The Revival of Pagan Antiquity - 14 October

I'm in general a pretty careful reader, especially when I'm deep in a book for which I have long waited or about whom I've heard a great deal -- and both conditions prevail regarding Aby Warburg's The Revival of Pagan Antiquity, a massive (nearly 900 pages!) collection of his essays and articles on Renaissance art and history that definitely qualifies as a TOME -- really, I've not given myself a cramp like this since I carried Infinite Jest around the Boston area in the 1990s!*

As I say, generally I am a close reader but somehow this time around I found myself, most of the way through an analysis of Domenico Ghirlandaio's Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule before realizing that a change of subject midstream had actually occurred only in my misreading. I felt very silly when I realized this, mortified even, but then I went back to the passage where I thought the subject had been changed a bit and, well, I maintain my hair color has nothing to do with it.

The first third or so of the essay introduces the theme of the relationship between the painter and subject of a portrait in general as well as in particular, and then quickly goes into a comparison between Ghirlandaio's (his name derived from his goldsmith father's specialty of creating garlands of metal flowers for the elegant ladies of 15th century Florence, we learn. I had, in fact, been curious) fresco in the Santa Trinita church and an earlier and more famous treatment by Giotto of the same subject in Santa Croce. I see a lot of this kind of discussion in what little art history I read -- Giotto is always held up as an example of the "old way" of doing things to contrast with whatever Renaissance hot-shot is under discussion and I always stick out my bottom lip a little for Giotto, whose funky, slightly creepy way of rendering human faces and profiles I've always admired. It's not realistic, it's not very individualistic (they do all kind of look alike, Giotto's heads) but it's distinctive and haunting and I dig it. But Warburg had a point; there is a dramatic difference between these two treatments; Giotto's is formal and somewhat flat and very iconic; Ghirlandaio's is naturalistic and humanizing and features depictions of lots of people who, of course, were not present at the original scene.

Among those present are Ghirlandaio's patron, Francesco Sassetti and several members of his family, depicted in the grand votive tradition that is the subject of the next third or so of the analysis as bystanders off to the side of the main action of the Pope and College of Cardinals presiding over the birth of the Franciscan order -- and, my oh my, a good bit of the household of Lorenzo "High and Mighty"** d' Medici, including his sons and several key retainers who themselves have quite a lot to do with Florentine art history in ways I'll leave the really interested to discover by delving more into Warburg or other historians.

The votive tradition Warburg connects to the tendency of important 15th century Florentines to turn up in images of events in ecclesiastical history from long before is pretty interesting in its own right. Per Warburg, the Etruscan-descended Florentines "cultivated the magical use of images in the most unblushing form, right down to the 17th century" by placing in churches various forms of effigies, sort of permanent proxy presences. This tradition left a lot of churches crammed with life-sized wax figures, prefiguring Madame Tussaud in both degree and time. When there was no more floor space, these figures were hung from the walls on cords. "It was not until worshippers had several times been disturbed by falling voti that the whole waxworks was banished to a side courtyard," Warburg writes of the Annunziata, and I laughed out loud, never having ever heard of this detail before and WOW. Anyway, eventually this tradition was replaced out of space-conserving necessity by incorporating these people's images into the 2-D art on the walls.

And so, and so, to the beginning of the last act of "Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgois" and the origin of my error. I will quote and paraphrase from this at length because, well, I can't be the only one who read this and reached the conclusion I did, that this last third was about a whole 'nother fresco:

These marvelous portrait heads by Domenico Ghirlandaio have still to receive their critical due, whether as unique documents of cultural history or, in art-historical terms, as unsurpassed pioneer examples of Italian portraiture. This applies even to the life-size portrait of Lorenzo Il Magnifico himself, though it is the sole surviving, authentic, datable, contemporary portrait of him in the monumental fresco style by a maser of the first rank. Although the work has long been known to art history, no one has yet performed the simple, obvious duty of having a large-scale detail photograph taken, or at least subjecting the image to a thorough scrutiny. This can be accounted for, to some extent, by the fact that the fresco is very high up, seldom well lit, and even then hard to discern in detail.

What follows this passage is a lengthy and very charming look at close-up views not only of the famously ugly Lorenzo himself, who appears here as not so very ugly at all with "the upper lip not ominously pressed against the lower lip but rests lightly on it, conveying an expression of effortless superiority" and so on, but also at his three sons. And it is in looking at each of the sons in turn that Warburg gets to what is for me the charming heart of what he does, seeing in their portraits a sort of preview of their adult characters in a manner that must please Michael Ventura and James Hillman very much. Thus Piero, age 12 or so in this fresco, is every bit the haughty heir (and we are reminded that as an adult he would only allow himself to be painted in full armor "a typical and fateful sign of the superficiality of a man who, when only good generalship could have saved his position as ruler of Florence, proved to be barely more than a decorative tournament figure"). Giovanni already looks like his Papal self his medal portrait as Pope Leo X (and is really one of the ugliest kids I've ever seen in art; he'd be right at home in Goya's painting of the horrible royal family of Spain). And little Giuliano d'Medici, who would one day be a great jouster in his own right and who held a tournament in honor of Botticelli's favorite model, Simonetta Vespucci, is the only one of the kids with the curiosity and the courage to turn his head, just for a moment, and look back at the centuries of people who journey from near and far to the church of Santa Trinita to see his four-year old self paying a surprise visit to Daddy and his friends in the middle of a religious painting.

But so, hey, doesn't this last third sound an awful lot like it's about some other fresco than The Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule? I mean, really?

So imagine my surprise when I took another look at the little 3"x4" black and white reproduction (only about a half-inch or so bigger than the close-ups discussed above) of the Confirmation at the beginning of the article and everything suddenly clunked into place that all of these portraits were all part of this same fresco after all. Surprise and chagrin and maybe a little irritation, which only grew after I re-read the whole thing and came to the passage quoted at length above. I think it's the "even" and the sudden emphasis of the inaccesible location of the fresco that threw me. Is this Warburg's fault, or the translator's?

And, am I the only one ever to have made this mistake?

Will I make it again through the rest of Warburg, or will I now be on my guard?

We'll see, won't we?

*And how can I mention David Foster Wallace's footnote-riddled claim to literary glory without a footnote myself? So I'll just mention that the first 77 pages of this book are about, rather than by, Warburg and that I skipped the lengthy introduction by Kurt W. Forster partly because I have a whole 'nother book on my plate, that being E.H. Gombrich's biography of him, and partly because this is an interlibrary loan sent all the way from Florida (as is the biography) and I only have it for a week.

**Warburg says, and I don't have any reason to dispute it, that "High and Mighty" is a much better translation of his Italian epithet "Magnifico" than the usual "The Magnificent."