Lorenzo Monaco
Florentine, 1370-1425 ca.

Martyrdom of Pope Caius, 1394-95
tempera and gold on panel
17 3/8 x 23 in.

SBMA, Museum Purchase
1967.15

RESEARCH PAPER

In Lorenzo Monaco’s “The Martyrdom of Pope Caius”, the artist depicts the apocryphal death scene of this little-known 3rd century Pope, killed by the typical Roman means of execution: decapitation. Though it is now believed that he died several years before the start of Diocletian’s persecution, in Monaco’s time it was the belief that the Pope died at the Emperor’s hands. The intricate gothic architectural facade on the right represents the Emperor’s villa. The emperor Diocletian holds a scepter and wears a cloak of red violet. He stands in a portico with his aide and possibly his wife Serena. The beheaded Pope kneels in benediction with his arms crossed, blood gushing out of his neck. His papal garment, a cope, is painted in lavender and olive, echoing the colors of the architecture as well as Diocletian’s robes. He also wears pontifical gloves embroidered with Christ’s stigmata and a bejeweled headdress, a symbol of his sovereign power. The young executioner sheaths his sword and onlookers, dressed in rich, silk robes, that exemplify contemporary Florentine fashion, stand witness on the left. Six soldiers with letters SPQR (standing for Senate and the People of Rome) on their shields form the backdrop to this shallow scene in the foreground. In the top-left of the painting there is a mandorla (an almond-shaped aureola, which is a radiant cloud surrounding a sacred personage) around Pope Caius as his soul rises to heaven with the help of four angels. As observed with Caius’s robes and the villa, Monaco takes care to repeat colors such as the red of Caius’s blood with the blouses, shields, and flag, contributing to the overall harmony of the work. The diagonals in the painting draw our attention to the central gold breastplate of the Roman soldier and down to our protagonist, while the sword and sheath take our eye back up to the soul-ascending vignette. As a medieval work that precedes the development of linear perspective, depth and volume are created by well-modeled and strongly delineated figures, the placement of both the villa and the crowd on the left at opposing angles, the layering of heads on overlapping planes, and the strong shadows in the background of the architecture.

The SBMA panel is the long-lost part of the predella of the S. Gaggio Altarpiece, painted for the high altar of the monastery church of S. Gaggio just outside the Porta Romana in Florence. Pope Caius is “Gaggio” in the Florentine dialect. Looking at an image of the reconstructed original altarpiece (added below), one would find, (a) the top center panel is of the Coronation of the Virgin, a popular subject in Florentine painting since Giotto. At its pinnacle is Christ the Redeemer. (209x179cm London, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery). The next level contains, from the left, (b) a panel painting of the standing figure of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, shown with her accoutrements of the spiked wheel and a book that she is holding, indicating her ennobled, educated status. In the pinnacle is the Virgin Annunciate. (216x51cm Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia). On the opposite right is (c) a matching panel of Pope Caius with his hemline mirroring that of St. Catherine, and in the pinnacle is the Angel Gabriel. (218x51cm Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia). Although this is not without precedent, the trefoiled figures are unusually inverted, with the Angel Gabriel on the right of the Virgin. The central panel is missing but might have been either a devotional image of the Madonna or, as recent research suggests given the panels’ locking hardware, may have had an opening of 1m high, 180cm wide, and 15cm deep intended to contain a sculpture, relics, or a eucharistic tabernacle. On the lower predella level is, from the left, (d) the Marytrdom of St Catherine, depicting her decapitation and ascension into Heaven by angels to be placed in a tomb on Mt. Sinai. (43.3x58cm Berlin, Staatliche Museum, Gemäldegalerie.) The long, central predella panel is of (e) the Last Supper, an appropriate subject for a central predella narrative as the theme echoes the eucharistic sacrament that would be performed directly in front of this altar. Jesus and his 12 apostles are seated in a large, porticoed room with Judas separate from the others, foretelling the betrayal that was soon to take place. (46.6x142.4cm Berlin, Staatliche Museum). And finally on the right is our (f) Martyrdom of Pope Caius, (43.7x58.6cm). Here, the image of Pope Caius reflects that of St. Catherine with arms crossed and heads framed by punch-work haloes. The perspective drawn in the pavement continues that of the Last Supper and Coronation of the Virgin proving the cohesiveness of the whole polyptych.

After the sack of Constantinople in 1204, Byzantine objects made their way back to Italy with paintings on gold-ground panels profoundly influencing local production of art. Current knowledge of panel painting practices from this era comes from modern radiography and a 600-year-old treatise on the art of painting called Il Libro dell’Arte by the Italian painter Cennino Cennini. A seasoned plank of wood, usually poplar, would have been layered with coats of size (an animal skin glue), to which a piece of linen would be added to level the surface. This would then be covered in gesso (gypsum and animal glue) to form the ground for the preliminary drawing, and then gilded using bole (a reddish clay) to bind the gold-leaf sheets before burnishing. Decoration would be stamped using punches. Monaco’s pastiglia, or gilding, is an excellent example of Cennini’s ‘granare a distesto’, a collection of minute points that ‘sparkle like millet grains’ against the gold backdrop. Painting was with tempera, using a mixture of ground pigments with egg yolk, creating a brilliant, glossy finish. Monaco employs Cennini’s method of modeling, using three values, as seen in the execution of Caius’s robes; yet, he deviated from the norm in combining unusual consistencies and combinations of pigments to dramatic coloristic effects.

Don Lorenzo di Giovanni, born Piero di Giovanni and called Lorenzo Monaco, was born in the mid 1370’s and died circa 1425-30 in Florence. He worked as a painter and illuminator in Agnolo Gaddi’s circle. He took the name Lorenzo Monaco, or Lawrence the Monk, when he entered the Camoldolese Order in the convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli, a seat of Florentine culture and an institution popular with the city’s political elite. By 1402 he had his own shop, employing both monastic and secular assistants to produce illuminated manuscripts (miniatures), panel pictures, and frescoes. Vasari described him as a painter-monk and said he died from an unidentified infection such as gangrene or a tumor. Lorenzo Monaco is renown for his sumptuous panel paintings for the monastery, and his works were intended for fellow religious people. He is considered the best Florentine painter of the first quarter of the 15th century, preceding Masaccio, Masolino, and Fra Angelico.

As an esteemed manuscript illuminator, Monaco demonstrates great attention to the decorative character of the details in his panels. He is best known for his vibrant, yet elegant, juxtaposition of colors, something he would have learned from his time studying under Agnolo Gaddi. Colors are fluid in the contouring and the results are dramatic yet refined. Influenced by Sienese artists such as Duccio, he brought a grace and elegance to Florentine painting, and is considered a transitional figure “from the gold-ground aesthetic of the trecento to the ‘pure painting’ of the following century’’. Following the example of Spinello Aretino, he sought to extend Giotto’s tradition of painting figures with volume and emotion in a convincing - as opposed to stylized - manner, and like Giotto he uses confident lines in his strongly outlined and contoured figures.

The Church of S. Gaggio was originally called S. Caterina al Monte and was founded by the Corsini family in 1345 for Augustinian nuns to house the daughters of knights of a quasi-military order called the Cavalieri Gaudenti, who were bound to defend widows and orphans. The name of the convent was changed to S. Gaggio when some nuns from another convent dedicated to that saint joined those of Santa Catarina. At this time Florence fell from high prosperity to adversity due to economic depression, the Church being in the midst of the Great Western Schism with Popes residing at Avignon as well as Rome, and the Black Death ravaging Florence in 1348. The S. Gaggio altarpiece was therefore created 45 years after the church’s founding and may have had the patronage of the Corsini family.

Far from being out of the limelight, S. Gaggio enjoyed an important place as the starting point for every papal entry into Florence during the 15th century, and yet the only reference to the altarpiece was made in 1792 when it was recorded as being in the Corsini chapel. In 1809 the church was secularized under the French and its contents broken up and sold. It was Hans Gronau who linked the two Berlin paintings with the two panels depicting the patron saints of the church of S. Gaggio, Saints Catherine and Caius, in the Florence Academy. He also discovered the Coronation of the Virgin now at the Courtauld. The SBMA panel was purchased in Florence in 1912 by Mrs Oswald Cammann, and then went to Archdeacon De Lacy of Kells in Ireland, and finally to Mrs Maude Mowry in Santa Barbara, who bequeathed it to SBMA in 1967. It was shortly thereafter that it was recognized as part of the polyptych.

Although biographical details of Monaco’s life are scarce, it is important to note that he was a medieval monk who painted, and not an artist-monk. His artistic talents would have been appreciated as a divine gift for communicating God’s message. Trecento visual culture had an expressly ideological purpose for images to satisfy cultural, especially liturgical, needs. Art served as the mystical intermediary between the physical and the celestial world, and amongst the holy relics of the Santa Maria degli Angeli monastery, in which Monaco once resided, were the hands of deceased, miniaturist-painting monks. Talent was sanctioned as long as the fruits were noble. Monaco’s spiritual calling as a Camaldolese monk informed his work, and the serene quality of his paintings belies an almost prayerful, meditative relationship with image-creation as a spiritual practice. In celebrating the lives of St. Catherine and Pope Caius he not only speaks to their relevance for the convent but also, from a devotional perspective, he reminds the Christian observer of the heavenly reward for choosing Christ above all.

Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Docent Council by Monica Babich, January 2015

Bibliography

Baxandall, Michael. ‘Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy’. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, pps. 40-41.

Bustin, Mary, and Jane Anne Roberts. ‘Lorenzo Monaco: A Closer Look’. London: Courtauld Institute Galleries, 1985.

Caroselli, Susan, L. ‘Italian Panel Painting of the Early Renaissance’. Los Angeles: LACMA, 1995).

Eisenberg, Marvin. ‘Painting and Illumination in Early Renaissance Florence, 1300-1450’. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995.

Eisenberg, Marvin. ‘Lorenzo Monaco’. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Fenton, Jean. “The Martyrdom of Pope Caius.” Archivero 1 (1973).

Kleiner, Fred. ‘Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: The Western Perspective’. Cengage Learning, 2009.

Italian Panel Painting of the Early Middle Ages, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/iptg/hd_iptg.htm, read January 2015.

Muller, Norman. “Three Methods of Modelling the Virgin’s Mantle in Early Italian Painting.” JAIC 17: 2, article 2 (1978): 10-18.

Tartuferi, Angelo (ed) and Daniela Parenti. ‘Lorenzo Monaco: A Bridge from Giotto’s Heritage to the Renaissance.’ Florence: Giunti; Firenze Musei, 2006.

COMMENTS

Don Lorenzo Monaco, whose real name was Pietro di Giovanni, was born in Siena about 1370. He must have come to Florence at an early age, for his first known works, dating from I387-I388, show very close affinities to the style of Agnolo Gaddi, who was in all probability his teacher. In I39I he entered the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Mariadegli Angeli, where he learned the art of miniature painting. The practice of this craft, which requires great precision of technique, marked his style even in altar-pieces. From the start, however, he possessed as well a genuine sense of monumentality and grandeur. The culminating point of his career was the great altarpiece of the Coronation of the Virgin of I4I4, now in the Uffizi, in which he successfully combined Gothic linearism [forms are sharply delineated and line is emphasized over color, light and shadow] with Giottesque plasticity. The felicitous blend of these two very different aesthetics is the hallmark of his style.

Lorenzo was the greatest exponent of the International Gothic style in Florence, but unlike Ghiberti, his counterpart in sculpture, he was not an innovator, nor did he possess the creative genius or imaginative power of a Masaccio. Rather, he is to be singled out from among his contemporaries as a particularly sensitive artist, a highly accomplished craftsman with a keen sense of color and elegance of design. His importance lies in having brought to a peak of refinement the traditional character of late trecento painting and in having introduced an element of poetry and fantasy to its worn-out set of conventions. He was not a pacesetter, but his influence on the art of the succeeding generations was real. G. Pudelko expressed it well: Lorenzo "belonged to that revolutionizing new movement, the style of which, though seemingly overcome by Masaccio, has always secretly continued its existence in Tuscan painting. Thus it comes again, recurring in the lyric, sometimes even elegiac linear craftsmanship of Giovanni di Paolo and achieves, first in the late works of Uccello and later on in the paintings of Botticelli, a supreme symbiosis with the modern forms of the Renaissance in Florence."

- Guy-Philippe de Montebello, "Four Prophets by Lorenzo Monaco", The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 25, n. 4, Dec. 1966, p. 156

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Lorenzo Monaco was the most important and innovative painter in Florence during the decades following the Black Death, the pandemic of bubonic plague that killed up to two-thirds of the population of Europe.

Pope Caius was bishop of Rome in the 3rd century. He was executed for performing baptisms by the Roman Emperor Diocletian, shown here alongside his wife and assistant. The executioner sheathes his sword as Caius’s head rolls towards the viewer and his spirit ascends to heaven.

Paintings like this one have been referred to as Bibles of the Illiterate, as they were intended to make the sacred stories come to life even – or especially – for those who could not read. In Lorenzo Monaco’s time everyone knew the stories of the Bible, but only 1% of the population was literate. The church fathers encouraged artists to tell the stories in ways that would engage the hearts, minds, and emotions of the faithful.

This tiny panel was originally part of the predella (base) of a much larger altarpiece in the Church of San Gaggio, Florence.

- Botticelli, Titian, and Beyond, 2015