It's been a good year so far for exhibitions of renaissance drawing. We've had the brilliant Michelangelo show at the Courtauld Institute, and the not so well-known exhibition (After Michelangelo) currently on at Christchurch in Oxford. Now we have an exhibition of 100 renaissance drawings to look forward to- it's due to open at the British Museum tomorrow, a joint venture between the B.M and the Uffizi who have lent 50 drawings including the Raphael above.
BM exhibitions of the graphic arts are always worth a visit: they are expertly curated and their catalogues are exemplary. I've always wondered about the sort of people who go to these exhibitions though. Are they die-hard connoisseurs losing themselves in rapt contemplation of a pen or chalk drawing? Or are they just members of the general public drawn to the beauty of drawings. Maybe curious individuals seduced by the big names of renaissance art? At the Michelangelo exhibition, between looking at the drawings, I looked at the people looking at the drawings…
There should be even more people crowding around the drawings in the B.M. this summer In fact, the newspapers who have been given previews this week, are predicting a blockbuster. On his blog, the curator of the exhibition, Hugo Chapman, writes of another kind of crowd, the "hundreds of guests" invited to the launch party last night, though sadly not the Uffizi curators who were stranded in Italy due to the ash cloud.
Am I glad I went to Italy before Mr Volcano reared his troublesome head!
The church theme continues with a retrospective post describing a walk in Venice last week.
One of the problems with walking from my hotel to the RSA convention centre is that the route holds many traps for the art lover, especially churches. The temptation is too great to stop off at these buildings which hold examples of top-notch Venetian painting and sculpture. I find myself torn between art on the power point in the conference room, and art in its original surroundings.
Stepping out my hotel, I turn left and walk along the Fondamente Savorgnan, and bear left again to find the church of St Giobbe. One of five plague churches built in Venice; it is a low-key affair, a place for quiet contemplation of lesser-known works rather than awestruck ogling of more famous canvases. It wasn't always the case: St Giobbe's most famous possession- Bellini's eponymous altarpiece- has long decamped to the Accademia. Still, what's on display is intriguing. For example, you can see an example of the Brescian artist, Andrea Previtali, in the sacristy. Back in the main church you'll see the tomb of the French ambassador to Venice, executed by Perrault and others. The Doge Cristoforo Moro- some say the model for Shakespeare's Othello- is also buried here. Other artists featured include Luca della Robbia and Savoldo. And don't forget the Altar of the Gondoliers!
Retracing my footsteps, I head through the markets in the direction of the Piazzale Roma. On the left I'm confronted by the 18th century facade of San Geremia e Lucia.
Known as the seat of St Lucy who, in a picture near the entrance, holds out her eyes on a tray to you (er, no thanks). I find the atmosphere here less congenial than San Giobbe; the art is less interesting too. There are also quite a lot of relics and bodies in cases, hinting at Venice's taste for the macabre.
Onwards and upwards to the vaporetto whose passengers wait in the shadow of the Scalzi church. Now this is baroque architecture, but not offensively so. You get more of the atmosphere of the baroque inside where the air of cloying sanctity is more apparent because I've accidentally walked in on a mass. Standing and staring at the altar paintings while the priest intones, I endure quizzical stares from parishioners who are here for the religion, not the art. Perhaps I forgot to cross myself or genuflect upon entering. The taste of the Scalzi is opulent, and I'm not at all surprised to learn later that Ruskin condemned it for its baroque ostentation. This church is the wine to San Giobbe's water.
Straight over the large bridge opposite the Scalzi, and down into the entrammeled streets around Venice's most famous church, Titian's church- the Frari. I had forgotten how overpowering this site of altar painting and tomb sculpture can be. The Frari effect is lessened these days though; entry is not by the main door which meant originally you'd see Titian's Assunta right in front of you and his Pesaro Madonna to the left, but by a side door. Turning right, you now walk along and stop in front of the Pesaro Madonna as if encountering it in a museum. Then it's a walk up to Canova's sleek, melancholy tomb- originally meant for Titian- but now Canova's heart is buried there.
Directly opposite is that 19th century marble monstrosity that shows Titian in death as Michelangelo's Moses- it's the most inappropriate gesture anybody could have dreamt up for a painter whose creed was the dynamic brushstroke, not the lifelessness of stone.
Of course, all this is the preamble to the glorious vision of Titian's Assunta, which merits at least 30 minutes of anybody's time. Unfortunately, I'm on a schedule so I devote only 10 minutes to it. Every time I look at this awesome paintng, I'm struck by how it synthesizes a whole range of styles and periods: the gold of heaven recalling the Byzantine mosaics of St Marks; the shadows over the apostles bringing to mind the 'dark manner' of Leonardo da Vinci. Sidney Freedberg said that Titian approached the baroque in this work, but ultimately chose not to take that route. That was left to Correggio with his dazzling frescoes in Parma Cathedral.
Out into the sunshine and threading my way through what James/Jan Morris calls in his/her book on Venice the "spider's web" of streets around the Frari. Eventually, if you know the route you'll emerge near the Zattere that faces the channel of the Guidecca.
Turning left and passing the Don Orione- nerve centre of the conference- you fetch up against the last church for this morning- the Gesuati..
This exterior of this building has grandeur about it: Corinthian pillars supporting a very classical pediment. Inside, the magnificence continues, but there's a stylistic contrast because of the presence of late baroque/early rococo paintings by Tiepolo, Ricci and Piazzetta. Tilting the head back to look up at Tiepolo's ceiling paintings for the Dominicans can result in giddiness. Weightless bodies covered by drapery and the lightness of the colours suggest levitation rather than feet firmly planted on the ground.
But I must get to the conference and its academic sessions, of which more another time…
I've been in Venice for most of the last week, attending and participating in the Renaissance Society of America's (RSA) annual conference. Venice is a fantastic venue for a conference, but it does present certain organizational problems. The hub of the conference was in the Dorsoduro district, and my hotel was up in Cannaregio ward which gave me plenty of opportunity to walk across Venice, which you can do in 20-30 minutes if you know the layout of the streets. Of course, you can opt for the vaporetto, but the fares are ruinous. Here are some photos of Ca' Foscari, Venice University, whose many outposts served as venues for the conference programme. Try session hopping between these!
Though the conference was a great success, I felt slightly let down on the art front. I was disappointed to find that the Accademia had not escaped the ephemeral museum effect: one of their stellar paintings, Giorgione's 'Tempest' was not on display, nor a slew of other paintings.
The Giorgione was being readied for a forthcoming exhibition, and the scaffolding, boards and crane near the building told their own story about refurbishment at the museum.
If rumours I heard have any substance, the Accademia is going to need this extra space. On a visit to a local church which I won't name- I learnt from the very friendly and informative guide that this church - and others- is going to be amalgamated into other parishes/dioceses, leading to financial difficulties and the possible off-loading of paintings to the Accademia. Perhaps this is an unsurprising development- the line between museums and churches is very fine in Venice. I purchased a card allowing access to 12 churches, but was told at several churches I visited that said card was invalid because the building was not a church but a museum. When I protested that sticking a poster of Leonardo da Vinci on a church door to advertise a temporary exhibition, did not make the church a museum, I was met with a stony stare and no attempt to justify this Venetian scam.
More on Venetian churches and art in another post....
This post was inspired by (a) Easter (b) watching a DVD of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ ( all 2 ½ hours of it!) and (c) a meditation on what I call the "dynamics of the cross" from the Renaissance to modern art.
Not really a believer, I was nonetheless curious to see how Gibson's controversial film would handle the iconography of various scenes of Christ's final hours like the Agony in the Garden and the Crucifixion. It was the latter that fascinated me: has there ever been such a bloody breakdown of the execution of Christ; has it ever been rationalized into such a formula of suffering and brutality; has there ever been such a, literally, blow by blow account? I was particularly intrigued by how Gibson turned the Crucifixion into a mechanical process in which every detail was deemed greatly significant. Effort and exertion. Every tightening of the rope against the skin, every driving home of nail into flesh, every gasp of pain escaping the wracked body of the saviour. Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of the mechanics of suffering was the flipping of Jesus's cross through space, so that it lay with the messiah's face pointing towards the ground.
This inversion got me thinking about the dynamics of the cross in space, an idea that has seldom been considered in art history, accounts mainly concentrating on the iconography of the event. An interest in the spatial aspects of the crucifixion may be the result of institutionalizing perspective in the fifteenth-century, although in most depicted crucifixions of that time, the spatio-temporal fits a losing battle with static flat pattern. Thus in Andrea del Castagno's Crucifixion of 1450, we get the two thieves in three quarter view, but not really a sense of space within the composition, more variations in position.
Perspective is more exploited in later Renaissance art: Tintoretto's version has the cross of the bad thief being levered up, a dramatic foreshortening effect that immediately gives us a sense of the space around that particular cross although Christ's cross must remain static so that it faces the viewer.
Moving into the seventeenth-century, we encounter an excellent example of foreshortening the cross, in this case Christ's own. Annibale Carracci's Quo Vadis Domine (1600) shows Christ carrying a very foreshortened cross, an effect clearly developed from their experiments with perspective in the Carracci Academy in Bologna, where they would have been encouraged to study the cross from every angle, much like Gibson who rotates the cross on Golgotha so that the moviegoer becomes aware of the cross moving through space.
Lest I give the impression that Gibson's dynamics of the cross can be traced back to an academic tradition in which the cross is observed from multiple viewpoints, I should also say that Gibson in his stressing of the physical nature of crucifixion owes something to an anti-academic, realist tendency best represented by Caravaggio. His Crucifixion of St Peter shows the labour of crucifying a victim, and again we see the tipping up of the cross, although the black box like space obliterates perspective completely. The cross is swallowed up in the maw of a frozen moment of suffering unlike the Carracci whose wide open landscapes suggest the unfolding of natural processes over time. So perhaps Caravaggio is the more obvious model for Gibson, especially because his dynamics of the passion are mediated through a similar aesthetic in which the action is petrified in a sequence of moments: Christ's journey to Calvary is a series of stops and starts, the cumulative effect being to indicate inertia rather than motion.
It's probably the case that in the early modern period we encounter what marks the beginning of the modern and humanistic treatment of crucifixions, where the scientific and spiritual come together in a strange constellation of ideas. Consider a drawing by the deeply devout St John of the Cross, (1542-1591). Here the cross is not foreshortened, but shown in oblique view from above, begging the question why did this mystic chose such a precipitous view.
Gibson didn't exploit this viewpoint in his movie, but in a famous earlier film 1961, King of Kings, Nicholas Ray did: he gives us a dizzying few seconds directly at the top of the cross- we look down from the vantage point of God towards the ground before the camera restores order by pointing back towards the sky. If you hang in with this excerpt, you'll see it.
In John of the Cross's drawing we are close to that filmic viewpoint but we're seeing Jesus from an elliptical angle, a vertiginous position that inspired the surrealist genius Salvador Dali who also did a drawing of Christ from above, which he later turned into a painting, Crucifixion of St John of the Cross (1951). For Dali, the image of Christ on the cross offered a way of combing academic precepts with strictly scientific principles: he wanted to paint a saviour in cubist form, exchange metaphysics for physics. Not content with that, Dali wanted to paint an "exploding Christ"-and you thought a chocolate Christ was controversial! - as well as transcending the limitations of the form. Dali was also influenced by the treatise of a seventeenth-century architect, Juan de Herrera, on cubic form., whose ideas also underpin Dali's investigations into Velasquez Las Meninas.
Dali's earlier crucifixion is impressive because most views of the event can be accommodated: we can both look down on Christ or imagine ourselves standing on the shore of Port Lligat like the man by the boat looking up. We can have both an earthbound and celestial view. But his Hyper Cubic Crucifixion of a few years later is distinctively unsettling. Looking at it, I'm reminded of T.S. Eliot's line "Like a patient etherized upon a table"- this is Christ as an object ripe for dissection by the implements of white-coated anonymous bureaucracy- Christ as Joseph K. An objectified Christ, devoid of passion, arguably a more disturbing one than that of Gibson's, who though dripping with blood and wracked with pain, remains human.
