CF STUDIES JOURNAL 09 - Flipbook - Page 127
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Simultaneous vision in Paolo Fiammingo's A Vision of the Holy Family near Verona
as a way to forge their own Veronese identity, distinct
from the order’s mother church in Venice.29 Michele
da Verona’s 1501 Crucifixion (fig. 9) for San Giorgio in
Braida’s refectory provides an interesting point of
comparison with the Oberlin painting in that it depicts
a specific view of the city – albeit from a different
vantage point – transforming the wall on which it
hung into a window onto the surrounding Veronese
landscape.30 The cartellino in the Oberlin painting
arguably indicates a similar intended effect by recording
the place from which the view in the painting was
observed and therefore cementing the connection
between the depicted landscape and its intended
location. The Canons’ practice of commissioning
works for San Giorgio in Braida that portrayed views
of Verona continued throughout the sixteenth century:
the city of Verona appears twice in the background of
Gian Francesco Caroto’s altarpiece predella panels of
the Agony in the Garden and the Deposition (ca. 1512) and
again in Paolo Farinati’s Multiplication of the Loaves and
Fishes (1603) on the chancel wall (both still in situ).31
Fig. 9 / Michele da Verona,
Crucifixion, 1501, oil on
canvas, 335 x 720 cm, Milan,
Pinacoteca di Brera.
Simultaneous vision in Paolo Fiammingo's A Vision of the Holy Family near Verona
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Whether the Oberlin painting was intended as a work
for public display in the church, or rather for personal
enjoyment remains unclear, although it is worth
pointing out that the format of the painting resembles
that of a cabinet picture, more than an altarpiece.
Given its unorthodox representation of holy figures
and bizarre visual presentation, a more private setting
for this painting would seem to make sense.
In light of the Secular Canons’ proclivity for
commissioning images that celebrate illusionism and
geographic specificity, it is very possible that the patron
of the Oberlin painting was a member of the order
who resided at Sant’Angiolo.
While Paolo Fiammingo does not appear to be
recorded among those artists known to have worked
on the decorations of San Giorgio in Braida or other
Veronese churches of the Secular Canons,32 by 1581
he had moved from working as a painter of landscape
backgrounds in Jacopo Tintoretto’s workshop to
his first independent commissions in the Veneto,
including the works he produced for San Nicoletto in
Venice.33 His time in the Tintoretto workshop may
have introduced him to the Secular Canons in Verona.
Jacopo Tintoretto had provided paintings for the
Canons’ churches in both Venice and Verona: from
1552 to 1577 he painted several works for the Church
of the Madonna dell’Orto in Venice, and his workshop
executed a Baptism of Christ for San Giorgio in Braida.
Fig. 10 / Giotto, The Last
Judgment (detail), 1306,
fresco. Padua, Scrovegni
Chapel.
Probably executed around 1576, the Baptism seems to
have been commissioned by Prior Nicolò Bruno, who
paid for several other decorations of the church.34 That
Paolo Fiammingo was introduced to the Canons during
this period – either in Venice or Verona – is possible,
but his exact connection to Sant’Angiolo in Monte
remains unknown. Fiammingo’s commissions from
Hans Fugger during the 1580s also raise the possibility
that the Oberlin painting was informed by the secular
nature of those mythological and allegorical subjects.
To be sure, the most unusual – and most actively
disruptive – element of the composition is the peeling
down of the illusionistic “canvas” that supports
the landscape image. Indeed, the entire landscape
view seems simultaneously to dissolve and slip away
from the underlying image of the Holy Family,
which is partially visible through the transparent
portion of the fugitive canvas. These motifs of
rolling and peeling are also found in images of the
Last Judgment and the Apocalypse. For example,
in the upper right and left corners of the west wall
of Giotto’s fresco of the Last Judgment in the Arena
chapel in Padua (fig. 10), two angels peel back the
edges of the sky to reveal the “new heaven and new
earth” that occurs with the Judgment in the Book
of Revelations (21:1-4).35 This conjoined theme of
rolling and revelation is also explicitly mentioned
in Saint John’s description of the opening of the
Sixth Seal: “And I beheld when he had opened the
sixth seal… the heaven departed as a scroll when
it is rolled together…” (6:12-14). Albrecht Dürer’s
woodblock print from the 1498 Apocalypse (fig. 11)
conveys the chaos and disruption that occurs during
the opening of the sixth seal, and it is possible that
the textual reference to the “scrolling up” of the
sky informed his arrangement of the heavens into
sections of rolling banks of clouds. The theme of the
sky tearing apart and rolling up, of destabilization
and rupture, is appropriate for the depiction of
the Apocalypse, but it is also arguably suitable to
employ when conveying a general sense of transition,
discovery, and revelation of a new order.
