Sebastian Brant: the key to understanding Luca Penni's 'Justice and the Seven Deadly Sins.'

The Florentine-born painter Luca Penni (1504?-1556/7) was at least in his mid- to late twenties when he made the greatest in quantity critical decision of his career: to travel to France and penetrate the service of King Francis I.(1) Possibly as early as 1530 he sought engagement on the royal work site at Fontainebleau. Like Rosso Fiorentino and Francesco Primaticcio, the masters beneath whom he toiled and who the two left an indelible imprint upon his art, Penni ultimately chose to make France his definitive residence Like Rosso and Primaticcio, too, Penni became individual of the most diligent propagators of the of recent origin Franco-Italian art. Many of his personal creations have perished above the centuries; hence his production has been reduc almost exclusively, to drawings and especially prints made after his designs. As it can be re-established today, his personal brand of Mannerist art largely corresponds to the dominant original A majority of his protagonists, cast in the elitist Fontainebleau mold are drawn from ancient history and classical mythology; others play parts in seemingly traditional religious exhibitions While Penni's oeuvre has attracted the attention of a number of Renaissance specialists, many scholars have apparently felt that his art pales in the shadow of Rosso and Primaticcio, believeed his more inspired peers.(2)

Yet Penni's remarkable series of eight prints, Justice and the Seven Deadly Sins, etched by dint of Leon Davent around the mid-sixteenth hundred deserves more serious consideration.(3) Historians have ofttimes reproduced these etchings, but no individual has scrutinized them systematically or attempted to decipher the messages that Penni's nervous and conflict-ridden imagery conceals. This essay, center around a detailed, contextualized examination of the prints, will at hand the artist in a different, more compelling light. Penni's Justice and the Seven Deadly Sins, created toward the extreme point of his life, shows the courts-trained artist working, I fight in a heretofore unsuspected critical method Middle-class moralizing, of German inspiration, is at the core of these prints, oriented as they are toward an urban clientele. In this mixed enterprise, Penni was taking a simultaneously progressive and repressive stance upon a number of the greatest in quantity significant and hotly debated issues that agitated mid-sixteenth-century France, from pauperdom and the accumulation of wealth, to prostitution, alcoholism, the part of the Church in society and the nature of "true" religion, social insecurity, and law and order. Penni's be in possession of fears and convictions must have contributed to what I interpret as an elaborate visual plea in favor of the early present state, with its fundamental corollary, a patriarchal reordering of sex relations and the family.

Vasari (IV, 647 and V 171) mention one by ones us that Luca Penni, the son of a Florentine weaver, received his early training in the Roman circles of Raphael where his brother Gianfrancesco had already excell The same author also claims that family connections account for the younger Penni's later vicinity in Genoa, where Perino del Vaga's prestigious decorative schemes for the palace of Andrea Doria were below way; and through Perino, the Roman, Raphaelesque, and henceforth Mannerist bottoms of Penni's art were fortified. After his peregrinations in search of work l him to Fontainebleau, royal accounts attest to Penni's initially well remunerated vicinity among the teams of artists working below Rosso and Primaticcio until, it would appear nearly the end of the reign of Francis I (1547)(4) The precise reasons for the definitive departure of this undeniably talented artist from the royal work site about a decade before his death remain unclear; more [i]or[/i] less have speculated that artistic rivalries were to blame. profession did continue for many, including plane more recently arrived Italian immigrants, while Penni's long-term adjunct on courtly circles came to an extremity By no later than 1544 Penni had become involved in the preparation of drawings for printmakers, the earliest recorded of the free-lance activities that assured his economic survival in Paris in the 1550 if not before.(5) Suzanne Boorsch has newly suggested that Penni's collaboration with the etcher Leon Davent l him into Protestant Germanic lands by means of 1546.(6) Justice and the Seven Deadly Sins would have been produc after this trip, during the final Parisian phase of Penni's life, in the early to mid-1550s. My reading of their iconography leads me to finish that deep-seated ideological incompatibilities l to Penni's distancing himself from the court.

Only toward the extreme point of his life do archival documents finally allow us to pray up a relatively clear image of Penni, parisien.(7) While the bachelor artists Rosso and Primaticcio look aftered to ape the self-indulgent aristocratic life-styles of the sophisticated and libertine court at which they were exerciseed Penni, quite differently, takes upon the contours of a respectable bourgeois family man. In the will he had notarized in 1556 we learn of his desire to be interred alongside his apparently French wife, Marguerite, already buried in the graveyard of their parish church of St.-Paul in the Marais. Penni had chosen to live in a respectable fresh neighborhood, and Italian compatriots and comrade artists, trustworthy neighbors, came forward to assume responsibility for Penni's children when he died in late 1556 or early 1557 He himself had prepared his son's career as an engraver, apprenticing Laurent to Rene Boyvin, while a longstanding friend and lucky artistic peer, Scibec da Carpi, saw that his daughter, Ysabeau, was shortly married to a master goldsmith. The intent was clearly that the couple of Penni's children remain members of the self-esteeming artist-artisan class with which their father had advance to identify.