Manifattura Dell’italia Centrale, Inizi XVI Secolo e Bottega di Bernardino di Betto, Detto il Pintoricchio

Notable Works of Art on the Market, in “The Burlington Magazine”, LXIX, 1936, Advertisement supplement (month of December), plate VI; G. Botta, La collezione Agosti e Mendoza, Milano-Roma 1936, cat. 139, tav. CXI; Catalogo della vendita all’asta della collezione Agosti e Mendoza (Milano, Galleria, Pesaro, 25-29 gennaio 1937), Milano 1937, p. 17 cat. 139. Mauro Minardi The cassone we are here presenting has a protruding base, composed of four wooden boards and therefore hollow, which opens at the sides in trefoil arches. The lid is rounded and also slightly protruding. The decoration involves the front panel, the sides and the lid. A luxuriant plant motif made of interwined scrolls that terminate with acorns, mostly in groups of three (as an allusion to the three depicted Virtues), runs along the main side of the chest. This motif is made of gilded and dotted pastiglia in relief, which renders the venation pattern of every leaf, and the grainy consistency of the cupule of each single fruit. The background of the decoration is painted in red, pale blue and green; and the same colours alternate along the entire frontal panel. The branches are woven so as to create three oval openings, each occupied by the figure of a Virtue. The first from the left is Charity (a female figure holding two small children and offering them her milk), the second one, in the centre, is Faith (a female figure contemplating the cross she’s holding in her right hand and pointing at it with her left), while the third one, on the far right, is not to be identified as Hope, the third of the Theological Virtues with Faith and Charity, but more likely as Chastity. The figure, seated on a marble seat like her companions, has a whip with tails in her right hand and looks towards the attribute she is holding in her left: at first sight, this round-shaped object may look like a mirror, that would have been, however, slimmer and equipped with a handle, in normal Renaissance style. It is more probably a small sieve, one of the iconographical attributes, along with the whip, of Chastity, as stated by Cesare Ripa at the beginning of the 17th century (1). The painted decoration continues along the base and on the sides of the chest and of the lid, where another elaborate and elegant plant ornamentation unravels against a pale red background and comes to an end on the lid, at the centre of which the emblem of the Della Rovere family (an oak encircled by fruiting garlands with fluttering ribbons on either side), topped with a cardinal’s hat, is represented. This heraldic reference is repeated in the aforementioned pastiglia decoration, the oak branches with acorns being amongst the most common iconographical elements of this family, at the turn of the 16th century. The chest we are here examining is an exquisite, and practically unknown, example of the patronage of the Della Rovere family during the Renaissance. It belonged to the Agosti Mendoza collection in Milan and appears in the catalogue of the sale of the collection, which was put up for auction in 1937 (Botta 1936; Catalogo 1937); it was there dated to the beginning of the 16th century. In view of the sale, the work was illustrated in the Burlington Magazine (Notable Works of Art now on the Market, in the supplement from December 1936): “The notable example (…) is of a type so rare, that no specimen absolutely corresponding to it is reproduced in Professor Schubring’s stardard work on Cassoni” (2). The previous presence of the chest in the Achillito Chiesa collection is reported in the auction catalogue: there is not, however, any specific mention in the catalogue of the sale of this collection, which took place between 1925 and 1927 (3). The connection to the Della Rovere patronage did not elude the anonymous author of the text in the English magazine, who reported a passage from the Li tre libri dell’arte del vasaio, a treatise by Cipriano Piccolpasso da Casteldurante (today Urbania) in the mid-16th century. The latter text, which focused on pottery production techniques in his home town, also includes the description of several decorative motifs used by potters, such as the cerquate, an ornamentation in the form of oak branches, a clear allusion to the coats of arms of Della Rovere, lords of Urbino in the 16th century: “These – wrote Piccolpasso – are here much used due to the veneration and obligation towards the oak, under the shade of which we joyfully live; to the point that it can be defined Urbino style painting” (4). “Possibly we have here a clue, not only to the date of the present Cassone, but also to the local school, whence it issued”, was the conclusion of the text in the Burlington Magazine (Notable Works of Art 1936). As we will see, the context in which the cassone was created is not, however, that of Urbino, but rather of Rome. The heraldic and iconographical elements, as well as the style of the paintings, distinctive of a moment somewhere between the last years of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th, allows us to determine the patronage of the work we are here analyzing. The presence of a galero on the lid leads us in the direction of a cardinal of the Della Rovere family, and two figures in particular stand out for the role they held and for the importance of their patronage: Domenico Della Rovere (1442 – 1501) (5) and Girolamo Basso Della Rovere (circa 1450 – 1507), the latter the nephew, on his mother’s side, of Pope Sixtus IV (6). As is known, the former, besides being a passionate bibliophile, commissioned Bernardino Pintoricchio and his collaborators with the fresco decoration of his Roman palace and of the chapel dedicated to the Virgin and Saint Jerome in the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome (7); the latter, acting as protector of the Holy House of Loreto from 1477, summoned Melozzo da Forlì and Luca Signorelli to fresco the two sacristies, and then once again Pintoricchio and his workshop to decorate the chapel he had the patronage of in Santa Maria del Popolo (8). Domenico’s crest, which we see in his chapel in the Roman church and in the manuscripts he collected, usually comes with the initials S. D., allusive to his personal motto Soli Deo, and the cross (9), which are missing in the coat of arms painted on our cassone. This crest, characterized by two triangles with convergent tips at the sides of the trunk of the oak tree, is consistent with the insignia of Girolamo Basso della Rovere: the coats of arms found in several parts of the basilica in Loreto, on the title page of the Cerimoniale romano in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Turin (ms. E. II. 14, f. 1r), in the aforementioned chapel, as well as in the funerary monument executed by Andrea Sansovino before 1509 in the main chapel of the same church of Santa Maria del Popolo (10). It is also significant that the background colours of the pastiglia decoration on the front panel of the cassone (red, pale blue, green) are the same as those in the cardinal’s coat of arms in the illuminated page of the above mentioned manuscript in Turin. This hypothesized patronage of the work, in accordance with the style, implies a dating to the first years of the 16th century, but no later than 1507, year of the cardinal’s death. The figures of the Virtues in the foreground, in front of a landscape dotted with small slender trees and bushes, are characterized by tiny heads on bodies wrapped in loose robes, turning slightly in a three-quarter pose. They are an example of the ‘protoclassicism’ that Bernardino Pintoricchio and his followers popularized between Umbria and Lazio, that spread also to Siena following the artist’s activity there in the Duomo and elsewhere (circa 1503 - 1509); the complex postures and the expansiveness of the volumes speak of the solutions put to use by Raphael between 1505 and 1510. At the basis of this there are works by Pintoricchio such as the Nursing Madonna in Houston (1492) (11), but the strongest stylistic connections can be found, in my opinion, in the activity of the Umbrian artist and of his collaborators in several important commissions from the first decade of the 16th century, such as the frescoes in the aforementioned Basso della Rovere chapel in Santa Maria del Popolo (12). Today the critics agree that the intervention of the artist was only limited, and that he delegated his pupils (which were probably the same that not much later worked in the Piccolomini Library in the Duomo of Siena) with the execution of compositions for which he supplied the drawings. See, for example, the angels of the Annunciation of the Virgin frescoed in the Basso della Rovere chapel, that recent studies attribute to the Sienese Giacomo Pacchiarotto (13), or the Sibyls, which were probably painted by Pinturicchio himself on the vault of the main chapel in the same basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, at the end of the decade (14). A similar classical tone is detectable in the mythological scenes on the ceiling from Palazzo Petrucci in Siena (now on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York), executed by Pintoricchio’s workshop on the same occasion (circa 1509) (15). Fiorella Sricchia Santoro suggested recognizing the participation of Girolamo Genga and Giacomo Pacchiarotto in this decoration (16). In those years Girolamo del Pacchia was also a member of Pintoricchio’s atelier: to him the scholar attributed several Virtues (Siena, Pinacoteca Nazionale) (17) that also show stylistic features comparable to the paintings in the cassone we are here analyzing. Though of delicate craftsmanship, the painted surface of the Virtues appears a little worn; and as the composition of Pintoricchio’s workshop was complex and articulated, and the opinions of the critics on it sometimes disagree, it would be unwise to venture a guess at a precise name for the authorship of the paintings. Several decades after its execution, the decoration of the cassone was modified, as revealed by the plant ornamentation painted along the base and on the sides, which, though stylistically coherent with the 16th century, would seem, compared to the figures of the Virtues, of a later execution. In the last decades of the 15th century and in the first of the following, Santa Maria del Popolo was the main centre of the Della Rovere patronage, which consisted in the works conducted by Pintoricchio and his workshop. The same elements – patron and workshop – appear again in the chest we are here presenting. 1 C. Ripa, Iconologia, Padova 1618, edited by P. Buscaroli, Milano 1992, p. 50. 2 It obviously refers to P. Schubring, Cassoni. Truhen und Truhenbilder der Italienischen Frührenaissance. Ein Betrag zur Profanmalerei im Quattrocento, 2 voll., Leipzig 1915 (II ed. Leipzig 1923). The text that appeared in the Burlington Magazine was later repeated in the sale catalogue of the Agosti Mendoza collection (Botta 1936). 3 The Achillito Chiesa Collection (New York, American Art Galleries), 4 voll., New York 1925-1927. The descriptions and the sizes of the cassoni included in the 3rd part, dedicated to applied arts, do not correspond to the cassone we are here examining, which appears neither in the 1st section nor in the 2nd, dedicated to Italian painters. 4 C. Piccolpasso, Li tre libri dell’arte del vasaio (mid-16th century), edited by G. Conti, Firenze 1976, p. 205. 5 Fr.Ch. Uginet, Della Rovere, Domenico, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 37, Roma 1989, pp. 334-337. 6 M. Leopardi, Serie dei vescovi di Recanati, Recanati 1828, pp. 175-178; G. De Caro, Basso della Rovere, Girolamo, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 7, Roma 1965, pp. 152-153. 7 P. Scarpellini, in P. Scarpellini, M.R. Silvestrelli, Pintoricchio, Milano 2003, passim. 8 For the patronage of Girolamo Basso della Rovere in Loreto, see, for general reference, D. Frapiccini, Il cardinale Girolamo Basso della Rovere e la sua cerchia tra contesti marchigiani e romani, in “Quasi oculi et aures ac nobilissimae sacri capitis partes”, edited by M. Gallo, Roma 2001, pp. 9-23; on the works by Signorelli and Melozzo: G. Kury, The Early Work of Luca Signorelli: 1465-1490, Ph.D. thesis, New York-London 1978, pp. 148-158; L.B. Kanter, T. Henry, Luca Signorelli, München 2002, pp. 106-109, 163-165; D. Benati, Melozzo da Loreto a Forlì, in Melozzo da Forlì. L’umana bellezza tra Piero della Francesca e Raffaello, catalogue of the exhibition in Forlì, edited by D. Benati, M. Natale, A. Paolucci, Cinisello Balsamo 2011, pp. 77-93. On Santa Maria del Popolo, see infra and notes 12-13. 9 A. Quazza, La committenza di Domenico della Rovere nella Roma di Sisto IV, in Domenico della Rovere e il Duomo Nuovo di Torino. Rinascimento a Roma e in Piemonte, edited by G. Romano, Torino 1990, pp. 13-40; S. Pettenati, La biblioteca di Domenico della Rovere, ivi, pp. 41-106. 10 G. Fattorini, Andrea Sansovino, Trento 2013, pp. 77-80, 198-225. For the coats of arms in the Holy House of Loreto, see Frapiccini, Il cardinale cit., p. 12; for that illuminated in the Cerimoniale romano in the Biblioteca Nazionale di Torino: G.C. Alessio, Per la biografia e la raccolta libraria di Domenico della Rovere, in “Italia medioevale e umanistica”, XXVII, 1984, p. 210; Quazza, La committenza cit., p. 24 note 50; Pettenati, La biblioteca cit., p. 64. 11 See Scarpellini, in Scarpellini, Silvestrelli, Pintoricchio cit., p. 154. 12 This decoration has been generally dated to before 1492, but several scholars have recently suggested a later dating, to the first years of the following century (Scarpellini, Silvestrelli, Pintoricchio cit., pp. 202, 221; A. Angelini, Pinturicchio e i suoi: dalla Roma dei Borgia alla Siena dei Piccolomini e dei Petrucci, in Pio II e le arti. La riscoperta dell’antico da Federighi a Michelangelo, edited by A. Angelini, Cinisello Balsamo 2005, pp. 522-523; F. Gualdi, Pintoricchio e collaboratori nelle cappelle della navata destra, in Santa Maria del Popolo. Studi e restauri, edited by I. Miarelli e M. Richiello, I, Roma 2009, p. 273). An earlier dating, to before 1484, when the chapel was endowed by the cardinal, is proposed by C. La Malfa, Pintoricchio a Roma. La seduzione dell’antico, Cinisello Balsamo 2009, p. 73. 13 Intending the Maestro della Cappella Basso della Rovere, that F. Todini, La pittura umbra dal Duecento al primo Cinquecento, I, Milano 1989, p. 111, hypothetically identified with the young Pacchiarotto. See therefore Scarpellini, in Scarpellini, Silvestrelli, Pintoricchio cit., pp. 248-249; Angelini, Pinturicchio cit., pp. 522-523; Gualdi, Pintoricchio cit., p. 288. 14 These frescoes are from a later date compared to those in the Basso Della Rovere chapel, and should be dated to the years 1509-1510 (Scarpellini, Silvestrelli, Pintoricchio cit., pp. 241-242, 276-277). 15 F. Zeri, E.E. Gardner, Italian Paintings. A catalogue of the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sienese and Central Italian Schools, Vicenza 1980, pp. 67-69. 16 F. Sricchia Santoro, ‘Ricerche senesi’. 2. Il Palazzo del Magnifico Pandolfo Petrucci, in “Prospettiva”, 1982, 29, pp. 24-27, followed by A. Angelini, Giacomo Pacchiarotti, seguace del Pinturicchio a Siena, in R. Browning, Del Pacchiarotto e di come lavorò a fresco, edited by P. Petrioli, Siena 1994, p. 95; Scarpellini, in Scarpellini, Silvestrelli Pintoricchio cit., pp. 276-277, as regards Pacchiarotto’s partecipation. 17 F. Sricchia Santoro, ‘Ricerche senesi’. 1. Pacchiarotto e Pacchia, in “Prospettiva”, 1982, 29, p. 16. Literature: Notable Works of Art on the Market, in “The Burlington Magazine”, LXIX, 1936, Advertisement supplement (month of December), plate VI; G. Botta, La collezione Agosti e Mendoza, Milano-Roma 1936, cat. 139, tav. CXI; Catalogo della vendita all’asta della collezione Agosti e Mendoza (Milan, Galleria, Pesaro, 25-29 January 1937), Milano 1937, p. 17 cat. 139. Mauro Minardi