CF STUDIES JOURNAL 09 - Flipbook - Page 125
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Simultaneous vision in Paolo Fiammingo's A Vision of the Holy Family near Verona
Simultaneous vision in Paolo Fiammingo's A Vision of the Holy Family near Verona
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DISRUPTIVE ILLUSIONISM
Fig. 8 / Pauwels Franck, called
Paolo Fiammingo, Allegory of
Painting, ca. 1580, pen and
brown ink over graphite, 16.4
x 27.8 cm, London, British
Museum.
Fiammingo’s origins in the Low Countries are worth
emphasizing here, as there too a long tradition
persisted of religious subjects being rendered in
highly imaginative landscape settings that confuse
attempts at a singular reading of the painting’s
meaning. The mountainous panoramic landscapes of
Joachim Patinir and hallucinatory worlds presented
by Hieronymus Bosch gave way to more naturalistic
representations of daily rural life, such as the works
of Jan Brueghel and his family workshop, yet these
later treatments did not abandon their inherently
moralistic or devotional conceits. Indeed, the
philosophical culture in sixteenth-century Antwerp
cultivated a practice of visual exegesis typical for
viewing devotional subjects as a means for regarding
landscape paintings, subscribing to the concept,
among others, of “doctrina serena” in which nature
could be the domain of the sacred.23 Liturgically,
viewing landscape as a matrix for religious meaning
and nature as proof of God’s existence was a standard
element in basic catechistic instruction to clergy
and laity alike during the late sixteenth century.24
Viewed against this context of northern and Venetian
approaches to marrying secular natural settings with
religious narratives, Fiammingo’s painting seems less
anomalous, despite its highly unusual layering of two
worlds on top of each other. But its presentation of such
a destabilizing visual rhetoric of illusionism suggests
that there must be something more to understanding
the image.
To better contextualize Fiammingo’s spectacular
presentation of illusionism in this painting, it is useful
to examine it in terms of established critical theory
and evidence of the artist’s own comprehension of
the role of nature and its portrayal in his art. Shortly
before the Oberlin painting was executed, Cristoforo
Sorte (1510-1595), a native of Verona, published his
Osservazioni nella pittura (1580), where he discusses the
technique of constructing landscape scenes as layered
images, “because landscapes want to be distinct in
three parts. The first wants to be visible immediately,
the second more dazzling, and the third almost lost
in infinity, because the second is composed correctly
in perspectival effect with the first.”25 While Sorte’s
words could be construed simply as advice on how to
create the effect of atmospheric perspective, reading
them with Fiammingo’s painting in mind conjures
up a different interpretation of Sorte’s commentary,
which points to a familiarity with the importance of
layers in the construction of illusionism in landscape
painting. Sorte’s profession as a cartographer and
painter suggests that he was familiar with the demands
of balancing observation and imagination in the
construction of a landscape view; the introduction
of outright illusionism into the equation presents an
intriguing variation on this formula.26 Judging from
the elaborate care that Fiammingo took to construct
the overlapping landscape images in the Oberlin
painting – attempting to preserve the legibility of the
two compositions while simultaneously exploring the
possibility of their being read as a single image – it
is clear that the artist was deeply interested in the
illusionistic possibilities of rendering landscape, a
theme that pervaded his career and a tradition that
had deep and profound roots in his native Flanders.
A drawing by Fiammingo, depicting an Allegory of
Painting (ca. 1580, fig. 8), further illustrates his keen
awareness of the ontology of his creative practice and
the important role that nature and illusionism played
in it. Depicted on the sheet is an allegorical figure
of Nature, who, like an artist at work, is seated in
front of a canvas which bears an inscription that can
be interpreted as a challenge to artists: Nature, it
states, can represent the principle of movement (motus)
while the artist is limited to portraying specific acts
of movement (actus).27 In the middle distance of the
surrounding lush landscape there is a hunting scene,
presumably meant to illustrate the movement to
which the inscription refers. A hunter raises his spear
to strike a stag as his dogs run alongside; this group
is reflected upside down in the nearby pond. This
vignette gives form to Nature’s challenge to capture
motion, but it also allows the artist to create a double
illusion within the mimetic depiction of the subject
itself and its reflection in the water. The drawing
underscores Fiammingo’s interest in exploring the
concept of illusionism within the context of landscape
and the artist’s awareness of the broader theoretical
debate about the relationship between art and
nature. Given the complexity of its layering effect,
the Oberlin painting can also be interpreted as a
response to Nature’s challenge, functioning as a visual
treatise on the possibilities of landscape painting
to move beyond the limits of sacred and secular
portrayal through the vehicle of illusion.
The Oberlin painting’s landscape, rendered from
an identifiable location, raises the question of its
intended setting and audience; the latter presumably
would appreciate, if not inform, the complicated
sacred and metapictorial interpretive possibilities
of the image. The cartellino’s mention of the
Sant’Angiolo monastery provides an obvious starting
point. Sant’Angiolo in Monte is listed among several
monasteries in Verona that were united together
under the Secular Canons’ church of San Giorgio
in Braida in 1537.28 The Canons had a history of
commissioning art for San Giorgio in Braida that
specifically incorporated views of the local landscape
