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Benozzo Gozzoli. - book reviews
Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 1997 by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. 340 pp.; 325 ills., 121 in color, 204 b/w. $60.00
Diane Cole Ahl, a highly skilled, persistent, and reliable scholar, has written a monograph on the fifteenth-century master Benozzo Gozzoli (Benozzo di Lese, 1421-1497), who likewise could complete a complex task deftly and with an equal measure of polish. This first major biography of the artist in English is the only study to consider every aspect of his career. Very generously, Professor Ahl credits earlier scholars who supplied much of the material she summarizes, and she diligently presents and signals the new information she supplies. Because of the numerous works Benozzo produced - in particular, his frescoes for the Medici and for the Pisan Camposanto - he is almost never omitted from surveys of Early Renaissance painting. However, characterizing his personal contributions to the style of the time has remained relatively difficult. With Ahl's book, this situation will change, since she has provided access to almost sixty years of industry by Benozzo and his shop.
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The book consists of six chapters discussing Benozzo's career, from its beginnings in the 1440s to his surprising shift of technique in the last two years of his life, followed by a catalogue raisonne. We meet the young artist as a painter of lavish cloth and mythological cassoni, ironically the only nonreligious subjects of his career. He soon appears as a participant in Fra Angelico's commissions at San Marco in Florence, where Ahl differentiates his hand - less luminous and more linear, less inspired and more matter-of-fact - from Angelico's. She then follows him to Lorenzo Ghiberti's circle and the East Baptistery Doors, where rather than searching for his role in finishing the reliefs, she notes the important exposure to narrative, perspective, and setting he would have experienced there. After three years, Benozzo returns to Fra Angelico's shop as consotio (associate) in the Chapel of Nicholas V at the Vatican, in Spoleto, and in Orvieto on the ceiling of the San Brizio Chapel (144749). Although Ahl still recognizes his hand in these works by a comparative lack of expression and "chromatic luminosity and range," it was in Orvieto that Benozzo emerged as an independent master. But political unrest, as Ahl points out, soon ended his activity there; indeed, on this account he had to leave unfinished one of his earliest commissions.
Chapter 2 finds Benozzo in Montefalco working on his own for the local Franciscans. Among several large and small fresco projects, the most important to come down to us is the Life of St. Francis in the choir of the friary (now the Museo Comunale of the city). Ahl reproduces in color more of this cycle than has been seen before, meticulously placing reproductions of the left and right walls correctly on facing pages. Although she is not the first to do so, she observes that the scenes are not arranged chronologically, but instead follow Franciscan ideology in an order related to that of San Bonaventura's Vita Maior. She singles out the iconographical innovations that bolster the order's doctrine, known as Franciscus alter Christus (Francis as Christ), and, more important for Benozzo's personal approach, she calls attention to his use of architecture, in the manner of Ghiberti, to introduce multiple effetti (episodes) within a single framed field. Another important factor Ahl emphasizes is Benozzo's inclusion of portraits of local dignitaries and supporters of the order, as well as recognizable locales in the settings of the events portrayed. After appraising the small but innovative chapel of St. Jerome in the same church, the author is the first to trace at length the lost cycle of the Life of the Blessed Rosa, demonstrating how this project for the Clarissan community was to parallel visually Rosa's life with that of their patron St. Francis by reference to compositions in the mother church in Assisi.
In chapter 3, Ahl rationalizes the Medici's choice of Benozzo as painter of the chapel/audience hall in their new Florentine palace. Aside from already being acquainted with him from their San Marco commission, the Medici, she posits, recognized him as an experienced fresco painter as well as an accomplished portraitist. In this light, she gives the newly restored Procession of the Magi cycle (1459-63) all the attention it deserves. She does so by bringing together the known facts and opinions, both historical and modern, as well as technical discoveries and portrait identifications (scores of contemporaries are shown). She also suggests that the decorative surface qualities of the walls are related to Piero de' Medici's taste for Franco-Flemish tapestries, which were valued for their colors, patterned landscapes, rich costumes, and details. But later she proposes more cogently that these surface qualities are related to those of frescoes in various other Italian private chapels and palaces. Again the color reproductions provided make possible a new acquaintance with this unique monument. To finish the discussion, Ahl remarks that by this time, Benozzo had developed a working technique that allowed him to proceed quite rapidly: detailed, well-prepared drawings that served as prototypes for assistants; in transferring designs to the wall, the use of both sinopie (full-scale preparatory drawings on a rough level of plaster) and spolveri (full-scale drawings pricked with pin holes around the contours through which chalk dust is forced); and a painting technique that included besides fresco (painting with watercolors on wet plaster), secco (painting after the plaster has dried), tempera (pigments mixed with egg), and tempera grassa (egg tempera mixed with oil). In spite of the panoply of gold-shot coloristic exuberance, as Ahl points out, serious devotional implications are embedded in the lavish scheme, which she relates to a deepened spirituality then taking over Florence. She finds that this new trend was expressed openly in the somber quietude of the altarpiece for the Confraternity of the Purification (1461).
