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ANNIBALE CARRACCI’S FARNESE CEILING
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
ConnecticutCollege
New London, CT06320
(This essay was written in 1997 and is still unfinished.)
Drawing on Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, and Correggio, Carracci developed a grand, heroic, beautiful Baroque style which was yet grounded in the close study of nature. Indeed, his earliest works included genre scenes of butcher shops and peasant meals, and he made hundreds of drawings studying landscape and human forms. Remarkable for its observation of psychological states yet typical of Carracci's sensitivity to real life was an early drawing of a troubled boy inscribed, "I don't know if God loves me". No Italian Renaissance painter would have bothered with such a "trivial" subject.
Compared to High Renaissance Italian painters, Carracci was more dramatic, crowded, thickly textured in vibrant color, and more earthly and irreverent in his use of classical myth. The satiric treatment of myth was already common in late antique writings, one example being Lucian's Dialogue of the Gods. Its appearance coincided with the more sophisticated, witty Renaissance of the later sixteenth century, especially the Mannerist period, and with the Baroque. One late sixteenth-century Italian engraving even caricatured pagan deities and mythical figures including (left to right) Narcissus, Venus, Adonis, Apollo, Juno, Jove, Diana, and Ganymede. Carracci himself was keenly interested in caricature, as seen in one of his drawings.
Carracci was also interested in optical illusions and tricks, something seen in other drawings. These three sketches were said to depict a mason behind a wall with the top of his head and trowel showing, a Capuchin preacher resting in his pulpit, a knight jousting behind a wall, and a blind beggar behind a corner around which protrude his cup and cane. (The last two use the same lines but turn them differently.) In his heightened sense of the artifice of art, Carracci like other Baroque artists was indebted to Mannerism.
Carracci, Farnese Ceiling, 1597-1601, Palazzo Farnese, Rome
[last part of lecture on Aesthetics is still under revision]
Basic Information and Methodology
The Farnese were a central Italian noble family whose fiefs (feudal territories) near Rome dated back to the twelfth century. Their political base in Rome improved considerably after Alessandro Farnese , one of three by that name, was named Pope Paul III (1534-49). Among other notable works, Paul III commissioned Michelangelo’s Last Judgment and Campidoglio. He also usedthe papacy to enrich his family with lucrative church offices and territories. He made his son, Alessandro, into a cardinal and seized church lands in Northern Italy to carve out a new duchy for one of his illegitimate sons who was proclaimed Duke of Parma and Piacenza. To demonstrate the new prestige of the Farnese, Paul III built the largest palace in Rome. In the second half of the sixteenth century, his son, Cardinal Farnese, continued the family tradition as the leading artistic patron in Rome, hiring the leading Mannerist painters to decorate much of the FarnesePalace and the spectacular Villa Farnese and gardens outside Rome in Caprarola. (See Titian’s portrait of Paul III with two of his cardinal nephews.)
At the turn of the century, the FarnesePalace was occupied by Cardinal Odoardo Farnese. To complete the decoration of a large reception room and art gallery, and to celebrate the wedding of his brother, Ranuccio Farnese, Odoardo hired Annibale Carracci to paint a series of ceiling frescoes (and later, wall decorations).
On one level, the Farnese Ceiling worked as an art gallery featuring eleven large mythological scenes, six appearing as illusionistically-rendered oil paintings in gold frames set against a fictive architecture. Eight smaller “bronze” mythological medallions appear between and “behind” the major painted scenes, set into the painted architecture alongside ornamental marble nudes and “real” nudes. With such illusionistic devices, Carraccio created three levels of painted “reality”: 1) the painted architecture of the ceiling with its marble sculptural decorations and sky glimpsed outside, in the corners, 2) the “real” nudes sitting on the edge of the marble moulding and the wrestling cupids seen in the four corners, and 3) the “oil paintings” placed against the ceiling.
A few years later, Carracci and his pupils, Domenichino and Lanfranco, painted two large mythologies and eight smaller mythological subjects on the walls below. These works used esoteric mythological allegory to represent the personal mottos and virtues of three greatest Farnese men: Alessandro, Odoardo, and Ranuccio. As with the whole ceiling, mythology was put at the service of a high-minded, intellectually complex courtly flattery.
In contrast to traditional readings of the Farnese Ceiling (and other works of art) which looked for a single, primary meaning, my approach presumes the circulation of multiple issues and problems encompassing politics, social order, gender, ethnicity, morality, religious values, economic issues, and so on. This more flexible, open ended approach to meaning – common in Art History since the mid 1980s - seems especially suited for such complex works such as the Farnese Ceiling where the frescoes can be interpreted within a series of overlapping contexts: the gallery which served as a museum of classical sculpture installed in niches below, the palace as a whole with its extensive frescoes and other works of art, the larger world of Farnese cultural patronage and politic ambition around 1600, and the still-larger universe of early modern court culture.
The common thread through all of this is early modern court culture around 1600. Since time does not allow a discussion of all twenty-seven allegorical paintings, I will examine three broad, overlapping themes of early modern court culture which inform the fresco cycle as a whole: 1) love, sexuality, and marriage, 2) world history and empire, and 3) aesthetic refinement. While all of these themes were familiar in humanist court culture since 1500 (and continued in court culture through the seventeenth-century, with some subtle shifts), Carracci’s Farnese Ceiling gave them a particular inflection typical of high court culture in Italy around 1600.
Courtly Sexuality, Love and Marriage in the Farnese Ceiling
Sexuality, love and marriage are clearly overarching themes in Carracci’s frescoes. Marriage is clear in the nuptials of Bacchus and Ariadne (Ariadne's coronation flatters the real bride below), in Jupiter and Juno where conjugal sexuality is blessed by the most powerful of the gods,in Perseus and Andromeda painted on the lower walls, andVenus Pulled by Triton to the Wedding of Honorius. It is also implied in the amorous subject ofAurora and Cephalus.
Sexual desire is prominent in these lusty marriage scenes and in the remaining scenes where gods and heroes succumb, comically, to the power of love (Venus). In one of the larger “oil paintings,” Carracci takes up the story of Hercules and Omphale, a well-known classical fable of the power of love. Omphale “conquers” the great hero and warrior by makinghim put on her dress and jewelry and play her tambourine before becoming his lover. Here love reduces the great warrior to an effeminate “sissy” who acts more like a Greek flute girl or courtesan entertainer.Securing Hercules beneath her left thigh and appropriating his phallic club, Omphale turns him into a submissive boy toy.
In Venus and Anchises, the royal shepherd and progenitor of Rome displays the heroic musculature of antique statuary (and of Michelangelo) while carrying out the decidedly unheroic task of undressing a dreamy Venus who pretends to cover one of her breasts. Once again, love reduces a great hero to a submissive maid, attending on a more powerful female seductress. As in the scene of Hercules, Carracci added a smirking cupid. In another “painting,” Carracci depicted the goddess of the hunt, Diana, who falls in love with the shepherd, Endymion. To preserve her reputation for strict chastity,Diana comes to Endymion at night and makes love (rapes him?) while he sleeps. Here is the most famous male sleeping beauty in classical mythology, a subject equally well known in Roman relief sculpture on sarcophagi. His phallic shepherd’s staff contrasts playfully with his passive, reclining body while cupids and nude ornamental statues peek at the illicit rendezvous. Diana’s legendary chastity crumbles in another “painting” on the Farnese Ceiling where she accepts the rustic advances and gifts of wool offered by the woodland god of fertility, Pan as narrated in Virgil (Georgics III.391ff).
The triumph of sexual desire also informs the other major scenes including Mercury and Paris (Paris used the golden apple to commit adultery with Helen), Polyphemus and Galatea and the Wrath of Polyphemus (both discussed below). The small roundels in between the four large scenes on the side walls add more couples including Boreas and Oreithyia (rape/marriage), Orpheus and Eurydice, Jupiter and Europa, an unidentified rape scene, Hero and Leander, Pan and Syrinx, Salmace and the Hermaphrodite, Cupid and Pan, and the Judgment of Paris (where Paris chooses Venus in exchange for the married Helen).
In general, the tone of the ceiling is one of bacchanal and lust run rampant. The satyr kissing and caressing the goat in the lower left corner of the marriage procession helps set the overall tone. Bacchus is so drunk, one of his followers has to hold his arm up while fat Silenus on the donkey at far right needs two attractive, naked fauns to help him stay mounted. Ariadne’s chariot is drawn by goats running “out of control”and lacking the bridle seen on the tigers pulling Bacchus’ chariot. Here Carracci playfully subverted the Platonic metaphor of reason bridling the chariot of the body by having the bride’s chariot run wild with goat-like lechery. As a revealing contrast, think back to the bride’s allegorical chariot drawn by chaste unicorns painted by Piero della Francesca on the back of his portrait of Battista Sforza, Duchess of Urbino. While erotic mythology does enter the world of marriage imagery with Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera (c. 1482), the early world of Renaissance mythological depiction was relatively sober and chaste. All that changed in the early sixteenth century with the innovations of Titian and others but Carracci’s Farnese Ceiling broke new ground for licentious, “pagan” celebration on a large scale at the highest levels of church patronage (albeit in a secular setting). While not straying into the more explicit eroticism found in hundreds of works of classical art, the frescoes on the Farnese Ceiling take us as close to the full and unembarrassed celebration of bodily pleasures as Christian Europe could get in the world of monumental painting.
If this earthy celebration of love and sexual desire seems inappropriate as the painted backdrop for the wedding of a Cardinal’s niece, we forget the tradition of drunken festivity, coarse humor, and open sexuality which runs through Western wedding celebrations from antiquity to the present. We also forget the high literary tradition of wedding poetry or epithalamia which took up these very qualities and at times explicitly defended wedding celebrations as an occasion for suspending excess solemnity and propriety. The most famous classical wedding poems, which spurred numerous imitations in the Renaissance, were those written by the Roman court poet, Claudian, for the wedding of the Roman emperor, Honorius, (where the rhetoric of the gods serves in part to flatter the princely patron). Here are a few lines from that poem.
"Cupid is the only child of golden Venus. He with his bow subdues the stars and the gods and heaven, and disdains not to wound mighty kings"
"What victim has thine arrow pierced? [Venus asks cupid] Hast thou once more compelled the Thunderer [Jupiter] to low among the heifers of Sidon? [Rape of Europa] Hast thou overcome Apollo, or again summoned Diana to a shepherd's care [Diana and Endymion]? Methinks thou hast triumphed over some fierce and potent god"
"All night long let the music of the flute resound and the crowd, set free from law's harsh restraints, with larger license indulge the permitted jest"
"Let the soldiers feast even when on guard and the bleakers foam in the midst of arms. Let regal majesty lay by its awful pride and power, disdaining not to associate with the people, make one the nobles with the crowd. Let joy be unrestrained and sober Law herself not be ashamed to laugh." [1]
As early as the 1480s, the Medici humanist, Poliziano, wrote an epic poem extolling the love of Giuliano de’ Medici for Simonetta Vespucci. Well known into the eighteenth century, this poem included a long description of a marvelous work of art, a bronze door carved by Vulcan with scenes of the loves of the gods including most of the stories later chosen for the Farnese Ceiling. As with Carracci’s ceiling, Poliziano’s sculpture sings the power of love over the high and mighty, over gods, goddesses, and heroes. [2]Politian and Carracci also followed Claudian by using heroic mythological rhetoric to celebrate human sexuality. Both poets help reconcile the licentiousness of the Farnese Ceiling with its high culture. Indeed, one should read the work's sexual frankness and humor on one level as a display of high culture. After all, the celebration of sexual pleasure was a consistent feature of court culture from antiquity through the middle ages and into the Renaissance when humanism gave it a new philosophical and spiritual foundation. And since the 1480s, dozens of Italian Renaissance artists had made erotic and at times, comical mythological depiction into a centerpiece of court culture. These articles included Botticelli, Mantegna, Bellini, Michelangelo, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Primaticcio, Rosso, Giulio Romano, Bologna and Cellini, to name the more prominent artists in Italy. A host of Northern artists followed suit after 1500.
While a backlash against gratuitous nudity in religious art developed as early as the 1530s, the secular sphere of court culture and domestic decoration was much less constrained. This was especially true for those at the top of the social, political, and religious ladder, people such as Carracci’s patron, Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, or Cardinal Scipione Borghese who commissioned two full-size mythological rape sculptures from Bernini for his Roman villa, or Cardinal Bentivoglio who commissioned a cycle of mythological rapes for his Roman villa. While Cardinal Farnese avoided sexual imagery in Christian subjects and settings, he was free to display a more libertine courtly taste in the grand salons of his family palace. One might even see such conspicuous displays of erotic mythology as a courtly sign of power, proclaiming the ability of those at the top to make up their own rules. Literary parallels are easy to find in the erotic mythological poems of Marino which leave little to the imagination or the chorus extolling the Golden Age in Tasso’s widely read pastoral poem, Aminta (1573).
O happy golden age!
Not for that rivers ran
With streams of milk, and honey dropped from trees;
Not that the earth did gage
Unto the husbandman
Her voluntary fruits, free without fees;
Not for no cold did freeze,
Nor any cloud beguile
Th' eternal flow'ring spring,
Wherein lived everything
And whereupon th' heavens perpetually did smile;
Not for no ship had brought,
From foreign shores, or wars or wares ill sought.
…
That idol of deceit, that empty sound -
Called Honour, which became
The tyrant of the mind,
And so torments our nature without ground,
Was not yet vainly found,
Nor yet sad griefs imparts
Amidst the sweet delights
Of joyful, amorous wights;
Nor were his hard laws known to free-born hearts;
But golden laws like these,
Which nature wrote: 'That's lawful which doth please.'
Then amongst flowers and springs,
Making delightful sport,
Sat lovers without conflict, without flame;
And nymphs and shepherds sing
Mixing in wanton sort
Whisp'rings with songs, then kisses with the same,
Which from affection came.
The naked virgin then
Her roses fresh reveals,
Which now her veil conceals,
The tender apples in her bosom seen;
And oft in rivers clear
The lovers with their loves consorting were.
Honour, thou first did close
The spring of all delight,
Denying water to the amorous thirst;