Arts, Faculty of
Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Pourghanad, Samira
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
This thesis examines the landscape paintings produced by Italian artist Annibale Carracci in the early 1600s for Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini’s private chapel in Rome, the Palazzo al Corso (now, the Palazzo Doria Pamphili). Cardinal Pietro commissioned Annibale to complete a series of paintings depicting the life of the Virgin Mary for the lunette compartments in his chapel. Through application of the various ecocritical perspectives that acknowledge the intrinsic value of nature, I argue that these paintings give primacy to the landscape elements in biblical narratives, thus decentring humans from their perceived positions of importance. In doing so, Annibale’s paintings for the Aldobrandini Chapel both challenge the standards of chapel art and invert the long-standing expectations of human beings. I will analyze Annibale’s subversion of chapel conventions by way of a comparison to another artist who challenged chapel art during the same period in Rome: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Specifically, I will discuss the paintings produced by Caravaggio for the Contarelli Chapel, a public chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi. In drawing a comparison between Annibale’s Aldobrandini lunettes and Caravaggio’s paintings produced for the Contarelli Chapel, I will suggest that each artist engages with biblical narratives through opposing viewpoints: Annibale’s is ecocentric, while Caravaggio’s is highly anthropocentric. Thus, I posit that in certain respects, Annibale’s lunettes may be viewed as the antithesis to Caravaggio’s Contarelli paintings. My study approaches these paintings through a formalistic investigation, that is, I will pay close attention to the colour, content, and other compositional elements in the works. At the same time, I will consider the biographical and historical context in which these paintings were produced. In other words, while I am speculating regarding the ecocritical content in Annibale’s paintings, I remain observant of the concrete circumstances surrounding the design and completion of these paintings. As my study will indicate, there are several factors at play which signal that these paintings were intended to have a profound connection to the natural landscape.
GOIN’ TO THE CHAPEL WITH ANNIBALE CARRACCI: LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS IN THE GALLERIA DORIA PAMPHILI by Samira Pourghanad J.D., The University of Manitoba, 2014 B.A., The University of British Columbia, 2010 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Art History and Theory) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) August 2024 © Samira Pourghanad, 2024 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled: Goin’ to the Chapel with Annibale Carracci: Landscape Paintings in the Galleria Doria Pamphili submitted by Samira Pourghanad in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Art History and Theory Examining Committee: Dr. Joseph Monteyne, Professor & Department Head, Dept. of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC Supervisor Dr. Saygin Salgirli, Associate Professor, Dept. of Art History, Visual Art & Theory, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract This thesis examines the landscape paintings produced by Italian artist Annibale Carracci in the early 1600s for Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini’s private chapel in Rome, the Palazzo al Corso (now, the Palazzo Doria Pamphili). Cardinal Pietro commissioned Annibale to complete a series of paintings depicting the life of the Virgin Mary for the lunette compartments in his chapel. Through application of the various ecocritical perspectives that acknowledge the intrinsic value of nature, I argue that these paintings give primacy to the landscape elements in biblical narratives, thus decentring humans from their perceived positions of importance. In doing so, Annibale’s paintings for the Aldobrandini Chapel both challenge the standards of chapel art and invert the long-standing expectations of human beings. I will analyze Annibale’s subversion of chapel conventions by way of a comparison to another artist who challenged chapel art during the same period in Rome: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Specifically, I will discuss the paintings produced by Caravaggio for the Contarelli Chapel, a public chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi. In drawing a comparison between Annibale’s Aldobrandini lunettes and Caravaggio’s paintings produced for the Contarelli Chapel, I will suggest that each artist engages with biblical narratives through opposing viewpoints: Annibale’s is ecocentric, while Caravaggio’s is highly anthropocentric. Thus, I posit that in certain respects, Annibale’s lunettes may be viewed as the antithesis to Caravaggio’s Contarelli paintings. My study approaches these paintings through a formalistic investigation, that is, I will pay close attention to the colour, content, and other compositional elements in the works. At the same time, I will consider the biographical and historical context in which these paintings were iv produced. In other words, while I am speculating regarding the ecocritical content in Annibale’s paintings, I remain observant of the concrete circumstances surrounding the design and completion of these paintings. As my study will indicate, there are several factors at play which signal that these paintings were intended to have a profound connection to the natural landscape. v Lay Summary In this thesis, I examine the landscape paintings created by Annibale Carracci for Cardinal Pietro’s private chapel at the Palazzo al Corso (now, the Palazzo Doria Pamphili). I argue that Annibale’s paintings, when viewed through ecocritical perspectives, are akin to environmental philosophies that decentre humans from their perceived positions of importance. Annibale, in challenging the standards of chapel art and giving primacy to the landscape element in biblical narratives, inverts the long-standing expectations of human beings – just as ‘nature-first’ environmental philosophies (those that promote the intrinsic value of nature) are equally disruptive to the expectations of people. This thesis contains a comparative analysis involving Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s Contarelli Chapel paintings, as both Annibale and Caravaggio challenged the conventions of chapel art. My analysis will pay particular attention to the compositional elements in the paintings, along with consideration to the biographical and historical context in which these works were produced. vi Preface This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, Samira Pourghanad. vii Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ................................................................................................................................. v Preface ........................................................................................................................................... vi Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... vii List of Figures ............................................................................................................................. viii Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... x Dedication ..................................................................................................................................... xii Chapter 1: Introduction: Race to the Altar, Justification for an Ecocritical Approach…….1 Chapter 2: The Patron, The Papal Coffers, and The Context of the Commission .................. 9 2.1 Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini .......................................................................................... 9 2.2 Annibale's Aldobrandini Chapel Lunettes ..................................................................... 13 2.3 The Conventions of Chapel Art ..................................................................................... 15 Chapter 3: Ecocritical Genuflection: A Formal Analysis of Annibale's Lunettes, Featuring Caravaggio's Contarelli Chapel Paintings ................................................................................ 22 3.1 Annibale's Lunettes as Displays of the Intrinsic Value of Nature ................................. 23 3.2 Annibale's Artistic Predecessors/Influences .................................................................. 33 3.3 Caravaggio and the Contarelli Chapel ........................................................................... 37 Chapter 4: Nature is Our Chapel: The Ramifications of the Decentred Human .................. 46 4.1 The Viewer is Disoriented ............................................................................................. 46 4.2 The Viewer is Offended ................................................................................................ 47 4.3 The Viewer's Understanding of Religion is Disrupted .................................................. 49 Chapter 5: Conclusion: There's No Crying in the Chapel ...................................................... 53 Figures .......................................................................................................................................... 58 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................. 70 viii List of Figures Figure 1. Annibale Carracci, Landscape with the Flight into Egypt, c.1603, oil on canvas, Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome. Wikimedia.org ........................................................................... 58 Figure 2. Annibale Carracci, Landscape with the Entombment, c.1603, oil on canvas, Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome. Wikimedia.org ......................................................................................... 58 Figure 3. Caravaggio. The Calling of St. Matthew, 1599-1600, oil on canvas, San luigi dei Francesi, Cappella Contarelli, Rome. Wikimedia.org ................................................................... 59 Figure 4. Caravaggio. The Marytrdom of St. Matthew, 1599-1600, oil on canvas, San luigi dei Francesi, Capella Contarelli, Rome. Wikimedia.org ..................................................................... 60 Figure 5. Caravaggio, The Inspiration of St. Matthew, 1602, oil on canvas, San luigi dei Francesi, Cappella Contarelli, Rome. (© 2000-2024 ITHAKA, by permission) ......................................... 61 Figure 6. Possibly Domenichino (or Francisco Albani, Giovanni Lanfranco, and Sisto Badalocchio). Landscape with the Adoration of the Kings, c.1604-1613, oil on canvas, Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome. Wikimedia.org ......................................................................................... 62 Figure 7. Possibly Domenichino (or Francisco Albani and Sisto Badalocchio). Landscape with the Visitation, c.1604-1613, oil on canvas, Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome. Wikimedia.org ...... 62 Figure 8. Possibly Domenichino (or Sisto Badalocchio). Landscape with the Adoration of the Shepherds, c.1604-1613, oil on canvas, Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome. Wikimedia.org ........... 63 Figure 9. Possibly Francisco Albani. Landscape with the Assumption of the Virgin, c.1604-1613, oil on canvas, Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome. Wikimedia.org .................................................... 63 Figure 10. Annibale Carracci. Pietà with Saints, 1585, oil on canvas, Galleria Nazionale, Parma. Wikimedia.org ............................................................................................................................... 64 Figure 11. Annibale Carracci, Domine, Quo Vadis? c.1601, oil on panel, National Gallery, London. Wikimedia.org ................................................................................................................. 65 Figure 12. Detail of Flight into Egypt, with my annotations ......................................................... 66 Figure 13. Detail of Entombment, man in the red cloak ................................................................ 66 Figure 14. Titian. The Entombment of Christ, c.1520, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris, Wikimedia.org ............................................................................................................................... 67 ix Figure 15. Fra Angelico, Entombment of Christ, c.1438-1440, tempera on panel, Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Wikimedia.org. ............................................................................................ 68 Figure 16. Detail of The Calling of St. Matthew, feet turned away from the direction of pointing ....................................................................................................................................................... 69 Figure 17. Detail of The Marytrdom of St. Matthew, Caravaggio's self-portrait ........................... 69 x Acknowledgments I am eternally grateful to my supervisor, Dr. Joseph Monteyne, for his guidance on this project from start to finish. Dr. Monteyne’s feedback on my work broadened the way that I view art as a critical point of intersection in world affairs. I am very lucky to have enrolled in his Renaissance art courses during my diploma, as they strengthened my curiosity in this field, and I am even more fortunate that I was able to discuss my wish to pursue graduate studies in Art History with him. Dr. Monteyne’s advice and support made all the difference in my academic career. I am also extremely thankful to my second reader, Dr. Saygin Salgirli. His ideas and questions allowed me to discover new perspectives from which to examine these artworks, and this project is so much richer thanks to his contributions. Dr. Salgirli’s classes helped me locate the connection between art, nature and theology, and I am very grateful to have been his student during my tenure at UBC. My sincerest thanks to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their generous support throughout the Master’s program. I will take this opportunity to deeply thank Dr. T’ai Smith for her advice during the SSHRC application process. I am very thankful to the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia for their support and guidance throughout the years. I am incredibly fortunate to have been in contact with the best staff and administration team: Bryn Dharmaratne, Brandon Leung, and Dr. Yasmin Amaratunga. About twenty years ago, I had the pleasure of taking two courses at UBC taught by Dr. Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe, and his classes not only introduced me to the rich world of Art History, but changed the way that I view art and architecture from that moment onwards. I am xi grateful to Dr. Windsor-Liscombe for lighting this spark of interest that has, thankfully, never waned. I extend my thanks to Dr. Rachel Boate, whose teaching shaped my academic relationship with the history of art and inspired me to further pursue its study. I am forever grateful to Dr. Boate for her assistance during the graduate school application process. I would also like to thank Dr. Anton Lee for his life-changing course on postmodern art, as well as his help during the Master’s application process, as well. Thank you to Emily Cadger, Richard Chapplow, and Sara Ellis, for readily answering my questions and providing advice when I reached out for help. I am so thankful to Michael Dang for his friendship and kindness during the diploma and Master’s program – our conversations made all the difference. I send thanks to my fellow students in ARTH 537 for their collective input on the original version of this project. And to the University of British Columbia, for everything over the last six years (ten years, including my Bachelor’s degree), gratias tibi ago – and I’ll be back. Thank you to my mother for always supporting me throughout my studies, and thank you to my father for instilling within me a thirst for higher education. I am forever indebted to my parents and hope they know that my love for them is boundless. To my friends, family, and anyone who asked me questions about this thesis or showed an interest in what I was working on: you are the best, thank you. xii Dedication B.N.K. For my nephew Kaiden: Because he keeps asking me questions, and I keep trying to find answers. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction: Race to the Altar, Justification for an Ecocritical Approach In the literature examining Annibale Carracci, there are a number of oft-repeated statements made regarding the Italian painter’s oeuvre. One such statement is that Annibale’s art is highly disparate, perhaps even eclectic, ranging widely in terms of his influences and the content of his works.1 Jesus Christ crossing paths with St. Peter on a Roman road, a peasant man eating a spoonful of beans, the mythological goddess Venus asleep and surrounded by playful putti, and a naturalistic landscape featuring a slanted tree trunk – these are some of the examples of Annibale’s diverse array of painted subjects.2 Another oft-repeated statement is that Annibale Carracci may be one of the most important landscape painters of all time. This is not a hyperbolic description, as the art history texts chronicle high praise for Annibale’s landscapes. In the seventeenth century, Carlo Cesare Malvasia (while quoting his fellow art biographer Giovanni Baglione) argued that Annibale “gave birth to the proper manner of painting landscapes.”3 In the 1930s, Heinrich Bodmer wrote that Annibale’s contribution to Roman landscape painting was the “most important” of its time.4 And in 1990, Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf stated that Annibale “created the ideal landscape in a Roman cultural setting.”5 These are only a few of the 1 Clare Robertson, The Invention of Annibale Carracci (Milan: Silvana Editoriale Spa, 2008), 193. Robertson notes that thinking of Annibale, his brother (Agostino), and his cousin (Ludovico), in terms of their ‘eclecticism’ is rather controversial because eclecticism has become a “term of abuse to describe everything that [is] seen to be wrong with the Carracci” (193). I am utilizing ‘eclectic’ simply to refer to the heterogeneity of content and style in Annibale’s paintings. 2 I am referring to the following paintings by Annibale Carracci, in order of their listed descriptions: Domine, Quo Vadis? (c.1601), Bean Eater (c.1580-1581), Sleeping Venus (c.1603), and River Landscape (c.1590). Domine, Quo Vadis? is Fig. 11 in my List of Figures. 3 Anne Summerscale, Malvasia’s Life of the Carracci: Commentary and Translation (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 297. 4 Heinrich Bodmer, “The Aldobrandini Landscapes in the Doria-Pamphili Gallery,” The Art Bulletin (New York, N.Y.) 16, no. 3 (1934): 260. 5 Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf, Ideal Landscape: Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin, and Claude Lorrain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 16. 2 many examples that support the notion that Annibale contributed to the development of landscape art, particularly western European landscape art, in a very significant manner. And yet, there is a sprinkling of irony in the praise for Annibale’s legacy in landscape painting. Of the one hundred and seventy-nine works produced by Annibale (as catalogued by art historian Donald Posner in 1971), only twenty-one can be deemed as genuine landscape paintings.6 Even more surprising, six of those twenty-one paintings came from a single commission: the six lunette paintings created for Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini’s chapel at the Palazzo al Corso (today, the gallery at the Palazzo Doria Pamphili).7 To add a further twist, and an issue I will return to shortly, all but two of the six lunettes contain attribution problems. Therefore, the remarkable impact that Annibale Carracci had on landscape art is truly the result of only a handful of images, from an otherwise highly diverse, and extremely impressive, oeuvre. It is the two lunettes that were made for the Aldobrandini Chapel, the ones that have been deemed to be completed by Annibale’s hand alone, that form the central subject matter of this thesis. In Landscape with the Flight into Egypt (c.1603), (Fig. 1), a semi-circle canvas contains the Holy Family as they make their way through an idyllic, green space, referencing the journey detailed in the New Testament of the Bible. In Landscape with the Entombment (c.1603) (Fig. 2), another biblical scene from the New Testament is featured, as a group of women grieve while a group of men carry the body of Christ into the tomb. This dramatic scene contains the recognizable features of a landscape (green pastures, mountains, and a body of water), as they are visibly stressed at the centre of the image. In this thesis, I argue that Annibale Carracci’s lunettes, created for the Aldobrandini Chapel, challenge the conventions of early modern religious art because the paintings are inherently ecocentric – that is, they decentre human beings 6 Ibid., 45. 7 Ibid., 45-46. In my thesis, I will refer to this chapel as the Aldobrandini Chapel. 3 from their perceived positions of power and importance. My methodology entails a multi-pronged approach: I will apply ecocritical perspectives that acknowledge the intrinsic value of nature to Annibale’s lunettes while conducting a formal art analysis of the works, and also taking into account the historical and biographical context of the commission as a whole. Furthermore, my study will include a comparative factor as I will discuss the Contarelli Chapel paintings by Annibale’s fellow Italian artist, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. These paintings also challenge the conventions of chapel art, although, I will argue, in ways that render them as the antithesis to Annibale’s lunettes. I will clarify at the outset what is meant by the ‘intrinsic value of nature,’ as it is a term that will appear frequently throughout this study. Intrinsic value is best understood in opposition to instrumental value – it is independent of human judgment, human interest, and human well-being.8 Intrinsic value is not a relational property, meaning that the assessment of value is not due to the result of personal gain for the human being rendering the judgment.9 Nature is capable of assigning value to itself; in fact, this ability to recognize one’s internal value is a signifier of having intrinsic value.10 I am not suggesting that nature (or more aptly, Nature), possesses the conscious, sentient capacity to value itself, but rather that there are forces in the natural world which symbolize self-worth. Just as a person will not touch a hot stove in an effort to protect one’s fingers, nature also possesses the ability to protect and defend itself. It will shield itself from danger, repair itself when damaged, and regenerate when possible. Thus, when I discuss the intrinsic value of nature, I am referring to a value that is not for human purposes, but instead, ‘by 8 Austin Himes et al., “Why Nature Matters: A Systematic Review of Intrinsic, Instrumental, and Relational Values,” Bioscience 74, no. 1 (2024): 29-30. 9 Michael Bonnett, “Nature’s Intrinsic Value,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 37, no 4 (2003): 633. 10 Ibid., 634. For Bonnett, humans have intrinsic value because they have self-value and see themselves as “ends-in-themselves” (634). 4 nature, for nature.’ Throughout my thesis, I will reference three specific types of environmental theories that acknowledge the intrinsic value of nature: deep ecology, the resacralization of nature, and dark green religion. Where I note that Annibale’s lunettes contain the intrinsic value of nature, or are capable of being interpreted as displaying the intrinsic value of nature, I am suggesting that nature, in the picture, has value that is not meant to serve the human figures depicted within the canvas, and by extension, the viewer looking at the canvas. Due to the potential misalignment of theory and artwork (I am applying ecocritical perspectives from the 1960s and 1970s to paintings from the early 1600s), it is necessary to provide justification for the pairing of Annibale’s lunettes with environmental philosophy. An ecocritical approach to art is important because it unlocks new interpretations and understandings of an artwork’s impact. There are pragmatic outcomes to this approach, as well. Recognizing nature’s intrinsic value is believed to be vital to the conservation of the biosphere.11 In Ian A. Smith’s 2016 book, The Intrinsic Value of Endangered Species, he proposes that thinking of nature’s intrinsic value is an exercise that can lead to higher levels of environmental protection. Smith provides the example of the humpback chub, a fish that is not aesthetically pleasing to the human eye and has little to no economic value. Since the humpback chub has no clear instrumental value, an appeal must be made to “some other kind of value, like intrinsic value, if we are to show that the chub must be preserved.”12 Therefore, thinking about the intrinsic value of nature may help humans act in ways that benefit the natural world. It encourages the protection of nature even where there is no clear-cut advantage to humans. The consideration of nature’s intrinsic value is also informative. Applying an ecocritical perspective to art “affords 11 Sufen Ye, Luoping Zhang, and Huan Feng, “Ecosystem intrinsic value and its evaluation,” Ecological Modelling 430 (2020): 2. 12 Ian A. Smith, The Intrinsic Value of Endangered Species (New York: Routledge, 2016), 10. 5 distinctive insight into current and previous worldviews,” enabling a greater understanding of how we have arrived at the present moment – a time which is noted to be one of ecological crisis.13 In other words, interpreting Annibale’s lunettes as displays of the intrinsic value of nature may help us to better understand our own behaviors and interactions with the natural world. There will be no point during this thesis in which I will imply that Annibale – painting centuries before the era of modern environmentalism, and still too early for the ecology and conservation debates of the 18th and 19th centuries – intended for viewers to take an ecocritical approach to his lunettes (or any of his paintings, for that matter). That would be presumptuous at best, and anachronistic at worst. I am not attempting to rewrite the context surrounding Annibale’s lunettes, only I wish to see if we may read these paintings via ecocritical language, and in doing so, gain new insights regarding the artworks. Environmental philosopher Timothy Morton states that “all art – not just explicitly ecological art – hardwires the environment into its form.”14 Thus, a work of art does not have to be made for environmental purposes in order to be interpreted through that lens. There is some flexibility when it comes to applying the ecocritical approach, at least in the sense that the boundaries of analysis can be expanded creatively.15 As for the question as to why I am looking at these paintings specifically, I find it fascinating that, despite the high praise they have received for their significance in the history of landscape art, Annibale’s lunettes for the Aldobrandini Chapel are not vigorously studied works of art.16 And where art historians do mention the lunettes, it is often to emphasize Annibale’s 13 Karl Kusserow, “Ecocriticism,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 5, no. 1 (2019). 14 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 11. 15 In a way, I am attempting something similar to Mohebat Ahmadi’s 2022 book, Towards an Ecocritical Theatre: Playing the Anthropocene, wherein Ahmadi examines plays that do not have explicit environmental messaging from an ecocritical perspective in order to dissolve conventional ideas about nature and the world in a time of climate change ((London: Routledge, 2022), 79-81). 16 Over the course of the last century, research on the Aldobrandini Chapel lunettes has been more or less limited to the following art historians: B.M. Hudson and Heinrich Bodmer (the 1930s), Donald Posner, Howard Hibbard and 6 impact on future French painters Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, and their contributions to the classical, ideal landscape. I suspect the dearth of academic study on the lunettes has to do with the attribution issues. Although Howard Hibbard gained access to the Aldobrandini family archives in the 1960s, and Donald Posner amassed a full catalogue of Annibale’s works in the 1970s, neither art historian was able to confirm the precise dating of the lunettes, nor could they definitively conclude which artists painted the remaining four lunettes.17 Moreover, there is limited information regarding how the lunettes were viewed in the original Aldobrandini Chapel.18 There are also no preparatory drawings known for the lunettes, and Annibale’s chosen iconography is considered highly unusual for this type of religious art.19 This is all to say that the gaps in information regarding the lunettes may help explain why art historians are reluctant to discuss these works at length. My aim is to return to this material and, through an ecocritical lens, locate new points of interest and significance within the paintings. The final issue I will raise in this introduction pertains to the upcoming comparison between Annibale and Caravaggio, wherein I will contrast Annibale’s subversion of the standards of religious art to the equally subversive Contarelli Chapel paintings by Caravaggio. I acknowledge that comparing Annibale to Caravaggio is not a novel exercise. In fact, their names appear in art history literature essentially intertwined (in my opinion, more so for Annibale – the A. Richard Turner (the 1960s and 1970s), Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf (the 1990s), and Clare Robertson (the 2000s). Most recently, Xavier F. Salomon, a British art critic, has offered his thoughts on the lunettes, as well. 17 Elizabeth Barthold, “Annibale Carracci’s Aldobrandini Lunettes and the Ideal Landscape Tradition,” Master of Arts, Research Paper (Non-Thesis Option) (Washington, D.C.: American University, 1989), 8. I will expand on this in Chapter 2, but the general understanding in art history texts is that the remaining four lunettes were completed by several of Annibale’s pupils. 18 Francesca Cappelletti, “An Eye on the Main Chance: Cardinals, Cardinal-Nephews, and the Aristocratic Collectors,” in Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 1550-1750, edited by Gail Feigenbaum with Francesco Freddolini (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2014), 81. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Barthold’s research paper provides some speculations as to how the lunettes were positioned in the original Aldobrandini Chapel, to be discussed in Chapter 2. 19 Clare Robertson, Rome 1600: The City and the Visual Arts Under Clement VIII (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 95. Robertson notes that the iconography of the lunettes is unusual because one would not expect to find an Entombment scene in such a cycle – a Pietà is more common (95). 7 art history texts reflect that one cannot mention Annibale Carracci without mentioning Caravaggio, although it is possible to mention Caravaggio without mentioning anyone else, at all). Annibale passed away at the age of forty-eight (and thus, was unable to complete all six lunettes for the Aldobrandini Chapel) due to mental and physical stress stemming from an intense depression – a depression that was triggered from Annibale not receiving adequate monetary compensation for his work at the Palazzo Farnese.20 Caravaggio allegedly settled a dispute over a tennis score by killing his opponent; he fled from the scene, and later passed away from a rage-induced fever at the age of thirty-six, only three days before he was to receive a pardon for his crime.21 Annibale and Caravaggio were both Italian artists working in Rome during the same period of time, and they both died young and under tragic circumstances. The similarities and differences of their artistry, biography, and influence have been explicated by art historians for centuries. My aim is that this ecocritical approach, along with the focus on these specific commissions (the Aldobrandini and Contarelli chapels) will reveal previously unexamined connections between the two artists. My project will unfold as follows. In Chapter 2, I will address the question: why were the Aldobrandini lunettes painted in the first place? I will review the context of the Aldobrandini Chapel commission and consider Cardinal Pietro’s goals in assigning these paintings to Annibale. In Chapter 3, I will conduct a formal analysis of the lunettes, applying ecocritical theories to the paintings in order to demonstrate their ecocentric nature. This chapter includes comparisons to the Contarelli paintings as artworks that are not ecocentric, and instead, human- 20 Ann Sutherland Harris, Landscape Paintings in Rome, 1595-1675 (New York: Richard L. Feigen & Co., 1985), 110. 21 Roger Hinks, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio: His Life, His Legend, His Works (London: Faber & Faber, 1953), 26-28. Per Hinks, Caravaggio believed his belongings were on a ship that was sailing away without him; he ran after the boat in anger, wading into the cold water, fell ill, and subsequently died from fever. Hinks offers a sad conclusion to this story: as it turned out, Caravaggio’s items had never been on the ship and were on land, well within his reach, the entire time (28-29). 8 centred, to present how both artists challenged art conventions, albeit in strikingly different ways. In Chapter 4, I will consider the implications of this research and the ecocritical perspective. If humans are decentred in Annibale’s lunettes, what follows from this shift in the perceived hierarchy? What does this shift reflect regarding humanity’s place in nature at this time in early modern Italy? In Chapter 5, I will conclude by presenting an alternative perspective to my argument regarding the ecocentric qualities of Annibale’s lunettes. 9 Chapter 2: The Patron, The Papal Coffers, and The Context of the Commission Before inspecting the formal qualities of Annibale Carracci’s lunettes as demonstrative of the intrinsic value of nature, it is necessary to first discuss the patron of the commission. This will situate the lunettes within the context that they were designed, produced, and intended to be viewed. 2.1 Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini The Aldobrandini lunettes were commissioned by the nephew of Pope Clement VIII, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini.22 Pope Clement VIII was the head of the Catholic Church (1592-1605), but he also acted as the ruler of the territories ‘belonging’ to the church, known as the Papal States. In other words, Cardinal Pietro was related to one of the most, if not the most, powerful people in Italy at the time. However, popes are made – that is, they are elected. Therefore, Cardinal Pietro (being in his early twenties when his uncle became Pope), would have been aware that his opportunity to capitalize on his familial relationship was bound to the length of time that Pope Clement VIII held this significant title. Cardinal Pietro had only the few years in which Pope Clement VIII was alive and in power to “establish the Aldobrandini presence within the urban fabric of Rome.”23 Cardinal Pietro did not sit by idly, and enjoy the wealth and 22 The examination of the life circumstances of someone who happens to be the pope’s nephew, or holds the elevated title of Cardinal-Nephew (which Pietro Aldobrandini also held), is beyond the scope of this thesis. However, at the present moment, our society has become increasingly interested in the topic of nepotism, and it is worth noting this very modern debate about favouritism and privilege bestowed upon family members is richly linked to the early modern Italian practice involving popes and their relatives (see: Karen J. Lloyd’s Art, Patronage, and Nepotism in Early Modern Rome (New York: Routledge, 2022), particularly the introductory chapter on ‘papal nepotism’). 23 Clare Robertson, “Patronage Rivalries: Cardinals Odoardo Farnese and Pietro Aldobrandini,” in Art and Identity in Early Modern Rome, edited by Jill Burke and Michael Bury (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2008), 106. 10 prestige that came with being the nephew of the Pope. He was active in the upper echelons of Italian politics and became an important diplomat. For instance, in 1598, Cardinal Pietro negotiated the return of Ferrara to the Papal States.24 Cardinal Pietro understood that the best way to bolster his family’s reputation and value was through the use of the papal coffers; Pope Clement VIII was amenable to directing these resources to Cardinal Pietro “on a colossal scale.”25 Cardinal Pietro used his newfound wealth to brand the Aldobrandini as members of the Roman aristocracy, and to compete with princely families such as the Farnese and the Medici for power and prestige.26 One of the most effective ways to achieve such goals was through property acquisition. Land ownership was linked to significant social status and income generation.27 The ownership of land went hand-in-hand with the ownership of real property – palaces, villas, chapels. And for Cardinal Pietro, having “a good address in the city, a convenient palace to show the rank and richness of the family” was his greatest ambition.28 Another benefit in acquiring multiple properties was the ability to retain and display items inside these buildings. A significant portion of these items constituted artistic products. In fact, during the period of 1550 to 1750, when Romans purchased impressive properties, it was with the primary intention to display their art collections.29 Having a distinguished art collection signified splendor and magnificence, which in turn took on political weight in Roman society.30 Specifically, there was an increasing desire for landscape art among 24 Ibid., 100. Ferrara is a historic city in Northern Italy. 25 Robertson, Rome 1600, 26. 26 Ibid., 27 and 59. 27 Saskia Rubin, “‘Domine, Quo Vadis?’ Annibale Carracci Approaches an Old Theme Anew,” Artibus Et Historiae 39, no. 77 (2018): 248. 28 Cappelletti, 78. 29 Tracy Ehrlich, “City and Country: A System of Properties,” in Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 1550-1750, edited by Gail Feigenbaum with Francesco Freddolini (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2014), 41. 30 Renata Ago, “Splendor and Magnificence,” in Display of Art in the Roman Palace, 1550-1750, edited by Gail Feigenbaum with Francesco Freddolini (Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2014), 70. 11 wealthy Roman patrons; the concurrence of this interest in landscape art and the rise in grand Roman villa gardens among the elite (expanding to encompass formal gardens, parklands, and agrarian lands) signalled an important connection between landscape art and land ownership.31 Thus, at the same time that Cardinal Pietro was acquiring real land, he was also becoming one of the most significant patrons of landscape art in the 1600s.32 In 1601, Cardinal Pietro purchased a palace on the Corso belonging to the noble Della Rovere family.33 The property underwent a major renovation following Cardinal Pietro’s purchase, and this entailed the building of a new chapel.34 Cardinal Pietro became consumed with decorating this chapel; he employed painter Avanzino Nucci to work on the frescoes in the chapel ceiling, and the lunettes were commissioned to Annibale.35 There are two points of interest I would like to consider regarding the overall decoration of the Aldobrandini Chapel. First, given the high number of properties that wealthy Romans such as Cardinal Pietro owned, it was common for artworks to be commissioned with the intention that they could be easily moved and installed in a different villa or different palace, depending on the preference of the patron.36 However, Annibale’s lunettes were created for a specific space (the lunette compartments in the chapel), so there would have been some degree of planned permanency in their installation. Cardinal Pietro may have encouraged Annibale to design the lunettes as long-term features in his chapel, not paintings to be swiftly moved around. (Indeed, after the lunettes were completed in or around 1611, they remained in the chapel for nearly half a century, until the Pamphili family claimed the property in 1647 through the marriage of Cardinal Pietro’s only heir, Donna 31 Rubin, 248. 32 Ibid. 33 Cappelletti, 80. 34 Barthold, 28-29. 35 Cappelletti, 80. 36 Ehrlich, 44. 12 Olimpia, to Camillo Pamphili, the nephew of Pope Innocent X. At this point, the six lunettes are believed to have been moved to the Aldobrandini Palace on the Quirinal).37 Second, in comparison with the decorative schemes of other properties (the villa, the palace, or the gardens), the chapel generally fell low in terms of priority of decoration – most seventeenth century property owners did not pay a great deal of attention to chapel décor.38 Yet, Cardinal Pietro was very engaged with his chapel’s decoration. I posit, then, that given the unusual care and attention to the décor, Cardinal Pietro may have had a special affinity for this chapel or at the very least, he viewed the structure as an important property under his authority. What prompted Cardinal Pietro to select Annibale for the decoration of the chapel’s lunette compartments? Prior to the appointment of Pope Clement VIII, the Aldobrandini family had relatively “little history of artistic patronage.”39 This means that Cardinal Pietro had more to prove when it came to establishing himself as a patron of the arts. The decision to employ Annibale was likely rooted in Cardinal Pietro’s rivalry with Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, of the Farnese family, who, unlike Cardinal Pietro, was already an active art patron. Cardinal Odoardo was also responsible for bringing Annibale to Rome in 1595 to paint the Camerino and the gallery at the Palazzo Farnese.40 While Cardinal Pietro had the prestige of being the favoured Cardinal-Nephew, and having access to the resources of the papal coffers, Cardinal Odoardo had an advantage over Cardinal Pietro; the Farnese were well-established within the aristocracy as a result of the nepotistic activities of Cardinal Odoardo’s great-great-grandfather Pope Paul III.41 37 Barthold, 29. 38 Cappelletti, 80. 39 Robertson, “Patronage Rivalries,” 100. 40 Ibid., 98. In Chapter 1, I mentioned that Annibale’s death was due in part to a state of depression triggered by inadequate financial compensation for his work at the Palazzo Farnese – thus, his arrival in Rome to create the Farnese paintings marks the origin of the end of Annibale’s life and career. 41 Ibid., 95. 13 “Emulating the Farnese appears to have been a major motivation” for Cardinal Pietro’s decision to work with Annibale.42 2.2 Annibale’s Aldobrandini Chapel Lunettes Cardinal Pietro commissioned a cycle of images for the Aldobrandini Chapel depicting the life of the Virgin Mary.43 The six lunettes that constitute this cycle vary in their physical dimensions. The two paintings that I will examine closely in this thesis, Flight into Egypt and Entombment, are semi-circles (Flight into Egypt measures 122 cm x 230 cm and Entombment measures 120.5 cm x 189 cm). The other four lunettes (the ones with complicated attribution) are smaller and more elongated, and this inconsistency is likely the result of the lunette compartments having different heights.44 Most sources state that there is no conclusive evidence as to how the lunettes were arranged in the chapel.45 As the palace changed ownership a number of times over the centuries, the Aldobrandini Chapel was destroyed, and what architecture remained was later incorporated into the Palazzo Doria Pamphili.46 Art historians have been unable to locate the original building plans for the Aldobrandini Chapel.47 It is presumed that Flight into Egypt, being the largest of the six paintings, may have held a more prominent position in the room.48 42 Ibid., 106. Per Robertson’s analysis, I find it fascinating that Cardinal Pietro and Cardinal Odoardo were both very significant art patrons in Rome at the start of the 1600s, and yet, neither was interested in working with the “other rising star of Roman painting,” Caravaggio; Robertson further notes that both men would have been well aware of Caravaggio’s presence through their mutual friend, Cardinal del Monte (95), and yet they still chose not to pursue a serious artistic relationship with him. 43 Robertson, The Invention of Annibale, 184. 44 Bodmer, 260. 45 Cappelletti, 81. 46 Carol Mary Richardson, “Property Portfolios” in Reclaiming Rome: Cardinals in the Fifteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 272; Barthold, 29-30. 47 Barthold, 29-30. Per Barthold, “the Aldobrandini lunettes now hang perhaps within meters of the place in which they were first installed,” but we may never know for certain (30). 48 Ibid., 30. 14 Although I am not closely analyzing the four lunettes with attribution issues (and will only provide a few brief statements regarding them in this chapter and in Chapter 3), it is necessary to acknowledge that, while he passed away before being able to finish all of the paintings, Annibale was still the principal planner and designer of the commission as a whole.49 The four lunettes were completed by Annibale’s pupils: Francisco Albani, Sisto Badalocchio Rosa, Domenichino, and Giovanni Lanfranco.50 They are titled: Landscape with the Adoration of the Kings (possibly mostly by Domenichino) (c.1604-1613) (Fig. 6), Landscape with the Visitation (possibly mostly by Domenichino) (c.1604-1613) (Fig. 7), Landscape with the Adoration of the Shepherds (possibly mostly by Domenichino) (c.1604-1613) (Fig. 8), and Landscape with the Assumption of the Virgin (possibly mostly by Albani) (c.1604-1613) (Fig. 9).51 All six lunettes, intended for viewing in a private chapel, constitute private art. However, they may also be construed as public works in a limited sense. At this time in Italy, private chapels would sometimes be open to the public on certain days (or during certain religious events). I suggest that the contents inside Cardinal Pietro’s chapel were to be known by those on the ‘outside.’ And, given Cardinal Pietro’s intense desire to be admired for his art collection, this further solidifies the notion that the lunettes were likely meant to also be viewed by people other than the patron, himself. 49 There are a few sources which speak to Annibale’s involvement in all six lunettes. Howard Hibbard notes that Annibale planned the commission in full (see: “The Date of the Aldobrandini Lunettes,” The Burlington Magazine 106, no. 733 (1964): 184). Richard E. Spear, who, at one point, tried to imply that Domenichino may have painted some parts of Flight into Egypt, also confirms that Annibale designed the commission in its entirety (see: Domenichino (Yale: Yale University Press, 1982), 142-143). For the record, Spear admits that Donald Posner (the Annibale expert) rejected the suggestion that Domenichino worked on Flight into Egypt (142-143). 50 Robertson, Rome 1600, 95. 51 I am following Heinrich Bodmer’s attribution theories for the four lunettes, stating that they were completed for the most part by Domenichino, and to a lesser extent, Albani. In The Invention of Annibale, Clare Robertson offers a different theory as to which artist mostly painted which lunette: Landscape with the Visitation is credited to Albani and Badalocchio, Landscape with the Adoration of the Shepherds is credited to Badalocchio, Adoration of the Kings is credited to Albani and Badalocchio, and Landscape with the Assumption of the Virgin is credited to Albani. For the purpose of my project, I am less concerned with the precise attribution of the four lunettes, and more interested in the fact that they were completed by Annibale’s apprentices. 15 2.3 The Conventions of Chapel Art In seventeenth century Rome, chapel paintings, and religious art in general, were required to adhere to certain standards. Religious art needed to contain religious content. In the case of Annibale’s lunettes, all six paintings qualify as having the correct thematic material (retelling biblical narratives). There was also a general understanding between the patron and the artist that the artist would “follow established practice, either by adopting a traditional formulation of the subject, or by following… the unwritten rules of invention and composition of religious istorie” as set out by the Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti.52 However, Annibale, nearly fifteen years before working on the lunettes, had already engaged in challenging Alberti’s istoria conventions in his painting, Pietà with Saints (1585) (Fig. 10).53 This willingness, or rather, boldness, to challenge the status quo is significant given that the breaking of religious convention meant angering more than only one patron. There were layers of religious authority to whom the artist was expected to answer, and when Annibale began working in Rome, religious art was “strictly controlled in the wake of the Tridentine decrees.”54 The Tridentine decrees were set out by the Council of Trent, a Roman Catholic committee that met from 1543 to 1565 to reassess (or reconfirm) the authority of the Catholic Church on people’s daily lives. Throughout the twenty years it met, the Council of Trent addressed condemnation coming from the Protestant sector (the Catholic Church’s main adversary at this point), but the question of religious art was addressed only in the very last session of the Council, December 3 and 4, 1563, wherein they 52 Thomas Puttfarken, “Caravaggio’s ‘Story of St. Matthew’: A Challenge to the Conventions of Painting” Art History 21, no. 2 (1998): 168. Istorie/istoria refers to the guidelines set out by Alberti in the fifteenth century for making art, and how to relay a narrative through imagery. 53 Livia Stoenescu, “Retooling Medievalism for Early Modern Painting in Annibale Carracci’s Pietà with Saints in Parma,” Religions 12, no. 8 (2021): 6. Stoenescu argues that Annibale goes against istorie by depicting a sleeping Christ, instead of a Lamentation piece featuring a dead Christ. 54 Clare Robertson, “On the ‘Reform’ of Painting: Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio,” in Art and Reform in the Late Renaissance, After Trent, edited by Jesse M. Locker (New York: Routledge, 2018), 20. 16 decreed that chapel art must not contain superstition, lasciviousness, nor exaggeration, among other prohibitions.55 Yet, there appears to have been some latitude in artmaking despite the rules, decrees, and standards in place. On the one hand, Annibale’s lunettes, while I have noted they were for public consumption, were still ultimately produced for a private patron. And, more significantly, the commission was for lunette paintings and not an altarpiece (that is, not the work of art that is placed directly behind the altar, and directly in the line of sight of a viewer). With reference to the aforementioned speculation regarding Flight into Egypt’s prominent position in the chapel, even if some of the lunettes were more visually accessible than others, the fact remains that the lunettes were likely located close to the ceiling. They were potentially placed above a door frame or some arch in the wall, such as a vault. Simply put, they were not the main visual attraction for a viewer. A painting produced for a private patron, and one that is not an altarpiece, therefore, offers the artist greater opportunity in terms of experimentation. Cardinal Pietro’s position in his own family may have also created some leniency in Annibale’s art direction. As the papal nephew, Cardinal Pietro’s taste in art could be more progressive than his uncle, the Pope.56 In general, Roman patrons remained highly tolerant of different artistic practices, despite the rules set upon religious art.57 They felt comfortable employing non-Italian artists, particularly artists from Northern Europe, such as Peter Paul Rubens and Paul and Mathijs Bril.58 There seems to be two conflicting modes of thought regarding the rules of religious art: there were rules in place, 55 Jesse M. Locker, “Introduction: Rethinking Art After the Council of Trent,” in Art and Reform in the Late Renaissance, After Trent, edited by Jesse M. Locker (New York: Routledge, 2018), 2-3. Per Locker, it is believed that Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1536-1541) in the Sistine Chapel perhaps inspired these rules, given that “the disordered massive tangle of nude saints in one of Rome’s most sacred chapels embodies everything the church did not want” in chapel art (3-4). 56 Robertson, Rome 1600, 57. 57 Robertson, “On the Reform,” 20. 58 Ibid. 17 however patrons and artists were open to breaking these rules. Seeing as how the Aldobrandini lunettes “ushered in a completely new kind of religious narrative, set in an idealized landscape of the Roman Campagna,” it is evident that Annibale was one of the artists patrons turned to for the subversion of such rules.59 Another reason pertains to the Tridentine decrees, themselves. Despite being set by the highest Italian authority at this time, the stipulations were not consistently applied among the Papal States. Italy was so politically, socially, and economically divided, and every “state defended its independence and every city preserved its own character,” that one could not expect to find in art a style which satisfied all of the demands set out by the Council.60 In addition to Annibale’s Pietà with Saints, there are ample examples that show Annibale’s experimentalist tendencies, and the fact that, leading up to the lunettes, challenging art convention was not a rare occurrence for the artist. Completed only a couple years before the lunettes, Annibale painted another religious image for Cardinal Pietro, Domine, Quo Vadis? (c.1601) (Fig. 11), in which he also defied the rules attached to Christian iconography.61 The painting features Christ carrying his Cross as he passes by St. Peter, both figures standing in an idyllic landscape setting. Annibale breaks with religious art convention in this painting as he “firmly replants the subject in Aldobrandini’s own era” by incorporating the landscape in the form of the Roman Campagna.62 I mention Domine, Quo Vadis? because this re-positioning of the viewer relates strongly to the lunettes in the Aldobrandini Chapel, as well. In both Flight into Egypt and Entombment, the viewer is placed in the Roman countryside, and made to experience 59 Ibid., 21. 60 A.W.A. Boschloo, Annibale Carracci in Bologna: Visible Reality in Art After the Council of Trent, Volume I (Netherlands: The Hague Government Publishing Office, 1974), 144. 61 Rubin, 241. 62 Ibid., 242. 18 these religious events through the perspective of their own earthly environment. In other words, Cardinal Pietro views the religious landscape as emblematic of the green spaces he regularly sees around his properties, particularly the ones in the more rural areas. This relationship between art and the direct experience of the Roman Campagna pertains to the intrinsic value of nature. It is at this juncture that I wish to introduce the first of the three environmental theories that I will reference in my thesis: deep ecology. Deep ecology is a philosophy which expands on the recognition of the intrinsic value of nature. In 1972, Norwegian philosopher and ethicist Arne Naess advocated for a form of environmentalism that was to be undertaken for non-human reasons, or more specifically, for the sake of nature itself.63 Deep ecology posits that humans ought to relate to the natural world “through direct contact and not through pale abstractions… [because it] is through this unmediated contact that humanity can draw deeper conclusions about what is meaningful and real.”64 Simply, deep ecology encourages direct contact with nature (a walk through the countryside, sitting among the trees) in order to understand and appreciate nature’s intrinsic value. In setting the scenes in the Roman Campagna, Annibale is directly addressing his patron and other potential Italian viewers of his paintings.65 Annibale is acknowledging that this type of green space is the natural world with which Cardinal Pietro, and others like him, would have come into direct contact. The connection to nature becomes visceral, tangible, even if the subject matter remains biblical, or abstract. 63 I am referring to the foundational ideas expressed by Arne Naess during his presentation at the 3rd World Future Research Conference in Bucharest in 1972, where Naess specified the distinction between shallow ecology (fighting pollution as an objective for the “health and affluence” of people in developed countries) and deep ecology (a non-anthropocentric approach to environmentalism), as recorded in “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary” (115). 64 Robert Schimelpfenig, “The Drama of the Anthropocene: Can Deep Ecology, Romanticism, and Renaissance Science Rebalance Nature and Culture?” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 76, no. 4 (2017): 860. 65 Rubin, 242. 19 As deep ecology calls on humans to recognize the intrinsic value of nature, this is a non-anthropocentric perspective because it removes the human from the centre of focus (it is no longer a question of what benefits the human, but rather, what benefits the non-human?) “A dominant worldview (or social paradigm) is the collection of values, beliefs, habits, and norms which form the frame of reference for a collectivity of people.”66 Worldviews constitute “general assumptions about reality” including humanity’s place in nature.67 Intrinsic values are explicitly associated with a non-anthropocentric worldview.68 Hence, the recognition of nature’s intrinsic value produces a worldview that does not privilege the human; it is a frame of reference that is tailored towards putting nature first. The prevailing worldview in the early 1600s supported the notion that humans dominate the natural world, that humans are “above, superior to, or outside the rest of Nature.”69 Cardinal Pietro, in being a repositioned viewer, seeing these religious scenes set in the Roman Campagna that he knows through direct contact, may have experienced an unsettling – a shifting worldview. I am speculating, of course, but Annibale’s lunettes, in giving nature primacy in a religious artwork, clashed with the status quo worldview of the time, that is anthropocentrism. Those, such as Cardinal Pietro, who presumably saw themselves as the centre of the universe (and correspondingly, the centre of every religious image that references human figures), were now challenged to view the situation, or the world, differently. To conclude this chapter, I will connect these moving parts – the patron, the artist, the standards of chapel art. How did challenging chapel conventions converge with Cardinal Pietro’s goals in commissioning Annibale to paint the lunettes? I have noted that Cardinal Pietro wanted to ensure that his family name was associated with the upper rungs of Roman aristocracy, and 66 Bill Devall, Deep Ecology: George Sessions (Salt Lake City: Gibbs M. Smith, Inc., 1985), 42. 67 Ibid. 68 Himes et al., 30. 69 Devall, 43. Nature is capitalized in accordance with Devall’s text. 20 this would have entailed purchasing properties that came with lush garden space. Annibale’s lunettes, then, must be considered in connection with Cardinal Pietro’s relationship with nature, including his “meticulously designed gardens or the remote governance of lands in the Roman Campagna.”70 It is possible that Cardinal Pietro wished to transpose the Roman landscape into the paintings he commissioned as a way to “convey his power to Baroque Romans.”71 In other words, there was a link between owning landscape art and owning real land(scape). It was a symbolic connection in the sense that the landscape painting acted as a stand-in for the actual natural environment, however it was also a literal connection as Cardinal Pietro owned such lands in reality. “Viewing the landscape – whether real or represented – was considered noble.”72 And Cardinal Pietro, as the nephew of the Pope wishing to decorate a private chapel, had the power and flexibility to request a landscape-heavy religious painting. He could display the landscape aspects of the religious scene over and above the religious figures, thus achieving his goal: that the chapel paintings also become signifiers of his wealth. Annibale, as someone who was already familiar with challenging religious art convention, was a willing partner for Cardinal Pietro’s project. Therefore, to answer the question as to why Annibale subverted the expectations of chapel art and presented a predominantly landscape-filled painting in a religious environment, one relevant response may be that Cardinal Pietro had expressed a desire to showcase his landowner status inside the chapel, through art. It happened to be that one of the implications of this type of painting in a chapel was the unsettling of a worldview – a worldview that assumed human beings were at the centre of importance and nature was to be relegated to the periphery, or in the case of the canvas, to the background. There is irony in the fact that Cardinal Pietro’s 70 Rubin, 250. 71 Ibid., 248. 72 Ehrlich, 45. 21 very anthropocentric desire to own land (that is, to control and dominate nature) via the acquisition of landscape art is offset by the landscape taking precedence of importance in the painting (in some ways, suggesting that nature is not to be controlled, not to be dominated). 22 Chapter 3: Ecocritical Genuflection: A Formal Analysis of Annibale’s Lunettes, Featuring Caravaggio’s Contarelli Paintings In this chapter, I will analyze Annibale’s lunettes for the Aldobrandini Chapel using ecocritical theories to note the intrinsic value of nature that is visually present in the paintings. This will entail consideration of Annibale’s technique and method of art-making, that is, painting directly from nature (and how Annibale’s methodology is a product of the Carracci Academy’s art training, Lombard art styles, and Northern European artistic influences). First, I will demonstrate how the lunettes relegate nature to a primary, dominant position within the picture, and relay nature’s value as not meant only for human purposes (an ecocentric reading of the works). Second, I will compare Annibale’s lunettes to works by other artists in the biblical-landscape genre, to emphasize the unique quality of Annibale’s paintings. Third, and building off of these comparisons to other artists, I will contrast Annibale’s (ecocentric) lunettes to Caravaggio’s (anthropocentric) Contarelli Chapel paintings: two groups of paintings that are both highly subversive and provocative in terms of how they challenge the status quo in religious art convention, and yet, as I will argue, Annibale’s works push the envelope just slightly further because of their nature-first quality. The examinations in this chapter are predominantly formalistic, meaning I am looking at what is available on the canvas (the content, colours, and placement of figures), also known as the artwork’s “visual and material properties or its compositional elements.”73 73 Amanda Waiselewski, “Return to Form,” in Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023), 30. I am writing in 2024 when art formalism is said to have the potential to advance dominant power structures and biases. As Waiselewski notes, “formalism has thus developed a ‘bad name’ in art history” (31). However, formalist analysis also reveals the artwork’s “effervescent quality, its expressive power… [and it] remains a core method in art history” (30-31). In other words, if the artwork contains any semblance of materiality (such as an oil on canvas painting), form must be relevant to its analysis. 23 3.1 Annibale’s Lunettes as Displays of the Intrinsic Value of Nature Upon viewing Flight into Egypt, it is evident that Annibale has painted this scene based on his observations of the natural world. The lunette contains the elements that one may see in the Roman Campagna; it is as if Annibale had witnessed these religious events, though that would have been impossible. As noted in the last chapter, Annibale’s landscapes are not abstractions of nature, but instead they are based on direct contact, via the observation of nature. This quality of the lunettes relates to Annibale’s artistic training. Annibale portrays the humans and animals in this painting through his signature naturalistic style. Naturalism refers to artworks that are completed “from nature” or involve a “true and natural likeness” to the person or object in the real world.74 Annibale (and Caravaggio) fall under the category of Lombard art, which emphasizes the representation of nature (the living world) and entails observation of the world around the artist.75 The Lombard artists, thus, created art (paintings, drawings, etchings, and so forth) based on what they saw on a daily basis. Annibale treated this aspect of his art very seriously. In his “exasperated annotations to [Giorgio] Vasari’s text,” Annibale criticized Vasari for failing to recognize that great art drew its inspiration directly from nature, and not through second-hand methods.76 In Flight into Egypt, humans and animals are depicted as interacting as they would in the natural world. Through the inclusion of a “raised area of middle ground,” Annibale’s paintings exhibit great depth.77 This produces a natural, realistic scene, one that mirrors depth perception in reality (the viewer’s space). 74 Andrea Bayer, “Defining Naturalism in Lombard Painting,” in Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy, edited by Andrea Bayer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 3. 75 Interestingly, neither Annibale nor Caravaggio are from the Lombardy region of Italy. The Carracci family are Cremonese, but born in Bologna, and Caravaggio is from Cremona – and yet, both Annibale and Caravaggio would “consider themselves Lombard artists” (Bayer, 5). 76 Ibid., 13. Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) wrote The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, one of the most important art history texts of the Renaissance era. 77 Lagerlöf, 16. 24 The Lombard art tradition was not the only reason Annibale painted based on observation. Annibale, along with his brother Agostino and cousin Ludovico, co-founded the Carracci Academy: the Academmia degli Incamminati (which roughly translates to the Academy for Moving Forward, or the Academy for Progress). The artists that are believed to have assisted in completing the other four lunettes (Albani, Domenichino, Badalocchio, and Lanfranco) were part of this academy, as was the influential Bolognese painter, Guido Reni.78 In the last chapter, I noted Annibale’s experimental tendencies. This penchant for artistic experimentation is likely related to his Academy’s philosophy. The Carracci Academy contained an “experimental, avant-garde atmosphere.”79 As well, the Academy offered somewhat of an interdisciplinary education; pupils training in art also received instruction from anatomists, humanists, naturalists, scholars, and poets.80 The Academy contained the frequent “presence of literati and intellectuals.”81 Annibale’s diverse, eclectic art range likely resulted from this willingness to take risks in the making of art. One of the key aspects of training at the Academy was the emphasis on drawing.82 Annibale was known to sketch constantly – he would venture outside the city gates for fresh air, and sketch landscapes as he ate a meal.83 His sketches were based on “spontaneously observed slices of everyday life,” and these included pictures of a family cat in a domestic household, some Bolognese tradesmen at work, and landscapes with boats and streams.84 This tendency to draw from nature must have influenced his lunettes. Annibale may have never witnessed a ‘flight 78 Robertson, Rome 1600, 299. 79 Robertson, The Invention of Annibale, 30. Though, as Gail Feigenbaum notes, it is ironic that the Carracci Academy, while offering a “paradigm for artistic creativity… [later] became the foundation for all art academies that would follow… [and] would so often become the very instrument that enforced the authority of the history of art” (“Practice in the Carracci Academy,” Studies in the History of Art 38 (1993): 73). 80 James Hutson, “Li pittori parlano con l’opere: Visualizing Poetry in Practice in Early Modern Italian Art,” Athens Journal of Humanities and Arts 8, no. 3 (2021): 195. 81 Gail Feigenbaum, “Practice in the Carracci Academy,” Studies in the History of Art 38 (1993): 63. 82 Robertson, The Invention of Annibale, 71. 83 Ibid., 72. 84 Ibid., 35, 36, and 72. 25 into Egypt’ nor an ‘entombment,’ however, he had seen trees, animals, humans, moving water, and a sky with clouds. These are the observations of the natural world that could very well have impacted his creation of the biblically-themed lunettes. In Flight into Egypt, Annibale places the Holy Family (Joseph, Mary, and the Christ Child) in the middle foreground of the canvas. Given the significance of the placement of the human figures in the painting (in the very centre of the nature scene), it could be simple to dismiss this image as anthropocentric. However, I suggest that the natural elements in this image are competing with the centralized ‘human scene’ for primacy of the viewer’s attention. Behind the family, there is an array of nature-based activity occurring. While the viewer’s eye may initially fall upon the humans in the foreground, the gaze starts to travel in the same direction as the family’s movement (right-to-left). Alongside the family, two birds are depicted traveling in the same direction. And yet, the landscape is “shut in on the left side” by a dark patch of undergrowth, and trees with dense foliage are set against the sky.85 The viewer’s gaze hits this natural obstacle, and the right-to-left movement is interrupted. This is nature, in the picture, controlling the movement of the viewer’s vision. The gaze is then redirected back into the picture by way of the gentle slope of the hill, which parallels the curved top of the canvas (Fig. 12). The viewer’s gaze arrives at the waterfall where, immediately below, birds are depicted emerging from this area. The gaze follows these birds as they start the right-to-left movement once again. This visual motion parallels the processes of the water cycle in which the waterfall in the centre pours into the stream below, evaporates, condenses, and precipitates, returning to the stream once more. This comparison reiterates the notion that Annibale’s picture produces a gaze that 85 Bodmer, 260. 26 mimics the regenerative and cyclical aspects of nature.86 The humans in the foreground are only one prop to such a notion. There is value in nature that is not for human benefit as it regenerates for the sake of itself. Recalling the theory of deep ecology raised in the last chapter, the intrinsic value of nature is strongly viewable in these lunettes. I am focusing on the two basic tenets of deep ecology: humans and nature are interrelated, and there is value in nature that is not derived for human benefit.87 In Flight into Egypt, both of these strands are present. Nature values itself because of its ability to regenerate and repair, as seen in the natural cycles constantly operating in the environment. This regenerative cyclical aspect of nature is indication of its intrinsic value, because value, following Enlightenment ethics, is to see oneself as an end in and of themselves.88 Nature will defend itself using whatever means are available to it, and self-defence is part and parcel to self-worth. Nature and humans are interrelated in Flight into Egypt through the aforementioned interaction between humans, animals and the natural environment. The painting contains numerous scenes of what one may see in the Roman Campagna including shepherds with cattle in a field, and a man on horseback trotting up a hill. A further indication of the connection between humans and nature in Flight into Egypt is the pace of movement. The figure of Mary turns back towards Joseph, indicating that she is 86 I am utilizing A. Richard Turner’s ideas about the movement of the gaze via the birds as a product of the lunette-shaped image, as outlined in his book The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). Turner uses this visual direction to parallel the slow movement of the Holy Family’s escape through nature (189). I am altering his theory to instead focus on the cyclical nature of the gaze, and its relevancy to the flow of water. 87 Deep ecology is an evolving, expansive philosophy, however I am drawing on only these two specific strands as they appear to best encompass the overall intent of deep ecology. This is supported by the record of Arne Naess’s 1972 presentation, as well as such summaries of deep ecology provided by Robert Schimelpfenig (2017), who states that deep ecology suggests the value of nature must be divorced from human values, and not defined by what is useful about nature to humans (such as recreation and beauty) (889), and Andrew Fellows (2022), who advises that deep ecology views everyone as equal participants in the biotic community and recognizes the intrinsic value of all (1249). 88 Bonnett, 634. 27 walking slowly, or has stopped moving altogether. Joseph’s legs are bent at the knees, signaling that he finds the journey arduous, particularly this portion which appears to be uphill. Annibale has depicted the family as moving slowly through the woodlands.89 Akin to this slow, nearly halted movement, there is the gentle glide of the birds, positioned next to the family, as they seem to be hovering mid-air. Another non-human figure, the donkey, also may keel over from the strain of the journey. In the seventeenth century, Malvasia wrote that “no one painted foliage more effectively than the Carracci [family], and this is why [Giovanni] Baglione praises them very highly for their rendering of landscape.”90 The foliage in Flight into Egypt denotes gentle movement, as the leaves on the tips of the trees slightly droop down, others remain horizontal. It is as if the viewer can imagine the light breeze occurring on the day in which this scene is set. The stream of water also indicates a slow, unhurried flow of water. In fact, the only intense depiction of nature’s force, the waterfall pouring out of the building, is muted by the artist – Annibale blocks our viewing of the waterfall in full through the placement of greenery. Humans and nature are interrelated as their movements are in sync in this painting. Deep ecology reimagines time, seeking a “natural rhythm that allows humanity to live in accord with the planet.”91 My assessment of Flight into Egypt is that Annibale has depicted such a rhythm, situating humans and nature as part of one, unified time. Annibale’s sentiments toward nature are revealed through his treatment of the natural world in the painting. While it is difficult to discuss ‘sentiments’ and ‘feelings’ through concrete, formalistic analysis, a brief review of the other four lunettes may be fruitful in explicating this notion. All six landscapes have clarity built into their structure.92 As I noted in Chapter 2, 89 Bodmer, 263. 90 Summerscale, 296. 91 Schimelpfenig, 850. 92 Bodmer, 260. 28 Annibale designed all six landscapes for the Aldobrandini Chapel, and thus, it is likely that this sense of clarity, and simplicity of the narrative, is the result of Annibale’s hand. None of the six lunettes are chaotic nor disorganized in terms of their content and placement of figures. In short, the viewer does not have to overthink in order to understand the images. However, in Adoration of the Kings, believed to have been completed mostly by Domenichino, there are “certain weaknesses” that conflict with Annibale’s style, such as the figures in the foreground having no connection with the background – they are “separated by huts and tree trunks.”93 The hills on the right are also “weakly constructed and lack continuity.”94 Whereas Annibale’s landscapes are unified, and viewed from a single vantage point, the painter of Adoration of the Kings has divided the space into two separate sections.95 Likewise, in Visitation, also believed to have been completed mostly by Domenichino, there are many similar issues. There is a superficiality in the connection of the valley and the building in the centre.96 This superficiality is not present in Flight into Egypt, which contains a seamless transition between the man-made structure in the middle and the natural space surrounding the building. The same term, superficial, is used to describe Domenichino’s Adoration of the Shepherds, as it is said to lack a connection between the groups of people and the landscape in which they are positioned.97 Albani most likely completed the Assumption of the Virgin. His painting produces monotony and his scenery is made with talent, “but without any deep feeling for nature.”98 The implication here is a point of 93 Ibid., 264. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid., 264-267. 96 Ibid., 267. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid., 271. I would be remiss not to acknowledge that Bodmer’s elevation of the two lunettes completed by Annibale, and his criticisms against the other four lunettes, may be the result of a bias in favour of Annibale (or a distaste for Domenichino and Albani). In any event, I am utilizing Bodmer’s remarks because they emphasize the fact that there is a unity in Annibale’s two lunettes that does not come across in the other four paintings. 29 contrast, that Annibale’s Flight into Egypt and Entombment, full of unity, depth, and authenticity, are made with a deep feeling for nature. It is the concept of a ‘deep feeling’ for nature that brings me to the second of the three environmental theories I will reference in my thesis: the resacralization of nature. This idea was founded by Persian philosopher and scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr in the 1960s, where he discussed the observation of the intrinsic value of nature through a religious filter. The resacralization of nature promotes nature’s intrinsic value, but in tandem with the understanding that nature has a sacred quality that produces a value that is “beyond the merely utilitarian.”99 The term ‘sacred’ implies that recognizing nature’s intrinsic value may reveal something special about nature: that nature has the potential to outweigh the importance of humans because it invokes a higher power. Nasr writes that “nature needs to be resacralized not by man who has no power to bestow the quality of sacredness upon anything, but through the remembrance of what nature is as theatre of Divine Creativity and Presence.”100 Thus, nature is the reflection of Divinity. However, there is a practical consequence of this theory that sees nature as sacred, and hence, powerful, as well. It can be interpreted to mean that humans rely on nature more than nature relies on human beings. If the scene in Flight into Egypt were to be reimagined without human figures, the natural elements would not be impacted to any detriment. The hills would remain hills, the trees would be trees, and the sky would remain a sky. The key difference would be the missing walled building in the midpoint of the image, leaving the landscape unhindered by such a bulky feature. In other words, nature would be unimpacted or even improved. However, if the human figures were lifted out of the picture and placed into another scene, without these 99 Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Religion and the Resacralization of Nature,” in Religion and the Order of Nature: The 1994 Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 271. 100 Nasr, 270-271. 30 natural elements, their activities would change immensely. The man in the boat would struggle to move his watercraft without water, the shepherds would have no purpose without green pastures, and the Holy Family, attempting to flee from King Herod through nature, would need to rethink their escape route. Just as the resacralization of nature sees nature as the element with the power to connect to the Divine, Annibale’s lunettes can be interpreted as providing a similar power to the natural landscape. Even if human beings did not exist in the picture, nature would contain this objective, intrinsic value regardless.101 In Entombment, Annibale depicts another religious scene relating to the life of Mary. On the left side of the image, there are five female figures grieving the death of Christ. On the right, a group of men carry the body into a tomb carved out of the rock feature. The human figures are, in a sense, hidden from everything else behind the large rocks. In the middle of the image, there is an open green field, and behind it, there is a city. Beyond the city, there is a clear mountain view. It is the disposition of the landscape which directs the painting’s narrative.102 In other words, the placement of each figure – who is positioned where, and facing towards what – is ‘decided’ by nature. Above this scene, the clouds appear to be darker and stormier than the clouds depicted in Flight into Egypt (possibly as a reference to the darker subject matter of the narrative on which Entombment is based). While the viewer’s eye darts back and forth between the two narratives at the front of the picture plane, it also continues to seek out what is occurring in the recess of the image, deep into the landscape. In Entombment, Annibale has managed to give attention to the groups of human figures, but “without in any way detracting from the function of the landscape as the principal factor in the composition.”103 101 Smith, 2. 102 Bodmer, 263. 103 Ibid. 31 Humans and nature are shown to be interrelated through Annibale’s use of colour in Entombment. The women on the left seem to disappear into their rocky background, as the tones of the natural space behind them blends into their clothing. The men, presented in dusty, earthy tones, blur into the rock features. These colours are also symbolic of decay, which may be a reference to the decomposition of bodies, the breakdown of natural matter, and death, all of which are relevant in an entombment scene. Among the men, the man in the red cloak (John the Evangelist, per the biblical narrative), provides a stark contrast to the dark environment. And yet, by carrying a candle, he is the lone figure shown to be holding one of the natural elements: fire. This figure is thus also connected to nature. Moreover, the man in the red cloak is the first of the humans to enter into the tomb, or literally, to enter into nature (Fig. 13). This is further solidifying the connection between humans and nature. In the middle field, there are two figures on horseback, facing away from the viewer. I suggest that these figures are meant to parallel the movement of the man in the red cloak. As John the Evangelist enters into nature, the men on horseback are entering into a city. The green field in the middle of the lunette is depicted via a vibrant colour, very unlike the tones used in the foreground. Even as a biblical scene, Annibale has rendered the landscape as naturalistic as possible, capturing the details of the rocks, shrubs, and distant horizon lines. At the same time, he portrays the humans in equally naturalistic terms, as the tiny figures are set against the grandeur of the rock formations. What is dead, dying, or grieving is the colour of decay and blood, while that which is vibrant and alive is a rich green and healthy blue. One would imagine that this is all disorienting to a viewer that is expecting to see chapel art that is human-centred, a scene that renders the colours of the human drama occurring in the scene as dynamic and the main point of focus. Annibale has offered a scene that contradicts this expectation. 32 In Entombment, the issue of pacing and time is broached akin to Flight into Egypt. The women’s gestures indicate slow, languishing movements, as if it is cumbersome to lift their arms to point at Christ’s body, or to clasp their hands in prayer. The men, too, are shown, as if engaged in a slow-paced movement. One of the men leans backwards, as if to demonstrate the strength required to transport the body, and to convey that this is not a fast process. The weightiness of the clouds in the sky are parallel to the weightiness of the body being carried by the men. This synchronization between the heavy clouds and the heavy body also has the potential to be read as the visual connection between humanity and nature, such as the metaphorical ‘dark clouds’ of depression being relayed through art. The clouds are heavy, slow-moving features that resemble the slow movement of human figures. Through the harmonizing of time, the duality between humans and nature is dissolved here – precisely what is called for by the philosophies that promote the intrinsic value of nature. For instance, deep ecology, following the interrelation between humanity and nature, does away with the need to “set up hierarchies of species with humans at the top.”104 Hence, duality is dissolved, and nature and humans are placed in the same tier, as one. Similarly, in the resacralization of nature, humans and nature are united through the Divine: a “person who has reached the centre of his own being sees in every phenomenon of nature, in the crystals, plants, and animals, in the mountains and skies and the seas… realities that also reside within the being of man and come from the Logos and ultimately God.”105 The recognition that what is reflected in nature is also reflected in humanity, dissolves the separation between humanity and nature. Likewise, through emphasis on content, colour, and temporality, Annibale’s lunettes may be interpreted as dissolving the duality between humans and nature, and thus illuminating the intrinsic value of nature. 104 Devall, 68. 105 Nasr, 278. 33 3.2 Annibale’s Artistic Predecessors/Influences It is beyond the scope of this thesis to consider Annibale’s line of influence because, as I have noted, his work was so eclectic that it signals a mash of many different influences, not to mention his own propensity to experiment with art. Instead, I will offer some comments regarding what other artists (particularly artists for which Annibale had expressed interest or admiration) were doing before Annibale’s time in order to relay the novelty of Annibale’s approach to the lunettes. The scenes Annibale has produced in Flight into Egypt and Entombment are part of the Christian art repertoire; they are visual representations of biblical narratives that have been repeated by artists since at least the Byzantine era.106 When comparing Annibale’s Entombment with entombment images by other artists in the centuries prior to the painting of the lunettes, it is evident that there is a nature-first quality to Annibale’s work for the Aldobrandini Chapel. For instance, in Titian’s The Entombment of Christ (c.1520) (Fig. 14), there is some reference to the natural world – a glimpse of trees can be seen in the upper right corner – however, the central aspect of this image is undeniably the body of Christ. Titian has given emphasis to the depiction of his legs, stomach, and arms. There is also ample space devoted to the depiction of the human figures surrounding Christ, including the men that are carrying him and the women that are grieving him. The human figures take up the entire picture space, leaving little room for the rendering of the sky. Likewise, in Fra Angelico’s Entombment of Christ (c.1438-1440) (Fig. 15), the focus is on the body of Christ, placed upright in the centre of the image. Though the scene includes depictions of green grass, some tall shrubs, and thick trees in the background, Fra 106 Even in sixth century Byzantium, there was an interest in how Christian divinity was expressed through the “concrete work of art,” per Claire Farago, “The Concept of the Renaissance Today: What is at Stake?,” in Renaissance Theory, edited by James Elkins and Robert Williams (New York: Routledge, 2008), 77. 34 Angelico gives the greatest emphasis to Christ’s torso and arms. Annibale’s Entombment contains a Christ that is not centralized, as he is placed in the right-hand corner, small in size in contrast with the rest of the canvas. I suggest that in Titian and Fra Angelico’s versions of this story, they are depicting an entombment set in a landscape setting. Meanwhile, Annibale has painted a landscape, and within this landscape, there is an entombment scene. The difference is a matter of emphasis, and the elements to which the viewer’s gaze is pulled towards. I am not suggesting that Annibale produced religious art with the intention of working against the styles of Titian and Fra Angelico. In fact, Annibale “expressed great enthusiasm” for Titian.107 However, when juxtaposed with the Italian religious art that was produced before his time, Annibale’s conception of these biblical narratives can be perceived for their novelty. To return to the idea that Annibale’s paintings may have been disorienting for viewers expecting to see human-centred chapel art, the comparison to Titian and Fra Angelico’s pictures reinforces the unsettling quality of Annibale’s lunettes. Christ is not the central figure in Annibale’s religious paintings. The viewers, expecting to see humans as the point of focus, and Christ specifically as the principal figure, are rattled on both accounts. Environmental philosophies that acknowledge the intrinsic value of nature, such as deep ecology and the resacralization of nature, enact a similar form of disorientation in asking humans to decentre themselves in the world in which they occupy. In Chapter 2, I noted that the prevailing worldview in the early 1600s relegated humans as superior to nature. Then, Annibale’s lunettes can be said to challenge worldviews though pictorial representations, and it is possible that, had these images been viewed in a context outside Cardinal Pietro’s private chapel, they may have received a negative 107 Annibale also admired the work of Venetian artists Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, see: Robertson, The Invention of Annibale, 56, 59, and 61. 35 reception. Certainly in modern times, anger and rejection have been the standard response to the environmental philosophies that promote understandings of nature’s intrinsic value.108 Art historians have cited the most significant event in Annibale’s time in Rome to be the contact he made with Flemish painter, Paul Bril.109 After he arrived in Rome in the 1580s, Bril greatly popularized landscape art.110 Bril is credited as the artist who inspired Annibale to turn to landscape painting, however, there are some who disagree, stating that Annibale’s interest in landscape derived from the Venetian artists working in the genre.111 The latter is the more likely scenario because Annibale painted significant landscape art before he went to Rome and met Bril.112 The chapel for which Annibale produced the lunettes was connected to a palace – and this palace, occupied by Cardinal Pietro primarily during the summer months, was decorated with landscape paintings by Bril.113 I speculate whether this had an impact on Annibale’s art direction regarding the lunettes. Taking into account the theory posited in Chapter 2 – that Annibale recognized Cardinal Pietro’s desire to convey his landowner status through art – if Annibale was also aware of Cardinal Pietro’s preference for Bril’s landscapes, then, Annibale may have been further encouraged to give the landscape aspect primacy over the religious aspect of the painting. In ruminating on the role of Flemish painters as an origin point in the fusion of religious imagery with landscape painting in the first quarter of the sixteenth century in Antwerp, art historian Larry Silver asks: “When does a painting of a saint in a landscape become a painting 108 Schimelpfenig, 889. For instance, some critics of deep ecology label it as misanthropic because it removes humans from the pinnacle of value (889). 109 B.M. Hudson, “A Landscape Attributed to Annibale Carracci,” Bulletin of the City Art Museum of St. Louis 15, no. 4 (1930): 65. 110 A. Richard Turner, The Vision of Landscape in Renaissance Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 187. 111 Hudson, 66. 112 Ibid. 113 Barthold, 29. 36 of a landscape with a saint?”114 As seen in the passages above, I find this question highly relevant when reviewing Annibale’s treatment of religion and landscape in the lunettes. It is evident that northern European artists affected Annibale’s art making as he made this turn towards challenging the conventions of chapel art. I have noted possible influences and sources of inspiration for Annibale’s lunettes, linking his work to artists before his time, and to artists from other geographical areas. There remains one name that, perhaps more so than all the others, is responsible for Annibale’s willingness to take risks and upend religious art standards. It is the name that I have mentioned is most often invoked when discussing Annibale’s art: Caravaggio. And yet, despite the fact that Caravaggio arrived in Rome three years earlier than Annibale,115 I am unable to insert Caravaggio directly in Annibale’s line of influence. There is simply too much crossover between their works to indicate that only one inspired the other, but there is enough evidence to argue that they inspired each other. Caravaggio appears to have been very interested in Annibale’s art career. According to Albani, Caravaggio greatly admired Annibale’s St. Margaret altarpiece (1598-1599) in the Bombasi Chapel in Santa Caterina de’Funari.116 Caravaggio is also said to have based his conception of Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy (1606) on Annibale’s swooning virgin in Pietà with Saints.117 The two artists had also worked ‘together’ on a commission in 1600, when they were both assigned to paint the Cerasi Chapel.118 Some art historians speculate that 114 Larry Silver, “Introduction: ‘Cultural Selection’ and the Origins of Pictorial Species,” in Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 2. 115 Robertson, The Invention of Annibale, 100. 116 Ibid. 117 Sydney Joseph Freedberg, Circa 1600: A Revolution of Style in Italian Painting (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 19. 118 Robertson, The Invention of Annibale, 100. ‘Together’ is in quotation marks because I am not stating that they worked side by side in the Cerasi Chapel. In Roger Hinks’s book, he writes that the Cerasi Chapel in S. Maria del Popolo “interrupted” Caravaggio’s work on the Contarelli Chapel, so there was much overlap and back-and-forth as he worked on the two commissions (69). 37 Annibale’s interest in realism in art grew as a result of his close contact with Caravaggio’s work.119 As I will be examining in the final section of this chapter, if Annibale was dauntless enough to fully break with convention in the lunettes, it may have also been in part due to the impact of Caravaggio’s Contarelli cycle. 3.3 Caravaggio and the Contarelli Chapel This comparison between Annibale’s lunettes and Caravaggio’s Contarelli paintings will demonstrate that Caravaggio was also subverting chapel conventions. Through Cardinal del Monte, the Italian art patron, Caravaggio was able to secure the contract for the Contarelli Chapel at San Luigi dei Francesi.120 The Contarelli Chapel paintings were Caravaggio’s first major public commission.121 The chapel was to be decorated with episodes from the life of St. Matthew the Evangelist, including the events that led to his martyrdom while working as a missionary in Ethiopia.122 The making of these paintings proved very difficult for Caravaggio not only because they were the largest canvases he had yet to work on, but also due to his method of painting directly from the model, which caused “great strain” for him in a project of this magnitude.123 This ‘strain’ likely refers to the limitations of painting based on models posing in front of him, when one needs to, due to the religiosity of the narrative, exercise some degree of imagination, as well. I view this in contrast to Annibale’s lunettes, which were set in the familiar 119 Freedberg, 65. 120 Hinks, 40. I am omitting mention of the dramatic context of the Contarelli paintings. As Hinks writes, in comparison to Caravaggio’s short life, these three paintings took a very long time to complete (62). The first versions of the paintings were rejected, and Caravaggio had to start anew many times over – although, the rejected Contarelli paintings were purchased right away by private patrons instead (62). This raises the question as to whether the original paintings were truly objectionable as art, or simply not fitting the rules and regulations of a public religious space. 121 Todd P. Olson, “Pitiful Relics: Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St. Matthew,” Representations (Berkeley, Calif.) 77, no. 1 (2002): 113. 122 Ibid., 125. 123 Hinks, 65. 38 surroundings of the Roman Campagna (that is, painted based on what Annibale had at one point seen in real life), but without the necessity of painting the human figures from life, as well. Moreover, the Contarelli paintings were produced for a public space, meaning that there were stricter expectations for Caravaggio to follow the standards of religious art than Annibale’s lunettes made for his private patron. And yet, Caravaggio still managed to upend convention, albeit in a different (and potentially opposite) manner than Annibale. To the left of the chapel altar, also called a ‘lateral painting,’ sits The Calling of St. Matthew (1599-1600) (Fig. 3). In this image, five men are seated at a table, as two newcomers (one of whom is Christ) enter through an unseen door. Christ points to Matthew (the young, long-haired figure hunched over at the very end of the table), to join him in religious undertakings, hence, ‘the calling’ referenced in the title of the work. The background of the image is a tax office.124 The sharp light is the driving force of the narrative, and yet, Christ is removed from the viewer’s attention because he is placed near the right-hand edge of the picture.125 This is similar to Annibale’s Entombment, which also puts Christ in the right-hand corner. In Caravaggio’s painting, Christ is somewhat blocked from the viewer’s regard because the apostle Peter is positioned in front of his body, and only the feet of Christ are visible, pointed to the right (the opposite direction of his hand and head) (Fig. 16).126 Caravaggio depicts Matthew in the middle of counting money, performing his job as a tax collector. Matthew is hidden from the viewer’s gaze as well, with his head hanging low. In other words, the primary figures of this image are not clearly represented, or are not the obvious spectacles in the scene. This is in contrast to Annibale’s lunettes, with their immense clarity and simplicity. Creating 124 Puttfarken, 166. 125 Ibid., 169. 126 Ibid. 39 further disorientation is the fact that Caravaggio’s painting does not address the moment viewers expect to see. “What Caravaggio has chosen to depict here is not the traditional event of Matthew responding to Christ’s call, but the split second between the call and Matthew’s response to it.”127 Through the interpretation of Christ’s turned feet, Caravaggio is demonstrating the suddenness of Matthew’s conversion: “whilst calling Matthew, Christ is already moving on.”128 While the viewer’s “normal expectations [are] that details should elucidate and articulate the meaning displayed by the whole,” the meaning of the story in Caravaggio’s painting is not in the details – it is hidden.129 This is a challenge to religious art convention because the viewer must look beyond the painting to find its meaning. It is also a direct refutation of the Council of Trent’s decrees, as they required religious images to draw an immediately emotive response from viewers.130 If the painting is a puzzle, this may disorient the viewer such that they cannot have an instantaneously emotional reaction. The Calling of St. Matthew is highly human-centred, with its various figures seated, standing, pointing and turning. Viewers are intended to understand the meaning of the painting based on an analysis of the human bodies. Who is turned towards what? Who is pointing to whom? This is another difference from Annibale’s lunettes, with its tiny human figures plotted along the tranquil landscape. Caravaggio invests his figures “with a more richly varied and nuanced body language.”131 A similar emphasis on the human body appears in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew (1599-1600) (Fig. 4), the other lateral painting in the Contarelli Chapel. In this painting, a scene of violence takes place involving several human figures, with an angel above, bodies twisting and 127 Ibid., 172. 128 Ibid., 169. 129 Ibid., 173. 130 Lilian H. Zirpolo and Jon Woronoff, Historical Dictionary of Renaissance Arts (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2008), lxviii and lxix. 131 Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, Caravaggio: The Artist and His Work (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), 263. 40 moving frantically. St. Matthew lies on the ground in the centre of the image, appearing to plead for his life to the figure standing above him holding a sword. As mentioned, it is believed that St. Matthew was completing missionary work in Ethiopia when he was murdered; the art contract stipulated that that the painting must show a “large temple-like space with an isolated altar raised up on three to five steps, in front of which Matthew, wearing robes that are yet to be specified, is killed by the hand of a soldier while celebrating mass,” and it must include benches, carpets and other furnishings.132 Caravaggio has included a self-portrait among the figures in the background (Fig. 17). At this time, Caravaggio would have been in his late twenties, but the self-portrait is older, “bearded, brow furrowed, his mouth contorted in a grimace of dismay, his dark eyes filled with anguish.”133 The self-portrait is an emphasis on humanity, the human experiences of sadness and regret. Moreover, Caravaggio’s self-portrait signals human-centred perspectives. Self-portraits are the “anthropocentric art form par excellence.”134 This is not say Caravaggio’s Contarelli paintings are anthropocentric purely because they contain his self-portrait, or that Annibale’s lunettes are ecocentric because they do not contain the artist’s self-portrait. However, Caravaggio has (as he often does) slipped his own image into a religious, biblical scene, reinforcing the enduring line of human life, and this is highly anthropocentric. It is the notion that humans have existed since the time attested by the Bible, and Caravaggio is part of the same genealogy, a descendant of the figures in these images. It is as if to say: we are all human, regardless of the time and place. On the other hand, Caravaggio’s self-portrait can also indicate 132 Ibid., 123-124. 133 Jonathan Harr, The Lost Painting (New York: Random House, Inc., 2005), 20. 134 Stephen S. Bush, “Portraiture and Anthropocentrism,” De Ethica 7, no. 3 (2023): 93. Bush writes about portraiture in general, and how it treats the human as privileged subject matter (95). 41 hyper-interest in the self. Some have related self-portraiture to narcissism.135 In any event, Caravaggio’s inclusion of his own face in this painting reflects humanity. Martyrdom, akin to the Calling, is not an image through which one can decipher the meaning by looking at the details on the canvas.136 To truly understand this painting, one must reconstruct a sequence of events to learn that the killer of St. Matthew is not the nude figure standing above him with a sword (but instead, the figures fleeing in the background), and that this is not an image of an assassination, but instead the after-effects of the death of an apostle.137 And even then, when one has looked beyond the details to find meaning in the work, “it is difficult to understand what it is that Caravaggio was trying to do in these pictures.”138 Akin to Annibale’s lunettes, the viewer finds themselves disoriented standing before Caravaggio’s Contarelli paintings. However, in the case of Caravaggio, this disorientation is rooted not in the primacy of the landscape over humanity, but instead on the necessity of human logic to find meaning in the paintings. They are human-centred images not only because they feature humans, but also because they require deductive reasoning which (arguably) only humans can perform. The altarpiece of the Contarelli Chapel is The Inspiration of St. Matthew (or St. Matthew and the Angel) (1602) (Fig. 5), which depicts an elderly St. Matthew, dressed in a red robe, in the act of writing, as an angel appears above his head. An altarpiece painting generally requires the artist to follow the rules of religious art more closely than in the lateral paintings, and for this reason, I will limit my analysis of the work’s anthropocentric quality to the experience of 135 Ana Peraica, “Anthropocentrism and Solipsism in Photographic Self-Portraits of Edvard Munch,” Photographies 15, no. 2 (2022): 188. Peraica writes, “the image of Narcissus is axiomatic in Western canon of self-representation” (188). 136 Puttfarken, 177. “As in the Calling… we find that the close scrutiny of details belies the obvious display of pictorial composition” (177). 137 Ibid., 176-179. 138 Ibid., 179. 42 viewing the altarpiece.139 The painting hangs in the “dim, shadowed regions of the church, at the far end of the nave, in a recess,” with the smell of candle smoke and incense surrounding it.140 “In Caravaggio’s day, the flickering light of candles would have illuminated the chapel,” and the viewer would have felt as though they were standing not in a church, but in front of a theatrical scene.141 The altarpiece appears to “breathe,” and pulse with “heat and life.”142 St. Matthew, engaged in a human act (writing), expresses surprise as he comes in contact with emblems of divinity (the angel). To a viewer of these paintings that is deeply committed to their Christian faith, the feeling of surprise or wonder upon receiving religious revelation can be construed as a relatable, human experience. The manner in which St. Matthew leans over the writing table, using the stool as his leverage, is also highly humanistic in a tangible, physical way. A viewer can easily imagine seeing this display in real time, in the real world. I suggest that the viewing of the altarpiece during Caravaggio’s time may have reminded humans of their humanity, perhaps even their mortality. The altarpiece narrative is told from an anthropocentric viewpoint, one that emphasizes the human experience. In the three Contarelli paintings, Caravaggio depicts the human figures as the principal characters in the works. The humans take up most of the canvas space, and set against a dark background (another of Caravaggio’s signature elements), the viewer’s eye is automatically drawn to the faces, bodies and gestures of the human figures. In contrast, Annibale’s lunettes contain tiny human figures, set against a bright and extensive natural background. The lunettes 139 As an altarpiece, Caravaggio was under stricter control and had less room for experimentation. I note, however, that the original version of the altarpiece was rejected on the grounds of decorum, as dirty feet were depicted (Robertson, “On the Reform,” 26). Thus, even in an altarpiece that had stricter protocols and required a more traditional approach to religious art, Caravaggio attempted to subvert convention. Issues pertaining to decorum also played a role in Annibale’s subversive of chapel art. At one point, Malvasia had criticized Annibale’s religious paintings for being too realistic, “showing no respect, polish, or decorum” (Robertson, “On the Reform,” 19). 140 Harr, 19-20. 141 Ibid., 20. 142 Ibid. 43 are demonstrative of the type of landscape painting that Annibale would later become famous for creating (coined the ‘classical landscape’), one that is defined by the way in which human figures are subordinated to the landscape setting.143 While Annibale enjoyed sketching in nature, Caravaggio is not believed to have taken up this practice – he painted “straight from the model” in his studio.144 For the most part, Caravaggio evaded depictions of the natural world. “Nobody looks upwards in Caravaggio’s pictures: they gaze at each other, they gaze out of the picture, but they never gaze at the sky – for there is no sky in Caravaggio’s world.”145 I am led to conclude that Caravaggio may not have enjoyed nature. Or Caravaggio tolerated nature so long as it was a type of nature that could remain still and be posed for painting, just as one would pose a human model.146 Caravaggio challenged the status quo of chapel art convention in a very human-centred manner. He upended human emotions, human feelings, and human responses to drama. Caravaggio’s Contarelli paintings put humans on a pedestal (or a stool, as is in the case of St. Matthew and the Angel). At the same time, Caravaggio challenged the ways in which humans interpret and analyze information, particularly when viewing art. Meanwhile, Annibale’s lunettes gave primacy to the natural world. Humanity is minimized in the grandeur of nature. The experience of seeing the lunettes reminded the viewer that they are but one part of the broader systems of life on earth, and that humanity and nature are interrelated. This produced a sense of 143 Christopher Wright, The French Painters of the Seventeenth Century (Boston: Orbis Publishing Limited, 1985), 17. 144 Hinks, 50. 145 Ibid., 90. As much as I relish this quotation from Hinks, I admit that it is somewhat outdated. In Caravaggio: The Artist and His Work, Sybille Ebert-Schifferer points out that there is a sky in Caravaggio’s Jupiter, Neptune, and Plato (1599), perhaps the only ceiling painting Caravaggio ever completed (113). This painting by Caravaggio was not discovered until 1969, nearly twenty years after the publication of Hinks’s book. 146 Hinks, 52. This references Caravaggio’s still-life paintings (images of fruit, flowers and plants). “It was Caravaggio, with his respect for inanimate and his contempt for animate nature who dared to paint pomegranates and pears as though they were as important as Mary and Martha” (52). 44 disorientation in the viewer because it conflicted with their anthropocentric understandings of the world, and their expectations of religious art. At a time when Caravaggio subverted chapel conventions through gritty, realistic depictions of religious figures, Annibale, challenged the rules of chapel art by placing dominance on the landscape – the natural world – in a religious scene. Where Annibale’s paintings display the intrinsic value of nature, Caravaggio’s paintings heighten the importance of humanity and its corporeal presence. While Caravaggio may be better recognized for challenging religious art convention, Annibale is equally deserving of such a reputation because his ecocentric lunettes disrupt the status quo in a profound, and worldview-altering, manner. Hence, my suggestion that Annibale’s lunettes may have pushed the envelope slightly further than Caravaggio’s Contarelli paintings, for Annibale’s scenes challenge the core beliefs held by human beings. Caravaggio challenges the human experience of chapel art by way of humanity, whereas Annibale challenges the human experience of chapel art by way of nature. Given that they both challenged chapel conventions, is it possible, then, that Annibale looked to Caravaggio’s Contarelli Chapel paintings for inspiration when he was creating the lunettes for the Aldobrandini Chapel? I have already indicated the instances in which there was admiration or borrowing of ideas between the two artists, but there is at least one documented instance in which Annibale took inspiration from the Contarelli cycle. Annibale was commissioned to paint the altarpiece for a chapel in San Gregoria Magno, called St. Gregory at Prayer (1601-1602), in which Annibale seemed to be “engaged in an artistic dialogue with Caravaggio, the cushion [in the image] recalling the precariously balanced stool in… St. Matthew [and the Angel] in the Contarelli Chapel.”147 Based on my calculations, the present-day 147 Robertson, The Invention of Annibale, 183. St. Gregory at Prayer is an oil on panel that was formerly located at Bridgewater House in London. Robertson states that this important painting by Annibale was destroyed in World War II (183). 45 walking distance between the Contarelli Chapel and the original Aldobrandini Chapel in which Annibale’s lunettes were hung, is approximately ten minutes. In the 1600s, I would imagine that this distance was even more nominal than it appears to be today. Thus, assuming that Annibale, in assessing the space in which his works were to be hung, crossed paths with the Contarelli Chapel, and recalled Caravaggio’s paintings, it is possible that the three paintings had some influence on his decisions for the lunettes. Annibale may have minimized his human figures to contradict the enlarged human presence in Caravaggio’s paintings. He may have given the landscape supremacy to counteract the dominion of human beings in the St. Matthew cycle. And he may have felt encouraged to contradict the rules of chapel art as a result of Caravaggio’s successful risks in the Contarelli commission. 46 Chapter 4: Nature is Our Chapel*: The Ramifications of the Decentred Human *“Nature is our chapel” is a quote attributed to Icelandic musician and environmental activist Björk. In Chapter 2, I established the pragmatic grounds upon which Cardinal Pietro commissioned Annibale to create the lunettes. In Chapter 3, I examined the paintings through a combination of substantial (formal qualities) and speculative (theoretical philosophies) aspects. Now, I will consider the overall implications of this study, that is, what happens when humans are decentred from their perceived places of importance and dominance in religious art? I suggest three responses: the viewer is disoriented, the viewer is offended, and the viewer’s understanding of religion is disrupted. To reiterate a point I raised at the beginning of my thesis, I am not suggesting that Annibale intended to decentre humans in his lunettes for the Aldobrandini Chapel. Instead, Annibale created art that presented unconventional displays of religiosity, and I am interpreting his works through an ecocritical lens to locate the significance of this unconventionality. Thinking through how the decentring of humanity relates to religious art, and by extension, to religion, will help gleam further insight into the impact of Annibale’s lunettes. 4.1 The Viewer is Disoriented I have already noted the disorientation a viewer experienced as a result of the ecocentric quality of Annibale’s lunettes throughout this project. A viewer that expected to enter a chapel and view religious works of art, but instead encountered landscape paintings, would be unsettled. The paintings themselves may be simple and clear, but their content, in the context of the chapel, would be confusing to viewers. Caravaggio, too, disoriented the viewer, by abandoning the orderliness of art “in favour of a more ‘realistic’ sense of confusion that [needed] to be worked 47 through.”148 For Caravaggio, the divine nature of the narratives signaled the necessity of this disorientation: “for those to whom [Divinity] is not revealed, it remains obscure and enigmatic… if the divine events do not reveal themselves to us, it becomes our task to work them out.”149 Given the complexity of interpretating and understanding Divinity, the result of this exercise is, mostly likely, a disoriented, confused viewer. 4.2 The Viewer is Offended Earlier in this project, I mentioned that there are criticisms against deep ecology because it removes humans from the pinnacle of value, and this is viewed as anti-anthropocentric, or anti-human.150 If Annibale’s lunettes were to be construed, in the early 1600s, as representations of the intrinsic value of nature, then it is worth speculating whether they may have contained a similar potential to upset viewers. To examine this potential, it is useful to consider the religious narratives upon which these paintings are based. Generally speaking, religion is a human-centred venture. The Bible can be referenced to support this claim. The dominant Christian reading of Genesis I states that humans, as the culmination of God’s creation, are created in God’s image.151 This anthropocentric reading of biblical creation (seen as an alternative to highly non-anthropocentric Greco-Roman mythology) places humans at the centre of creation, separates humans from nature, and insists that it is God’s will for man to exploit nature for his own needs.152 There are even some controversial ecocritical perspectives that suggest religion is so human-centred, it may be the root of the modern 148 Puttfarken, 179. 149 Ibid. 150 Schimelpfenig, 889. 151 Ronald A. Simkins, “The Bible and Anthropocentrism: Putting Humans in Their Place,” Dialectical Anthropology 38, no. 4 (2014): 398. 152 Ibid. 48 ecological crisis.153 Taking all of this into account, an explanation forms as to why a viewer may be offended if they perceive themselves as decentred and de-placed by nature in a religious work of art. In some ways, the decentring of humans contravenes religious texts. In Europe during the early modern period, the Bible, aside from being one of the most significant religious texts, was also a very important and powerful document of reference. For instance, up to the end of the seventeenth century, English society was “deeply invested in absolute interpretations of biblical narratives, and these narratives were, in principle, sufficient to govern the moral, political, social, and economic lives of the entire nation.”154 Likewise in Italy, religion and society were deeply intertwined. There was much overlap between scientific study and the reading of religious scripture. For instance, Ulisse Aldrovandi, a doctor and professor of natural philosophy at the University of Bologna, scrutinized the Bible as a scientific text.155 (Interestingly, Aldrovandi also frequently visited, and most likely taught at, the Carracci Academy.)156 Aldrovandi was seeking to locate various biblical woods, and “much of his two-volume vernacular study of the cross upon which Jesus was crucified is an extended analysis of the woods of the ancient Near East.”157 Cedar wood, mentioned frequently in the Bible, was very important to Aldrovandi, as it constituted a type of wood that “Europeans of his own day could experience firsthand.”158 This is the type of climate in which Annibale and Caravaggio produced 153 Schimelpfenig, who quotes Lynn Townsend White Jr.’s argument that Christianity is the root of the ecological crisis (857). Although, my understanding of White’s writing is that he is not actually blaming religion for the ecological crisis, but rather industry and technology – which somehow become enveloped within religion. See White’s full argument in the 1966 paper that is considered to be a critical work in the intersection of religion and environmentalism: “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis.” 154 Michael Austin, “The Genesis Narrative and the Primogeniture Debate in Seventeenth-Century England,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 98, no. 1 (1999): 19. 155 Andrew D. Berns, “‘This is What King David Meant’: Amatus Lusitanus and Ulisse Aldrovandi on the Natural Science of Scripture,” in The Bible and Natural Philosophy in Renaissance Italy: Jewish and Christian Physicians in Search of Truth (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 37-39. 156 Hutson, 195. 157 Berns, 59-60. 158 Ibid., 62. 49 their religious paintings. Two centuries later, following the scientific discoveries of naturalist Charles Darwin in the 1800s, this frame of thought would be challenged, however in the 1600s, people were still firmly entrenched in the understanding that the Bible must be read as pure fact, including its geographical and territorial layouts. In Chapter 2, I noted that by setting the lunettes in the Roman Campagna, Annibale allows the viewer to experience the religious scenes through their own earthly environment. But, through theorizing the implications of religious art that decentres humans, it seems that the lunettes may contain the potential to offend, as well. While the lunettes attest to the realism of the natural world, they are set in the Roman Campagna, that is, central Italy, and not the Near East. Perhaps viewers would have been amenable to the decentring of humans against nature if this decentring articulated that which Aldrovandi sought in his study: the ability to experience biblical narratives firsthand. However, to the seventeenth century viewer seeking validation of religious texts, the lunettes’ Italian backdrop may have been perceived as a form of bait-and-switch, or even possibly, a visual repudiation of scripture. 4.3 The Viewer’s Understanding of Religion is Disrupted I have considered the viewpoints of those that perceive biblical narratives as anthropocentric, but there exists a different perspective that argues that the Bible is, in fact, extremely ecocentric. Some argue that “the Bible emerged out of the agrarian worldview of the ancient Near East” and it, thus, challenges the anthropocentrism that dominates western culture.159 While the Bible is primarily focused on relaying stories about human beings, the humans are “embedded in the larger context of creation.”160 The biblical worldview dethrones “humans from their artificial (human-made) precipice overlooking the natural world.”161 If 159 Simkins, 399-400. 160 Ibid., 400. 161 Ibid., 411. 50 Annibale’s lunettes decentre human beings, then the viewer’s understanding of religion is disrupted such that it reverts to an expansive interpretation of the Bible. The biblical stories about the relationships among humans, their mistakes, their tests, and other human-centred aspects of life are immersed (or minimized) within the grand scheme of life – the world in which humans inhabit. This type of reading of the Bible entails a specific understanding of value. “If humans have intrinsic value in the biblical tradition, then so does the rest of the natural world because humans and the rest of the natural world are valuable as part of God’s creation.”162 The hierarchal understanding of religion, which was the status quo in the 1600s, is disrupted: humans are not superior to nature, but they are instead connected to nature. This is akin to the resacralization of nature, which denounces the notion that religion is human-centred. Nasr suggested that religious scripture confirms religion is connected to nature, and that by turning to the Creator, we can (re)assert the sacred quality of nature and see its true intrinsic value.163 Nasr noted that the resacralization of nature does not apply to any one religion, and it is instead, a universal theory to be applied to many different religions and spiritual beliefs.164 When applied to the Christian tradition and the biblical narratives, the resacralization of nature – in decentring humans – produces a form of religious proof. Every plant and animal, every natural force, reflects Divinity.165 Thus, Annibale’s lunettes, when viewed through an ecocritical lens that decentres humans, overturn the need to link religion with humanity. Humanity and religion are already connected through the natural world. Moreover, the decentring of humans makes a statement about humanity’s place (and time) on earth. The 162 Ibid., 400. 163 Nasr, 271. 164 Ibid., 275-276. Although Nasr’s writing predominantly responds to Koranic passages, he advises that the resacralization of nature can be applied universally. 165 Ibid., 277-278. 51 biblical narratives are first and foremost the retelling of the fall of humanity, how people came to contain the so-called “sin-sotted soul.”166 The story, in brief: Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, and sent to live on earth, as humans, due to their transgressions in the paradisical garden. Following this, the decentring of the humans in Annibale’s lunettes can be interpreted through a few different channels. On the one hand, the subordination of humanity to nature may reflect the punishment aspect of humanity’s fall – that is, humans are on earth because of their disobedience, and therefore, they should be relegated secondary to the natural world that now serves as their host. On the other hand, the tiny human figures in Annibale’s lunettes may signify humanity’s fleeting experience on earth – humans will eventually move on from this earth, but the natural world will remain. Either way, for the seventeenth century viewer of Annibale’s lunettes, such understandings of the pictorial elements could have been inferred as further proof of Divinity. This brings me to the last of the three environmental theories I will reference in this thesis: dark green religion. Formulated by American scholar Bron Taylor in the 2000s, dark green religion views nature as having intrinsic value and therefore, warranting protection.167 The desire to protect nature is meant to arise from feelings of kinship with nature, a sense of humility, and a lack of moral superiority.168 When humans are decentred and religious understandings are disrupted such that nature becomes symbolic of Divinity, this may give rise to a nurturing sentiment towards nature. I am not suggesting that the viewer of Annibale’s lunettes, sensing 166 Leonard Swidler, “The Garden of Eden Story – Source of Often Mis-read Wisdom: A Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 46, no. 2 (2011): 143. 167 Jens Koehrsen, “Eco-Spirituality in Environmental Action: Studying Dark Green Religion in the German Energy Transition,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature & Culture (2018): 36. 168 Bron Raymond Taylor, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 13. Taylor’s use of the term ‘religion’ is less associated with traditional religions, and more related to spiritual practices – that is, understanding nature to be sacred and the “ethical responsibilities [that] naturally follow such a realization” (3-4). 52 their displacement from the centre of existence, suddenly resolves to love and care for nature. I do speculate however, whether a linear model can be derived from these three responses I have outlined to the question of what happens when we decentre humans from their perceived places of importance. In the first stage, the viewer of Annibale’s lunettes experiences disorientation at seeing a religious picture that does not epitomize humanity. Then, in the second stage, the viewer of the lunettes turns to anger as a way to process their feelings of disorientation; they are offended that their prominent position in the picture (the world, at large) is lost, despite religious scripture being an assurance of their domination. Then, in the third and final stage, the human’s entire understanding of religion is disrupted to reveal that perhaps they were never meant to be at the centre, ultimately. Along with this realization, that nature has an intrinsic value in and of itself, there comes the desire to appreciate and protect nature because of its religious connotation. Annibale may not have intended such a model to be realized upon viewing his lunettes, however through an ecocritical analysis of his paintings, it not beyond the realm of possibility that an early modern viewer, immersed in a highly religious society, may have experienced one or more of these stages. 53 Chapter 5: Conclusion: There’s No Crying in the Chapel “Form is the essence of a work of art, but it is also highly ambiguous.”169 Thus, as I bring this project to a close, I see it necessary to acknowledge alternative perspectives that can arise from viewing Annibale’s lunettes through formal art analysis. Due to the ambiguity and open-endedness of formal interpretations, it is possible that Annibale’s lunettes may be viewed as human-centred, after all. One may argue that Annibale’s lunettes contain a heavily theatrical structure, and are thus meant to be understood as human-centred visual representations. In art history texts, the lunettes are described as having theatrical backdrops and side-wings, akin to the curtains that hide the edges of the stage from audience members (hence art historian Heinrich Bodmer’s frequent reference to the coulisse of trees in Flight into Egypt – coulisse being another term for the wings of a theatre stage). In contrast to Flemish and German landscapes of the sixteenth century, Annibale depicts the lunettes from a “lower vantage point; the spectator is now closer to the action and immediately in front of the actors [the human figures in the painting]… as though looking up at a stage.”170 In fact, many of Annibale’s landscapes feature clear side-wings in the foreground, and an opening at the centre through which one can view the distant landscape horizon.171 This is the case in Entombment, which contains an open field in the centre and mountain view in the recesses of the image. The human figures in Annibale’s lunettes correspond to performers on a stage, as they remain closest in position to the audience/viewer. The figures in Annibale’s paintings appear, for sixteenth or seventeenth century viewers, as the 169 Waiselewski, 30. 170 Lagerlöf, 95. 171 Per Bjurström, “The Carracci Brothers and Landscape Drawing,” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 71, no. 4 (2002): 211. 54 “image of man-in-nature as a theatrical fiction.”172 In other words, the viewer of the lunettes may recognize the painted figures as typical of human dramas and plays that are set in natural spaces. The lunettes are further linked to theatre by way of Annibale’s art background. Annibale came from Bologna, where illusionistic art techniques such as quadratura and quadri riportati were commonly used. Although they are not examples of these types of paintings, the lunettes carry on similar traditions because they alter our perceptions through theatrical illusions.173 The notion that the theatricality of Annibale’s lunettes may render them as human-centred is predicated on the fact that performance is humanity. Theatre theorist Alan Read refers to theatre as the “last human venue,” the only remaining place wherein humans can see themselves as distinct from the rest of the world, where they can participate in society, engage in processes of politics, and exercise common sense.174 Likewise, theatre studies scholar Mohebat Ahmadi refers to theatre as “the most anthropocentric form of art.”175 Another counterargument against my claim that Annibale’s lunettes are ecocentric arises when one considers the intrinsic value of nature, and the philosophies which promote its recognition. Timothy Morton suggests that deep ecology “buries the dead too fast.”176 It may be that he is referring to deep ecology’s overtly determinant approach – that it, too quickly, desires the dissolution between humanity and nature, seeking an immediate and unified whole, when this is ultimately an unnatural process. By asking humans to see themselves as unified with nature, 172 Lagerlöf, 95. 173 Ibid., 137-138. Quadratura and quadra riportati are illusionistic architecture associated with the real architecture inside the room, via painted pictures on the ceilings or walls – “Annibale was perfectly familiar with this type of painting” (137). 174 Alan Read, Theatre, Intimacy & Engagement: The Last Human Venue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 1-2. Read’s argument is far more complex than my brief reference, but, essentially, he views theatre as a place for performing humanity, a place where humans can be humans. 175 Mohebat Ahmadi, Towards an Ecocritical Theatre: Playing the Anthropocene (London: Routledge, 2022), 3. 176 Timothy Morton, “Imagining Ecology Without Nature,” in Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 188. 55 this may actually further awaken a sense of separation from nature. Through an oversimplification of the diversity of the human and natural worlds, acknowledging the intrinsic value of nature may set up a new dualism, instead.177 To perceive the intrinsic value of nature, humans must change their ingrained logic, and this serves as a reminder that humans and nature are, at least on some levels, distinct. Thus, the dividing line between humans and nature may actually be emboldened through the insistence that the two categories should be as one. I suggest that the source of lighting in Annibale’s lunettes parallels this problem; while the paintings show humans and nature as interrelated, Annibale’s use of lighting can be viewed to fortify the dualities of humanity and nature, potentially undoing the relational effect and instead, rendering the scene human-centred. In Flight into Egypt, there are two sources of light. The first light source falls on the landscape, highlighting the tips of the trees and the walled building. The second light source focuses on the Holy Family in the foreground, with the strongest light falling upon Mary and the Child.178 Near the feet of the family, the water “becomes suddenly and inexplicably bright,” as if to further illuminate the figures. The different light sources break apart humans from nature. Seen through this perspective, the family appear unattached to the landscape, disturbing notions of interrelations. In Entombment, Annibale’s choice of lighting also undoes the unification of humans and nature presented in the image. There is a source of light that comes from behind the mountains. It is conceivable that, given the dark sky in the foreground scene, this light would not reach the human figures, positioned in front of the large rock features. However, despite being shielded from the light behind the mountains, the faces of the women are clearly lit. Another ray of unexpected light falls upon Christ’s body, as well. The light on the foreground figures is possibly coming from directly 177 Schimelpfenig, 892. 178 Turner, 189. 56 above, or perhaps even in front of the picture, where the viewer would be situated. Regardless, the dual light sources, one cascading on the natural landscape, and one falling upon the humans in the foreground, undoes understandings of non-duality between humanity and nature. If they cannot share a single light source, how can they be truly interrelated? The last alternative perspective to my ecocentric reading of Annibale’s lunettes may be derived from the hand of the artist, himself. I am not suggesting that merely because these works of art were made by a human, that this renders them as anthropocentric. Instead, it is necessary to acknowledge the process of completion: the exercise of human agency, contemplation and judgment that is applied in making art. For Annibale, “the best art is neither a ‘copy’ of imperfect nature, nor a nebulous creation of the free imagination.”179 Annibale takes a middle path. His landscapes are a “kind of imaginative synthesis of observations.”180 There is truth to what he paints, however, it is a heightened truth, based on the choices that Annibale makes. This process is best described by the seventeenth century Italian art theorist Giovanni Pietro Bellori, who argued that Annibale observed nature, only to then make choices about which forms were to be depicted per the ‘idea’ in the artist’s mind, creating a higher, better reality.181 While Caravaggio depicts every single sinew and vein bulging out of the human body, Annibale’s figures “belong to the world of art” as figures that are credible, and yet, imagined.182 While Annibale painted what he saw in term of humans and nature, he would still use his own judgment in a selection process regarding what to depict, and this application of human agency is undeniably human-centric. 179 Lagerlöf, 189. 180 Ibid., 192. 181 Ibid., 42. 182 Ibid., 44. 57 Based on the above, it is possible, then, to argue that Annibale’s landscape lunettes created for the Aldobrandini Chapel are anthropocentric, rather than ecocentric. However, as I have demonstrated throughout my study, an ecocentric perspective permits for flexibility in the interpretation of these early modern Italian paintings. Through a formal analysis that takes into account the biographical and historical context of the paintings, Annibale’s lunettes may be read via ecocritical language and interpreted as displaying a nature-first quality. An exclusive perspective is not obligatory. Anthropocentric and ecocentric visual elements may co-exist, even within the same image. My thesis has shown that taking an ecocentric approach to art entails viewing the world through human eyes, regardless. As ecology and conservation researcher John J. Piccolo posits, we should not think about nature’s intrinsic value as isolated from anthropocentric value, “we are not apart from, but a part of, nature.”183 The same condition applies to viewing Annibale’s lunettes through an ecocentric lens. The paintings display the intrinsic value of nature, but this interpretation does not have to negate nor deny humanity. The presence of humanity is already enfolded within the composition of the picture. Perhaps it is better to think about the duality between humans and nature as a pendulum, instead. As it swings back and forth, sometimes humanity is brought to the forefront of our gaze, and other times, nature, but the swinging movement never stops, and forces remain active, attempting to bring balance for all. 183 John J. Piccolo, “Intrinsic Value in Nature: Objective Good or Simply Half of an Unhelpful Dichotomy?” Journal for Nature Conservation 37 (2017): 10-11. 58 Figures Figure 1. Annibale Carracci, Landscape with the Flight into Egypt, c.1603, oil on canvas, 122 x 230 cm. Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome. Wikimedia.org. Figure 2. Annibale Carracci, Landscape with the Entombment, c.1603, oil on canvas, 120.5 x 189 cm. Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome. Wikimedia.org. 59 Figure 3. Caravaggio. The Calling of St. Matthew, 1599-1600, oil on canvas, 322 x 340 cm. San luigi dei Francesi, Cappella Contarelli, Rome. Wikimedia.org. 60 Figure 4. Caravaggio. The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, 1599-1600, oil on canvas, 323 x 343 cm. San luigi dei Francesi, Cappella Contarelli, Rome. Wikimedia.org. 61 Figure 5. Caravaggio. The Inspiration of St. Matthew, 1602, oil on canvas, 295 x 195 cm. San luigi dei Francesi, Cappella Contarelli, Rome. ©2000-2024 ITHAKA, https://jstor.org/stable/community.13606939. 62 Figure 6. Possibly Domenichino (or Francisco Albani, Giovanni Lanfranco, and Sisto Badalocchio). Landscape with the Adoration of the Kings, c.1604-1613, oil on canvas, 120 x 225 cm. Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome. Wikimedia.org. Figure 7. Possibly Domenichino (or Francisco Albani and Sisto Badalocchio). Landscape with the Visitation, c.1604-1613, oil on canvas, 93.5 c 126.5 cm. Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome. Wikimedia.org. 63 Figure 8. Possibly Domenichino (or Sisto Badalocchio). Landscape with the Adoration of the Shepherds, c.1604-1613, oil on canvas, 94 x 127 cm. Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome. Wikimedia.org. Figure 9. Possibly Francisco Albani. Landscape with the Assumption of the Virgin, c.1604-1613, oil on canvas, 121 x 189.5 cm. Galleria Doria Pamphili, Rome. Wikimedia.org. 64 Figure 10. Annibale Carracci. Pietà with Saints, 1585, oil on canvas, 374 x 238 cm. Galleria Nazionale, Parma. Wikimedia.org. 65 Figure 11. Annibale Carracci, Domine, Quo Vadis? c.1601, oil on panel, 77.4 x 56.3 cm. National Gallery, London. Wikimedia.org. 66 Figure 12. Detail of Flight into Egypt with my annotations. Figure 13. Detail of Entombment, man in the red cloak. 67 Figure 14. Titian, The Entombment of Christ, c.1520, oil on canvas, 148 x 212 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Wikimedia.org. 68 Figure 15. Fra Angelico, Entombment of Christ, c.1438-1440, tempera on panel, 88.9 x 54.9 cm. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Art History & Theory
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Monteyne, Joseph
Goin' to the chapel with Annibale Carracci : landscape paintings in the Galleria Doria Pamphili
Text