Arthritis in the hands of saints shown in 15th century Venetian altarpieces by Bartolomeo Vivarini
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Arthritis in the hands of saints shown in 15th century Venetian altarpieces by Bartolomeo Vivarini W. R. Albury1,2 · G. M. Weisz1,2 Received: 26 July 2020 / Accepted: 5 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Bartolomeo Vivarini (1432–1499) was the most prolific member of a prominent 15th-century Venetian family of artists who specialised in religious art, particularly altarpieces. Unlike their Florentine counterparts, Venetian artists of this period were typically more concerned with decorative effects than with accuracy of description, so their paintings often lacked detailed anatomical information. Bartolomeo, however, began the move toward anatomical realism in the Vivarini family. Two pictures of saints from his altarpieces are presented here to illustrate his depiction of arthritic hand deformities. The hands of Saint Louis of Toulouse (painted c. 1465-7), a young man who died in his 20s, show signs of inflammatory arthritis, while the effects of degenerative osteoarthritis can be seen in the hands of Saint Mark (painted c. 1470), who is portrayed as a man in late middle age. These observations extend the findings of previous studies of Florentine altarpieces from the same period, as well as more general studies of deformed extremities in Italian, Flemish and French Renaissance paintings. They also support the broader proposition that when 15th-century Venetian painters began to embrace anatomical realism they were capable of providing sufficient detail to enable pathological deformities in their figures to be identified. Keywords Vivarini · Hand deformities in art · Inflammatory arthritis · Degenerative osteoarthritis
Introduction During the fifteenth century Florentine artists were keenly studying human anatomy and attempting to present highly accurate representations of the body, while Venetian artists tended to be more concerned with colour and surface decoration. Painters of the Venetian school gradually adopted some of the techniques of the Florentine style, but even in the sixteenth century one of the most eminent Venetian painters, Titian (1490–1576), was criticised by Michelangelo (1475–1564), the supreme representative of Florentine art, who said that although Titian’s use of colour was very pleasing it was a pity that he had never learned how to draw the human body [1]. This traditional contrast between Florentine descriptive accuracy and Venetian decorative effects raises the question * G. M. Weisz [email protected] 1
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia
School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia
2
of whether earlier Venetian artists provide enough anatomical detail in their paintings to enable the identification of pathological deformities in their figures. The present study addresses this question by examining two works by Bartolomeo Vivarini, a member of a celebrated Venetian f
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