 Hello everyone, I'm Catherine Pulizzi from Rutgers University and I'd like first to extend thanks to the Barnes for offering sanctuary to this symposium when it was in danger of losing a home. So I also want to thank all of the graduate students who have presented so far, such an impressive group of papers, really professional. So thank you for that and I'm very delighted to introduce my advisor, Jeff Freeman, who earned his master's degree at Hunter College and is at present an advanced PhD student in the graduate department at Rutgers. Now for Jeff's day job. So since 2015 he's been working at the Metropolitan Museum and there he contributed as Keith Christensen's assistant to the exhibition Valente de Boulogne Beyond Caravaggio. And then subsequently, more recently he contributed to the catalog and worked with Carmen Bombeck on the Michelangelo drawings show. He has since moved on to become research associate to Denise Allen in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. Jeff is also enthusiastic about contemporary art and he's written essays and reviews about various artists and for the exhibition of Jeff Coons, the painter and the sculptor held in Frankfurt in 2012. He was the curatorial assistant and he contributed an essay to the catalog. Jeff's paper this afternoon, now for something very different, a drives from research for his dissertation entitled Site Specificity, Christian Archaeology and Naturalism in Roman Walter pieces about 1600 to 1630 which he will be defending next month. So please join me in welcoming Jeff. Hi everyone. Thank you Catherine and of course I'll repeat everyone's thanks to all the great organizers Martha and Aliya. I know how much work went into this so I thank you all and to all the universities involved. My fellow graduate student presenters, I've heard things all day that I think will dovetail nicely with mine so that was exciting. To remove the work is to destroy it. So Richard Sarah declined during a public hearing concerning the removal of his 120 foot long steel sculpture Tilted Ark installed in Foley Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan in 1981. Tilted Ark was eventually removed and separated into three plates of steel. Today it sits in a storage facility in Maryland. The work has never been displayed again. The artist saw its status as an artwork so intrinsically dependent on its original intended site. Writers including Miwan Kwan and TJ Demos have considered the controversy surrounding Sarah's Tilted Ark as the defining moment for site specificity in contemporary art positing that the phenomenon was the reaction to the commodification of mobile artworks seen in interchangeable gallery and museum spaces. Within this theorization they also allowed for a plurality of different types of site specific art. For example, memorials, land art, performance, and installation art. And I'll leave site conditioned art to Robert Irwin and Michael. What of the early modern period, though much of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art is site specific, whether a Spalliera panel made for a marital bed chamber, a portrait bus sculpted for a tomb, or perhaps most saliently, as in my study, an altarpiece produced for a specific altar. The concept has been little considered. Perhaps it seems to inherently self-evident, even totological. What is a wall fresco if not inextricably tied to its support? The most famous and original interrogator of early modern site specificity was Leo Steinberg, who in his inimitable way wrote a series of case studies, all examining a site's role in an artist's formal and iconographic choices. In Steinberg's earliest and most well-known example, the 1959 article Observations in the Trazi Chapel, he considers the design of Caravaggio's two lateral paintings in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome. Arguing that the unusual compositions and lighting were conceived in relation to the viewer's oblique and changing approach. My research concerns a related but ultimately different arena of early modern site specificity, one responsive to the unique conditions in Rome around 1600. A number of factors in the second half of the 16th century led to feverish interest in Rome's sacred topography, its holy sites, its relics, its early history. This is what we speak of when we discuss an early Christian revival in early modern Rome, a revival inspired by the rediscovery of the catacombs in 1578, the restoration of early Christian edifices, the publication of revised martyrologies, the influx of pilgrims to the city's holy sites for the jubilee years and more. The relation between the early Christian revival and the artwork produced in this period has been the subject of a number of art historical studies over the last 30 years, though there is much left to learn. In my dissertation, I consider the site specificity of a number of altarpaintings depicting early Christian saints, works intended for a holy site, a tomb, a well, the sewers associated with that figure. Each of the altarpieces in my case studies has been dislocated from its original site in some way, whether through destruction, dispersion or seclusion. My method to recover the works' original context combines the close study of surviving artworks, including drawings and prints, and of contemporary written material, like pilgrimage manuals, artistic guidebooks and martyrologies. I propose that holy sites in Rome could drive specific iconographical and artistic choices in ways heretofore unappreciated, arguing for a holy site specificity in early modern art. Cigolese now lost burial of St. Paul of 1609 to 13 for the church of San Paolo for Lemura provides a paradigmatic example. Installed on the high altar of one of the most important basilicas in all of Rome, Cigolese altarpiece must have been one of the most spectacular and influential landmarks of painting at the beginning of the 17th century. And it would have been, this is a view down the nave, it would have been behind the Siborium of Arnauforticambia which marked St. Paul's tomb and behind that. Cigolese altarpiece would have been 23 feet tall and 12 feet wide and likely painted on slate. Installed above the saint's tomb, the monumental painting enshrined one of the holiest sites in all of Christendom. Despite its prominence, the artist's original invention and achievement at San Paolo have not been here to for sufficiently recognized. And this is really the only print that survives that where you can make out what the composition eventually looked like. It's by Giovanni Maggi from his engravings for the nine churches in Rome. The works impact both in its day and for the history of art was severely compromised by several factors. The work was left unfinished at the artist's death in 1613. Subsequently, humidity left the painting in a ruinous state by the early 19th century. The paintings whereabouts have been unknown since the tragic fire that ravaged the church in 1823. I hold out hope that the work sits in a storeroom somewhere, albeit in a ruined state like Sarah's Tilted Ark. Ludovico Cardi, known as Cigoli after the town of his birth, was one of the most in demand painters and architects of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Though extremely important to early Tuscan and Roman Baroque painting, the artist has received relatively little attention, particularly in English language scholarship compared to his contemporaries, Caravaggio or Nibali Karachi. And I have to cite an important 2014 dissertation by Lisa Borla at the University of Pennsylvania as one of the few recent studies of the artist in English or any language. Cigoli is perhaps today best known for his friendship with Galileo and his realistic depiction of a cratered moon studied through a telescope for his fresco of the Immaculate Conception in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. The Florentine artist spent the last years of his life in that city receiving several important commissions, including an altar piece for St. Peter's Basilica. Cigoli was bestowed the commission for the high altar of San Paolo sometime between the spring of 1606 and the fall of 1607. The painting remained unfinished, but in situ at the artist's death in 1613. The Church of San Paolo for Elemura or St. Paul's outside the walls was believed to have been built over the spot where Paul's tomb was located. And this is what it looks like today, which is mostly reconstructed after the 1823 fire. Though its location outside of the city center makes it off the beaten path for today's tourists, San Paolo was one of the four ancient Basilicas of Rome, the city's second largest church following St. Peter's and one of the seven major pilgrimage churches. The hundreds of thousands of pilgrims in undating Rome, especially during the Jubilee year of 1625, would have included St. Paul's tomb on their itinerary where they would have had the opportunity to meditate on Paul's entombment in front of Chigoli's recently installed painting. In art, the burial of St. Paul was almost never depicted, even within cycles devoted to the saint's life. The lack of iconographical precedence cannot be overemphasized with regards to Chigoli's painting. The extant preparatory drawings for the altarpiece of San Paolo demonstrate how Chigoli was driven to conceive of the scene from scratch and that the artist carefully considered the figures to include the narrative moments to feature and the specificities of the setting. And there's about 14 drawings that survive. Here's the sampling. Most of them are in the Uffizi. These are all from the Uffizi. In studies of 1979 and 1984, Miles Chappell provided the fundamental analysis of the preparatory drawings for the burial of St. Paul Altarpiece. He has identified 14 extant sheets for the altarpiece design. Drawings that offer an abundance of valuable information otherwise lost. Across his various drawings, Chigoli developed two different compositions simultaneously. An important precedent for Chigoli in developing the burial iconography must have been Raphael's entombment of about 1508 for the Church of San Francesco al Prato in Perugia, a figure group in one of the surviving drawings by Chigoli. Appears to be an adapted quick study from Raphael's altarpiece, which Chigoli further developed in two more compositions. In this sheet, which did not ultimately become the final design, Chigoli drew the Roman nobo woman Lucina presiding over the burial of the Apostle in her vina along via Ostienza, as recounted in the early acts of the Apostle, as well as early modern guidebooks and martyrologies. A reference to Paul's tomb, the open grave itself, would have been a novel feature of the painting, one to which Chigoli paid close attention. In the same sheet, he laid down a uniform area of brown wash and then carefully used parallel hatching to delineate the back wall of the grave. In this section of the drawing, Chigoli was working out one of the most fundamental issues of such burial scenes, how to represent where the body will end up. He seems to have considered Caravaggio's entombment for a centimria in Vallicella from just a few years earlier, but with an important change. Though Caravaggio's Christ is being lowered into the tomb symbolically represented outside the picture by the actual altar itself, Chigoli depicts the actual open grave in which Paul will be lowered, the very earth on which the viewer stands in San Paolo. And about 10 years later, Graccino would innovatively employ the open grave device in his St. Petronella altarpiece for St. Peter's. And that's here, and there are these amazing big hands reaching out from someone in the earth, either lowering or rising her body, depending what you think is going on. Previously overlooked in discussions of the preparatory drawings or background details in the middle register of the design that demonstrate how carefully Chigoli considered the particular location of San Paolo in inventing his site-specific painting. The details of Rome's topography were carefully ideated and depicted, and established the remoteness of San Paolo vis-à-vis Rome's center. So on the upper left of the same sheet we've been studying, Chigoli portrayed via Ostienza a diagonal road emanating from the middle of the composition to the upper left. And then here's an aerial view of Rome. So here's the church of San Paolo today, here's where the high altar is and where the altarpiece would have been, and then here's via Ostienza here. Chigoli did this mostly by using the white of the paper in reserve to suggest the road, the same with some brown wash for the path and a sketchy outline and ink for the path's contours. In Chigoli's designs for his altarpiece, via Ostienza leads to a number of important monuments. From left these include, here's the Tiber, St. Paul's, here's the Pyramid of Caiacestius, there's the Porto San Paolo somewhere, there's a column there, and especially look for the, I'll show you a few more drawings, but look for the Pyramid across them, and then on the road to via Ostienza you see the Pyramid here, so the white triangle. So that's kind of a nice side-by-side. So these elements occur across, yeah, various drawings, including the more hastily executed compositional sketches on the verso of one sheet, a drawing in which Chigoli worked out the lower portion of the composition, and the final squared modello. Allowing for a degree of artistic license, these topographical features were carefully placed by Chigoli to correspond with the viewer's orientation toward the high altar while standing before the painting. The fact that Chigoli carried over these details across his various preparatory drawings shows how instrumental the specifics of the site were for his new pictorial invention. Returning again to the sheet we see that Chigoli included as a subsidiary scene in the background, the separation of Peter and Paul on via Ostienza. The separation was a popular legend with sixth-century roots in which Peter and Paul were led outside the city walls and shared a final moment together before being separated and led to their respective executions. In the late 16th century a small chapel was built on the spot along via Ostienza. Recent research by Barbara Wish emphasized the importance of the sacred site for early modern Rome and Pauline iconography. From 1562 on, the Archie Confraternita della Santissima Trinita de Pellegrini erected a small chapel on the site dedicated to the theme of the separation of Peter and Paul, richly decorated by some of the leading artists in 16th-century Rome. Though the chapel was demolished in 1910, it was once a prominent stop along the pilgrimage route to the Church of San Paolo. In 1984, Miles Chapel published this study in the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a late preparatory study by Chigoli for the figure of St. Paul in the Altarpiece, and the drawing is currently on view at the Met until the end of this month. So go see it. The drawing in blue wash with white heightening features Paul's body on the recto and the figure of Lutina on the verso. The sheet bears here a 17th-century inscription attributing it to Jacopo Vignale, whose name is also repeated on the mount. And here I propose that the inscription is correct, that the drawing is not a preparatory study by Chigoli, but instead a ricordo by the younger Florentine artist Jacopo Vignale, a record or memory of the now lost painting. There are several reasons to believe the work is a copy, not executed after a living model or dead model. And I thank Carmen Baumbach for her insightful discussions around this drawing. So some reasons I think it's a copy. The figure is composed in reserve, as though excerpted from a larger design. So I mean, these hands kind of just come out of nowhere at exactly the corner of the drawing instead of the drawing kind of emanating out from the center. And then also, you know, if you look, for example, at how this hand grasps the drapery, it looks like the two parts were drawn separately and not like there's actual weight in that hand or a pressing in type of effect. Instead, the drawing, the studies bear closer resemblance to similar works attributed to Vignale, many of which feature the drier diagonal white hatch marks and the highlights, as in this drawing in the Louvre, seen here at the right. Vignale was recorded in Rome in 1625 and may have made additional earlier trips there. Chigoli's altarpiece would have been over a little decade old and an important pilgrimage site for the younger Tuscan artist. So let's remember that St. Paul was decapitated. Though the squared modello in the Uffizi here on the right does not include the detail of Paul's body being reattached to his head, the surviving prints confirm that Chigoli's high altarpiece made sure to include this detail. And it is important to consider this change. Of course, the burial of a decapitated body may have been seen as inappropriate or in decorous. At the least, it may have provided an awkward and ungainly solution to this new iconography Chigoli was presenting. And one might compare the decapitated saint as depicted by Spadarino and his St. Peter's altarpiece of 1625, which is a, you know, amazing painting and strange and weird, but I don't know if it's fully successful. So what is this, you know, reattribution have to do with site specificity. The depiction of the reunification of the head could also reference early histories of Paul's relics and holy sites within the basilica. In a 1595 guidebook to Rome, the church of San Paolo is described as being built on this place where Paul's head was miraculously refound. And since 1330, the church had contained an altar that commemorated the spot where the head of St. Paul had been rediscovered. Presented here for the first time in connection to Chigoli's painting, a 1620 German guidebook to Rome offers valuable insight into how the central action of the scene was interpreted. In it, the tourist Hermann Boving wrote, the painting on the high altar shows how St. Paul's head, since it miraculously had been found in the church, had been laid to his holy body by the holy Pope Cornelius and Luciana the widow. The passage confirms that one of the key events depicted in the painting was indeed the reunification of Paul's head and body. In the upper left of the metropolitan sheet, a pair of hands delicately holds Paul's head to his neck. Focusing on one of the most significant details of the altarpiece, Vignale forcefully drew the line of Paul's decapitation. The drawing in the Met is therefore an invaluable record of the lost altarpiece's final appearance. A key piece of evidence describing Chigoli's remarkable site specific invention. Thank you.