Art History Today

Rediscoveries & Revelations. Book Review: The Secrets of Leonardo da Vinci, Vol. 1, Graeme Cameron, Vega Scan, 2011.

For the past few years I’ve had the pleasure of research exchanges with the Australian scholar Graeme Cameron, especially on Raphael matters. I’m taking this opportunity of introducing his findings to an internet audience via a review of a book he’s just published.

Scientific connoisseurship can seem extremely esoteric to some people, not least because it’s difficult to relay findings in an objective way whilst simultaneously engaging the reader, especially an authorship outside the charmed circle of curators and art historians. Last year we had an excellent work on the controversial “La Bella Principessa”, published by Martin Kemp and Pascal Cotte, which though well-researched and scientifically sound, lacked popular appeal. Kemp and Cotte’s book came to mind while reading The Secrets of Leonardo because from earlier research exchanges in 2010, I was aware that Graeme Cameron had discerned Leonardo's authorship of the "Belle Principessa", from when images of it first appeared on the internet, before the research findings of Kemp and others were released. Another reason for the comparison is that both books demonstrate scientific connoisseurship in different ways, a subject that appears on AHT from time to time. In an earlier blog post, I said that the “Bella Principessa” volume suggested a new approach towards scientific connoisseurship, a rapprochement between traditional connoisseurship and the new scientific methodology; but after reading Cameron’s book, I think his is the ideal blueprint for uniting the two, not least because of the book’s innovative design.

This is a book that serves its methodology extremely well. For one thing Cameron has opted for an A4 format (both soft and hard cover) which means that you can study the images more effectively, without having to move a magnifying glass over them. Cameron designed the book himself and he has obviously given a great deal of thought to how his research findings – over 40 years’ worth-should be organized and presented. In this volume you’ll find large scale images in a book that is light; you’ll see magnifications of details, as well as magnification of those very details, juxtapositions of X-rays, infra-red and of course plates showing Vega Scans which has made these voyages into the detail of the pictures possible. Generally, there’s a nice balance of image and text without each overwhelming the other. Apart from the running textual exposition of interpretations and theories, there’s a fascinating biographical essay, a connoisseurship case study, as well as a cautionary tale of the auction rooms, not to mention some brief closing thoughts on the more publicised Leonardo re-discoveries of the present time. All this makes the book information- rich as well as visually exciting; and by making the format enact the process of looking into the microscopic world of the paintings, we’ve truly hit on a new way of reporting on scientific and historical discoveries, in my humble opinion.

Cameron’s book, the first in a projected series of volumes, is an embarrassment of riches. He starts with what some will see as the most controversial thesis about the most famous painting in the world- the Mona Lisa. This is that the portrait is not the celebrated beauty, Lisa Gheradini del Giocondo, thought to have been painted in Florence in 1503. Instead Cameron postulates that “Mona Lisa” is the rejuvenated portrait of Leonardo’s mother Caterina, whose aged features are hidden beneath the surface and dating to 1493. To support his claim, Cameron deploys Vega Scan technology, unpeeling the layers of the picture like an onion; the fifth stage Vega Scan shows a woman with markedly different physiognomy to the woman on the painting’s surface.

1.Mona Lisa, Louvre, Paris, oil on panel, 77 x 53 cm and comparison between surface of painting showing 1503 “rejuvenated” painting and 1493 sub-surface.

As Cameron explains, beneath the surface, hidden in the depths of technique and motivation, we see an older woman with baggy, misshapen eyes, lighter in colour, a rounder, fatter jawline, and a thinner smiling mouth, all indicative of her humble origins. Caterina was a peasant who conceived Leonardo with his middle-class notary father, Ser Piero, out of wedlock, although Leonardo never forgot her. He asks after Caterina in his notebooks, though he never calls her mother. There are other differences revealed by the Vega Scan: a differently positioned hand coming up from a small box, maybe a receptacle for keepsakes, the author hazards, which was turned into a chair arm in the finished portrait on the surface. Personally I find this new interpretation entirely credible, but clearly there will be some who will push it to the margins of Leonardo scholarship. However, it’s important to point out that Cameron distances himself from the more outré readings of the “Mona Lisa” such as it being a feminized self-portrait or a feminized image of “Salai”, Leonardo’s troublesome pupil, To re-christen “Mona Lisa” as “Mona Caterina” seems plausible in the light of these literally incredible theories, and to do so needn’t involve such psycho-sexual extrapolations- one doesn’t need to descend into Freudian murk here. Neither does Cameron have any time for the Leonardo cryptographers intent on revealing Da Vinci codes under the skin of the painting, but instead concentrates on what he calls “Leonardo phenomena”, mostly visible with these micro-imaging techniques. These are hidden drawings and figures which lurk on and beneath the surface of the paintings. In the case of “Mona Lisa”, apart from the head of a man and Caterina’s buried features, there seem to be images of animals, such as cows and dogs as well as infants.

Some might dismiss the phenomena as the renaissance equivalent of seeing faces in clouds and on walls, but actually that was the way Leonardo’s fantasia or creative imagination worked, so these buried shapes and figures fit comfortably into his working method, a point that Cameron is keen to make: the artist has embedded his working practices within his paintings. More “phenomena” reside within another discovery that Cameron examines, namely a Self-Portrait of 1500, purportedly showing Leonardo at the age of 58 years, executed towards the end of his time in Florence.

2.Leonardo da Vinci, Self Portrait, Private Collection, (Florence, 1500), oil on canvas, 69 x 57 cm.	3.Leonardo da Vinci, Self-Portrait, Royal Library, Turin, red chalk on paper, 333 x 213 mm.

 

I’m not inclined to dismiss this lesser-known portrait of the artist, not least because doubt has been cast on the number of well-known self-images within the artist’s oeuvre, so why is this less likely to be a true image of the master?[1] It’s no less believable that this this is Leonardo than that the iconic drawing at Turin resembles the master. In fact the two seem to reinforce each other’s physiognomy when placed side by side. Here, thanks to facial matching techniques and forensic investigation we have the famous aquiline nose, the wavy beard, the corrugated brow, physical details which correspond with written descriptions of the man. I’m not so sure about tying in the newly discovered Self-Portrait with the Plato image in Raphael’s School of Athens, not least because there’s the issue of why Raphael decided to age the man he knew in Florence, and how we reconcile Leonardo’s “philosophy” with Plato rather than Aristotle, whose empiricism fits the artist’s precepts better. Having said that, it’s a fact that Raphael took “philosophical” type figures from Leonardo’s aborted Adoration of the Magi, done before he left Florence for Milan, so maybe The School of Athens is some kind of peculiar homage to the older master. However, philosophical associations aside, aging and self-image is something that Cameron is opening up to critical scrutiny here, to his credit. His theory that Leonardo’s knowledge of the human body gained through dissection would have enabled him to paint himself either younger or older seems to me ripe for research. And of course, it fits in with the reverse aging, or rejuvenation of “Mona Caterina” presented earlier in the book.

4.Leonardo phenomena on surface of Self-Portrait: two “grotesque heads” on the sleeve of Leonardo's robe.	5. Outline guide of heads to facilitate viewing.

 

6.area of Leonardo self-portrait (centre right of canvas)where grotesque head is located	7.Leonardo grotesque head

8.area of Leonardo self-portrait (lower left of canvas) where canon and mortar is located.	9.Canon and mortar combined device.

10.area of Leonardo self –portrait (left of face) where underwater man is located.	11.A Man in an underwater “frogman’s suit.”.

As for the “phenomena” in this Self-Portrait, how do we explain grotesque heads, a canon and mortar, and what appears to be a man in a “frogman’s suit” revealed by the Vega scan technology? All these interests dovetail with Leonardo’s own pursuits, and the military motifs seem relevant because this was the sort of invention that Leonardo was devising for Cesare Borgia in 1502. Phenomena also extend to the frame of the picture, which under magnification reveals shapes resembling old men as well as the artist’s monograms.

12. Raphael, The Judgement of Paris, Earl of Malmesbury, 1512, oil on canvas, 56 x 71 cm	13. Marcantonio Raimondi, The Judgement of Paris, engraving,

After a short section on a Leonardo drawing, a remarkably academic study of a nude with more “phenomena”, Cameron switches to an equally explosive revelation: Raphael’s lost masterpiece of the Judgment of Paris. It has always been received art history opinion that Marcantonio Raimondi’s engraving and a handful of workshop drawings came closest to the missing masterpiece, given up as lost for centuries. A small canvas of the subject has been known to scholars, but it’s always thought to have been painted by Giorgione, not least because of its Venetian landscape and luminous palette. Other Giorgionesque characteristics include the seated figure, thought to be a variant of the figure on the ground in the Tempest. All through its exhibition history, it has been catalogued as a Giorgione (of circa 1509), though most of the time it has languished at Heron Court, Dorset, the ancestral seat of the Malmesbury family. The attribution to Giorgione only began to be questioned in 1950, and in the 1960s it was taken away from Giorgione. What Cameron calls “reassignment research” was surprisingly not undertaken, despite the existence of three other copies (one in the Uffizi, one destroyed in the war, and one in the National Gallery of Sweden) until the author embarked upon this course in 1984. The line taken was to consider what other Venetian artist might have executed such an impressive work which had garnered the praise of such founding connoisseurs such as Waagen and Eastlake. Subsequently, unable to solve the problem, Cameron “deferred research” for another long period of 20 years until he fortuitously saw a close-up of a photo of Raphael’s lover “La Fornarina” in a book on the artist in 2003.

14. Physiognomic comparisons of La Fornarina at various stages – La Donna Velata, Sistine Madonna and re-discovered Judgement of Paris.	15.Comparison between figure in rediscovered  Judgement and Raphael Self-Portrait.

This set the author off on a new trail with the goal of testing his hypothesis that the seated figure was actually Raphael himself, who was choosing the woman he loved, “La Fornarina” like the mythological Paris who selected Venus. To strengthen the biographical interpretation, Cameron needed to reconcile the demonstrably Venetian handling of the canvas with its more Roman like relief aspect, a seemingly impossible task. There are many intersecting points here: Sebastiano del Piombo who successfully married Venetian colourism with the Roman antique; and of course the Venetian engraver Raimondi was one of Raphael’s star pupils in Rome. However, after the “La Fornarina” moment, and contrary to mainstream Raphael scholarship, Cameron judged the link between Raimondi’s engraving and the lost Judgment of Paris a red herring. What if this Judgment of Paris, given the resemblance of one of the women to Raphael’s inamorata, was a more personal statement, a declaration of love in paint, born of the cult of beauty in Rome and fear of the Church’s reaction to the celebration of nudity, hence its clandestine status? Cameron sees the Heron Court canvas as a more vivid sensual expression of passion, at odds with the chaste, classically moderated composition of Raimondi- the official sanitized version. For myself, I’m completely convinced by Cameron’s meticulous stylistic analyses where matches are made between figures in the lost Judgement of Paris and portraits of “La Fornarina” and Raphael himself. This is indeed a great achievement, and one wonders how the disclosure that the Heron Court work is the lost Judgement of Paris is going to be received by the magnifici who have always settled for the Raimondi engraving as the image of the lost composition.[2] Time will tell.

16.Hans Holbein the Younger, Portrait of Elizabeth Tudor, the future Elizabeth I, Private Collection, tempera and oil on oak panel, 52 x 42 cm.

Graeme Cameron’s last major revelation is the publication of a Holbein’s Portrait of Elizabeth the First a beguiling image of the beautiful, young English princess dating from about 1542. Despite its strong provenance, and its approval by a leading Holbein scholar, Paul Ganz in The Conoisseur in 1952, the painting has never been accepted into the artist’s oeuvre. Cameron supplies strong evidence and arguments for overturning the dis-attribution. Apart from the web of historical evidence and fact tying the work to the young Elizabeth, there is the iconography of the Judgement of Paris, reappearing again, this time on the brooch around the woman’s neck, which must relate to her virtue and beauty.

17.Hans Eworth, Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses, 1569.

Graeme Cameron probably knows this, but there’s a unique painting by Hans Eworth of 1569 showing the Queen in the Judgement of Paris,holding a royal orb instead of an apple, the idea presumably that Elizabeth’s beauty and queenly virtue surpasses the qualities of the three goddesses who are thrown into disarray by the monarch’s entrance. Though it’s not by Holbein, it proves that this specific subject was linked with images of the queen. Returning to Cameron’s portrait, there’s also the frame, which through dendrochronological analysis has been linked to Holbein’s workshop production through 1537 to 1542, the latter the date of the portrait. Despite all this, the Portrait of Elizabeth I continues to be ignored; given its historical significance to this nation, it should definitely have been in the Holbein in England exhibition of 2007, but astoundingly wasn’t! The English public were robbed of the sight of a national treasure, and that’s deplorable.[3]

I could go on, but hopefully I’ve conveyed the importance of these findings and the innovative presentation of this book. I’m sure that this book of art history revelations will be received well in some quarters. I’m also convinced that some will find these findings unwelcome, and may place Graeme’s book on the Index of prohibited titles. Art History despises paradigm change, and devises its own thumbscrews and inquisitions to keep the “heretical” in line. That would be a shame as this book opens up many interesting debates and inquiries about all these artists. It’s wonderful to see Graeme Cameron going public with these research outcomes, and there’s still more to come.

All images courtesy of Graeme Cameron except for  the Raimondi engraving and Eworth painting which came from here.

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[1] The best discussion of the problematics of Leonardo’s self-image is in Daniel Arasse’s Leonardo da Vinci, 28-33.

[2] It’s interesting to note that the French scholar Hubert Damisch, in his long exploration of the Judgment of Paris theme detected the painted residue of Raphael’s lost work in `a window embrasure in the Stanza della Segnatura. As Damisch noted, this studio work is hidden behind a wooden blind and an inscription, and has never been reproduced, which explains its invisibility. Since this complex decorative scheme is positioned beneath the Parnassus fresco Damisch saw this Judgement expressing the idea of the beautiful. It’s interesting to speculate whether the rediscovered Judgement and its variant copies suggest dissemination of similar ideas of beauty and judgement throughout Raphael’s studio. A subject worthy of further research?

[3] Susan Foister, Holbein in England, Tate Britain, 2007.

Seen and Not Seen: Raphael Book Review

Christian K. Kleinbub, Vision and the Visionary in Raphael, Pennsylvania University Press, 2011.

If there’s one question that frames Christian Kleinbub’s enquiry into the visual in Raphael, it’s this: how is it possible to reconcile the visionary in renaissance art with the rise of naturalism, amidst a context of historical picture-making and narrative art. An altar piece can be “read” as a narrative, but as Kleinbub argues in parts of this book, it’s also about how the artist presents, and represents a supernatural and religious vision- the not seen- to the viewer, as well as picturing the seen, the visible world in which such religious events supposedly occur. Kleinbub’s investigation demonstrates how Raphael was able to keep the two approaches in mind without his art falling into visual and thematic chaos.

Kleinbub’s book is especially welcome since the issues he discusses in this book are to be found at the margins of Raphael studies, which is more noted for its traditional methodologies like stylistic analysis and iconography rather than studies weighted more towards theories of visuality or the role of colour and perspective in making pictures signify. I’m not implying that Kleinbub is predominantly theoretical in this enquiry; on the contrary, he is meticulous in his examination of the details and motifs of the paintings that he selects for investigation, and succeeds in opening up new and persuasive avenues in the process. Yet his study owes a lot to that interface between traditional renaissance art history and work on French visual theory. As a contributor to a forthcoming volume on the latter, I find it very encouraging that Kleinbub is able to situate his enquiry within that lesser-known area of renaissance art history and theory that features such names as Arasse, Damisch and others.

One French art historian that Kleinbub has used in conjunction with his own thoughts on Raphael’s visionary paintings is Hubert Damisch, who has explored the idea of cloud in its iconographic, semiotic and figurative senses in his Théorie du Nuage. Pour une histoire de la peinture, of 1972. Kleinbub has many interesting things to say on supernatural manifestations like mandorlas and putti in relation to naturalised phenomena.  Kleinbub demonstrates convincingly how Raphael learnt from the cleric-painter Fra Bartolommeo via his Lucca altarpiece (left) on how to go beyond the flatness of Perugino’s mandorlas in order to create what Kleinbub calls “the glowing cloud glory”, a cluster of putti, cloud phenomena and theological symbolism.  This is a valuable addition to the scant literature on how meteorological realism, such as we find in the Madonna di Foligno (right), which has a comet in the background, and the invisible cloud children surrounding the Virgin, become part of a mechanism for making the invisible visible to the renaissance spectator.

That preliminary discussion is impressive enough, but it’s Kleinbub’s analysis of the School of Athens which may be the most innovative, and indeed controversial part of the book. In this section Kleinbub theorizes something called “the philosopher’s eye” because he wants to locate visuality firmly in the centre of the discourse of philosophy, to render wisdom an aspect of seeing rather than merely philosophical discourse or book learning. Kleinbub brings something new to the table with his point about why Raphael’s self-portrait is found within the School of Athens: it could suggest an alliance of painting and philosophy forged through perspective. Perspective in this context is not solely concerned with rendering figures and objects within the visual field, but also about transcending it. In line with his project to show how Raphael managed a dynamic between ascension and the terrestrial, Kleinbub argues for dialectic between skyscape and cityscape in the School of Athens. In viewing the infinite space through the veduta created by the perspective, the eye finds God. In this way veduta can be visionary as well as encircling the physical things in the world.

The next section of Kleinbub’s book deals with the themes of blindness and enlightenment in Raphael’s tapestry cartoons, particularly the Blinding of Elymas and Paul Preaching in Athens. In doing so, Kleinbub builds on John Shearman’s exhaustive exegesis of the sequence; but unlike that scholar, the author contextualises his enquiry within visuality, which hasn’t really been applied to the subjects of these designs. Kleinbub corrects this with some interesting readings of the two designs. In his analysis of the Elymas, Kleinbub links the blinded sorcerer and certain iconographical components with a failure of vision and the idea of idolatry. One of these compositional elements is a niche figure that appears on a pier in copies of Elymas created from Raphael’s original designs. Shearman affirmed that it symbolised Salus, Salvation, but he neglected to think about its placement within the lighting system of the design, not to mention its relationship to seeing. As this statuesque figure is bathed in light, and Paul stands next to it (in the copies adapted from the original), Kleinbub sees this representing Paul as the “Light of the Gentiles”, the light that Elymas cannot see. To cement this iconographical interpretation, Kleinbub cites the following passage from Acts (also used by Shearman, but obviously not within the visuality context). “I have set thee to be a light for the Gentiles: that thou mayest be for salvation (salus) unto the utmost part of the earth.”  

After a chapter focusing on representation and such concepts as fantasia in relation to visuality in such pictures as Raphael’s St Cecilia and Vision of Ezekiel, Kleinbub inevitably arrives at the summit of Raphael’s achievements, and the pinnacle of visionary painting, the Transfiguration. This work can also be seen as enshrining the guiding question of Kleinbub’s thesis. How do we reconcile visionary art with the rise of renaissance naturalism and historiated picture-making and narrative ways of seeing. What helps a methodology such as this is the formally “split” nature of Raphael’s altarpiece, with its historiated lower register and its upper nigh-iconic effect of Christ levitating and facing the viewer amidst blinding light. When art historians attempt to unite the two halves of this composition together, they generally do so by turning to theology, demonstrating how the lower part and upper register are connected by such concepts as faith, despite the fact that they depict different biblical episodes. The sudden appearance of Christ as the disciples try to cure the sick boy is seen as an admonishment that they do not have the faith to cure the boy. However visuality and vision is central to the mechanics of this altarpiece, as Kleinbub shows. He makes good use of Konrad Oberhuber’s observation that the dark-haired apostle who points upwards towards the levitating Christ has his eyes closed, and thus is witnessing the Transfiguration inwardly. As Kleinbub notes, Oberhuber was first to introduce the notion of a “visual contest” in the lower register, since not all those down below have the necessary spirituality to see the vision. Some of the apostles see externally; the possessed boy is clearly seeing something different altogether; and a figure in profile in the shadows next to the sick boy’s father has his head bent back and his eyes closed, which according to the author indicates “visionary ecstasy.”

Kleinbub’s analysis of these figures is suggestive, but what I can’t understand is why he hasn’t commented on another face in shadow whose head is very close to the boy’s mother; he kneels in the dark, not with eyes shut, but gaze directed to the apostles on the viewer’s left. The first scholar to notice this ghostly figure was not an art historian, but a philosopher, Gary Schapiro, who in a book called Archaeologies of Vision, stated this obscured figure was the Cyclops to Christ’s Apollo, an idea inspired by reading Nietzsche. Away from the philosophical speculation, I wonder if it’s too fanciful to see this face in the gloom as Raphael himself? He has a beard and recalls Raphael’s self-image in the Louvre Self-Portrait with a Friend. If as Kleinbub maintains, Raphael “inserted his own subjectivity at the heart of this image”, it seems feasible that Raphael might have introduced his corporeal self engaged in the process of seeing.

Anybody interested in Raphael, or the broader topic of vision and painting in the renaissance, will find Christian Kleinbub’s book thought-provoking and worthwhile. It’s admirable that this author is able to bring visual theory, especially modern French thought, exegesis and pictorial analysis together in such stimulating ways. Most of all, Kleinbub deserves praise for showing how vision and visuality are indispensable for understanding Raphael’s artistic development and achievement.

A Lesser Known Raphael Drawing

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

The Artist’s Studio & the Family

The Easel & the Family.

When considering the relationship between the family and the artist’s studio, it is necessary to bring in the notion of space, which we’ve seen is important in a variety of other contexts. The question to be posed is this: in what ways did family and artistic space overlap in the history of the studio? To help us focus on this problem, we can look at an unusual painting by the 17^th century artist Gerard van Honthorst: Margereta de Roodere and Her Parents (1652, Centraal Museum, Utrecht). In this image one parent is shown on the canvas and the other outside in the physical studio in which the painter, Margareta, sits. Note how the easel acts here as a way of breaking down the barriers between the artist’s studio and family life. At the same time we should be aware that this barrier between the studio and the space that the family of the painter occupies is a perceived bar, not one that definitely exists. Honthorst’s painting is also compelling because it suggests the link between artistic production and the family. Margareta significantly points with her finger at her father as if indicating that he is the most important figure, which in a sense he is. Without him the daughter would not exist; in a sense he has created a masterpiece, albeit in human form rather than on canvas. Note also that the artistic implements, brushes, palette, maulstick stand idly by while the woman designates. This is not a serious painter, but a member of a prosperous Dutch household who is taught painting as part of an elegant education, not as a trade or a profession. In the words of one scholar, this is “a well to do amateur who painted for pleasure.”[1] For a woman to achieve the status of a master painter was a very rare feat, although there was a wonderful exception to the rule, Judith Leyster, though her success should not be attributed to a craving for genius, but other factors. In the words of Germaine Greer:

“It would be crass to suppose that female relatives who copied, imitated, etched and engraved the works of their better-known menfolk were all much better artists prevented by naked tyranny from making their own designs or accepting their own commissions. Their participation in the graphic arts was probably a filial and submissive response to the family environment and family pressure. Such motivation springs from a desire to conform and please others, and has little to do with the self-generated determination to produce great art.”[2]

Another interesting example of the family appearing on a canvas in the studio is this Self-Portrait (Rijksmuseum, 1699) by another Dutch painter, Adriaen van der Werff, in which he proudly displays a painted image of his wife and child to the viewer; this also underscores the link between a painted creation and one made biologically.  What’s also interesting here is that his wife is dressed in an antique costume; she could function as an allegory, maybey Pittura the personification of the art of painting, as well as being a spouse of the painter in real life.

The Renaissance: Tintoretto’s Daughter.

In the renaissance workshop, family relationships are usually patterned after fathers and sons. The father recognizes the talent of the son, especially if the latter’s surpasses his own as in the case of Raphael Sanzio.[3] This would have been unthinkable with a daughter in the Sanzio family. Had Raphael’s father had a daughter, she would have been confined to what Germaine Greer calls “the nurturing activities of the family.”[4] Women were in the shadow of the easel, not because of any tyranny imposed by a domineering or unreasonable painter-father; but because of family pressures that forced them to conform. Still, there are accounts of women painters in the renaissance, daughters and sisters. We know of a sister of Hubert and Jan van Eyck, mentioned in an ode on the Ghent Altarpiece, although that document could have been an eighteenth-century forgery. Margarethe van Eyck remains in the shades of history despite enterprising art historians with a penchant for romanticism, trying to connect her with figures like the Virgin in Jan’s extant masterpieces.[5] Much more famous is the daughter of the Venetian maestro Jacopo Robusti, better known as Tintoretto. Marietta Robusti (Venice, circa 1552-1590) was dressed in boy's clothing until the age of 15, so she would not look out of place accompanying her father who took her everywhere. Marietta, who was given the sobriquet ‘La Tintoretta' was the apple of her father’s eye, the most cherished of his seven children. His eldest daughter, Marietta took the name from her father who had in his turn inherited it from his father, a dyer. Hence we have an interesting transmission of the “brand name” of the workshop along the lines of inheritance, although it’s unclear how the daughter fits into the patrilineal course along which artistic talent usually passes. Marietta worked in her father’s massive bottega from her years as a teenager up until her death in 1590. The daughter specialized in portraits of noble Venetians, these executed in the style of her father’s work. Feted by both the Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian II and King Philip II of Spain, “La Tintoretta” was invited to be a painter at court; but Tintoretto did not want to lose the company of his daughter who delighted her father with her singing and playing after the rigours of the day. In order to keep her in Venice, in 1578 Tintoretto engineered a marriage to a wealthy Venetian jeweller, Mario Augusti, conditional that Marietta would remain in Tintoretto's house until his death. These terms were accepted by wife and husband, but sadly Marietta predeceased her illustrious father in childbirth, at 30. It may have been the death of his daughter that plunged Tintoretto into prolonged depression eventually resulting in his own death in 1594. Father and daughter are buried next to each in the Church of Madonna dell'Orto in Venice. The relationship between Tintoretto and his daughter has been the subject no little speculation. Greer says that although it might be thought that Marietta was destroyed by her father’s egotism, things might have been more complex: “Her talent might have after all been for being a daughter, rather than a painter.”[6]  Identifying Marietta’s work has proved difficult since her contribution is buried deep within the productions of the workshop. One painting attributed to her is this allegory of the merchant Ottavio Strada, 1567-8, Stedelijkmuseum, Amsterdam), which seems suspiciously similar to Titian’s portrait of Jacopo Strada, Ottavio’s father. This shows a winged female figure (presumably Fortuna?) pouring gold coins into the young merchants lap; the life sized statue of Venus some consider a portrait of the painter herself, although there is no foundation for this identification. The Uffizi does contain what is thought to be indisputably her Self-portrait, (above). Here, Marietta is shown as a musician; she was an accomplished singer and played lute and harpsichord, which doubtless delighted her father in the evenings. According to sources, the musical score is Madonna per voi Philiane, by Philippe Verdelot, the father of the Italian madrigal. Its lyrics translate as ‘My lady, I burn with love for you and you do not believe it.' The story of Tintoretto’s daughter caught the imagination of artists right up into the Victorian era. The nineteenth-century became fascinated by the relationship between Tintoretto and his talented painter-daughter. Obsessed with the story was the French artist Leon Cogniet who portrayed Tintoretto painting Marietta on her deathbed in 1843. It would appear that Cogniet created this subject- which does not appear in the renaissance biographies- in order to manage problems of “discipleship” and “artistic posterity” in his studio.[7] In 1873 the Pre-Raphaelite artist Henry Nelson O’Neil painted a similar picture of Tintoretto painting representing his dead daughter; but this reveals more about the mawkishness and sentimentality of the Victorians than Tintoretto’s family and studio. It seems that O’Neil went in for death bed scenes: he painted both Mozart and Raphael in their final moments.

---

[1] Mariet Westermann, The Art of the Dutch Republic 1585-1718, 1996, 32.

[2] Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race, 1979, 13.

[3] On the parallels between the workshops where Raphael learnt his craft and the family, see Jeryldene M. Wood’s “Young Raphael and the Practice of Painting in Renaissance Italy” in The Cambridge Companion to Raphael, 2005, 15-18.

[4] Greer, The Obstacle Race, 14.

[5] Greer, The Obstacle Race, 29.

[6] Greer,The Obstacle Race, 15.

[7] Marc Gottlieb, “Creation and Death in the Romantic Studio” in Inventions of the Studio: Renaissance to Romanticism, ed. Michael Cole and Mary Pardo, 2005, 175-183.

The Artist’s Studio & the Academic Tradition.

Last week the artist’s studio was presented as an introspective space; an area where the painter contemplated himself either through the self-portrait in the studio, or the studio itself, which could be seen as a metaphor for the artist’s mind. This probably gave the impression of a solitary space, a place into which no other soul intruded. However, the artist’s studio was not only a space for reflection, but a realm where information was conveyed betweenn painter and others through the process of teaching.  This could take many forms: the rational, disciplined space of the academy (Carracci, above); the artist’s own private studio in which he taught paying pupils (Rembrandt, right ); an indeterminate space where pupils learnt through the division of labour (Raphael’s bottega); family concern where relatives, as well as external members, cooperated in the enterprise of the workshop (Tintoretto).

Learning could take many different forms. A pupil could be given the task of copying the artist’s work, trying to reproduce their style, and the master would subsequently evaluate it, correcting it where necessary, as in this fascinating example from Rembrandt’s private school in Amsterdam. Notice how the master has imposed his terribilita on the pupil’s (Constantin van Renesse) tentative Annunciation; Rembrandt’s angel has a grandeur that the puny original couldn’t hope to match. And note that in the drawing in the previous section, Rembrandt is shown amongst his pupils- this is a hands-on situation. However, there could be a much more systematic, hierarchically organised programme of study; the pupil would be allocated certain tasks depending on their place in the pecking order.

It is instructive to examine an image of a workshop by the Flemish engraver Cornelius Cort, after Jan van der Straet, and so perhaps a reflection of his own studio. Equally, as the title of Cort’s print suggests, it is meant to show the mechanics of painting, its operations broken down into parts within the studio. The objects that we see symbolise learning in the studio. The statues of Venus stand for female beauty; the books refer to humanist knowledge; the skulls and animal skeletons the importance of anatomy. In this image we get a striking sense of how important learnedness was in the artist’s studio. The young apprentices in van der Straet’s studio not only draw the limbs of the body, the effects of light and shadow on classical sculpture but also pore over texts, some of which are likely to be anatomical manuals. The elderly man who dissects the arm of the skeleton may be the master but he is more likely to be an older artist delegated to supervise the work of the pupils. It is likely that the master is the artist working on a large history painting at the back of the studio, which is labelled “Pictura”. What this print hints at is a division of labour within the Flemish studio; it also promotes the idea of an advertisement for the painter’s studio, a site of artistic skill and humanist virtue, qualities that the master hopes his pupils will learn from his teaching. (See Giles Waterfield’s discussion in The Artist’s Studio, 18.).  In another image of the workshop, this time from 17^th century Rome, perhaps illustrating the working practices of the Academy of St Luke (above), we see even sharper sub-divisions of painting. Amongst the studio activities we see a dissection of a cadaver, study of a statuette, lessons in geometry, the mapping out of a cartoon observed by a teacher, the sketching of a lower limb, and the inspection of a set of eyes drawn by a pupil. The latter would part of the curriculum in the Bolognese academy of Annibale Carracci, his relatives and external pupils. Here’s a sample of a set of drawn eyes showing you the progression from sketchy lines to a fully realized organ.  

 

As Carl Goldstein states in his survey of the academy in western art (Carl Goldstein, Teaching Art, (30-6), the organisation should be distinguished from other entities like workshops, clubs and schools, although there was inevitably a certain amount of overlap. Clubs existed in the early modern to bind artists, intellectuals and men of virtue together; the workshop would be an additional presence but not the same as a workshop in itself. There were differences too: a workshop would not encourage the study of literature and poetry, or music. For example, this painting by Eustache Le Sueur of members of the French Academy, set up in 1642, shows a fairly relaxed gathering of fellows, some of whom paint, play music and even stroke dogs!  This low key attitude would eventually be swept away by the reforms of Louis XIV. Painters would be made to think for the King, paint for the King! Nicolas Loir’s grand  Allegory on the Founding of the Academy of Painting and Sculptor of 1666 leaves you in no doubt who is calling the shots here. Female personifications of Painting and Sculpture are unravelled by Old Father Time, while a portrait of Le roi, accompanied by Fame and Wisdom, presides over all. The artist’s studio has turned into something that is the equivalent of the French Civil Service!

 

  The central tenet of the workshop would be learning from the masters, and this would entail lots of copying, both paintings, drawings and classical sculpture. The latter was especially important because of its figurative nature; the representation of the body was a key humanist idea that pupils were expected to adhere to. The emphasis on copying the works of the past would bring the working space closer to the idea of a school. Michelangelo’s famous ‘Battle of Cascina’ cartoon, destroyed through the enthusiasm of other artists, was called a “school” of art, according to his biographer Giorgio Vasari. Vasari seems to have been making a direct connection between the practice of copying and the notion of a “school.”  In an important representation of the renaissance artist Bandinelli’s workshop, drawing is obviously highly important, but another theme is suggested allusively by the sad, “melancholic” pose of a pupil who immediately conjures up the introspection and self-reflexivity we saw in the artist’s studio last week.  This note of sadness chimes in with the light shown in the image, which conveys the idea of inner illumination. Goldstein links this use of light to the concept of disegno, which on the one hand can signify drawing, but also a kind of inner, hidden design located in the artist’s mind. What Bandinelli was seeking to bring to his art was intellectual respectability- a body of theory to underscore the manual craft of drawing. This is taking the studio further away from a space in which manual functions are carried out and nearer to a philosophical view of art, which is essential to the intellectual theory behind the academy.

 

The idea of the academy brings us back to teaching, because the name refers to the grove of trees where Plato taught his pupils philosophy. Yet an academy in Plato’s sense would be about talking and discussion, usually about morals and ethics- not about art. Plato and art do come into contact in the renaissance in Raphael’s seminal fresco, the School of Athens where the young master shows himself in the company of Plato, Aristotle and other wise men. This image would serve other artists who wanted to make connections between philosophy and painting, most conspicuously in the art and writings of the seventeenth-century painter Pietro Testa, who in his Liceo or Lyceum- another philosophical teaching space- incorporates Plato and Aristotle as well as allegorical figures referring to the three arts: painting, sculpture and architecture. I’m not even going to attempt to unravel Testa’s abstruse allegory, and anyway the use of philosophers in 17^th century representations of the academy is a complex issue which deserves detailed consideration. Essentially it seems to boil down to the idea of discourse in the workshop and studio: it wasn’t “academic” enough to just practice the art of painting; it had to be discussed, analysed and presented as a set of theoretical precepts set  within in a teaching programme.

 

As should be obvious by now, the academy was exclusively a male space, though the female form was drawn, mainly from classical statues. Until the late 19^th century, women were excluded from academic life, although there were plenty of situations where they did paint, earn honours and distinction. Yet, it must be stressed that success stories like Sophonisba Auguisolla, Angelica Kaufmann and Artemisia Gentileschi were rare. Generally, women were barred from practicing the highest form of painting, so they fell back on the so-called lesser genres. They were definitely not history painters, but had to settle for painting still-life, portraits and types of art at the lower end of the academic hierarchy. However, with women gaining more economic independence, and with a thaw in the academy’s attitudes towards them, opportunities became more available. Private academies appeared such as Heatherley’s School in Newman St, London, and most significantly of all the Slade School of Art, which from its opening in 1871 admitted women to its classes. Women were also granted the right to draw and paint from male and female models. Reproduced in Waterfield is Elizabeth Brown’s Female Figure Lying on a Bed, which won first prize (equal) in the Slade Figure Painting Prize in 1931. More well-known than Brown is Gwen John who turned out to be one of the Slade’s greatest pupils. John was a pupil at the Slade between 1895-98. At the end of that stint John went to Paris and studied under Whistler at the Académie Carmen. A painting of John’s room in the rue du Cherche Midi, Paris, nicely encapsulates the privacy and intimacy of her painting space. The room’s pared down minimalism suggests a retreat to the interior away from the crowded and competitive Slade School of Art. As Greer has said of Gwen John, she “painted her paintings less and less, leaving the ground showing through, never touching the canvas twice, in the same place, risking failure with every move. While her brother (Augustus John) spread himself very thinly, she withdrew into a single drop, forever compressing and concentrating her art and her feelings to an inner end, the intense, energetic, but utterly circumscribed life of a mystic.” See Greer, The Obstacle Race, 110).Something of that retreating nature is present in this painting which does suggest the hermeticism of a saint crossed with the atmosphere of a bohemian studio.

 

Of course women had entered the studio as wives, lovers and models, and in some cases both. Gwen John had been model and lover to the sculptor Rodin, for example. Models are obviously vital to the practice of the artist, and the nude model comes to symbolise a variety of different artist’s studios encountered in the history of art. William Orpen’s ironically titled The English Nude of 1900  –Orpen was born in Dublin- is wonderfully realistic.This portrait of his mistress references a number of famous nudes: Emily Scobel’s unflinching gaze owes something to Manet’s success de scandale Olympia of 1865;  and the pose of Orphen’s nude is taken from Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, modelled by his own mistress Hendricje Stoffels. In this clever and knowing representation of the artist’s model, Orpen locates the type in the history of the studio whilst conveying the overlap of academy, gender and family within the artist’s habitat.

Inside the Artist’s Studio

As I’m busy for the next few months and don’t really have time to write anything new, I’m going to do what I did last term- do posts adapted from lectures on the term’s theme. This term it’s the topic of the Artist’s Studio, a course I developed after attending an exhibition in 2009. I’ve used Giles Waterfield’s book on the subject to create a framework for the lectures- I’ll be interweaving my own thoughts and ideas within this.

Some key ideas that Waterfield says should be kept in mind are the following. “How have artists’ studios been seen by the artists who occupy them, and by other artists, and by their publics, over the past four hundred years? What are the myths that have developed around this type of space? Do certain ideas, or motifs, characterise depictions of the artist’s studio? And can types of studios be arranged into valid categories? These are some of the issues that this book, and the exhibition that inspired it, attempt to illuminate, using examples primarily taken from the British tradition.” (The Artist’s Studio, 1).

If we start in the renaissance period we can immediately see a variety of contexts for the idea of the studio. Studio comes from studiolo, meaning a room for contemplation, like a study. This differs from the renaissance workshop or bottega. Although these two rooms would have different functions, they could be in the same building. Waterfield gives the example of Tintoretto who would have worked and supervised painting operations in his bottega, but he would have had a studiolo in which he could quietly ponder ideas for his paintings, or even attend to business matters there.  Already we see here a division emerging that might be characterised as a split based on the mind/body dichotomy. The private room could be likened to the mind; by contrast, the busy workshop would be analogous to the outward body, visible and busily functioning. We can also see division occurring between the idea of contemplation and that of acting, although that is to simplify. An artist like Raphael could be working in his own industrious bottega, but that would not stop him from contemplating the art he was working on amidst the din and distractions. His studiolo was in his head.

The image of the artist in their studio constitutes a genre in itself, but where did it originate? There are not many examples of the painter at work in their studio in the renaissance period; artists would not have felt the need to represent themselves at work in their studio, especially as there wouldn’t have been a market for it. The “studio” appears in the very composition itself with its draperies and figures suggesting drawing and modelling respectively. The odd representations of the artist in their studio don’t throw much light on it as an idea in the renaissance. In this engraving of young Raphael in a corner of his studio, we have a portrait of the man, not an image of how he worked, even though he is placed next to artistic tools.  It is only in later periods that Raphael, Michelangelo and other renaissance artists are shown in a studio situation, as in Delacroix’s painting of the latter, made about 1849-50.

After the renaissance, images of the artist in their studio become more common, especially in the Netherlands. Here, where matter-of-fact realism conditioned life, we see the space of the artist’s studio becoming more recognisable as a real space. Rembrandt is, of course, the main exponent. In this early painting (about 1628) in Boston, we see him staring intently at a canvas he has either painted, or is contemplating putting brush to. Behind the young painter are jars containing pigment and oil for binding; on the wall hangs a palette that he may eventually use, assuming that he has not started painting. This painting is also a self-portrait, and it was via this genre that the artist’s studio became more visible, both explicitly and by implication. In a later self-portrait at Kenwood House Rembrandt shows himself before an easel which we assume was in his own studio. This may be true, but the studio is also “present” as an abstraction: the circles on the easel probably refer to the theory behind the practical side of painting.  This theoretical representation of the studio can be contrasted with a magnificent painting (c.1660) by C. N. Gijsbrechts who shows us items in a studio such as a skull, the peeled stretcher of a canvas, a little miniature- possibly the artist’s wife- and other details such as his oozing palette and brushes stacked up against a ledge. These and the back of the painting obviously confirm it as a representation of the artist’s studio, but the skull, which must be a prop too, places it in the tradition of the vanitas- a meditation on the transience of life, and in the case of this image, the mutability of art too.

Sometimes we do not even see the artist at all, or the artist does not make it obvious he is the craftsman making pictures in his studio. An image of the 18th century academic painter Henry Fuseli’s studio is captured by an anonymous artist of the British school. He does not show Fuseli at work, but the watercolour shows the paraphernalia of painting: cheval glass (for self-portraits), palette, pigments and a large figurative painting on an easel. We could consider this image as a snapshot of a studio observed by an almost detached eye; we could equally see it as the artist viewing his own workspace from a distant point. Commenting on this watercolour, Wakefield says that the work plays with themes of presence and absence. We see a similar idea in an etching made in 1825 to illustrate a Guide for Young Artists, by the 19th century watercolourist David Cox. Cox shows us a very large palette with brushes- he is said to have used a large Swan’s Quill brush-sketches in various media, such as graphite, pen and wash, in the manner of Claude Lorrain. This corner of the artist's studio is “populated” by examples of the art that Cox studied and produced: Claude like classical scene, marines and seascapes in the Dutch style, watercolours that the artist executed on his many painting tours in England, Wales and abroad. Cox himself is not present. Instead, we get the impression that he has stepped out to have a quiet smoke, a habit of his while sketching. Notice also how in his instance the studio overlaps with the exhibition space, a theme I’ll return to in a later lecture.

Raphael, Rudolf Steiner and Secret Art History

My blog on Moreau has generated an interesting post and discussion over at Three Pipe Problem. In a discussion of the biographical and art history, under the umbrella of the psychosocial, TPP asks an interesting question about Raphael’s focus on images of children and mothers, wondering if it reflects a personal quality of Raphael.  Perhaps, but this exchange coincided with me reading about the Theosophist Rudolf Steiner, in a book given to me recently. The person who gave me this tome must have thought it was an art history book as The Secret History of the World: As Laid Down by the Secret Societies is lavishly illustrated with many images from art history. This work is by no means conventional itself; it claims to tell the secret history of the world with such ideas as religion as astral, an occult history of art and the symbol- well, you get the gist. The Sceptic should have dismissed it instantly, but the Art Historian was intrigued by the very interesting images, so I decided to read the book, which seems to be heavily dependent on the ideas of the theosophist, Rudolf Steiner. Steiner was, in fact, a great admirer of renaissance artists, especially Raphael. Steiner had a novel theory about Raphael’s consistent use of the mother and child image, and no, it wasn’t Freudian, or dependent on an obvious psychoanalytic model. It might be called incarnational, because Steiner believed that Raphael was the incarnation of John the Baptist, who was the incarnation of Elijah etc. Raphael painted the mother and child image frequently because it usually featured John the Baptist, his previous self. I found this cool site on Raphael’s School of Athens, which has an extract from a lecture on the painter that Steiner gave in 1912.

  “Raphael both heralded and established a new impulse in Christianity although, to begin with he was not understood. Occult investigation finds that the same Individuality who once worked in Elijah and later in John the Baptist, lived again on earth in Raphael. This helps us to understand how the forces develop in the same soul from life to life, and to discern the effects of earlier causes. The Baptist was beheaded; his work came to light again in the achievements of his great successor. The new proclamation of the Baptist in the Raphael life was for long ages forgotten. It came to life again in what Spiritual Science teaches concerning the Christ-Impulse. What a light shines in our understanding when we gather up the threads leading through the single personalities, and in what vivid perspective the single personality stands there before us!”

Of course this is nonsense, but Steiner seems to be deadly serious about this theory: he went on to explain that the incarnation of John the Baptist in Raphael was why certain subjects such as the Crucifixion and the Mount of Olives didn’t figure in his output because John didn’t live through them as he had been beheaded.

“What is it that Raphael did not paint? He painted no scene on the Mount of Olives, no Crucifixion. True, he painted a “Bearing of the Cross,” but it was a very poor picture and gives the impression of having been done to order. Neither did he paint any of the scenes leading directly to the Crucifixion. His creative genius begins to reveal itself again only when he portrays the figure of the great successor of John — the figure of Paul in “The School of Athens”; or when, passing over the other events in the life of Christ, he paints “The Transfiguration.” What Raphael has not painted helps us to understand that it was alien to him to portray those events on Earth (not events in the spiritual world) which took place after he was beheaded in his previous life. We realise why it was that Raphael painted fewer pictures of these particular events. When we look at the pictures, we feel that all those which portray events subsequent to the Beheading of John the Baptist, are not, like the others, born of earlier remembrances.” Note, Steiner doesn’t accept that it is Plato in the School of Athens- he thinks it’s St Paul.

I first came into contact with Steiner when doing my Phd on Poussin. The Poussin (and Raphael) scholar Konrad Oberhuber had curated an exhibition at Fort Worth in 1988, and I was obliged to read his catalogue of that event.  Oberhuber was a lifelong devotee of Steiner, and that had inspired him to formulate a model of Poussin’s stylistic evolution based on Steiner’s ideas of space and rhythm.  Nothing to do with the occult this time, but Steiner’s research on biorhythms, which seem to be an essential part of his philosophy.  I’ll say more about that another time, but briefly, Oberhuber used Steiner’s schema based on evolution theory and theories of child psychology to explain Poussin’s development within  a seven year arc. I thought it was an interesting approach, but the Poussin inquisition got to hear about it, and intent on stamping out this new heresy, turned their thumbscrews on Oberhuber. I was “advised” not to read Oberhuber, and he chose to avoid the auto da fe by abandoning Poussin studies forever. I’m not as familiar with his work on Raphael as I should be, so I don’t know if he used Steiner’s ideas there. I’d be interested in seeing it done though.

As for Steiner’s secret history of Raphael? Well, I’d want more evidence of reincarnation, or a more scientific approach to such claims. Still, I am intrigued by this overlap of art history and the occult. On my Moreau post I did compare interpretation of images to a kind of initiation into secrets. The most famous example of linking initiation with art history is Edgar Wind’s discussion of ancient mystery religious ceremonies in the context of renaissance paintings.

“Iconography, is always, as Focillon observed with regret, un detour, an unavoidable round-about approach to art. Its reward, in the study of Renaissance mysteries, is that it may help to remove the veil of obscurity which not only distance in time (although in itself sufficient for that purpose) but a deliberate obliqueness in the use of metaphor has spread over some of the greatest Renaissance paintings. They were designed for initiates; hence they require an initiation.”

(Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, p. 15).

Towards the end of the Secret History of the World, the author (Mark Booth or Jonathan Black) refers to an unnamed, mysterious art historian interested in the esoteric; and it does strike me that there are parallels between being in a secret society and practicing some aspects of art history. Somebody looking in at art history from the outside could be forgiven for regarding it as arcane, or the conversation of mystics, especially renaissance art history, which as Wind suggests entails a kind of initiation. The public see the pop side of this with the Dan Brown Da Vinci code phenomenon, conspiracy theory of religions; but there’s an even more hidden thread running through history from Leonardo to Steiner, if the Secret History of the World is to be credited. I’ll probably share some of this hermetic art history on future posts. I’m not saying I believe it- I baulk when I read that Veronese’s incarnation was known to “Hidden Masters”, and this stuff seems really “out-there” at times, the sort of erudite occultism that Umberto Eco sent up mercilessly in Foucault’s Pendulum, which I heartily recommend. Still, it strikes me that the Secret History of the World is relevant because it shows how closely art history and the occult are connected, in the minds of some people, both outside and inside the profession.

George Frederick Watts: An English Symbolist.

This post was looking like it was heading for the bowels of my computer, but now the V&A have announced a new exhibition on aestheticism, I think it’s fairly relevant to that. It’s adapted from one of my lectures on the renaissance and 19th century English art.

Watts was known as the “English Michelangelo," probably because of his prowess as a sculptor. Today his fame rests largely on his painting; he could paint across the spectrum, from society portraits to symbolic and allegorical works of the most beguiling complexity. When his art, especially ‘Love and Death’, were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878, he immediately became incorporated into the International Symbolist movement. His Cupid here could be based on the antique, but it’s pose also reminds me of a putto in one of Raphael’s tapestry cartoons.

A measure of his status can be seen in the fact that Watt’s works are mentioned in the so-called “bible of decadence”, J.K. Huysman’s A Rebours of 1884. Here’s a suitably dandified portrait of Huysmans. This novel was avidly read by Oscar Wilde and the English Aesthetic movement who regarded it as a manifesto for a life of decadence. In A Rebours, Watts is summed up in these terms: “..the weirdly coloured pictures by Watts…a dreamy scholarly Englishman afflicted with a predilection for hideous hues.” This assessment hits the mark; Watts did specialise in paintings that though laden with classical and renaissance references, nevertheless had a more abstract and “dreamy” feel to them. His treatment of the classical nude should be seen as part of a trend seeking to expunge all classical and humanistic associations from it in favour of something more symbolic and diffuse.  A source of this mistiness in technique and subject matter can be found in Spiritualism. Watts was heavily involved in this through friends and patrons, and his language as the following extract shows echoes the metaphors of spiritualism, such as rending the veil:

“the one thing which is more than ever clearly perceived is the density of the veil that covers the mystery of our being, at all times impenetrable, and to be impenetrable, in spite of which conviction we ever passionately yearn to pierce it. This yearning finds its natural expression in poetry, in art, and in music.”

“Yet as long as humanity is humanity, man will yearn to ascend the heights human footsteps may not tread, and long to lift the veil that shrouds the enigma of being, and he will most prize the echo of this longing in even the incoherent expression of literature, music, and art.”

Watts was, arguably, the most symboliste of all the post-Pre-Raphaelite movement. His art was a confluence of several genres: the figural nude, the poeticised archetypical woman, and an uncompromising symbolism in which the subject seems to dissolve into dream and reverie, the distillation of the painted thoughts of a dreamy, scholarly English scholar pursuing the unattainable.

We observe the dandy hero of Huysman’s novel, Des Esseintes, poring over British illustrated travel guides in the Rue de Rivoli.

“He became interested in the laconic and exact details of the guide books, but his attention wandered away from the old English paintings to the moderns which attracted him much more. He recalled certain works he had seen at international expositions, and imagined that he might possibly behold them once more at London: pictures by Millais- the Eve of Saint Agnes with its lunar clear green; pictures by Watts, strange in colour, gamboge and indigo, pictures sketched by a sick Gustave Moreau, painted by an anaemic Michel Angelo and re-touched by a Raphael submerged in blue. Among other canvases, he recalled a Denunciation of Cain, an Ida, some Eves (like this “She Shall Be Called Woman”) where in the strange and mysterious mixtures of these three masters, rose the personality, at once refined and crude, of a learned and dreamy Englishman tormented by the bewitchment of cruel tones.” I’ll do another post on Huysmans soon, his knowledge of renaissance art via  Gustave Moreau.

N.B. Gamboge is “a partially transparent dark mustard yellow pigment.” Thanks Wikipedia. What a brilliant name for a colour!

Landscape and Symbol: The Secret Life of Plants.

This post is adapted from a lecture I gave on Pre-Raphaelite and renaissance landscape a week or so ago. My students thought I’d really gone this time…Raphael and dandelions!

In a discussion of Giovanni Bellini’s landscape, Kenneth Clark considers John Ruskin’s categories of perception. According to Ruskin, there are three kinds of perception:. Clark chooses the Frick St Francis, a visual hymn to the delights of nature and the divine joy spreading through the landscape.

“The man who perceives rightly, because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose, because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose: a star, or a sun, or a fairy’s shield, or a forsaken maiden. And then, lastly, there is the man who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for ever nothing else than itself- a little flower apprehended in the very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the associations and passions may be that crowd around it.” (Ruskin, cited in Clark, Landscape into Art, 38-9).

For Clark, Bellini belongs in the third category because he was able to describe accurately whilst infusing his picture of nature with his passion for it. He neither unfeelingly reduced his landscape to symbol  nor was so passionless to render it in a dry and academic manner.  Although 19^th century, particularly Pre-Raphaelite landscape, cannot be considered the equivalent of renaissance landscape, affinities have been seen between the two types. Writing in the catalogue to the Pre-Raphaelite Vision: Truth To Nature exhibition held at Tate Britain in 2005, curator Alison Smith commented on how mid nineteenth-century English landscape painting, with its microscopic fidelity to detail not only encouraged links, but actually had more in common with the renaissance than post-renaissance landscape.

“Although Pre-Raphaelite landscapes do not closely resemble those of early Italian and Flemish painters, their nom de guerre nevertheless invited such comparisons, and indeed connections can be established in the Victorian painters’ adoption of devices such as the isolation of natural details, and an equality of focus throughout, which suggests a rebuttal of the landscape conventions that predominated after the Renaissance.” (cat, 14). 

In Northern renaissance art, nature often had symbolic meaning like the beautiful still-life at the centre of Hugo van der Goes’s renowned Portinari Triptych, all the more remarkable because it was painted before the genre was invented. This arrangement of fruits, flowers and plants is discussed by Craig Harbinson in his Art of the Northern Renaissance (58-9). Everything performs a symbolic function here: violets stand for Christ’s humility, lilies and iris for the passion, columbine for the Holy Spirit, 3 carnations represent the blood of the nailed saviour to the cross, grapes on the fine jar suggest the Eucharist. Adding an interpretation of my own: the translucent glass of water probably represents the purity of the Virgin, but meanings could be multiplied further. I read it as a representation of Christ and his mother anthropomorphised by the vessels which suggest human form.

Although the PRB’s practice of rendering landscapes in minute detail was criticised, Ruskin sprang to the movement’s defence with an argument that considered the Italian Raphael’s approach to art as well as the representation of the natural world.

“We begin, in all probability, by telling the youth of fifteen or sixteen, that Nature is full of faults, and that he is to improve her; but that Raphael is perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the better; that after much copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can do himself in a Raphaelesque, but yet highly original manner: that is to say he is to try to do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet this clever something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules…This I say is the kind of teaching which the Royal Academy lecturing, press criticisms, public enthusiasms, and not least by solid weight of gold, we give to our young men. And we wonder we have no painters.” (Ruskin, quoted in Colin Cruise, Pre-Raphaelite Drawing, 64).

Yet as Alison Smith argues in her discussion of Pre-Raphaelite landscape, despite their disavowal of Raphael, some P.R.B. artists were inclined to draw on him and other renaissance master’s treatment of nature when conceiving their vision of it. This tendency seems to have been pronounced in the art of William Holman- Hunt, who in the words of Smith, “..appropriated the quattrocento use of micro-environments of precise natural detail offset by artificial space-creating devices such as window ledges and orthogonal lines of recession.”

According to this curator it was Carlo Lasinio’s engravings of Benozzo Gozzoli’s fragile frescoes at Campo Santo that helped the painter to organise the landscape in a number of early works such as the Rienzi of 1848.

“The trees disposed as if in homage to the law of linear perspective in Rienzi and the Hireling Shepherd (1852) are surely allusions to the friction that exists in fifteenth-century landscape between the primacy of empirical observation and emerging cognitive ordering systems, just as the quotation in Rienzi of the dandelion ‘clock’ in Raphael’s St Catherine of Alexandria was probably intended as a tribute to the patient observation of natural phenomena in Renaissance landscape painting.” (cat, 14).

I have no idea what the dandelion means in HH’s Rienzi, but is it an example of “observation of natural phenomena” in Raphael’s 1507 St Catherine? Why was Raphael interested in plant life? What was his attitude to the “natural phenomena” of renaissance landscape? I found myself wondering and dived into my books on the artist. In Carol Plazzota’s entry on the painting in the London Raphael: Urbino to Rome catalogue, she points out that Raphael included the humble dandelion, probably as a symbol of grief because this “bitter herb” appears in Northern and German paintings of the crucifixion.  (cat, 224). This is taking us back to Hugo’s plant life,. but I don’t think there was a dandelion in that. The crucifixion was represented by red carnations (nail flowers).

 

But Plazzota notes the dandelion’s appearance in the slightly earlier Holy Family with a Palm and the Baglione Entombment (same date as the St Catherine) which definitely  is related to the crucifixion. In this composition the dandelion is deliberately juxtaposed with Raphael’s signature on a rock.  This seems to have been first spotted by Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny in their book on the master (Raphael, 44). The authors remark on the “curious” combination of painter’s signature and dandelion, and say that the work is “signed”. Puzzling my brains I wonder if this is a kind of anthromorphization  of a natural feature and that the dandelion/ painted signature in the landscape refers to the painter himself?  It would be a witty conceit to have this kind of artistic calling card invented with the aid of nature. But I have another thought. Returning to Ruskin’s comments on art and nature, he says that 19th century young painters are taught to believe that Nature is full of faults, and that they should improve on her. For Raphael, landscape was not even faulty, just an armature for the art of painting itself. In his early career he placed his ensembles in Perugino’s Umbrian landscapes; when he got to Rome he abandoned the natural world for architectural grandeur. Could Raphael’s dandelion symbol suggest a relationship between art and nature? Not a reconciliation, but a trumping of the natural environment by the artifice of painting. Dandelion= nature, painted inscription = Raphael’s art. Dandelions occur frequently in renaissance art but next to artists’ signatures! This symbol in the landscape must mean something. Why not this?

Raphael and the Victorians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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