BELLINI'S PESARO ALTARPIECE (B)

BELLINI's PESARO ALTARPIECE (B)

In the previous blog entry (A) we discussed the main section of the Pesaro Altarpiece painted by Giovanni Bellini probably in 1475, with its subject, the Coronation of the Virgin with Saints. In this blog entry I wish to talk about the gable painting that was originally above the main section and the predella panels that are still beneath it in the museum.

The gable painting, now in the Vatican Museums, is a scene of the Deposition, the taking of Christ's body off the cross before lowering it into the grave. His body perches on the edge of the sarcophagus while Joseph of Arimathaea holds it upright before placing it in his own tomb, a gift he gave to Jesus. Nicodemus, a dark-bearded figure standing above the rest, holds the ointment jar from which Mary Magdalene has taken the oil with which she is caressing Christ's hand.

Mary Magdalene here is focusing on the tender application of ointment to Christ's hand wound.  Her mouth is open, perhaps in prayer, perhaps in concentration. Joseph and Nicodemus watch intently as she takes Christ's left hand in both of hers, gently touching the top and bottom of it as if to recover the whole of him through just his hand. Christ's chest wound still bleeds and Joseph holds up Christ's body with his own.

The solemnity of this scene of death is presented by Bellini "di sotto in su," from below looking up,
because he knew that the viewer of the altarpiece would be looking UP at the gable above the
main scene. (For the questions about whether the Deposition or Compianto was originally intended
for this altarpiece, see Rona Goffen, Giovanni Bellini, Yale, 1989; she thinks it was.) Normally in Renaissance art we would expect this story of the end of Christ's life to be juxtaposed with a story from the beginning, something like the Nativity or the Adoration of the Child, so that we could compare the alpha and the omega, the beginning and end, and learn from that something about the length of Christ's whole life. This altarpiece, instead, places the image of death above a Coronation scene that doubles as a sacred conversation piece with the four saints who are attending the Coronation. We are reminded of the sadness of Christ's death just above the joyful experience of Mary's crowning as Queen of Heaven. Instead of a measurement of Christ's days on earth, though, the altarpiece is a reminder of the shortness of life and how successes such as the crowning of a Queen should be enjoyed while they last.
 
The gable panel and the predella panels (on the bottom of the altarpiece) tell stories of the saints depicted in the main altarpiece and they contribute to the emphasis on the importance of CARPE DIEM as a theme for the altarpiece. When the gable was together with the Coronation, the whole altarpiece would have been very large, as shown below in a conjoining that took place in 1989 for a special exhibit.


The date of the altarpiece has been disputed by scholars since there are no extant documents
to tell us anything about the commission, but it is generally dated between 1471 and 1483. In my blog entry on the Coronation, I have given reasons to date it to 1475. We do know that it was to be placed in the Franciscan church of San Francesco in Pesaro on the main altar, which explains why Saint Francis appears in the main section and the predella. I think Costanzo Sforza had the altarpiece made in celebration of his own wedding which took place over five days in May of 1475. 

The predella panels are wonderful scenes to be studied in and of themselves.

From the left the subjects are:

     Killing of dragon St. Paul's        St. Peter's      Nativity   St. Jerome     St. Francis    St.Terence
     by St. George       Conversion    Crucifixion                    Flagellation   Stigmata

The landscape runs in a continuous sweep behind the figures in the predella scenes and gives them
a coherent whole. The two saints furthest left and right are warrior saints meant to remind us of
Costanzo Sforza's career as a condottiere, while the five scenes in the center correspond to the
saints directly above, that is, St. Paul's Conversion for St. Paul, St. Peter's Crucifixion for St. Peter,
the holy family for Mary and Christ above, St. Jerome's self-flagellation for St. Jerome, and The
Stigmatization of St. Francis for St. Francis above.
From the left:
Killing of dragon by St. George:

Both this scene, where George breaks his lance in the dragon on behalf of the Princess who stands behind on the left, as well as the next scene of St. Paul's Conversion, feature a horse who rises on his
back legs in the same manner as the horse does in a medal of Costanzo Sforza of 1475:

 St. Paul's Conversion

This Conversion scene is set below the figure of St. Paul in the Coronation. In the predella panel Paul is on the ground, having been hit by the truth of the light so forceful that he is knocked from his horse. He looks up to the vision of Christ in the sky. From this moment on Paul is no longer a Roman Jew; he instantly becomes a Christian believer. He is wearing the armor of the Roman army since he was a Roman soldier before his conversion.

In the main altarpiece Paul stands next to St. Peter, so the subsequent predella panel is the story of the Crucifixion of St. Peter:

 

St. Peter was crucified upside down because he didn't think he was worthy to be crucified in the same manner as Christ. His upside-down Crucifixion takes place in front of a building meant to resemble Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome so that the viewer will understand where he was martyred. What is unusual in this scene, however, is that not only is Peter being crucified, but he is being stoned by several men, one of whom, dressed in pink and seen from the back, holds a stone in his right hand.

As Rona Goffen has pointed out in her book on Bellini, the Stoning of St. Peter is not a story from

the usual stories about St. Peter's life recounted in Acts in the Bible. She astutely connects this

predella stoning to the stoning that took place in 1471 in Rome of the newly elected Pope in that year,

Pope Sixtus IV. Sixtus survived, but it is probable that Costanzo Sforza was present in Rome in that

year and witnessed the stoning of the successor of St. Peter. Goffen suggests there are two portraits

over on the left of the scene, but she does not guess at the identities of them:

I think the dark-haired fellow, who looks around 27 years old, is Costanzo Sforza himself, and the cardinal standing next to him in red is Giuliano della Rovere, later Pope Julius II, a great patron of the arts even when he was Cardinal. As Sixtus IV's nephew, Giuliano would have been present at the stoning of his uncle, too. If we reverse the profile portrait of Costanzo on his medal cast in 1475, it 

looks much like the dark-haired man here. 

 

And Giuliano della Rovere's medal portrait resembles the Cardinal in the Stoning scene.

 

Costanzo and Giuliano are related by marriage, and Giuliano would have come to Costanzo's wedding in 1475, four years after they both saw the Pope being stoned in Rome. This panel unites them as witness figures in an important event for the papacy.

The next predella panel is more peaceful, the Nativity underneath Mary and Christ in the main altarpiece.

Mary and Joseph in this scene look down at their newborn child in front of a manger with an ox and ass, and behind them winds a river through a lovely valley landscape. A star with red seraphim can be seen in the open gable of the manger with the sky beyond.

The next two saints in the main altar also have predella stories associated with them; they are St. Jerome and St. Francis:

Flagellation of St. Jerome. Out in the desert Jerome fasted and beat himself with a stone on his chest to atone for sins. In Bellini's version he kneels in white before a simple cross in front of a cave. In one hand he holds a stone and hits his chest with the other.

 St. Francis' Stigmatization follows St. Jerome's self-flagellation:

St. Francis, in the story, was kneeling and praying near a church with his fellow monk, St. Leo, here shown reading a book on the left. They were in La Verna, the cliff location where Francis went to live with his followers. A red seraphim approached in the shape of Christ on the cross, and rays of light

from each of Christ's wounds struck Francis in the same places: one on each hand, one on each foot,

and one on the chest. Francis suffered the pain from the piercing wounds until his death two years after the event. Bellini does paint a church behind the saint, but it is not like any church at La Verna. Instead Bellini painted what he knew: the largest Franciscan church in Venice, its apse end with Gothic pointed arch windows, circled in the drawing below. Bellini reassures the viewer that this

predella is about St. Francis by painting in the Venetian church dedicated to Francis.

 

The final predella panel is of St. Terenzio, who holds a white flag with red cross and a model of Costanzo Sforza's castle, the Rocca Costanza, as it is known as today.

As explained in the previous blog, the presence of Costanzo Sforza's pet project begun in the same year he got married, 1475, seals the altarpiece, too, as one of his projects, and gives us the name of
one of the commissioners. The sea that can be seen in the medal for Costanzo's Castle is still very close to the Rocca Costanza in Pesaro today:

Two guardian saints framing stories of suffering in the predella, with a reminder of death, a memento mori, high above the altarpiece in the gable. 

 

Only two parts of this masterpiece are cheerful: the central subject:

and the predella panel of the Nativity:

They punctuate in the center the concern for death and suffering of the rest of the altar.

The theme of seizing life because it does not last long is displayed by sandwiching the joyful panels between ones that emphasize how hard life can be.
And yet what Bellini puts in the center with the largest figures is the happy story of the Coronation.

And the beautiful Venetian light he throws on the scene from the left so that it lights up the golden
orb on Christ's gown tells us that he is, ultimately, an optimist. Worth a trip to Pesaro to be reminded
of life's glories.

BELLINI's PESARO ALTARPIECE (A)

BELLINI'S PALA di PESARO - PESARO ALTARPIECE

Giovanni Bellini's Pala di Pesaro is an altarpiece that was originally made for the church of San Francesco in Pesaro, Italy. (Not to be confused with Titian's Pesaro Altarpiece made for the Venice church of the Frari. In Titian's painting Pesaro is the name of the family; in the Bellini painting, Pesaro is the name of the city near Rimini.) The Bellini painting is now in the Museo Civico di Pesaro. It was one of the paintings stolen by Napoleon in his 1797 raiding of Italy's artworks, so for a time it resided in France, but now it is back in Pesaro, albeit incomplete as the top gable painting by Bellini has gone to the Vatican Museums. The altarpiece is exhibited now like this with the top missing.

Originally it looked like this:

I will devote one blog entry (A) to the main altarpiece, a second (B) to the gable painting and the predella paintings.
An early Bellini work from around 1475, the main altarpiece subject is the Coronation of the Virgin, that is, Jesus crowning his Mother, while four saints stand beside them.
 
Christ sits on the same marble throne with his mother and places a crown on her head with his right hand as he looks towards her and beyond. She has her eyes closed and crosses her hands over her chest in an acceptance position. (The central marble step contains Bellini's signature, not visible in these photos, just below Christ's right foot in the white section.) The Coronation is meant to be a happy joining of Mother and Son after death, a reversal of a Pieta. They both have serious but content faces in this scene. They both seem the same age as well, eternally young.

The four saints from left to right are:
               St. Paul        St. Peter                                                                         St. Jerome    St. Francis 

Paul holds a sword in his right hand and a book in his left. Peter is reading a book, Jerome as well, while Francis, with eyes closed, holds a book and pen, and shows his stigmata (the wounds mirroring Christ's wounds.) St. Jerome looks somewhat like San Zaccaria in Bellini's later 1505 altarpiece in Venice (see other blog entry,) but in this altarpiece we know the saint must be Jerome because Jerome's beating of himself with a stone in his ascetic desert life is the narrative chosen for the predella panel beneath him.The presence of Francis on the right is understandable in the major Franciscan church in Pesaro, San Francesco, as a way of indicating the original location of the altarpiece, but the other saints have been chosen for other reasons. St. Peter may suggest papal input for the painting, and Peter is often represented with Paul as a pair. Jerome, however, is unaccounted for unless he is a name saint of one of the donors or church authorities.

None of the saints look at the Madonna or Christ and none look out at the spectator. They all seem self-absorbed and self-contained, just as Mary and Christ are contained within the frame behind them.
          Through a window in that frame, the throne of Mary and Christ, Bellini painted a landscape with the towers and walls of the city of Gradara, a town just north of Pesaro on the route south from Venice. In fact, the landscape near Gradara looks much like the continuing landscape in Bellini's painting; I disagree with Rona Goffen that the framed town is set in heaven and that the landscape on either side of the frame is not contiguous with Gradara. On the contrary, if you compare the actual landscape around Gradara with the painted one behind the shoulders of the saints, it is very similar, suggesting that Bellini set the Coronation on earth.

Gradara was a town bequeathed to Costanzo Sforza, the Lord of Pesaro, in 1473, by his father in the year in which his father died. His father, a condottiere like his son, had been given the town by Pope Pius II as a reward for defending the pope. Since Pesaro is the town next over from Gradara along the sea, the suggestion in the painting is that the Coronation took place at Pesaro. Gradara is present in the altarpiece, then, not just as a way of indicating the place near where the altarpiece was meant to be installed, but also as a tribute to Costanzo, the Lord of Pesaro, as it was one of his major landholdings. 

We know this is Gradara because Gradara, as a town, still exists, and still is a walled medieval stronghold along the major route north/south on the east coast of Italy.The town has grown since the 15th century but the three towers shown in the painting are still marked out in modern views of the town, and the major road running up the middle of the town still exists.

 

Gradara is important for another reason, too. It was known in the 15th century as the location of the story in Dante's Inferno of Paolo and Francesca, the lovers who were killed by the man who was the brother of Paolo and the husband of Francesca, Gianciotto. The passage in Canto V, 100-142, has memorable rhymed terzine in Italian describing how the lovers fell in love while reading about Lancelot and Guinevere.

"Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto
 di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse;
 soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto."

"One day we were reading for pleasure
about Lancelot and how love took hold of him;
we were alone and without any awareness of guilt." (trans. mine)

Francesca goes on to describe how they began to kiss, unable to help falling in love:

"la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.
Galeotto fu 'l libro e chi lo scrisse: 

quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.”

"His mouth kissed me all atremble.
Galahad was the book and the person who wrote it:
From that day forward we never read more." (trans. mine)

Because they committed adultery, Dante consigns them to the second circle of Hell, where they are forever together in horror. (He places their murderer, Gianciotto, in the ninth circle of Hell.)
 
The recognizable features of the town are painted here by Bellini on purpose.The Virgin represents the perfect Bride, and the crown given to her by Jesus just below the town resembles the encircling walls of Gradara punctuated by towers. We are meant, as viewers, to take note of this juxtaposition. The most famous bride of Gradara was faithless, while the Virgin is most faithful. The Virgin's head bowed in submission is given the gift of the kingdom of Heaven as opposed to that of Hell. Surely the message to women is clear, that following the Virgin's example will ensure a coronation and will keep them out of the eternal hellfire associated with Francesca. Gradara is placed in the altarpiece in homage to the Lord of Pesaro, but it was also meant as a reminder of the potential suffering in the afterlife for those who disrespect God's law.
         As we will see in the blog entry about the predella for this altarpiece, the probable patron of the altarpiece is Costanzo Sforza, the Lord of Pesaro from 1473-1483.

Since he took over the ownership of Pesaro and Gradara upon his father's death in 1473, the presence of Gradara in the altarpiece tells us a possible beginning year for the date of the altarpiece. The painting of Gradara in the background of the exact center of the main painting is also telling the viewer the date of the beginning of Costanzo's reign. His commissioning of this work by Bellini would be consistent with his own desire to advertise his new power in the region; the cityscape of Gradara stamps the altarpiece as his. Costanzo had big projects for his own rule of Pesaro and Gradara. Above is the medal he had cast with his profile as a condottiere (mercenary soldier) at the age of 27, in the mode of a Roman Emperor. The Latin inscription around the edge reads:Costantius Sfortia de Aragonia di Alessandros Pisaurens Princeps Aetatis Anni XXVII 

Costanzo Sforza of Aragona son of Lord Alessandro of Pesaro, Age in years, 27    

On the back of the medal he displays his skill on horseback, riding with armor, his dog alongside.

The date on this side of the medal is MCCCCLXXV, 1475. In that same year, 1475, Costanzo began construction on a huge castle in Pesaro called the Rocca Costanza. He had a medal cast to commemorate the eventual design of that castle which looked like this:

Castellum Costantium Pisaurense Salute Publicae, MCCCCLXXV, reads the inscription,dated 1475, inexoronabile. The Rocca Costanza still exists, and although the unfinished version is not quite the elaborate structure we see on the medal, the proximity to the sea is present today and in the medal.

 

And as if to clarify that the same patron who ordered the fortress ordered the altarpiece, the saint on the predella panel on the far right, St. Terence, holds a small model of the castle in his right hand:

It is as if Costanzo wants the people praying in front of the altarpiece to pray for the success of his building project, too. It seems likely, given the presentation of Gradara and the Rocca Costanza in the altarpiece, that Costanzo is the person who paid Bellini to paint these images for the Franciscan

church in Pesaro. If Costanzo receives Gradara in 1473 and begins building the Rocca in 1475, does it not then stand to reason that the altarpiece itself is dated from around the same time, with 1475 being the most likely date? And if that were not enough evidence for the date, we know something else about Costanzo from that particular year - HE DECIDES TO GET MARRIED in 1475, he TAKES A BRIDE. He marries Camilla Marzano d'Aragona.

          And what a wedding it was! Much like the royal weddings of today, it was the celebrity event

of the year. And fortunately we have documented evidence for what this wedding was like, a long, 5- day celebration that included the travel of the bride from an outlying village, Novilara, to Pesaro, and descriptions, both written and drawn, of the elaborate floats that were part of her journey as well as the floats for the celebrations once she reached the town. (See Jane Bridgeman, A Renaissance Wedding, The Celebration at Pesaro for the Marriage of Costanzo Sforza and Camilla Marzano d'Aragona, (26-30 May 1475), Studies in Medieval and Early Renaissance History, 2013.) A visit to

Novilara to retrace the steps of the bride can be rewarded with a view through an archway in the

town wall that looks back towards Pesaro and the sea:

         Because Costanzo was the brother of Battista Sforza, he was the brother-in-law of Federico da Montefeltro. His sister, Battista, shown here on the left in the Piero della Francesca portraits in the Uffizi, had died in 1472, so she was not at the wedding, but Federico, his brother-in-law, on the right, came

along with Federico's future

son-in-law's uncle, Giuliano della Rovere, the future Pope Julius II. 

While much of the wedding consisted of pagan deities displayed on carts and incorporated in plays performed for the wedding guests,

Luna (Moon)

Triumph of Love on float

Venus and Mercury on floats

Venus                                                                                Mars (God of War)
Sol (Sun)                                                                           Jupiter with his Cupbearer, Ganymede

the absence of Christian figures does not mean that Christian saints were not celebrated, too.
It just means that the appropriate celebration of Christ and his Bride with saints took place in the sacred space of the largest church in Pesaro, San Francesco, and that the Christian part of the celebration was acted out in Bellini's altarpiece there.
          To confirm this hypothesis, one only has to look at the floats or carts that were designed for
the wedding procession. The layering of fictive marble slabs set in inlaid steps that hold up the
thrones or seats for the deities is identical to the fictive marble slabs set in inlaid steps that hold up
the thrones for the Coronation of Mary in Bellini's altarpiece.

 

Even the medallions on the carts are repeated in the roundels on the throne:

                                                                         






And St. Terence's pedestal resembles the pedestals invented for the pagan figures:

While it might be possible that Bellini provided the designs for the pagan floats as well, it is enough to realize that the Coronation depicted on the main altarpiece as the Christian celebration subject must have been for Costanzo's wedding in 1475. The money would have been there (perhaps some from relatives of the groom,) the royal patron was from Pesaro, and a young new artist from Venice was brought down for the occasion.

Above the Coronation flies the dove of the Holy Spirit and cherubim (red) and angels hover in the
atmosphere.

For Italian Renaissance viewers these holy Christian figures could co-exist with the pagan deities and were all part of God's great panoply of spirits dedicated to love:

 

For them Camilla, the Bride, could even be conflated with the Virgin Mary for the occasion. Her

groom was making her Queen for the Day and was giving her the gift of Gradara and the Rocca

as her new residences.

Bellini's masterful rendering of this scene was just one of the joyous performances presented for
the couple's youthful celebration over five days in May.