Art History Today

Fool’s Gold

  I bet a lot of people don’t realise that Poussin’s recently stolen King Midas at the Pactolus, from the Fesch collection in Corsica, has been in the hands of thieves before. I don’t mean in modern times, but in Poussin’s own century.I suddenly recalled that Poussin’s merchant friend Stefan Roccatagliata mentions this painting during a deposition in the trial of the diamond smuggler Fabrizio Valguarnera; according to the testimony, the crook bought the painting with one stolen diamond from Roccatagliata’s stock in 1631. Although he had had to give evidence also, Poussin was completely innocent, oblivious to the nefarious schemes of this Spanish nobleman who sought to buy and commission original paintings, or have copies made, with his illicit proceeds.

  One of these copies is known to have been made of another version of the Midas subject, Midas and Bacchus, at Munich, probably made about 1629, about three years after the Fesch picture. This is perhaps the most well-known. It shows a statuesque Bacchus- based on sculpture that Poussin had studied and drawn in Rome at that time- absolving the foolish Midas of his wish that everything he touched should turn to gold. The god languidly stretches out a hand to indicate that Midas should bathe in the River Pactolus, if his curse of instant riches is to vanish. The other figures in the foreground, putti, Silenus, nymph and goat look like the remnants of a sleepover party or Bacchic hangover, a contrast to the stern controlled Bacchus.

  The river Pactolus  is represented by a reclining figure holding an urn, set far back into the picture. This is what the late Louis Marin, one of the most perceptive of Poussin scholars, would have called a “mini-picture.” It’s a miniature scene in which a later episode is acted out: the cleansing of Midas’s curse by the Pactolus which pours water over the naked king.  In order to draw our eye to it, Poussin creates a Venetian-style aperture through which we look to Midas's salvation, the waters of the Pactolus- almost certainly Christian baptism implied here. It’s almost like looking into the future at something that was ordained.

In the Fesch version, King Midas contemplates a man looking for gold in the Pactolus, but the monarch has learnt that this is fool’s gold; riches don’t always bring happiness, just the opposite.  I wonder if Valguarnera in his dark, Roman dungeon cast his mind back to the subject matter of the pictures he had owned.  Reflecting bitterly, he may have realized that he could have abandoned riches and misery like Midas, but by then it was too late. As the dust accumulated on Poussin’s Midas canvases, and the clock ticked away Valguernera’s trial proceedings, the life force ebbed from the thief’s body. The 17th century criminal died in prison. 

As for our 21st century felons contemplating the Fesch Midas, I wouldn’t like to think what’s going through their minds. According to Didier Rykner of Art Tribune, the thieves might consider destroying their haul as they can’t sell it. I hope they take DR’s advice that they would face more lenient treatment if they returned the art safe and sound.

Raphael and the Victorians

Continuing the series of posts adapted from lecture notes on the influence of the Italian renaissance on 19th century English art; we now come to an artist who features heavily on this blog. Ladies and gentlemen, Raphael Sanzio meets the Victorians!

Raphael’s status as “the foremost painter (Sir Joshua Reynolds) was never in doubt in the mind’s of the artists and professionals who ran the Royal Academy. Feted for his clarity of thought and precision in execution, Raphael provided the model for students of the academy to emulate. Charles Lock Eastlake, soon to be Director of the National Gallery, built Raphael’s standard of excellence into his art.

When Eastlake became Director in 1855, he lost no time in seeking out Raphael’s art for the museum. He acquired the Virgin, Child and Infant Baptist from Lord Garvagh, which gives the picture its name, the Garvagh Madonna. As Nicholas Penny notes in the catalogue to the 2004 Raphael exhibition in London, the “lucid palette and airy colour” of the Garvagh Madonna would have appealed to Eastlake who styled his art on Raphael.

Eastlake spread his interest in Raphael beyond the NG, out into the realm of public decorations and schemes. When asked to join a team of painters selected to decorate a pavilion ( left) in the grounds of Buckingham Palace, Eastlake opted for “an abstracted Virtue surrounded by Raphaelesque cherubs to quote the words of Mrs Jameson, the English art historian.” For Eastlake, English artists should seek to use the methods of renaissance masters when decorating walls and large surfaces; paintings required a “master mind” with lots of assistants to help in the preparation. In addition to that, Eastlake advised painters embarking on public schemes, like the decoration of the Houses of Parliament, to adopt Raphaelite precedents.

Another painter involved in the Houses of Parliament project, less famous than Eastlake was William Dyce, who might be considered the greatest devotee of Raphael in the 19^th century. His Madonnas are Raphael filtered through the simplicity of the Nazarenes, a German community of artists heavily influenced by the young renaissance master. Like Eastlake, Dyce believed firmly that in undertaking large art and design projects, artists should look to Raphael and his school:

“At that period (15^th and 16^th centuries) the great men whose pre-eminent talents have rendered their names familiar to us, did not disdain to guide spirits of an inferior order, who laboured mechanically at the loom, in the porcelain manufactory, in the workshop or with the needle…they educated a class of workmen in their schools, whose province it was to follow out in detail the designs and ideas of their masters…Thus it was in the school of Raffaele.”

Dyce studied renaissance art in Italy, and numbered among his favourites Gozzoli, Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Pinturicchio, Sebastiano del Piombo, and of course Raphael. He even wrote in 1856 to Eastlake suggesting he buy Raphael’s Agony in the Garden predella from the Colonna Altarpiece, as well as earlier art. In pressing Eastlake to buy what he called “genuine examples”, Dyce was theorising that art had an “adolescent” state, defined by “freshness of thought and invention, a vivacity, a gaiety, a vividness of impression, an innocence, simplicity and truthfulness which belong to first efforts.” Dyce found these qualities in those masters who had preceded Raphael; within this scheme Raphael, of course, would represent full maturity.

 

So two Victorian artists, and now a critic and amateur artist- what of Ruskin’s attitude to Raphael?

In order to understand that, we need to consider his remarks in a lecture called “Pre-Raphaelitism”, given at Edinburgh University in 1853. In that talk Ruskin describes Raphael’s frescoes in the Stanza della Segnatura, particularly Parnassus and Disputa, embodying Poetry and Religion respectively. In selecting these murals, Ruskin is making the point that Raphael was elevating poetry, in which the pagan god Apollo is featured, to the same level of religious faith represented by the Disputa. In effect, Ruskin is declaring that Raphael is not a true Christian painter because his spirit is too imbued with paganism.

“Raphael had neither religion nor originality enough to trace the spirit of poetry and the spirit of philosophy to the inspiration of the true God, as well as that of theology, but that, on the contrary, he elevated the creations of fancy on the one wall, to the same rank as the objects of faith upon the other [original italics]; that in deliberate balanced opposition to the Rock of Mount Zion, he reared the rock of Parnassus, and the rock of the Acropolis; [a reference to Philosophy in the same room] that, among the masters of poetry we find him enthroning Petrarch and Pindar, but not Isaiah nor David, and for lords over the domain of philosophy we find the masters of the School of Athens, but neither of those greater masters by the last of whom that school was rebuked- those who received their wisdom from heaven itself, in the vision of Gideon and the lightning of Damascus.” Thus Ruskin, in his grave rotund style, damns Raphael.

Ruskin is also saying that Raphael’s works mark the separation between medievalism and modernism; the one concerns itself with the spiritual essence of painting; the other involves technique, skill and a showier, meretricious notion of art. In Ruskin’s words, the “perfection of execution and the beauty of feature which were attained in his works, and in those of his great contemporaries, rendered finish of execution and the beauty of form the chief objects of all artists, and thenceforward execution was looked for rather than thought, and beauty rather than veracity.”

One thing remains unresolved. Did Ruskin know that the face of the young man staring out of the crowded Acropolis was Raphael’s own? This would have confirmed his suspicions that Raphael had forsaken the sweet, pure Madonnas of his early Umbrian period and “defected” to the high pagan classicism of papal Rome. Ruskin could have learnt about Raphael’s presence from Dyce , although the latter seems to have ignored the School of Athens completely, and studied the Disputa instead.

From the Disputa Dyce created art via the purity and simplicity of the Nazarenes that would even meet with Ruskin’s approval. In such designs as Dyce’s The Vision of Sir Galahad and his Company (1847), Raphael is assimilated into a Victorian realm ruled by Christianity, Chivalry and Civic Virtue. He has become domesticated by the Victorians and could not be further removed from the Italian renaissance.  

 

“This affair lacks clarity.”

Those are the words of the chief prosecutor, Thomas Pison, in the strange affair of the museum guard at Ajaccio. Trawling the web I came across this update from The Australian.

Apart from the Poussin, King Midas at the Pactolus, Giovanni Bellini Madonna and Child, there’s a Pentecost by Mariotto di Nardi (left) and “another Virgin and Child by a 17th century Umbrian painter.” I wonder if they’ve got that last bit right?  The guard Antoine Mocellini has now been charged with “theft with an organised gang as well as attempted theft.”

In another twist to an already bizarre tale, the charge has been extended to a Titian which “someone” had tried to unhook from the wall. I also understand that there’s lots of time unaccounted for- the security video tapes should prove interesting. Also, Mr Mocellini underwent “psychiatric evaluation” before interrogation by the police.

According to The Australian,

“The paintings could be worth millions of Euros on the black market or in ransom from an insurance company. Police said that if the theft were professional the art could have left on an early morning ferry. Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand said he was appalled and vowed to solve the case. Philippe Costamagna, the director of the museum, said: "These works are unsellable because they are catalogued throughout the whole world." The Palais Fesch has the biggest French collection of Italian art outside the Louvre. Mr Mocellini took three of its four most prized works.”

I’m obviously upset at the theft of the Poussin, and of course the other works, and wish the French authorities every success in retrieving the pictures and bringing the culprits to book.

Poussin Stolen from Ajaccio in Corsica

I’m getting reports of a bizarre story about the theft of a Poussin, a Bellini and two other renaissance works from the museum in Ajaccio, Corsica. Apparently, the works were “held to ransom” by a guard in protest at imminent eviction from his home. After some time he led the police to his car where the paintings were stowed; unfortunately, the paintings had been stolen from the thief and remain at large.

The Poussin is ‘King Midas’ (1626-7), the earliest version of this subject which he painted 3 times in different ways. I’ll update if I get more information. Meantime I found a video about the robbery (in French) where the stolen paintings are shown. Whoever has got it hasn’t a hope in hell of selling it on the art market as Poussin is too well-known. Some wag has suggested to me that the second thief could have been Napoleon’s ghost!

Perino in Peril.

There’s a corker of a post over at Artwatch concerning the recently acquired Perino del Vaga Holy Family and Infant St John by the Met in New York. A very important article with implications for the world of conservation, and the art market.

The Perino del Vaga was a triumph for the Met, bought for $2.098 m, along with a drawing by this master at Sotheby’s New Year Old Master sale. So what, you might say. Well, the Perino picture was unrestored, Sotheby’s deciding not to clean it up for the market.

This literally paid off with the picture selling for a record price unlike a restored old master which underperformed- Titian’s A Sacra Conversazione: The Madonna and Child with Saints Luke and Catherine of Alexandria. The re-touched Titian failed to reach its upper estimate only selling for $16.9 m (£10.6 m). This is significant according to Artwatch….

“Although even this low price broke a 20 years old auction house record for the artist, it did so when the going “museum rate” for privately sold large multi-figure Titians is about £50m (as with the Diana and Actaeon when recently bought jointly by the National Gallery, London, and the National Galleries of Scotland).”

And this points up an important development…

“The high premium that auctioneers now place on little or un-restored works is, to critics of restoration practices, one of the most heartening developments of our times. Another is the fact that some restorers, even, acknowledge that less has proved more in the preservation of old masters. The New York dealer/restorer, Marco Grassi, has disclosed that of the paintings coming into his hands, the ones enjoying the best condition are those of relatively minor and unfashionable artists. As he concludes, because such lesser works are so often “impeccably preserved, so we have to think something terrible started in the nineteenth century when the painter/restorer trade began.”

And the Met’s position on this? Artwatch is disappointed to report an “eccentric reading of the sale” by Keith Christiansen, one of the museum’s senior curators…“Though the work sold for more than its estimate, Mr. Christiansen said the museum actually benefited from what he called ‘negative chatter’ about it from dealers. Although the painting is in good condition, he said, it is filthy and will go on view only after it is cleaned. Paintings by this Renaissance master are rare.”

And even worse, the fate of this rare Perino to be satisfied by taste!??

“Restoration is interpretation”, and, “in the end, it’s a matter of taste. And I guess I have confidence in my taste.”

Artwatch have neither confidence in Keith Christiansen’s taste nor the possibility that he might re-consider the fate of the Perino. A long and painful silence prevails, though contacts tell me that pressure is being put on the Met to respond. Personally, I think Artwatch have got KC over a barrel. Just from the reproduction I can see that the work is in great condition and crying out to be admired by the public. Why this compulsion to clean it?

Various Things

Three Pipe Problem has a salutary post about the real motivations behind top lists and “best of” blogs services. I get a lot of e.mails from these people asking me to put badges on the site, supposedly to draw more interested people to Art History Today. Yet, as TPP points out…

“The services exist purely to attract traffic to their site and generate enrolment to online courses, for which they would receive a referral bonus. This may be financial, or an exchange for other information, such as names or contact details of referrers, or simply a swap of lists garnered by their ongoing researches into what sites are becoming popular in a particular field.”

I have often wondered about the motivations behind these services, so it’s helpful to hear from TPP who is much more technically/ web enlightened than me. Let me state that I am not interested in the commercial aspects of the web save when I buy something off Amazon UK, or similar sites.  I certainly don’t want to advertise somebody else’s services, so I’ve deleted the badges of these organisations from my site as they haven’t been transparent about their intentions. I’m completely against attempts to monetize the blogosphere, which I see as a space of information and learning, not a virtual free trade zone. This site is for an audience interested in art history, not for commercial advertisers  seeking to attract revenue. Thanks for putting me on top lists, but no thanks. Blogs like AHT, TPP and others earn their rankings through good research and stimulating posts.

On a more productive note, I’m pleased to flag up the birth of another blog, Art History News. AHN is run by Bendor Grosvenor of Philip Mould in London. If you have discoveries, want to write about an exhibition, or have research you want to bring to a wider audience, then contact Bendor- details on his site.  This looks a great resource, exactly the kind of thing that audiences should be attracted to.

 

Finally, speaking of alterations to the blog, I’ve cut down the number of posts on the home page so that the blog loads quicker.  This  suggestion was made by Gerry Bell who runs Currentartpics. He’s asked me to link to his site which I’m happy to do. Support his site by visiting it!

The Passion of Poussin

It came as quite a surprise to learn this week that a hitherto anti-Poussin critic, one that I chastised last year, has suddenly changed his mind- Jonathan Jones has now fallen in love with Poussin’s art, on appropriately Valentine’s day.

Most people  find it very hard to love Poussin. Most of the students I teach admit no love for Poussin at all. If I had a fiver for every time I’ve heard that Poussin is cold, passionless, academic etc, well you get my gist. Jones had much the same reaction, then. “But for a long time he left me cold. I knew it was my problem, not his. What I needed – it turned out, base creature that I am, is this painting. It finally encouraged me to see the passion of Poussin – and set me free to wander among the monuments of his profound art.

Rather than reproduce the National Gallery’s Nymph and Satyrs, which Jones is choosing to love to death, I’m putting up a similar paining that I’ve always liked: the master’s Pan and Syrinx, painted about 1637, and now in Dresden. Anthony Blunt said that this belonged to the “blonde” group of Poussin’s pictures, those that have this coppery, yellowish colour which is very attractive to look at. There are also other erotically charged works with this tonality like this one recently cleaned. The subject is both erudite and erotic. Syrinx was a chaste nymph who was pursued by the amorous Pan. To evade him she ran to the river and was turned into hollow water reeds that made a memorable sound when the frustrated god blew across them. From the reeds Pan created the first panpipe.

 

The picture was probably commissioned by one of Poussin’s patrons in Paris, maybe one interested in both musical theory and the erotic dimension of the myth? That’s the thing about Poussin: you have passion and intellectual content in the same package. Now with this laughable emulation of Poussin’s Pan and Syrinx by the 18th century rococo painter J.F. Troy, I’m wiling to bet that whoever commissioned this was solely interested in the sex rather than the learning. But with Poussin you can have both, although perhaps it takes some time for the former to register with the viewer.

Congratulations to Mr Jones for being successfully seduced by Poussin; let’s hope it is a long and lasting affair. As for myself, I still retain a passion for Poussin. It’s just Poussin studies that I’m not so enamoured of these days. That’s definitely needs a kiss- the kiss of life!

Two Star-Crossed Lovers for Valentine’s Day: Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta.

Last week I gave a lecture on the influence of Dante on 19th century art; given that it’s Valentine’s Day soon, it seems appropriate to feature two unfortunate lovers who appear in the Divina Commedia of the Italian poet, Canto V of Inferno to be precise.

Francesca da Rimini was a contemporary of Dante; he knew relatives of her family  in Ravenna and the story associated with her. Francesca was the daughter of Guido da Polenta who had been at war with a rival family, the Malatesta. To cement a peace, Guido decided to marry his daughter to the Malatestan heir, Giovanni Malatesta. However Giovanni was deformed, so his handsome young brother, Paolo, was sent as a proxy. The inevitable happened: they fell in love, although they had inspiration from a book about Lancelot's passion for Queen Guinevere. It all ended in tragedy when the enraged husband found the lovers together and stabbed them, most vividly depicted in Ingres’s 1819 version.

  This story was immensely popular with British nineteenth-century painters too. In the early part of the century two Scotsmen, the criminally underrated William Dyce and Sir Joseph Noel Paton, painted the subject. Dyce’s version, exhibited in 1837, was accompanied by an extract from Boccaccio who maintained the lovers were entirely innocent, a view I share. Although Dorothy L. Sayers in her great commentary on the poem says that Dante is at his most gentle with this episode, I still find him moralistic; why else would he place them in the Circle of the Lustful? Dyce’s composition owes more to the forms of the French neo-classical school and the German admirers of Raphael in Rome, the Nazarenes. Needless to say this picture owes its greatest debt to that great, young renaissance master himself. Interestingly, after Dyce’s death the figure of the vengeful and murderous Giovanni was removed on the orders of Paton no less; what remains is a spooky hand reaching towards the lovers. Shudder! We also get a reference to the star-crossed lovers with a crescent moon in the sky and a star near it, which could actually be the planet Venus, an suitable deity for the tragic pair.

  Paton treats the subject very differently. The artist shows Dante meditating on the fate of Francesca and Paolo, whilst holding a copy of his Inferno, presumably? The poet muses on the ill-starred lovers floating in the sky above him, naked and bound together by drapery, Francesca’s long flowing hair, and of course passion. This picture seems to be based on views of Italy. There’s an Italian palazzo at the right, vaguely reminiscent of the Villa Medici; there are also cypress trees leading down into a beautiful Italian garden. Paton seems to be thinking of an earlier generation of art than Raphael- the quattrocento. The scenes of Christ and the Adulterous Woman and the Prodigal Son (signifying sin and forgiveness respectively) on the arch remind me of Masaccio’s figures in the Brancacci Chapel, although they could be a fusion of different quattrocento  painters. 

Dyce and Paton painted his subject just once, but our final artist portrayed it (and the Arthurian story within a story) on a number of occasions. In 1855, Dante Gabriel Rossetti created a series of watercolours commissioned by Ruskin. Rossetti’s watercolour shows Francesca and Paolo on the left reading of the adulterous affair of Lancelot and Guinevere which inspires them to passion; the centre has Dante and Virgil watching the lovers on the right who float in the Circle of the Lustful surrounded by a strange pattern of goldfish shapes; these probably symbolise hell fire, passion, or both. The romantic poet Keats has a good description of it, told from Paolo’s point of view:

"... But to that second circle of sad hell,
Where ‘mid the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw
Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell
Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kiss’d, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm.

 

Rossetti was so obsessed with Dante that he changed the order of his original name so that Dante came first, not third. On one occasion he even painted a picture of Giotto painting the real Dante, but that’s another post.  This photograph shows DGR flanked by the painter and Keats admirer William Bell Scott, and Ruskin.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Ruskin and the Campo Santo

The Campo Santo, in Cathedral Square, Pisa, is one of the most important buildings in the history of taste and collecting. Amongst the frescoes covering the walls are “Stories of the Old Testament” by the quattrocento painter Bennozo Gozzoli.

 

Fate has not been kind to Gozzoli: his works have been assaulted by damp, wartime bombing and fire; his reputation has been continually eroded by art historians like Crowe and Cavalcaselle and Berenson. Here's one of Gozzoli's damaged frescoes- "Drunkenness of Noah".

 

Yet in the early 19^th century, Gozzoli’s frescoes were considered significant enough for the curator at Campo Santo, Carlo Lasinio, to engrave them. Appointed to this post in 1807, Lasinio lost no time in making prints of the wall paintings there, presumably with a view to preserving them since they may not even have been in robust condition in the first decade of the nineteenth-century.

Interestingly, as the curator of the current exhibition on Pre-Raphaelite drawing points out, Ruskin was far from impressed with Lasinio’s prints; to summarise Ruskin, Lasinio’s prints lacked beauty, power of expression and reduced all artists to a monotonous placement of figure, with no regard for the distinctions between different artists, e.g. Giotto and Gozzoli. Two years before his attack on Lasinio’s prints, Ruskin had actually been at the Campo Santo where he took the opportunity to make drawings of the frescoes there. As he observed with no little sadness, “these wonderful monuments are rotting every day.” A number of his drawings were on view in another exhibition recently, and one of these is an interesting object for study. This is a pen drawing over pencil; its subject is “Abraham parting from the Angels”, taken from Gozzoli’s fresco.

The drawing is all line, hardly any tonality at all, certainly no attempt to make the line tonal. To my eye, it seems as if Ruskin is trying to project these figures stylistically back into the trecento, an odd approach because Gozzoli’s frescoes at Campo Santo date from the 15^th century. The draughtsman has treated aspects of the figures in an archaic manner; the eyes seem to me to be too gothic for Gozzoli, his figures are more natural than this. There’s neither grace nor beauty in this drawing, qualities that are discernible in Gozzoli. It’s interesting that Ruskin doesn’t make these figures beautiful, unless you equate the gothic with beauty, which this writer doesn’t. Dare I say it? In some ways, Lasinio’s prints may be truer to the frescoes than Ruskin’s drawings. Ruskin is far too idiosyncratic to get an objective view of how he saw stylistic development in Italian painting.

  

Never mind distinguishing Giotto from Gozzoli. Ruskin seems to be blending the two artists together. He also made drawings after what he thought were frescoes by Giotto, but were in fact by his pupil or follower, Taddeo Gaddi. One of these was a drawing after a scene with Job and his friends, all but obliterated when Ruskin saw it: “Giotto’s Job is all gone-two of his Friends’ faces and some servants are all that can be made out.” Here's Lasinio's print of the "Job", more legible when the curator reproduced it.

Ruskin drew the right hand side of this; Job in his misery was invisible to the Englishman. This sheet is just pencil on paper, in the same uncompromising linear style as the Gozzoli sheet, although the outlines are difficult to see because presumably Ruskin wanted to convey the fragile condition of the frescoes in 1845.

 

 

 

Other painters had made the same mistake as Ruskin. For example, the Scottish artist David Wilkie had made an excursion to Campo Santo in 1824 and much admired the frescoes, thinking some of them were by Giotto. Wilkie even demanded to know why the Royal Academy couldn’t have copies made of the Campo Santo frescoes. Here’s what the Campo Santo would have looked like in his day.

 

However, it would be left to a truly remarkable woman connoisseur, Lady Callcott, to revive awaken interest in Giotto. She would visit Giotto’s real paintings at the Arena Chapel, Padua and write a monograph on them. Here’s one of her drawings from her Descriptions, Giotto via Flaxman, to my eye.

The influence of the Arena Chapel and Giotto is another story, but the most momentous chapter in the Campo Santo’s story had yet to be told: its influence on Holman-Hunt, Rossetti and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who would study Lasinio’s prints after early renaissance art in order to create a graphic style, a subject I shall return to after re-visiting the exhibition and reading the book that accompanies it, just arrived!

I learnt a lot about Campo Santo from Francis Haskell’s indispensable Wrightsman lectures, published as Rediscoveries in Art.