The beauty of an angel

An exhibition in the central Italian town of Forlì until 12 June 2011 is about Melozzo da Forlì, the greatest exponent of “the Roman and Catholic way to the glory of visible beauty”
By The Art Newspaper
Published online 27 Jan 11 (Museums)
Melozzo da Forlì, "Angel playing the Viol", 1472-74, detached fresco, from the Vatican Museums

Melozzo’s angels are a byword for human beauty, bearing comparison in this respect with Raphael’s Madonnas. Italians tend to say: “beautiful as a Raphael Madonna”, “beautiful as an angel by Melozzo”. Having survived the destruction of the apse of the Basilica dei Santi Apostoli in Rome, the angel musicians (1472–74) are now housed in the Vatican Museums, and even the least attentive of the millions of tourists who visit the papal collections observe and retain some memory of them. Their beauty is metaphysical because they are pure spirit, because Melozzo depicted them singing the praises of the Almighty in the delicate blue of the highest heavens. And yet, the Beauty they convey, sublimated in their case to the level of supreme perfection, is that found in the men and women of this world. Windblown blond hair, bright eyes, parted lips, glowing complexions and the fire and vitality of youth are their defining characteristics. The Divine become flesh, taking on human likeness, as if God had adopted the most attractive attributes of his earthly creatures.

Leave Melozzo’s angels and go on to the Stanza della Segnatura, and here you will see how, 30 years later, Raphael of Urbino managed to translate divine beauty into the human sphere with results that have never since been equalled.

All this explains the rationale of the exhibition devoted to Melozzo at the San Domenico Museums in Forlì until 12 June. The curators (the present writer, together with Daniele Benati and Mauro Natale) have gathered together 90 works, most of them celebrated masterpieces. They include all Melozzo’s known paintings, with due prominence given to his angels and apostles, but the real focus is on his large fresco of Sixtus IV appointing Bartolomeo Platina to be prefect of his library. Detached from its original wall in the 19th century and restored fairly recently by Carlo Giantomassi, it has made its first trip outside the Vatican. There are also works by Piero della Francesca (the Madonna di Senigallia from Urbino and Saint Julian from Sansepolcro), some fine paintings by Antoniazzo (including his Montefalco panel), Bramante’s Armigeri from Brera, some first-class Peruginos (portrait of Francesco delle Opere from the Uffizi, Saint Sebastian Borghese and an exquisite, privately owned Annunciation, already known to scholars), and Mantegna’s Saint Euphemia, now at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples.. And of course Raphael will be there, represented by an Angel from Brescia and a Saint Sebastian from Bergamo.

The subtitle “Human beauty from Piero della Francesca to Raphael” sums up the idea behind the exhibition, the third Forlì has devoted to its native-born artist in modern times. In 1994, the focus was on the relationship between the painter and his city, in an exhibition entitled “Melozzo da Forlì, his city and times”. Two venues were used, the Oratorio di San Sebastiano and Palazzo Albertini, because Forlì lacked the ample exhibition space now afforded by San Domenico. The catalogue included a substantial introductory essay by Andrea Emiliani and a historical and stylistic biography of the artist written by my late friend Stefano Tumidei, a full-scale monograph on Melozzo, still essential reading.

As far back as 1938, Forlì staged “Melozzo and the 15th century in Romagna”, a grandiose exhibition that still holds a legendary place in art history. It was conceived—or so the catalogue assures us—“under the auspices of the Duce”. In Forlì, Mussolini was on home territory and must have done everything to ensure that the cultural history of his city was duly recognised. Politics, however, did not detract from the scholarly value of the exhibition, which, for those years, was excellent. This was partly because the organisers sought advice from Roberto Longhi, the celebrated art historian at Bologna University, who had the ear of the Minister of Culture, Giuseppe Bottai; partly because the catalogue benefited from the input of the distinguished art historians Cesare Gnudi and Luisa Becherucci, then young inspectors with the Fine Arts Department.

Leafing through the pages of the catalogue, it is apparent that the “political” purpose of the exhibition, to make Melozzo the standard-bearer of a regional artistic culture, was painstakingly and systematically contradicted in the commentary provided by Longhi. Melozzo was “Forlivese” by birth, and through his relationships, friendships and the works he must have left to his native city (pre-eminent among them, and the only ones that survived intact until modern times, were the frescos he painted for the cupola of the Feo Chapel in San Biagio, sadly reduced to dust by a German bomb in 1944), but his training, development and destiny must be sought elsewhere: in the Urbino of Piero della Francesca, Luciano Laurana, the young Bramante and the Flemish painters, then in Loreto, and Rome during the pontificate of Sixtus IV.

An “ideological”, theoretical painter in the mould of Alberti and Mantegna, he was truly a “pictor papalis” (papal painter), as described in contemporary documents. In the 1470s and 1480s, the Roman and Catholic way to the glory of visible beauty (inaugurated by the Beato Angelico in the Chapel of Nicholas V and concluded by Raphael in the Stanze, a synthesis of sublime ideology and high-flown propaganda) found its greatest exponent in Melozzo da Forlì.

This is why I wanted the exhibition to include the Platina fresco, showing the great scholar kneeling before the pope in 1475 to be made Prefetto della Biblioteca Apostolica. The theme of the celebrated painting is the alliance between the Church and Culture. Everything that was to follow in Rome (Bramante’s Belvedere and the cupola of St Peter’s, Raphael and Michelangelo’s work in the Vatican, the baroque skies of Pietro da Cortona, the fountains and obelisks of the city squares, the endless libraries and admirable museums), everything that has contributed to the visible image of Italy as a place of Beauty, has its origins in this fresco.


—Antonio Paolucci

Director, Vatican Museums