The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice. - book reviews

For Jacob Burckhardt, the great tradition of modern European easel painting originated in the Italian Renaissance altarpiece. In its day, the altarpiece was "the most progressive genre in Italian painting," marked by the most advanced developments in the representation of figures, of space and light, and even of landscape.(1) Burckhardt made much of the fact that it was through the metamorphosis of the altarpiece that the rectangular picture, or quadro, became the primary format for panel painting, and then the paradigm for easel painting as such. The history of the altarpiece in the Renaissance was thus a decisive episode within the larger history of European art, and an especially useful laboratory in which to study the rise and eventual predominance of painting over sculpture in Western culture. Burckhardt's altarpiece essay originally appeared together with "The Collectors" and "The Portrait," all parts of a projected but never completed companion volume to The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Burckhardt had evidently intended to complement his famous account of the origins of modern individualism and statecraft with a similarly multifaceted account of the rise of a modern culture of aesthetics and art appreciation.

In the past two decades, the altarpiece has become the focus of a field-wide attention not unlike that enjoyed by "the great age of fresco" in the 1950s and 1960s. Peter Hum-frey's 1988 English translation and edition of Burckhardt's essay on the altarpiece was itself one of the fruits of this growth in interest, and has been followed in more recent years by two volumes of collected essays based on conferences organized around the subject.(2) Consciously or not, much of the recent attention continues to be motivated by Burckhardt's fundamental interest in the origins of modern European painting: what else could account for the seemingly irresistible attraction exerted by such issues as the rise of the Renaissance pala (the unified, windowlike, picture field), or the rise and role of narrative painting on altarpieces?

The last two decades of research have not only enormously increased our knowledge of specific works and commissions, but have in the process also established something like a standard working procedure for the study of altarpieces. It has become natural to expect altarpiece studies to take the work out of the museum, put it back on its original altar, reconstruct its original environment, and investigate the ways in which it was intended to serve the donor or the commissioning body. These studies have provided a much-needed corrective to earlier approaches that tended to consider altarpieces in aesthetic isolation - that is, according to modes of attention developed for the forms of painting familiar to us from picture galleries. Such studies have argued, either implicitly or explicitly, that the modern conception of easel painting - in which, as Burckhardt himself once put it, the frame serves to reinforce the "isolation of the beautiful from the entire rest of space"(3) - should not be projected back into a period when images were integrated into their setting as functional pieces of ecclesiastical furniture. This historicizing sensitivity to premodern forms of visual art has found an ally in postmodernist museum architecture, most conspicuously in the recently opened Sains-bury Wing in the National Gallery in London, where altarpieces are now displayed above altarlike structures: the arrangement interferes with the traditional gallery experience of close looking and "aesthetic" appreciation, setting the visitor at something like the "liturgical" distance of the altarpiece's original viewing conditions.

The historicizing reaction against the museum's aestheticization of the altarpiece has also, however, tended to obscure the fact that the trend to take altarpieces down from their altars and put them into picture galleries itself began in the Renaissance. This development was due primarily and fundamentally to the fact that the paintings themselves had changed, and had begun to elicit new kinds of attention and appreciation. The conversion of altarpieces into gallery pictures was one extreme consequence of a long history of volatile change and generic instability in the altarpiece. The first appearance of images on altars very probably anticipated official ecclesiastical prescription, and the altarpiece was never, even after it had become a conventional part of altar decoration, given a stipulated function by the Church. Its many transformations document a ceaseless effort to interpret its relation to the altar, and to the services performed before it. The altarpiece was thus particularly susceptible to the introduction of the devices and techniques celebrated by Burckhhardt: the exploration of spatial settings and of animated, increasingly thematic, figural relationships continually expanded and complicated the relationship of the image to its physical setting, and to its viewers.

Much of the time the new devices contributed only to the expansion and enhancement of the traditional functions, encouraging the regular replacement of old altarpieces with new and improved models. By 1500, however, some of the latest developments - particularly in the treatment of pictorial narrative - threatened to disrupt the rules and conventions of altarpieces altogether. At the time the threat was keenly enough felt to provoke reactions, sometimes in the form of deliberate archaism, sometimes in a rejection of painting altogether. In pointed contrast to the earlier pattern, the old was now called in to preserve the altarpiece from the new. Hans Belting's work on the history of the religious image in the West has brought these issues clearly into focus, and has drawn attention to the end point of what he has called the "history of the image before the era of art."(4)

The field has thus for some time been building toward a more global treatment of the subject, one that would incorporate the findings and close-knit detail of the specialized studies, while bringing these together in a fuller picture of the development of the altarpiece as an institution. We are still indebted to Hellmut Hager's account of the complex early history of the altarpiece in Italy.(5) Henk van Os's study of the Sienese altarpiece traces one of the strongest traditions of altarpiece production, up to the period when it came under the influence of innovations emanating primarily from Florence.(6) Our understanding of this crucial later phase has now been immeasurably enriched by Humfrey's study of the altarpiece in Renaissance Venice. This volume recuperates the ambitions of Burckhardt's project, but now, one hundred years later, on the basis of a greater wealth of information and a more developed understanding of the resources and approaches available to the study of altarpieces. The text, filled with information and yet eminently readable, is accompanied by an extremely rich corpus of photographs that includes many little-known works, as well as numerous details and views of arrangements in situ. The volume is a monument of scholarship, and will become a standard work in the field.

Although Burckhardt's essay is the primary model, Humfrey's study differs from it in at least one significant respect. Burckhardt addressed the most important issues raised by the history of the altarpiece in Italy; his discussion of specific examples, though wide-ranging, is necessarily selective. The study progresses thematically, but not quite synchronically, as the sequence of issues proceeds more or less in step with the history of the altarpiece. Humfrey's goal is, instead, to provide a comprehensive study for one Italian center. Yet the very decision to organize the study around an artistic institution, rather than by artist or period, proceeds from the intention to write a history motivated by a theme and an argument, rather than one that simply covers a body of material. It is for this reason that the book's chronological limits are tighter than its title might suggest. By restricting his focus to the period from ca. 1450 to ca. 1530, Humfrey keeps the book from becoming a plodding catalogue; he identifies the crucial phase of the history of the altarpiece in Venice in the period between Bartolomeo Vivarini's Certosa polyptych and Titian's Saint Peter Martyr altarpiece, and proposes to give an account of the developments that span the two.

No phase of altarpiece history, indeed, gives a more powerful demonstration of the radical open-endedness that characterizes its development. As Humfrey states in his introduction, the rules governing the altarpiece were largely unwritten, and its history shows a set of conventions submitted to continual structural and iconographic change. Humfrey's avowed purpose is thus to clarify "the relationship between the function of the altarpiece in general, and the form and content adopted in individual instances" (p. 1). His solution is to divide the book into two parts. The first, called "Contexts," is a synchronic, wide-ranging discussion of the conditions of altarpiece production and reception in Venice in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The second part, called "Objects," is a chronological account of the altarpieces produced during this period. This allows Humfrey to present an enormous wealth of information without making the book an impossible labyrinth of byways. Instead, we have a rich layering, in which the same altarpiece might reappear at several points in the book in the light of different issues and questions. It is the aim of the book, and ultimately the task of the reader, to put the two parts together - to come to terms with that history that lies in between the general conditions and the contingencies of individual commissions.

The "Contexts" section is a tribute to the sophistication and scope attained by altarpiece studies in recent decades. The problems considered include the relation of the altarpiece to its architectural setting, the conditions governing the ownership of rights (juspatronatus) over altars and the nature of altar dedications, the modes and institutions of lay piety, the classes of donor, and the various business transactions involved in the commissioning, construction, and delivery of altarpieces. It has become familiar to see one or more of these areas explored in specialized studies, but here for the first time we are offered a comprehensive account of the array of conditions as they operated in a major center of Renaissance art. The section thus reaps the harvest of slow and patient labors in the field - labors in which Humfrey himself has taken no small share. For this reason, although Humfrey's study is limited to Venice, many parts of it - for example, his account of the juspatronatus of altars - stand as the most useful introduction now available to the study of Renaissance altarpieces in general.

Some of Humfrey's "contexts" are based on well-known information: his history of the "physical environment" - essentially the history of Venetian church architecture from S. Marco to Mauro Codussi - does not fundamentally alter the traditional account, but it usefully and lucidly reviews this architectural history as a history of settings for altarpieces. The other chapters are informed by an unprecedented command of the information available from documented altarpiece commissions, and are accompanied by tables that organize the data in relation to the issues raised in the text. A series of tables (pp. 64-65) reviews the subjects of altarpieces commissioned for Venetian churches from 1450 to 1530, and the frequency with which certain saints or subjects were represented in the main fields of altarpieces. In other tables, altarpieces are classified according to the kinds of religious institutions or donors that housed and/or commissioned them. Humfrey's findings confirm some long-held beliefs that have never been submitted to systematic proof: they show, for example, that altarpieces with a saint in the main panel were indeed extremely common in Venice; we also see very clearly just how important the Venetian monasteries and friaries were as hosts for altarpieces, in contrast to the nunneries and parish churches. The tables also yield some surprises: Saint Mark, the patron saint of Venice, was represented at the center of altarpieces only half as often as Saints Jerome and John the Baptist.

Beyond these findings, it was natural to expect dramatic patterns to emerge when the altarpieces were organized according to the kinds of donor or institution for which they were made - an effort that has never been attempted on this scale. To an almost surprising degree these patterns fail to appear, and Humfrey is quick to admit it. Although it is always possible to point to the partial nature of the data, Humfrey's skepticism in the end leads him to a more fundamental conclusion: "on the whole, it would probably be a mistake to search for too direct a correlation between the various analytical categories identified here and the altarpieces" (p. 103). The thoroughness and rigor of the effort makes this a sobering lesson on the limitations of accounting for cultural production as the direct result of external determining conditions.(7) The tables are, nonetheless, an extremely efficient means of making available to the reader a quantity of information that would otherwise have placed an undue burden on the text. Another reader-friendly feature is the catalogue at the end of the volume, which provides essential information on one hundred important altarpieces, with references to tht relevant passages of the book's text.

Humfrey's disinclination to impose patterns and rules on the material makes him remarkably sensitive to the array of possibilities available to the altarpiece during this period. Humfrey steers a refreshing course, for example, through the wearying debate between those given to elaborate theological interpretation and those given to reductive noninterpretation. He very naturally and sensibly interprets. Giovanni Bellini's innovations in the Saint Catherine of Siena altarpiece as a new performative response to the Communicantes prayer of the Mass, in which the earthly liturgy is fused with the celestial liturgy perpetually celebrated in heaven (pp. 188, 76). Other issues are elegantly placed in the oblique light of the exceptional case or the curious document. In an illuminating section entitled "Altarpieces and Non-Altarpieces," for example, Humfrey produces documentary evidence that on the one hand reveals a great flexibility in the period with regard to the kinds of images considered serviceable as altarpieces, and on the other strongly suggests an awareness of the tacit norms governing the genre. Humfrey then compares altarpiece conventions to those governing the other three main forms of religious painting known at the time - large-scale narratives, small-scale devotional images, and votive pictures - and discusses the cross-fertilization that occurred between them. The section ends with a brief but illuminating discussion of a further change in attitude, when the reverence traditionally inspired by the beauty and grandeur of altarpieces was compounded by a mode of appreciation that would later be called "aesthetic" - and that brought with it the world of collectors and their agents.

Diachronic problems like these are appropriately raised in the first, "issues-oriented" part of the book, but its synchronic structure does not always allow them to be fully explored. In the apparently separate context of "business practices," for example, Humfrey notes that although canvas painting had been widely used in Venice for large-scale narrative painting since the 1470s, panels remained standard for altarpieces until at least the 1520s, despite the greater convenience of the canvas support. He reasonably suggests that the lag was due to a "sense of the greater appropriateness of panel to the dignity of the altar table" (p. 146). If so, then the overcoming of this resistance signals an important change, beyond the mere fact that the "practical advantages of canvas" had won the day. Any attempt to pursue the issue would need to build on Humfrey's own discussion of the contamination of the genres, mentioned above, as well as on his many observations on the increasing fluidity of the boundaries between narrative and nonnarrative subjects, and on the conscious attempts made after 1500 to reaffirm them.

This cluster of issues might then extend to further observations that Humfrey makes, again, in apparently unrelated contexts. He shows, for example, that the vast majority of altarpieces in this period were commissioned to serve specific devotional purposes rather than as platforms for church doctrine and theology. He nonetheless accurately notes some exceptions to the rule, especially after 1500: for example, in Titian's Brescia Resurrection polyptych of 1519-22, as well as in the Eucharist altars that appear in increasing numbers after 1500, he observes a "desire to express the more loftily theological doctrine of salvation for all Christians through the Sacraments of the Catholic Church, and in particular that of the Eucharist" (p. 74). In the era before the explicit programs of the Counter-Reformation, these and other theologically heavy-handed efforts were certainly not common, and Humfrey is right to call them exceptions. But in light of the developments described above it seems reasonable to ask whether they are not exceptions with a historical lesson to teach - that is, whether in certain cases they are not evidence of an unsystematic but deliberate effort to counteract a perceived dissolution in the genre by reimposing an "originary" Eucharistic significance and purpose on altar decoration. If so, it is worth pursuing their relation to the instances of deliberate archaism and Byzantine revival that Humfrey accurately observes, again in separate contexts, in several other altarpieces after 1500.

These issues in turn lead directly to the question of sculptured altarpieces, which are studied in an entirely separate section. Humfrey notes the Byzantinizing features within the classical relief style of Tullio Lombardo's Coronation of the Virgin, and connects it to the Byzantine references of Codussi's design for S. Giovanni Crisostomo as a whole. Other cases, such as the Zen chapel in San Marco, strongly suggest that after 1500 the very medium of sculpture was prized specifically for its associations with earlier traditions of religious art, and was adopted - with the help of classical models and of humanist arguments drawn from the paragone debate - in deliberate reaction to the illusionism of modern painting. Humfrey's assertion that "ultimately the preference of one medium over the other would have been a simple matter of taste" (p. 275) does not in the end do justice to the issues raised by many of his own observations. His mastery of the material and unfailing sense for the important issues brings these questions for the first time clearly into the light, but the very format in which he works prevents him from exploring them in a sustained fashion, either in the first or the second part of the book.

The chronological account offered in the book's second part makew very clear how carefully the makers of altarpieces and their patrons adopted and applied the artistic devices available to them. Humfrey's careful itinerary through this history is a clear presentation of what is known about a great number of commissions, and it offers many fresh empirical contributions along the way. Above all, however, Humfrey's account significantly revises Burckhardt's vision of the altarpiece as the constant focus and harbinger of artistic innovation. Right at the outset, Humfrey contrasts Jacopo Bellini's experiments with "modern," pala-like designs in his drawings to the more traditional formats and arrangements of his realized altarpieces. A review of the introduction of pictorial innovations in altarpieces of the 1460s prepares the way for a sensitive analysis of the paradigmatic shift instituted by Giovanni Bellini's lost Saint Catherine of Siena altarpiece of ca. 1470, which introduced a model of altarpiece design that was to predominate in Venice for the next five decades.

One consequence of Humfrey's approach is to allow for a better understanding of the stranger monuments in the tradition, such as Giovanni Bellini's Resurrection of 1476-79 for the Zorzi chapel in the Codussi-designed church of S. Michele in Isola. Giles Robertson had accurately observed, in the context of a stylistic analysis, that the exploration of narrative complexity and of the descriptive effects of oil painting had resulted in a certain dispersion of focus within the picture.(8) Humfrey reexamines these stylistic observations in the light of the larger generic problem of "the emergence of the narrative altarpiece." He points out that the continuous, all-around border of the Resurrection, which very probably served as its original frame, derives from small-scale domestic pictures rather than from the architectonic frames of altarpieces. He also notes that features of the pictorial composition - the emphasis on landscape, the relatively small scale of the figures - are in fact closer to the arrangements of Bellini's various Saint Jeromes and the Frick Saint Francis than they are to the compositions of his other major altarpieces (p. 221). In an earlier discussion, Humfrey had pointed out a more successful application of the lessons of domestic painting in the case of a non-narrative altarpiece: Antonello's S. Cassiano altarpiece, he observes, adapted the luminous surface textures, the optical verisimilitude and the intimacy of private cabinet pictures to the public and monumental context of altar painting. Humfrey also makes the inspired suggestion that through these means Antonello restored to post-gold-ground altar painting the effect of richness and sumptuousness that had been a part of Venetian taste in religious art since the mosaics of S. Marco.

A further investigation of the connection to domestic painting might well have illuminated Humfrey's discussion of later developments in the narrative altarpiece. Here altarpieces often applied strategies developed in the sphere of private devotion, above all the use of sacred narrative as a vehicle for thematizing the relation between the worshiper and the holy figures. These techniques, which F. O. Buttner has widely documented for the late Middle Ages,(9) were promoted in Venice at this time by popular devotional manuals such as the Zardino de Oration. In devotional images, especially in Venice, these strategies played an important role in the development of the "dramatic close-up" - a device which combined the intimacy and direct viewer-address of the icon with the dramatic energy of a narrative scene.(10) One sees versions of these strategies, adapted to the full-length figures and monumental scale of altarpieces, at work in the "open" narrative structures of Cima's Modena Lamentation (ca. 1495-97) for Alberto Pio da Carpi, as well as of Cima's Incredulity of Saint Thomas (ca. 1504-5), Basaiti's Agony in the Garden (1510), and Bellini's Lamentation (ca. 1510), all now in the Accademia. A new approach to the narrative altarpiece, incorporating the lessons of Raphael's Roman history paintings, was introduced by Titian in the late 1510s and 1520s, and it did not always meet with full approval from the commissioning authorities. For the earlier period, an exploration of the uses of sacred narrative in contemporary devotional practices might have helped to clarify and contextualize the terms Humfrey uses when he refers, somewhat vaguely, to "the conflicting demands of drama and symbol" (p. 225), or "the uneasy compromise . . . between action and contemplation" (ibid.) or again "the inherent tension between the demands of icon and narrative" (p. 250).

So far from being "inherent," the tension that Humfrey rightly observes in these altarpieces was the result of changes in the culture, and above all the high degree of sophistication reached by other forms of narrative painting in late 15th-century Venice. Humfrey is surely right in discerning in Carpaccio a temperamental aversion to "the mood of solemnity and dignity appropriate to the altar table" (p. 225), but this limitation attests above all to the rise of alternative forms of pictorial competency in the period. The crisis that came to a head in Carpaccio, and that is epitomized in the Accademia Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand Christians on Mount Ararat, in fact made him an acute critic of altarpiece painting and its history: the view of the interior of S. Antonio di Castello offered in the Vision of Prior Ottobon in the Accademia sets a cult statue and a series of traditional polyptychs in explicit contrast to an altarpiece of his own, which looks instead like a gateway onto a landscape. This review of a tradition of religious art, and of the artist's own somewhat disjoined relation to it, was itself provoked by the rise of a mode of painting devoted to documentary historical description. It is in fact as just such a documentary aid that the Vision of Prior Ottobon most often does duty in art-history books, Humfrey's included (p. 36).(11)

The fate of the altar image in an era of rampant artistic modernization is a persistent theme of this story, and it is for this reason that Giovanni Bellini emerges as the heart and soul of the book. Humfrey's treatment of the Vicenza Baptism, the S. Zaccaria altarpiece, and above all the Diletti Saint Jerome in S. Giovanni Crisostomo, reveals these to be more than intelligent compromises with the advances of modern painting: instead, they emerge as powerful expressions of the conviction that painting, even in its modern form, still found its deepest meaning and purpose in its role above an altar. In the light of this reappraisal, Albrecht Durer's well-known comment of 1506 - that Bellini was "very old, but still the best in painting" - acquires a sharper polemical edge: amidst the highly critical and stridently "modernist" atmosphere which Durer describes elsewhere in his Venetian letters, his defense of Bellini expresses an appreciation of the need to apply the devices of modern painting with discrimination, and to the right ends. This sensibility was evidently shared by others at the time, and found its greatest monument in the church of S. Giovanni Crisostomo, designed by Codussi on a Greek-cross plan and outfitted with Tullio Lombardo's Coronation, Bellini's Saint Jerome, and Sebastiano del Piombo's Saint John Chrysostom. Although it is perhaps beyond the scope of Humfrey's study, it is worth considering how this typically Venetian solution in the realm of religious art contributed to the more general myth of Venice as a model of enduring stability and viable conservatism.(12) The political dimensions of these developments in religious art were perhaps nowhere more clearly appreciated than in the revived Florentine republic of the post-Savonarolan years, for which Fra Bartolommeo served as artistic emissary.

Humfrey's book not only does the estimable job of providing a comprehensive picture of altarpiece production and reception in a major center of Italian Renaissance art, but it also clearly focuses scholarly attention on some of the vital issues raised by the history of this major artistic institution during a crucial phase of its development. A project of this scope, fulfilled with this degree of diligence, brings into light the big issues in a way that the specialized studies on which it draws could not. At the same time, the very burden of producing a work on this scale on occasion prevented Humfrey from fully pursuing all of the questions raised in the course of his study. That will perhaps be the task of specialized studies of a different kind, which will now proceed on the basis of a more complete understanding of the subject, and a much stronger grasp of the issues at stake in it. Like Burckhardt's essay before it, Humfrey's volume establishes a new basis on which further work will be carried out. And it is likely, given the greater concentration of the field, that it will leave an even richer and more sustained legacy.

1. J. Burckhardt, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Italy (1898), ed. and trans. P. Humfrey, Oxford, 1988, 81.

2. The Altarpiece in the Renaissance, ed. P. Humfrey and M. Kemp, Cambridge, 1990; and The Italian Altarpiece, 1250-1550: History, Technique, Style, ed. E. Borsook and F. Gioffredi Superbi, Oxford, 1994.

3. J. Burckhardt, "Format und Bild," in Vortrage, ed. E. Durr, Basel, 1918, 315: "Das Format ist die Abgrenzung des Schonen gegen den ganzen ubrigen Raum."

4. H. Belting, Das Bild und sein Publikum im Mittelalter: Form und Funktion fruher Bildtafeln der Passion, Weinheim/Berlin, 1981; idem, "Vom Altarbild zur autonomen Tafelmalerei," in Kunst: Die Geschichte ihrer Funktionen, ed. W. Busch and P. Schmock, Weinheim/Berlin, 1987, 128ff; and idem, Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst, Munich, 1990.

5. H. Hager, Die Anfange des italienischen Altarbildes: Untersuchung der Enstehungsgeschichte des toskanischen Hochaltarretabels, Munich, 1962.

6. H. van Os, Sienese Altarpieces, 1215-1460: Form, Content, Function, trans. M. Hoyle, 2 vols., Groningen, 1984-90.

7. For a lucid critique of efforts to reduce artistic production to external determinants - made, it should be noted, within a larger critique of formalist accounts of cultural change - see P. Bourdieu, "Principles for a Sociology of Cultural Works," in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. R. Johnson, New York, 1993, 176-91.

8. G. Robertson, Giovanni Bellini, Oxford, 1968, 74.

9. F. O. Buttner, Imitatio Pietatis: Motive der christlichen Ikonographie als Modelie zur Verahnlichung, Berlin, 1983.

10. S. Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting, Abo, 1965. See also H. Belting, Giovanni Bellini, Pieta: Ikone und Bilderzahlung in der venezianischen Malerei, Frankfurt-am-Main, 1985.

11. A notable exception is the discussion in P. Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio, New Haven, 1988, 188-89, in which the narrative structure of the painting is itself the focus of analysis.

12. Any such investigation would profit greatly from the arguments presented in M. Tafuri, Venezia e il rinascimento, Turin, 1985, chaps. 1, 2 (Venice and The Renaissance, trans. J. Levine, Cambridge, Mass., 1989).

ALEXANDER NAGEL Department of the History of Art The University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Mich. 48109-1357

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