[COPY] VASARI AND THE BOYS
Mary Magdalene requested
I have had a number of requests to publish this post again, especially for people traveling to Italy this summer. A couple of subscribers also missed the text on Mary Magdelene and Donatello’s Mary Magdelent. Enjoy!
The Duomo Florence, Italy
Photo by Giorgio
A few weeks ago George and I returned to Florence for the first time in over a decade. Walking the narrow medieval streets, we easily imagined life there in the 15th and 16th centuries when the Renaissance was in full swing.
Not much has changed, except that instead of baskets of bread and wine jars, the shops now have t-shirts emblazoned with FIRENZE, boxer shorts complete with genitalia, and miniature plastic statues of David with a female nude cozying up to him.
These are the treasured souvenirs tourists bring home. (I’m not judging. I’ve always coveted a lit-up Vatican myself.) Thank Bacchus, the family restaurants haven’t changed. Bistecca fiorentina, tagliatelli, and Casarecce pasta are available on nearly every menu.
The entire time I was wandering around Florence, I kept thinking of Damanhur (see previous post), comparing the vigorous 20th century Italians who created the Temples of Humanity to the group of the young Florentines who also took the remains of an ancient civilization and authored the Renaissance.
Were they so very different? Both time periods called for change, and it was a new generation who responded.
In the Renaissance period, one man understood the brilliance of his contemporaries and was determined that their works and names would not be lost to history, as so many of the Greek and Roman artisans’ works were. This artist, architect, art historian and writer was Giorgio Vasari.
If you haven’t read Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, you’re missing out on one of the most entertaining texts written during the Renaissance. His first volume covers the artists responsible for the emerging ideas of this new era, chronicling where, when, and why their works existed. But these artists were a generation before his time.
Although I suggest you read Vasari’s account of these pre-Renaissance painters, the real fun begins when Vasari talks about the artists he actually rubbed paint brushes with, like Donatello, Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Rafael.
These young Gen-Meds (as in Medici) literally dug up their Greek and Roman history to counter a medieval tradition dedicated to squashing all things pagan. In the Middle Ages the Church preferred squat little figures and plenty of gargoyles.
Like the Damanhurians, the Gen-Meds made their own rules. They operated in the dark of night performing illegal autopsies, spying on each other for inspiration, unearthing broken and buried statues, and spending years trying to figure out how the Romans built a dome as large as the Pantheon.
Although Vasari was not always accurate, art historians have always forgiven him. They love that he is a consummate gossip, not only chronicling the history of each art commission but detailing the jealousies, friendships and competitions that propelled the geniuses of the Renaissance.
Where did this change in perspective begin? At the turn of the 13th century Dante threw away Latin and claimed the vernacular dialect of Tuscany to place his enemies in a hell of his own making. Cimabue and Giotto shifted away from stylized religious themes toward the natural world.
Then came the Black Death (bubonic plague) and survival replaced artistic innovation as nearly half the population died in the 14th century.
But all bad things must end someday, and the story of what followed in the 15th century is eloquently told in my favorite museum in Florence: L’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore.
I know the preeminent museum in Florence is the Uffizi Gallery with its many corridors of Renaissance Art, but the smaller gallery called the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore tells a much more manageable story, one that Vasari would appreciate. The works of his friends, formerly housed in the Baptistery and Duomo, have been relocated here for preservation and safety.
The stories of four artists showcased in Vasari’s Lives dominate the Opera. In the first room visitors see the recreated façade of Florence’s medieval cathedral, but they are soon drawn to the gilded bronze doors on the opposite wall created by Ghiberti.
In 1400 a competition was held to choose a sculptor/goldsmith to complete the doors for the Baptistery, a project started by Andrea Pisano but again interrupted by the plague. The theme would be biblical stories.
The two main contenders for the design of the door were Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, with the former winning the commission. He was only 23. Following this set of doors, Ghiberti spent the rest of his life on the final set that Michelangelo dubbed the Gates of Paradise (Vasari).
Many art critics contend that the artistry of these doors initiated the Renaissance. To stand before the original reliefs, you know you are not only at the start of a new vision but also at its apex.
Panel from the Gates of Paradise
Photo by Giorgio
While you might feel bad for the loser of this competition, temper your concern for him. Accepting his loss, Brunelleschi went off to Rome to study the dome of the Pantheon for the next ten years and came back to win another competition. This time he created the largest masonry vault in the world, quite a feat for a goldsmith.
The exhibit in the Opera about Brunelleschi’s dome demonstrates precisely the genius behind his application of perspective and other mechanics. His own tireless analysis of the ruins in Rome provided the answers.
Model of Brunelleschi’s Dome
Photo by Giorgio
Another of Vasari’s boys was Michelangelo. Everyone knows that he had a thing for Pietàs. He started his career at 23 years old with his first sorrowing mother. It’s impossible to describe how he sculpted a mother’s grief from marble. As with most soft contacts between sacred and profane, it can only be experienced.
This work is the only sculpture he signed, as this marvel was often attributed to other artists. And I say “Good for him--and us.”
When I was 20 and a student in Rome, I often studied in a side chapel of St. Peter’s that housed The Pietà. No protective glass, no Vatican guard loitering about, no wires to be tripped if someone got too close.
In fact, the entire basilica was often empty except for a few older women in black, the usual living statues of Italy’s ecclesiastical architecture. Today I wonder how Michelangelo would feel if he knew it is estimated that 40,000 people a day visit San Pietro, many just to see his first Pietà.
Pietà Bandini
Photo by Giorgio
In the Opera we see a very different Pietà. When he was 72, Michelangelo started this one for his own tomb. On the face of Nicodemus (or Joseph of Arimathea), we see his self-portrait, a man who has created some of the greatest artwork of his time. But in a poem to Vasari he says in words what this statue may be saying in stone:
Now know I well how that fond phantasy
Which made my soul the worshipper and thrall
Of earthly art, is vain.
Regardless of what the great sculptor felt about the vanity of his accomplishments, his admirers find a profound spirituality in his art, an ability to blend human form with the transcendent, At least, this admirer feels that way. Yes, I know Vasari says he was a grumpy old man.
For me, this Vasari tour always ends with Donatello, Brunelleschi’s best friend. Despite their closeness, neither had any trouble challenging their very different approach to art. When Brunelleschi criticized Donatello for his depiction of Christ on the Cross as a suffering peasant, he made a competing crucifix with a body of Renaissance perfection.
After seeing the works side by side, the two friends came to an agreement. Brunelleschi would sculpt the divine and Donatello the human.
Donatello doubled down on naturalism in subsequent works, particularly in his depiction of Mary Magdalene, a wooden sculpture now housed in the Opera. Critics say the sculptor shows her as a haggard woman sorely in need of grief counseling for her many sins.
Photo by Giorgio
But I wonder: Is she so repentant? Many of the early church fathers preached that women were either virgins or whores, even questioning if they had souls. Of course this was a political move to disenfranchise Christian women who were originally valued for their efforts and money in the development of the early Church. (Jesus always stuck up for the women in his life. I love that about him.)
Since Mary Magdalene was the prototype of this role by bank rolling Jesus in his ministry, her status as the First Apostle had to be dismissed. Ecclesiatics wanted unquestioned control of uppity women. Sound familiar?
In the sixth century a pope named Gregory the Great (not so great for women) needed another scapegoat to account for the relentless plague. Mary became the convenient target.
Her popularity as a church leader with her own followers and gospel (The Gospel According to Mary) threatened the obvious misogyny of the Church. She was conflated with the prostitute who anointed Jesus’s feet, a claim debunked by contemporary theologians. Gregory hoped her repentance would inspire others, and the plague would go away--victim blaming at its best.
Although I have studied the misinformation campaign about Mary Magdalene for years, I don’t see the same defeated sinner preached by the Church in Donatello’s statue. His depiction is quite different from the other paintings of the Renaissance where the Magdela is often a voluptuous temptress with flowing hair and bared breasts.
Instead, could Donatello’s Mary have been a someone he knew? Was she his mother, sister, or lover, a woman without privilege who suffered but endured? Neither virgin nor whore. The wealthy women of the Medici world are idealized in the paintings of Vasari’s other boys. Those are the women we still admire in the Uffizi, but Donatello reminds us of their counterparts, the contadine, the peasant women.
On a personal level, when I look at this Mary, I see a survivor, not a repentant woman. Obviously worn down by life’s injustices, she still looks forward. Life has denuded her, but she covers her naked body with the abundant hair others have used to shame her. She will not let them take away her dignity. Her hands are raised in a prayerful position but not quite touching, as if she hasn’t yet decided that prayer will save her.
I suspect she saved herself and those she loved long before, including her bestie Jesus. I love the ambiguity and the space that so many artists give us to consider such a soft contact.
All in all, I would suggest we can learn a lot from Vasari and the boys—if we see the gaps that their genius allows, if we don’t forget that some artists create from gold while others sculpted from stone.