1280BurlingtonNov2009

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NOVEMBER

2009

Sculpture The Romanesque window from Trie-Château at the V. & A. Bartolomeo Bon’s Misericordia at the V. & A. Bertram Mackennal’s Curzon Memorial at Kedleston T H E B U RLINGTON MAG AZI NE

George Frampton and the Art Workers’ Guild Glyn Philpot’s ‘Dead faun’

Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese Sandby | Picasso–Cézanne Giacometti | Contemporary sculpture Acquisitions at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

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1280 VOL . C L I

USA

$35·50

November 2009

£15.50/€ 24

Still Standing, 2009, oil on canvas, 60 x 48" Š 2009 David Hockney

DAVID HOCKNEY

recent paintings Through December 24, 2009 32 East 57th Street New York City 534 West 25th Street New York City

www.pacewildenstein.com

Galerie Canesso Tableaux anciens

Paris Bordon Treviso, 500 - Venice, 571 .......................................................................... .

Portrait of a Young Woman Oil on canvas, 106,8 × 82,5 cm (42 × 32 ¹⁄₂ in) Signed at lower right: “.O. Paris. B”

26, rue Laffitte • 75009 Paris • Tel. + 33 1 40 22 61 71 • Fax + 33 1 40 22 61 81 • e-mail : contact@canesso.com

annonce Burlington.indd 1

www.canesso.com

2/10/09 17:44:30

nov09tomasso:Agnews 05/10/2009 16:38 Page 2

TOMASSO BROTHERS F I N E A RT

Bardon Hall Weetwood Lane info@tomassobrothers.co.uk

Leeds LS16 8HJ

UK

Tel: +44 (0)113 275 5545 www.tomassobrothers.co.uk

nov09tomasso:Agnews 05/10/2009 16:38 Page 1

TOMASSO BROTHERS F I N E A RT

Bardon Hall Weetwood Lane info@tomassobrothers.co.uk

Leeds LS16 8HJ

UK

Tel: +44 (0)113 275 5545 www.tomassobrothers.co.uk

nov09contactspageiv:Internet and Contacts 15/10/2009 11:45 Page 1

C O N T @ C T S

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D I C K I N S O N Agents and Dealers in Fine Art

ANTIQUE ARMS & ARMOUR

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SIMON C. DICKINSON LTD

JAMES ROUNDELL

DICKINSON ROUNDELL INC

58 Jermyn Street London SW1Y 6LX Tel: ( 020 ) 7493 0340 Fax: ( 020 ) 7493 0796

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Each monthly issue of The Art Newspaper contains interviews with leading artists, dealers, museum directors and policy makers.

We report and analyse the international art market, its personalities, trends and laws – keeping you abreast of the latest developments and breaking stories.

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www.katz.co.uk european sculpture

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European Prints, Drawings and Paintings from the 16th to 19th century

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TRINITY F INE A RT L TD E U R O p E A N S C U L p T U R E A N D W O R k S O F A RT O L D M A S T E R D R AW I N g S A N D pA I N T I N g S 29 Bruton Street, London W1J 6QP Tel: 020 7493 4916 Fax: 020 7355 3454 Email: mail@trinityfineart.com www.trinityfineart.com

DIDIER AARON, Inc. Fine Old Master Paintings and Drawings

3 2 e a s t 6 7 t h s t r e e t n e w y o r k , n y 1 0 0 26 15 t e l 2 1 2 9 8 8 - 5 2 4 8 fa x 2 1 2 7 3 7 - 3 5 1 3 www.didieraaron.com info@didieraaron.com

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nov09steinitz:Arturo Cuellar March 2003 13/10/2009 11:42 Page 1

S T E I N I T Z

© Art Digital Studio

9, rue du Cirque – 77, rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré – 75008 Paris Tel: +33 (0)1 56 43 66 70 www.steinitz.fr

Pair of Vases Decorated with Draped Male Heads “à l’Antique” Aubergine-glazed porcelain: China, 18th century Gilded and chased bronze mounts: Paris, circa 1765 Height: 38.5 cm (15¼ in). Width: 16.5 cm (6½ in). Depth: 11 cm (4½ in).

nov09ratton&Ladriere:Ratton & Ladriere Sept 04 06/10/2009 15:15 Page 1

CHARLES RATTON & GUY LADRIÈRE ANTIQUE - MOYEN AGE - ARTS PRIMITIFS TABLEAUX - SCULPTURES - OBJETS D’ART

Jean-Joseph Foucou (1739–1815) Portrait of a lady White marble. Height: 79 cm. Width: 48 cm Signed and dated “J J Foucou 1771” at the rear

14, rue de Marignan, 75008 Paris. Tél. (0) 1 43.59.58.21 11, quai Voltaire, 75007 Paris. Tél (0) 1 42.61.29.79 e-mail: galerie.ratton.ladriere@wanadoo.fr

Daniel Katz Ltd for Burlington 314 x 241 mm bleed

da n i e l k a t z l t d 13 o l d b o n d s t r e e t, l o n d o n w 1s 4s x Tel. +44 (0)20 7493 0688 info@katz.co.uk

Daniel Katz

european sculpture

A collector’s cabinet III an exhibition Wednesday 25 November to Wednesday 23 December 2009 Monday to Friday 9 am to 6 pm Catalogue and price list available upon request Prices £3,500 to £50,000

www.katz.co.uk

BENJAMIN

PROUST RUE DES MINIMES, 19 B - 1000 BRUXELLES + 32 478 35 64 09 I N F O @ B E N J A M I N P R O U S T. C O M W W W. B E N J A M I N P R O U S T. C O M

A N E A R LY G O T H I C LIMESTONE RELIEF OF AN APOSTLE F R E N C H - Î L E D E F RA N C E S E C O N D PA R T O F T H E 1 2 T H C E N T U R Y H E I G H T: 1 2 4 C M - 4 8 3/4 I N .

JOSÉ RISUEÑO (Granada 1635 - 1732), Dolorosa, polychromed wood, height: 118.5 cm

FURN-SCU_BURLINGTON:Q8 13/10/2009 16:53 Page 1

T O B E S O L D O N T H E I N S T R U C T I O N S O F T H E T R U S T E E S O F T H E B E D F O R D E S TA T E S

THREE TREASURES FROM WOBURN ABBEY A gilt-bronze-mounted Chinese blue porcelain vase, Louis XV, circa 1755-1760 A pair of gilt-bronze-mounted granite athĂŠniennes, Louis XVI, circa 1770 A gilded and silvered bronze figure of a seated Nymph by Pier Jacopo Alari-Bonacolsi, called Antico

Old Master Sculpture & Works of Art

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Important Continental Furniture

AUCTIONS IN LONDON 8 & 9 DECEMBER 2009 ENQUIRIES +44 (0)20 7293 5860 / +44 (0)20 7293 5470

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SOTHEBYS.COM

THE FINE ART SOCIETY Dealers since 1876

Sir George Frampton RA 1860–1928 Peter Pan 1918 Bronze · height 203/4 in · 52.6 cm This statuette is taken from the monumental work of the same title commissioned from Frampton by the author J. M. Barrie in 1910.

It was secretly placed in Kensington Gardens during the night of 30 April and announced in The Times on May Day 1912.

The present work was part of a small edition created in 1918 to be sold in aid of the Red Cross during the great post-war pandemic of Spanish influenza.

cu rrent exhibitions War 11 November to 3 December 2009 Edward Bawden: Drawings & Linocuts 9 to 23 December 2009

nov09vanhaeften:AQ_33598_Van Haeften 15/10/2009 10:28 Page 1

Winter Exhibition of 17th CENTURY DUTCH AND FLEMISH OLD MASTER PAINTINGS 1 – 23 December 2009

On panel

18¼ x 14 in. (46.5 x 35.5 cm)

MAERTEN VAN HEEMSKERCK A Portrait of a Lady Catalogue on application

Johnny Van Haeften 13 Duke Street, St. James’s, London SW1Y 6DB Tel: +44 (0)20-7930 3062 Fax: +44 (0)20-7839 6303 e-mail: paintings@johnnyvanhaeften.com www.johnnyvanhaeften.com

nov09pageXII:Layout 1 16/10/2009 16:33 Page 1

10 MASTERPIECES BY LOUYSE MOILLON (1610 – 1696)

« LA NATURE MORTE AU GRAND SIÈCLE »

13th November – 12th December 2009

Galerie Eric Coatalem 93 Fbg St Honoré – 75008 Paris – Tel:+ 33 142 66 17 17 – coatalem@coatalem.com - Catalogue on request

PRINT QUARTERLY THE JOURNAL FOR PRINT LOVERS Subscriptions for the calendar year: U.K. £; Europe  (airmail); U.S. and Canada U.S.$ (airmail), U.S.$ (surface); Rest of World £ (airmail), £ (surface).

All back issues available: U.K. £, Europe , Rest of World U.S.$ or £ each  Kelso Place London W8 5QQ , U.K. E-mail: admin@printquarterly.co.uk Registered Charity No.  XII

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nov09samfogg:Agnews 06/10/2009 10:24 Page 1

Belial consumed by snakes A supporting figure from the pulpit of the Cathedral of Calvi Vecchia Italy, Campania Late 12th century White marble: 78.3 x 13.5 x 14 cm

Sam Fogg 15d Clifford Street London, W1S 4jz tel : +44 (0)20 7534 2100 fax : +44 (0)20 7534 2122 info@samfogg.com www.samfogg.com

An exhibition October 29, 2009 – February 5, 2010 Held at

Richard L. Feigen & Co. 34 East 69th Street New York, NY 10065 tel : +1 212 628 0700 fax : +1 212 249 4574 info@rlfeigen.com www.rlfeigen.com

nov09pageXIV:Layout 1 16/10/2009 16:39 Page 1

DAGUERRE Auction 1850-1950 Paris, 20 november 2009

Pablo GARGALLO - Bacchante, 1926 - Copper - h.11 in.

www.daguerre.fr - 5 bis, rue du Cirque 75008 Paris - T. +33 (0)1 45 63 02 60

A SUBSCRIPTION TO THE IRISH ARTS REVIEW IS THE PERFECT CHRISTMAS GIFT Book a Christmas Gift Subscription to the Irish Arts Review and we will send a personalised gift card on your behalf Phone: Email: Online: Post:

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Burlington readers may claim 20% discount off annual subscription rates to the Irish Arts Review

Subscribe today for £38 www.irishartsreview.com XIV

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O L D M A S T E R S & 19 T H C E N T U R Y A R T

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn

Portrait of a man with arms akimbo

signed and dated ‘Rembrandt f.1658’ (lower left) oil on canvas, 421⁄4 x 341⁄4 in. (107.4 x 87 cm.) £18,000,000 –25,000,000 8 December, Evening Sale • 9 December, Day Sale Richard Knight, rknight@christies.com • Henry Pettifer, hpettifer@christies.com • +44 (0)20 7389 2541 8 King Street, SW1Y 6QT christies.com

Camille Corot, Mantes (le Matin), © Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Reims. Photo Devleeschauwer

nov09pageXVI:Layout 1 16/10/2009 16:43 Page 1

Verona

Palazzo della Gran Guardia, 27 novembre 2009 - 7 marzo 2010 www.corotverona.it tel.199199111 con il patrocinio di

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nov09wengraf:Pat Wengraf Ad 12/10/2009 16:49 Page 1

PATRICIA WENGRAF Ltd Fine Sculpture and Works of Art

Michael Rysbrack, Antwerp, 1693 – 1770, London Fortitude: Signed and dated: Mich. Rysbrack 174[?]

Terracotta modello for the monument to John Campbell, 2nd Duke of Argyll and Greenwich (1680–1743).

Height: 58.5 cm.

PO Box 31067, London SW1W 9FJ • tel. +44 (0)20 7259 0707 • fax. +44 (0)20 7259 0705 email pat@wengraf.com • website www.patwengraf.com By appointment only • London SW1

nov09pageXXVI:Layout 1 19/10/2009 10:17 Page 1

THE FRICK COLLECTION

JOANNA BOOTH Call for papers:

PO Box 50886, London SW3 5YH Tel: 020 7352 8998 Fax: 020 7376 7350 Email: joanna@joannabooth.co.uk

The Wallace Collection, London and The Frick Collection, New York are organising joint conferences on the history of collections and collectors during the nineteenth century to take place over two sessions. The first will be a two-day colloquium in London on 2 and 3 December, 2010, concentrating on European collecting, in particular in Britain, from c.1800 to c.1870, for which this is the call for papers. There will be four sessions and full details may be found on our website: http://www.wallacecollection.org/news/35

Website: www.joannabooth.co.uk

Brokers specialising in fine art insurance For further information please contact: Tel: +44 (0)207 234 4281 Email: art@heathlambert.com

Heath Lambert Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority

incorporating Blackwall Green

undertakes

C ATA L O G U E D E S I G N AND PRODUCTION for Private Galleries, Art Fairs and Museums To discuss your requirements or for a free no obligation quote St, Martin, seen in the act of dividing his military cloak to share with a lame beggar.

please contact Chris Hall at The Burlington Magazine hall@burlington.org.uk | tel: +44 (0)20 7388 1228

Carved oak, French, circa 1500.

Width: 44cm (17 1/4 in). Height: 83cm (32 3/4 in).

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14-16 Duke’s Road | London

WC1H

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Fine English Furniture & Works of Art Auction Fine English Furniture and Works of Art Wednesday 18 November New Bond Street Viewing Sunday 15 November 11am to 3pm Monday 16 November 9am to 4.30pm Tuesday 17 November 9am to 4.30pm Wednesday 18 November 9am to 12pm Catalogue +44 (0) 1666 502 200 subscriptions@bonhams.com Enquiries Guy Savill +44 (0) 8700 273 604 Sally Stratton +44 (0) 8700 273 603 Email: finefurniture@bonhams.com Illustrated: Sir George James Frampton, English (1860-1928) A Bronze Figure of Peter Pan Dated 1920, 48cm high (18.5in high) Estimate: ÂŁ30,000 - 50,000 Bonhams 101 New Bond Street London W1S 1SR www.bonhams.com/furniture

www.bonhams.com

nov09BurlGiftAd:Layout 1 16/10/2009 16:27 Page 1

Turner and The Masters at Tate Britain Until 31 January 2010 Magnificent ***** – The Times This unforgettable show places beautiful masterpieces by Canaletto, Rubens, Rembrandt and Titian next to some of JMW Turner's most dramatic paintings.

This exhibition illuminates a lesser-known side of this British Romantic painter, including his obsession to prove he was just as good, if not better, than the old masters who he so admired.

THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE have teamed up with Tate Britain to give you the chance to win one of 3 pairs of tickets.

To win tickets email tatetickets@burlington.org.uk quoting ‘Turner and The Masters Burlington Magazine’ Please include your postal address.

Winners will be drawn at random.

JMW Turner, Snow Storm – Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth, exh 1842. © Tate.

GIVE THE GIFT OF ART THIS THANKSGIVING OR CHRISTMAS An annual subscription (12 issues) to The Burlington Magazine – Plus a free annual index The Burlington Magazine promises to be the perfect gift lasting all year round Great for students in the Arts and for all with a passionate interest in art history.

SAVE 5% TODAY Return the enclosed form to order your gift subscription, alternatively call subscriptions on: 020-7388 1228 E-mail: sapsford@burlington.org.uk, or visit our website www.burlington.org.uk and subscribe online UK

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Give someone an informative and beautifully presented insight into the art world this Thanksgiving or Christmas

Sculpture The Romanesque window from Trie-Château and Bartolomeo Bon’s tympanum at the Victoria and Albert Museum Bertram Mackennal’s Curzon Memorial at Kedleston T

T

T

T

George Frampton and the Art Workers’ Guild Glyn Philpot’s ‘Dead faun’

Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese Sandby | Picasso–Cézanne Giacometti | Contemporary sculpture Acquisitions of sculpture at the

Art in Britain

Twentieth-century art and politics

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

French art in the nineteenth-century French visitors to a London armoury | The young Delacroix | J.-F. Millet’s ‘Waiting’ Degas’s ‘L’Absinthe’: a new drawing | Gustave Moreau’s intentions and reputation

A rediscovered decorative scheme by Alfred Stevens | Figures and shadows in the work of Sickert and Bacon Landscape and abstraction: art in St Ives and London in the 1950s | D.G. Rossetti’s ‘Hamlet and Ophelia’

An inventory of Baron Wiser’s collection | The identity revealed of Delacroix’s ‘J.’

Oskar Kokoschka’s ‘Prometheus triptych’, 1950 | Oskar Schlemmer’s ‘Bauhaustreppe’, 1932

The Edwardian taste for Piero di Cosimo

Stuart Davis and American politics in the 1930s | Recent exhibitions and books on Kandinsky

Art History Reviewed IV: Pevsner’s ‘Pioneers of the Modern Movement’

Van Dyck | Lievens | Cox | Caillebotte | Munch | Futurism | Giacometti | Le Corbusier

Coptic sculpture | Charles the Bold | Raphael father and son | William Blake | Flaxman

Drawing in the Middle Ages | Old Masters in London | Turner and Italy | Futurism | Omega | Magritte

Cézanne and Beyond | Calder | Dan Graham | Several Silences

Correggio | Monumental prints | Jodhpur | Watts | Van Dongen | Bonnard | Fairhurst USA

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Richard Philp 7 Ravenscourt Square London W6 0TW t : 44 (0)20 8748 5678 f : 44 (0)20 8748 2949 m : 44 (0)7850 470091

Florentine Altar Angels, a pair, c.1450-60, gilded and polychromed wood with red bole base, 12.5 inches (32 cm) high.

nov09sculpturebackissues:Layout 1 16/10/2009 16:24 Page 1

Special offer for new subscribers

% OFF ANNUAL SUBSCRIPTION Please contact Claire Sapsford | e-mail: sapsford@burlington.org.uk | tel: 020 7388 1228

Sculpture The Romanesque window from Trie-Château and Bartolomeo Bon’s tympanum at the Victoria and Albert Museum Bertram Mackennal’s Curzon Memorial at Kedleston T

George Frampton and the Art Workers’ Guild Glyn Philpot’s ‘Dead faun’

Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese Sandby | Picasso–Cézanne Giacometti | Contemporary sculpture Acquisitions of sculpture at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

USA

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November 2009

£15.50/ 24

A selection of sculpture back issues is available at £15.50/$35.50/€ 24.00 (postage extra) Please contact Olivia Parker | e-mail: parker@burlington.org.uk | tel: 020 7388 1228

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S E I T 17 0 7

Fourth Auction Week 23 – 27 November 2009

Contemporary Art, Modern Art Design, Art Nouveau, Silver, Jewellery, Watches Viewing from 14 November 2009, Palais Dorotheum, Dorotheergasse 17, 1010 Vienna, Austria Tel. +43-1-515 60-570, client.services@dorotheum.at, Online Catalogues: www.dorotheum.com Lynn Chadwick (1914–2003), Maquette III, Jubilee III, 1984, bronze, 77 x 33 x 68 cm and 76 x 33 x 63 cm, Auction 25 November 2009

JSTORNov08:Internet and Contacts 16/10/2009 16:59 Page 1

SEARCH BACK ISSUES OF THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE ONLINE!

To learn learn more about To about how how to toobtain obtain an individual subscription to The Burlington an individual subscription to The BurlingtonMagazine Magazine back issues issues online, back online, please pleasecontact contact Claire Sapsford at sapsford@burlington.org.uk Sarah Hillier at hillier@burlington.org.uk

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nov09pageXXVI:Layout 1 19/10/2009 10:17 Page 1

THE FRICK COLLECTION

JOANNA BOOTH Call for papers:

PO Box 50886, London SW3 5YH Tel: 020 7352 8998 Fax: 020 7376 7350 Email: joanna@joannabooth.co.uk

The Wallace Collection, London and The Frick Collection, New York are organising joint conferences on the history of collections and collectors during the nineteenth century to take place over two sessions. The first will be a two-day colloquium in London on 2 and 3 December, 2010, concentrating on European collecting, in particular in Britain, from c.1800 to c.1870, for which this is the call for papers. There will be four sessions and full details may be found on our website: http://www.wallacecollection.org/news/35

Website: www.joannabooth.co.uk

Brokers specialising in fine art insurance For further information please contact: Tel: +44 (0)207 234 4281 Email: art@heathlambert.com

Heath Lambert Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority

incorporating Blackwall Green

undertakes

C ATA L O G U E D E S I G N AND PRODUCTION for Private Galleries, Art Fairs and Museums To discuss your requirements or for a free no obligation quote St, Martin, seen in the act of dividing his military cloak to share with a lame beggar.

please contact Chris Hall at The Burlington Magazine hall@burlington.org.uk | tel: +44 (0)20 7388 1228

Carved oak, French, circa 1500.

Width: 44cm (17 1/4 in). Height: 83cm (32 3/4 in).

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14-16 Duke’s Road | London

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nov09laroussihle:Agnews 12/10/2009 13:07 Page 1

Brimo de Laroussilhe Specialist in Medieval and Renaissance Works of Art Since 1908

Reliquary Casket: The Martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket Limoges, ca.1180–1190 Champlevé enamel on copper, chased and gilt. Height: 17.5 cm; Width: 18.3 cm; Depth: 8 cm PROVENANCE: Marc Antocolsky coll. (sale Paris, 10–12 June 1901, no.42); Dimitri Schevitch coll. (sale Paris, 4–7 April 1906, no.185); Marius Paulme coll. (Paris); G. Dormeuil coll. (Paris).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Exposition des objets d’art du Moyen Age et de la Renaisance organisée par la marquise de Ganay chez Mr J. Seligmann, (exhib. cat. Paris, Hotel de Sagan, May–June 1913), Paris, 1913, no.218, pp.115–116.

T. Borenius, St Thomas Becket in Art, London, 1932, p.88.

S. Caudron, “Les chasses reliquaires de Thomas Becket émaillées à Limoges: leur géographie historique”, Bulletin de la Société archéologique et historique de Limousin, 1993, p.74.

7 , Q U A I V O LTA I R E – 7 5 0 0 7 P A R I S T E L . 3 3 1 4 2 6 0 7 4 7 6 – FA X . 3 3 1 4 2 6 0 5 3 9 2 E - M A I L : B R I M O D L @ A O L . C O M - W W W. B R I M O D E L A R O U S S I L H E . C O M

An historic publication from

T&H_Burlington_Oct09_outlined.in1 1

14/9/09 14:20:03

The Howard Neville Collection of Early Works of Art and Textiles, together with selected other properties Wednesday 9 December Knightsbridge As well as sculpture and works of art, this sale features an important collection of ecclesiastical embroideries with examples dating from the 14th to the 17th century including rare orpheries, chasubles, copes and chalice veils.

Other highlights of the collection include a 15th century Nottingham alabaster depicting the Resurrection, a pair of German 16th century carved walnut figures of God the Father and the Virgin and a small collection of 15th and 16th century silver gilt miniature reliquary boxes.

Enquiries Rachael Osborn-Howard +44 (0) 8700 273 614 rachael.osborn@bonhams.com Catalogue +44 (0) 1666 502 200 subscriptons@bonhams.com Illustrated: A selection of lots on offer in the sale.

Bonhams 101 New Bond Street London W1S 1SR www.bonhams.com/furniture

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LEMPERTZ

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696 – 1770). Presentation of the Rosary. Oil on cardboard, 72 x 34 cm Modeletto for the ceiling of the Gesuati church in Venice. Sale 21 Nov.

Autumn Auctions 2009 1 Oct. 20 Nov. 21 Nov. 4 Dec.

Paintings 15th – 19th C. Decorative Arts Old Master Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures Contemporary Art

4 Dec. 5 Dec. 11/12 Dec. 30 Jan. 2010

Photography Modern Art Asian Art Precolumbian Art

LEMPERTZ established 1845

Neumarkt 3 50667 Cologne, Germany Tel. +49 ⁄ 2 21 ⁄ 92 57 29 - 0 Fax - 6 www.lempertz.com Berlin: +49 ⁄ 30 ⁄ 27 87 60 8 - 0 Brussels: +32 ⁄ 2 ⁄ 514 05 86 New York: Tel. 917 ⁄446 75 20

nov09dury:Agnews 12/10/2009 16:57 Page 1

Marc Antoine du Ry Early Art Ltd 13 New Burlington Street London W1S 3BG Tel: +44(0) 777 0888 116 Fax: +44(0) 207 2873 673 Email: info@marcdury.com www.earlyart.net

Saint Peter Nottingham 15th century Alabaster with gilding and polychromy Height: 40 cm Ex Dreesman family collection

06 HH-H BURLINGTON November 2009 v4:01 Burlington / April 2006

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Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Modern British Art 38 Bury Street St James’s London SW1Y 6BB T F E W

020 7839 7600 020 7839 7255 info@hh-h.com www.hh-h.com

Lucian Freud Born 1922 Strawberries, circa 1950 Oil on copper 4 × 4e inches; 10.2 × 12 cm

Sickert Bevan Gore Gilman Ginner John Wadsworth Lewis Bomberg Bell Grant Roberts Nevinson Nash Sutherland Vaughan Piper Burra Nicholson Hepworth Moore Spencer Tunnard Scott Heron Hilton Hitchens Lanyon Lowry Auerbach Kossoff Andrews Bacon Blake Hockney Jones Paolozzi Riley Hodgkin Freud

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VOLUME CLI • NUMBER

EDITORIAL

1280

• NOVEMBER

2009

781

739 A renaissance at the V. & A.

by ANGUS TRUMBLE

ARTICLES

782

740 ‘A magnificent addition to our collections’: the TrieChâteau window at the Victoria and Albert Museum

by PAUL WILLIAMSON

783

. . . And then there was Sculpture.

Jacob Epstein’s Formative Years 1880–1930, R. Gilboa

784

In the Shadow of Yalta. Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989, P. Piotrowski

p.744 VÍCTOR HUGO LÓPEZ BORGES

by RUPERT RICHARD ARROWSMITH

755 ‘Love, Sympathy and Tenderness’: Bertram Mackennal’s monument to Lord and Lady Curzon

by MARK STOCKER

763 George Frampton, the Art Workers’ Guild and ‘the enemy

by HENRY MEYRIC HUGHES

alien in our midst’

by NANCY IRESON

785

The Buildings of England: Lancashire: North, C. Hartwell and N. Pevsner

785

Blinky Palermo: Abstraction of an Era, C. Mehring

768 ‘The dead faun’, by Glyn Philpot by

Vincent van Gogh Drawings. Vol.4.

Arles, Saint-Rémy & Auvers-sur-Oise.

1888–1890, M. Vellekoop and R. Zwikker

by HEINZ WIDAUER

746 A Venetian tympanum of the ‘Madonna della Misericordia’

by Bartolomeo Bon

by PETA MOTTURE and

Persuasion and Propaganda: Monuments and the EighteenthCentury British Empire, J. Coutu

by STEVEN BRINDLE

MELISSA HAMNETT

BOOKS

by ANNA LOVATT

771

Believing and Seeing: The Art of Gothic Cathedrals, R. Recht

p.747

786

by PAUL CROSSLEY

772

Francesco di Simone Ferrucci. Itinerari di uno scultore fiorentino fra Toscana, Romagna e Montefeltro, L. Pisani

EXHIBITIONS

by ANDREW BUTTERFIELD

772

789

Antonio Lombardo, A. Sarchi The Renaissance Palace in Florence, Magnificence and Splendour in Fifteenth-Century Italy, J. Lindow El Hospital Tavera de Toledo, F. Marías

775

Michelangelos Grabmal für Papst Julius II, C. Echinger-Maurach

by JESÚS ESCOBAR

790

Basil Beattie; Ian McKeever

791

Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese

by ALEXANDER ADAMS

by ANDREA M. GÁLDY

773

by PETER HUMFREY

p.799

793 794

Picasso Cézanne

by JAMES BEECHEY

Il Sanmarino. Giovan Battista Belluzzi architetto militare e trattatista del Cinquecento, D. Lamberini

797

Nino Costa

by ARNIKA SCHMIDT

by SABINE EICHE

776

Alberto Giacometti

by ROGER CARDINAL

by CHARLES DAVIS

775

Paul Sandby

by RICHARD GREEN

by MANFRED LEITHE-JASPER

773

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED

798

The Craftsman Revealed. Adriaen de Vries. Sculptor in Bronze, J. Bassett

Sculpture

by MORGAN FALCONER

by FRITS SCHOLTEN

778

Bernini in Francia. Paul de Chantelou e il Journal de Voyage du Cavalier Bernin en France, D. del Pesco

800

CALENDAR

804

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

805

SUPPLEMENT

p.794

Bernini’s Biographies, Critical Essays, M. Delbeke, E. Levy and S.F. Ostrow, eds.

by PHILIPPE MALGOUYRES

779

Collected writings on Velázquez, J. Brown

by ROSEMARIE MULCAHY

780

Bertos: The Triumph of Motion, C. Avery

780

A God or a Bench: Sculpture as a Problematic Art during the Ancien Régime, A.B. Weinshenker

by PATRICIA WENGRAF

Recent acquisitions of sculpture (2004–09) at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Sculpture and Enlightenment, E. Naginski

by PHILIP WARD-JACKSON

p.795

This issue on sculpture has been generously supported by the Henry Moore Foundation.

Cover illustration: Naraen Kongo (Ungyo), a temple guard (Niô). Shimane prefecture, Japan, c.1350. Wood with remnants of polychrome, 220 cm. high.

Illustrated in this issue on p.807.

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VOLUME CLI • NUMBER

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• NOVEMBER

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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Benefactors Gilbert de Botton † The Deborah Loeb Brice Foundation Christie’s Sir Harry Djanogly CBE Francis Finlay The J Paul Getty Trust Nicholas and Judith Goodison Drue Heinz Trust Daisaku Ikeda Jerwood Charitable Foundation Paul Z Josefowitz Samuel H Kress Foundation Robert Lehman Foundation Inc. The Leverhulme Trust John Lewis OBE The Michael Marks Charitable Trust The Andrew W Mellon Foundation Jan Mitchell The Monument Trust Stavros S Niarchos Foundation Mr and Mrs Brian Pilkington Mrs Frank E Richardson Paul Ruddock The Coral Samuel Charitable Trust Nancy Schwartz Madame Andrée Stassart Saul P Steinberg Thaw Charitable Trust Anonymous Benefactors

Supporters The Ahmanson Foundation Arts Council England Janet de Botton Gifford Combs Mark Fisch The Foundation for Sport and the Arts The J Paul Getty Junior Charitable Trust Global Asset Management Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation The Lady Heseltine The Isaacson-Draper Foundation Sir Denis Mahon CH CBE FBA The Henry Moore Foundation The Pilgrim Trust The Rayne Foundation Billy Rose Foundation The Rt. Hon. Lord Rothschild OM GBE FBA The Sheldon H Solow Foundation Waddington Galleries Patricia Wengraf The Wyfold Foundation US mailing agent: Mercury Airfreight International Ltd, 365 Blair Road, Avenel, New Jersey 07001.

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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 A renaissance at the V. & A. apprehension, even anxiety, is inevitably mixed in with the more usual feelings of curiosity and interest whenever a major gallery or museum opens a new wing or reveals a new display. In the past one could be fairly certain that classification was reasonably simple and that chronology was respected. Nowadays such certainties can no longer be relied upon. Schools and national boundaries, the comfort-blanket of chronology, the old differentiations between primary and secondary, the outstanding and the quotidian, all have been thoroughly shaken up in the light of curatorial innovation and public expectations. The kitchens of stately homes vie in popularity with the fine rooms; materials and human labour are on a footing with design and purpose; history is devoured by themes.

While such considerations will have inflected the plans of those in charge of the continuing re-display of the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, one can immediately say that a course has been taken that deserves the highest praise. Neither tourist nor scholar, student nor casual visitor has been shortchanged. The first major move was the inauguration in 2001 of the British Galleries 1500–1900. This saw the close integration of objects from across the collections, softening the distinction between the fine and decorative arts through an intellectual comprehension of a myriad dazzling exhibits, from the re-installed period rooms to costumes, painting and sculpture.

Since then smaller new displays have taken place – British sculpture, Islamic arts, jewellery, the paintings collection, miniatures, the twentieth-century rooms – all against the unfolding master plan for the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries which open next month.

It must be said straightaway that in order to mark the installation, the observations made here have been written before the final result has been seen, as the public will experience it from December onwards. At the time of writing, by no means was everything in place and much was under wraps. Nor can we yet comment on the two ‘discovery areas’, geared towards children’s activities. But even if the crucial relationship of objects and their lighting was not yet apparent, the sequence of galleries was coherent and several star-turns were in evidence. These alone show the astonishing riches of the collections and, incidentally, the taste and decisiveness of those early directors who pounced on great objects (such as the Venetian tympanum discussed in this issue on pp.746–54), sometimes against native outcry.

The ten new galleries, on three levels occupying the Museum’s south-east wing, are those immediately to the right of the main entrance in Cromwell Road (where visitors will remember Continental nineteenth-century furniture and decorative arts and British sculpture). A visit begins with an introductory gallery showing stylistic and liturgical developments from late Antique through early Christian and continuing with ‘The Rise of Gothic’; it ends with mostly sixteenth-century secular and ecclesiastical objects associated with the Renaissance city, dominated by the huge ’s-Hertogenbosch choir screen. Chronology is

AN ELEMENT OF

broadly but not strictly adhered to and, yes, there are the inevitable themes such as ‘Faiths and Empires’, ‘Devotion and Display’ and ‘Splendour and Society’. Some of these seem rather contrived catch-alls; but other groupings, such as a display on public worship and religious processions, may work well. Perhaps the most focused room is that given over to the Museum’s superlative works by Donatello, including, of course, the Chellini Madonna, which are joined by contemporary paintings and sculpture. These are displayed in the corner gallery, overlooking both Cromwell Road and the Brompton Oratory, a room appropriately once occupied by the Museum’s former director, John Pope-Hennessy. In some sections Europe is treated as an entity and Italian, Flemish and German works are shown side by side; elsewhere national schools are respected. These are predominantly British, French, Netherlandish, German and Italian (Spain and Portugal hardly figure). Trade and diplomacy with China, Persia and the New World, introducing new techniques and design, is represented through fine porcelain and carpets and such hybrid objects as the Robinson Casket with its intricately carved Sinhalese and Christian symbols. However, many masterpieces are displayed as ‘stand alones’, to be admired as works of art rather than being part of a chain of thematic illustrations.

Long-familiar works are refreshed and others are on view for the first time in years. The former include, for example, Luca della Robbia’s ceiling roundels from Piero de’ Medici’s study; the chapel from S. Chiara, Florence, now central to the section on the Renaissance city in which Benedetto da Maiano’s terracotta models for a pulpit are beautifully displayed at their correct height; and tapestries integrated where before they were marooned in the tapestry court. Of the latter, the Romanesque window from Tri-Château, the subject of an article in this issue (pp.740–45), has been reinstalled (though the view of it is compromised by neighbouring showcases). It should be noted that the display includes a good number of judicious loans from British collections ranging from Gentile Bellini’s Sultan Mehmed II to splendid coinage from the British Museum.

The all-important matter of lighting has received thorough attention, the architects McInnes Usher McKnight working closely with lighting specialists from Arup and dha design, balancing conservation requirements and theatrical flourish. The lower floor is lit by side windows that have been unblocked; a notable feature here is the filtered light through onyx window screens, which provide both atmosphere and an unusual background to the showing of works in the ‘Devotion and Display’ gallery. Daylight is a feature of the one newly created space in what used to be a courtyard behind the S. Chiara chapel at the east end of the galleries, a miscellaneous section entitled ‘Living with the Past, 300–1600’, which includes some medieval sculpture and the famous façade of Sir Paul Pindar’s London house, a miraculous survival from c.1600.

The subtitle of the accompanying publication, containing much new research, puts the emphasis of the display firmly on material culture.1 But the sensitivity of placement and lighting and the absence of a heavy-handed curatorial agenda allows the spirit of people and place to shine through this great assemblage of objects.

1 Catalogue: Medieval and Renaissance Art. People and Possessions. By Glynn Davies and Kirstin Kennedy. 320 pp. incl. 341 col. + 11 b. & w. ills. (V&A Publishing, London, 2009), £40. ISBN 978–1–85177–579–8. the burlington m a g a z i n e

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‘A magnificent addition to our collections’: the TrieChâteau window at the Victoria and Albert Museum

by PAUL WILLIAMSON

1. Triple window from Trie-Château, Oise. Probably c.1160–70. Limestone, 277.7 by 635.5 cm. (Victoria and Albert Museum, London; photograph taken before recent installation).

to the first gallery in the new suite of rooms dedicated to the Middle Ages and Renaissance at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, an imposing triple window in limestone serves to introduce the contents of the galleries, conveniently dividing the display space and providing a notable and rare example of Romanesque non-ecclesiastical architectural sculpture (Fig.1). Originally forming part of a house at Trie-Château near Gisors (Oise) and acquired by the Museum in 1937, it had been in storage since 1983, and the new galleries presented a welcome opportunity to reintroduce the window to public display; its re-emergence also offers the chance to look afresh at the window and the circumstances of its acquisition.1 The extensive correspondence and memoranda on the official acquisition file at the Museum are unusually eloquent of the issues and complications surrounding a major purchase in the late 1930s; they are also particularly revealing of the central role played by the National Art-Collections Fund and the dynamics of the English and French art establishments at that time.

In February 1937 the Parisian dealer Jean Seligmann (of the firm Arnold Seligmann & Fils) first brought the window to the

attention of Sir Eric Maclagan, the Director of the V. & A., and also a considerable authority on medieval sculpture. Obviously impressed, Maclagan wasted no time in testing the water with Sir Robert Witt, the chairman of the National Art-Collections Fund, and on 3rd March wrote formally to the latter:

For assistance with this article I wish to thank Melanie Vandenbrouck-Przybylski and Timothy Wilson.

1 Inv. no.A.47–1937. A necessarily summary account of the window is contained in P. Williamson: Catalogue of Romanesque Sculpture, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 1983, no.19.

2 R.P. Bedford (1883–1967) was in charge of the Department of Architecture and Sculpture.

3

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My dear Witt, I mentioned to you when we met at Carpenters’ Hall that I had been offered an extremely important piece of Romanesque architecture. I attach a minute from Bedford2 which gives the information about it, together with the photographs which were left with me by Messrs. Seligmann of 9 rue de la Paix, Paris, to whom it now belongs.

There is one other similar window arcade of this period with which I am acquainted; on the outside of a private house at Chartres not far from the Cathedral [Fig.2].3 Attempts were made to sell this arcade some twenty years ago and we actually made enquiries about it, but the French Government intervened and it is still in situ. The house to which Messrs. Seligmann’s arcade belonged has already been pulled down, and I understand that the French Government have consented, after considerable discussion, to its export.

See A. Mayeux: ‘Maison du XIIe siècle à Chartres’, Bulletin Monumental 79 (1920), pp.217–22.

4 Leigh Ashton (1897–1983), Assistant to the Director in 1937, had joined the Museum as Assistant Keeper in the Department of Architecture and Sculpture in 1922, and was Director from 1945 to 1955.

5 Margaret Longhurst (1882–1958), then Assistant Keeper in the Department of Architecture and Sculpture, went on to become the first woman Keeper of any

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It is of great size, about 20 ft. long, but there seems little doubt that we could erect it on a low wall across the East Hall of the Museum, where it would be one of the most prominent exhibits for every visitor coming in by the Main Entrance; and there is no doubt that, as Bedford says, it would enormously increase the importance of our at present rather meagre representation of French Romanesque Art. But the price is inevitably so large that we could not possibly think of trying to buy it unless the National Art-Collections Fund were prepared to take a very considerable interest in the matter. Monsieur Seligmann informed me that he would sell it to the Museum for 450,000 francs, representing considerably over £4,000; but that he would ask a good deal more than this from an American Museum. And judging by the passionate interest in Romanesque architecture which prevails in the United States, and the extreme difficulty of securing examples on this considerable scale, I should think it is by no means unlikely that he would be able to sell it there even at a higher figure. None of the sculpture, according to his account, is in any way restored although one or two of the plain pieces of stone have been made up and can indeed be detected as such in the photograph.

I feel that the arcade is in any case of such importance that I could not be justified in turning it down without putting it before the National Art-Collections Fund; and I should be most grateful if you will let me know what view the Executive Committee take of it when they have seen the photographs. I need hardly say that if any question of possible purchase arises it would be necessary for someone to go over to Paris and inspect, so far as this may be possible, the actual work.

2. Triple window, rue Chantault, Chartres. Probably c.1160–70.

Maclagan also wrote to John Hugh Smith at the same time: Just to confirm our telephone conversations of this morning, Monsieur Jean Seligmann, the present Manager of Arnold Seligmann & Fils, 23 Place Vendôme (Opéra 82–70, 82–71) is flying over to Paris by the afternoon plane on Sunday. He will come straight in his car to the Crillon and pick you up as soon after five as possible; he will take you and Miss Longhurst to see the Romanesque arcade, which I understand is set up in an annexe to his place of business. He is most anxious to show it to you himself and to give you all the information available.

Miss Longhurst is I hope going over this evening and will probably be staying at the Grand Hotel du Palais Royal, Rue de Valois, where I generally stop. If she is able to be in Paris to-morrow, she will try and see Vitry or Aubert6 at the Louvre and find out anything that is to be found out from them. She will in any case call at the Crillon and ask for you about five o’clock on Sunday.

I shall be greatly interested to hear what you think of the stuff when you get back next week.

By 19th March, the matter had progressed to the point where preparations were being made for a visit to Paris, as Maclagan had proposed. Apparently by chance, Maclagan had bumped into Seligmann in London that morning, and wrote to him care of his London representatives, Messrs. Robert Frank, Ltd., in Bruton Street: It was a great piece of luck being able to get at you in London this morning; I was expecting to have to telephone to Paris.

To confirm what Mr. Ashton4 told you over the telephone, Mr. John Hugh Smith, a partner in Hambro’s Bank and the Treasurer of the National Art-Collections Fund, will be in Paris on Sunday and is expecting you to call for him at the Crillon soon after five; or at any rate as soon as is possible after your arrival in the afternoon plane. My colleague Miss Longhurst5 will also be in Paris and will be at the Crillon at five.

I am very glad that you will be able to show the Romanesque arcade to Mr. John Hugh Smith yourself. As I explained to you when you were in London previously, for a purchase of this kind we are almost entirely dependent on the generosity of the National Art-Collections Fund so it is most important to us that their representative should see it under the best possible auspices!

National Museum between 1938 and 1942.

6 Paul Vitry was Conservateur-en-Chef de la Collection de Sculpture at the Musée du Louvre, 1920–40; Marcel Aubert was his successor as Conservateur-en-Chef, 1940–55.

7 Marquis F. de L’Eglise: ‘Sculptures romanes découvertes à Trie-Château’, Mémoires de la Société historique et archéologique de l’arrondissement de Pontoise et du Vexin 47 (1938), pp.65–66.

On her return to London, Margaret Longhurst wrote a short report for Maclagan (see Appendix 1 below) in which she stated that the window had been discovered in 1935–36.

Further information on the uncovering of the window, and the eventual demolition of the house to which it belonged, was later published in 1938 by the local historian the marquis Fernand de L’Eglise.7 Here he confirmed that the window had formed part of a building on the corner of the place de l’Eglise and rue des Ecoles at Trie-Château, which until 1849 had served as the presbytery. In that year the presbytery was moved to another building and the house was employed first as a stable and hayloft and later as a builder’s premises, before falling into disrepair in the 1930s. When demolition was being carried out in 1935–36 in order to clear space for a new building, the window was discovered under later plaster rendering.8 The discovery quickly came to the attention of the Parisian dealer Paul Gouvert, who purchased the window before passing it on to Seligmann.9 8

Ibid., p.65.

As confirmed in a letter of 3rd June 1937 from Aubert to Maclagan (see below).

Margaret Longhurst’s statement that ‘Monsieur Seligman’s assistant [. . .] had been in charge of the removal of the windows’ may be explained either by Gouvert selling on his interest in the window before removal or by the possibility that Gouvert and Seligmann were in partnership in the matter.

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Quite understandably, the National Art-Collections Fund and the Museum were concerned to ensure that the window was legitimately free for export from France, and Maclagan again wrote to Witt on 3rd April: I have just seen John Hugh Smith about the windows in Paris.

When Miss Longhurst came back from Paris, where as you know she had met him and seen the windows with him, she understood that he was going to write to me about his own impressions of them; and I was waiting to write to you until I had heard from him.

I enclose a copy of Miss Longhurst’s report. As you will see from this, and as John Hugh Smith has no doubt already told you, there is an apparent inconsistency between Vitry’s letter and Seligmann’s statement. But I have just laboriously deciphered the letter in question (his handwriting almost rivals that of the lamented Koechlin!)10 and I enclose a copy of the portion of it which relates to the windows. As you will see, he quite definitely does not say that he has not seen the windows; although he as definitely seems to have intended to imply it. I am writing Aubert to see if by chance I can get a more direct answer out of him; but it looks to me as if they had made up their minds to be as discreet as if they were themselves national monuments.

Both Miss Longhurst and John Hugh Smith very definitely came to the conclusion that Seligmann was telling the truth.

But you know how difficult it is to get positive statements in cases like this.11 I had discussed the windows again this morning with Bedford and Miss Longhurst before John Hugh Smith turned up. We are all agreed that they would be a magnificent addition to our collections; and the place in which we would erect them being immediately to the left hand of the Main Entrance, the arcading would at once become one of the most conspicuous objects in the Museum. But the question of our share in the purchase is certainly difficult. I am quite prepared to agree to your Committee negotiating direct with Seligmann about a reduction in the price; but it does not seem likely that such a reduction would be a very considerable one and I am bound to admit that I believe it would not be difficult to sell such a conspicuous piece of Romanesque architecture to one of the American Museums who are, as you know, particularly anxious to secure such architectural exhibits. Supposing Seligmann were to reduce his price to £4,000, the arrangement that you suggest in your letter would leave us to find £2,000 of the money; and frankly I do not think this would be possible. The Department of Architecture and Sculpture has spent a very considerable proportion of our available Purchase Grant during the last few months and at least one other purchase which has been under discussion for four years has at the moment matured. My Advisory Council meets on the last day of this month and I shall of course have to consult them.

But I do not think I could myself recommend our spending more than £1,000 out of our already reduced Purchase Grant for this particular Department; and I hardly think the

10

Raymond Koechlin (1860–1931), the great authority on Gothic ivory carvings.

That Seligmann was telling the truth is confirmed by the account given in L’Eglise’s article, op. cit. (note 7; and see below); and by the end of April Sir Robert Witt had satisfied himself that Seligmann had the right to export (see Maclagan’s 11

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Advisory Council would be prepared to go any further. But you will of course understand that I cannot commit them one way or the other.

As promised, Maclagan also wrote to Marcel Aubert on the same day: I daresay that Vitry told you that my colleague Miss Longhurst, when she was over in Paris just before Easter, asked him about a rather important Romanesque arcade or set of windows which belongs to Seligmann of the Place Vendôme and which he has offered to us for sale, with the assurance that he has permission to export them from France. Monsieur Jean Seligmann gave me to understand when he first showed me the photographs that either you or Vitry had actually seen these windows; and when Miss Longhurst and Mr. John Hugh Smith, the Treasurer of the National Art-Collections Fund, saw the windows he quite definitely repeated that both Vitry and you had seen them.

I know how embarrassing it is to be asked questions professionally about objects which are in the hands of dealers.

But I should be most grateful to you if you could give me any information about these windows; and particularly if you could tell me whether you have in fact seen them, with or without Vitry. Our only chance of getting the windows is to ensure the active and generous co-operation of the National Art-Collections Fund; and they are asking to be satisfied about this particular point.

Aubert replied on 9th April: Nous avons en effet entendu parler de cette façade de maison romane qui serait entre les mains de Seligmann de la place Vendôme, mais ni Vitry ni moi ne l’avons vue.

Je fais actuellement une enquête pour savoir si vraiment cette façade provient de Trie-Château dans l’Oise, et jusqu’ici, je n’ai riens pu savoir. C’est ce qui a retardé mon réponse. Dès que je saurai quelque chose, je vous l’ecririai.

Je crains bien d’ailleurs que le morceau en question ne soit pas à Paris, ce qui complique un peu les choses. Le marchand vous a-t-il dit ou il avait été remonté, et à quelle époque il aurait été trouvé à Trie-Château.

Il existe, dans cette petite ville, une maison de la Justice Seigneuriale qui est ancienne, et classée. Peut-être y avait-il aussi une autre maison romane dont l’existence nous aurait échappé?

J’espère bientôt vous donner quelque précision, et vous prie de croire, mon cher Ami, à mon meilleur souvenir.

Maclagan wrote back on 14th April, pointing out that the window was indeed in Paris, and Aubert wrote again on 19th April: Je vous remercie de votre lettre du 14. J’ai déjà quelques renseignements sur les arcades romanes qui ont bien été trouvées à Trie-Château mais que nous n’avons jamais vues, comme je vous l’ai écrit. Cette affaire n’est pas très claire; l’Inspection

minute of 1st May 1937 at Appendix 2).

12 The Museum had actually only purchased one capital from Mozat (Mozac), inv. no.A.7–1937, for which see Williamson, op. cit. (note 1), no.3.

13 Victoria and Albert Museum, Review of the Principal Acquisitions during the Year 1937,

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Générale des Beaux-Arts s’en est déjà occupée, mais il faut encore attendre quelque temps avant que je puisse vous donner des précisions.

Carle Dreyfus m’a dit que vous aviez acheté deux beaux chapiteaux provenant de Mozat.12 Je vous en félicite, et la chose nous intéresse vivement. Les avez-vous déjà publiés quelquepart, ou auriez vous des photographies que vous pourriez nous communiquer?

Je tâche de presser l’affaire de Trie-Château, pour vous donner une réponse aussi vite que possible.

By 1st May Maclagan was in a position to write an official minute to the Secretary of the Board of Education, summarising the situation and confirming the support of the National Art-Collections Fund (see Appendix 2). The expenditure was sanctioned, and on 29th May Sir Robert Witt was able to write to Maclagan confirming the arrangement and that he was ‘accordingly writing to Monsieur Seligmann, asking him to arrange for the delivery of the architecture to you at South Kensington’. No time was lost in bringing the window to the Museum. Seligmann himself called in on 2nd June to say that the cases containing the pieces of the window were already in London and arrangements were made for them to be delivered the following week. A day later a final letter arrived from Marcel Aubert of the Louvre: Je vais partir pour le congrès d’archéologie à CahorsRodez, et je ne veux pas vous faire attendre plus longtemps encore.

Si je ne vous ai pas écrit plus vite, c’est que nous avons eu toutes sortes de difficultés avec cette affaire. J’ai fini par retrouver que les fenêtres en question provenaient bien de Trie-Château et avaient été retrouvées au cours d’une démolition, mais la manière dont elles sont passées entre les mains des marchands reste peu nette et l’administration des Beaux-Arts hésite un peu sur ce cas, et sur la possibilité de retenir ce morceau ou de laisser partir.

Et surtout, nous n’avons réussi, ni les uns ni les autres, à voir ces pièces. Tantôt elles sont chez un marchand (Gouvert), tantôt chez un autre (Seligmann) et nous n’avons rien pu voir. Et c’est précisément ce que vous me demandiez de faire, et ce à quoi nous n’avons pu aboutir. J’en suis navré, et regrette de vous avoir fait tant tarder dans une affaire qui paraissait vous intéresser.

3. Lunette from the ‘Maison de la Chrétienté’, Reims. c.1160–70. Limestone, 91.5 by 157.5 cm. (Musée Saint-Rémi, Reims).

already mentioned, by the marquis Fernand de L’Eglise, who lamented the fact that the sculptures had left France for the V. & A., and, if he is to be believed, wrote revealingly of the Louvre’s position – never admitted by Vitry and Aubert and perhaps explaining their silence on the subject – and the perceived powerful influence of the English art establishment on French export controls: Il est infiniment regrettable que notre pays soit désormais privé de ces œuvres de notre art local: mais quand l’Administration du Louvre a appris leur existence, le prix demandé par celui qui les possédait alors dépassait notablement les possibilités budgétaires de cet établissement; d’autre part, les procédés de parfaite courtoisie dont avaient usé, à ce propos et dans d’autres occasions récentes, les Conservateurs du grand musée anglais, ne permirent pas de faire jouer contreux la législation qui peut éventuellement faire obstacle à l’exportation des objets d’art.14 The context, date and imagery of the window

Twenty-six cases were delivered to the Museum on 8th June via J. Chenue, the French packers, and W.H. Muller and Co., Lower Thames Street, and a further three cases arrived on 1st July. The installation clearly took longer than anticipated, as Maclagan wrote to Sir Robert Witt on 16th December that ‘the romanesque arcade is practically finished now; only a little plastering remains to be done. We have been short of plasterers so the work has been delayed’.

Early in January 1938 the Trie-Château window was finally unveiled, and published in the Museum’s annual Review.13 Later in the year it was the subject of the short monographic article,

As has been pointed out, Romanesque domestic architectural sculpture has not survived in good numbers, and twelfth-century windows of this type are extremely rare. They are invariably to be found on the first storey of houses, above wide ground-floor entrances, but most of the existing examples do not include figural decoration. Taking regional variations into account, generally comparable ensembles are still to be found at Cluny, Saint-Antonin, Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, Chartres and another window still in situ at Trie-Château itself (the so-called ‘l’Auditoire’).15 Apart from the present window, the principal example – as already mentioned – is on the rue Chantault in Chartres (Fig.2), where the six sculpted tympana with grotesque figures set below a gently pointed arch match those from TrieChâteau, and where the deep semi-circular mouldings above and the configuration of the capitals are closely comparable. This format, with sculpted tympana, continued into the thirteenth century and noteworthy examples are to be found at Charlieu (with blind tracery) and at the place de la Cathédrale in Chartres (with naturalistic foliate designs).16

London 1938, pp.iii, 1, pl.1.

14 L’Eglise, op. cit. (note 7), p.66.

15 See P. Garrigou Grandchamp: Demeures médiévales: Cœur de la cité, Paris 1992, pp.12, 24 and 28; for both Trie-Château windows, see idem: ‘L’architecture

civile romane des pays de l’Oise’, L’Art roman dans l’Oise et ses environs (Colloque organisé à Beauvais les 7 et 8 octobre 1995), Beauvais 1997, pp.183–85 and 203, figs.389–90.

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On the Trie-Château window, three round-arched divisions contain single lintels with a small tympanum above each opening.

The tympana appear to be paired in terms of their subject-matter.

On the left are a double-tailed merman and a figure with his tails terminating in animal heads (Fig.4). In the centre, two figures are bedevilled by snake-tailed winged dragons (on the left) and harpies (Fig.5). On the right, Dives, the rich man, with his purse clearly hanging from his neck, is seized by two flanking winged devils, who thrust him into the Mouth of Hell below;17 the final tympanum contains a centaur, who turns to fire his bow at a large cockerel or basilisk (Fig.6). Each lintel is supported by three small foliate capitals on colonnettes, and four larger attached columns with foliate capitals and bases divide the window bays.

The date of the window has, until recently, been given as the last quarter of the twelfth century, but a close inspection of the reliefs and capitals allows it to be placed slightly earlier, probably in the years 1160–70. Although the rudimentary style of the figurative sculpture is difficult to parallel exactly, the most compelling comparisons are with sculptures earlier in the twelfth century and it is unlikely that such work would have been

executed in the years after 1180. Distinctive features such as the fern-like crests on the heads of the devils to each side of Dives may be seen on the demons on a capital at Saint-Pierre-de-laTour at Aulnay-de-Saintonge, executed probably 1120–40, and the figure style and physiognomies can also be matched with other sculptures – albeit of a somewhat higher quality – on the south portal of the same church.18 The device of grotesque heads and figures within lunettes with decorative borders is not only seen in the Chartres window already mentioned (Fig.2) but also in fragments divorced from similar contexts, such as the three reliefs from Saint-Denis, now kept in the dépôt lapidaire at Saint-Denis and the Louvre, which are probably to be dated to about 1140–50.19 The popularity of such lunettes in the Ile-deFrance around the middle of the twelfth century is illustrated by a further example in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris and one showing the Woman of the Apocalypse, acquired by the Musée du Louvre in 1983.20 The Trie-Château window also seems most comfortably placed in the context of the architecture of c.1150–75 in its immediate vicinity, such as the north portal of Saint-Etienne at Beauvais and the related doorway of the church at Trie-Château itself.21 Certainly, the leaf-forms of the capitals of the window have more in common with those at Saint-Etienne than any foliate capitals from the period immediately after 1180.22 Another contemporary sculpted lunette with non-biblical scenes, almost certainly also from above a window opening and now in the Musée Saint-Rémi in Reims (Fig.3), has been carefully studied by the late Michael Camille, who imaginatively linked the subject-matter of the reliefs with the function of the house to which it originally belonged.23 The latter, in the immediate vicinity of Reims Cathedral and belonging to the cathedral chapter, was known as the ‘Maison de la Chrétienté’, and Camille plausibly suggested that the imagery of the tympanum was symbolic of the use of the house, ‘one of the schools of the celebrated masters linked to the cathedral’.24 In this context, the disputing scholars seated at the centre of the upper field advertise the primacy of teaching and intellectual debate, with the dual temptations of conflict (at the lower left) and love (lower right) shown below. The Trie-Château window was also sited on a house adjacent to a church, this time a presbytery, and there seems little doubt that the grotesques in the tympana were likewise site-specific, even admonitory.25 Here, the choice of images might be seen as a warning to those passing outside on their way to church, just as the Last Judgment scenes often carved on the tympanum above the church and cathedral portal gave vivid notice of the perils of sin. The two figures at the centre assailed by dragons and harpies, that on the left male (who resists and binds the beasts), the other female, may perhaps be interpreted as representing temptation and the fruits of lust, or Luxuria, while the presence of Dives, the rich man, on the left of the right bay, plunged into Hell by two fierce winged devils, speaks eloquent-

17 For the same scene on a capital at Santiago de Compostela and on the tympanum at Conques, see J. Lacoste: Les maîtres de la sculpture romane dans l’Espagne du pèlerinage à Compostelle, Bordeaux 2006, figs.31–32; and for a similar juxtaposition of Dives and the devils on a capital at Ennezat in the Auvergne, see P. Baumann: ‘The Deadliest Sin: Warnings against Avarice and Usury on Romanesque Capitals in Auvergne’, Church History 59 (1990), pp.7–18, fig.1.

18 B. Rupprecht: Romanische Skulptur in Frankreich, Munich 1975, pls.80 (lower right) and 78–79; for Aulnay, see A. Tcherikover: High Romanesque Sculpture in the Duchy of Aquitaine, c.1090–1140, Oxford 1997, pp.52–61, 107–11, 131–34, 137–40 and passim.

19 F. Baron: Sculpture Française, I, Moyen Age (Musée du Louvre, Département des Sculptures du Moyen Age, de la Renaissance et des temps modernes), Paris 1996, inv.

no.RF 482, p.64.

20 J.-P. Willesme: Catalogues d’art et d’histoire du Musée Carnavalet, I, Sculptures Médiévales (XIIe siècle – début du XVIe siècle), Paris 1979, p.13, pl.I; F. Baron in Nouvelles acquisitions du Département des Sculptures (1980–1983), Musée du Louvre, Paris 1984, no.2; and idem, op. cit. (note 19), p.70.

21 A. Henwood-Reverdot: L’Eglise Saint-Etienne de Beauvais: Histoire et Architecture, Beauvais 1982, figs.96–98 and 106–08.

22 For which, see the compendious survey in J. James: The Creation of Gothic Architecture, an illustrated thesaurus: the Ark of God. Part A., The evolution of foliate capitals in the Paris Basin 1170–1250, West Grinstead 2002.

23 M. Camille: ‘“Seeing and Lecturing”: Disputation in a twelfth-century tympanum from Reims’, in E. Sears and T.K. Thomas, eds.: Reading Medieval Images:

4. Detail of the Trie-Château window (left).

5. Detail of the Trie-Château window (centre).

6. Detail of the Trie-Château window (right).

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8. Capital showing a mermaid or merman from the east side of the south portal of the abbey church of Saint-Sever-de-Rustan.

Probably c.1125–50.

7. Capital showing Dives and devils from the west side of the south portal of the abbey church of Saint-Sever-de-Rustan.

Probably c.1125–50.

ly of the consequences of the related sins of avarice and usury.26 Just this combination of subjects is seen on the now rather damaged capitals on each side of the portal of the abbey church at Saint-Sever-de-Rustan in the Hautes-Pyrénées, probably of c.1125–50: these show a centaur and the rich man with a purse around his neck, the latter flanked by devils, on the left (Fig.7), and Luxuria and a mermaid on the right (Fig.8).27 Charity, through alms-giving, was the means to salvation; and it must have been the intention and hope of the inhabitant of the presbytery – the parish priest – that the late twelfth-century congregation at Trie-Château would contribute generously.

Appendix 1. Report by Margaret Longhurst submitted on 24th March 1937 to Eric Maclagan concerning the Romanesque window from Trie-Château.

(London, Victoria and Albert Museum, V. & A. National Art-Collections Fund nominal file, R.P. 1937/1114, 2721).

charge of the removal of the windows and he explained that the central columns had been removed and walled up at the sides of the piers in the 18th century in order to leave a square window opening. The tympana had also been plastered up with a wood beam forming a sort of lintel. Damp appears to have got behind this and to have rotted the stone to a certain extent behind the wood. This would account for the lower part of the carving of the tympana being more worn than the upper part which is quite sharp though apparently not re-cut. The carvings are coarse but quite what one would expect to find on an ordinary house in a small provincial town and as an architectural whole the windows have a most imposing appearance. The style is exactly similar to that of the Chartres windows and must be typical of the Normandie – Ile de France district. The larger columns attached to the piers have beautiful heavily undercut leaf capitals which appear almost Gothic in style. The smaller columns have rather curious and original capitals, probably designed by the local masons. I should say that the windows date from quite the end of the 12th century.

A rather curious point arose during our inspection as Monsieur Seligman stated quite definitely that the windows had been seen by both Monsieur Vitry and Monsieur Aubert and that they were free for export. On the face of it it seems impossible to reconcile this with Monsieur Vitry’s letter and I feel there must be a misunderstanding somewhere.

2. Official minute from Eric Maclagan to the Secretary of the Board of Education, 1st May 1937. (London, Victoria and Albert Museum, V. & A. National Art-Collections Fund nominal file, R.P. 1937/1114, 2721).

Director. As soon as I got to Paris on Saturday afternoon I went to the Louvre to try and see Monsieur Vitry or Monsieur Aubert but neither was there, but I saw Monsieur Carle Dreyfus and showed him the photographs of the Romanesque windows. He offered to communicate with either Monsieur Vitry or Monsieur Aubert, or both, as to whether the windows offered to us by Monsieur Jean Seligman [sic] had ever been shown to the authorities at the Louvre and whether anything was known about them. I received a letter on Sunday morning from Monsieur Vitry (attached)28 saying that he only knew of some 12th century windows in the present Hotel de Ville at Trie-Château which were classed as Monuments Historiques and obviously the windows in question could not have therefore been removed.

On Sunday evening Mr. John Hugh Smith and I met Monsieur Seligman and he showed us the windows. The whole of the plinth and the abaci of the central columns are modern restorations, though made of the same local stone which is in part old.

These portions were missing when the windows were discovered partially plastered up rather over a year ago. I also saw Monsieur Seligman’s assistant who had been in

. . . Two days ago Sir Robert Witt, with whom I have been in constant communication, rang me up and told me that he had had an interview with Mr. Jean Seligmann in the course of which, apart from the fact of satisfying him completely as to the ownership and right of removal of the arcade, Mr. Seligmann reduced his price from 45,000 [sic, but presumably meaning 450,000] francs (approximately £4,500) to £3,800; undertaking also to bear the cost of transport to London. Sir Robert Witt, while naturally unable to say in advance what the decision of his Executive Committee would be, gave me to understand that he believed they would agree to contributing £2,800 towards the sum if we would put up the remaining £1,000. And on the strength of this I laid the matter before the Advisory Council at their meeting yesterday morning. They were almost unanimously in favour of our contributing this £1,000 so as to secure the arcade; and the one dissentient did not wish to press his objection. I hope therefore that you will sanction the expenditure of this sum; of course on the understanding that the National Art-Collections Fund is prepared to pay the remaining £2,800. I need hardly say that if we get this arcade for such a relatively small sum out of our own funds we shall be doing extremely well.

the art historian and the object, Michigan 2002, pp.75–87. The image reproduced in Camille’s article, of a plaster cast of the lunette, is slightly misleading as it does not show the stone surrounding the relief, a feature which links it with the other window lunettes cited above, including those of the Trie-Château window; see also W. Sauerländer: Gothic Sculpture in France 1140–1270, London 1972, pp.414–15, pl.55.

24 Camille, op. cit. (note 23), p.77.

25 The building at rue Chantault in Chartres with a closely similar window was also in all probability a canon’s house.

26 Baumann, op. cit. (note 17), pp.10–11; for the close association of Luxuria with Avaritia in the Romanesque period, see A. Katzenellenbogen: Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art, London 1939, repr. Toronto 1989, pp.58–59.

27

J. Cabanot: Gascogne romane, La Pierre-qui-vire 1978, pp.209–10, pls.81–83.

‘Je regrette infiniment de n’avoir pas été l’à tantot pour vous recevoir au Louvre. Mon ami Carle Dreyfus m’a fait part de votre demande de renseignements au sujet de TrieChateau. Je sais qu’il y-avait dans cette petite commune de l’Oise une ancienne maison de justice seigneurale du XII e siècle qui sert aujourd’hui d’Hotel de Ville et qui est classée comme Monument Historique. Je ne pense pas que ce soit de cet édifice que proviennent les fenêtres romanes que l’on veut vous montrer. Sinon il serait impossible de les enlever.

Je n’ai pas entendu parler, non plus que Marcel Aubert que j’ai consulté tout à l’heure d’un dépeçage quelconque ou d’un litige quelconque avec les Monuments Historiques. Mais nous demanderons lundi à nos amis qui s’occupent de ce service, et nous vous aviserons, s’il y-avait quelque crainte à avoir’; for this second window at Trie-Château, see note 15 above.

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A Venetian tympanum of the ‘Madonna della Misericordia’ by Bartolomeo Bon

by PETA MOTTURE and VÍCTOR HUGO LÓPEZ BORGES

IN OCTOBER 1881 the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), London, purchased a relief of the Virgin of Mercy that had originally formed part of the tympanum above the main portal of the Scuola Vecchia, the old meeting house, of the Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Venice (Fig.9).1 The sculpture had been taken down from the abbey church of S. Maria della Misericordia, where it had been installed only in the mid-nineteenth century, and like many other monuments that were being removed from historic sites in Italy at that time, it was on the open market. The failure of the Venetian authorities to prevent the destruction or removal of such pieces was widely criticised in the press. In an extraordinary letter to The Times, published on 24th October 1883, the former curator of the Museum, John Charles Robinson, wrote a tirade against the Municipality of Venice, and listed a catalogue of works that he had helped to preserve by buying them for the Museum. Among them was the Misericordia tympanum, which he described as ‘intrinsically a work of high merit and importance, but it had infinitely greater significance in its original place. It is indeed a page torn from the record of Venetian art’.2 Given that it ‘lay in fragments on the ground’ when he saw it, the purchase ensured the sculpture’s survival, but, nonetheless, Robinson had eagerly colluded with others in keeping its destination secret from the vendor in order to get the best possible price.3 The tympanum shows the Virgin of the Misericordia with the Christ Child in a mandorla-shaped medallion on her chest, a type of Virgin and Child known in Byzantine images as the platytera.4 The Virgin spreads her cloak wide to shelter the members of the confraternity and is surrounded by a Tree of Jesse (taking the form of a fig tree), peopled with half-figures of the ancestors of Christ. Created in the mid-fifteenth century, the relief had been a prominent feature in the Venetian landscape for over five hundred years. In 1612 it was moved from the façade of the Scuola Vecchia and placed above the doorway

of the confraternity’s new meeting house, the Fabbrica Nuova della Misericordia. A drawing by Johannes Grevembroch of 1754 shows the relief in that position, together with the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity and two angels, all of which later disappeared from view (Fig.11).5 By 1834 the sculptures had been moved inside the church by the abbot, Pietro Pianton, who was responsible for the abbey’s nineteenth-century restoration (Fig.10).6 Since its initial installation in London, the tympanum has moved twice more. The recent dismantling and conservation of the sculpture in preparation for the new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, opening in early December, has allowed it to be examined closely, revealing significant new information about its structure and surface decoration and prompting a re-evaluation of its original appearance and history.

Many documents of the Scuola Grande della Misericordia have been lost and are known only from later copies or summaries of their content, which provide tantalising details of the events surrounding the creation and relocation of the sculpture.

Recently published archival discoveries help to throw further light on the probable sequence of events in relation to the tympanum, and the recent reappearance of two of the lost figures seen in the Grevembroch drawing – Hope and Charity (Fig.12) – has revived interest in the relief and sparked further consideration of its dating.7 The author of the tympanum is apparently undocumented, but in 1581 was identified as Bartolomeo Bon (or Buon; c.1400/05–64/67) by Francesco Sansovino. This attribution to the artist and/or his workshop has largely been accepted.8 Bartolomeo was a member of the Scuola della Misericordia and the leading sculptor of his day.9 He was responsible for a number of major sculptural and architectural works, both as a member of his father Giovanni’s workshop during the latter’s lifetime, and subsequently as head of the bottega.10 Their commissions included an extensive contract for work at the Ca’ d’Oro (1424–31) – for which Bartolomeo carved the figures

We are grateful to the following for their assistance in relation to this article: Adriana Augusti, Giorgio Bacovich, Joanna Brogan, Caroline Bulloch, Gaetano and Annamaria Burgio, Andrew Butterfield, Meghan Callahan, Adriana Caneva, Flora Dennis, Cristina Dossi, Norbert Jopek, Arcadia Fletcher, Sam Fogg, Phil James, Richard Mackenney, Alistair McFarlane, Rosie Mills, Kelly Quinn and Katy Temple. Our special thanks also go to a number of colleagues and friends who kindly shared their expertise: to Lucia Burgio for scientific analysis and interpretation of the samples; to Emma Jones, Michelle O’Malley and Paul Williamson for their helpful discussions and comments on the text; to Debra Pincus for her perceptive suggestions and refinements to the content; and to Victoria Avery, who provided insightful input and advice, and without whose generous hospitality and invaluable support, the research in Venice would not have been possible.

1 Inv. no.25–1882; see esp. J. Pope-Hennessy, assisted by R. Lightbown: Catalogue of Italian Sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London 1964, I, pp.342–45, no.369; W. Wolters: La scultura veneziana gotica 1300/1460, Venice 1976, pp.128 and 290–91, no.250; A. Markham Schulz: ‘The Sculpture of Giovanni and Bartolomeo Bon and their Workshop’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 68/3 (June 1978), pp.3–81; J. Pope-Hennessy: An Introduction to Italian Sculpture, vol.I: Gothic,

London 1996, pp.224 and 278; and A. Markham Schulz: ‘L’altar maggiore della chiesa veneziana della Misericordia e le sculture di Giovanni e Bartolomeo Bon per la Scuola Vecchia della Misericordia’, Arte Veneta 62 (2005), pp.27–39.

2 The Times (24th October 1883), p.3; see also La Venezia (9th April 1882), both partially transcribed in Pope-Hennessy 1964, op. cit. (note 1), p.343.

3 London, V. & A. Archive, R.P. MA/2/P7/1, Purchases by Officers on Visits Abroad, Part I, 1863–94. The sculpture was purchased through the agency of Mr Malcolm in Venice and the Rt. Hon. G.F.A. Cavendish Bentinck, MP, at the recommendation of Mr Bentinck and Lord Henry Layard, and following a discreet visit by Robinson to view the sculpture and approve its purchase. The vendor is not recorded; the sculpture had already been sold to a dealer by the Moro-Lin family, who took over ownership of the church in 1864; see Markham Schulz 1978, op. cit. (note 1), pp.16–17, note 46. The church is still in private ownership and it has not yet been possible to gain entry.

4 See, for example, I. Furlan et al., eds.: exh. cat. Venezia e Bisanzio, Venice (Palazzo Ducale) 1974, no.32.

5 J. Grevembroch: Monumenta Veneta ex antiques ruderibus, Venice 1754, II, p.83. The tympanum was moved when the Scuola Vecchia was taken over by the Silk Weavers’

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9. Madonna della Misericordia, attributed to Bartolomeo Bon and workshop. c.1440–41. Istrian stone with traces of paint and gilding, 251.5 by 208.3 cm.

(Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

Guild. The three Virtues were described as SS. Cristina, Dorotea and Callista in E. Paoletti: Il Fiore di Venezia ossia i Quadri, i Monumenti, le Vedute ed i Costumi, Venice 1840, II, p.19. The whereabouts of Faith and of the two angels remains unknown; the figures of Hope and Charity are currently on the London art market (see Fig.12 and note 7 below).

6 See Markham Schulz 1978, op. cit. (note 1), pp.16–17, note 46, with additional references, for full details. The tympanum was installed on the left wall at the west end and the figures of the Virtues in the first chapel on the right; see also E. Martinelli Pedrocco: ‘Altre Scuole’, in T. Pignatti: Le Scuole di Venezia, Milan 1981, p.217.

7 See J. Sisk: ‘Bartolomeo Bon’, in A. Butterfield, ed.: exh. cat. Italian Renaissance Sculpture, New York (Salander-O’Reilly Galleries) 2004–05, pp.14–21; and Markham Schulz 2005, op. cit. (note 1). For the 1612 documents, see S. Mason: ‘La decorazione pittorica e scultorea della Scuola Grande della Misericordia’, in G. Fabbri, ed.: La Scuola Grande della Misericordia di Venezia. Storia e progetto, Milan 1999, pp.71–95, esp. pp.77–78; the January 1612 document summarised by Mason is transcribed in the Appendix to this article. The surface treatment and paint layers appear different from the V. & A. sculpture, apparently due to the different treatments they have received since their separation in the nineteenth century. We

are grateful to Sam Fogg for providing access for study of these figures, as well as for allowing us to take samples of paint for analysis and comparison with the V. & A. materials (in progress at the time of writing); and to Arcadia Fletcher for organising this study.

8 F. Sansovino: Venetia Città nobilissima e singolare, Venice 1581, p.101; also idem, with additions by G. Martinioni: Venetia Città nobilissima e singolare, Venice 1663, p.286 (facsimile edition, Venice 1998). Notable exceptions are Wolters (who was not convinced by the attribution, but suggests instead that the figurative sections were probably carried out by collaborators, possibly based on a design commissioned from Bartolomeo) and Markham Schulz (see discussion below). For summaries of attributions of the Misericordia, see Wolters, op. cit. (note 1), pp.290–91; and Markham Schulz 1978, op. cit. (note 1), p.20, note 60.

9 On 22nd July 1458 Bartolomeo offered money for what was presumably the ceiling decoration (soffitto) of the Scuola; see P. Paoletti: L’architettura e la scultura del Rinascimento in Venezia, Venice 1893, I, p.55.

10 For father–son partnerships, see S.M. Connell: ‘The employment of sculptors and stonemasons in Venice in the fifteenth century’, Ph.D. diss. (Warburg Institute, University of London, 1976), pp.36–42. the burlington m a g a z i n e

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10. Photograph showing Fig.9 while in the church of the Misericordia, Venice.

Before 1881. From P. Paoletti: L’architettura e la scultura del Rinascimento in Venezia, Venice 1893, pl.8.

11. Drawing of the tympanum of the Scuola Nuova of the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, Venice, by Johannes Grevembroch, in ‘Monumenta Veneta’, MS, II, C.83. 1754.

(Museo Correr, Venice).

on the wellhead in the courtyard (1427–28) – as well as the design and execution of the Porta della Carta, where the figure of Justice (installed in 1441) in particular is accepted as a work by Bartolomeo. Although executed in a livelier manner, this figure bears a reasonable stylistic relationship to the V. & A.’s figure of the Madonna della Misericordia.11 The Scuola della Misericordia had its roots in a devotional confraternity dedicated to the cult of the Virgin and St Francis founded at the church of S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in 1261, around the same time that the other three oldest Scuole Grandi – the Carità, S. Marco and S. Giovanni Evangelista – were set up.12 In 1308 the Scuola della Misericordia was refounded at the abbey church of S. Maria della Misericordia in Cannaregio on the northern edge of the city. It was sited on a grassy island from which it took its popular name of S. Maria della Valverde. By the early fifteenth century the Scuola was well established, with around 1,500 members.13 It had a substantial meeting house, which had been regularly extended since it was built in 1310, as well as a hospital and almshouses for the poor brethren. The site of the complex, away from the more densely populated centre, is exposed to the winds from the lagoon and surrounded on three sides by water.

On 6th August 1441 the Chapter of the Scuola made a resolution to ‘reffar la fazzada della Schola per esser mal conditionata’, that is, to repair the façade of the Scuola because of its poor condition.14

Consequently the tympanum has been dated to the 1440s by virtually every scholar studying the sculpture, most often to c.1445–50, assuming that it was made in connection with the repair to the façade. The most notable exception to this consensus is Anne Markham Schulz, who has consistently dated it c.1424–25. She attributed the tympanum to Giovanni Bon and the two angels holding the scroll that survive on the Scuola Vecchia façade to Bartolomeo. This was based on stylistic grounds and documentary evidence.15 Recently, Markham Schulz reiterated her argument for the early dating, positing that the tympanum was the model for an altarpiece made for the church of the Misericordia in 1429 by ‘Messer Jacomel Itaiador à San Lio’, which she identified as the fragmentary polychromed wooden altarpiece now in the presbytery of the Eremite in Venice.16 The tympanum and the Eremite altarpiece share the iconography of the Virgin of Mercy combined with the Tree of Jesse (the panel has two additional prophet figures), while some of the brethren under the cloak of the Virgin have matching poses (Figs.9 and 13). The suggestion that the wooden panel now in the Eremite originates from the Misericordia is convincing, but it is unlikely to be the 1429 altarpiece and probably dates to around 1450 or later.

As first proposed by Wolfgang Wolters, the V. & A. tympanum would have provided the template for this later altarpiece,17 with its apparently novel combination of imagery,

11 For Bartolomeo Bon’s output, with varying attributions, see, for example, L. Planiscig: ‘Die Bildhauer Venedigs in der ersten Hälfte des Quattrocento’, Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien N.F. 4 (1930), pp.47–111, esp. pp.89–111; G. Fogolari: ‘Gli scultori toscani a Venezia nel Quattrocento e Bartolomeo Buon, Veneziano’, L’Arte 33 (1930) pp.427–64; idem: ‘Ancora di Bartolomeo Bon, scultore veneziano’, ibid. 35 (1932), pp.27–45; G. Mariacher: ‘Bono, Bartolomeo’, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, XII, Rome 1970, pp.275–77; Wolters, op. cit. (note 1), pp.115–30 and 279–80; Connell, op. cit. (note 10), pp.9–23, focusing primarily on documented activity; Markham Schulz 1978, op. cit. (note 1), esp. pp.68–77; Pope-Hennessy 1996, op. cit. (note 1), pp.223–25 and 277; see also R.J. Goy: ‘To the glory of God: building the church of S. Maria della Carità, 1441–1454’, Architectural History 37 (1994), pp.1–23. For the Justice on the Porta della Carta, see, for example, Wolters, op. cit. (note 1), fig.843.

12 See Paoletti, op. cit. (note 9), p.90, doc.9. For summaries of the history of the Scuola and its early buildings, see Markham Schulz 1978, op. cit. (note 1), p.16, note 44; G. Nepi Scirè: ‘La Scuola Vecchia della Misericordia’, Quaderni della Soprintendenza ai Beni Artistici e Storici di Venezia 7 (1978), pp.9–10; D. Howard: ‘La Scuola Grande della Misericordia di Venezia’, in G. Fabbri, ed., with the collaboration of P. Piffaretti: La Scuola Grande della Misericordia di Venezia. Storia e progetto, Milan 1999, pp.13–70, esp. pp.18–20. For Scuole generally, see in particular B. Pullan: Rich and

Poor in Renaissance Venice: the social institutions of a Catholic State, Oxford 1971; Pignatti, op. cit. (note 6); and P. Fortini Brown: Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio, New Haven and London 1988.

13 R. Mackenney: Tradesmen and Traders: the world of the guilds in Venice and Europe, c.1250–c.1650, London 1987, p.51, data for 1446. In theory each Scuola Grande was limited to 550 members; for membership, see also Pullan, op. cit. (note 12), pp.87–91.

14 Paoletti, op. cit. (note 9), p.91, no.21.

15 Markham Schulz 1978, op. cit. (note 1), pp.12–13 and note 38; she equates sums deducted from Bartolomeo’s salary at the Ca’ d’Oro, where he was supposed to be working with his father, to about fifty-seven days of work, with an assistant; see Paoletti op. cit. (note 9), pp.20–21, for the documents, in which payments to Giovanni and Bartolomeo Bon included ‘Bartolomeo [. . .] che lavora ala misericordia’, for which he was paid eleven ducats, and ‘Bartolomeo [. . .] che lavora suso una sepoltura’, for which he received one ducat, taken by some to indicate that Bartolomeo was working on a tomb at the Misericordia.

16 See Markham Schulz 2005, op. cit. (note 1), where the London relief remains attributed to Giovanni and the figures of Hope and Charity to Bartolomeo. Markham Schulz originally questioned that the 1441 document referred to the west façade; see Markham Schulz 1978, op. cit. (note 1) p.16, and therefore considered it irrelevant for dating the

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13. Madonna della Misericordia.

Venetian(?), c.1450–1500.

Painted and gilded wood, 225 by 215 cm. (Convent of the Eremite, Venice; photograph P. Motture).

12. Figures of Hope and Charity, attributed to Bartolomeo Bon and workshop. c.1440–41.

Istrian stone with traces of polychromy, 145 and 143 cm. high. (Sam Fogg Ltd., London).

discussed briefly below. He also suggests that its iconography was perhaps derived from an image in the Mariegola, or book of statutes, of the Scuola of 1392, which shows the Virgin standing before a tree with the Christ Child placed in a radiance and suspended in front of her chest and with half figures of kings and prophets in the foliate border.18 This specific iconography may already have been used in an existing altarpiece, either in the church or in the Scuola Vecchia itself, but it seems more likely that it was an invention of Bartolomeo Bon for the image on the façade. By 1308 the altarpiece in the church was already described in the documents as a powerful image that inspired the devotion of the brethren.19 It was replaced in 1386 by another, and again in 1403, when the Virgin was described as covering the brothers with her mantle.

The ancient emblems of the Scuola were also to be preserved in the new high altar.20 It is, therefore, highly likely that the 1429 replacement pala, and any subsequent altarpieces, recalled or developed the existing iconography of their predecessors.

The tympanum may well have been intended to be read as a reinforcement of the sacred image on the altar, updated with the inclusion of the Tree of Jesse. In addition, carved roundels bearing the ‘SMV’ acronym of the Scuola (presumably the same as the emblems referred to in relation to the 1403 altarpiece) remain embedded in the brickwork of the empty

tympanum above the doorway to the Scuola Nuova (Fig.14).

Although they would have been hidden from view, these had presumably formed part of the original ensemble that was moved there from the Scuola Vecchia façade.

With regard to dating the Bon tympanum, a document recently discovered by Markham Schulz provides evidence for a slightly earlier date than has generally been accepted. This document refers to two inscriptions in ‘pietra viva’ (limestone) above the doorway of the main portal of the Scuola Vecchia.

One clearly relates to the previous tympanum:

tympanum. While acknowledging that new archival evidence confirms that it was the main façade that was repaired, she maintained her argument for the early dating.

17 Wolters, op. cit. (note 1), p.291, suggested that the panel copied the tympanum without relating it to the documented work of 1429. Markham Schulz 1978, op. cit. (note 1), p.20, note 58, formerly suggested that the gilded wood relief was probably by a German sculptor. No closely analogous piece has yet been found. It may have been produced by a north Italian sculptor influenced by artists from north of the Alps, or possibly by a north European, and could be later in date. For the restoration of the panel, see A. Ruggeri Augusti: ‘Dorsoduro’ (in ‘Restauri a Venezia 1967–1986’), Quaderni della Soprintendenza ai Beni Artistici di Venezia 14 (1986), p.81.

18 See Wolters, op. cit. (note 1), p.291, who suggests that this image, which is closer to the Byzantine precedents, may have formed part of the contract for the tympanum. For the image, see P. Molmenti: Storia di Venezia nella Vita Privata, Bergamo 1905, I, p.180; and C. Lena: ‘Le Madonne della Misericordia nella Plastica Medioevale Veneziana: censimento e analisi iconografica’, unpublished Tesi di Laura (Università Ca’ Foscari Venice, 2003–04); available online at www.tesionline.it, fig.26; see ibid. for the iconography of the Misericordia generally, and pp.53–58 for the V. & A. relief. The Virgin of the Misericordia was a common motif in Venice, where several tympana bear the image. The combination with the

Tree of Jesse is, however, unusual, and research on this subject is continuing.

19 Paoletti, op. cit. (note 9), p.90, no.9, 14th March 1310; and Archivio di Stato di Venezia (hereafter ASV), Scuola Grande della Misericordia, B.226, A, fol.1r, copy of a document dated 18th August 1308.

20 See Markham Schulz 2005, op. cit. (note 1), p.38, note 8, citing L. Sartor: ‘Scultura lignea veneziana del Quattrocento (1390–1500)’, Ph.D. diss. (Università degli Studi di Udine, 2000–01), p.108, note 238; the authors have not consulted this thesis directly. See also Markham Schulz 2005, op. cit. (note 1), pp.37–38 and note 15, quoting ASV, Scuola Grande della Misericordia, B.272, ref. B.58, dated 25th September 1744. See Mason, op. cit. (note 7), pp.33 and 91, for a documented panel

by Francesco da Santacroce of 1535. In 1543 the gilding was renewed on both the altarpiece in the Scuola and that in the church, which accords with the common practice of freshening the appearance of venerated images.

21 See Appendix. This inscription is not included in Markham Schulz 2005, op. cit. (note 1). It is summarised in ASV, Scuola Grande della Misericordia, B.272: ‘Inscrizione in Pietra Sopra la Porta Vecchia di Scola Nostra Ubi 1323: Settembrio fó fatto questo Lauorier et esser le pertinanze date a Scola N[ost]ra 2240 Di a ogn’uno che si spoglierá, e con disciplina Seguirá la Croce Amen’. The practice of flagellation carried out by the confraternity is implicit in the reference to undressing.

1323 in the month of September this work was made: these are the indulgences given to the Scuola of S. Maria de Valverde Mother of Mercy 2240 Days to each person who disrobes himself and with discipline follows the Cross, Amen.21 The other refers to a later replacement: In the name of the Eternal God Amen. 1441 in the month of September this work was made for the Glory of the Almighty God, and for his mother, Madonna, St Mary, Mother of Mercy and for our Protector, Apostle and Evangelist, St Mark, and to the honour and state of our most serene Prince, the Doge, and of his Magnificent Council and of the Guardian, and Company,

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and of all of the Brothers of this Scuola, and [each one] who follows the Cross will have 3066 days of indulgences.22 Dated shortly after the agreement to repair the façade, the inscription indicates that the new tympanum was already in place, and that the repair was perhaps related to the installation work.23 In 1440–41 Bartolomeo Bon was still engaged on the Porta della Carta, which had been commissioned in 1438.24 As he was not emancipated from his father, the commission would presumably have been given to Giovanni as head of the workshop, or to both of them. As appears to be the case in relation to several of their other commissions, however, the sculpture was probably designed by Bartolomeo. It was also potentially executed in part by him, but such a sculptural ensemble has to be viewed as a workshop production.

The inscription would presumably have been carved into the now empty scroll, held by two delicately carved angels, that remains beneath the site of the Bon Misericordia relief. We know that the Virgin of Mercy was a popular corporate emblem in Venice.25 The inscription of 1441, however, indicates the importance of the Virgin of Mercy in relation to the Venetian Republic and its holy protectors, as well as highlighting the increased power of the new image. This is evidenced by the granting of additional indulgences that would reduce the time spent in purgatory by the members of the confraternity before entering the kingdom of heaven. Were it not for the inscription, the dating of the tympanum to 1445–50 would be equally acceptable on stylistic grounds, and logical given the other evidence, particularly in light of a document dated 15th August 1451, which apparently refers to the placement of another tympanum over the entrance to the Corte Nuova, constructed behind the Scuola Vecchia.26 No image exists of the Bon tympanum as originally installed on the Scuola Vecchia façade, but the scars on the building (Fig.15) indicate that it consisted of a pointed tympanum flanked by two columns and surmounted by a third – a format similar to those found, for example, at the Madonna dell’Orto nearby and at the church of S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, both of which are associated with the Bon workshop.27 The tympanum would have been encompassed by an elaborate foliate moulding and, judging from the outline on the façade, it may have incorporated an additional central element, such as that on the portal of the church of S. Stefano or the Porta della Carta.28 This was possibly a protective canopy. The cursory representation in Jacopo de’ Barbari’s map of Venice, dated 1500, indicates the pointed arch of the tympanum, flanked by two columns and topped by a third (Fig.16). As seen in Grevembroch’s drawing of the tympanum on

the Scuola Nuova, it is likely that these were surmounted by the figures of Faith, Hope and Charity, placed in similar positions.

However, it is unclear exactly how the missing angels would have fitted – although they possibly flanked the Misericordia relief, as on the Scuola Nuova – or whether there were any additional elements that did not find their way onto the new building.29 While remaining a powerful sculpted image, during the course of its history the tympanum has suffered a number of losses and significant surface damage that can be linked to its dismantling and reassembly in different locations. The apex of the arch is missing, apparently cut off and discarded, together with the moulding, when it was inserted into the semicircular tympanum at the entrance to the Scuola Nuova in 1612.30 The Virgin had lost her metal crown before the sculpture came to London, as evidenced by the photograph showing the sculpture still in the abbey church that was published by Pietro Paoletti in 1893 (Fig.10).31 The relief as it stands now consists of six carved sections, which no longer fit neatly together.32 Areas of the stone have been cut away at both sides of the different sections, notably where the elements of the Tree of Jesse and of the brethren meet the figure of the Virgin. This intervention has resulted in the destruction of significant carved elements, such as leaves and branches of the fig tree, leaving behind a few small patches of original surface (Fig.19). Both the missing sections and original patches were hidden by cement and plaster make-up in the previous V. & A. installation, which has now been removed.

22 See Appendix. Also ASV, Scuola Grande della Misericordia, B.272: ‘1441.

Inscrizion sopra la Porta grande della Chiesa Scuola [amended in another hand] esser stata fata nel settembre di detto anno a Laude etc. [added in the same other hand] Che chi seguirà la Croce hauevà 3066 Di di Indulgenze’.

23 Originally suggested by Markham Schulz 1978, op. cit. (note 1), pp.16–17, but in relation to the earlier dating of the tympanum.

24 See, for example, Connell, op. cit. (note 10), pp.13–14; p.12 for payments in 1439 and 1440 in relation to the Corte Nuova of the Scuola Grande di S. Marco.

25 See, for example, S. Steer: ‘“Tota pulchra, et formosa es Maria et macula originalis non est in te”: The Congregation of Clergy at Santa Maria Formosa, Venice, and their Altar of the Immaculate Conception’, Artibus et historiae 53 (2006), pp.111–23, and 177, with a reference to the V. & A. relief. We are grateful to Debra Pincus for this reference.

26 See Paoletti, op. cit. (note 9), p.91, no.21, for the 1451 document; ibid., p.55, note 8, for the suggestion that the Corte Nuova tympanum came from the cloister. A ‘fegura de nostra dona la qual xe nel chiostro dela mixerichodia’ was referred to in a document dated

25th April 1436 (ibid., p.91, no.19), in front of which a candle was to be lit. The severely weathered remnants of a tympanum remain above the entrance from the cloister into the Scuola Vecchia, although it is unclear if this is the same image as that referred to in the document. E. Maclagan and M. Longhurst: Catalogue of Italian Sculpture, London 1932, p.100, apparently following L. Planiscig: Venezianische Bildhauer der Renaissance, Vienna 1921, pp.26–27, believed that the V. & A. tympanum had come from the Corte Nuova. See G. Lorenzetti: Venezia e il suo estuario, Venice 1926, p.393; Wolters, op. cit. (note 1), no.99, pp.197 and 290, and fig.273, for the suggestion that an earlier tympanum from the Scuola Vecchia façade was installed in 1451 and remains there today. This tympanum probably dates to around 1370, and cannot, therefore, be the tympanum referred to in the 1323 inscription. An inscription relating to the houses built for the poor brethren in the Corte Nuova was added later.

27 For the Madonna dell’Orto, see, for example, P. Hills: Venetian Colour. Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass, 1250–1550, New Haven and London 1999, fig.109.

28 For the Porta della Carta, see, for example, ibid., fig.105.

29 See above for the ‘SMV’ roundels that survive on the Scuola Nuova façade. There

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Due to the loss of stone, particularly at the contact points, it is difficult to determine the precise dimensions of the tympanum or the exact relationships between the different parts of the carving.33 In addition, evidence from the back of the Virgin (Fig.17) reveals three fixing systems that can with confidence be related to its three locations in Venice. Two regular holes were carved into the stone around the level of the figure’s hips, into which metal cramps (now lost) would have been embedded with lead.

These were probably used to tie the figure back to the Scuola Vecchia façade. Slightly lower down are the remains of two flat iron fixings embedded into the stone with lead,34 which were most likely used to fix the sculpture into the masonry of the Scuola Nuova. Finally, the protruding metal hooks found in the top half of the Virgin, which are still used today, probably formed part of the nineteenth-century system for securing the relief inside the church.35 By the nineteenth century a dark superficial layer (commonly found on exterior sculpture) would have formed, the result of dirt from the atmosphere and possibly the alteration of an oil coating. This oil or varnish layer would have been applied to the unpainted areas of stone in order to saturate and protect the surface and to bring out its colour. The different surface finishes would have deteriorated in different ways and at varying rates.

The exposed and oiled stone would have darkened quite quickly, as it was least protected from the atmosphere. The pigmented and gilded areas would have aged and suffered chemical alteration. The medium would have lost its binding qualities, resulting in darkening, crumbling and dispersal of the pigment or gold. Ultimately the stone beneath would have been exposed.

The freshly exposed areas are lighter as they have had less time to react with the atmosphere.

The overall surface of the sculpture has been highly abraded, leaving few traces of the original paint and gilding. This treatment, doubtless carried out to remove the dark layer, probably occurred when the sculpture was taken inside the church. Tool marks are visible throughout, as well as remnants of the dark layer in the recesses that could not be reached. The consequent loss of detail can perhaps account in part for the varying uncertainty as to whether parts of the sculpture were carved by Bartolomeo himself. For instance, the eyes of each of the figures are carefully defined, although the finely delineated pupil and iris of the Virgin differ from those of Hope and Charity, in which these details are more deeply carved. Despite the abrasion, traces of polychromy and gilding were found in many areas of the tympanum during the latest cleaning treatment, as well as remnants of patterns that had been etched into the stone by the varnishes appear to be three fifteenth-century figures inside the Scuola Nuova that have not yet been identified. The de’ Barbari map also indicates three figures on the roof of the hospital to the left of the Scuola on the other side of the canal. The church of the Madonna dell’Orto has a similar arrangement of figures, with St Christopher, often attributed to Bon, at the apex and the Virgin and Angel of the Annunciation in the flanking positions.

30 The rounded top was retained for the installation in the church, see Fig.10.

31 The Virgin’s head has been carved so as to support a separate metal crown. The figure is shown wearing apparently different crowns in Grevembroch’s drawing (see Fig.11) and an engraving in Paoletti, op. cit. (note 5), opposite p.19, that shows the tympanum as installed in the church. A similar engraving showing the relief ‘sulla Porta della Scuola della Misericordia’ appears in L. Cicognara: Storia della Scultura dal suo risorgimento in Italia fino al secolo di Canova, II, Prato 1824, pl.XXXIX. 32 The section at top left consists of two pieces joined together, possibly the result of a repair rather than having been separately carved.

33 For practical reasons the layout largely follows the previous installation, although

15. Scuola Vecchia and church of the Misericordia, Venice.

(Photograph P. Motture).

16. Detail showing the area of Cannaregio with the Scuola Vecchia della Misericordia in the bird’s-eye view of Venice, by Jacopo de’ Barbari. 1500. Woodcut, 134.5 by 281.8 cm. (British Museum, London).

and oils used for the gilding. This was particularly evident in areas that were less exposed to the atmosphere, such as the Virgin’s mantle. By piecing together this evidence, it is possible to reconstruct the paint scheme of the tympanum, revealing a rich palette of colours and patterns.

The background behind the Tree of Jesse was blue, made up, primarily, from azurite mixed with iron oxide, and applied over some adjustments have been made. The stone sections of the proper right side of the tree, for example, are narrower than the one on the left due to the loss of carving, but it has been installed so as to create a symmetrical arch. The gaps have now been filled with flat lime mortar, which has also been used to create a pointed apex to the arch indicative of its original form. We are grateful to Phil James for his assistance in devising the installation method.

34 These fixings appear to have been roughly cut, and the figure has been carved away on the sides from this point down (evidenced by the paler areas). Presumably these modifications were all made for the installation on the Scuola Nuova façade.

35 This type of fixing is more suitable for attaching the stone to the surface of an existing wall. Small circular fixing points located at the back of the angels were also revealed with the removal of mortar, and were evidently not used in the last installation. Their form differs from the original rectangular fixing points around the edge of the tympanum. Although it cannot be entirely ruled out, it seems unlikely that these drill holes were made at the Museum, and they probably date from the nineteenth-century installation inside the church. the burlington m a g a z i n e

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19. Right-hand section of the Tree of Jesse in Fig.9.

(Photograph V. Borges).

17. Back of the figure of the Virgin in Fig.9. (Photograph V. Borges).

18. Cross section of paint sample taken from the background of the Tree of Jesse in Fig.9, showing layers of lead white, azurite mixed with iron oxide and gilding.

(Photograph L. Burgio).

a white lead base layer (Fig.18). In addition, the localised use of lapis lazuli mixed with the previous pigments, was found in the areas surrounding the Virgin. The pigments could have been mixed in such a way as to achieve different tonalities depending on the area of the relief, but this is difficult to establish with certainty. This is similar to the treatment of the figures on the façade of St Mark’s basilica, which was apparently repainted in c.1493–94, and has been associated with techniques used in panel painting.36 The front surfaces of the branches and leaves of the tree were oil-gilded over a very thin layer of red lead or minium.37 There is evidence on their sides of a mixture of a green copper resinate with small amounts of the yellow pigment orpiment.38 It seems 36 See L. Lazzarini: ‘Nuovi studi tecnico-scientifici sui rilievi degli arconi della Basilica Marciana’, in O. Demus, ed.: Le Sculture Esterne di San Marco, Milan 1995, pp.228–34, esp. p.232; we are grateful to Paul Williamson for this reference.

37 For the use of minium, see, for example, ibid., p.32; and C. Cennini: The Craftsman’s Handbook, transl. D.V. Thompson, Jr, New York 1960, pp.24–25.

38 See Hills, op. cit. (note 27), pp.146–48, for the use of orpiment.

39 A similar use of copper resinate over metal leaf was found on the lining of the Virgin’s robe in an earlier Florentine picture of the Coronation of the Virgin of the 1340s to 1360s attributed to Nardo di Cione (active 1343; died 1365–66) in the V. & A. (inv. no.CAI 104); see www.vam.ac.uk/res_cons/conservation/journal/issue_24/coronation/index.html.

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likely that this mixture would have been carried over the gilding onto the front of the trees to create a vibrant green, with the gilding shining through the oil-based glaze.39 What appear to be random traces of gilding in some areas of the blue background, together with the remnants of leaf shapes etched into the stone, suggest that gilded leaves had been painted onto the flat background surface to create a sense of depth to the tree. There are traces of a single white paint layer over the blue in some areas of the outer edge. By the time the ensemble was moved in the early seventeenth century, it would already have been dirty and discoloured because the copper resinate and the azurite would have reacted with the atmosphere and deteriorated. In addition, the gilding and polychromy would have been damaged during the removal. It is possible, therefore, that the white layer found over the blue background was added at that time to disguise the areas of damage and to create overall unity.40 The traces of blue background finished neatly along the outer moulding of the arch where the sculpture would have originally been gilded. The prophets retain little evidence of their original paint, although fragments of pigment were found on the scrolls: white for the background and black for the lettering. There was also evidence of lost gilding on the edges of the garments. As the cleaning progressed, it was possible to make out the names of some of the prophets from the painted pigment, together with incised lines created by the pigment etching into the surface.41 From top to bottom on the proper left side are Solomon, Abraham and Aaron. On the proper right side are David, Jeremiah and a third figure that could not be identified.

40

It was ironic that the tympanum was removed when the Scuola Vecchia was taken over by the Silk Guild, as one would imagine that the extravagant decoration of the Virgin’s dress (were it still visible) would have been particularly significant (see discussion below).

41 The names were distinguished by Víctor Borges, using raking and ultraviolet light, and magnification in some instances.

42 See L. Monnas: Merchants, Princes and Painters. Silk Fabrics in Italian and Northern Paintings 1300–1550, New Haven and London 2008, pp.187–88, and figs.209a–b and 210.

43 See, for example, Crivelli’s Virgin and Child of c.1480 in the V. & A. (inv. no.492–1882) and the Madonna della Rondine of 1491–92 in the National Gallery, London (inv. no.NG 724 1–2); ibid., figs.184 and 183, respectively.

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20. Pattern constructed from traces of remaining fragments, pieced together from different areas of the inside of the Virgin’s cloak in Fig.9.

(Photograph V. Borges).

21. Detail of the Virgin’s head in Fig.9. (Photograph V. Borges).

Lines etched onto the edges and cuffs of the garments probably indicate where there had originally been gilding.

Remains of bole and gilding can still be seen on the crowns of kings Solomon and David and on the wings of the angels. The members of the guild, seen sheltering under the Virgin’s cloak, were probably not painted, as only a line of gilding was found along the edges of the garments. The angels holding the Virgin’s mantle appear to have been similarly treated, but with gilded wings and possibly black hair, indicated by small traces of pigment. No evidence of paint was found on any of the flesh areas.

Not surprisingly, the figures of the Virgin and Child were far more spectacularly decorated than the rest of the relief. Traces of gilding were found in Christ’s hair and the cross of his halo.

The Virgin’s cloak and hood had gilded lines along the edges, neckline and cuffs, and apparently random squiggles around the cuffs perhaps represent the pseudo-Kufic script or similar motifs that often decorated such trimmings of the Virgin’s robes. There are also traces of etched patterns showing leaves and stylised flowers or pomegranates on both the outside and inside of her mantle (Fig.20). Some of the leaf pattern on the side of Mary’s hood is still clearly visible (Fig.21) because the areas formerly covered with the gilding have not suffered the same darkening as the adjacent areas of exposed stone.

This sumptuous decoration was clearly designed to imitate the rich textiles produced in the period, specifically Venetian silk, apparently of the type worn by Doge Leonardo Loredan in Giovanni Bellini’s portrait of c.1501–04 (Fig.22) and in a similar sample of cloth in the V. & A.42 Here the white silk damask, brocaded with silver and gold thread, reflects the white and gold

that was traditionally worn by rulers at significant events.

Although the Virgin is more usually shown wearing a blue mantle, she is often depicted in more elaborate dress, notably in the work of Carlo Crivelli.43 The Virgin and her son are similarly draped in shimmering white robes, decorated with a delicate pattern of birds and stylised flowers in an earlier painting of the Coronation of the Virgin by Jacopo di Cione and Niccolò di Tommaso(?) dated c.1370–71 (National Gallery, London).44 The powerful figure of the Madonna della Misericordia must have presented a stunning image in her brocaded white and gold damask standing before the brilliant gold-green leaves of the Tree of Jesse. Adding to the richness is the decorated lining of the cloak that encompasses the brethren.45 This gilded figure was intended to portray extraordinary opulence, appropriate to the Virgin’s elevated status.

As the Venetian guild system prevented members subcontracting to those in other guilds, the painting and gilding would have been commissioned directly by the Scuola and carried out in situ after the installation of the sculpture.46 Despite competition from marble imported from Carrara, Istrian limestone continued to be prized for its whiteness and would have contrasted beautifully with the applied decoration.47 The enhancement of a stone’s natural colour by the application of oil and varnish was a known practice; Marin Contarini, for instance, employed a painter to finish the red stonework (Verona marble) dentil courses on the façade of the Ca’ d’Oro in this manner ‘so that they appear red’.48 The combination of bare stone with partial painting and gilding, often set against a deep blue background, was also typically found in Venice, both for interior and

44 See also ibid., figs.1 and 84. In Giovanni Bellini’s Coronation of the Virgin of c.1471–74 in the Museo Civico, Pesaro, the figure of Christ is dressed in similar fabric; see Hills, op. cit. (note 27), fig.12.

45 This would have been an extraordinary garment, as the brocaded damask is not double-sided, and it would therefore have required two layers of the expensive material, sewn together with a interlayer. We are grateful to Clare Browne at the V. & A. for her advice on the textiles.

46 Connell, op. cit. (note 10), p.223; for guild regulations see also Mackenney, op. cit. (note 13); see also Hills, op. cit. (note 27), pp.69–71, for painters at work on the Ca’ d’Oro. Painting in situ would have been common practice for most architectural sculpture. We cannot be certain that the decoration was applied immediately after the

tympanum was erected, although it seems most likely.

47 Connell, op. cit. (note 10), p.89, highlights that the best Istrian stone possessed all the qualities required of a building stone: strength, fine grain, a good colour and resistance to the weather. It was praised by V. Scamozzi: Dell’Idea della architetturea universale, Venice 1615, part II, p.204; and Sansovino, op. cit. (note 8), p.383.

Compare Hills, op. cit. (note 27), p.71, for the competition from Carrara marble and the desire of Marin Contarini to improve the colour of the Istrian stone at the Ca’ d’Oro by having it painted white.

48 Hills, op. cit. (note 27), p.71, quoting R.J. Goy: The House of Gold: Building a Palace in Renaissance Venice, Cambridge 1992, p.287, which includes useful discussions on the Bon and stonmasons’ practices. the burlington m a g a z i n e

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Appendix52 1. Document related to the inscriptions over the doorway to the Scuola Vecchia. (ASV, Scuola Grande della Misericordia, B.226, A, fol.13r).53 Copia [In Margin:] 1323 Settembre Inscrizion intagiata in Pietra uiua sopra la Porta uecchia della Scola de Madonna Santa Maria de Valuerde Madre de Misericordia 1323 del Mese di Settembrio fò fatto questo Lauorier Queste sono le pertenanze dade alla Scola de Santa Maria de Valuerde Ma[d]re de Misericordia 2240 Di á ciaschedun, che se despogerá, et con desciplina seguirá la Croce Amen.

Inscrizion Intagiada sopra la Porta Granda de detta Scola in Piera uiua Al Nome de Dio Eterno Amen 1441 del Mese de Settembrio fò fatto questo lauorier A Laude dell’Onipotente Dio, et de la só Madre Madonna Santa Maria Madre de Misericordia, et del Prottetor Nostro Apostolo, e Vangelista Messr San Marco, et á honor, e stado del nostro Serenissimo Prencipe Messr ló Dose, e del suo Mag[nifi]co Conseggio, e de Messr Lo Vardian, e Compagni, et de tutti i Fradelli della detta Scola, et che seguirá la Croce haverá 3066 – Di de Indulgenzia –

22. Doge Leonardo Loredan, by Giovanni Bellini. c.1501–04.

Panel, 61.6 by 45.4 cm.

(National Gallery, London).

2. Document of 18th January 1612 [1613] regarding the removal of the tympanum to the Scuola Nuova. (ASV, Scuola Grande della Misericordia, Notatorio, B.168 (1593–1613), fol.467v).54

sculpture.49

exterior The colourful nature of the cityscape is evident from contemporary paintings, such as Gentile Bellini’s famous Procession in Piazza San Marco of 1496 (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice), which includes an oblique view of the Porta della Carta, with the main figures and decorative details of the pale Rovigno stone shown as richly gilded, with a blue background.50 The shadows of the original decorative scheme, revealed through the cleaning and close examination of the V. & A. Madonna della Misericordia, demonstrate that it was designed to proclaim the status of the Scuola to all who entered or passed the meeting house of the confraternity. While we cannot be certain of its original form in detail, it must have incorporated a carved framework similar to those seen on the entrances to rival Scuole and to numerous churches in the city, including others designed by the Bon workshop. The colour scheme fitted with both traditional and contemporary Venetian taste for bare white stone enhanced with areas picked out in gold or paint, as well as for the combination of dark blue backgrounds with gilded highlights that was also a common feature of mid-fifteenth-century altarpiece frames.51 The iconography mimicked, at least to some extent, the altarpieces in the adjacent church and possibly also in the Scuola Vecchia itself. It reinforced the significance of the image and the spiritual benefits of membership of the confraternity – the tympanum signalled the Scuola’s identity in the public arena, and would have formed an impressive backdrop to the regular processions, led by the bearer of the crucifix, that emanated from the portal beneath.

49 The much earlier sculpture on the portal of St Mark’s, for instance, was similarly treated, as revealed by the removal of the dark surface layer, although it was more extensively polychromed; see Lazzarini, op. cit. (note 36), esp. pp.230–34. Interior sculptures were also often partially gilded onto the bare stone, including the reliefs of the Frari choir screen, often attributed to Bartolomeo Bon and completed by Pietro Lombardo in c.1475; for an image, see G. Romanelli, ed.: Venice Art and Architecture, Cologne 1997, p.147; and the later figures from the tomb of Doge Marino Grimani in S. Giuseppe di Castello by Girolamo Campagna, on which drapery patterns are picked out in gilding; see W. Timofiewitsch: Girolamo Campagna. Studien zur venezianischen Plastik um das Jahr 1600, Munich 1972, pp.268–73, fig.82.

50 See Hills, op. cit. (note 27), pp.83–86 and 173, and figs.36 and 200; and Connell,

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Il spectabil sig[no]r Guardian Grande, hà ordinatto @ me Canc[elie]ro, che registrar debba l’Instro[mento] ordine delli Ecc[ellentissi]mi S[igno]ri Cappi dell’Ecelso Cons[igli]o di X v[i]Z: Gl’ Ecc[ellentissi]mi S[igno]ri Cappi dell Ex[cellentissim]o Cons[igli]o di X infrascritti, udito il spettabil D[omi]no Sabieno Velutello G[uardian] G[rande], della V[enera]nda Scolla della misericordia, dimandante riuocatione, della suspenssione fatta fare, da sue sig[no]rie ecc[ellentissi]me, ad’Inst[anz]a del fedel Lippama Borttolamio Lippamano, sotto li i6 Instante, dell ellevatione, che fà fare esso G[uardian] G[rande] della figura della Beatt[issi]ma Vergine, che si ritroua sopra la scola vechia, con tutti li suoi fornimenti p[er] riponerla nella scolla noua p[er] esser al p[rese]nte, detta scolla uechia ridotta In magazeno da Biave et altre merci, da una, et dall’altra udito il sud[ett]o fidel Bortolamio Lipp[oma]no, dicente le cose dimandate non douer esser fatte, et esso G[uadian] G[rande] douer esser licentiato p[er] diuersse sue ragioni dette et Allegatto: S[ue] S[igno]rie Ecc[ellentissi]me il tutto ben Inteso et consideratto, hanno riuocatta la sudetta suspenssione, concedendo che essa Imagine, sia riposta nella scolla Noua, In luoco sicuro et opportuno, di doue però non possa esser mossa, ó posta in opera, se non conforme, a quello, che sarà deliberatto nella Banca et Zontha, con l’Interuento del Coll[egi]o delli deputatti sopra la fabrica di detta scola noua guista le parti, et ordini di essa ordinando, che cossi sia notatto. Datj Die 18 Gianuarij 1612 [m.v.]

Subscriptj D. andrea minota) D. franc[esc]o Correr) Capi dell’ Ex[cellentissim]o. Cons[igli]o di X D. franc[esc]o.Diedo) Ex[cellentissi]mi Cons[ellier]ij X:m [decem] secret.s Petrus Donduinus 1612 [1613] marginalia Ter[minanzio]ne delli Cappi dell’ ecc[ellentissi]mo cons[igli]o di X, udito di una parte il spe[ttabile] Sabieno Velutello G[uardian] G[rande] dimandante la reuocatione della suspensione ch[e] la s[antissi]ma Madre di gratia non sia leuata de s[opr]a la Porta di scuola vecchia et dall’[?] Ser Barto[lomi]o Lipomano ch[e] sua madre di gratia non sia Mostra[?] Reuocaro [?] la detta suspension et concedemo ch[e] essa immagine sia leuata et reporte in scuola Nova, et ut è contra[?].

op. cit. (note 10), p.13, for the Porta della Carta contract terms and use of Rovigno stone.

51 See Hills, op. cit. (note 27), p.69, for Contarini’s taste for such combinations of colours; and p.58 for the use of deep blue, including the frames of polyptychs of the 1440s and 1450s by the Vivarini workshop and others.

52 We are especially grateful to Victoria Avery and Emma Jones for checking and correcting the transcriptions and translations of these documents.

53 The 1441 inscription is reproduced in Markham Schulz 2005, op. cit. (note 1), note 18. Lucia, Gaetano and Annamaria Burgio kindly assisted with the translation.

54 This document is briefly summarised by Mason, op. cit. (note 7), p.92. We are grateful to Flora Dennis for assistance with this document.

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‘Love, Sympathy and Tenderness’: Bertram Mackennal’s monument to Lord and Lady Curzon

by MARK STOCKER

THE LATE VICTORIAN and Edwardian era marked an Indian summer for ambitious church monuments of the recumbent effigy format. Examples include Edward Onslow Ford’s memorial to Percy Bysshe Shelley (1893; University College, Oxford), Alfred Gilbert’s tomb to Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence (1893–1928; St George’s Chapel, Windsor), and their slightly later, lesser-known counterpart by Bertram Mackennal commemorating George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (1859–1925), and his first wife, Mary Victoria (née Leiter), in All Saints’ Church, Kedleston, Derbyshire (1907–13; Fig.23).

The Curzon monument is remarkable for three main reasons.

One of Mackennal’s most elaborate and emotionally affecting works, it compares in its significance with his seminal Symbolist sculpture Circe (1893; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne).1 Secondly, as a double effigy, the Curzon monument is an extreme rarity. Few such works had been erected during the previous century, and in subsequent years the format all but disappeared from Britain and further afield.2 Finally, the Curzon monument is remarkably well documented. George Curzon scrupulously preserved his personal papers, including those appertaining to the monument. Seventy-two letters from Mackennal to Curzon, together with items from Curzon’s lawyers, R.S. Taylor, Son & Humbert, and the architectural sculptors Farmer & Brindley, comprise the monument archive housed at Kedleston Hall. The destruction of Mackennal’s papers unfortunately means that we are largely denied Curzon’s version of events apart from a few drafts and comments appended to incoming letters. Yet the archive enables us to reconstruct the monument’s progress; it documents the relationship between a leading sculptor and a famous patron and it elucidates the otherwise abstruse iconography of this work.

The monument originated within the lifetimes of George and Mary Curzon. Curzon had been appointed Viceroy of India in 1899. In September 1904, during a period of leave in England, shortly after suffering a miscarriage and just before her intended return to India, Mary Curzon fell gravely ill with peritonitis, phlebitis and pneumonia. Torn between his two loves, work and wife, Curzon only left for India when she was out of danger.

When Mary’s death had seemed imminent, George asked her:

23. Monument to Mary Victoria and George Nathaniel Curzon, by Bertram Mackennal. 1907–13. Seravezza marble on black marble plinth, c.200 by 160 by 130 cm. (All Saints’ Church, Kedleston, Derbyshire).

whether in another world, if there was one, she would wait for me till I could come. Yes, she said, I will wait. When I said that we had loved each other long and been all in all to each other, she asked that that might be inscribed on her tomb. She asked that we might be buried side by side with a marble effigy of each of us looking towards each other, so that we might one day be reunited.3

Within two years, Curzon was in a position to fulfil this poignant promise. In 1905 he had resigned as Viceroy and the couple returned to England. Mary died in London in his arms on 18th July 1906 aged thirty-six. Hopes for her permanent recovery had been high and the enthusiasm that greeted her brief return to India in 1905 caused Mary to tell her mother, Mary Leiter: ‘People treat me as though I were a miracle returned from the dead, and the affection is affecting. No one has ever had such a welcome to India’.4 The Curzons were so moved by the reception that they resolved to erect, at their own expense on the Calcutta Maidan, a marble reproduction of the fountain in Great Court, Trinity College, Cambridge. Although Curzon continued with this project after Mary’s death, he eventually abandoned it because, he claimed:

I am grateful to the Curzon Archive, Kedleston Hall, and to the National Trust for giving me permission to make relevant quotations. R.A. Bickerton, Deborah Edwards, Phillip Lindley and Philip Ward-Jackson also kindly assisted me with this article.

1 See D. Getsy: ‘“Her Invitation and her Contempt”: Bertram Mackennal and the Sculptural Femme Fatale in the 1890s’, in D. Edwards, ed.: Bertram Mackennal,

Sydney 2007, pp.97–104.

2 See, however, E. Hicks: ‘The End of an Era: The Tomb of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra 1910–27’, in ibid., pp.190–93.

3 Quoted in D. Gilmour: Curzon, London 1994, p.292.

4 Ibid., p.319. the burlington m a g a z i n e

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24. Curzon Memorial Chapel, 1907–13. All Saints’ Church, Kedleston, Derbyshire.

(Photograph courtesy of the Churches Conservation Trust).

25. Wrought-iron grille in the Curzon Memorial Chapel, by Barkentin & Krall.

Curzon’s career was then at a low ebb. His resignation as Viceroy in August 1905 followed a bitter power struggle with Lord Kitchener, the British military commander-in-chief in India, and he found himself politically isolated once home. Now he was widowed. Curzon sublimated his grief by pouring his energies into other duties, notably his chancellorship of Oxford University. Equally important, but far more personal, was his commission for a memorial chapel at All Saints that would house the monument to himself and Mary and thereby fulfil his promise.

The north wall of the nave was dismantled to accommodate the chapel. Built in Hollington stone in a late Decorated Gothic style, it is usually ascribed to George Frederick Bodley. However, his death in October 1907, within months of the commission, suggests it should be reattributed to his partner, Cecil Hare (1875–1933).7 Curzon, who regarded himself as an architect manqué, also contributed to the design. In his privately printed

monograph, Kedleston Church: An Account, Historical, Descriptive and Archaeological (1922), he stated: ‘the work was carried on, and the entire interior decoration executed, under the direct orders of Lord Curzon’.8 The chapel was a highly personal and eclectic Gesamtkunstwerk, which included stained-glass windows by F.C. Eden depicting figures of the nine Marys of the Christian Church and St George, dedicatory wall panels to the couple in Derbyshire alabaster, designed by Curzon himself, and a green aventurine quartz floor sourced from the Russian Urals and laid by Farmer & Brindley (Fig.24). The marble altar has a frontal of antique Genoese velvet and is furnished with a silver-gilt processional crucifix and candlesticks and a silver Mexican lectern, and is flanked by a pair of Spanish sixteenth-century carved panels. The elaborate wrought-iron grille, separating the chapel from the nave, was executed after Curzon’s designs by P. Krall of the firm of Barkentin & Krall (Fig.25). Curzon was not exaggerating when he claimed that the memorial chapel project was ‘the subject of anxious care’. The Irish nationalist and popular writer Shane Leslie provided a memorably lush description: ‘It was though a Gothic chantrey had been made to enclose an Arabian Night. [. . .] In the quiet hills of Derbyshire, the Viceroy built his Taj Mahal to the memory of a passion and a dereliction no less deathless than that of Shah Jehan’.9 There is no indication as to why the Australian Mackennal was commissioned for the main monument, although by 1907 he was arguably not only Britain’s, but the Empire’s leading sculptor (Fig.26). The Earth and the elements was purchased that year by the Chantrey Bequest, as was his Diana wounded in 1908 (both Tate, London). Part Mannerist goddess, part Edwardian pin-up adjusting her stocking, the Diana powerfully appealed to the highly sexed Curzon, who attempted to acquire it in vain.10 Mackennal wrote to him:

5 Ibid., pp.319–20. For Curzon’s implementation of the partition of Bengal and the ensuing political crisis, see S. Bandyopadhyay: From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India, Hyderabad 2004, pp.248–62.

6 Quoted in Gilmour, op. cit. (note 3), p.359.

7 Hare is not mentioned in Curzon’s privately printed monograph, Kedleston Church: An Account, Historical, Descriptive and Archaeological by the Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, K.G., Chiswick 1922. Mackennal mentions meeting Hare in a letter to Curzon, Kedleston Hall Archives (cited hereafter as KHA), Church Chapel Sarcophagus

Monument Sir Bertram Mackennal, R4–35/8, 17th October 1907.

8 Curzon, op. cit. (note 7), p.26. For a detailed description of the furnishings of the memorial chapel, see pp.82–88.

9 S. Leslie: Studies in Sublime Failure, London 1932, p.222.

10 See esp. Gilmour, op. cit. (note 3), p.96. For Diana wounded, see N. Hutchinson: ‘“Here am I!” Sexual Imagery and its Role in the Sculpture of Bertram Mackennal’, in Edwards, op. cit. (note 1), pp.115–18.

11 KHA, R4–35/14, Mackennal to Curzon, 5th May 1908.

the violent outbreak of sedition in Bengal in 1908–9, accompanied by a good deal of rancorous abuse against myself, led me to fear that any monument erected by me in Calcutta would be liable to desecration at the hands of Bengali agitators. Such a fate for the memorial of my darling I could not contemplate.5 Mary Curzon’s death deeply grieved the hard-bitten ex-Viceroy.

Curzon wrote to his mother-in-law: There has gone from me the truest, most devoted, most unselfish, most beautiful and brilliant wife that a man ever had, and I am left with three little motherless children and a broken life. Nothing, however, can take from me the memory of eleven happy and long years, and somewhere her spirit is watching over me and doing what good she can.6

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It is a very great pleasure to know how much you admired my statue, and I would have liked you to possess it as a statue in a home becomes more intimate than in a Public Gallery [. . .] I have been thinking over your Lordships suggestion as to an altered replica of Diana. I am afraid I cannot make alterations without doing harm. All I could do is to make another figure of a similar type but not the same pose. Which I would gladly do.11 While their relationship appeared cordial, professional pride is evident in Mackennal’s letter.

Curzon first visited Mackennal in his studio in August 1907 when he explained his – and Mary’s – vision of their monument. Mackennal aimed to design ‘something which I hope may have some of your ideas embodied with my own. Roughly I have two designs indicated and I am now busy on a third which is to me the one I love and I am greatly excited about it’.12 In October Curzon sent Mackennal a postcard of a tomb featuring prominent ‘guardian figures’. Mackennal objected that ‘they are only humans in their pose and treatment. Take away the wings and there is nothing to suggest a soul. However I shall try my greatest to secure in my idea your thoughts and my own, and I feel I can give you a pure and beautiful work’.13 This already accords with the eventual monument, where two wingless life-sized angels play a major role in the composition (Figs.27 and 28).

When Hare showed him the chapel plans, Mackennal complained to Curzon: ‘I thought the chapel was intended as the casket to hold the jewel, but now we have to make the jewel fit the casket’. He calculated: I have about five feet for my base of sarcophagus. This will leave about three feet at least either side and more between the columns. So now I shall design on these lines. I tried as you suggested a combination of my two ideas, and the spreading corners came beautifully but of course we cannot have that now, as the ground space is so limited. No architect dreams of consulting a sculptor as to what space is required. If they did they would not cramp us so. They also forget that the greatest architects were mostly all sculptors. [. . .] I am not a big man and Your Lordship is. Yet cramping myself yet reclining I occupy two feet 2 inches of space. And Mrs [Agnes] Mackennal who is slight two feet so this makes us four feet two inches with our shoulders touching which is impossible as there must be some space in between the figures. As I am starved as to the sarcophagus, I am determined not to let anything interfere with the beauty of the lines of the figures on the tomb. These must be grand simple and beautiful.14 In February 1908 Curzon and Mackennal viewed Henry VII’s tomb in Westminster Abbey which, with its gisants of the king and Elizabeth of York and elaborate grille, provided a historical precedent for the new monument, even if it was stylistically very different. Curzon probably desired a more

12

KHA, R4–35/5, 25th September 1907.

KHA, R4–35/7, 12th October 1907. The identity of the tomb is uncertain, but one possibility is that by G.F. Watts to the 8th Marquess of Lothian at St Andrew’s Church, Blickling (c.1871–74).

14 KHA, R4–35/8, 17th October 1907. Mackennal was correct; because of the confined space, it is difficult to photograph the long side of the monument closest to the wall.

15 KHA, R4–35/12, 21st February 1908.

13

26. Bertram Mackennal in his studio, working on a model for a monument to Gainsborough, with the bronze Circe behind. Photograph, c.1910. (La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne).

historicist scheme than that envisaged by Mackennal, who told him that ‘if we both look at this work together in sympathy it must bring our ideas closer in touch’. Mackennal’s creative passion emerges: ‘I want & mean to make this work beautiful and pure – and I intend to accept no idea as final that does not give satisfaction to us both’.15 In August 1908 an elaborate nine-clause agreement between Curzon and Mackennal was signed, a document unique in the history of British sculpture. Curzon initiated the move; however friendly his relations with Mackennal seemed, it reflected a deeper ‘assumption that all contractors were his enemies’, according to his biographer Lord Ronaldshay. This involved deducting ‘the amount which he regarded as constituting the excess over a reasonable profit’. Curzon felt ‘an intense dislike of being done’, which ‘led him to drive hard bargains and made him a man with whom to do business was seldom easy and sometimes far from pleasant’.16

16 The Rt. Hon. Earl of Ronaldshay: The Life of Lord Curzon, Being the Authorized Biography of George Nathaniel Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, K.G., London 1928, III, pp.82–83. Ronaldshay (p.83), describes another agreement, made with A.S.G. Butler when Kedleston Hall was modernised c.1924 as having been ‘. . . drawn up much in the form of a Convention between the Governments of two Powers and with all the care that, as Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon would have devoted to the drafting of such a document. Even the quality of the meals to which the architect would be entitled in the owner’s absence was exactly stipulated’.

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27. Detail of Fig.23.

28. Detail of Fig.23.

The agreement specified the format, with ‘full life size recumbent figures of the late Lady Curzon and Lord Curzon. [. . .] The said recumbent figure of Lord Curzon is to be so executed as to be detachable from the main work in order that it may be placed in position after the death of Lord Curzon’. The description corresponds closely to the finished monument: ‘two figures bending over supporting Heavenly Crown also two large panels on the sides and enriched with figures at the four corners and at the end of the sarcophagus shall comprise the Arms of Lord Curzon’. All the ‘said figures and work’ would be designed ‘to the reasonable satisfaction of Lord Curzon’. Following the submission of a satisfactory sketch model, the finished work would be carved in ‘Serravezza and Verde Ancio [sic] or some other marble to be selected by Lord Curzon’. It was to be completed in four years

by August 1912. Mackennal was to be paid £5,000 in five instalments, the first for work already undertaken, the second on completion of a satisfactory plaster model, two further annual instalments while work progressed, and a final payment made on completion and erection. Copyright was vested in Curzon, and Mackennal undertook not to reproduce ‘any of the main features or conceptions of the work’.17 Ernest Humbert, Curzon’s solicitor, warned him that ‘in my experience Artists and Sculptors are generally difficult to deal with in matters of business’. He advocated a stricter regime of payment by results and was surely thinking of Alfred Gilbert’s inability to complete the Boer War Memorial for Leicester when he cited ‘a recent case where a sculptor received considerable sums on account and practically never touched the work at all’.18 Mackennal, however, was a

sharp but scrupulous businessman, the temperamental opposite of his feckless friend Gilbert, so Humbert need not have worried.

By October 1908 Mackennal specified the proposed dimensions, which he said ‘are as near as I could give but I don’t expect much variation from them’. He thanked Curzon for ‘considering [him] in the matter’ of the proposed statue of the former Viceroy to be erected on the Calcutta Maidan, although several weeks later Hamo Thornycroft was confirmed as its sculptor.19 In November Mackennal visited Kedleston to try out his design for size in the chapel. The disconsolate sculptor reported how ‘[t]he memorial to fit in with the measurements suggested during my visit [. . .] must be very different to my previous conception in design and size’. He therefore proposed a simpler design costing only £3,000, in which the two figures at the head would be replaced by a ‘sculptured panel’.20 Curzon at once encouraged Mackennal to reconsider his previous design and several days later, Mackennal could report:

17

London 2000, pp.71–72.

20 KHA, R4–35/29, N.D. [November 1908].

21 KHA, R4–35/30, 16th November 1908.

22 KHA, R4–35/33, 26th November 1908.

23 KHA, R4–35/36, 24th March 1909.

24 KHA, R4–35/38, 17th May 1909.

25 KHA, R4–35/39, 19th May 1909.

KHA, R4–35/17, agreement signed by Mackennal, 20th August 1908.

KHA, R4–35/20, Humbert to Curzon, 9th June 1908. Gilbert’s exposure in the press occurred in May; see R. Dorment: Alfred Gilbert, New Haven 1985, esp. pp.261–63.

19 KHA, R4–35/26, Mackennal to Curzon, 30th October 1908. For Thornycroft’s statue of Curzon, see E. Manning: Marble & Bronze: The Art and Life of Hamo Thornycroft, London 1982, pp.151–52 and 200; and M.A. Steggles: Statues of the Raj, 18

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I have measured up to find the smallest dimensions that I can carry out my original design within. I have drawn it out (the ground plan) to scale on the architects plan of the chapel and seeing it thus it looks in good proportion and quite feasible [. . .] I am of opinion that the rough frame work we looked at in the chapel being so square and awkward deceived me and gave me an impression of size which the actual work would not do [. . .] I will do all in my power to realize your wishes and my conception. [. . .] I much regret you have had this worry when I well know that you have so much to attend to.21

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These problems, together with Curzon’s imminent departure for South Africa, led to a temporary suspension of the agreement.

On Curzon’s return, he would examine the ‘rough model full size on the spot [. . .] this model I will prepare during your absence’.22 By late February 1909 the model was completed and evidently satisfied Curzon, subject to certain alterations.

Mackennal wished to ‘get the mouldings much more delicate [. . .] I feel now exactly what I want to do’.23 This feeling did not last. Mackennal’s letter to Curzon of 17th May declares: ‘Your remarks during your last visit to my Studio make it impossible that I should continue the work of the memorial for Kedleston. I enclose a cheque for £1000 – the amount advanced by you and am returning the photograph . . .’.24 Curzon’s daily prayer to avoid being rude or unkind to anyone had, as usual, failed him.

Two days later, an evidently placated Mackennal told Curzon: ‘Your letter has made me realise what we owe to one another’.

His outburst had been caused by ‘feelings and uneasiness that had been growing upon me for some time’. He believed that Curzon had ‘not confidence in me and that I shall never satisfy you [. . .] I always thought about your ideas and not my own.

This is absolute paralysis for an artist. Instead of my usual confidence I became fearful and timid’. Curzon had this effect on many others beside Mackennal. Clearly he had caused offence by questioning Mackennal’s costs: ‘I felt I would rather give up entirely as it seemed to me you were not pleased and I could not go on under such conditions. I was getting very despondent so at a great sacrifice I wrote the letter of withdrawal’. Mackennal argued for his artistic autonomy: I don’t see what you have to fear in the execution [. . .] but if I am to take up the work again it must be left more to my conception of what is right. I would naturally ask your help in all matters concerning the work. But I want to feel more free to design and work. This will be all to the benefit of the memorial [. . .] you will get the best I have in me to give.25 He reassured Curzon: ‘I now see that my fears were due to mostly imagination. I care for nothing else in the World but my work. And I am very happy to think I have your full confidence[.] It will enable me to go much higher in the quality of my work . . .’.26 Subsequent letters from Mackennal concern the aventurine quartz floor of the chapel: ‘My own feeling is towards something quiet say grey green unpolished but fine rubbed [. . .] I fear it in the mass [i.e. en masse], and polished’.27 In September 1909 Curzon sent Mackennal a brace of grouse, a kindness repeated on three further occasions. In December Mackennal told him ‘I would like you to see the recumbent figure sometime next week, as I wish to put it in plaster before Christmas’.28 Several weeks later, he sent Curzon photographs of the group ‘which I think express the feeling in the heads’. Early in 1910 Mackennal

26

KHA, R4–35/40, 21st May 1909.

KHA, R4–35/43, 29th June 1909. In Curzon, op. cit. (note 7), p.83, Curzon stated: ‘The work of cutting and laying the floor was carried out by Messrs Farmer and Brindley of London, and occupied close upon three years’.

28 KHA, R4–35/48, 9th December 1909.

29 KHA, R4–35/51, N.D. [February or March 1910].

30 See M. Stocker: ‘Athletes, Monarchs and Seahorses: Mackennal’s Coin, Stamp and 27

was recuperating in Ramsgate: ‘I found I had been doing too much [. . .] Your work is going on well in fact I am carrying on the group of two [angel] figures and yours at the same time which means a big task’.29 The year 1910 proved exceptionally busy; with commissions to design the coinage, official medal and postage stamp portraits of George V, Mackennal’s correspondence became more sporadic.30 In August he wrote: ‘I am afraid I shall have no holiday this year [. . .] I would like you to see the group of two figures’. Four months later Mackennal expressed delight at Curzon’s pleasure with the work and requested that he should return to the studio to be modelled from life: ‘I do not find the photographs help me very much as there is no profile’.31 In May 1911 Bertram Mackennal and Agnes, his wife, were invited to watch the Coronation procession from Curzon’s residence in Carlton House Terrace. Gratefully accepting, Mackennal reported that ‘I have the work almost complete with the exception of the boys [sic] in the niches. It has taken a long time fitting it together’. He was now awaiting suitable marble and complained: ‘There has not been a good piece out this year’.32 In July Mackennal secured a block of Seravezza marble for the two angel figures: ‘The sarcophagus being built I have every hope of securing all the marble I want very soon now’.

Once the relief panels were in place, he wished to discuss the final aspect of the design, the statuettes for the niches. When Curzon had approved of his progress, Mackennal would ‘get the two recumbent figures started in the marble, so that I can try my hardest to get the work through when you wish’.33 Correspondence until early 1912 deals principally with the panels, coat of arms and inscriptions. Obtaining appropriate marble for the pedestal and panels took far longer than anticipated.

In January Mackennal assured Curzon: I am doing my utmost to hurry matters. But I am still waiting for marble for the Angel [bas relief] group. Mr Cripps the largest marble man has been to Italy and he tells me he has a block coming next week [. . .] You know I have so much love for this work that I am doing my best to push matters. But this delay in the marble and the alterations have thrown matters back that it is not possible for me to finish by August.34 Mackennal complained: ‘I am so disappointed as I thought I had got all my marble blocks. This last one turning out bad is a great misfortune. Of course I can get other kinds of marble but it is cold and blue in tone’.35 By June Mackennal had secured fresh Seravezza marble, which was being sawn down to the required size. He added: ‘The Angel Group is now being pointed in the marble and I am getting on with the new panels’.36 Mackennal experienced a further misfortune, which his correspondence leaves tantalisingly unexplained. The contents of his studio had been vandalised: ‘I suspect a certain fiend as the brute who broke up my work – but I can prove nothing

Medal Designs’, in Edwards, op. cit. (note 1), pp.154–63.

31 KHA, R4–35/57, Mackennal to Curzon, 15th December 1910.

32 KHA, R4–35/58, 1st June 1911.

33 KHA, R4–35/59, 19th July 1911.

34 KHA, R4–35/73, 10th January 1912.

35 KHA, R4–35/74, N.D. [Early 1912].

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29. Purity and Beauty, detail of Fig.23.

30. Contemplation, detail of Fig.23.

31. Government, detail of Fig.23.

and can do nothing. It was the most awful sight I have ever seen and one I will never forget’.37 A later letter alludes to this ‘accidental loss through the smashing up of my work’.38 By February 1913, however, he could assure Curzon that ‘The marble is splendid all good in colour and no unpleasant markings’.39 Mackennal then requested permission to exhibit the four corner statuette figures at the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy (Figs.29–31), assuring Curzon that he would not reveal their destination. By the time the exhibition had closed, ‘the monument would be all fixed [. . .] and it would be a simple matter to place the four figures in the niches. I am rather pleased with the figures’.40 Curzon assented, and a grateful Mackennal reassured him that they would be described as ‘figures designed for a monument’.41 In the course of 1913 the problem arose as to whether the marble base of the tomb would be green, white or black, with Curzon changing his mind and finally opting for black. In September, when the monument was at last installed, Mackennal assured Curzon: ‘The whole chapel will look very beautiful when you get the floor in. It is a great joy to me that all is in place at last. I was very anxious up to the moment of placing the two figures together. When that was done without any accident I knew that all was well . . .’.42 ‘It has been a long work to both of us but Thank Heaven it has proved worth the time’.43 Curzon’s appreciation was, however, soon tempered by concern about a blemish in the marble. Mackennal asserted: ‘it is impossible to lessen. No large piece of marble especially of this fine quality and colour is without these defects. In fact I think the marble is splendid and no piece I could find would be without some fault’.44

Curzon requested a comprehensive description of the work, what a later age would call an artist’s statement. Mackennal warned him that ‘It is very difficult for an Artist to explain much for it is nearly all feeling and almost impossible to express.

However I shall do my best and send you some idea of what I meant and how the work was conceived’.45 Far from providing a ‘lame description’ Mackennal sensitively and lucidly explained the ‘great motives’ of the design as ‘Love, Sympathy, and Tenderness’ (see Appendix below). Curzon carefully transcribed this description and, adding some literary polish, published it ten years later in Kedleston Church. He was obviously impressed with Mackennal’s ability to reproduce ‘as far as might be possible in marble, the pathos of his wife’s premature death, and to make the sculpture emblematic of the deepest emotion. Most ably did the artist second these ideas, which are embodied in every feature and detail of his creation’.46 Yet Mackennal’s relationship with his patron ended unhappily because of another intemperate letter from Curzon:

37

Academy Exhibitors 1905–1970: A Dictionary of Artists and their Work in the Summer Exhibitions of the Royal Academy of Arts, Calne 1987, IV, p.88.

42 KHA, R4–35/86, 20th September 1913.

43 KHA, R4–35/98, 29th September 1913.

44 KHA, R4–35/89a, 1st October 1913.

45 KHA, R4–35/90, 3rd October 1913.

Ibid.

KHA, R4–35/88, 10th October 1913.

39 KHA, R4–35/80, 10th February 1913.

40 KHA, R4–35/81, 31st March 1913.

41 KHA, R4–35/82, 2nd April 1913. The exhibits, nos.1839, 1846, 1956 and 1964, were each described as ‘Statuette for niche, marble’. See A. Jarman, ed.: Royal 38

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I will make no comment on its contents but I was amazed.

Now that all my work is complete I would like to say, that sometime back when you told me I was receiving a very high price for the work. You gave me the impression that you felt I had overcharged you. In fact you informed me you had expert advice on the matter. I was as you know very annoyed at the time; for I knew then that instead of a high price the amount was far too low and I felt your remark very much.

However now that the work is finished, I should like to say that had I charged £7000 for the work it would not have been a penny too much. In fact I would not undertake it

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again under £10,000. In my estimate of £7000 – I am not including my accidental loss through the smashing up of my work. I am writing this without the slightest wish to be remunerated for any loss – and would not under any condition accept any further money from you. I said I would do the work for £5000 – and that finishes the matter between us. But after the remark you made as to the high price I received I feel that I could do no other than give you the real fact.47 A rueful Curzon scrawled on it: ‘Oh Lord! I wrote a very courteous reply regretting what I had said & saying I should always remember his work with gratitude & admiration’.

This he did. Curzon went on to call the monument ‘one of the supreme artistic achievements of the twentieth century.

The style is Renaissance, Lord Curzon being averse from a Gothic design, but the conception, treatment, and execution, are original and modern’.48 At first sight, however, the monument appears anything other than ‘modern’. A commission in 1907, for a double recumbent effigy resting on a sarcophagus with Renaissance ornament, would seem to reinforce Curzon’s enduring image as an anachronistic Tory grandee. The monument’s absence of obvious modernity – let alone modernism – further contributed to its long neglect when Victorian and Edwardian sculpture was unfashionable. Nikolaus Pevsner, in The Buildings of England: Derbyshire, did not help matters in his well-intended but inaccurate reference to ‘an elegant white woman, life-size, standing at the head end’.49 There are, of course, two such figures, the traditionally sexless – if here very feminised – angels. The genius loci of All Saints, with its rich array of monuments to earlier members of the Curzon family, necessarily dictated an element of conservatism. An important precedent – perhaps even historical competitor – is the midfifteenth-century alabaster tomb-chest of Sir John Curzon and his wife, Joan.50 In George Curzon’s self-penned epitaph, ‘he sought to serve his country and add honour to an ancient name’. His monument consciously aims at the latter – and attains it.

Its traditionalism notwithstanding, the Curzon monument is subtly and distinctively of its time. Mackennal was a remarkably versatile sculptor, constantly and intelligently aware of changing stylistic trends – from Jules Dalou to Art Deco – over a fifty-year career.51 By 1907 he had deliberately discarded the Symbolism of Circe and was working instead in a more subdued mode.

Three years later, he would effectively become the sculptor laureate to George V, and much of his subsequent work, while highly competent, is duller. Yet the Curzon monument is anything but dull. Indeed, it could be seen to represent the high point of Mackennal’s memorial sculpture. It is poised between his memorial to Annie Springthorpe (1897–1901; Boroondara Cemetery, Kew, Melbourne) and his double recumbent effigy of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra (1911–27; St George’s Chapel, Windsor). The Springthorpe memorial is admirably moving, especially in its swooping angel of divine

46

Curzon, op. cit. (note 7), p.84.

KHA, R4–35/88, Mackennal to Curzon, 10th October 1913.

48 Curzon, op. cit. (note 7), p.84.

49 N. Pevsner and E. Williamson: The Buildings of England: Derbyshire, Harmondsworth 1978, p.254.

50 Curzon, op. cit. (note 7), pp.64–67.

47

32. Detail of side relief of Fig.23.

33. Detail of side relief of Fig.23.

love, but the composition lacks the fluent, effortless integration of sarcophagus and figures of the Curzon monument. Its theatrical qualities and religiosity, as well as the handling of the marble, relate it closely to the late nineteenth-century sculptures of Staglieno Cemetery in Genoa.52 In contrast, the royal monument bears the hallmark of Mackennal’s later œuvre, dominated by official commissions. Carefully conceived and executed, it lacks the animation of the two earlier works, perhaps intentionally so.

A further distinctive contemporary quality of the Curzon monument is its deliberate playing down of traditional Christian iconographic content. ‘Sympathy, Love, and Tenderness’ are evoked more powerfully than any overtly Christian,

51 See esp. D. Edwards: ‘Adaptability and Versatility: Bertram Mackennal – an Overview’, in Edwards, op. cit. (note 1), pp.15–81.

52 See J. Peers: ‘“The Genius of Mr Bertram Mackennal”: The “Springthorpe Memorial” 1897–1901’, in Edwards, op. cit. (note 1), pp.180–85. For Staglieno Cemetery, see S. Berresford: Italian Memorial Sculpture: A Legacy of Love 1820–1940, London 2006, pp.62–65.

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spiritual virtues; the Curzons’ love for one another and ‘the ancient name’ are of equal or greater significance. Mary Curzon claimed that ‘Religion has not been very much to me’, while George espoused ‘a vague deism, a belief in a Creator whose secrets had not been revealed to mankind through the prophets of any religion’.53 In this context, his question to Mary should be repeated: ‘whether in another world, if there was one, she would wait for me till I could come’. The monument holds out that possibility, and in later years Curzon appeared convinced of their eventual heavenly reunion, ‘with a faith curiously simple for a man so intellectually mature’, as Nigel Nicolson observed.54 The two crowning angels are wingless. In their appearance, they are like charming domesticated siblings of Julia Margaret Cameron’s contrived photographs of Madonnas and Mary Magdalenes. At the same time, the gleaming Seravezza marble enhances their spiritual, otherworldly beauty, and its whiteness testifies to the purity and fidelity of the Curzons’ love. It would be tempting, but probably misleading, to apply a postcolonial trope and see them and the recumbent figures as signifiers of the hubristic white supremacy of the British Raj. What seems more certain is that Mackennal’s monument represents a deliberate antidote to the polychromatic sculptural pyrotechnics of Gilbert in the 1890s.

Mackennal realised the pitfalls of making husband and wife romantically face one another, as Mary had envisaged. Instead, with subtle grace, he made the gazes of their angels cross: the right-hand angel tenderly contemplates George to its left, while its partner looks down towards Mary on the right. One crown is somehow to be bestowed on both figures. While this crown may be celestial, it is adorned with a popinjay, the heraldic bird of the Curzon armorial bearings. And while both sets of bas-reliefs on the long sides of the tomb include winged angels bearing inscriptions, these are more about love than faith (Figs.32 and 33). One quotation comes from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’, whose romantic sensuality appealed strongly to Curzon.55 Curzon admired the recumbent figures for the ‘extraordinary fidelity of their likenesses’. Mackennal was, of course, dependent on photographs of Mary, borrowed from Curzon; it seems likely that Curzon acceded to Mackennal’s request to model his portrait from life. Mary Curzon, celebrated for her cloth-of-gold and peacock feather dress, designed by Worth, and worn at the Coronation Durbar ball in Delhi in 1903, is clad in simple drapery, a compromise between contemporary dress and classicised idealisation, which emphasises her elegant figure. Her husband, devoted to ceremonial in death as in life, wears the robes of the Grand Master of the Star of India, which Mackennal borrowed from Ede & Ravenscroft; at the time of Mary’s death, Curzon had not yet been raised to the English peerage. In contrast to the angels, the recumbent figures appear appropriately linear and symmetrical until one glimpses that their hands touch and are about to be clasped (Fig.34).56 While this may appear a sentimental, indeed clichéd, variant on earlier double effigies, it

53

Gilmour, op. cit. (note 3), p.597.

N. Nicolson: Mary Curzon, London 1977, p.179.

55 It reads: ‘THERE WILL I ASK OF CHRIST THE LORD/ THUS MUCH FOR HIM AND ME:/ ONLY TO LIVE AS ONCE ON EARTH/ WITH LOVE, ONLY TO BE/ AS THEN WHILE, FOR EVER NOW/ TOGETHER, I AND HE’.

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34. Detail of Fig.23.

becomes powerfully poignant when we note that Curzon instructed Mackennal to make the hands interlock at the final installation. He would then indeed meet Mary, if not in heaven, then in a remarkable work of sculpture.

Appendix Letter from Bertram Mackennal to George Curzon, 3rd October 1913.

(KHA, R4–35/90).

38 Marlborough Hill, London NW 3 October 1913 Dear Lord Curzon, My one wish and idea, when I began the Memorial Tomb of Lady Curzon, was to erect a work which should have Love, Sympathy, and Tenderness as the great motives of the design. And this I have endeavoured to embody in each separate part.

To me the work represents a great love, and it was with this idea that the two angel figures were conceived, holding between them the veiled Heavenly Crown. In their pose and action, I tried to express Purity, Tenderness, everlasting protection, and above all a Heavenly Hush and Peace. This latter feeling I hope is expressed in the attitude of the outstretched hand. The front Panel with the two winged Kneeling Angels, supporting the Crown of Love and in their attitudes I wished to express adoration of Love. The back panel with the seated figures, either side of an altar, which bears an ever burning lamp, symbolic of Life Everlasting. The figure with the outstretched hand holds a cup containing the water of life, and the other figure with the recording scroll embodies the idea that Earthly Life is finished and nothing more can be written, and so she folds the scroll. In the four statuettes in the niches at the corners, my inspiration for the two on the front of the Tomb where the panel of the Kneeling angels, came from what I had heard of Lady Curzon. The one with the book was conceived with the idea that it was to show sympathy and care of the native children of India. This figure has the head covered and holds the book outturned imparting knowledge. The other statuette on this side of the memorial bears in hands a bunch of lilies symbolic of Purity and Beauty. On the side of the Memorial where the figure of Lord Curzon rests are two further statuettes. The one with the hand raised to the cheek in a thinking attitude is contemplation and the other denotes government holding a scroll of the laws. I hope that you will be able to understand this rather lame description but it is very difficult for an artist to express himself but in his own peculiar medium.

Yours sincerely, B. Mackennal

56

In ‘An Arundel Tomb’, Philip Larkin wrote of a similar sensation when he saw the recumbent effigy commemorating Richard Fitzalan, 3rd Earl of Arundel, and his wife, Eleanor of Lancaster (1375; Chichester Cathedral): ‘One sees, with a sharp tender shock/ His hand withdrawn, holding her hand’; see P. Larkin: Collected Poems, London 1988, p.110.

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George Frampton, the Art Workers’ Guild and ‘the enemy alien in our midst’

by NANCY IRESON

Peter Pan situated in Kensington Gardens (Fig.36), one of the best-known statues in London, is by the sculptor George Frampton, an artist whose work also registers with visitors to the British Museum, as they pass through its north entrance under the watchful eye of his stone lions. But less well loved (if more prominently placed) is another monument by this Royal Academician: an awkward composition at the foot of St Martin’s Lane (Fig.35). The work is a memorial to Nurse Edith Cavell, the victim of a German firing squad in Belgium on 12th October 1915, who defied German military law as she assisted allied soldiers in their escape to the Netherlands in the First World War. Appropriately, for this memorial, Frampton created a structure as sombre as its subject-matter. But there are aesthetic conflicts within the work and these, as much as any sense of solemnity, hinder its appreciation.

The forms of the monument are simple but their interrelation is confused. The angular face of the figure turns its smooth marble cheek in a non-confrontational movement, yet the body beneath adopts a rigid, frontal stance. And although the bonnet of her uniform provides a delicate frame for her finely carved features, the dress Cavell wears, with its flared sleeves and floorlength layers, casts her as a figure of judgment rather than one of forgiveness. In this context, it is unsurprising to find that the inscription beneath, which records the accepted version of her last words – ‘Patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone’ – was a later addition, added at the request of the general public.1 It is at odds with the visual message of the piece and its original written components: the date and place of death ‘Brussels, Dawn, October 12th 1915’ on the pedestal; the words ‘Humanity, Fortitude, Devotion, Sacrifice’ singly inscribed on the individual sides of the granite between the two distinct sections of the memorial; and the legend ‘For King and Country’ directly above the figure.

The monument incorporates further contradictions. On the reverse, below the words ‘Faithful Unto Death’, Frampton represented an angry lion, a stylised animal poised to pounce, as a metaphor for British outrage at the atrocity (Fig.37).2 The carved beast stands atop an expanse of unworked stone, quite unlike the tidy plinth that faces towards Trafalgar Square and in contrast to the contained statue of the nurse. The relative proportions of the component parts are no less disconcerting. In 1928, although not averse to the monument in its entirety, the sculptor Edward Gleichen wrote of how the immense granite monolith behind the figure spreads ‘somewhat incomprehensibly’ into a cross-like shape above. This is topped with a mother THE LIVELY

All documents quoted in this article, unless otherwise noted, are from the archive of the Art Workers’ Guild (hereafter cited as AWG), kept at the home of the Guild at 6 Queen’s Square, London. This article developed from my research for the project ‘Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851–1951’.

I would like to thank the project staff for their support. I am also grateful to Monica Grose-Hodge, Emma Berry and Elspeth Dennison for allowing access to the archive of the Art Workers Guild, and to Eric Turner at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, for his advice on Krall.

35. Monument to Edith Cavell, by George Frampton. 1920. Granite and marble, approx. 760 cm. high. (St Martin’s Place, London).

and child group that represents humanity protecting the ‘small states’; but, as he observed justly, its placement is ‘so high up it is difficult to see properly’.3 The work – begun in 1915 and unveiled in 1920 – attracted varied responses in its day. From cultural quarters the memorial was criticised for its conservatism,4 but in the popular press and 1

N. Penny: ‘English Sculpture and the First World War’, Oxford Art Journal 4/2 (1981), p.37.

2 E. Gleichen: ‘Edith Cavell’, in London’s Open-Air Statuary, London 1928, pp.13–14.

3 Ibid.

4 These negative responses are explored in S. Malvern: ‘“For King and Country”: Frampton’s “Edith Cavell” and the writing of gender in memorials to the Great War’, in D. Getsy, ed.: Sculpture and the Pursuit of the Modern Ideal in Britain c.1880–1930, Aldershot 2004, pp.219–49. the burlington m a g a z i n e

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37. Detail of Monument to Edith Cavell, as shown in Fig.35.

from ‘official’ voices there was praise.5 Historical distance has brought acknowledgment of the advanced stylistic qualities of the piece. In 1981 Nicholas Penny remarked on the paradox of how this proto-modernist monument found Royal support,6 while Sue Malvern, in a more recent essay on the subject, looked at its ‘writing of gender’ in relation to the suffragette cause.7 This article, however, considers a different aspect of its reception; it suggests that the art-world’s disapproval of the memorial might have been as much a side effect of London art politics as it was a matter of aesthetic preferences. For Frampton, clearly, the monument was a highly personal undertaking. His words on his adoption of the commission were reported in the newspapers: ‘I will model a statue to the memory of this English heroine, and it shall be for me a labour of love [. . .] It will cost what the bronze and stone cost. I would not accept a penny for my work’.8 But unpublished documents reveal that as this patriotic memorial progressed, in a different context, Frampton attracted the censure of his contemporaries through his nationalistic opinions.

It was on contemplating the Cavell monument, and ‘asking each other why the statue to Nurse Cavell was so unworthy of both the artist and the subject’, that two of Frampton’s associates from the Art Workers’ Guild decided some years later that ‘noth-

ing good can come out of hate’.9 This strange comment appeared in some recollections of Frampton written by the architect Charles Robert Ashbee, in his unpublished memoir of the Masters of the Guild, in which he also recalled that the sculptor ‘nearly broke the Guild [. . .] during the unhappy war years 1916–17 when we were all on edge and ashamed of ourselves’.10 Ashbee declined to add details of the incident – he maintained that ‘some things are better forgotten’ – but his words refer to a controversial episode in the life of the artist, one that is detailed in the minutes of the meetings held by the Guild that year, but which is all but absent from the Art Workers’ Guild Annual Report for 1916.11 Frampton had played a significant role in many London art societies. He was a full member of the Royal Academy from 1902,12 had been heavily involved with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society from at least 1892 to 1907,13 and had helped to establish the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1904–05.14 He was one of the earliest members of the Arts Workers’ Guild and had served on its committee from 1893 to 1895.15 With the sculptor William Reynolds-Stephens and the architect Charles Annesley Voysey, he had arranged the first exhibition of the Guild in 1895; in 1902, he became its Master.16 Before and during his periods of office he was an occasional lecturer at their meetings17 and, on leaving the chair, he presented the Guild with a badge in silver, of his own design and creation, to be worn by future Masters in their official capacity at Guild meetings (Fig.38).18 An unpublished photograph, from 1907, shows the sculptor at the heart of its Entertainment Committee (Fig.40). Later still, in 1914, Frampton donated a bust of the

5 For instance, in reporting on the progress of the work in 1917, the Nursing Times suggested that the monument would be the ‘most beautiful in London’; ‘The Edith Cavell Memorial’, Nursing Times (28th July 1917), n.p.

6 Penny, op. cit. (note 1). The Queen, Princess Mary and Prince Albert visited the studio of the sculptor as work progressed; details are given in Anon: ‘The Nurse Cavell Memorial’, Westminster Gazette (6th December 1915).

7 Malvern, op. cit. (note 4).

8 ‘Memorial Funds Started’, Pall Mall Gazette (23rd October 1915).

9 Unpublished memoir by C.R. Ashbee: ‘The Masters of the Art Workers Guild’, bound 1941, pp.292–93.

10 Ibid.

11 The annual report declines to mention the names of those involved in the incident that is the subject of this article. Frampton’s resignation from the Guild – also

discussed – was reported as due to the ‘press of work and other calls upon [his] time’; Annual Report and Statement of Accounts of the Art Workers’ Guild for the Year 1916 (hereafter cited as ARAW, with appropriate year), London 1917, pp.9–10.

12 G. Popp and H. Valentine: Royal Academy of Arts, Directory of Membership, from its Foundation in 1768 to 1995 including Honorary Members, London 1996, p.44. Frampton had been an Associate of the Royal Academy from January 1894.

13 Four voting papers for election of members and of committee of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society at their annual meeting, 19th December 1893; London, Blythe House, Archive of Art and Design, AAD 1/554–1980 to AAD 1/555–1980, and Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society: List of Members 1907, AAD 1/566–1980.

14 Royal Society of British Sculptors: Minutes of Council Meetings ‘No.I’, entries from 5th January 1905; London, Archive of the Royal Society of British Sculptors.

36. Peter Pan, by George Frampton.

1912. Bronze.

(Kensington Gardens, London).

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painter and Past-Master William Strang to add to its collection of Past-Master portraits.19 It is clear, then, that Frampton was particularly important to the Guild and it was surely with some confidence that he raised a concern at the close of a committee meeting on 12th May 1916.20 The matter was one of nationality in a time of war. The sculptor spoke of a fellow Guild member, the Arts and Crafts metalworker Carl Krall, whom he dubbed ‘a hostile alien’.21 Krall had been a British national since 1905 – and a long-standing contributor to Guild life22 – but, for Frampton at least, his origins eclipsed such details. Undoubtedly, as he raised the issue, his implication was that the Guild should ask Krall to resign.

Although the works of his company are relatively well known (they include the dessert service, designed by William Burges, in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Fig.39), little personal information about Krall has come to light.

Of Czech origin, he was born in Heidelberg in 1844, and joined Barkentin’s silversmiths in Regent Street, London, in 1868.23 When Barkentin died in 1883, Krall took over the business. He was still in charge from 1903 to 1906, when the metalworker John Farleigh served as an apprentice at the business; but though Farleigh left a rare comment on the personality of his employer, his words fall short of flattery. He wrote that Krall ‘was limited as a designer and better described as an adaptor’ and that he was ‘an exceedingly difficult man to work for’. He continued in a similar vein: ‘the only praise I received from him was half a dozen grudging remarks in about six years. Naturally, I wanted to get away from Krall as soon as my five or six years had been completed’.24 If Farleigh’s negative sketch of Krall is reliable, given that Frampton seems to have been a jovial and well-liked character, perhaps the sculptor felt that personal popularity would add weight to his suggestion that the silversmith resign from the Art Workers’ Guild. In contrast to Krall’s grudging tutelage, in an open letter to The Times some years later, the sculptor Ernest Gillick recalled ‘the amazing practical help that he [Frampton] gave throughout his life to young sculptors’.25 But, for this moment at least, Frampton’s confidence was misplaced. At the same meeting on 12th May, the Master of the Guild, Harold Speed, questioned whether Guild rules would necessitate any action. Even from this early stage it seems that opinion was divided. Another sculptor-member of the Guild, Henry HopePinker, suggested that he and Frampton should go and see Krall, perhaps to discuss the matter with him, or to gain assurances of his allegiance. Dissatisfied with such an arrangement, Frampton suggested that Krall should be asked to attend the home of the Guild at 6 Queen’s Square, presumably for direct questioning. At this point the Honorary Treasurer, Francis Newbolt, diffused the situation. As one ‘averse to any kind of persecution’, he decided that he should send a letter to bring the matter to Krall’s attention.26

15

Exh. cat. Beauty’s Awakening: The Centenary Exhibition of the Art Workers’ Guild, Brighton (Royal Pavilion Museum) 1984, p.54.

16 The first exhibition of the Art Workers’ Guild opened on 6th December 1895; ARAW 1895, London 1896, p.7.

17 Frampton lectured on ‘Sculptor’s materials’ in 1891 (ARAW 1891, London 1892, p.7), ‘Coloured Sculpture’ in 1894 (ARAW 1894, London 1895, p.4) and ‘Low-relief in Sculpture’ in 1902 (ARAW 1902, London 1903, p.7).

18 ARAW 1902, London 1903, p.7.

19 ARAW 1914, London 1915, p.12.

20 Minutes of committee meeting of the Art Workers’ Guild, approved by Harold Speed, 12th May 1916.

21 Ibid.

38. Art Workers’ Guild medal, by George Frampton.

1901. (Present whereabouts unknown).

39. Dessert service, designed by William Burges and manufactured by Barkentin & Krall.

1880–81. Raised and cast silver with enamelled decoration and semi-precious stones, main stand 39.5 by 54 cm.

(Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

At a further committee meeting on 26th May 1916, letters to and from Krall were read aloud. Frampton produced a letter from Krall with reference to a visit from Hope-Pinker.

Although the content of this is not detailed in the minutes, and the letter itself is not among Frampton’s papers at the Archive of Art and Design, it was clearly controversial. The basket-maker Thomas Okey (another Past-Master of the Guild) suggested that Krall be asked not to attend meetings during the War; the motion was seconded by the painter George Clausen. But an amendment to Guild rules – which would have obliged Krall to resign – was rejected by one vote (five to six) and it was decided that no action be taken.27

22 For instance, Krall spoke at a discussion of ‘Die Sinking and Coining’ at the Art Workers’ Guild on 1st July 1887, and on the evening of 16th March 1906 he offered explanations of his work, including ‘Cold-Wrought Iron’ and ‘The Tempering of Steel’; ARAW 1887, London 1887, p.5; and ARAW 1906, London 1906, p.6.

23 H. Clifford: A Treasured Inheritance: 600 Years of Oxford College Silver, Oxford 2004, p.50.

24 J. Farleigh: The Creative Craftsman, London 1950, pp.197–99, cited in D. Meera: Victorian Memorial Brasses, London 1983, pp.77–78.

25 E. Gillick: ‘The Late Sir George Frampton’, The Times (28th May 1928), p.17.

26 Document cited at note 20 above.

27 Minutes of committee meeting of the Art Workers’ Guild, approved by Harold Speed, 26th May 1916.

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Despite these proceedings, however, it seems that Frampton was determined to gain satisfaction. At a further committee meeting on 6th July 1908, the sculptor brought some ‘police information’ to the attention of the members, some kind of accusation against Krall in relation to his nationality. When Speed remarked that the material was not evidence – and when later in the meeting Francis Newbolt pointed out that Krall had long been a naturalised British citizen – Frampton responded that ‘naturalisation to a German meant nothing’. Newbolt remarked that, if Krall did not wish to resign, ‘there was no way to get rid of him, that the best way would be to let him drop out at the end of the year, or [. . .] report him to the Guild under Rule XXXII’.28 Newbolt went on to suggest that a special meeting be held.

This would allow members to vote as to whether Krall should resign. Okey then read the Cohen declaration;29 he proposed that they ask Krall to sign it. But the minutes show that this was insufficient remedy for Frampton’s xenophobic suspicions.

‘Frampton was quite sure that Mr Krall would sign it or anything else, and he then proposed that Mr Krall be expelled by the Guild’. Yet he was thwarted once again. A draft letter to that effect, proposed by Frampton and seconded by Strang, was rejected by the committee. The matter was voted on three separate times and was lost, eventually, by one vote (six to seven).30 The matter might have ended there, but Krall’s opponents were undeterred. Again, as if to reinstate order, Newbolt pointed out that any Guild member could call a special meeting to ask a member to resign. Another member, the painter John Leighton, declared it best that the Guild, not the committee, should decide; another – the cabinet-maker C.C. Bessant – ‘spoke of some insidious ways of the Germans’. All decided that a special meeting was needed. One was called for 8.30 p.m. on 2nd August 1916.31 When the day arrived, prior to the Guild meeting, Frampton tried to persuade his fellow committee members to forward his proposal – that Krall resign – as a group decision. But the committee would not agree.32 At this point, failing to find the support of his peers, the sculptor decided that he would forward the notion alone. Speed warned him that to do so would be ‘out of order’; but Frampton declared he would take the risk.

The meeting that followed was a heated affair. After Speed had explained its purpose to the assembly, and other members had added their opening remarks, the sculptor took the floor.

Frampton spoke at length about letters of accusation he had seen at the (unspecified) police station; he read extracts from an anonymous letter with further accusations against Krall. After this, seconded by Bessant, he moved that they should ask the metalworker to resign. But there were voices of dissent. Okey spoke at length against the motion, as did Newbolt and Leighton. Leighton read a letter too, sent from France, from the sculptor Herbert William Ward. The painter John Cooke, the sculptor Gilbert Bayes and Ashbee then appear to have spoken in support of Krall; letters from the painters John Batten, Joseph Southall and the architect Charles Mileham were also read.

Finally, the painter Frank Salisbury, the paper-stainer Metford 28 Sadly, in Guild records, the content of ‘Rule 32’ is unclear; minutes of committee meeting of the Art Workers’ Guild, approved by Harold Speed, 6th July 1916.

29 The Cohen declaration, in this context, seems to relate to the ethics of the philosopher Hermann Cohen, although no text is provided in the minutes.

30 Minutes of committee meeting of the Art Workers’ Guild, approved by Harold Speed, 6th July 1916.

31 Ibid.

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40. George Frampton (centre) with members of the Entertainment Committee of the Art Workers’ Guild. 1907. Photograph. (Art Workers’ Guild, London).

Warner and the painter Walter Urwick, added their contributions to the debate.

After this, Speed put forward the resolution, for an immediate vote: ‘That Karl [sic] Krall being of enemy alien birth be asked to resign’. But with ten votes for, and seventeen against, the resolution was lost. Frampton notified the Guild of his resignation and left the hall immediately.33 At this dramatic turn of events, Speed forwarded the notion (seconded by Okey), that the Guild should reject the resignation. The assembled company agreed unanimously and, although Frampton confirmed his resignation in writing the following day (see Appendix 1 below), the committee took no immediate action, doubtless sure that they could restore amicable relations with the Past-Master.

However, when the Guild reconvened in the autumn, it emerged that its rules made rejection of the resignation impossible. At the next committee meeting on 9th October 1916, after Frampton’s letter of resignation was heard and after another member, the painter Alex Mavrogordato, had spoken of the prejudice that the sculptor had shown against Krall, it was decided that his resignation should be accepted ‘with very great regret’. The painter Herbert Hughes-Stanton protested at the proposed course of action – and the architect Charles Townsend suggested that the matter be postponed until the next meeting – but the motion held fast. This caused Hughes-Stanton to resign and leave the room. Clearly taken aback by yet another resignation, the committee decided that an explanation of the inflexible circumstances be sent to Frampton, to Krall and to ‘anyone who had or might resign before the next meeting’.34 Nothing more could be done and, although names are not listed, the minutes suggest that further members resigned over the issue before the next meeting took place.35 By 16th October, however, the Guild had apparently lost its resolve. Clausen asked if it would be possible to cancel the proceedings of the last meeting; the architect Walter Tapper agreed 32

They also suggested that Frampton modify the wording of his proposal; he accepted their changes; minutes of committee meeting of the Art Workers’ Guild, approved by Harold Speed, 2nd August 1916.

33 Ibid.

34 Minutes of committee meeting of the Art Workers’ Guild, approved by Harold Speed, 9th October 1916. The relevant section of the draft letter, attached to the minutes, reads as follows: ‘That in the opinion of this meeting any other action than

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and expressed the desire ‘that Sir George be shown that the Guild has a power to dismiss one of its members’. It was decided that the committee should ask Frampton to reconsider his letter, and Speed suggested that, since the meeting had been informal (although Guild gatherings were almost always informal), its events might be overlooked. Yet the motivations for the change of heart were not strictly ideological. Speed spoke of the future of the Guild, its ‘delicate’ financial situation and ‘the risk of further resignations in the case of a split’.36 Then he read a letter from Krall, prompted by an interview with Wilson, wherein the metalworker agreed to ‘waive his membership till happier times’ (see Appendix 2). Here, potentially, lay a solution to the problem.

Krall could be accepted back into the Guild in peacetime and, meanwhile, they could reinstate Frampton. Crucially, in view of its economic position, the Guild could not afford to stick to its principles. Newbolt reported that he had called a meeting of the Trustees and conveyed that the dissolution of the Guild would ‘involve a sale, at a loss, of all the Guild properties, and would absorb the £18,000 lent by members’.37 After much consideration, it was agreed that they should accept Krall’s offer, and that, carefully, Frampton should be persuaded back to the Guild. These actions taken, in a meeting of 3rd November, the issue was finally put to rest.38 The only official indication that any trouble had arisen appeared in the 1916 Guild Annual Report, printed the following year, which gave a rather vague summary of the episode: Early in the year, the Trustees of the Chest – Sir George Frampton, Mr J.D. Batten, and Mr W. Cave – who had held office since the foundation of the Trust, felt that they must resign, owing to press of work and other calls upon their time. [. . .] The question of the enemy alien in our midst was raised early in the year in Committee, discussed in the Guild, reconsidered in all its bearings by the Committee, and finally debated at a Special Meeting on Wednesday, August 2nd. The debate was not entirely satisfactory, for the voting was not representative of the Guild – thirty members only being at the meeting – and the result was that one of our most distinguished Past-Masters felt it his duty to resign. Later in the year, after the summer recess, the question, which had become more acute, was finally solved by the Member whose position had given rise to the discussion writing a letter which laid the matter to rest.

Following on this the Past-Master resumed his Membership.39 That Frampton’s anti-German feelings had run so deep in 1916 is perhaps unsurprising. These events at the Art Workers’ Guild were contemporary with his work on the Cavell memorial. If the words ‘For King and Country’ appear above the figure of Cavell, he also used them in his letter of resignation from the Guild (see Appendix 1). Perhaps Frampton – albeit in a less extreme way than the subject of his statue – felt a martyr to the patriotic cause. But if Cavell had felt no bitterness towards the enemy, clearly, the sculptor was less forgiving. In 1917 he went on to argue, in an open letter to The Times, that the commission and creation of national war memorials should await the return of all sculptors on active service ‘so that they may have the opportunity of increasing the wealth of that taken in accepting, with very great regret, the resignation of Sir George Frampton, would have been for the committee to act contrary to the rules of the Guild, and, in effect, to set itself above the law of the land’.

35 Unexplained resignations were discussed at the end of the meeting of the 16th October; minutes of committee meeting of the Art Workers’ Guild, approved by Harold Speed, 16th October 1916.

36 Ibid.

our national art’.40 Here, once more, Frampton seemed to allude to his concerns over Krall. On the subject of British soldier-sculptors, he wrote that ‘there is a grave danger that whilst these brave men are doing their duty in the fighting line [,] aliens – though naturalised – may be given a preference and allowed to suck the juice from the grape (which should be the birthright of our own flesh and blood), leaving but the dry husk to the men of our race, whose development we have watched with such pride and pleasure’. His lines seemed to suggest a rather personal involvement, one that echoes the controversy of the previous year. It was vital, he argued, that ‘all true patriots see to it and do not allow such a thing to occur again as did a short time ago, when a vice-provost of one of our great public schools recommended to the parents of a departed hero a firm of German origin to execute a tablet to be placed in the chapel of the school in memory of their son, an old boy, who fell fighting for the honour of England’.41 Although no mention is made of the specific situation or subject of the memorial, in many churches throughout Britain, Barkentin & Krall memorial plaques were a common feature. The letter could be further proof of Frampton’s resolve – even after the metalworker’s resignation from the Guild – that Krall, the ‘enemy alien’, was an undesirable.

Nevertheless, though many of Frampton’s fellow sculptors would surely have welcomed war memorial commissions, it is likely they would have preferred a competition free from xenophobic prejudice. If the Past-Master’s actions reveal a conservatism that was somewhat at odds with his open-minded approach to aesthetics, to their credit, the divisions caused by the ‘enemy alien’ question at the Art Workers’ Guild indicate that, for the most part, his peers were rather more cosmopolitan.

Appendix 1. Letter from George Frampton to the Master, Committee and Members of the Art Workers’ Guild, 3rd August 1916, from 90 Carlton Hill, St John’s Wood, London.

Gentlemen, It is with sincere regret that I have to confirm my resignation tendered last night and sever my connection with the A.W.G. It is not necessary for me to explain the reason, as it is well known to us all. I know full well that I shall be the principle sufferer by my action which is purely the outcome of strong patriotic motives. The loss of meeting many dear friends at future gatherings will be great; but I shall always get some little consolation from happy memories of the past. Before here saying good-bye to the brethren I should like to ask you to remove my portrait from the walls and erase my name from all printed matters relating to the Guild and from the panels in the Hall, as then-future members shall never know that I belonged to a society in which, even during war, so many of my fellows placed the interests of a member of enemy alien birth before those of our own countrymen, and more especially those brave and noble souls who are sacrificing their lives and everything for Right, King and Country/. With this, I am sending for the receipt for my loan of £200 to deal with in any way that will best benefit the Guild or the check – or both, and I wish you to kindly accept it on behalf of the Guild as a souvenir of my affection for its members, and pay the interest into the chest for the assistance of those who may not have been quite so fortunate as yours very sincerely, Geo. Frampton.

2. Letter from Carl Krall to Harold Speed, 16th October 1916, from Barkentin & Krall Ltd., 291 and 289 Regent Street, London.

Dear Master, I deeply feel the disappointment to be unable to attend the Guilds [sic] meetings especially on subjects which interest me very much that I should be glad if you would not send me any invitations or circulars and cease to consider me a member until happier times come once more. Yours faithfully, Carl Krall.

37

Ibid.

Minutes of committee meeting of the Art Workers’ Guild, approved by Harold Speed, 3rd November 1916.

39 ARAW 1916, London 1917, pp.9–10.

40 G. Frampton: Letter to the Editor, 16th July 1917, published as ‘War Memorials.

Work for our own Sculptors’, The Times (26th July 1917), p.9.

41 Ibid.

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‘The dead faun’, by Glyn Philpot

by MELISSA HAMNETT

IN 2008 THE Victoria and Albert Museum, London, acquired an intriguing small bronze mask by the British painter Glyn Philpot (1884–1937). Entitled The dead faun, the sculpture was cast c.19201 and shows the face of a young male, his head inclined slightly to the right with his eyes lightly closed and hair falling forwards (Fig.41). The model for the bronze was George Bridgman, essentially an affable drifter, who met Philpot before the First World War and whose physique and good looks represented an ideal for the artist, who depicted him in many of his most memorable figurative paintings.2 Painting portraits in a style similar to that of John Singer Sargent, Philpot made his name as a society portraitist in the early years of the twentieth century. One of the most financially successful portrait painters of his generation, he achieved early prominence in both Britain and America, and was associated with such Edwardian artists and aesthetes as Philip Connard, Eric Kennington and, a little later, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon.3 As a precocious establishment artist, he was elected to the Royal Academy in 1923, and in 1927 became a trustee of the Tate Gallery, kudos that brought to him some of his most influential patrons.4 Most notable among these patrons were Henry and Gwen Mond, whose family had been important and long-standing patrons of the arts. Ludwig Mond, Henry’s grandfather, was a German-born Jewish industrialist who accumulated a collection of old-master paintings which he bequeathed to the National Gallery, London, in 1924.5 Henry and Gwen, in collaboration with the architect Darcy Braddel, commissioned Philpot (and the sculptor Charles Sargeant Jagger), to execute a daring decorative mural scheme for their drawing room in Mulberry House, Smith Square, Westminster, in 1930.6 Arranged around Jagger’s Scandal fireplace relief (also acquired by the V. & A. in 2008; Fig.43),7 Philpot’s murals portrayed myths such as ‘Oedipus and the Sphinx’ and ‘Leda and the Swan’, startlingly painted on silver foil (Fig.44).8 This was deemed a highly contemporary technique, one commentator describing the murals as ‘glowing in unique tones of green and blue’.9 This novel approach represented a clear attempt by Philpot to bridge the classical tradition, which he admired, with prevailing new movements in art, giving him a sense of freedom and challenge. ‘The work leaves no doubt as to [Philpot’s] complete change in outlook and practice [. . .] as he applies himself to the pictorial interpretation of metaphysical problems in rhythmic arrangements of colour and form’.10

I am grateful to Norbert Jopek, Alicia Robinson, Marjorie Trusted and Paul Williamson for their help in the preparation of this article, and to Juliet Tuck, the daughter of Jack and Joanna Evers.

1 J. Delaney: Glyn Philpot: His Life and Art, Ashgate 1999, p.165. Although modelled in plaster (private collection, London) as early as 1912, The dead faun does not appear as a bronze until c.1920, when it was probably cast in a small edition, one of which is recorded as having been exhibited at the Grosvenor Galleries in 1923.

2 R. Gibson: exh. cat. Glyn Philpot: Edwardian Aesthete to Thirties Modernist, London (National Portrait Gallery) 1984, p.21. Bridgman would apparently vanish for long periods at a time before unexpectedly resurfacing. Apart from posing for

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41. The dead faun, by Glyn Philpot. c.1920. Cast bronze, 41.5 by 15 by 12.5 cm.

(Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

Indeed, the commission proved to be the culmination of a revolutionary change in his outlook and method.

As a prominent public figure, Philpot had long embodied deep personal contradictions. Tensions were evident between his highly respectable public life of strict Christian observance and academic painting on the one hand, and his homosexuality and desire for artistic experiment on the other. Weary of producing virtuoso portraits, he explained after the mural commission that ‘new modes of expression are continually necessary if the artist is

the 1912 plaster model of The dead faun, he appeared in Philpot’s red-chalk Male nude (1919), was the model for A street accident (1925; present whereabouts unknown), and appears as many of the figures in Philpot’s mural at St Stephen’s Hall, Westminster (1927).

3 Ibid., p.26.

4 Delaney, op. cit. (note 1), pp.46–48. Siegfried Sassoon, Oswald Mosley, Stanley Baldwin and Mrs Walter Brewster were among his most renowned sitters.

5 C. Saumarez Smith: Ludwig Mond’s Bequest: A Gift to the Nation, London 2006.

Mond’s gift is the single largest bequest to have been made to the National Gallery, including some of the most significant paintings by early Italian masters.

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43. Scandal, fireplace relief, by Charles Sargeant Jagger. 1930. Cast bronze, 161 by 149 cm. (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

to add to the sum of beauty in the world. In my own case this change has been towards a simplification of technique and a crystallisation of form’.11 The 1920s had seen these new modes of expression coming to fruition with Philpot increasingly conveying his ideas and vision through sculpture rather than painting. As one of Philpot’s most sensuous creations, the mask was described by Robin Gibson in his 1984 exhibition catalogue, in relation to Philpot’s systematic examination of the male body: ‘If there is any criticism to be made of The dead faun it is that it does not seem dead, but instead exudes a warmth and vitality in its modelling. In this it is closely allied to the heads of unidentified young men drawn and painted around this time, especially the well-known red chalk drawing [. . .] of the same model George Bridgman’.12 Fauns are often classified as spirits of untamed woodland, frequently portrayed as half-man/half-goat, and paralleled in

Greek mythology with Pan, the god of pasture. Pan personifies Lust in Renaissance allegory and was later known, of course, for his music, capable of arousing inspiration and sexual feeling.13 The faun’s overt sensuality, captured in a medium still largely new to Philpot, shows his modernist credentials; although the bronze clearly owes something to Rodin, it epitomises an angular Art Deco style and consciously resists any classical stylistic allusions.

This ability to combine established and modern references sets Philpot apart from most of his contemporaries in Britain as an artist at the crossroads of traditions, while the subject of the bronze provides a more intimate glimpse of the artist himself.

Although not overtly erotic, it is arguably rooted in Philpot’s own masked homosexuality and enduring fascination with models such as George Bridgman, who posed for him for more than twenty years.

Philpot’s persistent and explicit treatment of the male nude increasingly broke with convention to the extent that his reputation and income started to wane in the 1930s.14 This was exacerbated by trips to Berlin, which introduced him to the city’s homosexual subculture, precipitating an emotional crisis, and a

6 Henry Mond was heir to the ICI fortune and later became the 2nd Lord Melchett.

7 The V. & A. acquired the Scandal relief (inv. no.A.1–2008) in February 2008. The Museum already possessed the fire basket (inv. no.M.16–2005; acquired 2005), which was Jagger’s other important contribution to this scheme, enabling the two elements to be displayed together.

8 While these murals have been destroyed, examples of their design, now also in the V. & A.’s collection (inv. nos.E.251–E256–2008), were reproduced in THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 151 (2009), p.435.

9 J. Delaney, ed.: Gerald Heard’s Memoir of Glyn Philpot, London 2005, p.2. Gerald

Heard was a philosopher and mystic who spent some time with Philpot and is believed to have written this memoir in 1945.

10 P.G. Konody: ‘An Artist Turns Modernist’, Daily Mail (17th April 1931).

11 G. Philpot: ‘The Making of a Picture’, Apollo 17 (June 1933), pp.286–87.

12 Gibson, op. cit. (note 2), p.119.

13 J. Hall: Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, London 1979, pp.232–33.

14 A.C. Sewter: Glyn Philpot 1884–1937, London 1951, p.60. In 1932 Philpot submitted The great Pan to the Royal Academy, a painting which made explicit what had for so long been a coded homosexual language; the artist suffered the shame of rejection.

42. Jack Evers, by Joanna Evers. c.1930s. Watercolour, 72 by 54 cm. (Private collection).

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44. Mural scheme for Mulberry House, London, showing the position of Fig.43 (lower right), by Glyn Philpot. 1929–30. Pencil, watercolour and silver paint, each design 27 by 19.5 cm. (Victoria and Albert Museum, London).

move towards greater personal expression in his art. As a result, only a few long-standing patrons and friends remained faithful to him, including Jack and Joanna Evers, who met Philpot in the early 1920s through his long-standing companion, the painter Vivian Forbes (1891–1937).15 Forbes collaborated frequently with Philpot and for five years shared a flat with him at Lansdowne House on Lansdowne Road, Holland Park.16 Specifically constructed as living accommodation for artists, it had been built by Sir Edmund Davis for Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, and had numerous north-facing studios sought after for their light.

Jack and Joanna Evers also had a flat in the building. As an artist herself, Joanna Evers often painted with Philpot, notably

executing a portrait of her husband with The dead faun in the background (Fig.42).

Philpot produced only a small number of casts of The dead faun,17 and gave the version, now at the V. & A., to Jack and Joanna Evers in 1928 as a wedding present. It was displayed in their London home until they moved to Sussex in 1945, where it remained for a further fifty years.18 In 1996, a year after their parents’ deaths, their daughters sold it at Christie’s, London, where it was bought by a dealer before coming to the V. & A.; it is now fittingly displayed in dialogue with Jagger’s Scandal.19 Of the fourteen sculptures executed by Philpot, The dead faun was the only piece that sold well. In Robert Gibson’s words: ‘Philpot has created a timeless elegy to the passing of youth’.20

15 E. Cooper: The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West, London 1986, pp.184–86. The Melchett family were among the patrons who remained faithful to Philpot.

16 Delaney, op. cit. (note 1), pp.59–60 and 101–04. Vivian Forbes met Philpot in 1914 when they served together in the First World War and there is a plaque on the house they shared in Lansdowne Road between 1923 and 1928.

17 Gibson, op. cit. (note 2), no.120. Philpot gave one of the other existing casts to his niece, Gabrielle Cross, on her twenty-first birthday.

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My thanks to Juliet Tuck, the daughter of Jack and Joanna Evers, for the information she provided me on her mother’s and father’s friendship with Philpot and for the reproduction of her mother’s painting of her father.

19 For The dead faun, see sale, Christie’s, London, Modern British Pictures, 21st March 1996, sale no.5563, lot 42, sold to Strachan Fine Art from whom it was later bought by the V. & A. 20 Gibson, op. cit. (note 2), p.119.

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Books Believing and Seeing: The Art of Gothic Cathedrals. By Roland Recht. Translated

by Mary Whitthall. 392 pp. incl. 85 b. & w. ills. (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008), £23.50. ISBN 978–0–226–70606–1.

Reviewed by PAUL CROSSLEY A N Y O N E W O R K I N G O N German late medieval art (particularly in Alsace), on Gothic architectural drawing or on medieval design will have profited from Roland Recht’s scholarship.1 It might be thought that his range of interests is primarily in the understanding of creative technique, but this book2 tackles the colossal problem of the Gothic cathedral on the broadest conceptual canvas. The shaping and experience of the Gothic cathedral (runs his argument) is primarily driven by a new religious preoccupation with seeing – with the science and theology of vision.

Recht’s path to this conclusion is circuitous. Readers do not reach any discussion of an actual cathedral building until page 108. There are two long theoretical chapters on the historiography of Gothic architecture and a third chapter on the Eucharist and the reliquary. The theoretical sections provide English readers with a heavy-duty canter through German late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art history, especially its Viennese component. Unlike its original Franco-German readers, for whom this kind of Rezeptionsgeschichte now seems an almost mandatory introduction to any study, English-speaking readers will find these sections long, gritty and not obviously relevant to the argument.

The Eucharistic chapter at last introduces us to the main theme of the book: the new emphasis, from the later twelfth century onwards, on ‘visuality’, on seeing the sacred – an emphasis encouraged by Franciscan affective piety and given precious artistic form in the burgeoning cult of the Eucharist and its display, in sacrament houses, monstrances and rock crystals. The theology of seeing leads smoothly to an examination of different kinds of reliquary, to a quick foray into the medieval cult of saints and to an intriguing discussion of medieval optics, with special emphasis on Grosseteste and Bacon.

Recht’s concentration on the visual nicely links with what is in many respects the book’s core – the long fourth chapter on Gothic architecture and the ‘connoisseurs’ – a term which refers to the increasing importance of complex design and visual subtlety among the medieval architect’s list of skills, including modulated profiles, the manipulation of light and the organisation of perspectival seeing. Gothic, far more than Romanesque, is a visually self-conscious architecture, an architecture which ‘has the

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look of being looked at’. And these visual sophistications lead Recht naturally to their creators – to a long and revealing discussion of the new status and freedom given to the later medieval architect, whose technologies (largely of drawing) transformed him from a mason to a magus, from a craftsman into something approaching a modern designer.

Recht’s attempts to see that ingenuity at work in his formal analyses of a few handpicked Great Churches (Bourges, Chartres, Amiens, Canterbury, Prague) is, however, disappointing, since he adds little to our current understanding of these buildings and does not always take into account more recent thinking. Canterbury’s Gothic models are not just from Sens (p.169), and it is bizarre to assert that ‘Bourges owes nothing to the classical tradition’ despite its programmatic debts to both Cluny III and Early Christian basilicas (a point recognised by Recht himself on p.165). We are also now less certain than Recht that Chartres, and not Soissons cathedral, was the ‘innovative’ pioneer of French High Gothic (p.149). In all this Recht hardly goes beyond the classic analyses of Gothic by Jean Bony and Kimpel and Suckale published in the 1980s.

Recht’s discussion of the architectural polychromy of the Gothic church, while dependent almost wholly on Michler, is timely; so too is his discussion of medieval colour preferences. But a five-page analysis (pp.188–93) of the only stained-glass window in the whole book, that of St Eustace in the nave of Chartres, amounts to a glaring neglect of one of the leitmotifs of Gothic art. Nor is it an isolated lacuna: the reader will find no discussion of the rose window; no analysis of the narratives of Gothic glass or of the relationship between the imagery of windows and their attendant altars. It is cheap and easy to castigate a book of this scope and ambition for not including one’s own themes and preferences, but to give so little weight to the iconography of glass as Recht does is to deprive the cathedral of one its principal pedagogic and artistic instruments.

Chapter five, on the (largely devotional) functions of carved imagery, anticipates with real insight many of the themes that have fascinated a younger generation of medievalists in the last decade or so: the cathedral and its imagery as a theatre of memory; moveable imagery and the liturgy (e.g. crucifixes with moveable arms); the ‘styles’ of sculpture and their analogies to modes of literary composition; gesture and imagery. Recht does not dwell on these issues for long, but what he says is particularly stimulating, partly because he is not afraid of confronting the big questions: ‘to what uses were images put in preaching?’; ‘how were moral states conveyed by the decorum of dress?’; ‘how does sculpture deny the value of the body?’. The same stimulating range of questions – this time about artistic originality and naturalism – enliven the final chapter of the book, on models and the transmission of forms, types and working methods. Here we find ourselves in the presence of fourteenth-century

French funerary sculpture, Claus Sluter, the Beautiful Madonna, the Late Gothic altarpiece and even Dürer.

To some (myself included) Recht’s emphasis on methods of production and artistic agency are timely warnings against over-ideological explanations of artistic change. Yet the sheer intellectual vitality of this book cannot conceal its lack of focus. A proper title for it should have omitted the word ‘cathedral’ and called it: ‘Believing and Seeing. Imagery and Inspiration in Gothic art’. For even by the end of the book the reader (I suspect) will have no clearer idea of what Recht means by a ‘cathedral’. His ‘cathedral’ is a partial concept, confined largely to France and Germany. Why is there nothing on the cathedrals of central Italy or Late Gothic Spain? The former would have introduced us to a theme hardly touched on here, namely the vital relations – topographical, liturgical, economic – between cathedrals and their cities. The latter would have underlined the tenacity of the cathedral ideal into the early sixteenth century and raised questions about its function and ideology.

And Recht’s cathedral is an amorphous animal, sheltering forms and ideologies of art which have little or nothing to do with cathedrals per se, indeed, in some cases positively oppose them. The book is rich in remarks on mendicant spirituality, yet Recht seems unaware of the ambivalence of that emphasis, since it can be persuasively argued that the opposition of the mendicants to expensive architecture was one cause for the decline of the ‘cathedral project’ in northern Europe in the course of the thirteenth century. And it hardly helps the reader to define for themselves the nature and identity of the medieval cathedral when so many of the works of art discussed by Recht have little or no connection to cathedrals: French royal effigies (largely for monasteries); Veit Stoss’s Krakow altar (for a parish church); the Christus dolorosus (found largely in parish and collegiate churches); Rogier van der Weyden’s Deposition (for a guild chapel). Under Recht’s plethora of suggestions and insights the outlines and identity of ‘the cathedral’ – in the strict sense the Great Church of a bishop – disappears. A more precise phenomenology of the actual institution called ‘cathedral’, and its artistic peculiarities, still, therefore, await a synthetic study.

But if Recht’s book underlines the difficulties of defining a concept and an institution, it also opens up rich fields of medieval thought and craft. Most writers on the cathedral to date can be divided between the ‘intellectual’ and the ‘artisan’ approaches to the history of art – those driven by ‘the spiritual’ and the ideological (Panofsky, Sedlmayr, Von Simson), and those convinced of the primacy of technique, function and materials (Salzman, Fitchen, Kidson, Viollet-le-Duc and the Rationalists). The value of this book lies in its exceptional3 and admirable balance between both camps.

Recht may not have calibrated his focus on the cathedral in ways that a reviewer might

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exactly like, but he has offered us a bold intellectual adventure – the fruit of years of experience and knowledge. It will be a long time, I suspect, before a better book on the cathedral will come to supersede his.

1 R. Recht: L’Alsace gothique de 1300 à 1365: Etude d’architecture religieuse, Colmar 1974; idem: Nicolas de Leyde et la sculpture à Strasbourg, Strasbourg 1987; idem, ed.: exh. cat. Les Bâtisseurs des Cathédrales Gothiques, Strasbourg (L’Ancienne Douane) 1989; and idem: Le Dessin d’architecture: Origine et fonctions, Paris 1995.

2 It first appeared as Le Croire et le voir: L’Art des cathedrals (XIIe – XVe siècle), Paris 1999.

3 The most obvious exception is Christopher Wilson’s masterly synthesis The Gothic Cathedral. The Architecture of the Great Church 1130–1530, London 1990.

Francesco di Simone Ferrucci. Itinerari di uno scultore fiorentino fra Toscana, Romagna e Montefeltro. By Linda Pisani. 229 pp. incl. 211 b. & w. ills.

(Leo S. Olschki, Florence, 2007), €78.

ISBN 978–88–222–5613–1.

Reviewed by ANDREW BUTTERFIELD

on Francesco di Simone Ferrucci is the most comprehensive examination of the artist ever presented and a fine contribution to the study of late fifteenthcentury sculpture. With the primary goal of reconstructing the artist’s life and clarifying his œuvre, the author concentrates her efforts on the classic methods of documentary research and stylistic analysis. The results form a sound and sturdy account of a figure who had not been clearly understood before.

The book consists of two chapters. The first, entitled ‘Il percorso di Francesco di Simone’, provides an overview of his biography and artistic production. The second, somewhat misleadingly called ‘La biografia e il catalogo delle opere’, contains both a register (but not transcriptions) of relevant documents, almost all of which have been published before, and a catalogue of his sculptures and of the sheets from the so-called Verrocchio sketchbook. Francesco di Simone was the son of an assistant to Lorenzo Ghiberti and spent much of his own career as a secondary figure; as Pisani states in her conclusion, Ferrucci was not ‘una delle menti più geniali dei suoi tempi’. Studying an artist of this kind, one might have wanted to ask questions about technique, workshop organisation, channels of influence and the like. Indeed, Pisani has previously written an interesting article on Florentine workshop practice,1 but unfortunately she does not expand on such research in her present book.

Nonetheless, there is much to consider in her study. One section that merits special attention is her stimulating discussion of the relief in the Bargello of a woman dying in childbirth, a work that has long been associated with Verrocchio and has generally been said to depict the death of Francesca

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Tornabuoni. Pisani offers several new hypotheses about the work. One is that it might represent Fiammetta di Donato di Matteo Adimari, the first wife of Filippo Strozzi, who died on 23rd August 1476 after having given birth to a daughter on 6th August of that year. The advantage of this theory is that this sculpture is often said to be identifiable with a relief bearing the Strozzi coat of arms that was listed in the 1666 inventory of the Medici collection. However, as Pisani admits, there are unresolved problems with this theory. We do not know where Fiammetta was buried or whether she was honoured with a tomb. Moreover, the male protagonist in the relief looks a good deal like the known portraits of Giovanni Tornabuoni. This leads Pisani to an alternative theory that this relief was not made for the tomb of Francesca Tornabuoni in S. Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, as has generally been thought, but rather that it was produced for a second monument to her commissioned by Giovanni Tornabuoni in his testament of 1490 for the cappella maggiore of S. Maria Novella in Florence. Pisani does not insist on either theory, and both suggestions should provoke renewed study of this perplexing relief.

Another part of the book that will interest many readers is Pisani’s account of the so-called Verrocchio sketchbook. She offers the plausible idea that this is not by Francesco di Simone, but instead by his cousin Sandro di Marco di Nanni, who was a member of his workshop. Pisani also provides notably good discussions of Ferrucci’s Eucharistic tabernacle in Monteluce, the Tartagni monument in Bologna, the Barbara Manfredi monument in Forlì and of the Pietro Minerbetti tomb, of which she publishes a previously unknown photograph taken around 1900 when it was still intact in the Bardini collection.

The author and the subject have been ably served by the publisher: the book is beautifully produced and, although all the photographs are printed in black and white, the plates are of exceptional clarity.

1 L. Pisani: ‘The Exchange of Models in Florentine Workshops of the Quattrocento’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 67 (2004), pp.269–74.

Antonio Lombardo. By Alessandra Sarchi.

393 pp. incl. 191 b. & w. ills. (Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Venice, 2008), €48. ISBN 978–88–88143–97–2.

Reviewed by MANFRED LEITHE-JASPER Alessandra Sarchi has published some interesting material on late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venetian sculpture, especially with regard to Antonio Lombardo. This book is the revised and expanded publication of her 2003 doctoral dissertation devoted to the artist. The book

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has six chapters that are divided into several sub-sections, followed by a detailed catalogue raisonné, a list of documents, an extensive bibliography, a list of illustrations and an index of names.

The first chapter, devoted to the artist’s critical fortune, is followed by an examination of Antonio’s early artistic development.

This is a particularly difficult undertaking for several reasons: the date and the place of his birth are unknown; for decades he worked in the workshop of his father, Pietro Lombardo (only in 1513 did he cut himself loose legally from his father’s ‘firm’); and his first welldocumented and signed work is the marble relief of the Miracle of the new-born child in the Cappella dell’Arca delle Reliquie in the Basilica of St Anthony, Padua, which was made between 1500 and 1505 (Fig.45). If we accept 1458 as the artist’s year of birth then he would already have been over forty years old when he made this relief, which illustrates the difficulty in establishing what the early work of Antonio was like; we can only work on the basis of stylistic analysis and what we know about secure sculpture by his father and brother. Sarchi fulfils her task with great skill, carefully weighing up ideas already advanced but not afraid of providing her own solutions, with which this reviewer, on the whole, can happily agree, although, admittedly, any identification of the various hands at work in the 1480s on the sculptural decoration of S. Maria dei Miracoli, Venice, will of necessity involve a fair amount of speculation.

As one can gather from the third chapter, exploring Antonio’s collaboration with his older brother, Tullio – for example, on the reliefs on the façade of the Scuola Grande di S. Marco in Venice and especially on the funerary monument of Doge Andrea Vendramin, today in the presbytery of SS. Giovanni e Paolo – the absence of documentary evidence means that stylistic analysis is the only available tool, even if this is made easier by the fact that at least Tullio’s œuvre is more clearly defined by documents and signed works.

We thus find ourselves on more secure ground only in the fourth chapter, dealing with the early sixteenth century, when the author discusses the Miracle of the new-born child and the work in the funerary chapel of Cardinal Giambattista Zen in S. Marco, Venice, which was carried out more or less simultaneously. And although these two works seem to have been studied exhaustively – the latter notably by Bertrand Jestaz1 – Sarchi provides some important additional observations on iconography, the relevant documents and recently voiced opinions.

In the shorter, but no less important, fifth chapter the author examines Antonio’s social status, first in Venice as an increasingly prominent associate, together with Tullio, in his father’s ‘firm’, and then from 1506 as court artist in Ferrara in the service of Duke Alfonso I d’Este. The final chapter is devoted to the artist’s late works (Antonio is thought to have died in 1516, although this can only be indirectly deduced from the

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of bad quality. In none of the six photographs of the flag poles on the Piazza S. Marco in Venice, for example, can one see any detail. Is it really the case that in Italy one can find sponsors only for exhibition catalogues or luxury volumes, and not for books by budding authors? It would be very welcome if an American, British or German publisher could produce a proper edition of this outstanding book.

45. Miracle of the new-born child, by Antonio Lombardo.

1500–05. Marble, 250 by 550 cm. (Cappella dell’Arca delle Reliquie, Basilica of St Anthony, Padua).

documents). Most important among these are the reliefs that adorned the Camerino di Marmo (or di Alabastro) of the Duke in the via Coperta in the Castello di S. Giorgio, Ferrara, now for the most part in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (others are in the Louvre, Paris, and in the collections of the Prince of Liechtenstein, Vaduz–Vienna). Dismantled in the late sixteenth century, these extremely subtle reliefs were reunited in 2004 in an exhibition at Ferrara,2 after which the small spaces of the via Coperta were again made accessible to the public. Alessandra Sarchi neatly summarises the findings of this show, supplementing them with her own iconographic and stylistic observations, but also drawing conclusions based on the political and historical circumstances of Alfonso’s reign.

Here a graphic reconstruction of the room and its sequence of reliefs would have been helpful, the more so because the ground plan that has been included is not labelled, but this is perhaps too much to ask given that our knowledge of the various elements of this room is only fragmentary.

The final discussion, concerning the small reliefs with motifs from ancient mythology, makes it clear that, despite many recent studies, the last word on these has not yet been said. The same is true for the small bronzes for which Antonio at least provided the models, which were not all cast in the workshop of Severo da Ravenna. Unfortunately there is no catalogue of rejected works.

Thus, for example, it would be interesting to know Sarchi’s opinion on the marble relief of Mars, Venus and Cupid in one of the Steinzimmer of the Residenz in Munich, published by Ursula Schlegel,3 as well as its aftercast in bronze in the Bode Museum in Berlin.

In sum, this is a long-needed and interesting publication, which confirms Antonio Lombardo’s importance as well as his place in a broader cultural history. The Istituto Veneto deserves credit for publishing it, but ought to have caught some proofing errors and ensured that the quality of the photographs matched that of the text. It is well-nigh impossible to understand some of the author’s comparisons because the illustrations are either too small or

1 B. Jestaz: La Chapelle Zen à Saint-Marc de Venise: d’Antonio à Tullio Lombardo, Stuttgart 1986.

2 M. Ceriana: exh. cat. Gli Este a Ferrara: il Camerino di alabastro; Antonio Lombardo e la scultura all’antica, Ferrara (Castello) 2004.

3 U. Schlegel: ‘Mars, Venus und Amor. Ein Relief von Antonio Lombardi’, Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 28 (1984), pp.65–76.

The Renaissance Palace in Florence, Magnificence and Splendour in Fifteenth-Century Italy. By James Lindow. 265 pp. incl. 8 col. + 42 b. & w. ills. (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2007), £55.

ISBN 978–0–7546–6092–7.

Reviewed by ANDREA M. GÁLDY

Cosimo de’ Medici, not wishing to attract the envy of his fellow citizens by too ostentatious a building, decided to award the commission for a new family palace to Michelozzo rather than Brunelleschi. It was important to contribute to the magnificence of the city of Florence by erecting a beautiful palace, but dangerous to make oneself the object of ridicule by choosing too ambitious a design that might anyway bankrupt the family. The Medici’s new palace was, however, hardly inconspicuous and was soon widely imitated both in Florence and elsewhere in Italy. From the surviving inventories we also know that, up to the time of the expulsion of the family, it was beautifully adorned with some of the greatest antiquities and works of art known at the time, since the interior of a palace could be furnished in the most splendid fashion without giving offence.

Using quotations from such sources as the Autobiography of Pius II and Cavalcanti’s Seconda Storia, the author uses this episode to explain why and how the architecture of a family palace could impact on local politics and on diplomatic relationships outside Florence. ‘Splendour’ and ‘magnificence’ are the keywords in any such discussion; hence they need to be explained and analysed.

Lindow’s book is less concerned with architectural history than with what might be called the philosophy of architecture and its connections with the politics of a small city-state. Lindow explores the tradition of architectural decorum from the time of Aristotle and Cicero through to its development during the Middle Ages by Aquinas and others in a Christian context that made a display of wealth and magnificence more

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appropriate in sacred buildings than in private palaces. Alberti’s writings are used to illustrate a fifteenth-century debate concerned with family wealth and rank and the most effective forms of display by means of a building that expressed the worth (both moral and financial) of its owner.

This study is not only concerned with the appropriate use on a palace of magnificence (on the exterior, seen by many) and splendour (in the interior, reserved for a select few), but charts the accessibility of the palace and of particular rooms (pp.94–99) and explains the functions of those rooms (pp.119–34), touching on fifteenth-century concepts of privacy and of the most appropriate use of particular spaces. The discussion of interior decoration – furniture, spallieri and decorative roundels for ceilings – gives an impression of what it would have been like to live in such a building.

This book helps one to understand the difficulties encountered by the Medici and other Florentine families when contemplating building a new palace. As well as the choice of the appropriate architect, the location of the palace was of the utmost importance. Even when the available plot of land was in a good position – its site in a neighbourhood with ancestral family associations was preferable – it might be too small. Sometimes neighbours could be persuaded to sell their property, but sometimes the original design had to be adapted or left unfinished (pp.57–58). Neighbours might object to major building work being carried out on their doorstep, but could be placated with promises of hospitality and entertainment, two major functions of such a palace (pp.52–54 and 99–111).

This is an interesting and useful book, bringing together architectural, political, social and cultural history in a particularly appealing way. It reminds us that the buildings we so admire for their proportions and harmony were once lived in and that their planning and construction was observed with keen interest and critical eyes by fellow Florentines. Many of their comments survive, attesting to the fact that although architectural style has changed, the need to keep up with the Joneses has not.

El Hospital Tavera de Toledo. By Fernando Marías, with photographs by Joaquín Bérchez. 319 pp. incl. 72 col. ills.

(Fundación Casa Ducal de Medinaceli, Toledo, 2007), €50. ISBN 978–84–611–9202–1.

Reviewed by JESÚS ESCOBAR

Renaissance architecture in Spain has an outstanding scholar.

His monograph on the Hospital Tavera, also known in its day as the Hospital de Afuera, given its location just outside Toledo’s city walls, offers an opportunity to assess the question of the Renaissance in Spain some two decades after Marías’s earlier writings on the

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topic. Built between 1541 and 1625, the hospital was meant to serve as a new kind of health institution dedicated to convalescence.

Moreover, it was intended to function as the burial place of its patron, the CardinalArchbishop Juan Pardo Tavera (1472–1545), whose funerary chapel, modelled after the innovative Basilica at El Escorial, is one of the singular elements of the hospital he sponsored.

Marías’s book is composed of eight chapters, six of which are previously published essays appearing here for the most part with minimal changes. Throughout, the writing is complemented by the photography of Joaquín Bérchez, a scholar of note for his own contributions to the architectural history of early modern Spain and Mexico.

Following a brief introduction, the first chapter explores the career of Cardinal Tavera as ‘the perfect state bureaucrat’ (p.51), and traces the typology of late medieval and early Renaissance hospitals as a means of interpreting the innovations of the Hospital Tavera. Marías’s discussion centres on the plans for the hospital prepared around 1541 by one of the leading architects working for the court of Charles V, Alonso de Covarrubias. Designed around a double courtyard (Fig.46) with a monumental staircase and chapel along the central axis, the early building plan, one variant of which survives, reflects for Marías a fusion of Italian and Spanish practices in hospital design. Marías also notes that two thirds of the building’s function was given over to bureaucracy, that is to offices and quarters that supported the cardinal’s personal concerns with poor relief and its administration.

The history of the construction of the Tavera Hospital is the topic of the second and third chapters, in which Marías tackles the historiography of the building and particularly the question of its authorship. The second chapter is largely concerned with the eightyyear building chronology, from the initial drawings prepared by Covarrubias to the fundamental work undertaken by Hernán González de Lara after 1550 and then Nicolás Vergara the Younger between 1575 and 1606. The established chronology sets the stage for chapter three’s careful consideration of the architects involved in the realisation of the Hospital. For Marías, the shift from what he labels Plateresque ‘sumptuousness’ to the ‘authority and monumentality’ of the classical style in the Hospital’s design, reflects larger changes in Spanish architecture over the course of the sixteenth century and the absorption of Italian theory and practice (pp.99–100). Marías denies any meaningful contribution on the part of the Jesuit architect Bartolomé de Bustamante, who was credited in the authoritative eighteenth-century guidebook to Spain, written by Antonio Ponz, as the author of the building’s plan.

Instead, innovation is credited to González de Lara, who took over the project in 1550 and, according to Marías, designed the building’s most important feature, its funerary chapel.

Following González’s death in 1575, Nicolás de Vergara assumed control of the Hospital

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46. View of the double courtyard of the Hospital Tavera, Toledo.

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(Photograph by Joaquín Bérchez).

Tavera, for which he designed the portal of S. Lázaro (not realised until the eighteenth century), the interior and exterior elevations of the funerary chapel and the sacristy, thereby leaving his ‘personal mark’ on the project (p.108).

In 1603 the hospital administrator, Pedro Salazar de Mendoza, wrote a life of Cardinal Tavera, which includes a ten-page description of the hospital prepared by Vergara that forms the basis of chapter four. Vergara’s text offers what Marías considers to be a rare critique of contemporary architecture and his analysis of the document makes for the most compelling chapter of the book. Vergara walks the reader into the hospital’s patios and through its offices, with much attention to their arrangement, thus emphasising the functions of the building. For Marías, Vergara’s words, and especially his discussion of classical elements in the funerary chapel viewed in relation to the whole design, capture a change in taste in Toledan architecture around 1575. Indeed, Marías’s analysis offers solid evidence to illustrate the impact on a younger generation of El Escorial and Juan de Herrera’s radical orthodoxy in classical design.

Chapters five to seven highlight the art in the funerary chapel and the contributions of Alonso de Berruguete and El Greco.

Chapter five addresses the marble tomb of Cardinal Tavera, designed in 1554 by Berruguete (c.1489–1561) and carved from Carrara marble between 1557 and 1561, the year of the sculptor’s death. Marías counters criticism of the sculpture, which focuses on its errant Italianate elements, to argue that the monument fuses Italian and Spanish tomb traditions and represents a critical moment in Spanish sculpture that was soon to be eclipsed by the work of Leone and Pompeo Leoni for Philip II. The next two chapters address the tabernacle and three altarpieces designed by El Greco for the chapel sanctuary. Marías first

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investigates El Greco’s design for the tabernacle based on the piecemeal survival of the sculpture and documentary evidence surrounding its commission by Salazar de Mendoza. The documents include a lawsuit filed

by El Greco over payment following completion of the tabernacle. El Greco’s lawsuits are familiar territory in the study of this artist, but his forays into architectural design are less so, and here Marías’s writing is highly illuminating. With elements derived from Palladio’s treatises, as well as Michelangelo’s designs for St Peter’s and Juan de Herrera’s famed tabernacle for El Escorial, this ‘architecture in miniature’ represents what Marías calls ‘total invention’ (p.166). El Greco’s architectural instincts are also partially revealed in the surviving elements of the three altarpieces that he designed for the funerary chapel and which form the topic of chapter seven. Here, Marías addresses what turns out to be El Greco’s last works and attempts to situate the surviving paintings (now in Toledo, New York, Athens and Madrid) within the space of the chapel sanctuary. A final chapter examines eighteenth- and nineteenth-century projects for the Tavera Hospital, and a collection of important documents for the building’s history ends the book.

Interspersed with the text are five ‘portfolios’ of Bérchez’s photographs of the building’s exterior and interior, as well as part of the art collection and documents housed within.

A list of illustrations appears in the book’s back matter but, without captions or references in the body of the text, Bérchez’s beautiful photography frustrates rather than elucidates Marías’s argument. For the patient reader, however, the opportunity to encounter, or perhaps reconsider, Marías’s writing is worth the effort. Among other things, its integration of painting, sculpture and architecture provides a model for the study of the important, but still little-known monuments of Renaissance Spain.

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Michelangelos Grabmal für Papst Julius II. By Claudia Echinger-Maurach, with photographs by Andrea Jemolo. 210 pp. incl.

195 b. & w. ills. (Hirmer Verlag, Munich, 2009), €98. ISBN 978–3–7774–4355–3.

Reviewed by CHARLES DAVIS

of Michelangelo’s monument to Pope Julius II is so long that many shy away from it. Bertolt Brecht’s ironic question, ‘Can the Moses of Michelangelo take hold of us only after a professor explains him?’, is answered by Claudia Echinger-Maurach, as by Brecht himself, in the affirmative. For Brecht, understanding works of art requires knowledge, and even more the art of observation, which the author possesses in a high degree.

Her book is first of all an apologia for the finished monument that we see in S. Pietro in Vincoli – a defence of the monument as a whole in all its dignity and grandeur and an attempt to rescue it from its fate of neglect, and ultimately from the overshadowing dominance of the Moses, of the prolonged history of its genesis and of the portrayal of the monument as a personal and artistic tragedy in Michelangelo’s biography.

The Entstehungsgeschichte is re-explained to demonstrate how the final redaction of the monument grew out of Michelangelo’s first idea. Instead of distinct phases in the tomb’s development, the author sees an almost continuous and fluid development in Michelangelo’s ideas. Surviving drawings appear to validate this interpretation. The genesis of the monument is explained in terms of the intersection of successive conceptions with other determining factors: artistic, logistic, collaborative, deadlines and the incidence of the many participants. The final form of the monument began to emerge as a project for a two-storey structure in S. Pietro in Vincoli in 1532. The first level, a pian terreno foundation, was erected in 1533–34, using marbles carved two decades earlier. Its resemblance to Michelangelo’s drawing of 1518 for the first level in London is astonishing (British Museum, 1859–5–14–824r). If the design of the first level emerges from the monument’s history, the second level was designed anew.

This much taller second level is a kind of piano nobile, conceived in the style of Michelangelo’s ‘new’ architecture expounded in the Laurentian Library.

Viewed architecturally, the Julius Monument is simply a Hermengrabmal – with anthropomorphic herms as supporting elements substituting the classical column orders: below, four robed men, their arms wrapped around themselves to help them support the structure’s weight – the same fiction found in illustrations of the Persian Porch in sixteenth-century editions of Vitruvius with muscular male supporting figures variously called herms, terms, atlases (e.g.

Giocondo, Cesarino, Goujon, Barbaro, Rivius) – here embedded in an opera di intaglio context. Above, herms again, with long T H E L AB Y R I N T H I N E H I S T OR Y

tapering abstract shafts, in a new architettura piana with, as ornament, only opera di quadro in Michelangelo’s dramatic manner, a hybrid architecture, enlivened by a tension between nature and geometry. Here the canonical head-and-bust formula of the herm is nearly drained of its human element, and faces are reduced to simple grimacing unreal masks set on diminutive necks and shoulders.

Michelangelo’s herms are what remain of his grandiose plans for prisoners and victories – a herm was also called a prigione. Owing to the recent restoration, we can better see the monument as it is proposed in this book: an architectural membrane through which pass light, sound and rite, in an building context of wall, door, sacristy, cantoria and church.

Echinger-Maurach re-identifies the centre of meaning of the monument. It is not Moses, but the papal effigy. The Imago Pietatis of Julius, in conjunction with the Madonna and Child, is already present in Michelangelo’s drawing for the Julius Monument of 1505 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). This deictic centre reappears in all the project drawings, and it forms the centre of the completed monument, where its expression becomes more conventional and muted. Ultimately Julius’s monument is not a paean to pagan or secular virtue but a Christian one, infused with the hope for salvation.

The Moses is the only statue not made expressly for S. Pietro in Vincoli. In the course of the monument’s history so many statues, finished and partially executed, were cast aside that one must wonder if Michelangelo himself really wished to include the Moses in the final tomb, or was he forced to do so by his patrons? On the lower level, the centre of the monument seems conceived almost as a blank, a void waiting to be filled or used, perhaps a real or fictive entrance with an inscription above. The monument is anepigraphic.

The concluding chapters examine the individual statues. The effigy of Julius and the statue of the Madonna and Child finally receive their due as works conceived and partially executed by the master. A half-century ago the Rachel and Leah were viewed unfavourably in a way that is now difficult to imagine. One facet of the monument that deserves greater emphasis is the ambiguity that surrounds the identity of four of its seven statues. Condivi and Vasari identify the lateral female personifications as Rachel/ Vita contemplativa and Leah/Vita attiva (Matilda). The Leah, at the right, clearly looks into an object which she holds in her right hand, and this object is, just as clearly, a hand-mirror with a concave upper surface, a fact verified in situ some years ago. Thus it is visually obvious that the lateral personifications, among their other identities, represent Hope (Rachel prays, kneeling, hands folded, eyes raised) and Prudence (Leah studies circumspectly the mirror of past, present and future). The implications of the resemblances of the two statues to Hope and Prudence are doubtless open to interpre-

tation, but the resemblances themselves are inescapable and too apparent to be ignored.

Although Hope and Prudence do not accord fully with the testimony of written sources, works of art, in this case unchanged in the course of nearly five hundred years, are equally valid testimonies to their own identities as are narrative primary sources.

Il Sanmarino. Giovan Battista Belluzzi architetto militare e trattatista del Cinquecento (Arte e Archeologia. Studi e Documenti 30). By Daniela Lamberini. 2 vols. 840 pp. incl. 85 col. + 17 b. & w. ills.

(Casa Editrice Leo S. Olschki, Florence, 2007), €195. ISBN 978–88–222–5660–7.

Reviewed by SABINE EICHE ANYONE SEEING DANIELA LAMBERINI ’s two massive volumes from a distance would be excused for thinking that, at the least, they were yet another publication on Michelangelo, Leonardo or Raphael. No one would expect a book of this size to be about Giovan Battista Belluzzi, called Il Sanmarino, a native of the Republic of San Marino in central Italy, who was unknown to all but a few specialists on Italian Renaissance fortifications. With her exhaustive study, Lamberini, an international expert on Renaissance fortifications, brilliantly fulfils the request of the Fondazione San Marino – Cassa di Risparmio – SUMS to write about its most famous citizen for the celebration of the five-hundredth anniversary of his birth. Lamberini not only fully restores to Belluzzi the reputation that he held in his lifetime as one of the most highly regarded military architects and theorists of Italy, but she also manages to provide an immensely informative context. If this had been a book about Michelangelo, the author’s lens would have been fixed on countless minute details of Michelangelo’s life, career or works, leaving the larger picture out of focus; what Lamberini has done is to take both a wide-angle and close-up view, which allows her not only to meticulously analyse Belluzzi’s work and working methods, but also to reveal him immersed in the society and politics of the period.

In elegant and readable prose, Lamberini reconstructs the historic context – the first half of the sixteenth century, in territory extending from the Adriatic to the Tyrrhenian seas – and presents all there is to know about this architect of remarkable achievements, whose most important work was done for Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. Thanks to her careful research carried out over more than two decades, our knowledge of Belluzzi is now enriched by a considerable body of previously unidentified manuscript and graphic material. Her scrupulous investigation has also led to the correction of earlier misconceptions and factual errors. As if all this were not enough, Lamberini provides a welcome bonus when she examines the different roles

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that a man of Belluzzi’s standing and profession was expected to play, providing insights that will be useful to historians for understanding the careers of many other prominent Renaissance men.

The first of the two volumes is dedicated to Belluzzi’s biography and career. Following a chapter proliferating with newly unearthed details of the Belluzzi family and Giovan Battista’s early years, when, because of his marriage to the daughter of the Urbino architect Girolamo Genga, he served the della Rovere dukes of Urbino, Lamberini shifts her focus to Florence, where Belluzzi was sent by the Republic of San Marino as ambassador in 1543, and where he realised his full potential under the patronage of Duke Cosimo I. Lamberini’s skills both as narrator and architectural historian come to the fore here in her gripping account of the turbulent events of those years and the challenges facing Belluzzi as the Medici’s principal engineer and architect.

The third chapter covers the final years of Belluzzi’s life, which ended in 1554, during the war with Siena, when he was shot in the head by enemy fire while explaining to the Florentines where to place their artillery. An examination of Belluzzi’s architectural treatises constitutes the bulk of the fourth and fifth chapters. Chapter four, the longest in the book, is devoted to a discussion of the treatise that Duke Cosimo commissioned Belluzzi to write in 1550, which was to show the fortified places of Italy and other countries. The treatise survives in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze (Fondo nazionale, II.I.280).

Lamberini publishes and discusses in an exemplary manner the sixty-two drawings made

by Belluzzi for this manuscript. Anyone who struggles to understand how Renaissance architects/engineers used the mathematical instruments necessary for their work will greatly benefit from Lamberini’s explanation, in the fourth chapter, of Belluzzi’s bussola topografica, or surveyor’s compass. Invented by Belluzzi to aid him in measuring city plans and drawing fortifications, this compass is a modification of the one used by Raphael a few decades earlier to draw a plan of ancient Rome. In the fifth chapter Lamberini analyses theory and practice in military architecture, using, among other manuscript sources, Belluzzi’s treatise in Pesaro’s Biblioteca Oliveriana (MS.196).

Vasari’s life of Belluzzi in the second edition of his biographies, and the identification of Belluzzi’s portrait in the tondo in the Sala di Cosimo I, Palazzo Vecchio, that shows Duke Cosimo surrounded by his artists, are the subject of the final chapter of the first volume.

In volume two Lamberini publishes Belluzzi’s writings, both known and unknown, beginning with his Diario (Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, Vitt.

Em.476), first brought out by Pietro Egidi in 1907, which Lamberini checked against the original, making emendations and including the final folios that Egidi had omitted. We can read fascinating letters by the architect discussing his architecture and working methods in the next chapter. Lamberini transcribed and annotated fifty-six letters, the majority by

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or to Belluzzi, which are found in the state archives of San Marino and Florence. The remainder of the second volume contains studies of three important treatises on fortifications by Belluzzi. Lamberini’s illuminating research revealed that an unknown, badly damaged manuscript in the Archivio storico of Anghiari (Carte Taglieschi, MS.1624), inventoried as by Girolamo Maggi, was, instead, an original by Belluzzi. It was always assumed that this particular Belluzzi treatise had survived only in a copy, now in the Archivio di Stato of Turin (Z.II.24). Lamberini publishes the texts of the two manuscripts, from Anghiari and Turin, on facing pages, making it easy to compare them and to complete passages missing from the fragmentary Anghiari original. The concluding chapter offers a new edition of Belluzzi’s Trattato delle fortificazioni di terra, preserved in the Biblioteca Riccardiana of Florence (MS. Riccardiano 2587). This manuscript was a presentation copy for Duke Cosimo’s general, Stefano Colonna, and is autograph in both text and drawings. It was first published by Lamberini in 1980; the new edition corrects the errors that marred the earlier version, which was rushed through the press.

Olschki of Florence, who have published Lamberini’s majestic work in a suitably majestic form, have spared no effort in producing an attractive book, printed on paper that makes reading it a pleasure, easy on the eyes, with glossy paper used only for the plates.

Everything about the book is of the highest quality. It is difficult to find anything to criticise. Still, perhaps one can find something to regret, namely that this elegant and informative work of scholarship is accessible only to scholars who read Italian. Once upon a time all Renaissance scholars read Italian, but in our day and age the new generation of AngloSaxon and American historians depends ever more on translations into English.

The Craftsman Revealed. Adriaen de Vries. Sculptor in Bronze. By Jane Bassett, with contributions by Peggy Fogelman, David A. Scott and Ronald C. Schmidtling II. 352 pp. incl. 100 col. + 220 b. & w. ills.

(Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2008), £39.95. ISBN 978–0–89236–919–5.

Reviewed by FRITS SCHOLTEN

an ideal medium for reproducing small sculptures and artefacts, it was not this that attracted the Dutch sculptor Adriaen de Vries (1556–1626) to the material.

In contrast to most of his colleagues, he chose to work in bronze for its intrinsic value. The majority of De Vries’s compositions therefore exist in only one version, or at most a few. His style is also unlike anything his contemporaries were doing: De Vries was a modeller to the fingertips – ‘der Aller berümbist Künstler auff dem Bosziren’ (‘the most celebrated artist in

ALTHOUGH BRONZE IS

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modelling’), as he was described in 1620 – and in many cases his statues are more like overgrown wax or clay bozzetti executed in durable bronze. As far as we know, he never worked in stone – again unlike many of his fellow sculptors. The thorough scientific research into the technical aspects of the work of this atypical and highly individual sculptor, carried out by Jane Bassett (Associate Conservator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) and some of her colleagues, is therefore extremely welcome. Her research project began in 1999–2000 on the occasion of the Adriaen de Vries retrospective staged in Amsterdam, Stockholm and Los Angeles.1 Altogether Bassett examined twenty-five bronzes, seventeen of which are indisputably by De Vries. The same equipment was used throughout, and the work was done under the same conditions. Each sculpture was described on the basis of a visual inspection and various technical characteristics were noted, among them traces of cold afterwork (chasing, filing and polishing), remains of sprues, casting defects, core pins, old repairs, etc. Where possible, samples of core material were taken from the interior of the statues; these were used for petrographic analysis and dating research using thermoluminescence (TL). X-radiographs were also made to reveal the internal structure of the statues, the thickness of the bronze wall and the homogeneity of the cast.

Lastly, the composition of the alloy of each bronze was measured with the aid of X-radiograph fluorescence spectrometry (XRF).

Although the use of technical data in analysing bronze-casting methods and establishing the authenticity of sculptures was not new, never before had the work of a single sculptor been scrutinised in such a consistent, thorough manner – something for which the 1998–2000 exhibition provided a unique opportunity. The methodological basis for research of this kind had already been laid by Richard Stone (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) with pioneering studies into the work of Antico (1981) and Severo da Ravenna (2006), and by Francesca Bewer (Straus Center for Conservation, Harvard University, Cambridge MA).2 Bewer also seized the opportunity offered by the Adriaen de Vries exhibition to undertake the first scientific research into the sculptor’s work, and this resulted in two publications.3 Now, almost ten years later, the research by Bassett and her colleagues has been published in a substantial volume with a number of essays – including an enlightening introduction by Peggy Fogelman – followed by twenty-five technical entries or case studies (‘chapters’).

Adriaen de Vries emerges from this study as an artist of remarkable technical consistency: he almost always cast by using the direct method; he used an unchanging binary bronze alloy (copper and tin); he preferred one particular clay for constructing his models; he had his own specific way of making his armatures; he finished the surface of his models according to fixed patterns; and he eschewed an artificial patina for many of his

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sculptures. This carefully conceived, systematic approach is certainly in line with De Vries’s recognisable and unwavering style, but is nonetheless surprising given the number of places in which he worked (Florence, Milan, Turin, Rome, Augsburg and Prague) and the relatively simple casting methods in the pre-industrial age. It means that De Vries always directed and monitored the casting of his statues with great care and that he had an excellent understanding of the technical aspects of the process. This was without doubt the result of years spent training in the workshops of Giambologna and Leoni.

De Vries’s fondness for using the direct method, in which the original wax model is lost during the casting process so that a single – and hence unique – sculpture in bronze is produced, has to do in part with the often large scale of his works and the simple outlines of his compositions. In a number of his smaller bronzes – although by no means all – De Vries opted for a different casting technique, the more labour-intensive indirect method that gave him the opportunity to make several pieces from the same master mould, or matrix (see p.26, table 32.4). It is often hard to tell what considerations played a role in the choice of method, but in some cases it is undoubtedly true that the artist hoped to find a wider market for his smaller compositions. The two horses cast by the indirect method (chapters fifteen and sixteen) are good examples.

Designed as horse sculptures in their own right, these works also lent themselves to reuse in a composition with a rider; there is a variant of the rearing horse in the J. Paul Getty Museum (chapter fifteen) with the separately cast figure of Duke Heinrich Julius of Braunschweig-Lüneburg on its back. Happily this bronze, which had been missing since the Second World War, was recovered in 2008 (Herzog Anton-Ulrich Museum, Braunschweig).4 It is perhaps not entirely coincidental, given this presumed commercial attitude on De Vries’s part, that in the same period when most of the smaller, indirectly cast statuettes were made, the sculptor commissioned Jan Muller in Amsterdam to make engravings after some of his inventions, probably in order to promote his work. It would seem that De Vries abandoned this more market-oriented approach after he had secured the permanent post of imperial sculptor in Prague in 1602, and the output of smaller, indirectly cast bronzes tailed off. A striking fact, and one that has yet to be explained, is that in no case do we know of more than two examples of De Vries’s indirectly cast autograph bronzes, for example the Cain and Abel groups in Edinburgh and Copenhagen (chapters eighteen and twentyfour) or the small Flying Mercury. There is a damaged version of the Mercury in Lambach and a second example, signed in full, resurfaced on the art market not long ago. Recent examination of this latter bronze demonstrated that it is also an indirectly cast piece (information from Robert van Langh, Rijksmuseum).

Adriaen de Vries did not, however, have complete control over the reproduction of his models. The existence of replicas of some

47. The Farnese bull, by Adrian de Vries. 1614. Bronze, 103.5 cm. high. (Schlossmuseum, Gotha).

models of lesser quality, and made of different materials, indicates that his work was also reproduced by others, in some cases possibly in the circle of the Saxon court architect Giovanni Maria Nosseni in Dresden. Only two of the bronzes studied belong to the non-autograph but contemporary group (chapters eight and ten), and Bassett’s research confirmed that these pieces differ significantly in technical terms from the authentic bronzes. A worthwhile future investigation would be to subject further De Vries inventions that appear to have been cast by others during his lifetime to extensive technical analysis; these include the Apollo in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Triton and Naiad in the Frick Collection, both versions of the Flying Mercury and the various versions of the Sextus Tarquinius and Lucretia groups, the Dancing faun with seated nymph, the small Gladiator and the Seated nymph washing her foot.5 It seems that this last sculpture was still being reproduced until well into the twentieth century, as is evident from a photograph of the cast-making workshop at the V. & A. in which the Seated nymph can be seen.6 Bassett’s research has confirmed the doubts that existed about the authenticity of some other sculptures. The Crucifix in Wullenstetten, which was still cautiously attributed to the sculptor on stylistic and historical grounds in 1999–2000, but was more recently given to Giambologna by Dorothea Diemer, can now be removed from De Vries’s œuvre for good (chapter nine).7 The findings of the XRF investigation into the composition of the bronze alloys, conducted by David Scott and described by him in chapter four, are surprising. Doubts have recently been voiced about how representative this sort of XRF investigation is, in part because only a superficial point measurement is carried out (to 0.03 mm. deep) and in part

because local differences in composition can occur within one and the same bronze alloy as a result of segregation (see p.23).8 Casting practices in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries moreover meant that the composition of bronze could never be constant: generic alloys were used by experienced casters who judged them ‘by eye’, often by using or reusing scrap metal. Essentially an alloy could vary from one day to the next in the same foundry. A comparison of two nineteenth-century sand-cast French replicas of De Vries’s group Hercules, Nessus and Deianeira – possibly even from the same workshop – demonstrates this well: whereas one of these bronzes is made from an alloy that contains approximately 13% zinc, the material used in the other contains almost twice as much (see p.248). This would seem to suggest that XRF analysis is of limited value, so it is fascinating to see that the XRF examination of De Vries’s authentic bronzes produced very consistent results, as table 4.1 and the diagrams on p.24 clearly demonstrate, thus implicitly underlining the value of the method.

Most of De Vries’s bronzes look spontaneous and sketchy, as if they were modelled off the cuff. The sculptor evidently pursued a highly individual style that departed markedly from the more polished bronze sculptures produced by many of his contemporaries. His spontaneity can best be described by the term sprezzatura – a cultivated insouciance aimed at displaying artistic or social skills. This nonchalance is expressed, for instance, in his habit of incorporating some remnants of the casting runners and vents – the sprues – into his compositions, rather than sawing them off after casting. This is particularly evident in the Farnese bull (Fig.47) and in the Laocoön, both examined by the researchers. It is not clear why he did this, but the notion that he wanted to demonstrate that his sculptures were cast in one pour is certainly a very plausible explanation (see p.270). In her introduction Fogelman makes another interesting suggestion that ties in with this: by leaving these sprues, she argues, De Vries might have been referring to the small struts found on many marble statues from Antiquity and the Renaissance. Just as carving a composition from a single block of stone was a heroic feat for a sculptor in marble, so was for De Vries casting in one pour.

Even such an exemplary book as this, a model of scrupulous technical examination, leaves something to be desired. It would, for instance, have been helpful to test some of the results of the research against historical sources, such as Biringuccio’s Pirotechnia of 1540. It is also regrettable that the lengthy duration of the study meant that the researchers were unable to profit from new investigative techniques for the analysis of bronzes, which have meanwhile been developed. The most important of these is neutron radiography and tomography, which, among other things, produces a much more accurate determination of the alloy composition and far more readable X-radiographs.9 Although the authors had sound and understandable reasons for not undertaking an investigation into patina and other finishes on De

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Vries’s bronzes, the omission is nonetheless regrettable (see pp.5–6 and 22). This is certainly an area for future research.

Finally, there are a number of minor inaccuracies and omissions, such as the mistaken assertion that according to the 1998 exhibition catalogue the Braunschweig bronze of the Seated nymph was cast as a model for the Augsburg fountain (p.81) and the lack of any reference to Bewer’s study of the bronzes by Willem van Tetrode (in chapter twentyseven), and some printing errors (Niedhart rather than Neidhart on p.xiii and meseum instead of museum on p.78, note 1). These are inconsequential blemishes in an otherwise highly commendable study. However, the designer’s decision to leave a number of pages blank throughout the book (pp.61, 79, 87, 125 and 133) was completely unnecessary and even amateurish in typographic terms.

Jane Bassett and her colleagues have done an impressive job in penetrating some of the mysteries surrounding De Vries’s bronzes.

That their insights did not result in the demythologising of Adriaen de Vries, but in fact serve to increase our admiration for his artistic and technical skills, testifies both to their careful approach and to the sculptor’s outstanding quality.

1 F. Scholten, ed.: exh. cat. Adriaen de Vries (1556–1626), Imperial Sculptor, Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum), Stockholm (Nationalmuseum) and Los Angeles (J. Paul Getty Museum) 1998–2000.

2 R.E. Stone: ‘Antico and the development of bronze casting in Italy at the end of the Quattrocento’, Metropolitan Museum Journal 16 (1981), pp.87–116; and more recently idem: ‘Severo Calzetta da Ravenna and the indirectly cast bronze’, The Burlington Magazine 148 (2006), pp.810–19. See also, F. Bewer: ‘A study of the technology of Renaissance bronze statuettes’, Ph.D. diss. (University of London, 1996).

3 Idem: ‘“Kunststück von gegossenem Metall”: Adriaen de Vries’s bronze technique’, in Scholten, op. cit. (note 1), pp.64–77; idem: ‘The sculpture of Adriaen de Vries: a technical study’, in D. Pincus, ed.: Small bronzes in the Renaissance, Studies in the History of Art, Washington 2001, pp.58–93.

4 J. Luckhardt: ‘Die Rückkehr des Herzogs, Die Reiterstatuette des Herzogs Heinrich Julius von Adriaen de Vries’, in S. Graf Adelmann and D. Diemer, eds.: Neue Beiträge zu Adriaen de Vries. Vorträge des Adriaen de Vries Symposiums vom 16. bis 18. April 2008 in Stadthagen und Bückeburg, Bielefeld 2008, pp.157–67.

5 See Scholten, op. cit. (note 1), nos.5, 10, 11, 12 and 31; L.O. Larsson: Adrian de Vries, Adrianus Fries Hagiensis Batavvs 1545–1626, Vienna and Munich 1967, p.127, no.2; and sale, Sotheby’s, London, Old Master Sculpture and Works of Art, 9th July 2009, no.107.

6 See M. Trusted, ed.: The Making of Sculpture. The materials and techniques of European sculpture, London 2007, fig.316.

7 D. Diemer: ‘Giambologna in Germania’, in B. Paolozzi Strozzi and D. Zikos, eds.: exh. cat.

Giambologna, gli dei, gli eroi. Genesi e fortuna di uno stile europeo nella scultura, Florence (Museo Nazionale del Bargello) 2006, pp.106–25, esp. pp.114–15.

8 R. van Langh: ‘The technology of bronze, notes and suggestions for new research’, in F. Scholten and M. Verber, eds.: From Vulcan’s Forge, Bronzes from the Rijksmuseum, 1450–1800, London 2005, pp.145–49, esp. pp.145–46.

9 See D. Visser: ‘Neutron radiography and tomography, a new technique for the scientific study of bronzes’, in ibid., pp.150–54.

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Bernini in Francia. Paul de Chantelou e il Journal de Voyage du Cavalier Bernin en France. By Daniela del Pesco. 575 pp. incl. numerous b. & w. ills. (Electa Napoli, Naples, 2007), €38. ISBN 978–88–510–0374–6.

Bernini’s Biographies, Critical Essays.

Edited by Maarten Delbeke, Evonne Levy and Steven F. Ostrow. 419 pp. incl. 41 b. & w. ills. (Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 2006), $65. ISBN 978–0–271–02901–6.

Reviewed by PHILIPPE MALGOUYRES THE CONTINUING FLOW of new publications on Bernini – articles, exhibition catalogues, monographs – illustrates the increasing fascination that this artist still exerts. Two new books are now added to this already extensive literature. The first is a new Italian translation of Chantelou’s journal, preceded by essays that act as an introduction, also written by the translator. Providing a new Italian translation is very useful, the last, in 1988, being an abridged edition of that published by Stefano Bottari in 1946;1 this new one is not based on the original manuscripts but on the French edition of the text made by Lalanne in 1885.2 As well as the five introductory chapters, the volume includes two appendices, one of succinct biographies of the people mentioned and the other a list of the works of art and architecture cited by Chantelou, an expanded index and a bibliography ordered by date.

The chapters, while ambitious in their titles, are in fact little more than a rather disappointing summary of questions raised by the text.3 Certain mannerisms of the publishing house Electa Napoli are particularly aggravating: the puerile absence of capital letters and the abundant illustrations that are neither referred to in the text nor numbered, thereby making them virtually useless. The praiseworthy translation attempts to get close to the original French text even if it is impossible to be faithful to certain ‘délicatesses’ or to those ellipses in the Journal, which is a masterpiece of the ‘non dit’: some of the inevitable choices have the effect of flattening the original.4 Also regrettable is the lack of differentiation of the phrases and words written by Chantelou in Italian, thus making it impossible to distinguish the citations, that he sometimes took the trouble to copy out in Italian, from the rest of the text. Nor does this edition respect the form of the original: numerous paragraph breaks are introduced, sometimes in the middle of a phrase, replacing a simple semi-colon. It is still essential to read the text in French, even for an Italian specialist, and Milovan Stani´c’s edition is the best to use.5 However, this will be a useful tool for the Italian reader, allowing easy access to that mine of almost inexhaustible information contained in Chantelou’s Journal.

The second title under review is the realisation of a work dedicated to the analysis

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of the biographical sources on Gianlorenzo Bernini. It comprises ten essays that emerged from a conference, ‘Bernini’s biographies’, organised in Rome in 2002. The authors subject to various forms of analysis the two Lives published by Baldinucci and Domenico Bernini in, respectively, 1686 and 1713.

The question of the reliability of these texts is always in the background of their interpretations. Tomaso Montanari’s study explains that Domenico Bernini’s Life, published after that of Baldinucci, was drafted earlier than the latter and was based on family sources. The idea of a biography being published during an artist’s lifetime, as happened to Michelangelo, was favoured by those close to Bernini, and the material they gathered must have served as the basis for both biographies. Equally one can take for granted the largely autobiographical origin of the information; Bernini was constantly creating an ‘auto-mythography’, in Cesare D’Onofrio’s word. But one must keep in mind that this ‘mythification’ was not only an image invented a posteriori for the public, it was also a means of constructing his own persona. For example, an anecdote that reveals a borrowed topos may be, despite everything, authentic: these topoi are not only a pattern for narrative, but also for actual behaviour, and it is very likely that the events that mirrored those in the life of Annibale Carracci or of Michelangelo really happened, and were not the fruit of the narrator’s unique imagination. The explicit reference to Michelangelo’s biographies also underlines the fact that Michelangelo himself provided a model for Bernini in his work and in his relationship with the popes whom he served.

In fact, the fine, close analysis of these two texts, however familiar they are to those concerned with Bernini studies, reveals a quantity of details which subtly colour their factual and narrative framework. Viewing the texts in the perspective of the literary genre to which they belong, their analysis in terms of narrative structure, or construction or even of typography, is often fruitfully revealing and always stimulating. While this runs the risk of reducing the text to a structure that would not convey any other meaning than its own, it is a price worth paying. Sometimes one has the sensation of finding oneself faced with a synoptic edition of the Gospels, searching for the logia Christi in a methodical attempt to reject everything that is an interpolation, cliché or convention. The re-reading is never less than impassioned, as evidenced by the reflections of Evonne Levy on the episode of the two busts of Cardinal Scipione Borghese.6 The famous story of the fly and the bust of Alexander VII, rather pointlessly repeated

by Domenico, takes on a new meaning when traced back to its origin with Sforza Pallavicino and Galileo.7 The hackneyed use of the idea of bel composto acquires a new sense when applied to the person of the artist himself.8 In contrast, the consideration of the links between the visual arts and poetry prove to be, as is often the case, disappointing: to compare an artist to Orpheus, Amphion or

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Apelles is a literary cliché, applied equally to the very great and to lesser artists, and the perspectives that are opened are more seductive than convincing.9 It is a pity that an editorial policy as to which translation to use was not adopted throughout the publication: the main questions arise from the texts analysed, principally the two Lives and Chantelou’s Journal, and they are sometimes translated without citations or without indicating the origin of the translation, thereby weakening the more subtle arguments.10 The last essay is devoted to Constanza Bonarelli with, as an appendix, her will and an inventory of her effects after her death, duly transcribed and translated.11 The light shed on her fascinating portrait is tremendous. The inventory reveals rich contents, which correspond to her patrician origins (she was born a Piccolomini): the jewels, clothes and harpsichord all testify to that. But the large number of paintings and sculptures, in particular the decorative busts in coloured marble, the antiques and fragments, are more reminiscent of the inventory of a dealer–restorer than of an aristocrat, yet it seems entirely possible that the widow of Matteo Bonarelli was in some way involved in such trade.

The vast possibilities offered by such a variety of methodological approaches to the texts proves stimulating and, from this point of view, the publication can be recommended to non-Bernini specialists. As to the questions that have been left open: why did Domenico Bernini publish a biography of his father, when that published by Baldinucci twentyseven years earlier was based on the same family documents? Why, if most of the events reported came from the mouth of the artist himself, is there never any mention of Pietro Bernini as a sculptor? Pietro appears only as the father of the genius, and his contribution is merely circumstantial and anecdotal: it is because of him that Gianlorenzo was a sculptor,12 but equally he could have been a genius in any other field. The miraculous precocity (for which the source is the voice of Gianlorenzo himself) remains one of the less questioned aspects of Bernini’s ‘automythology’, the genius ‘in omnibus unicus’13 who owed nothing to anyone else.

1 P. Fréart de Chantelou: Viaggio del Cavalier Bernini in Francia, transl. S. Bottari, Rome 1946; and ibid., repr.

Palermo 1988, with an introduction by G. Bilancioni.

2 ‘Journal du voyage du Cavalier Bernin en France: ouvrage illustré de 40 gravures dans le texte par M. de Chantelou. Manuscrit inédit publié et annoté par Ludovic Lalanne’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1885); an issue comprising a series of articles published between 1877 and 1884.

3 The author includes references in the bibliography to P. Schneider and P. Zitzlsperger: Bernini in Paris: das Tagebuch des Paul Fréart de Chantelou über den Aufenthalt Gianlorenzo Berninis am Hof Ludwig XIV, Berlin 2006, but adds that she has been unable to take the volume into account in her work.

4 For example, 5th October, p.408, the famous episode of the visit of the king when Bernini caught the king’s eye ‘travaillait à faire lui-même [. . .] son portrait’ is translated as ‘stava esseguendo un Autoritratto’. The king saw the bust ‘sur cette table, ornée d’un tapis’, which

becomes ‘sulla tavola coperta dal velluto’. Then the Cavaliere ‘a pris le prince de Marsillac [. . .] et l’a mis en lieu que le roi tournait les yeux sur lui’, is rendered as ‘ed ha pregato il principe di Marsillac [. . .] di spostarsi in modo da consentire al Re di rivolgere lo sguardo verso di lui’.

5 M. Stanic ´, ed.: Journal de voyage du cavalier Bernin en France, Paris 2001.

6 E. Levy: ‘Chapter 2 of Domenico Bernini’s “Vita” of his Father: Mimeses’, (pp.168–70).

7 E. Bellini: ‘From Mascardi to Pallavicino: the biographies of Bernini and seventeenth-century roman Culture’, (pp.298–307).

8 M. Delbeke: ‘Gianlorenzo Bernini’s “Bel composto”: the Unification of Life and Work in Biography and Historiography’, (pp.251–74).

9 Bellini, op. cit. (note 7); see also idem: ‘Le biografie di Bernini e la cultura romana del Seicento’, Intersezioni 23/3 (2003), pp.399–436, not cited in the book under review.

10 For example, it is curious that ‘hardiesse’ in French, analysed as a concept in the Journal, should be translated several times in different essays as ‘assurance’ in English when it means ‘boldness’.

11 S. McPhee: ‘Costanza Bonarelli: biography versus archive’, (pp.315–76).

12 H. Damm: ‘Gianlorenzo on the grill: the Birth of the Artist in his “Primo parto di devozione’”, (p.235).

13 R. Williams: ‘“Always like himself”: Character and Genius in Bernini’s biographies’, (pp.180–99).

Collected writings on Velázquez. By Jonathan Brown. 447 pp. incl. 112 col. + 47 b. & w. ills. (Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, distributed by Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2008), £35. ISBN 978–84–936060–2–2 (CEEH); ISBN 978–0–300–14493–2 (Yale).

Reviewed by ROSEMARIE MULCAHY

the collected writings of Jonathan Brown on Velázquez is a fitting celebration of the important contribution of this distinguished American hispanist to the study of Spanish painting. It is a companion to the volumes on Velázquez already published by the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica (by Enriqueta Harris, 2006, and Diego Angulo, 2007). Brown is widely known for his splendid monograph, Velázquez, Painter and Courtier (1986), and for The Golden Age of Painting in Spain (1990), revised and expanded as Painting in Spain, 1500–1700 (1998). Both volumes immediately became essential texts and were particularly welcomed by those attempting to introduce Spanish painting into the arthistory curriculum.

In a comprehensive introductory essay, Bonaventura Bassegoda reviews Brown’s impressive and extensive body of writings, which ranges over the Golden Age period and beyond, to include Goya and Picasso.

Here, however, the focus is firmly on Velázquez in thirty-two pieces of writing: essays, exhibition catalogue entries, articles for specialist journals and the popular press, which have been published in English and Spanish between 1964 and 2006. It is an impressive body of work, and from the very

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first piece, ‘On the origins of Las Lanzas by Velázquez’, we already see the traits that have come to characterise Brown’s research: intellectual rigour, meticulous investigation of bibliography, visual sources and historical context, and clarity of exposition. There is also a recognition of the complexity of major works of art and a healthy scepticism of attempts at finding a definitive reading.

It is this spirit of questioning and openness that ensures these writings are of lasting relevance. As Bassegoda observes in his introduction: ‘Brown knows that the historian’s task does not consist of finding the “only right” interpretation of each work, but rather to explain and understand the cultural and historical context in which it was conceived’.

Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Painting (1978), based on Brown’s doctoral thesis of 1964, exemplifies this approach and it was to be widely influential on the development of the historiography of Spanish art. This reviewer well remembers the sense of excitement on first reading the chapter on Las Meninas, which is published here. Although it remains the essential text on the masterpiece, he does not consider his work concluded: ‘Every work of art is renewed, not depleted by time’. However, Brown is not reticent in his criticism of theories that he perceives to be erroneous or plain far-fetched. In “‘Las Meninas” as a Masterpiece’ (1999) his rebuttal of Manuela Mena’s interpretation of the picture as an expression of Philip IV’s political intentions in relation to the succession to his throne, is forensic in its thoroughness and draws upon the historical and technical expertise of John Elliott and Carmen Garrido. This collaborative approach has resulted in important publications, most notably with Elliott in A Palace for a King. The Buen Retiro and the Court of Philip IV (1980) and with Garrido, Velázquez: The Technique of Genius (1998).

These works exemplify the twin foundations of his scholarship: the examination of historical context and of the art object itself. He has a discerning eye and does not shirk from taking issue with questionable attributions, either in scholarly journals or the popular press – he expects others to apply the same intellectual rigour as he does to scholarly debate. “‘Las Meninas” at Kingston Lacy: a Velázquez original or “from the original”?’

(1997), ‘Velázquez and lo velezqueño: the attribution problems’ (2000) and ‘Velázquez today and tomorrow’ (2006) all make stimulating reading.

Brown likes to consider the larger picture, to stand back and look at Spanish painting within the wider European context. In Kings and Connoisseurs. Collecting Art in SeventeenthCentury Europe (1995) he explored relationships between the production of Spanish art in the seventeenth century and that of Italy and Flanders. In the exhibition Velázquez, Rubens y Van Dyck. Pintores cortesanos del siglo XVII at the Prado (1999), he opened up the study of Velázquez to comparative analysis with contemporary European artists, and his

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two introductory essays are reprinted here in the original English versions. Brown’s writings on portraiture are always illuminating, such as ‘Enemies of Flattery. Velázquez’s Portraits of Philip IV’ (1986) and ‘“Peut-on assez louer cet excellent ministre?” Imagery of the favourite in England, France and Spain’ (1999).

This volume of essays goes beyond the immediate field of Velázquez studies. As a masterly demonstration of art-historical methods it is inspirational. The groundwork is always so well prepared, the historical context investigated, possibilities explored and, most importantly, the work of art remains the central focus. The Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica and its director, José Luis Colomer, are to be congratulated for producing this important volume and adding another title to their impressive list of publications on Spanish art in the European context.

Bertos: The Triumph of Motion. By Charles Avery. 303 pp. incl. 78 col. + 227 b. & w. ills. (Umberto Allemandi & Co., Turin, 2008), £56. ISBN 978–88–422–1556–1.

Reviewed by PATRICIA WENGRAF

few recently discovered documents provided in this volume devoted to the sculptor Francesco Bertos are the registration of his birth in Dolo, on the Brenta Canal, on 23rd May 1678, and of his death aged sixty-five in the same town on 28th November 1741; both were found by Carlo Milano.

This new evidence showing that Bertos was born and died in the Veneto negates the long held identification of him with a stone-carver of the same name recorded in Rome in 1693, first suggested by Bertolotti in 1884 (see pp.13 and 22, note 4).

The description of Francesco being a ‘valiant disciple’ of the Venetian sculptor Giovanni Bonazza (1654–1736) is for now the only evidence of his early training. Mystery also surrounds his exact relationship to Girolamo Bertos, who is recorded as having made three elaborate marble altarpieces for S. Vitale, Ravenna, in 1700 and 1702 (nos.1–3).

A letter of introduction to Giovanni Battista Foggini in Florence, provided by Girolamo to Francesco in 1708/09, might well indicate that he was working for Girolamo at that time. It also affords the only evidence (to date) of Francesco having travelled outside the ambiente of the Veneto.

Yet this experience seems to have made little impression upon the sculptor, whose abiding influence remained steadfastly steeped in the œuvre of Venetian sculptors of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as demonstrated by Avery on p.62 (figs.54a and b) and less precisely on p.63, where, unaccountably, he identifies the Robert H. Smith statuette of Astronomy (fig.56) with Tiziano

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Aspetti (private collection) rather than with Roccatagliata, to whom it has been attributed since 1994.1 The highly distinctive format of Francesco’s sculpted groups, which he reproduced in marble, stone and bronze, is characterised by their composition in which many thin-limbed ‘allegorical’ figures balance precariously one on top of each other to form a pyramid. The suggestion that Bertos drew his inspiration from the popular acrobatic sport known as the ‘Labours of Hercules’, traditional to Venice, seems highly plausible and may explain the sculptor’s enduring preoccupation with this theme. The very intricate nature of his marble compositions led, in the 1730s, to his being summoned before the Inquisition to account for his skill. To prove that he was not in league with the Devil, Bertos carved a work before his interrogators’ eyes.

In 1715 Francesco obtained from Antonio Manin his first known documented commission. Between 1715 and 1719 he provided eight marble groups for the Villa Manin at Passariano (nos.9–12) and a further eight large marble groups and twelve smaller groups for the gardens of the same villa in 1729–30. During the next decade (1732–39), the sculptor produced two marble groups and a number of large bronzes for Field Marshal von der Schulenberg, then resident in Venice (nos.60, 61 and 121; see also pp.80 and 82). Although these are among the first bronzes that Bertos is recorded to have made, the brilliance of their execution is indicative of his having worked in this medium for many years, albeit possibly on smaller, less challenging models. Of the third substantial group of works commissioned from Bertos, now to be found in the Royal Palace, Turin, Avery indicates a previous provenance for seven of the marble groups (nos.44–50), and notes that Bertos received payment on 9th January 1739 for the two large bronze groups (nos.118 and 119) from the Savoy family.

The distinctive style of this highly idiosyncratic sculptor does not readily translate to a larger scale. Two bronze candlesticks, commissioned in 1733 for the Basilica of S. Antonio, Padua, and an accompanying Crucifixion of 1734 (nos.159–64), comprise the total of this sculptor’s known ecclesiastical commissions. The argument advanced by Avery and others regarding the hypothesis that Bertos might have copied Aspetti’s bronze reliefs of the Martyrdom of St Daniel (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; nos.165 and 166) from the originals, now Museo Diocesano, Padua (p.5, figs.43–44), has yet to be substantiated. Similarly the initials ‘M.A.V.F’ on the lower edge of one of the copies do not correspond to a known Venetian founder of the eighteenth century, nor do they seem to relate to Bertos.

As the author observes, it is not surprising that no portrait busts by the artist are known, since when one studies the faces of Bertos’s figures, their homogeneous features are devoid of expression. Less relevant are the persistent parallels drawn with Giambologna.

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Avery’s comparison of a marble group by Bertos (p.41, fig.24) to a bronze group of The rape of Europa, which he describes as ‘After Giambologna’ (p.41, fig.25), is out of context since it has long been variously attributed to Foggini or Piamontini.

For those familiar with the pioneering articles of Leo Planiscig2 and Walter Leo Hildburgh, the present publication adds few new insights into the sculptor’s œuvre and suffers from an over-inclusive catalogue. Yet it serves as a valuable reminder of the extraordinary skill of Francesco’s follower Agostino Fasolato (1714–87), whose many-figured group The fall of the rebel angels (cat.221) demonstrates an astonishing feat of technical skill.

As always, Avery writes very fluently. He tells a good if rather repetitive story, although his delivery of facts is often inconsistent.

Nonetheless Bertos: The Triumph of Motion is lavishly illustrated with many good quality images, providing a highly practical anthology in a compact form, which many will find useful.

1 A. Radcliffe and N. Penny: Art of the Renaissance Bronze 1500–1650, The Robert H. Smith Collection, London 2004, pp.106–11, with earlier publications; see also M. Leithe-Jasper and P. Wengraf: exh. cat. European Bronzes from the Quentin Collection, New York (Frick Collection) 2005, pp.102–07, no.7, fig.1.

2 L. Planiscig: ‘Francesco Bertos’, Dedalo 9 (1928), pp.209–21; idem: ‘Dieci opere di Francesco Bertos conservate nel Palazzo Reale di Torino’, ibid. 10 (1928), pp.561–75.

A God or a Bench: Sculpture as a Problematic Art during the Ancien Régime.

By Anne Betty Weinshenker. 379 pp. incl.

4 col. + 72 b. & w. ills. (Peter Lang AG, Oxford, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt am Main, New York and Vienna, 2008), £48. ISBN 978–3–03910–543–4.

Sculpture and Enlightenment. By Erika Naginski. 336 pp. incl. 33 col. + 78 b. & w. ills. (Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2009), £25. ISBN 978–0–89236–959–1.

Reviewed by PHILIP WARD-JACKSON A SERIES OF exhibitions of the works of individual French sculptors of the mid-eighteenth century, and the scholarly work of Guilhem Scherf, Aline Magnien and others, have recently presented us with a thriving and vigorous art, one whose practitioners seemed sufficiently undaunted by invidious comparisons with the Antique, and whose precepts, if not their basic aesthetic, had subtly changed over the course of the century. The first of the two volumes reviewed here warns us against an undue triumphalism in this area. Anne Betty Weinshenker, who has previously written on the most argumentative of the sculptors of this period, Etienne-Maurice Falconet, sets out to remind us that achievements such as his were realised against the backdrop of a predominant-

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ly negative consensus on the worth of sculpture in general and despite the fact that sculptors were perceived as being of a low status compared with painters, reflecting the rough manual nature of their trade and the often routine decorative work that was expected of them. In pursuit of this thesis, she mines the discourse on sculpture from the mid-seventeenth century up to the Revolution, taking a broad view of what constitutes discourse, to include, for example, allusions to sculpture in literature and painting, allegorical representations of sculpture in paired images of the sister arts, and theological debate on the origin of idols.

Many of the arguments about the comparative virtues of painting and sculpture stemmed from the Italian ‘Paragone’ debates, which had been revived by French artists and amateurs wishing to provide a firm basis for the establishment of the Académie Royale. Some of these arguments had, by the mid-eighteenth century, become stale from reiteration. One, which seemed set up for a fall, unwisely claimed durability as a particular virtue of sculpture. It was, as Weinshenker points out, ‘often old, but not indestructible’, and she uses a glorious engraved frontispiece of 1638, showing a figure of Time gnawing at the arm of the Belvedere Torso, to indicate how little anyone was taken in by such a claim. All this makes salutary, although at times dispiriting, reading. It is clearly not Weinshenker’s aim to relaunch the ‘Paragone’ debates, and to avoid this she relentlessly pursues the negative angle, although occasionally mentioning what she refers to as the ‘reactive stance’ taken by sculptors like Pigalle and Falconet and such supporters of the plastic cause as the comte de Caylus. This stance has been well presented for us by Aline Magnien and so it was no doubt sufficient to remind us of it without undue reiteration.1 However, in pursuit of the theme, Weinshenker at one point seems to get the wrong end of the stick. She claims that the use of sculptures as motifs in fêtes galantes and history paintings, by reducing them in scale and sometimes cutting them off at the frame, demeans and marginalises sculpture. Labouring a determination to look ungenerous views in the face, she neglects to point out that this might have been a major weapon for the ‘reactive’ position. This interesting habit of using sculptures to add a layer to the visual narrative, seems, on the contrary, to be an acknowledgement by painters of the symbolic charge which their sculptor colleagues could instil in a work.

The fact that the author of the second book here under review takes an opposite view to Weinshenker on the desirability or even the possibility of writing a survey of ancien régime sculpture is probably a consequence of her concentrating on a more confined period, but one which saw the radical changes of the Revolution and the events leading up to it. Erika Naginski takes her cue from Jacques de Caso, who has stated that the multifaceted nature of the monuments erected in France between 1750 and 1800, puts them beyond the grasp of a traditional art history. A recent, and far from negligible, attempt by Alison West to write a survey of

48. Detail of the Mausoleum of the Dauphin and Dauphine, by Guillaume II Coustou. 1766–77.

Marble. (Cathedral of Saint-Etienne, Sens).

the sculpture of this period is dismissed by Naginski uncharitably, as if it were a laundry list or the contents of a Christmas stocking.2 Her alternative is a version as selective of the works of art which it treats – in a book with the title Sculpture and Enlightenment we may be surprised not to find a single sculpted image of Voltaire – as it is impressive in its range of reference to architectural and church history, to the writings of the philosophes, to later commentators on the Enlightenment and much besides. The style in which it is written does not make for easy reading. At times the ‘discursive parameters’, as the author calls them, come at one so thick and fast that one is left reeling, but many of the difficult passages have been found by this reviewer to be worth revisiting.

The book, embracing not just single sculptures but pantheons, mausolea and other commemorative structures, charts the shift in the primary focus of commemoration from royalty under the aegis of the church to Grands Hommes and heroic commoners in an increasingly secularised and ultimately Republican state. Besides an introduction and ‘coda’, it is made up of four case studies with many internal cross-links. In the first of the outer pair we are presented with the dwindling neglect and pre-Revolutionary depredations experienced by the royal tombs at Saint Denis. Then, as a corollary, Naginski goes on to discuss the response to this and to government ordnances on urban cemeteries of the Académie d’Architecture, which instigated competitions for royal memorials combined with fosses communes and halls of fame. The pendant to this is a study of the system of allegory devised by Quatremère de Quincy for the Panthéon between 1791 and 1794, which the author sees anticipated in an already demotic programme of religious sculpture for the building in its previous incarnation as Sainte-Geneviève. Sandwiched between

these are two more specifically sculptural studies. The first is on the tomb of the Dauphin

by Guillaume II Coustou in Sens Cathedral (Fig.48), the second on the marquis d’Angiviller’s series of Grands Hommes. In both of these the author describes a process in which the specifics of portraiture and individual commemoration were transcended and replaced by something more reflective and emblematic.

The process, in the case of the Dauphin’s tomb was masterminded less by the sculptor himself than by Diderot and Charles-Nicholas Cochin.

This section usefully explores, not only the preliminary musings of the philosophe and his intermediary, but also places the tomb in the context of other commemorations in different media of this lost hope of sage Bourbon rule.

The argument in the Grands Hommes section centres very much on Pierre Julien’s Poussin, the only statue in the series for which history had not provided a significant psychological moment. Around this Naginski uses her ‘discursive parameters’ to justify her claim that this statue is a key example of sculpture as polemic, an interpretation which dovetails almost too perfectly into the following section on the Panthéon, where the subject is a programme of sculptural imagery designed to frame ceremonies in honour of great men, while omitting all reference to individuals.

This book is a spectacularly sustained structure, combining some synthesis of other people’s work with a great deal of original research, but which suffers from occasional interpretative overload. This, and the gnomic style of writing come to an almost unbearable climax in the ‘coda’, a bewildering meditation on a crude revolutionary print.

1 A. Magnien: La Nature et l’Antique. La chair et le contour – Essai sur la sculpture française du XVIIIe siècle, Oxford 2004.

2 A. West: From Pigalle to Préault: Neoclassicism and the Sublime in French Sculpture 1760–1840, Cambridge 1998.

Persuasion and Propaganda: Monuments and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire. By Joan Coutu. 465 pp. incl. 161 b. & w. ills. (McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, Kingston, London and Ithaca, 2006), CA $60.

ISBN 978–0–7735–3130–7.

Reviewed by ANGUS TRUMBLE THE SUBJECT OF this dense book is a selection of eighteenth-century funerary monuments of various types which were either shipped to British possessions in the West Indies, North America or India and erected mostly in colonial churches (at times incompetently), or else set up at home in Britain for the purpose of alluding more or less explicitly to the Empire, to imperialists or to colonists, which are not necessarily the same thing. The author’s concern is with tensions arising from the intertwined imperial and national sensibilities that she argues evolved in Britain through

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the course of the eighteenth century, and the concrete residues of those same tensions both in Britain and in colonial settler societies.

Monuments, she argues, shed a powerful ray of light on Britain’s imperial project in its successive phases.

As its emphatic title attests, Persuasion and Propaganda builds on recent postcolonial studies, but the author sees as its primary historical focus the processes and socio-political meaning of commemoration itself.

While acknowledging the gulf that separates certain species of monument, her discussion of particular works cleaves to this theoretical framework, and its weaknesses mainly arise from that. She is careful to distinguish between dreary stock-in-trade wall plaques with urns, or saggy cartouches, or ponderous personifications of Faith, Hope and Charity that were churned out by English provincial workshops, inscribed appropriately, packed up, dispatched to Antigua, Jamaica, Bermuda or elsewhere, and major works of art such as Roubiliac’s monument to Lord Shannon in St Mary’s, Walton-on-Thames; Rysbrack’s bronze equestrian statue of King William III in Bristol; Wilton’s monument to Major-General James Wolfe or, indeed, Thomas Banks’s monument to General Sir Eyre Coote, both in Westminster Abbey.

But her treatment of such widely diverging types and styles of sculpture creates the impression that she regards the ‘imperial monument’ as a single eighteenth-century entity faute de mieux.

This is reinforced by the arrangement of the book. Part one, ‘Family Empires’, examines privately commissioned funerary monuments shipped to North America and the West Indies through the first half of the century, the products of the studios of Cheere, Scheemakers, Coade Manufactories and numerous others. Part two, ‘Official Empire’, focuses on monuments that were primarily products of the Seven Years’ War, including some ‘commissioned by Cobham and other members of the Grenville Cousinhood [at Stowe] insofar as they offer precedents and parallels to Pitt’s monument for General Wolfe’. Part three, ‘Empire Secured?’, looks at monuments in Canada and America that ‘are characteristic of the first phase of the new British Empire’, and therefore emphasise the benevolence of British rule, and the blessings of liberty under the Hanoverian crown. Part four, ‘Empire Renewed’, turns finally to monuments in the West Indies and India that postdate the American Revolution, and, Coutu argues, reflect a fundamentally stronger emphasis on the concept of empire, the better to shore up, preserve, reinforce and extend it, indeed to assert its moral necessity.

Except for the first, these sections combine to roll out a socio-political argument which bears down too heavily on the works of art it seeks to illuminate. On their own, each might have offered a less sprawling, more focused subject as regards the immediate circumstances in which the relevant clusters of works were created. And even though the wall monuments in West Indian churches in

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the second chapter of part one are mostly undistinguished, that subject is nevertheless fascinating. There is a handful of remarkable exceptions, including the handsome monuments to the Earl and Countess of Effingham and Mrs Parker, both by John Bacon the Elder in St Catherine’s Church, Spanish Town, and St James’s Church, Montego Bay, Jamaica, respectively, and to Mrs Ottley and Mr and Mrs Matthew Gregory, both by Joseph Wilton, the former in St John’s, Antigua, and the latter in the same St Catherine’s, Spanish Town.

Coutu emphasises the aspirational dimension of these commissions and the wealthy planters they commemorate, and seems surprised that many of these, even the lowliest wall plaques, are doggedly identical to exactly contemporaneous monuments in English parish churches, avoiding any apparently topical references to sugar cane, palm trees or slaves. She regards as strange or counter-intuitive the homesickness and nostalgia of colonist–settlers, especially those who were born in the West Indies or in other British possessions abroad. She underlines the proliferation of anti-colonial prejudice in England, plays down the existence despite this of somewhat embattled outposts of polite society, which did what they could to counteract bad colonial manners. And she sees the life of the transplanted eighteenthcentury colonial churches as a relatively unimportant context in which to examine the local tomb and other monuments. I am not sure that it is entirely fair to echo Jack P. Greene’s view (in respect of Barbados) that ‘the West Indians were notoriously irreligious’,1 and even if they were, the unavoidable eighteenth-century necessity of Christian burial remained. The determination of parent, relict or heir to offer as rich as possible a testimony to the worth of the departed seems not an unreasonable aim, not by any means confined to colonial societies, nor indeed necessarily dependent upon varying degrees of ‘churchiness’. And in the West Indies the processes of mouldering were evidently much accelerated by hurricanes, earthquakes, fire and flood. In theory, bigger monuments ought to last longer.

So by arguing so forcefully for the propagandist nature of tomb and other monuments in the colonial Americas and elsewhere, especially those that are almost embarrassingly modest in scale and execution, often tucked away in little rural churches, and to see them bathed so brightly in the cold light of imperial ambition, makes reading Coutu’s study something of an uphill slog. Fortunately, however, she gives us good cause to be sincerely thankful that John Flaxman’s proposal in 1799 to make a 230-foot colossal Britannia for Greenwich, presenting to the world ‘the noblest Monument of National Glory’, was never built.

1 J.P. Greene: ‘Changing Identity in the British Caribbean: Barbados as a Case Study’, in N. Canny and A. Pagden, eds.: Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, Princeton 1987, pp.225 and 251–52.

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Vincent van Gogh Drawings. Vol.4.

Arles, Saint-Rémy & Auvers-sur-Oise.

1888–1890. By Marije Vellekoop und Roelie Zwikker, with the assistance of Monique Hagemann. 2 vols. 595 pp. incl. 352 col. + 62 b. & w. ills. (Waanders, Amsterdam, 2007), €99. ISBN 978–0–85331–741–8.

All four volumes in the series are also published separately as a complete set (Lund Humphries, London, 2007), £225.

ISBN 978–0–85331–983–2.

Reviewed by HEINZ WIDAUER IN RECENT YEARS the drawings of Van Gogh have received more attention than ever before. This has been made possible by the pioneering research carried out by Sjraar van Heugten and Marije Vellekoop. Without their catalogues of the artist’s drawings at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, the exhibitions in 2005–06 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Van Gogh Museum, as well as the 2008 exhibition at the Albertina, Vienna, would have been impossible. While in New York the works on paper were for the first time the sole focus of an exhibition, the show at the Albertina sought to explore Van Gogh’s drawings in a wider sense, and thus also included paintings. Both catalogues included substantial contributions by both Van Heugten and Vellekoop and in both the latter presented many of the findings offered in the volumes here under review.

Included are, in chronological order, 398 sheets, the entries giving provenance as well as detailed technical information. The volumes cover the Museum’s drawings made by the artist in Arles, Saint-Rémy and Auvers-surOise between February 1888 and July 1890.

Not included are sketches in letters or on sheets that Van Gogh attached to his letters.

Three appendices present new acquisitions, new datings and very sketchy drawings, while there is also an extensive bibliography and an index and concordance which lists works in all four volumes. Vellekoop’s introduction outlines the period under consideration and explores the drawings’ motifs, style and function and how they influenced each other.

In a further contribution she describes the materials used by Van Gogh.

In Arles Van Gogh at last found his individual style. In 1888 he was in search of the light of the south and its legendary intensity of colours and he was also beguiled by the idea that he could find in this Provençal landscape similarities to the Japan he knew from prints. The high cost of canvas and paint, as well as the mistral, restricted his painting on canvas in Arles, and Van Gogh resorted to the medium of drawing and rediscovered the reed pen, which he had already tried in Nuenen, but now changed his style radically compared with his earlier Dutch drawings. In discussing this, Vellekoop concentrates exclusively on the Japanese colour woodcut as the artist’s source of inspiration. Although Vincent

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certainly followed the outlines of Japanese woodcuts (cat. no.325), a set of landscape drawings of the fields and farmhouses around Arles (nos.327–30) suggests that he was also inspired by prints by Félix Bracquemond after Hokusai’s Manga and by Japanese drawings which Siegfried Bing published from 1888 in his monthly magazine Le Japon Artistique. Van Gogh captures the rolling fields with pen lines drawn in various directions which, towards the horizon, end up in dotted areas and are often accentuated by the use of the reed pen. On a drawing from the second Montmajour series with a view of La Crau and the surrounding high plains (no.343), Van Gogh pushes the boundaries of naturalism beyond his Manga-inspired style of drawing. The sheet, with its seemingly decorative patterns, becomes almost abstract. Earlier he had already made a first series of the abbey of Montmajour (nos.335–37) for an exhibition of the Dutch Etching Society (Nederlandsche Etsclub) in Amsterdam. Vellekoop explores in depth the often faded, sometimes even illegible, condition of these drawings, which were carried out in aniline colours.

Walking tours to the high plateau of Montmajour alternated with trips to the fishing village of Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. It was not only the memory of his Dutch homeland, as Vellekoop and others have suggested, that attracted him to this place, but also Theo’s dealings with Claude Monet, who Vincent’s brother had visited in June 1888 in Giverny and from whom he had acquired paintings from Antibes, also on the Mediterranean coast. By then Vincent had become a much more confident draughtsman and by squaring up his drawings (nos.339 and 340) he was able to transfer the outlines of the landscape to canvas. There was a much closer interaction between the artist’s drawings and paintings, and the former were highly significant in his stylistic development, as was explored by Van Heugten in the catalogue for the Albertina exhibition.

Van Gogh occasionally neglected the practice of drawing, for example, when, in anticipation of Gauguin’s arrival, he decorated the ‘Yellow House’ with paintings. Gauguin’s probing inquiry into the proper use of colour and whether a painter should be led by nature or by his imagination contributed to Van Gogh’s nervous breakdown around Christmas 1888, his subsequent stay in hospital and his voluntary retreat into the asylum at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy.

At the asylum Van Gogh’s drawing style became more heterogeneous. Life in an institution obviously limited his views and he concentrated on motifs he had already explored in Arles: portraits, the field outside his window, the asylum grounds; in these sheets (nos.360–62), which form a counterpoint to his panoramic compositions, he concentrates on the detailed rendering of vegetation and his drawing style becomes more ornamental (no.366; Fig.49). In addition he made studies of peasants and harvesters in

. . . And then there was Sculpture. Jacob Epstein’s Formative Years 1880–1930. By Raquel Gilboa. 208 pp. incl. 200 b. & w. ills.

(Paul Holberton, London, 2009), £20. ISBN 978–1–903470–92–3.

Reviewed by RUPERT RICHARD ARROWSMITH

was certainly the most influential figure in British sculpture of the early twentieth century, there is a startling paucity of reliable published information about his early life and background. The existing biographies by Richard Buckle, June Rose and Stephen Gardiner frequently stray away from objective consideration of the evidence into mythology, and Epstein’s own autobiographical efforts are not only notoriously inconsistent, but often demonstrably wrong.1 In contrast, Raquel Gilboa’s new book sets out to combine a meticulously researched account of Epstein’s early life with critical analyses of his most significant works up until 1930.

Gilboa is a first-rate documentary investigator, and the study glitters with fascinating details gleaned from a wide range of archives and from direct correspondence with Epstein’s living descendants. She reveals, for example, that the sculptor was buried holding a first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; and is able to demonstrate that the accepted early biography by his first wife, Margaret Dunlop, was in fact a tissue of lies.

The background information Gilboa provides is similarly well researched, particularly with regard to Epstein’s upbringing. For the first time, the New York Jewish community that shaped his earliest attitudes is presented in three-dimensional, living detail. These New York chapters are undoubtedly the most revelatory in the book, and the sculptor emerges as a figure far more in touch with his ethnic roots than has previously been assumed.

The critical commentary on particular works by Epstein is regrettably not as successful. There are some innovative comments on Epstein’s Rodin-influenced student work at the Paris academies, but when the more revolutionary work of the early London years is considered, very little is brought to the table that has not been said before. Some groundbreaking work has been done recently on Epstein’s trans-cultural borrowings, notably from the British Museum’s Indian collections in the case of the 1907–09 Strand sculptures, and from identifiable West African pieces during his residence at Pett Level in Sussex between 1913 and 1916. Gilboa, however, keeps largely to the well-trodden paths of European influence mapped out more than two decades ago by writers on Epstein such as Evelyn Silber and Richard Cork, whose works are referenced heavily throughout the book.2 The familiar photograph of the famous Fang reliquary head from Epstein’s extensive African collection is dutifully inserted into a discussion of the Pett Level years, but no commentary is offered on how it may have ALTHOUGH JACOB EPSTEIN

49. Tree with ivy in the garden of the asylum, by Vincent van Gogh. 1889. Pencil, pen and reed pen, 62.3 by 47.1 cm. (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).

black chalk or in pencil on lightly coloured sketchbook paper in very expressionless lines (nos.399, 401–08 and 410–15). The SaintRémy drawings are characterised by curvy, flickering lines, which seem to express his desire to escape, not only physically but also psychologically, from his constricted life.

The memory of the north, the motifs of his early period and of the work of JeanFrançois Millet determined the picture titles and motifs of a series of paintings for which the aforementioned drawings were preparatory. All this fuelled a wish to return to the north and, following Theo’s advice, he put himself in the care of Dr Gachet in Auvers-sur-Oise.

It is fitting for the requirements of a collection catalogue that all works receive equal attention, and Vellekoop has acquitted herself of this task admirably. The technical examination of the drawings, especially with regard to the provenance of the paper used by the artist (for example, nos.475–80) is, moreover, an added bonus that one does not often encounter in catalogues of this kind.

It would perhaps have been preferable to have had all the drawings catalogued in one volume, and perhaps this could have been done by diminishing the size of some illustrations (for example, the studies from SaintRémy or the sketches on cardboard from Auvers, whose style does not change very much). Similar considerations obviously led to two different editions, with the one by Lund Humphries published as a complete set of all four volumes, which makes this publication something of a bibliographical anomaly. However, this does not diminish the fact that we have here a standard reference work that will be extremely useful for many years to come.

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affected the sculptor’s thinking. Scant attention is given also to when or where particular works that supposedly influenced Epstein may have been viewed. It is claimed, for example, that the sculptor’s 1909–10 Narcissus ‘echoes’ the 4th century BC ‘Marathon Boy’ (National Archaeological Museum, Athens) – a Greek bronze that was not actually discovered at the bottom of the Aegean until 1925.

One gets the feeling when reading this book that it would have worked better as a straight biography rather than the uncomfortable hybrid of life-writing and art criticism that it offers. Gilboa has genuine talent as a biographer, and nails down Epstein’s complex personality, his Jewish background and the character of his family life, far more intuitively and with greater scholarly flair than her predecessors. Accordingly, the rather arbitrary cut-off date of 1930 disappoints, as her insights into Epstein’s later life – another twenty-nine years – would have held considerable interest for the reader. As a critical work, on the other hand, the book is too indebted to Silber and Cork to represent an original approach, and the works of those two authorities still offer a more consistent introduction to Epstein’s œuvre.

1 R. Buckle: Jacob Epstein, Sculptor, London 1963; S. Gardiner: Epstein – Artist against the Establishment, London 1992; J. Rose: Daemons and Angels, a life of Jacob Epstein, London 2002; J. Epstein: Let there be Sculpture, London 1940; and A.L. Haskell, ed.: The Sculptor Speaks: Jacob Epstein to Arnold L. Haskell, London 1931.

2 See esp. E. Silber: The Sculpture of Epstein, Oxford 1986; and R. Cork: Art beyond the Gallery in Early Twentieth Century England, New Haven and London 1986.

In the Shadow of Yalta. Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989. By Piotr Piotrowski. 488 pp. incl. 224 b. & w. ills. (Reaktion Books Ltd., London, 2009), £29. ISBN 978–1–86189–438–0.

Reviewed by HENRY MEYRIC HUGHES

from the fall of the Berlin Wall, we are far from familiarising ourselves with the artistic production of what used to be known as Eastern Europe. In the early 1990s there was a flurry of activity when it looked as if Western narratives could be enlarged and what belonged together would inexorably grow together in the way that Willy Brandt had anticipated, with his ‘Ostpolitik’. The 1993 Venice Biennale offered a notable break with precedent, when its artistic director, Achille Bonito Oliva, placed special emphasis on the ‘Four Cardinal Points of Art’ and the ‘co-existence’ of the languages that had formed contemporary art. He posited a form of cultural nomadism that was ‘capable of overcoming distances and historical schemes by offering a place for condensation and for linguistic and cultural intertwining’.1 Since

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then, however, the market would appear to have gained the upper hand, and audiences for contemporary art may be more familiar with the production of China, the Middle East and India than with that of Eastern Europe, with its fractured terrain and conflicted histories.

Over the years, there has been an increase in the number of monographic, national or thematic exhibitions of work from Eastern Europe.2 However, many of these have necessarily been put together by Western curators and institutions with their scholarly and financial resources, and few attempts have been made to assess the art of the region in relation to its own history and the widely varied social and economic conditions under which it was produced. Piotr Piotrowski’s book, published in Polish four years ago and only now available in English, represents the most ambitious attempt to date to offer a comparative survey of art from the region and a key to understanding its fitful evolution.

The ‘Shadow of Yalta’ was, of course, the shadow cast by Great Power diplomacy of 1945, in which Polish national interests, as so often in the past, were sacrificed on the altar of expediency and the West capitulated to Soviet demands to move the frontiers of Eastern Europe to the West, with the consequent displacement of millions of civilians in both directions. The period up to 1948–49 represented one of deprivation, but also of opportunity, when any kind of future seemed possible, and certainly preferable to the present. After that, for forty years it became hard for those living on either side of the divide to make out any features on the opposing terrain.

The difficulties for any historian start with the problems of delimitation, caused not only by the boundary changes of 1945, but by the bewildering shifts in identity, attributable both to external pressures and to opportunistic readings of history. Piotrowski takes the line that the experience of Sovietisation up to the time of Stalin’s death in 1953 was the common unifying factor between the notably diverse cultures in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, and that ‘normal’ development was profoundly, although variously, affected by this negative factor. Even if he cannot bring himself to inscribe Socialist Realism and its hardcore derivatives into the artistic canon of the period (although museums in the region have already started to tackle this challenge), he leaves us in no doubt as to its lasting impact, in determining the way in which we should try to ‘read’ both the figurative art of the period and the conceptual neo-avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s.

Piotrowski’s achievement is to disinter the histories of various forms of modernism, postmodernism and the neo-avant-garde that flourished in Eastern Europe, to disentangle the fruitful misunderstandings on which some of them were based and to explain the originality that lay behind many of the apparent inconsistencies. He covers the space in Eastern Europe that was determined by Stalin’s interpretation of the Yalta Agreement (Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland),

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with the addition of Yugoslavia, which broke with the Soviet Union as early as 1948.

Bulgaria and Romania feature in his narrative at the relevant points towards the end, but not the Baltic States (despite their links with Poland) or Albania, which migrated to the Maoist cause. He omits Austria, although some comparison with occupied Germany in the early years might have been helpful.

Methodologically, Piotrowski confronts an unusual number of difficulties, starting with the asynchronic economic and cultural developments in different East European countries, the varying success of attempts at modernisation, the unpredictable outbreaks of popular protest against Communist rule and, in general, the asymmetry of relationships with neighbouring countries and foreign powers.

Added to this was the powerful ingredient of nationalism, which cut straight across ideological issues at critical moments and could be a force for good or ill, in shaping Eastern Europeans’ sense of identity. To all this might be added the shifting images that Westerners sought to project of themselves, as Paris, New York, London and Cologne/Düsseldorf, in turn, offered rival poles of attraction.

In mid-October 1945 a group of Hungarian art critics and the artist Lajos Kassák had published a manifesto, quoted by Piotrowski, that laid the foundation for the so-called European School: ‘Europe and the old European ideals lay in ruin. Until now, the term “European Ideal” meant a Western European ideal. From now on we must consider the entire Europe.

The New Europe could be built as a synthesis of the East and the West. In 1945 AD everyone must decide whether to participate in realizing the idea of “being a European”. We must create a vital European art, one that will describe a new relationship to life, to an individual, and to a society. That objective characterizes the activities of the European School’ (p.33). The realisation of this ideal was first delayed by forty years of Cold War and then, arguably, superseded by globalisation. Piotrowski’s account puts in place much of the material and many of the arguments that will be needed to construct this missing narrative, at a time when the mere recollection of it threatens to succumb to the impact of globalisation.

Piotrowski writes clearly and readably, even in translation, and his groundbreaking study is augmented with numerous illustrations, regrettably, only in black and white. It will be interesting to see how he gives concrete form to his ideas, when he takes over the direction of the National Museum in Warsaw this autumn.

1

A. Bonito Oliva: ‘Cardinal points of art’, in idem, ed.: Cardinal Points of Art. Theoretical Essays, Venice 1994, p.10.

2 Piotrowski cites, first and foremost, Europa, Europa, organised by Ryszard Stanisławski and Christoph Brockhaus at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle, Bonn (1994), and others such as Expressiv. Mitteleuropäische Kunst seit 1960, Vienna and Washington (1987–88) and Reduktivismus, Vienna (1987), as well as Der Riss im Raum, Berlin (1994) and Aspekte/Positionen. 50 Jahre Kunst aus Mitteleuropa, 1949–1999, Vienna (1999).

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The Buildings of England: Lancashire: North. By Clare Hartwell and Nikolaus Pevsner. 780 pp. incl. 123 col. + 65 b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press, London and New Haven, 2009), £29.99. ISBN 978–0–300–12667–9.

Reviewed by STEVEN BRINDLE

wrote, with winning modesty, that it would be the second editions of the Buildings of England county series that would be really valuable. His achievement was extraordinary and unrepeatable, but under the skilful direction of his successors, Bridget Cherry and Simon Bradley, the second editions are shaping up to be wonderful and indispensable books.

The latest to appear is Clare Hartwell’s exemplary and beautifully written revision of North Lancashire. The editors have generally defined Lancashire by its ancient boundaries, but it is melancholy for a Lancastrian to see that Furness and Cartmel have, nevertheless, been hived off to the forthcoming ‘Cumbria’ volume. Surprisingly, this concession to the 1970s butchery of the English counties appears to have been at Pevsner’s own behest.

The revised volumes series may have lost the pocket-sized compactness of the original editions, but they now have the character of comprehensive guides, rather than Pevsner’s brisk introductions. Hartwell has been at pains, though, to retain a good deal of Pevsner’s wording, in particular when introducing places. The descriptions are fuller, without Pevsner’s occasionally rather telegraphic quality, and there is more history to fill out the topography. The book benefits, too, from excellent new photographs, in colour throughout, by Bob Skingle of English Heritage.

The revised volume has benefited from many advances in scholarship since 1969. An example is the much fuller treatment of the county’s medieval monuments, such as Whalley Abbey (Fig.50) and Lancaster Castle, and of its remarkable but little-known medieval churches, such as Croston and Tunstall. Vernacular architecture benefits too: a wealth of fine and characterful manor- and farmhouses that Pevsner never found are here introduced to the reader.

It is a measure of Pevsner’s thoroughness and organisation that there are hardly any really first-rate buildings that he had not found. The revised volume provides excellent extended studies of the county’s great set-pieces, such as Hoghton Tower, a romantic-looking sixteenth-century hilltop mansion, or Scarisbrick Hall, A.W.N. Pugin’s astounding Gothic tour-de-force with his best-preserved domestic interiors, or Rufford Old Hall, with the finest timber-framed Great Hall in England.

The new volume provides a much more detailed treatment of the towns, and much fuller perambulations, benefiting from research by a generation of local historians.

NIKOLAUS PEVSNER ONCE

50. View of the outer gateway of Whalley Abbey, Clitheroe, Lancashire. c.1320. (Photograph by Bob Skingle; English Heritage Photographic Library).

The development of Southport and Blackpool as pre-eminent seaside resorts is very well presented. Pevsner had difficulty taking such festive monuments as Blackpool Tower and the Winter Gardens very seriously, and here they receive their due as the masterpieces of late-Victorian design that they are.

Hartwell provides a thorough treatment for many of the smaller towns like Accrington, Colne and Lytham St Annes, in much more detail than Pevsner managed. Occasionally she errs on the side of charity, as in the case of poor Blackburn, whose town centre is dominated by a gigantic 1960s shopping centre, which erased the town’s ancient market place.

The author remarks drily that ‘the cranes are hanging over Blackburn again [. . .] and it may not survive . . .’, without conveying just how ugly it is or the incoherence to which this ill-conceived development reduced the whole town centre.

Another valuable strand of the book is the much improved understanding of the work of provincial architects: the author has benefited, for example, from Geoff Brandwood’s research on the pre-eminent Lancaster-based practice of Paley & Austin. Other interesting local firms, like Briggs’s Wolstenholme & Thorneley of Blackburn and the more recent Building Design Partnership of Preston, are cases in point. Catholicism, too, is an important strand in Lancashire’s history and produced some of the county’s best twentieth-century architecture, such as F.X. Velarde’s marvellous Our Lady of Lourdes in Blackpool, or Weightman and Buller’s centrally planned St Mary, Leyland.

And of course, the buildings themselves have changed since 1969. The provincial Baroque façade of Emmott Hall near Colne and the handsome E-shaped manor house of Livesey Hall near Blackburn were both noted

by Pevsner and both have been destroyed.

There has been the rescue of the Music Room on Sun Street in Lancaster, a very ambitious garden pavilion whose main interior has a spectacular display of Baroque plasterwork by unknown Italian stuccadori of about 1740, one of the best in the country. In 1969 Pevsner was outraged by its neglected condition, writing ‘it is now so decayed that there can be no hope of saving it. It is a disgrace for a town like Lancaster’. Thanks to the Landmark Trust, this marvel has, nevertheless, been saved. One new building which Pevsner, surprisingly, did not notice was Keith Ingham’s Bus Station in Preston (1967), one of the best modern buildings in the county, and now doomed. Hartwell does not give a description, noting only that ‘the marvellously brutal bus station [. . .] is to be demolished’.

It is sad to see how little new architecture of distinction has been built since Pevsner’s time, and the author’s introduction to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries makes this very apparent. The fine ecclesiastical work of the firm of Francis Roberts, such as his beautiful modern Arts and Crafts church of St Christopher in Blackpool and MacCormac Jamieson Pritchard’s excellent Ruskin Library at Lancaster University, are rare exceptions. Just one really important new house can be mustered, the ‘Old Zoo’ at Langho, by Homa and Suma Farjadi of 1999–2000, with thatch-faced walls and a plethora of specially commissioned artworks.

Be that as it may, Lancashire has as rich and diverse an architectural heritage as any county in England, and this excellent volume is now the pre-eminent guide to it.

Blinky Palermo: Abstraction of an Era.

By Christine Mehring. 320 pp. incl. 64 col. + 98 b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press, London and New Haven, 2009), £35.

ISBN 978–0–300–12238–1.

Reviewed by ANNA LOVATT

death in 1977, Blinky Palermo has become a cult figure in the history of abstract painting, an ‘artist’s artist’ cited by figures as diverse as David Reed, Julian Schnabel and Rirkrit Tiravanija. After entering Joseph Beuys’s class at Die Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1964, the artist (previously known as Peter Heisterkamp) adopted the name of a Mafioso boxing promoter to whom he bore a passing physical resemblance. In the thirteen years that followed, Palermo adhered to painting while many of his contemporaries abandoned the medium in favour of process-based sculpture, installation, performance and conceptual art. Yet his loyalty to painting was

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neither aggressively reactionary nor blindly celebratory. Instead, Palermo pieced together a practice from the vestiges of the medium, seeking painting’s continuation into the fragmentary, the transitory and the everyday.

If Palermo’s painterly project seems unresolved, it is not just because his career was cut short by his death aged thirty-three, but because he dealt with the uncertain predicament of abstract painting at the end of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the artist’s truncated career and his reticence during his lifetime have left his work curiously open to interpretation, particularly where conservation and display are concerned. One of the principle arguments of Christine Mehring’s monograph is that a series of Palermo retrospectives since 1980 have misrepresented the artist’s œuvre by interspersing distinct groups of works: hanging one of his cloth pictures directly above a painted object, for instance.1 While Palermo’s student shows were installed in this way, evidence suggests he favoured a more structured mode of display as his career progressed. By dividing his production into four categories – objects, cloth pictures, wall paintings and metal pictures – Mehring contends that each of these painterly interventions (and interventions in the field of painting) should be considered separately and in depth. A similar approach characterised the most recent Palermo retrospective at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; and Mehring’s scholarly monograph offers a useful counterpart to the conversational format of the catalogue accompanying that exhibition.2 While the clear structure of Mehring’s book facilitates the close study of specific groups of work, it also lays bare the startling simplicity and repetitive logic of Palermo’s work – perhaps one reason why curators have felt compelled to juxtapose its various strands. Each chapter offers an exhaustive account of a particular group of works, contextualising it within a broader narrative of post-War art in Germany and the United States. The first chapter examines Palermo’s relationship with Beuys as the latter’s Meisterschüler and protégé, but also his sustained and subtle critic. Mehring convincingly argues that Palermo’s propped staffs and painted objects can be read as a critical engagement with the work of his one-time teacher and with broader legacies of Romanticism, Expressionism and the spiritual in post-War German art. If this chapter identifies Palermo’s art-historical precedents, the following section situates him firmly within the context of the 1960s, presenting the cloth paintings as literal snippets of the unabashed materialism that characterised West Germany’s ‘economic miracle’. In both chapters, Mehring deploys extensive historical research in order to locate Palermo within the burgeoning artistic centre of Düsseldorf and the rapidly expanding economy of post-War Germany. Although the poetic and suggestive aspects of Palermo’s work have been more productively explored in the work of other critics, the contextual

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framework Mehring provides here is comprehensive and highly informative.3 It proves more difficult, however, to relate Palermo’s understated, abstract wall paintings to the tumultuous political climate of the 1960s, as Mehring attempts to do in chapter three. While she reluctantly acknowledges that ‘arguing for a political meaning to the wall paintings would be a stretch’ (p.111), her proposal that ‘the wall paintings project through their banal qualities caution and scepticism about the success of critical art’, while their ‘phenomenological qualities [. . .] push toward critical reflection’, seems equally tenuous (p.132). One of the most striking (and perhaps troubling) aspects of Palermo’s precarious work is its refusal to bear the weight of political proselytising, despite its charged historical and geographical context.

Rather than relating Palermo to contemporaneous developments in conceptual art, activist art and institutional critique, Mehring might have done more to interrogate his withdrawal from these debates as an artistic strategy. Palermo’s unwillingness to provide an explanatory framework for his art either verbally or in writing chimes with Susan Sontag’s account of an ‘aesthetic of silence’ or Moira Roth’s more politicised idea of an ‘aesthetic of indifference’.4 These theorists seem more relevant to Palermo than Maurice Merleau-Ponty on phenomenology or Jacques Derrida on the parergon, both deployed in chapter three to limited effect.

An overriding theme of Mehring’s book is the often antagonistic dialogue between European cultural centres like Düsseldorf and the still-dominant, insular New York art world of the 1960s. In chapter four, she argues that the metal pictures Palermo produced in the last four years of his life formed part of a sustained engagement with American art and culture. The red, gold and black composition of his final work, To the people of N.Y.C., is shown to echo not only the German flag, but the Native American colour schemes he had seen in a book on Navajo sand paintings. In Palermo’s piece, this chromatic overdetermination is systematically deconstructed and reconfigured, as if to demonstrate the contingency of all associations. Finally, Mehring considers a series of fascinating and littleknown collaborations between Palermo and Gerhard Richter from the early 1970s. Like the exchanges with Beuys discussed at the beginning of the book, these works highlight the radical contingency of Palermo’s work, which was perhaps at its most effective when engaged in critical dialogue with the work of other artists.

Blinky Palermo: Abstraction of an Era is an important contribution to the expanding literature on the artist and an informative account of the cultural life of post-War Germany. Although Mehring’s documentary style lacks the imaginative spark of some other writing on Palermo, her comprehensive and beautifully illustrated monograph will be an important sourcebook for anyone interested in the work of this enigmatic artist.

the burlington magazine

1 Mehring cites the 2003 Palermo retrospective that travelled from the Museu d’art Contemporani de Barcelona to the Serpentine Gallery, London, as a recent example of this tendency; see G. Moure: exh. cat. Blinky Palermo, Barcelona 2003; reviewed by Lynne Cooke in this Magazine, 145 (2003), pp.528–29.

2 U. Groos, S. Kuper and V.J. Muller, eds.: exh. cat.

Palermo, Düsseldorf (Kunsthalle) 2009.

3 For an alternative approach to Palermo’s objects, see B. Fer: The Infinite Line, London and New Haven 2004.

4 See S. Sontag: ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’ (1967), in idem: Styles of Radical Will, New York 2002; and M. Roth: ‘The Aesthetic of Indifference’ (1977), in idem and J. Katz, eds.: Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, London 1998.

Publications Received Depth of Field. Relief sculpture in Renaissance Italy. Edited

by D. Cooper and M. Leino. 419 pp. incl. 65 col. + 66 b. & w. ills. (Peter Lang, Bern, 2007), £49. ISBN 978–3–03911–111–4.

In 2004–05 the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, held an exhibition of relief sculptures of the Italian Renaissance, organised in collaboration with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The exhibition focused on the innovative medium of relief sculptures by artists such as Donatello, Agostino di Duccio and their contemporaries. This volume presents eleven essays based on papers given at a related conference held at the Institute in March 2005. They concentrate in particular on the interaction between viewer and image and the manipulation of the boundary between the fictive space of the sculpture and the real space of the viewer.

This made reliefs a powerful devotional aide, while affordable plaster reproductions were a useful way of disseminating designs between workshops.

G A B R I EL B Y N G

Uit het goede hout gesneden: Middeleeuwse beelden uit de collectie Schoufour-Martin in Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam. By Marieke van Vlierden, with a contribution by Jeroen Giltaij. 192 pp. incl. 167 col. ills. (Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 2008), €28. ISBN 978–90–6918–227–8.

This useful catalogue, accompanying an exhibition at the museum in Rotterdam in the first half of 2008, comprises sixty-two entries about thirteenth- to early sixteenth-century European sculptures as well as an informative introduction on polychromy, functions and production centres, concentrating on the Netherlandish pieces in the collection. It also includes an essay on Jacques Schoufour, whose collection was donated to the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in two instalments in 2000 and 2003. His collection was by and large acquired in the last ten to fifteen years at the fairs in Maastricht and ’s-Hertogenbosch and from dealers in Amsterdam, London and Munich.

Most of the wood and stone carvings in the collection either originally formed part of multi-figured altarpieces, or were single figures usually placed on consoles attached to a wall or a pier in churches. Others, such as small-scale statuettes and reliefs, were objects for private devotion.

South Netherlandish sculpture is well represented by forty pieces, of which twenty-nine are ascribed to the production centres in Antwerp, Brussels and Mechelen.

Twelve pieces are of German origin, ascribed to Swabia, Franconia and the Tyrol, while two wood and one stone relief are thought to have been made in late fifteenthcentury France. In addition, two English alabaster reliefs depicting The Trinity and the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin have found their way into the collection.

With this donation the medieval sculpture collection in Rotterdam has nearly doubled and may now be compared with the similar, albeit more comprehensive, collections at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Museum Mayer van den Bergh in Antwerp and the Museum Catharijneconvent in Utrecht.

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Rosso: The Transient Form. Edited by Paola Mola. 182 pp. incl. 52 sepia + b. & w. ills. (Skira, Geneva and Milan, 2007), £27. ISBN 978–88–6130–397–3.

This is a catalogue of an exhibition held at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, in 2008. The exhibition, but not this English-language catalogue, was reviewed in this Magazine, 149 (2007), p.881. It is composed of a preface and two essays by Paola Mola, as well as discussions of works in twelve beautiful studio and exhibition photographs by Medardo Rosso, some of which are known, while others are published for the first time. Twenty-two detailed catalogue entries by Fabio Vittucci and an abbreviated biography complete the book.

The book’s preface is ambitious: the author states that her aim is to stabilise and define Rosso’s biographical contours and cleanse interpretations of his art.

Despite specialised studies, Rosso has not been the subject of a catalogue raisonné, nor does a reliable monograph on him exist. Such a catalogue, for which Rosso: The Transient Form acts as a preview, could bring order to the chaotic legacy left by the artist. Scholars have attempted to sort out this situation before now, but their endeavours never led to a systematic publication.

While the author’s efforts are commendable, they also carry significant responsibility. A catalogue raisonné, like this book, will determine how Rosso is seen in the world, defining that which is lasting about him. For such an important endeavour, it is perhaps paradoxical that the title of the book, which aims to capture the transient elements in Rosso’s art, stands in such marked contrast to her stated goal, that of highlighting the lack of coherence between certain and uncertain aspects of his legacy.

One example of this slippage is the issue of dates. In her essay, Mola makes the startling declaration that Rosso did not begin to use wax, his signature medium, from an early point in his career in Milan in the 1880s.

Instead, she locates this moment in Paris after 1895, when he made his final series of new subjects. ‘There is no work in wax documented prior to the year 1985 [sic] in any exhibition list, press article or photograph, in Rosso’s letters or those of his correspondents’.

An omission in documentation cannot be taken as proof that Rosso did not make waxes at an earlier date but then held them back from exhibition for years, as he did with his Madame X. To back her new date, Mola cites an 1895 review in which a journalist reports seeing the artist modelling with his ‘caresse puissante’ in wax. Today we know from studies of Rosso’s technique that this is not a true account of his process.

Physical evidence shows that the waxes were cast in gelatine moulds despite their hand-modelled appearance. Mola makes no comment on these technical findings. A contradictory voice is Julius Meier-Graefe’s dating of the wax Rieuse to 1890–91 after his visit to Rosso’s studio in 1904.

Elsewhere in the book the two authors admit that ‘Rosso confused us by writing one date on a photograph and another in the exhibition catalogue. It is as though time had little importance to him and the work, once out in the world, were a fluid thing [. . .] and even in the photographs one does not really know which version is which’. They also note that ‘by omission Rosso defended the things that were most important to him’, even destroying all letters in his possession at the end of his life. What authoritative weight, one must ask, can a ‘document’ ultimately have given the artist’s well-known creative practice of muddying the waters himself?

Phrased as a question, Mola’s assertion about dates could be further mined. It is crucial to reconsider exactly when Rosso began using wax, why this shift in medium and what the historical, art-historical and economic implications might be. Are we now to imagine that Rosso in 1895, upon discovering wax, then went back and reworked nearly all his previous subjects from 1883 onwards in that medium, as his material legacy in wax might suggest? Such an open approach to Rosso’s instabilities could produce provocative responses from multiple viewpoints, even

Lutyens and the Great War. By Tim Skelton and Gerald Gliddon, with a foreword by Gavin Stamp. 224 pp. incl. 350 col. + 34 b. & w. ills. (Frances Lincoln Ltd., London, 2008), £30. ISBN 978–0–7112–2878–8.

It seems almost perverse that Sir Edwin Lutyens’s work on more than sixty memorials, cemeteries and monuments to ‘The Glorious Dead’ for the Imperial War Graves Commission and other clients, spread across many cities, towns, villages and graveyards in Britain and abroad, has never before been the subject of a dedicated monograph.

Most of those works are distinguished, and many are works of genius – the incomparably beautiful Monchy British Cemetery; Bagneux British Cemetery; the Australian National War Memorial and the Military Cemetery at Villers-Bretonneaux; the Faubourg d’Amiens Memorial; the Anglo-French Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval; and the Irish National War Memorial in Dublin. Etaples, Daours, Feuchy, Favreuil, Marquion, Zuydcoote, Voormezeele: the list is as long as the hideous industrialised slaughter of 1914–18, which offered up mounds of corpses. In places only hundreds, but elsewhere tens, even hundreds of thousands were so commemorated by Lutyens and his collaborators. No doubt the genius of his highly versatile designs for radically different sites was the consistency with which he envisaged a new type of war cemetery consisting of the graves (naturally); a rectangular altar-cum-‘War Stone’ set on a course of three broad, shallow steps, suitably inscribed ‘THEIR NAME LIVETH FOREVER MORE’; a monumental cross; shelter buildings, gate-houses and approaches variously combined, terraced, enclosed, raised, sunk or otherwise set out and exquisitely planted on ever more ingenious axes. If Lutyens had never designed any other building, his work on war memorials and cemeteries would obviously identify him as one of the greatest architects and planners of his generation.

Tim Skelton and Gerald Gliddon’s book is lavishly illustrated, and intelligently and clearly written. They trace Lutyens’s thinking from the pre-War domestic architecture through public commissions such as the Rand Regiment’s Memorial in Johannesburg, Lutyens’s first war monument, and the profound impact of the death of no fewer than five of his nephews at Gallipoli, Ypres and elsewhere. They cover in detail the emergence of a broad consensus in relation to Lutyens’s concept of the ‘War Stone’, and the potentially explosive issue of the uniform design of headstones that would nevertheless accommodate sectarian and, indeed, inter-faith sensitivities.

(He plucked up the courage to raise his idea with Archbishop Randall Davidson over lunch at the Athenaeum. His Grace was cautious but positive, noting that he could certainly ‘perform the Sacrament on such a stone’.) In succeeding chapters the authors set out the design history of the Cenotaphs in Whitehall and Southampton; the Spalding War Memorial; ‘civic’ memorials in England, such as those of Manchester, Leicester, Rochdale, Northampton and many others; humbler crosses for English village greens; and the great and culminating works in France and throughout the Empire. What is so moving about this body of work is not merely the brilliance of each broad concept but the exquisiteness of even the most modest junction of stone and brick, step and plinth, bench, alcove and grille, even the tool houses, many of which are miniature masterpieces.

The book contains a very useful catalogue of the entire corpus of cemeteries and memorials, a concluding chapter on ‘the unbuilts’ – the Great Yarmouth War Memorial deserves to be – and helpful instructions for visitors wishing to undertake the necessary pilgrimage by car through northern France and Flanders’ Fields.

Tennyson Transformed: Alfred Lord Tennyson and Visual Culture. By Jim Cheshire, Colin Ford, John Lord, Leonée Ormond, Ben Stoker and Julia Thomas. 160 pp. incl. 100 col. + 30 b. & w. ills. (Lund Humphries, Farnham, in association with Lincolnshire County Council, 2009), £40. ISBN 978–1–84822–003–4.

This book catalogues an exhibition held this year, marking the two-hundredth anniversary of Tennyson’s birth, at The Collection in Lincoln, home of the Tennyson Research Centre and close to his birthplace in the county. The texts preface annotated entries, all with reproductions, many in colour. A group of essays by specialists follow a valuable introduction. ‘Tennyson and Victorian Culture’, by the editor, Jim Cheshire, surveys the rapidly expanding art market and increasing demand for book illustration at both ‘high art’ and popular levels in the nineteenth century. Tennyson, Poet Laureate from 1850, was to benefit spectacularly from this situation.

Julia Thomas writes on Tennyson’s illustrators; Colin Ford on Tennysonian photography, notably that of Julia Margaret Cameron; Ben Stoker on the informal portraits; John Lord on the sculpted portraits, including those by Woolner and Watts, which confirmed Tennyson as an archetypal Victorian patriarch. Leonée Ormond, writing on ‘Tennyson and the Artists’ – chiefly the Pre-Raphaelites, for whom Tennyson was a hero, Atkinson Grimshaw and, later, J.W. Waterhouse – makes the useful point that, in depicting some less intellectually demanding poems, they helped to create the early twentieth-century perception of him as a ‘poet of stories’.

Illustrations to Tennyson poured forth from the 1850s: the Poems of 1857 were famously brought out by Moxon; there was Daniel Maclise with The Princess in 1859; Arthur Hughes with Enoch Arden in 1865; and Gustave Doré with Idylls of the King in 1866, 1867 and 1868. These works, together with previously unpublished archival material, are central to the book’s catalogue. The sequence here of Doré’s softly shadowed effects on India paper (1877; cat. nos.32 and 34) and the energetic watercolours by Edward Lear (c.1880; nos.36 and 37) evokes the considerable variety of interpretations and media that Tennyson’s imagery could set in motion.

Tennyson’s attitude to illustrators, on the other hand, was notoriously fixed. Sensitive to the slightest distortion of his words, he was apt to challenge everything.

In her interesting essay, Julia Thomas points to two contemporaries who seem to have realised that the best illustrations led independent lives which paralleled the verse rather than identified with it. George Somes Layard, author of a book on the Moxon Tennyson, concluded that its value was as ‘a bundle of splendid incongruities’. Ruskin, Thomas also suggests, was right to maintain, in a letter to Tennyson of July 1857, that a good illustration is ‘always another poem’.

Whether or not Tennyson’s illustrators grasped this point for themselves, thankfully for us they went their own ways. Holman Hunt, Millais and Rossetti all pushed their individualities. The persona of the Lady of Shalott, prominent in this book and close to Tennyson’s heart, produced Hunt’s hypnotically charged woodcut design of c.1857 (no.15) and culminated in his great rendition (1886–1905) now in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hertford CT. The close-up detail of Waterhouse’s Lady, from his sketch for a full-length portrayal (1891–93; Falmouth Art Gallery; no.43; final version, 1894; Leeds City Art Gallery; no.42) is, it must be said, a riveting choice for the book’s dust jacket.

Attractively produced, Tennyson Transformed is welcome as a lively tribute in a year of otherwise somewhat underplayed national commemoration of Tennyson’s bicentenary. For all his great fame in his lifetime, Tennyson looked at the future with some uncertainty. The thought he gave to his Ulysses, ‘all experience is an arch wherethrough/Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades/For ever and for ever when I move’, may have carried its own premonitory ring for him. As Victorian culture continues to fascinate, this book will help to speed him into the twenty-first century.

A N G U S T R U M BL E

J O H N S W E E T M AN

conflicting ones, initiating dialogue and collaboration among Rosso scholars. Indeed, the vitality of this book will be judged by its ability to generate further thinking on this fascinating and complex artist.

S H A R ON H E C K E R

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Non-Western art and architecture Arts of the City Victorious: Islamic Art and Architecture in Fatimid North Africa and Egypt. By Jonathan M. Bloom. 236 pp. incl. 95 col. + 70 b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press, in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies, New Haven and London, 2007), £45. ISBN 978–0–300–13542–8.

Between 909 and 1171, the Fatimid dynasty ruled one of the most important political entities in Islamic history. Their state was founded in North Africa, with its capital at the new port of Mahdiyyah in what is now Tunisia, but in 969 the conquest of Egypt by a Fatimid army moved their State’s centre of gravity westward.

Cairo was founded as the new capital, and the caliph came from Tunisia to take up residence there. With power in Egypt came control of the holy places in Mecca and Medina, and much of Syria was ruled by Fatimid governors for long periods.

The Fatimids were Isma’ili Shi’ites. Their claim to power was based on their descent, via the Imam Isma’il, from Fatimah, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, and her husband, Ali ibn Abi Talib, who, Shi’ites believe, was Muhammad’s chosen successor.

The succession proceeded in an orderly fashion until 1094, when Prince Nizar, the elder son of the previous caliph, was excluded from power. A second succession crisis occurred in 1130, and from these two internal conflicts arose the Nizari Isma’ilis, who are led by the Aga Khan, and the lesser-known Bohras. In addition, the Druze sect broke away from the Isma’ili mainstream under the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim (reigned 996–1021).

These dissensions among the Fatimid elite undermined their power, as did their loss of territory to their enemies, especially the Crusaders, and the failure of most of their subjects to convert to the Isma’ili form of Islam. The caliphs were sidelined by their viziers, and in 1169, this role was taken by the Sunni hero Salah al-Din (Saladdin), who deposed the last caliph two years later.

This book was commissioned by the Nizari Isma’ilis to commemorate the artistic exploits of their predecessors. Their artistic heritage is worth commemorating for its own sake: it ranges from the imposing city walls and gates of Cairo to a series of delicately carved rock crystal ewers. It is also worth investigating for its broader historical importance: it marks the move of the centre of Islamic culture from Iraq, where the Abbasid dynasty was in decline, to the Mediterranean, where, for much of the tenth century, the Fatimids vied with the Macedonian emperors in Constantinople and the Umayyad caliphs in Spain to commission works of appropriate magnificence. They helped to restore the Mediterranean’s role as a region of artistic dynamism, mixing the Classical heritage with ideas brought from Iraq and making innovations of their own.

Jonathan Bloom has provided a fluent and straightforward history of this artistic phenomenon, combining historical data with the visual evidence in an assured manner not found in earlier accounts. An introduction is followed by five chapters based on broad regional and historical periods: one covers North Africa from 909, two cover architecture and the decorative arts in Egypt from 969, and two more deal with art and architecture in Egypt from the 1060s. The seventh and last chapter deals with ‘The Legacies of Fatimid Art’. Here Bloom is cautious about the Fatimids’ direct contribution to developments in Norman Sicily and other parts of Europe, emphasising the mediating role of their vassals in North Africa.

Caution is also seen in Bloom’s approach to the meaning of Fatimid art. The texts that explain what the Fatimids thought their art meant are limited in number, and Bloom has avoided the ill-informed musings that have undermined some earlier studies. None of these, though, covered this ground in the same comprehensive manner, and, as an authoritative synthetic study of the art and architecture of a single Islamic political entity in the Middle Ages, this book is a great rarity.

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The Majesty of Mughal Decoration: the art and architecture of Islamic India. By George Michell. 287 pp. incl. 358 col. ills. (Thames & Hudson, London, 2007), £35.

ISBN 978–0–500–513774.

Together with Ottoman Turkey and Safavid Persia, Mughal India is one of the great Islamic empires of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a dynamic period of exchange and encounter across Eurasia and the Indian Ocean. The Mughals dominated South Asia in this period, their visual arts drawing upon their Central Asian heritage, the arts of neighbouring Persia and the rich, varied traditions of India itself. George Michell is a well-known authority on the art and architecture of India and the Islamic world and the author of numerous publications in these fields over the past thirty years.

There are now many good books and exhibition catalogues on Mughal arts and visual culture, but this book adopts a different approach by emphasising the stylistic and aesthetic coherence that developed across a range of media over three centuries in northern India. Introductory chapters outline the history of Mughal India, the imperial patronage of the arts, the sources for design and the materials used. This is followed by the details of one hundred objects, all beautifully illustrated, to explore Mughal design. These objects include inlaid or relief stonework, illumination and calligraphy, miniature painting, furniture, carpets, textiles, ceramic and glass, gems and jewellery, jade, ivory, coins, metalwork, arms and armour. However, instead of grouping the objects in these categories, this visually stunning book examines them via five design themes: geometry, arabesques, plants, animals and birds. Many are illustrated by several colour reproductions; the complete catalogue of objects is included in an appendix. The popular perception of Islamic art as stressing the abstract and geometric over the naturalistic is challenged by the Mughals’ delight in floral decoration, from the ornate coloured pietra dura inlay of the Taj Mahal to the bright printed cotton hangings, the exquisitely detailed borders of a miniature portrait and the petals of the emperor’s own pure white jade wine cup.

with its Asian neighbours than with the anti-Fascist policies of the West. Akira Takagishi traces the issue of bridging East and West through the more individual circumstances of Yashiro Yukio, the scholar who founded the Yamato Bunkakan museum in Japan.

Saloni Mathur and Kavita Sing next identify how three major Indian religious organisations are adapting the museum format to the task of inculcating devotees with a sense of spiritual community – a strategy that the authors suggest requires an enlarged conception of the museum. And Gao Shiming urges Chinese artists to replace Party ideology with a personal ideology of everyday life, ‘a minimal Utopia’, as the most promising subject for contemporary art.

The third front comprises two parallel topics: Asian traditions in a global art market and Asian artists living and working outside their country of origin. Gennifer Weisenfeld shows how the first has led contemporary Japanese artists to experimentally recombine elements drawn from Japan’s own subcultures past and present.

And Alexandra Monroe has curated a major exhibition that explores modern American artists’ responses to Asian art and philosophy. In regard to the second topic, Melissa Chiu suggests expanding Chinese art history to include Chinese artists living abroad, given their distinctive interest in traditional cultural signifiers.

But which trends are driving contemporary Asian art?

The answer, John Clark writes in the concluding essay, rests with neither the artists nor the viewing public, but with the curators who select and display the works in international exhibitions. This little-understood community is defining the canon for the future and, Clark proposes, may be ‘one of the places where the “Asian modern” resides’.

The book represents the proceedings of a conference held in 2006 at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown MA. A L FR E D H A FT

Russian art

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Asian Art History in the Twenty-first Century. Edited by Vishakha N. Desai. 257 pp. incl. 73 b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, and Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown MA, 2008), £18. ISBN 978–0–300–12553–5.

This informative and thought-provoking group of essays reveals a cultural and scholarly landscape unfolding in new directions. As Vishakha Desai explains in the introduction, the fourteen contributors to the volume aimed for a more ‘inclusive, heterodox, and interrogative’ art history. On that basis they have opened Asian art to study along three thematic fronts.

Concise surveys first examine how the accepted regional art histories were formulated, and point to where younger researchers are heading in response. According to Frederic Asher, Indian art historians have begun to generate taxonomic systems based on passages in Indian philosophical texts. Nancy Steinhardt sees historians of Chinese architecture turning their attention from elite to vernacular buildings and to structures in minority areas. And Jerome Silbergeld identifies a generation of researchers ‘given to nuance and complexity’, who have found the Song-to-Yuan development in Chinese inklandscape painting to be not a revolution, as long taught, but a transition involving an array of social interactions.

In the same context, Yukio Lippit’s understanding of Japanese monastic culture and calligraphic inscriptions uncovers the socio-religious tensions behind medieval Zen portraiture, centring on the question of spiritual legitimacy and inheritance. And Kaja McGowan’s study of Balinese textiles provides an alternative view of combined Western and Indonesian pictorial spatial systems.

The second front marks the relationship between art and ideology. Rana Mitter observes that in post-Mao China, public art still serves the aims of politics, but it has begun to explore topics formerly suppressed under Mao, particularly the Nationalists’ resistance to Japanese invasion, a historical narrative that aligns China less

the burlington magazine

Vitebsk: The Life of Art. By Aleksandra Shatskikh. 391 pp. incl. 20 col. + 233 b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2008), £30. ISBN 978–0–300–10108–9.

Vitebsk has long been relegated to the footnotes of early twentieth-century Russian art, receiving a passing mention as the birthplace of Chagall and a brief nod in the accounts of the flowering of artistic activity following the 1917 October Revolution. Aleksandra Shatskikh’s book is a long overdue investigation into the cultural life of this important provincial Russian town, providing a full historical picture of the art schools, exhibitions and celebrations that occurred here between 1918 and 1922.

The concentration on a single location allows the reader to understand how people influenced each other in a relatively small community, and how exhibitions and publications produced in Vitebsk contributed to a larger national, and even international, artistic dialogue.

The most valuable sections of the book are on the Vitebsk People’s Art School and the artists’ collective Unovis. Shatskikh corrects long accepted rumours about the struggle for power between Chagall and Malevich at the Vitebsk People’s Art School, and extends her investigation of this school from the work of Chagall and Malevich to look at the continued presence of realism evident in the teaching and work of Robert Falk, who moved to Vitebsk in 1921. The book also provides insight into the artistic development of El Lissitzky, from a follower of Chagall to a follower of Malevich, and into his early typographic work on the publication Unovis Miscellany No.1. The final two sections further enrich the discussion of the cultural life of Vitebsk by looking at the performing arts and the influence of this small town on the cultural philosophy of Mikhail Bakhtin.

Illustrated with a wealth of archival photographs, Vitebsk is the product of an enormous amount of primary research. Shatskikh’s book is a valuable source for the young scholar, providing an excellent – and enticing – platform for further research.

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Exhibitions Paul Sandby Nottingham, Edinburgh and London

by RICHARD GREEN

of Birmingham’s commemoration earlier this year of the 150th anniversary of David Cox’s death comes Nottingham’s marking of the bicentenary of that of Paul Sandby, one of its own famous sons.

An artist of an earlier generation, Sandby was described by an obituarist as ‘the father of modern landscape painting in water-colours’ and has been repeatedly characterised in similar terms since then. The exhibition Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain, having originated at Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery (where it was seen by this reviewer), opens this month at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (7th November to 7th February), before travelling to the Royal Academy of Arts, London – of which Paul and his elder brother, Thomas, were founder members. It presents the full range of Sandby’s works including those associated with mapmaking, graphic satires, views in aquatint (of which he was a pioneer exponent in this country) and rare paintings in oils as well as the topographical works in watercolour or bodycolour for which he is best known.

Through its substantial catalogue, the show brings stimulating new perspectives to bear upon Sandby, placing him in a range of professional and ideological contexts.1 Rigorously selected by John Bonehill, the exhibition comprises sizeable groups of works from the Royal Library, Windsor, the British Museum, London, and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, as well as from Nottingham’s own collection, and loans from other British sources. Only a handful of items have been borrowed from private owners apart from the Royal Collection, but these include three magnificent views of Luton Park, Bedfordshire – in superb condition, never having previously been mounted, framed and hung, and hitherto unpublished – which are highlights of the show (cat. nos.89–91; Fig.51).

The exhibits (mostly by Paul, with some by Thomas, as well as collaborations) are catalogued in four sections, followed almost exactly by the Nottingham hang. Only the first, ‘Picture-making’, has precise chronological significance, comprising essentially two groups of Sandby’s earliest works – those connected with his employment in Edinburgh as draughtsman to the Military Survey of North Britain, in the years 1747–51 following the Battle of Culloden, and his etched plates, published in 1753–54, viciously lampooning Hogarth’s Analysis of beauty (nos.21–28).

Many will be surprised by these little-known

H A RD O N T H E H E E L S

51. View in Luton Park, by Paul Sandby. 1765. Pen, bodycolour and watercolour over graphite, 51 by 74 cm.

(Private collection, Mount Stuart; exh. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh).

aspects of Sandby’s work, in the latter case particularly by the crudity of the imagery – scabrous and even scatological – in relation to the refinement of technique. Geoff Quilly’s exemplary commentary in the catalogue is essential to a full understanding of these prints, and perhaps rather more of this than the concise summary on the wall label could be made accessible within the exhibition to visitors in Edinburgh and London.

Introducing the second section, ‘Roads and Street Life’, Bonehill conveys a vivid image of mid-eighteenth-century society on the move, exploiting new turnpike routes and other major improvements in travel and transport. Sandby himself will have spent much of his life on the road, visiting the country seats of his patrons, and making tours in search of picturesque subject-matter.

Although faded, the large watercolour Morning

– view on the road near the Bayswater turnpike (1790; no.48), perfectly exemplifies this theme, showing thirty-three figures going about their business outside the Swan Inn near Sandby’s house in St George’s Row. Equally at home here are Sandby’s studies of Edinburgh street life (nos.31 and 32) and his etchings Twelve London cries done from the life, part 1st (1760), together with watercolour designs for further projected sets of this kind (nos.35–47). It was perhaps stretching a point to place here the two very large, unfinished watercolour views by Paul and Thomas Sandby looking east and west from the gardens of Somerset House (nos.53 and 54), but their inclusion usefully raises the question of the extent to which Paul and Thomas were influenced by Canaletto, particularly in their Windsor views.2 The two prospects from Somerset House are inconceivable without 52. The North Terrace, Windsor Castle, looking west, by Paul Sandby. c.1765.

Bodycolour over graphite, 37.9 by 54.5 cm. (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; exh. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh).

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53. A lady painting, by Paul Sandby. c.1760s.

Watercolour over graphite, 19.5 by 15.2 cm. (Royal Collection, London; exh. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh).

the precedent of Canaletto’s large paintings of virtually the same subjects, which were surely known to the Sandbys in the original as part of Consul Smith’s collection of the artist’s work, purchased by George III in 1762.3 The famous views of Windsor, produced mostly in the 1760s and represented in the subsequent ‘Antiquities’ section of the exhibition, are central to the career of Paul Sandby, even though he collaborated with Thomas on some of them. In this instance our guide is Matthew Craske, who convincingly demonstrates that while Sandby, in these views, pays lip-service to notions of Windsor Castle as emblematic of lofty ideals such as political liberty, he gently subverts them by introducing burlesque or low-life figures, often as a contrast to elegant, promenading visitors: in the example illustrated here, to borrow Craske’s words, a drunk dozes off the day’s indulgences – beneath a Canalettesque sky (no.57; Fig.52).

Sandby obviously took delight in providing his staffage, which, in its humour and variety, is one of the most original and engaging features of his work.

The prospects of Windsor Great Park are catalogued, and at Nottingham were shown separately, taking their place in a final ‘Estates’ section, alongside examples of the countryestate views for which Sandby was much sought after by the aristocracy and landed gentry. In these he often conveyed a sense of immense space and distance, reflecting his beginnings in the world of map-making, while obviously flattering his patrons’ proprietorial expectations (nos.87 and 88). In the three magisterial views of Luton Park, painted for the 3rd Earl of Bute in or around 1765, Sandby’s pictorial approach was the opposite, for he closes off the distance and focuses on the magnificent beech trees themselves.

However, as Bonehill points out, the imagery

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of long-lived hardwood trees, such as beech, elm and oak, could equally allude to a great family’s occupancy of a landscape through successive generations.

Although underplayed in the exhibition, Sandby’s activity as a drawing master was an important aspect of his career, and one often closely coupled with commissions for views of country seats. It is introduced, under ‘Antiquities’, by the well-known work in bodycolour of Roslin Castle, Midlothian (c.1780; no.70), which depicts, in the foreground, the amateur artist Lady Frances Scott, almost certainly a pupil of Sandby’s,4 sketching with the aid of a camera obscura. Lady Elizabeth Harcourt, the subject of a previously unexhibited and unpublished study of 1759 showing her sewing (no.67), was definitely a pupil of Sandby, along with her brothers and sister and her father, who commissioned two oil paintings of Nuneham c.1760 (nos.84 and 85).5 We may assume that the subject of A lady painting was too, although her identity is not known (no.66, catalogued as ‘A lady drawing’; Fig.53). This fascinating watercolour is highly informative about the young sitter’s painting table, with colours in shells laid out on sliding trays, suggesting that the scene is set in her home rather than in Sandby’s studio.

What has not previously been noted is that the view glimpsed through the window is across the Thames to Lambeth Palace, with the Morton’s Tower gatehouse seen sideways-on and, to the right of it, the tower of St Mary’s church. This might have been inserted for associational reasons, but, if interpreted literally, would locate the subject’s house on Millbank, in either case providing a clue to her identity.

This absorbing exhibition, supported by its impressive catalogue offering a wealth of information, interpretation and insight, constitutes a milestone by fully defining Paul Sandby’s important position in British eighteenth-century culture. At the same time it reveals an artist who is considerably more diverse and surprising than the one we thought we knew.

1 Catalogue: Paul Sandby: Picturing Britain. Edited by John Bonehill and Stephen Daniels, with contributions

by Nicholas Alfrey, Matthew Craske, Felicity Myrone, Martin Postle, Geoff Quilley and Sarah Skinner. 248 pp. incl. 197 col. ills. (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2009), £35 (HB). ISBN 978–1–905711–48–2; £19.95 (PB). ISBN 978–1–905711–49–9. Certain of its illustrations are unfortunately marred by excessive contrast and a tendency to blackness, not least those of the Luton Park watercolours, one of which is also reproduced on the front cover; it is hoped this might be rectified in any reprinting. The publication reproduces but does not formally catalogue Francis Cotes’s famous portrait of Paul Sandby (1761; Tate, London), which is included in all three showings.

2 These are excluded from the Edinburgh showing.

There, too, no.63, Thomas Sandby’s large, early prospect, Nottingham Market Square from the East, is being replaced by a comparable view of Edinburgh from the collection of the National Gallery of Scotland (possibly both will be shown in London).

3 Through his pupil and friend the Hon. Charles Greville, Paul Sandby will undoubtedly also have

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known Canaletto’s five views of Warwick Castle, commissioned in 1752 by the former’s father, Earl Brooke. At some stage he received from the Greville family two of Canaletto’s drawings of the Castle; see C. Beddington: exh. cat. Canaletto in England, New Haven (Yale Center for British Art) and London (Dulwich Picture Gallery) 2006, pp.149–51, nos.47 and 48.

4 Lady Frances Scott, later Lady Douglas (1750–1817), noted as an artist by Horace Walpole, is represented by four landscape drawings in the Oppé collection at Tate, London. She was the sixth and posthumous child of Francis Scott, Earl of Dalkeith, the eldest son of the 2nd Duke of Buccleuch. Sandby had executed drawings of Drumlanrig, including no.14, for the Duke during his early years in Scotland, which enhances the probability that Lady Frances was his pupil. She has been erroneously referred to in recent literature as Lady Scott.

5 Regrettably, these will be seen only in London, while nos.68 and 69, etchings of Stanton Harcourt made in 1763 by her brother, Viscount Nuneham, one of them after Paul Sandby, are not being shown at all.

Basil Beattie; Ian McKeever London

by ALEXANDER ADAMS

parallel displays by two British artists at the peak of their abilities.

Although painters of nominally abstract work, Basil Beattie (b.1935) and Ian McKeever (b.1946) have flexible approaches, which incorporate semi-recognisable forms into non-representational compositions.

The two painters use a variety of media to explore ideas and both have made distinctive drawings and prints. In outlook they share a drive to purify and simplify but paint in nuanced ways. They describe forms and yet allow paint to remain true to its essential nature. Beattie likes paint thick and allows brushmarks to be visible. McKeever layers and stains thin washes. Beattie’s legible forms have tended to be man-made (ziggurats, towers, steps and corridors), while McKeever’s

THIS AUTUMN SAW

54. In the middle of nowhere, by Basil Beattie. 2009. Oil and wax on canvas, 213 by 198 cm. (Exh. Purdy Hicks Gallery, London).

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are emphatically organic. McKeever is the painter of natural forms and processes, both cosmic and microscopic, whereas Beattie’s imagery is concrete and in the scale of Man. The viewer feels Beattie’s forms are graspable and McKeever’s are intangible (or at least fugitive and out of reach).

Over the years Beattie has gained admiration for his trenchant defence of painting.

During his time at Goldsmiths’ College, in the heyday of conceptual and multi-media art, he taught many of the leading painters of the younger generation of the 1980s and 1990s, including Jason Martin, Angela de la Cruz and Alexis Harding. Now a Royal Academician and retired from teaching, Beattie admits that the urge to paint gets stronger as age encroaches. Meditating upon the passing of time, he has reached back to childhood memories of the railways in Yorkshire where his father worked as a signalman.

In the Janus series (Fig.54) exhibited at Purdy Hicks, London (closed 3rd October), Beattie has developed a format of three (occasionally four) arched lozenges, which the artist has referred to as ‘windows’ and ‘frames’, stacked vertically. These frames are often outlined in graphite or oilstick (a medium new for the painter) on bare canvas. Imagery inside the arches varies between pure colour and rudimentary landscapes, running the gamut of abstraction to representation. Blocks of unmodulated paint recall Beattie’s older work, which was close to colour field painting, and shapes have the directness of Adolph Gottlieb’s pictograms. In this respect, Beattie’s transition away from strict abstraction is similar to Philip Guston’s. There are no blank areas in the paintings; everything has weight and significance. The landscapes are mostly nocturnal or at least overcast. Tracks like rails or roads disappear to distant horizons.

Coloration is generally sombre: ochres, blacks, whites and dark reds, all familiar from Beattie’s earlier series. His distinctive use of oil paint blended with beeswax to achieve lush impasto effects, which he then draws into with palette knives to reveal the underpainting, is perfectly suited to these hefty, simple pictographs.

Drawings by Beattie at Eagle Gallery, London (closed 16th October), complement the paintings at Purdy Hicks. One panoramic drawing spans five metres. From converging track lines a towergate juts above a horizon under dense cloud. Beattie has not denied the image’s association with the entrance to Auschwitz but the symbol could equally refer to the Menin Gate in Ypres. The simplicity of his compositions allows for a rich multivalency. Arches resemble driving mirrors and also inverted bowls. When the area above the horizontal line is scrubbed roughly, the spaces are like snow globes. The painting The black of beyond (2009) is a vision of catastrophe: black sky and blasted earth converge around a glimmering horizon. It is what the last human being alive would see after a natural disaster.

Beattie’s late Black Period has arrived, chilling and exhilarating.

55. Temple painting, by Ian McKeever. 2005–06. Oil and acrylic on cotton duck, 270 by 420 cm. (Exh. Kings Place Gallery, London).

In the gleaming atrium of Kings Place Gallery, London (closed 17th October), Ian McKeever’s delicately tinted and boldly configured Temple (Fig.55) and Assembly paintings enveloped the spectators. McKeever works on canvases over long periods, which allows them to develop at an unforced pace. Despite extended working times of up to three years, the paintings never have a fussy or congested surface. Paint is thin and the texture of the supports gives the paintings an expansive aspect. In the canvases white ovals gather, and milkily obscure stains of dark colour: ultramarine, alizarin red and chrome green. Ovals resemble microscopic organisms, perhaps blood corpuscles or weathered bone. The watery quality is enhanced by the running of paint. Not a straight line is to be seen in any of the pieces. The painter has admitted to being influenced by the surroundings of his Dorset studio. ‘One cannot paint an “abstract” painting and not have a strong sense of subject matter without it lapsing into formalism, which as such does not interest me’.1 The main gallery contained paintings in diluted gouache, as well as prints (lithographs and aquatints) from 2003 to 2009, reprising the same shapes: oval discs, organic forms stretched to breaking point, tangled roots.

McKeever dilutes gouache to the consistency of ink wash and uses pencil only sparingly.

These pieces, which the artist describes as drawing using brush and paint, are habitually produced as variations after completing a series on canvas. Forms and techniques perfectly match the repertory of organic imagery. Six lithographs made by the painter in a Copenhagen print studio have the closest variations of tone, mostly in off-greys.

Wavering vertical lines mimic reeds, grooves in sediment and other natural phenomena.

This exhibition consisted of fractions of two series. More examples can be seen in Ian

McKeever: Paintings,2 a newly published book, which is a good introduction and generously illustrated survey of the artist’s painting. Let us hope that full retrospectives for these two inventive and subtle painters are not too far distant.

1 ‘Ian McKeever in Conversation’, The Art Book 17/1 (February 2010), forthcoming.

2 Ian McKeever: Paintings. By Marjorie AllthorpeGuyton et al. 208 pp. incl. 110 col. + 45 b. & w. ills.

(Lund Humphries, London, 2009), £35 (HB). ISBN 978–1–84822–037–9.

Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese Boston and Paris

by PETER HUMFREY IT CAN HARDLY be said that the great triumvirate of Venetian painters of the later sixteenth century has been neglected by international loan exhibitions in recent years. Titian, of course, has done particularly well, while Tintoretto had his own excellent monographic show in Madrid in 2007; and although the celebrations of 1988 can no longer be called recent, Veronese has been the subject of at least two, albeit more limited exhibitions since 2004 (one of them on tour at this moment in Austin, Texas). Furthermore, all three painters have featured prominently in several pan-Venetian events, from Bordeaux and Caen, to Edinburgh and Naples. It has to be admitted that many of the pictures in the present exhibition at the Musée du Louvre, Paris (to 4th January),1 first shown in a slightly different form at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,2 are veterans of one or more of these previous events, and by now have

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accumulated many air miles. Yet new hangings and intelligent new juxtapositions bring their own rewards, and as well as predictably providing a sumptuous feast for the eye, both versions succeed in their aim of stimulating fresh perceptions of familiar masterpieces.

The unifying concept of the two versions, as signalled by their respective subtitles (‘Rivals in Renaissance Venice’/ ‘Rivalités à Venise’), was devised by Frederick Ilchman of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His idea was to explore the artistic relationships between the three great painters by illustrating their contrasting treatments of the same or closely related subjects. The theme of cut-throat rivalry is most obviously appropriate to Tintoretto, whose aggressive competitiveness is well documented; it is much less applicable, however, to the mature and late Titian, who by the 1540s had no need to compete with the younger generation, and it is hardly applicable at all to Veronese, who clearly approached the work of the elder master and Venetian tradition in general in a spirit of deep veneration. Nevertheless, the theme of rivalry provided an effective framework for a series of groupings of two or more works by each of the three painters, depicting well-chosen subjects such as the Supper at Emmaus, St Jerome in the desert, portraits of armoured warriors, portraits of children, pictures of dogs or erotic nudes. Unlike in the art-historical lecture room, the invitation to compare and contrast was inevitably sometimes compromised by the unavailability of the ideal loan. In the case of the armoured portrait, for example, Titian’s Francesco Maria della Rovere in the Uffizi was conspicuous by its absence; and it did Tintoretto no service to juxtapose his gawky version of Emmaus from Budapest (cat. no.22) with Titian’s sovereign masterpiece from the Louvre (no.21; Fig.56). Yet other comparisons worked very well indeed. To be able to see two great altarpieces celebrating St Anthony Abbot side by side – Veronese’s Virgin and Child in glory with saints from the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk VA (no.19), and Tintoretto’s Temptation of St Anthony from S. Trovaso (no.20) – was both instructive and moving. And in another room Venice’s love affair with the female nude was celebrated with paintings of the stature of Titian’s Venus with an organist and dog from the Prado (no.28), Tintoretto’s Susannah and the elders from Vienna (no.31), and Veronese’s Venus and Mars from New York (no.34).

The Boston Museum is not itself especially well endowed with Venetian pictures (although visitors could easily cross the road to the Gardner Museum to see one of the greatest in America, Titian’s Rape of Europa). But the exhibition turned a potential weakness into a strength by including a section displaying a work from the Museum’s collection by each of the three studios, with accompanying technical documentation. Particularly interesting here was Tintoretto’s Nativity (no.26; Fig.58), a picture of uneven execution, but containing two female figures of high quality.

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56. Supper at Emmaus, by Titian. c.1533–34.

Canvas, 169 by 244 cm.

(Musée du Louvre, Paris).

57. Supper at Emmaus, by Paolo Veronese. c.1555–60.

Canvas, 242 by 416 cm.

(Musée du Louvre, Paris).

Cleaning and X-radiography have revealed that these originally belonged to a painting of a quite different subject and format, a vertical, airborne Trinity flanked by the two females, apparently by Tintoretto himself, which was later adapted by his workshop to fulfil a different commission.

The quite different effect of the Louvre version of the exhibition begins with its setting, which in striking contrast to I.M. Pei’s toplit West Wing galleries in Boston, is the

subterranean, artificially lit Hall Napoléon under the Pyramid. The curators, Jean Habert and Vincent Delieuvin, also offer a rather different slant to that of Ilchman on the theme of rivalry, taking their cue from the central group of four musicians in Veronese’s Wedding feast at Cana (which, for obvious reasons, remains in its usual place upstairs in the Salon Carré). According to Boschini’s anecdote, these portray the four great Venetian painters of the later sixteenth century

58. Nativity, by Jacopo Tintoretto and workshop. Late 1550s, reworked 1570s. Canvas, 156 by 358 cm. (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

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(with Jacopo Bassano added to the other three), each playing his separate part, but in complete harmony with his colleagues. The Louvre exhibition, comprising no less than eighty-six paintings, is about one third larger than that in Boston, with a number of works omitted, but many more added. In a sense the addition of painters such as Schiavone, Sustris and Palma Giovane, as well as Bassano, has diluted the rigour of Ilchman’s concept, but the curators have been careful not to let the exhibition become just another panorama of the Venetian cinquecento by creating their own thematic sections. These naturally correspond in part to those in Boston, but the numerous smaller groupings have now been absorbed into five larger and more loosely defined sections (with their walls carefully colour-coded for the assistance of the visitor).

Thus one of the sections, entitled ‘Entre Sacré et Profane’, has as its key work Veronese’s Supper at Emmaus from the Louvre, not lent to Boston (no.38; Fig.57), which effectively ties together the several previous mini-sections on biblical suppers, and on portraits of men, women, children and dogs.

Similarly, the new section called ‘Nocturnes Sacrés’ brings together an especially powerful series of Lamentations by each of the four principals, as well as groups of Baptisms and St Jeromes (even though not all of these are in fact nocturnes). Again, the portraits of men in armour and nudes with mirrors become part of a larger theme entitled ‘Reflets’, which explores the paragone debate, and the rivalry between painting and sculpture.

Because of the differences of scope and emphasis between the two versions of the exhibition, their respective catalogues are quite different publications. Some of the essays written for Boston reappear in translation in the French catalogue, but others are omitted, while Habert and Delieuvin and their colleagues have added extensive new material. But the two catalogues resemble one another by consisting largely of synthetic, thematic surveys, rather than providing detailed information on the individual works.

The contributors are hardly concerned, for example, with precise datings, or with detailed assessments of the extent of shop collaboration. But the solution of such issues is not the point of the exhibition in either of its manifestations, and both catalogues admirably fulfil their function of illuminating the various interlocking themes that underlie this spectacular visual display.

1 Catalogue: Titien, Tintoret, Véronèse . . . Rivalités a Venise. By Vincent Delieuvin and Jean Habert, with the assistance of Arturo Galansino. 480 pp. incl. 265 col. ills. (Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2009), €42. ISBN 978–2–75410–4050.

2 Catalogue: Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese. Rivals in Renaissance Venice. By Frederick Ilchman, with contributions by Linda Borean, Patricia Fortini Brown, Vincent Delieuvin, Robert Echols, John Garton, Rhona MacBeth, John Marciari, David Rosand, Jonathan Unglaub and Robert Wald. 315 pp. incl. 168 col. + b. & w. ills. (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2009), $40. ISBN 978–0–87846–7402.

Alberto Giacometti Riehen/Basel

by ROGER CARDINAL THE

PRESTIGE

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ALBERTO

GIACOMETTI

within his native Switzerland was consolidated this summer by a well-designed retrospective, entitled simply Giacometti, which took place at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen (closed 11th October). As curator at the Foundation, Ulf Küster was successful in securing many important loans, predominantly from the Alberto Giacometti Foundation in Zürich and the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti in Paris. His selection of some 150 works covered the artist’s entire career, representing practically every aspect of his artistry, save that there were very few drawings and nothing of his output as a printmaker.1 The exhibition began with a brief homage to two forebears, each a major painter in the Switzerland of Giacometti’s time and an inspiration to the young artist. His father, Giovanni Giacometti (1868–1933), was honoured with a small room presenting his Self-portrait before a winter landscape (1899) and Spring (Piz Duan) (1905). His intimate canvas The lamp (1912) grouped the Giacometti family about a table in their home in the Alpine village of Stampa. Giovanni’s distant cousin, Augusto Giacometti (1877–1947), was also represented, with a serene view of the Stampa rooftops in eye-catching colours.

Alberto Giacometti then entered the scene with a resolute set of plaster busts of his father, in which realism veered toward unflattering stylisation. Giovanni’s fond portraits of his young son were balanced

by Alberto’s first self-portraits, one a stunning drawing, Self-portrait glancing over his shoulder (1918). After rather too brief a glance at the young sculptor’s Paris dalliance with Cubism, as in the gnomic Tête qui regarde (1929), the exhibition turned to the wellknown pre-Surrealist Femme cuillère (1927), and then to the Surrealist works of c.1931–34, setting out pieces both famous and notorious in a room dominated by the one sprawled at its centre, the violated Femme égorgée (1933). Other female figures rose up within the crowded display, now almost mythic presences. A black-painted bronze lent by the Fondation Maeght, the primitivistic figure L’Objet invisible (1934–35), was posed in silhouette by a window, peering across at Femme qui marche, in its simplified 1936 version lent by the Foundation in Paris. Other Surrealist pieces included the playfully scary assemblage Main prise (1932) and the toy-like On ne joue plus (1932), which can be read as a cemetery with desecrated tombs.

Given the fascination of Giacometti’s working methods, it was particularly telling to see the juxtaposition of two versions of that geometric paradox, the thirteen-sided Cube (1933), both from the Foundation in Zürich.

59. La Mère de l’artiste, by Alberto Giacometti. 1950.

Canvas, 89.9 by 61 cm. (Museum of Modern Art, New York; exh. Fondation Beyeler, Basel).

One was of plaster, painted white, but now bearing dirty grey patches; the other a cast bronze exhibiting scratches and scrawls.

In a theatrical gesture, Küster lavished the space of an entire room upon one of the tiniest pieces in all Giacometti’s œuvre, Petit homme sur socle (1940–41), also from Zürich.

This sculpture is one of the legendary miniatures surviving from Giacometti’s wartime years in Switzerland.2 It is a mere eight centimetres high – this includes the metal pedestal integral to the figure, although not the disproportionate plinth, chest-high, on which it was mounted.

This retrospective was essentially an exhibition of sculpture, although one alcove was given over to the functional objects which bolstered the artist’s finances: plaster lamps and vases by Alberto, metal chairs and a hatstand by his brother Diego. Another sideroom housed some notable paintings, among them the riveting La Mère de l’artiste (Fig.59), the fruit of one of Giacometti’s annual homecomings to Stampa, and loaned by MoMA, New York. The old lady appears weightless, suspended amid her polished tables and sideboards, which shimmer impalpably amid a web of brushstrokes. An exquisite little still life, La Table (1950) echoed the mood of metaphysical wonder, whereas Figures dans un intérieur (1946) struck an alarming note, its naked figures waiting listlessly, as if in a washroom at Dachau.

A long hall marked the sculptor’s accession to a fresh idiom when, abjuring Surrealist fantasy, he embarked on a compulsive engagement with the human figure. The pivotal Homme qui marche (1947), on loan from Zürich, marks the artist’s espousal of the new figural type, emaciated yet energetic. The helpless

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deux boîtes qui sont des maisons (1950), from the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, which could suggest a tale about homelessness. Further on, a reworking of Homme qui marche – made in 1960, just a few years before the artist died – stood out as incorporating a far more purposeful stride than the prototype of 1947.

1

Catalogue: Giacometti. By Ulf Küster et al. 224 pp. incl. 161 col. + 37 b. & w. ills. (Beyeler Museum, Riehen, and Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, 2009), CHF88 (HB); CHF68 (PB); English edition: ISBN 978–3–7757–2349–7; 978–3–905632–77–4. German edition: ISBN 978–3–7757–2348–0; 978–3–905632–76–7.

Ulf Küster is also the author of Alberto Giacometti. Space, Figure, Time. 112 pp. incl. 8 col. + 22 b. & w. ills.

(Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, 2009), CHF35 (HB); 978–3–7757–2373–5.

2 An exhibition entitled Alberto Giacometti will be held at the Musée Rath (Musée d’Art et d’Histoire) in Geneva, from 5th November 2009 to 21st February 2010. Curated by Nadia Schneider, it will focus on the ‘minimalist’ Geneva period of 1942–45, with most loans coming from the Alberto Giacometti Foundation in Zürich.

Picasso Cézanne Aix-en-Provence

by JAMES BEECHEY

diary of his encounters with Picasso, Brassaï records an incident in the artist’s studio in occupied Paris in November 1943. Unannounced, a young man appeared at the rue des Grands-Augustins, bearing a Provençal landscape, which he claimed was a Cézanne that had belonged to his family since the 1890s, and seeking Picasso’s opinion of it.

A quick glance at the painting was enough to convince Picasso that it was a fake. ‘As if I don’t know Cézanne!’, he muttered angrily, after the hapless visitor had been shown the door. ‘He was my one and only master! Don’t you think I’ve looked at his paintings? I spent years studying them. Cézanne! He was like our father. It was he who protected us’.1 This vignette is revealing in several respects.

That the possibility of setting eyes on an unknown Cézanne was enough to lure the then reclusive Picasso out of his hidey-hole indicates the enduring spell that the Master of Aix continued to have on him; his eagerness to assume the role of expert is an example of his conceit that, posthumously, Cézanne’s reputation belonged exclusively to him; while his comments acknowledge the dual nature of Cézanne’s paternity, both as the progenitor of Cubism and as a moral exemplar. How all these Cézannes coalesced in Picasso’s life and art was the subject of Picasso Cézanne, recently at the Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence (closed 27th September), the centrepiece of a summer season of exhibitions and events in the town marking the fiftieth anniversary of Picasso’s acquisition of, and temporary move to, the nearby Château de Vauvenargues. For a relatively small museum (albeit one which,

IN HIS AB SORBING

60. L’Homme qui chavire, by Alberto Giacometti. 1950.

Bronze, 60 by 14 by 22 cm. (Kunsthaus Zürich; exh.

Fondation Beyeler, Basel).

61. Grande femme III, by Alberto Giacometti. 1960.

Bronze, 237 by 31 by 54 cm. (Fondation Beyeler, Basel).

pose of L’Homme qui chavire (Fig.60) suggests a mixture of deep seriousness and vague comicality, registered also in the haggard Le Chien (1951), which the artist half-jokingly said was a self-portrait. Here lurks that sense of the absurd that made Giacometti’s work emblematic for the Existentialist generation.

Lent by the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, a Grande figure (1947), all but two metres high, announced the Giacometti archetype of the frontal female, standing to attention as if transfixed by the artist’s unwavering stare, a figure uncompromisingly thin and jaggedly ill-finished. Few of the sculptor’s subsequent works went much further than these, except in scale and consequent monumental impact. Standing close together as if to invite comparison were two lofty divinities from the Fondation Beyeler’s own holdings: Grande femme IV (1960) stands very tall at 2.7 metres, although she looks scrawny and gawky, unlike the shorter but shapelier Grande femme III (Fig.61).

Exploiting the daylit interiors designed by Renzo Piano at Riehen, Küster engineered a

climactic display in the long wide hall looking onto the park. Paintings from three decades occupied the walls, including studies of such favourite sitters as Annette, Caroline and Isaku Yanaihara, along with some imposing standing female nudes, one a spectral yet sturdy Nu debout dans l’atelier (1954), from the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein. The ample space encouraged a lively interplay between static bronzes and the shapes of visitors on the move. The viewer could circumnavigate such pieces as La Place (1948) and ponder the emotional trajectories of anonymous figures moving hesitantly together. Trois hommes qui marchent (1948), from the Fondation Maeght, groups three skinny males almost shoulder to shoulder, although each seems eager to set off in a different direction. Many like pieces emphasised movement and implied a narrative context: L’Homme qui pointe (1947), lent by the Tate; Homme qui marche sous la pluie (1948) from the Beyeler collection; and the whimsically titled Figurine dans une boîte entre

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since co-organising the major retrospective Cézanne in Provence in 2006, has considerably extended its reach), this was an ambitious undertaking. Some of the flaws in its execution are directly attributable to the inevitable unavailability of a number of desirable works – a situation undoubtedly exacerbated by the competing claims of the far more lavish Cézanne and Beyond in Philadelphia, in which Picasso was a, if not the, key protagonist.2 Regrettably, many of the juxtapositions one might have hoped to have seen made in the galleries of the Musée Granet were relegated to illustrative comparisons in the pages of the accompanying catalogue.3 But Picasso Cézanne also suffered from an awkward, hybrid structure, and from an apparent confusion on the part of the Museum’s director, Bruno Ely, and his collaborators regarding the exhibition’s methodology, and the manner in which its four sections related to each other.

If the overall impression was of inadequacy and incoherence, individual moments spoke for themselves with great eloquence. The opening room, hung with a simple still life

by Cézanne, Fruit, napkin and jug of milk (cat. no.1; Fig.62), completed in the year of Picasso’s birth, was to supply the younger artist with a number of the objects which he would deploy in the process of analysing form in space: the milk jug specifically, but also the glass, apples and napkin, while the lime-green wallpaper with its chevron patterning that decorated Cézanne’s Paris apartment in rue de l’Ouest was repeatedly quoted by Picasso well into his Surrealist period (and was, incidentally, quoted in turn by Francis Bacon in a rare surviving Interior of the mid-1930s). Picasso probably first encountered Cézanne’s work at the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, in which the two artists were shown in their respective national pavilions; and although it was Degas and Lautrec who, at the time, were his principal ciceroni, that he was already looking to Cézanne for lessons in how to eliminate the illusion of depth by flattening perspective and 62. Fruit, napkin and jug of milk, by Paul Cézanne. 1880–81.

Canvas, 60 by 73 cm. (Musée national de l’Orangerie, Paris; exh. Musée Granet, Aix-enProvence).

63. Portrait of Gustave Geffroy, by Paul Cézanne.

1895–98. Canvas, 116 by 89 cm. (Musée d’Orsay, Paris; exh. Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence).

64. Girl with a mandolin, by Pablo Picasso. 1909.

Canvas, 92 by 73 cm. (State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg; exh. Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence).

by increasing the number of viewpoints is obvious in the most imitative of his early essays in Cézannism, The sideboard of 1901 (no.2). Soon afterwards, he was able to gain a much fuller understanding of Cézanne through the pictures he saw in the back room of Ambroise Vollard’s shop, on the walls of Leo and Gertrude Stein’s apartment in rue de Fleurus, in the studios of Matisse (who owned Cézanne’s Three bathers) and Derain (who always kept at hand a reproduction of Five bathers) and at the Salon d’automne. His responsiveness to Cézanne quickened around 1906, in the wake of the artist’s death and the memorial exhibitions mounted the following year at Bernheim-Jeune and at the Salon d’automne, and continued through the early stages of Cubism’s evolution, a progression excellently summarised by Elizabeth Cowling and Brigitte Leal in their contributions to the

catalogue. Cowling rightly stresses how Picasso’s researches into Cézanne were inextricably bound up with his simultaneous discoveries of art nègre, ancient Greek and Egyptian sculpture and Iberian art, so that, although on occasion he made paraphrases of Cézanne’s subjects, he could never, like some of his contemporaries, be classified as a mere Cézannist.

Fully to illustrate the successive phases of Picasso’s engagement with Cézanne between 1906 and 1910 was beyond the means of this exhibition, requiring the presence of a rollcall of unattainable loans: Picasso’s 1906 Boy leading a horse, the first work in which he sought to interpret Cézanne’s primitivism, the source of which he found in the latter’s great Bather of c.1885, both now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Madame Cézanne with a fan of 1879–82, the showpiece of the Steins’ collection, and Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein, which was conceived partly in emulation of it; Picasso’s explicitly Cézannist portrait of Clovis Sagot and the two artists’ portraits of Vollard; to say nothing of the three monumental figure compositions made in 1907–08 in which Picasso took on the challenge of deconstructing Cézanne’s large Bathers, the Demoiselles d’Avignon, Three women and Friendship (the latter two now in St Petersburg). Of the works the Granet succeeded in assembling, the selection of rigorously geometric landscapes made at Horta de Ebro during the summer of 1909 – the year in which Picasso reached his closest stylistic affinity with Cézanne – was disappointingly thin, though compensated for to some extent by a contemporaneous group of densely modelled and sharply faceted painted and sculpted heads of Fernande Olivier. The pairing of Cézanne’s magnificently sombre portrait of Gustave Geffroy (no.27; Fig.63), which Picasso would first have seen at the 1907 Salon d’automne, and the latter’s Girl with a mandolin (no.28; Fig.64), painted in 1909, provided

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the one undeniable coup de théâtre. Here, in Picasso’s replication of Cézanne’s distorted perspective in his treatment of the bookcase and table top, in his duplication of Cézanne’s long, straight brushstrokes, obliquely placed to convey architectural strength, and in his mastery of passage, the Cézannesque device of eliding planes to evoke space that was to prove so crucial to the development of Cubism, was the distillation of everything that, by this stage, he had learnt from his ‘one and only master’.

The next, brief but rather oddly placed, section of the exhibition considered Picasso as a collector of Cézanne. Alongside Matisse, Cézanne was the lodestar of Picasso’s collection: the four major works by him which he owned gave him the greatest satisfaction of all his possessions, while a letter written by Cézanne to his son Paul a few days before his death, and given to Picasso at the very end of his own life by Edouard Pignon and Hélène Parmelin (no.34), held for him a similar talismanic significance as the 1888 newspaper account of Van Gogh cutting off his ear, a copy of which he had begged some years earlier from the curator of the museum at Arles. (According to Parmelin, Picasso kept the Cézanne letter on his bedside table.)

Probably the first of his purchases was a consummate late watercolour of the cathedral at Aix, which he bought from Vollard before 1916; but neither this, nor the masterpiece of Cézanne’s old age, the Château Noir of 1905–06, were shown at the Musée Granet.

Given that both might have been expected to make the none too arduous journey from the Musée Picasso in Paris, it seemed eccentric, to say the least, to borrow instead from Japan a portrait of Mme Cézanne (no.35), which Picasso declined to buy, on account of its botched restoration. The other two Cézannes in his collection, the majestic view of the bay at L’Estaque (no.36), which Picasso so prized for the stone-like solidity with which Cézanne rendered the sea, and the Five bathers of 1887–88 (no.37), which he bought in 1957 and which triggered his final reprise of this subject a few years later, might more cogently have been integrated elsewhere into the presentation.

After this short detour, the exhibition changed tack again. Its third, and most extensive section largely eschewed chronology in favour of a thematic exploration of motifs employed by both artists. On one hand, this approach demonstrated effectively how Picasso utilised certain Cézannesque motifs to distinct purposes at different junctures in his career: the simple white porcelain compotier, for instance, that made its first appearance in his 1901 still life, then recurred in a number of proto-Cubist paintings of 1907, re-emerged in several of his curvilinear still lifes of the mid-1920s and finally resurfaced in the assemblages of diverse objects he made during the Second World War; or how some subjects, such as the woman seated in an armchair (Fig.65), are so imbued with a Cézannist resonance that Picasso could tackle them in a

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65. Jacqueline seated in an armchair,

by Pablo Picasso. 1964. Canvas, 194.7 by 130 cm. (Private collection; exh. Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence).

variety of styles over many years without ever eradicating traces of their original inspiration.

(Perhaps the most compelling of all the descendants of Mme Cézanne in Picasso’s œuvre, the 1932 series of portraits of MarieThérèse Walter, derived from Madame Cézanne in a red armchair of c.1887, now in Boston, were, alas, entirely absent from the exhibition.) On the other hand, it appeared to reduce their affiliation to a repertory of shared ciphers. Of course, it is impossible, postCézanne, to see such emblematic motifs as apples and bathers without reference to their prototypes in his work; and with other examples we have Picasso’s testimony as to Cézanne’s impact, as when he told Roland Penrose that while painting one of his late series of harlequins he was thinking of the latter’s Mardi Gras Harlequin from Washington (no.71), which he could have seen at Vollard’s nearly seventy years earlier. But such a reductive reading of how Picasso appropriated a number of other subjects that were hardly exclusive to Cézanne – men smoking pipes, portraits of the artists’ children, the vanitas still life – obscured the complex nature of their relationship. It overlooked how, in Picasso’s work, Cézanne’s influence was invariably fused with that of other artists – the way in which Five bathers infiltrates some of his variations on Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe is a case in point – and it downplayed the less easily definable aspects of his debt to Cézanne: the

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manner in which he used the latter’s notorious lack of completion as the impetus to treat an object in opposing methods, as both painting and drawing, or the constant suspicion of facility he inherited from the Master of Aix. Nor did it allow for the possibility that, as John Richardson has suggested, after about 1910 Picasso’s attitude to Cézanne was sometimes as sardonic as it was reverential.4 ‘J’ai acheté la Sainte-Victoire de Cézanne’, Picasso announced to his erstwhile dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, following his purchase in late 1958 of the Château de Vauvenargues, and with it one thousand hectares on the lower slopes of Cézanne’s mountain.

‘Laquelle?’, asked Kahnweiler. ‘La vrai’, replied Picasso. The text of this celebrated exchange was plastered all over Aix this summer, on leaflets, posters, the sides of buses and the façade of the Musée Granet. The organisers’ keenness to close the exhibition with a selection of works made during the three years in which, intermittently, Picasso lived and worked at Vauvenargues was understandable enough – particularly given that, by permission of the artist’s step-daughter, Cathy Hutin, the château was open to the public during the run of the exhibition for the first time since his death. But proximity to the Mont Sainte-Victoire, allied to the austerity of Vauvenargues, seems to have had the paradoxical effect of turning Picasso’s mind away from France and back to Spain. Although he

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did paint several views of the village (nos.89–91) – maintaining a lifelong habit of documenting his surroundings immediately after taking possession of a new property – he otherwise avoided making overt reference to Cézanne’s overwhelming motif. The exhibition’s final section included some bravura examples of Picasso’s late work: still lifes of mandolins and jugs painted in an heraldic combination of red, bottle-green and yellow, and of the famously ornate Henri II sideboard he installed at Vauvenargues, as well as several wonderfully impudent portraits of its châtelaine, his second wife, Jacqueline. As a coda to his artistic relationship with Cézanne, however, this was mostly irrelevant. To catch a final echo of Cézanne one needed to take a tour of the château itself, and venture to the foot of its terrace where Picasso is buried, his tomb surmounted by a cast of his 1933 sculpture Woman with a vase. In its peculiarly disquieting nature, it is, as John Elderfield proposes in his stimulating essay in the catalogue of the recent Philadelphia exhibition, a far more apt memorial to the Master of Aix than the serenely classical river goddess commissioned by the town’s citizens from Aristide Maillol, but eventually rejected by them.5 The curatorial vogue for exhibitions either pitting Picasso against his contemporaries or constructing a dialogue between him and the masters he admired seems to know no bounds. At their most imaginative, such exercises can be genuinely illuminating of the multifaceted ways in which Picasso drew on the example of other artists: exemplary in this respect was Picasso Ingres at the Musée Picasso, Paris, in 2004. But all too often they degenerate into a futile search for visual correspondences between works that, in reality, have only the slenderest connection, a strategy that reached its nadir with the overblown Picasso et les Maîtres in Paris last winter. Picasso Cézanne fell somewhere between the two extremes. ‘It is not what an artist does that counts’, Picasso once remarked to Christian Zervos, ‘but what he is. Cézanne’s anxiety is what interests us.

That is his lesson’.6 It is a lesson that pervades Picasso’s œuvre, but one that, ultimately, proved impossible to expound within the limits of this exhibition.

Nino Costa Castiglioncello

by ARNIKA SCHMIDT

1883 THE British writer Julia Cartwright published an article in the Magazine of Art entitled ‘Giovanni Costa – patriot and painter’, thereby signalling the two ruling passions of his life: his love for his native Italy (a follower of Garibaldi, he took part in both the first and second wars of independence) and for art. The recent exhibition Nino Costa e il paesaggio dell’anima – Da Corot ai Macchiaioli al Simbolismo at the Castello Pasquini, Castiglioncello (closed 1st November),1 introduced the public to the influential, yet now little-noted Italian painter, chiefly known for his lyrical landscapes. Over the last few years Castiglioncello has held several exhibitions devoted to painters of the Italian ottocento, in particular the Macchiaioli. While Costa’s critical role in the development of this movement is acknowledged, surprisingly little light has been shed on his life, work and international connections, probably because many of his works are in private collections scattered throughout Italy, the United Kingdom and further afield. The exhibition’s curators, Francesca Dini and Stefania Frezzotti, succeeded in reuniting over fifty works to create the first monographic show on the artist since that held in Rome in 1927.

Arranged chronologically, its five sections provided an overview of Costa’s artistic production and illustrated the analogies with international movements. Some forty paintings by his contemporaries acted as a foil for Costa’s own works. Giovanni Costa (1826–1903), called Nino by his friends, was born in Rome and started his career in that city in the late 1840s as part of the international artistic community. Later he acted as a conduit for new approaches to landscape painting for the Florentine Macchiaioli.

The international dimension of his work was addressed in sections three and four, illustrating his interest in French landscape painting and his role as master of the Etruscan School, a circle of young British artists founded in IN

1883, one year after Costa’s successful monographic exhibition held at the Fine Art Society in London. The last room was dedicated to his late works produced as an alternative to the conventional and conservative art promoted

by Italian institutions. After 1871 he attacked such art through his teaching and in critical reviews of national and international shows in Italy. His major writings on art are published in an appendix in the exhibition catalogue and further discussed in Frezzotti’s essay. Cosimo Ceccuti writes on the artist’s political activities and Carlo Sisi provides an overview of landscape painting in Rome towards the end of the nineteenth century.2 The first room illustrated Costa’s early break with academic and romantic tendencies and his turn to nature as a source of inspiration, which was largely attributable to the international artistic community in Rome.

He was one of the few Italians who, around 1850, started to mix with foreign colleagues such as François Louis Français, Arnold Böcklin and Emile David. With his masterpiece, Women loading wood on boats at Porto d’Anzio he ascertains his methodological approach, which began with an ‘eterno bozzetto’, a sketch made directly from nature intended to guide the painter up to the last brushstroke of the finished work.3 The importance of studying from nature was passed by Costa onto the Macchiaioli when he arrived in Florence in 1859, staying there for ten years. His large canvas Women stealing wood on the shore near Ardea on an evening when the Libeccio blows (Fig.66) dominated the space in the exhibition dedicated to his Florentine period. The inspiration for this work derived from an episode Costa observed in the Roman Campagna in 1853, during a sketching trip with George Mason, a painter from Staffordshire whom Costa befriended in Rome. The preliminary studies he made then were to occupy him for the next twenty years. Costa’s canvas was juxtaposed with two other paintings of women gathering wood by Cristiano Banti and Giovanni Fattori, which show that Costa was the source of inspiration for the Macchiaioli painters. Both in sentiment and technique Costa’s Tuscan works shown in the same

1

Brassaï: Picasso and Company, New York 1966, p.79.

Reviewed by Catherine Craft in this Magazine, 151 (2009), pp.501–02.

3 Catalogue: Picasso Cézanne. Edited by Bruno Ely, with essays by Anne Roquebert, Elizabeth Cowling, Brigitte Leal, Sylvie Patin, Florian Rodari, Jean Arrouye, Ludmilla Virassamynaïken, Michèle Moutashar and Denis Coutagne. 280 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Réunion des musées nationaux/Communauté du Pays d’Aix – Musée Granet, Paris, 2009), €39. ISBN 978–2–7118–5600–8.

4 See J. Richardson: A Life of Picasso, Vol.II. 1907–17: The Painter of Modern Life, London 1996, p.408.

5 See J. Elderfield: ‘Picasso’s Extreme Cézanne’, in J. Rishel and K. Sachs, eds.: exh. cat. Cézanne And Beyond, Philadelphia (Philadelphia Museum of Art) 2009, pp.207–25.

6 C. Zervos: ‘Conversation avec Picasso’, Cahiers d’Art 10, nos.7–10 (1935), p.178.

2

66. Women stealing wood on the shore near Ardea on an evening when the Libeccio blows, by Nino Costa. c.1853–74.

Canvas, 119.4 by 279.5 cm. (Castle Howard, Yorkshire; exh. Castello Pasquini, Castiglioncello). the burlington m a g a z i n e

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67. Twixt summer and autumn, by Nino Costa. Panel, 16 by 68.5 cm. (Castle Howard, Yorkshire; exh. Castello Pasquini, Castiglioncello).

room are fascinatingly unlike the productions of his Florentine contemporaries.

In 1862 Costa travelled to Paris where he met Corot and various members of the Barbizon school, returning to France the following year. The third section of the show was dedicated to Costa’s exchange with these French painters. Well-selected works by Jules Dupré, Théodore Rousseau and CharlesFrançois Daubigny illustrated the analogies between the Barbizon school and the Roman artist in the choice of unspectacular views animated by small figures. While Dini, in her catalogue essay, adumbrates the importance of French landscapists for the development of Costa’s style around 1850, this aspect unfortunately was barely reflected in the exhibition.

Costa’s ideas, method and paintings of the 1850s demonstrate an engagement with Corot’s lyrical approach to realism, which he learned from Corot’s students François-Louis Français and Emile David, an interesting subject which merits further study.

Costa’s relationship with Britain has already been examined in the exhibitions curated

by Paul Nicholls, Sandra Berresford and Christopher Newall.4 His friendship with George Mason and Frederic Leighton dated from 1852 and 1853 respectively, and from that time his contacts with England brought him friends, students and, most importantly, a market for his works. Leighton introduced him into society, and George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle, became his friend, student and patron. In consequence, Castle Howard in Yorkshire has the largest collection of works

by Costa open to the public, including the evocative Twixt summer and autumn (Fig.67), an enchanting example of his panoramic views of the landscape in Lazio and Tuscany in a style that was later adopted by the members of the Etruscan School. The essays

by Alison Brisby, Paul Nicholls and Daniel Robbins provide precious information on Costa’s personal and professional relationships with the British that determined the course of his life even when he returned to Italy with the mission to renew Italian art, presiding over the movement In Arte Libertas, founded

by Alessandro Morani and Alfredo Ricci in 1886. While the Etruscans were recognisable as a group in stylistic and thematic terms, In Arte Libertas should rather be considered a disparate group of artists united in their rejection of conventional Italian art of the day and open to the influence of foreigners, whose works they included in their annual exhibitions. The last section of the exhibition

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showed works by members of the society juxtaposed with paintings by Costa demonstrating his growing interest in Symbolist ideas. The exhibition in Castiglioncello and its catalogue have rightly drawn attention to Nino Costa as a pivotal figure in the European scene, rescuing him from the oblivion into which he has fallen for so many years.

1 It was organised by the council of Rosignano Marittimo and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome.

2 Catalogue: Nino Costa e il paesaggio dell’anima – Da Corot ai Macchiaioli al Simbolismo. Edited by Francesca Dini and Stefania Frezzotti. 328 pp. incl. 95 col. + 92 b. & w. ills. (Skira, Milan, 2009), €40. ISBN 978–88–5720–353–9.

3 ‘. . . far prima, sul vero, un bozzetto di impressione il più rapidamente possibile; e poi, fare dal vero studi di particolari.

Finalmente abbozzare il quadro, stando attaccato al concetto del bozzetto non togliendo mai le pupille dall’eterno bozzetto’; N. Costa: Quel che vidi e quel che intesi, ed. G. Guerrazzi Costa, Milan 1927, p.95.

4 S. Berresford and P. Nicholls: exh. cat. Nino Costa ed i suoi amici inglesi, Milan (Società per Belle Arti ed Esposizione Permanente) 1982; reviewed in this Magazine, 124 (1982), p.522; and C. Newall: exh. cat.

The Etruscans: painters of the Italian landscape 1850–1900, Stoke on Trent (Museum and Art Gallery) 1989.

with the monument, the plinth and the legacy of modernist sculpture. Yet the work at Bard suggests that these concerns have emerged out of interests which are essentially Post-minimalist. The earliest piece in the show, Snake in the grass (1997), evokes a temporary exhibition space: it includes a series of poorly centred and ill-focused photographs of figures on a grass verge, but these photographs are fixed to hanging walls, which are suspended from ropes and anchored to the floor with loaded green bin-bags; the suggestion is that if the walls were moved, the figures would come into clear view. This conception of sculpture as imbricated in site, and entwined in imagery, continues in Perth Amboy (2001), a maze of cardboard screens hiding a series of comic emblems of quasi-religious devotion, including an Apache figurine gazing at a framed reproduction of the setting sun, and a bust of Marilyn Monroe (Fig.69). Outside the maze hang photographs of pilgrims touching the window of a house in New Jersey where an apparition of the Virgin was reported.

Harrison is typical of many young sculptors in having no interest in the phenomenologically charged Minimalist object; she is more typically drawn to richly symbolic, popcultural artefacts. But she is also intrigued by modes of presentation and exhibition, and it is perhaps this which has forced her return to the problem of the plinth, and to an awkward fascination with monumentality, and thus with monumental public sculpture – which is, after all, sculpture’s primordial genre. This was clear in many pieces, particularly Indigenous parts, III (1995–2003), which includes a clutter of plinths: some stand empty, others carry travesties of modernist sculpture – small candy-

Sculpture New York

by MORGAN FALCONER AMONG THE MOST SIGNIFICANT recent exhibitions of contemporary sculpture in New York is Unmonumental, the group show that marked the reopening of the New Museum in 2007. It located a new ambivalence about monumentality, particularly among sculptors, at a time when installations and environments seem to be less popular and the figure has made a return in some media. A glance at the better shows in New York this autumn suggested that there are many more directions in sculpture than this alone, yet the importance of this trend has been highlighted by the rising reputation of the New York sculptor Rachel Harrison, who is currently enjoying her first retrospective, Consider the Lobster, at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum in Annandale-onHudson (to 20th December).

Unmonumental could almost have been a vehicle for Harrison, so preoccupied is she

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68. American master, by Tom Burr. 2009. Wood, white paint, steel poles, vintage headphones, Plexiglas, newspaper, magazines, assorted printed matter, 184.2 by 121.9 by 91.4 cm. (Exh. Bortolami Gallery, New York).

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69. Marilyn Monroe in Perth Amboy, by Rachel Harrison. 2001. Mixed media installation, dimensions variable.

(Exh. CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson).

coloured constructions weighted down with amorphous heaps of plaster; meanwhile, a monitor screens footage of a budget auction.

Works like this point to the sometimes cynical quality of Harrison’s iconoclastic attitude to monumentality, yet pieces like Perth Amboy show that she can also have a moving sympathy with other people’s totems.

Alongside this show, Harrison has collaborated with six other artists to reinstall works from the excellent permanent collection of the Bard Hessel Museum. One of the chosen artists is Tom Burr, who is also currently, and deservedly, gaining recognition for his own distinct approach to the object. His recent show at Bortolami Gallery (closed 24th October) was in a typical vein, and had the air of a deserted stage set. endlessly repeated gesture (2009) resembles a model for a nightclub: a low platform supports a white, carpeted, corridor-like space, which runs between four walls covered in mirrored tiles; the walls rise up little further than one’s waist, so while the object seems to invite occupation as an environment, its scale precludes it. Characteristic 70. Untitled, by Vincent Fecteau. 2008.

Papier-mâché and acrylic paint, 65 by 83 by 32 cm. (Exh. Matthew Marks Gallery, New York).

also is American master (Fig.68): a small white platform is surrounded by a high balustrade of white poles; headphones hang from the poles; and album sleeves, some relating to John Cage, are attached to the floor. It is, perhaps, a staging of silence.

Burr seems more comfortable with the Minimalist object than does Harrison, and he is also close to Conceptualism. Objects like endlessly repeated gesture invite Minimalism’s phenomenology; arrangements like American master take the quality of theatricality, which was always latent in the movement, and make of it an emblem of performance; and most of the work is also – in the manner of Minimalism – clear and open in its construction. Yet Burr often uses his slightly reticent objects as supports for webs of association: the references to music return in a collaged tribute to Kate Bush, Caged Kate (2009), which consists of album sleeves, inner sleeves, silk stockings and press cuttings. Occasionally his work results in quiet riddles that are less satisfying than Harrison’s emotiveness, yet sometimes they are also more appealing than her satire.

Harrison and Burr may occupy the vanguard in contemporary sculpture, but the field is accommodating enough to welcome Vincent Fecteau’s recent plinth-based abstract sculptures. Last year the San Francisco-based sculptor exhibited them at the Art Institute of Chicago, and this September they came to Matthew Marks Gallery (closed 24th October). In the past, Fecteau’s work has usually been small, and has incorporated found images and quirky, collaged adornments. His latest series retains the scale, but moves much closer to modernist abstraction (Fig.70). He creates them by beginning with a papiermâché casting of a large, inflated beach ball, then cutting and manipulating it and, finally, painting it in a strident hue – turquoise, purple, mustard, lavender – often with contrasts of black or white to accentuate contours.

Essentially, the sculptures evoke complex fragments of car bodywork, or vents and pipes, and they often open on to suggestions of interiority. They are immersed in West Coast Pop, but they are also reaching in the contrary direction of mid-century Modernist abstraction and for all their interest as formally ambiguous objects, they seem limited by that conservatism.

Hauser & Wirth celebrated the opening of their first New York gallery in September by revisiting a sculpture which seems quite removed from any of these contemporary debates. Allan Kaprow’s Yard was originally created in 1961 for the backyard of the Martha Jackson Gallery, which occupied the townhouse where Hauser & Wirth have established themselves. It was part of a show which also included Claes Oldenburg’s Store, and if Yard has n0t quite garnered the renown of the former, it has continued to attract curators, who commissioned Kaprow to reinstall it in various locations before his death in 2006.

It consists, essentially, of a mass of tyres with which viewers can interact at will. Kaprow thought of it as a rolling sea when he first installed it, but in later incarnations it made him think of a coal cellar and much else – it was always birthed anew. Without Kaprow to stage a reinstallation, the curator, Helen Molesworth, commissioned the installation and performance artist William Pope.L to recreate it (and commissioned the artists Sharon Hayes and Josiah McElheny to create responses to it at other sites around New York). Pope.L heaped up the tyres, dimly lit the gallery with bare bulbs, and installed on a shelf a pile of body bags – apparently containing figures. He also added a voice-over, in the tone of President Obama, making slightly rambling analogies between rearranging the tyres and renewing life, and events in the ‘war on terror’. The reek of the tyres and the sense of weight and darkness reminded one of why Yard has remained so interesting – one can only imagine the impact it had, on the heels of Abstract Expressionism, in piling the gallery with refuse. Its message was powerfully political, although it surely remains political enough without being encumbered by laboured analogies.

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Calendar London Alan Cristea. An installation by Boo Ritson, BackRoads Journeys. The Diner, is here to 21st November.

Alison Jacques. An exhibition of works in a variety of media by Robert Mapplethorpe; to 21st November.

Annely Juda. Experimental Workshop, Japan 1951–1957, and The Great Experiment, Russia. Homage to Camilla Gray, are both on view to 18th December.

Barbican. The Curve is transformed into a Second World War bunker by the Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski; to 10th January.

Boundary Gallery. Bronzes and works on paper by Jacob Epstein on the 50th anniversary of the artist’s death are displayed to 23rd December. See also Royal Academy.

British Museum. Completing its series of exhibitions exploring power and empire, the Museum examines the rule of Moctezuma II, the last elected Aztec Emperor; to 24th January.

The first exhibition in Europe to examine the great age of printmaking in Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century; to 5th April; to be reviewed.

Camden Arts Centre. A group show of works on the theme of ‘perceptual ambiguity’, selected by the Polish artist Paulina Olowska, is here to 29th November.

Connaught Brown. Paintings, watercolours and drawings by Chagall and by Dufy; to 28th November.

Courtauld Gallery. Frank Auerbach’s paintings of post-War London building sites, including St Paul’s, Oxford Street and the Shell Building, are on view here to 17th January; to be reviewed.

Daniel Katz. A Collector’s Cabinet III: An Exhibition of European Sculpture and Works of Arts; 25th November to 23rd December.

Dulwich Picture Gallery. Drawing Attention: Tiepolo, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Picasso & more presents a selection of 100 drawings from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; to 27th January.

Faggionato Fine Art. Twenty paintings by Wayne Thiebaud, including still-life, landscape and cityscape paintings of his native San Francisco, are on view here to 18th December (Fig.71).

Fine Art Society. An exhibition of paintings, prints and sculptures of First and Second World War subjects is here from 10th November to 3rd December.

Fleming Collection. Works from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery; to 19th December.

Gagosian. Recent paintings and sculpture by Glenn Brown; to 26th November.

Haunch of Venison. A group show of works by Enrico Castellani, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd and Günther Uecker is on view to 7th November.

Hauser & Wirth. At Southwood Garden,  Piccadilly, sculptures by Hans Josephsohn are on display to 22nd January.

Hayward Gallery. A retrospective of works by Ed Ruscha is on view here to 10th January (then in Munich and Stockholm); to be reviewed.

Helly Nahmad. An exhibition of works by Monet; to 26th February.

Karsten Schubert. Works 1968–90 by the conceptual artist Keith Arnatt are on view to 13th November.

Marlborough Fine Art. Recent paintings by the Spanish artist Juan Genoves; to 28th November.

Matthiesen Gallery. An exhibition of Spanish sculpture 1550–1750 (to 18th December) coincides with the National Gallery’s The Sacred Made Real (see below).

National Gallery. The Sacred Made Real brings together 17th-century Spanish paintings and painted wooden sculptures and provides a reappraisal of the role of hyper-realist sculptures in the development of Spanish art; to 24th January (then in Washington; see also Matthiesen Gallery and Indianapolis); to be reviewed. To coincide with the exhibition, a special display examining the technical challenges of making a polychrome sculpture is on view in Room 1.

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71. Little deli, by Wayne Thiebaud. 2001. Canvas, 48 by 36 cm. (Exh. Faggionato Fine Art, London).

Parasol Unit. An exhibition of work by Keith Tyson is on view here to 11th November.

A group show of work by Cecily Brown, Hans Josephsohn, Shaun McDowell, Katy Moran and Maaike Schoorel; 25th November to 7th February.

Pilar Corrias. Videos, paintings and drawings by Shahzia Sikander are on view to 21st November.

Queen’s Gallery. The exhibition tracing the history of the ‘conversation piece’, seen previously in Edinburgh and reviewed in the October issue, is on view here to 14th February.

Raven Row. An exhibition of works by Harun Farocki; 19th November to 7th February.

Redfern Gallery. An eightieth-birthday retrospective of paintings by Anne Dunn runs here from 24th November to 28th January.

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 survey exhibition of works by Anish Kapoor is on view to 11th December; to be reviewed.

An exhibition examining the radical transformation of British sculpture at the beginning of the twentieth century focuses on the work of Epstein, GaudierBrzeska and Gill; to 24th January.

Sadie Coles HQ. At  South Audley Street, works

by Ugo Rondinone, and at  Balfour Mews, works

by John Bock; both to 21st November.

Sam Fogg. An exhibition of Tibetan manuscripts runs to 20th November.

Serpentine Gallery. An exhibition of works by Gustav Metzger can be seen to 8th November; it is followed

by Design Real which looks at industrial, scientific and domestic design; 26th November to 7th February.

Sir John Soane’s Museum. The use of classical orders in architecture since classical times is the theme of an exhibition running here to 30th January.

South London Gallery. Nostalgia, a new three-part video installation by Omer Fast; to 6th December.

Tate Britain. A show exploring Turner’s responses to the work both of European predecessors and British contemporaries runs to 31st January; to be reviewed.

Cold Corners by Eva Rothschild is the latest Duveen Commission to occupy the central Duveen Galleries; to 29th November.

Lucy Skaer, Enrico David, Richard Wright and Roger Hiorns square up for this year’s Turner Prize; the display of their works runs to 3rd January.

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Tate Modern. Pop Life: Art in a Material World examines how artists since the 1980s have cultivated their public persona as a product; to 17th January.

An exhibition of work by the pioneering conceptual artist John Baldessari is on display to 10th January.

The tenth Unilever commission for the Turbine Hall is by the Polish artist Mirosław Balka; to 5th April.

Timothy Taylor. New works by Bridget Riley; 7th November to 19th December.

Victoria and Albert Museum. The Museum’s new Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, as well as the new Ceramics Galleries, open on 2nd December; see this month’s Editorial on p.739 above.

The exhibition Maharaja: the Splendour of India’s Royal Courts runs to 17th January.

A Higher Ambition: Owen Jones (1809–74) traces Jones’s contributions to Victorian design reform; to 22nd November.

Victoria Miro. New works by the Indian artist N.S. Harsha are on view to 14th November.

Vilma Gold. A video and sculptural installation by Stephen G. Rhodes is on view to 29th November.

Wallace Collection. Vorsprung durch Technik: The Innovative Work of Cabinet-Maker Johann Fiedler explores a recently restored commode of c.1786; to 29th November.

During refurbishment of the west gallery of the museum, a sizeable selection of nineteenth-century paintings is temporarily on view in the exhibition space in the basement.

25 new paintings by Damien Hirst, recycling motifs from Francis Bacon, are on view to 24th January.

Whitechapel. The first retrospective in Britain of works by the French artist Sophie Calle is on view here to 20th December.

White Cube. Both at Hoxton Square, and Mason’s Yard, works by Anselm Kiefer; to 14th November.

Great Britain and Ireland Bedford, Bedford Castle. A large exhibition of works

by Edward Bawden, from the archive of his works donated by the artist to the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, is on show here for the first time; to 31st January.

Birmingham, Barber Institute of Fine Arts. 17thcentury Dutch paintings from the Holburne Museum of Art, Bath, are shown alongside Dutch paintings from the Barber itself; 13th November to 28th February.

Birmingham, Ikon Gallery. Paintings by Semyon Faibisovich and film and video work by Victor Alimpiev; to 15th November.

Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum. An exhibition of recent acquisitions of drawings and prints runs to 24th January.

The leading international authority on Renaissance medals in the post-War period, Graham Pollard (1929–2007) spent his entire career at the Fitzwilliam Museum, rising from a gallery attendant to become Deputy Director, and his contribution to the field is explored through the two collections that he built up during his life: the Museum’s collection and his own private collection; to 31st January.

Compton Verney. An exhibition exploring the private world of the artist’s studio from the 17th century to the present day runs to 13th December; to be reviewed.

Georgian Portraits: Seeing is Believing is an exhibition of works from the Holburne Museum of Art, Bath; to 13th December.

Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art. An overview of work by the French artist Philippe Parreno, and the first solo exhibition in Europe of sculpture by the American artist Lynda Benglis; both to 24th January.

150 master photographs from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, depicting New York City; 25th November to 7th February.

Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland. An exhibition of Munch prints, seen earlier in Oslo, is on view here to 6th December.

Dundee, Contemporary Arts. An exhibition of work by Thomas Hirschhorn; to 29th November.

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Edinburgh, Dean Gallery. Running Time. Artist Films in Scotland 1960 to Now runs here to 22nd November.

Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland. The exhibition devoted to Paul Sandby, already seen in Nottingham and reviewed on p.793 above, has its second showing here from 7th November to 7th February (then in London).

Edinburgh, Queen’s Gallery. Photographs by Herbert George Ponting and Frank Hurley of Scott and Shackleton in the Antarctic mark the centenary of Scott’s illfated journey to the South Pole; to 11th April.

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; to 8th November.

Gateshead, Baltic. Works by Martin Parr are on show here to 10th January.

Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery. Paintings, drawings and prints by Andrzej Jackowski; to 12th December.

Leeds, Henry Moore Institute. The exhibition Sculpture in Painting brings together 30 paintings from the 1500s to the present, with works by Titian, Hogarth, Vuillard and de Chirico, and explores the dialogue between painting and sculpture; to 10th January.

Liverpool, Tate. The artist Michael Landy curates an exhibition that juxtaposes his own works against those of Jean Tinguely, by whose concepts of auto-destruction Landy has been inspired; to 10th January.

Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery. Flashback is an exhibition of works by Bridget Riley drawn from the Arts Council Collection; to 13th December.

Works old and new comprise an exhibition charting the rise of women artists; to 14th March.

Manchester Art Gallery. Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism; to 10th January; to be reviewed.

Fantasies, Follies and Disasters: The Prints of Francisco de Goya; to 31st January.

Middlesbrough, Institute of Modern Art. Works by Gerhard Richter; to 15th November.

Milton Keynes Gallery. Works made from the 1950s to the 1980s by the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi are on view to 15th November.

Norwich, Sainsbury Centre. Subversive Spaces. Surrealism and Contemporary Art is on view to 13th December.

Oxford, Ashmolean Museum. The Museum reopens on 7th November after a major redevelopment of its building.

Oxford, Museum of Modern Art. An exhibition of work by the Glasgow-based sculptor Karla Black is on view here to 29th November.

Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery. Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Acquisition of Genius is the curious title of a monographic exhibition devoted to the Plymptonborn artist and includes loans from the United Kingdom and abroad; 21st November to 20th February.

St Ives, Tate. The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art explores the influence of folklore, mysticism, mythology and the occult on British art since the turn of the twentieth century; to 10th January.

Salford, The Lowry. An exhibition of paintings by L.S. Lowry and by Maggi Hambling on the theme of the sea runs here to 31st January.

Salisbury, Roche Court, New Art Centre. A survey exhibition of sculpture by Hubert Dalwood runs to 8th November (Fig.72).

Wakefield, Bretton Hall, Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The angel (1989) by James Lee Byars comprises 125 spheres of hand-blown Murano glass, which will be arranged on the stone floor of St Bartholomew’s Chapel in Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The chapel will be open to the public for the first time in 250 years; to 29th November.

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.

Woking, The Lightbox. An exhibition of works by Jenny Holzer is on view here from 14th November to 14th February.

Europe 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, Museum Van Loon. An exhibition devoted to the paintings of Jurriaan Andriessen (1742–1819) runs here to 4th January.

Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. A survey of winter landscapes by Hendrick Avercamp; 20th November to 15th February (then in Washington).

Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum. The exhibition Alfred Stevens, previously in Brussels and reviewed in the September issue, is here to 24th January.

15 years of research into Van Gogh’s correspondence culminates in the launch of a website detailing the results of this work, the publication of a six-volume book in three languages and the exhibition Van Gogh’s letters: The artist speaks; to 3rd January.

Antwerp, Rubenshuis. Room for Art in 17th-century Antwerp explores art collecting in 17th-century Antwerp through three paintings by Willem van Haecht depicting the art collection of Cornelis van der Geest (1555–1638); 28th November to 28th February (then in The Hague).

Athens, Byzantine and Christian Museum.

Warhol/Icon: The Creation of Image juxtaposes ‘iconic’ works by Warhol with Byzantine and early Christian painting; to 10th January.

Athens, Gagosian Gallery. Works by Cy Twombly comprise the inaugural exhibition of this new branch, located at 3 Merlin Street; to 19th December.

Athens, National Gallery. The Louvre’s indefatigability in sending its ‘masterpieces’ around the world is apparent in The birth of Neoclassicism in France. Masterpieces from the Musée du Louvre; to 11th January.

Bagno a Ripoli (Florence), Oratorio di S. Caterina all’Antella. The trecento frescos in this oratory are joined by 12 unfamiliar paintings by, among others, Agnolo Gaddi and Spinello Aretino; to 31st December.

Barcelona, Fundació Joan Miró. Works by Frantisek Kupka; 27th November to 24th January.

Barcelona, Museu d’Art Contemporani. A large survey of work by John Cage runs here to 10th January (then in Høvikodden).

Basel, Fondation Beyeler. A large survey exhibition of works by Jenny Holzer includes pieces from the late 1970s to the present, and also a selection of recent works not seen before in Europe; to 24th January.

Basel, Kunstmuseum. From Dürer to Gober: 101 Master Drawings from the Kupferstichkabinett; to 24th January.

Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie. The monographic exhibition devoted to the life and work of Carl Gustav Carus, previously seen in Dresden, runs here to 10th January.

72. Signs, by Hubert Dalwood. 1959. Aluminium, 117 by 79 by 30.5 cm. (Exh. Roche Court, New Art Centre, Salisbury).

Berlin, Charlottenburg. Cranach and Renaissance Art under the House of Hohenzollern; to 24th January.

Berlin, Deutsche Guggenheim. Paintings by Julie Mehretu are on view here to 10th January.

Berlin, Deutsches Historisches Museum. Following showings in Los Angeles and Nuremberg, the exhibition Kunst und Kalter Krieg. Deutsche Positionen 1945–1989 (known by the more divisive title ‘Art of Two Germanys’ for the US display) can be seen here to 10th January; to be reviewed.

Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof. Seen earlier in London, The Saints, by the American artist Paul Pfeiffer, is a multi-media installation recreating the 1966 World Cup final; to 28th March.

Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie. A solo exhibition of work by Thomas Demand; to 17th January.

Bern, Kunstmuseum. Fury and Grace: Guercino: Baroque Drawings from the Uffizi, Florence; to 22nd November.

Bielefeld, Kunsthalle. An exhibition of work by the German Impressionists, Liebermann, Slevogt and Corinth; 22nd November to 31st January.

Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum. Seen earlier in New York, the exhibition devoted to the life and work of Frank Lloyd Wright, reviewed in the September issue, is on view to 14th February.

Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes. An exhibition devoted to the early work of Murillo runs here to 17th January (then in Seville); to be reviewed.

Bologna, Museo Civico Archeologico. An exhibition here reconstructs Federico Zeri’s intellectual biography through the paintings for which he found sound attributions and through his collection of photographs of works of art and archaeological sites; to 10th January; to be reviewed.

Bonn, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. A retrospective of work by Markus Lüpertz; to 17th January.

Bordeaux, Capc-Musée d’Art Contemporain. An exhibition of works by Ilya Kabakov; to 7th February.

Bourg-en-Bresse, Musée de Brou. Paintings by Zoran Music (1909–2005) are here to 10th January.

Bregenz, Kunsthaus. An exhibition of work by Tony Oursler can be seen here to 17th January.

Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts. From Botticelli to Titian: Masterpieces of Two Centuries of Italian Art includes some 80 loans from international collections; to 14th February.

Caldarola, Palazzo dei Cardinali Pallotta. A show devoted to the collection of Cardinal Giambattista Pallotta, reviewed in the October issue, runs to 12th November.

Catania, Fondazione Puglisi Cosentino, Palazzo Valle. Burri e Fontana: Materia e Spazio confronts the work of these two artists; 15th November to 14th March.

Cologne, Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst. Das Herz der Erleuchtung. Buddhistische Kunst aus China (550–600); to 10th January.

Cologne, Museum Ludwig. An exhibition examining the work of Angelika Hoerle (1899–1923), whose work foreshadowed Surrealism; to 1st January.

Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst. Works

by Christian Lemmerz are on view to 6th March.

The monographic exhibition devoted to Nicolai Abildgaard, seen previously in Paris and Hamburg, has its final showing here; to 3rd January.

An exhibition devoted to Haarlem Mannerist prints runs to 17th January.

Dijon, Le Consortium. An exhibition of work by the painters Sophie von Hellerman and Josh Smith is on show here to 29th November.

Dresden, Residenzschloss. ‘Crossing the Sea with Fortuna’: Saxony and Denmark – Marriages and Alliances Mirrored in Art (1548–1709) runs to 4th January.

Dresden, Semperbau. An exhibition of works by Georg Baselitz reflects on the artist’s relationship with Dresden; to 28th February.

Düsseldorf, K. A survey of paintings by the Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal is on view here to 10th January.

Düsseldorf, Museum Kunst Palast. Seen earlier in London, a survey exhibition of work by Per Kirkeby, is on view here to 10th January.

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Eindhoven, Van Abbemuseum. An ambitious, threepart exhibition examining the work of El Lissitzky; to 5th September 2010.

Enschede, Rijksmuseum Twenthe. An exhibition of works by Nicolaas Verkolje; to 24th January.

Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti. An exhibition focusing on Boldini in Paris between 1871 and 1886 and on his work before he became the portraitist of the beau monde runs here to 10th January (then in Williamstown); to be reviewed.

Florence, Palazzo Strozzi. Trompe l’œil from Antiquity to the present day is the theme of an exhibition running here to 10th January.

Frankfurt, Liebieghaus. An international loan exhibition here explores the work of Houdon and his contemporaries; to 28th February (then in Montpellier).

Frankfurt, Museum für Angewandte Kunst. A monographic exhibition devoted to the cabinet-maker André Charles Boulle runs here to 31st January.

Frankfurt, Museum für Moderne Kunst. A survey exhibition of works by Jack Goldstein, one of the ‘Pictures Generation’; to 10th January.

Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle. A retrospective of works by László Moholy-Nagy, including the artist’s Raum der Gegenwart of 1930; to 7th February.

Frankfurt, Städel Museum. A monographic show devoted to Botticelli runs here from 13th November to 28th February; to be reviewed.

Geneva, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire. Rembrandt, Rubens, Ruisdael and Beyond: Dutch and Flemish Printmaking in the 17th Century; to 3rd January.

Haarlem, Teylers Museum. Here, and at the Singer Museum, Laren, the first monographic show devoted to the work of Anton Mauve runs to 14th January.

The Hague, Gemeentemuseum. An exhibition comparing works by Cézanne, Picasso and Mondrian is on view here to 24th January.

The Hague, Mauritshuis. The exhibition devoted to Philips Wouwerman, seen previously in Kassel, runs here from 12th November to 28th February; to be reviewed.

Hamburg, Kunsthalle. The third instalment of a tripartite exhibition of works by Sigmar Polke; to 17th January.

Humlebaek, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. A major survey of contemporary art from around the world runs here to 10th January.

Lausanne, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts. A retrospective of works by Renée Green; to 3rd January.

Leiden, Lakenhal. The exhibition Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde. Constructing a New World comprises some 300 works by 80 artists surveying Van Doesburg’s influence on the European avant-garde; to 3rd January (then in London).

Leon, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon. Current exhibitions include works by Ugo Rondinone, Jorge Galindo and Kyong Park; all to 10th January.

Louvain, M. At this curiously renamed museum, an international loan exhibition explores the work of Rogier van der Weyden; to 6th December; to be reviewed in conjunction with the exhibition that took place in 2008–09 in Frankfurt and Berlin.

Madrid, Fundación Juan March. An international loan exhibition explores Caspar David Friedrich’s drawings in relation to his paintings; to 10th January.

Madrid, Museo del Prado. An exhibition devoted to Juan Bautista Maíno; to 31st January; to be reviewed.

Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Videos, drawings, objects and installations by the Croatian artist David Maljkovic; to 18th January.

A survey exhibition of works by Francesco Lo Savio; to 11th January.

Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Here and at the Fundación Caja Madrid, Tears of Eros explores the relationship between sexual desire and the death instinct in the visual arts spanning Rubens to Rodin; to 31st January.

The first retrospective in Spain of works by FantinLatour; to 10th January.

A display focuses on the Museum’s famous grisailles

by Jan van Eyck; 3rd November to 31st January.

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Mainz, Gutenberg-Museum. Here and at the Ladesmuseum an exhibition explores the history of the art of the mezzotint; to 29th November.

Malaga, Museo Picasso. A retrospective of work by Sophie Taeuber-Arp; to 24th January.

Marseilles, Musée Cantini. De la scène au tableau, shows the influence of the theatre and the theatrical on artists from David to Vuillard; to 3rd January.

Martigny, Fondation Gianadda. Modern works from Courbet to Picasso from the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, are on display here to 22nd November.

Milan, Palazzo Reale. An exhibition devoted to the Scapigliatura movement, including artists such as Medardo Rosso, Picio and Cremona, runs here to 22nd November.

Also here is a major Edward Hopper exhibition; to 24th January (then in Rome).

Montpellier, Musée Fabre. A monographic exhibition devoted to Jean Raoux (1677–1734) runs here from 27th November to 14th April; to be reviewed.

Munich, Alte Pinakothek. The completion of a complex and lengthy restoration of Andrea del Sarto’s Holy Family is celebrated in a display which also includes another version of the painting from the Louvre; to 6th January.

Rubens challenges the Old Masters: Inspiration and Reinvention examines the copies Rubens made of the work of other painters; to 7th February.

73. Birth of the Virgin, by Daniel Mauch. c.1515.

Wood, 85 by 59 by 7.5 cm. (Liebieghaus, Frankfurt am Main; exh. Ulmer Museum).

Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne. Prints by Daniel Hopfer are here from 5th November to 31st January.

Nijmegen, Museum Het Valkhof. Catherine’s world presents the Hours of Catherine of Cleves from the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, which will be disbound for the occasion so that more than 100 pages can be viewed separately; to 3rd January.

Padua, Galleria Civica Cavour. Futurist sculpture 1909–1944: homage to Mino Rosso is another in the series of celebrations of Futurism’s centenary; to 31st January.

Padua, Palazzo Zabarella. Telemaco Signorini’s works will be shown alongside those by contemporaries such as Van Gogh, Degas, Caillebotte and others; to 31st January; to be reviewed.

Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou. A comprehensive survey of Surrealist photography made between 1920 and 1940 runs here to 11th January (then in Winterthur and Madrid).

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.

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Paris, Grand Palais. An exhibition surveying works made by Renoir after 1900 runs here to 4th January (then in Los Angeles and Philadelphia).

Paris, Institut Néerlandais. Dutch and Flemish paintings from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen are on loan here from 19th November to 24th January.

Paris, Jeu de Paume. An exhibition examining the cinematic work of Fellini is accompanied by installations devised by Francesco Vezolli; to 17th January.

Paris, Musée Cognacq-Jay. An exhibition here focuses on Marguerite Gérard as a pupil and collaborator in Fragonard’s studio; to 6th December; to be reviewed.

Paris, Musée d’art moderne. In Arc, a survey exhibition of paintings by the German artist Albert Oehlen is on view to 3rd January.

Paris, Musée de la Vie Romantique. Souvenirs d’italie (1600–1850): Chefs-d’œuvre du Petit Palais; to 17th January.

Paris, Musée du Louvre. Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, previously in Boston and reviewed on p.795 above, runs to 4th January.

An exhibition devoted to drawings by Battista Franco runs from 26th November to 22nd February.

Paris, Musée du Luxembourg. A monographic exhibition devoted to the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany runs to 17th January.

Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André. A loan exhibition of works by artists such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Memling and Van Eyck from the Muzeul National Brukenthal, Sibiu, Romania, runs to 11th January.

Paris, Musée Rodin. The first exhibition exploring the relationship between Matisse and Rodin runs to 28th February; to be reviewed.

Paris, Pinacothèque. De Rembrandt à Vermeer is a loan exhibition of paintings from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, running to 7th February.

Parma, Fondazione Magnani-Rocca. Futurismo! Da Boccioni all’aeropittura; to 8th December.

Passariano, Villa Manin. The age of Courbet and Manet: the spread of realism and Impressionism through central and eastern Europe charts the influence of French art on artists in Belgium, Austria, Russia, Romania and elsewhere; to 7th March.

Piacenza, Galleria d’arte moderna Ricci Oddi. An exhibition devoted to small-scale paintings by the Macchiaioli and post-Macchiaioli; to 2nd May. Pont-Aven, Musée. Paintings by Maurice Chabbas (1862–1947) can be seen here to 3rd January.

Rancate (Mendrisio), Canton Ticino, Pinacoteca cantonale Giovanni Züst. The collection assembled

by Riccardo Molo (1883–1934) of 19th-century Italian painters from Fattori to Segantini is on public view for the first time; to 10th January.

Rimini, Castel Sismondo. Paintings spanning Rembrandt to Picasso from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, are on loan here; to 14th March.

Rome, Galleria Borghese. 20 paintings by Francis Bacon, including two triptychs, are placed side-byside with Caravaggio’s work; to 24th January.

Rome, Musei Capitolini, Palazzo dei Conservatori.

Michelangelo’s drawings for his architectural projects in Rome are on view here to 7th February; to be reviewed.

Rome, Palazzo della Cancelleria. Another celebration of Galileo, this one ironically sponsored by the Pontificia Accademia delle Scienze, among others, is here from 15th November to 31st January.

Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni. A large exhibition of works by Alexander Calder is on view here to 14th February.

Rome, Villa Medici. Gérard Garouste’s work is on show here to 29th November.

Rotterdam, Kunsthal. Photographs and paintings from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Neue Pinakothek, Munich, comprise the exhibition New Horizons. The Hague School and the modern Dutch landscape; to 6th December.

Modern Life. Edward Hopper and his Time places works

by Hopper alongside a large selection of works by O’Keeffe, Feininger and Grant Wood among others, drawn from the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; to 17th January.

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Rovereto, Museo d’Arte moderna e contemporanea. Masterpieces of modern art from the Winterthur collection are on show here to 10th January.

Also here, Kendell Geers. Irrespektiv, a loan exhibition devoted to this South African artist; to 17th January.

Salzburg, Museum der Moderne. A survey exhibition of work by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner runs here to 14th February.

Siena, S. Maria della Scala. An exhibition devoted to Federico Barocci runs here to 10th January; to be reviewed.

Stockholm, Moderna Museet. An exhibition juxtaposing works by Dalí and Francesco Vezolli runs here to 17th January.

Stockholm, Nationalmuseum. An exhibition devoted to the work of Caspar David Friedrich introduces the Swedish public to an artist who is not at all represented in Swedish public collections; to 10th January.

Turin, Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’arte Contemporanea. An exhibition exploring the kinetic art of Gianni Colombo runs here to 10th January.

Ulmer Museum. A monographic exhibition devoted to the work of Daniel Mauch (Fig.73) runs here to 29th November.

Valenica, Museo de Bellas Artes. Valencia, The Splendour of the Renaissance in Aragon, previously in Bilbao, presents a selection of some 100 works on loan from the Museo de Zaragoza; to 17th January (then in Zaragoza); to be reviewed.

Valenciennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts. The exhibition Jean Baptiste Vanmour: a painter from Valenciennes in Constantinople is on view here to 7th February; to be reviewed.

Venice. The 53rd Biennale closes on 22nd November.

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, Peggy Guggenheim Collection. 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.

An exhibition devoted to the work Maurice Prendergast while he was in Italy in 1899 and again in 1911–12, previously in Williamstown, runs here to 3rd January (then in Houston).

Verona, Palazzo della Gran Guardia. The idea that Corot can be seen as the ‘father’ of modern art is explored here in an exhibition of 115 works spanning Poussin to Picasso; 27th November to 7th March.

Vienna, Kunsthalle. The exhibition 1989: The End of History or Beginning of the Future? includes works by artists such as the Kabakovs, Nedko Solakov and Susan Philipsz; to 7th February.

Vienna, Essl Collection. 25 recent paintings by the German artist Daniel Richter go on view here to 10th January.

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Charles the Bold (1433–77): Art, War and Courtly Splendour, previously in Bern and Bruges and reviewed in the July issue, runs here to 10th January.

Sensual – female – Flemish centres on Rubens’s ‘Fur coat’, Cimon and Iphigenia and Self-portrait and places them in the context of contemporary Flemish works from the permanent collection that are not usually on display; to 13th December.

Vienna, Liechtenstein Museum. An exhibition exploring the picture frame from the late medieval period to the 19th century is here to 12th January.

Vienna, MUMOK. The exhibition Gender Check.

Femininity and Masculinity in Eastern European Art offers a broad survey of works from more than 200 artists; from 13th November to 14th February.

Volterra, Palazzo dei Priori. The exhibition devoted to the Flemish painter Pieter de Witte (Pietro Candido), reviewed in the October issue, runs here to 8th November.

Zürich, Kunsthaus. A loan exhibition of drawings and paintings, Georges Seurat: Figure in Space, runs to 17th January (then Frankfurt).

New York Asia Society. Hanging Fire: Contemporary Art from Pakistan is on view to 3rd January.

Brooklyn Museum. An exhibition of 124 watercolours from a set of 350 by James Tissot, depicting detailed scenes from the New Testament, all in the Museum’s collection, are displayed for the first time in two decades; to 17th January.

David Zwirner. Dan Flavin. Series and Progressions; to 23rd December.

Drawing Centre. Drawings by Ree Morton are displayed here to 18th December.

Frick Collection. The exhibition Exuberant Grotesques: Renaissance Maiolica from the Fontana Workshop shows the Frick’s recently acquired maiolica dish with the Judgment of Paris along with five related works on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; to 17th January.

Watteau to Degas: French Drawings from the Frits Lugt Collection; to 10th January (see also Morgan Library).

Gagosian. At  W. st St., new sculptures by Richard Serra; to 23rd December.

Jewish Museum. An exhibition examining how Man Ray’s work was shaped by his turn-of-the-century American Jewish immigrant experience runs here from 15th November to 14th March.

Lehmann Maupin. Works by Tracey Emin are on view to 19th December.

Marian Goodman. Works by Gerhard Richter are on view from 7th November to 9th January.

Metro Pictures. A retrospective exhibition of works

by Robert Longo is on display to 29th November.

Works by Olaf Breuning are on view to 5th December.

Metropolitan Museum of Art. From 3rd November the Museum will have on loan the marble sculpture Young archer, first attributed to Michelangelo in 1997 in this Magazine.

An international loan exhibition here explores the place of music and theatre in Watteau’s art; to 29th November; to be reviewed.

Vermeer’s Milkmaid is on loan here from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and is put into context through works by Vermeer, De Hooch, Metsu, Maes, De Witte, Van Vliet and Sorgh from the Metropolitan’s permanent collection; to 29th November.

An exhibition devoted to the 18th-century Chinese painter Luo Ping runs to 10th January.

An exhibition exploring scenes of everyday life in American painting between 1765 and 1915 runs to 24th January.

Art of the Samurai: Japanese Arms and Armor, 1156–1868; to 10th January.

Morgan Library & Museum. William Blake’s World: ‘A New Heaven Is Begun’ is drawn from the Morgan’s extensive holdings of works by Blake; to 3rd January.

Rococo and Revolution: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings includes more than eighty drawings from the Morgan’s renowned holdings; to 3rd January (see also Frick Collection).

Museum of Modern Art. A display of six late paintings by Monet, made at Giverny, including four from the collection are on show for the first time since the Museum’s reopening in 2004; to 12th April.

Seen earlier in Berlin, the exhibition Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity, can be seen here from 8th November to 25th January; to be reviewed.

Neue Galerie. From Klimt to Klee: Masterworks from the Serge Sabarsky Collection honours the life and work of the museum’s co-founder; to 15th February.

New Museum of Contemporary Art. Works by Urs Fischer are on view to 24th January.

Pace Wildenstein. Recent works by David Hockney are at th St. and th St.; to 24th December.

P.S.. On the occasion of Performa 09, the third edition of the performance art held in New York City (1st to 22nd November), the exhibition 100 Years (version #2, ps1, nov 2009) gathers important happenings, actions, movements and gestures to outline a history of performance art; to 5th April.

Richard L. Feigen. The London dealer Sam Fogg and Richard Feigen join forces in the show Medieval Art and the Contemporary Spirit; to 5th February.

Sculpture Centre. Collaborative works by Mike Kelley and Michael Smith are on view here to 30th November (then in Los Angeles).

Solomon Guggenheim Museum. Seen earlier in Munich and Paris, the extensive retrospective of works by Kandinsky is on view here to 13th January.

It was reviewed in the July issue.

A new commissioned work by Anish Kapoor, Memory, is on display to 28th March.

Whitney Museum of American Art. Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction is on view here to 17th January.

An exhibition of works by Roni Horn is on view to 31st January.

North America Atlanta, High Museum of Art. Leonardo da Vinci: Hand of the Genius includes some 50 works, including more than 20 sketches and studies by Leonardo, some of which will be on view in the United States for the first time; to 21st February.

Birmingham Museum of Art. The touring exhibition Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery has its last showing here to 10th January.

Blanton Museum of Art. The display reconstructing Veronese’s Petrobelli altarpiece, seen earlier in London and Ottawa, is on view here to 31st December.

Boston, ICA. The first museum survey exhibition of works by Damián Ortega runs here to 17th January.

Chicago, Art Institute. Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus from the National Gallery, London, is on view here (to 15th January) as a reciprocal loan for the Institute’s Crucifixion by Zurbarán, which is on show in the National Gallery’s The Sacred made Real exhibition.

Fort Worth, Kimbell Museum. Private Collection, Texas: European Masterpieces from Texas Homes, Past and Present; 22nd November to 21st March.

Fort Worth, Modern Art Museum. Twenty-five paintings by Susan Rothenberg comprise an exhibition running here to 4th January (then in Santa Fe, Washington and Miami).

Houston, Menil Collection. Works by Joaquín Torres-Garcia; to 3rd January (then in San Diego).

An exhibition exploring the fragmented human body in art spanning late medieval to the 20th century runs here to 28th February.

Houston, Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition The Moon, previously in Cologne and reviewed in the September issue, runs here to 10th January.

Indianapolis Museum of Art. Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World explores the exaggerated aesthetic and expressive means employed by 17th-century Spanish artists to convey religious experience through works in various media, including polychrome sculpture; to 3rd January (see also London, National Gallery).

Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The monographic show devoted to Luis Meléndez, previously in Washington, is here to 3rd January (then in Boston).

Los Angeles, Hammer Museum. An exhibition of watercolours by Charles Burchfield can be seen here to 3rd January (then in Buffalo and New York).

Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. Irving Penn: Small Trades shows photographs of ordinary working people by Penn from a collection recently acquired by the Museum; to 10th January.

Los Angeles, Santa Monica Museum of Art. Collages and drawings by Allen Ruppersberg are displayed alongside two new installations by the artist; to 19th December.

Minneapolis, Institute of Arts. An exhibition here explores how the definition of a ‘masterpiece’ has changed over time through works from the Louvre, including Vermeer’s Astronomer; to 10th January.

Montreal, Musée d’Art Contemporain. Exhibitions of work by Tacita Dean, Tricia Middleton and Francine Savard; to 3rd January.

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New Haven, Yale Center for British Art. An exhibition devoted to Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill includes many objects that were in Walpole’s collection (Fig.74); to 3rd January (then in London).

The exhibition A bouquet of botanical delights: the life and art of Mary Delany is on view here to 3rd January.

Oklahoma City Art Museum. The touring exhibition The Dutch Italianates: Seventeenth-Century Masterpieces from Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, has its last showing here to 3rd January.

Philadelphia, Museum of Art. A retrospective of work by Arshile Gorky is here to 10th January (then in London and Los Angeles); to be reviewed.

Providence, Rhode Island School of Design. An exhibition accompanied by a beautifully produced catalogue explores the technical mastery of the burin through masterpieces of the art of engraving spanning the Master ES to the later 17th century; to 3rd January (then in Evanston).

Sarasota, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. Venice in the Age of Canaletto; to 10th January.

Seattle Art Museum. Michelangelo Public and Private: Drawings for the Sistine Chapel and Other Treasures from the Casa Buonarroti; to 11th April.

Syracuse, Everson Museum of Art. Turner to Cézanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum Wales is on view to 3rd January (then in Washington and Albuquerque).

Washington, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. A retrospective of works by Anne Truitt, who died in 2004, honours this important minimalist artist; to 3rd January.

Washington, National Gallery of Art. In celebration of Judith Leyster’s 400th birthday, a display focuses on the Gallery’s Self-portrait and includes ten additional works by the artist from American and European collections; to 29th November (then in Haarlem).

The exhibition, Renaissance to Revolution: French Drawings from the National Gallery of Art, 1500–1800, is on view here to 31st January.

The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900; to 18th January.

45 proofs for lithographs, etchings and screenprints

by Jasper Johns; to 4th April.

November sales London, Bonhams (Bond St.). Japanese and Chinese art (5th); Printed books and manuscripts (10th); The Greek sale (10th); Design from 1860 (11th); English furniture and works of art (18th); The art of Newlyn and St Ives (18th); The Russian sale (24th); Silver, gold boxes and objects of vertu (25th); Continental furniture and works of art (25th); The Hoffmeister collection of Meissen porcelain, part 1 (25th).

London, Bonhams (Knightsbridge). Asian works of art (2nd); Furniture and works of art (3rd); The Arts Club sale: pictures from the Club and members (10th); Modern pictures (11th); British and Continental pictures (24th); Portrait miniatures (25th).

London, Christie’s (King St.). Chinese ceramics and works of art (3rd); Spanish Splendour, the collection of a Marqués (5th); early European furniture, sculpture and tapestries (5th); 20th-century British and Irish art (12th); Silver, European ceramics, miniatures and gold boxes (17th); English furniture and clocks (19th); Property from the collection of HRH The Prince George, Duke of Kent KG, KT and HRH Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent CI, GCVO and their families (20th); Manuscripts and printed books (24th); Orientalist works (25th).

London, Christie’s (South Kensington). Japanese art and design (4th); Chinese ceramics, works of art and textiles (6th); The collection of the late Christopher Wood (8th); Maritime art (10th); Lalique (12th); Christie’s interiors (17th); Victorian and British Impressionist pictures including drawings and watercolours (18th); Printed books and manuscripts (23rd); Christie’s interiors (24th); Impressionist and Modern art (25th); Arms and armour (30th).

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74. Angel dressed as a deacon. French, 1470–80. Cast latten (copper alloy), 86.4 cm. high. (Victoria and Albert Museum, London; exh. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven).

London, Sotheby’s. Chinese ceramics and works of art (4th); The Greek sale (9th); The collection of Lord and Lady Attenborough (11th); 20th-century British art (11th); A Piedmontese Villa, the contents of Vigna Corte di Buonvicino, Moncalieri, Turin (17th); English and Continental furniture including silver, ceramics and clocks (18th); 19th-century European paintings and sculpture (24th and 25th); Russian Art (30th).

New York, Christie’s. Impressionist and modern art (3rd and 4th); Post-War and contemporary art (10th and 11th); Latin American art (17th and 18th); Decorative arts of Europe and oriental carpets (24th).

New York, Sotheby’s. Russian art (2nd); Impressionist and modern art (4th and 5th); Contemporary art (11th and 12th); Latin American art (18th); French furniture (23rd); Judaica (24th); Israeli art (24th).

Forthcoming Fairs Amsterdam, PAN Amsterdam; 22nd to 29th November.

Brussels Antiques and Fine Art Fair (BRAFA); 22nd to 31st January.

Chicago, Sculpture, Objects and Functional Art (SOFA). Decorative art; 6th to 8th November.

London, Olympia. Winter Fine Art and Antiques Fair; 16th to 22nd November.

Miami, Art Basel Miami Beach; 3rd to 6th December.

Moscow, rd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; 25th September to 25th October.

New York, IFPDA Print Fair; 5th to 8th November.

New York, Master Drawings; 24th to 31st January.

Notes on contributors Alexander Adams is an artist and writer.

Rupert Richard Arrowsmith is a Research Associate at University College, London.

James Beechey is a writer on later nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. He is curating an exhibition on Picasso and England for Tate Britain in 2012.

Víctor Hugo López Borges is Senior Sculpture Conservator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Steven Brindle is Ancient Monuments Inspector for English Heritage.

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Andrew Butterfield is President of Andrew Butterfield Fine Arts, LLC. Roger Cardinal is Emeritus Professor of Literary and Visual Studies, University of Kent, and writes on the literature and art of Surrealism and the early avantgarde.

Paul Crossley is a Professor of the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

Sabine Eiche is a freelance art historian.

Jesús Escobar is Associate Professor of Art History at Northwestern University, Evanston IL. Morgan Falconer is a critic and journalist and writes regularly for The Times, Art World and Frieze.

Andrea M. Gáldy is Professor of Art History at Florence University of the Arts.

Richard Green was Curator of York City Art Gallery from 1977 to 2003. As an independent art historian, he is currently cataloguing the British paintings at Brodsworth Hall, South Yorkshire.

Melissa Hamnett is a Curator of Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Peter Humfrey is Professor of Art History at the University of St Andrews. His catalogue of the Italian paintings in Glasgow will appear in 2012.

Nancy Ireson is a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow.

Her current work focuses on the Salon des Indépendants between 1884 and 1914.

Philippe Malgouyres is a Curator in the department of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Louvre, Paris.

Henry Meyric Hughes is currently working with the Council of Europe on a trilogy of exhibitions on ‘Art in Europe since 1945’.

Peta Motture is Chief Curator of the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Rosemarie Mulcahy teaches Art History at University College, Dublin.

Manfred Leith-Jasper is Director Emeritus of the Kunstkammer and the Schatzkammer at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

Anna Lovatt is a Lecturer in Art History at the University of Nottingham.

Arnika Schmidt is currently writing a Ph.D., ‘Giovanni Costa (1826–1903) – a Roman landscape painter in the national and international context’.

Frits Scholten is Senior Curator of Sculpture at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and holds a chair in the history of collecting at the Free University in Amsterdam.

Mark Stocker is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

Angus Trumble is Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. His next book The Finger: A Handbook will be published in April 2010.

Philip Ward-Jackson, retired Conway Librarian (Courtauld Institute of Art), works on the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association’s National Recording Project.

Patricia Wengraf is an expert and dealer specialising in 15th- to 18th-century bronzes. She is currently preparing the catalogue of Renaissance and Baroque bronzes in the collection of J. Tomilson Hill.

Heinz Widauer is a Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Albertina, Vienna.

Paul Williamson is Keeper of Sculpture, Metalwork, Ceramics and Glass at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. His catalogue of the V. & A.’s Early Christian to Romanesque ivory carvings will be published next year.

Next month’s issue The December issue includes articles on Mariette’s notes on the Jullienne sale of 1767; the decoration of Queen Victoria’s Audience Room at Windsor; oldmaster sources for a Jackson Pollock sketchbook of the late 1930s; and Morris Louis in Australia and New Zealand. Art History Reviewed VI: E.H. Gombrich’s ‘Art and Illusion’.

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Recent acquisitions (2004–09) of sculpture at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam for its Dutch paintings, the Rijksmuseum also houses important collections of international sculpture, decorative art and works on paper. In recent years, under the directorship of Ronald de Leeuw, there was a growing recognition that sculpture could make a significant contribution to the Rijksmuseum’s international profile. This translated into an active acquisition policy which brought to the collection a number of outstanding statues from the Netherlands — the traditional heart of the collection — and several important examples of foreign sculpture. The support of the BankGiro Lottery, the Rijksmuseum Fund, the Mondrian Foundation and the Rembrandt Society has given the Rijksmuseum a larger purchasing budget than it had ten years ago. This has considerably strengthened the Museum’s position and has enabled it to make major purchases far more often than it could before. For example, the acquisition of a number of French and Italian sculptures and the imposing Japanese temple guards (Figs.II, XI, XIII and XVI) would not have been possible without these funds.

New tax rules introduced by the Dutch government to encourage the donation of art have also led to three exceptional acquisitions from private individuals. The Museum acquired a finely modelled terracotta attributed to Nicholas Stone

A L T H O UGH PRIMARILY KNOWN

(Fig.VI) together with a unique group of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drawings from the estate of the art historian I.Q. van Regteren Altena, while the virtuoso and engaging head of a child in boxwood attributed to Stone’s teacher, Hendrick de Keyser (Fig.I), came as a gift from a private individual. The recent expansion of the Rijksmuseum’s general collection policy to include the twentieth century was enthusiastically embraced in acquiring Eight stacked beams (Fig.XIX) for the sculpture collection, a key work from 1964 by Carel Visser, one of the most important post-War sculptors in the Netherlands.

While work on the renovation and reconstruction of the Rijksmuseum building proceeds, a great deal is going on behind the scenes to maximise access to the collections. The entire sculpture collection, for instance, whose last published general collection catalogue dates from 1973, is currently being catalogued so that it can be made available on the Museum’s website. Sculpture will be an important presence throughout the reopened Rijksmuseum, with the unique eighteenth-century group of seven lead statues by Francesco Righetti (Fig.XII) welcoming visitors to the atrium in the restored building.

FRITS SCHOLTEN Senior Curator of Sculpture

I. Crying boy stung by a bee, attributed to Hendrick de Keyser (1565–1621). Amsterdam, c.1615. Boxwood, 20 cm. high.

Anonymous donation. (BK-2007-24). On the basis of his strong resemblance to the weeping putti on the tomb of William of Orange in Delft, this crying boy can be attributed to the Amsterdam sculptor Hendrick de Keyser.

It is an extremely successful and early example of the interest in anecdotal facial expression, and confirms the breadth of De Keyser’s talent. There is a bronze version of the boy in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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II. Misshaku kongo (Agyo) and Naraen Kongo (Ungyo), two temple guards (Niô). Shimane prefecture, Japan, c.1350. Wood with remnants of polychrome, each 220 cm. high.

Purchased with the aid of the BankGiro Lottery, the M.J. Drabbe Fund, the Mondrian Foundation and the Rembrandt Society. (AK-RAK-2007-1a–b). These imposing Buddhist temple guards (Niô) were made for the Iwayji temple (Shimane prefecture in Western Japan). The statues were restored by a sculptor from Kyoto in 1539 and repolychromed. The purchase reveals a less restrained aspect of Japanese sculpture that was not previously represented in the collection at this monumental level. the burlington m a g a z i n e

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III. (above) Virgin and Child, by the Master of Joachim and Anne. North Brabant (Breda?), c.1470. Oak, 105 cm. high. Promised gift in lieu of inheritance tax.

(BK-C-2006-7). We know of only a handful of statues by the anonymous Master of Joachim and Anne, including an intimate group in the Rijksmuseum from which the artist derives his name. This Virgin and Child is the largest known work by the sculptor who, in light of the provenance of a number of his works, including this one, is now believed to have lived and worked in Brabant. The Virgin’s crown is a Neo-gothic addition.

IV. (top right) Madonna of Foy. Southern Netherlands, early seventeenth century.

Unfired clay and original polychrome, 17.9 cm. high. Purchased with the aid of the Frits & Phine Verhaaff Fund. (BK-2005-1). The original model for this statue of the Virgin comes from Utrecht and dates from the middle of the fifteenth century.

It was subsequently mass-produced in pipe clay and distributed widely. When a copy of this Utrecht Madonna was discovered by chance in a felled tree in Foy in the Ardennes in Belgium in 1609, it sparked off a widespread devotion which attracted thousands of pilgrims. Since then polychrome figurines of Mary like this one have been made as luxury pilgrim souvenirs of Foy (see I. Reesing: ‘NotreDame de Foy: the re-use and dissemination of a late medieval figurine of the Virgin in the Low Countries’, Simiolus 33 (2007–08), pp.145–65).

V. (right) Pentecost/Descent of the Holy Spirit. Northern Netherlands (Utrecht or Amsterdam?), c.1450–70. Oak, 23.5 cm. high. Donated by the Uylenberg family in lieu of inheritance tax. (BK-2007-7). This small sculptural group was carved with a great feeling for detail, a quality seldom found in oak. The style suggests that the maker might have been from the province of Utrecht or Holland. The eighteenth-century label on the back states that it was rescued from the fire in the Nieuwezijds Kapel in Amsterdam in 1452, but the historical reliability of this information is doubtful.

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VI. (right) Young woman standing, attributed to Nicholas Stone (1586/87–1647). Amsterdam(?), c.1610–13. Terracotta, 74 cm. high.

Donated by the heirs of I.Q van Regteren Altena in lieu of inheritance tax. (BK-2008-209). As long ago as 1948 this charming yet enigmatic terracotta was attributed to Nicholas Stone, the English assistant and son-in-law of the Amsterdam sculptor Hendrick de Keyser, and dated to his Dutch period.

This is confirmed by stylistic similarities to the elongated figures on a number of tombstones by him in Delft. In the pose and physique of this statue, however, Stone shows clear evidence of his knowledge of Venetian sculpture from the late cinquecento, in particular female nudes by Alessandro Vittoria and Girolamo Campagna.

VII. (top right) Two drinking companions,

by Jan Pieter van Baurscheit the Elder (1669–1728). Antwerp, c.1700. Terracotta, 78 by 100 by 46 cm. Purchased with the aid of the Rijksmuseum Fund. (BK2006-19). This sculpture group by Jan Pieter van Baurscheit is a rare and ambitious example of the jocular genre in the sculpture of the Low Countries, a genre that was extremely popular in paintings.

The sculptor probably drew his inspiration for this monumental work from popular theatre in which comic characters engaged in witty dialogues (see E. Bijzet: ‘”Waer in den Aert en Stand zijn uitgedrukt heel stout”: Pieter van Baurscheits Drinkebroers en de boertige kunst in de Nederlanden’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 56 (2008), pp.425–45).

VIII. (middle right) Holy Family, by Jan III van Doorne (1616–1663). Mechelen, c.1640. Boxwood with inlaid glass eyes, 15 cm. high. (BK-2009-29). Much Flemish Baroque sculpture in ivory and boxwood is of outstanding quality, but it is rarely signed. This playful little group of the Holy Family bears the monogram VD of the Mechelen sculptor Jan van Doorne. He and his colleague Frans van Loo specialised in this kind of virtuoso micro-carving, which appealed to the refined taste of art collectors. The sculpture also attests to the need for private devotion in the Catholic Southern Netherlands.

IX. (bottom right) Sitting greyhound, by Artus Quellinus (1609–1668). Antwerp, 1657. Oak, 70.5 cm. long. Purchased with the aid of the BankGiro Lottery.

(BK-2008-120). Artus Quellinus made his name first and foremost with his statues for the Amsterdam town hall (now the Royal Palace in Dam Square); a great many studies in terracotta for them are now in the Rijksmuseum. This sitting greyhound demonstrates another aspect of the artist’s talents – the naturalistic depiction of animals. That this dog is an animal portrait in its own right is suggested by the collar, which bears the arms of the Roose family of Antwerp, and by the fact that the sculpture is monogrammed and dated (A.Q. 1657).

Quellinus may have carved this work for Pieter Roose (1586–1673), one of the most powerful politicians in the Southern Netherlands.

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X. Blind hurdy-gurdy player. Antwerp or France(?), early eighteenth century. Bronze, 34.5 cm. high. Purchased with the aid of Cyril Humphris. (BK-2006-25). A modest tradition of ‘low life’ sculpture – figurines and little groups of comical and jocular figures like this blind beggar playing his hurdy-gurdy – evolved in Antwerp in the second half of the seventeenth century. Even though the model is undeniably Flemish, the high quality of the bronze and its beautiful lacquered patina suggest it might have been made in France, where in the eighteenth century there was a great demand for jocular art.

XII. Euterpe, from a set of seven statues including Laocoön, Bacchus and Amphelos, Ganymede and Zeus, Cupid, Apollino, and Mercury, by Francesco Righetti (1749–1819). Rome, 1781. Lead, 140 cm. high. (BK-2006-7–13). Between 1786 and 1790 the banker Henry Hope built Paviljoen Welgelegen, a grand Neo-classical country house near Haarlem. For its decoration he ordered thirteen lead casts of classical statues from Righetti in Rome. It was Righetti’s first and probably only completed commission for monumental sculpture. Seven statues from this group have survived, including a full-size Laocoön. The last owner, the Province of Noord-Holland, transferred them to the Rijksmuseum because they were suffering too much in the open air.

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XI. The sacrifice to Venus and The sacrifice to Ceres, by Louis-Simon Boizot (1743–1809). Rome, 1766.

Terracotta, each 53 cm. high. Purchased with the aid of the BankGiro Lottery. (BK-2008-92a–b). These two reliefs were made during Boizot’s stay in Rome (1765–70). They are the sculptor’s earliest dated works and demonstrate the virtuoso modelling talent of the then young artist in competition with his fellow-artist Clodion. With their all’antica theme and their subdued execution they rank as early examples of the advent of Neo-classicism. Boizot may have borrowed the motif of the veiled Vestal virgin from Corradini’s Vestal Tuccia of 1743.

XIII. Hercules delivering Prometheus, by François Lespingola (1644–1705). c.1670. Bronze, 42.5 cm. high.

Purchased with the aid of the BankGiro Lottery. (BK-2008-93). This bronze is the best-known work in Lespingola’s small œuvre. It is part of an unfinished series of statues dedicated to the Labours of Hercules, possibly created during the sculptor’s stay in Italy. Of the four known examples this is the only one with an eighteenth-century ormolu base; it may therefore be the version on a gilded bronze base from the Julienne Collection, which was sold in Paris in 1767.

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XIV. Bust of Pierre-André Bailly de Suffren (1729–1788), by JeanAntoine Houdon (1741–1828). Paris, 1787. Marble with its original pedestal, 90.5 cm. high. On permanent loan from the Mauritshuis, The Hague. (BK-C-2003-3). The French viceadmiral De Suffren assisted the Dutch in the defence against the English of the Cape of Good Hope colony and in 1781–82 recaptured the colonies of Cuddalore (India) and Trincomali (Sri Lanka). As a token of their gratitude, the Dutch East India Company in Middelburg commissioned Houdon to make this impressive bust of De Suffren, which was exhibited at the Salon in 1787. The admiral died a year later, so the marble portrait never reached him, although in 1784 he did receive a medal in a gold box, which the Rijksmuseum acquired in 2006.

XV. Portrait of a woman, by Lorenzo Bartolini (1777–1850).

Florence, c.1825. Marble, 68 cm. high. (BK-2007-9). The plaster modello for this anonymous and unsigned portrait is in Bartolini’s studio estate in the Accademia in Florence. From the 1810s the sculptor experimented with quattrocento statue types. In this bust he successfully reworked Verrocchio’s Woman with a bunch of flowers (Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence) into a contemporary portrait (see M. Boomkamp: ‘Bartolini and Verrocchio: a newly discovered portrait’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 149 (2007), pp.856–59).

XVI. Carità educatrice, by Lorenzo Bartolini (1777–1850). Florence, c.1842–45. Marble, 192 cm. high.

Purchased with the aid of the BankGiro Lottery. (BK-2008-5). In 1836 Bartolini completed a life-size marble Carità commissioned by the Grand Duke of Tuscany which has been in the Pitti Palace ever since. He made this slightly altered version of that statue between 1842 and 1845. One significant difference is the inscription on the boy’s scroll. Whereas the scroll in the first Carità refers to a biblical message (Deut. 6:5–7 or Mark 12:30) in Latin, the Amsterdam statue bears, in Italian, the golden rule of all great cultures and religions: Non fare ad altri quel che non vuoi sia fatto a te (‘Do as you would be done by’). This appears to be the sculptor’s personal and politically motivated motto, as Bartolini used exactly the same words in a polemic about his views on art in a Florentine newspaper in 1842 (see M. Boomkamp: ‘Bartolini’s “Carità educatrice”: Politics and Iconography in Nineteenth-Century Tuscany’, The Rijksmuseum Bulletin (2009), no.3). the burlington m a g a z i n e

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XVII. Nele, by Charles H. Samuel (1862–1938). Belgium, c.1897.

Ivory and African(?) fruitwood, 33 cm. high. (BK-2004-3).

In 1894 Samuel made a monument for the writer Charles de Coster in Elsene (Brussels). The main characters from De Coster’s well-known novel Tijl Uilenspiegel are portrayed on the monument in bronze. This girl’s face is an ivory version of the face of Nele, Tijl Uilenspiegel’s friend, who sits beside him on the monument. It is typical of Belgian ivory sculpture around 1900, which experienced a short yet intense boom because of the ivory trade from the Belgian Congo. The plinth for the statue was designed by the architect Paul Hankar, to whom Samuel made a gift of the plaster version of the figure. The writer Neel Doff modelled for Nele’s face.

XVIII. La mort de Monseigneur le Duc de Clarence, by Alfred Emilien O’Hara, Comte de Nieuwerkerke (1811–92) and E. Quesnel (cast). Paris, 1838. Bronze, 62 cm. long. Donated by H.B. van der Ven, The Hague. (BK-2008-204). The Comte de Nieuwerkerke’s romantic bronze depicts a decisive moment in the Hundred Years War, the Battle of Beauge, where the English Duke of Clarence was killed (1421). The sculpture, entirely composed according to horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines, is outstanding in its detailed rendition of the armour and the horses’ tack. This example is from the first, extremely limited edition, which was cast by Quesnel over the course of a single year (1838). From 1839 onwards his competitor, the Susse Frères foundry, successfully marketed the model until the late nineteenth century. Nieuwerkerke later became Napoleon III’s Superintendent of Fine Arts and a famous opponent of Impressionism.

XIX. Eight stacked beams, by Carel Visser (b.1928). Amsterdam, 1964. Welded iron plates, 100 cm. high. Purchased with the aid of the Rijksmuseum Fund. (BK-2008-4). Until the 1970s Carel Visser’s work was constructivist, as seen in this work. It is a typical example of Visser’s way of composing through serial succession. The work was made for a sculpture exhibition in the Vondelpark in Amsterdam (1964) organised by Stedelijk Museum director Willem Sandberg. The work was also shown at the Venice Biennale in 1968.

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