Doge Alvise Mocenigo and Family Before the Madonna and Child

Alvise I di Tommaso Mocenigo (1507–1577) was the fourth member of the Mocenigo family to become doge of Venice. His tenure in office (1570–1577) was notable for a number of historic events: the victory of the Holy League (Venice, Espana, and the Papacy) over the Turks in the sea boxing of Lepanto in 1571; Venice's controversial conclusion of a separate peace with the Turks in 1573; the visit of Henry III of France to Venice in 1574; a disastrous fire in the Palazzo Ducale in 1574; and the devastating plague of 1575–1577, which prompted the doge to take a vow to build the votive church building that became Santa Maria della Salute. His ducal iconography includes his official portrait past Jacopo Tintoretto (versions of which are at present in the Accademia, Venice, and Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin); his votive painting in the Palazzo Ducale, executed past Tintoretto and his studio around 1582; an incomplete compositional sketch for that work, painted during Mocenigo's lifetime and showing a somewhat different composition (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); and a paliotto (altar material) for the high altar of the basilica of San Marco, traditionally commissioned by each doge, of 1571, the design of which has been attributed to Tintoretto. The commissions of Alvise Mocenigo and his family suggest ambitions to create a ducal dynasty; for example, his votive painting in the Palazzo Ducale is unique in that it includes portraits of the late doge'due south two brothers [fig. 1] [fig. ane] Jacopo Tintoretto and Workshop, Doge Alvise Mocenigo Attended by Saint Marker and Other Saints before the Redeemer, c. 1582, oil on canvas, Palazzo Ducale, Venice. Cameraphoto © Photo Archive - Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia . [1] [1]
Tracy E. Cooper, "The Trials of David: Triumph and Crisis in the Imagery of Doge Alvise I Mocenigo (1570–1577)," Centre / National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Report in the Visual Arts xviii (1998): 64–68; Tracy E. Cooper, Palladio's Venice: Architecture and Society in a Renaissance Republic (New Haven, 2005), 189–195; Miguel Falomir, in Tintoretto, ed. Miguel Falomir (Madrid, 2007), 329; Benjamin Paul, "Les tombeaux des doges vénitiens: De fifty'autocélébration dans une République," in Les Funérailles princières en Europe, Sixteen^e–Xviii^e: two. Apothéoses monumentales, ed. Juliusz A. Chrościcki, Mark Hengerer, and Gérard Sabatier (Rennes, 2013), 167–168; Benjamin Paul, "Convertire in se medesimo questo flagello: Autocritica del Doge Alvise Mocenigo nel bozzetto di Tintoretto per il dipinto votivo a Palazzo Ducale," in Celebrazione e autocritica: La Serenissima e la ricerca dell'identità veneziana nel tardo Cinquecento, ed. Benjamin Paul (Rome, 2014), 131–134.

Co-ordinate to Tintoretto's 17th-century biographer Carlo Ridolfi, "in the business firm of Signor Toma Mocenigo . . . in a long canvas is the aforementioned [Doge Alvise Mocenigo] with his wife adoring the Queen of Heaven, with other portraits of senators and children of the same family, shown equally angels at the anxiety of Our Lady, who play on instruments." [two] [2]
Carlo Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell'arte, overo Le vite de gl'illustri pittori veneti, e dello stato (Venice, 1648), 2:44; Carlo Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell'arte, overo Le vite de gl'illustri pittori veneti, e dello stato, ed. Detlev von Hadeln (Berlin, 1924), 2:53. This is unmistakably the Gallery's painting, in which the kneeling figure of Doge Alvise Mocenigo is identifiable by comparing to his official portraits. Opposite him is his wife, Loredana. [3] [3]
Cecilia Gibellini, L'immagine di Lepanto: La celebrazione della vittoria nella letteratura east nell'arte veneziana (Venice, 2008), 52–53, argued convincingly that the dogaressa is as well pictured in the painting past Jacopo Palma il Giovane of the Doge Alvise Mocenigo Thanking the Virgin for the Victory at Lepanto in the church of San Fantin, Venice. The continuing older human to the left is the doge'south brother Giovanni (1508–1580), who is besides the subject of ane of Tintoretto's finest portraits, probably painted presently before the field of study's expiry (Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin) [fig. ii] [fig. 2] Jacopo Tintoretto, Giovanni Mocenigo, belatedly 1570s, oil on canvas, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. bpk Bildagentur / Staatliche Museen, Berlin / Joerg P. Anders / Art Resource, NY . [4] [iv]
Paola Rossi, Jacopo Tintoretto: I ritratti (Venice, 1974), cat. no 15; Paola Rossi, ed., Jacopo Tintoretto: Ritratti (Milan, 1994), 160, cat. no. 39. There he looks significantly older than in the Washington painting. The more than youthful and idealized representation in the Washington painting is probably intended to convey a sense of timelessness consistent with its dynastic function. The two immature men at far right are Giovanni's sons Tommaso (1551–1592) and Alvise (1554–1591), known as "Alvisetto" to distinguish him from his uncle. These identifications, first proposed past Rodolfo Pallucchini in 1954 and generally accepted, take been confirmed and expanded upon past Tracy E. Cooper, who has explained the painting equally a dynastic commemoration of the ramo (branch) of the Mocenigo associated with the family's ancient properties past the church building of San Samuele. The doge and Giovanni lived at that place together with their families in a fraterna, a fiscal partnership designed to keep the family patrimony from beingness diluted. After the decease of Giovanni'due south eldest son Leonardo (1547–1572), according to a codicil of 1574 to the doge's will, Giovanni's two surviving sons became the heirs of the 2 brothers: Tommaso, as Giovanni's oldest surviving son, became his father's heir, while Alvisetto was designated as the beneficiary of the childless doge. The painting thus depicts the family unit dynasty headed by the doge and reflects the disposition of the property he shared with Giovanni. This explains the absence of the doge's other surviving brother, Nicolò (1512–1588), who had initiated a new ramo of the family at San Stae. [5] [5]
Rodolfo Pallucchini, "Un capolavoro del Tintoretto: La Madonna del Doge Alvise Mocenigo," Arte Veneta eight (1954): 222–224; Tracy E. Cooper, "The Trials of David: Triumph and Crisis in the Imagery of Doge Alvise I Mocenigo (1570–1577)," Center / National Gallery of Art, Middle for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts 18 (1998): 64–68; Tracy E. Cooper, Palladio'south Venice: Architecture and Social club in a Renaissance Republic (New Haven, 2005), 189–195. Nicolò is pictured along with Giovanni in the votive painting in the Palazzo Ducale; run across Cooper, Palladio'southward Venice, 195; and Benjamin Paul, "Convertire in se medesimo questo flagello: Autocritica del Doge Alvise Mocenigo nel bozzetto di Tintoretto per il dipinto votivo a Palazzo Ducale," in Celebrazione eastward autocritica: La Serenissima e la ricerca dell'identità veneziana nel tardo Cinquecento, ed. Benjamin Paul (Rome, 2014), 134. The date of Nicolò's death was provided by Tracy E. Cooper.

Ridolfi'southward statement that the angel musicians correspond children of the Mocenigo family unit was presumably based on family tradition. The youth at the correct appears in a separate portrait by Tintoretto or an associate (private collection) [fig. iii] [fig. 3] Jacopo Tintoretto, Portrait of a Boy, c. 1575, oil on canvas, Individual Drove. Photograph © Christie'due south Images / Bridgeman Images , mayhap a few years older. [6] [vi]
Portrait of a Male child; Paola Rossi, Jacopo Tintoretto: I ritratti (Venice, 1974), true cat. 102, fig. 175; sold Christie'due south, London, July vi, 2007, lot 222, sale 7414. The early on provenance of this picture is unknown. The younger kid to the left seems to depict a real individual as well: he is represented with considerable specificity, in contrast, for example, to the generic features of the Christ Child. At the time of Alvise Mocenigo'south death, none of Giovanni'south sons had children. [7] [7]
By 1580, when Giovanni died, he had two young grandsons living at San Samuele: Tommaso's son Giovanni, born in 1578, and Alvise's son Alvise I, built-in in 1580, a few months before his grandfather's death that aforementioned year. This information was provided past Tracy Due east. Cooper. Pallucchini suggested that the musicians are sons of Giovanni'due south daughters, only every bit Cooper noted, this seems unlikely because these grandchildren would non have borne the Mocenigo name.

The Gallery's painting must take been executed after Leonardo's death in 1572. (Otherwise, he would certainly have appeared in it.) Pallucchini and others, bold that the portrait of Loredana was taken from life, have seen her death in December 1572 as a terminus dues quem, and thus dated the painting precisely to that year, during the short period between the death of Leonardo and that of the dogaressa. [eight] [8]
Meet Paola Rossi, in Jacopo Tintoretto: Ritratti, ed. Paola Rossi (Milan, 1994), 152; Miguel Falomir, in Tintoretto, ed. Miguel Falomir (Madrid, 2007), 329; Tracy E. Cooper, "Patricians and Citizens," in Venice and the Veneto, ed. Peter Humfrey (New York, 2007), 155; Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman, "Toward a New Tintoretto Catalogue, with a Checklist of Revised Attributions and a New Chronology," in Jacopo Tintoretto: Actas del congreso internacional/Proceedings of the International Symposium, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, February 26–27, 2007 (Madrid, 2009), 126, no. 158. However, this analysis fails to take into consideration the fact that four of the portraits (Giovanni, Tommaso, the young Alvise, and Loredana) probably came from an before painting, which may not have included exactly the aforementioned bandage of characters. Before scholars have assumed that these portraits were painted from life on smaller pieces of canvas and later sewn into the large canvas purely for the convenience of the creative person or to speed upwardly production. However, the inserted pieces are extremely irregular, and ii of them show pregnant harm from having been folded. It therefore seems much more likely that they were taken from a preexisting painting, probably one that had somehow been badly damaged. [9] [9]
Technical evidence cannot explicate the reason that the four portraits were added to the painting. However, it is consistent with the hypothesis that the portraits came from a damaged preexisting painting and were reused in the electric current painting. The earlier version might well have included Leonardo, but if the family had simply wanted a new flick without him, it seems more likely that changes would have been made on the original sheet rather than dismembering information technology. For some other example of a Tintoretto work in which a preexisting, apparently damaged painting was reused, see the Nativity (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) in Frederick Ilchman et al., Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice (Boston, 2009), 164–172, cat. no. 26. For examples of other paintings from the Tintoretto studio in which portraits were inserted into larger canvases, see Miguel Falomir, in Tintoretto, ed. Miguel Falomir (Madrid, 2007), 110, suggesting that the purpose of the practice was primarily for efficiency. See also Fern Rusk Shapley, Catalogue of the Italian Paintings (Washington, DC, 1979), one:474 north. 7. (The face up of the doge was probably copied from a studio ricordo executed at the time of his official portrait in 1570.) [10] [10]
See Miguel Falomir, in Tintoretto, ed. Miguel Falomir (Madrid, 2007), 105.

The current painting may thus take been executed after Loredana'due south death. A plausible date would be circa 1575, based on the likelihood that information technology was commissioned in 1574, at the time Alvise made the codicil to his will, when dynastic concerns were clearly on the minds of the two brothers. Indeed, Giovanni may have been a joint or even the sole patron. The painting was undoubtedly intended to hang in the thou key hall (portego or sala) of the palace at San Samuele, where Giovanni and his sons lived and where Ridolfi saw it some seven decades later. [eleven] [11]
Tracy Eastward. Cooper, "The Trials of David: Triumph and Crisis in the Imagery of Doge Alvise I Mocenigo (1570–1577)," Center / National Gallery of Fine art, Center for Avant-garde Study in the Visual Arts xviii (1998): 67–68, has identified the Toma Mocenigo named by Ridolfi as the owner of the onetime Mocenigo palace at San Samuele and a groovy-grandson of Giovanni Mocenigo (b. 1608). Simona Savini Branca, Il collezionismo veneziano del Seicento (Padua, 1965), 243, mistakenly sought to place him as a member of the San Stae branch of the family unit. On portego paintings, see Monika Schmitter, "The Quadro da Portego in Sixteenth-Century Venetian Art," Renaissance Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2011): 693–751.

The mural background may be intended to correspond the Mocenigo family unit's holdings at Villabona on the Venetian terraferma. [12] [12]
Tracy Eastward. Cooper, "The Trials of David: Triumph and Crisis in the Imagery of Doge Alvise I Mocenigo (1570–1577)," Center / National Gallery of Art, Eye for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts eighteen (1998): 67, suggests that the landscape has a moralizing graphic symbol, the classicizing temple and peasant hut representing an exhortation to virtue. The roses at the Virgin's anxiety, while a standard aspect of the Virgin, may also accept a farther meaning here. The Mocenigo ramo at San Samuele was known as "dalle rose," and the rose appeared on their family scudo, or escutcheon. Moreover, roses were regularly associated with the battle of Lepanto: roses had bloomed in Venice in Oct 1571, the month of the boxing, seemingly miraculously, and Pope Pius V subsequently defended the victory to the Madonna of the Rosary. [13] [13]
See Tracy E. Cooper, "Patricians and Citizens," in Venice and the Veneto, ed. Peter Humfrey (New York, 2007), 155. Cecilia Gibellini, L'immagine di Lepanto: La celebrazione della vittoria nella letteratura due east nell'arte veneziana (Venice, 2008), 168–169, argued that an explicit reference to the rosary would exist unlikely considering the rosary was no longer celebrated in Venice later on the plummet of the Holy League in 1573, due to its associations with Rome.

The picture is a variant of the official votive paintings that decorated the Palazzo Ducale and other regime buildings in Venice. These are part of a long tradition of Venetian paintings that bear witness the patrons venerating or being presented to the Virgin and Kid past their patron saints. Tintoretto's finest votive painting is the Madonna of the Treasurers of circa 1567 (originally in the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi; now Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice); he and his studio assistants were likewise responsible for many of the doges' votive paintings executed for the Palazzo Ducale in the early 1580s to supercede those lost in the fires of 1574 and 1577. Although less common than official votive paintings, other examples of domestic family votive paintings exist, including Titian's Vendramin Family Venerating a Relic of the True Cross (National Gallery, London) and Veronese'southward Presentation of the Cuccina Family to the Madonna of circa 1571 (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden), similar to Tintoretto'south Mocenigo picture show in its monumental scale and once role of an ensemble in the portego of the family unit's palace. [14] [fourteen]
On the Cuccina pictures, run across Blake de Maria, Condign Venetian: Immigrants and the Arts in Early Modern Venice (New Haven and London, 2010), 143–159. The Gallery's painting is unusually static for Tintoretto and lacks the complex interaction of pose, gesture, and gaze of his feature compositions. [15] [15]
Meet Robert Echols, "Tintoretto the Painter," in Tintoretto, ed. Miguel Falomir (Madrid, 2007), 28; Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman, "Toward a New Tintoretto Catalogue, with a Checklist of Revised Attributions and a New Chronology," in Jacopo Tintoretto: Actas del congreso internacional/Proceedings of the International Symposium, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, February 26–27, 2007 (Madrid, 2009), 99. (The Madonna of the Treasurers provides an instance of what he could accomplish in this genre.) Its symmetrical system is rare for the menstruation, not but for Tintoretto but for his major contemporaries as well. Wolfgang Wolters suggested the flick may have been designed to match an older ancestral votive painting in the room for which it was painted. [xvi] [16]
Wolfgang Wolters, Der Bilderschmuck des Dogenpalastes: Untersuchungen zur Selbstdarstellung der Republik Venedig im 16. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden, 1983), 124; Italian ed., Wolfgang Wolters, Storia e politica nei dipinti di Palazzo Ducale: Aspetti dell'autocelebrazione della Repubblica di Venezia nel Cinquecento, trans. Benedetta Heinemann Campana (Venice, 1987), 123.

While there is no question of the attribution to Tintoretto, scholars have disagreed as to the level of studio intervention in the picture. Pallucchini and Paola Rossi affirmed information technology every bit autograph, equally a number of other writers seemed to presume; in contrast, Bernard Berenson called it "studio piece of work"; Fern Rusk Shapley noted that some areas, including the Virgin and Child, are less inspired and well modeled than other parts of the picture, and suggested that they reveal studio participation; West. R. Rearick saw the entire picture as a "workshop assemblage" with a few portraits by Jacopo himself; Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman assigned it to "Jacopo and studio." [17] [17]
Rodolfo Pallucchini and Paola Rossi, Tintoretto: Le opere sacre eastward profane (Venice, 1982), 1: true cat. no. 324; Bernard Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: Venetian School (London, 1957), 2:157; Fern Rusk Shapley, Catalogue of the Italian Paintings (Washington, DC, 1979), 1:474; West. R. Rearick, "Reflections on Tintoretto as a Portraitist," Artibus et Historiae xvi, no. 31 (1995): 62; Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman, "Toward a New Tintoretto Catalogue, with a Checklist of Revised Attributions and a New Chronology," in Jacopo Tintoretto: Actas del congreso internacional/Proceedings of the International Symposium, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, February 26–27, 2007 (Madrid, 2009), 126, no. 158. It seems likely that more than one mitt was involved in the painting, particularly given its scale and date, though it is difficult to be more specific. The mid-1570s was a time of transition for the Tintoretto studio, when Jacopo's children Marietta and Domenico were coming of age. Although Domenico had not yet assumed a major role, Marietta was noted for portraiture, and numerous other administration seem to have been present in the shop, including landscape and probably other portrait specialists too. [18] [18]
On Tintoretto's studio, meet Rodolfo Pallucchini and Paola Rossi, Tintoretto: Le opere sacre e profane (Venice, 1982), one:81–82; Robert Echols, "Tintoretto the Painter," in Tintoretto, ed. Miguel Falomir (Madrid, 2007), 55–62; Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman, "Toward a New Tintoretto Catalogue, with a Checklist of Revised Attributions and a New Chronology," in Jacopo Tintoretto: Actas del congreso internacional/Proceedings of the International Symposium, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, February 26–27, 2007 (Madrid, 2009), 99–102. On the likely presence there of portrait specialists, see Miguel Falomir, in Tintoretto, ed. Miguel Falomir (Madrid, 2007), 110. Here the Virgin and Child seem crude and perfunctory (although Tintoretto himself could exist perfunctory at times). The portraits, by dissimilarity, are potent and expressive; the forms of the family unit members have a sense of weight and presence, and include passages of virtuoso brushwork, such equally the representation of the ermine sleeves of the two older men. The beautiful background may be past a landscape specialist.

Robert Echols

March 21, 2019

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Source: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.46143.html

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