GOING FOR BAROQUE Into the Bin - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

What makes this painting
so remarkable is
the way it impresses
itself on the imagination
as
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Federico Barocci
Descent
from
the Cross,
1567-69
Oil on canvas, 160 x
9i3/s in. x (412 232 cm)
Cathedral of Perugia
Photograph: Alinari/Art
Resource, N.Y.
the transcription
of something experienced.
The head was
obviously
studied from life?
indeed, Barocci was
among the first artists to
make oil sketches of heads in preparation
for his
paintings (fig. 22)?and
the watery highlights
in
the eyes add a special poignancy.
The still life of
the open devotional book and the crucifix no
less than the rose leaves at the upper right
medi
ate between the viewer's space and that of the
saint, whose left hand, conspicuously pierced
with the nail of his
stigmata (a
detail based on
thirteenth-century literary sources),
extends
outward as though
to break
through
the picture
plane.
For those who know the mountainous
region
of the Marches around Urbino, the land
scape will seem hauntingly
familiar: Barocci
must have made a drawing
from a particular
locale. And then there is the way light
has been
used to orchestrate the various elements,
as it
on
delicately plays
the cross and illuminates
Saint Francis's head and left hand while the
right hand is enshrouded in shadow. The landscape is still enveloped
in the darkness before
dawn, as, we are told in early Franciscan sources, it was on a September morning
in 1224
when Francis had a vision of a seraph
on Mount Alverna and received the stigmata.
Each fea
ture of the painting?the cross, the book open to the Lord's
Prayer,
the saint's rapt expres
sion, the grotto and landscape?was
meant to suggest the saint's retreat, his devotional exer
cises, and his
stigmatization?but without, however, illustrating any particular
narrative
moment. The picture
is a meditation on Saint Francis and gives palpable
form to the practice
of meditational recollection. So powerful
is Barocci's evocation that we do not need a deep
knowledge
of the saint's biography
to connect with the emotional tenor of the painting.
Toward a Poetics of Painting
though they are from one
another, Caravaggio's Musicians, Annibale's
Different
Two Children
a
Teasing Cat, Ludovico's Lamentation, and Barocci's Saint Francis all
employ
naturalistic effects to break down the idealizing vocabulary
of so much
High
Renaissance
and Mannerist art. But
they also reaffirm a poetics
of mere
painting, disavowing representa
tion and embracing
the world of ideas. How this new balance between these two imperatives
might
be achieved was much debated; the most extreme
was
position
taken by
the theorist
antiquarian
Giovan Pietro Bellori
(1613-1696),
whose heroes were Annibale Carracci, Domeni
chino, and Poussin
(Bellori may have studied
painting
with Domenichino and was a friend
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