01 Work , RELIGIOUS ART, Italian School, 16th Century, THE VIRGIN AND CHRIST AT THE TOMB WITH TWO ANGELS - with footnotes #199

Italian School, 16th Century

THE VIRGIN AND CHRIST AT THE TOMB WITH TWO ANGELS

Oil on copper

12 by 9 in.; 32 by 24 cm

Private collection

Sold for 245,000 USD in January 2015

The painting was clearly produced by a painter conversant in both Northern and Venetian trends of painting. The composition ultimately derives from a Pietà designed by Michelangelo Buonarotti.  It is not known whether Michelangelo executed the eventual painting but his drawing, dated to circa 1546, survives today in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.  The design for the Virgin’s pose, with her raised arms outstretched and face turned upward toward heaven, enjoyed great popularity.

Although Michelangelo sets his scene at the base of the cross, and Christ’s body is slumped in the lap of the Virgin’s, in the present painting, the artist instead places the figures before Christ’s tomb.  Christ is seated on a stone plinth at the mouth of the tomb.  In its present incarnation, the composition relates more closely to an engraving of the Pietà by Battista del Moro. More on this painting

Italian School, 16th Century. The first two decades of the 16th century witnessed the harmonious balance and elevated conception of High Renaissance style, perfected in Florence and Rome by Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. It brought together a seamless blend of form and meaning. In Venice, Bellini, Giorgione, and Titian devoted themselves to an art that was more sensual, with luminous color and a tactile handling of paint, preoccupations that would attract Venetian artists for generations, including Tintoretto and Veronese later in the century.

In the 1520s, Florence and Rome, but not Venice, saw a stylistic shift following the social and political upheaval ensuing from the disastrous Sack of Rome. Mannerism, as practiced by Bronzino, Pontormo, and Rosso, was a self-consciously elegant style that traded naturalism for artifice, employing unnaturally compressed space, elongated figures, and acid color. While mannerism became popular internationally, and lingered in northern Europe, by around 1580 it had fallen out of favor in Italy. One factor was the desire of the Church, challenged by the Protestant Revolution, to connect with the faithful. In place of mannerism’s ingenuous complications and artificiality, the Counter-Reformation Church required painting that was direct and emotionally resonant. The “reform of painting,” as it was called, was launched by two brothers and a cousin in Bologna: Annibale, Agostino, and Lodovico Carracci. They established an academy that emphasized drawing from life and looked to inspiration from Titian and other Renaissance masters, restoring the naturalism and classical balance of the early 16th century. More Italian School, 16th Century

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