The Brothers Campi; Images and Devotion. Religious Painting in Sixteenth-Century Lombardy.

Bram de Klerck, The Brothers Campi; Images and Devotion. Religious Painting in Sixteenth-Century Lombardy

Trans. Andrew McCormick. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999. 240 pp. illus. n.p. ISBN: 90-5356-383-0.

Marcia B. Hall, After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century

New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xvi + 188 pls. + 32 color illus. + 349 pp. $60. ISBN: 0-521-48245-3.

Although very different, both of these studies represent substantial scholarship, filling gaping lacunae in standard accounts of later sixteenth-century Italian painting. They draw heavily on recent scholarship, culling pertinent contributions while retaining a wide perspective on the historiography of their respective subjects: religious painting in Lombardy and central Italian painting after 1520. Neither study attempts to introduce new theoretical paradigms, but instead to reconceptualize the assumptions that have defined the topics.

Bram de Klerck intends to rehabilitate the reputation of the Brothers Campi -- Giulio, Antonio and Vincenzo -- nor just as accomplished masters of their native Cremona, but as innovators of devotional painting. His analysis emphasizes the underlying messages of their sacred imagery, and builds connections to the Catholic Reform in northern Italy. In this context, he argues that the Campi gave rise to new representations that spoke directly to a devout, astute audience who sought confirmation of their belief system. He implies that the Brothers Campi were interpreters of the this new spirituality, as they devised their own mode of expression, with a combination of naturalism and stylization. Although unmentioned as an objective, his study also establishes the centrality of women's spiritual life in northern Italian centers such as Cremona, Milan, and Brescia by providing a wealth of insights into female patronage, social structures, and agency.

In the introductory chapter, the author sorts out the identities of individual family members, acknowledging the weight of Roberto Longhi's 1929 characterization of Antonio and Vincenzo as precursors of Caravaggio's naturalism. In recent decades, the Campi like other northern Italians have been investigated primarily by Italian scholars who have focused on stylistic distinctions and regional affinities. Perhaps the most familiar name is that of the successful Bernardino Campi, a contemporary and native of Cremona, who however was neither a blood relation nor connected to the art of the Brothers Campi. The three brothers (including Giulio, the paterfamilas worked in Lombard centers, producing an astounding number of religious works -- large altarpieces, vast fresco cycles and independent devotional images. Yet they retained their identification with Cremona, with Antonio publishing an important history of the city in 1585. As spiritual reform swept through northern Italy, propelled by third-order visionaries such as Angela Merici (1474-1540) in Brescia and culminating in the leadership of the Archbishop of Milan, the powerful Carlo Borromeo (1538-1584), the Campi were favored with important commissions. Their artistic approach shifted in the mid-1560s in order to feature naturalistic renderings, as they drew on northern European prototypes. In the case studies that follow, de Klerck addresses the linkage between the messages imbedded in the Campi's images and their viewing audience.

Chapter 2 explores the long history of "The Decoration of San Paolo Converso in Milan" where all the Campi brothers participated over a period of three decades. The decorative program was determined by the influential women of the Angelic order who were guided by Borromeo's views on gendered space within the church, but who exerted ultimate control over the imagery. Chapter 3 examines "Antonio Campi's Crucifixion with Episodes from the Passion," a painting in the Louvre that Borromeo bequeathed to the nuns of San Paolo and became an object of spiritual devotion. In chapter 4, we confront two other "Paintings as Relics of San Carlo Borromeo" painted by Antonio and Giulio Campi. Chapter 5 is dedicated to the biblical scenes in "Antonio Campi and the Chapel of St. John the Baptist" in the Abbey of S. Sigismondo near Cremona. A detailed analysis of the chapel's frescoes suggests that the fifteenth-century patronage of Bianca Maria Visconti was implicated in the reformist spirit of the following century with the charismatic Paola Antonia Negri and the priest, Antonio Maria Zaccaria from Cremona. In chapter 6, "Vincenxo Campi's Assumption of the Virgin with St. Ursula and St. Ann," a large altarpiece commissioned for the Church of SS Vitale e Geroldo in Cremona is shown to reference the virtuous "virgins of St. Ursula" and the pious "widows of St. Ann," identified with Angela Merici. Chapter 7, "Vincenzo Campi's St. Matthew and Angel," focuses on the northern European sources for the Pavia altarpiece of the late 1580s and its Franciscan meanings. The "Conclusion" returns to the affinity between the Campi Brothers and Caravaggio, suggesting that the latter's sources may lie in devotional imagery.

De Klerck has produced a provocative study that thrusts sixteenth-century sacred painting into the foreground, breaking open the conventional discourse on iconography and style. The text is written in a straightforward manner (probably the result of a literal translation from the original Dutch edition of 1997); nevertheless the author's vocabulary can be limiting. He repeats the notion of the "function or use" of a work of art when he is actually addressing more complicated issues concerning its rhetorical value. The bibliography is weakest on Anglo-American scholarship, omitting references to Wittkower's fleeting but influential treatment of the Campi brothers and Bernardino Campi's new visibility as the master of Sofonisba Anguissola.

The books by de Klerck and Marcia Hall share the virtue of rich illustration in both black and white, and color. Not only an unusual number but an unusual selection of works await the reader of these costly productions, an observation which is more salient in respect to Hall's study of sixteenth-century painting in central Italy. The visual canon of Renaissance art established in earlier surveys has avoided substantive revision until now. Hall reaches outside the boundaries, drawing attention to equally compelling but relatively little known works by the acknowledged masters. Paintings that have been ignored through accidents of history - like Rosso's Death of Cleopatra in Braunschweig -- or scholarly indifference -- like the fresco cycle by Salviati and his assistants in the Cappella del Pallio of the Cancelleria Palace in Rome -- emerge, thus creating altered visions of an artist's production.

Indeed, Hall's intention is to confront works of art with "freshness and honesty" by allowing them to speak to the viewer of today. "A Note on Style Labels" at the outset alerts the reader to the author's position on the validity of categories and labels for the study of art history. She argues that they reflect cultural values, now as in the sixteenth century, and sees them as useful though unstable tools of analysis. She defines her own categories in contradistinction to those used by earlier generations, discarding terms such as "anticlassical" and "Mannerism," and adopting the period labels of classical (in reference to ancient Rome) and Classic, transitional and relieflike, Maniera, Counter-Maniera (in reference to sacred art), Counter-Reformation and late Maniera. The "Introduction" calls attention to specific forms of the Renaissance revival of the antique which embraced classical sculpture, rhetoric, and the ideal style. The chapters that follow could exist as discrete essays but taken together they form a detailed analysis of the relationship of painting to the events that shaped the century: "The High Renaissance," "The 1520s in Florence and Rome," "The Diaspora of Roman Style," "The Roman Restoration," "The Counter-Reformation in Rome," "Ducal Florence," and "The End of the Century in Rome." Throughout, Hall perceives diversity and pluralism. The narrative is too dense to summarize here, but she introduces theoretical interpretations and arguments from the history of art history when relevant to specific artistic commissions.

Hall's definition of central Italy exists chiefly as a geographical expression (pace Metternich). It consists of Rome and Florence, but also places as far north as Genoa and Parma, and even Fontainebleau, in the chapter on the "Diaspora." She casts her net widely. She addresses the impact of northern artists, like Van Heemskerck who worked in Rome, and the circulation of prints. She also covers a wide chronology, identifying Pinturicchio's frescoes in the Borgia Apartments with the antiquarian spirit of the late-fifteenth century and the illusionism of the Carracci at the close of the sixteenth century. With the introduction of Caravaggio near the end, we are reminded of the permeability of labels that can translate the Renaissance to the Baroque. The narrative constructed by the author is grand in sweep, but not in pretension. While one might argue with the way that Hall frames her vast subject by insisting that periodization shapes rather than reflects our understanding of visual culture, her work is worth y of superceding the surveys constructed by her predecessors.