STAGIONI. – The theme of the S., because of its allegorical significance, interested Christian art from its very beginnings (v. PERSONIFICAZIONI).
At a later stage it developed into, and became intertwined with, the more complex but related themes of the Zodiac and the Months. The point from which every subsequent development proceeds is indicated by an early Christian ivory preserved in the Treasury of the cathedral of Milan. The Agnus Dei is inscribed within a garland of fruits that change four times around its circumference, signifying the succession of the S. and exalting, in the circle that has neither beginning nor end, the eternity of the symbol they frame; but here the decorative material is still perceived in its realistic articulation of volumes and appreciated outside any didactic scheme.
As time advanced, this tendency was overwhelmed by the allegorical intention: for allusive stylization, the calligraphic sign became sufficient. Only didactic meanings survived, and the theme of the S. was absorbed into the complicated and general rhythms of ecclesiastical calendars. This process reaches completion in Byzantine illumination. The motif derives its significance from its reference to the parabola of human life—that is, from the obvious analogies, of literary origin, for example, between spring and youth, between summer and maturity, and so forth. Thus transformed, it was returned by illumination to the figurative arts of the Romanesque period, as can be observed in a fresco in the crypt of the cathedral of Anagni. Around a naked man placed at the center of a vault appear four small haloed heads bearing the captions: Ver humidum et calidum - estas calida et sicca - Autumnus frigidus - Hiems humidus.
(courtesy of Prof. E. Joni)
STAGIONI - Pagan sarcophagus with the genii of the s., from the cemetery of Praetextatus (4th century) - Rome, Lateran Museum.
also undertaking an educational task: the same fundamental meteorological notions indispensable to the success of every rural activity were learned in church, and this provided a pretext for representing them, as a permanent reminder. But the motif pleased and became successful above all because of its lofty moral and theological significance: as a glorification of work, in which humanity’s aspiration toward that perfection and fullness of physical and intellectual life is enacted, the first root of redemption. One may see how this conception finds its consecration in the double cycle of sculptures and paintings of the baptistery of Parma, where another medieval parallelism prevails, according to which the four S. correspond to the four Evangelists, just as the twelve months correspond to the twelve Apostles. There, in fact, of a complete sculptural cycle comprising the four S. and the twelve Months, perhaps originally arranged in a single frieze, there remain the two high reliefs of Spring and Autumn, hierarchically exalted by their larger proportions and by their frontal or foreshortened presentation, in contrast to those of the Months, inscribed in profile.
In the frescoes of the lunettes inside, the S. are grouped in pairs, and their particular significance is transcended in the recurrence of a quaternary rhythm reiterated throughout the decoration (the four rivers of Eden, the four dimensions, etc.). Within this allusive framework belong the analogous cyclical representations on the portals of French and Italian cathedrals, including those of the Gothic period, from Notre Dame in Paris to the cathedral of Cremona, from S. Martino in Lucca to the cathedral of Messina.
Renaissance art removed the theme from its strictly allegorical relationship. It was once again taken up for its value as a decorative occasion, in which, if any allusion remains, it concerns the various ways in which the Platonic ideal of beauty is configured in human vicissitudes and in the variations of time.
Whereas in the various Books of Hours of Flemish and French illumination documentary and illustrative interest predominates, and the meaning of the S. becomes a chronicle and an account of the various means by which human beings know how to defend themselves against and exploit meteorological changes and their natural effects, in fifteenth-century Italian sculpture and painting, by contrast, the taste for ideal personification persists, rarely declining into a merely narrative episode. Typical examples of this mode come spontaneously to mind in the classic example of Botticelli’s Primavera, and even more so in the group of S. executed by artists of the Ferrarese school, formerly in the church of S. Domenico in Ferrara and now dispersed among the Strozzi collection (Florence), the Gemäldegalerie (Budapest), and the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum (Berlin). The highest point is reached in the Autumn of the last-named collection, variously attributed (Galasso, Francesco del Cossa): an absorbed figure of a young woman, firmly planted, brandishing the implements of labor and supporting several vine branches from which succulent clusters hang, dominates, like a pagan divinity, a clear landscape populated by small figures. The subordinate theme of the Months and the signs of the zodiac is extensively developed in the frescoes of Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara (Tura, F. del Cossa, E. de Roberti), which as a whole summarizes the metaphysical taste of humanistic allegories.
The detachment from every religious intention is by now definitive. The development of the theme in sixteenth-century art would provide other artistically elevated examples, such as the statues by A. Vittoria at Villa Pisani (Montagnana), those by Francavilla and Caccini on the Ponte S. Trinita (Florence), and Paolo Veronese’s pleasing pictorial interpretations at Maser, where the personification of the S. is brought into coincidence with the pagan divinities who represented them in classical myths (for example, Spring is personified by Venus, Summer by Ceres, Autumn by Bacchus, etc.).
Similarly, in the scenographic adaptation of gardens, the theme spontaneously merges with the evocation of the classical divinities; those especially called upon are Ceres, Pomona, Flora, and Proserpina (examples found almost everywhere, from Villa d’Este by Pirro Ligorio [Tivoli] to Villa Aldobrandini by Giacomo della Porta [Frascati], to the Palladian Villas of the Veneto, and to the eighteenth-century Villa Barbarigo at Valsanzibio [Padua]). It is evident that here the personification does not correspond to any cultural requirement, and the iconographic datum is reduced to a mere pretext, to a play of environmental references serving an emblematic and allusive function.
In the seventeenth century, however, the motif was revived on several occasions with the expansive breadth that Veronese had given it in his daring aerial foreshortenings; but artists focused above all on sensory stimuli (whereby the allegory becomes a cipher for exclusively physical effects: solar force in summer, the looming of clouds heavy with rain in autumn, etc.), particularly in the Genoese pictorial cycles of Palazzo Bianco (D. Piola) and Palazzo Rosso (G. de Ferrari), and in those by Ciro Ferri in the Villa Falconieri at Frascati.
The eighteenth century adhered to a selection of precise references analogous to those that had distinguished Flemish illumination: the S. were visualized in the attitudes they suggest to human beings. Thus G. D. Tiepolo celebrated Summer with a delicate poetic quality tinged with exoticism, in frescoes such as The Peasants’ Rest in the Villa Valmarana (Vicenza); Van Loo and the Valeriani brothers, in the episodes of Diana’s Hunt in the Castle of Stupinigi, personified Spring, Summer, and Autumn.
The nineteenth century abandoned personifications and concentrated attention on the landscape and environmental aspects of each S. French Impressionists in particular engaged in chromatic and light-related investigations from which the illustrative intention now appears remote. The entire cycle of the S. was executed, with many variations, by Sisley, who achieved his finest result in the Spring of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1874). But there is perhaps no painter whose body of work does not contain more than one piece bearing a title relating to the S.; it will suffice to recall Cézanne’s Summer in the Liebermann collection (Berlin), and, for Italy, P. Fragiacomo’s Winter in the Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and Segantini’s Alpine Spring in the Gallery of Modern Art in Milan. - Vedi tav. LXXVIII.