48 Wharf Road London N1 7UX, UK www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2021 Copyright © Michael Fried 2021 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers Printed and bound in China by 1010 Printing International Ltd A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 78914 319 5 Frontispiece

Savoldo, Mary Magdalene (illus. 39), detail.

CONTENTS

Introduction

6

pa rt o n e 1

Death of St Peter Martyr

22

2

Hands

44

3

Faces

78

4

Magic

104

5

The Brescia Adoration of the Shepherds

122

pa rt t wo Breathing the same air

132

Savoldo and the self-portrait

137

Faces, masks, Northern art

142

‘Magic’, ‘inuence’, demons

151

Who, then, was Savoldo?

156

Savoldo and Caravaggio: the inescapable relation

161

Afterword

170

References

172

Acknowledgements

187

Photo Acknowledgements

188

Index

190

I N T RO D U C T I O N

1 (facing page) Savoldo, Portrait of a Man in Armour (illus. 20), detail.

Wh y a b o o k – not just an article, an entire book – on the sixteenthcentury Italian painter Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo at this time? Such a choice may seem surprising. After all, Savoldo is not an artist with a strong public prole. On the contrary, he has virtually no presence in general, survey-type accounts of Italian High Renaissance painting, which understandably dwell on the period’s many major gures – Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Correggio, Giovanni Bellini, Mantegna, Giorgione, Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto and their ilk, all undisputed titans (the list is hardly exhaustive). Indeed the basic narrative of sixteenth-century art in and around Savoldo’s native Venice would be essentially the same in his absence. And yet I think it is fair to say that art historians of the period have long been aware that his achievement was, to say the least, out of the ordinary and that his strongest paintings exert a unique force of attraction, even as they would also acknowledge that his art has never received the concentrated scholarly and critical attention it deserves. The present book is a response to this state of affairs. More precisely, it is a highly personal attempt to engage seriously with Savoldo’s achievement in the conviction, arrived at over decades, that his is a body of work of singular distinction and renement (terms that should require no defence even in our age of crude anti-elitism). For one thing, Savoldo radically reimagines virtually every Christian subject he undertakes, to an extent perhaps unequalled by any other Italian painter of his time. Thus he depicts a penitent St Jerome performing the traditional action of striking himself on the breast with a stone in a manner different from that of any other treatment of the theme; his intensely poetic picturing of Tobias and the Angel is even

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more comprehensively at odds with standard versions of the subject; the ravishing St Matthew and the Angel puts Caravaggio’s later treatments of the subject in the shade; and his sublime Magdalenes depict the saint turning to face the risen Christ, who we are to understand is standing just ‘this’ side of the picture surface, alongside us, the viewer, an astonishing conception. (In line with this, Savoldo conceals the Magdalene’s hands under her gleaming shawl, thereby compelling the viewer to imagine as if in permanent deferral the gesture with which she will in a moment reach out to touch Christ, as well as Christ’s response, ‘Noli me tangere’.) All this barely suggests the imaginative force of many of Savoldo’s canvases, which are also, it should be said, superbly executed. But the further, indeed the deepest interest of his oeuvre for me embraces four issues in particular. The rst concerns what has always – or rather, since the pioneering writing of the great twentieth-century Italian art historian Roberto Longhi – been seen as Savoldo’s anticipation of signicant aspects of the art of Caravaggio (for Longhi the decisive gure in the emergence of modern art). As the author of an ambitious book on Caravaggio (The Moment of Caravaggio, 2008), I have a large stake in the question of the relationship between the two painters. In fact I believe the connection is extremely close, for reasons other than those adduced by Longhi. I will have more to say about the topic shortly and at greater length towards the close of this book. A second issue that I nd worth attending to concerns the fact that self-portraits play a surprisingly large role in Savoldo’s oeuvre, as the late Creighton Gilbert was the rst to observe. The full signicance of this will be brought out in the course of what follows, but for a start it supports the notion of an intimate relationship to Caravaggio, for whom the self-portrait, explicit and disguised, was nothing less than fundamental (as I demonstrate in The Moment of Caravaggio). The third issue that I nd especially compelling turns on Savoldo’s treatment of hands. Again, the topic was rst broached by Longhi, who recognized in Savoldo’s depiction of hands one of the keys to his art, though his observations are, as will be seen, mainly stylistic, having to do with the presentational logic of Savoldo’s approach. My own line of argument is different, and here I touch on the principal methodological theme of my book, namely the need to look at Savoldo’s art empathically, in a spirit of imaginative identication with the actions of the protagonists, not merely stylistically, from ‘outside’, as if from a safe distance (‘safe’ in the sense of

introduction

standing beyond the paintings’ various bodily and imaginative solicitations). As I try to show, if the hands are considered in this light, they can be identied, more or less, with the painter’s left and right hands as he brought his paintings into being. (In this connection it matters that the hands are usually shown in intimate proximity to the picture plane.) Such an argument goes back not only to The Moment of Caravaggio but also to my Courbet’s Realism (1990), a double afliation I regard as suggesting that the problematic of the inscription of the painter-in-the-act-of-painting that surfaces in Savoldo’s art turns out to have a rich posterity in the centuries to follow. (A fascinating canvas by Savoldo, Portrait of a Man in Armour, recognized by Gilbert as a self-portrait, is crucial in this regard.) A fourth issue differs in kind from the rst three. Roughly halfway through my research into Savoldo I became aware, to my considerable surprise, that a number of his paintings contain images of grotesque or monstrous-seeming heads and faces as if ‘hidden’ in rocks or, more typically, in the folds, creases, bulges and depressions of his unusually free-form, often intensely coloristic drapery. (In the previous literature Savoldo’s treatment of drapery has often been singled out for comment but never on these grounds.) Eventually, again to my surprise, I came to understand these often grimacing or snarling physiognomies as essentially ‘demonic’, an identication that will require extensive discussion further on in this book. Two paintings in which such heads and faces not only appear but openly declare themselves are distinctly Northern, more precisely Boschian versions of the Temptation of St Anthony, which is hardly surprising given the nearness of Venice to the North and in view also of the presence of works by Bosch in Venetian collections. At this point the question arises as to whether all or most of the grotesque faces that appear in Savoldo’s canvases were placed there deliberately by the artist, and I frankly admit that this turns out to be an extremely difcult question to resolve. In certain instances, such as the St Anthony panels, the faces were plainly intended to be seen (they were, so to speak, called for by the subject). But there are others, for example in the shawls of the Magdalenes or in the sleeve of the kneeling Joseph in a late Adoration of the Shepherds, that seem not only anomalous with respect to subject matter but, at a time and place of religious crisis and widespread pursuit of heresy, extremely dangerous for the painter. Let me reserve further consideration of this deeply interesting question for its proper place later in this book. So much by way of indicating some of the reasons why Savoldo seems to me to deserve, indeed to require, a serious account of his art. To begin:

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G i ova n n i g e ro la m o s avo l d o , one of the subtlest and most intriguing – also, I shall suggest, one of the most original and profound – painters of the Italian Renaissance, most probably was born in Brescia, an important city in the general dependency of Venice, in the rst half of the 1480s, although no hard evidence exists as to either his place or date of birth. Nor do we know when he died, an event usually placed in the late 1540s, by which time he was referred to by Pietro Aretino in a letter as an ‘excellent old man’ (vecchioni ottimo).1 Indeed there are relatively few documents around which to construct a reliable outline of his career: among other facts we know that he was in Parma in 1506 (indicating that he was a practising painter by that date), and a letter of 1508 from Pietro d’Argenta to Michelangelo’s brother suggests that he may have been in Florence in 1508, if the letter refers to him and not to another Brescian painter with a similar name (it makes sense to think of him as having spent time there). Certain scholars have also posited an early visit to Rome. For the most part, however, Savoldo seems to have resided in Venice, in the 1520s and ’30s one of the main centres of ambitious painting in Italy. There he received commissions for altarpieces in towns such as Treviso, Pesaro, Verona and Brescia as well as, one surmises, for the independent paintings on a smaller scale that constitute by far the bulk of his surviving oeuvre. (The epithet ‘independent’ is a place-marker for a discussion of the character of those paintings further on in this book. As will eventually become clear, I am deliberately avoiding what may seem the obvious descriptive epithet, ‘devotional’.) His former student Paolo Pino, in an important treatise on painting, Dialogo di pittura (1548), remarks that he worked for Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan (probably in the early 1530s),2 while Giorgio Vasari in brief remarks in his Lives of the Painters (1568) reports having seen ‘four paintings of night and re’ by Savoldo in the Milan mint.3 Three closely related late commissions were for an Adoration of the Shepherds for the Bargnani chapel in the church of San Barnaba in Venice, today in the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo in Brescia, a work of considerable interest, and two less impressive variants for San Giobbe in Venice and Santa Maria la Nova in Terlizzi (all three datable around 1540). One of the salient facts about Savoldo’s life and art is that in the course of a long career he produced only a limited body of work; the contrast in this regard with his Venetian-native contemporary, the prodigious Lorenzo Lotto, could hardly be more striking. (Lotto, who like Savoldo made his career largely outside Venice, will be a recurrent term of comparison in this book. For all the afnities and exchange of inuence between them, the

introduction

differences are even more telling.) Francesco Frangi’s catalogue raisonné of 1992 lists no more than 47 canvases, some of which are near-repetitions of previous works, though it should be noted that one of Savoldo’s most compelling creations, the Death of St Peter Martyr, came to light only in 2001. Another painting, a Crucifixion, very likely the earliest of his surviving works, today in Monte Carlo, was given to Savoldo two years before.4 Pino in his treatise also remarks that Savoldo was underappreciated in his lifetime (‘He has spent his life on few works, and with scant esteem to his name’ [D, p. 304]), and in general one has the impression of a career conducted not precisely in a minor key but in terms that were strangely personal given the norms of the age. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Savoldo’s most acute artistic concerns were not such as to be fully intelligible to his contemporaries, or for that matter to his modern commentators (I shall try to make good on this claim in the pages to come). In any case, we are dealing with a restricted corpus, with a handful of modest-sized independent pictures mainly of religious subjects. Signicantly, the large altarpieces that survive, such as those alluded to above, are unremarkable, all the more so in comparison with Lotto’s prolic inventiveness in that domain. The relative smallness of his oeuvre notwithstanding, starting in the early twentieth century Savoldo has attracted the attention of some of the leading art historians of Italian painting, among them Roberto Longhi, Adolfo and Lionello Venturi, Creighton Gilbert, Mina Gregori and Keith Christiansen. Gilbert, in fact, made Savoldo his speciality, devoting to the painter a strongly researched and closely argued doctoral dissertation (1955), a work that remains the most sustained scholarly engagement with Savoldo’s art to date. Not surprisingly, given the paucity of documentary evidence, a number of other writers, Antonio Boschetto prominent among them, have taken issue both with Gilbert’s proposals for dating and with his larger sense of Savoldo’s achievement.5 (More broadly, the chronology of Savoldo’s oeuvre is an area of considerable dispute; the dates given in this book for individual works represent my best assessment of the arguments of previous scholars, but we are on uncertain ground.) In addition there took place in Brescia and Frankfurt in 1990 a major exhibition, Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo tra Foppa, Giorgione e Caravaggio, accompanied by an impressive catalogue with essays by prominent scholars including Gilbert, Frangi, Gregori and Sybille Ebert-Schifferer.6 No exhibition since that time compares with it for comprehensiveness, though Savoldo, treated as one of the key precursors of Caravaggio, is discussed both by Keith Christiansen in

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the catalogue for the 1985 exhibition The Age of Caravaggio7 and by Andrea Bayer in that for another ambitious exhibition, Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2004.8 (The latter deliberately echoes the name of an important exhibition, I pittori della realtà in Lombardia, mounted in Milan just over fty years previously.) Finally, a recent exhibition, Titian e la pittura del cinquecento tra Venezia e Brescia, at the Museo di Santa Giulia in Brescia in 2018, included no fewer than eight canvases by Savoldo accompanied by scholarly catalogue entries for them by Frangi and others.9 As such titles suggest, the overriding tendency in recent scholarship has been to treat Savoldo situationally, in the rst place as a predecessor to Caravaggio and in the second as a signicant gure in an essentially naturalistic Lombard tradition, Lombardy being loosely dened historically as including Milan, Brescia, Bergamo, Cremona and Mantua (whose courtly culture set it somewhat aside from larger developments) as well as, stretching its boundaries, implicating Correggio’s Parma and even Bologna. (The Lombard roots of the Carracci, natives of Bologna, have been a leading theme in modern scholarship.10) As already mentioned, the by now deeply entrenched notion that Savoldo looks forward to Caravaggio goes back to the most charismatic presence in Italian art history, Roberto Longhi, who in a series of inuential articles, notably ‘Quesiti caravaggeschi, II: I precedenti’ (1929), argued powerfully if succinctly that Savoldo’s treatment of light, along with the underlying ‘empiricism’ of his art, belonged to a distinctly Lombard tradition that reached its revolutionary climax in Caravaggio’s paintings of the 1590s and the rst decade of the seventeenth century.11 In greater detail, Longhi contended that there existed a distinct school of Brescia, originating with Vincenzo Foppa (1430–1515) and giving an honoured place to the robust sixteenth-century master Alessandro Buonvicino, known as Moretto (1498–1554), born roughly a generation after Savoldo and a dominant presence there throughout his career. Naturally enough, subsequent scholars have modied these views, emphasizing, for example, the likely inuence on Savoldo of Leonardo da Vinci owing to the latter’s years in Milan; Savoldo’s growing involvement with Venetian art in the course of his decades-long residence in that city (emphasis falling on both Giorgione and Titian, among others); his sometime closeness to Lotto; and his evident engagement with Northern art, for example that of Bosch, Cranach, Patinir, Dürer, Schongauer and the Flemish generally, in various of his works, most explicitly in the early Temptations of St Anthony in San Diego and Moscow (assuming

introduction

that both are early) as well as in the Crucifixion in Monte Carlo. In addition, certain scholars, notably Gilbert, have called into question the sharpness of the Lombardy-Venice divide basic to Longhi’s arguments – possibly no one would argue for so strong a divide today. Nevertheless, the Lombard connection, which is also to say Longhi’s inuence, continues to dominate Savoldo commentary, as in the exhibition catalogues mentioned above or, to take a concrete passage of criticism, in the following observations by Sydney J. Freedberg in his masterly Painting in Italy, 1500–1600, apropos of two early canvases to be discussed in Chapter Three, Savoldo’s Elijah Fed by Ravens and SS Paul and Anthony (see illus. 43 and 44): These works, preceding Savoldo’s likely time of settling in Venice and following soon upon it, are clearly products of a temperament already formed. Longer and deeper experience of Venetian art would come to make important differences in Savoldo’s style, without, however, effecting an essential change in his attitude towards art. That had been generated from Savoldo’s Lombard roots, conceiving the rst function of art to be the reproduction of an ordinary reality; and in this respect Savoldo’s early paintings represent the fullment of his previous tradition. (PI, p. 225) This is, one might say, the ground level of the prevailing account of Savoldo’s style. Freedberg adds to it in two further stages, both of which would receive widespread assent from commentators to this day, at least up to a point. First he writes: To a simplistic and popular descriptive mode he added a renement of light-searched details that approximates the effects of a Flemish style, and must be learned in part from it. The human image takes on the character of still life, but one to be described not just in detail but with a generalizing and including power of whole plastic form. These large plastic elements are structurally simple, and they are combined in designs in which an additive mentality like that of the late Quattrocento détente style remains dominant. Seen outwardly as still life, and inwardly with reticent emotion, Savoldo’s persons do not conform to a principle of modern classicism, and cannot achieve the mobile coexistences we expect of Cinquecento style. (PI, pp. 225–6) And then, continuing the same intense paragraph: Yet in these cautious structures and in this atmosphere of emotional reserve there is a factor that intensely charges both: the same light that

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in one aspect of its functioning nds out detail in another suffuses surfaces with arbitrary strength, reecting brilliances of colour that exceed our expectation of visual truth. These brilliances, lucent and commanding, make an effect of illusion still stronger than that of the underlying form, but they transcend illusion, exalting it beyond verity into an effect of art. The power of this surcharged colour to transmute descriptions into poetic meaning is the more compelling from the very contrast of its mutism in design and emotion that accompanies it. (PI, p. 226) This is distinguished art writing by any standard. Let me draw out several points, starting by observing that Freedberg’s description detects in Savoldo’s manner a distinct note of archaism in contrast to the uency of multi-gure relations that Freedberg associates with what he calls classical style, as practised in contemporary Venice by Titian among others. The emphasis in Savoldo, in other words, falls strongly on individual gures, usually no more than a very few in a single canvas, gures who, as Gilbert and others remark, tend to loom with a certain massiveness and monumentality in the foreground of his compositions. Gilbert applied this observation to SS Paul and Anthony: ‘The isolated dramatic gure . . . is Savoldo’s concentrated theme. The hermits are the rst examples: solid enough to impress by reality, pensive enough to impress by seriousness’ (G, p. 312). For Freedberg, as for other commentators, Savoldo’s autograph achievement concerns the treatment of light and in particular of ‘surcharged’ colour as revealed by light. This is not yet in play in the Elijah or SS Paul and Anthony but it is gloriously on view in numerous other works, such as, to take just one example, the Death of St Peter Martyr, in which the padded crimson doublet of Peter’s assassin possesses a coloristic luminosity that almost seems at odds with the subject: at the very least, both the vividness of hue and the virtuosic rendering of the doublet’s silken texture and many folds and indentations attract the eye in a manner that may be felt to consort oddly with the ostensible violence of the main action. In particular it draws attention away from the assassin’s face, which in any case is surprisingly impassive, not to say withdrawn. This is not a criticism: the interplay between the two is gripping, as is the contrast between the dazzling white and black of Peter’s Dominican dress and the intense red of the doublet. Freedberg twice suggests that the human gure in Savoldo’s art has somewhat the character of still life. This is to go rather far – I think too far – in the direction of stressing the naturalistic object-character of the latter’s

introduction

persons. (Gilbert, only somewhat in contrast, notes a tendency ‘to make the single gure separate, monumental and compact, to internalize its massiveness – to make it portrait-like’ [G, p. 323]. Interestingly, though, Savoldo is not particularly distinguished as a portraitist – again, the comparison with Lotto, one of the nest portraitists of the century, is telling.) At the same time, Freedberg detects a characteristic ‘air of emotional reserve’ and ‘reticence of emotion’, terms that at once shift the discussion into an affective register, and goes on to note a ‘mutism in design and emotion’ – in short, an instinctive restraint or holding back – which he sees as contrasting with the poetic intensity of the light-struck colour and in effect throwing that intensity into even greater relief. Gilbert, for his part, points to ‘the emotional concentration of Savoldo’s gures, their quality of reacting with easy bruises to their physical and mental world’ (G, p. 343) – not a simple remark to cash in terms of the paintings themselves. But in a later publication, an essay in Italian in the Savoldo tra Foppa, Giorgione e Caravaggio catalogue, Gilbert goes considerably further. After briey summarizing Savoldo’s preference for constructing gures of impressive density and large bodily architecture (Gilbert’s term), bearing concentrated expressions and almost always immobile and isolated, he writes: Thus was born a gallery of imposing personages who seem to incarnate moral and aristocratic stability and an inclination to the intimacy of thoughts. It’s a matter of solitary personages, sometimes also heroic, from whom is banished every trace of academicism, who very often bring with them a sense of artistic heroism, but who rather are interpreted with a poetic sensibility and a capacity for emotional depth which invites one to participate in their life . . . They are denitively personages linked to one another by a profound interior afnity, like those one sometimes encounters in the work of a great novelist, and yet we cannot say that that afnity is a matter of literary relations: their characters are dened uniquely by visual means, in part by gestures, expressions, and costumes, but also by considerations of form in the most abstract sense of the word.12 I know of no comparable passage elsewhere in the Savoldo literature, but my impression is that it captures a prevailing intuition that there is something out of the ordinary about many of Savoldo’s personages and that that something lies within the realm of subjectivity, that is, in the ‘interior afnity’ among them, but also that it is not at all easy to specify or otherwise

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get at, largely because the personages’ outward gestures and expressions are such as to defeat easy verbalization. Note in this connection that Freedberg imagines a sort of double encounter with Savoldo’s protagonists, whom he describes as ‘seen outwardly as still life, and inwardly with reticent emotion’ – another remark that is difcult to cash, in this case because it is not quite clear what ‘seen inwardly’ amounts to. Whose ‘inwardness’ is at stake here, exactly? Let me come to my point: the chief limitation of the Savoldo literature down to the present moment is its preoccupation with style. Gilbert on Savoldo’s personages is an exception to this, but otherwise stylistic categories are basic to his approach. An emphasis on style is explicit in Freedberg’s summary, which is hardly surprising in view of the fact that his entire book, a sustained tour de force of art-historical analysis and exposition, is an attempt to provide a stylistic overview of the decisive century of Italian, and in a sense of European, painting. Its opening sentences read: The artistic events that most powerfully determined the history of sixteenth-century painting took place in the century’s rst two decades in Florence and Rome, in the time which, implicitly recognizing the stature of its achievement, we have come to call the High Renaissance. The most extraordinary intersection of genius art history has known occurred then and gave form to a style which, again eliciting a term that is a value judgment, we call ‘classic’ or ‘classical’ – meaning, in its original usage, ‘of the highest class’. (PI, p. 1) Freedberg, of course, is today regarded as an unabashed formalist, and there are few if any practising art historians who would foreground the concept of style to that extent. (Gilbert, writing in the 1950s, did not hesitate to title a major section of his dissertation ‘Savoldo’s World of Style’.) But in fact very nearly the entire secondary literature on Savoldo, as I read it, shares a focus on style, by which I mean that its concerns are largely taxonomic, deploying concepts of classical style, archaizing tendencies, Lombard tradition, still life or portrait-like gures, Leonardesque atmospherics, Giorgionesque visual poetics, Northern and/or Venetian inuence and so on, and that such concepts mainly refer to surface or external, in any case immediately apprehensible features of his pictures; these are features the nature of which, and to a large extent their signicance, are taken as self-evident, at any rate to an informed eye. Jaś Elsner, in attempting to dene ‘style’, writes:

introduction

The basic stylistic reex, then, is the grouping of like with like and the disjunction of unlikes, on the basis of morphological or formal analysis (which may amount to the swift taxonomic action of an expert eye, passing over the material and registering its relationships with a body of other material stored in the mind).13 So consistent an emphasis on stylistic considerations is somewhat surprising. Elsner also remarks, and as I have just suggested, that the concept of style, which for decades reigned supreme in art-historical discourse, has been in eclipse for some time in the face of newer emphases and methodologies (Freedberg’s writing is routinely discounted for this reason). But Savoldo studies, nearly without exception, continue to pursue their interpretively modest ends in a stylistic vein, no doubt because no one has yet come up with alternative terms of criticism for making sustained sense of his art. One consequence has been that even as Savoldo’s artistic stature has come to be acknowledged by scholars and he has featured importantly in exhibitions such as those mentioned above, our understanding of his achievement may be said to have reached a virtual dead end (no signicant advances for decades, except for a growing sense of his involvement with Northern precedents).14 And not only that: despite that wider acknowledgement, and in effect going along with it, insufciently close attention has been paid to individual works as if on the assumption, plausible from a stylistic optique, that most or all of what is worth saying about them has already been said. As might be imagined, I take strong issue with such a view and the present book is my attempt to intervene against the status quo as decisively as I can. Whether the reader will be persuaded by what I have to say remains to be seen, but at least it will depart from the all too familiar pathways that have led to the present impasse. By way of bringing these introductory remarks almost to a close, let me give one brief example of a major painting the very subject of which has not been recognized: the superb and poetic Tobias and the Angel in the Borghese Gallery (mid-1520s; illus. 2). Probably no painting by Savoldo is today more admired by scholars and curators who concern themselves with his work. And yet to the best of my knowledge it has never been observed (until recently, by the present writer) that the action depicted in the painting consists not, as is always claimed, in the angel Raphael pointing to the sh emerging from the river in the lower left corner of the canvas, but rather in the angel’s drawing or summoning the sh out of the water with his extended

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2 Savoldo, Tobias and the Angel, mid-1520s, oil on canvas.

arm and hand (also of course with his concentrated gaze). There is no precedent for this ‘magnetic’ or quasi-‘magical’ operation in the book of Tobit or indeed, again to the best of my knowledge, in previous art.15 I shall return to Tobias and the Angel in Chapter Four, in fact the chapter will begin with an extended encounter with that canvas, but I hope that my brief remarks about it here will make it seem more plausible to suggest that much, indeed a great deal, remains to be discovered about Savoldo’s pictorial project, in the rst place by engaging with his paintings with a new intensity of looking as well as, equally important, with a more open and empathic sense of imaginative possibility. What follows is organized in two unequal parts. Part One (the longer of the two) comprises ve chapters starting with a close reading of a single

introduction

painting, going on to cover a set of basic themes and issues, and concluding with a chapter given over to another single work (plus two variants). Part Two, in unnumbered sections of varied length, goes on from the rst, returning to those themes and issues by way of amplifying and deepening them, in part by focusing anew on particular works and motifs, in part by invoking contextual factors that can be shown to bear intimately on Savoldo’s art. My approach, in other words, will not be chronological or indeed systematic in any way. Rather, I shall proceed intuitively, dealing with works and topics as they present themselves to me, with the aim nally of doing at least minimal justice to as artistically and intellectually challenging a body of painting as any of its time.

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part o n e

one

3 (previous page) Savoldo, Portrait of a Young Man with Flute (illus. 37), detail. 4 (facing page) Savoldo, Death of St Peter Martyr (illus. 8), detail.

• D E AT H O F S T P E T E R M A RT Y R

I n 2 0 0 1 a h i t h e rto unknown Savoldo of extremely high quality, the Death of St Peter Martyr, surfaced on the art market and was soon purchased by the Chicago Art Institute, where it hangs today (early 1530s; illus. 8).1 Some background: the historical Peter was a thirteenth-century Dominican friar and preacher born in Verona and active in Lombardy, often preaching against heresy (a current concern for the Dominican order in the 1520s and ’30s), who was murdered along with a companion friar in 1252. The decisive blow was from an axe to his head, and in some of the most famous depictions of the saint, such as Lorenzo Lotto’s Madonna and Child with St Peter Martyr (1503; illus. 7), or the same master’s portrait of a Dominican friar as St Peter Martyr (1548; see illus. 15), the weapon, usually a heavy knife or sword, is shown embedded in the saint’s skull (it is, in effect, his saintly attribute). (There will be more on the latter canvas towards the end of this chapter.) Savoldo’s painting, in contrast, depicts the murderous act, but does so in a manner that at once links it with other such depictions in contemporary Venice and its environs and distinguishes it from those depictions in ways that I shall try to show are revelatory of Savoldo’s unique pictorial vision. The crucial comparison, as was recognized from the rst, is with Titian’s monumental altarpiece painted for the basilica of SS Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, a work of stupendous dramatic and expressive force (1529; illus. 5). The original was lost in a re in 1867 and a replacement hangs today in its place in the Chapel of the Rosary (illus. 6). Here is Freedberg on Titian’s painting: At an undetermined date between 1525 and 1527 a competition was held for an altar painting of the Death of St. Peter Martyr in SS Giovanni

5 (above left) Martino Rota after Titian, Martyrdom of St Peter, c. 1560, engraving. 6 (above right) Carlo Loth after Titian, Martyrdom of St Peter, 1691, oil on canvas. 7 (right) Lorenzo Lotto, Madonna and Child with St Peter Martyr, 1503, oil on panel.

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e Paolo: Titian won the contest, and in 1528–30 executed the painting (now lost, and replaced by a copy). Titian’s rivals were Palma [Vecchio] and Pordenone [a ‘provincial’ painter of formidable inventiveness and rude strength]. Palma was no challenge, but Pordenone was, and in terms that presented to Titian the same problem of a plastic style that he had faced recurrently since his indirect encounter with the Laocoon and Michelangelo [indirect because he had not actually visited Florence or Rome]. In addition, Pordenone was the exponent of the most extreme dramatic manner in contemporary art. Apparently thinking of Venetian taste Pordenone moderated his accustomed violence in his design; but apparently thinking of his competitor, Titian conceived the most radical

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8 Savoldo, Death of St Peter Martyr, early 1530s, oil on canvas.

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invention he could make, exceeding Pordenone’s precedents in dramatic force, in urgency of action, and in assertion of an energy of forms expanding in their space. Articulate in form and in expression as Pordenone could not be, and far surpassing him in his descriptive means, in this picture Titian generated a vastly higher and more trenchant power. The design in which the gures act conveys the sense of an explosion: behind the gures tree-trunks act almost anthropomorphically to extend and elaborate this effect. The violence of emotion, the intensity of action, and the expansiveness of pattern are in a degree which, at least as much as in Pordenone’s or Correggio’s extreme inventions, suggests the temper of a baroque style. Yet, more evidently than in them, that end pertains to classicism. The mode of feeling of the gures is rened towards typology, and their actions have the structured grace of classical dramatic repertory; their ordering is in a scheme of counterpoise. In the setting, the explosive impetus of design is tempered as it rises, then muted, then diffused into a lyrical and tragic light. (PI, pp. 215–16)2 By now Freedberg’s concern with classical norms should be unsurprising, but what I want to stress is that his account of Titian’s achievement in his Death of St Peter Martyr makes much of the competitive framework in which it was conceived, and of course Savoldo’s canvas, which scholars date to the early 1530s, must be understood not exactly as in competition with Titian’s dramatic masterpiece (Savoldo would have been perfectly aware that Titian, whom he seems to have admired greatly, could not be beaten on that ground) but nevertheless as offering a radically alternative vision of its subject. Instead of a towering vertically oriented image, such as Freedberg describes, Savoldo gives us a much more modest-scaled depiction (115 cm high by 141 cm wide), with two three-quarter-length gures, Peter and his murderer, in the near foreground and two much smaller ones, Peter’s companion and his killer, further back in space to the right. The main action consists in the assassin about to launch a backhanded blow with his dagger, which is to say that his body is turned partly away from Peter (it is sometimes said that he turns his back to him, which does not seem right), in such a way that, as was mentioned in the Introduction, emphasis falls on his crimson doublet and its folds and creases rather than on his partly obscured and shadowed face. The backhanded blow is surprising: in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings it usually precedes an attempt at decapitation with a large sword, obviously not the case here; the dagger with its curious point seems an odd

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weapon to be employed in such a manner. Nor is it entirely clear where the blow is intended to strike: Peter’s body seems a more likely target than his head. As for Peter himself, the painting’s protagonist, he has fallen to his knees – the killer looms above him – and looks up and to his left, a rapt expression on his face, while as if reexively raising his left hand before him with its palm facing the viewer. Signicantly, but it is never mentioned, the hand, exquisitely delineated and painted, occupies almost the very centre of the canvas. At the same time, Peter’s brilliantly foreshortened right hand, at the lower left, makes a kind of reexive gesture that conveys a sense of momentariness and surprise (more will need to be said about both hands shortly, as well as about the nature and direction of Peter’s gaze). Also at the lower left is a rock on which are inscribed the letters CR, standing for ‘Credo a Dio’ (impossible to make out in an illustration), in a reference to the legend of Peter’s dying act of writing the opening words of the Nicene Creed in his own blood. The killer’s left hand grips the hilt of a sword still at his side. The setting is characteristic of Savoldo’s art in that it features a sharp division between a distant landscape (at the left) and nearer elements – often rocks but here a stand of trees (at the centre and right). The double murder takes place in broad sunlight, which casts denite shadows but mainly illuminates both the killer’s doublet and Peter’s simple but splendid white robe or surplice and copious sleeves. Mina Gregori in a short article marking the painting’s exhibition at a New York art gallery in 2001 writes that as the light irregularly strikes the man’s doublet it bathes that splendid surface in sunshine, producing an apparent intensication of color and a sparkling quality that lends the painting its most sublime note. The calm placement of light in the friar’s habit and the assassin’s shirt captures the distinction between the various hues of white according to the way light falls, and between the luminous and penumbral areas of the picture. (p. 77) This is acutely observed, but it is characteristic of Gregori’s stylistic priorities that no comparable closeness of observation is directed towards, for example, Peter’s facial expression. As Gregori remarks in the same article, another version of the Death of St Peter Martyr by Palma Vecchio (c. 1529; illus. 9), in the parish church in Alzano Lombardo, a small town near Bergamo, was clearly present in Savoldo’s mind when he composed his painting (pp. 75–6). Palma’s work is a high altarpiece, and Gregori suggests, on the strength of the background

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9 Palma Vecchio, Martyrdom of St Peter of Verona, c. 1529, oil on panel.

trees, that it probably dates from roughly the moment of the competition, with which, however, it had nothing to do. In any case, the closeness of the saint’s pose to that of Savoldo’s protagonist is self-evident: Palma’s saint is on his knees; his right hand points to the famous sentence on the ground, which he has just written in his own blood; his left hand is very nearly in the same position as in the Savoldo; and he looks up, presumably towards the spectacular heavenly display of God the Father and a virtual ring of angels, one of which, the lowest one at the right, bears the palm branch of martyrdom. In line with other depictions of the same subject, a shortish sword is

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embedded in Peter’s head, while one of the assassins draws a long sword, presumably to complete the act of killing. Obviously, though, the effect of Savoldo’s painting is altogether different from that of Palma’s, for several mutually reinforcing reasons. First, it radically undoes the distance between the viewer and the scene of martyrdom: whereas in Palma’s altarpiece the viewer is imagined as sufciently distant to see all the gures at full length, Savoldo has moved in for the equivalent of a close-up (as mentioned, the saint and his killer are depicted three-quarter length) and the viewer is left to conclude that the saint is on his knees simply by his position relative to that of his killer. Second, Savoldo has done away with the sense of crowding and tumult in Palma’s painting by eliminating the entire heavenly host and concentrating attention almost exclusively on the two principal gures. In Palma’s canvas, in contrast, not one but two assassins directly menace Peter, and the latter’s eeing companion, only somewhat more distant than he, deects the viewer’s attention to the right, further lessening the already diffuse effect of the whole. Third, as Gregori emphasizes, the close-up framing of the scene allows Savoldo to pursue his autograph luministic and coloristic ends (never more brilliantly than here), while at the same time bringing into the sharpest imaginable focus, thereby granting a wholly new signicance to, in the rst place, Peter’s facial expression, and in the second his upraised left hand. Note, by the way, the magnitude of the difference in these regards from Titian’s altarpiece, in which the dramatic energy of the killing and of Peter’s companion’s ight and backwards look takes pride of place at the expense of any but the most ‘typological’ (Freedberg’s term) or indeed ‘theatrical’ (in a non-pejorative sense) physiognomic and gestural expressiveness; to speak of all the gures’ actions and gestures as belonging to a classical dramatic repertory, as Freedberg does, seems exactly right. Savoldo’s painting has none of this. In fact it could not be more deliberately removed from all such considerations (from all trace of emphatic rhetoric), a point that contemporary viewers could not but have recognized, whether in approval or not. Put slightly differently, in his Death of St Peter Martyr, knowing himself to be working in the immediate aftermath of Titian’s titanic achievement, and having gleaned useful intimations from Palma’s much less powerful but by no means uninteresting altarpiece, Savoldo found the resources to make a painting that stands out absolutely among sixteenth-century treatments of the subject – my task now being to say exactly why and how.

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10 Savoldo, Drawing of a Man’s Head, 1530–35.

To begin with the saint’s face and expression: as Gregori noted, these are closely based on a drawing of a man’s head in Warsaw (early 1530s?; illus. 10), one of a number of extremely impressive charcoal or pencil drawings by Savoldo, all but one portrait studies of models, all but one of whom are male. In this case Savoldo had evidently already decided on the basics of his composition, and had his model – dark-bearded, with rened features, seemingly in his thirties – assume the position of the saint’s head and the direction of his gaze (towards the upper right, the model’s left). Thus Gregori: ‘In every respect . . . the correspondences are perfect, conrming the naturalism of Savoldo’s creative process’ (p. 76). But in the rst place

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the correspondences aren’t quite perfect, and in the second to speak of naturalism in this connection, while making perfect sense as far as it goes, falls short of acknowledging the creative thought that went into the conception of the painting before the artist rst posed his model and began to draw his features. Gregori knows this, indeed no contemporary scholar knows more about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian painting and how it came into being, but once again a prioritizing of stylistic considerations rules out any intimate imagining of the creative process. To go beyond such considerations, let us ask a simple question – at what is Peter gazing? Is the viewer being invited to think of him (to see him) as gazing at anything in particular? Or is the artist’s point simply that Peter is in a sort of ecstatic trance, ‘immersed in thoughts of heaven’, as Gilbert puts it in a short article on the painting?3 My strong intuition, my conviction, is that the artist intended the saint to be seen as gazing at one or more angels bringing down to him the palm branch of martyrdom, the traditional Christian symbol of the triumph of the spirit over the esh. That is why Peter seems virtually to ignore the assassin, as Gilbert puts it. In this connection it is obviously not irrelevant that angels bearing a palm branch appear in both Titian’s and Palma Vecchio’s altarpieces, where in a sense we scarcely notice them; what Savoldo has done is to confer a wholly new measure of importance, of virtual ‘presence’, on such an angelic emissary (the compositional economy of Savoldo’s painting suggesting that there was just one) precisely by locating angel and palm branch outside (beyond, above) the representational, and in effect the physical, limits of the canvas, in the direction of the saint’s enthralled but also, it seems to me, surprised, even astounded, gaze. To go a bit farther, one might almost say that the main action of the painting, the action that determines its affective character, is the descent of the angel, with an extended arm proffering the palm branch. Of course the assassin is wholly unaware of any of this, which gives added point to the partial turning of his body away from the saint and also to his contained expression, both artful strokes on Savoldo’s part. Of course, too, the viewer, while being given all the information needed to understand exactly what is going on – assuming that he or she is familiar with the convention of palm branch-bearing angels in paintings of martyrdom, as would beyond a doubt have been the case for Catholic viewers about 1530 – is at the same time offered a ravishing distraction in the radiant, light-struck treatment of the assassin’s gorgeous doublet, as if to underscore the difference, if not indeed the disparity, between the world of ordinary experience, including

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the experience of painting, and the divine world made momentarily ‘present’ by the fact of martyrdom. Scholarly responses to the painting testify to the appeal of the offer, to the extent that the descent of the angel has been altogether ignored. All this makes Savoldo’s canvas a work of the highest fascination. But there is more to be said about Peter’s gaze, namely that it implies that the palm branch-bearing angel is to be imagined as located not only above the depicted scene, which is also to say above the upper framing edge, but also, even more radically, ‘this’ side of the picture plane – as if in the ‘real’ space between the painting and the viewer. (I take this to be self-evident, if one follows the painting’s cues.) As will become clear in the course of this book, we are not dealing here with an isolated and exceptional feat of compositional daring. On the contrary, the Death of St Peter Martyr is a particularly gripping example of one of the most profoundly original features of Savoldo’s art: its implied activation, in certain of his most compelling inventions, of the space before the painting, together with its frequent evocation of the proximate presence of the viewer, in a manner that goes far beyond the norms of sixteenth-century painting in the direction of some of the basic innovations of Caravaggio and his successors around 1600 and after. In this particular case, the effect, once we allow it to take hold, is at once thrilling and disconcerting: we suddenly realize that we are imagined as there, not standing at a ‘safe’ distance before a representation but rather witnessing at extremely close range a simultaneously dreadful and astonishing event, though it is also true that no account has been taken of our presence by Peter or his killer, leaving us unaccounted for, so to speak. At the same time, none of this is felt to entail a notional dissolving of the limits of the painting (we are very far from the illusionistic propensities of the full-blown Baroque). Rather, those limits are made palpable as limits for being activated in these ways. But this makes it all the harder to imagine Savoldo’s canvas on the side wall of a chapel in a Dominican church, as Gilbert suggests would have been its destination (p. 292). Such circumstances inevitably would have militated against a recognition of the viewer-oriented dynamic I have sought to evoke. There is still more to be said about the Death of St Peter Martyr, but before going there I want to leave Savoldo for a moment to consider a major painting by Caravaggio, one of the two that made his early reputation as a revolutionary force, the Martyrdom of St Matthew (c. 1599–1600; illus. 11) in S. Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. I have already noted that, starting with Roberto Longhi, modern scholars have emphasized Savoldo’s signicance as a key

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predecessor of the later master, on the strength of his ‘Lombard naturalism’, his related treatment of light and colour, and his predilection for nocturnal or penumbral scenes, as in his Magdalenes or the St Matthew and the Angel. (Longhi also famously focuses on Savoldo’s treatment of his personages’ hands, a topic about which there will be much more to say.) All this makes perfect sense, but what I want to call attention to in the Martyrdom of St Matthew is something else entirely: Caravaggio’s extraordinary depiction of the relations among the almost naked executioner holding a sword and rmly gripping Matthew’s right wrist, the fallen but apparently still unwounded Matthew and, of particular interest, the winged angel who reaches down from a strikingly material cloud to extend a palm branch towards Matthew’s upraised right hand. As has been recognized, the treatment of the executioner and Matthew plainly evinces the use of models holding poses. Indeed there is at least the suggestion that the young assassin’s grip around Matthew’s wrist is less persuasively an image of sudden violence than it is a device for

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11 Caravaggio, Martyrdom of St Matthew, c. 1599– 1600, oil on canvas.

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allowing models for the two gures to maintain a difcult pose long enough for it to be set down in paint. Put slightly differently, Caravaggio’s decisive innovation has always been seen as his use of models, as Keith Christiansen has pointed out: ‘[A]ll of Caravaggio’s contemporaries viewed his practice of painting from a live model to be the single most outstanding feature of his work.’4 What this particular gure-group suggests is that Caravaggio not only wished to insist on that fact; here as elsewhere in his art he was willing, up to a point, to evoke the original studio situation of models holding poses, even as he also sought to represent with unprecedented force and realism a scene of murderous violence. What particularly interests me, of course, is the presence of the angel extending a palm branch down towards Matthew’s upraised (or upheld) hand, at once a traditional feature of depictions of martyrdoms and – in this particular painting, by virtue of the realistic levelling of the three gures (no special treatment for the angel beyond giving him a pair of wings) as well as of the angel’s imminent intrusion into the relations between the assassin and the saint – a way of casting that feature in a new, defamiliarizing light, an early example of what would be a major feature of Caravaggio’s art. This would be the case to the very end: think of the King of the Huns ring an arrow at point-blank range into St Ursula’s breast in his nal painting, the Martyrdom of St Ursula. Needless to say, I would like to be able to assert that Caravaggio was in part inspired to do this by a familiarity with Savoldo’s canvas with its very different but comparably unconventional treatment of the palm-branch theme, but there is no solid basis for such a claim. Not only is nothing known about where the Death of St Peter Martyr originally hung, for all the widespread assumption on stylistic grounds that Savoldo signicantly anticipated Caravaggio, we have no hard evidence that actually places the later master in front of a work by the earlier one. Despite this, Christiansen has noted that ‘It is signicant that whereas Savoldo’s pictures seem to have made little impression on Venetian painters, they were the basis of much subsequent painting in Milan, where Caravaggio almost certainly studied them rst-hand.’5 Mina Gregori agrees, condent that Caravaggio would have seen Savoldo’s Tobias and the Angel in the Milan mint in his youth.6 I concur, but like all students of the subject I wish we had concrete information as to what Caravaggio saw and didn’t see during his early years. In any case, I nd the relation between the elision and thereby the foregrounding of the angel in the Death of St Peter Martyr and the trio of angel, Matthew and assassin in the Martyrdom of St Matthew to be

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suggestive of a deeper afnity than simply a stylistic one between the two painters.

I c om e n ow to another feature of Savoldo’s painting that deserves further attention: the depiction of Peter’s hands. In an obvious sense, as Gregori remarks, Savoldo was inuenced in this by Palma Vecchio’s depiction of the saint’s martyrdom in Alzano Lombardo (p. 76), the most obvious difference being that Palma shows the saint’s right hand pointing at the rst words of the Credo written in blood on the ground beside him, whereas in Savoldo’s painting Peter’s right hand merely gestures reexively in a manner already discussed. But there is a more profound difference between the two paintings in this regard, I mean the way in which Savoldo’s decision to pitch the entire scene much nearer to the picture plane, and thereby to the viewer, gives the saint’s left hand emerging from its sleeve an altogether more pointed signicance than in the predecessor work. Moreover, the sense of its signicance is further heightened by the fact, as already noted, that it now occupies very nearly the exact centre of the canvas, with the result that it must be accounted one of the painting’s three main foci of pictorial interest, along with the saint’s facial expression and the killer’s crimson doublet (or four main foci if one includes, as I have suggested one must, the descending angel). The question is what to make of that hand, a question, it seems worth noting, that so far has escaped being asked. This would be surprising if there were a larger secondary literature on the painting, which would doubtless be the case had it not come to light so recently. By this I mean that hands in Savoldo’s paintings have attracted a great deal of commentary, going back to Longhi, for whom they constituted one of the signature elements in his art. (As will become clear, they are a recurrent topic in Gilbert’s dissertation.) In Chapter Two, taking off from a discussion of the Portrait of a Man in Armour in the Louvre – in fact, as Gilbert realized, a self-portrait – I shall engage the larger topic of Savoldo’s treatment of hands. Here, though, I simply want to focus on Peter’s hand in the Chicago canvas, and use it to make some basic points about the project of coming to terms with Savoldo’s highly idiosyncratic achievement. The rst and most important point is simply to acknowledge the hand’s particular claim on the viewer’s attention and, going farther, on what I would like to call his or her capacity for empathic projection, to use a term

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12 (above left) Caravaggio, Death of the Virgin, 1601–2, oil on canvas.

rst put in circulation in a different context by the philosopher Stanley Cavell.7 In my book The Moment of Caravaggio I try to show how in early revolutionary paintings such as Caravaggio’s Penitent Magdalene (1596–7; illus. 13) and Death of the Virgin (1601–2; illus. 12), a seeming inexpressiveness – a deliberate avoidance of outward-directed gestures and expressions (of the depiction of affetti) – turns out to be perceived, by viewers attuned to his art, as a mark or sign of the depth of Mary’s or the grieving disciples’ absorption in thought and feeling. Freedberg’s comment in a 1982 essay on the painter, that ‘there is no secret of the psyche that Caravaggio cannot nd out’, bears witness to the efcacy of Caravaggio’s strategy, as well as to its invisibility as such to his commentators.8 Put more strongly, my claim in that chapter is that the paintings in question are the scene of a momentous discovery,

13 (above right) Caravaggio, Penitent Magdalene, 1596–7, oil on canvas.

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the discovery that a powerful mode of emotional communication can be actuated by absolutely minimal physiognomic and gestural means. Put slightly differently, the discovery concerns what viewers, confronted with certain sorts of outwardly almost wholly inexpressive gures – gures who are outwardly inexpressive in certain distinctive ways – spontaneously do, at least in the Western tradition . . . namely, read that lack of outward expression as an unmistakable sign of intense inwardness and sheer depth of feeling, as if in the presence of certain very slight but nevertheless telling visual hints or cues the illusion of absorption, which is to say the endowing of the gures in question with an imagined inner life comparable, if not superior, in intensity to the viewer’s own, proves irresistible. The discovery, in other words, is of the basic truth that human beings tend strongly to project – that by and large they cannot not project – a conviction of inwardness onto, or rather into, painted or sculpted gures who elicit that act of projection in various barely speciable ways, which is why the magic of absorption continues more or less unabated to the present day. (MC, p. 77) Further on in my book I refer to this phenomenon as ‘empathic projection’, and I relate it to Cavell’s arguments about scepticism and acknowledgement – topics there is no need to go into here. Now my account of the signicance of Peter Martyr’s facial expression in Savoldo’s canvas, to remain with that remarkable work, does not involve responding to an instance of expressive minimalism of the Penitent Magdalene sort (whatever one makes of his state of mind, he cannot be seen as someone simply holding a pose, which was a risk inherent in such minimalism). The modality of its expressiveness, however, is as much inward as outward, and I have also implicitly suggested (I would like to feel I have demonstrated) that it is only to be understood by an act of something like imaginative identication on the part of the viewer with the gure of the saint, above all with the latter’s upward, intense, marvellously nuanced gaze. Put in further Cavellian terms, what is at stake in one’s encounter with Savoldo’s Death of St Peter Martyr is nothing less than ‘the discovery of the other, the inwardness of the other, the beyond of the other’, insofar as it lies within the power of pictorial representation to persuasively evoke such a state of affairs.9 In its own time and place, that power was underwritten by the Catholic faith. What has replaced this, however, in our time and place, assuming that Cavell’s words are felt to exert their grip? At any rate, at the risk of getting ahead of myself,

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I am inclined to say that I know of no sixteenth-century Italian painting – not even Lotto’s portraits, about which there will be more to say – that outdoes Savoldo’s canvas in this regard.10 Finally, we come to the saint’s left hand (illus. 14), almost at the exact centre of the canvas. The rst thing to be remarked is that it is an astonishingly subtle, nuanced, feeling entity – one of the most remarkable hands in Western painting, I want to claim (in my enthusiasm, but I do not think I overstate the case). The palm faces us, the ngers are slightly separated, they are all bent to a greater or lesser degree (the forenger least, the middle nger somewhat more, the next two ngers sufciently so that we glimpse their ngernails, a descriptive triumph at an intimate scale). A certain tension seems palpable, but there is not the slightest hint of the sort of mannered gesticulation that we nd in Titian’s altarpiece, while the hand as a whole is the object of an extraordinarily subtle treatment in terms of light and dark: the palm with its creases is relatively strongly illuminated, the ngers are delicately shadowed, with light towards their tips, the wrist as it emerges from Peter’s owing sleeve is in relatively dark shadow. As for the feeling conveyed, it is hard to pin this down with any precision, but the hand’s status as a potential focus of what I have been calling empathic projection (or imaginative identication, but I prefer Cavell’s term) seems to me undeniable. At any rate, the longer I have spent in front of the canvas on repeated visits to the Art Institute, the more unwaveringly my attention has come to rest and dwell on the hand – as if the crucial clue, or one crucial clue, to the painting’s meaning hovers precisely there. Having gone this far, I want to take a further step and propose that the viewer’s response to the hand involves a mimetism (not mimicry) of a very particular sort. Note, to begin with, that the hand, despite facing the viewer, in no sense thrusts the viewer away or to even the slightest degree blocks or resists his or her imaginative access to the painting. On the contrary, and here I come to my most extreme claim, the hand is felt to offer itself as a perfect ‘match’ or ‘double’ to the viewer’s hand – specically to his or her right hand, which is to say to the hand that is in a position to ‘mirror’ the saint’s left hand with perfect naturalness. Indeed I think of the two hands, the saint’s depicted left hand and the viewer’s actual right one, as all but coinciding in the near foreground of the painting, very nearly in the vicinity of the picture plane as such, though precisely what it means to suggest this, precisely what such ‘coinciding’ involves – obviously it is imaginative, not physical – is impossible to state with as much clarity as

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one would wish. But the force of the suggestion, of the solicitation, on the part of Peter’s left hand, once it is apprehended with empathic openness, and once the viewer allows his or her own bodily feeling to activate the representation, seems to me undeniable: the ‘beyond’ of the other but also a certain intimate proximity. Viewed in those terms, the hand is the vital crux of the composition, a locus of juncture between worlds, one sublunary and the other divine (the hand will shortly grasp the palm of martyrdom). For an extended moment in and around Venice (Galileo will not be born for another thirty years, Descartes for another thirty after that), even as the Reformation is gathering strength in Northern Europe, followed within little more than a decade by the summons to the Council of Trent to deal

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14 Savoldo, Death of St Peter Martyr (illus. 8), detail.

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with the mounting crisis not just as regards the North but within the Catholic Church itself, these worlds are not yet implacably faced off against each other, as will eventually be the case. And what of the saint’s other hand, his right one, in the lower left corner of the canvas? As was noted earlier, it is shown in foreshortening and as if caught midway in a grasping gesture, evincing a muscular tension, also perhaps a sense of distress, that the left hand does not. Because the palm is in shadow, and also, of course, because of its marginal position, the right hand is all too easily lost sight of; but the foreshortening is brilliant, the treatment of the ngers with their carefully delineated ngernails once again is scrupulous, and it makes a ne counterbalance to the upraised left hand once it is taken in. Moreover, one has the impression that it is ever so slightly larger than the left hand, as if the right hand were slightly nearer the viewer than the other. Here one has to recognize the simple fact, invariably ignored, that the Death of St Peter Martyr was brought into being, that is, painted, by means of a two-handed sequence of actions: the painter, if he operated in a traditional fashion, which there is no reason to doubt, wielded a brush in his right hand and held, or gripped, a palette in his left. My further suggestion is that the saint’s right hand mirrors, or say matches, the painter’s left hand ‘this’ side of the picture surface. His left hand would have been lower than his right, so its position in the lower left corner of the painting may be thought of as ‘matching’ or ‘reecting’ the actual circumstances of the production of the painting. Moreover, in the normal course of things it would for the most part have been nearer the painter than his brush hand. So the painting’s rst viewer, its rst intimate other, so to speak, would have been the painter himself. I shall have more to say about hands in Savoldo’s paintings in Chapter Two, as well as about the strong element of self-portraiture in his relatively sparse oeuvre – indeed self-portraiture carrying the implication that the painter is somehow representing himself in the act of painting, at least up to a point. But by way of bringing this chapter to a close I want to consider a painting mentioned much earlier, Lorenzo Lotto’s moving and arresting A Dominican Friar as St Peter Martyr in the Fogg Art Museum (illus. 15). In many respects comparing Savoldo to Lotto is bound to be unfair to the former. Not that Lotto is a canonical master like Titian. On the contrary, although born in Venice and very likely trained there, he mainly worked in provincial locales (Treviso, Bergamo, Jesi, Ancona, Loreto), and throughout his long, diverse and immensely productive career his art was marked

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by personal idiosyncrasies, including, as Freedberg writes, ‘an almost morbid hyperphotosensitivity’, by which he means that Lotto ‘extrapolates the techniques of realism, and in particular its technique of light, to record the response of a special sensibility, acute and nervous, to visual experience’ (PI, p. 199). Freedberg also identies two powerful strains in Lotto’s art, the rst leading to ‘an expressive turbulence in which the toughness and immediacy of forms and feelings are popolano, unstylized, and unidealized’, and the second, ‘no less irrationally inspired, seek[ing] to translate pathos into an extreme of grace, conveying the rapture of religious feeling by an articial beauty given to appearances and forms’ (PI, p. 202). Just these few sentences evoke a body of work very different from Savoldo’s, to which it should be added that Lotto was also a colourist of rare originality, that his altarpieces in particular reveal an extraordinary richness of visual invention, and that he was without question a portraitist of genius, in the last two respects leaving Savoldo far behind. If one compares a characteristic Lotto of the 1520s, for example his Virgin and Child with SS Jerome and Nicholas of Tolentino (1523–4; illus. 16) in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, with the Death of St

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15 (below left) Lorenzo Lotto, A Dominican Friar as St Peter Martyr, 1548, oil on canvas. 16 (below right) Lorenzo Lotto, Virgin and Child with SS Jerome and Nicholas of Tolentino, 1523–4, oil on canvas.

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Peter Martyr, it can be hard to see what common ground, beyond their shared religiosity and a feeling for intense colour, exists between the two painters. Both were keenly interested in Northern art, however, and it is also true, as Bernard Berenson was the rst to recognize, that Savoldo in the late 1520s and early 1530s was inuenced by Lotto. No doubt inuence also owed the other way. Nevertheless, the difference between their most characteristic productions could not be more striking. But there is this: one central issue in my reading of Savoldo’s Death of St Peter Martyr concerns its relation to the viewer, who I have tried to show is implicated in the most intimate terms in the gradual bringing forth or progressive revelation of the painting’s meaning. While I would argue that nothing quite like that is to be found in Lotto’s oeuvre, it is also true that his portraits have always been found remarkable for their apparent depth of psychological penetration, which is also to say for the forcefulness with which they inect a basic portrait convention – the sitter looking directly out of the painting – with the further implication that the viewer is addressed or, perhaps more accurately, engaged by the sitter in a manner that calls for a response, if only that of seeking actively to interpret the sitter’s mood or state of mind. This is often one of sadness or melancholy, since something appears plainly to weigh on the minds and indeed the bodies of certain of these, especially his older male subjects.11 To cite Freedberg one more time, referring to the Fogg painting (see illus. 15): One of the last portraits we possess, a Monk as St. Peter Martyr (c. 1548–9), half-portrait, half-icon, is a powerful afrmation of a simple and intense presence; it is not only by an accident of subject matter that we nd here, as in the last religious paintings, that art has become the servant of belief. (PI, p. 207) Freedberg, like Berenson before him and other commentators since, plausibly sees Lotto’s art in the context of the religious turmoil of his time.12 Needless to say, I am not suggesting that Lotto’s canvas refers back to Savoldo’s of at least twenty years before. But it is by no means impossible that Lotto would have known the earlier work: the two friars are not devoid of all facial resemblance. In Lotto’s picture, too, Peter’s hands play a conspicuous role, albeit not one keyed to the act of painting (the right hand pointing downwards, here too at the rst sentence of the Credo), while a palm branch of martyrdom has been placed partly behind Lotto’s Peter to the right. (The Credo lying off-canvas recalls the off-canvas angel bringing the palm of

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martyrdom to the saint in the Chicago canvas.) Lotto’s Peter, a cleaver resting in his skull, also bears a sword or dagger that has been plunged into his upper left breast, and there is no reason to doubt that the viewer is meant to imagine a blow struck from in front. But that is also – may I say, suggestively, or does this go too far? – more or less where we might imagine it having been planted by a backhanded blow of the kind depicted in the Death of St Peter Martyr. In any case, the two paintings are in dialogue with one another, whether intended to be so by Lotto or not.

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17 (facing page) Savoldo, Penitent St Jerome (illus. 33), detail.

• HANDS

I n the moment of caravaggio I begin by suggesting that an astonishing early Caravaggio, his Boy Bitten by a Lizard (c. 1595–6; illus. 18), may be seen as a disguised right-angle mirror-reected and mirror-reversed self-portrait.1 By right-angle mirror-reection I refer to a studio set-up (or dispositif ) according to which the canvas on which the self-portrait is to be made is placed at a right angle to the mirror in which the (in the interest of simplicity, male) painter will study his own features; in effect the painter in the act of painting pivots his attention back and forth between the reected image and the canvas on which he is working, a process that of course cannot actually be depicted in the nal painting. But as I show by surveying a wide range of examples, such self-portraits can easily be recognized by the way in which the painter’s gaze out of the painting – apparently at the viewer but ‘originally’ at his own image in a mirror – is invariably at odds with the orientation of his body, which, again ‘originally’, was turned towards the canvas on its easel. When the painting is completed it in effect takes the place of the mirror. Thus in the Boy Bitten by a Lizard my claim is that the boy’s upraised left hand was ‘originally’ the painter’s right hand wielding a brush and his left hand being bitten by a lizard his left hand holding a palette, the entire ctive scenario, with its strong sense of surprise (hence instantaneousness), being a way of disguising the basic arrangement I have just outlined as well as, by so doing, putting out of mind the protracted process of making the painting. A further claim, going beyond Caravaggio, concerned mirror-reection as such, which by its nature ‘reverses’ right and left. Thus a right-handed (male)

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18 (above left) Caravaggio, Boy Bitten by a Lizard, c. 1595–6, oil on canvas.

painter’s reection in a mirror will show him with the brush in his left hand; but in fact it turns out that for several centuries self-portraits that depicted the artist holding his tools or in the act of painting (most did not) presented a normalized image – brush in right hand, palette in left – that aimed to be faithful to the reality of the case rather than to the reection in the mirror. There are a few exceptions, notably Annibale Carracci’s marvellous Selfportrait with Other Figures (c. 1585–90; illus. 19) in the Brera, but basically the normalized status quo prevailed until around 1860, when quite suddenly and with no formal acknowledgement of the change, painters everywhere began to be faithful to the reversed image, which is to say to what they saw in the mirror rather than what they knew to be true.2 In the book I also show how a number of pre-1860 self-portraits hint at mirror-reversal without actually spelling it out; nothing could be more surprising than that the entire issue largely escaped art-historical notice for so long. Signicantly, an impressive painting by Savoldo belongs squarely to this problematic: the Portrait of a Man in Armour (c. 1525; illus. 20).3 For a long

19 (above right) Annibale Carracci, Self-portrait with Other Figures, c. 1585–90, oil on canvas.

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time it was considered a portrait of the French military commander Gaston de Foix, duc de Nemours, but in fact there is little doubt that we are dealing here with a self-portrait, as Creighton Gilbert appears to have been the rst to recognize,and it is this identication that allows us to understand it as the conceptual and pictorial tour de force that it is.4 First, though, it is necessary to say something about a famous work, albeit no longer extant (and perhaps simply legendary): a painting by Savoldo’s Venetian predecessor Giorgione as described by Savoldo’s former student Paolo Pino. In an often-cited passage in his Dialogo di pittura of 1548, a text we shall return to, Pino writes that Giorgione painted a picture of an armed St George, standing and leaning on the shaft of a spear, with his feet at the very edge of a limpid and clear pool – which [pool] was transxed by the entire gure, foreshortened as far as the

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20 Savoldo, Portrait of a Man in Armour (previously known as Gaston de Foix), c. 1525, oil on canvas.

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crown of the head; in addition, he had feigned a mirror leaning against a tree trunk, in which the entire gure was reected from the back and one side. He depicted a second mirror opposite this, in which was visible the entire other side of St George. And this he did in support [of the argument] that a painter can show an entire gure at a single glance, which a sculptor cannot. (D, p. 367)5 The last reference is to what has come to be known as the paragone, a competition between artistic media, in this case between painting and sculpture, which by its very nature shows gures in the round. This was a major theme in sixteenth-century writing about the arts.6 As regards Savoldo’s canvas, the paragone issue is doubtless relevant, but in The Moment of Caravaggio I go on to argue, on the strength of its identication as a self-portrait, that questions of right/left mirror-reversal are the focus of its operations: In fact, Savoldo’s canvas provides a precocious precedent for Caravaggio, in that I understand the respective position of the artist-sitter’s right and left arms and hands as miming in reverse those of the artist-viewer as he worked on the painting (as if the artist-sitter’s extended left arm were holding a brush and the bent right arm were gripping a palette) – in reverse, because, this being a self-portrait, Savoldo would presumably have been portraying his image in a mirror (i.e., the entire scene represented in the painting should be understood as a mirror-image). In addition, Savoldo depicts two other mirrors, one of which, the large mirror that occupies the upper right quadrant of the canvas, reverses back the implied mirror reversal of the artist-sitter’s arms and hands. Thus, in that mirror the artist-sitter’s right arm is shown extended and the left not, which is what in actual fact would have been the case (the artist-viewer’s right hand wielding a brush, the bent left arm holding a palette). The genius of this construction is that it explicitly presents the mirror not simply as an indispensable element in a paragone between painting and sculpture but also, equally important, as a device or technology for reversing right and left; this in turn shows that a heightened consciousness of the workings of reversal was in place as early as the second half of the 1520s. (MC, p. 13) Consistent with this last claim, in Chapter One I concluded my reading of Savoldo’s Death of St Peter Martyr by invoking the viewer’s imagination –

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his or her empathic projection – of something like a virtual merger between his or her right hand and Peter’s centrally disposed left one, and I further suggest that, inasmuch as the rst viewer would have been Savoldo himself, we are entitled in this case to think of the notion of merger as evoking, implicitly, the act of painting the picture. Which is to say that there exists a deeper afnity between the Death of St Peter Martyr and the Portrait of a Man in Armour than the absence of formal resemblance would seem to indicate.7 The wider stakes of these observations emerge when it is recognized, as I stress in The Moment of Caravaggio, how deeply involved with self-portrayal Caravaggio’s paintings often are. Specically, Caravaggio is thought to have depicted himself on a number of occasions: in addition to the Boy Bitten by a Lizard (if I am right about that), in the early Bacchino Malato (c. 1593–4; illus. 21); as the musician at the right holding a cornetto in The Musicians (c. 1595–6; illus. 22) (seemingly a right-angle mirror-representation); as an anxiously eeing bravo in the Martyrdom of St Matthew (1599–1600; illus. 23); as a man holding aloft a lantern in the Taking of Christ (1602; illus. 24); in the severed head of Goliath in the magnicent David with the Head of Goliath (1606; illus. 25); and as a looker-on straining to witness the tragic events unfolding before him in Caravaggio’s valedictory masterpiece, the Martyrdom of St Ursula (1610; illus. 26). There also appears to be a minuscule

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21 (below left) Caravaggio, Bacchino Malato, c. 1593–4, oil on canvas. 22 (below right) Caravaggio, The Musicians, 1595–6, oil on canvas.

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23 (below left) Caravaggio, Martyrdom of St Matthew (illus. 11), detail. 24 (below right) Caravaggio, Taking of Christ, 1602, oil on canvas.

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reection of a painter at his easel in the wine ask of the Ufzi Bacchus (c. 1596–7), but that is probably too uncertain to count. In Caravaggio’s case this has everything to do with the modality of his realism, which I see as anchored not merely in his personal experience, as is often rightly said, but more precisely in a profound sense of his own embodiment, his worldly existence as a corporeal being, a crucial dimension of which involved the making of paintings. (I think of this as correcting the traditional characterization of Caravaggio as concerned above all with delity to ocular perception.) So for example Caravaggio’s pictures characteristically thematize the issue of bodily orientation, by which I mean the basic fact that a painter at work on a painting faces towards it, or say into it, while the painting itself, the canvas, faces outwards. This fact is made all but explicit in The Musicians by virtue of the juxtaposition of the gure studying a score in the right foreground, who has been depicted largely from the rear, with the central musician tuning a lute, who is shown gazing meltingly out of the painting as if seeking to meet and hold the viewer’s gaze. As already mentioned, the cornetto player, a self-portrait, evokes a right-angle mirror-reection dispositif, though of course the painting as a whole cannot be imagined as having been produced in such a fashion; in other words we are dealing here with an intensely self-referential work of art. More broadly,

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25 (above left) Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath, 1606, oil on canvas. 26 (above right) Caravaggio, Martyrdom of St Ursula, 1610, oil on canvas. 27 (left) Caravaggio, Judith and Holofernes, c. 1599, oil on canvas.

a contrast between gures facing into the painting and others seemingly addressing the viewer will be prominent in the work of Caravaggesque artists like Bartolomeo Manfredi, Valentin de Boulogne and Nicolas Régnier, while central gures depicted from the rear, also in my view keyed to the orientation of the painter, will play a crucial role in Gustave Courbet’s Realist canvases of the late 1840s and ’50s.8 In other works by Caravaggio one or another version of the painter-painting relationship may be understood as having been transposed into a lateral axis, the Judith and Holofernes (c. 1599; illus. 27), Taking of Christ and Martyrdom of St Ursula being

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particularly rich and complex examples of this sort of structure. In still others, and also in the Judith and Holofernes, the motif of decapitation provides thematic reinforcement for the project of making a particular sort of painting – the full-blown gallery picture – that will present itself as severed from the context of its exhibition as well as from the very activity that brought it into being, or so I claim. There will be more on this towards the close of Part Two. The question now is what bearing all this has on a consideration of Savoldo, whose art cannot be regarded as bodily in the ways just summarized. But Savoldo – like Caravaggio, indeed like Courbet – does make surprising use of the self-portrait: no fewer than four paintings in his surviving oeuvre of less than fty, as well as a highly nished drawing, have been identied as such (initially by Gilbert). And my thought – my suggestion – is, rst, that this deserves to be regarded as a matter of some importance (as Gilbert implies, though he cannot say why), and second, that it precisely indicates a deep afnity with Caravaggio, one not based on considerations of style of the sort that have dominated the secondary literature down to the present. For in Savoldo’s art what anticipates and up to a point stands in for the sense of bodiliness that plays so central a role in Caravaggio’s oeuvre is the depiction of hands.

I n de e d th e d e pic t io n of hands is a central crux, in certain respects the central crux, in Savoldo’s art – at least that is a basic premise of this book. Signicantly, it is a topic that caught the notice of Roberto Longhi in his rst, brief, characteristically penetrating remarks about the painter in his 1917 article ‘Cose Bresciane del Cinquecento’ (see below), and it recurs continually in Gilbert’s dissertation, where he both pays tribute to Longhi and adds various observations of his own, none of which, in my view, quite captures the complexity of the pictures he discusses.9 For a start, there are three paintings that deserve particular attention. The rst and almost certainly the earliest is the so-called Prophet (or Apostle) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (early 1520s; illus. 28), persuasively identied by Gilbert as a self-portrait on the basis of the sitter’s resemblance to certain other gures in Savoldo’s oeuvre and also on the strength of the fact that the scroll held in the gure’s left hand, which ordinarily would bear the personage’s name, instead bears Savoldo’s signature (of which there are very few).10 The second, a later work, is the so-called

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Evangelist in a private collection in Milan (mid-1520s?; illus. 29); the sitter bears a loose resemblance to the Vienna prophet – they are both youngish men with strong physiques, brown hair and beards, and piercing gazes – but no one has suggested that the ‘evangelist’ (identied as such on the strength of the open book behind him to the right) is a self-portrait, which

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28 Savoldo, Prophet (or Apostle), early 1520s, oil on poplar.

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29 Savoldo, Evangelist, mid-1520s?, oil on panel.

seems to me correct – but the situation is perhaps more interesting than this suggests, as will emerge shortly.11 The third work is the so-called Self-portrait in the Costume of St Jerome in a private collection in Bergamo (c. 1530; illus. 30).12 As Alberto Veca remarks, the sitter, whom he identies as the painter, is much younger than traditional images of the saint (including one by Savoldo, as we shall see), but he is shown gazing at a crucix with a skull at its foot (‘a common formula’, as Gilbert notes), and then there is the coincidence of names between the saint and the painter, which although not decisive is nevertheless suggestive.13 Gilbert agrees that the features of the

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sitter are consistent with those in the other self-portraits previously assembled by him, but, somewhat surprisingly, says nothing about the fact that in this case the sitter does not meet the viewer’s gaze but rather is turned so that one sees only his left prole. In all three paintings hands play a perspicuous role. The crucial statement about hands in Savoldo’s paintings is made by Longhi in 1917 in two brilliant paragraphs apropos the Milan Evangelist:

30 Savoldo, Self-portrait in the Costume of St Jerome, c. 1530, oil on canvas.

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You can sense it’s Savoldo right away; if nothing were left but his ‘hand’, that would be enough to recognize him. And then there’s the melted stuff of his red cassock, studied in the usual key of folds where Savoldo delighted in solving certain of his queries about form; and there’s also – and it’s a shame that it was cut out of the photograph – a bubble of light that wanders over the edge of the book and gives back [restores] freedom and unanticipated life [vivacity] to the entire luminous composition. But we must return to that hand, which grabs the eye in a formal complexity that must be untangled like the knot of Solomon; to think that this is some sort of perspective game would be a bit supercial, since it’s a choice both too bony and too eshy to be enclosed in a few planes, in a perspective prism. Actually, it both hides and reveals a simpler and more profound pictorial anagram; it’s a moment, an impression of a hand xed [frozen] with wondrous perspicacity by a mirror placed at the strangest [possible] point; it’s a cursive [feat of] foreshortening, which although it is rendered in paint that is still ‘quattrocento’, anticipates the swift hand of Caravaggio, and perhaps of Degas.14 The basic idea appears to be that the hand is no mere perspectival feat of strength, though it is also surely that, but rather that in its esh-and-blood form it conveys a sense of having been rapidly seized by a swiftly moving pictorial act, as if on the basis of its image in a mirror. That is, Longhi’s remarks draw attention to the ‘cursive’ act of painting itself (or seeing-and-painting), an act that in his account looks forwards to Caravaggio or even to Degas (in 1917 the equation of Impressionism with modernity as such was extremely strong). Gilbert will cite Longhi, as I have said, approving particularly of the latter’s emphasis on ‘studies of form’, seeing in the hands the classic expression of Savoldo’s gift of materiality and dignity to each element of the gure. Indeed, the attitude that produces this kind of hand appears to be the same that produces this kind of color . . . Both evince the slow and sober construction of mass and reality in each major section of the gure contemplated, undeniable and brilliant, neutral but powerful. The hands, stretching forward, not perspective games but caught in light, live in themselves, betoken the energy of the gure by its gesture, and create a breadth of space to give it elbow room. (G, pp. 346–7) Although Gilbert does not say so, such a reading is at odds with Longhi’s stress on speed and cursiveness, but the difference between them is perhaps

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less important than their shared focus on the hands as what Longhi strikingly called ‘pictorial anagrams’ for Savoldo’s vision and practice. Put another way, one can see and appreciate the force of both their emphases, the rst on the singleness and, so to speak, the suddenness with which the hands are grasped as functional entities, the second on slow and deliberate construction (the rst on the hand in its knot-like complexity, the second on the gure as a whole installed in its space). (Gilbert does say that the hands ‘live in themselves’, but leaves unclear what he means by that.) What I now want to suggest is that both accounts, for all their considerable interest, fall short of recognizing an important aspect of what the three paintings offer to be seen. This is probably clearest in the case of the Prophet or Apostle, which at once presents itself as a portrait – one believes instantly in the ‘reality’ of the sitter – with three major foci of interest: rst, the sitter’s gaze, which engages directly and as if interrogatively the viewer’s own (the sitter’s expression, full of unspecied emotion, along with the turn of his head towards the viewer, undergird the force of the encounter); second, the sitter’s left hand rmly but lightly holding the smallish rolled scroll mentioned earlier; and third, his right hand, which seems to be caught mid-gesture, palm down, ngers separate and as if about to grasp something but without any clear purpose (in fact it is strikingly similar to the protagonist’s right hand in the Death of St Peter Martyr). In addition there is the sitter’s garment, a blouse with wide sleeves of an almost garish green material and strong white highlights suggesting bright illumination, the contrasting dark background giving the blouse an incandescent sheen. In short, the viewer instinctively understands that he or she is being challenged by the painting to come to terms with its complex assertion of human and material presence. My suggestion, as in the case of the Death of St Peter Martyr, is that it is not enough to respond to the hands as both Longhi and Gilbert do, each in his own way, as fascinating entities viewed as it were objectively from outside, at a near but disengaged distance. Rather, I take the hands as inviting what in Chapter One I called both imaginative identication and empathic projection, which is to say a kind of heightened phenomenological or kinaesthetic awareness of the hands as experienced by the subject as living corporeal organs, respectively doing the work of holding the scroll and of reaching or grasping (to what end is unclear, at least at rst). And as in Chapter One, but with added emphasis in view of the fact that we are in this case unmistakably dealing with a self-portrait, I also suggest that we are

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entitled to go on from there to regard the hands as displaced representations of the painter’s hands at work on the painting, taking the sitter’s left hand (to begin with, at any rate) as a representation of the painter’s left hand holding a palette and his right hand as a representation of the painter’s right hand wielding a brush. Of course, that is to take the painting as a whole as what I have described as a normalized self-portrait (brush in right hand, palette in left, assuming the painter is right-handed, as Savoldo appears to have been). But is there not also a sense in which, in the act of projecting empathically, the viewer may be led to identify the prophet’s or apostle’s left hand with his or her right hand and, even more naturally, the apostle’s or prophet’s right hand with his or her left hand (the ‘match’ between the latter two being particularly close, if one gives it a chance) – in other words, in a ‘mirroring’ relation to left and right within the painting? Needless to say, we are on inrm ground here, Savoldo’s treatment of the hands leaving open the question of the relation of left and right within the painting to left and right outside it (that is, ‘this’ side of the picture plane). But it seems to me beyond question that the viewer’s hands are, in effect, solicited, imaginatively mobilized, in something like these terms. The Milan Evangelist makes this point even more succinctly by virtue of depicting only one hand, the sitter’s left, which again is largely open (we see the palm) even as it seems to reach strongly towards the picture plane as if to grasp something ‘this’ side of the latter. One sees Longhi’s point: the hand is too vigorous and carnal to be subjected merely to the laws of perspective; but his counter-suggestion that it appears miraculously captured in a mirror facing the sitter’s hand (presumably at close range) is highly problematic: how is one to imagine this? Indeed even if one takes the ‘owner’ of the hand to be the painter, the mirrored left hand would then represent the painter’s right, which is to say that it is that hand that would be doing the painting; once again, how would this work? The idea, for all its attractiveness, seems not quite thought through. But what seems clear, at least to me, is that however this was accomplished, the sitter’s left hand ‘matches up’ most persuasively with the viewer’s, hence also with the painter’s, right hand, a relationship that recalls that of the viewer’s right hand to the friar’s upraised left hand in the Death of St Peter, as analysed in Chapter One (in that sense being a ‘mirroring’ relationship). The third painting mentioned above, the St Jerome in Bergamo, departs from the Vienna and Milan canvases by virtue of the subject having been depicted in prole, facing left, with both hands in view: his right hand at the

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lower left, his left hand, seemingly extended towards the picture plane, at the lower right. As already mentioned, the sitter gazes at a crucix set up in front of him and slightly to his right. There is nothing natural or comfortable about such an arrangement, with the result that the picture is less immediately compelling than the other two – one particularly misses the confrontational gazes – but in a certain sense it is the most ambitious, as it were intellectually, of the three. Simply put, I suggest that the composition represents an attempt by Savoldo to make a self-portrait based all but explicitly on the right-angle paradigm, which he interprets in a particularly challenging way. The ‘classic’ self-portrait based on right-angle mirror reection shows the painter facing directly out of the painting, as if directly at the viewer, for the simple reason that the painting portrays what the painter saw in the mirror, which in effect hung where the nished canvas now hangs (with the canvas-in-progress at right angles to it, often just outside the limits of the canvas itself). Annibale’s Self-portrait with Figures, in which a slice of the canvas viewed from the side is included, exemplies this structure with perfect clarity. But what Savoldo has sought to do, if I am right, is to imply that the sitter is gazing at his reection in a mirror within the painting (symbolized by the crucix, or perhaps both crucix and skull together), while holding his palette in his left hand and reaching towards the canvas with his right or brush-hand, both of which have been reversed right and left by their reection in an actual mirror, though of course the implied mirror in the painting is not in the correct position to bring this about. Nevertheless, the sense of the sitter’s extended left arm and hand at the lower right somehow representing the painter’s right arm and hand at work on the canvas is surprisingly strong. I realize, how could I not, that such a reading of the Bergamo canvas may not compel immediate conviction; what would help is to insert it among all the other right-angle self-portraits I discuss in Chapter One of The Moment of Caravaggio: it would still stand out as anomalous, but its structure of intentions would be more apparent. (Anomalous, in part, because of its early date: Annibale’s masterly group portrait and Caravaggio’s displaced versions of the right-angle dispositif belong to a distinctly later moment.) A fourth painting, denitely not a self-portrait, of keen interest to Gilbert is the Portrait of a Young Man (St John the Evangelist?) in the Borghese Gallery (mid-1520s; illus. 31),15 the association with the saint being based on the resemblance between this gure and that of St John in the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, formerly in the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin and

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destroyed in the Second World War (c. 1515–20; illus. 32).16 Here we are shown the protagonist rather closely cropped by the smallish canvas; the sitter’s right hand is off-canvas to the bottom left but his left hand, seemingly resting on a woven gold belt or scarf, thrusts prominently towards us, the palm (which we mostly do not see) facing upwards, the ngers loosely bent, and as usual the perspective is compelling and the ngers themselves shapely. Gilbert, impressed by the hand, characterizes it ‘as a sort of vivid still life, in which the varied interrelations of parts in space are clearly reported and interesting’ (G, p. 110). (He also sees the hand as a variation on Christ’s right hand in the Lamentation.) As for the young man himself, his features could not be more rened: his gaze travels off-canvas to the right (in effect before him), his skin is delicate, his lips rosy, his cheeks slightly

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32 Savoldo, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, c. 1515–20, oil on canvas.

31 (facing page) Savoldo, Portrait of a Young Man (St John the Evangelist?), mid-1520s, oil on canvas.

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ushed; he appears thoughtful, perhaps because of what he is seeing, but the viewer has no idea what that might be. The treatment of light and shadow is exquisite, characteristic of Savoldo at his most luministically nuanced. The question, our question, concerns the meaning of the hand, assuming we are not satised by Gilbert’s still-life metaphor or the association with the Lamentation. Again, I see it as inviting empathic projection, but precisely how this plays out in left/right terms remains unclear, as does whether or not the viewer is invited to imagine the sensation of the back of the young man’s hand against the woven gold belt or scarf on which it partly rests. It is tempting to relate the hand to the painter’s left hand holding a palette, but there is no clear warrant for doing so; perhaps all one can say (by my lights) is that once again the viewer is invited, at least to some degree, to participate imaginatively in the carnal life of the hand, which therefore emerges as fully as important to one’s experience of the painting as the youth’s meticulously rendered head.

At th i s po i n t it will help to turn to a rather different-seeming painting, which nevertheless bears a deep structural relation to the works we have just considered: the magnicent Penitent St Jerome in the National Gallery, London (1527–30; illus. 33).17 In a sense, the treatment of the subject is traditional or at least consistent with other pictures of the saint physically belabouring himself in sixteenth-century Venetian or Brescian art, for example in works by Montagna, Lotto, Cima da Conegliano, Romanino and others; as Hans Belting and others have remarked, paintings of St Jerome either beating himself or simply reading or writing in the wilderness are among the most numerous in Venetian Renaissance art.18 In this case, the grey-bearded saint, wearing a loose red-purple robe, kneels in a mountain landscape before a stone ledge (an improvised table) and a stone wall with a bit of foliage at the top, slightly further away than the ledge, all the while gazing at the gure of Christ on a modest-sized crucix at the upper right and about to strike himself in the chest with a stone clutched in his right hand. Below the crucix, propped open on the ledge facing the saint, is a book that presumably represents the Bible he has been translating into Latin; no writing materials are in view, however, and of course the idea of a bound volume is anachronistic. Just in front of the book, also resting on the ledge, is the saint’s left hand, about which there will be more to say. Behind the saint, in the middle distance, there is a view, or more precisely a glimpse, of the

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bank of the Fondamente Nuove in Venice with the Church of SS Giovanni e Paolo. Much further away blue mountains rise against the backdrop of what is usually described as a dawn sky. The luminous sky and darkish clouds, although an area of some repaint, are superb. What is of particular interest in the present context, however, is the hands, in the rst place the right one clutching a stone at the end of a muscular right arm that has been depicted in the act of preparing to strike the stone against the saint’s chest. The arm itself is not silhouetted against the background or the sky, or for that matter against the chest, all familiar dispositions, but rather shown in what Gilbert rightly describes as ‘virtuoso’ perspective foreshortening against the saint’s body (G, p. 105), a highly original treatment that in fact compels a far more focused act of attention on

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33 Savoldo, Penitent St Jerome, 1527–30, oil on canvas.

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34 (facing page) Savoldo, Madonna and Christ Child and Two Angels in Glory with SS Peter, Dominic, Paul and Jerome (the Pesaro Altarpiece), 1524–5, oil on panel.

the part of the viewer to take its measure. And in the second place there is the saint’s left hand, which does not so much rest on the ledge, as I just said it did, as rise from it by an action of the wrist, the hand itself making a by now familiar grasping gesture with open palm and bent ngers. This is another knockdown instance of perspective rendering, familiar by now but also infused with an unusual degree of muscular tension. In other words, the hands bear a close relation to those in the paintings we have just considered, in particular the Vienna and Bergamo self-portraits. My suggestion, or further suggestion, is that while the St Jerome is not exactly what I have been calling a disguised or displaced self-portrait, the two-handed operation that it depicts, the decisive ‘actor’ being the right hand and arm, is not without some resemblance to the two-handed operation of working on a painting, and indeed it is tempting in this connection to think of the open volume with its carefully delineated two-column pages as equivalent to a canvas, and to think of the crucix, the focus of the saint’s strained attention, as . . . what exactly? The subject of the saint’s ‘painting’? Or indeed a mirror, taking up the analogy put forward in the Bergamo Self-portrait as St Jerome? This would make the London St Jerome a kind of disguised or, perhaps better, displaced self-portrait after all. Needless to say, these last suggestions are nothing if not speculative, but I mean them to imply that the Penitent St Jerome, like the Death of St Peter Martyr – a painting with which it has more than a little in common (for one thing, both involve blows) – calls for a sustained effort of empathic attention on the part of the viewer, an effort that in this case requires the guidance of familiarity with the other Savoldos we have considered to nd its way to even the tentative proposals advanced above. One more small point: note the afnity between the grasping left hand and the dead-seeming broken branch with smaller twigs in the lower right corner of the canvas, an afnity that I will shortly describe as one of auto-mimesis. Other paintings by Savoldo conspicuously involving hands are less complex. For example, the early Brera altarpiece depicting the Madonna and Christ Child and Two Angels in Glory with SS Peter, Dominic, Paul and Jerome (1524–5; illus. 34), originally made for the church of San Domenico in Pesaro, appears conventional in most respects.19 As mentioned earlier, there are few altarpieces in Savoldo’s oeuvre and it seems he did not favour them, as Freedberg suggests in his description of the Pesaro altarpiece as ‘heavy in form almost to inertness, sombrely powerful in colour, and insisting on veristic presence’ (PI, p. 226); again Freedberg’s still-life metaphor is never far away.

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35 Savoldo, Madonna and Christ Child and Two Angels in Glory with SS Peter, Dominic, Paul and Jerome (illus. 34), detail.

But once alerted to the signicance of Savoldo’s hands the viewer cannot fail to notice that each of the four saints is doing something precise and nuanced in that regard (illus. 35). From right to left, Jerome with his powerful left hand supports an open book partly resting on his thigh, while his right hand grasps a length of red drapery crossing the same thigh (the action of the right hand has no necessary role apart from exhibiting itself as such); Paul, to his right (our left) and standing farther back in space, holds a volume to his breast with his left hand and rather elegantly rests his right hand on the pommel of a long sword; Dominic, in prole and looking up towards the Madonna and child, holds open a smaller book with his left hand (we see mainly his long, elegant ngers), while with his right hand, ring nger exed and partly elevated, he seems to mark his place; nally, Peter, the one saint making eye contact with the viewer, holds a book to his body with his left hand while seemingly proffering his keys to the viewer with his right,

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another small tour de force of foreshortening, in a gesture that comes closer than any other in the picture to the ones we have been analysing. There is, I think, no deeper content to any of these actions, no meaning of the kind we have seen in play in the self-portraits and related works. But Savoldo’s investment in the saints’ hands is palpable and sets the Brera altarpiece apart from similar works by contemporary masters. Then there is the exquisite Portrait of a Young Man with Flute in the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo in Brescia (1525–30; illus. 37), briey analysed by Keith Christiansen in the seminal 1985 The Age of Caravaggio exhibition catalogue, in which he compares Savoldo’s canvas with respect to its lighting (from a single source), spatial illusionism and basic naturalism to Caravaggio’s Lute Player in the Hermitage.20 Christiansen remarks only briey on the ute player’s hands, but Gilbert in his dissertation writes, ‘The hands, playing the instrument, are beautifully expressive of this action – they not only have the tentative holding and touching effect of the other hands of this time, but a detail like the shadow of the ngers on the palm adds to the melodic evocation’ (G, p. 125), perhaps because the nger-shadows have somewhat the look of musical notation. Gilbert’s remarks come close to what I wish to suggest, namely that we are dealing in this canvas not only with perhaps the most ne-grained and persuasive transcription of optical effects in all Savoldo’s oeuvre (note in particular the fold-bearing scrap of paper covered with musical notation afxed to the wall to the left, not to mention the delicate play of light and shadow on the young man’s face), but also with an extraordinarily nuanced evocation of the player’s bodily awareness of the ngertips of his two hands resting precisely on the different holes of his instrument (the shadow of the ngers heightening the effect). The musical notation, both on the scrap of paper and on the pages of the book open before the musician, only strengthens the point. Or consider the somewhat confusingly titled Shepherd with a Flute in the Getty Museum (c. 1535; illus. 36). Very simply, this shows a youngish man in a wide-brimmed hat that casts a shadow over his eyes (as in the Portrait of a Young Man with Flute) and with a slight moustache and beard. He is seated, although we are not shown what he is sitting on, while seemingly making a quiet pointing or ‘presenting’ gesture with his open right hand. In traditional scholarship he is described as dressed as a shepherd, but Andrea Bayer notes that ‘his face is rened and his shirt collar a creamy white’.21 Indeed Bayer remarks that the gure has been interpreted as an allegorical portrait of a patrician disguised as a shepherd, which seems plausible. In any

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case, his gesture appears to point towards a rustic scene in the right middle distance that Bayer describes as including ‘a bagpiper, a ock of sheep, farm buildings (one taken from a print by Dürer), and an imposing, ruined classical building’. But the fascinating hand is the left one, which does double duty of a pictorially perplexing sort, at least I nd it initially perplexing: the left hand most obviously loosely holds the end of a longish staff with its bark still on, the hand resting on the staff, and the staff, although this detail is easy to miss, extending between the shepherd’s forenger and middle nger. Moreover, the left hand also holds a small ute or recorder, or at least the mouthpiece of one, the disjunction between the staff and the musical instrument being obscured by the hand itself. Bayer once more provides more details: ‘Interpretations focusing on [the shepherd’s] recorder – we see its pple and three nger-holes – stress that this was the instrument par excellence of the Arcadian shepherd.’ And she cites an earlier scholar

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37 Savoldo, Portrait of a Young Man with Flute, c. 1525, oil on canvas.

36 (facing page) Savoldo, Shepherd with a Flute, 1535, oil on canvas.

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as pointing out that ‘the deliberate juxtaposition of the staff and recorder in the shepherd’s hand alludes to the natural, rough origins of the instrument, further associating it with the rustic ways of Arcadia’ (PR, p. 139). All this is interesting and might conceivably bear on Savoldo’s intentions, but for me the painting’s visual crux is precisely the hidden discontinuity between the staff and the ute (a thought reinforced by the composition, which conspicuously isolates the rather large left hand and its contents). Resolving the crux involves not simply understanding intellectually, in effect from outside, that there are two items in play and not merely one, most obviously the staff, but also coming to access – empathically to ‘share’ – the shepherd’s bodily awareness of the separate items in his left hand, a truly Savoldesque touch (no pun intended). (His awareness, too, of the shaft running between his ngers.) Seen in this light, the ‘presenting’ gesture might have an additional valence, as if instructing the viewer to look more closely or say more feelingly than he or she might normally do.22 Another painting to discuss in the light of these considerations is the Portrait of a Gentleman as St George in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc (1530s; illus. 38).23 A youngish man with dark brown hair, a moustache and a small well-trimmed beard gazes at the viewer while making a characteristic, which is also to say not quite readable, gesture with his upraised right hand and resting his left hand on a staff (belonging to a spear?), one end of which clearly rests on the ground below the picture-edge to the lower right. Also in the right-hand sector of the canvas, in the middle distance above the hand on its staff, is a small image of St George on horseback ghting the dragon. Characteristically, too, the subject’s right hand is located almost exactly at the centre of the painting, much as in the Death of St Peter Martyr the saint’s left hand is all but centred (as is the shepherd’s right hand in the Shepherd with a Flute even though, as we have seen, it is less important than the left). Equally to the point, in a much less elaborate variant of the role of armour and reections in the Portrait of a Man in Armour, Savoldo has contrived to show us a partial reection of the young man’s right hand in his gleaming breastplate as a left hand turned away from the viewer, as if to facilitate an act of imaginative identication with that reection (at least in principle, since in fact the latter is too small and indeed obscure to function effectively in those terms, but the use of mirror-reversal to turn left into right is typical of the painter). Another feature worth noting is the drapery and its deeply shadowed folds, especially on the young man’s left sleeve and across

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38 (facing page) Savoldo, Portrait of a Gentleman as St George, 1530s, oil on canvas.

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the lower portion of the picture; there will be more on Savoldo’s treatment of drapery in Chapter Three. It should also be said that considered simply as a portrait, as a pictorial rendering of a distinct personality, the National Gallery canvas is undistinguished: that simply isn’t one of Savoldo’s aims.

O n e las t g ro u p of paintings is pertinent in this connection, three nearly identical Magdalenes in London, Berlin and Los Angeles (1530s; illus. 39, 40, 41).24 For present purposes they are interchangeable, so I will restrict my present remarks to the London canvas, which is universally agreed to be particularly strong. As it happens, the Magdalenes as a group (with special emphasis on the London version) are the subject of an important article by Mary Pardo, ‘The Subject of Savoldo’s Magdalene ’ (1989), the rich and detailed argument of which I won’t try to summarize here.25 The crucial point is that Savoldo’s paintings depict the early-morning moment (or moments, as Pardo suggests) when the Magdalene, having previously discovered that Christ’s tomb was empty, returns there alone having told John and Peter that Christ’s body was missing. Pardo notes that this was ‘late enough in the narrative, incidentally, for dawn to have broken’ (p. 73), in reference to the sunrise on the horizon in the paintings. A key to the identication of the woman as the Magdalene is the ointment jar on a small ledge at the bottom left of the London and Los Angeles canvases. Pardo then quotes the source of the subject as it appears in John 20 :11–16:

39 (facing page) Savoldo, Mary Magdalene, 1530s, oil on canvas. 40 (page 74) Savoldo, Mary Magdalene, 1530s, oil on canvas. 41 (page 75) Savoldo, Mary Magdalene, 1530s, oil on canvas.

11. But Mary stood at the sepulchre, without, weeping. Now as she was weeping, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre. 12. And she saw two angels in white sitting, one at the head, and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had been laid. 13. They say to her: Woman, why weepest thou? She saith to them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him. 14. And when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing, and she knew not that it was Jesus. 15. Jesus saith to her: Woman, why weepest thou, whom seekest thou? She, thinking that it was the gardener, saith to him: Sir, if thou hast taken him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away. 16. Jesus saith to her: Mary. She, turning, saith to him, Rabboni. In Pardo’s account the paintings depict both Mary turning from the tomb, a rst moment when she takes Jesus for a gardener, and the almost

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immediately subsequent moment of revelation, leading the viewer, as Pardo puts it, to imagine ‘the temporal interval they bracket, in the course of which a mere gardener at the saint’s back metamorphoses into a resurrected deity’ (p. 73). Seen in these terms, the extraordinary radiance that plays over the highly reective surface of Mary’s silver-coloured shawl, in the London canvas, the focus of Pardo’s remarks (but the shawls in the other versions are also reective in just this way), has its source in the risen Christ, who would, Pardo suggests on the basis of the distribution of light and shadow, therefore appear to be standing ‘this’ side of the picture surface and just slightly to the viewer’s right, assuming the viewer to be centred before the image (both Christ and the viewer are situated very near the picture surface, needless to say). As for the alluring Magdalene herself, head tilted and eyes in shadow, she turns her beautiful face towards the viewer (and towards Christ), with an unreadable expression that leaves open the possibility that she has been weeping, as described in the biblical text. Pardo further proposes that Mary’s gesture of raising her cloaked right hand to her face ‘clearly derive[s] from a well-established convention for weeping mourners at the scene of Christ’s death, but here the wrapped st is not pressed to the eyes, and the saint gazes out as if acknowledging a momentary interruption’ (p. 73). In all three paintings the Magdalene’s shawl covers her entire upper body, except for the oval of her face and a glimpse of her left hand that is easy to miss, wrapping the shawl around her at the lower left. Commentators universally have praised this altogether unusual piece of costuming as a remarkable invention, and in fact the shawls differ both in colour and in the pattern of their creases and folds from one Magdalene to the next (more on this in Chapter Three). But what has not been considered is the bearing of this extraordinary artistic decision on the topic of this chapter, Savoldo’s attitude towards hands and their depiction. What I mean will be instantly clear in the light of the next two verses in John: 17. Jesus saith to her: Do not touch me, for I am not yet ascended to my Father. But go to my brethren, and say to them: I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and your God. 18. Mary Magdalene cometh and telleth his disciples: I have seen the Lord, and these things he said to me. ‘Do not touch me’ (Noli me tangere), a traditional theme in Christian art, is the subject of Titian’s great painting of 1511–14, today in the National

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Gallery, London. Here the gure of Jesus, carrying a gardener’s tool, bends gracefully away from the kneeling Magdalene’s attempt to reach out and touch him.26 Savoldo would have known Titian’s canvas, of course, and even apart from that he would have been acutely aware that according to the biblical text his Magdalene was just a moment away from reaching through the picture plane towards Jesus with her hand or hands. So the stroke of genius of Savoldo’s Magdalenes, keeping Mary’s hands out of sight and indeed replacing them by the visually ravishing shawls with their dazzlingly executed, brilliantly arbitrary-seeming patterns of highlights, creases, folds and shadows – including folds around the ngers – treated differently in each of the versions, has the effect of deferring that moment, as it were permanently, and therefore also of deferring any possible invitation to the viewer to perform the sort of act of empathic projection or quasi-kinaesthetic imaginative identication that I have associated with the treatment of hands in the extreme foreground of the other paintings discussed in this chapter. And yet this feat of deferral also has the effect of giving extraordinary salience to the hands, whose precise conguration under the shawls the viewer can only guess at. Not for nothing did Vasari characterize Savoldo as ‘fanciful and artful’ in Pardo’s translation (p. 69).

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42 (facing page) Savoldo, St Matthew and the Angel (illus. 53), detail. 43 (page 80) Savoldo, Elijah Fed by Ravens, 1512–15, oil on panel transferred to canvas. 44 (page 81) Savoldo, SS Paul and Anthony, c. 1516, oil on canvas.

• FAC E S

Two o f s avo l d o ’s early paintings, Elijah Fed by Ravens in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1512–15; illus. 43) and SS Paul and Anthony in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice (c. 1516; illus. 44), give a clear idea of the state of his art around the middle of the second decade of the century, prior to the various works we have considered.1 What is noteworthy, all commentators agree, is an ‘archaizing’ quality, looking back to the previous century; there is no hint yet of the inuence of Giorgione or the young Titian, or indeed the aged Giovanni Bellini (himself a gure spanning two worlds, the late quattrocento and the new century). Instead the personages are grasped in their stolidity and massiveness – Freedberg’s still-life metaphor takes hold precisely here – ‘struck by light but not penetrated’, in Gilbert’s helpful phrase (G, p. 299), with strong, slightly abstracted contours, and are provided with just enough ambient space to contain them. In both works, however, we glimpse a distant landscape towards the edge of the picture: at the left in the Elijah, at the right in SS Paul and Anthony. In the sky at the left in the Elijah we are also given a distant glimpse of the prophet being carried to heaven in a chariot pulled by horses, observed by a group of gures on the ground: this sort of detail, a celestial event that seems almost to burst through from another world, recurs elsewhere in Savoldo’s art. Nor is there uidity of movement; on the contrary, in both pictures the gures exhibit a certain rigidity, almost as if they were sculptures, with an emphasis on joints, as Gilbert also remarks (G, p. 87). Elijah sits before a rocky outcrop with his legs somewhat apart, his bare left foot planted on the ground (as is the other foot, but we see only a bit of it), his left hand on his left knee, supporting his bearded head with his right hand as he looks up towards his

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45 Savoldo, Elijah Fed by Ravens (illus. 43), detail.

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left (our right), where a raven bearing food in its beak perches on a twisted branch. In the Venice painting the two hermit saints sit before a similar outcrop, Anthony on the left with his arms and hands crossed on his breast (right over left), Paul on the right with his hands brought together in prayer (not quite clasped, with the ngertips lightly touching). This is a traditional contrast of prayerful gestures that will turn up again in Savoldo’s oeuvre. Like Elijah, Anthony, with a balding head and white beard and moustache, looks up towards a raven bearing food; while Paul’s gaze seems to have no precise object, his face is more nearly turned towards the viewer and his expression with eyebrows raised and eyes wide open carries a plangency that draws the viewer’s attention. In both paintings the gures are ruddy, almost terracotta, in hue, adding to one’s sense of their solidity. Drapery plays an important role in both, as it will continue to do throughout Savoldo’s career: Elijah wears a luminous blue robe with deep folds and a raspberry-red shawl with a fur reverse and white highlights around his shoulders; while Paul and Anthony are in browns and greys respectively, with Anthony wearing a robe, a darker cloak and what seems to be a fallen hood of a slightly different hue. In this canvas, too, the fall of the cloth over both saints’ lower bodies is marked by powerful folds. It is the Elijah that rst attracted my particular attention, for a simple reason. In the lower left corner, several modest-size brownish rocks rise vertically just this side of the larger outcrop (illus. 45). When one looks closely at these, in particular the rock nearest the picture surface and the smaller grey rock behind it, one becomes aware of . . . heads and faces: at least two, somewhat abstract and skull-like, on the nearest rock and a third, especially clear-cut, on the grey rock. Indeed the grey rock seems to consist solely in a Leonardesque grinning head facing downwards. I say ‘one becomes aware’, but in fact the heads and faces have

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never been remarked, so far as I can tell; I nd that surprising, obviously, but will refrain from speculating as to why and how they have been missed. What instead I want to stress, to begin with, is that they are an extreme expression of a tendency in Savoldo’s art towards what I will call, for want of a better term, internal mimesis, or auto-mimesis – a tendency that, as will emerge, takes a number of different forms in his work throughout his career (in Chapter Two I called attention to an instance of this in the London Penitent St Jerome). Nor are the heads the only instance of such mimesis in the Elijah. Consider the striking afnity, as it seems to me, between the raven on its branch and Elijah’s upper body, in particular the way in which the reddish shawl tied around his shoulders may be seen as miming the raven’s wings (not that we exactly see the raven’s right wing, which seems as though it should be outspread but may not be), or indeed vice versa. There is also the further respect in which Elijah’s arm and hand supporting his head bear an analogy with the branch on which the raven is perched (the raven’s body plus the bread in its beak would therefore be approximately matched with Elijah’s head). At another scale, is there not a rough accord between, on the one hand, the divided shawl and the raven’s wings and, on the other, the left/ right division of the leaves in the small plant at the lower right? For that matter, is there not a sense in which the rocky mass with horizontal striations to the right of and slightly above Elijah’s head may be seen, or should I say imagined, as a large head-like structure in its own right looking back down at him? (Compare the rocky mass covered at the top with hair-like vegetation confronting at close range, as if head to head, the bearded saint in the London St Jerome.) And is there not a hint of something like internal mimesis in the relationship between Elijah’s powerful left hand with its strong ngers sculpted by light and his equally impressive left foot almost directly beneath it? I am not quite claiming that empathic projection is invited by the treatment of the hand, or for that matter the foot, but the sheer pictorial authority of both points towards future developments. In SS Paul and Anthony, in which another raven brings sustenance to the two hermit saints, there is at rst glance nothing quite like the heads and faces at the bottom left of the Elijah. But the dark rocky mass directly beyond Anthony’s largely bald head not only frames but in a general way repeats or mimes that head, while in the case of Paul (on the right) the dark grey rocks just beyond him and to his left (our right) are divided in two vertically, as are the similar rocks just behind his head, a division I see as thematically

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linked to the not-quite clasping of his hands. In this picture, too, full-blown empathic projection on the part of the viewer is not elicited, though one can sense, knowing what will happen, that it is not far off. But there is a strong and subtle sense at once of contrast and of interrelation between the two saints: Anthony in his more elaborate robe, cloak and hood, Paul in his simpler, rougher garment leaving his arms bare; Anthony’s feet as if decorously out of sight, Paul’s naked feet in plain view; Anthony in prole and with his eyes in shadow distinctly composed and collected (within himself, one might say, even as he gazes calmly towards the raven), Paul, his face illuminated, in a more labile state, as if in spiritual distress (in the brief narrative of his life in the Golden Legend he was near death when Anthony visited him). But the strongest contrast between the two saints concerns their respective hands and arms, Anthony’s crossed over his chest signifying containment, Paul’s hands not quite clasped in prayer, his ngertips barely touching. My sense is that the viewer registers the contrast, and what makes it all the more telling is the way in which the parallelism of Anthony’s legs beneath his drapery invites comparison with Paul’s hands, while the almostcrossing folds of Paul’s garment over his thighs express a similar relation to Anthony’s arms, which is to say that the contrast between their actions also provides the basis for a chiasmatic mimetic relationship between the two gures. Another mimetic element is the palm tree, a source of food for Paul, rising just beyond them, at once separating and sheltering them. Three further observations are apropos before moving on. The rst is that one has the denite impression that both saints are in effect portraits of specic persons, by which I do not mean to suggest that the painting was commissioned with that end in view, but rather that already by this time Savoldo very likely proceeded by rst making portrait drawings of models whom he thought suited his subject matter, and then developing these into the gures in the nal work (a ‘naturalistic’ practice). On the strength of SS Paul and Anthony, it is clear that Savoldo’s skill in this regard was already considerable. The point is worth stressing because the portrait as a genre was not a speciality of his as it was of his great contemporary Lotto, but his drawings of individual heads are masterly. The second point is a different form of observation: if one looks closely at Paul’s garment one sees that it has not been painted a single colour (a continuous brown, which is the impression it conveys at a distance). Instead it comprises a plethora of small, squarish areas within which a number of parallel brushstrokes in brown overlay a somewhat lighter background, the

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strokes in each area running at right angles to the strokes in the adjacent ones (see illus. 74). One result of this is that the garment also conveys a feeling of texture, consistent with the Golden Legend claim that it was woven from palm leaves, as opposed to the smoother-seeming robe, cloak and hood of St Anthony. But what I want to emphasize is that all this becomes evident, and becomes fully visible, only at extremely close range, within a few feet or less of the canvas. In fact it is quite easy to miss, although an unusually informed viewer would have known to look for it. This leads me to go further and remark that Savoldo’s paintings often posit precisely such a physically proximate relation to the viewer, as for example in the Death of St Peter Martyr with its suggestion of the angel descending with the palm of martyrdom, not only from above the upper framing edge but also just ‘this’ side of the picture surface. More broadly, the very operation of empathic projection focusing on the pictorial subject’s hands, as I have described it at work both in the Death of St Peter Martyr and the self-portraits and other paintings discussed in Chapter Two, requires that the representations in question be pitched seemingly in close proximity to the viewer – closer, certainly, than is normally the case in the art of Savoldo’s contemporaries. Whether this basic fact had something to do with his relative lack of success, as related by Paolo Pino and as suggested by his limited oeuvre, it is impossible to know. Finally, something should be said about the treatment of drapery in the painting as a whole, both because it is unusual in its own right and because it too anticipates future developments. In fact commentators have always been aware that Savoldo’s highly idiosyncratic use of drapery is one of the hallmarks of his art, Longhi early on seeing in it a precedent for Caravaggio’s.2 For his part, Freedberg notes Savoldo’s propensity for ‘an exaggeratedly abundant drapery, strong in colour and brightly lit, disposed around plastically large but inert forms’ (PI, p. 227). For the moment, though, I want simply to acknowledge the unusual forcefulness as well as the seeming arbitrariness of the treatment of folds and the like in both the Washington and Venice paintings. Look in particular at the folds in the drapery covering Anthony’s shins and feet: nothing could be less revealing of the conguration of the underlying limbs; rather, the folds make two large quasiphysiognomic or perhaps more accurately quasi-mask-like constructions, the dark angled folds behind the knees seeming almost like eyes and the large upside-down V-shaped folds with their strange ‘inner’ workings (at least in the nearer of the two, the one covering the saint’s right shin) almost like open mouths, though not quite human: the entire motif has something

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46 Savoldo, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 1515–20, oil on poplar.

animal- or gargoyle-like about it. I realize that this may be asking a lot of the reader at this early stage in my argument, and in fact there is in SS Paul and Anthony another, less conjectural grotesque face that I will hold off noting until later, which need not discourage the reader from searching it out before moving on. I shall have much more to say about faces in Savoldo’s drapery as I proceed, but at this juncture it will be useful to consider another early painting marked by what I have called internal mimesis, if only to clinch the point that this was basic to Savoldo’s operations at this stage in his career: the Lamentation over the Dead Christ (1515–20; illus. 46).3 A full consideration of the Lamentation would have to take into account its relation to various copies, to the unresolved question of its initial destination, and to the likelihood that at an early moment it was cut down at the right. But for present purposes what should be noted is, rst, the conspicuous matching of the trickles of blood from the wound in Christ’s side with the ngers of his dead hand supported near the wound by Nicodemus and, second, the equally striking doubling of Christ’s left hand with its wounded palm with Mary’s left hand

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gesturing slightly above it and to the right. The latter doubling is noted in passing by Gilbert (G, p. 88), though it is worth spelling out that there is no question of empathic projection being inspired by any of these hands. Less obviously there is also the close doubling of Mary’s weeping face with the Magdalene’s partly obscured face immediately to her right (our left), as well as, in a minor way, the semblance between the handkerchief-like cloth that Mary has raised to her face with the piece of cloth, no doubt belonging to a larger length of fabric, around Nicodemus’s left hand as it rests on Christ’s left shoulder. In this connection, too, one might mention not the parallelism but the contrast between Nicodemus’s head and features and those of Christ. The two heads are in immediate proximity to each other, the rst alive and warm in colour (half illuminated, half in shadow), the second dead and discoloured (albeit illuminated, a brilliant stroke), the point being that so emphatic a contrast, while not mimetic in the sense I have been tracking, amounts nevertheless to a strong relationship between pictorial elements (much the same might be said about the contrast between Nicodemus’s and Christ’s right hands). The larger point would therefore seem to be that for Savoldo at this early stage, at least in the Elijah, SS Paul and Anthony and Lamentation, a painting in progress was treated by him as a relational eld, the relations in question being, as I have said, internal to the work. Soon, however, as we have seen, the relational axis will shift through ninety degrees to engage the viewer, the rst such viewer being in every case the painter, which is why the self-portrait surfaces in his art as basic to his operations starting as early as the large Treviso altarpiece of 1521 (see illus. 76), with the gure of St Liberale in armour gazing directly out of the picture at the extreme right, his body mostly hidden except for his head (as Gilbert, again, remarks).4

A l l th i s i s i m po rtan t, I think, but there is another aspect of Savoldo’s early career that has so far gone unmentioned here except in the most general terms: his interest in Northern art, which in fact marks his entire oeuvre, and in particular in the sort of Northern art associated with Hieronymus Bosch and artists like him (but also others including Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Martin Schongauer, Joachim Patinir and Hugo van der Goes).5 Two works by Savoldo, both Temptations of St Anthony, are crucial here: the rst, and almost certainly the earlier one, in the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego (1515–20; illus. 47), the second in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow

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47 Savoldo, Temptation of St Anthony, 1515–20, oil on panel.

(c. 1520; illus. 48).6 I will conne my remarks mainly to the rst, having seen the second only in reproduction. In the San Diego panel the composition is divided in two, with a large, brownish, geologically improbable rocky mass sweeping upwards in the middle distance; towards the right we see a nightmare landscape of ery skies, bizarre structures, Boschian monsters and ruddy-skinned, naked, eeing humans (some of whom have been caught and are being devoured by the monsters), while to the left are daylight and the appearance of normality – elds, woods, a road, buildings, a few strange dark rock formations, and in the distance blue mountains and cloudy skies. In the left foreground the painting’s protagonist, the bearded saint, in a skullcap and a dark robe overlaid by a twisting white tunic, ees mid-stride towards the left, looking back over his shoulder at the hellish world behind him while raising his not quite clasped hands in prayer. In an obvious sense the central rocky mass, though more spectacular, is similar to the smaller mass behind Elijah, even to the grassy stubble and the bits of twig-like growth at the top of both; more to the point, the entire rocky structure has a bodily feel, plus there is towards the bottom right, just above the gures and creatures exiting from

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a cave-like space, a dark indentation in the rock that has the distinct sense of an eye, which would make the cave a kind of mouth and that entire portion of the rocky mass a grotesque quasi-face. In the same vein, once alerted to the possibility that physiognomies of one sort or another are in play, the two lighter-coloured rocks immediately above the cave and to its left reveal themselves to be viewable as a head in prole with a large forehead confronting at point-blank range a smaller animal-like creature with feline ears and a kind of tail. There also seems to be a rudimentary hand or paw with claws beneath the two heads. Nor is this all: if one then raises one’s gaze to just above the dark space above the creatures (or creature-like forms) I have just described (illus. 49), one becomes aware of another face in prole on the front of the ‘roof ’ of the space (seemingly bearded, seemingly looking down to the left), and then inside the dark space and to the left another cartoonish face with large round eyes and a horizontal slit-like mouth. Also (once started it is hard to stop) it is tempting to discern still another cartoonish face with round dark eyes to the right of the bearded face, and just possibly a head in prole at the left of the rocky mass, silhouetted against the distant landscape. (So far as I know, none of this has been noted in the literature on the

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48 Savoldo, Temptation of St Anthony, c. 1520, oil on panel.

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painting.) Finally, might there not be something quasi-mask-like – two eye sockets, a nose, a gaping mouth, all facing upwards – in the blown-back folds in the saint’s white tunic where it crosses his upper left thigh, as well as not quite a face but nevertheless a snoutish (mouse-like?) physiognomy with two small eyes in the swirling convoluted end of the white tunic, just to the left of the tiny creature reading a book? In a different vein, the large, dark rock formation to the right of the central mass, proled against the hell-like ames in the distance, has something monstrous about it, especially the suggestion of an open maw full of menacing teeth. There is also, less tendentiously, a clear resemblance between the landscape to the left in the St Anthony and the more modest one in the Elijah, but what in addition I nd striking is the afnity between the charming, or at least in no sense alarming, stone bridge-like formation in the far middle distance in the Elijah and the sinister-seeming dark rounded semi-arch-like form to the immediate right of and connecting with the stony mass in the Anthony. A quick glance at the Moscow version of the subject nds the same two-part division with a central rocky mass that seems even more semianthropomorphic (or semi-monstrous) than in the version in San Diego. Here, however, the white-bearded saint in a voluminous red robe and cowl has fallen backwards in terror as hideous animal-like beings crowd in on him, tugging at his long scarf and the hem of his robe. To the right, presumably seen by the saint, an almost naked man in a strange loincloth enters bearing a naked gure on his back, the gure plainly human except for a horrid bird-skull-like head. This pair has always been seen as based upon, in that sense referring to, a comparable motif in Raphael’s Fire in the Borgo in the Stanza dell’Incendio of the papal apartments.7 Knowing the painting only in small-scale reproduction, my impression that it comprises numerous physiognomic elements of the sort just discussed remains merely that, an impression, albeit a strong one. More than thirty years ago a young scholar in a short article in the Art Bulletin pointed to certain specic sources in Northern art for the two paintings: a print by Lucas Cranach, itself derived from one by Martin Schongauer (1506; illus. 50), and Hieronymus Bosch’s Last Judgement triptych today in the Groeningemuseum, Bruges (1486; illus. 51).8 Savoldo’s citations from the latter have been taken to suggest that it might then have been in Italy, but in any case recent scholarship, culminating in the landmark 2017 exhibition Jheronimus Bosch e Venezia in the Palazzo Ducale, has drawn attention not only to the circulation of Northern artists and works

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49 (facing page) Savoldo, Temptation of St Anthony (illus. 47), detail.

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50 Lucas Cranach the Elder, Temptation of St Anthony, 1506, woodcut in black on cream laid paper.

in early sixteenth-century Venice but also in particular to the presence of several important paintings by Bosch in the collection of Cardinal Domenico Grimani between roughly 1516 and 1523, where Savoldo would surely have viewed them.9 For the present study, however, the important point is not the question of inuence in a strictly art-historical sense so much as the fact that the impact of a Northern, in particular a Boschian, vision of a monstrous, demonic and oneiric world on Savoldo’s pictorial imagination appears unmistakable, and not only in the St Anthony panels.

Wh at i h av e i n m in d is likely to seem surprising even to readers familiar with Savoldo’s art – at any rate, I have never seen the topic I am about to raise addressed in the secondary literature. In effect I have already raised

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it, but now I mean to pursue it. Very simply, it concerns his treatment of drapery, in particular his altogether personal, indeed highly idiosyncratic tendency to proliferate folds, bulges and indentations in a manner that often bears little or no relation to the underlying form of the body, but instead tends towards a kind of dynamic autonomy, one might even say anarchy, unlike anything else in Italian art with which I am familiar.10 A painting already discussed, the Penitent St Jerome in London (see illus. 33), is a case in point, the entire expanse of the saint’s red-purple garment below the waist being a zone of arbitrary-seeming folds, bulges, indentations, pockets, highlights and shadows with only the most minimal relation to the limbs that presumably it covers and the ground on which its lower inches rest; in fact

51 Hieronymus Bosch, Last Judgement, 1486, oil on oak panel, triptych.

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the bottom framing edge cuts through the drapery before it comes to an end. As has been mentioned, Longhi in an early article found in Savoldo’s drapery a precedent for Caravaggio’s (Longhi had in mind Savoldo’s Shepherd with a Flute in the Getty, illus. 36), but in fact there is nothing in Caravaggio’s oeuvre even roughly comparable to what we nd in the St Jerome. By this I mean that, while it is perfectly true that drapery in Caravaggio is often conspicuous and ‘excessive’, he never appears to proceed, as does Savoldo in the St Jerome and elsewhere, with a sense of near-total improvisational freedom, as if precisely in that regard, in the treatment of that seemingly parergonal element (in Derridean lingo), his art could all but slip conventional constraints in the interest of what might certainly be described as expressiveness of a sort, but of what sort?11 In the rst place, an expressiveness keyed to the implied state of mind of Jerome himself, as he leans forwards gazing intently at the smallish gure of Christ on the crucix, his right arm and hand in the act of preparing to strike his breast with a stone, his left hand making the convulsive gesture as if clutching or grasping discussed in Chapter Two. Note, by the way, how the vertical division in the rocky mass to the right of Jerome may be seen as miming Christ’s legs, or for that matter the facing-page division of the saint’s Bible. Then there is the way in which the darkish downwardturning indentation in the drapery to the right of, and slightly below, his right hand clutching the stone may be seen as subtly emphasizing the action of the saint’s right arm, an action that at once is perfectly traditional (Jerome in the act of beating his breast with the stone) and wholly original, with the arm and hand neither drawn further back and so silhouetted against the sky or landscape, nor having just delivered the blow and so in contact with the saint’s breast, but rather viewed as if in mid-trajectory, foreshortened against the saint’s body, which is to say against the red-purple drapery itself. The risk of a decision to frame the arm and hand in this manner is that they might thereby be made less dramatically visible than would otherwise be the case, indeed that they might become momentarily lost against their immediate background, despite the emphatic shadowing of the arm’s forward contour (and the highlighting on the drapery immediately beneath it). But by partly miming or matching the saint’s action, in particular by underscoring the position of his hand and wrist, the downwardturning indentation helps ensure that the viewer never loses sight of the main action, which however is then complemented by the differently focalized, also sharply illuminated, grasping gesture of the saint’s left hand, with

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its invitation to the viewer to respond to it empathically, as discussed in Chapter Two. Then there is this, the direction in which I have been moving all along, not without a certain anxiety. Towards the very bottom of the same length of drapery that contains the downward-curving, dark inward fold that I have just discussed, one nds a cluster of indentations, together with shadows, highlights and bulges, that I cannot help seeing as a face or mask: two eyes in darkish sockets, a mouth, a possible nose, a jaw and chin (illus. 52). The eyes are set wide apart, the whole face somewhat squat, the mouth open and slightly out of alignment, with an unreadable but not particularly friendly expression. I have to assume that the reader sees what I am seeing, now that it has been pointed out. The question, unevadable, is what exactly to make of it. For a start, was it, the face or mask, consciously intended as such by Savoldo? My rst stab at an answer is that I doubt it, but is that out of the question? Remember the heads and faces in the rocks at the bottom left of the Elijah, clearly intended as such, in my view. This must also be true of the heads and faces in the central rocky mass in the San Diego Temptation of St Anthony. In the light of the face or mask in the drapery in the Penitent St Jerome, what exactly should one make of the strange triangular structures of folds in the lower drapery of Anthony in SS Paul and Anthony, which I have already suggested have something face- or mask-like about them? In fact, looking again at the Elijah, might there not be the hint of a raven-like

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52 Savoldo, Penitent St Jerome (illus. 33), detail.

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head with a strong beak in the folds immediately above his right foot? And a related question: assuming for the moment that Savoldo did not specically intend the face or mask in the Penitent St Jerome as such, once it was in place did he recognize that it was there, that it had materialized in some way or other, and did he then in effect knowingly accept it as belonging to the structure and meaning of his painting? Or did it simply escape his notice? For the moment let the question remain open. And if we now let our attention drift to the rather dense concatenation of folds and bulges at the lower left of Jerome’s robe, to the left of the face or mask I have been discussing, is there not a sense, now we have become just a bit sensitized to the possibility – which is to say once we have begun to mobilize a certain empathic projection in this context also – in which that concatenation too might be seen as suggesting a somewhat collapsed face or mask of sorts, with deep eye sockets, a vertical divide between them, no obvious nose but a perfectly plausible mouth slanting downwards to the right at the very bottom of the picture? Needless to say, it would not surprise me to nd that even a reader sympathetic to my general approach to Savoldo might refuse to go along with the latter set of proposals. But I would nevertheless hope that he or she would be struck by a hint of something like purposiveness – but to what end? – in the very density of the collapsing cascade of folds and bulges in the region I have described as implying the possibility of a second mask-like form. Another painting makes relevant viewing in the light of these considerations, St Matthew and the Angel (early 1530s; illus. 53),12 by universal agreement one of the works singled out by Vasari when he wrote of having seen four ‘nocturnes with res, very beautiful’ in the mint of Milan.13 (As mentioned in the Introduction, Savoldo evidently worked for the Duke of Milan in the 1530s.) For Longhi, as Andrea Bayer remarks in the Painters of Reality catalogue, the St Matthew was the picture by Savoldo that more than any other looked forward to Caravaggio: ‘To [Longhi’s] eye, every aspect of the work conrmed his belief: gure type, illumination, mood.’14 And in fact the St Matthew is one of Savoldo’s most inspired creations: the Evangelist, still relatively young, with a dark beard and powerful build possibly reecting Savoldo’s own, and wearing a rose-red blouse with a simple neck and owing sleeves, sits at a table writing with a quill pen on a single sheet of paper (or parchment?). This would have been understood by Savoldo’s contemporaries as anachronistic, like the open Bible in the Penitent St Jerome, the idea evidently being to make the images in question as directly accessible to contemporary viewers as possible, which

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was standard procedure in sixteenth-century Venetian depictions of the saint. In a characteristically Savoldesque invention, though, the table surface runs across the bottom of the canvas. Barely above the bottom framing edge, indeed touching that edge, a small oil lamp provides an unlikely degree of illumination. Just beyond it the sheet of paper is being written upon by Matthew, his right hand wielding a pen and his left hand gripping an inkwell (anchoring the composition at the bottom, that is, making it likely that the viewer begins his or her engagement with the picture precisely there). At the moment depicted, Matthew appears to have paused in his writing to receive inspiration from a Leonardesque angel with a dark blue-purple robe and darkish wings. In greater detail, the writer, his face partly in shadow, raises his handsome head and turns it towards the angel half-hovering further back in space, whose face we see mainly in prole but which has

53 Savoldo, St Matthew and the Angel, early 1530s, oil on canvas.

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been turned and tilted feelingly towards Matthew. The impression conveyed is less of mutual eye contact than of intense rapport. In fact we have the sense of viewing the angel partly from the rear, which is to say that there is a certain afnity between this composition and that of the Death of St Peter Martyr, for all the disparity between their respective subjects. The quality of communication between angel and Evangelist is exquisite, a triumph of nuance, tenderness, suggestion. At the same time, the subtle discrepancy in size between the two – Matthew rmly planted at his table, the angel almost dreamlike in its relative indenition – underscores the difference in existential registers, as in the Death of St Peter Martyr, between everyday reality and a visitation of the divine, as does the intimation of movement in the treatment of the winged visitor. It is not to take anything away from Caravaggio’s profound imaginativeness, but his own versions of the subject are distinctly less inspired. In the background to the right and left are scenes that have been associated with Matthew’s life as narrated in the Golden Legend; both scenes are themselves minor triumphs of nocturnal illumination, the one at the right featuring a re in a hearth, the one at the left a moon in a night sky.15 In a compositional stroke that by now should be familiar, Savoldo situates the Evangelist’s hands in extremely close proximity to the picture plane. As the painting stands, however, the viewer is not thereby invited to respond empathically, either because Savoldo on this occasion deliberately toned down his usual masterly depiction of hands so as to make these unavailable for such a purpose, or because – far more likely – the hands belong to a portion of the canvas that suffered badly at some time in the past. In any case, the viewer is placed directly before the scene, so near that one nds oneself trying to read the writing on the sheet of paper (all one sees is a few rows of marks). What turns out to be emphasized in the St Matthew is, rst, the marvellously imagined lyrical communion between angel and Evangelist, and second, a very different matter, the extraordinary presentation of the latter’s owing blouse, red with dazzling white highlights, radiant beyond all rational justication (the tiny oil lamp could not remotely have produced such an outcome), a spectacular, all but phosphorescent expanse of folds, highlights, valleys, shadows and the like with not even an approximate equivalent that I can think of in the art of Savoldo’s contemporaries (there is nothing like it in Lotto’s work, for example). At this point I want simply to urge the reader to consider the blouse in as receptive or empathic a state of mind as possible – in other words, not simply

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taking the overall cascade of folds for granted either representationally, as what such a blouse composed of the appropriate material would actually look like (assuming greater illumination than that provided by the little lamp), or merely stylistically, as characteristic of Savoldo’s pictorial handwriting, which of course it is. The alternative I want to propose, here as elsewhere in his oeuvre, is to ‘actively’ or, say, projectively view the folds and bulges as continually hinting at one or another quasi-physiognomic visual metaphor, even as the precise terms of the latter mostly escape clear denition. But not, I think, entirely: for example, about midway down the saint’s left sleeve there is a bunching of folds that, after multiple viewings (and much internal debate), suggests to me a face or a mask – at any rate, I propose that the bunching may be seen as evoking two eyes slanting outward left and right, and below them a squat or attened nose, and below that a long downwardcurving slit of a mouth, the face or mask turned slightly to the saint’s left. Of course I recognize that the suggestion could scarcely be more tenuous, and that if the reader nds it unpersuasive there is no effective means by which to counter his or her disbelief. Or, to shift attention to the saint’s right hand holding its pen, and then to the improbably ample ‘cuff ’ of his sleeve, in particular to the bit of the ‘cuff ’ immediately above the hand (illus. 54), is it out of the question that one discern here a kind of semi-monstrous masklike or gargoyle-like face, two dash-like eyes and a slanting nose with the writer’s hand issuing from an open mouth? At any rate, such a reading quite

54 Savoldo, St Matthew and the Angel (illus. 53), detail.

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unexpectedly struck me with considerable force when I encountered the St Matthew, with which I had long been familiar, in a small exhibition at the Palazzo Barberini in 2017.16 Here too, however, the visual evidence for such a reading is hardly dispositive. And even if it were provisionally granted that one or another face or mask of the sort I have been evoking might be taken to be ‘there’, the question of its signicance – of its meaning in and for Savoldo’s art – remains to be determined.

I s h a l l late r have occasion to direct attention to faces in other works by Savoldo as well as to pursue the question of their signicance, but one cluster of remarkable canvases bears closely on the topic: the Magdalenes. Even more than Matthew’s blouse in St Matthew and the Angel, the Magdalene’s shawl in the three versions of the subject I have seen – in the National Gallery, London, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, with the shawl treated differently in each of the versions as to colour and the pattern of folds and highlights – provides an extraordinary eld for pictorial enlivenment and what I have been calling empathic projection. In each of the three versions such projection discovers the strong possibility of faces in the folds, though especially as regards the London and Berlin canvases the very notion of possibility may be felt to err on the side of tentativeness. To begin with the London painting (see illus. 39) and its radiant silver shawl, the most sheerly ravishing of the three canvases, there are two candidates. The rst and less immediately persuasive may be found high on the saint’s left shoulder, taking the narrow highlighted fold running at a slight angle from right to left as a long nose, with two eyes or eyebrows aring off from it at the right-hand end and an outsize open mouth under it, seen as if in prole, making the entire head or mask into a kind of mocking caricature. As for the second candidate, just below the mouth of the rst in the shadowy part of the shawl, in the vicinity of the saint’s elbow, one nds two round depressions that offer themselves as eyes (or eye sockets), and then a perfectly plausible ski-slope-shaped nose pointing towards the left, and beneath that an equally plausible small, partly open mouth, as if half-smiling, or in the act of speaking. Elsewhere the folds in the shawl resist interpretation even as they draw the eye, making it linger over one or another stunningly beautiful passage, indeed teasing it here and there with intimations of further meaningfulness, in particular – it takes a while to come to terms with this – that of a small grotesque head and face with an impossibly long, downward-plunging nose

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in the drapery covering the saint’s right hand. (See also the various small indentations in the portion of the shawl covering the saint’s forehead, as well as the round, small, dare I say moon-face-like indentation immediately to their right.) In the Getty Magdalene (see illus. 41) the conspicuously seamed orangebrown drapery offers one strong candidate for a face of sorts, the pike-like creature gliding downwards from right to left with open jaws just below where the Magdalene’s left elbow would be (its upper contour being the seam itself). There are two weaker ones, the pattern of folds just above the pike’s head (a nose angled to the left, an eye socket-like depression, a minimal mouth, none of these as denite as the features of the not dissimilar face in the London version), and the light vs dark, left-facing mask-like form in prole just to the right of the Magdalene’s ointment jar in the lower left corner of the painting, its nose a hook-like stub trending up, its eye in shadow, its mouth open. But perhaps the Berlin Magdalene, with its colouristically hard to specify shawl, takes the prize. In the rst place the shawl bodies forth a much more dramatic congeries of folds and depressions than those in the other versions; and in the second the suggestion of a monstrous grinning Boschlike face or mask in the region of the saint’s upper left arm, in effect between shoulder and elbow, seems to me – again, dare I say it? – all but unmistakable (illus. 55). Specically, I have in mind the face or mask comprising a right eye or eye socket, a large downward-sweeping, hooked and highlighted, beaklike nose (perhaps comparable with the bird-skull-like head of the creature being carried on his back by an almost naked man at the right of the Moscow Temptation of St Anthony), and directly below the nose a hideously grinning mouth with shark-like teeth. Beneath the face or mask is a sequence of deeper serpentine indentations that, while not quite offering themselves to physiognomic reading, nevertheless disturbingly engage one’s eye and mind (one’s bodily imagination), as if some further empathic metaphorics were potentially in play. I say ‘Bosch-like face or mask’, using an adjective that could also be applied to the ‘pike’ at the Getty, but in fact the possible sources of such imagery far exceed the work of any single artist. For example, there seems to me an intriguing resemblance between the face or mask in the Berlin picture and the monster in Giulio Campagnola’s engraving The Astrologer (1509; illus. 56), which Savoldo surely knew, although the monster does not have savage teeth.17 It does not follow, however, that Savoldo would have intended the

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connection, and in any case the meaning of such imagery in paintings of the Magdalene, which is to say in works with a Catholic subject but also ones that feature a beautiful and alluring woman (and, if Pardo is correct, imply the near presence of Christ), remains an open question. Necessarily, there will be more to say about Savoldo’s phantasmic faces and their possible signicance before this book is done.

56 Giulio Campagnola, The Astrologer, 1509, engraving.

55 (facing page) Savoldo, Mary Magdalene (illus. 40), detail.

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57 (facing page) Savoldo, Tobias and the Angel (illus. 2), detail.

• M AG I C

E a r l i e r, towa r d s t h e e n d of the Introduction, I offered as preliminary evidence of how much has not been adequately seen in and about Savoldo’s art, much less intellectually taken into account, the observation that the subject of his universally lauded painting Tobias and the Angel (mid-1520s; see illus. 2), is not, as has invariably been held, the angel Raphael pointing to the sh emerging from the river at the lower left corner of the canvas.1 Instead the angel is drawing or summoning the sh out of the water with his extended arm and hand, a ‘magnetic’ or quasi-‘magical’ operation for which there is no precedent either in the book of Tobit or, to the best of my knowledge, in previous painting. In fact commentators have often remarked on the originality of Savoldo’s interpretation of the subject. Gilbert, for example, nds in the Borghese picture ‘a complete transformation of traditional iconography, in a more obvious way than the Matthew. The Tobias and the Angel pictures of the fteenth and sixteenth centuries show the gures walking along. Small wonder that their stationary, meditative monumentality here has evoked the name of Giorgione’ (G, p. 376). Again, the prevalence of stylistic categories, in this case ‘Giorgionesque’, tends to displace attention away from the deeper stakes of Savoldo’s enterprise. Gilbert also describes Tobias and the angel Raphael as ‘pausing to contemplate each other’ (G, p. 370), which I don’t think is accurate: the angel’s gaze seems directed towards the sh (as one would expect, given the larger meaning of his action), while Tobias’s is focused on the angel’s face. In fact there is something marvellously nuanced in Tobias’s bodily position – a hint of tension, even recoil in his head and upper body as he responds with dawning comprehension to the angel’s gesture and perhaps also to his words. Note

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58 Savoldo, Tobias and the Angel (illus. 2), detail.

in this connection the subtle ribbon of light just beyond Tobias’s shadowed prole, which in effect prevents the latter from being lost to view against the more distant trees. That is not all: Tobias’s right arm and hand might strike one at rst as pointing towards the sh, but on a closer look it feels more accurate to say that he too is summoning the sh with his right forenger, not deliberately but as if unknowingly, mimetically, under the inuence of the angel’s ‘magic’ (illus. 58). If this might seem too strong, I am convinced that it simply describes what is going on. As for the angel’s right hand, once again it occupies almost the exact centre of the composition, as if offered to the viewer for empathic projection, at any rate up to a point. But perhaps it is the painting as a whole, or at least the angel’s action in its entirety, that demands to be apprehended in empathic terms, virtually drawing the viewer into the scene, subjecting him or her as well as Tobias and the sh to the angel’s ‘magic’, lest the meaning of that action be missed – which is exactly

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what has happened ever since the painting rst became the object of arthistorical attention starting in 1910, when it emerged from long obscurity.2 The failure to grasp the meaning of Tobias and the Angel is all the more striking in that it is one of the most admired canvases (if not the most admired) in Savoldo’s oeuvre. Bayer, however, does allude to the painting’s ‘almost magical mood’ (PR, p. 137). And Gaetano Panazza, who nds the Tobias ‘stupendous’, sees the two gures as closed by ‘enchantment’ (incantesimo) at the magic hour of dusk.3 Scholarly consensus tends to place the Tobias in the mid-1520s, largely on the strength of various formal resemblances to the Adoration of the Shepherds in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin, to which we shall turn shortly. There is the further possibility, strongly advocated by Gilbert, that both the St Matthew and the Angel and the Tobias were on display in the Milan Zecca or mint, where Vasari would have seen them (G, pp. 434–4). Milan, of course, was where Leonardo’s inuence was strongest, and the angel, like the one in the St Matthew, could not be more Leonardesque. The landscape setting, on the other hand, as well as the ickering lighting and the overall poetic mood of the scene tend to be compared to Giorgione. The drapery on both gures, however, is purest Savoldo with gleaming highlighted folds, deeply shadowed pockets (especially on Tobias’s tunic, including an inverted heart-shaped one over his heart) and passages that only barely stop short of suggesting partial masks or faces (for example, at the angel’s waist near his left hand, or in the further length of blue-grey drapery that falls between his thighs, or just below his right armpit). The animistic-seeming drapery folds around the angel’s feet are also to the point. Characteristic, too, are the large rock with a deep partial cleft on which the angel rests his left foot, itself obscurely bodily (perhaps an automimetic ‘monstrous’ counterpart to the surfacing sh), and the sleeping dog to its right, less ‘a particularly naturalistic touch’, as has been suggested, than a participant in the dreamlike somatic network of the image as a whole. Notice, too, the similar divided rock to the left of the angel’s right side; the correspondence between the two rocks, once one notices it, is almost disconcerting. All this is to say nothing of the angel’s wings, which on the one hand are widespread as if in ight and on the other anchor the angel within the landscape setting to marvellous effect; or of the way in which the background foliage between the angel and Tobias has somewhat the force of a distinct living presence in its own right; or, nally, of the smallish chinks in the foliage through which we glimpse the sky at dusk, like so many bursts of light.

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59 Caravaggio, Calling of St Matthew, 1599– 1600, oil on canvas.

But to return to the ‘magnetic’ gesture of the angel summoning the sh. I rst put forward this reading of Savoldo’s canvas by way of suggesting a source for what I took to be the analogous action of the gure of Christ in Caravaggio’s Calling of St Matthew (1599–1600; illus. 59), one of his two career-dening realist masterpieces in S. Luigi dei Francesi (the other, of course, being the Martyrdom of St Matthew, briey discussed in Chapter One).4 Specically, I suggested, rst, that the bearded gure seated at the table and looking towards Christ and Peter while gesturing towards himself (as if to say, ‘Do you mean me?’) is in fact Matthew; this by way of countering the recent proposal that Matthew is the younger man at the extreme left who appears entirely occupied by the coins before him. Second, that Christ’s ‘pointing’ gesture with his right arm and hand is not one of pointing at all but rather one of ‘magnetic’ summoning, like the angel’s in the Savoldo; this is why it appears surprisingly unvigorous, a characteristic that has puzzled art historians who have taken it to be based on the gesture of Michelangelo’s

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God creating Adam. (In fact it came to strike certain scholars as more like Adam’s hand than God’s, an observation that was then cashed iconologically by the notion that Christ was ‘the new Adam’. As I remark in The Moment of Caravaggio, I nd this unconvincing, art history’s way of saving the appearances. There is a pointing gesture, but it is Peter’s, singling out the target.) And third, I suggested that Caravaggio built on the ‘magnetic’ theme to represent Matthew responding to Christ’s summons in three essentially simultaneous moments: a moment of sheer priorness, expressed by Matthew’s right hand still dealing with the coins on the table (and, signicantly, mirroring the immersed youth’s right hand); one of initial uncertainty, signied by Matthew’s gaze towards Christ and Peter and his questioning gesture (‘Do you mean me?’, or simply ‘Me?’); and a moment of instant obedience, as indicated by his muscular right leg in tights already beginning to move, lifting his foot from the ground and taking the rst fateful step towards martyrdom. Here, too, I take this reading to be incontrovertible. And what is further suggestive is that, assuming the Tobias and the Angel to have been on view in the Milan mint, it requires no mental gymnastics to imagine the young Caravaggio standing before it, during his years of apprenticeship to the Milanese painter Simone Peterzano, starting in 1584.5 So once again we are in a position to endorse the view of Longhi and others that Savoldo provided an important precedent for Caravaggio, with the proviso that in this case the basis for such a claim is not essentially a matter of style (naturalism, lighting, treatment of drapery) but rather of the two paintings’ imaginative structures.

Wi th in th e larg e r c o n te xt of the argument of this book, it matters that the instrument of the exertion of ‘magnetic’ inuence in the Tobias is the angel’s hand, a key Savoldesque motif, as has been seen (also his gaze, but the hand is primary). Not that there is anything quite like the summoning of the sh in any other work by Savoldo. But there is another motif that, as I understand it, bears a denite relation to the summoning, namely the actions of certain male gures relative to the infant Christ. To take the most obvious example, in the Virgin Adoring the Child with Two Donors at Hampton Court (c. 1523–8; illus. 60) we are shown the Virgin and the female donor at the right gazing down at the naked infant Christ, who lies on a pillow (more precisely, two pillows, a large one for his body, a small one for his head) while raising his left leg into the air as if kicking it and his right hand in a gesture

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60 Savoldo, Virgin Adoring the Child with Two Donors, c. 1523–8, oil on canvas.

that conveys a sense of incipient blessing.6 His left hand grasps a fold in the Virgin’s robe. The Virgin and the female donor clasp their hands before them, in the Virgin’s case with just the ngers touching (Savoldo’s norm for such a gesture), in the donor’s, apparently, the entire hands. But what gives the picture its surprising force is the action of the male donor at the left, who gazes directly at the viewer as he delicately raises a darkish coverlet (brown or dark red?) so as to expose the Christ Child to the Virgin and female donor as well as to the viewer. He is a quietly impressive gure, with a thick head of brown hair and a strong, well-trimmed beard, wearing a black robe with a rich fur collar; one’s best guess is that he is in his forties; and his features are strongly modelled by the fall of light from the upper left, casting the left side of his face in shadow and giving him a density of psychological presence that the other gures, much more evenly lit, obviously lack. His mouth is closed, his gaze intent, and the double action of his hands – only his forengers and thumbs actually hold the coverlet – could not be more

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measured and exact. The setting is outdoors, with a rocky mass behind the Virgin, some earthworks and what may be a ruined church behind the female donor, and a curving ruin of some kind and a glimpse of distant landscape behind the man. There will be more to say about this canvas, but rst it is necessary to introduce another, the Adoration of the Christ Child with SS Jerome and Francis, in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin (mid-1520s; illus. 61).7 The close similarity between the two pictures is evident: they are roughly the same size; even the settings are similar, though in the Turin Adoration in the place of the female donor St Francis stands with outspread arms while gazing at the Christ Child, and instead of the male donor one nds the bearded St Jerome, distinctly older than the donor, here too gazing directly at the viewer while lifting the coverlet with the same almost archly delicate gesture as in the Hampton Court painting. In both cases, the action of a male personage exposing the Christ Child has been found extremely puzzling by

61 Savoldo, Adoration of the Christ Child with SS Jerome and Francis, mid-1520s, oil on canvas.

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scholars, though Gilbert suggests that it is perhaps understandable in the case of a saint ‘but almost shocking in a donor as a casual token of familiarity with the holy gures’ (G, p. 85). He continues: It goes against the contemporary ethos; thus, in the exactly contemporary Pesaro Madonna of Titian (nished 1526) the donors kneel and pray as they would have in a Medieval image, and the same may be seen in numerous examples of the same group by Palma Vecchio. The inexplicable device in Savoldo [that is, in the Hampton Court picture] becomes understandable only if we see it as a repetition of the motive established by the Saint in the earlier version. In fact, the argument for the chronological priority of the Turin painting rests largely on the observation that in it the coverlet is being lifted by a saint rather than a mere donor, which is to say that there is no strong ‘external’ or even stylistic evidence for the earlier dating. As is said apropos of the Hampton Court picture in the standard catalogue of Italian pictures in the Royal Collection, It is now generally agreed that the Turin painting came rst, particularly because the gesture of lifting the cloth to reveal the Christ Child seems more appropriate for a saint . . . [I]t is usually the Virgin who lifts the Christ Child’s bedcover in this way to reveal him to his worshippers . . . [John] Shearman even suggests that the unknown donor here might have been called Giuseppe (Joseph) and the action chosen to allude to Joseph of Arimathea who helped at Christ’s entombment.8 In short, the chronological case is weak: the Turin picture comes rst only if one agrees that the ‘inexplicable’ action of the male donor in the Hampton Court Adoration can be rationalized only in those terms.9 As for Shearman’s notion that the male donor ultimately stands in for Joseph of Arimathea and therefore might well be named Giuseppe, it is precisely the sort of arthistorical speculation that fails to recognize itself as such, so trusting is its faith in iconological arguments, however far-fetched. Which leaves us where? Here is a proposal: if my readings of paintings by Savoldo in this book have indicated anything, it is that he was an artist of remarkable originality – even more remarkable, in fact, than has been recognized by previous commentators. As we have seen, from the very rst, or at least starting with the Elijah and SS Paul and Anthony, one major operator or vehicle of pictorial meaning in his art has been hands, culminating earlier in this chapter in the ‘magnetic’

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summoning of the sh by the angel Raphael (eventually Raphael will instruct Tobias to anoint his father’s eyes with the gall of the sh, ‘magically’ curing his father’s blindness). My proposal is that something of the sort is in evidence in both the Hampton Court and Turin paintings, regardless of which came rst: that is, the crucial action in both paintings is the exposure of the Child, less because of the iconographic signicance of such exposure than because of the precise, delicate and measured gesture of the hands (the male donor’s or St Jerome’s) in raising the coverlet. In this connection it is also crucial that the gures in question x their gazes on the viewer: the coverlet is being raised with the viewer in mind (with the viewer in view, so to speak), though in the Turin painting we are also given the open-armed response to the sight of the Christ Child of St Francis (his hands, signicantly, bearing the stigmata), which in effect underscores the specicity of the treatment of hands in the three gures of Jerome, the Virgin and Francis. Incidentally, looking at St Francis’s outspread arms and hands with their suggestion of suddenness and surprise, it is impossible not to think of the disciple inging his arms wide apart at the right of Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (1596–8; London, National Gallery). Going a bit further, one might say that in both Adorations there is a hint of something like ‘magic’ in the lifting of the coverlet, as if what is being exposed to the viewer is something wholly unexpected, something positively unnatural – and is that not in fact the case? As if the donor in the one and St Jerome in the other were ‘magicians’ (that is, Magi) of a sort, their gazes expressing nothing less than satisfaction in the successful revelation to the viewer – to the paintings’ intended audience – of the miraculous Child. A comparison with a supercially similar work by Lotto, his Holy Family with St Catherine of Alexandria (1533; illus. 62) in the Accademia di belle arti G. Carrara, Bergamo, will help underscore the specialness of Savoldo’s treatment of the revelation or disclosure theme. In Lotto’s canvas, a work of extraordinary poetry and beauty, the sleeping Child is revealed to Catherine by Joseph, who lifts the coverlet with his right hand and gestures towards him with his left. Scholars have been struck by Joseph’s ‘quite exceptional’ action, but it seems clear, at least to me, that the effect of his lifting of the coverlet is altogether different, by which I mean much less compelling, than the seemingly similar actions in the Hampton Court and Turin paintings.10 Put another way, Lotto’s treatment of hands is singled out for praise by Berenson in his early book on the painter: ‘Far from treating the hand as a mere appendage, he makes it as expressive, as eloquent, as the face itself, and in some of

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62 Lorenzo Lotto, Holy Family with St Catherine of Alexandria, 1533, oil on canvas.

his pictures . . . the hands form a more vital element in the composition than even in Leonardo’s Last Supper.’11 The Bergamo Holy Family is a case in point: the faces are relatively inexpressive but the hands are full of feeling; note especially the Virgin’s right hand with its improbably slender, illuminated ngers gently raised as if in protective reaction to Catherine’s rapt, forward-leaning response to the sight of the Child and Joseph’s one-handed lifting of the coverlet while gesturing quietly – ‘Here he is’ – with his other hand. More broadly, a highly motivated concern for the treatment of hands characterizes Lotto’s art as it does Savoldo’s. But their respective attitudes towards hands are fundamentally distinct, Lotto being chiey concerned, as Berenson recognized, and as is vividly the case in the Bergamo canvas, both with the evocation of expressive nuance and with the compositional interplay between the superbly rendered hands across the lateral expanse of the painting. In contrast, Savoldo’s hands, put as simply as possible, play a vital, indeed all-important role in the articulation of certain highly specic, often empathic projection-soliciting, structures of beholding, which is why it is a fundamental fact about the Hampton Court and Turin pictures that the male donor in one and St Jerome in the other x the viewer with their respective gazes. Were this not the case – were their gazes directed inside the painting, as in the Lotto – what I have described as the quasi-‘magical’ viewer-

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transxing force of both canvases would be sharply diminished. Put slightly differently, the unusual actions of the male donor and St Jerome, along with their equally unconventional gazes, are saturated with thought in a manner unique to Savoldo. Is it not plain that the viewer is invited to participate in that thought, to the extent that he or she can? One other point worth making before moving on is to do with the role played by the Christ Child in the structure I have been trying to elucidate. Until now I have stressed the importance of the donor’s and St Jerome’s actions of delicately lifting the coverlet and xing the viewer with their respective gazes. Such an account implicitly treats the Christ Child as essentially the object of those acts of revelation, but in fact the Child in both canvases is depicted as unusually active (comparison with the Lotto is again relevant), so much so that it is tempting to see his actions (kicking, grasping, indeed blessing) as the inaugural actions in the painting and everything else, including the revelation of his presence, as a secondary effect – the consequence of his ‘magic’ or ‘inuence’. It was a brilliant stroke to make the Child’s most conspicuous action the kicking of his upraised leg, in counterpoint to the surrounding play of hands. Again, a more sophisticated artist than Savoldo is hard to imagine. In fact there is another dimension to all this, as is persuasively argued in a brilliant essay by Stephen Campbell and then developed in greater detail in his recent book The Endless Periphery: Towards a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto’s Italy. Briey, Campbell argues that in Brescia between 1520 and 1550, in response to a growing sense of religious crisis within the Catholic Church, certain painters, Savoldo among them, came to associate not only the Christ Child (and more broadly the body of Christ) but also naturalistic representation itself with the miracle of the Eucharist, the latter being conceived ‘as a supreme mode of representation with a unique purchase on the real, the sign that is consubstantial with what it represents’.12 The other major painters he treats in this connection are Romanino and Moretto. His term for the pictorial mode in question is ‘sacred naturalism’ (also ‘Eucharistic naturalism’), which he sees as ‘seek[ing] to occupy a kind of second rung . . . between the “ultra-true” Eucharist on the one side and the ctive or poetic mode on the other’ (p. 209). Such a summary, however, does less than justice to the richness of Campbell’s evidence, the subtlety of his visual analyses, the cumulative force of his arguments. As he emphasizes, the nature of the Eucharist, which is to say the question of the ‘real presence of Christ’, was a bitterly divisive topic in the disputes between Luther and other Northern

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theologians and the Catholic Church, just as the desecration of the Host was a ‘demonic’ threat of which Savoldo’s contemporaries were acutely conscious.13 This suggests that the ‘magic’ I associate with the Hampton Court and Galleria Sabauda canvases, with their intense close-range focus on the infant Christ, may be thought of as Eucharistic in nature, a view I take to be perfectly compatible with my emphasis on the actions and gazes of the male donor and St Francis.

A pa i n ti n g re lat e d to both the Hampton Court and Turin pictures but scenographically more ambitious than either, though close in size to both, is the Adoration of the Shepherds also in the Galleria Sabauda, Turin (c. 1522–3; illus. 63).14 In an expansive dusk-lit outdoor setting – as usual with a central dark mass, this one seemingly a brickwork ruin – three shepherds make their way from the left towards the kneeling Virgin and the Christ Child, who lies partly wrapped in swaddling clothes on a blanket on the ground and with a pillow under his head, while gesturing towards his mother. Freedberg beautifully describes the gures as ‘mov[ing] with slow arrested cadence in a crepuscular landscape, shining in it’ (PI, p. 227). Each of the shepherds, wearing what one takes to be contemporary dress, is clearly characterized: the leftmost, by far the most youthful, is shown walking, his arms crossed over his chest and holding a long staff; the second, bearded but by no means aged, also with a staff, kneeling on one knee, clasps his hands (ngers touching) while gazing down at the Child; and the third, also bearded, probably the oldest and certainly the most strongly individuated of the three, kneels on both knees (not that we see them; they are covered by his owing robe) while hovering almost directly above the Child. Gilbert assumes the last of these is Joseph, but that seems doubtful; in any case, one feels he belongs rhythmically to the procession of visitors.15 More precisely, he has come to ground just to the left of the Child but his hands, conspicuously large and open with ngers separated in a gesture (of what exactly?), do the hovering to mysterious effect. As to the gesture: at rst glance one is tempted to take it as a sign of marvelling, which would be consistent with numerous precedents of images of Joseph, but on looking closer – and, let me acknowledge, with a focused empathic effort to feel one’s way into the hands’ actions, including the cocking of the right wrist – the meaning of the gesture seems otherwise, at once a quasi-‘magical’ evocation of the Child, as if the kneeling adorer were conjuring his presence, and a ‘magnetic’ – in

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the sense of unconscious, automatistic – response to the sight and perhaps also the action of the Child, which is to say that once again the implied ow of ‘magic’, or what I have called ‘inuence’, runs in both directions, towards and from the Child, the brightly illuminated focus of the composition. All this is apart from the two-way ow of affection between the Child and the Virgin, another ‘magical’ relationship, albeit a traditional one. Savoldo, however, makes one feel it as ‘magical’, which is not quite traditional.16 Also fascinating are the shepherds’ costumes, which appear to have nothing to do with shepherd life; on the contrary, the impression conveyed is of fashionable materials, and of a stylish interplay of colours and textures. The contrast between the pale violet of the youngest shepherd’s jerkin and his knee-length yellow-gold trousers is particularly striking. His bare feet hardly establish his shepherd credentials, nor, balletically posed as they appear, are they intended to. The entire painting has somewhat the sense

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63 Savoldo, Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1522–3, oil on panel.

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of a contemporary quasi-theatrical re-enactment before a select audience. And then there is the animistic-seeming play of folds, particularly evident in the loosely cut blue jodhpurs of the second shepherd (is that a sort of snout over his right knee?), the yellow-gold drapery beneath the kneeling shepherd’s hands (in which I think I see an eye with eyelids, a sort of nose and a mouth), and the groundcloth on which the Child has been placed, as well as the smallish bundle of something unidentiable near the Virgin in the lower right corner of the canvas. Resting against that bundle is a small metal canteen, another contemporary item; Savoldo appears to be making a denite point. And is there just possibly the suggestion of a rosary with large dark beads on the ground beneath the male gure with open hands? It is impossible to be certain. Finally, it is worth stressing that with the covering of the gesturing man’s knees, his posture takes on a somewhat ‘magical’ air, as if he himself were in fact hovering rather than kneeling – no doubt a momentary impression, but a suggestive one.

O n e m o re a d o rat io n - ty pe painting is relevant here: the Adoration of the Shepherds in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (c. 1530–35; illus. 64).17 As in the Hampton Court and the rst of the Turin pictures, the gures are half-length (in the latter they are slightly more), but the setting is nocturnal and the scene as a whole feels strangely compressed, concentrated. The focus of the scene, even more than in the other Adorations, is the mysteriously illuminated naked Christ Child in the immediate foreground – indeed the Child, shown lifting a transparent veil with his left hand as if discreetly exposing himself, seems a source of light rather than its recipient (there is no other source of light on view) – while the shepherds, assuming that is who they are, are only somewhat particularized. At the left we see two bearded gures who appear almost to double one another, and at the right a beardless youth who somewhat oddly gazes upwards, as if towards the Virgin. Three of the four gures – the second bearded man, the Virgin and the youth – clasp their hands in admiration of the Child (Mary, as is customary with Savoldo, with only ngertips touching), but it is the action of the shadowy bearded man at the extreme left that catches one’s attention. As in the Turin Adoration, his two dramatically poised hands hover feelingly above the Child, and even more strongly than in that painting his gesture, consistent with his expression, appears one less of surprise or wonderment than of practised conjuration, as if the painting were the locus, the arena, of two equally pow-

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erful feats of ‘magic’: one Eucharistic, emanating from the Child, the other of an uncertain nature, though probably it too is best thought of as Eucharistic, reective of, in that sense channelling, the divine mystery the painting emanates. Note, by the way, the Savoldesque motif of a distant burst of light in the dark sky at the top right, within which is depicted the angel of the Annunciation in ight, as well as the tiny gures on the ground down below. This is undoubtedly a Christian motif, but also, in this wholly unusual work, painted in an age and place where witches were a constant concern, one perhaps not devoid of a tinge of uncanniness; there will be more on this later.18

64 Savoldo, Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1530–35, oil on panel.

A f i nal work in a different vein will bring this chapter to a close: the impressive Portrait of a Woman as St Margaret in the Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome (c. 1525–30; illus. 65).19 The presentation of a specic individual in the guise of a saint was a previously established convention, one, as also in the

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65 Savoldo, Portrait of a Woman as St Margaret, c. 1525–30, oil on canvas.

Portrait of a Young Man as St George, that Savoldo found congenial. What establishes the reference to Margaret is the unlikely-looking ‘dragon’ at the lower left, which at rst appears to be attached to the sitter’s waist by a silver(?) chain, one of the fourth-century saint’s apocryphal feats having been the repulsing (in one account the destruction) of a dragon that had come to devour her while in prison. In an obvious sense, the ‘dragon’ in this painting is meant to appear ridiculous, in effect a not particularly attractive pet. But there is no mistaking the originality of the composition, not only because it is wider than it is high, unusual for a portrait at that time, but also because of the sharp division between the two halves of the picture, with the large open vista on to a Northern-seeming landscape at the right setting off the elaborately dressed and coiffed sitter (plus ‘dragon’) at the left. As for the woman herself, whose identity remains unknown, for all her rich, meticulously depicted costume with pearls and embroidered owers

magic

(marguerites) bearing symbolic associations, she communicates a palpable strength of purpose as she sits erect with her left hand keeping her place in a small book, doubtless a breviary, and her right poised backhandedly against her right hip, all the while directing her serious, thoughtful, almost frowning gaze towards the viewer. She indeed almost appears troubled: what is the viewer to make of the not quite vertical crease in the woman’s brow, an expressive marker of considerable force? Gilbert singles out for praise Savoldo’s treatment of her left hand holding the breviary, and it is easy to see why (G, p. 97). But what I nd most suggestive within the framework of the present chapter is the detailed rendering not so much of her right hand (we are given only a glimpse of several ngers) but of the left-hand glove that she holds in that hand, and in particular of the way in which it may be seen as directed ‘magically’ against the ‘dragon’, as if casting a spell that keeps the latter subjugated and harmless (illus. 66). (On close looking, too, it emerges that the chain-like leash is also being held in the lady’s right hand, which appears to be wearing its glove. What is notable, in any case, is the amount of detailed care Savoldo has lavished on this seemingly marginal precinct of the painting.) This would also explain the half-comic, half-pathetic upward and backward gaze of the ‘dragon’, afraid or unable to tear his eyes away from the controlling glove. In other words, in the Portrait of a Woman as St Margaret, too, a certain perhaps not entirely orthodox ‘magic’ is conspicuously in play, and a further implication of the woman’s steady gaze might well be that she is perfectly aware of that fact.

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66 Savoldo, Portrait of a Woman as St Margaret (illus. 65), detail.

five

• T H E B R E S C I A ADORATION OF

THE SHEPHERDS

67 (facing page) Savoldo, Adoration of the Shepherds (illus. 68), detail showing faces or masks in drapery.

L ate i n h i s c ar e e r , around 1540, Savoldo conceived and painted a work of considerable originality for the Bargnani chapel in San Barnaba in Brescia (c. 1540; illus. 68).1 It hangs today in the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo in that city and, so far as we know, was his last compositional invention. Once again it is an Adoration of the Shepherds, and like two of his four previous depictions of that subject the Brescia painting is on panel, not canvas; it is also signicantly larger than the others, 192 cm high by 178 cm wide (the format, essentially square, is all but unique in his production). It should also be said that the painting’s execution is not that of Savoldo at his nest. Most importantly, however, there is no precedent in his oeuvre for the basic compositional idea, which presents in the foreground the kneeling Joseph and Mary gazing down at the naked Christ Child, who kicks his left leg and makes the same gesture with his right hand as in the Hampton Court and Turin canvases, while three shepherds, separated from the Holy Family by a ruined but still functional structure in stone and wood, look on. The shadowy presence of animals, a cow and a mule, behind the Virgin indicates that the structure is a stable; beyond the animals two of the shepherds, a man with a dark beard and a young man, whose face only we see, appear at a window; while to the left, behind and beyond Joseph, a third shepherd with a dark beard, green jacket and wide-brimmed hat leans on a stone sill. The hour is nocturnal, with clouds in the sky; possibly we are to understand the moment as shortly after dusk. But whatever the hour, the mood of the painting is difcult to specify. Joseph and Mary seem unusually inexpressive and

the bres cia adoration of the shepherds

both appear as if withdrawn into private states of mind, Joseph with lowered eyes and arms crossed on his breast, Mary, distinctly unbeautiful, with hands pressed together as if in prayer (conventional poses, in other words). The shepherds too seem merely to look on, not to respond to the scene in any obvious way. In fact only two of the shepherds, the older men, can plausibly be said to be taking in the Holy Family; at the window beyond the Virgin, the youth or boy at the lower right looks up towards his right (our left), not, it would appear, at the dark-haired man at his side but at something else – perhaps the unseen moon (this is suggested by a splash of light on his forehead as well as by the illumination from above of the bearded man’s blue blouse or jacket). The upwards gaze of the young man matches that of the similar gure in the Washington Adoration, also a late work. In any case the physical distancing of the shepherds, positioned outside the stable, gives them the character of witnesses, not participants, as is normal in Adorations and is manifestly the case in Savoldo’s other paintings of the theme. Impassive witnesses, at that: how else are we to understand the action of the shepherd at the left, who seems to partly support his head with his right hand while simultaneously pushing his hat back on his head, as if quietly puzzling over the scene before him? The other bearded shepherd seems almost frowning with concentration, but with his face in shadow it is hard to make this out. Besides which, concentration or indeed melancholy, another possible characterization of his state of mind, is far from a standard response to the sight of the Christ Child. Finally, beyond the peasant on the left we see, rst, a zig-zagging brick or stone-slab wall partly illuminated from above; a hillside with ruins and trees; and in a distant clearing a trio of tiny gures apparently reacting to the sight of the angel of the Annunciation to the Shepherds at the centre of a burst of light in the sky – the most spectacular instance of this device in Savoldo’s art. Other features of the scene relate to effects and motifs with which we are by now familiar: the (Eucharistic) Christ Child seems almost as palpable a source of radiance as in the Washington Adoration; more broadly, the treatment of nocturnal light in the Brescia panel has always been singled out for praise; the large stone blocks to the right of the Virgin may be imagined as crudely miming the prole of the cow; and a grotesque face or mask with a large grimacing mouth is formed by the richly black folds of Joseph’s right sleeve, just below the shoulder. (Assuming one grants the possibility that such faces or masks are to be found in Savoldo’s art, this one almost leaps into view; see illus. 67.) Note, too, how the eroded wood above and

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68 (facing page) Savoldo, Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1540, oil on panel.

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69 Unknown artist, Adoration of the Child, c. 1440, fresco, detached and moved to its present location in the Brescian church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in 1539.

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beyond the Christ Child’s kicking leg and blessing hand may be seen as having been ‘magically’ removed by the Child’s action of kicking, as Campbell more or less suggests.2 And does not the angel of the Annunciation in the burst of light in the sky to the left have something disconcertingly witchlike or Boschian about it (those long, raptor-like wings, so unlike the angel wings in other Renaissance paintings, including the Tobias), especially when seen in relation to the small gures gesturing towards it on the hillside below? In addition, the very idea of placing the Holy Family in such a setting has rightly been seen as indebted to Northern precedents. But the differences between the Brescia panel and Savoldo’s other Adorations are in the end more striking: rst, the affective neutrality, verging on nullity, of all the gures except the Christ Child, including Joseph and the Virgin (one would never know on the basis of this painting what a master of facial expression Savoldo was, or perhaps I should say had been); second, the absence of any signicant play of hands, the decisive operator of pictorial relationships throughout Savoldo’s oeuvre (the deployment of the hands of the leftmost shepherd plainly shows the painter’s desire to normalize them, make them merely ordinary); and third, the basic architecture of the composition, which gives pride of place to the ruined stable with its thick stone wall viewed end on, ramshackle wooden roof, and dark inner space punctuated by a simple window, as well as, this being the point of the entire structure, to the theme of the separation of onlookers from the central scene.3 A local term of comparison, illustrated and briey discussed by Campbell, is a miracle-working (in that sense ‘magical’) fresco of the Nativity (c. 1440; illus. 69) that was moved to the Brescian church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in 1539.4 But the architecture in the fresco is nominal, no shepherds are present, and there is not a hint of separation between the members of the Holy Family, two angels with

the bres cia adoration of the shepherds

clasped hands, and a curious cow. So the resemblance between the two works, albeit undeniable, is limited. Another term of comparison, compositionally and indeed thematically less close but surely on Savoldo’s mind, is Moretto’s monumental Nativity with the Shepherds, St Jerome and a Hieronymite Donor (c. 1530–35; illus. 70), known as the Delle Grazie Altarpiece and today in the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo. The question is what all this comes to, or, to put it slightly differently, what was Savoldo’s intention, his project, in proceeding in this way? Throughout this book, starting with my reading of the Death of St Peter Martyr in Chapter One, I have drawn attention to Savoldo’s determination to build into his paintings one or another specic relational structure with respect to the viewer, characteristically implying extreme proximity between the two and often, as in the Death of St Peter Martyr, involving a quite particular emphasis on the depiction of hands. I suggest that what we nd in the Brescia Adoration, looked at from this perspective, is nothing less than an effort to construct a new mode of pictorial organization (a new dispositif ) that in effect identies the viewer before the painting as standing in a comparable relationship to the scene as the witnessing shepherds, by which I mean that the viewer’s consciousness of being held at a distance from the Virgin, Joseph and the Christ Child is mirrored or, perhaps better, modelled within the painting by the shepherds’ conspicuous separation from the Holy Family. And not only that: there is also a sense in which the impassiveness of the shepherds, together with the neutralizing of their hands by virtue of the latter’s engagement in strictly conventional gestures, is designed to force the issue of the viewer’s personal response to the sight of the Holy Family, as if all the emotion that may or may not turn out to be in play is to be understood by the viewer as coming from, originating in, his or her own response to the Christ Child, a response inevitably attenuated, not to say disabled, by the circumstances I have just described.

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70 Moretto da Brescia, Nativity with the Shepherds, St Jerome and a Hieronymite Donor, c. 1530–35, tempera on canvas.

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To take one further, frankly speculative step: it is as if the organization of the painting, with its unusual square format and its foregrounding of the partly ruined stable, aspires and in a sense gestures towards a realization in three dimensions, an actual architecture, that would in effect embrace the viewer while at the same time holding him or her at a distance from the principal gures – even while the literal embracing of the viewer would be an impossibility within the limits of the art of painting. But the very framing of that impossibility may be understood as acknowledging that Savoldo’s until then fundamental commitment to a far more direct, intimate and involving mode of entanglement of painting and viewer (in the rst instance, of painting and painter) was no longer available to him. Or, to put it more strongly, at this late stage in his personal evolution painting, as he had hitherto practised it, was leaving him or at least becoming distant from him, which is also to say from his still active and productive but no longer fully efcacious hands.5 (More on the notion of entanglement will be found towards the close of Part Two.) In short, the Brescia Adoration marks a valedictory and all but nal phase, pictorially and ‘ontologically’, in what I hope can now be seen as among the most singular and artistically compelling careers in all sixteenthcentury painting. I describe this as ‘all but nal’ because, some time after completing the Brescia Adoration, Savoldo painted two variants of the composition, one for the church of San Giobbe in Venice (also dated c. 1540; illus. 71) and the second for Santa Maria la Nova in Terlizzi.6 Without question the San Giobbe painting is much less pictorially authoritative than the original: the hour is no longer nocturnal but indeterminate; the architecture of the stable is much less powerful; the Holy Family is pitched nearer the viewer (the sense of blockage, of distancing, is largely done away with) without, however, yielding a sense of genuine proximity; the shepherd at the left of the Brescia picture has been replaced by a dark-bearded man, doubtless a donor, with hands clasped in prayer, who seems to look on almost furtively (though if one follows his implied sightline one cannot be certain that he can see much of anything); and the Christ Child no longer kicks his leg but rather seems to unveil himself, at least to the extent of holding up a bit of coverlet with his left hand (probably the strongest detail in the work). The painting as a whole is slightly smaller and considerably narrower than the Brescia prototype, while the addition of the rounded top of a traditional pala further diminishes its force. The execution too is weaker, hastier, than in the original. Not a happy sequel, in other words. I have not seen the Terlizzi picture, but in

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reproduction its condition appears very poor; it also dispenses with the leftmost gure found in the other versions. One last observation about the San Giobbe picture is that it lacks the face in Joseph’s sleeve in the Brescia original. Does this suggest that Savoldo was unaware of the face in the rst place? Again, it is impossible to say.

71 Savoldo, Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1540, oil on canvas.

part t wo

Wi t h t h e p re v i o u s ve chapters in play, I now want to pursue a range of further reections under various headings, all with a view to bringing the special character of Savoldo’s art into overall focus. Necessarily, there will be some repetition of observations and suggestions already put forward. But my aim in the remarks that follow will be to relate those observations and suggestions to each other with new clarity, as well as to introduce and develop relevant contextual material that has not yet been part of my account. By so doing I hope to bring out unexamined depths and reaches of Savoldo’s unique achievement, and beyond that to provide some portion of a new understanding of what was artistically possible in the imaginative universe of early sixteenth-century Venice and its environs.

b r e at h i n g t h e s a m e a i r

72 (previous page) Savoldo, Adoration of the Christ Child with SS Jerome and Francis (illus. 61), detail. 73 (facing page) Savoldo, Death of St Peter Martyr (illus. 8), detail.

Going on from the previous chapters, as well as from my observations about the structure of the late Brescia Adoration, I now want to expand on the claim that Savoldo’s determined and resourceful close-range engagement with the viewer has no equivalent in the work of any other sixteenth-century Italian painter. Gilbert does not pursue the point, but he does remark that it is as if Savoldo’s gures and the viewer breathe the same air (G, p. 7). So, for example, in the early Elijah Fed by Ravens and SS Paul and Anthony (illus. 43 and 44) the viewer is invited, indeed positively encouraged, to approach the canvas very closely in order to register certain details of the depiction, such as the fur on the inside of Elijah’s cloak or, a subtler feature, the brown hatchwork on Paul’s palm-leaf robe, which cannot be perceived

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74 Savoldo, SS Paul and Anthony (illus. 44), detail.

at a distance of more than a few feet (illus. 74). (Not to mention the faces in the rocks in the left foreground of the Elijah, about which there will be more to say.) Then there is the conspicuous deployment of hands in paintings such as the Portrait of a Man in Armour in the Louvre, the Prophet or Apostle in Vienna, the Young Man (John the Evangelist?) in the Borghese, the Evangelist (?) in a private collection in Milan, and the so-called Self-portrait as St Jerome in a private collection in Bergamo. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the hands in question occupy the bottom immediate foregrounds of those paintings, which is to say the portion of the representational eld nearest the viewer. What is surprising, however, or at least far from usual, is that in certain pictures, such as the Man in Armour and the Milan Evangelist (?), hands extend or thrust towards the viewer, and that more broadly – not only in those canvases – the hands repeatedly call for the viewer’s imaginative participation in their implied activities (grasping, clutching, ultimately, I have suggested, the acts of holding a palette and wielding a paintbrush), a feat of empathic projection that can be conducted only at extremely close range, as

breathing the same air

if involving virtual merger. In the case of the Portrait of a Man in Armour there is also the important matter of the reection in the mirror on the (not at all distant) rear wall, which requires close and intensive looking if it is to be properly construed. Note too the breastplate or gorget in the lower right foreground, cut off by the bottom framing edge and to be imagined extending into the viewer’s space. Moreover, if I am right, the entire image is to be understood as the reection in a mirror ‘this’ side of the picture surface. Continuing with the theme of reections, there is also the right hand of the Gentleman as St George in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, which is reected reversed, that is, as a left hand, in the man’s armour breastplate; partly obscured by the sitter’s right hand, the reection requires a distinct close-range act of attention to be noticed and is easily missed. Once seen, however, it raises the question of the viewer’s relation to that virtual left hand, which again invites (or at least suggests) a kind of projective ‘identication’. Another observation, not made earlier, is that might there be a sort of one-eyed, upward-gazing, tragically grimacing face-like mask in the phosphorescent green drapery at the bottom of the canvas near the sitter’s left hand? For that matter, what of the pair of mask-like (frog mask-like) forms in the drapery above the man’s left hand and wrist, especially the uppermost of the two? Finally, what is one to make of the strange, narrow, tube-like form improbably assumed by a length of drapery (is this right?) just in front of the staff resting against the sitter’s shoulder (illus. 75)? Is it possible, for example, that there is a face of sorts – an eye, a long slotted nose, a rudimentary mouth – in the swollen area towards its top? This can be made out only at very close range, virtually ignoring the rest of the painting. All this is in contrast to the conventional, in no way unusual, appearance of the sitter himself. In any case, one is dealing with a painting that on rst encounter appears unremarkable but on close examination turns out to be charged with puzzling provocations. The green drapery at

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75 Savoldo, Portrait of a Gentleman as St George (illus. 38), detail.

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the lower left with its central ‘spine’ and strange indentations and highlights seems almost abstractly such, though there too one notes a possible pikejawed prole of sorts facing downwards towards the left. In a different vein, there is the lamp, page of writing and inkwell, and also the writer’s curiously uncompelling hands, in St Matthew and the Angel, which together stake out the bottom few inches of the painting as a zone demanding particular attention.1 As well as, if my earlier suggestion is found persuasive, the gargoyle-like face or mask in the ‘cuff ’ immediately above the saint’s right hand. Coming to terms with the St Matthew involves several different acts or phases of seeing: a rst (let us say) directed close-range and down towards the hands and their activities (and the inkwell, lamp and sheet of paper with ‘writing’ on it); a second registering the exquisitely imagined communication between the angel and the Evangelist (implying a greater distance but not by much); and then perhaps a third and fourth taking in the smaller scenes further back in space to the left and right (approaching the canvas again). There is also conceivably a oating eye (or ‘eye’) gazing as if placidly at the viewer in the angel’s drapery, just to the side of his elbow (this may not be apparent in the illustration). As remarked earlier, the entire scene is permeated by a sense of psychic, not to say quasi-physical intimacy extending, if one allows it, to the relationship between painting and viewer. Nothing quite so deliberately scripted is found in Tobias and the Angel, but it speaks volumes as to Savoldo’s intent in that deeply poetic production that the surfacing sh – the crucial focus of the composition, once one comes to understand the latter correctly, or rather one of the two crucial foci, along with Raphael’s right hand and arm – is found at the very bottom of the canvas (and in a corner), where it is easily missed by the viewer, at least at rst; this may be one reason why the picture’s true subject, the ‘magnetic’ extraction of the sh from the water, has never been recognized. (‘Never’ is almost certainly too strong: my proposal in The Moment of Caravaggio is that Caravaggio understood exactly what is going on and adapted the idea in his Calling of St Matthew. Possibly other early viewers got the point as well.) And it is in that same precinct of the canvas that one nds the subsidiary ‘mimetic’/‘magnetic’ detail of Tobias’s beckoning forenger. Note, by the way, with what nesse Savoldo has depicted the ripples caused by the sh’s surfacing, just in case a viewer might be inclined to take that surfacing for granted. Signicantly, too, because suggesting how deeply Savoldo rethought this traditional subject, another standard ‘character’ in the story, Tobias’s dog, usually portrayed accompanying the walking gures, is shown

breathing the same air

asleep in the lower right-hand corner of the canvas. This calls for a further, separate act of seeing, as if the dream-likeness of the scene were anchored precisely there. Also requiring close attention is the byplay in the lower left corner of the Portrait of a Woman as St Margaret between the hapless ‘dragon’ on its chain and the lady’s left glove (a surrogate hand), another brilliant stroke that seems to have escaped recognition over the centuries. And of course there is the altogether stunning tour de force that the present book began by unpacking: the implication in the Death of St Peter Martyr of a descending angel bearing the palm of martyrdom to the astounded saint just ‘this’ side of the picture surface and above the painting’s upper framing edge, along with the (to me) irresistible solicitations to empathic projection proffered by the saint’s gesturing hands. Finally, capping everything as regards the issue of nearness, there is the astonishing implied scenario of the sublime Magdalenes, which posits the viewer (in the rst place the painter) standing in intimate proximity to the beautiful saint with the risen Christ, the presumed source of the radiance ooding the saint’s shawl, at his or her side – a pictorial and ‘ontological’ invention of almost inconceivable daring and genius. I shall return to the theme of nearness shortly.

s av o l d o a n d t h e s e l f - p o r t r a i t To Savoldo’s most devoted modern scholar, Creighton Gilbert, is owed the recognition that among the painter’s surviving paintings (roughly fty) are at least four self-portraits, or works including a self-portrait.2 First is the Prophet or Apostle in Vienna, which, as Gilbert notes, bears Savoldo’s signature on the scroll in the sitter’s left hand (G, pp. 426–7; see illus. 28).3 We may therefore take this work as providing certain evidence of Savoldo’s physiognomy. Second is the gure of St Liberale at the right of the large altarpiece in Treviso, Madonna and Child Enthroned among SS Nicholas, Dominic, Thomas, Jerome and Liberale (1521; illus. 76), the earliest and most ambitious of Savoldo’s four altarpieces.4 In fact the altarpiece was begun by another painter, Marco Pensaben, who worked on it between April 1520 and May 1521, after which Savoldo replaced him. Scholars have disagreed as to the extent of Savoldo’s participation in the nal work, but it appears to have been signicant. Gilbert notes that the St Liberale gure closely resembles

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s avoldo and the self-portrait

the Vienna Prophet or Apostle, which is plainly the case. The saint also, in Gilbert’s view, ‘occupies the exact place and pose which is [sic] correct for a self-portrait. He is at the extreme right, in prole, his head turned towards us, and unlike all the other gures in being entirely hidden except for his head. In every one of these respects he is identical, for instance, with the most famous of all self-portraits in the decade preceding, Raphael’s in the School of Athens’ (G, p. 428). Third is the painting in the Louvre long regarded as a portrait of the condottiere Gaston de Foix and today called Portrait of a Man in Armour, a work analysed both in The Moment of Caravaggio and in Chapter Two above (see illus. 20). In my view Gilbert is right in taking this to be a self-portrait, and I will forgo summarizing his arguments; sufce it to say that his emphasis on the presence of mirrors and reecting armour is to the point, as well as his suggestion that the subject of the painting facially resembles the previous two images of Savoldo. What Gilbert leaves out, of course, is the entire dynamic of mirror-reversal and the act of painting implicit in the treatment of the sitter’s arms and hands and their reections. Fourth is the painting in a private collection in Bergamo that Francesco Frangi catalogues as a self-portrait as St Jerome (see illus. 30). Frangi himself expresses reservations as to the identication of the sitter,5 but I am persuaded by Gilbert’s insistence that the latter resembles the persons in the other self-portraits, quite apart from the fact, which by itself is hardly dispositive, that the name Gerolamo (Jerome in Italian) is that of the painter.6 As is spelled out in Chapter Two, the knockdown evidence for me, quite apart from matters of physiognomy, as regards the Vienna and Bergamo canvases again concerns the treatment of the respective sitters’ hands, which I understand in each case as referring at a remove to the act of painting: in the Self-portrait in the Costume of St Jerome, to one involving the right-angle dispositif that will later come into play in Annibale’s Self-portrait with Figures and Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard. All this is to say nothing of other paintings such as the Death of St Peter Martyr and Penitent St Jerome, which are not self-portraits but which nevertheless share with the self-portraits a common impulse by way of the depiction of hands. Gilbert also cites the charcoal drawing in Windsor (c. 1515–20?; illus. 77), persuasively in my view.7 But nothing crucial hangs on this. As Gilbert remarks, Savoldo’s preoccupation with the self-portrait was highly unusual. In his words:

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76 (facing page) Savoldo, Madonna and Child Enthroned among SS Nicholas, Dominic, Thomas, Jerome and Liberale, 1521, oil on panel.

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77 Savoldo (attributed), The Head of a Man, c. 1515–20?, black and white chalks on blue paper.

painting with dem ons

It seems paradoxical that an artist simultaneously was so concerned to paint himself over and over, in perhaps the largest proportion of his total oeuvre of any artist [competitors for the distinction would include Sofonisba Anguissola, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Rembrandt, Courbet, Van Gogh and Corinth], and yet always concealed it [by which I take Gilbert to mean that Savoldo never portrayed himself unmistakably in the act of painting, nor even holding brush and palette] . . . The material here for a psychological interpretation is obviously tempting.8

s avoldo and the self-portrait

Not tempting to me, though. For one thing, the notion of concealment is not quite right. In fact Savoldo’s treatment of hands has been viewed as one of the signatures of his art by a succession of art historians going back to Longhi in 1917; the failure of the same commentators to understand the action of those hands in the terms developed in Chapter Two probably says more about the limitations of traditional stylistic categories than about any desire on Savoldo’s part to obfuscate what he was doing. As to Savoldo’s motivation in thematizing the act of painting in this way, here too I would minimize psychological considerations in favour of what I have been calling ‘ontological’ ones. In that perspective it makes perfect sense that an artist who found himself driven to emphasize the seeming nearness to the viewer (in the rst instance the painter) of a painting’s contents, and by implication of the painting itself, would be led to become aware to a particularly acute degree of his own role in bringing the painting about. And that one offshoot of that awareness might plausibly be a tendency to portray himself in the act of doing just that, at least in the necessarily somewhat disguised (but by no means ‘concealing’) form that I have tried to evoke, just as another would be the calling into question of the impermeability of the picture surface as an ‘ontological’ barrier, as in the self-portraits, but also as in the Death of St Peter Martyr, the Penitent St Jerome, the Magdalenes and other non-self-portraits in which an effect of nearness is carried to a hyperbolic extreme. This is to suggest that throughout Savoldo’s oeuvre – not in every work but in a sufcient number to make this one of the dening characteristics of his vision – the painting itself, the painting as artefact, emerges as a kind of transactional eld belonging at once to both the virtual, depicted world situated ‘beyond’ the picture surface and the actual, physical world grounded ‘this’ side of that surface, in the latter of which, in intimate proximity to the canvas, the painter, paintbrush in his right hand and (traditionally) palette in his left, actively pursued his enterprise. A further implication of all this is that such paintings eschew the essentially lateral mode of organization that was common in Venetian painting in his time. Exactly why Savoldo proceeded in this way, why he imagined the pictorial arena in these highly charged, partly somaticized, intensely relational terms, is impossible to specify, but again it seems unlikely that personal psychology holds the key to what he repeatedly did. Perhaps the best one can say at this point in our analysis is that he held a vision of painting unlike that of any Italian contemporary, one that looked forwards to Caravaggio’s epochal achievement even as it stopped short of the full-blown thematization

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of embodiment that I have suggested marked Caravaggio’s canvases of the 1590s and early 1600s, as well as those of successor artists such as Ribera, Manfredi, Valentin, Régnier and Cecco del Caravaggio. More on this too before we are done.

fac e s , m a s k s , n o rt h e r n a rt With considerations such as these we put Caravaggio aside for the time being; more to the point, we acknowledge that Savoldo belonged to the rst half of the sixteenth century, when many of the oppositions that characterize the late sixteenth and early seventeenth – crucially between religion and science, or for that matter between magic and science – were not yet in place. Nor, during the decades of Savoldo’s activity in North Italy, had the religious crisis within the Catholic Church that already deeply troubled his environment developed to the point that we associate with the later period, with a militant Protestantism, itself far from unitary, centred in Germany and Switzerland, faced off against an equally militant Catholic Church, with the Jesuits at the point of the spear. A decisive event, the Council of Trent, began in 1545 and did not conclude until 1563.9 Another feature from the 1510s to the 1540s, as mentioned earlier, was the inuence on painting in and around Venice of Northern art, much (though by no means all) of it conveyed through prints, an inuence that in the case of Savoldo resulted in two works that form a distinct unit in his oeuvre, the St Anthony panels in San Diego and Moscow, though it remains an open question whether they belong to the same or different moments in time. I have suggested that this is also to be detected in the proliferation, as I see it, of grotesque or monstrous faces, semi-faces and masks in rocks and drapery folds and creases throughout his art. Key gures in this connection are Bosch, Dürer, Cranach, Schongauer and Patinir, both as regards specic imagery, the St Anthony panels being obvious cases in point, and as regards Savoldo’s treatment of drapery generally, which has no parallel elsewhere in Italian art. A striking afnity between Savoldo and Dürer is suggested by a comparison between the various faces I have claimed to discern in Savoldo’s paintings and the marvellous early Dürer pen-and-ink drawing Six Pillows (c. 1493; illus. 78), which as it happens is found on the verso of a Self-portrait at Age Twenty-two (c. 1493), one of a series of remarkable selfportrait drawings and paintings by the Northern master. (A predilection for self-representation is something else Savoldo and Dürer have in common.)

faces, masks, northern art

Both drawings are discussed by Joseph Koerner in his ambitious study The Moment of Self-portraiture in German Renaissance Art, where the verso is seen, reasonably enough, as depicting a single pillow that has been punched and twisted into six different congurations.10 To that extent it is a study in realistic description. But there is another aspect to the sheet. Koerner continues: For as commentators have long noted, the pillows themselves contain hidden faces in their folds and indentations. For example, the curious spiral on the left edge of the pillow at center left acts as a possible eye for faces discoverable in the lower left corner and, upside down, at the upper left. Similarly, faces appear at the far edge of the pillow just to the right; the curved horizontal fold just below center reads both as the mouth of one face whose nose is the pillow’s upper corner, and as the nose and eye of a smaller face in the lower corner. Once set in motion, this game of

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78 Albrecht Dürer, Six Pillows, c. 1493, pen and brown ink.

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‘seeing as’ can be played indenitely, transforming corners into noses, chins, or satyrs’ horns, and creases into mouths and brows, until each pillow is animated by a number of hypothetical masks frowning, laughing, fretting, and speaking. None of these faces, it is true, can be posited with certainty as really being there, nor do they remain stable for us. We lose one possible physiognomy once we discover another that overlaps with it. Yet even the skeptic will admit that the pillows, arranged in pairs and gesturing dynamically, have been rendered animate, if not anthropomorphic, by the artist’s pen. These drawings exercise the visual fantasy not only of the artist inventing these grotesque physiognomies, but also of the viewer discovering faces that others might miss (pp. 27–8). A strange statement in some ways, as if Koerner wants both to endorse the presence of the faces and at the same time not disown them exactly, but rather emphasize the role of the viewer in construing the pillows in those terms, which is fair enough so long as the two formulations are balanced against one another. (So long as ‘once set in motion’ is understood as meaning ‘once having started responding to the drawing’s cues and solicitations’ rather than ‘once the viewer starts playing the game of “seeing as” ’, as if doing so were an entirely subjective choice on the viewer’s part. I take Koerner and myself to be in agreement on this point.) To shift the discussion to Savoldo, it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the grotesque faces and masks that I have pointed out, sometimes hesitantly or tentatively, fall short of declaring themselves unmistakably, unequivocally, which doubtless is largely why until now they have been overlooked. But it is equally if not more important to register the fact that the treatment of folds and such in clothes and drapery in Savoldo’s paintings repeatedly holds out the possibility that something very far out of the ordinary with respect to animistic physiognomic imagery is in play, and that if we fail to take that aboard we are ignoring one of the most intriguing and perplexing features of his art. Simply put, nothing remotely similar can be found in the production of any other Italian painter, though in the work of various artists – Giotto, Andrea Mantegna, Piero di Cosimo, Lorenzo Lotto, Bernardo Zenale and, I would add, Giovanni Bellini – isolated instances of faces or bodies in clouds, trees or rocks can be made out.11 While anthropomorphic imagery is notoriously present in the work of more than a few Northerners, including Dürer, Bosch and Herri met de Bles, the forms it takes differ fundamentally from what I have claimed to nd throughout Savoldo’s oeuvre.12

faces, masks, northern art

Of course, not all the faces and masks I have pointed to are equally striking. To consider several examples, in the rst place there are the heads and faces in the rocks in the left foreground of the Elijah. I take them to be incontrovertible and in that sense to provide a kind of evidentiary ‘anchor’ to the rest of my proposals. But what of the possible raven’s head in the drapery folds immediately above Elijah’s right foot? At rst glance that may seem unlikely, but is it not also consistent with the general play of auto‘mimetic’ relationships in this and other paintings, for example between the raven on its branch and Elijah’s head supported by his arm and hand? Or, in the same canvas, looking patiently, may one not make out a frontal face of sorts in the large rocky form alongside Elijah’s left shoulder, one nowhere near as striking as the faces at the bottom left but not simply to be ruled out on that account? Then there is the large monstrous face with an open cave mouth in the central rocky mass in the San Diego Temptation of St Anthony, another plainly intentional ‘anchor’ as well as the clearest possible indication of a connection with Northern art, Bosch in particular. (I also see the other heads and faces in the central rocky mass as incontrovertible, but am willing to grant that others might not. Or not at rst; in the end, they can scarcely be doubted.) In a somewhat different register, in the Penitent St Jerome what is the status of the possible face or mask (two faces or masks, actually) near the bottom of the painting in the vicinity of the saint’s covered right knee, again in the context of other ‘mimetic’ relationships elsewhere in the canvas? Or in St Matthew and the Angel, the face or mask with attened nose in the folds of the left sleeve or the gargoyle-like face with wide-open mouth in the glowing red right cuff of the writing evangelist? Or in the late Adoration of the Shepherds in Brescia, of the grimacing face or mask in the indentations of Joseph’s right sleeve? Or in the London, Berlin and Getty Magdalenes of the various faces in the radiant shawls among the latter’s deep folds and gleaming highlights (see illus. 55)? Or in the Death of St Peter Martyr, of the grimacing face-like folds in the upper sleeve of the impassive murderer preparing his backhanded death-blow (a stretch, I admit, but in the light of more perspicuous faces elsewhere in Savoldo’s oeuvre, perhaps not out of the question; see illus. 73)?13 Or to look again at a painting we have not yet considered in this regard, what of the dark folds towards the bottom of the shepherd’s blue tunic in the Getty Shepherd with a Flute (see illus. 36), which suggest an exaggeratedly long downward-turning mouth, a squashed nose and a deep eye socket, all directly below the shepherd’s right elbow? (It was the Shepherd with a Flute that Longhi saw as anticipating Caravaggio’s

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handling of drapery.) Finally, turning to a work that has so far gone unmentioned, what of the possible face- or mask-like intimations of the yellow and red drapery in the region of the disciples’ feet in the Transfiguration in the Ufzi (1530s; illus. 79), the yellow folds suggesting a masked visage with deep eye sockets, the red ones hinting at a small animal’s head with a short snout and large ears (illus. 80)? Ultimately, I am tempted to let my entire argument rest on a single crux, the large grinning beak-nosed face or mask in the Berlin Magdalene (see illus. 55), which I earlier compared both with the bird-like skull in the Moscow Temptation of St Anthony and with the Bosch-like creature (an unlikely dragon?) in Giulio Campagnola’s engraving The Astrologer. To be as plain as possible: I think the grinning face or mask is there, despite the fact that until now it has gone unrecognized. A further, crucial question is whether or not Savoldo was aware of its presence, and if he was, whether he can be imagined as having put it there deliberately. On the one hand, the latter possibility seems to go too far. On the other hand, assuming the head came about partly or wholly automatistically, in the course of developing the ostensibly merely decorative and enlivening bulges and creases in the radiant fabric of the shawl, is it plausible to imagine that the painter remained oblivious to what he had done, in spite of the singular strength of the hideous image once it is given its due, and bearing in mind the facial

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80 Savoldo, Transfiguration (illus.79), detail.

79 (facing page) Savoldo, Transfiguration, 1530s, oil on panel.

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and mask-like ‘anchors’ that I have cited in other of his works? I mean this as other than a rhetorical question. In this connection, some remarks by Savoldo’s former student, Paolo Pino, in his 1548 Dialogo di pittura, make intriguing reading. At a crucial juncture Pino has one of his dialogists, Fabio, expatiate on the sweetness of the art of painting: This is evident, for nature imitates herself, and by nature do all articers have the things she makes [a Leonardesque claim, needless to say]. Nature demonstrates this often by painting on her own, in marble and tree trunks, a diversity of gurable forms, and elsewhere in smoke and cloud is she similarly engaged; and nature does this with that same delight one experiences in seeing one’s efgy in the mirror. (D, p. 330) Earlier Pino states that ‘Our art creates the same effect as the mirror, which receives within itself whatever form (minus the movement) is present before it’ (D, p. 305).14 Elsewhere in Pino’s Dialogo, as discussed in Chapter Two, is his inuential account of Giorgione’s legendary invention of a gure of St George multiply reected so as to provide a fully in-the-round depiction of a single gure on the at surface of a painting, thereby equalling sculpture’s ability to render three-dimensional form (D, pp. 367–8), an account obviously related to Savoldo’s Portrait of a Man in Armour (see illus. 20), a self-portrait of the painter in the act of painting, as I have said. Returning to Pino’s remarks about nature taking pleasure in painting herself, it is striking that he understands this as a practice of self-portraiture (also self-relishing) on nature’s part via the metaphor of the mirror, which raises the question as to whether Pino had Savoldo in mind when he wrote these sentences. The answer would seem to be yes, and at any rate he soon singles out ‘Messer Gerolamo of Brescia [who] was most learned in [the painting of vistas]. I once saw by his hand certain sunrises with solar reections, certain nocturnes with a thousand most ingenious and rare particularities, all of which seemed truer images of actuality than the Flemish ones’ (D, p. 372). To this he adds: ‘This specialty is very natural to the painter and a source of pleasure to himself and to others; and that method used by the Germans, of copying landscapes [paesi] in a mirror, is very much to the point [here]’ (D, p. 373). Not that it is entirely clear what Pino is getting at. As Mary Pardo, Pino’s translator, writes in her invaluable commentary on the Dialogo:

faces, masks, northern art

Whatever its source, Fabio’s advice to follow the ‘German’ manner of depicting landscapes in a mirror – it is hard to tell whether he means using the mirror as a pictorial aid, or making Eyckian mirrored vistas – recalls his earlier words on nature ‘depicting’ herself in clouds and rocks with the same delight with which we behold ourselves in a mirror; Fabio insists that the skill in the making of landscapes is most ‘natural’ to the painter, and as much a source of personal delight as it is to the ‘mother’ whose works he imitates. In fact, the passage reads like a deliberate partial commentary on the earlier Natura pictrix statement. It would seem that ‘paesi ’ here has the double sense of ‘nature’s image’ and ‘nature’s inventione ’, in to which both nature and the painter ‘project’ themselves. (P, p. 277) One more reference to Savoldo is worth noting. The topic is the difculty of depicting three-dimensional form on a at surface and the failure of persons not versed in painting to grasp the complexities of foreshortening and the like. Thus Fabio: we cannot make every gure distinctly visible in its entirety, and this occurs because of the promptness of its gestures, as [is apparent] in foreshortened forms, where certain parts evade the sight; we [painters] comprehend these with difculty, and they cannot be understood by anybody without [a knowledge of] art. And so it will happen that an excellent painter will make a gure resembling the living model, in a pose of such difculty, and that it will be not only not understood, but censured by whomever does not know the scope of our art. And so the man will divest himself of honor with the very toils which he invests in its acquisition. To which the other dialogist, Lauro, responds: You speak the truth. Be there a master as learned as it is possible to be about the art, his works will still keep him shackled between the hope of praise and the fear of censure; and sometimes the ignorant are lled with such a bad impression that if a gure by the painter, or a single hand displeases them, they take such a dislike to him that they never again nd pleasure in his works. See how Messer Gerolamo of Brescia, Paolo Pino’s master and a man most rare in our art, excellent in the imitation of all things, spent his life on few works and with scarce renown. However, it is true that at one time he was salaried by the late Duke of Milan. (D, p. 304)

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‘A pose of such difculty’ (perhaps that of the man in armour in the painting in the Louvre) and ‘a single hand displeases them’: it is impossible not to think not only of the Louvre canvas but also of the other self-portraits, with their prominent hands as if vigorously gripping or wielding imaginary implements. This gives added force to Pino’s metaphorics of mirroring, which his remarks allow us to extend beyond the self-portraits proper to Savoldo’s oeuvre generally, for example to the electrifying painting discussed in Chapter One, the Death of St Peter Martyr, and in particular to the nature of its solicitations towards empathic projection as conveyed by the saint’s left and right hands, which I suggested are chiey to be seen as mirroring the viewer’s (originally the painter’s) right and left hands as he or she stands before the canvas (having approached it closely, as already said). To repeat a question posed earlier: where could a painting such as the St Peter Martyr have been hung in Savoldo’s time so that the proximity-effects just mentioned could come into play? It is as if a painting like that nds its ideal place in a modern museum. As we saw in Chapter Two, a similar mirror-reversal effect with respect to the sitter’s hands is to be found in the Self-portrait as St Jerome and the Portrait of a Man in Armour. The Prophet or Apostle is more ambiguous, at once evoking a ‘normalized’ self-portrait in which the brush would be held in the sitter’s right hand and keeping open the possibility of a mirror-reversed relationship by virtue of which the sitter’s right hand stimulates empathic projection on the part of the viewer’s left hand. All of which leads to the further suggestion that Pino’s mirror metaphor, far from being merely a literary ourish, captures something fundamental about Savoldo’s art: that his paintings often evoke the thought that they are, to an uncanny degree, mirrors (perhaps I should say ‘magic’ mirrors), in which both world and artist paint themselves, mirror-reversal with respect to hands being one indication of that state of affairs. Another such indication, of course, are the gleaming, light-struck surfaces of the intensely coloured drapery in many of his works, culminating in the Magdalene’s highly reective, dazzlingly radiant shawls in the London, Berlin and Los Angeles canvases. In her important essay on the Magdalenes, Pardo describes them as ‘constituting the image as a virtual mirror’, which seems perfectly apt.15 As regards the faces and masks, Pino’s appeal to the idea of nature’s selfdepiction by no means settles the questions I have raised, but the cited passages present Savoldo’s art in a context of ideas, concerns and metaphors

‘magic’, ‘influence’, demons

that goes at least some of the way towards accounting for the production of imagery whose intentional structure remains suggestively in question. We are about to take a step farther, raising the stakes of the discussion as we go.

‘magic’, ‘influence’, demons We touch here on another crux that belongs to the sixteenth century, or more precisely to the late fteenth century and the sixteenth, with roots going back much earlier. Simply put, Savoldo lived at a time and in a culture when and where belief in astrological thinking was rife, and various notions of magical ‘inuence’ and, especially pertinent in the present context, both good and bad demons were seriously entertained by a diverse array of unorthodox gures, both Italian and foreign, with Marsilio Ficino, Cornelius Agrippa, Trithemius of Würzburg, Girolamo Cardano, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno prominent among them. (At this point I am discarding the quotation marks around ‘magic’ and ‘magical’.) As D. P. Walker and others have emphasized, one major source or Ur-source of magical ideas was the Catholic Mass, with its music, words of consecration, incense, lights, wine and supreme magical effect – transubstantiation. This, I would suggest, is a fundamental inuence on all mediaeval and Renaissance magic, and a fundamental reason for the Church’s condemnation of all magical practices. The Church has her own [Eucharistic] magic; there is no room for any other. The effort to make a sharp distinction between Christian rites and any kind of secular magic is . . . apparent in many 16th-century discussions of such subjects.16 In particular, according to Ioan P. Couliano, any form of magic invoking demons was held to be suspect and was persecuted. This is why Marsilio Ficino, who had to endure the attacks of the Church for his treatise De via coelitus comparanda [On Obtaining Life from the Heavens] – which the pope nally judged to be inoffensive – did not know what precautions to take to demonstrate that the ‘natural’ magic he practiced was not demonic. Probably he was right only in the sense that the magician was able to restrict his own processes, but that did not prevent demonomagic, in certain if not all cases, from being a form of spiritual magic.17

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For another key gure, Agrippa, even more open to the thought of demons than Ficino, the universe was ‘permeat[ed] by spiritual beings, both good and evil. Not only the heavens, stars, and elements but also the whole world itself have rational souls. Man can by careful preparation and correct ritual summon these spirits and souls and induce them to do his bidding.’18 The personage who could contrive this was the Magus. It is not my aim to associate Savoldo with one or another school of magical thinking in Italian culture of the late fteenth century and the sixteenth; nor are these pages the place for a consideration of the role of demons in the contemporaneous European imaginaire, a vast and fascinating topic.19 But it does seem plausible to think of the often snarling or glowering or otherwise distorted faces and masks in Savoldo’s drapery as essentially demonic, and to associate their occurrence with the idea of ‘inuence’, understood in the rst place as based on Savoldo’s familiarity with Northern paintings and prints. (The modern art-historical notion of inuence, such as I have been appealing to until now, would be a ‘scientic’ reduction of the earlier, richer conception.20) Furthermore, as emerged in Chapter Four, I nd an intimation of magical proceedings in a number of Savoldo’s paintings. This is most obvious, in the Tobias and the Angel, in the ‘magnetic’ gesture of the angel Raphael (also, by implication, in the Tobias narrative, which includes the idea of burning the sh’s liver and heart to drive away a demon!); in the Hampton Court and Turin Adorations, in the ‘conjuring’ actions of the male donor in the rst and St Jerome in the second; in the Turin and Washington Adorations of the Shepherds, in the far from ordinary hovering hand gestures of the Magus-like bearded men; and in the Portrait of a Woman as St Margaret, in the implied ‘dragon’-suppressing action of the lady’s right glove, perhaps the most outlandish of all the magical operations in Savoldo’s art. Is there not also a sense in which the intense close-range concentration on the Christ Child of the main bearded gure in the Washington Adoration seems akin to what one imagines would have been that of a person indulging in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century practice of scrying, that is, gazing intently into an instrument like a crystal ball? In a different, manifestly ‘Eucharistic’ register, there is also the incandescent presence of the Christ Child in the Adorations, a powerful, or should one say all-powerful, source of ‘inuence’ in its own right – which, however, is not to deny the witch-like aura of the unconventional angels of the Annunciation in at least the Washington and Brescia paintings.

‘magic’, ‘influence’, demons

In my discussion of the St Margaret I imply that the magical power I associate with her glove is perhaps somewhat unorthodox, but of course there is no reason not to regard it as belonging to an essentially Catholic imaginative universe, as would have been the professed belief of Ficino, Agrippa and the others, whatever the various ambiguities of their writings. Similarly, as already noted, the actions of the hands as well as the facial expressions of the male gures in the Hampton Court and Turin Adorations, albeit iconographically unusual (uncovering the Christ Child to the puzzlement of art historians) and charged with a special intensity (keyed to the male gures’ seemingly pointed gazes directly at the viewer), are perfectly intelligible in Catholic terms, especially if we understand them, as doubtless we should, as channelling the Christ Child’s divine presence. The same holds for what I have just characterized, no doubt tendentiously, as the ‘witch-like’ angels of the Annunciation in their nocturnal heaven-rending bursts of light in the Washington and Brescia Adorations, another Savoldesque motif with no equivalent in the art of his Italian contemporaries. As for the grotesque or monstrous faces and masks, our particular concern in these pages, my suggestion is that these may be understood as evoking what might (almost? not quite?) oxymoronically be described as a Catholic world of demonic forces, such as was typically depicted in scenes of the Temptation of St Anthony (Bosch’s great triptych in Lisbon being the ne plus ultra of this), which is to say that, to take a particularly striking example, the presence of a frightening visage in the drapery of the Berlin Magdalene (an apparition that I have compared with the creature depicted in Campagnola’s The Astrologer) is plausibly to be viewed as offering special insight into the demon-ridden nature even of scenes of purest sainthood. The Magdalenes as a group all but spell this out, as do the expressively urgent Penitent St Jerome and the lyrically intense St Matthew and the Angel. But would the Italian Church in Savoldo’s time possibly have been accepting of such a vision? It seems extremely unlikely: the uncompromising, lifethreatening hostility of the religious authorities to any hint of demonism in art or thought, which would without question have included the physiognomies I have claimed to nd in Savoldo’s work, is the strongest evidence imaginable that they went unremarked at the time, most likely by the artist himself. To cite Stuart Clark in Thinking with Demons, ‘an unbridgeable gulf between [what they saw as] religion and magic came to dominate the

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sensibilities of churchmen and their evangelical efforts.’21 With regard to real-world consequences, in the Val Camonica in the Venice-ruled diocese of Brescia around sixty women and twenty men in the years just before 1520 were burned as witches or ‘perdious and malecent persons’.22 Indeed Savoldo in the course of his career appears to have been in signicant contact with the Dominican Order, which, as was earlier remarked apropos of his Death of St Peter Martyr, was at the forefront of efforts to stamp out heresy wherever it was suspected to have arisen.23 Savoldo’s St Anthony panels would have been acceptable, of course, licensed by the particular subject of a saint famously understood to have been tormented by demons and by its Northern origins. Apropos the latter, Paul Vandenbroeck, a leading Bosch scholar, remarks about Bosch: ‘For the same spirit permeates his entire oeuvre: the cosmos teems with demons, unbridled sexuality ows through nature’s very veins, humanity is composed of fools and sinners, and the saints – even Christ himself – are constantly beleaguered and tormented.’24 Needless to say, so extreme a formulation cannot be applied broadly to Savoldo’s art. Nevertheless, the notion of a Catholic universe not just teeming with but interpenetrated by demonic agents, and therefore subject to the operations both of the ‘good’ magic of the Mass and of demonic magic (unequivocally ‘bad’), perhaps bears more closely on the works we have been considering than is comfortable to think. Put slightly differently, in certain paintings by Savoldo the Eucharistic and the demonic – the sacred and the monstrous – inhabit the same representational eld: as if the painter himself were the locus, a nodal point, of their interpenetration, imaginatively speaking. One further face or mask, notice of which I have been holding back, bears on this issue as well as on the question of Savoldo’s awareness of what he was doing. In SS Paul and Anthony (illus. 44), discussed in detail in Chapter Three, there is, to my mind unmistakably, in the brownish folds of Anthony’s cloak in the lower left-hand corner of the canvas a rather large, grotesque face or mask more or less aligned with the saint’s body (that is, facing right, in our terms), with two deeply shadowed, outwardly slanting eyes, a rudimentary nose and a large, partly open mouth, the entire ensemble conveying a sense of hard-to-read emotion, perhaps melancholy (illus. 81). What makes this face or mask particularly signicant is that it is located exactly where in the immediately previous Elijah there appears the cluster of undeniable heads and faces to which I called attention at the start of Chapter Three. This raises the possibility if not the likelihood that Savoldo in the SS Paul and Anthony was indeed conscious of what he was doing. If that is the case,

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it perhaps works against the thought that he was oblivious to the greater part of the masks and faces in drapery that I have claimed to detect. (And what, it might be asked, of the two faces or masks towards the bottom of the saint’s robe in the Penitent St Jerome, that is, in a similar position relative to the gure?) And yet it seems to go much too far to imagine Savoldo throughout his career knowingly suggesting one face here, another there, except in the Elijah, SS Paul and Anthony and Temptation of St Anthony pictures – and perhaps in the Penitent St Jerome. Rather, I think of the appearance – the embedding, surfacing, condensing, materializing – of such faces and masks in the folds, creases, bulges and pockets of drapery in the other works considered in these pages as much more likely the outcome of a technique-based improvisatory procedure, according to which Savoldo’s markedly original, largely automatistic treatment of the typically radiant, colouristically ‘surcharged’ (Freedberg’s epithet) fabric of his personages’ clothing turns out to give visible expression to demonic presences and ‘inuences’ that otherwise would remain mostly undetectable. As for whether or not Savoldo, except in the obvious cases mentioned above, became aware of what in effect he was doing or had done, I trust it is clear how uncondent I am as to where in the end to come down. Just conceivably, in the spirit of Bosch, he understood the demons and monsters as belabouring saints and others but in the end overcome by them (and as meant to be seen in those terms if they were noticed as such by contemporary viewers). But is it at all likely that an Italian painter of Catholic subjects, much less one linked with the Dominicans, in the far from serene religious climate of sixteenth-century Venice and Brescia, would have dared deliberately to place one or more blatantly demonic faces in immediate juxtaposition to the Magdalene’s

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81 Savoldo, SS Paul and Anthony (illus. 44), detail.

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own? Or to depict St Matthew’s writing hand emerging from the mouth of a demon? Or to position another grimacing face on the kneeling Joseph’s sleeve, in close proximity to the Virgin and the Christ Child (see illus. 67)? Regardless of the fact that these and other faces and masks have gone unrecognized until now.25 A nal turn of the screw would be to emphasize the instrumental role in such a procedure of the activity of Savoldo’s hands, which in this regard are to be imagined working as if on their own, disengaged from other than the most improvisational cast of mind – which is to say as if responding to a play of ‘inuence’ that could be made manifest, given palpable form, only in this way.

w h o , t h e n , wa s s av o l d o ? By now it need hardly be stated that this is not an easy question to answer, even if one puts to one side, as for the moment I mainly shall, the matter of faces, demons and magic. As Gilbert succinctly remarks, ‘Few Italian painters of his time, of any interest at all, are so slightly known as persons’ (G, p. 49), and ‘He was one of the last artists to be raised to the rank of the major High Renaissance masters.’26 As was noted in the Introduction, we have only a handful of dates with the aid of which to construct a chronology, with the result that a great deal of uncertainty prevails when it comes to establishing an artistic trajectory. What we think we know is this: Savoldo was very likely born in Brescia, probably around 1480; his training, Gilbert proposes, was in the style of Alvise Vivarini and Cima da Conegliano; he seems to have been in Parma in 1506 and Florence in 1508, which perhaps indicates a wide experience of early sixteenth-century central Italian painting; by 1521 he was living in Venice, and it is possible that he settled there years before that. At some point he established a studio, which we know of only thanks to a reference in his former student Paolo Pino’s 1548 Dialogo di pittura. Beyond that, the studio is a blank. Also according to Pino, who clearly admired him, Savoldo’s oeuvre was small and he enjoyed only modest success except, it seems, for a period in the employ of Francesco Maria Sforza, the last Duke of Milan. This was likely during the years 1531–5, and resulted in four paintings in the Milan mint, described by Vasari as night scenes and admired by him; among those, it is widely agreed, were two of Savoldo’s supreme achievements, St Matthew and the Angel and Tobias and the Angel (not a night scene but the same dimensions

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as the Matthew). Savoldo appears still to have been alive when Pino wrote his Dialogo, but by then he may well have ceased painting. The date of his death is unknown. And in fact his oeuvre is unusual, to say the least. Not only is it small, it is also strangely unbalanced, containing only a half-dozen altarpieces, fewer, Gilbert says, than by any other signicant Italian painter of the time (G, p. 137). Moreover, the altarpieces themselves tend to be rather bare bones in comparison with the magnicent productions in that genre by the likes of Giovanni Bellini, Titian, Lotto, Veronese and Tintoretto or, in Brescia, by the prodigious, younger Moretto. Savoldo’s corpus also includes relatively few portraits, and the ones that survive, with the exception of the Portrait of a Young Man (St John the Baptist?) and the Portrait of a Young Man with Flute, are by no means among his most distinguished productions; even in those technically superb canvases the sitters’ inner lives, what Berenson would have called their psychology, are left untouched, unexplored. Finally, as already mentioned, there is a disproportionately large number of selfportraits. All in all, a highly idiosyncratic body of work. Like so many sixteenth-century masters, Savoldo was rediscovered in the second half of the nineteenth century, but his modern recuperation owes much to Roberto Longhi, on the strength of a few paragraphs in early essays. (The enthusiasm of Adolfo and Lionello Venturi also contributed to this.) In particular Longhi advanced the notion of a distinct Brescian school or tradition going back to Vincenzo Foppa, along with that of a Lombard tradition of naturalism and concern with effects of light. (Gilbert demurs, emphasizing Venetian painting, including that of Titian, and during Savoldo’s time in Milan, assuming he worked there in the rst half of the 1530s, the palpable inuence of Leonardo on both the St Matthew and the Tobias. Giorgione is also frequently mentioned, though Gilbert doubts his relevance.) Another feature of Longhi’s appreciation of Savoldo was the important claim that he was a major predecessor of Caravaggio, an idea that has proven greatly inuential in the subsequent literature. Perhaps most important, as we have seen, Longhi brilliantly pioneered the recognition of the originality of Savoldo’s treatment of hands, one of the most distinctive features of his art and a major preoccupation of this book. My own impulse, intermittently expressed in these pages, has been to see Savoldo alongside and in more or less continual juxtaposition to Lotto, another Northern Italian born around 1480 whose art has rightly been viewed as marked by a certain quattrocento archaism, who remained open

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to the inuence of Northern art, and whose career also seems to have been partly shaped by a desire to avoid direct competition with Titian, hence his projects in and travels to provincial towns. To that extent, both Lotto and Savoldo stand apart from the central line of pictorial development in Venice; Gilbert refers in passing to their stylistic ‘cousinship’ (G, p. 308). But at that point the differences between them become salient: for one thing, we know vastly more about Lotto, his commissions, his travels, his stays in various towns in North Italy and the Marches (most importantly, perhaps, in Bergamo in 1513–25), even, modern scholarship has shown, his religious commitments, which suggest an openness to reform movements within Catholicism.27 For another, Lotto was a vastly more productive artist, with more than 250 surviving works in his oeuvre. And the difference is not only quantitative: there is no equivalent in Savoldo’s corpus to Lotto’s 38 magnicent altarpieces, the best of them works of nonpareil beauty and imaginative richness, such as the Martinengo, Santo Spirito and San Bernardino altarpieces in Bergamo or the stupendous Crucifixion in Santa Maria della Pietà in Telusiano, Monte San Giusto. Or, more broadly, for the cornucopia of Lotto’s pictorial gifts, his marvellous colourism, his compositional inventiveness, his particular brand of lyricism (amounting at times to a ‘mysticism of the affections’, in Longhi’s formulation28), and his stylistic range, from works of exquisite renement to the ‘popular’ imagery of the St Lucy altarpiece (Iesi, Pinacoteca Civica) and the frescoes in the Suardi oratory at Trescore Balneario. Finally, nothing in Savoldo remotely approaches the authority of Lotto’s portraits, as compelling as those of any other sixteenth-century painter. In short Lotto, for all his idiosyncratic tendencies, emerges as a larger gure in every way, fully worthy of Berenson’s attention in his path-breaking monograph of 1895.29 And yet . . . And yet, nothing in all this takes away from a sense of Savoldo’s remarkable distinction – of his particular genius, I am inclined to say. By this I mean, to begin with, that Savoldo’s handful of truly great paintings – the Tobias, the St Matthew, the St Jerome, the Magdalenes, the Portrait of a Man in Armour, the Prophet or Apostle, the Adoration of the Shepherds with full-length gures in Turin, the Portrait of a Young Man with Flute, the Shepherd with a Flute and, in my view, the St Peter Martyr – are utterly unique in their age. In each Savoldo radically reconceived traditional subject matter; from each radiates a sense of imaginative, technical and rhetorical (I would also say ‘ontological’) singularity with no parallel in the art of his contemporaries. This

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is apart from the question of hitherto unremarked faces, masks, monsters, demons; but perhaps it was his singularity that made him, uniquely among Italian painters of his age, open to the suggestion of demonic ‘inuence’ that I have found myself tracking in this book. And although his generic portraits are undistinguished, his mastery of facial expression in paintings like the Death of St Peter Martyr and St Matthew and the Angel is beyond compare; the half-dozen charcoal drawings of individuals are also magnicent. The mystery, we might say, is why there are so few paintings such as those I have just cited, even assuming that a number of works have been lost, including the two other canvases that Vasari reports having seen in the Milan mint. And indeed Savoldo’s singularity has been registered by his admirers. Vasari, as noted earlier, calls him ‘fanciful and artful’. For Longhi in 1917, Savoldo was the most civilizzato and cittadino – the least provincial – of all the Brescians.30 Gilbert sees in his half-hidden signatures a sign that he was reluctant to assert himself and that his obscurity in his lifetime may have owed as much to this psychological trait as to a lack of appreciation (G, p. 49). (Glossing Pino, he also refers to ‘the hierarchical lordliness of gure and hand that was apart from Venetian taste’ [G, p. 394].) Alessandro Ballarin nds his intellect sensitive to Northern art, to every extreme of ‘escape into the realm of dreamlike imagination’ (‘evasione nel regno della fantasia onirica’), which, in the context of the present book, is a suggestive remark, to say the least.31 Gaetano Panazza, who notes the smallness of his oeuvre, writes that by the end Savoldo was solitary, apart, bitter, in the grip of deep sadness – an interesting view, but based on what, exactly? Savoldo’s work, he goes on to say, reveals a severity of temperament, a felt religiosity (like Moretto’s), but also great renement and control; one can only agree.32 Gilbert again, as was remarked earlier, discerns in Savoldo’s gures a capacity for profound emotion; they invite us to participate in their lives via an interior afnity like the characters of a great novelist. That is not an analogy that would have occurred to me; one has the sense that Gilbert’s deep admiration for Savoldo continually escapes adequate characterization. I say this without wishing to detract from a recognition of Gilbert’s fundamental contribution to Savoldo studies.33 By all odds the most stimulating attempt to capture Savoldo’s specialness is by Mary Pardo, who in her indispensable and wide-ranging essay on the Magdalenes emphasizes the importance of pictorial artice and the aesthetic dimension in his art. In her account, the Magdalene (she focuses on the London version) ‘engages our self-conscious awareness of pictorial

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artice’, noting that ‘by 1500 chiaroscuro, contraposition and foreshortening . . . functioned as demonstration subjects in their own right’. She continues: ‘If I am correct about the importance of the aesthetic to the devotional experience of Savoldo’s painting, then it is possible to say that the Magdalene afrms its own critical dimension – which is that of artistic problem-solving – even as it opens the way for higher contemplative activity’ (p. 84; the latter presumably centred on its Christian content, a surprising ordering of its priorities). In this connection she cites Pino, who lamented that while Savoldo was ‘raro nell’arte’, he never achieved popularity and ‘spent his life on few works’. ‘Even so gorgeous a painting as the Magdalene ’, she suggests, ‘seems to propose a restricted audience of fellow-painters and sophisticated patrons willing to savor its mirror play of sense and surface’ (p. 90).34 Pardo goes on: It seems likely that, in calling Savoldo capriccioso e sofistico, Vasari was targeting the Brescian master’s ironic reserve, his pleasure in putting grand artistry into modestly scaled, isolated images. The Magdalene is especially suited to the display of artice: since it does not pretend to ‘contain’ truth, only to reect it [that is, to reect the light of Christ standing before it], its ostensible content is wholly exterior to it. Yet the resultant ‘emptiness’ is also a kind of limitless potentiality (since it holds the viewer in thrall), and guarantees the painter’s essential autonomy in spinning out his ction. The gleaming shawl ‘re-represents’ the pigmented and brush-imprinted canvas surface in terms of illusion, and thus invites us to contemplate on its own terms that other content, the artistic process itself. It is an extraordinary sleight-of-hand (pp. 90–91). This is dazzling, as bets its topic, but my sense is that it perhaps portrays Savoldo as somewhat more modern, not to say proto-modernist, than he really was (who is Pardo’s ‘us’?). In her account, at any rate in the London Magdalene, he emerges as a ‘pure’ painter, working for a small, cultivated audience of cognoscenti, setting for himself and then brilliantly solving pictorial problems that, however fascinating and ingenious, were inevitably of limited appeal. Also, her account implies, such problems were ahead of their time, the entire issue of ‘guarantee[ing] the painter’s autonomy as he spins out his ction’ seeming not quite to match either his situation or his project.35 (As this makes clear, the faces and masks escaped her notice.) But her appreciation of Savoldo’s profound originality, astounding sophistication and sheer intellectual renement feels exactly right.

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s av o l d o a n d c a r ava g g i o : t h e i n e s c a pa b l e r e l at i o n With the following reections I aim to draw this book to a close. In the Introduction I used the term ‘independent’ paintings to refer to the bulk of Savoldo’s work, remarking that I considered this a place-marker for a further discussion of the character of his art. I also said that I used the term by way of avoiding the designation ‘devotional’ paintings, which during the past decades has become more or less standard for late fteenth- and early sixteenth-century Italian, especially Venetian, works that are not altarpieces, portraits or narratives. The Venetian master of such ‘devotional’ painting is of course Giovanni Bellini, in his (and his workshop’s) many images of the Virgin and Child, sometimes alone, sometimes anked by two or more saints.36 Typically such paintings are modest in scale, smaller than the Savoldos we have considered, as bets the fact that they were intended as aids to private devotion, both by presenting the viewer with an image to be contemplated in a devout frame of mind and also, when two or more saints are present, by offering in the persons of those gures images, or say models, of appropriate religious response. A particularly affecting example of such a painting is Bellini’s Madonna and Child with SS Catherine of Alexandria and Mary Magdalene (c. 1490; illus. 82), the gures depicted half-length against a dark background. The Christ Child, naked, is seated on a small pillow, apparently on Mary’s lap; her right hand delicately embraces his body and her left hand gives support to his left hand in a marvellously subtle gesture of mutual touching. Her expression with its averted gaze, which drifts off to

82 Giovanni Bellini, The Madonna and Child with SS Catherine of Alexandria and Mary Magdalene, c. 1490, oil on panel.

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83 Giovanni Bellini, St Jerome in the Desert, 1480, oil on panel.

her right, suggests pensiveness (a traditional notion: Mary has foreknowledge of what is to come); the Child looks up, towards what we cannot tell; St Catherine of Alexandria, a frequent participant in such scenes, gazes somewhat sadly down at the child with her hands lightly clasped in prayer; while Mary Magdalene, with loosened hair, her facial expression not happy but otherwise unreadable, has her hands crossed on her breast. It is as though the entire composition in its utter repose and relative inexpressiveness, though the general tonality is quietly sad, has been devised to leave room for, in that sense to elicit, the viewer’s inward act of devotion, which I imagine as comparably stilled, reective, grave. Or, to take another ‘devotional’ subject popular in Venice at the time, Bellini’s depictions of St Jerome in the wilderness conveyed to urban collectors a vision of ‘an alternative, solitary life to be lived in nature’ (Hans Belting), as in the work Belting calls the painter’s

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masterpiece in this vein, the St Jerome in the Ufzi (1480; illus. 83). These too are outwardly inexpressive scenes of quiet reection.37 Other Venetian painters found in the subject a devotional theme par excellence, Lotto’s St Jeromes in Paris and Rome (1506 and 1508) being two much-admired variations on the Bellinesque ideal. My aim in adducing such works at this juncture is to drive home the point that nothing of the sort can be found in Savoldo, who, simply put, is not in the least a ‘devotional’ painter. It is no accident, for example, that his Penitent St Jerome is not a small-scale, distanced image inviting quiet contemplation but rather an altogether original close-range depiction of intense concentration and violent physical self-punishing (on a literal level; what else might be involved in the actions of Jerome’s two hands is a topic broached in Chapter Two). The St Jerome is also considerably larger than the ‘devotional’ norm, and its relation to the viewer, as I suggest in Chapter Two, is a matter not simply of inducing subjective feeling but rather of inviting what I have been calling empathic projection, that is, a quasi-active, quasi-bodily sense of identication with the saint’s actions and gestures, including, crucially, the focalized clutching gesture of his left arm and hand. Nor for that matter are the Tobias and the Angel, St Matthew and the Angel and the Death of St Peter Martyr plausibly to be understood as ‘devotional’ in intent; in contrast (but not really) the Hampton Court and Turin Adorations at rst might appear to t the ‘devotional’ mould, but very quickly the ‘conjuring’ (or ‘disclosing’) actions of the male donor in the rst and St Jerome in the second, along with their penetrating gazes directly at the viewer, shift both works into another, far more challenging register.38 A similar dynamic marks the Washington Adoration of the Shepherds, in which the unconventional hand gesture and Magus-like expression of the bearded man refuse to allow the viewer an unconsidered response. One other cluster of works that seem ‘devotional’ on rst view, not mentioned until now, comprises several canvases of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the most impressive of which may well be the version in a private collection in Milan with a highly detailed and topographically accurate vista of the Riva degli Schiavoni in Venice in the right-hand portion of the canvas (1525–7; illus. 84). However, the composition with its multiple centres of interest – the seated Virgin and Child, Joseph in the middle distance seeing to their donkey, the small group of a red-cloaked and hatted man on horseback, a dog and a page or soldier, the tower at the extreme right, as well as the numerous workmen in its vicinity hauling and assembling lengths of

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84 Savoldo, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 1525–7, oil on canvas.

wood (to what end?), the Riva degli Schiavoni itself and St Mark’s Basin with its many vessels, and nally the dark entranceway behind the Virgin with its round window within which is silhouetted the upper body of a person (a bust or statue?) – is far too complex and dispersive to allow a merely ‘devotional’ response on the part of the viewer.39 More broadly, throughout this book I have been stressing the uniqueness of Savoldo’s paintings in their time, the designation ‘independent’ serving both to acknowledge that fact and to leave open the question of how they might most accurately be characterized in general terms. The relative lack of distinction of Savoldo’s few altarpieces makes the same point differently: nothing could be less Savoldesque than the structurally distanced and formal mode of address to a gathering of believers that the classic late fteenth- or sixteenth-century altarpiece entailed. And here is my further point, which brings me back to Caravaggio. In The Moment of Caravaggio and then in its sequel, After Caravaggio (2016),

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I emphasize the invention of what I call the full-blown gallery picture by the master and his successors. By this I mean that in Caravaggio’s work of the 1590s and early 1600s, and then in that of successor artists such as Bartolomeo Manfredi, Valentin de Boulogne and Nicolas Régnier, there came to the fore a new kind of painting aimed at the patronage of an elite group of ambitious and cultivated collectors – a kind of painting not small but not outstandingly large, often religious in subject matter but not necessarily devotional in intent, framed and portable rather than xed permanently in place, open to compositional and interpretive innovation, and typically, as in Caravaggio’s case, executed with a care that signaled the painter’s alertness both to the cultivated tastes of his elite viewership and to the circumstances of display that would make possible unusually close scrutiny of the nished artifact . . . Such works are sometimes called ‘gallery pictures’ and are best thought of as a version of – perhaps more accurately, an immediate forerunner of – the autonomous and essentially portable or, as is sometimes said, ‘homeless’ easel picture that would presently emerge as the dominant pictorial form of the modern era. (MC, pp. 83–4) The notion of autonomy is crucial here, the idea that such a painting was meant to be entirely sufcient to itself, independent of its surroundings, in effect cut off or severed from them (as it were by its frame). At the same time, the ideal of autonomy as I develop it in those books goes along with a pursuit of what I characterize as pictorial density, keyed in the rst place to the bodies of both painter and viewer, which is also to say to the question of bodily orientation: the painter and viewer facing into the painting (hence the proliferation of gures seen from the rear, especially in the work of the Caravaggisti), while the painting itself, as a worked artefact, faces outwards, in effect addressing both painter and viewer (hence the proliferation not simply of facing gures in Caravaggio and his successors but also of an unprecedentedly acute practice of interpellation, to use a nakedly anachronistic term). (In many multi-gure works by the Caravaggesque painters the theme of pictorial density is driven home by the placement in the middle of the composition of a solid, block-like table, often of marble, almost always skewed relative to the picture plane so as to be as obtrusive as possible.40) The issue of empathic projection also is in play, not quite according to the close-range, essentially ‘mimetic’ dynamic I have attributed to Savoldo but by way of a new pictorial poetics of absorption, which I contend

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rst enters European painting in force, as a major resource for the art, in such paintings by Caravaggio as the Penitent Magdalene in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, the Death of the Virgin in the Louvre, and the St Jerome Writing in the Galleria Borghese. Roughly, I see these and other expressively ‘minimal’ paintings as eliciting the viewer’s spontaneous and unreective conviction as to the self-contained inner life of the paintings’ protagonists. All this, I want to argue, is both somewhat like but also, equally important, crucially unlike what we nd in Savoldo: like above all in that at the very core of Caravaggio’s enterprise, as is true of Savoldo’s, is an intense one-toone and in important respects bodily relation between painting and painter (the relation between painting and viewer being as it were subsequent to that), which in both their oeuvres leads to a practice of self-portrayal that is anything but common in their respective pictorial universes. (The Moment of Caravaggio begins with a detailed consideration of Caravaggio’s early Boy Bitten by a Lizard, which I interpret as a disguised and displaced self-portrait of a particular kind; I go on to argue that Savoldo’s Portrait of a Man in Armour is also a self-portrait, each of the two works involving the mirrorreversal of right and left.) And unlike in that Caravaggio, as I understand him, soon came in works such as the Martyrdom of St Matthew in San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, and the tremendous David with the Head of Goliath in the Borghese to pursue a project involving his ultimate expulsion from his paintings. In the Martyrdom this was in the person of the eeing bravo at the left looking back over his shoulder with an expression Mina Gregori acutely describes as ‘overwhelmed with sadness’,41 in the David through an act of decapitation, that is, of violently separating the work in question from himself, which I take to be a further manifestation, a hyperbolization, of the desire to sever the full-blown gallery picture from its immediate context, thus securing its aesthetic autonomy in the most declarative terms possible. (Both the bravo and Goliath are self-portraits, I need hardly add.) In sum, I regard the unprecedented proliferation of scenes of decapitation in the art of Caravaggio and his successors in this light, as a virtual acting out of the gallery picture ideal.42 Here we come to a basic difference, in some respects the basic difference (bracketing once again the matter of faces and demons), between Caravaggio and Savoldo, in whose paintings nothing remotely like a pursuit of separation is to be found. By this I refer not only to the forthright, in no sense ‘removed’ or ‘severed’ presence of the sitter in Savoldo’s self-portraits – even his marginal self-portrayal as St Liberale in the altarpiece in San

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Nicolò, Treviso, has something quietly assertive about it – but also, returning one last time to a central motif of this book, to the painter’s hands, into the depiction of which, starting with my reading of the Death of St Peter Martyr, I have tried to show the viewer is invited empathically to project time and again. (That the invitation has been declined even by Savoldo’s most prescient and devoted commentators speaks to the norms of the arthistorical discipline rather than to any merely personal failure.) Note, by the way, that the viewer’s relation to the depicted hands in Savoldo’s paintings is sometimes one of mirroring, sometimes one of congruence, sometimes possibly both, which I see as contrasting signicantly with the polarity between facing and facing away in Caravaggio and his successors discussed in Chapter Two – so much more rigorous, more nearly systematic, than what we nd in Savoldo. (Facing versus facing away is not a Savoldesque trope.) In any case, with a few exceptions, the early Boy Bitten by a Lizard being one, nothing comparable to such an intense thematization of hands is to be found in Caravaggio, which is not at all to say that hands play an unimportant role in his art. They are certainly important, but they are not the decisive factors – the foregrounded, often central, dramatically active presences – that they are in Savoldo’s. (Also, in a different sense, as often in the tavern paintings of such as Valentin, Manfredi and Régnier.43 And that they will be again, more than three centuries later, in the early self-portraits and key Realist canvases of the great French painter Gustave Courbet: but that is another story, or, perhaps more accurately, another chapter of a single, still incompletely understood dialectic.44) Even more strongly, the presence – also the actions, the thrusting and grasping gestures – of hands in Savoldo’s pictures testify to the fact that he never achieved, or never sought to achieve, the separation and distancing from his paintings that I am claiming was basic to Caravaggio’s enterprise. Put slightly differently, there is in Savoldo no equivalent to the pursuit of autonomy at all costs that marks Caravaggio’s project and the emergence of the full-blown gallery picture in the 1590s and after. (Savoldo’s are not gallery pictures in that sense, despite having broken with the ‘devotional’ convention. By the same token, no subject matter could be more foreign to his project than decapitation.45) Rather, Savoldo remains productively, if at times also somewhat confusingly, entangled with his paintings and, I have suggested, the ideal empathic viewer becomes entangled with that entanglement. This at once largely accounts for the interpretive challenge Savoldo’s paintings have posed for even his most appreciative modern

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85 Savoldo, Adoration of the Shepherds (illus. 63), detail.

commentators, and perhaps also helps explain what seems to have been, in their own time and country, their somewhat limited appeal, as is suggested by Pino’s remarks cited earlier about viewers being put off by ‘a single hand’.46

savoldo and caravaggio

It follows that the afnity between Savoldo and Caravaggio is at once partial and profound, the latter to the extent that it is only in the retrospective light of Caravaggio’s momentous achievement and the emergence in the 1590s and after of the full-blown gallery picture that Savoldo’s supremely intelligent, mysteriously ‘inuenced’ and, at their best, almost literally spellbinding paintings can be brought into art-historical focus. This in turn means that Longhi’s pioneering insight was on target, even if the grounds of that insight stand in need of the radical reimagining that the present study has sought to provide.47 One last thought. What I have just called Savoldo’s entanglement with his art – the fact that he seems never to have achieved or indeed sought to achieve separation and distance from it (not even in the late Adoration in Brescia, where a tendency towards both is in play) – may also help explain his not having been aware of the greater number of the faces or masks I have claimed to discover in his paintings, assuming that such awareness escaped him (the grotesque face in Joseph’s sleeve in the Adoration being a nal case in point). But this is speculation.

169

A F T E RWO R D

A b r i e f ac c o u n t o f h ow t h i s b o o k came about is perhaps in order. As readers of The Moment of Caravaggio will be aware, early on in that book I discuss in some detail Savoldo’s Portrait of a Man in Armour in the Louvre (long thought to be a portrait of the French military commander Gaston de Foix), which the late Creighton Gilbert was the rst to suggest should be recognized as a self-portrait. I found myself in agreement with Gilbert, and went on to discuss the Man in Armour ’s fascinating play of hand and arm gestures and mirror-reections, which I understood as representing in displaced form the actions of Savoldo’s left and right hands in the course of bringing the painting into being. (I rehearse that reading in Chapter Two of this book.) Subsequently I realized that there was much more to say about the treatment of hands in Savoldo’s art, and sat down to write an essay that would spell that out, with the working title ‘Savoldo’s Hands’. But it quickly became clear that a short book, not an essay, was required in order to do justice to the topic. And then, after several months of close looking, research and writing, on a visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, I noticed that there were unmistakable heads and faces in the rocks at the bottom left of the early Elijah Fed by Ravens. This was surprising, but even more so was the fact that no one had ever seen (or at least had ever commented on) the heads before. And in the months that followed, mainly during 2017–18, I discovered or came to believe that I discovered a signicant number of other heads and faces, mainly though not exclusively in the folds, bulges, creases and depressions of the drapery of various personages in Savoldo’s pictures.

afterword

Working out what this meant for the understanding of his art was a tremendous challenge and became the other central theme of the present book. Eventually I came to be persuaded that for the most part Savoldo was less than fully aware of the presence of such heads, faces and mask-like forms in the bulk of his work (the early Elijah, SS Paul and Anthony and the Temptation of St Anthony paintings in San Diego and Moscow being exceptions to this), and also that the heads and faces were essentially demonic, which is to say that they belonged to a sixteenth-century frame of mind that imagined the universe as saturated with demonic presences. That such a frame of mind, which at least to some degree I take to have been Savoldo’s, could also be rigorously Catholic and indeed orientated to the reality of the Eucharist is also a basic claim of this book.

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86 Savoldo, Adoration of the Shepherds (illus. 68), detail showing the appearance of the angel of the Annunciation.

REFERENCES

a b b r e v i at i o n s D

F G

MC P

PI PR

Savoldo 1990

T

Paolo Pino, Dialogo di pittura, trans. in Mary Pardo, ‘Paolo Pino’s Dialogo di Pittura, a Translation with Commentary’, PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1984 Francesco Frangi, Savoldo: Catalogo completo (Florence, 1992) Creighton Gilbert, ‘The Works of Girolamo Savoldo’, PhD diss., New York University, 1955. Subsequently published as Creighton E. Gilbert, The Works of Girolamo Savoldo: The 1955 Dissertation, with a Review of Research, 1955–1985 (New York and London, 1986). In the latter publication pp. 71–158 of the original dissertation are omitted, replaced by a fresh discussion of the post-1955 scholarly literature and questions of chronology on pp. 524–69. All references in the present book are to the original dissertation. Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio, The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2010) Mary Pardo, Commentary on Pino’s Dialogo di pittura, in Pardo, ‘Paolo Pino’s Dialogo di Pittura, a Translation with Commentary’, PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1984 S. J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy, 1500–1600, Pelican History of Art (Harmondsworth and Baltimore, MD, 1971) Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy, ed. Andrea Bayer, exh. cat., Cremona, Museo Civico ‘Ala Ponzone’; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New Haven, CT, and London, 2004) Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo tra Foppa, Giorgione e Caravaggio, ed. Bruno Passamani, exh. cat., Brescia, Monastero di San Salvatore-Santa Giulia; Frankfurt, Schirn (Milan, 1990) Tiziano e la pittura del cinquecento tra Venezia e Brescia, ed. Francesco Frangi, exh. cat., Brescia, Museo di Santa Giulia (Milan, 2018)

references to pages

introduction 1 Aretino’s letter is quoted in the original in G, pp. 57–8. See G for a summary of basic facts about Savoldo’s life and career, as well as for a useful survey of Savoldo scholarship up to 1955. 2 D, p. 304. Further page references will be in parentheses in the text. 3 Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 4 vols, trans. William Gaunt (London and New York, 1963), III, p. 321. Vasari’s remarks on Savoldo read in their entirety: ‘Many works of Giangirolamo Bresciano may be seen in Milan and Venice, and the mint contains four very ne representations of night and res. In the house of Tommaso di Empoli there is a very ne Nativity at night, and some similar fancies, in which he excelled. But as he only did such things and no large works, I can say no more of him than that he was imaginative and fantastic [capriccioso e sofistico], and his works deserve much praise.’ Mary Pardo translates ‘capriccio e sostico’ as fanciful and artful in ‘The Subject of Savoldo’s Magdalene ’, Art Bulletin, LXXI/1 (1989), p. 69. 4 See the catalogue entry by Andrea Bayer on the Crucifixion in PR, p. 136. 5 See Antonio Boschetto, Giovan Gerolamo Savoldo (Milan, 1963). 6 Savoldo 1990. 7 Keith Christiansen, ‘Gerolamo Savoldo’, in The Age of Caravaggio, exh. cat., Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1985), pp. 79–85. 8 Andrea Bayer, cat. entries in PR, pp. 136–45. 9 T. 10 For more on Lombardy, see Bayer, ‘Dening Naturalism in Lombard Painting’, in PR, pp. 4–5. 11 Roberto Longhi, ‘Quesiti caravaggeschi, II: I precedenti’, Pinacotheca, 5–6 (1929), pp. 258–320; repr. in ‘Me pinxit’ e quesiti caravaggeschi, Edizione delle opere complete di Roberto Longhi, vol. IV: 1929–34 (Florence, 1968), pp. 97–143. 12 Creighton Gilbert, ‘Savoldo Cortese’, in Savoldo 1990, p. 38 (my translation). The original Italian reads: Nasce così una galleria di personaggi imponenti nei quali sembrano connaturate la stabilità morale e aristocrata e l’inclinazione all’intimità dei pensieri. Si tratta di personaggi solitari, qualche volta anche eroici, nei

10–34

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quali tuttavia è bandita ogni traccia di accademismo, che non di rado gli eroi artistici portano con sé, ma che piuttosto sono interpretati con una sensibilità poetica e una capacità di approfondimento emotivo che ci invitato a participare all loro vita . . . Sono in denitiva personaggi legati tra loro da profonde afnità interiori, come quelle che talvolta si incontrano in un grande romanziere, ma tuttavia non possiamo dire che in essi vi siano afnità di rapporti letterari: i loro caratteri sono deniti unicamente attraverso i mezzi visive, in parte dei gesti, dalle espressioni, dei costume, ma anche alla forma nel senso astratto della parola. 13 Jaś Elsner, ‘Style’, in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds, Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd edn (Chicago, IL, 2003), p. 102. 14 One recent exception is the pages on Savoldo in Stephen J. Campbell’s important The Endless Periphery: Toward a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto’s Italy (Chicago, IL, and London, 2019). These will be cited again and discussed later in this book. 15 I make these observations in MC, pp. 200–201.

pa r t o n e o n e • d e at h o f s t p e t e r m a r t y r 1 The painting was rst shown at Hall & Knight Ltd (London and New York) in 2001, accompanied by an exhibition catalogue titled MMI, including an essay by Mina Gregori, ‘Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, The Death of St. Peter Martyr ’, pp. 70–77. Further page references to her essay will be in parentheses in the text. 2 On Titian’s Death of St Peter Martyr, see also the interesting discussion in Una Roman D’Elia, The Poetics of Titian’s Religious Paintings (Cambridge, 2005), chap. 4, ‘Christian Tragedy’. 3 Creighton E. Gilbert, ‘Savoldo’s Death of Peter Martyr’, in Venezia, le Marche e la civiltà adriatica: per festeggiare i 90 anni di Pietro Zampetti, Arte documento 17–19 (2003), p. 291. Further page references will be in parentheses in the text. 4 Keith Christiansen, ‘Caravaggio and “L’esempio davanti del natural”’, Art Bulletin, LXVIII/3 (1986), p. 422. 5 Keith Christiansen, ‘Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo’, in The Age of Caravaggio, exh. cat., New York, Metropolitan

174

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34–48

Museum of Art; Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte (1985), p. 79. 6 See Mina Gregori, ‘I temi della luce articiale en Savoldo e le radici lombarde di Caravaggio’, in Savoldo 1990, p. 91. 7 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (New York and Oxford, 1979), esp. pp. 440–41. I make use of the concept apropos of the invention/discovery of absorption as a major resource for painting in MC, pp. 105–6. 8 S. J. Freedberg, Circa 1600: A Revolution of Style in Italian Painting (Cambridge, MA, 1983), pp. 65–6. 9 Personal communication (2007). This was said apropos of my discussion of the ‘invention of absorption’ in MC, which Cavell had read in draft form. 10 Or in Hegelian language, from the Lectures on Fine Art: ‘This being at one with itself in its other is the really beautiful subject matter of romantic art [by which Hegel means Christian art], its Ideal which has essentially for its form and appearance the inner life and subjectivity, mind and feeling. Therefore the romantic Ideal expresses a relation to another spiritual being which is so bound up with depth of feeling that only in this other does the soul achieve this intimacy with itself ’ (G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox [Oxford, 1975], I, p. 533). This reciprocity, if I may call it that, the thought ‘that only in this other does the soul achieve this intimacy with itself ’, may appear to critique the idea of empathic projection, and perhaps it does. (As if the italicized term can be taken as implying too one-way an operation.) But my use of Cavell’s term has always for me implied the notion that the projection in question is elicited by the painting, in one way or another. The question, in any case, is to what extent Hegel’s notion of romantic art remains in force in ‘our’ encounter with the Death of St Peter Martyr, or indeed with other works by Savoldo to be treated in this book. My thanks to Robert Pippin for discussing the above passage with me. See also Robert Pippin, ‘Hegel on Painting’, in The Art of Hegel’s Aesthetics: Hegelian Philosophy and the Perspectives of Art History, ed. Paul A. Kottman and Michael Squire (Paderborn, 2017), pp. 211–37. 11 See in this connection the superb discussion of Lotto’s portraits by Stephen J. Campbell in The Endless Periphery: Toward a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto’s Italy (Chicago, IL, and London, 2019), pp. 149–51.

Campbell writes: ‘We might describe Lotto’s subject’s postures as labored. It is as if the body is straining against its own opacity in order to make itself articulate and intelligible. The soul is not a light that shines forth from within, as the character “Pietro Bembo” conceives it at the conclusion of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano. Interiority is, as it were, produced and maintained through the application of the subject’s entire physical being . . . Lotto clearly wants to signal the disparity between Bembo’s identication of grace and virtue, and the lived experience of embodied individuals in their everyday world’ (pp. 149–50). To this I would add that Lotto’s sitters’ characteristically charged address to the viewer solicits the latter’s awareness of some such disparity, as well as a sense of the ‘inquisitional’ character of the world in which they (and Lotto) increasingly found themselves. At the limit, it is as if certain of Lotto’s portraits seek to induce a comparable bodily and psychological response in the viewer. 12 Campbell’s The Endless Periphery brings new insight to bear on these matters; see esp. chaps 2 and 4. I shall have more to say about Campbell’s ndings later in this book.

t wo • hands 1 MC, pp. 7–12. 2 The change from normalization to mirror-reversal around 1860 was rst remarked by Zirka Zaremba Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp, 1550–1700 (Princeton, NJ, 1987), p. 202. In MC I illustrate and discuss Henri Matisse’s Self-portrait of 1918 as exemplifying the same right-angle mirror-reversed structure I claim to detect in the Boy Bitten by a Lizard (pp. 9–11). See also my essay ‘David/Marat: The Self-portrait of 1794’, in Another Light: Jacques-Louis David to Thomas Demand (New Haven, CT, and London, 2014), pp. 40–51. 3 F, cat. 12. 4 G, pp. 129–30, 428–31. 5 Mary Pardo makes the connection between the ‘Gaston de Foix ’ and the Giorgione, adding that we may never know whether Giorgione actually painted such a picture (P, p. 266). 6 See in this connection Rona Goffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New

references to pages Haven, CT, and London, 2002), pp. 31–67. My thanks to Stephen Campbell for the reference. 7 Interestingly, Gilbert in passing associates the ‘Gaston de Foix ’ with Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard, but says nothing more about the relation of the one to the other (G, p. 401). 8 See in this connection Michael Fried, After Caravaggio (New Haven, CT, and London, 2016); and idem, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago, IL, and London, 1990). 9 See for example G, pp. 346–7 and passim. 10 F, cat. 8. 11 F, cat. 24. 12 F, cat. 19. 13 Creighton Gilbert, ‘Newly Discovered Paintings by Savoldo in Relation to their Patronage’, Arte Lombarda, n.s., no. 96/97 (1–2) (1991), p. 41. Gilbert cites an essay by Veca of 1981. 14 Roberto Longhi, ‘Cose Bresciane del Cinquecento’, in Scritti giovanili, 1912–1922, 2 vols, Edizione delle opere complete di Roberto Longhi (Florence, 1961), I, pp. 339–40 (my translation). The paragraphs read in the original: Il Savoldo si respira alla prima; se non restasse che la mano, essa basterebbe per riconoscerlo. Eppoi v’è la pasta fusa e compatta della casacca rossa studiata nelle solite tortuose chiavi di pieghe ove Savoldo si compìa ceva di risolvere certi suoi quesiti di forme; e v’è anche – ed è peccato che sia caduto fuor della fotograa – un bolla di luce che vaga sul margine del libro e ridona libertà e vita imprevista a tutta la composizione dei lumi. Ma bisogna ritornare a quella mano che afferra l’occhio in una complicatezza formale da risolversi como il nodo di Salomone; credere ch’esse sia un gioco prospettico sarebbe alquanto superciale; poichè è scelta troppo ossuta e carnosa ad un tempo per potersi installare entro pochi piani, entro un prismo prospettico. In verità, esse nasconde e rivela un più semplice e profondo anagramma pittorico; è un momento, è un’impressione di mano ssata con perspicacia mirabile da una specula appostata nel punto più strano; è uno scorcio ‘corsivo’ che sebbene attuato in pasta ancora ‘quattrocentesca’ prepara le rapide mani di Caravaggio, et forse di Degas. My thanks to Walter Stephens for his assistance in translating Longhi’s difcult Italian.

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15 F, cat. 8. 16 F, cat. 24. 17 F, cat. 22. 18 See Hans Belting, ‘Poetry and Painting: Saint Jerome in the Wilderness’, in Giovanni Bellini: Landscapes of Faith in Renaissance Venice, ed. Davide Gasparotto, exh. cat., Los Angeles, CA, J. Paul Getty Museum (2017), pp. 25–35; and (more broadly) Eugene F. Rice, Jr, Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD, 1985). 19 F, cat. 13. 20 Keith Christiansen, The Age of Caravaggio, exh. cat., New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte (New York, 1985), cat. 11, pp. 79–81. See also the essays by Gilbert, Frangi and Maria Teresa Rosa-Barezzani in Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo, Ritratto di Gentiluomo con Flauto (Brescia, 1994). 21 Bayer in PR, p. 139. 22 Cf. Gilbert’s extended and largely bafed discussion of the ‘strange gesture’ of the shepherd’s hands in G, pp. 342–3. 23 F, cat. 32. 24 F, cats 28, 31, 29. I owe to Francesco Frangi the information that a fourth Magdalene is at present in the Contini Bonacossi collection in the Galleria degli Ufzi in Florence. Not having seen it, I shall not discuss it in this book. See F, cat. 30. 25 Mary Pardo, ‘The Subject of Savoldo’s Magdalene’, Art Bulletin, LXXI/1 (March 1989), pp. 67–91. Further page references will be in parentheses in the text. Pardo briey reviews several opinions of the relative dating of the four paintings, none of which bears a date (p. 69, n.3). 26 On Titian’s Noli me tangere, see the brief discussion in Una Roman D’Elia, The Poetics of Titian’s Religious Paintings (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 20–22.

three • faces 1 F, cats 3, 4. 2 Roberto Longhi, ‘Due dipinti inediti di Giovan Gerolamo Savoldo’, in Saggi e richerche, 1925–1928, 2 vols, Edizione delle opere complete di Roberto Longhi (Florence, 1967), I, p. 153. Andrea Bayer, in her catalogue entry in PR on Savoldo’s Shepherd with a Flute in the Getty, notes that ‘Longhi said of this painting that the drapery, modeled with a directed fall of light and

176

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86–98

deep shadows, seemed “like a fragment of a Caravaggio”’ (p. 139). Longhi’s Italian reads: ‘Il massimo di lume e il massimo d’ombra sono qui congiunti direttamente per opposizione e si giunge a quella sommità quasi abbagliata della casacca sul ginocchio che, presa per sé sola, apparirebbe come un frammento del Caravaggio, o di un Velázquez del 1620.’ 3 F, cat. 1. 4 In his dissertation Gilbert identies the gure as St George (G, p. 428). The correction to St Liberale is made in Gilbert, ‘Discovered Paintings by Savoldo in Relation to their Patronage’, Arte Lombarda, n.s., no. 96/ 97 (1–2) (1991), p. 41. 5 I mention Hugo van der Goes because of the probable inuence on Savoldo’s treatment of hands, especially in the early Elijah and SS Paul and Anthony, of the great Flemish painter’s monumental Portinari Altarpiece (1475–8), which Savoldo would have seen in Florence in Santa Maria Nuova, assuming that it is he and not another Brescian painter who is referred to in the letter from Michelangelo’s brother mentioned in the Introduction. The connection has been recognized by several authors, including Gaetano Panazza, Sybille EbertSchifferer and Mina Gregori in Savoldo 1990. 6 It should be noted that the date of the Moscow picture has been the object of considerable dispute. See the brief discussion in F, p. 37. The San Diego canvas is less problematic, but Gilbert in 1963 proposed a date of 1535–8, which seems at wrong; see Creighton Gilbert, ed., Major Masters of the Renaissance, exh. cat., Waltham, MA, Poses Institute of Fine Arts, Brandeis University (1963), p. 23. 7 F, p. 36. See also Beverly Louise Brown, ‘From Hell to Paradise: Landscape and Figure in Early Sixteenthcentury Venice’, in Renaissance Venice and the North: Crosscurrents in the Time of Bellini, Dürer, and Titian, ed. Bernard Aikema and Beverly Louise Brown, exh. cat., Venice, Palazzo Grassi (New York, 2000), p. 427, n.57. Brown suggests that the two gures are probably based on Jacopo Caraglio’s engraving of the Fire in the Borgo from c. 1525, which, if true, would imply a later date for the painting. The engraving is erroneously labelled ‘Aeneas rescuing his father’. Brown also thinks Savoldo’s Moscow picture probably reects a lost Giorgione ‘re landscape’.

8 M. A. Jacobsen, ‘Savoldo and Northern Art’, Art Bulletin, LVI/4 (1974), pp. 530–34. 9 Bernard Aikema, ed., Jheronimus Bosch e Venezia, exh. cat., Venice, Palazzo Grassi (2017). Essays by Aikema, Rosella Lauber, Isabella di Lenardo, Jos Koldeweij, Giulio Bono and Maria Chiara Maida. 10 This is perhaps as good a place as any to cite a recent book that bears indirectly on Savoldo’s treatment of drapery: Paul Hills, Veiled Presence: Body and Drapery from Giotto to Titian (London, 2018). Hills never mentions Savoldo, but his Chapter Seven, ‘Lorenzo Lotto: Drapery Possessed’ (pp. 149–71), is of interest. 11 My reference, of course, is to Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘Parergon’, in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, IL, and London, 1978), pp. 15–147. 12 F, cat. 23. 13 Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. William Gaunt, 4 vols (London and New York, 1963), IV, p. 321. 14 Roberto Longhi, ‘Quesiti caravaggeschi, II: I precedenti’, Pinacotheca, 5–6 (1929), p. 259; repr. in Longhi, ‘Me pinxit’ e quesiti caravaggeschi, 1928–1934, Edizione delle opere complete di Roberto Longhi, vol. IV (Florence, 1968), p. 98. 15 Andrea Bayer in PR: ‘The diminutive scenes in the background have been identied as episodes in Matthew’s life, as known through the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century compilation of lives of the saints. That on the right most probably represents the saint – now elderly and seated before a re – receiving hospitality at the house of the eunuch of the queen of Ethiopia, where he had preached and exposed the chicanery of two magicians. The scene on the left, in which four small gures, one lower to the ground, are silhouetted against a towering edice seen in moonlight, is more difcult to identify. One interpretation regards the gures as the citizens of Ethiopia, whom Matthew is healing of the malign sorcery of the two magicians; the other sees the tower as the symbolic center of the vignette, metaphorically representing the virtuous edice the apostles could build through their knowledge of many tongues, contrasting it with the Tower of Babel. Another moment during Matthew’s long sojourn in North Africa might also be represented. After the magicians were unable to

references to pages bring the dead son of the king of Ethiopia to life (perhaps he is the gure on the ground), Matthew miraculously did so, and in response the king and his people built a great church’ (p. 138). 16 The exhibition, called ‘Venezia Scarlatta: Lotto, Savoldo, Cariani’ and comprising six paintings, was held in 2017. 17 On Campagnola, see Antonio Corradero, ‘Giulio Campagnola, un artista umanista’, Venezia Cinquecento, 20 (2010), pp. 55–134, esp. p. 102, where the print is called ‘a work of rare and personal interpretive tension’. See also Brown, ‘From Hell to Paradise’, pp. 442–3, cat. 115, on The Astrologer. She calls the monster an ‘iridescent dragon’, and sees it as owing less to Bosch than to Dürer (p. 442). She also states that the date implied by the sphere is 13 September 1509, when there was to take place a conjunction of the sun and moon, understood as a sign of impending devastation. She adds: ‘Demons were thought to wait until certain phases of the moon made it more favorable for them to infest bodies.’ More on demons in Part Two of this book. Highly interesting remarks about Campagnola, including a brief discussion of The Astrologer, are also to be found in Stephen J. Campbell, ‘Naturalism and the Venetian “Poesia”: Grafting, Metaphor, and Embodiment in Giorgione, Titian and the Campagnolas’, in Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art, ed. Lorenzo Pericolo and Alexander Nagel (Burlington, VT, and Farnham, 2010), pp. 113–40.

four • magic 1 F, cat. 10. 2 In fact, in the book of Tobit, where the Tobias story is found, the capture of the sh is related as follows: ‘Tobias set out on his journey with a dog following, and the rst stop was by the river Tigris. When he went to wash his feet, he saw a huge sh come up and try to eat him. Terried by the sh, Tobias cried out and said, “It’s coming after me, sir!” And the angel said to him, “Grab it by the gills and pull it toward you.” When he did this and dragged it on to the dry land, the sh began to gasp near his feet’ (Brian Copenhaver, ed., The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment [London, 2015],

100–116

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p. 37). Savoldo’s painting, in other words, amounts to a reinterpretation of this sequence of events, the sh not emerging from the water on its own initiative but because summoned by Raphael. 3 Gaetano Panazzi, ‘Gian Gerolamo Savoldo: quesiti risolti e problemi insoluti’, in Savoldo 1990, p. 34. 4 MC, pp. 195–201. 5 As is suggested by Mina Gregori, ‘I temi della luce articiale nel Savoldo e le radici lombarde di Caravaggio’, in Savoldo 1990, p. 91. Interestingly, a depiction of Christ making a similar beckoning gesture is found in Giacomo Jaquerio’s small painting from the rst half of the 1400s of the Vocation of St Peter and the Liberation of St Peter from Prison in the Palazzo Carignano, Turin. 6 F, cat. 15. 7 F, cat. 16. 8 Lucy Whitaker and Martin Clayton, with Aislinn Loconte, The Art of Italy in the Royal Collection: Renaissance and Baroque (London, 2007), pp. 210–11. 9 In fairness to Gilbert, he adduces various ‘stylistic’ reasons for the earlier dating of the Turin canvas, but one gets the impression that the iconological argument is decisive for him. 10 Peter Humfrey, in Lorenzo Lotto: Rediscovered Master of the Renaissance, ed. David Alan Brown, Peter Humfrey, Maure Lucco et al., exh. cat., Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art; Bergamo, Accademia di belle arti G. Carrara; Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 1998–9 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1997), p. 182. 11 Bernard Berenson, Lorenzo Lotto: An Essay in Constructive Art Criticism (New York and London, 1895), p. 327. 12 Stephen J. Campbell, ‘Renaissance Naturalism and the Jewish Bible: Ferrara, Brescia, Bergamo, 1520–1540’, in Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, ed. Herbert Kessler and David Nirenberg (Philadelphia, PA, 2011), p. 209; and Campbell, The Endless Periphery: Towards a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto’s Italy (Chicago, IL, and London, 2019), chap. 5, ‘Brescia and Bergamo, 1520–1550: Sacred Naturalism and the Place of the Eucharist’, pp. 181–226. Further page references to Campbell, ‘Renaissance Naturalism’, will be in parentheses in the text. 13 See, in particular, Walter Stephens’s indispensable book Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief

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(Chicago, IL, and London, 2002), esp. chap. 8, ‘“This Is My Body”: Witchcraft and Desecration’, pp. 207–40. The core of Stephens’s compelling argument is that the reality of witches’ experiences, including sexual contact with demons, was important to Renaissance inquisitors precisely because it served indirectly to conrm the reality – the divine status – of the Eucharist, belief in which turns out to have required constant reinforcement. There will be more to say about demons in Part Two of this book. 14 F, cat. 9. 15 A length of yellow-gold drapery trails across his left upper arm before falling to the ground behind him; might this be an indication that he is Jewish, hence that he is to be taken as Joseph after all? In this connection see, for example, Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (London, 2004), who refers to yellow as ‘the colour that Jews – in Christian Europe, since the thirteenth century, and in Islam since about the eighth – were forced to wear to symbolize their infamy’ (p. 371). This is said apropos of the gure of Judas in Lucas Cranach’s Wittenberg Altarpiece, the artefactual focus of Koerner’s deeply learned and closely argued book. 16 Compare Gilbert on the hands, which he sees as recalling works from disparate moments in Savoldo’s career; this suggests to him that ‘Savoldo kept on hand a le of motives’, in this case, hands. Specically, he sees the right hand as that of ‘an elderly male saint lifted to express wonderment over the Christ Child [cf. Jerome in the Turin Adoration] and his left hand [as] the hand of an elderly male saint in kneeling adoration with his elbow behind it pressed down on a ledge [cf. the Penitent St Jerome]’ (G, p. 149). Such a manner of proceeding seems to me foreign to Savoldo’s aims. 17 F, cat. 37. 18 Gilbert doubts the painting’s authenticity on various grounds, including the gesture of the gure at the left: ‘The emphasis given to a genre motive, in which a shepherd plays a little game with his ngers to amuse the child, is also outside Savoldo’s ways of proceeding’ (G, p. 154). Needless to say, I take this reading of the gesture to be off-key. In the end Gilbert thinks the National Gallery canvas ‘may be accepted as a fairly close copy of a lost work’ (G, p. 155). 19 F, cat. 20.

f i v e • t h e b r e s c i a a d o r at i o n o f the shepherds 1 F, cat. 40. See also the catalogue entries by Pier Virgilio Begni Redona on the Brescia Adoration and the subsequent variants in San Giobbe, Venice, and the Chiesa di Santa Maria la Nova, Terlizzi, in Savoldo 1990, pp. 106– 15; and the important essay by Bruno Passamani, ‘La “Natività” della Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo di Brescia’, in Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo, Pittore Bresciano, ed. Mario Pedini (Brescia, 1984), pp. 89–98. 2 See Stephen J. Campbell, ‘Renaissance Naturalism and the Jewish Bible: Ferrara, Brescia, Bergamo, 1520– 1540’, in Judaism and Christian Art: Aesthetic Anxieties from the Catacombs to Colonialism, ed. Herbert Kessler and David Nirenberg (Philadelphia, PA, 2011), p. 305. 3 Gilbert glosses the painting’s ‘astounding spatial arrangement’ by noting that ‘[e]ach of the four major gures has his own little space, marked off from the others by a wall, a ledge, or a window, making a kind of labyrinth of two-dimensional design’ (G, p. 137). 4 Campbell, ‘Renaissance Naturalism’, pp. 303–5. 5 Campbell’s perspective is somewhat different. After noting various signs of the supernatural, such as the ‘negative halo produced by the decay of the wooden planks’ behind the Christ Child, he remarks (ibid., p. 305): ‘But supernatural effulgence is now only a supplement or foil for an emphatically material and everyday manifestation of the divine: as the shepherds regard the Christ child through frames and across parapets, it is impressed upon us in our parallel condition as viewers of the painting that the divine does indeed exist in the realm of facts accessible to human vision. This is the case even if we perceive it through the mediation of frames and thresholds that mark off the domain of the sacred but do not disrupt its continuity with the world from which we regard it. I will again refer to this style of handling religious subjects as “sacred naturalism”; it is distinguished not simply by delity to natural appearances, but by hierarchically ordered degrees of reality within the pictorial eld itself. It is as if that which we, like the shepherds, perceive just beyond the frame is the most “real” of all – the incarnate body of Christ.’ 6 F, cat. 41. See also the brief discussion of the San Giobbe painting in a brochure devoted to the church, Lorenzo Finerchi Ghersi, Augusto Gentili and

references to pages Carlo Corsato, The Church of San Giobbe (Venice, 2007), pp. 23–7.

pa r t t w o 1 It is almost as if the tabletop in the immediate foreground is shared with the viewer. Compare the discussion of a comparable structure in an early self-portrait drawing by Henri Fantin-Latour in Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism, or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago, IL, and London, 1996), pp. 377–8. 2 Gilbert twice discusses the self-portraits as a group: rst in his dissertation (G, pp. 426–34) and subsequently (now adding the Self-portrait as St Jerome) in his article ‘Newly Discovered Paintings by Savoldo in Relation to their Patronage’, Arte Lombarda, n.s., no. 96/97 (1–2) (1991), pp. 41–4. 3 Gilbert, ‘Newly Discovered Paintings’, pp. 41–2. 4 F, cat. 7. 5 This remains the case in his catalogue entry for the painting in T, cat. 48, p. 162. 6 Gilbert, ‘Newly Discovered Paintings’, p. 41. 7 Ibid., p. 42. 8 Ibid., p. 43. 9 On the Council of Trent, see John O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council? (Cambridge, MA, 2013). Various dimensions of the struggle for reform within the Catholic Church (with particular emphasis on Venice) are analysed by Elizabeth Gleason, Gasparo Contarini: Venice, Rome, and Reform (Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles and Oxford, 1993). Also informative are Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince and Prophet (Cambridge, 2000); O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA, 1995); and Adam Patrick Robinson, The Career of Cardinal Giovanni Morone (1509–1580): Between Council and Inquisition (Burlington, VT, 2012). My thanks to John O’Malley for suggesting Gleason’s, Mayer’s and Robinson’s books to me. 10 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago, IL, and London, 1993), pp. 27–8. 11 The reference to Giotto is to the surprising recent (2011) discovery of a demonic-seeming face in the clouds in the upper portion of his fresco of the Death of St Francis in the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi. To Mantegna, famously, to certain images in clouds in his

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work, specically in his Martyrdom of St Sebastian (1459; Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum) and Pallas Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue (1503; Paris, Louvre). (In the rst of these, a rocky mass in the form of a head is also evident.) To Piero di Cosimo, to his Misfortunes of Silenus (c. 1500; Cambridge, MA, Fogg Art Museum), in which Erwin Panofsky found a tree-trunk with ‘an excrescence resembling the head of a deer’ (see Panofsky, ‘The Early History of Man in Two Cycles of Paintings by Piero di Cosimo’, in Studies in Iconology [New York, 1972], p. 63). To Lotto, to tree-trunks resembling the limbs of a human body in his St Jerome in the Wilderness (1509–10; Rome, Castel Sant’Angelo), as well as a possible head emerging from the rocks behind the saint in the Penitent St Jerome (1506) in the Louvre. To Zenale, to a mysterious demonic face in the rock formation over the Virgin’s head in his altarpiece (c. 1510) for the Milanese church of San Francesco Grande, today in the Denver Museum of Art. And to Giovanni Bellini (not previously remarked, as far as I can tell, though that scarcely seems possible), to a large partial head and face in prole in the rock wall confronting the saint in his St Jerome in the Wilderness (c. 1480; Florence, Ufzi). My thanks to Stephen Campbell for the Zenale reference, as well as for the information that the detail is shown in isolation on the museum website (https://denverartmuseum.org). I will add that the face in the Zenale altarpiece is at least as difcult to make out as any cited by me in connection with Savoldo. Relevant studies of such imagery include Daniel Arasse, ‘Lorenzo Lotto dans ses bizarreries: le peintre et l’iconographie’, in Lorenzo Lotto: atti del convegno internazionale di studi per il V centenario della nascita, ed. Pietro Zampetti and Vittorio Scarbi (Treviso, 1981), pp. 365–82; see also Arasse, Le Détail: Pour une histoire rapprochée de la peinture (Paris, 1992), pp. 244–5. Stephen J. Campbell, ‘Cloud-poiesis: Perception, Allegory, Seeing the Other’, in Senses of Sight: Towards a Multisensory Approach of the Image. Essays in Honor of Victor I. Stoichita, ed. Henri de Riedmatten et al. (Rome, 2015), pp. 1–29 (mainly on Mantegna). Dario Gamboni, Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art (London, 2002), pp. 27–31. James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity (New York and London, 1999), chap. 7, ‘Hidden Images: Cryptomorphs, Anamorphs, and Aleamorphs’, pp. 178–230. Famous

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texts by Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci are cited and discussed by H. W. Janson, ‘The Image Made by Chance in Renaissance Thought’, in De artibus opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. Millard Meiss, 2 vols (New York, 1961), I, pp. 254–66. In Le Détail, apropos of the anthropomorphic imagery in Lotto’s St Jerome paintings, Arasse refers to Lorenzo Giustiniani, who ‘in his De Vita religiosa, published in Venice in 1494, [gives the description] of diverse modes of temptation, whether the devils “offend the spirit” and lead it to forget to invoke God, or whether they “show themselves to the human spirit in a horrible manner by means of obscure images and inhabitual aspects”’ (p. 244, my translation). See also Campbell, ‘Naturalism and the Venetian “Poesia”: Grafting, Metaphor, and Embodiment in Giorgione, Titian and the Campagnolas’, in Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art, ed. Lorenzo Pericolo and Alexander Nagel (Burlington, VT, and Farnham, 2010), pp. 113–40. And on metamorphic transformations generally, see Michel Jeanneret, Perpetual Motion: Transforming Shapes in the Renaissance from da Vinci to Montaigne, trans. Nidra Poller (Baltimore, MD, and London, 2001). Two additional observations (the rst owed to Keith Christiansen): one nds a deliberate, Mannerist play with heads and faces, including a large partial mask-like face (eyes, nose, nostrils), in the lower part of the sitter’s costume in Agnolo Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man (1530s; New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art); and is there not an unmistakable face or mask looking aggressively, one might say deantly at the viewer (out of its left eye), in the folds of the silver-grey left sleeve of the protagonist of Jacopo da Pontormo’s Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap (Carlo Neroni?) (c. 1530; private collection), another plainly deliberate, Mannerist tour de force? This too seems to have gone unremarked by commentators. Finally, let me cite ‘The End of the Masquerade’, the last chapter of Charles Dempsey’s Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Chapel Hill, NC, and London, 2001), pp. 219– 31, with its beautiful closing pages on masks in Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel. 12 See, for example, the discussion of various works by Dürer, including the ink drawing of six pillows, in Gamboni, Potential Images, pp. 31–3. Gamboni cites four previous texts in particular: Heinz Ladendorf, ‘Ein Felsgesicht bei Albrecht Dürer’, in ‘Festschrift für Wolfgang

Krönig’, Aachener Kunstblätter, 51 (1971), pp. 229–30; Karl Möseneder, ‘Blickende Dinge: Anthropomorphes bei Albrecht Dürer’, Pantheon, 45 (1986), pp. 15–23; Hermann Leber, Albrecht Dürers Landschaftsaquarelle: Topographie und Genese (Hildesheim, Zürich and New York, 1988), pp. 33–9, 59, 147–69; and Felix Thürlemann, ‘Der Balkon im Auge: Dürers Arco-Aquarell als Theorie der Mimesis’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, no. 227 (30 September–1 October 1993), pp. 67–8. Also on Dürer, see Peter Parshall, ‘Graphic Knowledge: Albrecht Dürer and the Imagination’, Art Bulletin, 95 (September 2013), pp. 393–410. On Herri met de Bles, see Michel Weemans, Herri Met de Bles: Les Ruses du paysage au temps de Bruegel et d’Erasme (Paris, 2013). My thanks to Giovanni Careri and Angela Mangoni for alerting me to Weeman’s work. Also pertinent are Joseph Leo Koerner, ‘Bosch’s Contingency’, in Kontingenz, ed. Henri de Riedmatten et al. (Munich, 1998), pp. 242–83; Koerner, ‘Impossible Objects: Bosch’s Realism’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 46 (2004), pp. 73–97; Reindert L. Falkenburg, ‘The Devil Is in the Detail: Ways of Seeing Joachim Patinir’s “World Landscapes”’, in Patinir: Essays and Critical Catalogue, ed. Alejandro Vergara, exh. cat., Madrid, Museo del Prado (Madrid, 2007), pp. 61–79; and Stephen Campbell’s brief discussion of the sphinx-like rock formation in the background of Cosmè Tura’s Annunciation on the Ferrara Cathedral organ-shutters (Cosmè Tura of Ferrara: Style, Politics and the Renaissance City, 1450–1495 [New Haven, CT, and London, 1998], p. 156). Koerner further develops his account of Bosch in Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life, The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2016); see in particular his discussion of and around Bosch’s Lisbon Temptation of St Anthony, pp. 155–78. Finally, both Italian and Northern images (including nine by Dürer) are illustrated and discussed under the rubric of ‘double images’ in Jean-Hubert Martin and Dario Gamboni, eds, Une image peut en cacher une autre, exh. cat., Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (Paris, 2009). 13 And an equal stretch in the same painting: note how the white robe of the second Dominican friar being attacked in the right middle distance may (almost?) be seen as a head in prole, with a long Jimmy Durante-like nose pointing downward at the left. 14 Compare Leonardo: ‘The painter’s mind endeavours to be a mirror, for a mirror always makes itself have

references to pages the colour of the object that is reected by it. A mirror is indeed full of as many things as happen to stand opposite it. A painter ought to know therefore that he cannot be good at his craft unless he is a universal master of creating through his art all the qualities of the forms which nature produces. But this cannot be done unless he sees them and retraces them in his mind . . . And in fact, whatever is in the universe as essence, occurrence, or imagination, the painter must rst have in his mind and then in his hands. His hands must be of such excellence that they can shape things into a well-proportioned harmony by a single glance and take no more time doing it than it takes the things to be.’ Cited in Eugenio Garin, Science and Civic Life in the Renaissance, trans. Peter Munz (Garden City, NY, 1969), pp. 51–2. Compare the slightly different version in Edward MacCurdy, ed., The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (New York, 1955), p. 857. 15 Mary Pardo, ‘The Subject of Savoldo’s Magdalene’, Art Bulletin, LXXI/1 (March 1989), p. 83. Further page references to Pardo’s article will be in parentheses in the text. 16 D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London, 1958), p. 36. 17 Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago, IL, and London, 1987), p. 161. A book of considerable originality, with particular emphasis on the thought of Ficino and Bruno. 18 Charles G. Nauert, Jr, Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought (Urbana, IL, 1965), p. 269. Nauert’s basic view owes much to Eugenio Garin, as when he writes: ‘so far was medieval magic from perishing in the Renaissance, that some intellectual historians have concluded that magic became more important, not less so, in the later epoch. From being an unspoken and often unacknowledged element in the mental world of European men, magic during the Renaissance stepped forth into the light of day as a central element of culture; and the Renaissance marks not a stage in the abandonment of the occult in favor of pure reason, but a re-emphasis of the magical world view’ (pp. 225–6). See in this connection Garin’s brilliant chapter ‘Magic and Astrology in the Civilization of the Renaissance’, in his Science and Civic Life in the Renaissance, esp. pp. 163–5. 19 In addition to the books by Walker, Couliano and Nauert cited above, I have found particularly instructive the following: André Chastel, Marsilio Ficino et l’art

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(Geneva and Lille, 1954); Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997); Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford, 2007), esp. chap. 2, ‘Fantasies: Seeing Without What Was Within’, pp. 39–77, and chap. 4, ‘Glamours: Demons and Virtual Worlds’, pp. 123–60; Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: The Demonization of Christians in Medieval Christendom (New York, 1975); Michael Cole, ‘The Demonic Arts and the Origin of the Medium’, Art Bulletin, LXXXIV/4 (December 2002), pp. 621–40; Brian Copenhaver, ‘How to Do Magic, and Why?’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 137–70 (on Ficino); Marsilio Ficino, The Book of Life, trans. Charles Boer (Woodstock, CT, 1980); Eugenio Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life, trans. Carolyn Jackson and June Allen, rev. by the author and Clare Robertson (London, 1983), esp. pp. 61–78 (on Ficino); Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1999), esp. chap. 9, ‘Rival Disciplines Explored’; Frank Klaassen, The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance (University Park, PA, 2013), esp. chap. 7, ‘Medieval Ritual Magic and Renaissance Magic’, pp. 187–218 (on Ficino and Agrippa); Philippe Morel, Magie, astres et démons dans l’art italien de la Renaissance (Paris, 2008); Ingrid Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic (Chicago, IL, and London, 2008); Juanita Feros Ruys, Demons in the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, MI, and Bradford, 2017); Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex, and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago, IL, and London, 2002), esp. chap. 8, ‘“This Is my Body”: Witches and Desecration’, pp. 207–40. Stephens’s article ‘“In the Body”: The Canon Episcopi, Andrea Alciati, and Gianfrancesco Pico’s Humanized Demons’, in Demonology and Witch-hunting in Early Modern Europe, ed. Julian Goodare, Rita Voltmer and Liv Helene Willumsen (forthcoming), is also of great interest, as is his translation of an important text discussed in that article, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s The Witch, or On the Deceptions of Demons, to appear in the I Tatti Renaissance Library (in preparation). Stephens, ‘Habeas Corpus: Demonic Bodies in Ficino, Psellus, and Malleus Maleficarum’, in The Body in Early Modern Italy, ed. Julia L. Hairston and Walter Stephens (Baltimore, MD, 2010), pp. 74–91; Claudia Swan, Art, Science and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland: Jacques de

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Gheyn ii (1564–1629) (Cambridge and New York, 2005), esp. chaps 5 and 6; Stéphane Toussaint, ‘L’ars de Marsile Ficin, entre esthétique et magie’, in L’art de la Renaissance entre science et magie, ed. Philippe Morel (Rome, 2006), pp. 455–67 (a rich essay, which tellingly contrasts Panofskyan and Warburgian conceptions of Renaissance art, the latter, of course, open to the demonic); Christopher S. Wood, ‘Countermagical Combinations by Dosso Dossi’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, nos 49/50 (Spring–Autumn 2006), pp. 151–70; Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago, IL, and London, 1964) and Charles Zika, The Appearance of Witchcraft: Print and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-century Europe (London, 2007). The title of Gianfrancesco’s text alerts one to the fact that demons were frequently said to cause delusions in their victims, as was also remarked by contemporary writers on melancholy, another major theme in the early modern period. On melancholy and delusions see, in particular, Clark, ‘Fantasies’, and of course Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York, 2001) and Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (Cambridge, 1964). Two passages from works just cited are particularly arresting. The rst, from Grafton’s study of Cardano (a famous astrologer, physician and mathematician), conveys one version of mid-sixteenth-century Italian thought on the topic of demons: ‘In [his book] On Variety, Cardano . . . described, at great length, the world and habits of the daemons who inhabited the upper realms . . . Later in the work, in the detailed discussion of daemons to which Cardano devoted book 16, he described at horric length the ways in which they interacted with humans: “They come, sometimes, when called, or produce the image of one coming. Sometimes they are gentle and wise, and predict certain future things, surrounding them with a thousand ambiguities and mingling them with lies. Others choke humans, or, if they cannot do that, drive them to despair. They make some think they are entering their bodies. They kill the sons of others, not on their own, but by a certain art, in exactly the same way that men use net and trident to kill sh on the bottom of the sea.” Cardano advised against becoming acquainted with daemons, since, like tyrants, powerful men, and wild animals, they made dangerous company’ (Cardano’s Cosmos, pp. 167–8).

See also Cardano, The Book of My Life, trans. Jean Stoner, intro. Anthony Grafton (New York, 2002). The second, from Cole’s superb article on the demonic arts, cites Francesco Cattani da Diacceto’s discourse ‘On the Art of Magic’s Superstition’ (Discorso . . . sopra la superstizzione dell’arte magica [1567]): ‘[Demons] can also form themselves into bodies and present themselves to our eyes in various aspects [specie], it being within their power to operate those things that one conducts to an end with the local motions of inferior bodies. One of the things demons can do is operate bodies that appear to be men, or some sort of animal, the likeness of this animal consisting in its gure and its color. The gure is induced by means of local motion, just as painters, by means of brushes and other instruments, color their bodies. In this manner, then, they gure and color their bodies, and the bodies then appear at one moment in the form of a man, in the next in the form of a woman, in the next in the form of an animal, or of another thing, according to what the demons judge most harmful to others’ (‘The Demonic Arts and the Origin of the Medium’, p. 623). Cole goes on to argue, persuasively to my mind, that for Diacetto and others the inferior bodies in question were mainly those of air. But in the present context might one not also imagine that they could be folds, creases, depressions, bulges and other irregularities in drapery? Or indeed (coming full circle metaphorically) the imitation of such folds, creases, bulges and other irregularities by a painter’s brushwork? One further set of remarks. Although there exists no hard documentation for the events in question, in Mexico in 1531 a recent Catholic convert named Juan Diego, passing the hill of Tepeyac on his way to Tlatelolco, was accosted by a resplendent vision of the Virgin Mary, who instructed him to go to his bishop and tell him to have a church built on the spot. Juan Diego tries to do so but is put off; but the Virgin appears to him again and instructs him to gather owers and conceal them in his filma or cloak, then return to the bishop and open the cloak in his presence. When Juan Diego does so the owers fall to the ground and reveal, imprinted on the cloak, a beautiful full-length picture of the Virgin. The image in question is the famous Our Lady of Guadalupe, which eventually became the most sacred image in Mexican history and is today found in the Minor Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City. Not surprisingly, modern

references to pages scholarship has raised a host of serious questions about this account, starting with the supposed date of the event, but what strikes me, if one regards the date of 1531 not as a chronological fact but nevertheless as a signicant feature of the story, is the coincidence with the years of Savoldo’s activity – by which I mean that the alleged spectacular appearance of the image of the Virgin in a piece of clothing in the New World forms an antithetical, religiously positive counterpart to the proliferation in North Italy of (until now) unseeable demonic faces and masks in the clothing and drapery in Savoldo’s paintings. On the Mexican image, see, for example, Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797 (Tucson, AZ, 1995, rev. 2017). For a stimulating treatment of the concept of a medium (I am here referring back to Cole’s article), see Antonio Somaini, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory: The Medium and the Apparat’, Grey Room, no. 62 (Winter 2016), pp. 6–41. 20 My deployment of the concept of ‘inuence’ in this book has also been coloured by the arguments developed in François Roustang’s subtle account of Ericksonian suggestion and its implications for psychoanalytic practice in the former’s Influence (Paris, 1990). Thus Roustang remarks apropos of all the traits, habits, assumptions and elements of seemingly personal style a man or woman acquires without being aware of it from his or her acculturation, surroundings, interactions with others, and the like: They are at the same time that which characterizes our individuality and that which allows us to communicate with others and with the world. Because each of us is only the nodal point of a network, in such a way that it is vain to wish to separate that which truly belongs to us and that which was transmitted to us. Just as it is useless to want to distinguish an interiority that would be our exclusive affair and those of our gestures and manner that derive from the collective. Because we always have only the feelings and sensations and thoughts that our entourage has taught us and which are inscribed in us. We are only the product of multiple forces. The intermingling of the weave and of the chain of socio-cultural tissue that constitutes us is at the same time this particular point and the entirety of the canvas. That in us which is the most inalienable is

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already and from the start entirely relational (pp. 91–2; my translation). (Ils sont donc à la fois ce qui caractérise notre individualité et ce qui nous permet de communiquer avec les autres et avec le monde. Car chacun entre nous n’est que le noeud n’un réseau, de telle sorte qu’il est vain de vouloir séparer ce qui nous appartient en propre et ce qui nous a été transmis. De même qu’il est inutile de vouloir distinguer une intériorité qui serait notre seule affaire et nos gestes et manière qui relèveraient du collectif. Car nous n’avons jamais que les sentiments et les sensations et les pensées que notre entourage nous a appris et qui se sont inscrits en nous. Nous ne sommes qu’une résultante de forces multiples. L’entrecroisement de la trame et de la chaîne du tissu socioculturel qui nous constitue est à la fois ce point particulier et l’ensemble de la toile. Ce qui en nous est le plus inaliénable est déjà et depuis toujours instance relationnelle.) 21 Clark, Thinking with Demons, p. 458. 22 Stephen B. Dowd, Venice’s Most Loyal City: Civic Identity in Renaissance Brescia (Cambridge, MA, 2010), p. 188. The entire chapter ‘Witches’, pp. 174–91, which also describes a political struggle between the Venetian authorities and the inquisitorial branch of the Church, is of interest in this context. See also Stephen J. Campbell, The Endless Periphery: Towards a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto’s Italy (Chicago, IL, and London, 2019), in particular the (to me) indispensable chap. 5, ‘Brescia and Bergamo, 1520–50: Sacred Naturalism and the Place of the Eucharist’, pp. 181–226. 23 Savoldo’s ‘continual contact’ with the Dominican Order is noted by Gregori in her essay on the Death of St Peter Martyr (p. 74), with particular reference to an article by Alessandro Nova detailing those relations, ‘Brescia and Frankfurt: Savoldo’, Burlington Magazine, CXXXII, no. 1047 (1990), pp. 433–4. 24 Paul Vandenbroeck, ‘The Axiology and Ideology of Jheronimus Bosch’, in Bosch: The 5th Centenary Exhibition, ed. Pilar Silva Maroto, exh. cat., Madrid, Museo del Prado (London, 2017), p. 92. 25 Apropos of what he takes to be the relative disappearance of double images and the like from Italian painting after Mantegna, Stephen J. Campbell remarks:

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156–60

‘Most likely, the need to sustain the enterprise of Christian art, increasingly the target of iconoclastic critiques as the century progressed, could no longer sustain such open avowals of the vagaries of sight’ (‘Cloud-poiesis’, p. 19). Which, if true, makes the occurrence of faces and masks in the drapery and clothing in Savoldo’s paintings all the more remarkable. 26 Creighton E. Gilbert, ‘Savoldo, Giovanni Girolamo’, in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (London, 1996), XXVII, p. 892. Also: ‘Savoldo was an “independent” working in Venice in the age of Titian. His failure to follow that great painter’s taste cost him fame and success; indeed, the best known fact about him in his lifetime was that he was little known’ (Creighton Gilbert, ed., Major Masters of the Renaissance, exh. cat., Waltham, MA, Poses Institute of Fine Arts, Brandeis University (1963), p. 23). 27 See Adriano Prosperi, ‘The Religious Crisis in Early Sixteenth-century Italy’, in Lorenzo Lotto: Rediscovered Master of the Renaissance, ed. David Alan Brown, Peter Humfrey and Mauro Lucco, exh. cat., Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art; Bergamo, Accademia di belle arti G. Carrara; Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (New Haven, CT, and London, 1997–9), pp. 21–6. Also Massimo Firpo, Artisti, gioiellieri, eretici: Il mondo di Lorenzo Lotto tra Riforma e Controriforma (Rome, 2001). 28 Cited by Mauro Lucco in the catalogue entry for Lotto’s Virgin and Child with SS Jerome and Nicholas of Tolentino (1523–4) in Lorenzo Lotto, ed. Brown, Humfrey and Lucco, p. 147. 29 Also a far more complex gure in important respects. See in this connection the brilliant analysis of Lotto’s art and its many references to the work of other artists, and indeed a range of different religious and artistic sites, in Campbell, The Endless Periphery, esp. chap. 4, ‘Distant Cities: Lorenzo Lotto and Gaudenzio Ferrari’, pp. 97–180. 30 Roberto Longhi, ‘Cose Bresciane del cinquecento’, in Scritti giovanili, 1912–1922, 2 vols, Edizione delle opere complete di Roberto Longhi (Florence, 1961), I, p. 339. 31 Alessandro Ballarin, ‘Gerolamo Savoldo: Gli albori d’un nuovo umanesimo nella pittura del Savoldo’, in Ballarin, Gerolamo Savoldo (Milan, 1966), n.p. 32 Gaetano Panazza, ‘Gian Gerolamo Savoldo: quesiti risolti e problem insoluti’, in Savoldo 1990, p. 37. 33 Finally, in a later essay, Gilbert notes what he sees as Savoldo’s ‘lifelong preference for images of single quiet

heroes. Even when portraits are not counted, paintings of only one or two gures play a role in his oeuvre perhaps greater than in that of any other contemporary. He makes them, in their emphatic airy empty worlds, subjects as well as objects of monumental meditation’; ‘Several of the Contexts of Savoldo’s “Dead Christ”’, Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, LXXIX/1 (1992), p. 32. Here, too, the notion of ‘emphatic airy empty worlds’ is hard to reconcile with what I have tried to show is the intensely somatic internal dynamic of Savoldo’s paintings. In a similar vein, Gilbert in his dissertation remarks in certain paintings Savoldo’s gures’ ‘lassitude, the sense that their heroism has nothing to apply itself to in this perfect empty world’ (G, p. 353). 34 Pardo adds in a note: ‘Gilbert [in his dissertation] has a very seductive hypothesis for the Magdalene ’s original ownership: in 1527, Savoldo was commissioned to do a Saint Jerome (very probably the painting in London, National Gallery, no. 3092) for Giovan Paulo Averoldi, a member of the prominent Brescian family . . . The archives show that G. P. Averoldi . . . regularly invested in vanguard Venetian painting. The London Magdalene was recorded in the Averoldi Collection by 1620 . . .; perhaps it had been there, like the nearly contemporary Jerome, since the cinquecento. If it had, it was indeed painted for an audience of cognoscenti’ (p. 90, n.88). More broadly, in the brief review of the 1990 exhibition ‘Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo tra Foppa, Giorgione e Caravaggio’ (see n.23), Alessandro Nova remarks that, according to Marcantonio Michiel, a Venetian nobleman interested in art, Savoldo had four pictures in two of the best and most selective Venetian collections (none of the pictures seems to have survived): ‘From Michiel’s description of these Venetian palaces,’ Nova writes, ‘it is clear that Savoldo’s paintings were displayed in a sort of Wunderkammer where one could also admire the works of the best artists of the time (Giorgione, Titian, Cariani, Palma, Lotto) mixed with Roman antiquities, precious crystals, medals and all sorts of natural and unnatural curiosities. This atmosphere of rarity and exclusive elitism perhaps relates as well to Savoldo’s slender output, his meticulousness and slow working procedures’ (p. 433). As Nova also remarks, the multiple Magdalenes suggest that Savoldo painted the rst for a patron, and that as the painting became known other collectors requested copies, or rather close variations (p. 433).

references to pages Fascinatingly, the pattern of folds and creases in the shawls differs sharply from one variant to another. 35 Such a claim might better t Veronese, who in 1573 defended himself before the Inquisition for including a depiction of a dog along with various seemingly merely secular gures in his magnicent canvas of the Last Supper in SS Giovanni e Paolo, or, even more closely, innumerable artists of later times. But I don’t fault Pardo for her proto-modernist leanings – my own private ahistorical comparison for Savoldo has been Mallarmé. 36 See in this connection Keith Christiansen, ‘Giovanni Bellini and the Practice of Devotional Painting’, in Giovanni Bellini and the Art of Devotion, ed. Ronda Kasl, exh. cat., Indianapolis Museum of Art (Indianapolis, IN, 2004), pp. 7–58. The other essays in the catalogue (by Kasl, Andrea Golden, David A. Miller, and Cinzia Maria Mancuso and Antonietta Gallone) are also of interest. For general background, see Eugene F. Rice, Jr, Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD, 1985). 37 Belting’s essay, ‘Poetry and Painting: Saint Jerome in the Wilderness’, appears in Davide Gasparotto, ed., Giovanni Bellini: Landscapes of Faith in Renaissance Venice, exh. cat., Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017–18 (Los Angeles, 2017), pp. 1–23. The citations given are to pp. 25 and 25–6. (The Ufzi picture he mentions is the one briey discussed by me earlier, see n.11, which includes the large face-like rock mass directly in front of the saint.) An essay by Gasparotto, ‘Giovanni Bellini and Landscape’, pp. 11–23, is also of interest. See also Belting, ‘St. Jerome in Venice: Giovanni Bellini and the Dream of the Solitary Life’, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, XVII/1 (Spring 2014), pp. 15–33. 38 A claim that goes somewhat against the current. See Francesco Frangi, ‘Sacre conversazioni e immagini di meditazione, tra Venezia e Brescia’, in T, pp. 118–28, esp. pp. 119–20. Interestingly, Frangi emphasizes the originality of both the Hampton Court and Turin compositions, but stops short of suggesting that they have other than ‘devotional’ ends in view. 39 On this difcult-to-parse painting, see the catalogue entry by Francesco Frangi in T, pp. 48–50. (The Milan canvas does not appear in his catalogue raisonné of 1992.) It might be noted that the tower at the extreme right also contains a face or mask of sorts, with two round eyes (windows) and a large open mouth (a squarish doorway).

160–66

185

40 See Michael Fried, After Caravaggio (New Haven, CT, and London, 2016), chap. 2, ‘Toward a Post-Caravaggio Pictorial Poetics’. 41 Mina Gregori, ‘Caravaggio Today’, in The Age of Caravaggio, exh. cat., New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte (New York, 1985), p. 39. In MC I write that the gure in question ‘looks back with an expression of dismay, or bitterness, or regret, as if – here one’s powers of description become uncertain – as if he were reluctant to depart? Or as if he regretted his participation, assuming it was such, in the murder? Or, indeed, as if he wished he might have interceded to save Matthew? . . . In any case, as an iconic surrogate for the painting’s maker, the eeing bravo’s implication in the murder is undeniable. So what are we to make of his imminent departure from the scene of the crime?’ (p. 205). 42 And something else. In MC I suggest that Caravaggio’s paintings imply two distinct and notionally successive polar ‘moments’ in their production: ‘The rst is a “moment” of extended duration of the painter’s engagement in the ongoing, repetitive, partly automatistic act of painting; I call that “moment” immersive, imagining the painter as so caught up, so immersed, in this phase of his work on the painting (or rather, simply, in his work on the painting) as to be less than fully aware of any sharp distinction between the painting and himself. The second is a “moment”, notionally instantaneous, of separating or indeed recoiling from the painting, of becoming detached from it, which is to say of no longer being immersed in work on it but rather of seeing it, taking it in, as if for the rst time; I call that “moment” specular, meaning thereby to emphasize the strictly visual or optical relation between the artist-viewer and the image, or image-artifact, that he has just brought into being. The contrast between the two “moments”, one might say, is between the artist’s being “in” the painting (or at least “continuous” with it in the ongoing process by which the painted image was laid down on the canvas) and nding himself “outside” the painting, of discovering that he has become not just detached but distanced from it, in a relationship of mutual facing (also mutual freezing) that rst establishes the painted image as an image and with it the painting as a picture, as fundamentally addressed to a viewer – in the rst instance, to the artist himself (or herself, needless to say). In Boy Bitten by a Lizard,

186

references to pages

167–9

the second or specular “moment” is dramatized to the extent of largely eclipsing the rst, which can be recovered, made intuitable, only by an act of interpretation that cannot quite point to knockdown evidence in its support either inside or outside the painting. By way of staking out further reaches of my argument, I want to claim that precisely such a double or divided relationship between painter and painting – at once immersive and specular, continuous and discontinuous, prior to the act of viewing and thematizing that act with unprecedented violence – lies at the core of much of Caravaggio’s art, including (or especially) his most radically inventive creations’ (MC, p. 40). In other words, in Caravaggio’s art a certain severing and distancing is as it were built into the ‘internal structure of the pictorial act’ (the title of chap. 6 of MC). In the interest of economy, I have held off introducing these considerations in the present book. But they are intrinsic to Caravaggio’s enterprise as I understand it. 43 Fried, After Caravaggio, pp. 95–8. 44 A huge topic. See Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago, IL, and London, 1990). 45 Not surprisingly, then, nothing like the distinction between immersive and specular ‘moments’, or rather, nothing even remotely like the specular ‘moment’ of distancing, freezing and severing as evoked in the passage from MC cited in n.42 is in play in Savoldo’s art. 46 In this connection, too, it should be noted that although Savoldo seems to have been aware of the rightangle mirror-reversed self-portrait dispositif, as in the Self-portrait as St Jerome, what I have called his entanglement with the painting precluded the later ‘classic’ rendering of that dispositif that I have associated with Annibale and Caravaggio (and their successors). Nor, for that matter, in Savoldo’s work do we nd the various emphases on the lower right corner of the canvas that in MC I associate with Caravaggio, a feature of the latter’s paintings that I understand as acknowledging the exter-

nal, active presence of the painter’s right (brush) hand approximately there. 47 This implies a two-part relation between Savoldo and (after a gap of fty-plus years) Caravaggio, though probably one should introduce at least two more terms into the structure: the Bellinesque devotional picture, from which Savoldo fundamentally departs; and the work of Caravaggio’s successors (Ribera, Manfredi, Valentin, Régnier, von Honthorst, Caracciolo and others), who establish Caravaggism as a going concern, in effect guaranteeing its importance for subsequent European painting. (In an obvious sense, the present book, The Moment of Caravaggio and After Caravaggio, in that order, form a trilogy.) One might note, too, a three-part relation precisely with regard to the depiction of hands among Savoldo, Caravaggio and a major painter not yet mentioned in this book, Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Guercino, in whose masterly canvases of 1619–20 the conspicuous presence of crossed hands and limbs serves at once to solicit the viewer and to keep him or her at a certain (near) distance. On this feature of Guercino’s art, see Fried, After Caravaggio, chap. 4, ‘Guercino’s Anni Mirabiles, 1619–1620’, pp. 135–73. As for the three- or four-part relations among the painters in question, see my discussion of what I call ‘hinge-like structures’ with regard to the relations among Courbet, Manet and Impressionism, and among Chardin, Greuze and David, in Manet’s Modernism; or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago, IL, and London, 1996), pp. 411–13. This is not the place for a fuller discussion of the recursive nature of such structures, but see the very interesting remarks by Stephen Mulhall in the last pages of his essay ‘Deep Relationality and the Hinge-like Structure of History: Michael Fried’s Photographs’, in Michael Fried and Philosophy: Modernism, Intention, and Theatricality, ed. Mathew Abbott (New York and Abingdon, Oxon, 2018), pp. 87–103.

AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S

A num ber of f ri e n d s a n d s c h o la r s have contributed in diverse ways to this book. My thanks, then, to Jennifer Ashton, Stephen Bann, Stephen Campbell, Keith Christiansen, Thomas Demand, Francesco Frangi, Anthony Grafton, the late Ricky Jay, John O’Malley, Walter Benn Michaels, Peter Parshall, Robert Pippin, Charley Ray, Walter Stephens and Molly Warnock, for advice and conversation, the latter often in front of fascinating paintings. Special thanks are owed to two Italian friends, Giovanni Careri and Angela Mengoni, for inviting me to give a series of seminars at the Università Iuav di Venezia during the spring of 2018; among other benets, my sixweek stay in that fabulous city enabled me to visit the stunning exhibition ‘Tiziano e la pittura del cinquecento tra Venezia e Brescia’ in the Museo Santa Giulia in Brescia, which included no fewer than eight important Savoldos. Happily, Giovanni Careri and Angela Mengoni went through the exhibition with me, and the exchanges we had in the course of a memorable day proved extremely fruitful, as I was sure they would. I am grateful, too, to Michael Leaman of Reaktion Books for welcoming my project; to Sally Nichols for her invaluable help gathering the illustrations for this volume; and to the nonpareil Gillian Malpass for designing the book for maximum effectiveness. I might also mention that my involvement with Northern Italian art goes back to my rst semester of graduate school under a great art historian and teacher of genius, Sydney J. Freedberg. Finally, two other longtime companions in looking deserve particular mention: my wife, Ruth Leys, and the painter Joseph Marioni, both of whose insights I have freely turned to my own purposes. This book is dedicated to Marioni and to another painter of high achievement, Frank Stella.

P H OTO AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Some locations of artworks are also given below, in the interest of brevity: Accademia Carrara, Bergamo/Mario Bonotto – photo Scala, Florence: 62; The Art Institute of Chicago: 4, 8, 14, 73; Banca Intesa Sanpaolo, La Gallerie d’Italia, Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, Naples: 26; Basilica di San Giovanni e Paolo, Venice: 6; Biblioteka Uniwersytecka, Warsaw: 10; The British Museum, London: 56; Chiesa di San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome: 11, 23, 59; Chiesa di San Nicolò, Treviso/ Mario Bonotto – photo Scala, Florence: 76; Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome: 13; Galleria Nazionale dell’Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome: 27; Galleria Sabauda, Turin/photos Sergio Anelli/Electa/Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images: 61, 72; Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice/photo akg-images/Cameraphoto: 82; Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice/photos Scala, Florence: 44, 74, 81; Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence: 83; Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence/photos Scala, Florence: 79, 80; Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/photos Scala, Florence/bpk, Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin: 40, 55; Groeninge-museum, Bruges: 51; Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Edward W. Forbes in memory of Alice F. Cary, photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College: 15; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles: 36, 41; formerly Kaiser-FriedrichMuseum, Berlin/photo Scala, Florence/bpk, Bildagentur für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte, Berlin: 32; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna: 28, 46; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 5, 22, 42, 50, 53, 54, 78; Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali (MiBAC) – Galleria Borghese, Rome: 2, 21, 25, 31, 57, 58; Ministero per i beni e le attività culturali (MiBAC) – Galleria Sabauda, Turin/ photos Scala, Florence: 63, 85; Musée du Louvre, Paris: 12; Musei Capitolini, Rome/

photo acknowledgements photos Scala, Florence: 65, 66; Museo d’Arte Sacra San Martino, Alzano Lombardo: 9; Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples: 7; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/ photo Scala, Florence: 16; The National Galley, London/photos Scala, Florence: 17, 18, 33, 39, 52; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC: 38, 43, 45, 64, 75; National Gallery of Ireland, on indefinite loan from the Jesuit Community, Leeson St, Dublin, who acknowledge the kind generosity of the late Dr Marie Lea-Wilson, 1992/photo © National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin: 24; Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan: 19, 34, 35; Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, Brescia: 3, 37, 70; Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, Brescia/photos Scala, Florence: 67, 68, 86; private collection, Milan/ photo Mondadori Portfolio/Electa/Antonio Guerra/Bridgeman Images: 29; private collections: 30 (Bergamo), 84 (Milan); The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Art, Moscow/photo Bridgeman Images: 48; Putnam Foundation, Timken Museum of Art, San Diego, CA: 47, 49; photos © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre, Paris)/ Franck Raux: 1, 20; Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020: 60, 77; San Giobbe, Venice/Mario Bonotto – photo Scala, Florence: 71; Santa Maria delle Grazie, Brescia, photo courtesy Diocesi di Brescia/Ufficio per i beni culturali ecclesiastici: 69.

189

INDEX

Illustration numbers are indicated in italics

Madonna and Child with SS Catherine of Alexandria and Mary Magdalene 161–2, 82

absorption 36–7, 165–6 Age of Caravaggio, The (exhibition) 12, 67

St Jerome in the Desert 162–3, 83 Belting, Hans 62, 162–3 Berenson, Bernard 42, 113–14, 157

Agrippa, Cornelius 151, 152, 153

Bergamo 12, 40, 158

Alzano Lombardo 27, 35

bodily orientation 50

Ancona 40

Bologna 12

angels 35, 97–8, 107, 136

Bosch, Hieronymus 9, 12, 87, 88, 92, 101,

at the tomb of Christ 72

126, 142, 144, 145, 154, 155

of the Annunciation 119, 125–6, 152,

Last Judgement 91, 51

153 Raphael summoning the fish 17–18, 102, 108, 113, 152

Temptation of St Anthony 153 Boschetto, Antonio 11 Brescia 10, 11, 12, 115, 155, 156

Anguissola, Sofonisba 140

Museo di Santa Giulia 12

anthropomorphic imagery 144

San Barnaba 122

Aretino, Pietro 10

Santa Maria delle Grazie 126

Art Bulletin 91

school of 157

auto-mimesis 64, 83

Val Camonica 154

autonomy 93, 160, 165–6, 167

Bruno, Giordano 151

Ballarin, Alessandro 159

Campagnola, Giulio, Astrologer, The 101,

Baroque 32 Bayer, Andrea 12, 67–71, 96, 107 Bellini, Giovanni 6, 78, 144, 157, 161–3

147, 153, 56 Campbell, Stephen 126 Endless Periphery, The: Towards a

index Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto’s Italy 115–16 Caravaggio 48–52, 164–9

Catholic Church 37, 40, 116, 142, 153, 158, 171 Mass 151, 154

and Lombard tradition 12

Cavell, Stanley 36–7, 38

as predecessor of Savoldo 8, 11–12, 48,

Cecco del Caravaggio 142

141–2, 157

Chicago Art Institute 22, 38

decapitation in art of 166

Christiansen, Keith 11–12, 34, 67

depiction of hands 167

Cima da Conegliano 62, 156

handling of drapery 94, 145–7

Clark, Stuart, Thinking with Demons

Longhi on 96 Savoldo’s affinity with 32, 34–5, 164–9

153–4 Corinth, Lovis 140 Correggio 6, 12, 26

self-portrayal 48–9, 52, 59, 140

Couliano, Ioan P. 151

Bacchino Malato 49, 21

Courbet, Gustave 51, 52, 140, 167

Bacchus 50

Cranach, Lucas, the Elder 12, 87, 91, 142

Boy Bitten by a Lizard 44, 49, 139, 166, 167, 18

Temptation of St Anthony 91, 50 Cremona 12

Calling of St Matthew 108–9, 136, 59 David with the Head of Goliath 49, 166, 25 Death of the Virgin 36, 166, 12 Judith and Holofernes 51–2, 27

decapitation 26, 52, 166, 167 Degas, Edgar 56 demons, demonic imagery 9, 92, 116, 151–6, 158, 159, 166, 171

Lute Player 67

Derrida, Jacques 94

Martyrdom of St Matthew 32–5, 108,

Descartes, René 39

166, 11, 23 Martyrdom of St Ursula 34, 49, 51–2, 26

‘devotional’ paintings 10, 160, 161–7 distancing 8, 32, 57, 125, 127–8, 163, 164, 167, 169

Musicians, The 49, 50, 22,

Dominican order 22, 154, 155

Penitent Magdalene 36, 37, 166, 13

‘dragon’ imagery, and St Margaret 152

St Jerome Writing 166

Dürer, Albrecht 12, 69, 87, 142, 144

Supper at Emmaus 113

faces appearing in work 143–4

Taking of Christ 49, 51, 24

Self-portrait at Age Twenty-two 142

see also Fried, Michael, After

Six Pillows 142–4, 78

Caravaggio; Moment of Caravaggio, The

Ebert-Schifferer, Sybille 11

Cardano, Girolamo 151

Elsner, Jaś 16–17

Carracci, Annibale, Self-portrait with

empathic projection 37, 38, 57, 84, 95,

Other Figures 46, 59, 139, 19 Carracci family 12

134–5, 150, 165–6 entanglement 128, 167–9

191

192

index Eucharist 115–16, 125, 151, 152, 154,

and other art historians 11

171

on Penitent St Jerome 63

Eucharistic naturalism 115, 119

on Portrait of a Young Man (St John the Evangelist) 59–62

facing into the picture 51, 165

on Savoldo and Lotto 158

Ficino, Marsilio 151–2, 153

on Savoldo’s early paintings 78

De via coelitus comparanda 151 Flemish painters 12, 13, 62 Florence 10, 16, 156 Foppa, Vincenzo 12, 157 Francesco II Sforza, Duke of Milan 10, 96, 149, 156 Frangi, Francesco 11, 12, 139 Frankfurt 11 Freedberg, Sydney J. 36, 41, 42, 64–6, 85, 116, 155 Painting in Italy, 1500–1600 13–17, 22–6, 29 Fried, Michael After Caravaggio 164–5 Moment of Caravaggio, The 8, 9, 36, 44,

on Savoldo’s individual figures 14–16, 132 on Savoldo’s self-portraits 8, 35, 47, 52, 54–5, 137–40 on Savoldo’s signatures 159 on Savoldo’s training 156 on smallness of Savoldo’s oeuvre 157 on Tobias and the Angel 104, 107 Giorgione 6, 12, 16, 47–8, 78, 104, 107, 148, 157 Giotto 144 Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo tra Foppa, Giorgione e Caravaggio (exhibition) 11, 15 Golden Legend 84, 85, 98

48, 49, 59, 109, 136, 139, 164–5,

Gregori, Mina 11, 27, 29–31, 34, 166

166, 170

Grimani, Cardinal Domenico 92

Galileo Galilei 39

hands 157, 163

gallery pictures 53, 165, 166–7, 169

grasping/gripping 27, 33, 39, 40, 48,

Gaston de Foix, duc de Nemours 47,

57, 58, 64, 66, 94–5, 97, 110, 115,

139 Gentileschi, Artemisia 140

134, 150, 167 left and right 150, 170

Germany 142

Hegel, G.W.F. 174n10

Gilbert, Creighton

Herri met de Bles 144

admiration for Savoldo 159

hinge-like structures 186

on Adoration of the Shepherds (Turin) 116 on Death of St Peter Martyr 31, 32 on donor figures 112 on Giorgione 157 on hands in Savoldo’s works 35, 56–7, 61–2, 67, 86–7, 121 and Longhi 13, 56–7

imaginative identification 9, 37, 38, 57, 71, 77 immersion vs specularity 185–6n18, 186n45 Impressionism 56 influence 152, 156, 183n20 internal mimesis 83, 86

index Jesi 40

hands in work of 42–3, 113–14

Jesuits 142

and paintings of St Jerome 62

Jews 178n15

portraits 38, 84, 158

‘Jheronimus Bosch e Venezia’ (exhibition)

Savoldo’s closeness to 12

91–2 Juan Diego, vision of 182n19

Crucifixion 158 A Dominican Friar as St Peter Martyr 22, 40–43, 15

Koerner, Joseph, Moment of Selfportraiture in German Renaissance Art, The 143–4

Holy Family with St Catherine of Alexandria 113–14, 62 Madonna and Child with St Peter Martyr 22, 7

Laocoön and His Sons (sculpture) 25

St Jerome (two versions) 163

Leonardo da Vinci 6, 12, 16, 82, 96, 107,

Virgin and Child with SS Jerome and

148, 157 Last Supper 114

Nicholas of Tolentino 41–2, 16 Luther, Martin 115–16

Lombardy Lombardy/Venice divide 13 tradition 12–13, 16, 22, 157 Longhi, Roberto

magic, magical imagery 151–4 in Adorations 113, 116–19, 126, 152 and Mass 151, 154

on Gilbert 13, 56–7

miracle-working 126

and Lombard connection 13, 32–3

and mirrors 150

on Lotto 158

in Portrait of a Woman as St Margaret

on Savoldo’s treatment of hands 8, 35, 52, 55–7, 58, 141, 157 on St Matthew and the Angel 96

121, 152–3 quasi-magical operation 18, 104, 115, 116

on Savoldo 159

and science 142

on Savoldo as predecessor of

in Tobias and the Angel 104, 106–7, 113,

Caravaggio 109, 145–7, 157, 169 on Savoldo’s use of drapery 85, 94, 145–7 ‘Cose Bresciane del Cinquecento’ 52 ‘Quesiti caravaggeschi, II: I precedenti’ 12

152 see also demons, demonic imagery magnetic gesture 18, 104, 108–9, 113, 116–17, 136, 152 Magus 152, 163 Manfredi, Bartolomeo 51, 142, 165, 167

Loreto 40

Mantegna, Andrea 6, 144

Lotto, Lorenzo

Mantua 12

altarpieces 157–8 contrasted with Savoldo 10–11, 15, 84 faces and masks in work of 144 frescoes 158

martyrdom 28–9, 31–2, 34, 35, 39, 42–3, 85, 109, 137 Michelangelo Buonarroti 6, 10, 25, 109 Milan 10, 12, 34, 95, 157 Zecca 107, 156, 159

193

194

index mimesis 84, 87, 106, 136, 165 auto-mimesis 64, 83, 107, 145 internal 83, 86

Pesaro 10 San Domenico 64 Peter Martyr, St 22

mimetic dynamic 165–6

Peterzano, Simone 109

mimetism 38

Pico della Mirandola, Gianfrancesco 151

mirror-reflection 44–50, 56, 58, 59, 64,

pictorial anagrams 57

109, 127, 135, 139, 148–50, 160, 167, 170

pictorial density 165

right-angle 44–6, 49, 50, 58–9

Piero di Cosimo 144

mirror-reversal 38, 40, 44–6, 48, 71, 139, 150, 166 models 30, 31, 33–4, 84, 149 Montagna, Bartolomeo 62 Moretto da Brescia (Alessandro Buonvicino) 12, 115, 157, 159 Nativity with the Shepherds, St Jerome and a Hieronymite Donor 127, 70 nature, imitating itself 148–9, 150 nearness 137, 141 New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art 12 Northern art 87–92, 142, 145, 158, 159

Pietro d’Argenta 10 Pino, Paolo 85, 159, 160, 167 Dialogo di pittura 10, 11, 47–8, 148–51, 156 Pittori della realtà in Lombardia, I (exhibition) 12 Pordenone 25–6 Protestantism 142 Raphael 6 Fire in the Borgo 91 School of Athens, The 139 Realist paintings 167 reciprocity 174n10 Reformation 39

Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo

Régnier, Nicolas 51, 142, 165, 167

and Caravaggio in Lombardy (exhibi-

relational field 82

tion) 12, 96

religious crisis 9, 115, 142

palm branch of martyrdom 2, 31–5, 39, 42, 85, 137 Palma Vecchio 25, 112 Martyrdom of St Peter of Verona 27–9, 31, 35, 9

Rembrandt van Rijn 140 Ribera, Jusepe de 142 right-angle dispositif 139 Romanino (Girolamo Romani) 62, 115 Rome 16, 25

Panazza, Gaetano 107, 159

Palazzo Barberini 100

paragone 48

S. Luigi dei Francesi 32

Pardo, Mary 77, 103, 148–9, 159–60

Roustang, François, Influence 183n20

‘Subject of Savoldo’s Magdalene, The’ 72–6 Parma 10, 12, 156

sacred naturalism 115 Savoldo, Giovanni Gerolamo

Patinir, Joachim 12, 87, 142

affinity with Caravaggio 164–9

Pensaben, Marco 137

altarpieces 164

index art historians and 11–17 autonomy 160 drapery 71–2, 85–6, 93–101, 107, 109, 118, 135–6, 142, 145–7, 150, 155–6, 170

Adoration of the Shepherds (Venice) 10, 128–9, 71 Adoration of the Shepherds (Washington) 118–19, 125, 152–3, 163, 64

exhibitions 11–12

Crucifixion 11, 13

grotesque images (faces and masks)

Death of St Peter Martyr 11, 14, 22–43,

9, 85–6, 89–91, 95–6, 99–102, 107,

48–9, 57, 58, 64, 71, 85, 98, 127, 137,

125, 129, 135–6, 142–8, 144–8,

139, 141, 145, 150, 154, 158, 159,

150–56, 159, 160, 169, 170

163, 167, 4, 8, 14, 73

hands, depiction of 8–9, 35–40, 42,

Drawing of a Man’s Head 30, 10

52–77, 94–5, 98, 110–16, 118, 121,

Elijah Fed by Ravens 13, 14, 78–85, 87,

126, 127–8, 134, 135, 137, 141, 150,

91, 95–6, 112, 132–4, 145, 154–5,

157, 163, 167

170, 171, 43, 45

‘independent’ paintings 10, 11, 161, 164–5 interest in Northern art 87–92, 126, 142, 145 life and work 9–11

Evangelist 53–4, 58, 134, 29 Head of a Man, The 139, 77 Lamentation over the Dead Christ 59–62, 86–7, 32, 46 Madonna and Child Enthroned among

Lombard roots 13, 33

SS Nicholas, Dominic, Thomas, Jerome

magical effects 106–7, 113, 115,

and Liberale (Treviso altarpiece) 87,

116–17, 119, 121 self-portraits 8, 40, 63, 137–42, 157

137–9, 167, 76 Madonna and Christ Child and Two

signature 52, 137, 159

Angels in Glory with SS Peter,

singularity 6, 128, 158–9

Dominic, Paul and Jerome 64–7, 34,

smallness of oeuvre 157

35

and work of Caravaggio 8 Savoldo, Giovanni Gerolamo, wo r k s Adoration of the Christ Child with SS Jerome and Francis 111–16, 118, 163, 61, 72 Adoration of the Shepherds (Brescia) 9, 122–9, 132, 145, 152–3, 156, 169, 171, 67, 68 Adoration of the Shepherds (Terlizzi) 10, 128–9 Adoration of the Shepherds (Turin) 10, 107, 116–18, 122, 152–3, 158, 63, 85

Magdalenes (as group) 8, 9, 33, 72–7, 100–103, 137, 141, 145, 147, 150, 153, 156, 158, 159–60, 39–41 Penitent St Jerome 62–4, 83, 93–4, 96, 138, 141, 145, 155, 158, 163, 17, 33, 52 Portrait of a Gentleman as St George 71–2, 135, 38, 75 Portrait of a Man in Armour 9, 35, 46–7, 49, 71–2, 134, 139, 148, 150, 158, 166, 170, 1, 20 Portrait of a Woman as St Margaret 119–21, 137, 152–3, 65, 66

195

196

index (Savoldo, wo r k s continued)

Portrait of a Young Man with Flute 67, 157, 158, 37 Portrait of a Young Man as St George 120 Portrait of a Young Man (St John the Baptist?) 157 Portrait of a Young Man (St John the Evangelist) 59–62, 134, 31 Prophet (or Apostle) 52–3, 57, 134, 137–8, 150, 158, 28 Rest on the Flight to Egypt 163–4, 84 St Matthew and the Angel 8, 33, 95–100, 104, 107, 136, 145, 153, 156, 157, 158, 159, 163, 42, 53, 54 SS Paul and Anthony 13, 14, 78–85,

separation of onlookers 126–7, 166–7, 169 severed presence 52, 165, 166 shawls Elijah’s 82, 83 Magdalene’s 8, 9, 76–7, 100–101, 137, 145, 147, 150, 160 Shearman, John 112 style, stylistic considerations 8, 109, 112 art historians and 13, 16–17, 27, 31, 34–5, 52, 104, 141 classical 14, 16 surcharged colour 14, 155 surface, ‘this’ side of and beyond 58, 135, 141 Switzerland 142

87, 95, 112, 132–4, 154–5, 171, 44, 74, 81 Self-portrait in the Costume of St Jerome 54–5, 58–9, 64, 134, 139, 150, 30 Shepherd with a Flute 67–71, 94, 145–7, 158, 36 Temptation of St Anthony (Moscow) 9, 12–13, 87–91, 142, 145, 154, 155, 171, 48 Temptation of St Anthony (San Diego) 9, 12–13, 87–91, 95, 142, 145, 154, 155, 171, 47, 49 Tobias and the Angel 6, 17–18, 34, 104–7, 109, 126, 135–6, 152, 156–7, 158, 163, 2, 57, 58

Terlizzi, Santa Maria la Nova 10, 128–9 Tintoretto 6, 157 Titian 6, 12, 14, 40, 78, 157, 158 Martyrdom of St Peter 25–6, 29, 31, 38 Martyrdom of St Peter, copy by Carlo Loth 22, 6 Martyrdom of St Peter, engraving by Martino Rota 22, 5 Noli me tangere 76–7 Pesaro Madonna 112 Titian e la pittura del cinquecento tra Venezia e Brescia (exhibition) 12 Tobit, Book of 104

Transfiguration 147, 79, 80

transactional field 141

Virgin Adoring the Child with Two

Trent, Council of 39, 142

Donors 109–16, 118, 122, 152–3,

Treviso 10, 40, 87

163, 60

Trithemius of Würzburg 151

Schongauer, Martin 12, 87, 91, 142 Second World War 61 self-portraits, self-portrayal 8, 40, 44–52, 63, 137–42, 148, 157, 166

unknown artist, Adoration of the Child 126–7, 69

index Valentin de Boulogne 51, 142, 165, 167 van der Goes, Hugo 87

San Giobbe 10, 128 SS Giovanni e Paolo 22, 63

Van Gogh, Vincent 140

Venturi, Adolfo and Lionello 11, 157

Vandenbroek, Paul 154

Verona 10, 22

Vasari, Giorgio 95, 107, 156, 159, 160

Veronese, Paolo 6, 157

Lives of the Painters 10, 77

Vivarini, Alvise 156

Veca, Alberto 54 Venice 6, 9, 10, 13, 14, 22, 39, 40, 155, 156, 161 Fondamente Nuove 63 Palazzo Ducale 91

Walker, D. P. 151 Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art 170 witches 119, 126, 152, 153, 154

Riva degli Schiavoni 163–4 San Barnaba, Bargnani chapel 10, 128

Zenale, Bernardo 144

197