Sunday, October 16, 2016

CASTAGNO'S NICCOLO DA TOLENTINO



CASTAGNO'S NICCOLO DA TOLENTINO

In the last blog we talked about Uccello's fresco of the condottiere John Hawkwood (1436) in the
Florentine Cathedral aisle. To the left on the same wall, and twenty years later, in 1456, Andrea del Castagno (1419-1457) painted a fresco
of another condottiere, Niccolo da Tolentino.
The 1456 fresco was meant to serve the same purpose as the fresco by Uccello, a painted equestrian statue over a bier standing in for an actual funerary monument for the condottiere (general of a private army.) Niccolo Mauruzi da Tolentino lived from 1350 to 1435 and is buried beneath the fresco in the church.
Instead of the green color for faux bronze, Castagno paints the equestrian statue as though it were marble, and the bier beneath made of the same material.

The Latin inscription follows the laudatory formula used in the Uccello inscription but does not have an ancient precedent:

LATIN AS ON THE fictive plaque here (some letters inside other letters):
                                                HIC QVEM SVBLIMEM IN EQVO
                                                PICTVM CERNIS NICOLAVS TOLENTINAS
                                                EST INCLITVS DVX FLORENTINI EXERCITVS.
LATIN more familiar to us today:
                                                 HIC QUEM SUBLIMEM IN EQUO
                                                 PICTUM CERNIS NICOLAUS TOLENTINAS
                                             EST INCLITUS DUX FLORENTINI EXERCITUS.
ENGLISH translation (mine):
                                                 Here you can see painted high above on horseback
                                                 Niccolo da Tolentino,
                                                 Honored Leader of the Florentine Army.

The bier has two bookend fictive marble soldiers, each holding a coat-of-arms; the left one holds that of the city of Florence, the right one, the family coat-of-arms of Niccolo.
The bier seems to rest on a marble bench under which stands a fictive sculpted marble shell, perhaps a reference to his victory near the Arno River.

Niccolo da Tolentino lived in a period (1350-1435) that overlapped with the life of the man painted next to him, John Hawkwood (c. 1320-1394). Both were condottieri, men who led private armies and made contracts (condotte) with Italian city-states to protect them with their private armies, hence the name "condottieri." Both wear the hat common to representations of condottieri in the Renaissance, a hat that was usually red but made to look like green bronze in the Uccello painting and to look like white marble in the Castagno painting. Both men had reputations for being good commanders and both were hired by the Florentine Republic to defend the city: Hawkwood, from 1377 to his death in 1394, Tolentino in 1425 and again in 1431 and 1432.
          But while Hawkwood is known as an able general and city defender, a role he held during many attacks on Florence over a 17-year period, Tolentino is praised and honored by the city because of his leadership in one important battle, the Battle of San Romano in 1432. Florence in that year is in conflict with Siena, and the armies of both cities range over the Tuscan and Umbrian countryside, avoiding each other and occasionally engaging in warfare. After skirmishes and successfully hiding from each other for months, the two armies eventually meet at the town of San Romano, on the Arno River plain, halfway between Florence and Pisa. The battle lasts two days, after which both sides claim victory, the Florentines saying they won because they took more prisoners. They were grateful to the general of their forces, Niccolo da Tolentino, and when he returned to the city, he was feted in the Cathedral. He was subsequently given a state funeral when he died in 1435, and his heirs were promised a marble equestrian statue monument to him to be placed in the Cathedral. By 1456 the promise was reduced to another fictive monument painted in fresco on the wall of the Cathedral.

THREE THINGS TO NOTE ABOUT THESE TWO FRESCOES OF CONDOTTIERI:

1) STYLE DIFFERENCES
2) HORSE'S EYE
3) ANIMATION          

1) STYLE DIFFERENCES - The location of painted generals on horseback side by side, or back to back, on the same wall of the Florentine Cathedral left aisle makes the viewer look at them for comparison. They are the same subject, same height, similar plain color background, and similar bier structures with Latin inscriptions. The horse and riders face the same direction and the horse in each case lifts one hoof. What is different is the artist who painted them and the year they were painted.
But Uccello is still alive when Castagno paints his marble condottiere, and, in fact, had had his own chance in the years 1438-1455
to paint Niccolo da Tolentino in the Battle of San Romano, in a three-part series painted for the Salimbeni family in Florence and later bought by Lorenzo the Magnificent for his bedroom in Palazzo Medici. 

In the top panel (now in London's National Gallery) Uccello paints Niccolo as the main protagonist of the drama of the battle. Here he wears the perfunctory red hat of the condottiere while riding a white horse.

The second panel, in the Uffizi, depicts a second stage of the battle, where Niccolo's face is covered by armor and he uses a lance to thrust a Sienese opponent back on his white horse:

He does not appear in the third panel (in the Louvre), where the Florentines win the victory. The condottiere in this panel is Micheletto Attendolo, whose flag bears the unicorn, his coat-of-arms.
But perhaps because Uccello had already painted Niccolo in two of these panels, he is not commissioned to paint him in the fresco next to John Hawkwood.
           If you place these condottieri side by side, however, it is clear to the viewer that Castagno has a very different style from that of Paolo Uccello.

Uccello's interest is in perspective and wide planes of color that seem to abstract the beast and his rider, making his image staid and stiff (although perhaps more appealing to viewers today.) Castagno's interest is in movement and ornament and making his horse and rider seem alive on the plinth. He has a sculptor's feeling for the muscles and bones in the horse and rider and uses shadows to convey realistic anatomy. We see bulges on the legs and head of the horse for muscles in motion. Castagno's condottiere and horse seem to be about to ride off the plinth and into real space. The horse turns his head to look at the viewer, Niccolo's cloak flies back behind him as if caught up in the wind created by the horse moving forward, the ties on the cloak sling back behind the neck as if picked up by air, and the tail of the horse is knotted in curved sweeps of horsehair. Even the horse's trappings are lifted up in foreshortened view to give the impression that the horse and rider are in motion.
The baton is held by the general at arm's length, another projection of movement forward. The soldiers holding the coats-of-arms turn in space to add motion to the whole, while the ribbons extending in S patterns next to the Latin plaque echo the ribbons of the cloak above. In comparison the Uccello seems stiff, unyielding, and trapped in an unmoving form.
          We could say some of the differences may be attributed to the reputations of the two generals themselves, Hawkwood known for his ability to delay battle and Tolentino known for his active role in the thwarting of the Sienese army in the battle. But it is also true that attention to anatomy, movement, and interest in ornament, along with chiselled contours for every element, are characteristics we find in any painting by Andrea del Castagno, while the need to abstract surfaces to planes of color and the reduction of hard-edged curves and corners, are characteristics of Paolo Uccello as an artist. These two paintings are perfect examples of what style is, when applied to individual artists.

Which brings us to point 2) EYE OF THE HORSE
If you look at the eye of the horse in each fresco, you will notice a great difference. Uccello's horse looks forward in profile and ahead toward the altar in the church.

  Castagno's horse turns his head to the right and looks directly at the viewer.
The eerie experience inside the Cathedral when you look at this eye is that it follows you, no matter where you move in front of the fresco. If you back down the aisle to the left, the eye looks at you; if you proceed further down the aisle to the Uccello fresco, Castagno's horse's eye is still looking at you as you move. The artist has made a connection between viewer and painter, between viewer and condottiere through the illusion of a horse who commands the prospect in front of him no matter where you stand in church. A pictorial feat that is a Renaissance coup repeated by other artists such as Mantegna later. It is a tour de force by the painter that he can make the viewer even 600 years later respond to the eye of the horse he has painted in 1456.

3) ANIMATION -  The lifelike quality of the horse and his eye in the Castagno portrait brings us to the last point. Not only has Castagno made Uccello's horse and rider liven up, but he has chosen a different hoof on his horse than the hoof on Uccello's horse to lift to give the viewer a sense of animation on the walls of the Cathedral.

If you think of the horse as the same horse, the rider the same rider, the back horse in the parade lifts his left foot, the front horse lifts his right foot; it is as though one horse is moving in dressage mode through space along the aisle of the Cathedral, left up, right up, left right, clop, clop. It is as though we are made as viewers to hear the sound of the animation of a single horse as it proceeds
on its way down the aisle toward the altar of the Cathedral. Castagno has purposely not repeated the same leg lifted by the horse in the Uccello fresco. He wants us to imagine these horses moving in sequence, like a Disney cel in animation for modern movies, as they carry their condottieri in parade dress toward the center of the Cathedral for the honors they are to receive from the city they saved from peril. The closest thing to indoor movie theater projection a Florentine could get in the 15th century.

          

Thursday, October 6, 2016

JOHN HAWKWOOD by UCCELLO

JOHN HAWKWOOD by UCCELLO

In the left aisle of the Florentine Cathedral, painted in fresco on the wall are two huge
equestrian warriors, John Hawkwood, 1436, by Paolo Uccello (1397-1475,) to the right, and Niccolo
da Tolentino, 1456, by Andrea del Castagno, here at left:
 
Each warrior is imagined as an
equestrian statue on a pedestal that serves as a pictorial sarcophagus.
(For our purposes
we must ignore the frames which
were painted later in 1524 by Lorenzo di Credi.)



Each is painted as if sculpture made of material other than paint. Uccello's Hawkwood is faux bronze (hence the green color) and Castagno's da Tolentino is faux marble, with the pedestal created in the same material.




 
While the Florentine Cathedral itself is even today a space that is meant for civic ceremony as much as religious ceremony, these painted images of warriors on horseback still seem to stand at odds with the Christian function of the church for worship. Even if we think of both these battle generals as Christian knights, the very presence of these tomb monuments to condottieri (mercenary soldiers) suggests a military purpose for a church dedicated to Mary (Santa Maria del Fiore) and used for masses to celebrate Mary's son.
          When we find out more about each of the men portrayed in these frescoes, that sense of
strangeness does not disappear.
This blog will discuss Uccello's Hawkwood. Next blog will take on Castagno's Da Tolentino.
FIRST UCCELLO'S HAWKWOOD, 1436:

         

I show two photos of the Uccello fresco because the first is good for allowing the viewer to see the Latin inscription, the second is good for the color which is closer to the original. The two coats of arms below the sarcophagus are those of John Hawkwood.  The Latin inscription identifies the man:
 LATIN on sarcophagus in painting:

                                    IOANNES ACVTVS EQVES BRITTANICVS DVX AETATIS S
                                   VAE CAVTISSIMVS ET REI MILITARIS PERITISSIMVS HABITVS EST
                                                              PAVLI VGIELLI OPVS
Latin as we would read it today:
                                    IOANNES ACUTUS EQUES BRITTANICUS DUX AETATIS S
                                    UAE CAUTISSIMUS ET REI MILITARIS PERITISSIMUS HABITUS EST
                                                              PAULI UGIELLI OPUS
Inscription in ENGLISH (my translation):
                                   John Hawkwood, British knight, considered in his day
                                   the most cautious leader and ablest in military strategy.
                                                             Work by Paolo Uccello 

Who was this Englishman honored in Florence with a funerary monument in the middle of
the city's Cathedral? Two good books on his life have recently been published:
Sir John Hawkwood by Steven Cooper, (2008, Pen and Sword Books, Barnsley, South Yorkshire), with many illustrations and photos, and John Hawkwood by William Caferro (Johns Hopkins, 2006), which traces documents about Hawkwood's life all over Europe. A short summary of their findings:

John Hawkwood was born in England in the little village of Sidle Hedingham around 1320.
He died in Florence, Italy, in 1394. He was a soldier of fortune, the general of a private army of
mercenary warriors from various backgrounds, many of whom were English. He began his career
as a soldier in France in the Hundred Years' War and continued into Italy following the White
Company in the service of various city-states: Pisa, Milano, and Florence. John Hawkwood is quickly
considered a great leader of his men, creates his own army separate from the White Company. He manages to survive with his band of 4,000 soldiers by marauding, by drawing up contracts with various city-states, by retreating in winter, by threatening his force against various cities, such as Perugia, Siena, Florence, Urbino, Gubbio. He is usually anti-papal and pro-Milan, but occasionally can be bought off by contracts where he agrees not to attack a city-state if he is paid in money or goods to keep his soldiers content. At the end of his life and after travelling over much of central and northern Italy he buys up property in England as if intending to return there in retirement. He marries off his daughters to other condottieri and writes a will in Florence, where he dies. His body is later taken back to Sidle Hedingham. End of short summary.

Florence feels obliged to him for keeping Milanese and papal forces away from the city
for a period of about thirty years, 1364-1394, as well as for directly working for Florence in the years
1377 to 1394. Thus it follows that the Florentine Republic gives him an elaborate funeral in the Cathedral when he dies, and then promises his heirs a bronze statue in his honor for a funerary monument in the church. His popularity and legend are so great that the funerary honor is maintained through both Albizzi and Medici governments, but as time passes, the funds for bronze diminish and eventually Paolo Uccello is commissioned to paint a substitute bronze statue on the wall of the aisle in 1436, forty-two years after Hawkwood's death.
Paolo's first idea for the fresco is rejected, perhaps this preparatory drawing made prior to the
final image:
Rather than showing the knight in direct profile, as the finished fresco does, this preparatory
drawing shows his horse slightly in 3/4 view from behind, revealing the back end of the horse.
Could this view have been objectionable to church authorities and thus changed to the direct
profile view that reveals less of the rear end?

The rider and horse are seen by the viewer as though directly on, the pedestal as though "da
sotto in su" (from below, looking up) in the finished painting. Hawkwood is caught and his motion held fast, along with that of the horse, in a sharply contoured silhouette of a general in armor, holding his general's baton as if on parade, and wearing a hat that distinguished him from his ordinary soldiers:
The closest ancient precedent would certainly have been available for Uccello to see, in Rome,
in front of the Lateran, the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius (c. 2nd cent. A.D.), thought
in the Renaissance to be a statue of the first Christian emperor, Constantine:
 



(It should be pointed out that this statue was moved by Michelangelo in 1538 to the piazza he designed on the Capitoline Hill, but was brought indoors in 1981 to save the bronze from pollution;
a horrible plastic brown statue was substituted in its place in the middle of the Campidoglio while the
original is now in the Capitoline Museums.) Uccello could not have seen it on the Capitoline, but
he could have seen it in front of the Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano.

In both the horse lifts his front right leg while the figure on its back looks forward and moves his
right arm. Aurelius is bearded, hatless,
and wears no spurs; his right arm is extended forward, either in greeting to his soldiers, or in celebration of a captured enemy body that originally might have knelt under the horse's right hoof,
as in this bas-relief of Marcus Aurelius:
But the general (no pun intended) evocation of a great Roman emperor, Constantine, would have added to the touted leadership qualities of Hawkwood spoken about in the Latin inscription painted on the sarcophagus of Uccello's fresco. We don't have any documentation of Uccello's having seen the Aurelius statue or having been to Rome, but since many artists of his period went to Rome and made drawings, (and we know he went to Venice), it is possible he had seen it or a recreation of it to rely on for his own condottiere. While his Hawkwood is not gesturing to a prisoner, he is in parade
gear as though reviewing the troops as Marcus Aurelius may be.
        One more word about the Latin inscription. It is a phrase that is directly lifted from a description on a plaque of the ancient Roman general from the 3rd cent. B.C., Fabius Maximus (280 B.C. to 203 B.C.)At the bottom of a plaque that has survived from the period, the General Fabius is said to be:
(4th row from bottom):"Dux aetatis suae cautissimus et re militaris peritissimus habitus est..."
It is this phrase which is repeated on Hawkwood's plinth beneath the equestrian image.
(Plaque example in Rome, Museum of Roman civilization.)
Fabius Maximus was the Roman general who, along with several others, tackled the problem of defending the city of Rome from Hannibal (247-181 B.C.,) after Hannibal had crossed the Alps with his elephants and had ransacked much of the land around Rome.
 Fabius head

Statue of Fabius in Vienna.
Fabius managed to defeat Hannibal (Hannibal's portrait below)

by wearing him out, avoiding direct battle with him, skirting his camps in menacing fashion, sending Hannibal false signals about the whereabouts of the Roman army. So worn out was Hannibal by these tactics of bait and switch, then retreat, that he gave up the idea of attacking Rome itself and headed to Tarentum, where he again faced the tricky strategies of Fabian warfare. In the end Hannibal returned to Carthage and left the Italian peninsula alone. Fabius Maximus is considered a great General for circumventing direct battle with Hannibal, and is much lauded by the Roman Senate, even included in Plutarch's work about great men. At first the Roman Senate lambasted Fabius for his indecision, calling him Cunctator, "Lingerer." But since other generals lost their lives and the lives of their men to Hannibal in battle, Fabius was eventually lauded for his "caution" and for his foresight in warfare (re militaris peritissimus). (The discussion as to whether Hannibal purposely avoided direct attack on Rome is for another place.)
         The same phrase taken from the Roman plaque and used to describe John Hawkwood is not chosen lightly. In much the same way that Fabius managed to avoid being killed himself and to avoid having his own troops killed, John Hawkwood was a master of menace and retreat. He would threaten Florence at her walls by bringing his 4,000 men right up to them, then make a compact with the City not to attack if they would pay him a certain sum. Florence would pay. He would announce a battle to armies such as the Milanese army, then not appear on the field on the day of the battle, having taken his troops on raiding parties in Tuscany and Romagna to loot and burn there instead. His fear tactics paid off, as city-states such as Florence, Siena, and Pisa, would regularly pay him to stay away from their surrounding countryside and defensive walls. John Hawkwood today would probably be called an extortionist, a mobster, a blackmailer, not to mention an arsonist, but his strategies in the 14th-century warring between city-states in Italy worked, and the Florentine Republic realized his worth as a private defender for their City.
         One thing not understood by some of the historians of the period is the Tuscan pronunciation applied to the Englishman's name. In some of the documents he is referred to as "Giovanni Auto."
 HAWKWOOD
 ACUTO
 AUTO
The H of Hawkwood is dropped by Tuscan speakers because H in Italian is not pronounced. They hear the WK as a hard C, which also gets dropped because Tuscan speakers tend to turn hard c's into H's. Hawkwood then becomes "auto" -  a-ooh-toe - because the c of acuto drops out, leaving only the vowels and d. We can tell they are not hearing either the W or D in "wood", the first letter not existing in Italian, and the last disbelieved as an ending since most Italian names do not end in a consonant. With the Tuscan dropping of hard c's, acuto becomes "A-U-T-O." Interesting for linguists because it means that the dialect was dropping c's as early as the 1300's.
         The hat that Hawkwood wears in Uccello's fresco is the mark of a condottiere. 
Cooper points out that a contemporary Chronicle written by Giovanni Sercambi in 1375 has illustrations of battles involving Hawkwood in which he wears the particular hat as attribute. Cooper's illustration of Sercambi is in black and white, but the original was in color, which tells us something else:   John Hawkwood is mentioned in the Italian written above the scene, in red, "Come Messer Johannes aguto chavalca in sul tereno e contado di firenza"(How Sir John Hawkwood (again the problem of no H or WK) rides on the lands and surrounding countryside of Florence.)
 
Hawkwood is on the far right on horseback dressed in red, with a red hat in the same shape as the hat on Hawkwood's head in the Cathedral fresco. A red hat of this shape must have signified the captain of a mercenary army, as another famous condottiere painted in later years presents himself with the same red cap:
Federico da Montefeltro by Piero della Francesca, 1472              Uccello, 1436 Hawkwood
 Uccello's cap for Hawkwood is green because he wants to give the impression that we are looking at a bronze statue, so he cannot color the cap red. But it is the same type of hat used to distinguish condottieri from men in other careers, and is the same hat that Hawkwood wears in the scene from Sercambi's Chronicle.

Hawkwood as "lingerer," or "delayer" is appropriate here, too. He knows that merely by taking prisoners, as in the manuscript, and by waiting for the governments to pay him bribes, he will ensure his own survival and that of his troops, while also forming a protective fence of men around the towns who paid. The technique allowed Hawkwood to live to an old age, 74. (Average death age in
the 15th century was 30.)
         For the Medici, who paid Uccello to paint Hawkwood's portrait, the quality of "lingering,"
"delaying," must have appealed. Cosimo de' Medici, who began the Medici bank, and who
had to wait from 1433-34 in Venice in exile while the Albizzi ruled in Florence, realized the virtue of
"waiting," "delaying" during that period. Cosimo also used similar tactics to those of the painted military leader in eliminating his enemies in government in Florence. He merely refused to do banking business with the worst of them, and after enough "delay" and "wait," they eventually went bankrupt, and had to come to Cosimo to beg him to let them back in his good graces. Hawkwood's blackmailing techniques were most easily advertised in a laudatory fresco in the public church at the center of Florentine life. Attaching Uccello's name and Fabius Maximus' maxim served to lead the viewer away from the original source of the appreciated wisdom and warning. For the Florentines loyal to the Medici, the message was also clear. As for Hawkwood, the bronze honor was cut down to size. (It causes one to wonder how the Medici had the bronze for Donatello in the 1430's to complete the David in their private courtyard.) In the end, the Florentines had the last laugh, in church.