Here is one
of my favorite pictures at New York’s Metropolitan
Museum of Art: the portrait of sculptor Alessandro Vittoria by Paolo
Veronese (1528-1588). Vittoria was
one of the most celebrated sculptors of the Venetian Renaissance, and he is
shown in the painting holding the model for his statue of St. Sebastian, carved in 1561-2 for the church of San Francesco dell Vigna in Venice.
Vittoria’s Sebastian was so successful that he later cast it as a bronze
statuette, which can be seen at the Metropolitan.
Like many a
great artist, Vittoria was not shy – he has multiple portraits of himself
painted by the leading artists of the time, and five of them hung near the
studio in his home where they could be seen by clients and visitors. This portrait dates to c1580, when the
sculptor was 55 years old.
The easy
collaboration between sculptor and painter may be inferred not only by the
sympathetic depiction, but also by the fact that Vittoria collaborated with
Veronese on the decoration of Palladio’s Villa
Barbaro at Maser some 20 years earlier.
Veronese
ranks, alongside Titian and Tintoretto, as the greatest of Venetian
Renaissance painters. He is celebrated
for his work as a colorist, and for his ability to create teeming, multi-figure
canvases on a heroic scale. His taste
for ornamentation and excess got him into a bit of trouble with the Holy Inquisition, which was appalled at
the excesses to be found in his representation of The Last Supper. After
questioning by the church, Veronese was ordered to fix the picture to something
more decorous and within the austere teachings of the church over the next
three months. Instead of touching the
picture, he simply renamed it The Feast
in the House of Levi, sidestepping obsessive – and dangerous –
ecclesiasticals. (See below.)
Vitorria
was born in Trent, son of a tailor. He
was heavily influenced by Michelangelo
(who was, in turn, heavily influenced by antiquity and the Belvedere Torso); he was trained in the atelier of
architect/sculptor Jacopo Sansovino.
It must be
remembered that the Renaissance was not just a reawakening of human potential
and artistic and intellectual ideals, but a rediscovery of the ancient
world. The broken statue next to the
sculptor represents a fragment of our Greco-Roman heritage, and serves as a
bridge between the ancient world and the modern.
Why do I
love this picture so? On one hand, it is
one of Veronese’s more quiet pictures. A
sense of serene and studied mastery pervades both the pose and the
execution. Vitorria’s delicately
depicted hands (especially the strong and tapering fingers) are significant, of
course, but not more so than the look of bland sophistication and … sprezzatura
on the sculptor’s face. One can well
imagine Vitorria murmuring, “Oh this?
Yes, it’s a little something I put together. Do you like it?”
Veronese’s
love of decoration can be seen in the elaborate tablecloth and is barely hinted
at in the faint traces of wall decoration over the sculptor’s right shoulder. The expression on Vittoria’s face is much
like the one the sculptor later used when depicting himself in three
dimensions.
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