Can stone be that soft? Contrast defines this sculpture. Mary is sweet but strong, and Christ, real yet ideal.

Michelangelo, Pietà, 1498–1500, marble, 174 x 195 cm (Saint Peter’s Basilica, Rome). Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker

The Pietà was a popular subject among northern European artists. It means “Pity” or “Compassion,” and represents Mary sorrowfully contemplating the dead body of her son which she holds on her lap. This sculpture was commissioned by a French Cardinal living in Rome.

Look closely and see how Michelangelo made marble seem like flesh, and look at those complicated folds of drapery. It is important here to remember how sculpture is made. It was a messy, rather loud process (which is one of the reasons that Leonardo claimed that painting was superior to sculpture!). Just like painters often mixed their own paint, Michelangelo forged many of his own tools, and often participated in the quarrying of his marble—a dangerous job.

When we look at the extraordinary representation of the human body here we remember that Michelangelo, like Leonardo before him, had dissected cadavers to understand how the body worked.

Jacopo Sansovino, Loggetta, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 1538–46 (attached to the reconstructed medieval bell tower) (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

View of the Loggetta, looking toward the Piazza San Marco from the Piazetta (photo: Fred Romero, CC BY 2.0)

A “new Rome”

Venice’s famous Piazza San Marco has been painted, drawn, and photographed more thoroughly than a celebrity. This large public square has been central to Venetian life for centuries—it contains both the seat of the Venetian government (the Palazzo Ducale), and the city’s most important church (the Basilica San Marco).

It also holds a small, rich building known as the Loggetta which forms the base of the tall bell tower (campanile). It was designed by Florentine architect Jacopo Sansovino, and represented a new direction for Venetian architecture. Instead of the onion domes and ogee arches that had previously characterized Venetian structures, the Loggetta employs the classical vocabulary of ancient Greek and Roman architecture—columns, an entablature, and reliefs of ancient gods.

Map of the Mediterranean (underlying map © Google)

The classicism of the Loggetta declared a new identity for the Adriatic empire. Venice, long understood as cultural and geographically situated between East and West, in the 16th century sought a different identity as “a new Rome.”

Column capitals, spandrel figures, swag, and relief sculpture (detail), Jacopo Sansovino, Loggetta, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 1538–46 (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Though the Loggetta is the smallest of structures on the Piazza San Marco, it makes a large statement with bold architectural choices. Four pairs of partially engaged columns thrust forward from the lower story of the façade. Their composite capitals, already ornate, bookend classical swags hanging in carved marble over four bronze statues set in red Verona marble niches. Above an architrave banded in gray and white stone, an exaggeratedly tall attic story displays relief sculptures mythologizing Venice and its colonial territories. The forms are relentlessly classical and attest to the architect’s knowledge of the writings of 1st-century B.C.E. Roman architect Vitruvius.

Map showing the location of the Loggetta in the Piazza San Marco (aerial view; underlying map © Google)

Located between the Piazzetta facing the formal water entrance to Venice and the Piazza anchored by the Basilica San Marco, the Loggetta and other buildings on the square served as a visual representation of the Republic of Venice.

The Piazza San Marco had long been the seat of Venetian government, a religious pilgrimage site, and the setting for civic rituals such as religious processions, ceremonial reception of foreign dignitaries, and state punishments. The structures on the Piazza San Marco built the image of Venice. The opulence of the basilica spoke to the city’s wealth; the open lacey arcades of the Palazzo Ducale boasted peaceful Venice had no need for defensive architecture such as the thick walls found on Florence’s government building, the Palazzo Vecchio. Though the lagoon city made of 118 islands had no ancient Roman past, unlike most towns on the Italian peninsula mainland, the Loggetta created something more desirable: a Roman present.

Jacopo Sansovino, Loggetta, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 1538–46 (attached to the reconstructed medieval bell tower) (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The Loggetta project mattered enough to the Procurators of San Marco, who oversaw all the buildings on Piazza San Marco, that they purchased lavish materials. Bands of red Verona marble delineate the horizontal lines of the classical entablature and set off four bronze allegorical sculptures set in niches. Dark green verde antico marble accents the niches. Rare eastern marbles were used for the columns. The procurators’ account book suggests most of the Loggetta was built between 1538 and 1540. The marble purchases were made in 1540 and Sansovino completed the bronze niche figures by 1545. [1]

An earlier wooden loggia can be seen on the right edge of the painting. Lazzaro Bastiani, Arrival in Venice of Duke Ercole I and Alfonso I of Ferrara, 1487, oil on panel, 104.7 x 81.8 cm (Museo Correr, Venice)

Renovatio urbis

By the 16th century, the need for a dignified structure at the base of the campanile (the bell tower) was urgent. Nobles, the only social class allowed to hold governmental office, and the Procurators of Saint Mark had gathered in small structures on the piazza since the late 13th century. The Loggetta’s placement directly across from the Porta della Carta—the entrance to the Palazzo Ducale connecting the government building with the Basilica San Marco—made it a convenient gathering place for nobles and Procurators of Saint Mark. The structure prior to Jacopo Sansovino’s marble marvel left much to be desired, however. A wooden loggia was attached to the campanile in the 15th century, but its humble materials lacked gravitas and grandeur. Worse still was the general state of the piazza. In the 16th century latrines, food stalls, and even money-changing booths at the base of the campanile filled the square with the undignified sounds and motions of commerce. A plan was devised to fix this.

Titian, Doge Andrea Gritti, c. 1546–50, oil on canvas, 133.6 x 103.2 cm (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

Refurbishing the Piazza San Marco became a top priority under Doge Andrea Gritti who reigned from 1523–38. Civic morale had flagged after a humiliating military defeat in 1509 at the Battle of Agnadello during the War of the League of Cambrai. Plague and famine further depressed Venice through the 1520s. A display of confidence and power was in order—a renovatio urbis. Piazza San Marco would look distinctively classical by the end of the 16th century.

View of Piazza San Marco and the city of Venice. The Loggetta can be seen at the base of the campanile (bell tower), opposite the Palazzo Ducale (the Doge’s palace) (photo: Wolfgang Moroder, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Fundamental to the renovatio urbis was Jacopo Sansovino, architect and sculptor, who arrived in Venice at age 41 in 1527 following the highly disruptive Sack of Rome. He quickly found work restoring the domes of the Basilica San Marco. Two years later, upon the death of the proto (the architect to the Procurators of Saint Mark), Bartolomeo Buon, the procurators appointed Sansovino his successor on April 7, 1529. Sansovino remained in Venice for the rest of his life.

As proto, Sansovino was charged with the renovations of Piazza San Marco. He brought familiarity with classical ruins from his time in Rome and familiarity with modern architects such as Bramante who also had studied Vitruvius.

The campanile had previously been jammed into a corner; Sansovino widened the piazza, which allowed pedestrians to circumambulate the campanile and Loggetta. Establishing the Loggetta as an independent monument enhanced its similarity to ancient Roman triumphal arches, which were also free-standing. The aim of transforming Venice into a new Rome involved appropriating the classical (ancient Greek and Roman) architecture of triumph.

Left: Arch of Constantine, 312–315 C.E., and older spolia, marble and porphyry, Rome (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0); right: Jacopo Sansovino, Loggetta, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 1538–46 (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Horses of San Marco (ancient Greek or Roman, likely Imperial Rome), 4th century B.C.E. to 4th century C.E., copper alloy, 235 x 250 cm each (Basilica of San Marco, Venice)

The triple-arched façade and partially engaged columns of the Loggetta recalled ancient Roman triumphal arches like the Arch of Constantine. This brought another image of victory into the Piazza San Marco, which already boasted an ancient bronze quadriga on the porch of Basilica San Marco, known today as the Horses of San Marco. Sansovino further echoed the 4th-century Arch of Constantine with relief sculptures in the Loggetta’s attic story. The architectural message would have been immediately understandable to 16th-century viewers foreign and local alike: Venice, no matter its recent troubles, is a triumphant state akin to the Roman Empire.

Myth of Venice and sculptural program iconography

Triumphant Venice was a core tenet the so-called “Myth of Venice,” a conglomeration of beliefs and stories portraying Venice as supernaturally destined, divinely favored, and innately virtuous. [2] Previously, Venetian art had focused on the legend of Saint Mark, the patron saint of Venice, and the medieval journey of his relics from Alexandria, Egypt to Venice. Following the renovatio urbis language of antiquity, the Loggetta’s architecture and iconography turned away from Christian stories in favor of classical mythology utilized as allegories for the Myth of Venice. [3]

Jacopo Sansovino, bronze sculptures of (left to right) Pallas Athena, Apollo, Mercury, and Pax (Peace) on the façade of the Loggetta, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 1545 (photo: Wolfgang Moroder, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Bronze statues of Pallas Athena, Apollo, Mercury, and Pax flank the Loggetta doors facing towards the Palazzo Ducale’s Porta della Carta that leads to the Scala dei Giganti (a large ceremonial staircase inside the ducal palace). Each statue represents a virtue of the Venetian Republic. Sansovino’s son, Francesco Sansovino conveniently wrote explanations of the sculptural program in two books he published in the late 16th century. Pallas Athena’s wisdom and warrior prowess alludes to the state’s discernment and military power. Apollo, god of the unique single sun, signifies the singularity of the Venetian Republic. His role as the god of music invokes Venice’s often repeated assertion of political harmony. One might assume the god of commerce, Mercury, would refer to Venice’s extensive international trade, but Sansovino wrote that he appears on the Loggetta as an allegory of eloquence, a virtue claimed by Venetian nobility. Pax, the allegorical figure of Peace, lowers a lit torch on a pile of armor at her feet to signify that there is no need for war now that the Venetian Republic has brought about peace.

Jacopo Sansovino, relief sculptures of (left to right) Jupiter on Crete, Venice as Justice, Venus on Cyprus, framed by putti, Loggetta, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 1545, marble (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The Loggetta attic story relief sculptures incorporate Venice’s colonies in the Myth of Venice messaging. According to the 16th-century arts writer Giorgio Vasari they were designed by Sansovino and executed by Girolamo Lombardo, Tiziano Minio, and Danese Cattaneo. [4] Jupiter in the left relief panel appears as an allegory of Crete because he was said to have grown up on the island; Venus appears similarly as an allegory of Cyprus on the right. Both Mediterranean islands were held by Venice in the 16th century. The central relief panel depicts an allegorical female figure of Venice with the attributes of Justice: a sword, a balance, and the lion-headed throne of Solomon, the biblical wise king. The allegorical river god figures flanking Venice-Justice make yet another imperial claim, this time to the rivers of Venice’s terrafirma (solid land) holdings on the Italian mainland.

Sansovino’s transformation of the Piazza San Marco yanked state imagery firmly into the columns, arches, and cornices of Vitruvian architecture and the Myth of Venice into the visual language of ancient Rome. Set off by the additional classicizing buildings Sansovino added to the Piazza San Marco, the Loggetta stood out as an even more opulent triumphal arch, boasting of the empire and virtues of Venice.

Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus, c. 1537–39, oil on panel, 114.3 x 96.5 x 10.5 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

Documentation mysteries

Most artworks come to us without surviving documentation, an artist’s signature, let alone an explanation. In such cases, art historians use a variety of evidence to make an informed assessment. Often, what is absent is as telling as what is present. While some questions cannot be definitively answered, compelling explanations can emerge from analyzing related artworks, historical context, and the object itself.

The painting displayed by the Philadelphia Museum of Art as Cosimo I as Orpheus by Agnolo Bronzino with a creation date range of c. 1537–39 is an example of an object that has arrived in the 21st century without much documentation. We have no contract that might tell us definitively who painted the artwork, what it depicts, when it was made, and who wanted this image enough to commission it, i.e. a patron. The earliest potential reference to Cosimo I as Orpheus dates to the 1650s, over a century after we think the painting was made.

The painting

The Philadelphia portrait is an unusual artwork. An almost entirely nude man occupies the foreground of the composition and most of the surface of the canvas. The nearly life-sized figure turns to make eye contact with the viewer. The background offers few clues. Only a small path over the figure’s right shoulder and a fiery lake briefly interrupt the murky brown background. Three canine heads, one barely visible, appear in front of the man whose hands are occupied with a musical instrument. In his left hand, the figure gently grasps a lira da braccio, a string instrument associated with poetry. Many have seen a visual pun between the shape of the instrument’s pegbox shape and female genitalia. In his right hand, the man fingers a bow positioned between his legs at the groin pointing up like an erect phallus.

Left: Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus, oil on panel, 114.3 x 96.5 x 10.5 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art); right: Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici in Armor, c. 1545, oil on panel, 76 x 59 cm (National Museum in Poznań)

The composition indicates a mythological subject. Italian Renaissance viewers found ribald elements more appropriate when presented through the both culturally elevated and distancing realm of ancient myth. Italian Renaissance paintings frequently depicted figures from Greek and Roman myth nude. The idealization of the figure’s muscular body and unblemished flesh adhere to conventions for mythological subjects as well. The specificity of the figure’s face, however, suggests a portrait of a specific individual. The likeness known from many other portraits of Cosimo identifies the sitter as Cosimo I, Duke of Florence and eventually the first Grand Duke of Tuscany. The other portraits, however, feature a fully clothed man presented as himself, a 16th-century aristocrat, not in the guise of mythological hero.

Investigation

Connoisseurial analysis has led to the consensus that the painting was made by Agnolo Bronzino, the artist who worked at Cosimo I’s court as his primary portrait painter. His compositions served as a template for other artists to copy. Bronzino’s Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici in Armor has thirteen known surviving copies. So it’s tempting to analyze Cosimo I as Orpheus as one of Bronzino’s many renditions of the Florentine leader. The nudity and sexual explicitness of the painting, however, marks it an outlier among the otherwise decorous portraits.

Agnolo Bronzino, Eleonora of Toledo, 1543, oil on panel, 59 x 46 cm (National Gallery, Prague)

Assuming the portrait’s sexual innuendo implied an intimate relationship between sitter and viewer, 20th-century art historians generally considered the painting a gift to Cosimo I’s bride, Eleonora of Toledo, the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s viceroy in Naples, whom he married in 1539. The Orpheus myth (as told by ancient Roman authors Ovid, Virgil, and Boethius) concerns an unusually strong marital bond.

A love story abruptly turns tragic when Orpheus’s wife Eurydice dies suddenly. Playing music to soothe Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog of the underworld, Orpheus descended into the realm of the dead to find his wife. His music so moved Hades, the god of the underworld, that he agreed to let Eurydice return to the land of the living—with one condition: Orpheus must walk ahead of Eurydice without turning back before they reach the upper world. Close to the surface, Orpheus’s faith faltered; he turned back to see Eurydice vanish back to the underworld.

Though the myth relates a marital devotion deep enough to challenge death, a painting implying masturbation would have made a highly unusual wedding present for an upper-class bride in 16th-century Italy. Though some later versions vary, Eurydice dies on her wedding day, making the painting’s subject discordant with nuptial festivities. Furthermore, there is no record of the Orpheus portrait in Medici collections. Giorgio Vasari, the writer who covered much of Italian Renaissance art history, does not mention the painting though he discussed other Bronzino portraits of Cosimo in the 1568 edition of the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. [1] The first archival mention of what we think is the Philadelphia painting comes in an inventory of artworks owned by Simone di Giovanni di Berti and compiled by himself in the 1650s. [2]

Belvedere Torso, 1st century B.C.E., marble, 1.59 m high (Vatican Museums; photo: Sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Who else might have commissioned this ribald yet learned portrait—and for whom? Classically educated viewers would have recognized the composition’s direct reference to the ancient Belvedere Torso sculpture, which the Renaissance believed portrayed the mythological figure Hercules. Cosimo I continued the Medici family habit of invoking Hercules. Cosimo had included the image of the ancient hero on his seals and medals. Interestingly, after the painting was essentially complete, Bronzino reworked the composition to make it more sexual. The figure lost drapery; the bow, already a Renaissance pun for masturbation, moved from a horizontal to an upright position. A dog’s head pivoted to stare directly at Cosimo’s crotch.

Cosimo I came to power after the assassination of Alessandro de’ Medici, Duke of Florence, on January 6, 1537. Because he was only eighteen and descended from the Medici family matrilineally, it’s likely that the Florentine senators who selected him assumed he would be easy to control. That was not the case. Cosimo took a heavy hand in Florentine politics immediately. Importantly for our purposes, he created the Accademia Fiorentina, an academy promoting Tuscan dialect as a literary language in 1541. Berti, who wrote the aforementioned inventory (that includes the first archival mention of what we think is the Philadelphia painting), was a member of the Accademia Fiorentina’s successor, the Accademia della Crusca.

Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Andrea Doria as Neptune, c. 1545–46, oil on canvas, 149 x 199.5 cm (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan)

We must consider the possibility that Cosimo did not commission the portrait of himself as Orpheus at all. The closest related picture to the Orpheus portrait is another painting by Bronzino, a portrait of Genovese sea captain Andrea Doria—as Neptune. We see the 16th-century captain out of uniform, nude save for a drapery threatening to slip out of place. He clutches a trident to secure the image as Neptune, but his name “A. Doria” is engraved on the wooden pier resembling a ship mast next to a sail hanging behind Doria. This painting was not commissioned by Doria, but by Paolo Giovio, a Florentine historian, scientist, and bishop of Nocera, who was assembling a collection of portraits of famous men. [3] So there is a precedent for portraits of men as mythological figures commissioned by people other than the portrayed sitter in the painting.

Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus, c. 1537–39, oil on panel, 114.3 x 96.5 x 10.5 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

Deliberate ambiguity?

An intriguing possibility is that the Accademia Fiorentina (or one of its members) commissioned the humorous portrait of Cosimo. Bronzino, who wrote poetry, was a member. [4] Berti’s inventory does not necessarily prove the Accademia Fiorentina commissioned or owned the image, but does tell us a state personage as Orpheus was an appealing subject for learned collectors. [5] If a political message was intended, it might have been negative. The myth of Orpheus ends not with the loss of Eurydice, but with the hero’s own death. In grief, Orpheus rejected the company of women and was then torn to pieces by bacchants he had spurned. For those disgruntled by Cosimo’s authoritarian rule, such a picture might cathartically address a like-minded group.

If the discontented commissioned Cosimo I as Orpheus, the painting’s lack of a definitive interpretation might have been protective. If the painting is indeed a joke exercised by people with few means of addressing their grievances publicly, the ambiguity would be welcome. One could liken Cosimo’s rule to the harmony produced by Orpheus’s music or simply see the painting as associating Cosimo with the arts. In that way, the painting could be interpreted as flattering to the Florentine ruler—should its owner need such a message.

Produced during the Catholic Counter-Reformation, El Greco’s painting is an ecstatic embrace of the spiritual.

El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586–88, oil on canvas, 480 x 360 cm (Santo Tomé, Toledo). Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker

El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586–88, oil on canvas, 480 x 360 cm (Santo Tomé, Toledo)

A miracle at a burial

Don Gonzalo Ruíz, who died in 1323 (and was later known by the title, Count of Orgaz), is not likely someone you know. Ruíz, who was the Señor (Lord or ruler) of the town of Orgaz, donated money to the church of Santo Tomé in Toledo, Spain upon his death. Local stories circulated about the Count of Orgaz in the 14th century, including a miraculous story of the circumstances of his burial: that after he died Saints Augustine and Stephen lowered him into his tomb to honor him for his good deeds. This story continued to be popular in the city of Toledo, serving as the source of inspiration for one of the city’s most famous paintings: El Greco’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz. The painting was made for the burial chapel of the Count of Orgaz at Santo Tomé between 1586 and 1588. While you may not know Don Gonzalo Ruíz, chances are you’ve seen a reproduction of El Greco’s painting—it is one of the world’s most recognizable and often reproduced paintings.

“The Greek”

El Greco, St. Luke Painting the Virgin and Child, c. 1560–67, tempera and oil on panel, 41.6 x 33 cm (Benaki Museum)

El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), or The Greek, is known for numerous paintings where malleable and elongated figures are lit from sources that can’t readily be discerned. Born and raised in Crete, El Greco was trained as a Greek icon painter (in a post-Byzantine style). At the time he painted on Crete, Venice controlled the island. He left for Venice at age 26, where he worked in Titian’s workshop and was influenced by Tintoretto’s loose brushwork.

He then traveled to Rome before settling in Toledo, Spain in 1577 to work for the Spanish King Philip II. He lived there until his death in 1614. Some of his contemporaries, like Friar Hortensio Félix Paravicino, commented on how his time in Toledo gave him his remarkable artistic abilities, “Crete gave him life, and Toledo his brushes….” [1] After his death, El Greco continued to inspire artists, including 20th century avant-garde artists like Pablo Picasso, who found inspiration in El Greco’s fluid distortions of the body.

The painting

El Greco’s Burial of the Count of Orgaz is monumental—more than 15 feet high—and depicts numerous figures in addition to the miraculous circumstances surrounding the burial of Don Gonzalo Ruíz.

Saints Augustine and Stephen holding the Count of Orgaz (detail), El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586–88, oil on canvas, 480 x 360 cm (Santo Tomé, Toledo)

At the bottom center, Saint Augustine (on the viewer’s right) and Saint Stephen (on the viewer’s left) hold the Count of Orgaz, who is dressed in armor. As they lower him into his tomb, we get the impression that they place his body into the physical tomb that exists in front of the painting in the burial chapel.

Titian, The Entombment of Christ, c. 1520, oil on canvas, 148 x 212 cm (Louvre, Paris)

This act is reminiscent of paintings showing the entombment of Christ, such as versions by Raphael or Titian, where Christ’s body is lowered into its grave. Perhaps El Greco adapted this subject for his painting to emphasize the solemn moment and the miraculous nature of the burial itself.

Earthly scene (detail), El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586–88, oil on canvas, 480 x 360 cm (Santo Tomé, Toledo)

Here on earth

Other religious figures in the lower scene include Franciscan, Augustinian, and Dominican friars. The parish priest of Santo Tomé, Andrés Núñez de Madrid (shown reading, far right), and other individuals who lived in late 16th century Toledo are visible. The men dressed in black and decorated with red crosses belonged to the Order of Santiago (St. James the Greater), an elite military-religious order.

El Greco, Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino, 1609, oil on canvas, 112.1 x 86.1 cm (The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

El Greco’s young son, Jorge Manuel, stands to the left of St. Stephen and points towards the saints lowering Orgaz’s body, leading our eye to the main subject. The figure directly behind and above Saint Stephen who looks out at viewer is a self-portrait. While El Greco was an accomplished portrait painter, as evidence by his painting of Friar Hortensio Félix Paravicino, the Burial of the Count of Orgaz is remarkable for the number of portraits included within such a complex composition.

It was customary for elite men to come to the burial of other nobles in Spain at this time, but why would El Greco include so many of his contemporaries in a painting ostensibly focused on a miraculous story about the Count of Orgaz? The answer can be found in the painting’s 1586 contract that stipulated that portraits be included to suggest that they witnessed the miracle. El Greco brilliantly combines portraits with saintly figures—the spiritual with the historical. Santo Tomé was El Greco’s parish church, so he likely included people he knew in the painting as a sign of respect.

Saint Stephen’s clothing showing a scene of his martyrdom (detail), El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586–88, oil on canvas, 480 x 360 cm (Santo Tomé, Toledo)

To help people feel like they were among their contemporaries, El Greco emphasized the naturalistic textures of the clothing, the reflective shine highlighting the metal armor, and even the faces and skin of the individuals in the earthly realm. Saint Stephen’s vestments are so detailed that we can see a scene of his martyrdom on the lower edge. Yet for all the naturalistic elements of this lower scene, it still seems mysterious. Are we outside at night? Are we inside the chapel? It is unclear. Nevertheless, the dark atmosphere heightens the sense of mourning and drama of the painting.

Just like heaven

The heavenly realm covers the upper half of the composition. We see many figures here as well, including both angels and saints—David with his harp, Peter with his keys, John the Baptist, the Virgin Mary, and Christ. The Spanish King Philip II and Pope Sixtus V are also visible in this celestial realm.

Between Mary and Christ, an angel guides the Count of Orgaz’s small soul (what looks like a baby) upwards (a gesture common in Byzantine icons generally). The Count’s soul will be judged by Christ in Heaven, who presides over the entire scene. Anyone looking at the painting was reminded that judgment awaits them too.

Heaven (detail), El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586–88, oil on canvas, 480 x 360 cm (Santo Tomé, Toledo)

Heaven and earth

El Greco’s style differs between the two realms. In the upper heavenly realm, the artist used looser brushwork to give the figures a more ethereal and dynamic quality. He also chose cooler colors, including silvers and lilacs, that appear to shimmer and reflect light. The lower half of the canvas has a darker, more earth-tone palette (except saints Stephen and Augustine), giving it a more naturalistic appearance. Differences also exist between the way the figures in each realm are painted. Christ, Mary, and John the Baptist are more angular and elongated than those below. These figures are often described as dematerialized—less material or solid. We certainly get this impression from some of the wispy, insubstantial figures among the clouds.

Earthly scene (detail), El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586–88, oil on canvas, 480 x 360 cm (Santo Tomé, Toledo)

We get the sense of a solid group surrounding the burial of Orgaz. The figures are arranged as a frieze that moves across the bottom half of the painting with the heads forming a straight horizontal line, giving an impression of stability.

This differs from the heavenly realm, where the clouds arc upwards to creates a sense of motion and flux. These clouds and the way that El Greco uses them to define clusters of figures at differing heights helps to remove the heavenly realm from reality and to provide a sense of motion that contrasts with the more static scene below.

Figures gazing upwards to heaven (detail), El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586–88, oil on canvas, 480 x 360 cm (Santo Tomé, Toledo)

El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586–88, oil on canvas, 480 x 360 cm (Santo Tomé, Toledo)

Even though the celestial and earthly realms are divided, El Greco links them to create a unified painting. Staffs and torches held by men on earth rise upwards, crossing the pictorial threshold between heaven and earth. Figures gaze upwards to heaven, encouraging us to lift our eyes as well. Certain figures also echo one another across the threshold of the two spheres. Mary and John the Baptist gather at Christ’s feet, leaning inwards—not unlike saints Stephen and Augustine holding the Count of Orgaz’s body.

Counter-Reformation artist

The mid-to-late 16th century was the era of the Counter Reformation, with Toledo as a staunch bastion of Catholic Christendom. At the Council of Trent (1545–63), the importance of saints as intercessors was defended in the wake of Protestant attacks. El Greco’s painting, made only two decades later, with its depiction of saints in both the earthly and heavenly realms, strongly reaffirms the spirit of the Counter Reformation and beautifully captures El Greco’s ability to pair the mystical and the spiritual with the life around him.

Jacopo Tintoretto, The Removal of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–66, oil on canvas, 397 x 315 cm (Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Tintoretto’s florid and dramatic painting style has led many art historians to think of his work as an outlier in the Venetian painting tradition, better known for the quietude of Giovanni Bellini’s altarpieces and harmonious colors of Titian’s narrative canvases. However, Tintoretto was the only major 16th-century artist who was born in Venice and who worked almost exclusively for Venetian patrons commissioning works for Venetian locations. His works for the city’s institutions give us insight into how civic pride and legends were expressed to viewers eager to see their state mythology pictured in their city churches and confraternities.

The city-state of Venice consisted of the city itself, a conglomerate of islands clumped together in a lagoon just off the Adriatic coast of mainland Italy, and an empire consisting of islands in the Adriatic, parts of the Dalmatian coast, and parts of northern Italy near the lagoon. Territorial evolution of the Republic of Venice, 697–1797 (map: Netzach, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Scuola Grande di San Marco e Chiesa Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice (photo: Mark Edward Smith, by permission) © Mark Edward Smith

Tintoretto’s The Removal of the Body of Saint Mark is one of three large narrative paintings Tintoretto delivered in the 1560s to the Scuola Grande di San Marco, Venice’s most important confraternity. All three canvases portrayed the miracles of Saint Mark, patron saint of both the confraternity and the state of Venice. The three new works by Tintoretto joined a preexisting painting cycle depicting episodes from the life of Saint Mark.

Jacopo Tintoretto, The Removal of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–66, oil on canvas, 397 x 315 cm (Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Saint Mark

Saint Mark, one of Christ’s twelve apostles and one of the four gospel writers, traveled around the Mediterranean after Christ’s ascension spreading Christianity. In Egypt, Mark was made bishop of Alexandria (according to the medieval hagiographer Jacobus de Voragine) and was conducting mass on Easter Sunday in the church he founded at Baucalis when pagans attacked and killed him. [1] Because early Christians feared cremation would prevent a body from resurrecting when Christ returned to earth, the small new community of Christians stole Saint Mark’s body from the funeral pyre to preserve it. Saint Mark’s body stayed in Alexandria until the 9th century C.E. when two Venetian merchants sailed to Egypt, stole the evangelist’s body once more, and transported it to its current resting place in Venice.

Jacopo Tintoretto, The Removal of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–66, oil on canvas, 397 x 315 cm (Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The painting

The Removal of the Body of Saint Mark—a large painting at about thirteen feet high—depicts the dramatic seizure of Saint Mark’s body from a pagan funeral pyre shortly after his martyrdom in the 1st century C.E. Tintoretto creates a sense of motion with the use of steep one-point perspective. The piazza seems to narrow at the hazy church closing the paved square. A powerful storm drags black clouds across a sky turned orange as staccato white lead brushstrokes indicate rain and lightning whipping against the piazza, driving figures to seek shelter underneath the loggia of the two-story building on the left.

The central figural group of three men strains to carry the nude, slumped corpse of Saint Mark. His weight sags in their arms. A camel, our first indication of the story’s location (Alexandria), shrugs off its handler to join the saint. The foreground figure on the ground clutching at a piece of pink drapery made more sense before the painting was cut down in the 19th century. Thanks to an early modern etching made by Andrea Zucchi, we know that Saint Mark’s soul flew out of the painting at the left as the bystander clutched a pink mantle, one that appears in Tintoretto’s other paintings of the saint for the Scuola Grande di San Marco.

Body parts of saints or objects touched by saints during their lifetimes, known as relics, were highly desirable to Christians. Because relics were believed to hold the presence and power of a saint’s holiness, pilgrims undertook long journeys to sites that held relics. The more important the saint, the more important the reliquary site. 

The current resting place for Saint Mark’s body, Saint Mark’s Basilica, Venice (photo: Venicescapes, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Prior to acquiring Saint Mark’s relics, Venice had a relatively unknown patron saint: Saint Theodore, a minor Byzantine military figure. The procurement of a full-body relic of one of the twelve apostles and one of the four evangelists signaled the political and cultural importance of the growing city and helped shed its subservient status to the Byzantine Empire. There was just one catch: Venice needed to portray that its possession of Saint Mark’s body was morally correct and not the result of an illicit theft. Tintoretto’s The Removal of the Body of Saint Mark was just one of many artworks and texts that sought to establish Saint Mark’s presence in Venice as predestined.

Left: Jacopo Tintoretto, The Removal of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–66, oil on canvas, 397 x 315 cm (Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0); right: Canaletto, The Piazza San Marco in Venice, c. 1723–24, oil on canvas, 141.5 x 204.5 cm (Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid)

Referring to multiple stories

Because so many aspects of the painted setting resemble the Piazza San Marco, Venice’s governmental and religious center, Tintoretto’s painting has often been mistaken for the 9th-century theft of Saint Mark’s body, and its transport from Alexandria to Venice. [2] Apart from the camel, the painting gives little impression of Alexandria. Instead, the paved square, columned buildings, and church façade resemble the Piazza San Marco, the square where confraternity members of the Scuola Grande di San Marco often participated in state pageantry. Details resemble parts of the actual city square. The colonnaded loggia atop several stairs resembles the classicizing government office buildings (procuratorie) lining Piazza San Marco. Until the conquest of Venice by Napoleon in 1797, the small church of San Geminiano stood at the end of the square. [3] Moreover, the men carrying Saint Mark’s body progress towards the foreground, where, if we imagine the painted piazza as Piazza San Marco, the Basilica San Marco stood—the church where Venice keeps Saint Mark’s relics.

Creating visual confusion between stories could be a deliberate strategy to draw analogies between two distinct stories. When a viewer initially mistook the 1st-century Alexandrian theft of Saint Mark’s body with the 9th-century Venetian theft of Saint Mark’s body, the later theft became a repetition of the first, right, and moral taking of the body. The visual conflation of the two episodes helped justify Venice’s theft of Saint Mark’s relics from the Christian community in Alexandria. 

Left: Jacopo Tintoretto, The Removal of the Body of Saint Mark, 1562–66, oil on canvas, 397 x 315 cm (Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0); right: Raphael, Entombment, created for Atalanta Baglioni’s chapel, San Francesco al Prato, Perugia, 1507, oil on panel, 184 x 176 cm (Galleria Borghese, Rome)

In addition to merging the two thefts, Tintoretto took advantage of iconography to add meaning and allusions to the composition. [4] Supported by a small group of figures, Saint Mark’s undressed body with a limp arm dangling in the classical gesture of death suggests the common Christian iconography of the Deposition, the moment following the Crucifixion in which Christ’s followers carried his body away from Golgotha. By arranging the figure of Saint Mark in a pose associated with Christ, Tintoretto underscored how devotees of the Venetian patron saint understood him to be Christ-like, further enhancing the cult of Saint Mark. 

A Venetian artwork 

The Removal of the Body expands its scope beyond a basic depiction of a single episode of Saint Mark’s life. Through a series of visual choices blending aspects of Venice’s Piazza San Marco, Tintoretto drew parallels between different moments in the legend of Saint Mark. These visuals make the argument: Saint Mark’s body was always meant to arrive in Venice, and the theft and transport to Venice was a justified part of holy history. Visual art can make complex arguments succinct and often more palatably than expository texts, burdened with the precision of language. In a Venetian confraternity portraying the patron saint of the state, Tintoretto mixed Saint Mark’s life abroad with his future in Venice, contributing to Venetian mythology centering the lagoon city.   

Dreamlike, imaginative, and inexplicable, Bosch’s landscape confounds our expectations of Christian art of the Renaissance.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1490–1500, oil on oak panels (triptych), 185.8 cm high, central panel 172.5 cm wide, wings 76.5 cm wide (Museo del Prado, Madrid). Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker. We are especially indebted to the scholarship of Dr. Hans Belting and Dr. Joseph Koerner.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (inner panels), 1490–1500, oil on oak panels (triptych), 220 x 390 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid)

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, or you wouldn’t have come here.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Deciphering the indecipherable

To write about Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych, known to the modern age as The Garden of Earthly Delights, is to attempt to describe the indescribable and to decipher the indecipherable—an exercise in madness. Nonetheless, there are a few points that can be made with certainty before it all unravels.

The painting was first described in 1517 by the Italian chronicler Antonio de Beatis, who saw it in the palace of the counts of Nassau in Brussels. It can therefore be considered a commissioned work. The fact that the counts were powerful political players in the Burgundian Netherlands made the palace a stage for important diplomatic receptions and the work must have caused something of a sensation with its viewing audience, since it was copied, both in painting and tapestry, after Bosch’s death in 1516.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (outer panels), 1490–1500, oil on oak panels (triptych), 220 x 390 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid)

We can assume, therefore, that Bosch’s bizarre lexicon of human congress must have held some appeal, or some meaning, for a contemporary audience. In a period marked by religious decline in Europe and, in the Netherlands, the first blush of capitalism following the abolition of the guilds, the work has often been interpreted as an admonition against fleshly and worldly indulgence, but that seems a rather prosaic purpose to assign to a highly idiosyncratic and expressively detailed tour-de-force. And, indeed, there is very little agreement as to the precise meaning of the work. It is a creation and damnation triptych, starting with Adam and Eve and ending with a highly imaginative through-the-looking glass kind of Hell. No one really knows why Bosch imagined the world in this particular way.

Here’s what I think. What concerned Bosch, in his triptych of creation, human futility and damnation (the Garden of Earthly Delights is a modern misnomer for the work), was the essentially comic ephemerality of human life. Allow me to explain.

God (detail of outer panels), Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1490–1500, oil on oak panels (triptych), 220 x 390 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid; photo: Vincent Steenberg)

The outer panels

When the triptych is in the closed position (above), the outer panels, painted in grisaille (monochrome), join to form a perfect sphere—a vision of a planet-shaped clear glass vessel half-filled with water, interpreted to be either the depiction of the Flood, or day three of God’s creation of the world (which has to do with the springing forth of flowers, plants and trees, in which case he’s guilty of heedless over-watering).

A tiny figure of God, holding an open book, is found in the uppermost left corner of the left panel, and the inscription that runs along the top of both panels can be translated to read “For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm,” which is from Psalm 33.9. If one thinks of the outside panels as the end of the entire pictorial cycle, rather than its beginning, then this image could easily be a depiction of the Flood, sent by God to cleanse the earth after it was consumed by vice.

Detail, Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (outer panels), 1490–1500, oil on oak panels (triptych), 220 x 390 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid)

This path towards vice is mapped in the inner panels of the triptych. The outer panels are therefore intended to provoke meditative purgation, a cleansing of the mind. It should be pointed out that this work, like Bosch’s Haywain triptych (also framed by a creation and damnation scene), is a triptych only in form; neither depict the conventional arrangement of a tripartite altarpiece because their center panels do not include religious figures or even religious scenes. What Bosch seems to have invented is an entirely new form of secular triptych, one that functioned kind of like a Renaissance home theater package for wealthy patrons.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (first panel), 1490–1500, oil on oak panels (triptych), 220 x 390 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid)

The first panel: God Introduces Eve to Adam (and all hell breaks loose)

The first panel depicts God, looking like a mad scientist in a landscape animated by vaguely alchemical vials and beakers, presiding over the introduction of Eve to Adam (which, in itself, is a rather rare subject). Although they are precisely located in the center foreground, in scale Adam and Eve—as well as God—are precisely as important as the other creatures in this paradisiacal garden, including an elephant, a giraffe (straight out of Piero de’ Cosimo) a unicorn and other more hybrid and less recognizable animals, along with birds, fish, other aquatic creations, snakes and insects.

The introduction of woman to man, in this setting, is clearly intended to highlight not only God’s creativity but human procreative capacity. In the hierarchy of God’s handiwork, Adam and Eve represent his most daring achievement, as though after he’d made everything else he thought he needed to leave a signature on the world in which he could recognize himself. It’s a matter of conjecture, when one proceeds to the central panel, as to whether Bosch is saying that the creation of man, on whom God conferred free will, might have been a divine mistake.

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (central panel), 1490–1500, oil on oak panels (triptych), 220 x 390 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid; photo: 84user)

The central panel: People nakedly cavort (and all hell breaks loose)

This is the panel from which the title Garden of Earthly Delights was derived. Here Bosch’s humans, the offspring of Adam and Eve, gambol freely in a surrealistic paradisiacal garden, appearing as mad manifestations of a whimsical creator—sensate cogs of nature alive in a larger, animate machine. It is a matter of divided opinion as to what, exactly, the humans are actually doing in this delightful, dense and nonsensical landscape, alive with a dizzying array of some of Bosch’s most delectable creatures and dotted with his alembic architecture. It is almost as though he imagined the world of creation as a terrific Willy Wonka series of machines with humans as their product.

Detail, Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (central panel), 1490–1500, oil on oak panels (triptych), 220 x 390 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid; photo: Vincent Steenberg)

Given Bosch’s emphasis on nude figures, some of which are engaged in amorous activities—although none in flagrante—this central scene has often been interpreted as a warning against lust, particularly in conjunction with the third panel, depicting Hell (the Spanish Hapsburgs, in fact, referred to the work as “La Lujuria“—lust). I wonder though. Bosch’s depiction of humans cavorting in the elemental world of God’s creation, seems, to me, less inculpatory than simply a commentary on the fact that there’s little to differentiate man from animals from plants.

Detail, Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (central panel), 1490–1500, oil on oak panels (triptych), 220 x 390 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid; photo: Vincent Steenberg)

Many figures appear in all sorts of chrysalis states, or inside eggs or shells, and are fed ripe berries by birds or strange hybrid creatures; in the middle-ground some kind of procession of men, riding on various animals and accompanied by birds, circles a small lake of bathing maidens.  It’s true that some unlikely human orifices are stuffed with flowers, but there is no explicit sex in this panel—just a gluttonous consumption of varieties of berries that have, by some, been linked to the pervasively hallucinogenic atmosphere (magic berries instead of magic mushrooms). In the end, there is folly and there is much that is visceral, but there’s no real vice.

Detail, Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (central panel), 1490–1500, oil on oak panels (triptych), 220 x 390 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid; photo: Vincent Steenberg)

Instead, what Bosch appears to be doing is contemplating man’s place in the greater divine machine of nature. Maybe he’s saying, as Lucretius did, that all matter is made of atoms that come together for a time to form a sensible thing and, when that thing dies, those atoms return to their origins to reconfigure in some other form. This breaking and becoming is the nature of nature, and man in nature, is not differentiated by anything OTHER than his free will, his concern for his own behavior. Our reason is our undoing. Every man’s hell is only what he can imagine, and Bosch was more imaginative than most. His was a highly singular and idiosyncratic talent, and Bosch was really no more a product of his own time than he would have been of any other time. However, his ability to visualize hallucinatory landscapes made him extremely popular, three centuries later, with surrealists like Salvador Dali, who was also a virtuoso imagineer of nightmarish other-worldly worlds. I would venture to guess that Lewis Carroll must also have been a fan.

Panel of hell (detail), Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (third panel), 1490–1500, oil on oak panels (triptych), 220 x 390 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid; photo: Vincent Steenberg)

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (third panel), 1490–1500, oil on oak panels (triptych), 220 x 390 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid)

The third panel: finally, all hell breaks loose

Bosch saves the best for last. Earlier visions of Hell, if indeed that’s what Bosch intended here, are pretty tame in comparison to this. Against a backdrop of blackness, prison-like city walls are etched in inky silhouette against areas of flame and everywhere human bodies huddle in groups, amass in armies or are subject to strange tortures at the hands of oddly-clad executioners and animal-demons.

Dotted about are more crazy machine-like structures that seem designed to process human flesh. Some of these are strikingly disturbing. Near the center, a bird-like creature seated in a latrine chair, like a king on a throne, ingests humans and excretes them out again; nearby a wretched human is encouraged to vomit into a well in which other human faces swirl beneath the water.

Panel of hell (detail), Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (third panel), 1490–1500, oil on oak panels (triptych), 220 x 390 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid; photo: Vincent Steenberg)

In general, the bodies purge themselves or are purged of demons, black birds, vomitus fluids, blood; as in any good Boschian world, bottoms continue to be prodded with various instruments. But the general emphasis is on purgation.

Overall, there is a marked emphasis on musical instruments as symbols of evil distraction, the siren call of self-indulgence, and the large ears, which scuttle along the ground although pierced with a knife, are a powerful allusion to the deceptive lure of the senses. In fact, many of the symbols and the tortures here are pretty standard in the catalogue of the Seven Deadly Sins, in which our senses deceive our thoughts into self-indulgent over-consumption.

Panel of hell (detail), Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (third panel), 1490–1500, oil on oak panels (triptych), 220 x 390 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid; photo: Vincent Steenberg)

One key element here, however, requires some explication—the central, Humpty-Dumpty-ish figure who gazes out of the scene, his cracked-shell body impaled on the limbs of a dead tree. The art historian Hans Belting thought this was a self-portrait of Bosch, and a lot of people believe this, but it’s impossible to verify. Still, it quite strikingly illustrates the presence of a controlling, human consciousness in the centre of all this tortured imagining. And this is where my interpretation parts ways with those who have come before.

Panel of hell (detail), Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (third panel), 1490–1500, oil on oak panels (triptych), 220 x 390 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid; photo: Vincent Steenberg)

Because, while “Bosch’s” mind (if it is a self-portrait) might be distracted with thoughts of lust, symbolized by the bagpipe-like instrument balanced on his head (standard phallic stand-in), within the hollow of his body, a tiny trio of figures sit at a table as though dining. To me, these three figures are reminiscent of Genesis 18.2, in which God arrives at the door of Abraham, accompanied by two angels (all disguised as ordinary men) and Abraham, without question, offers them his humble hospitality. As his reward, God bestows a miraculous pregnancy on the aged Abraham and Sarah, declaring that, through this act, Abraham will father God’s chosen tribe on earth. This would also be consistent with Psalm 33.12: “ Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people he chose for his inheritance.” God then sends his angels (who are kind of early incarnations of FBI agents) to investigate matters in Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham uses this opportunity to intervene with God on behalf of the wickedness of the people there: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” he asks.

It seems to me that this is the question the whole triptych asks—whether God, having made the world and having conferred on man both the blessing and the curse of free will, would destroy all of his creation in the face of human failing. This is the fundamental connection between these inner panels and the destructive flood depicted on the outer wings. Bosch’s lesson, if there is one, seems to be that we can choose good over evil or we can be swept away. Man proposes, God disposes.

Panel of hell (detail), Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (third panel), 1490–1500, oil on oak panels (triptych), 220 x 390 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid; photo: Vincent Steenberg)

In 1543, Copernicus proposed the idea that the earth was not still at the center of a moving universe. In fact, as he proposed in his book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres it was the earth that moved around the sun. You could say that, thanks to what historians call the Copernican Revolution, human beings, particularly in Christian Europe, were removed from their imagined place at the center of the universe—even as they dominated, exploited, and converted cultures around the world.

Crucifixion, Convent of San Nicolás Tolentino, Actopan, Hidalgo, Mexico, 1546 and after (photo: linkogecko, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Soon after Columbus and other Europeans arrived in the Americas, friars also arrived. They built Mission churches to convert large numbers of Indigenous people. These conventos (conversion centers or missions) were built with forced labor and sometimes with stone from older Indigenous structures that predated the conquest. The paintings and sculptures that decorate them also the reveal complex layering of both European and Indigenous cultures. The murals at San Agustín de Acolman make it clear that artists (and prints after European paintings) came to the Americas from Spain bringing the forms and ideas of the Renaissance with them. In South America too, the ideas of the European Renaissance combined with Indigenous art forms, for example in the architecture of Colombia. Despite efforts to eradicate vestiges of Indigenous cultures in the Americas, there was active resistance to colonial rule. Although some cultural forms disappeared, many others were transformed, and still others continued unchanged.

Map of New Spain showing Mexico City (which was the Mexica city of Tenochtitlan before the arrival of the Spanish), 1610 (underlying map © Google)

In 1521 the large and powerful Mexica (Aztec) Empire fell to the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes and in 1533 Francisco Pizarro defeated the powerful Inka in Peru (also on behalf of the Spanish monarchs). To govern these and other new territories, the Spanish established viceroyalties in the Americas (lands ruled by viceroys who were second to, and a stand-in for, the Spanish king). The Viceroyalty of New Spain was established in 1535, and the Viceroyalty of Peru was established in 1542. 

Map of the Viceroyalty of Peru (underlying map © Google)

Tragically, little remains of the art, architecture, and literature of American Indigenous cultures before the invasion of the Spanish. Shortly after their arrival in what today is Mexico, they began destroying Indigenous manuscripts; they also began recording what was being destroyed with an encyclopedic work, known as the Florentine Codex, or the General History of the Things of New Spain that documents the culture, religious and ritual practices, economics, and natural history of the Indigenous central Mexican peoples as well as the events of the conquest itself.

Remains of the Qorikancha (“Golden House”), the most sacred shrine of the Inka below Spanish church and monastery of Santo Domingo, Cusco, Peru, c. 1440 (photo: Angela Rutherford, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

In South America, The Inka had grown their empire across the Andes. Like the Mexica to the north, their cities were largely obliterated by the Spanish in the 16th century, though traces of their architecture remain in their capital city, Cuzco where the Spanish built a church atop a mostly destroyed Inka temple—a symbolic act of power and subjugation .

Map of the Portuguese colony of Brazil (underlying map © Google)

Also during this time, the Portuguese colonized Brazil and transported the first kidnapped Africans to Brazil to be enslaved laborers. In 1526 the Spanish brought the first enslaved Africans to North America. In the following centuries, more Africans were enslaved and transported to Brazil than to any other region of the Americas. During the following centuries, the transatlantic slave trade constituted a forced mass movement of African peoples to European colonies in North and South America. Over 11 million people were enslaved and endured horrifying brutality on cotton, rum, and sugar plantations throughout the Americas.

Mimar Sinan, Süleymaniye Mosque, Istanbul, Turkey, completed 1558 (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The 16th century is also an era of powerful leaders like the Medici family and Pope Julius II in Italy, King Francis I in France, Henry VIII in England, Charles V and Phillip II in Spain, Suleiman the Magnificent in the Ottoman Empire, Shah Tahmasp I in Safavid Iran, and Akbar I in Mughal India. It’s also the period of artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Mimar Sinan, Diego Velazquez, and Hans Holbein in Europe, Sultan Muhammad, and Nanha in West and South Asia, all of whom were employed by these powerful rulers.

In 1517, a German monk and theologian, Martin Luther, launched an all-out assault on the most powerful institution in Europe: the Catholic Church. The events sparked by Luther are referred to as The Protestant Reformation. Originally, the Reformation was an attempt to reform the Catholic Church, but reform became rebellion as people began to question the power and practices of the Pope and the Catholic Church (which had been the only church in western Europe up until Luther). The Reformation led to the establishment of new Christian religious traditions (such as Lutheran and Calvinist denominations) which offered a different path to salvation—one in which the role of the church was diminished. 

Made in consultation with Martin Luther, The Law and the Gospel explains Luther’s ideas in visual form, most basically the notion that heaven is reached through faith and God’s grace. Lucas Cranach, The Law and the Gospel, c. 1529, oil on wood, 82.2 x 118 cm (Schlossmuseum, Gotha)

Thanks to the printing press and an increase in literacy, people could read and interpret the bible on their own. Pamphlets and images disseminated Luther’s theology and put into visual form these new paths to salvation. The Church initially ignored Martin Luther, but his ideas quickly spread throughout Europe. The Church’s delayed response to the threat from Luther and others during this period is called the Counter-Reformation (“counter”—against).  

The iconoclasm began in Flanders and Brabant in the year 1568 and spread throughout the Netherlands in a short time. Here, iconoclasm is in full swing: pulling down and smashing statues of saints, and in the middle, attempts to pull down a crucifix standing on the altar. Jan Luyken, Beeldenstorm, 1677–79, etching, 27 x 34.8 cm (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

For the history of art, this has particular significance since the use (and abuse) of images was an important topic of debate. Protestants were concerned that the proliferation of images of Christ, Mary, and saints in churches essentially encouraged the worship of the images themselves (instead of the holy figures pictured in the images). In response, the Catholic Church reaffirmed the importance of images in helping to inspire faith and learn the stories of the Bible (remember many people couldn’t read). Many images were attacked and destroyed in northern Europe by Protestant reformers during this period, a phenomenon called iconoclasm.

Bernardo Bitti, Coronation of the Virgin, 1575–80, tempera (Church of San Pedro, Lima)

As part of an effort to renew and strengthen the Catholic faith in the face of the spread of Protestantism, in 1540 the Pope established the Jesuit order (also known as the Society of Jesus). Jesuit priests were among the first to arrive in the Americas in an effort to convert the Indigenous people. Bernardo Bitti was a Jesuit, but also a painter who traveled to Lima (Peru) as part of the order’s evangelization efforts (the Jesuits were at the forefront of global missionary efforts during the 16th and 17th centuries—including a failed effort in Japan). Bitti’s first project in Lima was a large altarpiece depicting the Coronation of the Virgin. The painting’s clarity and legibility are exactly what the Catholic Church prescribed for images to serve their didactic and devotional functions. 

Medici Porcelain, c. 1575–87, soft-paste porcelain from the Medici Porcelain Manufactory, decorated in underglaze blue, 20.3 x 10.8 x 12.4 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Art history often focuses on painting, sculpture, and architecture, but other materials were often held in higher esteem. In this period, the Medici in Florence began to try to replicate Chinese porcelain because it was so precious and beautiful. Talavera poblana was developed by potters in New Spain inspired by imported ceramics, like highly coveted Chinese porcelains. In South America, both before and after conquest, textiles (a hallmark of Inka culture), could be worth more than gold or other luxury items. Carpets are among the most fundamental of Islamic arts—they were traded and sold across the Islamic lands and beyond its boundaries to Europe and China. The exceptional Ardabil Carpet from the following century is a good example. It is also through carpets and other portable media that we can see the kinds of cross-cultural exchanges that were taking place during this period (for example among Jews who were forced to leave Spain, and relocated to the Ottoman Empire).

View of the northeast of the exterior slopes of the quarry, with several moai (human figure carving) on the slopes; a young man with a horse is standing in the foreground for scale, Rapa Nui (Easter Island), photographed by Katherine Maria Routledge, c. 1914–15, lantern slide (photograph), 8.2 x 8.2 cm (© The Trustees of the British Museum, London)

In the vast region of the Pacific, numerous island cultures thrived. The Spanish were among the first Europeans to explore and establish contact with the Pacific Islands. The people of Rapa Nui produced enormous stone figures called Moai that stand on ahu (stone platforms) with their backs to the sea, in essence keeping watch over one of the most remote islands in the world. Roughly 6,500 miles to the west, on the Pacific island of Pohnpei (in what is today the Federated States of Micronesia), the Sau Deleur Dynasty used basalt and coral to construct a complex, known as Nan Madol, of close to 100 artificial rectilinear islets spread over 200 acres that are thought to have housed up to 1,000 people with walls as high 25 feet. Like in the Americas and Africa, the peoples of the Pacific would soon be impacted by soldiers, traders, and missionaries from competing European powers. 

The first half of the 16th century saw radical changes akin in some ways to the digital revolution of the late 20th century. But it wasn’t only information that was moving in unprecedented ways, as we have seen, it was people and objects that were on the move. Not only were prints and the printing press bringing people together in exceptional numbers, but the voyages of Christopher Columbus and sailors from Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England, brought much of the globe together for the very first time, though often with disastrous consequences for the “discovered” including from the introduction of diseases that had been previously unknown and for which there was no immunity.

Saint Wilgefortis, Book of Hours and Psalter, c. 15th century, ink and gold on vellum (The University of Manchester Library, Rylands Collection, Latin MS 20, sheet 78)

Though you may have never heard of Saint Wilgefortis, she was once popular enough in Europe to rival the Virgin Mary. Religious reforms and controversies resulted in the destruction of shrines, paintings, and statues dedicated to her and she was almost forgotten. [1] The surviving artworks depicting her attest to a strong cult, especially in Central Europe in the early modern period. A great deal of Wilgefortis’s appeal lay in her specialty: relieving women of unwanted husbands. Images of Wilgefortis depict a crowned woman with a beard on a cross uncannily reminiscent of imagery of Christ on the cross. Sometimes there is little visual differentiation between Christ and Wilgefortis on the cross save a feminine dress.

A complex figure, Wilgefortis speaks to medieval and early modern understandings of gender beyond a simplistic binary and often undocumented histories of women suffering abuse. [2] Recent interest in Wilgefortis has been buoyed by interest in queer histories. In accordance with current scholarly literature, this essay uses female pronouns for Wilgefortis following medieval and early modern texts while recognizing textual pronouns are but one part of Wilgefortis’s legend. 

Saint Wilgefortis, Book of Hours, c. 1440 (The Morgan Library and Museum, MS W.3, folio 200 verso)

Legend of Wilgefortis

The legend seems to have appeared around the 14th or 15th centuries. With the exception of the facial hair detail, the legend follows standard virgin martyr tropes. Wilgefortis was a princess, the daughter of the pagan king of Portugal. She had converted to Christianity and taken a vow of virginity. She expressed a desire to be married only to Christ himself and remain a virgin bride her whole life. Wilgefortis resisted the marriage her father had arranged with the king of Sicily. Enraged, her father imprisoned his daughter. In some versions of the story, he tortures her as well. Wilgefortis prayed for a physical transformation that would render her too unattractive for marriage. Miraculously she grew a beard and the King of Sicily withdrew from the betrothal agreement. At this point, the King of Portugal decided to crucify his bearded daughter. During her crucifixion, Wilgefortis prayed that those who remembered her martyrdom be delivered from their burdens. Wilgefortis has been considered a patron saint of prisoners, the ill, soldiers, female health issues (including childbirth and uterine cancer), sexual abuse survivors, and women trapped in bad relationships.

Wilgefortis’s role as a saint who frees people from their burdens is expressed in the variety of names by which she is known. In Dutch she is known as “Ontcommer” and English “Uncumber,” monikers that literally name the saint as an “unencumberer.” Some French cults of the saint referred to her as “Débarras,” from the verb “débarrasser,” meaning “to get rid of.” The Tyrolian name Kümmernis likely derives from the German word “Kummer,” meaning “grief” or “sorrow.” Wilgefortis might be a German transliteration of the Latin “virgo fortis,” meaning “strong virgin,” or alternatively from the German “hilge vratz,” meaning “holy face.”

Volto Santo, c. 770–880, polychrome wood and gold, 2.4 m high (Cathedral of San Martino, Lucca; photo: Holly Hayes, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Like Christ

In visual art we typically see Wilgefortis in a standing position affixed to a wooden cross, often wearing a crown. Shoulder-length hair and a beard heighten the comparison to Christ. Her calm demeanor is suggestive of the Christus triumphans type of crucifix, with the iconography of Christ standing upright rather than sagging. In this form, Christ stretches his own arms into the familiar T shape rather than hanging on the nails affixing him to the cross, emphasizing Christ’s triumph instead of his suffering, and his voluntary acceptance of the crucifixion. [3]

An example of the Christus triumphans crucifix can be seen in the famous miracle-working wooden Volto Santo (Holy Face) crucifix housed in the Cathedral of San Martino in Lucca, Italy in which Christ appears alive, standing, crowned, and wearing robes of kingship and priesthood. This figure’s attire already appeared somewhat feminine to late medieval viewers. The additional clothes, ornaments, and shoes added to the sculpture for special feast days furthered the perception that the statue might portray a woman. [4] It’s possible that the cult of Wilgefortis, the crucified bearded princess in a crown, emerged from devotional practices around the Volto Santo (supporting their connection of Volto Santo and Wilgefortis is a legend associated with them both that involves a musician and the gift of a golden shoe). 

Saint Wilgefortis, c. 1750–1800, wood, 254 cm high (Museum of the Diocese Graz-Seckau, Graz; photo: Gugganij, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Wilgefortis’s similarity to Christ in art visually expresses broad medieval and early modern Christian cultural understandings of gender and the divine. The princess saint grows a beard and becomes more Christ-like in advance of her crucifixion that imitates Christ’s own. [5] The beard was not perceived as a transgression of femininity, but rather as confirmation of her holiness. Since medieval and early modern Christian European culture viewed masculinity as superior to femininity, we might expect praise for women saints who imitated Christ by performing masculine actions. The Virgin Mary and some female martyrs were praised for what were perceived to be manly virtues. What might be more surprising are historic ideas concerning Christ’s feminine qualities. 

Medieval Christian writings often attributed feminine qualities to Christ’s body. Mystical interpretations of Christ’s side wound likened it to a vulva and vaginal opening, associating Christ’s life-giving blood with the life-giving blood of childbirth. His body was understood as both male and female: male as the son of God, female as flesh made by the body of his mother Mary. [6] Wilgefortis’s dual masculine and feminine qualities only enhanced her laudable imitation of Christ. 

Hieronymus Bosch, The Crucifixion of Saint Wilgefortis, c. 1497, oil on panel, 104 x 119 cm (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice)

In the cultural context of European Christian thought, Wilgefortis was not anomalous. The visual arts present her as a serious figure without sensationalizing her possession of a beard for spectacle—no circus “freaks” here. [7] Even Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych depiction—recently recognized as portraying Wilgefortis—presents the saint in markedly feminine attire with long hair and a light beard, keeping the focus on the martyrdom of Wilgefortis rather than playing up her facial hair. In an anonymous 18th-century German painting, Wilgefortis stands on a pedestal with only a horizontal beam suggesting a crucifix behind her. Her beard matching her hair color exists simply on her face. The same straightforward presentation can be found in the earlier images. The 15th-century Morgan illumination depicts Wilgefortis’s angry father in red shaking a scepter at his daughter high on the cross, but the saint herself is presented serenely, bearded, gazing down at her father. Images of Wilgefortis contrast with sexualized images of female saints who were stripped (Saint Catherine in the Belles Heueres) or faced sexualized torture (Saint Agatha whose breasts were removed with pincers).

Wilgefortis now

Wilgefortis was never officially canonized by the Catholic Church. In 1969, following Vatican II, her feast day was removed from the Catholic calendar. Nevertheless, she was an important saint to many people centuries ago—and recently too. LGBTQ+ communities in particular have embraced Wilgefortis as a testament to queer histories and queer holiness. Contemporary artists continue to find Wilgefortis fascinating; for example, queer Chicana artist Alma Lopez included Wilgefortis in a “Queer Santas: Holy Violence” series she painted in the 2010s. [8] A news article about the exhibition asked, “Were some Catholic saints transgender?”

Art historians ask instead, “how did people relate to the figure of Wilgefortis and what can we learn about that through the history of art?” As with all culture, especially cultural figures that have remained relevant over time, there is no ultimate determination that can define what Wilgefortis is or was historically. As art historians, we describe how a symbol, story, or figure functioned in a culture and how people responded with historical practices. Cultural responses change over time as do understandings and beliefs. What can be said with certainty is that Wilgefortis’s gender expression outside of a strict gender binary formed a fundamental aspect of her appeal in the medieval and early modern periods and continues to generate interest in the figure today.

Following the outstretched arms of the apostles, we look up to Mary and arrive at a circle of light.

Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516–18, oil on panel, 690 x 360 cm (Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice). Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker

Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516–18, oil on panel, 690 x 360 cm (Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice)

The Renaissance altarpiece

Who is the audience for a work of art? The Assumption of the Virgin painted by Titian for the church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice demonstrates the dual goals of many Renaissance altarpieces: to support liturgical functions within the church and, as an artwork, to address contemporary art theory—and critics. Artists crafting works for churches balanced the desires of the patron and church officials while also entering an object into an increasingly sophisticated cultural conversation about artworks as aesthetic objects that were valued for their artistic merits.

Mary surrounded by putti and angels (detail), Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516–18, oil on panel, 690 x 360 cm (Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice)

Altarpieces were prestigious commissions for artists working in 16th-century Italy. Sitting on or behind the altar, painted and sculpted altarpieces served to focus attention during the Eucharist, the ritual sacrament performed at the altar during the Catholic Mass worship service. Because altarpieces were typically located in publicly accessible spaces, artists could expect a large viewership interested in a new addition to the city’s art. In the early modern period, altarpieces demonstrated both artistic ambitions and served a specific religious function. 

Assumption of the Virgin

Rising over twenty-two feet above the main altar, Titian’s Assumption inevitably attracts attention even within the cavernous Gothic space of the Frari church. Framed by the opening within the church’s stone rood screen, the painting can be seen from the main entrance. It depicts the Virgin Mary as she ascends to heaven from her deathbed. Christ’s apostles witness the miracle from below. Titian placed the Madonna on clouds, borne aloft by putti and angels, as she moves from the earthly realm of the apostles and the golden light of heaven. 

Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice showing the rood screen with Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin at the center (photo: Didier Descouens, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The altarpiece relates the last episode of the Life of the Virgin Mary. As the hour of her death grew near, Christ’s apostles gathered at Mary’s deathbed. Versions varied until Pope Pius XII officially declared the Assumption one of the Marian dogmas of the Catholic Church in 1950. The Virgin Mary’s life ended in another miracle. At the moment of death, she directly ascended to heaven. Visual representations of the story sometimes emphasize her soul joining Christ and other times her entire physical body as well. The story underscores Mary’s special status in Catholicism as a person born without sin, an idea expressed by the Immaculate Conception of Mary that was made dogma officially in 1854. A century later, the Assumption of Mary was also declared to be Catholic dogma. Though these dogmas weren’t made official until centuries later, the stories were commonplace in the 16th century. Overall, Mary parallels Christ both through miraculous conception and bodily assumption into heaven. 

Left: Virgin Mary with orant gesture, north side of Saint Mark’s Basilica, marble (Saint Mark’s Basilica, Venice); right: Mary with orant gesture (detail), Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516–18, oil on panel, 690 x 360 cm (Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice)

Composition and genres

Unlike other paintings of the same subject, Titian’s composition for the Assumption ambitiously combines previously separate approaches to altarpieces.

1. a devotional figure
Devotional images generally include only a single figure, who could be the focus of prayer. To ensure the figure of the Virgin could serve as a devotional image, Titian centered the Virgin Mary in the composition in a position ready to receive prayers from the congregation and petition God on their behalf. She stands in an orant gesture with raised arms and palms open. This was understood as an intercessory gesture—a worshipper would pray to the Virgin Mary who could then plead for the supplicant to Christ and God the Father. The orant gesture can be found widely in Byzantine icons and locally in Venice in the mosaics of the Basilica San Marco Church and relief sculptures on the church’s façade. Titian’s Madonna with raised arms therefore joins this Venetian iconographic tradition. 

2. narrative or history painting
Titian pushes the painting into the genre of narrative or history painting (also known as istoria in Italian). On her toes, the Virgin steps forward as if approaching heaven of her own volition as well as God’s divine miracle. The centrifuge of putti seems to rotate as the babes writhe, limbs jutting out of the angelic ring. Adding to the impression of movement, its force billows the Virgin’s blue mantle and twists her red dress around her legs.

Left: Raphael, The Deposition, 1507, oil on wood panel, 179 x 174 cm (Borghese Gallery, Rome); right: Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516–18, oil on panel, 690 x 360 cm (Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice)

Narrative altarpieces had become prestigious as Italian art theory and writers such as Leon Battista Alberti established istoria (history painting) as primary and above other genres such as portraiture and still life. Considered intellectual and technically difficult, history paintings, which related stories from history, the Bible, or mythology, required multiple figures engaging in significant actions. Raphael’s The Deposition is a good example of this type of altarpiece.

Left: A sacra conversazione (detail), Giovanni Bellini, San Zaccaria Altarpiece, 1505, oil on wood transferred to canvas, 500 x 235 cm (San Zaccaria, Venice); right: Apostles witness Mary’s assumption in sacre conversazione (detail), Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516–18, oil on panel, 690 x 360 cm (Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice)

3. a sacred conversation (sacra conversazione)

The apostles in Titian’s Assumption will not say their final goodbyes at the Virgin’s deathbed, but instead witness her miraculous assumption into heaven. As characters who perform actions, the apostles are an integral part of the narrative; as holy saints, they can also be understood as forming a sacred conversation (sacra conversazione) type of altarpiece. This type of altarpiece, popular in Venice, gathered multiple saints together in a unified space even if they had not lived during the same historical time.  A good example of this is Giovanni Bellini’s, San Zaccaria Altarpiece.

Commission & reception

Art historians have wondered what role commission stipulations played in the unusual composition of the Frari’s main altarpiece. There were more senior (and famous) artists in Venice. The choice of the younger Titian over Giovanni Bellini might be explained by the elder artist’s death on November 16, 1516. No contract for the Frari’s main altarpiece has survived. It is assumed the order’s prior, Fra Germano de Casale, organized the commission along with other altarpieces in the choir to focus on the Virgin Mary. [1] Venetian chronicler Marin Sanudo mentions Germano’s name when recording the Assumption’s installation date as May 19, 1518. Titian did not return to Venice from Ferrara until April 1516 at the earliest, which implies a fast timeline for the production of the Assumption of the Virgin. 

The stakes for Titian were high. When he received the commission, he would have known that the location alone conferred prestige on the project. The state of Venice granted the land to the Franciscan order in 1250 and their popularity was such that the church they built needed to be enlarged in the 14th century. As the most visible painting in one of the two most important mendicant churches in Venice, the main altarpiece not only had to function as a religious artwork, but as an expression of Venetian civic identity as well. 

While the painting now enjoys near-universal acclaim, 16th-century arts writer Ludovico Dolce tells us the friars of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari initially struggled to make sense of Titian’s dynamic rendition of the Assumption of the Virgin before coming to appreciate Titian’s innovations. Titian’s solution for the Assumption of the Virgin iconography eventually became a standard model to imitate, reference, or work against.  

Miracle of the Black Leg (detail), Master of the Rinuccini Chapel (Matteo di Pacino), Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian, c. 1370–75, tempera and gold leaf on panel, 79.4 x 135.6 cm (North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh)

The Miracle of the Black Leg is a medieval Christian legend of a miracle performed by two doctor saints that explicitly mentions race. From the 14th through 16th centuries it appeared frequently in European Catholic art. Stories that people find appealing can tell us a lot about social and cultural values. Because they select specific moments from a story and render details vividly, visual representations of those stories can reveal further unspoken cultural beliefs and assumptions. The Miracle of the Black Leg’s popularity in visual art coincides with the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, but the story’s origin predates race-based slavery, raising questions about the connections between cultural ideas and historic practices.

Master of the Rinuccini Chapel (Matteo di Pacino), Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian, c. 1370–75, tempera and gold leaf on panel, 79.4 x 135.6 cm (North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh)

The earliest surviving artistic rendition of The Miracle of the Black Leg can be found on a 14th-century altarpiece painted by Matteo di Pacino, also known as the “Master of the Rinuccini Chapel.” The altarpiece features a larger main panel with Saints Cosmas and Damian, twin doctor saints, standing against a gold leaf background facing the viewer as was common in Italian depictions of devotional figures. At the bottom of the altarpiece are two smaller narrative panels making up the predella. Predella panels typically depict stories from the life of the devotional figure in the main panel above. On this altarpiece, we see the Miracle of the Black Leg and a second panel showing the martyrdom of Saints Cosmas and Damian by beheading.

Many Catholic saints achieved martyrdom through beheading; only Cosmas and Damian performed the miracle of interracial surgical transplantation. According to the Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea), the authoritative 13th-century compilation of lives of saints, Cosmas and Damian were born in the 3rd century C.E. in the area of the Roman Empire that is now modern-day Turkey. [1] Instructed in medicine by the Holy Ghost, the two Christian physicians refused payment for their services.

The miracle

The Miracle of the Black Leg was a posthumous miracle—it was performed by Cosmas and Damian in the 6th century C.E. hundreds of years after their deaths. A pious man who worked as a verger caring for a church dedicated to Cosmas and Damian unfortunately suffered from a cancerous leg. One night while the verger slept, Cosmas and Damian came to his room, amputated the verger’s painful leg, and replaced it with the leg of a recently deceased man who had been buried in a nearby cemetery. In the Golden Legend and most visual representations, the deceased man is pictured as Black.  

Miracle of the Black Leg using continuous narrative (detail), Master of the Rinuccini Chapel (Matteo di Pacino), Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian, c. 1370–75, tempera and gold leaf on panel, 79.4 x 135.6 cm (North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh)

Pacino’s panel uses continuous narrative to show the viewer both the placement of the Black leg on the verger and the graveyard where the Black man’s body can be seen lying in the exhumed coffin. The Golden Legend says the verger’s friends were skeptical of the miracle and went to the graveyard where they found that indeed the deceased Moor’s removed leg had been replaced with the verger’s diseased leg. The contrast between the skin colors is amplified by the markedly diseased state of the verger’s leg attached to the unblemished Black man’s body.  

Miracle stories involving bodies made whole are common in Christian medieval hagiographies, but most miracle stories did not involve racial or ethnic designation of the participants the way the Golden Legend specifies in the Miracle of the Black Leg. The Greek version of the Cosmas and Damian miracle does not specify a race, religion, or ethnic group for deceased man whose leg is taken. The Golden Legend text refers to as both a “Moor” and “Ethiopian,” a term used in Europe to broadly refer to anyone of African descent. 

During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Europeans frequently used the terms “African,” “Black,” “Moor,” and “Ethiopian” interchangeably. As Europeans began enslaving Africans in large numbers, they began associating Blackness itself with slavery. [2] The racial and ethnic terms and their meanings vary, but consistently frame Blackness as the Other, a binary idea of the “not us.” Nevertheless, multiple iterations of the Miracle of the Black Leg including the Golden Legend text source, Pacino’s predella panel, and part of an altarpiece by Fra Angelico all predate the transatlantic slave trade and even the Portuguese introduction of West Africans they enslaved into Europe. 

Fra Angelico, Miracle of the Black Leg, part of the San Marco Altarpiece, tempera on wood, 37 x 45 cm (Museum of San Marco, Florence)

In nearly all depictions of the miracle, the transplanted limb has Black skin that contrasts visually with the verger’s skin. The story’s text does not specify the verger’s race; in art he is portrayed as light-skinned. The coloristic contrast, prominent compositionally, emphasizes race as an important element of the legend. 

Blackness in late-medieval Europe

European attitudes towards Black people and Blackness during the late medieval and Renaissance periods varied. Early instances of anti-Blackness include negative depictions of demons, Jews, and Muslims with dark skin. The term “Moor,” which can mean both Muslim or a person with dark skin, further suggests a correlation between dark skin and a person who is not Christian. Conversely, medieval European Christian practice also venerated Black figures including Saint Maurice, the Black magus who visited the infant Christ, and various Black Madonna figures. Ethiopian ambassadors emphasized their common religion of Christianity when practicing diplomacy at European courts. 

An Adoration with Black Magus, part of The Salzburg Missal, c. 1478, ink and gold on parchment, 38 x 28 cm (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, volume 1 Clm 15708 I, folio 63 recto)

Interestingly, the Golden Legend implies that the Black man whose leg was taken by Cosmas and Damian to heal the verger was Christian even if the text refers to him as a “Moor.” According to the text he was buried in the cemetery of San Pietro in Vincoli, a Christian church. Representations that attach the verger’s diseased leg to the Black man’s corpse attends to contemporary Christian concerns that a body needed to be “whole” for the promised resurrection at the Last Judgement. [3]

Isidro Villoldo, Miracle of the Black Leg, c. 1547, polychrome carving on wood, 88 x 80 x 17 cm (Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid; photo: Jl FilpoC, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The structure of the story both in the Golden Legend text and in multiple visual representations appears to use racial differentiation between the healed man and the unwitting donor as justifying logic for the saints’ miraculous action. In other words, his Blackness makes his body available for use. Some renditions of the story even depict the Black man as awake and in pain in the verger’s bedroom (such as Isidro de Villoldo, Miracle of the Black Leg). [4] Contemporary viewers would have read these later representations that eliminate the graveyard and turn the corpse into a “mutilated living African man” as portraying an enslaved man. [5] The taking of a Black man’s limb without consent for its utility unsettlingly parallels future instances of medical experimentation and exploitation of Black persons. [6]  

Fernando del Rincon, Miracles of the Doctor Saints Cosmas and Damian, c. 1510, oil on panel, 188 x 155 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid)

Ideas of race and racial categories are determined not by biology but by cultural and historical ways of thinking. Thinking about race as a system of organizing people into groups and distributing power—often unequally—helps us understand historical ways in which cultures thought about categories. [7] While late medieval and Renaissance European notions of race differ from 21st-century categories of race, they nevertheless form the history of contemporary thought.

Showing off his skill, Michelangelo carves the popular subject of the Madonna and Child, but with a twist (literally).

Michelangelo, Bruges Madonna, c. 1503–05, marble (Carrara), 130 x 63.5 x 63 cm (Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk/Church of Our Lady, Bruges). Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker

VISITFLANDERS has joined forces with Smarthistory and the Center for Netherlandish Art at the MFA Boston to bring you a series of video conversations with curators on important Flemish paintings by artists such as Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, Peter Paul Rubens, and James Ensor.

Albrecht Dürer, The Rhinoceros, 1515, woodcut on laid paper, 23.5 x 29.8 cm (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

Enter Albrecht Dürer’s rhinoceros, the best-known animal of the Renaissance, an early modern celebrity and cultural icon. Its identity is affirmed again and again: “They call it a rhinoceros. It is represented here in its complete form” reads a part of the lengthy gothic script that flanks the top of the image. As if to leave no doubt, “RHINOCERVS” is inscribed in large capital letters in the right corner, with an unusual dorsal horn pointing to the “R.” The artist’s AD monogram is below the label, the date of 1515 above: artist, subject, and date of portrayal are emphatically confirmed. The medium is woodcut, usually cheaper to produce than an engraving, and easy to distribute widely. This is an image that insists on its own truth and was intended for broad public consumption. 

And yet it takes only a cursory glance to see that this rhinoceros is strange indeed, and quite unlike what we might expect to see in a zoo. Stolid and hulking, covered with decorative patterns, the surface of the rhinoceros has been likened to an elaborate and richly ornate suit of armor. This is an unusual embellishment by an artist who is more often acknowledged for his “true-to-life” portrayals. Dürer’s own written insistence on the completeness of his representation is all the more striking given that he did not see the rhinoceros for himself and only knew it from a drawing that had been sent to him. The format and obvious plans for distribution make the rhinoceros woodcut more akin to a broadsheet, a tabloid, or even a viral post, with the goal of presenting a sensational event to the biggest audience possible. Why did Dürer depict the rhinoceros this way? And why was he so keen for a large audience? 

Left: Albrecht Dürer, Hare, 1502, watercolor on paper, 25 x 22.5 cm (Albertina Museum, Vienna); right: Albrecht Dürer, Stag Beetle, 1505, watercolor and gouache, 14.1 x 11.4 cm (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)

From bestiary to zoo

This was not the first or last time that Dürer showed interest in the world of animals, both nearby and from far-flung distant locations. His many watercolors of animals such as hares, beetles, and various birds show remarkable attention to detail, while his writings emphasized the importance of first-hand observation. During his travels to the Low Countries in 1520–21 Dürer sketched a baboon, a lynx, and a chamois in a garden in Brussels. From his diaries, we know of his excitement at the news of a beached whale in Zeeland that he was determined to travel to and see for himself. His advice for students of art was clear: “Study nature diligently. Be guided by nature and do not depart from it, thinking that you can do better yourself. You will be misguided for truly art is hidden in nature, and he who can draw it out possesses it.” [1] Like his contemporary Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer valued first-hand experience and eye-witness testimonial. Rather than repeating what was available in medieval pattern books, he sought to show things as he perceived them, and his animal and plant studies mark a turning point for the history of scientific illustration. 

In Dürer’s “zoo” the rhinoceros is clearly an anomaly—idiosyncratic and strange when compared to his other more faithful depictions of animals from life. But this was no anonymous creature found in a forest near home. Dürer emphasized the rhinoceros as exotic and curious, clad in armor and prepared for battle for a reason. He ensured an afterlife for this celebrity creature, and his woodcut would become the definitive image of a rhinoceros for centuries to come. 

A singular creature

Dürer’s source was a written testimonial and sensational back story that came to him from afar. The rhinoceros had arrived in the port of Lisbon on May 20, 1515, and was celebrated as the first rhinoceros to reach Europe alive since the 3rd century. The ancient Romans had maintained exotic menageries, and now leaders of Renaissance courts sought to do the same. Governor Albuquerque of Portuguese India had received the rhinoceros as a gift from Sultan Muzafar II, ruler of Gujarat; and the governor in turn sent the animal, along with a cargo of spices, to his king in Portugal, Manuel I. Shipped from the region of Cambaia in Northwest India, one of the farthest of the Portuguese colonies, it is remarkable that the rhinoceros survived the journey. In a later act of diplomacy, King Manuel would send the rhinoceros to Pope Leo X in Rome, however, the Portuguese vessel capsized near Porto Venere in January 1516, and the crew and rhinoceros drowned.

Albrecht Dürer, The Rhinoceros, 1515, pen and brown ink, 27.4 x 42 cm (© The Trustees of the British Museum, London)

How did Dürer, in distant Nuremberg, come to know of these events? In a newsletter received by the mercantile community of Nuremberg, Valentim Fernandes—a Moravian printer who lived and worked in Portugal—detailed the arrival and appearance of the exotic creature at the court in Lisbon. While this newsletter has not survived, we know of its contents thanks to a drawing by Dürer (now in the British Museum) that became the prototype for his own woodcut. After announcing the date and place of the arrival of the rhinoceros, Dürer includes a textual description of the creature at the bottom of his drawing and the top of his woodcut: 

…it is covered with thick scales and in size like an elephant, but lower and is the elephant’s deadly enemy; it hath on the fore-part of its nose a strong sharp horn and when this beast comes near the elephant to fight with him, he always first whets his horn upon the stones; and he runs at the elephant with his head between his forelegs, then rips up the elephant where he has the thinnest skin, and gores him; the elephant is terribly afraid of the rhinoceros, for he gores him always, wherever he meets an elephant, for he is well armed, and is very alert, nimble. Albrecht Dürer, translated text from The Rhinoceros, 1515

The theme is violent combat, with the elephant as enemy. No wonder, then, that Dürer depicted the rhinoceros as prepared for battle wearing a suit of embellished armor. The “thick scales” become a breastplate, pauldrons for the shoulders, faulds for the hindquarters, and even the simulation of chain mail in the decorative patterning. Dürer was at the height of his labors for Emperor Maximilian I and was well aware of the types of armor worn by knights past and present. 

Apart from the newsletter received at a distance, Dürer would have had little information to go on, in part because the rhinoceros was an unknown entity at the time. Ancient authors had little to say, and in the medieval bestiary, the rhinoceros was often interchanged with the unicorn as a single-horned and fierce creature, as already noted a rhinoceros had not been seen in Europe since the 3rd century. By contrast, the elephant was represented in many 16th-century menageries, including Lisbon and Rome—King Emmanuel had sent Pope Leo X an elephant the previous year. 

Rhinoceros (detail), Albrecht Dürer, The Rhinoceros, 1515, woodcut on laid paper, 23.5 x 29.8 cm (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)

The ancient Roman historian Pliny the Elder had also described the animosity between the rhinoceros and elephant, and a fight was arranged by the court for June 3, 1515 (apparently the elephant “turned tail,” disappointing audiences). Regardless, the presence of a live rhinoceros in Lisbon was a sensational and newsworthy event for which Dürer provided a definitive vision.

Conrad Gessner, Historiae Animalium, volume 1 (1551), p. 953 (National Central Library of Rome)

A global image before globalism

Reporting from afar, Dürer’s depiction was like a major journalistic scoop. The woodcut was in high demand and went through at least eight editions, with two further printings from the original wood block in 1540 and 1550. In the Renaissance, news was not instantaneous, but it could travel fast. For example, when Martin Luther promoted the Reformation using broadsheets and pamphlets, one contemporary noted that it took fourteen days for a pamphlet to be known in the German lands, and four weeks for all of Christendom. [2] 

Dürer’s rhinoceros as an armored combatant remained a reference point for centuries to come, and the image was copied and reached an unprecedented level of dissemination. It became the prototype for virtually all succeeding rhinoceros illustrations for the next three centuries. This included appearances in natural histories, for example the Swiss doctor Conrad Gessner featured the rhinoceros in his Historiae Animalium (1551), Jan Joesten’s zoological atlas Curious Descriptions of Nature of Four-Footed Animals, Fish and Bloodless Water Animals, Birds, Crocodiles, Snakes and Dragons (1660) also included Dürer’s rhinoceros. Writing in 1938 the art historian Friedrich Winkler stated that school-books had only then given up using Dürer’s image of the rhinoceros in favor of more “naturalistic” depictions. 

Despite the creation of other more visually precise depictions of the rhinoceros, for centuries it was Dürer’s woodcut that intrigued artists, scientists, and the public alike. Celebrated in its lifetime and beyond, the rhinoceros was invincible in art, and its broad dissemination made it the most global of images even before the era of globalism. 

Mary Tudor (detail), Anthonis Mor, Portrait of Mary Tudor, 1554, oil on panel, 178 x 136.5 cm (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid)

A regal presence. An iron will. A hint of impatience. A suggestion of a smile. These are some of the traits that one can discern in the countenance of Mary I, more commonly known as Mary Tudor, Catholic queen of England and Ireland, who reigned from 1553 to 1558. This acutely observed and beautifully understated portrait was painted by the Netherlandish artist Anthonis Mor (also known as Antonio Moro), who worked as court painter to the Habsburg dynasty.

Anthonis Mor, Portrait of Mary Tudor, 1554, oil on panel, 178 x 136.5 cm (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid)

Queen Regnant

Due to her own royal lineage, Mary was the first woman to rule as monarch in England and Ireland as “Queen Regnant”: she did not become monarch through marriage, but ruled in her own right—and on her own terms. [1]

The portrait, painted from life, was commissioned by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, to commemorate the marriage of Mary to Charles V’s son, Prince Philip, who ruled as Philip II, king of Spain, from 1556 until 1598, with whom Mary ruled England and Ireland jointly from 1554 until her death in 1558, and with whom she hoped to have an heir. Mary, however, who endured ill health throughout her life, suffered “phantom” or false pregnancies (known as pseudocyesis) and two miscarriages. 

Henry VIII, king of England and Mary Tudor’s father, had broken with the Catholic Church of Rome in 1534 and had created the Protestant Church of England through the Act of Supremacy, which had made the English monarch head of the Church of England. In her courage, in her brutal impatience, Mary was very much her father’s daughter. Notoriously, Henry VIII had two of his six wives tried and executed for adultery and treason (Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard). A pious and uncompromising Catholic, Mary’s overarching ambition was to re-establish papal supremacy in her kingdoms and—far more difficult—to reconvert the hearts and minds of the English people to the Catholic Church.

Hans Eworth, Mary Tudor, 1554, oil on panel, 107 x 81 cm (The London Society of Antiquities, London)

Enthroned in crimson velvet

Mor’s painting is uncharacteristic of royal portraits produced at the English royal court, which usually depicted monarchs in three-quarter length, in a standing position, as, for example, in Hans Eworth’s 1554 portrait of Mary Tudor. Instead, in Mor’s portrait Mary is depicted in three-quarter profile, seated in an exquisitely embroidered crimson velvet chair, a symbol of authority. She is wearing a beautifully embroidered dress with a foliate pattern and a purple overgarment. Pearls and precious stones adorn her headdress, cuffs, and belt. The seated portrayal recalls (though is not directly modeled on) Raphael’s portrait of Pope Julius II, in which Julius is also sitting in a red velvet chair. Mor’s painting also refers to the same compositional formula of Raphael and Giulio Romano’s portrait of Doña Isabel de Requesens y Enríquez de Cardona-Anglesola, viceroy of Naples, who was viewed as the epitome of feminine beauty.

Left: Raphael and Giulio Romano, Doña Isabel de Requesens y Enríquez de Cardona-Anglesola, 1518, oil on canvas, 120 x 95 cm (Musée du Louvre, Paris); right: Anthonis Mor, Portrait of Mary Tudor, 1554, oil on panel, 178 x 136.5 cm (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid)

The royal, papal, and imperial connotations of the crimson velvet chair and the purple overgarment cannot have been lost on anyone who viewed the portrait. It is a portrait whose iconography seems to challenge the English Protestant legacy of Mary’s father, Henry VIII, and of her half-brother, Edward VI. However, although a Catholic, Mary was still a Tudor, and the rightful successor of her younger brother, Edward. This is the reason why her accession to the throne was greeted with wide popular support.

Rose, diamond ring, and pearl pendant (detail), Anthonis Mor, Portrait of Mary Tudor, 1554, oil on panel, 178 x 136.5 cm (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid)

The red rose

Mary is holding a red rose in her right hand. The rose is often a symbol of the Virgin Mary. It also signifies the Passion of Christ (his arrest, trial and suffering) and Christ’s sacrifice. The rose can also be read as a symbol of Mary’s dynastic heritage since it was the symbol of the House of Lancaster, to which Mary could trace her paternal line. [2]

A dynastic marriage

Mary wears a diamond ring on her left hand, and a diamond and pearl pendant hangs from her neck. The portrait thus speaks of another Catholic dynastic history: the very powerful Habsburgs. What is more, the column or pillar of authority in the left background (which can also be interpreted as a symbol of the Virgin Mary) suggests imperial dominion: Charles V’s impresa was a crowned eagle separated by twin columns, which represent the Pillars of Hercules.

The imminent marriage, and the fact that according to the Act of Marriage of 1554, Philip would rule jointly with Mary, caused a Protestant rebellion led by Sir Thomas Wyatt, which was successfully put down.

Mary’s marriage to Philip was not a match made in heaven. For the majority of her subjects, whose anti-papal and anti-Spanish hostilities had long been shaped by the policies of Henry VIII, she had married an enemy of the state. For Mary, it must have been a relatively joyless marriage, as Philip (who had mistresses) seems to have been less than enamored to have married a woman eleven years his senior. However, should Mary have produced an heir, preferably male, with Philip, it would have ensured a Catholic future for Tudor England and Ireland. 

There is no disputing the fact that during Mary’s reign 237 men and 52 women, mostly of humble backgrounds, were burned at the stake for refusing to recant their “heretical” Protestant beliefs and swear allegiance to the Catholic faith. This earned Mary the infamous nickname “Bloody Mary” from later Protestant Tudor writers, and has tarnished Mary’s reputation ever since.

“It’s a man’s world”

If being reviled by Protestants for her Catholicism as “Bloody Mary” was not enough, Mary had to put up with being a woman in a man’s world. John Knox wrote the following anti-Catholic and rabidly misogynistic invective in The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, which was a comment on Mary’s reign and was later universalized to apply to other female rulers, including Elizabeth I:

To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and, finally, it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.                          John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, 1558

Mary’s funeral and memory

In a loyal act of royal sisterhood, at the funeral of Mary I on 14th December 1558, at Westminster Abbey, Mary’s heir, Elizabeth I, allowed the Catholic Bishop of Winchester, John White, to speak. He did so in explicitly gendered terms:

She was a King’s daughter, she was a King’s sister, she was a King’s wife. She was a Queen, and by the same title a King also: she [Elizabeth I] was a sister to her, that by the like title and right, is both King and Queen at this present of this realm.Bishop of Winchester, John White, 1558

The words of the Bishop of Winchester are a reminder that, despite her Catholicism, Mary I remained a member of the Tudor dynasty. Indeed, in her courage, in her impatience, and in her undoubted brutality, Mary was not so very different from her Tudor forebears, nor indeed her Tudor successor, Elizabeth I, whose reputation as “Gloriana” and “The Virgin Queen” has far outshone that of “Bloody Mary.” The two sisters were buried together in the north aisle of the Lady Chapel built by Henry VII in Westminster Abbey.

Anthonis Mor’s Portrait of Mary Tudor, arguably one of the finest and subtlest portraits produced in early modern Europe, is a historically significant painting that makes a complex statement about domestic and European dynastic politics and post-Reformation religious conviction. 

Church of the Annunciation, view from southeast, Moldovița Monastery, Moldavia, modern Romania, 1532–37 (photo: Nicu Farcaș, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Richly painted both inside and outside, the Church of the Annunciation at Moldovița Monastery is one of the best preserved churches of the early 16th century in the region of the Carpathian Mountains. It was built, decorated, and endowed with support from the local ruler, Prince Peter Rareș, between the years 1532 and 1537 in the former principality of Moldavia, which extended over the region of northeastern modern Romania and the Republic of Moldova. Moldovița is a prime example of how local church architecture in Moldavia developed at the crossroads of competing Latin, Greek, and Slavic traditions during the early 16th century.   

Map showing the Carpathian Mountains and Moldovița Monastery (underlying map © Google)

Aerial view showing Moldovița Monastery including additional structures and fortifications, Moldavia, modern Romania, 1532–37 (source: Tereza Sinigalia and Oliviu Boldura, Monumente Medievale din Bucovina [Bucharest: ACS, 2010], p. 171)

Moldovița’s architecture

At Moldovița, the main church, dedicated to the Annunciation of the Virgin, was built first at the center of the monastic compound, and the surrounding structures were later added. These included the cells of the nuns, the living quarters of the abbess, the princely house (now a museum), the treasury, and the refectory (or dining hall), with other auxiliary rooms and cellars below. The monastery was also heavily fortified in order to protect the community in times of conflict and set the monastic world apart from the rest.

The church at Moldovița was built with local stone on a so-called elongated triconch plan. The layout of the church consists of an open barrel-vaulted exonarthex at the west end. A single narrow entryway leads into the domed rectangular pronaos of the church, which has two large windows on each of the north and south walls. This space, in turn, leads through another small entryway into a small barrel-vaulted burial chamber. The burial room leads to the triconch naos where the liturgical ceremonies are celebrated. 

Plan for the Church of the Annunciation, Moldovița Monastery, Moldavia, modern Romania, 1532–37 (source: Richard Thomson)

The naos comprises a central rectangular space with two lateral semicircular apses, extending to the north and south, and a cylindrical tower above with four narrow windows pointing in the cardinal directions. Toward the church’s east end, the altar area, or chancel, is separated from the naos by a large iconostasis with painted icons in multiple registers. The layout, architectural features, and furnishings of the church at Moldovița offer a longitudinal progression of spaces of different dimensions that serve diverse functions. For the faithful advancing through the church, these spaces grow progressively darker as one approaches the altar area.

Eaves (detail), Church of the Annunciation, view from southeast, Moldovița Monastery, Moldavia, modern Romania, 1532–37 (photo: Frank Hukriede, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Built on a plan adapted from Byzantine models, the church at Moldovița also displays several Gothic features. The subdivisions of the roof, with steep slopes and large, smooth eaves following the undulating line of the apses, and the three-tier buttresses on the exterior, find visual parallels in Gothic buildings in neighboring Transylvania and Hungary. Furthermore, the door, window framings, and the window tracery derive from Gothic models. Although little information survives about the masons who worked at Moldovița, certain stonecutters active in Moldavia in the early 16th century were trained in Transylvanian workshops that generally followed Gothic building practices and designs. 

Brightly colored murals inside and out

In addition to the distinctive architecture of the main church at Moldovița, the brightly colored mural cycles set in multiple registers on the interior and exterior walls of the building are another striking feature of the edifice. Executed by local and traveling artists, these murals display Christological, Mariological, and hagiographical stories interspersed with monumental images of historical and apocalyptic scenes, as well as full-length depictions of saintly figures and angels. Although the murals follow mainly Byzantine models, select iconographies derive from western medieval prototypes, and the inscriptions are all written in Church Slavonic, thus demonstrating the blending of distinct visual traditions in the Moldavian cultural context of the early 16th century. 

Interior view of the pronaos, church of the Annunciation, Moldovița Monastery, Moldavia, modern Romania, 1532–37 (photo: Alice Isabella Sullivan)

On the exterior of the church, the mural cycles are best preserved on the south, west, and east sides; the north wall murals are most damaged due to local weather conditions. The south wall of the burial chamber received a monumental scene of the Tree of Jesse, which is an image type that traces the genealogy of Christ, and in particular his human lineage, through Jesse, his son David, the kings of the Old Testament, and then finally through the Virgin Mary. The representations of the Tree of Jesse highlighted the notion of lineage—that of Christ in the painted representation, and that of the noteworthy individual laid to rest in the space of the burial chamber beyond the painted exterior. As such, a holistic view of the image cycles reveals that they were carefully designed for each section of the building.

Exterior view of the south façade showing the Tree of Jesse and the Akathistos Hymn, church of the Annunciation, Moldovița Monastery, Moldavia, modern Romania, 1532–37 (photo: Alice Isabella Sullivan)

Next to the Tree of Jesse, the church’s south wall displays twenty-four scenes that illustrate the stanzas of the Akathistos Hymn. This is the oldest performed hymn dedicated to the Virgin Mary sung in the Eastern Christian Church. It celebrates the important events in the life of the Virgin, praising her role in the Incarnation, Redemption, and other mysteries. During the Middle Ages, the Akathistos Hymn evolved into a war hymn believed to bring divine protection to Constantinople in moments of struggle. 

The Siege of Constantinople, exterior mural, south façade, church of the Annunciation, Moldovița Monastery, Moldavia, modern Romania, 1532–37 (photo: Alice Isabella Sullivan)

By the 15th century, the representations of the Akathistos acquired historical narratives. They were accompanied by a scene depicting the Siege of Constantinople saved through divine intervention. Moldovița preserves a particularly striking example. The mural does not reference a single historical event but several, augmenting the impact of the historical narrative. In particular, the mural conflates various triumphant victories of the Byzantine capital during the sieges by the Avars and the Persians in 626, by the Arabs in 717/18, and by the Rus’ in 860. The inclusion of contemporary artillery in the mural at Moldovița—such as the culverin cannons, Turkish spears, and halberds at the center of the composition—presents an anachronism that brings the relevance of these earlier victories into the present. In light of the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the ongoing Ottoman threat across Eastern Europe at this time, the image reassures that divine aid is forthcoming. The scene was painted on the exterior of several Moldavian churches at about eye level and close to the main entrance to the church, ensuring that its crucial message reached the faithful entering and leaving the church building.

Exterior view of the south side of the apse, church of the Annunciation, Moldovița Monastery, Moldavia, modern Romania, 1532–37 (photo: Sîmbotin, CC BY-SA 3.0 RO)

Finally, around the triconch apses of the church, five registers display figures arranged hierarchically, beginning with monks and hermits at the bottom, followed by martyrs, apostles, prophets, and angels. These figures are shown full-length. They direct their attention toward the east, as if partaking in a procession around the building that culminates at the axis of the altar window where Eucharistic imagery abounds, like Christ as the Lamb of God. These kinds of exterior images would have welcomed a circumambulation of the church in the context of certain liturgical ceremonies, such as those that occur even to this day during the Easter celebrations.

Moldovița Monastery demonstrates how local church architecture in the principality of Moldavia was informed by the region’s networked position relative to Byzantium, the West, and the Slavic cultural spheres in the post-Byzantine period. It also reveals the new and creative spatial and visual forms that developed in local church architecture as Moldavia assumed the role of a bastion of orthodoxy at the edges of empires and of Europe.  

Esztergom Basilica, Esztergom, Hungary, 19th century (photo: © Google Street View)

When you enter the monumental 19th-century Basilica in Esztergom in Hungary (today about an hour north of Budapest), you may notice a small, much older chapel that sits just left of the nave. Visitors are drawn to the chapel by the sight of the shiny red marble covering the chapel walls, which is further accentuated by the contrast with a white marble altarpiece occupying the back wall. This is Bakócz Chapel, the only element deemed worthy of saving from the old cathedral, built more than 300 years earlier. 

Jacopo di Biagio di Camicia, Bakócz Chapel in Esztergom Basilica, Esztergom, Hungary, 1506–07, red marble (photo: Fine Arts in Hungary)

Commemorative coin of Tamás Bakócz, bronze, 6 cm diameter (Hungarian National Museum, Budapest)

A surviving Renaissance chapel

The foundation stone of the chapel was laid in 1506, and by the next year, most of the structure was finished. The façade and the bronze dome of the chapel were finished during the following years, while the main altar of the chapel was installed in 1519. Sources tell us that Tamás Bakócz, the Archbishop of Esztergom from 1497–1521 had richly equipped the chapel (which served as his place of burial) with liturgical objects, gold and silver utensils, and expensive vestments. He also left other treasures in the chapel, but they were later confiscated by King Louis II. The chapel, as well as a few surviving objects—such as a monumental gradual commissioned by him and a chasuble—testify to his patronage in Esztergom.

Left: Bakócz Gradual, early 16th century, Ms. I. 1a, folio 1 recto (Bibliotheca Ecclesiae Metropolitanae Strigoniensis, Esztergom); right: Chasuble, 1500–1510 (Esztergom Cathedral)

The Bakócz chapel is the earliest Italian Renaissance-style building north of the Alps. It is also the first fully Renaissance-era, centrally planned ecclesiastical building outside of Italy. It is a groundbreaking and influential structure, which uniquely fuses the style of Tuscan (central Italian) early Renaissance with Hungarian architectural traditions.

Original plan and section of the Bakócz Chapel, János Packh (1822)

In 1823, the chapel was dismantled and was later rebuilt block-by-block, incorporated into the fabric of the Neoclassical building. The orientation of the chapel was turned around and the building lost its original façade. The original configuration of the chapel is known from numerous drawings. The plan is based on a Greek cross. This architectural shape of the structure is part of a long sequence of centrally-planned Italian chapels, including Brunelleschi’s Old Sacristy in San Lorenzo and the Sacristy of Santo Spirito, both in Florence. The Santo Spirito Sacristy and the small chapel of the Barbadori family attached to it, both designed by architect Giuliano da Sangallo between 1488–97, are the closest analogy to the Bakócz chapel. Giuliano da Sangallo’s Santa Maria delle Carceri church in Prato (1485–91) is a more monumental and free-standing version of such a centrally-planned space. 

Left: Jacopo di Biagio di Camicia, Bakócz Chapel in Esztergom Basilica, Esztergom, Hungary, 1506–07, red marble (photo: Fine Arts in Hungary); right: Giuliano da Sangallo, Santa Maria delle Carceri, Prato, Italy

The Florentine structures, however, generally used grey stone (pietra serena) for elements of the architectural articulation, combined with plain white walls. In contrast, the chapel in Esztergom was built entirely from red marble. This building material—in reality a local red limestone, quarried in the hills near Esztergom—has been used in Hungary since the late 12th century. It was clearly the patron’s request to conform to this tradition, while at the same time red marble, with its ancient and imperial associations, seemed perfectly fitting as a medium for his funerary chapel. 

The cornice of the chapel, running around the inside of the building above the wall niches, contains a large inscription in antiqua letters, referring to the founder and the year of completion:

THOMAS BAKOCZ DE ERDEUD CARDINALIS — STRIGONIENSIS ALME DEI GENITRICI MARIE — VIRGINI EXTRUXIT ANNO M CCCCC VII

Thomas Bakócz of Erdőd, Cardinal of Esztergom, built this to the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary, in the year 1507

Originally, the letters were inserted in bronze. In fact, the original dome of the chapel was also made of bronze and decorated with a total of 96 reliefs (these did not survive the rebuilding of the chapel). The four pendentives are decorated with a coat of arms.

Andrea Ferrucci, Altar, 1519, white marble (Bakócz Chapel in Esztergom Basilica, Esztergom, Hungary; photo: Fine Arts in Hungary)

The masters of the chapel

Some documents recently published by Doris Carl shine light on the masters of the Bakócz chapel. The architect of the chapel can be identified as Jacopo di Biagio di Camicia, who arrived in Hungary first around 1477. In Florence, he had worked on a wooden model for the inner façade of the basilica of Santo Spirito and was a close collaborator of Giovanni di Mariano and Salvi d’Andrea, who worked on the realization of Brunelleschi’s plan. The Florentine sculptor Andrea Ferrucci—identified by Giorgio Vasari as the master of the chapel—executed the white marble altar of the chapel. This was delivered to Esztergom in 1519. Of the original carvings, only the kneeling figure of the patron next to the central niche as well as the scene of the Annunciation on the top remain. A similar white marble altarpiece of Ferrucci, originally from Fiesole, is now at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The leading master of the stone carvers executing the ornamental decoration of the Bakócz Chapel is probably Domenico Baccelli, who was Giuliano da Sangallo’s nephew and who was trained in the workshop of Jacopo del Mazza and Andrea Ferrucci. He was also master of the Pécs tabernacle, and it was most likely his workshop that executed two similar red marble tabernacles in the parish church of Our Lady in Pest (present-day Budapest). The identification of these masters shines new light not only on the extensive presence of Florentine artists in late-15th-century Hungary but also on the connections of Bakócz’s architectural project with earlier works carried out for King Matthias Corvinus in Buda. 

The Florentine sculptor Ioannes Fiorentinus (Giovanni Fiorentino) worked on the execution of the chapel. He was a prolific stone carver, based in Esztergom, who usually worked in red marble, and often signed his works. These were exported to far-away towns, such as Gniezno in Poland, Zagreb, and even to Transylvania. He can be identified as one of the carvers of the decoration of the Bakócz-chapel, along with at least two other unidentified sculptors. 

Vlad III (detail), Portrait of Vlad III Dracula (Ambras Portrait), second half of the 16th century, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm (Ambras Castle, part of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

Romania, with historical regions (underlying map © Google)

No other historical figure from Eastern Europe has enjoyed as much popularity in the historical record and the modern imagination as Vlad III Dracula. He was prince of Wallachia on three separate occasions during the second half of the 15th century (Oct–Nov 1448; 1456–62; and Nov–Dec 1476).

This was a time of great turmoil across Eastern Europe, following the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 and the subsequent fall of the Byzantine Empire. Although many of the details of Vlad’s life and deeds remain open to interpretation, several surviving visual and textual sources offer a complex picture of this medieval hero who inspired the modern vampire.  

Portrait of Vlad III Dracula (Ambras Portrait), second half of the 16th century, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm (Ambras Castle, part of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)

This portrait (commonly known as the Ambras Portrait) preserves an iconic image of Vlad III Dracula. Completed several decades after his death and supposedly based on a now-lost original, this painting shows the Wallachian ruler’s bust in three-quarter view and dressed in a red velvet coat with gold buttons and a large fur collar. His elaborate headdress is lined with pearls, a large central gem, and gold accents. His appearance is stern, with large, piercing eyes, arched eyebrows, an aquiline nose, long curly hair, and a prominent mustache. In this painting, the “Dux Balachie” (or ruler of Wallachia)—as the portrait was described in the inventory of Archduke Ferdinand in 1596—is shown as a respectable, yet stern, figure. 

The portrait seems to match the only extant written description of Vlad, penned by Niccolò Modrussa (Modruš)—a papal legate at the court in Buda while Vlad was in captivity there for more than a decade, from 1462–74. Modrussa’s description reads:

[Vlad] was not very tall, but very stocky and strong, with a cold and terrible appearance, a strong and aquiline nose, swollen nostrils, a thin and reddish face in which the very long eyelashes framed large wide-open green eyes; the bushy black eyebrows made them appear threatening. His face and chin were shaven, but for a mustache. The swollen temples increased the bulk of his head. A bull’s neck connected [with] his head from which black curly locks hung on his wide-shouldered person. Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, Dracula, Prince of Many Faces, 1989 [1]

The Ambras Portrait reflects these details, arguably confirming key features of the appearance of Vlad III.

Gentile Bellini, The Sultan Mehmed II, 1480, oil on canvas, 69.9 x 52.1 cm (The National Gallery, London)

In the guise of Vlad

In its artistic choices and mode of execution, the Ambras Portrait recalls the famous portrait of the Ottoman ruler Mehmed II by Gentile Bellini. Both portraits feature their sitters in similar positions set against a dark, ambiguous background, as well as garbed in a red mantle with a broad fur collar and elaborate headdress. Both portraits are successful in highlighting the key features and high status of the sitters. Bellini’s painting includes additional details like the delicately carved arch and decorated ledge in the foreground, which further frame and define Mehmed’s status, as well as the gold crowns in the upper portions of the panel, which represent the sultan’s newly-conquered cities: Constantinople, Iconium, and Trebizond.

Vlad’s appearance in the Ambras Portrait was also repeated in several other visual sources. In one mid-15th-century painting, the Roman official who condemned Christ appears in the guise of Vlad. Vlad’s figure is therefore associated with the torture and suffering of Christ in the Christian narrative of Pontius Pilate, drawing on the stereotypes that circulated during his reign and beyond. Moreover, the only full-length portrait of Vlad is found in an oil painting of c. 1700. The anonymous artist painted Vlad according to the Ambras Portrait, but completed his look with a long belted coat, a mace, and a sword. The accompanying inscription clarifies the identity of the figure: “Dracula Vaida [Voda] Prince and Voivode of Transalpine Wallachia, the most feared enemy of the Turks 1466.”  

Left: Christ before Pontius Pilate (in the guise of Vlad Dracula), mid-15th century, tempera on wood, 83.5 x 51.5 cm (National Gallery of Slovenia, Ljubljana); right: Portrait of Vlad III Dracula, c. 1700, oil on canvas, 218 x 130 cm (Forchtenstein Castle, Austria)

Narratives of fear

Vlad was not only feared by his enemies, but also by his people and those in Wallachia’s neighboring regions. Shortly after his death in the winter of 1476/1477, numerous stories of his gruesome deeds began circulating across Europe in printed media. The so-called Geschichte Dracole Wayda pamphlets were used to spread stories about the atrocities Vlad had committed during his reign. Several of the accounts include the following brief narratives:

He had a great cauldron made, and over it [were placed] boards with holes, and he had people’s heads shoved through there, and thus he had them imprisoned. And he had the cauldron filled with water, and a great fire made under it. And thus he had the people scream miserably until they were boiled to death.

He had people ground to death on a grindstone, and he did many more inhumane things, which people tell of him.

He had a good meal prepared for all the beggars in his land. After the meal, he had them locked up in the barn in which they had eaten, and burned them all. He felt they were eating the people’s food for free and could not repay it. Dracole Wayda pamphlet, c. 1488 [2]

Accounts like these circulated through printed pamphlets, especially in the period between the 1480s and the 1530s. Fourteen versions of these pamphlets have survived, and they each include a woodcut of the Wallachian ruler (sometimes colored), which recalls the key features of the Ambras Portrait. 

Left: Portrait of Vlad III in Dracole Wayda, c. 1488, colored woodcut from a pamphlet printed in Nuremberg (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich); right: Portrait of Vlad III in Dracole Wayda, c. 1491, woodcut from a pamphlet printed in Bamberg (British Library, London)

Several of the pamphlets also include a narrative vignette that accompanies this account: “… Dracula rested near the chapel of Saint James [in the vicinity of Brașov, a town in Transylvania]. He had the suburbs burned. And as the day came, in early morning, he had women and men, young and old, impaled near the chapel and around the hill, and he sat amidst [them], and ate his morning meal with joy.” This story underscores Vlad’s cruelty and indifference, which likely sent chilling messages to all those who encountered him through such sources. Although likely exaggerated, these accounts present Vlad as an immoral monster who spared no one. The lack of narrative coherence or chronology in these brief stories, which offer just a series of anecdotes with horrific details, contributed to the dissemination across Europe of a certain, otherworldly image of the Wallachian ruler.

Vlad III dining among a forest of the impaled, 1500, woodcut from pamphlet, printed by Matthias Hupnuff in Strasbourg (Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg)

The purpose of these pamphlets, according to one hypothesis, was to enlist the support of German towns in the struggles of the Transylvanian German Saxons. The German Saxons settled in regions of the Carpathian Mountains, mainly in Transylvania, beginning in the 12th century, and repeatedly suffered and were oppressed by the local communities. Vlad had many conflicts with the Transylvanian merchants during his reign, which often resulted in struggle and death for those who opposed him. Another hypothesis suggests that these stories emerged as part of a propaganda campaign while Vlad was captive, for more than a decade, at the Hungarian court (his captivity began in 1462). Such accounts certainly paint Vlad as a ruthless tyrant and enemy of the people.

In these sources, moreover, Vlad is demonized and “othered.” But what stands out is the cruelty of his deeds, and especially the acts of killing and impaling. The latter, a barbarous method of punishment, has a long history dating to antiquity. During the 15th century, impaling became a signifier of the vicious “East” in general (i.e., Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire) and intimately tied to the figure of Vlad. He and his realm became strange, savage, and mysterious through the circulation of these stories and later through the transformations of these accounts in popular media.

Vlad’s legacy

From the othering of the historical figure and the ongoing mystical aura of Eastern Europe, there was only a short leap to the vampire culture that developed around Vlad in the modern periods. Through Bram Stoker’s famous novel Dracula, first published in 1897, Vlad became associated with a vampire, essentially someone who returns from the dead in the guise of a creature in order to attack the living, who in turn also become vampires.

Sources like the Ambras Portrait, Modrussa’s description, and the German pamphlets, among others, informed Stoker’s research for his novel. Stoker’s Dracula became a monstrous, ruthless figure, mysterious and disturbing to the reader just like the realm from which he hailed. Stoker’s novel was further popularized through numerous creative adaptations in films, plays, comic books, novels, art, and more during the 20th and 21st centuries, contributing to the ongoing fascination with vampires and Eastern Europe in the popular imagination.

Chafariz d’El Rei, late 16th century (Netherlandish), oil on panel, 93 x 163 cm (The Berardo Collection, Lisbon)

In the late 1990s, a 16th-century painting depicting one of the main public places in early modern Lisbon, the Chafariz d’El Rei (the King’s Fountain), was bought by the Portuguese millionaire José Berardo. Many people doubted the authenticity of the painting when it was first displayed publicly in 1999 in the exhibition “Os negros em Portugal: séculos XVI-XIX” (Blacks in Portugal: 16th–19th centuries) in Lisbon’s Jerónimos monastery. Although the presence of Black people in late medieval and early modern Portugal, and in Lisbon in particular, has been well-studied, many argued that the painting could not be from 16th-century Lisbon due to the large number of Black people depicted in it. The matter was mostly settled in 2017 when experts in Lisbon’s Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (National Museum of Ancient Art, MNAA) conducted a technical analysis and dated the painting to 1570–80, also determining that it might be by an unknown Netherlandish artist. All this happened as Portuguese society continues to debate its imperial and colonial history, a debate that remains far from over. Political conservatives, like Mr. Berardo, celebrate a traditional reading of Portugal’s past, while a younger generation, led by Black Portuguese people, call for a reckoning with Portugal’s not so distant colonial legacy (for example, Portugal held Angola as a colonial possession until 1975).

A large Black presence

Chafariz d’El Rei shows the King’s Fountain in the Alfama district on a feast day. At the time, public spaces were of paramount importance. It was there that commerce transpired and people socialized and formed and maintained social networks. The King’s Fountain was a particularly important space where a large swath of the city regularly gathered away from the center of power on the newer side of the city. Before running water in homes, public fountains were an essential service, and the painting highlights the laborious task, most often assigned to Black women, of carrying water in red ceramic jugs from the fountain to homes. The painting does not represent a single moment or scene, but is a composite that attests to the large Black presence in 16th-century Lisbon, whose 10,000 to 12,000 Black inhabitants constituted ten percent of the city’s total population. The city had the highest concentration of Black inhabitants in Europe, and foreign visitors often commented on the city’s Black population in their travel accounts and letters.

Knight João de Sá Panasco on pony (detail), Chafariz d’El Rei, late 16th century (Netherlandish), oil on panel, 93 x 163 cm (The Berardo Collection, Lisbon)

In the lower right, we see four Black knights, identifiable by their clothing and swords. Two knights are walking on foot. Another knight, who we see from the back (not seen in the detail above), is riding on a donkey. The knight featured more prominently is riding on a pony. This knight, who has been identified by name as João de Sá Panasco, has the red cross of the prestigious military order of Saint James on his right sleeve. Sá was born in West Africa around 1520, and was enslaved in Lisbon as a teenager, where a powerful aristocrat, also named João de Sá, bought him. In the 1540s, after being freed by the white Sá, the Black Sá served in the royal court of King John III, first as a jester and eventually as a page.

King John made Sá a knight for this service. He died sometime between 1560 and 1570. His regalia, boots, and the adornments on the pony underscore Sá’s high social status. These four knights demonstrate that Black Portuguese people could reach elite social status in early modern Portugal—though it must be noted that only donkeys and ponies (not horses) were available to these knights, perhaps due to horses’ high price. These Black knights were one of the main reasons why Portuguese scholars doubted the painting’s authenticity. They argued that knightly orders were regulated according to blood purity laws, which restricted membership to people who could prove that their ancestry was white and Christian for at least three generations. However, Hector Linares, a scholar studying how non-whites gained access to these prestigious orders, has shown that sometimes Iberian kings, who commanded these orders, bypassed these rules and admitted non-white men to them as reward for service to the crown, as in Sá’s case.

Festive scene, upper right, with dancing (detail), Chafariz d’El Rei, late 16th century (Netherlandish), oil on panel, 93 x 163 cm (The Berardo Collection, Lisbon)

In the upper right, we see a festive scene, with a Black couple dancing and, strikingly for many, a Black man dancing with a white woman. This scene, like others in the painting, may have been meant to be comical. Around them, people are fetching water in red jugs from the King’s Fountain. Along with the tambourine player at the bottom center of the painting, these dancers bear witness to Afro-Lisboetas’ (Lisboners of African descent) well-documented festive traditions.

Black horn players (detail, right), The Engagement of Saint Ursula and Prince Etherius panel, Saint Auta Altarpiece, 1522–25, oil on panel, 67 x 72 cm; 66.5 x 71.9 cm (Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon)

For example, when Frederick III married Eleanor of Portugal in 1452, the wedding festivities included Black dancers. Moreover, we see Black musicians in the Portuguese court in a set of paintings commissioned in 1522 by princess Eleanor of Viseu for the Convent of the Madre de Deus in Lisbon.

Unloading a boat (detail), Chafariz d’El Rei, late 16th century (Netherlandish), oil on panel, 93 x 163 cm (The Berardo Collection, Lisbon)

Varied labors

On the lower left corner, we see a Black man unloading a boat. This laborer, the Black people fetching water from the King’s Fountain, and the gondolier on the right lower corner (who recalls the well-documented Black gondoliers of early modern Venice) show the varied labors Black people carried out in early modern Lisbon.

Man bleeding (detail), Chafariz d’El Rei, late 16th century (Netherlandish), oil on panel, 93 x 163 cm (The Berardo Collection, Lisbon)

On the upper left square, the painting shows the violence to which Afro-Lisboetas were subjected. Significantly, at the very center of the painting, we see a Black man bleeding after his head has been put through a water jug (or according to Halikowski Smith, performing some ritual involving fire). This figure (like the Black and white dancing couple) too seems to have been intended to be humorous. Moreover, in the lower left corner, another Black man is being carried away by authorities, while the Black woman behind him, possibly his wife, seems to wonder why—a scene not unfamiliar today.

Woman questioning man’s arrest (detail), Chafariz d’El Rei, late 16th century (Netherlandish), oil on panel, 93 x 163 cm (The Berardo Collection, Lisbon)

The painting highlights the variety of peoples and activities associated with the city of Lisbon. Well-dressed white women remain sequestered within the domestic sphere, looking out of windows. White women with bare feet, a traditional visual symbol of poverty, work and mingle in the streets. Children, men with long grey beards, work, and leisure are all portrayed. The painting’s comical elements suggest that it may have been done in the spirit of the celebrated Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Interpretations of the painting’s intended purpose vary but the overrepresentation of Black people may hold a clue. The Dutch artist may have meant to criticize Lisbon as a “Black” city where the institution of slavery was more common than in other parts of Europe. The depictions of violence against Black people might be a critique of Portuguese race relations. Yet, the Black knights suggest more positive possibilities, and the focus on the fountain presents the city as a wealthy and healthy place to live.

By the 20th century, the painting was in an art collection outside of Portugal (possibly in the Netherlands), suggesting that the painting appealed to travelers or others who wished to showcase Lisbon’s remarkable features. Including both the good and the bad would have allowed the painting to serve as a conversation starter.

Whatever its intended purpose, Chafariz d’El Rei is an important record of the varied lives, labors, punishments, and cultural activities of Black Portuguese people in early modern Lisbon. It is a pity therefore that the painting remains in Mr. Berardo’s private collection (in one of his private homes outside Lisbon) as the debate about Portugal’s colonial past continues, when it should be displayed in a public museum for everyone to see.

Master H.L., The Breisach Altarpiece, c. 1523–26, limewood (Saint Stephan’s Cathedral, Breisach)

Japanese Haiku. Black and white movies. Zen ink drawings. Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites. What do all these have to do with a 16th-century carved wooden altarpiece? They all share an aesthetic of restraint, of less is more, of evocative intimation rather than bold declaration.

Priest celebrating the Eucharist (detail), Rogier van der Weyden, The Seven Sacraments, 1440–45, oil on panel, 200 x 223 cm (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp)

A more understated altarpiece

Between 1523 and 1526, the artist known as Master H.L. carved the understated yet affecting Breisach Altarpiece to adorn the high altar of the church of Saint Stephen in the city of Breisach, Germany.

Altarpieces (also called retables) may be painted, carved, or a combination of both. Master H.L. is only known to us by his initials, though art historians have speculated about his identity. His initials appear in three separate places in the altarpiece.

Altarpieces stand behind an altar and create the backdrop for the celebration of the Eucharist, the blessing and eating of the bread and wine that is the climax of public Christian worship.

Mary (detail), center panel with the Coronation of the Virgin, Master H.L., The Breisach Altarpiece, c. 1523–26, limewood (Saint Stephan’s Cathedral, Breisach)

Area where Master H.L. worked (underlying map © Google)

Master H.L. was active in an area overlapping the modern borders of Germany and France, including Colmar, Freiburg, and Strasbourg in addition to Breisach. Master H.L. was also a print maker. Like sculpture, printmaking as a technique involves carving in wood and metal and relied on line rather than color for expression.

Northern European artists of the 15th and 16th centuries often made carved altarpieces (retables). A very famous example is the colorful and shining Saint Mary’s Altar in Saint Mary’s Basilica in Kraków, Poland by the German sculptor Veit Stoss.

Veit Stoss, Saint Mary’s Altar, completed 1489, limewood (Saint Mary’s Basilica, Kraków)

Unlike the lavish gold and colors of the Stoss’ altarpiece in Kraków, Master H.L. and his patrons chose a quieter mood. Like his contemporary Tilman Riemenschneider, Master H.L. stained the carved limewood a warm, earthy brown. This predominant monochrome allows the crests, waves, dips, swirls, and shadows of the carving to speak for themselves almost entirely without color, save for the delicate passages of reds around the mouths, blues around the eyes, and the alabaster faces of the figures.

Such delicate touches of color recall a prayerbook called The Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux by Jean Pucelle of 1325, painted in grisailles (shades of gray) with subtle passages of color that enliven and enhance the gray shadows and lines.

Jean Pucelle, The Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux, Queen of France, c. 1324–28, grisaille, tempera, and ink on vellum, 9.2 x 6.2 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

In Breisach, the restrained monochrome allows the deep carving and complex shadows to extend outward, creating a sense of figures emerging out of shadows on their own and sharing space with viewers. Flickering candlelight enlivens the figures and shadows even further.

Despite the quiet of the medium, the dancing lines and joyful subject are exuberant. The central panel displays the Coronation of the Virgin, who sits in glory in heaven, receiving a crown from God the Father to her left and the risen Christ to her right.

The Virgin herself exemplifies ideal beauty of 16th-century Northern Europe. She is a very young woman with a high forehead and long tresses.  Surrounded by carved tendrils and arabesques as well as playful angels, she inclines her head to receive the crown from Christ and God the Father, looking towards the viewer rather than God or Christ. The sculptor framed her head on one side with the arms of God and on the other with the arms of Christ, while her folded arms complete the bottom length of the triangle.

In Breisach, the restrained monochrome allows the deep carving and complex shadows to extend outward, creating a sense of figures emerging out of shadows on their own and sharing space with viewers. Flickering candlelight enlivens the figures and shadows even further.

Despite the quiet of the medium, the dancing lines and joyful subject are exuberant. The central panel displays the Coronation of the Virgin, who sits is in glory in heaven, receiving a crown from God the Father to her left and the risen Christ to her right.

Center panel with the Coronation of the Virgin (detail), Master H.L., The Breisach Altarpiece, c. 1523–26, limewood (Saint Stephan’s Cathedral, Breisach)

The Virgin herself exemplifies ideal beauty of 16th-century Northern Europe. She is a very young woman with a high forehead and long tresses. Surrounded by carved tendrils and arabesques as well as playful angels, she inclines her head to receive the crown from Christ and God the Father, looking towards the viewer rather than God or Christ. The sculptor framed her head on one side with the arms of God and on the other with the arms of Christ, while her folded arms complete the bottom length of the triangle.

Left: jamb figure (detail), west portal, Notre Dame de Chartres, 12th century; right: God the Father (detail), Master H.L., The Breisach Altarpiece, c. 1523–26, limewood (Saint Stephan’s Cathedral, Breisach)

The detail of God the Father is both lush and demure. Creased skin around his eyes suggest wisdom and concentration. The thin, straight nose and sensitively formed lips are proportionate and quietly expressive. The extravagant beard, whose locks flow like long hair floating under water, flutters around the face without overwhelming it in a display of virtuoso carving and energetic line and texture. The intense bone structure and angled, thoughtful eyes recall the gaunt, inward features of Gothic sculpture, such as the 12th-century jamb figures at Chartres Cathedral.

Hans Baldung (Grien), Freiburg Altarpiece (open to the Coronation of the Virgin surrounded by two panels depicting the apostles), 1516, 253 x 232.4 cm (Freiburg im Breisgau Münster; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

The subject matter and style recall the altarpiece painted by Hans Baldung Grien in nearby Freiburg. Baldung’s altarpiece is painted rather than carved, but also depicts the coronation of the Virgin surrounded by jubilant angels. Master H.L. was almost certainly familiar with and inspired by Baldung’s painting. Baldung, in turn, may have drawn inspiration from sculpted retables, as the tight composition and interweaving of figures suggests.

Wings and superstructure

The wings in Breisach depict Saints Stephen and Lawrence on the left, and the city patrons of Breisach, Saints Protaseous and Gervasius, whose relics are kept in the church, on the viewer’s right.

Left: Saints Stephan and Lawrence; right: Saints Protaseous and Gervasius, Master H.L., The Breisach Altarpiece, c. 1523–26, limewood (Saint Stephan’s Cathedral, Breisach)

The figures are dressed sumptuously, stand before a flat ground, and are surmounted by an intricate weaving of abstract leaves. The unadorned ground allows the figures to stand out as individual personalities and styles—bearded or clean shaven, baby faced or mature. The saints, blessed but less holy than the Virgin or the Trinity, are a step out of our mundane world towards the holy figures in the center.

Master H.L., The Breisach Altarpiece, c. 1523–26, limewood (Saint Stephan’s Cathedral, Breisach)

The soaring superstructure (Aufzug or Gesprenge) that soars above the altarpiece is a tangle of vegetal lines and tendrils, with The Holy Kinship (Mary, her mother Anne, and Christ) at the top and Christ as the Man of sorrows, displaying his wounds from the Crucifixion.

Predella

The predella, the rectangular section at the bottom, depicts the four evangelists, traditionally identified as the writers of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as life-sized busts.

Predella, Master H.L., The Breisach Altarpiece, c. 1523–26, limewood (Saint Stephan’s Cathedral, Breisach)

Each is a different age and possessed of a different personality, all seeming to bring a different perspective and attitude to the active discussion and weighty project of writing the Gospels. Their active discussion makes them look more like scholars exchanging ideas than visionaries receiving God’s word.

Jeffrey Chipps Smith (see additional resources below) rightly observes the difference between the Breisach Altarpiece and the conventions of much Italian art, where a viewers are expected to stand stock still and observe a space that opens up before them as a world seemingly contiguous with their own. In contrast, the shadows and turning attitudes of the figures within the Breisach Altarpiece practically invite the viewer to dance. To see each of the figures and enjoy the changing effects of light, the viewer must move left and right, forward and back to experience the full effect.

Choir screen

One complicating factor is the choir screen. Jacqueline Jung (see recommended sources below) proposes that choir screens organize and enliven church spaces, functioning almost cinematically.

View through the choir screen, Master H.L., The Breisach Altarpiece, c. 1523–26, limewood (Saint Stephan’s Cathedral, Breisach)

Light and shadow, figures and objects move as the viewer moves, revealing changing perspectives and fragments of the altarpiece and the rest of the space.

Choir screens divide space within a church, separating the most sacred spaces reserved for the clergy from the more workaday spaces open to the laity.  Dating from the 1490s, the screen was in place when Master H.L. was designing the altarpiece. In one sense the choir screen may impede our view of the altarpiece, but on the other hand, it choreographs our dance with the object even further. The figures in Superstructure were meant to respond to the changing light coming through the screen. The Four Gospel writers are visible through central portal of the screen, and rest of the figures reveal themselves as we walk closer.

We often talk about works of art in terms of the artist’s identity; for instance, we speak of a “Michelangelo” or a “Vermeer”. We are so accustomed to this convention that it is tempting to think that works of art by anonymous masters are less worthy. We tend to forget that naming artists is a relatively recent practice. For most of human history and in most parts of the world, artists were anonymous. Though we cannot be sure about his identity, Master H.L. is no less worthy than his named contemporaries.

Antoniazzo Romano, Virgin and Child with a Donor, c. 1480, tempera and gold leaf on panel, 47.1 x 37.8 cm (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)

Everyone recognizes recurring trends as retro styles in fashion and design. Case in point: the current popularity of Polaroid cameras, “mom jeans,” old sitcoms, and other cultural relics from generations past. The new and cutting-edge only constitutes part of a consumer culture that demands the past mingle with the present. The same is true of Renaissance art in Italy, as exhibited in the retro style of the painter Antoniazzo Romano. His working career, from the 1460s to the 1490s, was nearly contemporary with more celebrated artists like Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Yet his works persistently recall certain traits of medieval paintings—gold backgrounds, stamped decorative detailing, simplified compositions, and frontal figural arrangements—that other artists rejected as old-fashioned.

Left: Fra Filippo Lippi, Madonna and Child with two Angels, c. 1460–65, tempera on panel, 95 x 63.5 cm (Uffizi Gallery, Florence); right: Raphael, Madonna of the Goldfinch, 1505–06, oil on panel, 107 x 77 cm (Uffizi Gallery, Florence)

New and old fashions

Antoniazzo Romano’s retro style is evident when compared to other Renaissance artists. Fra Filippo Lippi’s Madonna and Child with Two Angels humanizes Mary as she tenderly clasps her hands in prayer while Christ, rendered as a chubby toddler, turns lovingly towards her. All figures are activated and turned in space. Through the open window behind we see an unfolding landscape. Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch builds upon Lippi by softening the contours of the figures with delicate modeling and imbuing them with graceful and calm demeanors. Further, Mary, Jesus, and Saint John the Baptist are set in a warmly lit and fully articulated outdoor setting that is carefully and realistically rendered. Both Lippi and Raphael show off new artistic achievements in striving for greater naturalistic renderings. 

Virgin and child (detail), Antoniazzo Romano, Virgin and Child with a Donor, c. 1480, tempera and gold leaf on panel, 47.1 x 37.8 cm (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)

By contrast, Antoniazzo Romano’s Virgin and Child with a Donor mixes elements of new and old styles. We do see some of the traits that mark Lippi’s and Raphael’s painted Madonnas, like the attention to delicate naturalistic features and the tenderness with which she nuzzles the Christ Child. But other changes signal Antoniazzo’s intentional desire to evoke older artistic forms from the 1300s and earlier. He restricted his composition to the figures alone, and rendered them in simpler and more frontal postures. Even more prominent is the gold background that at this stage of the Renaissance was almost entirely out of fashion. In this regard, his painting harkens back to Duccio’s late-gothic gilded Madonnas, themselves modeled on older styles. 

The functions of all these images of the Madonna and Child to inspire religious devotion remained constant. But their manners of representation signal that there is not always a one-to-one relationship of style to a single historical moment. An artist like Romano working in the late 1400s is capable of borrowing visible features as much from the past as from the present—not unlike designers of clothing, and other products made today. 

Medieval revival

Antoniazzo Romano’s retro style emerged during the Byzantine revival in Rome. Though the import of West Asian culture and artifacts into the West goes back centuries, the influx of Byzantine art into Rome increased after the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. This resulted in increased interest in and demand for images modeled after medieval icons both for private and church settings. Even if those icons were later copies, they could be revered for their originary ties to early Christianity.

Left: Antoniazzo Romano, Madonna and Child, late 15th century, tempera on wood, 109 x 77.5 cm (Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, NY); right: Icon of Madonna del Popolo, c. 13th century, tempera on panel (Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome)

Sometimes Antoniazzo copied particular medieval icons. His Madonna and Child at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY is one of a number that replicate the 13th-century Madonna del Popolo in the church of the same name in Rome. By the 1400s that icon was regarded as a much older authentic painting by Saint Luke. Antoniazzo maintained the older image’s figural and spatial flatness, the frontality of the bust-length Mary and Jesus, and the richness of its decorative gold leaf.

Left: Icon of Christ, known as the Uronica, Sancta Sanctorum, Saint John Lateran, Rome (photo: Sailko, CC BY 3.0); Antoniazzo Romano, Bust of Christ, c. 1495, tempera and gold on panel, 87 x 62 cm (Museo del Prado, Madrid)

Another, the Bust of Christ, copies the icon of Christ at the Sancta Sanctorum in Rome. This icon was also believed to have been painted by Saint Luke but finished by an angel. Its style was what convinced people that it was very old. Its severe frontal rendering of Christ’s face, staring out with large almond-shaped eyes, were (and still are) hallmarks of its ancient age. Even while Antoniazzo Romano embellished these copies with traits borrowed from his Renaissance contemporaries—he enlivened the faces and rendered them more realistic through soft light and shadow—the works’ appeal was their unmistakable resemblance to the older medieval models.

Retro style meets modern manner

Antoniazzo Romano shows us that Renaissance artists were capable of choosing styles from a variety of periods rather than sticking with the newest and most recent modes of pictorial representations. Take, for instance, his frescoes in the apse of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. This church was one of Rome’s primary sites for pilgrimage thanks to its collection of holy Christian relics brought to Rome by Emperor Constantine’s mother, Saint Helen.

Antoniazzo Romano, apse of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, c. 1492–95, Rome (photo: Sailko, CC BY 3.0)

Apse imagery has a long history in Rome, where medieval examples in mosaic testify to the styles and mediums common before the Renaissance. Antoniazzo Romano’s apse fresco formed part of an extensive renovation of this early Christian basilica and surely replaced an older one. The lower part shows Saint Helen’s recovery of the True Cross. Figures in realistic poses act out the scene in a legible narrative and are set against a daylit landscape replete with atmospheric perspective. But the apse painting above looks quite different. There we see a flat background of regularly arranged stars. In the center Christ sits enthroned in majesty surrounded by a golden mandorla and presented in a strict and monumental frontality that conveys his authority as ruler of the world.

Mandorla (detail), Antoniazzo Romano, apse of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, Rome (photo: Sailko, CC BY 3.0)

Here Antoniazzo Romano puts different styles in confrontation. While the narrative below is typical of the late 15th century, Christ harkens back to medieval figural styles. While the Christ in Majesty was informed by Renaissance treatments of the body and the drapery that covers it, its stark almost frozen frontality recalls images of Christ Pantokrator (or Christ All Powerful) in medieval icons and mosaics, such as at the Cappella Palatina in Palermo. Further, no existing medieval image in Rome features Christ in a mandorla. This motif was instead more common in the eastern Byzantine empire. In other words, unlike the icons of the Madonna and Christ discussed above, this is not a copy of a particular medieval image. It is a new image, but adopts a retro style recalling the legacy of the antique.

An alternative Renaissance

The history of Renaissance art in Italy is often, unfortunately, told as the vanquishing of medieval art. Yet this excludes the painters, patrons, and viewers who desired retro artistic styles. Antoniazzo Romano was not alone in catering to those tastes. Greek painters in Venice and Venetian Crete in the 1400s and 1500s also mixed Renaissance and Byzantine styles. But these are only representative of a much larger alternative to our modern cannon of the Italian Renaissance whose prioritizing of new naturalistic renderings of figures and settings has excluded artists like Antoniazzo Romano. Consequently, to uphold artists like Raphael as the epitome of the Renaissance is to blindly adhere to the legacy of Giorgio Vasari whose categorization of the period and whose tastes for certain artistic traits over others has fundamentally shaped the field of Renaissance art history. In reality, this was not just an age of forward-looking artistic innovation. Rather, much like trends in fashion and design today, Renaissance painting experienced recurring fads for retro medieval imagery and a persistent valorization of past styles as well.

Plautilla Nelli, The Last Supper, c. 1568, oil on canvas, 200 x 700 cm (Santa Maria Novella Museum, Florence)

In the 1990’s the badly damaged and monumental The Last Supper by Florentine painter Plautilla Nelli came to the attention of Advancing Women Artists (AWA), an American non-profit based in Florence that sought to recover forgotten women artists and their artworks. Nelli, a sister and three-time prioress of the Dominican monastery of Santa Caterina in Florence, painted The Last Supper in 1568 for the convent’s refectory. When Santa Caterina, like many other religious institutions, was suppressed under Napoleon in the 19th century, Nelli’s painting was moved to nearby Santa Maria Novella, only to be later removed from its frame, rolled up, and largely ignored for most of the 20th century. AWA fundraised with the “Adopt-an-Apostle” program to facilitate the careful restoration of Nelli’s painting. After four years of restoration, Nelli’s Last Supper was rehung in the Museum of Santa Maria Novella in 2019. Subsequently, Nelli and her paintings have been the focus of numerous exhibitions and publications, finally shining a well-deserved light on the gifts of this painter.

Despite her relative obscurity in the 20th century, Nelli was recognized as a talented painter in her own time. Indeed, she was one of only four women artists that Giorgio Vasari discussed in the second edition of his influential compilation of Renaissance artist biographies, the Lives of the Artists. Vasari praised the nun’s skill, particularly as someone without professional training, and noted that her artworks were prevalent in private collections and sacred sites throughout Florence.

While many Renaissance monastic women made art to fundraise for their convents, Nelli’s creation of large-scale paintings was unprecedented. Santa Caterina’s The Last Supper (measuring about 6.5 x 21 feet) would have required the aid of numerous assistants (likely her fellow sisters) and the construction of scaffolding. While most Florentine Last Suppers made for refectories were done in fresco, Nelli’s is oil paint on canvas, likely because Nelli was self-taught. Though many 16th-century girls and young women were encouraged to dabble with art recreationally, fresco required considerable technical training. As a woman under religious vows, decorum would have prohibited her study in an artist’s studio.

Christ with Judas and John & Chinese porcelain bowls (detail), Plautilla Nelli, The Last Supper, c. 1568, oil on canvas, 200 x 700 cm (Santa Maria Novella Museum, Florence)

Subject & significance

Nelli’s painting depicts the Last Supper—the moment Christ announces to his apostles that one of them has betrayed him, a popular subject for Renaissance refectories in which monastic members would take their communal meals. Shock and dismay reverberate around the group as the haloed men react to the news. Nelli provided visual and iconographic clues to help identify some of the apostles. Notice, for example, that a halo-less figure sits alone on the front side of the table, physically and morally separating him from the rest of the apostles and thus identifying him as the betrayer, Judas. We also see that the traitor clutches a purse of coins in one hand, a reference to Judas’s reward of 30 pieces of silver for betraying Christ to the Romans (John 13:29). With his other hand, the informer reaches for Christ’s proffered piece of bread, another biblical reference alluding to his role in Christ’s inevitable death (John 13:26). In contrast, to the right of Christ, John is so troubled by the pronouncement he leans into the Lord’s breast with his eyes closed, seeking comfort.

During this last meal, Christ also instructed his disciples to partake of the blessed wine and bread as surrogates for his blood and body to nourish themselves spiritually while awaiting his return via resurrection. This was the foundation for the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, in which followers consume sanctified wine and bread to commemorate Christ’s sacrifice, and to join them physically with the source of life.

Tailoring The Last Supper for Santa Caterina

By the Renaissance, depictions of the Last Supper were largely standardized, especially in central Italy. Like many other artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, Nelli situated the event at a long rectangular table parallel to the picture plane, with Christ at the center surrounded by his twelve apostles. On the cloth-covered table is a relatively modest banquet consisting of the traditional Last Supper meal of wine, bread, and roasted lamb, all symbols and reminders of Christ’s physical sacrifice.

Fava beans and glassware (detail), Plautilla Nelli, The Last Supper, c. 1568, oil on canvas, 200 x 700 cm (Santa Maria Novella Museum, Florence)

In many ways, Nelli’s The Last Supper mirrored the environment of the monastery’s refectory. For example, the nuns sat at long, rectangular tables, taking their communal meals in silence to meditate on spiritual matters, like the subject of the Last Supper. Nelli extended that quiet into the painting. The apostles at their long table react to Christ’s announcement with gestures, body language, and facial expressions, but no one appears to be speaking.

Further, many of the items appearing on the painted table would have been familiar to the sisters’ own meals, encouraging the sense that the painting and its sacred event were an extension of the refectory’s space. For example, records show that like the painting’s Christ and his apostles, Nelli and her nuns had meals consisting of a meat dish (three times a week) and wine, supplemented with a variety of produce. Indeed, convent receipts show the purchase of local fava beans, which Nelli depicted scattered among The Last Supper’s fare, adding a particularly Florentine element to the biblical event. The Last Supper’s leafy greens may have been a symbolic reference to the Seder meal, while also illustrating the practice of some Santa Caterina sisters to deny themselves excessive pleasures of the body by making their meals less palatable with a sprinkling of bitter lettuces. Even The Last Supper’s tableware may have been the monastery’s own. The highly specified glassware emulates styles made in 16th-century Florence.

In contrast to the humble meal, however, are three Chinese bowls adorning Christ’s table. A rare luxury in Renaissance Italy, Chinese porcelain was highly sought after in elite circles—not something we might expect to see in a convent. However, Santa Caterina acquired such grand gifts from the wealthy families of its sisters. By including them in her Last Supper, Nelli was participating in an aesthetic trend inspired by new international trade between China and Europe.

Nelli’s use of cangiante (detail), Plautilla Nelli, The Last Supper, c. 1568, oil on canvas, 200 x 700 cm (Santa Maria Novella Museum, Florence)

Visual qualities & cangiante

Stylistically, Nelli’s painting is consistent with Italian artistic tastes while also meeting the needs of the convent setting. While other regional and contemporaneous Last Suppers (like those of Andrea del Castagno and Domenico Ghirlandaio) include illusionistic backgrounds, decorative details, or even painted onlookers, Nelli’s is focused and simplified to not distract the sisters from the salient points of the sacred image. Set against a simple background of fictive wood paneling, the monumental figures dominate the painting with the saturated, jewel-like colors of their clothing. Gestures, body language, eye lines, and repeated colors draw the viewer’s attention around the scene, but always return the focus to the figure of Christ at the center of the symmetrical composition. While highlights and shadows naturalistically model the forms (look at those drapery folds!), notice Nelli’s use of cangiante. Meaning changing in Italian, cangiante was a coloring mode used by artists like Michelangelo and Raphael, in which volume is indicated not through value contrast (as it is with chiaroscuro), but through the complete changing of color. The result is an illusion of volume with an almost iridescent finish that dazzles the eye. See, for example, how the tunic of Nelli’s left-most apostle shifts from magenta in its shadows to a lemony yellow in the highlights. Or, in the figure to the right of John whose tunic of dark teal lightens to a soft lavender pink.

Nelli’s painting illustrates her knowledge of iconographic traditions and contemporary artistic trends. Simultaneously, she maintained the sacred function of the painting as a means of connecting the viewer to divine matters. In an unusual addition to The Last Supper, Nelli seems to acknowledge her remarkable situation as a successful, untrained female painter under sacred vows by signing the masterpiece with “Orate pro pictura,” or Pray for the Paintress.