1277 The Burlington Magazine ­ Angust 2009

COV.Aug09.v.1:cover.june.pp.corr 17/07/2009 11:38 Page 1

AUGUST

2009 T H E B U RLINGTON MAG AZI NE

Andrea di Bonaiuto | Fra Angelico as miniaturist | The Mantegna exhibition NO .

The provenance and restoration of Titian’s ‘Triumph of Love’

1277

Art History Reviewed III: Roger Fry’s ‘Cézanne’ | Venetian paintings in the National Gallery

VOL . C L I

Boulton | Blake | Utrillo | Heartfield | Long | Venice Biennale

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The Fundación Focus-Abengoa has created the Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez Research Prize, intended to honour, highlight and extend the outstanding achievements of the leading art historian Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez.

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aug09dorotheum:AQ_31815_J_Baroni 21/07/2009 11:42 Page 1

S E I T 17 0 7 Third Auction Week 2009

Old Master Paintings, 6 19th Century Paintings, 7 Works of Art, 7 – 8 Jewellery, 8

October October October October

Viewing one week before the auction Palais Dorotheum, Dorotheergasse 17, 1010 Vienna, Austria Tel. +43-1-515 60-570, client.services@dorotheum.at Catalogues: Tel. +43-1-515 60-200, kataloge@dorotheum.at Online Catalogues: www.dorotheum.com

Ferdinand Georg WaldmĂźller, Children Decorating the Hat of a Recruit (detail), 1854, oil on wood, 55.5 x 44 cm, Auction 7 October

01 BURLINGTON 308x235mm v1 parchment:18 BURLINGTON / March 2006

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VOLUME CLI • NUMBER

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• AUGUST

2009

555

EDITORIAL

511 New online resources: Italian paintings in France

Peter Blake. One Man Show, M. Livingstone

by PAUL MOORHOUSE

ARTICLES

556

512 Andrea di Bonaiuto’s painting in the National Gallery and

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED

S. Maria Novella: the memory of a church

by DILLIAN GORDON EXHIBITIONS

518 An unpublished miniature from the circle of Fra Angelico

by LAURA

ALIDORI BATTAGLIA

526 Reflections on the Mantegna exhibition in Paris

by LUKE

557

Richard Long

558

Matthew Boulton

p.520

SYSON

by MARINA VAIZEY

by CELINA FOX

536 Titian’s ‘Triumph of Love’

by CATHERINE

WHISTLER

and

561

JILL DUNKERTON

by FRANCES SPALDING

543 A new contribution to the biography of Leonardo 562

da Vinci

by P . G . GWYNNE

563 564 p.540

566

550

Early French altarpieces

by JUSTIN E.A. KROESEN

National Gallery Catalogues. The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings. Vol.II 1540–1600, N. Penny

568

Valadon – Utrillo

by MERLIN JAMES

by JENNIFER FLETCHER

569

John Heartfield

Pittura rupestre medievale. Lazio e Campania settentrionale (secoli VI–XIII), S. Piazza

571

‘Visual Encounters’

by MICHAEL WHITE

by ALESSIA TRIVELLONE

551

Italy in nineteenth-century art

by RICHARD WRIGLEY

BOOKS

548

William Blake

by ROBIN HAMLYN

544 Roger Fry’s ‘Cézanne, a study of his development’, 1927 RICHARD VERDI

Polish art

by ROBERT RADFORD

ART HISTORY REVIEWED III

by

Moore, Hepworth, Nicholson

Antike Steinskulpturen und Neuzeitliche Nachbildungen in Kassel: Bestandskatalog, P. Gercke and N. Zimmermann-Elseify

by SILVIA LORETI

572

by JOHN-PAUL STONARD

p.529

574

Die antiken Skulpturen in Newby Hall sowie in anderen Sammlungen in Yorkshire, D. Boschung and H. von Hesberg

Venice Biennale Pasqualino Rossi

by ERIKA LANGMUIR

by THORSTEN OPPER

552

Art, Marriage, and Family in the Florentine Renaissance Palace, J.M. Musacchio

576

CALENDAR

580

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

by BRENDA PREYER

553

The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance, D.E. Katz

by D.S. CHAMBERS

553

Politics, Civic Ideals and Sculpture in Italy 1240–1400, B. Cassidy

p.568

The September issue contains articles on:

by JULIAN GARDNER

554

Leonardo. Dagli studi di proporzione al ‘Trattato della pittura’, P.C. Marani and M.T. Fiorio, eds.

Baron Wiser’s picture gallery

Leonardo e il monumento equestre a Francesco Sforza, A. Bernardoni, ed.

An early episode in the life of Delacroix

by ANNA SCONZA

555

The Edwardian taste for Piero di Cosimo

Architettura e committenza nella Napoli del Quattrocento, B. de Divitiis

by CORDELIA WARR

Art History Reviewed IV: Pevsner’s p.573

‘Pioneers of the Modern Movement’

Cover illustration: Triumph of Love, by Titian. c.1545. Canvas, diameter 88.3 cm., after cleaning and restoration. (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

Illustrated in this issue on p.537.

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VOLUME CLI • NUMBER

1277

• AUGUST

2009

Editor: Richard Shone

Managing Director: Kate Trevelyan-Kee

Deputy Editor: Bart Cornelis Associate Editor: Jane Martineau Production Editor: Alice Hopcraft Editorial Assistant: Anne Blood Contributing Editor: John-Paul Stonard Index Editor: Barbara Pezzini

Advertising & Development Director: Mark Scott Design & Production Manager : Chris Hall Circulation & Promotion Manager: Claire Sapsford Administrator: Bébhinn Cronin Administrative Assistant: Olivia Parker Accountant: Anita Duckenfield

Consultative Committee Dawn Ades OBE FBA David Anfam Colin B Bailey Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue GCVO FBA FSA David Bindman Claude Blair FSA Christopher Brown Richard Calvocoressi CBE Lorne Campbell Lynne Cooke Paul Crossley Caroline Elam David Franklin Julian Gardner FSA John Golding CBE FBA Sir Nicholas Goodison FBA FSA Christopher Green FBA Tanya Harrod Michael Hirst FBA John House Ian Jenkins FSA Simon Jervis FSA C M Kauffmann FBA Rose Kerr Alastair Laing Sir Denis Mahon CH CBE FBA Robin Middleton Jennifer Montagu LVO FBA Rosemarie Mulcahy Nicholas Penny Anthony Radcliffe FSA Dame Jessica Rawson CBE FBA J M Rogers FBA FSA Pierre Rosenberg Deborah Swallow Gary Tinterow Julian Treuherz Sir Christopher White CVO FBA Paul Williamson FSA Although the members of the Consultative Committee give invaluable assistance to the Editor on their respective subjects, they are not responsible for the general conduct of the magazine Attributions and descriptions relating to objects advertised in the magazine are the responsibility of the advertisers concerned

THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE FOUNDATION

Registered Charity in England & Wales (No. 295019), and incorporated in the State of New York, USA

Trustees and Directors Timothy Llewellyn OBE** Dawn Ades OBE FBA Colin B Bailey Gifford Combs Joseph Connors Lynne Cooke Caroline Elam Sir Nicholas Goodison FBA FSA The Lady Heseltine Simon Jervis FSA* Alastair Laing* Bryan Llewellyn* Richard Mansell-Jones* Jennifer Montagu LVO FBA Nicholas Penny Marilyn Perry Duncan Robinson CBE* Paul Ruddock Angelica Zander Rudenstine Coral Samuel CBE Richard Shone* Seymour Slive FBA Kate Trevelyan-Kee* John Walsh Sir Christopher White CVO FBA* Paul Williamson FSA* **Chairman *Also a member of the Board of Directors of The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.

Contributing Institutions The Art Institute of Chicago The Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute The Cleveland Museum of Art The Frick Collection The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Kimbell Art Museum The Metropolitan Museum of Art Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, and The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London

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The Burlington Magazine, 14-16 Duke’s Road, London WC1H 9SZ Tel: 020–7388 1228 | Fax: 020–7388 1229 | Email: burlington@burlington.org.uk Editorial: Tel: 020–7388 8157 | Fax: 020–7388 1230 | Email: editorial@burlington.org.uk

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Editorial

New online resources: Italian paintings in France are so preoccupied with understanding the past, art historians have been relatively slow to adapt to the changes being wrought on their discipline by automation and to take full advantage of the benefits that it offers. But digital transition is still in its early stages and most researchers have been participants for hardly twenty-five years, too short a time to begin building more than a few of the long-term projects that are now feasible. However, a few such enterprises have already become part of the vocabulary of research and others are being launched – sometimes with minimal publicity – whose impact will certainly be significant. One of the most ambitious of these and worthy of special attention is dedicated to Italian paintings in France. This is the Répertoire des tableaux italiens dans les collections publiques françaises (XIIIe–XIXe siècles) (RETIF), the first tranche of which, consisting of Brittany, Poitou-Charente and Centre, was mounted on the website of the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA) two years ago, followed by a second batch in March this year, which includes the Pays-de-Loire and Nord Pas-de-Calais. The number of paintings so far included amounts to hardly 2,000, but the number is expected to grow to approximately 13,000 and even now it is possible to see that, if it can continue as it has begun, the results will be impressive.

In addition to basic information, an abbreviated provenance is given for each painting as well as a brief bibliography and, most important, an image, something a book cannot easily rival. The illustrations are often not of high quality, many – especially those of churches – being amateur photographs taken by members of the group compiling the Répertoire.

The conception and execution of the project is due primarily to Michel Laclotte, former director of the Musée du Louvre and now Vice President of the Comité scientifique of INHA. Laclotte began his professional career with a thesis on early Florentine and Sienese paintings in regional French museums, and so this latest project is a continuation of the work he began more than half a century ago, though on a truly grand scale. He now has the help of a small team at INHA as well as the advice of numerous scholars, mostly French and Italian, to whose opinions Laclotte has ready access. The extent of the project will eventually exceed any similar national inventory that has preceded it.

Indeed, the French have been the quickest and most efficient in building such large automated projects, a reflection of the marked centralisation in that country. The huge online databases Joconde (which includes the possessions of the French national museums), Mobilier-Palissy and Architecture-Mérimée (the last two produced by the department of Architecture et Patrimoine) are testaments to their industry. In Britain, a national online survey of paintings is still being developed, and in the United States individual museums are left to their own devices, with very mixed results and minimal consistency.

The Italian project follows close on the heels of a similar one, the Répertoire des peintures françaises des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles en Allemagne (REPFALL), initiated and overseen by

PERHAPS BECAUSE THEY

Pierre Rosenberg, which was accompanied by an exhibition held in Paris, Munich and Bonn, and culminated in a book that lists and reproduces all the French paintings of the Baroque and Rococo periods in German museums, including as well an abbreviated bibliography and provenance in addition to the essential information.1 Although necessarily smaller – it lists around 2,000 paintings – and freed of the necessity of searching for unknown pictures in churches, that project was nevertheless similarly ambitious, and, taken together, the two databases provide a standard to which others can aspire. They also indicate the increasingly international character that such projects require: RETIF eschews the French form of Italian names – Carrache for Carracci, for instance – and the French/German project provides both.

RETIF will necessarily overlap with Joconde and other French projects, but it is inevitably bringing to light a large number of previously unknown paintings, among which one might mention a new Lotto of St Jerome in the museum in Varzy, an unknown cassone with the Story of Romulus and Remus by Matteo di Giovanni in Libourne, a Coronation of the Virgin by Antonio Vivarini in a church in the Alpine village of Alos, and many others that will appear region by region in the following months.

Ambitious projects on this scale usually come about through the persistence of one dedicated person, and it would be difficult to find someone with the same governmental clout and connoisseurial experience to equal Laclotte. Like other institutions designed with academic standards, the administration of INHA is expected to change on a regular basis and new administrators may have different priorities. This can make long-term projects vulnerable. Even much wealthier institutions, such as the Getty Research Institute in California, where one might have expected ambitious projects to have a secure footing, are dropping their support for initiatives that need more than short-term financial planning, including the Bibliography for the History of Art (BHA) and most of the projects under the Getty Provenance Index.

Another – generally unacknowledged – drawback associated with such online efforts is their anonymity, which is sometimes overcome by publishing the principal results in books or journals, thereby giving the author appropriate recognition. As the size of such projects expands, however, this becomes increasingly difficult, and compilers can no longer assume that an online project will ever take any other form. Even when RETIF is concluded a few years from now, it expects to be able to keep the bibliographical and provenance parts of the database up to date, a plan that will require firm commitment. We hope that INHA and its future administrators will live up to these high expectations and continue to provide us with such marvellously rich material.

1 P. Rosenberg and D. Mandrella: Gesamtverzeichnis Französische Gemälde des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts in deutschen Sammlungen, Munich 2005; also available on the website of INHA.

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Andrea di Bonaiuto’s painting in the National Gallery and S. Maria Novella: the memory of a church

by DILLIAN GORDON

1. Virgin and Child with saints, by Andrea di Bonaiuto. c.1365. Tempera on panel, 28 by 105.8 cm. (National Gallery, London).

THE SMALL PAINTING

(Fig.1) attributed to Andrea di Bonaiuto da Firenze (active 1346, died 1379), now in the National Gallery, London, is unique in shape and unusual in iconography. It was first connected with the Dominican church of S. Maria Novella in Florence by Millard Meiss who described it as a ‘sort of hagiographic compendium of the church’, and suggested that the dossal format was a deliberate repetition of a thirteenth-century design ‘motivated less by the artistic intention of the painter than by the wish of his patron to possess a sort of replica of a Dugento painting made memorable for religious or other reasons’, or possibly a replica of an altarpiece in the Gondi chapel in the same church.1 The painting was indeed a replica, but not

of the kind envisaged by Meiss, and its shape and iconography can be explained by its unique function, deeply integrated within the church, perhaps reflecting Dominican practice in a way not so far discerned in any other Italian fourteenth-century work.

The long thin shape of Andrea di Bonaiuto’s painting is immediately striking. The entire frame is original and complete; carved twisted columns of moulded gesso divide the painting into eleven compartments, with beads of coloured glass resembling jewels embedded in the pastiglia of the spandrels.2 In the centre are the Virgin and Child under a gabled arch decorated with crockets. On either side, beneath round-headed arches, are ten saints, including three of the Evangelists and three

I am very grateful to Joanna Cannon, Luke Syson and Julian Gardner for reading a draft of this article and for their invaluable comments. I am also grateful to Beverly Brown, Roberto Lunardi, Gail Solberg, Carl Strehlke and Simon Gaine OP for their suggestions, and to Marcia Hall for allowing me to use her plan of S. Maria Novella.

1 M. Meiss: Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death, Princeton 1951, repr.

1978, pp.47 and 176.

2 It is inconceivable that this tiny painting, the frame of which is almost certainly complete, could have had a predella as suggested by Johannes Tripps (J. Tripps: Tendencies of gothic in Florence: Andrea Bonaiuti. Corpus of Florentine painting, ed. M. Boskovits, Florence 1996, section IV, vol.VII, pp.44–45 and 188–92), let alone the one with half-length figures in barbed quatrefoils, including St Francis (Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City) and St Louis of France (Museo Nazionale di S. Matteo, Pisa), but no Dominican saints. The two panels are cruder in style (even taking condition into account), and proportionally wrong, since they are nearly as tall (19.5 cm.) as the National Gallery painting (24 cm. high at the sides); Tripps suggested a Man of sorrows once went between the two panels.

3 The palm, originally green, is now blue due to the fading of a yellow lake component. I am extremely grateful to Rachel Billinge for examining the painting with me and for all her insights and help. The painting’s technique will be discussed in detail in the catalogue of Italian paintings in the National Gallery 1250–1400 (forthcoming).

4 Meiss, op. cit. (note 1), p.175.

5 Ibid., p.175, note 3; and J. Wood Brown: The Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella at Florence, Edinburgh 1902, pp.115–35.

6 Meiss may have been distracted by the other altars (as opposed to chapels) which were listed in ibid. For a general discussion of family chapels, see J.K. Nelson and R.Z. Zeckhauser: ‘Private chapels in Florence. A paradise for signalers’, in idem, eds.: The patron’s payoff. Conspicuous Commissions in Italian Renaissance Art, Princeton and Oxford 2008, pp.113–31.

7 M. Hall: ‘The “Ponte” in S. Maria Novella: the problem of the rood screen in Italy’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974), pp.157–73. See also R.

Lunardi: ‘La ristrutturazione vasariana di Santa Maria Novella. I documenti ritrovati’, Memorie Domenicane 19 (1988), pp.403–19.

8 For the chronicle by Borghigiani, see S. Orlandi: ‘Necrologio’ di Santa Maria Novella, Florence 1955, II, appendix I, pp.397–404.

9 Fra Modesto Biliotti: ‘Chronica pulcherrimae aedis magnique coenobii S. Mariae cognomento Novellae florentinae civitatis’ (1586); the relevant sections printed in Analecta Sacri Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum 23 (1915). A photocopy of the entire chronicle is in the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. Sources are not always consistent with regard to the dates of changes of patronage; these did not usually involve changes of title, and there was none during the period under discussion.

10 Although there were other chapels in the church in the fourteenth century, they were outside the main body of the church; see also note 51 below.

11 Borghigiani in Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, p.402; and Hall, op. cit. (note 7), pp.159 and 164–65. In that publication Hall drew no vaults for the ponte (ill. p.36, fig.d), but subsequently in idem: Renovation and Counter-Reformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce 1565–1577, Oxford 1979, p.197, fig.I, she indicated a single cross vault spanning the two central chapels. Presumably the altars of the central chapels were like those at each end of the ponte, namely on the walls dividing the chapels, given that there were arches facing north and doorways to the south; Hall believed that the altars were placed between the ponte’s façade and the nave piers.

12 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, p.120: ‘. . . primum incipiemus sacello quod parieti aedem a claustro dividenti haerebat, quod in divi Thomae aquinatis honorem principio aedificatum affirmant [. . .] qui anno MCCCLXV huic domui praeerat, illud de fratrum consensu Vermiglio cuidam florentino civi, Alfanorum familia nato concessit. Qui Vermilius, suppresso divi Thomae nomine Marco Evangelistae dicavit, et divi Marci sacellum ab omnibus appellare voluit’; and Borghigiani in Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, p.401. E. Giurescu: ‘Trecento family chapels in Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce: Architecture, patronage and competition’, unpublished Ph.D. diss. (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1997), p.190, states that according to the Liber Novus (written by Fra Zanobi

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Dominican saints, each identified by an inscription below.

Reading from left to right the saints are: Mark, with his attribute of a lion, holding his gospel inscribed with pseudo-kufic; Peter Martyr, holding a book and a martyr’s palm,3 with a knife buried in his shoulder; Thomas Aquinas, with rays from his hand illuminating a small church (Fig.2); Dominic, with a book and a lily; Luke, with his attribute of an ox and his gospel (Fig.3); John the Evangelist, holding his gospel, inkwell and quill pen, with his attribute of an eagle; Gregory, wearing a papal tiara, blessing and holding a book; Catherine of Alexandria, crowned and holding a book and martyr’s palm, with her attribute of a wheel; Mary Magdalene, holding her jar of unguents; and a Bishop saint, wearing a mitre and cope and holding a book and a crozier, inscribed S. THOMAS (C?).

Meiss identified the latter as St Thomas of Canterbury, in place of the fourth Evangelist, Matthew, and pointed out that Thomas is rarely shown in Tuscan painting, but that he was the titular of an altar in S. Maria Novella, and that all the saints shown in the painting had altars dedicated to them in that church.4 Meiss gave as his source the book on S. Maria Novella by the Revd Wood Brown of 1902.5 What Meiss apparently did not realise is that the position of the saints and Virgin and Child in the painting precisely mirrors the position of the major chapels dedicated to them on the ground floor of the liturgical east end of the church, which is orientated north–south.6 In 1974 Marcia Hall published an important article on the interior of S. Maria Novella before Vasari’s renovations of 1565 removed the ponte which divided the nave from the liturgical east end of the church.7 Hall was primarily using a chronicle of 1556, which had been transcribed and amplified by Borghigiani in the eighteenth century, supplemented by various sepoltuarii.8 Another chronicle of 1586 by Fra Modesto Biliotti, also based on earlier sources, is more detailed and can be used as a startingpoint to establish the location and patronage of family chapels in the church at the end of the fourteenth century.9 From this it is clear that the sequence of saints in the National Gallery painting

enables one to make a mental journey around the church, reading the saints not simply from left to right, but beginning at each end, and reading inwards in a sequence which follows the major chapels. The sequence on the picture starts as if from either end of the ponte, and moves towards the centre of the ponte and then outwards to the transept chapels, reaching the central cappella maggiore from both directions (Fig.4).10 The ponte was a large bridge-like structure dividing the church halfway down the nave, with three archways facing the north end and three doorways facing the south façade. It housed four chapels on the ground floor and four chapels above.11 In the painting the viewer begins at the left with the two outermost chapels on the ponte. Sited against the west wall of the church that divides the church from the Chiostro Verde was the chapel of St Mark under the patronage of the Alfani family. On acquiring the chapel in 1365 they changed its dedication from St Thomas Aquinas to St Mark;12 in 1367 Margherita, a widow, daughter of Vermiglio de Alfanis, wished to be buried in the chapel founded by her father.13 After the destruction of the ponte the chapel was moved under the organ where it still is, and was given to the Confraternity of St Catherine of Siena who changed the dedication to that saint.14 The next chapel was dedicated to St Peter Martyr and belonged to the Castiglione family; it was founded in 1298 and still belonged to them in the fifteenth century.15 Following the chapels clockwise one comes next to the west transept where the raised chapel was, and still is, dedicated to St Thomas Aquinas, as it had been since its foundation, the date of which is uncertain but with a terminus ante quem of 1348.16 It belonged to the Strozzi family; Nardo di Cione17 frescoed the chapel in the mid-1350s18 and also designed the stained-glass window, which shows St Thomas Aquinas holding the model of a church which is lit by rays emanating from the image of the sun cupped in the palm of his hand, a motif that also occurs in Andrea’s painting (Fig.2).19 In the altarpiece, completed by Andrea Orcagna for the chapel in 1357, Aquinas is shown on

Guasconi; see Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), I, pp.621–22), the chapel was in the cloister.

Orlandi concludes (pp.610–11) that the family chapel behind the church was given up in 1365, and the family allocated the chapel (on the ponte) dedicated to St Thomas Aquinas, which was then rededicated to St Mark. The change of dedication may have been motivated by the fact that there was already a chapel dedicated to St Thomas Aquinas in the main body of the church (see note 16 below).

13 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, p.120; and Florence, Archivio di Stato (hereafter cited as ASF), Diplomatico Santa Maria Novella, 14th August 1367: ‘. . . quam cappellam fecit fieri in dicta ecclesia dominus vermiglius olim pater de testatoris seu Jacominus olim fratrum dicte testatoris’; the reference comes from S. Cohn: The cult of remembrance and the Black Death: six Renaissance cities in central Italy, Baltimore 1992, p.212.

14 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, pp.120–21; and Hall, op. cit. (note 11), pp.110–11.

15 According to Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, p.121: ‘. . . iuxta [i.e. beside the chapel dedicated to St Mark] erat arcus ianuae occidentalis navis oppositus, et post ipsum divi Petri Martyris erat sacellum’. Borghigiani in Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, p.403; see also S. Orlandi: ‘I Ricordi di San Pietro Martire in Santa Maria Novella’, Memorie Domenicane 64 (1947), p.36, note 163. According to the Sepoltuario of Sermartelli of 1617, ASF, Manoscritti 621, fol.10, it was dedicated to St Peter Martyr when it was restored by Bernardo Castiglione in 1484; in fact it was dedicated to that saint at its foundation in 1298; see Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), p.120, who notes it may have been the site of a thirteenth-century painting of St Peter Martyr. It has been suggested (M. Boskovits, ed.: Corpus of Florentine painting. The fourteenth century.

Bernardo Daddi and his circle, section III, vol.V, Florence 2001, p.258, note 4) that the Coronation of the Virgin (Accademia, Florence) by Bernardo Daddi could have come from this chapel, on account of St Peter Martyr being in a position of honour on the right. On this criterion perhaps a more likely candidate for the chapel would be the triptych dated 1375, now in the Galleria Nazionale, Parma, attributed to Agnolo Gaddi, which also comes from S. Maria Novella; it shows St John the Baptist introducing St Peter Martyr who in turn introduces a female donor to the Virgin and Child enthroned on their proper right, accompanied by Sts Dominic and Paul who

introduce Thomas Acquinas on their proper left, accompanied by St Laurence; see L. Fornari Schianchi, ed.: Galleria nazionale di Parma. Catalogo delle opere dall’antico al cinquecento, Milan 1997, pp.48–50, no.54.

16 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, p.117; Borghigiani in Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, appendix I, p.400; and W. and E. Paatz: Die Kirchen von Florenz, Frankfurt 1952, III, p.712. For the problems concerning the date of its foundation, see K.A. Giles: ‘The Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella: Florentine painting and patronage 1340–1355’, unpublished Ph. D. diss. (Fine Arts Department, New York University), University Microfilms, Ann Arbor 1977, I, pp.1–32, esp. p.13.

17 See G. Marchini: Le vetrate, in U. Baldini, ed.: Santa Maria Novella. La basilica, il convento, i chiostri monumentali, Florence 1981, p.267, and ill. p.282. The decoration or altarpieces of a chapel will generally only be mentioned in this article where relevant to the titular saint for the purposes of the present argument.

18 See R. Offner: Corpus of Florentine painting, section IV, vol.II, Nardo di Cione, New York 1960, pp.47–60.

19 This is a literal interpretation of Pope John XXII’s encomium, quoted in the service of Aquinas’ canonisation in 1323: ‘. . . after the apostles and first doctors, this glorious doctor illuminated further the church of God’; cited by J. Cannon: ‘Simone Martini, the Dominicans and the early Sienese polyptych’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982), pp.69–93 and 73, and note 32. This iconography became habitual in S. Maria Novella: it was used again for St Thomas Aquinas in the fresco in the refectory painted in 1353; see S. Orlandi: Historical-Artistic Guide of Santa Maria Novella and her monumental cloisters, rev. I. Grossi, Florence 1984, pp.76–77, and again in the stained glass of the liturgical east window behind the high altar designed

by Domenico Ghirlandaio possibly in 1491, installed by 1497. For the stained glass, see Marchini, op. cit. (note 17), ills. pp.266 and 274; see also J.K. Cadogan: Domenico Ghirlandaio. Artist and artisan, New Haven and London 2000, pp.282–84, no.54. It is possible that the motif originated in Ugolino di Nerio’s altarpiece, for which see note 27 below; if so, this would imply that the altarpiece was commissioned in 1323, possibly to celebrate the canonisation, rather than 1319/20. the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e

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2. St Thomas Aquinas (detail of Fig.1).

Christ’s right-hand side, taking precedence over St Peter.20 There follow the five chapels aligned along the liturgical east end, which are precisely mirrored in their sequence in Andrea’s painting.

The first chapel on the row of chapels along the liturgical east end was dedicated to St Dominic and belonged to the Falconi family. In 1566 it passed to the Gaddi family who changed the dedication to St Jerome in 1591.21 Next came a chapel belonging to the Guardi and Scali families. It was dedicated to Luke, possibly from 1279, certainly by 1325; according to Biliotti, it was given to Ghita, wife of Branca degli Scali, in 1319 after the death of her mother, Guardina Guardi, widow of Cardinale Tornaquinci; both women had originally wanted the chapel dedicated to St Catherine but that had already been ceded to Bencivenni di Nardo di Giunta Rucellai (see below). St Luke’s chapel remained with the Guardi/Scali until it was taken over by the Della Luna family; in 1466 the Scali resumed patronage; it was ceded to the Gondi family in 1503 to fulfil the testamentary wishes of Giuliano Gondi of 1501.22 Its thirteenth-century frescos showed at least one scene (now lost), probably more, from the life of St Luke,23 and according to Vasari it contained an altarpiece which included St Luke by Simone Martini (untraced).24 The figure of St Luke in Andrea’s painting, with his attribute resting on the frame (see Fig.3), may well reflect that of Simone’s altarpiece.25 Next came the cappella maggiore dedicated to the Virgin, hence the Virgin and Child at the centre of the painting, under a higher gable, just as the arch of the cappella maggiore rises higher than the arches of the chapels on either side. It was frescoed with scenes from the lives of the Virgin and John the Baptist by Andrea Orcagna (later replaced by those by Domenico Ghirlandaio),26 and on the high altar was an altarpiece by Ugolino di Nerio showing the Virgin and Child with angels, saints and prophets (untraced), which was paid for by Fra Baro Sassetti

20 See G. Kreytenberg: Orcagna. Andrea di Cione. Ein universeller Künstler der Gotik in Florenz, Mainz 2000, pp.81–96.

21 See Hall, op. cit. (note 11), pp.106–07. The chapel at some point acquired a secondary dedication to St Michael and all angels; see Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, p.116; and Borghigiani in Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, appendix I, p.400, who wrongly gives the date of change of patronage as 1570. Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), p.133, suggests a painting attributed by Ghiberti to Stefano Fiorentino showing the Fall of the rebel angels may have been for this chapel.

22 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, p.56. According to a passage in the Liber Novus, it was agreed in 1325 that the money which Donna Guardina had bequeathed in her will of 1303 should be redirected towards the fabric of the façade, given that the chapel she had wanted had already been built. Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), I, p.335; and ibid., II, appendix II, doc.IX, pp.424–25. See also Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), pp.132–33; Paatz, op. cit. (note 16), III, p.711. According to Borghigiani in Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, appendix I, pp.399–400, the Gondi added St Julian as titular saint of the chapel.

23 See D. Wilkins: ‘Early Florentine frescoes in Santa Maria Novella’, Art Quarterly NS.1, no.3 (1978), pp.141–74, esp. pp.149–53, figs.2, 4 and 5.

24 ‘. . . una Nostra Donna et un San Luca con altri santi a tempera che oggi [1568] è nella cappella de Gondi in Santa Maria Novella col nome suo’; see G. Vasari: Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori: nelle relazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. R. Bettarini and P. Barocchi, Florence 1967, II, p.195. In the 1568 edition Vasari attributed the frescos in the Spanish Chapel to Simone Martini, causing Meiss, op. cit. (note 1), p.176, to suggest that the altarpiece in the Gondi chapel may have been painted by Andrea. It is, however, unlikely that Vasari would have misread the inscription with the artist’s name on the altarpiece.

25 Suggested by the present writer in M. Davies: The early Italian schools before 1400.

National Gallery catalogues, ed. D. Gordon, London 1988, p.5. The motif of the Evangelists resting their attributes on the frame of the painting is found in Simone Martini’s altarpiece of 1319–20 for the Dominican church of S. Caterina in Pisa and again in his panel of St Luke now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; see A. Martindale: Simone Martini. Complete edition, Oxford 1988, pp.26–28, no.20, pp.198–99, figs.49 and 52, and pp.38–40, no.17, pp.194–95, fig.87, respectively; P. Leone De Castris: Simone Martini, Milan 2003, pp.165–72 and 242–49.

26 In 1348 the Tornaquinci family, who were not allowed to use it as a burial chapel, but only to put their arms there, paid for it to be frescoed; see Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8),

II, doc.XX, p.434. According to Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.I, p.50, basing himself on earlier sources such as Ghiberti and Vasari, it was frescoed by Orcagna with scenes from the lives of the Virgin and John the Baptist, but the frescos were eventually damaged; see L. Becherucci: ‘Ritrovamenti e restauri orcagneschi I–II’, Bollettino d’Arte 33 (1948), pp.24–33 and 143–56, esp. pp.24ff. The high altar was under the patronage of the Sassetti (see note 27 below), and remained so, even after the Ricci had taken over the patronage of the cappella maggiore; Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.I, pp.51–52. Since the Ricci were unable to afford to have it repainted, Francesco Sassetti proposed to pay for frescos showing the life of St Francis; the Dominicans refused, so the patronage was taken over by the Tornabuoni who promised to retain the Ricci arms in an honourable place; the new frescos for the chapel were commissioned in 1485 from Domenico Ghirlandaio, again with scenes from the lives of the Virgin and John the Baptist; see Cadogan, op. cit. (note 19), pp.236–43, no.17; the double-sided high altarpiece was eventually commissioned from Domenico Ghirlandaio by the Tornabuoni; ibid., pp.264–68, no.38. Domenico’s altarpiece replaced that by Ugolino di Nerio (see note 27 below). See also Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), pp.128–31, for the problems of patronage and squabbling between the Sassetti, Ricci and Tornabuoni.

27 For a discussion of Ugolino’s altarpiece, see Cannon, op. cit. (note 19), pp.87–91.

See further note 19 above. It was replaced by a double-sided altarpiece by Domenico Ghirlandaio (see note 26 above). Ugolino’s altarpiece was moved to the Spanish Chapel; it was still in S. Maria Novella in 1790; see V. Fineschi: Il forestiero istruito in Santa Maria Novella di Firenze, Florence 1790, p.82, who attributed it to ‘Guido Pittore Senese’, which suggests that some but not all of Ugolino da Siena’s signature remained. It was suggested by the present writer that the iconography of Ugolino’s altarpiece may be reflected in Andrea di Bonaiuto’s National Gallery painting (Davies, op. cit. (note 25), pp.4–5), but this was dismissed by A. Tartuferi: ‘I “primitivi” italiani della National Gallery di Londra: un nuovo catalogo e alcune considerazioni’, Arte Documento 3 (1989), p.49.

28 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.I, pp.52–53; and Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, p.339, and doc.LXXIX, p.513. Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), p.128, gives this as another Bardi family chapel until 1356 when he says Marco di Bernardo Bardi sold it to Paolo di Antonio di Messer Zanobi Castagnuolo. On 21st April 1487 Filippino Lippi was commissioned to fresco the walls with scenes from the lives of Sts John the Evangelist and Philip (completed 1502); see L. Berti and U. Baldini: Filippino Lippi, Florence 1991, pp.218–23; and L. Berti in Baldini, op. cit. (note 17), pp.215–32.

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(d.1324).27 On the right of the cappella maggiore was the chapel dedicated to St John the Evangelist, which was sold by the Boni in 1486 to the Strozzi, who added St Philip to the dedication.28 The final chapel on the liturgical east end was that of St Gregory granted to the heirs of Riccardo Bardi in 1335.29 Presumably it was already dedicated to Gregory since it is decorated with thirteenth-century frescos attributed to Duccio of St Gregory enthroned opposite an enthroned Redeemer. Beneath them were fourteenth-century scenes from the life of St Gregory.30 The chapel still has a carved relief of a man kneeling in front of Pope Gregory and the inscription ‘QUESTA CHAPPELA EDIFICATA HONORE DI DIO E.DI. SCO GREGORIO. EDE. DI MESSERE RICARDO DE BARDI E DI FIGLIUOLI E DE SUOI DISCENDENTI’, with the Bardi arms.31 The Bardi retained the patronage for over two hundred years; by 1790 the titular had been changed to St Dominic.32 Next came the raised transept chapel dedicated to St Catherine (as it still is), probably built between 1303 and 1325, not quite diametrically opposite that of St Thomas Aquinas. It was ceded to the Rucellai probably before 1325, certainly by 1355/56.33 The only surviving fresco decoration is in poor condition; it includes a Crucifixion, Massacre of the Innocents and Martyrdom of St Ursula and her companions; David Wilkins has suggested that the legend of St Catherine could have been on the left wall.34 Back on the ponte was the chapel dedicated to St Mary Magdalene belonging to the Cavalcanti family who kept the patronage until the ponte was removed.35 It was next to the central archway immediately east of that dedicated to St Peter Martyr;36 in 1363 Fra Tommaso di Lionello Cavalcanti was buried there.37 On the outer wall of the ponte, which divided the church from the cemetery, was the chapel of St Thomas of Canterbury (Thomas à Becket) belonging to the Minerbetti family from at least 1308.38 In his will of 1308 Maso di 29 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.I, pp.53–54. In 1316 it was being used by the ‘laudesi’; see Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), p.127. The original location of Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna, commissioned by the ‘laudesi’ in 1285 is beyond the scope of this article; see I. Hueck: ‘La tavola di Duccio e la Compagnia delle Laudi di Santa Maria Novella’, in La Maestà di Duccio restaurata. Gli Uffizi. Studi e ricerche, Florence 1990, pp.33–46; and L. Bellosi: ‘The function of the “Rucellai Madonna” in the Church of Santa Maria Novella’, in V. Schmidt, ed.: Italian panel painting of the duecento and trecento, New Haven and London 2002, pp.147–59. For the chapel, see Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), I, pp.444–45, and Borghigiani in ibid., II, appendix I, p.399. See also R. Lunardi in M. Ciatti and M. Seidel, eds.: Giotto. The Santa Maria Novella crucifix, Florence 2002, p.167, in which the chapel is mistakenly dedicated to St George instead of St Gregory by Lorenza Melli, p.229.

30 See Wilkins, op. cit. (note 23), pp.153–58; L. Bellosi: ‘Il percorso di Duccio’, in A. Bagnoli et al., eds.: exh. cat. Duccio. Alle origini della pittura senese, Siena (Museo del Opera del Duomo) 2003, pp.121–23.

31 Wilkins, op. cit. (note 23), p.148, fig.23.

32 Fineschi, op. cit. (note 27), p.20; and Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), pp.127–28. By this date the chapel previously dedicated to St Dominic had been dedicated to St Jerome.

33 Borghigiani in Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, appendix I, p.399; ibid., I, p.335 and note 12 (citing from the Liber Novus to the effect that Bencivenni di Nardo died in 1355 or 1356). Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.I, p.54, says in his will of 1335 or 1336 that Bencivenni di Nardo left money for oil for a lamp to be kept alight in the chapel.

The date of building of the chapel is given as 1335 in the document cited at note 15 above, fols.19v–20. Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), p.126, gives 1335–36 as the date when the family acquired the chapel. The Rucellai had another very small chapel dedicated to Ognissanti, not within the main body of the church but under the bell tower. For its frescos, see Wilkins, op. cit. (note 23), pp.163–64 and figs.12–22.

Roberto Lunardi has kindly drawn my attention to the fact that it had an altarpiece (untraced) which was commissioned in 1336 following the testamentary wishes of Albizzo di Nardo di Giunta di Rucellai in his will of 24th March 1334 and which was restored in 1524 by Pietro di Mariotto Rucellai; see Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, p.119, and Borghigiani in Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, appendix I, p.400. For the will specifying that the chapel should be painted and have ‘tabulis pictis’, see ibid., I, p.434, note 2. The altarpiece for this chapel would have been extremely small. The eighteenth-century copy of Sermartelli’s Sepoltuario of 1617 (ASF, Manoscritti 812,

3. St Luke (detail of Fig.1).

fols.73–75, new fols.65–66) has a sketch of the arms on the altarpiece.

34 Wilkins, op. cit. (note 23), pp.159–62 and figs.12–15 and 17–19. It is tempting to suggest that possibly the altarpiece showing the Mystic Marriage of St Catherine with St John the Baptist and St Dominic on either side (Ajaccio, Musée Fesch), attributed to Niccolò di Tommaso (see D. Thiébaut: Ajaccio, Musée Fesch. Les primitifs italiens, Paris 1987, pp.108–11, no.23) could have been painted for this chapel. The design mirrors that of Andrea Orcagna’s altarpiece facing it in the opposite transept chapel, and is conceptually the same in showing Christ bestowing a ring on St Catherine, just as he bestows a book on St Thomas and the keys to heaven on St Peter. The Ajaccio panel is evidently missing a panel on either side of the central panel. Richard Offner in H. Maginnis, ed.: Corpus of Florentine painting. A legacy of attributions, New York 1981, p.87, suggested that a St John the Evangelist and a St Paul (Horne Museum, Florence) were the missing panels, although this is rejected by Thiébaut.

35 Hall, op. cit. (note 7), p.165, note 21.

36 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, p.121: ‘Post medium pontis arcum qui mediae templi ianuae respondebat, sequebatur divae Mariae Magdalenae sacellum a Cavalcantum erectum’.

37 ‘. . . sotto la Cappella di S. Maria Maddalena alli scalini della nostra chiesa edificata a Casa Cavalcanti . . .’ (document cited at note 15 above, fol.45); Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), I, pp.553–54. Buried in front of the ponte was Donna Ilaria, wife of Cantinus Cavalcanti who died 20th May 1300; Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), p.120. According to Wood Brown this was originally the site of the tomb of Mainardo Cavalcanti (d.1379), which was moved to the sacristy in 1565.

38 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, pp.121–22: ‘Inter sacellum hoc [i.e. Mary Magdalene] et novissimum quod ad caemeterium surgebat, tertius erat arcus, orientali faciei templi ianuae directus, et iuxta ipsum ad murum qui aedem a caemeterio dividit haerebat divi Thomae archiepiscopi Cantuariensis et martyris sacellum quod Minerbetta [sic] posidebat familia’. See also the document cited at note 15 above, fols.9v–10: ‘La prima per cominciare di verso levante . . . ’. See also Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), pp.121–22, who points out that the chapel had an altarpiece attributed by Vasari to Gaddo Gaddi. Paatz, op. cit. (note 16), III, p.703, incorrectly gives the titular of the chapel as St Thomas Aquinas, but see ibid., p.735. The Minerbetti family were supposedly descendants of St Thomas of Canterbury; Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), p.122. Hanging near their chapel is the Crucifix thought to have been painted in England in the second half of the thirteenth century; see A. Giusti in A. Tartuferi and M. Scalini, eds.: exh. cat. L’arte a Firenze nell’età di Dante (1250–1300), Florence (Accademia) 2004, pp.150–51, no.41. the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e

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Ruggerino Minerbetti requested that he be buried dressed in a Dominican habit at the foot of the altar that had been built by his family.39 When the ponte was removed in the sixteenth century the Minerbetti chapel remained on the east wall, where it is still dedicated to the same saint. It contains two wall tombs and a floor plaque to Fra Ugolino Minerbetti (d.1348), all three

decorated with the arms of the Minerbetti family of three swords.40 The saints in Andrea di Bonaiuto’s painting are arranged in precisely the same order as the dedicated chapels on ground-floor level of the liturgical east end of S. Maria Novella. This explains not only the omission of the fourth Evangelist, Matthew (no chapel is dedicated to him in the church), but also the curious bunching together of the three Dominican saints. The rounded arches are applied uniformly across the painting despite the fact that the liturgical east-end chapels have pointed arches, presumably reflecting those of the ponte.

The change of dedication in the Alfani chapel from Thomas Aquinas to Mark in 1365 gives the National Gallery painting a terminus post quem (no titles were changed during the fourteenth century to supply a terminus ante quem), and 1365 may also be a terminus ad quem: Andrea di Bonaiuto, who lived in the quartiere of S. Maria Novella intermittently during the years 1351 to 1376, was active in the church between 1365 and 1368: the design of the rose window of the Coronation of the Virgin, which in 1365 was paid for out of the bequest of Tedaldino de Ricci (d.1363), has been attributed to Andrea,41 and on 30th December 1365 he was contracted to paint the chapterhouse (later known as the Spanish Chapel) within two years.42 Although the National Gallery painting has been dated by Miklós Boskovits43 and Johannes Tripps44 c.1370–77, both circumstances and style suggest a date closer to 1365. When compared with Andrea’s early work, such as the Carmine altarpiece, where the facial features have a sharp, almost Sienese appearance,45 in the National Gallery painting they have softened under the influence of Nardo di Cione.46 The Virgin’s hands are misshapen and clumsy: her right hand is in the same position as in the Carmine altarpiece, the Child’s curiously elongated right foot is similar to its counterpart in the same altarpiece, and the sgraffito is comparatively crude, particularly when compared to that in the dresses of St Agnes and St Domitilla (Accademia, Florence) dated c.1365–70 by Angelo Tartuferi.47 Andrea’s style had not yet reached the level of confident elegance found in much of the Spanish Chapel. It is therefore likely that the National Gallery painting was painted after the Carmine altarpiece, and shortly before the Spanish Chapel.

The close mirroring of the arrangement of the chapels in S. Maria Novella in the National Gallery painting both in design

39 Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), I, pp.415–18; obituary no.364, of Fra Ugolino Minerbetti (d.1348); and Borghigiani in ibid., II, p.398.

40 See Hall, op. cit. (note 11), pp.100–02.

41 Tripps, op. cit. (note 2), pp.130–37.

42 R. Offner: Corpus of florentine painting, section IV, vol.VI, Andrea Bonaiuti, New York 1979, passim (p.10 for the document); and R. Salvini in Baldini, op. cit. (note 17), pp.89–125. The frescos were paid for out of the bequest of 1355 of Buonamico di Lapo Guidalotti.

43 M. Boskovits: La pittura fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento, Florence 1975, p.278.

44 Tripps, op. cit. (note 2), pp.44–45. He considered it could have been either for S. Maria Novella or for S. Caterina in Pisa (pp.44 and 182). Although Tripps (p.44) says Meiss presumed the National Gallery painting to date from the same period as the Pisan frescos, Meiss, op. cit. (note 1), p.47, only drew attention to the ‘design’ of the Virgin and Child resembling both the Pisan frescos and the Carmine altarpiece and never suggested a date.

45 For the Carmine altarpiece, see Tripps, op. cit. (note 2), pp.107–15, pls.V–V 1–6.

46 Offner, op. cit. (note 18), pp.47–60. Tripps, op. cit. (note 2), pp.31 and 36, analyses the influence of Nardo di Cione on Andrea in the 1360s, as well as the influence of the Paradise frescos.

47 See Tripps, op. cit. (note 2), pp.116–18; and A. Tartuferi in M. Boskovits and A.

Tartuferi, eds.: Cataloghi della Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze, Dipinti. Vol.I, Dal duecento a Giovanni da Milano, Florence 2003, pp.34–36, no.1.

48 Meiss, op. cit. (note 1), p.176. The Gondi are evidently ruled out by the date they acquired the chapel, regardless of any other arguments.

49 ‘Il perche non si potea celebrare ogni di messa alle dette tre cappelle. Altrimenti l’altre cappelle sarebbono troppo abbondonate’; ASF, Corporazioni religiose soppresse dal governo francese, 86, 96, fol.9v. The three chapels concerned were those dedicated to Sts Catherine, Job and John the Baptist.

50 Margarita de Alfani was commemorated on 25th April on the feast day of St Mark, and also on 22nd January, her anniversary, and 21st September, the feast day of St Matthew; see Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, pp.405, 409 and 414 (the latter date is a later addition), although Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, p.120, comments that there is no record of any obligations for the chapel of St Mark. Maso di Ruggerino Minerbetti was commemorated on 29th December, the feast day of St Thomas à Becket, and also on 1st February; Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, pp.406 and 417. The Bardi were commemorated on 12th March, the feast of St Gregory (ibid., II, p.407), although Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.I, p.54, comments on the endowment of 200 florins for the Bardi chapel and the lack of onerous obligations, saying it was only in 1430 that the obligation to celebrate the feast of St Gregory was imposed.

51 Nor does the painting encompass all the fourteenth-century chapels in S. Maria

4. Plan of S. Maria Novella showing the titular saints of the ground-floor liturgical east-end chapels surrounding the choir, and how they read in Fig.1 (from a plan by and reproduced courtesy of Marcia Hall).

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and iconography indicates that not only the painter but also the patron were there at the time it was conceived. Meiss suggested that the painting could have been commissioned by a member of the Gondi family as a replica of the altarpiece in their family chapel.48 However, since no saint is given particular prominence, the patron is unlikely to have been a member of one of the families owning chapels represented in the painting. Evidently the question of who commissioned Andrea’s painting is inextricably linked to its function. Who might have wanted an aide-memoire of the liturgical east end of S. Maria Novella?

It is unlikely that it served to fulfil the quasi-legal obligation to commemorate those who had paid pittances for masses to be said or sung for their souls, although this obligation could be onerous; in 1446 when the Camaldolese monks of S. Maria degli Angeli in Florence found themselves unable to cope with the number of masses to be said daily, they sought dispensation from the Bishop of Florence to be released from this obligation for three of the monastery’s chapels so that the others should not be neglected.49 The liturgical calendar of S. Maria Novella, drawn up by Fra Zanobi Guasconi, its prior from November 1362 to the end of 1365, listed some, but not all, of the patrons of the chapels represented in the painting on the feast day of the titular of their chapel.50 But even if a painting could be regarded as an acceptable substitute for attendance in church, it is evident that all the patrons listed in the liturgical calendar as requiring commemoration could not be encompassed in a small painting.51 It was not the representation of the individual chapels that was important, but the representation of those chapels as a collective whole.

By representing the chapels that surrounded the choir,52 the painting could provide a plan of that part of the church reserved for the friars for daily offices. This might suggest that it was painted for a friar who required a ‘virtual’ choir when away from the church. Its small scale suggests it was designed to be portable, even if somewhat unwieldy for an itinerant friar.53 It could have been commissioned by a friar who left S. Maria Novella after a long residence there. A possible candidate is Fra Benedetto degli Ardinghelli who, Stefano Orlandi speculates, may have taken his vows at S. Maria Novella around 1350, was sent to study in Paris in 1365, went as lector to Siena and elsewhere, by 1376 had been made Bishop of Castellaneta, taught logic and philosophy and died in 1383 aged almost fifty.54 In

1352 his Order permitted him to receive a substantial inheritance of 780 florins from his mother which was subsequently accepted by the friars of S. Maria Novella; in 1381 he undertook that after his death the books, liturgical paramenta and goods (‘bona’) he had borrowed from the convent would be returned and compiled an inventory of them, although no paintings are listed.55 Fra Benedetto had the learning to develop the concept of a painting which mirrored the church, which he could revisit in his memory and prayers when far away; he also had the funds to pay for it.

However, there is also the possibility that the painting might have had a liturgical function outside the church but still within the confines of the convent of S. Maria Novella. Beverly Brown suggested that it might have been used for saying divine office in winter or at night,56 while Carl Strehlke proposed that it could have been used in the infirmary for friars too sick to visit the church.57 The sick had their own chapel, built in 1332, in the second cloister and dedicated to St Nicholas.58 Gail Solberg suggested that it could have had a similar function to the fresco known as the Madonna of the shadows in the east dormitory of the Dominican convent of S. Marco in Florence, which resembles a freestanding altarpiece on panel in its iconography and in its painting technique and which may have been intended for the recital of matins.59 The Dominican constitutions required all friars to attend choir unless given dispensation: the painting could have been used by those with dispensations. For example, officials who were legitimately impeded were excused choir; the lector, who was obliged to attend compline and choir as often as possible, could be absent under extenuating circumstances,60 while professors and advanced students who were given dispensation from choir recited their office alone or in groups.61 A painting such as Andrea di Bonaiuto’s could have been used in a private cell or in the studium.

If the painting had a specific function in the convent, it is likely to have been commissioned by the prior, probably Fra Zanobi Guasconi (d.1391), who served in that capacity until 25th March 1366 (modern style), when he was succeeded by Fra Giovanni Giachinotti. Fra Zanobi, an intellectual, was extremely active in his office.62 Whether or not he devised the complex programme for the frescos in the chapterhouse, which he commissioned in 1365 from Andrea di Bonaiuto, he must, at least at the beginning, have been involved in their implementation.63

Novella. There were also chapels dedicated to St Anthony Abbot, to the Annunciate Virgin and St Nicholas (for the latter, see note 58 below), but these were extraneous to the main body of the church. A useful plan of the entire complex is in R. Lunardi: Arte e storia in Santa Maria Novella, Florence 1983, p.15.

52 For the position of the choir before 1565, near the ponte and occupying two bays of the central nave aisle, see Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), p.121; Hall, op. cit. (note 7), ill. p.36, fig.d; and idem, op. cit. (note 11), p.197, fig.I. 53 See V.M. Schmidt: Painted piety. Panel paintings for personal devotion in Tuscany 1250–1400, Florence 2005, for a survey of portable devotional paintings; he does not include the painting under discussion.

54 Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, pp.5–7, obituary no.514; and ibid., II, appendix III, p.535. Fra Benedetto Ardinghelli’s portrait was painted in the chiostro grande of S. Maria Novella.

55 Ibid., II, p.5; doc.XLVIII, pp.465–66; and doc.XLIX, pp.466–68. Joanna Cannon has pointed out that this would have been a normal obligation for friars to return books to the house in which they had made their profession.

56 Beverly Brown made this suggestion at a seminar on the subject of this article given by the present author at the National Gallery, London, 11th June 2007.

57 Carl Strehlke made this suggestion after reading the entry for NG 5115 for a forthcoming catalogue of early Italian paintings in the National Gallery

being written by the present author.

58 Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, doc.XI, p.426.

59 Verbal communication. For the fresco, see W. Hood: Fra Angelico at San Marco, New Haven and London 1993, pp.255–60.

60 See E.T. Brett: Humbert of Romans: his life and views of thirteenth-century society, Toronto 1984, p.142.

61 W.A. Hinnebusch: The history of the Dominican Order, New York 1965, I, pp.351–52, 357 and 371, note 108; and Brett, op. cit. (note 60), p.99, note 77. I owe the suggestion of exemption from choir for scholars to Simon Gaine OP, Blackfriars, Oxford.

62 For Fra Zanobi Guasconi, see Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), I, obituary no.511, pp.605–23.

63 Meiss, op. cit. (note 1), p.102, suggested that the programme was devised in the studium generale in consultation with the painter, and that Jacopo Passavant (d.1357) may have formulated the initial scheme. Orlandi, op. cit. (note 19), pp.47 and 70, proposed that the programme was devised by Fra Zanobi Guasconi. See also S. Romano: ‘Due affreschi del Cappellone degli Spagnoli: Problemi iconologici’, Storia dell’Arte 26–28 (1976), pp.181–213, esp. p.181, note 4; and J. Gardner: ‘Andrea di Bonaiuto and the Chapter House frescoes in Santa Maria Novella’, Art History 2 (1979), pp.107–38. the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e

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Included in those frescos, among the Liberal Arts and below Rhetoric, is the figure of Cicero, to whom the Latin treatise on the art of memory, Rhetorica Ad Herennium, was attributed,64 a fundamental work for the theories on artificial memory of the Dominican theologians Albertus Magnus and St Thomas Aquinas.65 It may have been the inspiration behind Andrea di Bonaiuto’s small painting, which can be read as a pictorial representation of the system of mnemonics it advocates, that of placing images in loci: it is an aide-memoire to S. Maria Novella.66

As such it appears to be unique in Italian fourteenth-century painting, although other such paintings may not have survived or have not been recognised.67 It is possible that no other religious foundation commissioned such an object, since the moment the titular saint of a chapel changed it became obsolete. In S. Maria Novella this would have been in 1565 when the ponte was removed,68 rendering Andrea di Bonaiuto’s painting as a functionally superfluous, if aesthetically charming, white elephant.69

64 F. Yates: The art of memory, London 1966, repr. 1999, pp.20 and 63–92. A useful chart of the allegories and figures below St Thomas Aquinas enthroned is given in Orlandi, op. cit. (note 19), pp.65–68; and repeated in Baldini, op. cit. (note 17), pp.102–03.

65 Yates, op. cit. (note 64), pp.68–73 and 93–94; see also L. Bolzoni: The web of images.

Vernacular preaching from its origins to St. Bernardino da Siena, Ashgate 2004, esp. p.83; and M. Carruthers: The book of memory. A study of memory in medieval culture, Cambridge 2008, pp.129, 154–55 and 193.

66 According to Albertus Magnus ‘. . . various people will place for themselves different backgrounds, those indeed which move them more. For some will place a church, from having turned their mind to churches . . .’, and he recommends ‘small-scale’ or ‘curtailed space’ since a mind ‘should not be spread excessively by traversing through imaginary spaciousness, like a field or a city, but the “place” is “small scale” when the soul at once flies swiftly around its corners seizing the images hidden away in them’; De Bono. Tractatus IV, Quaestio II ‘De Partibus Prudentiae’; translation taken from Carruthers, ibid., pp.357–59.

67 Another possible example of a portable devotional painting reflecting the sequence

of the titulars of chapels is the Wilton Diptych (National Gallery, London); see F. Wormald: ‘The Wilton Diptych’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 17 (1954), p.200, who pointed out that the three saints presenting Richard II to the Virgin and Child are in the same order as their chapels in Westminster Abbey, a church with which Richard felt a particular affinity, where he was crowned and eventually buried; see further D. Gordon in exh. cat.: The Wilton Diptych. Making and meaning, London (National Gallery) 1993, pp.60–62.

68 In 1591 the Gaddi changed the dedication of their chapel to St Jerome (see note 21 above), so the saints in the painting would no longer have been relevant, even if the ponte had not been removed. Change of patronage did not usually entail a change of dedication. Additional dedications presumably would not have affected the potential function of the painting, such as the addition in 1486 by the Strozzi of St Philip to the chapel of John the Evangelist, or Julian to the chapel of St Luke in 1503 by the Gondi. See notes 22 and 28 above.

69 In 1940 the painting was presented to the National Gallery by Mrs R.P. Blennerhassett, the daughter of its previous owner, Mrs F.W.H. Myers (d.1937). It may have been acquired in Rome by Mr F.W.H. Myers (d.1902).

An unpublished miniature from the circle of Fra Angelico

by LAURA ALIDORI BATTAGLIA

GIORGIO VASARI DESCRIBED

Fra Angelico as an ‘excellent painter and miniaturist’,1 yet despite this, or perhaps because of Vasari’s evident inaccuracies, his activity as a miniature painter has received less attention than his work on a larger scale.2 While recent exhibitions have proposed new attributions and chronologies,3 one at S. Marco, Fra Giovanni Angelico pittore miniatore o miniatore pittore?,4 underlined the importance of his work

as a miniaturist and the decisive influence of his figurative style on a circle of miniaturists working for the monastery of S. Marco and on other commissions around the mid-fifteenth century.5 These artists’ fidelity to their master’s style still makes it difficult to establish which are his autograph works or to assess the role of his collaborators. While some works, for example a gradual and two psalters (MSS 558, 530 and 531; all at S. Marco), have been

1 ‘. . . eccellente pittore e miniatore’; see G. Vasari: Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori, ed. G. Milanesi, Florence 1906, II, pp.506, 516 and 522.

2 Most of the manuscripts attributed to him today were already recognised by Max Wingenroth at the end of the nineteenth century; see M. Wingenroth: ‘Beiträge zur Angelico-Forschung’, Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 21 (1898), pp.335–45 and 427–38, esp. pp.342–45, although his attributions did not find immediate approval; see L. Douglas: Fra Angelico, London 1902, pp.159–60; P. D’Ancona: La miniatura fiorentina (secoli XI–XVI), Florence 1914, I, pp.22 and 56, nos.3 and 57; and II, pp.352–56, nos.772–76.

3 L.B. Kanter and P. Palladino: exh. cat. Fra Angelico, New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2005; A. Zuccari, G. Morello and G. De Simone: exh. cat. Beato Angelico: l’Alba del Rinascimento, Rome (Musei Capitolini) 2009; reviewed in this Magazine, 151 (2009), pp.417–19.

4 M. Scudieri and S. Giacomelli: exh. cat. Fra Giovanni Angelico pittore miniatore o

miniatore pittore?, Florence (Museo di S. Marco) 2007.

5 For Angelico as a miniaturist, see L. Kanter: ‘Guido di Pietro detto Beato Angelico’, in M. Bollati, ed.: Dizionario biografico dei miniatori italiani secoli IX–XVI, Milan 2004, pp.333–36, who gives a resumé of earlier opinions and a full bibliography.

6 Angelico’s hand is almost universally recognised in fifteen of the miniatures in MS 558, Museo di S. Marco, Florence; in the sheet with the Crucifixion, S. Trinita, Florence; in MS Gerli 54, Biblioteca Braidense, Milan; and in two psalters in S. Marco; see L. Bellosi: exh. cat. Pittura di luce, Giovanni di Francesco e l’arte fiorentina di metà quattrocento, Florence (Casa Buonarroti) 1990, pp.98–101. Only Spike does not accept the psalters as Angelico’s work; see J.T. Spike: Fra Angelico, New York 1996.

7 See M. Boskovits: ‘Attorno al Tondo Cook: precisazioni sul Beato Angelico su Filippo Lippi e altri’, Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 39 (1995),

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5. Page with the initial ‘T’ and St Jerome from the Regula monachorum, fol.1.

Miniature by a follower of Fra Angelico, decoration by Battista di Biagio Sanguigni.

Before 1451.

Tempera on parchment, 19 by 14 cm. (Private collection).

6. Detail of St Jerome from Fig.5.

almost unanimously accepted as Angelico’s work,6 more recent attributions, such as a choirbook (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence; corale 43)7 and a fragment with St Benedict in a private collection in Turin,8 are still the subject of debate.9 Thus the work of Angelico and his immediate circle as miniaturists has yet to be defined, in particular in regard to the accepted body of work, the question of autograph status and the establishment of a chronology.

An unpublished manuscript, probably made for the monastery of S. Girolamo at Fiesole by an artist very close to Angelico working in collaboration with Battista di Biagio Sanguigni – the miniaturist who is documented working with Angelico and Zanobi Strozzi for much of his career – prompted the re-examination of the miniature production of Angelico and his circle in the 1440s and the early 1450s and led to the identification of the precise iconography of the penitent St Jerome adopted by Angelico.

The manuscript is a small codex containing the Regula monachorum, once believed to be by St Jerome,10 and other texts on the life of the saint. Formerly in the collection of Dyson Perrins and recently on the American art market,11 the volume opens

with the initial ‘T’ (Tepescens) decorated with the image of St Jerome (Figs.5 and 6). He is shown to the waist, holding a book in his right hand while with the left he beats his chest with a stone. The marginal decoration can be attributed to Battista di Biagio Sanguigni, who was also responsible for the friezes in the psalters nos.530 and 53112 and who had already collaborated with Angelico on the decoration of MS 558.13 But another artist was responsible for the figure. It is lit from high on the right and shadows are indicated by delicate parallel strokes which create volume in a manner that is also found in many of the monks’ cells in S. Marco. On the beard and the face, however, the shadows are added with larger brushstrokes in an olive colour which follows the outline of the cheek and the eyes, while on the forehead the shadow is laid in with larger brushstrokes beneath the final paint layer which extends from the hair on the left towards the centre, as can be seen in infra-red examination. The saint’s three-dimensionality is also defined by his relationship to the framing initial: his left arm almost seems to lean on the blue base line of the ‘T’ while his right arm is inserted between the blue and yellow frames, leaving only the hand holding the book visible. This play of light can be found in numerous psalters at S. Marco, for example in the King David on fol.169v or in the beautiful initial ‘B’ on fol.39r, both in MS 531 (Fig.7) with a lead white highlight on the tip of the nose, touches of red to indicate

pp.32–68, esp. pp.37–46.

8 L. Bellosi in G. Romano, ed.: Da Biduino ad Algardi pittura e scultura a confronto, Turin 1990, pp.38–43, cat. no.4.

9 For choirbook 43, see also A. Dillon Bussi in A. di Lorenzo: exh. cat. Omaggio a Beato Angelico. Un dipinto per il Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan (Museo Poldi Pezzoli) 2001, pp.30–35; A. Dillon Bussi in M. Scudieri and G. Rasario, eds.: exh. cat. Miniatura del ’400 a San Marco. Dalle suggestione avignonesi all’ambiente dell’Angelico, Florence (Museo di S. Marco) 2003, pp.160–61; Scudieri and Giacomelli, op. cit. (note 4), pp.16–17; and A. Dillon Bussi: ‘Il Beato Angelico miniatore, cioè pittore su libro (riflettendo sul Corale 43 della Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana)’, Rivista di Storia della Miniatura 12 (2008), pp.95–102. For the Turin fragment, see also G. Bonsanti: Beato Angelico, Florence 1998, pp.158–59; L.B. Kanter: ‘Florentine illuminations at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum: Zanobi Strozzi and a proposal for Matteo di Pacino’, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 62 (2001), pp.143–54; and G. Morello in Zuccari, Morello

and De Simone, op. cit. (note 3), p.58.

10 J.P. Migne: Patrologiae cursus completus, seu bibliotheca universalis, integra, uniformis, commoda, oeconomica, omnium ss. Patrum doctorum scriptorumque eccelesiasticorum sive Latinorum sive Graecorum. Series Latina, in qua prodeunt patres, doctores scriptoresque Ecclesiae Latinae, a Tertulliano I ad Innocentium III, Paris 1844–1902 (hereafter cited as PL), XXX, cols.391–426; and B. Lambert: Bibliotheca Hieronymiana Manuscripta, Steenbrugis 1969–72, no.560.

11 Sotheby’s, London, Perrins Catalogue, 15th June 1907, lot 234; Maggs, Catalogue 246, 1909, lot 812; Sotheby’s, London, 2nd November 1920, lot 3325; Sotheby’s, London, Scent Catalogue, 22nd June 1936, lot 72; Sotheby’s, London, 10th November 1952, lot 70; and Bonhams and Butterfields, Fine Books and Manuscripts, San Francisco, 28th June 2005, lot 3009.

12 See Kanter, op. cit. (note 5), p.335.

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8. Initial ‘D’ with King David from a psalter. Illumination by Fra Angelico and Battista di Biagio Sanguigni. c.1449. Tempera on parchment, 39.2 by 28 cm. (full folio). (Museo di S. Marco, Florence, inv.530, fol.86v).

7. Initial ‘B’ with God the Father and David from a psalter.

Illumination by Fra Angelico and Battista di Biagio Sanguigni. c.1449.

Tempera on parchment, 38.5 by 26.7 cm. (full folio).

(Museo di S. Marco, Florence, inv.531, fol.39r).

the cheeks, light catching the forehead and shadows defining the eyes. St Jerome’s broad shoulders are also close to those of God the Father in the same ‘B’ and to those of David on fol.86v of MS 530 (Fig.8); in both the figures take up most of the space within the initial letter, the halo touches the frame and there is only space for half-moon strips of background colour around the body. The tight-fitting sleeves that emphasise the figure’s volume can also be found in the insipiens on fol.100v of MS 530.

The face of St Jerome compares well to that of St Paul in the medallion in the bas-de-page of fol.1r in choirbook 43 in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence (Fig.9). Both share the outline of the face, the barely indicated ears, while the mouth and shadows beneath the eyes and on the cheeks are indicated with similar brushstrokes. Other illuminating comparisons are with the prophet in a medallion on fol.1r in the same choirbook (Fig.10) and the face of a saint in the Last Judgment on the Silver Cupboard (Fig.11).

The penitent St Jerome was a popular subject in Florence in the first half of the fifteenth century as outlined by Millard Meiss14 following the establishment of the Order of the Hermits of St Jerome (Eremiti di S. Girolamo) in Fiesole at the end of the fourteenth century by the blessed Carlo dei Conti Guidi di Montegranelli.15 This was rapidly followed by the formation in Florence of the Compagnia, or Buca, di S. Girolamo,16 a lay confraternity affiliated to the Order. Iconographic prototypes of the saint were soon adopted by Florentine artists, who usually showed him with tattered clothing kneeling before a crucifix in the wilderness and beating his breast with a stone.

But another group of paintings show him standing, dressed in a monastic habit open at the chest, as in the miniature under examination. This typology appears to be closely tied to the Hieronymite community. Three images can be connected to these two foundations: the small panel at Princeton (Fig.12),17 attributed to the young Angelico, the dating of which is still debated; the statue of the saint that Giuliano Amidei modelled in 1454 for the Confraternity (Fig.13);18 and the image of the

14 M. Meiss: ‘Scholarship and penitence in the Early Renaissance: the image of St. Jerome’, Pantheon 32 (1974), pp.134–40; see also D. Russo: Saint Jérôme en Italie: étude d’iconographie et de spiritualité (XIIIe–XVe siécle), Paris 1987, pp.201–51.

15 On the Hieronymites of St Jerome at Fiesole, see G.M. Brocchi: Vite de’ Santi e Beati Fiorentini, Florence 1761, II, pp.195–214; B. Ridderbos: Saint and Symbol Images of Saint Jerome in early Italian Art, Groningen 1984, pp.73–75; G. Perazzolo: ‘Eremiti di San Gerolamo’, in Dizionario degli istituti di perfezione, Rome 1974–97, cols.1203–04; D. Brunori: L’Eremo di San Girolamo a Fiesole, Fiesole 1920; G. Raspini: I romitori nella diocesi di Fiesole, Fiesole 1981, pp.11–12; and idem: Gli eremi nella diocesi di Fiesole, Fiesole 1981, pp.8–14.

16 See L. Sebregondi: Tre confraternite fiorentine. Santa Maria della Pietà detta ‘Buca di San Girolamo’, San Filippo Benizi, San Francesco Poverino, Florence 1991; Idem in G. Rolfi, L. Sebregondi and P. Viti: exh. cat. La chiesa e la città, a Firenze nel XV secolo, Florence (Sotterranei di S. Lorenzo) 1992, pp.95 and 97.

17 For the Princeton panel, see the catalogue entry in Kanter and Palladino, op. cit. (note 3), pp.55–57, which gives a resumé of earlier opinions and bibliography. On the links of this work to the hermitage at Fiesole, see also note 18 below. As Eisenberg observed (M. Eisenberg: ‘“The penitent St Jerome” by Giovanni Toscani’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 118 (1976), pp.275–83, esp. p.279, note 16), the text on the saint’s scroll contains three separate quotations: the first from the rule of St Augustine, the second from Jerome’s letter to Eustochium that reappears in the Regula monachorum and the third from the Regula monachorum itself; but the text on the panel at Princeton modifies Jerome’s original words ‘sponsa Christi vinum fugiat pro veneno’, making the monk the subject of the sentence (‘monacus vinum fugiat pro veneno’),

leaving little doubt, in the present writer’s opinion, that it was intended for a monastic foundation. This reconfirms the link between the panel and S. Girolamo at Fiesole, whose monks had recently adopted the Hieronymite rule and from 1441 used it together with that of St Augustine (see notes 24 and 25 below). The presence of the coats of arms of the families Gaddi and Ridolfi on the painting, which was subjected to an extensive restoration at an early date, does not seem to be binding for its dating; see C.B. Strehlke: ‘The Princeton “Penitent Saint Jerome”, the Gaddi family, and early Fra Angelico’, Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 62 (2003 [2004]), pp.5–27; N.E. Muller: ‘Technical Note’, in ibid., pp.28–31. Kollewijn’s proposal (R. Kollewijn, ‘Alcune osservazioni di ordine iconografico a proposito del “Girolamo penitente” di Princeton’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 34 (1990), pp.413–20) to link the Princeton panel to the convent of S. Maria del Santo Sepolcro, called delle Campora, belonging to another Hieronymite order, seems to be less convincing given that, as Strehlke observed, the cult of Jerome does not seem to have acquired a high profile even in the brief period in which the monks adopted the Hieronymite rule. Besides, the inventory of the codices in the library of the convent delle Campora includes no text by St Jerome; see R. Blum: La Biblioteca della Badia fiorentina e i codici di Antonio Corbinelli, Città del Vaticano 1951, pp.179–82.

18 See Sebregondi, op. cit. (note 16), pp.12 and 125–27, cat. no.2SG; and idem in Rolfi, Sebregondi and Viti, op. cit. (note 16), p.97, cat. no.5.5. This statue is closely tied to the panel at Princeton. The identical iconography of the two figures leads to the hypothesis that the Penitent St Jerome at Princeton was kept in the original Hermitage at Fiesole and was the object of devotion for the members of the Confraternity, who met there regularly, as can be deduced from its constitution: ‘Rubrica di

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9. Medallion with St Paul from a choirbook.

Illumination by Fra Angelico and an anonymous follower. After 1451. Tempera on parchment, 51 by 37.2 cm. (full folio). (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, corale 43, fol.1r).

10. Medallion with a prophet from a choirbook.

Illumination by Fra Angelico and an artist of his workshop. After 1451. Tempera on parchment, 51 by 37.2 cm. (full folio). (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, corale 43, fol.1r).

saint in the altarpiece attributed to Zanobi Strozzi made for the church of the monastery of S. Girolamo at Fiesole (Fig.15), for which a date between 1463 and 1465 is proposed here.19 The earliest of these images is by Angelico, the second depends iconographically on the first and that the third is by an artist in his circle. Further confirmation of the links between Angelico’s image and the Hieronymite foundation can be found in the fact that starting with Angelico’s S. Trinita altarpiece of the Deposition of 1432 in which the penitent St Jerome appears on a pilaster (Fig.14), the artist consistently portrayed the saint dressed in the robes worn by the monks of the Fiesole Order:20 an ash grey tunic with a frayed hem open at the chest, with a leather belt, as described in the Ordinarium fratrum congregationis sancti Ieronimi de fexulis,21 robes that we also find in the miniature under discussion.

Little information about this Order and its organisation survived its suppression in 1668 and the almost complete dispersal of its documents and artistic possessions. However, there is evidence for the close links between the Monastery of St Jerome and the Dominican house at Fiesole in the first half of the fifteenth century,22 and between the two centres of the cult of St Jerome and the artists in Fra Angelico’s circle.23

11. Detail from the Last Judgment from the Silver Cupboard, by Fra Angelico and an artist of his workshop. c.1450–52.

Tempera on wood, 38.5 by 37 cm.

(Museo di S. Marco, Florence).

quelli che si possono et debbono ricevere nel nostro luogo di Fiesole et di quello sa afare. Al nome di Dio ordiniamo che alluogo di Fiesole entrino gente chesi voglino convertire a Dio . . .’; Florence, Archivio dell’Oratorio di San Girolamo (hereafter cited as AOSGF), Libro dei Capitoli di S. Maria della Pietà, fol.52v. For a similar suggestion, see also M. Minasi in Zuccari, Morello and De Simone, op. cit. (note 3), pp.148–49.

19 The altarpiece must date from later than the completion of at least part of the work of the church, which was underway in 1463 when the Hieronymites were exempted from taxes (Florence, Archivio di Stato (hereafter cited as ASF), Carte Strozziane, 2nd ser., 53, fol.172v), and probably not later than 1465 given that the Medici coat of arms on it does not include the ball with the French lily, the use of which was conceded to Piero de’ Medici that year. Besides, in the altarpiece St Laurence wears a dalmatic decorated with the Medici coat of arms which might relate it not to Lorenzo the Magnificent but to his cousin Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, born precisely in 1463. Consequently it can be proposed that the commission was given by his father, Pierfrancesco. In 1466 the Hieronymites commissioned Neri di Bicci to paint another altarpiece, as described in his Ricordanze and also by Strozzi; see N. di Bicci: Le ricordanze (10 marzo 1453–24 aprile 1475), ed. B. Santi, Pisa 1976, and ASF, Carte Strozziani, 3rd ser., 9/2 (9bis), p.269.

20 Angelico showed St Jerome in the garb of a Hieronymite hermit also in the Crucifixion of the chapterhouse of S. Marco, on the pilaster strip of the S. Marco altarpiece now in the Lindenau Museum, Altenburg, and in cell 4 in the convent of S. Marco and probably in the panel sometimes identified as the Ecstasy of S. Benedict but more probably a representation of the Fathers of the Church now in the Musée Condé, Chantilly, which is stylistically quite close to our miniature; see M. Laclotte: ‘Autour de Fra Angelico: deux puzzles’, in F. Pasut and J. Tripps, eds.: Da Giotto a

Botticelli. Pittura fiorentina tra Gotico e Rinascimento, Florence 2008, pp.187–200.

21 Fiesole, Archivio Vescovile (hereafter cited as AVF), MS X.B.1: the codex contains the Latin version of the Ordinarium to which is added a translation in Venetian dialect; on pp.21 and 22, in the paragraph ‘De forma habitus et de omni vestitu’, we read, ‘clamides vero et tunice scapulariaquem sint de panni mustelino seu berretini coloris’ (‘their light colour distinguished them from the Carmelite and Ambrosian orders’), ‘Qonam [sic] portent nostri fratres onino de corio nigri coloris vel berretini cum fibulis de osse vel de ferro sine aliquo ornatu’.

This is repeated in the Venetian version on pp.63 and 71. The manuscript is dated 1466.

22 This connection goes back to the foundation of S. Domenico: Giovanni Dominici and the first friars lived for some time in 1406 in the Hieronymites hermitage while the Dominican monastery was being built (Fiesole, Convento di S. Domenico, Chronica Quadripartita, fol.2v: ‘dicti fratres habitaverunt in Eremitorio sancti hieronimi’; (‘later the Hieronymites marched with the Dominicans under the same banner’). Moreover, in 1442 the Domincan Antonino Pierozzi, then prior of S. Marco, chose the first members of the Compagnia dei Buonomini di S. Martino from the members of the Compagnia di S. Girolamo; see N. Martelli: I buonomini di S. Martino: discorso storico, Florence 1916; P. Bargellini: I Buonomini di San Martino, Florence 1972; and M.R. De Gramatica and L. Sebregondi: Congregazione dei Buonomini di San Martino, archivio storico, Florence 2001.

23 To Battista di Biagio Sanguigni, who also lived at Fiesole, are attributed the miniatures in the book of the Capitoli della Compagnia di Santa Maria della Pietà, also known as the Compagnia Buca di S. Girolamo, which were completed in March 1414 (1413 Florentine style); see Sebregondi, op. cit. (note 16), pp.123–24. Zanobi Strozzi’s brother, Francesco di Benedetto di Caroccio degli Strozzi, is recorded in 1432 as a member of the Compagnia di S. Girolamo (see AOSGF, Registro dei Morti A, s.c.). the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e

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12. Penitent St Jerome, by Fra Angelico. 1420–30(?). Tempera on panel, 57 by 41 cm. (Art Museum, Princeton University).

13. Penitent St Jerome, by Giuliano Amidei.

1454. Polychromed terracotta, 135 cm. high.

(Oratorio di S. Girolamo e S. Francesco Poverino, Florence).

14. Detail of the penitent St Jerome from the Deposition (S. Trinita altarpiece), by Fra Angelico. 1432.

Tempera on panel, 54 by 14 cm.

(Museo di S. Marco, Florence).

The Regula monachorum, attributed to the so-called Pseudo Girolamo, was the first rule adopted by the Order according to the Papal Bull of Pope Gregory XII24 and remained in use even after the adoption of the Rule of St Augustine following the Bull of Eugenius IV of 1441,25 as one can deduce from the Ordinarium.26 Given the similarity in the figure of the saint in the miniature under discussion with the S. Trinita altarpiece, the consistency of the iconography with that of works associated with the Hieronymite in Fiesole and the stylistic similarity with works produced by Angelico and his close collaborators in the short period between the frescos in S. Marco and the panels for the Silver Cupboard, we propose to attribute the miniature of the Regula monachorum to an artist in Angelico’s immediate circle and to link the commission to the Hieronymite foundation at Fiesole.

This work can be added to a group of miniatures that are close to the work of Fra Angelico made in the years immediately after he finished the frescos at S. Marco. They document the existence of artists who worked side-by-side with him and also, perhaps, independently but always in Angelico’s style, in the same way that artists can be identified who worked with him on the frescos in S. Marco, in the Cappella Niccolina in the Vatican and on the Silver Cupboard. The works in question include the

psalters of S. Marco already mentioned, in which some initials can be attributed to assistants, choirbook 43 of the Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence, and missal 533 of S. Marco. This last manuscript has twelve historiated initials, the work of two artists, eleven by one hand and just one, fol.1r (Fig.16), by the other.

This miniature shows Christ blessing and eight saints, and has been attributed to Zanobi Strozzi,27 an attribution tentatively accepted in the recent exhibition catalogue,28 but its figures seem closely related to those in the psalters, in particular to the young David, and have a delicacy and intensity that is unknown in Zanobi’s work. The circular arrangement of the praying saints was used by Angelico in the Griggs Crucifixion (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and was employed throughout his career. The rapid and summary treatment of the flesh, hair, beards and clothes, painted with larger brushstrokes, is closer to the technique used in choirbook 43, and creates a greater sense of volume than the other miniatures in the psalter, which employ vivid light effects. The Pietà in the round bas-de-page (Fig.16) depends directly on the figure of the same subject frescoed in the cell of Cosimo de’ Medici at S. Marco and in the predella of the altarpiece for Bosco ai Frati (Museo di S. Marco, Florence). The remaining eleven miniatures also show the profound influence of

24 L. Cherubini: Magnum Bullarium Romanum ab Leone Magno usque ad S.D.N. Clementem X, Lyon 1673–92, I, p.307.

25 Ibid., I, p.359.

26 AVF, X,B,1, passim.

27 The miniature at fol.1r was attributed to Angelico by Wingenroth, op. cit. (note 2), p.344, while Douglas, D’Ancona and Chiarelli attributed it to Zanobi Strozzi or to a pupil of his; see Douglas, op. cit. (note 2), pp.159–60; D’Ancona, op. cit. (note 2), II,

no.774; and R. Chiarelli: I codici miniati del Museo di San Marco a Firenze, Florence 1968, p.62.

28 Scudieri and Giacomelli, op. cit. (note 4), pp.149–51.

29 See Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (hereafter cited as BML), S. Marco 370, fol.8v; and R. Morçay: ‘La cronaca del convento fiorentino di San Marco. La parte più antica, dettata da Giuliano Lapaccini’, Archivio storico italiano 71, 1,1 (1913), pp.1–29.

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Angelico, particularly in their iconography. The miniature with St Mark at fol.213r (Fig.17), the only evangelist illustrated in the missal, confirms that it was made for S. Marco, and the attribution of missal 533 to Angelico’s immediate circle confirms that his studio was involved in making liturgical books for that monastery at the time of its formal separation from S. Domenico in 1445, a separation in which Angelico was personally involved.

The two psalters for S. Marco were not an isolated episode: together with missal 533 they can be identified as an undertaking worked on in parallel with the illuminated choirbooks written by Fra Benedetto at S. Domenico and illuminated by Zanobi Strozzi. This undertaking was recorded in the chronicle of S. Marco compiled by Roberto degli Ubaldini early in the sixteenth century based on information taken from Prior Giuliano Lapaccini’s chronicle written before 1457. This account mentions two illuminated psalters29 made on the orders of Cosimo de’ Medici between 1443 and 1453. Angelico was helped in this work by other miniaturists, one of whom can be identified as Battista di Biagio Sanguigni, responsible for the lettering and the foliate decoration in the psalters.30 Finally choirbook 43, whose provenance from S. Domenico in Fiesole adds weight to the attribution, is stylistically and compositionally so close to Fra Angelico to suggest that he was involved at least in the conception and design if not in the complete execution. Large parts of it were left unfinished, as can be seen in the group of bystanders to the right of the Crucifixion on fol.168v; in other passages the hand of one or more assistants can be recognised, even if only in applying the colour to a rapid drawing by the master. Christ’s billowing loincloth in the Crucifixion is a late Gothic touch, a trait much evident in Angelico’s work, particularly in the frescos at S. Marco. Where the colour is virtually lost, as in the drapery or Christ’s face on fol.241r, the drawing with its characteristic tremulous lines is close to the drawing of David playing the psaltery (British Museum, London) or to the underdrawing of the Coronation of the Virgin (Uffizi, Florence) recently revealed by infra-red reflectography.31 Exact quotations from Angelico’s work in earlier commissions for S. Domenico show the lasting influence of models taken from MS 558; for example, the fantastic flying animals by the initials on fols.67v and 68v of that manuscript reappear in the margins of fols.1r and 199r of choirbook 43, while the Assumption of the Virgin on fol.248r of the choirbook can be associated with the same scene painted by Angelico in MS 558.

Apart from differing levels of ability among the artists, this group of manuscripts is faithful to Angelico’s style both in its choice of models and in the depiction of figures. In this period Angelico was striving towards greater expressive effects through the careful use of line; it would seem that these works were based on modelli by Angelico that were circulated among a small group of artists who seemed to be fully aware of his evolving artistic language. A group of drawings in the Uffizi has been related to specific works.32 The figure of the Evangelist in a tondo of MS 95E (Fig.19), recently related to the Evangelist

30 Missal 534 at S. Marco may also be associated with this group; Battista di Biagio Sanguigni was responsible for its lettering and foliate decoration leaving spaces for the principal miniatures, as can be seen on some incomplete sheets.

31 See Scudieri and Rasario, op. cit. (note 9), p.140, fig.14.

32 F. Bellini and G. Brunetti: exh. cat. I disegni antichi degli Uffizi. I tempi del Ghiberti, Florence (Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi) 1978, pp.58–62; and L. Melli in Zuccari, Morello and De Simone, op. cit. (note 3), pp.66–68.

15. Virgin and Child with Sts Cosmas, Damian, Jerome, John the Baptist, Francis and Laurence, by Zanobi Strozzi. Here dated 1463–65. Tempera on panel, 220 by 257 cm. (overall dimensions). (Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon).

Mark in Missal 533,33 seems to reappear also in the bust of the Evangelist in a tondo high on the right on fol.168v of choirbook 43 (Fig.20). Other parallels include the angel in the Resurrection in the missal and that to the left of Christ in fol.241r of the choirbook or the apostle beneath the Virgin in Pentecost (Fig.18) with two of the prophets in medallions on fol.1r of the manuscript in the Laurenziana (Fig.21). These similarities suggest that they derive from the same model, or are even the work of the same artist, and form a nucleus to which the St Jerome manuscript can be related.

These attributions of miniatures to Angelico’s close circle also permit us to review the problem of chronology. Both the psalters and MS 533 are undocumented, and only a tenuous link ties the first two manuscripts with the psalter sent to Vespasiano da Bisticci for binding in 1449.34 Stylistically the foliate decoration of the psalters represents the final state of evolution of a characteristic decorative style of Sanguigni’s that can be followed throughout his career, from the missal of S. Pietro in Mercato of 1419–26 (Museo di S. Marco, inv.1890, no.10075), the choirbook of S. Gaggio documented to 1434 (inv.1890, nos.10073 and 10074) to the breviary in the Laurenziana (Conv.

Soppr.461) and the Libro d’Ore MS 127 (Biblioteca Palatina, Parma).35 The missal seems to be slightly later in date because of the simplification of the figures with their economical use of line, a graphic trait that Angelico himself used between finishing the frescos of S. Marco and painting the small panels of the Silver Cupboard. A more precise dating for the missal can be deduced from the figure of St Mark on fol.213r (Fig.17), which precisely follows the same saint frescoed on the vault of the

33

Scudieri and Giacomelli, op. cit. (note 4), p.150.

Bellosi, op. cit. (note 6), p.100.

35 The codex, attributed by Zambrelli and Zanichelli to Zanobi Strozzi, would seem to be more probably the work of Battista di Biagio Sanguigni, who was certainly responsible for its marginal decoration; see Zanichelli in exh. cat. Cum picturis ystoriatum. Codici devozionali e liturgici della Biblioteca Palatina, Parma (Biblioteca Palatina) 2001, pp.104–07, with previous bibliography.

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17. Initial ‘P’ with St Mark from a missal, by an artist of Fra Angelico’s circle.

After 1448. Tempera on parchment, 37.1 by 26.8 cm. (full folio). (Museo di S. Marco, Florence, inv.533, fol.213r).

16. Page from a missal showing Christ blessing and eight saints and the Pietà, by Fra Angelico or an artist of his circle? After 1448. Ink and tempera on parchment, 37.1 by 26.8 cm. (full folio) (Museo di S. Marco, Florence, inv.533, fol.1r).

Cappella Niccolina in Rome (Fig.22) and which provides a terminus post quem of 1448.36 The Regula monachorum should be dated between the S. Marco psalters and 1451, the year in which Battista di Biagio Sanguigni died. The form of the letter ‘T’ and of its foliate decoration, the use of two shades of blue, the white-lead decoration and the small circles suggest a date close to the psalter. A dating in the years 1449–51 works well with the sequence of building works at S. Girolamo, which, under the stimulus of Medici patronage, saw the construction of first the monastery and then the church close to the Medici villa at Belcanto.37 Building was already underway in 1445 and continued almost up to 1451, as far as one can tell from the surviving documents.38 Nothing is recorded of the monastery’s library, nor is it mentioned in the inventories of accounts in the seventeenthcentury act of suppression.39 However, a fragmentary testimony is provided in a letter written by Fra Anselmo de Caruysan to Lorenzo de’ Medici dated 28th July 1470.40 The Hieronymite foundation must have been given the texts pertinent to the cult of St Jerome at an early date, and in particular copies of the Regula monachorum which, as stated in the Ordinarium, was to be recited daily after Lauds.41 It is tempting to hypothesise that the Hieronymites turned to the monks at S. Domenico to

illuminate one of their manuscripts just at the time when Angelico’s circle of artists was active.

Choirbook 43 of the Laurenziana is dated by Miklos Boskovits just before the frescos in the cells of S. Marco, that is in the late 1430s or early 1440s, while Dillon Bussi has recently dated it c.1425.42 But a comparison with the psalters nos.530 and 531 and with the Silver Cupboard might suggest a later date, one supported by three details which, if they are accepted, would allow us to fix the chronology with greater precision. The first is that the scribe responsible for choirbook 43 was not Fra Benedetto, as can be deduced from a comparison with the first antiphonaries

36 The four evangelists were also frescoed by Angelico in the convent of S. Domenico at Cortona: a comparison of St Mark in the missal to the St John at Cortona, suggested by Scudieri and Giacomelli, op. cit. (note 4), p.150, does not seem so close.

37 The Medici patronage of the construction of S. Girolamo is mentioned by, among others, Filarete, Vasari and Macchiavelli, who refer both to Cosimo and to Giovanni de’ Medici. That Giovanni was probably responsible for the commission can be deduced from the funeral oration of Andrea Alamanni: Florence, BML, Plut.54.10, fol.88r, ‘fesulis divi hieronimi templum et pulcherrimam quamdam domum construxit’, and fol.88v, ‘monasterium quondam suis ex facultatibus ex integro edificiet’. Alberto Avogadri, in De Relligione et magnificentia illustris Cosmi Medices florentini, comments on Cosimo’s munificence towards numerous monastic foundations but does not mention the Hieronymites of Fiesole; see Plut.54.10, fol.140v, where Avogadri mentions S. Marco, S. Lorenzo, the monks’ dormitory of S. Croce, Bosco ai Frati, the Badia Fiesolana and the chapel at La Verna.

38 The construction of the new monastery of S. Girolamo is first mentioned in 1445;

ASF, Carte Strozziane, terza serie, 9/2 (9bis), fol.269. The Florentine Signoria exempted the friars from payment of taxes during its construction in 1451; it is also recorded in two letters sent to Giovanni de’ Medici by the canon Antonio of Fiesole, one of which is dated 13th October 1457 (see ASF, Mediceo Avanti il Principato, filza 9, no.307, and filza 7, no.176) but it is not clear if he is referring to the convent or to the church; see also M. Ferrara and F. Quinterio: Michelozzo di Bartolomeo, Florence 1984, pp.234–38; and D. Mazzini: Villa Medici a Fiesole: Leon Battista Alberti e il prototipo di villa rinascimentale, Florence 2004, pp.108–11. For work on the church, see note 19 above.

39 AVF, MSS XII.A.1 (fols.435r–79v); XVIII.B.37 (fols.832r–75v); and XVII.B.78 (fols.1621r–22v). I was unable to confirm the suggestion that the library from S. Girolamo was amalgamated with that of the Biblioteca Laurenziana (see S. Girolamo Fiesole – historical notes, acquapendente 1928).

40 ASF, Mediceo Avanti il Principato, filza 23, no.305; the unpublished letter alludes to a request for books and mentions titles in the convent’s library: ‘Nobis porro operis santi thome de aquino atque codicum decretorum et aliorum voluminum iuris canonici atque

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18. Initial ‘S’ with Pentecost from a missal, by an artist of Fra Angelico’s circle. After 1448.

Tempera on parchment, 37.1 by 26.8 cm. (full folio).

(Museo di S. Marco, Florence, no.533, fol.147v).

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19. An Evangelist, by Fra Angelico? Second quarter of fifteenth century. Pen and brush on parchment, 11.4 by 3.8 cm. (full folio).

(Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence, no.95E).

20. An Evangelist from a choirbook, by Fra Angelico or an artist of his circle? After 1451.

Tempera on parchment, 51 by 37.2 cm. (full folio). (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, corale 43, fol.168v).

21. Medallion with a prophet from a choirbook, by Fra Angelico(?) and an artist of his circle. After 1451.

Tempera on parchment, 51 by 37.2 cm.

(Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, corale 43, fol.1r).

22. St Mark, by an artist of Fra Angelico’s circle.

1448. Fresco. (Segment of the vault, Cappella Niccolina, Vatican City, Rome).

of S. Marco which we know were the work of Angelico’s fellow Dominican and illuminated in 1445.43 It would be most improbable that the monks of S. Domenico would have gone to a scribe outside their order for a new series of choirbooks while Fra Benedetto was alive, and the monastery did not seem to have other scribes in their employ in the 1440s for they had to get the Franciscan Fra Giovanni di Guido from S. Croce to finish the series of Graduals for S. Marco after Fra Benedetto’s death, which occurred between the second half of 1449 and 1450. This date also coincides, perhaps not coincidentally, with the return of Angelico from Rome, so that it seems that 1449 can be taken as the terminus post quem for the work which may have also included choirbook 44 of the Biblioteca Laurenziana. As

choirbook 43 bears no trace of the work of Battista di Biagio Sanguigni, who worked with Angelico at S. Marco and who illuminated the frieze of the Regula monachorum, it would seem possible to propose a date around or slightly after 1451. Finally, in that same year a payment made to Vespasiano da Bisticci is recorded on the account of S. Domenico, Fiesole, for two fiorini, 1 lira and 2 soldi to buy paper.44 This amount corresponds to the cost of two quires of paper for antiphonaries45 which with all probability were for this group. Choirbook 43 can therefore be dated close to the departure of Angelico for Rome, and his absence makes sense of the interruption of the work on the decoration, on which his collaborators subsequently worked, and would explain the absence of miniatures in choirbook 44.

antonianii opues est’. Liturgical books used in the church of the convent are often noted in the Ordinarium, and from this it can be ascertained that the brothers used the Roman liturgy, making an exception only in the use of the Franciscan psalter. The fact that novices were required to study grammar and music presupposes that there was a library in the monastery (see AVF, MS X.B.1, passim). Finally it declares that ‘nessun libro dalcuno convento se venda sanze licentia del generale o vero di visitadori lo prezo de lo quale se converta in libri’ (p.86). An inventory drawn up at the time of the suppression of the Order lists ‘quattro messali’ and ‘cinque libri da canto in coro’; see AVF, XIII.A.1, c.441r.

41 AVF, X.B.1, pp.60–61: ‘Regula nostra verus (?) sancti Ieromini patris nostris omni die sicut ipset describit in illa conventualium recitetur fratribus ut etiam nostram antiqua est consuetudo post laudes matutinales’. The requirement to have copies of the rule to be read to the brothers is explicitly mentioned on p.61: ‘Unde Stude[m] debet unus quisque prior libellus in que hec scripta sunt habeatur in legibili littera’.

42 See Boskovits, op. cit. (note 7), pp.37–46; Dillon Bussi in di Lorenzo, op. cit. (note

9), pp.30–35; Dillon Bussi in Scudieri and Rasario, op. cit. (note 9), pp.160–61.

43 Florence, BML, S. Marco 902, Libro di ricordanze A, fol.2r. The final payment to Benedetto was recorded in May 1449. Subsequently on 2nd July 1450 there is a payment for 21 quires written by the Franciscan friar Giovanni di Guido (S. Marco 902, fol.35v). A preliminary palaeographical analysis of the manuscript confirms this; there is a change of handwriting on fol.87v of the gradual of the Trinity, MS 527, Museo di S. Marco, illuminated by Zanobi Strozzi in May 1453.

44 See Florence, BML, S. Marco 902, Libro di ricordanze A, fol.31v.

45 In 1461 the Badia Fiesolana paid 4 lire to Agnolo Tucci, cartolaio, for ‘un quinterno per gli antifonarii’; Florence, Archivio dell’Ospedale degli Innocenti, Badia fiesolana 5, fol.58r; see A. Garzelli: ‘Note su artisti nell’orbita dei primi Medici: individuazioni e congetture dai libri di pagamento delle Badia fiesolana (1440–85)’, Studi medievali 3/26 (1985), no.1, pp.435–82, esp. p.49. See also the payments registered to Agnolo Tucci in 1447; see ibid., pp.462–63; and Florence, Archivio dell’Ospedale degli Innocenti, Badia fiesolana 150, fol.25r. the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e

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Reflections on the Mantegna exhibition in Paris

by LUKE SYSON

AT THE END of her introduction to the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Mantegna, 1431–1506 shown last winter at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, Dominique Thiébaut issues a generous invitation: by absorbing the content of show and book, visitors and readers should arrive at their own Mantegna.1 The exhibition gave munificent scope to do just that – not least because it contained such extraordinary loans, a marvellously different array from those seen in the 1992 exhibition in London and New York or even in the several Italian exhibitions of 2006.

The show’s supreme feat was the reunion of the three predella panels from the S. Zeno altarpiece of 1456–59 (cat. nos.51–53), brought together for the first time since 1956, and seen with the London Agony in the garden (no.48; dated c.1453–54) and the New York Adoration of the shepherds (no.50; dated c.1455–56).

But this was only the first of a sequence of many fascinating groupings.

The exhibition investigated not just Mantegna himself but also the complex network of teachers and collaborators, imitators and rivals around him. We were encouraged to consider Mantegna’s early career in Padua and his links to other painters active there, his marriage into the Bellini family and its artistic consequences, and the impact of his works on lesser masters, sometimes outside Mantua and mediated by prints. Finally, we were able to assess the style and ambition of the works made at the end of his long life, set against the efforts of famous contemporaries and of younger painters who later became more celebrated still: Perugino, Leonardo and Correggio, masters of the ‘maniera moderna’.

Thiébaut’s co-curator, Giovanni Agosti, stated that the exhibition was intended as ‘un esercizio di illuminismo, dove le regole del gioco della storia dell’arte sono spiegate a tutti’ (p.30). He pointed out that the scholars working on the exhibition represented different generations and schools of thought. That is not to say, however, that every current art-historical approach is evenly represented in the catalogue (or was in the exhibition). Iconographical readings are at times too curtly brushed aside if they are judged over-complicated or ill-founded; the social and religious functions of the works are rarely explained; and technical considerations are ignored to a degree that nowadays seems almost eccentric.2 What then are Agosti’s rules as they are revealed here?

Measured caution might be one – here best exemplified by the sections curated by Thiébaut and Caroline Elam, respectively on

the Louvre St Sebastian and the Triumphs of Caesar. Determining what precisely can be established from documentary evidence and other contemporary writings is another, a method taken very seriously by all the authors. But what in the end matters most is style. All the contributors revel in their command of analytical description, which they employ to tremendous effect. In constructing their own Mantegna, visitors were thus really asked to assess the stylistic arguments presented by the organisers of each section, to decide if, on the evidence of what they could see, they were convinced by the hypotheses. And thanks to the richness of the material on show (there were 199 exhibits) and its elegant and telling organisation, the evidence was there to be studied.

Another ‘rule’, often ignored in the (not always respectful) Anglo-American tradition but fully observed in the catalogue, is a proper reverence for the views of great art-historical predecessors. A crucial subtext for many of the contributors to this exhibition is the legacy of Roberto Longhi.3 To those intensely engaged with this inheritance, the remarks that follow will be judged jejune, but to explain, even briefly, how their method looks to an outsider may have some value. This might be defined as a broadly philological approach: the identification and discussion of those artists who were central to the formation of a modern, unified language for Italian art – visual Dantes and Boccaccios – whose individual contribution can be measured partly by its subsequent impact. Other artists can therefore legitimately be regarded as dead-ends, and regional differences and dialects, individualist contributions that run counter to a ‘progressive’ current, artists who looked not forwards but backwards (even sometimes – as with Mantegna – to the ancient world), all need to be scrutinised and mapped but not necessarily as highly prized. These values establish what is essentially a systematic, autonomous and teleological mode of classification, founded upon a notion of unifying progress, which can be used to determine both chronology and attribution. This is a structure that assumes an absolutely central role for the artists themselves in the formation of their language, demanding therefore that they should be properly identified (ideally named), and it is navigated by following the stylistic currents – sometimes subterranean, making up a ‘secret history’ – running between them.

Vasari’s notion of the modern is of course key here, but so too is Longhi’s – overlapping, but significantly shaped by early

I am very grateful to Stephen Campbell, Keith Christiansen, David Ekserdjian, Elke Oberthaler, Nicholas Penny and Xavier Salomon for their many extremely stimulating comments and observations. Opinions expressed in this review remain of course my own.

1 Catalogue: Mantegna, 1431–1506, edited by Giovanni Agosti and Dominique Thiébaut, with the assistance of Arturo Galansino and Jacopo Stoppa. 480 pp. incl.

335 mostly colour ills. (Musée du Louvre and Hazan, Paris, 2008), €42. ISBN 978–2–35031–209–5 (HB); 978–2–7541–0310–7 (PB). This was marred by disastrous colour reproductions. References in this review are to the Italian edition, 496 pp. incl. 354 ills. (Officina libreria, Milan, 2008), €60. ISBN 978–88–89854–31–0.

2 A useful corrective was provided by the colloquium, ‘La technique picturale d’Andrea Mantegna/Andrea Mantegna’s painting technique’, held at the Louvre on 19th December 2008 and organised by the C2RMF (with the support of the

EU-ARTECH European network and the Mission Recherche et Technologie du Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication).

3 Longhi’s method is ripe for historiographical reconsideration; see G. Previtali: ‘Roberto Longhi, profilo biografico’, in idem, ed.: L’arte di scrivere sull’arte. Roberto Longhi nella cultura del nostro tempo, Rome 1982, pp.141–70 and passim; and M.G. Messina: review of Roberto Longhi and Modern Art exhibition, Ravenna, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 145 (2003), pp.538–39.

4 G. Romano: ‘Verso la maniera moderna: da Mantegna a Raffaello’, in Storia dell’arte italiana, Turin 1981, VI/1, pp.3–85.

5 Thiébaut (p.26) points out that Longhi’s strictures were preceded by similarly derogatory comments made by Berenson. We should not forget the political context for Longhi’s remarks; antiquarian classicism was the style favoured by Italian Fascists. His dislike of Mantegna was paralleled by his predictable distaste for

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twentieth-century modernism and its late nineteenth-century roots. As well as various formal characteristics and innovations, many defined by Vasari, Longhi regarded both artistic freedom and some degree of harmonious stylistic endeavour between progressive artists as crucially important, as well as their works’ poetic or emotional immediacy, often synonymous with a brand of naturalism such as could (and can) foster empathetic connections between picture and viewer. Though for Vasari they belonged in his second period, the prelude to what he called the ‘maniera moderna’, painters like Perugino and, critical in this context, Giovanni Bellini are viewed by Longhi and his followers – including Giovanni Romano, one of the contributors to the Mantegna exhibition – as pioneers of the modern style.4 Perugino and Bellini created pictures notable for their sweetness or poignancy, modern therefore because of their direct human appeal and because (like Piero della Francesca) they can be seen to stand at the head of progressive artistic developments.

On the other hand, Longhi was horribly disparaging about Mantegna, accusing him of stylistic ‘imperialism’ and ‘archaeological mysticism’.5 Longhi favoured painters who sought to express the truths of the world around them rather than shaping themselves only by reference to artistic tradition and he famously made ‘judgments of moral value’: ‘to-day, for all of us, Giovanni Bellini stands higher as an example of independence of spirit than Mantegna’.6 Patrons matter (as Isabella d’Este does for Giovanni Romano) mainly because of their preferences but not because they themselves were necessarily instrumental in shaping the languages of art. These then seem not so much the rules, but the broad framework and aims of this ‘game’ which, to a significant degree, underpinned the narrative of this exhibition. They lead to a particular kind of evaluation of the works included, admittedly seeking to mitigate Longhi’s dislike of Mantegna, but nonetheless taking full account of his overall system.7 With all this in mind, the exhibition was on its own terms a resounding success. The argument was made with panache and is learnedly elaborated in the catalogue. There is a demonstrable stylistic evolution to be traced and many of Mantegna’s works from the last two decades of his life are unquestionably more emotionally direct than those from the early part of his career.

The curators revealed a Mantegna who was not only hugely inventive but often acutely responsive to what was novel in the work of other artists, as well as to ancient precedent. In his early years Mantegna worked within set parameters, executing paintings for private devotion or for public worship, using a language forged in Padua and Venice largely by others. He soon challenged existing categories and boundaries and, by the end of his life, seems to have aspired to paint pictures that by their direct human appeal and emotional truth could become more than remote images, works whose primary raison d’être was that they

were painted by Mantegna. Indeed, his Triumphs were seemingly created with no particular setting in mind. And they are triumphs indeed – of a ‘dramatic and solemn’ modernity, Italian possibly but certainly pan-European, his inventions studied (sometimes via prints) by Rubens, Rembrandt and Poussin, as well as by his fellow countrymen rather earlier.

The exhibition therefore could be treated as a series of milestones on the journey towards the Triumphs. In some respects Mantegna appears to have sprung upon the scene fully armed. In fact, his remarkable ambition as a painter becomes most apparent in his works from the mid-1450s on. By that time, he had already worked out his approach to monumental narrative set within the great perspectival stages he constructed for the Ovetari Chapel frescos in Padua (the lower register was represented in the exhibition by three miniature copies from the Jacquemart-André; nos.12–14). But, while the combinations and arrangements of the figures are always immensely impressive, they are somewhat inchoate in terms of narrative clarity; it is not always easy to decipher the action, which sometimes seems dictated by the difficoltà or beauty of a pose rather than arising, as Donatello’s do, from the passions of the protagonists.8 Similarly, he already knew what he wanted to do with the depiction of the isolated figure. The hieratically posed S. Eufemia of 1454 (no.11) still looks resolutely Paduan, conscious of itself as an image, as a pseudo-sculpture, with all the familiar Squarcionesque tricks regarding framing and spatial relationships, those games of what is in our world and what in Eufemia’s. With the panel depicting S. Giustina (no.25; 1453–55) from the St Luke polyptych there comes a change; the

Canova, ‘lo scultore nato morto’.

6 R. Longhi: review of the Giovanni Bellini exhibition, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 91 (1949), pp.274–83, esp. p.278. For an oppositional reaction, see K. Christiansen: ‘Bellini and Mantegna’, in P. Humfrey, ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Giovanni Bellini, Cambridge 2004, pp.48–74 and 281–85, esp. p.282, note 11.

7 Complete knowledge of the bibliography is a very important ingredient in this method. The chains of influence that run between art historians can be perceived as paralleling those traced between artists.

8 In seeking to combine what he had learned from Donatello and Jacopo Bellini, Mantegna arrived at pictures which are less easy to read than either man’s works.

Donatello’s Santo reliefs contain their emotional urgency by an insistence on centrality – the protagonists occupy centre stage, given space and a kind of calm, so that the members of the chorus, exhibiting an extraordinary range of emotions, like

waves breaking over a rock, underpin the drama. Jacopo in the Louvre album could situate the main figures in the middle ground or pushed to one side (as Mantegna does), but the subsidiary groupings have a lucidity and composure, a separateness, that does not distract from the principals. The spaces are so enormous as to make a crucial point (developed by his son Giovanni) about the events unfolding. In a crowded narrative like Mantegna’s St James led to martyrdom, the saint needs his halo to distinguish him from his companions. The soldier with his shield, on the other hand, becomes curiously prominent. The most dynamic figure is the man in the right foreground, whose diagonal actually directs the eye away from James; such incoherence arose surely from youthful artistic virtuosity. That his efforts were not widely understood is indicated by his dispute with his patron, Imperatrice Ovetari, over the number of Apostles (eight rather than the expected twelve) in his depiction of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. These ambitious experiments were not repeated.

23. The adoration of the shepherds, by Andrea Mantegna. c.1450–51. Tempera on panel transferred to canvas, 40 by 55.6 cm. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

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24. The agony in the garden, by Andrea Mantegna. 1457–59. Tempera on panel transferred to canvas and stuck down on panel, 71.1 by 93.7 cm. (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tours).

25. The agony in the garden, by Andrea Mantegna. c.1458–60. Tempera on panel, 62.9 by 80 cm. (National Gallery, London).

lighting is subtler, her expression sweeter, her contours softer and more elegant, enveloping, almost caressing her figure.

Moreover, Mantegna’s naturalism is no longer confined to the lonely fruit or showy swag; he now introduces more touchingly familiar details: the saint’s middle finger tucked into her book to mark her place, the graceful knot tying the taut laces of her mantle across her collar-bones. She is still sculptural (and Mantegna’s figures would remain so until nearly the end of his life) but she is now fully human too. However, her gold ground ensures that she remains isolated and, although she was placed on the far right of unified perspectival stage, Giustina and her fellow saints are presented separately with little or no interplay or communion (this is not simply an inevitable feature of the polyptych format).

They need to be looked at one by one.

With The adoration of the shepherds (no.50; Fig.23) comes Mantegna’s first attempt at blurring the distinction between the narrative and the iconic, between those pictures that act out a story, like a kind of pictorial mystery play, and those in which knowledge of the Christian story is assumed, intended to inspire sustained contemplation. The Adoration tends to the latter. All the figures are given their own space; the shepherds do not really look at the infant Christ, and the Virgin and Child with their border of cherubim and seraphim are presented as a kind of vision – the shepherds’? – rather than as physically present. The setting is designed to reinforce these divisions between human and divine, the Virgin given her own little platform, the sleeping Joseph’s tree cultivated mainly to support his elbow. The many details in the background (tiny sheep, a giant willow) are arranged with little sense of how they recede within the somewhat unreal landscape. Increasingly, however, Mantegna arrived at more advanced solutions (by dint, one feels, of obsessive hard work), finding an astonishing balance between the integration and isolation of his figures. In all his pictures, from the S. Zeno altarpiece to the Camera Picta, everything connects but maintains its particularity. Mantegna began to ask more and more of his pictures and their viewers, more indeed than any artist before

him and most since. He wanted his viewers both to feel and to think, to be moved certainly (humanly and humanely), but also to consider (intellectually) and, where appropriate, to contemplate (spiritually). He required that they should admire his art, but he also gave his pictures something of the quality of a natural marvel: like an exquisite gemstone, his images appear complete and unalterable.

Every element was worked out, deliberately placed and combined; his pictures should seem as if they could never be other than they are, and they need, as grand narratives should, time to discover them. It is no surprise that recent scientific investigations reveal that he made almost no changes to his designs once he had completed the underdrawings, and that the underdrawings themselves contain very few pentiments. Yes, the figures become more carefully related to their settings, endowing his pictures with a greater pictorial wholeness. But it is more than that: Mantegna exerts control over the viewer, making the eye travel in ways that are rigorously predetermined: towards physical features of the landscapes, down roads, empty or thronged, across water, up to magnificent cities and soaring crags, around figures, following their gazes, interpreting their restrained gestures and expressions, as well as by thrilling perspective and tight, complicated compositions. Little bursts of energy are always contained. Details are precisely and convincingly described (we know that what we are seeing is true); they can delight and intrigue, but they never intrude, always delicately subsumed in the larger, exalted vision (the pictures are more than true). And nothing, not even the clouds, can move. The impact of his paintings is not only immediately striking but cumulative – they have both surface and depth. Mantegna almost literally transports the viewer through the hard work demanded of them. At this stage of his life, he never seeks merely to please or impress (though he will reward).

These are difficult journeys, visual pilgrimages towards what Roger Fry rightly categorised as the sublime.9 We were able to follow this evolution in the three S. Zeno predella panels. The agony in the garden (Fig.24) is full of frozen

9 See R. Fry: ‘Andrea Mantegna’, Quarterly Review (January 1902), pp.139–58; Italian transl.: idem: Mantegna, ed. C. Elam, transl. R. Rizzo, Milan 2006, pp.11–37; see also idem: ‘Mantegna as a Mystic’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 8 (1905), pp.87–98.

10 It can only just post-date it and may well be exactly contemporary with

the Crucifixion.

11 He reverts to a kind of Squarcionesque mode for his S. Bernardino with angels (Brera, Milan) executed in the 1460s for the chapel dedicated to Bernardino in S. Francesco, Mantua, which was a more public setting than those for most

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instants – the angel’s precipitate dive paralleled by the bees hovering around their hives and by the stream of water splashing over rocks, all caught in mid-flight. The landscape remains rather contrived, still broken up into its component parts. The beehives, for example, are set up on a little clump of rocks, there just for that purpose. The city wall is broken simply to show the road behind. And there are still some problems of scale – the pair of rabbits on the hillside behind the hives must be enormous.

The delight in anecdotal detail and deliberately tricky effects is almost distracting, like the way in which the rock that functions as Christ’s prie-dieu projects above the bodies of the exhausted apostles. With the Crucifixion (Fig.26) Mantegna has fully risen to his self-imposed challenge. Each of the figures or groups contributes separately but seamlessly to the narrative. Whereas in the Ovetari frescos the bystanders are just that, staffage swarming round the protagonists, here they take on a new importance as onlookers. Their gazes become significant, looking up – not just to Christ but also to the bad thief, veiled in shadow. And their setting is marvellously integrated, the landscape flows around the figures, creating beautiful connections and intervals.

The naturalistic observation is still acute but is now given a subsidiary role, adding texture to the narrative rather than providing delightful distractions: the wedges of wood holding the crosses of the thieves in place; the base of Christ’s cross set into a little cairn; the holes in the shoes worn by the gambling soldier.

This is the approach Mantegna masters in The agony in the garden in London (Fig.25), making it less likely, perhaps, that this work was painted before the Tours depiction of the same scene.10 In that picture, for example, there is a little bridge that leads nowhere, whereas in the London painting the log flung with seeming casualness over the stream leads the eye into the picture space and to Christ. In comparison to its precursor, the narrative is stripped down, the drama is no longer just frozen but stilled.

This is what Mantegna carried to Mantua in the early 1460s, an approach resolutely developed in the pictures made for the chapel in the Castello di S. Giorgio, including the Uffizi Circumcision (no.63), the Uffizi Adoration of the Magi, in which the crowd control is remarkable, and the Prado Death of the Virgin (no.60).

This way of making art had its ultimate expressions in the Louvre St Sebastian of 1478–80 (no.76), although he returned to it in the Copenhagen Dead Christ with angels (no.84). But from the mid-1470s onwards, just as he started to produce prints (and perhaps this is not unconnected), he began to eliminate backgrounds to produce pictures that work on the viewer very differently, that are distillations rather than panoramas. At that time he returned to another early experiment in which he found an alternative solution to the narrative/icon, the Berlin Presentation of Christ of the late 1450s, with its half-length figures set against a neutral ground (in his later elaborations of this theme he eliminates the Squarcionesque fictive frame of this work). This was his way forward – a more economical mode of painting certainly but, more importantly, one which enhances the intensity of the viewer’s encounter with the image, but especially with what it depicts. He mined this seam, not just in religious pictures like the Getty Museum’s Adoration of the Magi (no.181) and the Jacquemart-André Ecce Homo (no.183) but in the Triumphs themselves, in which landscape almost ceases to matter. This is a new

kind of directed viewing, and though it is not just modern (returning as it does to the essence of the icon), it is that too.

These observations have emerged from the straightforwardly chronological (and subtly didactic) structure of the exhibition and from the observations of the writers in the catalogue. For those broadly in sympathy with this approach, the Paris exhibition provided an account of Mantegna’s artistic evolution that will be deemed satisfactory and satisfying (even as they dispute some of its finer points). But it need hardly be stated that for every devotee of Longhi there is a more sceptical view or even a voice of outright dissent. If Renaissance art history is a game, it is one that has come to have teams, and there will be scholars who reject the entire premise of the show as alien or ill-founded. To do so is unhelpful. There was, after all, a notion of progress that was expressed in the period (even if the idea of progress at the Mantuan court was not always the same as the Vasarian or Longhian schemae). Mantegna himself was an artist constantly striving for his own perfection. But there are inherent fault-lines built into this method. A reverence, however ingrained or sincere, for time-honoured arguments, and the adherence to an over-arching system linked to a way of seeing (one which calculates what in a picture looks ‘archaic’, what innovative) can prove restrictive. The trajectory of a career such as Mantegna’s is never going to be neatly consistent and, although change, perhaps even progress, clearly occurs, it is probably unwise to see it as linear and systematic. Mantegna responded to the function and (where there was one) intended setting of his pictures.11 Sometimes, as with the Triumphs, his works were started seemingly on his own initiative and he was allowed a free hand, but the appearance of other pictures might be monitored by a demanding and resourceful patron, who had – as did Isabella d’Este – strong ideas of her own.12 He may sometimes have been directed to look at works by other painters; and, like most artists, he might sometimes return to old ideas, just as he re-used motifs or formulae invented much earlier.13 Certainly, we should look for a consistent pattern of personal stylistic development (and of the techniques he

of his works in this period.

12 This is a more complicated problem than Giovanni Romano allows. Isabella’s interests extended beyond issues of style to the ways in which complex and overlapping meanings could be allied with stylistic decisions; see S. Campbell: The

Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este, New Haven and London 2006.

13 The Getty Adoration of the Magi looks back to the Berlin Presentation of Christ; he also re-used drawings of the early 1460s for prints in the mid-1470s.

26. Crucifixion, by Andrea Mantegna. 1457–59. Tempera on panel, 76 by 96 cm.

(Musée du Louvre, Paris).

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employed) but allow that other, sometimes external, pressures might disrupt a purely linear flow.

Thus, although there was little to quarrel with in the presentation in Paris of Mantegna’s chronology, the dating of two pictures in the exhibition seemed to have been determined either on the basis of received opinion or because of a view that the change in Mantegna’s art was steady and logical. On the one hand, the anatomy and modelling of the torso and the lighting and arrangement of the draperies, even the strong shadowing, of the Vienna St Sebastian (no.71; dated, pace Longhi, c.1470) look so like those of the Christ in the Tours Resurrection (no.53) as to suggest that its normal dating to about 1460 must be correct (and therefore that this could indeed have been the ‘operetta’ sent by Mantegna to the Venetian Jacopo Antonio Marcello in 1459). At any rate, there can be little doubt that it was painted a decade or so before his St George (Accademia, Venice; Agosti’s candidate for the Marcello gift), in which the landscape resembles those in the Camera Picta. On the other hand, the curious flesh-painting (the chest like polished marble, the head as ruddy as a farmer’s) of the Copenhagen Dead Christ with angels (no.84; dated c.1485–90), is, as Fry realised,14 so similar to the Ca’ d’Oro St Sebastian that it too must come from the end of Mantegna’s career, even if its stillness and austerity might suggest an earlier date and though he had returned to a motif – the quarry – first used during his brief sojourn in Rome (1488–c.1490) for the Uffizi Virgin of the stonecutters. Some of the differences between this extraordinary painting and others from the years around 1500 are explained very simply by the fact that it, unlike them, is painted on panel, some perhaps by how it may have functioned or because of the requests of its unknown patron.

More seriously, adherence to an intellectual system of this kind can distort or mislead when evidence is seemingly directed to bear out predetermined ideas. We see an example of this kind of thinking in the last section of the exhibition, ‘Vers la manière moderne’, an aesthetic anticlimax with several pictures that appeared insipid and uninspiring. The prominence bestowed upon an anonymous Lombard picture in the Louvre, the Madonna of the scales (no.197), is a case in point; to the present reviewer this seems a somewhat unresolved melange of Mantegnesque and Leonardesque tropes, but it was deemed valuable precisely because of this stylistic amalgam.15 Mantegna himself, we are told, fully assimilated the modern in his S. Andrea Baptism (no.187). This is undeniably a work of powerful ambition, its design extraordinarily dramatic, but, even taking its poor condition into account, there can be little doubt that it was reworked, or more likely executed, at least in part, by an assistant, probably Mantegna’s son Francesco. This is not a new observation, but because of what the picture had to stand for in this exhibition, it was disallowed.

The confining effect of this over-arching system is most perturbingly demonstrated, however, in the assessment of

14

Fry 1902, op. cit. (note 9).

Giovanni Romano has cautiously connected the picture with Correggio; see G. Romano: ‘Correggio in Mantua and San Benedetto Po’, in L. Ciammitti, S.F. Ostrow and S. Settis, eds.: Dosso’s Fate: Painting and Court Culture in Renaissance Italy, Los Angeles 1998, pp.15–40, esp. pp.36–37, note 16.

16 A similar relationship can be divined between Squarcione’s altarpiece for Leone de Lazara (1449–52; Museo Civico, Padua), its execution largely delegated (as De Marchi states, it resembles no.1), and his signed Berlin Virgin and Child, which should be regarded as the touchstone for Squarcione’s style and technique; in type and proportions Mantegna’s Virgin in the S. Zeno altarpiece echo Squarcione’s in the Berlin painting.

17 The attribution to Donatello of the two bronze reliefs (nos.2 and 3) should be treated with caution, though both must have been executed in Padua during 15

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27. Three all’antica male nudes, here attributed to Nicolò Pizzolo. c.1446–50. Pen and brown ink and wash with white heightening on blue paper, 39.5 by 27.2 cm.

(Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi, Florence, inv.6347 F v).

Mantegna’s early career. Here the Vasarian model of the great artist superseding his master is arguably as important as the Longhian schema. A somewhat workaday Virgin and Child in a private collection (no.1) is given unequivocally to Francesco Squarcione and therefore becomes a kind of embodiment of Squarcione’s inadequacies. Mantegna, it is implied, could have learnt precious little from his master (with whom he lived and studied from 1442 to 1448). Actually this picture must be a copy of the damaged picture in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (cat. fig.30). In no.1, the punching is cruder, the forms are simplified, contrasting with the elegant gilt ornament and energetic, tensile line of the Baltimore picture, in which the Child has a defined musculature. The liquid highlights in this latter picture are a feature of Mantegna’s earliest paintings (see no.6; the Frankfurt St Mark) and of works by other pupils of Squarcione (Zoppo and Schiavone; see nos.20 and 21); thus it is not unreasonable to argue that this descriptive mode was taken by all three from their teacher – that there was, in other words, something to learn. The Virgin and Child in the show is probably more useful for understanding the ways in which Squarcione delegated works to his many pupils.16 The exhibition also attempted an exposition of the influence on Mantegna of Donatello in Padua, handicapped only by the unavailability of key works.17 The Uffizi drawing of the

Donatello’s time there by sculptors working more or less closely with him.

18 W.R. Rearick: ‘Nicolò Pizolo: Drawings and Sculptures’, in A. De Nicolò Salmazo, ed.: Francesco Squarcione, ‘pictorum gymnasiarcha sigularis’. Atti delle Giornate di studio. Padova 10–11 febbraio 1998, Padua 1999, pp.177–93, an article that is otherwise rather eccentric.

19 K. Christiansen in J. Martineau, ed.: exh. cat. Andrea Mantegna, London (Royal Academy of Arts) and New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 1992, pp.115–17, no.3.

20 As De Nicolò Salmazo suggested, Pizzolo may be responsible for the Poldi Pezzoli Portrait of an old man (no.8), though this, as she realised, could have been painted by Mantegna c.1450, contemporary with his Ovetari fresco of the Calling of Sts James and John, in which the impact of Pizzolo’s style is clearly felt; see A. De Nicolò Salmazo: Il soggiorno padovano di Andrea Mantegna, Cittadella 1993, pp.64–65.

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28. St Jerome in the wilderness, attributed to Nicolò Pizzolo. c.1448.

Tempera on panel, 48 by 36 cm.

(Museu de Arte, São Paulo).

Flagellation of Christ (no.4), so reminiscent of Donatello’s reliefs, is undeniably pertinent, and Agosti ascribes it to a ‘Follower of Donatello in Padua (Giovanni Bellini?)’. The attribution to Bellini was first proposed by Longhi and subsequently championed by Bellosi. Roger Rearick, however, argued that this double-sided sheet should instead be ascribed to the elusive painter–sculptor Nicolò Pizzolo, making a persuasive comparison between the three all’antica figures on its verso, utterly un-Bellinesque (Fig.27) and Pizzolo’s destroyed St Gregory from the Ovetari Chapel vault.18 Before their falling out in 1449, Pizzolo was Mantegna’s partner on the decoration of the Ovetari Chapel and, as the older, might be thought to have had some role in forming the younger painter’s style. In addition, these twisting figures link the sheet to the splendidly febrile St Jerome from São Paulo (no.7; Fig.28) which is given to Mantegna, as it has been since 1938, albeit far from unanimously; this attribution was promoted by Longhi, Berenson and, in recent years, by Keith Christiansen, who placed it at the beginning of Mantegna’s career.19 It is very unlikely that the St Jerome was painted after the signed St Mark (no.6) whose dating to c.1447–48 must be correct; and Mark is so close in spirit to the S. Eufemia of 1454 (no.11) as to indicate a significant stylistic consistency in these years around 1450. Since, with its quicksilver complications, the Jerome is equally unlikely to predate

21 Luciano Bellosi, who curated this section, chose not to enter the debate regarding the date and circumstances of Giovanni’s birth, though he cites Jacopo Filippo Foresti’s 1503 designation of Gentile as the ‘minimus frater’ that seemingly supports his position (pp.103 and 109, note 1). That such sources are not always reliable is demonstrated by the fact that other humanists send Giovanni Bellini, rather than his brother Gentile, to Istanbul. See J.M. Fletcher: ‘Bellini’s Social World’, in Humfrey, op. cit. (note 6), pp.13–47 and 274–81, esp. pp.32–33 and 279, note 120. There is evidence to support the opposite view. The badly damaged Palazzo Ducale Pietà, dated to 1472 in documents of 1716 and 1771, is now accepted by many as a fixed point in Bellini’s career. Agosti, however, writes (p.68) that it should be ‘sganciata dalla impropria data 1472’; he and Bellosi believe that the canvas was painted c.1460. For the arguments in favour of the 1472 date, see M. Lucco in idem and G.C.F. Villa, eds.: exh. cat. Giovanni Bellini, Rome (Scuderie del Quirinale) 2008, pp.172–74, no.12. In

the four-square, Squarcionesque St Mark, it becomes difficult to associate the São Paulo picture with any phase of Mantegna’s career. In the early 1990s Alberta De Nicolò Salmazo tentatively attributed the picture to Pizzolo and, especially if the analogies with the Uffizi drawing are accepted, this seems a very satisfactory solution.20 The section exploring Mantegna’s relationship with his brother-in-law Giovanni Bellini was the most controversial of all. Since Bellini rather than Mantegna is judged to have been the pioneering modern, the evidence was shaped to fit this sense of the two artists’ relative priority. Most scholars are now content with the opposite view – that Bellini was much impressed

by Mantegna in the first decade of his career. The question hangs not least on Giovanni Bellini’s date of birth: was he younger or older than his brother Gentile, born c.1431–33 (probably the third of Jacopo’s children), legitimate or illegitimate? Was he therefore older or younger than Mantegna himself? The majority of scholars currently put Giovanni’s birthdate at c.1434–35, or possibly even a little later, whereas Longhi’s followers prefer a birth date in about 1430 or slightly earlier. The only certainty is that in 1453 Mantegna married Nicolosia, Giovanni’s sister (or better, Jacopo Bellini’s daughter), at just the time therefore that he began work on the St Luke polyptych (Brera, Milan; see no.25).21 The Paris exhibition provided the opportunity (especially with the then concurrent Giovanni Bellini show in Rome)22 to assess the arguments on both sides, the coherence of the two competing chronologies, and thus the plausibility of the argument that Mantegna in the mid- to late 1450s was deeply indebted to Giovanni. Bellini’s signed St Jerome in Birmingham is accepted as his earliest surviving panel painting, but there is less accord as to its exact date.23 This can plausibly be narrowed down by reference to the two full-page illuminations painted for a manuscript edition of Strabo’s Geography (De situ orbis geographia), commissioned in 1459 by the Venetian Jacopo Antonio Marcello (no.31–32; now in Albi), whose attribution to Giovanni Bellini, often argued in recent years, appears entirely convincing. In both we see the same delicate but insistent contour lines, similar elongated figures and means of making the landscape gently recede (both features derived from Jacopo), the same lines carrying the eye across the picture surface, linking figures, their actions and setting. Morellian examination of individual details supports a view that the Jerome was painted in about 1459 or conceivably a mite earlier: the method of highlighting the knuckles and wavy hair (see, for example, the fur hat in the second of the two illuminations that is so like Jerome’s beard) are very like; even the two lions are twins of one another.24 Three other early works by Giovanni were also included: the Louvre pictures of Christ blessing (no.35; correctly

the opinion of the present reviewer there are no stylistic reasons to doubt that the Venice Pietà was painted by Giovanni, probably with assistance, in the late 1460s or early 1470s, not long after his Brera Pietà.

22 Reviewed by Neville Rowley in this Magazine, 150 (2008), pp.848–49.

23 See M. Lucco in Lucco and Villa, op. cit. (note 21), with full bibliography.

24 Both must be of nearly the same date as Giovanni Bellini’s signed Pietà in the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, for which see – albeit with a later dating – G.C.F. Villa in ibid., pp.64–66, no.10. Giles Robertson: Giovanni Bellini, Oxford 1968, p.29, recognised that it must immediately follow the Barber St Jerome. The physiognomical similarity between the head of Christ in this work and the bystander with crossed arms immediately behind Jacopo Marcello in the second of the Albi illuminations is striking.

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30. Portrait of a young man, detail of fol.22 of the Paris album,

by Jacopo Bellini. c.1445–55.

Pen and brown ink on vellum, 29 by 42.7 cm.

(Musée du Louvre, Paris).

29. Portrait of Jacopo Antonio Marcello, fol.38v of J.A. Marcello: Passio Mauritii, here attributed to Jacopo Bellini. 1453. Tempera on vellum, 18.7 by 13 cm. (Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris).

dated c.1459), and the Bishop saint and St Anthony Abbot (nos.36 and 37; dated c.1460), which must be very close in time to his supremely Mantegnesque Transfiguration (Correr, Venice), and, like that awkward masterpiece, probably painted c.1462–63. All these works are in some ways Mantegnesque, and since this group post-dates the date of Mantegna’s marriage, it does nothing to contradict the recent consensus that Bellini, at the beginning of his independent career, was more affected by Mantegna than the other way around.

So far, so good, but here the confusion begins in earnest. To justify the argument that the current of influence ran primarily from Giovanni Bellini to Mantegna, other paintings have to be identified which show Bellini working in the earlier part of the 1450s. It is only from such pictures that Mantegna could have learned such aspects of a Bellinian style as he introduces to his pictures in the period after his marriage to Nicolosia. The Birmingham St Jerome is therefore dated early. So too is the Pavia Virgin and Child (no.34), which must surely have been painted about a decade after the date of 1455 proposed here. And it is not possible to accept either the attribution to Giovanni Bellini

or the dating – c.1453–55 – of the predella with stories from the life of Drusiana once in the Carità, Venice (no.33; now in Munich; the main tier of the altarpiece is lost). Documentary evidence apparently indicates that the altar on which this predella stood was dedicated only between 1468 and 1471, but this is disregarded. Marcantonio Michiel wrote of this work ‘Credo lo scabello fusse de man de Lauro Padovano’, and even if his cautious ‘credo’ might lead modern scholars to reject a firm attribution to this shadowy figure, there can be no doubt that Michiel noticed a dip in quality in relation to the main panel, which he gave to Bellini himself. The predella was probably executed by an assistant of Giovanni Bellini in the early 1470s, probably working to Giovanni’s designs.25 Bellosi re-submits his 1986 attribution to Giovanni of the four exquisite illuminations in the Paris manuscript of the Life and Passion of St Maurice (no.30), made for Marcello six years earlier than the Geography. But the two manuscripts cannot have been illustrated by the same painter. The pages in the Passio Mauritii are altogether more delicate, more resolved, the sensibility is different, and, since the Strabo illuminations

25 The attribution of this work has been confused by its erroneous association with the predella of the St Vincent Ferrer altarpiece (SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice).

Bellosi gives them different dates, but they do not appear to be by the same hand – though the latter is not seemingly by Bellini either. Bellosi’s perspicacious attribution to Alvise Vivarini of the sgraffito Pagan allegory (no.38; private collection, Paris, formerly Stanley Moss Collection), often given to Bellini and, by Robertson, to Lauro Padovano, bolsters the opinion of the present reviewer that the entire St Vincent Ferrer altarpiece may have been painted by the youthful Alvise. In the mid-1470s Alvise’s style was much affected by Giovanni Bellini and, in this case, the two painters – the younger moonlighting from his family firm? – could perhaps have been collaborating. The St Vincent Ferrer altar was seemingly dedicated in 1464, but no altarpiece was in place by that date; see G. Fogolari: Scritti d’arte, Milan 1946, p.250; Christiansen, op. cit. (note 6), p.285, note 34; and it is possible the altar initially remained empty. The work was attributed to Alvise by Ridolfi in 1648; it fits very uncomfortably within any of the proposed chronologies for Giovanni Bellini, which is why its attribution to Bellini, proposed by Sansovino and forcefully argued

by Longhi in 1914, has been regularly questioned since; see R. Longhi: Scritti Giovanili, 1912–1922, Florence 1961, pp.90–93.

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It is also worth comparing the portraits of Marcello. Is it really possible that, even taking their different sizes into account, the same artist would so radically have re-envisaged the features of his patron?

27 G. Toscano in D. Banzato, A. De Nicolò Salmazo and A.M. Spiazzi, eds.: exh. cat.

Mantegna e Padova, 1445–1460, Padua (Musei Civici agli Eremitani) 2006, pp.224–27, no.40a–b. Bellosi rightly points out that the illuminations bear very little resemblance to the panel of Sts Anthony Abbot and Bernardino (National Gallery of Art, Washington) believed by many scholars to have belonged to the 1459 Gattamelata altarpiece.

See M. Boskovits in idem and D.A. Brown: Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art. Systematic Catalogue, Washington 2003, pp.89–94. The Gattamelata altarpiece was supposedly signed jointly by Jacopo, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini (in that order!) and several scholars have proposed that Gentile may have executed this panel. See C. Eisler: ‘Saints Anthony Abbot and Bernardino designed by Jacopo and painted by Gentile Bellini’, Arte Veneta 39 (1985), pp.32–40; K. Christiansen: ‘Venetian painting of the early Quattrocento’, Apollo 125 (March 1987), pp.166–77, esp. pp.174–76. Certainly it is hard to reconcile its stiffness and somewhat summary mode of execution either with Jacopo’s drawings in the Louvre album thought to date from the 1450s or with his exquisite paintings believed

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appear to have been painted by Giovanni, another candidate for the Maurice illuminations needs to be found.26 In the past, they have been wrongly given to Mantegna. Bellosi is perplexed (p.103) by the attribution to Jacopo Bellini by Giordana Mariani Canova of these miniatures, an opinion forcibly supported in 2006 by Gennaro Toscano.27 However, in the opinion of the present writer, this remains the most persuasive suggestion made so far. There are a number of striking similarities between these pages and Jacopo’s S. Bernardino in a New York private collection,28 and to many of the sheets in the Paris album of Jacopo’s drawings. A helpful comparison was provided in the show between the Marcello portrait (Fig.29; not the page chosen for exhibition) and the profile of a young man (Fig.30) on the page in the Louvre album opposite Jacopo’s drawing of Christ in Limbo (no.26). In both we see the same firm contour, the delicate fall of light within, and short strokes of shimmering hatching around the profile.

Where does this leave us? In the period immediately following his marriage, Mantegna certainly introduced Bellinian elements to his painting – in the lighting and landscapes of the S. Zeno predella panels and especially the London Agony, and in the softer flesh-painting of the saints in the lower tier of the St Luke polyptych – but with no works by Giovanni to imitate, we are forced to conclude that Longhi, as all art historians do on occasion, got this wrong. Mantegna’s contract (marital, but also artistic) was with Jacopo, not Giovanni. His National Gallery Agony in the garden, for example, reveals his awareness of Jacopo Bellini’s Agony drawing in the British Museum album (no.44), although his model was re-envisaged according to his own exacting principles. If Giovanni’s youthful works contain a similar stylistic fusion of father and brother-in-law (albeit with the ingredients weighted very differently), then that is hardly surprising. And it is from that moment, in the early 1460s, that the fascinating dialogue between Mantegna and Bellini really begins. It is surely absurd to think that all contact between the two ceased after Mantegna’s removal to Mantua.

Antonio Mazzotta has observed that the rock forms at the base of the little hummock in Bellini’s Correr Transfiguration are precisely copied from Mantegna’s drawing of Christ in Limbo (no.68). Since this is highly finished in most parts and drawn on parchment it seems reasonable to ask if this was not a presentation drawing made for one or other of his in-laws, executed probably shortly after Mantegna’s arrival in Mantua, and copied

by Giovanni almost immediately. Mantegna’s Berlin Presentation of Christ, available for Giovanni Bellini to make his free

copy in the early 1470s (Fondazione Querini, Venice), may also have been a gift to the family.29 And, in his turn, Mantegna, in mid-career, took sensitive note of the activities of his talented relation by marriage. It is worth pointing out that his treatment of figures in landscape is closest to Giovanni Bellini, in the way that the lines of the landscapes and the contours of the figures flow from one another at certain key nodal points within the composition, in his St George (suggestive in view of its Venetian provenance) and in the Camera Picta, therefore in the years around 1470. As Thiébaut points out, the treatment of light and surface in the Copenhagen Dead Christ is unthinkable without Giovanni Bellini.30 An exhibition devoted to Mantegna inevitably raises another problem of classification, one connected with our sense of what determines (or better, determined) authorship. What do we mean when we say that a work is ‘by’ Andrea Mantegna, or by his workshop or when we categorise a work as realised ‘after Mantegna’ – that is, by another maker following his designs?

This is a question that becomes urgent in relation to Mantegna’s activities as a printmaker. In general, the contributors to the catalogue favour the formulation ‘bottega di’ when dealing with those prints copying Mantegna’s designs but universally agreed to have been actually engraved by a specialist in the medium. However, the Virtus combusta and Virtus deserta prints (no.146 and 147) are given to Giovanni Antonio da Brescia, on the basis of research conducted by Suzanne Boorsch and David Landau for the 1992 exhibition, and the print of the Bearers of royal armour (no.164) from the Triumphs, the plate for which (like others) remained in the hands of the Mantegna family, is attributed to Giulio Campagnola. The small number of engravings historically assumed to have been entirely executed by Mantegna himself (Kristeller’s group of seven, including nos.89, 95, 105, 106 and 113) were labelled as his. In recent decades, this topic has been an especially vexed one, made, if anything, still more complicated by the remarkable archival discoveries of Andrea Canova, curator of the section, ‘Mantegna invenit’; we now know that in April 1475 Mantegna forged an exclusive working relationship with the young goldsmith Gian Marco Cavalli who, in exchange for a salary, would engrave plates provided by Mantegna after drawings (subjects unspecified) that he was required to keep secret.

There is room for much more thought on this matter. We might, for example, investigate Cavalli’s other activities further.

His struck medals of Francesco Gonzaga and Maximilian I are probably too small to be helpful, though, since they are

to come from the same period: see, especially, the Virgin and Child, c.1450, in the Uffizi. The difficulty is compounded by the seeming discrepancy between the formalised late ‘Gothic’ style of most of Jacopo’s surviving pictures and the huge (Renaissance) ambition of his drawings, especially the later group in the Louvre, which are more akin to the Passio Mauritii illuminations. Bellosi is, however, surely right to disassociate the three predella panels by Jacopo – the Christ in Limbo in Padua (no.27, dated c.1450–55), the Crucifixion in Venice and the Adoration of the Magi in Ferrara from the Washington panel – though they may perhaps have been executed rather closer to 1450, seemingly when the British Museum album was begun.

28 This is dated, because of Bernardino’s canonisation in that year, to ‘shortly after 1450’

by C. Eisler: The Genius of Jacopo Bellini: The Complete Paintings and Drawings, New York 1989, pp.28, 51, 69 and 165. The painting has a curious affinity with the elephant in the Allegory of Venice in the Arsenal manuscript – in the treatment of the cowl (and the elephant’s ear), the long strokes of tempera hatching and even in the expression; these affinities were noted by A. De Marchi: Gentile da Fabriano, Milan 1992, pp.218 and 220, note 13, who used them to argue the attribution of both works to Giovanni Bellini.

29 R. Goffen: Giovanni Bellini, New Haven and London 1989, pp.282 and 284, argues persuasively that the Querini Presentation may not be wholly autograph.

30 In the Copenhagen picture the contrast between the cool, even pre-dawn light in the lower landscape (particularly the quarry) and the glow in the sky on the left contributes to the sense of Christ’s revivification; he is dead but will come alive.

Mantegna reinforces this idea by juxtaposing the stiff angular folds of the shroud around Christ’s feet, which have a kind of rigor mortis (as crisply carved as the tomb), with the frothy explosion of folds at his groin. Bellini’s encounter with Mantegna in Padua in the late 1450s remained fundamental and he must surely have made drawings then after both Mantegna and Donatello. Bellini’s Christ Church portrait drawing of the 1490s (for which see E. Greer in L. Campbell et al.: exh. cat.

Renaissance Faces: van Eyck to Titian, London (National Gallery) 2008, pp.250–51, no.80), which has sometimes been given to Mantegna, owes much to Mantegna’s much earlier portrait of Lodovico Trevisan (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). Antonio Mazzotta’s division of the drawings in the exhibition which have sometimes floated between the two artists is entirely convincing, though, partly by analogy with Bellini’s underdrawing style, one wonders if the chronology for his works on paper should be reversed. The Louvre drawing of the Pietà (no.47; dated c.1490) probably belongs in the mid-1470s, earlier than the other treatments of the subject in the exhibition, very likely of the mid-1480s (nos.45 and 46; dated c.1480).

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unusually fine and unquestionably his, they should not be ignored.31 A route that might ultimately be more helpful is Donald Johnston’s speculative but circumstantially convincing attribution to Cavalli of a glamorous bronze roundel depicting Mars, Venus, Cupid and Vulcan (Fig.31).32 Johnston proposed that the same sculptor executed the magnificent Entombment relief in Vienna (Fig.32), a work which in 1992 Landau bravely ascribed to Mantegna himself. There is a qualitative difference between these two reliefs, but could one argue that the latter, superb in all respects, was executed under Mantegna’s close supervision, whereas the former, a weaker composition, more generalised in its modelling, was an independent work? Might that help us with the prints? Three things are clear. First, the maker of the Vienna relief would have been entirely able to engrave the plates for the print of the same subject (no.89;

Fig.33) or for the Battle of the sea-gods (no.108). Second, Mantegna kept his printmakers (including Cavalli, Campagnola and very probably Giovanni Antonio da Brescia) on a tight rein and retained their plates. Third, for good stylistic reasons it has been realised that the prints normally given to Mantegna himself must have been executed over a substantial period of time, the horizontal Entombment in about 1475, the Sea-gods and Bacchanal with a wine-vat (no.105) probably slightly later (but before 1481), and the Madonna of humility (no.113) perhaps as late as 1490.33 In response to those who still cling to Mantegna as an engraver, it might be asked why, having entered into such a satisfactory arrangement with Cavalli, he subsequently, and very occasionally, returned to engraving his own designs, while otherwise depending upon the services of others? All of this lends credence to Boorsch’s view that Mantegna did not himself engrave plates and suggests in addition that it was probably Cavalli, minutely controlled by Mantegna, who engraved the plates for the finest of this sequence of prints.34 That is not to say, however, that these prints should cease to be labelled ‘Andrea Mantegna’; they are his absolutely and would surely always have been identified in this way. But so too are the other, less skilled engravings realised from Mantegna’s designs, works given here to individual engravers, where they have been identified, and to the ‘bottega’.35 It might be useful here to distinguish between those prints for which drawings were made especially by Mantegna (essentially Kristeller’s seven) and those which were reproductive of designs made for other purposes: paintings and presentation drawings. We are still at the beginning of our investigation, but one thing is paramount: better formulations for these works need to be found.

And we need to pose the question of whether this mode of collaboration with goldsmith–engravers was extended to other forms of production – to painting itself. The issue arises partly because of the handful of pictures in the exhibition whose autograph status is questionable. Critics have long been content to assign drawings to Mantegna’s workshop but have not always asked how these workshop members might have served their master. We are not even very clear who these assistants were; Mantegna is not known to have taken on pupils in significant numbers, though we can assume that he trained his sons. The problematic works might be divided into two types. Given Mantegna’s practice of making a finished design and a detailed underdrawing which he followed closely, it would have been very easy to delegate the actual painting of less important works to assistants, these pictures identifiable because they lack

31 G.F. Hill: A Corpus of Italian Medals of the Renaissance before Cellini, London 1930, p.613, nos.241–45.

32 Sale, Christies, London, 11th December 2003, lot 20.

33 Shelley Fletcher found the same Basilisk watermark on the first state impressions of the Madonna of humility print in Vienna and Berlin as those found in examples of the horizontal Entombment, Battle of the sea-gods (both halves) and Bacchanal with Silenus prints, leading her to suggest that ‘we must reconsider the possibility that the Virgin and Child was created closer in time to the others’ than is usually supposed, although she acknowledges that ‘this particular paper could have been purchased, stored and used at various times’; see S. Fletcher: ‘A Re-evaluation of two Mantegna prints’, Print Quarterly 14 (1997), pp.66–77, esp. pp.74–76. Stylistically the present reviewer believes, with David Landau, that this is the last of Kristeller’s ‘seven’ to have been executed and that a date close to the Uffizi Virgin of the stonecutters seems likely. Assuming the watermark evidence to be conclusive of a restricted date range would involve giving Mantegna’s British Museum drawing of Mars, Diana and Iris (?), with the same Basilisk watermark, an unacceptably early date; see D. Ekserdjian in Martineau, op. cit. (note 19), pp.449–50,

no.146; and S. Boorsch and D. Landau: ‘Appendix II: Watermarks’, in ibid., p.473.

34 S. Boorsch: ‘Mategna and his printmakers’, in Martineau, op. cit. (note 19), pp.56–66; A. Canova: ‘Gian Marco Cavalli incisiore per Andrea Mantegna e altre notizie sull’oreficeria e la tipografia a Mantova nel XV secolo’, Italia medioevale e umanistica 42 (2001), pp.149–79, the publication of which was clumsily anticipated by the present author, in L. Syson and D. Thornton: Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy, London 2001, p.158, fig.124.

35 From the letter of September 1475, detailing a dispute between Mantegna and the engraver Simone Ardizzoni of Reggio Emilia, it appears that Mantegna first wanted to engage Simone and then fell out with him after he discovered that Simone had collaborated in some way with the Mantuan painter Giovanni Andrea. Possibly he had earlier thought of Simone in the Cavalli role and that his unusual stipulations regarding the secretive treatment of his designs in the contract with Cavalli may have been spurred by some indiscretion on Simone’s part – very possibly that he showed Mantegna’s drawings to Giovanni Andrea. This hypothesis might be linked to both the prints of the vertical Entombment (no.86), the Christ in Limbo and the Deposition

31. Mars, Venus, Cupid and Vulcan, attributed to Gian Marco Cavalli. c.1480–1500.

Cast bronze relief, partially parcel-gilt with some silvering, diameter 42 cm.

(Private collection).

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Mantegna’s delicacy of touch. Some of the late grisaille paintings fall into this category: the Paris Judgment of Solomon (no.127; correctly attributed to Mantegna and workshop) but also possibly the Dublin Judith (no.126), which lacks the refinement of the Samson and Delilah (National Gallery, London), or the exquisite canvas from Cincinnati (no.132), whose subject is still puzzling. The pictures whose execution was delegated might therefore be thought of as equivalent to the prints; they are ‘by’ Mantegna because they were designed by him.

Others obey the basic precepts of Mantegna’s style (and can sometimes be beautifully painted), but evince a lack of discipline in their design that makes it difficult to see them as autograph works.36 One of the two canvases from Mantegna’s funerary chapel in S. Andrea, the Holy Family with the family of the Baptist (no.186), falls into this category, though is not among those which are well executed. Completed after Mantegna’s death, it is probably the work of two assistants, one of them, by analogy with the ugly female courtier and her slave on the ceiling of the Camera Picta, his son Francesco: the Virgin shares the amorphous facial type and soupy smile of the girl painted in the oculus. With pictures in this category, any signature would therefore function as a stamp of approval by the master rather than his active participation. The Paris exhibition gave the opportunity to examine the signed picture from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, The Virgin and Child, the infant St John the Baptist and six female saints (no.136), in the distinguished company of, most usefully, the Louvre Parnassus (no.137). This is probably, as Giovanni Agosti has suggested, the panel painting of the ‘Marys’ owned in 1493 by Eleonora of Aragon, Duchess of Ferrara, known probably to Ercole de’ Roberti. In modern times, only Fry, Longhi and Agosti have been prepared to credit the ostensible message of the signature. It is here presented by Elam with a justifiable question mark against Mantegna’s name. There is no gainsaying its exquisite technique, but its composition is incoherent, with peculiar shifts in scale, the assemblage of different facial types is worrying (none of them very like the Venus or those Muses that remained unaltered in the Parnassus, although closer to those in the earlier Virgin of the stonecutters and the British Museum drawing of the Calumny of Apelles; no.148)37 and the draperies veer towards slippery ornament. The landscape background, studded with more saints, is like a theatrical backdrop, its lines sometimes battling with the figures in the foreground. Some of these features are echoed in the grisaille paintings of Judith and Dido from Montreal (nos.128 and 129), particularly the disregard for relative scale

(no.87). Boorsch, in Agosti and Thiébaut, op. cit. (note 1), p.254, suggests that the drawing for the latter, like the Christ in Limbo, was not entirely finished. Arguably its technique relates the Deposition to engravings by Ferrarese printmakers; that Simone came from Reggio should come as no surprise given the pioneering efforts in the 1460s of Emilian engravers such as Gherardo da Vicenza, probable author of the so-called ‘Tarocchi di Mantegna’. It also appears that, to create these prints in the mid-1470s, Mantegna may have supplied his engravers with drawings executed much earlier – illustrating Christ’s Passion, perhaps associated with his paintings for the chapel of S. Giorgio, explaining the gap in time between the Courtauld drawing of Christ at the column, here correctly dated c.1456–59 (no.42; probably closer to the latter date), and the Flagellation print (no.88) in which the figure of Christ reappears.

The Paris Christ in Limbo drawing (or a version of it) was seemingly one of these, unfinished in some of its details, like the tree in the Deposition print. The dimensions and relative scale of figures to landscape in the vertical Entombment and the Deposition engravings are close to those of three problematic scenes from Christ’s Passion in the National Gallery (no.73–75). Could these have been painted by Giovanni Andrea,

32. The entombment of Christ, here attributed to an anonymous sculptor (possibly Gian Marco Cavalli) working under Mantegna’s supervision. 1475–80. Cast bronze relief, partially parcel-gilt, 24.4 by 44.9 cm. (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).

33. The entombment of Christ, here attributed to Gian Marco Cavalli working to Mantegna’s design and under his supervision. c.1475. Engraving and drypoint, 29.9 by 44.2 cm. (National Gallery of Art, Washington).

and the delicate chaos of draperies, tempting one to suggest that they are by the same hand. Mantegna, at the end of his career, seems to have had a highly skilled assistant as able to work in his idiom as Cavalli had been in translating his designs into copper plates and bronze reliefs. This utterly absorbing exhibition demonstrated that his shrewd choice of collaborators was only one of the things that make Mantegna so remarkable.

copying drawings by Mantegna supplied by the wayward Simone? Were these paintings the cause of the argument?

36 Two pictures in the exhibition are neither by Mantegna nor made under his supervision: the Jacquemart-André Virgin and Child with Sts Jerome and Louis of Toulouse (no.28) and the Capodimonte Portrait of Francesco or Lodovico Gonzaga (no.69). The technique of the former is too dense and the composition too awkward to be Mantegna’s (St Louis’s hand cut off by the line of the Virgin’s mantle). Though he supports the attribution to Mantegna, Agosti’s mention of the young Lazzaro Bastiani is to the point. The Gonzaga portrait (also damaged) is somewhat naive and unresolved, the treatment of the young cleric’s draperies dull and the painting of eyes and lips surprisingly summary. The work has the appearance of a copy but it must be asked if the original has much to do with Mantegna. The autograph status of both was rightly questioned by Creighton Gilbert after their inclusion in the 1961 Mantua exhibition; see C. Gilbert: review of the Mantegna exhibition, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 104 (1962), pp.5–9, esp. p.6.

37 This perhaps implies an earlier date for the latter than is usually supposed. the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e

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Titian’s ‘Triumph of Love’

by CATHERINE WHISTLER

THE ‘TRIUMPH OF LOVE’ ,

recently acquired by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford,1 is a little-known work by Titian which has not always been accepted as autograph (Fig.34).2 Its restoration

by Jill Dunkerton at the National Gallery, London, has revealed that the painting was originally rectangular in shape, and that the Cupid standing on a lion was shown in a fictive oculus (see Appendix below). Its provenance can now be traced to the collection of Gabriel Vendramin (1484–1552). The inventories and documents concerned mostly lack attributions, so that the Triumph of Love is described as Titian’s work only from the late eighteenth century.

The painting is first recorded on 4th January 1602 (Venetian style 1601) in a partial inventory of paintings, without artists’ names, from the Vendramin collection compiled by the notary Ottaviano Constantini.3 It appears as ‘uno quadro con un dio d’amor sopra un lion con soazete de legno dorade, qual quadro è il coperto del soprascritto quadro de retratto della donna con la mano al petto’. The portrait of a woman for which the Triumph of Love acted as a cover is listed two entries above as ‘un altro quadro de retratto d’una dona con la mano destra al petto vestita de negro con soaze de noghera con li suoi filli d’oro a torno alto quarte cinque e 1/2 e largo quarte 5 in circa’. This inventory recorded paintings that had recently been removed by Andrea and Federigo Vendramin from the Ca’ Vendramin at S. Fosca in Venice. The female portrait can be identified in an earlier inventory made in 1567–69 of the collection of Gabriel Vendramin at S. Fosca, where it was attributed to Titian

by Orazio Vecellio and Jacopo Tintoretto: ‘Un ritrato de una zentildona de man de ser Titian con fornimento de noghera con paternostri et fusarioli doradi’.4 Detached painted covers were not described in that inventory, which had as its prime focus Gabriel’s famous camerino d’anticaglie, the focus of disputes over illicit sales from the collection by his heirs.5 In a second inventory of 26th January 1602 the same notary, Constantini, compared the document of 1567–69 with the paintings he had listed three weeks earlier. He specified that ‘un dio d’amor’ was a timpano, or painted cover, and recorded that it was part of the original collection at S. Fosca.6 He

ordered that works from Gabriel’s collection should be locked up in the camerino and the door sealed.7 The dispersal of the collection mainly occurred during the lifetime of the last Vendramin heir, Andrea Vendramin di Zamballotta (1628–85).8 The Triumph of Love is next documented in 1680 as ‘Quadro con un putino in piedi sopra un lion in un paese’ in the collection of Salvatore Orsetti, a Venetian merchant and lawyer, in an inventory without dimensions or attributions.9 This was compiled when the family collection was divided between Salvatore and his brother Giovanni Battista. Their father, Cristoforo Orsetti (1608–64), had acquired a major group of paintings between late 1650 and mid-1657 from Andrea Vendramin, including Giorgione’s Tempest and La vecchia.10 The painting is next recorded in 1784 by the Venetian connoisseur and dealer Giovanni Maria Sasso, who acted as an agent for such collectors as Sir Abraham Hume and also restored paintings prior to their export.11 In a letter to John Strange (1732–99), British Resident in Venice until 1789, Sasso listed works belonging to the Bernardi family, including the Tempest among other paintings formerly in Gabriel Vendramin’s collection, and wrote that these pictures came from the Orsetti family.12 Sasso transcribed for Strange a recent ‘Nota di stime’ of the Bernardi pictures, including the ‘rotondo grande di Tiziano con putino che scherza con un leone 20 zecchini’. He mentioned that Sebastiano Ricci and Pietro Guarienti had previously assessed the collection, which must have belonged to Bortolo (Bartolomeo) Bernardi (fl.1743), a dealer and mercante di colore.13 Sasso went on to mistakenly identify the Triumph of Love with Carlo Ridolfi’s description of a painted cover that Titian had made for his portrait of the writer Sperone Speroni (1500–88).14 Some time after this, the Triumph of Love was acquired by John Udney (1727–1800), a British diplomat and merchant who had spent many years in Venice and Livorno; it was inherited by his brother Robert (1722–1802), and is described in his sale of 1804 as the painted cover by Titian described by Ridolfi as from the Bernardi family.15 The picture remained in British hands,

We are particularly grateful to Jennifer Fletcher, and to Linda Borean, Beverly Brown, Keith Christiansen, Jill Dunkerton, Paul Hills, Charles Hope, David Jaffé, Paul Joannides, Rosella Lauber, Nicholas Penny, Carol Plazzotta, Francis Russell, David Scrase, Luke Syson and Jeremy Warren for their opinions and suggestions. A fuller account of the conservation history, recent restoration and technical examination of the painting will appear in a future issue of the National Gallery Technical Bulletin.

1 Accepted by H.M. Government in lieu of Inheritance Tax and allocated to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2008 (hybrid arrangement), with a grant from The Art Fund (with a contribution from the Wolfson Foundation); support from Daniel Katz Ltd., the Friends of the Ashmolean, the Elias Ashmole Group, the Tradescant Group, the Virtue-Tebbs, Russell and Madan Bequest Funds, and donations from Mr Michael Barclay, the late Mrs Yvonne Carey, the late Mrs Felicity Rhodes and many private donors. It is currently on view at the National Gallery, London, to 20th September.

2 Exhibited: Exhibition of the Works of the Old Masters, London (Royal Academy of Arts) 1875, no.176 (as Titian); Exhibition of the Works of the Old Masters, London (Royal Academy of Arts) 1892, no.115 (as Titian); Exhibition of Venetian Painting, London (New Gallery) 1894–95, no.160 (as Titian); The Burlington Fine Arts Club, Exhibition, London 1903, no.41 (as Titian); Loan Exhibition of Thirty-Nine Masterpieces of Venetian Painting In Honour of the Coronation, London (Thomas Agnew & Sons)

1953, no.37 (as Titian); and Italian Art and Britain, London (Royal Academy of Arts) 1960, no.79 (as Titian). See H. Knackfuss: Tizian, Bielefeld and Leipzig 1900, pp.89 and 106 (as Titian; painted in 1545); B. Berenson: Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, Venetian School, London 1932 (rev. ed. 1957), I, p.187 (as Titian); F. Valcanover: L’Opera Completa di Tiziano, Milan 1969, no.251 (as Titian with assistance; 1545); H. Wethey: The Paintings of Titian, III, The Mythological and Historical Paintings, London 1975, pp.220–21, no.X–35 (as Venetian School; c.1560); and P. Humfrey: Titian. The Complete Paintings, London 2007, p.27, no.159 (as Titian; c.1545–50).

3 New documents comprising two inventories by Constantini have been published

by R. Lauber: ‘Memoria, visione e attesa. Tempi e spazi del collezionismo artistico nel primo Rinascimento veneziano’, in M. Hochmann, R. Lauber and S. Mason, eds.: Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Dalle origini al Cinquecento, Venice 2008, pp.66–70; and Appendice documentaria, pp.371–75. They correct and amplify the document published by J. Anderson: ‘A further Inventory of Gabriel Vendramin’s Collection’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 121 (1979), pp.639–48 (hereafter cited as Anderson 1979).

4 A. Rava: ‘Il “Camerino delle Anticaglie” di Gabriele Vendramin’, Nuovo Archivio Veneto 117–18 (1920), pp.155–81 (hereafter cited as Rava 1920), esp. p.178; the inventory did not include dimensions.

5 On the chequered history of the collection, see Anderson 1979; idem: Giorgione,

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34. Triumph of Love, by Titian. c.1544–46. Canvas, diameter 88.3 cm., after cleaning and restoration.

(Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

Paris and London 1997, pp.160–75; R. Lauber: ‘Per un ritratto di Gabriele Vendramin. Nuovi contributi’, in L. Borean and S. Mason, eds.: Figure di collezionisti a Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento, Udine 2002, pp.25–71, with previous references; and N. Penny: The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, II, Venice 1540–1600, London 2008, pp.224–26, for further observations.

6 Lauber, op. cit. (note 3), p.374.

7 In 1615 the camerino was described by Vincenzo Scamozzi as ‘sotto sigillo’ (i.e. sealed); however, Titian’s The Vendramin family was hanging in the ground-floor entrance-hall, as specified in Constantini’s inventory of 26th January 1602, and therefore could be offered for sale in 1636.

8 See Lauber, op. cit. (note 5), pp.66–71.

9 L. Borean and S. Mason: ‘Cristoforo Orsetti e i suoi quadri di “perfetta mano”’, in idem, op. cit. (note 5), p.155.

10 Ibid., p.141; Cristoforo Orsetti, a Bergamasque merchant, assembled a type of aristocratic collection with portraits and history paintings by cinquecento Venetian artists, unlike other wealthy merchants in Venice who acquired pictures by contemporary artists.

11 On Sasso, see L. Borean, ed.: Lettere artistiche del Settecento veneziano, II, Il carteggio Giovanni Maria Sasso – Abraham Hume, Verona 2004.

12 This discovery will be discussed by Linda Borean in her essays ‘Il collezionismo

veneziano del Settecento’ and ‘Il caso Manfrin’, in L. Borean and S. Mason, eds.: Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Il Settecento, Venice 2009 (forthcoming, November).

The letter is undated but Sasso’s previous letter to Strange in the same correspondence is of March 1784.

13 G.B. Tassini: Cittadini Veneziani, Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Correr, MS.P.D.c.4/1, recorded the approval of Bernardi’s status as ‘cittadino originario’ in 1743. His collection was well known and links can be found between the Bernardi and Orsetti families who lived in the same parish of S. Aponal; later, Bartolomeo’s sons knew the Orsetti heirs. The ‘fratelli Bernardi quondam Bortolo’ are cited in relation to the Orsetti family in a legal document of 1779; Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Correr, MS.P.D.c707 (information from Rosella Lauber).

14 C. Ridolfi: Le maraviglie dell’arte, ed. D. von Hadeln, Berlin 1914, I, p.192; Speroni’s portrait is often incorrectly identified with a painting in Treviso, for which, see H. Wethey: The Paintings of Titian, II, The Portraits, London 1971, pp.140–41, no.98a, workshop of Titian; and the presumed cover, no.98b, Device of lion and Cupid (Alba Collection, Madrid) as Venetian school, c.1544. For clarification, see E. Saccomani: ‘“Dal naturale, come fe già Tiziano . . .” I ritratti di Sperone Speroni’, Sperone Speroni, Filologia Veneta 2 (1989), pp.257–67. Knackfuss, op. cit. (note 2), repeated Sasso’s mistaken identity.

15 Robert Fullerton Udney sale, Christie’s, London, 19th May 1804, lot 37. the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e

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entering in 1874 the collection of the politician and PreRaphaelite patron William Graham (1817–85) and passing to his descendants.16 The canvas was cut down and laid on a pine panel in the late seventeenth century, perhaps when it left the Orsetti collection.

The original shape of the canvas was rectangular, and the uncut edges at either side represent the original width. Infra-red examination revealed an underdrawing (Fig.35), a scribbled pensiero for the composition, which is typical of Titian’s style and working practice. As an abbreviated creative idea it is not the kind of underdrawing that a member of the workshop would produce, nor is it a blueprint for an assistant to follow. Instead Titian’s evolving ideas can be traced as he changed the position of the figure of Cupid, the size of his wings and many other details. The underdrawing is closely comparable with that for The Vendramin family (Fig.36), begun in the early 1540s.17 The painting is rapid and free, with many pentimenti. The freshness of the treatment of Cupid’s flesh remains remarkable owing to the fact that the painting has never been lined.

The composition was designed with an illusionistic round window or oculus through which the lion’s front paws and muzzle break into the viewers’ space. Such a fictive oculus was often used in ceiling decoration in Venice, but was rare in easel paintings.

Stylistically, the painting seems to belong to the mid-1540s.

The standing amorino with an elongated torso and twisting body in the Danaë of c.1544–46 (Fig.37) is closely comparable, his larger wings akin to those envisaged in the underdrawing of the roundel (Fig.35), while similar small orange-red wings can be found among the amorini in the earlier Worship of Venus (Museo del Prado, Madrid). The lion and Cupid stand before a screen of foliage which forms a rhythmic silhouette against the landscape, a device Titian used in the Clarice Strozzi (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) of c.1542. The design and lighting of the clouds and sky recall the Resurrection of late 1542–43 (Palazzo Ducale, Urbino).

The handling of the lion’s bulging eye and teeth is comparable to that of the monster in the later Perseus and Andromeda (Wallace Collection, London). Unlike his dogs, Titian’s lions were not studied from life; this one probably derives from one of the many images of the lion of St Mark in the city. The placing of the group against a fantasy lagoon landscape recalls the background of Carpaccio’s Lion of St Mark of 1516 in the Palazzo Ducale.

Subjects alluding to the power of Cupid and love abound in Titian’s work. Omnia Vincit Amor – the power of love over all passions and faculties – was a familiar theme in the sixteenth century. Amor is shown as a winged boy riding a tamed lion in classical art, especially on gems. The same image appears in a drawing of 1527 by Giulio Romano and a design by Gianfrancesco Enzola (fl.1455–78) of a Cupid riding a lion which reappears on some versions of a medal for Ercole II d’Este (1508–59).18 Titian’s interpretation is more inventive, with a balletic Cupid (who is about to shoot an arrow) commanding the wild beast. A possible source may be an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi where the turning Cupid figure is quite similar (Fig.38), but equally the dynamic pose with outflung arms is

16 O. Garnett: ‘The Letters and Collection of William Graham – Pre-Raphaelite Patron and Pre-Raphael Collector’, Walpole Society 62 (2000), p.334, cat. d.314. The British provenance is John Udney; Robert Fullerton Udney; Christie’s, London, 19th May 1804, lot 37 (bought in at 55 gns); his son, John Robert Udney; Christie’s, London, 15th May 1829, lot 80 (bought in at 285 gns); Major C. Currie; Christie’s, London, 13th February 1874, lot 115 (110 gns to Duncan, i.e. William Graham); William Graham M.P.; Christie’s, London, 10th April 1886, lot 484 (230 gns), to Agnew’s, London, buying for his daughter Agnes, Lady Jekyll; by descent to her grandson David McKenna.

17 Information from Jill Dunkerton, who also noted similarities with Titian’s Urbino Resurrection, which she has recently studied.

18 Courtauld Institute, London, Witt Collection Inv.1129, for a stucco roundel in the Camera delle Aquile, Palazzo Te; and P. Attwood: Italian Medals c.1530–1600 in British

Public Collections, London 2003, no.650a.

19 A. Doni: I marmi, Venice 1552, III, fol.40–41 (cited by Anderson 1979, p.640): ‘. . . e fra l’altro mi mostrò un leone con un Cupido sopra. E qui discorremo molto della bella invenzione, e lodassi ultimamente in questo, che l’amore doma ogni gran ferocità e terribilità di persone’.

20 Rava 1920, p.163; ‘Una testa de marmoro de una zovane che crida con un cupido che pesta sopra un lion de bronzo appresso alla testa’. On Gabriel’s antiquities, see I. Favaretto: Arte antica e cultura antiquaria nelle collezioni venete al tempo della Serenissima, Rome 1990, pp.80–81.

21 See G.F. Hill: A Corpus of Italian Medals of the Renaissance before Cellini, London 1930, p.10, no.32, for a medal by Pisanello for Lionello d’Este.

22 G. Toderi and F. Vannelli: Le Medaglie italiane del XVI secolo, Florence 2000, I, p.338, no.1000.

35. Digital infra-red reflectogram of Fig.34, after cleaning, before restoration.

36. Detail of an infra-red photograph of The Vendramin family, by Titian and workshop.

Early 1540s.

(National Gallery, London).

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37. Detail of the Cupid in Danaë, by Titian. c.1544–46. (Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte, Naples).

reminiscent of small north Italian bronzes such as an example from the Paduan workshop of Severo da Ravenna (Fig.39).

Gabriel Vendramin owned a number of Cupid figures, including a bronze group showing Cupid standing on a lion which was admired by Antonfrancesco Doni when he visited Gabriel’s collection in 1552.19 This bronze group appears in the 1567–69 inventory; unfortunately virtually none of Gabriel’s antiquities and sculpture can be identified today.20 The striking illusionism of the fictive oculus is an unusual and arguably new motif in Titian’s work, although he had used illusionistic stone parapets in portraits. His treatment of the oculus alludes to conventions used in relief sculpture. The impresa-like imagery of the group recalls motifs found on gems and on the reverses of medals. The subject of Love conquering the passions was often found in personal devices and medals.21 Ercole d’Este’s medal is mentioned above, while a commemorative medal of Sperone Speroni shows a boy embracing a lion.22 Since the name Leonardo (Lunardo) recurs in the Vendramin family – Gabriel’s father and nephew shared this name – there may have been some additional significance for the choice of subject.

The Triumph of Love is a rarity as a surviving, documented timpano. Painted covers for small panel paintings are relatively

23

The best study is still; A. Dülberg: Privatporträts, Berlin 1990.

Ibid., esp. pp.45–78; N. Penny: The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, I, Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona, London 2004, under Lotto, NG1047, appendix I, pp.99–101; and J. Cranstoun: The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance, Cambridge 2000, pp.18–28.

25 Gian Paolo da Ponte commissioned timpani and frames for two portraits by Titian; see Penny, op. cit. (note 24), p.100. A letter of 2nd May 1536 from Francesco Maria della Rovere concerns the portrait of a woman in blue that he wished to acquire together with its timpano; see D. von Hadeln: ‘Some little-known works by Titian’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 45 (1924), p.180, for this and an early discussion of timpani.

26 Dülberg, op. cit. (note 23), no.336; see also no.192 (Sperone Speroni), no.287 (La Bella), no.337 (Filippo Archinto), no.338 (Allegory of Prudence); and Penny, op. cit.

24

familiar, representing a development of a traditional type of double-sided image, such as portraits or devotional works that could be held in the hands.23 Our knowledge of canvas covers, which could be on quite a large scale, is still very limited.24 Like painted reverses, covers could provide a gloss on the picture beneath, whether playful or erudite. The term timpano seems to have been used almost exclusively in Venice and its territories in the sixteenth century to mean a tightly stretched canvas cover. In the inventory of 26th January 1602 Constantini explained the term (‘quali timpani sonno coperti’). Timpani would have been attached to the frames of paintings to protect them from damage and from scrutiny, although it is hard to envisage how they would have been handled. The dimensions of large covers would have made sliding mechanisms tricky to operate; they may have neatly slotted over the frames.

Titian certainly painted or provided canvas covers for his portraits, as we know from documents of 1534 and 1536.25 It has often been suggested that the Allegory of Prudence (National Gallery, London) and the Cupid and a wheel of Fortune (National Gallery of Art, Washington) could have functioned as timpani.26 The portrait of Filippo Archinto behind an illusionistic curtain (Philadelphia Museum of Art) alludes to ways of covering paintings and may itself have acted as a cover.27 The ‘Portrait of a lady dressed in black with her right hand to her chest’ in Gabriel Vendramin’s collection, measuring roughly 94 by 85 cm. in its frame, cannot be conclusively identified. It might have been a version of the lost portrait of Elisabetta Querini Massola (d.1559), who was famed for her beauty and praised

by Pietro Bembo, Giovanni Della Casa and by Aretino. Titian painted her around 1543, and she and her husband commissioned St Laurence in the Gesuiti. A painting of a woman in black (Musée des Augustins, Toulouse; on deposit from the Musée du Louvre, Paris)28 may be a version of that portrait and, while it does not fit the almost-square shape of the Vendramin portrait, a half-length version would correspond. Gabriel owned portraits of men and women who were not family members, and if he acquired a Titian portrait of an aristocratic beauty he might have ordered a painted cover from a sense of decorum or discretion.29 The collection of Gabriel Vendramin, a well-known connoisseur and authority on architecture, represented his intellectual and aesthetic interests. The arrangement of the collection is known from the detailed 1567–69 inventory. A group of artists, including Jacopo Sansovino and Jacopo Tintoretto, were involved in compiling the inventory. They often worked in pairs and were always accompanied by family members who provided additional information.30 Titian seems to have been a close friend of Gabriel’s, since he was one of the witnesses to a codicil to his will in 1552; Gabriel owned many of his works of the 1540s, while the artist provided a major decorative element for the camerino d’an-

(note 5), pp.238–41 and 242.

27 See the entry by T. Scarpa in N. Spinosa et al.: exh. cat. Tiziano e il ritratto di corte da Raffaello ai Caracci, Naples (Capodimonte) 2006, no.33.

28 See the entry by M. Szanto, in exh. cat. Splendeur de Venise 1500–1600. Peintures et dessins des collections publiques françaises, Bordeaux (Musée des Beaux-Arts) and Caen (Musée des Beaux-Arts) 2005, no.100; and Wethey, op. cit. (note 14), p.204, no.L26.

29 On ownership, see P. Simons: ‘Portraiture, Portrayal and Idealization: Ambiguous Individualism in Representations of Renaissance Women’, in A. Brown, ed.: Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, Oxford 1995, pp.285–90.

30 Rava 1920 omitted the goldsmith’s name in his discussion, and it is rarely cited.

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38. Venus at her bath, copy in reverse after Marcantonio Raimondi. c.1510–27.

Engraving, 16.4 by 13.3 cm.

(Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

39. Putto, Padua or Ravenna. c.1510–30. Bronze, 9.8 cm. high.

(Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

ticaglie. In the first section of the inventory, made on 26th August 1567, Vincenzo Mantovano and Tommaso da Lugano listed the large busts, vases and other objects displayed at a high level, noting ‘le qual tutte cose erano nel soazon de sopra con tempani atorno depinti de man de misier Titian come hanno ditto’.31 That is, the camerino had a frieze above the cornice with inset canvases; their attribution to Titian was reported by the family members. The term ‘timpano’ might have been employed because the frieze could have presented allegorical or mythological scenes that recalled the type of imagery used for painted covers. Only a summary description was needed, as the frieze was not easily portable.

Gabriel’s paintings collection was remarkable and its disposition was carefully planned: he noted in his will that he owned many pictures by excellent artists, which were in his ‘camerino and outside the said camerino’. From Constantini’s inventory of 26th January 1602 we know that The Vendramin family hung in the ground-floor entrance-hall at S. Fosca, and that some large paintings were displayed in the portego on the piano nobile.32 While there were small paintings in Gabriele’s camerino (including one attributed to Titian), they were kept on shelves or inside cabinets and chests, together with prints, drawings, small sculptures and other treasures.

Tintoretto and Orazio Vecellio participated only in the last section of the inventory: it was decided at a late stage, in August

1568, to involve them because of the specific need to record paintings.33 Their contribution carries the date of 14th March 1569 and lists paintings, drawings, prints and some sculpture in rooms other than the camerino d’anticaglie. Beyond the portego four rooms were surveyed. The camera da notar, Gabriel’s study and business room, held what is often regarded as the cream of his paintings collection, with works by Giorgione, Raphael, Palma, Vivarini, Bonifazio, Cariani and Dürer, including some portraits of artists such as a self-portrait of Raphael on paper. Most of these pictures were small in scale. Other rooms contained Flemish pictures and in a further camera was a group of paintings commissioned or purchased from Titian, displayed with a large Madonna in the Byzantine style.34 Here there was a sizeable Selfportrait in the form of a roundel, showing the artist wearing the gold chain presented to him by the Emperor Charles V.35 Titian was depicted in the act of drawing, with an antique Venus pudica, referring to Gabriel’s interests as a collector. There was a second roundel, an Ecce Homo,36 together with two framed female portraits. As previously discussed, the Triumph of Love was a cover for one of these. The second female portrait, described on 4th January 1602 as ‘un quadro de retratto de dona vestita de damasco turchin con cento depento d’oro con le sue soaze dorade alto quarte 7 et largo quarte 6 1/2 in circa’, has not been identified, although its description and dimensions evoke the Young woman

31

father-in-law, Nicolò Renieri; see D. de Grazia, E. Garberson et al.: Italian Paintings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Washington 1996, pp.328–33. J. Fletcher: ‘“Fatto al Specchio”. Venetian Renaissance Attitudes in Self-Portraiture’, in Imaging the Self in Renaissance Italy. Fenway Court 1990–91, Boston 1992, pp.45–60, suggested that Parmigianino’s self-portrait tondo, well known in Venice, might have been influential. See also idem: ‘“La semblanza vera”. I ritratti di Tiziano’, in Spinosa et al., op. cit. (note 27), p.46; and D. Jaffé under no.26 in the same volume (the Berlin Self-portrait) for the argument that the Giovanni Britto woodcut self-portrait derives from Vendramin’s tondo.

36 Rava 1920, p.178. For the Ecce Homo, see H. Wethey: The Paintings of Titian, I, Religious Paintings, London 1969, pp.84–85, under no.28, as a lost painting; the roundel in the Musée du Louvre (diameter 109 cm.) in his view may be a copy. For the latter as workshop of Titian, see J. Habert: ‘Calcar au Louvre’, in Hommage au

Rava 1920, p.161.

Lauber, op. cit. (note 3), p.373. This corrects previous accounts of the collection.

33 Rava 1920, p.181, published a document of 25th August 1568 that established their involvement. Unlike the other sections of the inventory where the names of notaries, artists and family members appear on each specified date, the last section does not include this record; see also Lauber, op. cit. (note 5), pp.60–61.

34 Rava 1920, p.178.

35 Ibid. and Anderson 1979, p.648, usually identified with a tondo (cypress), diameter 137 cm., ex-Kaufmann collection, Berlin; Wethey, op. cit. (note 14), p.179, no.X–92, as a copy. M. Marini: ‘Letters: The Vendramin Collection’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 122 (1980), p.255, proposed the tondo in a private collection in Rome as an autograph work. Pietro della Vecchia painted a rectangular version, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, probably when it was owned by his 32

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40. Fig.34, before cleaning.

41. Reconstruction of the original format of Fig.34.

(Capodimonte, Naples).37 Titian did not normally paint tondi, and the two might have been intended to face each other across the room.38 Gabriel was clearly keen to acquire pictures by Titian, and in the 1540s it was easier to have assistants work up the Self-portrait and the Ecce Homo to the master’s designs and to provide studio versions of attractive female portraits. Paradoxically, it seems that Titian’s least demanding Vendramin commission, a portrait cover, was a fully autograph work.

Although we have many references to the prestige of the Vendramin collection, little is known of how visitors were received there. Marcantonio Michiel visited it in 1530.39 In the camerino Gabriel seems to have kept pictures of appropriate subjects with his antiquities. He owned double-sided images and diptychs (such as the pair of portraits by Jacometto with decorated reverses)40 and pictures with covers attached (for instance ‘un altro quadretto con il retrato de Zuan Belin et de Vetor suo dixipulo nel coperchio’).41 Outside the camerino was a Crossing of the Red Sea, probably a Flemish painting, with a timpano attached.42 Giorgione’s La vecchia had a timpano that depicted a young man, dressed in black fur or leather, listed in 1602; six other detached timpani with chiaroscuro decoration, perhaps fictive sculpture, were also described then as part of the original collection.43

One wonders how closely Tintoretto and Orazio Vecellio examined the collection on their visit in 1569. The descriptions of the two female portraits by Titian are very summary, and the procedure may have been rather cursory: for instance, in describing The Vendramin family, Gabriel as a sitter is mentioned twice (an error edited out by Rava in his publication).44 The painted covers were probably not regarded as important objects by the family members who were more concerned with recent or potential sales of the antiquities, drawings and medals. Tintoretto and Orazio may not have seen the timpani: they did not list furniture, textiles or the contents of chests in the five rooms that concerned them, but simply identified the visible works of art.

Possibly the Triumph of Love was framed and displayed separately later in the century by Gabriel’s heirs. In the inventory of 4th January 1602, the ‘dio d’amor’ had a gilded wooden frame and was listed as an autonomous item, separated from the female portrait by another inventory entry.45 While the contents of the camerino might have remained undisturbed from 1567 to 1602, the paintings hanging in the adjoining rooms could have been rearranged, and this portrait cover by Titian might have been hung as an independent painting which ensured its survival, unlike most painted covers.

Michel Laclotte, Milan 1994, pp.368–69.

37 Anderson 1979, p.647, no.67.

38 Penny, op. cit. (note 5), p.226, suggested that the two tondi were overdoors; however, Constantini specified overdoors in his inventory of 26th January 1601.

39 Lauber, op. cit. (note 5), pp.46–55, with previous references.

40 Rava 1920, p.170, as Bellini, now in the Robert Lehman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

41 Ibid., p.169. Jennifer Fletcher suggested that these might be two chiaroscuro drawings by Vittore Belliniano now in Chantilly; see W.R. Rearick: ‘The drawings of Vittore Belliniano’, in A. Forlani Tempesti and S. Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, eds.: Per Luigi Grassi: Disegno e disegni, Rimini 1998, pp.51–52.

42 Rava 1920, p.179: ‘Un quadro de una sumercion de Faraon con un adornamento negro dorado col suo timpano soazado et dorado’. D. Landau and P. Parshall: The Renaissance

Print, New Haven and London 1994, p.290, identified this as Titian’s Crossing of the Red Sea woodcut, but it is more likely to have been a Flemish painting, since large or important works on paper are usually identified (e.g. Raphael’s self-portrait in the camera per notar is described as ‘in carta’; Rava 1920, p.178).

43 Constantini’s inventory of 26th January 1602 is unambiguous: ‘. . . un quadro in retratto della mare [sic: madre] de Zorzon de man de Zorzon con suo fornimento depento con l’arma Vendramina con il suo timpano cioè coperto depento con un ritratto d’un homo’; Lauber, op. cit. (note 3), pp.372 and 374 for the other timpani: ‘tre coperchi delli soprascritti quadri depenti de chiaro scuro con diverse figure’; ‘tre altri simili in tutto come di sopra’; and ‘16 coverchi de detti quadri non depenti’.

44 Lauber, op. cit. (note 5), p.30; and Penny, op. cit. (note 5), p.214.

45 While I am inclined to think that the ‘soazete de legno dorade’ was a frame, this may have been a narrow moulding that a timpano would have required. the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e

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Appendix The conservation of the ‘Triumph of Love’

by JILL DUNKERTON

The Triumph of Love was obscured by an opaque, decayed and very discoloured varnish (Fig.40). There was also extensive repainting, some of it partly removed in previous cleanings, resulting in a patchy appearance that suggested a badly abraded work. Infra-red reflectography,46 however, indicated that the painting might not be as damaged as it appeared. Although it was partly concealed by the overpainting, a remarkable underdrawing was revealed (Fig.35 was made following removal of the overpaint). In addition, it became apparent that at the edges the repainting was covering the opening of an oculus through which the lion was about to leap.

The canvas, of a robust twill weave, is now glued to a thin circular panel constructed from boards of pine, but it can be demonstrated that originally it was rectangular in format. At the left and right sides of the tondo old tack holes and frayed canvas edges indicate that the canvas was once stretched by nailing through the front of the fabric into a stretcher, as was common practice in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.47 There are no tack holes at the bottom of the circle and the canvas may have been trimmed slightly, but the pronounced cusped distortion of the canvas weave indicates that little has been lost, probably no more than the ragged tacking edge. Around the rest of the roundel, including the top, surplus canvas has been turned over the edge of the panel and tacked to its sides. Originally the timpano must have been stretched over a rectangular wooden stretcher, the lines of tacks perhaps covered by narrow strips of frame moulding. Moreover, following the cleaning it becomes apparent that the cutting down of the canvas to the present circle has disrupted Titian’s original intention. The portrait and its cover must have hung sufficiently high for the lion to appear to be crouching on the front edge of a circular opening in the fictive wall. The viewer looked up at the underside of the oculus, the fall of light on the right edge consistent with the lighting of the painting. Completion of the front edge of the circle in the upper part of the painting produces a rectangle of similar proportions and dimensions to those of the portrait as given in the 1602 inventory (Fig.41).

The painting was already recorded as circular by 1784 and was most probably cut down and mounted on its panel at some point in the seventeenth century, perhaps while still in the Orsetti collection. By then Titian’s canvas is likely to have become fragile, the tacks no longer securing the edges as they corroded the fabric. It was fairly common in the seventeenth century to glue small canvases to panels.48 Titian’s canvas is very well adhered, conforming to every distortion in the panel, including the pronounced wood grain. To achieve this, the canvas must have been soaked in glue, causing the gesso ground to swell and push

small flakes of paint from the tops of the canvas weave. Thinly painted areas such as the clouds and the edges of the oculus are worst affected. Areas with more substantial amounts of paint are better preserved, and especially the Cupid; since the canvas has escaped the repeated relining that might be expected in a painting of this age, the brushwork on this figure has retained almost all of its original texture and detail. In addition, the gesso ground has not been stained by lining adhesive and so continues to reflect light through the paint layers.

When the painting was cut down and mounted on panel the edges of the oculus were eliminated by repainting. While some of this repaint is likely to have been removed in later restorations, it survives at the left edge – its age makes its safe removal impossible. The inclusion of natural ultramarine in this overpaint,49 now degraded and darkened, is a further indication that this restoration took place in the seventeenth century. The next restoration was almost certainly carried out by Sasso in 1784. The edges were again repainted, this time using Prussian blue in the sky, and new clouds added over the damaged original ones. The streaks of orange paint towards the horizon and various smaller retouchings can also be attributed to this intervention. Much of this repainting seems to have been left in place when the canvas was again restored in the nineteenth century, most probably by one of the two restorers favoured by William Graham, Henry Merritt and Raffaelle Pinti. At the dispersal of his collection, Graham’s pictures were criticised for their repainted and glossy, over-varnished state.50 Certainly yet more repainting was added to the edges and sky of the Triumph of Love, and the varnish was notably thick.

Following the removal of most of these earlier restorations, retouching has been limited to the many small points of damage from the tops of the canvas threads and to re-establishing some sense of the original perspective of the remains of the oculus.

The visible evidence of Titian’s free and creative design process has not necessarily been suppressed. The flicks and strokes of lead white paint used as structural abbreviations or for adjustment of contours in the course of painting remain visible, adding vivacity to the image. Similarly, some of the multiple revisions to the underdrawing, for example the three positions of the arrow, can still be detected on close inspection. So too can the outlines of Cupid’s wing and his bubbling curls in their initial position, drawn with a liquid black paint over finer and more broken lines, possibly sketched with a dry material such as charcoal. In character and extent this underdrawing is directly comparable with that (also often visible to the naked eye) on The Vendramin family, the painting with which the Triumph of Love can now be closely associated.

46 The digital infra-red reflectograms before and after cleaning were taken by Rachel Billinge of the National Gallery Conservation Department using an OSIRIS digital infra-red scanning camera with an indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) array sensor.

47 J. Dunkerton, N. Penny and S. Foister: Dürer to Veronese. Sixteenth-century painting in the National Gallery, New Haven and London 1999, pp.266–68.

48 An example is the National Gallery’s Rape of Europa by Veronese, mounted on an oak panel from a tree felled probably in the 1620s; see Penny, op. cit. (note 5), p.430.

49 The analysis of the three layers of overpainting was carried out by Rachel Morrison of the National Gallery Scientific Department.

50 Garnett, op. cit. (note 16), p.184.

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A new contribution to the biography of Leonardo da Vinci

by P.G. GWYNNE

in the biography of Leonardo da Vinci.1 Among them there is little documentary evidence to record his exact whereabouts from late 1500 to mid-1502. This note proposes that during this period of turmoil and change, following the French invasion of northern Italy, Leonardo can be found working for Cesare Borgia earlier than is usually assumed.

On 6th October 1499 Louis XII of France entered Milan at the head of a conquering French army with Cesare Borgia in his train.

On the following day the king and Cesare visited the monastery of S. Maria delle Grazie to see Leonardo’s Last Supper and presumably to meet the master himself, who may have been involved in the preparations for the king’s triumphal entry into the city.2 It was perhaps then that Leonardo met his future employer Cesare Borgia for the first time. Leonardo left Milan in December 1499 bound for Venice. He is next documented on 24th April 1500 in Florence where it is generally assumed that he stayed for about a year concentrating on a single composition showing life-size figures of the Virgin and Child with St Anne.3 Whatever the case may be, certainly by the summer of 1502 Leonardo had entered the service of Cesare Borgia as an architect and military engineer.

Yet apart from two references in letters from Pietro da Novellara in Florence to Isabella d’Este, we have no documentation for his activities between late 1500 and summer 1502.4 However, an aside in a panegyric poem by Francesco Sperulo celebrating Cesare Borgia’s campaign in the Romagna may provide a clue as to Leonardo’s activities during these missing months.5 In late autumn 1500 Cesare Borgia began his second campaign against the dissident lords in the Papal States. Nominally to restore papal authority in central Italy, in reality the campaign was intended to establish a power base for Cesare in the Romagna.

Although initially both Rimini and Pesaro surrendered in quick succession, by November Cesare’s forces had received a serious setback before the walls of Faenza and the army then settled down for a long and difficult winter siege in the cold and mud.6 Sperulo provides a vivid first-hand account of the soldiers’ discomforts and the frustration of their commander. Leaving a skeleton force under Vitellozzo Vitelli to blockade the town, Cesare spent Christmas and the winter months at Cesena, which he intended to make the capital of his new state. In relating these events, the poet describes the harbour of Cesena at Porto Cesenatico and in the course of this description the following lines (ll.314–20) occur: THERE ARE SEVERAL LACUNAE

1 L. Andalò: ‘Prospetto cronologico delle pricipali vicende di Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolò Macchiavelli e Cesare Borgia’, in M. Ara, A. Gramiccia and F. Piantoni, eds.: exh. cat. Leonardo, Machiavelli, Cesare Borgia. Arte, storia e scienza in Romagna (1500–1503), Rimini (Castel Sismondo) 2003, pp.177–85; also L. Reti: ‘Leonardo da Vinci and Cesare Borgia’, Viator 4 (1973), pp.333–68.

2 Robert Scheller seriously doubts Leonardo’s involvement in the preparations for the king’s entry into the city; see R.W. Scheller: ‘Gallia cisalpina: Louis XII and Italy 1499–1508’, Simiolus 15 (1985), p.8, note 16.

3 J. Roberts: ‘The Life of Leonardo’, in M. Kemp and J. Roberts, eds.: exh. cat.

Leonardo da Vinci, London (Hayward Gallery) 1989, p.28.

4 D. Ferrari: ‘“La vita di Leonardo è varia et indeterminata forte”. Leonardo da Vinci e i Gonzaga nei documenti dell’Archivio di Stato di Mantova’, in Ara

At vigil assiduum dux volvens pectore martem, dum vulgus mentem in iucunda remittere credit ocia, praeteritos et compensare labore; tum secreta parat certamina, castra in apertum postquam difficilis prohibet deducere bruma.

Semotaque faber scalas componit in arce, quas iuga vix centum curru traxere gemente. (‘But the Duke spent many sleepless nights reflecting upon the war; while the rabble believes that he is relaxing and making up for the previous hardships with pleasant ease, he is, in fact, preparing secret assaults, since the difficult winter restrains him from leading the army out. In a remote tower an engineer is making scaling ladders which a hundred team of oxen can scarcely drag along on a creaking chariot’.) Can the unnamed ‘faber’ (engineer) working in isolation on mammoth siege engines, virtually impossible to move, be identified as Leonardo? Numerous drawings attest to his interest in war machines. Studies, such as those of traction, with oxen straining to pull great weights (Codex Atlanticus, fol.561r) and designs for gigantic military equipment (for example Windsor, Royal Library, 12647) reveal a similar interest in the sort of technology ascribed by the poet to the anonymous engineer.

In the letter recommending his services to Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo had emphasised his skill as a military engineer, mentioning in particular his ability to create siege machinery including scaling ladders: ‘I know how, in the course of the siege of a terrain, to remove water from the moats and how to make an infinite number of bridges, mantlets and scaling ladders and other instruments necessary to such an enterprise’.7 These skills, presumably, also attracted him to Cesare Borgia.

Although the evidence is circumstantial, if the suggestion is correct, then, having met and been impressed by Cesare in Milan, Leonardo took the opportunity of Cesare’s winter campaign to prove his worth with the new lord of the Romagna and in late 1501 was working for Cesare at Porto Cesenatico providing ideas for war machines to break the siege of Faenza, as well as supervising the fortifications of the town and harbour.8 If this is so, the poet Francesco Sperulo provides a first-hand (albeit brief) account of Leonardo’s working practice and offers a contemporary opinion of his contribution to the war effort. et al., op. cit. (note 1), pp.73–79.

5 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat.5205; see P.G. Gwynne: ‘Another Laureate of Cesare Borgia: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat.5205, text, translation and commentary’ (forthcoming).

6 Due to the extreme conditions of a harsh winter and the fact that the Faenzans had razed the countryside before retreating behind the city walls, Cesare suspended the campaign and marched back to Forlì. Reinforced by French supplies and troops, he began a second assault on Faenza in the following spring.

7 M. Kemp, ed.: Leonardo On Painting, New Haven and London 1989, p.251.

8 E.F. Londei: ‘I progetti leonardiani di macchine scavatrici per il canale di Cesena per Cesare Borgia’, in Ara et al., op. cit. (note 1), pp.55–71.

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Art History Reviewed III: Roger Fry’s ‘Cézanne, a study of his development’, 1927

by RICHARD VERDI

‘THE TIME MAY COME when we shall require a complete study of Cézanne’s work, a measured judgment of his achievement and position’, wrote Roger Fry in this Magazine in 1917, reviewing Ambroise Vollard’s recently published biography of the artist, adding that ‘it would probably be rash to attempt it as yet’.1 Less than ten years later, Fry himself had done just that and produced a landmark book which is arguably still the most sensitive and penetrating of all explorations of Cézanne’s pictures. Written at a time when Cézanne was still not widely accepted in Britain as a modern master, and when the only published studies of him had been largely biographical and anecdotal, Fry’s study breaks new ground, peering over the artist’s shoulder to recreate his works, as though witnessing their very inception. ‘If one would understand an artist, one must sooner or later come to grips with the actual material of his paintings’, asserted the critic, ‘since it is there, and nowhere else, that he leaves the precise imprint of his spirit’.2 In so far as any writer could fathom the richness and complexity of Cézanne’s achievement, Fry succeeded; and his book on the artist remains the supreme introduction to a painter he justly regarded as the ‘greatest master of modern times’.3 Given its subsequent renown, Fry’s Cézanne could hardly have had a more inauspicious beginning. Originally written in French, it was first published in 1926 in L’Amour de l’Art and intended as an introduction to the works by Cézanne in the Pellerin Collection in Paris, the most comprehensive of all holdings of the artist’s works. Although it reads effortlessly and contains some of the most memorable passages on the painter ever written, it cost the author much labour. Virginia Woolf records Fry’s exasperation with its progress in her biography of him: ‘O Lord, how bored I am with it [. . .] it seems to me poor formless stuff and I should like to begin it all over again’.4 Further hampered by the difficulty of obtaining photographs of some of the works in Pellerin’s collection, Fry earned nothing from the French edition but a few presentation copies and in 1927 translated and recast it for publication in English by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. It was illustrated by fifty-four plates which are discussed largely in numerical order but not laid out accordingly, the reader having constantly to shuffle through them to follow the argument. But this is a small price to pay for the quality of the insights and the range of works encompassed, which amount to a comprehensive survey of the artist’s paintings and works on paper.

Little in Fry’s early background had anticipated his later championing of Cézanne, though it undoubtedly enriched and extended his perspective on the artist. Educated at Clifton College, Bristol, and King’s College, Cambridge, where he read

natural sciences, he subsequently trained as a painter – which he was always to regard as his principal profession – spending two months at the Académie Julian, Paris, in 1892, where (he later confessed) he ‘never once heard the name of the recluse of Aix’.5 A year earlier, he had visited Italy, where his lifelong passion for early Italian painting took root, eventually leading to his first major publication, a monograph on Bellini of 1899. With his appointment in 1906 as Curator of Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fry was inevitably encouraged to embrace a much wider field, purchasing works by Jan Steen, Goya and Renoir in addition to Crivelli and Giovanni di Paolo.

From this year, too, dates the first evidence of his burgeoning interest in Cézanne, which followed his encounter with two of the artist’s works at the International Society’s exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, London. ‘We confess’, admitted Fry, ‘to having been hitherto sceptical about Cézanne’s genius but these two pieces reveal a power which is entirely distinct and personal, and though the artist’s appeal is limited, and touches none of the finer issues of the imaginative life, it is none the less complete’.6 Two years later, writing in response to a denigrating article on modern French art in this Magazine – which Fry himself had been instrumental in founding in 1903 – he wrote a long and reasoned rejoinder (March 1908, pp.374–75). Praising the decorative qualities of the art of Cézanne and Gauguin especially, he dubbed both men ‘proto-Byzantines’ for their synthetic approach to design, which Fry deemed superior to the mere naturalism of Monet.7 Although still conceding that neither painted ‘great masterpieces’ or was a ‘great genius’, Fry had taken a major step forward in his conversion to recent French art and soon became the first British critic to champion Cézanne, publishing a translation in 1910, also in the Burlington, of one of the key early assessments of his art by the latter-day disciple of the master, Maurice Denis.8 Denis’s essay is the first to examine Cézanne’s art in relation to that of his own time and of the past. Recognising that, like many of his contemporaries, Cézanne was dedicated to the study of nature, he is seen as exceptional among his generation in his efforts towards style; and, for Denis, style means the classicism of the old masters. ‘Spontaneously classic’ is his description of the artist, whom he calls ‘the Poussin of Impressionism’, to which Fry, in his introduction to the article, widens the range of connections to encompass such seemingly unrelated masters as Rembrandt and even El Greco.

Fry’s advocacy of modern French painting reached a much wider public in the same year as his translation of Denis’s essay with the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, which he

We are grateful to the Azam Foundation for sponsoring this article.

1 “‘Paul Cézanne”, by Ambroise Vollard: Paris, 1915, A Review by Roger Fry’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 31 (1917), p.53.

2 R. Fry: Cézanne, a study of his development, 2nd ed., London 1927, p.51 (cited hereafter as RFC).

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RFC, p.28.

V. Woolf: Roger Fry, A Biography, Oxford 1995 (1st ed. 1940), pp.235–36.

5 RFC, p.38.

6 D. MacCarthy: ‘Roger Fry and the Post-Impression Exhibition of 1910’, in Memories, London 1953, p.181.

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staged at the Grafton Galleries in London and which made him (in his own words) ‘the centre of a wild hurricane of newspaper abuse’.9 Included in it were twenty-one paintings by Cézanne in addition to works by Van Gogh, Gauguin and their followers.

Assaulted by the critics, who were deeply affronted by this attack upon civilised Edwardian taste, Fry staunchly defended his position, comparing the monumentality of Cézanne’s portraits with those of Piero della Francesca or Mantegna and, of his still lifes, with those of Chardin.

In 1912 Fry mounted a successor to this exhibition, which included more works by living French artists – among them Picasso, Matisse and Braque – in addition to their British and Russian contemporaries. There were also five paintings and six watercolours by Cézanne (the latter augmented in a late rehang of the show), who by this time had ceased to shock the critics, leaving Fry himself to establish the master’s unassailable position as the key figure in modern French painting.

In October 1919 Fry visited Aix, where the magnificent countryside, dominated by the Mont Ste-Victoire, not only inspired him to paint it but soon led him to declare Cézanne ‘a pure naturalist’, so wondrous did the hues of the surrounding landscape seem. Of Cézanne himself, nothing appeared to be known save that he ‘came and went and left no trace on the little bourgeois life of the place’.10 But on a visit to the Jas de Bouffan, he did discover two early works by the master, though the gardener himself had never heard of Cézanne, who was apparently only remembered by a few local artists and connoisseurs.

One year later, Fry’s collection of essays Vision and Design was published, including his review of Vollard’s biography of Cézanne and a ‘Retrospect’, in which he avows his veneration for the artist as a painter who wedded ‘the modern vision with the constructive design of the older masters’,11 an idea he was to develop much further in his forthcoming book.

By early 1925 Fry was visiting the Pellerin Collection and embarked on his essay on Cézanne. As the title indicates, it was intended as an account of the artist’s stylistic development – the first ever to appear. He begins by observing that, by the 1920s, Cézanne’s style had become an academic convention, parodied in the art of a Vlaminck or a Friesz, who had adopted it purely decoratively and with an assurance unknown to the master; for as Fry was later to assert, Cézanne’s art was the antithesis of the abstraction of Cubism, constantly questing instead to explore the inner face of nature.12 In this respect, Cézanne is for Fry ‘nearer [. . .] to Poussin than to the Salon d’Automne’. One of the central tenets of the book, this is both visually and historically justifiable and accounts for Cézanne’s seemingly contradictory position as an artist caught between the study of nature and the act of contemplation.

Fry continues with a discussion of Cézanne’s early life and art, which acknowledges his initial attraction to the most diverse influences – from the meticulous technique of Kalf and Ingres to the brusque manner of Courbet, and from the Arcadian visions of Giorgione to their modern reincarnations in the art of Manet.

But his prevailing view is that the young Cézanne was a visionary who was ultimately inspired by the art of Delacroix and by his models, above all Veronese and Rubens, rather than by the art of

his own day. His ensuing account of the figure paintings of Cézanne’s early years is the first to tackle these; Fry acknowledges their awkwardness and intractability, conceding that the artist had not been gifted with the powers of invention or visualisation of Rubens or the great Venetian decorators. Focusing on the Banquet, with its maladroit figures and compositional incongruities, he concludes that this is an inept exercise in the manner of Tintoretto or Veronese which is, however, entirely redeemed by the artist’s mastery of colour – and colour not as it clothes an already preconceived form but as it actually creates it.

As Fry rightly asserts, Cézanne’s colour sense is ‘the one gift which never failed him’ and ‘remains supremely great under all conditions’.13 This is among the critic’s chief contributions to our understanding of the artist and beggars words, but never praise. Whether extolling the ‘unspeakable richness’ of Cézanne’s colour, or recognising how its subtle variations correspond to changes in plane, Fry acknowledges the artist’s powers as a colourist as among the supreme aspects of his genius – a judgment with which few would disagree.

Aside from the quality of the artist’s colour, however, Fry is aware of the compositional and imaginative shortcomings of these early works, which aspire to the Baroque tradition of grandiose figure paintings but are utterly deficient in the pretensions and artificialities of that style and reveal instead ‘the simplicity and directness of the peasant and the artisan’ in their lack of flamboyance or inventiveness. Although Cézanne was soon to abandon such imaginative flights of fancy in favour of an art founded upon the study of nature, Fry’s advocacy of these powerful works is pioneering and revelatory.

Fry’s discussion of the portraits of this period is no less full of insights and already reveals the complex – and even contradictory – nature of Cézanne’s creative personality. Here, faced with a live model and absorbed in his sensations, the artist turned not to the extravagance of the Baroque but to the simplicity of Byzantine art. Symmetry, frontality and a wilful austerity characterise these works, which are always enlivened by Cézanne’s infallible sense of colour but otherwise emotionally intransigent.

In his analysis of these, Fry concedes that the artist remains more plastic than psychological and points to one of the greatest strengths of his portraiture: namely, that it is concerned constantly not to explore and lay bare any peculiar quirks of character or personality but to distance itself from the individual and focus instead upon the human condition.

Considering a third group of Cézanne’s early pictures – his bacchanalian subjects featuring figures in a landscape – Fry broaches the other great source of his youthful inspiration, which was grounded neither in fantasy nor direct experience but in a preoccupation with what he calls the ‘Museum picture’. Here the artist’s principal models are deemed to be Titian and his fellow Venetians, as well as Rubens, and their most recent followers, above all Manet. But Fry also astutely acknowledges the importance of Dutch art for the painter’s early genre pictures, such as Alexis reading to Zola, with its indebtedness to de Hooch.

These multiple allegiances and affinities lead him to another of the central themes of his book, that Cézanne’s art encompasses the most diverse styles in earlier painting and that it brings much

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8

12

D. Sutton, ed.: Letters of Roger Fry, London 1972, I, pp.298–301, no.242.

M. Denis: ‘Cézanne’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 16 (1910), pp.207–19; and ibid., pp.275–80.

9 Sutton, op. cit. (note 7), I, p.338, no.296.

10 Ibid., pp.473–74, no.469.

R. Fry: Vision and Design, London 1920, p.191.

R. Fry: ‘An Exhibition of French Painting’, THE (1934), p.35.

13 RFC, p.13.

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of Western art with it – from the Primitives to Poussin, Tintoretto to Rubens and Delacroix to Daumier. Who else but the artistically omnivorous Fry could, after all, link Cimabue, El Greco and Cézanne, as he does at one point in his career?14 Through all of this, however, the critic asserts the authenticity and humility of the artist’s vision together with ‘the desperate sincerity of his work’. In so doing, he underlines the very focus of Cézanne’s creative dilemma, caught between being utterly himself and subsuming so much of the past.

Around 1870, the artist had begun to abandon the extravagant inventions of his early figure paintings and (in Fry’s words) ‘take advantage of his real gift, the extraordinary sensibility of his reaction to actual vision’.15 In contact with Camille Pissarro and his fellow Impressionists, Cézanne gradually came to submit himself to the vagaries of pure sensation but, unlike them, he was already armed with a rigour and discipline gained from his early ‘apprenticeship’ to the old masters. ‘The revelation of Impressionism was decisive and complete’, observes Fry, ‘but it was not sufficient’. Architecture and logic were also essential, for, as he rightly admits, ‘the intellect is bound to seek for articulations’. Armed with an allegiance to these seemingly opposing goals, ‘from this moment’ – Fry exclaims, with remarkable candour and empathy – ‘begins the thrilling drama of this determined explorer’.

At the heart of Fry’s book is his own masterly exploration of Cézanne’s journey through this uncharted terrain. This begins with an analysis of those works in which nature and structure are held in equal measure – the still lifes. ‘Dramas deprived of all dramatic incident’, which are at times ‘tragic, menacing, noble or lyrical’, these are implicitly recognised as the central achievement of the artist’s career and the fullest manifestation of his genius.

Fry begins with a lengthy investigation – the most extended in the entire book – of one of the most concentrated and resolved of the artist’s still lifes of his early maturity, the Still life with compotier of c.1880.16 Never questioning how the objects depicted arrived there, or in that particular arrangement, he reveals one of the major omissions in his consideration of the artist. After all, Cézanne exercised choice over the composition of his pictures, a crucial stage in the creative process. But it is not one that Fry addresses. Even now, a reasoned account of Cézanne’s selection of motifs in relation to his artistic aims has not been attempted; yet it is undeniable that, for the master himself, this was the first and most important decision. What to paint inevitably preceded how to paint.

For Fry, the ‘idea’ of the picture is tacitly accepted and the ‘material quality’ welded to it. In the latter, the critic insists, the idea comes alive; and it is this, ultimately, that conveys the artist’s inner feeling. Only through it can the viewer confront the physical reality of the painting. And here Cézanne equals the very greatest masters, excelling even Chardin in his accentuation of all parts of the paint surface, so that none of it appears lifeless or inert, and comparable instead, in his expressive use of his materials, to Rembrandt.

Having acknowledged that Cézanne’s seemingly crude handling is justifiable and now ‘so universally accepted’, the critic then moves on to consider the organisation of the composition itself. Here, he notes, the artist exhibits ‘a constant tendency towards the most simple and logical relations’; and in one of his most memorable passages, he declares: ‘One has the impression that each of these objects is infallibly in its place, and that its place

was ordained for it from the beginning of all things, so majestically and serenely does it repose there’. Noting how few and formally related the objects are in Still life with compotier, Fry then observes Cézanne teasing out even closer harmonies among them through a sequence of unconscious deformations in which circles become ovals and ovals acquire rounded ends, entering into a hidden compact with the rest of the picture. In this web of interrelations Fry concedes, somewhat embarrassedly, that he cannot explain the prominent shadow cast by the half-opened drawer at the bottom centre of so otherwise perfect a design. Without this stabilising compositional plumb line, however, the entire arrangement would slip inexorably towards the lower right.

Concluding what Fry deems ‘this tiresome analysis of a single picture’ – in truth, the fundamental key to Cézanne – he considers more summarily a number of the master’s other still lifes before apologising for devoting so much time to them. Yet, as the critic admits, they embody the formal principles that govern the painter’s designs which, as Cézanne indicated, constantly strive after the geometric regularity of the sphere, the cone and the cylinder.

To quote such phrases is one thing; to demonstrate them is another. And it is the greatest strength of Fry’s study that it dissects Cézanne’s pictures, relentlessly encouraging the reader to scrutinise them, and examine their interrelations of form and colour, in a way that was later adopted by such formalist critics as Earle Loran and Meyer Schapiro, but was pioneered by Fry. In pursuing this approach, he admittedly neglects almost entirely to investigate the artist’s subjects. Thus, Cézanne’s late preoccupation with skulls – which may well have vanitas connotations – is explained purely by the fact that the shape of a skull resembles that of a sphere and accords with the geometric concerns of his art. (How different from later interpretations of the opposite extreme which link Cézanne’s fondness for painting apples with the theme of original sin!) But such a bias ignores the emotional power and terror of these works and does no justice to the profound humanity of Cézanne’s art, a feature which Fry addresses especially when discussing the self-portraits.

Ever conscious of the contending currents of Cézanne’s creative aims, Fry deals fairly and astutely with these throughout, noting the artist’s inclination towards balanced, often rigidly symmetrical compositions marked by a central line or gap and often dominated by a strictly parallel disposition of objects. But this desire for an inherent stability is then enlivened by infinite gradations of colour, which render the skeletal structural simplicity of the picture indescribably rich and pulsating with life. ‘A perfect synthesis of opposing principles’ is how Fry describes this quest to wed ‘the data of Impressionism with – what he regarded as an essential to style – a perfect structural organization’.17 How the artist succeeded in clothing the objects before him with all the richness and complexity of nature without resort to mere description is among the wonders of his art. And this forms the focus of one of the most illuminating passages in Fry’s book.

Writing of the so-called Houses in Provence (R438) of c.1880, he observes:

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15 16

Sutton, op. cit. (note 7), II, p.408, no.397.

RFC, pp.31–40 (for the discussion which follows).

Ibid., pp.42–51.

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We may describe the process by which such a picture is arrived at in some such way as this: – the actual objects presented to the artist’s vision are first deprived of all those 18

Ibid., p.57.

Ibid., pp.58–59. Here and elsewhere ‘R’ refers to J. Rewald: The Paintings of Paul

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specific characters by which we ordinarily apprehend their concrete existence – they are reduced to pure elements of space and volume. In this abstract world these elements are perfectly co-ordinated and organized by the artist’s sensual intelligence, they attain logical consistency. These abstractions are then brought back into the concrete world of real things, not by giving them back their specific peculiarities, but by expressing them in an incessantly varying and shifting texture. They retain their abstract intelligibility, their amenity to the human mind, and regain that reality of actual things which is absent from all abstractions.18 As far as anyone could recreate the process by which Cézanne transformed ordinary things into pure pictorial elements and then back into the multifarious world of nature, Fry has done so here.

Discussing the artist’s mature works, the critic devotes relatively little time to the bathers paintings and somewhat unconvincingly finds a lyrical intensity comparable to Giorgione’s pastorals in so austere and intimidating a work as the great Barnes Foundation Bathers. But he is much more convincing in his account of a previously neglected aspect of the artist’s achievement – his mastery of watercolour and its effect on his oil-painting technique of the later years.19 Rightly observing that the transparency of this medium led Cézanne to regard the paper itself as an ever-visible support, Fry notes that the artist treated the paint surface as an unbroken sequence of coloured touches. These possess a freedom, fluency and lightness of handling that Cézanne had not attained in his early paintings but was increasingly to emulate in his later works in oil. Here the pulsating rhythms which came naturally to his watercolours are also apparent, resulting in a weft of animated strokes of colour which accord equal emphasis to all areas of the canvas – a blank wall being as rich and diverse in hue as a commanding figure. In this unparalleled technique the entire picture surface is imbued, Fry asserts, with ‘the vibration and movement of life’.

Fry demonstrates this superbly in extended accounts of two of the artist’s late portraits, one of Mme Cézanne (R655) and the other of Gustave Geffroy.20 In the intricate and ambitious portrait of Geffroy, the critic marvels at the silent drama created between the pose of the sitter and the arrangement of the books on the shelves behind him. Together these conspire to hold all in a state of dynamic equilibrium that Fry concludes was arrived at solely by the artist’s sensibility and intuition rather than by any a priori scheme. In this he confesses that Cézanne differs from the moderns, who contrive such complex constructions rather than discover them. This concordance of intellect and sensibility is, for Fry, ‘something of a miracle’ which occurs only rarely in the history of art. No one could deny this; but it is characteristic of Fry’s approach to pay no heed to Cézanne’s crucial historical position as an artist who straddled both the naturalism of his own age and the more conceptual art that was to succeed it.

After Fry’s probing investigation of Cézanne’s mature works, it is something of a disappointment to confront his account of the artist’s last years. This is relatively cursory and bypasses a number of important works that were to be seen in the Pellerin Collection. However, he does examine two versions of the Cardplayers and the three large late Bathers. In his consideration of the Cézanne, A Catalogue Raisonné, London 1996.

19 RFC, pp.63–66.

former, their gravity and monumentality leads Fry to invoke two of his favourite comparisons – the Italian Primitives and Rembrandt. Both are justified, if surprising, seldom recurring in later discussions of Cézanne’s art. But it is wholly in keeping with Fry’s widespread familiarity with the whole of Western art that the early Italians – his own once-chosen field – should be repeatedly cited in comparison with the fixity and finality of Cézanne’s art, and that Rembrandt is the one old master most often cited as possessing a profundity and richness of interest comparable to his.

Ignoring the fact that Cézanne’s copies after the old masters tell a very different story – with those after Rubens, the Venetians and works of sculpture of all periods predominating – Fry cites Rembrandt no less than seven times in his book as the one artist who comes immediately to mind when contemplating Cézanne’s complexity and intensity.

In his treatment of the late Bathers, Fry is less sympathetic and rightly detects a wilfulness and conscious contrivance, together with a fear of the live model, that deprives these works of the spontaneity of his paintings based on nature. His reservations about these reveal him as a child of his time for they still persisted in the 1960s, when the acquisition by the National Gallery, London, of its late Bathers gave rise to a public outcry in the press.

Much more ahead of his time is the theme with which Fry concludes his study: namely, that of Cézanne’s attitude towards women. But rather than adopting a proto-feminist approach, he admits the artist’s inhibitions – even terror – and yet attraction to such subjects and confines his discussion of a handful of Cézanne’s depictions of the female nude solely to formal matters.

With this, Fry’s study tails off and, as before, testifies to his fundamental indifference to the artist’s choice of subject-matter – one which has been redressed by many more recent critics, although not always convincingly. Inevitably reflecting its pioneering status, Fry’s study also fails to embrace in detail matters of chronology, pictorial sources or the relationship between paintings and works on paper. When he does broach these, however, he is invariably astute, suggesting that an early Cézanne landscape (R184) resembles a Pissarro without realising that it is actually a copy of one, and comparing the early Lazarus with Tintoretto or El Greco, unaware that it derived from a painting by their near-contemporary, Sebastiano del Piombo.

Such fine points all lay in the future when Fry wrote, awaiting later scholars, cataloguers and compilers. But what did not await them was the challenge of providing an illuminating introduction to the range, depth and magnitude of Cézanne’s achievement. That Fry had already done in his now classic study, which explores and elucidates the master’s art with a clarity and penetration that have continued to set a standard for all later studies of the artist – and with a humility worthy of Cézanne himself, who remains unfathomable to Fry from the start to the finish of his book and who he was later to proclaim with reverence and awe as ‘the purest artist that has ever been’.21 ‘To describe Cézanne’s works’, he confesses at the beginning, ‘I find myself, like a medieval mystic before the divine reality, reduced to negative terms. I have first to say what it is not’. And in his concluding sentence, he admits of his hero, ‘in the last resort we cannot in the least explain why the smallest product of his hand arouses the impression of being a revelation of the highest importance, or what exactly it is that gives it its grave authority’.

20 21

Ibid., pp.68–71.

Fry, op. cit. (note 12), p.30.

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Books National Gallery Catalogues. The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings.

Vol.II 1540–1600. By Nicholas Penny.

518 pp. incl. 278 col. + 81 b. & w. ills.

(National Gallery, London, 2008), £75.

ISBN 978–1–85709–913–3.

Reviewed by JENNIFER FLETCHER

by Nicholas Penny presents a rather mixed group of paintings for, besides the expected works by Venetian artists, there are entries on paintings

by Flemish artists such as Paolo Fiammingo and Lambert Sustris, both of whom operated in the Veneto, while other visitors such as Elsheimer and Rottenhammer are reserved for a future German catalogue. Readers may be somewhat disconcerted to find that the date span of the catalogue inevitably means that Titian’s earlier paintings will appear in a future volume. Jacopo Bassano’s The way to Calvary makes its debut with a wellresearched entry, while the fragmentary A boy with a bird, long regarded as a seventeenthcentury imitation of Titian and recently hailed by some as autograph, is excluded.

Masterpieces are placed in the broad context of European art history, which works particularly well for Titian’s Venus and Adonis and Veronese’s The family of Darius before Alexander. Penny draws attention to striking similarities in the paintings of tree trunks and foliage in Constable’s Leaping horse and Titian’s Diana and Actaeon. He illustrates Duncan Grant’s version of the latter, which was made into a slide and projected onto the curtain at the Royal Opera House, Convent Garden, during the campaign to save the Titian from export in 1971. To gauge the popularity of paintings at given times he consults the lists of amateurs who applied for permission to make copies. Deeply aware of the National Gallery’s importance for artists past and present and of its educational role, Penny does full justice to the specific aesthetic qualities and functions of works while being equally committed to recounting their history and to explaining the politics and diplomacy that lie behind so many acquisitions.

The painters’ biographies, which are fuller than those in Cecil Gould’s earlier catalogue, are well balanced and nearly always up to date. I particularly admired the assessment of the achievements and limitations of Paris Bordone and Palma il Giovane. Veronese’s adaptation of the Caliari surname is explained

by Brugnoli’s discovery of documentation proving that his mother was the illegitimate daughter of a Veronese nobleman. However, more is now known about Leandro Bassano’s dissipated lifestyle and patrons.1 The lives of patrons and collectors are exceptionally well researched, Penny here being assisted by the computerised resources

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of the Getty Provenance Index and recent archival research into the inventories conducted at the University of Udine. Salient points are illustrated by family trees, photographs and earlier views of collections in situ and pages from early illustrated catalogues.

While I admire the quality of the research, perhaps the biographies need not have been so full, particularly as they are not always sharply focused on the works owned by the Gallery.

Nevertheless, the catalogue deals with paintings that have belonged to some truly great collectors such as Gabriel Vendramin and the Reynst brothers, while the Orléans family sale was a rich source for the National Gallery’s Venetian masterpieces. It is also notable how many artists once owned paintings in the collection: Van Dyck bought Titian’s The Vendramin family, and Reynolds had Bassano’s Good Samaritan, to name but two.2 Technical and conservation evidence and descriptions of condition are clearly conveyed, assisted by photographs of joined-up X-radiographs, magnified details and diagrams showing the make-up of canvases. We learn about the damage sustained during transport for safe keeping to Bangor during the Second World War as well as that caused by bombing in London. Findings published in successive technical Bulletins are reassessed and updated.

In 1984 Joyce Plesters demonstrated that Tintoretto’s Jupiter and Semele was painted on wood from the same tree as the Courtauld Institute’s Latona changing the Lycian peasants into frogs and Apollo and Diana killing the children of Niobe. Alfonso d’Este’s name is now visible on the coin shown to Christ in Titian’s Tribute money, which once decorated a cupboard containing coins in the Duke’s castle in Ferrara. The discovery of a differently positioned corpse under Tintoretto’s St George and the dragon must have come too late to be fully written up. There are shrewd comments on earlier restoration and cleaning practices, including Eastlake on the Genoese tendency to enlarge paintings, as was done to Bordone’s Portrait of a young woman.

Thirty-five illustrations are devoted to frames, although none is original and few are Renaissance examples. Admittedly this reveals much about changing taste in interior decoration. It is amusing to learn that oak mouldings from the Gallery’s central heating cases were recycled to provide the frame for Bassano’s Purification in the temple and to see the witty use of the money pattern motif on Titian’s Tribute money. While aware of Penny’s unrivalled expertise in this area, I feel he goes too far, even giving highly detailed accounts of their repair and restoration.

Penny has a ‘good eye’ and a well-exercised visual memory which results in convincingly argued dating and attributions. Gould was heavily dependent on Stella Newton’s dating of works on the evidence of dress and hairstyles, but Penny sensibly rejects some of her more sweeping statements arguing, for example, that there was no reason why Paris Bordone should equip his mythological or allegorical lovers with the latest hairdos. The Labours of the Months, formerly given to the

school of Bonifazio di Pitati, are now demoted and dated c.1580, given their resemblance to works by Toeput.3 The author is good at spotting sculptural sources, such as the bronze statuette of Cupid by Barthélemy Prieur which Mazza used for his Ganymede. He makes a telling comparison between details from the fountain in the Family of Darius before Alexander and the well-head in the Doge’s Palace courtyard cast by Niccolò dei Conti.

Like other scholars before him he dwells on Titian’s most direct quotation from the Antique, from the Bed of Polyclitus in his Venus and Adonis, noting that two of Titian’s patrons, Bembo and Granvelle, owned versions of the celebrated relief.

Penny suggests that Titian’s Gloria was inspired by ‘an epitaph type of painting or relief sculpture common in Germany’, but he does not refer to Dürer’s Landauer altarpiece, which it most clearly resembles, nor does he mention that the Virgin looks like a Savoldo Magdalene of the type represented in the Gallery. On graphic sources he is impressive, describing Sustris’s dependence in The Queen of Sheba before King Solomon on an engraving of the same subject by Marcantonio Raimondi.

The painter seems to have also used a second print, for I find the pointing man on the right very like Moses in Titian’s woodcut Pharaoh submerged in the Red Sea. Penny is eager to trace literary as well as visual responses and speculates intelligently on Shakespeare’s and Spenser’s familiarity with Venus and Adonis as a fitting subject for paintings, such was the fame of Titian’s composition; he draws attention to George Eliot’s evocation of Titian’s Tribute money in Daniel Deronda and to Dickens’s and Henry James’s appreciation of The family of Darius before Alexander.

The author is particularly strong on original locations and functions, often deduced from internal evidence, vanishing points, light direction and degrees of finish or confirmed by documentation and comparisons with similar works whose function has been proved. In the secular context he identifies works destined for connoisseurs’ galleries and cabinet pictures suitable for other kinds of rooms. He refutes Anderson’s claim that Titian’s The Vendramin family was hung in Gabriel’s ‘camerino delle anticaglie’, for which it was far too large, and locates it in a portego. He proves that Veronese’s Adoration of the kings originally decorated a side wall in the chapel of the Confraternity of St Joseph before S. Samuele was transformed in the nineteenth century. And he proves that Tintoretto’s Christ washing the feet of the disciples originally hung on the left wall of the chapel of the Sacrament in S. Trovaso.

Penny may be right to claim that in Veronese’s Allegories of love ‘the relationship between the scenes is not necessarily sequential’ and that there is no narrative development, but it does not necessarily follow that they adorned separate ceilings in a suite of rooms since their viewpoints, related colour schemes and figure scale suggest that they were meant to be viewed together. Penny

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cites Xavier Salomon’s observation that the letters visible on a diagrammatic drawing, Studies for the allegories of love, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, might give some clue as to their original arrangement.

But I do not share Penny’s doubt as to whether Salviati’s Justice was intended for the Mint: employees were constantly tempted to steal, to adulterate precious metals and, on occasions, to forge signatures and the official weigher’s scales were subject to regular checking.

Iconographical problems and subjectmatter are handled with sophistication; trendy, over-facile interpretations are rejected: Bassano dogs are not to be interpreted allegorically and rapes of Ganymede do not necessarily indicate a homosexual patron, since they can be found in married couples’ bedrooms. He is well informed on the liturgical and architectural context of altarpieces and on problems of unorthodoxy during the Counter-Reformation when a work like Tintoretto’s St George and the dragon might be deemed unsuitable for public display. Like Ludovico Dolce, Penny stresses the sensuality of Titian’s Venus and Adonis, but its immense popularity was also due to its hunting theme.

Thanks to Carol Plazzotta’s re-reading of Ovid, the archer in Schiavone’s small panel is identified as Arcas, the son of Callisto, who pairs neatly with Schiavone’s pendant of Jupiter seducing his mother. A drawing for the painting is in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (D1764). Tommaso Rangone’s botanical and medical interests are rightly stressed in relationship to the iconography of Tintoretto’s Origin of the Milky Way, but his claims to be its patron could be strengthened by reference to his patronage of Tintoretto, whom he commissioned to paint scenes from the life of St Mark (1562–64) when he was Guardiano Grande of the Scuola of S. Marco. Penny suggests that the motif of the boy blowing on charcoal that appears in the Adoration of the shepherds (NG.1858) and in several works produced by the Bassano family is descended from candle-bearers in earlier Nativities influenced by the writings of St Bridget: a more likely source, however, is Tintoretto’s large Easter of the Hebrews prominent on the ceiling in the Scuola di S. Rocco.

Substantial sections of this catalogue are devoted to copies and workshop versions and variants. In his entry on Campaña’s reduction of Zuccaro’s Conversion of the Magdalene Penny speculates on the Venetian taste for small copies. To the examples that he gives by Clovio and Vasari can be added Basaiti’s Calling of the sons of Zebedee (Vienna), derived from his altarpiece in the Accademia, and the little copies of Mantegna’s Eremitani frescos that Marcantonio Michiel saw in a private collection in Padua and in Michele Contarini’s Venetian house in 1543.

Penny’s subtlety and aptness of phrase is demonstrated by his delicate handling of Bordone’s Portrait of a young woman which, in comparison with the painter’s other female images, he places midway on the erotic scale.

I agree that his nineteen-year-old bella donna is

42. Consecration of St Nicholas, by Paolo Veronese.

1561–62. Canvas, 282.6 by 170.8 cm. (National Gallery, London).

likely to be a highly idealised courtesan or mistress: the man on the backstairs hints at illicit love. According to Aretino courtesans hung their portraits on their premises. Penny proves that she cannot be paired with male portraits in Genoa and Florence and that her darting glance and assertive hand on hip suggest an independent operator rather than a submissive fiancée or wife.

Penny is at his very best on Titian’s The Vendramin family, whose relationship with the miraculous relic of the True Cross is clarified by previously unpublished passages from Gabriel Vendramin’s will. The vexed question as to whether it is he (who was younger than his brother Andrea) who gazes outwards, his hand proprietorially touching the altar, is argued at length but the problem is unresolved. Penny suggests that only male members of the family were included because only men could belong to the Scuola Grande of S. Giovanni Evangelista, which owned the relic, but in Venice nobility was transmitted exclusively through the male line, and there are no women in Titian’s Pesaro altarpiece (Frari) or in Giovanni Bellini’s Doge Loredan with his sons (Berlin). It is unlikely that the sitters in the mixed-sex group portraits that Penny considers were of aristocratic Venetians: Veronese’s Cuccina were arrivistes from Bergamo while Fasola’s sitters were provincial nobles from Vicenza.

Penny is to be congratulated on sorting out the many copies and versions of Titian’s Venus and Adonis, making mincemeat of recent claims that the Prado picture is not the original. More controversial is his interpretation of the Allegory of Prudence and his rejection of an autobiographical reading in which the portrait heads represent Titian, his son

Orazio and his nephew Marco.4 Penny is interesting on earlier fanciful identifications of the portraits and to his long list of triple human heads I would only add the 1507 medal of Paolo Diedo and to the list of exhibitions The Story of Time, Greenwich 2000, The Age of Titian, Edinburgh 2004, and Tiziano e il ritratto di Corte da Raffaello ai Carracci, Naples 2006. In 1966 Frances Yates drew attention to Camillo Delminio’s L’Idea del Theatro where the heads of a wolf, a lion and a dog appear in the cave of Saturn. Delminio’s Theatro existed as a real wooden structure and in book form it was a best seller; there are four editions by Lodovico Dolce who, like Delminio, moved in Titian’s circle. This is not to deny the influence of Pietro Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica, but the immense popularity of the Theatro may explain Titian’s decision to replace the original foliate base with animal heads. To me the oldest man does look like Titian and Penny’s objection that he had grey eyes can be overcome if we consider the allegorical context in which this head belongs to the shadowy past; if, like him, we believe that it is not autograph then all the more reason for the mistake. Orazio appears in the later workshop Madonna of Mercy (Palazzo Pitti, Florence), his features and thinning hair compatible with those of the central head. It would be highly appropriate for the elderly Titian, whose concern for the future of the family firm is well documented, to associate himself with attributes connected to Saturn, the planet of melancholy then much associated with the artistic temperament.

Penny writes perceptively about the recent cult of late Titian, but seems out of sympathy with the ageing master’s ultima maniera, his own taste being for more finished and classical styles; yet Titian’s ability in the Death of Actaeon to show the process of metamorphosis from man to beast by means of brushstrokes alone might be better described as unresolved rather than unfinished.

Veronese is the star of the volume. His works outnumber Tintoretto’s and Titian’s and on the whole they are in better condition and more usually autograph. He is represented by pictures sacred and profane, great and small, single and serial, of all dates. It is possible that the dreaming St Helena had special personal significance for the artist who married his teacher Badile’s daughter Elena in 1566, close to the date here plausibly proposed for the painting which, although it is based on a print after Raphael, looks so immediate. It seems likely that it once belonged to Rubens, whose second wife, another Helen, willingly served as his model.5 The longest entry in this catalogue is devoted to Veronese’s Family of Darius before Alexander which, thanks to Eastlake’s diplomatic handling of the Austrian authorities and appeal to the Treasury, was acquired in 1857. It is now known that it originally hung in the Villa Pisani at Montagnana.6 Penny gives an impressive account of the evolution of the composition and considers its display in the family palace in Venice where it remained until the mid-nineteenth century. the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e

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He identifies the main textual source as Valerius Maximus, easily available in Italian translation. Appendices are devoted to the critical responses of Goethe and Ruskin set against the aesthetic ideas of their respective times.

This entry, so rich in ideas and information, is enhanced by twenty-three figures including an X-radiograph mosaic photograph, family trees, interior and exterior views of the Palazzo Pisani Moretta, as well as an account of the painting’s role in the development of history painting, traced through its impact on Bellucci, Tiepolo, Le Brun and others.

The recent cleaning of Veronese’s small Rape of Europa revealed the painter’s characteristic palette and, together with the detection of pentimenti, confirmed its autograph status. This is by far the most dramatic shift in attribution in the catalogue. In the last century it was dismissed as a school piece, a later pastiche and as an eighteenth-century imitation produced ‘with fraudulent intent’ to pass for a preliminary sketch. In this case it was an illustrious provenance through Rudolf of Prague, Christina of Sweden and the Orléans collection that alerted the Gallery to the possibility that it might be a dirty original.

More controversial is the renaming of Veronese’s painting NG931 as Christ healing a woman with an issue of blood (?). While it is unlikely to represent Christ and the adulteress, given the absence of male accusers, the kneeling beauty with her long flowing tresses is very much a Magdalene type, and it is significant that she is surrounded by women whose heads are either covered or have their hair bound up and who, unusually for Veronese, are rather austerely clad and noticeably lacking jewels. Her eye-catching unfastened necklace has clearly visible clasps: this weakens Penny’s argument that it was a string of jewels that was wound in her hair, and in fact he states that ‘it may be objected that if the unfortunate woman was impoverished by her medical bills it is odd that she should be wearing jewels’. Admittedly, as Veronese’s interrogation by the Inquisition in 1573 proves, he did not always stick to accepted iconography but invented details. It is just such an imaginative procedure that could easily have led him to anticipate seventeenth-century depictions showing the Magdalene laying aside her jewels.

The publication of this book happily coincided with Nicholas Penny’s return to the National Gallery as Director. By chance this volume includes Veronese’s Consecration of St Nicholas (Fig.42), his patron saint, who was selected as bishop of Myra following a bishop’s dream. The circumstances surrounding Penny’s appointment were obviously somewhat different, but it is clear from the outstanding achievement of this catalogue that he was the right man for the job. One of St Nicholas of Bari’s better-known acts was his provision of dowries to poor maidens; given the current economic climate it would be rash to expect miracles, but the recent saving of Titian’s Diana and Actaeon for the nation suggests that at the very least we can look forward to some exceptional acquisitions.

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1 See N. Wilding: ‘Galileo’s idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo unveiled’, Galilaena 3 (2006), pp.229–45.

2 To this I can add that Assonica, who owned Mazza’s Rape of Ganymede, was related to Faustina, who appears with her husband, Marsilio, in Lotto’s Prado double portrait, and that Titian’s Venus and the organ player (Museo del Prado; no.420) has an Assonica provenance and that the musician looks very like Titian’s friend in the portrait now in San Francisco, which may be the portrait of Assonica mentioned by Vasari.

3 The double rods in the May Labours of the Month are unexplained, but I wonder if they illustrate waterdivining Veneto-style.

4 This has provoked hostile reactions, most notably from Augusto Gentili, whose article ‘Ancora sull’Allegora della Prudenza’, Studi Tizianeschi 4 (2006), pp.122–34, is absent from the bibliography although it contains corrections to the English translation of the Latin inscription.

5 He speculates that it might have decorated an organ shutter.

6 See C. Terribile: Del Piacere della virtù: Paolo Veronese, Alessandro Magno e il patriziato veneziano, Venice 2009; to be reviewed.

Pittura rupestre medievale. Lazio e Campania settentrionale (secoli VI– XIII). By Simone Piazza. 308 pp. incl. 32 col. + 64 b. & w. ills. (Ecole Française de Rome, 2006), €70.

ISBN 978–2–7283–0718–0.

Reviewed by ALESSIA TRIVELLONE

rock painting in Italy has been rediscovered largely thanks to the work of Cosimo Damiano Fonseca and to the technical investigations he has organised since the start of the 1970s. Rock painting which, after the prehistoric era, reappeared in the Mediterranean only in the Middle Ages and went into decline in the following centuries, is one aspect of this phenomenon. Cappadocia and southern Italy are particularly rich in medieval rock paintings, and Simone Piazza’s book provides an excellent analysis of examples in Lazio and southern Campania. The book is organised in four chapters, the first examining the symbolic significance of the rocky cavern for Christians, in part an inheritance from pagan cults, and describing the various types of caves and rocks.

The second chapter comprises a catalogue of pictorial remains. Forty-two sites are reviewed, including well-known examples such as the Sacro Speco of Subiaco (pp.119–25) or the grotta of S. Salvatore di Vallepietra (pp.125–28), as well as littleknown sites, like the interesting cave of S. Michele at Avella (pp.170–75) or that of S. Nicola at Capradosso (pp.70–73). The author provides a description of each site and its paintings, augmented by high-quality photographs both in black and white and in colour, as well as drawings and diagrammatic reconstructions. The better-preserved paintings are analysed stylistically and dated approximately.

Apart from suffering from decay as a result of humidity and other natural factors, it is not unusual for such frescoed caves located in the

THE PHENOMENON OF

remote countryside to be used to house agricultural equipment or animals; in other cases the paintings have suffered from vandals, thieves and illegal raids (pp.243–49). One of the most important aspects of the catalogue is subsequently that it provides scholars with a pictorial census of caves that are often both difficult to visit and/or deteriorating.

The adopted classification by present-day provinces (and not by historical provinces) is convincingly justified by the author. Nevertheless, following this choice, one could have expected that the analysis covers the whole region of Campania.

The third chapter provides the interpretative key to rock paintings, identifying the phenomena which gave rise to them: the adoption of an eremitical life, the cult of the Archangel Michael and the veneration of the loca sancta of the catacombs. The phenomenon of hermits living in caves, which until the 1970s was too readily believed to be the reason that rock paintings were made, is considered to be the case in only five sites in the entire corpus (pp.183–92). More often it was the cult of the Archangel Michael that prompted the use of caves for religious purposes: in the Middle Ages every natural cave was a potential site for the cult of the archangel in imitation of the cave of Monte Gargano in which, according to legend, St Michael miraculously appeared in the fifth century. Of the sites surveyed, seven were dedicated to the Archangel and two to the angel, or angels. It was not necessary to have a representation of the Archangel in all these caves: as the author emphasises, the rocks themselves, by their very presence, were enough to evoke sanctity. Some holy places in Roman catacombs, which until now have been taken into account in the study of rock paintings, show significant similarities to the cave sanctuaries: called speluncae in a seventhcentury source (p.203), these were often the goals of pilgrimages. Even the paintings in these places share similar characteristics with those of other cave sites, above all in the prevalence of votive panels with figures of saints with the characteristics of icons.

The fourth chapter considers rock painting in the context of the artistic production of Campania and Lazio as a whole. The phenomenon began in the sixth century and developed rapidly in the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries before declining and disappearing altogether in the fourteenth century. The development in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, according to Piazza, is linked to a contemporary heightened interest in eremitism, as well as to the Gregorian artistic reform. In regard to this last point, it would nevertheless be interesting to compare the material of Lazio and Campania with that of other regions: it is possible that the development of rock painting in that area follows more general tendencies, given that the centuries under discussion are those which saw an intense artistic flowering throughout Europe.

The close iconographic and stylistic similarities between rock paintings and contemporary fresco painting in Lazio and Campania,

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scrupulously recorded by Piazza, show that the former were fully integrated into the artistic production of the region. The specificity of this painting does not lie in its style, even less in a supposed retardataire style, but rather in a type of decoration, mostly based on votive panels of saints, and in the special interrelationship between the painting and the rocks themselves. This is evident in a fresco in the cave of Monte Monaco di Gioia, in which a painted angel seems to be standing on an uncut rocky spur: the painter evidently chose not to represent the rock because it was already provided by the spur itself (p.234). In other cases the rock itself is invested with sanctity, as in the case of the chapel of St Gregory in the Sacro Speco of Subiaco, which is singled out and ‘exalted’ by its man-made frame (p.237).

By the end of the book the reader has surveyed a variety of caves and sites of differing dates, types, finishes and decoration unified only by the application of paint on rocks. The book provides a critical study and an important catalogue and, given the elegance of its style and the care taken in its details (there are minimal typographical errors), is a pleasure to read. Its indices of places and names as well as of iconography allow ease of consultation. It provides a solid base for the further study of this artistic phenomenon, which could be approached from an anthropological perspective. Even the lack of the very few sites that have not been analysed, listed by the author himself (p.8), in no way compromises the rigour of the book and makes one hope that in the future a similarly scrupulous investigation of the phenomenon could be applied to other regions of southern Italy.

Antike Steinskulpturen und Neuzeitliche Nachbildungen in Kassel: Bestandskatalog. By Peter Gercke and Nina Zimmermann-Elseify. 428 pp. incl. 625 b. & w. ills. (Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Mainz am Rhein, 2007), €70.

ISBN 978–3–8053–3781–6.

Die antiken Skulpturen in Newby Hall sowie in anderen Sammlungen in Yorkshire. By Dietrich Boschung and Henner von Hesberg, with contributions by Werner Eck, Andreas Linfert and Georg Petzl. 273 pp. incl. 2 col. + 175 b. & w. ills. (Reichert Verlag, Wiesbaden, 2007), €110.

ISBN 978–3–89500–4315.

Reviewed by THORSTEN OPPER

a tradition of publishing Bestandskataloge, well-illustrated comprehensive catalogues of their permanent collections that provide in condensed form the latest scholarship on the objects in their care. The Antike Steinskulpturen catalogue by Peter Gercke (director of the Kassel antiquities collection until 2003) and Nina Zimmermann-Elseify does so in an exemplary form

G E R M AN M U S E U M S M A I N T A I N

for the substantial collection of ancient sculptures in stone in Kassel, housed since 1973 in Schloss Wilhemshöhe. Although the Kassel collection has an illustrious history and contains a number of very significant pieces, it is not as well known outside Germany as it undoubtedly deserves to be.

Except for the bronzes, which are to be dealt with separately, the new catalogue replaces the 1915 volume Antike Skulpturen und Bronzen des königlichen Museum Fridericianum in Cassel by Margarete Bieber. It contains full entries for 144 sculptures, all illustrated (which was not the case for the Bieber catalogue) in black-and-white photographs, usually showing the four main views.

Fifty-seven of the sculptures came to the Museum after the old catalogue was compiled, and twenty-two of the pieces were previously unpublished, including four omitted by Bieber. The new volume is therefore highly welcome in making these sculptures available to a wider audience of scholars and the interested public.

The book opens with a brief but very useful history of the collection (pp.11–36), initially formed by the Landgraves of Hesse-Cassel.

The first marbles, Attic votive reliefs and inscriptions, entered the collection in 1688, gathered by Hessian mercenaries returning from a Venetian-led expedition against the Ottoman Turks that culminated in the siege of the Athenian Acropolis in 1687. The core of the collection, however, comprises thirtyfour marbles acquired by Landgrave Frederic II in Rome during his Grand Tour in 1776–77 through such well-known British dealers as Gavin Hamilton and Thomas Jenkins.

These include the two best-known Kassel sculptures, the Kassel Apollo (no.4) and an important replica of the Athena Lemnia type (no.5), both high-quality Roman marble copies after famous, lost Greek bronze originals. These marbles were destined for the new Museum Fridericianum, opened in 1779 and modelled on the British Museum, London, with its encyclopaedic Enlightenment approach. While much of the original archive material relating to the acquisition of these sculptures was destroyed during the Second World War, there is perhaps a hope that future research in Britain (there are references, albeit limited, to Kassel statues in, for example, the British Museum’s Townley Archive) and Italy may provide further information on some of the provenances, which at present is disappointingly limited.

Most astonishing is the growth of the collection since the Second World War, with forty-nine pieces acquired mostly on the Swiss and German art markets, of which thirty-three were bought after 1970. These figures include ten sculptures on loan from private lenders, which, rather oddly, are fully integrated in the catalogue and treated like permanent collection pieces.

The section ends with a brief discussion of conservation work carried out since the 1970s on some of the marbles, much of it necessitated by damage sustained during the War. In keeping with prevailing policies at

the time, this was frequently coupled with a ‘de-restoration’ of the sculptures and the removal of elements added by the eighteenth-century restorers, a trend halted and sometimes even reversed in recent years by other institutions.

The catalogue itself comprises 144 marbles, of which 133 are ancient and eleven modern copies, mostly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The ancient pieces are divided into eleven categories: Greek ideal sculpture (39 pieces; nos.1–39), Roman ideal sculpture (24; nos.40–63), Greek portrait sculpture (6; nos.64–69), Roman portrait sculpture (25; nos.70–94), Greek reliefs (5; nos.95–99), Roman reliefs (6; nos.100–05), Greek sepulchral sculpture (4; nos.106–09), Roman sepulchral sculpture (15; nos.110–24), Architectural fragments (2; nos.125–26), Cypriot (3; nos.127–29) and Egyptian pieces (4; nos.130–33). At the end a further twenty-two marbles are listed that were lost or destroyed during bombing raids in the War. Surprisingly, there is also a full entry for a sculpture that had been on loan to Kassel from a private collection since 1992 and was acquired in 2000, but turned out to have been stolen from a museum in Italy and has since been returned.

The latest volume in the fine series on sculpture in English country houses by the renowned Cologne Research Archive for Ancient Sculpture by D. Boschung and H. von Hesberg takes the Bestandskatalog concept to Britain. It discusses the ancient marbles (chiefly Roman works of the first and second centuries AD, as well as mostly eighteenth-century modern copies) in Newby Hall (seventy-two pieces in total, including a Greek vase) and seven other North and West Yorkshire collections (Duncombe Park [2 pieces], Fountains Abbey [1], Harewood House [2], Hovingham Hall [6], Nostell Priory [5], Rokeby Hall [26] and Sledmere House [26]). The Cologne series is well established and has already proved an indispensable tool for scholars. In many cases the volumes represent the first full treatment of the sculptures since Adolf Michaelis’s still fundamental Ancient Marbles in Great Britain of 1882. While the history of the collections under discussion has become more prominent in recent volumes, the key focus is on the archaeological and iconographic contexts of the sculptures as ancient works of art (an aspect almost entirely missing from most studies in English, which tend to focus almost exclusively on the eighteenth-century aspects of collecting and interior design). This more than compensates for the sometimes uneven bibliography concerning the latter aspects in the present volume, which overlooks some more recent British publications.

By far the most important collection treated is the one at Newby, assembled by William Wedell in the 1760s, again mainly through the English dealer and Rome resident Thomas Jenkins. Still mostly intact and in its original display in the sculpture gallery designed by Robert Adam, it evokes the spirit of Grand Tour collecting like few the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e

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others. Sadly, the Barberini Venus, the most famous piece in the collection, was sold in 2002. The authors have nonetheless included it in the catalogue (a modern replica is now on display at Newby Hall), appropriately enough, given the notoriety and fame of the statue in the eighteenth century. Perhaps less obvious is the inclusion of the two sculptures from Duncombe Park, both now dispersed (the Discobolus acquired by the Liebighaus in Frankfurt, the famous Dog of Alcibiades by the British Museum), particularly since the account of Henry Constantine ‘Dog’ Jennings, the original eighteenth-century owner, offers little new and omits references to more recent studies. In other cases, sculptures sold from the collections in recent decades are not mentioned (e.g. a fourthcentury BC statue of a seated girl from Rokeby now in the British Museum), making the treatment somewhat uneven. These minor points notwithstanding, the individual entries on the sculptures are comprehensive and provide a wealth of useful information and stimulating leads. The catalogue contains excellent photographs (although, sadly, it was not always possible to illustrate all four sides of a work), and, like its sister volumes, will be mandatory reading for anyone working on these collections.

Art, Marriage, and Family in the Florentine Renaissance Palace. By Jacqueline Marie Musacchio. 353 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2008), £35. ISBN 978–0–300–09563–0.

Reviewed by BRENDA PREYER J AC Q U E L I N E M U S A C C HI O ’ S B E AU T I F UL NEW

gives much food for thought. It continues with the theme, enunciated in her The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy of 1999,1 of the significance for Renaissance Italians, especially women, of some of the domestic objects that have come down to us. The author assembles a great deal of material about marriage, but her real contribution concerns a wide range of objects that she links to marriage and procreation, such as betrothal chests, marriage chests (Fig.43), clothing, jewellery (including rings), girdles, cutlery, linens, prayerbooks and other aids to piety, as well as aids to beauty, spinning and needlework and ‘intimate accessories’. Her argument, reiterated in numerous formulations throughout the book, runs something like this: documents show that when a man and a woman married, many items were acquired in connection with the dowry, the woman’s counter-dowry and the furnishing of the new couple’s living quarters; many of these objects must have had significance with regard to marriage or the idea of producing a family, and objects for women predominate; similar objects reappear later in the life cycle of the family, in inventories taken upon the

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43. The Triumph of David and Saul, from The story of David panels from a pair of cassoni(?), by Francesco Pesellino. c.1445–55. Panel, 43.3 by 177 cm. (National Gallery, London).

death of the husband, leading one to conclude that they were treasured throughout the couple’s married life; the place in the house where inventories situate most of these objects – in the all-important camera – reinforces their significance. Musacchio makes the case that women, because of restrictions on their movements, tended to be confined to the house, and thus that the objects she discusses related most particularly to them. Through judicious interweaving of data from private record books and other contemporary writings, letters and inventories, she is able to demonstrate the presence – indeed the importance – of all these objects in the house. However, the associations she outlines perhaps do not justify such strong statements as: ‘These objects both reminded a woman of her role in society and let society know who she was’ (p.9) or ‘Contemplation of these narrative scenes helped everyone in the house understand his or her role’ (p.127). Musacchio tries a little too hard to find a logical place for everything in her scheme, and we read that painted decoration on walls, spalliere and furniture had ‘an emphasis on ideal familial behavior’ (p.127).

This is an oversimplification in the light of her sustained discussion later in the book of audiences for the various sorts of subjectmatter, especially when we reflect on the horrific story of Nastagio degli Onesti or the many scenes from mythology or ancient history that have nothing to do with family values.

There is little new in the book about the ‘Florentine Renaissance Palace’ of the title – indeed almost everyone is said to live in a palace, although architectural historians define the building type more narrowly than does Musacchio and link it to a more restricted social class. Also disappointing is the lack of a probing discussion of ‘women’s rooms’; in her first book Musacchio alerted us to ceremonial visits to a new mother, but the nature of the room remains very much open. Only by the mid-fifteenth century can we sometimes find records of a separate camera for the female head of household; otherwise, did the wife receive these visitors in her husband’s camera? The question has a bearing on the audiences for the objects in any of these rooms.

Musacchio’s third chapter, ‘Chests and their Contents’ – carefully defined to deal with objects that reveal details about family life – has much good research and many new findings. The section on betrothal chests is especially rich and interesting. Also

innovative is the idea of examining the contents of chests in terms of wifely values.

Musacchio’s detailed discussion of painted rooms moves the formal discourse forward, but it takes on a life of its own. It is integrated into the book’s main focus on objects only with respect to two proposals: that the increase in objects may have been a cause for the decline of painting of the walls of rooms and that the decoration was usually executed at the time of marriage. This last assumption is questionable, witness the securely documented and intact decoration of the Palazzo Datini in Prato, little discussed in the book.

Two comments must be made regarding form. Like many scholars writing in English, the author translates the word anticamera as antechamber, but this is misleading; in Florence until well into the sixteenth century the anticamera always followed the camera in the sequence of rooms in a suite.2 Thus the following phrase distorts the spatial relationship: ‘in the antechamber to the main bedchamber of the villa’ (p.217).

Musacchio’s decision to use fifteenthcentury spellings for names of some individuals and families ‘to give a proper sense of the original text’ (p.260) is idiosyncratic and cannot be condoned, not only because for centuries all other scholars have used standard spellings to refer to people, but also because her practice leads to confusion. The prominent woodworker Giovanni da Gaiuole, who came from the town in the Chianti, becomes unrecognisable to modern ears as ‘Giovanni da Gaivolo’. New names for well-known families startle the reader: ‘Ghondi’, ‘Chastellani’, ‘Inghirrami’. Lorenzo Ghiberti’s son, Vittorio, cited in Giovanni Rucellai’s Zibaldone, appears as ‘the lesser known Vettorio di Lorenzo Bartolucci’, and in the index under Bartolucci, seemingly not the same person as the Vittorio Ghiberti of another citation.

Standard practice also demands that, to aid the reader, punctuation be added to names and quotations, and thus that an author perform an essential act of interpretation of a text. Yet, these criticisms should in no way obscure the value and interest of the new information the book provides and of the author’s fresh approach.

1 Reviewed by Dora Thornton in this Magazine, 141 (1999), pp.479–80.

2 See B. Preyer: ‘The Florentine “Casa”’, in M. Ajmar Wollheim and F. Denis, eds.: exh. cat. At Home in Renaissance Italy, London (Victoria and Albert Museum) 2006, pp.34–48, an article apparently not consulted by Musacchio.

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The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance. By Dana E. Katz. 248 pp. incl. 70 b. & w. ills. (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2008), £36.

ISBN 978–0–8122–4085–6.

Reviewed by D.S. CHAMBERS T O B E M O R E P R E C I S E , this book is about some anti-Jewish images in northern Italy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and the degrees of intolerance implied by them. Its portrayals of real Jewish people are incidental and rare, and not much related to ‘the Renaissance’, or even in some cases to Italian Renaissance art (e.g. twelve woodcuts crudely illustrating the castration and ritual murder of the infant Simon of Trento). The discussion concentrates upon images in five different places – Urbino, Mantua, Ferrara, Florence and Trento – each being the subject of a separate chapter.

According to Dana Katz, any lingering illusion that Renaissance Italy was a safe haven for Jews (as Cecil Roth suggested in 1946) has to be abandoned. Even in two of the most protective north Italian princedoms – Mantua and Ferrara – toleration was only relative and conditional; much the same, she suggests, applied further south, in Urbino.

Although Jewish moneylenders, physicians and others were valued for their services, Katz argues that there were residual threats of violence which could be expressed in art. In Urbino she reads such implications into Joos van Ghent’s Communion of the apostles (Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino) and – perhaps more cogently – into Uccello’s predella painting below it, the Miracle of the profaned host, which illustrates the detection and burning to death of an entire Jewish family (although this story had nothing to do with Urbino, but originated in fourteenthcentury Paris). Katz argues that the period of the painting coincided with the preaching in Urbino of an anti-Semitic Franciscan and that the appearance in the Communion of a Persian ambassador (apparently a converted Jew) in the presence of Federico da Montefeltro implied support for a combined task force against the Turks and a threat to all other non-Christians. This is not wholly convincing.

Regarding Mantua, Katz confirms the beneficence of its Gonzaga rulers, but reminds readers about Mantegna’s Madonna della vittoria, for which a Jew, Daniele da Norsa, was forced to pay with a punitive fine.

A painting survives which portrays him and his family (in the church of S. Andrea, although on p.1 it is mislocated to the votive church – now restored – for which Daniele also had to pay). Pressure from Augustinian Hermit friars and the Mantuan mob had brought about this lapse in normal Gonzaga tolerance. No such painful incident occurred in Este Ferrara, but allegedly the point was made that toleration would not be perpetual and that Jewish religion and separatism were doomed. Here Katz discusses the theme of

the blind Synagogue confronted by the triumphant Church of Christ, forcefully illustrated in Garofalo’s altarpiece of the Living cross (now in the Pinacoteca, Ferrara) commissioned for the church of the Augustinian hermits in the presence of Duke Alfonso d’Este and his chief adviser, Antonio Costabili. This weird and menacing device shows human (or divine?) arms growing from the wood of the cross, one of which pierces with a sword or spear the personified Synagogue.

We are told that the friars would have been aware, from studying the works of their patron, St Augustine, that in his City of God he pronounced that the Jews and their mistaken religion must be endured in the short term, but ultimately they will be humiliated and converted. Since the Augustinian friars in Mantua seem to have taken a more robust view even in the short term, one wonders if the great Church Father was ambiguous in his pronouncement or just misunderstood.

In the republic of Florence Jews accused of sacrilege were apparently in regular danger from both court prosecutions and lynch mobs. Katz recounts the case in 1493 of Bartolomeo de Cases, a vagrant Sephardic Jew who was said to have slashed a marble sculpture of the Madonna at Orsanmichele and several other Marian images. Whether the wretched Bartolomeo received any of the torments prescribed for him before being murdered by a street crowd is not altogether clear from the sources; there is no visual representation of the story, but a Latin inscription was placed beneath the Madonna; Katz claims ‘the symbolic power of the written word’ served the purpose of perpetuating the infamy. The case of a Jew in Empoli who (by accident) emptied his chamber pot from a window while the Corpus Domini procession was passing his house also resulted in a commemorative inscription. Not much there about Jews in art, however.

The worst place – for virtually zero tolerance – was the prince-bishopric of Trento, though this was only in part an Italian city. In 1475, as is well known, the whole Jewish community there was blamed – and probably framed – for ritual practices leading to the death of a Christian boy. About thirty Jews were judicially murdered after atrocious tortures. The cult of the infant martyr, encouraged by the Church (though not by the pope) and by malicious rumours about sacrificial Passover practices, is generously illustrated here, not only by the woodcuts already mentioned, but also by little-known if repetitive mural paintings in the region of Brescia, which depict the two year-old Simon being tormented by gloating Jews.

Although there are short introductory and concluding chapters to bring the subject together, the book seems rather like a collection of five separate papers, and occasionally the same information is repeated in two different contexts (e.g. the Empoli case, on pp.49–51 and 114–16). It is not exactly an enjoyable book, the subject-matter being too depressing or gruesome, and for the argument to be wholly convincing more

examples would be needed (if difficult to find) from all over Italy. Nevertheless it incorporates a lot of recent work, as the informative notes and bibliography demonstrate, and includes numerous black-andwhite illustrations, although some of these are rather faint. It is not obvious why there need be so many reproductions of Garofalo’s painting in Ferrara; the whole work is given twice as figs.25 and 34 (though only the latter, the larger and clearer version, includes the inscriptions) and eight times in particular detail (figs.26–32 and 37). One decent double-page reproduction would have sufficed.

Politics, Civic Ideals and Sculpture in Italy –. By Brendan Cassidy. 314 pp. incl. 185 b. & w. ills. (Harvey Miller Publishers, London and Turnhout, 2007), €120. ISBN 978–1–905375–01–1.

Reviewed by JULIAN GARDNER WHEN IN DECEMBER 1364 the executors of Pietro di Dante wished to commission an appropriate tomb for the great poet’s son in S. Francesco at Treviso, they sat with their chosen sculptor, Gilberto, beneath his intended model, the tomb of Bishop Castellano Salamone, in the cathedral. The bishop had died in 1322 and his tomb proved to be an important channel for the design innovations of Arnolfo di Cambio in the Veneto. It is perhaps surprising that a wish to commemorate a prominent layman with a figure ‘in cathedra ad modum doctoris’ should follow an episcopal prototype of almost half a century earlier, and despite the exactitude with which the model was described, down to the modillions supporting the sarcophagus, both model and copy survive in too mutilated a condition to be closely compared. But the Treviso commission emphasises the permanence of sculpture, its capacity to make an enduring public statement, and this a fortiori was yet more marked when the tombs were placed outside churches like those of the glossators, or jurists, at Bologna. It is one of the many virtues of this freshly argued and thoughtprovoking new book that it moves easily from private memorial sculpture to state monuments and from façades to fountains. It attends closely to subject-matter, while also making shrewd assessments of stylistic development, and to a splendid extent it systematically addresses the ideological and cultural contexts within which many of these commissions were conceived and executed.

Cassidy’s book covers the period between c.1250, the death of Frederick II and the arrival of the Angevin dynasty in the south, until 1400, a period dictated by political events, eerily reminiscent of the Courtauld Institute curriculum of the 1960s as canonised

by John Pope-Hennessy and John White, in which essential relationships with earlier communal sculpture got short shrift. For

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Cassidy’s purpose an earlier starting date would probably have been preferable. The sculpted pulpit did not begin with Nicola Pisano. Episcopal patron saints like Zeno and Zenobius were figures from the remote past – the current bishop was generally a bureaucrat and only exceptionally in the fourteenth century – as with Thomas Cantilupe – was he canonised. But the great advantage here is that all Italy is included, not merely Tuscany with appendages. The scene is set in a brisk and up-to-date historical survey that owes much to the late Philip Jones’s magnum opus on republican rule.1 Given the book’s welcome emphasis on sculpture and politics, the Capua Gate is an appropriate point of entry. The configuration of southern Italy changed politically and artistically after the Battle of Benevento (1266) and the extirpation of the viper’s breed of Hohenstaufen, but it remained a kingdom with the artistic imperatives of dynastic tomb sculpture and the representation of rulers. The design of the gate, its location, ground-plan and sculpture clearly owed much to ancient precedent – more even perhaps than is acknowledged here – but its relationship to Italian medieval city gates other than those of Milan could have been given greater emphasis.

The early chapters on tomb design and communal projects are well informed and make creative use of recent scholarship, but are relatively familiar. The impact of Arnolfo di Cambio’s tomb designs is lucidly set out, although Cassidy unquestioningly accepts the accuracy of the current reconstruction of the influential tomb of Cardinal Guillaume de Bray in S. Domenico, Orvieto. Slips are rare – De Bray was not a Dominican friar and the Domino Accursio mentioned later in conjunction with a planned commemorative tomb programme in Florence Cathedral was not a mobster but the Tuscan jurist buried outside S. Francesco at Bologna. The panorama of Italian trecento tomb sculpture which this book provides should long prove stimulating and serviceable. In particular, the author provides a reliable guide to the elaborate culture of death and representation at the Angevin court at Naples, and makes a persuasive attempt to bring Anne Morganstern’s important categorisation of tombs of kinship to bear on the Neapolitan designs.2 The inner contradictions in royal tomb sculpture are also illumined – in the hubristic tomb of Robert I in S. Chiara, Naples, indebted to the imperial tomb by Giovanni Pisano once in the apse of Pisa Cathedral, the crowned effigy of the king is barefoot and clad in the Franciscan habit.

In all of this Cassidy creatively extends important recent research. More innovative in some ways are his discussions of communal sculpture and the civic programmes of the Veneto and north-western Italy. The importance of the spread of Giovanni Pisano’s influence along the water-borne marble routes to Genoa and Liguria is well brought out. He makes a series of sensible comments on the trades represented on the

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front of S. Marco in Venice and weaves it into a valuable comparative discussion with the reliefs on the exterior of the Campanile at Florence. Here, as elsewhere, one would have appreciated a greater attention to the location and context of the spectator. At Venice, as elsewhere in northern and central Italy, new evidence is rapidly accumulating about sculptural polychromy, about which more will need to be said. Also to discuss only the surviving sculptural vertebra of tomb programmes is fundamentally reductive: very few monuments preserve the painted images that once formed an integral part of their original design. The extraordinary painted Crucifixion which included the deceased, his wife, Sts Francis of Assisi, Radislav and Mary Magdalene above the tomb of Albertino Morosini, Dux Sclavonie (d.1305), once in SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, and recorded in his will, alerts one to what has irretrievably vanished.

Fountain commissions were a communal speciality, and here attention is rightly devoted to the encyclopaedic programme of the Fontana Maggiore at Perugia. Cassidy makes many shrewd observations about both the programme and setting of Nicola Pisano’s fountain, but in his discussion of Arnolfo’s slightly later fountain in pede platea he reproduces the manifestly erroneous reconstruction proposed at the recent Perugia exhibition.3 In this, as in other aspects, recent studies of fountains remain indebted to Hoffmann Curtius’s very useful book,4 and the possible impact of the iconography of ancient fountains is still not entertained.

The discussion of the statues of Boniface VIII, erected when the Caetani pope was still alive, their avatars and influence shows the author at his best: incisive, lucid and able to relate the programmes convincingly to the political situation at the moment of their execution. The discussion of the uses of equestrian figures in lay tombs in northern Italy is particularly good, and here as elsewhere the publishers have served the author well with pertinent illustrations.

Sculpture clearly had more allure than painting. Tactile, more permanent, able to articulate the public spaces that staged political debate and action in communes and signorie, sculpted programmes had more impact than painted programmes within palaces. In his concluding chapter, Cassidy makes some valuable comparative remarks on the impact of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s muchanalysed programme in the Sala dei Nove in Siena, and his sensitivity to contemporary painting is apparent throughout. This exemplary discussion of late medieval sculpture in Italy deserves to be widely read and should stimulate many fruitful trains of thought.

1 P. Jones: The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria, Oxford 1997.

2 A. Morganstern: Gothic Tombs of kinship in France, The Low Countries and England, University Park IL 2000.

3 Reviewed in this Magazine, 147 (2005), p.257.

4 K. Hoffmann-Curtius: Das Programm der Fontana Maggiore in Perugia, Bonner Beiträge zur Kunstwissenschaft 10, Düsseldorf 1968.

Leonardo. Dagli studi di proporzione al ‘Trattato della pittura’. Edited by Pietro C. Marani and Maria Teresa Fiorio.

208 pp. incl. numerous ills. in col. + b. & w.

(Electa, Milan, 2007), €48. ISBN 978–88–370–5733–6.

Leonardo e il monumento equestre a Francesco Sforza. Edited by Andrea Bernardoni. 128 pp. incl. 27 col. + 91 b. & w. ills. (Giunti, Florence, 2007), €18. ISBN 978–88–090–5396–0.

Reviewed by ANNA SCONZA

an exhibition held in the Castello Sforzesco, Milan (closed January 2008), Leonardo. Dagli studi di proporzione al ‘Trattato della pittura’, sheds new light on the complex and somewhat neglected subject of the later reception of the artist’s theories. From the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, Leonardo’s writings and drawings stimulated the curiosity of artists and thinkers, even if they were only transmitted in a somewhat fragmentary manner by way of numerous reprintings of his Trattato della pittura, published for the first time in Paris in 1651. This bilingual edition (in Italian and French) provided, in a reduced form, the text of Leonardo’s Libro di pittura, which was in fact compiled by his pupil Francesco Melzi. The Raccolta Vinciana has copies of all the subsequent editions of the work, described in this catalogue, up to the first complete edition of the text edited by Guglielmo Manzi in 1817. The fate of several manuscript copies preceding the seventeenthcentury edition is reconstructed with important clarifications by Mauro Pavesi. Also convincing are the results of Juliana Barone’s research into Nicolas Poussin’s compositional methods, which adapted Melzi’s drawings to the new demands of taste for the first published edition of the Trattato. It is known that in his years of study in Italy (1630–40) the French artist studied numerous antique statues in Roman collections. Barone explains how Poussin constructed a model which faithfully reproduced the plasticity of the Farnese Hercules and the proportions of the Belvedere Antinous and made use of them through turning the limbs with minimum variations to adapt them to the pose needed in the chapter that he wished to illustrate.

Leonardo’s theory of proportion, one of his most important subjects, is almost entirely absent from Trattato della pittura, perhaps because Leonardo treated it in a separate ‘libro’ that has been lost. An attempt to reconstruct the contents of that book gives rise to several important essays in the catalogue, in particular that of Pietro Marani on the various opportunities Leonardo had to study the Antique.

However, as the curator makes clear, it was above all thanks to his studies from Nature that the artist was able to obtain proportional ‘modules’ which took count of the variations of the body that was to be drawn, human or animal, and which differs from that of his predecessors (Vitruvius and Alberti).

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Although the anatomical composition of a woman was not subjected to Leonardo’s theoretical scrutiny, he tried his hand at it in the lost cartoon of Leda, as Maria Teresa Fiorio proposes in her essay. In fact, of the ‘Leonardesque rules’ studied here by Giulio Bora, Carlo Urbino made observations and designs of the geometric construction of the female body, elaborating in the Codex Huygens on the theme of proportion, material derived from Leonardo and from later Lombard writers of treatises.

Leonardo also studied the anatomical proportions of the horse in a series of drawings, originally more complete than what has come down to us today, and in a ‘small wax model’, as Vasari described it, identifiable as the statuette with an Aldobrandini provenance included in the exhibition and analysed in the catalogue by Martin Kemp. The drawings of the proportions of a horse (echoes of which were still present in the work of Antonio Canova in the first years of the nineteenth century) were necessary for Leonardo to undertake the important commission for the equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza.

The subject has recently been re-examined in the second book under review, edited by Andrea Bernardoni, Leonardo e il monumento equestre a Francesco Sforza, which concentrates on the technical construction of this imposing colossus. Leonardo intended to revive ancient monumental sculpture and also reintroduce the technique of indirect casting, a technique that had been lost from memory in the Middle Ages. He probably began to work on this project soon after his arrival in Milan in 1484, even if the only document that certainly refers to it dates from 1489. He worked on it in a haphazard manner, as is demonstrated by the drawings preserved in the codices Madrid II (8936), Forster, H and Atlantico, and in certain drawings at Windsor, which are analysed by Bernardoni. Leonardo’s ambitious attempt to cast the statue in one piece was interrupted in 1497; it is reproduced in a virtual reconstruction in these pages.

Architettura e committenza nella Napoli del Quattrocento. By Bianca de Divitiis.

220 pp. incl. 119 b. & w. ills. (Marsilio editori, Venice, 2007), €23. ISBN 978–88–317–9108–7.

Reviewed by CORDELIA WARR B I A NC A D E D I V I T I I S ’s book concentrates on the architectural patronage of the Carafa family, in particular on Diomede Carafa, who played an important role in Aragonese Naples.

Diomede was part of the army that helped Alfonso of Aragon take Naples in 1442 and was a member of Ferrante I’s inner circle. The first chapter traces the fortunes of the Carafa family and their association with the seggio di Nido, one of the five main political and administrative areas of the city.

In the following two chapters de Divitiis examines living and dying in the seggio di Nido.

‘Abitare nel seggio’ is concerned with Diomede Carafa’s palace. Rather than choosing a site on which he could build a palace ex novo, Carafa chose one already occupied by a family property in via S. Biagio de’ Librai, less than a hundred metres from the church of S. Domenico Maggiore where he was to be buried. The palace, which still exists, was made up from property Diomede acquired from his elder brother, Francesco, and from the Pignatelli family. Diomede imposed, as far as possible, a unified design on the block of buildings, which reflected Florentine and Catalan influences and contained many elements in the all’antica style so favoured in much of Italy at this time. The exterior of the palace took up three sides of the block, or insula, and elements of the pre-existing building, for example the placement and shape of some of the windows, can still be seen despite the application of opus isodomum (regular coursed masonry) to the façade. De Divitiis argues that the palace was completed only after Leon Battista Alberti’s visit to Naples in 1465. Alberti was in the city as the guest of Filippo Strozzi, from whom Diomede later asked for information about Piero de’ Medici’s studiolo with an eye to the design of his own studiolo in the palace. The timing of the visit, as well as specific elements of the façade design, in particular its Ionic portal, gives some weight to the hypothesis that Alberti was consulted. De Divitiis also argues convincingly that the arrangement and decoration of the palace’s interior was carefully considered. Diomede obtained furniture from Florence, owned a painting by Rogier van der Weyden and had a large collection of antique marble sculpture which he assembled through his connections in Florence, particularly with Filippo Strozzi, and through finds made at his property at Pozzuoli. Although the collection has now been dispersed – a process which began after Diomede Carafa, 1st Duke of Maddaloni, died in 1561 without direct heirs – some elements of it can still be identified, such as the mid-fifteenth century bronze head of a horse, the gift of Lorenzo de’ Medici, now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples. De Divitiis shows that, through his family and court connections, Diomede Carafa was able to ensure that both his palace and the collection it housed followed the latest trends, and even set them.

The third chapter, ‘Morire nel seggio’, deals with Carafa burial monuments in S. Domenico Maggiore, the main church in the seggio di Nido, and the final resting place of a number of members of the Carafa family.

After his death on 16th May 1487, Diomede’s funeral was held there and he was buried in the Cappellone del Crocefisso, one of two chapels in the church to which he had patronal rights. De Divitiis suggests that one reason that Diomede may have chosen to be buried there was because of the presence of a panel painting of Christ crucified which, according to legend, had spoken to Thomas Aquinas. She argues that Diomede’s funeral

monument (started seventeen years before his death) represents a significant innovation when compared with earlier Neapolitan funerary architecture, and that there are parallels between it and tombs of the 1460s and 1470s in Rome and Florence. Diomede’s father, Antonio Malizia Carafa, and his brother Francesco, are also buried in S. Domenico.

In an epilogue, de Divitiis examines the commission of the Cappella del Succorpo, constructed between 1497 and 1508, in Naples Cathedral by Oliviero Carafa, Francesco’s son.

The chapel was built to house the relics of S. Gennaro, patron saint of Naples, which had been brought to the cathedral through the efforts of various members of the Carafa clan.

Naples is not a city in which it is easy to trace its Renaissance past. The domination of Baroque architecture and the tendency to view fifteenth-century Naples as lagging behind cities such as Florence in terms of architectural or sculptural developments has resulted in a relative lack of studies of this period. Bianca de Divitiis’s thoroughly researched and fluently written book demonstrates how one Neapolitan noble family sought to be at the forefront of architectural and sculptural patronage not only in their own city, but in the Italian peninsula as a whole.

Peter Blake. One Man Show. By Marco Livingstone. 240 pp. incl. 195 col. + 35 b. & w. ills. (Lund Humphries, London, 2009), £35. ISBN 978–0–85331–980–1.

Reviewed by PAUL MOORHOUSE IN HIS INTRODUCTION to this handsome monograph, Marco Livingstone observes that ‘Blake’s early and sustained exploration of his own brand of Pop art has often failed to be given due credit’. It is perhaps a paradox that while Peter Blake is widely acknowledged as one of the pioneers of Pop art in Britain in the mid-1950s, his stature and later achievements have not been documented as fully as might be expected. During a career that now extends over more than fifty years, retrospectives held in 1973 at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Tate Gallery in 1983, Tate Liverpool in 2007 and the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao in 2008, with their accompanying catalogues, provided overviews. But a substantial monograph illuminating the full spectrum of his art has proved elusive. This book addresses that need.

Livingstone is an ideal guide. An authority on Pop art, he is sympathetic and sensitive to the particular character and wider nuances of Blake’s work. He is informative on the range of his subject’s passions: from early enthusiasms for cinema, the circus (Fig.44) and wrestling matches, to folk art, popular music and ephemera of bewildering diversity.

Indeed, if one overriding impression emerges from these pages, it is that of the extraordinary breadth of Blake’s work. The artist’s burgeoning engagement with popular culture and his

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Livingstone’s disclaimer underplays the useful personal and professional information interwoven with particular themes. We have accounts of Blake’s working-class childhood in which he emerges as a solitary boy fascinated by popular entertainment. Later we learn of his art education and grounding in a range of commercial, craft and fine art processes; of the serious cycling accident which led him to grow a beard to disguise the facial injury he suffered; and of his disabling shyness, sexual inexperience and subsequent relationships with Jann Haworth and Chrissy Wilson.

For Livingstone, Blake is a ‘gentle humanist’, a figure incapable of aggressive imagery or of engaging with darker concerns. This perception is apposite. Like its subject this book does not purvey a complex message, but is distinguished by affection and accessibility; and its design by Herman Lelie and Stefania Bonelli, with images created by the artist introducing each section, is a visual feast.

Publications Received 44. Circus poster, by Peter Blake. 1949. Gouache, 48.2 by 30.5 cm. (Collection of the artist).

gentle, at times whimsical, celebration of human experience here finds a clear and approachable exposition.

Doing justice to the rich texture of Blake’s œuvre will have presented a challenge. As Livingstone points out, the artist has constantly explored and adopted a multiplicity of styles and techniques, switching between pictorial languages within a short space of time and also, over periods of many years, simultaneously pursuing several different lines of protracted development. These contrasting artistic voices encompass that of the folk artist, Pop artist, academic, naive and naturalistic painter, sculptor, collagist and maker of conceptual works. Underpinning this medley there is Blake’s activity as an insatiable and obsessional collector of found objects, printed matter and memorabilia. As a result, the development of his work can appear confusing.

Livingstone’s strategy is to approach these various areas thematically. There are eight chapters, including sections focusing on early work connected with the circus and funfairs; the classic Pop phase, including the creation of his celebrated collage paintings; ‘fantasy portraits’ of wrestlers, boxers and strippers; paintings and drawings made from life and photographs; and ‘escapist fantasies’ addressing Blake’s Ruralist period characterised by imaginative, magical and sentimental subjects.

This successful device enables Livingstone to concentrate on patterns of related work pursued over longer periods and, when needed, to depart from a basic chronological structure. Somewhat surprisingly he prefaces this organisation of his material with the qualification that the book concentrates on ‘Blake’s art rather than his life’.

While the text reads as an appreciation of an artistic life and is not a biography,

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Altri Quaranta Dipinti Antichi della Collezione Saibene.

Edited by Giovanni Agosti. 384 pp. incl. 59 col. + 69 b. & w. ills. (Edizioni Valdonega, Verona, 2008).

ISBN 978–88–85033–53–5.

As the title indicates, this is the second volume of the Saibene collection, the first having been catalogued by Federico Zeri in 1955, under the title Trenta Dipinti Antichi della Collezione Saibene (reviewed in this Magazine, 99 (1957), p.103), covering acquisitions prior to that date. This second volume differs in that Giovanni Agosti provides an introductory essay of seventy pages, assigning the actual cataloguing to nine contributors.

Agosti’s contribution is a fascinating portrayal of the period of collecting in Milan between 1941 and 1971, with some intriguing insights into the working methods of Longhi and Zeri. In contrast, the catalogue entries tend to be too verbose and do not seem to have benefited from Zeri’s exemplary catalogues of Italian paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where even the most important painting is limited to three pages. In the current book, the shortest entry of some three pages refers to an enchanting Country scene

by Monaldi; while one of the longest entries (ten pages) concerns a Ferrarese Fragment of a lion, at the end of which there is an inconclusive attribution to Ercole de Roberti. Notable among the paintings are a Savoldo Evangelist, formerly in the Castelbarco Collection; a Moretto Virgin and Child, formerly Wesendonck, Berlin; a Domestic interior by Il Genovesino; and an impressive Landscape with architecture by Lemaire, with the suggestion that the figures are by Poussin (mention could have been made of the larger variant at Chatsworth; no.503).

W I L L I A M M O S T YN - O W E N

La Raccolta Dimezzata. Storia della Dispersione della Pinacoteca di Guglielmo Lochis (1789–1859). By Giovanna Brambilla Ranise. 412 pp. incl. 33 col. + 95 b. & w. ills. (Lubrina Editore, Bergamo, 2007), €60. ISBN 978–88–7766–360–3.

The Accademia Carrara in Bergamo was immeasurably enriched by the bequest in 1859 of Count Guglielmo Lochis. The 240 paintings, the single most important addition ever made to the collection, include masterpieces by Giovanni Bellini, Cosmè Tura and Titian. This book, however, deals with an additional three hundred pictures which, despite Lochis’s bequest of his entire collection to the city of Bergamo, were not in the end accepted. Lochis had stipulated in his will

that the collection must remain intact and on display, but in his purpose-built gallery at his villa outside Bergamo. The obsessively tight conditions of the will were, however, gradually unravelled, a final settlement allowing the Comune to take those paintings it wanted for the Accademia Carrara and in return awarding the Count’s heir, his nephew Carlo Lochis, title to the remainder. Giovanni Morelli selected the pictures for Bergamo and wrote shortly afterwards to Austen Henry Layard that among what remained ‘there is really very little worth having; anything of real interest [. . .] has been awarded on my recommendation to the Comune of Bergamo’. The remainder was quickly dispersed, the works of art sold at auction in Paris in 1868 and the greater part of the pictures bought in 1874 by the London-based Italian dealer Raffaelle Pinti. The main part of this book consists of a full catalogue of those pictures from the Lochis collection not selected

by Morelli, using as its starting point Lochis’s own catalogue of his pictures, the final edition of which was published in 1858.

Giovanna Brambilla Ranise sets out clearly what is known about the paintings’ subsequent histories, attempts to identify what they might have been and indeed succeeds in identifying a small number. She has unearthed some fascinating archival material, connecting Pinti and the dispersal of some pictures in Britain with the 3rd Marquess of Northampton and J.C. Robinson.

This book is beautifully produced, which makes it all the more disappointing that it should ultimately feel so lopsided. This is because, with the exception of a complete concordance of the collection, it ignores the Lochis collection as a whole, including the core still in Bergamo. Brambilla Ranise has already published separately on the development of the Lochis collection (G. Brambilla Ranise: ‘Una vita, una collezione, un tradimento. Guglielmo Lochis (1789–1859) e la sua raccolta’, Bergomum 99–100 (2005–06), pp.225–88), but it seems a wasted opportunity not even to summarise here, for a wider audience, the well-documented story of this fascinating collector. However, there is a slightly aggrieved undercurrent to this book, present also in some of the prefaces, lamenting the betrayal of Lochis’s wishes and the loss to Italy of this patrimony. Drawing more attention to the masterpieces now in the Accademia Carrara might have made it more difficult to sustain this line of argument.

Many civic authorities might have blenched at the demands made by Lochis’s will and the fact is that the Comune was able to select what it wanted. On the basis of the – with one or two exceptions – minor works and copies identified here, it seems clear that Morelli did his job pretty well. However, the catalogue, the fruit of painstaking and intense research, should certainly assist the process of identification of more pictures and is a valuable contribution to the study of collecting and Anglo-Italian cultural relations in the 1860s and 1870s.

J E R E M Y W A R R EN

Monuments and the Art of Mourning. The Tombs of Popes and Princes in St. Peter’s. By Philipp Fehl, revised and completed by Raina Fehl, edited by Richard Bösel and Raina Fehl. 219 pp. incl. 38 b. & w. ills.

(Unione Internazionale degli Istituti di Archeologia Storia e Storia dell’Arte in Roma, Rome, 2007), €20. No ISBN. Between 1996 and 1998 Philipp Fehl gave ten lectures, finally bringing together his highly personal insights into subjects on which he had been meditating for several decades: the tombs of St Peter’s, and the theme of tombs as guardians of memory and ‘witnesses and teachers of the Art of Mourning’. By his death in 2000 he had regrettably not yet revised them for the obligatory publication, and the onerous task of doing so was undertaken by his widow. Her notes also include useful material from other studies by the author, some never published; extracts from three of these related works are printed in appendices.

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Exhibitions Richard Long London

by MARINA VAIZEY O N E O F S H A K E S P E A R E ’ s most often quoted lines, from Hamlet, simply asserts that ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy’. The current retrospective at Tate Britain (to 6th September) of the art of Richard Long, the first in London since the Arts Council’s Hayward Gallery show in 1991, has been titled Heaven and Earth by Long himself, a phrase he had earlier used for specific works of art. The phrase, implying complementary opposites, has been suggested by the I Ching, that ancient Chinese text which for millennia has guided explorations of change and stability, order and chaos, the seemingly random and the discovery of pattern. The sophisticated yet simple concepts behind the I Ching may well be an inspiration for three of the largest works on view: the great wall painting in Vallauris clay (Fig.45) and the first room with its two huge wall paintings in River Avon mud, exploiting almost endless variations in density of tone and hue, dominated by light and dark ochres and browns so dark as to be almost black, shaped by the primordial forms of cross and line. The tidal Avon is Long’s home river; he was born in Bristol, where he still lives, in 1945.

Long was part of the gifted generation at St Martin’s School of Art which included those anarchic sculptors Gilbert & George, in a department whose faculty was led by Anthony Caro. Long is on record, however, as saying that, as might be expected, the students taught each other; and Long, uncannily precocious, is perhaps the most original of all the post-War generation of British artists.

Physicists tell us that even the most solidappearing object is actually continually in flux, that all matter is always on the move.

Long’s unusual gift is to make this visible, just as in the earliest part of the last century Kandinsky and later Paul Klee made the rhythms of music consciously visible. In part, originality does obviously consist in making others look and think in different ways and the surprising, even archaic simplicity of Long’s strategies have done just that. He takes us with him on his seemingly solitary journeys which underline, usually in black-and-white photographs, very occasionally in colour, and printed or handwritten prose poems, the emotive beauties of everything from a scruffy English meadow to the Australian outback, from the Himalayas to the high Peruvian plains. We too can have a dream of selfreliance, of the enjoyment of solitude, of wilderness both near and far: nothing man-made is visible except for Long’s own

45. From beginning to end, by Richard Long. 2009. Vallauris clay, dimensions variable. (Exh. Tate Britain, London).

interventions which only use the found and natural materials to hand.

The first iconic piece in the exhibition, deceptively simple, was given by its creator its literal title: A line made by walking (Fig.46) was just that: from a train window Long spied a promising meadow, and finding it, made a line through the rough grass by walking up and down and up and down, wearing a path (as animals and humans have done for millennia). He photographed the surprisingly serene result, ensuring through the lens an almost complete symmetry, the wildflower meadow divided in half by the path, the path itself disappearing into a boundary which consisted, with a fairy-tale resonance, of a dark wood.

In 1968 Long had his first one-man exhibition, with Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf, with whom he has shown ever since. The city was home to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, perhaps at that point the most innovative teaching institution anywhere – the prodigiously gifted photographers and teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher were among the faculty, not to mention Joseph Beuys, whose title was Professor of Monumental Sculpture. Düsseldorf was then the self-styled City of Artists, the city publishing a book by that name, and hosted, among others, the young Klaus Rinke who was throwing water into the Rhine as a piece of performance. From the very beginning, whether willed or not, Long has been at the heart of things. In London, his first commercial exhibitions throughout the 1970s were at the Lisson Gallery, which pioneered the exhibition of a remarkable range of young British sculptors (Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Anish Kapoor, Julian Opie) and, to the astonishment of the influential few who then visited, the leading American conceptualists and minimalists. By the 1980s Long was showing

with Anthony d’Offay and indeed the Anthony d’Offay Artist Rooms includes one devoted to Long.

In the more than four decades since that first show Long has had hundreds of solo and group exhibitions, published countless cards and other ephemera, and been involved in scores of major publications, from such seminal group catalogues as When Attitudes Become Form (London and Bern, 1969), to catalogues and monographs of his own work.

Long has made art of his own journeys, performance on the grandest scale, dominated and characterised by invented rituals, even at times by the repetitive actions which we may sometimes associate with captive animals pacing in cages, or routines which shore up human fragility by an external framework of

46. A line made by walking, by Richard Long. 1967.

Black-and-white photograph, 85.5 by 116 cm.

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47. Walking music, by Richard Long. 2004. Text work, dimensions variable. (Collection of the artist; exh.

Tate Britain, London).

ritualistic activity. He has made art of the most childlike activities, the playing with sticks and stones – a 1980 publication has on its title page ‘Five, six, pick up sticks/Seven, eight, lay them straight’ – mud and wood. Rather than sandcastles though, Long uses a free hand and intuitive geometry, no line exactly straight, each characterised by the individual physiognomy, so to speak, of a flint, a twig, a rock. For an art that can seem so austere, there is at times a surprising flamboyance; and, in several interviews over the years, Long has indicated the intense enjoyment his hard walking ways have provided for him.

Long’s radical art is about the outside, the outside world of nature itself, seemingly untouched by human hand or intervention – except of course for the artist’s – but in order to appreciate it, to make it visible, we, his audience, and his work have to be inside, in the confines of the classic white room, the gallery space, and often, in the case of the large sculptures made of permanent materials such as pieces of slate, rocks, flints or driftwood, in the cultivated garden, an outdoor room confined and defined by human design. The wilderness is domesticated, and the emotions landscape evokes are made clear; we cannot look at ‘nature’ and not anthropomorphise what we see. Do these hills know they are providing a view, these clouds know they are drifting, the buzzard know he is watching the artist?

The work at Tate Britain is arranged in a rough chronology, but the show opens with the two site-specific new wall paintings of Heaven and Earth, and then proceeds, again roughly chronologically. All but one of the galleries are filled with wall-hanging texts (Fig.47) or text-and-photo pieces or wall paintings, but this intelligently and spaciously arranged spectrum of work from the 1960s onwards is punctuated at the centre of the exhibition by a room of six floor sculptures covering twenty

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years (1980–2000) – circles, a line and an ellipse, deploying slate, basalt and flint. Circle, black white blue purple circle is surprisingly Baroque, almost florid in its use of coloured Swiss stones, some upended. Two rooms further on there is another wall painting, an enormous White water line of cascades and waterfalls of Cornish china clay, made in situ, belying its title. Mostly there are hanging text works, descriptions of walks, amplified by words or phrases indicating things seen, things felt, sounds heard. A text piece called Circle of autumn winds is a scatter of arrows framed in a circle, captioned as Reading the Wind Reading the Compass A Walk of 46 miles inside an imaginary circle on Dartmoor, England, 1994. The text pieces are both spare and informative. They work as formal arrangements of symbols, maps and words. Other pieces are photographs, each a moment in time with the text describing the walk, the sculpture or intervention, as well as time. The occasional use of colour is curiously jarring, the more typical use of black-and-white photography (no technical details are given) silvery in tone and peculiarly soothing.

One thing leads to another, everything is connected is a photograph of the Cairngorm mountains overlaid with a written description of a sequence of things, from rainclouds to rainbow. This particular image and text (2007) is not at Tate but is published as a double spread in the catalogue which contains a significant number of works not on view, and does not include the site-specific wall pieces or the installations of the sculptures.1 The catalogue shows work from 1966 to 2008, the exhibition to 2009. A separate gallery is devoted to a specialist exhibition of Long publications, from invitation cards to posters and books by (not on) the artist.

All this exemplifies one of the fascinating paradoxes of Long’s œuvre. An original text piece, a captioned photograph and, certainly, a large sculpture can probably only be afforded by major institutions and rich private collectors. The big pieces have to be seen in reality to be appreciated, for their relation to human scale, their textures and physicality being sometimes overwhelming. The highly legible yet rather touchingly quirky handwriting of the earliest pieces also needs to be seen.

Yet many of the printed text pieces and captioned photographs are readily enjoyed in a myriad publications and are often available at modest cost. This means much of his work is accessible in book or pamphlet form, easily enjoyed domestically. He is the most democratic of artists, permitting us to be armchair travellers in a new definition of the relationship of the viewer to art.

Richard Long has vehemently denied being a romantic, suggesting if anything he might be a classicist. He has referred to path-making and mark-leaving as ancient activities, and although he has been labelled a Conceptual artist and has been included in anthologies of Land Art, in most respects he is none of these. People do not make pilgrimages to see his work in situ; rather it comes to us, in publications often at low cost, and in exhibitions and public collections, in

the heart of cities. His practice has many provocative contradictions. But above all else his work not only makes us think but is visually captivating, in both word and image.

1 Catalogue: Richard Long Heaven and Earth. Edited

by Clarrie Wallis, with contributions by Michael Craig-Martin, Nicholas Serota, Clarrie Wallis and Andrew Wilson. 240 pp. incl. 120 col. ills. (Tate Publishing, London, 2009), £24.95 (PB). ISBN 978–1–85437–841–5. The catalogue, co-designed by Long, contains a surprisingly poetic introduction by Nicholas Serota, a vividly informative biographical and critical essay by Clarrie Wallis, a good piece on Long’s publications by Andrew Wilson and a charming if superfluous artist’s interview with Michael Craig-Martin. There is an excellent and inclusive bibliography, lists of exhibitions and indexes; and there has been a sincere attempt to make the book as aesthetically appealing as possible.

Matthew Boulton Birmingham

by CELINA FOX

(1728–1809; Fig.48) was blessed with an enterprising nature, it was nurtured by Birmingham where he had the good fortune to be born. As an unincorporated borough, the town was not encumbered by the restrictive trade practices associated with guilds. Its skilled workforce adapted flexibly to the needs of specialist metal trades, producing iron, brass and pewter ware, nails, guns, edge tools, clocks and ‘toys’ (buckles, buttons, sword hilts, snuff boxes, chatelaines, watch chains, etc.), the manufacture of which involved rolling, stamping, cutting out, chasing, engraving, burnishing, gilding and many other processes. During Boulton’s lifetime the town’s population multiplied five-fold, from fifteen

IF MATTHEW BOULTON

48. Portrait of Matthew Boulton, by Lemuel Francis Abbott. c.1798–1801. Canvas, 73.6 by 61.6 cm.

(Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery).

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49. View of Soho Manufactory, Birmingham, engraved

by Francis Eginton. From S. Shaw: History and Antiquities of the County of Stafford, London 1798–1801, pl.XVII. Etching and engraving with aquatint, 27.7 by 38.2 cm. (plate mark). (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery).

to seventy-five thousand. Already by 1759 some twenty thousand people were involved in the metal trades. If the handsome exhibition Matthew Boulton: Selling What All the World Desires at the Gas Hall, Birmingham (to 27th September),1 commemorates the bicentenary of Boulton’s death, it can also be seen as a tribute to one of the country’s great manufacturing centres.

The dependence of the wealth of ornamental goods displayed on core mechanical skills is symbolised at the start of the exhibition by Boulton’s own treadle lathe, a blacksmith’s anvil, bellows and hand tools typical of those employed in eighteenth-century workshops, overlooked by Wright of Derby’s painting of An iron forge (1772). The intellectual context is suggested, almost inevitably, by Wright’s An experiment on a bird in the air pump (1768), supported by examples of correspondence between Boulton and Benjamin Franklin as well as with members of the Lunar Society.

One of Boulton’s notebooks is opened to reveal lists of the scientific instruments he owned and those which he wanted to acquire.

Others containing observations, sketches and even a sample of gold leaf demonstrate the range of his interests and his tastes in art, music and literature. The sciences and the polite and mechanical arts intermingled in a still unified world of knowledge.

In 1761 Boulton leased thirteen acres of land at Soho in Handsworth, about two miles from the town centre. Although able to invest £6,000 of his own money, boosted the following year with £5,000 from his business partner, John Fothergill, he was taking a huge financial gamble. The principal building of the Soho Manufactory ran well over budget, costing £10,000 by the time it was completed in the mid-1760s. But Boulton was determined to raise the reputation of ‘Brummagem’ ware as synonymous with the cheap and shoddy, by ensuring that outward appearances reflected the inner product.

Designed by William Wyatt in Neo-classical style, the Soho Manufactory served as a valuable promotional tool. Prints presenting its Palladian front to the world (Fig.49) spread Soho’s fame as a repository of taste and an

approved source of quality goods for fashionable society.

The exhibition does not explore the beehive within, where at any one time, depending on the economic cycle, four, six or even eight hundred men, women and children were employed in a warren of chambers, their labour deployed on a medley of processes and techniques. But some idea of the precision skills involved is gained from a pattern book showing designs for sword hilts ornamented with tiny facetted steel studs, as well as from finished examples. The wholesale trade is represented by a group of gilt-metal chatelaines of Rococo design in their original wrapping paper, probably acquired as samples

by James Watt when he ran a shop selling polite accoutrements to aspirational Glaswegians. A bespoke order of 1769, for Mrs Fontaine of Marylebone and Mrs Yeats, comes complete with wax seal impressions of the crests to be incorporated in servants’ livery buttons. As Peter Jones’s essay in the catalogue shows, Soho was a high spot on the industrial tourism circuit, attracting a stream of luminaries, not to mention various shades of industrial spy. Presumably Boulton needed no encouragement to ‘show every civility’ to His Excellency Alleyne Fitzherbert, British Ambassador to the Russian Court, as requested in a letter of introduction on display, given that diplomatic connections for Boulton, as for Wedgwood, served as trade conduits to Continental markets.

A section of the exhibition is devoted to Boulton’s family life, focusing on Soho House, newly built in 1757 and leased with the rest of the estate. The family Bible, from the edition printed in 1763 by Boulton’s friend John Baskerville of Birmingham, records births over three generations including Matthew Robinson Boulton, who is depicted aged three in a charming pastel by Jean-Etienne Liotard. Most of the material on display relates to the period after the remodelling of the house in 1790 by James and Samuel Wyatt, complete with a centralised steam heating system, and the purchase of the freehold in 1794. Drawings and watercolours made by John Phillp, who came to live with

the family from Cornwall in 1793 at the age of fourteen (possibly he was Boulton’s natural son), show the mature parkland around Soho House and the Manufactory, featuring a hermitage, temple and boating lake. The klismos chair and dainty japanned furniture by the London maker James Newton indicate that Boulton kept up with contemporary design trends into the Regency period.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a glittering assemblage of ormolu, displayed with more than a touch of ‘bling’ to suggest the rich, fashionable set of people the pieces were intended to attract. Mrs Montagu led a chorus of admirers who paid homage to Boulton for the exquisite taste of his ornaments based on the Antique. A spectacular blue john and ormolu garniture de cheminée, comprising a clock, candle and sphinx vases designed by William Chambers, has been lent from the Queen’s private sitting room at Windsor Castle (Fig.50). The elegant pair of blue john and ormolu ewers adorned with satyr masks were created in 1772 for Sir Harbord Harbord, who wanted ‘ures such as are proper for the gods to drink necter’. Most impressive to this reviewer are a pair of candle vases, the oval bodies of matt white glass supplied from the Stourbridge glassworks of Boulton’s friend and fellow ‘Lunatick’, James Keir. A considerable degree of judgment and luck must have been required to drill the glass to secure the ormolu fittings without it shattering into pieces.

Boulton was intimately involved in all stages of design and production. The simple forms, smooth surfaces and regular patterns favoured by Neo-classicism were well suited to machine production. Further economies could be made through the division of labour: an ormolu and white marble candle vase on display has been dismantled into forty different parts. Cast models of different motifs – rams’ heads, satyrs, masks and medallions – were re-used in different designs. The

50. King’s vase, by Boulton & Fothergill. 1770–71.

Blue john and ormolu, with tortoiseshell-veneered base, 56.1 cm. high. (Royal Collection, Windsor Castle; exh. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery). the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e

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51. A ceiling baffle, a vacuum trumpet and decorative plates from a coin press,

by John Phillp.

1799. Coloured drawing on paper, 48.3 by 62 cm.

(Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery).

less-than-perfect condition of some pieces reveals how separate sections of ormolu were pieced together, using rivets to attach them to the body. But special orders and short runs meant that Boulton & Fothergill’s ormolu business never made a profit. Their chefs d’œuvre, the ‘Geographical Clock’ and ‘Sidereal Clock’ (Fig.52), were designed round movements commissioned by Boulton from another friend and Lunar Society member, John Whitehurst. In 1772 Boulton put them both into the last of the three ormolu sales he staged at Christie’s, but they failed to sell.

The ‘Sidereal Clock’ went to Russia in 1779 but returned unsold in 1787, eclipsed by James Cox’s all-singing, all-dancing ‘Peacock Clock’, which had been acquired by the Empress Catherine for less than half the price of Boulton’s chaste scientific timepiece. Now safely in the possession of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, the ‘Sidereal Clock’ is displayed for the first time since 1772 alongside the ‘Geographical Clock’, lent from a private collection.

Boulton’s energies do not seem to have been drained by the ormolu business. He led the campaign to establish an assay office in Birmingham, a goal achieved in 1773 – it is now the busiest in the world. The exhibition demonstrates he was already producing highquality silver and plate in the 1760s, notably the ‘three Great Solomonean Candlesticks’ commissioned by the Duke of Cumberland for the Royal (Masonic) Lodge, another prestige job which proved costly: nine years later he still had to be paid. Yet, dynamic entrepreneurship and mechanical ingenuity sustained Boulton’s multifaceted enterprise.

In 1772, one learns, he supplies green glass earrings as barter for Captain Cook’s second circumnavigation of the globe. Twenty years later he is proposing specimens of ‘Brass Cabinet Furniture’ be sent on Lord Macartney’s mission to China to find out whether ‘we could not execute any designs adapted to their own taste in a superior & cheaper manner than themselves’. He never resisted the opportunity for innovation. Between 1776 and 1780 he backed an employee Francis Eginton in his

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scheme to produce decorative ‘mechanical paintings’ by a convoluted process involving the transfer of a coloured print to canvas, which was then varnished to give the appearance of an oil. Even before he met James Watt, he was thinking of introducing steam power at the Soho Manufactory, but the partnership he established with him in 1775 was to be the making of both of them. It was Boulton’s energy, experience and connections as a manufacturer that pushed Watt’s steam engine into production. It was his knowledge of industrial needs that persuaded Watt to develop the rotative engine to power factories.

To do justice to that story would require another exhibition. Instead, the organisers have concentrated on one application of steam power: Boulton’s Soho Mint, the first constructed in 1787–89 and the second in 1799, incorporating technical improvements which made the coining process quieter and more efficient. One of Phillp’s fine technical drawings (Fig.51) for the latter shows that even it displayed dulce et utile – a ceiling baffle in the form of a sun radiating rays of folded paper and a coin press adorned with allegorical plaques. The shining example of the world’s first steam-powered mint against the murky background of counterfeit is highlighted in the displays both here and in a small exhibition Matthew Boulton and the Art of Making Money at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham (to 16th May 2010), as well as two essays in the catalogue and a dedicated publication from the Barber.2 The quality of its output was unrivalled, every coin being for the first time of identical appearance, size and weight. The quantities were colossal: nearly 600 million coins, medals and tokens were struck by the Soho Mint between 1787 and 1809, including six million tokens in twenty-five designs, fortyfive different medals and hundreds of millions of copper coins for Great Britain, Ireland and the East India Company. Furthermore, Boulton supplied mints to Russia and Denmark, as well as presses and blanks to Philadelphia. The Mint’s business with France confirms Boulton’s pragmatism in matters political: seven

and a half million French tokens were produced for Monneron Frères between 1791 and 1792, as well as medals featuring Revolutionary themes, fraternal feelings soon reversed by those commemorating the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Patriotic British medals, the finest engraved

by Conrad Heinrich Küchler, celebrated, among other events, the restoration of George III’s health in 1789 and Nelson’s victories of the Nile and Trafalgar. But the Mint’s core business came from what is now called quantitative easing – tokens issued to compensate for the shortage of specie and eventually, in 1797, the copper coinage contract from the British government.

Boulton may have mastered the art of making money for others but not necessarily for himself. At the time of his death he held thirteen partnerships and his disorganised financial affairs have never been wholly untangled. It seems he was highly leveraged, relying on loans arranged by his London bankers, William and Charlotte Matthews.

They certainly deserve credit for keeping Boulton afloat; as these illuminating exhibitions confirm, few men have contributed more to Britain’s industrial progress.

1 Catalogue: Matthew Boulton: Selling What All the World Desires. Edited by Shena Mason. 258 pp. incl. 404 col. ills. (Birmingham City Council in association with Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2009), £40 (HB). ISBN 978–0–300–14358–4.

2 Catalogue: Matthew Boulton and the Art of Making Money. Edited by Richard Clay and Sue Tungate. 89 pp. incl. 99 col. ills. (Brewin Books, Studley, Warwickshire, for the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, 2009), £9.95. ISBN 978–1–85858–450–8.

52. Sidereal Clock, by Boulton & Fothergill. 1771–72.

Ormolu, silvered dial, 104.1 cm. high. (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery).

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Moore, Hepworth, Nicholson Norwich and Sheffield

by FRANCES SPALDING O N L Y T W O R E L A T I V E L Y small galleries are needed for Moore, Hepworth, Nicholson: A Nest of Gentle Artists at the Graves Gallery, Sheffield (to 31st August). Yet packed into this limited space is a major exhibition, intelligently focused and beautifully structured around a sculptural development that climaxes with serene examples of high Modernism. Throughout, the selection of works provokes fresh examination of the shared ideas and relationships between artists who, when living in Hampstead, were described by Herbert Read as ‘a nest of gentle artists’. This he defined as ‘a spontaneous association of men and women drawn together by common sympathies, shared seriousness and some kind of group collaboration’.

Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson are the three main figures, with John Skeaping playing a significant but lesser role. One motivation behind this exhibition, originated by Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery (where it was shown earlier in the year), seems to be a desire to prove the significance of Norfolk, and in particular the beach below the cliffs at Happisburgh, to the history of Modernism in Britain. More familiar is the emphasis on the importance of the Yorkshire landscape for Moore and Hepworth, and the focus on Hampstead as a crucible of international Modernism after the arrival of émigré artists, architects and designers in the mid- to late 1930s. But the claim for Norfolk is, nevertheless, justified, for certain members of Moore’s family moved to Norfolk after the death of his father in 1922 and he himself began spending holidays there. In this way he discovered Happisburgh, which in 1930 he suggested to Hepworth as a location for a working holiday.

53. Reclining figure,

by Henry Moore.

1930. Ironstone, 11.5 by 17.5 by 3.5 cm. (Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, University of East Anglia; exh. Graves Gallery, Sheffield).

54. Three forms, by Barbara Hepworth. 1936. Serravezza marble, 21 by 53.2 by 34.3 cm. (Tate Collection; exh.

Graves Gallery, Sheffield).

At the time, Hepworth was married to Skeaping who had taught her how to carve directly in stone and wood. At Moore’s suggestion they rented Church Farm on the outskirts of Happisburgh, and Moore and his wife, Irina, were invited to join them, as were others – the painter Ivon Hitchens and Hepworth’s friends Douglas and Mary Jenkins. The party spent much time on the beach where they discovered large ironstone pebbles which proved to be ideal for carving and polishing. Nicholas Thornton points out, in the catalogue to this show, that a particular feature of these pebbles is their flat, disc-like shape.1 This encouraged inventive compression, as can be seen in the case of examples included here. Skeaping’s Duck (cat. no.52) has its head turned back and pressed into its body. The thorax of Moore’s Reclining figure (no.11; Fig.53) is necessarily tilted upright so that the weight of the body and its rhythms can be adequately conveyed. The astonishing

completeness of this small work, from the University of East Anglia’s Sainsbury Collection, reminds us that these small carvings, far from being mere exercises, soon afterwards took their place in exhibitions, seven of them appearing in Skeaping’s and Hepworth’s joint show at Arthur Tooth’s later that year, and four appearing in Moore’s solo appearance at the Leicester Galleries in 1931.

Not all the works shown in Norwich have travelled to Sheffield. One regrettable absence is Moore’s Woman with upraised hands (1924–25; no.5), which must have offered a powerful example of the early influence on Moore of non-Western and archaic art. Nevertheless, among the items suggesting the back-history to this exhibition is the small, early carving Two heads: mother and child from 1923 (no.4), in which we find Moore rebelling against the emphasis on modelling as taught at the Royal College of Art. He left off before any facial features had been indicated, the two heads emerging from the block of Serpentine stone with the elemental simplicity of a Brancusi. Elsewhere, a well-chosen selection of drawings, either sculptural in feel, as in Moore’s weighty drawing of his sister Mary, or deliberately pursuing ideas for sculpture, add to the rich substrata of correspondences which this exhibition taps.

Inevitably, one of these ideas is the piercing of form by means of a hole. Much has been written about the dynamism of the hole, while arguments continue as to whether Moore or Hepworth originated this move. Thornton simply remarks that as holes in pebbles are a common occurrence we might sensibly credit Happisburgh beach as a source for this invention. In 1931 Hepworth and Moore decided to organise a second working holiday at Happisburgh. By this date, the tensions in the Skeaping–Hepworth marriage had led Skeaping to ask for a divorce and he decided to stay in London. In his place, Hepworth invited Nicholson. When Skeaping had a change of heart and arrived in Happisburgh, he discovered that his wife had already begun an the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e

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Polish art Norwich

by ROBERT RADFORD

at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art, University of East Anglia (to 30th August), The Art and Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor: An Impossible Journey and Take a Look at Me Now: Contemporary Art from Poland, contribute to the many manifestations that make up POLSKA! YEAR, a celebration of Polish culture taking place throughout Britain in 2009. In the first exhibition, we are vividly reminded of the powerful and widespread influence of Kantor during the 1970s and 1980s. Here was a man dedicated to the idea of ‘Café Europe’, a trans-European mentality, even though his objects and performances evoke at the same time specific locations and sites of memory, which were particular to the artist and the troubled times that his life spanned from 1915 to 1990. Extensive loans from the Cricoteka in Kraków help to recreate one of the last moments in which new and emotionally intense art forms were developing, as performance art and ‘happenings’ were emerging as hybrids from the union of experimental theatre, painting and sculpture.

Although the original purpose of many of the exhibits, such as the ranks of pupils in The dead class (Fig.56), was that they should be central elements of a stage performance, their surviving status as sculptural imagery can scarcely be considered as secondary. The itinerant figure of Man with a suitcase (1967), bent double under his burden of baggage remains a powerful and universal metaphor. Kantor’s world is one shared, not only with Samuel Beckett, but also with Antoni Tàpies and Joseph Beuys, in his affirmation of the significance of the banal, disdained ‘poor object’.

His original training was as a painter and this aspect of his output is also reflected in the exhibition. He first achieved recognition in Paris, with works such as the black, nihilistic, tachiste work Pacific (1957), and paintings from the 1980s are also shown here. But the theatricality of his work still operates. The visitor

TWO CONCURRENT SHOWS

55. Still life with guitar, by Ben Nicholson. 1932. Oil on board, 76.2 by 63.3 cm. (Leeds City Art Gallery; exh.

Graves Gallery, Sheffield).

association with Nicholson which would eventually lead to their marriage. Skeaping therefore drops out of the nest, at the same time abandoning his central role in the history of Modernism. Nicholson moves into the gap, and begins to incise lines (Fig.55) into the gesso often laid over the board on which he painted. Previously it has been inferred that the inspiration for this came from watching carvers work, but here the suggestion is that Nicholson’s scratched lines encouraged Moore to incise his near-abstract sculptures with facial profiles and other details. Certainly, the few choice works by Nicholson make a timely and eloquent contribution to this show.

What needs to be intuited in the exhibition’s final section is the sense of urgency and idealism which Moore, Hepworth and Nicholson assimilated through their association with non-figurative artists living in Paris, many of whom had fled totalitarian regimes in Germany and Russia. But having been given the opportunity to follow this transition to purer forms, we are made especially alert to the ways in which allusions to representational matter still cling to some of these abstracts.

The confident geometrical simplicity of Hepworth’s Three forms, for instance (no.40; Fig.54), carries within it a reminiscence of familial relationships, such as had earlier informed her mother-and-child carvings.

Even Nicholson’s white reliefs are multi-referential, not least through the various resonances conveyed by the use of white. Three are shown here. The one hanging on the wall has a magisterial beauty and calm. But it is one of the two smaller versions, displayed in a nearby case and composed entirely of rectangles, that best conveys the astonishing profundity of feeling he attained through abstraction.

1 Exhibition guide: Moore, Hepworth, Nicholson: A Nest of Gentle Artists in the 1930s. Introduction by Nicholas Thornton. 11 pp. incl. 6 col. + b. & w. ills. (Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery and Graves Gallery, Sheffield, 2009), p.5.

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57. Kolorobloki, by Nicolas Grospierre. 2006. Aluminium, 100 by 70 cm. (Collection of the artist; exh.

Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art, Norwich).

encounters an apparently mute pile of old folding chairs which suddenly springs into cranky, autonomous life and becomes an Annihilating machine. Some of his pieces are ‘secreted’ in the Sainsbury’s permanent collection so that his amply descriptive Children in the rubbish cart is seen disarmingly close to Degas’s Little dancer aged 14. There is a substantial section of the exhibition devoted to archive material from Kraków, supplemented by other material recording performances of his work in Edinburgh, Cardiff and London’s Riverside Studios in 1976, as well as his Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition, the same year.

The fifteen artists selected for Take a Look at Me Now, a show that contributes to Norwich’s season of contemporary art, CAN09, share little with the dark, traumatic world of Kantor.

They are from the generations that look to the new, politically unthreatening world of the EU as their natural habitat, even though the physical environment inherited from the Communist years is not fully banished from their worldview. Although it would be unrealistic to expect a common programme to emerge from this heterogeneous and accidental grouping of artists, a concern with and reaction to urban living can be discerned as a noticeable theme. Nicolas Grospierre documents the high-rise workers’ housing blocks (Fig.57), initiated, no doubt, with all the zeal for collective identity that was so well served by high Modernism. His photographs reveal the colourful and resourceful efforts that their subsequent owners have taken to express their 56. Children at their desks, from The dead class, by Tadeusz Kantor. 1975. Mixed media, 150 by 150 by 420 cm. (Cricoteka Collection, Kraków; exh. Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art, Norwich).

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58. Tanagram, by Anna Molska. 2006–07. Video projection, 4 minutes, 3 seconds. (Foksal Gallery, Warsaw; exh. Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art, Norwich).

personal independence from such an ideology.

The relentless, mechanical circuit of the multi-storey lift of such a block is treated with a formal, conceptual elegance in Piotr Zylinski’s video. A potential sense of menace is evoked in the depiction of buildings in Adam Adach’s paintings. A mood of ambient tension is also discernible in a number of pieces, most obviously – albeit humorously – in Olaf Brzeski’s distressed and battered ceramic museum exhibits. The ‘Grimmest’ of mock fairy tales is played out by Katarzina Kozyra in her film and performance work Summertale. In a setting, not unlike Józef Mehoffer’s Strange garden, shown in Tate Britain’s recent Symbolism in Poland and Britain exhibition, a company of dwarfish maidservants deal gorily with the Berlin transvestite Gloria Viagra and her singing teacher. The legacy of Eastern European and Russian Constructivism finds a distant echo in the painting of Rafak Bujnowski, based on views restrictively glimpsed through the cracks in a Venetian blind, and in Anna Molska’s curious video, Tanagram (Fig.58), in which a pair of muscular young men, in fetishist leather, arrange and rearrange sectional furniture, to the accompanying soundtrack of the Red Army Choir.

On this evidence contemporary Polish art displays wit and vitality, an eagerness to respond to the direct experience of the world, free from any affected self-consciousness or insipid irony.

Although Blake may have been neglected in Paris, he himself believed that his life and work would be eternal and universal. Perhaps, then, an unrealised ambition to visit France has been fulfilled by this exhibition in the afterlife. Blake told John Flaxman in October 1801 that, aware of Napoleon’s French seizures of Italian treasures, he hoped now ‘to see the Great Works of Art [. . .] Paris being scarce further off than London’.2 In reality, he never left England, but in 2006 the first work

by Blake ever to be acquired by France was bought for the Louvre – the powerful 1805 watercolour of The Death of the Strong Wicked Man (cat. no.159; Fig.59) from Robert Blair’s poem ‘The Grave’.

So the French connections live on. André Gide’s words in homage to Blake from 1947 provide the frontispiece in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition: ‘The star, Blake, sparkles in the remote region of the sky . . .’. Happily, too, a few French subjects were shown: two 1782 prints after Antoine Watteau, Morning amusement and Evening amusement (nos.150–51), which were hung next to three Westminster Abbey tomb drawings of c.1774 showing King Edward III, a dedicated pursuer of French wars (nos.6, 7 and 8). Also included was a fine tempera portrait of Voltaire after Jean Baptiste Guélard, dating from Blake’s time in Sussex between 1800 and 1803 (no.152; Fig.60).

Complementing Pierre Leyris’s invaluable translations of the poems (1974–83) is Jean Cortot’s telling painted diptych Elegy to William Blake (1988–89; no.160).

The catalogue includes twenty-nine essays, all learned and engaging, a chronology and catalogue entries expertly handled by Catherine de Bourgoing, Deputy Director of the Musée de la Vie Romantique, Paris (although David Fuller catalogues the five Dante works), a brief bibliography and index.

Michael Phillips, the well-known Blake scholar, is the exhibition’s guest curator. His fine opening essay (pp.39–51) concisely and

accurately covers the artist’s life, times, radicalism and ever-innovative printmaking.

The ensuing essay, ‘The Art of William Blake’ (pp.65–73) by Martin Butlin, enlarges on Blake’s art and is the perfect introduction to the twenty-six brief, single-author essays that follow.

Among the essays, Jon Stallworthy (pp.101–03) discusses the significance of metre and rhyme in Blake in ways not often brought to the fore in Blake exhibitions.

David France (pp.200–02) explores four different French translations of Blake’s poem ‘O Rose, thou art sick’. A magical injection to this exercise is the reference to Benjamin Britten’s setting of the words.

The scope of the exhibition was admirably balanced, striking the right inquiring note for everyone from Blake neophytes to the cognoscenti. There were eighteen illuminated plates from ‘Innocence’ and ‘Experience’ (from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Victoria University Library, Toronto; Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the Wormsley Library, London), including a fine impression of ‘The Tyger’ (Fitzwilliam Museum; no.27); ‘Pity’ (no.76), one of the two large colour plates lent by Tate with the other, ‘The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy’ (no.79), joined by a second state lent by the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (no.80); ‘The Ancient of Days’ (Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; no.42); seventeen plates of ‘Europe a Prophecy’ (University of Glasgow; nos.43–59); the ‘Fall of Man’ (Victoria and Albert Museum, London; no.105); and the print ‘The Laocoon’ (Fitzwilliam Museum; no.99).

There were also carefully arranged drawn sketches; for example, a ‘Tiriel’ subject (Whitworth Art Gallery; no.12) placed next to the finished ink-and-watercolour of the same subject (Fitzwilliam Museum/Keynes Family Trust; no.13). We also had the first stages in the development of the large colour plate ‘Pity’ (nos.73–76). Two other display ‘musts’ were naturally highlighted – an 1825 ‘Job’ 59. The Death of the Strong Wicked Man,

by William Blake.

1805. Pen, black ink and watercolour over pencil, 20.2 by 25.5 cm. (Musée du Louvre, Paris; exh.

Petit Palais, Paris).

William Blake Paris

by ROBIN HAMLYN

the first-ever retrospective in France devoted to William Blake, held at the Petit Palais, Paris (closed 28th June).1 Until now Blake had a very limited French audience. In 1937 sixteen works were shown at the Bibliothèque Nationale and in 1938 eight Blakes were included in the large exhibition of English paintings at the Musée du Louvre, while in 1947 the British Council organised forty-two works for display at the Galerie Drouin. Contributions came from André Gide, Philippe Soupault and Jean Wahl, who had long been interested in Blake.

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60. Voltaire, by William Blake. c.1800–03. Pen and tempera on canvas, 41.9 by 70.6 cm. (Manchester Art Gallery; exh. Petit Palais, Paris).

copper plate next to the relevant print and the small woodblock engraving of the Virgil/Thornton ‘Blighted Corn’ (British Museum, London; nos.114 and 117).

One high point was the beautiful large colour print of Newton of c.1795, a generous loan, rarely seen outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art (no.78; Fig.61). The subtle colour printing of this work, initially suggestive of oil painting, gives a hint which perhaps raised Royal Academicians’ doubts about Blake’s puzzling ‘painting’ methods. It is noticeably different from the famous Tate version of c.1804: a very faint line is seen on Newton’s scroll; and the symbol of the triangle of the Trinity into which a pair of compasses semicircle has been drawn on the later scroll, shows Newton’s arrival at the material universe. Was Blake showing hesitancy in the first instance when confronting Newton?

Another was the Dante ‘Inferno’ Canto Five illustration, ‘The Circle of the Lustful’ (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery; no.139), which demonstrates Blake’s unique sensitivity to word and colour. Cary’s trans-

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1 Catalogue: William Blake (1757–1827): The Visionary Genius of English Romanticism. By Michael Phillips and Catherine de Bourgoing et al. 256 pp. incl. 64 col. pls. + 143 col. + b. & w. ills. (Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 2009), €39 (HB). ISBN 979–2–7596–0077–9.

2 Blake to John Flaxman, 19th October 1801; see D. Erdman, ed.: The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1982, p.718.

3 W. Blake: ‘Vision of the Last Judgement’ [p.69], in ibid., p.555.

4 A. Symons: William Blake, London 1907, p.65.

5 P. Soupault: William Blake, transl. J.L. May, London 1928, p.18.

Italy in nineteenth-century art Paris

by RICHARD WRIGLEY THE EXHIBITIONS Voir l’Italie et mourir.

Photographie et peinture dans l’Italie du XIXe siècle and Italiennes modèles. Hébert et les paysans du Latium, both recently at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris (closed 19th July), with a concurrent display of architectural drawings from Orsay’s collections, L’Italie des architectes du relevé à l’invention, created a remarkable ensemble that provided an opportunity to reflect upon the variety of ways in which Italy was represented across different media in the nineteenth century.1 Ernest Hébert holds a special place in the history of French artists as he was the only person to hold the directorship of the Académie de France in Rome twice (1867–73 and 1885–90), having previously been a pensionnaire in 1839. Italiennes modèles, occupying a space usually dedicated to ‘dossier’ displays, illustrated the considerable degree of continuity found in his work across these three séjours. The exhibition

61. Newton, by William Blake. c.1795. Colour print and watercolour, 44.2 by 57.8 cm. (Philadelphia Museum of Art; exh. Petit Palais, Paris).

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lation of the ‘Divine Comedy’ inspired Blake’s work but, almost certainly, he read Italian quite well. The pertinent words from Canto Five are translated as ‘black air’, ‘element obscure’ and ‘bloody stain imbrued’ and Blake’s knowledge of Dante inspired him to create a powerful vision in purple, blue-black and black – a sombre dye symbolising sin. The work is a masterpiece.

Although the exhibition was comprehensive, the absence of some highly desirable and significant loans from the United States because of transport costs was noticeable.

There were certainly two significant omissions which would have been accessible to collections in Great Britain. One is a copy of the handsome engraved illustrated text from Edward Young’s 1797 four ‘Night Thoughts’ (as opposed to the complete, important nine ‘Night Thoughts’ printed and watercolour leaves in the British Museum). With this in mind, two of the six manuscript leaves of ‘Vala’ (nos.60–62) might have been reduced to make space for two 1797 pages: the crucial importance between ‘Night Thoughts’ and

‘Vala’ would have been duly emphasised. The other omission was Mary Wollstonecraft’s book Original Stories from Real Life with its six illustrations designed, drawn and engraved

by Blake in 1791; he is here seen as a fellow radical working with a great woman.

There are several errors in the catalogue text, two in particular: ‘John Bunyan dreams a Dream’ (no.169) has been printed in reverse, and the wood-engraving and printed impression of ‘Blighted Corn’ (nos.116 and 117) is mistitled ‘blithed Corn’.

In conclusion the present reviewer feels that a further Blake exhibition awaits. Starting from Blake’s ‘World of Imagination [which] is the World of Eternity’,3 enriched by the thoughts of D.G. and W.M. Rossetti and of A.G. Swinburne, taking on Symons’s affirmation that our artist was ‘the only poet who sees all temporal things under the form of eternity’,4 as well as Soupault’s clarity over Blake who ‘acted as if he could see into the future’5 and beyond – all this allows us to think more fully about a relationship between Blake and nineteenth-century French Symbolism. It could be hugely rewarding.

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62. Fountain of the French Academy, Rome, by Camille Corot. 1826–27. Canvas, 25 by 38 cm. (Musée départemental de l’Oise, Beauvais; exh. Musée d’Orsay, Paris).

displayed a selection of Hébert’s drawings and paintings of Italian subjects, with a generous sprinkling of comparative material provided

by Michallon, Hesse, Papéty (it was a pity drawings by Hébert and Papéty after the same model could not be juxtaposed), among others. Hébert’s sketchbooks and the shared journal of 1853–54 kept by Imer, Castelnau and Hébert were on display, the latter very usefully transcribed in the catalogue. A selection from the photographs taken in Italy by Hébert’s wife, Gabrielle (1853–1934), during the second directorship, provided a sense of the practical stage-managing of the ‘Italiennes’ who became ‘modèles’, depicting them as pausing in their mundane activities to act as picturesque motifs; in some cases they were asked back to the Villa Medici. Gabrielle, it should be noted, was responsible for the creation of the Musée Hébert in La Troche, near Grenoble, which opened in 1934.

Further encouragement to think about the process of representing ‘Italiennes’ was offered in the form of objects collected by the Héberts: a peasant dress and headdress, augmented by an example of ciocie, the bound and strapped footwear used by Italian shepherds, from the Musée international de la chaussure, Romans. The exhibition was also supplemented by works from the Louvre, as in the case of the dazzling La Madone des Grâces à la Cervara (Etats-Romains) of 1853 by Jean-François Montessuy (1804–76), a work whose other-worldly luminosity resembled that of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s disturbingly hallucinatory Deux paysannes italiennes et un enfant (1849; Musée d’Orsay, Paris). And, in authentic ‘Orsay style’, sculpture found its place in the form of the commanding presence of Carpeaux’s terracotta La Palombella au ‘pane’ (1861–64).

Hébert’s earlier works sometimes have an arresting particularity, as in the self-portrait as pifferaro (black chalk; 1850; ex-cat.), which

elides artist and rustic Roman role model. The later work, perhaps as early as the later 1850s, tends to become smothered by a rather mannered palette and sentimentalised facial expressions. Indeed Hébert’s best-known painting, La Malaria (the 1850 Salon livret included the brief explanatory text: ‘Famille italienne fuyant la contagion’), here as always accompanied by Gautier’s comments, is a patchwork of studio poses and gestures, with similarities to the pretty decorative colours of early Millet and the stylised exoticism of Chassériau, further distanced from its Italian referent by a faint but unmistakable echo of the Raft of the Medusa. The sense of overview was slightly offset by the fact that key pictures such as Malaria, Les filles d’Alvita (1855) and Les Cerverolles, Etats-Romains (1858) occupied separate spaces. Indeed, the first of these was to be found in Voir l’Italie et mourir, on the other side of Orsay’s central avenue.

Rather in the manner of film credits, Voir l’Italie et mourir (as commemorated in the book-style catalogue) is billed as ‘sur une idée d’Ulrich Pohlmann et de Guy Cogeval’. In his preface Cogeval explains that the exhibition is ‘dedicated’ to ‘cette Italie âpre et insaisissable’ which, in the form of a chaotic southern Italian popular religious procession, is the mise-en-scène for the reconciliation of a couple played by George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy (1953).

The couple’s troubled but ultimately restored relations personify the ‘amorous and fraught’ interaction between painting and photography as they engaged in the ‘delicate task’ of creating an image of Italy ‘as romantic as elegiac, as archaeological as sociological’. Yet the preface has the playfully paradoxical title ‘Aus Italien’, alluding to Richard Strauss’s symphonic fantasy, which is velouté and seductive, rather than indigestible and elusive. The rapprochement evoked here in the way modern cinema reinvented the old subject of

the Italian journey also applies to the multifarious dialogue between painting and photography from the latter’s earliest days. It is, indeed, striking that this new technology was almost immediately applied to the compelling and venerable sites of Italy, inheriting from paintings, drawings and prints the task of reproducing and celebrating the well-established repertory of monuments and views.

The daguerreotypes shown here – including a generous selection from the Alexander Ellis series conserved in Bradford’s National Media Museum – had a compelling presence far in excess of their modest proportions. Whether the beauty and visual drama of the resulting images should be explained by the tremendously photogenic character of the subjects, or because those making the photographs were exceptionally gifted at matching intended image to technical resources, is a moot point. One of the strengths of the exhibition was the fact that it was able to draw on private collections of nineteenth-century photographs of Italy whose breadth and depth rivals those of most public collections (Dietmar Siegert, W. Bruce and Delanay Lundberg and an anonymous collection in Kalamata).2 The exhibition contained a few moments of comparative convergence; images of Tivoli

by Carl Blechen (1832) and Robert Macpherson (1854), for example, or Blechen and Caneva’s views of the Campagna. The hand of Ulrich Pohlmann was evident here, reminding one of his 2004 Munich show Ein neue Kunst? Eine andere Natur! Fotografie und Malerei im 19. Jahrhundert (2004). This reviewer could not decide how much this added to our viewing of the respective images, each arresting in different ways. There were also well-chosen neighbours: Bonnat’s Interior of the Sistine Chapel (1875–80) and Alma Tadema’s Interior of the Church of S. Clemente, Rome (1863) seemed like two scenes from a Henry James novel, but nonetheless were fascinating

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to observe together because of their specific pictorial qualities. Another mode of visual comparison is at work in the catalogue, where images are equalised (or differentiated) by the homogenising format of reproduction.

The exhibition’s scope extended from pre-photographic paintings – sketches which alternated between the deceptively poetic (Cogniet, Corot; Fig.62) or intensely prosaic (Valenciennes, Jones); early photography, notably the ‘Roman school’ (primarily Anderson, Macpherson, Normand, Flachéron, Caneva; Fig.63); tourist itineraries; archaeological imagery; the Risorgimento; Italian peasants as subjects, and their photographic manipulation; ending with lugubrious Germanic fin-de-siècle Symbolist pictorialism.

Most impressive were the first two sections, the introductory room of painted sketches and the larger section surveying early photography. Each contained enough works capable of effortlessly holding one’s attention for lengthy periods, so that awareness of, or concern for, any prevailing curatorial framework, whatever its merits, receded from view. For example, it was hard to tell if Corot’s so-called Promenade de Poussin looked even more limpid and meticulously resolved because of the prior experience of viewing silvery and luminous photographs in the adjacent room.

In both exhibitions the relationship between catalogue and exhibits was, alas, not straightforward. If it matters that exhibitions have some form of proper, reliable record, which can serve as a portable source of information and receptacle for on-the-spot notes, then a simple handlist would have done the trick. It is also a shame there was no attempt to track the usage of the phrase ‘See Italy and die’ adopted for the clever but confusing title, beyond the indirect source in Goethe’s Italian Journey (3rd March 1787), where he quotes the self-congratulatory Neapolitan saying: ‘vedi Napoli e poi muori’. Indeed, apart from some photographs of Pompeian victims and Capuchin catacombs in Palermo, there was very little death on view – a theme which could have been interestingly explored. More generally, only Michael F. Zimmermann’s essay on banditry and social problems in the mezzogiorno genuinely expanded the horizons of historical context beyond the cultural preoccupations of the Grand Tourists and their photographically active successors.

1 Italiennes modèles was seen last year at the Musée Hébert, La Tronche. Catalogues: Voir l’Italie et mourir.

Photographie et peinture dans l’Italie du XIXe siècle.

By Ulrich Pohlmann and Guy Cogeval et al. 384 pp. incl. 248 col. + b. & w. ills. (Skira Flammarion, Paris, 2009), €39. ISBN 978–2–354333–03–2; Italiennes modèles. Hébert et les paysans du Latium. Unpaginated with numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Musée Hérbert la Tronche and Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 2009), €23. ISBN 978–2–35567–009–1.

2 See D. Ritter: exh. cat. Rom 1846–1870: James Anderson und die Maler-Fotografen, Sammlung Siegert, Munich (Neue Pinakothek) 2005; and W. Bruce Lundberg and J.A. Pinto, eds.: Steps off the beaten path: nineteenth-century photographs of Rome and its environs. Images from the collection of Delaney and W. Bruce Lundberg, Milan 2007.

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Early French altarpieces Paris

by JUSTIN E.A. KROESEN

Les premiers retables: Une Mise en Scène du Sacré, at the Musée du Louvre, Paris (closed 6th July), filled an important lacuna in the study of medieval altarpieces.

While such works in Scandinavia, Germany, Italy and Spain have been charted reasonably well, a systematic survey of retables in France – a country which in many ways played a key role in the development of the genre – was lacking. Pierre-Yves Le Pogam and Christine Vivet-Peclet have finally addressed this topic in a pioneering exhibition accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue.1 Despite the complexity of the subject-matter, lack of research and the long history of destruction of French altarpieces in which most key pieces have vanished and which has left many others in a battered or fragmentary state, their endeavour was richly rewarding. Moreover, the number of visitors in the three small rooms in the Richelieu wing showed that such scholarly exhibitions appeal to a considerable audience.

The exhibition and the catalogue’s subtitle, ‘staging the sacred’, suggests a close connection between the ritual performed on and around the altar and the images on the altarpieces. According to the curators, the altarpiece acted as a scenic wall in front of which the central liturgical rites were performed, and whose figured or narrative decoration reflected and amplified the significance of these rites (p.18). The catalogue’s introduction emphasises the complexity of the subject-matter: it is impossible to exhibit the earliest altarpieces since none survives. Likewise, the enormous transformation which the altarpiece underwent during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries – not only in terms of the number produced, but also in respect to its composition – also remains largely unexplained. The

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catalogue gives a somewhat haphazard outline of the correlations between the evolution of altarpieces and changes in liturgy, including the definitive establishment of the celebration of the Mass ad orientem (with the priest’s back turned towards the people, before the end of the millennium) and the placement of images and reliquaries on the altar. It would have been greatly helpful to provide the non-specialist visitor with photographs and drawings showing how altarpieces were placed and how altars and altarpieces were connected.

How were altars arranged in churches and chapels and what was behind the altarpieces (architecture, paintings, stained glass)?

The fifty-one exhibited pieces primarily emphasised the complexity of the subject. A wide variety of works were shown, including panels originally placed on or behind the altars, sculptures in the round and so-called ‘tabernacle’ or ‘baldachin’ altarpieces. The objects varied from perfectly preserved examples to isolated figures and fragments of which the origins were not always clear. There were altar stipes (supports for the mensa), loose free-standing sculptures, altar frontals, ivory diptychs and, of course, a range of retables of different sizes and compositions in various materials. The curators discerned two ‘families’ of altarpiece; the ‘tabernacle altarpieces’ and the ‘altarpieces of an oblong rectangular shape’. This last type, sculpted in stone, can be regarded as the typical French medieval altarpiece and constituted the core of the exhibition. One of the central objects in the show was the altarpiece from Carrières-SaintDenis of c.1150 (cat. no.3; Fig.65), one of the earliest completely preserved examples, either in France or elsewhere. The mature, composed character of this piece was striking: as the catalogue observed, ‘the retables from the twelfth century do not at all present themselves as the primitive stammerings of an embryonic genre, but already offer a wide range of solutions, corresponding to the complexity of their models’ (p.28). Subsequently,

64. Six apostles. Burgundy, second quarter of the fourteenth century. Polychromed limestone, 62.5 by 106 by 8.6 cm. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; exh. Musée du Louvre, Paris).

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65. The Annunciation; Virgin and Child in Majesty; Baptism of Christ.

Ile-de-France, mid-twelfth century.

Polychromed limestone, 90.6 by 184 by 19.5 cm. (Musée du Louvre, Paris).

the exhibition traced the most important developments in the thirteenth century – with altarpieces resembling figured friezes that were clearly inspired by architectural sculpture (see p.51) – and the fourteenth, when many were subdivided into compartments following architectural models.

Around this core were shown a wide-ranging spectrum of liturgical and iconographical accessories for medieval altars. This provoked a number of questions which were unanswered by the objects themselves or the accompanying texts. How were round sculptures, often called ‘cult images’, related to the altar stipes? Should we imagine that the wooden Romanesque Virgin and Child from the Auvergne (no.2) was originally placed under a wooden or stone canopy, or did she sit directly on the mensa? Was this type of altar decoration restricted to side altars or was it also employed on high altars in medieval churches?

What is the relationship between relic triptychs such as the silver-gilt reliquary altar of the True Cross from Floreffe (c.1250; no.10) and stone retables, given that this type of winged triptych was barely established in painted altarpieces at that date? To what extent was the altar frontal (not forgetting embroidered frontals) maintained alongside the retable and is it true that their iconographic complexity diminished as the altarpiece became more prominent? Apart from formal and stylistic similarities, what was the relationship between retables and ivory diptychs?

How much evidence is there to show that these small objects were also placed at the back of the altar table? The catalogue’s conclusion that the retable served to ‘magnify the central place of the cult by means of images and also, often, by the adoption of complex and contrived narratives’ is hardly satisfying.

The battered condition of many pieces, with figures defaced and noses hewn off, was striking; only fragments remain of some retables (nos.4, 13, 18–26, 28–33, 41–42 and 44) and they were sometimes reconstructed as a puzzle (nos.17 and 36). One cannot help but wonder how many great works of art vanished without trace during one of the many fateful phases in France’s long ‘histoire du

vandalisme’, which affected practically all parts of the country. Even the best preserved examples have survived without the context for which they were made, and questions about their original environment are frequently raised: how were these pieces connected to the altar to which they once belonged? In a number of cases, such as the Crucifixion with scenes from the life of St Nicholas from Saint-Leu d’Esserent (no.43), roughly hewn sides and backs of retables show that these were not placed on the mensa, but rather built into the wall behind it. In some other cases, it was unclear exactly why the curators categorised these pieces as retables at all. Thus, the rectangular stone block with The Adoration of the Magi, King Herod and an Innocent from Briollay (no.5) has been labelled a ‘retable(?)’, leaving unclear how we should imagine this heavy, low, deep-cut stone block served as an altarpiece. The hypothetical reconstruction of nine sculptures from Burgundy and Franche Comté in the form of a retable (no.48) was mainly based on stylistic comparisons and provides few answers as to the structural character of the altarpiece to which they once belonged – if at all.

Anachronistically, the curators chose to focus on the territory of the present-day French Republic – something to which they explicitly draw attention (p.14). This ahistorical approach was reflected in the heterogeneity of the pieces. Thus, the painted frontal and unique wooden baldachin-altarpiece from Angoustrine (nos.8 and 9) are fully in keeping with the rich collection of Romanesque painted wooden objects in the National Art Museum of Catalonia in Barcelona. Both pieces originated around the mid-thirteenth century in the Pyrenaic Cerdagne region, which was under the Catalan–Aragonese crown from the ninth until the mid-seventeenth century.2 The painted altarpiece of The Crucifixion, Trinity with the Last Communion and Martyrdom of St Denis (c.1416; no.51) ascribed to Henri Bellechose, was painted in the Duchy of Burgundy, which deliberately reacted against the French kingdom, both politically and artistically, by allying itself with the Low Countries. The

attention paid to the border regions of Burgundy, Languedoc and Lorraine arouses curiosity about relationships with other regions just outside modern France, including Spanish Catalonia, the German Rhineland and England.3 Some altarpieces even seem to have affinities with Swedish ones: the fourteenth-century carved retables of Tofta and Skattunge may be described as wooden translations of a type of stone retable found in Burgundy and the Champagne region (nos.35 and 37; Fig.64).

In spite of these remarks, the exhibition provided a very rich and useful survey of the diverse forms, styles, materials, types and imagery employed in French altarpieces during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Essays by Pierre-Yves Le Pogam effectively trace the evolution of altarpieces during the period under scrutiny. The last section of the catalogue, entitled ‘Corpus des retables français sculptés (XIIe – début du XVe siècle)’ and compiled by Christine Vivet-Peclet, is of enormous interest. It provides a corpus of wholly or partly preserved altarpieces scattered throughout France, from the great abbey-church of Saint-Denis to remote country churches deep in the heart of the Massif Central. Although this survey makes us curious about retables made after 1420 (a terminus which unfortunately excludes all stone retables in Brittany, for example), it will be of inestimable value in the future; it also shows how much research still remains to be done. For these future projects, the exhibition and catalogue will provide an indispensable source of inspiration.

1 Catalogue: Les premiers retables (XIIe – début du XVe siècle). Une Mise en Scène du Sacré. By Pierre-Yves Le Pogam and Christine Vivet-Peclet. 280 pp. incl. 268 col. ills. (Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2009), €38. ISBN 978–2–35031–238–5.

2 How both objects were related remains unclear, but judging from their divergent sizes, it is hardly possible that frontal and retable belong together.

3 In Catalonia, unlike in England, the stock of stone retables is much larger than in France, with sixty pieces wholly or largely preserved. In terms of material and typology, these fixed stone retables closely correspond to those at the core of the Louvre exhibition.

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Valadon – Utrillo Paris

by MERLIN JAMES M A U R I C E U T R I L L O I S the third classic painter of the Ecole de Paris (after Soutine and Rouault) to be given an airing at the Pinacothèque de Paris (to 15th September). ‘Airing’ is perhaps not the word, however. The gallery – a windowless warren behind the Madeleine – goes in for dark, dramatic presentations, with spot-lit works in niches and vitrines, or on richly pan-toned walls. This is particularly unfortunate for the popular (or once-popular) masters of Montparnasse and Montmartre, who have long suffered from associations with bourgeois taste and the framing and taming of bohemianism by the market. Utrillo, more than any, needs a fresh look. The catalogue to the Pinacothèque’s Soutine exhibition1 may have exaggerated that artist’s neglect (and disregarded some recent scholarship); but Utrillo has for decades been truly taboo to European and American curators and art historians alike. The present show, Valadon – Utrillo, (which is shared with work by Utrillo’s mother Suzanne Valadon) whatever its faults, gathers over sixty of Utrillo’s pre-1920 paintings. The catalogue2 reasserts the usual verdict of a wholesale decline after the First World War, and a very different exhibition would be required to qualify that judgment.

Anyway, there are enough strong, typical paintings here to allow a fair reconsideration of Utrillo’s stature.

Early on, a work such as Place de l’église à Montmagny (cat. no.21; Fig.66) demonstrates how quickly, from Impressionist experiments just a year or two earlier, Utrillo crystallised his unique compound of old-town imagery, strong pictorial structure and distressed but delicate surface. Sky or ground can flip back and forth spatially, now dropping into illusionistic depth, now jumping up onto the literal picture plane. Receding wall planes and oblique façades simultaneously tessellate as two-dimensional pattern. The diminution of buildings and objects in recessive space, and the converging of perspectival lines, can suddenly read as compression or contraction within the skin of the painting itself. The compositional vortex around a vanishing point is used time and again to signify (and induce in the viewer) an intensification of consciousness: just where the eye and mind expect to lose purchase on the scene in a smooth fade out, they are thrown back to an awareness of the physical picture itself.

Related effects occur where segments of a view are framed between buildings or tree trunks and seem to ‘fill in’ the area given to them; or when architecture or sky seen through a latticework of branches and foliage seems to hang suspended in the space of the tree itself. Such devices are deployed with rich diversity from painting to painting, with the perspectival centrifuge placed in radically

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66. Place de l’église à Montmagny, by Maurice Utrillo. c.1907. Canvas, 54.7 by 81.5 cm. (Private collection; exh.

Pinacothèque de Paris).

different points, the architecture and topography varied restlessly, high and low viewpoints experimented with, pictorial space and structure put through a range of mutations.

Light and mood are adjusted, with colour schemes playing subtle greys, whites and earth hues against the stronger chromatic chords of shutters and shop fronts. A common facile criticism of Utrillo – as of Soutine and Rouault (and indeed Modigliani, another hero for the present curator)3 – is that he is formulaic. In fact, like all of these, he can play infinite and strenuous variations on a theme.

And he has more than one theme. This exhibition displays several of his church

paintings, quite distinct from his streetscapes, often more monochrome, bleached or wintry. Sometimes they exude stony gravitas and sometimes they conjure poignancy from the papery origami of their facets. A few of his rural scenes are here also, such as the haunting Moulin de Sannois (1912; no.50), and some of his more village-like evocations of sheds, fences and yards on the Butte of Montmartre, such as the ineffably poetic Moulin de la Galette (1914–16; no.81). He did occasionally escape from Paris, and made some superb works on the coast. There are few better things in the exhibition than La chapelle de Roscoff (no.32; Fig.67) borrowed from Manchester – a type of

67. La chapelle de Roscoff, by Maurice Utrillo. c.1911. Canvas, 62 by 81.5 cm. (Manchester City Galleries; exh.

Pinacothèque de Paris).

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Utrillo surely known to L.S. Lowry, whose own work parallels his French contemporary’s across a similar range of motifs.4 It is a pity Suzanne Valadon shares a double-bill with her son in this exhibition.

Admittedly her nude drawings, emulating the Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Symbolist artists for whom she had modelled, can be strong and touching. Close to Maillol’s or Renoir’s draughtsmanship, she avoids their tendency to generalise. On canvas, however, her work is undistinguished, a hodgepodge of modern-art tropes and modes from Matisse, Gauguin, Derain, Manet or Vuillard.

Happily Valadon’s work is generally not intermixed with Utrillo’s in the hang. Where it is, the benefit is only in pointing up his infinitely greater achievement. He too occupies territory opened up by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism; but like others of the best Ecole de Paris artists he finds there, and explores, all kinds of potentials for painting – ones that few would exploit again once paths to abstraction (largely via Cubism and its allied movements) came to be seen as the key project of late Modernism.5 The dynamic simultaneity of, or alternation between, literal and illusionistic, representational and abstract, underpins much of Utrillo’s appeal. Whitewashed buildings, peeling and abraded walls, roughly rendered façades, even heavy skies and greasy streets, all take turns stepping forward to become synonymous with the painted canvas itself.

The rectangles of windows, shutters and doors can function as patches on, or openings into, the picture plane, like the flaps on an Advent calendar. Trees read primarily as occasions for dragged lines and stippled or dabbed areas of brushwork against more solid expanses. Scumbled and knifed layers, often over dry underpainting, create a micro-dazzle of amazing complexity and sophistication.

(Enlarged details in the catalogue reveal this brilliantly for Utrillo; equally they expose Valadon’s insensitivity.) Utrillo can anticipate the interlocking slabs of a Poliakoff abstract (Rue Cortot à Montmartre; 1912; no.33; Fig.68) or even seem to chime with the geometry of Mondrian or Malevich (Place du Tertre à Montmartre; 1912; no.31). But it is the dialectic of surface and scene, pattern and picture, material and meaning, that he seeks to keep in balance. Repeatedly, as Utrillo’s painting presents us with the world, that world reciprocally presents us with painting, with its own paintedness.

The point of all this in Utrillo is not merely to do with Modernist pieties about art’s selfreferentiality or the art work’s aesthetic autonomy. In each painting the dynamic equilibrium of substance and significance works metaphorically, even psychologically, to simulate (and perhaps stimulate) moments of compound consciousness when we are not just deeply aware of the world, but somehow aware of ourselves being so aware. As we shift from seeing a door, window, gable-end or tree in Utrillo’s painting to seeing Utrillo’s painting of the door, window, gable-end or tree, the effect

tions, saves him from the empty parading of emotion into which Vlaminck or Bernard Buffet, tended to lapse.

Much remains to be said about, and for, Utrillo, not least in the light of the emotional ambivalence, or apparent neutrality, of much postmodern painting and photography. It will be a shame if this exhibition is not followed by others.

1

68. Rue Cortot à Montmartre, by Maurice Utrillo. c.1912. Canvas, 81 by 65 cm. (Private collection; exh.

Pinacothèque de Paris).

replicates that experience we might have ‘in the real world’ of shifting from simple observation (whether idle or absorbed) to a more conscious, and self-conscious, appreciation.

Utrillo’s painting, then, promotes an enriched apprehension of reality, and the implacable neutrality of his subject-matter is interesting in this regard. He chooses empty streets and commonplace buildings, all the more startlingly to orchestrate his moments of revelation and awakening. Similarly he does not often confront us with singular, selfcontained entities (Roscoff chapel is exceptional) that might seem apt talismans for contemplation. Instead he creates roads and paths and perspectives deep into the picture space, sucking us in and, by implication, extending beyond and behind us, including us as it includes the little half-hidden figures that staff his scenes. Again, the effect is all the more bracing when we are abruptly propelled back out of the vortex by the physicality of surface, the teeming artifice of facture and the compelling syncopation of his overall design.

This basic effect takes on various flavours or implications from picture to picture.

Colour, light, the associations of the buildings shown, even the weather conditions depicted – all can influence whether we experience the moment of compound consciousness as exhilaration, serenity, yearning, unease or alienation. The obsessiveness and seminaivety of Utrillo’s handling also brings an underlying connotation of the therapeutic, perhaps distilling beauty from pain or depression. Everywhere segments of his works separate themselves into arenas of miniaturised Abstract Expressionism. In general a simple celebration of the quaintness of old quarters seems the least of his concerns, and this distinguishes him from a host of artists with similar subjects and syntax. At the same time local and particular observation (or transcription from postcard photographs), and lively play with depictive means and conven-

See M. Restellini et al.: exh. cat. Soutine, Paris (Pinacothèque de Paris) 2007.

2 Catalogue: Valadon – Utrillo. Au tournant du siècle à Montmartre – de l’impressionisme à l’Ecole de Paris. By Marc Restellini, with contributions by Jean-Pierre Valex, Sophie Krebs, Jacqueline Munck and Jean Fabris. 389 pp. incl. 210 col. + b. & w. ills. (Pinacothèque de Paris, Paris, 2009), €45. ISBN 978–2–358–67001–2.

3 Marc Restellini staged the Modigliani retrospective in 2002–03 at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, and Modigliani, Soutine, Utrillo e i pittori di Zborowski at the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, in 1994–95; see also his Le silence eternal: Modigliani – Hébuterne 1916–1919, Paris 2008.

4 La chapelle de Roscoff did not enter Manchester’s public collections until 1975, but his Church at Anet was there from 1935. Lowry was undoubtedly well aware of Utrillo.

5 Achim Hochdörfer has recently proposed the notion of the ‘hidden reserve’ in painting, an area of achievement and potential, in particular an ‘exploration of gesture, semiotisation, and the dialect between literalness and transcendence’ that is eclipsed by subsequent dominant agendas but remains latent for rediscovery.

His focus is on only relatively neglected tendencies of the 1950s and 1960s, but the principal is in fact recurrent through art history; see A. Hochdörfer: ‘A Hidden Reserve’, Artforum 47 (February 2009), pp.152–59.

John Heartfield Berlin

by MICHAEL WHITE HEARTFIELD WAS BORN Helmut Herzfelde in Berlin in 1891 and died in East Berlin in 1968. The exhibition John Heartfield: Zeitausschnitte. Fotomontagen 1918–1938 at the Berlinische Galerie (to 31st August) focuses on the period running from his involvement with the Berlin Dada group at the end of the First World War to his flight from Prague to London in 1938. It was during this time that Heartfield was most active as the designer of book and magazine covers for left-wing publications using the photomontage techniques he had first experimented with in Dada journals. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue steer clear of the vexed problem of who invented photomontage but do present Heartfield as the outstanding figure in this field, ‘the most influential designer of Dada Berlin’, as the wall text has it.1 The familiarity visitors will have with many of Heartfield’s much reproduced photomontages, such as his satirical images of Hitler (Fig.69), belies the complexity of their interpretation, especially in Berlin. The last major Heartfield exhibition to have taken place in

JOHN

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Berlin was in 1991, shortly after German reunification. This marked the beginning of a substantial reappraisal which the current exhibition takes much further. Having been treated initially with huge suspicion by the East German authorities on his return in 1950 and even denied membership of the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), Heartfield was later rehabilitated and his photomontage work held up us a shining example of Communist agitation. Heartfield exhibitions were sent all around the world in the 1960s, including Britain in 1969, and he became enshrined in accounts of historical avant-gardism.

Heartfield’s brother, the writer and publisher Wieland Herzfelde, who facilitated his return to East Germany, became his mouthpiece. On his transformation from Helmut Herzfelde to John Heartfield during the First World War, the artist had destroyed his juvenilia. His later successive flights from Nazism led to the loss of a very large amount of his pre-War output. There remains a great deal about Heartfield of which we know little, and he neither wrote nor spoke about his work to any extent. During the Cold War, Herzfelde was therefore able to control the presentation of his brother’s work almost entirely. He frequently reproduced photomontages with alternative texts which he invented, sometimes confusing their original date and context. Also of significance was his attempt to draw connections between Dada and the covers for the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung 69. Adolf der Übermensch,

by John Heartfield. AIZ 29, 1932. Photomontage, 38 by 27 cm. (Akademie der Künste, Berlin Kunstsammlung/Heartfield Community of Heirs; exh. Berlinische Galerie, Berlin).

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(Workers’ Illustrated Press) made during the 1930s. Dada was a potential embarrassment, especially during the years when it was being linked elsewhere in the world to such decidedly non-Communist practices as Pop art.

This exhibition recovers Heartfield from his brother’s shadow by concentrating on him as an artist. It begins with a short section on Dada, but what we are invited to consider is less its politics than its primary visual characteristics. The attention paid in the first montages Heartfield made with George Grosz to the integration of text and image, scale, juxtaposition and indeed the whole question of intelligibility can be found everywhere else in the show. What changes is the number of elements. Where the Dada photomontages have cascades of small cuttings, the later works settle on a few significant elements. It is striking also to see in work from the end of the First World War to the 1930s the continuity in motifs of extreme violence, bodily dismemberment and disfiguration. When the political glasses are removed for a moment, the morbidity of Heartfield’s imagery becomes highly apparent and could easily be considered in the context of late Expressionism.

A key image in resituating Heartfield is a self-portrait published in AIZ in 1929 (Fig.70), singled out in the catalogue for particular analysis by Sabine Kriebel.2 Under the headline ‘Use photography as a weapon!’ it shows Heartfield with scissors in hand decapitating the chief of the Berlin police

70. John Heartfield mit Polizeipräsident Zörgiebel, by John Heartfield. Original montage for ‘Benuetze Foto als Waffe!’. AIZ 37, 1929. Photomontage, 28 by 21.1 cm.

(Akademie der Künste, Berlin Kunstsammlung/ Heartfield Community of Heirs; exh. Berlinische Galerie, Berlin).

who had a few months before used violent force to suppress Communist May Day marches. According to Kriebel, this event marked a turning point in the ambition of political parties to use the popular press for agitational and propaganda purposes, providing Heartfield with the opportunity to reach an audience with his photomontages that he did not have before. Heartfield responded with an image which not only presents him as an artist in a fascinating way – the scissors replacing the brush as his tool – but also shows a fantasy of revenge and power. It might thus be taken as the origin of the Heartfield who is best known to us, the strident propagandist.

On the other hand, the exhibition makes a clear distinction between the press material in the show and the photomontages made for them. Not only are the latter kept quite separate from the former, the frames are colour coded: plain wood for printed matter, grey for ‘original montages’. In a complex manoeuvre, the preparatory works, in which the violent scissor cuts are most obvious, are considered closer to the true Heartfield, the artist, than the seamless, finished products. A vitrine contains a selection of cut-out photographs from Heartfield’s collection, the source materials for his montages. Intriguingly one envelope has bundles of bayoneted rifles spilling out of it, photographs of weapons from which to make photographs as weapons.

Along with violence, notably recurrent in the exhibition is the theme of the return of the past. While he consistently celebrated the Soviet Union as the future (although he chose to flee West rather than East in 1938), Heartfield perceived Nazism as a revisitation of imperial Germany. Skeletons and ghosts haunt the photomontages throughout the show. There is a degree of irony in holding

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back to the very end of the exhibition the original montage for Auferstehung (Resurrection) of 1932, which shows Hitler with figures of the old German military establishment in the Dorotheen-städtischen cemetery.

Reserved for Berlin’s most honoured citizens, as the East Germans considered Heartfield by his death, this is the graveyard where he lies buried today. Again, with deepest irony, on the opening day of the exhibition the front pages of several German newspapers carried images of Rosa Luxemburg, whose own body, it appears, may not be residing in her much visited grave but mutilated in the basement of Berlin’s Charité hospital. Just a few days before her murder in 1919, she had presented Heartfield with his Communist party membership. This history is still very much alive here and, while the exhibition persuasively makes the argument for Heartfield’s artistic credentials, a final reckoning with his politics still awaits.

1 Catalogue: John Heartfield: Zeitausschnitte. Fotomontagen 1918–1938. Edited by Freya Mülhaupt, with essays by Thomas Friedrich, Sabine Kriebel, Roland März, Freya Mülhaupt, An Paenhuysen, Rosa von der Schulenberg, Andrés Mario Zervignón and Peter Zimmermann. 175 pp. incl. 186 ills. (Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, 2009), €35. ISBN 978–3–77572–43–26. George Grosz and Raoul Hausmann both made claims for the origination of photomontage in collaboration with John Heartfield and Hannah Höch respectively.

2 S. Kriebel: ‘John Heartfields Selbstporträt von 1929’, in ibid., pp.64–73.

‘Visual Encounters’ Basel

1917–21 (Fig.71). Presented suggestively as if they floated beneath the surface of Monet’s pond, the elaborately carved crocodiles also emphasised the decorative roughness of the painting’s surface.

The exhibition reversed the ratio of modern Western and ‘primitive’ works in the Beyeler collection in order to convey the visual impact of both in the spirit of its founder, Ernst Beyeler, who had initially intended to assemble a comprehensive collection of non-European art, but narrowed this to a careful selection of African (nine) and Oceanic (sixteen) objects to juxtapose with his Cubist and Surrealist holdings.2 The date at which Beyeler began to collect African and Oceanic works, we are told, ‘remains unclear’, although acquisitions were increased in the wake of William Rubin’s 1984 exhibition ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.3 It was in relation to Rubin’s hugely controversial show that some of the complexities beyond the curatorial plot of Visual Encounters emerged.

Rubin’s gargantuan exhibition was indeed epoch-making, the first major show to bring ‘primitive’ art centre stage in the development of Modernism, and the first to stir a dialogue between art history and anthropology within the context of post-structuralist thought.

Nonetheless, that exhibition has become an example of how not to display ‘primitive’ art.

The problem lay in Rubin’s initial aim – legitimate from the point of art history, and original at the time – to establish which specific ‘primitive’ sculptures inspired the artists who collected them at the beginning of the twentieth century. Made impossible by the dispersal of collections, the exhibition reverted to the creation of a story of modern art’s encounter with non-European works, revolving around the putative existence of

‘natural’ affinities between the two. The MoMA narrative, condemned by anthropologists and postmodernist art historians alike for silencing the voice of ‘the other’, aimed at an all-encompassing, progressive and celebratory history of modern art through its relationship with other cultures, felt as equally self-created and expressive.

The essentialist claims laid by the ‘Primitivism’ exhibition resounded disturbingly at a time when, following the impact of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), art history and criticism began to integrate post-colonial theory.

Yet, whether formalist or ‘spiritual’, a universally transcendental attitude to modern and ‘primitive’ art was already part and parcel of the attitude of modern artists and collectors.

Seventy years before MoMA’s exhibition, the first ever American show of ‘primitive’ art, Statuary in Wood by African Savages. The Root of Modern Art (1914), had already presented in New York the African and ‘classical’ modern art collections of the Parisian dealer Paul Guillaume. Taking place in the gallery of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and with theoretical and performative contributions by the Dadaist Marius de Zayas, and the composer Alberto Savinio, this exhibition reminds us that, far from being Rubin’s invention, the concept of affinity between ‘primitive’ and modern art reflects earlier concerns to establish a genealogy of the avant-garde from ‘primal’ cultures, thus bypassing modern Western tradition.

It is clear that our impression of African and Oceanic art has been formed by this philyogenetic narrative of modern art. As Nélia Dias has written, ‘an increasing stress on the internal qualities of the work of art also changed the status of extra-European objects from ethnographic documents to carriers of universal aesthetic meanings’.4 At times one wished that

by SILVIA LORETI T H E C AP T I V A T I N G E X H I B I T I O N Visual Encounters: Africa, Oceania, and Modern Art at the Beyeler Foundation, Basel (closed 28th June), restaged the controversial topic of parallels between modern and so-called ‘primitive’ art.1 Across fourteen rooms African and Oceanic sculpture surrounded twentieth-century works (mostly paintings), drawn from the Beyeler’s own collection and augmented by important loans from Swiss and German museums. The principle of a loosely chronological order was demonstrated in the decision to devote the first rooms to Africa and the final ones to Oceania, reflecting the shifting taste for the art of the two continents among Western artists and collectors.

The result was a series of high-impact tableaux vivants in which modern and ‘primitive’ pieces stood next to each other in perceptive contrasts, without necessarily interacting but nevertheless recreating the sense of surprise produced by avant-garde art and non-European objects. This was the case, for instance, with the odd coupling of two Korewori crocodiles from Papua New Guinea and Monet’s Nymphéas triptych of

71. Korewori crocodiles, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. Wood, 723 by 36 by 33 cm. and 722.5 by 33 by 27 cm. (Museum der Kulturen, Basel; exh. Beyeler Foundation, Basel); Le basin aux nymphéas, by Claude Monet. 1917–20. Canvas, three parts, each 200.5 by 301 cm. (Beyeler Foundation, Basel). the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e

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72. Malagan figure and fishes, North New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. c.1900. Wood, dimensions variable.

(Musée Barber-Mueller, Geneva; exh. Beyeler Foundation, Basel); Picture no.III, by Piet Mondrian. 1938. Canvas, 100.5 by 141.5 cm. (Private collection; exh. Beyeler Foundation, Basel).

the Basel exhibition and its catalogue had reminded the visitor of this particular position.

Rather, a distance was kept between the fields of art and anthropology, the first displayed throughout the exhibition, the latter being the unique subject of an ‘interactive’ catalogue in which a series of academic essays by ethnologists and anthropologists discuss the social function of the African and Oceanic works on display. The catalogue’s introductory section presents, however, an open-ended dialogue between the Beyeler curator, art historians and anthropologists, in which Gottfried Boehm stresses the importance of inquiry ‘into the preconditions that led people like Ernst Beyeler to interest themselves in this art . . .’.5 By staging the story of modern artists’ flirtation with ‘primitive’ sculpture in the simple but all-the-more gripping terms of a coup-defoudre we were constantly, though indirectly, reminded that the romantic story between ‘primitive’ and modern art is a one-sided affair.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the juxtaposition of Mondrian’s Picture no.III (1938) and three Malagan carvings from Papua New Guinea (nineteenth/twentieth century), the first rigorous and minimalist, the latter Baroque in effect, yet remaining a striking complementary group whose decorative impact was accentuated by the display (Fig.72).

Although the history of primitivism staged at the Beyeler was more in the spirit of bal en masque than Indiana Jones, some of the unexpected visual and metaphorical juxtapositions succeeded in producing new perceptions of the modern works on display with the potential of constructing a less normative history of modern art. Menacing nkisi (‘nail fetishes’) from the Congo transformed Braque’s and Picasso’s analytic Cubism from post-Kantian to pre-Bataillan; Le Douanier Rousseau’s

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jungles finally found a truly primitivist dimension within an anthropomorphic forest of tino aitu Nukuoro figures; and a Hawaiian feather portrait of an angry war god screamed out the tension found in Rothko’s monochromes.

Visual Encounters is to be praised for its effort to take into account the different dimensions of the primitivist debate while celebrating the sense of beauty through which we have come to appreciate the works on display.

perhaps even sharpened. Negotiations with this supposedly ‘outdated’ form of presentation, however, lend the excitement of a real competition to the Biennale, and also contribute to its continued political relevance.

For these reasons the sprawling exhibition Making Worlds in the Arsenale and the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, curated by Daniel Birnbaum, appears nebulous alongside the geo-political jigsaw of Pavilions in the Giardini.1 A few individual works stand out, in particular Michelangelo Pistoletto’s installation comprising a large room filled with ornate mirrors, one half of which had been smashed by the artist at a spectacular performance during the opening of the exhibition.

The Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg displays three stop-motion animated films of plasticine figures involved in surreal sexual goings-on, in a room crammed with monstrous plantsculptures. Ulla von Brandenburg’s installation Singspiele comprises a series of spaces made by hanging blankets that culminate in a viewing room, similarly constructed, in which a film shot in Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye is playing. The camera glides around and reveals the slow choreographed movements of a variety of actors. Such disengaged wandering is rather appropriate for the exhibition as a whole in which there is no real point of reference to orient attention.

By contrast the national Pavilions were incredibly varied and for the most part successful. Rumours spread in the days before the opening of a grand coup de théâtre in the Danish and Nordic Pavilions, where Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset had for the first time in the history of the Biennale created an exhibition across two Pavilions. Both spaces were beautifully crafted as domestic

1 Catalogue: Visual Encounters. Africa, Oceania, and Modern Art. Edited by Oliver Wick and Antje Denner.

48 pp. incl. 230 col. + 100 b. & w. ills. (Beyeler Foundation, Basel; Christopher Merian Verlag, Basel, 2009), CHF78. ISBN 978–3–85616–482–9.

2 O. Wick: ‘Preface’, in ibid., p.11.

3 W. Rubin, ed.: exh. cat. ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art. Affinities of the Tribal and Modern, New York (Museum of Modern Art) 1984.

4 N. Dias: ‘Le Musée du Quai Branly. Une généalogie’, Le Débat. Histoire, philosophie, société 147 (November–December 2007), pp.70–71.

5 Wick, op. cit. (note 1), p.24.

Venice Biennale Venice

by JOHN-PAUL STONARD

of ‘collateral’ events, the national Pavilions in the Giardini remain the heart of the Venice Biennale (to 22nd November). Shifting national rivalries have existed since the first Pavilion appeared just over one hundred years ago (Belgium, 1907), and with the rise of solo rather than group shows over the past forty years, have

DESPITE THE PROLIFERATION

73. Photograph of performance Paso Doble, by Miquel Barceló and Josef Nadj. Held at the Teatro Fondamenta Nuove, Venice 2009.

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74. Fight, by Mark Lewis. 2009. Still from single-screen projection, HD video, 5 minutes 27 seconds. (Collection of the artist; exh. Canadian Pavilion, Venice Biennale).

interiors displaying works of art as if in a collector’s home. The choice of works was such that at first glance it might seem that Elmgreen and Dragset themselves were responsible for everything, and indeed their copy of a Brancusi, titled Torso of a (Forever) young man (2008), sat perfectly opposite Sturtevant’s copies of paintings by Frank Stella. On the surface the point appears to mix art and design, a ‘modern pictures for modern rooms’ type of display, nostalgic and unheimlich in equal measure. Furniture by the design trio Norway Says is ranged next to works by Martin Jacobson, and elsewhere artists such as Terence Koh and Jonathan Monk are included. A narrative of sorts is formed in the second Pavilion by four naked youths (who conveniently recovered their clothes in time for the public opening) lounging Hockney-style in an open-plan interior, while outside the Pavilion the stuffed body of a collector floated face-down in a small swimming pool. As a whole the display is extremely stylish, but also excruciatingly ‘knowing’: one has the impression of being manically winked at. A pretend

estate agent’s very hammy, predictably ironic tour of the Danish Pavilion is best avoided.

The invitation extended to the British artist Liam Gillick to exhibit in the German Pavilion has also been the source of much discussion. He is not the first non-German to have received the call – Nam June Paik was invited in 1993 (although he had far deeper connections with Germany) and it might be remembered that in 1948 the Pavilion was given over to an exhibition of French Impressionism. Gillick, who does not seem to have lived or worked much in Germany, appears to have been flummoxed by his election and one can only admire the off-handed nerve of his response, a series of bland pine cupboards and a stuffed animatronic cat. For those who are a little lost about what this all ‘means’, a handy volume of essays on Gillick’s work has just been published, Meaning Liam Gillick.2 Gillick is a master of the ‘look’ of meaning, a putative heritage of conceptual art in which meaning itself somehow has a style. Traces of further unintended ‘meaning’ are not hard to detect.

That an unrealised idea by the artist for this

display – a copy of a model by Arnold Bode of a redesign for the German Pavilion – is marketed as a limited edition for a large sum of money on the back of the visitors’ information pamphlet was an even bolder challenge to the spiritual and political importance of national representation.

If, over the years, nationalism has formed an arid theme for works in the Giardini, in certain cases, and with subtly judged gestures, it may still hit the mark. The Slovakian artist Roman Ondák’s installation, titled Loop, for the Czech and Slovak Pavilion, involves nothing more than a garden planted within the Pavilion, through which a path leads directly in and out. Some lingered to search for the art, behind a shrub perhaps, some walked straight through and out before realising that there was nothing more to see. Like some of the best commissions the Pavilion itself was an integral part of a display, becoming a microcosm of national division and evoking a paradox of inside and outside that in different ways is central to the politics of nationalism.

Mark Lewis’s high-definition films in the Canadian Pavilion were extraordinarily engaging, although it was for one work, Fight (Fig.74), that the display took off, and it is a shame that the focus was not entirely on this film. Showing a market stall in front of which actors recreate a simmering altercation between two unidentified groups, who appear to be divided along ethnic lines, and shot using an extremely high-definition camera and a method of back-projection typical of Lewis’s work, Fight is an absorbing and fascinating piece. Yet, one wants to ask of the commissioner, why here, why now? Echoes have not diminished of Rodney Graham’s brilliant film Vexation Island, which transformed the Canadian Pavilion into a desert island hut in 1997. The best Giardini displays are those that respond at least in some way to the context, and this much at least can be said for Gillick’s cupboards and cat.

A similar dislocation between place and display can be seen in the Spanish Pavilion, 75. Giardini, by Steve McQueen.

2009. Still from double-screen projection.

(Collection of the artist; exh. British Pavilion, Venice Biennale).

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containing numerous paintings by Miquel Barceló made since 2000. Some of these are interesting, but there appears no reason why so many have been gathered in this particular location; and one can only empathise with the artist on this missed opportunity. The display might have focused on the extraordinary performance, Paso Doble (Fig.73), first given at the Avignon festival, and restaged at the Teatro Fondamenta Nuove in Venice during the opening days of the Biennale, involving Barceló and the choreographer Josef Nadj performing various physical engagements on a clay stage and with clay hoods moulded into strange bestial heads. Here, however, only a DVD of the performance is shown in the reading area of the Pavilion, minimising its impact.

Transforming a Pavilion into a minimuseum is also the approach adopted for the American contribution, with a flawless display of work by Bruce Nauman. Yet the delicacy and tact of museum curating seem at odds with the opportunity that Pavilion architecture offers for surprise encounter. One has the impression of being in the wing of a larger retrospective, and that a consecration was taking place instead of a revelation, particularly in the case of Nauman’s fountain work in the final room, which recalled the more interesting fountain piece by the artist in the Italian Pavilion in 2007.

Most fascinating of all, however, is the transformation of the British Pavilion into a cinema, with timed viewings of Steve McQueen’s new film, Giardini (Fig.75).3 Tickets, at least in the opening days, were hard to come by, reminding one of the ‘booking is essential’ culture of contemporary Britain. But here it was also worth the wait. McQueen shot his film in the Giardini between Biennales, during the low winter months when the Pavilions are boarded up and nature reclaims the grounds from art.

Comprised of a series of still-camera shots, often close-ups, and various views of the Pavilions, it creates a highly sensuous combination of images and sound on a doublescreen projection. Greyhounds often appear, scavenging around the debris of the last Biennale. They suggest the fantastical quality of the gardens imagined through art, the association arising with the greyhounds that can be found in works by Carpaccio. Other creatures invade the Giardini, from caterpillars to beetles, just as the seasons strip the trees and create a sense of desolation so antithetical to the excitement of the Biennale.

Bin-liners of rubbish await collection outside the Swiss Pavilion; a name is scrawled on the door of the Italian Pavilion; from a high window of the boarded-up Danish Pavilion a curious orange pipe emerges. Out of season the Giardini is also a cruising ground for male hustlers, who appear in McQueen’s film standing and waiting. One short sequence shows two figures emerging from the darkness and embracing – a curiously mawkish bit of narrative in an otherwise seamlessly evocative film. Despite this, Giardini remains

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a masterly film, mainly because it so simply reverses the stakes of what it means to exhibit in a national Pavilion, and to carry such a burden of expectation to excite and shock. It reveals the historical layering underlying a sense of place, the magical qualities of what remains once the party is over and the fascination of time passing. As a leitmotif this feeling of eternal expectation is captured in the final shot, showing a drop of water hanging from a spring bud, reflecting the British Pavilion like a specchio convesso, trembling but not falling.

1 Catalogue: Making Worlds: 53rd International Art Exhibition. La Biennale di Venezia. Edited by Daniel Birnbaum. 704 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Marsilio, Venice, 2009), £65. ISBN 978–88–317–9696–5.

2 M. Szewczyk, ed.: Meaning Liam Gillick, Cambridge MA 2009.

3 Catalogue: Steve McQueen Giardini Notebook. With an essay by T.J. Demos. Unpaginated, with numerous illustrations. (British Council, London, 2009), £13.

ISBN 978–0–86355–625–8.

Pasqualino Rossi Serra San Quirico

by ERIKA LANGMUIR

to surprise. Not only does austere, medieval Serra San Quirico, a tiny rock-built mountain commune in the Marches, contain S. Lucia, the most sumptuously decorated Baroque church of the region, but the church also houses two altarpieces and, in the apse, five large canvases

by Pasqualino Rossi (Vicenza 1641–Rome 1722), a painter once renowned in Rome for small cabinet pictures. This first exhibition devoted to the artist, Pasqualino Rossi: La scoperta di un protagoniasta del Barocco, and the first ever to be held in Serra San Quirico, in the ex-monastery of S. Lucia (to 13th September), turns out to be a genuine arthistorical revelation. It reconstructs Rossi’s eclectic œuvre – until recently almost universally misattributed to others1 – in the context of older and younger contemporaries. Exhibition and catalogue together illuminate a complex and not well-known moment in Italian late seicento art and collecting, when two seemingly contrasting trends coincided: a ‘modern’ taste for genre, and a cult of sixteenth-century masters, notably Giorgione and Correggio.2 While proclaiming himself to be an autodidact, formed through assiduous copying of paintings in Venice and Rome,3 Rossi may have been a pupil of, and was certainly indebted to, the cultivated though eccentric neo-Giorgionesque artist Pietro Della Vecchia (Vicenza? 1603–Venice 1678). Della Vecchia’s penchant for caricature is especially evident in the Mathematics lesson (cat.

ITALY NEVER CEASES

no.III.3), probably a workshop replica of a theme frequent in this artist’s œuvre. Images of instruction – often painted in pairs, distinguishing between the teaching of male and female accomplishments – became, on a more diminutive scale, a staple of Rossi’s repertory. The earliest shown here, A school of women’s work, with women intent on embroidery, sewing and reading, and Rehearsal for a concert, with young players and singers (nos.II.1 and 2), are close to Della Vecchia in extravagance as well as in their free brushwork and their predominantly brown, red and ochre palette. They also point to Rossi’s acquaintance with the hectic works of that epigone of the Bamboccianti active in the Veneto, Matteo Ghedoni (?1626–Padua 1689), known as Matteo dei Pitocchi, who specialised in motifs drawn from Callot’s prints of beggars and vagabonds (no.III.5).

Perhaps the most impressive of the ‘contextual’ artists shown here, however, is the Dane Eberhart Keilhau (Helsinger 1624–Rome 1687), known as Bernard Keil or Monsù Bernardo. He imported to Rome a more decorous depiction of humble sitters, derived from domestic Dutch genre, paving the way for Rossi’s later, bourgeois images of ‘everyday life’. The previously unpublished Girl with a pail (no.III.9) demonstrates Keilhau’s ‘naturalistic poetry’ at its highest: the freely painted three-quarter figure on the scale of life, turning her gaze on the viewer, is no longer an object of repulsion or laughter, but a subject, of humanity equal to the viewer’s.

A notary’s act of 1700 indicates that the Vicenza-born, Venetian-trained Pasqualino Rossi had relatives in Parma, suggesting a first-hand knowledge of Correggio’s works,

76. Lamentation, by Pasqualino Rossi. Before 1689.

Panel, 43.5 by 38.8 cm. (Museo del Barocco Romano, Arriccia; exh. S. Lucia, Serra San Quirico).

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which were also to prove an enduring influence on his own. In 1668 the artist was admitted to the Virtuosi of the Pantheon in Rome; in 1670 he was enrolled in the Academy of St Luke. He remained principally based in the city until his death, executing, however, only three projects for Roman churches.4 It is assumed that his numerous church commissions from Benedictine orders in the Marches resulted from an acquaintance in Rome with a high prelate from the region, where ambitious abbots were busied restoring and modernising.5 The paintings for the Silvestrine church of S. Lucia in Serra San Quirico (after 1674–by 1694), and particularly the cycle of the saint’s life in the apse, are acknowledged to be the best of his works in a large format.6 The Charity of St Lucy (Fig.77), although a second episode in the story, opens the cycle, its greater number of figures requiring the larger space available.7 (Its pendant on the right of the apse is the equally animated St Lucy dragged in vain to the brothel; no.I.13.) Having decided not to marry after a miraculous vision of St Agatha, pictured in the following canvas, Lucy distributes her dowry to the poor. An eloquent pattern of hands against the sky – that of the saint with her delicate profile, in her neat, not gaudy, apparel, giving alms; those of the poor clasped in prayer or open to receive; the demonstrative gesture of the genteel witness drawing her little black page’s attention to the scene – resumes the action. A sense of intimacy, and the almost symmetrically bracketed alignment of figures, are also traits of the small genre pictures of Rossi’s maturity, such as the Concert (no.II.5). Paired with a Players at dice (no.II.6), this work evokes the cinquecento through the figures’ subtly anachronistic dress, although its Giorgionesque poetics are reinterpreted in the idiom of Caravaggesque tenebrism and drama.

The most enthusiastic collector of Rossi’s cabinet paintings was the Spanish grandee Don Gaspar Méndez de Haro y Guzman, Marquess of Carpio, envoy to the Holy See, later Viceroy of Naples. Between his arrival in Rome in 1677 and his departure in 1682 he acquired no fewer than forty-one pictures by the artist, though only of religious, mythical or allegorical subjects. No.994 of his inventory was The Holy Family with the infant St John (no.I.9). Guzman was also a great admirer and collector of Correggio, and Rossi’s painting clearly emulates the latter in composition and physiognomies. Correggio, as filtered through the young Annibale Carracci, is the obvious influence on the tender Lamentation (no.I.16; Fig.76) painted by Rossi for his most illustrious client, the Venetian Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, elected pope in 1689 under the name Alexander VIII. The picture, in relatively good condition, exemplifies that refined retrospection which made Rossi’s cabinet paintings so appealing to collectors, and his authorship so readily forgotten.

Pasqualino Rossi testifies to the richness of late seicento visual culture, the variety of models, modern and from the past, local and

77. Charity of St Lucy, by Pasqualino Rossi. c.1679. Canvas, 282 by 310 cm. (S. Lucia, Serra San Quirico).

foreign, available to artists and connoisseurs through prints, travel and a flourishing art trade. A painter as attuned to the market and as resourceful as Rossi was spurred to draw at will on this living treasury, to suit the occasion and his clients’ predilections.

1 These misattributions have ranged from Correggio, through Barocci, Annibale Carracci and Giulio Cesare Procaccini to Giuseppe Maria Crespi, and others less famous. The rediscovery of Pasqualino Rossi can be credited in the first instance to Roberto Longhi, followed by Federico Zeri. The curators of the present exhibition, Anna Maria Ambrosini Massari and Angelo Mazza, through exhaustive research into inventories and private collections, have succeeded in tracing not only misattributed pictures but also ones that have never before been exhibited or published, including many of the paintings by the ‘contextual’ artists on show – discoveries that make the exhibition a thrilling event out of all proportion to its modest size and installation.

2 Catalogue: Pasqualino Rossi, 1641–1722, Grazie e affetti di un artista del Seicento. Edited by Anna Maria Ambrosini Massari and Angelo Mazza, with contributions by Lucia Diotalevi, Fabrizio Lemme, Francesco Federico Mancini, Fabio Marcelli, Fausto Nicolai, Maria Maddalena Paolini and Giovanna Perini. 232 pp. incl. 50 col. + 70 b. & w. ills. (Silvana Editoriale, Milan, 2009), €32. ISBN 978–88–366–134–58. Not for the first time the present writer has occasion to complain about the almost total omission of technical information – despite recent restorations, and given the obvious discrepancies in handling and condition of Rossi’s paintings – that mars an otherwise exemplary publication.

3 As reported by P.A. Orlandi: Abcedario pittorico nel quale compediosamente sono descritte le Patrie, i Maestri, ed i tempi, ne’ quali fiorirono circa quattro mila Professori di Pittura, di Scultura, e d’Architettura, Bologna 1704, p.312.

4 A Baptism of Christ in S. Maria del Popolo (by 1674); the Agony in the garden in S. Carlo al Corso (c.1675); and a cycle dedicated to S. Rosa of Viterbo in S. Maria in Aracoeli (by 1686). The dates are deduced from the successive publication dates of F. Titti: Studio di Pittura, scoltura, et architettura, nelle chiese di Roma, Rome 1674, 1686, only the second of which lists all three projects.

5 Two canvases for the Camaldolese church of Sts Blaise and Romualdo in Fabriano in 1674; by 1679 the pictorial decoration of three chapels in the Silvestrine church of S. Benedetto, also in Fabriano: two under the patronage of noble families, the Ambrosi and the Alberti, the third of the Arte dei Falegnami e degli Scalpellini (St Joseph’s dream and the Assumption of St Mary Magdalene are included in the exhibition). In 1699, declining in health and technique, Rossi executed four canvases for the church of S. Bartolomeo in Cagli; see especially the essay and the documentary appendix compiled by Maria Maddalena Paolini in Ambrosini Massari and Mazza, op. cit. (note 2), pp.79–85.

6 For the Serra San Quirico pictures, see especially Lucia Diotalevi in ibid., pp.107–27. Both she and Angelo Mazza misidentify the iconography of Rossi’s altarpiece in the church of Sts Quirico and Giulitta: the martyred Early Christian mother and son, with the Blessed Alessandra Sabini of nearby Arcevia and St Silvestro, the Marchigian founder of the Silvestrine Benedictines, are shown venerating a Holy Thorn, the prized relic of the church housed in the ostensory, and not the Holy Sacrament.

7 Restoration of the S. Lucia canvases in 1995–96 revealed that those of the cycle were widened, after completion, to fit their frames within the decorative scheme. The autograph additions demonstrate that, while Rossi painted the pictures in Rome, he later adapted them in situ. Borrowings from Lorenzo Lotto’s S. Lucia altarpiece in Jesi (c.1523–32) further attest to the artist’s presence in the Marches; see especially Diotalevi in Ambrosini Massari and Mazza, op. cit. (note 2), pp.108–09.

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Calendar London Alan Cristea. Prints by Patrick Caulfield, 1964–99; to 5th September.

Works by Picasso, Matisse and Braque; to 14th September.

Barbican. Radical Nature. Art & architecture for a changing planet, 1969–2009 explores artistic responses to nature and climate change; to 20th September.

Bernard Jacobson. Works by Robert Motherwell are on view here to 28th August.

British Museum. Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur, seen previously in Washington and Seattle and reviewed in the April issue, runs here to 23rd August.

Medals are best known for celebrating important figures or heroic deeds, but the exhibition Medals of Dishonour features examples that condemn their subjects; to 27th September.

Camden Arts Centre. The first large exhibition in Britain of work by Johanna Billing, including a newly commissioned film on the theme of contemporary dance; to 13th September.

A new sculptural installation by Alexandre da Cunha; to 13th September.

Courtauld Gallery. Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs of the Omega Workshops 1913–19 unites the Gallery’s collection of working drawings from the Omega Workshops with examples of the textiles, pottery and furniture that it produced; to 20th September; to be reviewed.

Design Museum. The exhibition Super Contemporary celebrates design in London with fifteen specially commissioned works; to 4th October.

Dulwich Picture Gallery. Works by the Polish artist Antoni Malinowski are on display to 27th September.

To complement its new catalogue of British pictures, the Gallery exhibits the best of its British paintings in a special display running to 27th September.

Fleming Collection. Sir Muirhead Bone (1876–1953): Artist and Patron; to 5th September.

Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square. Antony Gormley’s One & Other invites ‘ordinary’ people to occupy the fourth plinth, one after the other, around the clock, for 100 days; to 14th October.

Haunch of Venison. The second part of the exhibition devoted to the artist Keith Coventry runs to 15th August. Thereafter a new body of work by the Swiss artist Uwe Wittwer (b.1954) includes recent works on paper in watercolour and inkjet; from 24th August to 3rd October.

Hayward Gallery. Ten large-scale installations comprise the exhibition Walking in my Mind, including works by Keith Tyson, Jason Rhoades and Thomas Hirschhorn; to 6th September.

Imperial War Museum. Unspeakable: The Artist as Witness to the Holocaust runs here to 31st August.

ICA. The exhibition Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. explores text-based works by artists such as Carl Andre and Frances Stark; to 25th August.

Lisson Gallery. Boule to Braid, curated by Richard Wentworth, is on view to 15th August.

National Gallery. Corot to Monet: A fresh look at landscape from the Collection charts the development of open-air landscape painting up to the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874; to 20th September; to be reviewed.

Titian’s Triumph of Love, recently acquired by the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and the subject of an article on p.536 above, goes on display here after its recent conservation treatment at the Gallery; to 20th September.

National Portrait Gallery. The 2009 BP portrait award is on view to 20th September.

Pilar Corrias. Works by Benjamin Saurer are on view here to 5th September.

Queen’s Gallery. French Porcelain for English Palaces: Sèvres from the Royal Collection; to 11th October.

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Riflemaker. Some 100 small drawings celebrating the art and ritual of bullfighting by José María Cano (b.1959) are on display here to 12th September.

Royal Academy. In the Madejski Fine Rooms works from the RA’s permanent collection examine High Art: Reynolds and History Painting and the loan of W.P. Frith’s Private view at the Royal Academy, 1881 (1883), shown with other late Victorian paintings; to 29th November.

A major retrospective devoted to J.W. Waterhouse, seen previously in Groningen, runs to 13th September (then in Montreal); to be reviewed.

This year’s summer exhibition runs to 16th August.

Saatchi Gallery. Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture, offering a survey of recent trends in abstract painting (broadly defined); to 13th September (Fig.78).

Sadie Coles HQ. Works by Carl Andre (at 695 Audley St.); to 22nd August.

Serpentine Gallery. Jeff Koons’s Popeye Series is on display to 13th September.

This years Pavilion, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the leading Japanese architecture practice SANAA, is on view to 18th October.

Sir John Soane’s Museum. Immagini e memoria – Rome in the photographs of Father Peter Paul Mackey 1890–1901 is on view here to 19th September.

Tate Britain. A collections display recreating William Blake’s only one-man exhibition, mounted by the artist in his brother’s shop in Golden Square in May 1809, runs to 4th October; it was reviewed in the July issue.

Works spanning four decades by Richard Long, comprise an exhibition running to 6th September; it is reviewed on p.487 above.

Recent acquisitions of British contemporary art, including the Chapman Family Collection by the Chapman brothers, a series of faux-primitive sculptures incorporating MacDonald’s motifs, are on view to 23rd August.

Cold Corners by Eva Rothschild is the latest Duveen Commission to occupy the central Duveen Galleries, and comprises a metal framework sculpture that fills the space; to 29th November.

Tate Modern. Seen earlier in Paris and Rome, the exhibition of Futurism, the first large survey of the movement in Britain for over thirty years, which includes a reconstruction of the 1912 Futurist exhibition that travelled from the Galerie Bernheim in Paris to the Sackville Gallery in London, runs here to 20th September; to be reviewed.

An exhibition of works by the Danish artist Per Kirkeby, spanning four decades, is on view here to 12th September.

Victoria and Albert Museum. A Higher Ambition: Owen Jones (1809–74) traces Jones’s contributions to Victorian design reform; to 22nd November.

78. Mother popcorn, by Chris Martin. 2006–07. Canvas with collage, 162.6 by 149.9 cm. (Exh. Saatchi Gallery, London).

Wallace Collection. Vorsprung durch Technik: The Innovative Work of Cabinet-Maker Johann Fiedler explores a recently restored commode of c.1786; to 29th November.

Whitechapel Gallery. A survey of work by Elizabeth Peyton is on view here to 20th September.

The triennial East End Academy, showing work by 12 artists from the East End of London, is on view to 20th September.

White Cube. A new series of works by Gilbert & George, titled ‘Jack Freak Pictures’, is on view at Mason’s Yard and Hoxton Square to 22nd August.

Great Britain and Ireland Bexhill-on-Sea, De La Warr Pavilion. Sculptures, photographs, drawings and watercolours by Joseph Beuys comprise an exhibition to 27th September.

Birmingham, Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Dürer to Spencer: Highlights on Paper from University College, London; to 25th October.

Birmingham, Ikon Gallery. The first major exhibition in Europe of abstract paintings by the Cuban-born, New York-based artist Carmen Herrera, including works from the late 1940s to the present; to 13th September.

Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. Matthew Boulton – Selling What All the World Desires, reviewed on p.488 above, is on view here to 27th September.

Blackpool, Grundy Art Gallery. ‘Rank’: picturing the social order 1516–2009, seen previously in Leeds and Sunderland, runs here to 5th September.

Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. Seen earlier in London and Nottingham, and reviewed in the September 2008 issue, The American Scene: Prints from Hopper to Pollock, can be seen here to 31st August.

Bristol, Arnolfini. The mixed exhibition Sequelism Part 3: Possible, Probable or Preferable Futures features work by artists including Graham Gussin and Victor Man; to 20th September.

Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum. Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts, seen previously in New Haven, is on display here to 4th October.

Cardiff, National Museum. The exhibition No Such Thing as Society: Photography in Britain 1967–1987 is on view here to 31st October.

Cheltenham, Art Gallery and Museum. Seen earlier in London, the exhibition Athletes and Olympians, celebrating sporting heroes of the past century, is on view here to 30th August.

Compton Verney. The exhibition devoted to John Constable’s portraits, seen previously in London and reviewed in the May issue, is on view here to 6th September.

Georgian Portraits: Seeing is Believing is an exhibition of works from the Holburne Museum of Art, Bath; to 13th December.

Cookham, Stanley Spencer Gallery. 2009 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Spencer’s death. The Gallery’s own collection is augmented with works on loan from Tate Britain; to 1st November.

Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art. A survey of works by Terry Winters from the past decade is on view to 27th September.

Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland. From Raphael to Rossetti: Drawings from the Collection; to 23rd August.

Edinburgh, Dean Gallery. See Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Edinburgh, Fruitmarket Gallery. An exhibition of small experimental works by Eva Hesse is on view here to 25th October (then in London).

Edinburgh, Inverleith House. An exhibition of work by John McCracken runs here from 6th August to 11th October.

Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland. The Discovery of Spain. British Artists and Collectors: Goya to Picasso explores the work of 19th- and early 20th-century British artists such as David Wilkie, David Roberts, John Phillip and Arthur Melville who were inspired by Spain; to 11th October.

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Edinburgh, Queen’s Gallery. An exhibition tracing the history of the ‘conversation piece’ through works from the Royal Collection is on view here to 20th September (then in London).

Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Works by Hirst, Celmins, Gallagher, Katz, Woodman and Warhol selected from some 700 works comprising the ‘Artist Rooms’ acquisition are displayed here as part of an inaugural series of ‘Artist Rooms’ across the country (see also Dean Gallery); to 8th November.

Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery. Drawings and sculptures by David Nash; to 10th October.

Glasgow, Hunterian. An exhibition of prints by Munch, on loan from the Munch Museum, Oslo, is the most substantial exhibition of the artist’s prints on view in Britain for 35 years; to 5th September.

Leeds Art Gallery. Works of British Surrealism from the Sherwin Collection; to 1st November.

Leeds, Henry Moore Institute. The New Monumentality: Gerard Byrne, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Dorit Margreiter; to 30th August.

Leeds, Temple Newsam House. Drawn from the collections of Leeds Art Gallery, the exhibition Watercolour Masterpieces: Turner and his Contemporaries, runs here to 1st November.

Lismore Castle Arts. An exhibition curated by Philippe Pirotte comprises works by Stefan Brüggemann, Rita McBride, Corey McCorkle, Jason Rhoades and Ai Weiwei; to 30th September.

Liverpool, Lady Lever Art Gallery. Whistler: The Gentle Art of Making Etchings, seen previously in Glasgow, runs to 20th September.

Liverpool, Tate. Seen earlier in New York, the exhibition Colour Chart: Reinventing Colour, 1950 to Today, is on view here to 13th September.

Middlesbrough, Institute of Modern Art. An exhibition of works by Gerhard Richter, from 1980 to the present, is on view here to 15th November.

Milton Keynes Gallery. A group exhibition of contemporary sculptural works made from found or discarded materials, Quiet Revolution, is on view here to 30th August.

Norwich, Sainsbury Centre. Polish art is celebrated in two exhibitions: An Impossible Journey. The Art and Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor, and a display of contemporary art from Poland, both running to 30th August; they are reviewed on p.492 above.

Nottingham Castle. An international loan exhibition here marks the bicentenary of the death of the Nottingham-born artist Paul Sandby and includes watercolours, gouaches, etchings and a few rare paintings; to 18th October (then in Edinburgh and London).

Oxford, Christ Church Picture Gallery. Mannerist drawings from the permanent collection are on display to 4th October (Fig.79).

Oxford, Museum of Modern Art. 92 early Polaroids

by Robert Mapplethorpe, and an exhibition of twelve paintings by Silke Otto-Knapp, made since 2005, are on display to 13th September.

Penzance, Penlee House Gallery & Museum. An exhibition focusing on works by artists associated with the Newlyn Colony at the time of its inauguration in the late nineteenth century; to 12th September.

St Ives, Tate. A summer exhibition combining works by seven fine and applied artists, from Alfred Wallis to Katy Moran, runs to 27th September.

Salisbury, Roche Court, New Art Centre. Work by Barry Flanagan is on view to 6th September.

Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery. An exhibition of work

by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson from the 1930s; to 29th August; it is reviewed on p.491 above.

Windsor, Windsor Castle, Drawings Gallery. An exhibition marking the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII’s accession to the throne includes works by Holbein; to 18th April 2010.

York Art Gallery. Drawing on the Arts Council Collection and that of the Gallery, an exhibition examining the work of artists from St Ives from the 1930s to the 1960s runs here to 27th September.

79. Man leaning down over a cross-bar, by Francesco Salviati. Black chalk, heightened with white, on blue paper, 26.8 by 20.8 cm. (Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford).

Europe Aix-en-Provence, Musée Granet. An exhibition on Picasso’s debt to Cézanne; to 27th September; to be reviewed.

Amsterdam, Hermitage. The opening exhibition at this revamped and expanded outpost of the Hermitage explores life and art at the Russian court in the 19th century; to 31st January.

Amsterdam, Rembrandthuis. The monographic exhibition devoted to Jan Lievens, seen earlier in Milwaukee and Washington and reviewed in the May issue, runs here to 9th August.

Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Four times a year, the Museum will present treasures from its print room as part of the Masterpieces on Paper series; the theme of the inaugural presentation is ‘light and dark’ in a display running to 31st August. Also on display (to 7th September) are four recently acquired and subsequently restored portraits by Johannes Verspronck (Fig.80).

Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum. Odilon Redon and Emile Bernard explores the collection of Andries Bonger (1861–1936) which was acquired by the Dutch State in 1996 and given to the Museum on long-term loan; to 20th September.

Asti, Palazzo Mazzetti. An exhibition of 17th- and 18th-century sacred wooden sculpture; to 18th October.

Barcelona, CaixaForum. Andrea Palladio: His Life and Legacy, seen earlier at Vicenza and London and reviewed in the March issue, is here to 6th September.

Barcelona, Museu Picasso. Seen earlier in Montreal and reviewed in the April issue, the retrospective of works by Kees van Dongen is here to 27th September.

Basel, Fondation Beyeler. A comprehensive survey of works by Giacometti; to 11th October.

Basel, Kunstmuseum. Vincent van Gogh. Between Earth and Heaven: The Landscapes offers a complete survey of the artist’s works in the genre; to 27th September.

Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst. The in-focus exhibition Little Theatre of Gestures explores the role of theatricality in art; to 15th August.

Bassano del Grappa, Museo Remondini. The remarkable collection of prints assembled by the Remondini family of printers includes works by Schongauer, Dürer, Titian and Rembrandt among others; to 4th October.

Berlin, Berlinische Galerie. John Heartfield – Zeitausschnitte shows photomontages made between 1918 and 1939; to 31st August; it is reviewed on p.499 above.

Berlin, Georg Kolbe Museum. The exhibition Romantic Machines. Kinetic Art of the Present includes works by Elmgreen and Dragset, Michael Sailstorfer, and Julius Popp; to 6th September.

Berlin, Martin-Gropius-Bau. The major exhibition Modell Bauhaus organised in collaboration with the Bauhaus archives in Berlin, Dessau and Weimar, and also with the Museum of Modern Art, New York, presents a complete survey of the Bauhaus, with an emphasis on its development and lasting impact; to 4th October. The exhibition will travel in changed format to New York.

Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie. A survey exhibition of work by Imi Knoebel; to 9th August.

Berlin, Sprüth Magers. The exhibition Source Codes presents a range of work by a generation of artists including Kenneth Anger, Richard Hamilton and Bruce Conner, showing how their work has influenced the neo-conceptual art of today; to 29th August.

Bielefeld, Kunsthalle. A retrospective of works by the Chinese artist Fang Lijun is on view here from 30th August to 8th November.

Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum. Following the artist’s installations in the New York Guggenheim, Cai GuoQiang produces here a site-specific version of his exhibition I want to believe, running to 13th September.

Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao. The Splendour of the Renaissance in Aragon presents a selection of some 100 paintings, sculptures, drawings and objects on loan from the Museo de Zaragoza; to 20th September (then in Valencia and Zaragoza).

Bonn, Kunstmuseum. A retrospective of paintings by the Belgian painter Raoul de Keyser goes on view here from 20th August to 18th October.

Bonn, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle. A monographic show devoted to Amedeo Modigliani runs here to 30th August.

Bregenz, Kunsthaus. A large solo exhibition of works

by Antony Gormley spills out into the surrounding Vorarlberg region in the form of one hundred lifesize cast-iron statues modelled on the artist, planted within 100 square miles of Alpine scenery and visible from any vantage point; to 18th October.

Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts. The exhibition devoted to Alfred Stevens will be reviewed in next months issue; to 23rd August.

Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts. Turner and Italy, seen previously in Ferrara and Edinburgh, runs here to 25th October; to be reviewed.

Caen, Musée des Beaux-Arts. See Rouen.

Caldarola, Palazzo dei Cardinali Pallotta. The magnificent collection of Cardinal Giambattista Pallotta, which included works by Caravaggio, Reni, Guercino and Preti, was dispersed at his death in 1668 but is briefly reassembled in a show running to 12th November; to be reviewed.

Caraglio, Il Filatoio Rosso. The rose in art is the theme of a show spanning the 15th to the early 20th century; to 25th October.

Cologne, Museum Ludwig. Jonathan Horowitz’s film montage Apocalypto Now is on display to 23rd August.

A comprehensive display of editions by Sigmar Polke, recently donated to the Museum by Ulrich Reininghaus and Anne Friebe-Reininghaus, are on display to 27th September.

Seen earlier in London, a retrospective of works by Isa Genzken is on view here from 15th August to 15th November.

Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum. The Moon includes paintings, drawings, prints and photographs, as well as astronomical instruments, exploring the fascination that the moon has exerted throughout the ages; to 16th August (then in Houston); to be reviewed.

Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst. Works by the German-born Danish sculptor Christian Lemmerz are on view to 6th March 2010.

The monographic exhibition devoted to Nicolai Abildgaard, seen previously in Paris and Hamburg, has its final showing here from 29th August to 3rd January.

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Coruña, Fundación Caixa Galicia. An exhibition of bodegones from the Prado runs here to 20th September.

Dresden, Japanisches Palais. Two of the oldest collections of antiquities outside Italy are being brought together in an exhibition of classical sculptures from the Museo del Prado and from Dresden’s Skulpturensammlung; to 27th September.

Dresden, Residenzschloss. Here and at the Semperbau am Zwinger, a monographic exhibition devoted to the life and work of Carl Gustav Carus; to 20th September (then in Berlin).

Düsseldorf, Kunsthalle. An exhibition of video and installation by the Bosnian artist Danica Dakic is on view here from 29th August to 8th November.

Düsseldorf, Museum Kunst Palast. On paper: our finest drawings: from Raphael to Beuys, from Rembrandt to Trockel is on view to 30th August.

Evian, Palais Lumière. An exhibition of decorative works by Rodin; to 20th September.

Florence, Casa Buonarroti. A selection of Italian Renaissance drawings from the Rothschild Collection in the Musée du Louvre, Paris; to 14th September.

Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia. 91 of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of beautiful bodies are juxtaposed with Michelangelo’s sculptures; to 27th September.

Florence, Museo delle Cappelle Medicee. An exhibition to mark the fourth centenary of the death of Grand Duke Ferdinando I; to 1st November.

Florence, Uffizi. Splendour and Reason: 18th-century Art in Florence is a major exhibition of all the arts under the last of the Medici and the house of Lorraine; to 30th September; to be reviewed.

Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle. An exhibition promising a look ‘behind the scenes of the contemporary art world’, The Making of Art; to 30th August.

Grenoble, Musée de Grenoble. Some 40 paintings

by Alex Katz comprise an exhibition running here to 27th September (then in Kleve).

Haarlem, De Hallen. Sublime landscapes of Dutch romanticism; to 30th August.

The Hague, Gemeentemuseum. Fauve and Expressionist painting from the Triton Foundation are exhibited to 6th September.

The Hague, GEM, Museum voor Actuele Kunst.

Seen earlier in London, the survey exhibition of works by Michael Raedecker is on view here to 1st November.

An exhibition of drawings by Emo Verkerk is on display to 1st November.

Hamburg, Bucerius Kunst Forum. Work by Edward Hopper is on view to 30th August.

Hamburg, Deichtorhallen. A survey exhibition of Cecily Brown’s work is on view to 30th August.

Hanover, Sprengel Museum. Photographs from the collection of the Cologne-based dealers Ann and Jürgen Wilde, on permanent loan to the Museum, comprise an exhibition running here to 30th August.

Humlebaek, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. An exhibition of recent acquisitions, 2007–08, is on view to 20th September.

Kassel, Gemäldegalerie. An exhibition devoted to Philips Wouwerman runs here to 11th October (then in The Hague); to be reviewed.

Le Havre, Musée Malraux. See Rouen.

Maastricht, Bonnefantenmuseum. A display of the Rijksmuseum’s six tapestries with themes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, woven by Frans Spiering after designs

by Karel van Mander, three of which were acquired in 2006, runs to 13th September; to be reviewed.

The exhibition Exile on Main St. shows works by a number of artists, including Artschwager, Copley and Westermann, who stood out from mainstream American Pop art in the 1960s; to 16th August.

Madrid, Museo del Prado. A monographic show devoted to Joaquin Sorolla runs to 6th September.

Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. A retrospective of works by Juan Muñoz is on view to 31st August.

The first comprehensive museum survey of works

by Matthew Buckingham is on view here to 28th September.

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80. Eduard Wallis (1621–84), by Johannes Cornelisz Verspronck. 1652. Panel, 97 by 75 cm.

(Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).

Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. An exhibition focusing on the central period of Matisse’s work, from 1917 to 1941, runs here to 20th September.

Malaga, CAC. A large exhibition of work by the American artist Jack Pierson; to 27th September.

Marsala, Convento del Carmine. Monochrome art

by Burri, Fontana, Kounellis and others is on display here to 18th October.

Martigny, Fondation Gianadda. Modern works from Courbet to Picasso from the Pushkin Museum are on display here to 22nd November.

Milan, Museo Poldi Pezzoli. Neo-classical and Romantic drawings from the collection of Riccardo Lampugnani are on view here to 18th October.

Milan, Palazzo Reale. A large-scale exhibition devoted to the Scapigliatura movement, born in Milan at the time of the reunification of Italy and including artists such as Medardo Rosso, Picio and Cremona, runs here to 22nd November.

Twenty of Monet’s late paintings are shown with 60 prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige from the Musée Guimet, Paris; to 27th September.

Milan, Spazio Oberdan. A survey show of contemporary Latin-American art runs to 4th October.

Montauban, Musée Ingres. The exhibition Ingres et les Modernes previously in Quebec, explores the influence of Ingres on modern artists; to 4th October.

Munich, Haus der Kunst. A thematically organised overview of works by the sculptor Thomas Schütte, including watercolours, prints and photographs, can be seen here to 30th August.

Munich, Museum Brandhorst. Opened in May, this new museum houses the collection of American modern and contemporary art, including a large collection of works by Cy Twombly, belonging to Udo and Anette Brandhorst.

Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne. A complete survey of works by Hermann Obrist; to 27th September.

Murcia, La Conservera. This new contemporary art centre, which opened in May, is showing exhibitions

by Manu Arregui, Björn Dahlem, Loris Gréaud and Banks Violette; all to 16th August.

Naples, Museo Madre. An exhibition of paintings by Francesco Clemente, which focuses on the artist’s relationship to Italy, and culminates with the fresco Ab Ovo made for the Museum in 2004–05, is on view here to 14th September; to be reviewed.

Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum.

Seen earlier in Los Angeles, the exhibition Kunst und Kalter Krieg. Deutsche Positionen 1945–1989 is on view here to 6th September; to be reviewed.

Nuremberg, Kunsthalle. A survey of paintings 1999–2009 by the Expressionist painter André Butzer is on view here to 23rd August.

Palma, Es Baluard Museum of Art. Thirteen large paintings by Anselm Kiefer from the Grothe Collection are on view here to 30th August.

Seen earlier in Dortmund, Tampere and Malaga, Under the Snow, an exhibition of work by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, is on view here to 6th September.

Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou. Seen earlier in New York and Munich, the retrospective of works

by Kandinsky runs here to 10th August. elles@centrepompidou presents works from the collections by female artists; to 24th May 2010.

Works by Phillipe Parreno are on view here to 7th September.

Paris, Fondation Cartier. Born in the Streets – Graffiti provides a survey of graffiti and street art from the 1970s to the present day; to 29th November.

Paris, Musée d’Orsay. The original collages created

by Max Ernst for his collage novel Une semaine de bonté during a three-week stay in Italy in 1933 are on display here to 13th September.

Paris, Musée du Louvre. An exhibition of drawings by Laurent de La Hyre runs to 2nd November. A display of drawings by Domenico Beccafumi is concurrent.

Paris, Musée du Luxembourg. Filippo and Filippino Lippi: the Renaissance in Prato runs here to 2nd August.

Paris, Musée Maillol. An exhibition of work by George Condo is on display here to 17th August.

Paris, Musée Rodin. Two exhibitions on the theme of portraiture by Rodin and the contemporary British artist Gillian Wearing; to 23rd August.

Paris, Palais de Tokyo. An exhibition on the theme of espionage in contemporary art, Spy Numbers, runs here to 30th August.

Paris, Pinacothèque. 50 works each by Valadon and Utrillo; to 15th September; reviewed on p.498 above.

Pordenone, Civici Musei d’Arte e Spazi espositivi provinciali. Sculpture and designs by Harry Bertoia (1915–78), inventor of the diamond chair, born in Pordenone and active in the US, are on display here to 30th August.

Remagen, Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck.

Work by Jonathan Meese is on view here in the exhibition Erzstaat Atlantisis; to 30th August.

Rome, Gagosian Gallery. Recent work by Cindy Sherman is on view here to 19th September.

Rome, MACRO Future. An installation by Hema Upadhyay is on view here to 21st September.

Rome, Palazzo Braschi. An exhibition of works by Umberto Prencipe (1879–1962), some recently donated to the Museum, runs here to 13th September.

Rome, Palazzo Venezia. The travelling exhibition The Mind of Leonardo is on show here to 30th August.

Rome, Scuderie Papali al Quirinale. Photographs

by Lee Miller and Tony Vaccaro charting the Second World War from the Normandy landings to the liberation of Italy; to 30th August.

Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts. An exhibition here and at the Musée Malraux, Le Havre, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen, explores 19th-century art inspired by Normandy; to 16th August.

St Etienne, Musée d’art moderne de Sainte-Etienne. A retrospective of work by the Sarajevo-born artist Braco Dimitrijevic; to 16th August.

St Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum. Masterpieces of Egyptian portraits from the Egyptian Museum in Berlin; to 20th September.

The Blue and the Gold of Limoges. The Enamels of the XII–XIV Centuries; to 20th September.

Saint Paul de Vence, Fondation Maeght. Miró en son Jardin illuminates the relationship between Miró and the Maeght family, in an exhibition comprising some 250 works; to 8th November.

Saint-Tropez, Musée de l’Annonciade. More than 60 works by Rouault explore the role of landscape in his œuvre; to 12th October.

Salzburg, Museum der Moderne Salzburg Mönchsberg. 120 drawings and 20 sculptures by Tony Cragg comprise an exhibition running here to 11th October.

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Scandiano, Rocca dei Boiardo. Recently recovered traces of frescos by Niccolo dell’Abate in the Rocca form the backdrop to an exhibition of work by the artist and his pupils; to 11th October.

Serra San Quirico, ex-Monastero di S. Lucia. The exhibition Pasqualino Rossi. La scoperta di un protagonista del Barocco, reviewed on p.504, runs to 13th September.

Trento, Castello del Buonconsiglio. A large-scale exhibition of ancient Egyptian art is on view here to 8th November.

Treviso, Centro Carlo Scarpa. An exhibition of Scarpa’s unrealised designs for theatres dating from the 1920s to the 1970s is on view here to 21st November.

Trieste, Castello di S. Giusto. The Serbian community of Trieste from 1751 to 1914 is the subject of a show running to 4th November.

Tübingen, Kunsthalle. Some 110 works in a variety of media comprise a retrospective exhibition of works by Tal R; to 4th October.

Turin, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.

Seen earlier in Liverpool, the exhibition of works by Glenn Brown runs here to 4th October. Überlingen, Municipal Art Gallery. The 175th anniversaries of the births of Degas and Whistler are celebrated in the exhibition Impressionism and Japonism, focusing on the way both artists responded to Japanese prints; to 13th September.

Utrecht, Museum Catharijneconvent. Masterly Manuscripts. The Middle Ages in gold and ink is organised in collaboration with the Library of Utrecht University; to 23rd August.

Venice, Chiostro di S. Apollonia. S. Apollonia, patron saint of teeth, was the subject of some unexhibited drawings made by Andy Warhol in 1984; they are shown with recent works by Omar Gallani of the same saint; in an exhibition running to 15th August.

Venice, François Pinault Foundation. At the Palazzo Grassi and the newly restored Punta della Dogana, works from the François Pinault Foundation; to 22nd November.

Venice, Giardini. The 53rd Venice Biennale runs to 22nd November; it is reviewed on p.502 above.

Venice, Palazzo Fortuny. The exhibition In-finitum is the last of the trilogy of shows organised by the Vervoordt Foundation; to 15th November.

Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Robert Rauschenberg: Gluts, showing a selection of sculptures, runs to 20th September.

Torre, the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s latest creation, is a corten steel tower in the International Gothic style and is on view to 22nd November.

Vienna, Kunsthalle. An exhibition of work by Thomas Ruff; to 13th September.

Vienna, Liechtenstein Museum. An exhibition exploring the picture frame from the late medieval period to the 19th century runs to 12th January.

Vienna, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. The monographic exhibition exploring the work of Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, seen previously in Paris, runs here to 11th October.

Vienna, MUMOK. Sensations of the Moment, the first retrospective of works by Cy Twombly to be displayed in Austria, runs here to 11th October.

Volterra, Palazzo dei Priori. An exhibition devoted to the Flemish painter Pieter de Witte (c.1548–1628) runs here to 8th November; to be reviewed.

Wuppertal, Von der Heydt-Museum. Freedom, power and splendour: Dutch art in the 16th and 17th centuries explores the dichotomy between a country experiencing a golden age and a country continually at war; to 9th September.

Zürich, Kunsthaus. A survey exhibition of sculptures by the German artist Katharina Fritsch, including a number of new works, is on display here to 30th August.

Paintings by the Swiss-born founder of the Munich Secession, Albert von Keller; to 4th October.

An exhibition of work by the Paris-based Romanian artist Mircea Cantor (b.1977) runs here to 8th November.

New York Andrea Rosen. Paintings by John Currin are on view here to 21st August.

Asia Society. The first US museum presentation of the complete five-part film by Yang Fudong, Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, runs to 13th September.

Brooklyn Museum. A mid-career survey of work by Yinka Shonibare runs here to 20th September.

Cheim & Read. A group exhibition of works by female artists depicting the female form, with works from Berenice Abbott to Marlene Dumas, runs here to 19th September.

Dia Foundation. At Beacon an exhibition placing works by Antoni Tàpies, drawn from the collection of the Reina Sofia, Madrid, in relation to works by American and German artists from the 1960s and 1970s runs to 19th October.

Also at Beacon, a new work by Zoe Leonard can be seen to 7th September.

Frick Collection. An exhibition here explores works by Whistler in the permanent collection; to 23rd August.

Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pen and Parchment: the art of drawing in the Middle Ages; to 23rd August; to be reviewed.

African and Oceanic Art from the Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva; to 27th September.

Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, seen previously in London and Madrid and reviewed in the September 2008 issue, runs here to 16th August.

Metro Pictures. A retrospective exhibition of works

by Robert Longo is on view here to 29th November.

Morgan Library & Museum. An exhibition here is devoted to the outstanding 18th- and early 19thcentury oil-sketches in the collection of Eugene V. and Clare Thaw; to 30th August.

Pages of Gold: Medieval Illuminations from the Morgan; to 13th September.

Museum of Modern Art. An exhibition of work by James Ensor; to 21st September (then in Paris).

In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976 shows works by a range of artists, from Gilbert & George to Allen Ruppersberg, who spent time in Amsterdam in the 1960s and 1970s; to 5th October.

Cézanne to Picasso: Paintings from the David and Peggy Rockefeller Collection comprises ten early modern European paintings given or promised to MoMA by David and Peggy Rockefeller; to 31st August (Fig.81).

The first major retrospective of work by the British designer Ron Arad; to 19th October.

81. Interior with a young girl (girl reading), by Henri Matisse. 1905–06. Canvas, 72.7 by 59.7 cm. (Museum of Modern Art, New York, fractional gift of Mr and Mrs David Rockefeller).

New Museum of Contemporary Art. Currently on show are photographs by David Goldblatt, an installation by Rigo 23 on the theme of political prisoners (both to 11th October), political posters by Emory Douglas, a former Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, and works by Dorothy Iannone made between 1965 and 1978 (both to 18th October).

New York Public Library. Diaghilev’s Theatre of Marvels: The Ballets Russes and its Aftermath runs here to 12th September.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Sculptural works

by Jonathan Horowitz in the manner of Jeff Koons are on view to 14th September.

Solomon Guggenheim Museum. The Museum celebrates its fiftieth anniversary with an exhibition documenting the life and work of Frank Lloyd Wright; to 23rd August; to be reviewed.

An exhibition drawn from the contemporary paintings and sculptures acquired by James Johnson Sweeney during his tenure as director from 1952 to 1960; to 2nd September.

Whitney Museum of American Art. Seen earlier in Los Angeles, and reviewed in the July issue, the retrospective exhibition of work by Dan Graham runs here to 11th October (then in Minneapolis).

Claes Oldenburg: Early Sculpture, Drawings, and Happenings Films is on view here to 6th September.

North America Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice runs here to 16th August (then in Paris); to be reviewed.

Chicago, Art Institute. Works by Cy Twombly, 2000–07, are on view to 13th September.

An exhibition of Japanese screens drawn from the Institute’s own collection, and from that of the Saint Louis Art Museum; to 27th September.

Fort Worth, Modern Art Museum. Seen earlier in San Francisco, the survey of works by William Kentridge, is here to 27th September (then to West Palm Beach, New York, and further locations).

Houston, Menil Collection. An exhibition of works

by John Chamberlain; to 2nd August.

Ithaca, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. An exhibition exploring the graphic œuvre of Romeyn de Hooghe (1645–1708), seen previously in Amsterdam, runs here from 8th August to 11th October.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples, seen earlier in Washington, runs here to 4th October.

Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea runs here to 20th September.

Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. The exhibition exploring French bronzes spanning the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, seen earlier in Paris and New York and reviewed in the February issue, runs here to 27th September.

French landscape drawings spanning the 17th to 19th centuries from the permanent collection are on display to 1st November.

Minneapolis, Institute of Arts. Some 60 works by William Holman Hunt are on view to 6th September.

In anticipation of another Louvre masterpiece leaving home for an extended period, a small display (from 8th August to 31st January) explores the scientific and cultural world of the 17th-century astronomer through prints, books, scientific instruments and other objects that Vermeer depicted in his painting The astronomer, scheduled to arrive here from Paris in October for a three-month-long stint.

Minneapolis, Walker Art Center. The Quick and the Dead; to 27th September.

An installation by Robert Irwin, first seen here 20 years ago, is on display in the Friedman Gallery; 6th August to 21st November.

Montreal, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal. Exhibitions of works by the photographer Robert Polidori, the Canadian sculptor Spring Hurlbut and the artist Christine Davis, are all on view to 7th September. the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e

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Montreal, Museum of Fine Arts. Grandeur Nature.

Peinture et Photographie des Paysages Américains et Canadiens de 1860 à 1918; to 27th September.

New Haven, Yale Center for British Art. A small display of works by the French sculptor Jules Dalou executed during his British period (1871–79); to 23rd August.

Oklahoma, City Museum of Art. Seen earlier in Columbia, the exhibition Turner to Cézanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales is on view here to 20th September (then in Syracuse, Washington and Albuquerque).

Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada. The international loan exhibition From Raphael to Carracci: The Art of Papal Rome includes some 150 paintings and drawings and runs to 7th September.

The display reconstructing Veronese’s Petrobelli altarpiece, seen earlier in London, runs here to 7th September (then in Blanton).

Philadelphia, Museum of Art. An exhibition on Duchamp’s Etant Donnés, installed in the Museum in 1969 and here contextualised by related works and documentation, runs to 30th October.

Pittsburgh, Frick Art & Historical Center. The seventeenth-century Dutch Italianates: Masterpieces from Dulwich Picture Gallery, London; to 20th September.

Salem, Peabody Essex Museum. Turmoil and Tranquillity: the Sea through the Eyes of Dutch and Flemish Masters, 1550–1700, seen previously in London, is entirely made up of loans from the National Maritime Museum, London; to 7th September.

San Francisco, Fine Arts Museum. At the Legion of Honour, a retrospective of prints by John Baldessari from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation; to 8th November.

San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art. Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities is on view to 7th September.

Seattle Art Museum. Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949–78; to 7th September.

Toronto, Art Gallery. Seen earlier in Cologne, the exhibition Painting as a Weapon: Progressive Cologne 1920–33 is on view here to 30th August. Concurrently, an exhibition of works by Angelika Hoerle, ‘the Comet of Cologne Dada’ (then in Cologne).

Vancouver Art Gallery. Vermeer, Rembrandt, and the Golden Age of Dutch Art: Treasures from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; to 13th September.

Washington, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. The Tsars and the East: Gifts from Turkey and Iran in The Moscow Kremlin; to 13th September.

Washington, National Gallery of Art. A monographic show devoted to Luis Meléndez runs here to 23rd August (then in Los Angeles and Boston).

A show comprising 12 works devoted to Tullio Lombardo and Venetian sculpture runs to 31st October (Fig.82).

The Art of Power: Royal Armor and Portraits from Imperial Spain includes armour on loan from the Spanish Royal Armoury, Madrid; to 1st November.

Washington, National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition Reflections/Refractions: Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century is on view here to 16th August.

Washington, Phillips Collection. Seen earlier in Nashville, the exhibition Paint made Flesh is on view here to 13th September.

Williamstown, Sterling and Francis Clark Art Institute. An exhibition comparing the work of Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keefe; to 7th September.

Australia Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia. An exhibition here explores the depiction of landscape since the Renaissance; to 6th September.

Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria International. The first comprehensive retrospective of works by Dalí to be shown in Australia is on view here to 4th October.

Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Intensely Dutch: image, abstraction and the word; to 23rd August.

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Notes on contributors

82. Lucretia, by Antonio Lombardo. 1520s. Marble with darker stone inlay, 34.3 by 23.8 by 11.1 cm.

(Walters Art Museum, Baltimore; exh. National Gallery of Art, Washington).

Asia Kyoto, Municipal Museum. Seen previously in Tokyo, Masterpieces of 17th-century European art from the Louvre, runs here to 27th September.

Osaka, National Museum of Art. An exhibition of works on loan from the Louvre; to 23rd September.

Singapore, National Museum. The sufficiently vague concept of ‘the world of the image’ provides the pretext for two major museums in Antwerp to send a selection of their 16th- and 17th-century paintings and prints on loan here for an exhibition previously seen in Shanghai; 14th August to 4th October.

Tokyo, Mori Art Museum. A retrospective of works by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei; to 8th November.

Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art. An exhibition devoted to the work of Paul Gauguin is on show here to 23rd September.

Announcement The British Museum, London, has launched an appeal to purchase 7,250 prints not already represented in the Museum’s print room selected from the important collection of British mezzotints (spanning c.1680 to c.1900) formed over the past forty years by the Hon. Christopher Lennox-Boyd. For further details and information about how to make a donation, please contact the Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings, Antony Griffiths, at 020–73238405 or by e-mail: Agriffiths@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk.

Forthcoming Fairs Berlin, Art Forum Berlin. Contemporary art; 24th to 27th September.

London, 20/21 British Art Fair. Modern and contemporary art; 16th to 20th September.

London, Frieze Art Fair. Contemporary art; 15th to 19th October.

London, LAPADA Art and Antiques Fair. Art and antiques; 24th to 27th September.

New York, International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show. 16th to 22nd October.

Paris, FIAC. Contemporary art; 22nd to 25th October.

Toronto International Art Fair (TIAF). Contemporary art; 22nd to 26th October

Laura Alidori Battaglia teaches at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her current research focuses on the iconography of St Jerome in fifteenth-century Florentine painting.

D.S. Chambers is a Reader in Renaissance Studies at the Warburg Institute, University of London.

Jill Dunkerton is a Senior Restorer in the Conservation Department at the National Gallery, London.

Jennifer Fletcher was a Senior Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, until September 2002.

Celina Fox is an independent art historian. Her book, The Arts of Industry in the Age of Enlightenment, will be published in Autumn 2009.

Julian Gardner is the Foundation Professor of History of Art at Warwick University.

Dillian Gordon is Curator of Early Italian Paintings 1250–1460 at the National Gallery, London, where she is currently writing a catalogue of paintings of that period in the Gallery’s collection.

P.G. Gwynne teaches at the American University of Rome. His Poets and Princes: the Panegyric Poetry of Johannes Michael Nagonius is forthcoming.

Robin Hamlyn is a former curator at the Tate and continues to research William Blake.

Merlin James is an artist represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Justin E.A. Kroesen teaches at the University of Groningen.

Erika Langmuir is the author of the National Gallery’s Companion Guide and other Gallery publications. Her book Imagining Childhood was published in 2006.

Silvia Loreti is an independent art historian.

Paul Moorhouse is Curator of Twentieth-Century Art at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Thorsten Opper is Curator of Greek and Roman Sculpture at the British Museum, London.

Brenda Preyer is Emerita Professor of Art History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Robert Radford is a lecturer at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. He is currently writing a monograph on de Chirico.

Anna Sconza is a researcher at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, France. She is currently preparing a critical edition of Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting (1651).

Frances Spalding teaches art history at Newcastle University. Her book John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art will be published in September 2009.

Luke Syson is Curator of Italian Paintings, 1460-1500 and Head of Research at the National Gallery, London.

Alessia Trivellone is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Dijon. Her book L’hérétique imaginé.

Hétérodoxie et iconographie dans l’Occident médiéval, de l’époque carolingienne à l’Inquisition is forthcoming in Autumn 2009.

Marina Vaizey is the former editor of Art Quarterly and The Review for the National Art Collections Fund.

She is currently a Trustee of the Geffrye Museum and chairs the Friends of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Richard Verdi is the former director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham.

Cordelia Warr is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. Her book Dressing for Heaven: Religious clothing in Italy, 1215–1545 will be published in 2010.

Catherine Whistler is Senior Assistant Keeper at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, with responsibility for Italian and Spanish paintings and drawings.

Michael White is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of York. He is currently working as a consultant curator on an exhibition provisionally titled ‘Theo van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde’ for Tate Modern in February 2010.

Richard Wrigley teaches in the Department of Art History at the University of Nottingham. His book Roman Fever: influence, contagion, and the experience of Rome is forthcoming.

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