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Giovanni Bellini's Pala di Pesaro is an altarpiece that was originally made for the church of San Francesco in Pesaro, Italy.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.