Frank Stella recommends Sebastiano del Piombo's Flagellation of Christ
Sebastiano's Rome
Flagellation of Christ
c. 1521, Sebastiano
del Piombo
Church of San Pietro in Montorio
In a letter attempting to explain his difficulties with a commissioned altarpiece, Rubens complained of a "perversi lumi." Bad light pervades the churches of Rome, yet sometimes it can be more of a blessing than a curse. Discovering a great painting all by oneself is a thrill that is hard to come by nowadays. Usually, the great paintings are thrown at us, overpresented and overlit, but a few are still somewhat hidden in their original settings, awaiting discovery. What light there is in these Roman churches has been mismanaged over the centuries, diminished by careless renovations. Not surprisingly, the Church of San Pietro in Montorio, just such a dark case, made for a perfect discovery. Pushing my son's stroller over a worn stone floor, I looked up into a reveal to catch a poorly defined aura, the afterglow of what had to be a special painting.
A late-winter afternoon in Rome is not the best time to stalk 16th-century church painting. It's very hard to find your prey. But that afternoon I did flush a great painting out of the Janiculum's shadow. I had no idea of its source. It looked like a Renaissance painting, but it easily could have been a copy, like the compositionally striking Caravaggio I had seen a few days before at the Palazzo Corsini, a fantastic Narcissus, easily the highlight of the collection. I had been very disappointed when my wife read the label of the Narcissus to me-a "copy after Caravaggio." I went into a deep sulk, wondering why I couldn't tell an original from a copy and why this copy was so good, because even confronted by its lack of authenticity, I still wanted it. To me it was a hot painting from the moment I saw it, maybe the hottest cool painting I had ever seen.
The painting in San Pietro in Montorio didn't have the boxy modernism of the Narcissus, but it did have a special kind of in-your-face classicism. It was an over-the-altar painting with mural power, one with "a tiger in its tank." My first guess was a conservative one, maybe after Giulio Romano; my second guess was, "I just don't know." I was surprised by the attribution to Sebastiano del Piombo, but not by the title, The Flagellation; the darkness was not so great that I couldn't make out the action.
Three months later I was there, again late in the afternoon, when the painting was perfectly lit, the seasonal angle of the sun being now in my favor. Sebastiano's painting was beautiful, inventive, and expansive. The beauty was all Sebastiano's, brought out by his Venetian gift for full-scale color, intensely articulated and swirling across the canvas from side to side and from top to bottom. Beauty brought out also by his paint-handling and form-building skills, so evident that Michelangelo, in Sidney Freedberg's words, had no reservations about selecting Sebastiano as his deputy in what amounted to a Medici-driven painting contest with Raphael.
The inventiveness in the painting owes something to Michelangelo's design, which allowed Sebastiano to run wild with a full-blown painterly classicism tinged opportunely with an innate piety. Painterly, pietistic classicism may sound strange, perhaps even at odds with itself, but it is a quality that really counted for a lot in the following hundred years of painting.
Finally, The Flagellation has a convincing expansiveness, an ability to make narrative action and gesture fill the pictorial boundaries to the point that they seem to swell and and bow out the framing edges. In a similar way, Sebastiano's work pushes painting itself beyond the confines of the 16th century into the 17th century. It is clear, too, that it was Sebastiano's brand of Roman painterly classicism that helped make the expansion so fluid and so far-reaching. He easily caught the attention of Caravaggio and Rubens, as we can see by their magnificent versions of the Flagellation. Certainly, this power-enhanced 16th-century Roman art had no trouble beaming itself out all over Italy and across Europe, led, for example, by Sebastiano's Flagellation to Naples and Antwerp. And it's equally certain that any painter, having seen the Roman light, perversi lumi as it could often be, was bound to follow its path all over Italy, and all across Europe, as the history of Western painting so clearly attests.
Frank
Stella
Artist
