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Replicating Mysteries of the Passion: Rosso's Dead Christ with Angels*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Regina Stefaniak
Regina Stefaniak*
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside
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Extract

During his sojourn in Rome from 1524 to 1527, Rosso painted a panel of a dead Christ with angels for his friend Leonardo Tornabuoni, bishop of Borgo San Sepolcro. Vasari saw the painting in the house of Giovanni della Casa at mid-century, but subsequently it was lost from general sight until the 1950s, when it was acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (Fig. 1). The panel has been assessed by art historians as one of signal importance, at once a high water mark in Rosso's own work and masterpiece of the early Roman maniera, a painting remarkable for its great beauty and artfulness, composed after long study of Michelangelo and the antique. The first considered estimation of the work emphasized its sculptural qualities, its formal tensions in pose and color, and its artistic virtuosity, suggesting that the subject was a version of the imago pietatis, reworked into a resurrecting Christ, emblematic of the patron's titular see. Although still impressed with the suavity of the panel in relation to Rosso's previous work, a subsequent critic was more conscious of its ambivalences, discerning a continuity with the young Rosso's individualistic and eccentric sensibilities, finally identifying the subject as an assertion of the eucharistic real presence. Analogies with language have been advanced, among them an allusion to the intensely equivocal nature of the painting. For one scholar the artfulness of the panel and Rosso's artistic attitudes were separate from their religious purpose; for another, they were absolutely at odds.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 45 , Issue 4 , Winter 1992 , pp. 677 - 738
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1992

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Footnotes

*

For their comments on earlier versions of this essay I am grateful to Professors Loren Partridge, Andrew Stewart, and (at a later stage) Randolph Starn, all of the University of California, Berkeley. This essay grew out of my dissertation research, funded by the Italian Fulbright-Hays Commission, the Social Science Research Council, the Faculty of the Department of History of Art at Berkeley, and the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation. I wish to thank all these benefactors for their generous assistance.

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