Catholic Reform and Bernardino Poccetti's Chiostro dei Morti at the church of SS Annunziata in Florence

Apollo, Sept, 2003 by Gauvin Alexander Bailey

Most studies of the influence of the Catholic Reform movement on Italian painting of the late renaissance still focus on Rome, yet it was in Florence that this stylistic revolution was pioneered. Reformist painters such as Santi di Tito (1538 1603) and his followers directly inspired Roman commissions, including those of the youthful Society of Jesus. (1) Florence's older churches underwent major renovations before most of their Roman counterparts, beginning with the Dominican seat of S Maria Novella and the Franciscan S Croce in the 1560s and 1570s, when Duke Cosimo I had Giorgio Vasari open up their naves and systematise the sequence of side chapels to make the mass more accessible to the people. (2) These construction projects, which were the model for subsequent restorations in churches throughout northern Tuscany, involved many of the principal reform painters of the time, including Santi and Alessandro Allori (1535-1607), and they were motivated as much by a desire to return to a renaissance unity of design as they were by Tridentine concerns. (3)

One typically Tuscan form of revival with roots in the renaissance was the cloister lunette fresco cycle. This tradition of painting the lunettes under the vaults of cloister arcades with narrative scenes from the Bible, from the lives of the saints, or from the history of the founders of the religious orders, derives from prototypes such as the Chiostro Verde at S Maria Novella, with frescoes by Paolo Uccello and assistants (second quarter of the fifteenth century), and the Chiostro degli Aranci at the Badia Fiorentina (c. 1430s), and it flourished in the later renaissance with Sodoma's and Luca Signorelli's frescoes at Monte Oliveto Maggiore in the 1490s and early 1500s, the Chiostro dei Voti at SS Annunziata with frescoes by Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, and Andrea del Sarto (first two decades of the sixteenth century), and Andrea del Sarto's Chiostro dello Scalzo (1510-26), among others. (4) This genre owed its popularity to a combination of a straightforward and lively descriptive style with panoramic architectural and landscape settings full of naturalistic and genre detail.

In the late cinquecento, Florentine patrons seized upon the cloister lunette fresco cycle as an ideal format for reformist didactic painting. (5) It was perfectly suited for long narrative epics, since traditional Florentine cloisters could accommodate a lengthy series of lunettes on four walls, and it could address a large audience, since the lunettes were visible from a spacious, centrally-planned, and well-lit courtyard. The length of a lunette cycle was comparable to the series of illustrations found in sacred books of the period, a connection made more explicit by the frescoes' regular use of captions. (6) The sequential format of cloister lunette cycles also gave them a triumphalist aspect, since they evoked a procession and also recalled the cycles of ephemeral paintings of biographical episodes which decorated state funerals and weddings, most notably the exequies of Michelangelo in 1564 and the wedding of Francesco de' Medici in 1566. (7)

The campaign of post-Tridentine cloister lunette cycles began with the Chiostro Grande at S Maria Novella in 1581, and if was soon followed by examples at the Compagnia della SS Annunziata (or S Pierino, c. 1585), S Salvatore d'Ognissanti (1599-1624), S Maria degli Angeli (1600-1601), S Marco (1602-1604), S Spirito, and SS Annunziata in Florence (1605-18), as well as places outside of the city such as SS Annunziata in Pistoia (1601-1602). In addition to Santi and Allori, who directed the S Maria Novella cycle, a new generation of painters worked on these commissions, including Jacopo Ligozzi (1547-1627), Giovanni Battista Naldini (1537-91), and Giovanni da San Giovanni (1592-1636). Unlike their precursors, these new cycles focused almost exclusively on the founders or ideological leaders of the various religious orders or confraternities. They returned to the classicising and naturalistic narrative style of Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530), and they had a panoramic character and delight in detail which recalled earlier Florentine fresco painters such as Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-94) or Benozzo Gozzoli (1420-97). (8) One of the main contributors to these cycles was Bernardino Barbatelli, known as Poccetti (1548-1612), from S Marino Val d'Elsa, a now rather underrated artist whom Filippo Baldinucci considered a painter 'di prima classe'. (9)

Poccetti became the premier practitioner of reformist narrative painting. Beginning in the 1590s, his works depart almost completely from the maniera, with its cool and flat light, its tendency to crowd figures against the picture plane, and its self-conscious complexity and virtuosity. (10) Combining warm and vivid pastel colours with spacious settings and rational compositions, Poccetti populated his scenes with realistic and legible figures animated by a dramatic and easily comprehensible story line. His settings and figure types alike owed a debt to Sarto, while his enthusiasm for narrative clarity was also influenced by Santi, who had worked with the younger artist at S Maria Novella. Poccetti enriched his frescoes with a wealth of detail, whether in natural landscape elements or genre, creating scenes whose visual splendour and human interest captivated viewers of the day--and achieved precisely that combination of delectare, docere, movere ('to delight, to teach, to move') which Catholic churchmen were calling for in religious painting at the time. (11)