Triumph (art)
The allegorical theme of triumph found repeated acceptance in the fields of literature and the visual arts during the Italian Renaissance .
Text sources
Already Dante Alighieri (1265–1325) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) used ancient descriptions of triumphal procession to formulate their own christological ideas. In the chapter Purgatorio of his Divine Comedy (1307-1321) Dante uses ancient sources to describe Ecclesia triumphans ; Among other things, he mentions wagons pulled by griffins (carri) . In the years 1342/3 Boccaccio describes in his poem Amorosa Visione a dream in which he saw five large pictures on a castle wall with depictions of the triumphs of wisdom, fame, wealth, love and luck; he explicitly mentions Giotto as their possible creator.
The best-known and most influential, however, is the poem I Trionfi by the Italian Renaissance poet Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), written in the Tuscan colloquial language between 1350-1374 , whose 6 chapters are titled:
- Triumphus Cupidinis ("Triumph of Love")
- Triumphus Pudicitiae ("Triumph of Chastity")
- Triumphus Mortis (" Triumph of Death ")
- Triumphus Famae ("Triumph of Glory")
- Triumphus Temporis ("Triumph of Time")
- Triumphus Eternitatis ("Triumph of Eternity")
In the literary form of the theme it becomes clear that there are interactions, and above all, competitions between the various triumphs.
painting
For a long time the literary creations were considered to be models of the painted, but Giotto di Bondone took up the subject even before Petrarch : he created the Vanagloria fresco in Milan in 1335 - the original has been lost . However, copies have been preserved and show in the upper half of the picture the winged allegory of fame (gloria) surrounded by a halo in a mandorla sitting on a two-horse chariot and accompanied by trumpet angels ; the lower half of the picture is occupied by numerous horsemen, some of whom wear laurel wreaths on their heads.
Especially in the second half of the 15th century, depictions of triumph became a popular theme in Italian Renaissance painting. Later they went out of fashion, but were also occasionally imitated in baroque painting .
See also
literature
- Alexandra Ortner: Petrarch's Trionfi in Painting, Poetry and Festival Culture. Investigation of the origin and distribution of a Florentine motif on cassoni and deschi da parto of the 15th century . VDG, Weimar 1998, ISBN 3-932124-98-7 . ( Table of contents and introduction )
- Margaret Ann Zaho: Imago Triumphalis. The Function and Significance of Triumphal Imagery for Italian Renaissance Rulers. Peter Lang Publ., New York 2004; ISBN 0-8204-6235-7 . (Multiple chapters; limited preview in Google Book Search)
