As They Looked

John Haber
in New York City

Giovanni Battista Moroni and Renaissance Drawings

Giovanni Battista Moroni did not make history. Giorgio Vasari omits him from his Lives—the majestic survey of the Renaissance from the Renaissance. So, more likely than not, will a textbook now. Bernard Berenson, who single-handedly mapped the field of Renaissance art history at the turn of the last century, was more scornful still.

Berenson's Italian Painters devotes two long paragraphs and three illustrations to Moroni, only to damn him with faint praise, as "a portrait painter pure and simple." He "gives us sitters no doubt as they looked." But wait a minute: what is so bad about that? Not a thing, says the Frick, with "The Riches of Renaissance Portraiture." It sees him as a pioneer of naturalism and a precursor to Rembrandt and the Baroque, but the trick question will not go away—and the Morgan Library supplies some helpful context. Yes, the Renaissance broke the mold, and its early Italian drawings open with templates for making art, as a prelude to how.

Pattern and possessions

The omissions are telling, because they are also judgments. Vasari says as much with his full title, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Giovanni Battista Moroni, the silence implies, lacked stature in his own time, much as today. Maybe so, but he did not lack for patrons. The Frick displays nearly two dozen portraits from between 1550 and 1575, and roughly five times as many survive—many more than from as fine a painter as Titian, who died within a year or two of Moroni. He commanded an audience for both seated and more costly full-length portraits, and he made a point of how much that audience could afford. They appear in their finest clothing and with their most cherished possessions.

They mean to make an impression, and they do. Silk and brocade glisten. Gold and silver highlights intensify patterned reds and greens. Classical sculpture and present-day armor lie fallen at their feet, as if to say that there is more where that came from. Along with wealth and power, too, come certainty and ease. Women attest to it with a raised eyebrow or a fan held like a scepter, men with a rapier or slightly bent knee.

The curators, Aimee Ng with Simone Facchinetti and Arturo Galansino, have rounded up some of those very riches along with the portraits. Now that museums routinely put on fashion shows, they look newly relevant. So does Moroni's love of surfaces, now that contemporary artists bridge tapestry and painting or art and design. The Met displayed a sixteenth-century painter in context of Renaissance tapestry in 2015. As the Frick points out, too, the pairing often shows the Italian improving on the original. He did not quite defer to appearances after all.

Was he a "Pattern and Decoration" artist, like Robert Kushner and others since the 1970s, way ahead of his time? Not really, not when his true subjects were his sitters and their status. He did, though, have something personal to contribute. At times he composes in nearly flat patterns, placing the sitter in front of elements of architecture, like sculpture in a niche. Elsewhere he tones down the color, apart from a ruddy complexion, so that status means sobriety. The Frick compares a portrait to one by Rembrandt in its collection—and the black clothing and shallow settings may evoke Diego Velázquez in Baroque Spain as well.

Moroni anticipates the next century, too, with a man posed as a tailor with shears in his right hand. The man's anonymity only adds to the association with Dutch genre painting. Touches of naturalism also appear in the thick flesh over a woman's lips or a lay brother's wrinkles and sun-burnt face. None of this is all that telling, and the later artists could hardly have called him a rival or an influence. Still, he can take credit for one invention, donors posed in adoration of a religious scene. Along with the props, the show displays the source for one such vision, a print by Albrecht Dürer.

Born in the early 1520s, Moroni worked in Bergamo, part of Lombardy in northern Italy. He studied with Moretto da Brescia, who may not make it into textbooks either, but whom Berenson calls the closest thing the region had to a great artist apart from Venice. Moretto may have invented the full-length standing portrait. By the century's end, Lombardy gave birth to Caravaggio and so the Baroque. Could Moroni's surfaces have led directly to a new era, and what then went wrong? Either way, what accounts for his neglect?

From naturalism to wonder

For one thing, Lombardy. It was not so much an artistic center as torn between them. Not far southwest lies Milan, where Leonardo da Vinci dropped by to make The Last Supper and Saint Jerome and ended up hanging around, with little else to show for it apart from his titanic influence. To the southeast lies Venice, and Bergamo fell under Venetian rule. Lorenzo Lotto worked outside Venice, but only to escape the competition. And not a single work from Caravaggio in Lombardy survives.

For another, Moroni ran afoul of Renaissance ideals. Naturalism is one thing, and the Renaissance brought with it an unprecedented realism. Oil painting, first in the Northern Renaissance and then in Venice, also rewarded attention to surfaces. For Giovanni Bellini and Saint Francis in the Desert in the Frick, it put natural light in place of heavenly illumination. Still, what mattered more were light and space, anatomy and architecture, character and understanding, and vision and insight. And this painter was not terribly good at any of them.

A closer look shows Berenson more than just dismissive of resemblance. Less a historian than a connoisseur in the company of collectors, he cared less about meaning and context than fine distinctions, and that approach has come under challenge. "Like Life" at the Met Breuer made the case for appearances just last year. Still, Berenson speaks well enough for the Renaissance in wanting more "exemplars of humanity." He hones right in on routine poses and a lack of "poetry in light." Moroni, he must have seen, marks the turn from the High Renaissance to a kind of Post-Renaissance, or Mannerism.

This painter has no concern for character or individuals, beyond piety and possessions. He has no concern for perspective, which he flattens, or anatomy, which he buries in those magnificent dresses, and the greatest degree of shading goes to undefined backgrounds. He treats portraiture as "face painting," plus attributes and clothing. Embedded religious scenes are particularly bland. They show not an unearthly vision, but a display of virtue. They show people not as they are or as they could be, but as they want to be known.

In each case, humility or wealth alike is a public pose. For Moroni, richness lies less in nature's surfaces than in objects, whereas Titian found no richer surface or substance than human flesh. Nor is he all that close to the Baroque. Even the tailor has a fine collar, and his pose may play not on his profession, but on his family name. As for Caravaggio, a world of earthly temptations, casual violence, and angels with dirty feet is far, far away.

Moroni has a charming world at hand all the same, down the hall from Edmund de Waal, on his own and his sitter's terms. The confusion lies rather in competing, changing, and slippery conceptions of naturalism. No one here looks all that natural, if that means someone you might recognize on the street or get to know. Only the dog at a man's side has a disingenuous expression. What unites the poles of religious scenes and high fashion is something else again, a sense of wonder. It can feel rather modest as wonders go, especially amid the shocks of the late Renaissance, but it will have to do.

Renaissance imaginings

Earlier Renaissance artists became free to draw from life or from their imagination. They could treat drawing as a teaching tool, as a discipline, as a prelude to painting, or as a finished product for a growing market. Disegno, which means both drawing and design, became a watchword. It stood, in the words of the Morgan Library's title, for "Invention and Design." Take care, though, for those aims are not so easy to tell apart. Take care, too, before dismissing those templates as imitation, for every pattern book had a patterner.

From the very start, on or before 1400, works go beyond formulas. A sheet from Lombardy mixes realism and fancy with a goat, a sheep, a lynx and a unicorn. A study of a wine shop seems both playful and down to earth. One will recognize the courtly mix from illuminated manuscripts, like the museum's own Livre de la Chasse, or book of the hunt. This section also has room for a student of Pisanello, whose drawings from the 1430s include hanged men. Then, too, the Renaissance never stopped imitating.

Most obviously, art drew on antiquity, for the very idea of a renaissance. The show has little of that—certainly compared to Michelangelo drawings a year ago at the Met or Renaissance drawings at the Morgan a few years later. J. P. Morgan's tastes just did not run that way. Budding artists copied others, too—entering a workshop to learn the designs and techniques of its master. He, in turn, could refine his ideas by drawing them. The Morgan reserves its longest wall for just such figure studies. It also alternates sections for this and other objects of attention, like portraits and landscapes, with sections by regions of northern Italy, with traditions of their own.

Not that they sketched en plein air, like an Impressionist. Landscapes only slowly become a subject to themselves—from bare architectural studies to a hospice by Fra Bartolomeo and an entire town between city and country for Vittore Carpaccio or Giulio Campagnola. Renaissance portraits, in turn, strive for an ideal, with new money and power as a successor to the medieval aristocracy. And neither subject is free of types. A head in profile, by Giovanni Agostino da Lodi, shows the influence of Leonardo in its red chalk and naturalistic textures. Still, its preposterous hair and beard recall medieval monsters.

The Morgan has only now catalogued its Italian drawings, and the show contains over half—omitting the late Renaissance, to focus on the ideal taking shape. It has its gaps, with major artists visible mostly through their influence, if at all. They and workshop assistants mix with lesser names, like Agostino. Standing figures by Luca Signorelli may look familiar enough in their athleticism and elegance. And they should, for he used much the same poses time after time, from the fall of the rebel angels to the resurrection of the dead. Yet only one drawing matches a complete painting, Agony in the Garden by Raphael.

The curator, John Marciari, argues for the gaps as essential: they show the importance of drawing as not a mere study for painting, but for its own sake and for the sake of invention. Still, not all that many have the polish of presentation drawings, and some are pricked for transfer to canvas. Filippo Lippi left Saint Matthew and an angel as mere traces—and as emblems of an artist's moment of inspiration. It comes, in fact, on a wall for "exploratory" sketches. As a further paradox, those unfinished explorations go to show art as no longer a servant's craft, but now an intellectual endeavor. It shows the treachery of labeling design as simply from life or a novel idea.

Workshop copies have their own rewards, including the puzzle of attribution, but leading artists like Lippi stand out. His son Filippino sure does, with his command of anatomy, and Raphael with the weight of his nude. Raphael also supplied a remarkable model for another painter, Pintoricchio. Its near vertical perspective subordinates a royal wedding to fervent onlookers, a classical column, and an unfolding landscape. Leading artists thrive on exploring at that, like Andrea Mantegna with the shifting angle of three standing saints. A torrent of horses and faces by Sandro Botticelli was to become a more measured backdrop for his Adoration of the Magi, but only after a considered act of imagination.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Giovanni Battista Moroni ran at The Frick Collection through June 2, 2019, early Renaissance drawings at The Morgan Library through May 19. A portrait of a woman by Moroni has since come to the Frick along with the Eveillard and Gregory gifts, in early 2023.