"Paintings... silent and motionless, penetrate into our innermost feelings with such power that at times they seem more eloquent than language itself..."
⁓ Quintilian, The Orator's Education
How do a painting's subjects speak to us? What similarities were observed between art and oratory in the Italian Renaissance? What did Renaissance humanists value about the art of speaking well?
In this snapshot exhibition focusing on just three portraits by the early sixteenth-century artist Sebastiano del Piombo, and using his most famous religious subject, The Raising of Lazarus, as a thematic focal point, we may learn what the art of addressing an audience in the Renaissance hinged upon, and how, in some ways, this was no different in painting.
Sebastiano del Piombo, friend to popes and poets, found himself at the epicentre of Italy's early sixteenth-century artistic and religious milieu, when he moved to Rome in 1511, the same year Michelangelo finished the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and also the year in which the German monk Martin Luther would plant the seeds of the Reformation that would later threaten the bedrock of the Catholic Church at large. During the Counter-Reformation, rhetoric and preaching would come to play an increasingly important role in the church, something reflected in the dynamic portrayal of Christ in the Raising of Lazarus.
In our age of sound-bite politics and instantly published opinions, the value of well-crafted speech is of lasting value for all of society, not just the elite, as was the case in the ancient world and the Renaissance.
