M, p.14
M, page 14
Which precipitated the crisis. Painting for Del Monte in the latter fifteen nineties, M’d put his sense of drama on hold while he prolonged the painting of static single figures and still life. Made them more static. Even paintings like the Francis & angel, the Musicians and the Rest on the flight into Egypt were static, built up out of their single components. Now, after he’d played around with his inconclusive and clinical studies of isolated emotion in art, the impulse behind the Cheats and the Fortune teller was felt again, asserting itself even in his still life. A question of market came into this – the only way a painter could win big public commissions and make a major reputation was doing big history paintings of complex action, and M’s ambition was being fed by his growing scope and the recognition he was getting now from the connoisseur vanguard. The heart of it though was M’s own feeling for the drama of the human presence.
How could you paint action directly from life? M painted from life directly on to canvas, like his idol Giorgione. There was no preliminary drawing, no design of the image. On M’s canvases not even modern infrared reflectography would find any trace of drawing under the paint. The very source of the subtlety and immediacy of his art, above all the living presence of his human figures, was the directness of his working method. It ran against everything Italian renaissance painting stood for – and even more its feeble and denatured present day mannerist derivative. Painting a single figure or a still life straight on to the canvas was abnormal but could be done, but you couldn’t do a complex scene of violent action from life. The problem was figures in movement. Giulio Mancini saw the problem clearly, though not the way M handled it. M’s working method, Mancini thought,
is closely observant of real life and always keeps the subject in front of him during the painting. It works very well for a single figure. But composing a history and representing feeling come from the imagination and not from observing something real in front of your eyes. It doesn’t seem to me that in that case the method works. You can’t put the whole crowd of people enacting a history into a room lit from a single window. You can’t have someone laughing or crying or walking and get them to freeze while you copy them. So figures done like this are strong but they lack movement and feeling and grace …
Handling complexity was the function of drawing. Sketching out the preliminaries of a painting, grouping the elements and relating volumes in a meaningful space, weighing light and shade. Doing this you foresaw the problems, knitted the parts into a coherent visual structure, caught the vivid details of life and movement you’d then work into that whole. Drawing was one thing on whose importance those polar opposites and rivals of renaissance art, the abstracting idealist Michelangelo Buonarotti and the empirical realist Leonardo da Vinci, had agreed. Drawing was the intellectual basis of painting, the idea of what would be done in paint. The painting, Vasari had written confidently in 1550, is born from the drawing. A generation later Armenini, looking back to values that were being lost, wrote in 1586 that the preliminary drawing
is the work itself, except for the colouring, which is why you can see it was always done so thoroughly and carefully by Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael …
Colour, in this tradition, came after drawing, and was the lesser part of painting. And when painting was done on walls and ceilings, in fresco on to damp plaster, as most was, the preliminary drawing was essential. It was done on big sheets of paper that were placed on the wall and traced over with a metal stylus to make light incisions in the damp fresh plaster on the wall before painting started. Faint signs of these grooves might remain in the surface of the finished work. Or a lot of holes might be made along the lines of the drawing, and these holes traced over with charcoal. Oil painting on wood panels or canvas was also done from a carbon tracing of the drawing that was transferred to the painting surface by backing the drawing paper with charcoal and running over it with a stylus. Sometimes painters traced incisions when they painted on wood, and even – very rarely – on to primed canvas, adapting the fresco technique to define perspective. Only incisions left faint traces in the finished work. Drawings transferred to wood or canvas disappeared forever under the oil paint.
Painting on canvas was still a fairly recent thing in sixteenth century Italy. Vasari remarked that it had started in Venice, in whose damp sea air wood soon became rotten or wormeaten. Canvas had taken on fast as a more resistant art material that was easily cut to any size, weighed little and was easy to transport. On properly prepared canvas oil paintings were flexible and could even be rolled up. The use of canvas for painting was soon so common that at some point in the sixteenth century people had started speaking about a canvas – una tela – to mean the painting done on it. And apart from the mythological oddity of his painting on Del Monte’s distillery ceiling and a couple of paintings on wood, M would always paint in oil on canvas. Baglione remembered that he didn’t work in any other way. Notwithstanding his early training with Peterzano, M would never, ever work in fresco.
Giuseppe Cesari did a lot of work in fresco – when M worked in his studio in 1593 he’d just finished painting in fresco the vault of the Contarelli chapel in San Luigi dei Francesi – but he was probably making more money with his workshop team turning out small quickie canvases on an industrial scale than he was from his prestige commissions for church and nobility. He seemed to prefer working for people of lower social standing, said Baglione, remembering Cesari’s insultingly offhand manner with the pope and his aristocratic clients. The requirements of scale and speed in his art operations pushed Cesari and his workers to develop new techniques. When they did frescos, along with the incisions they made in copying drawings they also cut lines directly into the damp plaster to guide their painting. A like process – outlines marked in the prepared canvas with the other end of the paintbrush or something similar – was sometimes carried over into the small mass production canvases. M might’ve learnt the trick at the time he was turning out fruit and flowers for Cesari. The Cesari factory’s industrial methods apart, nobody else began a painting like this. It was a technique M now developed as his own rapid way of fixing the critical contours of an image. It was nothing like drawing – he was neither shaping the image nor expressing value, simply fixing a few purely optical relations by scoring lines in the wet priming with the pointy end of his paintbrush. It became a working method unique to M – it let him extend his range to large and complex paintings without betraying that truth to life his art uniquely stood for.
He’d made incisions in some of his earliest paintings – the first Fortune teller, the Cheats, the Musicians, the Mario Bacchus and the second Lute player. He’d made them on the skirt of Anna Bianchini as the Penitent Magdalen, and around the face of Fillide as Catherine, along the folds in her skirt and the edge of the vicious spike on the wheel. They weren’t lines made by tracing a drawing, but freehand marks that caught the outline of a head, aligned the angle of the eyes and fixed the contour of a shoulder or the position of a hand. Sometimes they might have served a mechanical purpose, as on the Anna Magdalen, where they marked out the pattern of her brocade, the Bacchus, where they aligned the tabletop and defined the blue band on his pillow, or on the second Lute player, where they marked the details of his instruments and where the outline of his head, hands and shoulders coincided so exactly that M must have used a tracing of the painting he’d done for Vincenzo Giustiniani when he started his second version for Del Monte. An odd foreshortening in the lower part of Anna’s seated figure in the Magdalen and Mario’s left handedness in the Bacchus suggested M was starting to use mirrors to fix his image on a plane surface – painting the reflection rather than the model – and using mirrors and making incisions might’ve developed together.
The value of the incisions M made in his paintings showed up when he did Judith sawing through the neck of Holofernes – his first real foray into doing history and action painting, doing it his way without preliminary drawing. Leonardo had written a lot on the problems of history pictures in his Book of painting, and his own cartoon of The battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo’s rival study for The battle of Cascina were two lost classics of renaissance drawing, the turning point of the renaissance. You drew from life, Leonardo said, and worked it up later.
When you go around, look and consider where men gather and how they act when they speak, and when they argue or laugh or fight together. Notice the things they do among themselves, and the spectators and bystanders, and sketch them briefly … in a little notebook that you ought to have with you all the time … and don’t ever rub anything out but keep it all and replace your old notebook with a new one when necessary. These aren’t things to rub out but to keep carefully, because the forms and actions of things are infinite and the mind can’t remember them all …
You had to forget detail, be unlike painters who wanted every smallest mark of the charcoal to count, and
think about the movements that are appropriate to the mental events in the creatures that make up the story, before you attend to the beauty and quality of their parts.
Painting from life, M had to set up a tableau of the event and compose in real life, with models, what Leonardo had urged – not a mere sum of individual figure studies but a movement that related the figures, locked them together – and paint that directly. Nude cavalry battles were out of the question, massacres of the innocents and anything requiring heavenly hosts, but events of three or four figures could be managed in a studio, and later on even a ring in angel or two, a borrowed horse or a rented sheep when needed. It took longer than a single study and was harder on the models, holding their frozen action. Particularly hard on Fillide in this case, arms forever tensed in mid decapitation, but also on the male in spasm. After blocking out his composition in real figures, like a photographer lining up a shot, M couldn’t simply activate a shutter. He had to paint, and his actors freeze, for longer than any single sitting could last. A few key incisions lightly cut into the wet priming at the start, enough for the needs of M’s own visual memory, and just deep enough to show him the contours through the brush strokes of a preliminary abbozzo and the earlier stages of the actual painting, would let M recompose the group precisely after his models’ lunch break, or when they showed up again for work the next morning – working over time with no fixed image like a drawing to guide him, M needed the marks. The work of painting might bring changes of mind – pentimenti and repainting of details, but slight repositionings of the models too – such that the faint incised grooves, where they were visible in the finished painting, didn’t always match the figures’ definitive outlines. Judith, in this case, lowered her arm in the final version. He linked the central elements of the image on the canvas by marking out Judith’s left shoulder and arm, the one grasping Holofernes’ head, and outlining the twisted head itself – without the beard – and indicating his radically foreshortened chest. On the right he outlined the old woman’s skull – without her scarf – and her throat. These were the deepest cuts and the structurally crucial ones. Other markers were likely filled in by the paint.
Realism like that could be a trap. There was always a tiny gap between the physical reality of the model and the imaginative reality of the event being shown. Fillide Melandroni would always be M’s friend Fillide the courtesan, filling in time between professional engagements, maybe her empty afternoons, and for all her wild moments never quite a Jewish freedom fighter out of the old testament. The murdered tyrant was maybe someone M knew from the ball games or the tavern, maybe a professional model, maybe someone found on the street in the way Bellori described for the fortune teller. He didn’t lose his head over M’s work, and at some point M became aware of a difference between what he saw, what he was painting in his studio in the palazzo Madama, and what he would’ve been seeing in, as it were, real life. He’d already sketched in the model’s convulsed male body and the hideous semi dead face, a horror far more shocking than the earlier essay on the Medusa shield, when M realized that a really half severed head, under tension from Judith’s hand grasping it by the hair, would be pulling away from the body as she hacked through the spinal column, would be looking out from the picture plane at a crazier angle than a live model with a fully attached head could accommodate. So he relocated the nose and the left eye, raising them and moving them slightly to the right and adjusting the silently screaming mouth to show the head was coming away from the body.
The fine scorings M left in almost all his work – until he was driven to work from memory at the end – went unremarked by his contemporaries and weren’t even noticed for several hundred years. They were the tangible sign of his uniqueness. M never drew. It was why, even when he was offered a fortune to do it, he never painted in fresco. M painted from life.
Not drawing was polemical as well as practical. The year after M arrived in Rome the artists’ academy of San Luca was started – or restarted – with the ostensible purpose of giving artists a higher education and the real one of asserting the church’s control over art. Federico Zuccari was a notably over the hill late mannerist who had a religious theory of drawing as a sign of God in ourselves … and as president he cloudily expounded on the metaphysics of drawing at the academy’s first meeting in January 1594 and appalled the working artists. Young unknowns like M had to submit a drawing if they wanted to join and when Zuccari called the young painters up to him to show him the drawings they’d done M didn’t respond, if he was even there. He didn’t join for years – if he ever did.
* * *
M WAS DOING a lot of private paintings that can be seen in private studies, paintings that never became well known because they remained concealed in the homes of the wealthy avant garde collectors,
various paintings for other people … they aren’t accessible in public places.
He did a painting of Narcissus that was almost his last painting not to have one of the religious themes the market would increasingly impose, apart from a few portraits, and it was already moving beyond the dreamy suspended eroticism of his Del Monte adolescents. Already it was only partly of that early world. M was leaving that refined milieu behind him, creatively if not yet domestically, by the time he painted Narcissus around the end of the century, and Narcissus had a lot more in common with all the adolescent Johns in the wild that were still to come. The painting contained its drama as an inner tension – between a boy and his reflection. The Narcissus myth, of the boy who fell in love with his own image reflected on the water, was the last subject to imagine eyeballing the viewer in the manner of the earlier models. Even so the austere intensity of introspection here was startling.
It was an unusual subject in art. Del Monte had in his garden a copy of the classical bronze of the nude boy pulling a thorn from his foot and M seemed in part to be using it as a model here. Giambattista Marino, a wild and calculating poet on the make who arrived in Rome from Naples in the autumn of 1600, had written about Narcissus four years earlier in his interminable erotic epic Adonis – although the poem wouldn’t be published until 1622 – and by 1601 M was starting to see a lot of Marino. He later painted Marino’s portrait and got a few short poems in return. Marino was mannerist and mannered – he particularly liked things like the Medusa and had nothing to offer M – and his Narcissus was the ungrateful youth who rejected the nymph Echo and then felt a new torment of strange love. M’s Narcissus was no object of desire, even to himself. Instead of love or desire or rejection, or even any of that anxiety that his own early Sick self portrait might’ve seemed to foreshadow, M showed a bleakly adolescent scrutiny of a self closed in the circle made by the arc of the kneeling boy locked to his own dark reflection in the pond. Narcissus was action and contemplation, history as well as a portrait. The boy’s kneeling was an act and not a pose. His tensed figure, resting on his hands and largely lost in the dark behind the folds of his pushed up shimmering silk sleeves, was pivoted around the pale skin over bone of his boulder like bare knee, jutting out of the dark into the centre of the canvas. The knee took on a luminous life of its own. The boy leant toward the water over this folded knee, framed and isolated by the darkness around him, eye sockets full of shadow, searching out his own image in the black water. Suspended between the search and the gaze, the boy was the adolescent enigma. There was no way M was going to even hint at what he found.
And he did another single figure history around the same time – still 1599 or 1600 – a David with Goliath’s head, another full length study of a kneeling boy, this time more in thoughtful action than active thought. Even more like Del Monte’s bronze Thorn puller than Narcissus had been, the very young and almost childlike David, swaddled in a kind of sheet, leant into the picture out of its dark depth like Narcissus and bent over to fill the canvas like a teenage quadruped, his right knee and right shoulder catching light and looming out of the picture plane. This David was neither enacting the killing nor displaying the trophy head, but tenderly caught, his face in deep shadow, in a quiet and oddly intimate moment of concentration on simply getting a purchase on Goliath’s hair with the cord of his sling shot, the better to carry the head. The dead head itself in the bottom corner was already a mere object and its severing hardly seemed to have mattered – it wasn’t now the issue, as it had been in Judith. M did the giant’s corpse perfunctorily, almost crudely, without interest. It’d become just another landscape feature for the boy to rest his knee on as he bent to the task. At first M had done Goliath’s head fixed in the wild eyed open mouthed horror of the moment of death, baring the front teeth and rolling the tongue, eyeballs swivelled to the very edge of the sockets. Then he’d painted out the violence, lowering the eyes and half closing the mouth in the fixity of death. The pentimento might’ve been dictated by a client’s revulsion, more likely by his own sense that it presented a glaring distraction from the tender intimacy of the David, whose own features were daringly muted by the shadow. M knew about diminishing returns. Horror wasn’t something you evoked at will.
