Hybridity in Early Modern Art

Ashley Elston, Madeline Rislow, Ashley Elston, Madeline Rislow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000429879
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art de la Renaissance

This collection of essays explores hybridity in early modern art through two primary lenses: hybrid media and hybrid time.

The varied approaches in the volume to theories of hybridity reflect the increased presence in art historical scholarship of interdisciplinary frameworks that extend art historical inquiry beyond the single time or material. The essays engage with what happens when an object is considered beyond the point of origin or as a legend of information, the implications of the juxtaposition of disparate media, how the meaning of an object alters over time, and what the conspicuous use of out-of-date styles means for the patron, artist, and/or viewer. Essays examine both canonical and lesser-known works produced by European artists in Italy, northern Europe, and colonial Peru, ca. 1400–1600.

The book will be of interest to art historians, visual culture historians, and early modern historians.

Part I
Hybrid Media

1 Connecting Human and Divine

Carlo Crivelli’s Hybrid Media

Amanda Hilliam

DOI: 10.4324/9780429345203-1

Carlo Crivelli’s multi-paneled altarpieces for the Dominicans of Ascoli Piceno are analyzed in their ability to operate as in-between spheres that connect human and divine. The liminal zone of the altarpiece is explored through Crivelli’s amalgams of media and matter, in which ontological categories blur to suggest continuities between different realms of existence. Living and nonliving, natural and artificial echo each other, resulting in hybrid states of being and signaling the interdependence of figure and ornament. The writings of Thomas Aquinas shed light on Crivelli’s artistic process, in which the combination of preexisting forms to produce new compositions follows the principles of rhetorical inventio. It is suggested that Crivelli’s representational system appealed to the contemplative practices of his Dominican viewers, triggering them to reflect upon the mysteries of God’s created universe. The essay concludes that Crivelli’s hybrid assemblages dissolve boundaries and enhance the capacity of the saints to act as intercessors.

Carlo Crivelli’s (ca. 1430/5–94/5) work is hybrid in several senses. A highly receptive artist, Crivelli constructed his compositions via a process of what Thomas Golsenne aptly calls “bricolage,” appropriating ideas, motifs, and styles from the various places in which he worked to produce a novel pictorial idiom.¹ His itinerant career, spanning the years ca. 1450–94/5, saw him leave his native Venice to work in Padua, Zadar in Croatia, and, from 1468, numerous towns in the Marches on the east coast of Italy where he spent the rest of his life. While the embodied presence of his saints within the niches of richly carved polyptychs have at their source altarpieces comprising both painting and sculpture—such as those by the Vivarini workshop in the San Tarasio chapel of Venice’s church of San Zaccaria (1443–4)—Crivelli’s hard, mineralized surfaces and his use of illusionistic devices, including the fly and the cartellino, which play on the boundary between art and reality, are evidence of his association with Francesco Squarcione’s (1397–1468) Paduan studium.² Nor was Crivelli’s work left unchanged by his exposure to art in the Marches, a culturally hybrid region with links to Venice and the eastern Mediterranean owing to its strategic location on the Adriatic coast.³ The silk cloths and Anatolian carpets that proliferate in Crivelli’s paintings would have been common sights in the prosperous towns of Ascoli Piceno, Fabriano, Camerino, and Ancona, imported from Venice, Turkey, and the Levant.⁴ In Ascoli, where the dominant artistic tradition was goldsmithing, Crivelli’s analogies with metalwork regalia and jewels carried even greater immediacy.⁵ Further north, where his patrons often preferred the pala quadra over the polyptych, Crivelli borrowed compositional ideas from such artists as Giovanni Angelo d’Antonio (documented from 1443 to 1478/81) and Niccolò di Liberatore called Alunno (ca. 1433–1502).⁶ Fundamentally, it was in the Marches that Crivelli shaped his art, so that it would serve the devotional requirements and ideologies of the mendicant friars for whom he worked. His ecstatic saints with mouths open and eyes vacant surrounded by rich ornamental assemblages appealed to their mystical theology and contemplative practice.

As well as being stylistically hybrid, Crivelli’s paintings are truly hybrid objects in their media. Some of his altarpieces combine painted surfaces with real gems and entire objects in raised gesso relief and carved wood.⁷ Even his painted depictions of locally produced craft objects, such as ceramics, gesture towards physicality in ways that assert the painted object as continuous with the environment for which it was made.⁸ The resistance of Crivelli’s work to neat categorization led past scholars to dismiss it as naïve, since little did it conform to their narratives of progress bent on establishing a firm boundary between medieval and Renaissance art.⁹ In this essay, I want to contribute further to the work of more recent scholars who have recognized Crivelli’s hybrid visual system as the most compelling aspect of his art.¹⁰ Taking as my theme the generative nature of hybridity, whereby two opposing things merge to produce one, I will demonstrate how seemingly opposing categories blur in Crivelli’s compositions, suggesting continuities between different realms of existence. Neither fully of this world nor entirely divorced from it, Crivelli’s works depict in-between spheres in which painting and other crafts, art and nature, fiction and reality coexist and intermingle. Victor Turner’s theory of the liminal comes into play here, as a state of transition, of being “neither here nor there,” but “betwixt and between” the cultural classifications and structures assigned by a given society.¹¹ For Turner, this state of being transgresses established norms and hierarchies, leading to heightened spiritual experiences. Crucially, however, this release from structure enables participants to return to society, “revitalized by their experience.”¹²

The functions of liminality outlined by Turner shed light on Crivelli’s paintings, which I argue act as connective spheres between human and divine. By blurring established boundaries, they offer to bridge disparate worlds. I will focus especially on Crivelli’s polyptychs for the Dominicans of Ascoli Piceno, in which the interplay between paint and relief plays a central role. How and why did Crivelli suggest parallels between objects, beings, and ornaments in these works? What does this tell us about his creative process? And what role did transitions between media and matter play in moments of religious contemplation? By drawing upon Dominican theories of art and highlighting aspects of their religious practice, my contribution will reveal how Crivelli’s hybrid worlds assisted the spiritual journey of his viewers.

The Altarpieces for the Dominicans of Ascoli Piceno

Crivelli’s use of ornament is now understood as one of the most intelligent in the Italian Renaissance. The semiotics of his textiles, the ways in which gold leaf and pastiglia operate as visual and material systems, and the role of elements such as his vegetable festoons and insects that sit both “on” and “in” his paintings, have been the subject of nuanced analysis in recent scholarship.¹³ The comparative approach in Crivelli’s work between objects, beings, ornaments, and their material vehicles has also been highlighted by several scholars. Stephen Campbell observed that the Annunciation with St. Emidius (Figure 1.1) poses “a paragone of human craftsmanship and the natural order,” as the viewer is invited to compare “a precious Anatolian carpet, the variegated tail of a peacock, carved reliefs of spiritelli and of foliate ornament, revetment of colored marble, a ceiling with red and blue coffers receding in perspective.”¹⁴ All of these forms, suggests Campbell, are surpassed by the painting itself “in its spectacular re-rendering of their effects.”¹⁵

Figure 1.1 Carlo Crivelli, The Annunciation with St. Emidius, 1486, tempera transferred from panel onto canvas, The National Gallery, London (Photo: © The National Gallery, London).

The fact that this poetic interplay coalesces in Crivelli’s multi-paneled altarpieces with relief for the Dominicans of Ascoli Piceno has, however, not yet been the subject of sustained analysis. Although several scholars have highlighted some of the examples I shall explore below, no study has assessed their functions within the overall compositional program of the altarpiece to which they belong. Moreover, how these exchanges operate in Crivelli’s mixed-media polyptychs as distinct from his smooth-surfaced pale quadre, and questions of spectatorship, have not entered the discussion. In The Annunciation with St. Emidius, a single-field altarpiece made for the Franciscans of Ascoli, the paragone that Campbell described treats human-made objects and nature as distinct entities. Conversely, in Crivelli’s mixed-media polyptychs, object and subject merge to operate as one. In the more up-to-date format of the pala quadra, where he applied the principles of linear perspective, artificial and natural forms behave ostensibly as they would in reality, while in the polyptych, an older typology of altarpiece, Crivelli perhaps saw it fit to draw upon the symbolic language of his predecessors. The polyptych for Crivelli represents a space in which to utilize a range of techniques that draw attention to the picture support and transform painting into a precious object, such as a metalwork antependium; tooling and ornaments in relief never find their way into Crivelli’s single-field altarpieces.¹⁶ In a spatial vacuum where figures are backed with gold leaf, objects, beings, ornaments, and their material vehicles behave according to different laws. As I will show, Crivelli reconstructs the operations of nature anew rather than just representing them in mirror form. The fact that this process was deliberate with calculated effects is revealed in the complexity of Crivelli’s pictorial structures. Moreover, as I will suggest later in this essay, these choices would have informed how his Dominican patrons contemplated the sacred via his paintings. In what follows, I shall describe the communicative system that Crivelli implements between the various components of his images, which will situate the phenomenon within wider themes in European art and religion at this time.

Beato Costanzo da Fabriano (born Costanzo di Meo di Servolo in ca. 1410, d. 1481), the scholarly prior of the church of San Domenico in Ascoli Piceno known for his mysticism and passionate piety, learned the value of devotional painting after living with Fra Angelico’s art as a novice at the convent of San Marco in Florence.¹⁷ He must have admired Crivelli’s three-tiered altarpiece resplendent upon Ascoli Cathedral’s high altar since 1473, as a few years later his convent in the neighboring Piazzarola district, just 250 meters from the cathedral, came to house two multi-paneled altarpieces by the Venetian artist, almost certainly paid for with lay donations.¹⁸ Signed and dated 1476, the first, in which Fra Costanzo appears in the guise of St. Dominic, was displayed upon the high altar, where it remained until the 1760s, when it was dismantled and sold by the friars.¹⁹ All of its ten panels but the cimasa with the Pietà, which is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, are now in the National Gallery, London.²⁰ The second altarpiece is signed and may have been dated on its now-lost original frame.²¹ Stylistic factors and Crivelli’s commitments in Camerino in the early 1480s date it to ca. 1479–80. It was displayed in the church’s first right-hand chapel, where it was described by Tullio Lazzari in 1724, a site of private ownership since 1477.²² Comprised of five panels, it too was dismantled in the eighteenth century, and all but its central panel with the...