Art102: Art History 2

"An Artist Who Kept his Day Job as a Priest"

By: Holland Cotter

The New York Times, January 28, 2005

D

on't be fooled by the sweet-natured Madonnas and angels on Claritin highs. Painting in Renaissance Italy was no picnic. In artist-packed cities like Florence, competition for jobs was fierce. Nor was it much more relaxed in the boondocks, where minor potentates had Medician aspirations but limited cash.

Strategizing was essential. A front-rank art career usually required landing in the right workshop, learning the ropes fast and generating A+ product in the style of the maestro in charge. The savvy striver then updated and personalized that style to attract his own clients. Everyone trend-spotted, constantly. Is Gothic gold really over? One-point perspective de rigueur? What's the story with oil painting? And who is this Jan van Eyck?

Eventually, through some combination of technical virtuosity, stylistic flair, political skill and personal charm, an artist might turn himself into a star. He could then open his own workshop and market his name, take a cushy court appointment or travel the country from lucrative job to job, leaving his mark.

Such careerism might not jibe with the popular image of painters as prodigies, heaven-kissed. But it was a reality, one that helped make the Renaissance stimulating and unpredictable. And it is the subject of an intricate, lively, and occasionally zany show titled ''From Filippo Lippi to Piero della Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master,'' which opens on Tuesday in the Robert Lehman wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

At its center is an artist named Fra Carnevale, a painter-priest who was a second-tier somebody in mid-15th century Italy, then faded from view. Giorgio Vasari, in his ''Lives of the Artists,'' notes that Carnevale had some clout in Urbino, where he contributed to architectural projects. But to modern historians he was, until a few decades ago, little more than a name attached to two oddball paintings of tiny figures doing inscrutable things in fantastic architectural settings. These pictures are among the 50 or so pieces by Carnevale and his contemporaries, famous and obscure, in the show that comes to the Met from the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan.

Despite the archival research that went into the exhibition, making it feel as dense—and to some viewers, no doubt, as arcane—as a hard-core scholarly essay, hard information about the artist remains slim. We know he was born Bartolomeo di Giovanni Corradini in the 1420's. Somewhere he may have had early training. But for sure, he arrived in Florence in 1445 to join the workshop of Fra Filippo Lippi. Florence was the right place to be. This was where advanced art was happening; Lippi was among its experimental figures. An intuitive thinker, he was impatient with convention and intrigued by illogicality: surreal spatial arrangements, bursts of emotion, Classicalism set at a tilt. At the same time, he created a figurative ideal of sacredness, of humanized holiness, that melted the hearts of tradition-addicted viewers.

Both aspects of his art inspired his followers, and both are represented in the show. It opens with three panels from a dispersed altarpiece, one depicting the Madonna and Child, the others male saints. With their perfected naturalism and monumental gravity, these are classic Lippi inventions, and anyone hungry for sheer optical beauty, independent of theory or theme, will find it here.

But alongside it they will find something quite different in a small devotional painting of the ''Pieta.'' Here the Virgin has lost her youthful beauty; old and distraught, she stares straight out of the picture, beseeching us to look at the dead son she cradles in her arm. An emblem of inconsolable grief, her face brings to mind those seen in recent news photographs from Iraq and Sri Lanka.

Lippi thrived on variety. He had novel ideas about what ''beautiful'' and ''divine'' could look like, and about how realism and abstraction could coexist. As the show demonstrates, these ideas were picked up by many other artists, who carried them out of Florence and added to them other ideas. Indeed, in the transmission-intensive model of Renaissance art that the exhibition proposes, Florence is just one nodal point, a crucial one, among many, large and small, on a great interactive network of artists and cultural centers that spread across Italy and beyond.

The diversity it produced can be startling. An exquisite ''Annunciation'' by Francesco Pesellino preserves Lippi's idealizing style. By contrast that style is ignored by the Florentine artist called the Pratovecchio Master, who appears to take his cues from the Expressionistic paintings of Andrea del Castagno and the operatic sculptures of Donatello. A tiny painting of a vengeful-looking Virgin displays elements of both.

Fra Carnevale's "Annunciation" makes specific references to architectural projects.

Things get stranger in the work of Benedetto Bonfigli, who spent most of his career in Perugia. He seemed to have sampled riffs from all over the chart—Lippi, Domenico Veneziano, Gothic art, Netherlandish painting—and they are all right there in an ''Annunciation.''

Giovanni di Piermatteo Boccati, working in provincial Camerino, goes out even further on a stylistic limb, and right off the deep end, some will say. His little picture of ''The Arrest of Christ'' is as formally maladroit as it is conceptually innovative, riddled with hilarious details that can be self-conscious jokes or just mistakes. Either he was an artist who was good with ideas but not so hot with a brush, or he was working with a set of aesthetic interests very different from those in Florence at that time.

''He's just BAD,'' you may sniff. Well, O.K., but Camerino was an art center of consequence in the 15th century, and he was considered one of its ornaments. He was a Lippi workshop alumnus; had a sound reputation in cities like Padua and Perugia; and finally was hired by Federigo da Montefeltro, an ambitious art maven if ever there was one, to fresco his ducal palace at Urbino.

In short, his was a model art career that didn't produce model art. But what it did produce, a funky hybrid of sophistication and provincialism, is a vital component of the expanded picture of Renaissance art that this show defines.

Fra Carnevale is also part of that picture. He, too, networked extensively. He, too, worked for Federigo in Urbino, spending much of his later career there as artist, art-and-architect adviser to the court and parish priest. Like that of his contemporaries, his art was about mixing and matching. An early ''Annunciation'' attributed to him not only speaks of Lippi, Veneziano and Fra Angelico, but also makes specific references to architectural projects by Michelozzo in Florence and Maso di Bartolomeo in Prato.

The two pictures for which he is best known are, of course, about architecture. Yes, they've been given titles: ''The Birth of the Virgin'' and ''The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple.'' But if we didn't know they were part of an altarpiece, we might take them for genre scenes: people chatting in an open-air hospital, in a church, on the street.

"The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple," one of Carnevale's best-known works.

The spirits of many artists and architects, major and minor, flow together here; their identities are sorted with a kind of algebraic precision in the catalog written by the show's organizers, Keith Christiansen, a curator at the Met; Matteo Ceriana, vice-director of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan; and Emanuela Daffra, of the Superintendency of the Historical and Artistic Patrimony of Lombardy, in Milan. Among the artists they cite is Piero della Francesca, who, like Carnevale, had been in Florence, shared his passion for architectural form and painted in Urbino. Although Carnevale's ''Life of the Virgin'' panels are the very last works in the show, keeping the focus on his elusive figure, Piero is the real finale. His ''Madonna and Child Attended by Angels,'' from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., hangs near Carnevale, but alone on a wall, facing those first Lippi panels across the courtyard. Great calling to great, you can't help but think.

Maybe you even breathe a sigh of relief. With Piero, we are back to the Renaissance art we know, the ''real'' one, a classical vision of balance, order, poise, symmetry, polish and art that makes up for all the lesser, stumbling, striving examples that preceded it: the Bonfiglis, Boccatis and the anonymous painters whose names are forgotten because, we assume, their art was inferior, inconsequential, forgettable.

But what's this? The Williamstown Piero has problems. Its depiction of space and scale are illogical; a shadow is missing a source; two of the angels' faces are not strictly Piero-worthy. The longer you look, the less things cohere. Maybe the painting isn't a Piero? Some art historians have thought this.

As it happens, other paintings by him reveal comparable flaws. If you think they are flaws. I tend to see them as formal experiments, imaginative fancies, explorations of pictorial physics, responses to patrons' demands and perceptual jokes meant to unseat perfection, upset expectations, keep all of us—so in love with art, so grumpy when it doesn't act or look like we think it should—wide awake and slightly puzzled. Keeping an audience awake and puzzled is a smart career move. The Met's exhibition, with its bigger, wilder, crankier picture of the Renaissance, does this too.