Rescue Mission: Saving Vasari’s “Last Supper” 45 Years After a Flood

When the Arno River overflowed in 1966 and flooded Florence, Italy, an art apocalypse nearly took place in that grand Renaissance city. Countless works, including Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Doors of Paradise, Donatello’s Magdalene, and a crucifix by Giovanni Cimabue, sustained serious damage from water and mud. Almost 45 years later, the rescue mission continues as conservation technology advances to a point at which it can finally restore some of these works to their original glory. Thanks to those advances, and to a €300,000 Getty Foundation grant awarded to Florence’s Opificio delle Pietre Dure e Laboratori di Restauro (OPD), Giorgio Vasari’s 1546 The Last Supper (detail shown) will undergo a 3-year resurrection to roll back the damage those rising floodwaters once caused. Vasari, author of the The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times and the original conservator of art history through his writing, finds his work the subject of one of the great conservation efforts in art history. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Rescue Mission."

Guiding Hands

When you hear the name Leonardo da Vinci you automatically think “Genius” with a capital “G.” Such Genius that he seemingly came from nowhere to walk among us. Science fiction writers love to imagine Leonardo as a brother from another planet or a time-traveling tourist from the future. The High Museum of Art’s exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Hand of the Genius (open until February 21, 2010) restores the Genius to his own place and time without diminishing him, as if that were possible. We may stand upon the shoulders of giants such as da Vinci, but da Vinci had shoulders to stand on as well. This exhibition gives names to those guiding hands that helped da Vinci reach his first heights. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Guiding Hands."

[Image: Andrea del Verrocchio (Italian, 1435-1488) and Leonardo da Vinci (Italian, 1452-1519), Beheading of St. John the Baptist, from the altar of the Baptistery with scenes from the life of St. John the Baptist, 1477-1478 (payments until 1483), silver, 12 1/8 x 16 ½ inches. Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence. Photo: Antonio Quattrone, 2009. Courtesy Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore.]

[Many thanks to The High Museum of Art for providing me with the image above and to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of Sculpture.]

The Challenger

When Gian Lorenzo Bernini began sculpting his David (above) in 1623, he must have felt like the Biblical David standing there in the Valley of Elah facing down the Goliaths of the Renaissance. Born December 7, 1598, Bernini and the rest of the Baroque generation worked in the shadow of Michelangelo et al. As Bernini chipped away at the marble, images of Donatello’s David of the 1440s, Verrocchio’s David of 1473-1475, and, standing tallest of all, Michelangelo’s David of 1501-1504 had to have been in his mind. Donatello and Verrocchio chose to show David victorious, standing over the decapitated head of his vanquished foe. Michelangelo showed David measuring up the competition and summoning up the courage to fight. Bernini daringly chooses to show the moment of action itself, when David rears back to sling the fateful stone. David’s mouth tenses in the moment of concentration, a beautifully realistic, natural touch that humanizes the mythic young shepherd. Where his predecessors posed the young hero, Bernini springs him into action. By sculpting his David, Bernini threw down the gauntlet at the feet of the greats of the past and announced himself as a worthy challenger to the title of greatest sculptor of his time.

From the time he came to Rome with his father at the age of seven, Bernini knew he would be a great artist someday. The painter Annibale Carracci first recognized Bernini’s blooming talent and clued Pope Paul V and other potential patrons in on the next great thing. Bernini’s promise soon flowered into realized works of art that revolutionized sculpture with their drama and breathtaking realism. The Ecstasy of St. Theresa (above, from 1647-1652) added a whole new dimension to religious art—sex. The expression on St. Theresa of Avila’s face is purely orgasmic as the presence of God literally pierces her soul. The young angel beside St. Theresa seems more like Cupid with his arrow of love than a messenger of God. It’s truly amazing the level of sensuousness Bernini achieves in the drapery of the saint’s robes and how they ebb and flow around her body, as if they conducted the euphoric electricity emanating from her. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing this sculpture in person, but just judging from photographs of it in place in the Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, the sexiness of the sculpture set in a church might make me blush.

Bernini’s monument to Blessed Ludovica Albertoni (above, from 1671-1674) in the chapel of the San Francesco a Ripa in Rome repeats the ecstasy of St. Theresa years later but actually amplifies the sexual component. The life-size sculpture shows Ludovica Albertoni on her deathbed, simultaneously suffering the final pangs before death and enjoying the first stirrings of divine acceptance. Again, religious ecstasy bears a great resemblance to sexual orgasm. By placing Ludovica on a bed, the implication becomes even clearer. Ludovica looks like any one of several Roman or Greek goddesses enjoying the caresses of another diety. Beneath a mountain of sculpted robes, Bernini reveals naked physical and spiritual pleasure. As with the drapery around St. Theresa, Ludovica’s robes seem vibrantly alive, quivering with the pleasure she is feeling. As with his David, Bernini depicts his figure in a moment of action, a moment of becoming. David throws the stone and is transformed from simple shepherd to prophet and king. St. Theresa and Ludovica accept the hand of God upon them and are transformed into saints. By showing these individuals at the moment of transformation, Bernini transforms sculpture and transformed himself from a prodigy of great promise into an artist who could take on all comers.

Dreams in Stone

It is so easy to just pass by Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum, dwarfed by the PMA looming so close by. Set back from the traffic surging down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Rodin Museum stands as an oasis from the hustle and bustle of urban life. Born November 12, 1840, Auguste Rodin took the course of nineteenth century sculpture and set it back hundreds of years in order to send it soaring into the future. Works such as Rodin’s The Age of Bronze (above, 1876) harked back to classical sculpture as well as to Rodin’s heroes, Michelangelo and Donatello. The anatomic accuracy of The Age of Bronze led some to accuse Rodin of cheating by simply casting around the live model. Rodin, of course, didn’t need to cheat, but the physical realism of the figure seems almost unimportant beside the psychological realism of the pose. Rodin patterned The Age of Bronze after Michelangelo's Dying Slave. Both sculptures show a figure at the moment of ecstasy, whether the release of death, of sex, or both. Rodin recognized the eroticism embedded in Renaissance sculpture and secularized it for a modern audience. So many artists overreach in tapping the dramatic, but Rodin always seems to be pitch perfect in sculpting human emotion at its peak.

I read years ago an article by a psychologist arguing that Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais (above, from 1889) illustrates all Five Stages of Grief. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross formulated her model of grief seventy years after Rodin sculpted his Burghers, but you can persuasively argue that Rodin knew enough psychology simply by studying human nature that he approximated the stages pretty well. The Burghers tells the story of six men who sacrificed themselves during the Hundred Years' War to save the people of Calais from destruction at the hands of King Edward III’s army. Fortunately, Edward’s queen, Philippa of Hainault, pleaded on their behalf to the king, who spared their lives. Rodin shows the sestet walking to their doom and still believing they are about to die. Few emotions strike so deeply to the heart of who we are as the anticipation of death. In The Burghers of Calais, Rodin prepares each one of us to meet our maker through the example of the torments of even these brave men of history.


I’ve always thought of Rodin’s finest figures as dancers. Sure, The Thinker remains the poster boy for immobility and The Kiss is the romance after the dance, but works such as I Am Beautiful (above, from 1882) look like a scene from a ballet or a contemporary dance piece to me. I Am Beautiful actually belongs to the suite of sculptures comprising the gigantic whole of Rodin’s Gates of Hell, the pandemonium over which The Thinker muses. The male figure lifts the woman up as if to show the world just how beautiful she is, at least in his eyes. Rodin stole the title from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Je suis belle” in Les Fleurs du mal:

I am beautiful, O mortals! Like a dream in stone,
And my breast, upon which each is bruised in turn,
Inspires in a poet love silent and eternal
Like that of the material clay flesh and bronze bone.

For a man who treated women so horribly (such as the sculptor Camille Claudel), Rodin knew how to depict human relationships of every shade, from tender to almost destructively passionate. For me, every work by Rodin seems “a dream in stone” where inanimate materials seem as alive as flesh and bone.

Teacher’s Pet

It must be a complex set of feelings for any teacher to see his student surpass him or her—a mixture of pride and, hopefully less, envy. When Andrea del Verrocchio painted the Baptism of Christ (above, from 1474-1475) for the monastery of San Salvi in Florence, he delegated some of the “minor” elements to students in his workshop. Little did Verrocchio, who died October 7, 1488, know that those “minor” elements would soon overshadow the work of the supposed master. Born sometime around 1435, Verrocchio assigned the painting of the angel on the left holding Christ’s clothes to his star pupil, Leonardo da Vinci. (Legend has it that the angel on the right was assigned to another promising student, Sandro Botticelli.) Soon viewers found themselves captivated more by that angelic face and the landscape behind the angel (also by da Vinci) rather than the central scene of Jesus’ baptism. A star was “born” in this painting, and da Vinci soon found his way to the top of the Renaissance art world. Master painters usually delegated parts of commissions to their assistants, saving the choice parts for themselves. Usually, those supporting elements go unnoticed, and the names of those assistants are forgotten. In this one case, however, the name of the master Verrocchio has been largely forgotten and da Vinci remains the household name.

Verrocchio didn’t necessary upstage his painting master, Fra Filippo Lippi, but he did learn enough to break out on his own and start his own workshop. After training to be a goldsmith as a young man, Verrocchio learned the fundamentals of painting from Lippi and the art of sculpture from Donatello. Although Verrocchio split time between painting and sculpture evenly up until the mid 1470s, he still managed to paint in a sculptor-like style. Verrocchio’s Madonna and Child (above, 1470) shows a great grasp of the depth and weight of the figures, as if they were statues. However, they are statuesque without being stiff, imbued with the humanizing psychological depth that characterized the entire Renaissance. Verrocchio clearly enjoys painting the drapery and veils of the Virgin Mary and the Christ child, showing off his ability to render fabrics convincingly. The landscape behind them, perhaps done by Verrocchio or assigned to an assistant, followed the conventions of the time but also impressed in the young da Vinci’s mind the value of such little details, which he placed not only in his religious subjects but even in secular portraits such as the Mona Lisa.

When Verrocchio tackled the story of David and Goliath in his sculpture The Young David (above, from 1473-1475), he clearly acknowledged his debt to and announced his distance from Donatello, whose own David set the current standard for that Biblical hero. Donatello’s David stands over the severed giant’s head nude, his helmet worn at a jaunty angle, one hand cockily on his hip, and a foot placed triumphantly on Goliath’s head. Verrocchio’s David plays it cooler, his head uncovered, his body covered by a simple yet elegant toga, a hand placed on his hip in a relaxed but not cocky way, and a foot placed respectfully beside his vanquished foe’s head and not on it. Donatello’s David seems ready to talk trash while Verrocchio’s version exudes quiet confidence. When Michelangelo sculpted his definitive David, he fused elements of these two predecessors together. Depicting David before the battle, Michelangelo sculpted him in the nude like Donatello and with a clear sexual energy like Donatello, but the overall mood is more like Verrocchio—calm, quiet confidence in who he is and what he can do. Perhaps Verrocchio the teacher shared that same steady confidence in his abilities even as he watched a new generation of genius grow under his watch and leave him behind.

Images of Christ: Part III: Donatello, Lamentation over the Dead Christ

Donatello’s Lamentation over the Dead Christ seems like a work created in a time other than his own. If you didn’t know who sculpted this, you might guess from the roughness of the images that it was an Expressionist sculpture from the early 20th century rather than an Early Renaissance work from the 15th century. You might even see the hand of Rodin in this group sculpture that made me think of The Burghers of Calais when I first saw it, and not the hand that created the smooth, youthful David. What inspired Donatello to create such work so uncharacteristic of his time?

The religious answer would be Donatello’s desire to capture the anguish of the moment after the crucifixion, centering on the Pieta image of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Christ as the other figures each deal with their grief in their own unique way. Pieta is Italian for “pity,” deriving from the Latin “pietas,” and it is pity we are asked to feel for the fallen Christ and his suffering family and followers. The pity generated by this nadir of the Christ story is mitigated by the heights of the Resurrection to follow, but Donatello’s expressive working of the figures draws us in to live in this moment of the narrative and not “skip ahead” to the ending and, thus, rob the triumphant climax of the power derived from the struggle before.

This psychological insight gives Donatello’s Lamentation its relevance for non-believers. I remember reading somewhere some psychologist arguing that Rodin’s Burghers each represent one of the different stages of grief. Donatello and Rodin most likely did not have some checklist of grief in mind, but they did have a firm enough innate grasp of psychology to recognize the diversity of grief and to represent it in their sculptures. The consolation offered here comes from the knowledge that others suffer as we do and that grief has a beginning, middle, and end. What that end may be depends on what we believe.