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JUNE
2010 T H E B U RLINGTON MAG AZI NE
Attributions, copies, fakes Giorgione or not Giorgione in the National Gallery, London | A copy by Sassoferrato acquired as a Perugino NO .
The etiquette of copying in Bologna | The meticulous records of Salomon de Bray
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A Van Gogh from Dirk Hannema’s collection emerges from the wilderness | Forgeries from the Bolton workshop
VOL . C L II
Art in Siena | Ife sculpture | Gonzaga tapestries | Murillo | Købke | Late Renoir | Glasnost
USA
$35·50
June 2010
£15.50/€ 24
june10baroniB:AQ_31815_J_Baroni 19/05/2010 09:33 Page 1
jean-auguste-dominique ingres (Montauban 1780 – 1867 Paris) Study of a Male Nude, Standing, with his Arms Crossed Signed lower left: Ingres. Black chalk, 446 by 260 mm
eXHiBition oF master draWings & Paintings 3rd - 16th july 2010 JEAN-LUC BARONI LTD. 7/8 Mason’s Yard, Duke Street, St James’s, London SW1Y 6BU. Tel: 020-7930 5347 Fax: 020-7839 8151 E-mail: info@jlbaroni.com
Galerie Canesso Tableaux anciens
Agostino Tassi Ponzano Romano near Rome, 578 - Rome, 644 ..................................................................... .
A Shipyard Oil on canvas, 74,5 × 98,5 cm (29 ⁵⁄₁₆ × 38 ³⁄₄ in) One of a pair (with The Capture of Troy)
26, rue Laffitte • 75009 Paris • Tel. + 33 1 40 22 61 71 • Fax + 33 1 40 22 61 81 • e-mail : contact@canesso.com
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www.canesso.com
5/05/10 18:25:54
Master DrawingsRoundup:Master Drawings Roundup 19/05/2010 11:42 Page 1
Master drawings London | 3-9 July 2010 www.masterdrawingsinlondon.co.uk
Studies of acrobats and a satyr, by Marco Marchetti called Marco da Faenza (1528–88). Bears number lower right corner: 52. Pen and brown ink and wash, 25.2 by 16.6 cm. JEAN-LUC BARONI, 7-8 MASON’S YARD
Wall decorations, by François-Joseph Bélanger (1744–1818). c.1785–89. Watercolour. DIDIER AARON, CLIFFORD HOUSE, 15 CLIFFORD STREET
The death of St Sebastian (?), by Paolo Farinati (1524–1606). Numbered in white chalk, lower right: 16. Black chalk, pen and brown ink, brown wash, heightened with white on yellow-ochre prepared paper, 35 by 46 cm. KATRIN BELLINGER AT COLNAGHI, 15 OLD BOND STREET
Peasant woman with a young boy, by Francesco de Mura (1696–1782). Oil on paper, laid down on canvas, 37 by 51.2 cm. TRINITY FINE ART, 29 BRUTON STREET
Le jongleur, by André Derain (1880–1954). Gouache on paper, 20.5 by 12.5 cm. STOPPENBACH & DELESTRE: 25 CORK STREET
The launch of a galleon, by Teodoro Filippo di Liagno called Filippo Napoletano (1587–1629). Pen and brown ink and brown wash over black chalk, 29.2 by 53.4 cm. AGNEW’S, EXHIBITING AT TRYON GALLERY, 7 BURY STREET, ST JAMES’S
june10trinity:Arturo Cuellar March 2003 27/04/2010 09:50 Page 1
TriniTy F ine A rT 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 pA i n T i n g S A n d d r AW i n g S
giovanni Baratta: The Statues from palazzo giugni rediscovered Viewing by appointment, weekdays only
25th June – 9th July 2010
Catalogue on request
29 BruTon STreeT london W1J 6Qp Tel: +44 (0)20 7493 4916 FAX: +44 (0)20 7355 3454 email: mail@trinityfineart.com www.trinityfineart.com
Trinity for Burlington 314 x 241 mm bleed
TRINIT Y FINE ART 29 b ru t o n s t r e e t, l o n d o n w 1 j 6 q p t e l e ph o n e + 44 (0)20 7493 4916 fa x + 44 (0)20 7355 3454 mail@trinityfineart.com www.trinityfineart.com
European Sculpture and Works of Art 25 June – 9 July 2010
Master Drawings London 3 July – 9 July 2010
Putto, one of a pair modelled by Carlo Francesco Mellone, cast by the founder Giuseppe Fontana, Milan, 1718 Bronze Height 71 cm
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PHILIP MOULD FINE PAINTINGS
ANGELICA KAUFFMANN (1741–1807) Portrait of a Lady, c.1780 Oil on canvas, 24 3/4 x 20 1/2 inches, 62.5 x 52 cm PROVENANCE Collection of Princess Odescalchi.
29 Dover Street L o nd on W 1 S 4N A T: 020 7499 6818 www.philipmould.com art@philipmould.com
Master Paintings Roundup:Master Drawings Roundup 19/05/2010 12:03 Page 1
Master Paintings Week – London 3–9 July 2010 | www.masterpaintingsweek.co.uk TWENTY-FIVE LEADING galleries (including seven from Italy, Paris, New York and Stockholm) will stage exhibitions in private gallery spaces in Mayfair and St James’s. Timed to coincide with the main sales at the three main auction houses as well as Master Drawings Week, Master Paintings Week offers a fine alternative to the traditional art fair and an opportunity to view works in elegant, often period surroundings.
Works on offer are largely European and range in date from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Deborah Gage will stage an exhibition entitled The Real and the Idealised: A Selection of European and Mythological Paintings from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Bartolomé Estaban Murillo’s The Holy Family in the Carpenter’s Shop, an early work with an impeccable provenance (Spanish and Netherlandish royalty), will attract much attention. Another highlight will be Whitfield Fine Art’s show marking the 400th anniversary of Caravaggio’s death.
Portrait of a young artist, attributed to Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson (1767–1824). Oil on canvas, 33.5 by 21.5 cm. BEN ELWES FINE ART
Self-portrait, by Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641). Oil on canvas, oval, 59.7 by 47.3 cm. PHILIP MOULD LTD
The head of a bearded man, a sketch for ‘the visitation’, by Federico Barocci (c.1526–1612). Oil on paper, laid down on canvas, 39.5 by 31.25 cm. BONHAMS
Christie’s sale on 6th July includes a Peter Paul Rubens and a Guercino from Althorp and Spencer House. Rubens’s Portrait of a commander, three quarter-length, being dressed for battle is considered to be one of the most important of his works remaining in private hands. For more information on the event please visit: www.masterpaintingsweek.co.uk
The Holy family in the carpenter’s shop, by Bartolomé Estaban Murillo (1618–82). Signed: Bar.me Murillo. Oil on canvas, 214.5 by 166.5 cm. DEBORAH GAGE
The rest on the flight into Egypt, by Antonio De Bellis (c.1616–57). Oil on copper, 31 by 22 cm. WHITFIELD FINE ART
june10elwes:AQ33598_M_Bonham-Carter 17/05/2010 15:20 Page 1
LEON DE TROY (French, 1857–1955) Head of an African Man
Circa 1880. 19½ x 15 3/8 inches (49.5 x 39 cm)
Master Paintings Roundup:Master Drawings Roundup 19/05/2010 12:00 Page 2
Master Paintings Week – London 3–9 July 2010 | www.masterpaintingsweek.co.uk
Sylvia freed by Amyntas, by Willem van Mieris (1662–1747). Oil on panel, 37 by 44 cm. DEREK JOHNS LTD
The oyster eater, by Henri Stresor (1613?-79). Oil on canvas, 107 by 89 cm. P & D COLNAGHI LTD
Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino, by Joseph Mallard William Turner (1775–1851). Oil on canvas, 90.2 by 122 cm. SOTHEBY’S
Cupid and Psyche, by Benjamin West (1738–1820). Oil on canvas, 137.8 by 142.9 cm. AGNEW’S
The Flemish proverbs, by Pieter Brueghel II (1564/5–1637/8). Oil on copper, 49 by 66.2 cm. JOHNNY VAN HAEFTEN
Diana departing for the chase, by Michel Dorigny (1616/17–1665). Oil on canvas, 133.9 by 220.4 cm. SIMON DICKINSON
SIR PETER PAUL RUBENS (SIEGEN 1577 – 1640 ANTWERP) Portrait of a commander, three-quarter-length, being dressed for battle · oil on panel · 481⁄4 x 383⁄8 in. (122.6 x 98.2 cm.) £8,000,000–12,000,000
Old Master & 19th Century Paintings, Drawings & Watercolours London · 6 July
The Althorp Attic Sale South Kensington · 7– 8 July
The Spencer House Sale London · 8 July Viewing
Contact
3–6 July
Richard Knight rknight@ christies.com +44 (0)20 7389 2541 8 King Street, SW1Y 6QT
christies.com
Masterdrawings Peter Anton von Verschaffelt (1710 - 1793) 3rd July until 9th July 2010 at Julian Hartnoll Fine Art 37 Duke Street, St. James‘s London SW1Y 6DF You will find our online catalogue at www.winterberg-kunst.de
Pallas Athena with the Sculpture. Pen, brownish blank ink, red chalk 32,8 x 19,8 cm.
Glaucus and Scylla. Pen, brown ink, red chalk. 28,1 x 28,3 cm.
Electress Elisabeth Auguste as Magnanimità. Pen, brownish blank ink, red chalk. 20 x 15,3 cm.
TM_103004_Burligton_v3 5/3/10 5:34 PM Page 1
ProPerty from an austrian family ColleCtion
A Marble Group of Three Satyrs Fighting a Serpent, Roman Imperial, circa 1st Century A.D. PROVENANCE LORENZO DE' MEDICI, IL MAGNIFICO, FLORENCE, FROM 1489 TO 1492
© Sotheby’S, Inc. 2010 tobIaS Meyer, prIncIpal auctIoneer, #9588677
estimate $300,000 - 500,000
egyptian, Classical & Western asiatic antiquities auCtion in neW york 11 June 2010
I
enquiries +1 212 606 7266
I
sothebys.Com
highlights exhibition on vieW during old master Paintings 29 may - 2 June
1000 Years of Craftsmanship 50 international galleries showcase
Fine Art & Antiques from Russia, Asia & Middle East
‘Bishamon’ - Edo Period 18th Century Sydney Moss Ltd
11th Century to Contemporary
Russian, Eastern & Oriental Fine Art Fair
9-12 June 2010 Park Lane Hotel London W1 To be opened by Andrew Graham Dixon in the presence of HRH Prince Michael of Kent GCVO Public Days: 11am to 6pm (5pm Fri) Royal Private View: Wed 9th June 6pm to 9:30pm VIP Collectors Evening: Thu 10th June 6pm to 9:30pm Charity Gala Evening: Fri 11th June 6pm to 9:30pm
T: 0845 116 2094 E: info@russianartfair.com
www.russianartfair.com
TREASURES_BURLINGTON_Q8 17/05/2010 11:01 Page 1
treasures ARISTOCRATIC
AUCTION IN LONDON 6 JULY 2010
I
HEIRLOOMS
ENQUIRIES +44 ( 0 ) 20 7293 6190
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SOTHEBYS.COM
AN ITALIAN ENGRAVED IVORY INLAID ROSEWOOD CENTRE TABLE MADE FOR THE DUKE OF URBINO FRANCESCO MARIA II DELLA ROVERE (1549-1631), CIRCA 1596-97 ESTIMATE £500,000 – 1,000,000
june10jstor:Agnews 18/05/2010 09:37 Page 1 J
SEARCH BACK ISSUES OF THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE ONLINE!
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XVI
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EXCEPTIONAL EYE_BURLINGTON_Q8 14/05/2010 15:54 Page 1
An Exceptional Eye: A Private British Collection EXHIBITION ON VIEW IN LONDON: HIGHLIGHTS ON 3-8 JULY AND THE ENTIRE COLLECTION ON 9-13 JULY, EXCEPT ON SATURDAYS AUCTION IN LONDON 14 JULY 2010
I
ENQUIRIES +44 ( 0 ) 20 7293 5083
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SOTHEBYS.COM
june10masterpieceroundup:Master Drawings Roundup 19/05/2010 11:43 Page 1
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MASTERPIECE 2010 LONDON Former Chelsea Barracks, Chelsea Bridge Road, London SW1 | 24 – 29 June 2010 | www.masterpiecefair.com
the second of the two events arising from the ashes of the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair that closed last year after presiding regally over the London Spring season for seventy-five years. The May issue covered the first event, Art Antiques London (9th – 16th June).
MASTERPIECE LONDON IS
Citrons et verre, by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). Signed centre left: Picasso and dated on the reverse: 14.1.44 Oil on canvas, 27 by 41 cm. DICKINSON, LONDON AND NEW YORK
The fair incorporates a wider spectrum of collectibles than the more traditional fine art and antiques events. Fine wines will be on sale at Cantenac Brown’s stand, Fiskens will sell vintage cars, the Reel Poster Gallery will have original film posters and Stephane Rolland will be selling couture fashion pieces. Twentieth-century decorative arts will be shown by Pruskin Gallery, Meta will have contemporary design and contemporary jewellery will be on sale at 21st Century Design. The twenty or so fine art dealers will be showing works ranging from old-master paintings, Renaissance sculpture to contemporary prints. Modern British art is by far the strongest category and will be shown by Austin Desmond, Browse and Derby, Hazlitt Holland–Hibbert, Robin Katz, Osborne Samuel, Piano Nobile and Offer Waterman. International decorative arts will abound at the fair and will include tapestries, Russian, Austrian, Italian and German furniture and works of art, Japanese and Chinese works, clocks, miniatures, arms and armour, antiquities, jewellery, silver and much more. For information on the faire please visit: www.masterpiecefair.com
Writing piece ‘Well’, by Anthony Caro. b.1924. Steel, 50.8 by 59.1 by 14 cm. HAZLITT-HOLLAND HIBBERT, LONDON
A pair of George II burr walnut armchairs with shaped solid back splat and out-scrolling arms, with contemporary needlework drop-in seats, the legs headed by the Astley family crest of feathers and a ducal coronet, standing on carved hairy paw feet. English, c.1730. APTER-FREDERICKS LTD, LONDON
Scarlet japanned secretaire. English, c.1730. Height: 206 cm. Width: 105 cm. Depth: 56 cm. THOMAS COULBORN & SONS, SUTTON COLDFIELD
The best of the best from around the world Introducing a unique showcase for the most covetable objects in the world: traditional and modern, old and new, from the finest of fine and decorative art to the best of wines, classic cars, jewellery and contemporary design. Find something to treasure at Masterpiece London.
24–29 june 2010 preview: 23 june
MSP_Burlington.indd 1
Location
Former Chelsea Barracks, london sw1
Information
masterpiecefair.com
+44 (0)20 7499 7470
30/3/10 10:19:38
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MASTERPIECE 2010 LONDON Former Chelsea Barracks, Chelsea Bridge Road, London SW1 | 24 – 29 June 2010 | www.masterpiecefair.com
Equestrian portrait of George Burrows on his grey, by James Seymour (1702–52). Signed with monogram and dated 1746, lower left. Oil on canvas, 101.6 by 127 cm. JAMES HARVEY, LONDON
Lucius Verus. Rome, 17th century. White marble and breccia africano. Height: 90 cm. TOMASSO BROTHERS, LEEDS
A Tutti Frutti bracelet and pair of dress clips, set throughout with diamonds, carved emeralds, sapphires and rubies. Mounted in platinum. By Henri Picq. Paris, c.1925. SANDRA CRONAN, LONDON
La conciergerie, by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889–1946). Signed. Oil on canvas, 50.8 by 61 cm. MACCONNAL-MASON, LONDON
A set of four Victorian etched crystal claret jugs with cast silver-gilt mounts. Made by John Figg of London, c.1875. N. & I. FRANKLIN, LONDON
Landscape with river and temple, by Ivon Hitchens (1893–1979). c.1943. Oil on canvas, 44.5 by 77.5 cm. OFFER WATERMAN, LONDON
june10galeried'art:AQ_33598_Van Haeften 07/05/2010 15:24 Page 1
Galerie d’Art Saint-Honoré Tableaux de Maîtres Anciens 69, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré 75008 Paris - France Tel: 01 42 66 36 63 ■ Fax: 01 42 66 92 65 www.art-st-honore.com ■ email: gal-art.st.honore@wanadoo.fr Open Mon-Sat 10:30am – 18:30pm ■ Catalogue available on request
JAN VAN OS Middelharnis 1744–1808 The Hague
Still Life with Pineapples and Grapes Oil on wood: 68.4 x 49.2 cm (26.9 x 19.3 inches) Signed and dated at bottom right: J Van Os f. 1776
june10pageXXII:Internet and Contacts 18/05/2010 09:33 Page 1
365 days of art market addiction that costs `V\ UV TVYL [OHU H TVU[O»Z Ä _ ^P[O V[OLYZ
Downsize your budget not your art market knowledge! 405,000 artists Art market information databases with images 108 million online images 25 million auction results and updated price levels & indices Upcoming sales from 3,600 auction houses Signatures and biographies of artists Artwork estimates Fine Art, Antiques and Design marketplace
www.artprice.com 00-800-2780-0000 (toll free number from the UK), for other countries please dial: +33 742 421 706 The Universe of Artprice on: http://web.artprice.com/video Artprice is listed on Eurolist by Euronext Paris (PRC-ARTF
THE WORLD LEADER IN ART MARKET INFORMATION XXII
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The Owston Collection Friday 25 & Saturday 26 June 2010 Circular Quay , Sydney One of the most spectacular private collections to have ever been offered for sale in Australia. This remarkable auction of fourteen hundred lots includes English, European and Australian furniture, Australian and European paintings, Tribal, Aboriginal and Oceanic art, silver, art nouveau, books, clocks, ceramics, Chinese and Japanese art, natural history and works of art.
Catalogue +61 (0) 29 238 2395 Australia +44 (0) 1666 502 200 Rest of World subscriptions@bonhams.com Viewing Monday 21 June 6pm to 9pm (Special trade view) Tuesday 22 June 9am to 8am Wednesday 23 June 9am to 5pm Thursday 24 June 9am to 8pm
Sale Enquiries Australia +61 (0) 29 238 2395 United Kingdom +44 (0) 20 7468 8313 owston@bonhams.com Bonhams Level 57, MLC Centre 19-29 Martin Place Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia www.bonhams.com/owston
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‘THE VERY BEST OF ENYA’ CD WITH EVERY NEW SUBSCRIPTION TO THE IRISH ARTS REVIEW In the Summer 2010 edition, on sale 4 June: Tony O'Malley, Cathy Carman, the RHA annual exhibition, maritime art in Ireland, Joshua Reynolds' Irish beauties, the gardens at Bantry House in Cork Subscribe today for £38 (a saving of 28% off standard rates): Phone: +353 1 679 3525 Email: subscriptions@irishartsreview.com Online: www.irishartsreview.com
Post: Irish Arts Review, State Apartments, Dublin Castle, Dublin 2, Ireland B 0510
www.irishartsreview.com Page 1
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 please contact Chris Hall at The Burlington Magazine hall@burlington.org.uk | tel: +44 (0)20 7388 1228 14-16 Duke’s Road | London
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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 52 Kelso Place London W8 5QQ , U.K. E-mail: admin@printquarterly.co.uk Registered Charity No.
the burlington magazine
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Art Antiques London June 10-16, 2010 Incorporating the renowned International Ceramics Fair & Seminar
The Jewel in the Crown of London’s Summer ‘Season’ The spectacular new Fair for Collectors and Connoisseurs in the heart of London close to the site of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Kensington Gardens provides the stunning backdrop to Art Antiques London where the past and the present come alive under one roof, featuring works of art, from the ancient to contemporary for both new and seasoned collectors alike. The world’s leading specialists will offer furniture, paintings, jewellery, clocks, textiles, silver and ceramics, rare books and modern and contemporary objets d’art. The Fair will also host a full programme of lectures and seminars and every object exhibited at the Fair is rigorously examined and vetted for quality and authenticity. ‘1851’ Restaurant and Bars by The Admirable Crichton
Albert Memorial West Lawn, Kensington Gardens, London SW7 The West Lawn is next to the The Albert Memorial and directly opposite The Royal Albert Hall. a HAUGHTON FAIRSM
Tel: + 44 (0)20 7389 6555 www.haughton.com
june10contacts:Internet and Contacts 18/05/2010 15:46 Page 1
C O N T @ C T S
D I C K I N S O N Agents and Dealers in Fine Art
O l d a n d M o d e r n M a s t e r Pa i n t i n g s, D r aw i n g s a n d S c u l p t u r e
SIMON C. DICKINSON LTD
JAMES ROUNDELL
DICKINSON ROUNDELL INC
58 Jermyn Street London SW1Y 6LX Tel: ( 020 ) 7493 0340 Fax: ( 020 ) 7493 0796
58 Jermyn Street London SW1Y 6LX Tel: ( 020 ) 7499 0722 Fax: ( 020 ) 7629 0726
19 East 66th Street New York, NY 10021 Tel: ( 212 ) 772 8083 Fax: ( 212 ) 772 8186
simondickinson.com
ANTIQUE ARMS & ARMOUR
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. EMAIL:
TEL: 0870 458 3774 subscribe@theartnewspaper.com
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THE RESOURCE FOR ART NEWS WORLDWIDE
Brokers specialising in fine art insurance For further information please contact: Tel: +44 (0)207 234 4281 Email: art@heathlambert.com
38 & 39, Duke Street, St. James’s, London SW1Y 6DF Tel: +44 (0) 20 7839 5666 Fax: +44 (0) 20 7839 5777 E-mail: pf@peterfiner.com www.peterfiner.com
DEREK JOHNS LTD. •
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ST JAMES’S
T. 0207 839 7671 E. fineart@derekjohns.co.uk
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F. 0207 930 0986 W. www.derekjohns.co.uk
Dealers and valuers in all European schools of painting
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
O L D M A S T E R PA I N T I N G S 11 Duke Street | St James’ | London SW1Y 6BN Tel. +44 207 930 1144 | Fax. +44 207 976 1596 www.rafaelvalls.co.uk | info@rafaelvalls.co.uk
Heath Lambert Limited is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority
incorporating Blackwall Green
W H I T F I E L D F I N E A RT O L D M AS T E R PA I N T I N G S 2 3 D E R I N G S T R E E T, L O N D O N W 1 S 1 AW
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www.katz.co.uk european sculpture
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
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Antiques, PAINTINGS, Sculpture, Furniture, JewelLery, Silver, Textiles & Objects Prestigious British and international dealers welcome you to an enhanced Summer Olympia Art and Antiques Fair in an elegant new format. Housed in Olympia’s magnificent Grand Hall, the annual June Fair is the largest international fine art and antiques fair in London, offering an unparalleled variety of world class art from all periods. FAIR HOURS Preview: Thursday 3 June: 11am - 9pm Fri 4th to Sat 12th June: 11am - 7pm Tuesday the 8th til 9pm | Sunday the 13th til 5pm LOCATION Grand Hall | Olympia Exhibition Centre Hammersmith Road | London W14 8UX
SPECIAL EXHIBITION: Modern British Masters: Pictures from the Bryan Ferry Collection This exceptional group of rarely seen paintings is representative of Bryan Ferry’s passion for early twentieth-century British painting which he has been collecting for thirty years.
A pair of bronze and ormolu candelabras on marble plinths, M&J Duncan, East Sussex
Duncan Grant - Still Life with Bust of Virginia Woolf
Selected by Richard Shone, Editor of The Burlington Magazine and the author of many publications on modern British art, this exhibition not only offers a fascinating insight into the
tastes and interests of the former lead singer of Roxy Music and internationally-known performer but is also a great opportunity to view works by some of Britain’s finest artists.
Preview 3 June | Grand Hall | Olympia Exhibition Centre | London | www.lifaf.com | +44 (0)207 370 8186
03 HH-H BURLINGTON June 2010:HH-H / NACF Review 2005
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Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert Modern British Art 38 Bury Street St James’s London SW1Y 6BB T 020 7839 7600 E info@hh-h.com W www.hh-h.com
Also exhibiting at Masterpiece London 24–29 June 2010 Stand: C4
BARBARA HEPWORTH 1903–1975 Two Forms (Maori), 1965 Carved slate on original black painted wooden base Height: 13a inches; 34.3 cm
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VOLUME CLII • NUMBER
1287
• JUNE
2010
EDITORIAL
420
363 Bastianini to Bolton ARTICLES
by DAVID EKSERDJIAN
364 Giorgione and the National Gallery by ELENA
GREER
and NICHOLAS
PENNY
421
376 Perugino, Sassoferrato and a ‘beautiful little work’ in the National Gallery, London by SCOTT NETHERSOLE and HELEN
HOWARD
385 Two disputes over copying in Bologna by
EXHIBITIONS
422
HUUB VAN DER LINDEN
QUENTIN BUVELOT
and FRISO
LAMMERTSE
by Vincent van Gogh by LOUIS VAN TILBORGH and ELLA
423
Christen Købke
425
Glasnost
by JANE MUNRO
by ANNE BLOOD
HENDRIKS
427
406 ‘The sophisticated answer’: a recent display of forgeries held at the Victoria and Albert Museum by TOM HARDWICK EXHIBITION REVIEW
409 Late Renoir
430
COLIN B . BAILEY
De Chirico, Max Ernst, Magritte, Balthus by ROBERT RADFORD
p.397
Fra Angelico by NEVILLE ROWLEY
431
LETTERS
Gonzaga tapestries by KOENRAAD BROSENS
414 Fernando Gallego 433
BARBARA ANDERSON
Renaissance Siena by TIMOTHY HYMAN
414 Bernini in Francia by
Crime and Punishment; Meijer de Haan by RACHEL SLOAN
428
by
Kingdom of Ife by JOHN PICTON
393 Dirk Hannema and the rediscovery of a painting
by
PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED
p.391
390 Numbered paintings by Salomon de Bray by
Leonardo da Vinci: ‘La Bella Principessa’ – The Profile Portrait of a Milanese Woman, M. Kemp and P. Cotte
435
DANIELA DEL PESCO
The Renaissance in Aragon by CLAUDIE RESSORT
BOOKS
415
Young Murillo
438
Recent exhibitions in Texas
by PETER CHERRY
Ancient Churches of Ethiopia, D. Phillipson by THOMAS PAKENHAM
415
436 p.427
by CATHERINE CRAFT
The Arts of Intimacy. Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture, J.D. Dodds, M. Rosa Menocal and A. Krasner Balbale
440
CALENDAR
444
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
by ROSE WALKER
416
A Story in Stones. Portugal’s Influences on Culture and Architecture in the Highlands of Ethiopia 1493–1634, J.J. Hespeler-Boultbee by MICHAEL GERVERS
417
Ribera a Roma, G. Papi by JOHN GASH
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419
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by PATRICIA FAILING
The July issue contains articles on eighteenth-century art and design and includes:
Louis Marcy: Marcy Oggetti d’arte della Galleria Parmeggiani di Reggio Emilia, C. Blair and M. Campbell
Benjamin Franklin and ceramics,
Edgar Degas, 1834–1917: The Complete Sculptures of Edgar Degas, W. Maibaum, G. Hedberg and J. Hargrove
by R.W. LIGHTBOWN
overdoors by J.B.M. Pierre,
Le Grand Déchiffreur. Richard Hamilton sur Marcel Duchamp. Une selection d’écrits, d’entretiens et de lettres, C. Diserens and G. Tosins, eds.
a Persian room at Fawley Court,
by JOHN-PAUL STONARD
Sèvres at Chatsworth, p.433
a painting by Mignard.
Cover illustration: Dirk Hannema (on the right) and the restorer H.G. Luitwieler looking at ‘The supper at Emmaus’ after its restoration. 1938. Photograph. (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam). Illustrated in this issue on p.393.
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Editor: Richard Shone
Managing Director: Kate Trevelyan Kee
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THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE FOUNDATION
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Editorial Bastianini to Bolton THE DETECTION OF FAKES and the unmasking of forgers always excites public interest and usually for one reason only – the consequent fooling of experts. The attendant headlines and reports emphasise the ‘acute embarrassment’ of dealers, auctioneers, collectors and museum personnel in having been so roundly duped. The forger rarely suffers opprobrium and is in fact lauded for his ability to pull wool over expert eyes, even if his activities lead to a prison sentence. All forgers are failed artists. Their motives, however, are extremely mixed and although many of them have protested that they only wanted to ‘get back’ at the world of dealing and connoisseurship, financial gain is a cornerstone of their flourishing new careers. But forgery is no compartmentalised activity. The many figures representative of deception – those gods of attribution, faked provenance, pastiche and copy – gather on the lower slopes of their very own Parnassus whose top is occupied by the great forgers from Bastianini, Marcy and Dossena to Keating, Hebborn and Greenhalgh. Some of these names appear in this issue of the Burlington, published to coincide with the National Gallery’s exhibition Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries (30th June to 12th September). Although the Burlington is no stranger to the forger’s art, its more usual bedfellow, over the years, has been the mistaken attribution. The business of attributing can sometimes sail dangerously close to forgery or, at least, conscious deceit. Scholars’ reputations and dealers’ profits can sink or swim on the upgrading of a work from minor to major; and sufficient inducements can attract even the most high-minded historian or connoisseur. The relatively sudden appearance of a work with a plausible name attached but little or no trace of a provenance is nearly always a matter of suspicion (it is one of the chief reservations people may hold over ‘La Bella Principessa’, for which see pp.420–21). The most notorious forgery to be associated with the Magazine, one backed by the flimsiest attribution, is the Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus, an early ‘masterpiece’ by Vermeer. It was published in the Magazine (November 1937, p.211) in a short article by Abraham Bredius who could hardly help but exclaim at its perfect preservation – ‘just as it left the painter’s studio!’. This, of course, was true; it was the studio of Han van Meegeren, rather than the master of Delft, and had been painted the year before. Five years earlier Bredius had also published in these pages (October 1932, p.145) a Dutch interior with two figures which, again, he gave to Vermeer. This too was a Van Meegeren; ironically Bredius prefaces his discovery of this ‘very beautiful authentic Vermeer’ with impatient remarks on how many fake Vermeers had recently been shown to him. The Christ and the Disciples was a grave mistake and the reputation of those who agreed with Bredius suffered when some years later the painting was revealed as a pastiche by the wily and embittered Van Meegeren.1 One of those who agreed with Bredius was the prominent Dutch connoisseur and museum director Dirk
Hannema who is seen (on the right) admiring the very picture in the photograph on the cover of this issue (and Fig.35). Hannema was no forger but a willing dupe who was so enamoured of his own eye for quality that he filled his collection with fakes and misattributions. Any schadenfreude is, however, tempered by the revelation that at least one of his four ‘Van Goghs’ was actually right (see pp.393–405). A glance through back numbers of the Burlington with their frequent ‘new attributions’ and tantalising advertisements can often produce derisive astonishment. On file at the Burlington is a list of works on paper by a variety of old masters which were illustrated in the Magazine in the 1960s and 1970s. A good number of these are undoubtedly the work of Eric Hebborn and several are reproduced in his autobiography, Drawn to Trouble. Hebborn was undoubtedly gifted but lacked any distinct artistic personality of his own, a sine qua non of the successful forger. Unconventional in the leading of his life, in the studio he was a well-mannered graduate of the Royal Academy Schools. But he had an enviable fluency of line and a convincing ability to place an image on paper with aplomb. Strictly speaking he was a superb pasticheur. The laborious business of forgery was not for him. Instead, he was a master of emulation, particularly of artists whose drawings were spontaneous and volatile. For Hebborn, the fakery was all in the attribution and provenance. In his autobiography he stresses his respect for many of the experts and art historians who attributed or authenticated his work. He needed them and they bolstered the pride he had in his productions, the sale of which enabled him to live in a certain amount of comfort and style in Italy, in strong contrast to his early hand-to-mouth existence. He was even able to afford THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, many copies of which were found after his death, with numerous illustrations cut from their pages. These served a dual purpose as both an extensive visual bank and as a record of his own drawings that featured in dealers’ and auctioneers’ advertisements and in announcements of museum acquisitions. Hebborn had his own business, the Pannini Gallery, and it must surely have given him greater satisfaction to see his ‘Bruegel the Elder’ landscape illustrate an advertisement for his business than his ‘Van Dyck’ that announced Colnaghi’s Summer Exhibition in 1970. While Hebborn mostly faked works on paper by artists from about 1500 to 1900, Shaun Greenhalgh and his family covered a huge stretch of time and disparate media, from an Egyptian alabaster sculpture (see Figs.54 and 55) to twentieth-century paintings by Peploe and Lowry. Almost equally ingenious was their forging of provenances, which calls for considerable knowledge, technical know-how and cunning; it was these that allowed Shaun Greenhalgh to profit from his garden-shed hobby, even though the family continued to live in almost ostentatious modesty in their Bolton council house. All art retains an element of repetition and copy; all copies retain an element of originality. In forgeries it is the amount of the latter – the forger’s own personality – in proportion to the rest of the work that determines its reception, one way or the other. Once detected, however, the forgery, commercially and aesthetically, is dead in the water. Nevertheless it continues to fascinate and, along with the spectacular deattribution, can provide us considerable insight into period taste, the needs of an era and our often desperate desire to believe. 1 An exhibition of Van Meegeren’s fake Vermeers is at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, to 22nd August; it will be reviewed in a future issue.
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Giorgione and the National Gallery by ELENA GREER and NICHOLAS PENNY
ONE OF THE GREATEST
controversies in the history of the National Gallery, London, was occasioned by Kenneth Clark’s purchase in 1937 of four small panels attributed to Giorgione. These were later correctly published in this Magazine as the work of Previtali.1 This mistake by one director may well have stimulated his successor to acquire another picture attributed to Giorgione, also controversial and with an even stranger and more troubled history. Behind these episodes lay a long and complicated relationship between the National Gallery and the Venetian artist, a relationship which involved, in addition to earlier directors, Walter Pater, Giovanni Morelli, Bernard Berenson, Roberto Longhi and Herbert Cook. During the very period when Clark’s purchase for the National Gallery was being debated in the press, a newly discovered painting attributed to Giorgione was being kept in a subterranean safe in Pall Mall, only a few metres away from Trafalgar Square.2 It had been placed there, probably at the end of 1934, by Vitale Bloch, a young dealer of Russian extraction, active chiefly in Berlin, Holland and Paris, and a close friend of Roberto Longhi.3 The picture seems to have been discovered in 1931 or 1932 by Giulio Lorenzetti, author of a famous guidebook to Venice and Director of the Museo Correr, in a storeroom of Sansovino’s great Villa Garzoni at Pontecasale, then the property of the Donà dalle Rose family who were obliged by their creditors to sell much of its contents.4 The theory of the Roman art dealer and critic Giorgio Sangiorgi that the painting was a lost Giorgione (and specifically one described not long after Giorgione’s death by Marcantonio Michiel of Aeneas and Anchises) was first published in a newspaper on 26th October 1933.5 The illustration to the article shows that the painting had already been restored by that date. This had been undertaken by the reputable Florentine restorer Agosto Vermehren (frequently referred to in print as Vermeeren and once even as Vermeer!). A simplified account of Sangiorgi’s discovery was repeated and this photograph also reproduced in the Illustrated London News of 4th November 1933, together with a dramatic photograph taken in
raking light of the picture in the condition in which it was discovered (Fig.1).6 The decision to grant an export licence was either made, or more probably endorsed, by a committee of three, headed by Carlo Gamba, director of the Uffizi, which met in Venice in the week before 19th November.7 They were not convinced that it was by Giorgione but were perhaps persuaded by the attribution to Giulio Campagnola proposed by Giuseppe Fiocco8 and others. They also surely took the painting’s condition into account. Even if the photograph of the painting taken in raking light was originally made for documentary purposes, it must have been useful at this point. Its appearance in the Illustrated London News is, however, perhaps best explained as sabotage. Sangiorgi did not merely want the world to know about his discovery, he also wanted to frustrate Vitale Bloch’s intention to sell it in the English-speaking world, either out of patriotic indignation that it could be exported, or (as Bloch seems to have insinuated) out of jealousy because Bloch had outbid him.9 The painting was next taken to Rome and restored there, partly under Longhi’s instructions.10 Longhi’s first published reference to the ‘supremo Tramonto di Giorgione’ appeared when the painting was probably already on its way to London.11 When the War had ended and Bloch was free to reclaim the picture, Longhi published it at greater length in one long, scintillating, vertiginous sentence coupling it with the Three philosophers.12 The illustrations used on that occasion were sufficient to obtain Berenson’s endorsement of it as a Giorgione in 1953,13 and in the summer of 1955 Bloch agreed to lend it to the Giorgione exhibition in Venice provided the attribution was supported by the entire selection committee which, in addition to Longhi, included Roberto Pallucchini, Lionello Venturi and Giuseppe Fiocco, who had now changed his mind about the attribution to Campagnola.14 The interval between the discovery of the painting and its appearance on the art market calls out for an explanation. Bloch and his associates would certainly have been embarrassed if comparisons between the painting after its first and second
1
4
G.M. Richter: ‘Four Giorgionesque Panels’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 72 (1938), pp.33–34. For a full account of this controversy, which includes a discussion of Philip Pouncey’s concealed but crucial role in Richter’s article, see N. Penny: The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings: Vol.I Paintings from Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona, London 2004, pp.295–98. 2 See the manuscript memorandum in the National Gallery dossier, ‘Giorgione’s tramonto’, signed ‘Philip Hendy, Cecil Gould, December 1956 and August 1960’. The claim has been made by Vittorio Sgarbi that the painting travelled first to Switzerland; see E.M. Dal Pozzo in idem and L. Puppi, eds.: exh. cat. Giorgione, Castelfranco (Museo Casa Giorgione) 2009, pp.431–33, no.47, but we do not know the evidence for this. 3 Vitale Bloch was born in Russia in 1900, settled in Western Europe in 1923 and died in 1975; obituary by K.G. Boon in THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 118 (1976), pp.30–31. Longhi and Max J. Friedländer are described as his ‘pilots’ throughout. In the list of the Office of Strategic Services Art Looting Investigation Unit of 1946, Bloch was described as ‘the most important figure in Dutch collaborationist art circles’ after Friedländer. As a Jew, he secured immunity from persecution by acting as an agent for Nazi collectors. After the War he continued to reside in The Hague and wrote several works on Dutch art including the first to be devoted to Sweerts.
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The discovery is generally dated to September 1933, but Leo Planiscig, who was working with Lorenzetti, stated in the Neues Wiener Journal (19th November 1933) that it was found ‘a couple of years’ before November 1933, and it seems unlikely that Agosto Vermehren undertook the restoration in about a fortnight! 5 Giornale d’Italia (26th October and 1st November 1933); see also G. Sangiorgi: ‘Scoperta di un opera di Giorgione’, Rassegna Italiana 34 (November 1933), pp.789–93. Although it has been suggested that Sangiorgi claimed all the credit, he in fact acknowledged that Lorenzetti had first drawn attention to the painting and recognised that it was Giorgionesque. 6 Illustrated London News (4th November 1933), p.741. 7 The other members of the committee were Gino Fogolari and Ettore Modigliani. The date of the meeting can be deduced from the account given by Planiscig, op. cit. (note 4), this is quoted with an outraged commentary by Tomaso Silani in Rassegna Italiana (of which he was editor) 34 (December 1933), pp.898–900. Although the committee is often said to have granted the export licence, Planiscig claimed that it had been granted before the first newspaper article appeared on 26th October. 8 G. Fiocco: Review of Louis Hourticq, ‘le problème de Giorgione’; Arnaldo Ferriguto, ‘Attraverso I misteri di Giorgione’; and Federico Hermanin, ‘il mito di Giorgione’, Pan. Rassegna di lettere, arte e musica 1 (1933–34), pp.787–88. The exact
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conservation treatment could have been made in Italy in the years immediately following its export. Perhaps Bloch did plan to offer it to the National Gallery, but if so the Previtali controversy would have put him off. In the following years the purchase would have been impossible for the National Gallery and difficult for anyone else. After the War, Clark’s successor, Philip Hendy, although mindful of Clark’s record – not only the purchase of the Previtalis but also his failure to acquire the Allendale Nativity – was ready to venture into the same dangerous territory.15 Hendy visited the exhibition daily for some three weeks and let his trustees know of his interest at a meeting on 14th July 1955. He was authorised to pursue the painting and on 11th October of the following year it was offered through James Byam Shaw of Colnaghi’s, but a decision was postponed until more opinions were obtained. It was then discussed at more than a dozen subsequent meetings. Favourable opinions were solicited from Kenneth Clark and John Pope-Hennessy. Much was made of cleaning tests as revealing the quality of the best preserved parts of the painting. On 8th November 1956 the Board was divided and a final decision postponed; on 10th January 1957 they agreed to make a modest contribution if a ‘benefactor’ would pay the remainder but they then insisted that any benefactor be made aware of their mixed feelings. No benefactor was found, but finally, on 13th October 1960, they agreed to pay, provided an attempt were made to lower the price, and the acquisition was announced on 14th June 1961, a month after it was leaked. By then the Gallery’s revisions of the restoration were complete.16 The degree of restoration had always been the chief problem not only for senior trustees such as the Earl of Crawford and Brinsley Ford but for outside experts (notably Johannes Wilde) and for some of the curators.17 The Trustees made it a condition of the purchase that a clear diagram be illustrated in the Gallery’s annual report and included in a special exhibition in order to clarify how little of the painting could be regarded as original.18 The diagram was rapidly forgotten and it is hoped that the article by Jill Dunkerton published in the National Gallery Technical Bulletin defining the picture’s complex condition and restoration history with unprecedented detail will stop art historians speculating on the significance of those parts (most notoriously the group of St George and the dragon) that were added by restorers.19 Passages that can be trusted include the minute painting of deep blue in pale blue, wet in wet, in the distant hills, and the
tiny touches of white representing the broken water beside the boathouses (Fig.2); the picturesque geometry of the roofs of the farmhouses contrasted, and yet united, with the swelling land around them; the way the walls of the buildings are animated by vertical strokes; the bristling grass on the bank behind the figures and the hanging weeds on the cliff on the right; some at least of the delicate leaves and branches of the slender central sapling and much of the jagged limestone strata softened by erosion and
date at which Fiocco’s article appeared is not clear but was certainly after the Illustrated London News. It is likely to have been in 1933 despite often being dated to 1934. The association with Campagnola was also made by Lorenzetti in the preface to the Donà dalle Rose sale catalogue; see G. Lorenzetti and L. Planiscig: La collezione dei Conti Donà dalle Rose a Venezia, Venice 1934, pp.vii–viii. 9 That Sangiorgi was outbid by Bloch and was responsible for the Illustrated London News article is asserted by Gould, op. cit. (note 2), whose account must have relied on information supplied by Bloch. 10 Restoration and reconstruction was undertaken in Rome by Theodor Dumler, supervised by Mauro Pellicioli and advised by Longhi; see London, National Gallery Archive (cited hereafter as NGA), C. Gould: ‘Notes on the “Tramonto” of Giorgione’, in Board of Trustees papers, 26th October 1956, pp.1–3, NG 25/28. 11 R. Longhi: Officina Ferrarese, Rome 1934, p.133. It has been claimed, again by Sgarbi, that Longhi was a partner with Bloch in the actual purchase, but the authority for this is uncertain; Dal Pozzo and Puppi, op. cit. (note 2), p.431. It does seem possible that Longhi saw the painting being restored in Florence and alerted Bloch. In any case some explanation of how Bloch came to be involved is required. 12 R. Longhi: Viatico per cinque secoli di pittura veneziana, Florence 1946, pp.21–22. 13 Berenson in a letter to Cecil Gould referred to the painting as ‘the most convincing
of all attributions to Giorgione’; see Gould, op. cit. (note 10), p.2. 14 The exhibition was held at the Palazzo Ducale, Venice (June to October 1955); see P. Zampetti: exh. cat. Giorgione e i giorgioneschi; catalogo della mostra, Venice (Palazzo Ducale) 1955, no.30. For Bloch’s condition, see Gould, op. cit. (note 10), p.2. 15 Hendy was alienated from Clark soon after he became Director for reasons that Clark claimed not to understand; see the cryptic paragraph in K. Clark: The other half, London 1977, pp.78–79. 16 For Hendy’s opinion, see NGA, Board Minutes, 14th July 1955, p.246, NG 1/13. For the offer to the Gallery, see NGA, Board Minutes, 11th October 1956, p.309; 8th November 1956, pp.313–14; 10th January 1957, p.322, NG 1/14; and 13th October 1960, p.79, NG 1/13. For the announcement, see NGA, NG 23/1961. 17 See NGA, Board Minutes, 8th November 1956, p.313, NG 1/13; and G. Robertson: ‘Venetian Exhibitions’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 97 (1955), pp.271–77, esp. p.275. 18 NGA, Board Minutes, 4th May 1961, p.117, NG 1/14. We would like to thank Caroline New, whose comprehensive list of references of archival, unpublished and published material relating to the Tramonto has been invaluable. Thanks also to Alan Crookham and Nicholas Donaldson. 19 J. Dunkerton: ‘Giorgione and not Giorgione: The conservation history and technical examination of “Il Tramonto’”, National Gallery Technical Bulletin 31 (2010).
1. Illustrated London News (4th November 1933), p.741, showing photographs of Fig.2.
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2. Il Tramonto, by Giorgione. Canvas, 73.3 by 91.4 cm. (National Gallery, London).
breaking up into pebbles; and some of the still foreground water, hardly distinguishable from the shadowed banks beside it. There are parallels with the architecture in the background on the left of Giorgione’s Castelfranco altarpiece and with the landscape forms, half eradicated on the right, as well as parallels with the landscape of the Three philosophers and, to a lesser extent,
the Tempesta – enough for it to be clear that one hundred years after failing to buy the Tempesta from the Manfrin collection, the National Gallery had secured a painting which epitomises the revolution in landscape painting that Giorgione effected.20 The influence of this aspect of Giorgione’s work on the young Titian can be seen in the National Gallery’s Noli me tangere bequeathed
20 It became possible to buy individual works from the Manfrin collection in June 1856 when Alexander Barker and others acquired many of the finest paintings. Although Eastlake had examined the Tempesta carefully on several occasions and found the landscape in it ‘beautiful’ (NGA, MS notebook for 1852, vol.4, fol.16r), and although Mündler (who considered it might be by Savoldo) thought it had ‘great charm’ (see B. Fredericksen and C. Dowd, eds.: The travel diary of Otto Mündler, London 1985, p.213), it was never listed among the paintings that it would be desirable for the Gallery to buy. 21 For Eastlake’s friendship with Rogers, see D. Robertson: Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World, Princeton 1978, pp.20–22 and 79, note 10. 22 Even in his earliest surviving notebook (undated but of 1830, fol.4r–v), Eastlake was clearly perplexed by aspects of the Dead Christ with angels (then, as now, in the Monte di Pietà, Treviso), which was one of the most celebrated works by Giorgione. His scepticism concerning it increased in the 1850s, although Mündler had been very impressed by it (as is clear from the MS register of Italian Paintings, NG 28; formerly GV 111.10.4) and evidently he converted Mündler to his point of view; see Fredericksen and Dowd, op. cit. (note 20), pp.80, 136 and 139. Eastlake’s assessment of Christ carrying the Cross (now in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) is in NGA, notebooks for 1863, 3rd vol., fol.1r.
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Select committee of enquiry on the National Gallery, 1853, pp.437 and 680; see also Morris Moore’s letter to The Times (5th July 1853), p.6. It emerges from Moore’s allegations that Eastlake was the first to think of Catena as a possible author, and it is now generally accepted as his work. 24 J. Crowe and G. Cavalcaselle: A History of Painting in North Italy, London 1871, II, pp.119–69. A rehearsal for Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s stringency was provided by Otto Mündler’s notes in J. Burckhardt: Der Cicerone, 2nd ed., Leipzig 1869, pp.975–76. 25 Catalogued as Giorgione, completed by Sebastiano (as Michiel claimed) in A. Krafft: Verzeichniss der kais. Kön. Gemälde-Gallerie im Belvedere zu Wien, Vienna 1845, p.8, no.6. 26 Jaynie Anderson in her Giorgione: The Painter of ‘Poetic Brevity’, New York 1997, pp.247–50, has argued that it was Byron’s Beppo that made the Tempesta famous. We hope to publish a separate article on this very complicated topic. Here it is sufficient to point out that the Tempesta was given no stars in Zanotti’s Nuovissima Guida of 1856, was not among the paintings selected from the Manfrin Collection for the Accademia Gallery in 1857, and was not given a high valuation either by Thomas Uwins and William Woodburn in the report compiled for the trustees in June 1851 (NG IV.4.37) or in Eastlake’s 1855 notebooks (NGA, fol.6r 1855 [2]).
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by Samuel Rogers in 1855, more clearly, perhaps, than in any other painting. Another painting bequeathed by Rogers to the Gallery is A man in armour, which was generally acknowledged to be a study for the figure of St Liberale in the Castelfranco altarpiece. Eastlake had been a close friend of Rogers, so it is likely that he had recommended, and certain that he sanctioned, the inclusion of this painting among the small but choice group of pictures which came to the Gallery.21 Eastlake’s travel diaries reveal that he took a special interest in Giorgione but was sceptical about many of the works then attributed to him.22 The one acquisition by the Gallery for which we know he was responsible in the period when he was a Trustee (after his resignation as Keeper and before his appointment as Director) was the Warrior adoring the Infant Christ (NG 234), now attributed to Vincenzo Catena, which Morris Moore seems first to have identified as a Giorgione in 1841 and which Samuel Woodburn had promoted as such. We know from Eastlake’s replies to the Parliamentary Commission of 1853, made at the very moment of the acquisition, that he was attracted to the idea that the painting might be by Giorgione but his attitude in general is ambiguous.23 It is clear from the disputes recorded by the Commission that the expectations and tensions surrounding the name of Giorgione, coupled with the lack of secure information about him, were already causing immense difficulties for scholars and connoisseurs who were, nevertheless, fascinated by the problem. With the publication of Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s new A History of Painting in North Italy in 1871, an authoritative account of Giorgione’s œuvre became available for the first time.24 Central to the argument were four paintings: The concert in Palazzo Pitti (now generally attributed to Titian); the Castelfranco altarpiece; now familiar in reproduction but then known to relatively few connoisseurs, the Three philosophers, then in the Belvedere (now in the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna);25 and the Tempesta, then generally known as The family of Giorgione, in the Manfrin collection in Venice, a painting long – perhaps always – attributed to the artist, but previously only considered to be of marginal significance.26 It may seem astonishing today but the Tempesta only became celebrated when it was realised that it was one of the works as by Giorgione in the manuscript notes of the Venetian connoisseur Marcantonio Michiel.27 Although it passed into a private collection, the Tempesta remained at the centre of the debate concerning Giorgione’s identity, which coincides, and is deeply entwined with the origins of modern connoisseurship in the last decades of the nineteenth century.28
Many art lovers must have shared Walter Pater’s view that, after Crowe and Cavalcaselle, ‘what remains of the most vivid and stimulating Venetian masters, a live flame, as it seemed, in those old shadowy times, has been reduced almost to a name’ by scientific connoisseurship.29 Frederic Burton, who was appointed as the third Director of the National Gallery in 1874, took up Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s sceptical approach and reduced the artist’s œuvre still further. In 1889 Burton completed his revision of R.N. Wornum’s official catalogue, and in the biographical account of ‘Barbarelli, Giorgio’ wrote that:
27 See C. Hope: Giorgione or Titian? History of a Controversy, New York 2003. He is undoubtedly right that the impact of Michiel’s evidence was far from instantaneous in the case of the Three philosophers, but was, we believe, decisive for the Tempesta. 28 Unlike the Manfrin collection, that of Prince Giuseppe Giovanelli was not open to the public. 29 W. Pater: The Renaissance, ed. D.L. Hill, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1980, p.113. 30 Descriptive and historical catalogue of the pictures in the National Gallery with biographical notices of the painters: Foreign schools (hereafter cited as NG Foreign Schools), London 1889, p.22. 31 Ibid., p.23. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, op. cit. (note 24), p.54, had included it in their list of paintings falsely ascribed to Giorgione. We hope to publish a short article on the attribution and provenance of this painting. Here it is worth noting that the supporting panel is endorsed with a manuscript note concerning Mariette’s recognition of the figure related to the saint in Giorgione’s Castelfranco altarpiece (of which there was then no print). After this it was always considered by Giorgione, although Mariette had considered it to be ‘tirée de’. 32 Burton demoted the Death of St Peter Martyr to ‘school of Barbarelli’ in NG Foreign Schools, London 1881, pp.38–39, and eight years later described it as ‘ascribed to Cariani’. The painting had been attributed to Giorgione in the collections of
Queen Cristina and the duc d’Orléans, and perhaps for this reason experts had hesitated to demote it, although it was not highly regarded. For example, see J. Landseer: Descriptive, explanatory and critical catalogue of fifty of the earliest pictures of the National Gallery of Great Britain, London 1834, pp.123–25. Waagen’s letter of 1835, published in Germany in 1837 and in London in 1838, denies Giorgione’s authorship, and Otto Mündler in his manuscript annotation of Ralph Wornum’s catalogue of 1854 (NG library, NC 30, NG 1854) attributes it to Dosso Dossi. Eastlake, although he must have known these opinions, evidently declined to change the attribution. J. Crowe in the Academy (21st December 1878), criticised the Gallery’s attribution of the Death of St Peter Martyr ‘to the same hand [as] the splendid figure of a Knight in armour’ (Crowe here refers to the 73rd edition of the catalogue, published in 1878, the year of Wornum’s death). Burton replied calling this an ‘oversight’, suggesting that he realised the attribution was no longer tenable. 33 NG Foreign Schools, London 1877, pp.131–32. See C. Gould: National Gallery catalogues: the sixteenth century Italian schools, London 1975, p.27, where this painting, like the Death of St Peter Martyr, was attributed to Bernardino da Asola. 34 The abridged catalogue of the pictures in the National Gallery: Foreign schools (hereafter cited as Abridged NG Foreign Schools), London 1885, pp.161–62; and NG Foreign Schools, op. cit. (note 30), pp.23–24.
Many pictures have been and still are assigned to Giorgione, on no authority but that of individual opinion. A very few are admitted on all hands to be his work. Among (or perhaps as solely) these may be noted the Enthroned Madonna, with SS Francis and Liberale, in the Parish Church of Castelfranco; the small composition called La Famiglia di Giorgione, once in the Manfrin Collection, and now in that left by the late Prince Giovanelli of Venice; and the so-called Three Philosophers in the Belvedere at Vienna.30 As an afterthought Burton added a footnote respectfully referring to ‘Sgr Giovanni Morelli’s’ claim concerning the Sleeping Venus in Dresden and admitting vaguely that ‘a few other works, in and out of Italy, may, without much danger of dispute, be ranked in the same category’. This note was probably devised to appease the Trustee Austin Henry Layard, who was a close friend of Morelli. Among the National Gallery’s own paintings, Burton accepted, as had almost all scholars in previous decades, that A knight in armour was an authentic preliminary study for St Liberale in the Castelfranco altarpiece.31 While this painting continued to be labelled and catalogued as Giorgione for several decades to come, the legacy of Burton’s acquisitions and cataloguing gradually came to redefine the Gallery’s attitude to the master.32 Although he was cautious when it came to attributing works to Giorgione himself, he bolstered the master’s school. Initially the only painting which he allowed within this group was the work entitled The garden of love (NG 930) from the Wynn Ellis bequest of 1876.33 In 1884 and 1885 Burton purchased two pictures (NG 1160 and NG 1173), which were initially catalogued as ‘Venetian School, fifteenth century’ but by 1889 were also classed as ‘School of Giorgione’.34 Indeed, the Adoration of the Kings (Fig.3) is the only painting in the Gallery that is today fully attributed to Giorgione, although it
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3. Adoration of the Kings, by Giorgione. Panel, 29.8 by 81.3 cm. (National Gallery, London).
was first catalogued as such in 1898, not by Burton, but by his successor, Edward Poynter.35 The painting may in fact have been attributed to Giorgione in the first decade of the nineteenth century36 but it had long been considered to be by Giovanni Bellini and was exhibited as such at the Royal Academy in 1870.37 One year later Crowe and Cavalcaselle, in the first pages of their account of Giorgione’s œuvre, referred to it as the ‘Leigh Court Epiphany’ where it followed on from their discussion of the two allegorical landscapes in the Uffizi of the Ordeal of Moses and the Judgment of Solomon in the first pages of their account of Giorgione’s œuvre. All three were also associated by them with the painting which we now know as the Allendale Nativity (then in the collection of Mr Beaumont, previously in the collection of Cardinal Fesch, today in the National Gallery of Art, Washington). Although Crowe and Cavalcaselle conceded that the attribution of these paintings would continue to be debated, they had entertained the possibility that the Adoration was by Giorgione.38 The writer of The Times article, written when the picture was about to be sold in 1884, considered it as ‘Giorgionesque’ but perhaps by a follower such as Bissolo.39 A few years earlier
Morelli had declared it to be by Catena, an opinion he repeated in 1893.40 Such dissent explains Burton’s preference for the general formula of ‘Venetian School’, but we do in fact know that he believed the painting was by Giorgione and merely preferred to keep his opinion private because of Layard’s esteem for Morelli.41 We like to think that Burton had recognised that the Three philosophers, which he accepted as an autograph Giorgione, was the work of the same hand and mind, albeit in a more monumental and calculated composition. This is so whether one considers the painting of the pebbles or the drawing of the hands, the stiff folds and brilliant colours of the drapery contrasted with the shadowed background, or the spots and dashes of impasto with which ornamental borders – illegible in pattern – are rendered. Nor are the connections with the Tempesta less obvious – the brick wall behind the soldier and the piers of the stable are, for example, painted with exactly the same discontinuous horizontal lines (Figs.4 and 5). Despite this, Morelli’s attribution to Catena was repeated for decades:42 Lionello Venturi, like Berenson, also followed Morelli but added the Allendale Nativity and the Benson Holy Family (National Gallery of Art, Washington), which was discovered in
35 NG Foreign Schools, London 1898, p.27. Poynter’s description in the illustrated catalogue published the following year is cautious rather than unequivocal; E.J. Poynter: The National Gallery: Foreign Schools, I, London 1899, pp.22–23. 36 The painting of this subject, sold at Phillips on 28th April 1803 as a Giorgione, describes the Magi as ‘kneeling with great humility’ and it is a striking feature of NG 1160 that all three kings are on their knees. In addition, as Burton Fredericksen pointed out to the present writer (N.P.), the sale’s following lot was Raphael’s Procession to Calvary, which also found its way to Leigh Court and later to the National Gallery (NG 2919). The vendor was ‘Evans’ so the ‘Offering of the Magi’ by ‘Giorgione’, sold by the same person at Christie’s, London, on 29th May 1804 (lot 40), may be the same picture. 37 See A. Graves: A century of loan exhibitions 1813–1912, London 1913, p.94. The attribution to Bellini was accepted by G.F. Waagen in his Works of art and artists in England, London 1838, III, p.144; and idem: Treasures of art in Great Britain, London 1854, VI, p.185. 38 Crowe and Cavalcaselle, op. cit. (note 24), I, pp.6–11; and II, pp.128–29, and for the larger discussion, pp.125–29. 39 The Times (4th July 1884). 40 G. Morelli: Die Werke italienischer Meister in den Galerien von München, Dresden und Berlin, Leipzig 1880; and idem: Italian painters: critical studies of their works – the galleries of Munich and Dresden, London 1893, pp.205–06. Berenson followed Morelli, although his opinion fluctuated over the years; see Gould, op. cit.
(note 33), p.105, note 6. 41 Letter from Layard to Morelli; London, British Library, Add. MS 38967. For Morelli’s influence over Layard, see Penny, op. cit. (note 1), p.373. 42 See B. Berenson: Venetian painters of the Renaissance, New York and London 1894, p.96, albeit with a question mark. Berenson also accepted the attribution to Catena in his 1897 lists and even in 1932 and 1936. Morelli 1893, op. cit. (note 40), p.204, and indeed Berenson 1894 above, also attributed A warrior adoring the Infant Christ (NG 234) and St Jerome in his study (NG 694) to Catena. Burton, however, catalogued the works as ‘school of Giovanni Bellini’; NG Foreign Schools, op. cit. (note 30), p.37. He footnotes his entry on NG 234 by saying that ‘some authorities of deserved repute ascribe this picture as well as 694 to Vincenzo Catena’, adding that he regards his attribution a ‘safe’ one. His view was criticised by Crowe, op. cit. (note 32). Poynter later accepted the attribution; NG Foreign Schools, London 1901, p.119. 43 L. Venturi: Giorgione e il giorgionismo, Milan 1913, pp.299–300; and Berenson, op. cit. (note 42), p.96. Berenson used Catena as an example of a painter who took up the ‘Giorgionesque spirit’ in his own works, citing NG 234 as a manifestation of this spirit; ibid., pp.31–32. Giles Robertson lists several works, including NG 1160, that are now attributed to Giorgione but were once attributed to Catena on account of this reasoning; see G. Roberston: Vincenzo Catena, Edinburgh 1954, p.80. Berenson later changed his mind about the attribution of the group; see Gould, op. cit. (note 33), p.105. 44 C. Phillips: ‘Some figures by Giorgione(?)’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 14
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5. Detail of the Three philosophers, by Giorgione. Canvas, 123 by 144 cm. (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).
4. Detail of ‘La Tempesta’, by Giorgione. Tempera and oil on canvas, 82 by 73 cm. (Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice).
about 1887, to the group under the name of Catena.43 Claude Phillips retreated from the attribution to Giorgione and gave this group to the anonymous Master of the Beaumont Adoration.44 Charles Holmes, director of the National Gallery in the 1920s, on the other hand, assigned the Adoration of the Kings to the young Bonifazio de Pitati.45 No one, however, regretted its purchase for the National Gallery and no serious student of Giorgione could fail to acknowledge its importance and today it is usually accepted as by him.46 This is not true of Burton’s other, equally astute acquisition in this area, the painting later baptised as The Golden Age and more recently as the Homage to a poet (Fig.6).47 Burton left a bid for this picture at the sale of the collection of the publisher Henry George Bohn on 19th March 1885 where, however, it was acquired by a Bond Street dealer called Lesser, from whom Burton then bought it (having first used the Trustee George Howard to determine the asking price).48 The painting was sold as a Giorgione, but Burton ignored this, informing
Layard that he found it ‘useful to have pictures of this class, which, besides having a charm of their own, tend to throw light on the very obscure subject of Venetian painting during the Bellinesque period’.49 Burton would seem to have found agnosticism in matters of attribution something of a virtue. The Times writer had invoked the name of Carpaccio as well as Giorgione50 and Burton did mention that that name had been ‘hovering’ in his own thoughts, a suggestion prompted, it seems, by the painter Henry Wallis.51 Since 1889, however, he had decided to describe it as ‘School of ’ Giorgione and we must conclude that he had recognised that it was by the same artist as the Ordeal of Moses (Fig.7). It would be hard for any visitor to the recent exhibition at Castelfranco (where the paintings were hung in the same room) to conclude otherwise, although many scholars have, it seems, hesitated to make the connection.52 The straight long nose and puzzled expression of this enthroned poet (Fig.8) are matched exactly in the faces of those
(1909), pp.331–37. He had earlier accepted the attribution to Giorgione; idem: ‘Correspondance d’Angleterre’, Gazette des Beaux Arts 30, series 2 (1884), pp.279–88, esp. pp.285–86. According to Herbert Cook, the idea of an anonymous master was first put forward in a letter to the Daily Telegraph (29th December 1899); see H. Cook: Giorgione, London 1900, p.21. For a brief summary of the grouping of these pictures, see W.E. Suida: Paintings and sculpture from the Kress Collection acquired by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation 1945–51, Washington 1958, p.98, no.39 (catalogue entry on the ‘Benson Holy Family’). 45 C. Holmes: ‘“Giorgione” problems at Trafalgar Square’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 42 (1922), pp.169–81 and 230–39; see also idem: Old masters and modern art: The National Gallery Italian schools, London 1923, pp.182–83. 46 Gould, op. cit. (note 33), pp.104–05; Anderson, op. cit. (note 26), p.293; and J. Dunkerton in D. Bomford, ed.: exh. cat. Art in the making: Underdrawings in renaissance paintings, London (National Gallery) 2002–03, pp.136–43, no.10. 47 Cook had suggested the title The Golden Age; see Cook, op. cit. (note 44), pp.92–93. The title Homage to a poet was first proposed by C. Gould: National Gallery catalogues: Sixteenth century Venetian school, London 1959, p.42. For a summary of the attribution history of the painting, see Dal Pozzo and Puppi, op. cit. (note 2), pp.413–14, no.35, as Giorgione. 48 London, British Library, Layard papers, CVIII. Add. MS.39038. Henry George Bohn died in 1884 at the age of eighty-nine. His profession was publishing and it was under his imprint that Bryan’s Dictionary of Painters and Engravers was published. He
sold the business in 1865 to Messrs George Bell & Sons, who continued to publish the Dictionary while he retired to Twickenham, where he pursued his collecting of porcelain, pictures, miniatures and books; see G. Redford: Art sales: A history of sales of pictures and other works of art, London 1888, I, p.388. It is interesting to note that in the 1903 edition of Bryan’s Dictionary, The Golden Age is the only painting at the National Gallery included in the list of pictures ‘generally recognized to be Giorgione’s work’; see G.C. Williamson, ed.: Bryan’s Dictionary of painters and engravers, London 1903, p.248. 49 Layard papers, op. cit. (note 48). 50 The Times (22nd December 1885); Burton cites this article in the footnote to the attribution of the painting in Abridged NG Foreign Schools, London 1888, p.177, where the picture is catalogued as ‘Unknown (Venetian: 15th or 16th century)’. 51 Letter to Henry Wallis, 27th November 1885; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Papers of Henry Wallis 1846–1952, MSS ENG 7039–41 (fols.73–111), 7040. 52 Clearly a connection is made by those art historians who accept that both are early works by Giorgione, notably among modern scholars; A. Ballarin: ‘Una nuova prospettiva su Giorgione’, in Giorgione: Atti del convegno internazionale di studio per il 5o centenartio della nascita, Castlefranco Veneto 1979, pp.228–29; and M. Lucco: Giorgione, Milan 1995, pp.46–49. However, although both T. Pignatti: Giorgione, London 1971, pp.124–25, no.A.22, and Anderson, op. cit. (note 26), discuss the Homage to a poet in some detail, neither notes the connection with the Ordeal of Moses, which they both accept as by Giorgione. the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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6. Homage to a poet, by Giovanni Agostino da Lodi? Panel, 59.7 by 48.9 cm. (National Gallery, London).
7. Ordeal of Moses, by Giovanni Agostino da Lodi? Panel, 89 by 72 cm. (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence).
figures seen in the Ordeal (Fig.9) and we find a very distinctive shape of hill placed to the right of centre in the middle distance in both paintings. There are affinities between these paintings and the Three philosophers and the Tempesta, but highly idiosyncratic features shared by the Homage to a poet and the Ordeal of Moses in fact relate more closely to the odd landscapes and fantastic types found in the work of Giovanni Agostino da Lodi, a Lombard artist who worked briefly in Venice.53 Edward Poynter, who succeeded Burton as Director in 1894, was liberated by the death of Layard in the same year from any obligation to defer to Morelli. As noted above, he accepted the Adoration as by Giorgione in the 1898 edition of the Descriptive and Historical Catalogue54 and in the three-volume illustrated catalogue published late in the following year by Cassell, he also noted the connection between the Homage to a poet and ‘the pic-
tures attributed to Giorgione in the Uffizi gallery’.55 Under the new limitations to the Director’s powers imposed by the Rosebery Minute of 1894, Poynter was unable to make acquisitions on his own initiative.56 Speculative purchases such as Burton’s became impossible. Poynter’s taste and interests are, however, revealed by reattributions and by paintings taken on loan. Notable among the latter was Nymphs and children in a landscape with shepherds (Fig.10), a small panel painting included in the Mitchell Bequest to the South Kensington Museum in 1878, which was lent to the National Gallery in response to a request by Poynter made in a letter of 23rd May 1900.57 Poynter, acting as an adviser to the South Kensington Museum had himself selected the painting from Mitchell’s residence. In the list that he presented to the Board, it was described as a ‘Pastoral scene with figures’ and given to Giorgione.58
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with relish that the new label made when the Adoration was reattributed to Giorgione was at one time accidentally affixed to the Homage to a poet, which hung just above it; Cook, op. cit. (note 44), p.93. 56 For the Rosebery Minute, see J. Conlin: The Nation’s Mantelpiece: A History of the National Gallery, London 2006, pp.95–98 and 106; and C. Saumarez Smith: The National Gallery, London 2009, pp.96–97. 57 Letter from Edward Poynter to Caspar Purdon-Clarke; London, Victoria and Albert Museum Archive, MA/1/N120. 58 List of pictures selected from the Mitchell residence signed E.J.P. and dated 4th June 1878; V. & A. Archive, MA/1/M2344, nominal file: Mitchell, George, registered papers, RP 1878/2901. 59 V. & A. inv. no.341/78. A catalogue of the National Gallery of British art at South Kensington with a supplement containing works by modern foreign artists and old masters, London 1878, I, p.198. 60 Ibid. 1893, I, p.109. 61 Poynter in NG Foreign Schools, London 1901, p.613.
This connection was made by Franco Moro in ‘Giovanni Agostino da Lodi ovvero l’Agostino di Bramantino: appunti per un unico percorso’, Paragone 40/472 (1989), pp.34–37. He captions the Trial of Moses as by Giorgione and Giovanni Agostino, but with a question mark. It is odd that although Moro’s point is sometimes mentioned it has not been taken up by other scholars, although it is one of very few new and perceptive observations made about the paintings attributed to Giorgione in the last twenty-five years. The landscape in the Homage to a poet is very close to that in Giovanni Agostino’s Ovidian mythologies in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. The yellow drapery worn by the enthroned figure is especially characteristic of Giovanni Agostino both for its folds and its highlights, something that does not apply to The Judgment of Solomon. 54 Herbert Cook responded positively to the upgrade; see Cook, op. cit. (note 44), pp.53–54. 55 Poynter in NG Foreign Schools op. cit. (note 30), p.26. Herbert Cook, who attributed the painting to Giorgione (despite noting an affinity with Carpaccio) and citing Adolfo Venturi and Cosmo Monkhouse in support of his argument, noted
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8. Detail of Fig.6.
9. Detail of Fig.7.
In his letter, however, Poynter refers to the picture not as a Giorgione but as ‘a very interesting Venetian picture’, reflecting the South Kensington Museum’s catalogue. Initially catalogued in 1878 as ‘attributed to Giorgione’,59 by 1893 the painting had been downgraded further to ‘Venetian School, early sixteenthcentury’.60 It appears with the same attribution in Poynter’s catalogue of 1901 where the accompanying description expands on the beauty of the landscape, ‘bathed in a warm glow’ with ‘the finest qualities of the Venetian school, recalling Giorgione, whose work it may possibly be’.61 Not all scholars agreed – Claude Phillips’s annotated copy of the 1915 catalogue reveals his candid opinion of the picture: ‘Should be removed. A pastiche of Venetian and Florentine elements and an abominable picture’.62 Thirty years later Cecil Gould argued that it was either a copy of a lost Giorgione (as Berenson had previously speculated) or ‘more probably, a deliberate forgery of Giorgione dating from a relatively early period’.63 It need not have been designed to deceive, but it surely is a ‘pastiche of Giorgionesque elements’.64 The infants on the right are more reminiscent of Rottenhammer than of an early sixteenth-century artist but the painting may be of a later date: the face of the standing nymph resembles those in paintings by Pietro Liberi. Among Poynter’s revised attributions we find Venus and Adonis (Fig.11), a painting that Burton had bought at the Hamilton Palace sale in 1882.65 It is now known that it was sold as a Giorgione to the 10th Duke of Hamilton (then Marquess of Douglas) early in the century.66 The painting’s prestigious provenance – it had been known as a Giorgione when in the collection of the
Venetian dealer and connoisseur Sasso – as well as its Ovidian subject-matter may have established its attribution and ensured that it stuck.67 Crowe and Cavalcaselle, however, had listed the work among the pictures falsely attributed to Giorgione.68 Burton had classed it simply as ‘Venetian School’ and it was still catalogued as such in 1898,69 but in the illustrated volumes of 1899 Poynter, who catalogued the work as ‘School of Giorgione’, observed that it was ‘difficult not to believe’ that it was ‘by the same hand’ as the ‘famous “Fête Champêtre’” in the Louvre – so, ‘if the Louvre picture is rightly named, the original attribution to Giorgione, may be correct’.70 This high praise was preceded in 1896 by the publication of Pictures in the National Gallery, in which the Gallery’s Keeper (nephew and namesake of Charles Eastlake) declared in rapturous prose that the picture was ‘strongly suggestive of Giorgione’.71 Poynter’s tentative promotion of the picture to ‘School of Barbarelli’ in 1901 was well received, and Gustave Geffroy in his book on the Gallery in 1904 gave it a special plate and noted that it ‘recalls the Pastoral Concert in the arrangement of the background, the drawing of the full, firm contours, the tender, golden tones of the carnations’.72 There is, however, no passage in the Concert champêtre (Fig.12) that resembles the distinctive painting of the lush foreground vegetation and the hopeless anatomy of the figures in the Venus and Adonis. This is not the place in which to assess the case for the Concert champêtre itself as a Giorgione, but it is important to note that its attribution has never rested on an analysis of minute particulars by which we can place the Adoration in relationship to the Three philosophers or the Tempesta. In Britain, the painting had acquired
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Giorgione, where he refers to pictures representing episodes in the life of Adonis. 68 ‘. . . sketchy, empty, rosy’; Crowe and Cavalcaselle, op. cit. (note 24), p.168. 69 NG Foreign Schools, op. cit. (note 35), p.576. 70 Poynter, op. cit. (note 35), p.24, as ‘Barbarelli (Giorgione), School of’. 71 C.L. Eastlake: Pictures in the National Gallery, London, with descriptive text written by Charles Locke Eastlake, Keeper and Secretary, NG., Munich, London and New York 1896, II, p.84. The description is accompanied by a full-page plate. Eastlake had catalogued the painting in his Notes on the principal pictures in the Louvre gallery, London 1883, pp.7–8. 72 G. Geffroy: The National Gallery, London 1904, p.69. This comparison with the Louvre picture was made in The Times (26th July 1882), where it was that claimed that the picture was warmly admired in artistic circles, and mentioned that ‘Waagen accepted the attribution adding that “the conception and glow of colour are true to Giorgione and of great charm’”. G.F. Waagen: Art Treasures in Great Britain, London 1854, III, p.303.
London, National Gallery Library, NC 30, NG 1915. Berenson in his 1932 and 1936 lists saw it as a copy of a lost Titian; Gould, op. cit. (note 33), pp.110–11. 64 When the painting was briefly exhibited on the National Gallery’s main floor in the late 1990s, a leading Italian scholar informed the present writer (N.P.) that he considered it possible as a work by Giorgione. 65 Hamilton sale, Christie’s, London, 24th June 1882, lot 383, as Giorgione; Gould, op. cit. (note 33), pp.304–05, as ‘follower of Titian’. 66 For the sale of this painting from Sasso’s collection, see G. Evans: ‘The Hamilton Collection and the 10th Duke of Hamilton’, Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History 8 (2003), pp.53–72, esp. p.58; see also L. Borean: ‘Giovanni Maria Sasso’, in L. Borean and S. Mason, eds.: Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia, il Settecento, Venice 2009, pp.300–01. 67 See The Times (26th July 1882) in which the author, while praising the picture that he calls ‘the story of Mhyrra’ (the mother of Adonis), cites Ridolfi’s Life of 63
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10. Nymphs and children in a landscape with shepherds, by an imitator of Giorgione. Panel, 46.6 by 87.6 cm. (National Gallery, London).
a special status on account of D.G. Rossetti’s sonnet ‘For A Venetian Pastoral by Giorgione (In the Louvre)’: Water, for anguish of the solstice: – nay, But dip the vessel slowly, – nay, but lean And hark how at its verge the wave sighs in Reluctant. Hush! Beyond all depth away The heat lies silent at the brink of day: Now the hand trails upon the viol-string That sobs and the brown faces cease to sing, Sad with the whole of pleasure. Whither stray Her eyes now, from whose mouth the slim pipes creep And leave it pouting, while the shadowed grass Is cool against her naked side? Let be: – Say nothing now unto her lest she weep, Nor name this ever. Be it as it was, – Life touching lips with Immortality.73 Although a version of this poem was penned several decades earlier in 1849, it was not published in a widely accessible form until 1870,74 at a date when Rossetti’s own paintings had begun to adopt cinquecento accessories, featuring sobbing viols and pouting mouths, and hinting heavily at satiated hedonism.75 One may imagine how someone deeply impressed by this sonnet would be shocked to find its subject assigned by Crowe and Cavalcaselle in the following year to ‘an imitator of Sebastian del Piombo’ and disparaged for its ‘slovenly design’ and ‘defects of form’.76 Walter Pater, who alludes to Rossetti’s ‘delightful sonnet’ in his celebrated essay ‘The School of Giorgione’ of 1877, gave the painting a prominent place in his evocation of the Giorgionesque ideal: ‘in the school of Giorgione, the presence of water – the well, or marble-rimmed pool, the drawing or pouring of water, as the woman pours it from a pitcher with her jewelled hand in the Fête Champêtre, listening, perhaps, to the
73
D.G. Rossetti: Poems, 3rd ed., London 1870, p.260. For the publication history, see K.R. Ireland: ‘A kind of pastoral: Rossetti’s versions of Giorgione’, Victorian Poetry 17/4 (Winter 1979), pp.303–15, esp. pp.303–04, and notes 5 and 6. 75 See, for example, Mariana (1870, Aberdeen Art Gallery); The bower meadow (1872; City Art Gallery, Manchester); and La ghirlandata (1873; Guildhall Art Gallery). 76 Crowe and Cavalcaselle, op. cit. (note 24), p.27. 77 Pater, op. cit. (note 29), p.120. ‘The School of Giorgione’ (ibid., pp.102–22) was first published in the Fortnightly Review in October 1877 and was incorporated in The Renaissance in 1888. As Hill points out (p.36), the passage echoes an earlier one in ‘A Study of Dionysius’ published in 1876 in which the Concert champêtre is described as the ‘loveliest of all works attributed to Giorgione’. 78 For Cook and the young Berenson, see S. Sprigge: Berenson, London 1960, p.117. 74
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11. A mythological scene, formerly called Venus and Adonis, by a follower of Titian. Panel, 76.2 by 132.1 cm. (National Gallery, London).
cool sound as it falls, blent with the music of the pipes – is as characteristic, and almost as suggestive, as that of music itself’.77 At this point in the story of Giorgione and the National Gallery it is necessary to introduce Herbert Cook. He was the grandson of Sir Francis Cook, whose great collection of pictures, founded with the advice of J.C. Robinson, he inherited, weeded and extended. His influence was greater than his publications would merit, on account of the fortune that enabled him to sponsor the young Berenson, to help direct the Burlington Fine Arts Club, to establish the National Art-Collections Fund and to support this Magazine.78 Cook, in his monograph on Giorgione published in 1900, quoted Pater with reference to the Concert champêtre and the Pitti Concert. Although he did not deny the ‘coarse’ nature of the nudes, he explained that ‘such exuberance of feeling as expressed in the Concert Champêtre is the logical outcome of a lifetime spent in lyrical thought’, and that, ‘Giorgio has become Giorgione; he is riper in experience and richer in feeling. He saw the work as the apogee of the painter’s maturity, and as such thought that it ought to be understood as a ‘characteristic’ work.79 One of the recurring themes of Cook’s monograph was that ‘criticism that condemns a picture claiming to be Giorgione’s because “it is not good enough for him”, does not recognise the truth that for that it may be characteristic, and, consequently, perfectly authentic’.80 As a result, although he admitted that the Hamilton Venus and Adonis represented an instance of ‘average merit’, he fully supported Poynter’s association of the picture with the Louvre Concert, claiming that ‘the idyllic landscape [. . .] is just such as we see in the Louvre picture and elsewhere, the glow and splendour of the whole reveal a master of tone and colouring’.81 Charles Holroyd, who served as Director between 1906 and 1916, was inclined to the poetic as distinct from the forensic view of Giorgione but, unlike Pater, he followed Cook in con-
He organised the Burlington Fine Arts Club Milanese exhibition in 1897. For his help to THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, see C.J. Holmes: Self & Partners (Mostly Self), London 1936, pp.214–15. Cook’s volume Reviews and appreciations was published in London in 1912. 79 Cook, op. cit. (note 44), pp.40–43. 80 Ibid., p.59. 81 Ibid., pp.94–95. Here Cook also notes that some commentators saw the work as a production of the young Titian and confesses that, although he finds it too intimately Giorgionesque, it is difficult to draw the line of division. 82 NG Foreign Schools, London 1913, p.300. Holroyd added NG 2145 (now attributed to the studio of Bonifazio) to the ‘School of Giorgione’. 83 Ibid. 84 C. Holroyd: The National Gallery: the North Italian Schools, London n.d.
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13. Giorgione at Asolo, by Charles Holroyd. Etching, 21.4 by 17.5 cm. Repr. in the Art Journal (September 1902), p.272, pl.7. 12. Concert champêtre, by Titian. Canvas, 105 by 137 cm. (Musée du Louvre, Paris).
fusing the two. He drastically modified the artist’s biography in the Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of 1913, writing that Giorgione’s ‘capital achievement was the invention of the modern spirit of lyrical passion and romance in pictorial art’.82 He lists, as accepted ‘practically without demur’, not only ‘the famous Concert Champêtre of the Salon Carré in the Louvre’, but the Uffizi allegories, the Christ bearing the Cross in the Gardner Collection and the portrait in Budapest.83 In an earlier publication, dating probably from a little before his appointment, Holroyd wrote of his ‘special devotion’ to Giorgione: ‘our admiration and love are so great that we would rather think about him than talk about him’.84 These sentiments had indeed already found expression in an etching of his entitled Giorgione at Asolo (Fig.13) reproduced in the Art Journal of 1902,85 which recalls the pastoral concert in the Lansdowne collection,86 a painting which Crowe and Cavalcaselle had not accepted but which had been exhibited as a Giorgione in 1895.87 The etching, Frederick Wedmore explained to readers of the Art Journal, has been ‘suggested, as I happen to know, by the reading of Mr Herbert Cook’s agreeable, studious book on Giorgione; and often, ere he read that book, had the etcher of this plate pondered over the lives of those Venetian painters . . .’. It was surely with Holroyd’s endorsement that he added that the etching was ‘in a certain way, an allegory’ of the Italian Renaissance itself, ‘even if we do not definitely say or feel that the grave elder is Gentile Bellini, the lover Giorgione, and the lady Catarina Cornaro’.88 The assumption, from the title, would be that the ‘grave elder’ represents the more spiritual thread in Gli Asolani, Pietro Bembo’s dialogues on love, set at the Court of Caterina
Cornaro in Asolo,89 but the reference to Gentile Bellini must have been prompted by knowledge of the fact that Gentile had painted the former queen’s portrait and a source for the pose may be found in the portrait attributed to Gentile in the National Gallery.90 Clearly Holroyd was aware of Vasari’s claim that Giorgione played the lute. As an artist himself, Holroyd was inspired by the notion of an intimate intellectual connection between Caterina Cornaro and her portraitists. This idea was certainly stimulated by Herbert Cook who was especially keen to find, or rather forge, such connections, writing, without offering any evidence, that ‘History tells us of the friendly encouragement the young Castelfrancan received at the hands of this gracious lady, and he doubtless painted this likeness of her in her country home, at Asolo, near to Castelfranco’.91 The painting to which he refers here is that by Titian which was once in the Crespi collection in Milan but hangs today on the walls of the National Gallery and which is now generally known as La Schiavona.92 Herbert Cook had sponsored the publication of Berenson’s pamphlet reviewing the exhibition of Venetian art at the New Gallery, London, in 1895 in which the young connoisseur, with terrifying aplomb, cut the thirty-one Titians on show down to one and rejected every single one of the eighteen Giorgiones.93 Cook’s monograph displayed the opposite tendency and extended Giorgione’s œuvre enormously, absorbing many paintings previously regarded as by Titian, including La Schiavona. Cook revived the old idea that it represented Caterina Cornaro and proposed that the portrait had first established Giorgione’s reputation partly on account of the sitter’s eminence.94 Nine years later Cook published a painting at Attingham Park, Shrop-
[c.1905], p.xxiii. 85 For the etching and its accompanying commentary, see F. Wedmore: ‘Giorgione at Asolo’, Art Journal (September 1902), p.272 and accompanying plate. The etching is also reproduced in Dal Pozzo and Puppi, op. cit. (note 2), p.222, fig.28, with an unusual interpretation. 86 See P. Rylands: Palma Vecchio, Cambridge 1992, p.274, no.A.26; see also O. Bradbury and N. Penny: ‘The picture collecting of Lord Northwick: Part I’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 140 (2002), pp.485–96, esp. p.491 for provenance; ‘Part 2’, ibid., pp.606–17, esp. pp.616–17 for Eastlake’s, Waagen’s and Northwick’s opinions. Any etching with this title would have been influenced by the discovery of and vogue for Asolo and its history in the nineteenth century, as illustrated by the inspiration it provided for the work of composers and poets such as Gaetano Donizetti and Robert Browning.
87 Crowe and Cavalcaselle, op. cit. (note 24), p.45; and exh. cat.: Exhibition of Venetian art, London (New Gallery) 1894–95, p.21. Berenson did not accept the attribution in his pamphlet review of the New Gallery exhibition, calling it Cariani instead; B. Berenson: Exhibition of Venetian art at the New Gallery, London 1895, p.37. 88 Wedmore, op. cit. (note 85). 89 P. Bembo: Gli Asolani, Venice 1505. 90 NG 1213; see M. Davies: National Gallery catalogues: The earlier Italian schools, London 1986, pp.50–51. 91 Cook, op. cit. (note 44), p.80. 92 Gould, op. cit. (note 33), pp.287–90. 93 Berenson, op. cit. (note 87). 94 Cook, op. cit. (note 44), p.3.
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14. Concert at Asolo, by unknown artist. Nineteenth century over an original of c.1500. Canvas, 124.5 by 194 cm. (Attingham Park, Shropshire).
shire, as a copy after Giorgione (Fig.14).95 The painting depicts a group of figures assembled in a valley against the backdrop of a prosperous town, overlooked by a fortress perched upon the highest peak. Cook interpreted the scene as Caterina at Asolo, surrounded by her courtiers including Giorgione, who stands behind the Queen and looks out of the picture, and possibly even, he suggested, Pietro Bembo.96 Cook hoped the painting would support his identification of ‘La Schiavona’ as Caterina Cornaro.97 The portrait of La Schiavona (Fig.15) appears to be signed with Titian’s initials; it is clearly closely related to the documented frescos by Titian of 1511 in Padua; it was referred to as a Titian in a document of 1641 and was published as by him in 1817.98 It comes as a surprise to find that it struck both Otto Mündler in 1855 and Charles Eastlake in 1857 as untypical of Titian99 and that it was acquired for the Crespi collection early in the 1890s, probably after treatment by Cavenaghi, with an attribution to Licinio.100 This artist was then being reassessed, partly in response to the acquisition by the National Gallery in 1890 of a signed and dated portrait by him,101 a painting that has something of the
breadth and grandeur of La Schiavona, as is also true of the portrait of a woman from the Lochis collection in the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo.102 Berenson claimed in an essay published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in 1897 that ‘to make Licinio the author was an idea of my own propounded years ago when, in the heat of rediscovering this far from insignificant painter, I was hoping to find him worthy of such a masterpiece’.103 Yet, in this essay, Berenson, although regarding the portrait as a masterpiece, classed it as a copy – ‘above Titian in genius, copy though it be, it yet betrays a superiority to him even in execution’.104 For him it was a copy of a lost Giorgione. The association with Giorgione seems to have begun here. The most remarkable aspect of this claim is the idea that the portrait could possibly be a copy, because drastic changes in design are clearly evident. But Berenson never took much interest in such technical matters. Berenson saw himself as a disciple of Walter Pater as well as Giovanni Morelli, and his desire to write poetically about aesthetics and the transmigration of ideas is just as apparent in this essay as any severely forensic analysis of style or ingenuity in the
95
100 A.
H. Cook: ‘The concert at Asolo, after Giorgione’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 15 (1909), pp.38–43. For this painting, see also J. Anderson: ‘Some new documents relating to Giorgione’s “Castelfranco altarpiece” and his patron Tuzio Costanzo’, Arte Veneta 27 (1973), pp.290–99, esp. pp.291–92. Technical examination undertaken at the Courtauld Gallery by conservation student Katya Belaia suggests that the painting may be a heavily overpainted sixteenth-century original. As Anderson points out, it may have been repainted in the late eighteenth century. The overpainting seems to have taken place in the nineteenth century. 96 Cook, op. cit. (note 95), p.43. 97 Ibid., p.38. 98 A. Sala: Collezione de’ quadri scelti di Brescia, Brescia 1817. 99 Eastlake saw it on or soon after 26th August 1857 and noted it as ‘an indifferent work – no resemblance to Titian’; NG 22.14, 1857 (1), fol.9v (see also fol.12r). Fredericksen and Dowd, op. cit. (note 20), p.89.
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Venturi: La galleria Crespi in Milano, Milan 1900, pp.133–37. 1309; see Gould, op. cit. (note 33), p.129. 102 See F. Rossi: Accademia Carrara: Catalogo dei dipinti sec. XV–XVI, Bergamo 1988, I, pp.166–67, no.669. 103 B. Berenson: ‘De quelques copies d’après Giorgione’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 39, series 3 (1893), pp.265–82, esp. pp.278–82. 104 Ibid., p.281. 105 Ibid., p.279. 106 M. Nicolle: sale cat. La Galerie Crespi, Paris (Georges Petit Gallery) 4th June 1914, p.viii, mentions how the gallery was ‘largement ouverte au public, suivant la noble tradition toujours observée en ce pays’; for the stars, see editions of Baedeker’s Handbook for Travellers, London and New York after 1903. 107 B. Berenson: ‘Certain copies after lost originals by Giorgione’, The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, London 1901, repr. 1903 and 1908, pp.70–89; also 1903 ed., pp.70–89. 101 NG
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construction of artistic personality. ‘François Rabelais, not as the vulgar know him, but as he reveals himself in his nobler votaries, an artist glowing with the purifying fires of health, kindling into exuberant life whatsoever he touches, the last re-incarnation of Dionysius – Rabelais then, or perhaps Shakespeare, in some divine moment between creating Titania and Falstaff, had either of them been a painter, might well have painted the original of this portrait’.105 This wonderful piece of nonsense, Paterine in both syntax and imagery, may have done something to help the fame of the painting that was starred in the guidebooks to Milan, where Crespi’s palace gallery was open to the public.106 Berenson allowed his article to appear in English in 1901 and again in revised form in 1903 and 1908,107 but on 11th April 1911 he wrote from I Tatti to René Gimpel a long letter of congratulations on acquiring ‘by far & away the most important painting remaining in private hands in Italy’, adding: ‘No sacrifice you may have made to get it out of the predatory claws of the Italian art commissioners can be regarded as too great’.108 He continued to make it quite clear that he now regarded the painting as a masterpiece by Titian – along with a growing number of experts, including Claude Phillips, Charles Ricketts, Lionello Venturi, Georg Gronau and Gustavo Frizzoni. Gimpel had in fact obtained the painting from the Crespi family through the Milanese dealer Carlo Zen who had managed to persuade the Consiglio Superiore delle belle arti to overrule the painting’s listed status in the previous month. He was acting in partnership with Nathan Wildenstein and Berenson who had been negotiating with another dealer for the painting between 1909 and 1910.109 Permission to export the picture had depended upon the argument that it was a copy, but once exported that opinion need to be refuted. The letter was written to reassure the clients that the painting was neither a copy nor a Licinio. It was published in a monograph on the picture produced by Wildenstein. The hyperbole is more embarrassing than the parody of Pater: ‘I want to tell you that I know of no Titian grander, nobler, more vital, more radiant than this one [. . .] your portrait incarnates as no other that I know the opulence, the joy in life, the feeling of security & happiness of the renaissance at its culminating moment’.110 Ironically, the painting was bought by none other than Herbert Cook who still passionately believed it to be by Giorgione.111 Berenson had remained on friendly terms with Cook and indeed stayed with him in Portugal in the spring of 1909, so he may have helped fix the sale.112 This, however, was not completed or at least published until July 1914. On the death of his father in 1920, Herbert Cook inherited the baronetcy, the Doughty House collection and a great fortune.113
108 A
copy of this letter, kindly communicated by Everett Fahy in 1990, was found among the photographs in the Duveen archive, then deposited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 109 See note 108 above. The fact that a copy of this letter was in Duveen’s archive itself suggests that he had some involvement. In 1907 René Gimpel and Nathan Wildenstein combined with the Duveens to buy the Rudolf Kann collection. The Times, reporting the sale to Cook on 10th July 1914, named the vendors as Wildenstein and Gimpel. For the sale at Wildenstein, Paris, see L. Iamurri: ‘Questo bellissimo quadro ha una lunga storia: Note sulla vendita della Schiavona di Tiziano’, Ricerche di Storia dell’arte 73 (2001), pp.49–55, citing MSS in the Berenson archive at I Tatti. The painting was added to the Burlington Fine Arts Club where the exhibition Titian and his Contemporaries was on show. 110 Venturi, op. cit. (note 100). 111 H. Cook: The portrait of Caterina Cornaro by Giorgione, London 1915; and idem, ed.:
15. Portrait of a lady (‘La Schiavona’), by Titian. c.1510–12. Canvas, 119.4 by 96.5 cm. (National Gallery, London).
From 1923 until 1930 he served as a Trustee of the National Gallery. After his death on 4th May 1939, his son, Sir Francis, presented the portrait to the National Gallery through the National Art-Collections Fund (which Herbert Cook had helped to found). The gift was first mentioned to the Trustees by Viscount Lee in December 1941.114 The obstacle of estate duty had to be dealt with and then the problem of how to describe the painting, Lord Lee urging that it should be labelled as its late owner had preferred. Kenneth Clark refused to allow it to be called a Giorgione, not because the idea had no respectable supporters in the 1930s115 – it was even revived by Cecil Gould in 1961116 – but rather that he believed it to be by Titian. It was because he was put under pressure by his Trustees that he agreed to label the four small panels as by Giorgione tout court despite the doubts that others had expressed. He was no doubt determined not to make that mistake again.
A Catalogue of the Paintings at Doughty House, Richmond, London 1915, III, pp.172–77. Ironically Cook quotes praise of the picture from Berenson’s letter as the closing lines of the description of the painting in both publications. Berenson’s opinion regarding the attribution to Titian was reported in The New York Times (6th July 1914). 112 For Berenson and Cook in Portugal, see E. Samuels: Bernard Berenson: The making of a legend, Harvard 1987, p.81. 113 For the history of the Cook collection, see E. Danziger: ‘The Cook collection, its founder and its inheritors’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 146 (2004), pp.444–58. 114 NG 1/12, Board Minutes, 4th December 1941, p.36. 115 See, for example, J. Wilde: Festschrift Alexis Petrovics, Budapest 1934, cited in Gould, op. cit. (note 33), p.290, note 6; and G.M. Richter: Giorgio da Castelfranco, Chicago 1937, p.239. 116 C. Gould: ‘New light on Titian’s Schiavona portrait’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 103 (1961), pp.335–40, esp. p.339. the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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Perugino, Sassoferrato and a ‘beautiful little work’ in the National Gallery, London by SCOTT NETHERSOLE and HELEN HOWARD
ON 4TH OCTOBER 1899 Mary Berenson recorded in her diary that she, accompanied by Roger Fry and his wife, Helen Coombe, had visited the Sienese forger Federico Joni. In the course of their excursion, Fry commented that the National Gallery had recently acquired a fake Perugino, at which point they all laughed and dug him in the ribs, assuming that he himself had sold it to the Gallery.1 They were, however, wrong. The so-called ‘Perugino’ – a predella-like painting of the Baptism of Christ (Fig.16) – had been bought by Sir Edward Poynter in 1894 during his first six months as Director. Although Poynter would always hold to the view that the ‘beautiful little work’ dated from ‘the fifteenth (or quite early sixteenth) century’, several eminent critics were of another opinion.2 Damned as a ‘detestable little production’, the painting, its attribution and dating became the means by which the late Victorian and Edwardian art world expressed its dissatisfaction with the institution and direction of the Gallery.3 The conviction that the painting was a forgery effectively ensured that it received little critical attention for most of the twentieth century, during which time its dating shifted from the late fifteenth to the early nineteenth century. Yet, more recently these assumptions, and the politics that drove them, have come to be questioned. The National Gallery Baptism is now understood to be a seicento copy for reasons outlined below. To make sense of how its critical fortune could swing so widely, it is necessary to examine the differing perception of fakes and copies in the nineteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively. Writing anonymously in the Saturday Review in early 1898, Herbert Horne lamented that since ‘Sir Edward Poynter has assumed the directorship of the Gallery [in 1894] no picture of first-rate importance has been added to the collection’.4 The Baptism, bought four years previously, called ‘for a more special examination’ than other pictures acquired by Poynter, not only because Perugino was erroneously placed in the Venetian school, but because the ‘most charitable view which one could take of
this worthless picture is to suppose it to be a late sixteenthcentury copy of some lost original’. Its acquisition bore testament to the Director’s incompetence: ‘we can only conclude that here we have some indication of his knowledge of Early Italian Painting [. . . it] is a gross scandal to the administration of the Gallery, and the sooner it is consigned to the limbo of mistaken acquisitions the better for every one concerned’.5 Horne did, however, show himself to be sensitive to the difficult circumstances under which the painting was acquired. He opened his article by observing that Poynter’s appointment had brought with it a change in the process by which paintings were procured. Whereas previously – since the time of Sir Charles Eastlake – the power to make purchases had rested on the shoulders of the Director, the so-called Rosebery Minute of April 1894 had transferred such Atlantean authority to a group of aristocratic Trustees.6 To make matters worse, the Treasury had reduced the Gallery’s grant in the wake of the acquisition of two pictures from Blenheim in 1885.7 ‘Whether this very radical change in the administration of the Gallery was intended as a censure upon the retiring Director [Sir Frederic Burton], or a want of confidence in the gentleman about to succeed him, we are not informed’, Horne noted, before astutely recognising that it left both the Director and the Trustees absolved of responsibility.8 The Rosebery Minute would prove a great hindrance to Poynter, as would his cool relations with the Trustees, themselves dismissed and disregarded by the Treasury.9 The publication of the Gallery’s Annual Report for 1898 prompted Horne to return to the subject, which had in the intervening period given rise to much comment from correspondents, among them Sydney Cockerell.10 A year later and Horne was again campaigning against misguided acquisitions at the Gallery.11 Once more his subject was the ‘Perugino’, but now he had more substantial evidence. He realised that the picture was in fact a copy of Perugino’s predella panel in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen (Fig.17). Although the documents
We would like to thank Ken Reedie of the Canterbury City Museums, as well as our colleagues in the Archive, Conservation, Curatorial and Scientific departments at the National Gallery, London, for their help with this research. 1 E. Samuels: Bernard Berenson: The making of a connoisseur, Cambridge MA and London 1979, p.253, citing Mary Berenson’s diary for 4th October 1899, now in the Berenson Archive at Villa I Tatti, Florence; see also B. Strachey and J. Samuels, eds.: Mary Berenson: A self-portrait from her letters and diaries, London 1983, p.84; and G. Mazzoni: ‘La cultura del falso’, in idem: exh. cat. Falsi d’autore: Icilio Federico Joni e la cultura del falso tra otto e novecento, Siena (S. Maria della Scala) 2004, p.66. We would like to thank Caroline Elam for directing us to this entry and for subsequent references to Horne, and also Ilaria Della Monica, Archivist, Villa I Tatti. 2 E.J. Poynter: ‘A maker of old masters’, Athenaeum 4137 (9th February 1907), p.174. 3 The author of this phrase is not known, although it is cited in several sources; see, for example, M.W. Brockwell: ‘A maker of old masters’, Athenaeum 4138 (16th February 1907), p.206; R.C. Fisher: ‘Sir E. Poynter and the National Gallery’, The Times (1st April 1907), p.9; and M.W. Brockwell: ‘Sir E. Poynter and the National
Gallery’, ibid. (8th April 1907), p.5. 4 Anon. [H.P. Horne]: ‘The state of the National Gallery’, The Saturday Review (26th February 1898), supplement, p.278. Horne’s authorship is confirmed by D. Sutton: ‘Herbert Horne: A pioneer historian of early Italian art’, Apollo 122 (1985), p.131. 5 Horne, op. cit. (note 4), pp.275–76. 6 Since Gladstone’s Minute of 1855, directors, beginning with Eastlake, had been solely responsible for the decision to acquire pictures. The Rosebury Minute shifted that power (and others) to the Board of Trustees, the Director only having one vote on the panel. The Lansdowne Resolutions of 1902 further restrained the Director’s power to make acquisitions; see C. Saumarez Smith: The National Gallery: A short history, London 2009, pp.96–97 and 99; and J. Conlin: The nation’s mantelpiece: A history of the National Gallery, London 2006, pp.95–98, 106 and 358. 7 A. Geddes Poole: ‘Conspicuous Presumption: The Treasury and the Trustees of the National Gallery, 1890–1939’, Twentieth century British History 16:1 (2005), p.8. 8 Horne, op. cit. (note 4), p.275. 9 For the ill will and ‘controversies’ between Poynter and his Trustees, particularly
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16. Baptism of Christ, after Perugino, here attributed to Sassoferrato. Second quarter of the seventeenth century. Canvas laid onto panel, 32.5 by 59 cm. (National Gallery, London).
pertaining to the Rouen picture (and the other elements from the dismantled altarpiece) were only published in 1931, Horne pointed both to its quality as a sign of authenticity and its mention by Vasari. It had been commissioned in 1495 as part of the high altarpiece for the Benedictine house of S. Pietro, Perugia.12 But Horne did not condemn the National Gallery picture outright, as did connoisseurs writing eight years later. Instead, he suggested that it dated to ‘a period at least a hundred years later’.13 Horne’s perspicacious insight went unheeded among critics intent on berating the Gallery and it took more than a century to prove his supposition correct. Fry, too, was quick to realise that the National Gallery’s new acquisition was not all that it purported to be. Writing in The Pilot in 1901, two years after his visit to Joni, he was concerned to show how the purchase of the ‘poor copy’ after Perugino was symptomatic of a greater malaise in the Gallery’s administration
and expertise.14 He worried that works were bought as examples of important ‘names’, rather than for their inherent quality; much as ‘the nouveau riche orders his books to fill the shelves of his library, we appear to buy our pictures – the object in each case being that the names in the catalogue may impress the visitor with admiration for our cultivated taste’.15 Yet the criticisms of Horne and Fry appear to have had little effect on Poynter or the Trustees. True, the attribution to ‘Vannucci’ in the catalogue of 1898 was changed the following year to read ‘ascribed to Vannucci’, but the picture remained on view, and no official statement justifying the acquisition was forthcoming. Tired, and evidently unpopular, Poynter finally left his post in 1904, to be replaced by Sir Charles Holroyd in 1906 after an interregnum of over a year during which time the Treasury deliberated on whether or not to appoint Fry. The unresolved issue of the ‘Perugino’, however, had not disappeared. It
Lord Lansdowne, see the memoirs of C. Holmes: Self and partners, New York 1936, p.320; Geddes Poole, op. cit. (note 7), pp.1–28; and Saumarez Smith, op. cit. (note 6), p.97. 10 Anon. [H.P. Horne]: ‘The state of the National Gallery: The report of the Director for the year 1897’, The Saturday Review (6th August 1898), pp.171–72. For correspondence, see, for example, D.P. Sellar: ‘Correspondence: The National Gallery’, ibid. (12th March 1898), pp.359–60; idem: ‘Correspondence: The state of the National Gallery’, ibid. (26th March 1898), p.432; and anon. [H.P. Horne]: ‘Correspondence: The state of the National Gallery’, ibid. (2nd April 1898), p.467. Cockerell observed that it was impossible for anyone to adequately perform the roles of Director of the National Gallery and President of the Royal Academy simultaneously. ‘The Director [. . .] should be able to take the first train to Venice or Madrid and get there before the Berlin people or any other public or private rivals; and this is not easy for a man with all the engagements of a P.R.A’; S.C. Cockerell: ‘Correspondence: The National Gallery’, ibid. (12th March 1898), p.360. 11 H.P. Horne: ‘An inquiry into two pictures recently acquired for the National Gallery’, The Magazine of Art (1899), pp.241–43.
12 The panel was removed from the church in 1798 and accessioned by the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen, in 1803. For the other elements of the altarpiece and for the provenance of this work, see P. Scarpellini: Perugino, Milan 1984, pp.93–95, nos.74–88. The documents relating to the commission were published by F. Canuti: Il Perugino, Siena 1931, II, pp.176–83. For the most recent reconstruction of the altarpiece, see C. Gardner von Teuffel: ‘Carpenteria e macchine d’altare: Per la storia della ricostruzione della pale di San Pietro e di Sant’Agostino a Perugia’, in V. Garibaldi and F.F. Mancini, eds.: exh. cat. Perugino il divin pittore, Perugia (Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria) 2004, pp.141–53. 13 Horne, op. cit. (note 11), p.241. 14 R.E. Fry: ‘Recent Acquisitions in the National Gallery’, The Pilot 45 (5th January 1901), pp.10–11. 15 Ibid., p.10. Fry also bewailed that this maladroit system had permitted such important works as Titian’s Europa to leave British shores. Concern for the loss of great pictures to foreign (generally American) buyers is a leitmotif of these articles and would eventually lead to the establishment of the National Art-Collections Fund in 1903.
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17. Baptism of Christ, by Perugino. 1495–1500. Panel, 39 by 68 cm. (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen).
flared-up again in winter 1906–07 and once more provided the pretext for an attack on the Gallery’s direction. The publication of a new edition of the catalogue of the foreign schools, which maintained the association with Perugino, prompted Maurice Brockwell to write three articles for the Athenaeum.16 They provoked a series of letters and articles, both in the weekly itself and subsequently in The Times, all written with the polite deference typical of the period, thinly disguising the vitriol. Such was the response that the editor of the Athenaeum was forced to add an exasperated plea on 16th February 1907, entreating his readers that ‘Further correspondence on this subject is not invited’. These articles are marked by their insistence that the painting was a modern forgery, completely rejecting Horne’s suggestion that it could be an early copy. The position adopted by their authors was political: their desire for the painting to be a fake was used to justify a low opinion of Poynter’s expertise. Brockwell complained that the high standard in cataloguing that had been set by Eastlake and Wornum in 1855 was not being maintained.17 In the third of the articles, he drew attention to the ‘Perugino’, expressing the same view as Fry that too often the Gallery sought big names.18 The result, he concluded, of allowing cataloguing to ‘degenerate’ to such a degree was ‘a general disposition in certain quarters to treat it as a subject for badinage’. But there was hope, there was a feeling in artistic circles that
everyone should ‘combine loyally to support the recently appointed Director [Charles Holroyd], who has taken up his duties at a not very favourable moment in the Gallery’s history, and has already made his presence felt’.19 Brockwell was evidently shrewd in complimenting the Director and in demanding a higher standard of catalogues, for within a few years he found himself assisting Holroyd in rewriting them.20 Response to Brockwell’s articles was immediate. Richard C. Fisher – a magistrate sitting on the Midhurst Bench who was also the son of Richard Fisher, the scholar of Renaissance prints – wrote to the editor of the Athenaeum claiming that the Baptism was ‘not even an old copy, but [. . .] a modern work, by Michele Micheli, of Florence, painted in the first half of the nineteenth century’.21 Fisher seems to have known a fair amount about this forger, now forgotten, having collected information on him in Florence during the 1880s. Micheli apparently died in September 1848 and had copied Raphael, Perugino and Lorenzo di Credi among others. According to Fisher, many of his works were masquerading in English collections. He wished to publish more extensively on him, but for the fact that his information had been attained in confidence. His purpose in writing, however, was not simply to denounce the painting as an outright forgery and unveil its author, but to make an accusation of incompetence against the former Director. Fisher claimed that
16 Descriptive and historical catalogue of the pictures in the National Gallery: Foreign schools, London 1906, p.600. 17 Anon. [M.W. Brockwell]: ‘The National Gallery: Foreign catalogue – I’, Athenaeum 4129 (15th December 1906), p.80. 18 Anon. [M.W. Brockwell]: ‘The National Gallery: Foreign catalogue – III’, Athenaeum 4134 (19th January 1907), pp.81–82. The second article appeared as Anon. [M.W. Brockwell]: ‘The National Gallery: Foreign catalogue – II’, Athenaeum 4131 (29th December 1906), pp.838–39. 19 Brockwell 1907, op. cit. (note 18), p.82. 20 Brockwell’s time at the National Gallery is not documented since he did not appear on the pay roll. It is mentioned, instead, in his obituary in The Times (8th December 1958), p.15. However, it must date to around 1909–11, when he published two works related to the collection; M.W. Brockwell: The National Gallery: Lewis bequest, London 1909; and idem: The ‘Adoration of the Magi’ by Jan Mabuse formerly in the collection of the Earl of Carlisle, London 1911. 21 R.C. Fisher: ‘A maker of old masters’, Athenaeum 4135 (26th January 1907), p.110. Relatively little is known about Fisher, but some information can be gleaned from his obituary in The Times (5th March 1928), p.9. Some of his papers are held by the West Sussex Record Office among the Richard Cobden Papers and in various
additional manuscripts (in particular Add. MSS. 14,810–14,840). However, there would appear to be no reference to Micheli among them. An article in The Atlantic Monthly claimed that one of Micheli’s fakes – a ‘Raphael’ – ‘long graced the Imperial Gallery of Russia’, see J.J. Jarves: ‘Italian Experiences in collecting “Old Masters’”, The Atlantic Monthly 6/37 (November 1860), pp.578–86. 22 Fisher, op. cit. (note 21), p.110. 23 Canterbury City Council Museums and Galleries (CANCM 4030). In a letter dated 28th December 1929, now in the dossier in Canterbury, de Zoete notes that his painting had ‘for a time [. . .] hung on [the National Gallery’s] walls’. De Zoete claimed that it had been rejected ‘only on the worthless criticisms of Mr Fisher’; letter from de Zoete to Poynter, 6th March 1907, National Gallery Archive (cited hereafter as NGA), 7/323/1907. 24 NGA, Minutes of Board Meetings, 19th February 1907 and 7th May 1907, 7/323/1907. The two photographs and two letters presented to the Board on these occasions survive at NGA, 7/319/10 (photographs); 7/323/11–13 (letters). 25 E.J. Poynter: ‘A maker of old masters’, Athenaeum 4137 (9th February 1907), p.174. Fisher replied to Poynter, acknowledging his mistake and the existence of two pictures, but regretting that he could not ‘agree with him as to its genuineness’; see R.C. Fisher: ‘A maker of old masters’, ibid. 4138 (16th February 1907), pp.205–06.
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18. Baptism of Christ, after Perugino. Probably late sixteenth century. Canvas laid onto panel, 36 by 60.5 cm. (Canterbury City Council Museums and Galleries).
the ‘Perugino’ had already been offered to the Gallery, less than a decade before Poynter acquired it. He had personally inspected it with Burton, which was when he first identified the dissembling hand of Micheli. Burton was consequently forced to return the painting to its owner. ‘I was much surprised’, Fisher quipped, ‘some years later when I found the picture hanging on the walls of the National Gallery as a Perugino, and I need hardly mention that Sir F. Burton was not then the Director’.22 Fisher’s revelation was only half wrong. A near-identical painting, thought to be by Timoteo Viti, had been presented to the nation by Gerard Frederick de Zoete in 1887 (Fig.18). It was returned to him by Burton in exchange for a Virgin and Child by Luis de Morales (NG 1229), but it seems to have hung on the walls at Trafalgar Square for a short period. In 1905 de Zoete sent the picture to the Royal Museum in Canterbury instead, where it was accepted and where it has remained.23 There were, then, two copies by different hands derived from Perugino’s prototype in Rouen. The scandal was sufficient for the Trustees to discuss the matter twice. At their meeting on 19th February 1907, the new Director, Charles Holroyd, laid before them two photographs to demonstrate that NG 1431 and the painting in Canterbury were, in fact, different, while correspondence from de Zoete and Poynter was presented on 7th May.24 Although in retirement,
Poynter wrote to the editor of the Athenaeum to clarify the matter, but not before Brockwell lent his support to Fisher.25 Vexed by these attacks, by the fact of being named and by the biased selections published in the Athenaeum, Poynter finally wrote to The Times.26 His lengthy letter was intended as much for circulation among the Trustees as it was for general consumption. In it, he detailed the research he had undertaken in advance of purchase, particularly the comparisons he had made with paintings in the Vatican Gallery. But instead of evoking the name of Perugino, Poynter met his adversaries by upping the attribution to the young Raphael. He had long suspected that it was by the Urbinate painter, but was impelled to publish his opinion as the same suggestion had recently been forwarded by a French authority, Emile Durand-Gréville.27 Why Poynter waited until 1907 to answer his critics is a difficult question to answer and one on which the archives are silent. It is probable that the renewed controversy had hurt his pride. Now away from the Gallery, he could freely respond to those Trustees and critics who had caused him so much difficulty. It is just possible, too, that by 1907 the character of the vendor was becoming known in London. The Baptism had been acquired from a dealer in Rome called Godfrey (von) Kopp, whom Poynter had met on his Continental Trip in autumn 1894.28 Where Kopp acquired the picture is unknown; indeed
Brockwell noted that had Poynter only read the Gallery’s Annual Report for 1855, ‘he would have realized that the picture bought by him in 1894 could at the best be only a replica of one of the Rouen panels’, agreeing with Fisher that it dated to the early nineteenth century; see M.W. Brockwell: ‘A maker of old masters’, Athenaeum 4136 (2nd February 1907), pp.140–41. The Annual Report was instituted by Treasury Minute on 27th March 1855, and employed – by chance – the S. Pietro altarpiece as an example to illustrate correct cataloguing (pp.6–7). There was a further letter from Brockwell, op. cit. (note 3), on 16th February 1907, p.206. 26 E.J. Poynter: Letter to the Editor, The Times (30th March 1907), p.4. The proofs, dated 13th March 1907, survive in both manuscript and typescript at NGA, 68/29/3 and 5. For the editor’s reply, see ‘Sir E.J. Poynter and the National Gallery’, Athenaeum 4145 (6th April 1907), p.417. His letter prompted responses from each of the chief protagonists. De Zoete wrote to expose the ‘incapacity’ of Fisher, but equally to vent his spleen against the authorities at the Gallery. ‘If Directors [. . .] must call in the assistance of art critics, the least the nation expects is, that, before its paintings are removed from the walls of the National Gallery, the reasons and authority for so doing should be made public’; see G.F. de Zoete: Letter to the Editor, The Times (4th April 1907), p.6. Brockwell reasserted his position and mentioned by name Horne, Bernard Berenson and Claude Phillips as of the same view; Brockwell, 8th April
1907, op. cit. (note 3), p.5. See also Fisher, op. cit. (note 3), p.9. Letters in support of Poynter from de Zoete (7th April 1907) and Fred White of 170 Queens Gate (31st March 1907) were not published, but instead survive in manuscript; NGA, 68/29/6 (de Zoete); 68/29/4 (White). 27 E. Durand-Gréville: ‘Le baptême de la National Gallery’, Bulletin de l’art ancien et moderne 9 (1907), pp.70–71. The Rouen panels have also sometimes been attributed to Raphael by, among others, Eugène Delacroix; see A. Joubin: Correspondance générale de Eugène Delacroix: 1838–1849, Paris 1936, II, pp.23 and 58. 28 On 25th November 1894 Poynter wrote to Kopp on paper bearing Kopp’s address at 20 Piazza di Spagna, Rome, offering him £400 for the picture. Kopp replied, writing on the same letter, that Loraine Cox would deliver the painting to him in exchange for a cheque. The Board approved Poynter’s acquisition retrospectively at their meeting on 18th December 1894. Cox signed a receipt on 4th January 1895, which was presented to the Board on 6th February 1895. The archive also preserves a visiting card from Giuseppe Pierantoni (13 Piazza Rosa, Rome) dated 21st Dec ember 1894 and mentioning a letter from Mr Evans; it is not known what role these two individuals played in the acquisition, although it may relate to the shipping of the picture; NGA, 68/16/19 (Poynter to Kopp), 68/16/20 (visiting card), 68/17/16 (receipt); NG Minutes of Board Meetings, 18th December 1894 and 6th February 1895. the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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19. Virgin and Child with the Infant Baptist (The Garvagh Madonna), by Sassoferrato, after Raphael. 1625–50. Canvas, 47.8 by 38.5 cm. (Musée du Louvre, Paris).
its provenance before this date is a mystery, unless it can be identified with the work listed in the inventory of the collection of Cavaliere Francesco Maria Azzi in Perugia in 1788 (‘A copy of the Baptism of Pietro Perugino, that is in the sacristy of S. Pietro’).29 Kopp, however, is less of a mystery. Born Gottfried rather than Godfrey, he was the son of a Swiss pastry chef. After going into partnership with Charles Wakefield Mori, however, he aggrandised himself by anglicising his name and elevated himself to an Austrian baronetcy. Trading in both Paris and Rome, he found a lucrative market for fakes. But his ambition was far grander, and he rose to become one of the most celebrated fraudsters of his generation, counting the fraudulent ‘sale’ of the Arch of Constantine to the Chicago restaurateur
29
‘Una copia del Battesimo di Pietro Perugino, che sta nella sagrestia di S. Pietro’, cited by E. Gardner: A bibliographical repertory of Italian private collections, Vicenza 1998, p.57. We would like to thank Antonio Mazzotta for directing our attention to this reference. 30 E. Fowles: Memories of Duveen Brothers, London 1976, p.27. The dubious dealings of Kopp are discussed by C. Simpson: The partnership: The secret association of Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen, London 1987, pp.94–101; and W. Craven: Stanford White: Decorator in opulence and dealer in antiquities, New York 2005, pp.37–40. 31 Henry Duveen to White, London, 10th June 1898; Stanford White Papers, New York City, Columbia University, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, cited by Craven, op. cit. (note 30), p.38. 32 The design was still being given to Perugino as late as 1923 by U. Gnoli: Perugino, Spoleto 1923, p.55. 33 See our forthcoming article in The National Gallery Technical Bulletin 31 (2010), pp.78–95. 34 For Perugino’s technique, see D. Bomford et al.: ‘Three panels from Perugino’s Certosa di Pavia altarpiece’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin 4 (1980), pp.3–31; and
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John R. Thompson among his more infamous achievements.30 He was sufficiently well known by 1898 for Henry Duveen to write to the American architect and decorator Stanford White to warn him against any dealings with Kopp, who was in his opinion ‘capable of almost anything [. . . he] is a very dangerous person and you should be very careful to keep away from him’.31 Were Kopp unmasked by the time the articles went to press in the Athenaeum, then Poynter would surely have been eager to defend his judgment and clear the Gallery of involvement with such an unsavoury individual. The scandal eventually died down. Under the new Director, the picture no longer served as a battleground to rally forces against Poynter. For the first time, the 1913 catalogue designated the painting as ‘after’ Perugino, presumably on the advice of Brockwell.32 But recent scientific investigations have reopened the debate, calling into question the assumption that if a ‘Renaissance’ painting is not of its period, then it must by default be a nineteenth-century fake. Nine pigment samples, first taken in 1970 and re-examined last year, have established beyond doubt a terminus ante quem for the picture in the mid-eighteenth century.33 The work contains no modern pigments or Prussian blue (known from about 1710) and most tellingly employs a lead-tin yellow type pigment in the draperies which fell out of use during the first half of the eighteenth century. While Perugino is known to have re-used figures extensively in his paintings, it was rare – if not unknown – for him to repeat entire compositions. He also tended to use better quality ultramarine.34 It is far more likely that the painting is the work of a seicento copyist. This conclusion is borne out by the presence of antimony in addition to lead and tin in the yellow pigment, which not only suggests a date in the seventeenth century, but points to a Roman painter. Lead-tin-antimony yellow has only been identified in a small number of instances, all by painters with some connection to Rome, including Pietro da Cortona, Salvator Rosa and Sassoferrato.35 The other pigments accord with these findings. The dark green in the foliage at the top right-hand corner contains an artificial form of azurite (blue verditer), a pigment not unknown in Perugino’s time, but common in the seventeenth century, while natural azurite, which occurs in some of the blue drapery, disappears after c.1700.36 The finely ground ultramarine in the sky is also typical of seventeenth-century practice. Together with the pinkish-brown imprimitura, the pigments point to a work produced in that century.37 Perugino’s panel in Rouen and the National Gallery copy correspond in colour and scale, suggesting that the copyist had direct
the various essays in B.G. Brunetti et al.: The painting technique of Pietro Vannucci, called il Perugino, Florence 2004. 35 A. Roy and B. Berrie: ‘A new lead-based yellow in the seventeenth century’, in A. Roy and P. Smith, eds.: Painting techniques, history and studio practice, London 1998, pp.160–65; C. Sandalinas and S. Ruiz-Moreno: ‘Lead-tin-antimony yellow, historical manufacture, molecular characterization and identification in seventeenthcentury Italian paintings’, Studies in Conservation 49 (2004), pp.41–52; and C. Seccaroni: Giallorino, storia dei pigmenti gialli di natura sintetica, Rome 2006. 36 Blue verditer has recently been identified in what are thought to be original paint layers in Giulio Romano’s The nurture of Jupiter, painted in the mid-1530s; see L. Keith: ‘Giulio Romano and “The Birth of Jupiter”: studio practice and reputation’, National Gallery Technical Bulletin 24 (2003), pp.38–39. This is a very early occurrence of the artificially produced copper carbonate pigment which became common in the seventeenth century; see R. Harley: Artists’ Pigments c.1600–1835, 2nd ed., London 1982, p.50. 37 J. Dunkerton and M. Spring: ‘The development of painting on coloured surfaces in sixteenth-century Italy’, in Roy and Smith, op. cit. (note 35), pp.120–30.
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access to the original. The former was still at S. Pietro in the seventeenth century, although it had been moved to the sacristy in the wake of the Counter-Reformation, when the high altar was dismantled. Sassoferrato was closely involved with the monastery during the second quarter of the seventeenth century, so there is the distinct possibility that the National Gallery painting is by his hand, especially when stylistic similarities are taken into consideration. Sassoferrato is one of the few painters known to have used lead-tin-antimony yellow. Giovan Battista Salvi, generally called after his native town Sassoferrato, specialised in producing copies of sacred images. He seems to have found ready patrons, of various social levels, for these replicas; indeed, he might even have created a niche market. Born in 1609, he was certainly in Rome by 1641, when he received the commission for the ceiling painting of The Blessed Virgin appearing to St Francis of Paola for the Minim friars of S. Francesco di Paola. Two years later he painted his best-known work, a large altarpiece for S. Sabina. It is alleged to have replaced a painting attributed to Raphael, which had been offered to Cardinal Antonio Barberini, although it does not appear to be a copy. By this date, it would seem that Sassoferrato had already made a name for himself as a talented copyist, replicating Raphael with such skill that eighteenth-century historians thought they were contemporaries (Fig.19). His œuvre, however, ranged far wider, from free adaptations to direct imitations.38 There was, of course, nothing unusual in copying, or even faking, during the seventeenth century, especially after works by Raphael.39 Some artists seem to have made it their career. In his Life of the painter Terenzio Terenzi, called Terenzio da Urbino or il Rondolino, Giovanni Baglione observed that ‘he was one of those painters who want to pass off modern paintings as ancient ones. He went to obtain old panels, and frames all worked all’antica, blackened by smoke and corroded by wood worms, where there might have been some figures, although coarse and badly executed’. Having painted over the old panels, ‘he darkened them with smoke, and covered them with certain varnishes mixed with colours, that they appear as images of about a hundred years earlier’.40 It is significant that Terenzio sought to fake Raphael, for there was also a healthy market in honest reproductions of his works. And Raphael was not unique: the same is probably true of those artists of the preceding generations – ‘of about a hundred years earlier’ in the words of Baglione – who were thought to have possessed God-like abilities and who were often given the epithet ‘divine’. Their
38
The bibliography dedicated to Sassoferrato is not extensive. His œuvre was constructed in large part by F. Macé de Lépinay: ‘Archaïsme et purisme au XVIIe siècle: les tableaux de Sassoferrato à S. Pietro de Pérouse’, Revue de l’Art 31 (1976), pp.38–56; idem, in conjunction with J.-C. Boyer: ‘The “Mignardes”, Sassoferrato and Roman classicism during the 1650s’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 123 (1981), pp.69–76; idem et al., eds.: exh. cat. Giovan Battista Salvi ‘il Sassoferrato’, Sassoferrato (S. Francesco) 1990; and idem: ‘Sassoferrato (1609–1685) au Louvre: une réhabilitation’, La revue des musées de France. Revue du Louvre 2 (2004), pp.62–73. Other contributions have been made by F. Russell: ‘Sassoferrato and his sources: A study in seicento allegiance’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 119 (1977), pp.694–700; F. Zeri: Sassoferrato copista, San Severino 1986; and S. Caldarigi: Giovan Battista Salvi ‘il Sassoferrato’: Aspetti e problemi, Sassoferrato 2003. 39 The phenomenon is, however, relatively understudied, with the exception of the work of R. Spear: The ‘divine’ Guido: Religion, sex, money and art in the world of Guido Reni, New Haven and London 1997, pp.253–74; and the essays by Spear and J.M. Muller in K. Preciado, ed.: Retaining the original: Multiple originals, copies, and reproductions, Washington 1989, pp.97–99 and 141–49.
20. Annunciation, by Sassoferrato. c.1430. Black and white chalk on greygreen paper, 39.8 by 27 cm. (Royal Collection, copyright 2010 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II).
paintings had acquired canonical status, and copies seem to have been commissioned either because the originals were unobtainable, or to replace the originals when they had been removed from the altars they once decorated. But among these divine practitioners, Raphael was Olympian, not least because of the model he provided to those young artists pursuing a classicising style. Malvasia attributed Guido Reni’s early success in part to his copy of Raphael’s St Cecilia with saints (sometimes identified as the painting in the Polet Chapel, S. Luigi dei Francesi, Rome); while the copyists that Poussin oversaw for Paul de Chantelou in the 1640s were similarly replicating Raphael, including paintings in the Palazzo Farnese, the Transfiguration, then in S. Pietro in Montorio, and the Madonna di Foligno, then in S. Francesco, Foligno.41 These images were not fakes. They were recognised for what they were, and inventories, for example, often carefully distinguished between them. That of Francesco Maria del Monte, drawn up in 1627, singles out works that are ‘di mano di’ or ‘copia
40 ‘fu pittore di quelli, che le lor pitture moderne volgiono per antiche spacciare. Egli andava procacciando tavole vecchie, e cornici all’antica lavorate, dai fumo annegrite, e da’tarli corrose, ove fosse stata qualche figura, benchè grossolana, e mal condotta [. . .] e dopo esser dipinte le appiccava al fumo, e con certe vernici misti con colori, che sopra di loro dava, faceale parere immagini per tratto di centinaja d’anni al tempo avanzate’; G.B. Baglione: Le vite de’ pittori, scultori, architetti, ed intagliatori, rev. ed., Naples 1733, p.149. Terenzio was by no means the only painter involved in such duplicitous activity. Baldinucci mentioned Cesare Aretusi and Andrea Commodi as involved in similar work, while John Evelyn wrote in his Diary on 6th May 1645 that Antonio della Cornia ‘has such an addresse of counterfeiting the hands of the ancient masters so well as to make his copies passe for originals’; see Spear 1997, op. cit. (note 39), pp.273 and 383, note 137. Giulio Mancini, writing around 1620, provides much evidence of the same problem; G. Mancini: Considerazioni sulla pittura, ed. A. Marucchi, Rome 1956–57, I, p.134. 41 For Poussin’s copies for Chantelou, see C. Jouanny: Correspondance de Nicolas Poussin, Paris 1911, pp.189–204; and T. Green: Nicolas Poussin paints the ‘Seven Sacraments’ twice, Watchet 2000, pp.173–82. We would like to thank Sheila McTighe for directing us to these references.
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21. St Flavia, by Sassoferrato, after Perugino. 1625–50. Canvas, 63 by 50 cm. (Monastero di S. Pietro, Perugia).
del’.42 Yet within this broad market, Sassoferrato stands alone, for not only did he copy, but he created an aesthetic based on emulation and imitation. In this sense, he was unique. But Sassoferrato can also be differentiated from other seicento copyists by the fact that, on occasion, he turned his attention to fifteenth-century painters, most notably Perugino. In what might be one of his earliest commissions, he seems to have been set to copy a fifteenth-century fresco of the Annunciation, variously attributed to Giovanni Antonio da Pesaro or Antonio da Fabriano, in the church of S. Chiara in Sassoferrato. A drawing for it survives in Windsor (Fig.20), as does a copy on canvas, whose authorship is debated.43 It is unknown if a cult was attached to this image, but it is the type of work that would have been venerated locally. Similar circumstances surround the next commission of any certainty. In 1643 a venerated fresco of the Madonna del Giglio, attributed to Giovanni di Pietro, ‘lo Spagna’, was detached from the wall of a small chapel at Villa di Valliano, near Perugia, and solemnly processed to its new location in the chapel of the Holy Sacrament in the Benedictine abbey of S. Pietro, Perugia.44 The dedication was a typical Counter-Reformation move; the Clementine transept added to S. Giovanni Laterano, Rome, in time for the Jubilee year 1600 was dedicated to the Eucharist.45 The abbey was locked in disagreement with successive bishops of Perugia over Episcopal jurisdiction and turned increasingly to powerful figures in Rome for succour.46 Unsurprisingly, then,
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C.L. Frommel: ‘Caravaggios Frühwerk und der Kardinal Francesco Maria del Monte’, Storia dell’arte 9/10 (1971), pp.30, 31, 34 and 35. This point was first made by Spear 1997, op. cit. (note 39), p.268, who also observed that the inventory of Cardinal Federico Borromeo’s collection, drawn up in 1618 on the donation to the Ambrosiana, designated certain works as ‘copie fatte con diligenza’. 43 A.F. Blunt and H.L. Cooke: The Roman Drawings of the XVII & XVIII Centuries in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, London 1960, p.106, no.906. For the debate over the attribution of the canvas, compare Russell, op. cit. (note 38), p.695; and Caldarigi, op. cit. (note 38), p.80. 44 For the painting by ‘lo Spagna’, see F.G. Sabatini: Giovanni di Pietro detto Lo Spagna, Spoleto 1984, I, pp.299–300. In addition to her archival references, see Perugia, Archivio di S. Pietro, Cassetto IIo, 6: ‘Fasciolo di memorie relative all’oratorio della Madonna del Giglio [. . .] spese fatte’, for a rare description of the translation of the image. 45 J. Freiberg: The Lateran in 1600: Christian concord in Counter-Reformation Rome,
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22. Judith, by Sassoferrato. 1625–50. Canvas, 160 by 85 cm. (Monastero di S. Pietro, Perugia).
the transfer of the image – and presumably its cult – was officially sanctioned by Urban VIII, who commissioned a copy of the painting from Sassoferrato, according to an eighteenth-century account. So too did Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the Prottettore della Congregazione Casinese and thus protector of the Benedictines at S. Pietro.47 These paintings do not survive, but others do. Preserved in the church is a Madonna del Giglio, clearly by Sassoferrato, which may be among his earliest works. Eighteenth-century descriptions of the abbey state that it was produced for the abbot Don Leone Pavoni di Todi and hung in the chapel of his apartment. Further copies were dispatched to Benedictine houses under the control of the same abbot. Three survive respectively at S. Pietro in Assisi, S. Pietro in Reggio Emilia and S. Pietro in Modena.48 There is no record of why the young Marchigian painter was chosen to replicate this damaged fresco, but evidently his skills were prized in disseminating the likeness of a holy image. Could it be that Sassoferrato, who was known as the ‘pittore delle belle Madonne’ on his death in 1685, had developed an anachronistic style that resonated with the sacred function of these works?49
Cambridge 1995, passim. 46 C. Black: ‘Perugia and post-Tridentine church reform’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 32/2 (1984), pp.429–51, esp. pp.447–49. 47 For the copy in the Chapel of the Abbot’s apartment, the transfer with the authority of Urban VIII and Sassoferrato’s copy for the Pope, see P. Galassi: Descrizione delle pitture di San Pietro di Perugia chiesa de’ Monaci Neri di S. Benedetto della congregazione casinese e di quanto si vede in essa di più singolare, colle notizie de’ loro autori, 3rd ed., Perugia 1792, pp.47 and 80. 48 Macé de Lépinay, Zampetti and Sassi, in Macé de Lépinay 1990, op. cit. (note 38), p.121, no.57. 49 This sobriquet became commonplace in the eighteenth century, but it was already in use in his lifetime. See the ‘Annales’ for the year 1685 in the Archive of S. Pietro, in which it is noted that he was known in Rome ‘sotto nome di Pittore delle belle Madonne’, cited in Macé de Lépinay 1976, op. cit. (note 38), p.53, Annexe 2.
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24. Detail of trees in The Virgin and Child embracing, by Sassoferrato. 1660–85. Canvas, 97.2 by 74 cm. (National Gallery, London).
23. Entombment, by Sassoferrato, after Raphael. 1625–50. Canvas, 115 by 125 cm. (Monastero di S. Pietro, Perugia).
Another of the instances of a seventeenth-century painter copying an early fresco was also one who is now classified as stylistically retardataire. In 1655–56 Carlo Dolci was commissioned by the Marchese Scipione di Piero Capponi to copy the much-venerated miracle-working fresco of the Annunciation in SS. Annunziata in Florence.50 As with Sassoferrato’s copy of the Madonna del Giglio, Dolci’s must have been prompted by the sanctity of the prototype, which was reputed to have been painted by an angel. Such replication relates to a much older tradition, of which the copying, replacement and updating of Bernardo Daddi’s altarpiece in Orsanmichele is probably the most famous instance. Sassoferrato’s archaism might be thought, therefore, to refer as much to his style as to the function of his imagery. The Madonna del Giglio was not Sassoferrato’s only work for the community at S. Pietro, nor was it his only work for the abbey that made reference to earlier paintings. Galassi’s guide to the church, published in 1792, recorded ‘In the rooms [of the abbot] St Benedict, St Scholastica, St Maurus, St Placidus, St Flavia [. . .] in half-length figures. They are all beautiful copies taken from various originals of Raphael, Pietro Perugino and other illustrious men, by the same, the most accurate Sassoferrato’.51 In fact, ten paintings of half-length saints survive, four of which replicate figures from the predella of Perugino’s high altarpiece, the same predella that inspired the National Gallery
50
Florence, Palazzo Pitti, appartamenti monumentali, oggetti d’arte, no.839. Baldinucci records that he executed another copy of this fresco, now lost; see F. Baldassari: Carlo Dolci, Turin 1995, pp.129–30, no.102. For a copy made for Spain, see S. Salort and S. Kubersky-Piredda: ‘Art Collecting in Philip II’s Spain: the role of Gonzalo de Liaño, King’s dwarf and Gentleman of the Bedchamber’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 148 (2006), pp.660–65. 51 ‘Nelle stanze [. . .] San Benedetto, Santa Scolastica, San Mauro, San Placido, Santa Flavia, Santa Maria Maddalena, Sant’Agnese, Santa Caterina, Santa Barbara e Santa Apollonia in mezza figure, sono tutte bellissime copie tratte de vari originali di Raffaello, di Pietro Perugino e di altri valenti omini, dallo stesso, acuratissimo Sassoferrato’; see Galassi, op. cit. (note 47), p.81. 52 On the reorganisation of the church in 1591, see F. Mezzanotte, ed.: La basilica di San Pietro in Perugia intorno all’anno 1591, Perugia 2003. There are no copies in the church of the narrative scenes from the predella, nor are any recorded. For the
canvas. By the time Sassoferrato came to copy these figures the altarpiece had been dismantled, following the reorganisation of the church in 1591 by Valentino Martelli, and the predella panels, including the narrative scenes of the Adoration, the Baptism and the Resurrection, had been moved to the sacristy. Sassoferrato’s copies after Perugino show Scholastica, Maurus, Placidus and Flavia (Fig.21).52 They are almost double the size of the original and on canvas rather than panel.53 He evidently made careful preparatory drawings, one of which survives at Windsor (Fig.20), in such a precise manner that it would have been possible to produce a copy at some distance from the original, but for the similarity of the colouring. These pictures would seem to have served a private devotional function, hanging in the abbot’s apartment and showing saints important to the community at S. Pietro, including the abbey’s founder. Sassoferrato’s paintings for S. Pietro remain his most extensive commission. Beyond the works already described, there are other canvases that seem to have been intended for display in the church. Some, like the Judith (Fig.22), are original compositions; others, like the Entombment (Fig.23) and the Annunciation, are either direct or free copies after Raphael. Although undocumented, they were described in a guide to Perugia published in 1683, just two years before Sassoferrato died. There can, therefore, be no doubt as to his authorship. ‘Around the church’, wrote Giovanni Francesco Morelli, ‘enclosed in stucco frames, one sees many pictures of which some are well copied from superb originals by the painter named after his homeland Sassoferrato and they are an Annunciation, a[n Immaculate] Conception, a Dead Christ carried to the Tomb and another with Judith’.54 Beyond Sassoferrato’s connection to the church, which housed the prototype for the National Gallery picture, there are
identification of St Flavia with Giustina in Perugino’s original, see Gardner von Teuffel, op. cit. (note 12), pp.148 and 258, no.I.44.c, although the seventeenthand eighteenth-century documents refer to the saint as Flavia, which is why it is maintained in this article. 53 NG 1431 is also on canvas, although it has been laid over a poplar panel that has the appearance of age. When this happened is unknown; it is quite possible that the worm-eaten panel was added at a later date to falsify the semblance of a predella by Perugino. 54 ‘Intorno alla chiesa, chiusa in cornicci di stucco, veggosi molti quadri de quale alcuni sono copiate benissimo da ottimi originali dla pittore cognominato dalla Patria Sassoferrato e sono une Anunziata, una Concezione, un Cristo morto portato alla sepoltura e un altro con Giuditta’; G.F. Morelli: Brevi notizie delle pitture e sculture che adornano l’augusta citta di Perugia, Perugia 1683, p.52. The Immaculate Conception is now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv. no.600). the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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25. Holy Family, by Sassoferrato. Canvas, 73 by 95 cm. (Sanssouci, Potsdam).
stylistic reasons for giving the latter work to him. The particularities of the copyist’s hand are evident in small deviations from Perugino’s original. These are most pronounced in the trees. Although the branches follow the general pattern of the original, the leaves are broader, as if they have been flattened against the surface. They bear comparison with other works by Sassoferrato: see, for example, the tree at upper left in the background of his Virgin and Child embracing (also in the National Gallery; Fig.24), or the trees in the Virgin and sleeping Child in the Galleria Estense, Modena. The facial types have a sweetness entirely typical of Sassoferrato, developed from Raphael on the one hand and influenced by Pierre Mignard on the other.55 On the whole, they are fuller and rounder than Perugino’s. The face of the Virgin in the Potsdam Holy Family (Fig.25), or for that matter the painting of the same subject in the Fitzwilliam, Cambridge, are of the same general structure as the second from the left angel in the Baptism, or the two figures on the extreme left and right. In the figure on the far right, the line of the nose continues in a single arc to describe the eyebrow, while the point of the nose is squared-off, as in the Potsdam picture. In Perugino’s predella panel of the Baptism the clasped hands of Christ and two of the angels have their smallest fingers tensely pressed together – a trait typical of painters associated with the workshop of Verrocchio. In the National Gallery picture, by contrast, these are loosened and only gently touch one another. In the case of Perugino’s Christ, the small fingers describe the two sides of an isosceles triangle, quite unlike the rounded form found in the National Gallery canvas. This is characteristic of Sassoferrato’s copies at S. Pietro and is also seen in the St Giustina and St Placidus when compared with their respective prototypes (Figs.26 and 27). When Orsini wrote about the paintings in S. Pietro in 1784, it was not the direct replicas by Sassoferrato that he criticised, but rather those that displayed invention on the artist’s part. He observed that in the Annunciation, ‘he took his figures from the 55
For Sassoferrato and Mignard, see Boyer and Macé de Lépinay, op. cit. (note 38), passim. 56 ‘Ha tolto le sue figure dall’istorietta di Raffaello, che è nella predella del quadro dell’Assunta in S. Francesco de’ Conventuali, ma si è dimenticato di dar loro la grazia, e l’intendimento di Raffaello’; see B. Orsini: Guida al forestiere per l’augusta città di Perugia . . ., Perugia
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26. St Placidus, by Sassoferrato, after Perugino. 1625–50. Canvas, 63 by 50 cm. (Monastero di S. Pietro, Perugia).
27. St Placidus, by Perugino. 1495–1500. Panel, 33.5 by 30 cm. (Monastero di S. Pietro, Perugia).
small histories of Raphael, that are in the predella of the painting of the Assumption in S. Francesco de’ Conventuali, but he forgot to give them the grace and the understanding of Raphael’.56 He also commented on the Judith: ‘The genius of this painter is not exhibited in the making of histories of this taste, [but rather in the] fineness that one observes in his beautiful Madonnas. The pose of the Judith is cold, and without grace’.57 It would seem that Sassoferrato’s direct copies were appreciated for their capacity to convey piety through grace, a grace that was associated with the sacred art of the past. Such copying is a far cry from the fakery of which the National Gallery canvas stood accused in 1907. Had Poynter but possessed the technology to heed Baldinucci’s advice that to assess originality in paintings, one should look ‘in the laying in of the colours and tints [. . .] particularly in the fabrics’, then one of the more scandalous moments in the Gallery’s history could have been avoided.58 He might not have bought a Perugino, but he did inadvertently acquire a ‘beautiful little’ Sassoferrato. 1784, p.36, note. 57 ‘Il genio di questo pittore non si mostra nell’istoriare di quel gusto, e finezza, che si osserva nelle sue belle Madonne. L’attitudine della Giuditta è fredda, e senza grazia, perchè non vi ha contrasto nelle membra principali . . .’; ibid., p.27. 58 Baldinucci, cited by Spear 1997, op. cit. (note 39), p.273.
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Two disputes over copying in Bologna by HUUB VAN DER LINDEN
WORKSHOP PRACTICE IN painters’ studios and the co-existence of multiple versions of paintings have long been a point of interest for art historians. More recently the often difficult concepts of ‘originals’, ‘copies’, ‘replicas’, ‘variants’ and ‘imitations’ have become the focus of exhibitions and of interest to scholars as a means to investigate the theoretical, aesthetic and socio-cultural underpinnings that they reflect.1 This article is intended to make a small contribution to these lines of research by drawing attention to copies that were made after the deaths of both the artist and the patron who originally commissioned the work, and especially to the role of such copies in social interactions and disputes. If a painting acquired fame over the years, problems of ownership and copyright could assume greater importance and become bones of contention. Disputes over copying paintings by earlier artists in Bologna in the later seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth illustrate the importance of exclusivity and status in regard to bestowing the right to copy altarpieces. The first of these disputes arose over Guido Reni’s Massacre of the innocents, which he had painted in 1611 for the Berò family chapel in S. Domenico (Fig.28).2 Details of this dispute emerge in a document from the archive of the Ranuzzi family, apparently a copy or draft of a letter, in which an unnamed prince is asked to intervene in the row (see Appendix 1 below). The document is undated, but mention of the painter Giulio Cesare Milani (c.1621–78) provides a secure terminus ante quem. The conte Berò mentioned in the letter was Ercole Agostino Berò (1623–96), a Bolognese nobleman and a descendant of one of the two cousins who originally commissioned the altarpiece from Reni.3 The letter explains that ‘prince
Filiberto’ of Savoia, that is, Emanuele Filiberto of SavoiaCarignano (1628–1709), had requested to have a copy made of the painting.4 In his Felsina pittrice of 1678 Malvasia wrote that ‘hundreds of copies, also by skilled masters’ had been made of Reni’s Massacre of the innocents.5 As the letter suggests, Emanuele Filiberto was known to the Berò family. Another member of the family, Vincenzo Berò, served at the Savoy court in Turin, and Ercole Agostino also had connections with the court.6 Some years later Emanuele Filiberto asked Ercole Agostino to devise a programme of decoration for the great oval salone of Guarino Guarini’s Palazzo Carignano that was being built in Turin from 1679, which was eventually adapted and used for another room.7 Unfortunately no clear terminus post quem can be deduced from the document.8 The only clue to its date is the fact that the events took place during the election of a new prior at S. Domenico, which occurred every three years, and the preceding interregnum in which the inquisitor of Bologna acted as prior. The episode must have taken place somewhere between the 1650s and 1678, when Milani died. It is also not certain who wrote the letter and to whom it was sent. The fact that the document has survived in the archive of the Ranuzzi family would suggest that it was written by a member of that family.9 Given the dates, the most likely candidate would seem to be conte Annibale Ranuzzi (1625–97), who, like other members of the family, was a correspondent and agent for various members of the Medici, informing them of paintings that were up for sale and negotiating on their behalf.10 On the other hand, the fact that this draft or copy was not kept among the files of family correspondence but in a volume of miscellaneous
1 In the field of seventeenth-century Bolognese painting, notable recent contributions include P. Boccardo and X.F. Salomon: exh. cat. The agony and the ecstasy: Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastians, Genoa (Palazzo Rosso) and London (Dulwich Picture Gallery) 2007; S. Pepper: ‘Guido Reni’s practice of repeating compositions’, Artibus et Historiae 20 (1999), pp.27–54; and R. Spear: The divine Guido: religion, sex, money and art in the world of Guido Reni, New Haven and London 1997, esp. part III. See also E. Cropper: The Domenichino affair: novelty, imitation, and theft in seventeenth-century Rome, New Haven and London 2005; and M. Loh: ‘New and improved: repetition as originality in Italian Baroque practice and theory’, The Art Bulletin 86 (2004), pp.477–504. 2 For the dating, see the documents published by S. Pepper: ‘Guido Reni’s Roman account book – II: the commissions’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 113 (1971), pp.372–86, esp. p.385; and F. Landolfi: ‘Per “La strage degli innocenti” di Guido Reni: un inedito documento d’archivio’, Accademia Clementina Atti e Memorie 30/1 (1992), pp.181–83; see also J. Bentini and G. Cammarota: Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, catalogo generale. 3. Il Seicento: gli Incamminati, Reni, Guercino, la scuola bolognese, Venice 2008, pp.50–57, no.31. 3 Berò was a well-known amateur painter. Malvasia mentions him several times in Felsina pittrice, remarking that he practised ‘l’esercizio anche del pennello, che assai ben maneggia’; see C.C. Malvasia: Felsina pittrice: vite de pittori bolognesi, Bologna 1678, I, pp.193, 244 and 543; II, pp.86 and 299; and idem: Scritti originali del conte Carlo Cesare Malvasia spettanti alla sua Felsina pittrice, ed. L. Marzocchi, Bologna [1983], p.287. 4 On Emanuele Filiberto, see I. Massabò Ricci and A. Merlotti: ‘In attesa del duca: reggenza e principi del sangue nella Torino di Maria Giovanna Battista’, in G. Romano, ed.: Torino 1675–1699: strategie e conflitti del Barocco, Turin 1993, pp.121–74. On copies of Reni’s paintings, see R. Morselli: ‘Guido Reni: i collezionisti, gli allievi, le copie’, in E. Negro and M. Pirondini, eds.: La scuola di Guido Reni, Modena 1992, pp.17–25; and Spear, op. cit. (note 1), passim. 5 Malvasia 1678, op. cit. (note 3), II, p.22: ‘centinaia di copie, anche da’ bravi Maestri’, which he reiterated: ‘Questi famosissimi Innocenti del Sig. Guido, de’ quali è stato ricavato copia dugento volte, e da valent’uomini’; idem: Le pitture di Bologna,
Bologna 1686, p.220. 6 An Oda del signor Ercole Agostino Berò cavaglier Bolognese was printed in V. Castiglione, ed.: Le pompe torinesi nel ritorno dell’altezza reale di Carlo Emanuele II. Duca di Savoia, principe di Piemonte, Re di Cipro &c., Turin 1645; other poetry referring to the house of Savoy survives in manuscripts in Bologna. 7 I will discuss this document in H. van der Linden: ‘The collaborative authorship of pictorial invention in 17th-century Italy: artist, adviser, and patron at Palazzo Carignano’, in C. Zittel et al., eds.: The artist as reader: on education and non-education of Early Modern artists, Leiden [forthcoming]. For a survey of contacts between Bologna and Turin in this period, see C. Mossetti: ‘Un committente della nobiltà di corte: Ottavio Provana di Druent’, in Romano, op. cit. (note 4), pp.253–353, esp. pp.326–37. 8 Berò was in Bologna in these years, as shown by letters to and from him dating from 1658 and 1672 and the printed Riprova in difesa d’amore risposta del co. Hercole Agostino Berò fatta al problema proposta nell’Accademia de’ ss. Gelati tenuta nel palazzo di questo publico di Bologna li 30 decembre del 1666, Bologna 1667. 9 The archive is dispersed between the Archivio di Stato, Bologna, the British Library, London, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin; see M.X. Zevelechi Wells: The Ranuzzi manuscripts, Austin 1980. 10 R. Carapelli: ‘Annibale Ranuzzi e i suoi rapporti con la Firenze medicea del ’600’, Il Carrobbio 10 (1984), pp.69–79; idem: ‘Un corrispondente bolognese del Gran Duca Ferdinando de’ Medici con alcune puntualizzazioni sui pittori Giuseppe Maria Crespi e Sante Vandi’, Il Carrobbio 13 (1987), pp.97–104; and G.L. Betti: ‘Tra Bologna e Firenze: vicende delle famiglie Cospi e Ranuzzi durante il Seicento’, Strenna Storica Bolognese 49 (1999), pp.101–19. See also M. Fileti Mazza: Archivio del collezionismo mediceo: il cardinal Leopoldo: volume secondo rapporti con il mercato emiliano, Milan and Naples 1993; and for an account of the importance of Bologna in the Italian art market in this period, see A. Modesti: ‘Patrons as agents and artists as dealers in Seicento Bologna’, in M. Fantoni et al., eds.: The art market in Italy: 15th–17th centuries, Ferrara 2003, pp.367–88. the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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documents and copies seems to imply it was copied, like other items in these volumes, from an ‘external’ original. Until more information comes to light, the names of some of those involved must remain uncertain. The letter explains that Emanuele Filiberto wished to obtain a copy of Reni’s Massacre of the innocents and had asked conte Berò if the painting could be taken down from the altar so as to allow Giovanni Maria Viani, the painter charged to execute the copy, ‘to have it more exact’.11 Berò granted this request in order to ‘please and serve His Highness’ and to ‘distinguish him from everyone else [. . .], notwithstanding the danger that the picture could run into’. Because the painting was a work ‘appertaining to the church’, Berò spoke to the inquisitor (in his capacity of
acting prior), who also gave his permission for it to be copied and allowed Viani to work in the prior’s own rooms, presumably to prevent the work from being moved outside the monastic complex of S. Domenico. The dispute arose because, while the painting was taken down from its altar, a nobleman by the name of ‘Marc’Antonio Scadinari’ (i.e. Seccadenari) also wanted to have a copy made or, as the letter states, he wanted ‘to enjoy the same authoritative privilege’.12 When Berò replied that he ‘intended to return the picture to its place, because he wanted to differentiate between an important prince and an ordinary person’, Seccadenari went to the new Dominican prior who had been elected in the meantime. The prior was apparently unaware of the sensitivities of the matter and ‘indiscreetly’ gave Seccadenari permission to have the painting copied, ‘as if he were its absolute owner’. Compared to the Prince of Carignano, Seccadenari was merely an ‘ordinary person’ (‘soggetto ordinario’), a comment that, besides the obvious difference in status, perhaps also alluded to the fact that the family was considered ‘not [. . .] of great renown’, having lost its seat in the senate in 1616.13 The author of the letter and Berò propose two possible solutions to prevent Seccadenari obtaining the copy he desired, both of which required the intervention of the unknown prince addressed in the letter, and both turning on questions of honour, hierarchy, privilege and precedence. The first solution was that the unknown prince should press Milani, who had been asked to make the copy for Seccadenari, to obey the wishes of Emanuele Filiberto (and Berò) and allow Reni’s painting to be returned to its altar as soon as Viani had finished his copy for the prince of Carignano. The second solution was that the unknown prince should request a copy for himself and ask to be given precedence over Seccadenari. In this way, he would be able to stall the matter indefinitely. Thus, the possibility that Seccadenari ‘would like to be treated on an equal footing with the prince of Savoy’ could be prevented by a request from yet another prince, whose prerogative Seccadenari could not easily ignore. What is striking is that Berò did not turn to the cardinal legate or to a court of law to have the matter dealt with, but chose to resolve a dispute over privilege by rules of privilege. The problems surrounding the prerogative to grant permission to make a copy, and the importance of the status of the recipient to whom permission was granted, also appear in a second case some years later. This dispute concerned the altarpiece of the chapel of the Bargellini family in the church of S. Tommaso in the Strada Maggiore, Bologna. Some time between 1617, when the church was completely rebuilt, and 1624, when the painting was mentioned in a notarial document, the Bargellini, a senatorial family of Bologna, had commissioned Alessandro Tiarini (1577–1668) to paint an altarpiece for their chapel (Fig.29). The work remained in its original location until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the church was deconsecrated and, in 1849, demolished. In 1830 the then conte Camillo Bargellini donated the painting to the nearby church of SS. Vitale e
11
14
28. Massacre of the innocents, by Guido Reni. 1611. Canvas, 268 by 170 cm. (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna).
On Viani, see G. Foglia and M.G. Morganti: ‘Giovanni Maria Viani’, Paragone 345 (1978), pp.45–53; and R. Roli: Pittura bolognese 1650–1800, Bologna 1977, p.99. 12 On the family, see P.S. Dolfi: Cronologia delle famiglie nobili di Bologna con le loro insegne e nel fine i cimieri, Bologna 1670, who in the chapter on the Seccadenari family identifies the person in question on p.684: ‘1668 Marc’Antonio di Filippo vivente, è stato degl’Antiani col Confal. Achille Volta’. 13 ‘Questa famiglia, non essendo stata di molto grido [. . .], ad ogni modo si legge esser antica’; ibid., p.681.
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D. Benati: Alessandro Tiarini: l’opera pittorica completa e i disegni, Milan 2001, II, p.163, no.243; and A. Bigi Jotti and G. Zavatta: ‘Precisazioni sui dipinti di Alessandro Tiarini e Guido Reni della distrutta chiesa di San Tommaso di Strada Maggiore’, Il Carrobbio 30 (2004), pp.145–64, who provided the terminus ante quem for the commission. 15 Malvasia 1686, op. cit. (note 5), pp.306–07. 16 For which, see A. Brogi: Ludovico Carracci (1555–1619), Ozzano Emilia 2001, I, pp.133–36; and J. Bentini et al.: Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna: catalogo generale: 2. Da
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Agricola, where it can still be seen today on the right wall of the chapel of S. Maria degli Angeli.14 In his guidebook to Bologna, Malvasia marked the painting with an asterisk, which he used to indicate especially noteworthy works.15 Apart from Ludovico Carracci’s Madonna dei Bargellini (Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna), this commission was one of the few instances of the family contracting a painter of considerable repute in this period.16 As Raffaella Morselli has shown, the Bargellini were not great collectors of paintings during the seventeenth century, and tended to employ prestigious painters only for works that would be on public display, to act as status symbols for the family.17 That Tiarini’s altarpiece played such a role is also evident from the dispute over a copy made of it, which is summarised in a Bolognese manuscript chronicle in an entry of late September 1704 (see Appendix 2): Since the entire Bargellini family owns an altar in the parish church of S. Tomaso in Strada Maggiore which has a famous picture by Tiarini, sig.r Giacomo Filippo [Bargellini] wanted to have a copy made of it by a good painter that he had brought to his house for that reason. When sig.r senator Vincenzo Bargellini, his nephew, heard of this, he went with an order from the vicar general and with the officials of the court to find the painter, and when the copy had been cut into shreds he had the original picture returned to the church with a court order that it could not be removed again. The uncle felt insulted, and leaving it to the cardinal legate [Ferdinando d’Adda] to obtain for him the satisfaction that was due to him, he left the city, and later everything was concluded with mutual satisfaction. Vincenzo was the son of Ermes, the second of three sons of Camillo Bargellini. At the death of Camillo’s brother Vincenzo Senior in 1649, the seat in the senate passed first to the eldest of Camillo’s sons, Astorre, who held the post until 1672. Since Ermes, the second son, died in 1670, the office then passed to the third son, Giacomo Filippo, and, in 1693, to his nephew Vincenzo Junior.18 The fact that a chronicle should mention the dispute at all suggests that it was something of a scandal. Malvasia’s high opinion of the altarpiece is repeated by the chronicler, who also calls it ‘famoso’, and this reputation, in combination with the fact that it was on public view, may be the reason both for Giacomo Bargellini’s wish to have a copy of it and Vincenzo’s objection. More detailed information on the dispute is derived from some documents from the Bargellini family archive, now kept by the Opera Pia Davia Bargellini housed in the former family palace. Vincenzo claimed that although the painter Giulio Valeriani claimed to be working for his uncle, he found Giacomo Filippo to be out of town, and considered that, since he himself had not been asked permission by either the painter or his uncle, the painter was perhaps lying. According to Vincenzo, he feared that the painting might be ‘altered’, especially since ‘it was a speciality
of the said painter to retouch paintings that have suffered’, and he had reason to believe that ‘the painting was going to be cleaned, as [another] painter had previously unsuccessfully attempted, or that under the pretext of repairing it, a copy was secretly going to be made of it’ (see Appendix 4a–c).19 Thus, he had the copy destroyed and Tiarini’s altarpiece returned from the painter’s studio to the church. Giacomo Filippo provided a different version of what happened (see Appendix 3). In a letter sent on his behalf to the cardinal legate Ferdinando d’Adda, he recounts that he had asked Valeriani to make a ‘smaller’ copy of the painting, ‘with the intention of placing that copy in his apartment for the occasion of the wedding arranged between one of his daughters and sig.r senator Camillo Bolognetti’. Giacomo Filippo states that he had the ‘consent and licence of the parish
Raffaello ai Carracci, Venice 2006, pp.231–36. 17 R. Morselli: Collezioni e quadrerie nella Bologna del Seicento: inventari 1640–1707, Los Angeles 1998, pp.79–84. The family built up a large collection only during the next century. On art as a status symbol, see P. Burke: ‘Conspicuous consumption in seventeenth-century Italy’, in idem: The historical anthropology of early modern Italy: essays on perception and communication, Cambridge 1987, pp.132–49. 18 Based on M. Fanti: ‘Bargellini e Davia: due famiglie nella storia di Bologna’, in R. Grandi, ed.: Museo civico d’arte industriale e Galleria Davia Bargellini, Bologna 1987,
pp.67–75; and Morselli, op. cit. (note 17), pp.79–81. The chronology, however, is not clear, because while the diary calls Vincenzo ‘senatore’, the letter to cardinal d’Adda says he is ‘renunciatario della dignità senatoria’ (Appendix 3), and Fanti states that Vincenzo Junior became senator when Giacomo Filippo died. 19 In 1796 representatives of the Accademia Clementina included the painting in a list of works in dire need of restoration; see N. Giordani: Il restauro dei dipinti a Bologna nella seconda metà del ’700: Problemi, metodi, idee al tempo dell’Accademia Clementina, Ferrara 1999, p.168.
29. Flight into Egypt, by Alessandro Tiarini. 1617–24. Canvas, 285 by 180 cm. (SS. Vitale e Agricola, Bologna).
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priest’. When his nephew asked Valeriani for whom he was making the copy, Giacomo Filippo continues, he was told that it was for him, his uncle. Vincenzo allegedly repeated ‘so you are making this copy for my uncle?’, and then told Valeriani ‘that doesn’t matter’, and proceeded to cut up the copy with a knife. No copies of Tiarini’s Flight into Egypt are known; the copy mentioned here was destroyed, so unless the ‘reciprocal satisfaction’ with which the affair was concluded (see Appendices 2 and 5) means that Vincenzo Bargellini did in the end concede his uncle a copy there is no point in looking for it. The case of Viani’s copy of Reni’s altarpiece is less clear. The fact that the painting was taken down to allow for the copy to be more exact, and that it was executed by Viani, who was certainly an able copyist, should have resulted in a high-quality version. Although the painting is not listed in the 1710 inventory of Palazzo Carignano made after Emanuele Filiberto’s death, there is a good possibility that the work was indeed completed and sent to Turin.20 It can probably be identified with a picture by ‘Guido’ that appeared in a series of early nineteenth-century auctions in England. The painting first turned up in October 1808 when the estate of Mary Lynch, widow of William Lynch (1730–85), was put up for auction by Christie’s at a sale held at the family mansion at Staple, near Wingham (Canterbury).21 The painting which, according to the catalogue, came ‘from the Chapel of a Convent in Italy’ remained unsold, and was offered again at auction in London the next year, where it was again unsold. It was then listed as ‘The Murder of the Innocents. This noble Gallery Picture was purchased by the late Sir Wm. Lynch from the Palace of a Nobleman, during his Embassy at the Court of Turin. It has ever been highly admired for it’s [sic] pathos and fine expression’.22 Thus it would seem that Emanuele Filiberto gave the copy away during his lifetime, and that it was subsequently sold to Lynch when he was in Turin between 1768 and 1779. The painting was finally bought in March 1810 by an unspecified ‘Emmerson’ (probably the collector Thomas Emmerson) for the rather large sum of £52.10.23 Other copies of the Massacre of the innocents went through auction in London after the Lynch sale, but not enough information is given to determine if any of these were the same painting. In his monograph on Reni, Stephen Pepper lists an old copy of the Massacre of the innocents in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, as well as a (possibly old?) copy formerly in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.24 The latter was sold by the Museum in 1954 and its present whereabouts are unknown.25 Another early copy of the painting at the Musée de la Chartreuse at Douai was noted by Stéphane Loire.26 Since the
latter two copies were made on a reduced scale they would seem less likely candidates for being the Carignano copy than the Munich painting, which closely matches the original’s size and appears to be of relatively high quality. However, an old inventory number lists this copy in the archiepiscopal residence in Bamberg around 1810, so it cannot be the copy that Lynch brought back from Turin.27 Despite the uncertainties about the date and protagonists in the case of the Reni copy, the two disputes considered here share sufficient similarities to suggest a pattern. Both dealt with paintings of high repute, both were altarpieces on public display, and both disputes were primarily about status and precedence. To support his case, Giacomo Filippo Bargellini reminded the cardinal of the ‘many other animosities’ his nephew had shown towards him (the Bargellini archive holds papers concerning at least ten other quarrels between the two dating between 1680 and 1706). In the case of the Guido Reni, the distinction in social status between the Prince of Carignano and Marc’Antonio Seccadenari was at the heart of the matter, and one can suspect that in the Bargellini family dispute mutual grudges over who occupied the family’s seat in the senate may have played a part. The crux of both cases was the right to have a copy made, and the right to grant permission for the temporary removal of the work to ease the copyist’s task. However, in the case of altarpieces the ownership of the family was not absolute, and it is not surprising to find that in both cases the consent of the ecclesiastical authorities also came into play. Both Giacomo Filippo Bargellini and Ercole Agostino Berò conferred with the church authorities, and the letter concerning Reni’s altarpiece criticises the new Dominican prior for giving his permission to Seccadenari without consulting Berò. In both cases the physical danger of the original painting is adduced as an argument against its being copied. Berò is reported to have given his permission to the prince of Carignano ‘notwithstanding the risks that the painting could run into’ and Vincenzo Bargellini explicitly makes his worries that the Tiarini altarpiece could be meddled with by the copyist part of his argument. However, when the letter concerning Reni’s altarpiece urges the recipient for a prompt reply ‘because the danger is imminent’, he appears to refer to the infringement of the prerogatives and privileges of Emanuele Filiberto rather than to any actual physical danger to the painting. In seicento politics and aristocratic culture, claims of status and their concomitant prerogatives were of extreme importance and, as these two cases demonstrate, could involve many issues, including the copying of works of art.28
20
25
The 1710 catalogue was made available as S. Pinto, ed.: Musei d’arte a Torino: cataloghi e inventari delle collezioni sabaude, VI, Turin [n.d.]. 21 These and the following auction data have been retrieved through the online Getty Provenance Index Databases at www.getty.edu/research/conducting_research/provenance_index. Christie’s, Staple, near Wingham, 25th October 1808, lot 78 (from Sale Catalogue Br–621): ‘The Murder of the Innocents, a truly grand and noble Gallery Picture. This Chef d’Œuvre in point of Design and Expression was purchased by the late Sir W. Lynch, from the Chapel of a Convent in Italy’. The description of this lot is taken from a copy of the catalogue in the British Library (RB.23.b.4303), because the description in the Getty’s online database is taken from a damaged copy and therefore incomplete. I thank Sietske Fransen for this transcription. 22 Christie’s, London, 31st May 1809, lot 100 (from Sale Catalogue Br–676). 23 Christie’s, London, 24th March 1810, lot 98 (from Sale Catalogue Br–738), listed as ‘The Murder of the Innocents – a grand composition’. 24 S. Pepper: Guido Reni: a complete catalogue of his works with an introductory text, Oxford 1984, pp.225–26, no.34.
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The painting measured 147 by 93 cm. (information provided by the Museum, e-mail correspondence, 26th March 2008). A black-and-white photograph of this copy is repr. in The Philadelphia Museum Bulletin 36/187 (1940), pp.1–15, on p.2. It is not clear if this was an old or a modern copy. 26 S. Loire: ‘Guido Reni dopo la mostra di Bologna: qualche aggiunta’, Accademia Clementina. Atti e Memorie 25 (1990), pp.9–30, esp. p.24. Museum inv. no.1191, measuring 132 by 90 cm. 27 The original measures 268 by 170 cm. The Munich painting (inv. no.5508), of which I have seen a black-and-white photograph, measures 259 by 169 cm. Information on its provenance was kindly provided by Cornelia Syre, curator of Italian paintings (e-mail correspondence, 10th December 2009). 28 On these questions, see, for instance, N. Elias: Die höfische Gesellschaft: Untersuchungen zur Soziologie des Königtums und der höfische Aristokratie, Darmstadt and Neuwied 1969; C. Donati: L’idea di nobiltà in Italia: secoli XIV–XVIII, Bari 1988; and M.A. Visceglia: ‘Conflitti di precedenza alla corte di Roma tra Cinquecento e Seicento’, in idem: La città rituale: Roma e le sue ceremonie in età moderna, Rome 2002, pp.119–90.
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Appendix In the transcriptions the original orthography has been retained, but accents, capitalisation and punctuation has been revised to conform to modern Italian usage. 1. Copy or draft of a letter requesting help in resolving problems over the copying of Guido Reni’s ‘Massacre of the innocents’ in the Berò chapel, S. Domenico, Bologna; author and recipient unknown. Before 1678. (Austin, University of Texas, Ransom Humanities Center, Ranuzzi Papers, Ph.12880, pp.671–72).
All’Em[inentissim]o e R[everendissi]mo principe Il sig.r card[ina]le D’Adda Legato di Bologna per Giacomo Filippo Bargelini Em[inentissim]o e R[everendissi]mo P[ri]n[ci]pe
Il fatto, di cui mi motivai a V[ostra] S[ignoria] Ill[ustrissi]ma per il preteso favore è nella forma seguente. Il Ser[enissi]mo P[rinci]pe Filiberto fece istanza al co[nte] Berò di far copiar il quadro degl’Inocenti di Guido Reni, posto nell’altare eretto da suoi antenati in S. Domenico, e addimandò se si potesse tor giù dal d[ett]o altare per più comodità del pittore, e per haverlo più esatto; a cui il conte, per compiacer, e servir Sua Altezza, e differenziarlo da tutti, immediatamente condescese, non ostante i pericoli, che potea correr il quadro; e perché si trattava di cosa spettante alla chiesa, se n’hebbe parola con il p[ad]re inquisitore, che era in vece di priore, il quale pur condescese, e diede le sue camere per quest’effetto, dove già il sig. Viani pittore per Sua Altezza l’ha ridotto a buon termine. Frattanto è saltato in capriccio ad un gentilhuomo di voler godere l’istesso privilegio auttorevole di far copiar ancor lui il quadro istesso da un suo pittore giù dall’altare conforme ha ottenuto il prencipe, e doppo haverne fatta instanza al predetto co[nte] Berò, il qual gli rispose, che pretendeva tornar a suo luogo il quadro, perché voleva differenziar un prencipe grande da un soggetto ordinario, questo prefato gentilhuomo ricorse a dirittura dal nuovo prior dominicano, il quale indiscretamente gli diede parola di lasciarglilo copiare senza haver riguardo ad altro, come se fosse lui assoluto padrone, et già ha lasciato tor le misure al prefato. Stante dunque questo modo di procedere si del frate, come del gentilhuomo, è parso bene al co[nte]. Berò di far supplicare il ser[enissi]mo prencipe foresto a volersi interponere, col far intendere al pittor, che deve copiarlo, il qual si dimanda Giulio Cesar Milani, di non haver gusto che egli né altri si ingerischa in tal fatto prima che non sia esequita la mente a lui nota del Ser[enissi]mo di Savoia, che il quadro cioè sia rimesso al suo luogo subito che il pittor di S[ua] A[ltezza] l’havrà finito: in questa guisa si crede, che il pittore non havrà ardire d’esequir cosa alcuna, e che il frate si indurrà a lasciarlo mettere a suo luogo, et che il gentilhuomo penserà più a casi suoi, attesoché per quanto si è penetrato, egli ha fatto credere qui d’essersene inteso con l’istesso prencipe, che è una enorme menzogna. Non havendo per tanto il co[nte] Berò sudetto l’onore della servitù con S[ua] A[ltezza] supplico io per lui la bontà di V[ostra] S[ignoria] Ill[ustrissi]ma a far ogni possibile, per procurarci questa lettera, perché in tal guisa S[ua] A[ltezza] leverà i soggetti da un gran impegno, e il Ser[enissi]mo di Savoia resterà differenziato da gli altri conforme è stata la mente del conte. Habbiamo anco pensato un altro modo, se così a Lei paresse meglio, cioè che si potria supplicar l’istesso ser[enissi]mo prencipe foresto a degnarsi di far scriver una lettera al sig. Marc’Antonio Scadinari, che è il gentilhuomo, che vorria andare a paragon del prencipe di Savoia in questo fatto, la qual lettera contenesse[:] Che havendo anco l’Altezza Sua l’istesso genio d’haver una copia dell’ancona degl’inocenti conforme l’ha havuta il Ser[enissi]mo di Savoia, et havendo presentito, che lui haveva havuta l’intentione dal prior dominicano di poterla copiar adesso, che perciò gli farà cosa grata a dessistere dall’esequir ciò sinché la medesima Altezza Sua non habbia rissoluto altro. In questa forma ancora si crede, che resteria incagliato il negozio, e che nissuna ardirebbe d’intraprender altro sia che S[ua] Al[tezza] non si dichiarasse in altra forma; si che si lascia in arbitrio del di lei giudizio a prendersi uno di questi mezi, che a lei parerà più proprio, alterandoli, o diminuendoli conforme stimerà necessario, non si essendo curato il conte di procurar da Torino cosa particolare sopra questo fatto, attesa la longhezza del tempo, che vi vuole, per ottener risposte, e nel nostro caso habbiam bisogno di brevità, perché il pericolo è imminente e pregandola a scusarmi d’incomodo si grande, umilmente la riverisco.
Giacomo Filippo Bargelini in età avanzata riverentem[en]te deduce a notizia dell’Em[inen]za V[ost]ra; qualm[en]te lunedì 22 corrente sett[emb]re il sig.r Vincenzo Bargelini di lui nipote e renunciatario della dignità senatoria portossi alla stanza di Giuglio Valeriani pittore, quale d’ordine d’esso zio copiava in più piccolo un quadro di pittura del Tiarini, rappresentante la fuga in Egitto della b. Vergine, e s. Giuseppe col bambino, tavola d’un altare proprio della casa Bargelini, posto nella chiesa di S. Tomaso di strada maggiore, levato dal zio di consenso e licenza di quel paroco, con intenzione poi di porre tal copia nel di lui appartamento in occasione delle nozze stabilite fra una di lui figlia, et il sig.r sen[ato]re Camillo Bolognetti, giunto dunque, che fu il detto nipote nel luogo, in cui detto Valeriani pittore stava operando in d[ett]a copia di già dissignata tutta la tavola, e quasi perfezionata la figura di s. Gioseppe, esso nipote fece levare, mediante uno che si dice essecutore di questo foro ecclesiastico, l’originale di detto quadro quale, si dice, fu riportato nella sudetta chiesa, e trattenutosi ivi dopo il nipote voltandosi al pittore, lo interrogò chi havesse levata detta pittura originale, e come fosse pervenuta nelle di lui mani, al che rispose havergliela mandata il di lui sig.r zio, e che d’ordine del medesimo doveva perfezionare quella copia in forma tanto più piccola, al che replicò il nipote: dunque fate questa copia per mio zio?, e replicatosi dal pittore di sì, sogiunse il sudetto nipote, non importa, e levatosi di sacoccia un temperino principiò a far tagli in forma di croce su la tela, lacerando particolarmente tutta la figura di s. Gioseppe quasi perfezionata, e raccomandatosi il pittore in quel mentre che per grazia si trattenesse, perché vi era il suo danno, esso rispose, fativi [sic] pagare, e ciò detto partì. Tale risoluzione al solito troppo animosa del detto nipote, ha ritrovata nella memoria dello stesso zio le tante altre praticate del medesimo nipote tanto sotto la felice memoria del pontefice Pignatelli che fu astretto per decreto a deputare il sig.r marchese Cesare Tanari per detto nipote, che in vece del medesimo dovesse intervenire quando si volevano dagl’interessati Bargelini vedere le scritture communi per ovviare ad altri trascorsi, che il medesimo nipote haveva praticato poco prima contro il fu Astorre altro suo zio, in occasione di visitare le scritture communi, come anco sotto la legazione dell’Em[inentissim]o Negroni in tempo, che per la di lui absenza governava mons.r Leti vicelegato, nel qual tempo ritrovandosi esso zio su la porta del loro palazzo in Strada Maggiore a prender fresco in abito da camera, e sopravenuto esso nipote lo ricercò che nove vi fossero per la città, e ne riportò villanie e minaccie improprie nella bocca di un cavagliere; come pure sotto la legazione dell’Em[inentissim]o Durazzi, oltre moltissimi strapazzi praticati in esecuzioni giudiziali con inconvenienze, arrivò a segno esso nipote di levare le chiavi della cantina et altre officina al canevaro d’esso zio, e scacciato d’autorità usurpatasi fuori di casa, il che saputosi da esso Em[inentissim]o Durazzi, lo constrinse alla restituzione in propria mano delle chiavi, accompagnandola dall’atto di scusa e per trascorso, e ciò oltre anco li molti pregiudizi pur troppo avuti dal nipote in questo criminale. A tali, e molt’altre animosità non avendo mai esso zio data ne dando occasione alcuna, non sa dare altro sfuogo che a qualche astio del nipote contro di lui, a causa di liti vertite e vertenti fra essi particolarmente in una causa da esso ultimamente superata contro detto nipote come erede di mons.r Bargelini, in cui questo è anco succumbito alla Rota di Roma, come anco d’un altra che in oggi si aggita avanti il sig.r auditore generale con speranza di buon esito sopra la purificazione d’un fidicomisso del sen[ato]re Vincenzo seniore Bargelini nella sola persona d’esso zio; che però questi per sottrarsi da ulteriori affronti anco per sicurezza della di lui persona, ha stimato proprio l’allontanarsi per attendere li comandi dell’Em[inen]za V[ost]ra, supplicando l’autorità della med[esim]a procedere a simile inconveniente et assicurare esso zio, sua sig.ra consorte, e figlie, e famiglia in forma propria, mediante cui esso zio possi [sic] accertarsi della quiete quel puoco resto di vita che piacerà a S[ua] D[ivina] M[aestà] concederle.
2. Account of a dispute over the copying of Tiarini’s ‘Flight into Egypt’ in the Bargellini chapel, S. Tommaso, Bologna; diary entry, 28th–30th September 1704. (Diario di cose di Bologna nella legazione del Card. d’Adda, Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, MS.616, vol.8, p.756).
4a. The facts of the dispute over the copy of the Tiarini as presented for arbitration, with two (presumably earlier) variants of the second paragraph in two other copies of the text. October 1704. (Bologna, Opera Pia Davia Bargellini, Archivio Bargellini, F: Corrispondenza, 19–1150).
Possedendo tutta la casa Bargellini un altare nella chiesa parochiale di S. Tomaso di strada Maggiore nel quale vi è un famoso quadro del Tiarini, volle il sig.r Giacomo Filippo farne far copia a buon pittore che a tal effetto se lo era portato a casa. Ciò penetratosi dal sig.r senatore Vincenzo Bargellini suo nipote, con ordine del vicario generale andò con gl’esecutori del foro a trovare il pittore, e trinciato la copia fece ritornare in chiesa il quadro con precetto di non potersi più levare. Il zio si metesse affrontato, e rimettendo nel sig.r cardinale legato il fargli dare quelle sodisfattioni che meritassero le sue ragioni si absentò dalla città, e fu poi tutto terminato con reciproca sodisfattione.
Nel mese di sett[embr]e 1704 il s:r Tizio mandò p[er] un suo cameriere a pregare il curato della di lui parocchia, acciò lo compiacesse di concedergli licenza di levare e trasportare fuori della detta chiesa un quadro di pittura esistente in un altare com[m]une della sua casata, quale di presente è divisa in tre teste, che vivono separatam[en]te p[er] farlo poi copiare in forma più piccola p[er] valersene di tal copia da porre in propria casa divisa alcuni an[n]i sono dal sig.r Tizio, e Sempronio nipote; e p[er]ciò ottenutasene la licenza dal curato il sig.r Tizio mandò a pigliare il sud[ett]o quadro per il pittore assieme col suo cameriere, quale levato di subito fu portato alla stanza dove sta d[ett]o pittore a lavorare. Passati alcuni giorni fu avvertito il sig.r Sempronio essere capitato nelle mani del pittore sud[ett]o il quadro medemo, et havendo havuto giusti motivi di temere, che o col pretesto di accommodarlo fosse alterato, o fosse da un altro pittore lucidato, come inutil[men]te haveva dianzi tentato, e che con ingan[n]o e sotto l’ombra del sig.r Tizio, che stava absente della città fosse stato levato di chiesa, non veduto in casa
3. Copy of a letter written on behalf of Giacomo Filippo Bargellini to Ferdinando d’Adda concerning the dispute over the copy of the Tiarini, probably late September 1704. (Bologna, Opera Pia Davia Bargellini, Archivio Bargellini, F: Corrispondenza, 19–1150).
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alcuno del sud[ett]o sig.r Tizio, che potesse ragguagliarlo se ciò fosse a notizia del medemo, si portò il doppo pranso del di 22 sett[embr]e alla casa del pittore, e lo ritrovò, che stava copiando l’originale, e rimproveratolo di temerario trinciò la copia, et in app[ress]o chiamando un esecutore del foro arcivescovale, che veniva accompagnato da un precetto sequestrativo gli disse Ecco il quadro che io vi consegno esequite gli ordini di mons.r vicario, e rivoltosi poscia al pittore gli disse per chi facevate voi q[ues]ta copia? Rispose egli p[er] il s:r Tizio suo zio. Doppo di che imediatam[en]te partì il sig.r Sempronio, e l’esecutore consegnò in mano del curato il sud[ett]o quadro. 4b. Variant of the second paragraph in another copy of the document 4a. Probably Vincenzo Bargellini’s version of events. (Bologna, Opera Pia Davia Bargellini, Archivio Bargellini, F: Corrispondenza, 19–1150). Passati alcuni giorni fu avvertito il s:r Sempronio che era capitato nelle mani del pittore sud[ett]o il quadro medemo con pericolo d’essere alterato col pretesto di accom[m]odarlo (essendo particolar proffessione del medemo pittore di porre mano ne’ quadri che hanno patito). Restò soprafatto da tale notizia il sig.r Sempronio, ma non potendo dargli intieram[en]te fede ne fece a suo nome ricercare il curato, che replicò essere venuto in persona il s.r Tizio a farlo levare; parendo po’ a sempronio impossibile che senza sua licenza fosse stato levato il quadro, e sapendo che poco avanti un altro pittore haveva ricercato il curato medemo per poterlo lucidare, e che havendoglielo negato si era questo espresso in termini minaccieri, che havrebbe trovato modo di farlo senza haver bisogno di lui e de padroni del quadro medemo. Si diede p[er] ciò a procurare ulteriori notizie, e rinven[n]e, che altrim[en]te il sig.r Tizio non era stato in persona a far levare il quadro, anzi che in tal tempo era fuori di città. Il che diede giusto motivo a Sempronio di credere che sotto titolo del sig:r Tizio si lucidasse il quadro come p[er] l’avanti inutil[men]te haveva tentato il pittore, o pure col pretesto di accom[m]odarlo ne fosse occultam[en]te levata una copia non havendo intanto il sig:r Sempronio veduto in casa alcuno del s.r Tizio che potesse ragguagliarlo del seguito non volle perdere più tempo, ma stimò di dover mettere in sicura il quadro medemo. Portatosi adunque il doppo pranso del di 22 sett[embr]e . . .
4c. First version, by Giacomo Filippo Bargellini, of the document 4a. (Bologna, Opera Pia Davia Bargellini, Archivio Bargellini, F: Corrispondenza, 19–1150). Il dì 22 del d[etto]o mese di settembre portossi il sig.r Sempronio nipote paterno del sud[ett]o sig.r Tizio alla stanza del d[ett]o pittore che allora stava operando in d[ett]a copia, di già dissignata tutta la tavola, e quasi perfezionata la figura di S: Giuseppe (poiché esso quadro rappresentante [sic] la fuga in Egitto della B[eata] V[ergine]. col bambino, e s: Giuseppe) esso sig.r Sempronio nipote fece levare, mediante uno che si dice esecutore del foro ecclesiastico di quella città, l’originale di d[ett]o quadro, quale fu riportato nella sud[ett]a chiesa, e trattenutosi ivi doppo detto sig.r Sempronio nipote, e voltatosi a quel pittore, lo interrogò chi havesse levata d[ett]a pittura, e come fosse pervenuta nelle di lui mani, a che rispose havergliela mandata il sig.r Tizio di lui zio, e che per ordine del medesimo doveva perfezionare quella copia in forma tanto più piccola; al che replicò il sig.r Sempronio nipote, non importa, dunque fate questa copia per mio zio?, e replicatosi dal pittore di sì, soggiunse il d[ett]o sig.re Sempronio nipote, non importa, e levatosi di saccoccia un temperino . . . 5. Terms of agreement between Giacomo Filippo Bargellini and his nephew, Vincenzo Bargellini, over the copying of Tiarini’s altarpiece. 29th October 1704. (Bologna, Opera Pia Davia Bargellini, Archivio Bargellini, F: Corrispondenza, 19–1150). Adì 29 ott[ob]re 1704 Il s[ignor] Tizio nel chiedere licenza al curato di potere levare la tavola da altare p[er] il consaputo effetto credette di havere sodisfatto alle sue parti ma riconoscendo hora di havere omesso q[ue]lla che più propria doveva col s.re Sempronio suo nipote ne sente dispiacere, e lo priega ad iscusarlo dichiarandosi di non havere mai havuto che sentim[en]ti di stima et affetto per il nipote. All’incontro il s[ignor] Sempronio havendo havuto notizia che la copia ch’egli trinciò doveva servire p[er] il s.re Tizio suo zio ne attesta un vivo dispiacere, e professa sentim[en]ti di viva cordialità e riverenza p[er] il s.re Tizio suo zio.
Numbered paintings by Salomon de Bray by QUENTIN BUVELOT and FRISO LAMMERTSE
A LEADING REPRESENTATIVE of Dutch classicism, the Haarlem artist Salomon de Bray (1597–1664) was not only active as a painter, but also as a poet and architect.1 In 1616 he was first mentioned in Haarlem,2 where he was a pupil of two famous painters, Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem (1562–1638) and Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617). Following in his teachers’ footsteps, De Bray mainly concentrated on history painting, although he occasionally painted portraits. Together with his three sons – Jan (1626/27–97), Dirck (c.1635–94) and Joseph (c.1628/34–64) – Salomon seems to have run a joint workshop. In this ‘family business’, drawings – both preparatory studies and drawn copies of their own paintings – played an important role as working material. Importantly these sheets are often dated to the day.3
Using such ricordi, both father and sons occasionally made more than one version of their paintings. Recently, an exceptionally well-preserved painting from 1636 surfaced which, in a remarkable manner, sheds new light on the chronology of Salomon de Bray’s œuvre (Fig.30). The oval panel, at lower right characteristically signed and dated ‘SD Bray. / 1636.’, comes from the collection of the Earls of Spencer at Althorp, Northamptonshire, in which it was possibly included as early as the seventeenth century,4 and displays his great talent as a painter. Its subtle lighting focuses all attention on the face of the young woman, whose blonde curls as well as the fur of her coat are rendered with quick and effective touches of the brush. Because the overall colouring is quite restrained, the red hair-
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(1640–1702), along with three other paintings by the artist. In any case, the work has long remained at Althorp (see K.J. Garlick: ‘A Catalogue of the Pictures at Althorp’, The Walpole Society 45 (1976), p.9, no.62); see also Von Moltke, op. cit. (note 1), pp.357 and 386, no.82, curiously with an incorrect attribution to Leonaert Bramer, as in an inventory of the Hon. John Spencer of 1746: ‘A Girl’s Head in an Oval by Bremar’. After the death of Albert, 7th Earl Spencer (1892–1975), the painting came on the market. In 1987 it was with Johnny van Haeften, London. It was subsequently in the collection of Hinrich Bischoff, Bremen; see B. Schnackenburg in E. Mai, ed.: exh. cat. Das Kabinett des Sammlers: Gemälde vom XV. bis XVIII. Jahrhundert, Cologne (Wallraf-Richartz-Museum) 1993, pp.90–92, no.34. He put the painting on loan to the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Kassel, until 2002, when it was sold at auction; sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 22nd January 2004, lot 62. It was recently auctioned again at Sotheby’s, London, 8th July 2009, lot 7, where it was acquired by the present owners (we thank F.J. Duparc, Wassenaar, for help in reconstructing the provenance). Later this year the painting will be part of the exhibition Made in Holland: Old Masters from a private
For the artist, see J.W. von Moltke: ‘Salomon de Bray’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 11–12 (1938–39), pp.309–420; and F. Lammertse: ‘Salomon de Bray: Painter, architect and theoretician’, in P. Biesboer et al.: exh. cat. Painting Family: The De Brays, Haarlem (Frans Hals Museum) and London (Dulwich Picture Gallery) 2008, pp.9–16. For a fully annotated biography of Salomon de Bray, see I. van Thiel-Stroman: ‘Salomon Simonsz de Bray’, in N. Köhler et al., eds.: Painting in Haarlem 1500–1850: The collection of the Frans Hals Museum, Ghent 2006, pp.120–23. 2 Van Thiel-Stroman, op. cit. (note 1), p.122, note 4. 3 See J. Giltaij and F. Lammertse: ‘Maintaining a studio archive: Drawn copies by the De Braij Family’, Master Drawings 39 (2001), pp.367–94. Pieter Saenredam (1597–1665) also dated his drawings and paintings very accurately; see G. Schwartz and M.J. Bok: Pieter Saenredam: The painter and his time, Maarssen 1990. 4 According to E.K. Waterhouse: ‘The exhibition of pictures from Althorp at Messrs. Agnew’s’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 89 (1947), p.77 and fig.C, the painting had been acquired by Robert Spencer, 2nd Earl of Sunderland
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30. Bust of a young woman in profile, by Salomon de Bray. 1636. Panel (oval), 26.7 by 20.5 cm. (Eijk and Rose-Marie de Mol van Otterloo, Florida; photograph: Margareta Svensson, Amsterdam).
31. Verso of Fig.30. (Photograph: Margareta Svensson, Amsterdam).
band and pearl earring become conspicuous. That this painting is not a portrait but a tronie, a bust-length image of a fantasy figure that held a specific connotation to seventeenth-century viewers,5 can be deduced from an unsigned and undated history painting that De Bray painted in the same year, Judith with the head of Holofernes in the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (Fig.32).6 This work shows the same model, this time her face in threequarter view, again with powerful lighting effects. Salomon de Bray’s drawn copy of the painting (Fig.34) dates from 1636.7 That the woman posed for other artists is clear from a drawing of the same model that is attributed to Pieter de Grebber (c.1600–53), a fellow artist from Haarlem.8 The reverse of the recently discovered oval panel carries some interesting information (Fig.31). Initially two circles and two lines are perceived, as well as points made by a compass.9 Apparently
the panel maker used a compass to construct a perfectly oval support. This method of employing two circles with the same diameter to make an oval must have been common at the time and is indeed a procedure described in Serlio’s Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospetiva . . . (1537–75).10 Despite the efforts of the panel maker, the panel has a somewhat irregular perimeter and the timber has an uneven thickness of 5 to 6 mm. But on closer inspection the back of the panel carries more information, not from the panel maker but from the artist himself. In the middle appear the following figures in black ink: ‘46 / 1636. / 4 / 14’.11 The artist gave the painting the serial number 46 and dated it 14th April 1636, the date in exactly the same manner as was his habit on his drawn ricordi. It can thus be easily established which was the next painting in De Bray’s production; on the reverse of the painting in Madrid we find a similar numbering: ‘47 / 1636 / 4 / 25’ (Fig.33),12
collection in America at the Mauritshuis, The Hague. 5 On tronies, see E. van de Wetering in C. White and Q. Buvelot, eds.: exh. cat. Rembrandt by himself, London (National Gallery) and The Hague (Mauritshuis) 1999–2000, p.21; and D. Hirschfelder: Tronie und Porträt in der niederländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, Berlin 2008. 6 Inv. no.2097; see Gerdien Wuestman in Biesboer, op. cit. (note 1), pp.42–43, no.4. Wuestman mentions that Teresa Posada Kubissa from the Prado had already noticed the inscription on the reverse. See also T. Posada Kubissa: Pintura Holandesa en el Museo Nacional del Prado: Catálogo razonado, Madrid 2009, pp.39–42, no.8. 7 Inv. no.42/162; see Von Moltke, op. cit. (note 1), p.398, no.Z.23 and fig.83; and Giltaij and Lammertse, op. cit. (note 3), p.368. 8 Schnackenburg, op. cit. (note 4). 9 This was noticed by the authors in 2009. We would like to thank Petria Noble, chief conservator at the Mauritshuis, and Carol Pottasch, senior conservator at the museum, for their help in examining the panel. 10 See P. Rosin: ‘On Serlio’s constructions of ovals’, Mathematical Intelligence 23
(2001), pp.58–69. 11 One can also read ‘9 9/10’, ‘92’, ‘10’ (upper right; for an interpretation of a similar inscription, see note 12 below) and ‘Painted D BRA 1[6]36’ (upper left), the latter presumably dating from when the painting was at Althorp House (see note 4 above). Unfortunately we could not examine the reverse of its presumed pendant, Bust of a young man in profile in a private collection, also by De Bray (signed and dated 1636, oval panel, 27 by 20.5 cm.; Von Moltke, op. cit. (note 1), pp.357 and 387, no.90 and fig.47), as we do not know its present whereabouts. If it is indeed its pendant, one would expect this painting to have the number 45. 12 The panel in Madrid displays various other numbers, the most conspicuous being ‘No. 8. 1636 9 / 24’, directly underneath the earlier dating. It could possibly refer to the sale of the panel. Posada Kubissa, op. cit. (note 6) thinks that the second date might refer to when the painting was shipped or when it was acquired by Philip IV. In the upper-left corner there are other dates in black ink that are difficult to decipher, one of which at any rate displays the date ‘1635’ (Fig.33). Perhaps it indicates the date that De Bray started the painting or bought the panel. the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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32. Judith with the head of Holofernes, by Salomon de Bray. 1636. Panel, 89 by 71 cm. (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid).
33. Details of verso of Fig.32. (Photograph: Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid).
that is, number 47, completed on 25th April 1636, eleven days after the tronie. Other panels by De Bray display similar numbers and dates and form a unique source of information in reconstructing the chronology of the artist’s œuvre. Thus, a landscape with figures in the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, is dated 1633 on the front, while the back bears the number ‘26’ and the date ‘1633 / 11’.13 Unfortunately, the day is not legible because of a seam in the panel. A small panel of St John on Patmos (private collection) is dated 1635 on the front, while the reverse has the number ‘33’ and the date ‘1635 / 8 / 8’.14 This tells us that between November 1633 and 8th August 1635 De Bray completed seven paintings. From that date there seems to have been a significant increase in production because, as we have seen, on 14th April of the following year he completed number 46. A painting of the Sacrifice of Abraham in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, bears on its reverse a date of 4th April 1639 and the number 64. In the three years between 1636 and 1639 De Bray therefore completed eighteen works.15 Further research is sure to throw more light on De Bray’s production during his entire career. Unfortunately it is not possible to retrieve all such data because almost all his paintings on canvas will have been relined in the course of time, making it impossible, at least with the naked eye, to verify whether these pictures also display such annotations.16 As for panels, they may have been thinned, cradled or the reverse covered in a coat of paint, so that even on paintings on this support such information can be irretrievably lost. Numbers found thus far all date to the 1630s. Further research will show when De Bray began these notations, and whether he continued to do so throughout his
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Inv. no.2086; panel, 48.5 by 64.3 cm.; H. Bock et al.: Gemäldegalerie Berlin: Gesamtverzeichnis, Berlin 1996, p.23 and fig.1198. We would like to thank Stephan Kemperdick, who sent a photograph of the reverse of the panel. 14 Private collection, Netherlands; for this painting, see Biesboer, op. cit. (note 1), pp.36–37, no.1. 15 Inv. no.NM 1069; panel 57 by 48 cm.; inscription on reverse: ‘64 / 1639 / 4 / 4’; G. Cavalli-Björkman, with contributions by C. Fryklund and K. Sidén: Dutch and Flemish Paintings II: Dutch Paintings c.1600–c.1800, Stockholm 2005, pp.119–20. We
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34. Judith with the head of Holofernes, by Salomon de Bray, after Fig.32. 1636. Black chalk, 29 by 23 cm. (Städtische WessenbergGalerie, Konstanz).
career. It is likely that the artist did not use this method merely to keep track of his production; one would expect it to have some further use. It also raises the question whether other artists used similar methods. Every art historian is familiar with numbers found on the backs of paintings. These are usually old inventory or auction numbers, but it is also possible that some of these numbers refer to a system similar to Salomon de Bray’s.
would like to thank Lena Dahlén and Carina Fryklund. 16 It is remarkable that the two large unrelined, triumphal processions that Salomon de Bray painted in 1649 and 1650 for Huis ten Bosch, The Hague (still in situ), do not display a date or number on the reverse, as was apparent during their recent restoration (we would like to thank Michiel Franken, The Hague). For these paintings, see F. Lammertse in A. Blankert et al.: exh. cat. Dutch classicism in seventeenth-century painting, Rotterdam (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) and Frankfurt (Städel Museum) 1999–2000, pp.88–95, figs.7 and 7a.
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Dirk Hannema and the rediscovery of a painting by Vincent van Gogh by LOUIS VAN TILBORGH and ELLA HENDRIKS
(1895–1984) is perhaps better known as a connoisseur who made a terrible mistake than as the decisive and innovative Director of Rotterdam’s Museum Boymans (now the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), an appointment he took up in 1921 at the age of twenty-six.1 Although he helped lay the foundations for the Museum’s later success, his achievements as a Director with taste and almost American reserves of energy have been overshadowed by a faux pas committed in 1938 when he bought The supper at Emmaus (Fig.35). He acquired it on the authority of the specialist Abraham Bredius as an early work by Johannes Vermeer, but in 1945 the costly purchase turned out to be a genuine Van Meegeren.2 Connoisseurship had been under attack for some time, but this acquisition, which was hailed by every leading light in the Dutch art world, turned into a ‘drama from which traditional connoisseurship never completely recovered’, as the art historian Peter Hecht recently wrote. The ‘connoisseur’s intuition and the authority granted to him’ proved to be ‘a bad compass to steer by’.3 The purchase and the attribution to Vermeer became known as ‘one of the greatest blunders of twentieth-century scholarship’, and the underlying connoisseurship was condemned as ‘swift, intuitive, arrogant and naive’.4 Bredius had the good fortune to die the year after the forgery was revealed, and his mistake was glossed over.5 Hannema, whose efforts had been rewarded with an honorary doctorate from the University of Utrecht, was left behind in the dock but failed to say ‘mea culpa’. He dismissed as irrelevant the confession of master forger Han van Meegeren and the overwhelming
35. Dirk Hannema (on the right) and the restorer H.G. Luitwieler looking at ‘The supper at Emmaus’ after its restoration. 1938. Photograph. (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam).
The F numbers in the notes refer to J.-B. de la Faille: The works of Vincent van Gogh: his paintings and drawings, New York 1970 (cited hereafter as De la Faille 1970), the JH numbers to J. Hulsker: The new complete Van Gogh. Paintings, drawings, sketches, Amsterdam and Philadelphia 1996 (cited hereafter as Hulsker 1996), and the numbers of letters to L. Jansen, H. Luijten and N. Bakker, eds.: Vincent van Gogh. The Letters, October 2009: www.vangoghletters.org (cited hereafter as Letters). Unless otherwise noted, the documentation and the correspondence quoted are from the archive of the Museum de Fundatie (formerly the Stichting Hannema-de Stuers Fundatie) in Heino/Wijhe and Zwolle. The archive could only be sampled, due to its large size and the lack of a detailed inventory. Of the many people who helped with this article we would especially like to thank Kristian Garssen, who carried on searching the Museum de Fundatie archive long after the deadline had passed, and Maarten van Bommel, Duncan Bull, A.C.A.W. Baron van der Feltz, Muriel Geldof, Peter Hecht, Anita Hopmans, Don Johnson, Rick Johnson, André Kraayenga, Kees Mensch, Luc Megens, Frits Scholten, Frans Stive and Teio Meedendorp, as well as other colleagues in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The painting of The Blute-fin mill was conserved in January 2010 by John Polder, Borne. Fig.39 shows the painting after restoration. All the other photographs were taken before that. The X-radiograph was made by René Gerritsen, the details and the photomicrographs by Ella Hendriks and the infra-red photograph by Frans Stive. This article was translated from the Dutch by Michael Hoyle. 1 Hannema recorded his memoirs in interviews which were later reworked in Flitsen uit mijn leven als verzamelaar en museumdirecteur, Rotterdam 1973. Max Pam wrote a vivid, well-informed essay about him, ‘Dirk Hannema. De tragiek van het onfeilbare oog’, Vrij Nederland, Supplement 49 (8th December 1984), pp.2–35, which was later included in his De armen van de inktvis. Een keuze uit het journalistieke werk,
Amsterdam 2005, pp.69–110. J.C. Ebbinge Wubben gave his opinion in ‘D. Hannema, 1895–1984’, Rotterdams Jaarboekje 3 (1985), pp.249–58. A later work is M. Mosler: Dirk Hannema. De geboren verzamelaar, Rotterdam 1995, but it is inadequate as a biography. 2 Bredius announced his discovery of the early ‘Vermeer’ to the world in ‘A new Vermeer’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 71 (1937), pp.210–11. Many books and articles have been published about the affair, the most important being M. van den Brandhof: Een vroege Vermeer uit 1937. Achtergronden van leven en werken van de schilder/vervalser Han van Meegeren, Utrecht and Antwerp 1979; D. Kraaypoel and H. van Wijnen: De Emmausgangers. Han van Meegeren, Zwolle 1996; A. Blankert: ‘The case of Han van Meegeren’s fake Vermeer. “Supper of Emmaus” reconsidered’, in A. Golahny et al., eds.: In his milieu. Essays on Netherlandish art in memory of John Michael Montias, Amsterdam 2006, pp.47–57; and J. Lopez: The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren, Orlando 2008. For the context of the Vermeer forgeries, see also B. Broos: ‘Malice and misconception’, in I. Gaskell and M. Jonker: Vermeer studies, New Haven and London 1998, pp.19–23. 3 P. Hecht: 125 jaar openbaar kunstbezit. Met steun van de Vereniging Rembrandt, Zwolle 2001, pp.98–101. 4 A. Blankert: Johannes Vermeer van Delft 1632–1675, Utrecht and Antwerp 1975, p.104; and H. Balk: De Kunstpaus H.P. Bremmer 1871–1956, Bussum 2006, p.409. 5 W. Martin, director of the Mauritshuis, The Hague, wrote that Bredius had been taken in by ‘a deceptive story’; see his ‘Abraham Bredius’, Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde (1946–47), p.40. However, Martin had himself hailed The supper at Emmaus; see Hecht, op. cit. (note 3), p.99. For Martin’s own mistaken attributions to Vermeer, see Broos, op. cit. (note 2), p.26.
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technical evidence demolishing the attribution to Vermeer that was published in the late 1940s.6 He even stated categorically in 1952 that ‘intuition is superior to science, and the eye to chemistry or the X-ray photograph when it comes to fathoming art’.7 Connoisseurship, in his view, was a solitary skill founded on a special talent which teamwork and detailed scientific examination could only hamper. They were of no help when it came to what he regarded as the essence, which was the assessment of quality, or as he himself put it, of ‘character and personality’.8 He felt that the ‘purely scientific [. . .] is of course important and essential as background, but the aesthetic fascinates me far more, and always counts for much more with me’, as he later wrote to the Groningen professor and Rembrandt expert Horst Gerson.9 Hannema did not defend himself publicly, but it seems that there were other reasons for that. He had been dismissed as Director of the Museum Boymans in 1945 because of a perfectly understandable incomprehension of his unquestioning co-operation with the occupying Germans during the Second World War, and although found not guilty of collaboration at a trial in 1947, he was not reinstated. Utterly devoted to the mission of museums and blessed with a private income from a small legacy, he now invested all his energy in adding to his own collection and making it accessible to the public, first in Weldam Castle near Goor, and from 1957 as the Hannema-de Stuers Fundatie in a castle near Heino in the province of Overijssel. Today it is known as the Museum de Fundatie and is spread over two locations in Heino/Wijhe and Zwolle. Moulded as an aesthete at a time when new reputations were made almost daily in both modern and old-master art, Hannema had soon demonstrated an exceptional talent for spotting art that was not yet sought after but was of fine quality, as shown by his purchases of Bosch and Kandinsky for the Museum Boymans, and he now pursued the same strategy as a private collector. ‘Get there first; always rely on the aesthetic’, as he later put it.10 He bought art in every genre and from every period, and although the great names were beyond his means, there were still plenty of opportunities for an epicure like himself. To take some examples completely at random, he acquired an expressionistic Mondrian and an early gouache by Karel Appel, but the art-historical value of his purchases declined when, as he aged, he was no longer prepared to pay the prices being asked. ‘You could get hold of Sluyters and Leo Gestel for a few hundred guilders ten years ago; it’s not for me any more now that they cost thousands’.11 Hannema’s interest in works without a big name attached grew as time passed, and he became obsessed with the art-historical
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Hannema, op. cit. (note 1), p.110. The technical evidence was published in P.B. Coremans: Van Meegeren’s faked Vermeers and de Hooghs: a scientific examination, London 1949. See also M.M. van Dantzig: Johannes Vermeer: de ‘Emmausgangers’ en de critici, Leiden 1947. 7 D. Hannema: Kunst in oude sfeer. Oude en moderne kunst in het kasteel Weldam Twenthe, Rotterdam 1952, p.7. 8 D. Hannema: ‘Enkele mededelingen 15 januari 1978 tot 15 september 1979’, p.4; see also Hannema, op. cit. (note 1), p.65. 9 Letter from D. Hannema to H. Gerson, 25th October 1971. 10 Letter from D. Hannema to J.G. van Gelder, 13th August 1973. For his policy, see also D. Hannema: Beschrijvende catalogus van de schilderijen, beeldhouwwerken, aquarellen en tekeningen behorende tot de verzameling van de Stichting Hannema-De Stuers Fundatie, Rotterdam 1967, p.1. 11 Letter cited at note 10 above. 12 Ibid.; D. Hannema: Supplement van de Catalogus schilderijen, beeldhouwwerken, aquarellen en tekeningen, Rotterdam 1971; and idem: Over Johannes Vermeer van Delft,
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36. Still life with peonies. Anonymous. Canvas on plywood, 35.7 by 27.4 cm. (Museum de Fundatie, Heino and Zwolle).
sport, or temptation, of identifying the makers of inexpensive works that had been acquired as anonymous pieces. His first suggestions were made in his 1967 catalogue of the Foundation’s holdings, and he became even more categorical in the supplement of 1971, in his brochure about Vermeer of 1972, and in his museum periodical Enkele mededelingen, in which he presented his acquisitions from 1972 onwards.12 It is impossible to check all Hannema’s ideas for their reliability (the collection quadrupled in size from the 1950s to reach 1,600 pieces in the 1970s), but he clearly succumbed to the temptation to come up with names for his paintings, in particular, and not so much those of minor, relatively unknown masters but of the greats. His wild attributions in the area he was considered to know best, seventeenth-century Dutch painting, attracted the greatest interest. He claimed to have works by Fabritius, Rembrandt, Seghers and above all Vermeer (no fewer than seven).13 The latter assertion gave rise to ‘a lot of sensation in the form of front-page news in serious newspapers and a lengthy TV appearance’,14 but art historians merely shrugged their shoulders.15 The suggestions were absurd, and now that Hannema publicly stated for the first time that he still considered The supper at Emmaus to be a genuine Vermeer, despite all the evidence to the contrary,
twee onbekende jeugdwerken, Heino 1972. 13 Hannema, op. cit. (note 10), pp.19–21, nos.80–83 (Fabritius), p.63, no.291 (Seghers), pp.40–41; Hannema 1971, op. cit. (note 12), pp.19–20, no.683, and p.36, no.181 (Rembrandt). For the Vermeers, see Hannema 1972, op. cit. (note 12), in which he published six ‘Vermeers’, two of which had already been more or less announced in Hannema, op. cit. (note 10), pp.15–17, nos.64–65. For his seventh ‘Vermeer’, see N. Hornstra: ‘De Vermeers van Hannema’, unpublished research report 1995, pp.62–67. One dismissive reaction from a friend was Ebbinge Wubben, op. cit. (note 1), p.257. Hannema had already been attributing dubious works to Vermeer for some time in the 1930s; see Blankert, op. cit. (note 2), p.51. After The supper at Emmaus was revealed to be a fake, Hannema carried on philosophising about attributions to Vermeer in an intimate circle of his friends, probably influenced by the artist and collector Jean Decoen (ibid.; and Hornstra, op. cit., pp.15–24). Later, he did not always adopt a standpoint of his own but took ideas from other people. 14 Blankert, op. cit. (note 2), p.112, note 5. 15 Jaap Bolten, curator in the Leiden print room, was the only person who went to
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insiders began regarding him as ‘the isolated connoisseur who was ultimately not taken seriously by any of his colleagues’.16 No one questioned his eye for quality, but as the journalist Max Pam wrote soon after his death in 1984, ‘at certain moments [he was] as blind as Belisarius’.17 The Vermeer specialist Albert Blankert went so far as to call him ‘the laughing stock of the art world’, and felt that he knew precisely when Hannema had been struck blind: ‘when the idea of True Genius entered his mind’.18 We will have to wait for a biography of Hannema for a definitive and comprehensive explanation for his overweening confidence at the time, but it is already clear that advancing age alone cannot account for this dwindling capacity to be objective about his own knowledge and intuition. His dismissal as Director of the Rotterdam museum had been a severe blow, but in the opinion of Johan C. Ebbinge Wubben, one of his acquaintances and later himself the Director of the Rotterdam museum, what really wounded him was the Vermeer affair.19 ‘He found it impossible to [. . .] acknowledge that his feeling for the exceptional, for standards and quality, that his intuition had let him down so badly’.20 Driven by the debacle, Hannema wanted to show that he did know his art history, and his discoveries had the advantage of allowing him to think that, as a collector, he was once again operating at the same high level that he had been forced to relinquish on his departure from the Museum Boymans. The latter point is typified by the spectacular attributions he made in areas other than seventeenth-century Dutch painting, among them the four pictures he gave to Vincent van Gogh in the period 1961–75. His hope of owning works by Van Gogh was understandable, because his appreciation of the artist was almost as old as his love of art itself. His taste had been largely shaped by H.P. Bremmer, adviser to the collector Helene Kröller-Müller, whose lessons in aesthetics he had started following at the age of twenty-one.21 He had learned from him that ‘beauty [. . .] was not a property of things’, as he wrote in the notebook he used for Bremmer’s lessons, and he was also told about the greatness of Vincent, who ‘differed utterly from the painters who came before him’.22 At home, Hannema shared these views with his mother, who also attended Bremmer’s lessons and had a small collection that included three drawings from Van Gogh’s early Dutch period, one of which she had bought on her teacher’s recommendation.23 When Hannema was appointed a junior researcher at the Museum Boymans in 1920 he immediately tried to convince his parents of the need to buy Van Gogh’s Morning: going out to work (after Millet) and Olive trees with the Alpilles in the background, which were with the Amsterdam art dealer Komter at the time and are
now in the Hermitage in St Petersburg and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.24 His ultimate goal was to make donations to the Museum, but it never got as far as that because the price was beyond his parents’ means.25 Not a single Dutch museum yet owned a work from Van Gogh’s period in the south of France, and it is typical of Hannema’s vision and energy that he wanted to put that to rights.
the trouble of responding seriously to Hannema’s brochure about Vermeer in his article ‘Zes “Nieuwe Vermeers” zijn niet van Vermeer’, Het Parool (25th February 1972). 16 A.A.M. de Jong: ‘Hannema, Dirk (1895–1984)’, Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland; see www.inghist.nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/BWN/lemmata/bwn4/ hannema. 17 Pam, op. cit. (note 1), p.5. Pam was here alluding to one of the works attributed to Vermeer, Blind Belisarius, the subject of which Hannema had not originally recognised. See Hornstra, op. cit. (note 13), pp.35–39. 18 Blankert, op. cit. (note 2), p.54. 19 C. Blotkamp and M. Visser: ‘Een gesprek met J.C. Ebbinge Wubben’, Jong Holland 3 (1987), p.25, no.2. 20 Ebbinge Wubben, op. cit. (note 1), p.257. 21 For Bremmer’s importance for the introduction of modern art in the Netherlands, see H. Balk: ‘A finger in every pie: H.P. Bremmer and his influence on the Dutch art world in the first half of the twentieth century’, Simiolus 32 (2006), pp.182–217.
Hannema’s long acquaintance with Bremmer is described in Balk, op. cit. (note 4), pp.202–04; and Mosler, op. cit. (note 1), pp.17–18. 22 The notebook is preserved in the Museum de Fundatie. 23 The drawings are F 884/JH 57 (bought on Bremmer’s recommendation); F 961/JH 284; and F 1065/JH 217. The collection of Hannema’s mother is discussed in Balk, op. cit. (note 4), pp.201–02. For the purchase of F 884/JH 57, see Hannema’s letter to A. Tellegen-Hoogendoorn, 31st August 1966, archives of the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD), The Hague (cited hereafter as RKD). 24 F 684/JH 1880 and F 712/JH 1740. See Hannema, op. cit. (note 1), p.145. Hannema mistakenly thought that they had ended up in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo. Komter put F 684/JH 1880 up for auction in 1925, whence it passed to the German art market. He sold F 712/JH 1740 to Sam van Deventer, a friend of Mrs Kröller-Müller, and after that it often went on travelling exhibitions of her collection, which explains Hannema’s mistake; see J. ten Berge et al.: The paintings of Vincent van Gogh in the collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo 2003, p.399. 25 Hannema, op. cit. (note 1), p.145.
37. Landscape with a quarry. Anonymous. Canvas, 37.6 by 54 cm. (Museum de Fundatie, Heino and Zwolle).
38. Still life with a jug and shells. Anonymous. Canvas, 49 by 57 cm. (Museum de Fundatie, Heino and Zwolle).
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He was appointed Director of the Museum shortly afterwards, and his eye was then caught by another, even better Van Gogh with which to usher modern art into the Museum. It was The starry night, which was on loan to the Museum in 1922–23. Although this painting, which is now in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, was not yet widely recognised as ‘the limit of Vincent’s attempt to go beyond the overtness of everyday objects’,26 Hannema realised that it was more important than Komter’s paintings. However, although he ‘went to a lot of trouble’, he was once again unable to raise the asking price, which was 100,000 guilders.27 It was simply far more difficult to find the funds for modern art than for old masters, he later wrote.28 In the end he was only able to enrich the Museum with works by Van Gogh by persuading private Rotterdam collectors to make donations. He set the example himself in the year of his appointment as Director by presenting it with a characteristic early drawing.29 Those later donations filled gaps, but they were less spectacular than the paintings he had dreamed of when he had been appointed.30 When the Hannema-de Stuers Fundatie was set up there was one authentic Van Gogh in Hannema’s own collection: a drawing of an old pensioner from the Hague period which he had inherited from his mother.31 He did not have the means to buy anything more, but in 1961 a rumour did the rounds of his small provincial circle that he had discovered ‘an unknown painting by Van Gogh’.32 That would have been the Still life with peonies (Fig.36), which he presented in his internal report on the foundation for the years 1958–64 as ‘a flower piece by Vincent van Gogh, from Antwerp, painted at the end of 1885’.33 The only trouble was that Van Gogh painted no flower still lifes in his Antwerp period. He painted from life, and peonies bloom in the summer, not the winter. Not long afterwards he bought Landscape with a quarry (Fig.37), which he also attributed to Van Gogh. Although it shows an old aqueduct or bridge that has never been located near Montmartre, Hannema believed that this painting came from Van Gogh’s early Paris period.34 He then announced the two attributions in
a letter of 1966 to Annet Tellegen, who was attached to the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD) in The Hague and was involved in the preparations for the new edition of Jacob Baart de la Faille’s catalogue of Van Gogh’s œuvre.35 However, it was ‘not the intention’, he wrote to her, ‘to include these two paintings now in the [planned] catalogue of the [Hannema-de Stuers Fundatie] Foundation’,36 from which one can cautiously deduce that he was mainly sounding out the specialists to see how much chance there was of getting them to accept his attributions. However, this was not followed by a viewing of the works, and he then sought the path of direct confrontation by publishing the Still life with peonies as an authentic Van Gogh in his 1967 collection catalogue.37 He kept the other work in reserve, but when his published attribution of the flower piece was not accepted (it was not included in the 1970 edition of De la Faille’s catalogue), he published Landscape with quarry in 1971 as another genuine Van Gogh.38 He had previously been more cautious with his intuitive opinions, but now he evidently threw circumspection to the wind. He had come to trust his own feelings completely, and that same year he acquired the rapidly painted, more traditional looking Still life with a jug and shells (Fig.38). He described it as a work from Van Gogh’s Paris period when he bought it, but two years later he published it, laconically and self-confidently, without consulting anyone at all, as a painting from the Nuenen period.39 As sure of himself as ever, he then bought The Blute-fin mill (Fig.39) in 1975, which he presented in his newsletter the next year as a canvas executed by Van Gogh in 1886.40 Oddly enough he did not hang it in his gallery, but he did have a postcard made of it and included it as part of his collection in an exhibition held elsewhere.41 As happened with his attributions to great seventeenthcentury Dutch masters, Hannema received no support from his colleagues for the four paintings he was now giving to Van Gogh, but in contrast to his Vermeer ‘discoveries’ he got no publicity either. The editors of the œuvre catalogue paid not the slightest attention to his ‘announcement’ of the still life and the landscape, and those two paintings, together with the Still life
26 M. Schapiro: ‘On a painting of Van Gogh’, View (Autumn 1946), pp.12–13; it only gained that reputation after being donated to the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s. 27 Hannema, op. cit. (note 1), p.56. 28 Ibid. 29 The drawing donated by Hannema is F 842/JH 5; see ibid., pp.92 and 100. 30 They were F 27/JH 503; F 1472a/JH 1497a; and F 1475/JH 1435. Hannema’s role as an adviser to the collectors Willem van der Vorm and D.G. van Beuningen, both of whom bought works by Van Gogh, has not been examined for this article. It is not known whether he was personally involved in these purchases. 31 F 961/JH 284. ‘My mother bought the drawing by Van Gogh for 60 guilders back in 1902! The family was scandalised. Such an ugly old fellow in the drawing room’; letter from D. Hannema to E.L. Cate, 23rd September 1976. 32 Letter from M.K. de Ley to D. Hannema, 4th December 1963. 33 D. Hannema: ‘Beknopt overzicht van de jaren 1958 tot 1964 van de Stichting Hannema-De Stuers Fundatie door Dr. D. Hannema’, 19th December 1963, p.5. 34 See Hannema 1971, op. cit. (note 12), p.8, no.610: ‘Made in the environs of Montmartre, perhaps on the way to Versailles’, but that was in the opposite direction. Van Gogh had depicted the quarry near the hill of Montmartre twice during his first year in Paris (F 229/JH 1176 and F 230/JH 1177), which seems to explain Hannema’s attribution. 35 Correspondence between A. Tellegen-Hoogendoorn and D. Hannema, 18th, 24th and 31st August 1966, RKD archives, The Hague. 36 Ibid., letter of 18th August 1966. He was asked to send photographs but evidently thought it essential that someone came to view the works in person (letter of 31st August 1966). 37 Kind communication from Annet Tellegen; Hannema, op. cit. (note 10), p.26,
no.107. See also Hannema 1971, op. cit. (note 12), p.36, no.107. 38 Hannema 1971, op. cit. (note 12), p.8, no.610. Because the still life was not included in De la Faille’s catalogue, Hannema felt obliged to defend himself in his supplement by stating that the work was known to the Utrecht professor J.G. van Gelder and to acquaintances, including Ebbinge Wubben (ibid., p.36, no.107). The suggestion was that they backed his attribution, which is doubtful. See Ebbinge Wubben, op. cit. (note 1), p.257, and his letter to Louis van Tilborgh of 15th September 2009, in which he wrote that Hannema ‘knew of my scepticism about many of his attributions’. 39 Letter from D. Hannema to the members of the Provincial Executive, 15th December 1971, in which he said that he suspected that it came ‘from Van Gogh’s early Paris period’ when he bought it. He even thought that he saw traces of a signature, but none have been found (kind communication from Kristian Garssen). Hannema dated the painting 1884–85 in his exhibition catalogue Moderne schilderijen uit eigen bezit, Heino (Stichting Hannema-de Stuers Fundatie) 1973, p.8, no.38, on the sole evidence of a reference to a letter written by Van Gogh in 1884 in which he spoke of ‘old jars and other antiques’ which he wanted to paint; see Letters, no.471. 40 D. Hannema: ‘Enkele mededelingen vanaf 1 mei 1975 tot 1 mei 1976’, pp.10–11. 41 A.C.A.W. van der Feltz, the former deputy curator of the collection, said in an interview on 10th September 2009 that Hannema kept it in a small room full of odds and ends between the hall and the so-called Oriental Room. As far as Van der Feltz remembered, Still life with peonies was always part of the permanent display in Nijenhuis Castle. Copies of the postcard of The Blute-fin mill are in the archives of both the Van Gogh Museum and the Museum de Fundatie. The latter museum has a list of the works for the exhibition Een keuze uit de collectie Hannema-de Stuers in De Zonnehof in Amersfoort in 1977–78.
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39. The Blute-fin mill, by Vincent van Gogh. 1886. Canvas, 55.2 by 38 cm. (Museum de Fundatie, Heino and Zwolle). the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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40. Béla and Rickel Hein, by Jules Pascin. 1923. Ink, 24.5 by 20 cm. (Private collection).
41. The Blute-fin mill, by Vincent van Gogh. 1886. Pencil in a sketchbook, 11.0 by 19.7 cm. (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Vincent van Gogh Foundation).
with a jug and shells and The Blute-fin mill, were also omitted from Jan Hulsker’s œuvre catalogue of 1977 and later editions.42 It very much seems that museums and art historians were aware of Hannema’s suggestions but simply ignored them. Although he had not seen the view of the windmill, Han van Crimpen, a curator at the Van Gogh Museum at the time, wrote in 1988, four years after Hannema’s death, that ‘it is generally assumed that it [The Blute-fin mill] is not by Van Gogh’, from which one can infer that Hannema’s reputation had sunk so low that his attributions were considered valueless and not even worth checking.43 That attitude was mirrored by the behaviour of the staff of the museum in Nijenhuis Castle, who began dissociating themselves from such spectacular attributions after Hannema’s death in 1984. The reputed Van Goghs, for example, were never selected for official exhibitions in the Museum’s outbuildings but hung in the castle as part of Hannema’s collection.44 As a result, they faded back into the oblivion from which they had been plucked. No one was prepared to back Hannema’s discoveries and the paintings reverted to their anonymous status, as it were. None of this would have reached the pages of this Magazine, or would have merited anything more than a modest footnote in the literature on Van Gogh, were it not for the fact that Hannema’s last discovery, the scene of the windmill that he acquired in 1975 (Fig.39), is indeed by Van Gogh, as recent research has demonstrated. Nothing is known about its early provenance, but that does not invalidate the attribution. At least five paintings have surfaced since the publication of the Van Gogh œuvre
catalogue in 1970 whose early history is unknown but which are accepted as authentic on the evidence of their style and technique.45 Four of them are from the Paris period, and that is no accident. Van Gogh did not have any reputation worth speaking of when he was living in Paris, so there was a very real chance that his name would become detached from the paintings that he or his brother, Theo, sold, gave away or exchanged for goods.46 All that we know about The Blute-fin mill is that Hannema bought it as an anonymous work in November 1975 from the Paris dealer Rickel Hein (1897–1977/80), whose gallery, Hein Antiqués, was at 48 rue de Lille.47 Hannema had met her ‘around 1939’, and she was one of a select group of art dealers with whom he felt ‘a certain aesthetic affinity’.48 When he was abroad he always bought ‘from old, prewar contacts’, and the only one left in the 1970s was Rickel Hein.49 He described her as ‘a very intelligent woman’ from whom he learned ‘a great deal’, as he recalled in his memoirs.50 A.C.A.W. van der Feltz, who was appointed deputy curator of the collection in Nijenhuis Castle in 1969, recalled that Hannema visited Rickel Hein’s gallery several times a year.51 She supplied at least seventy-nine of the works in the Museum de Fundatie, most of them anonymous medieval sculptures and seventeenth-century decorative arts, but also drawings by Ingres and Millet, sculptures by Carpeaux, Dalou and Degas, and paintings by Jacque, Vernet and other artists.52 Hannema also bought many anonymous paintings from her, particularly in the 1970s, when he was at his most trenchant about his attributions. In several
42 De la Faille 1970 and Hulsker 1996, the earlier editions of which were published in 1977, and in 1980 and 1984 respectively. After reading Hannema’s publication, J.G. van Gelder wanted to pass on news of the discovery of the mill scene to both Jan Hulsker and Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov (letter from J.G. van Gelder to D. Hannema, 19th June 1976). The latter was due to publish her doctoral dissertation on Van Gogh’s Paris period in July 1976. It is not clear whether Hulsker received the information, but Welsh-Ovcharov did see the painting. See D. Hannema to E.L. Cats, 23rd September 1976; and Welsh-Ovcharov, e-mail to Louis van Tilborgh of 26th January 2010, in which she wrote that she had studied the painting at the time and had come to the conclusion that it was authentic. 43 Letter from H. van Crimpen to Brinkman, 5th October 1988 (documentation Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam). He suggested that it could have been the work of Van Gogh’s acquaintance Arnold Hendrik Koning, who had also painted on this spot. See note 64 below. 44 Kind communication from André Kraayenga, former curator of the Stichting Hannema-de Stuers Fundatie. In Mosler, op. cit. (note 1), p.61, it is said that there were doubts about the attribution to Van Gogh of the landscape with the quarry and the still life. Prior to the exhibition Alles wat aesthetisch bloeit. De collecties L.H. en J.F. van Baaren en D. Hannema, Utrecht (Centraal Museum) and Heino (Stichting Hannema-de Stuers Fundatie) 1993, the Van Gogh Museum was asked whether the
four works attributed to Van Gogh could be examined, and especially The Blue-fin mill, but practical reasons made that impossible. The request was repeated just before the exhibition Dirk Hannema (1895–1984). Het oog van de kenner in 2007–08 in the Museum de Fundatie at the Paleis aan de Blijmarkt in Zwolle. An internal report had already been written about The Blute-fin mill in the Museum de Fundatie by Feico Hoekstra, who said that Hannema’s attribution was ‘very convincing’. 45 They are from 1885 (F -/JH Add. 23) and 1886 (F -/JH Add. 2; F -/JH Add. 20; F -/JH 1240; and a still life described in H. van Crimpen: ‘Een nieuw ontdekte geschilderde studie van Van Goghs Parijse tijd’, Van Gogh Bulletin (1991), p.12, no.1). 46 The very earliest provenance of even accepted Paris works is often not known either; see L. van Tilborgh: ‘De geschiedenis van de collectie’, in E. Hendriks and L. van Tilborgh: ‘New views on Van Gogh’s development in Antwerp and Paris. An integrated art historical and technical study of his paintings in the Van Gogh Museum’, Ph.D. diss. (University of Amsterdam, 2006), I, p.6. 47 Her maiden name was Rickel Jachine. See sale, Hôtel Drouot-Richelieu, Paris, 8th December 2008, pp.14–16, to which Marie El Caïdi (Musée Départemental Maurice Denis in Saint-Germain-en-Laye) kindly drew our attention. It is stated there that Rickel Hein died in 1972, but that must be a mistake, since there is correspondence from her dated 1977 in the archives of the Museum de Fundatie. She died before the summer of 1980, in any event, because it was then that Hannema tried to
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43. The Blute-fin mill, by Vincent van Gogh. 1886. Canvas, 46.5 by 38 cm. (Formerly in a private collection; lost in a fire in 1967).
42. The Blute-fin mill, by Vincent van Gogh. 1886. Pen and ink, graphite on laid paper, 42.5 by 56.5 cm. (Phillips Collection, Washington).
cases he was sure that he knew who the artist was, mentioning both Still life with a jug and shells and The Blute-fin mill, as well as works which he attributed without any evidence to Corot, Ribera, Troyon, Vermeer and Vouet.53 He clearly regarded the gallery as an important if not the most important source of potential new strokes of luck. Rickel had taken over the firm founded by her husband, Béla Desco Hein (1883–1931), who came from Kremnica in presentday Slovakia.54 He arrived in Paris around 1901 in the hope of acquire a portrait of her drawn by Orlik from the estate ‘as a souvenir of this woman with whom I have worked for more than 30 years and who was an extremely intelligent lady whom I liked very much’; letter of 12th June 1980 to Hein’s niece Gisèle Weinberger, who inherited the gallery on Rickel’s death (kind communication from B. de Grunne). Hannema said in his memoirs that Van Dongen, Modigliani and Derain had made portraits of her and/or her husband, but no such works can be found in the œuvre catalogues of those artists. Hannema did publish a portrait drawing of Hein by Derain in his book. He called Mrs Hein ‘Riquel’, and said that she herself had a fascinating sculpture collection, ‘none of which is for sale’. For all of this, see Hannema, op. cit. (note 1), fig.28, after p.80, and p.142; and for Hein also M. Laclotte et al.: Les donateurs du Louvre, Paris 1989, p.229. See note 59 below for the date of purchase of The Blute-fin mill. 48 D. Hannema: ‘Inleiding door de verzamelaar’, in A.C.A.W. van der Feltz: Beschrijvende catalogus kunstnijverheid Hannema-de Stuers Fundatie, Zwolle 1980, p.14; and Hannema, op. cit. (note 1), p.142. 49 See note 11 above. Hannema mentioned only Hein’s gallery when family members asked his advice about dealers to visit in Paris (letter from E.V. Gatacre to D. Hannema, 17th June 1974). 50 Hannema, op. cit. (note 1), p.142; and Hannema, op. cit. (note 48), p.14.
becoming an artist, but in the 1920s he opened a gallery specialising in African art, although he also dealt in modern works.55 He had friends among the artists who frequented the Café du Dôme, among them Jules Pascin, who made a playful drawing on the occasion of the marriage of Béla and Rickel in 1923, with the message that any children they would have would look like African statues (Fig.40). Information about Rickel’s gallery is sparse, but she is known to have had art belonging to her husband, including a drawing by Redon, Priestess, which she probably sold to Hannema in 1977.56 However, it seems unlikely that The Blute-fin mill ever belonged to Béla Hein. It hung in Rickel’s crowded gallery and not in her home, as Van der Feltz recalled.57 He suspected that she had 51
Letter cited at note 10 above. This information is from the digital registry of the Museum de Fundatie: K. Garssen: ‘Objecten verworven door Dr. D. Hannema bij de kunsthandel M. Hein te Parijs’, 15th November 2008. 53 Ibid.; D. Hannema: ‘Enkele mededelingen vanaf 1 januari 1974 tot 1 mei 1975’, pp.11 and 14–15 (Ribera, Corot and Troyon respectively, although in the latter case he also spoke of Monticelli and even suggested the name of Guigou as the maker). For the ‘Vermeer’, see Hornstra, op. cit. (note 13), pp.68–70. For the attribution to Vouet, see Garssen, op. cit. (note 52), no.2302. 54 B. de Grunne: exh. cat. Béla Hein. Grand initié des ivoires Lega, Brussels (Galerie Bernard de Grunne) 2001, p.3, with further literature. 55 According to Hannema, op. cit. (note 1), p.142, Béla also dealt in medieval art, and it is known from œuvre catalogues that he sold works by Modigliani, Monet, Vuillard and others. 56 Loose note by Hannema found in a copy of ‘Enkele mededelingen vanaf 1 januari tot 15 juni 1978’, p.9. For the purchase see, among other things, the letter of 17th January 1977 to Hannema from Gisèle Weinberger, who occasionally took care of her aunt’s correspondence. 57 See note 41 above. 52
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44. Guinguette, by Vincent van Gogh. 1886. Canvas, 49 by 64 cm. (Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
acquired it as part of a job lot of household effects, and he said that the purchase was something of an accident. Hannema was interested in a scene of a hummingbird attributed to Jean-Baptiste Marie Huet, and spotted the anonymous view of the mill hanging nearby. He ended up buying both of them, for 2,000 and 6,500 francs respectively.58 The mill scene was covered with severely yellowed varnish which made it difficult to assess, but when it arrived in Heino, Hannema got the idea that it was by Van Gogh, according to Van der Feltz. He decided to have it restored, and the discoloured varnish was replaced by a fresh layer.59 In order to justify his attribution, Hannema pointed out in his newsletter of 1975/76 that Van Gogh had depicted the Paris mill on several occasions.60 It was called Le Blute-fin and in Van Gogh’s day it stood at the top of the hill of Montmartre.61 It dated from the seventeenth century, and had been turned into an observation
point known as the Moulin de la Galette after the waffles that were sold there. The site, which was divided in two by the Impasse des Deux Frères, also included two more mills, cafés, a dance hall, a garden with a fairground and a restaurant. It was not far from the apartment shared by the Van Gogh brothers in the rue Laval (now the rue Victor Massé), and when they moved to the rue Lepic in June 1886 they were living just around the corner from the mill. Van Gogh depicted the site many times from his arrival in Paris in March 1886 until the early spring of 1887, with the Blute-fin mill as the main subject on twelve occasions.62 He painted and drew it from both the western, rural side of the hill and the eastern, urbanised side. The Fundatie painting belongs to the latter category. The mill is viewed from a lower terrace with a small bar that stood to the west of the dance hall. There was direct access to this part of the amusement park through the gate-
58 Letter from D. Hannema to the chairman and secretary of the Stichting Hannemade Stuers Fundatie, 17th November 1975. It was equivalent to 5,271 guilders. See ‘Rekening van het Aankoopfonds van de Stichting Hannema-de Stuers Fundatie over 1975’. The hummingbird, which was part of a wall decoration, was financed partly by an earlier donation from Mr and Mrs Ter Kuile-Scholten, who had given the foundation 1,000 guilders to mark Hannema’s 80th birthday. See letter from N.H. and J.W. ter Kuile-Scholten to D. Hannema, 11th September 1975; Hannema, op. cit. (note 40), p.10. The remaining sum for the two works was paid from the estate of Eva Hannema, who left the foundation 150,000 guilders in 1971. 59 ‘The condition is excellent; it just needs to be cleaned a little’; letter from Hannema, op. cit. (note 58). It was restored by Pieter de Dood in Amsterdam (letter from D. Hannema to the insurance company Mees en Zoonen Assurantiën BV, 17th November 1975). A month later he reported that it was now ‘superb’ (letter to the chairman and secretary of the Stichting Hannema-de Stuers Fundatie, 18th December 1975). A year later he wrote that the restorer wanted ‘to clean it even more, but I didn’t want that. I don’t like scrubbed paintings of that kind. And anyway, it can always be done some other time’; letter cited at note 31 above. Hannema insured the view of the mill for 80,000 guilders and the work attributed to Huet for 3,000 guilders. The previous acquisitions had been reported to the insurance company on 5th November 1975 (see the cover sheet to Appendix 17 to the policy of 18th
November 1975 for the insurance of the collection), which means that the two works were bought at the Hein gallery between 5th and 17th November. That agrees with Hannema’s letter to Hein of 23rd October 1975 in which he made an appointment to call at the gallery on 5th November. 60 Hannema, op. cit. (note 40). 61 Hannema in ibid. actually spoke of The Moulin de la Galette, but that was and is a common mistake which he probably copied from De la Faille 1970; see, for example, p.138, no.274; p.165, no.348; p.166, nos.348a and 349; p.489, nos.1395–1396a; and p.490, no.1397. Information on the site run by the Debrays will be found in A. Roussard: Dictionnaire des lieux à Montmartre, Paris 2001, pp.247–51. 62 In chronological order they are two sketchbook sheets, both published in J. van der Wolk: The seven sketchbooks of Vincent van Gogh. A facsimile edition, New York 1986, pp.164–65: nos.SB 6/28 (F -/JH Add. 8) and SB 6/29 (F 1395/JH 1188, our Fig.41); and F1396a/JH 1185 (Fig.42); F 271/JH 1186 (Fig.43); F 1397/JH 173; F 273/JH 1116; F 274/JH 1115; the painting in the Museum de Fundatie (Fig.39); F 348/JH 1182; F 1396/JH 1222; F 348a/JH 1221; and F 346/JH 1244. 63 Hannema, op. cit. (note 40). 64 The first known depiction of the spot is a print, probably from the 1870s, in which the trees are also growing through the roof. It is attributed to Jean-Louis Forain but may be by another artist (see http://paris.bypainters.com/18eme/Moulin%20Galette.htm).
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way opposite the rue Tholozé in the rue Lepic, which led visitors to a point halfway up the steps to the Blute-fin, where there was a double wooden gate for closing off the area around the bar. The scene with The Blute-fin mill is almost identical with that in a sketchbook sheet, a large drawing and a lost painting by Van Gogh, all of which Hannema cited in justification of his attribution (Figs.41–43).63 A comparison of these works and other depictions of the steps and the mill shows that Van Gogh manipulated reality a little.64 In the Fundatie painting he not only omitted the fence on the left but also the handrail in the middle of the steps. He did the same in the lost painting (Fig.43), the left half of which is also not entirely true to life. He allowed the orchard to extend onto the terrace, where in fact there was a wall with wooden fencing. In the large drawing (Fig.42) he did not take the trouble of depicting the tree growing through the roof of the bar. Hannema backed his attribution not just with the subject but also with the style of the ‘broad, brilliant and impasted canvas’. He felt that those features were typical of Van Gogh’s Paris period, and dated the painting to around November 1886.65 The orange-red foliage on the left confirms that the painting was made in the autumn, but November is a little too late. The women are parading in their dresses and have no shawls, which indicates that it was not a cold time of the year.66 The bare branches show that September is not an option, so the painting would have been made around October. Hannema backed his attribution by referring to just one more work by Van Gogh: Guinguette (Fig.44),67 and he was right to do so. That painting of a café from the autumn of 1886 not only has the same varied, creamy and rather raw brushwork, but also contains similar, quite large figures. As in the view of the mill, the men and women are almost faceless and are modelled in an identical, thickly impasted way. Although Hannema did not mention any other examples, he did suggest that the colours, brushwork and paint thickness of The Blute-fin mill, which was executed wet-in-wet, were very similar to other autumn scenes that Van Gogh painted in 1886, and that, too, is perfectly true.68 The foliage in Bois de Boulogne with people walking (Fig.45), for example, is similar, and the way in which the smaller figures were executed is almost identical. The palette is the same, as is the coarse filling of the surfaces and the rapid brushwork of creamy paint. Recent technical examination revealed more parallels with other works in Van Gogh’s œuvre. As was his usual practice in Paris, The Blute-fin mill is painted on a standard commercial-size
canvas equivalent to Landscape 10 format (55 by 38 cm.). The canvas has never been taken off its original stretcher and bears the trade stamp of the Paris colourman Rey et Perrod on its reverse (Fig.46). These authentic details led Hannema to refer to the painting as ‘a rare and valuable document’.69 Rey et Perrod is known to have traded in artists’ materials from 1868 to 1905, and their canvas stamp also appears on works by Van Gogh’s fellow painters, such as Toulouse-Lautrec, John Peter Russell and Louis Anquetin.70 A stamp on the reverse of Van Gogh’s unlined Portrait of a woman from the spring of 1886 informs us that he had already visited their shop at 51 rue La Rochefaucauld when living in Theo’s nearby apartment at 25 rue Laval, before the move to the rue Lepic in early June 1886.71 Detailed comparison of the commercially prepared picture supports used for The Blute-fin mill and Portrait of a woman reveals that the canvas weave and single-layer ground preparations match exactly, indicating that Rey et Perrod sold a consistent type of à grain canvas acquired from the same manufacturer (Fig.47).72 A straight black line of underdrawing visible in the sky may also be associated with Van Gogh’s way of working. Running inward from the top-left corner, it is thought to have been traced
Henri Rivière photographed the steps twice; see M. Oberthür: Henri Rivière. Connu, méconnu (1864–1951), Semur-en-Auxois 2004, p.59, and p.134 for the date; and F. Fossier et al.: Henri Rivière. Graveur et photographe, Paris 1988, pp.74 and 81, no.36. There is also a painting of the same spot made in the summer of 1888 by A.H. de Koning (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), who was a friend of Theo’s and Vincent’s. 65 Hannema, op. cit. (note 40), p.10. 66 Temperatures had fallen to around ten degrees Celsius at the end of October, and rose a little at the beginning of November (data Parc de Saint-Maur, from Météo France). 67 F 238/JH 1178. See Hannema, op. cit. (note 40), p.11. 68 Other comparable studies from that autumn are F -/JH Add. 2; F 224/JH 1112; F 225/JH 1110; F 238/JH 1178; F 239/JH 1267; F 264/JH 1179; F 274/JH 1115; and F 256/JH 1169. For new datings for some of the works from this period, see L. van Tilborgh: ‘Chronologie’, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, op. cit. (note 46), I, pp.28–31. It should be noted that F 239/JH 1267 dates from the autumn of 1887, not 1886. 69 Hannema, op. cit. (note 40), p.11. 70 For a conspectus of his supply of paints in Paris, see E. Hendriks: ‘Van Gogh’s working practice: a technical study’, in Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, op. cit. (note 46), I, pp.102–06. Two examples of paintings with Rey et Perrod’s stamp are Toulouse-
Lautrec’s Young woman at a table: ‘Poudre de Riz’ of 1887 (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam), and Louis Anquetin’s La Dame au Carrick of c.1891 (private collection). For examples by John Peter Russell dated to 1886 and 1887, see A. Galbally: The art of John Peter Russell, Melbourne 1977, pp.99–100, nos.46 and 60. 71 F215d/JH -; for the attribution to Van Gogh, see Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, op. cit. (note 46), II, p.36. 72 Automatic thread counts were made from high-resolution digital scans of X-rays covering the whole picture area. The average thread count values for both paintings almost match; 14.1 by 16.9 threads per cm. for The Blute-fin mill and 14.3 by 16.9 threads per cm. for Portrait of a woman. A sample of ground from The Blute-fin mill shows a layer of 70 micrometers thick containing lead white, with small additions of calcium sulphate, barium sulphate and orange ochre pigment. The thickness of the layer, its composition and the morphology of the pigment particles all agree closely with the ground layer on Portrait of a woman. All samples discussed in this article were prepared in cross section and examined with the light microscope by Muriel Geldof at the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage in Amsterdam (ICN). Scanning Electron Microscopy with Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (SEM-EDS) was performed on the samples by Kees Mensch and Muriel Geldof at the Shell Research and Technology Centre in Amsterdam (SRTCA); see ICN report 2009–055.
45. Bois de Boulogne with people walking, by Vincent van Gogh. 1886. Canvas, 37.5 by 45.5 cm. (Noro Foundation).
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46. Detail of the reverse of Fig.39. 47. (Right). Automated weave map generated from high-resolution X-ray scans of Fig.39, revealing characteristic banding from subtle variations in warp thread density. 48. (Far right). Infra-red detail of Fig.39 showing a diagonal line of underdrawing traced from a perspective frame.
from the diagonal axis of a perspective frame (Fig.48). Infra-red examination of his plein-air studies made in and around Paris has often revealed pencil lines traced from a perspective frame with cords stretched across its window in a ‘union-jack’ (cross with diagonals) configuration, used to help transpose his motif onto the flat surface of the canvas in the correct proportions.73 Here the thickness of the paint limits the visible underdrawing to this single line segment, though more may be present. If the visible line is extended downwards it intersects the near corner of the mill fence where it is crossed by the left branch of the almost bare tree, marking a strategic point in the composition. X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) indicated the presence of vermilion, chrome yellow, zinc white, emerald or Scheele’s green, cobalt blue and possibly viridian or chromium oxide green.74 In addition, Scanning Electron Microscopy with Energy Dispersive Spectroscopy (SEM-EDS) of a sample of the well-preserved red lake colour revealed the substrate to contain aluminium and calcium, whereas High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) confirmed the organic pigment to be cochineal (Dactylopius coccus Costa).75 It is therefore the relatively stable type of cochineal lake, which has been identified in several other paintings from Van Gogh’s Paris period (1886–87).76 In places, the colours have been used unmixed from the tube to create bright effects, set off against sizeable blackish areas that chiefly consist of a mixture of coloured pigments, though a little carbon black may be present too.77 All of the pigments identified are known to have been present on Van Gogh’s palette in the autumn of 1886, including the chrome yellow that
had replaced the Naples yellow (lead antimoniate) earlier that year.78 Similarly, none of the pigments that entered his palette in early 1887 was found, such as red lead, cobalt violet and the less stable type of cochineal lake on a substrate containing tin.79 In keeping with other works by Van Gogh painted in the autumn of 1886, The Blute-fin mill shows a direct alla prima approach with most features simply painted over the fresh background colours.80 The numerous figures were improvised too, added onto a first coloured lay-in of the steps with red lake and dark horizontal strokes. The upper portion of the steps has been left in this sketchy state, whereas the lower part was worked up to completion by adding light horizontal strokes once the figures were in place. The same cochineal lake paint was used to thinly sketch in other areas of the composition too, applied both as pure crimson and mixed with zinc white to provide various tones of purple. A parallel for this lay-in with diluted washes of bright colour is found in some earlier Paris and Antwerp works by Van Gogh.81 Glimpses of the first sketch can be seen in open passages of brushwork across the composition (Fig.49), except in the sky, which was brushed in with a thin layer of zinc white instead.82 The white is still visible where the subsequent light blue layer did not quite extend to the left edge. The preliminary sketch was still wet when Van Gogh proceeded to work up the painting, virtually bringing it to completion in one go. Bold strokes carved into the fresh underlayers to provide a pronounced surface modelling, as in the greyish green dress of the woman in the left foreground, where bright, channelled strokes of vermilion were added to render the folds
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substrate containing aluminium and calcium as found elsewhere. However, the low molecular weight of their constituent elements makes it hard to detect these pigments with XRF. 78 Hendriks, op. cit. (note 73), I, p.148. 79 Ibid., I, pp.151, 156 and 155 respectively. 80 Only the main shapes of the mill and foreground buildings were planned in reserve, being sketched with dry blackish strokes on the ground. 81 A very thin underlayer of cochineal on an aluminium and calcium substrate was used to lay in the blackish dress of Van Gogh’s early Paris Portrait of a woman (F 215b/JH -). Thin washes of red lake and blue underpaint have also been observed in his Antwerp period paintings; red lake and blue in F 207/JH 979, and different shades of blue in F 174/JH 978. 82 The first crimson to purple sketch may be glimpsed, for example, between the forked branches of the tree on the left, by the far left corner of the flat roof, in
E. Hendriks: ‘Van Gogh’s use of the perspective frame in his Paris paintings’, in I. Verger, ed.: ICOM Committee for Conservation: preprints. 14th Triennial Meeting in The Hague, London 2005, I, pp.473–79. 74 XRF was performed by Luc Megens from the ICN (report number 2009–055); see note 72 above. 75 Ibid. In addition to cochineal, the sample contained a little lead white, zinc white, ultramarine and viridian. 76 Ibid.; and M. van Bommel, M. Geldof and E. Hendriks: ‘An investigation of organic red pigments used in paintings by Vincent van Gogh (November 1885 to February 1888)’, Art Matters: Netherlands Technical Studies 3 (2005), pp.113–15. 77 A pigment containing chrome was detected by XRF, possible chrome yellow, viridian or chrome green (ICN report 2009–055; see note 72 above). Microscopic examination also indicated the presence of a dark blue and a vivid red lake pigment, probably French ultramarine and a stable variety of cochineal lake on the same
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49. Photomicrograph of Fig.39 revealing traces of a purple sketch behind the handrail.
51. Photomicrograph of Fig.39 showing final touches of green added to the dress.
50. Photomicrograph of Fig.39 showing the stringy nature of the impasto mixed with zinc white.
52. Photomicrograph of Fig.39 showing how the pink face was obliterated by a final touch of dull green.
and bow. Some light strokes with zinc white create the most pronounced impasto with a coarse stringy texture, with fine trailing drips formed where the brush was lifted from the canvas, revealing the ductile properties of the zinc white paint (Fig.50).83 These short (stiff) yet stringy characteristics of Van Gogh’s impasto have been noted as a hallmark of his technique from an early date.84 Similarly, the variety of brushes exploited for lively effect, ranging from a fine pointed one used for hatched detailing to a flat-tipped brush 1.5 cm. wide, has a parallel in the range used in his slightly earlier Vase with gladioli and Chinese asters, for example (Fig.53).85 Although the colour scheme was largely established by the wet-in-wet mixing and layering of strokes, some final adjustments were made by adding last touches on top of paint that was at least dry-to-touch. One example is the final accents of bright green added onto the pale blue dress of the woman in the centre, providing an effective contrast to her light orange hat and the patch of bright vermilion colour added beside her sleeve (Fig.51). The woman beside her provides another example. At first her face was pink with crimson touches detailing her features, yet, once dry, this was largely obliterated by a flat patch of dull olive green (Fig.52). The greyish-green colour echoed that of the dress of the woman above, while providing complementary contrast
to her bright orange cap. This fine-tuned adjustment of a scheme consisting of both bright complementary colours and ‘broken’ greyish ones is reminiscent of the flower pieces Van Gogh painted throughout the summer of 1886, in which he often added greyer touches around the tips of the brightly coloured petals as a later refinement to soften the transition to the background area. One example is the light purplish to grey strokes added onto the pale asters and at the tips of the gladioli on the left in the Vase with gladioli and Chinese asters (Fig.53). However, not all the elements in the painting have direct parallels in Van Gogh’s œuvre. The size and number of figures is unusual for him, although there is the typically odd perspective of the figures at the bottom of the steps being too large relative to those immediately behind them. Van Gogh was generally not too bothered about academically correct proportions, and one finds a similar lack of harmony between the figures in works containing several of them.86 Nevertheless, reviewing all the evidence one can only conclude that Hannema was right to attribute this canvas to Van Gogh. The latter may even have referred to it in his correspondence, albeit indirectly, for it was one of the ‘dozen landscapes’ he had painted since arriving in Paris that are mentioned in a letter from the autumn of 1886.87
between the slats of the fence on the mill terrace, and in between the handrail beside the steps. 83 Pronounced passages of light impasto with zinc white occur, for example, in the cloud at top left, in the pale blue dress of the woman with the feathered hat, and in the bow on the greyish dress of the woman in the foreground. 84 On this, see E. Hendriks and S. Hughes: ‘Van Gogh’s brushstrokes; marks of authenticity?’, Art, conservation and authenticities: material, concept, context, London 2009, pp.145–46. 85 F 248a/JH 1149. In The Blute-fin mill it is striking how broad vertical strokes made with a brush approximately 1 cm. wide were used to rework the fresh paint surface in the region of the right treetop, smudging the fine detail of the branches. 86 See, for example, F 347/JH 1241 and F 426/JH 1468. 87 See Letters, no.569. So far only eleven of these landscapes have been identified; see L. van Tilborgh: ‘Van Gogh in Cormon’s studio: a chronological puzzle’, Van Gogh
Museum Studies 1 (2007), p.70, note 31 (with one wrong suggestion, namely F 239/JH 1267), but two more can now be added: the painting in the Museum de Fundatie (Fig.39) and F 271/JH 1186 (Fig.43). See the main text for the latter work. Van Gogh’s letter is dated ‘September or October 1886’ in Letters, but if we include the painting in the Museum de Fundatie as one of the dozen, it means that the letter was written after the first trees had already shed their leaves. That would be roughly November, which would fit in well with Van Gogh’s statement in the same letter that he had recently been making portraits. The cold of winter had made it impossible to work out of doors, so he would have switched to that genre from landscapes. It is also possible that the painting was one of the ‘2 views of the Moulin de la Galette’, which Van Gogh mentioned in his proposal for an exchange of works with Charles Angrand on 25th October 1886; see Letters, no.570. No such exchange ever took place, as far as we know.
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The relationship to the three other views of the same spot – the sketchbook sheet, the large drawing and the lost painting (Figs.41–43) – can only be determined if one knows when they were made. De la Faille and Hulsker originally placed them in the late autumn or early winter of 1886–87.88 The trees in the drawings are completely bare, unlike those in Hannema’s painting, which resulted in the date of the large sheet, in particular, being moved forward to the early spring of 1887, after the painting.89 That, however, is illogical, for once Van Gogh had depicted something in paint he never took up a pencil or a piece of chalk to record it again.90 He did the opposite, which means that both sheets with their bare trees have to be dated to the spring of 1886, when Van Gogh was training in the studio of the history painter Fernand Cormon and was exploring the city and the hill of Montmartre in his spare time.91 Those datings are confirmed by other pieces of information. The sketchbook including the small sheet with the view of the mill (Fig.41) also contains sketches of scenes from the centre of Paris and the hill of Montmartre, as well as studies of plaster casts, which tells us that the entire book was filled while Van Gogh was studying with Cormon. That the large drawing (Fig.42) dates from the same period is clear from its descriptive style, which does not match that of the drawings from the end of 1886 or beginning of 1887, when Van Gogh was starting to work in a far more stylised way, but does fit in with the drawings he made in Antwerp and during his time with Cormon,92 when he learned to work far more carefully and in much more detail than in his Nuenen period. In fact, one can regard the drawing of the mill as his first attempt to employ those recently developed skills in a landscape.93 The lost painting (Fig.43), which clearly postdates the large drawing (Fig.42), was not made in the autumn, as previously thought, for on the left there are fresh green leaves as harbingers of spring.94 There is no foliage on the large tree on the right, nor on the branches growing through the roof of the building, which means that it would have been painted in May 1886. The use of colour, which is far less powerful than the palette Van Gogh was using in the autumn, matches that of the View of Montmartre with windmills (Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo), which was also painted in May 1886 and has the same blocked, almost square brushstrokes in the sky.95 In other words, Van Gogh depicted the mill and the steps leading up to it soon after he arrived in Paris, first in his sketchbook (Fig.41), and then in the large drawing (Fig.42). The bare branches of the trees show that these were done in March or April, and when the weather became a little warmer and the trees
bore their first leaves he painted his study of the mill in oils (Fig.43). He evidently found the result promising, because he signed the painting but did not follow it up, or at least not immediately. From then on he depicted the mill from another vantage point,96 and only returned to the first spot with the terrace and the bar six months later (Fig.39). Van Gogh’s new painting (Fig.39) was by no means an exercise in repetition. He had stressed the rural nature of the site in the scenes he had made in the spring (Figs.41–43) and in his later studies of the site, and in doing so he was placing himself in the tradition of the Barbizon painters, who had portrayed the hill and mills of Montmartre as a rustic spot. Now, by emphasising the many figures parading up and down the steps, Van Gogh was modernising the subject, as he did with Guinguette (Fig.44), following the example of the contemporary urban repertory of the modern generation of artists. It is also interesting that he opted for a new, essentially different formal vocabulary, with the result that the mill seems to form the cautious start to his later, modern goal of creating a diversity of styles within a single subject. In 1888, for example, he painted numerous orchards and harvest scenes, and assured Theo that he would paint the same subjects the following year, ‘but – with a different colour and above all, altered execution. And that will still continue, these changes and these variations’.97 Unlike the subject, the new style of The Blute-fin mill did not accord with the latest fashion. Van Gogh himself said that he did not belong to the Impressionists’ ‘club’,98 but he did confess to an admiration for Monet, although that did not mean that he subscribed to the blonde palette of Monet and his friends.99 The French artist worked with ‘just a few colours, and in the centre of the palette, mountains of white, snowy white’, whereas Van Gogh was still using dark mixtures, as can be seen in The Blutefin mill.100 He considered powerful colours and contrasts more important than the depiction of light, and in that he was following in the footsteps of another master – Adolphe Monticelli. He began working in the spirit of that Provençal artist in the summer of 1886, at first only in still lifes but later also in city views and landscapes, and the painting in the Museum de Fundatie is a fine example of this new direction. The Blute-fin mill is quite an unusual work, not only because of the number of figures but also through its seemingly artless design. The mill itself is fluently articulated, but the bottom section is even more schematic than the equally rapid and coarsely painted Guinguette (Fig.44). The handrail and the figures by the bar are almost shorthand jottings for which there are no obvious parallels, except perhaps in his still lifes from the summer of 1886.
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painted study have leaves (Fig.44) whereas they do not in the drawing, but it was not realised that the latter is unfinished. Van Gogh began adding foliage to the pergola on the right but did not extend it to the rest of the sheet at the time, and probably never got around to adding it in detail later. There are just a few hatchings, but they are easily overlooked, with the result that the drawing appears to be a winter scene. 91 See Van Tilborgh, op. cit. (note 87), for the dating of Van Gogh’s time in Cormon’s studio in the spring of 1886. 92 See, for example, F 1369v/JH 1018; F 1319v/JH 911; F 1366v/JH 1044; and F 1366r/JH 1039. 93 For his Nuenen works, see, for example, F 1345/JH 802 and F 1319v/JH 911. 94 The painting was dated to the spring of 1887 when it was auctioned in 1963; see sale, Sotheby’s, London, 11th June 1963, lot 49.
F 271/JH 1185; F 1395/JH 1186; and F 1396a/JH 1888; C.F. Ives et al.: exh. cat. Vincent van Gogh. The drawings, New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Amsterdam (Van Gogh Museum) 2005, no.36. 89 It is cautiously dated February/March 1887 in M. Vellekoop and S. van Heugten: Vincent van Gogh. Drawings. Volume 3. Antwerp & Paris 1885–1888. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam and Blaricum 2001, p.214, but a firmer standpoint is taken in Ives, op. cit. (note 88), no.36. 90 It was only in Arles and Saint-Rémy that Van Gogh made drawings after paintings, but then he had other reasons for doing so. It is also thought that the sheet F 1407/JH 1034, also from the Paris period, was made after the painting of the same subject (Fig.44). See Vellekoop and Van Heugten, op. cit. (note 89), p.218, where it is dated February/March 1887. It is more likely, however, that the drawing was made in the autumn of 1886, prior to the painting. It is true that the trees in the
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53. Vase with gladioli and Chinese asters, by Vincent van Gogh. 1886. Canvas, 48.5 by 40 cm. (Vincent van Gogh Foundation, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam).
The undeniable charm of the painting lies mainly in this terse brushwork, and together with clumsy touches like the man in black who looks as if he is floating above the steps, it shows us the artist in the throes of his work, with all his idiosyncrasies and shortcomings. The painting is an excellent illustration of Van Gogh’s remark that he would go on ‘producing work in which people [. . .] can find faults’, as he wrote in 1885, but which would have to have ‘a certain life and raison d’être that will overwhelm those faults’.101 We do not know whether Van Gogh was satisfied with The Blute-fin mill. He did not sign it. Nor did he tackle the subject later in a larger size, and never again did he dare depict so many large figures. However, he was evidently impatient to see how it looked when framed, for the edges show linear impressions from slats that were pressed against the fresh paint surface and then lifted away, sucking up the paint. Similar marks have been
95
F 266/JH 1175. For the dating of that work, see Ten Berge et al., op. cit. (note 24), p.141. In addition, the rather arbitrary, highly impasted light passages match up well with his Antwerp paintings, where he first employed that device, F 206/JH 972 being a case in point. 96 In chronological order they are F 1397/JH 1173; F 273/JH 1116; and F 274/JH 1115. 97 Letters, no.686. 98 Ibid., no.569. 99 Ibid. 100 The quotation is from a letter by Monet; see A. Callen: The art of Impressionism. Painting technique & the making of modernity, New Haven and London 2000, p.150. 101 Letters, no.528. 102 F 248a/JH 1149. See the research report of 2001 by Ella Hendriks, Van Gogh
observed down the left and right sides of the Vase with gladioli and Chinese asters (Fig.53), revealing that Van Gogh did this more than once.102 All this leaves us with the question of what the acceptance of The Blute-fin mill as a genuine Van Gogh means for Hannema’s reputation as a connoisseur. Epicurean in his taste, he had always felt the need to prove himself as an art historian, but that only began to assume serious proportions in the 1960s and 1970s, when he started speculating in public about the makers of the works he had bought as anonymous pieces. As a man of taste with no truly specialist knowledge it was almost inevitable that he would think of great rather than minor masters, but so far none of those speculative attributions has stood the test of criticism – apart, that is, from the name he came up with for this view of a mill. In contrast to the beginning of his career as a collector, he bought his anonymous works increasingly with the expectation of being able to attribute them, and his speculations about the possible artists could best be described as a scattergun approach. In his quest for great names he hit the target once, as we now know, but that will not rehabilitate him as a connoisseur. What is interesting, however, is that it seems that Hannema himself was well aware that this one case could not be compared to his other suggestions. However categorical he was about them, he evidently realised that they were based more on intuition than on fact. For example, he described his attribution of The supper at Emmaus to Vermeer as ‘an opinion that is a conviction’,103 but felt that his idea about Van Gogh as the maker of The Blute-fin mill was not in the least bit subjective or speculative. ‘This discovery is not an attribution but an absolute certainty’, he wrote shortly after the painting was acquired in 1975.104 In short, he had hit the bull’s-eye – and he knew it. A lucky bull’s-eye it may have been, but Hannema’s attribution of the painting to Van Gogh was very commendable, because no one else had come up with that name. The unusually large size of the figures, and their number, had probably thrown people off the scent for a long time, but Hannema was not hampered by excessive specialist knowledge, as demonstrated by his other, incorrect attributions to the same artist. He presumably just looked at the ‘broad, brilliant and impasted’ style. His swift recognition that it was Van Gogh’s was due to his familiarity with Guinguette (Fig.44), which is so similar in brushwork and colour scheme. That work hung in his favourite museum, the Louvre in Paris, and after rightly making that connection it was simplicity itself to find scenes of the identical subject in the catalogue of Van Gogh’s œuvre.105
Museum archives. 103 Hannema, op. cit. (note 1), p.155. 104 Letter from Hannema, 17th November 1975, op. cit. (note 58). Although he initially insured it for 80,000 guilders, he rightly realised that that was far too little: ‘The present value at an international auction would run to several hundred thousand, and perhaps more’; letter cited at note 31 above. 105 Guinguette hung in the Louvre from 1927 to 1967 before being moved to the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume. ‘I have visited Paris at least a hundred times in the past fifty years. I visited the Louvre at least twice each time. I have visited it more than two hundred times’; see Hannema, op. cit. (note 1), pp.169–70 and 174–76. He would also have been familiar with Bois de Boulogne with people walking (Fig.45), for that matter, for it was on loan to the Museum Boymans in 1936–38, but he does not mention it to justify his attribution. the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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‘The sophisticated answer’: a recent display of forgeries held at the Victoria and Albert Museum by TOM HARDWICK
Sir Anthony Blunt: I still think the word ‘fake’ is inappropriate, ma’am. Queen Elizabeth II: If something is not what it is claimed to be, what is it? Blunt: An enigma? The Queen: That is, I think, the sophisticated answer.1 IN JANUARY 2010 the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, mounted an exhibition initiated and curated by the Arts and Antiques Unit (the ‘Art Squad’) at Scotland Yard, The Metro politan Police Service’s Investigation of Fakes and Forgeries.2 Initially scheduled to last for just over two weeks, from 23rd January to 7th February, the exhibition was extended for a fortnight until 21st February, and attracted over thirty-five thousand visitors, excellent numbers for a small temporary display: the two rooms of the exhibition were solidly packed for much of the show’s run, and were significantly busier than the neighbouring display of recent acquisitions made by the Museum (like the police display, this too contained some notable contemporary works of art). Given pride of place at the entrance to the exhibition, in an alarmed case, was the ‘Amarna Princess’ (Figs.54 and 55). This fragmentary gypsum alabaster statue had been acquired by Bolton Museum in 2003 for £440,000 as a representation of one of the daughters of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten (c.1350–1335 BC), the ‘heretic king’ and father of Tutankhamun. Akhenaten abandoned the old Egyptian gods to worship the sun-disc, moved the capital of Egypt from Thebes to a new site at Tell el Amarna and ordered a new, expressive style of art to record this. ‘Amarna’ objects are rare, beautiful and valuable. The ‘Amarna Princess’ was first brought to the attention of the Keeper of Egyptology at Bolton in 2002 by a Mr George Greenhalgh, an octogenarian living in a council house in a Bolton suburb. Mr Greenhalgh’s great-grandfather had bought it at the 1892 sale of the contents of Silverton Park, the Devonshire seat of the 4th Earl of Egremont, as his annotated copy of the catalogue showed. At a time when concerns over the provenance of antiquities have become widespread,3 this played an important part in the piece’s acquisition, which took place after much negotiation in 2003. The ‘Amarna Princess’ was fêted after her acquisition, which was largely funded by the National Heritage Memorial Fund: she was exhibited at the Hayward Gallery, and featured in the pages of this Magazine as a notable recent acquisition.4 Barely two years later, however, she was seized by the Art Squad and formed the centrepiece of an investigation which eventually saw George
Greenhalgh, his wife, Olive, and their son, Shaun, convicted on charges of fraud stretching back over seventeen years. The series of works made by Shaun Greenhalgh and peddled by George seems to have begun in 1989 with a silver reliquary of the True Cross inscribed for Eadred, the tenth-century King of the West Saxons, apparently discovered in a park in Preston (Fig.56). It continued with the ‘rediscovery’ of the Risley Park Lanx, a Roman silver tray lost since the 1720s, a Japanese gold crown, Roman and Anglo-Saxon metalwork, Egyptian and Assyrian sculptures, works by Barbara Hepworth and Paul Gauguin (the latter acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago), and paintings and drawings by Cubist artists and the Bolton-born American artist Thomas Moran.5 The Greenhalgh atelier featured prominently in the Art Squad’s exhibition, billed as ‘the most diverse art fraud in history’, but the exhibition also contained other recent British forgeries: ‘Victorian’ fairy paintings created by Robert Thwaites, exhibited alongside his preparatory notes and sketches; some of the mid-twentieth century paintings made by John Myatt and given false provenances and sold by John Drewe;6 forgeries and pastiches of antique silver; and forged prints said to be by Banksy and Damien Hirst. The display of these forgeries of second-division artists, minor objects and mass-produced works reminded the viewer that much profitable forgery involves the bulk production of mid-range material which receives less attention than masterpieces: the word on the ceramic, lacquer and Egyptological streets is that workshops based in China and/or provided with Chinese recipes and management are producing vast quantities of pieces which are technically perfect, if stylistically questionable. As an aside to this, a recent article claims that online sales of forged antiquities are driving down demand for looted originals.7 Although not above a little creative display themselves – the evocation of Shaun Greenhalgh’s workshop in a toolshed fresh from B&Q, surrounded by AstroTurf, was an arresting, surreal addition (Fig.57) – the police exhibition was unrepentantly dogmatic. Forgery is a crime, and its perpetrators are not to be admired (the object labels finished ‘Created by convicted criminal so-and-so’, lacking only the length of their prison sentence) or given special pleading. The financial side of the frauds was prominently displayed on the labels: a £440,000 Egyptian statue; a £240,000 Ben Nicholson; a £100,000 John Anster Fitzgerald. The straight-down-the-line views manifest in the Art Squad exhibition were in contrast to the more discursive approach now adopted by most museum curators. The 1990 exhibition Fake? The Art of Deception 8 was a landmark event in that it demonstrated
I am indebted to Pablo Pérez d’Ors, V.A. Donohue, and Amanda Bruce of the Victoria and Albert Museum for their assistance. 1 A. Bennett: A Question of Attribution, in idem: Single Spies, London 1988, p.50. 2 The exhibition was reviewed by R. Falkiner: ‘Forging Into the Past: The V&A’s exhibition of fake art and forgeries’, Minerva 21/2 (March/April 2010), pp.8–9. 3 For two positions on this, see J. Cuno: Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the
Battle Over our Ancient Heritage, Princeton 2008; and C. Renfrew: Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership: the Ethical Crisis in Archaeology, London 2000. 4 The ‘Amarna Princess’ was displayed at the Hayward Gallery in the exhibition Saved! 100 Years of the National Art Collections Fund (23rd October 2003 to 18th January 2004), although it was acquired too late to be included in the exhibition catalogue, and featured in ‘The Jerwood Supplement: Recent Acquisitions
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54. The ‘Amarna Princess’, forgery in the style of an Egyptian sculpture of 1350 BC, by Shaun Greenhalgh. 2001. Gypsum alabaster, 52 cm. high. (Metropolitan Police; formerly the Bolton Museum; exh. Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
55. Fig.54 viewed from the side.
the chronological and cultural sweep of forgery and varying approaches to authenticity, and even encouraged a guarded respect for forgers’ accomplishments. Even if the ‘Amarna Princess’ no longer documents fourteenth century BC Egyptian culture, she is an invaluable witness to the twenty-first century state of British Egyptomania and Egyptology, and certainly looks the same as she did before. The Art Squad exhibition provided an interesting and informative window into the forgery of works of art, but its viewpoint – as its organisers would admit – was partisan and limited. The Victoria and Albert Museum, with its curatorial emphasis on craftsmanship, and its original role as guardian of standards in British design, was an ideal venue for the exhibition, but it revealed a gap in the Museum’s own displays. Since the 1980s the V. & A. had had a small but important display of forgeries in the corridor between its cast courts. This was removed in 2004
to make way for a temporary display of medieval material while the galleries were renovated, and has not since been reinstated. Given the demonstrable public interest in the subject, and the director of the V. & A.’s own work in this field, it is to be hoped that the Museum is planning a new, updated display devoted to forgery. The opening panel of the recent exhibition stated baldly ‘Art fraud investigation has a history that involves more than simply spotting a “dodgy” brushstroke’. In so far as the evidence needed to reattribute an object or decline its purchase is of a different calibre from the burden of proof needed by the police to pursue a criminal case, this is true. Nonetheless the exhibition provided a reassuring demonstration of the importance of close examination in the study of works of art. Careful inspection revealed that Shaun Greenhalgh’s work was technically barely competent at best. The ‘Amarna Princess’
(1999–2004) of Sculpture by British Museums and Galleries’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 146 (2004), p.856, pl.III. 5 For a fuller list of the Greenhalgh productions and an analysis of their Egyptian works, see T. Hardwick: ‘A Group of Art Works in the Amarna Style’, in S.H. d’Auria, ed.: Offerings to the Discerning Eye: an Egyptological Medley in Honor of Jack A. Josephson, Boston 2010, pp.133–51.
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On Drewe and Myatt, see L. Salisbury and A. Sujo: The Conman: How One Man Fooled the Modern Art Establishment, London 2010; this book fully discusses the case but without providing a single illustration. 7 C. Stanish: ‘Forging Ahead: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love eBay’, Archaeology 62/3 (May/June 2009), pp.18 and 58–66. 8 M. Jones, ed.: exh. cat. Fake?: The Art of Deception, London (British Museum) 1990. the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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57. Forger’s shed. 2010. Mixed media, approx. 180 cm. high. (Metropolitan Police; exh. Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
was made of the wrong type of alabaster – not calcite, but far softer gypsum, which would never have lasted three thousand years without damage; the Risley Park Lanx was made of the right type of silver, but using such a strange process as to make its authenticity difficult to believe without special pleading;9 Shaun’s ‘Thomas Morans’ were crudely aged; the ‘Eadred Reliquary’ looked like a prop from the film of the Lord of the Rings. With hindsight many of his creations do not hold water. How, then, did the Greenhalghs escape prosecution for so long? One reason, given by Dick Ellis, a former head of the Art Squad, was that the Squad was underfunded, and unable to act on an earlier complaint – the clear subtext of the present exhibition was that the Art Squad needs an increased budget. Another reason lay in the variety of their creations: suspicious AngloSaxonists would be unlikely to share their findings with curators of nineteenth-century art. A third explanation was that many of the pieces were assessed in the light of their ingeniously chosen provenances, rather than as objects in their own right: any doubts as to the genuineness of an item were stilled by the object’s history, even if few facts of the provenance stood up to detailed scrutiny. Perhaps the most important reason, if one that was never explicitly stated, was that few of those involved with the
Greenhalgh material could envisage a series of ambitious forgeries emerging from a ramshackle household ‘up north’, nor did they try very hard to envisage it. It was preferable to see the Greenhalghs as characters out of an episode of The Antiques Road Show,10 where every attic conceals a Constable, and their goods as genuine. A forgery is something from which, until the music stops, everyone concerned benefits: the forger most of all; but also the curators who discover and identify the object; the dealers and auction houses who take their cut of its price;11 the scholar given the first opportunity to publish it; the museum that wins it; the national heritage increased by it; and – most numerous of all – the members of the public now able to view the masterpiece, saved for the nation, in its new home. The exposure of an object as a forgery is a painful process for all those who celebrated its acquisition – except for the members of the public. As the success of the V. & A. exhibition showed, the public seems to take boundless enjoyment in seeing ‘experts’ deceived. Short-term pain aside, art historians and curators can take heart from this. Implicit in the public outrage at the ‘experts’ getting it wrong is the assumption that they are trusted to get it right most of the time. Not only does it usually require an ‘expert’ to realise and articulate why an object is a forgery (few forgers willingly unmask themselves, although many thereafter enjoy the attention),12 but the interest aroused by a fake’s exposure focuses attention back onto examination of the objects themselves. Undetected forgeries damage scholarship;13 detected forgeries strengthen it. The pervasive danger of forgeries or misattributed works in the market, however, reflects a nonnegotiable demand for informed study to establish their true identity. Theoretically dominated research cannot fill this need, but object-based scholarship can.
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12
56. The ‘Eadred Reliquary’, forgery in the style of an Anglo-Saxon model of 955 AD, by Shaun Greenhalgh. 1989. Silver, niello, glass, rose quartz, wooden relic, diameter 6 cm. (Private collection; on loan to the Bolton Museum).
See P. Craddock: Scientific Investigation of Copies, Fakes and Forgeries, London 2009, pp.508–12; reviewed in this issue on p.421. 10 A BBC drama on the Greenhalgh case, broadcast in 2009, was titled The Antiques Rogue Show. 11 While the forged Assyrian reliefs which led to the Greenhalghs’ exposure were first questioned by Bonham’s in 2005–06, the ‘Amarna Princess’ was sold to Bolton Museum through Christie’s, which had previously declined to handle objects from the Greenhalghs, suspecting it to be forged. It was not business morality but ‘client confidentiality’ that prevented them from making Bolton Museum fully aware of their earlier concerns at the time of the sale of the ‘Amarna Princess’.
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Forgers’ kiss-and-tells, such as those of Eric Hebborn, Tom Keating and Icilio Joni, are an entertaining and informative, although completely unreliable, genre: Shaun Greenhalgh wrote from prison that he fully intended ‘to speak in relation to my dealings over a long period of time with the art establishment, dealers and others’; The Bolton News (27th January 2009). 13 Two ‘Morans’ by Shaun Greenhalgh in Bolton Museum were authenticated by comparison with a group of Moran drawings, which had appeared on the market in the mid-1990s, claimed to have been executed in 1882 when Moran visited Bolton. These were also Greenhalgh creations.
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Late Renoir by COLIN B. BAILEY
20TH CENTURY , seen by this reviewer at the Grand Palais, Paris (23rd September 2009 to 4th January), then shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (14th February to 19th May), and opening this month at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (17th June to 6th September), was an unqualified triumph.1 Rigorously selected, sensitively installed, surveying almost thirty years of Renoir’s production in all media, the exhibition contained nearly ninety-eight works by Renoir, supplemented in Paris by twenty-seven by younger acolytes – including superb paintings by Picasso and Bonnard. A rich crop of period documentation complemented the display: seventyeight photographs, many previously unpublished, and Sacha Guitry’s beautiful silent biopic, Ceux de chez nous, made in September 1915. Particularly notable in this regard were the Arbus-like print from the Vollard archive of Renoir’s family in the studio on the rue Caulaincourt in 1902–03 (cat. no.145) and Konrad von Freyhold’s poignant photograph of the bald artist, taken in Nice in November 1913 (no.161) – the single occasion on which the ageing Renoir allowed himself to be portrayed in any medium without a cap. A show devoted to late Renoir presents formidable challenges to its organisers, not the least of which is the pervasive scepticism, if not outright hostility, of many art historians, curators and critics, who question whether the artist’s production after 1900 deserves more than the most passing scrutiny. On a practical level, the restrictions on loans from the Barnes Foundation might have rendered the project still-born, since the majority of the 181 paintings by Renoir in Merion are from the period covered in the exhibition, and Barnes, who believed that Renoir’s best paintings had been made between 1890 and 1919, assembled the most comprehensive survey of the late career in existence. Happily, the current exhibition has benefited from the collaboration of the Barnes Foundation, something that was not possible at the time of the great Renoir retrospective a quarter of a century ago. The catalogue reproduces in colour many of the Barnes’s Renoirs as comparative illustrations, and there is a fine essay by that institution’s associate curator, Martha Lucy, on Barnes and Leo Stein. Future studies of Renoir’s late work will make even greater strides after the publication of the Barnes’s catalogue of its Renoirs, undertaken by John House and Martha Lucy, both contributors to the present catalogue. The curators of Renoir in the 20th century succeeded in bringing together exemplary and representative works in every category that preoccupied Renoir in the last thirty years of his life – with one notable exception. If the decision to avoid the innumerable pochades, scraps and tiny sketches that Renoir made compulsively from the 1890s onwards, was understandable, a more serious RENOIR IN THE
1
Catalogue: Renoir au XXe siècle. Edited by Sylvie Patry and Claudia Einecke, with contributions by John House, Emmanuelle Héran, Isabelle Gaëtan, Virginie Journiac, Monique Noane, Martha Lucy, Laurence Madeline and Roger Benjamin. 439 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Musée d’Orsay/Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris, 2009), €49 (PB). ISBN 978–2–7188–5587–2. English edition: Renoir in the 20th Century, $85 (HB). ISBN 978–3–7757–2539–2.
58. Seated bather, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. 1914. Canvas, 81.6 by 67.7 cm. (Art Institute of Chicago; exh. Grand Palais, Paris).
shortcoming was the absence of a room devoted to still-life painting. Jean Renoir’s memoirs begin with the convalescing soldier being ushered in to an expectant father who is painting a still life of roses.2 René Gimpel was struck by the anecdote of Vollard presenting the seventy-seven-year-old artist with fish from the market and ordering him, ‘Peignez-moi ça’.3 A group of still lifes spanning the last decades of Renoir’s career would also have provided a survey of the various inflections within the late work, acting as a sort of control group for Renoir’s stylistic evolution in general, which the largely thematic display in Paris addressed only episodically. After the drum roll of Orsay’s two full-length Dance panels from 1883, accompanied by Picasso’s monumental pastel of the Village dance (Musée Picasso, Paris) of 1922 – indicating at the outset Picasso’s admiration for the older master, one of the 2 J. Renoir: Pierre-Auguste Renoir mon père, Paris 1981, p.9: La Boulangère and La grande-Louise ‘m’embrassèrent et me dirent que “le patron” était en train de peindre des roses’. 3 R. Gimpel: Journal d’un collectionneur marchand de tableaux, Paris 1963, p.65, 15th August 1918. Renoir’s Les Poissons, signed and dated 1917 (Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Parma), is a candidate for the painting in question; see S. Tosini Pizzetti: Fondazione Magnani Rocca, Catalago Generale, Florence 2001, pp.158–59.
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60. Portrait of a model, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. 1916. Canvas, 55.5 by 46 cm. (Musée Picasso, Paris; exh. Grand Palais, Paris).
59. Seater bather in a landscape, called Euridyce, by PierreAuguste Renoir. c.1902. Canvas, 116 by 89 cm. (Musée Picasso, Paris; exh. Grand Palais, Paris).
leitmotifs of both exhibition and catalogue – the display proceeded in rooms devoted to the ‘new departure’ of the 1890s, signalled by the Young girls at the piano (no.3), acquired by the State at Mallarmé’s initiative (and over the objections of the Louvre’s curators) in September 1892. In his fifties, Renoir is the painter of ‘jeunes filles en fleurs’ – intimiste Parisian pastorals inspired by the well-born young women of the Morisot, Baudot and Lerolle households; of standing and seated bathers, in which the struggle to integrate his figures within the landscape is not always resolved; and of his growing family and its retainers, treated with tenderness, affection and not the slightest sentimentality. At the Grand Palais, the first rotunda, painted a Renoir red, grouped seven female half-lengths, ranging in date from 1890 to 1908, to show the solidity of Renoir’s figure painting and the sensuality of these genre scenes posed for by models and household staff. Despite the similarity of formats, Renoir’s style ranged from the tightness and detail of The young mother (1898; private collection, Baltimore; no.18) to the amplitude and vibrancy of Seamstress at window (c.1908; New Orleans Museum of Art; no.4). By hanging the piquant and more tautly executed Girl tatting (La Frivolité) of 1906 (Philadelphia Museum of Art; no.33) on a wall apart, this sequence reminded us that the development of Renoir’s handling does not progress in any straightforward way. Style may also be influenced by location and format. La Frivolité was painted in the summer of 1906 in Essoyes, not Cagnes; it is an interior scene, with little sense of enveloping daylight, and of greater concentration than the monumental and more fluidly painted Promenade (1906; Barnes Foundation), for which the same model posed in an identical blouse. The range in Renoir’s ‘late’ style over the decade 1898–1908 was well illustrated in this section, but I was troubled by the dating to 1890 of the first work in the sequence, The head of a young girl (no.37), acquired from Renoir by Durand-Ruel in June 1900 for 150
francs (according to Daulte) and donated to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, by Vladimir Horowitz in 1948. Its handling is certainly softer and more placid than the more sonorous later examples with which it was grouped, but it should be dated several years later, to the late 1890s, given its affinities with the Self-portrait of 1899 from Williamstown (no.19), whose arabesque-patterned background it also shares. The following section held seven superb nudes from 1899 to 1916, vertical in format, celebrating Apollinaire’s observation that ‘le vieux Renoir [. . .] use ses derniers jours à peindre ces nus admirables qui feront l’admiration des temps à venir’.4 The central work here was La Source (1906; no.31), one of the five paintings Renoir exhibited at the Salon d’automne of that year, immortalised in 1925 in Maurice Denis’s ceiling decoration of the coupole Dutuit in the Petit Palais.5 A homage of sorts to Ingres, Titian and Rubens, it is a work of the greatest concentration and plasticity, anticipating such masterpieces as the Barnes’s After the bath (1910) and the Art Institute of Chicago’s Seated bather of 1914 (no.62; Fig.58). This section also included two nudes that once belonged to Picasso, one of which is well known to visitors to the Musée Picasso, but the second of which – the mesmerising Portrait of a model, signed and dated 1916 (no.75; Fig.60) – is rarely on view there. Among the discoveries of the exhibition for this reviewer, this is Renoir’s most Titianesque nude, in which he unashamedly steals all the Venetian master’s tricks (to paraphrase a celebrated boutade reported by Walter Pach). Form emerges with absolute assurance from a vortex of inchoate, thinly applied strokes; the bare-breasted model seems to be resting her right arm on the back of a chair, but we cannot be sure if this is an interior or exterior scene. The abbreviation and extreme sketchiness of much of the canvas in no way detract from the consummate modelling of the woman’s face and torso, which impose themselves with absolute conviction –
4
deity of La Source at his side; see Sylvie Patry’s excellent survey, ‘Renoir and the Nabis’, in op. cit. (note 1), pp.146–57, where the section of the ceiling is illustrated as fig.61.
G. Apollinaire: Chroniques d’art: 1902–1918, Paris 1993, p.278 (his review of the Futurists exhibition mounted by Bernheim-Jeune in February 1912). 5 Denis portrayed the aged Renoir working on a small vertical canvas, with the
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62. Jean as a hunter, by PierreAuguste Renoir. 1910. Canvas, 173 by 89 cm. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art; exh. Grand Palais, Paris).
61. Dancing girl with tambourine, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. 1909. Canvas, 155 by 64.8 cm. (National Gallery, London; exh. Grand Palais, Paris).
a striking example of Renoir’s ‘audace, abondance et générosité’.6 Picasso’s other Renoir, Seated bather in a landscape, called Euridyce (no.22; Fig.59), presented pleasures of a different order. When should this work be dated? Traditionally assigned to between 1895 and 1900, the painting evokes the Arcadian and the classical that have come to be associated with Renoir’s move to the South of France. In terms of handling, subject-matter and luminosity, the Seated bather in a landscape, called Euridyce should be placed somewhat later, to around 1902. Here the relevant cognates are two smaller horizontal nudes, almost identical, for which the same model might have served: The sleeping nude in a landscape (formerly in Maurice Gangnat’s collection; present whereabouts unknown; the model also wears a white band in her chignon), and the Sleeping bather (La Boulangère), first owned by Gangnat’s friend the playwright Henry Bernstein, and today in the Niarchos Collection. Julius Meier-Graefe considered them to have been painted at roughly the same time and dated them both to 1902.7 6
A. André: Renoir, Paris 1919, p.20. J. Meier-Graefe: Renoir, Leipzig 1929, pp.287–88. As noted in the exhibition catalogue, the background detail of nymphs garlanding a herm reappears in Ode to
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From these late nudes, the next sequence was devoted to six radiant landscapes from the South of France, a section that could easily have been larger, but which elegantly introduced a small group of late mythologies – paintings and sculpture – under the rubric ‘Un Paradis des Dieux’. Renoir’s decorations, discussed at length in Sylvie Patry’s catalogue essay, were represented by three sets of vertical panels: Durand-Ruel’s folkloric diningroom paintings of 1890–91, now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington (nos.6 and 7); one of the pair of unfinished and stamped Caryatids (c.1897; no.10), on deposit at the Musée Renoir, Cagnes-sur-Mer; and the little-loved and frequently lent Dancing girl with tambourine and Dancing girl with castanets from the National Gallery, London (nos.40–41; Fig.61), painted in 1909 for Gangnat’s narrow dining-room in his apartment on the avenue de Friedland. Despite being shown in rather restricted quarters at the Grand Palais, the London pictures, hanging alone on a red wall, had never looked so beautiful. These Rubensian figures are clothed in riotous North African costumes painted with the brevity and sureness of touch that Renoir admired in Velázquez. Appropriately, their most eloquent champion was Henry Moore, who – in supporting their acquisition by the National Gallery in 1963 and acknowledging the general distaste for Renoir’s ‘best period’ – wrote eloquently of their ‘rounded forms [. . .] and marvellous, supple rhythms’. From decorations, via a second documentary section, the exhibition surveyed Renoir’s graphic art of the period – the most neglected aspect of his production, and long overdue for flowers (Anacreon) (1908; private collection, Japan), another painting that had belonged to Gangnat; such a late dating would be unsustainable for Seated bather in a landscape. the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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reappraisal. No exhibition has since approached the survey mounted by Durand-Ruel in April 1921, which included 142 sheets, in all media. As early as January 1886, Berthe Morisot, struck by one of Renoir’s preparatory sanguines for his Maternité, noted that he was ‘un dessinateur du premier ordre’, whose large number of preparatory drawings for a given picture would be of interest to the public, ‘qui s’imaginent que les impressionnistes travaillent avec la plus grand rapidité’.8 Although Jean Renoir stated that his father did not routinely use drawings to trace his compositions, other contemporary observers claimed the opposite, notably artists such as Jeanne Baudot, Albert André and Maurice Denis (the last mentioned in a journal entry for Pentecost 1897: ‘Renoir dessine sur des calques et modifie ses tableaux au moyen des calques successifs’).9 With Degas in mind, perhaps, Georges Rivière suggested that Renoir’s drawings might on occasion postdate his paintings and serve as a corrective to them.10 A little disappointingly, the exhibition was unable to assemble pairings to demonstrate the validity of any of these assertions. While it was able to borrow the monumental red-and-white chalk drawing of The coiffure (1900–01) from the Musée Picasso (no.84), the related painting in the Barnes was of course unavailable. That the works are illustrated pages apart in different sections of the catalogue only adds salt to the wound. As noted in the entry, the drawing is slightly larger than the painting, has been dated a year later and does not show exactly the same composition. In the painting, the attendant is brushing the bather’s hair; in the drawing she is wringing it dry by hand. Comparison with the Louvre’s large sanguine for the Judgment of Paris of around 1914 (no.67) – claimed to be the tracing of a painting of 1908 (also unavailable for the exhibition) – draws attention to the intense and somewhat leaden passages of brilliant white chalk in the Musée Picasso’s sheet, uncharacteristic of Renoir’s practice in these large sanguines (as far as one can tell). Might they have been strengthened by another hand? Following the somewhat truncated display of works on paper, the exhibition reached its conclusion in four magisterial sections
devoted to Renoir’s figure paintings, with superb examples of his grand-format nudes and portraits. The somewhat sketchy horizontal Reclining nude (Bather) of 1902 (no.28), in the Beyeler Foundation, Basel, deaccessioned in 1989 by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, also did duty for the more resolute and developed painting of the same subject at the Barnes Foundation, dated to 1910 – but is there really eight years between them? The Reclining nude was paired with Orsay’s long-limbed Nude on cushions (Large nude), signed and dated 1907 (no.39) – the most significant Renoir to have entered the French national collections since the Durand-Ruel Dance panels in 1979 and one of the artist’s most serene and perfectly crafted odalisques. The sense of plenitude and monumentality that is conveyed by these late nudes – in this same section were displayed São Paulo’s Bather drying her leg of c.1910 (no.60) and the previously mentioned Seated bather (no.62; Fig.58) – give the lie to the argument that these figures inhabit a ‘cottony world [. . .] a world of chiffon’ (the words are taken from the catalogue’s most engaging essay, Roger Benjamin’s ‘Why did Matisse Love Late Renoir?’). Renoir’s figures are far from being diaphanous and roseate confections. Once established at Les Collettes, he might claim to live in ‘une atmosphère ouatée’ (‘cossetted by the atmosphere’),11 but in his work Renoir strove for absolute solidity and the conquest of volume. Look at Renoir’s nudes, Maillol is reported to have said: ‘Ça c’est de la sculpture’.12 The sections devoted to Renoir’s late portraits were flawlessly selected: Renoir’s three sons and all his dealers were represented by his finest portraits of them, and 1910 emerges as an annus mirabilis. It was in that year that Renoir signed and dated works as different in mood and facture as the affectionate full-length of Jean as a hunter (no.56; Fig.62), the immensely dignified portrait of Paul-Durand-Ruel (no.50) and the Titianesque Madame Thurneyssen and her daughter (no.54). Of particular interest were two portraits of members of the Bernheim families, also signed and dated 1910: the chic, mondain Monsieur and Madame Gaston de Villers (no.52) and the over-the-top, richly impasted Madame Josse Bernheim-Jeune and her son Henry (no.53), of a quite different vibrancy and opulence. In a journal entry for 21st March 1910, Denis recorded Renoir working on these portraits at Les Collettes, but both portraits evoke the refinement and luxury of the Parisian residence that the Bernheim families shared on the avenue Henri-Martin. In addition to the sitters’ fashionable and formal costumes and jewellery, Renoir includes Louis XVI furniture, framed pictures and a Maillol statuette. As in all his figure painting of these late years – regardless of genre – Renoir’s process entailed direct observation and working from the motif, unquestionably, but also recollection, memory and revision, with certain canvases following him from Cagnes to Essoyes to Paris (and back again). ‘Aujourd’hui encore, le modèle doit être présent à l’atelier quand il travaille’, noted Meier-Graefe in 1911. ‘S’il le regarde, c’est une autre question’.13 Around the same time, Renoir confided something of this peripatetic means of production – if such a term can be used for someone immobilised by rheumatoid arthritis – in a letter to Bernheim-Jeune. Responding to the
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63. The bathers, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. 1918–19. Canvas, 110 by 160 cm. (Musée d’Orsay, Paris; exh. Grand Palais, Paris).
See Morisot’s journal entry, cited by Isabelle Gaëtan in her excellent introductory essay, ‘A painter who has never learned how to draw but who draws well – that is Renoir’, in op. cit. (note 1), pp.82–87. 9 M. Denis: Journal 1884–1904, Paris 1957–59, I, p.121. 10 ‘Certains dessins, qui rapellent de très près des personages figurants dans des tableaux, ont été executés postérieurement à ceux-ci. Ils constituent une sorte de correction, de variante plutôt . . .’; G. Rivière: Renoir et ses amis, Paris 1921, p.224.
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Ibid., p.250. Maillol’s advice to the young sculptor Louis Fernand Morel – son of a winegrower from Essoyes – who modelled for three works for Renoir in September 1918 (nos.96–98); see E. Héron: ‘Renoir and Maillol’, in op. cit. (note 1), p.158. 13 J. Meier-Graefe: Auguste Renoir, Paris 1912, p.24; the book had been published in German the year before. 14 G.-P. and M. Dauberville: Renoir: catalogue raisonné, 1858–1881, Paris 2007, p.57, 12
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dealer’s request for more canvases, Renoir explained his need for time and maturation: ‘J’ai en effet pas mal de choses en train, mais rien n’est au point et ne pourra l’être qu’après un arrêt et retouches que je me réserve de faire à Paris à tête reposée’.14 As a result of the misreading of the last digit, this letter, written on 16th March 1911, has been incorrectly published as from ‘1915’.15 From commissioned portraits to fantasy (and family) portraits, the exhibition devoted a penultimate section to canvases of orientalising and Hispanic themes. Here were also included such masterpieces as the Orangerie’s Claude Renoir as clown (1909; no.43) – the colour reproduction of the actual costume donated by the sitter to the Musée Renoir in 1967 confirms Renoir’s ruthlessness in obliterating all four black embroidered motifs so that nothing would interfere with his sonorous reds; Orsay’s Gabrielle with a rose of 1911 (no.59; Fig.64), and the unsurpassed Vollard in the costume of a toreador (1917; no.51), whose ‘unexpected gravitas’ is well elucidated in Patrice Marandel’s catalogue entry. Fittingly, the final room at the Grand Palais was devoted to a single picture, The bathers (no.80; Fig.63), ‘his masterpiece’, as Matisse confided to Frank Harris in 1923, ‘one of the most beautiful pictures ever painted’. Energised in handling and heroic in scale, its figures and landscape in perfect equipoise, The bathers has always been one of Renoir’s most contested paintings. Quoting from Georges Besson’s unpublished letter to Matisse of 28th October 1920, Sylvie Patry notes the incomprehension with which it was greeted when first exhibited at the Salon d’automne that year with twenty-nine other late works. Such was the lack of sympathy even of older critics (and former champions of Renoir), such as Alexandre, Lecomte and Vauxcelles, that ‘ce pauvre Jean Renoir voulait cassait la gueule aux gens qui s’esclaffait devant les œuvres de son père le jour du vernissage’. Indifference is almost as damaging as derision and contempt, and so the placing of The bathers as the exhibition’s conclusion and apotheosis was forthrightly polemical. The exemplary discussion in the catalogue (pp.328–31) identifies the painting’s various sources (Veronese, Manet, Courbet), models (Andrée Heuschling and Madeleine Bruno), preparatory works (surprisingly few; a pencil drawing once owned by Henry Moore and two painted head studies, perhaps executed as early as 1915). There is no consensus as to when Renoir embarked on such a work – certainly intended as a posthumous bequest to the Louvre – or how long he laboured on it. Barbara White’s suggestion that Renoir was inspired to paint The bathers in celebration of the Armistice of November 1918 is appealing, if undocumented. And while Matisse claimed that Renoir worked on the composition for three years, Albert André noted in 1931 that it had been executed ‘en quelques jours’.16 A previously unpublished letter from André to Durand-Ruel, cited by Patry, provides the date of the painting’s completion. Written on 25th April 1919, it notes that, though worn out (‘très usé’), Renoir was painting every day: ‘[il] a fait une toile de 2 m x 100 [sic] avec deux grandes femmes grandeur nature, une merveille’. Coming upon the work on its solitary wall, I was struck more than ever by its affinities with the great figure paintings of Courbet’s maturity, letter no.29; this letter is excerpted in Isabelle Gaetan and Monique Nonne’s indispensable Renoir au XX siècle: Chronologie 1892–1919, p.45, published online at www.rmn.fr/IMG/pdf_chronologie_renoir.pdf. 15 The letter should be compared with one written on 6th January 1911, in which the handwriting of the last two digits is identical; see Dauberville, op. cit. (note 14), p.41, letter no.15. 16 In his introduction to the first volume of Bernheim-Jeune: L’Atelier de Renoir,
64. Gabrielle with a rose, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. 1911. Canvas, 55.5 by 47 cm. (Musée d’Orsay, Paris; exh. Grand Palais, Paris).
less the Young ladies on the banks of the Seine (1857; Musée du Petit Palais, Paris) than his celebratory, fleshy and unrepentantly erotic nudes, although Renoir in his later years could not have seen Courbet’s Sleep (1866; Musée du Petit Palais), which had last been exhibited in Paris in 1878 and remained in Switzerland for the rest of Renoir’s lifetime.17 During the sixteen visits that Matisse made to Les Collettes between 1917 and 1919, Courbet was often evoked in the artists’ discussions. Renoir in the 20th century provided a rare opportunity to consider the various phases and inflections of Renoir’s late style, and to chart the shifts and evolution of his technique after 1890. While by no means as dramatic as the changes of the first twenty-five years of his career, the morphology of Renoir’s late production cannot be adequately characterised simply as a retreat into a generalised, Arcadian classicism. Renoir’s painting after 1916, at a time of extreme physical frailty, is perhaps the most authentic flowering of his late style. A reliable catalogue raisonné for his later decades is still years away, but there is now a wealth of documentation at our disposal to construct a more accurate chronology for the last years (and there will be more when Augustin de Butler’s edition of Renoir’s Correspondance is completed). The present catalogue’s generous sample of excellent comparative illustrations is another important contribution in this regard. Paris 1931, I, p.12. 17 As a result of Juliette Courbet’s bequests, the Museum inaugurated its Salle Courbet in February 1909; see H. Lapauze: Le Palais des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Paris 1910, p.72. Bernheim-Jeune organised two Courbet exhibitions, between 21st December 1917 and 5th January 1918, and 18th to 31st July 1919 (neither of which Renoir saw, since he was away from Paris at these times).
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With thirteen essays dominating the catalogue, and the entries grouped loosely by theme as well as chronologically, consulting this somewhat hastily prepared book is at times a frustrating experience; but the rewards are considerable. Drawing upon unpublished letters and photographs, overlooked references in journals and reviews, and exhibition catalogues and monographs from the first half of the twentieth century, the authors have amassed an enormous amount of material. There are excellent essays on Renoir’s sculpture and drawing, as well as his involvement in the decorative arts. The essay devoted to his relationship with the Nabis offers a new perspective on Renoir’s poetic, crypto-symbolist production of the 1890s. The excellent research initiated in recent years by the Musée Renoir at Les Collettes is reprised in an essay on Renoir and Cagnes, and there are good surveys of Renoir’s relationship with his dealers and collectors in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the shifting critical fortunes of his late work.
As Proust noted, in the hermetic and self-contained world that Renoir created, everything becomes a Renoir: women, forests, water, even the sky. In this regard, one would question the decision to punctuate the galleries with works by the most celebrated of Renoir’s younger admirers – Matisse, Bonnard and Picasso – however fine. The different pitches and inflections of Renoir’s language impose themselves with such conviction that while these intrusions do not disrupt the established harmonious groupings, they are ultimately superfluous to them. It is fascinating, for example, to see Picasso’s often reproduced drawing after the photograph of the arthritic Renoir (no.99); three times larger than the ‘original’, it is, not surprisingly, something of a self-promoting homage. Generally, though, one could not help feel that the addition of works by Picasso and Matisse served primarily as endorsement by association: a kind of art-historical special pleading that has never infiltrated exhibitions devoted to the late work of Cézanne, Monet or Degas.
Letters
would have been completed a decade or so later, during a period of serious turmoil that would surely have prompted the inclusion of the unusual eschatological subjects in the iconographic programme combined with the more common New Testament episodes.
Fernando Gallego
BARBARA ANDERSON SIR , I was gratified to read the highly favourable review by Carl Brandon Strehlke (January 2010, pp.41–42) of the Meadows Museum’s publication Fernando Gallego and his Workshop: the Altarpiece from Ciudad Rodrigo, Paintings from the Collection of the University of Arizona Museum of Art, London 2008. I did want to correct, however, one common misconception expressed by Mr Strehlke, namely that in this period it would have been difficult to change the components of an altarpiece once assembled and installed in a church. In fact, there are numerous fifteenthcentury altarpieces in Central Spain, including the main altarpiece in the old Cathedral of Salamanca, which Fernando Gallego probably saw daily, and that by Fernando Gallego and his workshop for Santa María la Mayor in Trujillo, in which original panels have been replaced. In Santa Maria, which dates from the 1480s and 1490s, a Crucifixion was removed to make way for a tabernacle in 1545, and an original Flagellation was replaced by a sixteenth-century Descent from the cross. It would have been a simple matter to accomplish the changes. Claire Barry, Amanda Dotseth and I visited Santa Maria la Mayor accompanied by our colleagues Araceli Gabaldón, Tomás Antelo and Carmen Vega from the Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España in Madrid. Our Spanish colleagues provided access to the back of the altarpiece through a door from its front leading to a small chamber where a staircase leads to the top, and each panel’s attachment to the frame can be seen. Their marvellous work, with instructive reproductions of the backs of the panels, was published as ‘Fernando Gallego en Trujillo: estudios físicos’, Bienes Culturales: Revista del Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural de España 8 (2008), pp.61–74. Of course, this does not mean that the altarpiece from Ciudad Rodrigo was necessarily altered after its initial completion. But if the inscription dating its completion in 1488 was correct, that is what would have happened. If incorrect, the entire altarpiece
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Bernini in Francia S I R , I write to point out some factual errors in Philippe Malgouyres’s review of my book Bernini in Francia. Paul de Chantelou e il Journal de Voyage du Cavalier Bernini en France in this Magazine, 151 (2009), pp.778–79. Of my translation, Malgouyres asserts: ‘This new one is not based on the original manuscripts but on the French edition of the text made by Lalanne in 1885’. However, in my preface I state: ‘For the first time a complete translation of the Journal is published here based on a comparison of the two extant manuscripts: the MS.2105 of the Library of the Institut de France and that of the Institut Néerlandais of Paris’. This is proved also by thirty citations in my footnotes of the manuscript in the Institut de France and 158 comparative references between that text (of which I was the first person to have made a complete microfilm) and that in the Institut Néerlandais. In note 4 of his review Malgouyres criticises the modification of the original punctuation to make the text more readable, even though the same is done in Stanic’s French edition of 2001 that Malgouyres cites as being the standard reference. ‘Also regrettable’, the reviewer writes, ‘is the lack of differentiation of the phrases and words written by Chantelou in Italian, thus making it impossible to distinguish the citations, from the rest of the text’. But all Chantelou’s Italian phrases in the Institut de France MS (almost always omitted in the Institut Néerlandais MS) are printed in italics in the Italian translation precisely to distinguish them as Italian phrases in the original French text.
DANIELA DEL PESCO
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Books Ancient Churches of Ethiopia. By David Phillipson. 230 pp. incl. 41 col. + 241 b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press, London and New Haven, 2009), £40. ISBN 978–0–300–14156–6. Reviewed by THOMAS PAKENHAM
writing more about these buildings’, wrote Francisco Alvares in 1540, ‘because it seems to me I shall not be believed if I write more [. . .] though I swear by God [. . .] all I have written is the truth’. Alvares was the chaplain to the official Portuguese mission to the so-called ‘Prester John of the Indies’ – in fact the Ethiopian emperor, Lebna Dengel – and he was describing the eleven Christian churches of Lalibela, all cut from the living rock in a dazzling variety of shapes and sizes. Tall story or wonder of the world? Strangely, it was a further 340 years before Alvares’s account was confirmed by the next European traveller to pass that way. This was Gerhard Rohlfs, a German explorer who had attached himself to the British Abyssinian Expedition of 1867–68. After Rohlfs came a string of enthusiasts, mainly amateurs, who examined the rock churches and produced startling theories about their origins and symbolism. But it was not until the late twentieth century that Lalibela was honoured with its own airport, a place in the travel brochures and the status of a world heritage site. And it is only now that David Phillipson has cast the cold eye of a professional archaeologist on Lalibela and come up with a new set of theories. Indeed Phillipson has done very much more. His account is by far the fullest and most persuasive yet devoted to the ancient churches of Ethiopia. It spans the two thousand years between 700 BC and the end of the Middle Ages, and traces the birth and development of an Ethiopian national style of Christian architecture, the style that reached its apogee at Lalibela. Phillipson begins by peering back into the fog of the first millennium BC. We don’t know when the first Semitic settlers from South Arabia crossed the Red Sea to grab the rich and fertile highlands that straddle the border between what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, but we know they brought remarkable gifts. They could plough, they could write (in Sabean) and they could build temples and palaces in stone. Soon the colonists intermarried with the local Cushitic-speaking Africans. By 700 BC they had built the great temple at Yeha enriched with ibex sculptures. Skip a thousand years and the king of Axum, a few miles west of Yeha, is the most powerful ruler in Africa south of the Sahara. From his imperial capital at Axum, King Ousanas dominated the world’s ivory trade. His coinage in gold carried his strident image as far as Rome, Byzantium and India. He and ‘I WEARY OF
his successors stretched greedy hands to east and west – to south Arabia and to Nubia in the Nile Valley. If one doubted the power of the Axumite kings, one had only to look at their tombs. They were topped by granite monoliths, up to one-hundred-feet high, crowned with the symbol of the war-god and carved with windows and doors to represent a royal palace. The tallest, Phillipson tells us, weighed 520 tons and was ‘probably the largest single block of stone that people anywhere at any time have attempted to stand on end’. (But the war-god failed them and the great column snapped during erection.) In 330, the next king of Axum, Ezana, was converted to Christianity and Axum’s pagan style of architecture was born again as a national Christian style. Of course churches had different needs from temples. From the Near East the Ethiopians borrowed aisles and naves, sanctuary domes and the oblong basilican plan. But the country cousins of the Early Christian churches of Syria and Armenia still bore unmistakable marks of their African and secular origins: carved wooden friezes in their clerestories, recessed plans and half-timbering with ‘monkey-heads’ (ornamental bosses) – all dominant features of the Axumite palaces and the great pagan monoliths. Hundreds of Ethiopian churches were to be built in this style during the next ten centuries, of which, sad to say, only a handful still survive. (In 1956 I myself had the good fortune to stumble on one unrecorded medieval church at Bethlehem, seventy miles south-west of Lalibela.) By contrast, several hundred rock churches survived, many of great antiquity, as they have proved almost indestructible (Fig.65). This brings us back to Alvares and those eleven churches of Lalibela. Were they really excavated, miraculously, in the lifetime of one king, as Alvares was assured: Lalibela, the king who ruled at the beginning of the twelfth century and gave his name to the churches? And why the dazzling cornucopia of shapes and sizes? Modern historians have tended to accept the traditional dating given by Alvares and repeated in various Ethiopian manuscripts. But there has been no consensus about the reason for the cornucopia of shapes. One scholar, the late David Buxton, came up with the exotic theory that King Lalibela had created a kind of underground museum of Ethiopian architecture – many-aisled, many-domed, cruciform, miniature and so on – representing the full repertory available to church builders. But Phillipson pours cold water on all this – and I am afraid he is right. Sceptical of the traditional dating, he follows his nose as an archaeologist and argues that the rock churches at Lalibela, far from being excavated in a single reign, must have spanned six hundred years. Phillipson attributes the differences in the architectural types to nothing more exotic than their dates. He proposes four main phases for the churches, culminating in the reign of Lalibela, the last great king of the Zagwe dynasty, who was motivated by a wish to see the churches as symbolic of his links with the Holy Land; he was creating a new Jerusalem in the wilds of Ethiopia. But he was also laying claim to the
65. Church of Beta Abba Libanos, Lalibela, Ethiopia, viewed from the south. Photograph, c.1970. (Photograph: David W. Phillipson).
imperial legacy of Axum, hence the extraordinary continuity of the Axumite style. Shall we learn more from scholars about the origins and meaning of the rock churches? Unfortunately Alvares was one of the last Europeans to witness the great days of the medieval Christian empire in Ethiopia. He had hardly gone before his host, Lebna Dengel, had become a fugitive on a mountain-top. The world of Prester John was now turned upside down by Moslem invaders from Somaliland. Most of the built-up churches in the country were reduced to ashes. Only the rock churches were too solid to burn. But their priceless manuscripts vanished in the flames.
The Arts of Intimacy. Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture. By Jerrilynn D. Dodds, María Rosa Menocal and Abigail Krasner Balbale. 395 pp. incl. 196 col. ills. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2008), £25. ISBN 978–0–300–10609–1. Reviewed by ROSE WALKER
story tells how Alfonso VI of León and Castile reconquered Toledo with El Cid at his side. Entering through the Aguileña gate, the Cid’s horse, Babieca, stopped the procession and knelt before the tiny mosque of Bab al-Mardum. Breaking down the walls, they discovered within it a divine image of Christ of the Light that the Visigoths had hidden from the invading Muslims. History spoils one element of this tale, as the Cid was not at the conquest of Toledo in 1085, but in exile at the court of the Banu Hud in Zaragoza, where he was fighting for them against the Christians of Aragón and Lérida. The mosque still stands, with an inscription that records that it was built in 999 by Ahmad ibn al-Hadidi. The brick structure was open on three sides like a pavilion, and divided inside by four columns. The columns are Roman and Visigothic spolia, like those of the Great Mosque of Córdoba, the building which may also have inspired the interlacing arches and nine miniature domes. In 1183 Domingo Pérez and his wife, Juliana,
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gave the building, by then a house, to the Knights of St John, so that they could turn it into a chapel and oratory. The Order broke down a wall destroying the mihrab, and attached an enormous apse, which was also built of brick and ornamented with a twelfthcentury version of the decorative vocabulary of the old mosque. This kind of hybridity is the subject of this book. The Arts of Intimacy performs an extremely useful task by bringing together the results of wide research on the convergence of Christian, Jewish and Islamic art and literature in medieval Spain, and presenting it in English. Its declared aim is to recover the ‘memory of a tangled, vibrant, hybrid world’, above all that of Toledo, and to recount how the ‘written, verbal, and artistic languages that were shared by Muslims and Christians [. . .] became the cultural bedrock of the Castilians, and of the Spanish nation-state that followed’. The authors set out their position in an introductory chapter, entitled Palos, after Palos de la Frontera, the port at which Columbus embarked in 1492. The view of Spain that they aim to demolish, is ‘a single distilled entity’ seen through the lens of the departing Christopher Columbus. In this sense, the book is another bout in the long-running debate on Spain’s unique national identity versus its hybrid identities (convivencia), famously fought between Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz and Américo Castro in the 1950s and never resolved. Dodds’s book aims to bring work on convivencia to a broader audience. Six chapters, with one-word titles, follow in roughly chronological order. ‘Frontiers’ skims the early history of Toledo and the story of El Cid; ‘Dowry’ deals with the conquest of Toledo in 1085; and ‘Union’ looks at the effects of the conquest over the next hundred years or so. The late twelfth and thirteenth centuries are covered in ‘Babel’, which also summarises a recent reinterpretation of the rebuilding of the church of S. Roman and its remarkable painting cycle. ‘Adab’ (an Arabic term for belles-lettres encompassing philology, poetry and sport) considers the thirteenth-century translation movement and the development of the Castilian language. ‘Brothers’ turns to the Toledan synagogue of Samuel Halevi as well as to the close diplomatic relationship between Pedro I of Castile and Muhammad V of Granada, who built part of the Alhambra in the fourteenth century. A short postscript, ‘Intimacy Betrayed’, completes the story with the fall of Granada, the expulsion of the Jews and the building of the church within the Great Mosque of Córdoba in 1523. As befits a textbook format, some of the key concepts and themes are highlighted in boxes, from background on the Almohads to the use of alternating voussoirs and extracts from texts including the Libro de Alexandre. The book has few footnotes and a short index but a very generous and useful bibliographic essay. Although the illustrations are plentiful, the quality is not always high, and inconveniently they are often not on the relevant page. The authors openly acknowledge that this text is a synthesis and, perhaps intention-
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66. Stucco decoration on the entrance arch of the palace of al-Mamun, Toledo. Eleventh century.
ally, have produced something close to a canon of credited authorities, only rarely mentioning divergent views. As this is a book about hybridity, it is appropriate that the text merges three authorial voices. No section is attributed to any one of the three authors, but the reader is conscious of shifts in language and tone from straightforward analysis to hyperbolic passages. Most valuably, the book presents some discoveries otherwise published only in Spanish, for example, Clara Delgado Valero’s work on stucco from an eleventh-century gateway to the palace of al-Mamun (Fig.66). The fragmentary hunting scenes, set against grounds of gold- and lapis-coloured glass, are particularly evocative of the lost world that the authors wish to reveal beneath the national consciousness of modern Spain.
A Story in Stones. Portugal’s Influences on Culture and Architecture in the Highlands of Ethiopia 1493–1634. By John Jeremy Hespeler-Boultbee, with a foreword by Richard Pankhurst. 198 pp. incl. 61 col. + 32 b. & w. ills. (CCB Publishing, British Columbia, 2006), $49.95. ISBN 10 0–9781162–1–6. Reviewed by MICHAEL GERVERS READERS WHO SEEK to find the crumbling stone remains that, according to ‘tradition’ (i.e. oral reporting), may have been built by royalty, the nobility or the ‘Portuguese’ in Ethiopia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will find this volume a very useful guide. The book has two distinct parts, the first being a history of the recorded presence of the Portuguese in Ethiopia from the arrival of the ‘soldier-explorer-diplomat’ Pêro da Covilhã in or about 1463, to the expulsion or killing of members of the Jesuit mission in 1634. Based on secondary evidence and popular interpreta-
tions, it offers a general introduction to the subject for those unfamiliar with the history of the period. Part two, ‘The Stones’, is a compendium of Hespeler-Boultbee’s notes about what he argues is evidence of Portuguese builders and buildings, or their influence, in Ethiopia, and the trials and tribulations he often encountered while accessing the sites. Most of these are to be found in the region around Lake Tana (Gojjam, and North and South Gondar) where Portuguese Jesuits were particularly active and where, he suggests, up to six thousand Portuguese settled following the defeat in 1543 of the Muslim invader, Ahmad Grag’n. The term ‘Portuguese’, he points out, could refer locally ‘to any foreigner in the Highlands’ (p.91). In the context of buildings, he also allows ‘Portuguese’ to be equated with ‘Gondarine’ (p.108). The attribution is further expanded by the possibility that Goan and/or Gujarati artisans worked in Gondar during the period when Portuguese influence was at its height. The author’s underlying argument is that mimesis, ‘the unconscious imitation of form’, was the means by which a wide range of building methods, styles and traditions were carried from the Iberian peninsula, particularly southern Portugal, by merchants or missionaries, not to mention Pêro da Covilhã himself, to the Highlands of Ethiopia via Portuguese settlements on the west coast of the Indian Subcontinent. It is not a difficult argument, but it does rather beg the question as to whether what is often referred to as ‘Gondarine’ architectural style comes from Portugal or Goa (etc.) or whether, as the Ethiopians themselves tend to believe, it is indigenous and has nothing to do with foreign influence. This is a long-standing controversy that is by no means resolved in the present volume. However, the reader is left in no doubt as to where the author’s sympathies lie: ‘By the time the Roman Catholics and Portuguese were expelled from the Highlands in 1634, the strongest cultural trait left behind was the utility of Portuguese prototypes in stone construction’ (p.166). He includes numerous visual comparisons with stone constructions found predominantly in Portugal’s Alentejo province, reminds us that eggs are used as a bonding material for mortar in rural Portugal and that the custom is also known in Ethiopia, and calls repeatedly for researchers to investigate the evidence in order ‘to further prove the validity of these findings’ (p.64). This comparative approach is not without its merits, but much is left out of the equation, including any consideration of Ethiopian buildings and construction methods outside the areas of ‘Portuguese’ influence, and before the late fifteenth-century arrival of European visitors. The wall constructions sketched on pp.71–72 are not unknown at earlier periods, particularly the ‘Flat stone files – usually mortared, rendered’ which one also finds below the plastered surface of the twelfth-century church of Yemrehannä Krestos in Lasta, and elsewhere. The subject needs to be seen through a wide-angle lens; one that would also include the phenomenon of the ‘traditional’ round church, itself an architectural novelty of the very period under discussion. Why the form appeared when it
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did has never been satisfactorily explained, although it is the most distinctive feature of the so-called Gondarine form of church building which survives to the present day. As Ethiopian studies come more to the fore in academic circles, as evidenced by the large number of contributors to the on-going publication of the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica (Hamburg 2003), much more material is becoming available for discussion. Interested readers will want to consult Hervé Pennec’s, Des Jésuites au royaume du prêtre Jean (Ethiopie): stratégies, rencontres et tentatives d’implantation 1495–1633 (Paris 2003), and follow the archaeological investigation of early Portuguese settlements in Ethiopia currently being carried out by Victór M. Fernández of the Universidad Complutense, Madrid. The results of their research unfortunately appeared too late to find a place in the bibliography of A Story in Stones, which is also somewhat compromised by the inclusion of such populist works as Graham Hancock’s The Sign and the Seal. Nevertheless, despite the many unresolved questions, Hespeler-Boultbee has contributed new and useful insights here into the history of Ethiopian architecture.
Ribera a Roma. By Gianni Papi. 270 pp. incl. 64 col. + 75 b. & w. ills. (Edizioni dei Soncino, Soncino, 2007), €165. No ISBN. Reviewed by JOHN GASH I N T H I S V O L U M E (which includes a full catalogue) on Ribera’s Roman sojourn to 1616, Gianni Papi sets out to prove that the corpus of paintings previously attributed, mainly on the authority of Roberto Longhi, to the anonymous ‘Master of the Judgment of Solomon’ was in fact the work of the young Játivan painter during his Roman years – and not, as often argued from Longhi onwards, by a French or Walloon artist, such as Guy François, Gérard Douffet or, more recently, Guy’s littleknown younger brother, Jean. Longhi himself, and others after him, discerned the Riberesque qualities of these paintings, but none crossed the Rubicon of attributing any of the pictures to Ribera himself (at least in print). Papi’s boldness and persistence in forcing the argument, however, comes near to winning the day, despite some lingering reservations. Although many works have been linked with the mysterious Master, the central core of pictures were all, bar one, identified by Longhi: the Borghese Judgment of Solomon itself; the five Apostles in the Fondazione Longhi, Florence; and the Denial of St Peter in the Corsini Gallery, Rome; to which should be added the Christ disputing with the doctors in the Cathedral of St-Mammès, Langres, discovered by Michel Laclotte in 1958.1 They seem to me to be clearly by the same hand, and those critics who have argued that they are by several artists, possibly including Ribera, are probably misguided. They should be all either by Ribera, as Papi argues, or by another, so far unidentified, artist. Are any of them clearly by Ribera on grounds
of style? It seems to me that at least one, the Corsini Denial of St Peter, is plausibly the work of the Spaniard, not least, in addition to points made by Papi, in formal parallels between it and a much later work by Ribera in the same gallery, the Venus and Adonis of 1637. Furthermore, the Christ disputing with the doctors would appear, as Papi argues, to be by the same hand as the signed St Jerome writing (on loan to the Art Museum of Ontario, Toronto), especially now that the signature, which was previously thought to be forged, has been confirmed as autograph. The fact too that the Langres picture probably hailed from the Giustiniani collection in Rome, where it was attributed to Ribera in 1638, would seem to clinch the deal. How do we proceed from these two to the somewhat different character of the Judgment of Solomon and the Longhi Apostles? Perhaps by introducing another picture into the equation, a fine Resurrection of Lazarus acquired by the Museo del Prado in 2001. Although some have doubted Ribera’s authorship, I would agree with Papi that it must be by the young Ribera – not least because of its close affinities with Ribera’s altarpieces for Osuna (c.1618). It could have been done in Rome since it is technically close to the Corsini Denial. Indeed, Papi’s convincing linkage of both these pictures with an inventory of 1624, discovered by Cecilia Grilli, of the possessions of Giovan Francesco Cussida, son of the recently deceased Spanish ambassador in Rome, Pietro Cussida, who also owned Ribera’s famous series of Five Senses, would strongly imply that they were done for the ambassador while Ribera was still in Rome. Can this group be further connected with other pictures? The treatment of the red silk of Christ’s surplice in the Prado Lazarus is technically close to another picture seemingly clinched for Ribera by the researches of Silvia Danesi Squarzina in the Giustiniani archives (and accepted by Papi), which show that Ribera was the author of St Gregory the Great writing in the Palazzo Barberini, garbed in an even more beautiful red silk mozzetta, and too good to be by Carlo Saraceni, to whom it has been long ascribed.2 At the same time, the grotesquely gibbering bald figure at the back of the Denial of St Peter, a characteristically pungent Riberesque take on the famous statue known as the ‘Schiavo di Ripa’, seems to be by the same hand, and under the same influence as the bald executioner holding the flayed skin of St Bartholomew in one of the Longhi pictures. This man is, in turn, from the same stable as Ribera’s Democritus, previously in the gallery of Piero Corsini in Monaco, and would seem, therefore, to confirm the attribution to Ribera of the, at first sight, more classicising Longhi series of five Apostles. And from these Longhi Apostles, with their piquant blend of Caravaggism, Bolognese classicism and sculptural drapery, it is but a short step to the Judgment of Solomon itself, at first sight so classicising (between Domenichino and Poussin). Indeed the Longhi St Thomas, in profile with his little Spanish beard, is quoted nearly verbatim as the right-hand full-length figure in the Judgment. Perhaps the same model was used also for the figure of Lazarus in the Raising, as Papi suggests.
At this stage, despite the ineluctable flow of the evidence, one has to admit that there are one or two incongruities in the jigsaw. Why, for instance, is the head of the flayed St Bartholomew, which should, by convention, be a self-portrait of the artist, as in Michelangelo’s famous image in the Sistine Last Judgment, of a man of at least forty, when Ribera left Rome at the age of twenty-five? Why, also, is the conception of the Christ disputing with the doctors totally different from other depictions of the subject by Ribera painted in Naples? Why, too, is the composition of the Judgment of Solomon so classical, and the execution of the threaded girdle of the kneeling ‘bad mother’ more characteristic of the French circle round Guy François than anything known by Ribera? Perhaps here we will need to invoke the renowned capriciousness and fertile imagination of Ribera, and the fact that he seems, if we are to judge from one of the connoisseur Giulio Mancini’s letters, to have practised different styles during his time in Rome. His admiration for the Carracci and Guido Reni, which may have begun during the time he spent in Parma before moving to (or back to) Rome in 1612, seems to infuse his youthful style as much as the passion for Caravaggesque realism and chiaroscuro. By accepting a high degree of experimentation on the part of the young Ribera, it becomes possible to allow for certain curiosities. Were it not for early inscribed engravings after his works, would we have easily grasped the zigzagging stylistic trajectory in Rome of the brilliant Simon Vouet, Ribera’s almost exact contemporary? Papi’s great achievement in focusing our attention on Ribera’s probable authorship of the Judgment of Solomon group helps to explain Mancini’s categorisation of him as one of Caravaggio’s four principal followers (together with Manfredi, Cecco del Caravaggio and Spadarino), even though, as Papi reminds us, Ribera was far more than a follower, and, in some respects – in technique and imagination – perhaps even his superior. For the benefit of the remaining doubters (who include Justus Lange) and also to resolve some of the less certain links in the argument (as pointed out not only here but by Nicola Spinosa in the second edition of his Ribera. L’opera completa, Naples 2006), Papi’s claims now need to be tested in an exhibition which would juxtapose the newly attributed canvases with others from throughout Ribera’s career. Papi’s introductory essay deals with facts and speculations about Ribera’s probable early biography in Italy (the facts bolstered by a useful documentary appendix edited by Mario Epifani), and with the nature and extent of his influence on other artists, especially realists and Caravaggists, such as Baburen, De Haen, Valentin, Manfredi, Vignon, Vouet, Douffet and the Master of the Incredulity of St Thomas (who was perhaps, as Papi proposes, Jean Ducamps). For him, the second is posited on the first, since he argues that Ribera may have arrived in Italy (probably Rome) from Valencia as early as 1608/09, although he is first recorded in Parma in 1611. As Papi admits, this is mere speculation, although not without the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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some ingenious reasoning, and his very tentative placing of the Christ disputing with the doctors c.1608–10, in Rome, would make sense of its apparently youthful infelicities and certain of its deviations from his mature Roman manner. However, it seems to me that the Judgment of Solomon group should all fall into the bracket of Rome 1612–16, or even later. The very early dating of some of these pictures also leads Papi to make excessive claims about the youthful artist being the main, revolutionary influence on the development of Caravaggism in Rome in the second decade. In fact, we now know that several of these artists were in Rome at least as early as Ribera’s first documented appearance there in 1612, and it is far more likely that the direction of influence between them was complex and mutual.3 1 Most of these paintings were exhibited in 2005; see L. Spezzaferro, ed.: exh. cat. Caravaggio e L’Europa, Milan (Palazzo Reale) 2005, reviewed by the present writer in this Magazine, 149 (2006), pp.56–57. 2 See S. Danesi Squarzina: ‘New documents of Ribera, “pictor in Urbe”, 1612–16’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 148 (2006), pp.244–51. 3 The Judgment of Solomon (Galleria Borghese, Rome), which Papi inclines to date very early, seems to have been influenced by Domenichino’s fresco of St Cecilia before the judge (1614–15; Polet Chapel of S. Luigi dei Francesi), rather than vice versa. The Denial of St Peter (Certosa di S. Martino, Naples) is not, in my opinion, by Ribera. Papi accepts Natali’s proposal that the Liberation of St Peter (Uffizi, Florence) could be by Ribera, probably c.1618, but he sees equal links with Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, as noted by Roberto Contini. While it seems to me to be plausibly by Ribera, it is not obviously by the same artist as the Master of the Judgment of Solomon canvases.
Edgar Degas, 1834–1917: The Complete Sculptures of Edgar Degas. By Walter Maibaum, Gregory Hedberg and June Hargrove. 225 pp. incl. 138 col. ills. (Herakleidon, Athens, 2009), $95. ISBN 978–960–98478–1–0. Reviewed by PATRICIA FAILING E D G A R D E G A S C R E A T E D sculptures in wax, clay and plastiline for more than forty years. After his death in 1917 his heirs contracted with the Hébrard Foundry in Paris to cast seventy-three of his sculptures in bronze editions, although Degas had not authorised the casting, nor did he cast his work in bronze during his lifetime. More than ethical qualms about post humous casting complicate the history of these Hébrard bronzes: the Degas bronzes in museum collections all over the world are actually surmoulages (casts of casts) made from a unique set of bronze modèles now in the collection of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. Sixty-nine of Degas’s original sculptures survive: most are in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The number of legally authorised casts is somewhat uncertain, as is the full chronology
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of the casting. Nevertheless, drawing upon dealer and auction records and five decades of research by Degas scholars, Anne Pingeot, then Chief Curator at the Musée d’Orsay, and Joseph Czestochowski were able to publish an authoritative catalogue raisonné of 1,380 Degas bronzes in 2002.1 None of the records or research utilised for the catalogue raisonné suggested or hinted that seventy-three plaster versions of Degas’s sculpture corresponding to the seventy-three bronzes cast after his death were made during the artist’s lifetime and with his permission. Not surprisingly, the discovery of such ‘lifetime plasters’ by two New York dealers with no previous track records in Degas scholarship was met with scepticism by many Degas scholars, especially since the dealers have provided no historical evidence to substantiate their claim. Both dealers, furthermore, are currently marketing bronzes made from the plasters. These bronzes have been shown in museums in Athens and Tel Aviv, and will be exhibited in the United States at the New Orleans Museum of Art. The sumptuous catalogue, with essays by art historian June Hargrove and the dealers, Walter Maibaum and Gregory Hedberg, that accompanies the exhibitions, is here under review. According to the dealers’ essays, their discovery of the ‘lifetime plasters’ began in 2001, when Maibaum heard about a new bronze edition of Degas’s Little dancer. Leonardo Benetov, owner of the Airaindor Foundry in Paris, cast the bronzes from a plaster replica of The little dancer aged fourteen, said to be among the inventory of his foundry when he purchased the business in 1980. Benetov also bought the stamp of the historic Claude Valsuani Foundry at auction, and marketed his Little dancer casts as the ‘Valsuani edition’. In 2004 Benetov revealed to Maibaum that his inventory also included plaster versions of all the other Degas bronzes. Meanwhile, Hedberg purchased one of the Benetov Little dancer bronzes, and became convinced that ‘Degas himself had made the [Benetov] plaster from his original wax’.2 Hedberg then concluded that all but two of the other plasters in Benetov’s inventory ‘can also be dated to Degas’s lifetime, having been made between 1887 and 1912’.3 Maibaum cites Hedberg, Director of European Art at New York’s Hirschl & Adler Galleries, as his sole authority on the history and provenance of the new plasters. In the catalogue, Hedberg states that Degas personally authorised his friend the sculptor Paul-Albert Bartholomé to make plaster casts of his sculptures for his own (Bartholomé’s) private collection. He further states that the plasters remained unrecorded in Bartholomé’s estate after he died and eventually found their way to Benetov’s foundry. The evidence cited to support these unprecedented assertions is an ambiguous letter Degas wrote to Bartholomé in 1892.4 The letter states: ‘A peine rentre [from Normandy] je compte fonder sur Mme Caron [an opera star of whom he is evidently planning to make a bust]. Vous devez déjà lui faire un place au milieu de vos chastes gravats’.5 Hedberg translates
the second line as: ‘You should already reserve a place for her among your precious bits of plaster’. What this text reveals, according to Hedberg, is that by 1892 ‘Bartholomé was routinely casting plasters from Degas’ waxes’. Theodore Reff, the leading authority on Degas’s notebooks and letters, was among many scholars who blinked twice when he encountered Hedberg’s translation and conclusions. As he recently noted in the Art Newspaper, ‘far from meaning “precious bits of plaster”, the phrase [chaste gravats] can be better understood as “decorous rubble” or “decorous chunks of plaster”. In the context of the friendly rivalry we know existed between the sculptors at the time [. . .] I think the phrase is a kind of teasing putdown of Bartholomé [. . .] In any event, the phrase surely refers to Bartholomé’s own sculpture and not Degas’, and I can see no justification for using it to support the idea that Bartholomé was [. . .] “routinely making plasters from Degas’ waxes’”.6 As for his assertion that the plasters remained unknown and unrecorded in Bartholomé’s estate for decades, Hedberg offers no documentation at all. Other challenges to Hedberg’s thesis are the anatomical and structural discrepancies between the Benetov plasters and Degas’s original work preserved in the National Gallery of Art.7 The Benetov Little dancer, for example, differs significantly from Degas’s multimedia figure. The hips are squared to the front in the plaster, the upper legs are bulbous, the clavicle is exaggerated; hairstyles, viewed from the back, are radically different. The eyes are more symmetrical in the plaster and the bridge of the nose more sharply angled. The plaster and Degas’s original wax might conceivably be cousins, but they are not twins. Similar disparities are evident in other pairings of the waxes and the newly promoted plasters. Hedberg offers a novel explanation for the differences between the bronzes illustrated in the catalogue and Degas’s wax sculptures in Washington. Since the plasters from which the bronzes were cast were made during Degas’s lifetime, according to Hedberg, the plasters ‘record Degas’ waxes from an earlier moment in time, before any forms were flattened or damaged from handling, and before Degas himself made some alterations and repairs’. The Benetov Little dancer plaster, he maintains, represents the appearance of the Little dancer at the time it was exhibited in 1881. The wax Little dancer in the National Gallery of Art (the model for the familiar bronze with a tutu), he argues, is a remodelled, and inferior, second version. If Hedberg’s claim that Bartholomé made lifetime plasters of Degas’s work rests, at best, on one ambiguous document, the distinction he draws between a first and second version of the Little dancer sculpture faces the opposite challenge: that Degas’s numerous drawn studies for the Little dancer date from c.1878 to 1881 has never been controversial. The poses and nude figures in these drawings, however, align closely with the ‘second’ Degas wax in Washington, and not with the ‘1881 version’ Hedberg is currently marketing.
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Several museum directors have been willing to support these dealers with shows of their new bronzes, so perhaps the historical and chronological puzzles in Hedberg’s nar rative will turn out to be minor snags, bothersome only to an old guard that ‘hangs on’, as Hedberg characterises his detractors, like ‘some people I know who are still not sure about the Big Bang’.8 1 J. Czestochowski and A. Pingeot: Degas Sculptures. Catalogue Raisonné of the Bronzes, Memphis 2002. 2 W. Maibaum: ‘Degas the Sculptor’, in the catalogue under review, p.36. 3 Ibid., p.37. 4 According to Hedberg, it would be correct to say, ‘the ONLY evidence that Bartholomé ever made plaster casts of Degas’ work is the letter Degas wrote to Bartholomé in 1892’; letter to the present author, 24th March 2009. 5 Bracketed inserts are courtesy of T. Reff: ‘Lost in Translation’, Letter to the Editor, The Art Newspaper (April 2010), p.39; Reff also established the date of the letter. 6 Ibid. 7 The term ‘Benetov plasters’ is used in this review to identify plasters said to come from Benetov’s foundry. All the Benetov plasters have been sold to Maibaum and private collectors. 8 G. Hedberg quoted in W. Cohan: ‘A Controversy over Degas’, Art News (April 2010), p.97.
Louis Marcy: Marcy Oggetti d’arte della Galleria Parmeggiani di Reggio Emilia. By Claude Blair and Marian Campbell. 179 pp. incl. 85 col. + 60 b. & w. ills. (Umberto Allemandi and Co., Turin, London, Venice and New York, 2008), €45. ISBN 978–88–422–1710–7. Reviewed by R.W. LIGHTBOWN L A T E I N T H E 1890s or in the early 1900s, I was told fifty years ago, Bernard Berenson, after going down to Swanage to visit Sir John Charles Robinson, lamented that it was melancholy to see a man once a great connoisseur now surrounded by fakes. This fascinating book reveals, in whole or in part, the background to that fall.1 One of the Italian children of the Anarchist movement of the late nineteenth century was Luigi Francesco Giovanni Parmeggiani, born in 1860 in Reggio Emilia, where, as a young man, he worked as a salesman of imitation jewellery. About 1880 in Nice he received a notification of conscription, and abandoned Italy for Paris. Of violent temperament, he was later accused, with a certain Vittorio Pini, of stabbing at Mirandola, a Socialist newspaper editor regarded by the Anarchists as a traitor. Both he and Pini fled to France, but Pini was detected by the French police and sentenced to twenty years in a penal colony. To escape this past, worthy of a novel by Conrad, Parmeggiani later changed his name to Louis Marsy or Marcy, which provided him with a disguised identity, and is now the name by which he is best known. Around 1893, he became involved with a once-famous Spanish history painter in the Late Romantic taste, Ignacio de Léon y Escosura (1843–1901),
and was to continue this involvement by a long-lasting association with his widow, Mme Augustine Marie-Thérèse Escosura, an involvement that was perhaps, as much as anything else, a business partnership in antique dealing and in the expert manufacture of fake medieval and Renaissance objects, often finely crafted. Escosura is seemingly the key figure in the whole story of these forgeries. He had begun by adopting a standard practice of nineteenthcentury painters of historical and picturesque subjects and formed a collection of works of art as models for use in his compositions, and also as a collection for show in his Paris studio. The authors of this book, Marian Campbell and the late Claude Blair, demonstrate that besides his public life in Paris and London, where he also had a studio, he led a second, secret life as a dealer and forger, based on the knowledge he had accumulated from thirty years’ experience as a collector, especially of Spanish art. He was suspected of forging Spanish masters, and also of involvement in the faking of Spanish arms and armour. The authors establish that it was he, rather than Parmeggiani, who at one time during his exile worked as a cobbler and street-vendor, and who was the inspirer of the learned fakes that are now associated with the pseudonym of Marcy. With exemplary thoroughness, Claude Blair has disentangled the extraordinary history of Parmeggiani, who set up as a dealer in London from 1894 to 1906, suspected by some experts of the time, but unsuspected by John Charles Robinson. He eventually went back to deal in Paris, which he finally left in the mid-1920s, returning to his native Reggio Emilia, where he erected the Galleria Parmeggiani to house his collections (Fig.67). Their real nature only began to become evident when a great Italian authority, Leonello Boccia, examined the arms and armour. In 1981, at Boccia’s suggestion, the late John Hayward of the Victoria and Albert Museum was commissioned to catalogue them, a task he was only able to begin, but which was completed by Blair with Marian Campbell, supported by the museum authorities in Reggio. Marian Campbell has compiled the admirable catalogue, which forms the second
part of this study, identifying the sources used by the fakers and drawing up a biographical list of the craftsmen they employed. The fakes themselves were a last wave of the nineteenth century’s revival of interest, initially antiquarian and Romantic, in medieval works of art, and recall publications so early as the catalogue of the Debruge–Dumesnil collection (Paris 1847), which was illustrated with woodcuts. Other later illustrated publications directly inspired certain fakes, not surprisingly since Escosura’s own personal expertise was in Spanish art. Besides a series of rather too imaginative imitation Limoges enamels and forgeries of medieval church plate, there is also fake Renaissance jewellery – in the nineteenth century, under the influence of Walter Scott, the Renaissance was sometimes considered not as a new beginning but as the conclusion of the Middle Ages. This is an important and enlightening publication by two eminent authorities and is very handsomely produced. It should be acquired by all art libraries, by all museums with medieval collections and by all collectors, students and admirers of medieval works of art. Marcy fakes are still in circulation, and students will learn from this book not to be taken in by over-romantic motifs, over-elaboration of ornament and workmanship, by anachronism of design and by sometimes deceptively clever imitation of medieval styles. Fortunately scientific tests can now come to our aid, though not as yet promising complete rescue from these sometimes too persuasive productions. 1 Copies can be obtained exclusively from Uffici Musei Civici, Piazza Prampolini 1, 42100 Reggio Emilia, Italy; tel. 0522456477; musei@municipio.re.it.
Le Grand Déchiffreur. Richard Hamilton sur Marcel Duchamp. Une selection d’écrits, d’entretiens et de lettres. Edited by Corinne Diserens and Gesine Tosins. 272 pp. incl. 79 b. & w. ills. (JRP/Ringier, Zürich, 2009), €19.50. ISBN 978–3–03764–059–3. Reviewed by JOHN-PAUL STONARD
inspired the love and devotion of generations of artists, but from none more so than Richard Hamilton. His recreation of Duchamp’s Large glass (1915–23), and translation of the accompanying Green box (1934) was the occasion for a correspondence between the two artists that lasted until Duchamp’s death in 1968, and a series of articles by Hamilton which are among the most important documents on Duchamp in the English language. The extraordinary descriptions of the functioning of the Large glass contained in these articles could only have resulted from the forensic study required for reconstruction. Much credit is due to the editors of the current volume, Corinne Diserens and Gesine Tosins, for bringing this material together in French translation, some of which is published for the first time in any language.
MARCEL DUCHAMP HAS
67. Circular brooch. France, c.1880. Based on German design, 10th–13th century. Enamelled gold, set with stones, 6 cm. diameter. (Galleria Parmeggiani, Reggio Emilia).
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Hamilton’s first letter to Duchamp, dated 27th June 1956 (a few days before the opening of the exhibition This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery), presented him with a schematic diagram of the Large glass, made in preparation for a discussion evening on Duchamp’s work held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts earlier that year. Hamilton also requested permission to work on a translation of the Green box notes. At that time Duchamp was relatively little known in England, and Hamilton was not known as an artist outside the small circle of friends at the ICA and colleagues at the University of Newcastle. A reply arrived a year later granting permission and suggesting that Hamilton collaborate with George Heard Hamilton, an art historian at Yale University who had privately published a translation of selected notes from the Green box in 1957. Published by Lund Humphries in 1960, the English translation by Hamilton and Hamilton (the coincidence must have pleased Duchamp) is a truly exciting book, with reproductions, photographs, gatefolds and drawings on transparent paper. The introduction, translated for the current volume, ends with a memorable description of the Large glass: ‘Water falls, the mill wheel begins to spin and starts the slow reciprocations of the chariot, we overhear its chanted litanies relieving the still silence of the cemetery of uniforms and liveries where the given gas is cast into malic forms’. Richard Hamilton’s account of the project, ‘Towards a typographical rendering of the Green Box’, in which he examines previous attempts to translate the notes, is known to English readers from its inclusion in his Collected Words of 1980 (which has a section devoted to his Duchamp writings). Less known, and of great interest, is the two-part interview involving Duchamp, Richard Hamilton, George Heard Hamilton and Charles Mitchell, broadcast in 1959 and reprinted here from a transcription provided by the BBC (one wonders what other documentary treasures are kept in the Corporation’s archive). Also of interest is the transcription of an interview between Duchamp and Richard Hamilton recorded in September 1961, parts of which were included in a special edition of the television programme Monitor devoted to Duchamp, broadcast in June the next year, also including interviews with Duchamp conducted by Eduardo Paolozzi and Reyner Banham. It was the full-size photograph of the Large glass made for the Monitor broadcast that launched Hamilton on his project of producing a replica of Duchamp’s original, by that time in a fragile, shattered state in Philadelphia. A previous exhibition copy had been made by Ulf Linde for the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, but, as Hamilton suggests, whereas Linde’s copy was made from the ‘outside’, it was his intention rather to generate a copy based on the ideas rather than appearance of the work; to ‘reconstruct procedures rather than imitate the effects of action’. His copy was made in a comparatively short space of time, ready for the 1966 Duchamp retrospective at the Tate Gallery. A full history of this recon-
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struction would be fascinating to read – it should be noted that the translation here of Hamilton’s essay ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even Again’, describing the fabrication of the copy, is the version published in Collected Words, expurgated of a final paragraph detailing the assistance of various departments at the University of Newcastle (where the copy was made), including ‘Mr John Knipe of the Geography Department’s cartography section’, who ‘made the extremely difficult technical drawing of the Oculist Witness’, and also the painter Mark Lancaster, who photographed the stages of production. Following Hamilton’s intense, detailed essay of 1973 on the Large glass, included in the catalogue of the retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the collection is bought up to date with Jonathan Watkin’s interview with Hamilton, again on the subject of the reconstitution of the Large glass, with fascinating information on the funding of the project and its acquisition and display at the Tate, despite the Gallery’s policy not to display reproductions. Also reprinted is the introduction Hamilton wrote for the typographic translation he produced with Ecke Bonk of the White box, privately published by the ‘Typosophic Society’ in 1999. One might get the impression that Hamilton’s obsession with Duchamp centres solely on a single work and its accompanying commentary. Although this is not entirely true, the Green box and the Large glass are once again the subjects of the final essay in this volume, an unpublished text from 2008 titled ‘Marcel Duchamp. The Bride Stripped Bare’. It was written by Hamilton in the third person, and gives a curious feeling of the artist looking back on his own life not as personal but ‘real’ history. Hamilton recounts how Hamilton first came across Duchamp and cultivated a relationship that led to the grand reconstructions. And it seems his ardour and excitement about the Large glass, now approaching its centenary, has hardly faded. A certain sense of claustrophobia nevertheless pervades this otherwise pioneering volume. It must be read alongside Sarat Maharaj’s excellent critical account of the creation of the Large glass, in which he cites at least nine letters between Richard Hamilton, George Heard Hamilton and Duchamp, which are not included in Le Grand Déchiffreur.1 The bibliography erroneously lists Maharaj’s excellent article as a book published by, of all firms, Chatto & Windus; which is some indication of the insufficient scholarly apparatus. Cursory footnoting of the letters is in particular a missed opportunity. The need for a more critical account remains. As Hamilton wrote in his highly critical review of Notes and Projects for the Large Glass (1969), edited by Arturo Schwarz (a review not included in the present volume), ‘the person who is after the complete documentation will still have to wait’. 1 S. Maharaj: “‘A monster of veracity, a crystalline transubstantiation”: Typotranslating the Green Box’, in M. Buskirk and M. Nixon, eds.: The Duchamp Effect. Essays, Interviews, Round Table, Cambridge and London 1996, pp.61–91.
Leonardo da Vinci: ‘La Bella Principessa’ – The Profile Portrait of a Milanese Woman. By Martin Kemp and Pascal Cotte, with contributions by Peter Paul Biro, Eva Schwan, Claudio Strinati and Nicholas Turner. 208 pp. incl. 122 col. + b. & w. ills. (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2010), £18.99. ISBN 978–1–44470–6260. Reviewed by DAVID EKSERDJIAN IN A QUINCENTENNIAL address on Raphael, E.H. Gombrich remarked that ‘it is sometimes said that there are two types of connoisseurs, the expansionists and the restrictionists. As a mere outsider I think I have observed that restrictionists often enjoy a higher prestige in academic circles’. The idea of Sir Ernst as a mere anything may be richly comic, but the point is well made, and that – together with the established distinction of a good number of its supporters (we hear nothing of its doubters in these pages) – is why the work of art that is the subject of this book, not to mention the book itself, must both be given a fair hearing. In consequence, the way in which ‘La Bella Principessa’ – as she has been christened – has been presented in the media, not to mention the bandying-about of prices (‘Previously changing hands for just £12,000, the portrait is now thought to be worth something in the region of £150 million’, according to the book’s blurb), should not have an adverse effect on any judgment concerning its authorship. Nor indeed should what some may regard as the distinctly gushing rhetoric of Martin Kemp’s evocation of what he dubs ‘a star portrait of a stellar sitter’, not to mention the uncertainty of her identification as Bianca Sforza. Conversely, neither the fact that the work currently has no known provenance before its appearance at auction in January 1998, nor the unique circumstance – if it is by Leonardo – of its being on vellum, is a compelling reason to reject the attribution. Turning to the volume itself, the text is divided into two halves: the first part has been written by art historians, and includes a short forward by Claudio Strinati and a short preface by Nicholas Turner, but the lion’s share of it is by Kemp, who is both a noted authority on Italian Renaissance art, and also – even more pertinently – the author of the most generally admired modern monograph on Leonardo. This is followed by a section entitled ‘The Physical and Scientific Evidence’ by Pascal Cotte and others, rounded off by the briefest of conclusions by Kemp. As a non-scientist, I am self-evidently not qualified to comment upon the arguments and conclusions of Cotte et al. in any detail, but it may suffice to say that the main point made in favour of Leonardo’s authorship is the fact that carbon-14 analysis ‘provided a 95.4% probability of a bracketed date of AD 1440–1650’ for the vellum support. Moreover, it is stated that none of the pigments originally employed (for there are also areas of restoration) is incompatible with a date during Leonardo’s lifetime. There is also fingerprint evidence, but the notion that it
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seems altogether less conclusive appears to be admitted by at least some of the authors. Arguably, the two big surprises of the analyses are first that needle holes along its left side indicate that the piece of vellum was at one time part of a bound volume, and secondly that the drawing was executed ‘en trois crayons’ and not in green, yellow and pink chalks as its colour scheme might lead one to suppose. Nevertheless, nothing in all of this disallows an attribution to Leonardo either. If so, and given the left-handedness of the hatching and the generically late quattrocento look of the image, there are only two plausible options: either ‘La Bella Principessa’ is indeed by Leonardo, or it is a subsequent counterfeit. Were the latter to be the case, as I personally strongly suspect (caution is always advisable when evaluating a work one has not had the opportunity to study at length in the original), then it is tempting to wonder if its creator did not seek inspiration from medallic portraits and other sculptural models, and in particular from the polychrome bust of a woman (there are differing opinions concerning the identity of the sitter) by Francesco Laurana in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. This was on public display in the Unteres Belvedere from 1871 and certainly captivated the young Gustav Klimt in his painting Two girls with an oleander of c.1890–92 in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. Notoriously, such cross-media sources were employed by nineteenth-century forgers to cover their tracks. In this context it should be noted that the drawing was catalogued as ‘German School, early 19th Century’ by Christie’s, New York, in 1998 and sold as such to the present owner some years later. In his conclusion, Kemp almost seems to apologise for the fact that the portrait has been ‘examined in such detail in this book’, but actually the oddest thing about his contribution is its lack of thoroughness and rigour, above all in the almost total absence of close comparisons with unimpeachable works by Leonardo, but equally at what might be described as the margins. Thus, there is no bibliography, but more crucially the references are minimal: so, for example, the work of Thomas McGrath on early coloured drawings in Italy is nowhere mentioned, nor indeed are the most recent monographs on Laurana and Clouet, respectively by HannoWalter Kruft and Etienne Jollet. Alongside the sins of omission, there are also positively surreal errors of commission: in note 17, a reference to ‘Jean Hey’ is glossed identifying him as Jean Fouquet, when they are completely different artists (Hey being customarily agreed to be the so-called Master of Moulins), but this is nothing compared to the disaster that is note 81, in which it is claimed that a portrait in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj in Rome, which is a Leonardesque copy of the portrait in the Louvre of Isabel de Requesens i Enríquez, the Vicereine of Naples, traditionally but erroneously identified as Giovanna of Aragon, generally attributed to Raphael and/or Giulio Romano, is equally ‘by Raphael and Giulio Romano’ (which it is
not), and that it is a later, idealised portrait of Gian Galeazzo Sforza’s wife, Isabella of Aragon (which it is not either). In the end, however, ‘La Bella Principessa’ will stand or fall as a work of art, regardless of the ingenuity or weakness of any arguments for it or against it, and there seems little purpose in engaging in a pantomime-style ‘Oh yes it is, oh no it isn’t’ debate on its merits. It has certainly created ripples, but only time will tell how long they last.
Publications Received The American Leonardo: A Twentieth-Century Tale of Obsession, Art and Money. By John Brewer. 388 pp. incl. 15 b. & w. ills. (Constable and Robinson Ltd., London, 2009), £18.99. ISBN 978–1–84529–872–2. Anyone expecting from this book an account of the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, will be disappointed, as John Brewer’s subject is a painting which its former owners, Mr and Mrs Hahn, claimed was the ‘original’ of the portrait in the Louvre known as ‘La Belle Ferronnière’, variously attributed to Leonardo da Vinci and to Boltraffio. The subtitle describes it as a ‘Twentieth-Century Tale of Obsession, Art and Money’; there is precious little about art or money; instead there is a great deal of ignorance and self-seeking publicity. The earlier book on the subject entitled, somewhat crudely, The Rape of La Belle, written by Mr Hahn and published in 1946, confusingly recounted the original court case after Duveen was served with a suit in November 1921, claiming that he had falsely and maliciously slandered the painting (which had been given to Mrs Hahn in 1920 by her French godmother), and adding that ‘fingerprints imprinted on the surface will prove its authenticity to [sic] Leonardo’. Experts were called to Paris and were unanimous in dismissing the painting; Sir Charles Holmes of the National Gallery, London, apparently burst out laughing when he saw it, while Roger Fry was, at least, grateful for the free trip to Paris. The matter should have ended there but in 1929 in New York the Hahns decided to bring a case at which the bewildered jury was unable to reach a verdict. Duveen petitioned the court to have the case dismissed, but the judge ordered a retrial. To reach a settlement, Duveen agreed to pay the Hahns $60,000. The Times Literary Supplement’s review of Hahn’s book in April 1947 slammed it for ‘its catch-penny title, repetitious and over-emphatic style, confusing presentation of the evidence and air of uneasy defiance’. The same comment could be made about the present book, which follows no chronological sequence and includes a lot of irrelevant material on forgeries; no-one ever defined the Hahn painting as a forgery, but rather as an attractive, but clumsy, late seventeenth-century copy on canvas. The reviewer in 1947 was the forgery expert Jake Carter, who subsequently joined Sotheby’s Manuscript Department and who found himself in the unenviable position of being sent to inspect the Hahn painting in a bank in Kansas City in 1956. Wisely, Carter gave no opinion at the time, but said that he would discuss it with his colleagues in London on his return. However, Mrs Hahn was unwilling to send the painting to auction and decided instead to take it to Amsterdam in the hope of enlisting the support of Vitale Bloch, who confided in a friend that he would not have another quiet night for the rest of his life if he authenticated it. In turn, Sotheby’s prudently decided against the painting in 1968, saying that it was not accepted by Kenneth Clark. Two years later the Hahns tried bewilderingly to interest the Louvre in buying it but were shown the door by Michel Laclotte. In September 1975 the present writer was asked to accompany a Mr Leon Loucks to check the condition of a painting in store at Coutts Bank on the Strand. When the packing case was opened, I realised what I
was looking at; fortunately, there were no scratches or tears and I was not asked for my critical opinion. Mr Loucks, apparently acting for the Hahns, shipped the painting back to the United States where it languished in various bank vaults. In 1993 I took part together with Martin Kemp and the late Sylvie Béguin (Beguine for the author) in a BBC docu-drama entitled The Two Belles. At one point the camera moved to Wichita, Kansas, and focused on Mr Loucks, while he slowly expounded the great qualities of the painting against a backdrop of freight trains moving equally slowly and ponderously through the yards. Meanwhile the Hahns and their successors promoted a scheme offering shares in the painting to various friends and creditors on the basis that they would be paid when it was successfully sold. At the last count, according to Brewer, there were twenty-nine liens totalling theoretically $42 million – a sort of insane tontine, the legacy of ignorance and greed. But another chapter in the story has just opened, too late for Brewer’s book and almost too late for this review: the Hahn family, having apparently reconfirmed their rightful ownership of the painting, asked Sotheby’s in New York to offer it at auction, leading to its inclusion as Lot 181 in a sale of Important Old Masters in January 2010, attributed to a ‘Follower of Leonardo da Vinci, probably before 1750’. The lengthy and admirably objective catalogue entry gave the whole story and provided a wide estimate of between $300,000 and $500,000 which seemed daring but, in the event, proved to be conservative as the final bid was $1,500,000. It seems clear that we have not reached the end of this extraordinary saga. WILLIAM MOSTYN-OWEN Scientific Investigation of Copies, Fakes and Forgeries. By Paul Craddock. 628 pp. incl. 148 col. + 191 b. & w. ills. (Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 2009), £100. ISBN 978–0–7506–4205–7. The present reviewer has recently had the challenge of setting up and starting a new centre for the study of archaeological and historical objects at Cranfield University, part of the work of which concentrates on the use of scientific analysis in the identification of copies and deliberate fakes in public and private collections. As part of the setting up of courses in this subject, a suitable list of relevant literature has had to be established. This proved to be more difficult than might be imagined. The great majority of texts in this area are either very specific and often technical studies of single or small groups of objects, or very general, verging on the sensational, such as books debating controversial fakes. There were very few serious studies that examined multiple material types. Paul Craddock’s new volume is therefore very welcome. Craddock has had many years of experience in the analysis of objects within the Department of Conservation and Scientific Research at the British Museum. As such he is rightly regarded as one of the leading experts on this subject and he has played a personal role in the study of many objects that have turned out to be ‘wrong’. He writes with authority on the full range of materials that the book offers, including metals, ceramics, stone, pigments, paper and cloth. The volume begins with a highly accessible introduction to both the motives and techniques of forgers and then moves on to an equally readable account of the key scientific techniques that are used for both relative and absolute dating. The succeeding chapters devoted to materials begin with brief histories and explore the main techniques used in their identification and the typical problems of contamination, patina and conservation. Interspersed within the chapters are highly illustrative case studies of up to eight pages in length, giving accounts of high-profile objects such as the Vinlandia Map and the Risley Lanx. The presentation of the book is first class. Although it is expensive, it is beautifully produced and includes many illustrations of exceptional quality. Craddock has thus produced a book that will quickly become a standard text. ANDREW SHORTLAND
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Kingdom of Ife London by JOHN PICTON
in south-western Nigeria, with its schools, university, museum, churches, mosques, temples and shrines to local deities, and its palaces of the king and the chiefly nobility. It is also a city of myth, the place where the gods came down from the sky to create the world as we know it, a place of rivalry between the gods as to the ownership of that world, a city created by a god who is the source of kingship throughout the region to the west of the lower Niger River, a heroic figure who conquers the inhabitants of the forest. Then there is the Ife of the current exhibition at the British Museum, London (to 6th June),1 an Ife of rescue archaeology revealing works of art principally in stone, ceramic and cast brass. Yet Ife was twice abandoned during the nineteenth century, the city and its temples quickly overgrown with foliage. So it is a city that had to reinvent itself in the late nineteenth century, its traditions IFE IS A CITY
68. Granite sculpture of a calabash of fermenting palm wine. Ife, 12th to 15th century AD. Granite, 47.5 cm. high. (National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria; exh. British Museum, London).
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seemingly, at times, only half remembered. Although some works of art were recovered from sacred sites in and around the city, there was no continuity of artistic practice with the past, and no evidence for wood sculpture and textile design, the two arts best described from the recent past. There was a complete absence of any of the documentation (whether literary or ethnographic) that one would regard as ‘normal’ in the history of art, while the excavation of particular sites through the past hundred years was always in response to accidental discoveries. When one excavation was thought to have revealed the site of a royal tomb, it was stopped. In another part of Ife, supposedly the site of several royal graves, excavation has never been permitted. This all adds up to precisely the sort of context in which myth runs wild: Ife has become the cradle of Yoruba civilisation, even, as the Ooni (king) of Ife said at the exhibition’s opening reception, ‘the mother home of mankind’; while the art itself allowed outsiders to generate other mythologies: evidence for the lost civilisation of Atlantis, the ‘legacy of an unknown Donatello’, and so forth. The result is that, apart from the ‘bare bones’ of the archaeology, every interpretive comment is nothing more than an inference whether from the antiquities themselves, from myth, or from what we know of sculptural practice from the recent past elsewhere in the lower Niger region. Until we have more archaeology this may be all we can do, but the procedure is patently unreliable and our inferences at best no more than provisional. On the other hand, we do have some dates, provided by C14 and thermoluminescence. We can be reasonably certain that the ceramic sculptures date from between AD 1100 and 1450, with lost-wax casting in copper and brass in the later phase of this period; and we cannot but recognise the magnificence of an art that possibly celebrates the nobility of a ruling elite, an art associated with the cults of local deities within city temples and forest groves, an art characterised by an idealised naturalism as well as the realistic depiction of age and disease. It is also an art with its own schematic forms, an art that represents itself in the depiction of shrine complexes on the decorative programmes of some ceramic vessels, an art that manifests the astonishing skills seen in its brass and copper castings, in its sculptural use of glass, stone and iron, in arts practised within the safety of its city walls, a city that, at the height of its powers, may have been four times the size of the City of London at the same period. Some ceramic sculptures were associated with raised areas in paved courtyards, and these do remind us of altars known from the recent past throughout the lower Niger region. Some of the ceramic material was found in a very fragmentary condition, half buried in temple and forest grove settings. The city is also marked, here and there, by magnificent granite monoliths, some embedded with iron nails. The area said to be the forest grove of the goddess of the sea, Olokun, seems to have been a glass-making factory
69. Figure of a man with elephantiasis. Ife, 1100–1450 AD. Terracotta, 29 cm. high. (National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria; exh. British Museum, London).
presumably dedicated to the beadwork and other ornamentation we can see represented on ceramic and cast brass sculpture. So what has the British Museum done with this material? The exhibition is in the space around the old Reading Room, now painted in the rusty laterite colour so familiar to anyone who has lived and travelled in West Africa. All the questions raised by this material are dealt with in the way the show is laid out and explained through a series of information panels that supplement but do not overwhelm the works of art on display. We are introduced to the history of excavation in Ife, we get a taste of the economic history of West Africa and a hint of the mythology of Ife and its (possibly contentious) relationship with modern Yoruba civilisation; and a final panel gives us a little of the visual culture of the modern city. We are introduced to some of the finest works at the beginning, and then we are led through all aspects of Ife art until the show culminates in a selection from the extraordinary series of seventeen cast brass heads found by accident in the dry season of 1938–39. All the material is on loan from Nigeria with the exception of the one head that found its way to the British Museum in 1939 (the other sixteen remain in Nigeria). A few of these objects have been seen in Britain before, most recently in 1995 at the Royal Academy’s show Africa, the Art of a Continent. What really matters now, however, is that this is the first time anyone has seen the art of Ife presented in a way that allows us to assess its entire scope. Not even in Nigeria, except in Ife itself, has there been a single exhibition as comprehensive as this. Never before have we seen the granite figure sculpture, the monoliths, the crocodiles and mudfish, and the extraordinary sculpture of a calabash of palm wine frothing around the neck of the vessel as it ferments (Fig.68), and all cleverly lit so as to bring out their sparkling texture. Nor have we seen the idealised naturalism of ceramic
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sculpture alongside images of disease (Fig.69) and old age, royal figures alongside sacrificial victims, nor the ceramic and granite sculpture together in one show, raising the inevitable question: this might all have been found in and around one city, but is it all the work of one community of people? (Although the ceramic medium is described as ‘terracotta’, it is the same coarse, low-temperature-fired clay as the domestic pottery of the region. This is a fragile art that can only have been made in and around Ife: complex figure sculpture, sometimes almost life-sized, was never going to be carried far!) The exhibition also includes early copper, brass and bronze castings (Fig.70) from elsewhere in the lower Niger region. We might take Ife to be the dominant visual influence, but what we see is quite the opposite: sculptural traditions that owe nothing to Ife, works of art from centres as yet unknown to the history and archaeology of art. The brass used in Ife must have come via its commanding position in a network of trade routes across West Africa, through Mali and across the Sahara: brass was an alloy incapable of manufacture in pre-industrial sub-Saharan Africa. Most of these unprovenanced works are cast in bronze, almost certainly the product of an early and entirely local technology that disappeared once European brass became available via coastal trade, as in Benin City from about 1500. A number of visitors to this exhibition have seen a likeness between the art of Ife and the Italian Renaissance. This calls for the comment that whereas in Europe drawing was used both as an end in itself and as a means of exploring ideas and forms to be
70. Head. Ife, c.1450 AD. Cast copper, 33 cm. high. (National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria; exh. British Museum, London).
realised in painting, sculpture and architecture, drawing was almost certainly not among the working practices of Ife artists. Throughout West Africa (until the development of a modern school of art) the man who cast in brass did not carve in wood; the woman who painted a sculpture, or the wall of a temple, did not make pots. The man or woman who marked patterns on a living human body did not draw on paper. There was no paper. Ife sculpture would have been made without any preliminary sketch. Insofar as there was a prototype for the work in hand, it would have been an earlier example, already made within the same tradition. Perhaps this explains the apparent lack of development in the art through a 350-year period; but it does not account for the sudden appearance and disappearance of the art of Ife, for which we have no explanation. 1
Catalogue: Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures from West Africa. By Henry John Drewal and Enid Schildkrout. 184 pp. incl. 147 col. ills. (British Museum Press, London, and the Museum for African Art, New York, 2009), £25. ISBN 978–0–7141–2595–4. The exhibition will tour North America until April 2012.
Christen Købke London and Edinburgh by JANE MUNRO
decades of the nineteenth century – a period defined almost precisely by Købke’s lifespan (1810–48) – have come to be recognised as a ‘Golden Age’ in Danish painting, then the fin-de-millénium will surely come to represent a similarly gilded era for nineteenth-century Danish art history. As pre-referendum Denmark continues to preserve its economic identity in the face of an encroaching eurozone, so in recent years it has been vigorous and imaginative in promoting the appreciation of its painters beyond the kroneshores. More general surveys of ‘Nordic’ painting apart, there have been, in the last decade alone, monographic exhibitions devoted to the works of Nicolai Abildgaard, C.E. Eckersberg, J.F. Willemsen and Vilhelm Hammershøi in Paris, Washington and London. Christen Købke. Danish Master of Light, the small and almost perfectly formed exhibition currently at the National Gallery, London (to 13th June; then at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh; 4th July to 3rd October), extends the series by examining the career of one of the most cherished of all nineteenth-century Danish painters.1 Købke was compulsively reticent about his own achievement, spiritually compelled to accept his artistic lot of expressing himself ‘via small things’ (or ‘little sections’ as it is translated in the catalogue). This pious reticence seems to have transmitted itself to his contemporaries such as his one-time student Frølich, who learned from Købke that a painter could
IF THE EARLY
71. View of the plaster cast collection at Charlottenborg, by Christen Købke. 1830. Canvas, 41.5 by 36 cm. (Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen; exh. National Gallery, London).
accomplish ‘splendid’ things ‘if only he does not seek to become more than he is’. Organised by the National Galleries in London and Edinburgh, under the guest curatorship of David Jackson, this exhibition presents an appropriately restrained selection of forty-eight paintings, spanning less than a decade of Købke’s short career. Of course this is not the first time his work has been presented to an admiring British audience. Over a quarter of a century ago, the National Gallery contributed significantly to his extra-Scandinavian rehabilitation, when nineteen of his paintings were shown as part of the loan exhibition from the Statens Museum for Kunst, Danish Painting: The Golden Age (1984). This was preceded some twelve years earlier by the magisterial Council of Europe exhibition, The Age of Neo-classicism, whose pan-European range encompassed the contribution of Denmark’s painters, and included two of Købke’s most notable masterpieces, View of the plaster cast collection at Charlottenborg (Fig.71) and View from Dosseringen near the Sortedam Lake looking towards Nørrebro (c.1838; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen), both of which are included in the current show. Nor is it the first monographic exhibition of Købke’s work, tout court. In 1996 Hans Edvard Nørregård-Nielsen and Kaspar Monrad brought together just under two hundred works by Købke at the Statens Museum in Copenhagen, accompanied by an exhaustive catalogue published in four languages; together with the publication of the former’s threevolume monograph the same year, Købke’s place in the history of nineteenth-century European painting was definitively assured. Købke, then, is hardly lacking in admirers. All the same, there can be an anxiety that a painter whose distinctive understatement and refined sensibility stand out in a crowd can, in a monographic show, be hoisted by his own exquisite petard. The current exhibition easily allays such fears, through a highly the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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considered choice of subjects, styles and scale, as well as a number of deft and thoughtprovoking juxtapositions. Like the 1996 Copenhagen retrospective, the exhibition takes the visitor through Købke’s career chronologically, and for the most part geographically, in all but a few cases within the two to three kilometre radius in Copenhagen where he lived and worked. These landscapes are complemented by a slightly smaller group of figurative paintings, mostly portraits, but which includes, too, a remarkable pair of character heads that recall the fascination for ‘type’ found in other painters such as Louis-Léopold Boilly and James Ward, and two wonderfully quirky nude studies that translate the classically inspired Davidian académies in which his own master, Eckersberg, had trained into a highly unidealised and distinctively Danish idiom, bony ribcage, ruddied skin and all. The majority of landscapes in the exhibition depict places with which Købke was intimately familiar: the Citadel, or Kastellet, a fortress area defined by a moat just outside Copenhagen, and Blegdammen, a few kilometres to the north-west, then on the city outskirts. The Citadel paintings cleverly put in context two of the four works by Købke in the exhibition that have been acquired by the National Gallery and National Gallery of Scotland over recent decades. The View of the square in the Citadel looking towards the Citadel ramparts (c.1831; National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh) is perhaps one of the least immediately seductive of the group, but contains a narrative element in the exchange between Købke’s father and two identifiable military men that propels us directly into the artist’s everyday existence (we observe the scene with him, from a viewpoint inside his own home). By contrast, the National Gallery’s Northern drawbridge to the Citadel in Copenhagen (1837), seen in the present context, is almost valedictory in tone, the distinctive red-painted homeyporte and anonymous passers-by recollected in semi-tranquillity against the rosy pink glow of the evening sky. The view was painted as a memento for Købke’s mother of what were presumably happy years spent in this part of the city between 1819 and 1833, but it may be no coincidence that it also takes as its subject the very one that three years earlier had caused Købke long months of creative ‘struggle’ and agonising religious doubt. As his first commission from the Danish Fine Art Society, Købke’s anxiety was understandable; but the result, View outside the north gate of the Citadel (Fig.72) – the only painting of this subject to have been exhibited publicly – is a tour-de-force. The curators remark on the ‘relaxed’ mood of the painting, and so, on the face of it, it is: boys are quietly fishing, while two men, their bodies partially cropped by a stanchion, are engaged in casual conversation; as we see none of their faces (Købke had a penchant for rear views), we do not busy ourselves with projected anecdote or narrative. But underpinning this is a compositional rigour, a honed asymmetry, and perfect control of light and shadow
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72. View outside the north gate of the Citadel, by Christen Købke. 1834. Canvas, 79 by 93 cm. (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen; exh. National Gallery, London).
that shows how painstakingly Købke devoted himself to every detail of its finish, each element for him an intimation of the Divine. The same infinite care marks two key ‘show pieces’ of the Blegdammen years: the View of a street in Østerbro outside Copenhagen (1836; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen) and the View from Dosseringen near the Sortedam Lake looking towards Nørrebro, mentioned above. Like his commissioned Citadel painting, these were preceded by numerous preparatory drawings and oil-sketches, showing how well he assimilated both dimensions of Eckersberg’s teaching, to paint ‘whatever there is’ directly before the subject, out-ofdoors, and to secure it by studied attention to perspective (sadly, no preparatory drawings for any of these commissioned pictures are included in the display). Faced with the imposing Renaissance palace of Fredricksborg, Købke confronted not the benignly familiar, but a powerful symbolism of nationhood. Painted in response to an art competition with an overt nationalist agenda, the view Købke submitted (cat.37) pulled out all the emotive stops, with clear passing references to Dahl and Friedrich, in the sharp silhouetting of the eight-storey building against a puce evening sky, its immense volume doubled in the glassy reflections in the surrounding water. This was his grandest view of the palace, but not his last word on the site. Perhaps more intriguing for modern audiences are the extremely arresting views painted from the roof of the castle, one of which, Roof ridge of Frederiksborg Castle, with
view of lake, town and forest (c.1834–35; Danish Museum of Art and Design, Copenhagen) has all the character of an informal oil-sketch writ almost impossibly large, so that the architectural elements of spire and chimney become (as in many of Dahl’s paintings) an ambient preliminary to the bold emptiness of the hazy blue sky: ‘whatever there is’ is here nothing less than the heavens above. Like the landscapes in the exhibition, the portraits focus on the small-scale and informal. These are mostly of family and friends, several – such as the masterly portrait of his close friend Sødring (Fig.73) – artists themselves. Sødring stares out, apparently directly at the painter, with a bemused look and barely open mouth that suggests they had just shared a joke. The setting of the portrait is more cluttered than most of Købke’s interiors, but, compelling though the superbly rendered details and trompe l’œil mirror reflections are, they are not mere displays of painterly virtuosity. Rather, the portrait achieves a perfect pitch in which the ‘little sections’ are at all times subservient to what Købke called the ‘total impression’: in this case, not merely a record of likeness, but an affectionate testament to youthful friendship. In their selection, the organisers have been careful to show that Købke also responded – sometimes brilliantly – to painting figures on a larger scale. Two impressive examples are included here: one, a portrait of a doughy-paunched baker relative, painted in appropriate harmonies of pretzel-beige in the year of Købke’s premature death; the other, a monumental portrait
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73. Portrait of the landscape painter Frederik Sødring, by Christen Købke. 1832. Canvas, 42.2 by 37.9 cm. (Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen; exh. National Gallery, London).
of his friend and mentor, the sculptor H.E. Freund (1838; Royal Danish Academy of the Fine Arts) that dominated the entrance to the London showing. The imposing nature of the portrait is a tribute to the potent influence that Freund exercised on Købke’s life, not least in persuading him to travel to Italy later in the same year this portrait was painted. Freund sits apparently lost in thought in a universe of his own creation – the interior decor, chair, smock and sculpture are all of his design. His solid frontality recalls Ingres’s images of classical deities, notably the painting of Jupiter and Thetis (1811; Musée Granet, Aixen-Provence) or would-be deities, such as Napoleon on his Imperial throne (1806; Musée de l’Armée, Paris), although unlike them, he exudes a sense of tortured terribilità that is even more apparent in a brilliantly characterful preliminary drawing in the Hirschsprung Collection (shown as a marvellous counterpoint in the 1996 exhibition, but not, alas, here). All of which leaves the question of Købke’s Italian sketches. As the 1996 Washington exhibition of oil-sketches and small paintings (including one by Købke) showed, ‘the light of Italy’ exercised a powerful, often transformative, effect on generations of European painters. So what does it mean to call Købke a ‘painter of light’, as this exhibition does (in common with nearly every exhibition of nineteenth-century Danish painters)? The clue lies in the ‘Danish’: light, as it turns out, can have a pronounced cultural specificity, something brought out very forcibly in this exhibition. In his contribution to the catalogue, Kaspar Monrad (whose own extraordinary contribution to the wider understanding of Golden Age Danish painters deserves to be more fully acknowledged than is possible in this short review) argues the case for the importance of the sketches Købke made around Naples and Capri, which have been largely dismissed in previous studies of the artist’s work. Here, as elsewhere, he points to close compositional similarities with the more
lusciously painted work of the Norwegian Thomas Fearnley, even though the direct line of influence is hard to pinpoint, given the six years that separated their visits (might their drawings – similar in motif and execution – provide a clue?). Before leaving for Italy, Købke ‘rehearsed’ potential subjects by copying Italian views by his compatriot Fritz Petzholdt, and seems to have maintained a distance from his subjects, even when painting them on the spot. To argue for the importance of his Italian trip, as Monrad convincingly does, does not in itself transform these thinly painted preparatory sketches into masterpieces of poetic restraint, and the four included here make for something of an underwhelming conclusion to the display. If the exhibition confirms anything, it is that Købke responded best to a northern light that is cool, clear and sometimes grudged, and not a Mediterranean one that bleaches and blinds: we feel he would so much rather have painted the Castel d’Ovo in red brick. It has become almost de rigeur to remind viewers, too easily lulled by these peaceful scenes and seduced by the sheer beauty of their painterly detail, that Købke’s active years were spent in the wake of one of the worst moments in Denmark’s history, culminating in national bankruptcy. Historically, this is essential to our wider understanding, of course, but the visual, and emotive, evidence is all against us. Little disturbs Købke’s universe – never a gust of wind and only the barest ripple on water. We are left with an art that is hermetically sealed, an airlessness that does not stifle, but on the contrary preserves Købke’s paintings in all their freshness, originality and almost miraculous poise. 1
Catalogue: Christen Købke. Danish Master of Light. By David Jackson, with a contribution by Kasper Monrad. 128 pp. incl. 85 col. + 1 b. & w. ills. (National Galleries of Scotland, in association with the National Gallery, London, 2010), £14.99. ISBN 978–1–906270–27–8.
commercial galleries to display or sell art. Barely thirty years later, by mounting the first survey of Soviet non conformist art from the 1980s and early 1990s in London, Haunch of Venison has brought this art to a public it was never expected to reach. Drawn primarily from the collection of the Berlin dealer Volker Diehl, the exhibition begins by looking at the work of the older generation of non conformist artists who began working in the 1960s and 1970s. Focusing primarily on Moscow Conceptualism and Sots Art (a blend of Socialist Realism and American Pop art), the first room includes artists whose names are already relatively well known to a Western audience: Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar & Alexander Melamid, and Erik Bulatov, all of whom, interestingly, had emigrated to America by the early 1990s.2 However, the exhibition focuses solely on work from the 1980s and early 1990s. In this way, the exhibition not only introduces us to the younger generation of non conformists, but allows us to look at the work of already well-established artists at a point of immense historical change, heralded by Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, where the exhibition largely ends. Although in 1986 Gorbachev’s introduction of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) was intended to herald a liberalisation of government policy and promised a more tolerant relationship between art and the State, it also reintroduced competition in the art world, which had been previously regulated by dependence on State sponsorship.3 In his paintings Dukat (Fig.75) and Bitsa (Fig.76), Eduard Gorokhosky expresses the bizarre state of affairs for a Soviet non conformist in the mid-1980s using a hyper-realist style of painting similar to Gerhard Richter. As Ekaterina Degot explains in her essay for the catalogue, the club at the Ducat tobacco plant and the Bitsa Park were among the first places in the 1980s where large exhibitions without an official committee were permitted. While looking at Dukat, the viewer becomes part of the crowd, but we have no idea what we are waiting for and
Glasnost London by ANNE BLOOD
setting of 6 Burlington Gardens seems an incongruous location for the Haunch of Venison’s current exhibition Glasnost: Soviet Non-Conformist Art from the 1980s (to 26th June).1 Artists who worked outside the State-sanctioned Soviet art world and the tenets of Socialist Realism exhibited their work secretly in the 1980s in the apartments of fellow artists, poets and curators in Moscow and Leningrad (St Petersburg) and rarely would have been presented with any chance for a public exhibition. In the early 1980s there was no art market in the Soviet Union, art was not the commodity that we understand it to be, and there were no private THE ORNATE, GRAND
74. Sleep quietly or rest in peace, by Maria Konstantinov. 1989. Mixed media, 118.1 by 142.3 by 17.7 cm. (Courtesy of Gallerie Volker Diehl, Berlin, and Diehl + Gallery One, Moscow; exh. Haunch of Venison, London). the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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75. Dukat, by Eduard Gorokhosky. 1987. Canvas, 81 by 100 cm. (Courtesy of Gallerie Volker Diehl, Berlin, and Diehl + Gallery One, Moscow; exh. Haunch of Venison, London).
what we might see. In Bitsa the canvas has the appearance of an over-exposed colour photograph in which a group huddles in the cold around the seated figure of an artist sketching. In both images the realism is countered by the unnatural, almost displeasing use of colour, and the excitement of the crowd is fought off by the rows of turned heads and shivering figures. In short, the paintings depict places where we are not sure we want to be – if such places even exist. This first room is dominated by paintings most of which are clearly derived from the style of Socialist Realism. While Gorokhosky’s paintings adopt realism as sombre critique, much of the work is a humorous parody of the State-sanctioned style. Works such as Alexander Kosolapov’s Marlboro Malevich (1987) and Komar & Melamid’s Yalta Conference (study) (1982) fuse American popculture references from cigarette advertising to Hollywood science-fiction characters with Soviet symbols and the kitsch of Socialist Realism. Oddly, photography, which was a central part of Moscow Conceptualism, is under-represented in the rooms devoted to the older generation of non conformist artists, with only the photographic work of Sergey Borisov and Andrey Bezukladnikov on display. The rooms upstairs focus on the younger generation of artists, and one is immediately struck by the increased amount of sculpture and mixed media assemblage pieces. While the stylistic output here is more diverse, much of the work still clearly draws on earlier styles and motifs seen downstairs. In Maria Konstantinov’s soft, red star sculpture Sleep quietly or rest in peace (Fig.74), the bizarre humour found in Sots Arts painting is transferred to sculpture. Understanding Socialist Realism not simply as kitsch or a vehicle for State propaganda, but as a rich field of stereotypes and myths, Sots Art appropriated the visual language of Socialist Realism in order to deconstruct Soviet myths. In Konstantinov’s work, three little white buttons hold together a red pillowcase, while a red
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sash with gold lettering crosses its middle – a mockery of the red star symbol and the Soviet comrades who march in the May Day Parades wearing sashes. Leaning against a wooden frame, the work becomes a limp, impotent symbol of Soviet power. While the visual parody in Konstaninov’s work is apparent in several other pieces, such as Andrey Filippov’s installation The Last Supper (1989), where the hammer and sickle replace the knife and fork on a long dining table covered with a red cloth, many other works in the show are lost in translation. This is particularly apparent in the selections from Pavel Pepperstein’s illustrated volume ‘OBSERVATION’ (1983–84), where each image is captioned with blocks of Russian text, as are the embroidered banners Shchi (1991) and Proletarians of all countries unite! (1992) by Sergey Bugaev (Afrika). Of the Russian text present on several works in the
exhibition, none is translated and even the dual-language catalogue, with excellent essays in Russian and English, provides no translation or further comment on individual works. In the final two rooms of the exhibition, the visitor’s attention is drawn to Sotheby’s first sale of Russian modern and contemporary art in Moscow in 1988, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall when perestroika was at its height. In retrospect, this sale can be included in the chain of events that lead to the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, but in many ways it is an unsatisfactory point on which to end. By focusing on a short, intense period of change of just over ten years, the exhibition leaves the visitor wondering what happened after the climax, though certainly this sense of confusion is intentional. It is important to remember that Soviet non conformist art is not a selfcontained artistic movement, but is instead a term used to classify an eclectic mix of underground art produced in the Soviet Union. While some artists seen here survived the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many fell victim to the political and economic chaos that followed Gorbachev’s resignation. In fact, what is most satisfactory about this somewhat mixed exhibition, is that by concentrating on the 1980s, it is able to convey a broader sense of the overall artistic output by Soviet non conformist artists at the time, and not simply parade the work of those who have found commercial success. 1 Catalogue: Glasnost: Soviet Non-Conformist Art from the 1980s. By Joseph Backstein, Ekaterina Degot, Boris Groys and Olga Sviblova. 269 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Haunch of Venison, London, courtesy of Gallerie Volker Diehl, and Kira Foundation, Moscow, 2010), £40. ISBN 978–1–905620–48–7. 2 Ilya Kabakov left in 1992, Vitaly Komar and Alexandre Melamid in 1978, and Erik Bulatov in 1989. 3 N. Condee and V. Padunov: ‘“Makulakul’tura”: Reprocessing Culture’, October 57 (Summer 1991), pp.85–86.
76. Bitsa, by Eduard Gorokhosky. 1987. Canvas, 81 by 100 cm. (Courtesy of Gallerie Volker Diehl, Berlin, and Diehl + Gallery One, Moscow; exh. Haunch of Venison, London).
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Crime and Punishment; Meijer de Haan Paris by RACHEL SLOAN I N 1791, L O U I S - M I C H E L L E P E L E T I E R , marquis de Saint-Fargeau, called for something unprecedented in the history of France: the abolition of the death penalty. It is one of history’s great ironies that the good marquis then voted for the execution of Louis XVI and was himself murdered by a royalist; the legislation he introduced continued to be the subject of heated debate for nearly two hundred years and was finally passed in 1981, thanks to the efforts of the then Minister of Justice, Robert Badinter. Based on a project by Badinter and curated by a team led by Jean Clair, the ambitious but highly problematic exhibition Crime and Punishment (to 27th June) at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, takes as its brief the impact of these debates on (primarily French) visual culture from the Revolution to 1920. Most exhibition catalogues serve as records of their exhibitions. Crime and Punishment inverts this formula; it is very much the exhibition of the catalogue, and therein lies the rub.1 The trajectory the catalogue traces – from the ‘first crime’ (Cain’s murder of Abel) to the Enlightenment ideals that underpinned debate during the Revolution and Convention, to the Romantic conception of the criminal, to the shift towards a scientific approach to crime and criminality and its increasing sensationalism in the later nineteenth century – is fascinating, and the essays by a team consisting of curators, historians, a
77. For art and my loved ones I will gladly endure to the end!, by Egon Schiele. 1912. Watercolour and pencil on Japanese paper, 47.9 by 31.9 cm. (Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna; exh. Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
78. Charlotte Corday, 13 July 1793, assassination of Marat, by Paul Jacques Aimé Baudry. 1860. Canvas, 203 by 154 cm. (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes; exh. Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
philosopher, a psychoanalyst and a neurologist taken together make a considerable contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship. The advantage of a catalogue, of course, especially one of this density (in all senses of the word) is that it can be read at leisure, in small doses if desired. Once one enters an exhibition, one has little choice but to attempt to take in everything in one fell swoop – a tall order in the present case. The Musée d’Orsay’s exhibition galleries normally accommodate between one hundred and 150 objects. Crime and Punishment boasts a staggering 476, a number that even a larger venue such as the Grand Palais would struggle to house comfortably. No amount of designer’s legerdemain can disguise how suffocating the hang is, both for the works themselves and for visitors, an effect amplified by the rebarbative nature of much of the material. Masterpieces and minor works – some gems among them, but many of indifferent quality – are deployed cheek by jowl, as if of equal value, on walls and in vitrines; large canvases such as Léon Bonnat’s Christ on the Cross (cat. no.141) and Franz von Stuck’s Lucifer (no.9) are shoehorned into dark corners, while the searing anguish of two watercolours that Egon Schiele painted while incarcerated on an immorality charge (nos.440–41; Fig.77) is utterly thrown away in a section on the artist as criminal that might have been better treated in a separate exhibition. Throughout, it is
difficult to avoid the impression that the objects themselves are treated as so many illustrations for the catalogue’s arguments (the surfeit of illustrated newspapers, medical photographs and mugshots being a case in point), rather than as being worthy of attention in their own right. This uncurbed excess is all the more regrettable in the light of a few sections of the exhibition that are genuinely well chosen and thoughtful. The sequence devoted to the evolution of the depiction of the assassination of Marat, from the revolutionary martyr of David’s celebrated canvas (represented here by a workshop copy; no.48) to his gradual eclipse by Charlotte Corday, epitomised by Paul Baudry’s 1860 Salon piece (no.51; Fig.78) but also, surprisingly, by later paintings by Munch (no.53) and Picasso (no.54), is lucidly presented, requiring only seven objects to make its points. Likewise, a judiciously selected run of works charting the increasingly criminalised representation of the femme fatale offers a new angle on one of the major discourses of the nineteenth century. It is tempting to wonder what sort of exhibition might have emerged if similar restraint had been exercised throughout. Upstairs from the overstuffed special exhibition galleries, Meijer de Haan (to 20th June) stands in stark contrast.2 Until now, Jacob Meijer de Haan has been reduced to an art-historical footnote, known to students of the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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modernism primarily as the subject of several deeply unflattering portraits by his friend and master, Paul Gauguin, as well as the deformed homunculus in the background of the latter’s Barbarian tales (Museum Folkwang, Essen). Relatively well known in his native Amsterdam for scenes of Jewish life strongly informed by the realism of the Dutch Golden Age, he left for Paris in 1888 on the heels of a scandal caused by a now-lost painting, Uriel Acosta; there he met Gauguin and followed him to Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu. However, he stopped painting several years before his early death in 1895, and immediately faded into obscurity; only about forty works by him are known today, most of them privately owned. The present exhibition, the first monographic show devoted to this mysterious artist, brings together most of his surviving œuvre along with an illuminating selection of documentary material and paintings and decorative art that Gauguin produced alongside him in Brittany. Together, they and the excellent catalogue give us as complete a portrait of Meijer de Haan and his career as we are likely to have for quite some time.3 The documentary material is all the more important in light of the fact that only two of Meijer de Haan’s paintings from his stay in Paris (nos.40 and 42) are known today. Even with examples of the work of avant-garde artists he would have seen there, however, the transition from the sombre palette and careful, academic brushwork of his Dutch genre scenes and portraits to the simplified forms and flat areas of bright colour that he adopted under Gauguin’s tutelage in Brittany is startling. The two often worked side by side, and examples of this practice have been brought together here – a move that sometimes does Meijer de Haan few favours, as in a pair of still
79. Self-portrait against a Japonist background, by Jacob Meijer de Haan. 1889–90. Canvas. 32.4 by 24.5 cm. (Triton Foundation, Netherlands; exh. Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
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De Chirico, Max Ernst, Magritte, Balthus Florence by ROBERT RADFORD
80. Maternity, by Jacob Meijer de Haan. 1889. Canvas, 72 by 59.5 cm. (Private collection; exh. Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
lifes of a pile of onions (nos.5 and 25). The skins of Gauguin’s onions have the dull pearlescent sheen of the real thing; Meijer de Haan’s are matte and drab, the laborious application of paint all too apparent. In other instances, such as a pair of luminous Le Pouldu landscapes (nos.6 and 8), he showed himself the equal of his master. Perhaps the best example of their collaborative work is saved for last: the surviving decorative panels the two artists painted for the inn owned by Marie Henry (who became Meijer de Haan’s lover – nos.30–31) are installed over a blown-up photograph of the dining room they originally adorned. That Meijer de Haan was an uneven artist is, on the evidence of this exhibition, difficult to dispute. That he was an artist of considerably more complexity and interest than has previously been assumed, and that his work was more than a mere derivative of Gauguin’s, is also forcefully demonstrated, especially by two introspective self-portraits (nos.1 and 34; Fig.79) and a beautiful ‘modern Madonna’ depicting Marie Henry and her baby (no.2; Fig.80). It is probably manifestly unfair to compare a large thematic exhibition like Crime and Punishment to a small monographic one like Meijer de Haan – a case of apples and oranges, or, given one of the Dutch artist’s favourite subjects, apples and onions – but the latter is a shining example of the concept that less really is sometimes more. 1 Catalogue: Crime et châtiment. Edited by Jean Clair. 416 pp. incl. 425 col. ills. (Musée d’Orsay/Gallimard, Paris, 2010), €49 (HB). ISBN 978–2–07–012874–7. 2 Meijer de Haan was seen first at the Joods Historisch Museum, Amsterdam (11th October 2009 to 25th January 2010). After it closes in Paris, it will travel to the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Quimper (8th July to 4th October 2010). 3 Catalogue: Meijer de Haan, le maître caché. By Jelka Kröger et al. 160 pp. incl. 120 col. ills. (Musée d’Orsay/Editions Hazan, Paris, 2010), €29 (PB). ISBN 978–2–7541–0434–0.
IN THE EXHI BITION , De Chirico, Max Ernst, Magritte, Balthus: A Look into the Invisible, at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (to 18th July), Giorgio de Chirico is seen as the major innovator, who, in Magritte’s words, revealed ‘a new vision where the viewer rediscovers his isolation and hears the silence of the world’1 and who, through his Pittura Metafisica, affected the visual language and underlying tone of unease and displacement common to much Surrealist and Neue Sachlichkeit painting. The extent to which the ripples spread out beyond these specific categories is suggested by the inclusion here of the artists beyond those featured in the exhibition’s title – Carrà, Morandi and Savinio, and the less frequently shown Arturo Nathan, Pierre Roy and Niklaus Stoecklin. Florence is a happy location in which to exhibit de Chirico, who once claimed the city as his birthplace, presumably in the ‘metaphysical’ sense as the place of his celebrated moment of revelation in the Piazza S. Croce. He lived there at various moments in his life, notably in the period between his studies in Munich and his move to Paris.2 A programme of events located elsewhere in Florence in various institutions with de Chirico connections is indicated in a ‘passport’ booklet produced by the Palazzo Strozzi. These include a showing of his costume and set designs for the first Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in 1933. The theme of exchange and influence is neatly set up by the opening work, which is actually a copy of de Chirico’s The enigma of an autumn afternoon (1909), made by Max
81. The drunken gentleman, by Carlo Carrà. 1916. Canvas, 60 by 45 cm. (Private collection; exh. Palazzo Strozzi, Florence).
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82. The passage of Commerce-Saint-André, by Balthus. 1952–54. Canvas, 294 by 330 cm. (Private collection; exh. Palazzo Strozzi, Florence).
Ernst for Paul Eluard in 1924 (cat. no.2). The number of works by de Chirico is restricted but has been pointedly selected. A fair proportion are drawings, ranging between rapid first thoughts and resolved preparations for paintings. An unstated objective appears to be to propose a greater recognition of the qualities of the work from the 1920s, which exposes the ambitions of his painterly manner; for example, in The poet’s fruits (1925; no.19), this element has the effect of adding a further aspect to the trans-rational complexities of this metaphysical composition. There are also two of the petrified seated subjects, The Greek philosophers (the Platonists) (1925; no.25) and Figures en plein air II (the trouble of philosophy) (1926; no.26), derived from both French Gothic and Parthenon frieze sculpture, and which were, in turn, to prove so suggestive to contemporary sculptors such as Zadkine and Moore.
83. Wig-stand mannequin with pear-shaped money-box, by Niklaus Stoecklin. 1929. Canvas, 47 by 38 cm. (Private collection; exh. Palazzo Strozzi, Florence).
The short period when the mantle of Pittura Metafisica was extended to include figures such as Carrà and Morandi must represent the moment when de Chirico’s influence was most directly evident, although it is very clear in Carrà’s case, for example in The drunken gentleman (1916; no.27; Fig.81), how the simplification of the elements ‘borrowed’ without disguise from de Chirico would have won popularity but at the loss of any challenging complexity of meaning. Whereas Morandi, although still simplifying the pictorial content, as in Still life (V.39) (1918; no.30), did take over from the movement much of the hidden signs of objects that he was soon to encode in his mature style. It was left principally to Ernst and Magritte to respond to de Chirico’s enigmas by transposing them into the full-blown language of Surrealist painting, and gearing up the intensity of surprise, immanent threat, tactility and eroticism. In Magritte’s The ordeal of sleep (c.1926; no.50) these features are all present but take on an extra frisson when we consider the patent autobiographical reference in the image to his mother’s death. Alberto Savinio is properly represented in the exhibition with a number of works that still provide a challenge to any act of decoding but, at the same time, provide an innocent visual entertainment with their exultantly coloured, building-block constructions and phosphorescent model cityscapes, recalling the intensity of concentration and aesthetic engagement experienced in childhood play. In the catalogue Nicoletta Cardano examines Savinio’s ambiguous selfpositioning with regard to Surrealism; he memorably described unfiltered automatism as ‘like drinking seawater’.3 Arturo Nathan (1891–1944), who closely followed certain aspects of de Chirico’s scenarios, deserves the extensive exposure of his work given here. Coming from a cosmopolitan Jewish family living in Trieste, being a British citizen, Nathan was recruited to serve in the British army during the First World War. His initial studies were in philosophy but he arrived at art
through the advice of a Freudian analyst, and was befriended by de Chirico when they met in Rome in 1925. In subjects like Lunar spells (1939; no.96), de Chirico’s Mediterranean coasts are transposed to a Northern clime, more reminiscent of Friedrich or Turner, where the artist floats in melancholic reflection in a boat borrowed from Puvis’s Poor fisherman. During the Second World War Nathan died in Biberach concentration camp in Germany and de Chirico published an obituary of him. The other major area of influence examined in the exhibition is that of Neue Sachlichkeit, and another under-exposed painter, Niklaus Stoecklin, has been selected to represent this development. A native of Basel, Stoecklin was the only non-German artist to be shown at the 1925 Mannheim exhibition which established the movement. As early as 1917 he had evolved his characteristic pre cisionism, indebted to a study of Konrad Witz, the fifteenth-century painter active in Basel. It is, however, a precision that transgresses and deceives in its representation of disconcertingly misleading objects such as the Wig-stand mannequin with pear-shaped moneybox (no.72; Fig.83) or the artist’s mannequin examining itself in a mirror (1930; no.74). His banal but claustrophobic street scenes invite comparison with those of the last of the big names in the exhibition, Balthus. The latter’s large-sized The passage of Commerce-SaintAndré (no.101; Fig.82) forms the terminal point of the show. The journey from de Chirico to Balthus is distant and problematic. Where de Chirico’s spaces are ‘metaphysically’ estranged from reality, the spaces of Balthus are precisely transcribed from observation. And whereas de Chirico’s figures are blank ciphers of poet/philosophers who guide us to abstract speculation, a malign population of caricatured types inhabit Balthus’s decaying street, far removed from the classic exemplars of Piero and Poussin, cited by Robert Kopp.4 Perhaps they indicate the disappointments of the blighted decades between 1910 and 1950. The show succeeds in its imaginative conjunction of often unfamiliar works and the suggested narrative of connection is largely convincing. It is accompanied by an extensively researched catalogue with full-page reproductions of all exhibits. 1 Catalogue: De Chirico, Max Ernst, Magritte, Balthus: A Look into the Invisible. By Paolo Baldacci, Guido Magnaguagno and Gerd Roos (the exhibition curators), with contributions by Wieland Schmied, Federica Rovati, Maria Cristina Bandera, Jürgen Pech, Ulrich Gerster, Robert Kopp, Nicoletta Cardano, Flavia Matitti, Dieter Schwartz, Tobias Garst, Jan Svenungsson and Graziella Bataglia. 255 pp. incl. 103 col. + 130 b. & w. ills. (Mandragora, Florence, 2010), €38. ISBN 978–88–7461–152–2 (English edition). Quotation from p.14. 2 The exact timing of his movements around 1910 has remained a matter of lengthy contention between Baldacci and Roos and the Fondazione Isa e Giorgio de Chirico. This matter is addressed by Roos in ibid., pp.35–41. 3 Cardano in ibid., p.122. 4 Kopp in ibid., p.112.
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Fra Angelico Pontassieve by NEVILLE ROWLEY
2008 A N T O N I O N A T A L I , Director of the Galleria degli Uffizi, launched a series of exhibitions with the aim of returning, albeit temporarily, masterpieces and little-known works in the Museum to their places of origin. This important project, involving small villages on the outskirts of Florence, is especially welcome, seeing that today so many works of art in museums are divorced from their intended settings. The third exhibition in the series ‘La Città degli Uffizi’ is held in the Palazzo Municipale, Pontassieve (to 27th June), and is centred on a Virgin and Child by Fra Angelico (cat. no.1; Fig.84), which was removed from the church of S. Michele Arcangelo, Pontassieve, in 1924. Around it the curator, Ada Labriola, has gathered seventeen paintings, miniatures and sculptures that, while very interesting, fail to make a coherent ensemble: for example, Michelozzo’s epigraph from the Aragazzi monument in Montepulciano (no.18) does not fit into this context, and the two Madonnas once attributed to the ‘Pseudo Pier Francesco Fiorentino’ (nos.16 and 17) were created after Angelico’s death and share little with his art stylistically. Yet since they and other works on view, such as Lorenzo Ghiberti’s ciborium door from the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, Florence (no.3), are normally virtually invisible, their display makes the exhibition valuable. The well-produced catalogue (which has an index, a rarity in Italy) contains scholarly entries that are particularly useful for works whose bibliography is scattered.1 This is the case of the cherubs that once decorated the inserts between the pinnacles of Giotto’s polyptych from the Florentine Badia (no.15), Andrea Staderini argues that they were not painted by the obscure Jacopo d’Antonio, the artist mentioned in the documents between 1451 and 1453, but by Francesco Pesellino, whose studio was in the corso degli Adimari, like Jacopo’s. This proposal needs further study, since Pesellino himself has only one documented work, the Trinity altarpiece now in the National Gallery, London; it is to be hoped that Staderini will turn his dissertation on Pesellino into a monograph.2 The essays mostly concentrate on Fra Angelico’s Pontassieve Madonna, its patrons, members of the da Filicaia family, and the date of the painting. Ada Labriola tentatively proposes that a damaged St Anthony Abbot from a private collection (not in the exhibition) and a predella panel of St Anthony tempted by a lump of gold (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) may have come from the same altarpiece. She also establishes a provenance from the da Filicaia family in the early nineteenth century for three fragments of a Thebaid by Fra Angelico and his workshop recently reconstructed by Michel Laclotte.3 Annamaria Bernacchioni provides a good background to the da Filicaias’ patronage
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84. Virgin and Child, by Fra Angelico. c.1437–42(?). Tempera on panel, 134 by 59.5 cm. (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; exh. Palazzo Municipale, Pontassieve).
in the early Renaissance, while Carl Brandon Strehlke reminds us of the complexity of Angelico’s artistic commitments in the 1430s. The identification of the patrons of the Pontassieve Madonna is very recent. In 2005 Laurence B. Kanter suggested that the fragmentary inscription at the base of the panel, ‘. . . IO DI LUCA E PIER [. . .] CHOLAIO E SER . . .’, should be read as ‘Antonio di Luca, Piero di Nicholaio e Ser Piero da Filicaia’, three Florentine contemporaries of Fra Angelico.4 Antonio and Piero were first cousins, whereas Ser Piero was a more distant relative (all
three shared a great-great-grandfather); on this basis, Alessandro Cecchi dismissed the Florentine connection posited by Kanter and instead linked the commission with Pontassieve, the family fiefdom since the thirteenth century, and its parish church of S. Michele Arcangelo.5 The catalogue asserts that this credible proposal is now a certainty. One of the numerous inscriptions compiled by the historian and genealogist Luigi Passerini in the nineteenth century reads as follows: ‘Nella Chiesa di S. Michele Arcangiolo al Ponte a Sieve, nella
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Ta=/vola dell’Altar’ Maggiore vi sono queste Lettere./Questa Tavola hà fatta fare/Berto e Simone di Francesco/di Berto alias Becto da Filicaia/ne MCCCCXXXV. ad honor di Dio’. Annamaria Bernacchioni believes that this must ‘clearly’ be identified with the dedication beneath Fra Angelico’s Pontassieve Virgin and Child. If this precise wording is no longer visible, it is, she claims, because of the panel’s deteriorated state, and ‘Berto alias Becto’ should be read as ‘Bartolomeo di Betto’, the brother of Ser Piero da Filicaia. With a total of six patrons, the 1435 altarpiece would be quite a family affair. As appealing as it might appear at first sight, this conclusion is far from certain. The fact that not a single letter of the dedication copied by Passerini matches Fra Angelico’s panel is more than puzzling. Some liturgical object could, of course, have obscured the central part of the inscription (as well as the first letters of Antonio’s name on the left panel), but poor conservation cannot be blamed, for the letters were correctly transcribed as early as 1889 – and partly repainted with not a single mistake. More problematic is the reading of ‘Berto alias Becto’ as ‘Bartolomeo di Berto’ (such a correction alone should have led the authors of the catalogue to be more careful with the date mentioned in the inscription). This interpretation artificially connects two branches of the da Filicaia family who had been separated for at least six generations. Passerini’s dedication should be taken as it stands, for the grandfather of Berto and Simone was indeed called Berto da Filicaia (admittedly, not ‘Becto’). There remains the possibility that Fra Angelico’s panel formed part of the high altarpiece of S. Michele in Pontassieve, but it is perhaps more likely that it did not. Certainly the date of 1435 should not be taken as a fixed point in Fra Angelico’s career; this is important if we consider that, during the 1430s and early 1440s, the dating of almost every work of Fra Angelico can be moved forwards or backwards (in the catalogue, the so-called Annalena altarpiece is dated after 1440 by Strehlke, who reads it as a posthumous homage to Cosimo il Vecchio’s brother, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and his son Francesco; but since Cosimo’s patron saint is also represented, this argument is not convincing). This problematic chronology is a testimony of the mastery of Fra Angelico who, more than any Florentine painter of the time, was able to adapt his style dramatically to suit each commission he received. Yet this should not deter art historians from attempting to reconstruct the painter’s artistic development. Between 1433 and 1436 the Dominican friar was certainly executing the Linaioli altarpiece in collaboration with Lorenzo Ghiberti (the crucial question of Angelico’s relationship to sculpture is studied in the catalogue by Francesca Petrucci in a far less convincing manner than Ulrich Middeldorf’s classic study of 1955).6 The very Gothic, Ghibertian style of the Linaioli tabernacle, evident also in the Annalena altarpiece, is not present in the Pontassieve Madonna, which is much more luminous and can be linked with
paintings dating from the late 1430s or early 1440s. Since one of the three patrons of Angelico’s Virgin and Child died in December 1437, this date should be considered a probable, if not definitive, terminus ante quem. 1 Catalogue: Beato Angelico a Pontassieve. Dipinti e sculture del Rinascimento fiorentino. Edited by Ada Labriola, with essays by Annamaria Bernacchioni, Ada Labriola, Francesca Petrucci and Carl Brandon Strehlke. 192 pp. incl. 92 col. + 8 b. & w. ills. (Mandragora, Florence, 2010), €20. ISBN 978–88–7461–149–2. 2 A. Staderini: ‘“Gentile, et in compositione di cose piccole eccellente”: Francesco di Stefano, detto il Pesellino (1422–1457)’, unpublished Ph.D. diss. (Florence University, 2008). 3 M. Laclotte: ‘Autour de Fra Angelico. Deux puzzles’, in F. Pasut and J. Tripps, eds.: Da Giotto a Botticelli. Pittura fiorentina tra Gotico e Rinascimento (Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi Firenze, Università degli Studi e Museo di San Marco, 20–21 maggio 2005), Florence 2008, pp.187–200. 4 L.B. Kanter in idem and P. Palladino, eds.: exh. cat. Fra Angelico, New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 2005–06, pp.127–31. 5 A. Cecchi: ‘Contributi sulla committenza fiorentina dell’Angelico’, in A. Zuccari, ed.: Angelicus pictor. Ricerche e interpretazioni sul Beato Angelico, Milan 2008, pp.35–48; the hypothesis was accepted by L.B. Kanter: Reconstructing the Renaissance. ‘Saint James Freeing Hermogenes’ by Fra Angelico, Fort Worth 2008, pp.43–48. 6 U. Middeldorf: ‘L’Angelico e la scultura’, Rinascimento 6/2 (1955), pp.179–94.
Gonzaga tapestries Mantua by KOENRAAD BROSENS
widely acclaimed show Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2002),1 tapestry has finally gained its rightful place on the exhibition agenda of American and European instituSINCE THOMAS P. CAMPBELL’S
tions. Major shows, including Campbell’s sequel Tapestry in the Baroque (2007)2 and Christa Thurman’s The Divine Art (Art Institute of Chicago, 2008), were supplemented with a relatively large number of less imposing yet equally engaging exhibitions focusing on tapestry designers (e.g. Isaac Moillon, Aubusson, 2005), sets (e.g. the Story of Alexander, Paris, 2008) and patrons (e.g. Louis XIV, Paris, 2009). Unfortunately, this renewed interest is not without its drawbacks: not all of the recent exhibitions were properly conceived or grounded in new scholarship, thus reducing exceptional and very fragile works of art to mere eye candy. The exhibition Gli Arazzi dei Gonzaga nel Rinascimento. Da Mantegna a Raffaello e Giulio Romano, at the fruttiere of the Palazzo Te, in the Palazzo Ducale and at the Museo Diocesano Francesco Gonzaga, Mantua (to 27th June), however, is an exemplary project, combining new research with the expectations of scholarly and non-scholarly audiences alike. It reunites no fewer than forty-eight tapestries produced between about 1470–75 and 1600 that once belonged to the Gonzaga family. Guy Delmarcel, curator of the exhibition, and his collaborators are to be congratulated for this tour-de-force, for the Gonzaga tapestry collection, which by 1614 had amounted to 386 pieces, was widely dispersed over the centuries, as is revealed by the list of American and European lenders. Provenance research on tapestries tends to be complex, given the multiple editions of sets and the scant and often problematic documentary evidence. Research on the Gonzaga tapestry collection started over thirty years ago, when Delmarcel, then the Curator of Tapestries and Textiles at the Brussels Museum of Art and History, acquired for his Museum The triumphal cortege from the Fructus Belli series bearing the coat of arms of Ferrante Gonzaga. This monumental piece is one of the stars of the show (cat. no.5/1; Fig.85). Delmarcel subsequently joined forces with Clifford M.
85. The triumphal cortege from the series Fructus Belli, from Jehan Baudouyn’s workshop. c.1545–47. Tapestry, 495 by 890 cm. (Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Brussels; exh. Palazzo Te, Mantua). the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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Brown to write their book of 1996,3 which has been updated and translated into Italian to accompany the exhibition.4 This welldesigned catalogue will remain of value far beyond the time-span of the exhibition. Nello Forti Grazzini’s entry on the Chicago Annunciation tapestry (no.1; Fig.86) is of exceptional importance,5 in which he convincingly argues that the piece was produced in Mantua in 1470–71 or shortly thereafter in the workshop of Maffeo Maffei. It was commissioned by Ludovico II Gonzaga and the design is tentatively attributed to Mantegna (p.44). Six sets, each represented by between three to nine tapestries, form the show’s backbone. They were acquired between about 1530 and 1560 by the three Gonzaga brothers Federico II (1500–40), 5th Marquess and 1st Duke of Mantua; Ercole (1505–63), Cardinal and Regent of Mantua; and Ferrante (1507–57), commander-in-chief of the imperial troops. Five of these sets were woven in Brussels: the Story of Cephalus and Procris (Musei e Gallerie Ponitificie, Vatican City), Puttini (Fondazione Progetto Marzotto, Trissino), Fructus Belli (Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, Brussels; and Musée national de la Renaissance, Ecouen), the Story of Moses (Castle of Châteaudun), and a further set of Raphael’s famous Acts of the Apostles (Palazzo Ducale, Mantua). A sixth, the Story of Moses, was designed by Giulio Romano’s right-hand man, Giovan Battista Bertani (1516?–76), and produced by Nicolas Karcher in Mantua around 1553–62 (Museo del Duomo, Milan). Among the most intriguing pieces are the three Cephalus and Procris tapestries (nos.9/1–3; Fig.87). They belong to a sixpiece set that is stored in the Vatican collections and is virtually unknown. The elaborate and detailed landscape settings are distinctly Flemish and closely resemble those of the Hunts of Maximilian series designed by Willem Tons (Musée du Louvre, Paris). Yet the fig-
87. The death of Procris, from the series Cephalus and Procris. Manufactured in Brussels, c.1530. Tapestry, 353 by 344 cm. (Musei e Gallerie Pontificie, Vatican City; exh. Palazzo Te, Mantua).
ures suggest that an Italian artist working in the manner of Perino del Vaga was involved in the design. The Cephalus set provides a fine example of the essentially collaborative nature of tapestry design and production in the first half of the sixteenth century: designs were often created by Italian artists, while the cartoons were painted by Flemish painters who were far more familiar with the medium of tapestry. The cartoon painters presumably worked in consultation with Italian artists living in Brussels, such as Giambattista Lodi da Cremona, who is linked to both the captivat-
86. Annunciation, designed by a North Italian artist, from Maffeo Maffei’s workshop. 1470–71. Tapestry, 113.7 by 179.4 cm. (Art Institute, Chicago; exh. Palazzo Te, Mantua).
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ing Puttini and Fructus Belli sets, but also with the workshop managers, whose expertise in translating painting into tapestry must have been valued by the artists. As a result, when archival documents are lacking (and they usually are), the question of authorship and attribution becomes a methodological minefield. The scholars tackled questions of attribution with caution (for example, Delmarcel on the Fructus Belli series, who concludes that it is hard, if not impossible, to pinpoint the names of the artists involved; no.6), counterbalancing the show’s name-dropping subtitle. Unfortunately, not all tapestries are in equally good condition, and the oblique lighting is at times unflattering, revealing areas of damage and repair. But these criticisms do not detract from the exhibition’s great merit in bringing together unique and rarely seen tapestries. 1 Reviewed by Candace Adelson in this Magazine, 144 (2002), pp.521–23. 2 Reviewed by Jamie Mulherron in this Magazine, 150 (2008), pp.59–61. 3 C.M. Brown and G. Delmarcel with the collaboration of A.M. Lorenzoni: Tapestries for the Courts of Federico II, Ercole, and Ferrante Gonzaga, 1522–63, Seattle and London 1996. 4 Catalogue: Gli Arazzi dei Gonzaga nel Rinascimento. By G. Delmarcel and C.M. Brown, with contributions by N. Forti Grazzini, L. Meoni and S. l’Occaso. 296 pp. incl. 126 col. + 52 b. & w. ills. (Skira, Milan, 2010), €65 (€52 online via www.skira.net). ISBN 978–88–5720566–3. 5 Which makes it unfortunate that the caption (p.37) still uses the dating this reviewer recently proposed of 1484–1519; see K. Brosens, with contributions by P.-F. Bertrand, C. Bremer-David, E. Cleland and N. Forti Grazzini: European Tapestries in the Art Institute of Chicago, New Haven and London 2008, pp.334–37.
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Renaissance Siena Siena by TIMOTHY HYMAN
of this grand and complex exhibition, Le Arti a Siena nel Primo Rinascimento: Da Jacopo della Quercia a Donatello, at the Ospedale S. Maria della Scala, the Opera della Metropolitana and the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena (to 11th July), is the series of predella panels of the Life of St Anthony (cat. nos.C.34a–h) – among the most vivid, poetic and surprising images in all Western art. Although their colour is pitched so high, it is never sweet. Anthony’s legend of wilderness and temptation (perhaps also his association with the gangrenous hallucinations known as ‘St Anthony’s Fire’) has inspired unsettling imagery in many Northern painters (from Bosch and Grünewald to Ensor and Beckmann), but one does not expect that kind of psychological depth in an early Italian. In their architectural and landscape invention, their narrative intensity, their fusion of fantastical imagining with everyday ‘realist’ observation, the Anthony series both fulfils earlier Sienese tradition and extends it into new realms of subjectivity (Figs.88 and 89). At the Ospedale, their curvatures of horizon and sky-vault are reinforced in an elaborate semi-circular hang, some of the panels inserted unglazed into purpose-built ‘primitive’ wooden niches; with the visitor seated in their midst, in unimpeded THE UNDOUBTED CLIMAX
intimacy. A painter once said to me – in front of the New York St Anthony – ‘if this artist had a name, he would be world-famous’. Central to this show is a quest for his identity, and a magnificent corpus of the paintings usually given to the ‘Master of the Osservanza’ has been reassembled, probably unrepeatable and certainly unprecedented. Seidel (and his labellers) have opted for a solution first proposed long ago – that every work identified as ‘Master of the Osservanza’ is in fact an early production of Sano di Pietro. Born in 1405, his first documented work, the fine Gesuiti altarpiece (no.C.37), is as late as 1444, and its predella, now in the Louvre, is of even higher quality. But no subsequent work by Sano comes anywhere near the stature or refinement of the ‘Osservanza’ pictures. We can all think of wonderful young artists who become dullards after forty. But the Sano attribution is doubtful also because the ‘Osservanza’ pictures are themselves so disparate; even within the two scenes of Anthony’s Temptations the treatment of the stony paths (one speckled with little flecks, the other solidly constructed) seems to point to two different hands. The more probable solution remains, therefore, that the ‘Osservanza’ pictures were produced by a collaborative workshop – a compagnia in which Sano and perhaps Sassetta himself sometimes worked, alongside artists still unnamed. Until recently, not only the ‘Osservanza’ enigma, but Sassetta and his entire generation, have remained elusive, their paintings scattered across Northern Europe and America;
relatively few are still in Siena. The 1989 reunion in New York of about seventy of the smaller panels was certainly a landmark.1 But the Ospedale’s vast survey is something else, a much ampler representation, and also a kind of homecoming. Despite the absence of several key works we can at last make some overall assessment.2 The painting culture that emerges is of such startling refinement and pictorial intelligence that every conventional account of ‘The Renaissance’ must now be set in question. This exhibition might be best understood as a series of intricate, revelatory juxtapositions: Jacopo della Quercia polarised against the young Donatello, then against the Sienese trecento; Sassetta contrasted to his Florentine contemporaries, but also to Giovanni di Paolo and to that so-called ‘Master of the Osservanza’; each encounter or cross-current fine-honed and beautifully staged. We enter the Ospedale via its frescoed Pellegrinaio (with Vecchietta and Domenico di Bartolo displaying their rival ‘Renaissance’ modes of the 1440s). A protracted and slightly dispiriting sculpture section follows; the beautiful wooden polychrome Madonna from Angers, here dated 1405–10 (no.A.13a), stands out among Jacopo della Quercia’s early work. His two half-pagan Mother-figures from the Fonte Gaia (nos.A.19a–b) look fresher than I have ever seen them, rescued from their usual quarters up in the Palazzo Pubblico loggia, and sympathetically lit. The catalogue is right, however, to stress Jacop’s ‘otherness’ (alterità) in relation
88. St Anthony Abbot tempted by a devil in the guise of a woman, attributed to the Master of the Osservanza. c.1400. Panel, 38.4 by 40.4 cm. (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; exh. S. Maria della Scala, Siena). 89. St Anthony Abbot tempted by a heap of gold, attributed to the Master of the Osservanza. c.1400. Panel, 47 by 33.7 cm. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; exh. S. Maria della Scala, Siena). the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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90. Virgin and Child with St Anthony Abbot and Cardinal Antonio Casini, by Jacopo della Quercia. 1437–38. Marble, 119 by 137.5 cm. (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena; exh. S. Maria della Scala, Siena).
to Sienese tradition; his role here is as a kind of preliminary foil to the painters. In his fierce late marble relief of 1437 (no.A.37; Fig.90) the kneeling Cardinal Antonio Casini is presented to the Virgin by a wild St Anthony.3 The powerful rhythmic vitality of these figures makes clear why Vasari’s narrative singles out Jacopo as forerunner, while omitting all mention of Sassetta and Giovanni di Paolo; they point to entirely different values. Masaccio’s tiny, radiant Madonna dell’Solettico of 1426, with Casini’s arms on the reverse (no.A.38), articulates the challenge further: will any fifteenth-century Sienese painting match this gravitas or sheerness? The visitor passes immediately into the section Eredita del Trecento to confront three massive triptychs (nos.B.1, 2 and 3): Pietro Lorenzetti’s great Birth of the Virgin (1340); the ‘Osservanza’ version of the same theme from Asciano, a century later; and a less distinguished intermediary, all hung within sight of one another. The Asciano version, for all its bustling charm, can appear a little anecdotal and flimsy after the Lorenzetti. Let into the wall alongside, however, is a much smaller trittichino of the same subject (no.B.34), also ascribed to the ‘Master of the Osservanza’, but striking a very different note; in its miniaturised monumentality, it is closer to Pietro, but in its crystalline colour and stilled perfection of surface asserting a new aesthetic.4 Upstairs, we enter on this exhibition’s heartland, in the section entitled ‘Sassetta and the Renewal (Rinnovamento) of Sienese Painting’. All the small surviving panels (nos.C.17a–r) from his Corpus Christi altarpiece of 1423–24 have been reassembled. The commission coincided with the Council of Siena, stagemanaged by Casini, where transubstantiation was a major topic, and the predella included the fascinating scenes from Melbourne and Barnard Castle, identified respectively as The burning of Jan Hus and The death of John Wyclif. The two Thomas Aquinas panels (from Budapest and the Vatican) are especially moving in their evocation of a solitary, inward experience. Their green expanses of silent
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space reprise the sophisticated architectural interiors created by the Lorenzettis (the young Sassetta’s exposure in Cortona to the elaborate architectural settings of Lorenzetti fresco cycles, now lost, may have been decisive),5 but now more charged with emotion, rendered more ‘innocent’. The Siena Pinacoteca’s two famous little landscape panels (until recently attributed to Ambrogio Lorenzetti) are here firmly identified as fragments from Sassetta’s lost centre panel; they share that inflexion of conscious ‘simplicity’. The itinerant revivalist friar S. Bernardino (based in the Observant house just outside Siena) preached a return to the uncorrupted poverty of the primitive Franciscans; Machtelt Israëls has suggested a personal affinity between Sassetta and the emaciated future saint, the ‘second Francis’ he depicts (no.C.29). Bernardino’s renunciatory thrust is often felt in Sienese fifteenth-century painting, both thematically (invoking the desert journeys of John, Anthony and Jerome, as well as the half-humorous fioretti told of Francis) and aesthetically, in a kind of vulnerability, a refusal of visual authority and power not only in Sassetta himself but also in younger associates such as Sano and Pietro di Giovanni d’Ambrogio. City by the sea and Castle by a lake are among the rare ‘panoramic’ images in this show, and this near-absence of so characteristic a Sienese genre is especially stunting to Giovanni di Paolo, chessboard-map specialist. The Louvre’s little painted box of 1421 (no.E28) marks his brilliant beginning – a courtly conceit with Venus approaching as a kind of cloud-storm over the concave brow of the hill. But in 1425 both Sassetta and Giovanni di Paolo were to receive a lifelong imprint from the sojourn in Siena of Gentile da Fabriano (referred to here as ‘una star internazionale’). Gentile’s beautifully preserved double-sided panel from Pisa (no.C.7) makes a dramatic appearance, the most ‘painterly’ surface anywhere in this show. Echoes of Gentile were to recur in Giovanni di Paolo’s work for the next fifty years, but always given a strange twist. In his Presentation of Christ in the temple (1435;
no.C.14), for example, the pavement suddenly gives way and a corner-chasm opens, literally undermining the stability of Gentile’s original image. Although at several points in this show Giovanni di Paolo’s hard, wiry linearity is played off against the colouristic beauty of the ‘Master of the Osservanza’, he is generally under-represented; it is known that Siena is planning a monographic exhibition devoted to this fascinating artist, now long overdue. In one exceptionally telling conjunction (nos.E.5 and E6) Giovanni di Paolo’s portable triptych from Los Angeles is set beside its ‘Osservanza’ counterpart (from the Chigi Saracini collection, Siena). Painted within ten years of one another, both are queenly Madonnas, both incorporating marvellous oriental carpets. But where Giovanni is buoyant with brittle wit, his flower-headdressed donzelle-saints smiling out at the viewer, the ‘Osservanza’ version has the dreamy still melancholy of a Duccio. The racked emotionalism of Donatello’s later figures, their lack of classical decorum, seems more in tune with Sienese tradition than with contemporary Florentine modes, and his application to end his life as a citizen of Siena should not be entirely surprising.6 Freed from the hideously over-elaborate niche in the cathedral, his life-size bronze St John the Baptist (no.C.38) takes on a new impact here: the prophet as filthy, crazed wildman/outsider, with gobbets of matted hair hanging off his pelt-skirt. This section ends with the transformation of the Sienese Madonna of Humility into a Donatellesque genre; and the exhibition becomes more dispersed, in manuscripts and luxury objects and textiles. So Donatello’s years in Siena (1457–61) are the cut-off point. Thereafter one would begin to encounter what Luke Syson has called ‘nose-thumbing rejections of the communal Sienese tradition’, usually accompanied by a shift towards classicism.7 ‘Six years of Preparation’ is Max Seidel’s title for his introduction to the catalogue,8 underlining the enormous labour such an accumulation of loans must entail. In the catalogue itself, every work is well reproduced in colour, and each entry full of unfamiliar information. But I don’t think any of the essays can be said to attempt a critical or intellectual synthesis. I have been interested to observe over the past forty years the passionate identification of many contemporary painters with the Sienese. While this may be partly a matter of formal affinity (of flat, bright colour, for example), it also has to do with our sense of a return to simplicity (that conscious abdication of authority I have tried to hint at earlier), which results in an art far more accessible than the classicising heroics of the Florentine Renaissance. 1 K. Christiansen, L.B. Kanter and C.B. Strehlke: exh. cat. Painting in Renaissance Siena, New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 1989; reviewed by William Hood in this Magazine, 131 (1989), pp.241–44. 2 A list of major early Sienese works absent from this show might include Sassetta’s St Francis panels from the National Gallery, London, Musée Condé, Chantilly, and I Tatti, Florence, and his Madonna of the snows (Uffizi,
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Florence); Giovanni di Paolo’s St John series in the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery, London; the Master of the Osservanza’s Passion predella in the Detroit Institute of Arts, Vatican Museums, Rome, the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge MA, and Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the British Library’s Dante manuscript, illuminated by Giovanni di Paolo and Niccolò d’Ulisse. 3 Recent archival research by Strehlke, Israels and others has brought the important figure of Antonio Casini (1378–1437) into focus. A Sienese ‘worldly Franciscan’, he was appointed papal treasurer in 1408 as well as Bishop of Siena, and Cardinal in 1426. His restoration of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome connects his patronage of altarpieces to the Madonna of the snows respectively by Masolino and Sassetta. 4 This small masterpiece has lain for most of the past twenty years in the dungeons of the National Gallery’s Reserve Collection, after the Sainsbury Wing opened without it. 5 See J. Cannon and A. Vauchez: Margherita of Cortona and the Lorenzetti: Sienese Art and the Cult of a Holy Woman in Medieval Tuscany, University Park PA 1988. 6 See L. Syson: ‘Stylistic Choices’, in idem et al.: exh. cat. Renaissance Siena, London (National Gallery) 2007–08, pp.43–59. He also quotes a letter attesting to Donatello’s ‘great passion to be in Siena, so as not to die among those toads in Padua’. 7 The imposition on Siena of a new Renaissance artistic language, first instigated by Pope Pius II Piccolomini, was linked to a wider suppression of republican liberties. Thus the recent exhibition in London cited at note 6 above, beginning where the Ospedale show ends, left a bitter taste, not least because it may have queered the pitch for any London show in the near future devoted to Sassetta’s generation. 8 Catalogue: Le Arti a Siena nel Primo Rinascimento: Da Jacopo della Quercia a Donatello. Edited by Max Seidel. 640 pp. incl. numerous col. ills. (Federico Motta Editore, Milan, 2010), €40. ISBN 978–88–7179–602–4.
in S. Maria la Mayor, Zaragoza (transferred to the Virgen del Pilar in 1717). Thanks to Carmen Morte’s research,2 Forment is well documented, and we also know that the prior Pedro Zapata supervised the selection and transportation of the alabaster from the quarries at Gelsa (Zaragoza), where he lived. Although no part of this monumental altarpiece could be lent to the exhibition, it acts as a benchmark against which other works can be authenticated or dated. Thus the relief of the God the Father (p.165), once considered to be a part of the tomb of the Lord Chancellor Jean Sauvage attributed to Felipe Bigarny or of the tomb of the Aragonese Chancellor Antonio Agustín executed by Gil Morlanes the younger, is now given to Forment and, Morte suggests, once formed part of an altarpiece. The impressive St Onofrio (p.167) from the Dominican convent of Zaragoza, previously attributed to Pere Joan and the French Gabriel Joly, was given by Steven Janke (1984) to Forment on the grounds of comparisons with St James from the scene of the Assumption in the Pilar altarpiece. Finally, a Virgin and Child (pp.157–58; Fig.92), from the convent of Discalced Carmelites of Zaragoza, recalls Benedetto da Maiano’s Virgin and Child at the Monte dei Paschi of Siena. Among Forment’s many collaborators were two foreigners: the Florentine Juan Moreto and Gabriel Joly from
Picardy. The latter was documented in Zaragoza from 1514 and is represented in the exhibition by The Lamentation over the dead Christ (p.174), recently recognised by Jesus Criado as belonging to the altar of St Thomas of Canterbury of Villafeliche (now in S. Maria Magdalena, Zaragoza), and the Virgin and Child (p.175), both painted and gilded wooden sculptures of great poignancy. In contrast to their rather traditional forms is the turbulent and expressionistic Lamentation altarpiece from the church of Almudévar, recently attributed by Morte to Arnao of Brussels (p.221). While the magnificent altarpiece in S. María de Bolea remains in situ, its painter was represented by the Lamentation over the dead Christ (p.149; Fig.91). Previously attributed to Pedro de Aponte, Jean de Louvain or Pedro Egas, the painter was not Aragonese, but must have arrived in Toledo in 1498 in the train of the most Catholic Monarchs and the archbishop of Toledo, Jiménez de Cisneros. The influence of the Castilian Pedro Berruguete is evident in the faces and the cangianti silks, while the composition owes much to Juan de Borgoña of Toledo. The artist’s name has yet to be discovered. The same is true for the Master of Sijena. In 1910 three scenes from the high altarpiece of the Sijena monastery (Huesca) were included in an exhibition in Zaragoza, and Emile 91. Lamentation over the dead Christ, by the Master of Bolea. 1499–1503. Panel, 124 by 78 cm. (Ex-Colegiatade S. María la Mayor; exh. Museo de Zaragoza).
The Renaissance in Aragon Bilbao, Valencia and Zaragoza by CLAUDIE RESSORT
and sculptures from the Renaissance collection at Zaragoza were joined by works from Spanish churches, museums and collections in the exhibition El Esplendor del Renacimiento en Aragón, first shown at the Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao (June to September 2009), then at the Museo de Bellas Artes, Valencia (October to January), and finally at the Museo de Zaragoza (closed 20th May), where the present reviewer saw it.1 The first section, curated by María Carmen Lacarra, included the fifteenth-century masters Blasco de Grañen, Martín Bernat and Miguel Jimenez as well as Bartolomeo Bermejo’s Flagellation of St Engracia, painted in 1474–77 for the Daroca retable (cat. p.136). The presence of the Guardian Angel of Zaragoza (p.132) in polychromed alabaster by the Catalan Pere Joan was an introduction to the excellent works in this medium by Aragonese masters in the sixteenth century. The most innovative sculptor of this date was Damián Forment, summoned from Valencia in 1509 to make the high altar retable SOME FIFTY PAINTINGS
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92. Our Lady of Coro, by Damián Forment. c.1515. Painted alabaster, 30 by 40 cm. (Private collection; exh. Museo de Zaragoza).
Bertaux noted in that catalogue the metallic modelling reminiscent of Mantegna’s followers, but the forms and colours in the Meeting at the golden gate (Zaragoza Museum; p.159) reveal, as Morte remarks, a sensibility closer to the Austrian Michael Pacher than to the Italian school. Among the great Aragonese artists in the mid-sixteenth century was Jerónimo Vicente Vallejo Cósida (doc.1532–92), painter to Archbishop Hernando de Aragon, who commissioned his altarpiece of the Coronation of the Virgin for the church at Valderrobles. This artist was fascinated by the new Italian Renaissance art that he probably discovered in Valencia in the paintings of Hernandos (Fernando Llanos and Hernando Yañez de La Almeida) or of the Italian painter Paolo de San Leocadio. He often took as his models northern or Italian engravings, as in the Annunciation (Bilbao Museum; p.209), a composition inspired by an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi which circulated in the Aragonese workshops for several years. Also very Raphaelesque are two of the Zaragoza Museum’s recent acquisitions of work by Cósida, the panels of St Lawrence and the Martyrdom of St John the Baptist (p.199), belonging to the same altarpiece, still unidentified, but which was probably contemporary with the Valderrobles retable (p.205). Still intact is the small retable of the Virgin (pp.234 and 235), once in the chapel of those condemned to death in Zaragoza. Morte attributes to Cósida the Noli me tangere (p.237; Fig.93), once in the collection of Isabella Farnese, where it was catalogued as Florentine school; later in the Prado it was given to Perino del Vaga. It has all the stylistic traits of Cósida: elegant figures, a wide landscape and a delicate palette.3 One of Cósida’s most ambitious undertakings was the commission from Archbishop Don Hernando de Aragon in 1574 for a monumental altar dedicated to the Virgin in the chapel of the Sagrario of the monastery of Aula Dei, near Zaragoza. But the archbishop died the following year and Cósida did not finish all the panels: those of St John the Baptist and St Bruno (Museo de Zaragoza; pp.256–57) do not seem to be by him.
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A colossal monochrome canvas of the Raising of Lazarus (356 by 606 cm.; pp.216–17) would seem to be by a German or Flemish Mannerist artist, perhaps Pierrez Chirart. More elegant are the wings to a sculpted retable by the contemporary Italian Pietro Morone for the church of S. Miguel Arcángel at Ibdes. If the Creation of Eve, inspired by an engraving, is a little clumsy, the scene of the Holy women at the tomb (pp.218–19) is framed by geometrical motifs inspired by Rosso Fiorentino’s and Primaticcio’s stuccos at Fontainebleau. The last part of the exhibition was devoted to painters in the employ of Don Martín de Aragón y Gurrea, Duke of Villahermosa (c.1526–81). This cultivated Aragonese collector of antiquities also collected portraits, sadly few of any distinction. While in the Netherlands (1554–59) he persuaded the Flemish painters Rolán Moys and Pablo Scheppers to come to work in Aragon. The former made a number of portraits of the ducal family, such as that of Ana de Aragón y Borja (p.227), the Duke’s daughter, for the gallery of his palace at Pedrola, while Scheppers painted religious scenes such as the Apparition of the Virgin of Pilar in St James in the presence of a donor Jesuit (1575; Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia; not exhibited in Zaragoza), which is close to the mural paintings (by Pablo Scheppers) in the monastery of SS. Severino e Sossio, Naples, of 1566. Also attributed to Scheppers is the Adoration of the Magi (p.260), formerly given to Moys, from the Dominican convent of Zaragoza and now in the Museum. Some magnificent pieces of Renaissance jewellery included a reliquary bust of St Blaise (p.223) and a portapaz (the plate on which the pax is presented to be kissed by the pious at mass) with the Penitent St Jerome (p.225) on which the painter Jéronimo Vicente Cósida collaborated. A spectacular box chased in silver, containing the relics of St Medard (p.232) and dating from 1564, was
93. Noli me tangere, by Jerónimo Vicente Vallejo Cósida. c.1570. Panel, 62 by 46.5 cm. (Museo del Prado, Madrid; exh. Museo de Zaragoza).
commissioned by the Duke of Villahermosa. It is regrettable that this important exhibition of art little known beyond the Pyrenees will not be shown outside Spain. 1 Catalogue: El Esplendor del Renacimiento. Edited by Carmen Morte García, with essays by Miguel Beltrán Lloris, Ángel Sesma, María del Carmen Lacarra Ducay, Guillermo Redondo Veintemillas, Agustín Bustamante García, Carmen Gómez Urdáñez, Carmen Morte García, Ana Agreda Pino, Manuel José Pedraza Gracia and Tess Knighton. 332 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Generalitat Valenciana, 2009), €25. ISBN 978–84–8380–183–3. Some of the paintings in this exhibition were also shown in C. Morte García and M. del C. Lacarra Ducay, eds.: exh. cat. Aragón y la pintura del Renacimiento, Zaragoza (Museo e Instituto Camón Aznar) 1990. 2 C. Morte García: ‘El retablo mayor del Pilar’, in El retablo mayor de la Basílica de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Zaragoza, Zaragoza 1995, pp.LVII–CV; and idem: Damián Forment, escultor del Renacimiento, Zaragoza 2009, pp.117–51. 3 The panel has been restored and studied under infrared reflectography; see Morte García, op. cit. (note 1).
Young Murillo Bilbao and Seville by PETER CHERRY IT SEEMED PARTICULARLY appropriate to see El joven Murillo, an exhibition that surveyed the art of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo up to c.1655, at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla (closed 30th May), the painter’s home town, and shown in a former Mercedarian monastery which still retains something of the atmosphere of the original settings for his religious paintings.1 The show included six large narrative paintings for the cloister of S. Francisco el Grande, where the artist found his own style, aided by emulation of Francisco de Zurbarán, Jusepe de Ribera and the Sevillian works of Diego Velázquez. Indeed, the composition of San Salvador de Horta and the Inquisitor of Aragón (cat. no.10), with its shift from boldly painted figures in the foreground to sketchily painted ones in a light-filled background, looks forward to such works as Christ at the pool of Bethesda (National Gallery, London). The painter’s sympathetic treatment of the destitute poor is first seen here and is expressed with particular poignancy in San Diego de Alcalá feeding the poor (no.8), through such figures as the ragged woman with withered breasts and unhappy child directly behind the saint. Murillo portrayed real individuals – some of whom were probably from the convent itself – in the role of protagonists; he used different models for San Diego de Alcalá in two distinct episodes from his life (nos.8 and 9), in the absence of a vera effigie of the saint. The Franciscan saints in heavy woollen habits have great plasticity and weight, the chiaroscuro intensified by the use of bitumen, making their miraculous levitation all the more meaningful (no.9; Fig.94).
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94. San Diego de Alcalá in ecstasy before the cross, by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. 1645–46. Canvas, 173 by 186 cm. (Musée des Augustins, Toulouse, on deposit from the Musée du Louvre, Paris; exh. Museo de Bellas Artes, Seville).
A selection of Murillo’s early genre paintings of the poor included the well-known Two boys eating melon and grapes from Munich (no.13) and the Louvre’s Boy delousing himself (no.12). The catalogue notes, but does not explain, the rudimentary contours of another jug behind the basket in the latter picture, visible to the naked eye as light in tone, akin to lines scratched into the varnish.2 The Old woman spinning from Stourhead (no.15) was revealed to be autograph. The Cologne version of An old woman eating mocked by a boy (no.16) – called, speculatively, an ‘Old Gypsy Woman’ – also appeared consistent with Murillo’s works of this period, although it was not restored for the occasion. While the version at Dyrham Park is dated to 1660–70, apart from the higher quality of the figure of the child in this same work, it and the Cologne version appeared extremely close in style when exhibited together in 2001.3 Most of Murillo’s works in the show are dated within the decade 1645 to 1655, with some fine-tuning of chronology within this narrow band. Although the tonality of Pollok House’s Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist (no.24) makes it difficult to date, it may be even earlier than this. Two signed versions of the Flight into Egypt are dated c.1645 (Palazzo Bianco, Genoa; no.17) and c.1647–50 (Detroit Institute of Arts; no.18), respectively. Direct comparison showed the Genoa painting to be the more simplified in detail and handling, which could be taken as evidence of its being a first or a second version. The snippet of technical information provided on the Detroit picture only (p.181) does not clarify the situation. Two versions of the Penitent Magdalene from the National Gallery of Ireland (no.31) and the Arango Collection (no.32) probably date from the same year, despite the implied later date of the latter work. Remains of tears, of such iconographic importance for this lachrymose devotion, can only be seen with the naked eye
today on the Arango picture. The St Catherine Martyr (no.34) is dated 1645–50, while the Magdalene renouncing her worldly life (no.33) is assigned to the early 1650s. Although the impasto of the latter picture has suffered in past relining, there seemed to be little real difference in style between them. Moreover, the cuffs on the sleeve of St Catherine appeared identical to that of the same saint in the Lisbon Mystic marriage (no.25), dated 1650–55. Another work whose style is consistent with these is the recently reattributed bust-length St Catherine (no.35). The exhibition provided the best opportunity to appreciate Murillo’s achievement in his early years. The extraordinarily well-preserved Mystic marriage of St Catherine (Fig.95) exemplifies his technical virtuosity; the Christ Child’s smiling face is rendered in radiant soft focus, rich lakes give chromatic depth to the Virgin’s drapery, and juicy wet-in-wet painting is used for that of the saint – blue-black feathered into pink in the sleeve to create an
indefinable plum colour – along with scumble effects in the diaphanous scarves. There were relatively few glazed paintings among the loans (nos.13, 14, 33 and 36). The show was let down by the poor condition of only a few pictures (nos.11, 19 and 30). The authorship of only one picture, Joseph and the wife of Potiphar (no.26), seemed debatable. Despite its ‘signature’, in conception, style and handling, this did not look like any others in the show, nor, indeed, the versions of the subject attributed to Murillo which are reproduced in the catalogue. Perhaps its former attributions to various Italian hands could be revisited. The exhibition showed that the roots of Murillo’s later success lay in his early artistic ambition, which was far greater than that of his contemporary Zurbarán. He quickly developed a capacity for effective narrative and expressive faces and gestures. Paintings of St Francis and other saints in the last room, wringing their hands, with open arms, hands on hearts, heads thrown back and eyes rolling heavenwards in soulful communion with the divine (nos.36, 37 and 39–42), show him revitalising the hackneyed repertory of devotional painting. Also impressive was the earnestly studied candlelight of the Last Supper (no.27); the divine light emanating from the Christ Child in a little-known Virgin and Child (no.21), the detail of the foot of Christ optically dissolving in a bowl of water with which St Augustine washes his feet (no.28); and the perspective of the architectural frame of Fray Juan de Quirós and the Immaculate Conception (no.29) and foreshortening of the angels which accompany her. Murillo’s draughtsmanship is key to his achievement, and a strong case could have been made for the inclusion in the exhibition of his drawings and oil-sketches. Although the show proved Murillo to be an original and talented master early in his career, the St Jerome of 1665 (no.38) in the final room demonstrated that the best was yet to come. Indeed, the holdings of the Museum itself provide a unique opportunity to see Murillo’s later evolution; emerging into the crossing of the old church from the first section of the show 95. Mystic marriage of St Catherine, by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. 1650–55. Canvas, 76.5 by 94.5 cm. (Museo Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon; exh. Museo de Bellas Artes, Seville).
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was to enter another world, with his glorious altar paintings for the Sevillian Capuchin church and the image of the Immaculate Conception that he made his own. The leading essay in the exhibition catalogue,4 by Benito Navarrete Prieto, offers a novel account of the art of the young Murillo; the most interesting contextual essays are those by Ana Sánchez-Lassa de los Santos on Sevillian culinary culture; by Ignacio Cano Rivero on the dispersal of Murillo’s works; and by Karin Hellwig on their reception in Europe. The catalogue entries are noteworthy for their detailed and accurate provenance and bibliographies. A complete English translation is provided at the back of the book. 1 The exhibition, curated by Benito Navarrete Prieto and Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, with the assistance of Ignacio Cano Rivero, was first shown at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao. Only one picture, The two Trinities (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; no.5), was missing from the second venue. 2 No comment on this feature is to be found in V. Gerard Powell and C. Ressort: Catalogue: Ecoles espagnole et portugaise, Musée de Louvre, Département des Peintures, Paris 2002. 3 X. Brooke and P. Cherry: exh. cat. Murillo: Scenes of Childhood, London (Dulwich Picture Gallery) 2001, nos.14 and 15. 4 Catalogue: El joven Murillo. Edited by Benito Navarrete Prieto, Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez and Ignacio Cano Rivero et al. 592 pp. incl. 260 col. ills. (Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao and Junta de Andalucía, Consejería de Cultura, Seville, 2009), €45. ISBN 978–84–96763–21–0.
Recent exhibitions in Texas Dallas and Fort Worth by CATHERINE CRAFT
of Fort Worth, the Menil Collection of Houston, the Nasher Sculpture Center of Dallas: these are among the best known of Texas’s art museums and ample proof of the state’s tradition of private collecting and philanthropy. The Kimbell Art Museum examined this phenomenon in From the Private Collections of Texas: European Art, Ancient to Modern (closed 21st March).1 Co-curated by the art historian Richard R. Brettell and the Museum’s assistant curator for European art, C.D. Dickerson III, the exhibition restricted its scope to the central focus of the Kimbell’s own collection, art of the ancient Mediterranean and European art to 1940. Accompanied by a luxurious, massive catalogue, the show featured both important works donated to museums as well as those in private hands. The curators dedicated the project to current collectors, with the undisguised hope that they would emulate their forebears in their generosity. Texans were late starters in collecting, compared with their counterparts on the East Coast. Brettell’s catalogue essay traces collecting in the state from its nineteenth-century origins through its pronounced growth over THE KIMBELL ART MUSEUM
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96. Landscape with Tobias’s return, by Paul Bril. 1601. Oil on copper, 22.9 by 30.5 cm. (Collection of Robert M. Edsel, Dallas; exh. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth).
the past six decades, the result of petroleumbased wealth, the rise of automobiles and air conditioning and friendly rivalries between individual collectors as well as urban centres. Brettell enlivens this narrative with a bracing sociological examination of the tastes and motivations behind the activity of collecting. Ancient art in the exhibition came primarily from the collection of Gilbert M. Denman, Jr., who gave his extensive holdings in Greek and Roman sculpture to the San Antonio Museum of Art. Interestingly, Denman – still an active collector – had been a student at the University of Texas at Austin when it received a donation of antique casts, and seeing them both ignited his interest in Greco-Roman art and grounded it in a tradition of philanthropy. Generations of Texans have also collected old masters, a trend that continues. Although a taste for British painting characterised many acquisitions of the past, more recently collectors have followed a broader trend to seek out works in pristine, unrestored condition. This has lent a lively variety to collections, exemplified by a fine small painting on copper recently attributed to Paul Bril (Fig.96). However, most Texas collectors have purchased the art of their own time. Acquired mostly to provide beauty for their homes, such works have tended to be attractive rather than challenging, resulting over the years in a wealth of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings. This inclination has not precluded quality, and significant works abound, including a lush Renoir nude (1882–83; cat. no.70), a rare Monet still life (1872; no.61), Cézanne’s arresting portrait of his friend Henri Gasquet (no.78; Fig.97) and a Van Gogh made in the optimistic moment just before Gauguin’s arrival in Arles (1888; no.73). A few collectors stand out. James H. and Lillian Clark embraced abstraction, and their gift to the Dallas Museum of Art of a series of Mondrians has made Texas one of the few key repositories of the artist’s work outside Holland and New York. Although Kay and Velma Kimbell collected mainly British paint-
ings, they left an endowment to permit the collection’s growth into the splendid array of works by, among others, Duccio, Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Velázquez, and the decision to have Louis Kahn design their Museum resulted in an architectural landmark that has inspired other Texas collectors since it opened in 1972. Most notable, perhaps, is the Menil Collection, outstanding both in the quality of individual works and the example of John and Dominique de Menil, who sought spiritual resonance in the juxtaposition of modern and contemporary art with that of Africa, Oceania and the ancient world. Just as the Kimbells fostered the aspirations of subsequent collectors, Brettell suggests the Menil Collection is a comparable exemplar for a new generation seeking unconventional ways to collect art without being bound by a single region, era or medium. Another collection highlighted in the Kimbell’s exhibition is that of Raymond and Patsy
97. Henri Gasquet, by Paul Cézanne. 1896–97. Canvas, 55.9 by 47 cm. (McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; exh. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth).
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98. Twins I and II, by Jaume Plensa. 2009. Painted stainless steel. Two sculptures, each 377 by 235 by 245 cm. (Courtesy of the artist and Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago and New York; exh. Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas).
Nasher, who focused their interest in modernism on sculpture, resulting in the outstanding group of works now housed in the Nasher Sculpture Center. One of the last works Ray Nasher bought before his death in 2007 was Song of Songs III and IV (2004; cat. pp.77–79) by the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa, who recently became the focus of the first exhibition of contemporary art organised by the Museum.2 Installed throughout the building and in the Museum’s grounds, eight large-scale sculptures made since 2004 exemplify Plensa’s concerns with the relationship of art and language, and his treatment of the body as both surface and container. Passages from the biblical Song of Songs adorn the softly illuminated chambers of the Nashers’ works; strings of words spelling out quotations from writings important to Plensa hang from wires like wind chimes, forming a permeable curtain in the Museum’s entrance hall. Letters create corporeal armatures in Twins (Fig.98), with the alphabets of seven different languages joining to form crouched, hollow bodies. Plensa’s art draws upon the utopian hopes of universal communication that infused modernist art, and his humanistic bent and poetic optimism made his work fit well into the Nashers’ collection. In many quarters it has become fashionable to lay the credit, or blame, for much of what has transpired in contemporary art over the last three decades at the feet of Andy Warhol. Renewed interest in Pop imagery, new ways to reproduce images and especially our continuing fascination with celebrity, power and wealth have all been traced to Warhol, especially his art of the 1960s. His late work, which became ‘late’ only after post-operative complications ended his life in 1987, has received less attention, particularly in the US, and has been criticised as opportunistic, commercialised and cynical. The Milwaukee Museum has sought to correct such impressions by presenting an exhibition of works from the last decade of Warhol’s life, organised by its former chief curator, Joseph D. Ketner II. Recently at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
(where this reviewer saw it; closed 16th May), the show is scheduled to travel to the Brooklyn Museum (18th June to 12th September) and the Baltimore Museum of Art (17th October to 9th January 2011).3 Belying claims that this was the most productive decade of Warhol’s career, the exhibition is carefully and rather narrowly selected. In Fort Worth, some fifty-three works were shown, although a few concentrations of these, such as a group of small black-and-white canvases reminiscent of Warhol’s pre-silkscreen period, were hung as tightly clustered grids and thus might well be mistaken for single works. The show’s size had the decided advantage of showing Warhol in the best possible light, and the Oxidation, Shadow and Rorschach paintings particularly benefited from the space and attention. In the Fort Worth installation, opening and closing displays of Warhol’s late selfportraits also proved compelling: grouped together, they appeared as explorations of beauty, ageing, dissolution and death. Objections to Warhol’s late work have tended to rest on moral as much as aesthetic
99. Self-portrait, by Andy Warhol. 1986. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 101.6 by 101.6 cm. (Mugrabi Collection; exh. Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth).
grounds: Warhol’s collaborations with JeanMichel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente and others and his accompanying return to painting by hand have been seen as financially calculated betrayals of his radical silkscreen works of the 1960s. Somewhat surprisingly, Ketner has couched his argument for the value of the late work in similarly moralising terms, viewing Warhol’s decision to paint by hand as evidence of his artistic ambition and sincerity. Ketner further treats Warhol’s engagement with Leonardo’s Last Supper and the intimations of mortality in his self-portraits (Fig.99) as indications of the artist’s religiosity. Ketner is not alone in making such pleas for Warhol’s work, but his project is complicated by his other point of emphasis, namely the centrality of abstraction in the artist’s late œuvre. Warhol’s Oxidation paintings, made by urinating on canvases coated with metallic paints, are the starting point of the exhibition, and Ketner links them, and the Rorschach and Shadow paintings, to an intensive engagement with abstraction, returning Warhol to confront the Abstract Expressionist paradigm dominant at the time he came to maturity. This is an intriguing idea, fleshed out most successfully in Keith Hartley’s catalogue essay, but both he and Ketner rely on an oversimplified vision of Abstract Expressionism – its high seriousness, macho self-importance and so forth – that generates an exaggerated contrast between it and Warhol’s art. Like his art of the 1960s, Warhol’s best late work in fact conjures up an aura of uncertainty over the differences between such seemingly opposed categories as art and the decorative, sincerity and insincerity, and intentionality and meaning. The exhibition unfortunately omits groups of paintings that do not fit the moral and formalist strands of Ketner’s argument. Thus the Torso paintings, the Diamond dust shoes, the Zeitgeist series and, for the most part, Warhol’s continued engagement with portraiture, are all missing. Nonetheless, this survey provides a valuable service by insisting on a reconsideration of the importance of the final decade of Warhol’s œuvre and suggesting ways in which such works challenge our understanding of prevailing trends in contemporary art attributed to Warhol’s influence. 1 Catalogue: From the Private Collections of Texas: European Art, Ancient to Modern. With introductory essays by Richard R. Brettell and catalogue entries by Richard R. Brettell and C.D. Dickerson III et al. 456 pp. incl. 296 col. + 40 b. & w. ills. (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2009), $65. ISBN 978–0–300–14494–9. 2 Catalogue: Jaume Plensa: Genus and Species. With an essay by Jed Morse. 104 pp. incl. 55 col. + 19 b. & w. ills. (Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, 2010), $40. ISBN 978–0–9741221–4–4. 3 Catalogue: Andy Warhol: The Last Decade. By Joseph D. Ketner II, with essays by Keith Hartley and Gregory Volk and contributions by Bruno Bischofberger, Keith Haring and Julian Schnabel. 223 pp. incl. 141 col. + 15 b. & w. ills. (Prestel, New York, 2009), $60. ISBN 978–3–79134344–0. The exhibition was shown in Milwaukee from 26th September 2009 to 3rd January 2010 and in Fort Worth from 14th February to 16th May.
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Calendar London Alan Cristea. Works from the 1970s by Richard Hamilton are on view to 3rd July. Annely Juda. Recent sculptures by Anthony Caro are on view here to 2nd July; to be reviewed. Austin/Desmond Fine Art. A mixed exhibition of modern British painting; 11th June to 30th July. Barbican. The Surreal House is a ‘mysterious dwelling infused with subjectivity and desire’ designed by the architects Carmody Groarke, and decorated with art from Dalí to Kienholz; 10th June to 12th September. Conterminously, a new installation in the Curve by the Berlin-based artist John Bock. Ben Uri Gallery. Works by 21 artists, from Stanley Spencer to Maggi Hambling, trace the representation of the Crucifixion from a religious icon to a generic expression of anguish and suffering; 23rd June to 19th September. British Library. Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art brings together cartographic masterpieces from the 1400s to the present day; to 19th September. British Museum. Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings contains work from both the Uffizi, Florence, and the permanent collection at the British Museum; to 25th July (then in Florence); to be reviewed. The exhibition Kingdom of Ife: Sculptures from West Africa, reviewed on p.422 above, runs to 6th June. Camden Arts Centre. The first solo exhibition in the UK of works by the American artist Jim Hodges is on view here from 11th June to 5th September. Courtauld Gallery. Celebrating the Gallery’s move to Somerset House 20 years ago, The Courtauld Collects: 20 Years of Acquisitions runs from 17th June to 19th September. Crane Kalman. Landscapes by Matthew Smith are on view to 12th June. Dulwich Picture Gallery. The Wyeth Family: Three Generations of American Art: Works from the Bank of America Collection; 9th June to 22nd August. Estorick Collection. Another Country: London Painters in Dialogue with Modern Italian Art; to 20th June. Photographs of Naples by Johnnie Shand Kydd; 30th June to 12th September. Gagosian. Pablo Picasso. The Mediterranean Years (1945–62); 4th June to 28th August. Haunch of Venison. Glasnost: Soviet Non-Conformist Art from the 1980s; to 26th June; it is reviewed on p.425 above. Hauser & Wirth. New work by Rachel Khedoori is on view here from 4th June to 31st July. Hayward Gallery. An exhibition of works by Ernesto Neto; 19th June to 5th September. Helly Nahmad Gallery. Henri Matisse. Rêve de Bonheur, a loan show of paintings, including the Tate’s four Backs, and sculpture, runs to 23rd July. Karsten Schubert. John Latham: Works 1958–1995; to 11th June. All Cats are Grey is an exhibition of work by Alison Wilding that runs here from 17th June to 30th July. Koopman Rare Art. An exhibition devoted to Neoclassical silver runs here from 3rd to 25th June. Marlborough Fine Art. Pablo Picasso: Celebrating the Muse: Women in Picasso’s Prints; 9th June to 2nd July. Michael Richardson. New paintings by Jeffrey Camp are on view on the occasion of the publication of Almanac (Royal Academy of Arts, £35), a survey volume of Camp’s work; to 12th June. National Gallery. The monographic exhibition devoted to Christen Købke, reviewed on p.423 above, runs to 13th June (then in Edinburgh). The exhibition Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries explores several works in the Gallery’s collection and how advances in scholarship and technology reveal the misconceptions of the past; 30th June to 12th September; to be reviewed.
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National Portrait Gallery. The Indian Portrait 1560–1860 runs to 20th June. A display of works by the portrait painter Philip de László, following the donation of the artist’s archive to the Gallery in 2005, runs to 5th September. The 2010 BP Portrait Award is on view here from 24th June to 19th September. Parasol Unit. The first solo exhibition in London by the Japanese artist Tabaimo; to 6th August. Queen’s Gallery. An exhibition focusing on Queen Victoria’s and Prince Albert’s shared enthusiasm for art runs to 31st October; to be reviewed. Royal Academy. The exhibition devoted to Paul Sandby, already seen in Nottingham and Edinburgh and reviewed in the November issue, runs here to 13th June. The 242nd Royal Academy Summer Exhibition fills the galleries here from 14th June to 22nd August. Sadie Coles. Works by Andrea Zittel; 10th June to 10th July. Sam Fogg. The exhibition Sculpture: Romanesque to Renaissance runs from 3rd June to 30th July. Serpentine Gallery. The work of two sculptors, Nairy Baghramian and Phyllida Barlow, comprises an exhibition running to 13th June. Thereafter works by Wolfgang Tillmans; 26th June to 29th August.
Wallace Collection. An exhibition devoted to Renaissance and Baroque bronzes from the collection of Peter Marino runs here to 25th July (then in San Marino); to be reviewed. Whitechapel. The first major solo exhibition in Britain of work by the American installation artist Rachel Harrison (b.1966) is on view to 20th June. A newly commissioned work from Claire Barclay, Shadow Spans, will form the backdrop to a number of dance events during its run; to 2nd May 2011. The work of John Latham is explored in an exhibition inspired by his engagement with Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; to 5th September (see also Karsten Schubert). A long-term exhibition of contemporary art from the D. Daskalopoulos collection is on view from 10th June to 22nd May 2011. White Cube. At Mason’s Yard, works by Antony Gormley; 3rd June to 10th July. At Hoxton Square, an exhibition of work by Marc Quinn runs to 26th June. Whitfield Fine Art. An exhibition entitled Caravaggio’s friends and foes includes works by Orsi, Finson, Salini, Baglione, Gramatica, Cavalier d’Arpino, Lo Spadarino, Ribera, Orazio Gentileschi, Vouet and others; to 23rd July.
Great Britain and Ireland
100. Staircase-III, by Do Ho Suh. 2003/2009. Translucent nylon and stainless steel tubes, dimensions variable. (Tate Gallery, London). Tate Britain. The major exhibition of work by Henry Moore it here to 8th August; it was reviewed in the May issue. Rude Britannia: British Comic Art runs from 9th June to 5th September. Fiona Banner’s installation for the 2010 Duveen commission is unveiled on 29th June. Tate Modern. Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera; to 3rd October (then in San Francisco); to be reviewed. A major exhibition of work by the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs; 5th June to 5th September (then in Brussels and New York). The Tate has recently acquired new work from Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, including Do Ho Suh’s Staircase-III (Fig.100). Timothy Taylor. New paintings by Sean Scully can be seen here to 3rd July. Victoria and Albert Museum. The exhibition devoted to Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, seen previously in New Haven and reviewed in the May issue, runs here to 4th July. An exhibition of quilts, including examples spanning the early 18th century to Grayson Perry and Tracey Emin, is on view here to 4th July. Victoria Miro. Woven and beaded sculptures by Maria Nepomuceno; to 12th June. Waddington. An exhibition of sculpture by William Turnbull runs here from 9th June to 3rd July.
Aberdeen Art Gallery. Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, recently acquired by the National Gallery, London, and the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, begins its British tour here before embarking on a 10month journey of the United States; to 27th June. Bath, Victoria Art Gallery. The Bath Society of Artists 105th Annual Exhibition is here to 20th June. Birmingham, Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Objects of Affection. Pre-Raphaelite Portraits by John Brett; to 4th July; to be reviewed. Birmingham, Ikon Gallery. The first European exhibition of works by MadeIn, the artists’ collective founded by Xu Zhen, shows works purportedly by a group of Middle Eastern artists – in fact all made in China; to 11th July. At Ikon Eastside, an installation of newly commissioned sound pieces by Florian Hecker is on show to 20th June. Brighton, Museum & Art Gallery. The exhibition From Sickert to Gertler: Modern British Art from Boxted House, is on view here to 12th September. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum. Maggi Hambling: The Wave; to 8th August. Gifts of the Ebb Tide: Japan and the Sea in Ukiyo-e Prints; to 15th August. Prized Possessions: Lord Fitzwilliam’s album of prints after Adam Elsheimer; to 26th September. 21st-Century Engraved Glass from the Guild of Glass Engravers; 15th June to 15th August. Cambridge, Kettle’s Yard. An exhibition of late works by Agnes Martin is on view to 11th July. Chepstow Museum. In the late 18th century a tour of the Wye Valley became wildly fashionable, and its views were painted by many great watercolourists including Turner, Sandby, Rooker and others, which is the subject of The Wye Tour and its artists; to 5th September; to be reviewed. Compton Verney. The exhibition exploring the work of Francis Bacon in relation to film and photography, previously in Dublin and reviewed in the January issue, runs to 20th June. Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art. Exhibitions of work by the Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa (b.1967), whose installations reflect on the architecture and urbanism of Havana; and the Spanish painter Ferran Garcia Sevilla (then in Valladolid); both from 10th June to 5th September. Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland. An exhibition of acquisitions made over the last decade runs here to 25th July. Edinburgh, Dean Gallery. Photographs by Diane Arbus are on display to 13th June.
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Edinburgh, Inverleith House. Some 55 botanical drawings made for the pioneering forest conservator Hugh Cleghorn (1826–95) are shown alongside works by the contemporary Californian sculptor Vincent Fecteau; to 4th July. Edinburgh, Queen’s Gallery. Dutch Landscapes brings together 42 works from the Royal Collection; to 9th January 2011 (then in London). Findhorn, Moray Art Centre. Nameless is the title of a show bringing together anonymous 15th- and 16thcentury Italian drawings from the British Museum, London, the Courtauld Gallery, London and the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; to 22nd August; to be reviewed. Gateshead, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. The first retrospective in the UK of work by the American composer and writer John Cage (then in Cambridge); 19th June to 5th September (Fig.101). Glasgow, Hunterian Art Gallery. Works by Joseph Beuys are on view here to 27th September. An exhibition of works by the Scottish painter James Paterson is on view here to 27th September. Aspects of Scottish Art: 1860–1910; to 11th September. Glasgow, Tramway. An installation by the Swiss artist Christoph Büchel is on view to 18th July. Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery. A survey exhibition of works by Mark Francis is on view to 3rd July. Liverpool, Lady Lever Art Gallery. An exhibition devoted to Dürer’s engravings explores his influence by displaying his work alongside that of his contemporaries in a loan exhibition from the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow; to 26th September. Liverpool, Tate. Picasso: Peace and Freedom offers insight into the artist’s role as political activist and peace campaigner in the post-War period; to 30th August; to be reviewed. An exhibition of works by Rineke Dijkstra is on view here to 30th August. Middlesbrough, Institute of Modern Art. A certain distance, endless light brings together works by the Cuban artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres and the Irish artist William McKeown; to 4th July. Much Hadham, Henry Moore Foundation. The first exhibition to examine Moore’s graphic work runs to 30th August. Norwich, Sainsbury Centre. Seen earlier at the Henry Moore Foundation, the exhibition of textile designs by Henry Moore from the 1940s and 1950s is on view here from 22nd June to 29th August. Nottingham Contemporary. The exhibition Uneven Geographies. Art and Globalisation is on view here to 4th July. Oldham, Gallery. At the Edge. British Art 1950–2000 celebrates fifty years of British art in the collection of four North West art galleries, Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale and Preston, including works by Moore, Freud and Epstein; to 18th July. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum. The Lost World of Europe: The Danube Valley, 5000–3500 BC; to 15th August. Oxford, Museum of Modern Art. An exhibition of paintings by Howard Hodgkin comprises 20 of the artist’s recent works; 23rd June to 5th September (then in Tilburg and San Diego). An article on these paintings was published in the April issue of this Magazine. Salisbury, Roche Court. An exhibition of works by Richard Deacon is here to 25th July; to be reviewed. Sheffield, Millennium Gallery. Watercolour in Britain. Tradition & Beyond explores the watercolour in British art from Turner and Blake to Edward Burra, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland; 17th June to 5th September. Southampton City Art Gallery. Sea Fever: From Turner to Today includes recent works by Maggi Hambling and Julian Opie; to 5th September. St Ives, Tate. An exhibition of works by Lily van der Stokker, including the artist’s characteristic wall drawings; to 26th September. Wakefield, Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Works by David Nash; to January 2011. York Art Gallery. China: Journey to the East; to 5th September.
Europe Ajaccio, Palais Fesch. There is an exhibition devoted to Lucien Bonaparte as patron and collector; a display focusing on the Museum’s Portrait of a man by Titian which also includes the artist’s Man with a glove from the Louvre and the Pitti’s Young Englishman; and an exhibition of 16th-century Florentine drawings, organised in collaboration with the Ecole Nationale Supérieur des Beaux-Arts, Paris; all to 27th September. Amsterdam, Hermitage Amsterdam. Matisse to Malevich: Pioneers of Modern Art from the Hermitage; to 17th September. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Three recently restored Italian tondi – by Cosimo Rosselli, the Master of the Conversazione di Santo Spirito and from the studio of Francesco Squarcione – are the subject of a display running to 21st June. An exhibition of paintings, prints and drawings that show the expansion of the city in the Golden Age, runs to 6th September. Joan Miró travelled to the Netherlands in 1928 and made a series of paintings titled Dutch interiors inspired by 17th-century works in the Rijksmuseum. Alongside previously unseen sketches and drawings, Miró’s paintings are shown in this exhibition with the works that inspired them; 15th June to 30th September (then in New York).
101. HV2, no.17b, by John Cage. 1992. Aquatint. (Courtesy of Crown Point Press, San Francisco; exh. Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead). Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum. Seen earlier in Cleveland, Paul Gauguin. The Breakthrough to Modernity examines the artist’s Volpini suite of lithographs; to 6th June. Antibes, Musée Picasso. An exhibition of drawings by the Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa; to 17th October. Aosta, Museo Archeologico Regionale. The collections assembled by the Este family first at Ferrara and later at Modena, which included ancient gems and coins, bronzes by Antico and paintings by Dosso Dossi, are the subject of an exhibition running here to 1st November. Assisi, Basilica di S. Francesco. Here and at the Palazzo del Monte Frumentario, the exhibition Giotto’s colours: the basilica between restoration and virtual recreation is on show to 5th September. Barcelona, Fundació Joan Miró. An exhibition of works by artists who make murals; to 6th July. Works by Pipilotti Rist; 18th June to 31st October. Barcelona, Museu Picasso. The exhibition Picasso versus Rusiñol runs to 5th September. Basel, Fondation Beyeler. A large retrospective marks the fiftieth anniversary of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s birth (1960–88); to 5th September (then in Paris). Basel, Kunstmuseum. An exhibition of works by Gabriel Orozco is on view here to 8th August. An exhibition examining the important role of drawing in the work of Rosemarie Trockel is on view here to 5th September (then in Bonn). Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst. Some 100 works by Rodney Graham made between 1978 and 2008 are on view from 13th June to 26th September.
Belluno, Palazzo Crepadona. Here, in the Museo Civico and S. Pietro, and in the Museo Diocesano d’arte sacra at Feltre, an exhibition explores Sebastiano Ricci’s work in the Dolomite region on the 350th anniversary of the artist’s birth; to 29th August. Bergisch Gladbach, Städtische Galerie Villa Zanders. Part of a series of exhibitions devoted to the work of Johann Wilhelm Schirmer (to be reviewed), Die multiplizierte Natur: Schirmer und die Druckgraphick runs here to 16th January 2011 (see also Neuss, Düsseldorf, Jülich and Bonn). Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie. Menzels extremer Realismus is curated by Michael Fried and staged alongside the Berlin Biennale; 11th June to 8th August. Berlin, Galerie Haas & Fuchs. Michael Craig-Martin has curated an exhibition of work by his own students and their contemporaries, including works by Hirst, Hume, Lucas, Landy and Rae; to 30th June. Berlin, Hamburger Bahnhof. The first retrospective of work by Bruce Nauman, including the 1984 installation Room with my soul left out, room that does not care, is on view here to 10th October. Berlin, Kunstwerke. The 6th Berlin Biennale is here and at various locations around Kreuzberg; 11th June to 8th August. See also Alte Nationalgalerie. Berlin, Martin-Gropius-Bau. An exhibition of works by Olafur Eliasson, Innen Stadt Außen (Inner City Out), is on view here to 9th August. A retrospective exhibition of work by Frida Kahlo is on view here to 9th August. Berlin, Staatliche Museen. At the Kulturforum, ‘Feelings are a private concern’. Verism and the New Objectivity runs to 15th August; at the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, Double Sexus: Hans Bellmer – Louise Bourgeois runs to 15th August (to be reviewed); at the Museum für Fotografie, A Fresh Look: Architectural Photography from the Collections of the National Museums in Berlin runs to 5th September. Bern, Kunstmuseum. Seen earlier in Stuttgart, the Edward Burne-Jones exhibition is on view here to 25th July. Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum. The exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: Gluts, previously in Venice, is on display here to 3rd October. Works by Anish Kapoor; to 6th September. Seen earlier in Basel, the exhibition of work by Henri Rousseau is on view here to 12th September. Bochum, Situation Kunst. A touring exhibition explores the subject of landscape in art spanning the 17th to the 21st centuries; to 21st November (then in Kiel, Chemnitz and Maastricht). Bonn, Landesmuseum. Part of a series of exhibitions devoted to the work of Johann Wilhelm Schirmer (to be reviewed), Wie Bilder entstehen: Einblicke in Schirmers Atelier runs here to 16th January 2011 (see also Neuss, Düsseldorf, Jülich and Bergisch Gladbach). Bordeaux, CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain. Paintings by Jim Shaw comprise a retrospective exhibition of the artist’s works running to 19th September. Bregenz, Kunsthaus. A retrospective of works by Roni Horn; to 4th July. Brescia, Museo di Santa Giulia. The exhibitions Inca and Beyond Baroque: Signs of Identity in Latin American art document the Pre- and Post-Columbian civilisations in Peru; both to 27th June. Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts. An exhibition tracing the evolution of Symbolism is on view here to 27th June. Caen, Musée des Beaux-Arts. Selected Treasures from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo; to 19th September. L’Estampe impressioniste. Trésors de la Bibliothèque nationale de France is on view to 5th September. Carpi, Palazzo dei Pio. Here, at S. Ignazio and the Palazzo Foresti, paintings made for the city in the seicento, including works by Guercino, Ludovico Carracci, Reni et al., return in a show running to 20th June. Chantilly, Musée Condé. On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the death of Henry IV, the Museum presents an exhibition devoted to the king that includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, tapestries and miniatures; to 16th August. the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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Cologne, Museum Ludwig. Ways to Abstraction and Back Again: Kasimir Malevich and his Circle; to 22nd August. Como, Villa Olmo. A loan exhibition from the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Liechtenstein Museum in Vienna of works by Rubens and his contemporaries runs here to 25th July. Conegliano, Palazzo Sarcinelli. A major monographic exhibition commemorates the 500th anniversary of Cima da Conegliano’s death in 1510; to 20th June; to be reviewed. Copenhagen, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. To mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Christen Købke, the Glyptotek’s works by this artist are compared with works by Caspar David Friedrich; to 18th July. Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen. At the Gemäldegalerie, Titian’s recently restored Portrait of a woman in white is the subject of an in-focus display; to 27th June. At the Residenzschloss, State of the Art since 1560 commemorates the foundation in 1560 by August I, Elector of Saxony, of the royal Kunstkammer, which laid the foundations for what would eventually become the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen; to 7th November. At the Japanisches Palais, Triumph of the Blue Swords: Meissen Porcelain for Aristocracy and Bourgeoisie from 1710 to 1815 runs to 29th August. Düsseldorf, Museum Kunst Palast. Part of a series of exhibitions devoted to the work of Johann Wilhelm Schirmer (to be reviewed), Ein bläulich silbriger Duft der Ferne: Schirmer in Italien runs here to 29th August (see also Neuss, Bonn, Jülich and Bergisch Gladbach). Le Grande Geste. Informel and Abstract Expressionism 1946–64; to 1st August. Ecouen, Musée national de la Renaissance. Léonard Limosin (1505–57) illustrated Ovid’s Heroides in painted enamel portraits – a full set are gathered here in a show running to 5th July. Eindhoven, Van Abbemuseum. The first part of a major exhibition of work by El Lissitzky is on view here to 5th September. Emden, Ostfriesisches Landesmuseum. Illusion or reality: realism in Dutch painting of the 17th century runs here to 12th September. Erfurt, Angermuseum. Previously in Lübeck, the monographic exhibition devoted to the work of Natalia Goncharova is on view here from 12th June to 3rd October; to be reviewed. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. During an exhibition of medical manuscripts both the library and Michelangelo’s vestibule will be open to the public; to 26th June. Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia. Here and at the Museo Horne a loan exhibition of Renaissance cassoni and spalliere made to celebrate weddings is on show from 8th June to 1st November; to be reviewed. Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Galleria Palatina. The exhibition Caravaggio e caravaggeschi a Firenze runs to 17th October; to be reviewed. Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Museo degli Argenti. A selection of the Medici family’s collection of cut gems and cameos is shown together with works of art inspired by them by artists ranging from Ghiberti to Michelangelo; to 27th June. Florence, Palazzo Strozzi. Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings are shown with works by Magritte, Balthus, Ernst, Carrà and Morandi in a show running to 18th July; it is reviewed on p.428 above. Florence, Piazza del Duomo. The Baptistry will be open every evening from 16th June to 31st August; see also Pisa. Florence, Uffizi. The recent refurbishment and arrangement of the Tribuna is the focus of a show running to 30th June. Frankfurt, Portikus. An exhibition of works by the American artist Jimmie Durham is on view here to 1st August. Frankfurt, Städel Museum. Some 170 works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner comprise the first retrospective devoted to the artist in Germany for thirty years; to 25th July; to be reviewed.
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102. Frau aus Flamen, by Arnulf Rainer. 2010. Black pencil and acrylic on laserprint, 42 by 29.7 cm. (Courtesy of the artist; exh. Alte Pinakothek, Munich). Gallarate, MAGa. To inaugurate the new seat of this Museum, an exhibition of works by Amedeo Modigliani runs here to 19th June. Geneva, Musée Ariana. La donation Clare van Beusekom-Hamburger: Faïences et porcelaines des XVIe–XVIIIe siècles; 3rd June to 9th January 2011. Geneva, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire. Art and its markets: Flemish and Dutch painting of the 17th and 18th century, reviewed in the February issue, runs to 29th August. Gothenburg, Eriksburghallen. A drawing of a woman’s head in profile purporting to be by Leonardo is shown incongruously with architectural plans by Michelangelo and a preparatory drawing by Raphael for his Transfiguration; to 15th August. Graz, Universalmuseum Joanneum. Showpieces: Masterpieces of goldsmithing from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection is on view here to 31st October. The Hague, Mauritshuis. Room for Art in 17th-century Antwerp, previously in Antwerp, explores art collecting in 17th-century Antwerp; to 27th June. Early works by Vermeer are here to 22nd August (then in Dresden); to be reviewed. Hamburg, Bucerius Kunst Forum. A loan exhibition of 17th-century Flemish art from the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, which is largely closed for renovation works, runs here from 6th June to 19th September. Hamburg, Kunsthalle. Sailing under full canvas: Dutch masters of the Golden Age; 4th June to 12th September. The exhibition ‘A Temporary Heaven’. Art in Hamburg in the 1920s, is on view here to 27th June. Humlebaek, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. An exhibition comparing Andy Warhol and Edvard Munch runs here to 12th September. Seen earlier in London and Tilburg, the exhibition of works by Sophie Calle is on view here from 23rd June to 26th September. Jülich, Museum Zitadelle. Part of a series of exhibitions devoted to the work of Johann Wilhelm Schirmer (to be reviewed), Bilder auf Reisen: Schirmer und Amerika runs here to 31st October (see also Neuss, Düsseldorf, Bonn and Bergisch Gladbach). Lausanne, Fondation de l’Hermitage. Works by Edward Hopper; 25th June to 17th October. Leipzig, Museum der bildenden Künste. A retrospective of paintings by Neo Rauch is on view simultaneously here and in Munich; both to 15th August. Leuven, Museum. An exhibition of work by Angus Fairhurst is on view here to 12th September.
Limoges, Galerie des hospices. De terre et de feu, l’aventure de la céramique européenne; 18th June to 26th September. Luxembourg, Villa Vauban. The museum reopens this month after five years of renovation and extension works with an exhibition devoted to 17th-century Dutch painting and its appreciation by French collectors in the 19th century; to 31st October. Madrid, Museo del Prado. Turner and the Masters, seen previously in London and Paris and reviewed in the December 2009 issue, runs here from 22nd June to 19th September. An exhibition devoted to Willem de Pannemaker’s Mercury series of tapestries; 2nd June to 26th September. Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. New Realisms: 1957–1962. Object strategies between Readymade and spectacle; 16th June to 4th October. Mixed Use, Manhattan. Photography and Related Practices 1970s to the present; 9th June to 27th September. Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Taking its famous Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni by Ghirlandaio as its starting point, the Museum has mounted a loan exhibition surveying quattrocento Florentine art; 23rd June to 10th October; to be reviewed. A survey of works by Matisse covers the central period of his career, 1917–41; 9th June to 20th September. Málaga, Museo Picasso. An exhibition of equestrianthemed works by Picasso; to 5th September. Mantua, Palazzo Te. An exhibition of Renaissance tapestries ordered by the Gonzaga family, reviewed on p.431 above, runs here and at the Museo Diocesano Francesco Gonzaga; to 27th June. Milan, Palazzo Reale. Goya and the modern world; to 27th June. The two empires, the eagle and the dragon, which confronts the Roman Empire to the Chinese Qin and Han dynasties, runs to 5th September. Montepulciano, Pinacoteca Crociani. An exhibition of Macchiaioli paintings runs to 26th September. Montpellier, Musée Fabre. The international loan exhibition exploring the work of Houdon and his contemporaries, seen previously in Frankfurt, runs here to 27th June; to be reviewed. Munich, Alte Pinakothek. Works by Arnulf Rainer (Fig.102); 10th June to 5th September. Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne. See Leipzig. Naples, Museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina (MADRE). Works by Ryan Mendoza are on show to 28th June. A retrospective devoted to Franz West runs to 23rd August (then in Graz). Neuss, Clemens-Sels-Museum. Part of a series of exhibitions devoted to the work of Johann Wilhelm Schirmer (to be reviewed), Die weite Ferne so nah: Schirmers Reiseskizzen runs here to 1st August (see also Düsseldorf, Bonn, Jülich and Bergisch Gladbach). Nîmes, Carré d’Art. An exhibition of work by Gerard Gasiorowski; to 19th September. Orléans, Musée des Beaux-Arts. Secrets and Transparencies: Bernard Perrot, Glass Artist, and his Production in Orléans from 1668 to 1754; to 27th June. Orvieto, Palazzi Papali. 700 years after the architect Lorenzo Maitani started work on Orvieto Cathedral, an exhibition here includes his original designs, sculpture from the main portal and paintings; to 13th November. Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou. The exhibition of work by Lucian Freud runs to 19th July. Les Promesses du Passé, 1950–2010. Une histoire discontinue de l’art dans l’ex Europe de l’Est; to 19th July. Paris, Galerie des Gobelins. The exhibition Trésors des Habsbourgs d’Espagne, chefs-d’œuvre de la tapisserie de la Renaissance is on view here to 4th July. Paris, Grand Palais. La voie du Tao: un autre chemin de l’être is on view here to 5th July. Paris, Jeu de Paume. Exhibitions of work by Bruno Serralongue, William Kentridge and Klara Lidén are on view from 29th June to 5th September. Paris, Maison de Victor Hugo. A loan show devoted to 19th-century oriental art runs to 4th July. Paris, Musée de l’Orangerie. An exhibition of 26 works by Paul Klee, including 17 from the collection of the Beyeler Foundation; to 19th July.
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Paris, Musée d’Orsay. The exhibition devoted to Meijer de Haan runs to 20th June (then in Amsterdam and Quimper); it is reviewed on p.427 above. Paris, Musée du Louvre. An exhibition of drawings by Toussaint Dubreuil (1561–1602) runs to 21st June. Paintings from the private collection of French and Italian paintings formed by Héléna and Guy Motais de Narbonne are on view to 21st June. Meroë, Empire on the Nile explores this ancient civilisation and its intermingling of African, Egyptian and Greco-Roman influences; to 6th September. Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André. From El Greco to Dalí. The Great Spanish Masters from the Pérez Simón collection; to 1st August. Paris, Musée Rodin. An exhibition of works by Wim Delvoye is on view here to 22nd August. Concurrently, the exhibition Rodin and the Decorative Arts. Paris, Pinacothèque. An exhibition of work by Edvard Munch; to 18th July. Pau, Musée National du Château de Pau. The grisaille paintings made by Tuscan artists to commemorate Henry of Navarre after his assassination in 1610 are exhibited here until 30th June (then in Florence). Pisa, Camposanto. In the initiative Le piazze sotto la luna, the buildings on the Camposanto will be open every evening from 8 to 11pm from 16th June to 31st August; see also Florence. Pontassieve (Florence), Palazzo Municipale. Fra Angelico’s Virgin and Child from S. Michele Arcangelo has returned to Pontassieve from the Uffizi and forms the focus of an exhibition that is reviewed on p.430 above; to 27th June. Pont-Aven, Musée. An exhibition of works by the Nabis artist Paul Ranson; 5th June to 3rd October. Prague, Palais Waldstein. Biedermeier from the collections of the Prince of Liechtenstein; to 17th October. Ravenna, Complesso di S. Nicolò. Theatre and masks in the ancient world are the theme of a show running here to 12th September. Ravenna, Museo d’Arte della Città. The PreRaphaelites and the Italian Dream; to 6th June (then in Oxford); to be reviewed. Rome, Complesso del Vittoriano. Paintings of nature by Corot, Monet, Sisley and Pissarro are on show here to 29th June. Rome, MAXXI. The new national museum of 21stcentury art, designed by Zaha Hadid, has opened in via Guido Reni with shows devoted to Gino De Domenicis, the architect Luigi Moretti and Kutlug Ataman’s Mesopotamian dramaturgies. Rome, Musei Capitolini. I giorni di Roma: l’età della conquista; to 5th September. Rome, Museo Carlo Bilotti. Philip Guston, Roma; to 50th September; to be reviewed. Rome, Palazzo Caffarelli. Greek works of art brought to Rome between the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD are shown here to 5th September. Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni. A show exploring Giorgio de Chirico’s view of nature; to 11th July. Rome, Palazzo del Quirinale. Pontomoro and Bronzino designed a set of tapestries of the Story of Joseph, ten are shown here to 30th June. Rome, Scuderie Papali al Quirinale. The 400th anniversary of Caravaggio’s death is commemorated in a plethora of exhibitions; the first runs here to 17th June; to be reviewed. Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. An exhibition devoted to Han van Meegeren’s fake Vermeers runs here to 22nd August. St Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum. From Gothic to Mannerism. Early Netherlandish Drawings from the 15th to the 16th Centuries in the Hermitage Collection; to 1st August. Siena, S. Maria della Scala. The Arts in Siena in the Early Renaissance, reviewed on p.433 above, runs to 11th July. Stockholm, Moderna Museet. Seen earlier in London and Munich, and reviewed in the January issue, works by Ed Ruscha are here to 5th September. Strasbourg, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain. A show of works by Richard Deacon brings together some 100 of his sculptures; to 19th September.
Strasbourg, Musée des Beaux-Arts. Works by Jean Barbault (1718–62); to 22nd August. Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie. Works by Brücke, Bauhaus and Blaue Reiter artists; to 20th June. Toulouse, Musée des Augustins. Antonio Verrio (1636– 1707), un italien entre Toulouse et Londres; to 27th June. Trento, Castello del Buonconsiglio. Over 700 pieces of glassware ranging in date from the early Renaissance to the 20th century, are on show here and at Castel Thun from 27th June to 7th November. Turin, Fondazione Merz. Merz, the pageantry of painting runs here to 26th September. Turin, Venaria Reale. An exhibition exploring images of Christ includes works by Donatello, Bellini, Titian and others; to 1st August. Udine, Galleria d’Arte Antica. A complete set of Giambattista Tiepolo’s capricci and scherzi prints is shown here together with a significant selection of his drawings; to 31st October. Udine, Villa Manin a Passariano. Paintings by the brothers Dino, Mirko and Afro Basaldella are shown together in a retrospective running to 29th August. Valenciennes, Musée des Beaux-Arts. An exhibition devoted to landscape drawings of 19th-century French artists who travelled to Italy runs here from 16th June to 13th September. Venice, Ca’ Foscari Esposizioni. 20th-century Russian art from the collections of Alberto Morgante and Alberto Sandretti is on show here to 25th July. Venice, Fondazione Giorgio Cini. Drawings and bozzetti by Sebastiano Ricci and his contemporaries are shown here to 11th July. Venice, Galleria dell’Accademia. On the occasion of the publication of a catalogue of the 16th- and 17th-century Dutch and Flemish drawings in the collection of the Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe, a selection has been put on show; to 20th June. Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Utopia matters: from confraternities to the Bauhaus; to 25th July. Viareggio, Centro Matteucci per l’Arte moderna. From Fattori to Casorati: masterpieces from the Ugo Ojetti collection is shown in this newly opened gallery devoted to 19th-century Italian art; 25th June to 12th September. Vienna, Albertina. A survey exhibition draws on the recent gift to the Gallery by Alex Katz of a complete set of his prints; to 29th August. Vienna, Liechtenstein Museum. The Prince As Collector: New Acquisitions under Hans-Adam II von und zu Liechtenstein; to 24th August.
103. Woman with tambourine, by Pablo Picasso. 1939. Etching and aquatint, 66.7 by 51.2 cm. (Museum of Modern Art, New York; exh. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).
New York Brooklyn Museum. A unique, site-specific installation by Kiki Smith is on view to 12th September. Seen earlier in Fort Worth, the first US museum survey to examine the late work of Andy Warhol is on view here from 18th June to 12th September; it is reviewed on p.438 above. Drawing Center. An exhibition of costume designs by Dorothea Tanning and drawings by Leon Golub, both on view to 23rd July. Gagosian. At Madison Avenue, photographs by Richard Prince (to 19th June), and sculpture by Tatiana Trouvé (to 26th June). At st St., a loan exhibition of important late works by Monet; to 26th July. At th St., the exhibition Roy Lichtenstein: Still Lifes is on display to 30th July. Galerie St Etienne. The exhibition Käthe Kollwitz. A Portrait of the Artist is on view here to 25th June. Jan Krugier. A Century of Picasso. Paintings, Sculptures and Works on Paper 1902–1971 is here to 6th July. Jewish Museum. Exhibitions of work by William Kentridge and by David Goldblatt are both on view to 19th September. Knoedler & Company. ‘Red Paintings’ (1962–63) by Michael Goldberg; to 20th July. Matthew Marks. At W. th St. and W. nd St., works by Darren Almond; at W. nd St., works by Anne Truit; both to 26th June. Marion Goodman. A new body of work by Thomas Struth is on view here to 19th June. Mary Boone. Paintings by David Salle from the 1980s are on view here to 26th June. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vienna Circa 1780: An Imperial Silver Service Rediscovered; to 7th November. Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art; to 1st August (Fig.103). An Italian Journey: Drawings from the Tobey Collection, Correggio to Tiepolo; to 15th August. Moeller Fine Art. Illustrations by George Grosz for Esquire magazine are exhibited here to 26th June. Morgan Library. Palladio and His Legacy: A Transatlantic Journey; to 1st August. The Art and Poetry of Nature explores the Romantic movement’s influence on landscape and garden design; to 29th August. A selection of drawings by Albrecht Dürer from the permanent collection is on display to 12th September. Museum of Modern Art. Work by Henri CartierBresson; to 28th June (then in Chicago, San Francisco and Atlanta). A collections exhibition of prints by Picasso is on display to 30th August. Neue Galerie. Works by Otto Dix are on display here to 30th August (then in Montreal). New Museum. An exhibition of works by the Brazilian conceptual artist Rivane Neuenschwander is on view here from 23rd June to 19th September (then in Saint Louis and Scottsdale). Pace Gallery. At W. nd St., works by Kiki Smith are on view to 19th June. PS. The third Greater New York Show, a quinquennial celebration of art from the five boroughs, is on view here to 20th October. Richard L. Feigen. The loan exhibition Richard Wilson and the British Arcadia runs to 25th June. Solomon Guggenheim Museum. Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance; to 6th September. Paintings by Julie Mehretu; to 6th October. Upper East Side. Several dealers (including Richard L. Feigen; see above) mount special shows, with Didier Aaron showing 17th-century works (to 11th June); Dickinson works by James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson and Spencer Finch (to 2nd July); James Graham & Sons recent paintings by Reeve Schley (to 18th June); and David Tunick lithographs by Daumier (to 11th June). For further details, visit www.masterworksofsixcenturies.com. Whitney Museum of American Art. Heat waves in a swamp. The paintings of Charles Burchfield is on view here from 24th June to 17th October. the burlingto n m a g a z i n e
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North America Albuquerque, Museum of Art & History. Seen earlier in various locations, the exhibition Turner to Cézanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum of Wales terminates here; to 8th August. Boston, ICA. Seen earlier in London, the retrospective of works by Roni Horn is here to 13th June. Cambridge, Harvard Art Museum. At the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, the temporary installation Rubens and the Baroque Festival is here to 29th August. Chicago, Art Institute. Matisse: Radical Invention 1913–1917; to 20th June (then in New York). Columbus, Wexner Center for the Arts. A survey of works by Mark Bradford; to 15th August (then in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco). Corning Museum of Glass. Medieval Glass for Popes, Princes, and Peasants; to 3rd January. Dallas Museum of Art. An exhibition of works by Luc Tuymans; 6th June to 5th September. Hamilton, Art Gallery. The exhibition Europe’s Exoticized East explores the works of 19th-century European Orientalists; to 6th September. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Myths, Legends and Cultural Renewal: Wagner’s Sources explores Germanic myths and legends in the modern era; to 16th August. John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, previously in London, is on view here from 27th June to 12th September. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of Sculpture: Inspiration and Invention, previously in Atlanta, runs here to 20th June; to be reviewed. An exhibition devoted to the work of Jean-Léon Gérôme runs here from 15th June to 12th September (then in Paris and Madrid); to be reviewed. An exhibition devoted to Charles Le Brun and monumental prints in the age of Louis XIV runs to 17th October. New Haven, Yale Center for British Art. The 1820s London art scene is explored in an exhibition focusing on John Scarlett Davis’s Interior of the British Institution; 24th June to 19th September. Contemporary bookbindings and jewellery by Romilly Saumarez Smith are also on display from 24th June to 19th September. New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery. Italian Paintings from the Richard L. Feigen Collection; to 12th September. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Seen earlier in Paris and Los Angeles, Renoir in the 20th Century, reviewed on p.409 above, runs here from 17th June to 6th September. Notations/Forms of Contingency: New York and Turin, 1960s–1970s charts changing attitudes to sculpture in the two artistic centres; to September 2010. Water work features a selection of works with water as their principal theme, from Ruscha to Celmins; to 18th July. Seattle Art Museum. An exhibition drawing together some 50 prints by James Ensor and Georg Baselitz runs here to 24th October. Vancouver Art Gallery. The first survey in North America of works by Fiona Tan; to 6th September. Washington, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. A retrospective devoted to Yves Klein is on view here to 12th September (then in Minneapolis). Washington, National Gallery of Art. The survey of winter landscapes by Hendrick Avercamp, reviewed at its Amsterdam showing in the February issue, runs here to 5th July. From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection; to 31st July. The exhibition German Master Drawings from the Wolfgang Ratjen Collection, 1580–1900 (Fig.104), is on view to 28th November. American modernism from the Edward and Deborah Shein Collection, with works from Davis to Duchamp, is on view to 2nd January 2011. Williamstown, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. Some 100 works from international collections comprise the exhibition Picasso Looks at Degas; 13th June to 12th September (then in Barcelona).
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arts in Europe (11th); 20th-century Decorative art and design (17th). New York, Sotheby’s. Old-master paintings and 19th-century European art (3rd); Antiquities (11th); 20th-century design (16th).
Forthcoming Fairs Art Basel; 16th to 20th June. Basel, Print Basel; 14th to 20th June. London, Master Drawings and Master Paintings; 3rd to 9th July. London, The Russian, Eastern & Oriental Fine Art Fair; 9th to 12th June.
Notes on contributors
104. Adolf Zimmermann, by Carl Oesterley. 1828. Pen and brown ink with brown wash over graphite on wove paper, 28 by 23 cm. (National Gallery of Art, Washington).
Rest of the world Abu Dhabi, Emirates Palace. A Story of Islamic Embroidery in Nomadic and Urban Traditions; to 28th July. Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Victorian Visions showcases John Schaeffer’s collection of work by artists such as Rossetti, Holman Hunt, Leighton and Waterhouse; to 29th August. Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art. Here, and at seven other locations around the city, the 17th Sydney Biennale; to 1st August. Tokyo, National Museum of Western Art. From Renaissance to Baroque: Masterpieces from the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples; 26th June to 26th September.
June Sales London, Bonhams (Bond St.). Modern and contemporary Middle Eastern and South Asian art (2nd); The Russian sale (7th); Design from 1860 (16th); English furniture and works of art (16th); Impressionist and modern art (22nd); 20th-century British art (30th); Silver and objects of vertu (30th); The Geoffrey Godden collection of blue and white porcelain (30th). London, Bonhams (Knightsbridge). Islamic and Indian art (9th); Modern and contemporary Middle Eastern and South Asian art (9th); British and Continental pictures (15th). London, Christie’s (King St.). Russian art (8th); Silver, European ceramics, portrait miniatures and gold boxes (10th); Syd Levethan: The Longridge collection (10th and 11th); Orientalist art (15th); Victorian and British Impressionist pictures including drawings and watercolours (16th); The Nicolette Wernick collection of British watercolours and paintings, 1800–1950 (16th); Impressionist and modern art (23rd and 24th); Post-War and contemporary art (30th). London, Christie’s (South Kensington). Russian pictures and works of art (10th); South Asian modern and contemporary art (10th); British prints and multiples (23rd); Victorian and British Impressionist art (30th). London, Sotheby’s (Bond St.). 19th-century European paintings, the Orientalist sale, Spanish painting, the Scandinavian sale, and 19th- and 20th-century European sculpture (2nd); Russian art (7th); Russian paintings, works of art, Fabergé and icons (9th); Indian art (15th); Impressionist and modern art (22nd and 23rd); Contemporary art (28th and 29th). New York, Christie’s. Old masters and 19th-century art (9th); Antiquities (10th); 500 Years: Decorative
Colin B. Bailey is Associate Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator of The Frick Collection, New York. Koenraad Brosens is Professor of History of Art at the University of Leuven (KULeuven), Belgium. Quentin Buvelot is Chief Curator at the Mauritshuis, The Hague. Peter Cherry is Lecturer and Head of Department, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Trinity College, Dublin. Catherine Craft is an independent scholar. David Ekserdjian is Professor of History of Art and Film at the University of Leicester. Patricia Failing is Professor and Chair of the Division of Art History, University of Washington, Seattle. John Gash is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Aberdeen. Michael Gervers is Professor of History at the University of Toronto. Elena Greer is Assistant Curator for Renaissance Painting, National Gallery, London. Tom Hardwick is Researcher at the Wilbour Library of Egyptology, Brooklyn Museum, New York. Ella Hendricks is Chief Paintings Conservator at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Helen Howard is a Conservator in the Scientific Department of the National Gallery, London. Timothy Hyman is an independent art historian and artist. He exhibits at Austin/Desmond. Friso Lammertse is Curator of Old Master paintings, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. R.W. Lightbown is former Keeper of Metalwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Huub van der Linden is an independent art historian. Jane Munro is Senior Assistant Keeper at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Scott Nethersole is the Harry M. Weinrebe Curatorial Assistant at the National Gallery, London. Thomas Pakenham is an independent historian. Nicholas Penny is Director of the National Gallery, London. John Picton is Emeritus Professor of African Art, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Robert Radford is a visiting research fellow, University of East Anglia, Norwich. Claudie Ressort is Honorary Research Assistant for Spanish Pictures at the Musée du Louvre, Paris. Neville Rowley is completing a Ph.D. at the Université Paris-Sorbonne. Rachel Sloan is Curatorial Research Fellow at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Louis van Tilborgh is Senior Research Curator at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Rose Walker is Associate Scholar, Courtauld Institute of Art Research Forum, London.
Correction In David Franklin’s review of the exhibition The Drawings of Bronzino at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in the May issue of this Magazine (pp.350–51), the name of George R. Goldner was inadvertently omitted from the list of contributors to the catalogue.
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