The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art by François Quiviger

Author:François Quiviger [Quiviger, François]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-86189-740-4
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2010-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

69 Diana Scultori, The Nativity of the Baptist, c. 1540, engraving, after a lost drawing by Giulio Romano.

The theme circulates throughout the Middle Ages. We encounter it again, always near the border of the image, in sixteenth-century interpretations such as those of Sebastiano del Piombo or Francesco Salviati (illus. 71). Francesco Salviati’s version, in the Oratory of San Giovanni Decollato in Rome, emphasizes the sonic dimension by showing the pitcher of water held high over the bath so that the water appears gurgling and rippling. The maid touching the water with the tips of her fingers touches the baby with her other hand, providing a further indication of her attention to temperature. Furthermore the flow of water placed between the two maids assists the brain to imagine space by assessing the distances separating the two figures in relation to the central axis of the water flow. Thus, again, space is defined in terms of the relationship of figures and things.

Newborn babies come with placenta and blood and it is indeed difficult to conceive of a culture that does not wash its newborn members. In the West, Galen advises frequently bathing newborn children to reproduce the conditions of the womb. Thus the bathtub stands as a transposition of a domestic custom into the universe of the Evangelical narrative.39 From there the bathing of newborn children, be it the Virgin, the Baptist or Christ, has been interpreted as an anticipation of the purifying baptismal rite of immersion and it has even been suggested that the bathtub could signify the womb of the church.40

The bathtub sub-theme shares a structural similarity with the allegories of the senses where the accessories placed at the border of the image serve as hints for apprehending the main scene in specific sensory terms (see illus. 49–53). Here the viewer entering the image is greeted by a figure depicted in a state of attentiveness to water temperature. This may well be a prompt to imagining the ambient air of the room in terms of hot and cold, moist and dry. In other words, the image of the bath provides some hints for imagining what we might call a thermoceptive atmospheric perspective.

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