Orvieto
Renaissance artists in the area
We landed upon this area because one of us (Dr Tom Henry) is an art historian whose life’s work has been devoted to the Renaissance artists who worked in Central Italy. They would have ridden through this valley on their way to and from the important commissions of the day. Many of their works can still be visited within an easy day trip from Casa Nova and the landscape they depicted so lyrically is still a source of delight today, as it was then.
Italian Renaissance art has historically been discussed as a series of regional ‘schools’ of artists, usually centred on one of the great cities of Italy (such as Florence or Venice). But the story was always more complicated. Central Italy – that is to say, Umbria, Southern Tuscany and the Marche – was rarely as marginal as these histories have suggested. Much of this area fell within the Papal States, and Central Italian artists were consistently more successful in Renaissance Rome than their (more famous) Florentine or Venetian counterparts.
The ‘wild-herb taste’ of Central Italian painting
The art historian Bernard Berenson would often compare food and art. He described Umbrian painting as having a “wild-herb taste”. This evocative phrase acknowledges the charm of Umbrian painting while implying a contrast with the sophistication of the Florentine painters of the time.
In his Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance (first published in 1897) Berenson asked:
“The consistent pursuit of the Florentine painters was form and movement; of the Venetians, splendour and harmony of colour: what did the Central Italians contribute to the magic of Renaissance art?”
His answer was that the Central Italians were the supreme decorative Illustrators of Italian art, and he demonstrated his thesis by flitting from Duccio and the Lorenzetti in Siena, via Piero della Francesca, Perugino and Signorelli, to Raphael. These canonical examples suggest the range of art to be found in Central Italy and help to define Berenson’s ideas of Decoration and Illustration. It is now usual to group these artists more narrowly, but their common approach to depicting landscape, light and life still give a unity to the notion of Central Italian painting during the Renaissance.
Five artists are particularly well-studied from Casa Nova: Piero, Signorelli, Perugino, Pintoricchio and Raphael, all of whom worked extensively in the surrounding area. The relevant archives and galleries are all within easy reach, as are the key monuments of Assisi, Perugia, the towns of the Tiber Valley, the Valdichiana, Southern Umbria, the Marche, and Siena.
Piero della Francesca
Piero della Francesca was born in Borgo Sansepolcro c.1411-13, and died there in 1492. The harmony of his works, with their light, clear palettes and their geometric underpinning, has a captivating stillness which gives even his narrative works a timeless quality.
His interest in naturalistic landscape painting, and his wonderfully monumental sense of form, partly derived from Florentine art and from the Antique, combined with his interest in perspective and pictorial composition, have marked him out as one of the great innovators of the Italian Renaissance.
Piero’s Resurrection is the star attraction in Sansepolcro, and great works by the artist can also be found in Arezzo, Monterchi and Perugia (all within an hour’s drive of Casa Nova). Slightly longer drives extend the list of paintings by Piero in the vicinity to include those in Urbino, Florence (both approx an hour and a half away) and Rimini – amounting to an almost complete tour of the artist’s works still in Italy.
Luca Signorelli
Luca Signorelli was one of the pre-eminent artists of his generation. Giorgio Vasari, the sixteenth-century artist and biographer who met Signorelli when he was a boy, gave Signorelli pride of place in his Lives of the Artists as the culmination of fifteenth-century artistic achievement.
Four figures from the Matelica Altarpiece
Signorelli was born in Cortona c.1450, and died there in 1523. He apparently trained with Piero della Francesca in the mid-1460s, which helps to explain the younger artist’s confident grasp of geometry and space, the monumental strength of his drawing, and his early command of an oil-based medium.
He worked in the Sistine Chapel in Rome in the early 1480s, and this resulted in numerous prestigious commissions across Italy in the 1480s and 1490s. He was granted citizenship of Città di Castello when he first worked in that city, and his connections with the Upper Tiber Valley resulted in works for Umbertide, Morra, Montone, Sansepolcro and Citerna that span the whole of his career. In 1498 Signorelli was asked to paint frescoes in the great cloister of the abbey at Monteoliveto Maggiore, south of Siena, but he abandoned this project when he was summoned to paint the frescoes in the Cappella Nova of the Cathedral at Orvieto (1499-1504). The decoration of this chapel had been started by Fra Angelico in 1447 and had been left unfinished for fifty years. Signorelli’s frescoes, which were restored in the 1990s, are his undisputed masterpiece and one of the most uplifting and dramatic monuments of the Italian Renaissance.
Signorelli was less interested in classical beauty than Piero and could be both bold and careless. He was more interested in striking combinations of colours than in accurate observation of light, and no other fifteenth-century artist drew such monumental figures in action. As a result Signorelli is frequently held up as one of the supreme exponents of the male nude.
Signorelli’s reputation is not as high today as it was in his own time. Although art historians usually recognise him as an important figure for the Italian Renaissance, he has been comparatively neglected in the second half of the twentieth century. Until Tom’s work brought him firmly back into view, with a monograph published in 2012 and international exhibition in Perugia in the same year, the last major monograph (written in Italian) had been published in 1903 and the last major international exhibition of his work was in 1953. For a video of Tom discussing Signorelli’s Lamentation, which you can see in the Diocesan Museum in Cortona, click here.
Detail from Signorelli’s Orvieto self portrait
Pietro Perugino
Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci, known as Il Perugino, was born c.1450 in Città della Pieve (near Perugia). He trained in Perugia and Florence before assuming a leading role in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel and receiving other Roman commissions (for Sixtus IV, various cardinals, and later for Julius II). He married a Florentine, and maintained a workshop in Florence as well as in Perugia. In the latter city he worked for most of the city’s churches and the Galleria Nazionale has an extraordinary collection of his work. His art is also wonderfully represented in the Collegio del Cambio on the Corso Vannucci in Perugia, and a walking tour around the city takes in many other works.
In 1500 Agostino Chigi described Perugino as ‘the best master in Italy’, but his period of greatest success was brief and judgements of his merits soon became less favourable. While never as sculptural as his Florentine contemporaries, Perugino learnt from their lessons and responded profoundly to Netherlandish art, especially in regard to landscape painting. His style was praised in his lifetime as exhibiting an ‘angelic and very sweet air’ (‘le sue cose hano aria angelica, et molto dolce’), and this referred both to his rendering of atmospheric perspective in landscape and his creation of a modern style for devotional painting in the period. He outlived many of his contemporaries, dying in Fontignano in 1523.
Perugino self portrait: Collegio del Cambio, Perugia
Il Pintoricchio
Bernardino di Betto, called Il Pintoricchio, was born in Perugia circa 1454 and died in Siena in 1513. Although he maintained a presence in Perugia throughout his career, he was in such great demand in Rome in the 1480s and 1490s (working for successive Popes and Cardinals), and in Siena in the last decade of his life, that many of his surviving works are to be found in those two cities. Pintoricchio developed a highly influential approach to fictive architectural decoration (which frequently imitates antique mosaics), and he was greatly concerned with recreating historical verisimilitude through details of dress and setting.
Famed for his ornate and decorative style, and for his interest in the rediscovery of the Antique, he is best remembered for some extraordinary fresco cycles. One of these, the Cappella Bella at Spello, is less than an hour from Casa Nova and is as vivid as the day it was painted (c.1500-01).
Pintoricchio self portrait: Cappella Bella, Spello).
Raphael
Raphael (Raffaello Santi) was born in Urbino in 1483. He has always been recognised as one of the very greatest artists of the High Renaissance and in his short life he achieved astonishing success as a painter, designer and architect by working in Rome for two of the greatest patrons of the age: Pope Julius II and Pope Leo X.
Raphael’s success had its origins, however, in Umbria and the Marche. His father, Giovanni Santi, was a painter, poet and courtier at the Montefeltro court of Urbino and Raphael probably learnt the first rudiments of painting from his father.
The nature, timing and length of his apprenticeship/collaboration or study with the Perugian artist Pietro Perugino is much debated, but there is reliable contemporary evidence that it took place, and the influence on Raphael’s style was long-lasting. His first independent paintings were painted for Città di Castello, Urbino and Perugia and some of these can still be seen there today. He went on to establish himself in Florence and subsequently in Rome.
Raphael died in Rome in 1520 on his thirty seventh birthday. He was buried in the Pantheon and was honoured in death, as he had been in life. Although Michelangelo was the central figure in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, Raphael was treated with great reverence by Vasari as the exemplary artist and saintly role-model (a pun on his family-name: Santi). Raphael’s place in the pantheon of great artists diminished in the early twentieth century when the fashion for the artist as flawed genius made his work unappreciated.
In recent times, the development of the artist’s personal style has been subject to intense scrutiny, and Raphael is once again widely recognised as the epitome of artistic achievement in the first two decades of the Sixteenth Century.
Bespoke guided tours can sometimes be arranged (see Tom’s separate website, Centotorce.it, for further details or email him at art@casanovaumbria.eu).
There’s a good deal more information about Umbria and the things you can see and do here in the other pages within this section of the Casa Nova website.