Week 5: Venetian Colour.

“Venetian Colour,” Colorito and Modern Colour

"We see these admirable works after three hundred years of varnish, accidents, and after repairs more harmful to them than the original damage."[1] E. Delacroix.

 Giovanni Bellini, Madonna of the Meadow, National Gallery, London, oil on canvas, transferred from wood, 67 x 86 cm.

Comparisons of Venetian blues in London NG paintings: Bellini (Madonna of the Meadow); Workshop of Bellini ( Madonna); Cima (Madonna). Thanks to Gareth Hawker.

 Bernardo Daddi, Crucifixion, 1345-48, Lindenau-Museum, Altenburg, Tempera on wood, 58 x 28 cm (with frame).

 Bartolomeo Vivarini, Pala di San Marco (Triptych of St Mark), 1474, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, Tempera on panel, 165 x 68 cm (central), 165 x 57 cm (wings).

We are hampered in our knowledge of Venetian colour by the scarcity of texts on the “science of colour” in Venice, not to mention that the historical picture has been obscured by enemies of the paintings: climate, wear and tear, and as Delacroix’s comment reminds us, restorers. Of the Venetian scholars who wrote on colour, mainly Ludovico Dolce and Paolo Pino, their books lack the coherence to be classified as a unified Venetian colour theory. Before setting out the goods, so to speak, a caveat emptor is in order: there is a crucial difference between what modern scholars, curators and restorers believe to be Venetian colour, and what Dolce and Pino thought it was.  At the heart of this problem is the distinction between the restorer’s notion of colour and the 16^th century idea of colorito. In 1549, Pino stressed that using colours for their beauty alone was a way of dazzling the viewer, but unless they were used appropriately, they were just a substitute for the skill of the artist. And in 1557, Titian’s friend, Dolce, described how the artist used colours naturalistically without artifice or ornamentation. It is vitally important to acknowledge this distinction between colour- as modern restorers view it- and colorito as explained by 16^th century Venetians because the way colour has been presented to the modern public in museums has led to a misleading idea of the nature of “Venetian colour.” As Charles Hope has demonstrated, the naivety of restorers has had consequences, not only for the condition of paintings themselves, but also for their reception by the museum-going public. ^[2] Though Vasari certainly promoted this view, restoration strategies have planted in the public’s mind the idea that colour was more important to Venice than other schools of Italian painting. However, writing in the Genius of Venice catalogue in 1983, the curator John Steer pointed out that “if this exhibition were of Florentine rather than Venetian painting, the colours would be more brighter, more variegated in hue and altogether more dazzling than what we see before us.”[3]

Venetian Colour in Situ.

One way of tackling the problem of “Venetian colour” is to investigate the dialogues and debates about colorito and other concepts in the renaissance. Another is to look for the origins of the phenomenon of Venetian colour in the physical and geographical setting in which the painting originated taking into account the interplay between colour, architecture, space and the warp and weft of daily ritual and customs. This was the approach taken by Paul Hills in his appropriately titled Venetian Colour of 1999, which strove to define how Venice’s lagoon situation contributed to the Venetian school of painting by examining not only paintings but glass, marble, mosaic and painted architecture. In his novella written in 1912, Thomas Mann said that to come into Venice via the railway station was to enter the palace by the back door.[4] The metaphor is apt: Venice is one gigantic building whose foundations rest on the water, the city of painters in a lagoon. But perhaps it is more accurate to see water as Venice’s “walls”, since unlike other Italian cities, such as Florence, Venice is not built on solid ground; there is always a sense of flow; the air circulates around objects; the maritime themed paintings in the galleries give the impression of a swaying motion born of artists gazing at the lapping waters of the city. Playing on this idea of an unstable foundation contrasted with the city of the Medici, Paul Hills observes: “Landlocked Florence would be the home of Brunelleschian linear perspective centred on the unmoving observer, whereas the seafaring Venetians would eventually feel at home with representations that allow for a moving eye…”[5] If we extend this fluidity to Venetian life and space, it could be argued that Venice  is porous in nature: outside and inside are not clearly demarcated; buildings within paintings in galleries remind one of the real structures outside in the streets and squares.^[6] Comparisons can also be made between the colour in the paintings and that of the hues of buildings outside, with the aim of showing how the painting grew out of physical conditions, a lagoon location.

Venetian Colour and Sculpture.

Michelangelo, David, 1504, Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence, Marble, height 434 cm.

Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, c. 1510, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, Oil on canvas, 108 x 175 cm.

Giovanni d’ Alemagna, Saint Apollonia attacking an Idol, c. 1450, National Gallery of Art, Washington, oil on panel, 60 x 34 cm. 

Tomb of the Doge Michele Morosini, 1382, Marble and mosaic, Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice.

If the ideal kind of art to a Florentine is a free-standing statue like Donatello’s or Michelangelo’s David, then the equivalent for a Venetian would be a reclining nude in the manner of Titian and Giorgione. The “four-squareness of the human figure” (Hills) epitomised in the Florentine sculpture was not part of the Venetian aesthetic: instead of solidly fixed sculpture, Venetians preferred to use sculpture in a playful and illusionistic way.[7] After all, Venice is not a city which is built “four-square” like Florence, and is more spontaneous and therefore subject to the “pleasure principle.”[8] If Florence was the city of solemn stone, the severe dun colour of Palazzo Vecchio, Venice was a carnival of dancing colours such as pink, vermilion and blue to be seen on such buildings as St Mark’s and the Ducal Palace.  Moreover, sculpture was the preferred art of the Florentines and it is no surprise that rather than producing its own stone workers, Venice drew on the skills of artists like Sansovino from Florence, since the solidity of sculpture was contrary to the Venetian aesthetic. Sometimes colour was used in Venetian art to mark differences not only between architecture and sculpture, but also ideological viewpoints: in Giovanni d’ Alemagna’s doctrinaire St Apollonia attacking an Idol, startling pinks and reds- Christian polychrome- contrast with the white of the pagan sculpture; this is colour in the service of ideology: the pinks, reds and yellows imply the zealotry of the saint, curiously at odds with the chaste monochrome of the object of her intolerance.

The Narratives of Colour.

Giovanni Bellini, Coronation of the Virgin, c. 1471-74, Museo Civico, Pesaro, central panel, 262 x 240 cm

Giovanni Bellini, The Transfiguration, c. 1480, Naples, Museo di Capodimento, oil on panel, 115 x 150 cm.

Andrea Mantegna, The Adoration of the Shepherds, after 1450, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, tempera on canvas, trans. From panel, 40 x 55.6 cm (overall); 37.8 x 53 .3 cm

Cima da Conegliano, Madonna of the Orange Tree, c. 1496-98, Venice, Accademia, oil on panel, 212 x 139 cm.

Each colour in Venice has its own role in the story of how Venetian painting evolved against a backdrop of the aesthetic and technical shift from tempera to oil. The ascent of Bellini coincided with this moment, and whilst he was undoubtedly influenced by Antonello da Messina’s visit to Venice in 1475-6, the Sicilian painter only “brought home to Venetians what mastery of the oil technique could achieve” (Hills). It was Bellini who stood at the centre of the transition, not Antonello despite Vasari’s attempts to cast him in the role of artistic saviour of Venice. The work that marks Bellini’s adoption of oil is the Pesaro Coronation of the Virgin. In this altarpiece he used lead white, natural ultramarine, azurite, vermilion, red lake, copper resinate, lead-tin yellow, yellow ochre and other pigments. Bellini’s move to oil was also determined by his encounter with canvas, which Hills sees as the Venetian solution to the problem of wall painting which was unsuitable to the climate.[9] Another interesting link between colour and the physical location of Venice is that between pigments and glass where Bellini mixed the lapis with smalt, a pigment consisting of “finely ground potassium glass in which the colorant is cobalt” (Hills).  Lead-tin yellow was used in the manufacture of glass and this pigment is evident in the work of the Vivarini brothers whose father was a fiolari, or glassblower. Though wary of yellow, Bellini used no less than four varieties of yellow pigment: orpiment, lead-tin yellow, yellow ochre, and yellow lake in his Pesaro Coronation, but the yellows in it are not conspicuous. St Peter’s gown is dulled by shadow and tends towards fawn, lionato, or lion coloured.[10] Bellini eventually adapted his lionato to outdoor subjects where he exploited sandy and deeper brown colours, which might symbolise the move towards naturalism These earth colours are present in the second version of his Transfiguration (Naples); Peter’s robe is brown, not yellow. ^[11]     Belllini’s darkening yellow towards brown or gold was important to the evolution of colour in Venice, but other painters were also experimenting with different pigments such as Cima’s combination of  realgar(orange) and orpiment (yellow) which probably first appears in his Madonna of the Orange Tree. 

^[12]

Titian’s Colour.

Titian, Jacopo Pesaro Presented to St Peter by Pope Alexander VI, Museé Royal des Beaux-Arts, Antwerp, oil on canvas, 145 x 183 cm.

Titian, Holy Family and a Shepherd, London, National Gallery, oil on canvas, 106.4 x 143 cm.

 Paolo Veronese, Conversion of St Pantaleon, 1587-88, San Pantalon, Venice, Oil on canvas, 277 x 160 

Jacopo Bassano, Susanna and the Elders, 1571, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nimes, Oil on canvas, 85 x 125 cm.

The story of colour in Titian’s art is of a response to his environment and culture; it continues the naturalistic tendency towards painting began by Bellini, but expands the repertoire further. However, naturalism needs to be qualified since Titian’s art is not wholly naturalistic. For example, the satin breeches of his young shepherd in his Holy Family (London) inverts both the natural and social orders: this shepherd wears fashionable silks of the town, not the rude clothes of a rustic.[13] Titian definitely has a system which becomes more complex as his long career unfolds. In the early years he uses a restricted number of hues (Steer) which seems to be borne out by his pictures of the early career- about 1510-20. For example, in the London Noli me Tangere, we see a scheme organised around three primary colours: red, blue and green. Unlike Bellini, Titian tends to exclude yellow, with interestingly, the hue only emerging in the robe of St Peter in the Pesaro votive picture. Compare Bellini who preferred brown for the mantle of St Peter in his Transfiguration.  And as we saw last week the orange and yellow pigments, realgar and orpiment, are conspicuous in the Bacchus and Ariadne, a hidden tradition of colour that is only now being unveiled. Titian also experimented with black colours, which were much richer in oil than tempera; but as we can never see Titian’s paintings in mint condition, we can never appreciate how he was “the master of black.”[14] Investigations of Titian’s paintings inevitably centre on the thorny topic of Titian’s original colours. His blue- the famous lapis lazuli, ultramarine- has provoked much controversy since questionable arguments have been used to justify the cleaning that resulted in very intense blues which we have no way of verifying as the original colour. As to the last, great exponent of colour in Venice, Paolo Veronese, though no new colours can be detected in his art, he does use chiaroscuro strikingly, relating colour values to light and shade in such works as his St Pantalon altarpiece, a stylistic development only anticipated by Jacopo Bassano and Titian, whose styles comingle in Bassano’s uncharacteristically intense Susanna and the Elders (Nimes) which but for the genre elements, might have come from Titian’s workshop. 

^[15]

Slides.

1.      Giovanni Bellini, Madonna of the Meadow, National Gallery, London, oil on canvas, transferred from wood, 67 x 86 cm.
2.      Comparisons of Venetian blues in London NG paintings: Bellini (Madonna of the Meadow); Workshop of Bellini ( Madonna); Cima (Madonna).
3.      Fra Angelico, Virgin and Child with Sts Dominic and Catherine of Alexandria, c. 1435, Pinacoteca, Vatican, Tempera with gilding on wood, 24 x 19 cm.
4.      Bernardo Daddi, Crucifixion, 1345-48, Lindenau-Museum, Altenburg, Tempera on wood, 58 x 28 cm (with frame).
5.      Bartolomeo Vivarini, Pala di San Marco (Triptych of St Mark), 1474, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice, Tempera on panel, 165 x 68 cm (central), 165 x 57 cm (wings).
6.      Paolo Veneziano, Madonna and Child with Donor, mid-14th century, Accademia, Venice, tempera on panel, 142 x 92 cm. [16]  
7.      Interior of San Marco, Venice.
8.      Mosaic Artist, Italian, (active 12th century in Venice), Vaulting, nave and transept, 12th century, Mosaic, Basilica di San Marco, Venice.
9.      Photograph of reflections in on the Grand Canal.
10.  Vittore Carpaccio, Duck-Shooting in the Lagoon, c. 1495, Getty Museum, Los Angeles, oil on panel, 75.4 x 63.8 cm.
11.  Comparison between Florentine buildings and Venetian ones.
12.  Giovanni Mansueti, Miracle of the Bridge, at San Lio, 1494, Accademia, Venice, oil on canvas, 318 x 458 cm.
13.  San Marco, Porto di Sant’ Alipio, with flanking columns (12^th to early 13^th centuries).
14.  San Marco, Greek veined and other marble columns to left of the central portico.
15.  San Marco, porphyry and Greek veined marble columns against verde antico around central portico of San Marco (12^th to early 13^th centuries).
16.  Paolo Veronese, The Marriage at Cana, 1563, Musée du Louvre, Paris, Oil on canvas, 666 x 990 cm.
17.  Michelangelo, David, 1504, Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence, Marble, height 434 cm.
18.  Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, c. 1510, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, Oil on canvas, 108 x 175 cm.
19.  Giovanni d’ Alemagna, Saint Apollonia attacking an Idol, c. 1450, National Gallery of Art, Washington, oil on panel, 60 x 34 cm. 
20.  Tomb of the Doge Michele Morosini, 1382, Marble and mosaic, Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Venice.
21.  Giovanni Bellini, Coronation of the Virgin, c. 1471-74, Museo Civico, Pesaro, central panel, 262 x 240 cm.
22.  Giovanni Bellini, The Transfiguration and details, c. 1480, Naples, Museo di Capodimento, oil on panel, 115 x 150 cm.
23.  Andrea Mantegna, The Adoration of the Shepherds, after 1450, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, tempera on canvas, trans. From panel, 40 x 55.6 cm (overall); 37.8 x 53 .3 cm. ^[17]
24.  Andreas Ritzos, Virgin of the Passion, second half of the 15^th century), oil on panel, Florence, Accademia, 103 x 84 cm. ^[18]
25.  Giovanni Bellini, Agony in the Garden, London, National Gallery, oil on panel, 81 x 127 cm.
26.  Cima da Conegliano, Madonna of the Orange Tree, c. 1496-98, Venice, Accademia, oil on panel, 212 x 139 cm.
27.  Michelangelo, The Holy Family with the infant St. John the Baptist (the Doni tondo),c. 1506, Galleria degli Uffizi, tempera on panel, diameter 120 cm.
28.  Titian, Holy Family and a Shepherd, London, National Gallery, oil on canvas, 106.4 x 143 cm.
29.  Titian, Jacopo Pesaro Presented to St Peter by Pope Alexander VI, Museé Royal des Beaux-Arts, Antwerp, oil on canvas, 145 x 183 cm. ^[19]
30.  Titian, Noli me Tangere, 1511-12, National Gallery, London, Oil on canvas, 109 x 91 cm. ^[20]
31.  Titian, “La Schiavona”, c. 1511, London, National Gallery, oil on canvas, 119.9 x 100.4 cm. ^[21]
32.  Titian, Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Catherine, (“The Aldobrandini Madonna”), c. 1530, oil on canvas, 101 x 142 cm.
33.  Paolo Veronese, Conversion of St Pantaleon, 1587-88, San Pantalon, Venice, Oil on canvas, 277 x 160 cm. ^[22]
34.  Jacopo Bassano, Susanna and the Elders, 1571, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nimes, Oil on canvas, 85 x 125 cm.
35.  Paolo Veronese, Susanna and the Elders, 1580, Museé du Louvre, oil on canvas, measurements unknown.

---

[1] Journal : 1st Jan, 1857 :"Nous voyons ces admirables ouvrages après trois cents ans des vernis, d'accidents, de réparations pires que leurs malheurs." Delacroix’s friend and a senior curator at the Louvre, Villot, would eventually be dismissed from his post in 1860 after his disastrous attempts to restore some of the Veroneses in the museum.

[2] The best overview of this problem is Charles Hope’s James Beck memorial lecture to Artwatch, “On the Sistine Chapel and National Gallery Controversies”, reproduced in the organisation’s journal, Winter, 2012. It’s worth noting that, according to Hope, one argument by the pro-cleaning faction linked Titian’s colours with the gaudy dress of Venetians: “ it may be salutary to remember that when Titian was a young man the facades of old houses on the Grand Canal in Venice were still painted in bright colours and gilded, and that the young bloods wore scarlet tights and many coloured tunics.”, Artwatch, 12 Thanks to Gareth Hawker and Michael Daley for drawing my attention to this lecture.  On the link between Titian’s colour and the fashions and fabrics of Venice, see Hills, Venetian Colour, On the restoration question, one is tempted to observe, borrowing a surgical metaphor from Gombrich that the operation was successful but the patient died.

[3] Steer, “Titian and Venetian Colour” in The Genius of Venice, 38.

[4] Thomas Mann, Death in Venice (Penguin Modern Classics), trans H. Lowe-Porter, 1928, rep 1983, 24.

[5] Paul Hills, Venetian Colour: Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass 1250-1550 (Yale University Press, 1999), 11.

[6] This is not a new idea. See Adrian Stoke’s remarks on Florence in Michelangelo (Routledge, 1995, 71): “Indeed, the ideal way to experience painting in Italy is first to examine olive terraces and their farms, then fine streets of the plain houses, before entering a gallery. As far as the streets are concerned, a similar procedure can be recommended for Holland in preparation for Rembrandt and Vermeer.” Stokes chose to comment on the “Venice of the North”: “It is not a coincidence that what we call old Amsterdam was rising above smooth water in Rembrandt’s day. Much existed on his canvas, in the character of his surface, before he started to particularize, to paint, ” (Michelangelo, 71).Interestingly Hills Venetian Colour (24-25) cites Ruskin’s comparison of the coloured architecture in Venice to the hues and shadows of Rembrandt and Veronese united. Logically, Hills opts for Veronese rather than Rembrandt.

[7] On Venetian sculpture, see Bruce Boucher and Anthony Radcliffe, “Sculpture” in The Genius of Venice, 355-391.

[8] See the lively discussion of both cities in Mary McCarthy’s The Stones of Florence and Venice Observed, (orig, pub. 1959 and 1961, rep. in one volume (Penguin 1972). For these descriptions of Florence, McCarthy, 12.

[9] Hills, Venetian Colour, (136) says that canvas became an antidote to fresco because “the saline atmosphere of the lagoon…rendered fresco vulnerable to salts in walls.”

[10] Hills, Venetian Colour, 141.

[11] Hills, Venetian Colour (143), states that the colour change might be due to its association with the Jews, but other Venetian painters (and Mantegna) robed their saints in yellow. It might be a critique of Mantegna’s bright yellow draperies. Bellini in his later works used deeper yellow more in common with ochre tending towards the brown of lightly stained wood, typical of 15^th century Christian icons. Cretan icons allowed Bellini to revive an earlier Venetian tradition, thus turning his back on Mantuan and Florentine colours.

[12] On the fascinating emergence of orpiment and realgar, Hills, Venetian Colour, 140f.

[13] Hills, Venetian Colour, 192.

[14] Hills, Venetian Colour, 188.

[15] Steer, “Titian and Venetian Colour”, 43. Described by Freedberg (Italian Painting, 548) “..as direct in its assessment of a human situation, as in the ancient Titian, almost as if this were a posthumous event in the history of Titian’s art.” Steer says of the Nimes picture: “the distant buildings seem suspended in crepuscular twilight…the figures are evoked by what seem to be the final flashes of the dying light out of the thickening atmosphere. This vision is based on the artist’s actual experience of the behaviour of colours in semi-darkness, and it is to this that the paintings owe their intensity and truth.”

[16] Dentil adapted into in a billet moulding, punctuates the golden frames of the Veneziano (Hills, 38). Light/dark, light/dark, gold/blue, gold/blue micro rhythm.

[17] Andrea Mantegna, (New York and London 1992), no. 8.

[18] Ritzos was born in Iraklio, was an influential member of the Post-Byzantine art Cretan School. He specialized in religious icon painting. He trained his son Nikolaos (1446-1503) who also went on to become a recognized icon painter.[1]

[19] The Genius of Venice, (1983, no. 113); Titian, Prince of Painters, (no. 4); Titian, (2003, no. 3).

[20] Titian, (2003, no. 7)

[21] Titian, (2003, no. 4) Many changes; a dead child intended?

[22] The Genius of Venice (1983, no. 147). And drawing in the Louvre (D82)