Art History Today

Leonardo Exhibition Security Debate

I’m been reading reports from the Telegraph and the Independent about a consequence of the Poussin incident last Saturday. According to these sources, the attack is causing the Cracow museum to re-consider lending Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine to the NG for its November show. I don’t, for one moment, think this will happen despite Olga Jaros, the newly appointed chairman of the Princes Czartoryski Foundation in Poland, saying there will have to be a “throrough debate” before the painting departs for London.  This will be a flagship exhibition for the gallery; there are also a lot of vested interests tied up in it, especially with the inclusion of the recently re-discovered Salvator Mundi work.

According to the Independent, the NG responds. "In regard to the Cecilia Gallerani painting, there is no change" and "The National Gallery is very pleased to work with Olga Jaros, the newly appointed chairwoman of the Czartoryski Foundation, on the loan painting of Lady with an Ermine.”

However, it must be worrying for the Czartoryski Foundation to read that the NG  “admits that its staff must now guard two rooms each in at least one third of the gallery after budget cuts.” According to the Telegraph, the NG also say “We were already considering extending the arrangements where an assistant invigilates more than one room, prior to needing to identify savings,” and that their security is “in keeping” with other museums. I’m not qualified to speak on this debate at all, but I suspect the NG will have to bump up security for the Leonardo show, as part of these “negotiations” mentioned in the Independent article. I really don’t envy them having to manage crowds and potential security hazards in this climate.

Meanwhile, back to Poussin. The Independent says: “On Friday, a 57-year-old man was detained under the Mental Health Act following the vandalism of the Poussins.” A little piece of the jigsaw in place. We might get more details in time, or then again, we might not!

Shakespeare & Titian II

How might we conduct an investigation into the possibility of Shakespeare knowing Titian’s composition? The situation is complicated by the fact that more than 30 copies of Venus and Adonis (20 on canvas, 10 in print) are known to exist. Let’s start with the definitive version, the Venus and Adonis in Madrid (centre right on grid). The facts concerning the authentic Prado version are these. Titian painted the Venus and Adonis in 1553 for Philip II of Spain to commemorate his marriage to Queen Mary Tudor, the half sister of Elizabeth, on July 25^th 1554. It was destined to hang in his private camerino, although the exact layout of Philip’s poesia is not known, though it has been the subject of much debate.[1] However, the historical fact is that Philip II left England in 1555 and had his paintings shipped to the Low Countries under Spanish control; from there they went to Madrid. It is therefore extremely unlikely that Shakespeare would have seen the Prado Venus and Adonis. However Shakespeare could- and I mean could, not did- have known the composition through prints by either Giulio Sanuto lived and flourished in Venice between 1540 and 1588- or Martino Rota- engraver born in Sebenico, c. 1520, lived in Venice, Florence and Rome. The one by Gulio Sanuto (centre left on grid)- which has a copy in the print collection of the British Museum, was acquired long after the publication of the poem: however, this collection dates back to only to the first half of the eighteenth-century, so it can be ruled out as an influence.[2] No copy of Rota’s print can be found in England prior to 1593, although Shakespeare could have seen one.

What about the painted variants and copies? To give you some idea of the problem, here are some of the more well-known versions. There is a painted variant in the National Gallery in London, (top left on grid). As Harold Wethey, the compiler of the Titian catalogue raisonné, says, this “does not measure up to Philip’s picture by a considerable margin”.[3] Its main difference is that it has a boyish Adonis, whose drapery is darker red and nearer to the velvet on which Venus sits. Sir Charles Holmes argued for this being earlier than the one in Madrid, and another connoisseur judged the canvas unfinished, perhaps because of the dull, brown colour of the landscape.[4] The Titian scholar Erica Tietze-Conrat said the painting was a sketch, or modello- or presentation sketch- of 1553 which “was used for repetitions in Titian’s workshop.” However, as Wethey says, the canvas is much too large to be a modello, and that Erica Tietze-Conrat probably hadn’t seen the London or Madrid painting for many years.[5] It was previously in the Colonna collection in Rome, and subsequently acquired by the gallery from an English collector, Angerstein, in 1824. It was restored in 1924. This is almost certainly a workshop piece of about 1554 which shows Adonis much younger, more in accord with Ovid rather than Shakespeare. This type of composition that shows Cupid asleep and three dogs is known as the “Prado type.”

There is another type known as the “Farnese type”, known after a lost version from that collection.[6] According to the Venetian connoisseur Ridolfi, Titian painted a Venus and Adonis in Rome in 1545-6, but is disappeared in the 19^th century without leaving any trace- we don’t even know if the engravings and painted variants look like the Farnese picture.[7] This type seems to have completely different iconography to the “Prado type”. Cupid is fully awake and very close to the lovers; there are two dogs instead of three. We know it through engravings and workshop versions.[8] One is in the Metropolitan Museum of New York (top right on grid), previously in the Palazzo Mariscotti in Rome for more than two hundred years until 1804 when it entered Lord Darnley’s collection in Cobham.[9] After that, it was in a London collection, and then it went to New York in 1949. This is almost certainly another workshop copy, of about 1560-3, and falls into the “Farnese group”. There’s another example (bottom right on grid) of this group in Washington. This version probably descends from the Barbarigo-Giustiniani collection and purchased by Lord Sutherland in 1675.[10]

An interesting sidelight is thrown on this variant with sleeping Cupid when a picture in the London National Gallery is considered. A painting that is rarely on display, Boy with a Bird shows a similar youth to the conscious Cupid in the Farnese variant. This canvas has been analysed by Paul Joannides, and Jill Dunkerton (of the NG) and interesting conclusions have been reached. According to Joannides, stylistically the colour matches Titian’s earlier “peaches and cream”, that is, white and vermillion scheme, and therefore was painted much earlier than the poesia Venus and Adonis.[11] It’s a long and complicated argument, but one of the most interesting views to come out of it is the possibility that Titian was thinking of the Venus and Adonis composition some thirty or forty years earlier.

This is taking us away from Shakespeare, but the third group, the so-called “Barberini type” has been of interest to Shakespeare scholars, though I would suspect art historians would steer well clear of it, mainly because it doesn’t seem to meet Titian’s very high standards. I would agree with Wethey that that the silly cap worn by Adonis in this picture (bottom left on grid) in the Palazzo Barberini, Rome, can have nothing to do with Titian, although that hasn’t deterred Magri in arguing that “Shakespeare” could have seen it. [12] It should be noted that her “Shakespeare” refers to Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, not the Bard of Avon.[13] I have no knowledge of the authorship debate, nor do I intend to pursue it. But as to the “author” of this painting, it’s certainly not Titian, but a follower, and not a very good one at that.

Bringing this talk to a close, what conclusions can we draw from the facts and images presented here?

 

The iconography of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love and the Venus and Adonis do have themes which appear in Shakespeare’s poem. That could be purely coincidental. We cannot say any more.

The language of Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis”, especially the play on Adonis as painted image, could support the theory that Shakespeare was looking at paintings which inspired these ideas, but not necessarily Titian’s. Quite a lot of other Venetian painters did this subject. However Shakespeare was interested in visual art, and the poem does reflect awareness of the paragone debate in Italy. Famously he mentions Giulio Romano in The Winter’s Tale, and Magri has tried to connect Giulio’s Sala dei Cavalli with the imagery of the lively horses in Shakespeare’s poem, but all that hinges on the authorship debate, which is best left to the experts.[14] For more on the authorship debate, go here.

Both Shakespeare’s poem and Titian’s painting for Philip II do contain the figure of a reluctant Adonis, which appears in Shakespeare, but not in Ovid. However, as David Rosand said, the reluctant lover was not without precedent. Still, although Panofsky’s theory cannot be proved, it cannot be disproved either- it therefore remains a valid hypothesis, until new evidence emerges to refute it. I’ll leave you with that final thought.

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[1] See for example the discussions in Thomas Puttfarken, Titian and Tragic Painting: Aristotle’s Poetics and the Rise of the Modern Artist, Yale, 2005; Jane C. Nash, Veiled Images: Titian's Mythological Paintings for Philip II, London, 1985.

[2] Magri, “Titian’s Barberini Painting”, 80.

[3] Wethey, The Paintings of Titian: Complete Edition, 3 vols., vol. III, Mythological and Historical Paintings, no 41, Phaidon, 1975, 190-1.

[4] Wethey, p. 190.

[5] Wethey, p.190.

[6] Wethey, L. 19, Farnese Coll., 1545-46 or about 1560; no. 95 (Sir Robert Strange’s engraving); no. 96 (Raphael Sadeler’s print); no. 97 (workshop variant in New York); no. 98 (Washington).

[7] Wethey, L-19, p. 242.

[8] According to Wethey, Sadeler made his print in 1610 from the version in the Barbarigo Coll, and now in Washington.

[9] Wethey, no. 43, pp. 192-3.

[10] Wethey, no. 44, p. 193.

[11] Paul Joannides and Jill Dunkerton, “Two Responses to a Titian Question”, National Gallery Technical Bulletin, Vol. 28, 2007. “The small canvas of A Boy with a Bird (NG 933; plate 1) that entered the National Gallery with the Wynn Ellis Bequest in 1876 appears to be an extract of a detail from the so-called ‘two-dog’ type of Titian’s Venus and Adonis, known from versions in Washington (plates 2 and 3) and New York, both of which are generally dated to the 1550s or 1560s. However, the paint handling of the boy in the National Gallery picture is characteristic of work by Titian and his studio in the 1520s and the colour range also suggests this period. This apparent contradiction led earlier scholars to conclude that it was a later pastiche of Titian, probably dating from the seventeenth century. The study of sources for the composition, and detailed technical examination following the recent cleaning of the painting, have led the present authors to reassess the work.”

[12] Wethey, X-40, p. 223. “This mediocre school piece, in which Adonis wears a ridiculous red hat and has rose ribbons on his quiver, is not only coarsely painted but so clumsily based upon the Prado composition as to eliminate Titian’s own participation. A related design and no better quality characterize the example at Alnwick Castle (cat x-39), where Cupid is wanting. The vertical shape of the picture allows for the inclusion of more of the trees and sky than in the Prado original.” See also Wethey’s comments on X-39, in the Duke of Northumberland’s collection. “The extraordinary fact is that Crowe and Cavalcaselle wrote with the greatest enthusiasm of this small picture, which they ranked above the masterpiece in the Prado Museum. The preposterous cap worn by Adonis and the general awkwardness of the composition leave the impression that variant of the Prado version, like that in Rome (cat X-40) owes nothing to Titian himself.”

[13] Those who support De Vere’s authorship of the plays are called Oxfordians; those who support the Swan of Avon are called Stratfordians. I make no further comment than that!

[14] Magri, “Titian’s Barberini Painting”, 85.

Shakespeare & Titian I

This is an edited version of a talk I gave recently to a Shakespeare society in Stratford-upon-Avon. My “brief” was to talk about Shakespeare and renaissance art; so I chose Titian. Rather than put this up as one long post, I’ve broken it into two, which works better, I think. The first post considers the iconographic approaches taken by scholars; the second- which Il put up tomorrow- concentrates on the problem of whether Shakespeare could have seen Titian’s art through copies, reproductions etc.

Titian probably never knew how he was going to finish a painting; his brush strokes were likely less planned execution and more the result of re-touchings as he felt his way. In speaking on Shakespeare and Titian, I find myself in much the same position- not really seeing the picture as a whole, but seeing lots of areas of specific interest along the way, which might, conceivably coalesce into a unified work, or talk.

Both Titian and Shakespeare left their mark on history and art; and although they came from different countries and cultures, it is intriguing to ponder the parallels between the two men. Most of the work carried out on Shakespeare and Titian has centred on determining (a) to what extent ideas contained in Shakespeare’s texts can be found in Titian’s paintings, particularly two which I’ll talk about tonight, the so-called Sacred and Profane Love (a title given to it in the 18th century) and the Venus and Adonis painted for Philip II of Spain. By considering these two paintings, I hope to bring out how the painter’s art might reflect the poet’s words, although we should be cautious of thinking there is a one-to-one correspondence between text and image in renaissance culture. The situation was far more complex in the renaissance with the doctrine of ut pictura poesis, as is painting, so is poetry. Titian’s paintings for the Spanish king, Philip II, including the Venus and Adonis, have been called poesia, meaning a created image developed out of the artist’s invention as well as out of his knowledge of visual sources and literary texts.

The second approach is to try to ascertain whether Shakespeare could have known any of Titian’s creations, mainly through painted variants and engraved copies, a problem that demands a high degree of connoisseurship rather than iconographical exegesis.

The first part of my talk will concentrate on exegesis, or the decoding of symbols and iconography, in order to see whether there could be a connection with Shakespeare’s themes and ideas. In the second I’ll consider whether Shakespeare could have known Titian’s Venus and Adonis, and have incorporated some of its ideas into his own work. It goes without saying that I’m no Shakespeare expert, and in the discussion period I’m hoping to benefit from your knowledge about Stratford’s most famous son.

The first art historian to directly connect Shakespeare with Titian was Erwin Panofsky,

one of the founders of the discipline, although he may have been unconsciously echoing the thoughts of the Shakespearean expert A.H. Bullen in making connections.

In a series of lectures in 1969, subsequently posthumously collected into a book Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographical, Panofsky made the intriguing suggestion that in a portrait (Stockholm National Museum) of Titian by Orlando Flacco, the Venetian master looked like how one thought the Merchant of Venice, Shylock, would have looked; next to Flacco’s portrait is an engraving by Richard Westall, a 19th century English artist, of a scene from the play.[1]

This was a playful and tenuous link, though it is known that Titian had a reputation for being greedy and avaricious; he appears as a moneylender in The Expulsion of the Moneylenders from the Temple, a painting by Jacopo Bassano, another Venetian artist. More appropriately Panofsky began to consider how certain Shakespearian themes might underscore a number of mythological paintings painted by Titian.

Foremost of these was the so-called Sacred and Profane Love (Borghese, Rome, 1514). Within this marvellous painting, which shows two Venuses- themselves the subject of much debate- there is a superbly executed sculptural relief. One of the figures on the ground, on the right hand side of the painted relief was thought by Panofsky to be Adonis chastised. In the background behind the two men, a female figure raises her hand, which. Panofsky

speculated might be Venus. Panofsky was not the first to suggest the prostrate man was Adonis; his contemporary Edgar Wind argued Adonis should be connected with the chastisement of Adonis in another visual source: a woodcut in the book known as the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream, published in Venice by Francesco Colonna in 1499.

Wind also maintained that the chastised man, together with the woman being grasped by the hair next to a horse represented the checking of the passions, the horse being the Platonic symbol of sensuous passion or libido.[2] Here’s a visual illustration of this so you get the idea: an engraving by Gulio Bonasone from Achille Bocchi’s Symbolicae quaestiones published in Bologna in 1555. Away from all these erudite, philosophical renaissance sources, Panofsky decided that the horse in the Sacred and Profane Love, with its connotations of sensual passion, had some connection with Shakespeare’s poem Venus and Adonis.[3] According to Panofsky, the tradition of depicting the horse as “unbridled passion” culminates in the description of mating horses in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Here’s an extract from it:

But, lo, from forth a copse that neighbours by,

A breeding jennet, lusty, young and proud,

Adonis' trampling courser doth espy,

And forth she rushes, snorts and neighs aloud:

The strong-neck'd steed, being tied unto a tree,

Breaketh his rein, and to her straight goes he.

Imperiously he leaps, he neighs, he bounds,

And now his woven girths he breaks asunder;

The bearing earth with his hard hoof he wounds,

Whose hollow womb resounds like heaven's thunder;

The iron bit he crusheth 'tween his teeth,

Controlling what he was controlled with.

The “breeding jennet” has occasioned much debate on the part of Shakespeare scholars. One believed that this episode (a) ridicules the courtship between Venus and Adonis by turning it to lust; (b) the runaway stallion is Adonis in animal form; (c) the breeding jennet symbolises the base motives of Venus, who seeks only lust.[4]

Turning now to Titian’s painting of Venus and Adonis (Prado), horses don’t appear in this; but horses may not be the only animals to suggest the psychological state of Adonis. According to one Shakespeare scholar, the hesitating third dog might refer to Adonis’s reticence as a lover.[5] Personally, I think this Shakespearean scholar is reading too much into Titian’s painting- Titian liked dogs and frequently put them in his art! Interestingly, Panofsky also didn’t mention the dogs as symbols conveying psychological moods; but he was convinced that the text inserted between Ovid- the poet who was a major influence on renaissance painting- and Titian was Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.[6] Panofsky was especially struck by the way the detail of a love or Cupid on his back- probably a symbol of love unfulfilled, matched the composition of Titian’s Venus and Adonis. To quote Panofsky:

“Shakespeare’s words, down to such details as the nocturnal setting and “love upon her backe deeply distrest,” sound like a poetic paraphrase of Titian’s composition.”[7]

As Panofsky says- and this is the crux of the matter- both art historians and Shakespeare scholars were troubled by the fact that both poet and painter show Adonis as a reluctant lover.[8] In stanza 136 of the poem Shakespeare describes Adonis’s flight from Venus in these words:

“With this he breaketh from the sweet embrace

Of those faire armes which bound him to her brest,

And homeward through the dark lawnd runs apace;

Leaves love upon her backe, deeply distrest.

Looke, how a bright star shooteth from the skye,

So glides he in the night from Venus’s eye.”

At this point Panofsky really went out on a limb asserting that Shakespeare saw the Venus and Adonis in London, and was consequently inspired to diverge from Ovid as well.[9] Panofsky said:

“I venture to propose that Titian- just as he was to inspire Keats with his “swift bound of Bacchus” – inspired Shakespeare with a new version of the Venus and Adonis story, a version well motivated on artistic grounds (i.e. by the painter’s intention to present the principal figure from the back) but not anticipated, it would seem, in any literary source.”

Regarding the question of the reluctant lover, Panofsky was convinced that Titian departed from Ovid by showing Adonis fleeing from Venus, in the process completely re-inventing the myth. Ovid has Adonis embrace Venus, and not break away, contrary to Shakespeare as well. Although art historians and literary scholars have shown no wish to argue with Panofsky about this, it has been pointed out that Shakespeare’s view of Adonis as a reticent lover was not without precedent; it has also been observed that the leave-taking of lovers at dawn was part of the literary tradition.[10] My own view is that unless somebody comes up with irrefutable evidence to disprove a connection between the two masterpieces, then we should give Panofsky the benefit of the doubt. It is possible that Shakespeare knew Titian’s composition and was influenced by the painter’s interpretation of the story of Adonis.

In order to reinvent the Adonis myth, Titian used a piece of classical sculpture known as the Bed of Polyclitus. He also did this because he had promised his patron, Philip II of Spain, that he would “show the female form from the back” for which Titian was severely censured by a renaissance critic, Raffaello Borghini, in his Il Riposo of 1584. Titian probably did this to introduce variety into the king’s series of nudes, probably to cater to the monarch’s erotic tastes; and also probably because it conformed to the painter’s own ideals of beauty. In the words of one scholar Titian produced a “relief aesthetic” making the figures look like a sculpture group whilist preserving their vitality by the effect of fleshy paint.[11] Within the terms of the renaissance paragone- the comparison between painting and sculpture made famous by Leonardo da Vinci - the painted relief of the Venus and Adonis ensemble would be a mature development of the relief in the Sacred and Profane Love, painted earlier in Titian’s career.[12]  This could be a interesting topic for further research; we can detect awareness of the paragone in Shakespeare’s text, since he does use the language of art to communicate Adonis’s coldness to Venus:

“Fie, lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone

Well painted idol, image dull and dead

Statue contenting but the eye alone.”

The language with its comparison of stone and paint suggests knowledge of the paragone, and further evidence of the poet’s understanding of art theory is proved by an allusion in the text to Zeuxis, the classical artist whose artificial grapes fooled the real birds. We know of course that Shakespeare was interested in the way marble became flesh and vice versa, as is proved by the reanimation of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale.  More significantly as Noemi Magri observed in a recent essay of 2007, Shakespeare is referring to Adonis as a painted image; the “well painted” reluctant lover strongly suggests that Shakespeare was looking at a painting, not the text of Ovid, although that is pure speculation. [13] This of course brings us to the other main topic of this talk: could Shakespeare have known Titian’s image, either through painting or copies in other media?

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[1] Panofsky, Problems in Titian, 6, note.

[2] Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance, 1980, 145.

[3] Panofsky, Problems in Titian, 118.

[4] Robert P. Miller, “Venus, Adonis, and the Horses”, English Literary History, 19, (1952), 249-64.

[5] John Doebler, The Reluctant Adonis: Titian and Shakespeare, Shakespearean Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Winter, 1982), 480-490.

[6] Panofsky, Problems in Titian, 153.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] David Rosand, “Ut Pictor Poeta:” Meaning in Titian’s Poesie, New Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 3, Literary and Art History (Spring 546), 527-546, 537.

[11] David Rosand, “Titian and the Bed of Polyclitus”, Burlington Magazine, Vol. 117, No. 865, (Apr 1975), 242-5, 242.

[12] David Rosand, “Ut Pictor Poeta:” Meaning in Titian’s Poesie, New Literary History, Vol. 3, No. 3, Literary and Art History (Spring 546), 527-546, 535.

[13] Noemi Magri, “Titian’s Barberini Painting: the Pictorial Source of Venus and Adonis” in Great Oxford: Essays on the Life and Work of Edward de Vere, 17^th Earl of Oxford, 1550-1604, ed. Richard Malim, 2004, 79-90.

Silence is Golden?

Poussin equated his art with silence, taciturn images and silent things. I don’t know if it’s me but I’ve been struck by the near-silence that has greeted the outrageous attack on two of his paintings in one of the most prestigious galleries in the world. Actually, I don’t think it’s just me. Bob Duggan at Big Pink observed yesterday: “I’ve read as much as I could about the attack, but details remain scarce, especially about the attacker.” Of course there have been reactions from concerned bloggers like me and Art History News, and newspaper bloggers like Jonathan Jones who really went over the top in his reaction- maybe silence might have been golden here. Meanwhile today Art Watch comment, in a hard-hitting article on the Observer’s “almost exclusive coverage” of the event.

I’m a bit puzzled myself as to why more information isn’t forthcoming, especially about the perpetrator of the crime. Unfortunately nobody in the room understood French, so no clues as to the nature of his diatribe or motivation. The National Gallery itself has been very tight-lipped about the incident; they’ve only issued one terse press release –see previous post-, which borders on silence itself. They will have to speak soon, especially with the debate about security implications that is brewing. The NG clearly have reasons for playing down this attack; but in the age of the World Wide Web, information should be more readily available, not veiled in silence, especially when it concerns cultural treasures in public collections.

Statement from National Gallery on Poussin.

 

Many thanks to Bendor Grosvenor for sendng me this NG press release. It looks as if the two paintings weren’t badly hurt, as they’re both going back on display.

NATIONAL GALLERY STATEMENT

At 5.08pm on Saturday 16 July 2011, a panic alarm was set off in Room 19 of the National Gallery.

A Gallery Assistant acted promptly and triggered the alarm after observing a person appearing to spray two of the paintings in the room with an aerosol can.

The police were called at 5.10pm and arrived at the National Gallery at 5.19pm.

A man has been arrested.

The two paintings involved are both by Nicholas Poussin, The Adoration of the Golden Calf (1633-4) and The Adoration of the Shepherds (1633-4).

Both works are part of the National Gallery permanent collection.

Prompt action by Conservation staff has ensured very little damage was sustained by the two works.

They will be returned to display in Room 19 of the National Gallery on Monday 18 July 2011.

NOTES TO EDITORS

The Adoration of the Golden Calf (1633-4)

Oil on Canvas

153.4 x 211.8 cm

Bought with a contribution from The Art Fund, 1945

Moses climbed Mount Sinai to receive the tablets of the Ten Commandments. During his absence the Israelites built an idol with Aaron's help and worshipped it with song and dance. On his return, Moses was so angered by this that he smashed the tablets (Exodus: 32).The Adoration of the Golden Calf and its companion piece, The Crossing of the Red Sea were made for Amadeo dal Pozzo, a cousin of Poussin's major Roman patron, Cassiano dal Pozzo. The paintings stayed together until 1945 when the National Gallery acquired The Adoration. Poussin took the design for the group of dancers from his Bacchanalian Revel before a Term of Pan' (also in the Collection) another picture of pagan celebration, but turned the group through 180 degrees. The even distribution of blue, red and orange throughout the painting helps to unify the composition as a whole, but colour, for example the white of Aaron's cloak, is also used to isolate individual figures. Poussin also used emphatic gestures in order to tell the story.

The Adoration of the Shepherds (1633-4)

Oil on canvas

97.2 x 74 cm

Bought with a special grant and contribution from The Art Fund, 1957

The shepherds come to adore the new-born Jesus in the stable. New Testament (Luke 2: 8-14). In the background the angel announces the birth of Christ to them. Poussin uses a long-established motif, and places the Nativity in a stable built into the ruins of a classical building. This motif appears in the National Gallery's earliest Botticelli, Adoration of the Kings, and Poussin's contemporaries the Le Nain brothers used it in their Adoration of the Shepherds of about 1640. The ruins represent the collapse of the Old Dispensation, the law of the Old Testament, superseded by the New Dispensation, the kingdom of Christ. The figure of the kneeling shepherd derives from that of one of the magi in The Adoration of the Magi by the studio of (Rome, Vatican Loggie). Each figure shows a different stage in the bending motion of the human body.

Press Office, 17 July 2011

Poussin’s Golden Calf Attacked.

This is a photograph taken after a maniac decided to spray Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden Calf  with red paint. I’ve only just heard this afternoon, from Bendor Grosvenor’s Art History News and the Guardian, where the photo came from.

As a Poussin scholar, I’m obviously deeply shocked and saddened by this news; it’s a criminal and callous attack on an inoffensive painting that  is recognised as one of Poussin’s finest canvases of the mid 1630’s.

The information about the crime is still vague, but I gather that the perpetrator was French, and for some reason decided to vandalise a work of art produced by a fellow Frenchman. As for the motive, there doesn’t seem to be any. Here’s the report of one eye witness via the Guardian:

"He was just stood there on his own. He seemed proud of what he had done, giving a verbal protest – some kind of explanation in French as to why he had done it – and then just standing there waiting to be arrested. At no point did he try to escape.

"The security guards then came over and snatched the paint cans from him, before clearing the room. It wasn't obvious why he did it, perhaps it was some kind of protest. Maybe a protest at the nakedness of the painting. He covered it all."

Well, there isn’t really any nakedness in the painting; a few bare arms from the dancing figures, although similar figures are nude in nearby works like the Triumph of Pan. The motive for this heinous crime just isn’t known. Sadly, this isn’t the first time this painting has been the target of vandals. In 1978, a lunatic slashed the canvas with a knife, and this serious damage resulted in restoration. I’m just wondering if this nutter knew of the earlier attack and wanted to replicate it, albeit with a different weapon.

This will inevitably re-ignite debates about security in museums. While I don’t want museums to resemble banks, maybe it would be a good idea to initiate bag searches (airport style) like they have in museums like the Rijksmuseum, for example. I’m sure we’re going to be hearing a lot about such subjects in the coming months.

Meanwhile, we pray that Poussin’s Golden Calf can recover from yet another stupid act of vandalism.

A Lesser Known Raphael Drawing

Reading Three Pipe Problem’s exemplary post on the Portrait of a Young Man in the Royal collection, and associated drawings, put me in mind of another drawing, in the Louvre. Catalogued also as Portrait of a Young Man, this sheet entered the Louvre collections in 1935 after Edmond de Rothschild left it to the museum. Executed in black chalk, it has a light feathery handling, and to my mind- and eye- it’s an autograph drawing. It also contains the inscription “Ritratto di se medessimo quando Giovane”-“Portrait of Himself when young.”. Now if it’s incontestably by Raphael, could it be a self-portrait? H Wagner was disinclined to think so; he said the sheet was actually the work of an unknown artist who represented Raphael at the age of 16 or 17 years of age. All these arguments are summarised in an exhibition catalogue of 1984. [1]

What might undermine its candidacy for a self-portrait is the unusual turned-up hat; this headgear helps us to connect it to a figure (the prophet Daniel) in a fresco executed by Raphael’s teacher, Perugino, in the Collegio del Cambio, in Perugia, approximately 1497-1500. As the style puts it also close to the Sposalizio (Milan 1504), the Louvre curators suggested a date between1500-04. This seems logical, and what also helps to put it in that timeframe is its stylistic, and arguably iconographic affinity, with a sheet in the British Museum, now increasingly seen as a self-portrait.[2]

That particular sheet in the British Museum (also done in black chalk, and also with the same inscription) was the subject of a hypothesis by the legendary curators and connoisseurs, Philip Pouncey and J.A. Gere. Their comments are worth quoting:

“Fischel’s dating of the verso at a time when Raphael was aged about twenty-one completely excluded, for him, the possibility of it being a self-portrait. On the other hand, he accepts as a youthful self-portrait (c.1498) another boy’s head…bearing an identical inscription in the same hand. [This is the famous sheet in the Ashmoleon, usually dated about 1500-2, and looking less like a self-portrait these days, despite its autograph status].[3] Our opinion is the reverse of his. We agree with Robinson and with Parker in dating the Ashmolean head c. 1504 and in rejecting its identification as a self-portrait, but are strongly inclined to accept no. 1 as such. The eyes, unlike those in the Ashmoleon drawing, stare intently at the spectator in a way characteristic of self-portraits (Fischel notes this trotziger Blick, but draws no conclusion from it) and Raphael in c. 1500 would have been about sixteen or seventeen, which could be the age of the boy here portrayed.”[4]

All well and good, but where does that leave the Louvre drawing? I think it’s reasonable to say that it has some connection with the British Museum variant: they’re both executed in black chalk; they both carry the same inscription. They also both show that unflinching glance out at the spectator, as Pouncey and Gere say, typical of self-portraits. And if it’s the same model as the one in London, then one might venture it’s Raphael himself. The Louvre sheet closely resembles the Daniel in Perugino’s fresco, but the way this sheet is individualised leads me to ponder its possible status as a self-portrait. My hypothesis would be that despite working under Perugino, the young Raphael wanted to assert his independence and self-reliance; something of that comes through here, despite its connection to Perugino’s commission.

 

Raphael wasn’t the kind of renaissance artist who tried to best his teacher by going up against him openly;  like the young Leonardo causing his master Verrocchio to recognise his superior talent and give up his palette in despair. This engraving by the nineteenth-century French artist, Jean Gigoux is indebted to Vasari’s account of Leonardo’s life. Raphael didn’t operate like that; he was competitive, but was always respectful of those who taught him. Perhaps the Louvre drawing should be seen in that light.

 

 

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[1] Raphael dans les collections françaises, Paris, 1984, 167.

[2] Philip Pouncey and J.A. Gere, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, Raphael and His Circle, London, 1962, 2 vols., vol 1, pp. 2-3, no.1, verso.

[3] See in the entry in the exhibition catalogue, Raphael: From Urbino to Rome, exhibition catalogue, London, 2004, no 1, p. 68.

[4] Pouncey and Gere, Raphael and His Circle, vol 1, pp. 2-3, no.1, verso.

Vermeer’s Virtual Studio.

And speaking of Vermeer……

Defining Virtuality in 17^th Century Dutch Art

A number of scholars of 17^th century Dutch art have used the phrase “virtual reality” to describe the startling realism of many of the paintings of the period; the art seems to possess a kind of “reality effect” making it seem more than painted materials applied to a surface.[1] A painting like Van Hoogstraten’s Interior  of 1662 encourages such comparisons: with the aid of computer magnification you can take a “virtual” walk around this spacious interior, loosing yourself in the strange angles and through-views as you navigate Dutch pictorial space. In her book, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Anne Friedberg discusses the term “virtuality” and its development in the seventeenth-century:

“In seventeenth and eighteenth- century optics, “virtual” was used to describe an image that was seen by looking through a lens or that appeared in a mirror. The term “virtual” first appears in English in the writings of Sir David Brewster about the properties of refraction in his Treatise on Optics (1831). Best known for his 1816 invention of the kaleidoscope (an optical device that demonstrated the principles of reflective symmetry),  Brewster described the differing properties of an image seen by the eye and an image seen through the mediation of a lens. A “real image” is formed by the convergence of rays of light and is visible to the eye, but will also appear on a surface that is placed in a plane with the image. A “virtual image”- perceived in the brain- is visible to the eye but will not appear on a surface placed in its plane. Hence a “virtual image” in Brewster’s optics is not recuperable to representation. This meaning of “virtual” suggests an intangible, uncapturable, ineffable appearance- more imago than pictura.”[2]

Following on from this, Friedman concludes that the virtual image “has no material existence (appears in the brain, or on the retina) and the virtual image that is formed in representation signifies a subtle shift in its materiality.”[3] It is interesting to think of the artist’s studio in relation to this distinction between imago and pictura, specifically Vermeer’s studio as it appears- or doesn’t!- within his masterpiece The Art of Painting. Other painters in Vermeer’s hometown- Delft- used scientific methods in the construction of compositions. Carel Fabritius who came to Delft from Rembrandt’s studio, in the 1650s, employed a lens in his view of Delft; Samuel van Hoogstraten is his wonderful perspective box in the London National Gallery (1655-60) devises a series of virtual worlds that are only visible through the peephole of the camera obscura.

The Virtual Studio and the Art of Painting.

In an essay on the “imagined studio” of Vermeer, H. Perry Chapman ponders whether we are actually looking at Vermeer himself or the idea of the painter in The Art of Painting (1665-7). In this celebrated work Vermeer shows an artist from the back which Chapman believes could indicate Vermeer’s wish to efface himself from the painting, to negate his persona and artistic identity.[4] As Chapman says, the anonymity of the painter makes him the ideal painter, not a specific one. Vermeer was known as “the Sphinx of Delft” since his biographers do not really reveal him, probably because there wasn’t much textual data on him. Attempts to give Vermeer and his studio an identity, like in the movie The Girl with the Pearl Earring, really are romanticizing an enigma. The film shows Vermeer in his studio, but he never shows himself, except maybe in the Procuress (1656) and there he is clothed in the kind of period garments that the painter wears in the Art of Painting, which doesn’t help to place him in a specific social situation. Even when the curtain to the painter’s refuge is drawn back in the Vienna painting, the artist’s rear view seems to act as a barrier to entry to the studio, an idea that crops up in many artists’ studios examined in this series. If we need proof that Vermeer’s strategy is completely different we need only compare the allegory with another complex meditation on self-representation. As shown a few weeks ago, another 17^th century painter Johannes Gumpp turns his back on the viewer, but he shows his own features through a complex system of representation involving canvas and mirror, not self-effacement at all.  Vermeer’s artist does no such thing and that rejection of the viewer could support Chapman’s theory that this figure is an idea of painting, not Vermeer himself, or even a physical artist in a studio. 

Chapman’s reading is persuasive and might help to explain why Clio- the muse of history- is present instead of some allegorical figure representing Pittura or painting itself, as this work is supposed to demonstrate the art of painting. An example of this in 17^th century Dutch art is a woman painted by another artist, Frans van Mieris the Elder, Pictura (1661) an un-idealized female dressed in eye-catching garments, holding a sculpture- a reference either to the paragone, or the triumph of painting over sculpture.  Yet if the painter sitting in the Art of Painting is a masculine version of Pittura, and the female muse is History, where is the painter himself? Could it be that he is an invisible presence revealing the studio to the spectator, and that the seated artist is a simulacrum of the painter, a virtual Vermeer?[5] A similar idea appears in another famous representation of a 17^th century studio: Velasquez’s Las Meninas. In that complex painting, a figure framed in a doorway suggests an echo of Velasquez, maybe another simulacrum. The figure is actually a Velasquez: Jose Nieto Velasquez, steward of the palace. “Velasquez 2” seems to be entering the studio and seeing what we can’t see- Las Meninas being painted.[6] See here for more discussion of this. It’s true that in the Art of Painting, we’re allowed to see into the studio but we don’t really see what is being painted since it’s partly occluded by another Vermeer, whom I’m tempted to call “Vermeer 2.” Instead, we see  an imago, which means something that cannot be seen or measured, as opposed to the pictura, which is something that can be focused on walls and surfaces, and thus measured with an instrument like a camera obscura- see below. The pictura belongs more to the process of representing and picturing, while the imago suggests the mystery at the heart of the artist’s studio, which we are never allowed to penetrate.

Vermeer's Virtuality: Looking Through the Camera Obscura in the Seventeenth-Century.

 

In her ground breaking The Art of Describing, Svetlana Alpers cites Kenneth Clark’s comment about Vermeer’s The Art of Painting being the “nearest painting has ever come to a coloured photograph.”[7] Indeed, some modern artists have tried to capture the “look” of a Vermeer in photographs and coloured prints.  The idea of Vermeer’s paintings resembling photographs goes back to the nineteenth-century when connoisseurs employed photographs, or reproductive media such as etchings, lithographs, when identifying and presenting a painter’s oeuvre. As Ivan Gaskell shows, photographic pioneers like Fox-Talbot turned to the conventions of Dutch art:  his photograph Open Door seems to reference Vermeer’s The Little Street.[8] This interest in Vermeer’s photographic realism has centred on the device known as the camera obscura, although it is not known whether Vermeer used optics to help him create his pictures.  His paintings with their sharp clarity suggest optical precision, although there is no documentation to back up these claims. Unperturbed by the lack of textual evidence, Philip Steadman, an architect and professor of Urban Studies, has written a book called Vermeer’s Camera.[9] Steadman has meticulously reconstructed Vermeer’s studio using models of the paintings to plot out the angles that Vermeer may have used to create his “virtual” worlds.  The camera obscura (Latin dark chamber) is an optical device used, for example, in drawing or for entertainment. It is one of the inventions leading to photography. The principle can be demonstrated with a box with a hole in one side (the box may be room-sized, or hangar sized). Light from a scene passes through the hole and strikes a surface where it is reproduced, in colour, and upside-down. The image's perspective is accurate. The image can be projected onto paper, which when traced can produce a highly accurate representation. Using mirrors, as in the 18th century overhead version, it is possible to project a right-side-up image. Another more portable type is a box with an angled mirror projecting onto tracing paper placed on the glass top, the image upright as viewed from the back. As a pinhole is made smaller, the image gets sharper, but the projected image becomes dimmer. With too small a pinhole the sharpness again becomes worse due to diffraction. Some practical camera obscuras use a lens rather than a pinhole because it allows a larger aperture, giving a usable brightness while maintaining focus. In the movie The Girl with the Pearl Earring,[10] we see Vermeer allow the serving maid Griet to look inside the magic box where she thinks the artificial model that the painter uses is located. Here we have another reconstruction of Vermeer’s studio, but this time in the cinema. The interiors are cleverly devised, but again, we have no idea if the movie is recapturing the reality of seventeenth- century Delft, or whether it is simply another virtual Vermeer created by imagination and trickery. The coordinates of Vermeer’s studio remain uncertain and his art an eternal mystery.

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[1] For example Mariet Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic 1585-1718, 1996, 71-98; H. Perry Chapman, “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer” in Inventions of the Studio, Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Michael Cole & Mary Prado, 2005, 108-146.

[2] Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 8-9.

[3] Friedberg, The Virtual Window, 9.

[4] Chapman, “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer”, 137-8.

[5] Chapman, “The Imagined Studios of Rembrandt and Vermeer”, 142.

[6] Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, 1995, 436.

[7] Kenneth Clark, quoted in Alpers, The Art of Describing, 1984, 27.

[8] Ivan Gaskell, Vermeer’s Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory and Art Museums, 2000, 142.

[9] http://www.vermeerscamera.co.uk/home.htm.

[10] The Girl with the Pearl Earring, 2003.

Fake at the Courtauld

In 2009 I posted about the likelihood of the picture known as the Procuress, at the Courtauld Institute, being real, not the fake it had been considered to be. After watching last night’s episode of Fake or Fortune,[1] I can see that this view will have to be revised.

With the aid of the curatorial departments of the Courtauld and the Rijksmuseum, Philip Mould and his team were able to establish that the picture- which looks like a Dirk van Barburen- contained one element that was not known to the 17th century- bakelite.

To my knowledge there is only one 20th century artist who is known to have used bakelite: the notorious forger, Han van Meegeren, the subject of last night’s programme. As Jonathan Lopez explains in his book on the forger:

“A forerunner to postwar thermoplastics, Bakelite was used during the twenties and thirties to make everything from telephone handsets to brightly coloured costume jewellery. Bakelite was impervious to just about anything. The alcohol test would have had no effect on a Bakelite fake. And unlike gelatin glue, Bakelite didn’t soften in water either. Indeed, a film of hardened Bakelite behaved almost exactly like an oil paint surface hundreds of years old. By grinding period-appropriate pigments into liquid Bakelite and then using the resulting mixture on re-cycled seventeenth-century canvases, Van Meegeren was suddenly able to create fakes that virtually no scientist could have proved fraudulent, at least not using the methods ordinarily employed in the conservation laboratories of the 1930s. In short, Van Meegeren had hit the technological jackpot.”[2]

Conservation technology has moved on since the 1930s, so, on the face of it, the scientific evidence would seem to be irrefutable because of the 20th century deposit. There’s a Holy Family in the National Gallery, once thought to have been painted by Poussin until Prussian blue was detected in it. So the scientific testing carries a lot of weight, and yet, and yet. When I look at the Procuress, it doesn’t look one of Van Meegeren’s fakes. They never match the original, and this Courtauld picture seems so close to van Barburen in its look, that it’s untypical of this forger. This year I’ve taught classes on the forger, and I’ve read a lot on him and I was extremely surprised to learn that not only was it a fake, but by the Amsterdam art crook. I would have put money that the Dutch curators were going to rule it out as a 20th century forgery. It’s this aspect of art crime- forgery- that fascinates me most because it involves connoisseurship and a deep knowledge of the canon of art, which I’ve trained myself to know. If this Procuress is by van Meegeren, then it’s the closest he ever came to the original, because all his other forgeries, of Vermeer, Hals, De Hooch, are always slightly off key. You know instinctively that they’re not by the original masters. Consequently, I’m completely thrown! I wish Fake or Fortune had addressed that side of the problem, i.e. the role of connoisseurship more, but full marks to them for an engrossing series. And, well, bakelite is bakelite!

Mention should be also made of John Myatt –above-, forger and catspaw of the cunning art conman John Drewe. A rueful Myatt told Fiona Bruce he’d regretted what he’d done, before going off to attempt to paint Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring, literally under laboratory conditions. That was absolutely fascinating.

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[1] Fake or Fortune, BBC, 3/7/11

[2] Jonathan Lopez, The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren, 2009, 109-110.