Art History Today

The Judgement of Paris. A Summing Up.

Att. to Raphael, previously att to Giorgione, The Judgement of Paris, Private Coll., 1512.

There's no doubt that the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris is a controversial painting. The series of posts started last year have examined every aspect of it. AHT has attempted to reconstruct its stylistic milieu, identify the context in which the picture was received, and tried to unravel its technique and iconography.

The dispute revolves around whether this disregarded picture was painted by Raphael. But even if we discount that attribution, I think we have to face the fact that the composition, models and sources are connected with Raphael’s workshop. I won’t repeat all that has been written in the lost four posts; but I did ask Graeme Cameron if he had anything else to add, or wanted to indicate material that had got left out of the previous posts. I’m quoting GC verbatim here:

1. Dating and Style.

“To assist with the scientific verification of both the date and style of the dress depicted within the "JoP", as worn by Raphael, it can be actually scientifically proven as certainly deriving from the years 1500 to 1520 in the High Renaissance. Most fortunately,my research is also dealing with yet another significant work from this period on an oak panel, which concerns "Three Saints", which has been accurately dated by leading Dendrochronologist, Prof. Dr. Peter Klein, to the 1500 to 1510-20 period.

Attribution to be advised, St James from “Three Saints”, oil on oak, dimensions not known.

The Saint depicted here, "St. James" ( with the Scallop Shell), wears the same White Hose and Slashed Doublet/Tunic style, and even more so, the same soft style Suede Boots/Shoes, as does Raphael in the "JoP". In this composition, St.James like Raphael, has likewise been updated to the contemporary early 1500's Renaiisance dress, for this purpose, rather than retaining his actual Biblical Garb. It is worth noting this important fact for definitive dress dating purposes of the "JoP."

2. Monogrammes. I didn’t get a chance to show images with the Raphael monogramme “"Rv", reproduced in GC’s book- so here they are.

Monogrammes from GC’s book.

Ditto

3. Physiognomy and Identification.

“It's perhaps worth adding to the remarks on physiognomy, that proof of the difficulty of rendering on a small scale an accurate likeness of young "Fornarina" was a very skilled task for Raphael, as some of the poorly rendered faces of some of the versions in these images attest. In the case of the versions, it is clear the Malmesbury prototype alone has these pivotal physiognomies of Fornarina and Raphael, whilst they all vary in both the quality and "type" of their respective renditions, but obviously have all derived from it, either as a versions or variants.

These images are "Age & Date Specific" with Fornarina's the youngest known image of her.

Raphael's Physical Concordances at various ages.

The comparisons show clearly "Age/Date Specific Physiognomic Concordances" which are entirely unique to the Malmesbury work, providing both dating confirmation and direct evidence of the 1512 evolution of this composition and of Raphael's certain involvement in its "original" creation in Rome at that time. These are in fact actual portraits of both Fornarina and Raphael, albeit small, yet so accurate in their Age and Date features, they could only have been painted from "life" sittings in Rome in 1512. The Fornarina is clearly a more naive and youthful portrayal than any previously known image of her and is therefore neither a copy nor any "chance resemblance", but a unique visage of her in 1512. It is self evidently an "Age and Date specific portrait, which most accurately records her actual physiognomy at that time, which may well include her naked countenance, from this original sitting. Accurate portraits are difficult enough to create, yet both these are finely wrought, true to life renditions and dateable to Rome in 1512. Likewise Raphael's countenance, which as proven by its subsurface pentimenti, was added into the composition to join that of Fornarina, and is also a unique portrayal, in that it is not a copy of any previously known image of him, either in its dress or "type", It too is an "Age and Date specific "original" portrait like Fornarina's of 1512. His physiognomy is consistent with with that of "Stanza" version, with the garb datable to this period, however he is clearly younger and in better health than seen in the 1519 joint portrait. None of these could be claimed as "chance" likenesses but were purpose created portraits for this painting.In the case of the versions, it is clear the Malmesbury prototype alone has these pivotal physiognomies of Fornarina and Raphael, whilst they all vary in both the quality and "type" of their respective renditions, but are obviously all derived from it, either as a versions or variants.”

	Three Graces, J of P and Farnesina nudes.

4. Poses, Sources and Copies.

“This image above shows Raphael's unique "Contrapposto" pose shared between all three compositions, from the earlier 1508 Venus, to the 1512 JoP. These anatomical pose Hallmarks are quite distinctive to his oeuvre. “

J of P and Entombment sketch

A further "Raphael "cut & Paste compositional source for the painting showing direct links & concordances evident between his earlier 1508 'discarded' Entombment Sketch and the later 'recycled' 1512 'JoP' figure group.”

Copies. See post 1 for details.

“Comparison with the Copies & Versions show the precedence of The Malmesbury original viz a viz the versions.”

5. Quality Issues and Connoisseurship.

“Not just Waagen & Eastlake, but other great connoisseurs, Ridolfi, Passavant, Sir Martin Conway, and Millions of admirers at two major National Art Treasures Exhibitions at Manchester & Leeds, & in was singled out for praise in subsequent Press Reviews. Also at the two Royal Academy Exhibitions it was greatly admired as a Giorgione and even given the privilege of a Full Page Engraved Plate. Its qualities were so self evident, as indeed they still are today, that The Louvre was honoured to exhibit it in Paris, and later many visited Lord Mamesbury's Mayfair mansion just to admire it as well. Therefore those who are unable to appreciate its inherent beauty are obviously in the minority, as the majority always appreciated its qualities.”

6. VegaScan and “Vested Interests.”

I did ask Graeme Cameron if he had anything further to add on the VegaScan issue amid concerns about “vested interests.” He referred those concerned back to the technical blog's images, “where the capabilities of the VegaScan process, in regard to the effectiveness of its image penetration, compared with Infra-reds, provides the most self evident demonstration".

In response to concerns expressed about the “vested interest” issue, GC said:

"How it (VegaScan) achieves this is presently subject to confidentiality provisions, whilst the necessary proprietary measures are being determined".

This is the situation at the present- that’s all I can report.

7. The Next Book.

Finally, Graeme tells me that in Volume 2 of his series, “that not only will an important new direct link back to Raphael and his "Judgement of Paris composition be revealed, confirming it has everything to do with Raphael and Rome, with only its palette and Piombo/Macantonio's ( Giorgione) "influence" representing its earlier explained Venetian elements, but not its actual origin”.

AHT’s Final Thoughts.

For myself, I think this case raises four important questions:

1. If this wasn’t painted by Raphael, then why are there physiognomic, stylistic and iconographic links between the Malmesbury painting and designs produced by his own hand, e.g. the Adam and Eve, and now as we can see above, the Entombment sketch?

2. Can we accept that Raphael- with all his exposure to Venetian painting- may not have sought to fashion a personal, erotic subject based upon some of Giorgione’s pastoral mythologies?

3. Leaving aside the issue of its authorship, and turning to the issue of quality: why was it endorsed by connoisseurs of the first rank like Waagen and Eastlake, not to mention good enough to go in the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition? See GC’s comments above.

4. How do we explain the facial resemblance between the left goddess in the Judgement of Paris and portraits of Fornarina; the same goes for portraits of Raphael and the “Paris” figure? Again, see above.

As for the attribution, the main bone of contention, I fully understand that people are protective of Raphael, but I’m a huge fan of the painter too- and I would never do anything to harm his reputation. I appreciate that it’s important to give a balanced, objective view of a painters development, weeding out the copies and variants from the true originals, which I’ve started with the Poussin project. In my own speciality as Poussin scholar I’m learning all the time, especially about the question of Poussin copies, which is clearly an emerging concern over at the PCP. We don’t yet have the “full picture” of Raphael too, which is a point that I’ve stressed again and again throughout the series of posts.

Perhaps the Malmesbury case illustrates the adversarial nature of attribution culture, and I’ll put my hands up and say that I've been guilty of rubbishing somebody’s attribution in the past. This time I’ve used my knowledge and judgement to try to negotiate between those who agree with the attribution and those who resist it. Everybody is entitled to their view, but I have to say that I think this case should be less a judgement on Graeme Cameron’s connoisseurship and the technology he uses, and more about the issues it raises for studying Raphael in the 21st century.

Stressing the positive, which I’d rather do, it’s interesting that the appearance of the Malmesbury picture has set some scholars on new paths of investigation. Though wisely keeping out of the attribution debates, Frank DeStefano has incorporated the Malmesbury painting into his thinking on Giorgione. I think that is the spirit in which to approach the problems surrounding this controversial canvas.

Many thanks for reading the posts and commenting on them.

Thanks of course to Graeme, and Norm Cameron for plentiful material,images and supplying answers to all my queries.

We now wait for GC’s new findings in the next volume of his research.

The Malmesbury Judgement of Paris: the Full Picture: Updated Research Report 4.

This is the final post in the series of research reports on the enigmatic and controversial Judgment of Paris- apologies for the delay. The technical research is organized under various headings, some with sub-divisions.

Judgment of Paris, att to Raphael, 1512, Private Collection, U.K.

1.  General introduction to technology used in scientific examination of Judgment of Paris

As this is a scientific report, and in order to establish the credentials of the author of the report, I think it’s only fair to introduce the post with a statement about Graeme Cameron’s professional background, and his expertise in the technical examination of paintings, which seems to have been questioned in some quarters. What follows is guided heavily by Graeme's scientific expertise, and is virtually verbatim. I don’t have anything like Graeme's technical expertise, just quietly added my voice at times, when I thought it appropriate.

Graeme Cameron’s Technical & Scientific Research Background

The scientific and technical investigative analysis of Old Master paintings in research projects, was an important specialty of the author’s multi-disciplinary background, complimenting his documentary and connoisseurship approach to the restitution of lost art works. This commenced in the United Kingdom in the late 1970’s, where he was much assisted in this area by the facilities of the University of London’s, noted Courtauld Institute, through the auspices of the leading British scholar, Mr. Christopher Wright FRS and by Sir Robert Bruce Gardner, the head of the institute’s Conservation Department.

Graeme Cameron also conducted additional independent scientific investigations using X-Radiography, infra-red, microscopy, macro photography and paint chip section analysis, etc. whilst in the United Kingdom over four years, which continues today.

As a consequence in the mid 1990’s, he was invited by Professor John Miller of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University’s Department of Physics, to perform a senior guest lecturing role in this specialist area of the sciences, conducting tutorials and subject exams in the methods and developing role of scientific techniques employed in today’s art research and attribution investigations.

He was earlier Conference Guest Speaker on this topic of “The Use of Scientific Techniques in Art Research”, at the International Conference of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons in Sydney, Australia in the late 1990’s, by invitation of its Professor President.

 Surface probing systems

Two scientific technologies were employed to analyse the painting’s sub surface, which revealed extensive compositional alterations, as noted in the volume, The Secrets of Leonardo da Vinci, Vol. 1.

These revealed not only the usual few “pentimenti”, but many major changes of Raphael’s created whilst refining his original concept of the legend. These findings eclipsed any that Cameron had witnessed over the past four decades conducting such investigative research. Such significant compositional changes confirmed the artist had used the sub surface of his composition as he would a sketching board. Only through technology can we now view his unique, multi- staged original creative development of this pivotal composition.

This extensive development of the composition from its initial concept, comes direct from the great artist’s mind, and is a rare event to witness in the field of Renaissance paintings research.

Infra-red Reflectography Scanning

In 2002, twelve detailed scans were undertaken at The University of Melbourne’s, technical analysis facility for art works, providing some remarkable findings of the painting’s sub surface, which first revealed this unique staged genesis of the composition.

Both Infra-red and Vega Scans of sections, whole image showing the many significant head, garment and hand compositional changes.	Both infra-red and Vega Scans of Goddesses body sections.

Two infra-red sections of Goddess Body Sections.

The most significant of these were the four major changes of both the position, dress and of the physiognomy of the face, of the seated figure of “Paris”. Likewise those of three significant changes to the dog’s position and other primary alterations were observed, including those to both of “Paris’s hands. See detailed discussion and other images of scans below.

VegaScan Deeper Sub surface Scanning

VegaScan of pentimenti of 4 body position, dress and face changes to Raphael figure.

A decade following the Infra-red reflectology scans, an advanced new scanning method developed by Cameron, the VegaScan system, was used to further reveal these known sub surface features, and search for further alterations.

Whilst the technology is still subject to proprietary restrictions, this adaptive scanning process, achieves the spectral sublimation of a primary image’s layers, by sequentially dissolving from the surface image, through its various constituent layers, to reveal its original deep sub surface base components. In simple terms, it is a technical way of peeling off the various upper layers of the paintng, (like an onion), to reveal the compostion’s deeper sub surface features.

These clearer scans further assisted the viewing and interpretation of the known major creative changes and importantly revealed that “Mercury”, in the top right corner, was originally lower and only one third of the size, than seen today on the finished surface.

location of inverted modello.

Further, a fascinating small fully completed “Modello”, also in oils, of a “Study for a Madonna & Child”, was also discovered, in a reverse mode in the upper right section of the work, an earlier trial study “pentimento. Further research indicates this to be slightly different to any extant version, of these subjects, but certainly has Raphael’s imprimatur, and is thus a previously unknown study for a future uncompleted work. For further observations on this hidden “modello”, see below.

2. Condition of Painting.

Examination of craquelure reveals

detail showing craquelure

There is volume loss present, consistent with 16thC Renaissance works; there is also shrinkage, very fine rectangular 16thC cracquelure, again consistent with works from this period.Initial Glazing layers are the original layers.

In 1980, ultra violet testing in London likewise confirmed there has been no alterations or intrusions or retouching performed and that the time yellowed balsamic glazes exhibited the usual indications of the deep opaque green of original varnish.

It should also be noted that for approximately two centuries or possibly more, this painting remained fully protected behind a framed glass surround, quite rare method usually reserved for watercolours rather than protecting oil paintings. Thus the vanish darkening effects, especially of 19thC Victorian coal fuelled fires has been averted.

Ultraviolet test reveals

Additional to remarks on varnish. This examination confirmed a dense cloudy green layer of extremely aged varnish over the entire surface of the painting with just a few tiny incidental losses having earlier been inpainted. This affirmed the physical observation that the work’s final surface glazing(s) had experienced minimal past cleaning or other interference, and are remarkably close to their original status.

Giorgione/Titian, Concert Champetre, Louvre, 1508-9.

The aged varnish imparts a patinated hue to the painting’s s surface and is particularly evident in the golden glow of the nude goddesses' bodies. In 1854 Gustave Waagen referred to this as,“the warmest golden tones”. Through this craquelure however other fresher colours and more natural pink flesh tones are readily discernible. In his Titian to1518, pp 99, Joannides had observed a very similar phenomenon in respect to the broadly contemporary Giorgione/Titian “Pastoral Concert” painting, where he refers  to, “layers of dirty and coloured varnish give it crespuscular warmth and subdued harmomy”.. “and its colour relations were once sharper brighter and more emphatic..” Over the considerable period since such finish(es) were finally applied, they had developed the expected fine, regular pattern of craquelure, resultant from their gradual hardening and consequent shrinkage from volume loss, of their naturally derived volatile balsamic constituents. Beneath these, can be evidenced the deeper, wider craquelure and fissuring of the original painted surface, caused likewise by this ageing process. Thus it still remains as Waagen had earlier noted in 1854, “in excellent preservation”, much due to its long unbroken provenance from 1770 – 1952 with successive Earls of Malmesbury whilst also having been protected behind glass, from 18^th -19thC coal laden city atmospheres, in provincial Malmesbury.

3. Pigment Analysis.

Microscopy

It is intended for gas chromatographic pigment analysis to be performed, as with the Holbein, however earlier attempts to have this arranged were unable to proceed due to prior commitments of the laboratory contacted. Initial microscopic visual analysis at 250x revealed crystalline structures of the pigments, consistent with those of other early 16thC works.

Lapis – not yet determined but is either this or Azurite.

Azurite – not yet determined but is either this or Lapis

Perhaps glass powder – It should be stated that glass powder appears restricted to Raphael’s earlier Florentine works, and it is recalled that Jill Dunkerton (of the scientific dept. at the NG)  actually admitted it was not definitive, as both this pigment and Raphael’s base grounds were both widely variable.

Ridolofi’s remarks.

Ridolfi, Title-page Le maraviglie dell’ Arte ovvero, Le vite degli Illustri Pittori Veneti and dello Stato, 1648.

Ridolofi’s citing is critically important as few paintings carry Ridolfi’s rare imprimatur and connoisseurship expertise. There is the other conjoint fact well worth citing that just as today in 2012 we can quite easily determine an 1850’s Victorian painting by its cracquelure and aged appearance, so in 1648 it would have been just as easy for Ridolfi to discern the painting had all the same age characteristics of a circa 1510 example.

Secondly, any advanced pigment testing would still only age the painting to around Ridolfi’s 1648 period and backwards, as the same pigments were used over that same 150 year period, and no test can yet differentiate within that one and a half century timeline. Therefore his unique visual 1648 on site evaluation is a more valid confirmation of this painting early 16thC dating, with the additional imprimatur of his acknowledged connoisseurship credentials of knowing many significant master’s paintings, and attesting to their primacy, even if he understandably gave this in Venice to Giorgione and not Raphael, for the earlier mentioned valid reasons.

4. Alterations and substitutions

Underdrawing

Vega Scans revealing a “modello” of a Madonna. below, magnification of vega scans revealing different layers.

 

A fascinating additional subsurface feature of significance was also revealed during these investigations, which would further support Raphael’s authorship of the painting. This is a finely detailed Study, Modello colorito, albeit just 12cm sq. approx, in an inverted position at the end of the right goddesses robe, for a exquisite Madonna and Child composition. The Madonna has her hair half covered by a light headdress, with a trailing piece to the rear, and is garbed in a white blouse with ballooning shoulders, contrasted with darker armbands over the upper arms, (which from the density scale of its Infra-red colour values are most probably in red). Over this white blouse is a darker “V” necked tunic, (which due to its much darker colour value is probably in the blue range), with white ballooning sleeves at the Virgin’s wrists.

magnification of Vegascan showing buried modello.

She cradles the figure of the infant Christ against her right breast, but significantly, it can also be discerned that she is holding a small darker rectangular (Bible) book in her right hand, which she is reading from, perhaps whilst suckling the infant Christ. The composition has a distant city background with walled buildings, one larger one with a dome and tower with a spire, and also a broad sky. Her exposed left arm comes up under the infant’s right arm, whilst her Right hand is just visible above his left shoulder, holding the book. It appears this fully painted study was for an unrealised Madonna and Child project as it differs from any of Raphael’s known executed Madonnas.

Alba Madonna, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1509-10.	Colonna Madonna, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, c. 1507.

The various deep subsurface “invisible” images captured range between just 2 and 12 kb in size and are in a very deep nanometer 25,000+ range, being reproduced through combined Infra-red with advanced surface scanning technology, and the resultant composition is only just discernible through, the final scans offering the best image resolution. Its detailing and qualities appear quite consistent with Raphael’s other productions from this period. The composition shares similarities with the contemporary, Alba Madonna, and since she is holding the small Bible, also has links with his earlier 1507 Colonna Madonna, now in Berlin. However in this rendition the Madonna is portrayed in a different posture to either of these, which suggest it represents a unique new creation from Raphael’s early Roman period. There is a separate seated Infant study to the Left of this, looking away from this composition, and various other minor pentimenti and alteration

Its existence on this work’s sub surface indicate it to be an original draft composition for a Madonna & Child subject from the period. Interestingly, under infra-red the inverted foreground robe reveals an underlying boat, scoop or cradle shape.

The under drawing is substantial and quite unprecedented in his oeuvre. This painting represents Raphael’s most innovative example in a ‘private work’ of the “Venetian oil on canvas alteration technique”, as demonstrated in Giorgione’s ‘The Tempest’, eg. where the focal nude figure was substantially shifted. In the Judgment of Paris composition, Raphael uses the original sub surface for both major compositional changes and minor figural improvements, as the concept is developed to its final surface appearance. He would have learned of these techniques from Marcantonio, who had worked with both Giorgione and Titian in Venice, and also from observing Piombo whilst working with him in the Farnesina Gallery.

Major Changes and their Implications.

There are three major alterations and substitutions that Raphael has made to the original conception that were initially revealed by Infra-red spectography carried out at the University of Melbourne’s, Ian Potter Centre for Art Research, by Mr. Sean Loughrey MA and later at the authors advanced scanning facility.

These alterations included:

Vega scans. Section A shows four different face and position changes, as they advance from the tree. Section B shows the two upper and lower hand positions, and a forefinger extension.

Shallower vega scan revealing final changes to the composition, which occur as “pentimenti” nearer the surface than the other three Vega Scans. In section A, the hand has 2 position changes and is downturned with a golden apple partly visible. The four faces changes are also evident. In section B the dog has had 3 very significant changes of its position, moving down with Paris away from the centre, being originally seated right next to “Fornarina.”

1. Changes to the ‘moment of Judgement’ of The Judgement of Paris episode, and consequential changes to the hands, both in their gesture and function, with substitutions of the Golden Apple award. The hand in the original hooded figure- see below for remarks on dress- was originally upturned and offering the Golden Apple seen within it, not pointing as in the last two versions. This means that in the so-called original “Shepherd” images, no “Apple” was in his lower clenched hand.

Detail showing later Mercury departing after Paris’s decision.

This reading is also supported by changes noted to the figure of Mercury who was originally conceived as a small, foreshortened figure in the sky, floating above the “Judgement” scene at right angles to the picture plane. Raphael subsequently deleted this figure, by the addition of a cloud, and substituted it with a far more significant and detailed Mercury figure, in a twisting pose, diagonal to the picture plane, departing the scene below. He looks back across his shoulder to the unfolding drama taking place below. Mercury’s role and depiction has therefore changed from one of observer of the contest, to that of bearer of the news of Paris’s final Judgement decision to Mount Olympus. This substitution also functions as a clever perspective device to accentuate the strong triangulation of the composition, to the sky, while assisting the painting’s three dimensionality and its depth, relative to the planar focal figures.

2. The most important change is one which completely revises the narrative from the classical interpretation of the legend, as in the later collaborative engraving by Marcantonio, (after the antique sculptural friezes), into an early 16thc Arcadian nude posie painting of love, in the contemporary Venetian manner. See post 3 of this series for a detailed discussion of this. This change transforms the painting’s concept from its traditional rendition, into the artist’s personal painting of love, and only known visual declaration of their joint devotion.

5. Dating

Sub-surface-see the above remarks on Ridolfi.

Age and date concordances scientifically confirmed dress by dendrochronology.

Raphael’s portrait. Physiognomic Age specific images. Raphael's countenance, which as proven by its subsurface pentimenti, was added into the composition to join that of Fornarina, and is also a unique portrayal, in that it is not a copy of any previously known image of him, either in its dress or "type", It too is an "Age and Date specific "original" portrait like Fornarina's of 1512. His physiognomy is consistent with that of "Stanza" version, with the garb datable to this period, however he is clearly younger and in better health than seen in the 1519 joint portrait. None of these could be claimed as "chance" likenesses but were purpose created portraits for this painting.

Faces of Raphael. Stanza self-portrait (1509-10); Judgment self-portrait (1512); self-portrait with a Friend, (1518)

Fornarina’s portrait. The Fornarina is clearly a more naive and youthful portrayal than any previously known image of her and is therefore neither a copy nor any "chance resemblance", but a unique visage of her in 1512. It is self evidently an "Age and Date” specific portrait, which most accurately records her actual physiognomy at that time, which may well include her naked countenance, from this original sitting.Accurate portraits are difficult enough to create, yet both these are finely wrought, true to life renditions and dateable to Rome in 1512.It is his first portrayal of the young Fornarina’s portrait image in Rome, completed in the year 1512, but probably commenced in 1511.

Faces of Fornarina. Judgment (1512); Sistine Madonna (1513);  “La Donna Velata” (1516).

6. Forensic

Anatomical

Raphael’s body type; concordant facial Comparisons.

Physiognomic

Ears and feet; physiological concordances.

Craniological

Similarities with Raphael’s exhumed skull and consequently proposed facial features; the ear of Venus is comparable with Raphaels other contemporary portrayal of ears The very distinctive “Raphaelesque Feet’ are quite comparable with his other portrayals and show a remarkable concordance.

Crainiometric comparison and forensic analysis is hoped to be undertaken at a future time to compare the now established visual concordances.  Readers might like to know that interest in Raphael’s skull dates back to the early modern period. What was thought to be Raphael’s skull was adorned with laurels by the Accademia di San Luca, but subsequent investigations revealed it to be that of a sixteenth-century canon at the Pantheon. The search for Raphael’s bones reflected a period interested in the science of craniology and craniometry, a story that David Allan Brown and Jane van Nimmen tell in their book on The Bindo Altoviti portrait, once thought to be a self-portrait, but now known to be a portrait of the renaissance banker.

Costume/dress

Detail of Judgment and Portrait of Agnolo Doni, 1506, Galleria Palatina (Palazzo Pitti), Florence.

In addition to linking to the age data, this aspect of the investigation crosses both science and style areas. The scientific examination determined that the “Paris” figure had undergone four changes: an initial garbed figure in a “monk” like black hood, seated next to the tree; then a shepherd figure seated further out; then Raphael introduced his own visage, as “Paris”, as self-portrait, with a comprehensive dress change; a final change where “Paris” is moved further out from the tree, whilist rotating his head towards the viewer. As observed in another post, there are similarities between the dress, “the parti-coloured tights and plumes and slashes of the sixteenth century”, in the Judgment and Venetian paintings like the Rural Concert by Titian and Giorgione. It should also be noted that the sleeve style and pigment directly match that seen in Agnolo Doni’s Portrait, painted by Raphael during his Florentine period.

7. Monogrammatic

It would appear that through his contact with Leonardo during his formative years, Raphael became familiar with Da Vinci’s monogramme signing traits. Some of these are present in the Malmesbury Judgment of Paris. They are manifested as signature devices, being multiple monogrammes and dates for the year 1512. A 1512 date is inscribed within the fabric headband of the central goddess, a method that Raphael is known to have used in another work.

As per GC’s book.

A further group of both 1512 date and monogramme is set within the Golden Apple. Two other “Rv” monogrammes are on the upper chest and within the crotch area of both goddesses, a cogent example of Raphael’s known approach, to his personal relationships as the “lothario” lover.

As per GC’s book.

There appears a just decipherable “R” monogramme or character on the collar of the dog at Paris’s side, along with other “meaningless” decorative inscriptions, (Gould), or perhaps (Cufic) writing as discussed in Rona Goffen’s 2003, “Designer Labels article. It is noted that Raphael’s earlier St George panel (1505), has an inscription on the horse’s bridle.

8. Future technical analysis

It is intended that further X-Radiographic, Spectrographic Pigment Sampling, Macro Surface Studies, and other relevant examinations be undertaken in the near future, to provide additional scientific corroboration to the definitive findings already established from the above examinations.

Canvas support analysis – Future testing handy – but likewise not really definitive. Also needs 1510 comparisons and other museum results support, which is never forthcoming and usually denied.

9. Finishing Up 

Just as a painting is never really finished- you can always come back to it and re-touch it, or re-view it in the light of something new, so this debate is likely to go on. Though this series is officially finished, there will be a unstructured catch-all summary post in which issues raised can be re-visited and  elaborated upon. I know that Graeme Cameron wants to amplify certain points. Likewise, readers of this blog are invited to supply material for this round-up post; if you want to raise anything, offer an insight, a criticism, or anything that occurs to you after reading this or all the posts in this series, then contact AHT via e.mail or leave a comment here and I’ll integrate it into the post.

 

David Brown & Jane Van Nimmen, Raphael & the Beautiful Banker : the story of the Bindo Altoviti portrait, New Heaven [Conn.] ; London : Yale University Press, c2005.

Graeme Cameron, The Secrets of Leonardo da Vinci, Vol. 1, VegaScan, 2011.

Rona Goffen, Raphael’s Designer Labels : From the Virgin Mary to La Fornarina, Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 24, No. 48. (2003), pp. 123-142.

Cecil Gould, Raphael versus Giulio Romano : The Swing Back, The Burlington Magazine , Vol. 124, No. 953. (Aug., 1982), pp. 479-485+487.

Paul Joannides, Titian to 1518: The Assumption of Genius, Yale University Press, 2002.

Carlo Ridolfi, Le maraviglie dell’ Arte ovvero, Le vite degli Illustri Pittori Veneti and dello Stato, 1648.

Patricia Rubin, Signposts of Invention : Artists’ Signatures in Italian Renaissance Art, Art History 29 (4), 563-599.

Dr G Wagen,Treasures of Art in Great Britain, John Murray London (1854) pp. 416.

Pordenone’s Provincialism.

“But there were Venetian towns without the traditions of even of the Schools of Vincenza and Brescia, where, if you wanted to learn painting, you had to apprentice yourself to somebody who had been taught by somebody who been a pupil of one of Giovanni Bellini’s pupils. This was particularly true of the towns where in that long stretch between the Julian Alps and the sea, known as Friuli. Friuli produced one painter of remarkable talents and great force, Pordenone, but neither his talents nor his force, nor even later study in Venice, could erase from his works that stamp of provincialism which he inherited from his first provincial master.”

Bernard Berenson.

Map of Northern Italy.

I’ve been pondering what Berenson meant by Pordenone’s provincialism. This word is one of several that Berenson produces when he wants to nail a painter, or a whole school of painting, to the cross on his art history Golgotha. Berenson dismissed the whole of the Milanese school with the epithet “pretty, ”and “provincialism”, coincidentally another P word, seems to be equally worthy of condemnation in his eyes. To understand Berenson’s meaning of the word, we have to appreciate how much schools of painting lying inland from Venice were seen by Berenson and his ilk as weak echoes of the ateliers of that great centre. This view was not only held by Berenson, but his contemporary, Giovanni Morelli, who spoke of local schools in terms of climate, culture and the ethnographic:

View of Bergamo

“By the Venetian school, however, I do not mean that of Venice alone. Properly speaking, this should be so, but in these days it is usual to include in this category all the schools of painting included in the territory once belonging to the Republic in North Italy, which felt the influence of the capital in a greater or lesser degree without losing their distinctive and local characteristics. This individuality of each school- the direct outcome of diversity of race, natural scenery, soil, climate etc, more strongly developed in some districts, less strongly in others- cannot, of course, be adequately studied in picture galleries, the contents of which are for the most part eclectic in character. It must be studied in the district where it originated, in the history of which it forms so integral a part.”

Morellii.

Berenson places the same emphasis on the soil as Morelli, though he is loath to use the word “Venetian” to cover all of Northern Italian painting; hence his construction of a model in which towns like Bergamo and Brescia are artistic backwaters compared to  the “metropolis” of Venice. However, Berenson’s view of provincialism proves to be highly selective: towns like Verona are to be distinguished from other schools like Brescia and Vincenza, whose painters are wanting in taste, chiefly because their schools grew away from Venice and Verona, the latter redeemed by Mantegna’s influence. Painters that hail from towns like Brescia and Cremona are likened by Berenson to “Eclectics” – an idea also used by Morelli- of a later day, by which he means the Carracci who moved operations from Bologna to Rome in the seventeenth-century, thus ushering in the mainstream academicism of the 17^th century.

Giovanni di Antonio de Sacchis (Il Pordenone), Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints, c. 1525, Parish church, Susegana (Treviso), oil on canvas.

Giovanni Antonio Pordenone who came from Friuli – see top right of map- shows every sign of “metropolitan” training, as can be seen in this fascinating altarpiece executed in 1525, still in situ in the Susegano, Treviso. There are the obligatory Bellinesque figures, as with his St Peter, and the musical angel; maybe a nod to Giorgione in the head of St Catherine, just a little too stylized that it stands out against the stark realism of his Baptist and the aforementioned St Peter. His Madonna is a nice combination of realism and the lurking beauty of Giorgione. Perhaps this offers a clue to the idea of provincial style in Pordenone. The painter strives to maintain a sense of the commonplace by inserting figures that are aggressively naturalised, despite having been exposed to the training of the Venetian workshops. Pordenone’s wonderful St Peter is derived from Bellini, but has the realism of the live model to me, someone known to the artist, not a pensive philosopher based on imagination and the canons of classical taste, as in Bellini’s insulated sacred conversations.

Giovanni di Antonio de Sacchis, (Il Pordenone), Pilate Judges Christ, 1520, Cremona Cathedral, fresco.

A defining feature of “provincialism” for Berenson was the exaggeration of colour which isn’t so evident in this altarpiece. However, if we step back a few years, we can see idiosyncratic colours in Pordenone’s frescoes for Cremona Cathedral (1521-22), a passionless colour that was shared by other painters who worked on this commission, including the Brescians Romanino, Bembo and Melone. Perhaps Berenson might have added “wilful eccentricity” to his list of provincial attributes, as in this fresco of Pilate Before Christ, Il Pordenone goes out of his way to break all the rules of composition.

Detail.

Pordenone's horse seems to leap out of the wall at us, brutish torturers grimace comically, expressive faces lurk in the gloom, whilist Pilate washes his hands, unperturbed by the tumult raging around all him. As for Christ, instead of showing his calm grandeur, he seems wretched and abject, his knees buckling under him, much like the composition itself.

Girolamo Romanino, Christ before Pilate and the Flagellation, 1519, Cremona Cathedral, fresco.

A comparison between Pordonone and Romanino’s versions of the same subject demonstrate competing provincial styles. Romanino’s has a clear composition, with some wonderful vignettes of street life, completely at odds with the compositional whirlwind of Pordonone.

Detail.

Despite the tyranny of the pervasive colour, which has probably faded over time, Romanino seems to be able to assimilate the drama of Venetian art, its historiated quality, into his own frescoes, with largely successful results.

Giovanni di Antonio de Sacchis, (Il Pordenone), Golgotha, 1521, Cremona Cathedral, fresco.

Absolutely nothing prepares us though for Pordenone’s Golgotha, which blows all definitions of “provincialism” out of the water. Here we have painting that goes beyond eclecticism, oversteps mannerism, rushing headlong into the frankly outrageous. It’s as if Pordonone wanted to stun the congregation into stupefaction with his overpowering style.

View of the nave and the inner façade of Cremona Cathedral, frescoes by Il Pordonone.

And what do we make of the fact that Romanino was discharged from the commission so that Pordonone could take over in 1521? This overblown style seems to have found favour with a provincial audience. According to S.J. Freedberg, the theatrical style of this crucifixion was conceived with the aim of communicating with “popular and provincial audiences” that Pordenone’s own origins had equipped him to understand. Much more could be said of the theatrical illusions of these pictures responding to popular and provincial sentiment. Berenson is silent on this matter.

Giovanni di Antonio de Sacchis (Il Pordenone), St Lorenzo Giustiniani and Other Saints, 1532, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice, oil on canvas, 420 x 220 cm.

Later in his career Pordonone would take his “provincialism” back to the “metropolis” of Venice, duelling unsuccessfully with Titian for commissions. We’ll end with a Venetian altarpiece, created for the Madonna dell’ Orto, now in the Accademia, the Blessed Lorenzo Giustiniani and Saints (1532). This work betrays the influence of Michelangelo in its rhetorical orotundity and monumental forms; the athletic St John seems to meld Michelangelo’s muscular figures with the Belvedere Torso, which incidentally can be seen on a ledge in the earlier altarpiece in Susegano. Painted for the Canons of St Giorgio in Algae, known as the “turchini”on account of their deep blue habit, the Blessed Lorenzo illustrates the blending of Roman grandeur, Venetian colour and the provincial residue that Berenson so loathed. Personally, I think this is what gives the altarpiece its individual character. The kneeling St Francis seems orientated towards the popolani, the people; his dirty feet pointing outward to the viewer seems to look forward to the direct realism of Caravaggio's paintings, which communicate piety at street level- back to the dirt and soil of the people. Though Berenson would not agree, I think here Pordonone successfully absorbs his provincial art within the styles of Venetian, and even central Italian art.

Sources.

Bernard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance: Venetian and North Italian Schools,. Phaidon, 1968, first pub. 1952.

S.J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500-1600, (New Haven and London, Yale University Press), 1993.

Giovanni Morelli, Italian Painters: The Galleries of Munich and Dresden, (1907, orig. 1893).

Giovanna Nepi Sciré and Francesco Valcanover, Accademia Galleries of Venice, (1985).

A Debate in Parliament

As I’m pressed for time I’m just going to post verbatim a report I’ve received from the Camerons about the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris. It is important new evidence, and comes from no other source than Hansard, the record of Parliamentary proceedings. I agree with GC; the timing is weird given that I’ve just posted about connoisseurship, Eastlake and the painting itself. Are the gods looking down on this blog!

 

An example of Hansard from the 19th century.

Verbatim from Graeme and Norman Cameron.

“Important New Research Evidence of Lord Malmesbury's "The Judgement of Paris" involving 'Sir Charles Eastlake' and the painting's 'Louvre Paris Exhibition', and also 'Connoisseurship Matters' in The House of Lords Hansard, of July 1869.

In a fascinating twist of providence, a valuable historical account has now been discovered by art researchers Graeme and Norman Cameron, with direct links to the same Three Topics covered in "Art History Today's" recent Posts. In an amazing coincidence, further significant new evidence as to the distinguished status of Lord Malmesbuy's painting comes from no less than the House of Lords, London Debate Report, in the Hansard of 26th. July 1869..

It concerns the National Gallery London's picture purchases, particularly of a Rembrandt, in the course of which, Lord Malmesbury contributes observations to the Debate. In a lengthy response he refers to a Letter of Attestation he has from the Late Sir Charles Eastlake; ( this Letter was earlier cited in these Posts, but its contents were unknown ). However, Eastlake's letter said, "It was one of the finest Giorgione's he had ever seen". This unequivocal statement from the still revered former the inaugural Director of the National Gallery, London, Artist & Connoisseur, when added to those of Prof. Gustave Waagen, Dr. J D Passavant, and Sir Martin Conway, shows just how acclaimed this painting was in the 19thC.

More importantly, Lord Malmesbury's speech reveals that Eastlake's regard for the painting was such that he arranged for "The Judgement of Paris" to be exhibited at the Louvre in Paris the late 1860's. Interestingly whilst there, a Louvre official expressed "it was not by "Giorgione" but another "Venetian Master", (Titian?)

This adds a most significant previously uncited "foreign" Exhibition credential to this painting's already extensive United Kingdom exhibition record and shows just how acclaimed this masterpiece was by both doyen Connoisseurs and the general public, as confirmed at both Manchester & Leeds Art Treasures Exhibitions and those at the RA's "Burlington House", etc..

Lord Malmesbury's speech also gives fascinating insights into his family's ownership and custodianship of the painting, especially his generous allowing weekly private viewing to art loving admirers at his Stafford Place residence, and gives other rare insights on 19thC collecting and altruism, which are equally relevant even today.”

The relevant section of the debate is below, the reference to the Judgement, its exhibition in Paris, and the Louvre curator’s non-Giorgione attribution  comes right at the end. Here’s a link to the whole of the Lord's debate of 1869, on Hansard’s web site. Now why can’t David Cameron- who studied art history at Eton- start a debate on the merits of connoisseurship and attribution in the Commons!

The Upper Chamber, the House of Lords.

HL Deb 26 July 1869 vol 198 cc651-65 651

Relevant section

The Earl of Malmesbury said, they must all feel obliged to the noble Lord (Lord Overstone) for his explanation, which showed that the Trustees displayed their judgment without fear or favour in choosing pictures for the National Gallery. If, indeed, there were any part of the noble Lord's speech with which he felt inclined to find fault, it was that in which he appeared to be more than displeased at these Questions having been put. The noble Lord must be aware that Questions of this kind, when asked in either House, were not only perfectly fair in a Parliamentary point of view, but were likewise a proof of the great interest felt by the public in the success of the National Gallery. He was sure that the noble Lord himself did not desire that the people of this country should wander in stupid silence through the rooms in which these pictures were hung, and no one with such a liberal mind as his could find fault with the remarks and criticisms, however extraordinary, which those who inspected the treasures of art preserved in the Gallery might make. These were after all, nothing more nor less than expressions of opinion. The noble lord had styled the Questions put to him this evening as ungenerous Questions; but for his own part he (the Earl of Malmesbury) thought they were evidences of the pride and interest which all persons in this country, whatever their rank might be, took in the art treasures which were to be found in our National Gallery. He maintained that it was entirely a matter of opinion as to whether a picture were genuine or not, and more especially must this be the case with regard to pictures painted by the Old Masters. When it was considered that upwards of three centuries had elapsed since the Venetians put their pencils to the canvass, it was obviously impossible to have what in a court of justice would be called complete and positive evidence that such and such a picture was painted by such and such a man who lived in the 16th century; all we could do was to trace the pedigrees and successive owners of these pictures, and to draw an inference from the facts as to whether they were genuine or not. 663 Most of the paintings in the National Gallery had, he believed, passed through that ordeal, and might be regarded with pride and confidence as genuine works of the Masters to whom they were ascribed. If it had not been for the Questions put this evening, the public would not have had the advantage of being acquainted with the complete pedigrees of the pictures to which the noble Lord had referred. Considering the great difficulty of identifying ancient pictures, he could not but admire the characteristic sagacity of a certain class of collectors—he meant those men who, having in the course of a life of practical business accumulated large fortunes, and having great taste and a desire to form galleries of pictures, almost universally discarded the Old School and laid out their money in purchasing modern pictures, the genuineness of which could be ascertained far more readily than the authenticity of works alleged to be by the Old Masters. This circumstance showed that the public were excusable if they were suspicious and timid with respect to purchasing pictures of the Old Masters; and the noble Lord and his Colleagues—for whose exertions he felt assured the country was deeply grateful —must occasionally expect Questions similar to those which had been asked this evening. The noble Lord had quoted various authorities; but it would not be difficult to show that those authorities did not agree among themselves. He himself possessed a picture which for the last 100 years had been deemed to be an undoubted Giorgione. Some lovers of art used to come to look at it two or three times a week, and he had a letter from the late Sir Charles Eastlake, in which he stated it was one of the finest Giorgiones he had ever seen. Yet when he sent that picture to the Exhibition at Paris, a gentleman employed at the Louvre pronounced it to be the work, not of Giorgione, but of another Venetian master. Indeed, he believed there was only one way of discovering the real authors of these ancient pictures —namely, by calling in the aid of spiritualism, and bringing ourselves into correspondence with Mr. Home, who should be requested to interrogate Giorgione, Titian, and other great artists on the subject. Until their Lordships believed in spiritualism, however, they must rely upon opinions such as had been adduced 664 this evening by the noble Lord (Lord Overstone.)

The Malmesbury Judgement of Paris: the Full Story, 3.

Sorry for the hiatus, but one has to earn a living- and this took a lot of time. Be warned; it’s a long post, but I did call this series the full picture.

“But while the process of invention can, to a certain extent, be reconstructed upstream, such is not the case closer to its final issue; unlike other pieces engraved by Marcantonio, the Judgement of Paris left no trace in the painted work of Raphael. This fact merits our attention, given that the comparison of engravings and finished works can often be quite instructive.”

Hubert Damisch.

The Lost Painting.

Marcantonio Raimondi (after Raphael), The Judgement of Paris, engraving, c. 1517-18.

Raphael’s Judgment of Paris has hitherto been known exclusively through the engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi, which has been endlessly emulated. Yet as Lisa Pon has noted, the Judgement of Paris was one of only 5 designed by Raphael and engraved by Marcantonio, to be both named and monogrammed. Amongst these are the Parnassus and St. Cecilia, both after Raphael’s paintings and both varying considerably from his originals.

Raphael, St Cecilia, 1514, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna.	Marcantonio Raimondi, (after Raphael), St Cecilia, engraving, c. 1514.

So, is the design in the surviving print of the Judgement of Paris a record of the final version? And more to the point for the purposes of this particular investigation: does the engraved “final” version have any kinship with the controversial Malmesbury Judgement of Paris of 1512? It’s the contention of the authors of the report on the Malmesbury painting that this could be the lost painting that the engraving is based upon. But, if Damisch is correct about the Judgment of Paris leaving no trace in the painting of Raphael, then is this case closed? Far from it. AHT thinks an examination into the links between the engraving, other sources, and the Malmesbury work is justified, as hopefully will be demonstrated in the third of these research reports. For the record AHT believes that the evidence is mounting that the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris has stylistic, iconographic and maybe even biographical associations with Raphael himself.

Actually Damisch did refer to a painting: a grisaille (monochrome) of the same subject beneath the fresco of Parnassus, which must have some connection with the more celebrated composition known via the engraving, so we can journey “downstream” from this towards the “final issue” of Raphael’s invention. Jones and Penny dated this small painted Judgement 1512-13 and noted it resembled the more classical relief style. Jones and Penny also observed that the “composition of the Judgement of Paris design was expanded, “perhaps in two stages, and certainly with work in different styles.” Gradually, over time, the composition was extended further to include a landscape inhabited by a river god, nymphs, woodland creatures; finally, a celestial vault ruled over by Jupiter and his court was added- all far beyond the basic scheme and demonstrating Raphael’s restless invention.

Raphael, The Expulsion of Heliodorus, 1511-12, Stanza della Elidoro, Vatican, Rome, fresco.

Jones and Penny’s hypothesis was that additions made to the 1517-18 Judgement of Paris, may reflect the influence of figure placement in painted schemes like the Expulsion of Heliodorus. In passing, it should be pointed out that the figure of Heliodorus in the above fresco seems modelled on the celebrated reclining statue of the river Tiber which was discovered in 1512; a river god based upon it later appears in Raimondi’s engraving.

Statue of the River Tiber, discovered in 1512.	Paris from Malmesbury Judgement of Paris, 1512.

Given its date, exact with the Malmesbury painting, it might be the case that the appearance of the river god may also have inspired Raphael to base the pose of Paris on it, in the Malmesbury picture. Returning to the engraving, the later Judgement of Paris composition is nothing less than a composite of different structural units. So, if we take Jones and Penny at their word and agree on a line of development for the Judgement of Paris that begins about 1512-13 and mutatis mutandis, culminates downstream in the surviving print dated 1517-18, then where does the neglected tributary of the Malmesbury picture join with this torrent of compositional invention?

Page from Graeme Cameron’s book showing pentimenti. Instead of pointing as seen in section B, in earlier versions revealed by infra red and vega scanning, the hand was actually upturned and offering the “Golden Apple”seen within it. This means that in earlier images, no apple was in his lower clenched hand, as in the final work today.

It’s logical to assume that changes would have occurred along the way; this is how Raphael thinks with the pen in his hand, even completely transforming designs in mid stream. Assuming that he painted the Malmesbury picture, he may applied his transformative skills in creating that work. In the words of GC:

“In this painting, Paris’s left pointing hand of “Judgement” was altered to portray the immediate moment after his fateful decision of Judgement, rather than as he had earlier depicted it, holding the award of the Golden Apple towards Venus as more traditionally seen, such as in the Marcantomio engraving. Accordingly the Golden Apple has been transferred to his clenched right hand, whilst the originally clenched left hand has been re-modelled to a pointing gesture, with a further later extension to the length of the left index finger.”

In considering these pictorial manoeuvres, it is worth bearing in mind a critical statement concerning gesture and pose in Raphael’s drawings, made by John Shearman – “Raphael learned the expressive possibilities of the slightest modification of pose, the potential of movement and the arrangements of the hands as indicators of character and mood.” Lisa Pon coined the term “graphic intelligence” to explain Raphael’s compositional processes where he seeks for a solution through his restless striving for the perfect composition. “Graphic intelligence” was derived from Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall’s “pictorial intelligence”, which Pon defines as “Resolutely visual and independent of textual concerns, a given artist’s pictorial intelligence shapes the decisions he or she makes in producing a picture, and even frames the alternatives from which these choices can be made.”

Drawing into Engraving.

Luca Penni (after Raphael), The Judgement of Paris, Petit Palais, Paris, c. 1517?

Only one drawing for Marcantonio’s engraving seems to have survived; this is attributed to Luca Penni, and is in the Petit Palais, Paris. Executed in pen and wash, this has occasionally been assigned to Raphael too The engraving may be based on the drawing, but this must remain a matter for speculation. A major change between print and drawing is Penni’s relegation of the reclining river god group to the background, which serves to emphasise the central Paris/Goddesses group unlike in the engraving where no detail is privileged over another.

Penni entered Raphael’s studio in 1515, and according to John Shearman his job was to act in a “secretarial” capacity, making visual records (ricordi) of Raphael’s compositions. Raphael would eventually trust Penni to draw the important modello for the Transfiguration, based presumably on the master’s original thought for that painting. Penni’s drawing might be considered a compositional study for the Judgement of Paris print, but that’s probably not the case. It might be better to regard Penni’s drawing as a record of the print albeit with his own stylistic flourishes, like the mannerist, tapered limbs of the women which are as far from Raphael as one can get.

Detail of Raimondi’s engraving.

There are definite similarities between the positions of the three goddesses in both drawing and engraving. In Penni’s drawing, the women closely match those in the engraving although interestingly, Minerva- with her back turned towards the spectator- is different in attitude. Her lower legs cross over each other unlike the Minerva in the engraving, whose legs are apart. This is significant because the drawing betrays Raphael’s study of contrapossto, counter-position to the un-initiated, where most of the weight is placed on one foot. There exists another drawing by Penni of a “Toilet of Venus”, in the British Museum, which has the goddess’s lower legs crossed again. Again, it was previously attributed to Raphael, but Pouncey and Gere note it’s typical of Penni’s phase when Raphael’s influence was wearing off. Penni seems to be forging his own style in these drawings, although Raphael provided the baseline. To AHT’s eye, the sharp pen line and faint hatching of the British Museum sheet – sorry, don’t have an image-recall Raphael’s treatment of the Leda on a sheet at Windsor, and the figure in the BM drawing manifestly has some lineage with (a) Minerva in Penni’s drawing and (b), the Eve in the print by Marcantonio Raimondi of Raphael’s Adam and Eve, viewed by Joannides as resembling the central figure (Venus) in the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris.

The Leda Factor

“Raphael was more interested in Leda’s pose….the extreme contrapposto which he was able to study in the works of Leonardo and Michelangelo. It had an instantaneous and lasting effect on his art.”

Tom Henry, Raphael exhibition, 2004.

Raphael, (after Leonardo da Vinci), Leda, Royal Library, Windsor, c. 1508.

The results of Raphael’s researches into Leda can be seen in such paintings as the London St. Catherine (1507) and the Rome Galatea (1512), but can the spirit of Leonardo’s Leda also be discerned in the Malmesbury painting, as the authors state in their report? According to Paul Joannides, the central woman in the Malmesbury painting has the same contrapossto pose as the figure of Eve in an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi, dated by Joannides to 1510- see below. AHT doesn’t see any reason to doubt a connection between the Malmesbury Venus and the print of the Adam and Eve. The undulating curve is the same; the position of the feet and the legs match.

 

Marcantonio Raimondi (after Raphael), Lucretia, c. 1510-11.

Thanks to the work of Raphael scholars, especially Lisa Pon, we know more about the working relationship between Raphael and Raimondi at the time that the Adam and Eve print was created. A number of engravings by Raimondi (based on Raphael’s designs) from the same time –1510-11-show tragic females from history, Lucretia and Dido, and they also betray Raphael’s study of Leonardo’s Leda. The crucial question to be posed here is whether the Leda pose of Eve, which is clearly a result of Raphael’s researches into that subject, and given the matching pose of Venus in the Malmesbury picture, supports the attribution. At the very least it reinforces a link between the painting  and Raphael’s workshop. A counter-argument would be that Raimondi’s Adam and Eve print was made without Raphael’s involvement, in which case the printmaker brought the design from Venice where he might have detected it in examples of mythology in that city, although as pointed out in the first post, there aren’t many painted examples of the subject in Venice in the early 1500s for Raimondi to have known. What also undermines that argument is that it was Raphael who became fixated on the Leda as a way of exploring the poses of his protagonists, not Raimondi. And for what it’s worth, AHT has always believed that these nudes didn’t originate in Venetian art.

Marcantonio Raimondi (after Raphael), Adam and Eve, 1511-12., engraving	Malmesbury Venus compared to physiognomy and pose of Eve.

Profile comparisons of the two goddesses in print and painting.

Graeme Cameron also states:

“It should also be noted that the physiognomies and juxtaposition of the two focal Goddesses (Hera and Venus) nearest to Paris, in the engraving are clearly comparable and share related physiognomies to those of the women in the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris, more so than any other known source. The engraving also shows the Paris figure seated in a higher position with a more severe contrapposto, as derived from a classical Medici relief. By contrast, in the painting Paris adopts a very similar pose and position to that of the engraving’s “River God”, but in the opposite corner and in reverse.”

Finally, despite the “Venetian” character of the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris, it has a general relief-like style which is consistent with the more well-known engraving.

Morphological analysis

“This same concern over distinguishing, within the body of work bearing Raphael’s name, between its autograph portion and that executed by assistants would lead connoisseurs- beginning with the most prominent among them, the celebrated Morelli, whose work and methods were of interest to Freud- to considerably reduce the number of works distilling, in its pure state, the essence of his art, a matter that would largely reduce itself to the question of “hands.”

Hubert Damisch.

It is significant that when the name of Morelli is invoked by Damisch, it is both a sign of connoisseurship and an expression of the artist’s working practice, as transmitted through the agency of the hands. Hands within Raphael studies can allude to the method of disentangling Raphael’s own productions from his pupils and followers-connoisseurship; or hands can also refer to the parts of the body that produce the art through “graphic intelligence.” Perhaps this re-configuration of Morelli suggests that his morphological approach- memorably called by one wit, the “ear and toenail school”- has little currency in Raphael studies today. In any case the Morellian method is too schematic and ineffective given the broad physiognomic variations between figures in renaissance painting. It is not flawless as was revealed with a Morellian analysis applied to the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris over on Three Pipe Problem recently.

“Some visual nuances are keenly observed in the article at Art History Today. What is omitted however are some smaller anatomical and compositional nuances. These need to be mentioned as potentially uncharacteristic of Raphael, so consistently astute in rendering models. Looking specifically at the semi-nude on the far right, the two points worth drawing attention are the rendering of head in profile compared to the rotation of the trunk, and the left foot, whose scale seems disproportionate. The overall harmony of the grouping is pleasing enough, but arguably lacks the grace Raphael was able to accomplish at this stage of his career.”

Raphael, The Three Graces, Museé Condé, Chantilly, 1504-5.

To address this issue of disproportion in the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris, it should be noted that focusing on an anatomical detail, a foot in an autograph painting by Raphael, the Chantilly Three Graces, the foot of the central Grace, reveal that it is self-evidently proportionally far smaller and also more anatomically 'deformed', than any of the Judgement of Paris examples.

Comparison of respective foot depictions and modelling of bodies in Three Graces and Malmesbury Judgement of Paris.

So if we followed the Morellian method here, we would have to eliminate the Chantilly Three Graces from Raphael’s oeuvre, which incidentally would be eliminating an important clue- see below. As to TPP’s claim about an "out of proportion foot" and other anatomical deficiencies, it appears quite within the range of "natural foot size variation", and may well have been chosen by Raphael to accentuate the large "well-turned thigh and calf" muscles of that figure.

Drawing comparison with Raphael’s distinctive rendering of feet.

It therefore seems wrong to deem it "deformed" or physiologically invalid. Raphael actually has a very distinctive manner of rendering feet, which also fully accords with those found in this work, an example here proving it.

Preparatory Studies?

“We in the digital age would metaphorically call this procedure of reusing figures from one drawing to in another one “cut and paste.” In fact that metaphor comes from our process of literally cutting or tearing apart a sheet of paper and gluing it onto another surface. This process first became widely practiced in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when printed images were often silhouetted and passed into books, boxes, or walls…Raphael actively cut or tore his drawings to advance his compositions.”

Lisa Pon.

Another concern of TPP was the absence of a preparatory study for the Malmesbury painting, which is fair comment as any art historian worth their salt would try to substantiate an attribution claim with relatable drawings. Well, it’s probably unwise to regard Penni’s individualistic drawing as a preparatory study- see above. However, there are drawings of female nudes, Venus, some based on the Leda, in existence. One of these is the so-called “Venus and the Vintagers”, a nude trio drawing in the Ashmoleon in pen with plumb lines. Unfortunately this sheet is difficult to read, either due to its state or the reproduction. It isn’t reproduced here as it’s too faint, but Joannides catalogue can be accessed here. It would be interesting to go to Oxford to see it. To quote from Joannides’s catalogue raisonné of Raphael drawings: 

“Presumably en suite with cat. 135 r. (Three Musicians, a satyr playing a horn, a muse (?) playing a harp, Apollo ( ?) playing a viol da braccio) for a decorative panel, perhaps for a piece of furniture. The accent is very much on the contour and the rhythmical relations of the figures. The nymph on the left echoes Leda (cat. 98, the Windsor drawing of Leda), the movement of that of the child on the right in cat. 120 (Louvre study for Belle Jardinière). The faun in the centre is reminiscent of Signorelli’s Kingdom of Pan” [sadly lost].

Clockwise from centre top: Malmesbury nude group; Posed nude girl with mirror,  Louvre, c. 1518; Venus, British Museum, 1512; Female nude posed as Venus, Budapest, c.1512; Standing nude Venus, Uffizi, c. 1508-9; Leda, Windsor, c. 1508;  Bust of Venus and lower half of Venus, Harvard and Bayonne. (These last two were originally “cut and pasted” together.

Inserted here is a composite of a variety of nudes in Raphael's drawings. According to Graeme Cameron, the characteristic Venus pose and the evolving, interlocking and rhythmical nude figurative group arrangement, generally echo those of the trio within the Judgement of Paris painting. What might work against a link with the Malmesbury three nude group is the date of the Ashmoleon “Venus and Vintagers”, 1505-6, well before the Malmesbury picture. However, we do have a drawing of a “Female Nude posed as Venus” (Budapest), which Joannides affirms is “close to the pose of Venus in the Judgement of Paris engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi” but Joannides adds that it was “probably not preparatory [for the engraving] “but simply an experiment in posing a model…as the Cnidian Venus.” Graeme Cameron believes this drawing has other links with other extant drawings of nude Venus subjects in Joannides’s catalogue 194v / 195v and 202r, which the cataloguer proposed as “studies for a painting” or for a “lost or unexecuted easel painting.” The authors of the Malmesbury report venture that these drawings are also linked to the “Venus and Vintagers” drawing; they also propose at least 194v / 195v (Harvard and Bayonne sheets), as the related “functional” nude drawings. These, they believe are from life, of Raphael’s studio models for the face and shoulders of his Fornarina lover, and for Venus’s body, (likewise cut and pasted), portrayed in the rediscovered Raphael Judgement of Paris painting. This obviously brings us to one of the most inflammatory parts of the attribution, the claim that Raphael inserted an image of himself and his lover, “La Fornarina” into it.

Cherchez la femme.

“To paint a figure truly beautiful, I should see many beautiful forms, with the further provision that you should yourself be present to choose the most beautiful. But good judges and beautiful women being rare, I avail myself of certain ideas which come to my mind. If this idea has any excellence in art I know not, though I labour heartily to acquire it.” Raphael in a letter from Rome to Baldassare Castiglione, 1514. Quoted in Rachel Le Goff, formal research on The Dream of Joseph, 2011, italics mine. Le Goff notes that “here Raphael is speaking in relation to a female model for his Galatea in the Farnesina…”

Raphael, Portrait of a Young Woman, “La Fornarina”, 1518-19, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome.

The question of Raphael’s relations with women has not been resolved though scholarship has progressed beyond Vasari’s risible claim that Raphael died of lovemaking. Yet Vasari’s comment has been useful in prompting inquiry into how Raphael’s amorous activities impacted on his workshop procedures and vice versa. Focusing more on the relationship between Raphael’s loves and the workshop, Konrad Oberhuber has pondered the problem of Raphael’s models, not least the “social problem of seeing a female body in the nude within the culture of 17^th century Rome.” As noted above there is a drawing in which a female model is posed in the manner of a classical Venus, which the authors of the report maintain has connections with the Malmesbury nudes. Assuming that the Malmesbury painting is a product of Raphael’s workshop protocols- and the evidence is mounting that it is- it wouldn’t be out of place to connect the drawings of nudes catalogued by Joannides with the painting. However, the real test comes with the assertion that one of the women in the Malmesbury painting has the features of “La Fornarina”, Raphael’s famous inamorata, immortalised in a painting which Joanne G. Bernstein calls the “most extraordinary” result of Raphael’s studies into the female model, accounting for “ the physicality, fullness and sensuality” of the woman. As Bernstein also observes, “La Fornarina” is a type as well as a portrait that derives from classical mythology. The raised hand and the lowered hand refer to her gender, and more specifically the antique statue of the Venus Pudica. The Pudica pose is hinted at the Malmesbury picture with the woman (Juno), the figure said to have the features of “La Fornarina”, who raises her hand up to her breast.This arm pose pose occurs in other Raphael works shown here for comparison.

Left, study for St Catherine (Louvre, c. 1507) ; bottom, study for St Catherine (Louvre, c. 1507); top right, Faith (Vatican, c. 1507), bottom right, Study for St Catharine (Ashmoleon, c. 1507).

 

Though she doesn’t have the dropped arm, her companion Venus, does. Combined, they make a Pudica figure although Venus herself – in the centre- turns her body slightly towards Paris.* This merging of the two focal goddesses may be significant since it gives the impression of intimacy between Juno and Venus which might suggest that Juno is congratulating Venus on her triumph, whilist the third goddess, Minerva, seems distinctly unimpressed. AHT’s initial reading was that the figure nearest the viewer was actually Juno since she is -traditionally- the most upset at Paris’s decision to award Venus the prize; but this opinion surely has to be revised because in one of the copies of the Malmesbury Judgement, the artist gave this figure the attributes of Minerva, armour and weapons discarded on the grass. He clearly was of the opinion that the goddess further away was Minerva.

Copy after Malmesbury Judgement of Paris, 16th century, National Gallery, Sweden.

It’s also worth pointing out that this copyist seems to have had Marcantonio’s engraving in mind, not just because of the addition of Minerva’s armour, but because he included Cupid clutching Venus’s legs, a detail that occurs in the print. The 17^th century imitator was thinking of the Malmesbury Judgement in terms of Raphael’s design, although admittedly his language of the nude is very different to the figures in Lord Malmesbury’s canvas.

Fornarina comparisons: Malmesbury Juno, La Donna Velata and Sistine Madonna.

Returning to the La Fornarina issue, it simply comes down to whether you believe that there is a facial resemblance between the Juno figure and portraits of Raphael’s women, like “La Fornarina” and “La Donna Velata.” There seems to be physiognomic concordances, but the option is with the viewer to dismiss it as “coincidental” or intentional. The Juno figure in the Malmesbury Judgement does bear a resemblance to both “La Fornarina” and “La Donna Velata”  who are supposed to be modelled on Raphael’s inamorata. There are also the links between these women and drawings of women with antique poses in Raphael’s oeuvre to consider. According to Graeme Cameron, Raphael took care to paint a conjoined monogramme and date (1512) on the headband of the central figure- Venus, which is a subject to be returned to when the technical evidence is presented in the final post. If this is consistent with Raphael’s practice of “labelling” his women, of imposing his “brand” on the model, then that needs to be evaluated in the context of Rona Goffen’s work on so-called “designer labels” in Raphael. Labelling a work meant it had both professional and personal significance for him; should the labelled nude in the Malmesbury painting be seen in that regard?

The Source?

“For his painting “Les Trois Graces” Raphael took his inspiration from an antique marble. …originally .only the woman on the left holding an apple. It was therefore a portrayal of The Judgement of Paris, the shepherd shown in a painting of comparable size in The National Gallery, London, with the title The Knight’s Dream. Later Raphael changed his mind and put an apple in the hands of each of the women thus making them Hesperides…”

Nicole Garnier

Raphael, The Dream of a Knight, London, National Gallery, c. 1504.

The Malmesbury picture may not have been the first time that Raphael personalised a mythological painting with beautiful women. According to Linda Borlonton, Raphael’s Dream of a Knight should be seen as “a spiritual self portrait of Raphael, torn always between two opposing types of women”. The Choice theme was used as a biographical marker in the renaissance, particularly Dὕrer, who used the Choice of Hercules as way of representing himself at a crossroads, a life crisis.* As Damisch observes, it was Panofsky in his ground-breaking work on “Hercules at the Crossroads” who said that the labours of Hercules were sometimes conflated with the story of Paris in Attic vase painting. Damisch sees this confluence of Paris in the painting thought to be a “pendant” to the Knight’s Dream, the exquisite Three Graces, already mentioned, in the Museé Condé at Chantilly, which may have iconographic links to the Judgment of Paris theme. In the words of Nicole Garnier, a curator at Chantilly:

Composite of Knight’s Dream (Scipio’s Dream) and Three Graces, according to GC showing the genesis of the later painting is evident in these earlier compositions.

“For his painting “Les Trois Graces” Raphael took his inspiration from an antique marble. …originally .only the woman on the left holding an apple. It was therefore a portrayal of The Judgement of Paris, the shepherd shown in a painting of comparable size in The National Gallery, London, with the title The Knight’s Dream. Later Raphael changed his mind and put an apple in the hands of each of the women thus making them Hesperides…” We could regard this as an early example of Raphael’s “pictorial intelligence” on this subject, which he was to hone right up to the version of 1517.

A Precedent Composition? 

“The position of the river god in the Judgement of Paris [engraving] is echoed in reverse in Joseph Dreams and there is something of the younger god seated at the foot of Minerva recognisable in the brother closest to Joseph in the group on the left who listens intently with his head resting on his right hand. The setting is similar too to the Paris engraving, with the hillock to the left, an expanse of water in the background and foliage to the right. However, the progression from this work to the design for Joseph Dreams despite all similarities, was not a direct step. The figures had been used by Raphael when designing a basemento grisaille for the Stanza della Segnatura circa 1512.”

Racihel Le Goff.

Raphael, Joseph Reveals His Dreams, Loggia of Leo X, Vatican,

As we’ve journeyed far upstream to these early paintings,to what could be the source of the Judgement of Paris in the Dream of a Knight and Three Graces, let’s now change course and move in the opposite direction right up to the period when the engraving was made, a period when other works were created that, according to the supporters of the Malmesbury attribution, have compositional and spatial similarities with that picture.

One of these images, Joseph Reveals His Dreams forms part of Pope Leo’s loggia- the “Raphael Bible”- painted by Raphael and his workshop between 1518-19. Examining the claims of the Camerons, namely that this composition (traditionally given to Guilio Romano) proves Raphael’s definite involvement in the Malmesbury painting of 1512, AHT believes that they have a very good case. Not only do we have a figure based on a reclining river god, and one which resembles Paris in the English painting, but the group nearest to Joseph is composed of three interlocking figures which echoes the configuration of goddesses in the Malmesbury painting. A scholar at Oxford University, Rachel Le Goff, noted that the figure of the river god in the Judgment of Paris print was “echoed in reverse” in the pose of one of the brothers.  Le Goff also noted that there was something of the younger god seated neat to Minerva in the brother close to Joseph with his head on his hand. Le Goff further read the imprint of the Judgment of Paris through Marcantonio’s engraving as she was unaware of the Malmesbury painting; but can that work continue to be left out of account given the stylistic, iconographic and artistic associations explored in this post? Doubtless there will be those who know the Malmesbury painting that insist that any similarities between relatable works such as the Joseph reveal the influence of the print, not the painting.

Comparison of Judgement of Paris and Joseph Reveals His Dreams.

Yet, the figurative elements and spatial organisation resembles the Malmesbury version more. The onus is on the nay-sayers to show where the group of brothers to Joseph’s left originate because this interlocking group is not derived from the print, so there must be another source. Is this group an echo of the three goddess group in the 1512 painting?

Raphael and workshop, Cupid and the Three Graces, c. 1518, Farnesina, Vatican, fresco.

Implicit in this motif hunting, stylistic analysis and source-matching is the issue of whether the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris is the precedent composition for all such later narrative compositions such as the female nudes in the Villa Farnesina  loves of the gods?

The final instalment will present the scientific and technical data on the painting, probably within the next two weeks. Phew!

Notes.

Peter Paul Rubens, The Judgement of Paris, 1630s, National Gallery, London.

*In his Recollections of Rubens, Jacob Burckhardt says that Venus’s triumph over Paris is assured by the fact that she presents her body towards Paris alone: “Venus takes the centre of the three goddesses, and since she is also presented in profile, she alone can be seen full face by Paris, which means that she is victorious.” Damisch comments that the shepherd Paris is situated so that Venus can only be seen from the front whereas Minerva and Juno present themselves to the judging eye of Paris in profile, which means there is no chance of him seeing their genitals, which Damisch regards as the implication of Burckhardt’s statement! I’ll say more about post-Raphael treatments of the subject in a future blog post, not exclusively related to the Malmesbury picture.

·**I won’t write anything more on this here as I’ve got a publication in press where I discuss Raphael’s Dream of a Knight in relation to dreams and invention.

Sources

Joanne G. Bernstein, “The Female Model and the Renaissance Nude: Durer, Giorgione, and Raphael”, Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 13, No. 26. (1992), pp. 49-63.

Phyllis Pray Bober, Renaissance artists & antique sculpture: a handbook of sources / Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein; with contributions by Susan Woodford, London, England: H. Miller; Oxford: Oxford University Press, c1986.

Linda Borlonton,The Life & Times of Raphael , 1968.

Jacob Burckhardt, Recollections of Rubens, Phaidon Press; London, 1950.

Graeme Cameron, The Secrets of Leonardo da Vinci, Vol. 1, Vega Scans, 2011.

Graeme and Norman Cameron, unpublished research report on Malmesbury Judgement of Paris, 2011.

Martin Clayton, Raphael and his Circle Drawings from Windsor Castle, Merrill Holberton, London, 1999.

Hubert Damisch, Judgement de Paris. English, The Judgement of Paris; translated by John Goodman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, c1996.

Rona Goffen, “Raphael’s Designer Labels: From the Virgin Mary to La Fornarina”, Artibus et Historiae, Vol. 24, No. 48. (2003), pp. 123-142.

Paul Joannides, Drawings of Raphael, Berkeley Press, University of California, 1983.

Paul Joannides, “Titian, Giorgione and the Mysteries of Paris”, Artibus et historiae, no. 61 (XXI), 2010, 99-114.

Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael, New Haven [Conn.]: Yale University Press, 1983.

Claudia Lazzaro, “River gods: Personifying nature in sixteenth-century Italy”, Renaissance Studies, Vol. 25, 1, Feb 2011, 70-94.

Racihel A. Le Goff, “Joseph Reveals His Dreams to His Brothers”, Formal Research, Oxford University, 04/07/2005 http://raichel.org/articlesRaichel/Art-Research/GiuiloRomano.htm

Konrad Oberhuber, Raphael: the paintings, Munich; New York: Prestel, c1999.

Lisa Pon, Raphael, Durer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: copying and the Italian Renaissance print, New Haven: Yale University Press, c2004.

Philip Pouncey and J.A. Gere, Italian Drawings in the British Museum: Raphael and his Circle, British Museum, London, 1962, 2 vols.

John Shearman, Raphael in early modern sources (1483-1602), New Haven; London: Yale University Press, c2003.

John Shearman, “The Organisation of Raphael’s Workshop”, Art Institute of Chicago Centennial Lectures: Museum Studies 10, (1983), 40-57.

Various, Raphael: from Urbino to Rome, Hugo Chapman, Tom Henry and Carol Plazzotta, London: National Gallery Co., c2004.

Edgar Wind, “Virtue Reconciled with Pleasure” in Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, Oxford, OUP, 1950, 81-96.

The Malmesbury Judgement of Paris: the Full Picture, 2.

On one occasion, back in the dim and distant 1990s, the late lamented scholar, perhaps the last of the great modern connoisseurs, Sir Denis Mahon, used the metaphor of an edifice or an architectural structure to describe Poussin’s development.* When confronted with certain pictures that he thought didn’t fit into the edifice, he was apt to reject them and banish them to another art history building site. The metaphor is a neat one: structural features that don’t fit could lead to the whole building crashing down, or tilting at an angel like an art historical Tower of Pisa. I must confess that the idea of the edifice came to me when I first saw the Malmesbury Judgment of Paris. My initial reaction was that it looked too “Venetian” and therefore it couldn’t fit into Raphael’s stylistic development or edifice. However, after reading more on the subject, pondering all the material sent to me by Graeme Cameron, and thinking about the comments of another Raphael scholar- incidentally, also a Poussin scholar interested in stylistic progression- Konrad Oberhuber, I began to learn more about what Oberhuber, and other leading Raphael scholars were calling Raphael’s Venetian, even Giorgionesque phase, which coincides with the date of the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris, historically attributed to Giorgione. It’s a difficult idea to convey since it involves a whole raft of stylistic, cultural, even sociological factors, all of which can be called for the sake of convenience the Rome/Venice nexus.

Raphael Studies and the Rome/Venice Nexus.

Sebastiano del Piombo, The Death of Adonis. Probably painted in Rome after Sebastiano had arrived from Venice in 1511 with Agostino Chigi. Ducal Palace, Venice in background..

 

The connections between Roman and Venetian art has a long history, usefully discussed by Patricia Fortini Brown (Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past), but what was the relationship between the two cities in the period in which the Malmesbury picture is said to have evolved- 1510-12. More relevantly, what was the conduit through which Venetian ideas about painting were passed to Raphael and his workshop? A recent essay by Costanza Barbieri in 2005 has considered the links between Raphael’s and Sebastiano’s painting in Rome, and also linked it with patrons for whom both artists worked. As Barbieri points out, Agostini Chigi who commissioned the frescoes in the Loggia della Galatea, brought Sebastiano from Rome in 1511. Due to loans to the Vatican, Chigi had become superintendent of papal finances and was a farmer of an alum monopoly- probably the richest private gentleman in Italy at that time.As Barbieri plausibly said, in Venice, Chigi could have looked at the “facades of Venetian palaces”, particularly the Fondaco dei Tedeschi painted by Giorgione and Titian, now only known through copies and fragments. It was Barbieri’s view that it may have been as a result of viewing these frescoes that Chigi decided to bring Sebastiano- Giorgione’s pupil- to Rome to work on his villa, although it could be that Sebastiano thought he would have a better chance of advancing, away from the competitive milieu of Venice and Chigi was his passport. According to the Chigi family archives, (1618-30), Agostino met the painter in Venice and brought him with him to Rome in 1511 but “travelled very little after his youthful days.” On arrival in Rome, Sebastiano would have been the most important channel for the communication of Venetian painting, “the representative of the Venetian style in Rome.” Although nothing is known about the intended program of the Loggia, it may have been a competition situation with stylistic battle lines being drawn. As a result of this commission, and given Chigi’s Venetian links, Raphael learnt about Venetian technique; colours were imported from Venice, with Raphael even sending members of his workshop there to collect them. Although Raphael’s Galatea trumps Sebastiano with its classicism and its “archaeological and classical appearance” , to use Barbieri’s words, that scholar did believe that Raphael “looked at Sebastiano’s colour technique with interest close to emulation.” 

 

Sebastiano, Polyphemous and Raphael, Galatea, Villa Farnesina, both 1511. It is not known which came first, although it is likely to have been Sebastiano.

 

This interest in the Venetian influence on Raphael has been evolving since the late 1980s.** Carlo Pedretti said of the Sistine Madonna: “It appears with the technique of oil on canvas Raphael was after the chromatic effects of the Venetians.” More relevantly, in 1999, Oberhuber referred to a new phase in Venetian influence and “colour shift” involving “Giorgionesque richness…” going on to say “….and in other works we will see that Raphael had not overlooked what Chigi had brought with him from Venice.” This topic of Raphael and Venetian art had solidified by the time of the 2004 exhibition in London with Tom Henry observing that “Sebastiano may well have brought some completed paintings with him, and Raphael probably sought him out and studied his work as soon as he arrived.” One of these may have been Sebastiano’s Death of Adonis, which AHT suggested in an earlier post Raphael must have seen. It is a transitional work because it blends Venetian colorito with the statuesque grandeur of Michelangelo. Also, the inclusion of the Ducal Palace in Venice serves to underline the link with that city. Barbieri’s essay drew all these scholarly thoughts and strands together, but with the focus on how Raphael’s stylistic preferences were formed out of his study of Giorgione and Sebastiano.

 

Raphael, Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, Louvre, c. 1514.

 

There was already a context for this since the author of a book on renaissance colour, as well as the editor of the Raphael Cambridge volume, Marcia Hall, argued that the technique of Sebastiano’s Polyphemous may have inspired the “unifying effects” in Raphael’s School of Athens of 1511-12 (noted by Barbieri). The preparation of the wall in the Venetian way resulted in “purplish grey tint to the intonaco.” Wether this is borne out by the restoration of the Loggia , which may have ended now as the rooms are open to the public, remains to be seen. Barbieri observes that this hands-on research will add “important information about concerning the stylistic development of Raphael.” In a technical discussion of Sebastiano’s painting, Barbieri also noted the influence of Venetian glazing technique on Raphael’s Portrait of Castiglione, of about 1514 whose painting technique “using thin layers of superimposing colours to obtain the final hue” was similar to Venetian methods analysed in renaissance treatises on the art of painting.

 

Raphael, detail from The Liberation of St Peter, Vatican, Stanza di Elidoro, 1514.	Sebastiano del Piombo, Pieta, 1516, Museo Civico, Viterbo.

 

It was also believed by Barbieri that the dazzling light effects in the magnificent fresco of the Liberation of St Peter, may have been influenced by Sebastiano’s Viterbo Pietà, current with the fresco. According to Barbieri, a lost Giorgione painting (Self-Portrait as Orpheus) had similar notte effects- a demand for these night scenes may have been created by patrons. This author speculates about Raphael learning about night time effects from prints such as Marcantonio Raimondi’s “Il Morbetto”, but is inclined to believe that Raphael’s knowledge of these light effects came from Venice, especially Giorgione’s experiments.

 

Malmesbury Judgement, 1512.

 

One of the claims of the compilers of the research summary on the Malmesbury J of Paris is that this picture shows Raphael’s absorption of Giorgione: “it was Raphael’s unique ability to absorb and adapt other master artist’s styles that has led to its profound Venetian and ”Giorgionesque” appearance.” (Cameron). We know that Raphael was a great synthesiser of other painter’s styles and ideas, but does it therefore follow that the Malmesbury painting is by his hand, albeit in a “Giorgionesque” manner? This incorporation of other painting styles has been noted on occasion by Raphael scholars. In the catalogue to the 2004 Raphael exhibition, Tom Henry and Carol Plazzota relevantly stated that Raphael assimilated various styles but also established his own; “He was quick to appreciate quality and absorb innovation, adapting and improving the inventions of other masters with incredible ease.” Yet none of these scholars has noted the significance of the Malmesbury painting, which the authors claim is explained by its attribution to Giorgione for 500 centuries. Centuries of attribution certainly are a stumbling block to accepting the current identification, which is one of the main challenges facing its supporters. Yet, to be fair to the authors, it should be pointed out that Oberhuber, a compiler of a Raphael catalogue of pictures, and a scholar fascinated by artistic development, did point out that “The larger picture of Raphael’s output has not been fully painted.” Oberhuber believed that certain works of Raphael “delicate and more finely executed products” remained “unrecognised.” Had Oberhuber not died in 2007, it would have been interesting to see if he would have admitted the Malmesbury Judgment of Paris into this small enclave of overlooked works. As it stands, it remains to be seen how this scholarship develops in the future, or if it turns out to be a cul-de-sac in Raphael studies.

Nuancing Stylistic Growth in Raphael’s Art.

What exactly was Oberhuber trying to say here? He was formulating a project which depended more on the micro analysis of paintings rather than the allocation of stylistic factors to broad swathes of Raphael’s development; an approach that hasn’t customarily troubled Raphael scholarship, though this relates to other painters as well. Traditional connoisseurship has relied more on determining stylistic homology between groups of paintings rather than the microanalysis that Oberhuber was seeking. There had been hints of this interest in the nuances of stylistic growth before Oberhuber though. Cecil Gould, in a 1982 article considered the problem of the authorship of Raphael’s paintings, particularly those attributed to Guilio Romano. Gould ventured that Raphael’s oeuvre was more varied than hitherto thought; the painter varied his manner in nearly every picture, which Gould observed created “obvious problems of connoisseurship, even in the years when he was painting pictures just by himself.”

To keep this in balance, Gould was considering late Raphael when his workshop had been established rather than the period of 1510-12 when the Roman workshop was establishing itself. Nevertheless, , the problem of authorship is clearly germane to the earlier Roman period as the controversial re-appearance of either copies of Raphael’s Portrait of Julius II by his own hand or the workshop show. The essential point to grasp here is that technical notes about colour made by scholars such as Hall, Barbieri and Oberhuber do point to a less uniformly stylistic development and to a variegated evolution due to influences that Raphael encountered in this period, which have yet to be assimilated into the study of Raphael’s paintings. This is clearly one of the main problems that supporters of the Malmesbury attribution face: it’s difficult to even get interested parties to grasp the context of a Rome/Venice nexus and its effect on Raphael’s development, let alone persuade decriers to support the attribution. However, once this stylistic diversity advocated by leading Raphael scholars is accepted, it then becomes fair to consider whether this stylistic fluctuation is accounted for by Raphael studying painters like Giorgione, or at least the School of Venice’s works disseminated in Rome in that crucial period of 1510-12. It is a matter of record that from 1510 onwards Raphael had access to Venetian styles through the pupils of Giorgione, Sebastiano del Piombo and maybe even Titian. In 2004, Henry speculated about Raphael having the chance to see early works of Titian “which may have reached Rome by this time.” This begs the obvious question: how could the Malmesbury J of Paris fit into this stylistic intersection of Roman and Venetian art? If we create a new edifice consisting of “Venetian” and Central Italian styles, then where would the Malmesbury canvas be located in the structure?

The Influence of Giorgione and the Venetian School on the Malmesbury Painting.

Giorgione and Titian, Concert Champetre, Louvre, 1508-9.	Malmesbury Judgement, 1512.

 

The obvious Venetian painting to compare the Malmesbury picture to is the Concert Champetre, whose attribution gauge registers equally with Titian and Giorgione, though it’s more likely to reflect a confluence of influences in early cinquecento Venice, even Sebastiano for some scholars. This beautiful picture epitomises the Arcadian ideal, and it explains partly why the Malmesbury Judgement has been assigned to Giorgione since it possesses the same atmosphere of drowsy pastoral lyricism, though this is slightly qualified by an identifiable mythological subject which works against the poetic abstraction. The authors of the Raphael research summary perceive a link not only between the Louvre Concert, but also the canonical Tempest by Giorgione, so we have three paintings- a triangle of works with the Louvre Concert as its apex. One angle of this triangle, Giorgione’s Tempesta is too vast a subject to deal with here, although specific characteristics have been claimed between it and the Malmesbury Judgement.

 

Comparisons of Malmesbury Paris with contemporary figures in Concert Champetre and Tempesta. (Graeme Cameron)

 

In his Secrets of Leonardo da Vinci Vol. 1, Graeme Cameron said that the seated figure in the Malmesbury painting was “reminiscent of the standing figure in Giorgione’s Tempesta.” AHT claims no expert knowledge of renaissance costume; it merely notes similarities between the dress, -“the parti-coloured tights and plumes and slashes of the sixteenth-century”, to use Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s words- worn by figures in all three paintings We can also add an observation of Frank DeStefano made to AHT after posting the first report in this series. He points out that in the 1999 Giorgione catalogue edited by Pedrocco and Pignatti, a picture they attribute to Giorgione, a "Rustic Idyll" seems to have stylistic links with the Malmesbury J of Paris. This will need to be checked when the libraries re-open, but this 12x19cm panel pictures a young man with a woman who holds an infant. DeStefano observes that the costume of the man in this painting is “remarkably similar to the one worn by Paris in the Judgments.” On a related point- which takes us back to Joannides, Frank DeStefano says that he originally thought this picture was a Rest on the Flight into Egypt, but now believes it could be depicting the story of Paris and Oenone, suggesting the influence of humanists in Venice. In passing, the importance of the treatment of the J of Paris in the Rome/Venice nexus should not be overlooked here. As Joannides said in his article on Titian, Giorgione and Paris, more research is needed on the relationship of poetry and painting in the humanist culture of Venice

“Much investigation remains to be carried out on the interaction of poetry and painting in Venice around 1500 and it is likely that only a systematic appraisal of vernacular literature, and perhaps poems and stories, that remain unpublished in manuscripts- or merely the operations of chance- will recover lost relations.” (Joannides)

As was said in the last section, much the same kind of project (inspired by Damisch’s point about the origin of Raphael’s knowledge about the J of Paris story) needs to evaluate the themes of the Malmesbury J of Paris within the milieu of 15^th century humanists in Rome, especially as it seems that one of the figures in the Malmesbury Judgement can be linked with a Raimondi engraving- more of that later. This cultured elite included poets and patrons, some of whom – like Chigi, who is now thought to be a facilitator of knowledge of Venetian painting styles- had direct cultural links with that city and were on good terms with Raphael and members of his workshop. That humanist culture obviously impacted on styles, and one might add this proposed research on poetry and painting is just as important an aspect of the Rome/Venus nexus as studying the stylistic, physiognomic and technical elements of the painting, the subject of the next section. Whether one agrees with the attribution or not, it seems perverse not to accept that research on the Malmesbury J of Paris should evolve along these lines.

Why hasn’t this Raphael attribution merited more attention?

The above question, prompted by a challenge from by H Niyazi of TPP, needs to be addressed. Why hasn’t the publication of the Malmesbury J of Paris attracted more interest? Apart from the fact that this blog isn’t the Burlington Magazine or some other such august journal- but you knew that already didn't you- there are probably a number of reasons.

· There is no context in Raphael studies for an evaluation of this picture. As I’ve been at pains to show in this post, the concept of the Rome/Venice nexus is comparatively recent. If we exclude the romanticist biographically- centred approach of Crowe and Cavalcaselle in the late 19^th century,this research strand starts in the 1980s and begins to gain momentum at the start of the last decade. Every field of art history evolves at a different rate; some ideas take time to bed down. Oberhuber’s death may slow down interest in the Rome/Venice nexus with obvious consequences for this attribution; although the likes of Joannides and Barbieri show that it remains a strand of thought in Raphael studies, though both have different motives in pursuing it. This in itself doesn’t prove the attribution, but it helps to identify a context of stylistic development in which it seems to have appeared.

· At the risk of labouring this point, Raphael scholarship hasn’t paid much attention to the Judgement of Paris as a subject of interest to the humanistic matrix of early cinquecento Rome. Curiously, Damisch’s book on the Judgement of Paris- which devotes a lot of space to Raphael and abounds with relevant insights- hasn’t really been assimilated into analyses. This may have something to do with the bias against art history conducted by French scholars whose methodology- for better or worse- is more theoretical. The recent publication of Christian K. Kleinbub’s study of Raphael which draws heavily on modern French thought is a welcome exception to the rule.

· The Malmesbury J of Paris doesn’t fit the Raphael “edifice” and hence is dismissed. Yet leading Raphael scholars seem, if not to actually want to re-build that structure, at least re-design it to accommodate the Venetian elements. Wether Raphael scholars want to include the Malmesbury painting into this “re-build” is obviously a key question.

· Interest in the J of Paris has focused on Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving alone, though occasionally it has been linked with other contemporary works as we’ll see. Joannides’s identification of the Venus figure in the Malmesbury painting with an engraving produced in Raphael’s workshop obviously helps to narrow the gap between the interpreter of Raphael’s J of Paris print, and the re-discovered picture. However, Joannides uses this source to argue the painting as a lost Titian creation, not a Raphael design. Obviously the next step is to analyse the links between the Malmesbury J of Paris and the engraving of the same subject, testing the claim that both contain stylistic, formal, as well as physiognomic similarities.

To make this absolutely clear, this will comprise the following: (a) analysis of Marcantonio’s engraving of the J of Paris, and surviving fragments compared with the Malmesbury picture; (b) analysis of morphological and physiognomic elements in the painting; (c) analysis of compositional similarities with Raphael’s works pre and post Malmesbury Judgement; (d) analysis of proposed biographical connections with figures in the painting including “La Fornarina” and Raphael himself. I’ll aim to get this penultimate section up round about Jan 10th, marking and other work permitting.

Notes.

* Sir Denis- who sadly died in April this year-, used this term on a BBC programme made to accompany the Poussin exhibition of 1994 in London. Sir Denis, who was taking Blunt to task for not understanding Poussin’s pictorial language or his artistic personality, cheerfully criticised the former surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures for not being a connoisseur. I have come across the metaphor of architecture in other writings on connoisseurship from time to time; but Sir Denis is the only one who linked it explicitly with fitting pictures into an artist’s oeuvre. Konrad Oberhuber’s catalogue of early Poussin at Fort Worth in 1984 relies on environmental factors, as well as stylistic ones to chart the artist’s early development over time. Some of this crossed over into his Raphael catalogue of 1999.

** The earliest attempt to connect Raphael with the Venetian school, especially Giorgione, seems to have been made by those two great Victorian art explorers, Crowe and Cavalcaselle who saw associations between Venetian painting and Raphael’s landscapes. Apart from the odd throwaway line about Giorgione’s landscapes reminding them of “early Raphael”, they draw attention to a painting of a soldier in the London NG supposedly derived from Giorgione’s Castelfranco Altarpiece; they note how its quality merited an attribution to Raphael, though they maintained it was one of Giorgione’s studies for the altarpiece. AHT has not been able to find out anything more about this attribution; but this work has now been downgraded to a “17^th century imitator of Giorgione” and is thought to have no connection with the Castelfranco painting. As to the attribution to Raphael, AHT merely notes that it may have been inspired by comparisons between the armour on Raphael’s early St George panels in the Louvre and Washington and the high quality reflections on the London soldier. It can be seen here. Obviously in early art history, Raphael’s pre-Roman works stimulated comparisons with the Venetian school, not Rome, as in later scholarship- an interesting shift.

Sources.

Costanza Barbieri, “The Competition between Raphael and Michelangelo and Sebastiano’s Role in It”, in The Cambridge Guide to Raphael (ed) Marcia Hall, (2005).

Patricia Fortini Brown, Venice and Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past, (1996).

Graeme Cameron, The Secrets of Leonardo da Vinci Vol. 1 (2011).

Fabio Chigi, History of the Chigi Family (1618, rev. 1626-30).

Hubert Damisch, Le Jugement de Paris: Iconologie analytique 1, (Paris, 1992); translated as The Judgement of Paris (trans John Goodman), (Chicago, 1996).

Cecil Gould, “Raphael versus Giulio Romano: The Swing Back”, The Burlington Magazine , Vol. 124, No. 953. (Aug., 1982), pp. 479-485+487.

Marcia Hall, Colour and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (1994).

Paul Joannides, Titian to 1518: The Assumption of Genius, (2001).

Paul Joannides, “Titian, Giorgione and the Mysteries of Paris”, Artibus et historiae, no. 61 (XXI), 2010, 99-114.

Denis Mahon, The Late Show, Thinker, Painter, Scholar, Spy, BBC, 1994.

Konrad Oberhuber, Poussin: The Origins of French Classicism in Rome, exhibition catalogue, Fort Worth (1984).

Konrad Oberhuber, Raphael: The Paintings, (1999).

Pedretti, Carlo, Raphael : his life and work in the splendours of the Italian Renaissance, with new documents and an unpublished essay by Vincenzo Golzio, (1989).

Various, Raphael: From Urbino to Rome, exhibition catalogue, London, NG, (2004).

Zampetti, Giorgione, 1477-1511, the complete paintings of Giorgione / introduction by Cecil Gould, (1970).

Judgement of Paris debate: first response.

This is just a quick post- a placeholder, if you like- to acknowledge the controversy about the Judgement of Paris, attributed to Raphael. It’s obvious to me that there are omissions on both sides, and we need more information before we can launch a real debate about it. When I tried to summarise the information in Graeme Cameron’s book, I wasn’t in possession of all his research matter; what appears in his book is just the tip of a much larger iceberg. However, to help me with my off-line researches into the Judgement of Paris generally, and renaissance aesthetics, Graeme Cameron has sent me his complete research material on the painting, which includes technical and scientific data. I’m currently sifting through this material and will present a summary of its main points in a series of posts over the next month as I’m anxious to give a wider research picture to aid interpretation and evaluation. This will aim to put the Malmesbury Judgement in its art historical, stylistic, technical and Raphael studies contexts. After that its up to the individual whether to accept, attribute, or reject this picture. I’m not going to fall out with anybody over this attribution.

A few points. On the question of quality, including whether this is a copy or schoolwork, I would point out that three of the most eminent scholars of the nineteenth-century vouched for the quality of this picture: Gustave Waagen, J.David.Passavant and Sir Charles Eastlake, although admittedly they assigned it to Giorgione, not Raphael- the attribution was removed in the twentieth-century. I must also clarify a point which is also important. All of these experts were affiliated to institutions: Waagen, (former Director of Berlin’s Gemaldegalerie and its first Professor of Art History); Passavant who was the Berlin Gemaldegalerie’s Curator and an artist; Eastlake who was then Britain’s foremost art historian, also an artist and former Director of The National Gallery London). Indeed, I can recall Lady Eastlake’s comment on her husband’s ability to detect copies or doubtful attributions. “My husband is a fountainhead of knowledge and seldom quits a collection of any kind without having cleared up some doubtful masters for the owners. The way in which [Sir Charles] smashes a false name is sometimes very amusing. “ (Correspondence of Lady Eastlake).

I should have made this clear, but this picture was hardly “private” since it did have an institutional record. These three institutionally connected scholars provided letters of attestation to the picture’s qualities and its Giorgione authorship. Obviously, this begs the question of why then didn’t they assign it to Raphael? I think the answer partly lies in the fact that the link between Raphael, Giorgione and the Venetian school is new in scholarship and Eastlake and his colleagues weren’t aware of this angle. There’s a whole new avenue to be opened up on Raphael and the Venetians, as is evident from reading this unpublished research. Published articles on this subject have only been appearing quite recently; I’ll say more about this in a future post on the painting’s significance to Raphael studies.

As for Hubert Damisch, the significance of his book for this specific debate is that in a an important discussion of the Raimondi engraving, Damisch refers to an  “an absent but conjectured “Masterpiece” by Raphael related to Marcantonio’s “The Judgement of Paris.” Although Damisch's book ranges far beyond the visual images, he is very well informed about visual art. He was taught by American art historians of the calibre of Meyer Schapiro and has curated exhibitions of drawings at the Louvre. I’ve no idea what he would make of this painting, but his book, without doubt, provides one of the most important contexts for further research on this painting and its themes.

That’s it for now. I’ll aim to get the first in this series up next week, but first there’s the tale of two Leonardos to tell.

 

Raphael and the Judgement of Paris.

I promised a follow-up post on the Graeme Cameron review, specifically with reference to the Judgement of Paris considered by that writer to be an autograph work by Raphael. What follows is a summary of the painting distilled from details in GC’s book, but set out in catalogue form. It’s followed by an essay on themes and ideas in the work. Thanks to Graeme Cameron for permission to use the images, and to his brother Norman for supplying information, and fielding my questions.

1. Raphael, The Judgement of Paris, 1512, Private Collection, U.K., 56 x 71 cm.

 

Raphael, The Judgement of Paris, oil on canvas, 56 x 71 cm, Private Collection, U.K.

Provenance.

First recorded in 1648 in the Casa Leoni, near Venice, by Carlo Ridolfi, in his Le Maraviglie dell Arte, as painted by Giorgione; bought by the Hon. James Harris MP, father of 1^st Earl of Malmesbury, in Venice in 1770. Subsequently housed in Malmesbury collection at Heron Court, near Salisbury, except when loaned out to exhibitions- see below. Mentioned by Gustave Waagen (fig 5) as a Giorgione in his Treasures of Art in Great Britain” (1854-7, Vol. 1, p.416) thus, “his Lordship possesses a number of (paintings) several of great value.” The Judgement of Paris”…slender yet powerful figures…warmest golden tones especially striking in this beautiful picture…delicately balanced masses of light in the different planes of distance…and in the background, of…the luminous light of the fine landscape.” A later endorsement of the painting was made by the renaissance scholar, Sir Martin Conway, who said in his monograph on Giorgione; “a very beautiful picture of Paris and the Three Goddesses.” He went on to say that “The Three Goddesses are a beautifully composed group of lovely figures.”

Exhibitions.

Manchester 1857 (“Art Treasures Exhibition”, Manchester, no. 251, “Giorgione”); Leeds, 1868 (“National Exhibition of Works of Art”, no. 214, “Giorgione”); London 1894 (New Gallery, “Exhibition of Venetian Art”, no. 29); London 1912 (R.A., Burlington House, accompanied by full page engraved plate, again as a “Giorgione” fig. 4); London 1929 (Burlington Fine Arts Club, “Early Venetian Exhibition”); Melbourne, 1984 (Special Exhibition.).

Related Works and Close Copies.

2.a-c. clockwise, Uffizi, Dresden and Stockholm copies.

3.Gubbio variant, almost certainly after Stockholm version.

4.1912, engraving, Burlington House exhibition.

Florence, Uffizi Gallery, cited as “Unknown 17thC artist’s copy after a lost Titian”, formerly in “Enrico Albuzio” Collection, Venice. Nearest to the original. (fig 2a)

Lost (destroyed during Allied bombing in WW2), formerly in Dresden Gallery. Revised copy; also recorded as by an Unknown 17thC artist, but content “much simplified” and “reduced.” Many original features missing including rear buildings and Mercury in the sky. (2b)

Stockholm, National Gallery of Sweden, formerly in the Larpent Collection, Oslo. Initially classified as by Unknown artist, but its previous owner, Sophus Larpent, was prepared to go into print to prove it as a Giorgione. (2c)

Gubbio, Gubbio Gallery. Almost identical variant to Stockholm version, attributed to “Dinesi”. Seems to be a later direct copy of the version owned by Larpent. (fig.3)

Engraving to 1912 RA. Exhibition. (fig. 4)

Technical Notes

5. Gustave Waagen

The painting is on canvas, a support that Raphael began to use about 1512- 13, probably in response to Sebastiano’s importation of Venetian methods. The canvas has been relined a long time ago; however, the weave of the original does not appear to exhibit the loose, rough facture evident, for example on the surface of Giorgione’s The Tempest. The canvas may be fine linen judging by the surface evidence. In his Treasures of Art in Great Britain, Gustave Waagen (fig. 5) included a reference to the condition of the painting as being in ...."an excellent state of preservation”, a condition it retains today, having been under glass in its frame. No substantial cleaning has been undertaken [unless many centuries ago] and it appears to retain its original glazes. Many of the photos do indicate craquelure (fig. 1), and it is both normal [and expected] for the period. How it appears in any particular photo depends on lighting angles etc.

6. Page from GC’s book showing hidden modello study and its location.

 

7. Magnified Vega scans of modello from GC’s book.

There are substantial sub-surface pentimenti suggesting that Raphael had used the canvas “like a drawing board” (G.C., 72). The basis of the composition was a rustic figure in a monk-like garment, seated next to a tree. At some point during the evolution of the composition, Raphael characteristically re-thought his design and decided to include his own features rather than an anonymous shepherd. The facial change was followed by new garments, in a renaissance style. Thus Raphael steered the composition away from a rustic pastoral into something more individual and personal. The changes also confirm that originally the painting was not intended as a specific mythology- no apple was originally in the man’s lower right hand- but some evocation of an Arcadian setting, with little narrative content. On the subsurface there is a Madonna and Child modello (figs 6-7), which might be an abandoned project from Raphael’s late 1512 period in Rome; it would be helpful to compare it with underdrawings in other Raphael Madonnas from that time slot. The Judgement of Paris is signed and dated “Rv 1512” on the golden apple that Paris holds; the date “1512” can also be seen on the headband of the central figure, Venus.

Subject and Themes.

8. Detail of Judgement of Paris, Paris.	9.Detail of Judgement of Paris, Minerva, Venus and Juno.

The Judgement of Paris was a favourite subject of many renaissance and early modern painters, as it offered the chance to depict nudes within pleasant surroundings. Although there are variations on the theme, the basic composition of three beautiful women regarded by a male was never changed. Charged with the task of choosing which of the three goddesses, Hera, Aphrodite and Athena (Juno, Venus and Minerva) was the most beautiful, the shepherd Paris chose Aphrodite/Venus, with dire consequences- the Trojan War. Raphael’s Judgment of Paris eschews the grand narrative theme in favour of a more intimate situation. It is a painting conceived to please the eye, with its glistening palette and warm colours. Paris lounges on the grass, dressed in attractive burgundy and white renaissance costume (fig.8); the three goddesses, painted in golden brown and moulded together into a unified form, charm the viewer (fig.9). In tone it is both sensual and courtly; in style, it’s both relaxed and ordered.

It’s no wonder that leading 19^th century connoisseurs like Waagen and Eastlake saw the lyricism of Giorgione in this painting, though by the 1950s, their modern successors were re-considering the attribution; although it was- unsurprisingly- still thought to be a product of the Venetian School. A scholar who has analysed the stylistic links between Roman and Venetian art, Paul Joannides, believed that it was a copy after a lost original of Titian, although he didn’t mention it in his book on early Titian, but did so in a presentation at a Giorgione exhibition held in the U.S.A., and later in an article.[1] To my eye, though the canvas undoubtedly evokes the Venetian Arcadian groves of Giorgione and Titian, there is something Roman about the nudes. In his discussion of it, Graeme Cameron- who’s worked on the painting since 1984- connects it with Sebastiano dell Piombo, a Venetian artist who came to Rome at about this time, to aid Michelangelo.[2] Sebastiano’s artistic relationship with Raphael has mainly been analysed in the context of the competition engineered by the Medici, out of which emerged Raphael’s Transfiguration (Vatican, 1518-20) and Sebastiano’s equally impressive Raising of Lazarus (London, National Gallery, 1518-20).[3] When competition in the earlier Roman period is considered, attention is usually directed towards Raphael’s Galatea and Sebastiano’s Polyphemous- both in the Villa Farnesina (figs 16,17). In the case of the Malmesbury Judgement, it may be more judicious to select another Sebastiano from the same period for comparison.

10. Raphael, The Judgement of Paris, 1512.

11. Sebastiano del Piombo, The Death of Adonis, 1512, Florence, Uffizi, oil on canvas.

It’s an interesting exercise to compare this Judgement of Paris with Sebastiano’s Death of Adonis (Florence, Uffizi), especially as both seem to have been painted in  1512 (figs 10-11). Studying the two paintings, one can discern similarities in mannerisms: the hook like configuration of forefinger and thumb that appears in the Sebastiano is repeated in the hand of the reclining figure of Paris, in the Raphael; there also seems to be echoes of the sharp, chisel like noses in the Raphael nudes. However, there are distinct differences, too. Unlike Sebastiano who’s content to conspicuously display his knowledge of classical sculpture, the Spinario, Crouching Venus et al, possibly as a concession to Roman taste, Raphael has naturalised his female antique sources, a process that can be traced back to the Three Graces (Chantilly, Musée Condé, 1507. As Cameron points out, the Judgement could be seen as a stylistic mid-point between the earlier Chantilly Three Graces and the Graces in a spandrel in the Loggia of Agostino Chigi, ( p. 74,) (figs 12-14).

12.Raphael, The Three Graces, Musée Condé Chantilly, 1507, oil on panel.	13.Detail of Judgement of Paris.	14.Detail from Loggia of Villa, Farnesina, Rome, The Three Graces, fresco, c. 1518.

As one might expect, Raphael’s figures do resemble real women while Sebastiano’s nymphs recall Michelangelo’s unhappy results when representing the female form, in the words of Sydney J. Freedberg, “an almost bulking massiveness, ponderous and sensuously splendid: idealizations, but of sensuous existence.”[4]

15.Hera? (La Fornarina) from Judgement and details of La Donna Velata, Florence, Pitti Palace, c. 1514, and Sistine Madonna, Vatican, c. 1512-14.

If Raphael borrowed, to use Freedberg’s word, a Giorgionismo style from Sebastiano, then what was the purpose? Assuming, as Graeme Cameron states, Raphael created the Judgment of Paris for private reasons, as “a pictorial message of love, set in a context of a mythical classical beauty contest” (p.64); if the painting has some connection with Raphael's own love affairs, which the presence of a woman resembling his lover “La Fornarina” definitely suggests (fig15), then Raphael might have seen in Sebastiano’s Death of Adonis, or similar works, a blend of Roman grandeur and Venetian sensuality appropriate for his aesthetic of love.  According to Joannides, Sebastiano may have painted the Death of Adonis immediately after his arrival in Rome; it may have hung in the Chigi Villa of the Farnesina since Peruzzi cited aspects of it in his Sala delle Prospettive of 1516, an illusionistic set of paintings based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, on the piano nobile of the Villa Farnesina..[5] If that were the case then Raphael would surely have seen the Death of Adonis and filtered its Giorgionismo through his antique, Roman style that he was using. Raphael started working for Chigi in 1510, and he was working on the Galatea in 1512, a possible pendant to Sebastiano’s Polyphemous (figs 16-17), who resembles the satyr at the rear of the nymphs in the Death of Adonis..For those who remain wary of admitting the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris to the Raphael canon, they will have to detect another Venetian painter practicing in Rome in 1512. Apart from an influx of Tuscan, Sienese and Umbrian painters, Venice is not really represented in the Eternal City until Sebastiano arrives, and his Giorgionismo is then assimilated into the Roman antique style in that crucial time slot of 1511-12.However, it seems highly unlikely that Sebastiano, or even Titian painted the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris. It should also be pointed out that the Judgement of Paris wasn’t really a Venetian subject.

16. Loggia di Galatea, Villa Farnesina, Rome, 1510-12.	17. Sebastiano del Piombo, Polyphemous and Raphael, Galatea, 1511-12, Villa Farnesina, Rome, Rome, fresco.

18 Marcantonio Raimondi, The Judgement of Paris (after Raphael), 1514-18. Detail: “piu grassa Minerva.”

In the “censored” version, known for centuries through the famous Marcantonio Raimondi engraving (fig.18), the aesthetic of love was played down, and the mythological overtones increased. Although little connection has been made by past scholarship between the Raimondi engraving and the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris, there are obvious compositional similarities, as pointed out by Graeme Cameron, (64-5). He notes the close juxtaposition of the heads of Venus and Juno, which repeats the configuration of the heads in the painting. The pose of the reclining river god in Raimondi’s engraving also closely matches Paris in the Malmesbury Judgement There is still the problem of Athena/Minerva, who was separated from the group and turned away from the spectator, unlike in the painting. In the engraving, Minerva has the proportions of Sebastiano’s oversize nudes; but according to Hubert Damisch, by placing Minerva on the “compositional central axis”, Raphael referenced Alberti’s distinction between painting and mathematics, “whereas geometry has need only of points without extension, of lines without thickness, of surfaces without texture, art requires a “fatter Minerva”, piu grassa Minerva.[6] Lines here refer to drawing, and the “fatter Minerva” to the needs of painting rather than graphic delineation. As Damisch observed, Raphael “cast his demonstration in black and white, without recourse to colour”.[7] This is simply a hypothesis, but I wonder if Raphael chose black and white in the engraving because he wanted to convey an altered idea of beauty, different to the vivid, warm colours of the painted Judgement of Paris?

19 Malmesbury Judgment of Paris.

20 Raimondi, Judgment of Paris.

21 Details of Judgement and Sistine Madonna

Damisch’s long study of the theme of the Judgment of the Paris concerns itself just as much with beauty as iconography; and we should consider beauty when we view the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris, especially when seen alongside Raimondi’s engraving, (figs 19-20). We should also take seriously Graeme Cameron’s claim that the Judgment of Paris is a personal statement of Raphael. Why else would the painter compare himself to Paris, and the goddesses to the women in his life? For those who doubt the attribution to Raphael, they will need to explain why Paris resembles Raphael’s self-portraits (fig.22); why the woman on the left of the goddess group resembles portraits of La Fornarina, and women like the Virgin in the Sistine Madonna, or La Donna Velata (figs. 15,21), who are thought to be modelled on Raphael’s lover. However, another problem emerges here. If the woman on the left is Athena/Minerva- the robes covering her suggest modesty- then why did Raphael neglect to give Aphrodite/Venus the features of his inamorata? As Damisch argued, though both Athena and Hera incarnated different notions of beauty, it was Aphrodite who was associated with a canonical idea of beauty, derived from the Greeks, (Damisch, 132). Out of the three goddesses in the painting, it is Aphrodite/Venus who seems to based conspicuously on an antique source. Despite Aphrodite according with classical canons of antique beauty, Graeme Cameron might be right to say the La Fornarina figure is likely to be Hera, as she was said to have the greatest beauty, (66). His identification may be confirmed by the fact that in one of the later related copies, attributes have been included to identify each goddess. In the Larpent version and its associated variant (figs 2c and 3) Athena’s arms appear on the grass behind the right hand woman; a cupid accompanies the central female, thus proving that she is Aphrodite/Venus, which means the remaining goddess must be Hera. Yet, there is a further complication since deep scans have detected Raphael’s monogramme “Rv” on the genitals of the middle woman. Such explorations into the technical and sexual boggle the mind, but they do underline the confusion over who is the most attractive woman, if Hera is modelled on “La Fornarina”, and Aphrodite is “branded” as an inamorata of the painter. We could account for this confusion over pulchritude by turning to Raphael’s own words on beauty and women. As he said in a famous letter to his friend Baldassare Castiglione, possibly depicted with Raphael in a later self-portrait (fig. 23).

“..in order to paint a beautiful woman, I would have to see several beautiful women …but because there are so few … I make use of a certain idea which comes into my mind. Whether it carries any excellence of art I do not know, but I work hard to achieve it.’[8]

22 illustrations from GC’s book: Paris figure (with varnish removed) compared with Raphael Self-Portrait. from School of Athens, 1510-12.	23 Raphael, Self-Portrait with a Friend, possibly Castiglione, Paris, Louvre, c. 1518, oil on canvas, 99 x 83 cm.

Was that “idea” to be associated with Aphrodite, Athena, Hera, or all of the goddesses? It’s difficult to say, but Raphael’s treatment of the goddesses in the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris suggests that he had a more complex notion of how feminine beauty could be calibrated. More work needs to be done on the relationship between the re-discovered Judgment of Paris and the engraving in relation to beauty. Damisch is the obvious reference point here. Questions remain of course. It needs to be determined where this painting was before the 17th century; was it in Raphael’s private collection, or maybe Chigi’s who was aware of the cross-over between Raphael’s love life and his painting. We also need to discover exactly what Raphael learnt about the Venetian school via Sebastiano’s paintings; this applies especially to his use of materials and supports. Though it may not be possible, it would help to compare the under drawing and pentimenti in the Judgment with other examples in Raphael’s oeuvre.

However, it seems fair to say for the present that the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris might be a visual counterpart to Raphael’s written meditations on seeking the ideal in women, especially given its personal associations. Raphael cast his aesthetic of love in terms of a subject which was perfectly appropriate, because it brought themes of selection, beauty and love together in close interaction, the Judgement of Paris.

Sources

Albert, Della Pittura.

Constant Barbieri, “Raphael, Michelangelo and Sebastiano” in The Cambridge Guide to Raphael, ed. Marcia Hall, (Cambridge, 2005), 141-164.

Graeme Cameron, The Secrets of Leonardo da Vinci, Vol 1, Vega Scan, 2011.

Hubert Damisch, Le Jugement de Paris: Iconologie analytique 1, (Paris, 1992); translated as The Judgement of Paris (trans John Goodman), (Chicago, 1996).

Sydney J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500-1600, (New Haven and London, 1993).

Rona Goffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New Haven and London, 2002).

Paul Joannides, Titian to 1518: The Assumption of Genius (New Haven and London, 2002).

Edward Williamson, “The Concept of Grace in the Work of Raphael and Castiglione”, Italica, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Dec., 1947), pp. 316-324.

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[1] Joannides was one of several academics who gave public seminar lectures at the National Gallery, Washington exhibition, “Rediscovering Venetian Renaissance Painting", on 17/9/2006. His was entitled "Titian, Giorgione and the Mysteries of Paris.” In later correspondence, he advised that he had publicly stated [presumably in this lecture], that the Malmesbury Judgement of Paris subject was by Titian. He later published an article in Artibus 2010 with the same title, and he published the 1912 engraving in this article. The article is available here [in abstract]. http://artibusethistoriae.org/chapter649.html. Thanks to Norman Cameron for the information in this footnote. I haven’t read the Joannides article yet, as my institution’s run ends before the date of publication, so if anybody’s got a copy….

[2] Graeme Cameron, The Secrets of Leonardo da Vinci, Vol 1, Vega Scan, 2011, 58-75, 62.

[3] Constant Barbieri, “Raphael, Michelangelo and Sebastiano” in The Cambridge Guide to Raphael, ed. Marcia Hall, (Cambridge, 2005), 141-164; Rona Goffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New Haven and London, 2002).

[4] Sydney J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy 1500-1600, (New Haven and London, 1993), 111. Friedberg’s short analysis remains the best on this fascinating painting.

[5] Paul Joannides, Titian to 1518: The Assumption of Genius (New Haven and London, 2002), 136.

[6] Hubert Damisch, Le Jugement de Paris: Iconologie analytique 1, (Paris, 1992); translated as The Judgement of Paris (trans John Goodman), (Chicago, 1996), 235. For Alberti’s quote, see Della Pittura, “Noi, perché vogliamo le cose essere poste da vedere, per questo useremo quanto dicono più grassa Minerva”.

[7] Damisch, The Judgement of Paris, 235.

[8] See the discussion in Edward Williamson, “The Concept of Grace in the Work of Raphael and Castiglione”, Italica, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Dec., 1947), pp. 316-324, who notes that “the work of Raphael is equally a commentary on this text.”, 323.

Venetian Notes 1: Of Churches and Museums

   
 
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....