The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo by Jerry Brotton

Author:Jerry Brotton [Brotton, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, Europe, Renaissance, General, Art
ISBN: 9780191592379
Google: PIU3AwAAQBAJ
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2003-05-21T21:00:00+00:00

16. Titian’s portrait of Charles V (1548) celebrates victory over the Protestants at Mühlberg in 1547, but the dark Andalusian horse also evokes Charles’s battle against another group of ‘unbelievers’, the Ottoman Turks.

However, Charles V had little moral right to justify his title as Defender of the Catholic Faith and leader of a holy war against all unbelievers. In 1526 Pope Clement VII attempted to oppose the Hapsburg domination of Europe. In 1527, to bring the papacy back into line, Charles allowed his imperial army (including Lutheran mercenaries) to sack Rome itself. Nearly half of the population of 55,000 were slaughtered. The papacy had finally been eclipsed as a political force, at a terrible cost.

As the papacy in Rome sensed its political power being eroded, it responded with even more lavish displays of art and architecture in an attempt to reaffirm its authority. The strain showed in the art of Michelangelo and Raphael, often seen as the ultimate manifestations of ‘High Renaissance’ art, and two of the greatest of all the artists commissioned to refashion Rome. Michelangelo’s frescoes of scenes from Genesis that decorate the Sistine Chapel, commissioned by Pope Julius II, offer a comprehensive view of creation based on the teachings of Rome. The graceful dynamism of the scenes and the powerful, straining musculature of its characters also idealize the power and potential wrath of the Roman Church if questioned. This tension is also detectable in Raphael’s frescoes for the Vatican’s Salon of Constantine, commissioned by Pope Leo X in 1519. Begun by Raphael and his workshop just before the artist’s death in 1520, these four huge frescoes tell the story of the life of the Emperor Constantine, each flanked by eight over-lifesize portraits of famous popes. The Salon and its decoration proclaimed the imperial authority of the papacy, and the shift in church power from the east (Constantine’s imperial seat of Constantinople) to the west (St Peter’s in Rome). The final scene in the fresco cycle, entitled Donation of Constantine (Plate 5), shows the Emperor Constantine handing over his worldly and imperial power to the pope, wearing a tiara that demonstrates both his spiritual and worldly power. The fresco boldly rejects Lutheran attacks on both the political power of the papacy and intellectual attacks on the Donation itself. In February 1520, just months after work began on the Constantine Salon, Luther wrote, ‘I have at hand Lorenzo Valla’s proof that the Donation of Constantine is a forgery. Good heavens, what darkness and wickedness is at Rome. You wonder at the judgement of God that such unauthentic, crass, impudent lies not only lived, but prevailed for so many centuries’. Valla’s treatise on the Donation had been printed for the first time in Germany in 1517 as part of the growing attack upon the Roman Church. The frescoes in the Salon of Constantine, with their towering popes, warring factions, and dramatic scenes of papal authority are aggressive, mannered, and anxious responses to religious and political change. They represent the rise of the artistic style that would come to be labelled ‘Mannerism’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.