Libina, Marsha. Sebastiano del Piombo and the Sacred Image: Mediating the Divine in the Age of Reform

Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547) is rarely considered on his own merits, which is perhaps understandable when the artist's career is so inextricably tied to Michelangelo's.While Michelangelo still serves as a leitmotif in Marsha Libina's study of Sebastiano and devotional imagery, her use of the framework of mediality is the driving force in her assessment of the artist's work.This allows her to recentre Sebastiano and his contributions to sixteenth-century art in Rome.The decades prior to the Council of Trent were marked by anxiety over the efficacy and theological correctness of religious imagery, particularly the ways in which devotional images implied unmediated access to holy figures.Libina argues that Sebastiano del Piombo explored this unease by pointedly visualizing the space between the mortal and the divine in what Libina calls "meta-pictorial strategies of devotional painting" (20).While mandating authorized and controlled access to sacred truths has long been accepted as a central tenet of Counter-Reformation doctrine, Libina calls into question when and how those concerns first appeared in devotional art.Libina clearly outlines the parameters of her study, which examines Christological works from Sebastiano's Roman period (1510-27) in which he used drawings from Michelangelo as references.The author explains her exclusion of Sebastiano's best-known painting-the Raising of Lazarus (1517), painted for Cardinal Giulio de' Medici in conjunction with Raphael's Transfiguration (1516-20) for the same patron-by citing both the extensive scholarship on the duelling commissions and the lack of connection with her theme of mediation.Following a lengthy introduction that astutely contextualizes the artist, his connections with Michelangelo, and the ways in which early sixteenth-century artists engaged with religious reform prior to the Council of Trent, Libina presents her argument in four case studies.Each chronologically ordered chapter is centred on a painting or group of paintings by Sebastiano.In the first chapter, Libina addresses the pointed disconnection between the Virgin and Christ in Sebastiano's Viterbo Pietà (c.1512-16).Previous scholarship discussed the painting as a failed attempt to incorporate Michelangelo's

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