 Ellie has held fellowships from the Walters Art Museum, from the Pure Point Morgan Library, the Warburg Institute, and she's about to move to Florence for two years on a Cress Foundation fellowship to the Kunsthistorisches Institute. I should mention that she's also made her mark as a very successful teacher at Johns Hopkins. In the spring of 2017, she taught a course in Leonardo da Vinci, designed to appeal to students in science and engineering, and the course had a wait list of 40, which is absolutely unprecedented in history of art at Hopkins. Ellie Vernon. Thank you, Stephen. And of course, thank you to the Barnes for hosting us today. This talk arises from my dissertation research on Cesare da Sesto's sketchbook, in which I'm grappling with the best way to contextualize and explain his drawing practice, including how it conforms to and differs from his peers, especially Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo, three men he personally knew and whose art he studied at various points in his career. In this process, I have been forced to confront the degree to which the few 16th century texts that mentioned Cesare do or do not help in explaining his drawing practice. In what follows, I will discuss a group of texts, however, that I argue do help us understand how Cesare is rethinking, expanding, or challenging the very idea of art. In this poem, the painter and art theorist, Gianpaolo Lomazzo, describes a painting by his fellow Milanese artist, Cesare da Sesto. Before he gives a basic description of the painting's composition, he declares, quote, one receives much honor when one can conceive an idea. But what does Lomazzo mean by idea? Why does he choose this semantically charged word knowing it would carry possible neoplatonic associations as well as more quotidian synonyms such as Concietto or Invenzione? After all, Panofsky and his classic book, Idea, a Concept in Art Theory, labeled Lomazzo, quote, the chief spokesman of a neoplatonic orientation in the metaphysics of art. Perhaps one explanation is that Lomazzo, writing in Milan, had never actually seen the painting he was describing, which Cesare executed for a church in Messina. For Lomazzo, in a very literal sense, this painting remained an abstract idea, and one that he could not experience directly. How then was he able to describe even the basic components of the composition, the swirl of pages, servants, and horses that surround the mother and child, the graceful gestures of the three kings? It was because he had seen a drawing. As he recounts in another treatise written three years later, Lomazzo had seen the drawing for this painting, presumably a large-scale cartoon that was brought to Milan by the painter Antonio Maria da Vaporeo, who in the service of his Spanish employer would have traveled throughout the kingdom of Naples, which during this period consisted of essentially the entire Italian peninsula south of Rome, as well as Sicily, and was ruled as a satellite state of the Spanish crown, therefore making it likely that a governor of Alexandria would have also been in Sicily at some point. Lomazzo's account of Cesare's Sicilian altarpiece raises many themes central to both the struggles and rewards of studying Cesare da Sesto. As an itinerant artist who traversed the length of the Italian peninsula at least twice, working in Milan, Rome, in and around Naples, Messina, and then back in Milan, Cesare can play a significant role in the emerging geographic turn within the discipline, in which scholars seek to revise the deeply rooted geographical biases in the story of Italian Renaissance art, the date back at least to Vasari's vitae, in which the access of great art, exhibiting what he called the quote unquote modern manner, passed through Venice, Florence, and Rome. And then those on the quote unquote periphery have subsequently been deemed provincial, somehow lesser, and dependent upon the center for any spark of innovation or talent. I argue however that Cesare allows us to tell the story from both perspectives, as it were, from both the periphery, I guess, here defined as Milan, Naples, Sicily, and the center, Rome. L'Amazzo's account also highlights the central role that drawings have always played in our attempts to not only chart Cesare's itinerary to get a basic sense of where he was when, but also to understand how mobility and style are often at the heart of Cesare's drawing practice, where and what he drew, and most importantly, why. Perhaps the greatest challenge in studying Cesare is that we simply have very few fixed dates, or facts, around which to build our analysis, we know that he was working somewhere in Julius II's Vatican apartments in 1508, that he was living in Naples and working on an altarpiece for the nearby monastery in Cavadier Tarani in 1515, and that he died in Milan in 1523 at the age of 46, while completing this altarpiece. This means that we have dozens of paintings and around 100 drawings by Cesare that have no documentation, and often no traceable provenance before the 19th century. It was during his Roman sojourn of around 1508 to 1513 that Cesare began compiling a sketchbook. Today held at the Morgan Library and Museum that is one of the only of its kind to survive. Cesare used this sketchbook to record the veritable explosion of artistic creativity taking place around him, making him both a participant and eyewitness to one of the most crucial moments in Italian Renaissance art. When he left Rome to travel south, Cesare took his sketchbook with him. Indeed, he seems to have kept it with him for the rest of his life as he traversed the length of the Italian peninsula encountering some of the most important artists and works of art of his generation along the way. And these encounters unfold across the pages of his sketchbook, which became for this itinerant artist a mechanism of transmission. The Morgan sketchbook consists of 26 pages, probably originally bound together into a small book with each page measuring roughly seven and a half by five and a half inches. The drawings reveal an extraordinary mind operating like a roving force, recording subjects both sacred and profane, historical and mythological, the grotesque and the divine. For example, on this sheet, Cesare combined studies for St. John the Baptist, the Roman god Mercury, a fantastical man-bird hybrid, and a man and woman engaging in a sexual act. The drawings are not organized according to any schema and there's no sense of a chronological progression from one page to another. The majority of the figural sketches are derived from various designs by Raphael. Of these, however, several record paintings that were not then in Rome, which means Cesare must have had privilege access to Raphael's own drawings. For example, on this sheet, the Madonna and Child in the upper right corner recalls Raphael's Bridgewater Madonna, which has been dated to Raphael's pre-Roman Florentine period. This motif of a dynamic, horizontal Christ child sprawled across the Virgin's lap, however also recalls Leonardo's design for the Madonna of the yarn winder. And indeed, it may be that the common denominator here for both Cesare and Raphael is actually Leonardo. As scholars have long acknowledged, Leonardo's impact on Raphael's art during his Florentine period. Cesare makes further references to Leonardo's designs on this sheet, from Leida and the Swan to the bizarre man-fish hybrid at the bottom, designs that probably reflect Cesare's access to Leonardo's drawings when they both resided in Milan a few years earlier. This is just one example of how time, space and quote-unquote influences mix and merge across the pages of Cesare's sketchbook. And it is because of his extraordinary sketchbook that even after he left Rome, Cesare was able to recall and redeploy a composition by Perugino, that he had seen in the Sistine Chapel, as the central motif and an altarpiece he made for an isolated, mountaintop monastery outside of Naples. The artistic ideas that he captured in his sketchbook allowed him to flaunt his direct knowledge of Roman art, even when he was hundreds of miles from the eternal city. Perugino's idea on one level permanently affixed to the wall in a specific and hard to access location in Rome has now been unmoored, has traveled forward through space and time to reappear above the high altar of a monastic church. And in the process, Perugino's idea has been subjected to forces beyond internal art historical questions, such as how do motifs travel? How are styles created and how do they travel? As we will see with Cesare, sometimes a motif can travel without the accompanying original style, and sometimes styles travel that are not tied to any specific motifs. Perugino's idea has also been subjected to historic economic and political forces, as has Cesare himself, as he and his sketchbook traveled from papal Rome to nominally Spanish Naples, to work for a monastery then in the midst of a sometimes violent struggle with the local villagers who refused to continue to pay taxes to support the monastery. In this particular instance then, it seems that Cesare's stylistic eclecticism and his direct knowledge of the art in the Vatican and the monastery's desire to express their gratitude to Julius II for his intercession on their behalf to quell these riots entered into a symbiotic relationship. For Perugino is not the only reference to contemporaneous Roman art in this altarpiece. Michelangelo's recently unveiled Sistine Chapel ceiling provided the inspiration for the poses of Saint Peter and Paul, two saints who were strongly associated with Rome and the papacy as well. And Cesare's close reworking of Raphael's Madonna of Foligno, commissioned by Julius II's closest advisor, Sages Mondo de Conti, and installed in the Roman church of Santa Maria in Aticelli, crowns the polyptych. The sketchbook does not hold all the answers to Cesare's approach to creative imitation. For example, there are no drawings in it after the Michelangelo prophets we just saw quoted in the Cavite-Terrani altarpiece, although there are two sheets in the sketchbook that do record Ignudy from the Sistine ceiling. And a sheet also recently resurfaced on the art market on which Cesare has recorded the figure of Eleazar. For Cesare, Michelangelo's ceiling in particular seems to have functioned like a thesaurus of posed figures that were slightly modified and inserted into his paintings over the next decade. For example, in his last painting back in Milan, Michelangelo's prophet Daniel makes another appearance. Although at this point in his career, one could argue that Cesare is quoting himself as much as Michelangelo. Once again, an idea contained in a fresco in the Sistine Chapel has migrated alongside Cesare from Rome to Naples to Milan. In assessing Cesare's sketchbook, I'm trying to maintain a dual focus and to operate on two levels. On the one hand, I'm conducting a much needed and overdue formal analysis of the drawings themselves by considering Cesare's materials and techniques and his personality as a draftsman. The few scholars who have cited the sketchbook have merely engaged in source hunting, attempting to match every figure that they can in the sketchbook with Cesare's original source in Leonardo, Raphael, or Michelangelo's oeuvres. One of the principal objectives of my dissertation therefore is to take the analysis of Cesare's drawings to a deeper level by arguing that his drawing practice reveals a sophisticated approach to drawing as a means of appropriation. Cesare drew in order to consciously construct a new style. And in this, he was in the vanguard of a revolution in drawing practices that would fundamentally alter the production of art by mid-century. But Alexander Nagel has called, quote, the expansion of the drawing phase, which in turn generated a larger array of images for the purposes of recombination, redistribution, and reuse, end quote. Thus, my other scholars have tried to make the link between Cesare, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael on the level of iconography. By trying to judge which specific motifs Cesare has copied from each, they have failed to see that the connection between these artists runs deeper to the level of drawing practice. All of these artists shared a new conception of how and why a painter should draw and what a drawing is on an epistemological level, a point I will return to in my conclusion. So in constructing a conceptual or theoretical framework in which Cesare's drawings can be analyzed, another goal is to develop a more precise vocabulary that can articulate the nature of the relationship between Cesare and his models that avoids unhelpful and formalist categories such as Raphael-esque or Leonardo Di Smo. Therefore, I've been wrangling with more abstract questions of artistic method and motivation that is not just focusing on how Cesare consciously constructed this synthetic or eclectic personal style, but why he approached style formation in this manner to begin with. How can we explain Cesare's choices based on the historical and theoretical options available to him at the time? And it's here that we must return to the question of texts and to what degree the few 16th century writers who mentioned Cesare can or cannot help us to understand his drawing practice. Lamazzo is our most knowledgeable 16th century source for Cesare de Sesto. Although he's writing almost 70 years after his death, he had directly studied not only Cesare's drawings, but his paintings in Milan as well, including this delicate, psychologically penetrating painting he incorrectly titles the Herodias, which he tells us he actually owned before gifting it to the Holy Roman Emperor. And indeed it remains in Vienna to this day. In his first art treatise published in 1584, Lamazzo described a drawing by Cesare that he also owned, the St. George and the Dragon, now in the Louvre. In a remarkable passage in which he is describing the psychological force displayed in Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of horses, he suddenly breaks off to note that the same intensity can be seen in Cesare's drawing, praising its force, impact, and strength. So Lamazzo had directly studied at least two of Cesare's drawings, and yet it is the altarpiece in Messina that he chooses to highlight in two different texts when attempting to explain what is so exceptional about Cesare. And what is most honorable in the Messina altarpiece? Once again, Cesare's ability to conceive an idea. As a Milanese art theorist writing the clothes of the 16th century, however, Lamazzo is also pushing a particular geographical and stylistic agenda that is generally anti-Visari and seeks to expand the pool of generally accepted great artists beyond Visari's triumvirate of Leonardo Raphael Michelangelo. We should therefore be cautious of accepting this anecdote about the nature of Raphael and Cesare's personal and professional relationship. And he writes, our Cesare de Sesto, a note, you know, our, the possessive here, was very dear to and held in high esteem by Raphael of Urbino, with whom it was said he would many times be found chatting, so as to appear to be the best of friends, which indeed they were. But as regards the art of painting, they had not the slightest respect for each other. We should also be suspicious of this assessment, giving the overwhelming visual evidence, demonstrating that Cesare was frequently inspired by, or literally drawn to Raphael's ideas. On the recto of the very sheet that Lamazzo himself owned, we see yet another example of this, as Cesare has recorded the central twisting figure and Raphael's final masterpiece, The Transfiguration. Cesare's sketchbook is riddled with references to Raphael Stanze, which he was working on at the same time, of course, that Cesare was also employed in redecorating the Pope's personal apartments. He was probably working one floor above him. Arnold Nassilrath has even suggested after the Stanzadella d'Or was cleaned, that Cesare executed some of the marginal designs surrounding Raphael's narrative scenes. And of course, Raphael himself is associated with the most famous and controversial use of the word idea. It could be argued in the Italian Renaissance. In 1554, Ludovico Dolce presented a letter that he said was written by Raphael to Castiglione about his Galatea fresco in the Farnesina, in which quote, unquote, Raphael says, in order to paint a beautiful woman, I would need to see many beautiful women under the condition that you were to help me with making a choice. But since there are so few beautiful women and so few good judges, I make use of a certain idea that comes into my mind. Whether this has any artistic value I am unable to say, I try very hard just to have the idea. This letter was reprinted by Dolce in 1559, by Pino in 1574, by Bellori in a treaty not coincidentally titled Lidea in 1664, and by Vinculman in 1755, always attributed to Raphael. Although by 1841, there were already serious doubts about its authenticity. In a 1994 essay, John Sherman persuasively argued that the letter was written by Castiglione in the guise of Raphael. In order to advance Castiglione's own Neoplatonic theory of art. Nevertheless, many eminent art historians have used this letter as evidence that it was Raphael himself who had the Neoplatonic ambitions. I think it's clear that we cannot, based on this letter, continue to regard Raphael as an artist consciously creating Neoplatonic art, beginning his process with a purely abstract and ideal idea, with a capital I, and only creating the form and style second. But if in Raphael's Galataea, we do not see an example of Raphael creating a composition that can live up to lofty Neoplatonic rhetoric, we can nevertheless deduce an approach to stylistic creation. Sorry, I've lost my, an approach to artistic creation that is strikingly similar to Chaser Days. Dependent on an additive process, combining concrete ideas taken from numerous sources that Raphael had personally seen, and sometimes we know, right, jotted down in drawings, which results in a synthetic product that participates in a web or network of ideas across space and time. In this case, for the sprawled Pudo along the bottom, Raphael could be recalling his own earlier Bridgewater Madonna, or Leonardo's Madonna of the Yarnwinder, or Raphael's Tadetondo, both of which he had seen in Florence several years earlier. In the 1995 essay, Janice Bell pushed against the long prevailing scholarly tradition in which Raphael's style is dismissed as classical, and therefore somehow self-contained and even a little boring. By confining Raphael to the classical and his supposedly brief achievement of an ideal classicism before inevitably falling into decline, she argues that, quote, scholars have been too prejudiced against what could be called the working theory of artists that was not formalized and written down, but is still visible in the works themselves, end quote. David Summers has similarly argued for the recognition on the part of art historians of a, quote, sub-theoretical tradition close to practice that played a fundamental role in how artists themselves conceived of their work. It is precisely this exchange of ideas on a sub-theoretical level closer to everyday artistic practice that I believe Chesaday was also participating in. The Morgan sketchbook, therefore, is a rare surviving document that reveals Chesaday's working theory. It is therefore in Chesaday's drawings and paintings themselves rather than in any text, ultimately, that I believe we can uncover the motives and the methods behind his conscious construction of a style that was ambitiously pan-Italian that flaunted his ability, in this case, to bring Leonardo's Fumato technique and Roman antiquarianism to Sicily or Michelangelo's ignudy to Milan. His goal was never to hide his various influences, quote, unquote, or the ideas that he variously copied, adapted, appropriated, or customized from other artists. His goal was to revel in them and the new idea of artistic creation that they championed. In the end, what ties Chesaday, Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo together on a deeper level than the simple exchange of individual motifs is their similar drawing practice and the new epistemological possibilities inherent within a drawing. In other words, what kind of knowledge does a drawing contain? How is that knowledge stored and accessed and how does it travel? Thank you.