LANFRANCO, Giovanni

Angelica is the daughter of a king of Cathay in Orlando Furioso, by the Italian poet Ariosto (1474-1533), a romantic epic poem about the conflict between Christians and Saracens at the time of Charlemagne. Angelica was loved by several knights, Christian and pagan, among them the Christian hero Orlando (Roland). He was maddened (furioso) with grief and jealousy because she became the lover of, and eventually married, the Moor Medoro.

In this painting, in front of a landscape, Medoro carves the name of his beloved onto a tree. It was the discovery of these proofs of their love that caused Orlando’s jealous rage.

This subject was very popular in Italian Baroque painting.

This fresco is on the ceiling of the Cappella Sacchetti in the church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentino in Rome. The figure of Christ is a direct borrowing from Correggio’s fresco in Parma.

Shortly after the completion of the ceiling in the Galleria of the Palazzo Farnese, Annibale and his pupils, who included Domenichino and Giovanni Lanfranco, were asked to provide decorations for a palazzetto behind Palazzo Farnese, across the Via Giulia. The decoration consisted of mainly landscapes. In keeping with the character of the building, a casino in a garden, they represented mythological episodes. A few years later, Cardinal Odoardo Farnese decided to add a small room (Camerino degli Eremiti) to the Palazzetto Farnese as a Christian retreat where he could withdraw for his devotion. Giovanni Lanfranco was responsible for its entire decoration which consisted of four large frescoes, and nine ceiling panels, only two of which survived, Mary Magdalen Raised by Angels and Christ Served by Angels.

Lanfranco, trained by the Carracci, took inspiration from Correggio and Schedone, and became popular in Rome after 1615, notably with his large-scale decorative projects.

The picture shows the paintings in the crossing cupola of Sant’Andrea della Valle: Assumption of the Virgin by Giovanni Lanfranco (in the cupola); The Four Evangelists by Domenichino (in the pendentives). At the bottom of the picture the antechoir vault with the First Calling of Andrew and Peter by Domenichino can be seen.

Sant’Andrea della Valle is the general seat for the religious order of the Theatines. Its construction started 1593 under the designs of Giacomo della Porta and Pier Paolo Olivieri, and under the patronage of Cardinal Gesualdo. With the prior patron’s death, direction of the church passed to Cardinal Alessandro Peretti di Montalto, nephew of Sixtus V. By 1608, work restarted anew with a more grandiose plan, mainly by Carlo Maderno. The interior structure of the church was finally completed by 1666, with additional touches added by Francesco Grimaldi (1560-after 1626). The Baroque fa�ade was added between 1655 and 1663 by Carlo Rainaldi, at the expense of Cardinal Francesco Peretti di Montalto, nephew of Alessandro.

One of the greatest challenges to confront Roman religious painting in the first half of the seventeenth century was the decoration of the Sant’Andrea della Valle. The structure of the church competed architecturally and in its urban setting with the two most important sixteenth-century Roman religious structures, namely Saint peter’s, with its similar tall drum cupola visible from afar, and Il Gesù, which provided the pattern for its longitudinal structure flanked by chapels. With the painting of choir and the cupola of Sant’Andrea these prototypes were outdone, for at that time neither Saint Peter’s nor Il Gesù had any high-quality painted decoration. Accordingly, Sant’Andrea della Valle set a new standard, and introduced an epoch of Roman monumental painting that would culminate a half-century later in two simultaneous Jesuit commissions (in Sant’Ignazio di Loyola).

Domenichino was commissioned in 1622 to paint the choir. Originally he was supposed to take over the entire painted decoration of the church, however, the commission for the cupola was given to Giovanni Lanfranco instead. This led to a breach between the two former workshop assistants of Annibale Carracci. Both Domenichino’s pictures in the choir calotte and Lanfranco’s cupola were completed in 1628.

Mattia Preti was commissioned in 1650 to paint the nave of the church. The commission included four pictures in the nave vault and the compartments above the windows. Additional contracts in the same year obliged the painter the paint three scenes from the life of St Andrew on the wall of the choir, and pictures on the wall of the antechoir. The paintings on the nave vault were not realised.

The large lunette on the back wall of the apse contains a multifigured Crucifixion. It serves as a monumental focal point and complements the pictorial program of the choir.

The painting in the cupola vault represents the Heaven of All Saints with Assumption.

With obvious borrowings from Correggio’s cupola painting in Parma, Lanfranco produced in Sant’Andrea della Valle, for the fist time in Rome, an illusionistic composition consisting solely of foreshortened figures, presenting a fictive opening into heaven above the crossing. A mass of innumerable figures is grouped in two concentric circles around the bright lantern, where Christ reaches down toward the Virgin, who lifts her arm to him in turn, borne upward on a bank of clouds by countless angels.

Lanfranco’s cupola became a successful prototype for Roman Baroque, one that inspired an extraordinary numbers of imitations.

The picture shows a detail of the fresco in the cupola vault representing the Heaven of All Saints with Assumption.

A mass of innumerable figures is grouped in two concentric circles around the bright lantern.

This drawing is a design for the vault frescoes in the church of San Martino, Naples. It shows a tondo with a group of angels, as well as prophets and sibyls.

During the Counter-Reformation, ecstasy may have suggested surrender to the Church, while the emphasis on the body suited Baroque ambitions to convey sculpture in paint. Canonized in 1728, Margaret may have had an earlier local cult: this painting was for a church in her native Cortona.

Sarah, Abraham’s childless wife, brought her Egyptian maid Hagar to him so that he would produce an heir with her. However, when she herself bore Isaac, she demanded of her husband: “Cast out this bondwoman and her son: for the son of this bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, even with Isaac.” (Genesis 21:10) Hagar and Ismael wandered in the wilderness, dying of thirst. Yet God heard the lamentations of the mother and sent her an angel who showed her the way to a spring and prophesied that her son would be the founder of a great nation.

In the painting, Hagar, who has been crying, is just lifting her head to look up at the angel in astonishment; her child, half hidden behind her shoulder, is also looking up incredulously at the kindly angel who has taken Hagar by the arm and is showing her the way to the water. It is the handling of colour, in particular, that highlights the unexpected aspect of the occurrence so clearly: against the gloomy brown of the wasteland, the sumptuous red and midnight-blue of Hagar’s robes radiate like a lamentation of pathos. Her pale, exhausted face is turned towards the shining figure of the angel that seems to have brought light with it. Light bathes the figure, and radiates from the angel towards Hagar, rising in a pale cloud behind the angel and inflaming the orange of his hair and robe.

The lunette on the entry wall, which is divided by the fa�ade window, shows on the left The Calling of Andrew and Peter and on the right the scene of Jesus Walking on the Sea. Both compositions borrow from Roman precedents

Giovan Pietro Bellori noted that Lanfranco’s altarpiece was painted in a firm and admirable style. This seems especially true of the figure of St James the Greater, who stands to the right. Similar figures can be found in the work of Correggio, but Lanfranco’s St James is far more dynamic. His raised left leg and strong contrapposto create a sense of movement which culminates in his upward gaze. The Madonna appears at the upper left holding the Christ Child, who blesses St James. With his right hand St James points to a small bell on the ground in front of him. This is an attribute of the other saint, Anthony Abbot, who kneels with clasped hands, looking up.

Shortly after the completion of the ceiling in the Galleria of the Palazzo Farnese, Annibale and his pupils, who included Domenichino and Giovanni Lanfranco, were asked to provide decorations for a palazzetto behind Palazzo Farnese, across the Via Giulia. The decoration consisted of mainly landscapes. In keeping with the character of the building, a casino in a garden, they represented mythological episodes. A few years later, Cardinal Odoardo Farnese decided to add a small room (Camerino degli Eremiti) to the Palazzetto Farnese as a Christian retreat where he could withdraw for his devotion. Giovanni Lanfranco was responsible for its entire decoration which consisted of four large frescoes, and nine ceiling panels, only two of which survived, Mary Magdalen Raised by Angels and Christ Served by Angels.

Lanfranco studied at Agostino Carracci in Parma and worked in Rome and Naples. His main rival was Domenichino.

The ten compartments of the nave vault contain a rich pictorial program. It is centred on the Ascension of Christ which is distributed across three panels treated as glimpses into heaven: a choir of angels, the ascending Christ, and God the Father. The continuous blue background suggests a unified space extending above massive, three-dimensional framing of the ribs. The three-part centre sequence is framed by seven vault caps in which numerous Old Testament can be seen in loose groupings, some lounging on clouds, some seated on the painted frames or cut off by them. The most prominent of these is a youth reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Jonah from the Sistine Ceiling. He represents Abel (at the bottom of the present photo), who as the first murdered human was also the first to glimpse the glory of Paradise.

Lanfranco’s large painting was commissioned by Cardinal Scipione for his villa at Frascati, at the time when the artist was working on The Council of the Gods in the loggia of the Villa Borghese (1624). It depicts an episode from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (XII, 23 ff.), in which Norandino, King of Damascus and his bride Lucina are shipwrecked on the Ogre’s island while on their honeymoon. They attempt to escape from the cave, but Lucina is discovered. Lanfranco’s figures move theatrically and are rendered with rapid brushstrokes. The dense colour of the classical landscape make Lanfranco far removed from the delicate glazing of his rival Domenichino.

The painting illustrates an episode from canto XVI (stanzas 60-63) of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. The artist’s focus is on the defining moment of pathos as Rinaldo takes his final leave of Armida, with the hero caught between guilt for abandoning the unconscious Armida and the pressing need to follow his destiny, placed in the hands of Fortune, who is depicted holding the tiller.

The painting is signed and dated on the hull of the ship: “IOA.S LANFRANCUS PARM/1614.” There is a second, slightly smaller version of this theme by Lanfranco in an Italian private collection.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 8 minutes):

George Frideric Handel: Two arias, Rinaldo, Acts II and III

In Lanfranco’s altarpiece, which stands more than four metres high in the right transept of Sant’Andrea della Valle in Rome, St Andrea Avellino gazes up, wearing an inward-looking expression. The heavens open and a host of angels descend from the skies as the wide-eyed altar-boy standing behind the saint stares up. The large angel at the upper left spreads his arms and looks down at Avellino.

Painted shortly after Lanfranco returned to Rome from his native Parma, the present picture reveals the new tendencies in the artist’s work that were soon to mark his ascendency over Domenichino. It is apparent in this picture that Lanfranco, without actually becoming a member of the Caravaggesque camp, was both aware of and sensitive to the various formal contributions made by Caravaggio and his followers in Rome.

Painted by Lanfranco at the commission of Giacomo Simonelli, this painting decorated Simonelli’s family chapel which was dedicated to Saint Ursula. In 1630 the church, Santa Marta in Vaticano, was destroyed to clear space for the construction of the Vatican’s Palazzo del Governatorato. A date of 1622 was proposed for the picture on the basis of stylistic analogies with Lanfranco’s Saint Margherita of Cortona, signed and dated by the artist in 1622 (Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence). The Saint Ursula does not belong to the most refined and elegant phase of Lanfranco’s career (1618-20), but rather to a slightly later phase of around 1622-24. This protobaroque period for Lanfranco is characterized by a more robust and vigorous style that is a prelude to the artist’s full baroque work of 1624-25.

In the same years Lanfranco also carried out another work for the Simonelli family at Santa Marta, an altarpiece similar in typology and style to the Saint Ursula. Showing the Virgin and Child and Saints James and Anthony Abbot, the painting is now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

The artist probaly painted this painting in Naples. A study drawing to this picture is in the Royal Collection, Windsor Castle.

This fresco in the Villa Borghese, housing the Galleria Borghese, decorates the ceiling of a large room, called Sala della Loggia. Originally the room was a loggia opening onto the park of the villa, hence its name.

In the fresco Lanfranco created an imaginary entablature in perspective, supported by telamones alternating with lunettes containing personifications of the Rivers of the Earth. At the centre is set the scene of the gods gathered in council around Jupiter, which draws on the tradition of the great decorative cycles of Annibale Carracci and Correggio. Between 1779 and 1782 the fresco, left unfinished by Lanfranco and now seriously deteriorated, was restored and completed by Domenico Corvi (1721-1803).

This fresco in the Villa Borghese, housing the Galleria Borghese, decorates the ceiling of a large room, called Sala della Loggia. Originally the room was a loggia opening onto the park of the villa, hence its name.

Lanfranco created a wholly new typology for the depiction of Olympus with his painting of the loggia of Casino Borghese. He treated the ceiling centre and the vault as a unified illusionistic space, one in which the divine hierarchy and the formal arrangement are brought into harmony. Thanks to the perspective painted architecture, the secondary pictorial features - grisaille medallions, telamones, river gods and vases - are casually subordinated to the centre ceiling with its assembly of gods.

The new church type, developed in the Baroque period, offered large format vertical picture surfaces on the inner fa�ade and on the dividing wall between the nave and the choir, which were used both for oil paintings and for frescoes. It was not as easy to see the pictures on the inner fa�ade because of the light from the windows, yet it was costumary to incorporate these surfaces into the iconographic program. The most magnificent solutions for this space were found in Naples, an example being Lanfranco’s The Healing of the Cripple at the Pool of Bethesda on the entrance wall of the church of Santi Apostoli. This fresco was executed in collaboration with the quadratura painter Viviano Codazzi.

The painting was executed for the Marco Marazzuoli, a virtuoso musician who played the harp and also composed for the instrument. Known also as “Marco dell’Arpa” (“Marco of the Harp”), he was part of the extensive Barberini entourage of musicians. Marazzuoli was the friend and fellow countryman of Lanfranco, and Passeri links the fact that Lanfranco’s daughter sang and played the harp to Marazzuoli’s influence. In his will, the harpist bequeathed this painting to Cardinal Antonio Barberini, who had a keen interest in music. The connections between the papal family and the musicians and composers of the moment were fundamental. In the particular cultural climate of the Barberini circle, thematic comparisons were often drawn between the arts; for example between the iconography of paintings and the themes of operas. One can also connect the painting to the current of representation, in the various arts, of the ‘affetti’ and of amorous sentiment.

The work is datable to the years between 1630 and Lanfranco’s move to Naples in 1634. The elaborate harp depicted is based on an actual instrument: previously in the Barberini collection it can now be seen in Rome’s Musical Instruments Museum (Museo degli Strumenti Musicali).

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 14 minutes):

George Frideric Handel: Concerto for harp, lute and theorbo in B flat major

The Carthusian charterhouse (Certosa di San Martino) in Naples was established in 1325 and it became one of the wealthiest monasteries in Naples. It enjoyed its greatest flowering in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries under the rule of the Spanish viceroys. The architectural redesign and modernization begun shortly after 1581. The splendid interior decoration set the style of the Neapolitan Baroque.

The first step in the redesign of the Gothic church of the charterhouse in the style of the Counter-Reformation was the painting of the choir, which was accomplished in two phases (1589 and 1595) by Giuseppe Cesari. Giovanni Lanfranco gave the choir a more modern look nearly fifty years later.

The picture shows a view of the nave and the choir. The Crucifixion in the apse and the Ascension of Christ on the nave vault with Old Testament groupings in the spandrels are by Lanfranco.