Saturday, April 24, 2010

Bartolomeo Passarrotti, The Fish Vendors


Butchers, fish vendors, and poultry sellers appear quite abruptly in northern Italian art, in paintings by Vincenzo Campi, Bartolomeo Passarotti, and Annibale Carracci, all made in Cremona and Bologna between about 1580 and 1585. (1) Curiously, these mundane figures appeared primarily in series of paintings rather than in single compositions. The first series, of about 1580, produced by Vincenzo Campi for the wealthy Fugger family of Augsburg, comprises five paintings, three of which represent fish vendors, together with one of a vegetable and fruit vendor and another of a poultry display (Figs. 1-5). Campi's second series, presumed painted about 1585 for an unknown patron, later finding its way into the Cremona monastery of S. Sigismondo, also contains five paintings, in which fish vendors, poulterers, and fruit sellers are joined by a group of cheese eaters and a kitchen scene (Figs. 6-10). Passarotti's four paintings have only recently been reconstituted as a series similar to Campi's two groups of paintings, thanks to an inventory that establishes their presence in the Mattei collection in Rome by 1614. (2) He added the depiction of butchers to the display of fish, vegetables, and poultry (Figs. 11-14). Annibale Carracci's genre works from the 1580s are the exception to this rule of the early genre series in Italy at this time. The Bean Eater (Fig. 20) recalls the bean-eating families in Campi's fish scenes (Figs. 1, 3, 6), while his Butcher Shop (Fig. 17) echoes Passarotti's meat handlers (Fig. 11), but there is no evidence that either of Carracci's paintings was conceived as part of a series.

The sudden appearance of these scenes from daily life signals the birth of a realist genre painting in Italy, very close to the moment in which the better-known realist genre art of northern Europe was first produced. These paintings are clearly related by format and subject to the earlier Flemish market scenes by Antwerp painters Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer. The Affaitati banking family, with its holdings in both Antwerp and Cremona, and the Farnese in Parma, after Alessandro Farnese's long military sojourn in Flanders, both imported Antwerp paintings, and especially those of Beuckelaer. Several of these made their way, along with other paintings from the Farnese collections, into the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples (Fig. 15). (3) It is highly likely that Vincenzo Campi in particular had some of these works before his eyes when he painted his first fish vendors in about 1580. Moreover, the fact that the Italian works were initially produced in series of four and five paintings ties them to the later generation of painters who elaborated on Aertsen's and Beuckelaer's market formats in the 1590s, such as Lucas and Frederick van Valchenborch in Frankfurt and Jan Baptiste Saive in Brussels. (4) These later northern market scenes use the format of a series to create allegories of the four seasons or the labors of the months, rooted in long-standing allegorical traditions. Despite numerous northern Italian precedents for such allegorical series in the works of the Bassano family, among others, the new iconography of the food vendors in Italy does not openly call on such well-known allegorical references. (5)

The other important alteration that Italian artists made to the Flemish models was the removal of biblical motifs from the backgrounds of the contemporary markets: scenes of Christ and the Miraculous Draft of Fishes are replaced in Campi's works by laborers catching the fish or picking the fruit. While it is true that some of Beuckelaer's market scenes, such as his depiction of a fish market in the Museo di Capodimonte (Fig. 15), did not have any religious reference, their complete absence in Italy is striking and important. Gone from these Italian works are the religious and ethical issues concerning market and commerce that were the driving force behind the creation of this genre in Antwerp. (6) In fact, the Italian paintings can only be called market scenes by a kind of slippage of terms derived from the northern models. Nowhere in them, except perhaps in Carracci's Butcher Shop, do we see any hint of the urban setting for markets, with buyers as well as sellers. Instead, the inclusion in Campi's series of a kitchen scene (Fig. 9) and cheese eaters (Fig. 10) and the great emphasis on the noncommercial actions of the low figures within the scenes point us to a very different theme than that of markets. The common link between all these Italian works of the 1580s is their significant juxtaposition of low-born human bodies with foodstuffs.

Thus, the clear relation between the Italian scenes and Antwerp market scenes hides a less obvious set of discrepancies between them. I will argue that similarities of iconography and parallels of style mask very important differences in function for the Italian genre paintings. Italian artists and their clients read--and misread--the Antwerp precedents in light of their own concerns. In the final section of this essay, I will address the problem of the reception of these works in greater detail. While it has occasionally been tempting for writers on Italian realism to borrow from the iconographic studies of northern works and to suppose a quasi-emblematic symbolism at work in the southern examples, we can now move beyond that so-far fruitless methodological lure, toward newer questions pointed at the very nature of Italian realism at this time. This new questioning of Italian realism also has roots in recent debates about Dutch realism. (7) But far from reinforcing our sense that these works are purely derivative of northern art, the present essay aims to establish the cultural and, indeed, ideological specificity of the northern Italian examples.

Three kinds of contemporary discourse will be related here to this new genre in northern Italy. The first is a polemic, partly political and partly scientific, that arose in northern Italy during the decade just prior to 1580, concerning the foods appropriate for high-born as opposed to low-born bodies. This discussion casts a very revealing light on the specific choices of foods and of bodies in these paintings. The second discourse concerns the relation of early genre imagery to the international culture of curiosity and the practice of collecting wonders, which illuminates what we know of the patrons of Campi's and Passarotti's works. And the third discourse is that of proverbs and folk sayings. This is an area much studied in relation to northern genre art, while its role in the production and reception of Italian genre art is little known. Yet proverbs were objects of curiosity, collected on an encyclopedic scale by Italian virtuosi as well as other European scholars throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Proverbial language may well have provided elite viewers, and perhaps also less elite viewers, a point of entry into this new subject matter of bodies and foods. These three social discourses have in common their roles in early modern systems of knowledge.

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Northern Italian genre scenes play a role in the elaboration of these systems of knowledge, not only in their new subject matter, but also in their very mode of representation. The realism of these works has often been seen as a kind of consciously "anti-Mannerist" style, the low-life subjects used as pretext for a "pure" naturalism. (8) In this vein of art history as a history of artistic styles, the group of market scenes from about 1580 is usually seen merely as a precursor to the more radical realism of Caravaggio's manner in the following decade. The discussion that follows shows this to be too limited a view of their significance. For a quasi-scientific naturalism in the broadest sense was an integral part of the paintings' address to their viewers. What these paintings naturalized, however, was a highly artificial, new, and troubling social order.

The Genre Paintings of about 1580: Campi, Passarotti, Carracci

One global interpretation of these northern Italian genre scenes has been proposed, and usually accepted. Barry Wind related them to the contemporary idea of pitture ridicole, or comic painting. (9) The term comes from a text published in 1582 by Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti in Bologna, and it echoes similar remarks by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, the Milanese art theorist. Wind proposed that the function of such pitture ridicole would be comparable to that of comedy in classical and Renaissance literary criticism. Moreover, an elite audience for these paintings would have known classical precedents for pitture ridicole, in comic pictures of barbers or butchers mentioned by Pliny and a few other sources. Wind saw the humble contemporary subjects for such pitture ridicole as having an elevated classical pedigree. And thus, according to Wind, paintings such as Campi's Fish Vendors (Fig. 1) and Poulterers (Fig. 4), both from the series done for the immensely rich banker Hans Fugger, were a "sustained bawdy joke" for an educated man with a low sense of humor.

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In Wind's view, the peasants depicted in these scenes "lasciviously grab" or "suggestively stroke" the foodstuffs in these pictures. Wind describes these foods as a tissue of "salacious emblematic elements." He focused in particular on the beans that Campi shows his peasants eating and the fish they are displaying in several paintings, calling them symbols of lust. He turned to classical literary texts to support this idea, for there are apparently no contemporary emblems that use foods in this way. But Wind assumed there was some form of symbolism at work in all of the foods depicted by Campi and Passarotti: in his view, both the figures and the foods in these scenes serve the same erotic purpose. Wind did not discuss the figures' social context, perhaps because he thought it so obvious that these figures were low, and because their bawdy address to the viewer eclipsed any other aspect of their appearance. Other scholars have questioned details of Wind's general account, without proposing alternative readings.

Comedy does appear to be the appropriate first category in which to place these scenes--these are representations of low people, directed at a high audience that would seek moral edification from the display of vulgarity. It seems clear that the figures in some of these works are depicted as both crude and laughable, and that some, but not all, are provocatively posed. But we can now expand our sense of how these images engage with comedy's aim to edify through the depiction of the low. There is a consistent logic at work in the juxtaposition of specific foods with these figures. Their association was born not from classical learning, but rather from a contemporary polemic about the appropriate foods to be given to different levels of people in society. Discussion on this topic of food and the social hierarchy first flourished during the 1570s and 1580s in the north of Italy, virtually at the same time and in the same place that Campi, Passarotti, and Carracci were producing their images.

Perhaps we can get at the logic of these images first through their visual arrangement. Vincenzo Campi probably studied Joachim Beuckelaer's paintings as soon as they arrived in the collections of the Farnese or the Affaitati families in Cremona. In altering the backgrounds of the Antwerp market scenes, Campi's works no longer sought to move the eye from foreground to background, juxtaposing the modern world of commerce and the sacred past. Instead, Campi composed his scenes around a horizontal axis across the surface of the works. Foods and bodies are here associated in a fashion that differs markedly from the Aertsen and Beuckelaer examples. As Bert Meijer has remarked, Campi's paintings depict a much more ordered display of products than that found in the Flemish paintings, an order that seemed to Meijer far closer to a scientific table for classification than to the jumble of a marketplace. (10)

This notion of a table of species offers an important insight into the common ground that unites the Campi and Passarotti series of paintings. In their series, each species of fish, each type of fruit or vegetable has been given its own container, whether copper basins, woven baskets, or ceramic bowls. All are tilted downward on the picture plane for maximum visibility of their contents.

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Unlike Campi's massive paintings, the four by Passarotti are relatively small in size, well suited for the kind of private cabinet in which they hung. It is uncertain whether the Mattei were their original commissioners, and the artist did not date the works. But they are generally dated on the basis of style to about the year 1580. (11) It is possible that Passarotti followed Campi's works in this vein, as well as emulating the Flemish market scenes of Beuckelaer. But the two artists make different sorts of compositions out of their northern models.

Addressing the viewer with looks and gestures, the figures in both Campi's and Passarotti's images point to the food and to each other as if to direct us forcibly to some meaning. The two artists, however, have found different structures of display with which to communicate that meaning. In Passarotti's four works, gestures seem to establish the likeness or resemblance between the goods displayed and the protagonists' appearance. The hoary snout of a boar, fondled by a meat seller in Passarotti's Butcher Shop, invites comparison to the butchers' own heads; the broad, thick brushstrokes that form the head of the butcher at right merge into the thick slabs of paint forming the carcass hanging beside him (Fig. 11). In his Poulterers, young and old chickens are juxtaposed with fresh or weathered peasant women (Fig. 14). A woman holds a rotund globefish behind the spherical head of an old man in his Fish Vendors (Fig. 12). This detail is most revealing, since the globefish was a rarity from the waters of the Nile, not meant for eating but highly sought after for display in natural history collections, precisely because of its alleged resemblance to a grotesque human head. (12)

In Campi's ten paintings, gestures more often establish the difference between the figures' actions and the static order of their wares. Campi's juxtapositions of figures and food bring out their difference one fundamental way that, while obvious once pointed out, has not been noted in the literature. The food his peasants eat is not the food that they display: they swill beans, with a meal of hard cheese, walnuts, rough bread, and dark wine set before them, while the foodstuffs piled next to the human protagonists never include these foods that are being actively consumed. Setting apart for a moment the complex, packed composition of his Kitchen Scene and the close-up view of heads in his Cheese Eaters, both of them from his second series of market paintings, Campi employs two basic types of composition in both of these series. And both types of composition carefully divide the figures from the displayed food. In the first type, as in the Fish Vendors and Poulterers images, active, gesticulating figures close the sides of the composition, framing a calm central market display that leads the eye into a vista of food gathering or fishing (Figs. 3, 4, 6, 8). In the second type, a single figure or tightly packed group of three figures anchors the composition at the center or side, and the foods are arranged as a counterweight opposite them. The best example of this arrangement is the Fruit Vendor from the Fugger series (Fig. 2), where the single upright figure at center right of a woman peeling fruit contrasts--meaningfully, as we will see--with the …

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