'Il Gran Cardinale': Alessandro Farnese, Patron of the Arts. - book reviews

Federico's originality, as Jones persuasively argues, lay in his attempt to enshrine at the Ambrosiana a canon of pictorial genres and styles that, by corresponding with the full range of God's gifts, would incite the viewer to the full scope of contemplative prayer. Whereas Jan Brueghel's landscapes and still lifes painted in the Flemish manner invited the viewer to reflect upon "elements, plants, fruit, cattle, etc.," Titian's Penitent Magdalene painted in the Venetian manner exemplified the compassionate and empathetic stages of meditative prayer, and compelled reflection upon the sacrificial Christ's behavior ad modum laborantis. Bernardino Luini's Magdalene painted in the Lombard manner, in turn, embodied the happy and unitive stages of meditative prayer, calling us "to consider how God dwells . . . in men giving them understanding." The principle of decorum undergirt Federico's canon of regional styles. The descriptive richness and coloristic brilliance of Flemish painting were best suited to capturing the properties of physical nature; Venetian chiaroscuro and handling, best suited to capturing natural movements, evoked fugitive and indeterminate emotional effects; and Lombard painting, which assimilated Tuscan disegno to the grazia of Raphael and the vaghezza and sfumato of Leonardo, whom Federico considered the progenitor of Lombard style, best captured contemplative states themselves, fulfilling the highest end of art, which was to illustrate the love that marks closeness to God, sustaining and issuing from prayer.

It is Jones's great accomplishment to have found a way of showing how the dynamics of spirituality resonated with pictorial criteria at the Ambrosiana. Federico occasionally privileged the thematics of spirituality even above doctrine, as is clear from his defense of Titian's Entombment and Adoration of the Magi, the former from having depicted the Magdalene too young, the latter from having included a little dog that seemed at best adventitious to the holy scene. Federico justified the Magdalene's youth as a device that allowed Titian to intensify her emotional response to Christ's death; the dog, on the other hand, was appropriate, for it was a wonder of naturalism. The context for this assertion was his conviction that the things of nature, like the Word made flesh, were divine gifts worthy of praise. Indeed, as Jones avers in one of the most exciting subsections of her book, Federico in collaboration with J an Brueghel invented a new genre of sacred image, the Madonna in a Flower Garland, which functioned to thematize the very prayer protocol he sought to install. The most complex of these Garland Madonnas is the version now in the Prado, which depicts a trompe-l'oeil image of the Virgin and Child, suspended from a massive garland of flowers and produce interspersed with animals and insects. Epideictic in format and function, the image, structured as a prayer of praise, invites us to view the things of nature as if they were the Virgin's crown (in the painting within the painting the Virgin is about to be crowned with a floral wreath). Delighting in God's gifts of the things of nature, we see those gifts transformed by human art, itself a divine gift, into an instrument of praise for the Virgin, who appears as the mater Dei, herself the instrument of God's gift, the incarnate Christ.