This text was published for the first time in 2001. It is reproduced here with some minor modifications
In mid
16th Century, the Florentine painter Agnolo Allori, nicknamed
Bronzino, painted the "Triumph of Venus and Cupid", now at the National
Gallery in London. Refined in its sophisticated erotic images and its eerie symbolism,
this painting is still widely known today. One element which has been much
discussed is the creature with a girl's face in the background. No Renaissance
artist had ever painted anything like that: it was something wholly alien
to the world of beautiful bodies which were the norm of the time. This
break with tradition may be linked to the excavations of Etruscan artifacts
which were being performed at that time. The main discovery and the focal
point of this Etruscan revival was the bronze statue known as the Chimaera
of Arezzo, dug out of the ground at about the same time when Bronzino was
painting his Venus. Bronzino's dark creature may have been influenced by
this Chimaera or by other Etruscan artworks.
This
is a personal interpretation of Bronzino's art and it does not pretend
to replace or to be in contrast with the previous works of distinguished art
historians. However, as somebody said "no interpretation of a painting
can be wrong", there should be space in the wide web also for these notes,
which maybe someone will find interesting or a source of further pleasure
in looking at these ancient works of art. You are free to copy, use,
integrate, transcript, insert, appropriate parts of this text or the
whole of it, if you quote me I will appreciate, if you do not quote
me ... enjoy. We do not own ideas, they own us. [A quote and an attitude from
Lorenzo Matteoli
on which the author fully agrees]. The author
is grateful to ms. Giselle Tiu for having suggested to him the possible
relation of Bronzino's painting with the Etruscan Chimaera.
The
Italian renaissance, beginning in 14th -15th century, saw the start of
the rediscovery of the Etruscans. Out of the ground, out of ancient Etruscan tombs there appeared
a wealth of vases, statuettes, urns, inscriptions, and manufacts of all
sorts. The Tuscan intellectuals who examined these objects found that the
Etruscan world was one of the precursors of the classical world which they
valued so much. They also found that the Etruscan world could have a political
meaning and as such it helped to create
a Tuscan "national" heritage that the dukes (and later grand-dukes) of
the ruling Medici family used to legitimate the existence of the Tuscan
state. The high point of this seriers of discoveries was the
Chimaera of Arezzo, dug out of the ground in 1553, something both unexpected
and impressive, surely impossible to ignore.
Nevertheless,
the encounter of the living Renaissance culture with the dead Etruscan
one was not an easy one. No matter how interested the Tuscans of the time
were in their Etruscan ancestors, it was hard for them to penetrate
a world so ancient and so remote. They had successfully assimilated Roman
and Greek classical art, where they had found a fertile ground in a vision
of the world that paralleled theirs in its refinement and concern about
human beauty. But the Etruscan vision was different, less refined, more
oriented towards religion and rituals, much more interlaced with a symbolic
view which involved creatures and subjects which were not at all "beautiful".
Refined and sophisticated as they were, Renaissance thinkers lacked the
cultural tools that would have permitted them to understand the basic tenets of the Etruscan
way of thinking, their civilization defined by their contemporaries the
"most religious one" and yet religious in a manner that was difficult to
understand two millennia afterwards.
Mid 16th
century, when the Chimaera of Arezzo was discovered, was in several ways
the apotheosis of the Renaissance, perhaps its last great season. In mid 16th
Century, the "Mannerist" school of painting was flourishing. The great
masters of the time, Pontormo, Bronzino, Vasari, Rosso Fiorentino, and
others had refined the painting techniques developed
in earlier times: they had perspective, they had color, they had expression,
they had anatomy, everything they needed to reproduce reality in perfect
detail. But they had little interest in expressing concepts which went beyond
the representation of the human body in its various aspects. It was in
this period of delicate refinement that roaring monsters such as the Chimaera
started to appear, the product of a very different civilization.
Renaissance artists were interested, for instance, both Vasari
and Cellini report the discovery of the Chimaera of Arezzo in
their books. But they had no way to integrate these creatures in their artwork,
there was no place among the finely crafted bodies they painted for these
rough, screaming monsters.
For
instance, here is how the two civilizations interpreted the same myth,
that of Medusa. On the left the head of Medusa from an Etruscan temple, perhaps from the 6th Century b.c. On the right, Medusa in Cellini's interpretation
of mid 16th Century. The interpretation of Cellini
is is typical of the Renaissance age and it is centered on
the beauty of the human figure. Not only the head of Medusa is fully human,
but also the body, lying at the feet of the winning hero Perseus, is shown
as that of a finely formed (and of course headless) woman.
Cellini was hardly
an exception. Renaissance artists seem to have had
little familiarity with animals and monsters, and even less with those
composite creatures made out of different animals (the Chimaera, for instance)
which were typical of much more ancient times. Think for instance, of Michelangelo, who seems to have never sculpted an animal. And this is
valid not just for figurative art. Think
of Boccaccio's Decameron, hundreds of pages of what is perhaps the masterpiece
of Renaissance literature. Practically the only animal which ever crosses
its pages as a protagonist is a falcon which has, in any case,
a definite "medieval" flavor, one where the medieval concept of the value
of birds of the food for humans is the basis of the story.
One of the reasons for the lack of familiarity
with the animal world was perhaps that the culture of the
age of the Renaissance
was an urban one, much more than the previous medieval one and perhaps
even more than our own. In a world which had only modest means of transportation
and no way to record images, those who lived in cities lived also in an
artificial, human made, context, even more artificial than today's one.
In the Renaissance, as it had been in the middle ages, the contrast between
"town" and "country" was sharp and physically marked by the town walls.
What was outside remained outside, wild creatures and monsters haunting
fields and woods. Inside it was a wholly human world made out of stone:
no concept there was of "green spaces".
But
Renaissance artists not only had no familiarity with animals in general,
they had no familiarity with animals as symbols. Medieval painters
had filled their works with animal symbols, they had the knowledge and
the mastery of a world of myths expressed by graphic icons: animal images
had a meaning that could be read just as we read printed words today. So,
out of medieval architecture there sprouted out a lively bestiary of animals
and monsters: gargoyles, dragons and chimeras. Think of the way the evangelists
were represented in medieval iconography: Mark, Luke and John, they all
had their "animal spirit": lion, ox and eagle. Often, just the
image of the animal was sufficient to indicate the evangelist without any
need for writing a name. Christ himself could be represented as a lion,
or a panther, and sometimes as an eagle. And the medieval attitude was just
a modern version of a much more ancient one, that of hunters and gatherers,
people who saw the animal world as a reflection of their own. Stories and paintings
from these societies are full of animals changing into men and women and
of women and men changing into animals. It is a world of animal spirits,
of changelings and tricksters which assume different shapes to beguile
humans. It is a world where the great forces of nature, storm, wind and
thunder are the emanation of the storm beast, the mythical creature pulling
God's chariot. A creature of many names, one of which is known - sometimes
- as the Chimaera. A creature which has nothing human, but
one that generates symbols all over. Symbols which are graphically explicit and
which were surely readable and
had a clear meaning at the time when the chimaera of Arezzo was cast, back perhaps
to the 5th century b.c.
By the time of the Renaissance, the meaning of these symbols had been lost,
so Etruscan art was difficult to decipher and its effect
on Renaissance art remained small. Art historians of today
believe to have found some evidence of this influence, for instance in
Donatello's David and in Michelangelo's Vatican Pietà. That is surely
possible, but these influences remained marginal and only related to features
such as somatic
traits of the figures and the way the composition was laid out. Nothing,
or almost nothing, of the complex symbolism of ancient Etruscan art seems
to have resurfaced during the Renainssance. However, these two different
worlds, remote from each other as they seem to be, may have met briefly
in one of Bronzino's paintings, in what is perhaps his best known work:
the "Triumph of Venus and Cupid".
The Florentine
painter and poet Agnolo di Cosimo (1503-1572) is better known with his nickname
"Bronzino" (because of the bronze color of his skin). He was perhaps the
most refined and accomplished of all mannerist painters. He is well known
today for his fine portraits, figures painted with great mastery and effect.
Some have seen a deep meaning and an "inner tension" in Bronzino's portraits,
but if these portraits have a symbolic meaning it is not at all explicit
and it remains
nowadays very difficult for us to penetrate. However, in his mature years,
around mid 16th century, Bronzino painted a few very different
paintings: not portraits but mythological scenes with plenty
of symbolic content. Of these, one stands out as a true masterpiece: the
"Allegory of Venus and Cupid".
As a
painting, the "allegory" is indeed impressive. When you look at it, first
you notice the bright figures in the foreground. There is love, there is
sex, there are beautiful bodies dancing, interlaced in a hug. But there
is more, this painting is teeming with symbols, something wholly new and
unusual for a Renaissance work of art. Here, objects of symbolic value
are scattered around or held by the figures: two masks (man and woman?)
lie on the ground. Venus herself holds a pomegranate (a symbol of fertility)
and an arrow (a symbol of death and of love at the same time). Old age
and young age look at each other in the upper area, while the hourglass
marks the passage of time. Youth and old age appear also as masks at the
bottom left, with a curious reflection in the empty head of the young man
on the upper left. Sadness screams on the left while happiness dances on
the right. The dove of peace on the bottom left contrasts with Venus and
Cupid who seem, instead, to be fighting each other. The painting is actually full
not only of symbols but of couples of symbols each opposing the other.
And an evident theme of the painting is that the joy of love is contrasted
with sadness, pain, and old age incoming
And then,
there is the dark creature in the background. What is it, exactly? The
position and posture of the creature seem to have been designed expressly
to stir curiosity. You need to look carefully, almost you are tempted to
look from a side of the canvas in order to get a better glimpse of the
creature - a girl? - behind the young "putto". Yes, a girl, with
a lion's body, snake's scales and tail and curiously inverted arms. She is holding
objects which critics have recognized as a honeycomb and a sting (again,
two opposite symbols, sweetness and pain).
Bronzino
had never painted anything like that and no Renaissance painter ever had,
either. What we have here is an interpretation of one of the
ancient mythological creatures made out of mixtures of human and animal
bodies. It seems that Bronzino had in mind something related to the
Sphynx, more precisely to the Greek sphinx: a creature with wings, lion's body and
woman's head and torso (the Egyptian sphinx: male head on a lion's body, was something
very different). The relation of Bronzino's creature with the Greek myth of the sphinx has
already been noted (see p. 214 of D: Parker's "Bronzino, Renaissance painter
as Poet, Cambridge 2000" with the references to the work of J. F: Moffit
in "Renaissance Quarterly").
But if it is a sphinx, it is a curious one that
Bronzino is painting, for the classical Greek sphinx always had wings and sometimes
woman's breasts, both not appearing in Bronzino's image. Then, the classical sphinx had
no scales on the back and only rarely a snake's tail, both things instead well visible
in the painting.
And it is not just a question of anatomical details appearing or missing. Also in terms
of posture, shape and setting, we have here something completely different from
the classical Greek sphinx.
In general, this is hardly surprising, at Bronzino's time archaeologists were just
beginning their excavations which - over a few centuries of work - were to lead
to the rediscovery of the way a sphinx was depicted in ancient Greece. But then,
supposing that Bronzino had in mind to paint a sphinx, what could have been his
sources of inspiration? And, besides, are we sure that what he painted was really
meant to be a sphinx?
There is no doubt that Bronzino had access to literary descriptions (Apollodorus, for instance)
of
the sphinx and of other ancient creatures as well,
but in terms of
images he had basically no other sources
than those coming out of excavations from Etruscan sites. Today, it is extremely
difficult to say what exactly could have inspired him. Our museums are
stocked with objects found over at least 5 centuries of excavations. The dating
of many of them, especially of early finds, is often uncertain.
Which ones could have passed into the
hands of a Renaissance painter is almost impossible to say. We can only say that
the sphinx, although not a very popular motif in Etruscan art, does exist in a few
artifacts we have. We can also say that the way
the Sphinx was represented in Etruscan art seems to be about the same as in the Greek
art we are more familiar with. But, as we said, the Greek sphinx is a winged creature,
rather different than the wingless one Bronzino painted in his "Venus".
At this point, we could explore the idea that
for his painting Bronzino was mixing up elements of more than
a single mythological creature and that the dark creature in the painting
was inspired not just
by the sphinx, but also by the classical Chimera concept. The Chimera seems
to have been more common than the sphinx in Etruscan art and,
as we all know, it did not have wings. The Chimaera had a snake's tail
and in all the representations
we have the snake's scales extend all the way to the lion's body.
The Chimaera is also, normally, wingless. So we can say that
there are at least some chimaeric elements in Bronzino's creature.
There
is a curious coincidence here: the closeness of the date when the Venus painting
was made and when the Chimaera of Arezzo
was discovered. The possibility
that Bronzino's creature was actually inspired by the newly discovered
Etruscan sculpture is intriguing. Note also that when the Chimaera was
discovered the tail was not found attached to the body, but broken nearby.
That fits very well with the tail of the creature in the Venus painting,
which seems not to be attached to the body. So, we know that the Chimaera
of Arezzo was discovered in 1553 and taken to Firenze perhaps in that same
year. Did Bronzino have a chance to see the it while it
was in the Duke's studio in Firenze? Almost certainly, yes, it is
at least unlikely that such an accomplished and renown artist as Bronzino
would be kept away from such a treasure just discovered. Did he ever have
a chance to see it before he had completed the "Venus"? Of course
that depends on when the Venus was exactly made.
Something about the dating of the painting can be found from the brief mention given by Vasari in
his
"lives" published in 1568. We have here just a sentence where Vasari says
says that the painting "fu mandato al
re di Francia, Francesco.", "it was sent to the king of France, Francis". Now,
whose Francis was Vasari referring to? Art critics normally associate the painting
to King
Francis 1st who died in 1547. If he is the king to whom the painting was
sent,
clearly Bronzino could not have been inspired by the Chimaera of Arezzo, which was
discovered
at least 6 years later.
However, there was another king Francis
in France in that period, Francis II, grandson of the first,
who reigned from 1559 to 1560. Bronzino was alive and still active during the brief
reign
of Francis II, so
he could well have been the Francis Vasari was referring to. In this case Bronzino
would have
had plenty of chances to see the Chimaera of Arezzo in Firenze much earlier on.
Vasari is normally
a reliable source, but we can't even exclude that in the great mass of data that he
reported in his "lives" he might have made a bit of confusion and refer to still
another king, the son of Francis 1st, Henry 2nd, who reigned
from 1547 until his death in 1559. And there would seem to be plenty of reasons
for Henry 2nd, to
be befriended by Cosimo, duke of Tuscany. Among many other things, Henry had
married a relative of Cosimo, Caterina de' Medici.
We might also think that the painting was initially commissioned for
Henry 2nd but that the death of the king had caught Bronzino with his painting still
unfinished. Then the painting was sent to the next king, Francis II.
About the problem of dates, we can also mention that some sources maintain
that the Chimaera of Arezzo was actually discovered much earlier than officially
reported, but that the discovery was kept secret (or even the Chimaera
re-buried) because of some "superstitious terror" that had overtaken the
discoverers. If that had been the case, there would have been a chance
for Bronzino to see the statue much earlier than in 1553
So, all these possibilities and the coincidence in the dates are suggestive hints
but, unfortunately,
we will never be able to
prove that Bronzino was influenced for his painting by a specific Etruscan piece,
and in particular by the one we call "Chimera of Arezzo".
Nevertheless, the line of reasoning we have been following
does not critically depend on a specific chimera image.
We said that Bronzino could have found inspiration
only in Etruscan art when
he painted his creature in the "Venus", and for that he may well have had
other Chimeras around. The Renaissance was a time of great interest in ancient art and many ancient artifacts were excavated. In ancient times, Chimeras were commonly represented with features similar to those of the Chimera of Arezzo, and it is perfectly possible that Bronzino may have seen another ancient Chimera before 1548.
So, we
have this creature in Bronzino's painting which we may take as in part as a sphinx and
in part as a Chimera. We may ask at this point what it was supposed to mean.
As a dark monster, whatever it may be, it could be taken as a generic symbol
of death. But the creature that Bronzino painted is so detailed and so
evidently deeply thought out that it has to be linked to some very specific idea.
If it was a Chimaera - or at least it had elements of a Chimaera - what
was it supposed to be a symbol of? And here we arrive to a surprise. Yes,
there is a logic in having just a Chimaera in this painting, and
to have it exactly where it is. To arrive to understand this point will
take some reasoning.
First
a question: in general what is that a Chimaera symbolizes? Answer: it depends.
It depends on the age you are considering. The Chimaera is a very ancient
myth, perhaps one of the most ancient occidental myths. Originally conceived
perhaps as early as in Sumerian times, it had been a symbol of the power
of destruction and of fertility of storms. For classical Roman writers, such
as Plautus or Servius, the ancient Chimaera had become already something
baffling, something to be explained as a naïve representation of a
volcano. But the concept had enough inner power and fascination that it
simply could not be explained away. It survived the middle ages as a demon
and - sometimes – as an allegory of woman as an evil creature. And, of
course, there is the meaning that we all know: Chimaera, a figment of the
imagination, something that can't exist but in our dreams. But all this
does not help us much in interpreting the Venus painting, the question
we must ask is another. What did the Chimaera mean for Bronzino?
The answer may lie in Bronzino's own words in the complex allegorical poem
that he wrote around 1552-1555 titled "Il Piato".
The relation
of Bronzino's poem with the Venus painting has been already noted by Deborah
Parker in her book on Bronzino. The "Il Piato" (the title meaning "The quarrel")
is a long poem describing the dream voyage of the main character, Bronzino
himself, over the body of the giant Arcigrandone (the Great Large one).
In the final chapter of the Piato we have a description of an encounter
with a "great woman" who turns out to be a monster, something which under
many respects may describe the girl creature of the Venus painting. But
the fact that the text corresponds to the painting still does not tell
us what exactly Bronzino had in mind, for this we must try to understand
the inner meaning of the "Il Piato". The poem is full of complex allegories,
many of which have a clear sexual (and specifically homosexual) content.
And, yes, the Piato does mention chimeras, and specifically mentions the
concept in verse 163 of chapter 8 where Bronzino says that only after the
end of all quarrels it is possible to get to the "Chimera". What does that
mean? Simple, for Bronzino, and in general during the Renaissance, the
concept of Chimaera had a double meaning. It could be used with the meaning
of "grotesque", more or less as in our times, but there was another meaning
to it, and it was homosexuality. And we know that Bronzino was homosexual,
actually for almost all of his life he was a lover of his teacher Pontormo.
Of course,
the ancient never thought of the Chimaera in terms of a symbol of homosexuality,
but it is easy to see the chain of reasoning that led Renaissance people
to see it that way (occasionally it is still used with that meaning today).
About in every time and every place on earth, homosexuality was widely
practiced, and the Italian Renaissance made no exception. However, the
moral vision of the time considered homosexuality as something "against
nature" a monstrosity, something patched up in an unnatural and therefore
impossible way. In his times, Bronzino could not explicitly
mention, nor represent, homosexuality and so he had to recur to allegories,
double meanings, and symbols such as the Chimaera (he also used the
owl as a symbol of sodomy and homosexuality).
Now,
perhaps, we have the key for the interpretation of the girl-monster and
of the whole Venus painting. We have already seen that the painting is
symbol-charged and that each symbol seems to have an opposite. So, our
Chimaera is symbolically opposite to the main figure in the painting, Venus
herself. Note how the Chimaera-girl is placed in an "opposite space" to
Venus, the woman. Venus is in full light, the chimera in near darkness,
Venus is fully shown, the Chimera is half hidden, Venus is beautiful and perfect,
the Chimaera is ugly and deformed. And, finally, the Chimaera and Venus
may stand for two opposite visions of love: gay and straight. This was probably
the main meaning that Bronzino saw and meant, even though this subtle meaning
probably escaped even his contemporaries.
The
opposition Venus-Chimaera makes for most of the fascination and the depth of
the painting, a fascination that goes well beyond the formal beauty of
the bodies shown and beyond the evident, but somewhat banal, dualistic
symbolism, pleasure and pain, young age and old age, sadness and happiness,
etcetera. As we said, Bronzino was probably well in his 50s when he painted
the Venus and this is an age of introspection and soul searching for many
men. The whole way of seeing the world for a Renaissance man was to seek
beauty, perfection, elegance, sophistication. But with old age approaching,
you can't ignore the presence of corruption, death, of that dark part of
ourselves that lurks behind and below. That was something which
had to be expressed somehow
in a painting which was destined to one of the kings of France,
rich and powerful as they were, but that at some moment had to reach, they too,
the end of their pleasures.
The earlier masters of the middle ages had painted dead and decaying bodies, but painting such subjects was against the sensibility and the training of a Renaissance
painter who had spent his life drawing and painting beautiful bodies. So,
Bronzino did not paint death and decay, but symbols of death and
decay. Hence all those double-meaning objects, all meaning, in the
end, simply the dual nature of life and death. And with all that, there came
the girl-sphinx-chimera. A symbol deeply complex,
something so original and unexpected in a Renaissance painting that Bronzino
must have placed a tremendous amount of work and of thought in it. Writers,
and Bronzino was one, tend to have a character who is themselves in their
stories, perhaps this is true also for painters in their paintings.
Perhaps this dark creature
is a representation of Bronzino himself. Did he see himself as a monster?
Perhaps, and in a way this would have
been unavoidable in a society that condemned "sodomy" as a sin, as a depravation,
as something against God and human nature at the same time. So, this mix
of animal and human, of beauty and ugliness. Note how sweet is the face
of the little creature, how delicate her hands: an angel locked into a
monstrous body. This strange little girl bearing a honeycomb and a sting
may be a message passed to us over the centuries, a message telling us
of a life of sweetness and pain, of joy and suffering, of beauty and ugliness.
A message expressed in symbols, coded in such a way that perhaps Bronzino
himself would have had difficulties in expressing it in words. A message,
however, that we feel we can still understand after so many years.
Renaissance
in Italy was a time of great hopes, but mannerism was its twilight. With
the fading of 16th Century there came hard times for Tuscany:
wars, epidemics, and economic crisis. After Bronzino's generation, the
school of the mannerists, the last great one of the Renaissance, faded
away. It was replaced with a new generation much concerned
with the newly fashionable "grotesque" style, where paintings were full of
mythological monsters and weird creatures. Perhaps the new school was influenced
by the Etruscan art more than their Mannerist predecessors had been, even
though they, too, never managed to grasp the real meaning of the Etruscan artwork they
may have been trying to reproduce. As art, it was spectacular, but it was far, far
away from the depth and breadth that
Renaissance art had been. With that, Tuscany was gradually ceasing to be
the center of intellectual life, it had been and went on to live a quiet
life in the suburbs of Europe ever after. Centuries later, both the roaring
bronze lion found in Arezzo and the dark creature in the background of
the Venus painting are still for us to look at and wonder. They share the
fact of having been made (or dug out of the ground) within a few years
from each other, perhaps just a coincidence or perhaps they share much
more than that. About Bronzino - angel in a deformed body - of whether
at the end of his life he had found his Chimaera, we cannot say.
