LAW ART

Il saggio indaga una Allegoria della Giustizia realizzata a Roma da Giorgio Vasari nel 1543 per il cardinale Alessandro Farnese. Il caleidoscopio di figure e simboli immaginato dall’artista aretino comunica, a prima vista, un’immagine virtuosa e tradizionale di giustizia. Eppure, un singolare dettaglio, raro e ambiguo, sembra suggerire un’immagine di giustizia ‘alla rovescia’, specchio riflesso della crisi del diritto comune e, più in generale, dell’ordine giuridico medievale, tra il nuovo penale egemonico e la formazione delle nuove realtà statuali.

Giorgione

Giorgione was a Venetian painter who was born at Castelfranco, some fifty kilometers from Venice, in 1473/74. His life ended tragically at the age of 36 on 17 September 1510, when he died of the plague. In contemporary documents his name is given in Venetian dialect as Zorzi da Castelfranco (George from Castelfranco), or as Zorzon (Big George), in recognition of the celebrity he enjoyed during his lifetime. Baldassare Castiglione, in his “Book of the Courtier,” in 1516, recognized Giorgione as one of the greatest artists of his age, along with Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna, Raphael, and Michelangelo. In 1548 the Venetian theorist Paolo Pino defined Giorgione as the painter of poetic brevity, as the inventor of new Venetian mode of creation. In 1550, in his Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari endorsed this assessment and placed Giorgione as the artist who introduced the modern style of the High Renaissance to Venice. With the notable exception of some significant frescoes, only a few of which survive, and some devotional images, such as the important altarpiece in his birthplace, the Castelfranco Altarpiece, Giorgione is celebrated for creating cabinet paintings, such as The Tempest, The Three Philosophers, and the Dresden Sleeping Venus, for private patrons, which have proved to be more complex to interpret than many other works by Renaissance artists. It has also proven challenging to establish a corpus of works that may be securely attributed to him. In recent decades the scientific examination of paintings has provided new data about underdrawing, as well as the use of pigments, which may be revealing in defining new characteristics for attribution. The scientific analysis of underdrawing reveals many pentimenti or changes of mind when Giorgione was working out his compositions on canvas, adding additional complexity to iconographic explanations. Given these difficulties of interpretation and attribution, Giorgione has often been considered a mysterious and impossible artist to define. Following the article Anderson, et al. 2019 (cited under Earliest Sources: Documents), the bookends of Giorgione’s life are now known, unlike those for his mentor Giovani Bellini and his pupil Titian. There is a huge investment in the scholarship of Giorgione’s work, both emotional and intellectual, so that any discovery or interpretation related to him arouses passionate argument. The evidence is so thin and contested that anything new—especially of this significance—is immediately seized upon and pored over, as has occurred in the following case. A copy of Dante’s Commedia (Divine Comedy), printed in 1497, in the library of the University of Sydney contains a previously unpublished inscription giving Giorgione’s age at his death. The accompanying drawing in red chalk reveals Giorgione’s engagement with the intricate text of Dante’s Commedia, a discovery that opens up a new understanding for the complexity of Giorgione’s interpretation of religious subject matter. The discovery is a fitting beginning to a new evaluation of this extraordinary period in Venetian art.

GIORGIO VASARI: (N)O ALVORECER DA ERA DA ARTE

“Le Vite” (As Vidas), de Giorgio Vasari, é reconhecidamente um dos textos mais relevantes da história da arte. Sob a perspectiva de biografar os mais renomados pintores, escultores e arquitetos de sua época, o texto vasariano se tornou célebre tanto como uma primeira história da arte, como o registro basilar para o estudo da arte italiana renascentista e, por fim, também para a compreensão do desenvolvimento e entendimento da arte em um de seus períodos históricos mais proeminentes, qual seja, a arte italiana de Cimabue a Michelangelo Buonarroti. Esses fatos podem nos conduzir a uma interpretação equivocada: a de que o texto de Vasari seja uma obra delimitada ao mero estudo histórico e artefatual, de modo que expandir a compreensão dos fenômenos que aquela obra abarca para os problemas filosóficos da arte de nosso tempo ou da arte em geral constituiria uma tarefa fadada ao anacronismo. No presente artigo, demonstraremos como “Le Vite”, pelo contrário, alicerça o conceito de era da arte para uma das principais filosofias da arte contemporânea, qual seja, o essencialismo histórico de Arthur Danto, e em seguida defenderemos em que medida naquela obra do Cinquecento já se fazem presentes e em germinação alguns dos principais aspectos da nossa compreensão atual do termo arte.

An Integrated Geometric and Material Survey for the Conservation of Heritage Masonry Structures

This paper reports the knowledge process and the analyses performed to assess the seismic behavior of a heritage masonry building. The case study is a three-story masonry building that was the house of the Renaissance architect and painter Giorgio Vasari (the Vasari’s House museum). An interdisciplinary approach was adopted, following the Italian “Guidelines for the assessment and mitigation of the seismic risk of the cultural heritage”. This document proposes a methodology of investigation and analysis based on three evaluation levels (EL1, analysis at territorial level; EL2, local analysis and EL3, global analysis), according to an increasing level of knowledge on the building. A comprehensive knowledge process, composed by a 3D survey by Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) and experimental in situ tests, allowed us to identify the basic structural geometry and to assess the value of mechanical parameters subsequently needed to perform a reliable structural assessment. The museum represents a typology of masonry building extremely diffused in the Italian territory, and the assessment of its seismic behavior was performed by investigating its global behavior through the EL1 and the EL3 analyses.

All’antica life style: private thermae in Italian Renaissance architecture

The heritage of antiquity was the basis of Italian Renaissance architecture and inexhaustible source of inspiration for its masters. Among the facilities of par - ticular interest for architects and lovers of the epoch were the Roman thermae. Their parts and elements brought to life a variety of spatial solutions in architecture of tem - ples, villas and cathedrals. However the attempts to lit - erally build the thermae similar to Roman ones in time of Renessaince were rare to encounter. The most detailed description of Renessaince ther - mae was given by Giorgio Vasari in the life story “ On Le - one Leoni Aretino and other sculptors and architects” which involves the brief biography of Galeazzo Aless - si. It narrates, among others, about the thermae built by Galeazzo Alesssi on Grimaldi (later Sauli) villa in Bisagno nearby Genova (the building was not saved). According to Vasari, the thermae were octagonally planned pavilion with the round pool in its centre. The interior was worked in antique style. The article gives an insight into efforts to build the private thermae during Renaissance, prior to Villa Grimaldi’s pavilion, which testifies to customers’ looking to reconstruct all’antica lifestyle in private life particularly on the villa which, following an - cient men of latters was regarded as ‘temple of muses’.

Leonardos da Vinci Wende in der Schlacht bei Anghiari: Poetik und genetische Kritik der zeichnerischen Entwürfe.

In 1505 or 1506, Leonardo da Vinci abandoned his project of the Battle of Anghiari, which was to depict the historical victory in 1440 of Florence over Milan. The last traces of the wall painting were obliterated in the 1560s when Giorgio Vasari and his collaborators restructured and redecorated the once Sala del Maggior Consiglio of the Florentine Republic. More or less contemporary foreign copies seem to reproduce what is believed to be the central part of the composition, known even by the same Vasari’s description as the group of horsemen fighting for a standard, “vn groppo di caualli, che combatteuano vna bandiera”, and only one colour detail, an old soldier in a red cap, “vn soldato vecchio con vn berretton rosso”. Vasari’s words do not identify in the scene any protagonist of the historical event. Only in the eyes of recent interpreters did it become the confrontation of two Milanese horsemen on the left and two Florentine on the right. Observations on Leonardo's method of projecting allow a new approach. The exhibition “Europe in the Renaissance”, organized in 2016 by the Swiss National Museum in Zürich, showed a computer animation produced based on the author’s screenplay by the studio xkopp creative in Berlin. The succession of sequential images demonstrate how both the final composition and the depicted action emerge from Leonardo’s drawing process. The present essay completes the silent animation with the necessarily verbal commentary. The inquiry concerns five original drawing-sheets in the collections of the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice and the Szépmüvészeti Múzeum in Budapest. Leonardo calls the first shaping of figures, the rough composition sketch, componimento inculto. From classical poetics he borrows the word, the term, and the priority of suitable actions which the same figures should demonstrate Genetic criticism distinguishes in the simultaneity of unerased strokes the variations of tools and their handling. Arranging the step-by-step changes, first traces, insertions and alternatives in the individual sketch and from sheet to sheet we recognize earlier and later positions and postures of the same protagonists. Just in the first sketch we discern the future “old soldier in a red cap” emerging victorious from the duel. His action represents the causa efficiens of the extreme left horseman’s finally twisted posture. At the beginning of the internal drawing procedure we recognize the same horseman in a different position, how he rides from right to left, holding the staff of the standard like a lance directed to the left. The counterattacking “old soldier”, coming from the left side and evading the mortal thrust, grips the enemy’s standard and turns it in the opposite direction. With few rapid modifications, the draftsman dramatically creates the “reversal” in the battle, Aristotle’s “change from bad fortune to good, or from good fortune to bad” (Poetics, 1451a). The final composition shows the “old soldier” fighting simultaneously at least three enemies like the paradigmatic Hercules defeating the multi-headed Hydra. The victorious “old soldier in the red cap” embodies the Florentine Republic.

Bartolomeo Ammannati

Bartolomeo Ammannati [Ammanati] (b. 1511–d. 1592) was a prominent sculptor and architect working in Florence in the mid- to late 16th century. He is considered a key figure of the Italian Mannerist period. One of many artists working in the wake of Michelangelo Buonarroti, Ammannati began as a pupil of Baccio Bandinelli before working under Jacopo Sansovino and Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli. Ammannati developed a style that drew on the dynamic compositions of Michelangelo but one that was tempered with a sense of restraint and an ability to engage bold classical forms and details. In the 1530s and 1540s, Ammannati worked on significant projects, such as Sansovino’s Biblioteca Marciana in Venice and Montorsoli’s tomb for the poet Jacopo Sannazaro installed in Naples. However, he encountered a frustrating setback when his tomb for the soldier Mario Nari in SS. Annunziata in Florence was criticized and taken down amidst religious objections. Between 1544 and 1548, Ammannati created remarkable sculptural and architectural ensembles in Padua for humanist and antiquarian Marco Mantua Benavides, including a triumphal arch, statues of Jupiter and Apollo and a colossus of Hercules, whose towering twenty-nine-foot figure was reproduced on a print by Enea Vico and Antonio Lafreri (1553). Ammannati’s tomb for Benavides in the Church of the Eremitani is celebrated for its sculptural and architectural balance, illustrating his take on Michelangelo’s unfinished wall tombs in the Medici Chapel. In 1550, Ammannati married Laura Battiferra of Urbino, an accomplished poet and a prominent figure in the devotional culture of Counter-Reformation Italy. He traveled to Rome where he undertook important commissions related to the papal family, including tombs for the Del Monte in S. Pietro in Montorio and portions of Julius III’s Villa Giulia, on which he collaborated with Giorgio Vasari and Jacopo Vignola. Ammannati’s elegant and whimsical Nymphaeum for the Villa Giulia showcases his developing architectural style. In 1555, Ammannati returned to Florence to serve under Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici, where his service to this family would mark the height of his career and see the full maturity of his style. His works exemplify Mannerism at its height, from the artfully elongated bronzes of the Neptune Fountain to the playful rustication of the Palazzo Pitti courtyard. His numerous fountains present splendid and witty tableaux, and his bronze Ops for the Studiolo of Francesco de’ Medici stands out for its grace and refinement. As architect and engineer, he was responsible for landmarks such as the Ponte Santa Trinità and the Column of Justice, and he oversaw construction materials for the Cathedral and the Uffizi. In his later years, Ammannati took on architectural projects outside of Florence and he grew increasingly dedicated to the Jesuit order and the concerns of the Counter Reformation, even condemning the display of nudity in his own work in 1582. He and Laura left their possessions to the Jesuits and helped with the reconstruction of the church of S. Giovannino in Florence, funding a chapel where they were buried.

Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence

Viewers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were encouraged to forge connections between their physical and affective states when they experienced works of art. They believed that their bodies served a critical function in coming to know and make sense of the world around them, and intimately engaged themselves with works of art and architecture on a daily basis. This book examines how viewers in Medicean Florence were self-consciously cultivated to enhance their sensory appreciation of works of art and creatively self-fashion through somaesthetics. Mobilized as a technology for the production of knowledge with and through their bodies, viewers contributed to the essential meaning of Renaissance art and, in the process, bound themselves to others. By investigating the framework and practice of somaesthetic experience of works by Benozzo Gozzoli, Donatello, Benedetto Buglioni, Giorgio Vasari, and others in fifteenth- and sixteenth century Florence, the book approaches the viewer as a powerful tool that was used by patrons to shape identity and power in the Renaissance.