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 most critical decision of his career: to travel to France and enter the service of King Francis I.(1) Possibly as early as 1530 he sought employment on the royal work site at Fontainebleau. Like Rosso Fiorentino and Francesco Primaticcio, the masters under whom he toiled and who both left an indelible imprint on his art, Penni ultimately chose to make France his definitive home. Like Rosso and Primaticcio, too, Penni became one of the most diligent propagators of the new Franco-Italian art. Many of his personal creations have perished over the centuries; hence his production has been reduced, almost exclusively, to drawings and especially prints made after his designs. As it can be reconstructed today, his personal brand of Mannerist art largely corresponds to the dominant model. A majority of his protagonists, cast in the elitist Fontainebleau mold, are drawn from ancient history and classical mythology; others play roles in seemingly traditional religious scenes. 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, deemed his more inspired peers.(2)

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

Vasari (IV, 647, and V, 171) tells 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 excelled. The same author also claims that family connections account for the younger Penni's later presence in Genoa, where Perino del Vaga's prestigious decorative schemes for the palace of Andrea Doria were under way; and through Perino, the Roman, Raphaelesque, and henceforth Mannerist roots of Penni's art were fortified. After his peregrinations in search of work led him to Fontainebleau, royal accounts attest to Penni's initially well remunerated presence among the teams of artists working under Rosso and Primaticcio until, it would seem, 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; some have speculated that artistic rivalries were to blame. Employment did continue for many, including even more recently arrived Italian immigrants, while Penni's long-term dependency on courtly circles came to an end. 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 1550s, if not before.(5) Suzanne Boorsch has recently suggested that Penni's collaboration with the etcher Leon Davent led him into Protestant Germanic lands by 1546.(6) Justice and the Seven Deadly Sins would have been produced 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 conclude that deep-seated ideological incompatibilities led to Penni's distancing himself from the court.

Only toward the end of his life do archival documents finally allow us to conjure up a relatively clear image of Penni, parisien.(7) While the bachelor artists Rosso and Primaticcio tended to ape the self-indulgent aristocratic life-styles of the sophisticated and libertine court at which they were employed, Penni, quite differently, takes on 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 cemetery of their parish church of St.-Paul in the Marais. Penni had chosen to live in a respectable new neighborhood, and Italian compatriots and fellow 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 successful artistic peer, Scibec da Carpi, saw that his daughter, Ysabeau, was soon married to a master goldsmith. The intent was clearly that both of Penni's children remain members of the self-esteeming artist-artisan class with which their father had come to identify.