artistic errors in a tale about the piovano arlotto

ARTISTIC ERRORS IN A TALE ABOUT THE PIOVANO ARLOTTOAuthor(s): Norman E. LandSource: Source: Notes in the History of Art, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Winter 2010), pp. 1-5Published by: Ars Brevis Foundation, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23208608 .

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ARTISTIC ERRORS IN A TALE ABOUT

THE PIOVANO ARLOTTO

Alexander Pope famously wrote in his Essay on Criticism (1711), "To err is human." Pope does not refer specifically to visual artists. But because painters and sculptors are human beings, they, too, err and have done so for a long time. According to several an cient authors, even as great a painter as

Apelles made mistakes in his pictures, and in the fourteenth century the habit of making errors continued with Cimabue and Giotto.1 The former, we are told, would destroy his

paintings if he discovered any fallacy or flaw in them, and the latter is said to have died of a broken heart because of some errors he made in designing the campanile next to Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence.2 Fif

teenth-century artists, even fictional ones, also made mistakes in their works, as one

overlooked tale makes clear.

At the center of the tale is a piovano, or

country priest, who is a figure of Arlotto de' Mainardi (1396-1484). From 1426 to 1468, Father Arlotto was the real-life vicar at San Cresci a Macioli, northeast of Pratolino in the diocese of Fiesole. Even in his own day, he was famous for his practical jokes and

witty sayings, some of which an anonymous admirer collected just after the middle of the fifteenth century. Eventually, the collection

appeared in print in Rome about 1514-1516 as Motti e facezie del piovano Arlotto,3 A

popular, if eccentric, priest who sometimes delivered burlesque sermons, he was not ad mired by everyone. For example, in his Sim

posio (cap. 8), Lorenzo de' Medici refers to

Norman E. Land

Father Arlotto as a tat drunkard who never drank water and says that the piovano would not "kneel for the Sacrament when it was

raised, if there was not a good wine, because he did not believe that God was inside." For Father Arlotto, transubstantiation could not occur in a bad wine.4

Another side of Father Arlotto's character is revealed in a facezia (no. 27) about an un

suspecting worshipper. One morning, he was passing through a church of Santo Spi rito (presumably a reference to the one in

Florence) when he spied a woman fervently praying before a figure of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino. The piovano walked over to her,

grabbed her head, and turned it toward a fig ure of the crucified Christ, saying, "Are you mad woman? Do you not see that you are

making a mistake? Address yourself to Him who is the Master and can help you better than His follower."5

In a motto (no. 130), the piovano again turns his attention to a mistake—actually, several mistakes—this time committed by an anonymous painter. Father Arlotto is the arbiter in a dispute between the artist and his

patron, one Goro Infangati, whose last name

suggests a person who belongs to a family besmeared with mud or soil (fango; fan gare). In other words, his name evokes a

person who lives in a rural setting. Signifi cantly, the painter is a "maestro alia antica

[s/c]" (master in the ancient style). He has

painted a room with parrots and a figure of the legendary Saint Julian the Hospitaller, to



2

which saint the said Goro is devoted. Father

Arlotto, as the narrator explains, thoroughly understands the dispute and decides that the artist is in the wrong because he made "un forte errato" (a serious error). Instead of

painting parrots, the artist should have fol lowed the instructions and the intention of Goro and filled the room with representa tions of "foxes, each with a rooster in its mouth." In other words, as Gianfranco Folena has explained, the patron, Goro, asked the artist to decorate a room with foxes that pappare galli—that is, he asked the painter to depict foxes that eat roosters. The artist misunderstood his patron's in structions: he understood that he should fill the room with pappagalli, or parrots.6 The artist's mistake is a common one—people often believe they hear that which has not been said.

and father, mistakenly believes that his wife is in bed with another man. Enraged, he draws his sword and slaughters his parents. Meeting his wife a short while later, he asks her about the two who had been sleeping in his bed. She tells him that they are his par ents. When Julian discovers his error, he is overwhelmed with remorse and, seeking his wife's assistance, does penance by building a hospice near a river.8

As several scholars have recently argued, the collected stories about Father Arlotto evoke an atmosphere that embodies "old re

publican values—the same ones Dante

praises, sobriety, hard work and fraternity," as well as a disdain for the culture of Medicean Florence.7 That disdain seems to extend to the master who paints in the an

tique style. Apparently, the priest intended to bring the humanistic artist down a peg or

two, for he finds fault with his hearing, not with the rural patron's pronunciation.

Having settled the dispute about the par rots, Father Arlotto turns to the hapless artist's depiction of Saint Julian, a noble man who mistakenly killed his mother and father. One day, as the young Julian is out

hunting, his parents, whom he has not seen for many years, arrive at his castle, and his wife courteously puts them up for the night in the very bedroom that she and Julian usu

ally share. That night Julian unexpectedly re turns home and, not recognizing his mother

The story about Goro and the anonymous painter is not precise about the nature of the

"figure of Saint Julian," but Father Arlotto seems to refer to a single figure. In any case,

according to the priest, who appears to act

upon a complaint made by Goro, the painter erred when he depicted Saint Julian holding a naked sword ("ispada") and without a sheath nearby. It was a mistake, he said, be

cause, with the blade of the sword exposed, the figure of Saint Julian seems to be still en

raged and not sorry for his error. The saint also appears to desire still more blood. More

over, because the artist depicted Julian as

apparently enraged, he committed another error. When he painted the saint with a "di

adema," or halo, he made the saint appear holy in an instant of rage. That was a grave mistake, according to Father Arlotto, be cause even in the horrible moment when Ju lian killed his parents, he was so penitent and remorseful that God pardoned him and im

mediately sanctified him, and for that reason the painter should have depicted Julian with out a sword or, more appropriately, with his sword in its sheath and attached to his belt.

According to Father Arlotto, the anony mous painter makes several blunders in his

depiction of a saint who is famous for a hor rible error. And, we must assume, like the

saint, the artist must do penance—he must correct his mistakes.

A bnef survey of some fourteenth- and fif



3

teenth-century representations of Saint Julian

reveals that artists represented Julian and his sword in a variety of ways. For example, in the 1340s, Taddeo Gaddi (c. 1300-1366) de

picted the haloed saint holding a sheathed sword wrapped in a belt (Fig. 1). The same is true of the Saint Julian in Alesso Bal dovinetti's (1425-1499) Madonna and Child with Saints of about 1454 for the Medici villa at Cafaggiolo.9 The Sienese painter Martino di Bartolommeo di Biagio (active c. 1389—

1435) depicted a haloed Saint Julian holding a naked sword, but there is no sheath nearby, as Father Arlotto says there should be.10 The

same is true of the haloed Saint Julian in Domenico del Ghirlandaio's (1449-1494) fresco of about 1473 in the church of Sant' Andrea a Brozzi at Borgo San Donnino near Parma. No doubt Father Arlotto would have been pleased that there is no sword in Andrea del Castagno's (1423-1457) famous fresco Saint Julian and the Redeemer (c. 1453) in the Cagliani chapel at Santissima Annunzi

ata, Florence. He might also have approved of Castagno's altarpiece of 1450 for San Miniato alle Torri in Florence, in which the

figure of Julian displays a sheathed sword.11 In Lorenzo di Credi's (1459-1537) altarpiece

Fig. 1 Taddeo Gaddi, Saint Julian. 1340s. Tempera on wood, gold ground; 52.7 x 35.2 cm. Metropolitan Museum of

Art, New York. Bequest of Lore Heine

mann, in memory of her husband, Dr.

Rudolf J. Heinemann, 1996 (1997.117.1). (Photo: Art Resource, NY)



2 Lorenzo di Credi, Madonna and Child with Saints Julian and Nicholas ofMyra. 1490-1492. on wood, 163 x 164 cm. Louvre, Paris. (Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

for the church of Santa Maria Maddalena dei

Pazzi, Florence, of about 1490-1492 (Fig. 2), a serene and reverential Julian appears at the right hand of the Virgin and Christ Child. A halo floats above his head, and a sword is attached with a belt to his waist. The sword is behind him, and only the handle is visible.

As this brief survey suggests, there seems to have been no single correct way for an artist to depict Saint Julian and his sword.

In a sense, Father Arlotto is like a fox who has caught a rooster in its mouth, for regard ing the problem of the parrots, he sides with Goro rather than with the painter, and con



5

cermng the depiction of Saint Julian, he

again rules in favor of the patron, repeating Goro's apparently nonsensical interpretation of the figure. The word pappare might be relevant here, too, for the word can refer to

feeding an infant with pap, and, figuratively speaking, Father Arlotto "spoon-feeds" the humanistic painter with nonsense. In both in

stances, however, the piovano plays the ca

pable shepherd protecting a member of his flock. And in siding with the provincial Goro rather than with the presumably urban "mae stro" who paints "alia antica," Father Arlotto not only demonstrates that he is intellectu

ally superior to both patron and artist, he also

displays his famous sense of humor.

NOTES

My thanks to Mary Pixley for a comment on an earlier

draft of this paper.

1. For Apelles' errors, see Norman E. Land, "Giotto

as Apelles," SOURCE: Notes in the History of Art 24, no. 3 (Spring 2005):6-9.

2. For Cimabue's errors, see L'Ottimo Commento

della "Divina Commedia": Testo inedito d'un con

temporaneo di Dante..., ed. Alessandro Torri, 3 vols.

(Pisa: Capurro, 1827-1829), II, p. 187. For Giotto's

alleged mistakes in the design of the campanile, see

Marvin Trachtenberg, The Campanile of Florence

Cathedral: "Giotto's Tower" (New York: New York

University Press, 1971), p. 206, doc. 5.

3. I have used the text in Gianfranco Folena, ed., Motti efacezie del piovano Arlotto (Milan: Ricciardi,

1953). For a description of the book, see Barbara C.

Bowen, "Renaissance Collections of facetiae, 1344—1490: A New Listing," Renaissance Quarterly

39, no. 1 (Spring 1986):11-12. 4. Lorenzo de' Medici, Tutte le opere, ed. Gigi Ca

valli, 3 vols. (Milan: Rizzoli, 1958), I, p. 85.

5. Folena, p. 43, no. 27. See also Franco Sacchetti, II

Trecentonovelle, ed. Emilio Faccioli (Torino: Einaudi,

1970), p. 491, no. 169, who tells a tale in which Buf

falmacco "showed their ignorance to the Perugians who

believed more in Saint Ercolano than in Christ."

6. Folena, pp. 182-183, no. 130.

7. The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed.

Peter Brand and Lino Pertile (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1996), p. 157. For Arlotto and the

Medici, see Folena, pp. xix-xxi and xxix-xxxi: and

F. W. Kent and A. Lillie, "The Piovano Arlotto: New

Documents," in Florence and Italy: Renaissance Stud

ies in Honour ofNicolai Rubinstein, ed. Peter Denley and Caroline Elam (London: Committee for Medieval

Studies, Westfield College, 1988), pp. 356-357.

8. The story is told by, among others, Jacobus de

Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), I, pp. 127-128.

9. Baldovinetti's altarpiece is now in the Galleria

degli Uffizi, Florence.

10. Martino di Biagio's panel is now in the Metro

politan Museum of Art, New York.

11. Castagno's altarpiece is now in the Staatliche

Museen zu Berlin.

