“The Beautiful Fragment- Capricci, Mistura, and Marginal Bodies: Representation of Ruin in Maarten van

Heemskerck’s Roman Sketchbooks”

Alexandria Brown-Hedjazi

Reading, Drawing, Representing ArchitectureProfessor Alina Payne, Fall 2014

History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University

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Introduction (Figures 1a-1f)

"Disegnia Antonio, disegnia Antonio, disegna e non perdere tempo" –Michelangelo to one of his students

Turning through Maarten van Heemskerck’s Roman sketchbooks, the rotated angles of

figures and objects suggests the continuous turning and movement of the artist’s hand and his

page. In the manner of Michelangelo and Leonardo, Heemskerck’s style of sketching was one of

active engagement- with every part of expensive Italian paper filled in. The artist’s use of mixed

drawing material and experimentation with technique only exaggerates this quality of movement

within the sketchbook, producing spontaneous and unintentional elements of lyrical layering and

collage. A slow observation of Figures 1.A-1.G will reveal this unmediated effect of moving

through the palimpsest of Heemskerck’s artistic memories of Rome during 1532-1537.

Starting with the fragmented sketches of the body, the turned page reveals their inversed

impressions as a trace beneath the new drawings of a draped sculpture done in faint ink. Pressed

lightly atop these two layers of torqued and draped torsos is a third layer left by the red chalk of

the folded adjacent page, adding contours of the torso in profile and the head of an ornamented

ox. Turning once again, these red chalk traces of body and beast now become the backdrop of

another scene of a reclined female bodice and the fragment of an antique sandal, this time with

the new impression of an animal resembling Hanno (the white elephant of Leo X). This

movement of impression, trace, and layer continues until the final accidental meeting of three

unlikely characters- Hanno (who we recognize more clearly now as Giovanni Udine’s fountain at

Villa Madama), a bitten son of Laocoön (and an experimental view of both the serpent and view

from behind), and the black ink trace of Marforio (by then a “talking statue” of Rome).

As the scholarship has already heavily focused on archeological factual identification as

well as art historical interpretation and meaning, this paper will in turn be entirely devoted to the

representational qualities of the sketches themselves, in what will be a comparative and formal

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analysis. This paper will take on this pursuit in two parts. Firstly, I will outline the culture of

drawing that Heemskerck enters into. With a brief consideration of his antiquarian predecessors,

I will largely illustrate how Heemskerck’s sketches of ruin are entirely unique to this particular

fragmented moment of 1530’s Rome. After the theme of contextual fragmentation has been put

forth, the second part of the paper will examine how Heemskerck’s sketchbooks embody this

theme of fragment through three experiments in representation: capricci and manipulation of

scale, mistura of place and object, and lastly, the representation of the sculptural and figural

body.

Now housed in the Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum, Maarten van

Heemskerck’s Roman sketchbooks are the only surviving artistic representations of sixteenth-

century Dutch travel. Perhaps it was precisely the inconspicuous nature of the medium of the

sketchbook that allowed it to pass unseen and safe from the Beldenstorm of the Netherlands that

destroyed much of Heemskerck’s oeuvre. While statues, paintings, and altarpieces were direct

objects of Calvinist violence, a small stack of personal drawings (not even prints) would be of no

interest to the icon smashers. This paper takes on the study of the sketchbook as an object in and

of itself, examining qualities that the medium produces both intentionally and in some cases,

unintentionally.

The importance of the sketchbook as survivor and source of early modern topographic

knowledge of Rome is eclipsed by a third point of understudied value- the compositions within

the sketchbook as objects of artistic invention. A historiographical mapping of the scholarship on

the sketchbooks will reveal a slow shift in interest from archeological inquiry (Jaro Springer,

Adolf Michaelis, Leon Priebisz, Christian Hülsen, Hermann Egger) to art historical analysis. The

analyses put forward from this period of scholars went largely unchallenged until the 1970’s,

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80’s, and 90’s, when a resurgence in interest in Heemskerck occurred- and authors such as Ilja

Veldman, Nicole Dacos, Rainald Grosshans, Elena Filipi, and Christof Thoenes put forward

theories that challenged Heemskerck’s drawings as strict realistic depictions of the landscape. In

recent literature, Tatjana Bartsch, Peter Selier, Kathleen Christian Wren, and Arthur DiFuria,

have contributed completely new interpretations on the significance of Heemskerck’s

sketchbooks- ranging from moralistic reminders of the nobility of antiquarian collections to

rhetorical devices for the memory of ancient Rome.

While coming closer to specificity in contextualization, the scholarship has still employed

thick lines in mapping Heemskerck’s timeline, sacrificing a rigorous comparative analysis that

would add a deeper understanding of the drawings. How do these sketchbooks figure into the

antiquarian drawing tradition in Rome? What do they share and where do they differ? This

would not only illuminate a dark period of artistic production in Rome that has yet to really be

considered (since most of the city was emptied after the 1527 Sack), but would show us what

Heemskerck produces that may be innovative. It is my hope that a magnified study of the

sketches considered in the specific context of Rome in 1532-1537 will illuminate one more layer

of artistic invention and importance.

Part I. Context: Forma Mentis of the Fragment (Figures 2a-2b)

“Vi e una bellissima statua sopra la base del marmot istesso, con un’ atto di gambe sforzato; ma le mancano le braccia, e la testa.”- Description in his Delle statue antiche of the Collection at Palazzo Medici by Ulisse Aldrovandi To say that the years following the 1527 Sack of Rome were defined by fragmentation

purely because of the aftermath conditions of war would provide a shallow reading of both the

Renaissance theory of fragment and of the political climate of early modern Italy. War and

violence were no unfamiliar condition to citizens of the not yet united and constantly influx

papal states of what we now know was Italy- surely the event of the “Sack” of Rome would beg

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to ask which one. The context of fragmentation here that we speak of is one pertaining to artistic

production and early modern reconciliation with that of the antique. The series of discoveries of

antique remains in combination with the specific effects of population decrease and deflation of

artistic production and discussion in Rome following the Sack, created a two-fold platform for

the metaphor of fragment and ruin in 1530’s Rome.

The humanist engagement with antiquity takes an interesting turn with the transition from

Pope Julius to Leo X, and I believe this is important when fully understanding the sketches of

Heemskerck. Even though Leo’s commission of an explicit reconstruction of ancient Rome may

seem more actively engaged with antiquarian study, perhaps something was lost here. Raphael

was commissioned to complete measured drawings of every extant ruin in the city of Rome, a

project for which he was not alone. Interesting collaborators included two Sangallo brothers-

Antonio il Giovane and his younger brother Giambattista. In her introductory essay to

Giambattista’s Corsini incunabulum, Ingrid Rowland offers the opinion that Leo spent heavily,

suffered from basic lack of imagination, and ultimately incited less exciting work from Raphael

than did Julius or Chigi. She notes that, “grand urban plans were reduced to exercises on paper.”1

While serving as prefect of antiquities Raphael was also filling the role of architect for St. Peter’s

after Bramante’s death. Here he is placed in a defining paradox of having to use stones quarried

from roman ruins for the building of the basilica, a paradox that Cammy Brothers defines as,

““how could the same architects and patrons who celebrated ancient Roman culture permit and

even endorse the willful and systematic destruction of its monuments?”2

This moment of reconciliation between ruin, representation, and building was exacerbated

by this entire thread of antiquarian inquiry coming to a halt with Bramante’s death in 1514,

followed by Fra Giocondo’s in 1515, and shortly after Raphael’s in 1520, and Pope Leo X in

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1521. This leads up to the second part of my inquiry, and arguably the most important- the

antiquarian efforts affected by the Sack of Rome. In the murderous waves of violence that

pillaged the city of Rome for six straight months, the reign of Clement VII saw the population

drop from some 55,000 before the attack, to a meager 10,000. Artists and architects fled the city

and pursued commissions elsewhere, and the project of reconstructing imperial Rome was

stopped in its tracks.

It is within this context of emptied Rome that Heemskerck arrives, and the artists, writers,

and architects look to the image of the ruin now imbued with a beauty all its own. Just as

Vitruvius’ 10 Books were written in the aftermath of Rome’s civil wars- providing a “uniquely

poignant, constructive tribute to peace after years of destruction”- the unearthing of ancient

fragment incited wonder and awe at the symbol of ruin and its implication for time, history, and

cultural memory. In this new light after the 1527 Sack, Heemskerck’s observation of ruins take

on an unprecedented antiquarian nature as the act and medium of drawing as a method for

contemplation, in Heemskerck’s case, of the representation of ruin.

Whereas the recording of the antique by early sixteenth-century century artists were more

concerned with an objective and nearly scientific recording of measurements in aims of

reconstructing the whole from close observation of the parts, the drawings of Heemskerck Rome

seem to be fascinated with the sole condition of fragment, with no attempt to represent antiquity

as a finished whole. Early fifteenth-century classical studies are represented almost as spaceless,

floating objects, unattached to any urban context of contemporary Rome. When the classical

drawings of Bramante, Raphael, Peruzzi, and even Michelangelo are compared Heemskerck, a

new image of Rome emerges unique to 1530’s Rome. Heemskerck’s sketchbooks capture for the

first time the vedute of contemporary Rome and embody the visual expression and representation

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of the forma mentis of fragment.

Alina Payne opens her article on “Architectural Creativity and bricolage in Renaissance

Architectural Literature” with this notion that the condition of fragment permeated the humanist

tension of assimilating the antique past into their early modern present through different modes

of written and visual representation. While the early scholarship of Tafuri retains a tendency of

subjective psychological analysis, he none the less addresses events that help us to understand

this dilemma of imitation, emulation, and completion of the classical fragment that affected

architects, artists, and writers alike.3 Tafuri identifies two conditions of representation after the

1527 Sack- that of classicist abstraction and fragmentation of time. He sees them not as direct

results of the attack on the city, but rather as a tension running parallel to the Sack, a short

circuit, or an interruption to the artistic investment in antiquity as outlined earlier.

Looking at the drawings (and even paintings) of Heemskerck and his companion

Hermanus Posthumus, Payne and Tafuri’s observance of fragmentation shine through with this

Dutch fascination of the landscape of ruin. The Lilliputian figures set amongst by the landscapes

of Roman ruin and the “worm’s eye views” of Heemskerck’s fragmented Capital in front of the

Colosseum bring to mind the work by Tom Conley that explores the paradox of an era defined

by cartographic delineations of national borders, and the simultaneous instability of the ambient

world of print, opening his book with the story of the Hypnertomachia Poliphili. The main

character wanders in a dark maze of a memory palace and unable to see, transforms into a snail

so that he may touch what he cannot see. Conley’s errant eye is an inquiry into new ways of

seeing through the haptic optical movement of the sixteenth century viewer. Corrozet’s emblem

of the snail is used to illustrate this topographical eye that, “feels, touches, tastes (even moistens)

ambient land and air.”4

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Through the medium of the sketch, a form of touching, seeing, and writing all its own,

Heemskerck’s representations of architecture and sculpture, are akin to the snail of Corrozet

trying to make sense of the fragmented condition of 1530’s Rome. Heemskerck and his

companion continue the antiquarian fascination with Rome much like the bodega of Raphael,

with the Dutchmen’s jaunts to the Domus Aurea where their names can still be seen side-by-side

engraved in the ruins. Heemskerck also continues the unfinished artistic project set out by

Raphael, Castiglione, and Leo X, adding, as we shall see, his own unique and innovative

representations of ruin and fragment.

Part II. Formal Analysis

Of the two Berlin albums, the first contains the 66 sheets of what was Heemskerck’s first

Roman sketchbook. The small size of the pages, 13.5 by 21 cm, suggests the portability of the

sketchbook, and the watermark tells us it was purchased in Italy. Flipping through the pages, one

can soon understand why Heemskerck’s prolific artistic output was oft compared to that of

Apelles. While very little is known of Heemskerck’s life, his characteristic traits of strategic use

of time and money endure in his biographies by Hadrianus Junius, Karl Van Mander, and even

Giorgio Vasari, who writes of their meeting in 1532. Flipping through the 66 pages, one can

easily envision Heemskerck living as a Roman of the ancient past- spending much of his time

outdoors, walking, and taking in the views in and out of the city’s Servian walls.

Capricci and Manipulation of Scale (Figures 3.a-3.3.e)

In the representation of classic and neoclassic architecture, the technique of manipulating

scale in order to emphasize the drama of experiencing the physical and grandiose size of

monuments and buildings was frequently applied. Heemskerck is one of the first artists to

execute this technique, seen page after page in his sketchbook. Heemskerck’s sketches, as varied

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as they are, can generally be categorized into two forms of composition- one of contextualized

topography and one of isolated object, with the common thread of Heemskerck’s consistent

manipulation and dramatization of scale. Leonard Barkan notes this quality of Heemskerck’s

sketches in his interpretation of the placement of the Belvedere Torso adjacent to an Egyptian

obelisk to conjure the effect of the Torso’s dominating presence.5 In terms of how this

representation of architectural scale fits into the context of the fragment, it should be noted that

this was not purely an artistic trope to emphasize the awe-inspiring grandiose of the physical

encounter with antiquity, but an effort to visually represent the internal encounter as well.

Evasive of the medium of written form, the visual representation thus provided a platform for

expression of the inarticulable element of the fragment.

In figure 3.b, Heemskerck captures the View of the Forum of Nerva as viewed from the

Western end. Unlike his antiquarian predecessors of Peruzzi and Raphael who drew from the

impulse to reassemble the fragment, Heemskerck leaves the Forum of Nerva in the state of grand

ruin. The condition of ruin does not seem to distract from its grandiosity, as the Lilliputian

figures gesture up in wonder and amazement to the skeleton of the classical past. Emptied of its

Roman glory into what would have been a marshland by the sixteenth-century, the only

passerby, accompanied by what seems to be a four-legged cattle, seem to take a moment to

contemplate the condition of their surroundings. The capped figure in the right middle ground of

the composition is flanked by two companions who gesture up towards the ruined pediments of

the forum’s monumental columns. The question of whether or not these figures were truly there

when Heemskerck sketches this Roman vedute is complicated by the fact that even the figures of

sculpture and relief seem to partake in this gaze of wonder towards the ruin. The dancing figures

on the band of bas-relief (on what seems remarkably similar to the Borghese vase- though this

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could not be possible since it wasn’t discovered until 1566) seem to gaze directly at the sculpture

in the left middle ground, which conveniently raises its arms up towards the ruins of the Temple

of Minerva. In this composition, Heemskerck’s juxtaposition of small figure and towering

monument serve to emphasize the external condition and physical experience of the sixteenth-

century fragment.

But are the gestures towards the ruin ones of amazement, or ones of warning? In Arthur

DiFuria’s study of Heemskerck’s Roman vedute, he attributes to them a mnemotechnic quality,

aiding in the art of memory of the Roman era. In DiFruria’s article, “The Eternal Eye: Memory,

Vision, and Topography in Maarten van Heemskerck’s Roman Ruin ‘Vedute’”, he comes as

close as any author to contextualizing the sketchbooks within the climate of fragment in post-

sack Rome. DiFuria especially describes the role of the symbolic ruin, echoing the phrase that

was familiarly repeated in 1530’s Rome by Serlio and Heemskerck’s traveling companion

Hermanus Posthumus, “ROMA QVANTA FVIT IPSA RVINA DOCET”. Looking at this sketch

of the Forum of Nerva and the ruination of the Temple of Minerva- Goddess of Wisdom and

patron of the arts- Heemskerck carries out the unfinished project of Raphael. In Raphael’s letter

to Leo X, he urges the importance of “studying what may still be seen amid the ruins of Rome”

in aiding the slippage of memory of the past, and more importantly in ensuring that the

achievements of Rome will not become understood in the future as “more fable than truth.”6

Heemskerck’s manipulation of scale in this composition can thus be seen to serve the

purpose of visually expressing both external encounter with physical fragment, and interior

contemplation of ruin as an introspective symbol of history, memory, and the passage of time. If

we consider the sketch as a mnemonic device as DiFuria suggests, the fate of the ruins of

Minerva take on an aura of eerie prophecy in Heemskerck’s representation of them. While the

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Temple of Minerva remained for the most part recognizable and intact as seen in Heemskerck’s

sketch, by 1606 Pope Paul V ordered its demolition in order that its fragmented spolia provide

building materials for the Fontana dell'Acqua Paola in the Janiculum and the Borghese chapel in

Santa Maria Maggiore.

This closer look at the carefully ordered gestures of the small figures in the sketch prompts

the question of whether or not this landscape is factual veduta or fantastical capriccio. The

careful direction of the viewer’s gaze suggests a level of artistic license with composition, and

this interpretation accrues grounding when we look at Heemskerck’s second type of sketch- the

composition of isolated objects. Kathleen Wren Christian has interpreted this category of

Heemskerck’s drawings as capricci developed in an effort by Heemskerck to contribute original

and innovative representations and interpretations of Rome’s antiquarian culture.7 This group of

sketches is unique in that while most of Heemskerck’s sketches are innovative for

contextualizing their fragments, these are pure compositions of fragments with no effort to

situate them in a recognizable landscape. Take the sketches of antique sculpture in the Villa

Madama (Figure 3.C) or the Courtyard of the Conservator’s Palace (Figure 3.E). In the former,

the frame of negative space overpowers the overturned capital and cracked draped figure- all

seemingly floating with an intentional omission of ground plane. This view of the Villa Madama

contrasts with his contextualized version seen in figure 3.D. Looking at the two versions of the

same space side-by-side, the composition of isolated objects is an entirely new and different

approach than what we have seen before- adding to Heemskerck’s arsenal of experimental

innovation in his representation of antiquity.

As we have noted, Heemskerck’s topographic vedute were unique in that they

contextualized and situated onto a horizon line and into a composed picture plane that which the

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earlier antiquarian studies treated in a scientific manner, with orthographic dissections of isolated

objects. Yet here, Heemskerck goes a step further. The fragments of sculpture are not treated as

entirely isolated- the left side of the sketch begins to set the stage for a sense of spatiality with

the dramatized pediments of which the slanted sculpture seems to perfectly lean on. Almost as if

Heemskerck had propped it up himself in order to compose the perfect picturesque view of ruin.

It is this quality of erasure that makes these compositions so alluring, endowing the statues with

a literally unimaginable and incomprehensible scale, ultimately heightening the condition of the

fragment.

This manipulation of scale through use of empty space is seen in Heemskerck’s view of the

Conservator’s Palace as well. Tatjana Bartsch and Kathleen Christian have also cast doubt on the

factual accuracy of this view of the fragments of Constantine floating beneath the bronze gaze of

Hercules, taking evidence from both the convenient non-overlap of fragments in the composition

and also textual evidence describing the disparate locations in the Capitoline of the remains of

the marble colossus and bronze Hercules from both Andrea Fulvio (1513 and 1527) and also

Fichard (after 1533).8

It would be impossible to say for sure whether or not Heemskerck sketched the Forum of

Nerva in solitude, adding in the fictitious figures for effect of ruinous contemplation and

dramatization of scale. Given the medium of the sketchbook and its autonomy from finalizations,

it would also be impossible to claim for certain that he purposely sketched the collections of

sculpture gardens in unfinished compositions to heighten the sense of fragment. Yet this

conjectures when considered alongside one another are important to consider when we interpret

not only the intention of Heemskerck, but the overall climate of antiquarian study unique to

Heemskerck’s time in Rome as a separate period of artistic innovation that has often gone under

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studied given the overwhelming emptying of the city of Rome. It is then in the compositions

where Heemskerck for certain combines two entirely different views into one single composition

that we truly gain ground for illuminating the work of Heemskerck as one of invention.

Mistura and the Suture of Disparities (Figure 4.a-4.d)

In Heemskerck’s sketches of the Galli Garden, the Belvedere Statue Court, and Palazzo

San Marco, we catch a glimpse of the tendency of Heemskerck to stitch together separate

locations into the illusion of a seamless composition. First noted by Nicole Dacos and Tatjana

Bartsch, their contributions to the same hypotheses that were delicately suggested by the

Huelsen-Egger scholarship have allowed for new interpretations that continue to challenge the

work of Heemskerck as faithful records of the landscape exactly as it was. Taking figure 4.A,

here Heemskerck not only employs the manipulation of scale, but also the manipulation of view.

By occupying the entire length of the sketchbook’s mid-page with a representation of a Greek

kantheros, the placement of the bust of Isis in its adjacency dramatizes the scale of what was

known as one of the “talking statues of Rome”. As we have already discussed Heemskerck’s

predilection for magnifying scale, what is jaunting here is the bringing together of objects from

the Palazzo San Marco (Isis) and the basilica of Santi Apostoli (kantheros). In a landscape

dominated by fragments, these sketches are evidence of the impressions left upon the mind’s eye

of artists working in 1530’s Rome.

In Alina Payne’s “Architectural Creativity and bricolage in Renaissance Architectural

Literature”, Payne introduces the idea of bricolage as a method of architectural representation

that met this inert desire to reassemble and reinterpret. Using the precedents of assemblage

options, Horace’s monster or Zeuxis’ maiden (defined respectively as heterogeneous and

homogeneous mixture of fragments)9, Payne introduces yet a third approach of the stile misto.10

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While these “fragments of theory” were introduced in the context of literary examples, Payne

argues that the approach to architectural representation can be viewed in the same light; “And as

early as Dante, the tension between existing models and their imitation, between the ancient

auctores and their modern counterparts, is resolved by way of the mistura of genres: for him, the

comedy is such a mixture and the only avenue open for invention in the present.”11 If I

understand this interpretation correctly, I would argue that these three sketches of Heemskerck

could be interpreted much in the same vein of the mistura of similar objects from disparate

locations.

When we reexamine both the sketches and scholarship on Heemskerck under this

interpretation of art produced during what Payne refers to as the defining forma mentis of the

fragment, we are privy to an understanding not just of Heemskerck but of the context of his

artistic production. As far back as 1913-1916, Huelsen and Egger dubbed the image of the

Belvedere Collection as false. Just as the kantheros as SS. Apostoli served as a mediating divisor

of illusion, the Apollo Belvedere reaches out with some effort of foreshortening directly into the

gaze of the viewer, separated by two fountains composed of antique spolia at either side. While

recent scholarship by Paolo Liverani has proven that the large fountain on the right hand side of

the composition was indeed adjacent to the Apollo Belvedere, the strange fountain to the left has

yet to be accounted for. It is my suggestion that this fountain is yet another of Heemskerck’s

inventions of capriccio. Kathleen Wren has pointed out that in investigation of the media tells us

that the fountain on the left is executed in slightly redder ink than that of the more spatially

complete right hand side.12

I would like to add to this observation two of my own. One, that Heemskerck was

fascinated with the design of fountains both antique and modern. In the early pages of his

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sketchbooks, we see impressions of Giovanni da Udine’s elephant fountain in Raphael’s Villa

Madama. From a look at his representations, Heemskerck was fond of drawing this animal head

as spout and adding fanciful elements to the base of the fountain that may not have been there at

all. In this addition of fountain to the Belvedere cortile, Heemskerck again seems to reimagine a

sort of rodent fountain that spouts water directly into the earth. Whereas the actual Belvedere

fountain projects water into the basin held by the matching sphinx, Heemskerck’s fountain of

fantasia has no such functional ordering. Secondly, this composition seems to be related to the

previously discussed mistura at Palazzo San Marco. The entablature directly in front of the

rodent fountain shares a striking resemblance in form to the inconspicuous object in the far right

of the San Marco composition. The right hand of the Apollo statue seems to direct our gaze to

the illegible marks of writing on this miniature arch, while at the same time reaching out directly

to us.

If we connect this mistura of views and objects realized by Huelsen-Egger, Dacos and

Bartsch with the interpretations of architectural representation in the context of fragment as

proposed by Payne, we can understand perhaps the motive behind this gesture of invention to

claim for himself an original mode of representation of the dominating icon of the fragment- not

imitation, not pure invention, yet a hybrid of the two. This is seen in two more of Heemskerck’s

sketches (figures 4.C and 4.D), Heemskerck applies his use of finished and empty space again in

the view of the Galli collection, leaving at the left the Pyrrhus that we now know to be at

Heemskerck’s time, lying on the ground of the Forum of Nerva. Here Heemskerck again cuts off

the ground plane which he has set up for view. His addition of steps seem to invite us into the

picture plane, to behold the massive reclining body of Mars encircled by a wall of fragment, only

to leave the massive ruin of Pyrrhus seemingly dangling on the edge of undefined space. With

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the careful direction of the viewer’s gaze, along with strategically placing objects that echo

scenes from other places in his sketchbook, it is almost as if Heemskerck’s drawings take on

elements of a planned out narrative, leading us through landscapes of fragment that serve both to

disorient and prompt us to follow.

Marginal Bodies: Human Specters and Sculptura Non Finito (Figures 5.a-5.j)

It has been my intention by this point to illustrate how one unique characteristic of

Heemskerck’s sketches is his inclusion of the figure in the picture plane. While we have explored

how this technique served functions of dramatized scale in the representation of fragment, I

would like now to focus on Heemskerck’s representation of the body in achieving again the

context defined by fragment. Just as we have applied Alina Payne’s notion of bricolage and

mistura to the interpretation of Heemskerck’s compositions of real and illusory fragment, I

would like now to turn to Leonard Barkan’s representational analysis of marginal bodies in the

wake of Renaissance discovery of ancient sculpture. Barkan notes the obvious fact that the

discoveries of ancient sculpture were rarely found in completed form, but more likely always

resurrected as broken and fragmentary pieces of whole. He notes that the importance of this era

of discovery lies in the shift towards the prestige and importance of the fragment, rather than

thought of as inferior because of its sutured condition. “To declare of a fragment instead that it

has a value independent of any potential for being made whole again is to engage in a category

shift. In place of usefulness of its determinants value comes to be related to some qualities

immanent in the object as it originally existed, qualities that may be diminished by fragmentation

but not wholly erased.”13

By marking this point in time by the unprecedented reception of the fragment as a beautiful

work of art in and of itself, Barkan also examines how the discovery of “marginal” bodies (be

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they of antiheroic uncanonical foreigners, barbarians, or children) provided yet another unique

opportunity for artistic experimentation through representation. While the discovery of such

loaded figures of Hercules or the Laocoön carried the weight of iconic narrative and symbol, the

plucking of other more anonymous figures allowed for, even required, an artistic license to

imbue these bodies with purposes all their own. Cammy Brothers has looked at how these

marginal bodies played a major role in Michelangelo’s painting of the Sistine Chapel, especially

at how the representation of the ignudi allowed Michelangelo to develop an iterative system of

disegno that would inform the rest of his artistic output. I will examine the work of Heemskerck

in a similar, yet different way, looking at his detailed studies of antique sculpture as well as his

representations of the human body, and often the blurred boundary between the two.

The medium of the sketchbook inevitably invites and demands experimentation and artistic

play. Free from any artistic anxieties induced by final drafts, the sketch- and certainly the sketch

of marginal figures- would prompt the hand to move swiftly in artistic invention. In a

comparative visual analysis of Renaissance representations of the crouching Venus, Barkan

suggests that many artists established canons for these marginal bodies by way of completing for

themselves that which was left unfinished by the fragment. By imagining positions and

appendages and movements of these figures, the artist would then arrive by experimentation to a

narrative, or gesture, or completion to the fragment. While Barkan has already addressed

Heemskerck’s Venus in this manner, Heemskerck’s sketchbooks also contain many studies of

fragmented bodies- often of children and grown men. In figure 5.a for example, Heemskerck

sketches the right and left legs and lower abdomen of a young boy or putti. Executed in both red

chalk and black-hatched ink, we can see that Heemskerck turns the page incessantly, capturing

the view in different angles and filling every part of the page. The effect produces a grotesque

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quality, perhaps reminiscent of Payne’s Horatian monsters- the assemblage resulting in a horrific

child’s torso sprouting not two but six legs from its center. Whatever the effect, Heemskerck’s

play with this representation of a marginal body allows him to experiment and play with the

fragment in order to create something new.

The fact that this drawing was in the front of Heemskerck’s sketchbook tells us that this

mode of representational play may have had implications that reached further than spawning a

tentacled putti torso. In Figures 5.b, 5.c, and 5.d, we see Heemskerck comfortable enough to

experiment with slightly more disparate elements than a right and left leg. Here he combines full

torsos with studies of muscular legs, and eventually in Figure 1.c, he goes so far as to include the

head of an ox and an arm. Barkan’s reading of these marginal bodies speaks loudly to these

sketches, “In the face of all these corporeal and iconographical uncertainties, it is that play which

might be considered the positive version of the story. The counters in this artistic game are, first,

those ellipses that result from the fragmentary state of the work and, second, the uncanonical

posture, which manages both to deny a single classic way of completing the body and to

challenge artists into an exercise of skill.”14 Perhaps it was Heemskerck’s early experimentation

with representations of the fragmented body that allowed him to stand back and admire the

qualities of assemblage and play that this experimentation allowed. For as his sketchbook

progresses, Heemskerck continues this method of play, advancing more and more with the level

of disparities. First with fragmented human body parts, adding heads of elephants, lions, and

oxen, and then extending to architectural and sculptural fragments as seen in Figures 5.3 and 5.f.

It is as these marginal bodies reach the plane of architectural space in the sketches of

Heemskerck that the condition of fragment reaches its fullest depth. As we have seen,

Heemskerck’s representation of the fragmented body has been in some cases in such close detail

  18  

that whether or not this piece relates to the whole of a sculptural or human body becomes

insignificant. In this way I would like to treat Heemskerck’s insertion of human bodies into these

compositions as evoking their own element of fragment. Often indistinguishable from pieces of

sculpture, Heemskerck’s representation of marginal bodies does not stop at antique sculpture- his

human bodies often retain an even more anonymous, specter-like quality which makes them

fragments in and of themselves. I would like now to look at Figures 5.g, 5.h, 5.i, 5.j, and explore

this unique mergence of all the qualities we have thus discussed so far.

In all four of these compositions, the careful arrangement and play with different positions

of the fragmented body is present. In the view of the Collection of the Casa Maffei, fragmented

torsos of different shapes and sizes recline, lean, stand upright and lie. While in the views of the

Statue Court at Palazzo Medici, the play with body is one of gesture and movement, as the torsos

lunge, torque, kneel, and crouch. In the last view of the Palazzo Della Valle di Cantone, the

fragmented bodies of Jupiter take on a much more Michelangelo type of ignudi play, as the

mirror images seem to unfold from one another, locked in glances towards the over-scaled

antique mask (that was in fact, nowhere near this palazzo). The presence of the human body in al

of these compositions somehow only heightens the aura of emptiness and fragmentary nature. In

the Palazzo Medici, a singular visitor- that some have interpreted as Heemskerck himself-

interacts with the headless sculptures. In the case of the Casa Maffei and Palazzo Cantone, the

human figure is relegated to the shadows of window and doorframes, or in the faint notion of

movement down a staircase.

This representation of the body, both sculptural and figural, in combination with the

unfinished quality of the architectural setting provides the best examples of artistic expressions

unique to 1530’s Rome. In the case of the Palazzo Medici, the colonnaded wall disappears after

  19  

mention of capital. The eye is meant to finish this composition that Heemskerck sets up for us,

providing the vaulted curves and hollowed apertures that the mind would need to imagine the

completion of the fragment. While the architectural space of the Casa Maffei is more seemingly

finished than that of the Medici, the quality of the ink that Heemskerck chooses to wash this

composition with adds an element of melted, blurred physical space. The bodies are rendered in

careful ink outlines, but the towering column seems to bleed into the adjacent structure, with just

a faint attachment to the raised courtyard arcade. Whether or not this is raised or merely sitting

atop a ground plane is also ambiguous as the delineations of space and depth fade into

indistinctness. These effects are only heightened in the Palazzo Cantone, as the source of light

seems to erase the completion of architectural detail. In what is perhaps my favorite sketch of

them all, this sketch truly captures the condition of fragment, and illustrates most poetically why

this context could not have been captured in any other representational media other than the

sketch.

Conclusion

After allowing one’s gaze to be directed through the landscapes of ruin or disappearing

colonnades that shade broken sculpture, it becomes apparent the quality of non finito is inherent

to the medium of the sketch and sketchbook. I hope it has also been illustrated that through

certain artistic techniques, Heemskerck intention is to evoke the incomplete by artistic agency of

his own. By the time Heemskerck is in Rome, we have established that the condition of the

fragment has accrued a beauty all its own- the ruins inspire historic contemplation and mnemonic

symbols of the past, and landscapes of decay were just as valued as modern marvels.

Heemskerck’s inclination to leave the fragment as unfinished, rather than complete and restore as

many of his predecessors, may have something to do as well with the state of sculpture and

  20  

painting from which he was sketching. While we have assumed that all the fragmented bodies he

depicts are those of antique ancestry, we would do well to consider one last thought put forward

by Barkan. “Michelangelo’s celebrated habit of abandoning, not finishing, or even mutilating his

sculptures formed a real part of his aesthetic, whether consciously or otherwise, and was not a

biographical happenstance later elevated into a principle of art.”15 This unfinished quality

exceeded the oeuvre of Michelangelo, and applied to works by Leonardo and Baccio Bandinelli

as well, so we have greater cause to believe that even some of the modern pieces of sculpture

would have been left unfinished (for various reasons), and thus Heemskerck’s representations of

such sculpture would have necessitated an outlet to properly capture this element of non finito.

Thoenes has gone so far to say that Heemskerck represented even the modern structure of

St. Peter’s as a ruin. This preference for fragment is really only seen in the sketches of

Heemskerck, and perhaps this is because the mediums of painted canvas or printed etch do not

allow for the same qualities of representation. Barkan defines the Torso Belvedere as the

paradigm of ancient sculpture, and Michelangelo as the tragic hero of the fragment. I would add

to this epithetic chain by defining Heemskerck as the innovative representer of this fragment,

and point out that his influence has yet to be considered. All that has been said in this vein is that

his sketchbooks ended up in Paris, in the possession of first, Pierre-Jean Mariette, and finally

Hippolyte Destaileur. Kathleen Wren Christian argues that while Heemskerck’s manipulation of

scale and fascination of ruin would seem to predate the work of Piranesi, that this is ultimately

wrong and invalidated.16 This deserves an alternative point of view, especially since Pierre-Jean

Mariette was a collaborator of Piranesi, and actually sent to Piranesi a copy of Heemskerck’s

drawing of the Pantheon to settle a dispute over the structure’s history of restoration.17 This

investigation would provide grounds for the sketchbooks of fragment to have influence not just

  21  

over the oeuvre of Piranesi, but the importance of the sketchbooks for their role in substantiating

modern arguments with visual rather than textual evidence.

Works Cited

Barkan, L. 1999, Unearthing the past : archaeology and aesthetics in the making of Renaissance culture,

Yale University Press, New Haven.

Conley, T. 2011, An errant eye : poetry and topography in early modern France, University of Minnesota

Press, Minneapolis.

Heemskerk, M.v., 1498-1574., Bartsch, T. & Seiler, P. 2012, Rom zeichnen : Maarten van Heemskerck

1532-1536/37, Gebr. Mann, Berlin.

Kantor-Kazovsky, Lola, “Pierre Jean Mariette and Piranesi: The Controversy Reconsidered”; Memoirs of

the American Academy in Rome. Supplementary Volumes,Vol. 4, The Serpent and the Stylus:

Essays on G. B. Piranesi (2006), pp. 149-168.

Payne, Alina, "Architectural Creativity and bricolage in Renaissance Architectural Literature." RES.

Journal of Aesthetics and Anthropology (fall 1998): 20-38.

Veldman, I.M. 1977, Maarten van Heemskerck and Dutch humanism in the sixteenth century,

Meulenhoff, Amsterdam.

Vitruvius Pollio., Sangallo, G.B.d., 1496-, Rowland, I.D.(.D., Sangallo, G.B.d., 1496-1548. & Accademia

nazionale, d.L. 2003, Ten books on architecture : the Corsini incunabulum, Edizione dell'Elefante,

Roma.

                                                                                                               1 The Julian tradition of beautifying Rome was then carried on- although in separate projects all his own- by Pope Leo X. Pope Leo X’s project of reconstructing a map of ancient Rome is evidenced by the 1519 letter of Castiglione and Raphael, who was named the “prefect of antiquities”, Rowland, I.D.(.D., Sangallo, G.B.d., 1496-1548. & Accademia nazionale, d.L. 2003, Ten books on architecture : the Corsini incunabulum, Edizione dell'Elefante, Roma., 12. 2 Brothers, Cammy,“Reconstruction as Design: Giuliano da Sangallo and the ‘Palazo di Mecenate’ on the Quirinal Hill”, Annali di architettura 14 (2002): 55-72“Architecture, History, Archeology: Drawing Ancient Rome in the Letter to Leo X and in Sixteenth-Century Practice,” in Coming About…A Festschrift

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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     for John Shearman, ed. Lars Jones and Louisa Matthew (Harvard University Art Museums, 2002), 135-40. 3 In Tafuri’s Interpreting the Renaissance, he notes “from the 1530’s on, all of the necessary elements are present that make it possible for us to identify a radical departure in the comportment of patrons, the relation between artists and the antique, and the use of symbolic and representational patrimony.” 4 Conley, T. 2011, An errant eye: poetry and topography in early modern France, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.,16. 5 Barkan, L. 1999, Unearthing the past : archaeology and aesthetics in the making of Renaissance culture, Yale University Press, New Haven., 193. 6 DiFuria, Arthur, “Memory and Ruins in Rome and at Home”; Heemskerk, M.v., 1498-1574., Bartsch, T. & Seiler, P. 2012, Rom zeichnen : Maarten van Heemskerck 1532-1536/37, Gebr. Mann, Berlin., 161. 7 Ibid., 152. 8 Ibid., 140. 9 Payne, Alina, "Architectural Creativity and bricolage in Renaissance Architectural Literature." RES. Journal of Aesthetics and Anthropology (fall 1998): 20-38., 6. 10 Ibid., 7. 11 Ibid., 6. 12 Wren, 137. 13 Barkan, 122. 14 Ibid., 143. 15 Ibid., 206. 16 Wren, 142. 17 Kantor-Kazovsky, Lola, “Pierre Jean Mariette and Piranesi: The Controversy Reconsidered”; Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 4, The Serpent and the Stylus: Essays on G. B. Piranesi (2006), pp. 149-168, 158.

Figure 1

Figure 1.A:

Heemskerck, Drawing studies of the first sketchbook, Sheet F recto; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 1.B:

Heemskerck, Drawing studies of the first sketchbook, Sheet D verso; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 1

Figure 1.C:

Heemskerck, Drawing studies of the first sketchbook, Sheet G recto; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 1.D:

Heemskerck, Drawing studies of the first sketchbook, Sheet G verso; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 1

Figure 1.E:

Heemskerck, Drawing studies of the first sketchbook, Sheet H recto; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 1.F:

Heemskerck, Drawing studies of the first sketchbook, Sheet H verso; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 2

Figure 2.A:

Herman Posthumus, Landscape with Roman Ruins, 1536Oil on canvas, height 96 cm, width 141 cm; Liechtenstein Collection.

Figure 2.B:

Heemskerck, Overturned Composite Capital before the Colosseum, 1532-ca. 1537. Fol. I, 28r; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 2

Figure 2.C:

Graffiti in the Volta Nera if the Domus Aurea of Heemskerck, Posthumus, and Lambert Sustris, 1532-1537.

Figure 3

Figure 3.A:

Heemskerck, Belvedere Torso, 1532/3, Fol. I, 63r; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 3.B:

Heemskerck, View of the Forum of Nerva, 1532-1536. Fol II, 37r; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 3

Figure 3.C:

Heemskerck, Antique Sculpture in the Villa Madama, 1532-1537, Fol. I, 46r.; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 3.D:

Heemskerck, Garden of the Villa Madama; Kupferstichk-abinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 3

Figure 3.E:

Heemskerck, Antique Sculpture in the Courtyard of the Conservator’s Palace Fol. I, 53r.; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 4

Figure 4.A:

Heemskerck, The Isis at Palazzo San Marco and a Kantheros at SS. Apostoli, Fol. I, 37r.; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 4.B:

Heemskerck, View of the Belvedere Statue Court, Fol.I, 23r.; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 4

Figure 4.C:

Heemskerck, The Upper Level of the Galli Garden and the so-called Pyrrhus, Fol. I, 27r.; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 4.D:

Heemskerck, Palazzo Della Valle di Cantone and Antique Mask, Fol. II, 20r.; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 5

Figure 5.A:

Heemskerck, Sheet from Heemskerck’s sketchbook, Fol. I, 37v.; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 5.B:

Heemskerck, Sheet D verso; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 5

Figure 5.C:

Heemskerck, Sheet E verso; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 5.D:

Heemskerck, Sheet F verso; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 5

Figure 5.E:

Heemskerck, Fol. 1, 64r.; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 5.F:

Heemskerck, Fol. I, 64v; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 5

Figure 5.G:

Heemskerck, Collection of the Casa Maffei, Fol. I, 3v; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 5.H:

Heemskerck, Statur Court at the Palazzo Medici, Fol. I, 5r..; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 5

Figure 5.I:

Heemskerck, Statue Court at the Palazzo Medici, Fol II, 48r; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.

Figure 5.J:

Heemskerck, Palazzo Della Valle di Cantone and Antique Mask, Fol II, 20r; Kupferstichkabinett of Berlin’s Staatliche Museum.