Art And Love In Renaissance Italy

ART AND LOVE IN\nRENAISSANCE ITALY ART AND LOVE IN\nRENAISSANCE ITALY LIVIA BELLA ART AND LOVE IN RENAISSANCE ITALY\nEdited by Andrea Bayer\nAndrea Bayer, Beverly Louise Brown, Nancy Edwards, Everett Fahy, Deborah L. Krohn, Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, Luke Syson, Dora Thornton, James Grantham Turner, and Linda Wolk-Simon\nWith contributions by Sarah Cartwright, Andreas Hemming, Jessie McNab, J. Kenneth Moore, Eve Strausman-Pflanzer, Wendy Thompson, and Jeremy Warren\nThe Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York\nYale University Press, New Haven and London This volume is published in conjunction with the exhibition \"Art and Love in Renaissance Italy\" held in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, from November 17, 2010, to February 16, 2011, and at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, from March 15 to June 16, 2011.\nThe catalogue is made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.\nAdditional support is provided by the Charles Blooms Foundations.\nThe exhibition was made possible by the Gale and Parker Gilbert Fund and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. \nAdditional support is provided by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation.\nThe exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth.\nIt is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.\nPublished by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York\nJohn F. O'Neill, Publisher and Editor in Chief\nGwen Regnier, General Manager of Publications\nMargaret Renczowich, Editing Editor\nJane Burch-Cook, Cynthia Clark, Managing Editors\nBruce Gainford, Designer\nPeter Antony, Basiana Louise, Christopher Zachello, Production\nBrett Waterhouse, Assistant Managing Editor\nJayne Kachka, Bibliographic Editor\nMarilyn Anderson, Indexer\nCopyright © 2010 by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishing.\nNew photography of works in the Metropolitan Museum collection by Caren F. Wilson, Joseph Crook, J. Mark Morrison, and Juan Tejeda. The Photograph Studio. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. A complete list of photograph credits is printed at the back of this volume.\nTypest in Adobe Garamond Pro and Perpetua Std\nPrinted on acid-free paper, 100 gsm\nSpirations by Professional Graphics, Inc., Rockford, Illinois\nDesigned and bound by Mendelson Graphics, P.S.A., Vienna, Italy\nJacket cover illustration: Antonio del Pollaiuolo (Florence, 1426-1488), Apollo and Daphne (detail of cat. no. 63).\nFrontispiece: Low-Food Rect with Bust of a Woman, Urbino (on Carol Duemart, cat. no. 122).\nEndpapers: Velvet Fragment with Medial Arms, Florence or Venice, 1400-1500 (detail of cat. no. 83).\nCataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.\nISBN 978-1-58839-186-5 (hdbk: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)\nISBN 978-1-58839-187-2 (pbk: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)\nISBN 978-0-300-16930-5 (hdbk: Yale University Press) TO PHILIPPE DE MONTEBELLO\nin gratitude and admiration CONTENTS\n\nDirectors' Foreword viii\nAcknowledgments ix\nLenders to the Exhibition xiii\nContributors to the Catalogue xv\n\nIntroduction: Art and Love in Renaissance Italy\nAndrea Bayer 3\n\nMarriage as a Key to Understanding the Past\nDeborah L. Krohn 9\n\nThe Marriage Portrait in the Renaissance, or Some Women Named Ginevra\nEverett Fahy 17\n\nWives, Lovers, and Art in Italian Renaissance Courts\nJacqueline Marie Musacchio 29\n\n\"Rapture to the Greedy Eyes\": Profane Love in the Renaissance\nLinda Wolk-Simon 43\n\nCATALOGUE\n\nCOMMEMORATING BETROTHAL, MARRIAGE, AND CHILDBIRTH 59\nRites of Passage: Art Objects to Celebrate Betrothal, Marriage, and the Family\nDeborah L. Krohn 60\n\ncatalogue numbers 1-86\nMaiolica of Love and Marriage 68\nBelle Donne, Facing Couples, and Fede 76\nThe Cruelty of Love—Amor Crudel 88\nMarriage Glassware 93\nGifts and Furnishings for the Home 100\nCassone Panels and Chests 129\nManuscripts and Books and the Rituals of Love and Marriage 139\nChildbirth and Family 149 Profane Love 177\nProfane Love: The Challenge of Sexuality\nJames Grantham Turner 178\n\ncatalogue numbers 87-117\nPaintings 185\nDrawings 188\nBooks and Prints 198\nMaiolica 214\nBronzes 220\nAccessories 225\n\nTHE PAINTINGS OF LOVE AND MARRIAGE 229\nFrom Cassone to Poesia: Paintings of Love and Marriage.\nAndrea Bayer 230\n\nPicturing the Perfect Marriage: The Equilibrium of Sense and Sensibility in Titian's Sacred and Profane Love\nBeverly Louise Brown 238\n\nBelle: Picturing Beautiful Women 246\n\ncatalogue numbers 118-153\nBetrothal and Marriage 255\nFamily 275\nWidows 282\nThe Camera: Spalliere and Other Paintings 288\nIllustrious Women 309\nBelle Donne 315\nMythologies and Allegories 319\n\nBibliography 333\nIndex 365\nPhotograph Credits 376 DIRECTORS' FOREWORD\n\nAmerican collectors have long been attracted to the secular, domestic arts of the Italian Renaissance. Maiolica, glassware, cassone panels, furniture, and portraits—all were acquired, in depth, by some of the nation's first patrons of the arts. In 1813 Thomas Jefferson Bryan bought the impressive Triumph of \nFaith (ca. no. 76), then thought to be by Giotto and now known to be the very painting to commemorate the birth of Lorenzo de' Medici, the Magnificent, making it one of the first early Italian paintings to arrive in New York City. The monumental bridal chest decorated with the narrative of the Conquest of Trinacria (cat. no. 56) was purchased for the Metropolitan Museum from the Florentine antiquarian and art dealer Stefano Bardini in 1913. Eli Voili, another important presence among dealers in Florence, played a key role in encouraging American collecting through the decoration of the Palazzo Davanzati (now a museum dedicated to Florentine domestic life and one of the important lenders to this exhibition). Archival photographs from the years between 1900 and 1916 show tables, apertures, sculptures, and other works now housed among the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick Collection in New York and collections in Boston, Richmond, and Los Angeles. One of Voili's best clients in New York in 1916 ordered objects from the dealer's cache of Renaissance domestic objects entered the Metropolitan collection.\n\nAs early as 1880 the American sense of attachment to the culture of the Renaissance was so widely diffused that in a review of a book by Jacob Burckhardt the New York Herald remarked: \u201cWe are Children of the Renaissance\u201d. Beyond their intrinsic beauty, the works of art and decorative objects offered for sale by Voili and Bardini may have had the attraction of skirting the deeply devotional imagery that made much Italian Baroque painting, for example, difficult for some of the North American public to admire. Wealthy Americans' desire to collect Renaissance domestic objects grew, above all, from their wish to emulate the Florentine merchants and bankers for whom the objects had been made (chief among them the Medici), who were seen as predecessors of the titans of American commerce. The architect Charles Follen McKim, who designed J. Pierpont Morgan's grand library on Madison Avenue between 1902 and 1906, called his client \u201cLorenzo the Magnificent.\u201d\n\nThe taste for beautiful domestic art of the Renaissance was abiding. Gifts to the Metropolitan Museum by Henry Marquand, J. Pierpont Morgan, Jules Bache, and Robert Lehman,\n\namong others, made numerous departments—Medieval Art, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, European Paintings, the Lehman Collection, and Drawings and Prints—important repositories of remarkable paintings and objects that once graced the Renaissance home. More than sixty of these works are presented in this exhibition and catalogue.\n\nThe exhibition was inspired by the desire to look afresh at these works of art, some of them quite familiar, others less so, in an effort to understand more fully their original functions and contexts and thus to better appreciate them. The curators aspired to provide an assessment of them in the \u201cfound,\u201d having considered them from both an aesthetic and a contextual point of view. Investigation revealed that many were commissioned or purchased by their original owners to mark the great ritual moments of family life: betrothal, marriage, and the birth of a child. They could have been given as gifts by the marry ceremonies accompanying a wedding; or commissioned by the bridegroom for the bride's adorned or her new home; or presented to the new mother. When a bridegroom in Florence wrote in his diary that he was preparing to scribe and decorate his camera, or abode, he would set on a credenza at a festive meal, carved and painted beds and benches, and exquisite paintings designed for the specific site. Recently, the historian Richard Kaplan-Zuber, whose work on the Florentine traditions of matrimony has elucidated this field of scholarship, historically, what a Renaissance artist painting a fresco of the Marriage of the Virgin, or Spousal, would have hoped to convey to his audience. Would viewers have recognized the trappings of a real marriage or something idealized, sanctified, and removed from daily life? She wondered how close scholars like herself could come to a faithful interpretation of these works of a fifth-century event. Our exhibition pursues comparable questions. Here we present these magnificent objects and ask: what did they convey to those who received them, and closest to a verifiable interpretation can we come?\n\nIn some cases, such as that of the double-handed cups often known as coppa amatorum, an association with nuptial rituals seems unequivocal, but in other cases ritual significance has had to be teased from works of greater ambiguity. This is most apparent in the final section of the exhibition. The great question is whether these are not defined by a precise reading; these paintings of love and marriage carry meanings and have provoked a wide range of often contradictory responses.