The Many Lives of Landscape in Ridolfo Ghirlandaio’s Portrait of a Gentleman (about 1505)

A rectangle of vividly colored landscape in the upper left-hand corner is our only hint that the sitter is somewhere, and not staged before a placeless backdrop. As we break his gaze and follow our own out the window, we enter a lush outdoor space.

In the landscape seen through the window, two small figures animate a rustic environment. A woman toils away, her back bowed under the weight of packed wheat, while another figure tends to the cattle. In the world of this lush and inviting little rectangle—this painting within a painting—Ghirlandaio offers a privileged glimpse of daily life in the Renaissance, or so it seems.

The conservation file for this painting reveals that it has undergone multiple interventions, lived many lives. By the time it arrived at the Art Institute in 1933, it had been transferred from panel to canvas, heavily restored, and then subsequently treated (presumably to remove the old restoration).

Once in Chicago, it underwent three additional treatments (1953, 1981, 1988/89) with the last one being a deep treatment involving a “largely conjectural reconstruction” of the landscape whose figures, foliage, and buildings were found to be so damaged that “a truly accurate restoration [was] impossible.”

Head conservator Frank Zuccari approached this reconstruction by looking to contemporary examples of Northern Renaissance art because, as he writes, “the landscape had been observed to derive from Flemish examples.” As is the nature of conservation work, he undoubtedly formulated this approach in close collaboration with curators and art historians.

contemporary examples of Northern Renaissance art

A sketch tucked into the report depicting architectural details from two Flemish paintings speaks to the thoughtfulness and precision of his work. In the end, he described the reconstructed landscape as “a pastiche which adopts its architectural form from these examples combined with the few indications of original which were preserved.”

As a graduate student in the midst of writing a dissertation on the landscape backgrounds of Italian Renaissance paintings, this treatment report intrigued me a great deal. Indeed, my dissertation seeks to complicate the very art historical truism cited in the report and embodied by the restoration itself—that the appearance of landscapes in Italian Renaissance paintings derives from Northern European models.

To be sure, there is a direct correlation between the rise of landscape in Italian Renaissance portraits around 1450 and the circulation of Northern European paintings in Italy around that same time. There is also a clear stylistic influence as well. Rather than contesting this history, however, my dissertation argues that even if Italian Renaissance painters did take inspiration from Northern art, that does not mean they ignored the landscapes outside their own windows. It ultimately asks how art historians can take both realities into account.

Before arriving at the Art Institute, I had spent a year in the Italian countryside trying to answer this question by systematically identifying and documenting topographic features, plants, and buildings that appear in the backgrounds of Italian Renaissance paintings. What I found (to some initial frustration) is that these artists were almost never so boring as to reproduce their surroundings exactly. Instead, they often made calculated changes and substitutions, blending elements local and foreign into new kinds of landscapes that, I believe, local viewers would have interpreted (and appreciated) as thoughtful re-imaginings of their own environments.

What I also found is that art historians had frequently overlooked this local perspective because they were focused primarily on identifying the landscape’s Northern influences. When I began to think about why that was, I realized it was not as much about “oversight” but about the nature of the inquiry itself. Our discipline is better equipped to deal with questions of influence and style (which are based in visual evidence) over questions of historical experience, which necessarily demand a certain level of speculation. By the end of my year in Italy, my focus had shifted from source-hunting to interrogating the purpose of the hunt itself. What exactly was I trying (hoping) to see in these painted landscapes?

And this brings me back to Frank Zuccari’s 1988 restoration, which enabled me to examine this question through a different and immensely valuable lens. Walking through the treatment report with conservation scientist Maria Kokkori, I learned about the painting’s ongoing transformations, the historical context of Frank Zuccari’s reconstruction, and the collaborative process that conservation work entails. I understood that those of us who study historical art—conservators, curators, and art historians—may have different investments but are ultimately unified in our attention to detail, curiosity about the past, and commitment to object study, which is, for each of us in different ways, a fraught and fluid methodology. Indeed, with the onset of COVID-19 and the Art Institute’s closure, Frank Zuccari’s treatment report became my primary mode of understanding Ghirlandaio’s portrait as an object. In some ways, the report replaced the portrait as my object of study.

In the end, I cannot say with any certainty what Ghirlandaio meant for us to see outside of his window, whether it was a view of the Flemish or Florentine countryside, or, more likely, some combination of the two. What I do know is that, across disciplines, we can only find answers to the questions we ask; and, for better and for worse (but mostly for better) the questions we ask change all the time. 

—Chloé M. Pelletier, COSI Fellow, 2019–20

Topics

• Conservation
• Collection
• Artists
• Perspectives