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0:13
Hello. I'm Steven Nelson, Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the 24th Annual Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art. This lecture series is one of the Center's most prominent, and has been a highlight of the fall for many since it began in 1997. The series is named in memory of the great specialist of Italian art, Sydney J. Freedberg with a gift from his wife, Catherine, who remains involved with the gallery today.
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Professor Freedberg earned his PhD from Harvard University in 1940, where he taught for 29 years until he was appointed chief curator of the National Gallery of Art in 1983. His legacy lives on at the Gallery through this series each year. I am delighted to introduce this year's Freedberg lecturer Megan Holmes. A professor of Italian art history at the University of Michigan, her scholarly interests include the social history of art, miraculous images, and image cults, popular religion,
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and early modern print culture, and reconceptualizing late medieval and early modern iconoclasm. In addition to myriad articles and scholarly presentations, Professor Holmes has published two books-- Fra Filippo Lippi the Carmelite Painter in 1999, and The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence in 2013. A reviewer of the latter book insisted that Professor Holmes's tracing of the complex histories of image cults in Florence between the 13th and 16th centuries forces us
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to reconsider the relationship between art and devotion, and encourages us to think carefully about what we mean by Renaissance. This groundbreaking book received both the College Art Association Charles Rufus Morey Award and the ACE/Mercer Award in 2014. Professor Holmes has earned prestigious fellowships from Harvard University, the Getty Research Institute, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Moreover, she was in residence at The Gallery in 2017-2018 as the center's Paul Mellon
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senior fellow. Today's lecture, entitled Telling the Past Differently: Italian Renaissance Art in the Hands of the Beholder, emanates from Professor Holmes's current research for a book on the scratching and marking of Italian panel paintings. Along with her previous scholarship, it is clear that Professor Holmes's aim is for a more inclusive view of the Italian Renaissance, one that embraces a broad spectrum of visual materials, as well as a wide range of viewers, including the non-elite.
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I, for one, am very excited to see what this Renaissance will look like. Without further ado, here is Professor Megan Holmes. Let me begin by saying what a great pleasure and honor it is to deliver the Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art this year. I'd like to thank the National Gallery of Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and Catherine Freedberg. This lecture will be about historical, cultural objects situated in specific places and spaces. So I want to reflect
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for a moment on the histories of place through a land acknowledgment. I speak to you from Ann Arbor, Michigan, on the occupied lands of the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations. Please take a moment to acknowledge and honor the lands of all Indigenous peoples.
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I began my PhD studies the fall after Sydney Freeberg retired from teaching and became chief curator at the National Gallery of Art. Freedberg's particular method of connoisseurship, however, was legendary: the close, comparative looking at paintings and the assessment of pictorial effects and painterly style that he brought to his pedagogy and scholarship. A number of the graduate students in my program had taken his final seminar tackling the challenges and distinguishing
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between the artistic hands of Giorgione and the young Titian. While I was a product of the post-Freedbergian era with an interest in the social history of Italian Renaissance art, close, comparative looking akin to that espoused by Freedberg is a key component of my scholarship. And such close looking is at the heart of my lecture today, where it will be utilized to tell a notably different art history for the Italian Renaissance, one in which celebrated artists like Giorgione and Titian,
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and their signature styles, play only a peripheral role. The National Gallery of Art, too, figures in this story as an invaluable resource for telling the past differently. The Gallery has served as a visual archive, as a repository of meticulous curatorial and conservation records, and as the institutional home of specialists who have generously shared their expertise. At the same time, this novel historical perspective on the museum's Italian Renaissance collection
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of paintings will effect a kind of reevaluation of these works of art, unsettling the ease according to which they assert their prestige within a Western European artistic canon. I will gesture toward the complex earlier lives of paintings that are now static on the gallery walls decontextualized from historical and social embeddedness. This panel painting representing the Madonna and Child hangs in one of the National Gallery rooms dedicated to early Italian Renaissance painting.
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A date is picked out in gold leaf at the bottom right of the panel, represented as if positioned along the front face of an illusionistic raised platform. This date tells us that the painting was completed in 1413. Authorship to the Florentine monastic painter Lorenzo Monaco has been fairly securely established through the kind of connoisseurship alluded to earlier, with one curious disagreement among specialists, to which I will return later. We know nothing else definitively about the origins
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of the panel, the patron who commissioned it, or the initial display site or context. The painting is sizable, a little under 4 feet in height, suggesting that it once stood above an altar in a church, possibly as part of a larger ensemble accompanied by attendant saints. The Madonna and Child in the context of the National Gallery collection asserts its value in manifold ways. It was part of one of the foundational donations to the gallery given by Samuel H. Kress, the department store
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magnate and avid art collector. A significant percentage of these early bequests were works of Italian Renaissance art. The Madonna and Child was sold in 1939 to Kress by the dealer Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, after being authenticated as a work by Lorenzo Monaco by two notable connoisseurs of Italian Renaissance painting. By 1939, Kress was purchasing work specifically for the National Gallery, which would open two years later in 1941. These works were purchased in consultation
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with the director and chief curator of the museum in order to shape the collection so that it appropriately represented major artists from the different regional Italian schools. The Madonna and Child was donated two days before the official opening of the gallery, initially on an indefinite loan, and then formally gifted two years later. The painting was described in the press release in the following manner-- "The Florentine School as represented in the gallery will be more
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complete with the addition of the Kress-loaned paintings. Lorenzo Monaco, who exerted a considerable influence on Fra Angelico and Masolino, will now be represented in the National Gallery by a fine example of a Madonna and Child." The painting was thus filling a hole in a critical stylistic lineage within the Florentine school. Additional value stems from the golden date, 1413. As a dated work confidently attributed to Lorenzo Monaco, the Madonna and Child is a rare fixed point
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in the assemblage of gold-brown paintings and scant archival documents associated with the artist. These fixed points allow connoisseurs to establish Lorenzo Monaco's fuller artistic output and changing pictorial style. The painting's distinctive typology, the Madonna of Humility where the Virgin Mary is positioned humbly, seated upon the ground rather than enthroned as the Queen of Heaven, was a significant iconography in Renaissance devotional culture. Lorenzo Monaco's demure Virgin
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with her head gracefully inclined to the side meets the beholder's eye as a compelling, accessible, and merciful sacred intercessor. It was on account of this Christian religious content that, in 2004, the painting briefly burst out of its confinement within the gallery exhibition space and, within the specialized circles of enthusiasts of early Florentine Renaissance painting, it made its way onto a Christmas stamp in a long-standing collaboration between the U.S. Post Office and the Gallery.
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I want, now, to approach Lorenzo Monaco's Madonna and Child anew in an exercise in close looking, the goal here is to introduce a very different way of conceptualizing and valuing the painting, and by extension, Italian Renaissance art. We'll stage a virtual visit to the second floor gallery, just off the Rotunda, and view the panel from very close up, as seen here, paying particular attention to the faces and bodies of the sacred figures. Then, we'll step back, move to the side, and kneel down
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to catch reflective, raking light hitting the surface. In viewing the painting in this manner, it becomes apparent that the Madonna and Child have been significantly defaced by someone at some point in time, and then subsequently repainted during a restoration campaign. We get a better overall sense of the extent of the defacement from a photograph from the museum's curatorial file, where the scratch marks have been rendered schematically in red pen to indicate areas of damage and paint loss.
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And here, the scratch marks are more apparent in this infrared reflectogram, which reduces the opacity of the pigment layers. A condition report, which forms the basis for the Gallery's catalog entry, notes that the painting has "suffered deliberate vandalism. Deep, vertical gouges were made in the figure of Christ and in Mary's face." The word here used to describe the damage, "vandalism," is a loaded term that first came into use in the aftermath of the French Revolution, implying
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the barbarous destruction of valued high culture by people from the lower social classes. In modern usage, the term also has illegal application, referring to intentional damage to property. This "vandalism" may have been enough to devalue the painting in the eyes of the preeminent scholar of Lorenzo Monaco, Marvin Eisenberg. Eisenberg vacillated across his career in assessing the quality of the painting, initially considering it to be by the hand of Lorenzo Monaco himself, then dismissing it
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as scarcely worthy of the painter, and finally allocating it to a distinctive assistant, a deadly devaluation in connoiseurial assessment, which, like follower of, school of, or workshop, can significantly alter the perceived cultural value and market value of a Renaissance work of art. There was speculation, however, that the damage and repair may have tricked Eisenberg's expert eye so that, according to another scholar, he was deceived by the skillful in-painting that
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has altered the painting's original effect in the Virgin's face and the head of Christ. Lorenzo Monaco's Madonna and Child is not the only painting exhibiting such deliberately made scratch marks in the National Gallery's collection. This painting, representing a secular subject from classical antiquity, and likely once to have adorned the bedchamber of a Florentine townhouse, has cuts across many of the figures. They're difficult to discern in the gallery, however, on account
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of the fine camouflage work of the painting conservator, so I've enhanced a few of them in yellow. Here, two of the sleeping soldiers in this Resurrection scene have scratches on their bodies, a feature found in numerous panel paintings of the subject. This kind of intentional scratching is, in fact, abundantly present in the larger corpus of surviving Italian Renaissance panel painting. There is a fascinating range in the kinds of subjects and motifs that are singled out for marking
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across a wide variety of pictorial genres and formats. The most commonly scratched subjects are devils and the antagonists in sacred narratives. And here, I'm showing you a detail from a painting in the Cleveland Museum of Art representing the Temptation of Eve, where you can see deep cuts dismembering Eve's transgressive hand and slicing across the serpent's coils and face. Scratching is also found on the figural imagery on domestic furnishings, on portraits, coats of arms,
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sensual seductive bodies, politically charged subjects, animals representations of classical antique idols, monks and members of the clergy, foreigners and non-Christian others, beggars and disabled people, and, as we have seen, on sacred figures. There is an intriguing range in the modes of scratching and in the implied tools that must have been used to make the marks. There are gouges, scrapes, incisions, and blows, some applied with evident force, and others with a lighter hand,
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with more control and precision. While most of these scratch marks cannot be dated, there is supportive textual and documentary evidence verifying that this practice did indeed occur in Renaissance Italy. Panel paintings offer historians of art an unprecedented body of evidence with which to study the historical practice of intentionally disfiguring and modifying images displayed in public and private spaces. Comparable practices can be identified in other historical cultures
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across time and geography. And here, I'm showing you on the left an example of what is known as damnatio memoriae, or the condemnation of memory, in ancient Rome where the head in a marble relief of the deposed Roman emperor Domitian was re-carved in the guise of his successor. On the right, you see an example of what is known as iconoclasm, or image breaking, in Byzantium, where the figures in an 8th-century floor mosaic in a church in Jordan were modified by scrambling the mosaic tiles.
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Panel painting, because of its material properties, allows one to track the practice of marking and modifying works of art to a significantly greater extent than other media. The wood support, plaster ground, pigments, and gold leaf have the capacity to absorb and register the marks of sharp implements so that these marks remain somewhat legible, even after restoration. There is a relatively high survival rate per panel painting, too, with many works remaining in situ, in churches,
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or in collections in Italy until modern times, when, as we have seen, they became desirable commodities in the Euro-American art market. The corpus of surviving panel paintings also offers a tidy 300-year chronological scope, beginning when panel painting first came into wider use in Italy around 1250 and terminating around 1550, when canvas replaced panel as the customary support for paintings. These scratched panel paintings, far from being "damaged goods," or devalued victims
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of "vandalism," constitute a rich archive revealing important dimensions of the reception history of late medieval and early modern Italian visual art that involved complex cultural understandings about the activation, efficacy, and mediation of visual images. This reception history also embraces a broad spectrum of viewers, including non-elite members of society who are rarely considered in histories of art written about the Renaissance period. These scratch marks are somewhat
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analogous to what archeologists call use wear in material culture. They can also be interpreted in constructive rather than primarily destructive terms, as meaning-making representation. In this detail on the left from a scene of the Betrayal of Christ, there is a semantic cleverness and dramatic inflection in the way that the scratcher's shallow cut is aligned with the knife blade and visually enacts the severing of the ear of Malchus by Saint Peter. I will concentrate now primarily
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on one category of marked panel paintings, altarpieces that were displayed in church settings. The goal will be to offer a broad historical context for the scratching of the National Gallery Madonna and Child by Lorenzo Monaco. I will present corroborative evidence from the broader historical record, and indications of changing practices over time. We will also look for culturally specific language and understandings about these scratching acts within the Renaissance
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to find appropriate substitutes for the value-laden and anachronistic terms vandalism and iconoclasm, which are most frequently used to describe intentional damage to works of art. The scratching of altarpiece imagery by Renaissance beholders is related to the longer-term practice of graffiti markings in churches. In this regard, churches were multi-purpose buildings with fluid spaces, where people who congregated in them scratched available surfaces for a variety of purposes.
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I'm showing you here period graffiti from the crypt of the Siena Cathedral, which can very usefully be dated to around 1280 to 1360. You can see here what are known as Guidonian hands, which were used as mnemonic devices to learn musical cords and intervals at the time, suggesting that choir practice may have taken place within this space within the church. In this example from the city's chapel in the Cathedral of Parma, a death on April 8 in the year 1475 is recorded on the wall. Some
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of these surface-marking graffiti practices migrated to panel paintings when altarpieces and devotional panels first began to appear in churches in greater number in the late 13th century. And here, you can see where a fragmentary date is visible on this narrative scene from an altarpiece reading, "On the 15th day of..." with the month and the year missing. And here is an assemblage of details from altarpiece panels that show a range of conventional graffiti markings.
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Along the top, a family coat of arms, and repetitive "X" marks and diagonal lines added to a band of floor tile ornament. Along the bottom numbers, an asterisk, and a sequence of loops on the highly scratchable gold ground. Here are two examples from the National Gallery collection of this kind of graffiti marking on altarpieces. On the left, Agnelo Gaddi's Coronation of the Virgin, where there are interlocking letters, or a play of curved and straight lines, inscribed on Christ's drapery.
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On the right, in a slightly earlier version of the same subject, there are many graffiti notations including shown at the top, a partial circle drawn with a compass, in the middle, an asterisk, and below, a string of beaded loops scratched into the gold ground. On the whole, however, panel paintings on account of their frequent placement upon altars and their figural and narrative content manifest markings that are typically more directly responsive to the subject matter depicted.
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Some of these additions were affirmative devotional gestures, like the cross incised on the bodies of the sacred figures in this scene on the left depicting the presentation of the Christ child in the temple. On the right, one can see what may be evidence of repeated devotional touch, perhaps accompanied by a verbal prayer, that wore away the paint on the stigmata wound on the chest of Saint Francis, necessitating later restoration. A kind of evocative naming act can be seen here
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in the vernacular phrase scratched along the lower edge of the small narrative panel, identifying the story-- "Saint Anthony beaten by devils." And here on the left, the word "demon" has been inscribed across the chest of the devil, and the eyes have been pierced and his body slashed. In the same altarpiece by the Sienese painter Giovanni de Paolo, some sort of accounting system has been applied to the souls in purgatory, with crosses incised on their heads, and the tally marks 3, 2,
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1 on their bodies. The narrative scene in this panel from the base of an altarpiece are quite delightfully enhanced with ornament. A rampaging horse representing the devil is reined in with a scratch bridle. Hats are adorned with feathers, and clothing with stripes. There are also instances where the pictorial medium has been selectively removed. The expensive blue pigment ground from lapis lazuli scraped off the Virgin's robe on the left, and the paint layer of the half length figure
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of Saint Bernardino on the right, leaving behind a ghostly silhouette in the plaster and gold leaf. It is possible that charismatic properties were ascribed to these materials of sacred depiction whereby they were removed for curative or protective use, or perhaps to reuse the costly ultramarine pigment. The most frequently scratched part of the altarpiece is what is known as the predella, or horizontal strip that runs along the base just above the altar. The predella is often composed
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of narrative scenes from the lives of saints and the Passion of Christ. The predella was the most accessible part of an altarpiece, particularly the outer sections reachable from either side of the altar. But scratching can also be found across the full predella, implying that the scratcher would have had to lean across the altar to mark the imagery with a sharp implement, perhaps a knife or a nail. The physical exertion and the time in care required to mark the diminutive figures,
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sometimes quite precisely, suggests that we are dealing here not with a secretive act done when the attendant clergy were absent or otherwise engaged, but with a more open, licit act done when the altar was not in use. Such scratching is found on altarpieces that once stood above the high altars and the cathedrals of Siena and Florence. And on the cover of the altarpiece for the high altar of San Marco in Venice. And here you can see in this reconstruction of Duccio's Maestà that once
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stood on the high altar of the cathedral in Siena, how the devil has been scratched in the scene of the Temptation of Christ. To emphasize my point about scratching acts not being secretive or done on the sly when the resident clergy was absent or inattentive, I'll use this example from a wall fresco from Giotto's Arena Chapel in Padua in a photograph taken before the most recent restoration. The busy demons in the hellscape in the Last Judgment have been extensively disfigured
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with their gruesome tortures turned back upon their own hairy pelts. To reach this portion of the fresco located about 10 feet up on the right side of the inner facade wall, a ladder would have been necessary. I imagine, particularly in the case of demons, that the clergy themselves may even have been involved in some of the scratching interventions. This predella scene represents the torture of Saint Reparata, one of the patron saints of the city of Florence. It is thought to have once been
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part of the altarpiece for the high altar of the cathedral in Florence painted by Bernardo Daddi, a follower of Giotto. The faces of the antagonists have been systematically defaced. In the detail on the right, Roman emperor Decius, who had authorized the torture, has been repeatedly, relentlessly cut, communicating injurious bodily harm but also dehumanizing the emperor, and visually unmaking the painted figuration. There are considerably more precise and economic incisions,
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however, that have been made to the legs of three of the torturers, seen here in these details. These marks are particularly telling as they enact on the representational bodies a type of physical punishment that was carried out in the criminal justice system-- the dismemberment of the hands and feet of convicted criminals. We can imagine the scratcher engaging with the dramatic story of the saint's physical torture with cathartic and empowering gestures, quite literally taking
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justice into her or his own hands. Sharp implements used to scratch were analogous to the "sword of Justice." This corporeal punishment performed on painted figures in the Renaissance here and now of the altar space had a ready analog in what was understood to be the ongoing suffering in Hell of the damned emperor and his complicit henchmen. There are two key period texts that describe this kind of disfiguration in sacred narrative. The humanist, Pier Paolo Vergerio,
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in a widely circulating letter of 1397, which eventually appeared in print in the mid-16th century, wrote of, "those, who, when they see in churches images of Jews and Gentiles either flagellating or crucifying Christ, they gouge out their eyes so that they seem angrier, and they disfigure the cruel faces of the guards, out of great belief and piety, as if, indeed, merit in life would be achieved by means of the destruction of the images and not more through the remission of sins
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and acquiring virtues. It seems we believe that the images of pharaoh, Pilate, and Herod, as well as evil demons, with all the terror painters could give them, should be expelled from temples and erased from walls." It is quite striking that Vergerio refers to these scratching acts as motivated by "great belief and piety," even if he expresses some skepticism over the true religious merit of this particular form of piety. Giorgio Vasari, too, in his Lives of the Artists,
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written in the mid-16th century, has a very similar account that may even be derived from Vergerio's letter that I just quoted. Vasari mentions how a fresco by the painter Andrea del Castagno of the Flagellation of Christ in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence had not been properly cared for and was quote, "scratched and broken by children and other simple-minded people who scratched their heads and arms and most of the bodies of the Jews, as if, in this way they would take revenge
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against them for the injury done to Our Lord." Here, Vasari considers such a hands-on response to the Passion narrative as a kind of naive, overly literal form of revenge by unsophisticated people who fail to recognize Castagno's fresco as a marvelous, masterful artifice. I want to turn now to the intentional marking of sacred figures. I will make a case that this form of panel scratching in churches, too, can be considered as a kind of devotional engagement, although of a rather more
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problematic variety. The sheer number of such images that I have come across in my research, and the variant modes in which they are scratched, suggests that this was not an exceptional practice. I found a little over 30 examples that I feel fairly confident about, and another 30 where the evident damage may or may not have been done intentionally. This kind of disfigurement of sacred images in the Renaissance was considered a form of blasphemy within criminal and canon law.
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Blasphemy had previously covered words and gestures that were considered disrespectful to God and the saints. The legal definition changed, however, beginning around the mid-15th century to include images. The communal statutes of Pordenone, near Venice, read, "If a person has, in disdain, destroyed marked broken or disparaged in any other way, painted or sculptured figures of omnipotent God himself and the glorious Virgin Mother Mary, or any other male or female saints, this person
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will be condemned to pay a fine." The language for damaging or attacking sacred images varies in these statutes, and gives us a nice range of in physical acts and descriptive terminology. The city statutes of Norcia in central Italy, for example, prohibited, quote, "the gouging out of a sacred figure and the striking of the figure with arms or similar implements so as to cause injury. " In Siena, it was forbidden to strike, spit at, or throw filth at sacred images, with
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the penalty involving images of Christ, the Virgin, and the Cross, the amputation of the right hand and perpetual exile, as opposed to a monetary fine when just saints were involved. Penalties tended to be more severe in major cities and capital punishment was on occasion authorized by local judicial authorities. While actual prosecution appears to have been infrequent, attacks on sacred images have high visibility in society in the case of venerated miracle-working images.
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There was a rise beginning in the second half of the 15th century in images, typically of the Madonna and Child, that were said to have been viciously attacked and injured. The Madonna in this fresco from Lodi, for example, was said to have been stabbed with a dagger by an angry nobleman in 1448, when he lost at dice. While we do not know the original enshrinement arrangement following the surge in veneration at the site, it probably included this wooden sculpture of the dagger-wielding nobleman
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represented in attack mode, which appears to date from the second half of the 15th century. Here, you see a graph which shows the foundation dates of miraculous image cults featuring attacks on sacred images based on well-known examples. And you can see the increase in these cults during the second half of the 15th century. These sacred images were typically accessible frescoes located on the exterior of churches or on streetside tabernacles. The acts of blasphemy were linked to socially
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marginalized figures like soldiers, gamblers, and Jews. In the stories told about these images, the perpetrators were typically apprehended in some form of official or unofficial justice enacted, usually resulting in the death of the offender, as seen in the illustrated story of the miracle-working Madonna dei Ricci in Florence. Here, Antonio Rinaldeschi, after losing at dice and egged on by a demon shown hovering above his head, quote, "threw horse dung, in the face
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of the beatified Virgin while swearing." He was arrested and convicted, and then hanged after repenting, with the possibility of redemption coming only in death, with angels seeming to have the upper hand in fighting off demons in the battle for his soul. It becomes extremely interesting when we turn from blasphemy laws and highly venerated images and consider the physical evidence on the panel paintings themselves. This physical evidence, I would argue, complicates the story.
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This altarpiece offers a particularly rich example of the marking of sacred figures and will allow me to propose some hypotheses about the physical, embodied acts of scratching and the related motivations. The painting dates to the early 14th century and once stood upon an altar in a church in Siena attached to a Franciscan nunnery. The relative legibility of the paint surface and extant archival photographs make it possible to interpret the markings and reimagine the scratching acts to a much
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greater extent than is possible with the National Gallery's Madonna and Child by Lorenzo Monaco. The iconography in this altarpiece corresponds with the Franciscan institutional setting, with Saint Francis on the outer left and Saint Claire on the outer right in the main register. The altarpiece bears evidence of the intentional scratching of only certain of the figures. Saint Claire in the main register and the bishop saint in the upper left gable had been scratched repeatedly
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with a sharp blade, probably a knife. If we proceed, rather like forensic scientists, to examine closely the surface of the panel, the precise linear cuts can be distinguished from the irregular pattern of the craquelure. Some cuts are so deep and wide that they were later filled in with putty and then painted over during the conservation of the altarpiece. In the case of Saint Claire, the incisions, which I've emphasized here in yellow, were probably made by a person standing
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to the right of the altar reaching over with the right hand. There is a sort of overall coverage or entrapment of the face in this net of intersecting diagonal lines, but also a different order of cut. Horizontal incisions that target the area of the eyes were probably made by reaching across the panel and drawing the implement sharply inward. The pattern of scratches across the face of the bishop is a little different-- a function of the higher placement of the figure and its location
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on the left side of the altarpiece. The cuts are seemingly made by a right-handed person standing to the left of the altar and repeatedly drawing the blade or tip of the sharp implement directly down, with the longest cut angling somewhat to the left, toward the person wielding the implement. Two of the cuts run through the eyes, including one of the two diagonal incisions, perhaps implying, again, a concerted effort to reach and cancel these vital facial features. If we move
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to the central section of the altarpiece, something rather different has occurred. We can see one feature in particular, the Christ Child's mouth, has been subject to extensive scratching, including a horizontal cut that runs right across the opening between the two lips. More intrusive physical exertion would have been required here than in the marking of the lateral figures. The scratcher would have had to lean across the altar and reach upward to mark this feature, which would have
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been located a little over a foot above the altar's surface. There may also be damage to the eyes and mouth of the Virgin, but the disturbance of the paint surface is more difficult to interpret in the aftermath of restoration. The markings on this altarpiece are varied, nuanced, and particularized, and suggest complex and multiple motivations behind these acts of sacred defacement. We don't see the loss of control and the suspension of reason associated in the period with blasphemy.
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The incisions appear calculated and dexterous. This kind of image marking, I would argue, differed from the extreme behaviors referenced in blasphemy laws and in the foundation legends of miraculous image cults. Altarpiece scratching in churches, I contend, reveals a more fluid and permissive religious culture. These scratches are evidence of religion at the level of lived experience and the everyday, indexing connectivity and the interpersonal relationship between the scratcher
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and the sacred beings. This interpersonal relationship involved reciprocal needs and expectations, conventionalized forms of address and propitiation, and ways of accommodating heightened emotions and resolving conflicts and ruptures. Anthropologists use the term perspectivism for such cultural constructions that posit complex, bi-directional interactions and exchanges between autonomously construed humans and non-human spirits and deities. In the French ecclesiastical and nunnery setting, where
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this altarpiece was displayed, this may have been a case where the specific saints failed to perform when petitioned in a time of need. And here I'm showing you a 15th-century fresco that presents a cautionary tale against reacting physically in anger against an underperforming sacred image. This scene from the Legend of Saint Nicholas of Bari tells the story of a Jewish man who had improperly installed a Christian image in his house in order to guard his worldly possessions and money.
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He then beat the image in anger when it failed to do its job and he was robbed by thieves. That such an attack against the material image could be understood to be hurtful to the saint in heaven as demonstrated quite literally in the textual source for the story from The Golden Legend . The Saint appears to the thieves who had stolen the goods, here represented on the right, and informs them that he had been beaten on their account, and that his body was bruised and bloody as a consequence.
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If we return to the Sienese altarpiece, another possibility to account for the pattern of the scratching, is that anger was being expressed through the defacing of the saints against the Franciscan nunnery, or the Franciscan order, or the Sienese bishop, or even the Papacy. The motivations for scratching just the mouth of the Christ Child could have been linked to the role of the mouth as the locus of speech, or as a sensory organ, or as the bodily orifice through which vitalizing breath passes.
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The targeting of the mouth could have been a means of decrying the limitations of the painting as a mute theological sign. Or, conversely, it could have conveyed a desire for the opening of these lips to hear Christ's words spoken in response to prayer. Here is another example of a panel painting in which the eyes and mouths of saints have been targeted. In this case, the virgin companions of Saint Ursula in a painting celebrating how the Saint had saved the city of Pisa during a flood.
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The scratching, seen in raking light, suggests a certain disquiet on the part of the beholder, positioned before the sacred image, perhaps with the recent history a sin or struggle against temptation laid bare before the all-seeing eyes of the saints. If supernatural agency in the period was known to manifest in and through images-- to present in these images, then these scratching acts may have effectively blinded and muted the saints, deactivating this image as a potential site
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of potent sacred eminence. Even if these scratching acts are interpreted as blasphemy-- as inappropriate disrespect shown toward the sacred beings-- it is useful to put pressure on period understandings of this behavior. Historian Gerd Schwerhoff in his work on the late medieval and early modern culture of swearing, suggests that blasphemy was, quote, "an everyday speech act that was part of a competitive masculine culture in which power and independence were asserted." If we modify this notion,
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somewhat, by extending it to both men and women and to a church setting, then can we not see these scratching interventions as impassioned assertions of individual agency and desire, within a longer term, a personalized relationship between the devotees and the sacred beings represented? Such acts of defacement could have been followed by repentance, reparation, and forgiveness. These images could then have been recuperated for daily devotional use, even involving restoration when
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necessary, but without resorting to the extreme solution of public denouncement prosecution and punishment for the person responsible for the defacement. This Madonna and Child may provide us with an instance where a damaged painting was restored during the Renaissance itself. These photographs, taken during the 1951 restoration of the painting, reveal that the eyes of both the Virgin and the Christ Child were gouged out. In order to reach the height of the eyes in this monumental panel that
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measures over eight feet tall, the scratcher would have had to climb up on the altar or use a ladder. When the painting was cleaned and restored in 1951, the original paint layer of the faces of the sacred figures with the damaged eyes was recovered by removing later, heavy overpaint. This is the appearance of the panel prior to that restoration, where we can see that the face of the Madonna has been substantially repainted. It has been plausibly suggested that the style
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of the repainting-- which can now only be appreciated by consulting pre-restoration photographs-- that this style is characteristic of the late 15th century. According to this scenario, then, the colossal Madonna and Child painted around 1450 was severely defaced at some point during subsequent decades. It was then renewed for devotion, restored around 1500, honoring the Virgin with the new, empowering, outward-looking visage. I want to touch briefly now on certain critical changes that
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took place in the Renaissance period. Physical evidence suggests that the practice of scratching altarpieces declined in the 16th century. Changes in blasphemy laws and the rise in image cults linked with blasphemy may have played a role. There was the potential by association to characterize negatively-- even demonize and criminalize-- what I am arguing was a widespread and conventional practice of scratching and marking religious imagery in churches. In this way,
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a performative, interactive mode of religious expression became conflated with the extreme behaviors and activities associated with blasphemy. There were also key changes in the design of new altarpieces installed in churches. Around 1500, altarpieces became taller and were encased within more substantial classical antique-style framing structures, and were elevated with additional tiers and with stairs leading up to the altar. And I'm using the church interior in Carpaccio's painting
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The Apparition of the 10,000 Martyrs to make my point, with the new-style, grander-scale altarpiece represented at the left. There was also an increasing monumentality in the scale of the represented figures in altarpieces, with more frequent narrative subjects in the main panel. Interestingly, the narrative predella-- the most commonly scratched feature in altarpieces in the 15th century-- disappeared. These new-style altarpieces, with a unified picture field, were increasingly
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painted on canvas too, rather than on panel. And canvas could not accommodate forceful, transformative image marking the way that wood had. During the decades leading up to the period of Catholic reform in the 16th century, there was also a kind of "privatization" of the altar space itself, sometimes closed off within chapels by gates made of metal or stone. The altarpiece came to be more tightly aligned with the liturgical needs of the patrons, and the devotional services offered by the clergy.
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While in many churches, the old and the new style of altarpiece endured side by side, in some cases, churches were endowed with new uniform altars and altarpieces, with an unprecedented degree of homogeneity and centralized coordination. There's a tendency to see such reform-minded remodeling of the church interior during the Counter- Reformation as benefiting the laity, through increased visual access to the high altar and to altar imagery in general. However, the net effect of all
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of these changes to altarpiece design and display was to make the altarpieces themselves significantly less physically accessible to people moving about the church interior. A new variety of visual engagement emerged involving hands-off viewing, from a distance, and from a lower vantage point. Religious reform introduced a rhetoric of lay inclusion, but with an emphasis on decorum and interiorized prayer and devotion to religious images. With greater attentiveness
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to social hierarchy and gendered behavior, extra-liturgical devotion and more popular forms of piety were channeled increasingly through confraternal participation and civic cults. There was also a significant expansion in domestic devotion with sacred images displayed in family homes. I want to conclude by reflecting on the implications that this manner of telling the past differently has for Italian Renaissance art history. At the most basic level, I have begun to recover
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a dimension of Renaissance visual culture that has hitherto been little acknowledged, studied, and understood. But I hope to have done more. This lecture comes after a summer of reckoning in the United States, when so many aspects of our society have been scrutinized and debated. Challenges have been made to educational and cultural institutions universities and museums, to identify and redress the ways in which these institutions can contribute to inequities within society.
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Art history as a discipline has-- for some time now-- been responding to a call for decolonizing, beginning with the recognition of the extent to which the discipline itself is imbricated in the histories and legacies of empires and colonialisms. There has been a move toward greater disciplinary self-reflection and a critical examination of the conditions, systems, and ideologies that undergird and sustain our practices as scholars, educators curators administrators artists and patrons.
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For those of us who specialize in the premodern European art history, there is an imperative to decenter the Italian Renaissance, and redimension its relative importance and influence within a plurality of visual cultures across time and global geographies. There are productive ways, too, that we can reframe Renaissance visual art itself in light of the decolonizing critique by deconstructing its remarkably enduring dominant narratives. And this is where an investigation of a topic
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like panel scratching can contribute. Alternative narratives about the Renaissance emerge when we "read" Renaissance panel paintings "against the grain" of traditional assumptions and interpretations. Canonical artist-makers recede, and anonymous beholders come to the fore. The elevated, transcendent work of Renaissance art descends, coming down to earth within hand's reach, with painting surfaces now understood to have been touched and marked. Hyper-valued neoclassical artistic forms,
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and new innovative visual technologies like linear perspective and engaging narrative become the staging grounds for scratching performances. And this emergent history of Italian Renaissance panel scratching, with its waxing and waning, itself becomes a relevant prehistory for the Protestant Reformation response to Christian images, and for the documented cases of iconoclasm in northern European cities and towns at this time. Let us switch now from applying a historiographic lens
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to a historical lens. In this new narrative about Renaissance visual culture, panel scratching can be shown to have disrupted the tight alignment between professional artists working contractually for specific patrons in the production of paintings. After initial installation, paintings became accessible to wider publics and users, who acted directly upon them and transform their material and representational properties-- and their meanings. Scratching was collective and "popular" in the sense
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that it required no professional training, technical expertise, literacy, manual dexterity, or deep appreciation of artistic principles. Scratching acts were practical, performative assertive and interactive. They were empowering, apotropaic vengeful and a means of earning spiritual credit. For the modern-day viewer, the recovered evidence of this visual culture of panel scratching can be unsettling. It whispers of enchantment and offers glimpses of unruly demons in spirited animals
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and uncircumscribable sacred beings. We are reminded of how the impact of the Enlightenment has left us with inadequate means for comprehending the premodern European spirit world, and for understanding the relationships between the human and the non-human within ecologies and cosmologies. There may be much for us to learn about such relationships and reciprocities from historical, living indigenous and traditional cultures. I will close now with an example of how Italian
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Renaissance panel scratching can also be productively deployed in cross-cultural comparative study. Such comparative study helps to undercut the elite culture exceptionalism that can be claimed for Italian Renaissance art, by demonstrating revealing commonalities with visual cultures from other times and places. Let us juxtapose these two cultural objects: Lorenzo Monaco's by now familiar Madonna and Child in the National Gallery, and the bronze equestrian statue of J.E.B. Stuart,
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once mounted on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, and removed this past summer from its plinth on city land, by order of the city, and currently in storage. These are discrete objects, but they are also linked by certain shared histories related to their sites and discursive operations in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Both of these objects have witnessed shifts in their perceived value and cultural currency following their initial production and display. They have provoked
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strong emotions on the part of beholders, challenges to their authority within public space, and they have had their physical integrity attacked and modified as a result. They have also, on occasion, been elevated by a few and made to stand for the many, in representing U.S. national history and cultural values. As repositories of memory, they hold in a fragile disequilibrium, multiple temporalities, complex significations, and competing truth claims. Decisions have been made
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about how they should be preserved in response to historical contingencies and cultural politics as they have moved from place to place. And each, too, continues to be available to new historical interpretations and counter-narratives that can be told about them. With Kehinde Wiley's Rumors of War on the right, designed as a counter-monument to the J.E.B. Stuart statue. In direct dialogue with it, and installed last year in another prominent civic space in Richmond-- outside the Virginia Museum
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of Fine Arts. Thank you very much.
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