Lignum Vitae in Medio Paradisi

Abstract

Within a few years, the Roman High Renaissance replaced the poetic elegance, the grace, the preciousness of late Quattrocento Italian painting, sculpture and architecture, with entirely new and diametrically different aesthetic ideals. Under Michelangelo and Raphael a sober dignity and massiveness inherited from Masaccio and from Giotto is invested with an intensity of energy the like of which had not been seen since Hellenistic sculpture. These two painters create a new world of vaster and more simple dimensions, under the authority of a new race, endowed with superhuman scale and powers, and rejoicing in a new and heroic beauty. For this race Bramante invents a new architecture, of more solemn proportions and more generous scope. Together the three artists develop at such speed that none of their major works can be finished in the same style as that in which it was begun. The consequences of this stylistic revolution have been the subject of exhaustive study. Yet it does not seem to have surprised most critics that so fundamental a change in style and content should have taken place so rapidly. I venture to suggest that not until the opening decades of the twentieth century do we again find an artistic transformation as rapid as that which was brought about in Rome between the years 1503 and 1513. It is the more extraordinary that such a change should have occurred in a city whose native school had been extinct for nearly two centuries, and which, in spite of having invited the greatest artists in Italy to work there, had until this time been unable to exert the slightest influence upon them by means other than the ruins of its remote past, or to produce a recognizable style of its own. In trying to understand the origin and nature of the High Renaissance style in Rome, it seems to me essential to bear in mind that the dates within which it rose and flourished correspond to those of the pontificate of Julius II.1 The present study is an attempt to evaluate the implications of this fact through an examination of the iconography of the works of art themselves.2