Alberti’s Window

This morning I came across an interesting post at Ponte Commedia, which mentions some of the mishaps and damage that have occurred to Michelangelo’s David.¹  One particular event stood out to me in this post: the 1991 attack of the David by a disturbed artist, who broke off part of a toe with a hammer.  This post instantly reminded me of another post from When Art History Goes Bad, which discusses the damage that has happened to Michelangelo’s Pieta (including when Laszlo Toth infamously attacked the statue with a sledgehammer in 1972).  If you’re interested, you can see some footage of the attack and damage below:

I don’t know of any other sculptor whose work has caused mentally disturbed people to attack it.  (But if you know of similar attacks on other sculptures, please comment! I’d be interested to learn about them.)  Does Michelangelo’s work get the brunt of such attacks, since these sculptures are some of the most well-known pieces of art in the Western world?  I think so.  It’s sad to think that Michelangelo’s fame and artistic beauty have had such an adverse side effect.

1 You can read an amusing BBC article about some damage and restoration work on the David here.

Recently I have been reading some back-and-forth discussion on Three Pipe Problem regarding interpretations of Giorgione’s Tempest (c. 1505, shown right).  Whenever I teach this painting to students, I give some background on the extant interpretations and scholarship, but I have never promoted one theory above another.  The reason?  In my opinion, it’s just too hard.  I haven’t found one interpretation that completely satisfies all of my questions regarding the enigmatic subject matter and composition.

One of the more popular arguments is that this painting is a Flight into Egypt scene, although that argument still leaves me with some questions.  X-ray scans of the painting reveal that Giorgione first painted a woman on the left side of the painting (see below, as reconstructed by Morassi in 1939), and then later changed his mind and painted the woman on the right (which is why both women appear in the x-ray scan.  For someone who is familiar with the final painting, this scan almost seems creepy at first glance, since the male figure eerily nonexistent.).

Anyhow, the woman revealed through x-ray is not holding an infant, nor is she positioned so that an infant could have been painted in her arms afterward.  This suggests to me that the female figure was not initially intended to be a Madonna (at least for a Flight of Egypt scene, since Mary is always depicted as the one holding the Christ Child).  Giorgione obviously could have changed his mind afterward in regards to the subject matter, but this initial female figure makes me wonder if the painting was intended to be (and still is) secular in nature.

I am especially intrigued by Paul Holberton’s argument that the woman in the painting is a gypsy.¹  Holberton’s article, “Giorgione’s ‘Tempest’ or ‘little landscape with the storm with the gypsy’: more on the gypsy, and a reassesment” discusses the clothing and iconography for gypsy women, and also gives some great examples of gypsies in the art of Giorgione’s contemporaries.  I think there are some interesting ideas presented, and I can see how both the man and woman can be interpreted as gypsies.  However, I have to admit that I don’t agree with everything Holberton suggests (e.g. I don’t think that the two figures seem “united by a bond of love.” They are too far separated across the canvas to fully suggest that idea to me).¹

Do you latch onto a certain interpretation of Giorgione’s Tempest? Why?

1 Paul Holberton, “Giorgione’s ‘Tempest’ or ‘little landscape with the storm with the gypsy’: more on the gypsy, and a reassesment,” Art History 18, no. 3 (September 1995). Available online here. Holberton isn’t the first person to put forth the gypsy argument, but I like much of the logic and ideas that he presents. I also like that Holberton discusses a little bit of the historiography of the Tempest, which makes this article a useful resource for scholars.

2 Ibid. Available online here (p. 14).

Excuse me, Marilyn Stokstad, but I found an error in your art history textbook.  Granted, I own a dated version (1999) of Art History (Revised Edition, Volume Two), and I’m hoping that subsequent editions have corrected this error.  My copy states the following on p. 647:

“In 1402, a competition was held to determine who would provide bronze relief panels for a new set of doors for the north side of the Florence Baptistery of San Giovanni.” (my emphasis)

This is incorrect.  Although the doors resulting from this competition have now ended up on the north side of the baptistery, at the time of the competition these doors were intended for the eastern side of the building.¹

The competition to create a set of doors for the baptistery helped revive a project that had been put-aside for several years.  When Andrea Pisano had created a set of doors about seventy years before (dated 1330), it was intended at the time that doors would be completed in a similar fashion for the remaining two portals.

Ghiberti won the competition and a set of doors were completed between 1403-1424 (see above left).  At the time of completion, Pisano’s doors were moved from their original location on the east side, in order to accommodate Ghiberti’s new doors.²

Although Ghiberti’s doors were installed on the eastern side, later they were moved to their current location: the north side of the building.  The same year that Ghiberti completed these now-northern doors, he was given a second commission to complete the last set of doors for the baptistery.  This second commission resulted in the famous doors which are known as “The Gates of Paradise” (1425-52, see below right), and are currently located on the east side of the building.³

I feel like there’s a lot of confusion regarding Ghiberti’s doors.  So much emphasis is placed on “The Gates of Paradise” (and for good reason), that no doubt many people think that these are the doors which immediately resulted from the competition in 1401-02.  If you think about it, though, that assumption doesn’t make a lot of sense.  Ghiberti’s submission piece for the competition, The Sacrifice of Isaac (1401) was designed within a quatrefoil shape.  Likewise, Brunelleschi (Ghiberti’s rival) completed his submission (also called The Sacrifice of Isaac (1401)) for the competition in a quatrefoil.  It’s easy to see Ghiberti and Brunelleschi’s logic for using the quatrefoil; they wanted their doors to match the already-existing door by Pisano. After winning the competition, Ghiberti’s used the quatrefoil shape for all the panels in his now-northern doors. Ghiberti only abandoned the quatrefoil shape when he created the doors for his later commission, “The Gates of Paradise.”

It’s easy to look at the competition submissions and see that the north doors resulted from that historic competition.  But you need to be able to see the north doors in order to make that association.  Many art history textbooks include images of Ghiberti’s and Brunelleschi’s competition panels (see this example in the most recent version of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages), but then don’t include pictures of the north doors.  Instead, “The Gates of Paradise” is shown.  It’s too confusing to discuss the 1401 competition and then display doors that weren’t directly associated with the competition!  If textbook writers could include just an image of the north doors (even a small one), it could help students keep their facts (and doors!) straight.


*7/25: I made a couple of revisions to this post, having found more information about the original location of Andrea Pisano’s doors and the nature of the 1401-02 competition.

1 See Laurie Schneider Adams, Italian Renaissance Art, (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2001), 60.  In truth, at this time the Florence baptistery needed two portals to be decorated.  The aim of the 1401-02 competition was to begin work on this project.  For a little bit more information regarding the nature of the competition, see Manfred Wundram and Gustina Scaglia, “Ghiberti.” In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T031929pg1 (accessed 26 July 2010).

2 Ibid. Today Pisano’s doors are located on the south side of the baptistery. Manfred Wundram and Gustina Scaglia write that Pisano’s doors were originally moved to the west portal, in order to create room for the doors from Ghiberti’s first commission.

Lorenzo de’ Medici (also known as Lorenzo the Magnificent) is well known for being a great patron of the arts during Renaissance in Florence.  However, it is also supposed that Lorenzo de’ Medici may have destroyed (in part) a series of paintings in his collection: Paolo Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano (c. 1435-56).

Paolo Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano consists of three different panels, which unfortunately are now separated into museums within three different countries.  During the Renaissance, though, these paintings hung in the bedroom of Lorenzo de’ Medici.  Here are the panels (as they appear today), shown in sequential order of their intended left-to-right placement:

Over the past few weeks or so, there has been some fascinating discussion about Botticelli’s Mars and Venus (c. 1485).  I’ve tweeted about this a bit, but I wanted to write out some of the details about this discussion.

About two weeks ago, a Times article publicized a new argument that the plant located in the lower right-hand corner of Botticelli’s painting (underneath the hand of the satyr) could be datura stramonium, a plant which is known for its hallucinogenic properties.  In essence, this article suggested that Mars is swooning due to effects from this drug plant.

This news was picked up in several places in the art history community of blogs, including the Art History Newsletter (see here) and Three Pipe Problem (see original post here).  I’d encourage you to read the comments for both of these posts, so you can follow the different arguments and ideas that were presented to critique this argument for the hallucinogenic plant.  Hasan Niyazi from Three Pipe Problem researched the history of datura stramonium even further, and came to the conclusion that the plant depicted is actually quite different (see his fascinating findings here).  Instead of datura stramonium, Niyazi finds it more likely (and I agree) that the plant depicted is ecballium elaterium, commonly known as the “exploding cucumber” plant. For one thing, the plant depicted simply looks a lot more like an “exploding cucumber” than datura stramonium.  I also think the phallic shape and properties of this plant are unmistakable, which makes this plant a more appropriate fit for the Mars and Venus theme of love.

Congratulations to Niyazi on some great research!  This is a very convincing argument, especially since Niyazi can assert that the “exploding cucumber” would have been commonly found in Europe during Botticelli’s day (which cannot be confirmed for the datura stramonium).

Although it can be disappointing to realize that the painting may not contain a reference to drugs or hallucinogenics, I think it’s quite fun to know that an “exploding cucumber” could be located on the canvas instead.