Seasons

SEASONS. - The theme of the Seasons, because of its allegorical scope, interested Christian art from its very origins (v. PERSONIFICATIONS).

At a later stage it became articulated and merged into the more complex but consequent themes of the Zodiac and the Months. The point from which every further 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 the circle, signifying the succession of the Seasons and exalting, in the circle that has no beginning and no end, the eternity of the symbol they frame: but here the decorative material is still felt in its realistic scanning of volumes and enjoyed outside of any didactic script.

As time went on this tendency was overwhelmed by the allegorical intention: for the allusive stylization the calligraphic sign became sufficient. Only the didactic meanings survive, and the theme of the Seasons is absorbed into the complicated and generic rhythms of the ecclesiastical calendars. This process is completed in Byzantine miniature painting. The motif counts for its reference to the parable of human life, that is, for the obvious analogies of literary origin, for example between spring and youth, between summer and maturity, etc. Thus transformed, it is given back by miniature painting to the figurative arts of the Romanesque period, as can be seen by observing a fresco in the crypt of the cathedral of Anagni. Around a naked man placed at the center of a vault appear four small nimbed heads, which bear the inscriptions: Ver humidum et calidum - estas calida et sicca - Autumnus frigidus - Hiems humidus.

The figurative reference to the characteristics of the Seasons and the Months, generally combined with the illustration of human activities, regained a complete meaning when the Church strove to bring the faithful back to agricultural activities, taking on also an educational task: the same fundamental meteorological notions indispensable to the successful outcome of every country activity were gleaned in church, and this provided a pretext for representing them, as a permanent reminder. But the motif pleased and was successful above all for its high moral and theological meaning; as a glorification of labor, in which is at work humanity's aspiration to that perfection and fullness of physical and intellectual life, which is 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 holds sway, that according to which the four Seasons 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 Seasons and the twelve Months, perhaps originally arranged in a single frieze, there remain the two high reliefs of Spring and Autumn, hierarchically exalted in their larger proportions and in their frontal or foreshortened presentation, compared with those of the Months, inscribed in profile.

In the frescoes of the lunettes inside, the Seasons are grouped two by two and their particular meaning is transcended in the recurrence of a quaternary rhythm insisted upon throughout the decoration (the four rivers of Eden, the four dimensions, etc.). Within this allusive ambit are placed the analogous cyclic figurations of the portals of French and Italian cathedrals, also in the Gothic period, from Notre-Dame of Paris to the cathedral of Cremona, from S. Martino of Lucca to the cathedral of Messina.

The art of the Renaissance strips the theme of its rigorously allegorical relationship. It is taken up again for its value as a decorative occasion, in which, if an allusion persists, it is to the varied manner in which the Platonic ideal of beauty is configured in human vicissitudes and in the variations of time.

If in the various Books of Hours of Flemish and French miniature painting the documentary and illustrative interest prevails and the sense of the Seasons becomes chronicle and sentiment of the various expedients with which man knows how to defend himself against and exploit meteorological mutations and their natural effects, on the other hand in Italian sculpture and painting of the Quattrocento there persists the taste for ideal personification which rarely descends to mere narrative episode. The typical examples of this manner offer themselves spontaneously to memory in the classic example of the Primavera of S. Botticelli, and even more in the group of the Seasons executed by artists of the Ferrarese school, formerly in the church of S. Domenico at Ferrara, and now dispersed among the Strozzi collection (Florence), the Gemäldegalerie (Budapest) and the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum (Berlin). The highest moment is reached in the Autumn of the latter collection, variously attributed (Galasso, Francesco del Cossa): an absorbed figure of a young woman, firmly planted, brandishing the tools of labor and supporting some vine shoots, from which hang juicy clusters, dominates, like a pagan divinity, a clear landscape populated with small figures. The subordinate theme of the Months and the zodiacal signs has ample development in the frescoes of Palazzo Schifanoia at Ferrara (Tura, F. del Cossa, E. de Roberti) which sums up, in its entirety, the metaphysical taste of humanistic allegories.

The detachment from any religious intention is here by now definitive. The development of the theme in the art of the Cinquecento will offer other artistically elevated examples, such as the statues of A. Vittoria at Villa Pisani (Montagnana), of Francavilla and Caccini on the Ponte S. Trinita (Florence), and the tasteful pictorial interpretations of Paolo Veronese at Maser, where the personification of the Seasons is brought back into coincidence with the pagan divinities that 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 blends spontaneously with the evocation of the classical divinities; and Ceres, Pomona, Flora, Proserpina are especially called into play (examples somewhat everywhere, from the Villa d'Este of Pirro Ligorio [Tivoli] to the Villa Aldobrandini of Giacomo della Porta [Frascati], to the Palladian Villas of the Veneto, to the eighteenth-century Villa Barbarigo of Valsanzibio [Padua]). It is evident that here the personification does not coincide with a cultural requirement and the iconographic datum is reduced to a pure pretext, to a play of environmental references, in an emblematic and allusive function.

In the Seicento, however, the motif had some revivals with the ample breath that Veronese had impressed upon his bold aerial foreshortenings; but the artists focused above all on sensory stimuli (so that the allegory becomes a cipher of exclusively physical effects: solar impetus 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 of Ciro Ferri in the villa Falconieri at Frascati.

The Settecento adhered to a selection of precise references analogous to those that had distinguished Flemish miniature painting: the Seasons were visualized in the attitudes that they suggest to men. Thus G. D. Tiepolo celebrated Summer with a delicate poetry tinged with exoticism, in frescoes such as the Riposo dei contadini in the villa Valmarana (Vicenza); Van Loo and the Valeriani brothers in the phases of the Quarrel of Diana in the Castle of Stupinigi personified Spring, Summer, Autumn.

The Ottocento abandoned personifications and concentrated attention on the landscape and environmental aspects of each Season. Above all the French Impressionists engaged in chromatic and luministic researches from which the illustrative intention now appears distant. The entire cycle of the Seasons was executed with many variations by Sisley, who obtained the best result in the Spring of the Nationalgalerie of Berlin (1874). But there is perhaps no painter who does not have in the body of his production more than one piece entitled to the Seasons; it will suffice to recall the Summer of Cézanne from the Liebermann collection (Berlin) and, for Italy, the Winter of P. Fragiacomo in the Galleria d'arte moderna of Rome and the Alpine Spring of Segantini in the Galleria d'arte moderna of Milan. - See pl. LXXVIII.

Riccardo Averini