Mid-Morning Art Thread [Kris]

Interior Of St. Peter's, Rome
Giovanni Paolo Panini

During the Era of Enlightenment, the Grand Tour became popular. These trips visited the centers of European culture, especially Rome and Venice, and were especially popular with the British and Americans. In these cities, tourists would commission local artists to depict major landmarks and grand regional vistas to commemorate the trips. These “vedute”, or “views” in Italian, were panoramic and very detailed.

The key element in a veduta is scale. They are meant to look grand and vast and act like large postcards that show off the city or area while allowing the purchaser to brag about where they’ve been. Scale dominates this depiction of the interior of the Vatican. Unfortunately, I have never been to Rome so I can’t comment on the painting’s accuracy, but art isn’t about fact anyway, even history paintings. Art is about idea.

The human form is the most familiar and basic measure of scale. Here, Panini uses this ruler to create a vast cavern of space and form. The humans are puny to impress on the viewer how colossal this space is. The massive piers and vaults tower overhead, and because the piers are spaced so far apart, the ceiling seems to hover miraculously overhead. Our point-of-view sits about 1/5th of the way up. This elevated viewpoint makes the humans even smaller, resulting in an even larger space. St. Peter’s Basilica was the largest church in Christendom. It was the center of Roman culture at the time and was the spiritual center of Europe for centuries. It was designed, built, and decorated by some of the greatest artists history ever produced. The building is both church and shrine. Its legend and stature is monumental and eternal and dwarfs all who enter it. Panini uses scale to communicate this idea.

In art, size matters, and scale can also refer the painting itself. A good rule of thumb is that the larger the work, the grander the message. This work is almost 4 ¾ ft. by 7 ½ ft. That’s not huge but it is big for a veduta. Remember, these painting are supposed to be vacation souvenirs!

Next, the detail is amazing. Panini meticulously recreates the decorations of the interior down to the glimmer on the gold in the coffers in the arches, bays and vaults. They flicker in the light, showing off the building’s magnificence. He has altered the colors quite a deal, however. The interior is much brighter than it would actually be in an era before artificial light. The murals and statuary seem brighter. They are also larger than the actual humans. The artwork on the walls appear more real than the tourists themselves. With the more-real-than-real art and the glittering decoration, the Basilica itself appears alive.

For me, this work has one tiny, almost invisible flaw. In a Roman Catholic church, the focus is the altar, and in most of those, the altar is at the end of a long, rectangular nave opposite the main entrance. Here the altar is off-center, in shadow to the lower left. This is not really a problem in and of itself. The artist is trying to create an interesting view by eliminating the expected, but the vanishing point for the work’s linear perspective is not the altar. The orthogonals converge to its lower left, near the floor. Vanishing points will, many times, highlight an image or area with great meaning. In this work, they converge just below the base of the statue group to the lower left in the apse. Perhaps because of this, the Baldacchino looks to have shifted too. Technically it’s correct, lined up along the centerline of the nave, but visually it looks… wrong. Is it purposeful or a mistake? I tend to fall on the side that everything in art is purposeful, but if so, why? The point of this painting is the magnificence of the Basilica. The purpose of the Basilica is to venerate the grave of St. Peter. The Baldacchino sits directly over the altar above the Apostle’s grave and frames the first Pope’s throne directly behind it. Why shift it? In this detailed image of a stunning interior, why this one small divergence? I’m not sure what Panini’s trying to say here, but once I noticed it, I could not un-see it.

[Kris has graciously agreed (after much begging from me), to write an occasional art thread. Look for her name in the headline so you won't be surprised to find actual informed art criticism on these august pages]

posted by CBD at 09:30 AM

| Access Comments