"Painting and oratory love each other mutually… as oratory flourishes, so does painting…"
⁓ Pope Pius II, 1452
Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, was one of the seven artes liberales ('liberal arts') in the medieval and Renaissance periods, and carried with it established rules and conventions handed down from the ancients. A revival of interest in the ancient Roman orators Cicero and Quintilian are evidenced by the various manuscripts that proliferated throughout Italy during the Renaissance, such as an early fifteenth-century northern Italian example of Cicero's Ideal Orator (DeOratore)pictured below.
The engraving above by Marcantonio Raimondi is a copy of Raphael's 1516 cartoon depicting St. Paul preaching at Athens, part of a tapestry series that would have hung in the Sistine Chapel. It establishes for us both that there was an ancient art of public speaking as well as its revived interest in the Renaissance. St Paul can be seen exhorting the listening crowds, indicated by his gestures and stance, something no doubt noticed by Sebastiano and Michelangelo when they began designing components of the Raising of Lazarus a year later in 1517.
Quintilian believed that a good orator must be a vir bonus, a good man, an idea which long prefigured the idea of the all-rounder, Renaissance humanist. Like Cicero, he stresses the importance of a person's self-presentation and delivery when speaking, and standardised techniques of non-verbal oratory, such as gesture, expression and emotion. These components have the power to make the spoken word more persuasive and put a person's character and learning on display. These ideas that were channeled by the famous Renaissance writer Castglione, who encourages his humanist readers to follow similar advice in his Book of the Courtier (published in 1528). Cicero writes in his handbook on rhetoric, Orator:
“The man of eloquence… will be able to speak so as to prove, to charm and to persuade…”
⁓ Cicero, Orator
'To prove, to charm and to persuade'. We see these themes emerging from Sebastiano's flattering depictions of his humanist sitters. His unparalleled portraits could almost be said to be modes of persuasive rhetoric themselves, encouraging us to imitate the virtuous example of these Renaissance 'good men'.
Gesture, facial expression and posture are visual means Sebastiano uses to convince us and his patrons of the value of their achievements, character and poetic sensibilities.
