1. Introduction

In Francisco de Holanda’s (1517–84) Diálogos em Roma, the interlocutor Michelangelo invokes the example of Alexander the Great and his court painter Apelles, asking, if a mere man had restricted the making of his likeness to a masterful painter, ought not the princes of the Church be even more rigorous in their requirements of artists who depict the “loving kindness and mercy of Our Redeemer” and the “purity of Our Lady”?Footnote ¹ Written to complement book 1 of Holanda’s treatise Da Pintura Antiga (1548), the dialogues examine the most salient aspects of artistic theory and patronage in the years leading up to the Council of Trent (1545–63). Holanda’s command of the material addressed in his treatise substantially developed during his extended stay in Rome between 1538 and 1540, which later became the subject of the dialogues. Set primarily in the cloister of San Silvestro al Quirinale in late 1538, these feature highly verisimilar conversations with some of the cultural and artistic luminaries whom the young Portuguese artist met in Italy: the poet Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547) and Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) in the first three dialogues, and the Croatian miniaturist Giulio Clovio (1498–1578) and the medalist Valerio Belli (ca. 1468–1546) in the fourth and final dialogue.Footnote ² Following his comments about Alexander and Apelles, Holanda’s Michelangelo advises limiting the authority to make images of Christ and the Virgin to select artists, who are both “great and skillful masters” and of “blameless” lives. This counsel draws a connection between technical mastery and pious intellect that appears throughout the dialogues and is best understood in the context of Catholic reform in the Cinquecento.Footnote ³ Michelangelo’s exemplary status as a divinely inspired and eminently skilled artist is central to Holanda’s rhetorical strategy: however, it was also crucial for the author to establish his and other artists’ qualifications to render authoritative copies of Christ’s and the Virgin’s likenesses.

The structure of the dialogues proposes Giulio Clovio as a prominent artistic model and successful imitator of Michelangelo, actually substituting the miniaturist for the sculptor in the final dialogue. Although Holanda does not present Sebastiano del Piombo (1485–1547) in this same capacity, the Venetian painter’s history of collaboration with Michelangelo, his friendship with Clovio, and his technical experimentation suggest that he, in turn, was an important model for Clovio. Both of these artists, moreover, devoted the greater part of their oeuvres to sacred images of Christ and the Virgin. When these likenesses were based on figures by Michelangelo and thus mediated by his disegno, Clovio’s and Sebastiano’s copies signaled a representational hierarchy in which their artifice found an important, albeit lesser, place. This essay asserts that Holanda’s text and a series of works by Clovio and Sebastiano reveal pictorial innovations devised to demonstrate the artists’ technical mastery and theoretical ambition within such a hierarchy.

These innovations — a stippling technique employed by Holanda and Clovio, and a method of painting in oil on stone by Sebastiano — have received little attention in the scholarship on these artists, despite their having been well known in the sixteenth century. The masterful execution of the techniques alone merits examination. Equally interesting, however, is the way in which these methods of painting and the metaphors suggested by them present a means for the artist and viewer to distinguish between image types: between an acheiropoieton, or divinely generated image not made by human hands, and a work of Michelangelo’s design — and, finally, between these models (divine and almost divine) and Sebastiano’s and Clovio’s appropriation of them. Such discernment not only safeguarded against idolatry, but also endowed Clovio’s and Sebastiano’s works (which have often been dismissed as derivative of Michelangelo’s designs) with legitimate authority, both through their proximity to the well-known originals and through their independent mastery.Footnote ⁴

Holanda put Michelangelo’s comments predicating the need for technical and personal virtuosity in the context of the older artist’s report about one of Holanda’s first projects in Rome, to faithfully copy the face of Christ from the cult image in the Sancta Sanctorum.Footnote ⁵ When another key interlocutor in the first three dialogues, Latanzio Tolomei, expresses his astonishment that Holanda had been given access to the miraculous image of Christ, Michelangelo responds in a way that foregrounds two important aspects of Holanda’s enterprise: his status as a foreign artist on a mission to translate the relics most sacred to Rome and his ability to work in a new medium and scale. Acknowledging Tolomei’s surprise, Michelangelo elaborates, “indeed you may well wonder at the toil and devices of Messer Francisco in robbing us of this noble Roman relic; and no less by painting it in oil, even though he had never in his life painted in oil,” nor “painted larger figures than those on a small sheet of parchment.”Footnote ⁶ His next point establishes the source of Holanda’s success: “let this be plain to all: design, or as it is called by another name, drawing, constitutes the fountain-head and substance of painting and sculpture and architecture and every other kind of painting and is the root of all sciences.”Footnote ⁷ Michelangelo maintains that a mastery of disegno enables the artist, “to paint frescoes in the old Italian fashion, with all its usual mingling and variety of colors; he will be able to paint very smoothly in oil, with more skill and daring, and patience than mere painters can; finally, in the scanty space of a piece of parchment he will prove himself a great and most perfect artist.”Footnote ⁸ Michelangelo’s point here about disegno’s role in qualifying an artist to work in different media and scale is of central importance to other passages in the dialogues. In them, Holanda ties disegno to good judgment, intellectual rigor, spiritual insight, and the practice of making copies after both Michelangelo and sacred images.

2. “A Mist Drawn over the Face of Painting”

One such passage occurs in Holanda’s Fourth Dialogue, which takes place in the home of Cardinal Marino Grimani (1488–1546) and features Clovio, in place of Michelangelo, as an interlocutor. Holanda describes a method that he and Clovio used, which was both technically virtuosic and intellectually demanding, both for the artist and viewer: “In the illuminated work of Don Giulio I saw a method of working by means of certain dots, which I call atoms, like a woven veil; they seem a mist drawn over the face of painting; and this manner (taking some license with [King] Solomon who says that everything has already been said and done) was not discovered until our time by Don Giulio of Macedonia, and I saw no one use it in Italy, nor in Flanders, though it seems they now copy it… . But I would like to tell the truth about this: when I was a boy at Evora, before the King our lord sent me to Italy, and was working on two subjects in black and white, the one being the Salutation of Our Lady, the other the Coming of the Holy Ghost, for a special Breviary of his Highness, I by myself discovered this way of illuminating with atoms and mist which Don Giulio was using at Rome… . It is a style very difficult to understand and even more difficult to execute.”Footnote ⁹ Holanda concludes by registering his pleasant surprise that, though five hundred leagues apart, he and Clovio had discovered this technique almost simultaneously. What might be inferred by this coincidence is that the two artists, equally matched in theory and practice, were divinely inspired: in other words, they are the sort of artists recommended by Michelangelo in the preceding dialogue. The importance of this method of painting for Holanda is indicated by his emphasis of it in chapter 44 of book 1 of his treatise Da Pintura Antiga, which discusses different painting media.Footnote ¹⁰ This first passage elaborates on the subtlety and grace of the “dew, mist or veil of atoms” and on the difficulty of the technique, which, according to the author, was imitated by others with varying degrees of success.Footnote ¹¹ Immediately preceding this passage in his treatise, Holanda links illumination to intellectual discovery and piety, characterizing it as chaste, spiritual, and pleasing to the eyes, the one medium in which the moderns might have an advantage over the ancients.Footnote ¹² The author concludes by stating that perfect works in miniature, whether in black-and-white or in color, appear as if they had not been painted by hand but by the divinely inspired intellect.Footnote ¹³ Somewhat at odds here is Holanda’s clear argument that this technique demonstrates an artist’s skill and invenzione through its discovery and visible execution.Footnote ¹⁴ This tension between suggesting divine intervention and apparent technical mastery can be reconciled by a particular metaphor.

Most scholars agree that two of the four miniatures by Clovio mentioned in the Fourth Dialogue are The Theological Virtues and The Conversion of the Roman Proconsul, both in the Musée du Louvre.Footnote ¹⁵ Given these subjects and those of the works by Holanda described in this passage, an Annunciation and a Pentecost, the author also seems to imply that this technique is particularly suitable for works that concern spiritual revelation. Although the Portuguese artist’s two works are not as easily identified now as those by Clovio, it is worth noting that one of the most beautiful examples of this kind of painting that survives may be seen in Holanda’s portrait of Michelangelo from the Desenhos das Antigualhas, drawings and miniatures finished and bound for King João after Holanda’s return from Rome.Footnote ¹⁶ That he would masterfully employ this technique in his portrait of Michelangelo is not surprising given the extent to which it seems to have been connected to the theory and virtues articulated by both men throughout books 1 and 2 of Da Pintura Antigua. Clovio’s own understanding of the metaphorical and theoretical potential of the method is best represented by his cabinet miniatures from the 1540s and 1550s, during which time the two works examined here were made. Clovio used short brushstrokes and subtle stippling in many of his works, especially in the sections with gold highlighting; however, the visibility of the painter’s mark increases in particular areas and figures. That Clovio purposefully and significantly emphasized the technique is most evident in the body of Christ in a Pietà (figs. 1 and 2), recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and a Resurrected Christ, now in a private collection (fig. 3).Footnote ¹⁷ Both works depend on a Michelangelesque model for the figure of Christ, although this source is more obvious in the latter work, clearly based on Michelangelo’s sculpture in Santa Maria sopra Minerva. If considered metaphorically, as the veil described by Holanda, Clovio’s emphatic use of stippling may be understood to mark ontological difference between the original sacred body and the artistic copy, both his and Michelangelo’s.Footnote ¹⁸

Figure 1. Giulio Clovio. Pietà, gouache on vellum, ca. 1550. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art.

Figure 2. Giulio Clovio. Detail of Christ’s torso, Pietà, gouache on vellum, ca. 1550. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art.

Figure 3. Giulio Clovio. Resurrected Christ, gouache on vellum, ca. 1550. Private collection.

Holanda’s descriptions of this mode of painting and of Clovio’s works in this manner vividly recall Lucretius’s famous explanation of vision in his poem De rerum natura.Footnote ¹⁹ In particular, the “woven veil” of Holanda’s account approximates Lucretius’s description of the images of things, rerum simulacra, as films or membranes that peel away from objects (like a snake’s skin), float through the air, and enter the eyes. These membranes, according to Lucretius, are made up of atoms and continually replicate the original object, becoming apparent in their constant stream or before a mirror, which, bright and non-porous, repels and directs them into the eyes.Footnote ²⁰ In his essay on the term figura and figural interpretation in the Western tradition, Erich Auerbach noted the word’s relationship to Lucretius’s concept of models and copies, linking figura to the atom itself and the material structure of the “film images,” which incessantly peel from and reproduce their original objects “like membranes.”Footnote ²¹

Holanda’s use of the word atom to describe a painting technique employed by him, his father, and Clovio does not necessarily prove that any of these artists espoused Epicurean philosophy or the atomist theory of vision.Footnote ²² He might also have been referring to the opening comments of Alberti’s discussion of Euclidian geometry, perhaps even aligning the artistic mark with Alberti’s punctum.Footnote ²³ Yet the idea of Lucretius’s atoms would have been an appealing model to refer to both vision and the concept of the copy, especially in regard to images of the Holy Face. Certainly the only copies that perfectly preserved the integrity of their original, in terms of Christian Platonic thought, were acheiropoieta, whose miraculous replication was an integral component of their legends.Footnote ²⁴ Holanda and Clovio would not have been alone in only partially adopting Lucretius’s explanation of vision for its poetic or metaphorical value. In his 1545 lectures on canto 1 of Dante’s Paradiso, Benedetto Varchi incorporated Lucretius’s description of film images thrown off from their original objects into his discussion of optics — not because he subscribed to the Roman poet’s theory of vision but because the passage in question from De rerum natura “divinely” described the process of sight.Footnote ²⁵ Although Varchi, following his own predominantly Aristotelian model, specifically rejected the materiality of Lucretius’s simulacra, such materiality is better suited, rhetorically and ontologically, to the objects described by Holanda and still extant today in Clovio’s oeuvre.Footnote ²⁶ By constructing images of sacred subjects with a veil or mist of atoms, Clovio and Holanda employed a metaphor capable of suggesting both revelation and the extent to which their works were faithful, authoritative copies of the divine models, as if their works were membranes thrown from the original objects. Given the vellum (that is, skin) supports of Clovio’s and Holanda’s works, this conceit would have been particularly powerful, powerful enough to necessitate the foregrounding of the works’ facture and artistic debt to Michelangelo, avoiding the danger of idolatry by making apparent their status as works of art.

3. Ornamenting the Michelangelesque Body

As noted, Clovio’s Pietà in Washington (fig. 1) is one of the best examples of the stippling-like technique described by Holanda. The woven veil of atoms, or points of paint, is especially apparent in Christ’s torso (fig. 2).Footnote ²⁷ Clovio’s figure of Christ in the Pietà is based on at least one or two models by Michelangelo: most likely his Pietà in St. Peter’s (fig. 4) and possibly a drawing usually associated with the other focus of this essay, Sebastiano del Piombo’s Pietà (fig. 5) painted for the funeral chapel of Francisco de los Cobos in Úbeda, Spain. One of the two drawings documenting this design is in the Musée du Louvre (fig. 6) and is most often attributed to Michelangelo.Footnote ²⁸ The broad influence of the sculpture (and perhaps the drawings) is made clear not only by Clovio’s and Sebastiano’s figures, but also by the Christ figure in Francesco Salviati’s Lamentation for Bernardo Moro of ca. 1540.Footnote ²⁹ Certainly Clovio used variations of this figure in all of his designs for Pietàs over several decades.Footnote ³⁰

Figure 4. Michelangelo. Pietà, marble, 1500. Vatican, St. Peter’s Basilica. Scala / Art Resource, NY.

Figure 5. Sebastiano del Piombo. Pietà, oil on slate, 1533–39. Madrid, Museo del Prado, on deposit from the Fundación Casa Ducal de Medinaceli. Photo courtesy of the Fundación Casa Ducal de Medinaceli.

Figure 6. Michelangelo. Study for the Úbeda Pietà, black chalk, ca. 1533. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY.

As Giorgio Vasari’s Life of Sebastiano del Piombo in the 1550 edition of the Vite indicates, Clovio was a close companion of Sebastiano. Thus the miniaturist might have known of this drawing or of another copy of Michelangelo’s figure through Sebastiano.Footnote ³¹ That Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520–89), Clovio’s patron by 1540, was one of a number of people called upon to mediate the lengthy dispute between Sebastiano and the Gonzaga agent in Rome over the Úbeda Pietà also increases the likelihood that Clovio was familiar with the details of the project.Footnote ³² If the marble Pietà in St. Peter’s was the more important source, however, neither Clovio nor any of the other artists whose figures of Christ seem based on this design need have had access to the drawings in Paris and Florence. In any case, by the time that Clovio painted the Washington Pietà (ca. 1550), he had long been benefitting from the appropriation of Michelangelo’s designs. According to Holanda, the miniaturist was first famous for his ability to copy Michelangelo’s Ganymede presentation drawing.Footnote ³³ Certainly Clovio utilized Michelangelo’s figures throughout the Farnese Hours (M. 69 Morgan Library, New York), completed in 1546, and most of his surviving cabinet miniatures, like the Pietà and Standing Christ, center on one Michelangelesque figure or figural group. It is important to emphasize, however, that Clovio conceived of these works as products of his invention and technical mastery. Though openly in debt to Michelangelo, Clovio’s compositions for the Farnese Hours, the Towneley Lectionary (Ms. 91, New York Public Library), and individual cabinet miniatures all include components representative of his own strengths: striking colore, dramatic secondary figures, and Flemish-like landscapes ornamented with antique trophies, buildings, and ruins.

The Washington Pietà, which includes eight figures in addition to the Virgin and Christ, lacks the kind of landscape found in many of these cabinet miniatures. In this case, Clovio’s invention reveals itself in these additional figures and their compositional arrangement around Christ and Mary, as a 1568 Cornelis Cort engraving after Clovio’s design indicates (fig. 7).Footnote ³⁴ In contrast, this engraving incorporates the kind of landscape characteristic of Clovio’s designs, including an obelisk and a rotunda-like building in the center background, while another engraving by Cort after Clovio dated two years earlier (fig. 8) provides the kind of tight focus found in the Washington Pietà, though with fewer figures. The positions of the figures in this composition, however, are reversed and slightly different. The Magdalene holds Christ’s hand, resting her cheek upon it, and John the Evangelist bends lower behind Christ’s back and seems more engaged in supporting his body. Most obviously different is the Virgin, who stands over Christ rather than cradling his shoulders and torso.

Figure 7. Cornelius Cort, after Giulio Clovio. Pietà, engraving, 1568. London, British Museum.

Figure 8. Cornelis Cort, after Giulio Clovio. Pietà, engraving, 1566. London, British Museum.

At least four drawings demonstrate Clovio’s consideration of this subject and relate to both his miniatures and Cort’s engravings after Clovio’s designs. A Pietà in the Art Institute of Chicago (fig. 9) and one in the Uffizi are closely tied to the Washington miniature and the 1568 engraving, while a second drawing in the Museo Nazionale of Palermo is clearly related to the earlier Cort engraving of 1566.Footnote ³⁵ Finally, a drawing in the British Museum (fig. 10), probably made earlier than either the Washington miniature or the abovementioned drawings and engravings, positions the figure of Christ across the Virgin’s lap, demonstrating the closest tie to Michelangelo’s St. Peter Pietà. This drawing may be related to a miniature described by Vasari as made for Cardinal Grimani, thus sometime before 1540 and contemporaneous with Sebastiano’s Úbeda Pietà.Footnote ³⁶ The removal of Christ’s body from his mother’s lap in Sebastiano’s painting, Clovio’s many later compositions, and Salviati’s Pietà for Bernardo Moro represent the most substantial deviation from Michelangelo’s work, but the central figure of Christ would still have been associated with the sculptural model.

Figure 9. Giulio Clovio. Pietà, black chalk, ca. 1550. Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago.

Figure 10. Giulio Clovio. Pietà, black chalk, ca. 1540. London, British Museum.

The addition of figures of Clovio’s design, their disposition around Michelangelo’s models, and the application of the miniaturist’s colore to the compositions were successful strategies for securing his inventive contribution to works that were at least partly desirable because of their reference to Michelangelo. The group of figures in the Washington Pietà varies slightly from those in the Chicago drawing and the Cort print of 1568, both of which have two pairs of figures in the right middle-ground and background behind the main group comprising the Virgin, Christ, St. John the Evangelist, and the Magdalene. In the miniature Clovio has added five female figures, a few of which appear throughout his oeuvre: for example, the mask-like, veiled figure directly behind John the Evangelist and the figure in profile with the white headdress, furthest in the background, may be found in other cabinet miniatures from the period, such as one of the Holy Family compositions from the Wildenstein Foundation now exhibited at the Musée Marmottan, Paris (fig. 11).Footnote ³⁷ In his Life of Clovio, Vasari refers to a work made for Vittoria Colonna, and later Cardinal Farnese, as a “Pietà with the Marys and other figures around [it].”Footnote ³⁸ Certainly some of these figures may be identified as the Marys at the tomb. The other figures in the Washington miniature, such as the veiled woman behind the Evangelist, function as decorous ornament.Footnote ³⁹ Providing the viewer with pleasing variety and the appropriate devotional cues, these figures and the more recognizable John and Mary Magdalene demonstrate Clovio’s ingegno, while framing the central compositional group of Christ and the Virgin, which is based on Michelangelo’s design.

Figure 11. Giulio Clovio. Holy Family with Saints, gouache on vellum, ca. 1556. Paris, Musée Marmottan. Photo: Bridgeman Art Library.

Clovio’s conception of the relationship between the primary (or central) figures and the secondary figures within compositions is suggested by two letters written late in his career. On 15 July 1573 he wrote to Margaret of Austria (1522–86), the Duchess of Parma and sister-in-law of Cardinal Farnese, to notify her that he had completed a painting, whose subject of a Virgin and Child with St. Simeon had been determined by the Duchess. In his letter, Clovio explains that the work was made “according to the order for the invention of Your Highness.” Given her specificity, Clovio felt obliged to explain the presence of additional figures, which were for “the ornament of the painting.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The existence of several miniatures depicting the Holy Family, such as the Musée Marmottan work (fig. 11), gives an idea of the general appearance of the painting for Margaret of Austria.Footnote ⁴¹ By referring to the subject of the work as his patron’s invention, Clovio relegated his additional figures to a secondary position meant to supplement her original idea.Footnote ⁴² Observing such a hierarchy was decorous both theologically and socially. A second letter written to Cardinal Farnese on 6 August 1575 reinforces the theological aspect of the figures’ precedence and introduces the relationship between it and aesthetic criteria: “About the beauty of the paintings, I say that they seem to me to be in a beautiful style, not including some weakness in the Ecce homo, that is in the [figure] of the Christ; the rest is finely worked. The other figures around him are in a beautiful manner, especially the head of Pilate, also that of a soldier and another in the shadow behind Christ. Of the painting of the Pietà, I know not what to say other than that to me everything appears good, Christ, the most merciful Madonna and similarly the very merciful angel.”Footnote ⁴³

Clovio’s evaluation suggests that while the quality of the secondary figures of Pilate and the soldier sustains the value of the first work, ideally the figure of Christ would have been without flaws. His long practice of adding alluring color, landscapes, antiquarian details, and beautiful but secondary figures to compositions centered on Michelangelo’s designs suggests a solution to such a problem, guaranteeing the quality and authority of his work. Michelangelo’s figures in Clovio’s work assume a quasi-divine, ideal status, though ultimately one below that of the acheiropoieton. In terms of his own artistic status, contributing figures that supplemented the narrative and ornamented the primary subject enabled Clovio to invent while showcasing his mastery of these well-known, sought-after designs by Michelangelo.Footnote ⁴⁴ As the passage in the Diálogos em Roma suggests, Clovio’s stippled manner, or the unique facture of his works, was another means by which he established his individual virtuosity. The technique not only allowed him to rival the ancients but provided a model of excellence, according to Holanda, for later illuminators.Footnote ⁴⁵

This pictorial innovation should not, however, be entirely divorced from Michelangelo, at least in regard to what it achieved in pictorial finish and what it demanded of the viewer. Upon close inspection, the short marks of charcoal in Michelangelo’s presentation drawings bear a close resemblance to Clovio’s marks in the Washington Pietà (fig. 2).Footnote ⁴⁶ As noted above, this technique appears throughout Clovio’s oeuvre but is most visible in his depiction of Christ’s flesh, as seen in the Pietà and the Resurrected Christ (fig. 3). In the contrast to the Pietà, whose many secondary figures signal Clovio’s contribution, his ornament for the latter is comprised of the room’s architecture, the striking red- and gold-highlighted cloth behind Christ, and the landscape with the antique temple in the middle- and background.Footnote ⁴⁷ Alone in this setting, the Michelangelesque Christ directly engages the viewer, whose connection with the work would have been amplified by its small, handheld scale. Such engagement is reported by Vittoria Colonna, poet and close friend of Michelangelo, and another principal interlocutor in Holanda’s dialogues. Admiring the stunning level of finish in a drawing of the Crucifixion given to her by Michelangelo (fig. 12), Colonna wrote that she exposed the work to light, a mirror, and a magnifying glass.Footnote ⁴⁸ Alexander Nagel’s close reading of the correspondence between Colonna and Michelangelo, and of the poetry and drawings exchanged between them, has demonstrated the intimate nature of their friendship, founded on their devout contemplation of grace and revelation. The intimacy that produced these exchanges is mirrored in the process of beholding the works, whose masterful execution, in addition to invention, demanded much of the viewer and, in Colonna’s words, perhaps too much of the average copyist.Footnote ⁴⁹

Figure 12. Michelangelo. Crucifixion, black chalk presentation drawing for Vittoria Colonna, ca. 1540. London, British Museum.

Clovio’s ability to copy Michelangelo’s works indicated to his patrons and to peers such as Vasari and Holanda that he was a master of disegno in his own right. Certainly Clovio’s bequest of his copies of Michelangelo’s drawings to Cardinal Farnese suggests their value to his patron’s collection.Footnote ⁵⁰ The inventory taken immediately before his death in January 1578 documents several of his copies after known presentation drawings, and those drawings that seem to be securely attributed to Clovio demonstrate the extent to which he was able in these works to approximate Michelangelo’s finish, whose short strokes of black chalk also have been interpreted as stippling.Footnote ⁵¹ Holanda’s text makes clear that he (and possibly Clovio) conceived of their technique as technically and intellectually challenging for both the artist and viewer. In this sense, Holanda’s comments provide an important parallel to the language of difficulty used by Colonna to describe the making, viewing, and potential copying of Michelangelo’s laboriously finished drawings. To be sure, Clovio’s miniatures were designed, like the drawings for Colonna, to prompt intimate contemplation and to reward careful inspection. Such rewards are especially clear in the Washington Pietà. Painted in white, at the base of the stone block on which Christ’s body is seated, is an almost invisible crown of thorns, which reveals itself only after prolonged viewing. Clovio’s treatment of the wood grain of the cross in the Resurrected Christ (fig. 3) is less difficult to find but equally interesting in terms of his emphasis on the work’s materiality. Unlike its sculptural model in Sta. Maria Sopra Minerva, Christ’s flesh appears substantially different from the illusionistic wood and the shimmering cloth behind him. These qualities as well as the calfskin support of the miniature powerfully amplify the illusionism of the figure, inviting the viewer’s touch.

That the stippling technique described by Holanda is most evident in Clovio’s bodies of Christ is no accident but, as proposed above, a purposeful means of asserting both ontological proximity and difference. The method’s Lucretian fiction proclaims the work of art’s origin in its subject, having peeled, like a membrane, away from it. Aptly calling to mind the nature of copies, this conceit implied the perfect replication of an authoritative original. Of course, neither Holanda nor Clovio would have proposed that their works were materially linked to the sacred subjects; such a reference to Lucretius’s theory of structures and vision enabled them to claim authenticity and to heighten the effect of their images by suggesting their origins in the divine prototypes. Ultimately, however, this method unveils the miniaturist’s artifice by calling attention to the brushwork, subsequently undermining its illusion. The same careful examination that would reveal Clovio’s hidden crown of thorns or prompt the viewer’s admiration for his wooden cross would thus expose his system of dots and hatches as a network composed of carefully selected and juxtaposed strokes of color. Though one may argue, as Holanda suggests, that this atomic layer is like a veil or mist through which one sees the divine object, it is still materially distinct from the original and thus susceptible to the judicious intellect of an informed viewer. By constructing their images with atoms of paint, then, Holanda and Clovio simultaneously challenge and make apparent the material connection between the sacred model and the copied work of art. That the most masterful execution of this technique is barely visible — almost but not quite as if, Hollanda writes, the works were not made by human hands — prompts a process of discernment that visually, intellectually, and devotionally engages the viewer.

Complicating the relationship between original and copy is Clovio’s figural source, both in Michelangelo’s designs and the implied model provided by the acheiropoieta in Rome. Stephen Campbell brilliantly problematized the notion of a divine Michelangelo by finding in the work of Rosso Fiorentino an ironic alternative to the adulatory artistic response commonly accorded him in art-historical scholarship. In the same study, Campbell also invokes Lucretius’s concept of the membrane, or simulacrum, to propose that Michelangelo’s self-portrait in the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew in the Last Judgment functioned as a sign of the fundamental inauthenticity of painting.Footnote ⁵² The argument here proposes that, in contrast to Rosso, Clovio, Holanda, and Sebastiano imitate Michelangelo both to pay homage to him and to posit his work as a kind of intermediary model between divine originals and their inventions.Footnote ⁵³ This is not to deny any rivalry between them and Michelangelo, especially in the case of Sebastiano, or even to say that there was not an attempt to limit his influence to specific forms, such as Christ’s body: for, if nothing else, the final unmasking of their works’ facture, like St. Bartholomew’s flayed skin, alerts the viewer to the true nature of the paintings as works of art, not to be worshipped as idols.

4. Sebastiano del Piombo’s Veil and the Úbeda Pietà

This dynamic takes almost diagrammatic form in Sebastiano del Piombo’s Úbeda Pietà (fig. 5), painted on slate between 1533 and 1539.Footnote ⁵⁴ In a different medium, and on a substantially larger scale than Clovio, Sebastiano made similar claims about his artistic source, innovative method, and the hierarchy of sacred images. The work’s principal conceit centers on the Veil of Veronica, or Sudarium, held by the Virgin almost perpendicular to the plane of the painting. The face on the cloth was believed to have been miraculously impressed when a charitable woman, later called Veronica, offered her handkerchief to Christ as he made his way to Calvary.Footnote ⁵⁵ The relic became the authoritative portrait in the Latin West by the twelfth century, when it was first documented in Rome.Footnote ⁵⁶ The initial force of Sebastiano’s invention and the revelation of the pictorial hierarchy in place proceed from the momentary illusion that Sebastiano’s half-length painting of Christ is the original body from which the veil’s image is imprinted. His obvious debt to Michelangelo’s design for the body of Christ easily dismantles this fiction by indicating an artistic, rather than a divine, historical source. Nonetheless, Sebastiano presents, almost simultaneously, the virtuosity of his painting and the beauty of Michelangelo’s figure as worthy archetypes. It is the Virgin’s gesture that effectively guides the viewer’s attention away from the Michelangelesque body to the image on the Veil.Footnote ⁵⁷ This shift in focus, then, subordinates both Sebastiano’s and Michelangelo’s inventions to the authority of the miraculous image. Of course, the veil too is a product of the painter’s artifice, but the oblique view that he provides of it purports a difference between the veil’s surface and that of the painting. Ultimately, recognizing the painted version as a manmade representation prompts the viewer to seek the true image in Rome.Footnote ⁵⁸ Sebastiano’s veil thus signifies, rather than reproduces, the acheiropoieton, though the austerity of his palette certainly recalls its aesthetic properties.Footnote ⁵⁹ In other words, this painting did not export a copy of the Veronica to Úbeda, Spain, as much as it communicated the authority of the Roman relic.

In addition to the figure of Christ, there is little doubt that the general placement of the Virgin and the position of her right arm were based on Michelangelo’s designs (figs. 4, 6). The inclusion of the Sudarium and the Virgin’s role in displaying it, however, are Sebastiano’s inventions, as are the figures of Saints Mary Magdalene and John the Evangelist, now barely visible in the darkened background of the work.Footnote ⁶⁰ These figures enact a process of turning and facing that emphasizes both the three-dimensional illusion of the painting and the probable topos of personal conversion via devotion to the Corpus Christi. As the Magdalene looks toward Christ and the Virgin’s right hand holding the nails of the Crucifixion, the Evangelist turns into the depth of the picture and away from Christ, reversing the angle of the Virgin’s left hand and the extended veil. The importance of these figures and the invention of the Veil of Veronica have generally been overlooked in favor of Sebastiano’s imitation of Michelangelo, which fits neatly into a pattern of artistic practice long associated with the Venetian artist. Sebastiano’s imitation of Michelangelo and his inventions for the Úbeda Pietà, including its stone support, are equally important for understanding the communicative goals of the painting. Certainly Michelangelo’s figure of Christ imbued Sebastiano’s work with an artistic pedigree and legitimacy that both the patron and the recipient of the painting would have appreciated. Even so, the Virgin, the Veil, and their relationship to the Christ figure emerge as powerful markers of ecclesiastical and artistic authority when considered in the contexts of Sebastiano’s office as papal piombatore and the historical circumstances of the commission. That the Úbeda Pietà was a gift from the Mantuan Ferrante Gonzaga (1507–57) — whose career depended on the favor of Charles V — to the emperor’s most powerful minister, Francisco de los Cobos (ca. 1477–1547), is especially important.Footnote ⁶¹ As such, it implicitly called to mind notions of power and grace, which the Veil, as a gift from Christ to faithful follower, would have reinforced. The Virgin’s presentation of it would also have been loaded with ecclesiastical and political significance because of the Church’s identification with both the Virgin and the relic, and because of painting’s commission by and for imperial subjects.Footnote ⁶²

Francisco de los Cobos first visited Italy in 1530 for the coronation of Charles V in Bologna. He would have met Ferrante Gonzaga in the 1520s, when the young man was sent to the imperial court of Charles V in Spain. Cobos’s exposure to Italian art seems to have made a strong impression on him, and many diplomatic gifts from Italy to the imperial court were sent his way. His intention to build the funerary chapel of San Salvador in the town of his birth dates to at least 1534.Footnote ⁶³ It seems likely that the selection of the painting’s subject matter was finalized with this function in mind, though the correspondence between Niccolò Sernini, the Gonzaga agent in Rome, and Ferrante Gonzaga also indicates that the sober subject was understood by Sebastiano to be in keeping with Spanish taste.Footnote ⁶⁴ A later sculptural program in the chapel centered on the Transfiguration and easily incorporated the theme of the Pietà.Footnote ⁶⁵ Michael Hirst’s study of the commission, following and substantially building upon the initial archival discoveries of Campori, notes that Sebastiano’s slow progress on the painting makes any chronology of the final composition difficult to establish. The first letter from Sernini to Gonzaga concerning the commission indicates that Sebastiano had at least two subjects in mind, either a Madonna and Child with a young St. John the Baptist or a Pietà “like that in Sta. Maria della Febbre” (Michelangelo’s sculpture in St. Peter’s).Footnote ⁶⁶ A number of circumstances suggests that the conceit of the Veronica was developed after the summer of 1535. In any case, the painting was completed by 1539 and sent to Úbeda in 1540. After many frustrating years of waiting, Cobos finally received one of Sebastiano’s highly-sought-after works on slate. Like its subject matter, the work’s facture on stone was appropriate to the function of the chapel, referring to the death and Resurrection of Christ and probably also the paragone between painting and sculpture. The metaphorical and liturgical significance of the stone is also emphasized by the block upon which Christ rests, whose hardness is oddly enhanced, rather than mitigated, by the cloth gathered across its surface.

5. Metaphoric Stone and Counterfeiting Michelangelo

If Clovio’s pictorial mastery was demonstrated by his use of a fine network of painted marks to produce the form and rilievo of Michelangelo’s figures, Sebastiano’s most noteworthy and most imitated innovation was his painting in oil on stone supports.Footnote ⁶⁷ Despite its success in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this practice has received little comment beyond its potential for longevity and its suitability to Sebastiano’s dark palette. In discussing Sebastiano’s experimental technique, Hirst cites two contemporary sources, which he interprets as indicative of the artist’s “concern for conservation.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The first source is a letter written on 8 June 1530 by the papal courtier Vittorio Soranzo to his fellow Venetian Pietro Bembo. Soranzo writes, “Our Sebastiano has discovered a secret [means] of painting on marble in oils which is very beautiful and will make the picture almost eternal”; it is, he continues, a method in which “the colors unite with the marble,” almost becoming a part of the stone, or “petrifying.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Hirst’s understanding of Sebastiano’s innovation also follows Vasari’s analysis, which discusses the potential imperviousness of the material to destructive elements such as fire and worms. Vasari too writes that “the paintings appeared as if they might become eternal.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Since Hirst’s monograph appeared in 1981, scholarship has also noted the way in which the dark surface of the slate or marble nicely served Sebastiano’s mastery of color and chiaroscuro, aiding his delicate use of light and shadow to model flesh and to create relief.Footnote ⁷¹

Physical preservation might have been at issue here, especially since this reasoning appears in the contemporary rhetoric of the paragone between painting and sculpture, but Sernini himself wrote of the work on stone’s fragility. At one point in his correspondence concerning the Úbeda commission, he actually suggests sending another work on copper, which, he notes, would be less likely to break.Footnote ⁷² Sebastiano’s technique, first developed and employed for a devotional image of Christ, was more likely conceived to function metaphorically and to foreground ontological concerns relevant to the status of sacred images.Footnote ⁷³ Upon the viewer’s touch, the work’s support would at once disclose its fiction, confounding its spectator by being neither the expected surface of a painting nor the three-dimensional object of sculpture. Sebastiano’s colors united with Michelangelo’s design for Christ’s body would become a sort of pictorial stone monument, invoking the tomb, the unction stone, and the altar table below the painting.Footnote ⁷⁴ Certainly, the painted, draped, emphatically veiled block on which Christ sits calls to mind the well-known metaphor of the Church and Rock of St. Peter, and perhaps even the stone material in which Michelangelo preferred to work and from which the figure of Christ was principally modeled: the Pietà in St. Peter’s.Footnote ⁷⁵

Sebastiano’s innovation, then, is grounded in an idea more conceptually ambitious than material longevity.Footnote ⁷⁶ The language used by Soranzo to describe this technique seems to marvel not only at its durability but also its discovery. In this sense, Sebastiano’s intellect and drive to experiment recall the character of Holanda’s comments about his and Clovio’s use of atoms and the intellectual and technical difficulty of their achievement. If at first confusing to the senses, Sebastiano’s work on stone demands that the viewer distinguish it from its referents: Michelangelo’s sculpture and, more importantly, Christ’s historical body and the Veil of Veronica. Such discernment beyond sensual cognition, like Holanda’s Lucretian metaphor, was well suited to an etymological connection between the dark stones favored by Sebastiano and later followers and the concept of a touchstone. These materials, while having specific names such as lavagna (slate) and marmo (marble), are physically similar to another black stone, the pietra di paragone, or touchstone.Footnote ⁷⁷ Though most are familiar with the figural use of the word touchstone, denoting something that sets the standard by which like things are judged, the practical use of a touchstone is less well known. From antiquity, as Pliny records, these small black stones were used to test the true substance of gold and silver in order to detect debased or fraudulent coins.Footnote ⁷⁸ Drawn across the surface of a touchstone, a false coin will leave a colored mark different from that left by pure gold.Footnote ⁷⁹

Before addressing the implications of producing a pictorial touchstone, it is worth noting that the term pietra di paragone would have invoked the art-theoretical debates about the paragone between sculpture and painting, a full decade before Varchi’s Lezzioni (1547) systematically addressed the topic. If Sebastiano’s colors merged with the stone of the support to present a monument to Christ centered on Michelangelo’s design, he also produced a work in oil that could rival Michelangelo’s skills as a painter and theoretically match the durability of a work of sculpture.Footnote ⁸⁰ In fact, Sebastiano’s material experimentations began earlier with his mural oil painting in San Pietro in Montorio, which surely sought to combine the scale and stability of fresco with the illusionism of oils. If there is any truth to Vasari’s claim that the friendship of the two artists ended over Sebastiano’s preparation of the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel for oil painting and Michelangelo’s subsequent dismissal of the medium as suitable only for women and lazy people, then Sebastiano’s technique of painting on stone assumes a greater potential for competition with his estranged friend.Footnote ⁸¹ Such rivalry, however, does not preclude the use of Michelangelo’s canonical figures. One could argue that such a reference actually demanded comparison between the artists, allowing Sebastiano to distinguish himself and his inventive powers in the Úbeda Pietà, even while basing his central figure on Michelangelo’s design.

As Hirst has shown, the early history of the painting’s production is difficult to establish, but it has always been associated with some kind of intervention by Michelangelo. Most scholarship assumes that the Louvre drawing (fig. 6) was made by him for Sebastiano before the end of their friendship, following the examples of such collaboration from the previous two decades.Footnote ⁸² Sernini’s letter and other circumstances suggest that the marble Pietà was ultimately the most significant source for the commission, calling into question the importance of the date of the drawing and the reason for its initial production. Whatever the case, that Michelangelo had previously provided Sebastiano with drawings is important. Sebastiano’s Viterbo Pietà, his Raising of Lazarus, and his Flagellation of Christ in the Borgherini Chapel of San Pietro in Montorio demonstrate the degree of success that he enjoyed in using Michelangelo’s designs for his central figures. Like Clovio, his invention becomes apparent in the entire composition through the contribution of several components, such as his technical innovation, colorito, secondary figures, and landscapes. Even so, Sebastiano’s works were so closely associated with Michelangelo’s designs that later, sixteenth-century reproductive engravings after their well-known collaborations, such as of his Viterbo Pietà, designate Michelangelo as the inventor.Footnote ⁸³ This reflects not only Sebastiano’s poor critical reception after his death in 1547 but also the degree to which his use of Michelangelo’s drawings was understood as authorized.

The most striking aspect of Vasari’s Life of Sebastiano is his pointed criticism of the Venetian’s professional indolence after receiving the office of piombatore; more interesting here is Vasari’s use of the term contraffare, which may bear some relevance to Sebastiano’s position at the papal court. The word appears throughout the Vite generally to indicate a faithful imitation of the natural world.Footnote ⁸⁴ The most obvious application to Sebastiano’s oeuvre would be to characterize his vivid and masterful portraiture, yet Vasari employs contraffare very specifically to refer to Sebastiano’s execution of figures for which Michelangelo had supplied a design. In each case, there is no evidence of a negative judgment. In fact, Vasari is quite purposeful in his praise of Sebastiano’s independent mastery. For example, in the case of the Borgherini Flagellation in San Pietro in Montorio, he goes so far as to write that — even though the work depended on Michelangelo’s design — if Sebastiano had never painted another figure, his reputation as a painter would still have been earned.Footnote ⁸⁵ The Raising of Lazarus for the Cathedral in Narbonne, Vasari declared, was “counterfeited and painted with the greatest diligence, according to the order and design in some parts of Michelangelo.”Footnote ⁸⁶ As Hirst noted, the comment “in some parts” and the survival of some of Michelangelo’s drawings for the figure of Lazarus suggest that at least some of the figures, and certainly the landscape, were Sebastiano’s invention.Footnote ⁸⁷

Contraffare, of course, also bore the more familiar and less positive denotation of fraudulence. Such an implication would have been particularly indecorous in Vasari’s text after Sebastiano became the papal piombatore.Footnote ⁸⁸ The falsification of papal bulls was punishable by excommunication and death: a clause in a bull entitled In Coena Domini, which was issued repeatedly from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries, explicitly addresses this serious transgression.Footnote ⁸⁹ To counterfeit, of course, is to replicate illicitly an image that bears authority, whether through the features of an emperor, president, or Saints Peter and Paul on the papal seal. When Sebastiano produced his Viterbo Pietà, Flagellation of Christ, and Raising of Lazarus, he had not yet received the sinecure given to him in 1531 and had the explicit permission of Michelangelo to use his designs. Thus there would have been nothing scandalous in Vasari’s use of contraffare to characterize the works from this early period. While Sebastiano might not have been able to claim Michelangelo’s authorization in later works, his office in the papal household endowed him with a new type of authority, one that is signaled in the Úbeda Pietà by the Virgin’s gesture to the Sudarium. As one of the piombatore (hence the name del Piombo, “of the Lead”), he not only oversaw the application of the papal seal but kept the die that made the seal, in other words, the original image from which the rest were replicated. Such a role approximated the Church’s stewardship of the Veronica, which was wont to replicate itself.Footnote ⁹⁰

Sebastiano’s Úbeda Pietà and its ability to represent the interests of papal Rome are founded on this relationship between authenticity and the technique of painting on stone. Although the potential rivalry between Michelangelo and Sebastiano deserves attention, especially given the critical tendency to treat Sebastiano’s achievement as dependent upon Michelangelo’s disegno,Footnote ⁹¹ the following argument concerns the thematization of discernment through the production of a painted touchstone. As a touchstone, Sebastiano’s work on slate proposes itself as a means to apprehend the true nature of his painting and that of the two images (or prototypes) within it, to judge between the reality of Christ’s painted body and his historical body, and between the relic in Rome and the veil in the painting. To touch Sebastiano’s work, of course, would be to recognize its fiction, yet the metaphor of the touchstone allows for Sebastiano’s mastery to display itself, not in the potential and ultimately unnecessary touch of the viewer, but rather in the revealing touch of the painter.Footnote ⁹² Sebastiano’s brushwork is all but invisible, so it is through the forms of his colors, seemingly “united with the stone” of the support, that the true substance of the real or fraudulent artifact is made apparent. Invoking such a metaphor laid open a series of artistic and political questions related to authority and authenticity: the paragone, Michelangelo’s exemplarity, and, most importantly, the status of the Roman Church and the Veronica.

6. Sebastiano’s Papal Office and “Turning Lead into Gold”Footnote ⁹³

The tumultuous fate of the relic during the Sack in 1527, its theft by imperial troops, and apparent return to Rome perhaps as early as 1533 would have been well known to both the patron and the recipient of the painting.Footnote ⁹⁴ Although Francisco de los Cobos was not a participant in the Sack (as Ferrante Gonzaga was) he would have been implicated in the disastrous events by his association with the emperor. More to the point, neither man would have failed to recognize the Veil as a marker of papal authority and a symbol of St. Peter’s. Sebastiano’s inclusion of it in his composition for a Pietà was not in itself radically new: there is a long tradition of including some of the arma christi in images of the Man of Sorrows, and there are certainly precedents for the appearance of the Veronica in such works.Footnote ⁹⁵ The novelty and significance of Sebastiano’s invention for the Úbeda Pietà depends on a combination of factors: the compositional dynamic between the Body of Christ and the Veil, the Virgin’s gesture of holding it before her son, the clear connection between Sebastiano’s Christ and Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s, and, finally, the painting’s stone support. Together, these particular aspects of the work suggest a profound investment in pictorial and ecclesiastical authority.

As suggested in the previous section, these concerns may be tied to Sebastiano’s office as keeper of the lead papal seals. In this capacity the artist had a stake in monitoring the official reproduction of images related to Rome and the papacy, which were still recovering from the trauma of the Sack. It is surely no coincidence that Sebastiano’s production of a series of papal portraits on slate began around the time that he received this office. These “almost eternal” works promulgating the pope’s likeness — first that of Clement VII and later Paul III — were his painterly counterpart to the lead seals of his court office.Footnote ⁹⁶ Such a connection between the piombatore and the production of authoritative portraiture is supported both by the Farnese’s general involvement in Sebastiano’s estate and, more interestingly, in their proposal to endow Titian with the office at the moment when he became their portraitist of choice.Footnote ⁹⁷ Furthermore, that Cardinal Alessandro had Francesco Salviati paint the Adoration of the Shepherds altarpiece for his personal chapel, the Capella del Pallio in the Palazzo della Cancelleria, on stone and include a portrait of Paul III in the figure of Joseph attests to the perceived appropriateness of Sebastiano’s technical innovation for both sacred images and portraits.Footnote ⁹⁸ Certainly Sebastiano’s role as the papal portraitist would have been likened to that of Apelles, a commonplace, albeit one that would have legitimately included him in the corps of authoritative and masterful artists recommended by Michelangelo in Holanda’s dialogues. Most pertinent to the Úbeda Pietà, however, is that each papal bull authorizing the funerary chapel of Cobos passed through Sebastiano’s office. This circumstance, which has never been noted in the literature on the artist, placed Sebastiano in the unusual position of issuing the imperial minister two different representations bearing the mark of papal Rome.Footnote ⁹⁹

Recognizing the Veil’s authority as one of a few miraculous archetypes for Christ’s likeness is essential to understanding the legitimacy and piety of Sebastiano’s invention. When the relic is considered in conjunction with the figure of Christ based on Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s, the extent to which Sebastiano’s work concerned itself with both sacred and artistic authority becomes clear. These images, of course, are not equal, but appear within a representational hierarchy that Sebastiano constructs through the compositional dynamic between the Veil and Christ’s body and the metaphor of the touchstone. These conceits ultimately position his painting (and its sculptural model) lower in the representational hierarchy, subordinating it, as previously noted, to Christ’s true image recorded by the relic in Rome. Nevertheless, both Sebastiano’s work and Michelangelo’s Pietà would have been identified with the Roman Church through their explicit associations with St. Peter’s.

While the recent theft of the acheiropoieton might have been a point of embarrassment for Cobos, another circumstance might have rendered Sebastiano’s invention particularly appealing to him. As the artist certainly knew, a miraculous copy of the Veil of Veronica was also believed to exist in the Cathedral of Jaén, a mere thirty miles from the Spaniard’s native Úbeda.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Cobos’s personal devotion to the Santo Rostro of Jaén is demonstrated by his veneration of it during the Holy Week of 1525.Footnote ¹⁰¹ His connection to the Andalusian town was further strengthened through his close relationship to its bishop, Gabriel Merino, later the Cardinal of San Vitale. How Cobos would have interpreted these connections between the relic and Church in Rome and his home — and, for that matter, the character of Sebastiano’s references to them — is difficult to gauge. What is certain is that a great deal of tension existed between the imperial and papal courts around the time of the painting’s commission and execution.

A series of events between July of 1535, when Cardinal Alessandro Farnese became the Apostolic Administrator of the Bishopric of Jaén, and July of 1537, when the Spaniard Francisco Mendoza was elected bishop, illustrate both the potential antagonism and the need for cooperation between the two courts. The appointment of Paul III’s fifteen-year-old grandson in 1535, surely distasteful to Charles V and Cobos, was only possible because of their preoccupation with the invasion of Tunis during that summer.Footnote ¹⁰² In August of 1535, Paul III also began a campaign to raise funds for the building of St. Peter’s through the promulgation of the knightly Order of St. Peter’s, following the example of Leo X.Footnote ¹⁰³ One of the papal bulls related to this project was transcribed by Giacomo Grimaldi in two copies of his history of the Veil of Veronica and Lance of St. Longinus, the “Opusculum de sacrosancto Sudario Veronicae et Lancea”: the document’s inclusion in Grimaldi’s text and its wording clearly identify St. Peter’s with the custodianship of its most precious relics.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Keeping in mind both the close affiliation between the Basilica and the Veil and the papacy’s relationship with the imperial court, one can date Sebastiano’s decision to make the Veronica the fulcrum of his invention for the Úbeda Pietà to the period between the Tunisian conquest in 1535 and the winter of 1537. The previous April, during Charles V’s triumphant visit to Rome, Paul III honored the emperor with an Easter viewing of the Veil.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Cobos, furthermore, seems to have seen Sebastiano’s unfinished painting for him on the same occasion.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In November of 1536, the emperor received an invitation from the pope to join the order established to rebuild St. Peter’s, while another papal letter urged Cobos to use his influence with Charles V to support the fundraising efforts.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ It is tempting to think that such a solicitation would have reminded the imperial minister of Sebastiano’s painting, as another product of the piombatore’s office.

Given the existence of the Santo Rostro in Jaén, the image of the Veil alone could not definitively assert papal authority. Furthermore, the authenticity of the relic in St. Peter’s might have been compromised by its theft and reappearance after the Sack. In order to signal the legitimacy and precedence of the Roman Sudarium, Sebastiano turned to the figure of the Virgin, whose authority as a figure of Ecclesia was more stable than that of the recently stolen Veil. The Virgin’s gesture indicating the portrait of Christ was theologically grounded in a tradition that likened the miraculous acheiropoieta to the Incarnation. The Úbeda Pietà, however, does not merely suggest the Virgin’s connection to the Veil: it renders her the appropriate and controlling entity for its display. As previously noted, its presence in an imago pietatis is not what is novel in Sebastiano’s work. The conceptual force of the painting stems from the degree to which the Virgin appears responsible for both the making (almost to the exclusion of Saint Veronica) and the presentation of the sacred image. The Virgin thus stands in for St. Peter’s, whose role as keeper and protector of the Veil was an integral component of the Church’s identity, as the Grimaldi manuscript text and the 1535 bull cited by him demonstrate.

Sebastiano’s painting thus seems to provide a rhetorically charged corrective to the previous imperial interaction with the relic.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Hirst’s detailed analysis of the conflict between Ferrante Gonzaga’s agent in Rome and a highly antagonistic Sebastiano invaluably established the fundamental history of the Úbeda Pietà. What has been missing from the discussion of this work, however, is a consideration of the commission from the artist’s perspective. Sebastiano might have accepted the project and been generously paid for it, but, as the correspondence between Sernini and Gonzaga indicates, he repeatedly tried to avoid painting the work, at one point suggesting that they ask Titian in his stead.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In 1533 the artist was first and foremost a papal servant, obligated to travel with the papal familia.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Such obligations provide an alternative to Vasari’s narrative of professional lassitude after Sebastiano began to receive the considerable income of the piombatore. Sebastiano, moreover, would not have forgotten the Sack, which he survived in the company of Clement VII. In a well-known letter to Michelangelo from February 1531, he suggests that the harm done to him was slow to heal, writing that he was not the same man as before the disaster.Footnote ¹¹¹ It is conceivable that such bitter memories might very well have fueled his infuriating behavior toward the Gonzaga agent: he certainly seems to have done almost everything in his power to lose the commission.Footnote ¹¹² Sebastiano’s price for the work and general delinquency in delivering it outraged Sernini and Gonzaga, and when his friend Francesco Maria Molza (1489–1544) was asked to intercede, the poet discreetly indicated to them that he did not think that Sebastiano wanted to finish the painting.Footnote ¹¹³

At this point it would be useful to return to the initial selection of the subject matter and Sernini’s letter to Ferrante Gonzaga (via his secretary), which cited Sebastiano’s immediate consideration of Michelangelo’s first Pietà as a model, “an Our Lady who holds in her arms her dead Son in the form of that of the [Sta. Maria della] Febbre.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ As has been argued, the presence of the Veil in the Virgin’s left hand is Sebastiano’s invention, but the position of the proper left arm and the hand are closely related to the sculptural counterparts. Raised slightly and positioned forward, the Virgin’s arm in Sebastiano’s painting has the unsettling effect, the longer one considers it, of seeming to increase in size and to project out of the picture plane. In the general context of the paragone, the Virgin’s upraised arm, in conjunction with the obliquely held Veil, plays an important role signaling Sebastiano’s ability to suggest three-dimensional figures and space. In the more specific context of Sebastiano’s imitation of Michelangelo, the extent to which he adjusts this arm and combines it with a motif that appears in other paintings, such as his portrait of Anton Francesco degli Albizzi, suggests the intelligence and ambition with which he engaged Michelangelo’s figures. For reasons probably having to do with Sebastiano’s poor critical fortune, most scholarship has focused on the kind of straightforward imitation suggested by the drawings in the Louvre and Casa Buonarroti. Sebastiano’s debt to the sculptural Pietà, which should be considered in the same terms as Pontormo’s altarpiece in Santa Felicità, has been neglected, despite its being the only source that he names in the documents that survive for the commission. This work, in fact, best explains other aspects of the painting, both technical and thematic. For example, the high degree of finish of the Úbeda Pietà recalls that of the sculpture, among the most highly polished of Michelangelo’s works. And, the clear signature on the vase in front of the Magdalene, F V SEB. / FACI. (“Fra Venetus Sebastianus faciebat”), may also be read as a reference to Michelangelo’s signed sculpture.

Sebastiano’s signature, of course, underscored his authorship and invention, but the vase itself bears several meanings: from the Virgin’s role as the vessel that bore Christ to the material from which the image was wrought. On the most obvious level, the Magdalene’s unguents provide clear counterparts to Sebastiano’s oil paints and the process with which each substance merged with the sacred body. In terms of the theology supporting the Virgin’s role in the picture, one must remember that she was not only the vessel that bore Christ but the fleshy matter from which his human form developed, even if his design was divinely ordained.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The Virgin’s agency in the creation of her son carries over in Sebastiano’s painting to the production of the Veil, which, as noted above, appears as if it has just been impressed from Christ’s painted face. Anointment and incarnation offer obvious parallels to the creative act of painting, but in this case the stone support enhances the metaphor of veiling, especially if one considers the almost overdetermined quality of drapery on the block and parapet separating Christ from the other figures. On one hand, this cloth seems to be a kind of painterly response to the astonishing folds of the Virgin’s robe in Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s Pietà; and, on the other, the fabric looks as if one could further pleat it by pressing against the surface, like the bunching and sliding of a tablecloth under pressure. This effect gives the sense that Sebastiano’s paint veils its stone support.

7. Beneath the Painted Veil

The idea of a sacred substructure or of a veiled original was also central to Clovio’s and Holanda’s works, and described in the latter’s treatise and dialogues. Intervening between the sacred original and Clovio’s painted veil was the Michelangelesque model, which seems to have been conceived by him and Holanda as a quasi-divine archetype subject to divine revelation. What little has been written on Clovio has tended to focus first on his imitation of Michelangelo and then on his general practice of referring to the works of other canonical painters. His imitative practice, however, was discriminating and marked by keen judgment and sensitivity to the times, especially in regard to Catholic reform. Despite the critical tendency to cast Clovio as slavishly dependent upon his peers in Rome, almost nothing has been said of his relationship with Sebastiano del Piombo, who surely provided an invaluable example of balancing an imitation of Michelangelo’s designs with an assertion of individual mastery. Aside from the subject and figural models, Sebastiano’s Úbeda Pietà and Clovio’s Washington Pietà demonstrate a similar interest in the development of secondary figures and a foregrounding of at least one of the arma Christi. Perhaps most importantly, both works assert their particular skill in colorito. Although Clovio’s color is substantially different from Sebastiano’s, painted in a higher key and considerably more ornamental in its effect, each artist was acclaimed for his coloring and his ability to suggest rilievo in his figures. Finally, contemporary sources attest to the extent to which Clovio and Sebastiano were identified with innovative techniques that ambitiously tied theory to practice.

Before moving beyond the centrality of Michelangelo’s model in the St. Peter’s Pietà, it is worth taking note of a detail of Cornelis Cort’s 1568 engraving, which suggests the extent to which this figure of Christ was connected to the papal Basilica (fig. 7). In the background of the engraving is a centrally-planned building with an obelisk before it that looks very much like the structure of Sta. Maria della Febbre before the obelisk was moved to the piazza in front of St. Peter’s. Whether the detail was Cort’s addition or Clovio’s makes little difference, since it indicates a roughly contemporary perception of the sculpture’s relevance to Clovio’s composition. That Clovio would have associated the Michelangelesque figure with St. Peter’s should come as no surprise, because the greater part of his career was spent promulgating the authority of Rome for his patron Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. Clovio’s works, like many of Sebastiano’s, were primarily sent to Spain. The Resurrected Christ (fig. 3), moreover, clearly indicates Clovio’s interest in basing his figures directly upon a sculptural model. In this sense, his and Sebastiano’s endeavors had the added appeal of translating Michelangelo’s sculpture into transportable and beautifully colored works.

The material support of Clovio’s works would not have suggested the durable, almost eternal nature of Sebastiano’s works on stone, and their distance from the properties of sculpture would have failed to call forth some of the Platonic ideas associated with the form within sculpture. Nonetheless, Clovio’s cabinet miniatures dating from the 1550s emphasize the marmoreal quality of the Michelangelesque body. In the case of the Washington Pietà, the material of the stone blocks and rock outcroppings amplify the stony aspect of Christ’s figure. As argued in the first part of this essay, the vellum of Clovio’s (and presumably of Holanda’s) miniatures functioned in a similar fashion as Sebastiano’s works on stone by asserting metaphorically a connection between the material of the model and that of their supports. Nonetheless, because the proximity of the animal-skin support to Christ’s flesh increased the danger of the work becoming an idol, Clovio’s stippling provided a visual safeguard where touch could potentially fail, unmasking the Lucretian fiction of the perfect copy by showing the true status of the work of art through visible marks of the artist’s hand.

Both techniques, stippling and painting on stone, suggest a sensitivity not just to the possible dangers of idolatry, but also to the possible misunderstanding of the artists’ artifice, particularly in its relationship to Michelangelo’s archetypal figures. In both cases, the contemporary critical language used to describe their techniques implied a process of technical and intellectual invention. Soranzo’s report to Bembo emphasized the aspect of discovery in Sebastiano’s paintings and his Venetian pride by referring to the artist as “our Sebastiano.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ After praising Sebastiano’s innovation for its popularity and durability, Vasari confirmed the intellectual foundation of the technique by writing that Sebastiano “found more pleasure in talking about [these works on stone] than in making them.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Since this comment immediately precedes Vasari’s description of the Úbeda Pietà, it seems reasonable to propose that this painting represents Sebastiano’s thinking about the technique, even if Vasari meant to impugn Sebastiano’s productivity. This passage also ties Sebastiano’s love of conversation to Clovio, who, according to Holanda’s Fourth Dialogue, insisted on the equal importance of viewing and discussing works of art. Vasari’s report that Clovio was one of Sebastiano’s regular companions (along with Molza) establishes the circumstances in which the artists might have discussed their similar methods of imitating Michelangelo while proclaiming their own masterful inventions. Finally, Holanda’s own high estimation of learned conversation is made plain by the fruits of his labor, the treatise and dialogue of books 1 and 2 of Da Pintura Antiga.

Holanda’s emphasis on the technical and intellectual difficulty of his and Clovio’s method of painting relates to Michelangelo’s remarks in the Diálogos em Roma concerning the enlightened painter in whom the Holy Spirit inspires understanding, or revelation. Michelangelo’s infamous comments differentiating between the weaknesses of Flemish painting and the strengths of Italian painting in the First Dialogue provide the strongest evidence of Holanda’s Neoplatonic philosophy. Having condemned Flemish painting, Holanda’s Michelangelo concludes with a definition of good painting: “And at its best nothing is more noble or devout, since with discreet persons nothing so calls forth and fosters devotion as the difficulty of a perfection which is bound up in union with God. For good painting is nothing but a copy of the perfections of God and a recollection of His painting; it is a music and melody which only intellect can understand, and that with great difficulty. And that is why painting of this kind is so rare that no man may attain it.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Holanda’s emphasis of his and Clovio’s independent discovery of the same painting technique establishes it not only as an intellectual process, but also as a spiritual one, difficult to understand and even more difficult to practice.

When discussing the copy of the Holy Face in the Lateran Sancta Sanctorum that he made for the Queen of Portugal, Holanda emphasizes his effort to faithfully reproduce the relic and expresses regret that the work that had cost him most would be least understood.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Other scholars have rightly noted the way in which this passage describing the acheiropoieton’s “grave austerity” suggests a taste or desire for the devout manner of older, archaic works. Holanda, however, is also lamenting the extent to which his own artistry, founded in both technical and intellectual skill, will be lost to all but the most sensitive viewers. Such viewers would be capable of recognizing in his technique not only painterly virtuosity, but the thought behind it. In a more optimistic vein, Holanda has another interlocutor in the Fourth Dialogue express his trust in Clovio’s judgment by admitting his own limited understanding of the miniaturist’s work. Signor Camillo admits, “as to your work Signor Giulio, it is enough to know that it is yours; and what we do not understand in it we must believe to be right and that the fault is ours in not understanding it, not yours.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Again, Holanda’s conception of the difficulty in viewing and comprehending his and Clovio’s works recalls Vittoria Colonna’s comments concerning the ineffable and sublime beauty of Michelangelo’s presentation drawing of the Crucifixion.Footnote ¹²¹ Their method and Sebastiano’s invention challenged viewers’ understanding of the difference between the subject represented and the art object before them.

Holanda’s allusions to Lucretius demonstrated, at the very least, the scope of his learning and, perhaps, his thoughts on the process of vision. One passage in the final dialogue, however, suggests the way in which the author reconciled the Neoplatonic foundation of his art theory with the Epicureanism implied by his veil of atoms. Before beginning an extended reading of Pliny’s Natural History, Signor Camillo connects the apex of art in the Augustan period to the historical, physical presence of Christ. If Christ’s body is both an archetype and materially real, then a relic like the Veronica’s veil or vera icon miraculously approaches Lucretius’s theory of the “film image.”Footnote ¹²² Thus while Holanda’s subjects were historically and materially real, like Christ’s body, they were also ideal models, above those found in nature. Sylvie Deswarte-Rosa seems correct in her understanding of Holanda’s desire to make the painting of Michelangelo, and subsequently that of Holanda, only one step removed from the original Idea, so that these men are not imitators of imitations but attuned through their piety and virtuosity to divine form.Footnote ¹²³ The sacred subject matter of the works of art allowed for the intermediary step between the Idea and the work of art to be decisively removed by revelation. Certainly, the exclusive nature of Michelangelo’s presentation drawings as gifts and the rarity of his sculpture reveal the extent to which his designs became as elusive as a Platonic archetype for artists, or like an icon or relic that through its reproduction lent authority to the new image. What Clovio and Sebastiano carefully constructed, however, were pictorial devices and strategies within their works that made an honored place for Michelangelo’s design while setting it squarely into a hierarchy that claimed both the merits of their virtuosic painting and the elevated status of the acheiropoieta. Ultimately, all three image types communicated the cultural and ecclesiastical — if not political — hegemony of Rome.