This week I look at the paradoxical practice of including writing in a painting, and what it can tell us about the reading of that image. Today’s article concentrates on signatures and their elaboration into dedications or comments, and tomorrow I look at writing that concerns the story in the painting.
Signatures are by no means universal, and seldom contribute much to the reading of a painting. However, extended signatures that enjoyed a vogue during the Renaissance are more relevant. Those in the form of a small note, a distinctive trompe l’oeil, are known as a cartellino.
Many of Antonello da Messina’s groundbreaking oil paintings include his cartellino. In the case of his magnificent Saint Jerome in his Study from around 1475, he places it in a position of prominence, close to the centre, stuck to the wooden panel on the side of the saint’s desk. But seen in detail (below) this may actually be a dummy, with unreadable text.
More typical is the cartellino at the lower edge of his Christ Blessing from about the same date, which states the year and Antonellus Messeneus me pinxit, Latin for Antonello da Messina painted me. Use of cartellini was a technique handed on by Antonello to his logical successor, Giovanni Bellini, who continued the practice through much of his career.
Books were another popular place for a signature and sometimes a bit more.
In Sofonisba Anguissola’s Self-portrait from 1554, the artist puts a small notebook in her own hand for this purpose. There she also makes clear that she’s still unmarried, in the word virgo.
By all accounts, Murillo was very reluctant to paint his self-portrait, but a few years before his death he acceded to the wishes of his children and painted this ingenious trompe l’oeil, where his hand rests on the false frame and his palette, brushes and sketching materials rest on either side. This was probably based on the frontispiece engraving then popular in printed books.
The inscription reads Bart[olo] Murillo seipsum depingens pro filiorum votis ac precibus explendis, meaning Bartolomé Murillo portraying himself in fulfilment of the wishes and prayers of his sons [children].
Lawrence Alma-Tadema often found ingenious pictorial locations and devices for his signature. In 1888, he painted A Priestess of Apollo as a wedding present for Sir Charles Hallé (1819-1895), the famous conductor who founded the Hallé Orchestra in 1858, and his second wife, the widowed violinist Wilma Neruda. He wrote his dedication to the couple in the graffiti inside the arch.
In Tintoretto’s Saints Jerome, Louis of Toulouse and Andrew (1555-56), the artist records the lives of the four family members remembered in this painting: Andreas Renerius, the father, who presumably died in 1555 which is thus the date of the commission, and his son Jacobus, who died thirty years later. Aloisius is recorded as nepos, which originally meant grandson, but also grew to mean nephew and from that gave rise to the term nepotism; as this individual died in 1625, he was more likely to be the grandson, and Daniel, who died in 1654, was probably the great-grandson.
Tintoretto himself died in 1594, so the last two would have been added by another artist. The painting itself is thought to have been for the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi in Venice, which at that time was the seat of several of the city’s financial magistrates. Inscriptions like this can thus be valuable in establishing a painting’s provenance.
This turns out to be a little more complex: in 1560-1566, an anonymous follower of Tintoretto painted a double portrait of Andrea Renier (Andreas Renerius) and his son Daniele, now in the National Gallery of Art. That Andrea Renier was appointed the podesta (governor) of Brescia in 1559, and died the following year.
My final example for today is an extended signature in which Botticelli pours out his fears.
In 1500, Botticelli was feeling his age. His great successes with the elite families were long past, and his workshop largely idle. From that came a painting of the nativity with a most curious combination of the traditional set alongside elements which today look quite bizarre: his Mystic Nativity, now in the National Gallery in London.
At the very top is an inscription in Greek, which means: This picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I Alessandro, in the half-time after the time, painted, according to the eleventh [chapter] of Saint John, in the second woe of the Apocalypse, during the release of the devil for three-and-a-half years; then he shall be bound in the twelfth [chapter] and we shall see [him buried] as in this picture. This refers to the chapters from Revelation used by the martyred Savonarola in his preaching.