Ancient Prototypes Reinstantiated: Zuccari's Encounter of
Christ and Veronica of 1594
Livia Stoenescu
The early modern age placed great weight on historical evi-
dence in effecting a revival of the ancient art of the past. To
an unprecedented degree, this nascent historical conscious-
ness subscribed to the truth value of visual evidence at the
same time that it entertained skepticism abotit the reliability
of written history.' Notoriotis instances of altered or misin-
terpreted doctiments encotiraged the belief that images pro-
vided more reliable insight into historical fact than written
sources.
The considerable attention devoted by the post-Tridentine
ecclesiastical program of reform to the image's subject matter
fostered a self-imposed medieval character. The reform pro-
gram sought to regtilate not only the format and function of
devotional images but also aspects of their istoria in the
treatment of many commis.sioned artists. The post-Tridentine
assertion of venerable traditions expressed itself in the cre-
ation of artifacts that directly referenced their reflexive con-
texts, a mechanism that enlisted the specifics of old images to
the system of Catholic truth visually argued. Thus, Cardinal
Federico Borromeo found theological and didactic value in
the engravings made by the sixteenth-century Antwerp artist
Marten de Vos that portrayed important chapters of church
history, and these became one of the principal instruments of
his canon of sacred art at the Ambrosiana Academy in Milan."*
Early modern artists resolved to reform such post-Tridentine
hermeneutical discourses through the expressive models of a
stibstitutional logic meant to self-consciously repurpose an-
tique features in ways that transcended the specific moment
of their creation. The substitutional effectiveness of Federico
Zuccari's S. Prassede altarpiece The Encounter of Christ and
Veronica on the Way to Calvary of 1594 (Fig. 1) emerged from
his ability to recover ancient prototypes and present them as
recognizably old with the aid of Renaissance altarpiece par-
adigms celebrating the artistic merits of Early Christian im-
ages.
Despite their differing aims, both ecclesiastical figures and
artists set religious images at the core of debates surrounding
the veracity of historical sources. After the Reformation im-
periled the historical legitimacy of the Catholic Church, and
a generation of powerful popes, stich as Paul II and his
successor, Sixtus FV, made classical antiquity a key area of
research, historical religious art acquired the task of shed-
ding new light on the past.' Writing from the vantage point
of the Counter-Reformation work of devotion, Peter Paul
Rubens pointed to the efforts of Antonio Bossio to convey
how the catacombs demonstrated the ungainly and substan-
dard qualities that characterized Early Christian art in the
views of many ecclesiastical patrons and theorists.'' An artist
with exceptional scholarly and antiquarian insight, Rubens
suggested that he could not defend the visual worthiness of
Early Christian images against the grace and excellence of
classical antiquity in Bossio's illustrated folio Roma sotterranea
(1636). Taking Rubens's conclusion one step further, it was
left to the early modern artist to reconcile the devotional
power of Early Christian art with its visual crudity in the
creation of sacred images. This reconciliation was especially
urgent given the new status of visual evidence as the preem-
inent historical source for the study of early Christianity.
Scholars generally regard the work of Zuccari as an essen-
tially controlled expression of the classicizing aesthetics of
early modernity, rather than as the achievement of an inde-
pendent artist whose intellectual appetite did not need the
stimulation of continuous contact with classical antiqtiity."'
Not surprisingly, art historians have located Zuccari within
the classicist framework expounded by Giovan Pietro Bellori,
the distinguished scholar, connoisseur, and theorist who set
himself the task of uncovering the errors of ancient scholar-
ship with a view to elaborating his conception of beauty as
associated with ideas, or modes of knowledge.'' Bellori pro-
pounded classicism as an approach to form and an aesthetic
theoiy of beauty that had a sustained counterpart in Counter-
Reformation htimanism. Prior to this, Giorgio Vasari had
initiated an early modern discourse on religious painting in
accordance with notions of decortim and appropiiateness,'
asserting that artists were to confine themselves to the imita-
tion of the timeless valties and perfect style of the ancients."
Yet imitation in Vasarian terms did not square with the Re-
naissance practice of imitatio, keyed to the transmission and
re-creation of an authoritative sotirce." Even though the ad-
vent of print had driven a wedge between reproduction and
imitation, early modern theorists and theologians found it
impossible to conceive of art otitside the parameters of Coun-
ter-Reformation antiquarian culture. Central to the project of
the Counter-Reformation was the confident highlighting of
the age and history of cultural artifacts, regardle.ss of their
relative artistic merit. Insisting like Va.sari and Giovanni Bat-
tista Armenini on the retrograde character of Early Christian
art, Bellori simply dismissed the significant number of Greek
icons present in the west after the fall of Constiintinople in
1453.'" Bellori yielded in fact to the temptation of classicist
aesthetics and restricted himself to laying stress on the mas-
sive unearthing of Roman statties, especially those associated
with Italy, and their presentation as foundational in early
modern art. He railed against the crtidity of ancient artifacts
other than tho.se of classical Greece and Rome, a.sserting the
aesthetic qualities of classical antiquity as the driving forces of
early modern discourse.
In contrast to his contemporaries, Zuccari, in his painting
The Encounter of Christ and Veronica, still in situ in Rome at the
S. Prassede Basilica, openly affirmed icons and prints as
source material for the modern altarpiece. Zuccari employed
the profile portrait of Christ to recall a period of purer
Christian art and rearticulate a different kind of ancient
image within a modern painting. He inflected his devotional
424 BULLETIN DECEMBER 2011 VOLUME XCIII NUMBER
message in terms of a self-conscious backward glance, depen-
dent on deliberate medievalisms that reinscribe earlier Chris-
tian imagery into the edifice of the altarpiece. Zuccari took
pains to reconcile these ancient forms with cultic function,
deriving his work securely from Early Chrisdan sources while
at the same time engaging with urgent contemporary con-
cern over true likeness in the realm of religious images.
Zuccari's specific sources for Christ's profile in the S.
Prassede altarpiece were medallic portraits transmitting
4
1 Federico Zuccari, The Encounter of
Christ and Veronica on the Way to
Calvary, 1594, oil on panel. Basilica of
S. Prassede, Rome, Olgiati Chapel
(artwork in the public domain;
photograph provided by
Soprintendenza Spéciale per il
Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed
Etnoantropologico e per il Polo
Museale della Città di Roma)
Christ's feattires as they had been preserved in other media
and a late medieval Italian woodcut recognized in the early
modern age as an authoritative early modern source for the
replicadon of Christ's image.
Zuccari themadzed the relation of prototype to copy in
ways that direcdy responded to the long-standing concern
over the authority of religious images in the decades follow-
ing the Council of Trent. Johannes Molanus, the famous
theologian and iconographer of Louvain, had contended.
 Z U C C A R I ' S KNC.OUNTKR 01- CHRIST AND VERONICA Of 1594
425

following Thomas Aquinas, that veneration directed to a

I eligiotis image was nothing other than idolatry if the image
did not offer an authentic representation of Christ and the
saints. Molantis offered guidance in his 1570 Treatise (m Sacred
Images on how to represent Christ by accentuating the evi-
dence of his true likeness recorded in proconsul Lentulus's
letter to the Roman Senate and in a bronze portrait described
by Patriarch Nikephoros Callistos in the last chapter of his
Histmia. ' ' Nikephoros, writing in the ninth century, had said
that icons produced in his own day were not invented btit
were true depictions of Christ, invested with the authority of
age, contiguous with antiquity and the proclamation of the
Gospels.'"* His observations provided the model and sptir for
a definition of the icon as artifact, built on his claim of the
direct relation between icon and archetype. As Charles Bar-
ber pointed out, the key terms introduced by Patriarch Ni-
kephoros in the formalist discotirse of Byzantine art allowed
for the understanding of the icon as a representation formed
in the likeness of an archetype.'"^
Remarkably, Zuccari managed to reconcile this cultic ar-
gument with his adaptation of religious concerns to fit a
narrative drama, building on the impetus for the reform of
the altarpiece given by Michelangelo, Raphael, and Lorenzo
Lotto. Zuccari visualized these points in The Encounter of Christ 2 El Greco, Saint Veronica with the Sudarium, ca. 1577-78, oil
and Veronica, a scene portraying the dramatic moment when on canvas, 33'/H X 35% in. (84 X 91 cm). Museo de Santa
Veronica extends to Christ her famous cloth. Veronica kneels Cruz, Toledo (artwork in the public domain; photograph by
Erich Lessing, provided by Art Resource, NY)
in front of Christ while Simon of Cyrene lifts the cross from
his shoulders, presenting the veil in a narrative framework
seldom explored in the frontal, centering treatment of other
altar paintings that include the relic. This assimilation of the
veil to a narrative had been instead the realm of prints and the theme, appropriated the conventions of trompe l'oeil to
antiquarian ctilttire, at a remove from the altarpiece project impart a convincing sen.se of the real presence of Christ,
of presenting the true likene.ss of Christ derived from a materialized before our eyes like the face miraculously im-
tradition of acheiropoietic images. A telling example likely printed on Veronica's cloth (Fig. 3)."'The painter's archaism
familiar to Zuccari was The Altar of Saint Veronica made be- expresses itself in an imitation of the acheiropoietic portrait,
tween 1524 and 1527 by Ugo da Carpi for Old St. Peter's reprodticing in paint features of the original Mandylion.
Basilica. Like the famous, albeit much contrasting, drawing Zurbarán and El Greco secured the authority of their copies
by Parmigianino at the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, the by referring back to the substitutional logic of the most
altarpiece shows Carpi's effort to present a portrait of Christ venerated ancient prototype, the true likeness of Christ in the
that would imitate Rome's vera icon, the sudarium of Veron- Mandylion. By contrast, Zuccari reminded his viewer that the
ica.''' A family of a few portraits of Christ professing to have veil is the bearer of a story that precedes the relic venerated
descended from the veil of Veronica, a cloth that had been in a reliquary at St. Peter's, Rome. Late sixteenth- and seven-
pressed against Christ's bloody face, pretended to be the teenth-century painters did not share his treatment of the
sudarium or the double of the Byzantine Mandylion. The vera icon, nor did it have an established tradition in Renais-
original Mandylion represented the most prestigious achei- sance altar painting. But, like his contemporaries, Zuccari
ropoietic portrait of Christ, having come to Constantinople took pains to make explicit claims about the origins of his
from Edessa in the tenth century; it re.surfaced in two versions painting. His image belongs to the time in which it was made
simultaneously in Rome and Paris after the fall of Constanti- and at the same time to its restaged context, thus narrating its
nople in 1204. A third portrait said to be the true Mandylion own production history without pushing it into the realm of
appeared in Genoa in the fourteenth century, where it is still imitation and emtilation. Zuccari's motif had enjoyed its
venerated in the chtirch of S. Bartolomeo degli Armeni.''"' greatest popularity in the late Middle Ages, when Veronica
In the late sixteenth century. El Greco responded to the was a character in Passion plays. Her role spoke to a grotmd-
emphasis on the acheiropoietic dimension of Christ's face swell of poptilar devotion and a hunger for narrative detail.
with images of the living appearance of Christ on Veronica's Zuccari's dramatic and narrative solutions responded directly
veil. There are several versions, one for the high altar of to this late medieval sensibility and its attendant embellish-
Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo and others with Veron- ment of textual evidence in religious imagery. Jacobus de
ica holding the cloth (Fig. 2). El Greco was heir to a tradition Voragine's The Golden Legend provided the source for Zucca-
that would continue into the seventeenth century and be- ri's pictorial representation of Veronica's entry on the scene
yond in the work of Francisco de Ztirbarán and numerous to offer Christ a cloth to wipe the sweat and blood from his
other Spanish artists. Zurbarán, in his frequent repetitions of face. In Zuccari's hands, medieval imagery acquired a re-
426 BULLETIN DECEMBER 2011 VOLUME XCIII NUMBER 4
3 Francisco de Zurbarán, The Veil of Saint Veronica, ca. 1635,
oil on canvas, 2TÁ X 20I/K in. (69.9 X 51.1 cm). National
Museum, Stockholm (artwork in the public domain; photograph
provided by Art Resource, NY)
newed efficacy in the creation of compelling modern narra-
tives.'^
Modem Altarpieces Need the Print
In the S. Prassede altarpiece, Zuccari centered the narrative
action around a beautiful image of Christ in profile, bearing
the cross. The result bears witness to the survival of Zuccari's
artistic influences: medieval portraits of Christ that circulated
during the Renaissance as engravings and woodcuts. Sixten
Ringbom recognized a half-length northern Italian woodcut
of Christ carrying the cross from the late fifteenth century as
a model withotit precedent north of the Alps, one that would
evolve into a major source for Italian Renaissance painting
(Fig. 4)."* It seems to have originated in Milan, where its
inventor, undoubtedly prompted by new developments in the
iconography of the Ecce Homo and Salvatw Mundi subjects,
created an original formula of a btist-length Christ in regal
attire carrying the cross. The Milanese woodctit shows Christ
in profile view, emphasizing his meditative stance in stark
contrast to the cruelty of the narrative. In The Encounter of
Christ and Veronica, Zuccari also portrays Christ in profile, but
at a different moment in the carrying of the cross. Zuccari's
dramatic depiction reframes for narrative purposes the mys-
tical feattires of Christ's face in keeping with the proportions
and physiognomy of the woodcut. It represents a convincing
attempt to appropriate Christ's image, as capttired by the
woodcut, for a rival undertaking that will forcefully assert
4 Christ Carrying the Cross, end of the 15th century, woodcut.
Colnaghi's, London (artwork in the public domain; photogr-aph
reproduced with permission of P&D Colnaghi Ltd., London)
Christ's character and individuality. The altarpiece is its own
predecessor and simultaneously its referendal context, such
that the woodcut is no longer prior but present. The woodcut
remains the documentary image to which Zuccari learnedly
submitted his painting, thus inscribing it within a subsdtu-
tional logic that sqtiared his profile Christ with the renowned
models of Renaissance andquarianism.
Accompanying the rise of humanism, an exacdng antiquar-
ian preoccupation with true likeness evolved in close kinship
with the urgent concern over authoritative religious images.
Antiquarian discussions of the authendcity of the referred
likeness aggravated worries about the dating of objects, and
specifically about the authendcity of Byzandne imports. In
this context, the evidentiary status of Christ medals in bronze
allowed them to function as a doctimentary source for the
modern religious image.'^ Emerging both from the reen-
gagement with the Byzantine icon and the archaeological
revival of antiquity, the bronze Christ medals derived their
expressive power from the true likeness of ancient statues
and inscripdons on coins.
For an antiquarian such as Enea Vico, the authoritative
status of Christ's medallic portraits derived from a prototype
likeness of Christ in the form of a Roman statue; in the same
way, he argued, the portraits of kings and emperors on
ancient coins were copies of their own freestanding statties.^"
In his Discorsi sopra le medaglie degli antichi (1555), the notion
that the medallist works after the sculptor lay at the core of
 ZUCCARTS ENCOUNTHR Oh CHRIST AND VERONICA OF 1594 427

Vico's central numismatic argument, namely, that the origi-

nal coin is a form of evidence that comes in multiples."" Vico
fashioned a creative illustration of his thesis in a woodcut
profile portrait of Christ (Fig. 5), placed in an inner roundel
that alluded to the front face of a medal and revealed the
image's borrowings from a series of renowned Roman stat-
ues, including the profile view in Michelangelo's Riseîi Christ
at S. Maria sopra Minerva. That Vico's profile portrait of
Christ is not an adaptation or a translation is stressed through
a comparison with Hans Btirgkmair's analogotis woodcut of
1510 that replicates the true likeness of Christ transferred
from a medallic documentary image. Burgkmair's profile
(Christ derives its persuasive power from a bronze medal
Profile of Christ hy Matteo de' Pasti (1440-50) and the descrip)-
tion of Christ in the proconsul Lenttiltis's letter.'^^ Vico and
Burgkmair are therefore to be numbered among the real
antiquarians who were also artists, rather than among the
men of letters and interpreters of antiquity of the emerging
(Jounter-Reformation age.
To an early modern artist like Zuccari, the ability of images
of Christ to capture a true likeness derived from the princi-
ples of authenticity and inimitability inherent in the Byzan-
tine icon, whose production history was equivalent to that of
the woodcut.~' Zuccari was familiar with Byzantine icons in
his native Urbino and through the Venetian collections he
was exposed to during his apprenticeship. The official display
of sacred images in the post-Tridentine decades reworked the
isolated viewing of the icon. The Counter-Reformation
church put its most sacred images and relics on public view,
blurring the boundaries between devotion and display during
the exhibition of the sudarium a.t the 1575 Roman Jubilee and 5 Enea Vico, Jesus Christ, ca. 1548, engra\'iiig, 7% X 5V4 in.
the 1578 ostentation of the Shroud of Turin."*' This emphasis (18.8 X 13.9 cm) (artwork in the public domain)
on the institutional display of the sacred marked the restruc-
turing of an earlier attitude toward icons, when their collec-
tion and exhibition was the prerogative of the private collec- printed image as a worthy substitute for the saint's presence
tor and donor. The famous collection of Byzantine icons and power."*^ In this regard, the woodcut served as a focus of
inherited by Lorenzo de' Medici from Pope Paul II served as devotion and as a reference to a sacred time and place that
the primary source for the expressive systems of Renai.ssance waited to be rekindled in both a present guise and in the
dramatic paintings.^'' Such collections furnished an effective model, or prototype, situated in the future.
backdrop for Zuccari's rearticulation of the medieval image In The Encounter of Christ and Veronica, Zuccari integrated
in the modern altarpiece. The icon, collected with the anti- reflections of the woodcut into the painted altarpiece, rein-
quarian and philological zeal of Renaissance humanism, pro- scribing the image of Christ as an object of modern contem-
vided a new basis for the authority of the art of painting. plation. This reinstantiation of the woodcut forms the repre-
These antiquarian interests did not accept the classicist schol- sentational core arotmd which Zuccari constrticted his
ars' view that icons lacked artistic value, and as scholars like narrative. His ability to create, with the aid of the woodcut, a
Vico gave visual expression to their antiquarian fascination, beautiful C>hrist that focuses devotional attention within a
they also drew attention to something beyond the age and narrative context is his greatest achievement with this altar-
history of the ancient artifacts: their value as potential objects piece.
of artistic imitation. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Zuccari was not an
Like icons, woodcuts constittited a source of authenticity in adept of the Counter-Reformation theory of imitation based
the early modern age. Christopher Wood has stressed the on the idea of style and decorum, or appropriateness to
significance of the woodcut as a means of transferring mean- purpose, but rather an advocate of the continuum between
ing from work to work and of effecting an assimilation of Renaissance and medieval values and the memory of his
various kinds of images to a single form."*'' The referential brother, Taddeo Zticcari, whose erudite combination of tra-
relation of the woodcut to other images made possible an dition and art had a significant influence on Annibale Car-
extension of the sacred original, amplifying its miraculous racci, Caravaggio, and many Roman painters even after his
powers and visual qualities as well as the substitutional func- untimely death in 1566."*" In Zuccari's Lament of Painting, as
tion that the woodcut originally filled. In the context of late shown in Cornelis Cort's 1579 print (Fig. 6), disegno and
medieval piety, woodcuts were primarily efficacious instru- intelligenza are not presented as the inspirational and innova-
ments of prayer, reflecting an acknowledgment of the tive concepts on which an image type would be invented.
428 DECEMBER 2011 VOLUME XCIII NUMBER 4
Zuccari instead identified paindng with a nude figure seen
from the back, the personification of xiera intelligenza as an
aspect of execution and the good disegtio that painters attain
in the art-making process itself. The allegorical representa-
tion as an evocadve means of expressing original and witty
ideas was a commonplace of the Renaissance print. It subse-
quently allowed for efforts to formulate a compelling state-
ment of the ardst's stattis in the Counter-Reformation's cli-
mate of upheaval and tmcertainty, as Tristan Weddigen
observed.^^ In 1572 Cort engraved Zuccari's Calumny of
Apelles, in which Zuccari formed an analogy between the
classical account of Apelles' calumny and the unfavorable
status of the artist in an image of pointed allusions to injtistice
and misunderstanding as the forces hostile to creativity. Zuc-
cari revealed a marked sensidvity to Renaissance printmak-
6 Cornelis Cort after Zuccari, Lament
of Painting, 1579, engraving, upper
plate 14'/4 X 21!/H in. (36.2 X 53.7
cm), lower plate 14% X 21 in. (37.3 X
53.4 cm). Kupferstichkabinett,
Staatliche Museen, Berlin (artwork in
the public domain; photograph by
Joerg P. Andere, provided by Bildarchiv
Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource,
NY)
ing, especially to Andrea Mantegna's convincing plea in sup-
port of Apelles' moral point in his Calumny of Apelles of 1505.
The revisions that Mantegna brought to Lucian's ekphrasis
were meant to stress the genuine defense of art embodied in
the allegory of his drawing.'* It was this real sense of allegor-
ical representation as a feature of the Renaissance print that
was reinforced in the Lament of Painting. Zuccari evolved his
own apologia for the moral duty of painting, situated within
late sixteenth-century concerns over imitation and reproduc-
tion.
It was not until 1607 that Zticcari gave his well-known
definition of disegno interno in his L'idea de' pittori, scultori et
architetti, published in Turin. Inemie Gerards-Nelis.sen has
aptly drawn attention to a number of art historians who, on
the basis of an unsubstantiated reladon with his Idea, have

misinterpreted Zuccari's Lament ofPaintingits an apologia for
imitation.*' In Zticcari's Lament, the smaller painting in the
upper zone shows Faith holding a cross and halting Fortune
at the head of her monstrous train. Here Zuccari maintains a
Renaissance tradition according to which Faith is closely
associated with Justice. This was not the only occasion when
Zuccari made a convincing plea for Faith and Justice as the
art of painting's closest allies. The drawings illustrating the
life of his brother Taddeo, the Parta virtutis of 1581 (which
involved him in a libel action), and the Allegory of the Liberal
Arts all established an unequivocal bond between art and
virtue.'^^ The desire for virtu also reflected an interest in a
long-standing intellectual and academic tradition meant to
raise the status of the vistial arts, one that prompted the
Carracci Academy to open under the name Accademia degli
Desiderosi, alluding to a desire for virtu, only later changed
in the 1590s to the Accademia degli Incamminad, or those
who had embarked on their studies as academy members.**
The acknowledgment that art belongs to a category differ-
ent from imitation divided reformers, or adherents of Renais-
sance values like the Carracci, from advocates of the new
principles of Cotmter-Reformation humanism. A model of
imitation involving stylistic invention was striving for recog-
nition, and it soon came to a head in the dispute between
Domenichino and Giovanni Lanfranco. Domenichino's Last
Communion of Saint Jerome, completed in 1614 for the high
altar of S. Girolamo della Carita in Rome (Fig. 7), was osten-
sibly a reinvention, on the level of style, of the contrasting
rendition of the same pictorial subject by Agostino Carracci
from 1592 (Fig. 8).'^' When Lanfranco latinched his attack on
Domenichino, he objected to this "invention" as an act of
plagiarism and a deliberate downgrading of the status of
Agostino's Communion. Richard Spear's obseiTation that Lan-
franco did not see points of convergence between painting
and the theory of imitation offers a framework for under-
standing Lanfranco's irritation at Domenichino's invenzi-
one:''^' Lanfranco encouraged recognition of Agostino's Com-
munion as opera prima, or prototype, through François
Perrier's etching based on a drawing made by Lanfranco
himself (Fig. 9).*'' Lanfranco had grounds for his grievance
because the Communion of Saint Jerome had no established
pictorial tradition before Agostino Carracci. Indeed, Renais-
sance painters avoided it as a problematic subject in the wake
of Desiderius Erasmus's criticism of the content of two spu-
rious letters perpetuating a legendary story that would be
relayed in the two paintings. Ecclesiastical intervention man-
aged to reaffirm the written source, as is made clear by the
Hieronymite Fray Miguel Salinas in 1563 and José de
Sigüenza, the librarian of El Escorial, in 1595."
Lanfranco perceived Domenichino's Last Communion to be
disengaged from a substitutional conception of the image's
place in time and in relation to a prior work. His complaint
echoed the early sixteenth-century mistrust of images that
tended to wander from their prototypes or simply disre-
garded the referential power of artifacts. Yet Lanfranco was
less, if at all, interested in canonizing Agostino's Communion
than in pointing out Domenichino's lack of a link back to a
prototype that would make the contemporary image secure.
The observation that Domenichino's mechanism of imitation
amounted to theft reveals Lanfranco's fury over a mere re-
ZUCCARI'S ENCOUNTER OF CHRIST AND VERONICA OF 1.594 429
flexive context or an artifact too obviously grounded in the
contemporary interest in stylistic invention.
The perception that Agostino's Communion earned a refer-
ential status among early modem artifacts was grasped by
Lanfranco within the framework of printmaking. Lanfranco's
drawing after Agostino for Perrier's etching rested on a novel
understanding of the print as the peculiar domain for the
artist's choice of models and personal evolution in light of
the seminal relationship between Marcantonio Rainiondi
and Raphael, which brought about a turning point in the
thematics of transmissions in print technology.'" Attempts
like Lanfranco's to develop as a designer of engravings were
especially suited to the maintenance of Renaissance values
after the Council of Trent, when these receded in the wake of
patrons' demands and a consumerist approach to printmak-
ing that even Vasari would deplore.'^'' Lanfranco cultivated
the perception of printmaking as Raphael's particular do-
main in a suite of etchings after Raphael's Vatican Logge that
he made with Sisto Badalocchio in 1607.'" He dedicated the
etchings to Annibale Carracci in order to underscore once
more that Raphael was the driving force behind his under-
standing of the relation of painter and engraver, an under-
standing that could not but expose the divergence between
Lanfranco and Domenichino." In his dispute with Dome-
nichino regarding the Last Communion of Saint Jerome, Lan-
franco artictilated his defense of Agostino's original in terms
of the relation between painter and engraver, and he saw in
Agostino's Last Communion an authoritative source of
(printed) replication.
Zuccari tmderstood the cost of sacrificing free expression
to the reinstantiation of prototypes. He aimed for a reflective,
self<onscious rearticulation of late medieval imagery within
his altarpieces and a dramatization of religious images that
would carefully explore the narrative potential of the atithor-
itative prototype. Zuccari's task was complicated in a late
sixteenth-century context where different temporal models
of the image were coming into conflict, nowhere more clearly
than in the realm of religious images. We have seen how
Domenichino launched one powerful model in proposing
the replacement of Agostino's image with his own. Lanfranco
railed against the work that reinvented rather than repeated
the prior work, for repetition staged difference for him and
imposed a challenge to the artistic mind. While Lanfranco
propounded an artistic process aligned with the Renaissance,
Domenichino became absorbed with the execution of Coun-
ter-Reformation paintings connected to the rise of new ico-
nography. Domenichino's Last Communion receded into an
ambigtious status, dubious as reliable evidence for the print-
ing process and outside a chain of authoritative substitutions
in painting just at the time when trtith, not fiction, was most
needed for the success of the Counter-Reformation.
Zuccari anticipated Lanfranco's defense of print technol-
ogy implicit in his attack on Domenichino's Last Communion
and at the same time assessed the merits of prints as a foil for
the new direction in religious painting. Zuccari's work was
tied not so much to the expression of an artistic personality—
which lay at the heart of the dispute between Lanfranco and
Domenichino^as to the need to juggle the very real de-
mands and expectations of his age. He had inherited the
concerns about referentiality and authenticity peculiar to the
430 B U L L E T I N D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 V O L U M E XGIII N U M B E R 4
Renaissance, and he refused to generate fictions from the
tradition. Zuccari's S. Prassede altarpiece is distinguished by
its profile portrait of Christ derived from the authoritative
prototypes of both the medallic portraits and statues of Christ
replicated by printmakers and numismatists such as Vico. His
painting reimagines the living Christ on which the profile
portrait had been based and also honors the portrait's claim
to antiquity as established by his Renaissance predecessors.
7 Domenichino, Lcut Communion of
Saint Jerome, 1614, oil on canvas, 13 ft.
9 in. X 8 ft. 4y4 in. (4.19 X 2.56 m).
Vatican Museums, Vatican City
(artwork in the public domain;
photograph provided by Scala/Art
Resource, NY)
Experiments in Renaissance printmaking exerted a tre-
mendous influence on Zuccari in The Encounter of Christ and
Veronica. The establishment of Christ as the center of devo-
donal attendon had broken endrely new ground in engrav-
ings of the Carrying of the Cross, pointing the way to a
narrative emphasis on Christ himself rather than on action
rotadng around him. Albrecht Dürer provided an important
precedent in The Little Passion (Fig. 10), in which he high-
 ZUCCARIS ENC:OVNTER OE CHRIST AND VERONICA OK l.-,94 431

8 Agostino Carracci, iMst Communion

of Saint Jerome, 1592, oil on canvas,
12 ft. 3% X 7 ft. 4'/. in. (3.76 X
2.24 cm). Pinacoteca Nazionale,
Bologna (artwork in the public
domain; photograph provided by
Scala/Art Resource, NY)

lighted Christ and his encounter with Veronica to a higher
dramatic extent than he had in The Great Passion (Fig. 11).
Hendrick Goltzitis evocatively rendered Christ as the protag-
onist of the carrying of the cross in an engraving that singles
out (Christ as the concluding element of the narrative (Fig.
12). Christ bearing the cross here halts all action, establishing
a point beyond which human activity no longer appears
plausible. Zuccari and the Carracci brothers would have
known Goltzius's creative power from the latter's extended
trip to Italy. This gave the Netherlandish artist an opportunity
to exchange prints and to impress the Carracci Academy with
his talent and elaborate technique.'"
432 BULLETIN DECEMBER 2011 VOLUME XCIII NUMBER
9 François Perrier after Agostino Carracci, The Last Communion
of Saint Jeronu, etching, 15'/« X 111/4 in. (38.5 X 28.5 cm). The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick
Fund, 1926 (artwork in the public domain; photograph © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, provided by Art Resource, NY)
Renaissance Antecedents versus the Rise of Legalistic
Religious Imagery
In The Encounter of Christ and Veronica, Zuccari's focus on
Christ recalls Dûrer's and Goltzius's stress on figura, or God's
presence, in a narradve context. Erich Auerbach has called
attendon to the transferences of meaning reflected hy figura
in a series of typological associations in late antique and
cla.ssical exegesis, with profound implications for the histor-
ical reality and consistency o{ figura as opposed to the figura
of the rhetoricians.'''' The figura disrupts the flow of discourse
in that it belongs to a narrative sequence subordinated to an
uldmate truth that is enacting the model or prototype situ-
ated in the future. Auerbach also noted that the Greek ety-
mology oifigura contained the idea of molding or impressing
a form."*^ Eigura had direct implications for the ninth-century
discourse on the icon as artifact. Theodore of Studios used
figura'dnd icon interchangeably to contribute to the construc-
tion of a strongly formalist account of Byzandne art.** Con-
demning as outdated and obsolete all forms of representa-
don that would associate the icon with the sign or symbol, this
formalist discourse sought to establish the figura as the essen-
dal model of the Christian image.
The argument that the Chrisdan icon directly descends
from an archetype had particular relevance for the post-
4
10 Albrecht Dürer, Christ Carrying the Cro.fs (The Littlf Passion),
1509, woodcut, 5 X 37/8 in. (12.7 X 9.7 cm) (artwork in the
public domain)
Tridentine desire to assert the contemporary authority of
many religious images. In terms of artistic pracdce, the call
for consistency between icon and archetype was sustained by
a nodonal model of producdon for which the ardfact was a
substitute for the original. Zuccari submitted his altarpiece to
one such act of legitimate subsdtudon, just as his Renaissance
predecessors had done when they cast their artifacts in the
mold of late medieval images. Ringbom recognized variations
of the Milanese woodcut in many Venetian formulations of
the solitary Christ, as well as in other figurai narratives of the
Italian Renaissance."*'' These experiments sprang from a fas-
cination with the half-length format of the Byzantine icon,
here adapted for the indmacy of the "dramatic close-up" view.
A number of fifteenth-century Netherlandish and Venedan
paintings explored the affecdve interactions of characters
viewed from close up, making a significant contribution to
the early history of portraiture that also had ramifications for
the medium of sculpttire. Donatello's images of the Madonna
and Child combined the half-length format of Byzandne
icons with medallic profile portraits. The historical citadons
in Donatello's Madonna dei Pazzi (Fig. 13), Madonna Chellini,
and Madonna Goretti Miniati derive from an understanding of
figura as a means of dislocating time through replication.
Reworking the icon in the medium of sculpture, Donatello
gave to his worLs the same power as an authoritative portrait
of Christ. Jeanette Kohl's observation that Donatello's busts
reveal an identity between the portrait and the portrayed that
disrupts the particular character of portraiture assumes a full

11 Dürer, Clin.U i.,...,...;^ n,, (Juss (The Great Passion),
ca. 1498-99, woodcut, Í5y8 X llMi in. (39.2 X 28.2 cm)
(artwork in the ptthlic domain)
interrelation between the art of Donatello and forces under-
lying the immutable beauty of figura.*^
In adapting the profile portrait to the dramatic encounter
between Christ and Veronica, Zuccari provided a creative
synthesis of Renaissance tradition with the early modern
revival of late medieval devotional practice. The early mod-
ern age encouraged portrayals of Christ carrying the cross,
along with the deliberate medievalisms that wotild shape
Zticcari's approach. The power and integrity of medieval
religious imagery dovetailed with Renaissance efforts to inte-
grate icons and relics into the representation of Christ. In the
sixteenth century, reinstantiation of medieval images took
the form of a dramatization of the Christian icon. Zuccari's
determination to strengthen the narrative element of his
altarpiece responded directly to the discourse on the benefits
of Christ's death for the internal reform of the individual. In
the post-Tridentine decades, this attitude specifically re-
sumed the late medieval insistence on Imitatio Christi and the
accompanying adaptation of the icon."**
Zuccari must have gained access to the important Christ
Carrying the Cross by Filippo Mazzola in Parma (Fig. 14),
where he was led both by his vivid interest in Correggio and
the urging of the Carracci.*" Mazzola's 1504 painting relies
on the northern Italian tradition of devozione privata that
ZUCCARIS ENCOUNTER OF CH/ilST AND VERONICA OF l.')94 433
••.•}
it Hendrick Golt/.ius, 1 he Bcimng aj llic Cws.s, cngiaviiig,
7y4 X 5'/« in. (19.7 X 13 cm) (artwork in the public domain)
drove the altarpieces of Antonello da Messina, Giovanni
Bellini, and Giorgione. The hold this more personal inter-
pretation of Christian spirittiality exerted on these masters
resulted in the central position of Christ's image in Renais-
sance painting. In Parma, the northern configurations of
private devotion were heightened by the local embrace of
Erasmus's Enchiridion militis christiani, which proposed the
new ideals of the philosophia Christi.^ The Erasmian unity of
eruditio and pietas was predicated on a Christian humanism
concerned with recovering both spiritual and intellectual
resources. In Parma such ideas were singled out for special
comment in the reform-minded quarters that practiced pietas
interiorizzata (inward religiosity), insisting on faith in the ben-
efits of Christ's Crucifixion and on a deeper Christian spiri-
tuality than instittitional practices could offer.''' Mazzola be-
longed to a Parmesan family of respected artists who were
practitioners of this pietas interiorizzata.^^
Mazzola's Christ Carrying the Cross derives from this Parme-
san circle and its interest in establishing the true likeness of
Christ. The painting echoes unmistakably the Milanese wood-
cut in its careful graphic expression and distribtition of tonal
effects. The graphic quality of the panel refers back to the
434 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2011 VOLUME XCIII NUMBER 4
13 Donatello, Madonna dm Pazzi, ca. 1420, marble, 29y8 X
27y8 in. (74.5 X 69.5 cm). Staadiche Museen, Berlin
(artwork in the public domain; photograph by Joerg P.
Anders, provided by Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/
Art Resource, NY)
most striking details of the Milanese woodcut, stressing the
roughness of the wooden cross while submitting Christ's
likeness as depicted in the woodcut to narrative development.
Mazzola emphasized the meditative quality of the image by
oriendng Christ frontally and sho'wing the haunted expres-
sion of his eyes. The panel is replete with powerful descriptive
details stich as Christ's arched eyebrows and the contrast of
his pallor with his locks of dark hair. Christ's regal attire
recalls northern renditions of the subject, as does Mazzola's
experimental emtilation in tempera of the Netherlandish oil
technique and the effects of light, color, and texture it could
achieve. The artist would have known the many Netherland-
ish images in collections around the city of Parma.'''' While
Mazzola had an interest in these paindngs' visual effects, he
primarily strove to capture not the realism associated with
Netherlandish art but its emotional impact through dramatic
gestures.
The spiritual ethos embodied in the Imitatio Christi took its
most compelling form with Lorenzo Lotto, whose reform-
minded character stands out as pardcularly significant among
his Italian contemporaries. His Christ Carrying the Cross (Fig.
15) uses the painter's brush to emulate the subtleties of a
hand-colored early sixteenth-century Lombard woodcut (Fig.
16).^"* Lotto translated into the format of the altarpiece the
woodcut's compelling plea that believers embrace the cross
in their own Imitatio Christi. Lotto's usage of sfumato in the
tormented expression of Christ and of metallic effects in the
crown and armor recalls the refinements of the Lombard
woodcut. Drawing on a printed image. Lotto was able to
highlight the most significant elements of the biblical narra-
tive of the carrying of the cross.
14 Filippo Mazzola, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1504, tempera on
panel, 12y8 X 8% in. (31.5 X 21.9 cm). Galleria Nazionale,
Parma, inv. no. 1090 (artwork in the public domain;
photograph by permission of the Ministero per i Beni el le
Attività Culturali—Galleria Nazionale di Parma)
Openness to painted and print media was integral to Lot-
to's ability to visualize textual sources. The letters in his
account book demonstrate the quintessential union between
Lotto's paintings and the Italian reform movement. This
movement was particularly prominent in northern Italy,
where Lotto lived most of his life and where adherence to sola
fides, or faith alone in the power of the crucified Christ,
registered its greatest popularity. As Adriano Prosperi has
recognized, the spirituality of northern Italy was a beacon for
both reformers and artists seeking a more personal relation-
ship with Christ in a time of historical and confessional
crisis.''"^ Lotto's paintings clearly reveal his profound involve-
ment with the Imitation of Christ, as expounded in Pietro da
Lucca's Dello imitar di Christo, which Lotto owned.'"'*'
In the post-Tridentine decades, the Roman Catholic
Church's official promulgation of doctrinal legitimacy dis-
couraged this 'view of faith as the personal experience and
inner conviction of the benefits of Christ's Crucifixion. It
survived, however, in the secret activity of the Italian spirituali,
who were both products of the Renaissance and agents of
religious reform in close kinship with the theology of the

15 Lorenzo Lotto, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1526, oil on canvas,
26 X 23% in. (66 X 60 cm). Musée du Lotivre, Paris (artwork
in the public domain; photograph by ThieiTy Le Mage, provided
by Reunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris/Art Resource, NY)
Protestant north." The late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries saw dramatic changes in the concern over devo-
tional contintiity with the Early Christian period that had
prompted Michelangelo's own attempted reform of art."'''^
Michelangelo had propo.sed simply taking religiotis images
back to their forma antiqua in ways that did not comply with
the Counter-Reformation's legalistic affirmation of the con-
tinuity of tradition, expressed in the adherence to moral law
rather than to personal religious faith. In the context of the
Oratorian-led interest in the archaeological remains of the
early Apostolic chtirch, intended to demonstrate the conti-
ntiity with its apostolic origins that the Roman Church had
always professed, a new sense of continuity as evidence of the
legitimacy of the Roman Church superseded the Renaissance
concern with reconstructing venerable image traditions.
The investigations of painters and ecclesiastical theorists
served as the corollary to the post-Tridentine Greek cam-
paign of church reform. Pope Clement VIII's interest in the
Greek Orthodox C^hurch and Byzantine liturgy was an exten-
sion of his broader commitment to the reform of the Roman
Chtirch, with the assistance of Saint Philip Ned and Cardinals
Cesare Baronio, Robert Bellarmine, and Silvio Antoniano.''
Their efforts constituted the sobering conclusion of earlier
attempts at ecclesiastical reform, after the Council of Trent
had prohibited actual ftision of the Roman and Byzantine
rites. The publication in 1568 of the revised Breviarum roma-
num, the traditional prayer book for the divine office, ac-
qtiired instittitional force in 1588 when Pope Sixtus V estab-
lished the Sacred Congregation of Rites and Ceremonies in his
attempt to bring local practices into alignment with Roman
atithority as part of the reform of the Roman Curia.''"
ZUCCARI'S ENCOUNTER OF CHKIST AND VERONICA OF I."!'.)!
GVADA. EL.TVO. BELlGNlO . CREATORE
APORTARE. STAPE3i7\TE .F0<?.ALMÖT .
:. MORTE.
16 Christ Carrying the Cross, Lombard, 1510-25, liaiul-coluicd
woodcut, sheet 2O'/4 X 16% in. (51.5 X 41.5 cm). National
Gallery of Art, Wa.shington, D.C, Pepita Milmote Memorial
Fund, 1984 (artwork in the public domain; ph()togia|3h
provided by National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.)
The post-Tridentine reform of the Roman rites and the
new sacred history were of immediate relevance to artistic
commissions. Emblematic images of the religious order re-
quired considerable attention to the history of their subject
matter, artfully pegged to the principles of clarity and legible
content. The powerful assertion of venerable traditions was
necessary to justify this order's power. The church's sense of
its own antiquity expressed itself in a dependence on, and
fascination with, prototypes. One of these from Byzantine art,
the saintly character placed in the center of the religious
image, often with a frontal orientation, became a prime
feature of post-Tridentine painting. Many ecclesiastical trea-
tises enthusiastically promoted the antiquity of frontally ori-
ented images. Cardinal Carlo Borromeo played a significant
role in formulating the decrees of the Cotincil of Trent, and
in his influential Jnstructiones fahricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae
Him duo, completed in 1577, he presented the dignity of
religious painting as integral to chtirch reform.''' Cardinal
Borromeo was not isolated in his efforts to project a post-
Tridentine prospect back onto Early Christian images. The
Dominican theologian Giovanni Andrea Gilio, who con-
cerned himself with the recovery of venerable image tradi-
tions, defended the old ctilt of images and prized in partic-
ular their frontality, what he called their prosopopeea, in his
1564 Degli errori de'pittori circa I'historie.'^^
Zuccari participated in the Greek campaign of the reform-
ers through altarpieces that self-consciously maintiiined an-
436 BULLETIN DECEMBER 2011 VOLUME XCIII NUMBER 4
17 Miraculous ¡mage of tlw Santissima Annunziata, detail,
Florentine, ca. 1340, fresco. Church of SS. Annunziata,
Florence (artwork in the public domain; photograph provided
by Scala/Art Resource, NY)
dque features, which he nonetheless reinscribed with the
dramatic content of modern paindng. His efforts convinc-
ingly staged the recovery of ancient Roman art, working
within a substitudonal field of cross-references between Re-
nai.ssance engraving and the Byzantine icon. The substitti-
tional effectiveness of the venerable traditions Zuccari recov-
ered meant they could be both recognizably ancient and
functional in a contemporary work. Zuccari's profile Christ at
S. Prassede transcends the specific moment of its creadon,
tesdfying to the enlistment of old images for the reinforce-
ment of contemporaiy authority. By contrast, the Counter-
Reformation interest in establishing historical continuity with
I he Apostolic past implied a sequence of unique creadons,
where every object or event cotild be securely anchored in
linear time.
The Roman Church's campaign for historicist legitimacy
collided with the interests of painters such as Zuccari. The
altarpieces that he created for the Basilica of San Lorenzo in
El Escorial led to a dispute with José de Sigüenza, secretary to
King Philip II and a proponent of the new sacred history of
Hapsburg ab.solutism.*'' After returning to Italy, Zuccari
nonetheless resumed his engagement with Early Chrisdan
images. In his 1594 Encounter of Christ and Veronica, figures
and landscape are organized around a vertical axis that fo-
cuses devodonal and contemplative attention on the figure of
Christ. His image has its basis in a dramatization of the
frontal aspect of the icon while depardng from the frontal
portraits of .saints espoused by Counter-Reformation art the-
orists. This reworking of frontality within the altarpiece for-
mat presented a rival model to the institudonally mandated
cult image. The re.sult was a highly dramatic treatment of the
figure of Christ, with a profile view that reveals Zuccari's
devotion to Renaissance experiments in altar painting.
Zticcari evocadvely adapted the late medieval Milanese
woodcut to his S. Prassede altarpiece by giving the profile
view a new motivation in a narrative moment, the bearing of
the cross. Mantegna had reformed devotional images by turn-
ing them into narratives, creating altarpieces that combine
the dramadc character of the Alberdan istoria with the in-
wardness of devotional images.*''' These qualities allowed the
sacred narrative to function both as cult image and as altar-
piece. A popular narrative stich as the Carrying of the Cross—
circtilated in miniatures, reliefs, and prints—tmdei-went var-
ious transformations, among them Mantegna's and Bellini's
inscription of the Milanese woodcut into the Gospel ac-
count.*''' Mantegna and Bellini repurposed the woodcut to
sittiate Christ's true likeness within a complex narrative. In
the post-Tridentine decades, Zuccari formed a modern link
with the same woodcut in an altarpiece that explored the
dramatic element of Christ's portrait even as it acknowledged
contemporary concerns about the stability of the icon in
narrative contexts.
The memory of late medieval images was significant to the
practice of early modern artists and theorists. Zuccari's ability
to lay stress on a beautifully profiled Christ, and, at the same
time, perpetuating the character of medieval images, reflects
what reformists in the post-Tridentine decades termed "the
beauty of holiness." Zuccari must have been cognizant of the
retrospective of Francesco Bocchi's 1592 treatise Opera di M.
Erancesco Bocchi sopra l'imagine miracolosa della Santissima An-
nunziata di Eirenze. Bocchi asserted that the head of Mary in
the late medieval Annunciation venerated at SS. Annunziata
in Florence (Fig. 17) rivaled the Renaissance canon in
beauty.*''' The Mary of the Annunziata, the central image of
the city and its most beatidful landmark, was ostensibly
painted by angels as the ardst slept. The beauty of holiness
celebrated in the Annunziata remained a powerful element
in reform-minded circles after Trent, even when the demand
for decorous images ended the call for medieval revivals.'"
The miraculous Virgin of the Annunciadon, with its inher-
ent allusions to the Incarnate Word, provoked an important
response at SS. Annunziata, where medieval image rittials
perpetuated the memory of the deceased. Mary's mysterious
appearance was tied to a ritual of figurai transformation, a
long-standing tradition at SS. Annunziata. The image of Mary
crystallized archaic gestures and postures generated by natu-
ral human fear over the life after death, which prompted
people to portray themselves through death masks, as if to
apprehend the unavoidable awaidng them. A stable proto-
type controlled sub.seqtient replicadons, thus restricting the
range of difference carried otit in future portrayals. Aby
Warburg was the first to draw attendon to the tradidon of
ex-votos as evidence of a central episode in the history of
resemblance.*'" Warburg also accepted that it was worth study-
 ZUCCARIS ENCOUNTER OE CHRIS I AND VERONICA OF laSII 437

ing rudimentary art like the waxwork in order to identify a

hierarchy of values by which the perfection of Renaissance art
was attained. The tradition of ex-votos, or bôti, immensely
popular in the late sixteenth century, was particularly empha-
sized at SS. Annunziata. The ex-votos were imprints of a
still-living face, based on the age-old technique of the imago,
or mortuary effigy, a medieval practice meant to connect the
donor with God.'''' It was, as Georges Didi-Huberman has
noted, a resemblance conceived as a sacrificial gift offered to
God in anticipation of the forthcoming life after death. By
performing this Imitatio Christi, believers hoped to defeat
their own death in the image of the resurrected Christ.™
Notwithstanding the cnide and rtidimentaiy character of the
waxworks, they deserve attention not only for the light they
shed on the history of Christianity but also as a repository of
models imitated in Renaissance painting.
The late sixteenth-century survival of the Imitatio Christi vi-à%
predicated on an interest in truthful and inimitable repre-
sentations that could reveal an original through a process of
reproduction and imitation. Implicit associations between
Imitatio Christi and the beauty of holiness, as exemplified by
the Virgin of SS. Annunziata, motivated engravers in their
engagement with historical art. Portraits such as Virgil Solis's
intaglio print of a profile Christ (Fig. 18) possessed the
beauty and holiness sotight by Zuccari in his own profile
C;hrist at S. Prassede. Solis, one of the most prolific German
printmakers of the sixteenth century, celebrated inimitability
as the .single most influential quality of his engravings.'^' He
no longer used the roundel format for his profile portrait of
(Christ, as in Vico's and Btirgkmair's portraits, which gave this 18 Virgil Solis, ¡iust of Christ in Profile, ca. 1550s, engraving
visual evidence of the medals as details gleaned from the (artwork in the public domain)
textual sotirce, nor did he appear interested in the medallic
format's suggestion of authenticity. Solis illustrates a higher
degree of liberation and emancipation from the philological
and archaeological ambitions of the print revealed in the authenticity of effigies, tombs, death masks, and epigraphic
preservation mechanism of the original Christ by treating monuments.'^'' They correlate the ancient understanding of
concrete evidence as an act of creative intervention. Solis the icon with modern practices of replication, leading to the
belonged to those who divined the danger inherent in rep- partictilarly significant conclusion that their makers' preoc-
lication: that it would make it difficult, even to the best- ctipation with finding authentic images of Christ eqtialed that
trained eye, to distinguish between the fabrication of visual of earlier ages. The extension of the referential authority of
evidence and an artist's imitation of a worthy prototype. His cult images like the Virgin of SS. Annunziata into the print
bold graphic reinterpretation of Christ's physiognomy as it medium reinscribed the medieval icon within individualized
appeared in the medallic portraits seemed to him perfectly compositions, in a very different manner from the new sacred
compatible with his interest in authentic likeness. After all, he iconography of the post-Tridentine era. Vico's interest in
still conformed to historical evidentiary standards with a clear authentic representation led him to derive his replicated
identifying label in the form of an inscription at the bottom Christian images from ancient portraits of Christ and the
of the image. saints. A numismatist. Vico corrected and supplemented tex-
Vico may have admired creative engravers such as Solis, tual sources with the assistance of Roman and Greek coins. "'
whereas he criticized the fabrication of historical evidence He inaugurated the study of a specific aspect of ancient
apparent in prints with unfounded titles and inaccurate numismatics he called sacred imagery on the basis of his
dates.''^ Vico's insistence on authenticity resulted in the ear- conviction that the deities reproduced on coins bore a true
liest systematic treatment of art forgery, an interest he ex- resemblance to Roman statues. Vico formed a link between
tended from numismatics to his own engraved designs after two types of replication, the discourse on engraving and the
ancient and contemporary art.*^'^ It was within the framework reproduction on coins, that would prove indispensable for
of this advanced concept of the historicity of the art of the truth claims of his printed portraits of ancient figures.
engraving that Vico's series Portraits and Medals included a Vico's concern with veracity as the essential attribute of
profile Christ of a beauty and serenity that reanimated the sacred imageiy sheds light on the late sixteenth-century con-
late medieval Christian image within the modern religious cept of the beauty of holiness. For the ecclesiastical program
engraving (Fig. 5). The engraved portraits and their fascina- of reform set in motion after Trent, the cla.ssical beauty of
tion with prototypes may be said to carry on the claims to Greco-Roman statues played an essential role in the effort to
438 DKCiE.MlíER 2 0 1 1 VOLL ML XCill NUMBER
demonstrate condnuities with the past.'*' Luba Freedman has
underscored how ecclesiastical patrons and theorists such as
Gabrielle Paleotti and Federico Borromeo demanded that
artists adhere to the classical beauty of pagan statues in the
creation of Christian paindngs for the post-Tridendne canon
of sacred art.'^ By contrast, for Vico and like-minded engrav-
ers, the affecting power of classical beauty constituted a po-
tent reminder of how tied up stich an ideal had been to true
likeness in both the past and present tense. The beauty of
holiness attests, therefore, to the chasm between the stylistic
choices of clerics invesdng Counter-Reformadon art with
classicist rhetoric for the sake of demonstradng historical
continuity and the pursuits of engravers preoccupied with
truthfulness of representadon.
Vico's Jesus Christ is an authentic reworking of Christ's
image that secures engraving as the essential link between
ancient past and modern artisdc future. Christ's replicated
features affirm a new category of cult image that translates
Christ's likeness into modern .sacred imagery based on the
referential authority of the documentary image. The merit of
engraving was to reframe Christ icons and to reinscribe them
in a proce.ss of reliable transmissions referring back to a true
effigy of Christ. The print discovered its vocation as a power-
ful instrument of knowledge and at the same dme as a
reliable extension of relics, sacred portraits, and miraculous
images.^*^ Engravers did not yield to the stylisdc choices of
many Counter-Reformation ecclesiastical figures and men
of letters, instead pursuing the beauty of holiness as a mark
of veracity in a series of replications connecting back to the
most ancient images of Christ. Arotmd these Renaissance
reinscriptions of the icon as profile portrait, Zuccari con-
structed his narrative of the bearing of the cross.
Architecture and the Creation of Zuccari's Early Modem
Altarpiece
Most of Zuccari's contemporaries looked to the past to pro-
vide them with an authorized canon of artistic models. We
have seen how both Lanfranco and Domenichino made ref-
erence back to the Last Communion of Saint Jerome oí Agostino
Carracci in disdncdve ways. While Lanfranco made explicit
the substitutional character of his drawing after Agostino's
opera prima, Domenichino dismissed the latter in order to
ground his invendon in the Counter-Reformation's culture
of textual authority. Zuccari's interest in authoritadve arche-
types was reflected in his extraordinary engagement with
Renaissance architectural thought. In 1607 he published his
treatise L 'idea de'pittori, scultori et architetti, in which he advised his eftbrts with Renaissance archaeology by imitating the
the architect to be both a painter, who must master disegno in
its dotible meaning of drawing and design, and a sculptor,
who designs bodies and forms in ways that respond directly to
the rules of architecture and the classical orders.™ Zuccari's
description of the inextricable bond between architecture,
sculpttire, and painting would later serve as an inspiration for
Diego Velazquez, who deliberately sought to claim the power
and prestige of architecture for painting. The concept of the
painter-architect would also help Rubens to become one of
the most outstanding artisdc personalities of his age and the
most disdngtiished disseminator of Italian Renaissance forms
in the Low Cotmtries.""
Zuccari explicitly patterned his notion of the ardst-archi-
4
tect on Michelangelo, thereby parting company with the
classicizing aesthedcs then in a.scendancy. Zuccari main-
tained architecture's tinion with the sister arts of sculpture
and painting, endorsing personal creativity as expressed in
individualized compositions that established secure links to
the past. Cammy Brothers has stres.sed the singularity of
Michelangelo's dependence in architecture on the figurative
character of his drawings."' Michelangelo's condnual trans-
formadon and refashioning of his ideas were bound up in the
rigorous study of formal syntax and the exercise of his deep
knowledge of andquity. He elevated the andquarian study of
architectural monuments to a fundamentally creative enter-
prise by resisting the conventional canon of established mod-
els.«^
In his framing of Christ's likeness within the narrative of
Veronica's veil, Zuccari acted in the manner of those medi-
eval architects who made replicas of the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre in Jerusalem to reinstandate this most prestigious
prototype.**' The architectural model of the Holy Sepulchre
ensured a fitdng context for the Christian cult and, in that
sense, was aligned with Zuccari's pictorial efforts to inscribe
the true likeness of Christ into the narrative of its making.
Zuccari's solution arose from the intermingling of Italian and
Spanish culture, on the one hand, and of an emergent clas-
sicism with Gothic survivals, on the other.
Zuccari's Spanish sojourn of 1585 to 1588 at the invitadon
of Philip II to paint the high altarpiece in the Basilica of San
Lorenzo at El Escorial, though unsuccessful, gave him re-
newed assurance regarding the artist-architect theory he
would formalize in wridng in 1607. Unlike in Italy, where
Gothic architecture decreased in viability after the second
half of the fifteenth century, the construction of the cathe-
drals of Seville (1506), Segovia (1526), and Salamanca (1510,
resumed in 1589) ensured the style's condnued prestige in
Spain throughout the sixteenth centtiry and beyond.*** As
Earl Rosenthal recognized, the cathedral of Granada, de-
signed in 1528 by one of Spain's greatest Italian-trained
architects, Diego de Siloe, was at once an image of the Holy
Sepulchre and a Renais.sance church that differed from me-
dieval copies precisely in its painstaking recovery of the orig-
inal architectural plan of the Constantinian monument.**"^
The Siloe project combined a tradidonal nave with a rottinda
derived from the Early Chrisdan rotunda of the Anastasis.
Siloe surpassed his medieval predecessors in basing his cathe-
dral not on the Anastasis alone but on the entire complex of
the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Siloe implicitly idendfied
original spatial disposition of the monument, unlike medi-
eval copies that had evinced little interest in its Early Chris-
dan state.***^
The replication of the rotunda and aedicule of the Holy
Sepulchre presaged the competing claims between model
and nonmodel in the context of Renaissance architecture.**^
Print technology reproduced the church's current architec-
tural state rather than the original Constantinian plan of
325-26, when a cupola and aedicule were built to shelter the
recendy rediscovered tomb of Christ. Subsequent destruc-
dons and reconstrucdons undertaken by either Muslim or
Chrisdan riilers remained consistent with the original Con-
stantinian plan of a rotunda, nave, and porch nested together

to form one architectural whole. The aedicule reproduced in
paint by Jan van Scorel in his 1528-29 group portrait of the
Brotherhood of Jerusalem Pilgrims of Haarlem may provide
one reliable depiction.**** This was the architectural frame-
work dtiplicated in both medieval and quattrocento art. It
proved as difficult to stippress the many popular legends
surrounding the Holy Sepulchre as to jettison the religious
and artistic traditions of the past. Renaissance thotight did
not banish the many variations introduced by pilgrims' ac-
counts but rather allotted them a fixed place in the typology
of the Holy Sepulchre.
Siloe's cathedral was a Renaissance reimagining of the
Early (Christian form of the Holy Sepulchre, based on the
belief that the cruciform choir and rotunda were originally
joined and that the church had been built in the Roman
style."" The lack of reliable models stimtilated the Renais-
sance architect to ponder the basic architectural strticttire of
the Holy Septilchre, from which centrally planned church
buildings had derived. Siloe used his design to reconcile the
increasing refinements of printed data with the receding
power of the strticttire's myth. He succeeded in placing his
new building on an equally authoritative footing with the
chain of images of the Holy Sepulchre that had exerted a
massive influence on artists for centuries.
The model's survival throtigh reliable replication allowed
for the thematization of such transmissions in painting. It was
the foil whereby figura, here the profile Christ in the S.
Prassede altarpiece, could emerge in a sixteenth-century nar-
rative painting informed by the icon and the acheiropoietic
image. The centrality of Zuccari's Christ figure in his altar-
piece may be seen as an interpretation of the centralized
plans of Byzantine architecttire. Pertinently, the Olgiati Cha-
pel, where The Encounter of Christ and Veronica still hangs, is
the pendant of the ninth-century S. Zeno Chapel, located
across from it in the main nave of the S. Prassede Basilica
(Fig. 19). S. Prassede was one of many chtirches in Rome and
its outskirts associated with an unprecedented campaign of
church building from 380 to 480 that followed the Constan-
tinian expansion of the Roman Empire in the west. Richard
Krautheimer noted that church building did not regain the
atithority it had held in the post-Constantinian age until the
seventeenth centtiry.'"' Nonetheless, the powerful and endur-
ing legacy of the church under Emperor Constantine mani-
fested itself up to the post-Tridentine age in the remodelings
of Roman churches, a process that exemplified through the
centuries the sustained relevance of the fourth- and fifth-
century Roman basilica.^'
Clerical writers in the late sixteenth century particularly
stressed the continuity of modern cultic sites such as S.
Prassede with the early Roman basilicas. The lore of Early
C/hristian religiosity permeating these sites was especially as-
sociated with the halcyon days of the Church following the
reign of Constantine. As John Shearman recognized, the
dome and mosaic decoration of the S. Zeno Chapel re-
claimed the eastern tradition of the central medallion of
Christ Pantocrator.'*'"^ The Counter-Reformation joined im-
ages that directly addressed the viewer with the immensity of
Christ's sacrifice to an obsessive concern with clear and tm-
ambigtious content. Such restrictions imposed by convention
and decortim cast Christ as the protagonist of a mere histor-
ZUCCARIS ENCOUNTER OF CHRIST AND VERONICA OF l.')94 439
ical drama. Amid post-Tridentine attention to sacred iconog-
raphy, Zuccari confronted the challenge of the highly regti-
lated religious image's frontal character. Alternatively, one
might see his solution as an altarpiece reinterpretation of the
S. Zeno Chapel that conflates the intimacy of the devotional
woodcut with the narrative of Veronica's veil. The creative
synthesis of architecture, woodcut, and portrait medallion
staged a heightened level of referential power akin to the
reactivation of the mosaic on the dome of the S. Zeno Cha-
pel.
Zuccari spared no effort in his attempt to engage the
mosaic ceiling of the S. Zeno Chapel without resorting to the
actual depiction of mosaic, as had been done in the back-
grounds of many significant quattrocento paintings.'*'' The
mosaic floor and ceiling decorations of Roman churches
stich as S. Pudenziana, where Zuccari was charged with the
drawings for the restoration of the Caetani Chapel, consti-
tuted powerful reminders of the enduring impact of Byzan-
tine art on the west, as preserved in originals as well as in
fifteenth-century Cosmatesque reconstructions that intro-
duced Byzantine patterns to the flooring of the chtirches of
Rome and in the stirrotinding province of Latium.^"* Like the
icon and the acheiropoietic image, mosaic shared in the
authority granted to antiquity in the Renais.sance.'''' The high-
pitched emotion of late medieval images and references to
ancient art were constants of Zuccari's career, both in his
stance toward religious images and in his sense of how the
revival of antiquity had brought about a renewal of the art of
painting. Earlier, we saw how Zticcari repre.sented the achei-
ropoietic image within the narrative of the medieval legend,
a solution utterly different from El Greco's or Zurbarán's
archaizing attempts to imitate the acheiropoietic portrait
itself in the medium of painting. Zuccari's image, by contrast,
narrates its own production history with the same authorita-
tive power as architecttiral models derived from the Holy
Sepulchre complex or the Christ Pantociator in the dome of
the S. Zeno Chapel.
Like any Byzantine vault or dome, that of S. Zeno replicates
the likeness of Christ Pantocrator in the medium of mosaic,
inscribing itself within the substitutional logic at work in the
central plans of Byzantine architecture. The need to adapt
the mosaic to figura had become a critical commonplace after
Constantine, and it would have ruled Zuccari's logic in the
medium of painting. By associating figura with the retroacti-
vating art of the S. Zeno mosaic, Zticcari attempted to affirm
the antiquity of his own panel painting and its viability as the
medium for the narrative account of Veronica's veil. But his
approach departed from the reprodtiction of fictive mosaic
backgrounds in quattrocento painting. Zuccari's chief ptir-
pose was twofold: to subordinate his painting to the larger
identity of the basilica and to bring his brand of antiquarian-
ism back into association with secure modes of replication.
The Basilica of S. Prassede stands as a particularly revealing
case study of Cardinal Baronio's fervent desire to demon-
strate the continuity of the Roman Catholic Church with
Early Christian practice, artictilated as early as 1588 in the
first volume of his Annales ecclesiastici.^^' S. Prassede served as
the model for a number of basilicas restored in the ninth
century to house relics tran.sferred from the abandoned Rc>
man catacombs. When Cardinal Carlo Borromeo set out to
440 •'^'*' B L I I . I . E T I N U E C : E M B E R ' ¿ O i l V O L U M K X C I I I N U M B K R 4
redecorate his titular church of S. Prassede, it was the resdng
place of some twenty-three hundred martyrs whose bones
had been rescued from the catacombs by Pope Paschal I in
the early ninth centuiy. Paschal's accommodation of an ever-
growing cult of martyrs gave eloquent testimony to the es-
teem in which the medieval Roman church held its Constan-
dnian past." The previous fifteen years of church building
under Constandne had particularly stressed the cult of mar-
tyrs and holy sites, bringing abotit architectural interventions
in both the size and plan of the basilicas to reflect their new
functions as martyria and funeral halls. Kiautheimer noted
that the Constantinian basilica exerted a distinct influence
throughout Early Chrisdan dmes, engendering later Roman
structures that merged funerary and cultic functions.''** In the
early ninth century, when Pope Paschal I combined the mar-
tyrium shrine and funeral space at S. Prassede, he decisively
reanimated the Constantinian idea. He reinforced this com-
mitment by commissioning large mosaics in celebradon of
the relics' tran.slation. Like the mosaics at the Roman basilica
19 Pantocrator and Angels, detail of the
vault, S. Zeno Chapel, 9th century,
mosaic. Basilica of S. Prassede, Rome
(artwork in the public domaiti;
photograph provided by Scala/Art
Resource, NY)
of SS. Nereo e Achilleo, also commissioned in the ninth
century, the S. Prassede mosaics were reflective of the inter-
relationship between relics and images (Fig. 20).''''
Proponents of the Counter-Reformation drew on the te-
nacity of these early tradidons, with the rediscovery of the
catacombs as a source of saints' relics suidng their adaptation
of historical pracdces to contemporary imperadves. The new
tirgency of establishing historical continuities with the early
Apostolic church expressed itself in a sustained interest in the
catacombs during the late sixteenth century. Their rediscov-
ery brought on a stream of saints' relics largely untapped
since the pondficates of Paul I (757-67) and Paschal I (817-
24).'"" In the Cotmter-Reformation, the heroic age of Early
Christian history became increasingly associated with the cat-
acombs and the central role they were believed to have
played in the activity of the early martyrs who were buried
there. The pope himself sought to harness the sanctity of
these relics to confirm the Apostolic past of the Roman see
and to profit from the rediscovery of venerable traditions.

20 Byzantitic tnosaics, apse and
tritttriphal arch, 9th century. Basilica
oi' S. Prassede, Rome (artwork in the
public dotnaiti; photograph provided
by Scala/Art Resource, NY)
SitrtotT Ditchfield has percepdvely observed that the relics
were aboveground, and "rediscovery" is a problemadc de-
notirinadoti for these acts of relocation and tran.sladon.""
Clement VIII attetided the closing ceremony of Baronio's
carefully staged translatiotr of the bones of the early martyr
saints Nereo and Achilleo to the recently restored church
bearing their name in 1597, the year when Baronio was made
a cardinal.'"^ Like SS. Nereo e Achilleo, the S. Cesáreo
Basilica was a product of the Roman Counter-Refortnation's
ititerest in restorations.'"'' The resumption of the nitith-cen-
tttry pttrsuit of t elics opened a whole new area of ecclesiasti-
cal studies, which has subsequently been termed Christian
archaeology. In concert with Baronio's Annales ecclesiastici,
this re.search laid the foundation for the new ecclesiastical
historiography and for innovadons in the subject matter of
teligious paitrting.'"'*
Zttccari adhered to this ctilture of relics and cult images,
and his S. Prassede altarpiece reverberates with a tragic
awareness of the Christian past. But the archaeological rigor
of the new teligious painting did not suit his ideal of the
itrdi\idttalized composition as a reinstantiation of the medi-
eval icon. The cotivendon and decortrm demanded by the
tiew historiography conflicted with the endeavors of artists
like Zuccari, who drew on ancient figurative sources in an
attempt to establish them as models worth imitatitig beyond
their age atrd historical value.
The S. Zeno dome and its Byzantine mosaics modeled one
way of enlisting the attthendcity of Christian artifacts for the
dramatic eticounter of Christ and Veronica, rather than for
the stadc display of a relic. The profile Christ holding the
center of devotional attendon in the S. Prassede altarpiece
represents the tnodern restructttrirrg of the directed center of
the Byzandne dome tradition. Zuccari's Encounter of Christ
and Veronica is a compelling substitttte for early Christocentric
itrrages and for relics of the kind venerated in medieval
churches. The creation of religious images devoted to cele-
btating the artistic merit of Early Christian works was by no
tneans as ttticondidonal as the Counter-Reformation em-
brace of the cult of relics. In combining a heartfelt devodon
to the artistic remains of early Christianity with an acknowl-
edgtnetrt of their aesthedc shortcomitrgs, images like Zucca-
ZUCCARI'S M t:H Oh CHHISÍ AM) \ ¡-.ROÑICA OK I.Ï94 441
ri's altarpiece claimed diat a lack of visttal grace tnight itself
be an indticement to piety.
Restaging the Altarpiece Paradigms
Zuccari's Encounter of Christ and Veronica is a dramatic scene
populated with a few figures, set outside the walls of Jerusa-
lem on the way to Calvary. The ardst focuses on the pro-
foundly wrenching moment when Christ, weakened by the
suffering he has endured, falls trnder the weight of the cross
atid Simon of Cyrene lifts it from his shoulders. The dramatic
core is the encounter between Christ and Veronica, who
kneels in front of him to extend her famotrs cloth. A ntmiber
of altarpiece paradigms are recogtiizable in Tlie Encounter of
Christ and Veronica. Zuccari reworked Raphael's Ascent to Cal-
vary, also known as the Spasimo di Sicilia, a key narrative
interpretation of the carrying of the cross (Eig. 21). By invok-
ing Raphael's Ascent, Zuccari aligned his paititing with the
reforming trajectory of Renaissance altarpieces that strove for
the legible dramadzation of religious stories. A prime objec-
tive of this reform of the altarpiece had been to use pictorial
narrative to reinforce, rather than disperse, devotional atten-
tion. Alexander Nagel has stressed how Rogier van der Wey-
den was resolute in adapting his dramatic and narrative
compositions to the icon, and thereby provided a subsequent
generation of Italian painters with a tneaningful tnodel for
the development of the Albertian istoria.^"^' Warbttrg similarly
concluded that the development of Italian altar painting
revealed a late medieval religious .sensibility in close kinship
with the north.""'
The Council of Trent gave official sancdon to this reform
of altar paindng. The challenge of religiotis image making
thencefordi tttrned oti the reconciliadon of atr archaic fron-
tality with dramadc istorie, Zuccari advanced the catise of the
dramatic composition within religious painting with his altar-
piece by creatirrg a successfttl itrtiovation in a rule-boittid age.
The Encounter of Christ and Veronica casts aside most narrative
accoutrements of the kind advised by post-Tridentine istorie
in order to concentrate devotional attetrtion on the suflering
Christ. Zuccari brought his protagonist into greater focus by
altering Raphael's crowded and dtamatic narrative. By con-
trast, the turned figure dominatitrg the left foregroutid of
442 B U L L E T I N UECKMBER 2 0 1 1 V O L U M E X C I I I N U M B E R 4
Raphael's Ascent indicates movement out of the altarpiece,
distracting us from the mystery of the Passion. Christ's col-
lapse under the weight of the cross and his anguished en-
counter with the Virgin occupy a narrative continuum, busily
populated with many figures and details. Raphael fleshed out
narrative incidents for dramatic ends, showing the Roman
soldiers as they command Simon of Cyrene to carry the cross
and the crowd of attendants supporting the Virgin.
Prints had played a crucial role in emboldening Raphael to
challenge the long-accepted convention of the altarpiece as a
stable object of prayer and worship. Raphael had as.sociated
altar painting with engraving as early as his 1507 work The
Carrying of Christ to the Tomb (Fig. 22), in which figures appear
to move otit of the picttire in a composition that incorporates
aspects of Mantegna's engraved Entombment (Fig. 23). Rapha-
21 Raphael, Ascent to Calvary, 1515-16,
panel, 10 ft 5'/4 in. X 7 ft. 6I/H in.
(3.18 X 2.29 m). Museo del Prado,
Madrid (artwork in the public domain;
photograph provided by Scala/Art
Resource, NY)
el's adjustments to Mantegna's scene were better suited to
the implicit cultic ftmction of the Lamentation he settled on
in the final altarpiece.'"^ He further responded to printmak-
ing in the Ascent to Calvary, which directly recalls Dürer's
model of the Passion, conceived as a continuous story in
which each scene exceeds the separate units of medieval art
and contributes to the narration of the whole. The effective
relation between Dürer's scenes gave Raphael the idea of the
altarpiece as a narrative continuum.
While the model of the engraving determined Raphael's
challenge to the conventions of the altarpiece, it also rein-
forced the association of Ascent to Calvary vñth novel dramatic
ideas. Konrad Oberhuber has examined how Raphael ad-
vanced the tradition of the Spasimo, or the swoon of the
Virgin as she sees her suffering Son, by laying stress on Christ

22 Raphael, ¡he Carrying of Clirisl to the Tomb, 1507, panel,
72'/^ X 69'/i in. (184 X 176 cm). Galleria Borghese, Rome
(artwork in the public domain; photograph provided by Scala/
die Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali/Art Resource, NY)
and especially on the Virgin's active compassion rather than
passive swooning.'"** The dramatic unity of feeling that char-
acterized Raphael's Ascent to Calvary recalled northern en-
gravings of (Christ falling under the cross. Raphael invoked
Dürer's Passion cycles in the pose of his Christ to reconcep-
tualize the spatial organizadon of the drama. In his rendering
of painful gestures and juxtaposition of dramatic action with
a delicate background landscape, Raphael revealed his
knowledge of prints to be indispensable to his innovations in
religious painting. His achievement in the Spasimo high-
lighted the efficacy of print technology in ways that stimu-
lated painters of altarpieces to ponder the basic nature of
their task. The historical interest of the engraving to modern
viewers owes much to Raphael's own decisions and the con-
cept of the original that governed his sttidio.'"'' The relation
between original and replica aimed to strengthen the former
through the explanatory and revelatory power of the latter.
As Wood has put it, the concept of the original that comes
into focus only through the lens of the perfect replica dis-
closes that painting and print were mutually influential."*'
Some eighty years after Raphael, Zuccari tapped the po-
tential of prints to reform modern altar painting with Renais-
sance precedents firmly in mind. The S. Prassede altarpiece
shares its principal arguments with his reliqtiary altars and
altarpieces at the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Spain, betoken-
ing an intimacy with prints. Zuccari showed how the print
might emancipate the image from post-Tridentine strictures
at the same time that it reclaimed Renaissance precedents.
He reverentially embraced Raphael's perception that the
tradition of a pictorial subject might be strengthened
through citations from printed images. Zuccari's pursuits
Z U C C A R T S KNCUVNTER Oh CHHISI AMU \l.l<()l\t(:.\ (JK 443
23 Andrea Mantegna, Entombment, 1465-70, engraving, 12'/i X
17% in. (31.1 X 45.4 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C., Rosenwald Collection (artwork in the public domain;
photograph provided by National Galleiy of Art, Washington,
D.C.)
were also akin to those of Lanfranco, who defended and
promoted Agostino Carracci's Last Communion of Saint Jerome
as the origin of a nascent pictorial tradition. Zuccari devel-
oped a modern altarpiece on the basis of the print, employed
here as visual source material. His approach is symptomatic
of a reform-minded ethos, and his reinstantiation of the
venerable woodcut entails dramatizations analogous to those
of his Renaissance predecessors. This evoltition of the altar-
piece was disturbing only to those many C-otmter-Reforma-
tion theorists who insisted on frontally oriented images.
The post-Tridentine decades were not propitiotis for the
devotional character of Imitatio Christi embodied in the Mil-
anese woodcut. Its features belonged to the domain of private
devodon, where it was tised as a recipient for prayer and as an
aid to meditation similar to the Ecce Homo dud Salvator Mundi
icons of Christ." ' Zuccari's interest in reform ideas is primar-
ily apparent in his grafting of the iconic Milanese woodcut
onto his S. Prassede altarpiece. The Encounter of Christ and
Veronica stuns us with a vertical format akin to the traditional
Byzandne icon, achieved by a pictorial composidon in which
figures and landscape are organized around a vertical axis
centered on Christ. In choosing to fuse the beautiftil profile
of Christ with a dramatic narrative, Zuccari cast his altarpiece
as the compelling solution to a fundamental dilemma of
modern religious painting. The reference to the print within
the pictorial composition preserved the appearance of Christ
from medieval images while generating a narrative drama.
Although Zuccari never directly reproduced the woodctit in
his S. Pra.ssede altarpiece, he decisively adapted its form to
the narrative of Veronica's veil.
Zuccari's S. Prassede altarpiece maintained the dramatic
power of his Renaissance predecessors while reinstantiating
the engraved profile of Christ jis a modern object for con-
templation and veneration. His integration of post-Triden-
tine reflections on cultic site and narrative action refocused
attendon on the late medieval image, not only for its history
but also for its ardstic value. Zuccari clearly combined the
subsdtutional mechanism inherent in such a task with the
444 BULLETIN DECEMBER 2Ü11 VOLUME XCIII NUMBER
24 Michelangelo, Entomlmmt, ca. 1500, panel, 63'>'i X 59 in.
(162 X 150 cm). The National Gallery, London (artwork in
the public domain; photograph © The National Gallery,
London, provided by Art Resource, NY)
overt narrative drama that had made Raphael's Spasimo such
a remarkable altar painting. Like Raphael, Zuccari depicted
the Roman .soldier commanding Simon of Cyrene to carry
the cross and the exclamatory gestures of the attendants.
Zuccari's determination to present the encounter of Christ
and Veronica with Christ occupying the center of the image
had analogies as well in the more radical procedure adopted
by Michelangelo in his Entombment of about 1500 (Fig. 24).
Michelangelo experimented here with narrative and the dra-
matic means of expressing the discontinuities of time and
space inherent in the icon, effectively heightening the sense
that Christ remains the fixed point arotind which htiman
action revolves.""* As Nagel has convincingly argued, Michel-
angelo merged new ideas of narrative painting to form an
image that directly recalled the frontal traditions of altar
painting."'' Zuccari managed to conflate the iconic stability
of Michelangelo's Entombment and the narrative drama of
Raphael's A.scent to Calvary in a composition that was a corol-
lary of these two seemingly opposed authoritative altarpieces.
He responded to the reform-minded solutions of his Renais-
sance predecessors by insisting on authentic and inimitable
representation, as derived from the engraved portrait arotind
which Zuccari constructed his dramatic encounter of Christ
and Veronica. The narrative action centers on the beautiful
Christ of the Passion, a direct response to the early modern
imperative that altarpieces contain within themselves models
worthy of imitation. The profile Christ is a reinstantiation of
the Milanese woodcut and the portrait medallion, now cen-
trally located at the vertical axis of the altarpiece to hold icon
and narrative in equilibrium and reinforce cultic veneration
of the host raised before it at every mass.
4
Zuccari's response to his Renaissance predecessors was
continuously mediated by contact with ancient tradition in an
exemplary case of substitutional logic. The stability of icons,
and even elements of their historical style, were thereby
preserved in the creation of individual modern compositions.
In post-Tridentine Italy, many ecclesiastical patrons and the-
orists demanded that the image's principal figure be placed
in the center of the composition and often oriented frontally.
Paintings that strictly adhered to these parameters remained
devotional and iconic, rather than narrative and dramatic."*
The most immediate and decisive change that Zuccari ef-
fected was to reinscribe the portrait medallion into a profile
view appropriate to the dramatic encounter between Christ
and Veronica without merely yielding to the antiquarian
interests of the Counter-Reformation. In pursuing an assim-
ilation of ancient models, Zuccari proved himself deeply
committed to upholding and advancing the istoria, while
submitting the narrative action to a Christocentric emphasis
indispensable to any compelling rendition of the Passion.
The location of The Encounter of Christ and Veronica across
from the dome of the S. Zeno Chapel made a powerful plea
for the recovery of Christian martyrs' relics by implicitly
associating them with authoritative ancient prototypes, here
restaged in an episode of the Passion narrative. Zuccari p r o
posed the idea of a parallel between Early Christian relics and
the altarpiece by focusing otir attention on an image of Christ
derived from the late medieval woodcut, which had .served
private devotion since its inception. Reflections on the au-
thority of cult images and relics reached their apogee in late
Renaissance altar paintings that referred back to medieval
forms. Through the cultivation of his dramatic narrative,
Zuccari decisively translated these ideas in a manner sup-
ported by the early modern interest in visual narrative styles
as the ultimate evidence of historical authenticity. Early mod-
ern works of art acknowledged "style" as historical evidence,
incorporating features dislocated from their own production
history. This phenomenon alerts us to the ciltarpiece as the site
of a remarkably original appraisal of Early Christian art and
of the value of ancient prototypes as a source for narrative.
Livia Stoenescu received her BA (1998) from the University of Eine
Arts in Bucharest, her MA (2002) from York University, and her
PhD (2009) from Queen's University. In addition to teaching at York
and Queen's, she conducted research at the University of Toronto
between 2002 and 2004 [Department of Art, Queen's University, 67
University Avenu£, Ontario Hall, Kingston, Ont. K7L 3N6, Can-
ada].
Notes
It is with a deep sense of gratittide that I express my thanks to Karen lang,
editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin, lor accepting my article. My gratitude also
extends to Michael C^ole for his stipport and to Adam Eaker and Lory Frankel
for their snperh editorial skills. I am particularly indebted to the art galleries
and image holders who permitted me access to the works of art in their care.
Finally, to Alexander Nagel, Philip Sohm. and Brian Grosskurth, I thank you,
as always, for your continued encouragement, many kindnesses, and sound
advice.
1. Francis Haskell, "Historical Narrative and Reportage," in History and
Its Images: Art and the Interpretation of the Past (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1993), 81-127.
 Z U C C A R I ' S tiXCÜUNTER
2. Pamela M. Jones. Federico Borrotneo and the Ambrosiana: Art. Patronage
and Reform iti Sexientemth-Century Milan (Cambridge: C^ambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1993), 131-35, 179, 288, 331. Jones notes that many
sainls treated in the engravings and paintings at the Ambrosiana were
to be fotind in the writings of Saint Jerome or in the Vitae patrum
sometimes attributed to him.
3. Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1969), 186-87, 190-93.
4. /Vs he noted in a letter of September 4, 1636, to Nicolas-Claude Fabri
de Peiresc, the famotis French scholar and collector of antiquities,
Rubens faced ihis problem when he looked at Bossio's voltime. See
Peter Patil Rubens, I he I Mers of Peter Paul Rubens, trans, and ed. Ruth
Saunders Magurn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1955),
405. For analogous comments on the very poor quality of the draw-
ings in Roma snttrrranea, and the disturbing fact that the paintings of
ihe catacombs were described before they had ever been seen, see
Haskell, History and Its Images, 107-8; and Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy,
.Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: IHetro Maria Campi and the Preser-
vation of the Particular (C'amhridge: ('ambridge University Press, 1995),
46.
5. A notable exception is Cristina Accidini Luchinat, Taddeo e Federico
Zufcari, fratelli pittori del cinqwcento. 2 vois. (Milan: Jaudi Sapi Editori,
1998).
6. C.iovan Pielro Bellori intervened in the classical debate with his re-
markable iiuroductoi-y paragraph to the 1672 edition of bis />> vite de'
pittmi, scultori e architetti modemi. Cîomparisons to the Neoplatonic the-
ory of the imperfect character of nature and the art of painters and
sculptoi-s surpas.sing nature in both Bellori's Idea (Rome, 1672) and
Federico Zticcari's Idea (Turin, 1607) are drawn by Evelina Borea in
her edition of Giovan Pietro Betlmi, IJ' vite de'pittori, scuttori e architetti
modemi (Turin: Einaudi, 1976). Idea. 13 n. 1. Bellori's Neoplatonic
bias is apparent in the beginning of Idea, 14: "For this reason noble
painters and sculptors, imitating that first maker, also form in their
minds an example of higher beauty and by contemplating that, they
emend natuic without fault of cok)r or of line [II perché li nobili pittori
e scultori quel primo fablrro imitando, si formano auch 'essi nelta mente un
esempio di bettezza su/more, ed in es.so riguardando, emendano Ui natura
senza colpa de colme e di lineamento]." However, Zuccari incorporates in
his Idea Augustinian ideas on the primacy of sight that took a compel-
ling form in his definition of disegno intemo, an activity of the divine
origins of the intellect. This marks his emancipation from Plato and
his absorption within the Augustinian diiection of the modern age.
On Zuccari and his Augustinian orientation, see William J. Bouwsma,
riw Waning of the Renaissance 1550-1640 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000), 248.
7. In the 1568 edition of the Lives dedicated to his patron, AIe.ssandro
Farnese, in a passage from the Life of Fra Angélico, Giorgio Vasari
openly condemned the depiction of "practically nude" figures in a
church setting. Vasari, Ij' vite de' piii eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architet-
tori nelle redazioni ilel 1550 e 1568, ed. Paola Barocchi and Rosanna
Bettarini, 6 vols. (Florence, 1966-76), vol. 3, Testo. 274-75. Alexander
Nagel identified in Va.sari's revised take on Fra Angélico an "oppor-
tunist's tmerring sense of the shifting ideological winds" and an en-
gagement with Piero Aretino's 1.54.5 early Counter-Refomiation po-
lemic on images that encouraged in artists an ever-increasing
artificiality and sophistication meant to formalize and intellectualize
the subject matter. Good art appeared incompatible with religion,
and religious arl was supposed to adhere to a classicist sense of deco-
rum or appropriateness. Nagel, "Sculpture and Relic," in Michelangelo
and the Reform of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
192.
8. On imitation as envisioned by Vasari, see Philip Sohm, Style in the Art
Theory of Early Modem Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), 84. Vasari defined style as ideal imitation, which resembled the
Aristotelian definition by Emanuelle Tesauro, who likened it to Poly-
clittis's canon of gathering all peiiection into an ideal form.
9. The powerful artistic sense of imitatio in the Renaissance has little to
do with the modern idea of imitation, which lacks the concept of
transformation or of a modern sensibility into which that past is re-
born. See Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery
in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 32. On
fifteentli- and sixteenth-century artisLs becoming themselves creative
authors, and the role of prints and engravings in sectn ing the relays
of stibstitutions and replications, see Christopher S. Wood, Forgery,
Refilica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2008), 12.
10. On Vasari's tise of the words gofjb (awkward) and rozzo (rough) with
regard to Early ("hristian art, see Patricia Rubin, Giorgio Vasari: Art and
History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 281-84. For Gio-
vanni Battista Armenini's castigation of these images, see his De' veri
precetti delUi pittura (Ravenna, 1586), 188—89. The paintings alia greca
OF (.HKISr Al-it) Vt:RONICA OK 1 5 9 4
445
seen by ,\rmenini were Italo-Byzantine icons acqtiired during the pre-
ceding centuries that had been passed I'rom generation lo generation
in Italian families. For more on Arinenini and his perception of Byz-
antine icons as artless productions, see Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narra-
tive: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-up in Fifleenth-Cmtury Devotional Paint-
ing, 2nd ed. (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1984), 34-35. On Bellori's
veneration of statues, see IJ vite. 24: "From this springs the veneration
and awe men have for statues and images, for this the reward and
honors of artists. . . . [quindi nasce I'ossequio, e lo stupore de gli uomini
verso le statue e te immagini, quindi it premio e gti onori de^i artefwi ...]."
11. Johannes Molanus, Traité des saintes images,, trans, and ed. François
Boespfliig. Olivier Christian, and Benoit Tassel, 2 vols. (Paris: Les Édi-
tions du Cerf, 1996), vol. 2, 287.
12. Henry Maguire, The Icons of Their Bodies: Saints and Their Images in By-
zantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1996), 11.
13. Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Refrresentntiim in
Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002),
110-11. Barber sheds light on significant aspects of the formalist ac-
count of the icon by insisting on the truthfulness of visual representa-
tion. To this end, he focuses on the definition of the icon as an artis-
tic work, or an artifact, and as a made object. Barber's emphasis on
the icon made in the likeness of an archetype refashioned the percep-
tion of the icon as likeness and representation proposed by Hans
Belting in Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before tfie tWa of
Art, trans. Edmtind Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1994).
14. Georges Didi-Htiberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a
Certain History of Art, trans. John (k)odman (University Park, Pa.:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 194-99.
15. Herbert L. Kessler and Gerhard Wolf, 'The Holy Face and the Paradox of
Refm'sentation (Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1998); and Gabriela Airaldi. " 'Ad
mortem festinamus . . .': Genova, il Mandylion e Leonardo Montaldo,"
in Mandylion: Intomo at "Sacro Volto, " da Hisanzio a Gemma, ed. Cierhard
Wolf et al., exh. cat. (Milan; Skira, 2004), 275-81.
16. Jonathan Brown, Francisco de Zurbarán (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1976), 112.
17. Zuccari stands out for his endeavor to rework medieval precedents.
See Julia Reinhard I.upton, The Afterlife of the Saints: Hagiography. Ty-
pology and Renaissance Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univei'sity
Press, 1996), 43-52. Lupton's efforts to distingtiish the rhetoric of al-
legory from the historical consciousness of figurai thinking provide an
appropriate context for the devolution of the Golilen Ij'gend from his-
torical account in the late Middle .\ges to unhistorical stoiT by the
seventeenth century. Whereas in the Renaissance the term legend
could encompass both history and literature, with the entrenchment
of the Reformation and the Cotmter-Reformation, legends and, above
all, the Golden Ij'gend began to itidicate neither histoi-y nor literature
to the seventeentlwentury histoiiographer. For more on ihe efface-
ment of the medieval legend in the wake of revisions of the (juestion
of truth and fiction, see William Nelson, Fact over Fiction: The Dilemma
of the Renaissance Stmyteller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1973), 25-33.
18. Ringbom, Icmi to Narrative, 148. For a recent assertion of the validity
of Ringbom's ideas, see Alessandro Nova, "leona, racconto e dramatic
close-up nei dipinii devozionali di Giovanni Bellini," in Giovanni Hellini,
ed. Mauro Lucco and Giovanni Charlo Federico Villa (Milan: Silvana
Editoriale, 2008), 10.5-17.
19. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance
(New York: Zone Books, 2010), 241-46.
20. Lttba Freedman, The Revival of the Olympian Gods in Renaissance Art
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 30-34, 218. The au-
thor points out the interchangeable character of the concepts "reli-
gious" and "antiquarian" in the Cinquecento as the result of a deeply
ingrained notion of the likeness to prototypes.
21. Ibid., 74-79. For a recent discussion of Enea Vico, medals, and the
art of forgery, see Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 286. The
authors highlight the significance of coins as "historical relics," a
value attached to them through time and beyond the institutions and
regimes that issued the original coin: "the historical coin was a special
kind of relic that came in multiples."
22. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 244.
23. A parallel between icon and woodcut is suggested by the perception
that the woodcut capttires the image itself; see Wood, Forgery, Replica,
Fiction, 12.
24. Robin Cormack. Painting the Soiil: Icons, Death Masks, and .Shrouds
(London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 116-27, esp. 123.
25. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, "What Counted as an 'An-
tiquity' in tlie Renaissance?" in Renaissance Medievalisms, ed. Konrad
446 BUl.l.ElIN DECEMBER 2U11 VOLUME XCIII NUMBER 4
Eisenbichler (Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Stud-
ies, 2009), 60-61.
26. Wood, Fiyrgpry, Replica, Fiction, 12.
27. David S. Aiefbrd, "Multiplying the Sacred: The Fifteenth-Century
Woodctit as Reproduction, Surrogate, Simulation," in The Woodcut in
Fifteenth-C^itury Furope, ed. Peter Parshall (Washington, D.C.: National
Gallery of Art, 2009), 119-47.
28. On Zuccari's singular efforts to restore the original meaning anil sub-
stance of an arsenal of old and traditional allegories, see David Cast,
The Calumny of Apelles: A Study in the Humanist Tradition (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1981), 159-60. ("ast distances Zuccari's conclu-
sions from ihe standard notions of imitation and invention in the Re-
naissance. (Concerning the notion of emulation in Renaissance art,
see G. W. Pigman III, "Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance," Re-
naissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 1-31. On Taddeo Zuccari, see Claudio
Strinati, "Annibale e i pittori romani," in Annibale Carracci, ed. Da-
niele Benati and Eugenio Riccomini, exh. caL (Milan: Electa, 2006),
51-57.
29. Tristan Weddigen. 'Federico Zticcari zwischen Michelangelo und Ra-
fael: Ktuistideal tind Bilderkult ztir Zeit Gregors XIII," in Federico Zuc-
caro: Kunst zwischen Ideal und Reform (Basel: Schwabe, 2000), 196-268,
esp. 202-11.
30. Francis Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 194-96. Unlike the version
by Sandro Botticelli, who must have been gtiided by Lucian's text in
his response to a classical ekphrasis in his famous Calumny of Apelles
(ca. 1495, Florence, Uffizi), Mantegna's subject in his drawing of
Apelles' caltimny was not an ekphrasis, but rather his own invented
narrative after his revisions of both Lucian's ekphrasis of Apelles' paint-
ing and Leon Battista Alberti's paraphrase of Lucian in his De pittura
(1435). Mantegna also re-created the classical accotmt as a relief
sculpture, in which he elaborated and emphasized the figtires' physi-
cal characteristics to reflect their allegorical qualities.
31. Inemie Gerards-Nelissen, "Federigo Zuccaro and the Lament of Paint-
ing," Simiolus I, no. 13 (1983): 44-60. esp. 44-46. Nelissen hints at
the incorrect explanation of Matthias Winner, according to which
Zuccari's Lammt of Painting is part of a series extending from Vasari's
Minerva and Vulcan to Rembrandt's etching Pygmalion, all of them il-
lustrating art theory.
32. Ibid., 51. On the Porta xnrtutis and its legacy, see Catherine Monbeig
Gogtiel. " Maniera Zticcaresca' et réactions individuelles: Obsei'va-
tions sur les dessinateurs autour de Federico Zuccari," in t)er Maler
Federico Zuccari: t'An römischer Virtuoso l'on eurojyäischevi Ruhm, eds. Mat-
thias Winner und Dedef Heikanip (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 1999),
105-16.
33. Clare Robertson. The Invention of Annibale Carracci (Milan: Silvana Edi-
toriale, 2008), 70.
34. On the Last Communion of Saint /eróme, which marked Agoslino's de-
but as a painter of altarpieces, see ibid., 82.
35. Richard Spear, Domenichino (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982),
36.
36. Elizabeth Oopper. Tlw Domenichino Affair: Novelty, Imitation, and Theft
in Seventeenth-Century Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005),
5—7. To prove his claims, Lanfranco turned to the press, ptiblishing
an etching made by his pupil François Perrier based on Lanfranco's
drawing.
37. Ibid., 53-54.
38. Patricia A. Emison, "Raphael's Multiples," in The Cambridge Companion
to Raphitel, ed. Marcia B. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. 2005), 186-206. Emison has highlighted Raimondi's reproduc-
tive undertaking as the mark of Raphael's involvement in printmak-
ing, along with the prints by Alhrecht Dürer that Raphael admired
and tacked up around his studio.
39. Ibid., 193. Emison has recognized that after the sack of Rome and the
Council of Trent, the conditions that Raphael developed in his role
as designer of engravings no longer existed. Printmaking would be-
come the realm of popular consiuiiption, intended for teaching or
delighting (he viewer rather than for the artist's personal evolution in
the manner oi Raphael.
40. Historia del Testamento Vecchio, dipinla in Roma nel Vaticano da Raffaetie
di Vrlnno/et intagliata in rame da Shto Badalocchi et Giovanni Lanfranco
(Rome: Orlandi, 1614). On Lanfranco and Badalocchio, see Erich
Schleier, "Note sul percorso artistico di Giovanni Lanfranco," in C-io-
vanni Lanfranco: Un pittore barocco tra Parma, Roma e Napoli (Milan:
Electa. 2001), 27-52; and idem, "Lanfranco: L'anno 1614," in Scritti in
memoria di Raffaello Cansa: Saggi e docummti per la storia iteU'arte 1994-
1995, ed. Ferdinando Bologna et al. (Naples: Electa, 1996), 232-41.
On the Roman collaboration of lanfranco and Badalocchio, see Les-
lie Brown Kessler, "Lanfranco and Domenichino: The Concept of
Style in the Early Development of Baroqtie Painting in Rome" (PhD
diss.. University of Pennsylvania, 1992).
41. On the interpretation of Raphael's style by Lanfranco and Domeni-
chino, see Spear, Domenichino, 51.
42. Adam von Bartsch, The Illustrated Bartsch, ed. Walter L. Strauss, The
Netherlandish Artists, 3 vols., vol. I, Hendrick Coltzius (New York: Abaris
Books, 1982), 7. On Golt/itis and the Carracci Academy, his influence
on Zuccari and on the engraving technique of Agostino (Carracci, see
Diane DeGrazia Bohlin, Prints and Related Drawings Iry the Carracci Fam-
ily: A Catalogue Raisonné (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art,
1979), 58-60.
43. Erich Auerbach, "Figura": Scenes from the Drama of Furofiean Literature
(New York: Meridian, 1959), 58-59.
44. Erich Atierbach, Mimesis: Thf Representation of Reality in Western Litera-
ture, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1953), 73-75; and idem, "Figura,' Archivuin Romanicum 22 (1938):
436-89. Auerbach draws on the historical implications of figura in
translations from the original, or closely related, Greek words schema
and chmis and obsei-ves that figiira takes from choros the notion of im-
pressing a shape from a mold. On the extreme complexity a{ figura in
the biblical exegesis of TerUillian (ca. 160-240), see T. P. O'Malley,
S.J., "Figura," in Tertullian and tlw Bible: Language, Imagery, F.xegesis
(Nijmegen: Dekker en Van de Vegt, 1967), 158-66. For Terttillian
and his bilingual (Latin and Greek) exegesis, figura carries two inter-
related meanings: to create a shape and to figure forth, both integral
to Christ, who figures forth in the Old Testament. On the historical
existence of figura as both bodily instantiation and prophecy, see
ibid., 160, 162-63).
45. Barber, Figure and Likeness, 96-97. Theodore of Studios directly con-
nected figura to the icon to argtie against interpretations of the cross
as a form of representation equivalent to the icon. In so doing, Theo-
dore of Studios sought to disclaim all relation between the term sign
and the form of the cross, and to condemn all discourse on signs and
symbols as belonging to the past.
46. Ringlx)m, ¡con to Narrative, 148-53. Ringbom broke entirely new
ground in art history with his emphasis on figura, or God's real pres-
ence, as the mark of many Renaissance narratives originating in the
assimilation of Christ's image lo altar painting. Such analysis is in-
debted to comparative literaltire, namely, to Auerbach's Mimesis, where
figura is seen as the Hgtiral sense of interpretation or the usage of the
human figure as bearer of meaning in a narrative context (74). A re-
cenl intervention to update Ringbom and Auerbach to the historical
and ñgtiral interpretation is Alexander Nagel and CChristopher S. Wood,
"Interventions: Toward a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism,"
Art Bulletin 87, no. 3 (2005): 403-15.
47. Jeanette Kohl, "Body, Mind and Soul: On the So-Called Platonic
Youth at the Bargello, Florence," in Subject as Aporia in Early Modem
Art, ed. Alexander Nagel and Lorenzo Pericolo (Burlington, Vt.: Ash-
gate, 2010), 43-69.
48. The poptilarity of Thomas à Kempis's Imitatio Christi in Italy was en-
sured by a series of exhortations to take up the cross and follow
Christ in the Tratatlo del beneficio di Cristo, the famous and widely read
devotional text of the Catholic Reform, written by Marcantonio
Flaminio and Benedetto da Mantova and published in Venice in
1543. Dtiring the second half of the sixteenth century, the stirvival of
the call to embrace Christ's Passion was made possible by private de-
votional activities. On these efforts, see Camilla Russell, Ciulia Gonzaga
and. the Religious Controversies of Sixteenth-Century Italy (Ttirnhout:
Brepols, 2006).
49. Cristina Acidini Ltichinat, "Federico Zuccari e i pittori di Roma: Ap-
ptmti per una storiografia artistica antivasariana," in Parmigianino e it
manierismo europeo: Atti del Convegno Intemazionale di Studi, Parma 13—15
giugno 2002, ed. Lucia Fornari Schianchi (Milan: Silvana Editoriale,
2002), 385-91, esp. 388. Zticcari frescoed an Assumption of the Virgin
Mary in the cathedral of Reggio Emilia that set otit to develop his Tri-
onfo di Maria for the cupola of the S. Giacinto Chapel in S. Sabina,
Rome, as a more creative response to Correggio's Parmesan model.
50. Giancarla Periti, "Nota stilla 'maniera moderna' di Correggio a
Parma," in Schianchi, Parmigianino e il manierismo eurofieo, 298-303,
esp. 300.
51. See Elisabeth G. Gleason, Reform Thought in Sixteenth-Century Italy
(Chico, Calif.: Scholars Pre.ss, 1981), 103, on the Beneficio di Cristo and
its adherents; and Susana Seidel Menchi, Erasmo in Italia 1520-1580
(Turin: B. Boringheri, 1987) on Erasmus's Enchiridion together with
his notes on the New Testament, and how his translations of Saint
Paul and Saint Jerome foiuid adherents inside the reform circles of
northern cinquecenio Italy. The tract Beneficio di Cristo represented
reforming thought in Italy, including the northern Italian Benedic-
tine reforming movement and the Naples circle congregated around
Juan de Valdés. It was circulated in manuscript form in 1542; the edi-

tion of l.')43 enjoyed enonnous poptilarity until 1549, when the book
wa.s placed on the luqtiisition'.s index of prohihited titles.
52. Patricia Sivieri, "Felippo Mazóla (1460-1.50.5), Cristo portacroce, c.
1504," itl Correggio, ed. Lucia Fornari Schianchi (Milan: Skira, 2008),
97.
53. Ihid., 98.
54. David Alan Brown. Peter Humfrey, and Mauro Locco, eds., Lorenzo
Lotto: liediscovered Master of the Renaissance, exh. cat. (Washington, D.C: 73.
National Gallery of Art, 1997), 160.
55. Adriano Prosperi, "The Religiotis Crisis in Early Sixteenth-Centtiry
Italy," in Brown et al., Lorenzx) Lotto, 21-26.
56. Pietro Zainpetti, ed.. Libro di spese diverse con aggiunta di letteri e d'altri
documenti (Venice: Istituto per la Collahorazioue Culttuale, 1969),
213, 237, and a letter dated Fehniary 1528, 28.5-86. For more on Lot-
to's copy of Pietro da Lticca's text, his spirittial interpretations as re-
corded in the accotuu book, and his awaretiess of the sermons and
disctissions taking place in monastic circles, see Prospeii, "The Reli-
giotis Crisis," esp. 24.
57. Russell, Giulia Gonuiga and the Religious Controversies, 47.
58. Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, 99.
59. Ludwig F. von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle
Ages. ed. Ralph F. Kerr, 40 vols. (London: Routledge and Kegan Patil;
St. Louis: B. Herder, 1952), vol. 24, 158, 195, 228. 262-63.
60. Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity, and History in Tridentine Italy, 17.
61. Evelyn Carol Voelker, Charles Borromeo's "Instructiones Fabricae et SupeUec-
tilis Ecclesiasticfie" 1577: A Translation with Commentary and Analysis (Syr-
atuse. N.'V.: Syracuse University, 1977). 229.
62. (;. A. Gilio, Due dialoghi, net primo de'quali si ragiona de le parti morali e
dvili apfmrtenenti a ' letterati cortigiani. . . net secondo si ragiona degli errori
de'pittori circa l'historié (Camerino, 1564), in Tratatti d'arte del Cinquecento
fra manierismo e controriforma, ed. Paola Barocchi, 3 vols. (Bari: Laterza,
1961), vol. 2, 55-.56.
63. Rosemarie Mulcahy, "Federico Zuccaro and Philip II: The Reliquary
Altars for the Basilica of San Lorenzo de El Escorial," Burlington Maga-
zine 129, no. 1013 (1987): 502-9.
64. Jack M. Greenstein. Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 10. For Mantegna the repre-
sentational fidelity of pictorial istorie depended not on capttiring the
physical appearance of the acttial event to which the literary source
referi'ed btit on investing the pictorial work with the same structure of
significance that made the Bible a true, figurai representation of the
created world.
65. Ringbom, Icon to Narrative, 153. Although some Venetian versions of
the Carrying of the Cross assimilated feattires of Leonardo's Christ
figure, the theme nonetheless remained shaped through Mantegna
and Bellini.
66. Francesco Bocchi's Opera . . . sopra l'imagine miracolosa delta Santissima
Annunziata was published in 1592, one year after his Le belleze della
città di Fiorenza. In the Opera (71), Bocchi concluded that the late me-
dieval Annunciation venerated in Florence's SS. Anntinziata stirpasses
ihe works of Michelangelo and Raphael in what could be termed the
beauty of holiness. Bocchi's essay on the subject ol SS. Anntinziata
was aiuicipated in his gtiidebook of 1591, The Beauties of the City of Flor-
ence: A Guidebook of 1591, trans. Thomas Frangenberg and Robert Wil-
liams (London: HaiTey Miller, 2006), 206-7.
67. For Bocchi and the reform circles after Trent, see Zygmtml
Wazbii'iski. "II modus semplice: Un dibattito suU' ars sacra fiorentina
intorno al 1600." in Studi su Raffaello: Atti del Congresso Intemazionale di
Studi, ed. Micaela Sambucco Hamoiid and Maria Letitia Strocchi, 2
vols. (Urbino: Quattro Venti, 1987). vol. 1. 625-48; and idem,
"L'Anntinciazione della Vergine nella chiesa della SS. Annimziata a
Firenze: Un contribtito al moderno culto dei quadri." in Renaissance
Studies in Honor of C^raig Hugh Smyth, ed. Andrew Morrogh and Fiorella
Superbi Gioffiedi, vol. 2, Art and Architecture (Florence: Gitiuti Bar-
bera, 1985), 533-52.
68. Aby Warburg took the first decisive step toward an anthropology of
the medieval image when he ascertained the affinity of such Floren-
tine practices with primitive image magic. See E. H. Gombrich, Aby
Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: Warbutg Institute, 1970),
120, 171.
69. For a number of interesting insights relevant to the evidence and vari-
ety of ex-votos for historical pui-poses, see Megan Holmes. "Ex-votos:
Materiality. Memory and Cult." in The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, De-
votioris and the Early Modem World, ed. Michael V. Cole and Rebecca
Zorach (Burlington. Vt.: Ashgate, 2009), 159-81.
70. I)idi-I lubeiinan. Confronting Images, 22.5.
71. On .Sous, see Adam Bartsch, The Illustrated Bartsch: German Masters of
ZUCCARI'S ENCOUNTER OF CHRIST AND VERONICA OF 1594 447
the Sixteenth Century, ed. Jane S. Petei"s, vol. 1 (New York: Abaris
Books. 1985).
72. Andrew Biunett, "C^oin Faking in the Renaissance," in WTiy Fakes Mat-
ter: Essays on Problems of Autlienticity, ed. Mark Jones (London: British
Musetim Press. 1993), 1.5-22. esp. 18. This is also qtioted in the dis-
ctission of Vico and numismatics in Nagel and Wood. Anachronic Re-
naissance, 286.
On Vico, see The llbistrated Bartsch: Italian Masters of the Sixteenth Cen-
tury, ed. John Spike (New York: Abaris Books, 1982), 30.
74. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction, 23.
75. Giulio Bodon, Enea Vico fra memoria e miraggio della clasicittà (Rome:
L'Erma di Bretschneider, 1997), 97-102, 119-29; and Freedman. "An-
cient Testimonies, Coins and Gems," in 7he Revival of the Olympian
Gods, esp. 15-16.
76. A. W. A. Boschloo, Annibale Carrcud in Bologna: Visible Reality after the
Council of Trent, trans. R. R. Symotids, 2 vols. (The Hague: Govern-
ment Ptiblishing House. 1974), vol. 1, 128-29.
77. Freedman, The Revival of the Olympian Gods, 236-37.
78. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction, 36-40.
79. The idea of the artist-architect is stated repeatedly in Zuccari's Idea as
integral to his definition of disegno interno. See Federico Zuccari,
L'idea de'pittori, scultori e architetti (Turin, 1607), in Scritti d'arte di Fe-
derico Zuccaro, ed. Detlef Heikamp (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1961),
229, 251, 263. On disegno «¡/(ron within the "absolute art." or what
Robert Williams defines as representations governed by the principle
of variety in unity, of Gian Paolo Lomazzo. Zuccari. and Torquato
Tasso, see Williams. Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy:
From Techne to Metatechne (Cambridge: C^ainbridge University Press,
1997). 123-87, esp. 138. Williams has cogently recognized the process
through which Zuccari appropriated the faculty of the senses as the
origin of his concepts. Zuccari's interests prompted him to assimilate
the inteipretation by Thomas Aquinas of the Aristotelian factilty of
sense impressions. On the assimilation of Zuccari's idea of the artist-
architect to contempoiaiy painters, see Frans Baudotiin. "Peter Paul
Rubens and the Notion 'Painter-Architect.' " in Rubens in Context: Se-
lected Studies: Litun Memoriales ([Antwerp]: Centnim voor de Vlaamse
Ktinst van de 16e en de 17e Eeuw; [Schoten]: BAI, 2005), 153-74.
80. Baudouin, "Peter Paul Rubens," 169.
81. Catnmy Brothers, Michelangelo, Drawing and the Invention of Architecture
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 42-43.
82. Ibid., 82-83.
83. The parallel I am drawing between Zuccari and medieval architec-
ttual plans is inspired by Richard Kiautheimer, "Introduction to an
Iconography of Medieval Architecture." founial of the Wartiurg and
Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 1-33.
84. Catherine Wilkinson-Zerner, Juan de Herrera: Architect to Philip II of
Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 119; and Fernando
Marias, La arquitectura del Renacimiento en Toledo {¡541-1631), 4 vols.
(Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1985), vol.
1, 195-274.
85. Earl E. Rosenthal, "The Image of the Holy Sepnicher," in The Cathe-
dral of Granada: A Study in the Spanish Renaissance (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1961), 148-66.
86. Ibid., 152. None of the scanty descriptions, written or delineated,
known to have been available by Siloe's time presented an obvious
source for the Granada project. The medieval copies were symbolic
rather than literal copies of the Holy Sepulchre.
87. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 54-56.
88. Ibid., 56. The depiction of the aedicule reproduced by Jan van Scorel.
who had been in Jerusalem in 1520. is incltided in his group poitrail
of the Brotherhood of Jerusalem Pilgrims of Haarlem.
89. Rosenthal, "The Image of the Holy Sepulcher," 158.
90. Richard Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 4th rev.
ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 178-79.
91. Ibid., 179.
92. John Shearman, "Domes," in Only Connect. . . Art and the Spectator in
the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992),
149-91, e.sp. 1.53.
93. Rotraut Wisskircheu. Die Mosaiken der Kirche Santa I'rassede in Rom
(Mainz: P. von Zabern, 1992); idem. "Zur Zenokapelle in S. Prassede,
Rom," Frühmittelalterliche Studien 25 (1991): 96-108; Gillian Mackie.
"The Zeno Chapel: A Prayer for Salvation." Pafiers of the British School
at Rome 57 (1989): 172-99; and Erik ThuiiB. "Santa Prassede," in Meis-
terwerke der Haukunst von tier Antike bis Heute: Festgabe für Elisabeth
Kieven, ed. Christina Strunck (Petersberg: Imhof. 2007), 138-41.
94. David McTavish, "A Drawitig in Rennes for the Vatilt of the Caetani
 B U t . I . E T I N D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 1 V O L U M E XCIII N U M B E R 4
448
Chapel in Santa Pudenziana, Rome," Bulletin de l'Association des Histo-
riens de l'Art ¡talien, no. 13 (2008); 5-11. On the significance of the S.
Pudenziana apse mosaic, see Rotraut Wisskirchen, "Zum Gerichtsas-
pekt im Apsismosaik von S. Pudenziana, Kom," Jahrbuch für Antike und
Chrislmtum A\ (1998); 179-92.
95. Nagel and Wood, "What Counted as an 'Antiquity'?" 53-74, esp. 63.
The authors have convincingly argued that the contemporary author-
ity of many images and monuments was boinid up with their ancient
origins and sustained by a notional creative model of production simi-
lar to the one that sustained sacred portraits and central plan build-
ings.
96. On the retrospective militancy of the Roman Church and the activity
of Cardinal Baronio "to establish sound historical foundations on
which to rest the claims of the Apostolic Church revived by the Coun-
cil of Trent," see Richard Krautheimer, "A (Christian Triumph in
1597," in Essays in tlie History of Art ¡Resented to Rudolf Wittkower, ed.
Douglas Fraser, Howard Hibbard, and Milton J. Lewine (London;
Phaidon Press, 1967), 174-78. For more on the activity of Cardinal
Baronio, see Alessandro Zuccari, "Restauro e filologia haroniani," in
Baronio e I'arte, ed. Romeo de Maio (Sora; Centro di Studi Sorani
"Vincenzo Patriarca," 1985), 489-510; and Jo.sephine von Hennen-
berg, "Cardinal Caesar Baronio; The Arts and the Early Christian Mar-
tyrs," in Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroqiw Image, exh. cat.
(Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1999), 136-50.
97. Kraulheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, 54-60; Anna
Maria Affanni, ¡.a chiesa di Santa F'rassede a Roma: ¡.a storia, it rilievo, il
restauro (Viterbo; BetaGamma, 2006); and Maurizio C-aperna, La basi-
lica di Santa Prassede: ¡I significato della. vicendn archittetonica (Rome; Mo- 110. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction, 17.
naci Benedettini Valombrosani, 1999).
98. Krautheimer. ¡ùirly Christian and ¡iyzantine Architecture, 60.
99. Erik Thuno, ¡mage and Relic: Mediating the Sacred in Early Medieval Rome
(Rome; L'Erma di Bret.schneider. 2002). 13-16, 130. The mosaics in
the Basilica of S. Prassede were conmiissioned during Paschal I's pon-
tificate (817-24). The mosaics in the Basilica of Ss. Nereo e Achilleo,
dating to the close of Leo Ill's pontificate, presumably to the year
815, covered the apse and the apsidal arch (the apse mosaic was de-
molished in 1596).
100. On the fate of the Roman catacombs up to the fifteenth century, see
John Osborne, "The Roman Catacomhs in the Middle Ages," Papers of
the British School at Rome 53 (1985); 278-328.
101. Ditchfield, ¡jturgy. Sanctity and Histmy, 85.
102. For the program of church restoration under Clement VIII, see Ste-
ven F. Ostrow, "The Counter-Reformation and the End of the Cen-
tury," in Artistic Centers of the ¡tedian Renaissance, ed. Marcia B. Hall
(New York; Cambridge University Press, 2005), 246-320.
103. Alexandra Hertz, "Cardinal Cesare Baronio's Restoration of Ss. Nereo
ed Achilleo and S. Cesáreo de' Appia," Art Bulletin 70 (1988); 590-
620. On Ss. Nereo e Achilleo, see Krautheimer, "A Christian Triumph
in 1597," 174-78.
104. Beverly Louise Brown, "Between the Sacred and Profane," in 77!« Ge-
nius of Rome, ¡592-¡623 (London; London Academy of Arts, 2001),
276-303, esp. 282.
105. Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform of Art, 62-67.
106. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 112-27.
107. Nagel, Michelangelo and the Refirrm of Art, 124.
108. Konrad Oberhuber, Raphael: The Paintings (Milan; Electa, 1999), 212.
109. On Raphael's studio, see Hubert Damisch, The Judgment of Paris, trans.
John Goodman (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1996), 84-86.
On the notion of the creative role of the print for Raphael, see Emi-
son, "Raphael's Multiples," 186-206, esp. 188; and Obeihuber, Ra-
phael: The Paintings, 212.
111. Ringbom, ¡con to Narrative, 148.
112. Alexander Nagel, "Michelangelo, Raphael, and the Altarpiece Tradi-
tion" (PhD diss.. Harvard University, 1993), 9-16.
113. Nagel, MicheUmgelo and the Reform of Art, 202.
114. On strict decorum in religious painting resulting in didactic and con-
ceptual images, see Stuart Lingo, ¡''ederico Barocci: Allure and Devotion in
¡.ate Renaissance Painting (New Haven; Yale University Press, 2008), 6,
78, 216.
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