After the Veronica: Crisis and the "Ars sacra" of Polidoro da Caravaggio and Pontormo. 2014.

After the Veronica: Crisis and the Ars sacra of Polidoro da Caravaggio and PontormoAuthor(s): Morten Steen HansenSource: I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Fall 2014), pp. 325-367Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center forItalian Renaissance StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/678260 .

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After the Veronica: Crisis and theArs sacra of Polidoro da Caravaggioand Pontormo

Morten Steen Hansen, Stanford University

THE PRESENT ESSAY aims at reopening the question of Mannerism and so-

cietal crisis by calling attention to the drastic changes that took place in the Chris-

tian paintings of two artists in connection with the tumultuous events of the

1520s: Polidoro da Caravaggio after the Sack of Rome by imperial troops in 1527

and Jacopo Pontormo during the plague in Florence in 1522–23. The unexpected

shifts in their religious works stood in relation to the erratic ruptures of the social

fabric in ways that call for clarification. In the case of Polidoro, the attack on the

papal capital produced a real crisis of the image when the miraculous images and

other physical manifestations of sanctity failed to protect populace and clergy, as

if God had wrathfully withdrawn his divine presence from material objects. Es-

caping to Naples and then Messina, Polidoro produced religious paintings that

reacted aggressively toward the pictorial culture of Rome, its miraculous images

included. Pontormo avoided the plague by seeking refuge in the Certosa del Gal-

luzzo south of Florence, where he created works that self-reflexively enacted the

insufficiency of Florentine art at a time when the city had become subjected to heav-

enly chastisement. Both painters initially participated in artistic cultures that iden-

tified profound connections between the Holy Face (the famous relic containing a

miraculous imprint of Christ’s face preserved in Saint Peter’s) and pictorial beauty.

Exile led to the painters’ reinvestment in the acheiropoieton for new types of Chris-

tian painting, steeped in humility and abjection.

Contact Morten Steen Hansen at Stanford University, 435 Lasuen Mall, Stanford, CA 94305([email protected]).

The current study has benefited from the critical insights of Salvatore Bottari, Elena Calvillo, Ste-phen J. Campbell, Angela Capodivacca, Elke Heckner, Beatrice Kitzinger, Ivan Lupic, Jane Tylus, andthe anonymous readers of I Tatti Studies.

I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 17, number 2. © 2014 by Villa I Tatti: The Harvard UniversityCenter for Italian Renaissance Studies. All rights reserved. 0393-5949/2014/1702-0006$10.00

325



Thinking about relationships between crises and pictorial style in the sixteenth

century means returning to issues raised by scholars in the early twentieth cen-

tury. From the Geistesgeschichte of scholars like Max Dvořák and Erwin Panofsky

to Frederick Antal’s and Arnold Hauser’s take on Historical Materialism, intel-

lectual, religious, philosophical, or socioeconomic tensions were invoked to ac-

count for strange and even dissonant works of art. Walter Friedlaender, a prac-

titioner of Geistesgeschichte, saw the early Mannerists to have taken a more

antagonistic stance to their High Renaissance predecessors, and he deemed them

“anti-classicists,” an idea soon followed by Erwin Panofsky.1 Notions of the work

of art having an intrinsic connection to tensions in the broader society or

reacting against its own immediate past were put to rest in the most influential

work on Mannerism of the past fifty years, that of John Shearman.2 Turning to

the artistic literature of the cinquecento, he famously identified Mannerism with

maniera, indicating both a certain stylishness and having a particular style. To

Shearman Mannerism spoke a “silver-tongued” language that prioritized form

above content. His declared aim was to explain artistic culture in its own histori-

cal terms. But the fact that he saw the copiousness of Mannerist ornament as

mainly an appeal to the tastes of “bored courtiers” revealed the extent to which

his own arguments were underwritten by twentieth-century sensibilities, as in

this echo of reactions against fin de siècle aestheticism.3

Despite the criticism that Shearman faced for excluding the majority of the

artists that had been of primary interest to earlier writers on Mannerism, includ-

ing Tintoretto, El Greco, the later Michelangelo, Rosso Fiorentino in Volterra, and

Pontormo at the Certosa, no real interpretative alternative was then developed.4 In

1. Max Dvořák, Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte: Studien zur abendländischen Kunstentwick-lung, ed. Karl M. Swoboda and Johannes Wilde (Munich, 1928), 259–76; Arnold Hauser, The SocialHistory of Art (London, 1951), 1:353–96, and Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and theOrigin of Modern Art, trans. Eric Mosbacher (Cambridge, 1986), 1–43; Walter Friedlaender, Manner-ism and Anti-mannerism in Italian Painting (New York, 1965); Frederick Antal, Classicism and Ro-manticism with Other Studies in Art History (London, 1966), 158–61; Erwin Panofsky, Idea: EinBeitrag zur Begriffsgeschichte der älteren Kunsttheorie (Berlin, 1993), 39–56, and Three Essays on Style,ed. Irving Lavin (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 17–88.

2. “In the attempt to rescue sixteenth-century art from the ill repute that much of it enjoyed in thenineteenth century, it has been endowed with virtues peculiar to our time—especially the virtues ofaggression, anxiety and instability. They are so inappropriate to the works in question that somepretty odd results are bound to follow (the sixteenth-century viewpoint of art was admirably re-laxed).” John Shearman,Mannerism (Harmondsworth, 1967), 15.

3. Ibid., 140.4. “The notion of crisis has been conspicuous by its absence in recent art historical literature on

mannerist imagery, whether applied to developments in the wider world or, more narrowly, to theprotocols of image-making.” Charles Burroughs, “The Altar and the City: Botticelli’s ‘Mannerism’

326 | I TATTI STUDIES IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE FALL 2014



what follows we will see just how interrelated painting and societal upheaval could

be when artists translated subjective experience into the shared world of Christian

imagery. Relationships between pictorial representations in religious settings and

external crises could emerge because the latter by the majority of the population

was perceived through a Christian hermeneutics. Moreover, Mannerism’s demon-

strative imitation of art, forging artistic genealogies, and its ostentatious deploy-

ment of artifice facilitated the use of style as argument with bearings on more than

purely pictorial concerns.

When considering cult images in Renaissance Italy, I will be relying on Rich-

ard Trexler’s sociohistorical studies of the religious life of Florence. The cults

around the miraculous images, some being more effective than others in respond-

ing to the prayers of particular individuals and groups, led the author to charac-

terize Christian worship as polytheist, not according to theory but in practice.5 In

the Western tradition the theologians’ repeated emphasis on the separation be-

tween base matter and divine presence, working through and in the sacred image,

can be seen to negotiate cultic practices, in which such distinctions were literally

invisible because the numen was inseparable from the physical object of pictorial

representation. The references made to miraculous images not as representations

but as the represented saint—as in the famous Annunciation fresco in the Santis-

sima Annunziata in Florence known as la Nunziata—blurred such distinctions.

In terms of Trexler’s work, whether an image was miraculous might be seen as a

question of degree, since even an image that, for instance, neither had come into

being supernaturally nor had bled, wept, lactated, talked, or performed manual

tasks could fulfill prayers in testimony to its spiritual presence. In this essay, I refer

to as miraculous the significant minority of images and sculptures for which a

group of people made concerted and successful efforts to promote their supernat-

ural status. When arguing for the centrality of miraculous images to artistic pro-

duction in the cinquecento I polemicize against scholarly commonplaces pitting

“art” against “image” during the Renaissance. A secularized “aesthetic” experience

of art, identified now indiscriminately both with Giorgio Vasari’s writings and

modernity, has been said to be incompatible with the traditional religious experi-

and the Reform of Sacred Art,” Artibus et Historiae 18, no. 35 (1997): 10. Nikolaus Pevsner, Studies inArt, Architecture and Design, vol. 1, From Mannerism to Romanticism (London, 1968), 11–12.

5. “In the days of the republic, Florentine citizens professed monotheism, yet their behavior andoften their speech were convincingly polytheistic.” Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence(Ithaca, NY, 1991), 46, and “Florentine Religious Experience: The Sacred Image,” Studies in the Re-naissance 19 (1972): 7–51. See also Caroline Walker Bynum, Christian Materiality: An Essay on Re-ligion in Late Medieval Europe (New York, 2011).

After the Veronica | 327



ence of miraculous images. I hope to demonstrate why such an ontology, partly

rooted in Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form of 1927 and echoing Burck-

hardtian notions of Renaissance secularism, cannot encompass the way audiences

related to painting in sixteenth-century Italy.6 In keeping with the image/art di-

chotomy, it has been presumed that during the Renaissance images attributed mi-

raculous agency were necessarily of an older age or archaic in style, but in a study

of cult images in Florence, Megan Holmes demonstrates that was not necessarily

the case. Whether a painting or sculpture joined the club of the miracle-working

ones was in God’s hands. In principle any cult image might reach that status, mod-

ern ones included, and that is indeed what happened.

MAKING MEANING OF THE SACK OF ROME

Polidoro was among the unfortunate trapped in Rome on May 6, 1527, when im-

perial troops invaded the city.7 A number of the religious images he executed

over the next seven years in southern Italy can be seen to respond to the Sack in

different ways. Written responses to the events of 1527–28 will provide a context

for a consideration of his church paintings in Naples and Messina. These texts

tell us how the Sack was understood and which kind of behavior it was thought

to call for. The early accounts of the acts of the imperial troops in Rome, as Pope

Clement VII was hiding in the Castel Sant’Angelo, describe killings, torture, and

the rape of women along with the desecration of sacred sites and relics. Liturgical

objects were stolen in the troops’ search for valuable materials, and relics were

treated with derision and abuse. Some sources tell of the profanation of the Eu-

charistic wafer, even though the pro-imperial apologist Alfonso de Valdés, eager

to prove that no heretics (German Lutherans) had participated in the Sack, de-

6. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher Wood (New York, 1991),72; Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: Eine Gesichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich, 1990),510–45, and more recently Das echte Bild: Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen (Munich, 2005), 91–93. For acritique of the image/art dichotomy, also with reference to Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood’sAnachronic Renaissance (New York, 2010), see Megan Holmes, Miraculous Images in RenaissanceFlorence (New Haven, CT, 2013), 160–61. See also Robert Maniura, “The Icon Is Dead, Long Live theIcon: The Holy Image in the Renaissance,” in Icon and Word: The Power of Images in Byzantium;Studies Presented to Robin Cormack, ed. Antony Eastmond and Liz James (Aldershot, 2003), 87–103.

7. André Chastel, The Sack of Rome, 1527, trans. Beth Archer (Princeton, NJ, 1983); KennethGouwens, Remembering the Renaissance: Humanist Narratives of the Sack of Rome (Leiden, 1998);Charles S. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington, IN, 1985), 320–24. For satirical represen-tations of the Sack, see Massimo Firpo, Il sacco di Roma del 1527 tra profezia, propaganda politica eriforma religiosa (Cagliari, 1990), 32–33; Stephen J. Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Myth-ological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este (New Haven, CT, 2004), 221–49; Nicola Catelli,“Scherzar coi santi: Prospettive comiche sul Sacco di Roma,” Critica letteraria 34, no. 3/132 (2006):463–82.




nied it.8 One correspondent wrote, “The holy relics have been scattered. The

Veronica was stolen; it was passed from hand to hand in all the taverns of Rome

without a word of protest; a German stuck the lance that struck Christ on a pike

and ran through the Borgo mockingly.”9 Other sources commented on the loss

of the major relics as well, including the anonymous Romae lamentatio, which

specified the Veronica and the heads of Peter and Paul among the victims. Luigi

Guicciardini in his account of the Sack could write that the “heads of St. Peter,

St. Paul, St. Andrew and many other saints; the wood of the Cross, the Thorns,

the Holy Oil, and even consecrated Hosts were shamefully trodden underfoot in

that fury.”10

The issue of Christian guilt and why God had allowed the Sack to happen

loom large in the sixteenth-century descriptions. Francesco Guicciardini in his

History of Italy could not comprehend the divine purpose behind the violence.

“Upon hearing the miserable cries and shouts of the Roman women and nuns

driven in crowds by the soldiers to satisfy their lust, one could only tell oneself

that God’s plan was obscure to men since He let the famous chastity of the Ro-

man women be lost by force in such ugliness and misery.”11 Other writers felt

certain that the punishment must have been justified. Francesco Berni in his re-

writing of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato expressed horror over the

events but still identified them with God’s chastisement.12 Pietro Aretino, writing

to the pontiff from Venice on May 31, 1527, urged him vindictively to thank God

for having sent the emperor to restore to him the humility due to the one hold-

ing Christ’s place on earth, and he described Charles V as “the firmament of the

faith” (il fermamento di quella fede).13 Clement himself on Palm Sunday (April 14)

1528 in Orvieto, before the return of the curia to Rome, urged cardinals and prel-

8. Alfonso de Valdés, Alfonso de Valdés and the Sack of Rome: Dialogue of Lactancio and anArchdeacon, trans. John E. Longhurst (Albuquerque, NM, 1952), 47–48.

9. Letter by “messer Urbano” to Isabella d’Este. Chastel, Sack of Rome, 104.10. “Dove son le reliquie tante e tante, / Di Pietro e Paolo i capi e ’l sacro velo? / Ahi, che priva son

or da tutte quante!” Romae lamentatio, in Scelta di curiosità letterarie inedite o rare dal secolo XIII alXVII, ed. Giosuè Carducci (Bologna, 1863), 375. Luigi Guicciardini, The Sack of Rome, trans. JamesH. McGregor (New York, 1993), 98. A similar sentiment can be found in Francesco Guicciardini,Opere, vol. 3, Storia d’Italia (libri XI–XX), ed. Emanuella Scarano (Turin, 1981), 1759: “Tutte le cosesacre, i sacramenti e le reliquie de’ santi, delle quali erano piene tutte le chiese, spogliate de’ loroornamenti, erano gittate per la terra; aggiugnendovi la barbarie tedesca infiniti vilipendi.”

11. “Sentivansi i gridi e urla miserabili delle donne romane e delle monache, condotte a torme da’soldati per saziare la loro libidine: non potendo se non dirsi essere oscuri a’ mortali i giudizi di Dio,che comportasse che la castità delle donne romane cadesse per forza in tanta bruttezza e miseria.”Guicciardini, Opere, 1759. Translations from the Italian are mine unless indicated otherwise.

12. Francesco Berni, introduction by Raffaele Nigro (Rome, 1999), 683.13. Pietro Aretino, Lettere, vol. 1, bk. 1, ed. Paolo Procaccioli (Rome, 1997), 65.




ates to alter their ways and do penance for their sins, for iniquity had been the

cause of the scourge.14 The Roman Capitoline official Marcello Alberini later re-

corded in his memoirs the shameful crimes of Charles, “emperor only in name,”

and he deemed the troops more cruel and impious than any of the barbarians

who ever wrought havoc on the city. Still, Alberini felt compelled to think that

Rome must have been to blame. “And I believe that Peter wept in heaven for our

miseries, but because of our sins the eternal Father did not turn to him nor was

he moved to compassion.”15

THE F I SH VENDORS ’ MADONNA IN NAPLES

In the years before the Sack, Polidoro in collaboration with the Florentine Matu-

rino frescoed some forty Roman palace facades in grisaille emulating ancient re-

lief sculpture, but the murals only survive in sparse fragmentary form.16 Vasari’s

claim that when artists arrived in Rome Polidoro was the one they studied above

all other modern painters is of great significance. According to the writer, be-

cause of the beauty and facility of the two painters’ maniera they had benefited

the art of painting more than anyone else since Cimabue.17 Escaping the city Ma-

turino died from the plague, while Polidoro is documented as being in Naples by

November 19, 1527, and in Messina by October 7, 1528.18 It was in the Neapolitan

church of Santa Maria delle Grazie where Polidoro for the first time would turn

the Sack of Rome into a subject of art, when the presence or absence of grace

became a question of geography. In 1526 the confraternity of fishmongers in Na-

ples had built the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie alla Pescheria (demolished

14. Chastel, Sack of Rome, 185.15. “Et credo anche che Pietro ne piangesse in cielo sopra di noi amarissimamente; ma per le

nostre colpe il Signore æterno nè a lui si rivolse, nè a pietà si commosse.” Marcello Alberini, Il Saccodi Roma: L’edizione Orano de i ricordi di Marcello Alberini (Rome, 1997), 275–76.

16. For Polidoro in Rome, see Lanfranco Ravelli, Polidoro a San Silvestro al Quirinale (Bergamo,1987); Achim Gnann, Polidoro da Caravaggio (um 1499–1543): Die römischen Innendekorationen(Munich, 1997); Pierluigi Leone de Castris, Polidoro da Caravaggio: L’opera completa (Naples, 2001);Isabella Colucci, Patrizia Masini, and Patrizia Miracola, eds., Dal giardino al museo: Polidoro da Caravag-gio nel Casino del Bufalo: studi e restauro (Rome, 2013). For the pictorial culture of Rome before the Sack,see recently Jill Burke, ed., Rethinking the High Renaissance: The Culture of the Visual Arts in EarlySixteenth-Century Rome (Farnham, 2012).

17. Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. Gaetano Milanesi(Florence, 1906), 5:144, 150. In support of Vasari’s claim regarding the centrality of Polidoro to themodern Roman manner, we can add a so far unnoticed instance of imitation. When painting thefrontispiece to the Penitential Psalms in the Farnese Hours (Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, M.69,fol. 64r), Giulio Clovio for the two women substituting for caryatids chose a Venus by Polidoro, knownfrom a print by Cherubino Alberti (Bartsch 93 [81]) that probably reproduces a detail from a facadefresco.

18. Leone de Castris, Polidoro da Caravaggio, 278–79, 323.




in 1968) to house their miraculous Marian image, installed on the high altar.19

The community must have grasped that a painting by a pupil of Raphael would

add prestige to their cult.

Because of the fragmentary state of what remains of the commission, some

consideration of the possible original placement of Polidoro’s paintings is in or-

der. Four panels have survived and are housed today in the Capodimonte: two

grisaille tondi with the Annunciation and a pair of panels with the fishermen

brothers Saint Peter and Saint Andrew, alluding to the professional identity of

the patrons (notice the fish hanging from Andrew’s left hand; figs. 1 and 2). The

only description of Polidoro’s works before their dismantling is Vasari’s of 1550:

“He also did for the church of the archangel at the Pescheria a smaller panel

[tavolina] in oil, in which one sees Our Lady and certain souls in agony. The

disegno of the painting rather than its coloring is held to be most beautiful. He also

did certain pictures of single whole figures in the same style in that of the high altar

[alcuni quadri in quella dell’altar maggiore].”20

If quella refers to tavola, then Vasari was describing some sort of polyptych

on the high altar. Among the preparatory drawings for the commission are two

designs for altarpieces of the pala type.21 The sheet at Windsor, an early design for

the high altar, pictures angels in the sky carrying the inset miraculous image

of the Virgin and Child, while below, flanked by Saint Peter and Saint Andrew,

are the souls suffering in purgatory (fig. 3). The context defines the Virgin as the

Madonna delle Grazie, whose cult was particularly widespread in Campania. The

miraculous image of the Neapolitans, however, did not show Mary expressing

19. Pietro de Stefano, Descrittione dei luoghi sacri della citta di Napoli . . . (Naples, 1560), 39v;Cesare D’Engenio, Napoli sacra . . . (Naples, 1623), 450–51; Pierluigi Leone de Castris, “Polidoro allaPietra del pesce,” Ricerche di storia dell’arte 21 (1983): 21–52; Paolo Giusti and Pierluigi Leone deCastris, Pittura del Cinquecento a Napoli, 1510–1540: Forastieri e regnicoli (Naples, 1988), 44–51;Francesco Divenuto, Napoli sacra del XVI secolo: Repertorio delle fabbriche religiose napoletane nellacronaca del Gesuita Giovan Francesco Araldo (Naples, 1990), 79, 128. For Polidoro in Naples andMessina, see also Evelina Borea, “Vicende di Polidoro da Caravaggio,” in Studi di storia dell’arte:Raccolta di saggi dedicati a Roberto Longhi in occasione del suo settantesimo compleanno, Arte antica emoderna 13–16 (Florence, 1961), 211–27; Roberto Longhi, “Un apice di Polidoro da Caravaggio,” Par-agone: Arte 245 (1970): 3–7; Giovanni Previtali, La pittura del Cinquecento a Napoli e nel vicereame(Turin, 1978), 27–28. A photograph of the high altar predating 1968 shows the cult image with theVirgin and Child in a baroque frame. The image has a metal cover, presumably of gold or silver,crowning the protagonists. Leone de Castris, Polidoro da Caravaggio, 288, fig. 338.

20. “Fece ancora in Santo Angelo, allato alla Pescheria di Napoli, una tavolina a olio, nella quale èuna Nostra Donna ed alcuni ignudi d’anime cruciate; la quale di disegno più che di colorito è tenutabellissima; similmente alcuni quadri in quella dell’altar maggiore di figure intere sole, nel medesimomodo lavorate.” Vasari, Vite, 5:150–51.

21. Lanfranco Ravelli, Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio (Bergamo, 1978), 157–58 (cat. 128), 186(cat. 185); Leone de Castris, Polidoro da Caravaggio, 490 (cat. D 262), 492 (cat. D 288).




Figure 1. Polidoro da Caravaggio, Saint Peter and Gabriel, ca. 1528. Oil on panel, 142.5 × 63 and

36 cm. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples. (Photo: Per gentile concessione della Fototeca della

Soprintendenza Speciale per il P.S.A.E. e per il Polo Museale della Città di Napoli.) Color version

available as an online enhancement.

332



Figure 2. Polidoro da Caravaggio, Saint Andrew and Virgin of the Annunciation, ca. 1528. Oil on

panel, 140 × 64 and 36 cm. Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples. (Photo: Per gentile conces-

sione della Fototeca della Soprintendenza Speciale per il P.S.A.E. e per il Polo Museale della Città di

Napoli.)

333



milk, otherwise standard for the Madonna delle Grazie, who intervenes to re-

duce the time spent by dead souls in purgatory.22 A second design by Polidoro,

22. Pierroberto Scaramella, Le Madonne del Purgatorio: Iconografie e religione in Campania trarinascimento e controriforma (Genoa, 1991). See also Christine Göttler, Die Kunst des Fegefeuers nachder Reformation: Kirkliche Schenkungen, Ablass und Almosen in Antwerpen und Bologna um 1600

Figure 3. Polidoro da Caravaggio, Design for Altarpiece with Inset Painting, ca. 1528. Drawing,

26 × 20.6 cm. Windsor Castle. (Photo: Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2014.)

Color version available as an online enhancement.




now in the Albertina, excludes the apostles (fig. 4). Instead of the inset miracu-

lous image of the Madonna and Child, the drawing represents Mary dispensing

milk/grace to the souls below. It is most likely a study for the tavolina men-

tioned by Vasari. Less than a century after the commission was completed, the

high altarpiece was dispersed. Cesare D’Engenio in his Napoli sacra of 1623

mentions that the many figures that once ornamented the high altarpiece had

been sold by the fish vendors, leaving only the two apostles and the sacred image

in the church.23 In 1630 Giulio Cesare Capoccio wrote that he had seen Polidoro’s

“most beautiful” panel with the souls in purgatory from the church of the fish-

mongers in the collection of Don Antonio Camerignano.24 Pierluigi Leone de

Castris presumed that Capoccio was referring to a panel once on the high altar,

although we do not know whether a scene with purgatory was part of that structure.

The painting mentioned by Capoccio could well have been the tavolina with the

Virgin and Child and souls in purgatory, corresponding to the design in Vienna.

Capoccio’s failure to mention the Madonna’s presence in the panel might be due

to his summary identification of the painting rather than to her absence.

Painted in grisaille and evoking the kind of work that had established Poli-

doro’s fame, the tondi in the Capodimonte show the moment when Mary became

“full of grace” with ethereal figures transformed by a Parmigianino-like graceful-

ness (figs. 1 and 2). Saint Peter above the high altar originally gestured at the sacred

image, while Saint Andrew turned his face ecstatically toward it, as if the image

were a celestial apparition (figs. 1 and 2). The strong light, which has bleached the

shoulder of Andrew’s toga, would have seemed to be emanating from the mirac-

ulous image. If we compare the two apostles to, for instance, Polidoro’s female

saints in the chapel of Fra’ Mariano in San Silvestro al Quirinale in Rome circa

1524–27, the apostolic brothers, illuminated from behind, seem ghostly. They en-

counter us as strange creatures with their smallish heads and unusually large hands

(Mainz, 1996). The inset cult images are considered in Martin Warnke, “Italienische Bildtabernakelbis zum Frühbarock,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 19 (1968): 61–102; Victor I. Stoichita,L’instauration du tableau: Métapeinture à l’aube des temps modernes, 2nd ed. (Geneva, 1999), 103–15;Klaus Krüger, Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren: Ästhetische Illusion in der Kunst der frühenNeuzeit in Italien (Munich, 2001), 133–52.

23. “collocando nella tauola dell’altar maggiore quella santa Imagine nel mezzzo [sic] di SS. Pietroe Paolo [sic] Apostoli, li quali furoni dipinti dal celebre Polidoro da Carauaggio, questi anche dipinsenella medesima tauola molt’altre figure per ornamento di quella, le quali poi sono state da Pes-ceuindoli vendute a diuersi (ingordigia infinita di questo misero mondo) e solamente oggi vi sonorimasti li detti Apostoli.” D’Engenio, Napoli sacra, 450.

24. “e con diligenze, e spese, conseruò quella bellissima tauola di Polidoro, doue sono dipintel’anime del Purgatorio, che con tante fatiche si hebbe dalla chiesa si S. Maria delle Gratie nella pietradel pesce, cosa di molto valore.” Giulio Cesare Capoccio, Il forastiero: Dialogi di Givlio Cesare Capoccio(Naples, 1634), 858. Leone de Castris, Polidoro da Caravaggio, 292.




Figure 4. Polidoro da Caravaggio, Madonna delle Grazie, ca. 1528. Drawing, 36.5 × 25.2 cm. Al-

bertina, Vienna. (Photo: Albertina, Vienna, http://www.albertina.at.) Color version available as an on-

line enhancement.



and feet. A low point of view enhances their sacred otherness, while the myste-

rious lights flickering across the background further distance them from the

beholder’s everyday experience. The vaghezza of Polidoro’s color in San Silvestro

has disappeared in the Neapolitan apostles set in dusky surroundings, Saint An-

drew seeming both to emerge from and recede into the darkness of his shadows.

Bushy tufts of curly hair grow from Peter’s otherwise bald head. The prominence

of his skull might have reminded the churchgoers of the recent fate of his head

relic in Rome, which it shared with that of Saint Andrew. I am not suggesting that

Polidoro in his Neapolitan paintings deployed a “penitential style” in response to

the historical circumstances, which I argue below was the case in his Sicilian Way

to Calvary (fig. 5). The lyricism and endearing qualities of the saints in the chapel

in San Silvestro, however, communicate an optimism that no longer had a place

in Christian painting at a time when the seat of the papacy, according to Polidoro’s

altarpiece designs, had become a purgatory on earth.

That more than one altar was dedicated to the Madonna delle Grazie in the

Neapolitan church is not remarkable, but it is of particular interest that Polidoro

considered identical iconographies for both altarpieces. It is plausible that he de-

veloped the design in Vienna for the tavolina after the initial project at Windsor

for the high altar had been abandoned. The tavolina might be seen to “attach”

itself to the high altar with the more potent Marian image through physical vi-

cinity and shared cult, as if the tavolina set forth the nature of the miraculous

image on the high altar. While the iconography with the lactating Virgin hover-

ing above purgatory was common, Polidoro’s interpretation of it was not. Both

altarpiece designs include the Castel Sant’Angelo in the background. The Wind-

sor sheet shows Hadrian’s tomb turned papal fortress as part of a more complete

cityscape, while the version in Vienna somewhat isolates the building, turning

it into a more symbolic representation of Rome. Elsewhere I have suggested that

cityscapes in cinquecento paintings, in the context of the questione della lingua,

could indicate the pictorial “dialect” of an artist.25 In a reversal of this notion, Po-

lidoro’s burning city can be seen to mark the end of his former bella maniera iden-

tified with Rome for religious painting.

What other meanings might the painter’s contemporaries have identified in

the transformation of the flames of Purgatory into the Tiber River? The fish ven-

dors could have been reminded of death at sea, one of the harsh realities of the

fishermen on whom they relied for their livelihood. Such an understanding would

25. Morten Steen Hansen, “Immigrants and Church Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Ancona,” inArtistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City, ed. Stephen J. Campbelland Stephen J. Milner (Cambridge, 2004), 327–54.




also have held special appeal for the fishermen who might have frequented the

church, although Polidoro’s body of (fresh) water is a rather specific one for this

interpretation of the image. More pertinently, Rome playing the part of purgatory

must have evoked the city during the Sack. In a letter sent from Rome on May 10,

1527, a certain Petrus de Franciscis wrote that “hell is a more beautiful thing to

Figure 5. Polidoro da Caravaggio, Way to Calvary, ca. 1534. Oil on panel, 310 × 247 cm. Museo

Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples. (Photo: Per gentile concessione della Fototeca della Soprinten-

denza Speciale per il P.S.A.E. e per il Polo Museale della Città di Napoli.)




see.”26 In accordance with the early accounts of the Sack and the questions they

raise about punishment and guilt, Polidoro pictured Rome in flames as an infer-

nal place purging sins.

In his now classic study of the Sack of Rome, André Chastel claimed that

against the many stories of desecrations during the Sack of Rome, other rumors

began to flourish, in which the sacred representations “fought back.”27 The prob-

lem with his hypothesis is that only one tale, in which an assault on a statue of

the Virgin Mary by a Spanish soldier ended with him being strangled by his com-

rades (as if acting according to her will), dates to the time of the Sack. By itself

the story hardly attests to a more widespread belief in the continued apotropaic

efficacy of images, or of relics and the sacred host for that matter, during 1527–

28. The question remains how the inactivity of the holy objects in Rome initially

might have been perceived. A reader of Lucretius or someone influenced by

Luther’s or Erasmus’s thought might have held that no miracles were to be ex-

pected from relics, images, and the consecrated host in the first place, but the

majority of Christians in Italy would not have shared that view.28 Beyond testify-

ing to the heretics’ blasphemies, stories of the pollution or destruction of relics

and crucifixes and the Eucharistic wafer scattered on the ground must have re-

vealed God’s withdrawal of grace. A short time after the Sack many of the major

relics were said to have found their way back to Rome, which the pontiff cele-

brated in November 1528 in his first public ceremony after his return to the

city.29 The ceremony demonstrated that the papacy once more enjoyed God’s

protection, as if the holy objects had returned to Rome by their own will.

Polidoro’s pictorial argument for the spirituality of the fish vendors’ icon turned

Rome into the antithesis of Naples. While the higher powers had deserted the pa-

pal capital, the deity was present in the icon of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the sacred

image being both godly presence and representation. That a displacement of divine

presence from Rome to Naples had taken place would have been emphasized by

the presence of Peter—according to tradition, the first bishop of Rome and the

26. “Tutta questa città è in tanta tribulatione che veramente vostra magnificentia pò considerar,che per universal dicto, l’inferno è cosa più bella da veder.” Marino Sanuto, I Diarii, vol. 45 (repr.,Bologna, 1970), col. 219.

27. Chastel, Sack of Rome, 103, 262–63 n. 57.28. Desiderius Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, trans. John Wilson (Rockville, MD, 2008), 44. Eras-

mus in a letter of May 9, 1529, to Willibald Pirckheimer described ironically the ineffectiveness ofthe sacred representations because of iconoclastic tendencies that he had witnessed in Basel. “DenStifter- und Grabbildern (simulacra) der Reichen und sogar den Kruzifixen wurde soviel Schimpf(ludibriis) angetan, daβ merkwürdigerweise kein Wunder geschah, wo doch einst schon Wundereintraten, wenn die Heiligtümer viel weniger beleidigt wurden.” Belting, Bild und Kult, 608.

29. Biagio Cesena noted in his journal that during the Holy Week of 1528 he held the Holy Face,displaying it to the crowds. Chastel, Sack of Rome, 181, 276 n. 9.




city’s protector—on the high altar of Santa Maria delle Grazie. In Polidoro’s altar-

piece designs, the heavenly apparition above the Castel Sant’Angelo might have

evoked a much earlier event, when Rome was subjected to heavenly punishment

(figs. 3 and 4). During the plague in 590, the saintly Pope Gregory led a procession

to appease God with the Marian icon attributed to Saint Luke from Santa Maria

Maggiore. Gregory then had a vision of the archangel Michael above Hadrian’s

tomb, wiping a bloody sword and sheathing it to indicate that the plague had

come to an end.30 According to Vasari, the church in Naples was also dedicated

to the archangel, which if correct would have enhanced the association with

Gregory’s vision.31 In 1527, however, no heavenly apparition appeared above

the Castel Sant’Angelo, where the imprisoned pope was unable to change the

course of events through prayer.

POL IDORO ’ S WAY TO CALVARY FOR MESS INA

Among Polidoro’s church commissions in Messina and the only one to make it

into Vasari’s Vite was theWay to Calvary (fig. 5). Inhabited by characters border-

ing on the grotesque, the altarpiece was painted for the oratory of the Catalans in

the church of the Santissima Annunziata.32 Modern scholars have claimed that

the shift which took place in his art upon his arrival in Messina stemmed from

his absence from Rome, as if a separation from the “source” of his classicism

accounted for the change. This clearly cannot have been the case considering that

the painter from Caravaggio was responsible for the most grandiloquent expres-

sion yet seen in Sicily of a modern style associated both with Rome and classi-

cal antiquity. For the triumphal entry of Charles V after his victory at the Battle

of Tunis in 1535, Polidoro—somewhat perversely considering the circumstances

under which he arrived in Sicily—designed the faux architecture of the triumphal

arches.33

30. The story also appears in Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints,trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 2:202.

31. Marabottini thought Vasari was mistaken. I have not encountered other sources regarding adedication of the church to the archangel. Alessandro Marabottini, Polidoro da Caravaggio, vol. 1,Testi (Rome, 1969), 153–62.

32. Placido Samperi, Iconologia della Gloriosa Vergine di Messina (Messina, 1644; repr., Messina,1990), 2:616–19; Teresa Pugliatti, Pittura del Cinquecento in Sicilia: La Sicilia orientale (Naples, 1993),121–22; Leone de Castris, Polidoro da Caravaggio, 343–55 (with further bibliography); Larry Keith,Minna Moore Ede, and Carol Plazzotta, “Polidoro da Caravaggio’s Way to Calvary: Technique andFunction,”National Gallery Technical Bulletin 25 (2004): 36–47; Salvatore Bottari,Messina tra Umanesimoe Rinascimento: Il “caso” Antonello, la cultura, le élites politiche, le attività produttive (Soveria Mannelli,2010), 43.

33. Leone de Castris, Polidoro da Caravaggio, 373–412. Certain additions to Messina Cathedral ina modern classical style have, since the seventeenth century, been attributed to Polidoro. Caterina Di




Polidoro’s paintings from Messina have also been explained in terms of the

presumably “medieval” influences from the religious life he encountered in the

south. Such an exoticizing thesis fails to convince because the aspects of religious

life said to characterize Sicilian Christianity—the fervent veneration of relics, flag-

ellations, mass participation in religious processions—were essentially the spiri-

tuality of the confraternities and equally common in cities such as Rome, Flor-

ence, or Milan.34 The fact that Andrea del Sarto, Perino del Vaga, and Giulio

Clovio, each practicing a distinct version of the bella maniera, were members of

flagellant confraternities warns us not to take for granted simple relationships

between pictorial style and religious practice.35 Another factor said to influence

Polidoro was the presence of Spanish and Flemish painting, but there are no

stylistic similarities to back up the thesis. A work like Colijn de Coter’s Deposi-

tion from the Cross from the church of San Francesco in Messina, with its graphic

depiction of the bleeding wounds of Christ, might, however, be seen to corre-

spond to the Way to Calvary at the level of brutality and the intense expressions

of grief (fig. 6).36 In the port city, individuals and groups, immigrant communi-

ties included, commissioned altarpieces in a plurality of pictorial styles to fashion

distinct, competitive, and pious identities. Painterly modes associated with Rome

remained one possibility but was not the unquestioned norm. The popularity of

Netherlandish and (perhaps) Spanish devotional painting in Messina enabled Po-

lidoro’s experimentation, which hardly would have been appreciated in Rome,

where the papal court largely defined artistic taste.37

Giacomo, “I restaurati portali di Polidoro Caldara da Caravaggio nel Duomo di Messina: Appunti dalcantiere,” in Interventi sulla “questionemeridionale,” ed. Francesco Abbate (Rome, 2005), 85–88.

34. For the artistic patronage of confraternities, see Konrad Eisenbichler, ed., Crossing the Bound-aries: Christian Piety and the Arts in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities (Kalamazoo,MI, 1991); Barbara Wisch and Diane Cole Ahl, eds., Confraternities and the Visual Arts: Ritual,Spectacle, Image (Cambridge, 2000). Arguments for a “medieval” religious climate in Sicily have beenset forth in Leone de Castris, Polidoro da Caravaggio, 278–86. His thesis was criticized in AndreaZezza, “Documenti per la ‘Cona magna’ di Sant’Agostino alla Zecca (Girolamo Santacroce, Polidoroda Caravaggio, Bartolomeo Guelfo, Marco Cardisco),” Prospettiva 75–76 (1994): 150 n. 20.

35. For Andrea del Sarto’s membership in the Compagnia dello Scalzo in Florence, see AlanaO’Brien, “Andrea del Sarto and the Compagnia dello Scalzo,” Mitteilungen des KunsthistorischenInstitutes in Florenz 48, nos. 1–2 (2004): 258–67, and for Perino del Vaga’s and Giulio Clovio’s mem-berships in the archconfraternity of the Santissimo Crocifisso in Rome, see Antonio Vannugli,“L’arciconfraternita del SS. Crocifisso e la sua cappella in San Marcello,” Ricerche per la storia religi-osa di Roma 5 (1984): 429–43.

36. Périer-D’Ieteren proposes a date around 1518–20. C. Périer-D’Ieteren, Colyn De Coter et latechnique picturale des peintres flamands du XVe siècle (Brussels, 1985), 114–15; Federico Zeri andFrancesca Campagna Cicala,Messina: Museo Regionale (Palermo, 1992), 77.

37. An argument for the periphery as a site for artistic experimentation and plurality is set forth inCarlo Ginzburg and Enrico Castelnuovo, “Centre and Periphery,” in History of Italian Art, trans.Ellen Bianchini (Cambridge, 1994), 1:29–112.




Figure 6. Colijn de Coter, Deposition from the Cross, ca. 1518–20. Oil on panel, 97 × 69.5 cm.

Museo Regionale, Messina. (Photo: Museo interdisciplinare regionale di Messina. Su concessione della

Regione Siciliana, Assessorato dei Beni Culturali e della Identità siciliana—Dipartimento dei Beni Cul-

turali e della Identità siciliana—Museo interdisciplinare regionale di Messina.) Color version available

as an online enhancement.



In 1534, probably shortly after Polidoro completed his altarpiece, the priest

Cola Giacomo D’Alibrando composed a longer poem in ottava rima entitled Il

spasmo di Maria Vergine.38 It was dedicated to Pietro Ansalone, the former sena-

tor of the city and Polidoro’s patron by virtue of being the consul of the Catalans.

According to the writer, Ansalone had asked permission from the Bishop of

Messina Antonio de Lignamine to transport the work to the church in a proces-

sion, which was attended by the clergy, friars, and an “endless” number of lay-

men (xvi–xix). When the group arrived in the church, people were already

praying in expectance of its arrival, some genuflecting. The picture was covered

with a light fabric, and, when unveiled, was met with cries and shouts from the

emotionally agitated crowd. At this point in the poem Cola Giacomo moves on

to an ekphrasis: The earth was earlier covered with hyacinths and violets, but

this spring it is a desert full of cruelty, the herbs and stones bathed with Christ’s

blood.39 The emotional intensity culminates when Simon of Cyrene from in-

side the painting calls on the poet to help carry Christ’s cross, and he answers back

while crying (xxxix–xlii).

The poem reveals the kind of response the work could trigger from a Chris-

tian audience. What the priest did not write about was a different set of responses

built into the work once the beholder recognizes a parodic, but in no way humor-

ous, imitation of Raphael’s so-called Spasimo di Sicilia (orWay to Calvary, fig. 7).

Reproduced in a print by Agostino Veneziano in 1517, the work was commis-

sioned for the Olivetan church in Palermo.40 That Cola Giacomo chose to name

Polidoro’s painting after the Virgin’s swoon, even though she only plays a pe-

ripheral part, hints at a comparison between the two altarpieces, almost identical

38. Cola Giacomo D’Alibrando, Il spasmo di Maria Vergine: Ottave per un dipinto di Polidoro daCaravaggio a Messina, ed. Barbara Agosti, Giancarlo Alfano, and Ippolita di Majo (Naples, 1999);hereafter, roman numerals refer to stanzas of the poem. Valeria E. Genovese, “Postille messinesi: Ilgolgota di Gualtieri Sicaminò e il dono per Polidoro da Caravaggio,” Annali della Scuola NormaleSuperiore di Pisa: Classe di Lettere e Filosofia, 5th ser., 3, no. 2 (2011): 447–51.

39. “Quel terren primo se vedea coperto / d’erbe diversi iacinti e vïole, / tal che pareva a noi queltempo aperto / quando Apollo col Tauro abitar suole; / ma quella primavera era un deserto / di crudeltàripieno onde me duole, / però ch’avea bagnati i sassi e l’erbe / di Christo il sangue e di sue piaghe acerbe.”D’Alibrando, Il spasmo, 23 (liii).

40. Helen S. Ettlinger, “Raphael’s Lo Spasimo: Its Historical and Iconographic Background,” Source:Notes in the History of Art 1, no. 4 (1982): 13–15; Raffaello in Vaticano, exh. cat., Citta del Vaticano (Milan,1984), 272–77; Christa Gardner von Teuffel, “Raffaels römischeAltarbilder: Aufstellung und Bestimmung,”Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 50, no. 1 (1987): 18–31; Achim Gnann, Roma e lo stile classico di Raffaello1515–1527, ed. Konrad Oberhuber, exh. cat., Mantua, Palazzo Te, and Vienna, Graphische SammlungAlbertina (Milan, 1999), 87; Jürg Meyer zur Capellen, Raphael: A Critical Catalogue of His Paintings, vol. 2,The Roman Religious Paintings, ca. 1508–1520, trans. Stefan B. Polter (Landshut, 2005), 150–57; TomHenry and Paul Joannides, eds., Late Raphael, exh. cat., Madrid, Prado, and Paris, Louvre (London, 2012),94–102.




Figure 7. Raphael, Way to Calvary, ca. 1515–16. Oil on panel transferred to canvas, 318 × 229 cm.

Museo del Prado, Madrid. (Photo: Scala/Art Resource, New York.)



in shape and size. Polidoro’s patron Pietro Ansalone would have been particu-

larly invested in the relationship between the two works, considering that his

family owned the rights of patronage to an altar in the Palermitan church that

housed the Spasimo.41 In Raphael’s tightly knit composition the figures are ar-

ranged relief-like across an interlocking plane. Christ has fallen, and a heroic Simon

of Cyrene is lifting the cross while resisting a soldier, who presses it down and

threatens Christ with a spear. Simon’s act enables the extended exchange of com-

passionate gazes between Christ and his mother, the moment on which the

drama hinges as each protagonist responds to it directly or indirectly. The repeti-

tion of action between mother and son visualizes her compassio.42 The Roman at

left is yanking the rope tied to Christ to make him continue the via crucis, while

the commander on the horse above right orders the procession to move on. The

Jew next to him reacts to the exclamation while the banner-carrying Roman head-

ing the group turns around to observe what has just happened. Writing in the

eighteenth century, Francesco Susinno, with the aid of Agostino Veneziano’s en-

graving (which he attributed to Marcantonio Raimondi), noticed how Polidoro’s

altarpiece left Raphael’s nothing to be desired.43 That Polidoro took Raphael’s al-

tarpiece as a point of departure also becomes clear from his preparatory oil

sketches.44 In the final version of his altarpiece, Polidoro retained from Raphael’s

invention the movement from upper right to foreground and back toward the

upper left. The soldiers, here accompanying the two thieves, ride out from Jeru-

salem, which takes us down toward the collapsed Christ, whose attention this

time is directed at the Magdalene. Raphael’s Roman with the banner Polidoro

relocated to the group on the right, while replacing the figure’s compositional func-

tion by the attendants gathered on the hill.

Viewing the Way to Calvary for the church in Messina by way of comparison

with Raphael’s altarpiece then in Palermo makes the violence of Polidoro’s scene

even more poignant. By spreading the proportionally smaller figures out across a

much larger area, Polidoro “tore apart” Raphael’s arrangement, destroying its dra-

matic coherence. The disorientation produced by the fragmentation of the pictorial

source leads to Christ’s physical and psychological isolation. The large sinister

41. Leone de Castris, Polidoro da Caravaggio, 343. Raphael’sWay to Calvarymeasures 318 × 229 cm,and Polidoro’s 310 × 247 cm.

42. For the compassio motif, see Otto von Simson, “Compassio and Co-redemptio in Rogier vander Weyden’s Descent from the Cross,” Art Bulletin 35, no. 1 (1953): 9–16.

43. Francesco Susinno, Le vite de’ pittori messinesi, ed. Valentino Martinelli (Florence, 1960), 56.44. Alessandro Marabottini, “Genesi di un dipinto (l’Andata al Calvario di Polidoro a Capodi-

monte),” Commentarii, n.s., 18, nos. 2–3 (1967): 170–85; Leone de Castris, Polidoro da Caravaggio,343–46.




patch of brownish field in the foreground, which Cola Giacomo described poeti-

cally as a desert of cruelty bathed in Christ’s blood (liii), further separates him

from the beholder. At center the horn blower, indifferent to Christ’s fall from

exhaustion, lends perversely to the event an air of Roman triumph. The frightened

attendants on the hill at the brutally severed tree (a truncated version of the tree in

the idyllic narrative with the Magdalene in the chapel in San Silvestro in Rome)45

give the impression of wanting to hide their faces from the gruesome sight, Christ

having become a spectacle too piteous to gaze upon, “as one from whom men hide

their faces” (Isa. 53:3). The two holding on to the trunk—an unheroic version of

Raphael’s attendants at the pillar in the Vatican Expulsion of Heliodorus—resemble

scared children clutching the legs of an adult. Christ’s expression is that of one so

spent that he is barely conscious. With gaping mouth he seems oblivious to Simon

of Cyrene’s attempt to assist him, to the blowing of the horn, and to the executioner

yanking the rope. Placed around Christ’s neck, the rope leaves a more violent im-

pression than in Raphael’s version, where it binds Christ’s chest. While the rope

in Polidoro’s altarpiece is not entirely stretched despite the executioner’s pull, it

adds to an overall slack quality and sense of collapse. With her mouth open, the

Magdalene seems to be calling for Christ, but he only manages to turn his eyes in

her direction, too exhausted to move his head.

The friends and supporters of Christ, experiencing conflicted and painful emo-

tions, present the spectator/worshiper with varied responses to the altarpiece. A

spectrum of empathetic beholding moves from the attendants on the hill, who

seem to want to hide from the fearful sight even as they are unable to look away,

to the Magdalene, who quasi-physically but ineffectively tries to break through to

Christ. The tragedy of the scene is emphasized by those of Christ’s supporters

who turn their gaze toward God in heaven (Saints John and Veronica), because it

adds to Christ’s isolation. The relatively small proportions of the protagonists of

the altarpiece in relation to the represented space and the empty foreground, so

unlike Raphael’s Spasimo where the drama is performed in the foreground, fur-

ther stress the beholder’s alienation from Christ. Cola Giacomo’s fantasy of Si-

mon of Cyrene calling him from inside the painting expresses a desire to over-

come this sense of separation. The issue of subjective response is also brought

into play once we consider that the painter did not want payment for the work.46

45. For the landscapes in San Silvestro with reference to the Way to Calvary in Naples, seeRichard A. Turner, “Two Landscapes in Renaissance Rome,” Art Bulletin 43, no. 4 (1961): 275–87.

46. D’Alibrando, Il spasmo, 29–30. For the theological implications of an artist’s donation of her orhis sacred art, see also Alexander Nagel, “Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna,” Art Bul-letin 79, no. 4 (1997): 647–68.




Since Polidoro was in Messina as a refugee, his gift of the Way to Calvary could

have hinted at his imitatio Christi, both painter and Christ having suffered the

violence of imperial troops.

The search for ideal beauty by cinquecento artists could on occasion lead to

explorations of its opposite in the deformed and monstrous, ugliness enhancing

beauty like a contrapposto. An example from Polidoro’s orbit comes from the Vat-

ican Sala di Costantino in the Adlocutio mural, where the caricatured dwarf gazes

at the beautiful personification of Moderation.47 When in Polidoro’s altarpiece the

entire ensemble of figures, the vegetation, and even the bare ground represent the

negation of the kind of beauty exemplified by the Spasimo di Sicilia, clearly other

issues are at stake. A debasing and almost comic element is at work, especially in

the physiognomies of Christ and Saint Veronica. It is as if mocking an art of

ideal beauty and mocking Christ and his followers have become inseparable.

Polidoro’s version of imitation as the distortion of a beautiful ideal relates to pen-

itence, and his pictorial strategies hold some comparison with Aretino’s con-

temporary Penitential Psalms of 1534, written in the voice of King David.

Aretino’s psalmist takes comfort in no longer having the light of day because

now he does not see vain and lascivious things, nor does he see the green of the

trees, the flowers of the fields, rivers running, the reflection of gold, and the fire

of gems.48 He concludes that his contrition and penitence have made him blind,

but in the place of sight he has received the light of the Lord. We can identify a

homology between Aretino’s blindness to the beauties of nature (so prominent in

Raphael’s Spasimo) and the desolate scenery around Jerusalem in Polidoro’s Way

to Calvary, not to mention the absence of anything lascivious or seductive in the

painting. Even the Magdalene, typically an emblem of female beauty and, by ex-

tension, the desirability of a painter’s maniera, has, despite her golden tresses and

refined costume, become distorted and homely.49 Polidoro’s transformation of

prototypes of ideal beauty to something close to the opposite implies what we

might think of as the artist’s penitence through deprivation. Cola Giacomo’s de-

47. On negative stereotypes of dwarfs in Renaissance Italy, see Giuseppe Crimi and Cristiano Spila,eds., Nanerie del Rinascimento: “La Nanea” di Michelangelo Serafini e altri versi di corte e d’accademia(Manziana [Rome], 2006).

48. Pietro Aretino, I sette salmi de la Penitentia di David, composti per Messer Pietro Aretino, eristampati nuouamente (Venice, 1539), 19v.

49. On represented female beauty as a synecdoche for a painter’s maniera and for beautiful paintingas such, see Elizabeth Cropper, “The Beauty of Woman: Problems in the Rhetoric of Renaissance Por-traiture,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe,ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago, 1986), 175–90.




scription of the reactions of the first audience to the altarpiece suggests that pen-

itence was among the feelings it inspired.50

Early poetic descriptions of the Sack provide some context for Polidoro’s aban-

donment of that beauty, which had been a defining feature of his Roman paintings,

in favor of a brutal painterly idiom. Aretino in a letter to the Marchese of Mantua

Federico Gonzaga of July 7, 1527, included poetry he had written on the Sack.

The writer preceded his verse with a reservation regarding his language, which

he wrote would not be sweet like a Petrarchan sonnet. “But the passion which

gave the good things of Madonna Laura to Messer Petrarch was sweeter than the

one which gives us Rome, the ass of the world, thanks to the Spaniards and the

Germans, so that, for God’s sake, to express our anger we must use words which

are like spears and arquebuses.”51 Not unlike Aretino, Eustachio Celebrino in a

poem on the events of 1527 claimed to be writing in a “language of iron” (lingua

di ferro).52 While the violence of poetic language respects the decorum of literary

style in keeping with the horrific subject matter, Polidoro’s aggressive pictorial lan-

guage takes particular objects: Christ and Raphaelesque painting. The two, as we

see below, also allude to Rome.

Polidoro’s “assault” on Raphael’s altarpiece in Palermo was even more loaded

than suggested above, because the Spasimo worked miracles. Vasari tells that when

it was shipped from Rome, destined for Palermo, a storm broke out and the ship

wrecked. The only thing to survive was the crate with the painting, which arrived

at the shores of Genoa.53 When the painting was unpacked, it was completely

50. Penitence in the early modern period, it has been argued, can be separated into sorrow for sin,confession to another person, works of penitence, and rituals of reconciliation. The references topenitence in the current study are aimed at the first and third of these subcategories. Introduction bythe editors in Katharine Jackson Lualdi and Anne T. Thayer, eds., Penitence in the Age of Reforma-tions (Aldershot, 2000).

51. “Optimo Signore, Io ho intitolato a V. Ex. questa Canzone, la quale ho fatta perchè l’Arciv.Cornaro che me n’ha pregato è degno d’essere obedito, et se ci è qualche vocabolo che non siapetrarchevole non è perch’io non conosca messer Sovente er Ser Unquanco et Don Quinci et maestroQuinci et maestro Quindi, forse quanto gli altri poeti quae pars est. Ma la passione che diede quellabona robba di Monna Laura a Ser Petrarcha fu più dolce che questa che ci dà Roma coda mundi pergratia de li Spagnoli et dei Todeschi, che per dio bisogneria che per isfogarsi le parole fosseno spiedie archibusi.” Alessandro Luzio, Pietro Aretino nei primi suoi anni a Venezia e la corte dei Gonzaga(Turin, 1888), 64.

52. “Già ‘l favor delle Muse ebbi per spasso / Hor qui mi fa mestier lingua di ferro.” Vincenzio DeCaprio, “‘Hor qui mi fa mestier lingua di ferro’: Note sull’immaginario poetico,” in Il sacco di Romadel 1527 e l’immaginario collettivo, ed. Massimo Miglio et al. (Rome, 1986), 24. Polidoro’s “violence”against Roman, Raphaelesque classicism in the Way to Calvary was noticed in Ferdinando Bologna,Roviale Spagnuolo e la pittura napoletana del Cinquecento (Naples, 1959), 18.

53. Vasari, Vite, 4:357–58.




unscathed because the furious winds and waves had respected its beauty, and it

was seen to be something divine ( fu veduta essere cosa divina). The intervention

of Pope Leo X was necessary to have the painting restored to Sicily. The sheer

improbability of these events, not supported by other historical sources, is for the

present purpose unimportant. Within the economy of Vasari’s Lives the anecdote

partakes in the construction of the divinity of certain modern artists and their

works. It has been noticed that the tale of the painting’s miraculous return from

the sea was based on an earlier Sicilian legend, that of the Madonna of Trapani, said

to have been carved in stone by angels and brought to Sicily from the east in the

fourteenth century.54 Thrown overboard to save a ship during a storm, the statue

miraculously made its way to the beach of Trapani and was installed in the Car-

melite basilica of the Santissima Annunziata. The cult around the miraculous

sculpture has been described as the most important in western Sicily from the

fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, and the numerous copies made af-

ter it during that period testify to its continued centrality to the religious life of

the region. The fact that Vasari, who never visited Sicily, showed no awareness

of the legend from Trapani suggests that he did not introduce the notion of

the Spasimo as miraculous, and significantly he began his tale with “as they say”

(secondo e’dicono).55 It was likely the Palermitans who, by recasting the tale of

the Madonna of Trapani with Raphael’s altarpiece as protagonist, attempted

to create a competing cult around a miraculous image. The copies done after the

painting in the sixteenth century for the churches of Sicily and Spain would then

have been motivated not only by admiration for Raphael but also by its heavenly

status.56 Polidoro’s much admired Way to Calvary was subjected to creative and

transforming imitations but not to copying, suggestive of the fact that the cult

image did not enter the ranks of the miracle-working ones. The closest Polidoro’s

54. Sylvia Ferino-Pagden, “From Cult Images to the Cult of Images: The Case of Raphael’sAltarpieces,” in The Altarpiece in the Renaissance, ed. Peter Humfrey and Martin Kemp (Cambridge,1990), 172–74. Hanno Walter-Kruft, “Die Madonna von Trapani und ihre Kopien: Studien zurMadonnen Typologie und zum Begriff der Kopie in der sizilianischen Skulptur des Quattrocento,”Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorisches Institutes in Florenz 14, no. 3 (1970): 297–322.

55. Vasari, Vite, 4:358.56. Maria Antonietta Spadaro, ed., Raffaello e lo spasimo di Sicilia (Palermo, 1991); Pugliatti, Pittura del

Cinquecento in Sicilia, 110, 166, and Pittura del Cinquecento in Sicilia: La Sicilia occidentale, 1484–1557(Naples, 1998), 108–18; Giuseppe Sorce, Autenticità dello Spasimo di Sicilia in Caltanissetta: Argomen-tazioni per una dimostrazione (Caltanissetta, 1997); Henry and Joannides, Late Raphael, 94–102. WalterBenjamin described the outcome of modern reproductive techniques as a loss of “aura” of the originalwork of art, compromised by being disseminated through copies. Mechanical and nonmechanicalreproductions of cult images in the pre-modern era by contrast had the opposite effect, enhancingthe authority of the original. Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalters seiner technischen Repro-duzierbarkeit,” in Schriften (Frankfurt, 1955), 1:366–405.




panel came to reaching that status, it seems, was Cola Giacomo’s Il spasmo in

which the priest described the altarpiece as a relic (“reliquia santa rara et eccel-

lente”; lxxi.4). Moreover, he thought it was God who had brought the painter

to Sicily (viii), an interesting notion considering the circumstances under which

Polidoro arrived there.

The Messinese altarpiece enacts further aggression against a miraculous im-

age, the Holy Face, by making it ugly. Saint Veronica, her own face disfigured

from grief, holds up the Sudarium toward the spectator. The bloody impression

from Christ’s face is mask-like, transformed by suffering. His hanging jaw, a

sign of complete exhaustion, repeats itself on the cloth, and it is likely the first

and only Sudarium in which his upper teeth are bared, before the emergence

of the Volto Santo in Manoppello in the seventeenth century.57 The likeness

on the Veronica is unnaturally large in relation to Christ at the center, enhanc-

ing its status as image and relic. Polidoro’s rendering of the Sudarium and his

imitation of Raphael’s Spasimo evoke the assault on the relics and holy objects

during the Sack of Rome, the Veronica being among the victims. The reaction

against Raphael in the Way to Calvary does not reflect an Oedipal anxiety of in-

fluence but rather an assault on painting—miraculous and otherwise—associ-

ated with Rome (Polidoro’s own included) triggered by the events of 1527 when

to all it seemed that God had abandoned the city.

In Polidoro’s Messinese altarpiece, the demonstrative rejection of that beauty,

which had been fundamental to his Roman production, raises questions about

the relationship between the bella maniera in Christian art and the divine in the

decades preceding the Sack. Raphael’s death in 1520 led to a momentary culmi-

nation of the association between excellent artifice and the workings of God. In

an epigram attributed to Antonio Tebaldeo, the poet asked the deceased: “What

57. André Chastel, “La Véronique,” La Revue de l’Art 40–41 (1978): 71–82; Victor I. Stoichita,“Zurbarans Veronika,” Zeitschrift für Kunsgeschichte 4, no. 2 (1991): 190–206; Jeffrey Hamburger,The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York,1998), 317–82; Herbert L. Kessler and Gerhard Wolf, eds., The Holy Face and the Paradox of Repre-sentation (Bologna, 1998); [Herbert L. Kessler], Giovanni Morello, and Gerhard Wolf, eds., Il volto diCristo, exh. cat., Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Milan, 2000); Gerhard Wolf, “Christ in His Beautyand Pain: Concepts of Body and Image in an Age of Transition (Late Middle Ages and Renaissance),”in The Art of Interpreting, ed. Susan C. Scott (University Park, PA, 1995), 164–97, and Schleier undSpiegel: Traditionen des Christusbildes und die Bildkonzepte der Renaissance (Munich, 2002). See alsoJeffrey Hamburger, “To Make Women Weep: Ugly Art as ‘Feminine’ and the Origins of ModernAesthetics,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 31 (1997): 9–33. For the image in Manoppello, to whichHerbert L. Kessler kindly called my attention, see Saverio Gaeta, L’enigma del Volto di Gesù: L’avven-turosa storia della Sindone segreta (Milan, 2010).




marvel if you died on the same day as Christ did? He was the God of Nature,

you of art.”58 Giovanni Francesco Pico gave a dramatic account of the artist’s

death in a letter to Isabella d’Este in Mantua. “Of his death the heavens wished

to give a sign, like that which indicated the death of Christ when stones were

split. Thus the papal palace opened up so that it seemed about to fall into ruins,

and His Holiness fled in fear from his rooms.”59 The painter here emerged with

greater sanctity than Leo X. Already in the 1520s ironic references had been

made to artistic divinity in connection with Michelangelo, and we should not

imagine that a connection between modern artifice and artists on the one hand

and heavenly matters on the other by any means was simple, uncontroversial,

or universally accepted.60 That being said, some took the divinity of Raphael’s

art and persona to be very real, and Raphael in a self-portrait can be seen to

have invited such thinking.

Like Albrecht Dürer, Raphael took the Veronica as a model when represent-

ing his own likeness with the aid of a mirror. Probably in 1515 the German artist

gave his colleagues in Rome a now-lost self-portrait that could be seen on both

sides of a piece of fine cloth, like a modern-day Sudarium.61 Informed by Dürer’s

example, Raphael turned to the miraculous image when painting his Self-Portrait

with Giulio Romano in the Louvre (fig. 8). The frontality and symmetry of Raphael’s

face, the calm and yet intense gaze encountering that of the beholder, and the style

of his hair and beard all allude to the Sudarium.62 If Dürer’s famous self-portrait

of 1500 in Munich is an indication of the “Sudarium” that he sent to Rome, then

Raphael’s evocation of the Veronica, unlike his German colleague’s, is more indi-

58. John Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, 1483–1602 (New Haven, CT, 2003), 1:661–62.

59. Quotation from Ferino-Pagden, “From Cult Images to the Cult of Images,” 174–75.60. Stephen J. Campbell, “ ‘Fare una Cosa Morta Parer Viva’: Michelangelo, Rosso, and the (Un)

Divinity of Art,” Art Bulletin 84, no. 4 (2002): 596–620.61. Vasari, Vite, 4:354.62. Norberto Gramaccini, “Raffael und sein Schüler—eine gemalte Kunsttheorie,” Georges-Bloch-

Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Seminars der Universität Zürichs 2 (1995): 45–55; Hannah Baader,“Sehen, täuschen und erkennen: Raffaels Selbstbildnis aus dem Louvre,” in Diletto e maraviglia: Aus-druck und Wirkung in der Kunst von der Renaissance bis zum Barock, ed. Christine Göttler et al.(Emsdetten, 1998), 41–59; Nicola Suthor, Bravura: Virtuosität und Mutwilligkeit in der Malerei derfrühen Neuzeit (Munich, 2010), 259–60; Henry and Joannides, Late Raphael, 296–300 (cat. 82), withfurther bibliography. For Raphael’s self-portrait and the Veronica in the Vatican Expulsion of He-liodorus, see Matthias Winner, “Allusio auf die Reliquie der Veronica in Raffaels Eliodor,” in Kesslerand Wolf, Holy Face, 301–17. For Parmigianino’s drawn self-portrait imitating the Veronica, see Mor-ten Steen Hansen, “Parmigianino and the Defense of a Miraculous Image,” in The Miraculous Imagein the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Erik Thunø and Gerhard Wolf (Rome, 2004), 185–203.




rect and done with sprezzatura. Raphael, for instance, chose not to portray his

physiognomy strictly en face and parallel to the painted surface. Evoking the

Sudarium in a self-portrait carried multiple connotations, from an artist’s imita-

tion of Christ and analogies between human artifice and divine creation to paint-

erly skills being so superior that they went beyond the humanly possible, like an

Figure 8. Raphael, Self-Portrait with Giulio Romano, ca. 1518–19. Oil on canvas, 99 × 83 cm.

Musée du Louvre, Paris. (Photo: ©RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource New York.)




image not made by hand.63 According to the semiology of Charles Sanders Peirce, a

bodily imprint constitutes an index, and hence the Veronica would fall into that

category.64 Renaissance painters paradoxically harnessed the relic to become some-

thing like the opposite, as if the work of the modern painter miraculously had come

into being without the artist’s labor and physical contact with the image.65 The Self-

Portrait with Giulio Romano turns Veronica’s veil into a model for the rendering

of ideal beauty that both relates to formal qualities of painting and fictions of

artistic making.

After God had unleashed his anger against Rome in 1527—so it then seemed—

and caused the at least temporary loss of the Sudarium, for Polidoro ideal beauty

was no longer a viable means to establish a connection with the divine when pic-

turing the suffering Christ. Did the altarpiece for the Catalans in Messina then

mark a final break between modern artifice and divinity, as embodied by Ra-

phael’s miracle-working Spasimo? I do not think this is the case. A letter sent

from Rome on June 15, 1527, illuminates the complex dynamics of Polidoro’s

Way to Calvary regarding its status as a cult image. A certain Vincenzo da Tre-

viso wrote, “there is not a Christ in the churches that does not have one or two

hundred lance wounds.”66 The wording elides the distinction between signifier

and signified, and hence iconoclasm (and that is what is being described) can be

seen to reenact the violence against the incarnate God in ways more than sym-

bolic. Moreover, the attacks on “Christ in the churches” become a synecdoche

for the Sack, establishing an analogous relationship between representations of

the suffering Jesus and the city. In a similar vein Pietro Aretino would later write

that during the Sack Christ let himself be crucified for a second time.67 Embrac-

ing the violence of the Sack by translating it into pictorial means might be taken

as an acceptance of divine wrath on the part of Polidoro and his audiences, since

both Christ’s passion and the Sack took place to restore a bond between God and

mankind. After the Sack of Rome, it seems, the sacred image itself had to suffer.

63. See the chapters on Dürer in Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in GermanRenaissance Art (Chicago, 1993).

64. “[The index being] a sign which refers to the object that it denotes by virtue of being reallyaffected by that object.” Charles Sanders Peirce quoted in James Feibelman, An Introduction toPeirce’s Philosophy Interpreted as a System (New York, 1946), 90.

65. See also Philip Sohm, “Maniera and the Absent Hand: Avoiding the Etymology of Style,” Res:Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics 30 (1999): 100–124.

66. Chastel, Sack of Rome, 107. “Non c’è Christo per le chiese che non habia cento e duxentocostelade.” Sanuto, I Diarii, col. 436.

67. The saying is taken from Aretino’s Pronostico of 1533. Pietro Aretino, Operette politiche esatiriche, ed. Marco Faini, vol. 2 (Rome, 2012), 181.




PONTORMO ’ S VERONICA , AND PETRARCH ’ S

Like Polidoro in Rome, Pontormo initially participated in an artistic culture in

which the Veronica was associated with the representation of ideal beauty. We

now turn to Pontormo’s Saint Veronica on the entrance wall inside the Cappella

dei Papi in Santa Maria Novella, commissioned in celebration of Giovanni de’

Medici’s election as Pope Leo X in 1513.68 Clad in fiery orange, the saint holds

the Sudarium underneath a baldachin (fig. 9). Other arma Christi are joyously

displayed by flying cherubs in the tondi of the vault. In the Veronica fresco three

heads of cherubs, in a numerical allusion to the Trinity, gaze down on her. Nude

angels resting on the imposts of the painted pillars pull back the draperies while

offering burning censers. With the forward thrust of her body, Veronica’s display

of the papal relic has a triumphant character in keeping with the celebration of

the pontiff, who might be seen to connect his native city with the Sudarium in

Saint Peter’s. Equally papal are the aristocratic connotations of Mary/Ecclesia in

Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio’s Coronation of the Virgin on the altar wall facing Pon-

tormo’s mural. According to medieval etymology Veronica stemmed from Vera

icon, the “true image,” but Pontormo’s elite and humanist audience might have

been aware that the name of the saint was a Latin derivative from Berenice mean-

ing “bearer of victory” (Pherenikē) in Greek.69

The fresco has aptly been characterized as an encounter between two origins

of art, human and divine.70 Unlike Raphael’s mellifluous union of artist and Su-

darium in the Self-Portrait with Giulio Romano, Pontormo relates his artifice to

the acheiropoieton in ways that suggest both similarity and competition between

modalities of image making. Holding her veil to the side, Veronica makes Christ’s

face appear in foreshortening whereas she encounters the beholder with that fa-

cial frontality and symmetry otherwise identified with the Holy Face. The Latin

inscription below the saint—“This is your salvation”—while referring to the Suda-

rium might also be seen to allude to Pontormo’s art for which Saint Veronica be-

comes a synecdoche, the painter’s artifice facilitating devotion to saint and relic.71

68. Kurt W. Forster, Pontormo: Monographie mit kritischem Katalog (Munich, 1966), 129–30;Frederick A. Cooper, “Jacopo Pontormo and Influences from the Renaissance Theater,” Art Bulletin55, no. 3 (1973): 383; Janet Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo X, andthe Two Cosimos (Princeton, NJ, 1984), 38–39; Luciano Berti, Pontormo e il suo tempo (Ponte alleGrazie, 1993), 128; Philippe Costamagna, Pontormo (Milan, 1994), 116–19.

69. Gerhard Wolf, “From Mandylion to Veronica: Picturing the ‘Disembodied’ Face of Christ andDisseminating the True Image of Christ in the Latin West,” in Kessler and Wolf, Holy Face, 153–79.

70. Campbell, “Fare una Cosa Morta Parer Viva,” 608.71. The political implications of the inscription “H[A]EC EST SALV[S] V[E]STRA” are considered in

Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny, 39.




The fresco leaves a trace of the great other of Christian representation: the idol. As

she literally takes center stage, the angels’ devotion seems more addressed to her,

Pontormo’s vera icon and true image of his art, than to the relic.

Pontormo and his audience would have been familiar with the exchange be-

tween a woman’s face and the Veronica from Petrarch’s Canzoniere (sonnet xvi),

in which the poet compares himself to an old man who, knowing that the end is

near, travels to Rome to see the Holy Face. The Veronica was an earthly prefigu-

ration of the encounter with Christ’s face during the Last Judgment, hence the

pilgrimage to Saint Peter’s in preparation of death.

Movesi il vecchierel canuto et bianco

del dolce loco ov’ à sua età fornita

et da la famigliuola sbigottita

che vede il caro padre venir manco;

indi traendo poi l’antico fianco

per l’estreme giornate di sua vita,

Figure 9. Jacopo Pontormo, Saint Veronica, 1515. Fresco, 307 × 413 cm. Cappella dei Papi, Santa

Maria Novella, Florence. (Photo: Scala/Art Resource, New York.)




quanto più pò col buon voler s’aita,

rotto dagli anni, et dal camino stanco;

et viene a Roma, seguendo ‘l desio,

per mirar la sembianza di colui

ch’ ancor lassù nel ciel vedere spera.

Così, lasso, talor vo cercand’ io,

Donna, quanto è possibile in altrui

la disiata vostra forma vera.

[The little white-haired pale old man leaves the sweet place where he has

filled out his age and his fear-stricken little family, who watch their dear

father disappear; / thence dragging his ancient flanks through the last days

of his life, as much as he can he helps himself with good will, broken by the

years and tired by the road; / and he comes to Rome, following his desire,

to gaze upon the likeness of Him whom he hopes to see again up there in

heaven. / Thus, alas, at times I go searching in others, my Lady, as much as

is possible, for your longed-for true form.]72

Like the aging pilgrim, Petrarch seeks out the image of the one he hopes to en-

counter in Paradise, but by a somewhat startling contrast it is the “imprint” of

the beloved woman’s face that he seeks, not in Saint Peter’s Basilica but in people

that he encounters. Hence, Petrarch’s simile of the moribund pilgrim’s desire to

gaze upon the Veronica and the poet’s search for Laura’s forma vera is ambigu-

ous to say the least.73 If the analogy is not questioned, then Laura, like Beatrice to

Dante, becomes an object of love that can elevate the poet’s soul to contemplate

divinity. Read otherwise, Petrarch’s “pilgrimage” when seeking out Laura’s simi-

larity becomes an erotic distraction, leading him astray from the heavenly con-

templation sought in Rome by the old pilgrim. The ambiguity regarding Pe-

trarch’s choice of religious metaphor is enhanced once considered in relation to

the Canzoniere as a whole, because elsewhere he compares Laura to an idol in

72. Petrarch, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The Rime Sparse and Other Lyrics, trans. and ed. Robert M.Durling (Cambridge, MA, 1976), 50–51 (xvi).

73. The potentially disturbing ambiguity was “corrected” in Malipiero’s pious rewriting of theCanzoniere when he took Laura out of the equation. The Venetian friar replaced the last tercet with thefollowing: “Così spesso qui anchor uo cercand’io / Dio, ch’è inuisibil, ne l’oggetto altrui, / Sperando inciel ueder sua forma uera.” Girolamo Malipiero, Il Petrarcha spirituale (Venice, 1536), 12v.




allusion to the transformed Daphne, “l’idolo mio scolpito in vivo lauro” (my idol

carved in living laurel), Laura’s name and his poetry (lauro referring to the poet’s

laurels) designating objects of worship.74

A contemporary of Pontormo, who could have been familiar with the Cappella

dei Papi, also used Veronica and her veil in love poetry:

[De Veronica]

Es Veronicane? an potius vere unica? quae me

uris, quae mihi me tam cito surpueris?

Unica nimirum, cui soli est forma, decorque,

gratiaque, et quantum est et salis et veneris.

Quaeque simul casta es, simul et pulcherrima sola;

o sola, o vero nomine digna tuo!

[“On Veronica”

Are you Veronica? Or are you rather the truly unique one? The one / that

makes me burn, the one that quickly steals me from myself? / Unique indeed,

the one alone possessing beauty, charm, / and grace, and all the wisdom and

the love there is. / You are as chaste as you are alone beautiful; / the only, the

truly worthy of your name.]75

Ludovico Ariosto’s declaration of love to a woman named Veronica turns the relic

into a metaphor for her in a play on vero nomine and vera icon. The admired

woman becomes, like the Sudarium, an ideal of beauty and grace. By exchanging

the face of a beautiful woman with the Veronica, Ariosto might be seen to idealize

and lend spiritual significance to his love. The poem, however, is not sacred, and

the Sudarium is a mere trope for erotic desire, a poetic conceit with an idolatrous

flip side.

With her Michelangelesque monumentality and slightly androgynous physi-

ognomy, Pontormo’s saint has more terribilità and gravitas than suave grace and

sweetness, and she is of a different species than the Petrarchan beauties inhabit-

ing cinquecento painting. Still her pose is highly sensuous. Ariosto’s and Petrarch’s

74. Petrarch, Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 88–89 (xxx.27). For Petrarch, see also John Freccero, “TheFig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics,” Diacritics 5, no. 1 (1975): 34–40; Nancy J. Vickers,“Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 2 (1981): 265–79;Cropper, “Beauty of Woman”; William J. Kennedy, Authorizing Petrarch (Ithaca, NY, 1994).

75. Ludovico Ariosto, Opere minori, ed. Cesare Segre (Milan, 1954), 66; trans. Irena Braticevic andIvan Lupic. For Ariosto’s visits to Florence while in the diplomatic service of the Este, see MicheleCatalano, Vita di Ludovico Ariosto ricostruita su nuovi documenti, vols. 1–2 (Geneva, 1930–31).




poetic use of the Sudarium attunes us to Pontormo’s stakes in exchanging, or tem-

porarily replacing, the face of Christ with that of a beautiful woman, who, vener-

ated by angels and carried by a cloud, emblematizes the perfections of his art.76

THE PASS ION CYCLE AT THE CERTOSA DEL GALLUZZO

In the Christian tradition penitential practices were inseparable from the Passion

story. In this light we find church and cloister paintings from the 1520s showing

Christ’s sufferings and death by artists who had escaped the Sack of Rome (Po-

lidoro and Rosso) and the plague in Florence (Pontormo and Andrea del Sarto),

outbreaks of the illness being attributed to God’s anger.77 In 1523 Pontormo and

his then assistant Bronzino traveled to the Carthusian monastery south of Florence

in the Galluzzo to escape the infected city. Here among other works, Pontormo

executed five large scenes from Christ’s Passion in the corners of the chiostro

76. In a letter to Benedetto Varchi in 1547, Pontormo defined the relationship between paintingand God’s creation as one of competition. “Ma quello che io dissi troppo ardito, ch’è la importanza, siè superare la natura in volere dare spirito a una figura e farla parere viva, e farla in piano; che sealmeno egli avesse considerato che, quando Dio creò l’uomo, lo fece di rilievo, come cosa più facile afarlo vivo, e’ non si arebbe preso un soggetto sì artifizioso e più tosto miracoloso e divino.” PaolaBarocchi, ed., Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento (Milan, 1971), 1:506. For the literary culture of Pontormo,see Roberto Fedi, “La cultura del Pontormo,” in Pontormo e Rosso, ed. Roberto P. Ciardi and AntonioNatali (Florence, 1996), 26–46; Cécile Beuzlin, “Jacopo Pontormo: A Scholarly Craftsman,” in TheArtist as Reader: On the Education and Non-education of Early Modern Artists, ed. Heiko Damm,Michael Thiemann, and Claus Zittel (Leiden, 2013), 71–104.

77. Savonarola, for instance, in a sermon delivered in Florence Cathedral on January 13, 1495,told his listeners that God scourged King David with plague for his pride. Girolamo Savonarola, Pre-diche sopra i salmi, ed. Vincenzo Romano (Rome, 1969), 1:44. For the plague in Europe, see SamuelK. Cohn Jr., The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe (Lon-don, 2002), and for the outbreak in Florence 1522–23, see John Henderson, “Epidemics in Renais-sance Florence: Medical Theory and Government Response,” in Maladies et société (XIIe–XVIIIesiècles): Actes du colloque de Bielefeld, novembre 1986, ed. Neithard Bulst and Robert Delort (Paris,1989) 165–86. Studies of European art and the plague include Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence andSiena after the Black Death: The Arts, Religion, and Society in the Mid-fourteenth Century (Princeton,NJ, 1951); Louise Marshall, “Manipulating the Sacred: Image and Plague in Renaissance Italy,” Re-naissance Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1994): 485–532; Gauvin Alexander Bailey and Pamela M. Jones, eds.,Hope and Healing: Painting in the Time of Plague, 1500–1800, exh. cat., Worcester, MA, ClarkUniversity, College of the Holy Cross, and Worcester Art Museum (Chicago, 2005). Numerousscholars have associated Pontormo’s use of northern prints in the Certosa with Protestant sympa-thies. Currently my interests lie elsewhere. With reference to Lorenzo Lotto, Adriano Prosperi haspointed out that an artist’s production of religious images was seen as an extension of her or his pietyindependently of patronage, making the issue of who chose the subject matter of a given work of artirrelevant to its historical reception. Adriano Prosperi, “The Religious Crisis in Early Sixteenth-Century Italy,” in Lorenzo Lotto: Rediscovered Master of the Renaissance, ed. David Alan Brown, PeterHumfrey, and Mauro Lucco, exh. cat., Washington, DC, National Gallery; Bergamo, AccademiaCarrara; Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais (New Haven, CT, 1998), 21–26.




grande, recently completed in 1520, and he received payments from the Certosa

until 1527.78 This was the next occasion after Santa Maria Novella in which

Pontormo painted the Veronica, the new work being no less self-reflexive than the

earlier mural. Because of their former outdoor location the now detached narra-

tives have lost much surface, but sixteenth-century painted copies give some im-

pression of their original appearance.79 Vasari’s description of the “feathery beards

and the marvelous sweetness of the coloring” in the heads of Joseph of Arimathea

and Nicodemus in the Lamentation reminds us of what the images once might

have looked like (fig. 10).80

The frescoes were the outcome of Pontormo’s intense study of northern

prints, Albrecht Dürer’s in particular. There was nothing unusual as such about

the use of German and Flemish prints, which Italian artists mined for their in-

ventions. Raphael’s Spasimo is one such example, borrowing generously from

Dürer’s Christ Carrying the Cross from the Large and Small Passion series (fig. 7).

What separated Pontormo’s reliance on the prints from the practice of his con-

temporaries was his imitation of Dürer’s style, whereas his actual borrowings of

figural and compositional motifs were rather limited. Vasari duly noticed—and

lamented—what was unique about Pontormo’s imitation of the prints when he

asked the rhetorical question, “Now did not Pontormo know that the Germans

and Flemish come to these parts to learn the Italian style, which he with great

78. Caterina Chiarelli, Le attività artistiche e il patrimonio librario della certosa di Firenze (dalleorigine alla metà del XVI secolo), Analecta Cartusiana, vol. 102[a] (Salzburg, 1984), 98–100, andvol. 102[b] 273–77, 344–46, 348–51, 437 (payment documents made to Pontormo for work at theCertosa, 1524–27).

79. The copies, or at least some of them, have been attributed to Jacopo da Empoli and dated toca. 1582. Alessandro Marabottini, Jacopo di Chimenti da Empoli (Rome, 1988), 178 (cat. 9a–e);Monica Bietti, “Pontormo copiato,” in Da Pontormo e per Pontormo: Novità alla Certosa (Florence,1996), 73–99. Literature on Pontormo’s frescoes at the Certosa includes Forster, Pontormo, 49–53,71–75, 138–39; Graham Smith, “On the Original Arrangement of Pontormo’s Passion Cycle,”Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 42, no. 1 (1979): 61–64; Giovanni Leoncini, La certosa di Firenze neisuoi rapporti con l’architettura certosina, Analecta Cartusiana 71 (Salzburg, 1980), 187; Janet Cox-Rearick, The Drawings of Pontormo: A Catalogue Raisonné with Notes on the Paintings (New York,1981), 1:49–55; Ignacio L. Moreno, “Pontormo’s Passion Cycle at the Certosa del Galluzzo,” ArtBulletin 63, no. 2 (1981): 308–12; Elizabeth Pilliod, “Pontormo and Bronzino at the Certosa,” J. PaulGetty Museum Journal 20 (1992): 77–88, and Pontormo, Bronzino, Allori: A Genealogy of FlorentineArt (New Haven, CT, 2001), 53–56; Berti, Pontormo, 225–30; Costamagna, Pontormo, 168–78;Alessandro Conti, Pontormo (Milan, 1995), 36–38; Ginzburg and Castelnuovo, “Centre and Periph-ery,” 68–71; Elizabeth Cropper, “Pontormo and Bronzino in Philadelphia: A Double Portrait,” inPontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence, ed.Carl Brandon Strehlke, exh. cat., Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, 2004), 1–33.

80. “hanno [Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus] le più bell’arie e teste di vecchi, con barbepiumose e colorite con dolcezza maravigliosa, che si possano vedere.” Vasari, Vite, 6:269.




Figure 10. Jacopo Pontormo, Lamentation, ca. 1523–25. Detached fresco, 300 × 290 cm. Certosa

del Galluzzo. (Photo: Scala/Art Resource, New York.)



effort tried to abandon, as if it were bad?”81 The writer exaggerated when he

contended that Pontormo had killed his former style in favor of Dürer’s.82 For

instance, the long craning necks, backs arching high above the small heads of

forward-bending figures, and round eyes set deep in shadowed sockets, all signa-

ture features of Pontormo’s maniera, carry no relationships to northern art.

Certain aspects of the Passion narratives, however, Vasari praised almost

without reservation: “Around Pilate are some soldiers, who in their faces and

clothing look so German that if one did not know whose hand this work was by

one would have taken them to be the works of a Northerner. It is true, however,

that in the background of this story there is a cupbearer of Pilate’s, descending

some stairs and holding a basin and ewer for washing Pilate’s hands. The figure

is most beautiful and lively, and possesses a certain something of Pontormo’s old

style.”83 Rather than following Vasari, who saw Pontormo’s natural gifts shine

through in the cupbearer despite his attempt to accommodate his art to the sup-

posedly inferior transalpine school, we can instead perceive in the servant a poi-

gnant reference to what the painter had abandoned (fig. 11).

Like Polidoro after him, Pontormo’s exile caused by the deity’s anger led him

to turn away from the artistic culture of his former city of residence when paint-

ing emotionally charged scenes from Christ’s Passion. (There were, in fact, no sig-

nificant local artistic examples of the Passion narrative in the modern manner.)

Abandoning his former styles with their Florentine connotations, Pontormo in the

frescoes might be seen to enact other types of rejection as well by pitting the se-

cluded world of the Carthusians against Florence, which, even though it had pro-

duced two Medici pontiffs, (temporarily) had lost God’s favor. Saint Bruno, the

eleventh-century founder of the Carthusian Order, was German. In the light of the

81. “Or non sapeva Puntormo che i Tedeschi e Fiamminghi vengono in queste parti per impararela maniera italiana, che egli con tanta fatica cercò, come cattiva, d’abbandonare?” Vasari, Vite, 6:267.See also Patricia Rubin, Giorgio Vasari: Art and History (New Haven, CT, 1995), 249–50; SharonGregory, “The Unsympathetic Exemplar in Vasari’s Life of Pontormo,” Renaissance Studies 23, no. 1(2009): 1–32, and “ ‘Quel Nuovo Studio e Fatica’: Pontormo, Dürer and Other Prints,” in Inganno—the Art of Deception: Imitation, Reception and Deceit in Early Modern Art, ed. Sharon Gregory andSally Anne Hickson (Farnham, 2012), 47–62.

82. For an alternative assessment, we can turn to Frederick Clapp, who noticed that the frescoes“have a soft vivacity, an unforced gravity, that no transalpine work could have.” Frederick MortimerClapp, Jacopo Carucci da Pontormo: His Life and Work (New Haven, CT, 1916), 41. See also Irving L.Zupnick, “Pontormo’s Early Style,” Art Bulletin 47, no. 3 (1965): 345–53.

83. “Intorno a Pilato sono alcuni soldati, tanto propriamente, nell’aria de’ volti e negli abiti,tedeschi, che chi non sapesse di cui mano fusse quell’opera, la crederebbe veramente fatta daoltramontani. Bene è vero che nel lontano di questa storia è un coppieri di Pilato, il quale scende certescale con un bacino ed un boccale in mano, portando da lavarsi le mani al padrone, e bellissimo evivo, avendo in sè un certo che della vecchia maniera di Iacopo.” Vasari, Vite, 6:267–68.




Figure 11. Jacopo Pontormo, Christ before Pilate, ca. 1523–25. Detached fresco, 300 × 290 cm.

Certosa del Galluzzo, Florence. (Photo: Scala/Art Resource, New York.)



saint’s origins, Pontormo’s use of Dürer might evoke a wider network of monas-

tic communities with no relationship to the city. Vasari’s description of the beauti-

ful cupbearer at Pilate’s court, gracefully making his entrance above center, is here

of particular interest. In the economy of the frescoes the figure indicates what the

artist had abandoned when taking up residence in the monastery. By the early

1520s Pontormo had a number of Medicean commissions behind him, his most

recent being the lunette fresco Vertumnus and Pomona at Poggio a Caiano, begun

in 1519 for Leo X through Cardinal Giulio and Ottavio de’ Medici, the former

having been elected to the papal throne by the time of Pontormo’s arrival at the

Certosa.84 The pastoral fresco in the Medici villa contains all the sweetness and

charm that Vasari thought was innate to the painter. That Pontormo in Christ

before Pilate identified his former maniera with a servant at a pagan court might

be seen as taking a critical stance toward his former patrons. If Pontormo’s

previous ways of painting could be identified with Medicean courtliness, then

they were no longer appropriate for the depiction of Christ’s suffering, death, and

resurrection.

Pontormo’s demonstrative abandoning of his former maniera with its con-

notations of a particular sociogeographical sphere recalls Polidoro’s post-Roman

painterly strategies, but unlike the “penitential” style of the latter’s Way to Cal-

vary I do not find evidence to characterize Pontormo’s Düreresque art in similar

terms. Walter Friedlaender’s perception that through the German prints Pon-

tormo looked back to something that was archaic, Gothic, and (with a particu-

larly “pre-Raphaelite” notion) spiritual is at odds with the most important Ital-

ian source on Dürer from the cinquecento.85 Vasari in his Lives only had praise

for the richness of Dürer’s inventions, perspectival constructions, and dexterity of

execution. Had Dürer been born in Tuscany and studied in Rome (as happened

to be the case with Vasari), he would in fact have been the greatest artist of all

time.86

Pontormo’s “overidentification” with Dürer begs comparison with related pic-

torial strategies by Mannerist artists. Toward the end of the century, Hendrick

Goltzius produced engravings in the styles of different printmakers, imitating

even the other artists’ handling of the burin. Such an approach to imitation has

84. Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny, 87–142. See also Massimo Firpo, Gli affreschi di Pontormoa San Lorenzo: Eresia, politica e cultura nella Firenze di Cosimo I (Turin, 1997), 300–311.

85. Friedlaender, Mannerism and Anti-mannerism, 24–27.86. Vasari, Vite, 5:400, 402.




been described as Protean, the artist effectively turning himself into the masters

he imitated.87 Even though composed a century earlier, Pico della Mirandola’s

Oration on the Dignity of Man on man’s ability to change himself into a different

creature through the practice of virtù can well be brought to bear on Goltzius’s

project of imitation.88 His engravings in the style of earlier artists astounded early

audiences with their virtuosity, and Pontormo’s assimilation of the northern prints

in mural painting made Vasari marvel, despite his many reservations regarding

the temporary change in Pontormo’s art. Still, Pontormo did not aim for the com-

plete transformation of his art into that of another. In a second version of Manner-

ist imitation after art, this time drenched in irony, Perino del Vaga and Pellegrino

Tibaldi explored in fresco decorations in courtly settings in Genoa, Rome, and

Bologna.89 Imitating Michelangelo while placing both their art and pictorial

sources in quotation marks, they undermined commonplaces of cinquecento artis-

tic theory according to which an artist’s maniera was an imprint of her or his soul

and mental makeup. In a number of works Perino and Tibaldi came across as the

disengaged manipulators of pictorial means. In doing so they played with notions

of the fictive nature of identity, with selfhood as performance and dissimulation.

Pontormo’s works in the Certosa do not fit easily into this company either. We

might instead construe his use of the northern prints as humble and self-effacing.

Rather than relying on the different versions of the bella maniera known from his

paintings before the outbreak of the plague, he now chose an alien pictorial idiom,

as if recognizing that, for the representation of the Passion story, his Florentine art

was lacking and, for reasons considered above, only suited for a figure like the

cupbearer inChrist before Pilate.

In the Saint Veronica in Florence Pontormo brought his rendering of the Holy

Face to bear upon and authorize an ideal of artistic beauty and order (fig. 9). He

did so by placing his artifice in an analogous and competitive relationship to that

of the Deus artifex. That the image of Christ that comes into being in the Certosa

is one of the utmost humility, in contrast to its triumphal, papal context in Santa

Maria Novella, is in particular suggested by the Holy Face in the Way to Calvary

(fig. 12). As to the cloth handed by Veronica to Jesus, the part that hangs from

her arm echoes the shirt tails of the executioner on the left with the slashed sleeve

87. Walter S. Melion, “Karel van Mander’s ‘Life of Goltzius’: Defining the Paradigm of ProteanVirtuosity in Haarlem around 1600,” Studies in the History of Art 27 (1989): 113–33.

88. Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man: A New Translation and Commentary,ed. Francesco Borghesi, Michael Papio, and Massimo Riva (Cambridge, 2012).

89. Morten Steen Hansen, In Michelangelo’s Mirror: Perino del Vaga, Daniele da Volterra,Pellegrino Tibaldi (University Park, PA, 2013).




and ax attached to his belt. Emerging below his buttocks, this piece of clothing,

through its analogy with Veronica’s veil, marks the ultimate debasement of the

image about to be left by the suffering Christ to his followers.

Writing about Pontormo’s drawings, Janet Cox-Rearick has noticed the fre-

quency with which figures stare in the beholder’s direction like self-portraits.

This establishes an ambiguous situation when the beholder comes to play the part

Figure 12. Jacopo Pontormo, Way to Calvary, ca. 1523–25. Detached fresco, 300 × 290 cm.

Certosa del Galluzzo. (Photo: Alinari/Art Resource, New York.)




of mirror to the draftsman.90 Bringing this characterization to bear on the frescoes

in the Certosa, we notice that the “Pontormo-like faces” do not actually resemble

the artist. Nonetheless, they stare into the beholder’s space as if they were looking

into a mirror in ways familiar from self-portraiture. Elizabeth Cropper links the

outward-turned “mirroring” gazes in the Passion cycle with a stimulus toward an

imitatio Christi and a deeply emotional engagement in Christ’s passion and hu-

manity.91 By way of conclusion let me connect these observations regarding effects

of self-portraiture in Pontormo’s art with Carthusian spirituality. In the fourteenth

century Ludolph of Saxony, and in the following Denis the Carthusian, promoted

affective meditation on the Gospels.92 To the latter the purpose of contemplating

Christ’s Passion was to imitate the virtues that he displayed during his sufferings,

such as humility and silence, both corresponding to Carthusian monasticism.93 A

passage in Denis’s treatise on contemplation is of particular interest to the frescoes.

The apostle tells us that if we suffer with Him, we shall also be glorified

with Him (Rm 8:17). So, if we are to be future partners in glory with Christ,

and if we are to enjoy His grace in this present life, we should recall His

passion daily. With all the affection and compassion in our power we

should bring it to mind; and, for grace to do this, we should beg Christ

most devoutly. . . . Christ’s Passion is the most brilliant mirror and the

most resplendent book in which we can learn all the virtues and the perfec-

tion of all the virtues.94

The theologian also commented on the emotional state proper to the under-

standing of scripture. “We should also note . . . that to attain to a knowledge of

sacred Scripture, to contemplation of the divine, and to the acquisition of holy

wisdom, there is more need of true contrition than of profound investigation. Sighs

are better than arguments, frequent groans more to the point than much banging

together of heads, tears mean more than sentences, prayer is preferable to read-

90. Cox-Rearick, Drawings of Pontormo, 1:33.91. Cropper, “Pontormo and Bronzino in Philadelphia,” 11–13. See also by the same author “Holy

Face—Human Face: Thoughts on Bronzino’s ‘Lutheran’ Panciatichi Portraits,” in Synergies in VisualCulture—Bildkulturen im Dialog: Festschrift für Gerhard Wolf, ed. Manuela Di Giorgi, Annette Hoff-mann, and Nicola Suthor (Munich, 2013), 45–56.

92. See the introduction by Terence O’Reilly to Denis the Carthusian, Spiritual Writings: Contem-plation, Meditation, Prayer, the Foundation of Light and the Paths of Life, Monastic Profession, Ex-hortation to Novices, trans. Íde M. Ní Riain (Dublin, 2005).

93. Ibid., 294 (Meditation, chap. 12).94. Ibid., 42 (Contemplation, bk. 1, chap. 25).




ing.”95 Pontormo’s cloister frescoes would have facilitated the monks’ daily, tearful

contemplation of Christ’s Passion as recommended by Denis the Carthusian. The

experience facilitated by the frescoes prepared the beholder for his mental union

with Christ in glory in the final fresco with the Resurrection.

Recalling Denis the Carthusian’s reference to the Passion story as a mirror, we

now turn to Pontormo’s version of the Holy Face in the Certosa (fig. 12). Just as

the Shroud—yet another acheiropoieton—being offered by Joseph of Arimathea

in the Lamentation fresco (fig. 10) is blank, so is Veronica’s veil, like a canvas

waiting to be painted. Christ, grasping the cloth and about to leave his imprint,

stares outward, establishing an analogous relationship between Veronica’s veil

and the beholder receiving Christ’s “mirroring” gaze. The connection between

beholder and relic suggests a woeful allusion to Genesis 1:27, when God created

man in his image.96 The fact that the Veronica is empty might be said to allude to

the beholder who, like the cloth, has not yet received Christ’s image, meaning

that he is as yet imperfect even as he strives for spiritual perfection by suffering

with Christ. In a similar light we can see the blankness of the Veronica as the

painter’s way of sidestepping the confident analogy between artifice and relic at

play in the Cappella dei Papi and in self-portraits by Dürer and Raphael (figs. 8

and 9). The emptiness of the Veronica forecloses a competitive relationship be-

tween human and divine creation. At the Certosa, painting and beholding the Pas-

sion narrative were tasks for penitent men, striving for redemption by contemplat-

ing the suffering Christ’s image.

95. Ibid., 43 (Contemplation, bk. 1, chap. 25).96. For the theology of the early modern image invoking Gen. 1:27, the imitatio Christ, and the

Veronica, see Koerner, Moment of Self-Portraiture, 127–38; Walter Melion, “Introduction: MeditativeImages and the Psychology of the Soul,” in Image and Devotion of the Religious Self in Late Medievaland Early Modern Europe, ed. Reindert L. Falkenburg, Walter S. Melion, and Todd M. Richardson(Turnhout, 2007), 1–36.




After the Veronica: Crisis and the "Ars sacra" of Polidoro da Caravaggio and Pontormo. 2014.

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Transcript of After the Veronica: Crisis and the "Ars sacra" of Polidoro da Caravaggio and Pontormo. 2014.