Given the sacramental primacy of the altar in the doctrinal and theological economy of the Catholic Church, altarpieces have necessarily demanded and received the most sublime workmanship of which generation upon generation of patrons and painters were capable of bringing to the service of God. David Ekserdjian (an established authority on Corregio and Parmigianino) admits that he has taken on an ambitious project, for no one has attempted an overview of the entire field of the Italian Renaissance since Jacob Burckhardt’s seminal essay, Das Altarbild, of 1898.
The range of Ekserdjian’s study is impressive, in terms of both its chronology and geography. It is the fruit of a lifetime of extensive travel, painstaking research, studied analysis and careful reflection. The period covered extends from the early 14th century to around 1600, and covers the efflorescence of three centuries of outstanding religious art. This diachronic timescale allows the author to trace important lines of continuity in the production of altarpieces.
Most notably, Ekserdjian emphasises the visual legacy of the polyptych, which after its structural demise as a work of several panels eventually re-asserted itself in the form of the single-image pala. Multiple figures (at first chiefly Old and New Testament characters) came to be grouped around an image of the Virgin and Child, set against a field of landscape or architecture. Ekserdjian concludes that the development of the polyptych and its replacement by the pala (single-panel pieces) were “unarguably the two most significant aspects of the evolution of the altarpiece in the period”. Meanwhile, in seeking to cover the whole of Italy, Ekserdjian remains alive to the regional and local differences that present themselves.
After an insightful introduction on how to read the Renaissance altarpiece as a work of sacred art, Ekserdjian settles for a thematic approach to his subject arranged in seven separate, but interlocking, chapters. He begins with a consideration of the historical context: the ever-complex relationships of patrons and artists. Only rarely did a contract settle the final form taken by a commission, and artists often seem to have retained licence to add to and subtract from an initial representation of the agreed subject. There were often wide variations between preparatory drawings and the finished object: instances cited include Campi’s Assumption, Raphael’s Transfiguration, Bagnacavallo’s Holy Family and Barocci’s Madonna del Popolo.
External factors (which would take several volumes to cover) contributed to the abundance of new altars, and probably had a qualitative effect on technique and composition, as the services of professional artists and their workshops were repeatedly called on to exercise their art. The increasing emphasis on the public and private cult of the saints, together with a growing number of canonisations, led to new churches and shrines being built – with new dedications. A proliferation of new altars to contain the relics of newly-proclaimed saints and newly-discovered martyrs excavated from the Roman catacombs greatly added to demand.
The late medieval expansion and variety of church organisations, including civic and mercantile guilds and devotional confraternities (which occurred at all levels of religious, secular and lay society) also stimulated the need for altarpieces among a wide spectrum of patrons. Thus artists were afforded almost unending opportunities to demonstrate their abilities and achieve a newer degree of experimentation – as witnessed by the creation, at the turn of the 16th century, of the enduring style of the more informal Sacra Converzatione.
The full integration of the saints into the composition lent itself to narrative treatment, drawing on the rich literature of the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha, but also on various Lives of the Saints. The latter genre established itself as a perennial form of Catholic devotion, and allowed patrons and artists to choose subjects from a gamut of saints and to explore their very different temperaments, lifestyles, geographical cultures, landscapes and architecture. Having their personal favourites, many saw no incongruity in putting together patriarchs, apostles and medieval and early-modern saints in the same painting, being convinced of “the orthodoxy of such images” of those heroes of the faith.
Altarpieces also addressed various mysteries, mainly in the form of icons. Most examples concern the Madonna invoked under her different attributes: Mother of Mercy, Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, Our Lady of the Rosary, and names connected with specific locations as well. Our Lord appears too, though, in the contexts of the Most Holy Name of Jesus, the Tree of Life, the Cross, the Mystic Winepress and so on. Ekserdjian also reviews the part possibly played by the predella – the lower, horizontal part of the altarpiece, which was so often later separated from the image above – in complementing and supplementing the main narrative. Whatever its doubtful purpose, it was phased out as the 16th century wore on.
Finally, Ekserdjian broaches the third dimension summarily to treat of frames, sculpture and the altarpiece, painters and frame-makers, and their drawings, including a selection of painted and gilded altarpieces containing “sculptural elements of various kinds within them”, such as carved marble or wooden figures or superimposed metal work, “and others just in the form of their frames”. Most strikingly these include Antonio Rossellino and Francesco Botticini’s Saint Sebastian between Angels and Donors, against a tempera panel (now in the Museo della Collegiata at Empoli, near Florence). For good measure the more ancient superseded sculptural form of altarpieces – paliotti – and della Robbia’s glazed terracotta Resurrection with Saints and Coronation of the Virgin are briefly mentioned.
David Ekserdjian is to be congratulated on completing his Herculean task. He has produced an unrivalled, comprehensive, scholarly and reliable guide to a major subject which no university department of art or historian of the period can easily now do without. It contains a welter of illustrations that cannot without difficulty be found elsewhere. Well chosen, they include many out-of-the-way rarities: most are rendered in colour, and some given full page spreads. The author has been extremely well served by his publisher, Yale University Press. Accustomed as we are to the high standards of the Press, it is also to be congratulated on the superlative quality of the reproductions. The Italian Renaissance Altarpiece is a joy to handle and goes some considerable way to make up for the altarpieces one has not, alas, seen for oneself.
Dr Robert Beddard is an Emeritus Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. David Ekserdjian’s The Italian Renaissance Altarpiece: Between Icon and Narative is published by Yale University Press at £60.
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