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What the renaissance Can tellusaboutcontent strategy

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ADDRobert BaldwinAssociate Professor of Art HistoryConnecticut CollegeNew London, CT 06320

robert.baldwin@conncoll.edu

(This essay was written in 2000 and was revised in 2005.)

The patrons were a prominent couple in Florence. Francesco Sassetti was general manager of the international Medici banking enterprise. He was also a humanistic collector of Roman coins and literature and a patron of humanist studies. His wife, Nera Corsi, came from a family with pretensions to an ancient Roman lineage. Like many wealthy families, Sassetti purchased burial and decoration rights in a local church, Santa Trinita, and commissioned a fresco cycle on the life of his patron saint, St. Francis (d. 1226). Sassetti appeared twice in the frescoes, once on the right of the Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule and below, kneeling in prayer, to the right of the Nativity (painted in egg tempera on wood). Nera Corsi appeared across on the left.

Main Frescoes and Panel Painting (Nativity) on the Rear Wall and Panel Painting

View of Chapel

Four Sibyls, ceiling fresco

Tiburtine Sibyl Revealing the New Born Christ to the Emperor Augustus, wall above archway outside the chapel

David Victorious Over Goliath, small fresco above and to the left of the "Tiburtine Sibyl and Augustus". This fresco bears the republican inscription: "to the safety of the fatherland and Christian glory".

Pope Honorius III Confirms the Franciscan Rule in 1223; central wall, top. Set outside Piazza della Signoria, Florence. Lorenzo de' Medici, Antonio Pucci, and Francesco Sassetti stand on the right across from three of Sassetti's sons on the left. Lorenzo's nephew and two sons enter from below, led by their tutor, the great humanist, Poliziano (Politian).

Saint Francis Raising the Roman Notary's Dead Son; central wall, lower scene. This is a posthumous miracle of St. Francis described as follows in the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century Italian handbook of saints. "In the city of Rome, a little boy had fallen from the window of a palace and had died; but Saint Francis was invoked, and at once the boy returned to life".

Saint Francis Giving His Wordly Goods Before the Bishop of Assisi, left wall, upper register

Nera Corsi, Nativity, Francesco Sassetti, just above the altar, painted in egg tempera on wood

Tombs of Corsi and Sassetti. Two Renaissance sarcophagi are set deeply into niches at the base of the two side walls.

Innovations and Unusual Features

The Sassetti Chapel has a many unusual features which can only be explained in the context of contemporary Florentine politics. Sassetti had Ghirlandaio give prominent attention to one of Francis's more obscure miracles, the revival of a dead boy, shown here just above the main altarpiece of the Adoration of the Shepherds. Second, Ghirlandaio moved the events depicted in the two primary frescoes above the Nativity - the Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule and the Raising of the Dead Boy - from thirteenth-century Rome to fifteenth-century Florence. Third, Ghirlandio painted the late medieval Christian theme of the Tiburtine Sibyl Revealing the New Born Christ to the Emperor Augustus above the archway leading into the chapel, as if to introduce the whole fresco cycle. Fourth, he painted a David and Goliath nearby, with a republican inscription. Fifth, he set the fresco of Francis Renouncing His Worldly Goods not in the saint's hometown of Assisi but in the the banking center of Geneva where Sassetti made much of his money. Sixth, he included portraits of Lorenzo de' Medici, his two sons, and their humanist tutor, Poliziano, in the fresco of the Confirmation. And finally, he packed the chapel with ancient Roman triumphal imagery.

Mercantile Wealth and Franciscan Poverty

Francesco Sassetti was drawn to Franciscan poverty like many rich burghers including Enrico Scrovegni who had Giotto fresco his own private chapel in Padua, the Arena Chapel, to atone for his extensive banking. In this way, wealthy merchants and bankers converted tainted money into a sumptuous offerings to God and set up tomb sites where priests would hold masses for the salvation of family members for centuries to come. Interestingly, Sassetti had Ghirlandaio relegate the important scene of Francis Giving up His Worldly Goods to one of the less visible side walls while relocating the story to the banking center of Geneva. By having Ghirlandaio set this scene in a Geneva made radiant by the rising sun, Sassetti included a proud reference to his own financial achievement while celebrating the international reach of the bank of Lorenzo de Medici. The Geneva setting may also have suggested comparisons between Franciss abdication of wealth and the pious expenditures of Francesco Sassetti in the chapel itself.

Though Francis was his patron saint, Sassetti's secular life was devoted to a burgher humanist world of lucrative finance, ambitious civic patronage, humanistic learning, and social prominence. By setting the two frescoes above the Adoration in Florence and by including a grand portrait of the main financial powerbroker in Florence, Lorenzo de' Medici, Sassetti and Ghirlandaio celebrated a Franciscan piety compatible with the modern mercantile wealth of international bankers and civic leaders. Here we see another typical feature of private chapels in Renaissance Italy. Set in prominent neighborhood churches, private chapels were also patriotic civic donations to the larger urban fabric, proud embellishments of public spaces where family wealth and social position could be displayed in a proper context of piety and worship. In short, the Sassetti Chapel offers a striking example of the transformation of late medieval, monastic values by a Renaissance, urban mercantile culture guided by new attitudes towards wealth, civic engagement, and, as seen below, classical learning.

Pagan Imagery at the Service of Christian Values

The ceiling of the Sassetti Chapel was decorated with frescoes of four sibyls, pagan prophetesses said by early Christian writers to have predicted the coming of Christ. A similar process of interpretation was applied to the Jewish Old Testament in the early Christian period to show Christ was the Messiah promised by the prophets. In this way, early Christian theology tried to legitimize the new religion for all groups, pagan and Jewish. And by reading Christian values back into the pagan and Jewish world, Christian thinkers tried to universalize Christianity as if all earlier human history had unconsciously predicted the coming Christ.

By the fifteenth century, the appearance of sibyls in Christian art was conventional, as seen in the Annunciation of van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece (1432) where prophets and sibyls "foresee" the birth of Christ from above. In the early sixteenth century, Michelangelo alternated sibyls and prophets along the Sistine Ceiling (1508-12) while making all of his Old Testament scenes refers symbolically to the life of Christ and to the later Roman Catholic church.

Prior to Ghirlandaio and Michelangelo, the sibyls were minor figures appearing now and then in late medieval Christian literature and art. Their rise to a new prominence here and in the Sistine Chapel makes more sense in relation to Renaissance humanism with its goal of reconciling pagan and Christian wisdom. This is even more likely when we notice the separate "pagan" fresco, located symbolically outside the chapel, depicting the Christian medieval legend of the Tiburtine Sibyl Revealing the New Born Christ to the Emperor Augustus.

According to early Christian legend, when the Roman Senate decided to deify the first Roman emperor, Augustus, he consulted the Tiburtine sibyl to see if he should accept. She pointed to a vision in the sky and announced the coming of a ruler (Christ) greater than the Roman gods. Christ, of course, was born during the reign of Augustus. Developed by early Christian writers, the legend of Augustus helped fashion a single, unified Christian world history in which Jewish and pagan epochs yielded to a superior Christian age. The subject was well known in the middle ages when Christians built a church S. Maria in Aracoeli on the very spot in Rome where legend located the vision of Augustus. In medieval art and literature, and even more during the Renaissance, the subject became a favorite theme in the world history of religious and secular rulers. It offered popes, kings, and emperors one more way to see history as a legitimate succession of great regimes and princes and to connect themselves with the glories of a Roman past.

By locating this pagan event in late fifteenth-century, Christian Rome, Ghirlandaio used the Vision of Augustus to announce the fall of pagan Rome and the triumphant rise of a new, Christian order. He also appropriated the conventional solar imagery used to hail Augustus and put it to Christian use. Instead of the visionary image of the Madonna and Child which the Tiburtine sibyl points out to Augustus in medieval and fifteenth-century Northern art such as Rogier van der Weydens Bladelin Altar, Augustus looks up to see a brilliant solar disc. The true "Sun King" is not Augustus or Apollo but Christ.

The same borrowing of classical imagery for Christian purposes appeared in the Nativity. This egg tempera painting on wood shows a typical Italian Renaissance revival of antique imagery. Note the empty Roman sarcophagus used as a trough by the animals, the Corinthian pilasters supporting the crumbling barn, and the Roman triumphal arch at left under which pass the three kings and their retinue. Set within a Nativity, the sarcophagus and arch took on Christian values in evoking Christ's triumphal resurrection from the tomb, his victory over death, and his eternal reign.

The Latin inscription with ancient Roman lettering on the sarcophagus tells of an ancient Roman soldier, Fulvio, who died in the Roman imperial conquest of Jerusalem after predicting his tomb would eventually be used by a deity. Thus the Roman sarcophagus appearing symbolically behind Christ's head should be seen as the tomb in which he was later buried and from which he triumphantly rose. By making a Roman sarcophagus speak for Christian values, Ghirlandaio used Christ's victory over death to signal the larger victory of Christianity over Roman paganism.

Inscribed with a tribute to Roman military victory, the Roman triumphal arch at left was well suited to the worldly kings who arrived in splendid, triumphant procession. But in the metaphoric world of humanist piety, this Roman imperial language of power also doubled as a sign of Christ's triumphal advent on earth and his eventual triumph over death. While medieval theology, hymns, and church ritual occasionally described Christ's birth as a glorious triumphal entry to conquer worldly sin and death, this Roman imperial rhetoric took on greater appeal in the age of Renaissance humanism. Borrowing pagan praise for the birth of classical rulers, Renaissance humanists described Christ's birth as ushering in a new Golden Age of universal peace, prosperity, agricultural bounty, political order, virtue, and piety.

Florence as the New Rome and the Golden Age of Medici Rule

In the far right of the Nativity, Ghirlandaio painted an idealized version of Jerusalem while painting ancient Rome behind Joseph's head. These two venerable cities, one Jewish, one pagan, refer to all world history before Christianity. Modern Christian history appears in the image of modern Rome in the Vision of Augustus and the image of Florence in the Confirmation and Raising.

The Sassetti Chapel is best understood within fifteenth-century Florentine civic humanism with its striking images of Florence in the two main frescoes. So why does it use so much Roman imperial imagery vs. the earlier Roman republican culture held dear by civic humanists? In part, we should remember that Augustus was an ambiguous figure, easily invoked to support imperial and republican values, court humanism and civic humanism.

As the first of the Roman emperors, he was famous for his republican virtues of moderation, austerity, traditional piety, and sober patriarchy. In 1480-81, the Medici humanist, Poliziano, found in the Medici library a transcription of an ancient inscription identifying Augustus as the founder of Florence. This quickly became a basic myth in Medicean political discourse. Other humanist legends credited the ancient Romans with building the city's town square (seen in the Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule). In short, the presence of Augustus could also refer in humanist terms to compare modern Florence, seen in the Confirmation, with a glorious and pious Roman republican past. This is why Ghirlandaio paired the scene of Augustus with a fresco of David and Goliath inscribed with a patriotic references to Florence. Both frescoes imaged the glories of modern, republican Florence under the wise guidance of its leading citizen, Lorenzo de Medici.

The Roman imagery in the Sassetti Chapel takes on greater ambiguity when we look briefly at the history of Medici politics in Florence. As early as the 1430s, Florentines suspected the Medici of "imperial" designs on the republican city. Egged on by Medici rivals like the Strozzi and the Pazzi and supported by many smaller merchants unable to compete in the new world of large-scale, international banking and trade, many Florentines began to suspect the powerful Medici of secretly plotting to seize control. In 1433, Cosimo de Medici and his family were expelled by the city government, ostensibly for attempting to overthrow the republic. In 1434, they returned with greater power than ever and banished their own rivals. For the rest of the century, the Medici gradually consolidated their control of the city behind the scenes without disturbing the outward imagery of Florentine republicanism. In the early years, they even contributed to this civic culture by commissioning two republican allegories from Donatello: the David and the Judith and Holofernes.

As Medici power grew in fifteenth-century Florence and in central Italy as a whole, so did the number of plots, revolts and assassination attempts. By the 1470s, Medici power had severely undermined the Florentine republic. In 1478, the pope secretly conspired with leading Florentine families to assassinate the two young men heading the Medici: Lorenzo and Giuliano. To enlist support among rival Florentine families including the Pazzi, the pope claimed he was trying to restore republican government in the city. His real objective was to overthrow the Medici and the Florentine republic and install an autocratic papal government. In a republic like Florence, the overthrow of republican government had to be carried out under a banner of republicanism.

The Pazzi hired assassins who struck in the middle of mass in the Duomo in 1478. Unfortunately for the Pazzi, their men managed to kill only Giuliano, leaving Lorenzo to rally his allies and destroy the Pazzis once and for all. The pope retaliated by declaring war on Florence and getting his ally, the king of Naples, to do likewise. Lorenzo eventually made a treaty with Naples. And with the death of the pope and the election of a new, pro-Medicean pope in 1484, Lorenzo de' Medici became the most powerful figure in central Italy. To cement ties with the papacy, he married his daughter to the son of the pope and had his son made cardinal at the age of seventeen. That son later bribed his way into the papacy when he was elected Pope Leo X in 1513.

All this greatly clarifies the new alliance in Florence in the 1480s - seen in the Sassetti Chapel - between the Medici and their dependents like Sassetti, and the papacy, whose authority appears in the Confirmation. Like any alliance between groups with different agendas, this one proved vulnerable to shifting circumstances. A later fifteenth-century Florentine coalition expelled the Medici once again in 1494, two years after Lorenzo de' Medici died. They remained exiled until 1512 when the Medici army of Pope Leo X retook Florence and installed the Medici as absolutist princes.

With all this in mind, it is easy to see how the pagan imagery of the Vision of Augustus also works in Renaissance humanist terms. While showing on a literal level how pagan deities and kingdoms fade away before a triumphant Christianity, the fresco sets up a highly flattering comparison between Augustan Rome and Florence as a "new Rome" under Medici patronage and authority. This was one of the favorite themes of Medicean humanism from the later fifteenth century on. And it depended on the common humanist idea that Augustus had restored a "Golden Age" of peace, stability, and great cultural accomplishments to Rome after a disastrous period of civil war.

When the court poets of Augustus such as Horace, Virgil, and Ovid hailed him for bringing back a lost Golden Age, they referred to a legendary, perfect, early moment of human history when peace, virtue, justice, and commercial prosperity prevailed throughout the universe and when all nature burst forth in new splendor. Beginning with Augustus, the natural imagery of Golden Age discourse also encompassed solar political metaphors. From Virgil on, the advent of the Golden Age was usually hailed as the advent of a solar prince whose benevolent reign over the flourishing earth was compared to that of Apollo. If the fresco of the "Tiburtine Sibyl and Augustus" bespeaks the rise of both an Augustan Golden Age and a Christian Golden Age, the Confirmation shows the rise of a Medicean Golden Age in modern Florence. (The most important text for the Augustan Golden Age is Virgil's Fourth Eclogue.)

Roman court poets also flattered Augustus in self-serving ways by inserting their own accomplishments into the Augustan Golden Age; thus the new rhetoric of cultural Golden Age and intellectual revival and rebirth. Henceforth, most Golden Ages, including most of those celebrated for Renaissance rulers, also included great cultural accomplishments reflecting the ruler's divine mind and patronage.

Once we see the comparison between Augustan Rome and Medicean Florence, we suddenly recognize that the most important person in the Sassetti Chapel was the man who already quietly controlled an ostensibly republican Florence, who had just triumphed over his own enemies (like Augustus) and who has just forged a powerful alliance with papal Rome. In many ways, the most important "patron" of the Sassetti Chapel was Lorenzo de' Medici, the man whose patronage of Sassetti was responsible for all of his wealth and for the chapel itself. When Lorenzo de' Medici died in 1492 and the Medici were expelled in 1494, Sassetti went bankrupt.

This also explains why we see not just Lorenzo de' Medici, but also his heirs who emerge from below in the Confirmation fresco, led by their brilliant humanist tutor, Poliziano, with two additional tutors bringing up the rear. The first boy is Giulio, son of the recently assassinated Giuliano, followed by Lorenzo's two oldest boys, Piero and Giovanni. (Giuliano, the future Pope Leo X, was too young to appear here.) In so far as these young men represent the future glory of the Medici and their dynastic ambitions for ruling not just Florence but the rest of central Italy, the ascent of the younger generation quietly compares itself to all the other processional images, triumphal arrivals, and ascents in the fresco cycle. These include the magi in the Nativity, the double triumph of Christ in the same work (as an arriving infant and a resurrecting victor over death), the ascent of a solar Christ in the Tiburtine Sibyl and Augustus, and the child sitting on the sarcophagus on the Raising of the Dead Son. Ghirlandaio even underscored the theme of a Medicean Golden Age with an ornamental motif of densely-packed plants and fruit. Like the cornucopias popular in ancient Roman Golden Age imagery, this ornament referenced the cosmic prosperity brought by peace and good government. The solar radiance of the Geneva glimpsed in the scene of Francis Giving Up His Wealth also extended the solar rhetoric typical of Golden Age discourse and seen here in the scene of Augustus.

There is nothing impious in these subtle analogies, no deification of the Medici. Rather, Ghirlandaio cleverly arranged his frescoes, thematically and compositionally, to create larger analogies, histories, and political messages which quietly flattered the Medici and revealed their grand place in world history. For example, the diagonally rising forms of the Medici heirs, guided by the higher mind of Poliziano toward the still higher authority of the standing Lorenzo de' Medici (a father figure toward whom Poliziano looks affectionately), closely parallels the rising, diagonal mass of Francis and his monks directly above as they submit to papal authority. Just as the Franciscan order submits to the pope, so the family and employees of Lorenzo de' Medici submit to his higher mind. Since Lorenzo de' Medici had just forged an alliance with the new pope, Sixtus IV, which greatly strengthened his hand in Florence, it is not surprising that Ghirlandaio chose to locate this scene in the middle of the Florentine town square with the republican town hall (Palazzo Vecchio) at left. Here, everyone could see how Lorenzo de' Medici's triumph over his own enemies brought Florence back to a new period of peace, piety, and stability. Needless to say, the town square is orderly and peaceful, with no signs of conspiracies, assassinations, and expulsions.

By placing Florence in the background and putting Lorenzo de' Medici and his sons in the foreground, Ghirlandaio quietly credited Lorenzo de' Medici as the man responsible for Florentine peace and prosperity while avoiding any explicit sign of Medici rule. To show Lorenzo standing proudly over the republican town square in the background would have made visible the realities of an increasingly imperial Medicean power. Instead, Ghirlandaio carefully separated republican space and would-be ruler to preserve the important fiction of Florence as an ongoing republic. Placed in the foreground and flanked by other honorable men, Lorenzo appears as just one of Florence's leading citizens. Ironically, when the Medici seized power in the sixteenth century, they symbolically appropriated the republican town hall as their new private residence and transformed the latter with new decorations into a monument to Medicean triumph, virtue, and high culture. The mid-sixteenth-century painter, Vasari, even painted a large fresco, The Foundation of Florence proclaiming a new Florentine Golden Age under his patron, Duke Cosimo I de' Medici. [check : there is probably a mistake here] All this went back the Medicean Golden Age discourse first formulated by Poliziano in the early 1480s.

The Medicean family rhetoric in the Confirmation also softened Lorenzo's imperial ambition and worked well in the patriarchal politics of civic humanism. As a civic "father" and the patriarch of a great Florentine family, Lorenzo de' Medici looked even less threatening. Here one thinks of Augustus who also cultivated a patriarchal family imagery as seen on the reliefs of the Ara Pacis (not known in the fifteenth century) and in the histories of Roman historians well known to later Florentine humanists.

By including a prominent fresco of the glory of (modern) Rome under Augustus, by moving the life of Francis to Florence, and by staging the Confirmation against the town square of Florence, Ghirlandaio implicitly compared Roman imperial grandeur and the Augustan Golden Age with the greatness of a politically and culturally reborn Florence under the wise and pious rule of Lorenzo de' Medici. Interestingly, it was the humanist proudly included in the Confirmation, Poliziano, who wrote a number of poems celebrating the Medici for restoring a Golden Age to Florence (most notably, his Silvae and his unfinished epic, the Stanze della Giostra). Other late fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Medici humanists continued the rhetoric, developing an increasingly elaborate discussion of Florence as a new Rome thriving under Medici leadership. (Remember how republican Sienna in Lorenzettis day compared itself to ancient republican Rome. Renaissance monarchs also compared their regimes to ancient Rome, but invariably to an early monarchical Rome under kings like Romulus or to a later imperial Rome.)

A Republican Version of Florence as New Rome: Ghirlandaio's Frescoes in the Sala dei Gigli, Palazzo Vecchio

The Medici version of Florence as a new Rome was only the latest, quasi-imperial Medicean spin on an old republican civic humanist political myth tying Florence to the glorious days of the Roman republican. If you reread Bruni's Panegyric on Florence (ca. 1405) assigned for Brunelleschi, you will see an early example of this elaborate humanist comparison between the two republics. Interestingly, Ghirlandaio painted a second set of frescoes around the same time (1482-84) in the republican town hall in Florence, in the Sala dei Gigli.

Here, in a gigantic fresco covering a large wall, Ghirlandaio painted three triumphal arches. The central arch framed Bishop Zenobius Enthroned with Two Saints with a small Madonna and Child above. (Zenobius was a Roman nobleman who converted to Christianity. As the first bishop of Florence, he is, along with John the Baptist, one of the two protector saints for the city.) The two flanking arches are topped by trios of Roman republican heroes: Brutus, Muscius Scaevola, and Camillus on the left, and Decius, Scipio, and Cicero on the right. In the archivolts, Ghirlandaio painted six ancient busts, five heroes and one heroine (Lucretia? or Cornelia). Each arch was broken by a athletic nude young man, a citizen-soldier reminiscent of the republican David. [Add the inscriptions here.] The Florentine lion or marzocco, emblem of the city's fierce spirit, also appears here. In addition to the theme of Florence as a new, republican Rome, this fresco shows how fully compatible pagan and Christian imagery had become by the 1480s.

The imagery of contemporary Rome may have also signalled the new alliance between Lorenzo de' Medici and the papacy.

Personal Revival and "Golden" Age for the Sassetti Family

Since this last scene had important personal meaning for Francesco Sassetti and for the whole chapel, it deserves further comment. The Raising of the Dead Boy was a miracle performed by Francis in Rome. By moving it to Piazza Santa Trinita in Florence, that is, the real space just outside this church, and by including numerous portraits of Sassetti's sons, daughters-in law, and fiancees, Sassetti used the Raising of the Dead Son to refer to the "miraculous" birth of another son and heir. In the 1470s, Sassetti's only son, Teodoro, died. This left the family without any heir or hope for the future. It is hard to overestimate the importance of male children in early modern Europe. Without a son to inherit property, carry on the family name, and run the family business, the very existence of a given family was threatened. This was particularly important among wealthy elites where lineage, continuity, and great fortunes were at stake. See, for example, the portrait of Federico da Montefeltro with His Son Guidobaldo by Joos de Ghent.

When Nera Corsi produced a second son in 1478-9, Francesco Sassetti made a vow of thanksgiving to his patron saint. It was this "rebirth" of the Sassetti family which apparently inspired Sassetti to fund this private chapel as a public thanksgiving. This background allows us to explain the inclusion of a mass of family portraits alongside the Raising of the Dead Boy and to relocate this event to the Florentine piazza right outside the church where Sassetti invested so much money. Francis's miraculous intervention to resurrect a dead boy in Rome was directly compared to the "miraculous" birth of a new son to the Sassetti family who appeared en masse to celebrate their restored continuity and future. By painting in the background of this fresco Franciscan monks emerging in procession from the church of Santa Trinita toward the scene where Francis revives the dead boy, Ghirlandaio made explicit the connection between the birth of a new Sassetti heir and the Sassetti Chapel as a whole. On a purely private level, the chapel gave monumental thanks to Saint Francis for restoring life to the Sassetti family. The Raising of the Dead Boy and the Nativity also strengthens the chapel's function as a burial ground and as a monumental plea for salvation for all members of the Sassetti family and especially for the patrons, buried in real sarcophagi inserted in niches in the side walls

There is still more to be said for the Raising of the Dead Boy. Ghirlandaio's dead boy sits on a sarcophagus directly above a painting of the miraculous birth of another boy, the infant Christ, who leans against another sarcophagus, conquering death. The miraculous rebirth of the dead Roman boy and the birth of a new Sassetti heir connects visually and thematically with the Nativity. The unusual solar disc around Francis extends the solar imagery of the Emperor Augustus and the Golden Age imagery of Rome and Medicean Florence to suggest a new, golden age dawning for the Sassetti family as well. Through thematic choices and parallels, Ghirlandio developed a complex image overlaying Christian, civic, and familial history and uniting all three spheres in a humanist imagery of "Golden Age".

The Ambiguity of Pagan Imagery in the Sassetti Chapel and Renaissance Culture

To understand pagan imagery in the Sassetti Chapel, we must go beyond simple distinctions between a crumbling Roman pagan world and a newly arising, triumphant Christianity. Although some of the pagan imagery here works this way, other motifs suggest more favorable comparisons between ancient Rome and the modern Christian world. This second approach lay at the heart of Renaissance humanism which fashioned historical, spiritual, moral and political ties between classical antiquity and a new, modern Christianity. Needless to say, the Renaissance humanist project of harmonizing pagan and Christian values proceeded slowly and fitfully, with many unresolved contradictions and ambiguities displaying themselves. In the early days of humanism, 1360-1500, classical imagery often appeared in an ostensibly anti-classical framework. That is, pagan elements appeared in Nativities, Passion scenes, and the martyrdom of early Christian saints where it could appear safely framed in narratives of Christian triumph and supremacy over paganism. In this sense, the anti-pagan framework of some early Renaissance classical imagery provided a useful Christian cover beneath which a modern humanist interest in pagan imagery could flourish.

If we look at the patrons of the Sassetti Chapel, Sassetti, Corsi, and the unofficial patron, Lorenzo de' Medici, all were leading patrons of humanist, practicing humanists themselves, and in the case of Corsi, modern Italians proud of their ancient Roman lineage. Thus the rich array of pagan imagery in the Sassetti Chapel needs to be grounded in Renaissance humanism. And seen from this perspective, the literal messages of Christianity triumphing over Roman paganism obscures a more subtle but clear display of humanist culture and ancient Roman roots.

In another cycle of frescoes painted in 1486-88 for the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, Ghirlandaio inserted even more Roman imperial architecture and sculpture into three scenes: Massacre of the Innocents (triumphal arch with scenes of Roman military conquests) Angel Appearing to Zachary (Roman triumphal-arch like temple with scenes of conquest); and Adoration of the Magi (ruined triumphal arch inscribed Caesar). And in the Birth of the Virgin, he included two sculptural reliefs of dancing, musical nude boys reminiscent of Donatello.

Whether his Roman imagery is contrasted to Christian imagery or used to develop a humanist Christianity of Florence as a new Rome, all such humanist imagery, historical comparisons, and visual analogies gave educated elites like Sassetti, Corsi, and the Medici a grand, civic arena to admire their own humanist learning in visual terms.

Since the Sassetti chapel shows a wide range of social types from rulers to lowly shepherds kneeling at the manger, we might see a variety of messages for a variety of audiences. For the uneducated viewer, Ghirlandaio's frescoes offered vivid examples of urban Franciscan piety, papal authority, and a newly born Christ flanked by a loving Madonna and three shepherds. The shepherds' scruffy faces and clothing, borrowed from Hugo van der Goes' Portinari Altarpiece recently installed in Florence, makes them all the more convincing for Ghirlandaio's more lowly viewers while their monumental form gives them considerably dignity.

While condescending to dignify the common man, the frescoes of this banker are tied to the values and interests of the wealthy mercantile elites who governed Florence, built sumptuous palaces for themselves (like the ones on the Piazza della Signoria seen in the rear of the Confirmation ), monopolized most of the profits of local industry and trade, and used their wealth to create a grand world of humanist high culture. In Ghirlandaio's reinterpretations of St. Francis, his allegorically-handled Latin texts, Roman tomb and arch, his Augustan imagery, his depictions of ancient and modern Rome, and his subtle discussion of an Augustan Golden Age reborn in Medicean Florence, we see a high-minded discourse which was intellectually restricted to a small, educated elite. And in so far as this level of meaning was reserved for a small number of viewers, it allowed them to display on a grand scale their elevated place in the world. The final icing on the cake was the display of this ruling place in a major cycle of religious frescoes in a major Florentine church. God's blessing may have come down on a particular version of St. Francis here, but the primary beneficiaries of divine sanctification in the Sassetti Chapel were the mercantile elites who ran Florence.

One might even see the whole chapel, on one level, as a quiet image of the triumph of the Sassetti Family in both Christian salvational terms and humanist terms of fame, virtue, and personal glory. The clearest evidence for this lies with the ornamental frescoes Ghirlandaio painted around the real sarcophagi where Sassetti and Corsi were eventually entombed. These ornamental frescoes all depicted ancient Roman triumphal imagery including emperors in chariots, rulers exhorting soldiers to battle, and equestrian figures. All were derived from ancient Roman triumphal arches and columns in Rome, Roman coins of the sort collected by Sassetti, and Roman relief sculptures. With their military and political imagery, they suggested not just the Sassetti's eventual triumph over death through Christ but also their lofty accomplishments as civic leaders in the great Golden Age of Medicean Florence.

Ghirlandaio and The Problem of Early Renaissance Naturalism

From the start, the new "Renaissance" style in Italian painting had artists and patrons who favored scenes crowded with descriptive detail. Since this was already an important part of late medieval naturalism as seen in Lorenzetti and in Gentile da Fabriano's Adoration of the Magi, one might speak of an unbroken taste for descriptive detail from the late Gothic right through the fifteenth century. Early fifteenth-century practitioners included Fra Filippo Lippi, Ucchello, and, at times, Fra Angelico.

Between 1450 and 1500, the level of descriptive detail increased significantly in Italian art. Yet each artist worked to "control" description and organize it expressively within a personal style. The Florentine painter, Benozzo Gozzoli (d. 1497) took well-described, three-dimensional spaces to a new level of visual familiarity while maintaining a patrician sense of ornate decoration and pageantry with roots in late Gothic courtly aesthetics. The best example is his religious frescoes in the private chapel of the Medici Palace from 1459-1470. Challenged by Flemish oil painting, Piero developed new degrees of description and particularity of light while subordinating "observation" to a severe yet expressive geometrical-perspectival order, a Masacciesque monumentality of form, and a poetic handling of light and color.

The impact of fifteenth-century Flemish art on Italian painting increased significantly in 1476 with the installation of Hugo van der Goes's Nativity. This Dutch painting was commissioned by the head of the Medici bank in Bruges, Tomasso Portinari, and installed in his private chapel in Florence. With its infinite detail, humble types, and atmospheric spaces, Hugo's Portinari Altarpiece helped accelerate the trend toward description in later fifteenth-century Italian painting. As noted above, Ghirlandaio was deeply impressed by this Dutch art. The more detailed Italian painting became, the more artistic control was needed to organize this wealth of detail and make it speak.

With Pollaiuolo (d. 1498), description was animated by dramatic nudes locked in heroic struggles and a new interest in sweeping, panoramic landscapes. With Botticelli (d. 1510), detail was subsumed within the elegant compositional dance of elongated, aristocratic forms. Their flowing movements across the picture plane was both courtly and spiritual in a blend typical of Ficino's Neoplatonic humanism with its delight in natural beauty and its yearning to ascend from the love of beautiful bodies to the love of an immaterial, divine beauty. Of the major late fifteenth-century central Italian painters, only Perugino (d. 1523) developed a simple, spacious, uncluttered naturalism dependent more on grand geometries and open, atmospheric spaces. Northern Italian painters of the late fifteenth century such as Mantegna (d. 1506) and Bellini (d. 1516) developed a similarly rich, crowded description. Mantegna structured his works with dramatic perspectives, heroic bodies, and grand classical architectures. Bellini's art grew increasingly broad-brushed, richly colored, and poetic in atmospheric space and mood. Like Botticelli, he moved away from detail as he got older without succumbing to mystical abstraction or surrendering a sensual, worldly manner.

The trend toward crowded description in later fifteenth-century Italian art presumes a similar taste among leading patrons. For example, the contract for the Sassetti Chapel required Ghirlandaio to paint "figures, buildings, castles, cities, mountains, hills, plains, rocks, costumes, animals, birds and beasts of every kind".

One potential problem with the new detailed description was the swamping of sacred narrative in description. This was particularly true of the rather prosaic manner of Gozzoli and Ghirlandaio. As early as 1450, the archbishop of Florence had condemned the proliferation of such potentially "secular" elements in religious art:

"things that do not serve to arouse devotion but laughter and vain thoughts-monkeys and dogs chasing hares ... or gratuitously elaborate costumes".

No doubt, many artists and patrons felt that the more descriptive naturalism of the later fifteenth century brought sacred stories down more vividly and powerfully into a familiar human world. This is particularly clear in some of Ghirlandaio's paintings where sacred events take place in Florentine settings and interiors with contemporary Florentines mingling with the Biblical figures. At times, as in Ghirlandaio's Birth of the Virgin for the Tornabuoni Chapel (Turner, p. 131), the Florentine figures take center stage. Is Lucretia Tornabuoni entering through a devotional vision into the sacred narrative or is the birth of the Virgin visiting one of the sumptuous bedrooms in Lucretia's humanist palazzo, complete with dancing, musical putti worthy of Donatello?

Ghirlandio's style of the 1480s suggests an ongoing problem faced by all early Renaissance artists, North and South. How could artists develop a more "naturalistic" style without losing a focus on the sacred figures or a sense of a larger, Christian transcendence? How could natural languages and vocabularies suggest something more than a material or everyday reality? As a challenge for any Christian art trying to represent larger sacred truths with terrestrial forms, this problem continued right through the seventeenth century. Complaints of growing "secularism" similar to those voiced by the archbishop of Florence in 1450 were repeated on and off through the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. If this didn't seem to be a problem for most artists and patrons working in fifteenth-century Italy, it's because those artists, in their own different ways, produced naturalist styles transcending any purely material or mundane vision.

In the later 1490s, the rise of an austere, reformist climate in fifteenth century Florence allowed anxieties over artistic "secularism" to reach a crisis for some people, especially the Dominican preacher, Savonorola, and the painter, Botticelli, who fell under his influence. In Botticelli's late works, 1494-1510, the artist literally "repented" of his earlier "worldly" naturalism and developed an archaic, abstract, mystical style.

In the sixteenth century, one sees similar periods of Christian reform and periodic episodes of artistic alienation from humanist worldly beauty. One such period came after the Sack of Rome (1527), aided by a sober, reform-minded pope. Another came with the rise of the Counter-Reformation in the 1560s and 1570s, especially in Rome, and in the late works of Michelangelo. While the larger dynamic of cultural change favored a steady advance of humanist values after 1350, the "forward" momentum of that change was never uniform or automatic.

Content

ADDRobert BaldwinAssociate Professor of Art HistoryConnecticut CollegeNew London, CT 06320

robert.baldwin@conncoll.edu

(This essay was written in 2000 and was revised in 2005.)

The patrons were a prominent couple in Florence. Francesco Sassetti was general manager of the international Medici banking enterprise. He was also a humanistic collector of Roman coins and literature and a patron of humanist studies. His wife, Nera Corsi, came from a family with pretensions to an ancient Roman lineage. Like many wealthy families, Sassetti purchased burial and decoration rights in a local church, Santa Trinita, and commissioned a fresco cycle on the life of his patron saint, St. Francis (d. 1226). Sassetti appeared twice in the frescoes, once on the right of the Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule and below, kneeling in prayer, to the right of the Nativity (painted in egg tempera on wood). Nera Corsi appeared across on the left.

Main Frescoes and Panel Painting (Nativity) on the Rear Wall and Panel Painting

View of Chapel

Four Sibyls, ceiling fresco

Tiburtine Sibyl Revealing the New Born Christ to the Emperor Augustus, wall above archway outside the chapel

David Victorious Over Goliath, small fresco above and to the left of the "Tiburtine Sibyl and Augustus". This fresco bears the republican inscription: "to the safety of the fatherland and Christian glory".

Pope Honorius III Confirms the Franciscan Rule in 1223; central wall, top. Set outside Piazza della Signoria, Florence. Lorenzo de' Medici, Antonio Pucci, and Francesco Sassetti stand on the right across from three of Sassetti's sons on the left. Lorenzo's nephew and two sons enter from below, led by their tutor, the great humanist, Poliziano (Politian).

Saint Francis Raising the Roman Notary's Dead Son; central wall, lower scene. This is a posthumous miracle of St. Francis described as follows in the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century Italian handbook of saints. "In the city of Rome, a little boy had fallen from the window of a palace and had died; but Saint Francis was invoked, and at once the boy returned to life".

Saint Francis Giving His Wordly Goods Before the Bishop of Assisi, left wall, upper register

Nera Corsi, Nativity, Francesco Sassetti, just above the altar, painted in egg tempera on wood

Tombs of Corsi and Sassetti. Two Renaissance sarcophagi are set deeply into niches at the base of the two side walls.

Innovations and Unusual Features

The Sassetti Chapel has a many unusual features which can only be explained in the context of contemporary Florentine politics. Sassetti had Ghirlandaio give prominent attention to one of Francis's more obscure miracles, the revival of a dead boy, shown here just above the main altarpiece of the Adoration of the Shepherds. Second, Ghirlandaio moved the events depicted in the two primary frescoes above the Nativity - the Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule and the Raising of the Dead Boy - from thirteenth-century Rome to fifteenth-century Florence. Third, Ghirlandio painted the late medieval Christian theme of the Tiburtine Sibyl Revealing the New Born Christ to the Emperor Augustus above the archway leading into the chapel, as if to introduce the whole fresco cycle. Fourth, he painted a David and Goliath nearby, with a republican inscription. Fifth, he set the fresco of Francis Renouncing His Worldly Goods not in the saint's hometown of Assisi but in the the banking center of Geneva where Sassetti made much of his money. Sixth, he included portraits of Lorenzo de' Medici, his two sons, and their humanist tutor, Poliziano, in the fresco of the Confirmation. And finally, he packed the chapel with ancient Roman triumphal imagery.

Mercantile Wealth and Franciscan Poverty

Francesco Sassetti was drawn to Franciscan poverty like many rich burghers including Enrico Scrovegni who had Giotto fresco his own private chapel in Padua, the Arena Chapel, to atone for his extensive banking. In this way, wealthy merchants and bankers converted tainted money into a sumptuous offerings to God and set up tomb sites where priests would hold masses for the salvation of family members for centuries to come. Interestingly, Sassetti had Ghirlandaio relegate the important scene of Francis Giving up His Worldly Goods to one of the less visible side walls while relocating the story to the banking center of Geneva. By having Ghirlandaio set this scene in a Geneva made radiant by the rising sun, Sassetti included a proud reference to his own financial achievement while celebrating the international reach of the bank of Lorenzo de Medici. The Geneva setting may also have suggested comparisons between Franciss abdication of wealth and the pious expenditures of Francesco Sassetti in the chapel itself.

Though Francis was his patron saint, Sassetti's secular life was devoted to a burgher humanist world of lucrative finance, ambitious civic patronage, humanistic learning, and social prominence. By setting the two frescoes above the Adoration in Florence and by including a grand portrait of the main financial powerbroker in Florence, Lorenzo de' Medici, Sassetti and Ghirlandaio celebrated a Franciscan piety compatible with the modern mercantile wealth of international bankers and civic leaders. Here we see another typical feature of private chapels in Renaissance Italy. Set in prominent neighborhood churches, private chapels were also patriotic civic donations to the larger urban fabric, proud embellishments of public spaces where family wealth and social position could be displayed in a proper context of piety and worship. In short, the Sassetti Chapel offers a striking example of the transformation of late medieval, monastic values by a Renaissance, urban mercantile culture guided by new attitudes towards wealth, civic engagement, and, as seen below, classical learning.

Pagan Imagery at the Service of Christian Values

The ceiling of the Sassetti Chapel was decorated with frescoes of four sibyls, pagan prophetesses said by early Christian writers to have predicted the coming of Christ. A similar process of interpretation was applied to the Jewish Old Testament in the early Christian period to show Christ was the Messiah promised by the prophets. In this way, early Christian theology tried to legitimize the new religion for all groups, pagan and Jewish. And by reading Christian values back into the pagan and Jewish world, Christian thinkers tried to universalize Christianity as if all earlier human history had unconsciously predicted the coming Christ.

By the fifteenth century, the appearance of sibyls in Christian art was conventional, as seen in the Annunciation of van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece (1432) where prophets and sibyls "foresee" the birth of Christ from above. In the early sixteenth century, Michelangelo alternated sibyls and prophets along the Sistine Ceiling (1508-12) while making all of his Old Testament scenes refers symbolically to the life of Christ and to the later Roman Catholic church.

Prior to Ghirlandaio and Michelangelo, the sibyls were minor figures appearing now and then in late medieval Christian literature and art. Their rise to a new prominence here and in the Sistine Chapel makes more sense in relation to Renaissance humanism with its goal of reconciling pagan and Christian wisdom. This is even more likely when we notice the separate "pagan" fresco, located symbolically outside the chapel, depicting the Christian medieval legend of the Tiburtine Sibyl Revealing the New Born Christ to the Emperor Augustus.

According to early Christian legend, when the Roman Senate decided to deify the first Roman emperor, Augustus, he consulted the Tiburtine sibyl to see if he should accept. She pointed to a vision in the sky and announced the coming of a ruler (Christ) greater than the Roman gods. Christ, of course, was born during the reign of Augustus. Developed by early Christian writers, the legend of Augustus helped fashion a single, unified Christian world history in which Jewish and pagan epochs yielded to a superior Christian age. The subject was well known in the middle ages when Christians built a church S. Maria in Aracoeli on the very spot in Rome where legend located the vision of Augustus. In medieval art and literature, and even more during the Renaissance, the subject became a favorite theme in the world history of religious and secular rulers. It offered popes, kings, and emperors one more way to see history as a legitimate succession of great regimes and princes and to connect themselves with the glories of a Roman past.

By locating this pagan event in late fifteenth-century, Christian Rome, Ghirlandaio used the Vision of Augustus to announce the fall of pagan Rome and the triumphant rise of a new, Christian order. He also appropriated the conventional solar imagery used to hail Augustus and put it to Christian use. Instead of the visionary image of the Madonna and Child which the Tiburtine sibyl points out to Augustus in medieval and fifteenth-century Northern art such as Rogier van der Weydens Bladelin Altar, Augustus looks up to see a brilliant solar disc. The true "Sun King" is not Augustus or Apollo but Christ.

The same borrowing of classical imagery for Christian purposes appeared in the Nativity. This egg tempera painting on wood shows a typical Italian Renaissance revival of antique imagery. Note the empty Roman sarcophagus used as a trough by the animals, the Corinthian pilasters supporting the crumbling barn, and the Roman triumphal arch at left under which pass the three kings and their retinue. Set within a Nativity, the sarcophagus and arch took on Christian values in evoking Christ's triumphal resurrection from the tomb, his victory over death, and his eternal reign.

The Latin inscription with ancient Roman lettering on the sarcophagus tells of an ancient Roman soldier, Fulvio, who died in the Roman imperial conquest of Jerusalem after predicting his tomb would eventually be used by a deity. Thus the Roman sarcophagus appearing symbolically behind Christ's head should be seen as the tomb in which he was later buried and from which he triumphantly rose. By making a Roman sarcophagus speak for Christian values, Ghirlandaio used Christ's victory over death to signal the larger victory of Christianity over Roman paganism.

Inscribed with a tribute to Roman military victory, the Roman triumphal arch at left was well suited to the worldly kings who arrived in splendid, triumphant procession. But in the metaphoric world of humanist piety, this Roman imperial language of power also doubled as a sign of Christ's triumphal advent on earth and his eventual triumph over death. While medieval theology, hymns, and church ritual occasionally described Christ's birth as a glorious triumphal entry to conquer worldly sin and death, this Roman imperial rhetoric took on greater appeal in the age of Renaissance humanism. Borrowing pagan praise for the birth of classical rulers, Renaissance humanists described Christ's birth as ushering in a new Golden Age of universal peace, prosperity, agricultural bounty, political order, virtue, and piety.

Florence as the New Rome and the Golden Age of Medici Rule

In the far right of the Nativity, Ghirlandaio painted an idealized version of Jerusalem while painting ancient Rome behind Joseph's head. These two venerable cities, one Jewish, one pagan, refer to all world history before Christianity. Modern Christian history appears in the image of modern Rome in the Vision of Augustus and the image of Florence in the Confirmation and Raising.

The Sassetti Chapel is best understood within fifteenth-century Florentine civic humanism with its striking images of Florence in the two main frescoes. So why does it use so much Roman imperial imagery vs. the earlier Roman republican culture held dear by civic humanists? In part, we should remember that Augustus was an ambiguous figure, easily invoked to support imperial and republican values, court humanism and civic humanism.

As the first of the Roman emperors, he was famous for his republican virtues of moderation, austerity, traditional piety, and sober patriarchy. In 1480-81, the Medici humanist, Poliziano, found in the Medici library a transcription of an ancient inscription identifying Augustus as the founder of Florence. This quickly became a basic myth in Medicean political discourse. Other humanist legends credited the ancient Romans with building the city's town square (seen in the Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule). In short, the presence of Augustus could also refer in humanist terms to compare modern Florence, seen in the Confirmation, with a glorious and pious Roman republican past. This is why Ghirlandaio paired the scene of Augustus with a fresco of David and Goliath inscribed with a patriotic references to Florence. Both frescoes imaged the glories of modern, republican Florence under the wise guidance of its leading citizen, Lorenzo de Medici.

The Roman imagery in the Sassetti Chapel takes on greater ambiguity when we look briefly at the history of Medici politics in Florence. As early as the 1430s, Florentines suspected the Medici of "imperial" designs on the republican city. Egged on by Medici rivals like the Strozzi and the Pazzi and supported by many smaller merchants unable to compete in the new world of large-scale, international banking and trade, many Florentines began to suspect the powerful Medici of secretly plotting to seize control. In 1433, Cosimo de Medici and his family were expelled by the city government, ostensibly for attempting to overthrow the republic. In 1434, they returned with greater power than ever and banished their own rivals. For the rest of the century, the Medici gradually consolidated their control of the city behind the scenes without disturbing the outward imagery of Florentine republicanism. In the early years, they even contributed to this civic culture by commissioning two republican allegories from Donatello: the David and the Judith and Holofernes.

As Medici power grew in fifteenth-century Florence and in central Italy as a whole, so did the number of plots, revolts and assassination attempts. By the 1470s, Medici power had severely undermined the Florentine republic. In 1478, the pope secretly conspired with leading Florentine families to assassinate the two young men heading the Medici: Lorenzo and Giuliano. To enlist support among rival Florentine families including the Pazzi, the pope claimed he was trying to restore republican government in the city. His real objective was to overthrow the Medici and the Florentine republic and install an autocratic papal government. In a republic like Florence, the overthrow of republican government had to be carried out under a banner of republicanism.

The Pazzi hired assassins who struck in the middle of mass in the Duomo in 1478. Unfortunately for the Pazzi, their men managed to kill only Giuliano, leaving Lorenzo to rally his allies and destroy the Pazzis once and for all. The pope retaliated by declaring war on Florence and getting his ally, the king of Naples, to do likewise. Lorenzo eventually made a treaty with Naples. And with the death of the pope and the election of a new, pro-Medicean pope in 1484, Lorenzo de' Medici became the most powerful figure in central Italy. To cement ties with the papacy, he married his daughter to the son of the pope and had his son made cardinal at the age of seventeen. That son later bribed his way into the papacy when he was elected Pope Leo X in 1513.

All this greatly clarifies the new alliance in Florence in the 1480s - seen in the Sassetti Chapel - between the Medici and their dependents like Sassetti, and the papacy, whose authority appears in the Confirmation. Like any alliance between groups with different agendas, this one proved vulnerable to shifting circumstances. A later fifteenth-century Florentine coalition expelled the Medici once again in 1494, two years after Lorenzo de' Medici died. They remained exiled until 1512 when the Medici army of Pope Leo X retook Florence and installed the Medici as absolutist princes.

With all this in mind, it is easy to see how the pagan imagery of the Vision of Augustus also works in Renaissance humanist terms. While showing on a literal level how pagan deities and kingdoms fade away before a triumphant Christianity, the fresco sets up a highly flattering comparison between Augustan Rome and Florence as a "new Rome" under Medici patronage and authority. This was one of the favorite themes of Medicean humanism from the later fifteenth century on. And it depended on the common humanist idea that Augustus had restored a "Golden Age" of peace, stability, and great cultural accomplishments to Rome after a disastrous period of civil war.

When the court poets of Augustus such as Horace, Virgil, and Ovid hailed him for bringing back a lost Golden Age, they referred to a legendary, perfect, early moment of human history when peace, virtue, justice, and commercial prosperity prevailed throughout the universe and when all nature burst forth in new splendor. Beginning with Augustus, the natural imagery of Golden Age discourse also encompassed solar political metaphors. From Virgil on, the advent of the Golden Age was usually hailed as the advent of a solar prince whose benevolent reign over the flourishing earth was compared to that of Apollo. If the fresco of the "Tiburtine Sibyl and Augustus" bespeaks the rise of both an Augustan Golden Age and a Christian Golden Age, the Confirmation shows the rise of a Medicean Golden Age in modern Florence. (The most important text for the Augustan Golden Age is Virgil's Fourth Eclogue.)

Roman court poets also flattered Augustus in self-serving ways by inserting their own accomplishments into the Augustan Golden Age; thus the new rhetoric of cultural Golden Age and intellectual revival and rebirth. Henceforth, most Golden Ages, including most of those celebrated for Renaissance rulers, also included great cultural accomplishments reflecting the ruler's divine mind and patronage.

Once we see the comparison between Augustan Rome and Medicean Florence, we suddenly recognize that the most important person in the Sassetti Chapel was the man who already quietly controlled an ostensibly republican Florence, who had just triumphed over his own enemies (like Augustus) and who has just forged a powerful alliance with papal Rome. In many ways, the most important "patron" of the Sassetti Chapel was Lorenzo de' Medici, the man whose patronage of Sassetti was responsible for all of his wealth and for the chapel itself. When Lorenzo de' Medici died in 1492 and the Medici were expelled in 1494, Sassetti went bankrupt.

This also explains why we see not just Lorenzo de' Medici, but also his heirs who emerge from below in the Confirmation fresco, led by their brilliant humanist tutor, Poliziano, with two additional tutors bringing up the rear. The first boy is Giulio, son of the recently assassinated Giuliano, followed by Lorenzo's two oldest boys, Piero and Giovanni. (Giuliano, the future Pope Leo X, was too young to appear here.) In so far as these young men represent the future glory of the Medici and their dynastic ambitions for ruling not just Florence but the rest of central Italy, the ascent of the younger generation quietly compares itself to all the other processional images, triumphal arrivals, and ascents in the fresco cycle. These include the magi in the Nativity, the double triumph of Christ in the same work (as an arriving infant and a resurrecting victor over death), the ascent of a solar Christ in the Tiburtine Sibyl and Augustus, and the child sitting on the sarcophagus on the Raising of the Dead Son. Ghirlandaio even underscored the theme of a Medicean Golden Age with an ornamental motif of densely-packed plants and fruit. Like the cornucopias popular in ancient Roman Golden Age imagery, this ornament referenced the cosmic prosperity brought by peace and good government. The solar radiance of the Geneva glimpsed in the scene of Francis Giving Up His Wealth also extended the solar rhetoric typical of Golden Age discourse and seen here in the scene of Augustus.

There is nothing impious in these subtle analogies, no deification of the Medici. Rather, Ghirlandaio cleverly arranged his frescoes, thematically and compositionally, to create larger analogies, histories, and political messages which quietly flattered the Medici and revealed their grand place in world history. For example, the diagonally rising forms of the Medici heirs, guided by the higher mind of Poliziano toward the still higher authority of the standing Lorenzo de' Medici (a father figure toward whom Poliziano looks affectionately), closely parallels the rising, diagonal mass of Francis and his monks directly above as they submit to papal authority. Just as the Franciscan order submits to the pope, so the family and employees of Lorenzo de' Medici submit to his higher mind. Since Lorenzo de' Medici had just forged an alliance with the new pope, Sixtus IV, which greatly strengthened his hand in Florence, it is not surprising that Ghirlandaio chose to locate this scene in the middle of the Florentine town square with the republican town hall (Palazzo Vecchio) at left. Here, everyone could see how Lorenzo de' Medici's triumph over his own enemies brought Florence back to a new period of peace, piety, and stability. Needless to say, the town square is orderly and peaceful, with no signs of conspiracies, assassinations, and expulsions.

By placing Florence in the background and putting Lorenzo de' Medici and his sons in the foreground, Ghirlandaio quietly credited Lorenzo de' Medici as the man responsible for Florentine peace and prosperity while avoiding any explicit sign of Medici rule. To show Lorenzo standing proudly over the republican town square in the background would have made visible the realities of an increasingly imperial Medicean power. Instead, Ghirlandaio carefully separated republican space and would-be ruler to preserve the important fiction of Florence as an ongoing republic. Placed in the foreground and flanked by other honorable men, Lorenzo appears as just one of Florence's leading citizens. Ironically, when the Medici seized power in the sixteenth century, they symbolically appropriated the republican town hall as their new private residence and transformed the latter with new decorations into a monument to Medicean triumph, virtue, and high culture. The mid-sixteenth-century painter, Vasari, even painted a large fresco, The Foundation of Florence proclaiming a new Florentine Golden Age under his patron, Duke Cosimo I de' Medici. [check : there is probably a mistake here] All this went back the Medicean Golden Age discourse first formulated by Poliziano in the early 1480s.

The Medicean family rhetoric in the Confirmation also softened Lorenzo's imperial ambition and worked well in the patriarchal politics of civic humanism. As a civic "father" and the patriarch of a great Florentine family, Lorenzo de' Medici looked even less threatening. Here one thinks of Augustus who also cultivated a patriarchal family imagery as seen on the reliefs of the Ara Pacis (not known in the fifteenth century) and in the histories of Roman historians well known to later Florentine humanists.

By including a prominent fresco of the glory of (modern) Rome under Augustus, by moving the life of Francis to Florence, and by staging the Confirmation against the town square of Florence, Ghirlandaio implicitly compared Roman imperial grandeur and the Augustan Golden Age with the greatness of a politically and culturally reborn Florence under the wise and pious rule of Lorenzo de' Medici. Interestingly, it was the humanist proudly included in the Confirmation, Poliziano, who wrote a number of poems celebrating the Medici for restoring a Golden Age to Florence (most notably, his Silvae and his unfinished epic, the Stanze della Giostra). Other late fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Medici humanists continued the rhetoric, developing an increasingly elaborate discussion of Florence as a new Rome thriving under Medici leadership. (Remember how republican Sienna in Lorenzettis day compared itself to ancient republican Rome. Renaissance monarchs also compared their regimes to ancient Rome, but invariably to an early monarchical Rome under kings like Romulus or to a later imperial Rome.)

A Republican Version of Florence as New Rome: Ghirlandaio's Frescoes in the Sala dei Gigli, Palazzo Vecchio

The Medici version of Florence as a new Rome was only the latest, quasi-imperial Medicean spin on an old republican civic humanist political myth tying Florence to the glorious days of the Roman republican. If you reread Bruni's Panegyric on Florence (ca. 1405) assigned for Brunelleschi, you will see an early example of this elaborate humanist comparison between the two republics. Interestingly, Ghirlandaio painted a second set of frescoes around the same time (1482-84) in the republican town hall in Florence, in the Sala dei Gigli.

Here, in a gigantic fresco covering a large wall, Ghirlandaio painted three triumphal arches. The central arch framed Bishop Zenobius Enthroned with Two Saints with a small Madonna and Child above. (Zenobius was a Roman nobleman who converted to Christianity. As the first bishop of Florence, he is, along with John the Baptist, one of the two protector saints for the city.) The two flanking arches are topped by trios of Roman republican heroes: Brutus, Muscius Scaevola, and Camillus on the left, and Decius, Scipio, and Cicero on the right. In the archivolts, Ghirlandaio painted six ancient busts, five heroes and one heroine (Lucretia? or Cornelia). Each arch was broken by a athletic nude young man, a citizen-soldier reminiscent of the republican David. [Add the inscriptions here.] The Florentine lion or marzocco, emblem of the city's fierce spirit, also appears here. In addition to the theme of Florence as a new, republican Rome, this fresco shows how fully compatible pagan and Christian imagery had become by the 1480s.

The imagery of contemporary Rome may have also signalled the new alliance between Lorenzo de' Medici and the papacy.

Personal Revival and "Golden" Age for the Sassetti Family

Since this last scene had important personal meaning for Francesco Sassetti and for the whole chapel, it deserves further comment. The Raising of the Dead Boy was a miracle performed by Francis in Rome. By moving it to Piazza Santa Trinita in Florence, that is, the real space just outside this church, and by including numerous portraits of Sassetti's sons, daughters-in law, and fiancees, Sassetti used the Raising of the Dead Son to refer to the "miraculous" birth of another son and heir. In the 1470s, Sassetti's only son, Teodoro, died. This left the family without any heir or hope for the future. It is hard to overestimate the importance of male children in early modern Europe. Without a son to inherit property, carry on the family name, and run the family business, the very existence of a given family was threatened. This was particularly important among wealthy elites where lineage, continuity, and great fortunes were at stake. See, for example, the portrait of Federico da Montefeltro with His Son Guidobaldo by Joos de Ghent.

When Nera Corsi produced a second son in 1478-9, Francesco Sassetti made a vow of thanksgiving to his patron saint. It was this "rebirth" of the Sassetti family which apparently inspired Sassetti to fund this private chapel as a public thanksgiving. This background allows us to explain the inclusion of a mass of family portraits alongside the Raising of the Dead Boy and to relocate this event to the Florentine piazza right outside the church where Sassetti invested so much money. Francis's miraculous intervention to resurrect a dead boy in Rome was directly compared to the "miraculous" birth of a new son to the Sassetti family who appeared en masse to celebrate their restored continuity and future. By painting in the background of this fresco Franciscan monks emerging in procession from the church of Santa Trinita toward the scene where Francis revives the dead boy, Ghirlandaio made explicit the connection between the birth of a new Sassetti heir and the Sassetti Chapel as a whole. On a purely private level, the chapel gave monumental thanks to Saint Francis for restoring life to the Sassetti family. The Raising of the Dead Boy and the Nativity also strengthens the chapel's function as a burial ground and as a monumental plea for salvation for all members of the Sassetti family and especially for the patrons, buried in real sarcophagi inserted in niches in the side walls

There is still more to be said for the Raising of the Dead Boy. Ghirlandaio's dead boy sits on a sarcophagus directly above a painting of the miraculous birth of another boy, the infant Christ, who leans against another sarcophagus, conquering death. The miraculous rebirth of the dead Roman boy and the birth of a new Sassetti heir connects visually and thematically with the Nativity. The unusual solar disc around Francis extends the solar imagery of the Emperor Augustus and the Golden Age imagery of Rome and Medicean Florence to suggest a new, golden age dawning for the Sassetti family as well. Through thematic choices and parallels, Ghirlandio developed a complex image overlaying Christian, civic, and familial history and uniting all three spheres in a humanist imagery of "Golden Age".

The Ambiguity of Pagan Imagery in the Sassetti Chapel and Renaissance Culture

To understand pagan imagery in the Sassetti Chapel, we must go beyond simple distinctions between a crumbling Roman pagan world and a newly arising, triumphant Christianity. Although some of the pagan imagery here works this way, other motifs suggest more favorable comparisons between ancient Rome and the modern Christian world. This second approach lay at the heart of Renaissance humanism which fashioned historical, spiritual, moral and political ties between classical antiquity and a new, modern Christianity. Needless to say, the Renaissance humanist project of harmonizing pagan and Christian values proceeded slowly and fitfully, with many unresolved contradictions and ambiguities displaying themselves. In the early days of humanism, 1360-1500, classical imagery often appeared in an ostensibly anti-classical framework. That is, pagan elements appeared in Nativities, Passion scenes, and the martyrdom of early Christian saints where it could appear safely framed in narratives of Christian triumph and supremacy over paganism. In this sense, the anti-pagan framework of some early Renaissance classical imagery provided a useful Christian cover beneath which a modern humanist interest in pagan imagery could flourish.

If we look at the patrons of the Sassetti Chapel, Sassetti, Corsi, and the unofficial patron, Lorenzo de' Medici, all were leading patrons of humanist, practicing humanists themselves, and in the case of Corsi, modern Italians proud of their ancient Roman lineage. Thus the rich array of pagan imagery in the Sassetti Chapel needs to be grounded in Renaissance humanism. And seen from this perspective, the literal messages of Christianity triumphing over Roman paganism obscures a more subtle but clear display of humanist culture and ancient Roman roots.

In another cycle of frescoes painted in 1486-88 for the Tornabuoni Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, Ghirlandaio inserted even more Roman imperial architecture and sculpture into three scenes: Massacre of the Innocents (triumphal arch with scenes of Roman military conquests) Angel Appearing to Zachary (Roman triumphal-arch like temple with scenes of conquest); and Adoration of the Magi (ruined triumphal arch inscribed Caesar). And in the Birth of the Virgin, he included two sculptural reliefs of dancing, musical nude boys reminiscent of Donatello.

Whether his Roman imagery is contrasted to Christian imagery or used to develop a humanist Christianity of Florence as a new Rome, all such humanist imagery, historical comparisons, and visual analogies gave educated elites like Sassetti, Corsi, and the Medici a grand, civic arena to admire their own humanist learning in visual terms.

Since the Sassetti chapel shows a wide range of social types from rulers to lowly shepherds kneeling at the manger, we might see a variety of messages for a variety of audiences. For the uneducated viewer, Ghirlandaio's frescoes offered vivid examples of urban Franciscan piety, papal authority, and a newly born Christ flanked by a loving Madonna and three shepherds. The shepherds' scruffy faces and clothing, borrowed from Hugo van der Goes' Portinari Altarpiece recently installed in Florence, makes them all the more convincing for Ghirlandaio's more lowly viewers while their monumental form gives them considerably dignity.

While condescending to dignify the common man, the frescoes of this banker are tied to the values and interests of the wealthy mercantile elites who governed Florence, built sumptuous palaces for themselves (like the ones on the Piazza della Signoria seen in the rear of the Confirmation ), monopolized most of the profits of local industry and trade, and used their wealth to create a grand world of humanist high culture. In Ghirlandaio's reinterpretations of St. Francis, his allegorically-handled Latin texts, Roman tomb and arch, his Augustan imagery, his depictions of ancient and modern Rome, and his subtle discussion of an Augustan Golden Age reborn in Medicean Florence, we see a high-minded discourse which was intellectually restricted to a small, educated elite. And in so far as this level of meaning was reserved for a small number of viewers, it allowed them to display on a grand scale their elevated place in the world. The final icing on the cake was the display of this ruling place in a major cycle of religious frescoes in a major Florentine church. God's blessing may have come down on a particular version of St. Francis here, but the primary beneficiaries of divine sanctification in the Sassetti Chapel were the mercantile elites who ran Florence.

One might even see the whole chapel, on one level, as a quiet image of the triumph of the Sassetti Family in both Christian salvational terms and humanist terms of fame, virtue, and personal glory. The clearest evidence for this lies with the ornamental frescoes Ghirlandaio painted around the real sarcophagi where Sassetti and Corsi were eventually entombed. These ornamental frescoes all depicted ancient Roman triumphal imagery including emperors in chariots, rulers exhorting soldiers to battle, and equestrian figures. All were derived from ancient Roman triumphal arches and columns in Rome, Roman coins of the sort collected by Sassetti, and Roman relief sculptures. With their military and political imagery, they suggested not just the Sassetti's eventual triumph over death through Christ but also their lofty accomplishments as civic leaders in the great Golden Age of Medicean Florence.

Ghirlandaio and The Problem of Early Renaissance Naturalism

From the start, the new "Renaissance" style in Italian painting had artists and patrons who favored scenes crowded with descriptive detail. Since this was already an important part of late medieval naturalism as seen in Lorenzetti and in Gentile da Fabriano's Adoration of the Magi, one might speak of an unbroken taste for descriptive detail from the late Gothic right through the fifteenth century. Early fifteenth-century practitioners included Fra Filippo Lippi, Ucchello, and, at times, Fra Angelico.

Between 1450 and 1500, the level of descriptive detail increased significantly in Italian art. Yet each artist worked to "control" description and organize it expressively within a personal style. The Florentine painter, Benozzo Gozzoli (d. 1497) took well-described, three-dimensional spaces to a new level of visual familiarity while maintaining a patrician sense of ornate decoration and pageantry with roots in late Gothic courtly aesthetics. The best example is his religious frescoes in the private chapel of the Medici Palace from 1459-1470. Challenged by Flemish oil painting, Piero developed new degrees of description and particularity of light while subordinating "observation" to a severe yet expressive geometrical-perspectival order, a Masacciesque monumentality of form, and a poetic handling of light and color.

The impact of fifteenth-century Flemish art on Italian painting increased significantly in 1476 with the installation of Hugo van der Goes's Nativity. This Dutch painting was commissioned by the head of the Medici bank in Bruges, Tomasso Portinari, and installed in his private chapel in Florence. With its infinite detail, humble types, and atmospheric spaces, Hugo's Portinari Altarpiece helped accelerate the trend toward description in later fifteenth-century Italian painting. As noted above, Ghirlandaio was deeply impressed by this Dutch art. The more detailed Italian painting became, the more artistic control was needed to organize this wealth of detail and make it speak.

With Pollaiuolo (d. 1498), description was animated by dramatic nudes locked in heroic struggles and a new interest in sweeping, panoramic landscapes. With Botticelli (d. 1510), detail was subsumed within the elegant compositional dance of elongated, aristocratic forms. Their flowing movements across the picture plane was both courtly and spiritual in a blend typical of Ficino's Neoplatonic humanism with its delight in natural beauty and its yearning to ascend from the love of beautiful bodies to the love of an immaterial, divine beauty. Of the major late fifteenth-century central Italian painters, only Perugino (d. 1523) developed a simple, spacious, uncluttered naturalism dependent more on grand geometries and open, atmospheric spaces. Northern Italian painters of the late fifteenth century such as Mantegna (d. 1506) and Bellini (d. 1516) developed a similarly rich, crowded description. Mantegna structured his works with dramatic perspectives, heroic bodies, and grand classical architectures. Bellini's art grew increasingly broad-brushed, richly colored, and poetic in atmospheric space and mood. Like Botticelli, he moved away from detail as he got older without succumbing to mystical abstraction or surrendering a sensual, worldly manner.

The trend toward crowded description in later fifteenth-century Italian art presumes a similar taste among leading patrons. For example, the contract for the Sassetti Chapel required Ghirlandaio to paint "figures, buildings, castles, cities, mountains, hills, plains, rocks, costumes, animals, birds and beasts of every kind".

One potential problem with the new detailed description was the swamping of sacred narrative in description. This was particularly true of the rather prosaic manner of Gozzoli and Ghirlandaio. As early as 1450, the archbishop of Florence had condemned the proliferation of such potentially "secular" elements in religious art:

"things that do not serve to arouse devotion but laughter and vain thoughts-monkeys and dogs chasing hares ... or gratuitously elaborate costumes".

No doubt, many artists and patrons felt that the more descriptive naturalism of the later fifteenth century brought sacred stories down more vividly and powerfully into a familiar human world. This is particularly clear in some of Ghirlandaio's paintings where sacred events take place in Florentine settings and interiors with contemporary Florentines mingling with the Biblical figures. At times, as in Ghirlandaio's Birth of the Virgin for the Tornabuoni Chapel (Turner, p. 131), the Florentine figures take center stage. Is Lucretia Tornabuoni entering through a devotional vision into the sacred narrative or is the birth of the Virgin visiting one of the sumptuous bedrooms in Lucretia's humanist palazzo, complete with dancing, musical putti worthy of Donatello?

Ghirlandio's style of the 1480s suggests an ongoing problem faced by all early Renaissance artists, North and South. How could artists develop a more "naturalistic" style without losing a focus on the sacred figures or a sense of a larger, Christian transcendence? How could natural languages and vocabularies suggest something more than a material or everyday reality? As a challenge for any Christian art trying to represent larger sacred truths with terrestrial forms, this problem continued right through the seventeenth century. Complaints of growing "secularism" similar to those voiced by the archbishop of Florence in 1450 were repeated on and off through the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth. If this didn't seem to be a problem for most artists and patrons working in fifteenth-century Italy, it's because those artists, in their own different ways, produced naturalist styles transcending any purely material or mundane vision.

In the later 1490s, the rise of an austere, reformist climate in fifteenth century Florence allowed anxieties over artistic "secularism" to reach a crisis for some people, especially the Dominican preacher, Savonorola, and the painter, Botticelli, who fell under his influence. In Botticelli's late works, 1494-1510, the artist literally "repented" of his earlier "worldly" naturalism and developed an archaic, abstract, mystical style.

In the sixteenth century, one sees similar periods of Christian reform and periodic episodes of artistic alienation from humanist worldly beauty. One such period came after the Sack of Rome (1527), aided by a sober, reform-minded pope. Another came with the rise of the Counter-Reformation in the 1560s and 1570s, especially in Rome, and in the late works of Michelangelo. While the larger dynamic of cultural change favored a steady advance of humanist values after 1350, the "forward" momentum of that change was never uniform or automatic.

Rich boss Francesco Sassetti made his money as a partner in the French branches of the Medici bank in Avignon and Lyon. He also spent over ten years representing the Medici bank in Genoa and occasionally in Geneva. By the end of the 1470s, Sassetti had already acquired the rights to a small side chapel, the second to the right of the choir in the Florentine church of Santa Trinit. Ghirlandaio was commissioned to paint the chapel, which he decorated with frescoes with scenes from the life of St Francis of Assisi between 1483 and 1485.

Content

ADDRobert BaldwinAssociate Professor of Art HistoryConnecticut CollegeNew London, CT 06320

robert.baldwin@conncoll.edu

(This essay was written in 2000 and was revised in 2005.)

The patrons were a prominent couple in Florence. Francesco Sassetti was general manager of the international Medici banking enterprise. He was also a humanistic collector of Roman coins and literature and a patron of humanist studies. His wife, Nera Corsi, came from a family with pretensions to an ancient Roman lineage. Like many wealthy families, Sassetti purchased burial and decoration rights in a local church, Santa Trinita, and commissioned a fresco cycle on the life of his patron saint, St. Francis (d. 1226). Sassetti appeared twice in the frescoes, once on the right of the Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule and below, kneeling in prayer, to the right of the Nativity (painted in egg tempera on wood). Nera Corsi appeared across on the left.

Main Frescoes and Panel Painting (Nativity) on the Rear Wall and Panel Painting

View of Chapel

Four Sibyls, ceiling fresco

Tiburtine Sibyl Revealing the New Born Christ to the Emperor Augustus, wall above archway outside the chapel

David Victorious Over Goliath, small fresco above and to the left of the "Tiburtine Sibyl and Augustus". This fresco bears the republican inscription: "to the safety of the fatherland and Christian glory".

Pope Honorius III Confirms the Franciscan Rule in 1223; central wall, top. Set outside Piazza della Signoria, Florence. Lorenzo de' Medici, Antonio Pucci, and Francesco Sassetti stand on the right across from three of Sassetti's sons on the left. Lorenzo's nephew and two sons enter from below, led by their tutor, the great humanist, Poliziano (Politian).

Saint Francis Raising the Roman Notary's Dead Son; central wall, lower scene. This is a posthumous miracle of St. Francis described as follows in the Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century Italian handbook of saints. "In the city of Rome, a little boy had fallen from the window of a palace and had died; but Saint Francis was invoked, and at once the boy returned to life".

Saint Francis Giving His Wordly Goods Before the Bishop of Assisi, left wall, upper register

Nera Corsi, Nativity, Francesco Sassetti, just above the altar, painted in egg tempera on wood

Tombs of Corsi and Sassetti. Two Renaissance sarcophagi are set deeply into niches at the base of the two side walls.

Innovations and Unusual Features

The Sassetti Chapel has a many unusual features which can only be explained in the context of contemporary Florentine politics. Sassetti had Ghirlandaio give prominent attention to one of Francis's more obscure miracles, the revival of a dead boy, shown here just above the main altarpiece of the Adoration of the Shepherds. Second, Ghirlandaio moved the events depicted in the two primary frescoes above the Nativity - the Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule and the Raising of the Dead Boy - from thirteenth-century Rome to fifteenth-century Florence. Third, Ghirlandio painted the late medieval Christian theme of the Tiburtine Sibyl Revealing the New Born Christ to the Emperor Augustus above the archway leading into the chapel, as if to introduce the whole fresco cycle. Fourth, he painted a David and Goliath nearby, with a republican inscription. Fifth, he set the fresco of Francis Renouncing His Worldly Goods not in the saint's hometown of Assisi but in the the banking center of Geneva where Sassetti made much of his money. Sixth, he included portraits of Lorenzo de' Medici, his two sons, and their humanist tutor, Poliziano, in the fresco of the Confirmation. And finally, he packed the chapel with ancient Roman triumphal imagery.

Mercantile Wealth and Franciscan Poverty

Francesco Sassetti was drawn to Franciscan poverty like many rich burghers including Enrico Scrovegni who had Giotto fresco his own private chapel in Padua, the Arena Chapel, to atone for his extensive banking. In this way, wealthy merchants and bankers converted tainted money into a sumptuous offerings to God and set up tomb sites where priests would hold masses for the salvation of family members for centuries to come. Interestingly, Sassetti had Ghirlandaio relegate the important scene of Francis Giving up His Worldly Goods to one of the less visible