III

    Such provisional titles could vary. The passage quoted from the Lives shows that Vasari designated a particular work of art by naming its subject or specifying its location. Each of these two data was quite useful to pinpoint the work in question if the artist's name was known, as the list of Fra Angelico's identified works above testifies. When the owner of a work was not an institution but an individual, the information about its whereabouts seems to us to be less than reliable, but it must have served Vasari's purpose well at the time of his writing.
    Our list in the previous section shows today's current 'titles' of some of Fra Angelico's paintings in both Italian and English. What is conspicuous here is that most of these titles, especially in Italian, consist of a name of its original location or owner and a type of painting such as 'pala'(altarpiece), 'tabernacolo' or 'trittico'. In one case (8), the components of the title are the subject and the name of the original owner. This sort of nomenclature may seem to be too vague, but as it was highly unlikely that the same artist should produce for the same patron the same kind of painting more than once, the title of this sort will do satisfactorily. In addition, it is especially effective when it comes to dealing with a most ordinary subject of Renaissance altarpiece: Madonna and Child surrounded by several saints. Vasari named all the main characters in the picture painted 'for the nuns of St Peter Martyr'(10). To call it Trittico di San Pietro martire or San Pier Martire altarpiece is far more concise and impressive.
    The titles like Trittico di SanPietro martire is a sort of nickname, and their origins could not date back very far, though it is difficult to say precisely when each nickname came into use. However, as to one of the most well-known titles given by posterity, we know with whom it originated: it was the Italian art theorist and biographer Giovanni Pietro Bellori who called Raphael's famous mural in the Vatican Ginnasio di Atene, that is, The School of Athens, in 1695 in his writing about the master's murals in the papal palace(Note:5). Bellori's title has been retained to this day, since it properly suggests what this densely populated scene is all about, without enumerating the names of the ancient philosophers present.
    Besides being brief, nicknames were useful for identifying each of the several works with the same subject and painted by the same artist. Therefore, Raphael's series of 'Madonna and Child' are called, for example, La Madonna di San Sisto or La Madonna della Sedia. The Madonna di San Sisto features San Sisto (Saint Sixtus) as one of the saints adoring the Madonna and Child, and it was also painted for San Sisto, a church dedicated to him, in Piacenza, Italy. The word 'sedia' in the title of the second work means 'chair' and refers to a conspicuous element in the picture itself. One of Raphael's most popular Madonnas, now in the Louvre, had been in the French royal collection since the 16th century, and is known as La Belle Jardinière (The Beautiful Gardener) [fig.4]. The sobriquet, which seems to date back to the 18th century, does not derive from anything concrete in or about the painting but from the bucolic impression of the mother and her children in a serene landscape. Portraits, too, were often given aliases, especially in Italy, and some of them seem to have been based on a vague impression of the subject. A man's portrait by Antonello da Messina in the Louvre [fig.5], for example, has been known as Le Condottiere (The Mercenary Captain), because of the sitter's virile features and resolute, even ruthless, expression. A woman's portrait by Raphael is called La Muta (The Mute Lady) [fig.6]. In this case the title seems to have been suggested by the impression given by the sitter who observes us calmly and distantly. In these examples the true identity of the sitters were forgotten at an early date. They looked so lifelike and vivid, however, it is only natural that viewers of old missed their names and started calling them by nicknames.
    As it is often the case when we give a nickname to someone, a title supplied by posterity sometimes becomes inseparable from the work in question and can influence our perception of it considerably. One such title is La Tempesta (The Tempest) [fig. 7], by which the enigmatic painting by the 16th-century Venetian painter, Giorgione, has been known. The title derives from the notes on Venetian private collections, written by a 16th-century Italian writer and connoisseur called Marcantonio Michiel. In his time, Venice was thriving on international trade and both the aristocracy and the plutocracy of the city had become highly interested in the patronage of art. Michiel visited and wrote about various Venetian private collections, and in one of them, the collection owned by Gabriele Vendramin, a wealthy Venetian nobleman, Michiel saw among other things, 'a canvas of a little landscape with a storm [tempesta], with a gypsy and a soldier, by Giorgio da Castelfranco'(Note:6).

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4. Raphael, La Belle Jardinière,
c.1507, Paris, Louvre.

5. Antonello da Messina,
Portrait of a Man
(‘Le Condottiere’),
1475, Paris, Louvre.

6. Raphael,Portrait of a Woman
(‘La Muta’),c.1507, Urbino,
Palazzo Ducale.

7. Giorgione,The Tempest,
c.1505-07,Venice,Galleria
dell’Accademia.