Renaissance Byways

Duccio and the Unfinished Durer

James Hall's Michelangelo

Art history sometimes sounds like one of those old newsreels, in which science marches on. It tells of breakthroughs—toward a greater naturalism or a higher reality, toward recognition of an artist's personal vision or the birth of art institutions, toward a popular culture or an avant-garde.

Does it matter if these sound contradictory? Not necessarily, not when together they bring art progressively closer to how one looks at it today. Without a little incoherence here and there, the story hardly could capture familiar experience. Of course, one may sometimes spot a contrary narrative, in a turning backward, as in the whole idea of the Renaissance. Getting back to basics, however, sounds rather like science, too.

No doubt Postmodernism complicates matters, as did the invention of art history as an academic profession. Both call for revisionist histories, from new perspectives, to bring in new voices or to stake out career space. Revisionism may advance someone, while taking someone else down a notch—but the march of history can still remain intact.

Or maybe not. Sometimes the blur of voices becomes the real story. Every so often, it makes those old turning points in art history resemble hidden byways. With the Metropolitan Museum of Art's headline-making acquisition of a Duccio, its exhibition of three unfinished paintings by Dürer, and James Hall's revisionist treatment of Michelangelo, the origins of the Renaissance and the High Renaissance definitely acquire a few dirt roads. In each, however, I found a sign or two leading back to the highway.

How to enter the Renaissance

I could understand if you did not rush to see the Met's priciest acquisition ever, a Madonna and Child by Duccio di Buoninsegna. I could even understand it if you did follow the hype uptown—and yet left the display puzzled. You would have found a single painting, destined soon enough for permanent display. You would have looked at art dating more than 200 years before many familiar works of the High Renaissance. Almost the same gap separates Michelangelo's Last Judgment from the American Revolution.

Perhaps you have some previous acquaintance with Duccio. You may recall him, along with Giotto, as a central figure in the dawn of the Italian Renaissance. You may have encountered the two in an undergraduate course, on facing screens. Perhaps Duccio came after Cimabue or served as a whipping boy, so that you could better appreciate Giotto's grandeur and humanism. In effect, you were already looking past the work, toward a psychological and spatial depth that fully takes hold in art only a century later. Another show at the Met this spring, of Fra Carnevale, explored just such changes.

The Met itself seemed to grope for a way to commemorate the occasion. Rather than too hastily assemble a big show, the curators set a freestanding display case in the usual room for art of its time. Where its Giotto usually stands, a bare spot and formal marker calls attention to the temporary nature of the installation. The room's sparse hanging reflects the intimate scale of these works for private devotion, and the display case's bare back permits one to assess the panel's state and the facture. Still, it may look as though the Met were warehousing the piece, while deciding how to integrate it properly into the collection.

The wall text tries to help, but it suffers from the museum's preference for self-congratulation over understanding. The room cannot illustrate anyway how the panel fits into Duccio's career or, for that matter, how his and Giotto's concerns differ. The Met's surrounding collection just does not have the goods to clarify their influence. The wall text also perpetuates an old claim that Giotto forged his style in Assisi, without so much as a hint that many consider the Assisi frescoes the work of a follower. I assume that it helps solidify a curator's pet thesis, not to mention relations with Italian art historians with emotional and institutional ties to the town. Still, the museum seems to be doing its best to take Giotto down a notch, as if to make certain that its acquisition of another looks progressive enough.

Perhaps you turned to other sources for insight and still had trouble locating references to this Madonna. Or perhaps you read the reviews and simply gave up. The head critic of the Times calls it his favorite painting at the Met, but his second favorite just happens to be the Met's next most expensive purchase. Perhaps he works on commission.

Still curious, I hope, about what makes this work so valuable? Go ahead: allow yourself that initial disappointment. Savor it, in fact. Take in the painting's size, just smaller than a printout of this page. Anyone, it must seem, could possess a work like this. Then get up close, as if you did.

A splendid experiment

Someone once did. Unlike many textbook works from the Renaissance, this one did not command an altar or hang on display for a duke and his privileged guests. It served as a ritual object. One still detects the marks of private worship in two indentations along the base, scarred by devotional candles. Its owners revered the image, not as an icon of fine art, but as a literal icon—with an end other than itself. The gold background, as in much older painting, testifies further to its value, its function, and its subject matter. To appreciate the painted illusions from later centuries that one now takes for granted, one must imagine the radicalism of letting something other than gold leaf suit a god.

Right away, then, the work signals at once its closeness and familiarity to the viewer and its larger-than-life subject, in order to bring the divine into the lives of its beholders. In the years ahead, the Renaissance would dramatically develop that same paradox. Its artists used sculptural and pictorial illusion to convey both nature and a timeless, higher reality. Duccio achieves much the same end in a different way—by creating as much an object as an image.

That aim helps account for his impulse toward the decorative. It drives the unexpected delicacy of his image. Duccio has a softer, more personal range of color than one anticipates in a conservative icon, as in the robe on the infant Jesus. One can only regret that the deep blue of the Madonna's cloak has faded largely to black—and that the Met does not use the accompanying labels to simulate what one might be missing. With all the abrasion, a visitor can almost overlook Duccio's tooling of the gold as well. The artist's care extends well beyond outlining halos, to an ornamental impulse all his own.

Duccio's combination of the familiar, the divine, and the decorative extends to the image, too. The child's open gesture, ruffling and loosening the edges of his mother's cloaked figure, has a playfulness and sensuality that naturalize both. It suggests surrounding space. However, it also follows the rigid line of her shoulder and her long nose out of Byzantine art, and it testifies to a prematurely independent Jesus, able to sit up straight and to offer a regal blessing. The parapet, perhaps the first of its kind in Renaissance art, implies a continuous space projecting outward, into the real, while separating the figures from the viewer. And it, too, has a decorative pattern, with light colors and a casual, fantastic geometry, closer to a Necker cube or floor tilings of the Classical world than to single-point perspective.

In the next decades, Giotto's greater illusion helped produce a growing grandeur as well. As a conservative reaction set in, art's severity only increased, before his influence blossomed at last, a hundred years later in Florence. Duccio's Siena does not fit easily into that narrative, this work even more so. I cannot call it simply backward looking, progressive, or even an alternative to both. Rather, it represents a splendid experiment along the way.

Art history will remember the innovation of Duccio's first works, such as the Rucellai Madonna of the 1280s—the artist at his most Byzantine and yet most defiant of gravity. It will remember his more progressive Madonnas after 1300. Above all, it will remember the Maestà, his multi-panel altar of around 1310. Little in the Renaissance recalls its crowded, varied, majestic center panel. Little, too, can match his sense of fantasy and verve for storytelling, as in a brilliant small panel at the Frick. I shall look at the Met's acquisition, painted in roughly 1300, as radically incomplete without the rest, but an intriguing turning point nonetheless.

Finishing school

Just a corridor away, the Met explored another turning point and another uncompleted journey in Renaissance art history. Around 1503, Albrecht Dürer began three panels. In each, a single religious figure has the dignity, reserve, and physical ease of the High Renaissance. Yet each figure seems to come forth from another world. It only adds to their austerity that he left all three unfinished.

A half-length savior of the world, from the permanent collection, has the sweetness of Dürer's youth. Yet Jesus's bony features are spare of flesh, his head leans away, and his eyes barely engage those who will receive his blessing. Even gesture creates a bar between worlds. They recall the thirty-year-old artist's own hands and fixed stare in a commanding self-portrait a year or two before. The other two panels, on loan from Bremen, depict saints in the wilderness.

Do the three form a lost altarpiece? Well, no, as the Met itself admits. Dürer leaves different parts unfinished in each—Jesus's hands and face in contrast to a richly colored robe and background, the remote landscape behind the carefully painted saints. The lines of the landscape in the Bremen panels imply a continuous space and sense of scale that the Salvator Mundi could only disrupt and destroy. Besides, the painter left other work of that time in fragments, too, as he explored future avenues for an astonishing career. Nonetheless, the display of the three together offers a good excuse to explore a painter's working methods and early maturity.

The German artist easily escapes the usual categories. He has the confidence born of his extraordinary virtuosity, his knowledge of Giovanni Bellini and the Italian Renaissance, and his explorations of the natural world. He also shares the intense feelings of art halfway through the millennium. Hieronymus Bosch was about to reach his peak, and, further away, Savonarola had gone to his death after frightening Florence—and notably Michelangelo—with threats of political upheaval and the wages of sin. Dürer had just completed his Apocalypse prints, and his painting was starting to darken from the calm control of his Nativity in Munich, known as the Paumgärtner altarpiece.

One sees how Dürer, ever the determined draftsman, planned a composition and decided what to do next. He seems to have drawn on the primed surfaces, then brought things from bare outline through underpainting to completion one compositional unit at a time. He is not alone either in letting coloristic unity take care of itself. Think of the laurel wreath standing alone, beside an otherwise bare canvas, in Jan Vermeer's Art of Painting.

Dürer's prints, with all their exquisite detail, go down easily. The unfinished panels help make his painting, which often looks stiff compared to his rivals or models, more accessible. One senses an apartness from the world, like that of his subjects, that may seem surprising given his rapid output. Erwin Panofsky, the pioneering art historian, referred to these years as a period of "rational synthesis." One can see the artist moving beyond the fully rational or the fully synthesized, toward constant exploration of his last twenty-five years. And that exploration starts to sound more than ever like the familiar High Renaissance.

Reinventing what?

Perhaps Duccio enters the classroom as a glorious also-ran. Perhaps Dürer has to live up to his own influential prints, his High Renaissance aspirations, and the apocalyptic fervor of Europe, all the while fitting into a compact history of northern painting. Surely Michelangelo, however, stands fully within—or above—the Renaissance? James Hall has other ideas. In Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body, he wants to undermine "too firm a conviction that [his] art is essentially timeless." Hall's attempt to recover the artist's quirky specificity, however, does anything but make him plainly a figure of his time.

Hall divides the artist's career into discrete chapters, each in the style of a who-done-it. What makes Michelangelo's Madonnas so remote, and why does even Jesus turn his back on his mother and the viewer? What accounts for the colossal scale of his sculptures, the brutal clarity with which he approaches human anatomy, or the sheer crowdedness of the Sistine Ceiling? In effect, Hall takes the very qualities that make Michelangelo a paradigm of the High Renaissance—his ability to sculpt figures fully in the round, his combination of a newfound realism with the larger-than-life scale of a transcendent reality, the evolution of his figures toward what Howard Hibbard calls a "more powerful spatial and emotional presence." Then he turns those facts against the familiar view, to create an artist of surpassing strangeness—even to his most fervent admirers. As Hall notes, Giorgio Vasari makes Michelangelo the hero of his Renaissance Lives, but Vasari's own art owes more to Raphael.

Hall has Michelangelo's brooding gracelessness on his side. In his stubborn pride, the artist banished assistants halfway through completion of the Sistine Ceiling, hid his progress thereafter from real and imagined rivals, and spent much of his career pursuing grand funerary monuments that he could never complete. The solutions proposed in each of the puzzle chapters only add to images of a tormented idealist, at once obsessed and repelled by the body. Hall uses associations between the gargantuan and the monstrous, for example, or crowds with disorder. Michelangelo, he argues, exempts not even a biblical hero from humanity's fallen nature, while even the saved at the Last Judgment experience only a "pyrrhic victory." If the artist imbibed sculpture, as he once claimed, with his mother's milk, he tasted the stoniness of a recalcitrant world and an art ever on the edge of formlessness. In the book's last and finest chapter, Michelangelo's influence comes into its own only centuries later—with those, like Rodin, already eager to disown it.

To the artist's, Hall unfortunately adds occasional gracelessness of his own. He finds Jonah quite "interesting" as books of the Bible go. Lingering Briticisms, such as a comparison of figures on the Sistine Ceiling to "bollards," do not help either. The highly selective black-and-white illustrations, grouped as inserts, probably work best if one knows the works by heart. Chapters do not provide the breadth or the larger shape that would offer newcomers a companion to Michelangelo. In some, I cannot swear that I ever did track down the promised resolution.

Scholars will have their doubts, too. More than one chapter turns on a work's resemblance to a little-known motif by an equally obscure hand, with no effort to show that Michelangelo—or his audience—cared all that much about it. Hall quotes the artist's poetry, but detached from its concern for the artistic and philosophical vocabulary of its day. Past scholarship often receives a passing dismissal rather than serious engagement. Indeed, Hall drops hints that might make for a fascinating study, if only he had bothered to write it. He does not so much take Michelangelo's homosexuality for granted as assimilate it to a Christian distaste for heterosexual appetites.

I can only admire another writer striving to reach both a popular audience and experts, but this short book may please neither. Clearly neither the crowds on the ground nor in the academic literature have found the early Pietà or David so stern and unwelcoming—and, more important, neither did Michelangelo's successors. In the figures of the Sistine Ceiling, so many others have felt spatial and expressive energy, where Hall sees torpor and consciousness of loss. In Michelangelo's scale, they would have recognized an artist's struggles with the demands of patrons and architectural settings as well as with his own dark emotions, and the body would become their reinvention, too. When it comes to the legends of the High Renaissance, one often sees a titan, an image from mass culture, a scientist before his time, a recluse, or a failure. Too great an effort to dig them out from myths partly of their own making, however, can estrange them from the consensus and divisions that they helped forged as well.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Duccio's inaugural stay at The Metropolitan Museum of Art was extended through June 13, 2005, and "Left Unfinished by Albrecht Dürer" ran through March 27. James Hall's Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body was published in 2005 by Farrar Straus & Giroux.