COV.Aug09.v.1:cover.june.pp.

corr 17/07/2009 11:38 Page 1

AUGUST
2009
T H E B U RLINGTON MAG AZI NE

Andrea di Bonaiuto | Fra Angelico as miniaturist | The Mantegna exhibition

The provenance and restoration of Titian’s ‘Triumph of Love’
NO .

Art History Reviewed III: Roger Fry’s ‘Cézanne’ | Venetian paintings in the National Gallery
1277

Boulton | Blake | Utrillo | Heartfield | Long | Venice Biennale

VOL . C L I

USA $34·50 August 2009 £15/€ 23

july09florencebiennale:Agnews 22/06/2009 12:30 Page 1

BIENNALE
internazionale
dell’antiquariato
di firenze
26a edizione
—
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2009
50o anniversario

PALAZZO CORSINI
LUNGARNO CORSINI
FIRENZE
—
26 settembre
4 Ottobre
2009

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777")%..!,%!.4)15!2)!4/)4
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Tableaux anciens

Francesco Prata da Caravaggio

Caravaggio, c. 490 - ?, after 527
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Virgin and Child

Oil on canvas, 74,7 × 59,5 cm (29 ³⁄₈ × 23 ⁷⁄₁₆ in)­­

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annonce Burlington.indd 1 9/07/09 18:31:20

aug09pageII:Internet and Contacts 20/07/2009 10:37 Page 1

Fundación Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez International

Focus-Abengoa
Research Prize: Velázquez y su siglo

The Fundación Focus-Abengoa has created the Alfonso E. Pérez

Sánchez Research Prize, intended to honour, highlight and extend
the outstanding achievements of the leading art historian Alfonso
E. Pérez Sánchez.

The prize seeks to encourage scientific research into the arts,

history, culture, literature and aesthetics of Velázquez´s age.

Prize worth: 24.000 euros

Deadline: 30 september 2009

Information and terms

Fundación Focus-Abengoa
Hospital de los Venerables. Plaza de los Venerables, 8. 41004. Sevilla (Spain)
t + 34 954 56 26 9 6. f + 34 954 56 45 95. focus@abengoa.com. www.focus.abengoa.es

Modern and
Contemporary Art

16-20 September 2009

Royal College of Art
Kensington Gore | London SW7 2EU
for information
tel: 020 8742 1611 | email: info@britishartfair.co.uk
website: www.britishartfair.co.uk

II august 2009 • cli • the burlington magazine

aug09tomasso:Agnews 13/07/2009 16:34 Page 1

TOMASSO BROTHERS
F I N E A RT

King Louis XII of France (1462–1515)

French, circa 1500 (detail)
A polychromed, gilt and silvered
carved walnut figure
Full length figure height: 109 cm (43 in.)

Provenance: George and Florence

Blumenthal, New York.

Bardon Hall Weetwood Lane Leeds LS16 8HJ UK Tel: +44 (0)113 275 5545
info@tomassobrothers.co.uk www.tomassobrothers.co.uk
aug09contactspageiv:Internet and Contacts 20/07/2009 10:22 Page 1

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IV august 2009 • cli • the burlington magazine
aug09steinitz:Arturo Cuellar March 2003 17/07/2009 09:29 Page 1

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We invite you to discover the new Steinitz Galleries as of September 18th, 2009
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aug09pageVII:Internet and Contacts 21/07/2009 11:46 Page 1

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aug09dorotheum:AQ_31815_J_Baroni 21/07/2009 11:42 Page 1

S E I T 17 0 7

Third Auction Week 2009

Old Master Paintings, 6 October
19th Century Paintings, 7 October
Works of Art, 7 – 8 October
Jewellery, 8 October
Viewing one week before the auction
Palais Dorotheum, Dorotheergasse 17, 1010 Vienna, Austria
Tel. +43-1-515 60-570, client.services@dorotheum.at
Catalogues: Tel. +43-1-515 60-200, kataloge@dorotheum.at
Online Catalogues: www.dorotheum.com

Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, Children Decorating the Hat of a Recruit (detail), 1854, oil on wood, 55.5 x 44 cm, Auction 7 October
01 BURLINGTON 308x235mm v1 parchment:18 BURLINGTON / March 2006 7/7/09 17:51 Page 1

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AUG.Contents:cont.nov.pp.corr 20/7/09 14:57 Page 1

VOLUME CLI • NUMBER 1277 • AUGUST 2009

EDITORIAL 555 Peter Blake. One Man Show,

M. Livingstone
511 New online resources: Italian paintings in France by PAUL MOORHOUSE

ARTICLES
512 Andrea di Bonaiuto’s painting in the National Gallery and 556 PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED
S. Maria Novella: the memory of a church
by DILLIAN GORDON
EXHIBITIONS
518 An unpublished miniature from the circle of Fra Angelico
by LAURA ALIDORI BATTAGLIA 557 Richard Long
p.520 by MARINA VAIZEY
526 Reflections on the Mantegna exhibition in Paris
by LUKE SYSON 558 Matthew Boulton
by CELINA FOX
536 Titian’s ‘Triumph of Love’
by CATHERINE WHISTLER and JILL DUNKERTON 561 Moore, Hepworth, Nicholson
by FRANCES SPALDING
543 A new contribution to the biography of Leonardo
da Vinci 562 Polish art
by P . G . GWYNNE by ROBERT RADFORD

563 William Blake

ART HISTORY REVIEWED III by ROBIN HAMLYN

544 Roger Fry’s ‘Cézanne, a study of his development’, 1927 564 Italy in nineteenth-century art
by RICHARD VERDI p.540 by RICHARD WRIGLEY

566 Early French altarpieces

BOOKS by JUSTIN E.A. KROESEN

548 National Gallery Catalogues. The Sixteenth Century Italian 568 Valadon – Utrillo
Paintings. Vol.II 1540–1600, N. Penny by MERLIN JAMES
by JENNIFER FLETCHER
569 John Heartfield
550 Pittura rupestre medievale. Lazio e Campania settentrionale by MICHAEL WHITE
(secoli VI–XIII), S. Piazza
571 ‘Visual Encounters’
by ALESSIA TRIVELLONE
by SILVIA LORETI
551 Antike Steinskulpturen und Neuzeitliche Nachbildungen in
572 Venice Biennale
Kassel: Bestandskatalog,
by JOHN-PAUL STONARD
P. Gercke and N. Zimmermann-Elseify p.529
574 Pasqualino Rossi
Die antiken Skulpturen in Newby Hall sowie in anderen
by ERIKA LANGMUIR
Sammlungen in Yorkshire, D. Boschung and H. von Hesberg
by THORSTEN OPPER

552 Art, Marriage, and Family in the Florentine Renaissance

576 CALENDAR
Palace, J.M. Musacchio
by BRENDA PREYER

553 The Jew in the Art of the Italian Renaissance, D.E. Katz 580 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
by D.S. CHAMBERS

553 Politics, Civic Ideals and Sculpture in Italy 1240–1400, p.568

B. Cassidy
by JULIAN GARDNER
The September issue contains
554 Leonardo. Dagli studi di proporzione al ‘Trattato della
articles on:
pittura’, P.C. Marani and M.T. Fiorio, eds.
Baron Wiser’s picture gallery
Leonardo e il monumento equestre a Francesco Sforza,
A. Bernardoni, ed. An early episode in the life of Delacroix
by ANNA SCONZA
The Edwardian taste for Piero di Cosimo
555 Architettura e committenza nella Napoli del Quattrocento,
Art History Reviewed IV: Pevsner’s
B. de Divitiis
by CORDELIA WARR p.573 ‘Pioneers of the Modern Movement’

Cover illustration: Triumph of Love, by Titian. c.1545. Canvas, diameter 88.3 cm., after cleaning and restoration. (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).
Illustrated in this issue on p.537.
AUG.Masthead:Masthead 17/7/09 14:29 Page 1

VOLUME CLI • NUMBER 1277 • AUGUST 2009

Editor: Richard Shone Managing Director: Kate Trevelyan-Kee

Deputy Editor: Bart Cornelis Advertising & Development Director: Mark Scott
Associate Editor: Jane Martineau Design & Production Manager : Chris Hall
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AUG.Editorial:Layout 1 20/7/09 15:34 Page 75
Editorial
New online resources: Italian paintings in France
PERHAPS BECAUSE THEY are so preoccupied with understand-
ing the past, art historians have been relatively slow to adapt to
the changes being wrought on their discipline by automation and
to take full advantage of the benefits that it offers. But digital
transition is still in its early stages and most researchers have been
participants for hardly twenty-five years, too short a time to
begin building more than a few of the long-term projects that are
now feasible. However, a few such enterprises have already
become part of the vocabulary of research and others are being
launched – sometimes with minimal publicity – whose impact
will certainly be significant. One of the most ambitious of these
and worthy of special attention is dedicated to Italian paintings in
France. This is the Répertoire des tableaux italiens dans les collections
publiques françaises (XIIIe–XIXe siècles) (RETIF), the first tranche
of which, consisting of Brittany, Poitou-Charente and Centre,
was mounted on the website of the Institut National d’Histoire
de l’Art (INHA) two years ago, followed by a second batch in
March this year, which includes the Pays-de-Loire and Nord
Pas-de-Calais. The number of paintings so far included amounts
to hardly 2,000, but the number is expected to grow to approx-
imately 13,000 and even now it is possible to see that, if it can
continue as it has begun, the results will be impressive.
In addition to basic information, an abbreviated provenance is
given for each painting as well as a brief bibliography and, most
important, an image, something a book cannot easily rival. The
illustrations are often not of high quality, many – especially those
of churches – being amateur photographs taken by members of
the group compiling the Répertoire.
The conception and execution of the project is due primarily
to Michel Laclotte, former director of the Musée du Louvre and
now Vice President of the Comité scientifique of INHA.
Laclotte began his professional career with a thesis on early Flo-
rentine and Sienese paintings in regional French museums, and
so this latest project is a continuation of the work he began more
than half a century ago, though on a truly grand scale. He now
has the help of a small team at INHA as well as the advice of
numerous scholars, mostly French and Italian, to whose opinions
Laclotte has ready access. The extent of the project will eventu-
ally exceed any similar national inventory that has preceded it.
Indeed, the French have been the quickest and most efficient
in building such large automated projects, a reflection of the
marked centralisation in that country. The huge online databases
Joconde (which includes the possessions of the French national
museums), Mobilier-Palissy and Architecture-Mérimée (the last
two produced by the department of Architecture et Patrimoine)
are testaments to their industry. In Britain, a national online
survey of paintings is still being developed, and in the United
States individual museums are left to their own devices, with
very mixed results and minimal consistency.
The Italian project follows close on the heels of a similar
one, the Répertoire des peintures françaises des XVIIe et XVIIIe
siècles en Allemagne (REPFALL), initiated and overseen by
Pierre Rosenberg, which was accompanied by an exhibition
held in Paris, Munich and Bonn, and culminated in a book that
lists and reproduces all the French paintings of the Baroque and
Rococo periods in German museums, including as well an
abbreviated bibliography and provenance in addition to the
essential information.1 Although necessarily smaller – it lists
around 2,000 paintings – and freed of the necessity of searching
for unknown pictures in churches, that project was neverthe-
less similarly ambitious, and, taken together, the two databases
provide a standard to which others can aspire. They also indi-
cate the increasingly international character that such projects
require: RETIF eschews the French form of Italian names –
Carrache for Carracci, for instance – and the French/German
project provides both.
RETIF will necessarily overlap with Joconde and other
French projects, but it is inevitably bringing to light a large num-
ber of previously unknown paintings, among which one might
mention a new Lotto of St Jerome in the museum in Varzy, an
unknown cassone with the Story of Romulus and Remus by Matteo
di Giovanni in Libourne, a Coronation of the Virgin by Antonio
Vivarini in a church in the Alpine village of Alos, and many
others that will appear region by region in the following months.
Ambitious projects on this scale usually come about through
the persistence of one dedicated person, and it would be difficult
to find someone with the same governmental clout and con-
noisseurial experience to equal Laclotte. Like other institutions
designed with academic standards, the administration of INHA
is expected to change on a regular basis and new administrators
may have different priorities. This can make long-term projects
vulnerable. Even much wealthier institutions, such as the Getty
Research Institute in California, where one might have expect-
ed ambitious projects to have a secure footing, are dropping their
support for initiatives that need more than short-term financial
planning, including the Bibliography for the History of Art (BHA)
and most of the projects under the Getty Provenance Index.
Another – generally unacknowledged – drawback associated
with such online efforts is their anonymity, which is sometimes
overcome by publishing the principal results in books or
journals, thereby giving the author appropriate recognition. As
the size of such projects expands, however, this becomes
increasingly difficult, and compilers can no longer assume that
an online project will ever take any other form. Even when
RETIF is concluded a few years from now, it expects to be able
to keep the bibliographical and provenance parts of the database
up to date, a plan that will require firm commitment. We hope
that INHA and its future administrators will live up to these
high expectations and continue to provide us with such
marvellously rich material.
1 P. Rosenberg and D. Mandrella: Gesamtverzeichnis Französische Gemälde des 17. und
18. Jahrhunderts in deutschen Sammlungen, Munich 2005; also available on the website
of INHA.
the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e • cLI • august 2009 511
MA.AUG.Gordon.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 17/7/09 10:10 Page 512
Andrea di Bonaiuto’s painting in the National Gallery
and S. Maria Novella: the memory of a church
by DILLIAN GORDON
1. Virgin and Child with saints, by Andrea di Bonaiuto. c.1365. Tempera on panel, 28 by 105.8 cm. (National Gallery, London).
THE SMALL PAINTING (Fig.1) attributed to Andrea di Bonaiuto
da Firenze (active 1346, died 1379), now in the National Gallery,
London, is unique in shape and unusual in iconography. It was
first connected with the Dominican church of S. Maria Novella
in Florence by Millard Meiss who described it as a ‘sort of
hagiographic compendium of the church’, and suggested that the
dossal format was a deliberate repetition of a thirteenth-century
design ‘motivated less by the artistic intention of the painter
than by the wish of his patron to possess a sort of replica of a
Dugento painting made memorable for religious or other
reasons’, or possibly a replica of an altarpiece in the Gondi chapel
in the same church.1 The painting was indeed a replica, but not
I am very grateful to Joanna Cannon, Luke Syson and Julian Gardner for reading a
draft of this article and for their invaluable comments. I am also grateful to Beverly
Brown, Roberto Lunardi, Gail Solberg, Carl Strehlke and Simon Gaine OP for their
suggestions, and to Marcia Hall for allowing me to use her plan of S. Maria Novella.
1 M. Meiss: Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death, Princeton 1951, repr.
1978, pp.47 and 176.
2 It is inconceivable that this tiny painting, the frame of which is almost certainly
complete, could have had a predella as suggested by Johannes Tripps (J. Tripps:
Tendencies of gothic in Florence: Andrea Bonaiuti. Corpus of Florentine painting, ed. M.
Boskovits, Florence 1996, section IV, vol.VII, pp.44–45 and 188–92), let alone the
one with half-length figures in barbed quatrefoils, including St Francis (Pinacoteca
Vaticana, Vatican City) and St Louis of France (Museo Nazionale di S. Matteo, Pisa),
but no Dominican saints. The two panels are cruder in style (even taking condition
into account), and proportionally wrong, since they are nearly as tall (19.5 cm.) as the
National Gallery painting (24 cm. high at the sides); Tripps suggested a Man of sorrows
once went between the two panels.
3 The palm, originally green, is now blue due to the fading of a yellow lake com-
ponent. I am extremely grateful to Rachel Billinge for examining the painting with
me and for all her insights and help. The painting’s technique will be discussed in detail
in the catalogue of Italian paintings in the National Gallery 1250–1400 (forthcoming).
4 Meiss, op. cit. (note 1), p.175.
5 Ibid., p.175, note 3; and J. Wood Brown: The Dominican church of Santa Maria
Novella at Florence, Edinburgh 1902, pp.115–35.
6 Meiss may have been distracted by the other altars (as opposed to chapels) which
were listed in ibid. For a general discussion of family chapels, see J.K. Nelson and R.Z.
Zeckhauser: ‘Private chapels in Florence. A paradise for signalers’, in idem, eds.: The
patron’s payoff. Conspicuous Commissions in Italian Renaissance Art, Princeton and
Oxford 2008, pp.113–31.
7 M. Hall: ‘The “Ponte” in S. Maria Novella: the problem of the rood screen in
Italy’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 37 (1974), pp.157–73. See also R.
512 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
of the kind envisaged by Meiss, and its shape and iconography
can be explained by its unique function, deeply integrated within
the church, perhaps reflecting Dominican practice in a way not
so far discerned in any other Italian fourteenth-century work.
The long thin shape of Andrea di Bonaiuto’s painting is
immediately striking. The entire frame is original and complete;
carved twisted columns of moulded gesso divide the painting
into eleven compartments, with beads of coloured glass resem-
bling jewels embedded in the pastiglia of the spandrels.2 In the
centre are the Virgin and Child under a gabled arch decorated
with crockets. On either side, beneath round-headed arches,
are ten saints, including three of the Evangelists and three
Lunardi: ‘La ristrutturazione vasariana di Santa Maria Novella. I documenti ritrovati’,
Memorie Domenicane 19 (1988), pp.403–19.
8 For the chronicle by Borghigiani, see S. Orlandi: ‘Necrologio’ di Santa Maria
Novella, Florence 1955, II, appendix I, pp.397–404.
9 Fra Modesto Biliotti: ‘Chronica pulcherrimae aedis magnique coenobii S. Mariae
cognomento Novellae florentinae civitatis’ (1586); the relevant sections printed in
Analecta Sacri Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum 23 (1915). A photocopy of the entire
chronicle is in the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. Sources are not always
consistent with regard to the dates of changes of patronage; these did not usually
involve changes of title, and there was none during the period under discussion.
10 Although there were other chapels in the church in the fourteenth century, they
were outside the main body of the church; see also note 51 below.
11 Borghigiani in Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, p.402; and Hall, op. cit. (note 7),
pp.159 and 164–65. In that publication Hall drew no vaults for the ponte (ill. p.36,
fig.d), but subsequently in idem: Renovation and Counter-Reformation: Vasari and Duke
Cosimo in Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce 1565–1577, Oxford 1979, p.197, fig.I,
she indicated a single cross vault spanning the two central chapels. Presumably the
altars of the central chapels were like those at each end of the ponte, namely on the
walls dividing the chapels, given that there were arches facing north and doorways
to the south; Hall believed that the altars were placed between the ponte’s façade and
the nave piers.
12 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, p.120: ‘. . . primum incipiemus sacello quod parieti
aedem a claustro dividenti haerebat, quod in divi Thomae aquinatis honorem principio aedifi-
catum affirmant [. . .] qui anno MCCCLXV huic domui praeerat, illud de fratrum consensu
Vermiglio cuidam florentino civi, Alfanorum familia nato concessit. Qui Vermilius, suppresso
divi Thomae nomine Marco Evangelistae dicavit, et divi Marci sacellum ab omnibus appellare
voluit’; and Borghigiani in Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, p.401. E. Giurescu: ‘Trecen-
to family chapels in Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce: Architecture, patronage
and competition’, unpublished Ph.D. diss. (Institute of Fine Arts, New York Uni-
versity, 1997), p.190, states that according to the Liber Novus (written by Fra Zanobi
MA.AUG.Gordon.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 17/7/09 10:10 Page 513
Dominican saints, each identified by an inscription below.
Reading from left to right the saints are: Mark, with his attrib-
ute of a lion, holding his gospel inscribed with pseudo-kufic;
Peter Martyr, holding a book and a martyr’s palm,3 with a knife
buried in his shoulder; Thomas Aquinas, with rays from his
hand illuminating a small church (Fig.2); Dominic, with a book
and a lily; Luke, with his attribute of an ox and his gospel (Fig.3);
John the Evangelist, holding his gospel, inkwell and quill pen,
with his attribute of an eagle; Gregory, wearing a papal tiara,
blessing and holding a book; Catherine of Alexandria, crowned
and holding a book and martyr’s palm, with her attribute of a
wheel; Mary Magdalene, holding her jar of unguents; and a
Bishop saint, wearing a mitre and cope and holding a book and
a crozier, inscribed S. THOMAS (C?).
Meiss identified the latter as St Thomas of Canterbury, in
place of the fourth Evangelist, Matthew, and pointed out that
Thomas is rarely shown in Tuscan painting, but that he was the
titular of an altar in S. Maria Novella, and that all the saints shown
in the painting had altars dedicated to them in that church.4 Meiss
gave as his source the book on S. Maria Novella by the Revd
Wood Brown of 1902.5 What Meiss apparently did not realise is
that the position of the saints and Virgin and Child in the paint-
ing precisely mirrors the position of the major chapels dedicated
to them on the ground floor of the liturgical east end of the
church, which is orientated north–south.6
In 1974 Marcia Hall published an important article on the
interior of S. Maria Novella before Vasari’s renovations of 1565
removed the ponte which divided the nave from the liturgical east
end of the church.7 Hall was primarily using a chronicle of 1556,
which had been transcribed and amplified by Borghigiani in
the eighteenth century, supplemented by various sepoltuarii.8
Another chronicle of 1586 by Fra Modesto Biliotti, also based on
earlier sources, is more detailed and can be used as a starting-
point to establish the location and patronage of family chapels in
the church at the end of the fourteenth century.9 From this it is
clear that the sequence of saints in the National Gallery painting
Guasconi; see Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), I, pp.621–22), the chapel was in the cloister.
Orlandi concludes (pp.610–11) that the family chapel behind the church was given
up in 1365, and the family allocated the chapel (on the ponte) dedicated to St Thomas
Aquinas, which was then rededicated to St Mark. The change of dedication may have
been motivated by the fact that there was already a chapel dedicated to St Thomas
Aquinas in the main body of the church (see note 16 below).
13 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, p.120; and Florence, Archivio di Stato (hereafter
cited as ASF), Diplomatico Santa Maria Novella, 14th August 1367: ‘. . . quam
cappellam fecit fieri in dicta ecclesia dominus vermiglius olim pater de testatoris seu Jacominus
olim fratrum dicte testatoris’; the reference comes from S. Cohn: The cult of remembrance
and the Black Death: six Renaissance cities in central Italy, Baltimore 1992, p.212.
14 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, pp.120–21; and Hall, op. cit. (note 11), pp.110–11.
15 According to Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, p.121: ‘. . . iuxta [i.e. beside the
chapel dedicated to St Mark] erat arcus ianuae occidentalis navis oppositus, et post ipsum
divi Petri Martyris erat sacellum’. Borghigiani in Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, p.403; see
also S. Orlandi: ‘I Ricordi di San Pietro Martire in Santa Maria Novella’, Memorie
Domenicane 64 (1947), p.36, note 163. According to the Sepoltuario of Sermartelli of
1617, ASF, Manoscritti 621, fol.10, it was dedicated to St Peter Martyr when it was
restored by Bernardo Castiglione in 1484; in fact it was dedicated to that saint at its
foundation in 1298; see Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), p.120, who notes it may have
been the site of a thirteenth-century painting of St Peter Martyr. It has been
suggested (M. Boskovits, ed.: Corpus of Florentine painting. The fourteenth century.
Bernardo Daddi and his circle, section III, vol.V, Florence 2001, p.258, note 4) that the
Coronation of the Virgin (Accademia, Florence) by Bernardo Daddi could have come
from this chapel, on account of St Peter Martyr being in a position of honour on the
right. On this criterion perhaps a more likely candidate for the chapel would be the
triptych dated 1375, now in the Galleria Nazionale, Parma, attributed to Agnolo
Gaddi, which also comes from S. Maria Novella; it shows St John the Baptist intro-
ducing St Peter Martyr who in turn introduces a female donor to the Virgin and
Child enthroned on their proper right, accompanied by Sts Dominic and Paul who
ANDREA DI BONAIUTO’S PAINTING
enables one to make a mental journey around the church, read-
ing the saints not simply from left to right, but beginning at each
end, and reading inwards in a sequence which follows the major
chapels. The sequence on the picture starts as if from either end
of the ponte, and moves towards the centre of the ponte and then
outwards to the transept chapels, reaching the central cappella
maggiore from both directions (Fig.4).10
The ponte was a large bridge-like structure dividing the
church halfway down the nave, with three archways facing the
north end and three doorways facing the south façade. It housed
four chapels on the ground floor and four chapels above.11 In the
painting the viewer begins at the left with the two outermost
chapels on the ponte. Sited against the west wall of the church
that divides the church from the Chiostro Verde was the chapel
of St Mark under the patronage of the Alfani family. On
acquiring the chapel in 1365 they changed its dedication from St
Thomas Aquinas to St Mark;12 in 1367 Margherita, a widow,
daughter of Vermiglio de Alfanis, wished to be buried in the
chapel founded by her father.13 After the destruction of the ponte
the chapel was moved under the organ where it still is, and was
given to the Confraternity of St Catherine of Siena who
changed the dedication to that saint.14 The next chapel was
dedicated to St Peter Martyr and belonged to the Castiglione
family; it was founded in 1298 and still belonged to them in
the fifteenth century.15
Following the chapels clockwise one comes next to the west
transept where the raised chapel was, and still is, dedicated to St
Thomas Aquinas, as it had been since its foundation, the date of
which is uncertain but with a terminus ante quem of 1348.16 It
belonged to the Strozzi family; Nardo di Cione17 frescoed the
chapel in the mid-1350s18 and also designed the stained-glass
window, which shows St Thomas Aquinas holding the model of
a church which is lit by rays emanating from the image of the sun
cupped in the palm of his hand, a motif that also occurs in
Andrea’s painting (Fig.2).19 In the altarpiece, completed by
Andrea Orcagna for the chapel in 1357, Aquinas is shown on
introduce Thomas Acquinas on their proper left, accompanied by St Laurence; see
L. Fornari Schianchi, ed.: Galleria nazionale di Parma. Catalogo delle opere dall’antico al
cinquecento, Milan 1997, pp.48–50, no.54.
16 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, p.117; Borghigiani in Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II,
appendix I, p.400; and W. and E. Paatz: Die Kirchen von Florenz, Frankfurt 1952, III,
p.712. For the problems concerning the date of its foundation, see K.A. Giles: ‘The
Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella: Florentine painting and patronage
1340–1355’, unpublished Ph. D. diss. (Fine Arts Department, New York
University), University Microfilms, Ann Arbor 1977, I, pp.1–32, esp. p.13.
17 See G. Marchini: Le vetrate, in U. Baldini, ed.: Santa Maria Novella. La basilica, il
convento, i chiostri monumentali, Florence 1981, p.267, and ill. p.282. The decoration or
altarpieces of a chapel will generally only be mentioned in this article where relevant
to the titular saint for the purposes of the present argument.
18 See R. Offner: Corpus of Florentine painting, section IV, vol.II, Nardo di Cione, New
York 1960, pp.47–60.
19 This is a literal interpretation of Pope John XXII’s encomium, quoted in the
service of Aquinas’ canonisation in 1323: ‘. . . after the apostles and first doctors, this
glorious doctor illuminated further the church of God’; cited by J. Cannon: ‘Simone
Martini, the Dominicans and the early Sienese polyptych’, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982), pp.69–93 and 73, and note 32. This iconography
became habitual in S. Maria Novella: it was used again for St Thomas Aquinas in the
fresco in the refectory painted in 1353; see S. Orlandi: Historical-Artistic Guide of Santa
Maria Novella and her monumental cloisters, rev. I. Grossi, Florence 1984, pp.76–77, and
again in the stained glass of the liturgical east window behind the high altar designed
by Domenico Ghirlandaio possibly in 1491, installed by 1497. For the stained glass,
see Marchini, op. cit. (note 17), ills. pp.266 and 274; see also J.K. Cadogan: Domenico
Ghirlandaio. Artist and artisan, New Haven and London 2000, pp.282–84, no.54. It is
possible that the motif originated in Ugolino di Nerio’s altarpiece, for which see note
27 below; if so, this would imply that the altarpiece was commissioned in 1323,
possibly to celebrate the canonisation, rather than 1319/20.
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ANDREA DI BONAIUTO’S PAINTING
2. St
Thomas
Aquinas
(detail
of
Fig.1).
20 See G. Kreytenberg: Orcagna. Andrea di Cione. Ein universeller Künstler der Gotik in
Florenz, Mainz 2000, pp.81–96.
21 See Hall, op. cit. (note 11), pp.106–07. The chapel at some point acquired a
secondary dedication to St Michael and all angels; see Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II,
p.116; and Borghigiani in Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, appendix I, p.400, who
wrongly gives the date of change of patronage as 1570. Wood Brown, op. cit. (note
5), p.133, suggests a painting attributed by Ghiberti to Stefano Fiorentino showing
the Fall of the rebel angels may have been for this chapel.
22 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, p.56. According to a passage in the Liber Novus, it
was agreed in 1325 that the money which Donna Guardina had bequeathed in her will
of 1303 should be redirected towards the fabric of the façade, given that the chapel she
had wanted had already been built. Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), I, p.335; and ibid., II,
appendix II, doc.IX, pp.424–25. See also Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), pp.132–33;
Paatz, op. cit. (note 16), III, p.711. According to Borghigiani in Orlandi, op. cit. (note
8), II, appendix I, pp.399–400, the Gondi added St Julian as titular saint of the chapel.
23 See D. Wilkins: ‘Early Florentine frescoes in Santa Maria Novella’, Art Quarterly
NS.1, no.3 (1978), pp.141–74, esp. pp.149–53, figs.2, 4 and 5.
24 ‘. . . una Nostra Donna et un San Luca con altri santi a tempera che oggi [1568] è nella
cappella de Gondi in Santa Maria Novella col nome suo’; see G. Vasari: Le vite de’ più
eccellenti pittori scultori e architettori: nelle relazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. R. Bettarini and
P. Barocchi, Florence 1967, II, p.195. In the 1568 edition Vasari attributed the
frescos in the Spanish Chapel to Simone Martini, causing Meiss, op. cit. (note 1),
p.176, to suggest that the altarpiece in the Gondi chapel may have been painted by
Andrea. It is, however, unlikely that Vasari would have misread the inscription with
the artist’s name on the altarpiece.
25 Suggested by the present writer in M. Davies: The early Italian schools before 1400.
National Gallery catalogues, ed. D. Gordon, London 1988, p.5. The motif of the
Evangelists resting their attributes on the frame of the painting is found in Simone
Martini’s altarpiece of 1319–20 for the Dominican church of S. Caterina in Pisa and
again in his panel of St Luke now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; see A.
Martindale: Simone Martini. Complete edition, Oxford 1988, pp.26–28, no.20,
pp.198–99, figs.49 and 52, and pp.38–40, no.17, pp.194–95, fig.87, respectively; P.
Leone De Castris: Simone Martini, Milan 2003, pp.165–72 and 242–49.
26 In 1348 the Tornaquinci family, who were not allowed to use it as a burial chapel,
but only to put their arms there, paid for it to be frescoed; see Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8),
514 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
Christ’s right-hand side, taking precedence over St Peter.20 There
follow the five chapels aligned along the liturgical east end, which
are precisely mirrored in their sequence in Andrea’s painting.
The first chapel on the row of chapels along the liturgical east
end was dedicated to St Dominic and belonged to the Falconi
family. In 1566 it passed to the Gaddi family who changed the
dedication to St Jerome in 1591.21 Next came a chapel belonging
to the Guardi and Scali families. It was dedicated to Luke, possibly
from 1279, certainly by 1325; according to Biliotti, it was given to
Ghita, wife of Branca degli Scali, in 1319 after the death of her
mother, Guardina Guardi, widow of Cardinale Tornaquinci; both
women had originally wanted the chapel dedicated to St Cather-
ine but that had already been ceded to Bencivenni di Nardo di
Giunta Rucellai (see below). St Luke’s chapel remained with
the Guardi/Scali until it was taken over by the Della Luna family;
in 1466 the Scali resumed patronage; it was ceded to the Gondi
family in 1503 to fulfil the testamentary wishes of Giuliano Gondi
of 1501.22 Its thirteenth-century frescos showed at least one scene
(now lost), probably more, from the life of St Luke,23 and accord-
ing to Vasari it contained an altarpiece which included St Luke by
Simone Martini (untraced).24 The figure of St Luke in Andrea’s
painting, with his attribute resting on the frame (see Fig.3), may
well reflect that of Simone’s altarpiece.25
Next came the cappella maggiore dedicated to the Virgin,
hence the Virgin and Child at the centre of the painting, under
a higher gable, just as the arch of the cappella maggiore rises
higher than the arches of the chapels on either side. It was fres-
coed with scenes from the lives of the Virgin and John the Bap-
tist by Andrea Orcagna (later replaced by those by Domenico
Ghirlandaio),26 and on the high altar was an altarpiece by Ugoli-
no di Nerio showing the Virgin and Child with angels, saints and
prophets (untraced), which was paid for by Fra Baro Sassetti
II, doc.XX, p.434. According to Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.I, p.50, basing himself on
earlier sources such as Ghiberti and Vasari, it was frescoed by Orcagna with scenes from
the lives of the Virgin and John the Baptist, but the frescos were eventually damaged;
see L. Becherucci: ‘Ritrovamenti e restauri orcagneschi I–II’, Bollettino d’Arte 33 (1948),
pp.24–33 and 143–56, esp. pp.24ff. The high altar was under the patronage of the
Sassetti (see note 27 below), and remained so, even after the Ricci had taken over the
patronage of the cappella maggiore; Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.I, pp.51–52. Since the
Ricci were unable to afford to have it repainted, Francesco Sassetti proposed to pay for
frescos showing the life of St Francis; the Dominicans refused, so the patronage was
taken over by the Tornabuoni who promised to retain the Ricci arms in an honourable
place; the new frescos for the chapel were commissioned in 1485 from Domenico
Ghirlandaio, again with scenes from the lives of the Virgin and John the Baptist; see
Cadogan, op. cit. (note 19), pp.236–43, no.17; the double-sided high altarpiece was
eventually commissioned from Domenico Ghirlandaio by the Tornabuoni; ibid.,
pp.264–68, no.38. Domenico’s altarpiece replaced that by Ugolino di Nerio (see note
27 below). See also Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), pp.128–31, for the problems of
patronage and squabbling between the Sassetti, Ricci and Tornabuoni.
27 For a discussion of Ugolino’s altarpiece, see Cannon, op. cit. (note 19), pp.87–91.
See further note 19 above. It was replaced by a double-sided altarpiece by Domeni-
co Ghirlandaio (see note 26 above). Ugolino’s altarpiece was moved to the Spanish
Chapel; it was still in S. Maria Novella in 1790; see V. Fineschi: Il forestiero istruito in
Santa Maria Novella di Firenze, Florence 1790, p.82, who attributed it to ‘Guido
Pittore Senese’, which suggests that some but not all of Ugolino da Siena’s signature
remained. It was suggested by the present writer that the iconography of Ugolino’s
altarpiece may be reflected in Andrea di Bonaiuto’s National Gallery painting
(Davies, op. cit. (note 25), pp.4–5), but this was dismissed by A. Tartuferi:
‘I “primitivi” italiani della National Gallery di Londra: un nuovo catalogo e alcune
considerazioni’, Arte Documento 3 (1989), p.49.
28 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.I, pp.52–53; and Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, p.339,
and doc.LXXIX, p.513. Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), p.128, gives this as another
Bardi family chapel until 1356 when he says Marco di Bernardo Bardi sold it to Paolo
di Antonio di Messer Zanobi Castagnuolo. On 21st April 1487 Filippino Lippi was
commissioned to fresco the walls with scenes from the lives of Sts John the
Evangelist and Philip (completed 1502); see L. Berti and U. Baldini: Filippino Lippi,
Florence 1991, pp.218–23; and L. Berti in Baldini, op. cit. (note 17), pp.215–32.
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ANDREA DI BONAIUTO’S PAINTING

(d.1324).27 On the right of the cappella maggiore was the chapel

dedicated to St John the Evangelist, which was sold by the Boni
in 1486 to the Strozzi, who added St Philip to the dedication.28
The final chapel on the liturgical east end was that of St Gre-
gory granted to the heirs of Riccardo Bardi in 1335.29 Presum-
ably it was already dedicated to Gregory since it is decorated with
thirteenth-century frescos attributed to Duccio of St Gregory
enthroned opposite an enthroned Redeemer. Beneath them
were fourteenth-century scenes from the life of St Gregory.30
The chapel still has a carved relief of a man kneeling in front of
Pope Gregory and the inscription ‘QUESTA CHAPPELA EDIFICATA
HONORE DI DIO E.DI. SCO GREGORIO. EDE. DI MESSERE RICARDO
DE BARDI E DI FIGLIUOLI E DE SUOI DISCENDENTI’, with the Bardi
arms.31 The Bardi retained the patronage for over two hundred
years; by 1790 the titular had been changed to St Dominic.32
Next came the raised transept chapel dedicated to St Cather-
ine (as it still is), probably built between 1303 and 1325, not quite
diametrically opposite that of St Thomas Aquinas. It was ceded
to the Rucellai probably before 1325, certainly by 1355/56.33
The only surviving fresco decoration is in poor condition; it
includes a Crucifixion, Massacre of the Innocents and Martyrdom of St
Ursula and her companions; David Wilkins has suggested that the
legend of St Catherine could have been on the left wall.34
Back on the ponte was the chapel dedicated to St Mary
Magdalene belonging to the Cavalcanti family who kept the
patronage until the ponte was removed.35 It was next to the
central archway immediately east of that dedicated to St Peter
Martyr;36 in 1363 Fra Tommaso di Lionello Cavalcanti was
buried there.37 On the outer wall of the ponte, which divided 3. St
the church from the cemetery, was the chapel of St Thomas of Luke
(detail
Canterbury (Thomas à Becket) belonging to the Minerbetti of
family from at least 1308.38 In his will of 1308 Maso di Fig.1).

29 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.I, pp.53–54. In 1316 it was being used by the ‘laudesi’; fols.73–75, new fols.65–66) has a sketch of the arms on the altarpiece.
see Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), p.127. The original location of Duccio’s Rucellai 34 Wilkins, op. cit. (note 23), pp.159–62 and figs.12–15 and 17–19. It is tempting to

Madonna, commissioned by the ‘laudesi’ in 1285 is beyond the scope of this article;
see I. Hueck: ‘La tavola di Duccio e la Compagnia delle Laudi di Santa Maria
Novella’, in La Maestà di Duccio restaurata. Gli Uffizi. Studi e ricerche, Florence 1990,
pp.33–46; and L. Bellosi: ‘The function of the “Rucellai Madonna” in the Church
of Santa Maria Novella’, in V. Schmidt, ed.: Italian panel painting of the duecento and
trecento, New Haven and London 2002, pp.147–59. For the chapel, see Orlandi, op.
cit. (note 8), I, pp.444–45, and Borghigiani in ibid., II, appendix I, p.399. See also R.
Lunardi in M. Ciatti and M. Seidel, eds.: Giotto. The Santa Maria Novella crucifix,
Florence 2002, p.167, in which the chapel is mistakenly dedicated to St George
instead of St Gregory by Lorenza Melli, p.229.
30 See Wilkins, op. cit. (note 23), pp.153–58; L. Bellosi: ‘Il percorso di Duccio’, in A.
Bagnoli et al., eds.: exh. cat. Duccio. Alle origini della pittura senese, Siena (Museo del
suggest that possibly the altarpiece showing the Mystic Marriage of St Catherine with
St John the Baptist and St Dominic on either side (Ajaccio, Musée Fesch), attributed to
Niccolò di Tommaso (see D. Thiébaut: Ajaccio, Musée Fesch. Les primitifs italiens, Paris
1987, pp.108–11, no.23) could have been painted for this chapel. The design mirrors
that of Andrea Orcagna’s altarpiece facing it in the opposite transept chapel, and is
conceptually the same in showing Christ bestowing a ring on St Catherine, just as he
bestows a book on St Thomas and the keys to heaven on St Peter. The Ajaccio panel
is evidently missing a panel on either side of the central panel. Richard Offner in H.
Maginnis, ed.: Corpus of Florentine painting. A legacy of attributions, New York 1981,
p.87, suggested that a St John the Evangelist and a St Paul (Horne Museum, Florence)
were the missing panels, although this is rejected by Thiébaut.
35 Hall, op. cit. (note 7), p.165, note 21.

Opera del Duomo) 2003, pp.121–23. 36 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, p.121: ‘Post medium pontis arcum qui mediae templi
31 Wilkins, op. cit. (note 23), p.148, fig.23. ianuae respondebat, sequebatur divae Mariae Magdalenae sacellum a Cavalcantum erectum’.
32 Fineschi, op. cit. (note 27), p.20; and Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), pp.127–28. By 37 ‘. . . sotto la Cappella di S. Maria Maddalena alli scalini della nostra chiesa edificata a Casa

this date the chapel previously dedicated to St Dominic had been dedicated to St Jerome.
33 Borghigiani in Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, appendix I, p.399; ibid., I, p.335 and
note 12 (citing from the Liber Novus to the effect that Bencivenni di Nardo died in
1355 or 1356). Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.I, p.54, says in his will of 1335 or 1336
that Bencivenni di Nardo left money for oil for a lamp to be kept alight in the chapel.
The date of building of the chapel is given as 1335 in the document cited at note 15
Cavalcanti . . .’ (document cited at note 15 above, fol.45); Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), I,
pp.553–54. Buried in front of the ponte was Donna Ilaria, wife of Cantinus Cavalcanti
who died 20th May 1300; Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), p.120. According to Wood
Brown this was originally the site of the tomb of Mainardo Cavalcanti (d.1379),
which was moved to the sacristy in 1565.
38 Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, pp.121–22: ‘Inter sacellum hoc [i.e. Mary Magdalene]

above, fols.19v–20. Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), p.126, gives 1335–36 as the date
when the family acquired the chapel. The Rucellai had another very small chapel
dedicated to Ognissanti, not within the main body of the church but under the bell
tower. For its frescos, see Wilkins, op. cit. (note 23), pp.163–64 and figs.12–22.
Roberto Lunardi has kindly drawn my attention to the fact that it had an altarpiece
(untraced) which was commissioned in 1336 following the testamentary wishes of
Albizzo di Nardo di Giunta di Rucellai in his will of 24th March 1334 and which was
restored in 1524 by Pietro di Mariotto Rucellai; see Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II,
p.119, and Borghigiani in Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, appendix I, p.400. For the will
specifying that the chapel should be painted and have ‘tabulis pictis’, see ibid., I, p.434,
note 2. The altarpiece for this chapel would have been extremely small. The
eighteenth-century copy of Sermartelli’s Sepoltuario of 1617 (ASF, Manoscritti 812,
et novissimum quod ad caemeterium surgebat, tertius erat arcus, orientali faciei templi ianuae
directus, et iuxta ipsum ad murum qui aedem a caemeterio dividit haerebat divi Thomae
archiepiscopi Cantuariensis et martyris sacellum quod Minerbetta [sic] posidebat familia’. See
also the document cited at note 15 above, fols.9v–10: ‘La prima per cominciare di verso
levante . . . ’. See also Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), pp.121–22, who points out that
the chapel had an altarpiece attributed by Vasari to Gaddo Gaddi. Paatz, op. cit. (note
16), III, p.703, incorrectly gives the titular of the chapel as St Thomas Aquinas, but
see ibid., p.735. The Minerbetti family were supposedly descendants of St Thomas of
Canterbury; Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), p.122. Hanging near their chapel is the
Crucifix thought to have been painted in England in the second half of the thirteenth
century; see A. Giusti in A. Tartuferi and M. Scalini, eds.: exh. cat. L’arte a Firenze
nell’età di Dante (1250–1300), Florence (Accademia) 2004, pp.150–51, no.41.

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ANDREA DI BONAIUTO’S PAINTING
4. Plan of S. Maria Novella showing the titular saints of the ground-floor liturgical
east-end chapels surrounding the choir, and how they read in Fig.1 (from a plan by
and reproduced courtesy of Marcia Hall).
Ruggerino Minerbetti requested that he be buried dressed in a
Dominican habit at the foot of the altar that had been built
by his family.39 When the ponte was removed in the sixteenth
century the Minerbetti chapel remained on the east wall, where
it is still dedicated to the same saint. It contains two wall tombs
and a floor plaque to Fra Ugolino Minerbetti (d.1348), all three
39 Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), I, pp.415–18; obituary no.364, of Fra Ugolino Minerbetti
(d.1348); and Borghigiani in ibid., II, p.398.
40 See Hall, op. cit. (note 11), pp.100–02.
41 Tripps, op. cit. (note 2), pp.130–37.
42 R. Offner: Corpus of florentine painting, section IV, vol.VI, Andrea Bonaiuti, New
York 1979, passim (p.10 for the document); and R. Salvini in Baldini, op. cit. (note
17), pp.89–125. The frescos were paid for out of the bequest of 1355 of Buonamico
di Lapo Guidalotti.
43 M. Boskovits: La pittura fiorentina alla vigilia del Rinascimento, Florence 1975, p.278.
44 Tripps, op. cit. (note 2), pp.44–45. He considered it could have been either for S.
Maria Novella or for S. Caterina in Pisa (pp.44 and 182). Although Tripps (p.44) says
Meiss presumed the National Gallery painting to date from the same period as the
Pisan frescos, Meiss, op. cit. (note 1), p.47, only drew attention to the ‘design’ of the
Virgin and Child resembling both the Pisan frescos and the Carmine altarpiece and
never suggested a date.
45 For the Carmine altarpiece, see Tripps, op. cit. (note 2), pp.107–15, pls.V–V 1–6.
46 Offner, op. cit. (note 18), pp.47–60. Tripps, op. cit. (note 2), pp.31 and 36, analyses
the influence of Nardo di Cione on Andrea in the 1360s, as well as the influence of
the Paradise frescos.
47 See Tripps, op. cit. (note 2), pp.116–18; and A. Tartuferi in M. Boskovits and A.
516 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
decorated with the arms of the Minerbetti family of three
swords.40
The saints in Andrea di Bonaiuto’s painting are arranged in
precisely the same order as the dedicated chapels on ground-floor
level of the liturgical east end of S. Maria Novella. This explains
not only the omission of the fourth Evangelist, Matthew (no
chapel is dedicated to him in the church), but also the curious
bunching together of the three Dominican saints. The rounded
arches are applied uniformly across the painting despite the fact
that the liturgical east-end chapels have pointed arches, presum-
ably reflecting those of the ponte.
The change of dedication in the Alfani chapel from Thomas
Aquinas to Mark in 1365 gives the National Gallery painting a
terminus post quem (no titles were changed during the fourteenth
century to supply a terminus ante quem), and 1365 may also be a
terminus ad quem: Andrea di Bonaiuto, who lived in the quartiere
of S. Maria Novella intermittently during the years 1351 to 1376,
was active in the church between 1365 and 1368: the design of
the rose window of the Coronation of the Virgin, which in 1365
was paid for out of the bequest of Tedaldino de Ricci (d.1363),
has been attributed to Andrea,41 and on 30th December 1365 he
was contracted to paint the chapterhouse (later known as the
Spanish Chapel) within two years.42 Although the National
Gallery painting has been dated by Miklós Boskovits43 and
Johannes Tripps44 c.1370–77, both circumstances and style sug-
gest a date closer to 1365. When compared with Andrea’s early
work, such as the Carmine altarpiece, where the facial features
have a sharp, almost Sienese appearance,45 in the National
Gallery painting they have softened under the influence of
Nardo di Cione.46 The Virgin’s hands are misshapen and
clumsy: her right hand is in the same position as in the Carmine
altarpiece, the Child’s curiously elongated right foot is similar to
its counterpart in the same altarpiece, and the sgraffito is compar-
atively crude, particularly when compared to that in the dresses
of St Agnes and St Domitilla (Accademia, Florence) dated
c.1365–70 by Angelo Tartuferi.47 Andrea’s style had not yet
reached the level of confident elegance found in much of the
Spanish Chapel. It is therefore likely that the National Gallery
painting was painted after the Carmine altarpiece, and shortly
before the Spanish Chapel.
The close mirroring of the arrangement of the chapels in
S. Maria Novella in the National Gallery painting both in design
Tartuferi, eds.: Cataloghi della Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze, Dipinti. Vol.I, Dal
duecento a Giovanni da Milano, Florence 2003, pp.34–36, no.1.
48 Meiss, op. cit. (note 1), p.176. The Gondi are evidently ruled out by the date they
acquired the chapel, regardless of any other arguments.
49 ‘Il perche non si potea celebrare ogni di messa alle dette tre cappelle. Altrimenti l’altre
cappelle sarebbono troppo abbondonate’; ASF, Corporazioni religiose soppresse dal
governo francese, 86, 96, fol.9v. The three chapels concerned were those dedicated
to Sts Catherine, Job and John the Baptist.
50 Margarita de Alfani was commemorated on 25th April on the feast day of St
Mark, and also on 22nd January, her anniversary, and 21st September, the feast day
of St Matthew; see Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, pp.405, 409 and 414 (the latter date
is a later addition), although Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.II, p.120, comments that
there is no record of any obligations for the chapel of St Mark. Maso di Ruggerino
Minerbetti was commemorated on 29th December, the feast day of St Thomas à
Becket, and also on 1st February; Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, pp.406 and 417. The
Bardi were commemorated on 12th March, the feast of St Gregory (ibid., II, p.407),
although Biliotti, op. cit. (note 9), fasc.I, p.54, comments on the endowment of 200
florins for the Bardi chapel and the lack of onerous obligations, saying it was only in
1430 that the obligation to celebrate the feast of St Gregory was imposed.
51 Nor does the painting encompass all the fourteenth-century chapels in S. Maria
MA.AUG.Gordon.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 17/7/09 10:10 Page 517
and iconography indicates that not only the painter but also the
patron were there at the time it was conceived. Meiss suggested
that the painting could have been commissioned by a member of
the Gondi family as a replica of the altarpiece in their family
chapel.48 However, since no saint is given particular prominence,
the patron is unlikely to have been a member of one of the
families owning chapels represented in the painting. Evidently
the question of who commissioned Andrea’s painting is
inextricably linked to its function. Who might have wanted an
aide-memoire of the liturgical east end of S. Maria Novella?
It is unlikely that it served to fulfil the quasi-legal obligation
to commemorate those who had paid pittances for masses to be
said or sung for their souls, although this obligation could be
onerous; in 1446 when the Camaldolese monks of S. Maria degli
Angeli in Florence found themselves unable to cope with the
number of masses to be said daily, they sought dispensation from
the Bishop of Florence to be released from this obligation for
three of the monastery’s chapels so that the others should not be
neglected.49 The liturgical calendar of S. Maria Novella, drawn
up by Fra Zanobi Guasconi, its prior from November 1362 to
the end of 1365, listed some, but not all, of the patrons of
the chapels represented in the painting on the feast day of the
titular of their chapel.50 But even if a painting could be regard-
ed as an acceptable substitute for attendance in church, it is
evident that all the patrons listed in the liturgical calendar as
requiring commemoration could not be encompassed in a small
painting.51 It was not the representation of the individual
chapels that was important, but the representation of those
chapels as a collective whole.
By representing the chapels that surrounded the choir,52 the
painting could provide a plan of that part of the church reserved
for the friars for daily offices. This might suggest that it was
painted for a friar who required a ‘virtual’ choir when away
from the church. Its small scale suggests it was designed to be
portable, even if somewhat unwieldy for an itinerant friar.53 It
could have been commissioned by a friar who left S. Maria
Novella after a long residence there. A possible candidate is Fra
Benedetto degli Ardinghelli who, Stefano Orlandi speculates,
may have taken his vows at S. Maria Novella around 1350, was
sent to study in Paris in 1365, went as lector to Siena and else-
where, by 1376 had been made Bishop of Castellaneta, taught
logic and philosophy and died in 1383 aged almost fifty.54 In
Novella. There were also chapels dedicated to St Anthony Abbot, to the Annunciate
Virgin and St Nicholas (for the latter, see note 58 below), but these were extraneous
to the main body of the church. A useful plan of the entire complex is in R.
Lunardi: Arte e storia in Santa Maria Novella, Florence 1983, p.15.
52 For the position of the choir before 1565, near the ponte and occupying two bays
of the central nave aisle, see Wood Brown, op. cit. (note 5), p.121; Hall, op. cit. (note
7), ill. p.36, fig.d; and idem, op. cit. (note 11), p.197, fig.I.
53 See V.M. Schmidt: Painted piety. Panel paintings for personal devotion in Tuscany
1250–1400, Florence 2005, for a survey of portable devotional paintings; he does not
include the painting under discussion.
54 Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, pp.5–7, obituary no.514; and ibid., II, appendix III,
p.535. Fra Benedetto Ardinghelli’s portrait was painted in the chiostro grande of
S. Maria Novella.
55 Ibid., II, p.5; doc.XLVIII, pp.465–66; and doc.XLIX, pp.466–68. Joanna Cannon
has pointed out that this would have been a normal obligation for friars to return
books to the house in which they had made their profession.
56 Beverly Brown made this suggestion at a seminar on the subject of this article given
by the present author at the National Gallery, London, 11th June 2007.
57 Carl Strehlke made this suggestion after reading the entry for NG 5115 for
a forthcoming catalogue of early Italian paintings in the National Gallery
ANDREA DI BONAIUTO’S PAINTING
1352 his Order permitted him to receive a substantial inher-
itance of 780 florins from his mother which was subsequently
accepted by the friars of S. Maria Novella; in 1381 he undertook
that after his death the books, liturgical paramenta and goods
(‘bona’) he had borrowed from the convent would be returned
and compiled an inventory of them, although no paintings are
listed.55 Fra Benedetto had the learning to develop the concept
of a painting which mirrored the church, which he could revis-
it in his memory and prayers when far away; he also had the
funds to pay for it.
However, there is also the possibility that the painting might
have had a liturgical function outside the church but still within
the confines of the convent of S. Maria Novella. Beverly Brown
suggested that it might have been used for saying divine office in
winter or at night,56 while Carl Strehlke proposed that it could
have been used in the infirmary for friars too sick to visit the
church.57 The sick had their own chapel, built in 1332, in the
second cloister and dedicated to St Nicholas.58 Gail Solberg
suggested that it could have had a similar function to the fresco
known as the Madonna of the shadows in the east dormitory of the
Dominican convent of S. Marco in Florence, which resembles a
freestanding altarpiece on panel in its iconography and in its
painting technique and which may have been intended for the
recital of matins.59 The Dominican constitutions required all
friars to attend choir unless given dispensation: the painting
could have been used by those with dispensations. For example,
officials who were legitimately impeded were excused choir; the
lector, who was obliged to attend compline and choir as often as
possible, could be absent under extenuating circumstances,60
while professors and advanced students who were given
dispensation from choir recited their office alone or in groups.61
A painting such as Andrea di Bonaiuto’s could have been used in
a private cell or in the studium.
If the painting had a specific function in the convent, it is
likely to have been commissioned by the prior, probably Fra
Zanobi Guasconi (d.1391), who served in that capacity until
25th March 1366 (modern style), when he was succeeded by Fra
Giovanni Giachinotti. Fra Zanobi, an intellectual, was extreme-
ly active in his office.62 Whether or not he devised the complex
programme for the frescos in the chapterhouse, which he com-
missioned in 1365 from Andrea di Bonaiuto, he must, at least at
the beginning, have been involved in their implementation.63
being written by the present author.
58 Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), II, doc.XI, p.426.
59 Verbal communication. For the fresco, see W. Hood: Fra Angelico at San Marco,
New Haven and London 1993, pp.255–60.
60 See E.T. Brett: Humbert of Romans: his life and views of thirteenth-century society,
Toronto 1984, p.142.
61 W.A. Hinnebusch: The history of the Dominican Order, New York 1965, I,
pp.351–52, 357 and 371, note 108; and Brett, op. cit. (note 60), p.99, note 77. I owe
the suggestion of exemption from choir for scholars to Simon Gaine OP, Blackfriars,
Oxford.
62 For Fra Zanobi Guasconi, see Orlandi, op. cit. (note 8), I, obituary no.511,
pp.605–23.
63 Meiss, op. cit. (note 1), p.102, suggested that the programme was devised in the
studium generale in consultation with the painter, and that Jacopo Passavant (d.1357)
may have formulated the initial scheme. Orlandi, op. cit. (note 19), pp.47 and 70,
proposed that the programme was devised by Fra Zanobi Guasconi. See also
S. Romano: ‘Due affreschi del Cappellone degli Spagnoli: Problemi iconologici’,
Storia dell’Arte 26–28 (1976), pp.181–213, esp. p.181, note 4; and J. Gardner: ‘Andrea
di Bonaiuto and the Chapter House frescoes in Santa Maria Novella’, Art History 2
(1979), pp.107–38.
the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e • clI • august 2009 517
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ANDREA DI BONAIUTO’S PAINTING
Included in those frescos, among the Liberal Arts and below
Rhetoric, is the figure of Cicero, to whom the Latin treatise on
the art of memory, Rhetorica Ad Herennium, was attributed,64 a
fundamental work for the theories on artificial memory of the
Dominican theologians Albertus Magnus and St Thomas
Aquinas.65 It may have been the inspiration behind Andrea di
Bonaiuto’s small painting, which can be read as a pictorial
representation of the system of mnemonics it advocates, that of
placing images in loci: it is an aide-memoire to S. Maria Novella.66
64 F. Yates: The art of memory, London 1966, repr. 1999, pp.20 and 63–92. A useful
chart of the allegories and figures below St Thomas Aquinas enthroned is given in
Orlandi, op. cit. (note 19), pp.65–68; and repeated in Baldini, op. cit. (note 17),
pp.102–03.
65 Yates, op. cit. (note 64), pp.68–73 and 93–94; see also L. Bolzoni: The web of images.
Vernacular preaching from its origins to St. Bernardino da Siena, Ashgate 2004, esp. p.83;
and M. Carruthers: The book of memory. A study of memory in medieval culture,
Cambridge 2008, pp.129, 154–55 and 193.
66 According to Albertus Magnus ‘. . . various people will place for themselves
different backgrounds, those indeed which move them more. For some will place
a church, from having turned their mind to churches . . .’, and he recommends
‘small-scale’ or ‘curtailed space’ since a mind ‘should not be spread excessively by
traversing through imaginary spaciousness, like a field or a city, but the “place” is
“small scale” when the soul at once flies swiftly around its corners seizing the images
hidden away in them’; De Bono. Tractatus IV, Quaestio II ‘De Partibus Prudentiae’;
translation taken from Carruthers, ibid., pp.357–59.
67 Another possible example of a portable devotional painting reflecting the sequence
An unpublished miniature from the circle of Fra
Angelico
by LAURA ALIDORI BATTAGLIA
GIORGIO VASARI DESCRIBED Fra Angelico as an ‘excellent
painter and miniaturist’,1 yet despite this, or perhaps because of
Vasari’s evident inaccuracies, his activity as a miniature painter
has received less attention than his work on a larger scale.2 While
recent exhibitions have proposed new attributions and
chronologies,3 one at S. Marco, Fra Giovanni Angelico pittore mini-
atore o miniatore pittore?,4 underlined the importance of his work
1 ‘. . . eccellente pittore e miniatore’; see G. Vasari: Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori e
architettori, ed. G. Milanesi, Florence 1906, II, pp.506, 516 and 522.
2 Most of the manuscripts attributed to him today were already recognised by Max
Wingenroth at the end of the nineteenth century; see M. Wingenroth: ‘Beiträge
zur Angelico-Forschung’, Repertorium für Kunstwissenschaft 21 (1898), pp.335–45
and 427–38, esp. pp.342–45, although his attributions did not find immediate
approval; see L. Douglas: Fra Angelico, London 1902, pp.159–60; P. D’Ancona:
La miniatura fiorentina (secoli XI–XVI), Florence 1914, I, pp.22 and 56, nos.3 and 57;
and II, pp.352–56, nos.772–76.
3 L.B. Kanter and P. Palladino: exh. cat. Fra Angelico, New York (Metropolitan
Museum of Art) 2005; A. Zuccari, G. Morello and G. De Simone: exh. cat. Beato
Angelico: l’Alba del Rinascimento, Rome (Musei Capitolini) 2009; reviewed in this
Magazine, 151 (2009), pp.417–19.
4 M. Scudieri and S. Giacomelli: exh. cat. Fra Giovanni Angelico pittore miniatore o
518 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
As such it appears to be unique in Italian fourteenth-century
painting, although other such paintings may not have survived
or have not been recognised.67 It is possible that no other
religious foundation commissioned such an object, since the
moment the titular saint of a chapel changed it became
obsolete. In S. Maria Novella this would have been in 1565
when the ponte was removed,68 rendering Andrea di Bonaiuto’s
painting as a functionally superfluous, if aesthetically charming,
white elephant.69
of the titulars of chapels is the Wilton Diptych (National Gallery, London); see F.
Wormald: ‘The Wilton Diptych’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 17
(1954), p.200, who pointed out that the three saints presenting Richard II to the
Virgin and Child are in the same order as their chapels in Westminster Abbey, a
church with which Richard felt a particular affinity, where he was crowned and
eventually buried; see further D. Gordon in exh. cat.: The Wilton Diptych. Making and
meaning, London (National Gallery) 1993, pp.60–62.
68 In 1591 the Gaddi changed the dedication of their chapel to St Jerome (see note
21 above), so the saints in the painting would no longer have been relevant, even if
the ponte had not been removed. Change of patronage did not usually entail a change
of dedication. Additional dedications presumably would not have affected the
potential function of the painting, such as the addition in 1486 by the Strozzi of St
Philip to the chapel of John the Evangelist, or Julian to the chapel of St Luke in 1503
by the Gondi. See notes 22 and 28 above.
69 In 1940 the painting was presented to the National Gallery by Mrs R.P.
Blennerhassett, the daughter of its previous owner, Mrs F.W.H. Myers (d.1937). It
may have been acquired in Rome by Mr F.W.H. Myers (d.1902).
as a miniaturist and the decisive influence of his figurative style
on a circle of miniaturists working for the monastery of S. Marco
and on other commissions around the mid-fifteenth century.5
These artists’ fidelity to their master’s style still makes it difficult
to establish which are his autograph works or to assess the role of
his collaborators. While some works, for example a gradual and
two psalters (MSS 558, 530 and 531; all at S. Marco), have been
miniatore pittore?, Florence (Museo di S. Marco) 2007.
5 For Angelico as a miniaturist, see L. Kanter: ‘Guido di Pietro detto Beato
Angelico’, in M. Bollati, ed.: Dizionario biografico dei miniatori italiani secoli
IX–XVI, Milan 2004, pp.333–36, who gives a resumé of earlier opinions and a full
bibliography.
6 Angelico’s hand is almost universally recognised in fifteen of the miniatures in
MS 558, Museo di S. Marco, Florence; in the sheet with the Crucifixion, S.
Trinita, Florence; in MS Gerli 54, Biblioteca Braidense, Milan; and in two psalters
in S. Marco; see L. Bellosi: exh. cat. Pittura di luce, Giovanni di Francesco e l’arte
fiorentina di metà quattrocento, Florence (Casa Buonarroti) 1990, pp.98–101. Only
Spike does not accept the psalters as Angelico’s work; see J.T. Spike: Fra Angelico,
New York 1996.
7 See M. Boskovits: ‘Attorno al Tondo Cook: precisazioni sul Beato Angelico su
Filippo Lippi e altri’, Mitteilungen des kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 39 (1995),
MA.AUG.Gordon.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 17/7/09 10:10 Page 519
5. Page with the
initial ‘T’ and
St Jerome from
the Regula mona-
chorum, fol.1.
Miniature by a
follower of
Fra Angelico,
decoration by
Battista di Biagio
Sanguigni.
Before 1451.
Tempera on
parchment, 19
by 14 cm. (Pri-
vate collection).
almost unanimously accepted as Angelico’s work,6 more recent
attributions, such as a choirbook (Biblioteca Medicea Lauren-
ziana, Florence; corale 43)7 and a fragment with St Benedict in a
private collection in Turin,8 are still the subject of debate.9 Thus
the work of Angelico and his immediate circle as miniaturists has
yet to be defined, in particular in regard to the accepted body of
work, the question of autograph status and the establishment of
a chronology.
An unpublished manuscript, probably made for the monastery
of S. Girolamo at Fiesole by an artist very close to Angelico
working in collaboration with Battista di Biagio Sanguigni – the
miniaturist who is documented working with Angelico and
Zanobi Strozzi for much of his career – prompted the re-exam-
ination of the miniature production of Angelico and his circle in
the 1440s and the early 1450s and led to the identification of the
precise iconography of the penitent St Jerome adopted by
Angelico.
The manuscript is a small codex containing the Regula mona-
chorum, once believed to be by St Jerome,10 and other texts on
the life of the saint. Formerly in the collection of Dyson Perrins
and recently on the American art market,11 the volume opens
pp.32–68, esp. pp.37–46.
8 L. Bellosi in G. Romano, ed.: Da Biduino ad Algardi pittura e scultura a confronto,
Turin 1990, pp.38–43, cat. no.4.
9 For choirbook 43, see also A. Dillon Bussi in A. di Lorenzo: exh. cat. Omaggio a
Beato Angelico. Un dipinto per il Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan (Museo Poldi Pezzoli) 2001,
pp.30–35; A. Dillon Bussi in M. Scudieri and G. Rasario, eds.: exh. cat. Miniatura del
’400 a San Marco. Dalle suggestione avignonesi all’ambiente dell’Angelico, Florence (Museo
di S. Marco) 2003, pp.160–61; Scudieri and Giacomelli, op. cit. (note 4), pp.16–17;
and A. Dillon Bussi: ‘Il Beato Angelico miniatore, cioè pittore su libro (riflettendo
sul Corale 43 della Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana)’, Rivista di Storia della Miniatura
12 (2008), pp.95–102. For the Turin fragment, see also G. Bonsanti: Beato
Angelico, Florence 1998, pp.158–59; L.B. Kanter: ‘Florentine illuminations at the
Wallraf-Richartz-Museum: Zanobi Strozzi and a proposal for Matteo di Pacino’,
Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 62 (2001), pp.143–54; and G. Morello in Zuccari, Morello
A MINIATURE FROM THE CIRCLE OF FRA ANGELICO
6. Detail of St Jerome
from Fig.5.
with the initial ‘T’ (Tepescens) decorated with the image of St
Jerome (Figs.5 and 6). He is shown to the waist, holding a book
in his right hand while with the left he beats his chest with a
stone. The marginal decoration can be attributed to Battista di
Biagio Sanguigni, who was also responsible for the friezes in the
psalters nos.530 and 53112 and who had already collaborated
with Angelico on the decoration of MS 558.13 But another artist
was responsible for the figure. It is lit from high on the right and
shadows are indicated by delicate parallel strokes which create
volume in a manner that is also found in many of the monks’
cells in S. Marco. On the beard and the face, however, the shad-
ows are added with larger brushstrokes in an olive colour which
follows the outline of the cheek and the eyes, while on the
forehead the shadow is laid in with larger brushstrokes beneath
the final paint layer which extends from the hair on the left
towards the centre, as can be seen in infra-red examination. The
saint’s three-dimensionality is also defined by his relationship to
the framing initial: his left arm almost seems to lean on the blue
base line of the ‘T’ while his right arm is inserted between the
blue and yellow frames, leaving only the hand holding the book
visible. This play of light can be found in numerous psalters at
S. Marco, for example in the King David on fol.169v or in the
beautiful initial ‘B’ on fol.39r, both in MS 531 (Fig.7) with a lead
white highlight on the tip of the nose, touches of red to indicate
and De Simone, op. cit. (note 3), p.58.
10 J.P. Migne: Patrologiae cursus completus, seu bibliotheca universalis, integra, uniformis,
commoda, oeconomica, omnium ss. Patrum doctorum scriptorumque eccelesiasticorum sive
Latinorum sive Graecorum. Series Latina, in qua prodeunt patres, doctores scriptoresque
Ecclesiae Latinae, a Tertulliano I ad Innocentium III, Paris 1844–1902 (hereafter cited as
PL), XXX, cols.391–426; and B. Lambert: Bibliotheca Hieronymiana Manuscripta,
Steenbrugis 1969–72, no.560.
11 Sotheby’s, London, Perrins Catalogue, 15th June 1907, lot 234; Maggs, Catalogue
246, 1909, lot 812; Sotheby’s, London, 2nd November 1920, lot 3325; Sotheby’s,
London, Scent Catalogue, 22nd June 1936, lot 72; Sotheby’s, London, 10th
November 1952, lot 70; and Bonhams and Butterfields, Fine Books and Manuscripts,
San Francisco, 28th June 2005, lot 3009.
12 See Kanter, op. cit. (note 5), p.335.
13 Scudieri and Giacomelli, op. cit. (note 4), p.32.
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A MINIATURE FROM THE CIRCLE OF FRA ANGELICO
7. Initial ‘B’ with
God the Father
and David from
a psalter.
Illumination by
Fra Angelico and
Battista di Biagio
Sanguigni. c.1449.
Tempera on parch-
ment, 38.5 by 26.7
cm. (full folio).
(Museo di S.
Marco, Florence,
inv.531, fol.39r).
the cheeks, light catching the forehead and shadows defining the
eyes. St Jerome’s broad shoulders are also close to those of God
the Father in the same ‘B’ and to those of David on fol.86v of
MS 530 (Fig.8); in both the figures take up most of the space
within the initial letter, the halo touches the frame and there is
only space for half-moon strips of background colour around
the body. The tight-fitting sleeves that emphasise the figure’s
volume can also be found in the insipiens on fol.100v of MS 530.
The face of St Jerome compares well to that of St Paul in the
medallion in the bas-de-page of fol.1r in choirbook 43 in the
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence (Fig.9). Both share
the outline of the face, the barely indicated ears, while the
mouth and shadows beneath the eyes and on the cheeks are
indicated with similar brushstrokes. Other illuminating compar-
isons are with the prophet in a medallion on fol.1r in the same
choirbook (Fig.10) and the face of a saint in the Last Judgment on
the Silver Cupboard (Fig.11).
14 M. Meiss: ‘Scholarship and penitence in the Early Renaissance: the image of St.
Jerome’, Pantheon 32 (1974), pp.134–40; see also D. Russo: Saint Jérôme en Italie: étude
d’iconographie et de spiritualité (XIIIe–XVe siécle), Paris 1987, pp.201–51.
15 On the Hieronymites of St Jerome at Fiesole, see G.M. Brocchi: Vite de’ Santi e
Beati Fiorentini, Florence 1761, II, pp.195–214; B. Ridderbos: Saint and Symbol Images
of Saint Jerome in early Italian Art, Groningen 1984, pp.73–75; G. Perazzolo: ‘Eremiti
di San Gerolamo’, in Dizionario degli istituti di perfezione, Rome 1974–97,
cols.1203–04; D. Brunori: L’Eremo di San Girolamo a Fiesole, Fiesole 1920; G.
Raspini: I romitori nella diocesi di Fiesole, Fiesole 1981, pp.11–12; and idem: Gli eremi
nella diocesi di Fiesole, Fiesole 1981, pp.8–14.
16 See L. Sebregondi: Tre confraternite fiorentine. Santa Maria della Pietà detta ‘Buca di
San Girolamo’, San Filippo Benizi, San Francesco Poverino, Florence 1991; Idem in
G. Rolfi, L. Sebregondi and P. Viti: exh. cat. La chiesa e la città, a Firenze nel XV
secolo, Florence (Sotterranei di S. Lorenzo) 1992, pp.95 and 97.
17 For the Princeton panel, see the catalogue entry in Kanter and Palladino, op. cit.
(note 3), pp.55–57, which gives a resumé of earlier opinions and bibliography. On
the links of this work to the hermitage at Fiesole, see also note 18 below. As
Eisenberg observed (M. Eisenberg: ‘“The penitent St Jerome” by Giovanni Toscani’,
THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 118 (1976), pp.275–83, esp. p.279, note 16), the text on
the saint’s scroll contains three separate quotations: the first from the rule of St Augus-
tine, the second from Jerome’s letter to Eustochium that reappears in the Regula
monachorum and the third from the Regula monachorum itself; but the text on the panel
at Princeton modifies Jerome’s original words ‘sponsa Christi vinum fugiat pro veneno’,
making the monk the subject of the sentence (‘monacus vinum fugiat pro veneno’),
520 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
8. Initial ‘D’ with
King David from a
psalter. Illumina-
tion by Fra Angeli-
co and Battista di
Biagio Sanguigni.
c.1449. Tempera
on parchment, 39.2
by 28 cm. (full
folio). (Museo di S.
Marco, Florence,
inv.530, fol.86v).
The penitent St Jerome was a popular subject in Florence in
the first half of the fifteenth century as outlined by Millard
Meiss14 following the establishment of the Order of the Her-
mits of St Jerome (Eremiti di S. Girolamo) in Fiesole at the end
of the fourteenth century by the blessed Carlo dei Conti Guidi
di Montegranelli.15 This was rapidly followed by the formation
in Florence of the Compagnia, or Buca, di S. Girolamo,16 a
lay confraternity affiliated to the Order. Iconographic proto-
types of the saint were soon adopted by Florentine artists, who
usually showed him with tattered clothing kneeling before a
crucifix in the wilderness and beating his breast with a stone.
But another group of paintings show him standing, dressed in a
monastic habit open at the chest, as in the miniature under
examination. This typology appears to be closely tied to the
Hieronymite community. Three images can be connected to
these two foundations: the small panel at Princeton (Fig.12),17
attributed to the young Angelico, the dating of which is still
debated; the statue of the saint that Giuliano Amidei modelled
in 1454 for the Confraternity (Fig.13);18 and the image of the
leaving little doubt, in the present writer’s opinion, that it was intended for a monastic
foundation. This reconfirms the link between the panel and S. Girolamo at Fiesole,
whose monks had recently adopted the Hieronymite rule and from 1441 used it
together with that of St Augustine (see notes 24 and 25 below). The presence of the
coats of arms of the families Gaddi and Ridolfi on the painting, which was subjected
to an extensive restoration at an early date, does not seem to be binding for its dat-
ing; see C.B. Strehlke: ‘The Princeton “Penitent Saint Jerome”, the Gaddi family,
and early Fra Angelico’, Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 62 (2003 [2004]),
pp.5–27; N.E. Muller: ‘Technical Note’, in ibid., pp.28–31. Kollewijn’s proposal (R.
Kollewijn, ‘Alcune osservazioni di ordine iconografico a proposito del “Girolamo
penitente” di Princeton’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 34
(1990), pp.413–20) to link the Princeton panel to the convent of S. Maria del Santo
Sepolcro, called delle Campora, belonging to another Hieronymite order, seems to
be less convincing given that, as Strehlke observed, the cult of Jerome does not seem
to have acquired a high profile even in the brief period in which the monks adopted
the Hieronymite rule. Besides, the inventory of the codices in the library of the
convent delle Campora includes no text by St Jerome; see R. Blum: La Biblioteca della
Badia fiorentina e i codici di Antonio Corbinelli, Città del Vaticano 1951, pp.179–82.
18 See Sebregondi, op. cit. (note 16), pp.12 and 125–27, cat. no.2SG; and idem in
Rolfi, Sebregondi and Viti, op. cit. (note 16), p.97, cat. no.5.5. This statue is closely
tied to the panel at Princeton. The identical iconography of the two figures leads to
the hypothesis that the Penitent St Jerome at Princeton was kept in the original
Hermitage at Fiesole and was the object of devotion for the members of the Confra-
ternity, who met there regularly, as can be deduced from its constitution: ‘Rubrica di
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A MINIATURE FROM THE CIRCLE OF FRA ANGELICO

9. Medallion with 10. Medallion

St Paul from a with a prophet
choirbook. from a choirbook.
Illumination by Illumination by Fra
Fra Angelico and Angelico and
an anonymous an artist of his
follower. After workshop. After
1451. Tempera 1451. Tempera on
on parchment, 51 parchment, 51 by
by 37.2 cm. (full 37.2 cm. (full
folio). (Biblioteca folio). (Biblioteca
Medicea Lauren- Medicea Lauren-
ziana, Florence, ziana, Florence,
corale 43, fol.1r). corale 43, fol.1r).

saint in the altarpiece attributed to Zanobi Strozzi made for the

church of the monastery of S. Girolamo at Fiesole (Fig.15), for
which a date between 1463 and 1465 is proposed here.19 The
earliest of these images is by Angelico, the second depends
iconographically on the first and that the third is by an artist in
his circle. Further confirmation of the links between Angelico’s
image and the Hieronymite foundation can be found in the fact
that starting with Angelico’s S. Trinita altarpiece of the Depo-
sition of 1432 in which the penitent St Jerome appears on a
pilaster (Fig.14), the artist consistently portrayed the saint
dressed in the robes worn by the monks of the Fiesole Order:20
an ash grey tunic with a frayed hem open at the chest, with a
leather belt, as described in the Ordinarium fratrum congregationis
sancti Ieronimi de fexulis,21 robes that we also find in the minia-
11. Detail from
ture under discussion. the Last Judgment
Little information about this Order and its organisation from the Silver
survived its suppression in 1668 and the almost complete Cupboard, by Fra
Angelico and an
dispersal of its documents and artistic possessions. However, artist of his work-
there is evidence for the close links between the Monastery of St shop. c.1450–52.
Jerome and the Dominican house at Fiesole in the first half of the Tempera on wood,
38.5 by 37 cm.
fifteenth century,22 and between the two centres of the cult of St (Museo di S.
Jerome and the artists in Fra Angelico’s circle.23 Marco, Florence).

quelli che si possono et debbono ricevere nel nostro luogo di Fiesole et di quello sa afare. Al nome Botticelli. Pittura fiorentina tra Gotico e Rinascimento, Florence 2008, pp.187–200.
di Dio ordiniamo che alluogo di Fiesole entrino gente chesi voglino convertire a Dio . . .’; 21 Fiesole, Archivio Vescovile (hereafter cited as AVF), MS X.B.1: the codex contains

Florence, Archivio dell’Oratorio di San Girolamo (hereafter cited as AOSGF), Libro
dei Capitoli di S. Maria della Pietà, fol.52v. For a similar suggestion, see also M.
Minasi in Zuccari, Morello and De Simone, op. cit. (note 3), pp.148–49.
19 The altarpiece must date from later than the completion of at least part of the work
of the church, which was underway in 1463 when the Hieronymites were exempted
from taxes (Florence, Archivio di Stato (hereafter cited as ASF), Carte Strozziane, 2nd
ser., 53, fol.172v), and probably not later than 1465 given that the Medici coat of arms
the Latin version of the Ordinarium to which is added a translation in Venetian dialect;
on pp.21 and 22, in the paragraph ‘De forma habitus et de omni vestitu’, we read, ‘clamides
vero et tunice scapulariaquem sint de panni mustelino seu berretini coloris’ (‘their light colour
distinguished them from the Carmelite and Ambrosian orders’), ‘Qonam [sic] portent nos-
tri fratres onino de corio nigri coloris vel berretini cum fibulis de osse vel de ferro sine aliquo ornatu’.
This is repeated in the Venetian version on pp.63 and 71. The manuscript is dated 1466.
22 This connection goes back to the foundation of S. Domenico: Giovanni Dominici

on it does not include the ball with the French lily, the use of which was conceded to
Piero de’ Medici that year. Besides, in the altarpiece St Laurence wears a dalmatic dec-
orated with the Medici coat of arms which might relate it not to Lorenzo the Magnif-
icent but to his cousin Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, born precisely in 1463. Consequently
it can be proposed that the commission was given by his father, Pierfrancesco. In 1466
the Hieronymites commissioned Neri di Bicci to paint another altarpiece, as described
in his Ricordanze and also by Strozzi; see N. di Bicci: Le ricordanze (10 marzo 1453–24 aprile
1475), ed. B. Santi, Pisa 1976, and ASF, Carte Strozziani, 3rd ser., 9/2 (9bis), p.269.
20 Angelico showed St Jerome in the garb of a Hieronymite hermit also in the
Crucifixion of the chapterhouse of S. Marco, on the pilaster strip of the S. Marco altar-
and the first friars lived for some time in 1406 in the Hieronymites hermitage while the
Dominican monastery was being built (Fiesole, Convento di S. Domenico, Chronica
Quadripartita, fol.2v: ‘dicti fratres habitaverunt in Eremitorio sancti hieronimi’; (‘later the
Hieronymites marched with the Dominicans under the same banner’). Moreover, in
1442 the Domincan Antonino Pierozzi, then prior of S. Marco, chose the first members
of the Compagnia dei Buonomini di S. Martino from the members of the Compagnia
di S. Girolamo; see N. Martelli: I buonomini di S. Martino: discorso storico, Florence 1916;
P. Bargellini: I Buonomini di San Martino, Florence 1972; and M.R. De Gramatica and
L. Sebregondi: Congregazione dei Buonomini di San Martino, archivio storico, Florence 2001.
23 To Battista di Biagio Sanguigni, who also lived at Fiesole, are attributed the minia-

piece now in the Lindenau Museum, Altenburg, and in cell 4 in the convent of S.
Marco and probably in the panel sometimes identified as the Ecstasy of S. Benedict
but more probably a representation of the Fathers of the Church now in the Musée
Condé, Chantilly, which is stylistically quite close to our miniature; see M. Laclotte:
‘Autour de Fra Angelico: deux puzzles’, in F. Pasut and J. Tripps, eds.: Da Giotto a
tures in the book of the Capitoli della Compagnia di Santa Maria della Pietà, also known
as the Compagnia Buca di S. Girolamo, which were completed in March 1414 (1413
Florentine style); see Sebregondi, op. cit. (note 16), pp.123–24. Zanobi Strozzi’s
brother, Francesco di Benedetto di Caroccio degli Strozzi, is recorded in 1432 as a
member of the Compagnia di S. Girolamo (see AOSGF, Registro dei Morti A, s.c.).

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A MINIATURE FROM THE CIRCLE OF FRA ANGELICO

12. Penitent St Jerome, by Fra Angelico. 1420–30(?). Tempera on 13. Penitent St Jerome, by Giuliano Amidei.
panel, 57 by 41 cm. (Art Museum, Princeton University). 1454. Polychromed terracotta, 135 cm. high.
(Oratorio di S. Girolamo e S. Francesco
Poverino, Florence).
14. Detail of the penitent St Jerome
from the Deposition (S. Trinita
altarpiece), by Fra Angelico. 1432.
Tempera on panel, 54 by 14 cm.
(Museo di S. Marco, Florence).

The Regula monachorum, attributed to the so-called Pseudo
Girolamo, was the first rule adopted by the Order according to
the Papal Bull of Pope Gregory XII24 and remained in use even
after the adoption of the Rule of St Augustine following the
Bull of Eugenius IV of 1441,25 as one can deduce from the Ordi-
narium.26 Given the similarity in the figure of the saint in the
miniature under discussion with the S. Trinita altarpiece, the
consistency of the iconography with that of works associated
with the Hieronymite in Fiesole and the stylistic similarity with
works produced by Angelico and his close collaborators in the
short period between the frescos in S. Marco and the panels for
the Silver Cupboard, we propose to attribute the miniature of the
Regula monachorum to an artist in Angelico’s immediate circle and
to link the commission to the Hieronymite foundation at Fiesole.
This work can be added to a group of miniatures that are close
to the work of Fra Angelico made in the years immediately after
he finished the frescos at S. Marco. They document the existence
of artists who worked side-by-side with him and also, perhaps,
independently but always in Angelico’s style, in the same way
that artists can be identified who worked with him on the
frescos in S. Marco, in the Cappella Niccolina in the Vatican and
on the Silver Cupboard. The works in question include the
psalters of S. Marco already mentioned, in which some initials
can be attributed to assistants, choirbook 43 of the Biblioteca
Laurenziana, Florence, and missal 533 of S. Marco. This last
manuscript has twelve historiated initials, the work of two artists,
eleven by one hand and just one, fol.1r (Fig.16), by the other.
This miniature shows Christ blessing and eight saints, and has
been attributed to Zanobi Strozzi,27 an attribution tentatively
accepted in the recent exhibition catalogue,28 but its figures seem
closely related to those in the psalters, in particular to the young
David, and have a delicacy and intensity that is unknown in
Zanobi’s work. The circular arrangement of the praying saints
was used by Angelico in the Griggs Crucifixion (Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York) and was employed throughout his
career. The rapid and summary treatment of the flesh, hair,
beards and clothes, painted with larger brushstrokes, is closer to
the technique used in choirbook 43, and creates a greater sense
of volume than the other miniatures in the psalter, which employ
vivid light effects. The Pietà in the round bas-de-page (Fig.16)
depends directly on the figure of the same subject frescoed in the
cell of Cosimo de’ Medici at S. Marco and in the predella of the
altarpiece for Bosco ai Frati (Museo di S. Marco, Florence). The
remaining eleven miniatures also show the profound influence of

24 L. Cherubini: Magnum Bullarium Romanum ab Leone Magno usque ad S.D.N.
Clementem X, Lyon 1673–92, I, p.307.
25 Ibid., I, p.359.
26 AVF, X,B,1, passim.
27 The miniature at fol.1r was attributed to Angelico by Wingenroth, op. cit. (note 2),
p.344, while Douglas, D’Ancona and Chiarelli attributed it to Zanobi Strozzi or to a
pupil of his; see Douglas, op. cit. (note 2), pp.159–60; D’Ancona, op. cit. (note 2), II,
no.774; and R. Chiarelli: I codici miniati del Museo di San Marco a Firenze, Florence
1968, p.62.
28 Scudieri and Giacomelli, op. cit. (note 4), pp.149–51.
29 See Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (hereafter cited as BML), S. Marco
370, fol.8v; and R. Morçay: ‘La cronaca del convento fiorentino di San Marco. La
parte più antica, dettata da Giuliano Lapaccini’, Archivio storico italiano 71, 1,1 (1913),
pp.1–29.

522 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine

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Angelico, particularly in their iconography. The miniature with
St Mark at fol.213r (Fig.17), the only evangelist illustrated in the
missal, confirms that it was made for S. Marco, and the attribu-
tion of missal 533 to Angelico’s immediate circle confirms that
his studio was involved in making liturgical books for that
monastery at the time of its formal separation from S. Domenico
in 1445, a separation in which Angelico was personally involved.
The two psalters for S. Marco were not an isolated episode:
together with missal 533 they can be identified as an undertaking
worked on in parallel with the illuminated choirbooks written by
Fra Benedetto at S. Domenico and illuminated by Zanobi
Strozzi. This undertaking was recorded in the chronicle of S.
Marco compiled by Roberto degli Ubaldini early in the six-
teenth century based on information taken from Prior Giuliano
Lapaccini’s chronicle written before 1457. This account men-
tions two illuminated psalters29 made on the orders of Cosimo
de’ Medici between 1443 and 1453. Angelico was helped in this
work by other miniaturists, one of whom can be identified as
Battista di Biagio Sanguigni, responsible for the lettering and the
foliate decoration in the psalters.30
Finally choirbook 43, whose provenance from S. Domenico
in Fiesole adds weight to the attribution, is stylistically and
compositionally so close to Fra Angelico to suggest that he was
involved at least in the conception and design if not in the
complete execution. Large parts of it were left unfinished, as can
be seen in the group of bystanders to the right of the Crucifixion
on fol.168v; in other passages the hand of one or more assistants
can be recognised, even if only in applying the colour to a rapid
drawing by the master. Christ’s billowing loincloth in the Cruci-
fixion is a late Gothic touch, a trait much evident in Angelico’s
work, particularly in the frescos at S. Marco. Where the colour
is virtually lost, as in the drapery or Christ’s face on fol.241r, the
drawing with its characteristic tremulous lines is close to the
drawing of David playing the psaltery (British Museum, London)
or to the underdrawing of the Coronation of the Virgin (Uffizi,
Florence) recently revealed by infra-red reflectography.31 Exact
quotations from Angelico’s work in earlier commissions for S.
Domenico show the lasting influence of models taken from MS
558; for example, the fantastic flying animals by the initials on
fols.67v and 68v of that manuscript reappear in the margins of
fols.1r and 199r of choirbook 43, while the Assumption of the
Virgin on fol.248r of the choirbook can be associated with the
same scene painted by Angelico in MS 558.
Apart from differing levels of ability among the artists, this
group of manuscripts is faithful to Angelico’s style both in its
choice of models and in the depiction of figures. In this period
Angelico was striving towards greater expressive effects
through the careful use of line; it would seem that these works
were based on modelli by Angelico that were circulated among
a small group of artists who seemed to be fully aware of his
evolving artistic language. A group of drawings in the Uffizi has
been related to specific works.32 The figure of the Evangelist in
a tondo of MS 95E (Fig.19), recently related to the Evangelist
30 Missal 534 at S. Marco may also be associated with this group; Battista di Biagio
Sanguigni was responsible for its lettering and foliate decoration leaving spaces for the
principal miniatures, as can be seen on some incomplete sheets.
31 See Scudieri and Rasario, op. cit. (note 9), p.140, fig.14.
32 F. Bellini and G. Brunetti: exh. cat. I disegni antichi degli Uffizi. I tempi del Ghiberti,
Florence (Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi) 1978, pp.58–62; and L. Melli in
Zuccari, Morello and De Simone, op. cit. (note 3), pp.66–68.
A MINIATURE FROM THE CIRCLE OF FRA ANGELICO
15. Virgin and Child with Sts Cosmas, Damian, Jerome, John the Baptist, Francis and
Laurence, by Zanobi Strozzi. Here dated 1463–65. Tempera on panel, 220 by 257
cm. (overall dimensions). (Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon).
Mark in Missal 533,33 seems to reappear also in the bust of the
Evangelist in a tondo high on the right on fol.168v of choir-
book 43 (Fig.20). Other parallels include the angel in the
Resurrection in the missal and that to the left of Christ in fol.241r
of the choirbook or the apostle beneath the Virgin in Pentecost
(Fig.18) with two of the prophets in medallions on fol.1r of
the manuscript in the Laurenziana (Fig.21). These similarities
suggest that they derive from the same model, or are even the
work of the same artist, and form a nucleus to which the St
Jerome manuscript can be related.
These attributions of miniatures to Angelico’s close circle also
permit us to review the problem of chronology. Both the
psalters and MS 533 are undocumented, and only a tenuous link
ties the first two manuscripts with the psalter sent to Vespasiano
da Bisticci for binding in 1449.34 Stylistically the foliate decora-
tion of the psalters represents the final state of evolution of
a characteristic decorative style of Sanguigni’s that can be
followed throughout his career, from the missal of S. Pietro in
Mercato of 1419–26 (Museo di S. Marco, inv.1890, no.10075),
the choirbook of S. Gaggio documented to 1434 (inv.1890,
nos.10073 and 10074) to the breviary in the Laurenziana (Conv.
Soppr.461) and the Libro d’Ore MS 127 (Biblioteca Palatina,
Parma).35 The missal seems to be slightly later in date because of
the simplification of the figures with their economical use of
line, a graphic trait that Angelico himself used between finish-
ing the frescos of S. Marco and painting the small panels of the
Silver Cupboard. A more precise dating for the missal can be
deduced from the figure of St Mark on fol.213r (Fig.17), which
precisely follows the same saint frescoed on the vault of the
33 Scudieri and Giacomelli, op. cit. (note 4), p.150.
34 Bellosi, op. cit. (note 6), p.100.
35 The codex, attributed by Zambrelli and Zanichelli to Zanobi Strozzi, would seem
to be more probably the work of Battista di Biagio Sanguigni, who was certainly
responsible for its marginal decoration; see Zanichelli in exh. cat. Cum picturis ysto-
riatum. Codici devozionali e liturgici della Biblioteca Palatina, Parma (Biblioteca Palatina)
2001, pp.104–07, with previous bibliography.
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A MINIATURE FROM THE CIRCLE OF FRA ANGELICO
16. Page from a
missal showing
Christ blessing and
eight saints and
the Pietà, by Fra
Angelico or an artist
of his circle? After
1448. Ink and
tempera on
parchment, 37.1 by
26.8 cm. (full folio)
(Museo di S.
Marco, Florence,
inv.533, fol.1r).
Cappella Niccolina in Rome (Fig.22) and which provides a
terminus post quem of 1448.36
The Regula monachorum should be dated between the S.
Marco psalters and 1451, the year in which Battista di Biagio
Sanguigni died. The form of the letter ‘T’ and of its foliate
decoration, the use of two shades of blue, the white-lead dec-
oration and the small circles suggest a date close to the psalter. A
dating in the years 1449–51 works well with the sequence of
building works at S. Girolamo, which, under the stimulus of
Medici patronage, saw the construction of first the monastery
and then the church close to the Medici villa at Belcanto.37
Building was already underway in 1445 and continued almost
up to 1451, as far as one can tell from the surviving documents.38
Nothing is recorded of the monastery’s library, nor is it
mentioned in the inventories of accounts in the seventeenth-
century act of suppression.39 However, a fragmentary testimony
is provided in a letter written by Fra Anselmo de Caruysan to
Lorenzo de’ Medici dated 28th July 1470.40 The Hieronymite
foundation must have been given the texts pertinent to the cult
of St Jerome at an early date, and in particular copies of the
Regula monachorum which, as stated in the Ordinarium, was to be
recited daily after Lauds.41 It is tempting to hypothesise that
the Hieronymites turned to the monks at S. Domenico to
36 The four evangelists were also frescoed by Angelico in the convent of S. Domenico
at Cortona: a comparison of St Mark in the missal to the St John at Cortona,
suggested by Scudieri and Giacomelli, op. cit. (note 4), p.150, does not seem so close.
37 The Medici patronage of the construction of S. Girolamo is mentioned by, among
others, Filarete, Vasari and Macchiavelli, who refer both to Cosimo and to Giovanni
de’ Medici. That Giovanni was probably responsible for the commission can be
deduced from the funeral oration of Andrea Alamanni: Florence, BML, Plut.54.10,
fol.88r, ‘fesulis divi hieronimi templum et pulcherrimam quamdam domum construxit’, and
fol.88v, ‘monasterium quondam suis ex facultatibus ex integro edificiet’. Alberto Avogadri,
in De Relligione et magnificentia illustris Cosmi Medices florentini, comments on Cosimo’s
munificence towards numerous monastic foundations but does not mention the
Hieronymites of Fiesole; see Plut.54.10, fol.140v, where Avogadri mentions
S. Marco, S. Lorenzo, the monks’ dormitory of S. Croce, Bosco ai Frati, the Badia
Fiesolana and the chapel at La Verna.
38 The construction of the new monastery of S. Girolamo is first mentioned in 1445;
524 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
17. Initial ‘P’ with St
Mark from a missal,
by an artist of Fra
Angelico’s circle.
After 1448. Tempera
on parchment, 37.1
by 26.8 cm. (full
folio). (Museo di S.
Marco, Florence,
inv.533, fol.213r).
18. Initial ‘S’ with
Pentecost from a
missal, by an artist of
Fra Angelico’s
circle. After 1448.
Tempera on
parchment, 37.1 by
26.8 cm. (full folio).
(Museo di S. Marco,
Florence, no.533,
fol.147v).
illuminate one of their manuscripts just at the time when
Angelico’s circle of artists was active.
Choirbook 43 of the Laurenziana is dated by Miklos Boskovits
just before the frescos in the cells of S. Marco, that is in the late
1430s or early 1440s, while Dillon Bussi has recently dated it
c.1425.42 But a comparison with the psalters nos.530 and 531 and
with the Silver Cupboard might suggest a later date, one sup-
ported by three details which, if they are accepted, would allow
us to fix the chronology with greater precision. The first is that
the scribe responsible for choirbook 43 was not Fra Benedetto,
as can be deduced from a comparison with the first antiphonaries
ASF, Carte Strozziane, terza serie, 9/2 (9bis), fol.269. The Florentine Signoria exempt-
ed the friars from payment of taxes during its construction in 1451; it is also recorded
in two letters sent to Giovanni de’ Medici by the canon Antonio of Fiesole, one of
which is dated 13th October 1457 (see ASF, Mediceo Avanti il Principato, filza 9,
no.307, and filza 7, no.176) but it is not clear if he is referring to the convent or to the
church; see also M. Ferrara and F. Quinterio: Michelozzo di Bartolomeo, Florence 1984,
pp.234–38; and D. Mazzini: Villa Medici a Fiesole: Leon Battista Alberti e il prototipo di villa
rinascimentale, Florence 2004, pp.108–11. For work on the church, see note 19 above.
39 AVF, MSS XII.A.1 (fols.435r–79v); XVIII.B.37 (fols.832r–75v); and XVII.B.78
(fols.1621r–22v). I was unable to confirm the suggestion that the library from S.
Girolamo was amalgamated with that of the Biblioteca Laurenziana (see S. Girolamo
Fiesole – historical notes, acquapendente 1928).
40 ASF, Mediceo Avanti il Principato, filza 23, no.305; the unpublished letter alludes
to a request for books and mentions titles in the convent’s library: ‘Nobis porro operis
santi thome de aquino atque codicum decretorum et aliorum voluminum iuris canonici atque
MA.AUG.Gordon.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 17/7/09 10:11 Page 525
19. An Evangelist, by
Fra Angelico? Second
quarter of fifteenth
century. Pen and brush
on parchment, 11.4 by
3.8 cm. (full folio).
(Gabinetto Disegni e
Stampe degli Uffizi,
Florence, no.95E).
21. Medallion with a
prophet from a
choirbook, by Fra
Angelico(?) and an artist
of his circle. After 1451.
Tempera on parchment,
51 by 37.2 cm.
(Biblioteca Medicea
Laurenziana, Florence,
corale 43, fol.1r).
of S. Marco which we know were the work of Angelico’s fellow
Dominican and illuminated in 1445.43 It would be most improb-
able that the monks of S. Domenico would have gone to a scribe
outside their order for a new series of choirbooks while Fra
Benedetto was alive, and the monastery did not seem to have
other scribes in their employ in the 1440s for they had to get the
Franciscan Fra Giovanni di Guido from S. Croce to finish the
series of Graduals for S. Marco after Fra Benedetto’s death,
which occurred between the second half of 1449 and 1450. This
date also coincides, perhaps not coincidentally, with the return
of Angelico from Rome, so that it seems that 1449 can be taken
as the terminus post quem for the work which may have
also included choirbook 44 of the Biblioteca Laurenziana. As
antonianii opues est’. Liturgical books used in the church of the convent are often noted
in the Ordinarium, and from this it can be ascertained that the brothers used the
Roman liturgy, making an exception only in the use of the Franciscan psalter. The
fact that novices were required to study grammar and music presupposes that there
was a library in the monastery (see AVF, MS X.B.1, passim). Finally it declares that
‘nessun libro dalcuno convento se venda sanze licentia del generale o vero di visitadori lo prezo
de lo quale se converta in libri’ (p.86). An inventory drawn up at the time of the
suppression of the Order lists ‘quattro messali’ and ‘cinque libri da canto in coro’; see AVF,
XIII.A.1, c.441r.
41 AVF, X.B.1, pp.60–61: ‘Regula nostra verus (?) sancti Ieromini patris nostris omni die
sicut ipset describit in illa conventualium recitetur fratribus ut etiam nostram antiqua est
consuetudo post laudes matutinales’. The requirement to have copies of the rule to be
read to the brothers is explicitly mentioned on p.61: ‘Unde Stude[m] debet unus quisque
prior libellus in que hec scripta sunt habeatur in legibili littera’.
42 See Boskovits, op. cit. (note 7), pp.37–46; Dillon Bussi in di Lorenzo, op. cit. (note
A MINIATURE FROM THE CIRCLE OF FRA ANGELICO
20. An Evangelist from a
choirbook, by Fra
Angelico or an artist of
his circle? After 1451.
Tempera on parchment,
51 by 37.2 cm. (full
folio). (Biblioteca
Medicea Laurenziana,
Florence, corale 43,
fol.168v).
22. St Mark, by an artist
of Fra Angelico’s circle.
1448. Fresco. (Segment
of the vault, Cappella
Niccolina, Vatican
City, Rome).
choirbook 43 bears no trace of the work of Battista di Biagio San-
guigni, who worked with Angelico at S. Marco and who illumi-
nated the frieze of the Regula monachorum, it would seem possible
to propose a date around or slightly after 1451. Finally, in that
same year a payment made to Vespasiano da Bisticci is recorded
on the account of S. Domenico, Fiesole, for two fiorini, 1 lira
and 2 soldi to buy paper.44 This amount corresponds to the cost
of two quires of paper for antiphonaries45 which with all prob-
ability were for this group. Choirbook 43 can therefore be dated
close to the departure of Angelico for Rome, and his absence
makes sense of the interruption of the work on the decoration,
on which his collaborators subsequently worked, and would
explain the absence of miniatures in choirbook 44.
9), pp.30–35; Dillon Bussi in Scudieri and Rasario, op. cit. (note 9), pp.160–61.
43 Florence, BML, S. Marco 902, Libro di ricordanze A, fol.2r. The final payment to
Benedetto was recorded in May 1449. Subsequently on 2nd July 1450 there is a
payment for 21 quires written by the Franciscan friar Giovanni di Guido (S. Marco
902, fol.35v). A preliminary palaeographical analysis of the manuscript confirms this;
there is a change of handwriting on fol.87v of the gradual of the Trinity, MS 527,
Museo di S. Marco, illuminated by Zanobi Strozzi in May 1453.
44 See Florence, BML, S. Marco 902, Libro di ricordanze A, fol.31v.
45 In 1461 the Badia Fiesolana paid 4 lire to Agnolo Tucci, cartolaio, for ‘un quinterno
per gli antifonarii’; Florence, Archivio dell’Ospedale degli Innocenti, Badia fiesolana 5,
fol.58r; see A. Garzelli: ‘Note su artisti nell’orbita dei primi Medici: individuazioni e
congetture dai libri di pagamento delle Badia fiesolana (1440–85)’, Studi medievali
3/26 (1985), no.1, pp.435–82, esp. p.49. See also the payments registered to Agnolo
Tucci in 1447; see ibid., pp.462–63; and Florence, Archivio dell’Ospedale degli
Innocenti, Badia fiesolana 150, fol.25r.
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Reflections on the Mantegna exhibition in Paris
by LUKE SYSON
AT THE END of her introduction to the catalogue accompanying
the exhibition Mantegna, 1431–1506 shown last winter at the
Musée du Louvre, Paris, Dominique Thiébaut issues a generous
invitation: by absorbing the content of show and book, visitors
and readers should arrive at their own Mantegna.1 The
exhibition gave munificent scope to do just that – not least
because it contained such extraordinary loans, a marvellously
different array from those seen in the 1992 exhibition in London
and New York or even in the several Italian exhibitions of 2006.
The show’s supreme feat was the reunion of the three predella
panels from the S. Zeno altarpiece of 1456–59 (cat. nos.51–53),
brought together for the first time since 1956, and seen with the
London Agony in the garden (no.48; dated c.1453–54) and the
New York Adoration of the shepherds (no.50; dated c.1455–56).
But this was only the first of a sequence of many fascinating
groupings.
The exhibition investigated not just Mantegna himself but also
the complex network of teachers and collaborators, imitators and
rivals around him. We were encouraged to consider Mantegna’s
early career in Padua and his links to other painters active there,
his marriage into the Bellini family and its artistic consequences,
and the impact of his works on lesser masters, sometimes outside
Mantua and mediated by prints. Finally, we were able to assess
the style and ambition of the works made at the end of his long
life, set against the efforts of famous contemporaries and of
younger painters who later became more celebrated still: Perug-
ino, Leonardo and Correggio, masters of the ‘maniera moderna’.
Thiébaut’s co-curator, Giovanni Agosti, stated that the
exhibition was intended as ‘un esercizio di illuminismo, dove le regole
del gioco della storia dell’arte sono spiegate a tutti’ (p.30). He pointed
out that the scholars working on the exhibition represented
different generations and schools of thought. That is not to say,
however, that every current art-historical approach is evenly
represented in the catalogue (or was in the exhibition). Icono-
graphical readings are at times too curtly brushed aside if they are
judged over-complicated or ill-founded; the social and religious
functions of the works are rarely explained; and technical con-
siderations are ignored to a degree that nowadays seems almost
eccentric.2 What then are Agosti’s rules as they are revealed here?
Measured caution might be one – here best exemplified by the
sections curated by Thiébaut and Caroline Elam, respectively on
I am very grateful to Stephen Campbell, Keith Christiansen, David Ekserdjian,
Elke Oberthaler, Nicholas Penny and Xavier Salomon for their many extremely
stimulating comments and observations. Opinions expressed in this review remain of
course my own.
1 Catalogue: Mantegna, 1431–1506, edited by Giovanni Agosti and Dominique
335 mostly colour ills. (Musée du Louvre and Hazan, Paris, 2008), €42. ISBN
Thiébaut, with the assistance of Arturo Galansino and Jacopo Stoppa. 480 pp. incl.
978–2–35031–209–5 (HB); 978–2–7541–0310–7 (PB). This was marred by disastrous
incl. 354 ills. (Officina libreria, Milan, 2008), €60. ISBN 978–88–89854–31–0.
colour reproductions. References in this review are to the Italian edition, 496 pp.
2 A useful corrective was provided by the colloquium, ‘La technique picturale
d’Andrea Mantegna/Andrea Mantegna’s painting technique’, held at the Louvre on
19th December 2008 and organised by the C2RMF (with the support of the
526 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
the Louvre St Sebastian and the Triumphs of Caesar. Determining
what precisely can be established from documentary evidence
and other contemporary writings is another, a method taken very
seriously by all the authors. But what in the end matters most is
style. All the contributors revel in their command of analytical
description, which they employ to tremendous effect. In con-
structing their own Mantegna, visitors were thus really asked to
assess the stylistic arguments presented by the organisers of each
section, to decide if, on the evidence of what they could see, they
were convinced by the hypotheses. And thanks to the richness of
the material on show (there were 199 exhibits) and its elegant
and telling organisation, the evidence was there to be studied.
Another ‘rule’, often ignored in the (not always respectful)
Anglo-American tradition but fully observed in the catalogue,
is a proper reverence for the views of great art-historical
predecessors. A crucial subtext for many of the contributors to
this exhibition is the legacy of Roberto Longhi.3 To those
intensely engaged with this inheritance, the remarks that follow
will be judged jejune, but to explain, even briefly, how their
method looks to an outsider may have some value. This might
be defined as a broadly philological approach: the identification
and discussion of those artists who were central to the formation
of a modern, unified language for Italian art – visual Dantes and
Boccaccios – whose individual contribution can be measured
partly by its subsequent impact. Other artists can therefore
legitimately be regarded as dead-ends, and regional differences
and dialects, individualist contributions that run counter to a
‘progressive’ current, artists who looked not forwards but
backwards (even sometimes – as with Mantegna – to the ancient
world), all need to be scrutinised and mapped but not necessar-
ily as highly prized. These values establish what is essentially a
systematic, autonomous and teleological mode of classification,
founded upon a notion of unifying progress, which can be used
to determine both chronology and attribution. This is a structure
that assumes an absolutely central role for the artists themselves
in the formation of their language, demanding therefore that
they should be properly identified (ideally named), and it is
navigated by following the stylistic currents – sometimes subter-
ranean, making up a ‘secret history’ – running between them.
Vasari’s notion of the modern is of course key here, but so
too is Longhi’s – overlapping, but significantly shaped by early
EU-ARTECH European network and the Mission Recherche et Technologie du
Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication).
3 Longhi’s method is ripe for historiographical reconsideration; see G. Previtali:
‘Roberto Longhi, profilo biografico’, in idem, ed.: L’arte di scrivere sull’arte. Roberto
Longhi nella cultura del nostro tempo, Rome 1982, pp.141–70 and passim; and M.G.
Messina: review of Roberto Longhi and Modern Art exhibition, Ravenna, THE
BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 145 (2003), pp.538–39.
4 G. Romano: ‘Verso la maniera moderna: da Mantegna a Raffaello’, in Storia
dell’arte italiana, Turin 1981, VI/1, pp.3–85.
5 Thiébaut (p.26) points out that Longhi’s strictures were preceded by similarly
derogatory comments made by Berenson. We should not forget the political
context for Longhi’s remarks; antiquarian classicism was the style favoured by Italian
Fascists. His dislike of Mantegna was paralleled by his predictable distaste for
MA.AUG.Syson.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 15/7/09 16:22 Page 527
twentieth-century modernism and its late nineteenth-century
roots. As well as various formal characteristics and innovations,
many defined by Vasari, Longhi regarded both artistic freedom
and some degree of harmonious stylistic endeavour between
progressive artists as crucially important, as well as their works’
poetic or emotional immediacy, often synonymous with a brand
of naturalism such as could (and can) foster empathetic connec-
tions between picture and viewer. Though for Vasari they
belonged in his second period, the prelude to what he called the
‘maniera moderna’, painters like Perugino and, critical in this
context, Giovanni Bellini are viewed by Longhi and his
followers – including Giovanni Romano, one of the contrib-
utors to the Mantegna exhibition – as pioneers of the modern
style.4 Perugino and Bellini created pictures notable for their
sweetness or poignancy, modern therefore because of their direct
human appeal and because (like Piero della Francesca) they can
be seen to stand at the head of progressive artistic developments.
On the other hand, Longhi was horribly disparaging about Man-
tegna, accusing him of stylistic ‘imperialism’ and ‘archaeological
mysticism’.5 Longhi favoured painters who sought to express the
truths of the world around them rather than shaping themselves
only by reference to artistic tradition and he famously made
‘judgments of moral value’: ‘to-day, for all of us, Giovanni
Bellini stands higher as an example of independence of spirit than
Mantegna’.6 Patrons matter (as Isabella d’Este does for Giovanni
Romano) mainly because of their preferences but not because
they themselves were necessarily instrumental in shaping the
languages of art. These then seem not so much the rules, but the
broad framework and aims of this ‘game’ which, to a significant
degree, underpinned the narrative of this exhibition. They
lead to a particular kind of evaluation of the works included,
admittedly seeking to mitigate Longhi’s dislike of Mantegna, but
nonetheless taking full account of his overall system.7
With all this in mind, the exhibition was on its own terms a
resounding success. The argument was made with panache and
is learnedly elaborated in the catalogue. There is a demonstrable
stylistic evolution to be traced and many of Mantegna’s works
from the last two decades of his life are unquestionably more
emotionally direct than those from the early part of his career.
The curators revealed a Mantegna who was not only hugely
inventive but often acutely responsive to what was novel in the
work of other artists, as well as to ancient precedent. In his early
years Mantegna worked within set parameters, executing paint-
ings for private devotion or for public worship, using a language
forged in Padua and Venice largely by others. He soon
challenged existing categories and boundaries and, by the end of
his life, seems to have aspired to paint pictures that by their direct
human appeal and emotional truth could become more than
remote images, works whose primary raison d’être was that they
Canova, ‘lo scultore nato morto’.
6 R. Longhi: review of the Giovanni Bellini exhibition, THE BURLINGTON
MAGAZINE 91 (1949), pp.274–83, esp. p.278. For an oppositional reaction, see K.
Christiansen: ‘Bellini and Mantegna’, in P. Humfrey, ed.: The Cambridge Companion
to Giovanni Bellini, Cambridge 2004, pp.48–74 and 281–85, esp. p.282, note 11.
7 Complete knowledge of the bibliography is a very important ingredient in this
method. The chains of influence that run between art historians can be perceived as
paralleling those traced between artists.
8 In seeking to combine what he had learned from Donatello and Jacopo Bellini,
Mantegna arrived at pictures which are less easy to read than either man’s works.
Donatello’s Santo reliefs contain their emotional urgency by an insistence on
centrality – the protagonists occupy centre stage, given space and a kind of calm, so
that the members of the chorus, exhibiting an extraordinary range of emotions, like
MANTEGNA EXHIBITION IN PARIS
23. The adoration of the shepherds, by Andrea Mantegna. c.1450–51. Tempera on
panel transferred to canvas, 40 by 55.6 cm. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York).
were painted by Mantegna. Indeed, his Triumphs were seemingly
created with no particular setting in mind. And they are triumphs
indeed – of a ‘dramatic and solemn’ modernity, Italian possibly
but certainly pan-European, his inventions studied (sometimes
via prints) by Rubens, Rembrandt and Poussin, as well as by his
fellow countrymen rather earlier.
The exhibition therefore could be treated as a series of mile-
stones on the journey towards the Triumphs. In some respects
Mantegna appears to have sprung upon the scene fully armed. In
fact, his remarkable ambition as a painter becomes most apparent
in his works from the mid-1450s on. By that time, he had already
worked out his approach to monumental narrative set within the
great perspectival stages he constructed for the Ovetari Chapel
frescos in Padua (the lower register was represented in the exhi-
bition by three miniature copies from the Jacquemart-André;
nos.12–14). But, while the combinations and arrangements of
the figures are always immensely impressive, they are somewhat
inchoate in terms of narrative clarity; it is not always easy to deci-
pher the action, which sometimes seems dictated by the difficoltà
or beauty of a pose rather than arising, as Donatello’s do, from
the passions of the protagonists.8 Similarly, he already knew what
he wanted to do with the depiction of the isolated figure. The
hieratically posed S. Eufemia of 1454 (no.11) still looks resolute-
ly Paduan, conscious of itself as an image, as a pseudo-sculpture,
with all the familiar Squarcionesque tricks regarding framing and
spatial relationships, those games of what is in our world and
what in Eufemia’s. With the panel depicting S. Giustina (no.25;
1453–55) from the St Luke polyptych there comes a change; the
waves breaking over a rock, underpin the drama. Jacopo in the Louvre album could
situate the main figures in the middle ground or pushed to one side (as Mantegna
does), but the subsidiary groupings have a lucidity and composure, a separateness, that
does not distract from the principals. The spaces are so enormous as to make a
crucial point (developed by his son Giovanni) about the events unfolding. In a
crowded narrative like Mantegna’s St James led to martyrdom, the saint needs his halo
to distinguish him from his companions. The soldier with his shield, on the other
hand, becomes curiously prominent. The most dynamic figure is the man in the right
foreground, whose diagonal actually directs the eye away from James; such incoher-
ence arose surely from youthful artistic virtuosity. That his efforts were not widely
understood is indicated by his dispute with his patron, Imperatrice Ovetari, over the
number of Apostles (eight rather than the expected twelve) in his depiction of the
Assumption of the Virgin Mary. These ambitious experiments were not repeated.
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MANTEGNA EXHIBITION IN PARIS
24. The agony in the garden, by Andrea Mantegna. 1457–59. Tempera on panel
transferred to canvas and stuck down on panel, 71.1 by 93.7 cm. (Musée des
Beaux-Arts, Tours).
lighting is subtler, her expression sweeter, her contours softer
and more elegant, enveloping, almost caressing her figure.
Moreover, Mantegna’s naturalism is no longer confined to the
lonely fruit or showy swag; he now introduces more touchingly
familiar details: the saint’s middle finger tucked into her book to
mark her place, the graceful knot tying the taut laces of her man-
tle across her collar-bones. She is still sculptural (and Mantegna’s
figures would remain so until nearly the end of his life) but she is
now fully human too. However, her gold ground ensures that
she remains isolated and, although she was placed on the far right
of unified perspectival stage, Giustina and her fellow saints are
presented separately with little or no interplay or communion
(this is not simply an inevitable feature of the polyptych format).
They need to be looked at one by one.
With The adoration of the shepherds (no.50; Fig.23) comes
Mantegna’s first attempt at blurring the distinction between the
narrative and the iconic, between those pictures that act out a
story, like a kind of pictorial mystery play, and those in which
knowledge of the Christian story is assumed, intended to inspire
sustained contemplation. The Adoration tends to the latter. All
the figures are given their own space; the shepherds do not really
look at the infant Christ, and the Virgin and Child with their
border of cherubim and seraphim are presented as a kind of
vision – the shepherds’? – rather than as physically present. The
setting is designed to reinforce these divisions between human
and divine, the Virgin given her own little platform, the sleeping
Joseph’s tree cultivated mainly to support his elbow. The many
details in the background (tiny sheep, a giant willow) are
arranged with little sense of how they recede within the some-
what unreal landscape. Increasingly, however, Mantegna arrived
at more advanced solutions (by dint, one feels, of obsessive hard
work), finding an astonishing balance between the integration
and isolation of his figures. In all his pictures, from the S. Zeno
altarpiece to the Camera Picta, everything connects but main-
tains its particularity. Mantegna began to ask more and more of
his pictures and their viewers, more indeed than any artist before
9 See R. Fry: ‘Andrea Mantegna’, Quarterly Review (January 1902), pp.139–58; Ital-
ian transl.: idem: Mantegna, ed. C. Elam, transl. R. Rizzo, Milan 2006, pp.11–37; see
also idem: ‘Mantegna as a Mystic’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 8 (1905), pp.87–98.
10 It can only just post-date it and may well be exactly contemporary with
528 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
25. The agony in the garden, by Andrea Mantegna. c.1458–60. Tempera on panel,
62.9 by 80 cm. (National Gallery, London).
him and most since. He wanted his viewers both to feel and to
think, to be moved certainly (humanly and humanely), but also
to consider (intellectually) and, where appropriate, to contem-
plate (spiritually). He required that they should admire his art,
but he also gave his pictures something of the quality of a natural
marvel: like an exquisite gemstone, his images appear complete
and unalterable.
Every element was worked out, deliberately placed and
combined; his pictures should seem as if they could never be other
than they are, and they need, as grand narratives should, time to
discover them. It is no surprise that recent scientific investigations
reveal that he made almost no changes to his designs once he had
completed the underdrawings, and that the underdrawings them-
selves contain very few pentiments. Yes, the figures become more
carefully related to their settings, endowing his pictures with a
greater pictorial wholeness. But it is more than that: Mantegna
exerts control over the viewer, making the eye travel in ways that
are rigorously predetermined: towards physical features of the
landscapes, down roads, empty or thronged, across water, up to
magnificent cities and soaring crags, around figures, following
their gazes, interpreting their restrained gestures and expressions,
as well as by thrilling perspective and tight, complicated compo-
sitions. Little bursts of energy are always contained. Details are
precisely and convincingly described (we know that what we are
seeing is true); they can delight and intrigue, but they never
intrude, always delicately subsumed in the larger, exalted vision
(the pictures are more than true). And nothing, not even the
clouds, can move. The impact of his paintings is not only imme-
diately striking but cumulative – they have both surface and
depth. Mantegna almost literally transports the viewer through
the hard work demanded of them. At this stage of his life, he
never seeks merely to please or impress (though he will reward).
These are difficult journeys, visual pilgrimages towards what
Roger Fry rightly categorised as the sublime.9
We were able to follow this evolution in the three S. Zeno
predella panels. The agony in the garden (Fig.24) is full of frozen
the Crucifixion.
11 He reverts to a kind of Squarcionesque mode for his S. Bernardino with
angels (Brera, Milan) executed in the 1460s for the chapel dedicated to Bernardino
in S. Francesco, Mantua, which was a more public setting than those for most
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instants – the angel’s precipitate dive paralleled by the bees
hovering around their hives and by the stream of water splashing
over rocks, all caught in mid-flight. The landscape remains rather
contrived, still broken up into its component parts. The
beehives, for example, are set up on a little clump of rocks, there
just for that purpose. The city wall is broken simply to show the
road behind. And there are still some problems of scale – the pair
of rabbits on the hillside behind the hives must be enormous.
The delight in anecdotal detail and deliberately tricky effects is
almost distracting, like the way in which the rock that functions
as Christ’s prie-dieu projects above the bodies of the exhausted
apostles. With the Crucifixion (Fig.26) Mantegna has fully risen to
his self-imposed challenge. Each of the figures or groups con-
tributes separately but seamlessly to the narrative. Whereas in the
Ovetari frescos the bystanders are just that, staffage swarming
round the protagonists, here they take on a new importance as
onlookers. Their gazes become significant, looking up – not
just to Christ but also to the bad thief, veiled in shadow. And
their setting is marvellously integrated, the landscape flows
around the figures, creating beautiful connections and intervals.
The naturalistic observation is still acute but is now given a sub-
sidiary role, adding texture to the narrative rather than providing
delightful distractions: the wedges of wood holding the crosses of
the thieves in place; the base of Christ’s cross set into a little cairn;
the holes in the shoes worn by the gambling soldier.
This is the approach Mantegna masters in The agony in the
garden in London (Fig.25), making it less likely, perhaps, that this
work was painted before the Tours depiction of the same scene.10
In that picture, for example, there is a little bridge that leads
nowhere, whereas in the London painting the log flung with
seeming casualness over the stream leads the eye into the picture
space and to Christ. In comparison to its precursor, the narrative
is stripped down, the drama is no longer just frozen but stilled.
This is what Mantegna carried to Mantua in the early 1460s, an
approach resolutely developed in the pictures made for the
chapel in the Castello di S. Giorgio, including the Uffizi Circum-
cision (no.63), the Uffizi Adoration of the Magi, in which the crowd
control is remarkable, and the Prado Death of the Virgin (no.60).
This way of making art had its ultimate expressions in the
Louvre St Sebastian of 1478–80 (no.76), although he returned to
it in the Copenhagen Dead Christ with angels (no.84). But from
the mid-1470s onwards, just as he started to produce prints (and
perhaps this is not unconnected), he began to eliminate back-
grounds to produce pictures that work on the viewer very
differently, that are distillations rather than panoramas. At that
time he returned to another early experiment in which he found
an alternative solution to the narrative/icon, the Berlin Presenta-
tion of Christ of the late 1450s, with its half-length figures set
against a neutral ground (in his later elaborations of this theme he
eliminates the Squarcionesque fictive frame of this work). This
was his way forward – a more economical mode of painting cer-
tainly but, more importantly, one which enhances the intensity
of the viewer’s encounter with the image, but especially with
what it depicts. He mined this seam, not just in religious pictures
like the Getty Museum’s Adoration of the Magi (no.181) and the
Jacquemart-André Ecce Homo (no.183) but in the Triumphs them-
selves, in which landscape almost ceases to matter. This is a new
of his works in this period.
12 This is a more complicated problem than Giovanni Romano allows. Isabella’s
interests extended beyond issues of style to the ways in which complex and
overlapping meanings could be allied with stylistic decisions; see S. Campbell: The
MANTEGNA EXHIBITION IN PARIS
26. Crucifixion, by Andrea Mantegna. 1457–59. Tempera on panel, 76 by 96 cm.
(Musée du Louvre, Paris).
kind of directed viewing, and though it is not just modern
(returning as it does to the essence of the icon), it is that too.
These observations have emerged from the straightforwardly
chronological (and subtly didactic) structure of the exhibition
and from the observations of the writers in the catalogue. For
those broadly in sympathy with this approach, the Paris
exhibition provided an account of Mantegna’s artistic evolution
that will be deemed satisfactory and satisfying (even as they
dispute some of its finer points). But it need hardly be stated that
for every devotee of Longhi there is a more sceptical view or
even a voice of outright dissent. If Renaissance art history is a
game, it is one that has come to have teams, and there will be
scholars who reject the entire premise of the show as alien or
ill-founded. To do so is unhelpful. There was, after all, a notion
of progress that was expressed in the period (even if the idea of
progress at the Mantuan court was not always the same as the
Vasarian or Longhian schemae). Mantegna himself was an artist
constantly striving for his own perfection. But there are inher-
ent fault-lines built into this method. A reverence, however
ingrained or sincere, for time-honoured arguments, and the
adherence to an over-arching system linked to a way of seeing
(one which calculates what in a picture looks ‘archaic’, what
innovative) can prove restrictive. The trajectory of a career such
as Mantegna’s is never going to be neatly consistent and,
although change, perhaps even progress, clearly occurs, it is
probably unwise to see it as linear and systematic. Mantegna
responded to the function and (where there was one) intended
setting of his pictures.11 Sometimes, as with the Triumphs, his
works were started seemingly on his own initiative and he was
allowed a free hand, but the appearance of other pictures might
be monitored by a demanding and resourceful patron, who had
– as did Isabella d’Este – strong ideas of her own.12 He may
sometimes have been directed to look at works by other
painters; and, like most artists, he might sometimes return to
old ideas, just as he re-used motifs or formulae invented much
earlier.13 Certainly, we should look for a consistent pattern of
personal stylistic development (and of the techniques he
Cabinet of Eros: Renaissance Mythological Painting and the Studiolo of Isabella d’Este,
New Haven and London 2006.
13 The Getty Adoration of the Magi looks back to the Berlin Presentation of Christ; he
also re-used drawings of the early 1460s for prints in the mid-1470s.
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MANTEGNA EXHIBITION IN PARIS
employed) but allow that other, sometimes external, pressures
might disrupt a purely linear flow.
Thus, although there was little to quarrel with in the presenta-
tion in Paris of Mantegna’s chronology, the dating of two pictures
in the exhibition seemed to have been determined either on the
basis of received opinion or because of a view that the change in
Mantegna’s art was steady and logical. On the one hand, the
anatomy and modelling of the torso and the lighting and arrange-
ment of the draperies, even the strong shadowing, of the Vienna
St Sebastian (no.71; dated, pace Longhi, c.1470) look so like those
of the Christ in the Tours Resurrection (no.53) as to suggest that its
normal dating to about 1460 must be correct (and therefore that
this could indeed have been the ‘operetta’ sent by Mantegna to the
Venetian Jacopo Antonio Marcello in 1459). At any rate, there can
be little doubt that it was painted a decade or so before his St George
(Accademia, Venice; Agosti’s candidate for the Marcello gift), in
which the landscape resembles those in the Camera Picta. On the
other hand, the curious flesh-painting (the chest like polished
marble, the head as ruddy as a farmer’s) of the Copenhagen Dead
Christ with angels (no.84; dated c.1485–90), is, as Fry realised,14 so
similar to the Ca’ d’Oro St Sebastian that it too must come from
the end of Mantegna’s career, even if its stillness and austerity
might suggest an earlier date and though he had returned to a
motif – the quarry – first used during his brief sojourn in Rome
(1488–c.1490) for the Uffizi Virgin of the stonecutters. Some of the
differences between this extraordinary painting and others from
the years around 1500 are explained very simply by the fact that it,
unlike them, is painted on panel, some perhaps by how it may
have functioned or because of the requests of its unknown patron.
More seriously, adherence to an intellectual system of this kind
can distort or mislead when evidence is seemingly directed to bear
out predetermined ideas. We see an example of this kind of think-
ing in the last section of the exhibition, ‘Vers la manière moderne’,
an aesthetic anticlimax with several pictures that appeared insipid
and uninspiring. The prominence bestowed upon an anonymous
Lombard picture in the Louvre, the Madonna of the scales (no.197),
is a case in point; to the present reviewer this seems a somewhat
unresolved melange of Mantegnesque and Leonardesque tropes,
but it was deemed valuable precisely because of this stylistic
amalgam.15 Mantegna himself, we are told, fully assimilated the
modern in his S. Andrea Baptism (no.187). This is undeniably a
work of powerful ambition, its design extraordinarily dramatic,
but, even taking its poor condition into account, there can be
little doubt that it was reworked, or more likely executed, at least
in part, by an assistant, probably Mantegna’s son Francesco. This
is not a new observation, but because of what the picture had to
stand for in this exhibition, it was disallowed.
The confining effect of this over-arching system is most
perturbingly demonstrated, however, in the assessment of
14 Fry 1902, op. cit. (note 9).
15 Giovanni Romano has cautiously connected the picture with Correggio; see
G. Romano: ‘Correggio in Mantua and San Benedetto Po’, in L. Ciammitti,
S.F. Ostrow and S. Settis, eds.: Dosso’s Fate: Painting and Court Culture in Renaissance
Italy, Los Angeles 1998, pp.15–40, esp. pp.36–37, note 16.
16 A similar relationship can be divined between Squarcione’s altarpiece for Leone
de Lazara (1449–52; Museo Civico, Padua), its execution largely delegated (as De
Marchi states, it resembles no.1), and his signed Berlin Virgin and Child, which
should be regarded as the touchstone for Squarcione’s style and technique; in type
and proportions Mantegna’s Virgin in the S. Zeno altarpiece echo Squarcione’s in
the Berlin painting.
17 The attribution to Donatello of the two bronze reliefs (nos.2 and 3) should be
treated with caution, though both must have been executed in Padua during
530 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
27. Three
all’antica male
nudes, here
attributed to
Nicolò Pizzolo.
c.1446–50. Pen
and brown ink
and wash with
white heighten-
ing on blue
paper, 39.5 by
27.2 cm.
(Gabinetto
Disegni e
Stampe degli
Uffizi, Florence,
inv.6347 F v).
Mantegna’s early career. Here the Vasarian model of the great
artist superseding his master is arguably as important as the
Longhian schema. A somewhat workaday Virgin and Child in a
private collection (no.1) is given unequivocally to Francesco
Squarcione and therefore becomes a kind of embodiment of
Squarcione’s inadequacies. Mantegna, it is implied, could have
learnt precious little from his master (with whom he lived and
studied from 1442 to 1448). Actually this picture must be a copy
of the damaged picture in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
(cat. fig.30). In no.1, the punching is cruder, the forms are
simplified, contrasting with the elegant gilt ornament and
energetic, tensile line of the Baltimore picture, in which the
Child has a defined musculature. The liquid highlights in this
latter picture are a feature of Mantegna’s earliest paintings (see
no.6; the Frankfurt St Mark) and of works by other pupils of
Squarcione (Zoppo and Schiavone; see nos.20 and 21); thus it
is not unreasonable to argue that this descriptive mode was
taken by all three from their teacher – that there was, in other
words, something to learn. The Virgin and Child in the show is
probably more useful for understanding the ways in which
Squarcione delegated works to his many pupils.16
The exhibition also attempted an exposition of the influence
on Mantegna of Donatello in Padua, handicapped only by
the unavailability of key works.17 The Uffizi drawing of the
Donatello’s time there by sculptors working more or less closely with him.
18 W.R. Rearick: ‘Nicolò Pizolo: Drawings and Sculptures’, in A. De Nicolò
Salmazo, ed.: Francesco Squarcione, ‘pictorum gymnasiarcha sigularis’. Atti delle Giornate di
studio. Padova 10–11 febbraio 1998, Padua 1999, pp.177–93, an article that is otherwise
rather eccentric.
19 K. Christiansen in J. Martineau, ed.: exh. cat. Andrea Mantegna, London (Royal
Academy of Arts) and New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 1992, pp.115–17,
no.3.
20 As De Nicolò Salmazo suggested, Pizzolo may be responsible for the Poldi
Pezzoli Portrait of an old man (no.8), though this, as she realised, could have been
painted by Mantegna c.1450, contemporary with his Ovetari fresco of the Calling of
Sts James and John, in which the impact of Pizzolo’s style is clearly felt; see A. De
Nicolò Salmazo: Il soggiorno padovano di Andrea Mantegna, Cittadella 1993, pp.64–65.
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28. St Jerome
in the
wilderness,
attributed
to Nicolò
Pizzolo.
c.1448.
Tempera on
panel, 48 by
36 cm.
(Museu de
Arte, São
Paulo).
Flagellation of Christ (no.4), so reminiscent of Donatello’s reliefs,
is undeniably pertinent, and Agosti ascribes it to a ‘Follower of
Donatello in Padua (Giovanni Bellini?)’. The attribution to
Bellini was first proposed by Longhi and subsequently cham-
pioned by Bellosi. Roger Rearick, however, argued that this
double-sided sheet should instead be ascribed to the elusive
painter–sculptor Nicolò Pizzolo, making a persuasive compar-
ison between the three all’antica figures on its verso, utterly
un-Bellinesque (Fig.27) and Pizzolo’s destroyed St Gregory
from the Ovetari Chapel vault.18 Before their falling out in
1449, Pizzolo was Mantegna’s partner on the decoration of the
Ovetari Chapel and, as the older, might be thought to have had
some role in forming the younger painter’s style. In addition,
these twisting figures link the sheet to the splendidly febrile St
Jerome from São Paulo (no.7; Fig.28) which is given to Man-
tegna, as it has been since 1938, albeit far from unanimously;
this attribution was promoted by Longhi, Berenson and, in
recent years, by Keith Christiansen, who placed it at the begin-
ning of Mantegna’s career.19 It is very unlikely that the St Jerome
was painted after the signed St Mark (no.6) whose dating to
c.1447–48 must be correct; and Mark is so close in spirit to the
S. Eufemia of 1454 (no.11) as to indicate a significant stylistic
consistency in these years around 1450. Since, with its quick-
silver complications, the Jerome is equally unlikely to predate
21 Luciano Bellosi, who curated this section, chose not to enter the debate regarding
the date and circumstances of Giovanni’s birth, though he cites Jacopo Filippo
Foresti’s 1503 designation of Gentile as the ‘minimus frater’ that seemingly supports his
position (pp.103 and 109, note 1). That such sources are not always reliable is
demonstrated by the fact that other humanists send Giovanni Bellini, rather than his
brother Gentile, to Istanbul. See J.M. Fletcher: ‘Bellini’s Social World’, in Humfrey,
op. cit. (note 6), pp.13–47 and 274–81, esp. pp.32–33 and 279, note 120. There is
evidence to support the opposite view. The badly damaged Palazzo Ducale Pietà,
dated to 1472 in documents of 1716 and 1771, is now accepted by many as a fixed
point in Bellini’s career. Agosti, however, writes (p.68) that it should be ‘sganciata dalla
impropria data 1472’; he and Bellosi believe that the canvas was painted c.1460. For the
arguments in favour of the 1472 date, see M. Lucco in idem and G.C.F. Villa, eds.:
exh. cat. Giovanni Bellini, Rome (Scuderie del Quirinale) 2008, pp.172–74, no.12. In
MANTEGNA EXHIBITION IN PARIS
the four-square, Squarcionesque St Mark, it becomes difficult
to associate the São Paulo picture with any phase of Mantegna’s
career. In the early 1990s Alberta De Nicolò Salmazo tenta-
tively attributed the picture to Pizzolo and, especially if the
analogies with the Uffizi drawing are accepted, this seems a
very satisfactory solution.20
The section exploring Mantegna’s relationship with his
brother-in-law Giovanni Bellini was the most controversial of
all. Since Bellini rather than Mantegna is judged to have been
the pioneering modern, the evidence was shaped to fit this sense
of the two artists’ relative priority. Most scholars are now con-
tent with the opposite view – that Bellini was much impressed
by Mantegna in the first decade of his career. The question
hangs not least on Giovanni Bellini’s date of birth: was he
younger or older than his brother Gentile, born c.1431–33
(probably the third of Jacopo’s children), legitimate or illeg-
itimate? Was he therefore older or younger than Mantegna
himself? The majority of scholars currently put Giovanni’s
birthdate at c.1434–35, or possibly even a little later, whereas
Longhi’s followers prefer a birth date in about 1430 or slightly
earlier. The only certainty is that in 1453 Mantegna married
Nicolosia, Giovanni’s sister (or better, Jacopo Bellini’s daugh-
ter), at just the time therefore that he began work on the St Luke
polyptych (Brera, Milan; see no.25).21
The Paris exhibition provided the opportunity (especially
with the then concurrent Giovanni Bellini show in Rome)22 to
assess the arguments on both sides, the coherence of the two
competing chronologies, and thus the plausibility of the argu-
ment that Mantegna in the mid- to late 1450s was deeply
indebted to Giovanni. Bellini’s signed St Jerome in Birmingham
is accepted as his earliest surviving panel painting, but there is
less accord as to its exact date.23 This can plausibly be narrowed
down by reference to the two full-page illuminations painted
for a manuscript edition of Strabo’s Geography (De situ orbis geo-
graphia), commissioned in 1459 by the Venetian Jacopo Antonio
Marcello (no.31–32; now in Albi), whose attribution to
Giovanni Bellini, often argued in recent years, appears entirely
convincing. In both we see the same delicate but insistent
contour lines, similar elongated figures and means of making
the landscape gently recede (both features derived from Jacopo),
the same lines carrying the eye across the picture surface, link-
ing figures, their actions and setting. Morellian examination of
individual details supports a view that the Jerome was painted in
about 1459 or conceivably a mite earlier: the method of high-
lighting the knuckles and wavy hair (see, for example, the
fur hat in the second of the two illuminations that is so like
Jerome’s beard) are very like; even the two lions are twins of one
another.24 Three other early works by Giovanni were also
included: the Louvre pictures of Christ blessing (no.35; correctly
the opinion of the present reviewer there are no stylistic reasons to doubt that the
Venice Pietà was painted by Giovanni, probably with assistance, in the late 1460s or
early 1470s, not long after his Brera Pietà.
22 Reviewed by Neville Rowley in this Magazine, 150 (2008), pp.848–49.
23 See M. Lucco in Lucco and Villa, op. cit. (note 21), with full bibliography.
24 Both must be of nearly the same date as Giovanni Bellini’s signed Pietà in
the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, for which see – albeit with a later dating –
G.C.F. Villa in ibid., pp.64–66, no.10. Giles Robertson: Giovanni Bellini, Oxford
1968, p.29, recognised that it must immediately follow the Barber St Jerome. The
physiognomical similarity between the head of Christ in this work and the
bystander with crossed arms immediately behind Jacopo Marcello in the second of
the Albi illuminations is striking.
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MANTEGNA EXHIBITION IN PARIS
29. Portrait of Jacopo
Antonio Marcello,
fol.38v of J.A. Marcel-
lo: Passio Mauritii, here
attributed to Jacopo
Bellini. 1453. Tempera
on vellum, 18.7 by 13
cm. (Bibliothèque de
l’Arsenal, Paris).
dated c.1459), and the Bishop saint and St Anthony Abbot (nos.36
and 37; dated c.1460), which must be very close in time to his
supremely Mantegnesque Transfiguration (Correr, Venice), and,
like that awkward masterpiece, probably painted c.1462–63. All
these works are in some ways Mantegnesque, and since this
group post-dates the date of Mantegna’s marriage, it does
nothing to contradict the recent consensus that Bellini, at the
beginning of his independent career, was more affected by
Mantegna than the other way around.
So far, so good, but here the confusion begins in earnest. To
justify the argument that the current of influence ran primarily
from Giovanni Bellini to Mantegna, other paintings have to be
identified which show Bellini working in the earlier part of the
1450s. It is only from such pictures that Mantegna could have
learned such aspects of a Bellinian style as he introduces to his
pictures in the period after his marriage to Nicolosia. The Birm-
ingham St Jerome is therefore dated early. So too is the Pavia
Virgin and Child (no.34), which must surely have been painted
about a decade after the date of 1455 proposed here. And it is
not possible to accept either the attribution to Giovanni Bellini
25 The attribution of this work has been confused by its erroneous association
with the predella of the St Vincent Ferrer altarpiece (SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice).
Bellosi gives them different dates, but they do not appear to be by the same hand –
though the latter is not seemingly by Bellini either. Bellosi’s perspicacious attribution
to Alvise Vivarini of the sgraffito Pagan allegory (no.38; private collection, Paris,
formerly Stanley Moss Collection), often given to Bellini and, by Robertson, to
Lauro Padovano, bolsters the opinion of the present reviewer that the entire St
Vincent Ferrer altarpiece may have been painted by the youthful Alvise. In the
mid-1470s Alvise’s style was much affected by Giovanni Bellini and, in this case, the
two painters – the younger moonlighting from his family firm? – could perhaps have
been collaborating. The St Vincent Ferrer altar was seemingly dedicated in 1464, but
no altarpiece was in place by that date; see G. Fogolari: Scritti d’arte, Milan 1946,
p.250; Christiansen, op. cit. (note 6), p.285, note 34; and it is possible the altar
initially remained empty. The work was attributed to Alvise by Ridolfi in 1648; it fits
very uncomfortably within any of the proposed chronologies for Giovanni Bellini,
which is why its attribution to Bellini, proposed by Sansovino and forcefully argued
by Longhi in 1914, has been regularly questioned since; see R. Longhi: Scritti
Giovanili, 1912–1922, Florence 1961, pp.90–93.
532 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
30. Portrait of
a young man,
detail of
fol.22 of the
Paris album,
by Jacopo
Bellini.
c.1445–55.
Pen and
brown ink on
vellum, 29 by
42.7 cm.
(Musée du
Louvre,
Paris).
or the dating – c.1453–55 – of the predella with stories from the
life of Drusiana once in the Carità, Venice (no.33; now in
Munich; the main tier of the altarpiece is lost). Documentary
evidence apparently indicates that the altar on which this
predella stood was dedicated only between 1468 and 1471, but
this is disregarded. Marcantonio Michiel wrote of this work
‘Credo lo scabello fusse de man de Lauro Padovano’, and even if his
cautious ‘credo’ might lead modern scholars to reject a firm attri-
bution to this shadowy figure, there can be no doubt that
Michiel noticed a dip in quality in relation to the main panel,
which he gave to Bellini himself. The predella was probably
executed by an assistant of Giovanni Bellini in the early 1470s,
probably working to Giovanni’s designs.25
Bellosi re-submits his 1986 attribution to Giovanni of the
four exquisite illuminations in the Paris manuscript of the Life
and Passion of St Maurice (no.30), made for Marcello six years
earlier than the Geography. But the two manuscripts cannot
have been illustrated by the same painter. The pages in the
Passio Mauritii are altogether more delicate, more resolved, the
sensibility is different, and, since the Strabo illuminations
26 It is also worth comparing the portraits of Marcello. Is it really possible that, even
taking their different sizes into account, the same artist would so radically have
re-envisaged the features of his patron?
27 G. Toscano in D. Banzato, A. De Nicolò Salmazo and A.M. Spiazzi, eds.: exh. cat.
Mantegna e Padova, 1445–1460, Padua (Musei Civici agli Eremitani) 2006, pp.224–27,
no.40a–b. Bellosi rightly points out that the illuminations bear very little resemblance
to the panel of Sts Anthony Abbot and Bernardino (National Gallery of Art, Washing-
ton) believed by many scholars to have belonged to the 1459 Gattamelata altarpiece.
See M. Boskovits in idem and D.A. Brown: Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century. The
Collections of the National Gallery of Art. Systematic Catalogue, Washington 2003,
pp.89–94. The Gattamelata altarpiece was supposedly signed jointly by Jacopo,
Gentile and Giovanni Bellini (in that order!) and several scholars have proposed that
Gentile may have executed this panel. See C. Eisler: ‘Saints Anthony Abbot and
Bernardino designed by Jacopo and painted by Gentile Bellini’, Arte Veneta 39 (1985),
pp.32–40; K. Christiansen: ‘Venetian painting of the early Quattrocento’, Apollo 125
(March 1987), pp.166–77, esp. pp.174–76. Certainly it is hard to reconcile its stiffness
and somewhat summary mode of execution either with Jacopo’s drawings in the
Louvre album thought to date from the 1450s or with his exquisite paintings believed
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appear to have been painted by Giovanni, another candidate for
the Maurice illuminations needs to be found.26 In the past, they
have been wrongly given to Mantegna. Bellosi is perplexed
(p.103) by the attribution to Jacopo Bellini by Giordana Mar-
iani Canova of these miniatures, an opinion forcibly supported
in 2006 by Gennaro Toscano.27 However, in the opinion of the
present writer, this remains the most persuasive suggestion
made so far. There are a number of striking similarities between
these pages and Jacopo’s S. Bernardino in a New York private
collection,28 and to many of the sheets in the Paris album of
Jacopo’s drawings. A helpful comparison was provided in
the show between the Marcello portrait (Fig.29; not the page
chosen for exhibition) and the profile of a young man (Fig.30)
on the page in the Louvre album opposite Jacopo’s drawing of
Christ in Limbo (no.26). In both we see the same firm contour,
the delicate fall of light within, and short strokes of shimmer-
ing hatching around the profile.
Where does this leave us? In the period immediately follow-
ing his marriage, Mantegna certainly introduced Bellinian
elements to his painting – in the lighting and landscapes of the
S. Zeno predella panels and especially the London Agony, and
in the softer flesh-painting of the saints in the lower tier of the
St Luke polyptych – but with no works by Giovanni to imitate,
we are forced to conclude that Longhi, as all art historians do
on occasion, got this wrong. Mantegna’s contract (marital, but
also artistic) was with Jacopo, not Giovanni. His National
Gallery Agony in the garden, for example, reveals his awareness
of Jacopo Bellini’s Agony drawing in the British Museum album
(no.44), although his model was re-envisaged according to his
own exacting principles. If Giovanni’s youthful works contain
a similar stylistic fusion of father and brother-in-law (albeit
with the ingredients weighted very differently), then that is
hardly surprising. And it is from that moment, in the early
1460s, that the fascinating dialogue between Mantegna and
Bellini really begins. It is surely absurd to think that all contact
between the two ceased after Mantegna’s removal to Mantua.
Antonio Mazzotta has observed that the rock forms at the base
of the little hummock in Bellini’s Correr Transfiguration are
precisely copied from Mantegna’s drawing of Christ in Limbo
(no.68). Since this is highly finished in most parts and drawn on
parchment it seems reasonable to ask if this was not a presenta-
tion drawing made for one or other of his in-laws, executed
probably shortly after Mantegna’s arrival in Mantua, and copied
by Giovanni almost immediately. Mantegna’s Berlin Presenta-
tion of Christ, available for Giovanni Bellini to make his free
to come from the same period: see, especially, the Virgin and Child, c.1450, in the
Uffizi. The difficulty is compounded by the seeming discrepancy between the
formalised late ‘Gothic’ style of most of Jacopo’s surviving pictures and the huge
(Renaissance) ambition of his drawings, especially the later group in the Louvre,
which are more akin to the Passio Mauritii illuminations. Bellosi is, however, surely
right to disassociate the three predella panels by Jacopo – the Christ in Limbo in Padua
(no.27, dated c.1450–55), the Crucifixion in Venice and the Adoration of the Magi in
Ferrara from the Washington panel – though they may perhaps have been executed
rather closer to 1450, seemingly when the British Museum album was begun.
28 This is dated, because of Bernardino’s canonisation in that year, to ‘shortly after 1450’
by C. Eisler: The Genius of Jacopo Bellini: The Complete Paintings and Drawings, New York
1989, pp.28, 51, 69 and 165. The painting has a curious affinity with the elephant in the
Allegory of Venice in the Arsenal manuscript – in the treatment of the cowl (and the
elephant’s ear), the long strokes of tempera hatching and even in the expression; these
affinities were noted by A. De Marchi: Gentile da Fabriano, Milan 1992, pp.218 and 220,
note 13, who used them to argue the attribution of both works to Giovanni Bellini.
29 R. Goffen: Giovanni Bellini, New Haven and London 1989, pp.282 and 284, argues
persuasively that the Querini Presentation may not be wholly autograph.
MANTEGNA EXHIBITION IN PARIS
copy in the early 1470s (Fondazione Querini, Venice), may also
have been a gift to the family.29 And, in his turn, Mantegna, in
mid-career, took sensitive note of the activities of his talented
relation by marriage. It is worth pointing out that his treatment
of figures in landscape is closest to Giovanni Bellini, in the way
that the lines of the landscapes and the contours of the figures
flow from one another at certain key nodal points within the
composition, in his St George (suggestive in view of its Vene-
tian provenance) and in the Camera Picta, therefore in the
years around 1470. As Thiébaut points out, the treatment of
light and surface in the Copenhagen Dead Christ is unthinkable
without Giovanni Bellini.30
An exhibition devoted to Mantegna inevitably raises anoth-
er problem of classification, one connected with our sense of
what determines (or better, determined) authorship. What do
we mean when we say that a work is ‘by’ Andrea Mantegna, or
by his workshop or when we categorise a work as realised ‘after
Mantegna’ – that is, by another maker following his designs?
This is a question that becomes urgent in relation to Manteg-
na’s activities as a printmaker. In general, the contributors to
the catalogue favour the formulation ‘bottega di’ when dealing
with those prints copying Mantegna’s designs but universally
agreed to have been actually engraved by a specialist in the
medium. However, the Virtus combusta and Virtus deserta prints
(no.146 and 147) are given to Giovanni Antonio da Brescia, on
the basis of research conducted by Suzanne Boorsch and David
Landau for the 1992 exhibition, and the print of the Bearers of
royal armour (no.164) from the Triumphs, the plate for which
(like others) remained in the hands of the Mantegna family, is
attributed to Giulio Campagnola. The small number of engrav-
ings historically assumed to have been entirely executed by
Mantegna himself (Kristeller’s group of seven, including
nos.89, 95, 105, 106 and 113) were labelled as his. In recent
decades, this topic has been an especially vexed one, made, if
anything, still more complicated by the remarkable archival
discoveries of Andrea Canova, curator of the section, ‘Manteg-
na invenit’; we now know that in April 1475 Mantegna forged
an exclusive working relationship with the young goldsmith
Gian Marco Cavalli who, in exchange for a salary, would
engrave plates provided by Mantegna after drawings (subjects
unspecified) that he was required to keep secret.
There is room for much more thought on this matter. We
might, for example, investigate Cavalli’s other activities further.
His struck medals of Francesco Gonzaga and Maximilian I
are probably too small to be helpful, though, since they are
30 In the Copenhagen picture the contrast between the cool, even pre-dawn light in
the lower landscape (particularly the quarry) and the glow in the sky on the left
contributes to the sense of Christ’s revivification; he is dead but will come alive.
Mantegna reinforces this idea by juxtaposing the stiff angular folds of the shroud
around Christ’s feet, which have a kind of rigor mortis (as crisply carved as the tomb),
with the frothy explosion of folds at his groin. Bellini’s encounter with Mantegna in
Padua in the late 1450s remained fundamental and he must surely have made
drawings then after both Mantegna and Donatello. Bellini’s Christ Church portrait
drawing of the 1490s (for which see E. Greer in L. Campbell et al.: exh. cat.
Renaissance Faces: van Eyck to Titian, London (National Gallery) 2008, pp.250–51,
no.80), which has sometimes been given to Mantegna, owes much to Mantegna’s
much earlier portrait of Lodovico Trevisan (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). Antonio
Mazzotta’s division of the drawings in the exhibition which have sometimes floated
between the two artists is entirely convincing, though, partly by analogy with
Bellini’s underdrawing style, one wonders if the chronology for his works on paper
should be reversed. The Louvre drawing of the Pietà (no.47; dated c.1490) probably
belongs in the mid-1470s, earlier than the other treatments of the subject in the
exhibition, very likely of the mid-1480s (nos.45 and 46; dated c.1480).
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MANTEGNA EXHIBITION IN PARIS
31. Mars, Venus, Cupid and Vulcan, attributed to Gian Marco Cavalli. c.1480–1500.
Cast bronze relief, partially parcel-gilt with some silvering, diameter 42 cm.
(Private collection).
unusually fine and unquestionably his, they should not be
ignored.31 A route that might ultimately be more helpful is
Donald Johnston’s speculative but circumstantially convincing
attribution to Cavalli of a glamorous bronze roundel depicting
Mars, Venus, Cupid and Vulcan (Fig.31).32 Johnston proposed
that the same sculptor executed the magnificent Entombment
relief in Vienna (Fig.32), a work which in 1992 Landau bravely
ascribed to Mantegna himself. There is a qualitative difference
between these two reliefs, but could one argue that the latter,
superb in all respects, was executed under Mantegna’s close
supervision, whereas the former, a weaker composition, more
generalised in its modelling, was an independent work? Might
that help us with the prints? Three things are clear. First, the
maker of the Vienna relief would have been entirely able to
engrave the plates for the print of the same subject (no.89;
31 G.F. Hill: A Corpus of Italian Medals of the Renaissance before Cellini, London 1930,
p.613, nos.241–45.
32 Sale, Christies, London, 11th December 2003, lot 20.
33 Shelley Fletcher found the same Basilisk watermark on the first state impressions of
the Madonna of humility print in Vienna and Berlin as those found in examples of the
horizontal Entombment, Battle of the sea-gods (both halves) and Bacchanal with Silenus
prints, leading her to suggest that ‘we must reconsider the possibility that the Virgin and
Child was created closer in time to the others’ than is usually supposed, although she
acknowledges that ‘this particular paper could have been purchased, stored and used at
various times’; see S. Fletcher: ‘A Re-evaluation of two Mantegna prints’, Print Quar-
terly 14 (1997), pp.66–77, esp. pp.74–76. Stylistically the present reviewer believes, with
David Landau, that this is the last of Kristeller’s ‘seven’ to have been executed and that
a date close to the Uffizi Virgin of the stonecutters seems likely. Assuming the watermark
evidence to be conclusive of a restricted date range would involve giving Mantegna’s
British Museum drawing of Mars, Diana and Iris (?), with the same Basilisk watermark,
an unacceptably early date; see D. Ekserdjian in Martineau, op. cit. (note 19), pp.449–50,
534 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
Fig.33) or for the Battle of the sea-gods (no.108). Second, Man-
tegna kept his printmakers (including Cavalli, Campagnola and
very probably Giovanni Antonio da Brescia) on a tight rein and
retained their plates. Third, for good stylistic reasons it has been
realised that the prints normally given to Mantegna himself must
have been executed over a substantial period of time, the hor-
izontal Entombment in about 1475, the Sea-gods and Bacchanal
with a wine-vat (no.105) probably slightly later (but before 1481),
and the Madonna of humility (no.113) perhaps as late as 1490.33 In
response to those who still cling to Mantegna as an engraver, it
might be asked why, having entered into such a satisfactory
arrangement with Cavalli, he subsequently, and very occasion-
ally, returned to engraving his own designs, while otherwise
depending upon the services of others? All of this lends credence
to Boorsch’s view that Mantegna did not himself engrave plates
and suggests in addition that it was probably Cavalli, minutely
controlled by Mantegna, who engraved the plates for the finest
of this sequence of prints.34 That is not to say, however, that
these prints should cease to be labelled ‘Andrea Mantegna’; they
are his absolutely and would surely always have been identified
in this way. But so too are the other, less skilled engravings
realised from Mantegna’s designs, works given here to individ-
ual engravers, where they have been identified, and to the
‘bottega’.35 It might be useful here to distinguish between
those prints for which drawings were made especially by Man-
tegna (essentially Kristeller’s seven) and those which were
reproductive of designs made for other purposes: paintings and
presentation drawings. We are still at the beginning of our
investigation, but one thing is paramount: better formulations
for these works need to be found.
And we need to pose the question of whether this mode of
collaboration with goldsmith–engravers was extended to other
forms of production – to painting itself. The issue arises partly
because of the handful of pictures in the exhibition whose
autograph status is questionable. Critics have long been content
to assign drawings to Mantegna’s workshop but have not always
asked how these workshop members might have served their
master. We are not even very clear who these assistants were;
Mantegna is not known to have taken on pupils in significant
numbers, though we can assume that he trained his sons. The
problematic works might be divided into two types. Given
Mantegna’s practice of making a finished design and a detailed
underdrawing which he followed closely, it would have been
very easy to delegate the actual painting of less important works
to assistants, these pictures identifiable because they lack
no.146; and S. Boorsch and D. Landau: ‘Appendix II: Watermarks’, in ibid., p.473.
34 S. Boorsch: ‘Mategna and his printmakers’, in Martineau, op. cit. (note 19),
pp.56–66; A. Canova: ‘Gian Marco Cavalli incisiore per Andrea Mantegna e altre
notizie sull’oreficeria e la tipografia a Mantova nel XV secolo’, Italia medioevale e
umanistica 42 (2001), pp.149–79, the publication of which was clumsily anticipated by
the present author, in L. Syson and D. Thornton: Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance
Italy, London 2001, p.158, fig.124.
35 From the letter of September 1475, detailing a dispute between Mantegna and the
engraver Simone Ardizzoni of Reggio Emilia, it appears that Mantegna first wanted
to engage Simone and then fell out with him after he discovered that Simone had
collaborated in some way with the Mantuan painter Giovanni Andrea. Possibly he
had earlier thought of Simone in the Cavalli role and that his unusual stipulations
regarding the secretive treatment of his designs in the contract with Cavalli may have
been spurred by some indiscretion on Simone’s part – very possibly that he showed
Mantegna’s drawings to Giovanni Andrea. This hypothesis might be linked to both
the prints of the vertical Entombment (no.86), the Christ in Limbo and the Deposition
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MANTEGNA EXHIBITION IN PARIS

Mantegna’s delicacy of touch. Some of the late grisaille paintings

fall into this category: the Paris Judgment of Solomon (no.127;
correctly attributed to Mantegna and workshop) but also
possibly the Dublin Judith (no.126), which lacks the refinement
of the Samson and Delilah (National Gallery, London), or the
exquisite canvas from Cincinnati (no.132), whose subject is still
puzzling. The pictures whose execution was delegated might
therefore be thought of as equivalent to the prints; they are ‘by’
Mantegna because they were designed by him.
Others obey the basic precepts of Mantegna’s style (and can
sometimes be beautifully painted), but evince a lack of discipline
in their design that makes it difficult to see them as autograph
works.36 One of the two canvases from Mantegna’s funerary
chapel in S. Andrea, the Holy Family with the family of the Baptist
32. The entombment of Christ, here attributed to an anonymous sculptor (possibly
(no.186), falls into this category, though is not among those Gian Marco Cavalli) working under Mantegna’s supervision. 1475–80. Cast bronze
which are well executed. Completed after Mantegna’s death, it relief, partially parcel-gilt, 24.4 by 44.9 cm. (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).
is probably the work of two assistants, one of them, by analogy
with the ugly female courtier and her slave on the ceiling of
the Camera Picta, his son Francesco: the Virgin shares the
amorphous facial type and soupy smile of the girl painted in the
oculus. With pictures in this category, any signature would
therefore function as a stamp of approval by the master rather
than his active participation. The Paris exhibition gave the
opportunity to examine the signed picture from the Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum, The Virgin and Child, the infant St
John the Baptist and six female saints (no.136), in the distinguished
company of, most usefully, the Louvre Parnassus (no.137). This
is probably, as Giovanni Agosti has suggested, the panel paint-
ing of the ‘Marys’ owned in 1493 by Eleonora of Aragon,
Duchess of Ferrara, known probably to Ercole de’ Roberti. In
modern times, only Fry, Longhi and Agosti have been prepared
to credit the ostensible message of the signature. It is here
presented by Elam with a justifiable question mark against Man-
tegna’s name. There is no gainsaying its exquisite technique, but 33. The entombment of Christ, here attributed to Gian Marco Cavalli working to
its composition is incoherent, with peculiar shifts in scale, the Mantegna’s design and under his supervision. c.1475. Engraving and drypoint, 29.9
by 44.2 cm. (National Gallery of Art, Washington).
assemblage of different facial types is worrying (none of them
very like the Venus or those Muses that remained unaltered in
the Parnassus, although closer to those in the earlier Virgin of
the stonecutters and the British Museum drawing of the Calumny and the delicate chaos of draperies, tempting one to suggest that
of Apelles; no.148)37 and the draperies veer towards slippery they are by the same hand. Mantegna, at the end of his career,
ornament. The landscape background, studded with more seems to have had a highly skilled assistant as able to work in his
saints, is like a theatrical backdrop, its lines sometimes battling idiom as Cavalli had been in translating his designs into copper
with the figures in the foreground. Some of these features are plates and bronze reliefs. This utterly absorbing exhibition
echoed in the grisaille paintings of Judith and Dido from Montreal demonstrated that his shrewd choice of collaborators was only
(nos.128 and 129), particularly the disregard for relative scale one of the things that make Mantegna so remarkable.

(no.87). Boorsch, in Agosti and Thiébaut, op. cit. (note 1), p.254, suggests that the copying drawings by Mantegna supplied by the wayward Simone? Were these
drawing for the latter, like the Christ in Limbo, was not entirely finished. Arguably its paintings the cause of the argument?
technique relates the Deposition to engravings by Ferrarese printmakers; that Simone 36 Two pictures in the exhibition are neither by Mantegna nor made under his

came from Reggio should come as no surprise given the pioneering efforts in the
1460s of Emilian engravers such as Gherardo da Vicenza, probable author of the
so-called ‘Tarocchi di Mantegna’. It also appears that, to create these prints in the
mid-1470s, Mantegna may have supplied his engravers with drawings executed much
earlier – illustrating Christ’s Passion, perhaps associated with his paintings for the
chapel of S. Giorgio, explaining the gap in time between the Courtauld drawing of
Christ at the column, here correctly dated c.1456–59 (no.42; probably closer to the
latter date), and the Flagellation print (no.88) in which the figure of Christ reappears.
The Paris Christ in Limbo drawing (or a version of it) was seemingly one of these,
unfinished in some of its details, like the tree in the Deposition print. The dimensions
and relative scale of figures to landscape in the vertical Entombment and the Deposition
engravings are close to those of three problematic scenes from Christ’s Passion in the
National Gallery (no.73–75). Could these have been painted by Giovanni Andrea,
supervision: the Jacquemart-André Virgin and Child with Sts Jerome and Louis of
Toulouse (no.28) and the Capodimonte Portrait of Francesco or Lodovico Gonzaga
(no.69). The technique of the former is too dense and the composition too awkward
to be Mantegna’s (St Louis’s hand cut off by the line of the Virgin’s mantle). Though
he supports the attribution to Mantegna, Agosti’s mention of the young Lazzaro
Bastiani is to the point. The Gonzaga portrait (also damaged) is somewhat naive and
unresolved, the treatment of the young cleric’s draperies dull and the painting of eyes
and lips surprisingly summary. The work has the appearance of a copy but it must be
asked if the original has much to do with Mantegna. The autograph status of both
was rightly questioned by Creighton Gilbert after their inclusion in the 1961 Mantua
exhibition; see C. Gilbert: review of the Mantegna exhibition, THE BURLINGTON
MAGAZINE 104 (1962), pp.5–9, esp. p.6.
37 This perhaps implies an earlier date for the latter than is usually supposed.

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MA.AUG.Whistler.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 16/7/09 17:04 Page 536
Titian’s ‘Triumph of Love’
by CATHERINE WHISTLER
THE ‘TRIUMPH OF LOVE’ , recently acquired by the Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford,1 is a little-known work by Titian which has
not always been accepted as autograph (Fig.34).2 Its restoration
by Jill Dunkerton at the National Gallery, London, has revealed
that the painting was originally rectangular in shape, and that
the Cupid standing on a lion was shown in a fictive oculus (see
Appendix below). Its provenance can now be traced to the
collection of Gabriel Vendramin (1484–1552). The inventories
and documents concerned mostly lack attributions, so that the
Triumph of Love is described as Titian’s work only from the late
eighteenth century.
The painting is first recorded on 4th January 1602 (Venetian
style 1601) in a partial inventory of paintings, without artists’
names, from the Vendramin collection compiled by the notary
Ottaviano Constantini.3 It appears as ‘uno quadro con un dio d’amor
sopra un lion con soazete de legno dorade, qual quadro è il coperto del
soprascritto quadro de retratto della donna con la mano al petto’. The
portrait of a woman for which the Triumph of Love acted as a
cover is listed two entries above as ‘un altro quadro de retratto d’una
dona con la mano destra al petto vestita de negro con soaze de noghera
con li suoi filli d’oro a torno alto quarte cinque e 1/2 e largo quarte 5 in cir-
ca’. This inventory recorded paintings that had recently been
removed by Andrea and Federigo Vendramin from the Ca’ Ven-
dramin at S. Fosca in Venice. The female portrait can be iden-
tified in an earlier inventory made in 1567–69 of the collection of
Gabriel Vendramin at S. Fosca, where it was attributed to Titian
by Orazio Vecellio and Jacopo Tintoretto: ‘Un ritrato de una zen-
tildona de man de ser Titian con fornimento de noghera con paternostri et
fusarioli doradi’.4 Detached painted covers were not described in
that inventory, which had as its prime focus Gabriel’s famous
camerino d’anticaglie, the focus of disputes over illicit sales from the
collection by his heirs.5 In a second inventory of 26th January
1602 the same notary, Constantini, compared the document of
1567–69 with the paintings he had listed three weeks earlier. He
specified that ‘un dio d’amor’ was a timpano, or painted cover, and
recorded that it was part of the original collection at S. Fosca.6 He
We are particularly grateful to Jennifer Fletcher, and to Linda Borean, Beverly Brown,
Keith Christiansen, Jill Dunkerton, Paul Hills, Charles Hope, David Jaffé, Paul
Joannides, Rosella Lauber, Nicholas Penny, Carol Plazzotta, Francis Russell, David
Scrase, Luke Syson and Jeremy Warren for their opinions and suggestions. A fuller
account of the conservation history, recent restoration and technical examination of
the painting will appear in a future issue of the National Gallery Technical Bulletin.
1 Accepted by H.M. Government in lieu of Inheritance Tax and allocated to the
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2008 (hybrid arrangement), with a grant from The
Art Fund (with a contribution from the Wolfson Foundation); support from Daniel
Katz Ltd., the Friends of the Ashmolean, the Elias Ashmole Group, the Tradescant
Group, the Virtue-Tebbs, Russell and Madan Bequest Funds, and donations from
Mr Michael Barclay, the late Mrs Yvonne Carey, the late Mrs Felicity Rhodes and
many private donors. It is currently on view at the National Gallery, London, to
20th September.
2 Exhibited: Exhibition of the Works of the Old Masters, London (Royal Academy of
Arts) 1875, no.176 (as Titian); Exhibition of the Works of the Old Masters, London
(Royal Academy of Arts) 1892, no.115 (as Titian); Exhibition of Venetian Painting,
London (New Gallery) 1894–95, no.160 (as Titian); The Burlington Fine Arts Club,
Exhibition, London 1903, no.41 (as Titian); Loan Exhibition of Thirty-Nine Masterpieces
of Venetian Painting In Honour of the Coronation, London (Thomas Agnew & Sons)
536 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
ordered that works from Gabriel’s collection should be locked
up in the camerino and the door sealed.7 The dispersal of the col-
lection mainly occurred during the lifetime of the last Vendramin
heir, Andrea Vendramin di Zamballotta (1628–85).8
The Triumph of Love is next documented in 1680 as ‘Quadro
con un putino in piedi sopra un lion in un paese’ in the collection of
Salvatore Orsetti, a Venetian merchant and lawyer, in an inven-
tory without dimensions or attributions.9 This was compiled
when the family collection was divided between Salvatore and
his brother Giovanni Battista. Their father, Cristoforo Orsetti
(1608–64), had acquired a major group of paintings between late
1650 and mid-1657 from Andrea Vendramin, including Gior-
gione’s Tempest and La vecchia.10 The painting is next recorded in
1784 by the Venetian connoisseur and dealer Giovanni Maria
Sasso, who acted as an agent for such collectors as Sir Abraham
Hume and also restored paintings prior to their export.11 In a
letter to John Strange (1732–99), British Resident in Venice until
1789, Sasso listed works belonging to the Bernardi family,
including the Tempest among other paintings formerly in Gabriel
Vendramin’s collection, and wrote that these pictures came from
the Orsetti family.12 Sasso transcribed for Strange a recent ‘Nota
di stime’ of the Bernardi pictures, including the ‘rotondo grande
di Tiziano con putino che scherza con un leone 20 zecchini’. He
mentioned that Sebastiano Ricci and Pietro Guarienti had
previously assessed the collection, which must have belonged to
Bortolo (Bartolomeo) Bernardi (fl.1743), a dealer and mercante di
colore.13 Sasso went on to mistakenly identify the Triumph of Love
with Carlo Ridolfi’s description of a painted cover that Titian
had made for his portrait of the writer Sperone Speroni
(1500–88).14
Some time after this, the Triumph of Love was acquired by
John Udney (1727–1800), a British diplomat and merchant who
had spent many years in Venice and Livorno; it was inherited by
his brother Robert (1722–1802), and is described in his sale of
1804 as the painted cover by Titian described by Ridolfi as from
the Bernardi family.15 The picture remained in British hands,
1953, no.37 (as Titian); and Italian Art and Britain, London (Royal Academy of Arts)
1960, no.79 (as Titian). See H. Knackfuss: Tizian, Bielefeld and Leipzig 1900, pp.89
and 106 (as Titian; painted in 1545); B. Berenson: Italian Pictures of the Renaissance,
Venetian School, London 1932 (rev. ed. 1957), I, p.187 (as Titian); F. Valcanover:
L’Opera Completa di Tiziano, Milan 1969, no.251 (as Titian with assistance; 1545); H.
Wethey: The Paintings of Titian, III, The Mythological and Historical Paintings, London
1975, pp.220–21, no.X–35 (as Venetian School; c.1560); and P. Humfrey: Titian. The
Complete Paintings, London 2007, p.27, no.159 (as Titian; c.1545–50).
3 New documents comprising two inventories by Constantini have been published
by R. Lauber: ‘Memoria, visione e attesa. Tempi e spazi del collezionismo artistico
nel primo Rinascimento veneziano’, in M. Hochmann, R. Lauber and S. Mason,
eds.: Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Dalle origini al Cinquecento, Venice 2008,
pp.66–70; and Appendice documentaria, pp.371–75. They correct and amplify the
document published by J. Anderson: ‘A further Inventory of Gabriel Vendramin’s
Collection’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 121 (1979), pp.639–48 (hereafter cited as
Anderson 1979).
4 A. Rava: ‘Il “Camerino delle Anticaglie” di Gabriele Vendramin’, Nuovo Archivio
Veneto 117–18 (1920), pp.155–81 (hereafter cited as Rava 1920), esp. p.178; the
inventory did not include dimensions.
5 On the chequered history of the collection, see Anderson 1979; idem: Giorgione,
MA.AUG.Whistler.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 16/7/09 17:04 Page 537
Paris and London 1997, pp.160–75; R. Lauber: ‘Per un ritratto di Gabriele
Vendramin. Nuovi contributi’, in L. Borean and S. Mason, eds.: Figure di collezionisti
a Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento, Udine 2002, pp.25–71, with previous references; and
N. Penny: The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, II, Venice 1540–1600, London 2008,
pp.224–26, for further observations.
6 Lauber, op. cit. (note 3), p.374.
7 In 1615 the camerino was described by Vincenzo Scamozzi as ‘sotto sigillo’ (i.e.
sealed); however, Titian’s The Vendramin family was hanging in the ground-floor
entrance-hall, as specified in Constantini’s inventory of 26th January 1602, and
therefore could be offered for sale in 1636.
8 See Lauber, op. cit. (note 5), pp.66–71.
9 L. Borean and S. Mason: ‘Cristoforo Orsetti e i suoi quadri di “perfetta mano”’, in
idem, op. cit. (note 5), p.155.
10 Ibid., p.141; Cristoforo Orsetti, a Bergamasque merchant, assembled a type of
aristocratic collection with portraits and history paintings by cinquecento Venetian
artists, unlike other wealthy merchants in Venice who acquired pictures by
contemporary artists.
11 On Sasso, see L. Borean, ed.: Lettere artistiche del Settecento veneziano, II, Il carteggio
Giovanni Maria Sasso – Abraham Hume, Verona 2004.
12 This discovery will be discussed by Linda Borean in her essays ‘Il collezionismo
TITIAN’S ‘TRIUMPH OF LOVE’
34. Triumph of Love, by
Titian. c.1544–46. Canvas,
diameter 88.3 cm., after
cleaning and restoration.
(Ashmolean Museum,
Oxford).
veneziano del Settecento’ and ‘Il caso Manfrin’, in L. Borean and S. Mason, eds.: Il
collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Il Settecento, Venice 2009 (forthcoming, November).
The letter is undated but Sasso’s previous letter to Strange in the same correspon-
dence is of March 1784.
13 G.B. Tassini: Cittadini Veneziani, Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Correr,
MS.P.D.c.4/1, recorded the approval of Bernardi’s status as ‘cittadino originario’ in
1743. His collection was well known and links can be found between the Bernardi
and Orsetti families who lived in the same parish of S. Aponal; later, Bartolomeo’s
sons knew the Orsetti heirs. The ‘fratelli Bernardi quondam Bortolo’ are cited in relation
to the Orsetti family in a legal document of 1779; Venice, Biblioteca del Museo
Correr, MS.P.D.c707 (information from Rosella Lauber).
14 C. Ridolfi: Le maraviglie dell’arte, ed. D. von Hadeln, Berlin 1914, I, p.192;
Speroni’s portrait is often incorrectly identified with a painting in Treviso, for which,
see H. Wethey: The Paintings of Titian, II, The Portraits, London 1971, pp.140–41,
no.98a, workshop of Titian; and the presumed cover, no.98b, Device of lion and Cupid
(Alba Collection, Madrid) as Venetian school, c.1544. For clarification, see E.
Saccomani: ‘“Dal naturale, come fe già Tiziano . . .” I ritratti di Sperone Speroni’,
Sperone Speroni, Filologia Veneta 2 (1989), pp.257–67. Knackfuss, op. cit. (note 2),
repeated Sasso’s mistaken identity.
15 Robert Fullerton Udney sale, Christie’s, London, 19th May 1804, lot 37.
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TITIAN’S ‘TRIUMPH OF LOVE’

The original shape of the canvas was rectangular, and the uncut
edges at either side represent the original width. Infra-red
examination revealed an underdrawing (Fig.35), a scribbled
pensiero for the composition, which is typical of Titian’s style and
working practice. As an abbreviated creative idea it is not the
kind of underdrawing that a member of the workshop would
produce, nor is it a blueprint for an assistant to follow. Instead
Titian’s evolving ideas can be traced as he changed the position
of the figure of Cupid, the size of his wings and many other
details. The underdrawing is closely comparable with that for
The Vendramin family (Fig.36), begun in the early 1540s.17 The
painting is rapid and free, with many pentimenti. The freshness
of the treatment of Cupid’s flesh remains remarkable owing to
the fact that the painting has never been lined.
The composition was designed with an illusionistic round win-
dow or oculus through which the lion’s front paws and muzzle
break into the viewers’ space. Such a fictive oculus was often used
in ceiling decoration in Venice, but was rare in easel paintings.
Stylistically, the painting seems to belong to the mid-1540s.
The standing amorino with an elongated torso and twisting body
in the Danaë of c.1544–46 (Fig.37) is closely comparable, his
larger wings akin to those envisaged in the underdrawing of the
35. Digital infra-red reflectogram of Fig.34, after cleaning, before restoration. roundel (Fig.35), while similar small orange-red wings can be
found among the amorini in the earlier Worship of Venus (Museo
del Prado, Madrid). The lion and Cupid stand before a screen of
foliage which forms a rhythmic silhouette against the landscape,
a device Titian used in the Clarice Strozzi (Gemäldegalerie,
Berlin) of c.1542. The design and lighting of the clouds and sky
recall the Resurrection of late 1542–43 (Palazzo Ducale, Urbino).
The handling of the lion’s bulging eye and teeth is comparable
to that of the monster in the later Perseus and Andromeda (Wallace
Collection, London). Unlike his dogs, Titian’s lions were not
studied from life; this one probably derives from one of the many
images of the lion of St Mark in the city. The placing of the
36. Detail of
an infra-red group against a fantasy lagoon landscape recalls the background
photograph of of Carpaccio’s Lion of St Mark of 1516 in the Palazzo Ducale.
The Vendramin Subjects alluding to the power of Cupid and love abound in
family, by
Titian and Titian’s work. Omnia Vincit Amor – the power of love over
workshop. all passions and faculties – was a familiar theme in the sixteenth
Early 1540s. century. Amor is shown as a winged boy riding a tamed lion in
(National
Gallery, classical art, especially on gems. The same image appears in a
London). drawing of 1527 by Giulio Romano and a design by Gian-
francesco Enzola (fl.1455–78) of a Cupid riding a lion which
reappears on some versions of a medal for Ercole II d’Este
entering in 1874 the collection of the politician and Pre- (1508–59).18 Titian’s interpretation is more inventive, with a
Raphaelite patron William Graham (1817–85) and passing to his balletic Cupid (who is about to shoot an arrow) commanding the
descendants.16 wild beast. A possible source may be an engraving by Marcanto-
The canvas was cut down and laid on a pine panel in the late nio Raimondi where the turning Cupid figure is quite similar
seventeenth century, perhaps when it left the Orsetti collection. (Fig.38), but equally the dynamic pose with outflung arms is

16 O. Garnett: ‘The Letters and Collection of William Graham – Pre-Raphaelite Public Collections, London 2003, no.650a.
Patron and Pre-Raphael Collector’, Walpole Society 62 (2000), p.334, cat. d.314. The 19 A. Doni: I marmi, Venice 1552, III, fol.40–41 (cited by Anderson 1979, p.640):

British provenance is John Udney; Robert Fullerton Udney; Christie’s, London, ‘. . . e fra l’altro mi mostrò un leone con un Cupido sopra. E qui discorremo molto della bella
19th May 1804, lot 37 (bought in at 55 gns); his son, John Robert Udney; Christie’s, invenzione, e lodassi ultimamente in questo, che l’amore doma ogni gran ferocità e terribilità di
London, 15th May 1829, lot 80 (bought in at 285 gns); Major C. Currie; Christie’s, persone’.
London, 13th February 1874, lot 115 (110 gns to Duncan, i.e. William Graham); 20 Rava 1920, p.163; ‘Una testa de marmoro de una zovane che crida con un cupido che pesta

William Graham M.P.; Christie’s, London, 10th April 1886, lot 484 (230 gns), to sopra un lion de bronzo appresso alla testa’. On Gabriel’s antiquities, see I. Favaretto: Arte
Agnew’s, London, buying for his daughter Agnes, Lady Jekyll; by descent to her antica e cultura antiquaria nelle collezioni venete al tempo della Serenissima, Rome 1990,
grandson David McKenna. pp.80–81.
17 Information from Jill Dunkerton, who also noted similarities with Titian’s Urbino 21 See G.F. Hill: A Corpus of Italian Medals of the Renaissance before Cellini, London

Resurrection, which she has recently studied. 1930, p.10, no.32, for a medal by Pisanello for Lionello d’Este.
18 Courtauld Institute, London, Witt Collection Inv.1129, for a stucco roundel in the 22 G. Toderi and F. Vannelli: Le Medaglie italiane del XVI secolo, Florence 2000, I,

Camera delle Aquile, Palazzo Te; and P. Attwood: Italian Medals c.1530–1600 in British p.338, no.1000.

538 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine

MA.AUG.Whistler.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 16/7/09 17:04 Page 539
37. Detail of the Cupid
in Danaë, by Titian.
c.1544–46. (Gallerie Nazionali
di Capodimonte, Naples).
reminiscent of small north Italian bronzes such as an example
from the Paduan workshop of Severo da Ravenna (Fig.39).
Gabriel Vendramin owned a number of Cupid figures, including
a bronze group showing Cupid standing on a lion which was
admired by Antonfrancesco Doni when he visited Gabriel’s
collection in 1552.19 This bronze group appears in the 1567–69
inventory; unfortunately virtually none of Gabriel’s antiquities
and sculpture can be identified today.20
The striking illusionism of the fictive oculus is an unusual and
arguably new motif in Titian’s work, although he had used illu-
sionistic stone parapets in portraits. His treatment of the oculus
alludes to conventions used in relief sculpture. The impresa-like
imagery of the group recalls motifs found on gems and on the
reverses of medals. The subject of Love conquering the passions
was often found in personal devices and medals.21 Ercole d’Este’s
medal is mentioned above, while a commemorative medal of
Sperone Speroni shows a boy embracing a lion.22 Since the name
Leonardo (Lunardo) recurs in the Vendramin family – Gabriel’s
father and nephew shared this name – there may have been some
additional significance for the choice of subject.
The Triumph of Love is a rarity as a surviving, documented
timpano. Painted covers for small panel paintings are relatively
23 The best study is still; A. Dülberg: Privatporträts, Berlin 1990.
24 Ibid., esp. pp.45–78; N. Penny: The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings, I, Paintings
from Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona, London 2004, under Lotto, NG1047, appendix I,
pp.99–101; and J. Cranstoun: The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance,
Cambridge 2000, pp.18–28.
25 Gian Paolo da Ponte commissioned timpani and frames for two portraits by Titian;
see Penny, op. cit. (note 24), p.100. A letter of 2nd May 1536 from Francesco Maria
della Rovere concerns the portrait of a woman in blue that he wished to acquire
together with its timpano; see D. von Hadeln: ‘Some little-known works by Titian’,
THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 45 (1924), p.180, for this and an early discussion of
timpani.
26 Dülberg, op. cit. (note 23), no.336; see also no.192 (Sperone Speroni), no.287
(La Bella), no.337 (Filippo Archinto), no.338 (Allegory of Prudence); and Penny, op. cit.
TITIAN’S ‘TRIUMPH OF LOVE’
familiar, representing a development of a traditional type of
double-sided image, such as portraits or devotional works that
could be held in the hands.23 Our knowledge of canvas covers,
which could be on quite a large scale, is still very limited.24 Like
painted reverses, covers could provide a gloss on the picture
beneath, whether playful or erudite. The term timpano seems to
have been used almost exclusively in Venice and its territories in
the sixteenth century to mean a tightly stretched canvas cover. In
the inventory of 26th January 1602 Constantini explained the
term (‘quali timpani sonno coperti’). Timpani would have been
attached to the frames of paintings to protect them from damage
and from scrutiny, although it is hard to envisage how they
would have been handled. The dimensions of large covers would
have made sliding mechanisms tricky to operate; they may have
neatly slotted over the frames.
Titian certainly painted or provided canvas covers for his
portraits, as we know from documents of 1534 and 1536.25 It has
often been suggested that the Allegory of Prudence (National
Gallery, London) and the Cupid and a wheel of Fortune (National
Gallery of Art, Washington) could have functioned as timpani.26
The portrait of Filippo Archinto behind an illusionistic curtain
(Philadelphia Museum of Art) alludes to ways of covering paint-
ings and may itself have acted as a cover.27
The ‘Portrait of a lady dressed in black with her right hand to
her chest’ in Gabriel Vendramin’s collection, measuring roughly
94 by 85 cm. in its frame, cannot be conclusively identified. It
might have been a version of the lost portrait of Elisabetta Queri-
ni Massola (d.1559), who was famed for her beauty and praised
by Pietro Bembo, Giovanni Della Casa and by Aretino. Titian
painted her around 1543, and she and her husband commissioned
St Laurence in the Gesuiti. A painting of a woman in black
(Musée des Augustins, Toulouse; on deposit from the Musée du
Louvre, Paris)28 may be a version of that portrait and, while it
does not fit the almost-square shape of the Vendramin portrait, a
half-length version would correspond. Gabriel owned portraits
of men and women who were not family members, and if he
acquired a Titian portrait of an aristocratic beauty he might have
ordered a painted cover from a sense of decorum or discretion.29
The collection of Gabriel Vendramin, a well-known connois-
seur and authority on architecture, represented his intellectual and
aesthetic interests. The arrangement of the collection is known
from the detailed 1567–69 inventory. A group of artists, includ-
ing Jacopo Sansovino and Jacopo Tintoretto, were involved in
compiling the inventory. They often worked in pairs and were
always accompanied by family members who provided additional
information.30 Titian seems to have been a close friend of
Gabriel’s, since he was one of the witnesses to a codicil to his will
in 1552; Gabriel owned many of his works of the 1540s, while the
artist provided a major decorative element for the camerino d’an-
(note 5), pp.238–41 and 242.
27 See the entry by T. Scarpa in N. Spinosa et al.: exh. cat. Tiziano e il ritratto di corte
da Raffaello ai Caracci, Naples (Capodimonte) 2006, no.33.
28 See the entry by M. Szanto, in exh. cat. Splendeur de Venise 1500–1600. Peintures et
dessins des collections publiques françaises, Bordeaux (Musée des Beaux-Arts) and Caen
(Musée des Beaux-Arts) 2005, no.100; and Wethey, op. cit. (note 14), p.204, no.L26.
29 On ownership, see P. Simons: ‘Portraiture, Portrayal and Idealization: Ambiguous
Individualism in Representations of Renaissance Women’, in A. Brown, ed.:
Language and Images of Renaissance Italy, Oxford 1995, pp.285–90.
30 Rava 1920 omitted the goldsmith’s name in his discussion, and it is rarely cited.
Anderson 1979 suggested that Tintoretto and Orazio spent six days on their part of
the inventory, but in fact the inventory was made on six different days over a period
of almost two years (1567–69).
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TITIAN’S ‘TRIUMPH OF LOVE’
38. Venus at
her bath,
copy in
reverse after
Marcantonio
Raimondi.
c.1510–27.
Engraving,
16.4 by 13.3
cm.
(Ashmolean
Museum,
Oxford).
ticaglie. In the first section of the inventory, made on 26th August
1567, Vincenzo Mantovano and Tommaso da Lugano listed
the large busts, vases and other objects displayed at a high level,
noting ‘le qual tutte cose erano nel soazon de sopra con tempani
atorno depinti de man de misier Titian come hanno ditto’.31 That is, the
camerino had a frieze above the cornice with inset canvases; their
attribution to Titian was reported by the family members. The
term ‘timpano’ might have been employed because the frieze
could have presented allegorical or mythological scenes that
recalled the type of imagery used for painted covers. Only a sum-
mary description was needed, as the frieze was not easily portable.
Gabriel’s paintings collection was remarkable and its dispo-
sition was carefully planned: he noted in his will that he owned
many pictures by excellent artists, which were in his ‘camerino and
outside the said camerino’. From Constantini’s inventory of 26th
January 1602 we know that The Vendramin family hung in the
ground-floor entrance-hall at S. Fosca, and that some large paint-
ings were displayed in the portego on the piano nobile.32 While
there were small paintings in Gabriele’s camerino (including one
attributed to Titian), they were kept on shelves or inside cabinets
and chests, together with prints, drawings, small sculptures and
other treasures.
Tintoretto and Orazio Vecellio participated only in the last
section of the inventory: it was decided at a late stage, in August
31 Rava 1920, p.161.
32 Lauber, op. cit. (note 3), p.373. This corrects previous accounts of the collection.
33 Rava 1920, p.181, published a document of 25th August 1568 that established their
involvement. Unlike the other sections of the inventory where the names of notaries,
artists and family members appear on each specified date, the last section does not
include this record; see also Lauber, op. cit. (note 5), pp.60–61.
34 Rava 1920, p.178.
35 Ibid. and Anderson 1979, p.648, usually identified with a tondo (cypress),
diameter 137 cm., ex-Kaufmann collection, Berlin; Wethey, op. cit. (note 14), p.179,
no.X–92, as a copy. M. Marini: ‘Letters: The Vendramin Collection’, THE BURLING-
TON MAGAZINE 122 (1980), p.255, proposed the tondo in a private collection in
Rome as an autograph work. Pietro della Vecchia painted a rectangular version, now
in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, probably when it was owned by his
540 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
39. Putto, Padua or Ravenna.
c.1510–30. Bronze, 9.8 cm. high.
(Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).
1568, to involve them because of the specific need to record
paintings.33 Their contribution carries the date of 14th March
1569 and lists paintings, drawings, prints and some sculpture in
rooms other than the camerino d’anticaglie. Beyond the portego four
rooms were surveyed. The camera da notar, Gabriel’s study and
business room, held what is often regarded as the cream of his
paintings collection, with works by Giorgione, Raphael, Palma,
Vivarini, Bonifazio, Cariani and Dürer, including some portraits
of artists such as a self-portrait of Raphael on paper. Most of these
pictures were small in scale. Other rooms contained Flemish
pictures and in a further camera was a group of paintings com-
missioned or purchased from Titian, displayed with a large
Madonna in the Byzantine style.34 Here there was a sizeable Self-
portrait in the form of a roundel, showing the artist wearing the
gold chain presented to him by the Emperor Charles V.35 Titian
was depicted in the act of drawing, with an antique Venus
pudica, referring to Gabriel’s interests as a collector. There was a
second roundel, an Ecce Homo,36 together with two framed
female portraits. As previously discussed, the Triumph of Love was
a cover for one of these. The second female portrait, described
on 4th January 1602 as ‘un quadro de retratto de dona vestita de
damasco turchin con cento depento d’oro con le sue soaze dorade alto
quarte 7 et largo quarte 6 1/2 in circa’, has not been identified,
although its description and dimensions evoke the Young woman
father-in-law, Nicolò Renieri; see D. de Grazia, E. Garberson et al.: Italian Paintings
of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Washington 1996, pp.328–33. J. Fletcher:
‘“Fatto al Specchio”. Venetian Renaissance Attitudes in Self-Portraiture’, in Imaging
the Self in Renaissance Italy. Fenway Court 1990–91, Boston 1992, pp.45–60, suggested
that Parmigianino’s self-portrait tondo, well known in Venice, might have been
influential. See also idem: ‘“La semblanza vera”. I ritratti di Tiziano’, in Spinosa et al.,
op. cit. (note 27), p.46; and D. Jaffé under no.26 in the same volume (the Berlin
Self-portrait) for the argument that the Giovanni Britto woodcut self-portrait derives
from Vendramin’s tondo.
36 Rava 1920, p.178. For the Ecce Homo, see H. Wethey: The Paintings of Titian, I,
Religious Paintings, London 1969, pp.84–85, under no.28, as a lost painting; the
roundel in the Musée du Louvre (diameter 109 cm.) in his view may be a copy. For
the latter as workshop of Titian, see J. Habert: ‘Calcar au Louvre’, in Hommage au
MA.AUG.Whistler.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 16/7/09 17:04 Page 541
40. Fig.34, before cleaning.
(Capodimonte, Naples).37 Titian did not normally paint tondi,
and the two might have been intended to face each other across
the room.38 Gabriel was clearly keen to acquire pictures by
Titian, and in the 1540s it was easier to have assistants work
up the Self-portrait and the Ecce Homo to the master’s designs
and to provide studio versions of attractive female portraits. Par-
adoxically, it seems that Titian’s least demanding Vendramin
commission, a portrait cover, was a fully autograph work.
Although we have many references to the prestige of the
Vendramin collection, little is known of how visitors were
received there. Marcantonio Michiel visited it in 1530.39 In the
camerino Gabriel seems to have kept pictures of appropriate
subjects with his antiquities. He owned double-sided images and
diptychs (such as the pair of portraits by Jacometto with decorat-
ed reverses)40 and pictures with covers attached (for instance ‘un
altro quadretto con il retrato de Zuan Belin et de Vetor suo dixipulo nel
coperchio’).41 Outside the camerino was a Crossing of the Red Sea,
probably a Flemish painting, with a timpano attached.42 Gior-
gione’s La vecchia had a timpano that depicted a young man,
dressed in black fur or leather, listed in 1602; six other detached
timpani with chiaroscuro decoration, perhaps fictive sculpture,
were also described then as part of the original collection.43
Michel Laclotte, Milan 1994, pp.368–69.
37 Anderson 1979, p.647, no.67.
38 Penny, op. cit. (note 5), p.226, suggested that the two tondi were overdoors;
however, Constantini specified overdoors in his inventory of 26th January 1601.
39 Lauber, op. cit. (note 5), pp.46–55, with previous references.
40 Rava 1920, p.170, as Bellini, now in the Robert Lehman Collection, Metropol-
itan Museum of Art, New York.
41 Ibid., p.169. Jennifer Fletcher suggested that these might be two chiaroscuro draw-
ings by Vittore Belliniano now in Chantilly; see W.R. Rearick: ‘The drawings of
Vittore Belliniano’, in A. Forlani Tempesti and S. Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, eds.: Per
Luigi Grassi: Disegno e disegni, Rimini 1998, pp.51–52.
42 Rava 1920, p.179: ‘Un quadro de una sumercion de Faraon con un adornamento negro
dorado col suo timpano soazado et dorado’. D. Landau and P. Parshall: The Renaissance
TITIAN’S ‘TRIUMPH OF LOVE’
41. Reconstruction of the original format of Fig.34.
One wonders how closely Tintoretto and Orazio Vecellio
examined the collection on their visit in 1569. The descriptions
of the two female portraits by Titian are very summary, and the
procedure may have been rather cursory: for instance, in describ-
ing The Vendramin family, Gabriel as a sitter is mentioned twice
(an error edited out by Rava in his publication).44 The painted
covers were probably not regarded as important objects by the
family members who were more concerned with recent or
potential sales of the antiquities, drawings and medals. Tintoret-
to and Orazio may not have seen the timpani: they did not list
furniture, textiles or the contents of chests in the five rooms that
concerned them, but simply identified the visible works of art.
Possibly the Triumph of Love was framed and displayed sep-
arately later in the century by Gabriel’s heirs. In the inventory of
4th January 1602, the ‘dio d’amor’ had a gilded wooden frame and
was listed as an autonomous item, separated from the female
portrait by another inventory entry.45 While the contents of the
camerino might have remained undisturbed from 1567 to 1602,
the paintings hanging in the adjoining rooms could have been
rearranged, and this portrait cover by Titian might have been
hung as an independent painting which ensured its survival,
unlike most painted covers.
Print, New Haven and London 1994, p.290, identified this as Titian’s Crossing of the
Red Sea woodcut, but it is more likely to have been a Flemish painting, since large or
important works on paper are usually identified (e.g. Raphael’s self-portrait in the
camera per notar is described as ‘in carta’; Rava 1920, p.178).
43 Constantini’s inventory of 26th January 1602 is unambiguous: ‘. . . un quadro in
retratto della mare [sic: madre] de Zorzon de man de Zorzon con suo fornimento depento con
l’arma Vendramina con il suo timpano cioè coperto depento con un ritratto d’un homo’; Lauber,
op. cit. (note 3), pp.372 and 374 for the other timpani: ‘tre coperchi delli soprascritti quadri
depenti de chiaro scuro con diverse figure’; ‘tre altri simili in tutto come di sopra’; and ‘16
coverchi de detti quadri non depenti’.
44 Lauber, op. cit. (note 5), p.30; and Penny, op. cit. (note 5), p.214.
45 While I am inclined to think that the ‘soazete de legno dorade’ was a frame, this may
have been a narrow moulding that a timpano would have required.
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TITIAN’S ‘TRIUMPH OF LOVE’
Appendix
The conservation of the ‘Triumph of Love’
by JILL DUNKERTON
The Triumph of Love was obscured by an opaque, decayed and
very discoloured varnish (Fig.40). There was also extensive
repainting, some of it partly removed in previous cleanings,
resulting in a patchy appearance that suggested a badly abraded
work. Infra-red reflectography,46 however, indicated that the
painting might not be as damaged as it appeared. Although it was
partly concealed by the overpainting, a remarkable underdraw-
ing was revealed (Fig.35 was made following removal of the
overpaint). In addition, it became apparent that at the edges the
repainting was covering the opening of an oculus through which
the lion was about to leap.
The canvas, of a robust twill weave, is now glued to a thin
circular panel constructed from boards of pine, but it can be
demonstrated that originally it was rectangular in format. At the
left and right sides of the tondo old tack holes and frayed canvas
edges indicate that the canvas was once stretched by nailing
through the front of the fabric into a stretcher, as was common
practice in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.47 There are no
tack holes at the bottom of the circle and the canvas may have
been trimmed slightly, but the pronounced cusped distortion of
the canvas weave indicates that little has been lost, probably no
more than the ragged tacking edge. Around the rest of the
roundel, including the top, surplus canvas has been turned over
the edge of the panel and tacked to its sides. Originally the
timpano must have been stretched over a rectangular wooden
stretcher, the lines of tacks perhaps covered by narrow strips of
frame moulding. Moreover, following the cleaning it becomes
apparent that the cutting down of the canvas to the present
circle has disrupted Titian’s original intention. The portrait and
its cover must have hung sufficiently high for the lion to appear
to be crouching on the front edge of a circular opening in the
fictive wall. The viewer looked up at the underside of the
oculus, the fall of light on the right edge consistent with the
lighting of the painting. Completion of the front edge of the
circle in the upper part of the painting produces a rectangle of
similar proportions and dimensions to those of the portrait as
given in the 1602 inventory (Fig.41).
The painting was already recorded as circular by 1784 and was
most probably cut down and mounted on its panel at some point
in the seventeenth century, perhaps while still in the Orsetti
collection. By then Titian’s canvas is likely to have become frag-
ile, the tacks no longer securing the edges as they corroded the
fabric. It was fairly common in the seventeenth century to glue
small canvases to panels.48 Titian’s canvas is very well adhered,
conforming to every distortion in the panel, including the
pronounced wood grain. To achieve this, the canvas must have
been soaked in glue, causing the gesso ground to swell and push
46 The digital infra-red reflectograms before and after cleaning were taken by Rachel
Billinge of the National Gallery Conservation Department using an OSIRIS digital
infra-red scanning camera with an indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) array sensor.
47 J. Dunkerton, N. Penny and S. Foister: Dürer to Veronese. Sixteenth-century painting
in the National Gallery, New Haven and London 1999, pp.266–68.
542 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
small flakes of paint from the tops of the canvas weave. Thinly
painted areas such as the clouds and the edges of the oculus are
worst affected. Areas with more substantial amounts of paint are
better preserved, and especially the Cupid; since the canvas has
escaped the repeated relining that might be expected in a paint-
ing of this age, the brushwork on this figure has retained almost
all of its original texture and detail. In addition, the gesso ground
has not been stained by lining adhesive and so continues to reflect
light through the paint layers.
When the painting was cut down and mounted on panel the
edges of the oculus were eliminated by repainting. While some
of this repaint is likely to have been removed in later restorations,
it survives at the left edge – its age makes its safe removal impos-
sible. The inclusion of natural ultramarine in this overpaint,49
now degraded and darkened, is a further indication that this
restoration took place in the seventeenth century. The next
restoration was almost certainly carried out by Sasso in 1784. The
edges were again repainted, this time using Prussian blue in the
sky, and new clouds added over the damaged original ones. The
streaks of orange paint towards the horizon and various smaller
retouchings can also be attributed to this intervention. Much of
this repainting seems to have been left in place when the canvas
was again restored in the nineteenth century, most probably by
one of the two restorers favoured by William Graham, Henry
Merritt and Raffaelle Pinti. At the dispersal of his collection,
Graham’s pictures were criticised for their repainted and glossy,
over-varnished state.50 Certainly yet more repainting was added
to the edges and sky of the Triumph of Love, and the varnish was
notably thick.
Following the removal of most of these earlier restorations,
retouching has been limited to the many small points of damage
from the tops of the canvas threads and to re-establishing some
sense of the original perspective of the remains of the oculus.
The visible evidence of Titian’s free and creative design process
has not necessarily been suppressed. The flicks and strokes of
lead white paint used as structural abbreviations or for adjust-
ment of contours in the course of painting remain visible,
adding vivacity to the image. Similarly, some of the multiple
revisions to the underdrawing, for example the three positions
of the arrow, can still be detected on close inspection. So too
can the outlines of Cupid’s wing and his bubbling curls in their
initial position, drawn with a liquid black paint over finer and
more broken lines, possibly sketched with a dry material such as
charcoal. In character and extent this underdrawing is directly
comparable with that (also often visible to the naked eye) on The
Vendramin family, the painting with which the Triumph of Love
can now be closely associated.
48 An example is the National Gallery’s Rape of Europa by Veronese, mounted on an
oak panel from a tree felled probably in the 1620s; see Penny, op. cit. (note 5), p.430.
49 The analysis of the three layers of overpainting was carried out by Rachel
Morrison of the National Gallery Scientific Department.
50 Garnett, op. cit. (note 16), p.184.
MA.AUG.Whistler.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 16/7/09 17:04 Page 543
A new contribution to the biography of Leonardo
da Vinci
by P.G. GWYNNE
THERE ARE SEVERAL LACUNAE in the biography of Leonardo da
Vinci.1 Among them there is little documentary evidence to
record his exact whereabouts from late 1500 to mid-1502. This
note proposes that during this period of turmoil and change,
following the French invasion of northern Italy, Leonardo can be
found working for Cesare Borgia earlier than is usually assumed.
On 6th October 1499 Louis XII of France entered Milan at the
head of a conquering French army with Cesare Borgia in his train.
On the following day the king and Cesare visited the monastery
of S. Maria delle Grazie to see Leonardo’s Last Supper and pre-
sumably to meet the master himself, who may have been involved
in the preparations for the king’s triumphal entry into the city.2 It
was perhaps then that Leonardo met his future employer Cesare
Borgia for the first time. Leonardo left Milan in December 1499
bound for Venice. He is next documented on 24th April 1500 in
Florence where it is generally assumed that he stayed for about a
year concentrating on a single composition showing life-size
figures of the Virgin and Child with St Anne.3 Whatever the case
may be, certainly by the summer of 1502 Leonardo had entered
the service of Cesare Borgia as an architect and military engineer.
Yet apart from two references in letters from Pietro da Novellara
in Florence to Isabella d’Este, we have no documentation for his
activities between late 1500 and summer 1502.4 However, an
aside in a panegyric poem by Francesco Sperulo celebrating
Cesare Borgia’s campaign in the Romagna may provide a clue as
to Leonardo’s activities during these missing months.5
In late autumn 1500 Cesare Borgia began his second campaign
against the dissident lords in the Papal States. Nominally to restore
papal authority in central Italy, in reality the campaign was
intended to establish a power base for Cesare in the Romagna.
Although initially both Rimini and Pesaro surrendered in quick
succession, by November Cesare’s forces had received a serious
setback before the walls of Faenza and the army then settled down
for a long and difficult winter siege in the cold and mud.6 Sperulo
provides a vivid first-hand account of the soldiers’ discomforts and
the frustration of their commander. Leaving a skeleton force
under Vitellozzo Vitelli to blockade the town, Cesare spent
Christmas and the winter months at Cesena, which he intended
to make the capital of his new state. In relating these events, the
poet describes the harbour of Cesena at Porto Cesenatico and in
the course of this description the following lines (ll.314–20) occur:
1 L. Andalò: ‘Prospetto cronologico delle pricipali vicende di Leonardo da Vinci,
Niccolò Macchiavelli e Cesare Borgia’, in M. Ara, A. Gramiccia and F. Piantoni,
eds.: exh. cat. Leonardo, Machiavelli, Cesare Borgia. Arte, storia e scienza in Romagna
(1500–1503), Rimini (Castel Sismondo) 2003, pp.177–85; also L. Reti: ‘Leonardo da
Vinci and Cesare Borgia’, Viator 4 (1973), pp.333–68.
2 Robert Scheller seriously doubts Leonardo’s involvement in the preparations for
the king’s entry into the city; see R.W. Scheller: ‘Gallia cisalpina: Louis XII and Italy
1499–1508’, Simiolus 15 (1985), p.8, note 16.
3 J. Roberts: ‘The Life of Leonardo’, in M. Kemp and J. Roberts, eds.: exh. cat.
Leonardo da Vinci, London (Hayward Gallery) 1989, p.28.
4 D. Ferrari: ‘“La vita di Leonardo è varia et indeterminata forte”. Leonardo
da Vinci e i Gonzaga nei documenti dell’Archivio di Stato di Mantova’, in Ara
At vigil assiduum dux volvens pectore martem,
dum vulgus mentem in iucunda remittere credit
ocia, praeteritos et compensare labore;
tum secreta parat certamina, castra in apertum
postquam difficilis prohibet deducere bruma.
Semotaque faber scalas componit in arce,
quas iuga vix centum curru traxere gemente.
(‘But the Duke spent many sleepless nights reflecting upon the
war; while the rabble believes that he is relaxing and making up
for the previous hardships with pleasant ease, he is, in fact,
preparing secret assaults, since the difficult winter restrains him
from leading the army out. In a remote tower an engineer is
making scaling ladders which a hundred team of oxen can scarce-
ly drag along on a creaking chariot’.) Can the unnamed ‘faber’
(engineer) working in isolation on mammoth siege engines, vir-
tually impossible to move, be identified as Leonardo? Numerous
drawings attest to his interest in war machines. Studies, such as
those of traction, with oxen straining to pull great weights
(Codex Atlanticus, fol.561r) and designs for gigantic military
equipment (for example Windsor, Royal Library, 12647) reveal
a similar interest in the sort of technology ascribed by the poet to
the anonymous engineer.
In the letter recommending his services to Ludovico Sforza,
Leonardo had emphasised his skill as a military engineer,
mentioning in particular his ability to create siege machinery
including scaling ladders: ‘I know how, in the course of the siege
of a terrain, to remove water from the moats and how to make
an infinite number of bridges, mantlets and scaling ladders and
other instruments necessary to such an enterprise’.7
These skills, presumably, also attracted him to Cesare Borgia.
Although the evidence is circumstantial, if the suggestion is
correct, then, having met and been impressed by Cesare in
Milan, Leonardo took the opportunity of Cesare’s winter
campaign to prove his worth with the new lord of the Romagna
and in late 1501 was working for Cesare at Porto Cesenatico
providing ideas for war machines to break the siege of Faenza, as
well as supervising the fortifications of the town and harbour.8 If
this is so, the poet Francesco Sperulo provides a first-hand (albeit
brief) account of Leonardo’s working practice and offers a
contemporary opinion of his contribution to the war effort.
et al., op. cit. (note 1), pp.73–79.
5 Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat.5205; see P.G. Gwynne:
‘Another Laureate of Cesare Borgia: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat.5205,
text, translation and commentary’ (forthcoming).
6 Due to the extreme conditions of a harsh winter and the fact that the Faenzans had
razed the countryside before retreating behind the city walls, Cesare suspended the
campaign and marched back to Forlì. Reinforced by French supplies and troops, he
began a second assault on Faenza in the following spring.
7 M. Kemp, ed.: Leonardo On Painting, New Haven and London 1989, p.251.
8 E.F. Londei: ‘I progetti leonardiani di macchine scavatrici per il canale di Cesena
per Cesare Borgia’, in Ara et al., op. cit. (note 1), pp.55–71.
the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e • clI • august 2009 543
MA.AUG.AHRIII.pg.proof:Layout 1 15/7/09 15:15 Page 544
Art History Reviewed III:
Roger Fry’s ‘Cézanne, a study of his development’, 1927
by RICHARD VERDI
‘THE TIME MAY COME when we shall require a complete study of
Cézanne’s work, a measured judgment of his achievement and
position’, wrote Roger Fry in this Magazine in 1917, reviewing
Ambroise Vollard’s recently published biography of the artist,
adding that ‘it would probably be rash to attempt it as yet’.1 Less
than ten years later, Fry himself had done just that and produced
a landmark book which is arguably still the most sensitive and
penetrating of all explorations of Cézanne’s pictures. Written at a
time when Cézanne was still not widely accepted in Britain as a
modern master, and when the only published studies of him had
been largely biographical and anecdotal, Fry’s study breaks new
ground, peering over the artist’s shoulder to recreate his works, as
though witnessing their very inception. ‘If one would understand
an artist, one must sooner or later come to grips with the actual
material of his paintings’, asserted the critic, ‘since it is there, and
nowhere else, that he leaves the precise imprint of his spirit’.2 In
so far as any writer could fathom the richness and complexity of
Cézanne’s achievement, Fry succeeded; and his book on the artist
remains the supreme introduction to a painter he justly regarded
as the ‘greatest master of modern times’.3
Given its subsequent renown, Fry’s Cézanne could hardly have
had a more inauspicious beginning. Originally written in French,
it was first published in 1926 in L’Amour de l’Art and intended as
an introduction to the works by Cézanne in the Pellerin
Collection in Paris, the most comprehensive of all holdings of the
artist’s works. Although it reads effortlessly and contains some of
the most memorable passages on the painter ever written, it cost
the author much labour. Virginia Woolf records Fry’s exasper-
ation with its progress in her biography of him: ‘O Lord, how
bored I am with it [. . .] it seems to me poor formless stuff and I
should like to begin it all over again’.4 Further hampered by the
difficulty of obtaining photographs of some of the works in
Pellerin’s collection, Fry earned nothing from the French edition
but a few presentation copies and in 1927 translated and recast it
for publication in English by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hog-
arth Press. It was illustrated by fifty-four plates which are discussed
largely in numerical order but not laid out accordingly, the
reader having constantly to shuffle through them to follow the
argument. But this is a small price to pay for the quality of the
insights and the range of works encompassed, which amount to a
comprehensive survey of the artist’s paintings and works on paper.
Little in Fry’s early background had anticipated his later
championing of Cézanne, though it undoubtedly enriched and
extended his perspective on the artist. Educated at Clifton
College, Bristol, and King’s College, Cambridge, where he read
We are grateful to the Azam Foundation for sponsoring this article.
1 “‘Paul Cézanne”, by Ambroise Vollard: Paris, 1915, A Review by Roger Fry’, THE
BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 31 (1917), p.53.
2 R. Fry: Cézanne, a study of his development, 2nd ed., London 1927, p.51 (cited
hereafter as RFC).
544 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
natural sciences, he subsequently trained as a painter – which he
was always to regard as his principal profession – spending two
months at the Académie Julian, Paris, in 1892, where (he later
confessed) he ‘never once heard the name of the recluse of Aix’.5
A year earlier, he had visited Italy, where his lifelong passion for
early Italian painting took root, eventually leading to his first
major publication, a monograph on Bellini of 1899. With his
appointment in 1906 as Curator of Paintings at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York, Fry was inevitably encouraged to
embrace a much wider field, purchasing works by Jan Steen,
Goya and Renoir in addition to Crivelli and Giovanni di Paolo.
From this year, too, dates the first evidence of his burgeoning
interest in Cézanne, which followed his encounter with two of
the artist’s works at the International Society’s exhibition at the
Grafton Galleries, London. ‘We confess’, admitted Fry, ‘to hav-
ing been hitherto sceptical about Cézanne’s genius but these two
pieces reveal a power which is entirely distinct and personal, and
though the artist’s appeal is limited, and touches none of the finer
issues of the imaginative life, it is none the less complete’.6
Two years later, writing in response to a denigrating article on
modern French art in this Magazine – which Fry himself had been
instrumental in founding in 1903 – he wrote a long and reasoned
rejoinder (March 1908, pp.374–75). Praising the decorative qual-
ities of the art of Cézanne and Gauguin especially, he dubbed both
men ‘proto-Byzantines’ for their synthetic approach to design,
which Fry deemed superior to the mere naturalism of Monet.7
Although still conceding that neither painted ‘great masterpieces’
or was a ‘great genius’, Fry had taken a major step forward in his
conversion to recent French art and soon became the first British
critic to champion Cézanne, publishing a translation in 1910, also
in the Burlington, of one of the key early assessments of his art by
the latter-day disciple of the master, Maurice Denis.8
Denis’s essay is the first to examine Cézanne’s art in relation to
that of his own time and of the past. Recognising that, like many
of his contemporaries, Cézanne was dedicated to the study of
nature, he is seen as exceptional among his generation in his
efforts towards style; and, for Denis, style means the classicism of
the old masters. ‘Spontaneously classic’ is his description of the
artist, whom he calls ‘the Poussin of Impressionism’, to which
Fry, in his introduction to the article, widens the range of
connections to encompass such seemingly unrelated masters as
Rembrandt and even El Greco.
Fry’s advocacy of modern French painting reached a much
wider public in the same year as his translation of Denis’s essay
with the exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, which he
3 RFC, p.28.
4 V. Woolf: Roger Fry, A Biography, Oxford 1995 (1st ed. 1940), pp.235–36.
5 RFC, p.38.
6 D. MacCarthy: ‘Roger Fry and the Post-Impression Exhibition of 1910’, in
Memories, London 1953, p.181.
MA.AUG.AHRIII.pg.proof:Layout 1 15/7/09 15:15 Page 545
staged at the Grafton Galleries in London and which made him
(in his own words) ‘the centre of a wild hurricane of newspaper
abuse’.9 Included in it were twenty-one paintings by Cézanne in
addition to works by Van Gogh, Gauguin and their followers.
Assaulted by the critics, who were deeply affronted by this attack
upon civilised Edwardian taste, Fry staunchly defended his posi-
tion, comparing the monumentality of Cézanne’s portraits with
those of Piero della Francesca or Mantegna and, of his still lifes,
with those of Chardin.
In 1912 Fry mounted a successor to this exhibition, which
included more works by living French artists – among them
Picasso, Matisse and Braque – in addition to their British and
Russian contemporaries. There were also five paintings and six
watercolours by Cézanne (the latter augmented in a late rehang
of the show), who by this time had ceased to shock the critics,
leaving Fry himself to establish the master’s unassailable position
as the key figure in modern French painting.
In October 1919 Fry visited Aix, where the magnificent
countryside, dominated by the Mont Ste-Victoire, not only
inspired him to paint it but soon led him to declare Cézanne
‘a pure naturalist’, so wondrous did the hues of the surrounding
landscape seem. Of Cézanne himself, nothing appeared to be
known save that he ‘came and went and left no trace on the
little bourgeois life of the place’.10 But on a visit to the Jas de Bouf-
fan, he did discover two early works by the master, though the
gardener himself had never heard of Cézanne, who was appar-
ently only remembered by a few local artists and connoisseurs.
One year later, Fry’s collection of essays Vision and Design was
published, including his review of Vollard’s biography of
Cézanne and a ‘Retrospect’, in which he avows his veneration
for the artist as a painter who wedded ‘the modern vision with
the constructive design of the older masters’,11 an idea he was to
develop much further in his forthcoming book.
By early 1925 Fry was visiting the Pellerin Collection and
embarked on his essay on Cézanne. As the title indicates, it was
intended as an account of the artist’s stylistic development – the
first ever to appear. He begins by observing that, by the 1920s,
Cézanne’s style had become an academic convention, parodied
in the art of a Vlaminck or a Friesz, who had adopted it purely
decoratively and with an assurance unknown to the master; for
as Fry was later to assert, Cézanne’s art was the antithesis of the
abstraction of Cubism, constantly questing instead to explore the
inner face of nature.12 In this respect, Cézanne is for Fry ‘nearer
[. . .] to Poussin than to the Salon d’Automne’. One of the
central tenets of the book, this is both visually and historically
justifiable and accounts for Cézanne’s seemingly contradictory
position as an artist caught between the study of nature and the
act of contemplation.
Fry continues with a discussion of Cézanne’s early life and art,
which acknowledges his initial attraction to the most diverse
influences – from the meticulous technique of Kalf and Ingres to
the brusque manner of Courbet, and from the Arcadian visions
of Giorgione to their modern reincarnations in the art of Manet.
But his prevailing view is that the young Cézanne was a visionary
who was ultimately inspired by the art of Delacroix and by his
models, above all Veronese and Rubens, rather than by the art of
7 D. Sutton, ed.: Letters of Roger Fry, London 1972, I, pp.298–301, no.242.
8 M. Denis: ‘Cézanne’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 16 (1910), pp.207–19; and
ibid., pp.275–80.
9 Sutton, op. cit. (note 7), I, p.338, no.296.
10 Ibid., pp.473–74, no.469.
ROGER FRY
his own day. His ensuing account of the figure paintings of
Cézanne’s early years is the first to tackle these; Fry acknowl-
edges their awkwardness and intractability, conceding that the
artist had not been gifted with the powers of invention or
visualisation of Rubens or the great Venetian decorators. Focus-
ing on the Banquet, with its maladroit figures and compositional
incongruities, he concludes that this is an inept exercise in the
manner of Tintoretto or Veronese which is, however, entirely
redeemed by the artist’s mastery of colour – and colour not as it
clothes an already preconceived form but as it actually creates it.
As Fry rightly asserts, Cézanne’s colour sense is ‘the one gift
which never failed him’ and ‘remains supremely great under all
conditions’.13 This is among the critic’s chief contributions to
our understanding of the artist and beggars words, but never
praise. Whether extolling the ‘unspeakable richness’ of
Cézanne’s colour, or recognising how its subtle variations corre-
spond to changes in plane, Fry acknowledges the artist’s powers
as a colourist as among the supreme aspects of his genius – a judg-
ment with which few would disagree.
Aside from the quality of the artist’s colour, however, Fry is
aware of the compositional and imaginative shortcomings of
these early works, which aspire to the Baroque tradition of
grandiose figure paintings but are utterly deficient in the preten-
sions and artificialities of that style and reveal instead ‘the
simplicity and directness of the peasant and the artisan’ in their
lack of flamboyance or inventiveness. Although Cézanne was
soon to abandon such imaginative flights of fancy in favour of an
art founded upon the study of nature, Fry’s advocacy of these
powerful works is pioneering and revelatory.
Fry’s discussion of the portraits of this period is no less full of
insights and already reveals the complex – and even contradict-
ory – nature of Cézanne’s creative personality. Here, faced with
a live model and absorbed in his sensations, the artist turned not
to the extravagance of the Baroque but to the simplicity of
Byzantine art. Symmetry, frontality and a wilful austerity charac-
terise these works, which are always enlivened by Cézanne’s
infallible sense of colour but otherwise emotionally intransigent.
In his analysis of these, Fry concedes that the artist remains more
plastic than psychological and points to one of the greatest
strengths of his portraiture: namely, that it is concerned
constantly not to explore and lay bare any peculiar quirks of
character or personality but to distance itself from the individual
and focus instead upon the human condition.
Considering a third group of Cézanne’s early pictures – his
bacchanalian subjects featuring figures in a landscape – Fry
broaches the other great source of his youthful inspiration, which
was grounded neither in fantasy nor direct experience but in a
preoccupation with what he calls the ‘Museum picture’. Here
the artist’s principal models are deemed to be Titian and his
fellow Venetians, as well as Rubens, and their most recent
followers, above all Manet. But Fry also astutely acknowledges
the importance of Dutch art for the painter’s early genre pictures,
such as Alexis reading to Zola, with its indebtedness to de Hooch.
These multiple allegiances and affinities lead him to another of
the central themes of his book, that Cézanne’s art encompasses
the most diverse styles in earlier painting and that it brings much
11 R. Fry: Vision and Design, London 1920, p.191.
12 R. Fry: ‘An Exhibition of French Painting’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 65
(1934), p.35.
13 RFC, p.13.
the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e • clI • august 2009 545
MA.AUG.AHRIII.pg.proof:Layout 1 15/7/09 15:15 Page 546
ROGER FRY
of Western art with it – from the Primitives to Poussin,
Tintoretto to Rubens and Delacroix to Daumier. Who else but
the artistically omnivorous Fry could, after all, link Cimabue, El
Greco and Cézanne, as he does at one point in his career?14
Through all of this, however, the critic asserts the authenticity
and humility of the artist’s vision together with ‘the desperate
sincerity of his work’. In so doing, he underlines the very focus
of Cézanne’s creative dilemma, caught between being utterly
himself and subsuming so much of the past.
Around 1870, the artist had begun to abandon the extravagant
inventions of his early figure paintings and (in Fry’s words) ‘take
advantage of his real gift, the extraordinary sensibility of his
reaction to actual vision’.15 In contact with Camille Pissarro and
his fellow Impressionists, Cézanne gradually came to submit
himself to the vagaries of pure sensation but, unlike them, he was
already armed with a rigour and discipline gained from his early
‘apprenticeship’ to the old masters. ‘The revelation of Impression-
ism was decisive and complete’, observes Fry, ‘but it was not suf-
ficient’. Architecture and logic were also essential, for, as he rightly
admits, ‘the intellect is bound to seek for articulations’. Armed
with an allegiance to these seemingly opposing goals, ‘from this
moment’ – Fry exclaims, with remarkable candour and empathy
– ‘begins the thrilling drama of this determined explorer’.
At the heart of Fry’s book is his own masterly exploration of
Cézanne’s journey through this uncharted terrain. This begins
with an analysis of those works in which nature and structure are
held in equal measure – the still lifes. ‘Dramas deprived of all
dramatic incident’, which are at times ‘tragic, menacing, noble or
lyrical’, these are implicitly recognised as the central achievement
of the artist’s career and the fullest manifestation of his genius.
Fry begins with a lengthy investigation – the most extended in
the entire book – of one of the most concentrated and resolved of
the artist’s still lifes of his early maturity, the Still life with compotier
of c.1880.16 Never questioning how the objects depicted arrived
there, or in that particular arrangement, he reveals one of the major
omissions in his consideration of the artist. After all, Cézanne exer-
cised choice over the composition of his pictures, a crucial stage in
the creative process. But it is not one that Fry addresses. Even now,
a reasoned account of Cézanne’s selection of motifs in relation to
his artistic aims has not been attempted; yet it is undeniable that,
for the master himself, this was the first and most important
decision. What to paint inevitably preceded how to paint.
For Fry, the ‘idea’ of the picture is tacitly accepted and the
‘material quality’ welded to it. In the latter, the critic insists, the
idea comes alive; and it is this, ultimately, that conveys the artist’s
inner feeling. Only through it can the viewer confront the
physical reality of the painting. And here Cézanne equals the
very greatest masters, excelling even Chardin in his accentuation
of all parts of the paint surface, so that none of it appears lifeless
or inert, and comparable instead, in his expressive use of his
materials, to Rembrandt.
Having acknowledged that Cézanne’s seemingly crude han-
dling is justifiable and now ‘so universally accepted’, the critic
then moves on to consider the organisation of the composition
itself. Here, he notes, the artist exhibits ‘a constant tendency
towards the most simple and logical relations’; and in one of his
most memorable passages, he declares: ‘One has the impression
that each of these objects is infallibly in its place, and that its place
14 Sutton, op. cit. (note 7), II, p.408, no.397.
15 RFC, pp.31–40 (for the discussion which follows).
16 Ibid., pp.42–51.
546 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
was ordained for it from the beginning of all things, so majestically
and serenely does it repose there’. Noting how few and formally
related the objects are in Still life with compotier, Fry then observes
Cézanne teasing out even closer harmonies among them through
a sequence of unconscious deformations in which circles become
ovals and ovals acquire rounded ends, entering into a hidden
compact with the rest of the picture. In this web of interrelations
Fry concedes, somewhat embarrassedly, that he cannot explain
the prominent shadow cast by the half-opened drawer at the
bottom centre of so otherwise perfect a design. Without this
stabilising compositional plumb line, however, the entire
arrangement would slip inexorably towards the lower right.
Concluding what Fry deems ‘this tiresome analysis of a single
picture’ – in truth, the fundamental key to Cézanne – he
considers more summarily a number of the master’s other still
lifes before apologising for devoting so much time to them. Yet,
as the critic admits, they embody the formal principles that
govern the painter’s designs which, as Cézanne indicated,
constantly strive after the geometric regularity of the sphere, the
cone and the cylinder.
To quote such phrases is one thing; to demonstrate them is
another. And it is the greatest strength of Fry’s study that it
dissects Cézanne’s pictures, relentlessly encouraging the reader to
scrutinise them, and examine their interrelations of form and
colour, in a way that was later adopted by such formalist critics
as Earle Loran and Meyer Schapiro, but was pioneered by Fry. In
pursuing this approach, he admittedly neglects almost entirely to
investigate the artist’s subjects. Thus, Cézanne’s late preoccu-
pation with skulls – which may well have vanitas connotations –
is explained purely by the fact that the shape of a skull resembles
that of a sphere and accords with the geometric concerns of his
art. (How different from later interpretations of the opposite
extreme which link Cézanne’s fondness for painting apples with
the theme of original sin!) But such a bias ignores the emotional
power and terror of these works and does no justice to the pro-
found humanity of Cézanne’s art, a feature which Fry addresses
especially when discussing the self-portraits.
Ever conscious of the contending currents of Cézanne’s
creative aims, Fry deals fairly and astutely with these throughout,
noting the artist’s inclination towards balanced, often rigidly sym-
metrical compositions marked by a central line or gap and often
dominated by a strictly parallel disposition of objects. But this
desire for an inherent stability is then enlivened by infinite grada-
tions of colour, which render the skeletal structural simplicity of
the picture indescribably rich and pulsating with life. ‘A perfect
synthesis of opposing principles’ is how Fry describes this quest to
wed ‘the data of Impressionism with – what he regarded as an
essential to style – a perfect structural organization’.17
How the artist succeeded in clothing the objects before him
with all the richness and complexity of nature without resort to
mere description is among the wonders of his art. And this forms
the focus of one of the most illuminating passages in Fry’s book.
Writing of the so-called Houses in Provence (R438) of c.1880, he
observes:
We may describe the process by which such a picture is
arrived at in some such way as this: – the actual objects
presented to the artist’s vision are first deprived of all those
17 Ibid., p.57.
18 Ibid., pp.58–59. Here and elsewhere ‘R’ refers to J. Rewald: The Paintings of Paul
MA.AUG.AHRIII.pg.proof:Layout 1 15/7/09 15:15 Page 547
specific characters by which we ordinarily apprehend their
concrete existence – they are reduced to pure elements of
space and volume. In this abstract world these elements are
perfectly co-ordinated and organized by the artist’s sensual
intelligence, they attain logical consistency. These abstrac-
tions are then brought back into the concrete world of real
things, not by giving them back their specific peculiarities,
but by expressing them in an incessantly varying and shifting
texture. They retain their abstract intelligibility, their amenity
to the human mind, and regain that reality of actual things
which is absent from all abstractions.18
As far as anyone could recreate the process by which Cézanne
transformed ordinary things into pure pictorial elements and then
back into the multifarious world of nature, Fry has done so here.
Discussing the artist’s mature works, the critic devotes
relatively little time to the bathers paintings and somewhat
unconvincingly finds a lyrical intensity comparable to Gior-
gione’s pastorals in so austere and intimidating a work as the great
Barnes Foundation Bathers. But he is much more convincing in
his account of a previously neglected aspect of the artist’s
achievement – his mastery of watercolour and its effect on his
oil-painting technique of the later years.19
Rightly observing that the transparency of this medium led
Cézanne to regard the paper itself as an ever-visible support, Fry
notes that the artist treated the paint surface as an unbroken
sequence of coloured touches. These possess a freedom, fluency
and lightness of handling that Cézanne had not attained in his
early paintings but was increasingly to emulate in his later works
in oil. Here the pulsating rhythms which came naturally to his
watercolours are also apparent, resulting in a weft of animated
strokes of colour which accord equal emphasis to all areas of
the canvas – a blank wall being as rich and diverse in hue as a
commanding figure. In this unparalleled technique the entire
picture surface is imbued, Fry asserts, with ‘the vibration and
movement of life’.
Fry demonstrates this superbly in extended accounts of two of
the artist’s late portraits, one of Mme Cézanne (R655) and
the other of Gustave Geffroy.20 In the intricate and ambitious
portrait of Geffroy, the critic marvels at the silent drama created
between the pose of the sitter and the arrangement of the books
on the shelves behind him. Together these conspire to hold all in
a state of dynamic equilibrium that Fry concludes was arrived at
solely by the artist’s sensibility and intuition rather than by any a
priori scheme. In this he confesses that Cézanne differs from the
moderns, who contrive such complex constructions rather than
discover them. This concordance of intellect and sensibility is,
for Fry, ‘something of a miracle’ which occurs only rarely in the
history of art. No one could deny this; but it is characteristic of
Fry’s approach to pay no heed to Cézanne’s crucial historical
position as an artist who straddled both the naturalism of his own
age and the more conceptual art that was to succeed it.
After Fry’s probing investigation of Cézanne’s mature works,
it is something of a disappointment to confront his account of the
artist’s last years. This is relatively cursory and bypasses a number
of important works that were to be seen in the Pellerin Collec-
tion. However, he does examine two versions of the Cardplayers
and the three large late Bathers. In his consideration of the
Cézanne, A Catalogue Raisonné, London 1996.
19 RFC, pp.63–66.
ROGER FRY
former, their gravity and monumentality leads Fry to invoke two
of his favourite comparisons – the Italian Primitives and
Rembrandt. Both are justified, if surprising, seldom recurring in
later discussions of Cézanne’s art. But it is wholly in keeping with
Fry’s widespread familiarity with the whole of Western art that
the early Italians – his own once-chosen field – should be repeat-
edly cited in comparison with the fixity and finality of Cézanne’s
art, and that Rembrandt is the one old master most often cited as
possessing a profundity and richness of interest comparable to his.
Ignoring the fact that Cézanne’s copies after the old masters tell
a very different story – with those after Rubens, the Venetians
and works of sculpture of all periods predominating – Fry cites
Rembrandt no less than seven times in his book as the one artist
who comes immediately to mind when contemplating
Cézanne’s complexity and intensity.
In his treatment of the late Bathers, Fry is less sympathetic and
rightly detects a wilfulness and conscious contrivance, together
with a fear of the live model, that deprives these works of the
spontaneity of his paintings based on nature. His reservations
about these reveal him as a child of his time for they still persisted
in the 1960s, when the acquisition by the National Gallery,
London, of its late Bathers gave rise to a public outcry in the press.
Much more ahead of his time is the theme with which Fry
concludes his study: namely, that of Cézanne’s attitude towards
women. But rather than adopting a proto-feminist approach, he
admits the artist’s inhibitions – even terror – and yet attraction to
such subjects and confines his discussion of a handful of
Cézanne’s depictions of the female nude solely to formal matters.
With this, Fry’s study tails off and, as before, testifies to his
fundamental indifference to the artist’s choice of subject-matter
– one which has been redressed by many more recent critics,
although not always convincingly. Inevitably reflecting its
pioneering status, Fry’s study also fails to embrace in detail
matters of chronology, pictorial sources or the relationship
between paintings and works on paper. When he does broach
these, however, he is invariably astute, suggesting that an early
Cézanne landscape (R184) resembles a Pissarro without realising
that it is actually a copy of one, and comparing the early Lazarus
with Tintoretto or El Greco, unaware that it derived from a
painting by their near-contemporary, Sebastiano del Piombo.
Such fine points all lay in the future when Fry wrote, awaiting
later scholars, cataloguers and compilers. But what did not await
them was the challenge of providing an illuminating intro-
duction to the range, depth and magnitude of Cézanne’s
achievement. That Fry had already done in his now classic study,
which explores and elucidates the master’s art with a clarity and
penetration that have continued to set a standard for all later
studies of the artist – and with a humility worthy of Cézanne
himself, who remains unfathomable to Fry from the start to the
finish of his book and who he was later to proclaim with
reverence and awe as ‘the purest artist that has ever been’.21 ‘To
describe Cézanne’s works’, he confesses at the beginning, ‘I find
myself, like a medieval mystic before the divine reality, reduced
to negative terms. I have first to say what it is not’. And in his
concluding sentence, he admits of his hero, ‘in the last resort we
cannot in the least explain why the smallest product of his hand
arouses the impression of being a revelation of the highest impor-
tance, or what exactly it is that gives it its grave authority’.
20 Ibid., pp.68–71.
21 Fry, op. cit. (note 12), p.30.
the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e • clI • august 2009 547
BR.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09 14:40
Books
National Gallery Catalogues. The
Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings.
Vol.II 1540–1600. By Nicholas Penny.
518 pp. incl. 278 col. + 81 b. & w. ills.
(National Gallery, London, 2008), £75.
ISBN 978–1–85709–913–3.
Reviewed by JENNIFER FLETCHER
by
T H I S B E A U T I F UL L Y I L L U S T R AT E D B O O K
Nicholas Penny presents a rather mixed group
of paintings for, besides the expected works by
Venetian artists, there are entries on paintings
by Flemish artists such as Paolo Fiammingo
and Lambert Sustris, both of whom operated
in the Veneto, while other visitors such as
Elsheimer and Rottenhammer are reserved
for a future German catalogue. Readers may
be somewhat disconcerted to find that the
date span of the catalogue inevitably means
that Titian’s earlier paintings will appear in
a future volume. Jacopo Bassano’s The way
to Calvary makes its debut with a well-
researched entry, while the fragmentary A boy
with a bird, long regarded as a seventeenth-
century imitation of Titian and recently hailed
by some as autograph, is excluded.
Masterpieces are placed in the broad
context of European art history, which works
particularly well for Titian’s Venus and Adonis
and Veronese’s The family of Darius before
Alexander. Penny draws attention to striking
similarities in the paintings of tree trunks and
foliage in Constable’s Leaping horse and Tit-
ian’s Diana and Actaeon. He illustrates Duncan
Grant’s version of the latter, which was made
into a slide and projected onto the curtain at
the Royal Opera House, Convent Garden,
during the campaign to save the Titian from
export in 1971. To gauge the popularity of
paintings at given times he consults the lists
of amateurs who applied for permission to
make copies. Deeply aware of the National
Gallery’s importance for artists past and pres-
ent and of its educational role, Penny does full
justice to the specific aesthetic qualities and
functions of works while being equally com-
mitted to recounting their history and to
explaining the politics and diplomacy that lie
behind so many acquisitions.
The painters’ biographies, which are fuller
than those in Cecil Gould’s earlier catalogue,
are well balanced and nearly always up to
date. I particularly admired the assessment
of the achievements and limitations of Paris
Bordone and Palma il Giovane. Veronese’s
adaptation of the Caliari surname is explained
by Brugnoli’s discovery of documentation
proving that his mother was the illegitimate
daughter of a Veronese nobleman. However,
more is now known about Leandro Bassano’s
dissipated lifestyle and patrons.1
The lives of patrons and collectors are
exceptionally well researched, Penny here
being assisted by the computerised resources
548 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
Page 548
of the Getty Provenance Index and recent
archival research into the inventories con-
ducted at the University of Udine. Salient
points are illustrated by family trees, photo-
graphs and earlier views of collections in situ
and pages from early illustrated catalogues.
While I admire the quality of the research,
perhaps the biographies need not have been so
full, particularly as they are not always sharply
focused on the works owned by the Gallery.
Nevertheless, the catalogue deals with paint-
ings that have belonged to some truly great
collectors such as Gabriel Vendramin and the
Reynst brothers, while the Orléans family sale
was a rich source for the National Gallery’s
Venetian masterpieces. It is also notable how
many artists once owned paintings in the
collection: Van Dyck bought Titian’s The
Vendramin family, and Reynolds had Bassano’s
Good Samaritan, to name but two.2
Technical and conservation evidence and
descriptions of condition are clearly con-
veyed, assisted by photographs of joined-up
X-radiographs, magnified details and diagrams
showing the make-up of canvases. We learn
about the damage sustained during transport
for safe keeping to Bangor during the Second
World War as well as that caused by bombing
in London. Findings published in successive
technical Bulletins are reassessed and updated.
In 1984 Joyce Plesters demonstrated that
Tintoretto’s Jupiter and Semele was painted on
wood from the same tree as the Courtauld
Institute’s Latona changing the Lycian peasants
into frogs and Apollo and Diana killing the children
of Niobe. Alfonso d’Este’s name is now visible
on the coin shown to Christ in Titian’s Tribute
money, which once decorated a cupboard
containing coins in the Duke’s castle in Fer-
rara. The discovery of a differently positioned
corpse under Tintoretto’s St George and the
dragon must have come too late to be fully
written up. There are shrewd comments on
earlier restoration and cleaning practices,
including Eastlake on the Genoese tendency
to enlarge paintings, as was done to Bordone’s
Portrait of a young woman.
Thirty-five illustrations are devoted to
frames, although none is original and few are
Renaissance examples. Admittedly this reveals
much about changing taste in interior decora-
tion. It is amusing to learn that oak mouldings
from the Gallery’s central heating cases were
recycled to provide the frame for Bassano’s
Purification in the temple and to see the witty use
of the money pattern motif on Titian’s Tribute
money. While aware of Penny’s unrivalled
expertise in this area, I feel he goes too far,
even giving highly detailed accounts of their
repair and restoration.
Penny has a ‘good eye’ and a well-exercised
visual memory which results in convincingly
argued dating and attributions. Gould was
heavily dependent on Stella Newton’s dating
of works on the evidence of dress and
hairstyles, but Penny sensibly rejects some of
her more sweeping statements arguing, for
example, that there was no reason why Paris
Bordone should equip his mythological or
allegorical lovers with the latest hairdos. The
Labours of the Months, formerly given to the
school of Bonifazio di Pitati, are now demot-
ed and dated c.1580, given their resemblance
to works by Toeput.3 The author is good at
spotting sculptural sources, such as the bronze
statuette of Cupid by Barthélemy Prieur
which Mazza used for his Ganymede. He
makes a telling comparison between details
from the fountain in the Family of Darius before
Alexander and the well-head in the Doge’s
Palace courtyard cast by Niccolò dei Conti.
Like other scholars before him he dwells on
Titian’s most direct quotation from the
Antique, from the Bed of Polyclitus in his Venus
and Adonis, noting that two of Titian’s
patrons, Bembo and Granvelle, owned ver-
sions of the celebrated relief.
Penny suggests that Titian’s Gloria was
inspired by ‘an epitaph type of painting or
relief sculpture common in Germany’, but he
does not refer to Dürer’s Landauer altarpiece,
which it most clearly resembles, nor does he
mention that the Virgin looks like a Savoldo
Magdalene of the type represented in the
Gallery. On graphic sources he is impressive,
describing Sustris’s dependence in The Queen
of Sheba before King Solomon on an engraving of
the same subject by Marcantonio Raimondi.
The painter seems to have also used a second
print, for I find the pointing man on the right
very like Moses in Titian’s woodcut Pharaoh
submerged in the Red Sea.
Penny is eager to trace literary as well as
visual responses and speculates intelligently
on Shakespeare’s and Spenser’s familiarity
with Venus and Adonis as a fitting subject
for paintings, such was the fame of Titian’s
composition; he draws attention to George
Eliot’s evocation of Titian’s Tribute money in
Daniel Deronda and to Dickens’s and Henry
James’s appreciation of The family of Darius
before Alexander.
The author is particularly strong on original
locations and functions, often deduced from
internal evidence, vanishing points, light
direction and degrees of finish or confirmed
by documentation and comparisons with
similar works whose function has been
proved. In the secular context he identifies
works destined for connoisseurs’ galleries and
cabinet pictures suitable for other kinds of
rooms. He refutes Anderson’s claim that
Titian’s The Vendramin family was hung in
Gabriel’s ‘camerino delle anticaglie’, for which it
was far too large, and locates it in a portego. He
proves that Veronese’s Adoration of the kings
originally decorated a side wall in the chapel
of the Confraternity of St Joseph before S.
Samuele was transformed in the nineteenth
century. And he proves that Tintoretto’s
Christ washing the feet of the disciples originally
hung on the left wall of the chapel of the
Sacrament in S. Trovaso.
Penny may be right to claim that in
Veronese’s Allegories of love ‘the relationship
between the scenes is not necessarily sequen-
tial’ and that there is no narrative develop-
ment, but it does not necessarily follow that
they adorned separate ceilings in a suite of
rooms since their viewpoints, related colour
schemes and figure scale suggest that they
were meant to be viewed together. Penny
BR.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09 14:40
cites Xavier Salomon’s observation that the
letters visible on a diagrammatic drawing,
Studies for the allegories of love, in the Metropol-
itan Museum of Art, New York, might give
some clue as to their original arrangement.
But I do not share Penny’s doubt as to
whether Salviati’s Justice was intended for the
Mint: employees were constantly tempted to
steal, to adulterate precious metals and, on
occasions, to forge signatures and the official
weigher’s scales were subject to regular
checking.
Iconographical problems and subject-
matter are handled with sophistication;
trendy, over-facile interpretations are reject-
ed: Bassano dogs are not to be interpreted
allegorically and rapes of Ganymede do not
necessarily indicate a homosexual patron,
since they can be found in married couples’
bedrooms. He is well informed on the liturgi-
cal and architectural context of altarpieces and
on problems of unorthodoxy during the
Counter-Reformation when a work like
Tintoretto’s St George and the dragon might be
deemed unsuitable for public display. Like
Ludovico Dolce, Penny stresses the sensuality
of Titian’s Venus and Adonis, but its immense
popularity was also due to its hunting theme.
Thanks to Carol Plazzotta’s re-reading of
Ovid, the archer in Schiavone’s small panel is
identified as Arcas, the son of Callisto, who
pairs neatly with Schiavone’s pendant of
Jupiter seducing his mother. A drawing for
the painting is in the National Gallery of
Scotland, Edinburgh (D1764). Tommaso
Rangone’s botanical and medical interests are
rightly stressed in relationship to the iconog-
raphy of Tintoretto’s Origin of the Milky Way,
but his claims to be its patron could be
strengthened by reference to his patronage of
Tintoretto, whom he commissioned to paint
scenes from the life of St Mark (1562–64)
when he was Guardiano Grande of the Scuo-
la of S. Marco. Penny suggests that the motif
of the boy blowing on charcoal that appears in
the Adoration of the shepherds (NG.1858) and in
several works produced by the Bassano family
is descended from candle-bearers in earlier
Nativities influenced by the writings of St
Bridget: a more likely source, however, is
Tintoretto’s large Easter of the Hebrews promi-
nent on the ceiling in the Scuola di S. Rocco.
Substantial sections of this catalogue are
devoted to copies and workshop versions and
variants. In his entry on Campaña’s reduction
of Zuccaro’s Conversion of the Magdalene Penny
speculates on the Venetian taste for small
copies. To the examples that he gives by
Clovio and Vasari can be added Basaiti’s
Calling of the sons of Zebedee (Vienna), derived
from his altarpiece in the Accademia, and the
little copies of Mantegna’s Eremitani frescos
that Marcantonio Michiel saw in a private
collection in Padua and in Michele Contari-
ni’s Venetian house in 1543.
Penny’s subtlety and aptness of phrase is
demonstrated by his delicate handling of
Bordone’s Portrait of a young woman which, in
comparison with the painter’s other female
images, he places midway on the erotic scale.
I agree that his nineteen-year-old bella donna is
Page 549
42. Consecration of St Nicholas, by Paolo Veronese.
1561–62. Canvas, 282.6 by 170.8 cm. (National
Gallery, London).
likely to be a highly idealised courtesan or
mistress: the man on the backstairs hints at
illicit love. According to Aretino courtesans
hung their portraits on their premises. Penny
proves that she cannot be paired with male
portraits in Genoa and Florence and that her
darting glance and assertive hand on hip
suggest an independent operator rather than a
submissive fiancée or wife.
Penny is at his very best on Titian’s The
Vendramin family, whose relationship with the
miraculous relic of the True Cross is clarified
by previously unpublished passages from
Gabriel Vendramin’s will. The vexed ques-
tion as to whether it is he (who was younger
than his brother Andrea) who gazes outwards,
his hand proprietorially touching the altar,
is argued at length but the problem is
unresolved. Penny suggests that only male
members of the family were included because
only men could belong to the Scuola Grande
of S. Giovanni Evangelista, which owned the
relic, but in Venice nobility was transmitted
exclusively through the male line, and there
are no women in Titian’s Pesaro altarpiece
(Frari) or in Giovanni Bellini’s Doge Loredan
with his sons (Berlin). It is unlikely that the
sitters in the mixed-sex group portraits that
Penny considers were of aristocratic Vene-
tians: Veronese’s Cuccina were arrivistes from
Bergamo while Fasola’s sitters were provincial
nobles from Vicenza.
Penny is to be congratulated on sorting out
the many copies and versions of Titian’s Venus
and Adonis, making mincemeat of recent
claims that the Prado picture is not the
original. More controversial is his interpreta-
tion of the Allegory of Prudence and his rejec-
tion of an autobiographical reading in which
the portrait heads represent Titian, his son
the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e
BOOKS
Orazio and his nephew Marco.4 Penny is
interesting on earlier fanciful identifications of
the portraits and to his long list of triple
human heads I would only add the 1507
medal of Paolo Diedo and to the list of exhi-
bitions The Story of Time, Greenwich 2000,
The Age of Titian, Edinburgh 2004, and
Tiziano e il ritratto di Corte da Raffaello ai Car-
racci, Naples 2006. In 1966 Frances Yates drew
attention to Camillo Delminio’s L’Idea del
Theatro where the heads of a wolf, a lion and
a dog appear in the cave of Saturn. Delminio’s
Theatro existed as a real wooden structure and
in book form it was a best seller; there are four
editions by Lodovico Dolce who, like
Delminio, moved in Titian’s circle. This is
not to deny the influence of Pietro Valeriano’s
Hieroglyphica, but the immense popularity of
the Theatro may explain Titian’s decision to
replace the original foliate base with animal
heads. To me the oldest man does look like
Titian and Penny’s objection that he had grey
eyes can be overcome if we consider the alle-
gorical context in which this head belongs to
the shadowy past; if, like him, we believe that
it is not autograph then all the more reason
for the mistake. Orazio appears in the later
workshop Madonna of Mercy (Palazzo Pitti,
Florence), his features and thinning hair com-
patible with those of the central head. It
would be highly appropriate for the elderly
Titian, whose concern for the future of the
family firm is well documented, to associate
himself with attributes connected to Saturn,
the planet of melancholy then much associat-
ed with the artistic temperament.
Penny writes perceptively about the recent
cult of late Titian, but seems out of sympathy
with the ageing master’s ultima maniera, his
own taste being for more finished and classical
styles; yet Titian’s ability in the Death of
Actaeon to show the process of metamorpho-
sis from man to beast by means of brushstrokes
alone might be better described as unresolved
rather than unfinished.
Veronese is the star of the volume. His
works outnumber Tintoretto’s and Titian’s
and on the whole they are in better condition
and more usually autograph. He is represent-
ed by pictures sacred and profane, great and
small, single and serial, of all dates. It is
possible that the dreaming St Helena had
special personal significance for the artist who
married his teacher Badile’s daughter Elena in
1566, close to the date here plausibly proposed
for the painting which, although it is based on
a print after Raphael, looks so immediate. It
seems likely that it once belonged to Rubens,
whose second wife, another Helen, willingly
served as his model.5
The longest entry in this catalogue is
devoted to Veronese’s Family of Darius before
Alexander which, thanks to Eastlake’s diplo-
matic handling of the Austrian authorities
and appeal to the Treasury, was acquired in
1857. It is now known that it originally hung
in the Villa Pisani at Montagnana.6 Penny
gives an impressive account of the evolution of
the composition and considers its display
in the family palace in Venice where it
remained until the mid-nineteenth century.
• clI • august 2009 549
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BOOKS
He identifies the main textual source as
Valerius Maximus, easily available in Italian
translation. Appendices are devoted to the crit-
ical responses of Goethe and Ruskin set against
the aesthetic ideas of their respective times.
This entry, so rich in ideas and information, is
enhanced by twenty-three figures including an
X-radiograph mosaic photograph, family
trees, interior and exterior views of the Palazzo
Pisani Moretta, as well as an account of the
painting’s role in the development of history
painting, traced through its impact on Belluc-
ci, Tiepolo, Le Brun and others.
The recent cleaning of Veronese’s small
Rape of Europa revealed the painter’s char-
acteristic palette and, together with the detec-
tion of pentimenti, confirmed its autograph
status. This is by far the most dramatic shift in
attribution in the catalogue. In the last century
it was dismissed as a school piece, a later pas-
tiche and as an eighteenth-century imitation
produced ‘with fraudulent intent’ to pass for
a preliminary sketch. In this case it was an
illustrious provenance through Rudolf of
Prague, Christina of Sweden and the Orléans
collection that alerted the Gallery to the
possibility that it might be a dirty original.
More controversial is the renaming of
Veronese’s painting NG931 as Christ healing a
woman with an issue of blood (?). While it
is unlikely to represent Christ and the adul-
teress, given the absence of male accusers, the
kneeling beauty with her long flowing
tresses is very much a Magdalene type, and it
is significant that she is surrounded by
women whose heads are either covered or
have their hair bound up and who, unusually
for Veronese, are rather austerely clad and
noticeably lacking jewels. Her eye-catching
unfastened necklace has clearly visible clasps:
this weakens Penny’s argument that it was a
string of jewels that was wound in her hair,
and in fact he states that ‘it may be objected
that if the unfortunate woman was impover-
ished by her medical bills it is odd that she
should be wearing jewels’. Admittedly, as
Veronese’s interrogation by the Inquisition in
1573 proves, he did not always stick to
accepted iconography but invented details. It
is just such an imaginative procedure that
could easily have led him to anticipate seven-
teenth-century depictions showing the Mag-
dalene laying aside her jewels.
The publication of this book happily coin-
cided with Nicholas Penny’s return to the
National Gallery as Director. By chance this
volume includes Veronese’s Consecration of
St Nicholas (Fig.42), his patron saint, who was
selected as bishop of Myra following a bish-
op’s dream. The circumstances surrounding
Penny’s appointment were obviously some-
what different, but it is clear from the out-
standing achievement of this catalogue that he
was the right man for the job. One of St
Nicholas of Bari’s better-known acts was his
provision of dowries to poor maidens; given
the current economic climate it would be rash
to expect miracles, but the recent saving of
Titian’s Diana and Actaeon for the nation sug-
gests that at the very least we can look forward
to some exceptional acquisitions.
550 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
14:40 Page 550
1 See N. Wilding: ‘Galileo’s idol: Gianfrancesco Sagre-
do unveiled’, Galilaena 3 (2006), pp.229–45.
2 To this I can add that Assonica, who owned Mazza’s
Rape of Ganymede, was related to Faustina, who appears
with her husband, Marsilio, in Lotto’s Prado double
portrait, and that Titian’s Venus and the organ player
(Museo del Prado; no.420) has an Assonica provenance
and that the musician looks very like Titian’s friend in
the portrait now in San Francisco, which may be the
portrait of Assonica mentioned by Vasari.
3 The double rods in the May Labours of the Month
are unexplained, but I wonder if they illustrate water-
divining Veneto-style.
4 This has provoked hostile reactions, most notably
from Augusto Gentili, whose article ‘Ancora sull’Alle-
gora della Prudenza’, Studi Tizianeschi 4 (2006),
pp.122–34, is absent from the bibliography although it
contains corrections to the English translation of the
Latin inscription.
5 He speculates that it might have decorated an organ
shutter.
6 See C. Terribile: Del Piacere della virtù: Paolo Veronese,
Alessandro Magno e il patriziato veneziano, Venice 2009; to
be reviewed.
Pittura rupestre medievale. Lazio e
Campania settentrionale (secoli VI–
XIII). By Simone Piazza. 308 pp. incl. 32
Rome, 2006), €70.
col. + 64 b. & w. ills. (Ecole Française de
ISBN 978–2–7283–0718–0.
Reviewed by ALESSIA TRIVELLONE
THE PHENOMENON OF rock painting in Italy
has been rediscovered largely thanks to the
work of Cosimo Damiano Fonseca and to the
technical investigations he has organised since
the start of the 1970s. Rock painting which,
after the prehistoric era, reappeared in the
Mediterranean only in the Middle Ages and
went into decline in the following centuries,
is one aspect of this phenomenon. Cappado-
cia and southern Italy are particularly rich in
medieval rock paintings, and Simone Piazza’s
book provides an excellent analysis of exam-
ples in Lazio and southern Campania. The
book is organised in four chapters, the first
examining the symbolic significance of the
rocky cavern for Christians, in part an inher-
itance from pagan cults, and describing the
various types of caves and rocks.
The second chapter comprises a catalogue
of pictorial remains. Forty-two sites are
reviewed, including well-known examples
such as the Sacro Speco of Subiaco
(pp.119–25) or the grotta of S. Salvatore di
Vallepietra (pp.125–28), as well as little-
known sites, like the interesting cave of S.
Michele at Avella (pp.170–75) or that of S.
Nicola at Capradosso (pp.70–73). The author
provides a description of each site and its
paintings, augmented by high-quality photo-
graphs both in black and white and in colour,
as well as drawings and diagrammatic recon-
structions. The better-preserved paintings are
analysed stylistically and dated approximately.
Apart from suffering from decay as a result of
humidity and other natural factors, it is not
unusual for such frescoed caves located in the
remote countryside to be used to house agri-
cultural equipment or animals; in other cases
the paintings have suffered from vandals,
thieves and illegal raids (pp.243–49). One of
the most important aspects of the catalogue
is subsequently that it provides scholars with
a pictorial census of caves that are often
both difficult to visit and/or deteriorating.
The adopted classification by present-day
provinces (and not by historical provinces) is
convincingly justified by the author. Never-
theless, following this choice, one could have
expected that the analysis covers the whole
region of Campania.
The third chapter provides the interpreta-
tive key to rock paintings, identifying the
phenomena which gave rise to them: the
adoption of an eremitical life, the cult of
the Archangel Michael and the veneration of
the loca sancta of the catacombs. The phe-
nomenon of hermits living in caves, which
until the 1970s was too readily believed to be
the reason that rock paintings were made, is
considered to be the case in only five sites in
the entire corpus (pp.183–92). More often it
was the cult of the Archangel Michael that
prompted the use of caves for religious
purposes: in the Middle Ages every natural
cave was a potential site for the cult of the
archangel in imitation of the cave of Monte
Gargano in which, according to legend,
St Michael miraculously appeared in the fifth
century. Of the sites surveyed, seven were
dedicated to the Archangel and two to the
angel, or angels. It was not necessary to have
a representation of the Archangel in all these
caves: as the author emphasises, the rocks
themselves, by their very presence, were
enough to evoke sanctity. Some holy places
in Roman catacombs, which until now have
been taken into account in the study of rock
paintings, show significant similarities to the
cave sanctuaries: called speluncae in a seventh-
century source (p.203), these were often the
goals of pilgrimages. Even the paintings in
these places share similar characteristics with
those of other cave sites, above all in the
prevalence of votive panels with figures of
saints with the characteristics of icons.
The fourth chapter considers rock painting
in the context of the artistic production of
Campania and Lazio as a whole. The phe-
nomenon began in the sixth century and
developed rapidly in the eleventh to the
thirteenth centuries before declining and
disappearing altogether in the fourteenth
century. The development in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, according to Piazza, is linked
to a contemporary heightened interest in
eremitism, as well as to the Gregorian artistic
reform. In regard to this last point, it would
nevertheless be interesting to compare the
material of Lazio and Campania with that of
other regions: it is possible that the develop-
ment of rock painting in that area follows
more general tendencies, given that the cen-
turies under discussion are those which saw an
intense artistic flowering throughout Europe.
The close iconographic and stylistic similarities
between rock paintings and contemporary
fresco painting in Lazio and Campania,
BR.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09 14:40
scrupulously recorded by Piazza, show that the
former were fully integrated into the artistic
production of the region. The specificity of
this painting does not lie in its style, even less
in a supposed retardataire style, but rather in a
type of decoration, mostly based on votive
panels of saints, and in the special interrela-
tionship between the painting and the rocks
themselves. This is evident in a fresco in the
cave of Monte Monaco di Gioia, in which a
painted angel seems to be standing on an uncut
rocky spur: the painter evidently chose not to
represent the rock because it was already pro-
vided by the spur itself (p.234). In other cases
the rock itself is invested with sanctity, as in the
case of the chapel of St Gregory in the Sacro
Speco of Subiaco, which is singled out and
‘exalted’ by its man-made frame (p.237).
By the end of the book the reader has
surveyed a variety of caves and sites of differ-
ing dates, types, finishes and decoration
unified only by the application of paint on
rocks. The book provides a critical study
and an important catalogue and, given the
elegance of its style and the care taken in its
details (there are minimal typographical
errors), is a pleasure to read. Its indices of
places and names as well as of iconography
allow ease of consultation. It provides a solid
base for the further study of this artistic
phenomenon, which could be approached
from an anthropological perspective. Even
the lack of the very few sites that have not
been analysed, listed by the author himself
(p.8), in no way compromises the rigour of
the book and makes one hope that in the
future a similarly scrupulous investigation of
the phenomenon could be applied to other
regions of southern Italy.
Antike Steinskulpturen und
Neuzeitliche Nachbildungen in Kassel:
Bestandskatalog. By Peter Gercke and
Nina Zimmermann-Elseify. 428 pp. incl. 625
Mainz am Rhein, 2007), €70.
b. & w. ills. (Verlag Philipp von Zabern,
ISBN 978–3–8053–3781–6.
Die antiken Skulpturen in Newby Hall
sowie in anderen Sammlungen in York-
shire. By Dietrich Boschung and Henner
von Hesberg, with contributions by Werner
Eck, Andreas Linfert and Georg Petzl. 273
Verlag, Wiesbaden, 2007), €110.
pp. incl. 2 col. + 175 b. & w. ills. (Reichert
ISBN 978–3–89500–4315.
Reviewed by THORSTEN OPPER
a tradition of
G E R M AN M U S E U M S M A I N T A I N
publishing Bestandskataloge, well-illustrated
comprehensive catalogues of their permanent
collections that provide in condensed form
the latest scholarship on the objects in their
care. The Antike Steinskulpturen catalogue by
Peter Gercke (director of the Kassel antiqui-
ties collection until 2003) and Nina Zimmer-
mann-Elseify does so in an exemplary form
Page 551
for the substantial collection of ancient sculp-
tures in stone in Kassel, housed since 1973 in
Schloss Wilhemshöhe. Although the Kassel
collection has an illustrious history and con-
tains a number of very significant pieces, it
is not as well known outside Germany as it
undoubtedly deserves to be.
Except for the bronzes, which are to be
dealt with separately, the new catalogue
replaces the 1915 volume Antike Skulpturen
und Bronzen des königlichen Museum Frideri-
cianum in Cassel by Margarete Bieber. It
contains full entries for 144 sculptures, all
illustrated (which was not the case for the
Bieber catalogue) in black-and-white photo-
graphs, usually showing the four main views.
Fifty-seven of the sculptures came to the
Museum after the old catalogue was com-
piled, and twenty-two of the pieces were
previously unpublished, including four omit-
ted by Bieber. The new volume is therefore
highly welcome in making these sculptures
available to a wider audience of scholars and
the interested public.
The book opens with a brief but very useful
history of the collection (pp.11–36), initially
formed by the Landgraves of Hesse-Cassel.
The first marbles, Attic votive reliefs and
inscriptions, entered the collection in 1688,
gathered by Hessian mercenaries returning
from a Venetian-led expedition against the
Ottoman Turks that culminated in the siege
of the Athenian Acropolis in 1687. The core
of the collection, however, comprises thirty-
four marbles acquired by Landgrave Frederic
II in Rome during his Grand Tour in 1776–77
through such well-known British dealers
as Gavin Hamilton and Thomas Jenkins.
These include the two best-known Kassel
sculptures, the Kassel Apollo (no.4) and an
important replica of the Athena Lemnia type
(no.5), both high-quality Roman marble
copies after famous, lost Greek bronze
originals. These marbles were destined for the
new Museum Fridericianum, opened in 1779
and modelled on the British Museum, Lon-
don, with its encyclopaedic Enlightenment
approach. While much of the original archive
material relating to the acquisition of these
sculptures was destroyed during the Second
World War, there is perhaps a hope that
future research in Britain (there are references,
albeit limited, to Kassel statues in, for exam-
ple, the British Museum’s Townley Archive)
and Italy may provide further information on
some of the provenances, which at present is
disappointingly limited.
Most astonishing is the growth of the
collection since the Second World War, with
forty-nine pieces acquired mostly on the
Swiss and German art markets, of which
thirty-three were bought after 1970. These
figures include ten sculptures on loan from
private lenders, which, rather oddly, are fully
integrated in the catalogue and treated like
permanent collection pieces.
The section ends with a brief discussion of
conservation work carried out since the
1970s on some of the marbles, much of it
necessitated by damage sustained during the
War. In keeping with prevailing policies at
the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e
BOOKS
the time, this was frequently coupled with a
‘de-restoration’ of the sculptures and the
removal of elements added by the eight-
eenth-century restorers, a trend halted and
sometimes even reversed in recent years by
other institutions.
The catalogue itself comprises 144 mar-
bles, of which 133 are ancient and eleven
modern copies, mostly of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. The ancient
pieces are divided into eleven categories:
Greek ideal sculpture (39 pieces; nos.1–39),
Roman ideal sculpture (24; nos.40–63),
Greek portrait sculpture (6; nos.64–69),
Roman portrait sculpture (25; nos.70–94),
Greek reliefs (5; nos.95–99), Roman reliefs
(6; nos.100–05), Greek sepulchral sculpture
(4; nos.106–09), Roman sepulchral sculpture
(15; nos.110–24), Architectural fragments
(2; nos.125–26), Cypriot (3; nos.127–29) and
Egyptian pieces (4; nos.130–33). At the end a
further twenty-two marbles are listed that
were lost or destroyed during bombing raids
in the War. Surprisingly, there is also a full
entry for a sculpture that had been on loan to
Kassel from a private collection since 1992
and was acquired in 2000, but turned out to
have been stolen from a museum in Italy and
has since been returned.
The latest volume in the fine series on
sculpture in English country houses by the
renowned Cologne Research Archive for
Ancient Sculpture by D. Boschung and H.
von Hesberg takes the Bestandskatalog
concept to Britain. It discusses the ancient
marbles (chiefly Roman works of the first
and second centuries AD, as well as
mostly eighteenth-century modern copies) in
Newby Hall (seventy-two pieces in total,
including a Greek vase) and seven other
North and West Yorkshire collections (Dun-
combe Park [2 pieces], Fountains Abbey [1],
Harewood House [2], Hovingham Hall [6],
Nostell Priory [5], Rokeby Hall [26] and
Sledmere House [26]). The Cologne series is
well established and has already proved an
indispensable tool for scholars. In many cases
the volumes represent the first full treatment
of the sculptures since Adolf Michaelis’s still
fundamental Ancient Marbles in Great Britain of
1882. While the history of the collections
under discussion has become more promi-
nent in recent volumes, the key focus is on
the archaeological and iconographic contexts
of the sculptures as ancient works of art (an
aspect almost entirely missing from most
studies in English, which tend to focus almost
exclusively on the eighteenth-century aspects
of collecting and interior design). This more
than compensates for the sometimes uneven
bibliography concerning the latter aspects in
the present volume, which overlooks some
more recent British publications.
By far the most important collection
treated is the one at Newby, assembled by
William Wedell in the 1760s, again mainly
through the English dealer and Rome res-
ident Thomas Jenkins. Still mostly intact and
in its original display in the sculpture gallery
designed by Robert Adam, it evokes the
spirit of Grand Tour collecting like few
• clI • august 2009 551
BR.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09 14:40
BOOKS
others. Sadly, the Barberini Venus, the most
famous piece in the collection, was sold in
2002. The authors have nonetheless included
it in the catalogue (a modern replica is now
on display at Newby Hall), appropriately
enough, given the notoriety and fame of the
statue in the eighteenth century. Perhaps less
obvious is the inclusion of the two sculptures
from Duncombe Park, both now dispersed
(the Discobolus acquired by the Liebighaus
in Frankfurt, the famous Dog of Alcibiades
by the British Museum), particularly since
the account of Henry Constantine ‘Dog’
Jennings, the original eighteenth-century
owner, offers little new and omits references
to more recent studies. In other cases, sculp-
tures sold from the collections in recent
decades are not mentioned (e.g. a fourth-
century BC statue of a seated girl from
Rokeby now in the British Museum), mak-
ing the treatment somewhat uneven. These
minor points notwithstanding, the individual
entries on the sculptures are comprehensive
and provide a wealth of useful information
and stimulating leads. The catalogue contains
excellent photographs (although, sadly, it was
not always possible to illustrate all four sides
of a work), and, like its sister volumes, will be
mandatory reading for anyone working on
these collections.
Art, Marriage, and Family in the
Florentine Renaissance Palace. By
Jacqueline Marie Musacchio. 353 pp. incl.
numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Yale Univer-
sity Press, New Haven and London, 2008),
£35. ISBN 978–0–300–09563–0.
Reviewed by BRENDA PREYER
J AC Q U E L I N E M U S A C C HI O ’ S B E AU T I F UL NEW
BOOK gives much food for thought. It
continues with the theme, enunciated in her
The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance
Italy of 1999,1 of the significance for Renais-
sance Italians, especially women, of some of
the domestic objects that have come down to
us. The author assembles a great deal of
material about marriage, but her real contri-
bution concerns a wide range of objects that
she links to marriage and procreation, such as
betrothal chests, marriage chests (Fig.43),
clothing, jewellery (including rings), girdles,
cutlery, linens, prayerbooks and other aids to
piety, as well as aids to beauty, spinning and
needlework and ‘intimate accessories’. Her
argument, reiterated in numerous formula-
tions throughout the book, runs something
like this: documents show that when a man
and a woman married, many items were
acquired in connection with the dowry, the
woman’s counter-dowry and the furnishing
of the new couple’s living quarters; many of
these objects must have had significance with
regard to marriage or the idea of producing a
family, and objects for women predominate;
similar objects reappear later in the life cycle
of the family, in inventories taken upon the
552 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
Page 552
43. The Triumph of David and Saul, from The story of David panels from a pair of cassoni(?), by Francesco Pesellino.
c.1445–55. Panel, 43.3 by 177 cm. (National Gallery, London).
death of the husband, leading one to con-
clude that they were treasured throughout
the couple’s married life; the place in the
house where inventories situate most of
these objects – in the all-important camera –
reinforces their significance. Musacchio
makes the case that women, because of
restrictions on their movements, tended to
be confined to the house, and thus that the
objects she discusses related most particularly
to them. Through judicious interweaving of
data from private record books and other
contemporary writings, letters and invento-
ries, she is able to demonstrate the presence
– indeed the importance – of all these objects
in the house. However, the associations she
outlines perhaps do not justify such strong
statements as: ‘These objects both reminded
a woman of her role in society and let
society know who she was’ (p.9) or ‘Con-
templation of these narrative scenes helped
everyone in the house understand his or her
role’ (p.127). Musacchio tries a little too hard
to find a logical place for everything in her
scheme, and we read that painted decoration
on walls, spalliere and furniture had ‘an
emphasis on ideal familial behavior’ (p.127).
This is an oversimplification in the light of
her sustained discussion later in the book of
audiences for the various sorts of subject-
matter, especially when we reflect on the
horrific story of Nastagio degli Onesti or the
many scenes from mythology or ancient
history that have nothing to do with family
values.
There is little new in the book about
the ‘Florentine Renaissance Palace’ of the title
– indeed almost everyone is said to live in a
palace, although architectural historians define
the building type more narrowly than does
Musacchio and link it to a more restricted
social class. Also disappointing is the lack of a
probing discussion of ‘women’s rooms’; in her
first book Musacchio alerted us to ceremonial
visits to a new mother, but the nature of the
room remains very much open. Only by the
mid-fifteenth century can we sometimes find
records of a separate camera for the female head
of household; otherwise, did the wife receive
these visitors in her husband’s camera? The
question has a bearing on the audiences for the
objects in any of these rooms.
Musacchio’s third chapter, ‘Chests and
their Contents’ – carefully defined to deal
with objects that reveal details about family
life – has much good research and many
new findings. The section on betrothal
chests is especially rich and interesting. Also
innovative is the idea of examining the con-
tents of chests in terms of wifely values.
Musacchio’s detailed discussion of painted
rooms moves the formal discourse forward,
but it takes on a life of its own. It is integrated
into the book’s main focus on objects only
with respect to two proposals: that the
increase in objects may have been a cause for
the decline of painting of the walls of rooms
and that the decoration was usually executed
at the time of marriage. This last assumption is
questionable, witness the securely document-
ed and intact decoration of the Palazzo Datini
in Prato, little discussed in the book.
Two comments must be made regarding
form. Like many scholars writing in English,
the author translates the word anticamera
as antechamber, but this is misleading; in
Florence until well into the sixteenth century
the anticamera always followed the camera in
the sequence of rooms in a suite.2 Thus the
following phrase distorts the spatial relation-
ship: ‘in the antechamber to the main
bedchamber of the villa’ (p.217).
Musacchio’s decision to use fifteenth-
century spellings for names of some individ-
uals and families ‘to give a proper sense of the
original text’ (p.260) is idiosyncratic and
cannot be condoned, not only because for
centuries all other scholars have used standard
spellings to refer to people, but also because
her practice leads to confusion. The promi-
nent woodworker Giovanni da Gaiuole, who
came from the town in the Chianti, becomes
unrecognisable to modern ears as ‘Giovanni
da Gaivolo’. New names for well-known
families startle the reader: ‘Ghondi’, ‘Chastel-
lani’, ‘Inghirrami’. Lorenzo Ghiberti’s son,
Vittorio, cited in Giovanni Rucellai’s Zibal-
done, appears as ‘the lesser known Vettorio di
Lorenzo Bartolucci’, and in the index under
Bartolucci, seemingly not the same person as
the Vittorio Ghiberti of another citation.
Standard practice also demands that, to aid the
reader, punctuation be added to names and
quotations, and thus that an author perform an
essential act of interpretation of a text. Yet,
these criticisms should in no way obscure the
value and interest of the new information the
book provides and of the author’s fresh
approach.
1 Reviewed by Dora Thornton in this Magazine, 141
(1999), pp.479–80.
2 See B. Preyer: ‘The Florentine “Casa”’, in M. Ajmar
Wollheim and F. Denis, eds.: exh. cat. At Home in
Renaissance Italy, London (Victoria and Albert Museum)
2006, pp.34–48, an article apparently not consulted by
Musacchio.
BR.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09 14:40
The Jew in the Art of the Italian Ren-
aissance. By Dana E. Katz. 248 pp. incl. 70
b. & w. ills. (University of Pennsylvania
Press, Philadelphia, 2008), £36.
ISBN 978–0–8122–4085–6.
Reviewed by D.S. CHAMBERS
T O B E M O R E P R E C I S E , this book is about some
anti-Jewish images in northern Italy in the
fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and
the degrees of intolerance implied by them. Its
portrayals of real Jewish people are incidental
and rare, and not much related to ‘the Renais-
sance’, or even in some cases to Italian Ren-
aissance art (e.g. twelve woodcuts crudely
illustrating the castration and ritual murder of
the infant Simon of Trento). The discussion
concentrates upon images in five different
places – Urbino, Mantua, Ferrara, Florence
and Trento – each being the subject of a
separate chapter.
According to Dana Katz, any lingering
illusion that Renaissance Italy was a safe
haven for Jews (as Cecil Roth suggested in
1946) has to be abandoned. Even in two of
the most protective north Italian princedoms
– Mantua and Ferrara – toleration was only
relative and conditional; much the same, she
suggests, applied further south, in Urbino.
Although Jewish moneylenders, physicians
and others were valued for their services,
Katz argues that there were residual threats of
violence which could be expressed in art. In
Urbino she reads such implications into
Joos van Ghent’s Communion of the apostles
(Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino)
and – perhaps more cogently – into Uccello’s
predella painting below it, the Miracle of the
profaned host, which illustrates the detection
and burning to death of an entire Jewish
family (although this story had nothing to do
with Urbino, but originated in fourteenth-
century Paris). Katz argues that the period of
the painting coincided with the preaching in
Urbino of an anti-Semitic Franciscan and
that the appearance in the Communion of a
Persian ambassador (apparently a converted
Jew) in the presence of Federico da Monte-
feltro implied support for a combined task
force against the Turks and a threat to all
other non-Christians. This is not wholly
convincing.
Regarding Mantua, Katz confirms the
beneficence of its Gonzaga rulers, but
reminds readers about Mantegna’s Madonna
della vittoria, for which a Jew, Daniele da
Norsa, was forced to pay with a punitive fine.
A painting survives which portrays him and
his family (in the church of S. Andrea,
although on p.1 it is mislocated to the votive
church – now restored – for which Daniele
also had to pay). Pressure from Augustinian
Hermit friars and the Mantuan mob had
brought about this lapse in normal Gonzaga
tolerance. No such painful incident occurred
in Este Ferrara, but allegedly the point was
made that toleration would not be perpetual
and that Jewish religion and separatism were
doomed. Here Katz discusses the theme of
Page 553
the blind Synagogue confronted by the
triumphant Church of Christ, forcefully illus-
trated in Garofalo’s altarpiece of the Living
cross (now in the Pinacoteca, Ferrara) com-
missioned for the church of the Augustinian
hermits in the presence of Duke Alfonso
d’Este and his chief adviser, Antonio Costa-
bili. This weird and menacing device shows
human (or divine?) arms growing from the
wood of the cross, one of which pierces with
a sword or spear the personified Synagogue.
We are told that the friars would have been
aware, from studying the works of their
patron, St Augustine, that in his City of God
he pronounced that the Jews and their mis-
taken religion must be endured in the short
term, but ultimately they will be humiliated
and converted. Since the Augustinian friars in
Mantua seem to have taken a more robust
view even in the short term, one wonders if
the great Church Father was ambiguous in his
pronouncement or just misunderstood.
In the republic of Florence Jews accused of
sacrilege were apparently in regular danger
from both court prosecutions and lynch
mobs. Katz recounts the case in 1493 of
Bartolomeo de Cases, a vagrant Sephardic
Jew who was said to have slashed a marble
sculpture of the Madonna at Orsanmichele
and several other Marian images. Whether the
wretched Bartolomeo received any of the
torments prescribed for him before being
murdered by a street crowd is not altogether
clear from the sources; there is no visual
representation of the story, but a Latin inscrip-
tion was placed beneath the Madonna; Katz
claims ‘the symbolic power of the written
word’ served the purpose of perpetuating the
infamy. The case of a Jew in Empoli who (by
accident) emptied his chamber pot from a
window while the Corpus Domini procession
was passing his house also resulted in a
commemorative inscription. Not much there
about Jews in art, however.
The worst place – for virtually zero toler-
ance – was the prince-bishopric of Trento,
though this was only in part an Italian city. In
1475, as is well known, the whole Jewish
community there was blamed – and probably
framed – for ritual practices leading to the
death of a Christian boy. About thirty Jews
were judicially murdered after atrocious
tortures. The cult of the infant martyr,
encouraged by the Church (though not by
the pope) and by malicious rumours about
sacrificial Passover practices, is generously
illustrated here, not only by the woodcuts
already mentioned, but also by little-known if
repetitive mural paintings in the region of
Brescia, which depict the two year-old Simon
being tormented by gloating Jews.
Although there are short introductory and
concluding chapters to bring the subject
together, the book seems rather like a collec-
tion of five separate papers, and occasionally
the same information is repeated in two
different contexts (e.g. the Empoli case, on
pp.49–51 and 114–16). It is not exactly
an enjoyable book, the subject-matter being
too depressing or gruesome, and for the
argument to be wholly convincing more
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examples would be needed (if difficult to
find) from all over Italy. Nevertheless it
incorporates a lot of recent work, as the
informative notes and bibliography demon-
strate, and includes numerous black-and-
white illustrations, although some of these
are rather faint. It is not obvious why there
need be so many reproductions of Garofalo’s
painting in Ferrara; the whole work is given
twice as figs.25 and 34 (though only the
latter, the larger and clearer version, includes
the inscriptions) and eight times in particular
detail (figs.26–32 and 37). One decent dou-
ble-page reproduction would have sufficed.
Politics, Civic Ideals and Sculpture in
Italy –. By Brendan Cassidy. 314
pp. incl. 185 b. & w. ills. (Harvey Miller
€120. ISBN 978–1–905375–01–1.
Publishers, London and Turnhout, 2007),
Reviewed by JULIAN GARDNER
WHEN IN DECEMBER 1364 the executors of
Pietro di Dante wished to commission an
appropriate tomb for the great poet’s son in
S. Francesco at Treviso, they sat with their
chosen sculptor, Gilberto, beneath his intend-
ed model, the tomb of Bishop Castellano
Salamone, in the cathedral. The bishop had
died in 1322 and his tomb proved to be an
important channel for the design innovations
of Arnolfo di Cambio in the Veneto. It is
perhaps surprising that a wish to commem-
orate a prominent layman with a figure ‘in
cathedra ad modum doctoris’ should follow an
episcopal prototype of almost half a century
earlier, and despite the exactitude with which
the model was described, down to the modil-
lions supporting the sarcophagus, both model
and copy survive in too mutilated a condition
to be closely compared. But the Treviso
commission emphasises the permanence of
sculpture, its capacity to make an enduring
public statement, and this a fortiori was yet
more marked when the tombs were placed
outside churches like those of the glossators, or
jurists, at Bologna. It is one of the many
virtues of this freshly argued and thought-
provoking new book that it moves easily from
private memorial sculpture to state monu-
ments and from façades to fountains. It attends
closely to subject-matter, while also making
shrewd assessments of stylistic development,
and to a splendid extent it systematically
addresses the ideological and cultural contexts
within which many of these commissions
were conceived and executed.
Cassidy’s book covers the period between
c.1250, the death of Frederick II and the
arrival of the Angevin dynasty in the south,
until 1400, a period dictated by political
events, eerily reminiscent of the Courtauld
Institute curriculum of the 1960s as canonised
by John Pope-Hennessy and John White, in
which essential relationships with earlier
communal sculpture got short shrift. For
• clI • august 2009 553
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Cassidy’s purpose an earlier starting date
would probably have been preferable. The
sculpted pulpit did not begin with Nicola
Pisano. Episcopal patron saints like Zeno and
Zenobius were figures from the remote past –
the current bishop was generally a bureaucrat
and only exceptionally in the fourteenth
century – as with Thomas Cantilupe – was he
canonised. But the great advantage here is that
all Italy is included, not merely Tuscany with
appendages. The scene is set in a brisk and
up-to-date historical survey that owes much
to the late Philip Jones’s magnum opus on
republican rule.1
Given the book’s welcome emphasis on
sculpture and politics, the Capua Gate is an
appropriate point of entry. The configura-
tion of southern Italy changed politically and
artistically after the Battle of Benevento
(1266) and the extirpation of the viper’s
breed of Hohenstaufen, but it remained a
kingdom with the artistic imperatives of
dynastic tomb sculpture and the represen-
tation of rulers. The design of the gate, its
location, ground-plan and sculpture clearly
owed much to ancient precedent – more
even perhaps than is acknowledged here –
but its relationship to Italian medieval city
gates other than those of Milan could have
been given greater emphasis.
The early chapters on tomb design and
communal projects are well informed and
make creative use of recent scholarship, but
are relatively familiar. The impact of Arnolfo
di Cambio’s tomb designs is lucidly set out,
although Cassidy unquestioningly accepts the
accuracy of the current reconstruction of the
influential tomb of Cardinal Guillaume de
Bray in S. Domenico, Orvieto. Slips are rare
– De Bray was not a Dominican friar and
the Domino Accursio mentioned later in
conjunction with a planned commemorative
tomb programme in Florence Cathedral was
not a mobster but the Tuscan jurist buried
outside S. Francesco at Bologna. The panora-
ma of Italian trecento tomb sculpture which
this book provides should long prove stim-
ulating and serviceable. In particular, the
author provides a reliable guide to the
elaborate culture of death and representation
at the Angevin court at Naples, and makes
a persuasive attempt to bring Anne Mor-
ganstern’s important categorisation of tombs
of kinship to bear on the Neapolitan designs.2
The inner contradictions in royal tomb sculp-
ture are also illumined – in the hubristic tomb
of Robert I in S. Chiara, Naples, indebted to
the imperial tomb by Giovanni Pisano once
in the apse of Pisa Cathedral, the crowned
effigy of the king is barefoot and clad in the
Franciscan habit.
In all of this Cassidy creatively extends
important recent research. More innovative
in some ways are his discussions of com-
munal sculpture and the civic programmes
of the Veneto and north-western Italy. The
importance of the spread of Giovanni
Pisano’s influence along the water-borne
marble routes to Genoa and Liguria is well
brought out. He makes a series of sensible
comments on the trades represented on the
554 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
14:40 Page 554
front of S. Marco in Venice and weaves it
into a valuable comparative discussion with
the reliefs on the exterior of the Campanile
at Florence. Here, as elsewhere, one would
have appreciated a greater attention to the
location and context of the spectator. At
Venice, as elsewhere in northern and central
Italy, new evidence is rapidly accumulating
about sculptural polychromy, about which
more will need to be said. Also to discuss
only the surviving sculptural vertebra of
tomb programmes is fundamentally reduc-
tive: very few monuments preserve the
painted images that once formed an integral
part of their original design. The extraor-
dinary painted Crucifixion which included
the deceased, his wife, Sts Francis of Assisi,
Radislav and Mary Magdalene above the
tomb of Albertino Morosini, Dux Sclavonie
(d.1305), once in SS. Giovanni e Paolo,
Venice, and recorded in his will, alerts one to
what has irretrievably vanished.
Fountain commissions were a communal
speciality, and here attention is rightly devot-
ed to the encyclopaedic programme of the
Fontana Maggiore at Perugia. Cassidy makes
many shrewd observations about both the
programme and setting of Nicola Pisano’s
fountain, but in his discussion of Arnolfo’s
slightly later fountain in pede platea he
reproduces the manifestly erroneous recon-
struction proposed at the recent Perugia
exhibition.3 In this, as in other aspects, recent
studies of fountains remain indebted to
Hoffmann Curtius’s very useful book,4 and
the possible impact of the iconography of
ancient fountains is still not entertained.
The discussion of the statues of Boniface
VIII, erected when the Caetani pope was still
alive, their avatars and influence shows the
author at his best: incisive, lucid and able to
relate the programmes convincingly to the
political situation at the moment of their
execution. The discussion of the uses of
equestrian figures in lay tombs in northern
Italy is particularly good, and here as else-
where the publishers have served the author
well with pertinent illustrations.
Sculpture clearly had more allure than
painting. Tactile, more permanent, able to
articulate the public spaces that staged polit-
ical debate and action in communes and
signorie, sculpted programmes had more
impact than painted programmes within
palaces. In his concluding chapter, Cassidy
makes some valuable comparative remarks on
the impact of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s much-
analysed programme in the Sala dei Nove in
Siena, and his sensitivity to contemporary
painting is apparent throughout. This exem-
plary discussion of late medieval sculpture in
Italy deserves to be widely read and should
stimulate many fruitful trains of thought.
1 P. Jones: The Italian City-State: From Commune to
Signoria, Oxford 1997.
2 A. Morganstern: Gothic Tombs of kinship in France, The
Low Countries and England, University Park IL 2000.
3 Reviewed in this Magazine, 147 (2005), p.257.
4 K. Hoffmann-Curtius: Das Programm der Fontana
Maggiore in Perugia, Bonner Beiträge zur Kunstwissenschaft
10, Düsseldorf 1968.
Leonardo. Dagli studi di proporzione
al ‘Trattato della pittura’. Edited by
Pietro C. Marani and Maria Teresa Fiorio.
(Electa, Milan, 2007), €48. ISBN
208 pp. incl. numerous ills. in col. + b. & w.
978–88–370–5733–6.
Leonardo e il monumento equestre a
Francesco Sforza. Edited by Andrea
w. ills. (Giunti, Florence, 2007), €18. ISBN
Bernardoni. 128 pp. incl. 27 col. + 91 b. &
978–88–090–5396–0.
Reviewed by ANNA SCONZA
THE CATALOGUE OF an exhibition held in the
Castello Sforzesco, Milan (closed January
2008), Leonardo. Dagli studi di proporzione al
‘Trattato della pittura’, sheds new light on the
complex and somewhat neglected subject of
the later reception of the artist’s theories. From
the sixteenth century to the nineteenth,
Leonardo’s writings and drawings stimulated
the curiosity of artists and thinkers, even if they
were only transmitted in a somewhat fragmen-
tary manner by way of numerous reprintings
of his Trattato della pittura, published for the
first time in Paris in 1651. This bilingual
edition (in Italian and French) provided, in a
reduced form, the text of Leonardo’s Libro di
pittura, which was in fact compiled by his pupil
Francesco Melzi. The Raccolta Vinciana has
copies of all the subsequent editions of the
work, described in this catalogue, up to the
first complete edition of the text edited by
Guglielmo Manzi in 1817. The fate of several
manuscript copies preceding the seventeenth-
century edition is reconstructed with impor-
tant clarifications by Mauro Pavesi. Also
convincing are the results of Juliana Barone’s
research into Nicolas Poussin’s compositional
methods, which adapted Melzi’s drawings to
the new demands of taste for the first published
edition of the Trattato. It is known that in his
years of study in Italy (1630–40) the French
artist studied numerous antique statues in
Roman collections. Barone explains how
Poussin constructed a model which faithfully
reproduced the plasticity of the Farnese
Hercules and the proportions of the Belvedere
Antinous and made use of them through
turning the limbs with minimum variations to
adapt them to the pose needed in the chapter
that he wished to illustrate.
Leonardo’s theory of proportion, one of his
most important subjects, is almost entirely
absent from Trattato della pittura, perhaps
because Leonardo treated it in a separate ‘libro’
that has been lost. An attempt to reconstruct
the contents of that book gives rise to several
important essays in the catalogue, in particular
that of Pietro Marani on the various oppor-
tunities Leonardo had to study the Antique.
However, as the curator makes clear, it was
above all thanks to his studies from Nature
that the artist was able to obtain proportional
‘modules’ which took count of the variations
of the body that was to be drawn, human
or animal, and which differs from that of
his predecessors (Vitruvius and Alberti).
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Although the anatomical composition of a
woman was not subjected to Leonardo’s
theoretical scrutiny, he tried his hand at it
in the lost cartoon of Leda, as Maria Teresa
Fiorio proposes in her essay. In fact, of the
‘Leonardesque rules’ studied here by Giulio
Bora, Carlo Urbino made observations and
designs of the geometric construction of the
female body, elaborating in the Codex
Huygens on the theme of proportion, mate-
rial derived from Leonardo and from later
Lombard writers of treatises.
Leonardo also studied the anatomical
proportions of the horse in a series of draw-
ings, originally more complete than what has
come down to us today, and in a ‘small wax
model’, as Vasari described it, identifiable as
the statuette with an Aldobrandini prove-
nance included in the exhibition and analysed
in the catalogue by Martin Kemp. The draw-
ings of the proportions of a horse (echoes of
which were still present in the work of Anto-
nio Canova in the first years of the nineteenth
century) were necessary for Leonardo to
undertake the important commission for the
equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza.
The subject has recently been re-examined
in the second book under review, edited by
Andrea Bernardoni, Leonardo e il monumento
equestre a Francesco Sforza, which concentrates
on the technical construction of this imposing
colossus. Leonardo intended to revive ancient
monumental sculpture and also reintroduce
the technique of indirect casting, a technique
that had been lost from memory in the
Middle Ages. He probably began to work on
this project soon after his arrival in Milan in
1484, even if the only document that certain-
ly refers to it dates from 1489. He worked on
it in a haphazard manner, as is demonstrated
by the drawings preserved in the codices
Madrid II (8936), Forster, H and Atlantico, and
in certain drawings at Windsor, which are
analysed by Bernardoni. Leonardo’s ambitious
attempt to cast the statue in one piece was
interrupted in 1497; it is reproduced in a
virtual reconstruction in these pages.
Architettura e committenza nella Napoli
del Quattrocento. By Bianca de Divitiis.
editori, Venice, 2007), €23. ISBN
220 pp. incl. 119 b. & w. ills. (Marsilio
978–88–317–9108–7.
Reviewed by CORDELIA WARR
B I A NC A D E D I V I T I I S ’s book concentrates on
the architectural patronage of the Carafa
family, in particular on Diomede Carafa, who
played an important role in Aragonese Naples.
Diomede was part of the army that helped
Alfonso of Aragon take Naples in 1442 and
was a member of Ferrante I’s inner circle. The
first chapter traces the fortunes of the Carafa
family and their association with the seggio di
Nido, one of the five main political and
administrative areas of the city.
Page 555
In the following two chapters de Divitiis
examines living and dying in the seggio di Nido.
‘Abitare nel seggio’ is concerned with
Diomede Carafa’s palace. Rather than choos-
ing a site on which he could build a palace
ex novo, Carafa chose one already occupied by
a family property in via S. Biagio de’ Librai,
less than a hundred metres from the church of
S. Domenico Maggiore where he was to be
buried. The palace, which still exists, was
made up from property Diomede acquired
from his elder brother, Francesco, and from
the Pignatelli family. Diomede imposed, as far
as possible, a unified design on the block of
buildings, which reflected Florentine and
Catalan influences and contained many
elements in the all’antica style so favoured in
much of Italy at this time. The exterior of the
palace took up three sides of the block, or
insula, and elements of the pre-existing build-
ing, for example the placement and shape of
some of the windows, can still be seen despite
the application of opus isodomum (regular
coursed masonry) to the façade. De Divitiis
argues that the palace was completed only
after Leon Battista Alberti’s visit to Naples in
1465. Alberti was in the city as the guest of
Filippo Strozzi, from whom Diomede later
asked for information about Piero de’
Medici’s studiolo with an eye to the design of
his own studiolo in the palace. The timing of
the visit, as well as specific elements of the
façade design, in particular its Ionic portal,
gives some weight to the hypothesis that
Alberti was consulted. De Divitiis also argues
convincingly that the arrangement and dec-
oration of the palace’s interior was carefully
considered. Diomede obtained furniture from
Florence, owned a painting by Rogier van der
Weyden and had a large collection of antique
marble sculpture which he assembled through
his connections in Florence, particularly with
Filippo Strozzi, and through finds made at his
property at Pozzuoli. Although the collection
has now been dispersed – a process which
began after Diomede Carafa, 1st Duke of
Maddaloni, died in 1561 without direct heirs
– some elements of it can still be identified,
such as the mid-fifteenth century bronze head
of a horse, the gift of Lorenzo de’ Medici,
now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in
Naples. De Divitiis shows that, through his
family and court connections, Diomede
Carafa was able to ensure that both his palace
and the collection it housed followed the
latest trends, and even set them.
The third chapter, ‘Morire nel seggio’,
deals with Carafa burial monuments in
S. Domenico Maggiore, the main church in
the seggio di Nido, and the final resting place of
a number of members of the Carafa family.
After his death on 16th May 1487, Diomede’s
funeral was held there and he was buried in
the Cappellone del Crocefisso, one of two
chapels in the church to which he had
patronal rights. De Divitiis suggests that one
reason that Diomede may have chosen to be
buried there was because of the presence of a
panel painting of Christ crucified which,
according to legend, had spoken to Thomas
Aquinas. She argues that Diomede’s funeral
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BOOKS
monument (started seventeen years before his
death) represents a significant innovation
when compared with earlier Neapolitan
funerary architecture, and that there are
parallels between it and tombs of the 1460s
and 1470s in Rome and Florence. Diomede’s
father, Antonio Malizia Carafa, and his broth-
er Francesco, are also buried in S. Domenico.
In an epilogue, de Divitiis examines the
commission of the Cappella del Succorpo,
constructed between 1497 and 1508, in Naples
Cathedral by Oliviero Carafa, Francesco’s son.
The chapel was built to house the relics of S.
Gennaro, patron saint of Naples, which had
been brought to the cathedral through the
efforts of various members of the Carafa clan.
Naples is not a city in which it is easy to
trace its Renaissance past. The domination of
Baroque architecture and the tendency to
view fifteenth-century Naples as lagging
behind cities such as Florence in terms of
architectural or sculptural developments has
resulted in a relative lack of studies of this
period. Bianca de Divitiis’s thoroughly
researched and fluently written book demon-
strates how one Neapolitan noble family
sought to be at the forefront of architectural
and sculptural patronage not only in their own
city, but in the Italian peninsula as a whole.
Peter Blake. One Man Show. By Marco
Livingstone. 240 pp. incl. 195 col. + 35 b. &
w. ills. (Lund Humphries, London, 2009),
£35. ISBN 978–0–85331–980–1.
Reviewed by PAUL MOORHOUSE
IN HIS INTRODUCTION to this handsome
monograph, Marco Livingstone observes that
‘Blake’s early and sustained exploration of his
own brand of Pop art has often failed to be
given due credit’. It is perhaps a paradox that
while Peter Blake is widely acknowledged as
one of the pioneers of Pop art in Britain in the
mid-1950s, his stature and later achievements
have not been documented as fully as might
be expected. During a career that now
extends over more than fifty years, retrospec-
tives held in 1973 at the Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam, the Tate Gallery in 1983, Tate
Liverpool in 2007 and the Museo de Bellas
Artes de Bilbao in 2008, with their accomp-
anying catalogues, provided overviews. But a
substantial monograph illuminating the full
spectrum of his art has proved elusive. This
book addresses that need.
Livingstone is an ideal guide. An authority
on Pop art, he is sympathetic and sensitive to
the particular character and wider nuances of
Blake’s work. He is informative on the range
of his subject’s passions: from early enthu-
siasms for cinema, the circus (Fig.44) and
wrestling matches, to folk art, popular music
and ephemera of bewildering diversity.
Indeed, if one overriding impression emerges
from these pages, it is that of the extraordinary
breadth of Blake’s work. The artist’s burgeon-
ing engagement with popular culture and his
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44. Circus poster, by Peter Blake. 1949. Gouache, 48.2
by 30.5 cm. (Collection of the artist).
gentle, at times whimsical, celebration of
human experience here finds a clear and
approachable exposition.
Doing justice to the rich texture of Blake’s
œuvre will have presented a challenge. As Liv-
ingstone points out, the artist has constantly
explored and adopted a multiplicity of styles
and techniques, switching between pictorial
languages within a short space of time and also,
over periods of many years, simultaneously
pursuing several different lines of protracted
development. These contrasting artistic voices
encompass that of the folk artist, Pop artist,
academic, naive and naturalistic painter,
sculptor, collagist and maker of conceptual
works. Underpinning this medley there is
Blake’s activity as an insatiable and obsessional
collector of found objects, printed matter and
memorabilia. As a result, the development of
his work can appear confusing.
Livingstone’s strategy is to approach these
various areas thematically. There are eight
chapters, including sections focusing on early
work connected with the circus and funfairs;
the classic Pop phase, including the creation
of his celebrated collage paintings; ‘fantasy
portraits’ of wrestlers, boxers and strippers;
paintings and drawings made from life and
photographs; and ‘escapist fantasies’ address-
ing Blake’s Ruralist period characterised by
imaginative, magical and sentimental subjects.
This successful device enables Livingstone to
concentrate on patterns of related work
pursued over longer periods and, when
needed, to depart from a basic chronological
structure. Somewhat surprisingly he prefaces
this organisation of his material with the
qualification that the book concentrates on
‘Blake’s art rather than his life’.
While the text reads as an appreciation
of an artistic life and is not a biography,
556 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
Page 556
Livingstone’s disclaimer underplays the useful
personal and professional information inter-
woven with particular themes. We have
accounts of Blake’s working-class childhood
in which he emerges as a solitary boy fas-
cinated by popular entertainment. Later we
learn of his art education and grounding in a
range of commercial, craft and fine art
processes; of the serious cycling accident
which led him to grow a beard to disguise the
facial injury he suffered; and of his disabling
shyness, sexual inexperience and subsequent
relationships with Jann Haworth and Chrissy
Wilson.
For Livingstone, Blake is a ‘gentle human-
ist’, a figure incapable of aggressive imagery
or of engaging with darker concerns. This
perception is apposite. Like its subject this
book does not purvey a complex message, but
is distinguished by affection and accessibility;
and its design by Herman Lelie and Stefania
Bonelli, with images created by the artist
introducing each section, is a visual feast.
Publications Received
Altri Quaranta Dipinti Antichi della Collezione Saibene.
Edited by Giovanni Agosti. 384 pp. incl. 59 col. + 69
b. & w. ills. (Edizioni Valdonega, Verona, 2008).
ISBN 978–88–85033–53–5.
As the title indicates, this is the second volume of the
Saibene collection, the first having been catalogued by
Federico Zeri in 1955, under the title Trenta Dipinti
Antichi della Collezione Saibene (reviewed in this Mag-
azine, 99 (1957), p.103), covering acquisitions prior to
that date. This second volume differs in that Giovanni
Agosti provides an introductory essay of seventy pages,
assigning the actual cataloguing to nine contributors.
Agosti’s contribution is a fascinating portrayal of the
period of collecting in Milan between 1941 and 1971,
with some intriguing insights into the working methods
of Longhi and Zeri. In contrast, the catalogue entries
tend to be too verbose and do not seem to have
benefited from Zeri’s exemplary catalogues of Italian
paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York, where even the most important painting is limit-
ed to three pages. In the current book, the shortest entry
of some three pages refers to an enchanting Country scene
by Monaldi; while one of the longest entries (ten pages)
concerns a Ferrarese Fragment of a lion, at the end of
which there is an inconclusive attribution to Ercole de
Roberti. Notable among the paintings are a Savoldo
Evangelist, formerly in the Castelbarco Collection; a
Moretto Virgin and Child, formerly Wesendonck,
Berlin; a Domestic interior by Il Genovesino; and an
impressive Landscape with architecture by Lemaire, with
the suggestion that the figures are by Poussin (mention
could have been made of the larger variant at
Chatsworth; no.503).
W I L L I A M M O S T YN - O W E N
La Raccolta Dimezzata. Storia della Dispersione della
Pinacoteca di Guglielmo Lochis (1789–1859). By Giovan-
w. ills. (Lubrina Editore, Bergamo, 2007), €60. ISBN
na Brambilla Ranise. 412 pp. incl. 33 col. + 95 b. &
978–88–7766–360–3.
The Accademia Carrara in Bergamo was immea-
surably enriched by the bequest in 1859 of Count
Guglielmo Lochis. The 240 paintings, the single most
important addition ever made to the collection, include
masterpieces by Giovanni Bellini, Cosmè Tura and
Titian. This book, however, deals with an additional
three hundred pictures which, despite Lochis’s bequest
of his entire collection to the city of Bergamo, were not
in the end accepted. Lochis had stipulated in his will
that the collection must remain intact and on display,
but in his purpose-built gallery at his villa outside
Bergamo. The obsessively tight conditions of the will
were, however, gradually unravelled, a final settlement
allowing the Comune to take those paintings it wanted
for the Accademia Carrara and in return awarding the
Count’s heir, his nephew Carlo Lochis, title to the
remainder. Giovanni Morelli selected the pictures for
Bergamo and wrote shortly afterwards to Austen
Henry Layard that among what remained ‘there is
really very little worth having; anything of real interest
[. . .] has been awarded on my recommendation to the
Comune of Bergamo’. The remainder was quickly
dispersed, the works of art sold at auction in Paris in
1868 and the greater part of the pictures bought in 1874
by the London-based Italian dealer Raffaelle Pinti. The
main part of this book consists of a full catalogue of
those pictures from the Lochis collection not selected
by Morelli, using as its starting point Lochis’s own
catalogue of his pictures, the final edition of which was
published in 1858.
Giovanna Brambilla Ranise sets out clearly what is
known about the paintings’ subsequent histories,
attempts to identify what they might have been and
indeed succeeds in identifying a small number. She
has unearthed some fascinating archival material, con-
necting Pinti and the dispersal of some pictures in
Britain with the 3rd Marquess of Northampton and J.C.
Robinson.
This book is beautifully produced, which makes it
all the more disappointing that it should ultimately feel
so lopsided. This is because, with the exception of a
complete concordance of the collection, it ignores the
Lochis collection as a whole, including the core still
in Bergamo. Brambilla Ranise has already published
separately on the development of the Lochis collection
(G. Brambilla Ranise: ‘Una vita, una collezione, un
tradimento. Guglielmo Lochis (1789–1859) e la sua
raccolta’, Bergomum 99–100 (2005–06), pp.225–88),
but it seems a wasted opportunity not even to
summarise here, for a wider audience, the well-doc-
umented story of this fascinating collector. However,
there is a slightly aggrieved undercurrent to this book,
present also in some of the prefaces, lamenting the
betrayal of Lochis’s wishes and the loss to Italy of this
patrimony. Drawing more attention to the master-
pieces now in the Accademia Carrara might have
made it more difficult to sustain this line of argument.
Many civic authorities might have blenched at the
demands made by Lochis’s will and the fact is that the
Comune was able to select what it wanted. On the basis
of the – with one or two exceptions – minor works
and copies identified here, it seems clear that Morelli
did his job pretty well. However, the catalogue,
the fruit of painstaking and intense research, should
certainly assist the process of identification of more
pictures and is a valuable contribution to the study of
collecting and Anglo-Italian cultural relations in the
1860s and 1870s.
J E R E M Y W A R R EN
Monuments and the Art of Mourning. The Tombs of Popes
and Princes in St. Peter’s. By Philipp Fehl, revised and
completed by Raina Fehl, edited by Richard Bösel
and Raina Fehl. 219 pp. incl. 38 b. & w. ills.
(Unione Internazionale degli Istituti di Archeologia
€20. No ISBN.
Storia e Storia dell’Arte in Roma, Rome, 2007),
Between 1996 and 1998 Philipp Fehl gave ten
lectures, finally bringing together his highly personal
insights into subjects on which he had been meditating
for several decades: the tombs of St Peter’s, and the
theme of tombs as guardians of memory and ‘witnesses
and teachers of the Art of Mourning’. By his death in
2000 he had regrettably not yet revised them for the
obligatory publication, and the onerous task of doing so
was undertaken by his widow. Her notes also include
useful material from other studies by the author, some
never published; extracts from three of these related
works are printed in appendices.
ER.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09 09:33
Exhibitions
Richard Long
London
by MARINA VAIZEY
O N E O F S H A K E S P E A R E ’ s most often quoted
lines, from Hamlet, simply asserts that ‘There
are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in our philosophy’. The
current retrospective at Tate Britain (to 6th
September) of the art of Richard Long, the
first in London since the Arts Council’s
Hayward Gallery show in 1991, has been titled
Heaven and Earth by Long himself, a phrase he
had earlier used for specific works of art. The
phrase, implying complementary opposites,
has been suggested by the I Ching, that ancient
Chinese text which for millennia has guided
explorations of change and stability, order and
chaos, the seemingly random and the discov-
ery of pattern. The sophisticated yet simple
concepts behind the I Ching may well be an
inspiration for three of the largest works on
view: the great wall painting in Vallauris clay
(Fig.45) and the first room with its two huge
wall paintings in River Avon mud, exploiting
almost endless variations in density of tone and
hue, dominated by light and dark ochres and
browns so dark as to be almost black, shaped
by the primordial forms of cross and line. The
tidal Avon is Long’s home river; he was born
in Bristol, where he still lives, in 1945.
Long was part of the gifted generation at St
Martin’s School of Art which included those
anarchic sculptors Gilbert & George, in a
department whose faculty was led by Anthony
Caro. Long is on record, however, as saying
that, as might be expected, the students taught
each other; and Long, uncannily precocious, is
perhaps the most original of all the post-War
generation of British artists.
Physicists tell us that even the most solid-
appearing object is actually continually in
flux, that all matter is always on the move.
Long’s unusual gift is to make this visible, just
as in the earliest part of the last century
Kandinsky and later Paul Klee made the
rhythms of music consciously visible. In part,
originality does obviously consist in making
others look and think in different ways and
the surprising, even archaic simplicity of
Long’s strategies have done just that. He takes
us with him on his seemingly solitary journeys
which underline, usually in black-and-white
photographs, very occasionally in colour,
and printed or handwritten prose poems, the
emotive beauties of everything from a scruffy
English meadow to the Australian outback,
from the Himalayas to the high Peruvian
plains. We too can have a dream of self-
reliance, of the enjoyment of solitude, of
wilderness both near and far: nothing
man-made is visible except for Long’s own
Page 557
45. From beginning to end, by Richard Long. 2009. Vallauris clay, dimensions variable. (Exh. Tate Britain, London).
interventions which only use the found and with Anthony d’Offay and indeed the
natural materials to hand. Anthony d’Offay Artist Rooms includes one
The first iconic piece in the exhibition, devoted to Long.
deceptively simple, was given by its creator In the more than four decades since that
its literal title: A line made by walking (Fig.46) first show Long has had hundreds of solo and
was just that: from a train window Long group exhibitions, published countless cards
spied a promising meadow, and finding it, and other ephemera, and been involved in
made a line through the rough grass by scores of major publications, from such semi-
walking up and down and up and down, nal group catalogues as When Attitudes Become
wearing a path (as animals and humans have Form (London and Bern, 1969), to catalogues
done for millennia). He photographed the and monographs of his own work.
surprisingly serene result, ensuring through Long has made art of his own journeys,
the lens an almost complete symmetry, the performance on the grandest scale, dominated
wildflower meadow divided in half by the and characterised by invented rituals, even at
path, the path itself disappearing into a times by the repetitive actions which we
boundary which consisted, with a fairy-tale may sometimes associate with captive animals
resonance, of a dark wood. pacing in cages, or routines which shore up
In 1968 Long had his first one-man exhibi- human fragility by an external framework of
tion, with Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf, with
whom he has shown ever since. The city was
home to the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, per-
haps at that point the most innovative teach-
ing institution anywhere – the prodigiously
gifted photographers and teachers Bernd and
Hilla Becher were among the faculty, not to
mention Joseph Beuys, whose title was Pro-
fessor of Monumental Sculpture. Düsseldorf
was then the self-styled City of Artists, the city
publishing a book by that name, and hosted,
among others, the young Klaus Rinke who
was throwing water into the Rhine as a piece
of performance. From the very beginning,
whether willed or not, Long has been at the
heart of things. In London, his first commer-
cial exhibitions throughout the 1970s were at
the Lisson Gallery, which pioneered the exhi-
bition of a remarkable range of young British
sculptors (Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon,
Anish Kapoor, Julian Opie) and, to the aston-
ishment of the influential few who then visit- 46. A line made by walking, by Richard Long. 1967.
ed, the leading American conceptualists and Black-and-white photograph, 85.5 by 116 cm.
minimalists. By the 1980s Long was showing (Anthony d’Offay; exh. Tate Britain, London).
the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e • clI • august 2009 557
ER.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09 09:33
EXHIBITIONS
47. Walking music, by Richard Long. 2004. Text work,
dimensions variable. (Collection of the artist; exh.
Tate Britain, London).
ritualistic activity. He has made art of the most
childlike activities, the playing with sticks and
stones – a 1980 publication has on its title page
‘Five, six, pick up sticks/Seven, eight, lay
them straight’ – mud and wood. Rather than
sandcastles though, Long uses a free hand and
intuitive geometry, no line exactly straight,
each characterised by the individual physiog-
nomy, so to speak, of a flint, a twig, a rock. For
an art that can seem so austere, there is at times
a surprising flamboyance; and, in several inter-
views over the years, Long has indicated the
intense enjoyment his hard walking ways have
provided for him.
Long’s radical art is about the outside, the
outside world of nature itself, seemingly
untouched by human hand or intervention –
except of course for the artist’s – but in order
to appreciate it, to make it visible, we, his
audience, and his work have to be inside, in
the confines of the classic white room, the
gallery space, and often, in the case of the large
sculptures made of permanent materials such as
pieces of slate, rocks, flints or driftwood, in the
cultivated garden, an outdoor room confined
and defined by human design. The wilderness
is domesticated, and the emotions landscape
evokes are made clear; we cannot look at
‘nature’ and not anthropomorphise what we
see. Do these hills know they are providing a
view, these clouds know they are drifting, the
buzzard know he is watching the artist?
The work at Tate Britain is arranged in a
rough chronology, but the show opens with
the two site-specific new wall paintings of
Heaven and Earth, and then proceeds, again
roughly chronologically. All but one of the gal-
leries are filled with wall-hanging texts (Fig.47)
or text-and-photo pieces or wall paintings,
but this intelligently and spaciously arranged
spectrum of work from the 1960s onwards is
punctuated at the centre of the exhibition by a
room of six floor sculptures covering twenty
558 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
Page 558
years (1980–2000) – circles, a line and an ellipse, the heart of cities. His practice has many
deploying slate, basalt and flint. Circle, black provocative contradictions. But above all else
white blue purple circle is surprisingly Baroque, his work not only makes us think but is visual-
almost florid in its use of coloured Swiss stones, ly captivating, in both word and image.
some upended. Two rooms further on there is
1 Catalogue: Richard Long Heaven and Earth. Edited
another wall painting, an enormous White water
line of cascades and waterfalls of Cornish china by Clarrie Wallis, with contributions by Michael
clay, made in situ, belying its title. Mostly there Craig-Martin, Nicholas Serota, Clarrie Wallis and
are hanging text works, descriptions of walks, Andrew Wilson. 240 pp. incl. 120 col. ills. (Tate
Publishing, London, 2009), £24.95 (PB). ISBN
amplified by words or phrases indicating things 978–1–85437–841–5. The catalogue, co-designed by
seen, things felt, sounds heard. A text piece Long, contains a surprisingly poetic introduction by
called Circle of autumn winds is a scatter of arrows Nicholas Serota, a vividly informative biographical and
framed in a circle, captioned as Reading the critical essay by Clarrie Wallis, a good piece on Long’s
Wind Reading the Compass A Walk of 46 miles publications by Andrew Wilson and a charming if
inside an imaginary circle on Dartmoor, superfluous artist’s interview with Michael Craig-Mar-
England, 1994. The text pieces are both spare tin. There is an excellent and inclusive bibliography,
and informative. They work as formal arrange- lists of exhibitions and indexes; and there has been a sin-
ments of symbols, maps and words. Other cere attempt to make the book as aesthetically appealing
as possible.
pieces are photographs, each a moment in time
with the text describing the walk, the sculpture
or intervention, as well as time. The occasion-
al use of colour is curiously jarring, the more
typical use of black-and-white photography
(no technical details are given) silvery in tone Matthew Boulton
and peculiarly soothing. Birmingham
One thing leads to another, everything is
connected is a photograph of the Cairngorm by CELINA FOX
mountains overlaid with a written description
of a sequence of things, from rainclouds to IF MATTHEW BOULTON (1728–1809; Fig.48)
rainbow. This particular image and text was blessed with an enterprising nature, it
(2007) is not at Tate but is published as a was nurtured by Birmingham where he had
double spread in the catalogue which contains the good fortune to be born. As an unincor-
a significant number of works not on view, porated borough, the town was not encum-
and does not include the site-specific wall bered by the restrictive trade practices
pieces or the installations of the sculptures.1 associated with guilds. Its skilled workforce
The catalogue shows work from 1966 to adapted flexibly to the needs of specialist
2008, the exhibition to 2009. A separate metal trades, producing iron, brass and
gallery is devoted to a specialist exhibition of pewter ware, nails, guns, edge tools, clocks
Long publications, from invitation cards to and ‘toys’ (buckles, buttons, sword hilts,
posters and books by (not on) the artist. snuff boxes, chatelaines, watch chains, etc.),
All this exemplifies one of the fascinating the manufacture of which involved rolling,
paradoxes of Long’s œuvre. An original text stamping, cutting out, chasing, engraving,
piece, a captioned photograph and, certainly, burnishing, gilding and many other process-
a large sculpture can probably only be es. During Boulton’s lifetime the town’s
afforded by major institutions and rich private population multiplied five-fold, from fifteen
collectors. The big pieces have to be seen in
reality to be appreciated, for their relation to
human scale, their textures and physicality
being sometimes overwhelming. The highly
legible yet rather touchingly quirky handwrit-
ing of the earliest pieces also needs to be seen.
Yet many of the printed text pieces and
captioned photographs are readily enjoyed in
a myriad publications and are often available at
modest cost. This means much of his work is
accessible in book or pamphlet form, easily
enjoyed domestically. He is the most dem-
ocratic of artists, permitting us to be armchair
travellers in a new definition of the relation-
ship of the viewer to art.
Richard Long has vehemently denied being
a romantic, suggesting if anything he might be
a classicist. He has referred to path-making and
mark-leaving as ancient activities, and although
he has been labelled a Conceptual artist and has
been included in anthologies of Land Art, in
most respects he is none of these. People do not
make pilgrimages to see his work in situ; rather 48. Portrait of Matthew Boulton, by Lemuel Francis
it comes to us, in publications often at low cost, Abbott. c.1798–1801. Canvas, 73.6 by 61.6 cm.
and in exhibitions and public collections, in (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery).
ER.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09 09:33
49. View of Soho Manufac-
tory, Birmingham, engraved
by Francis Eginton. From
S. Shaw: History and
Antiquities of the County of
Stafford, London 1798–1801,
pl.XVII. Etching and
engraving with aquatint,
27.7 by 38.2 cm. (plate
mark). (Birmingham
Museum and Art Gallery).
to seventy-five thousand. Already by 1759
some twenty thousand people were involved
in the metal trades. If the handsome exhibi-
tion Matthew Boulton: Selling What All the
World Desires at the Gas Hall, Birmingham
(to 27th September),1 commemorates the
bicentenary of Boulton’s death, it can also be
seen as a tribute to one of the country’s great
manufacturing centres.
The dependence of the wealth of ornamen-
tal goods displayed on core mechanical skills is
symbolised at the start of the exhibition by
Boulton’s own treadle lathe, a blacksmith’s
anvil, bellows and hand tools typical of those
employed in eighteenth-century workshops,
overlooked by Wright of Derby’s painting of
An iron forge (1772). The intellectual context is
suggested, almost inevitably, by Wright’s An
experiment on a bird in the air pump (1768),
supported by examples of correspondence
between Boulton and Benjamin Franklin as
well as with members of the Lunar Society.
One of Boulton’s notebooks is opened to
reveal lists of the scientific instruments he
owned and those which he wanted to acquire.
Others containing observations, sketches and
even a sample of gold leaf demonstrate the
range of his interests and his tastes in art, music
and literature. The sciences and the polite and
mechanical arts intermingled in a still unified
world of knowledge.
In 1761 Boulton leased thirteen acres of
land at Soho in Handsworth, about two miles
from the town centre. Although able to
invest £6,000 of his own money, boosted the
following year with £5,000 from his business
partner, John Fothergill, he was taking a huge
financial gamble. The principal building of
the Soho Manufactory ran well over budget,
costing £10,000 by the time it was completed
in the mid-1760s. But Boulton was deter-
mined to raise the reputation of ‘Brum-
magem’ ware as synonymous with the cheap
and shoddy, by ensuring that outward
appearances reflected the inner product.
Designed by William Wyatt in Neo-classical
style, the Soho Manufactory served as a valu-
able promotional tool. Prints presenting its
Palladian front to the world (Fig.49) spread
Soho’s fame as a repository of taste and an
Page 559
approved source of quality goods for fashion-
able society.
The exhibition does not explore the bee-
hive within, where at any one time, depend-
ing on the economic cycle, four, six or even
eight hundred men, women and children
were employed in a warren of chambers, their
labour deployed on a medley of processes
and techniques. But some idea of the pre-
cision skills involved is gained from a pattern
book showing designs for sword hilts orna-
mented with tiny facetted steel studs, as well
as from finished examples. The wholesale
trade is represented by a group of gilt-metal
chatelaines of Rococo design in their original
wrapping paper, probably acquired as samples
by James Watt when he ran a shop selling
polite accoutrements to aspirational Glaswe-
gians. A bespoke order of 1769, for Mrs
Fontaine of Marylebone and Mrs Yeats,
comes complete with wax seal impressions of
the crests to be incorporated in servants’ livery
buttons. As Peter Jones’s essay in the catalogue
shows, Soho was a high spot on the industrial
tourism circuit, attracting a stream of lumi-
naries, not to mention various shades of
industrial spy. Presumably Boulton needed no
encouragement to ‘show every civility’ to
His Excellency Alleyne Fitzherbert, British
Ambassador to the Russian Court, as request-
ed in a letter of introduction on display, given
that diplomatic connections for Boulton, as
for Wedgwood, served as trade conduits to
Continental markets.
A section of the exhibition is devoted to
Boulton’s family life, focusing on Soho
House, newly built in 1757 and leased with
the rest of the estate. The family Bible, from
the edition printed in 1763 by Boulton’s
friend John Baskerville of Birmingham,
records births over three generations includ-
ing Matthew Robinson Boulton, who is
depicted aged three in a charming pastel by
Jean-Etienne Liotard. Most of the material on
display relates to the period after the remodel-
ling of the house in 1790 by James and Samuel
Wyatt, complete with a centralised steam
heating system, and the purchase of the free-
hold in 1794. Drawings and watercolours
made by John Phillp, who came to live with
the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e
EXHIBITIONS
the family from Cornwall in 1793 at the age of
fourteen (possibly he was Boulton’s natural
son), show the mature parkland around Soho
House and the Manufactory, featuring a her-
mitage, temple and boating lake. The klismos
chair and dainty japanned furniture by the
London maker James Newton indicate that
Boulton kept up with contemporary design
trends into the Regency period.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is a
glittering assemblage of ormolu, displayed
with more than a touch of ‘bling’ to suggest
the rich, fashionable set of people the pieces
were intended to attract. Mrs Montagu led a
chorus of admirers who paid homage to
Boulton for the exquisite taste of his orna-
ments based on the Antique. A spectacular
blue john and ormolu garniture de cheminée,
comprising a clock, candle and sphinx vases
designed by William Chambers, has been lent
from the Queen’s private sitting room at
Windsor Castle (Fig.50). The elegant pair of
blue john and ormolu ewers adorned with
satyr masks were created in 1772 for Sir Har-
bord Harbord, who wanted ‘ures such as are
proper for the gods to drink necter’. Most
impressive to this reviewer are a pair of candle
vases, the oval bodies of matt white glass
supplied from the Stourbridge glassworks of
Boulton’s friend and fellow ‘Lunatick’, James
Keir. A considerable degree of judgment and
luck must have been required to drill the glass
to secure the ormolu fittings without it shat-
tering into pieces.
Boulton was intimately involved in all
stages of design and production. The simple
forms, smooth surfaces and regular patterns
favoured by Neo-classicism were well suited
to machine production. Further economies
could be made through the division of labour:
an ormolu and white marble candle vase
on display has been dismantled into forty
different parts. Cast models of different motifs
– rams’ heads, satyrs, masks and medallions
– were re-used in different designs. The
50. King’s vase, by Boulton & Fothergill. 1770–71.
Blue john and ormolu, with tortoiseshell-veneered
base, 56.1 cm. high. (Royal Collection, Windsor
Castle; exh. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery).
• clI • august 2009 559
ER.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09
EXHIBITIONS
51. A ceiling
baffle, a vacuum
trumpet and
decorative plates
from a coin press,
by John Phillp.
1799. Coloured
drawing on paper,
48.3 by 62 cm.
(Birmingham
Museum and Art
Gallery).
less-than-perfect condition of some pieces
reveals how separate sections of ormolu were
pieced together, using rivets to attach them to
the body. But special orders and short runs
meant that Boulton & Fothergill’s ormolu
business never made a profit. Their chefs
d’œuvre, the ‘Geographical Clock’ and ‘Side-
real Clock’ (Fig.52), were designed round
movements commissioned by Boulton from
another friend and Lunar Society member,
John Whitehurst. In 1772 Boulton put them
both into the last of the three ormolu sales
he staged at Christie’s, but they failed to sell.
The ‘Sidereal Clock’ went to Russia in 1779
but returned unsold in 1787, eclipsed by
James Cox’s all-singing, all-dancing ‘Peacock
Clock’, which had been acquired by the
Empress Catherine for less than half the price
of Boulton’s chaste scientific timepiece. Now
safely in the possession of Birmingham Mus-
eum and Art Gallery, the ‘Sidereal Clock’ is
displayed for the first time since 1772 along-
side the ‘Geographical Clock’, lent from a
private collection.
Boulton’s energies do not seem to have
been drained by the ormolu business. He led
the campaign to establish an assay office in
Birmingham, a goal achieved in 1773 – it is
now the busiest in the world. The exhibition
demonstrates he was already producing high-
quality silver and plate in the 1760s, notably
the ‘three Great Solomonean Candlesticks’
commissioned by the Duke of Cumberland
for the Royal (Masonic) Lodge, another
prestige job which proved costly: nine years
later he still had to be paid. Yet, dynamic
entrepreneurship and mechanical ingenuity
sustained Boulton’s multifaceted enterprise.
In 1772, one learns, he supplies green glass
earrings as barter for Captain Cook’s second
circumnavigation of the globe. Twenty years
later he is proposing specimens of ‘Brass Cab-
inet Furniture’ be sent on Lord Macartney’s
mission to China to find out whether ‘we
could not execute any designs adapted to their
own taste in a superior & cheaper manner than
themselves’. He never resisted the opportuni-
ty for innovation. Between 1776 and 1780 he
backed an employee Francis Eginton in his
560 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
09:33 Page 560
and a half million French tokens were pro-
duced for Monneron Frères between 1791
and 1792, as well as medals featuring Rev-
olutionary themes, fraternal feelings soon
reversed by those commemorating the execu-
tions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
Patriotic British medals, the finest engraved
by Conrad Heinrich Küchler, celebrated,
among other events, the restoration of
George III’s health in 1789 and Nelson’s
victories of the Nile and Trafalgar. But the
Mint’s core business came from what is now
called quantitative easing – tokens issued to
compensate for the shortage of specie and
eventually, in 1797, the copper coinage
contract from the British government.
Boulton may have mastered the art of
making money for others but not necessarily
for himself. At the time of his death he held
thirteen partnerships and his disorganised
financial affairs have never been wholly
scheme to produce decorative ‘mechanical untangled. It seems he was highly leveraged,
paintings’ by a convoluted process involving relying on loans arranged by his London
the transfer of a coloured print to canvas, bankers, William and Charlotte Matthews.
which was then varnished to give the appear- They certainly deserve credit for keeping
ance of an oil. Even before he met James Boulton afloat; as these illuminating exhibi-
Watt, he was thinking of introducing steam tions confirm, few men have contributed
power at the Soho Manufactory, but the part- more to Britain’s industrial progress.
nership he established with him in 1775 was to
1 Catalogue: Matthew Boulton: Selling What All the
be the making of both of them. It was Boul-
ton’s energy, experience and connections as a World Desires. Edited by Shena Mason. 258 pp. incl. 404
manufacturer that pushed Watt’s steam engine col. ills. (Birmingham City Council in association with
into production. It was his knowledge of Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2009),
£40 (HB). ISBN 978–0–300–14358–4.
industrial needs that persuaded Watt to devel- 2 Catalogue: Matthew Boulton and the Art of
op the rotative engine to power factories. Making Money. Edited by Richard Clay and Sue
To do justice to that story would require Tungate. 89 pp. incl. 99 col. ills. (Brewin Books,
another exhibition. Instead, the organisers Studley, Warwickshire, for the Barber Institute
have concentrated on one application of of Fine Arts, Birmingham, 2009), £9.95. ISBN
steam power: Boulton’s Soho Mint, the first 978–1–85858–450–8.
constructed in 1787–89 and the second in
1799, incorporating technical improvements
which made the coining process quieter and
more efficient. One of Phillp’s fine technical
drawings (Fig.51) for the latter shows that
even it displayed dulce et utile – a ceiling baffle
in the form of a sun radiating rays of folded
paper and a coin press adorned with allegor-
ical plaques. The shining example of the
world’s first steam-powered mint against the
murky background of counterfeit is high-
lighted in the displays both here and in a small
exhibition Matthew Boulton and the Art of
Making Money at the Barber Institute of
Fine Arts, Birmingham (to 16th May
2010), as well as two essays in the catalogue
and a dedicated publication from the Barber.2
The quality of its output was unrivalled, every
coin being for the first time of identical
appearance, size and weight. The quantities
were colossal: nearly 600 million coins,
medals and tokens were struck by the Soho
Mint between 1787 and 1809, including six
million tokens in twenty-five designs, forty-
five different medals and hundreds of millions
of copper coins for Great Britain, Ireland and
the East India Company. Furthermore, Boul-
ton supplied mints to Russia and Denmark, as
well as presses and blanks to Philadelphia. The 52. Sidereal Clock, by Boulton & Fothergill. 1771–72.
Mint’s business with France confirms Boul- Ormolu, silvered dial, 104.1 cm. high. (Birmingham
ton’s pragmatism in matters political: seven Museum and Art Gallery).
ER.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09 09:33
Moore, Hepworth, Nicholson
Norwich and Sheffield
by FRANCES SPALDING
O N L Y T W O R E L A T I V E L Y small galleries are
needed for Moore, Hepworth, Nicholson: A Nest
of Gentle Artists at the Graves Gallery,
Sheffield (to 31st August). Yet packed into
this limited space is a major exhibition,
intelligently focused and beautifully struc-
tured around a sculptural development that
climaxes with serene examples of high Mod-
ernism. Throughout, the selection of works
provokes fresh examination of the shared
ideas and relationships between artists who,
when living in Hampstead, were described by
Herbert Read as ‘a nest of gentle artists’. This
he defined as ‘a spontaneous association of
men and women drawn together by common
sympathies, shared seriousness and some kind
of group collaboration’.
Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben
Nicholson are the three main figures, with
John Skeaping playing a significant but lesser
role. One motivation behind this exhibition,
originated by Norwich Castle Museum and
Art Gallery (where it was shown earlier in the
year), seems to be a desire to prove the signif-
icance of Norfolk, and in particular the beach
below the cliffs at Happisburgh, to the history
of Modernism in Britain. More familiar is the
emphasis on the importance of the Yorkshire
landscape for Moore and Hepworth, and the
focus on Hampstead as a crucible of inter-
national Modernism after the arrival of émigré
artists, architects and designers in the mid- to
late 1930s. But the claim for Norfolk is,
nevertheless, justified, for certain members of
Moore’s family moved to Norfolk after the
death of his father in 1922 and he himself
began spending holidays there. In this way he
discovered Happisburgh, which in 1930 he
suggested to Hepworth as a location for a
working holiday.
53. Reclining figure,
by Henry Moore.
1930. Ironstone,
11.5 by 17.5 by 3.5
cm. (Robert and
Lisa Sainsbury
Collection, Univer-
sity of East Anglia;
exh. Graves Gallery,
Sheffield).
Page 561
54. Three forms, by Barbara Hepworth. 1936. Serravezza marble, 21 by 53.2 by 34.3 cm. (Tate Collection; exh.
Graves Gallery, Sheffield).
At the time, Hepworth was married to
Skeaping who had taught her how to carve
directly in stone and wood. At Moore’s
suggestion they rented Church Farm on the
outskirts of Happisburgh, and Moore and his
wife, Irina, were invited to join them, as were
others – the painter Ivon Hitchens and
Hepworth’s friends Douglas and Mary
Jenkins. The party spent much time on the
beach where they discovered large ironstone
pebbles which proved to be ideal for carving
and polishing. Nicholas Thornton points out,
in the catalogue to this show, that a particular
feature of these pebbles is their flat, disc-like
shape.1 This encouraged inventive compres-
sion, as can be seen in the case of examples
included here. Skeaping’s Duck (cat. no.52)
has its head turned back and pressed into its
body. The thorax of Moore’s Reclining figure
(no.11; Fig.53) is necessarily tilted upright so
that the weight of the body and its rhythms
can be adequately conveyed. The astonishing
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EXHIBITIONS
completeness of this small work, from the
University of East Anglia’s Sainsbury Collec-
tion, reminds us that these small carvings, far
from being mere exercises, soon afterwards
took their place in exhibitions, seven of them
appearing in Skeaping’s and Hepworth’s joint
show at Arthur Tooth’s later that year, and
four appearing in Moore’s solo appearance at
the Leicester Galleries in 1931.
Not all the works shown in Norwich have
travelled to Sheffield. One regrettable absence
is Moore’s Woman with upraised hands (1924–25;
no.5), which must have offered a powerful
example of the early influence on Moore of
non-Western and archaic art. Nevertheless,
among the items suggesting the back-history to
this exhibition is the small, early carving Two
heads: mother and child from 1923 (no.4), in
which we find Moore rebelling against the
emphasis on modelling as taught at the Royal
College of Art. He left off before any facial fea-
tures had been indicated, the two heads emerg-
ing from the block of Serpentine stone with the
elemental simplicity of a Brancusi. Elsewhere, a
well-chosen selection of drawings, either
sculptural in feel, as in Moore’s weighty draw-
ing of his sister Mary, or deliberately pursuing
ideas for sculpture, add to the rich substrata of
correspondences which this exhibition taps.
Inevitably, one of these ideas is the piercing
of form by means of a hole. Much has been
written about the dynamism of the hole, while
arguments continue as to whether Moore or
Hepworth originated this move. Thornton
simply remarks that as holes in pebbles are a
common occurrence we might sensibly credit
Happisburgh beach as a source for this inven-
tion. In 1931 Hepworth and Moore decided to
organise a second working holiday at Happis-
burgh. By this date, the tensions in the Skeap-
ing–Hepworth marriage had led Skeaping to
ask for a divorce and he decided to stay in
London. In his place, Hepworth invited
Nicholson. When Skeaping had a change
of heart and arrived in Happisburgh, he dis-
covered that his wife had already begun an
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EXHIBITIONS
55. Still life with guitar, by Ben Nicholson. 1932. Oil on
board, 76.2 by 63.3 cm. (Leeds City Art Gallery; exh.
Graves Gallery, Sheffield).
association with Nicholson which would
eventually lead to their marriage. Skeaping
therefore drops out of the nest, at the same
time abandoning his central role in the history
of Modernism. Nicholson moves into the gap,
and begins to incise lines (Fig.55) into the
gesso often laid over the board on which he
painted. Previously it has been inferred that
the inspiration for this came from watching
carvers work, but here the suggestion is that
Nicholson’s scratched lines encouraged
Moore to incise his near-abstract sculptures
with facial profiles and other details. Certainly,
the few choice works by Nicholson make a
timely and eloquent contribution to this show.
What needs to be intuited in the exhibi-
tion’s final section is the sense of urgency and
idealism which Moore, Hepworth and
Nicholson assimilated through their associ-
ation with non-figurative artists living in Paris,
many of whom had fled totalitarian regimes in
Germany and Russia. But having been given
the opportunity to follow this transition to
purer forms, we are made especially alert to the
ways in which allusions to representational
matter still cling to some of these abstracts.
The confident geometrical simplicity of Hep-
worth’s Three forms, for instance (no.40;
Fig.54), carries within it a reminiscence of
familial relationships, such as had earlier
informed her mother-and-child carvings.
Even Nicholson’s white reliefs are multi-refer-
ential, not least through the various resonances
conveyed by the use of white. Three are
shown here. The one hanging on the wall has
a magisterial beauty and calm. But it is one of
the two smaller versions, displayed in a nearby
case and composed entirely of rectangles, that
best conveys the astonishing profundity of
feeling he attained through abstraction.
1 Exhibition guide: Moore, Hepworth, Nicholson: A Nest
of Gentle Artists in the 1930s. Introduction by Nicholas
Thornton. 11 pp. incl. 6 col. + b. & w. ills. (Norwich
Castle Museum and Art Gallery and Graves Gallery,
Sheffield, 2009), p.5.
562 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
Page 562
Polish art
Norwich
by ROBERT RADFORD
TWO CONCURRENT SHOWS at the Sainsbury
Centre for Visual Art, University of East
Anglia (to 30th August), The Art and Theatre of
Tadeusz Kantor: An Impossible Journey and Take
a Look at Me Now: Contemporary Art from
Poland, contribute to the many manifestations
that make up POLSKA! YEAR, a celebration
of Polish culture taking place throughout
Britain in 2009. In the first exhibition, we are
vividly reminded of the powerful and wide-
spread influence of Kantor during the 1970s
and 1980s. Here was a man dedicated to the
idea of ‘Café Europe’, a trans-European men-
tality, even though his objects and perform-
ances evoke at the same time specific locations
and sites of memory, which were particular to
the artist and the troubled times that his life
spanned from 1915 to 1990. Extensive loans
from the Cricoteka in Kraków help to recreate
one of the last moments in which new and
emotionally intense art forms were develop-
ing, as performance art and ‘happenings’ were
emerging as hybrids from the union of
experimental theatre, painting and sculpture.
Although the original purpose of many of the
exhibits, such as the ranks of pupils in The dead
class (Fig.56), was that they should be central
elements of a stage performance, their surviv-
ing status as sculptural imagery can scarcely be
considered as secondary. The itinerant figure
of Man with a suitcase (1967), bent double
under his burden of baggage remains a
powerful and universal metaphor. Kantor’s
world is one shared, not only with Samuel
Beckett, but also with Antoni Tàpies and
Joseph Beuys, in his affirmation of the signif-
icance of the banal, disdained ‘poor object’.
His original training was as a painter and this
aspect of his output is also reflected in the exhi-
bition. He first achieved recognition in Paris,
with works such as the black, nihilistic, tachiste
work Pacific (1957), and paintings from the
1980s are also shown here. But the theatrical-
ity of his work still operates. The visitor
57. Kolorobloki, by Nicolas Grospierre. 2006. Alumini-
um, 100 by 70 cm. (Collection of the artist; exh.
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art, Norwich).
encounters an apparently mute pile of old fold-
ing chairs which suddenly springs into cranky,
autonomous life and becomes an Annihilating
machine. Some of his pieces are ‘secreted’ in the
Sainsbury’s permanent collection so that his
amply descriptive Children in the rubbish cart is
seen disarmingly close to Degas’s Little dancer
aged 14. There is a substantial section of the
exhibition devoted to archive material from
Kraków, supplemented by other material
recording performances of his work in
Edinburgh, Cardiff and London’s Riverside
Studios in 1976, as well as his Whitechapel Art
Gallery exhibition, the same year.
The fifteen artists selected for Take a Look at
Me Now, a show that contributes to Norwich’s
season of contemporary art, CAN09, share lit-
tle with the dark, traumatic world of Kantor.
They are from the generations that look to the
new, politically unthreatening world of the
EU as their natural habitat, even though the
physical environment inherited from the
Communist years is not fully banished from
their worldview. Although it would be unre-
alistic to expect a common programme to
emerge from this heterogeneous and acciden-
tal grouping of artists, a concern with and
reaction to urban living can be discerned as a
noticeable theme. Nicolas Grospierre doc-
uments the high-rise workers’ housing blocks
(Fig.57), initiated, no doubt, with all the zeal
for collective identity that was so well served
by high Modernism. His photographs reveal
the colourful and resourceful efforts that their
subsequent owners have taken to express their
56. Children at their
desks, from The dead
class, by Tadeusz
Kantor. 1975. Mixed
media, 150 by 150 by
420 cm. (Cricoteka
Collection, Kraków;
exh. Sainsbury
Centre for Visual
Art, Norwich).
ER.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09 09:33
58. Tanagram, by Anna Molska. 2006–07. Video pro-
jection, 4 minutes, 3 seconds. (Foksal Gallery, Warsaw;
exh. Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art, Norwich).
personal independence from such an ideology.
The relentless, mechanical circuit of the
multi-storey lift of such a block is treated with
a formal, conceptual elegance in Piotr Zylins-
ki’s video. A potential sense of menace is
evoked in the depiction of buildings in Adam
Adach’s paintings. A mood of ambient tension
is also discernible in a number of pieces, most
obviously – albeit humorously – in Olaf Brzes-
ki’s distressed and battered ceramic museum
exhibits. The ‘Grimmest’ of mock fairy tales is
played out by Katarzina Kozyra in her film and
performance work Summertale. In a setting,
not unlike Józef Mehoffer’s Strange garden,
shown in Tate Britain’s recent Symbolism in
Poland and Britain exhibition, a company of
dwarfish maidservants deal gorily with the
Berlin transvestite Gloria Viagra and her
singing teacher. The legacy of Eastern Euro-
pean and Russian Constructivism finds a dis-
tant echo in the painting of Rafak Bujnowski,
based on views restrictively glimpsed through
the cracks in a Venetian blind, and in Anna
Molska’s curious video, Tanagram (Fig.58), in
which a pair of muscular young men, in
fetishist leather, arrange and rearrange section-
al furniture, to the accompanying soundtrack
of the Red Army Choir.
On this evidence contemporary Polish art
displays wit and vitality, an eagerness to
respond to the direct experience of the world,
free from any affected self-consciousness or
insipid irony.
William Blake
Paris
by ROBIN HAMLYN
THIS YEAR SAW the first-ever retrospective in
France devoted to William Blake, held at the
Petit Palais, Paris (closed 28th June).1 Until
now Blake had a very limited French audi-
ence. In 1937 sixteen works were shown at
the Bibliothèque Nationale and in 1938 eight
Blakes were included in the large exhibition
of English paintings at the Musée du Louvre,
while in 1947 the British Council organised
forty-two works for display at the Galerie
Drouin. Contributions came from André
Gide, Philippe Soupault and Jean Wahl, who
had long been interested in Blake.
Page 563
Although Blake may have been neglected
in Paris, he himself believed that his life and
work would be eternal and universal. Perhaps,
then, an unrealised ambition to visit France
has been fulfilled by this exhibition in the
afterlife. Blake told John Flaxman in October
1801 that, aware of Napoleon’s French
seizures of Italian treasures, he hoped now ‘to
see the Great Works of Art [. . .] Paris being
scarce further off than London’.2 In reality, he
never left England, but in 2006 the first work
by Blake ever to be acquired by France was
bought for the Louvre – the powerful 1805
watercolour of The Death of the Strong Wicked
Man (cat. no.159; Fig.59) from Robert Blair’s
poem ‘The Grave’.
So the French connections live on. André
Gide’s words in homage to Blake from 1947
provide the frontispiece in the catalogue
accompanying the exhibition: ‘The star,
Blake, sparkles in the remote region of the
sky . . .’. Happily, too, a few French subjects
were shown: two 1782 prints after Antoine
Watteau, Morning amusement and Evening
amusement (nos.150–51), which were hung
next to three Westminster Abbey tomb
drawings of c.1774 showing King Edward III,
a dedicated pursuer of French wars (nos.6, 7
and 8). Also included was a fine tempera
portrait of Voltaire after Jean Baptiste
Guélard, dating from Blake’s time in Sussex
between 1800 and 1803 (no.152; Fig.60).
Complementing Pierre Leyris’s invaluable
translations of the poems (1974–83) is Jean
Cortot’s telling painted diptych Elegy to
William Blake (1988–89; no.160).
The catalogue includes twenty-nine essays,
all learned and engaging, a chronology and
catalogue entries expertly handled by Cather-
ine de Bourgoing, Deputy Director of the
Musée de la Vie Romantique, Paris (although
David Fuller catalogues the five Dante
works), a brief bibliography and index.
Michael Phillips, the well-known Blake
scholar, is the exhibition’s guest curator. His
fine opening essay (pp.39–51) concisely and
the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e
EXHIBITIONS
accurately covers the artist’s life, times,
radicalism and ever-innovative printmaking.
The ensuing essay, ‘The Art of William
Blake’ (pp.65–73) by Martin Butlin, enlarges
on Blake’s art and is the perfect introduction
to the twenty-six brief, single-author essays
that follow.
Among the essays, Jon Stallworthy
(pp.101–03) discusses the significance of
metre and rhyme in Blake in ways not often
brought to the fore in Blake exhibitions.
David France (pp.200–02) explores four
different French translations of Blake’s poem
‘O Rose, thou art sick’. A magical injection to
this exercise is the reference to Benjamin
Britten’s setting of the words.
The scope of the exhibition was admirably
balanced, striking the right inquiring note
for everyone from Blake neophytes to the
cognoscenti. There were eighteen illuminat-
ed plates from ‘Innocence’ and ‘Experience’
(from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge;
Victoria University Library, Toronto;
Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the Wormsley
Library, London), including a fine impression
of ‘The Tyger’ (Fitzwilliam Museum; no.27);
‘Pity’ (no.76), one of the two large colour
plates lent by Tate with the other, ‘The Night
of Enitharmon’s Joy’ (no.79), joined by a
second state lent by the National Gallery of
Scotland, Edinburgh (no.80); ‘The Ancient of
Days’ (Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester;
no.42); seventeen plates of ‘Europe a Prophe-
cy’ (University of Glasgow; nos.43–59); the
‘Fall of Man’ (Victoria and Albert Museum,
London; no.105); and the print ‘The Lao-
coon’ (Fitzwilliam Museum; no.99).
There were also carefully arranged drawn
sketches; for example, a ‘Tiriel’ subject (Whit-
worth Art Gallery; no.12) placed next to the
finished ink-and-watercolour of the same
subject (Fitzwilliam Museum/Keynes Family
Trust; no.13). We also had the first stages in
the development of the large colour plate
‘Pity’ (nos.73–76). Two other display ‘musts’
were naturally highlighted – an 1825 ‘Job’
59. The Death of the
Strong Wicked Man,
by William Blake.
1805. Pen, black ink
and watercolour
over pencil, 20.2 by
25.5 cm. (Musée du
Louvre, Paris; exh.
Petit Palais, Paris).
• clI • august 2009 563
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EXHIBITIONS
60. Voltaire, by William Blake. c.1800–03. Pen and tempera on canvas, 41.9 by 70.6 cm. (Manchester Art Gallery;
exh. Petit Palais, Paris).
copper plate next to the relevant print and
the small woodblock engraving of the
Virgil/Thornton ‘Blighted Corn’ (British
Museum, London; nos.114 and 117).
One high point was the beautiful large
colour print of Newton of c.1795, a generous
loan, rarely seen outside the Philadelphia
Museum of Art (no.78; Fig.61). The subtle
colour printing of this work, initially sugges-
tive of oil painting, gives a hint which perhaps
raised Royal Academicians’ doubts about
Blake’s puzzling ‘painting’ methods. It is
noticeably different from the famous Tate
version of c.1804: a very faint line is seen on
Newton’s scroll; and the symbol of the trian-
gle of the Trinity into which a pair of com-
passes semicircle has been drawn on the later
scroll, shows Newton’s arrival at the material
universe. Was Blake showing hesitancy in the
first instance when confronting Newton?
Another was the Dante ‘Inferno’ Canto
Five illustration, ‘The Circle of the Lustful’
(Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery;
no.139), which demonstrates Blake’s unique
sensitivity to word and colour. Cary’s trans-
61. Newton, by William
Blake. c.1795. Colour print
and watercolour, 44.2 by
57.8 cm. (Philadelphia
Museum of Art; exh. Petit
Palais, Paris).
564 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
09:33 Page 564
lation of the ‘Divine Comedy’ inspired Blake’s
work but, almost certainly, he read Italian
quite well. The pertinent words from Canto
Five are translated as ‘black air’, ‘element
obscure’ and ‘bloody stain imbrued’ and
Blake’s knowledge of Dante inspired him to
create a powerful vision in purple, blue-black
and black – a sombre dye symbolising sin. The
work is a masterpiece.
Although the exhibition was comprehen-
sive, the absence of some highly desirable and
significant loans from the United States
because of transport costs was noticeable.
There were certainly two significant omis-
sions which would have been accessible to
collections in Great Britain. One is a copy of
the handsome engraved illustrated text from
Edward Young’s 1797 four ‘Night Thoughts’
(as opposed to the complete, important nine
‘Night Thoughts’ printed and watercolour
leaves in the British Museum). With this in
mind, two of the six manuscript leaves of
‘Vala’ (nos.60–62) might have been reduced
to make space for two 1797 pages: the crucial
importance between ‘Night Thoughts’ and
‘Vala’ would have been duly emphasised. The
other omission was Mary Wollstonecraft’s
book Original Stories from Real Life with its
six illustrations designed, drawn and engraved
by Blake in 1791; he is here seen as a fellow
radical working with a great woman.
There are several errors in the catalogue
text, two in particular: ‘John Bunyan dreams a
Dream’ (no.169) has been printed in reverse,
and the wood-engraving and printed impres-
sion of ‘Blighted Corn’ (nos.116 and 117) is
mistitled ‘blithed Corn’.
In conclusion the present reviewer feels
that a further Blake exhibition awaits. Starting
from Blake’s ‘World of Imagination [which] is
the World of Eternity’,3 enriched by the
thoughts of D.G. and W.M. Rossetti and of
A.G. Swinburne, taking on Symons’s affir-
mation that our artist was ‘the only poet who
sees all temporal things under the form of
eternity’,4 as well as Soupault’s clarity over
Blake who ‘acted as if he could see into the
future’5 and beyond – all this allows us to
think more fully about a relationship between
Blake and nineteenth-century French Sym-
bolism. It could be hugely rewarding.
1 Catalogue: William Blake (1757–1827): The Visionary
Genius of English Romanticism. By Michael Phillips and
Catherine de Bourgoing et al. 256 pp. incl. 64 col. pls.
Ville de Paris, Paris, 2009), €39 (HB). ISBN
+ 143 col. + b. & w. ills. (Musée des Beaux-Arts de la
979–2–7596–0077–9.
2 Blake to John Flaxman, 19th October 1801; see D.
Erdman, ed.: The Complete Poetry and Prose of William
Blake, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1982, p.718.
3 W. Blake: ‘Vision of the Last Judgement’ [p.69], in
ibid., p.555.
4 A. Symons: William Blake, London 1907, p.65.
5 P. Soupault: William Blake, transl. J.L. May, London
1928, p.18.
Italy in nineteenth-century art
Paris
by RICHARD WRIGLEY
THE EXHIBITIONS Voir l’Italie et mourir.
Photographie et peinture dans l’Italie du XIXe
siècle and Italiennes modèles. Hébert et les paysans
du Latium, both recently at the Musée
d’Orsay, Paris (closed 19th July), with a
concurrent display of architectural drawings
from Orsay’s collections, L’Italie des architectes
du relevé à l’invention, created a remarkable
ensemble that provided an opportunity to
reflect upon the variety of ways in which Italy
was represented across different media in the
nineteenth century.1 Ernest Hébert holds a
special place in the history of French artists as
he was the only person to hold the director-
ship of the Académie de France in Rome
twice (1867–73 and 1885–90), having pre-
viously been a pensionnaire in 1839. Italiennes
modèles, occupying a space usually dedicated
to ‘dossier’ displays, illustrated the consider-
able degree of continuity found in his work
across these three séjours. The exhibition
ER.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09 09:33
62. Fountain of the French Academy, Rome, by Camille Corot. 1826–27. Canvas, 25 by 38 cm. (Musée départemental
de l’Oise, Beauvais; exh. Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
displayed a selection of Hébert’s drawings and
paintings of Italian subjects, with a generous
sprinkling of comparative material provided
by Michallon, Hesse, Papéty (it was a pity
drawings by Hébert and Papéty after the same
model could not be juxtaposed), among
others. Hébert’s sketchbooks and the shared
journal of 1853–54 kept by Imer, Castelnau
and Hébert were on display, the latter very
usefully transcribed in the catalogue. A selec-
tion from the photographs taken in Italy by
Hébert’s wife, Gabrielle (1853–1934), during
the second directorship, provided a sense of
the practical stage-managing of the ‘Italiennes’
who became ‘modèles’, depicting them as
pausing in their mundane activities to act as
picturesque motifs; in some cases they were
asked back to the Villa Medici. Gabrielle, it
should be noted, was responsible for the
creation of the Musée Hébert in La Troche,
near Grenoble, which opened in 1934.
Further encouragement to think about the
process of representing ‘Italiennes’ was offered
in the form of objects collected by the
Héberts: a peasant dress and headdress,
augmented by an example of ciocie, the bound
and strapped footwear used by Italian
shepherds, from the Musée international de la
chaussure, Romans. The exhibition was also
supplemented by works from the Louvre, as
in the case of the dazzling La Madone des
Grâces à la Cervara (Etats-Romains) of 1853 by
Jean-François Montessuy (1804–76), a work
whose other-worldly luminosity resembled
that of Jean-Léon Gérôme’s disturbingly
hallucinatory Deux paysannes italiennes et un
enfant (1849; Musée d’Orsay, Paris). And, in
authentic ‘Orsay style’, sculpture found its
place in the form of the commanding pres-
ence of Carpeaux’s terracotta La Palombella au
‘pane’ (1861–64).
Hébert’s earlier works sometimes have an
arresting particularity, as in the self-portrait as
pifferaro (black chalk; 1850; ex-cat.), which
Page 565
elides artist and rustic Roman role model. The
later work, perhaps as early as the later 1850s,
tends to become smothered by a rather
mannered palette and sentimentalised facial
expressions. Indeed Hébert’s best-known
painting, La Malaria (the 1850 Salon livret
included the brief explanatory text: ‘Famille
italienne fuyant la contagion’), here as always
accompanied by Gautier’s comments, is a
patchwork of studio poses and gestures, with
similarities to the pretty decorative colours of
early Millet and the stylised exoticism of
Chassériau, further distanced from its Italian
referent by a faint but unmistakable echo of the
Raft of the Medusa. The sense of overview was
slightly offset by the fact that key pictures such
as Malaria, Les filles d’Alvita (1855) and Les
Cerverolles, Etats-Romains (1858) occupied
separate spaces. Indeed, the first of these was to
be found in Voir l’Italie et mourir, on the other
side of Orsay’s central avenue.
Rather in the manner of film credits, Voir
l’Italie et mourir (as commemorated in the
book-style catalogue) is billed as ‘sur une idée
d’Ulrich Pohlmann et de Guy Cogeval’. In his
preface Cogeval explains that the exhibition is
‘dedicated’ to ‘cette Italie âpre et insaisissable’
which, in the form of a chaotic southern
Italian popular religious procession, is the
mise-en-scène for the reconciliation of a couple
played by George Sanders and Ingrid
Bergman in Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy (1953).
The couple’s troubled but ultimately restored
relations personify the ‘amorous and fraught’
interaction between painting and photogra-
phy as they engaged in the ‘delicate task’ of
creating an image of Italy ‘as romantic as
elegiac, as archaeological as sociological’. Yet
the preface has the playfully paradoxical title
‘Aus Italien’, alluding to Richard Strauss’s
symphonic fantasy, which is velouté and seduc-
tive, rather than indigestible and elusive. The
rapprochement evoked here in the way
modern cinema reinvented the old subject of
the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e
EXHIBITIONS
the Italian journey also applies to the multi-
farious dialogue between painting and pho-
tography from the latter’s earliest days. It is,
indeed, striking that this new technology was
almost immediately applied to the compelling
and venerable sites of Italy, inheriting from
paintings, drawings and prints the task of
reproducing and celebrating the well-estab-
lished repertory of monuments and views.
The daguerreotypes shown here – including a
generous selection from the Alexander Ellis
series conserved in Bradford’s National Media
Museum – had a compelling presence far in
excess of their modest proportions. Whether
the beauty and visual drama of the resulting
images should be explained by the tremen-
dously photogenic character of the subjects,
or because those making the photographs
were exceptionally gifted at matching intend-
ed image to technical resources, is a moot
point. One of the strengths of the exhibition
was the fact that it was able to draw on private
collections of nineteenth-century photo-
graphs of Italy whose breadth and depth rivals
those of most public collections (Dietmar
Siegert, W. Bruce and Delanay Lundberg and
an anonymous collection in Kalamata).2
The exhibition contained a few moments
of comparative convergence; images of Tivoli
by Carl Blechen (1832) and Robert Macpher-
son (1854), for example, or Blechen and
Caneva’s views of the Campagna. The hand
of Ulrich Pohlmann was evident here,
reminding one of his 2004 Munich show Ein
neue Kunst? Eine andere Natur! Fotografie und
Malerei im 19. Jahrhundert (2004). This review-
er could not decide how much this added to
our viewing of the respective images, each
arresting in different ways. There were also
well-chosen neighbours: Bonnat’s Interior of
the Sistine Chapel (1875–80) and Alma Tade-
ma’s Interior of the Church of S. Clemente, Rome
(1863) seemed like two scenes from a Henry
James novel, but nonetheless were fascinating
63. Tivoli, the Aniene cascade, by Giacomo Caneva.
c.1850. Photographic print, 24.5 by 18.9 cm. (Musée
d’Orsay, Paris).
• clI • august 2009 565
ER.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09 09:33
EXHIBITIONS
to observe together because of their specific
pictorial qualities. Another mode of visual
comparison is at work in the catalogue, where
images are equalised (or differentiated) by the
homogenising format of reproduction.
The exhibition’s scope extended from
pre-photographic paintings – sketches
which alternated between the deceptively
poetic (Cogniet, Corot; Fig.62) or intensely
prosaic (Valenciennes, Jones); early photo-
graphy, notably the ‘Roman school’ (prim-
arily Anderson, Macpherson, Normand,
Flachéron, Caneva; Fig.63); tourist itineraries;
archaeological imagery; the Risorgimento;
Italian peasants as subjects, and their photo-
graphic manipulation; ending with lugubrious
Germanic fin-de-siècle Symbolist pictorialism.
Most impressive were the first two sections,
the introductory room of painted sketches and
the larger section surveying early photo-
graphy. Each contained enough works capa-
ble of effortlessly holding one’s attention for
lengthy periods, so that awareness of, or con-
cern for, any prevailing curatorial framework,
whatever its merits, receded from view. For
example, it was hard to tell if Corot’s so-called
Promenade de Poussin looked even more limpid
and meticulously resolved because of the prior
experience of viewing silvery and luminous
photographs in the adjacent room.
In both exhibitions the relationship
between catalogue and exhibits was, alas, not
straightforward. If it matters that exhibitions
have some form of proper, reliable record,
which can serve as a portable source of infor-
mation and receptacle for on-the-spot notes,
then a simple handlist would have done the
trick. It is also a shame there was no attempt
to track the usage of the phrase ‘See Italy and
die’ adopted for the clever but confusing title,
beyond the indirect source in Goethe’s Italian
Journey (3rd March 1787), where he quotes
the self-congratulatory Neapolitan saying:
‘vedi Napoli e poi muori’. Indeed, apart from
some photographs of Pompeian victims and
Capuchin catacombs in Palermo, there was
very little death on view – a theme which
could have been interestingly explored. More
generally, only Michael F. Zimmermann’s
essay on banditry and social problems in the
mezzogiorno genuinely expanded the horizons
of historical context beyond the cultural pre-
occupations of the Grand Tourists and their
photographically active successors.
1 Italiennes modèles was seen last year at the Musée
Hébert, La Tronche. Catalogues: Voir l’Italie et mourir.
Photographie et peinture dans l’Italie du XIXe siècle.
By Ulrich Pohlmann and Guy Cogeval et al. 384 pp.
2009), €39. ISBN 978–2–354333–03–2; Italiennes mod-
incl. 248 col. + b. & w. ills. (Skira Flammarion, Paris,
èles. Hébert et les paysans du Latium. Unpaginated with
Tronche and Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 2009), €23. ISBN
numerous col. + b. & w. ills. (Musée Hérbert la
978–2–35567–009–1.
2 See D. Ritter: exh. cat. Rom 1846–1870: James Ander-
son und die Maler-Fotografen, Sammlung Siegert, Munich
(Neue Pinakothek) 2005; and W. Bruce Lundberg and
J.A. Pinto, eds.: Steps off the beaten path: nineteenth-century
photographs of Rome and its environs. Images from the
collection of Delaney and W. Bruce Lundberg, Milan 2007.
566 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
Page 566
Early French altarpieces
Paris
by JUSTIN E.A. KROESEN
THE EXHIBITION Les premiers retables: Une Mise
en Scène du Sacré, at the Musée du Louvre,
Paris (closed 6th July), filled an important
lacuna in the study of medieval altarpieces.
While such works in Scandinavia, Germany,
Italy and Spain have been charted reasonably
well, a systematic survey of retables in France
– a country which in many ways played a key
role in the development of the genre – was
lacking. Pierre-Yves Le Pogam and Christine
Vivet-Peclet have finally addressed this topic
in a pioneering exhibition accompanied by a
richly illustrated catalogue.1 Despite the com-
plexity of the subject-matter, lack of research
and the long history of destruction of French
altarpieces in which most key pieces have
vanished and which has left many others in a
battered or fragmentary state, their endeavour
was richly rewarding. Moreover, the number
of visitors in the three small rooms in the
Richelieu wing showed that such scholarly
exhibitions appeal to a considerable audience.
The exhibition and the catalogue’s subtitle,
‘staging the sacred’, suggests a close connec-
tion between the ritual performed on and
around the altar and the images on the altar-
pieces. According to the curators, the altar-
piece acted as a scenic wall in front of which
the central liturgical rites were performed, and
whose figured or narrative decoration reflect-
ed and amplified the significance of these rites
(p.18). The catalogue’s introduction empha-
sises the complexity of the subject-matter: it is
impossible to exhibit the earliest altarpieces
since none survives. Likewise, the enormous
transformation which the altarpiece under-
went during the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries – not only in terms of the number
produced, but also in respect to its compo-
sition – also remains largely unexplained. The
64. Six apostles. Burgundy, second quarter of the fourteenth century. Polychromed limestone, 62.5 by 106 by 8.6
cm. (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; exh. Musée du Louvre, Paris).
catalogue gives a somewhat haphazard outline
of the correlations between the evolution of
altarpieces and changes in liturgy, including
the definitive establishment of the celebration
of the Mass ad orientem (with the priest’s back
turned towards the people, before the end of
the millennium) and the placement of images
and reliquaries on the altar. It would have
been greatly helpful to provide the non-spe-
cialist visitor with photographs and drawings
showing how altarpieces were placed and
how altars and altarpieces were connected.
How were altars arranged in churches and
chapels and what was behind the altarpieces
(architecture, paintings, stained glass)?
The fifty-one exhibited pieces primarily
emphasised the complexity of the subject. A
wide variety of works were shown, including
panels originally placed on or behind the
altars, sculptures in the round and so-called
‘tabernacle’ or ‘baldachin’ altarpieces. The
objects varied from perfectly preserved exam-
ples to isolated figures and fragments of which
the origins were not always clear. There were
altar stipes (supports for the mensa), loose
free-standing sculptures, altar frontals, ivory
diptychs and, of course, a range of retables of
different sizes and compositions in various
materials. The curators discerned two ‘fam-
ilies’ of altarpiece; the ‘tabernacle altarpieces’
and the ‘altarpieces of an oblong rectangular
shape’. This last type, sculpted in stone, can be
regarded as the typical French medieval
altarpiece and constituted the core of the
exhibition. One of the central objects in the
show was the altarpiece from Carrières-Saint-
Denis of c.1150 (cat. no.3; Fig.65), one of the
earliest completely preserved examples, either
in France or elsewhere. The mature, com-
posed character of this piece was striking: as
the catalogue observed, ‘the retables from the
twelfth century do not at all present them-
selves as the primitive stammerings of an
embryonic genre, but already offer a wide
range of solutions, corresponding to the com-
plexity of their models’ (p.28). Subsequently,
ER.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09 09:33
the exhibition traced the most important
developments in the thirteenth century – with
altarpieces resembling figured friezes that
were clearly inspired by architectural sculp-
ture (see p.51) – and the fourteenth, when
many were subdivided into compartments
following architectural models.
Around this core were shown a wide-rang-
ing spectrum of liturgical and iconographical
accessories for medieval altars. This provoked
a number of questions which were unan-
swered by the objects themselves or the
accompanying texts. How were round
sculptures, often called ‘cult images’, related to
the altar stipes? Should we imagine that the
wooden Romanesque Virgin and Child from
the Auvergne (no.2) was originally placed
under a wooden or stone canopy, or did she sit
directly on the mensa? Was this type of altar
decoration restricted to side altars or was it also
employed on high altars in medieval churches?
What is the relationship between relic trip-
tychs such as the silver-gilt reliquary altar of
the True Cross from Floreffe (c.1250; no.10)
and stone retables, given that this type of
winged triptych was barely established in
painted altarpieces at that date? To what extent
was the altar frontal (not forgetting embroi-
dered frontals) maintained alongside the
retable and is it true that their iconographic
complexity diminished as the altarpiece
became more prominent? Apart from formal
and stylistic similarities, what was the relation-
ship between retables and ivory diptychs?
How much evidence is there to show that
these small objects were also placed at the back
of the altar table? The catalogue’s conclusion
that the retable served to ‘magnify the central
place of the cult by means of images and also,
often, by the adoption of complex and con-
trived narratives’ is hardly satisfying.
The battered condition of many pieces,
with figures defaced and noses hewn off, was
striking; only fragments remain of some reta-
bles (nos.4, 13, 18–26, 28–33, 41–42 and 44)
and they were sometimes reconstructed as a
puzzle (nos.17 and 36). One cannot help but
wonder how many great works of art
vanished without trace during one of the
many fateful phases in France’s long ‘histoire du
Page 567
vandalisme’, which affected practically all parts
of the country. Even the best preserved exam-
ples have survived without the context for
which they were made, and questions about
their original environment are frequently
raised: how were these pieces connected to
the altar to which they once belonged? In a
number of cases, such as the Crucifixion with
scenes from the life of St Nicholas from Saint-Leu
d’Esserent (no.43), roughly hewn sides and
backs of retables show that these were not
placed on the mensa, but rather built into the
wall behind it. In some other cases, it was
unclear exactly why the curators categorised
these pieces as retables at all. Thus, the rectan-
gular stone block with The Adoration of the
Magi, King Herod and an Innocent from Briollay
(no.5) has been labelled a ‘retable(?)’, leaving
unclear how we should imagine this heavy,
low, deep-cut stone block served as an altar-
piece. The hypothetical reconstruction of
nine sculptures from Burgundy and Franche
Comté in the form of a retable (no.48) was
mainly based on stylistic comparisons and
provides few answers as to the structural char-
acter of the altarpiece to which they once
belonged – if at all.
Anachronistically, the curators chose to
focus on the territory of the present-day
French Republic – something to which they
explicitly draw attention (p.14). This
ahistorical approach was reflected in the het-
erogeneity of the pieces. Thus, the painted
frontal and unique wooden baldachin-altar-
piece from Angoustrine (nos.8 and 9) are fully
in keeping with the rich collection of
Romanesque painted wooden objects in the
National Art Museum of Catalonia in
Barcelona. Both pieces originated around the
mid-thirteenth century in the Pyrenaic
Cerdagne region, which was under the Cata-
lan–Aragonese crown from the ninth until
the mid-seventeenth century.2 The painted
altarpiece of The Crucifixion, Trinity with the
Last Communion and Martyrdom of St Denis
(c.1416; no.51) ascribed to Henri Bellechose,
was painted in the Duchy of Burgundy,
which deliberately reacted against the French
kingdom, both politically and artistically, by
allying itself with the Low Countries. The
the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e
EXHIBITIONS
65. The Annunciation; Virgin and
Child in Majesty; Baptism of Christ.
Ile-de-France, mid-twelfth century.
Polychromed limestone, 90.6 by 184
by 19.5 cm. (Musée du Louvre,
Paris).
attention paid to the border regions of
Burgundy, Languedoc and Lorraine arouses
curiosity about relationships with other
regions just outside modern France, including
Spanish Catalonia, the German Rhineland
and England.3 Some altarpieces even seem to
have affinities with Swedish ones: the four-
teenth-century carved retables of Tofta and
Skattunge may be described as wooden trans-
lations of a type of stone retable found in Bur-
gundy and the Champagne region (nos.35 and
37; Fig.64).
In spite of these remarks, the exhibition
provided a very rich and useful survey of the
diverse forms, styles, materials, types and
imagery employed in French altarpieces
during the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. Essays by Pierre-Yves Le Pogam
effectively trace the evolution of altarpieces
during the period under scrutiny. The last
section of the catalogue, entitled ‘Corpus des
retables français sculptés (XIIe – début du
XVe siècle)’ and compiled by Christine
Vivet-Peclet, is of enormous interest. It pro-
vides a corpus of wholly or partly preserved
altarpieces scattered throughout France, from
the great abbey-church of Saint-Denis to
remote country churches deep in the heart of
the Massif Central. Although this survey
makes us curious about retables made after
1420 (a terminus which unfortunately
excludes all stone retables in Brittany, for
example), it will be of inestimable value in the
future; it also shows how much research still
remains to be done. For these future projects,
the exhibition and catalogue will provide an
indispensable source of inspiration.
1 Catalogue: Les premiers retables (XIIe – début du XVe
siècle). Une Mise en Scène du Sacré. By Pierre-Yves Le
col. ills. (Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2009), €38. ISBN
Pogam and Christine Vivet-Peclet. 280 pp. incl. 268
978–2–35031–238–5.
2 How both objects were related remains unclear, but
judging from their divergent sizes, it is hardly possible
that frontal and retable belong together.
3 In Catalonia, unlike in England, the stock of stone
retables is much larger than in France, with sixty pieces
wholly or largely preserved. In terms of material and
typology, these fixed stone retables closely correspond
to those at the core of the Louvre exhibition.
• clI • august 2009 567
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EXHIBITIONS

Valadon – Utrillo
Paris
by MERLIN JAMES

M A U R I C E U T R I L L O I S the third classic painter

of the Ecole de Paris (after Soutine and
Rouault) to be given an airing at the
Pinacothèque de Paris (to 15th Septem-
ber). ‘Airing’ is perhaps not the word,
however. The gallery – a windowless warren
behind the Madeleine – goes in for dark,
dramatic presentations, with spot-lit works in
niches and vitrines, or on richly pan-toned
walls. This is particularly unfortunate for the
popular (or once-popular) masters of Mont-
parnasse and Montmartre, who have long
suffered from associations with bourgeois
taste and the framing and taming of bohemi-
anism by the market. Utrillo, more than any,
needs a fresh look. The catalogue to the
Pinacothèque’s Soutine exhibition1 may have
exaggerated that artist’s neglect (and disre- 66. Place de l’église à Montmagny, by Maurice Utrillo. c.1907. Canvas, 54.7 by 81.5 cm. (Private collection; exh.
garded some recent scholarship); but Utrillo Pinacothèque de Paris).
has for decades been truly taboo to European
and American curators and art historians different points, the architecture and topogra- paintings, quite distinct from his streetscapes,
alike. The present show, Valadon – Utrillo, phy varied restlessly, high and low viewpoints often more monochrome, bleached or win-
(which is shared with work by Utrillo’s experimented with, pictorial space and try. Sometimes they exude stony gravitas and
mother Suzanne Valadon) whatever its faults, structure put through a range of mutations. sometimes they conjure poignancy from the
gathers over sixty of Utrillo’s pre-1920 Light and mood are adjusted, with colour papery origami of their facets. A few of his
paintings. The catalogue2 reasserts the usual schemes playing subtle greys, whites and earth rural scenes are here also, such as the haunting
verdict of a wholesale decline after the First hues against the stronger chromatic chords of Moulin de Sannois (1912; no.50), and some of
World War, and a very different exhibition shutters and shop fronts. A common facile his more village-like evocations of sheds,
would be required to qualify that judgment. criticism of Utrillo – as of Soutine and fences and yards on the Butte of Montmartre,
Anyway, there are enough strong, typical Rouault (and indeed Modigliani, another such as the ineffably poetic Moulin de la Galette
paintings here to allow a fair reconsideration hero for the present curator)3 – is that he is (1914–16; no.81). He did occasionally escape
of Utrillo’s stature. formulaic. In fact, like all of these, he can play from Paris, and made some superb works on
Early on, a work such as Place de l’église à infinite and strenuous variations on a theme. the coast. There are few better things in the
Montmagny (cat. no.21; Fig.66) demonstrates And he has more than one theme. This exhibition than La chapelle de Roscoff (no.32;
how quickly, from Impressionist experiments exhibition displays several of his church Fig.67) borrowed from Manchester – a type of
just a year or two earlier, Utrillo crystallised
his unique compound of old-town imagery,
strong pictorial structure and distressed but
delicate surface. Sky or ground can flip back
and forth spatially, now dropping into
illusionistic depth, now jumping up onto the
literal picture plane. Receding wall planes and
oblique façades simultaneously tessellate as
two-dimensional pattern. The diminution of
buildings and objects in recessive space, and
the converging of perspectival lines, can
suddenly read as compression or contraction
within the skin of the painting itself. The
compositional vortex around a vanishing
point is used time and again to signify (and
induce in the viewer) an intensification of
consciousness: just where the eye and mind
expect to lose purchase on the scene in a
smooth fade out, they are thrown back to an
awareness of the physical picture itself.
Related effects occur where segments of a
view are framed between buildings or tree
trunks and seem to ‘fill in’ the area given to
them; or when architecture or sky seen
through a latticework of branches and foliage
seems to hang suspended in the space of the
tree itself. Such devices are deployed with rich
diversity from painting to painting, with the 67. La chapelle de Roscoff, by Maurice Utrillo. c.1911. Canvas, 62 by 81.5 cm. (Manchester City Galleries; exh.
perspectival centrifuge placed in radically Pinacothèque de Paris).

568 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine

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Utrillo surely known to L.S. Lowry, whose
own work parallels his French contemporary’s
across a similar range of motifs.4
It is a pity Suzanne Valadon shares a dou-
ble-bill with her son in this exhibition.
Admittedly her nude drawings, emulating the
Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Sym-
bolist artists for whom she had modelled, can
be strong and touching. Close to Maillol’s or
Renoir’s draughtsmanship, she avoids their
tendency to generalise. On canvas, however,
her work is undistinguished, a hodgepodge of
modern-art tropes and modes from Matisse,
Gauguin, Derain, Manet or Vuillard.
Happily Valadon’s work is generally not
intermixed with Utrillo’s in the hang. Where
it is, the benefit is only in pointing up his
infinitely greater achievement. He too
occupies territory opened up by Impression-
ism and Post-Impressionism; but like others of
the best Ecole de Paris artists he finds there,
and explores, all kinds of potentials for
painting – ones that few would exploit again
once paths to abstraction (largely via Cubism
and its allied movements) came to be seen as
the key project of late Modernism.5
The dynamic simultaneity of, or alter-
nation between, literal and illusionistic, rep-
resentational and abstract, underpins much of
Utrillo’s appeal. Whitewashed buildings,
peeling and abraded walls, roughly rendered
façades, even heavy skies and greasy streets,
all take turns stepping forward to become
synonymous with the painted canvas itself.
The rectangles of windows, shutters and
doors can function as patches on, or openings
into, the picture plane, like the flaps on an
Advent calendar. Trees read primarily as
occasions for dragged lines and stippled or
dabbed areas of brushwork against more solid
expanses. Scumbled and knifed layers, often
over dry underpainting, create a micro-dazzle
of amazing complexity and sophistication.
(Enlarged details in the catalogue reveal this
brilliantly for Utrillo; equally they expose
Valadon’s insensitivity.) Utrillo can anticipate
the interlocking slabs of a Poliakoff abstract
(Rue Cortot à Montmartre; 1912; no.33; Fig.68)
or even seem to chime with the geometry of
Mondrian or Malevich (Place du Tertre à
Montmartre; 1912; no.31). But it is the dialec-
tic of surface and scene, pattern and picture,
material and meaning, that he seeks to keep in
balance. Repeatedly, as Utrillo’s painting
presents us with the world, that world recip-
rocally presents us with painting, with its own
paintedness.
The point of all this in Utrillo is not merely
to do with Modernist pieties about art’s self-
referentiality or the art work’s aesthetic auton-
omy. In each painting the dynamic equilibrium
of substance and significance works metaphor-
ically, even psychologically, to simulate (and
perhaps stimulate) moments of compound
consciousness when we are not just deeply
aware of the world, but somehow aware of
ourselves being so aware. As we shift from
seeing a door, window, gable-end or tree in
Utrillo’s painting to seeing Utrillo’s painting of
the door, window, gable-end or tree, the effect
Page 569
68. Rue Cortot à Montmartre, by Maurice Utrillo.
c.1912. Canvas, 81 by 65 cm. (Private collection; exh.
Pinacothèque de Paris).
replicates that experience we might have ‘in
the real world’ of shifting from simple obser-
vation (whether idle or absorbed) to a more
conscious, and self-conscious, appreciation.
Utrillo’s painting, then, promotes an
enriched apprehension of reality, and the
implacable neutrality of his subject-matter is
interesting in this regard. He chooses empty
streets and commonplace buildings, all the
more startlingly to orchestrate his moments of
revelation and awakening. Similarly he does
not often confront us with singular, self-
contained entities (Roscoff chapel is excep-
tional) that might seem apt talismans for
contemplation. Instead he creates roads and
paths and perspectives deep into the picture
space, sucking us in and, by implication,
extending beyond and behind us, including us
as it includes the little half-hidden figures that
staff his scenes. Again, the effect is all the more
bracing when we are abruptly propelled back
out of the vortex by the physicality of surface,
the teeming artifice of facture and the com-
pelling syncopation of his overall design.
This basic effect takes on various flavours
or implications from picture to picture.
Colour, light, the associations of the buildings
shown, even the weather conditions depicted
– all can influence whether we experience
the moment of compound consciousness
as exhilaration, serenity, yearning, unease
or alienation. The obsessiveness and semi-
naivety of Utrillo’s handling also brings an
underlying connotation of the therapeutic,
perhaps distilling beauty from pain or depres-
sion. Everywhere segments of his works
separate themselves into arenas of minia-
turised Abstract Expressionism. In general a
simple celebration of the quaintness of old
quarters seems the least of his concerns, and
this distinguishes him from a host of artists
with similar subjects and syntax. At the same
time local and particular observation (or tran-
scription from postcard photographs), and
lively play with depictive means and conven-
the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e
EXHIBITIONS
tions, saves him from the empty parading of
emotion into which Vlaminck or Bernard
Buffet, tended to lapse.
Much remains to be said about, and for,
Utrillo, not least in the light of the emotional
ambivalence, or apparent neutrality, of much
postmodern painting and photography. It will
be a shame if this exhibition is not followed by
others.
1
See M. Restellini et al.: exh. cat. Soutine, Paris
(Pinacothèque de Paris) 2007.
2 Catalogue: Valadon – Utrillo. Au tournant du siècle à
Montmartre – de l’impressionisme à l’Ecole de Paris. By
Marc Restellini, with contributions by Jean-Pierre
Valex, Sophie Krebs, Jacqueline Munck and Jean Fab-
de Paris, Paris, 2009), €45. ISBN 978–2–358–67001–2.
ris. 389 pp. incl. 210 col. + b. & w. ills. (Pinacothèque
3 Marc Restellini staged the Modigliani retrospective
in 2002–03 at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, and
Modigliani, Soutine, Utrillo e i pittori di Zborowski at the
Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, in 1994–95; see also his Le
silence eternal: Modigliani – Hébuterne 1916–1919, Paris
2008.
4 La chapelle de Roscoff did not enter Manchester’s
public collections until 1975, but his Church at Anet was
there from 1935. Lowry was undoubtedly well aware of
Utrillo.
5 Achim Hochdörfer has recently proposed the notion
of the ‘hidden reserve’ in painting, an area of achieve-
ment and potential, in particular an ‘exploration of
gesture, semiotisation, and the dialect between literal-
ness and transcendence’ that is eclipsed by subsequent
dominant agendas but remains latent for rediscovery.
His focus is on only relatively neglected tendencies of
the 1950s and 1960s, but the principal is in fact recurrent
through art history; see A. Hochdörfer: ‘A Hidden
Reserve’, Artforum 47 (February 2009), pp.152–59.
John Heartfield
Berlin
by MICHAEL WHITE
JOHN HEARTFIELD WAS BORN Helmut
Herzfelde in Berlin in 1891 and died in East
Berlin in 1968. The exhibition John Heartfield:
Zeitausschnitte. Fotomontagen 1918–1938 at the
Berlinische Galerie (to 31st August) focuses
on the period running from his involvement
with the Berlin Dada group at the end of the
First World War to his flight from Prague to
London in 1938. It was during this time that
Heartfield was most active as the designer of
book and magazine covers for left-wing
publications using the photomontage tech-
niques he had first experimented with in Dada
journals. The exhibition and its accom-
panying catalogue steer clear of the vexed
problem of who invented photomontage but
do present Heartfield as the outstanding figure
in this field, ‘the most influential designer of
Dada Berlin’, as the wall text has it.1
The familiarity visitors will have with many
of Heartfield’s much reproduced photomon-
tages, such as his satirical images of Hitler
(Fig.69), belies the complexity of their inter-
pretation, especially in Berlin. The last major
Heartfield exhibition to have taken place in
• clI • august 2009 569
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EXHIBITIONS
Berlin was in 1991, shortly after German
reunification. This marked the beginning of a
substantial reappraisal which the current exhi-
bition takes much further. Having been treat-
ed initially with huge suspicion by the East
German authorities on his return in 1950 and
even denied membership of the SED (Sozial-
istische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), Heartfield
was later rehabilitated and his photomontage
work held up us a shining example of Com-
munist agitation. Heartfield exhibitions were
sent all around the world in the 1960s, includ-
ing Britain in 1969, and he became enshrined
in accounts of historical avant-gardism.
Heartfield’s brother, the writer and publish-
er Wieland Herzfelde, who facilitated his
return to East Germany, became his mouth-
piece. On his transformation from Helmut
Herzfelde to John Heartfield during the First
World War, the artist had destroyed his
juvenilia. His later successive flights from
Nazism led to the loss of a very large amount
of his pre-War output. There remains a great
deal about Heartfield of which we know little,
and he neither wrote nor spoke about his work
to any extent. During the Cold War,
Herzfelde was therefore able to control the
presentation of his brother’s work almost
entirely. He frequently reproduced pho-
tomontages with alternative texts which he
invented, sometimes confusing their original
date and context. Also of significance was his
attempt to draw connections between Dada
and the covers for the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung
69. Adolf der Übermensch,
by John Heartfield. AIZ
29, 1932. Photomontage,
38 by 27 cm. (Akademie
der Künste, Berlin Kunst-
sammlung/Heartfield
Community of Heirs;
exh. Berlinische Galerie,
Berlin).
570 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
Page 570
(Workers’ Illustrated Press) made during the
1930s. Dada was a potential embarrassment,
especially during the years when it was being
linked elsewhere in the world to such decid-
edly non-Communist practices as Pop art.
This exhibition recovers Heartfield from his
brother’s shadow by concentrating on him as
an artist. It begins with a short section on
Dada, but what we are invited to consider is
less its politics than its primary visual charac-
teristics. The attention paid in the first
montages Heartfield made with George Grosz
to the integration of text and image, scale,
juxtaposition and indeed the whole question
of intelligibility can be found everywhere else
in the show. What changes is the number of
elements. Where the Dada photomontages
have cascades of small cuttings, the later works
settle on a few significant elements. It is strik-
ing also to see in work from the end of the First
World War to the 1930s the continuity in
motifs of extreme violence, bodily dismem-
berment and disfiguration. When the political
glasses are removed for a moment, the mor-
bidity of Heartfield’s imagery becomes highly
apparent and could easily be considered in the
context of late Expressionism.
A key image in resituating Heartfield is a
self-portrait published in AIZ in 1929
(Fig.70), singled out in the catalogue for
particular analysis by Sabine Kriebel.2 Under
the headline ‘Use photography as a weapon!’
it shows Heartfield with scissors in hand
decapitating the chief of the Berlin police
70. John Heartfield mit Polizeipräsident Zörgiebel, by John
Heartfield. Original montage for ‘Benuetze Foto als
Waffe!’. AIZ 37, 1929. Photomontage, 28 by 21.1 cm.
(Akademie der Künste, Berlin Kunstsammlung/
Heartfield Community of Heirs; exh. Berlinische
Galerie, Berlin).
who had a few months before used violent
force to suppress Communist May Day
marches. According to Kriebel, this event
marked a turning point in the ambition of
political parties to use the popular press for
agitational and propaganda purposes, provid-
ing Heartfield with the opportunity to reach
an audience with his photomontages that he
did not have before. Heartfield responded
with an image which not only presents him as
an artist in a fascinating way – the scissors
replacing the brush as his tool – but also shows
a fantasy of revenge and power. It might thus
be taken as the origin of the Heartfield who is
best known to us, the strident propagandist.
On the other hand, the exhibition makes a
clear distinction between the press material in
the show and the photomontages made for
them. Not only are the latter kept quite
separate from the former, the frames are
colour coded: plain wood for printed matter,
grey for ‘original montages’. In a complex
manoeuvre, the preparatory works, in which
the violent scissor cuts are most obvious, are
considered closer to the true Heartfield, the
artist, than the seamless, finished products. A
vitrine contains a selection of cut-out photo-
graphs from Heartfield’s collection, the source
materials for his montages. Intriguingly one
envelope has bundles of bayoneted rifles
spilling out of it, photographs of weapons
from which to make photographs as weapons.
Along with violence, notably recurrent in
the exhibition is the theme of the return of the
past. While he consistently celebrated the
Soviet Union as the future (although he chose
to flee West rather than East in 1938), Heart-
field perceived Nazism as a revisitation of
imperial Germany. Skeletons and ghosts
haunt the photomontages throughout the
show. There is a degree of irony in holding
ER.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09 09:33
back to the very end of the exhibition the
original montage for Auferstehung (Resurrec-
tion) of 1932, which shows Hitler with
figures of the old German military establish-
ment in the Dorotheen-städtischen cemetery.
Reserved for Berlin’s most honoured citizens,
as the East Germans considered Heartfield by
his death, this is the graveyard where he lies
buried today. Again, with deepest irony, on
the opening day of the exhibition the front
pages of several German newspapers carried
images of Rosa Luxemburg, whose own
body, it appears, may not be residing in her
much visited grave but mutilated in the base-
ment of Berlin’s Charité hospital. Just a few
days before her murder in 1919, she had
presented Heartfield with his Communist
party membership. This history is still very
much alive here and, while the exhibition
persuasively makes the argument for Heart-
field’s artistic credentials, a final reckoning
with his politics still awaits.
1 Catalogue: John Heartfield: Zeitausschnitte. Fotomonta-
gen 1918–1938. Edited by Freya Mülhaupt, with essays by
Thomas Friedrich, Sabine Kriebel, Roland März, Freya
Mülhaupt, An Paenhuysen, Rosa von der Schulenberg,
Andrés Mario Zervignón and Peter Zimmermann. 175
€35. ISBN 978–3–77572–43–26. George Grosz and
pp. incl. 186 ills. (Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, 2009),
Raoul Hausmann both made claims for the origination
of photomontage in collaboration with John Heartfield
and Hannah Höch respectively.
2 S. Kriebel: ‘John Heartfields Selbstporträt von 1929’,
in ibid., pp.64–73.
‘Visual Encounters’
Basel
by SILVIA LORETI
T H E C AP T I V A T I N G E X H I B I T I O N Visual Encoun-
ters: Africa, Oceania, and Modern Art at the
Beyeler Foundation, Basel (closed 28th
June), restaged the controversial topic of
parallels between modern and so-called
‘primitive’ art.1 Across fourteen rooms
African and Oceanic sculpture surrounded
twentieth-century works (mostly paintings),
drawn from the Beyeler’s own collection and
augmented by important loans from Swiss and
German museums. The principle of a loosely
chronological order was demonstrated in the
decision to devote the first rooms to Africa
and the final ones to Oceania, reflecting the
shifting taste for the art of the two continents
among Western artists and collectors.
The result was a series of high-impact
tableaux vivants in which modern and ‘prim-
itive’ pieces stood next to each other in
perceptive contrasts, without necessarily
interacting but nevertheless recreating the
sense of surprise produced by avant-garde art
and non-European objects. This was the case,
for instance, with the odd coupling of two
Korewori crocodiles from Papua New
Guinea and Monet’s Nymphéas triptych of
Page 571
1917–21 (Fig.71). Presented suggestively as if
they floated beneath the surface of Monet’s
pond, the elaborately carved crocodiles also
emphasised the decorative roughness of the
painting’s surface.
The exhibition reversed the ratio of modern
Western and ‘primitive’ works in the Beyeler
collection in order to convey the visual impact
of both in the spirit of its founder, Ernst Beyel-
er, who had initially intended to assemble a
comprehensive collection of non-European
art, but narrowed this to a careful selection of
African (nine) and Oceanic (sixteen) objects
to juxtapose with his Cubist and Surrealist
holdings.2 The date at which Beyeler began to
collect African and Oceanic works, we are
told, ‘remains unclear’, although acquisitions
were increased in the wake of William
Rubin’s 1984 exhibition ‘Primitivism’ in 20th
Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York.3 It was in relation to Rubin’s
hugely controversial show that some of the
complexities beyond the curatorial plot of
Visual Encounters emerged.
Rubin’s gargantuan exhibition was indeed
epoch-making, the first major show to bring
‘primitive’ art centre stage in the development
of Modernism, and the first to stir a dialogue
between art history and anthropology within
the context of post-structuralist thought.
Nonetheless, that exhibition has become an
example of how not to display ‘primitive’ art.
The problem lay in Rubin’s initial aim – legit-
imate from the point of art history, and
original at the time – to establish which
specific ‘primitive’ sculptures inspired the
artists who collected them at the beginning of
the twentieth century. Made impossible by
the dispersal of collections, the exhibition
reverted to the creation of a story of modern
art’s encounter with non-European works,
revolving around the putative existence of
71. Korewori crocodiles, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. Wood, 723 by 36 by 33 cm. and 722.5 by 33
by 27 cm. (Museum der Kulturen, Basel; exh. Beyeler Foundation, Basel); Le basin aux nymphéas, by Claude
Monet. 1917–20. Canvas, three parts, each 200.5 by 301 cm. (Beyeler Foundation, Basel).
the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e
EXHIBITIONS
‘natural’ affinities between the two. The
MoMA narrative, condemned by anthro-
pologists and postmodernist art historians
alike for silencing the voice of ‘the other’,
aimed at an all-encompassing, progressive and
celebratory history of modern art through its
relationship with other cultures, felt as equal-
ly self-created and expressive.
The essentialist claims laid by the ‘Prim-
itivism’ exhibition resounded disturbingly at a
time when, following the impact of Edward
Said’s Orientalism (1978), art history and crit-
icism began to integrate post-colonial theory.
Yet, whether formalist or ‘spiritual’, a univer-
sally transcendental attitude to modern and
‘primitive’ art was already part and parcel of
the attitude of modern artists and collectors.
Seventy years before MoMA’s exhibition,
the first ever American show of ‘primitive’
art, Statuary in Wood by African Savages. The
Root of Modern Art (1914), had already pre-
sented in New York the African and ‘clas-
sical’ modern art collections of the Parisian
dealer Paul Guillaume. Taking place in the
gallery of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz,
and with theoretical and performative contri-
butions by the Dadaist Marius de Zayas, and
the composer Alberto Savinio, this exhibition
reminds us that, far from being Rubin’s
invention, the concept of affinity between
‘primitive’ and modern art reflects earlier
concerns to establish a genealogy of the
avant-garde from ‘primal’ cultures, thus
bypassing modern Western tradition.
It is clear that our impression of African and
Oceanic art has been formed by this philyoge-
netic narrative of modern art. As Nélia Dias
has written, ‘an increasing stress on the inter-
nal qualities of the work of art also changed the
status of extra-European objects from ethno-
graphic documents to carriers of universal
aesthetic meanings’.4 At times one wished that
• clI • august 2009 571
ER.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09 09:33
EXHIBITIONS
72. Malagan figure and fishes, North New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. c.1900. Wood, dimensions variable.
(Musée Barber-Mueller, Geneva; exh. Beyeler Foundation, Basel); Picture no.III, by Piet Mondrian. 1938. Canvas,
100.5 by 141.5 cm. (Private collection; exh. Beyeler Foundation, Basel).
the Basel exhibition and its catalogue had
reminded the visitor of this particular position.
Rather, a distance was kept between the fields
of art and anthropology, the first displayed
throughout the exhibition, the latter being the
unique subject of an ‘interactive’ catalogue in
which a series of academic essays by ethnolo-
gists and anthropologists discuss the social
function of the African and Oceanic works on
display. The catalogue’s introductory section
presents, however, an open-ended dialogue
between the Beyeler curator, art historians and
anthropologists, in which Gottfried Boehm
stresses the importance of inquiry ‘into the
preconditions that led people like Ernst Beyel-
er to interest themselves in this art . . .’.5
By staging the story of modern artists’ flirta-
tion with ‘primitive’ sculpture in the simple
but all-the-more gripping terms of a coup-de-
foudre we were constantly, though indirectly,
reminded that the romantic story between
‘primitive’ and modern art is a one-sided affair.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the
juxtaposition of Mondrian’s Picture no.III
(1938) and three Malagan carvings from Papua
New Guinea (nineteenth/twentieth century),
the first rigorous and minimalist, the latter
Baroque in effect, yet remaining a striking
complementary group whose decorative
impact was accentuated by the display (Fig.72).
Although the history of primitivism staged
at the Beyeler was more in the spirit of bal en
masque than Indiana Jones, some of the unex-
pected visual and metaphorical juxtapositions
succeeded in producing new perceptions of
the modern works on display with the poten-
tial of constructing a less normative history of
modern art. Menacing nkisi (‘nail fetishes’)
from the Congo transformed Braque’s and
Picasso’s analytic Cubism from post-Kantian
to pre-Bataillan; Le Douanier Rousseau’s
572 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
Page 572
jungles finally found a truly primitivist dimen-
sion within an anthropomorphic forest of tino
aitu Nukuoro figures; and a Hawaiian feather
portrait of an angry war god screamed out the
tension found in Rothko’s monochromes.
Visual Encounters is to be praised for its effort
to take into account the different dimensions
of the primitivist debate while celebrating the
sense of beauty through which we have come
to appreciate the works on display.
1 Catalogue: Visual Encounters. Africa, Oceania, and
Modern Art. Edited by Oliver Wick and Antje Denner.
48 pp. incl. 230 col. + 100 b. & w. ills. (Beyeler
Foundation, Basel; Christopher Merian Verlag, Basel,
2009), CHF78. ISBN 978–3–85616–482–9.
2 O. Wick: ‘Preface’, in ibid., p.11.
3 W. Rubin, ed.: exh. cat. ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century
Art. Affinities of the Tribal and Modern, New York
(Museum of Modern Art) 1984.
4 N. Dias: ‘Le Musée du Quai Branly. Une généalo-
gie’, Le Débat. Histoire, philosophie, société 147 (Novem-
ber–December 2007), pp.70–71.
5 Wick, op. cit. (note 1), p.24.
Venice Biennale
Venice
by JOHN-PAUL STONARD
DESPITE THE PROLIFERATION of ‘collateral’
events, the national Pavilions in the Giardini
remain the heart of the Venice Biennale (to
22nd November). Shifting national rivalries
have existed since the first Pavilion appeared
just over one hundred years ago (Belgium,
1907), and with the rise of solo rather than
group shows over the past forty years, have
perhaps even sharpened. Negotiations with
this supposedly ‘outdated’ form of presenta-
tion, however, lend the excitement of a real
competition to the Biennale, and also
contribute to its continued political relevance.
For these reasons the sprawling exhibition
Making Worlds in the Arsenale and the
Palazzo delle Esposizioni, curated by
Daniel Birnbaum, appears nebulous alongside
the geo-political jigsaw of Pavilions in the
Giardini.1 A few individual works stand out,
in particular Michelangelo Pistoletto’s instal-
lation comprising a large room filled with
ornate mirrors, one half of which had been
smashed by the artist at a spectacular perform-
ance during the opening of the exhibition.
The Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg displays
three stop-motion animated films of plasticine
figures involved in surreal sexual goings-on,
in a room crammed with monstrous plant-
sculptures. Ulla von Brandenburg’s instal-
lation Singspiele comprises a series of spaces
made by hanging blankets that culminate in a
viewing room, similarly constructed, in
which a film shot in Le Corbusier’s Villa
Savoye is playing. The camera glides around
and reveals the slow choreographed move-
ments of a variety of actors. Such disengaged
wandering is rather appropriate for the exhi-
bition as a whole in which there is no real
point of reference to orient attention.
By contrast the national Pavilions were
incredibly varied and for the most part suc-
cessful. Rumours spread in the days before
the opening of a grand coup de théâtre in the
Danish and Nordic Pavilions, where Michael
Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset had for the first
time in the history of the Biennale created
an exhibition across two Pavilions. Both
spaces were beautifully crafted as domestic
73. Photograph of performance Paso Doble, by Miquel
Barceló and Josef Nadj. Held at the Teatro Fonda-
menta Nuove, Venice 2009.
ER.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09 09:33
74. Fight, by Mark Lewis. 2009. Still from single-screen projection, HD video, 5 minutes 27 seconds. (Collection
of the artist; exh. Canadian Pavilion, Venice Biennale).
interiors displaying works of art as if in a
collector’s home. The choice of works was
such that at first glance it might seem that
Elmgreen and Dragset themselves were
responsible for everything, and indeed their
copy of a Brancusi, titled Torso of a (Forever)
young man (2008), sat perfectly opposite
Sturtevant’s copies of paintings by Frank
Stella. On the surface the point appears to mix
art and design, a ‘modern pictures for modern
rooms’ type of display, nostalgic and unheim-
lich in equal measure. Furniture by the design
trio Norway Says is ranged next to works by
Martin Jacobson, and elsewhere artists such as
Terence Koh and Jonathan Monk are includ-
ed. A narrative of sorts is formed in the second
Pavilion by four naked youths (who con-
veniently recovered their clothes in time for
the public opening) lounging Hockney-style
in an open-plan interior, while outside the
Pavilion the stuffed body of a collector float-
ed face-down in a small swimming pool. As a
whole the display is extremely stylish, but also
excruciatingly ‘knowing’: one has the impres-
sion of being manically winked at. A pretend
Page 573
estate agent’s very hammy, predictably ironic
tour of the Danish Pavilion is best avoided.
The invitation extended to the British artist
Liam Gillick to exhibit in the German
Pavilion has also been the source of much
discussion. He is not the first non-German to
have received the call – Nam June Paik was
invited in 1993 (although he had far deeper
connections with Germany) and it might be
remembered that in 1948 the Pavilion was
given over to an exhibition of French Impres-
sionism. Gillick, who does not seem to have
lived or worked much in Germany, appears to
have been flummoxed by his election and one
can only admire the off-handed nerve of his
response, a series of bland pine cupboards and
a stuffed animatronic cat. For those who are a
little lost about what this all ‘means’, a handy
volume of essays on Gillick’s work has just
been published, Meaning Liam Gillick.2 Gillick
is a master of the ‘look’ of meaning, a putative
heritage of conceptual art in which meaning
itself somehow has a style. Traces of further
unintended ‘meaning’ are not hard to detect.
That an unrealised idea by the artist for this
the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e
EXHIBITIONS
display – a copy of a model by Arnold Bode of
a redesign for the German Pavilion – is
marketed as a limited edition for a large sum
of money on the back of the visitors’ informa-
tion pamphlet was an even bolder challenge
to the spiritual and political importance of
national representation.
If, over the years, nationalism has formed
an arid theme for works in the Giardini, in
certain cases, and with subtly judged gestures,
it may still hit the mark. The Slovakian artist
Roman Ondák’s installation, titled Loop, for
the Czech and Slovak Pavilion, involves
nothing more than a garden planted within
the Pavilion, through which a path leads
directly in and out. Some lingered to search
for the art, behind a shrub perhaps, some
walked straight through and out before real-
ising that there was nothing more to see. Like
some of the best commissions the Pavilion
itself was an integral part of a display, becom-
ing a microcosm of national division and
evoking a paradox of inside and outside that
in different ways is central to the politics of
nationalism.
Mark Lewis’s high-definition films in
the Canadian Pavilion were extraordinarily
engaging, although it was for one work, Fight
(Fig.74), that the display took off, and it is a
shame that the focus was not entirely on
this film. Showing a market stall in front
of which actors recreate a simmering alter-
cation between two unidentified groups, who
appear to be divided along ethnic lines, and
shot using an extremely high-definition cam-
era and a method of back-projection typical
of Lewis’s work, Fight is an absorbing and fas-
cinating piece. Yet, one wants to ask of the
commissioner, why here, why now? Echoes
have not diminished of Rodney Graham’s
brilliant film Vexation Island, which trans-
formed the Canadian Pavilion into a desert
island hut in 1997. The best Giardini displays
are those that respond at least in some way to
the context, and this much at least can be said
for Gillick’s cupboards and cat.
A similar dislocation between place and
display can be seen in the Spanish Pavilion,
75. Giardini, by
Steve McQueen.
2009. Still from
double-screen
projection.
(Collection
of the artist;
exh. British
Pavilion,
Venice
Biennale).
• clI • august 2009 573
ER.AUG.pg.proof.corrs:Layout 1 20/7/09 09:33
EXHIBITIONS
containing numerous paintings by Miquel
Barceló made since 2000. Some of these are
interesting, but there appears no reason why
so many have been gathered in this particular
location; and one can only empathise with the
artist on this missed opportunity. The display
might have focused on the extraordinary
performance, Paso Doble (Fig.73), first given at
the Avignon festival, and restaged at the
Teatro Fondamenta Nuove in Venice during
the opening days of the Biennale, involving
Barceló and the choreographer Josef Nadj
performing various physical engagements on a
clay stage and with clay hoods moulded into
strange bestial heads. Here, however, only a
DVD of the performance is shown in the
reading area of the Pavilion, minimising its
impact.
Transforming a Pavilion into a mini-
museum is also the approach adopted for the
American contribution, with a flawless display
of work by Bruce Nauman. Yet the delicacy
and tact of museum curating seem at odds
with the opportunity that Pavilion architec-
ture offers for surprise encounter. One has the
impression of being in the wing of a larger
retrospective, and that a consecration was tak-
ing place instead of a revelation, particularly in
the case of Nauman’s fountain work in the
final room, which recalled the more interest-
ing fountain piece by the artist in the Italian
Pavilion in 2007.
Most fascinating of all, however, is the
transformation of the British Pavilion into a
cinema, with timed viewings of Steve
McQueen’s new film, Giardini (Fig.75).3
Tickets, at least in the opening days, were
hard to come by, reminding one of the
‘booking is essential’ culture of contem-
porary Britain. But here it was also worth the
wait. McQueen shot his film in the Giardini
between Biennales, during the low winter
months when the Pavilions are boarded up
and nature reclaims the grounds from art.
Comprised of a series of still-camera shots,
often close-ups, and various views of the
Pavilions, it creates a highly sensuous com-
bination of images and sound on a double-
screen projection. Greyhounds often appear,
scavenging around the debris of the last
Biennale. They suggest the fantastical quality
of the gardens imagined through art, the
association arising with the greyhounds that
can be found in works by Carpaccio. Other
creatures invade the Giardini, from caterpil-
lars to beetles, just as the seasons strip the
trees and create a sense of desolation so anti-
thetical to the excitement of the Biennale.
Bin-liners of rubbish await collection outside
the Swiss Pavilion; a name is scrawled on the
door of the Italian Pavilion; from a high
window of the boarded-up Danish Pavilion
a curious orange pipe emerges. Out of season
the Giardini is also a cruising ground for male
hustlers, who appear in McQueen’s film
standing and waiting. One short sequence
shows two figures emerging from the dark-
ness and embracing – a curiously mawkish
bit of narrative in an otherwise seamlessly
evocative film. Despite this, Giardini remains
574 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
Page 574
a masterly film, mainly because it so simply
reverses the stakes of what it means to exhib-
it in a national Pavilion, and to carry such a
burden of expectation to excite and shock. It
reveals the historical layering underlying a
sense of place, the magical qualities of what
remains once the party is over and the fasci-
nation of time passing. As a leitmotif this
feeling of eternal expectation is captured in
the final shot, showing a drop of water hang-
ing from a spring bud, reflecting the British
Pavilion like a specchio convesso, trembling but
not falling.
1 Catalogue: Making Worlds: 53rd International Art
Exhibition. La Biennale di Venezia. Edited by Daniel
Birnbaum. 704 pp. incl. numerous col. + b. & w.
ills. (Marsilio, Venice, 2009), £65. ISBN
978–88–317–9696–5.
2 M. Szewczyk, ed.: Meaning Liam Gillick, Cambridge
MA 2009.
3 Catalogue: Steve McQueen Giardini Notebook. With an
essay by T.J. Demos. Unpaginated, with numerous
illustrations. (British Council, London, 2009), £13.
ISBN 978–0–86355–625–8.
Pasqualino Rossi
Serra San Quirico
by ERIKA LANGMUIR
ITALY NEVER CEASES to surprise. Not only
does austere, medieval Serra San Quirico, a
tiny rock-built mountain commune in the
Marches, contain S. Lucia, the most sump-
tuously decorated Baroque church of the
region, but the church also houses two
altarpieces and, in the apse, five large canvases
by Pasqualino Rossi (Vicenza 1641–Rome
1722), a painter once renowned in Rome for
small cabinet pictures. This first exhibition
devoted to the artist, Pasqualino Rossi: La
scoperta di un protagoniasta del Barocco, and the
first ever to be held in Serra San Quirico, in
the ex-monastery of S. Lucia (to 13th
September), turns out to be a genuine art-
historical revelation. It reconstructs Rossi’s
eclectic œuvre – until recently almost univer-
sally misattributed to others1 – in the context
of older and younger contemporaries. Exhibi-
tion and catalogue together illuminate a com-
plex and not well-known moment in Italian
late seicento art and collecting, when two
seemingly contrasting trends coincided: a
‘modern’ taste for genre, and a cult of
sixteenth-century masters, notably Giorgione
and Correggio.2
While proclaiming himself to be an auto-
didact, formed through assiduous copying of
paintings in Venice and Rome,3 Rossi may
have been a pupil of, and was certainly
indebted to, the cultivated though eccentric
neo-Giorgionesque artist Pietro Della Vec-
chia (Vicenza? 1603–Venice 1678). Della
Vecchia’s penchant for caricature is especial-
ly evident in the Mathematics lesson (cat.
no.III.3), probably a workshop replica of a
theme frequent in this artist’s œuvre. Images
of instruction – often painted in pairs, distin-
guishing between the teaching of male and
female accomplishments – became, on a
more diminutive scale, a staple of Rossi’s
repertory. The earliest shown here, A school
of women’s work, with women intent on
embroidery, sewing and reading, and
Rehearsal for a concert, with young players and
singers (nos.II.1 and 2), are close to Della
Vecchia in extravagance as well as in their
free brushwork and their predominantly
brown, red and ochre palette. They also
point to Rossi’s acquaintance with the hectic
works of that epigone of the Bamboccianti
active in the Veneto, Matteo Ghedoni
(?1626–Padua 1689), known as Matteo dei
Pitocchi, who specialised in motifs drawn
from Callot’s prints of beggars and vagabonds
(no.III.5).
Perhaps the most impressive of the ‘con-
textual’ artists shown here, however, is
the Dane Eberhart Keilhau (Helsinger
1624–Rome 1687), known as Bernard Keil
or Monsù Bernardo. He imported to Rome
a more decorous depiction of humble sitters,
derived from domestic Dutch genre, paving
the way for Rossi’s later, bourgeois images of
‘everyday life’. The previously unpublished
Girl with a pail (no.III.9) demonstrates Keil-
hau’s ‘naturalistic poetry’ at its highest: the
freely painted three-quarter figure on the
scale of life, turning her gaze on the viewer,
is no longer an object of repulsion or laugh-
ter, but a subject, of humanity equal to the
viewer’s.
A notary’s act of 1700 indicates that the
Vicenza-born, Venetian-trained Pasqualino
Rossi had relatives in Parma, suggesting a
first-hand knowledge of Correggio’s works,
76. Lamentation, by Pasqualino Rossi. Before 1689.
Panel, 43.5 by 38.8 cm. (Museo del Barocco Romano,
Arriccia; exh. S. Lucia, Serra San Quirico).
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EXHIBITIONS

which were also to prove an enduring

influence on his own. In 1668 the artist was
admitted to the Virtuosi of the Pantheon in
Rome; in 1670 he was enrolled in the Acad-
emy of St Luke. He remained principally
based in the city until his death, executing,
however, only three projects for Roman
churches.4 It is assumed that his numerous
church commissions from Benedictine orders
in the Marches resulted from an acquaintance
in Rome with a high prelate from the region,
where ambitious abbots were busied restoring
and modernising.5 The paintings for the
Silvestrine church of S. Lucia in Serra San
Quirico (after 1674–by 1694), and particular-
ly the cycle of the saint’s life in the apse, are
acknowledged to be the best of his works in a
large format.6
The Charity of St Lucy (Fig.77), although a
second episode in the story, opens the cycle, its
greater number of figures requiring the larger
space available.7 (Its pendant on the right of the
apse is the equally animated St Lucy dragged in
vain to the brothel; no.I.13.) Having decided not
to marry after a miraculous vision of St Agatha,
pictured in the following canvas, Lucy distrib-
utes her dowry to the poor. An eloquent
pattern of hands against the sky – that of the
saint with her delicate profile, in her neat, not
gaudy, apparel, giving alms; those of the poor
clasped in prayer or open to receive; the 77. Charity of St Lucy, by Pasqualino Rossi. c.1679. Canvas, 282 by 310 cm. (S. Lucia, Serra San Quirico).
demonstrative gesture of the genteel witness
drawing her little black page’s attention to the
scene – resumes the action. A sense of intima- foreign, available to artists and connoisseurs 4 A Baptism of Christ in S. Maria del Popolo (by 1674);

cy, and the almost symmetrically bracketed
alignment of figures, are also traits of the small
genre pictures of Rossi’s maturity, such as the
Concert (no.II.5). Paired with a Players at dice
(no.II.6), this work evokes the cinquecento
through the figures’ subtly anachronistic dress,
although its Giorgionesque poetics are
through prints, travel and a flourishing art
trade. A painter as attuned to the market and
as resourceful as Rossi was spurred to draw at
will on this living treasury, to suit the occasion
and his clients’ predilections.
1 These misattributions have ranged from Correggio,
the Agony in the garden in S. Carlo al Corso (c.1675);
and a cycle dedicated to S. Rosa of Viterbo in S. Maria
in Aracoeli (by 1686). The dates are deduced from the
successive publication dates of F. Titti: Studio di
Pittura, scoltura, et architettura, nelle chiese di Roma,
Rome 1674, 1686, only the second of which lists all
three projects.
5 Two canvases for the Camaldolese church of Sts

reinterpreted in the idiom of Caravaggesque
tenebrism and drama.
The most enthusiastic collector of Rossi’s
cabinet paintings was the Spanish grandee
Don Gaspar Méndez de Haro y Guzman,
Marquess of Carpio, envoy to the Holy See,
later Viceroy of Naples. Between his arrival in
Rome in 1677 and his departure in 1682 he
acquired no fewer than forty-one pictures by
the artist, though only of religious, mythical
or allegorical subjects. No.994 of his inven-
tory was The Holy Family with the infant St John
through Barocci, Annibale Carracci and Giulio Cesare
Procaccini to Giuseppe Maria Crespi, and others less
famous. The rediscovery of Pasqualino Rossi can be
credited in the first instance to Roberto Longhi,
followed by Federico Zeri. The curators of the present
exhibition, Anna Maria Ambrosini Massari and
Angelo Mazza, through exhaustive research into
inventories and private collections, have succeeded in
tracing not only misattributed pictures but also ones
that have never before been exhibited or published,
including many of the paintings by the ‘contextual’
artists on show – discoveries that make the exhibition
a thrilling event out of all proportion to its modest size
Blaise and Romualdo in Fabriano in 1674; by 1679 the
pictorial decoration of three chapels in the Silvestrine
church of S. Benedetto, also in Fabriano: two under the
patronage of noble families, the Ambrosi and the
Alberti, the third of the Arte dei Falegnami e degli
Scalpellini (St Joseph’s dream and the Assumption of St
Mary Magdalene are included in the exhibition). In 1699,
declining in health and technique, Rossi executed four
canvases for the church of S. Bartolomeo in Cagli; see
especially the essay and the documentary appendix
compiled by Maria Maddalena Paolini in Ambrosini
Massari and Mazza, op. cit. (note 2), pp.79–85.
6 For the Serra San Quirico pictures, see especially

(no.I.9). Guzman was also a great admirer and
collector of Correggio, and Rossi’s painting
clearly emulates the latter in composition and
physiognomies. Correggio, as filtered through
the young Annibale Carracci, is the obvious
influence on the tender Lamentation (no.I.16;
and installation.
2 Catalogue: Pasqualino Rossi, 1641–1722, Grazie e
affetti di un artista del Seicento. Edited by Anna Maria
Ambrosini Massari and Angelo Mazza, with contribu-
tions by Lucia Diotalevi, Fabrizio Lemme, Francesco
Federico Mancini, Fabio Marcelli, Fausto Nicolai,
Maria Maddalena Paolini and Giovanna Perini. 232
Lucia Diotalevi in ibid., pp.107–27. Both she and
Angelo Mazza misidentify the iconography of Rossi’s
altarpiece in the church of Sts Quirico and Giulitta: the
martyred Early Christian mother and son, with the
Blessed Alessandra Sabini of nearby Arcevia and St
Silvestro, the Marchigian founder of the Silvestrine
Benedictines, are shown venerating a Holy Thorn, the

Milan, 2009), €32. ISBN 978–88–366–134–58. Not

Fig.76) painted by Rossi for his most illus- pp. incl. 50 col. + 70 b. & w. ills. (Silvana Editoriale, prized relic of the church housed in the ostensory, and
trious client, the Venetian Cardinal Pietro not the Holy Sacrament.
Ottoboni, elected pope in 1689 under the for the first time the present writer has occasion to 7 Restoration of the S. Lucia canvases in 1995–96

name Alexander VIII. The picture, in rela-
tively good condition, exemplifies that
refined retrospection which made Rossi’s
cabinet paintings so appealing to collectors,
and his authorship so readily forgotten.
Pasqualino Rossi testifies to the richness of
late seicento visual culture, the variety of
models, modern and from the past, local and
complain about the almost total omission of technical
information – despite recent restorations, and given
the obvious discrepancies in handling and condition of
Rossi’s paintings – that mars an otherwise exemplary
publication.
3 As reported by P.A. Orlandi: Abcedario pittorico nel
quale compediosamente sono descritte le Patrie, i Maestri, ed i
tempi, ne’ quali fiorirono circa quattro mila Professori di
Pittura, di Scultura, e d’Architettura, Bologna 1704, p.312.
revealed that those of the cycle were widened, after
completion, to fit their frames within the decorative
scheme. The autograph additions demonstrate that,
while Rossi painted the pictures in Rome, he later
adapted them in situ. Borrowings from Lorenzo Lotto’s
S. Lucia altarpiece in Jesi (c.1523–32) further attest to
the artist’s presence in the Marches; see especially
Diotalevi in Ambrosini Massari and Mazza, op. cit.
(note 2), pp.108–09.

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Calendar
London
Alan Cristea. Prints by Patrick Caulfield, 1964–99; to
5th September.
Works by Picasso, Matisse and Braque; to 14th
September.
Barbican. Radical Nature. Art & architecture for a changing
planet, 1969–2009 explores artistic responses to nature
and climate change; to 20th September.
Bernard Jacobson. Works by Robert Motherwell are
on view here to 28th August.
British Museum. Garden and Cosmos: The Royal
Paintings of Jodhpur, seen previously in Washington
and Seattle and reviewed in the April issue, runs here
to 23rd August.
Medals are best known for celebrating important
figures or heroic deeds, but the exhibition Medals of
Dishonour features examples that condemn their
subjects; to 27th September.
Camden Arts Centre. The first large exhibition in
Britain of work by Johanna Billing, including a newly
commissioned film on the theme of contemporary
dance; to 13th September.
A new sculptural installation by Alexandre da
Cunha; to 13th September.
Courtauld Gallery. Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs of the
Omega Workshops 1913–19 unites the Gallery’s collec-
tion of working drawings from the Omega Workshops
with examples of the textiles, pottery and furniture that
it produced; to 20th September; to be reviewed.
Design Museum. The exhibition Super Contemporary
celebrates design in London with fifteen specially
commissioned works; to 4th October.
Dulwich Picture Gallery. Works by the Polish artist
Antoni Malinowski are on display to 27th September.
To complement its new catalogue of British
pictures, the Gallery exhibits the best of its British
paintings in a special display running to 27th
September.
Fleming Collection. Sir Muirhead Bone (1876–1953):
Artist and Patron; to 5th September.
Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square. Antony Gormley’s
One & Other invites ‘ordinary’ people to occupy the
fourth plinth, one after the other, around the clock,
for 100 days; to 14th October.
Haunch of Venison. The second part of the exhibi-
tion devoted to the artist Keith Coventry runs to 15th
August. Thereafter a new body of work by the Swiss
artist Uwe Wittwer (b.1954) includes recent works
on paper in watercolour and inkjet; from 24th August
to 3rd October.
Hayward Gallery. Ten large-scale installations com-
prise the exhibition Walking in my Mind, including
works by Keith Tyson, Jason Rhoades and Thomas
Hirschhorn; to 6th September.
Imperial War Museum. Unspeakable: The Artist as
Witness to the Holocaust runs here to 31st August.
ICA. The exhibition Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. explores
text-based works by artists such as Carl Andre and
Frances Stark; to 25th August.
Lisson Gallery. Boule to Braid, curated by Richard
Wentworth, is on view to 15th August.
National Gallery. Corot to Monet: A fresh look at landscape
from the Collection charts the development of open-air
landscape painting up to the first Impressionist exhibi-
tion in 1874; to 20th September; to be reviewed.
Titian’s Triumph of Love, recently acquired by the
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and the subject of an
article on p.536 above, goes on display here after its
recent conservation treatment at the Gallery; to 20th
September.
National Portrait Gallery. The 2009 BP portrait
award is on view to 20th September.
Pilar Corrias. Works by Benjamin Saurer are on view
here to 5th September.
Queen’s Gallery. French Porcelain for English Palaces:
Sèvres from the Royal Collection; to 11th October.
576 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
Riflemaker. Some 100 small drawings celebrating the
art and ritual of bullfighting by José María Cano
(b.1959) are on display here to 12th September.
Royal Academy. In the Madejski Fine Rooms works
from the RA’s permanent collection examine High
Art: Reynolds and History Painting and the loan of
W.P. Frith’s Private view at the Royal Academy, 1881
(1883), shown with other late Victorian paintings; to
29th November.
A major retrospective devoted to J.W. Waterhouse,
seen previously in Groningen, runs to 13th September
(then in Montreal); to be reviewed.
This year’s summer exhibition runs to 16th August.
Saatchi Gallery. Abstract America: New Painting and
Sculpture, offering a survey of recent trends in abstract
painting (broadly defined); to 13th September (Fig.78).
Sadie Coles HQ. Works by Carl Andre (at 695 Audley
St.); to 22nd August.
Serpentine Gallery. Jeff Koons’s Popeye Series is on
display to 13th September.
This years Pavilion, designed by Kazuyo Sejima
and Ryue Nishizawa of the leading Japanese archi-
tecture practice SANAA, is on view to 18th October.
Sir John Soane’s Museum. Immagini e memoria – Rome
in the photographs of Father Peter Paul Mackey 1890–1901
is on view here to 19th September.
Tate Britain. A collections display recreating William
Blake’s only one-man exhibition, mounted by the
artist in his brother’s shop in Golden Square in May
1809, runs to 4th October; it was reviewed in the
July issue.
Works spanning four decades by Richard Long,
comprise an exhibition running to 6th September; it
is reviewed on p.487 above.
Recent acquisitions of British contemporary art,
including the Chapman Family Collection by the
Chapman brothers, a series of faux-primitive sculp-
tures incorporating MacDonald’s motifs, are on view
to 23rd August.
Cold Corners by Eva Rothschild is the latest
Duveen Commission to occupy the central Duveen
Galleries, and comprises a metal framework sculpture
that fills the space; to 29th November.
Tate Modern. Seen earlier in Paris and Rome, the
exhibition of Futurism, the first large survey of the
movement in Britain for over thirty years, which
includes a reconstruction of the 1912 Futurist exhibi-
tion that travelled from the Galerie Bernheim in Paris
to the Sackville Gallery in London, runs here to 20th
September; to be reviewed.
An exhibition of works by the Danish artist Per
Kirkeby, spanning four decades, is on view here to
12th September.
Victoria and Albert Museum. A Higher Ambition:
Owen Jones (1809–74) traces Jones’s contributions to
Victorian design reform; to 22nd November.
78. Mother popcorn, by Chris Martin. 2006–07. Canvas
with collage, 162.6 by 149.9 cm. (Exh. Saatchi
Gallery, London).
Wallace Collection. Vorsprung durch Technik: The
Innovative Work of Cabinet-Maker Johann Fiedler
explores a recently restored commode of c.1786; to
29th November.
Whitechapel Gallery. A survey of work by Elizabeth
Peyton is on view here to 20th September.
The triennial East End Academy, showing work by
12 artists from the East End of London, is on view to
20th September.
White Cube. A new series of works by Gilbert &
George, titled ‘Jack Freak Pictures’, is on view at
Mason’s Yard and Hoxton Square to 22nd August.
Great Britain and Ireland
Bexhill-on-Sea, De La Warr Pavilion. Sculptures,
photographs, drawings and watercolours by Joseph
Beuys comprise an exhibition to 27th September.
Birmingham, Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Dürer
to Spencer: Highlights on Paper from University College,
London; to 25th October.
Birmingham, Ikon Gallery. The first major exhibition
in Europe of abstract paintings by the Cuban-born,
New York-based artist Carmen Herrera, including
works from the late 1940s to the present; to 13th
September.
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. Matthew Boul-
ton – Selling What All the World Desires, reviewed on
p.488 above, is on view here to 27th September.
Blackpool, Grundy Art Gallery. ‘Rank’: picturing the
social order 1516–2009, seen previously in Leeds and
Sunderland, runs here to 5th September.
Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. Seen earlier in
London and Nottingham, and reviewed in the Sep-
tember 2008 issue, The American Scene: Prints from
Hopper to Pollock, can be seen here to 31st August.
Bristol, Arnolfini. The mixed exhibition Sequelism
Part 3: Possible, Probable or Preferable Futures features
work by artists including Graham Gussin and Victor
Man; to 20th September.
Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum. Endless Forms:
Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts,
seen previously in New Haven, is on display here to
4th October.
Cardiff, National Museum. The exhibition No Such
Thing as Society: Photography in Britain 1967–1987 is on
view here to 31st October.
Cheltenham, Art Gallery and Museum. Seen earlier
in London, the exhibition Athletes and Olympians,
celebrating sporting heroes of the past century, is on
view here to 30th August.
Compton Verney. The exhibition devoted to John
Constable’s portraits, seen previously in London
and reviewed in the May issue, is on view here to
6th September.
Georgian Portraits: Seeing is Believing is an exhibition
of works from the Holburne Museum of Art, Bath;
to 13th December.
Cookham, Stanley Spencer Gallery. 2009 marks the
fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Spencer’s death. The
Gallery’s own collection is augmented with works on
loan from Tate Britain; to 1st November.
Dublin, Irish Museum of Modern Art. A survey of
works by Terry Winters from the past decade is on
view to 27th September.
Dublin, National Gallery of Ireland. From Raphael to
Rossetti: Drawings from the Collection; to 23rd August.
Edinburgh, Dean Gallery. See Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art.
Edinburgh, Fruitmarket Gallery. An exhibition of
small experimental works by Eva Hesse is on view
here to 25th October (then in London).
Edinburgh, Inverleith House. An exhibition of
work by John McCracken runs here from 6th August
to 11th October.
Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland. The
Discovery of Spain. British Artists and Collectors: Goya
to Picasso explores the work of 19th- and early
20th-century British artists such as David Wilkie,
David Roberts, John Phillip and Arthur Melville
who were inspired by Spain; to 11th October.
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Edinburgh, Queen’s Gallery. An exhibition tracing
the history of the ‘conversation piece’ through works
from the Royal Collection is on view here to 20th
September (then in London).
Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern
Art. Works by Hirst, Celmins, Gallagher, Katz,
Woodman and Warhol selected from some 700
works comprising the ‘Artist Rooms’ acquisition are
displayed here as part of an inaugural series of ‘Artist
Rooms’ across the country (see also Dean Gallery);
to 8th November.
Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery. Drawings and
sculptures by David Nash; to 10th October.
Glasgow, Hunterian. An exhibition of prints by
Munch, on loan from the Munch Museum, Oslo, is
the most substantial exhibition of the artist’s prints on
view in Britain for 35 years; to 5th September.
Leeds Art Gallery. Works of British Surrealism from
the Sherwin Collection; to 1st November.
Leeds, Henry Moore Institute. The New Monumen-
tality: Gerard Byrne, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and
Dorit Margreiter; to 30th August.
Leeds, Temple Newsam House. Drawn from the
collections of Leeds Art Gallery, the exhibition
Watercolour Masterpieces: Turner and his Contemporaries,
runs here to 1st November.
Lismore Castle Arts. An exhibition curated by Philippe
Pirotte comprises works by Stefan Brüggemann, Rita
McBride, Corey McCorkle, Jason Rhoades and Ai
Weiwei; to 30th September.
Liverpool, Lady Lever Art Gallery. Whistler: The
Gentle Art of Making Etchings, seen previously in
Glasgow, runs to 20th September.
Liverpool, Tate. Seen earlier in New York, the
exhibition Colour Chart: Reinventing Colour, 1950 to
Today, is on view here to 13th September.
Middlesbrough, Institute of Modern Art. An
exhibition of works by Gerhard Richter, from 1980
to the present, is on view here to 15th November.
Milton Keynes Gallery. A group exhibition of
contemporary sculptural works made from found or
discarded materials, Quiet Revolution, is on view
here to 30th August.
Norwich, Sainsbury Centre. Polish art is celebrated
in two exhibitions: An Impossible Journey. The Art and
Theatre of Tadeusz Kantor, and a display of
contemporary art from Poland, both running to 30th
August; they are reviewed on p.492 above.
Nottingham Castle. An international loan exhibition
here marks the bicentenary of the death of the
Nottingham-born artist Paul Sandby and includes
watercolours, gouaches, etchings and a few rare
paintings; to 18th October (then in Edinburgh and
London).
Oxford, Christ Church Picture Gallery. Mannerist
drawings from the permanent collection are on
display to 4th October (Fig.79).
Oxford, Museum of Modern Art. 92 early Polaroids
by Robert Mapplethorpe, and an exhibition of
twelve paintings by Silke Otto-Knapp, made since
2005, are on display to 13th September.
Penzance, Penlee House Gallery & Museum. An
exhibition focusing on works by artists associated with
the Newlyn Colony at the time of its inauguration in
the late nineteenth century; to 12th September.
St Ives, Tate. A summer exhibition combining works
by seven fine and applied artists, from Alfred Wallis
to Katy Moran, runs to 27th September.
Salisbury, Roche Court, New Art Centre. Work by
Barry Flanagan is on view to 6th September.
Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery. An exhibition of work
by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben
Nicholson from the 1930s; to 29th August; it is
reviewed on p.491 above.
Windsor, Windsor Castle, Drawings Gallery. An
exhibition marking the 500th anniversary of Henry
VIII’s accession to the throne includes works by
Holbein; to 18th April 2010.
York Art Gallery. Drawing on the Arts Council
Collection and that of the Gallery, an exhibition
examining the work of artists from St Ives from
the 1930s to the 1960s runs here to 27th September.
79. Man leaning down over a cross-bar, by Francesco
Salviati. Black chalk, heightened with white, on blue
paper, 26.8 by 20.8 cm. (Christ Church Picture
Gallery, Oxford).
Europe
Aix-en-Provence, Musée Granet. An exhibition on
Picasso’s debt to Cézanne; to 27th September; to be
reviewed.
Amsterdam, Hermitage. The opening exhibition at
this revamped and expanded outpost of the Her-
mitage explores life and art at the Russian court in the
19th century; to 31st January.
Amsterdam, Rembrandthuis. The monographic
exhibition devoted to Jan Lievens, seen earlier in
Milwaukee and Washington and reviewed in the
May issue, runs here to 9th August.
Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum. Four times a year, the
Museum will present treasures from its print room as
part of the Masterpieces on Paper series; the theme of
the inaugural presentation is ‘light and dark’ in a
display running to 31st August. Also on display (to
7th September) are four recently acquired and
subsequently restored portraits by Johannes
Verspronck (Fig.80).
Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum. Odilon Redon and
Emile Bernard explores the collection of Andries
Bonger (1861–1936) which was acquired by the
Dutch State in 1996 and given to the Museum on
long-term loan; to 20th September.
Asti, Palazzo Mazzetti. An exhibition of 17th- and
18th-century sacred wooden sculpture; to 18th
October.
Barcelona, CaixaForum. Andrea Palladio: His Life and
Legacy, seen earlier at Vicenza and London and
reviewed in the March issue, is here to 6th September.
Barcelona, Museu Picasso. Seen earlier in Montreal
and reviewed in the April issue, the retrospective of
works by Kees van Dongen is here to 27th September.
Basel, Fondation Beyeler. A comprehensive survey
of works by Giacometti; to 11th October.
Basel, Kunstmuseum. Vincent van Gogh. Between Earth
and Heaven: The Landscapes offers a complete survey of
the artist’s works in the genre; to 27th September.
Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst. The in-focus
exhibition Little Theatre of Gestures explores the role
of theatricality in art; to 15th August.
Bassano del Grappa, Museo Remondini. The
remarkable collection of prints assembled by the
Remondini family of printers includes works by
Schongauer, Dürer, Titian and Rembrandt among
others; to 4th October.
Berlin, Berlinische Galerie. John Heartfield – Zeitauss-
chnitte shows photomontages made between 1918 and
1939; to 31st August; it is reviewed on p.499 above.
the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e
CALENDAR
Berlin, Georg Kolbe Museum. The exhibition
Romantic Machines. Kinetic Art of the Present includes
works by Elmgreen and Dragset, Michael Sailstorfer,
and Julius Popp; to 6th September.
Berlin, Martin-Gropius-Bau. The major exhibition
Modell Bauhaus organised in collaboration with the
Bauhaus archives in Berlin, Dessau and Weimar, and
also with the Museum of Modern Art, New York,
presents a complete survey of the Bauhaus, with an
emphasis on its development and lasting impact; to
4th October. The exhibition will travel in changed
format to New York.
Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie. A survey exhibition of
work by Imi Knoebel; to 9th August.
Berlin, Sprüth Magers. The exhibition Source Codes
presents a range of work by a generation of artists
including Kenneth Anger, Richard Hamilton and
Bruce Conner, showing how their work has influ-
enced the neo-conceptual art of today; to 29th August.
Bielefeld, Kunsthalle. A retrospective of works by the
Chinese artist Fang Lijun is on view here from 30th
August to 8th November.
Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum. Following the artist’s
installations in the New York Guggenheim, Cai Guo-
Qiang produces here a site-specific version of his
exhibition I want to believe, running to 13th September.
Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao. The
Splendour of the Renaissance in Aragon presents a selec-
tion of some 100 paintings, sculptures, drawings and
objects on loan from the Museo de Zaragoza; to 20th
September (then in Valencia and Zaragoza).
Bonn, Kunstmuseum. A retrospective of paintings by
the Belgian painter Raoul de Keyser goes on view
here from 20th August to 18th October.
Bonn, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle. A mono-
graphic show devoted to Amedeo Modigliani runs
here to 30th August.
Bregenz, Kunsthaus. A large solo exhibition of works
by Antony Gormley spills out into the surrounding
Vorarlberg region in the form of one hundred life-
size cast-iron statues modelled on the artist, planted
within 100 square miles of Alpine scenery and visible
from any vantage point; to 18th October.
Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts. The
exhibition devoted to Alfred Stevens will be
reviewed in next months issue; to 23rd August.
Budapest, Museum of Fine Arts. Turner and Italy,
seen previously in Ferrara and Edinburgh, runs here
to 25th October; to be reviewed.
Caen, Musée des Beaux-Arts. See Rouen.
Caldarola, Palazzo dei Cardinali Pallotta. The
magnificent collection of Cardinal Giambattista
Pallotta, which included works by Caravaggio,
Reni, Guercino and Preti, was dispersed at his death
in 1668 but is briefly reassembled in a show running
to 12th November; to be reviewed.
Caraglio, Il Filatoio Rosso. The rose in art is the
theme of a show spanning the 15th to the early 20th
century; to 25th October.
Cologne, Museum Ludwig. Jonathan Horowitz’s film
montage Apocalypto Now is on display to 23rd August.
A comprehensive display of editions by Sigmar
Polke, recently donated to the Museum by Ulrich
Reininghaus and Anne Friebe-Reininghaus, are on
display to 27th September.
Seen earlier in London, a retrospective of works by
Isa Genzken is on view here from 15th August to
15th November.
Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum. The Moon
includes paintings, drawings, prints and photographs,
as well as astronomical instruments, exploring the
fascination that the moon has exerted throughout
the ages; to 16th August (then in Houston); to
be reviewed.
Copenhagen, Statens Museum for Kunst. Works
by the German-born Danish sculptor Christian
Lemmerz are on view to 6th March 2010.
The monographic exhibition devoted to Nicolai
Abildgaard, seen previously in Paris and Hamburg, has
its final showing here from 29th August to 3rd January.
Acquisitions made over the last three years are
highlighted in a display running to 9th August.
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Coruña, Fundación Caixa Galicia. An exhibition of
bodegones from the Prado runs here to 20th September.
Dresden, Japanisches Palais. Two of the oldest
collections of antiquities outside Italy are being
brought together in an exhibition of classical sculp-
tures from the Museo del Prado and from Dresden’s
Skulpturensammlung; to 27th September.
Dresden, Residenzschloss. Here and at the Sem-
perbau am Zwinger, a monographic exhibition
devoted to the life and work of Carl Gustav Carus; to
20th September (then in Berlin).
Düsseldorf, Kunsthalle. An exhibition of video and
installation by the Bosnian artist Danica Dakic is on
view here from 29th August to 8th November.
Düsseldorf, Museum Kunst Palast. On paper: our
finest drawings: from Raphael to Beuys, from Rembrandt
to Trockel is on view to 30th August.
Evian, Palais Lumière. An exhibition of decorative
works by Rodin; to 20th September.
Florence, Casa Buonarroti. A selection of Italian
Renaissance drawings from the Rothschild Collection
in the Musée du Louvre, Paris; to 14th September.
Florence, Galleria dell’Accademia. 91 of Robert
Mapplethorpe’s photographs of beautiful bodies are
juxtaposed with Michelangelo’s sculptures; to 27th
September.
Florence, Museo delle Cappelle Medicee. An exhi-
bition to mark the fourth centenary of the death of
Grand Duke Ferdinando I; to 1st November.
Florence, Uffizi. Splendour and Reason: 18th-century Art
in Florence is a major exhibition of all the arts under
the last of the Medici and the house of Lorraine; to
30th September; to be reviewed.
Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle. An exhibition prom-
ising a look ‘behind the scenes of the contemporary
art world’, The Making of Art; to 30th August.
Grenoble, Musée de Grenoble. Some 40 paintings
by Alex Katz comprise an exhibition running here to
27th September (then in Kleve).
Haarlem, De Hallen. Sublime landscapes of Dutch
romanticism; to 30th August.
The Hague, Gemeentemuseum. Fauve and Expres-
sionist painting from the Triton Foundation are
exhibited to 6th September.
The Hague, GEM, Museum voor Actuele Kunst.
Seen earlier in London, the survey exhibition of
works by Michael Raedecker is on view here to 1st
November.
An exhibition of drawings by Emo Verkerk is on
display to 1st November.
Hamburg, Bucerius Kunst Forum. Work by
Edward Hopper is on view to 30th August.
Hamburg, Deichtorhallen. A survey exhibition of
Cecily Brown’s work is on view to 30th August.
Hanover, Sprengel Museum. Photographs from the
collection of the Cologne-based dealers Ann and
Jürgen Wilde, on permanent loan to the Museum,
comprise an exhibition running here to 30th August.
Humlebaek, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
An exhibition of recent acquisitions, 2007–08, is on
view to 20th September.
Kassel, Gemäldegalerie. An exhibition devoted to
Philips Wouwerman runs here to 11th October (then
in The Hague); to be reviewed.
Le Havre, Musée Malraux. See Rouen.
Maastricht, Bonnefantenmuseum. A display of the
Rijksmuseum’s six tapestries with themes from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, woven by Frans Spiering after designs
by Karel van Mander, three of which were acquired
in 2006, runs to 13th September; to be reviewed.
The exhibition Exile on Main St. shows works by a
number of artists, including Artschwager, Copley and
Westermann, who stood out from mainstream
American Pop art in the 1960s; to 16th August.
Madrid, Museo del Prado. A monographic show
devoted to Joaquin Sorolla runs to 6th September.
Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
Sofia. A retrospective of works by Juan Muñoz is on
view to 31st August.
The first comprehensive museum survey of works
by Matthew Buckingham is on view here to 28th
September.
578 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
80. Eduard Wallis (1621–84), by Johannes Cornelisz
Verspronck. 1652. Panel, 97 by 75 cm.
(Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam).
Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. An exhibi-
tion focusing on the central period of Matisse’s work,
from 1917 to 1941, runs here to 20th September.
Malaga, CAC. A large exhibition of work by the
American artist Jack Pierson; to 27th September.
Marsala, Convento del Carmine. Monochrome art
by Burri, Fontana, Kounellis and others is on display
here to 18th October.
Martigny, Fondation Gianadda. Modern works
from Courbet to Picasso from the Pushkin Museum
are on display here to 22nd November.
Milan, Museo Poldi Pezzoli. Neo-classical and
Romantic drawings from the collection of Riccardo
Lampugnani are on view here to 18th October.
Milan, Palazzo Reale. A large-scale exhibition
devoted to the Scapigliatura movement, born in
Milan at the time of the reunification of Italy and
including artists such as Medardo Rosso, Picio and
Cremona, runs here to 22nd November.
Twenty of Monet’s late paintings are shown with
60 prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige from the Musée
Guimet, Paris; to 27th September.
Milan, Spazio Oberdan. A survey show of contem-
porary Latin-American art runs to 4th October.
Montauban, Musée Ingres. The exhibition Ingres et
les Modernes previously in Quebec, explores the influ-
ence of Ingres on modern artists; to 4th October.
Munich, Haus der Kunst. A thematically organised
overview of works by the sculptor Thomas Schütte,
including watercolours, prints and photographs, can
be seen here to 30th August.
Munich, Museum Brandhorst. Opened in May, this
new museum houses the collection of American
modern and contemporary art, including a large
collection of works by Cy Twombly, belonging to
Udo and Anette Brandhorst.
Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne. A complete sur-
vey of works by Hermann Obrist; to 27th September.
Murcia, La Conservera. This new contemporary art
centre, which opened in May, is showing exhibitions
by Manu Arregui, Björn Dahlem, Loris Gréaud and
Banks Violette; all to 16th August.
Naples, Museo Madre. An exhibition of paintings by
Francesco Clemente, which focuses on the artist’s
relationship to Italy, and culminates with the fresco
Ab Ovo made for the Museum in 2004–05, is on view
here to 14th September; to be reviewed.
Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum.
Seen earlier in Los Angeles, the exhibition Kunst und
Kalter Krieg. Deutsche Positionen 1945–1989 is on view
here to 6th September; to be reviewed.
Nuremberg, Kunsthalle. A survey of paintings
1999–2009 by the Expressionist painter André Butzer
is on view here to 23rd August.
Palma, Es Baluard Museum of Art. Thirteen large
paintings by Anselm Kiefer from the Grothe Collec-
tion are on view here to 30th August.
Seen earlier in Dortmund, Tampere and Malaga,
Under the Snow, an exhibition of work by Ilya and
Emilia Kabakov, is on view here to 6th September.
Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou. Seen earlier in
New York and Munich, the retrospective of works
by Kandinsky runs here to 10th August.
elles@centrepompidou presents works from the col-
lections by female artists; to 24th May 2010.
Works by Phillipe Parreno are on view here to
7th September.
Paris, Fondation Cartier. Born in the Streets – Graffiti
provides a survey of graffiti and street art from the
1970s to the present day; to 29th November.
Paris, Musée d’Orsay. The original collages created
by Max Ernst for his collage novel Une semaine de
bonté during a three-week stay in Italy in 1933 are on
display here to 13th September.
Paris, Musée du Louvre. An exhibition of drawings by
Laurent de La Hyre runs to 2nd November. A display
of drawings by Domenico Beccafumi is concurrent.
Paris, Musée du Luxembourg. Filippo and Filippino
Lippi: the Renaissance in Prato runs here to 2nd August.
Paris, Musée Maillol. An exhibition of work by
George Condo is on display here to 17th August.
Paris, Musée Rodin. Two exhibitions on the theme
of portraiture by Rodin and the contemporary
British artist Gillian Wearing; to 23rd August.
Paris, Palais de Tokyo. An exhibition on the theme
of espionage in contemporary art, Spy Numbers, runs
here to 30th August.
Paris, Pinacothèque. 50 works each by Valadon and
Utrillo; to 15th September; reviewed on p.498 above.
Pordenone, Civici Musei d’Arte e Spazi espositivi
provinciali. Sculpture and designs by Harry Bertoia
(1915–78), inventor of the diamond chair, born in
Pordenone and active in the US, are on display here
to 30th August.
Remagen, Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck.
Work by Jonathan Meese is on view here in the
exhibition Erzstaat Atlantisis; to 30th August.
Rome, Gagosian Gallery. Recent work by Cindy
Sherman is on view here to 19th September.
Rome, MACRO Future. An installation by Hema
Upadhyay is on view here to 21st September.
Rome, Palazzo Braschi. An exhibition of works by
Umberto Prencipe (1879–1962), some recently donated
to the Museum, runs here to 13th September.
Rome, Palazzo Venezia. The travelling exhibition
The Mind of Leonardo is on show here to 30th August.
Rome, Scuderie Papali al Quirinale. Photographs
by Lee Miller and Tony Vaccaro charting the Second
World War from the Normandy landings to the
liberation of Italy; to 30th August.
Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts. An exhibition here
and at the Musée Malraux, Le Havre, and the
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen, explores 19th-cen-
tury art inspired by Normandy; to 16th August.
St Etienne, Musée d’art moderne de Sainte-Eti-
enne. A retrospective of work by the Sarajevo-born
artist Braco Dimitrijevic; to 16th August.
St Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum. Master-
pieces of Egyptian portraits from the Egyptian Museum in
Berlin; to 20th September.
The Blue and the Gold of Limoges. The Enamels of the
XII–XIV Centuries; to 20th September.
Saint Paul de Vence, Fondation Maeght. Miró en
son Jardin illuminates the relationship between Miró
and the Maeght family, in an exhibition comprising
some 250 works; to 8th November.
Saint-Tropez, Musée de l’Annonciade. More than
60 works by Rouault explore the role of landscape in
his œuvre; to 12th October.
Salzburg, Museum der Moderne Salzburg
Mönchsberg. 120 drawings and 20 sculptures by
Tony Cragg comprise an exhibition running here to
11th October.
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Scandiano, Rocca dei Boiardo. Recently recovered
traces of frescos by Niccolo dell’Abate in the Rocca
form the backdrop to an exhibition of work by the
artist and his pupils; to 11th October.
Serra San Quirico, ex-Monastero di S. Lucia. The
exhibition Pasqualino Rossi. La scoperta di un protagonista
del Barocco, reviewed on p.504, runs to 13th September.
Trento, Castello del Buonconsiglio. A large-scale
exhibition of ancient Egyptian art is on view here to
8th November.
Treviso, Centro Carlo Scarpa. An exhibition of
Scarpa’s unrealised designs for theatres dating from
the 1920s to the 1970s is on view here to 21st
November.
Trieste, Castello di S. Giusto. The Serbian commu-
nity of Trieste from 1751 to 1914 is the subject of a
show running to 4th November.
Tübingen, Kunsthalle. Some 110 works in a variety
of media comprise a retrospective exhibition of
works by Tal R; to 4th October.
Turin, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
Seen earlier in Liverpool, the exhibition of works by
Glenn Brown runs here to 4th October.
Überlingen, Municipal Art Gallery. The 175th
anniversaries of the births of Degas and Whistler are
celebrated in the exhibition Impressionism and
Japonism, focusing on the way both artists responded
to Japanese prints; to 13th September.
Utrecht, Museum Catharijneconvent. Masterly
Manuscripts. The Middle Ages in gold and ink is organ-
ised in collaboration with the Library of Utrecht
University; to 23rd August.
Venice, Chiostro di S. Apollonia. S. Apollonia,
patron saint of teeth, was the subject of some unex-
hibited drawings made by Andy Warhol in 1984;
they are shown with recent works by Omar Gallani
of the same saint; in an exhibition running to 15th
August.
Venice, François Pinault Foundation. At the Palazzo
Grassi and the newly restored Punta della Dogana,
works from the François Pinault Foundation; to 22nd
November.
Venice, Giardini. The 53rd Venice Biennale runs to
22nd November; it is reviewed on p.502 above.
Venice, Palazzo Fortuny. The exhibition In-finitum
is the last of the trilogy of shows organised by the
Vervoordt Foundation; to 15th November.
Venice, Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Robert
Rauschenberg: Gluts, showing a selection of sculptures,
runs to 20th September.
Torre, the Belgian artist Wim Delvoye’s latest
creation, is a corten steel tower in the International
Gothic style and is on view to 22nd November.
Vienna, Kunsthalle. An exhibition of work by
Thomas Ruff; to 13th September.
Vienna, Liechtenstein Museum. An exhibition
exploring the picture frame from the late medieval
period to the 19th century runs to 12th January.
Vienna, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. The
monographic exhibition exploring the work of
Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, seen previously in
Paris, runs here to 11th October.
Vienna, MUMOK. Sensations of the Moment, the first
retrospective of works by Cy Twombly to be dis-
played in Austria, runs here to 11th October.
Volterra, Palazzo dei Priori. An exhibition devoted
to the Flemish painter Pieter de Witte (c.1548–1628)
runs here to 8th November; to be reviewed.
Wuppertal, Von der Heydt-Museum. Freedom,
power and splendour: Dutch art in the 16th and 17th cen-
turies explores the dichotomy between a country
experiencing a golden age and a country continually
at war; to 9th September.
Zürich, Kunsthaus. A survey exhibition of sculptures
by the German artist Katharina Fritsch, including a
number of new works, is on display here to 30th
August.
Paintings by the Swiss-born founder of the Munich
Secession, Albert von Keller; to 4th October.
An exhibition of work by the Paris-based Roman-
ian artist Mircea Cantor (b.1977) runs here to 8th
November.
New York
Andrea Rosen. Paintings by John Currin are on view
here to 21st August.
Asia Society. The first US museum presentation of the
complete five-part film by Yang Fudong, Seven Intel-
lectuals in a Bamboo Forest, runs to 13th September.
Brooklyn Museum. A mid-career survey of work by
Yinka Shonibare runs here to 20th September.
Cheim & Read. A group exhibition of works by
female artists depicting the female form, with works
from Berenice Abbott to Marlene Dumas, runs here
to 19th September.
Dia Foundation. At Beacon an exhibition placing
works by Antoni Tàpies, drawn from the collection
of the Reina Sofia, Madrid, in relation to works by
American and German artists from the 1960s and
1970s runs to 19th October.
Also at Beacon, a new work by Zoe Leonard can
be seen to 7th September.
Frick Collection. An exhibition here explores works by
Whistler in the permanent collection; to 23rd August.
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pen and Parchment: the
art of drawing in the Middle Ages; to 23rd August; to be
reviewed.
African and Oceanic Art from the Barbier-Mueller
Museum, Geneva; to 27th September.
Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, seen previ-
ously in London and Madrid and reviewed in the
September 2008 issue, runs here to 16th August.
Metro Pictures. A retrospective exhibition of works
by Robert Longo is on view here to 29th November.
Morgan Library & Museum. An exhibition here is
devoted to the outstanding 18th- and early 19th-
century oil-sketches in the collection of Eugene V.
and Clare Thaw; to 30th August.
Pages of Gold: Medieval Illuminations from the Morgan;
to 13th September.
Museum of Modern Art. An exhibition of work by
James Ensor; to 21st September (then in Paris).
In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art,
1960–1976 shows works by a range of artists, from
Gilbert & George to Allen Ruppersberg, who spent
time in Amsterdam in the 1960s and 1970s; to 5th
October.
Cézanne to Picasso: Paintings from the David and Peggy
Rockefeller Collection comprises ten early modern
European paintings given or promised to MoMA by
David and Peggy Rockefeller; to 31st August (Fig.81).
The first major retrospective of work by the British
designer Ron Arad; to 19th October.
81. Interior with a young girl (girl reading), by Henri
Matisse. 1905–06. Canvas, 72.7 by 59.7 cm. (Museum
of Modern Art, New York, fractional gift of Mr and
Mrs David Rockefeller).
the burlingt o n m a g a z i n e
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New Museum of Contemporary Art. Currently on
show are photographs by David Goldblatt, an instal-
lation by Rigo 23 on the theme of political prisoners
(both to 11th October), political posters by Emory
Douglas, a former Minister of Culture for the Black
Panther Party, and works by Dorothy Iannone made
between 1965 and 1978 (both to 18th October).
New York Public Library. Diaghilev’s Theatre of
Marvels: The Ballets Russes and its Aftermath runs here
to 12th September.
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Sculptural works
by Jonathan Horowitz in the manner of Jeff Koons
are on view to 14th September.
Solomon Guggenheim Museum. The Museum
celebrates its fiftieth anniversary with an exhibition
documenting the life and work of Frank Lloyd
Wright; to 23rd August; to be reviewed.
An exhibition drawn from the contemporary
paintings and sculptures acquired by James Johnson
Sweeney during his tenure as director from 1952 to
1960; to 2nd September.
Whitney Museum of American Art. Seen earlier
in Los Angeles, and reviewed in the July issue, the
retrospective exhibition of work by Dan Graham
runs here to 11th October (then in Minneapolis).
Claes Oldenburg: Early Sculpture, Drawings, and
Happenings Films is on view here to 6th September.
North America
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts. Titian, Tintoretto,
Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice runs here to 16th
August (then in Paris); to be reviewed.
Chicago, Art Institute. Works by Cy Twombly,
2000–07, are on view to 13th September.
An exhibition of Japanese screens drawn from the
Institute’s own collection, and from that of the Saint
Louis Art Museum; to 27th September.
Fort Worth, Modern Art Museum. Seen earlier
in San Francisco, the survey of works by William
Kentridge, is here to 27th September (then to West
Palm Beach, New York, and further locations).
Houston, Menil Collection. An exhibition of works
by John Chamberlain; to 2nd August.
Ithaca, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. An
exhibition exploring the graphic œuvre of Romeyn de
Hooghe (1645–1708), seen previously in Amsterdam,
runs here from 8th August to 11th October.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Pompeii and the
Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples,
seen earlier in Washington, runs here to 4th October.
Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from
Korea runs here to 20th September.
Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. The exhibition
exploring French bronzes spanning the Renaissance
to the Enlightenment, seen earlier in Paris and New
York and reviewed in the February issue, runs here
to 27th September.
French landscape drawings spanning the 17th to
19th centuries from the permanent collection are on
display to 1st November.
Minneapolis, Institute of Arts. Some 60 works by
William Holman Hunt are on view to 6th September.
In anticipation of another Louvre masterpiece
leaving home for an extended period, a small display
(from 8th August to 31st January) explores the scien-
tific and cultural world of the 17th-century
astronomer through prints, books, scientific instru-
ments and other objects that Vermeer depicted in his
painting The astronomer, scheduled to arrive here from
Paris in October for a three-month-long stint.
Minneapolis, Walker Art Center. The Quick and the
Dead; to 27th September.
An installation by Robert Irwin, first seen here 20
years ago, is on display in the Friedman Gallery; 6th
August to 21st November.
Montreal, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Mon-
tréal. Exhibitions of works by the photographer
Robert Polidori, the Canadian sculptor Spring Hurlbut
and the artist Christine Davis, are all on view to 7th
September.
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Montreal, Museum of Fine Arts. Grandeur Nature.
Peinture et Photographie des Paysages Américains et Cana-
diens de 1860 à 1918; to 27th September.
New Haven, Yale Center for British Art. A small
display of works by the French sculptor Jules Dalou
executed during his British period (1871–79); to
23rd August.
Oklahoma, City Museum of Art. Seen earlier in
Columbia, the exhibition Turner to Cézanne: Master-
pieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum
Wales is on view here to 20th September (then in
Syracuse, Washington and Albuquerque).
Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada. The interna-
tional loan exhibition From Raphael to Carracci: The
Art of Papal Rome includes some 150 paintings and
drawings and runs to 7th September.
The display reconstructing Veronese’s Petrobelli
altarpiece, seen earlier in London, runs here to 7th
September (then in Blanton).
Philadelphia, Museum of Art. An exhibition on
Duchamp’s Etant Donnés, installed in the Museum in
1969 and here contextualised by related works and
documentation, runs to 30th October.
Pittsburgh, Frick Art & Historical Center. The
seventeenth-century Dutch Italianates: Masterpieces from
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London; to 20th September.
Salem, Peabody Essex Museum. Turmoil and
Tranquillity: the Sea through the Eyes of Dutch and Flemish
Masters, 1550–1700, seen previously in London,
is entirely made up of loans from the National
Maritime Museum, London; to 7th September.
San Francisco, Fine Arts Museum. At the Legion
of Honour, a retrospective of prints by John
Baldessari from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer
and his Family Foundation; to 8th November.
San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art. Georgia
O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities is on view
to 7th September.
Seattle Art Museum. Target Practice: Painting Under
Attack 1949–78; to 7th September.
Toronto, Art Gallery. Seen earlier in Cologne, the
exhibition Painting as a Weapon: Progressive Cologne
1920–33 is on view here to 30th August. Concurrent-
ly, an exhibition of works by Angelika Hoerle, ‘the
Comet of Cologne Dada’ (then in Cologne).
Vancouver Art Gallery. Vermeer, Rembrandt, and the
Golden Age of Dutch Art: Treasures from the Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam; to 13th September.
Washington, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery. The Tsars
and the East: Gifts from Turkey and Iran in The Moscow
Kremlin; to 13th September.
Washington, National Gallery of Art. A mono-
graphic show devoted to Luis Meléndez runs here to
23rd August (then in Los Angeles and Boston).
A show comprising 12 works devoted to Tullio
Lombardo and Venetian sculpture runs to 31st
October (Fig.82).
The Art of Power: Royal Armor and Portraits from
Imperial Spain includes armour on loan from the
Spanish Royal Armoury, Madrid; to 1st November.
Washington, National Portrait Gallery. The
exhibition Reflections/Refractions: Self-Portraiture in
the Twentieth Century is on view here to 16th August.
Washington, Phillips Collection. Seen earlier in
Nashville, the exhibition Paint made Flesh is on view
here to 13th September.
Williamstown, Sterling and Francis Clark Art Insti-
tute. An exhibition comparing the work of Arthur
Dove and Georgia O’Keefe; to 7th September.
Australia
Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia. An exhi-
bition here explores the depiction of landscape since
the Renaissance; to 6th September.
Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria Interna-
tional. The first comprehensive retrospective of
works by Dalí to be shown in Australia is on view
here to 4th October.
Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Intensely
Dutch: image, abstraction and the word; to 23rd August.
580 a ugust 2009 • clI • the burlington magazine
82. Lucretia, by Antonio Lombardo. 1520s. Marble
with darker stone inlay, 34.3 by 23.8 by 11.1 cm.
(Walters Art Museum, Baltimore; exh. National
Gallery of Art, Washington).
Asia
Kyoto, Municipal Museum. Seen previously in
Tokyo, Masterpieces of 17th-century European art from the
Louvre, runs here to 27th September.
Osaka, National Museum of Art. An exhibition of
works on loan from the Louvre; to 23rd September.
Singapore, National Museum. The sufficiently vague
concept of ‘the world of the image’ provides the
pretext for two major museums in Antwerp to send a
selection of their 16th- and 17th-century paintings
and prints on loan here for an exhibition previously
seen in Shanghai; 14th August to 4th October.
Tokyo, Mori Art Museum. A retrospective of works
by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei; to 8th November.
Tokyo, National Museum of Modern Art. An exhi-
bition devoted to the work of Paul Gauguin is on
show here to 23rd September.
Announcement
The British Museum, London, has launched an
appeal to purchase 7,250 prints not already represented
in the Museum’s print room selected from the impor-
tant collection of British mezzotints (spanning c.1680 to
c.1900) formed over the past forty years by the Hon.
Christopher Lennox-Boyd. For further details and
information about how to make a donation, please
contact the Keeper of the Department of Prints and
Drawings, Antony Griffiths, at 020–73238405 or by
e-mail: Agriffiths@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk.
Forthcoming Fairs
Berlin, Art Forum Berlin. Contemporary art; 24th to
27th September.
London, 20/21 British Art Fair. Modern and con-
temporary art; 16th to 20th September.
London, Frieze Art Fair. Contemporary art; 15th to
19th October.
London, LAPADA Art and Antiques Fair. Art and
antiques; 24th to 27th September.
New York, International Fine Art and Antique
Dealers Show. 16th to 22nd October.
Paris, FIAC. Contemporary art; 22nd to 25th October.
Toronto International Art Fair (TIAF). Contem-
porary art; 22nd to 26th October
Notes on contributors
Laura Alidori Battaglia teaches at the University of
California, Santa Cruz. Her current research focuses
on the iconography of St Jerome in fifteenth-century
Florentine painting.
D.S. Chambers is a Reader in Renaissance Studies at
the Warburg Institute, University of London.
Jill Dunkerton is a Senior Restorer in the Conserva-
tion Department at the National Gallery, London.
Jennifer Fletcher was a Senior Lecturer at the
Courtauld Institute of Art, London, until Septem-
ber 2002.
Celina Fox is an independent art historian. Her book,
The Arts of Industry in the Age of Enlightenment, will be
published in Autumn 2009.
Julian Gardner is the Foundation Professor of History
of Art at Warwick University.
Dillian Gordon is Curator of Early Italian Paintings
1250–1460 at the National Gallery, London, where
she is currently writing a catalogue of paintings of
that period in the Gallery’s collection.
P.G. Gwynne teaches at the American University of
Rome. His Poets and Princes: the Panegyric Poetry of
Johannes Michael Nagonius is forthcoming.
Robin Hamlyn is a former curator at the Tate and
continues to research William Blake.
Merlin James is an artist represented by Sikkema
Jenkins & Co., New York.
Justin E.A. Kroesen teaches at the University of
Groningen.
Erika Langmuir is the author of the National
Gallery’s Companion Guide and other Gallery publi-
cations. Her book Imagining Childhood was published
in 2006.
Silvia Loreti is an independent art historian.
Paul Moorhouse is Curator of Twentieth-Century
Art at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Thorsten Opper is Curator of Greek and Roman
Sculpture at the British Museum, London.
Brenda Preyer is Emerita Professor of Art History at
the University of Texas at Austin.
Robert Radford is a lecturer at the University of East
Anglia, Norwich. He is currently writing a mono-
graph on de Chirico.
Anna Sconza is a researcher at the University of
Clermont-Ferrand, France. She is currently prepar-
ing a critical edition of Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise
on Painting (1651).
Frances Spalding teaches art history at Newcastle
University. Her book John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives
in Art will be published in September 2009.
Luke Syson is Curator of Italian Paintings, 1460-1500
and Head of Research at the National Gallery, London.
Alessia Trivellone is a post-doctoral researcher at the
University of Dijon. Her book L’hérétique imaginé.
Hétérodoxie et iconographie dans l’Occident médiéval, de
l’époque carolingienne à l’Inquisition is forthcoming in
Autumn 2009.
Marina Vaizey is the former editor of Art Quarterly and
The Review for the National Art Collections Fund.
She is currently a Trustee of the Geffrye Museum and
chairs the Friends of the Victoria and Albert Museum,
London.
Richard Verdi is the former director of the Barber
Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham.
Cordelia Warr is Senior Lecturer in Art History and
Visual Studies at the University of Manchester. Her
book Dressing for Heaven: Religious clothing in Italy,
1215–1545 will be published in 2010.
Catherine Whistler is Senior Assistant Keeper at the
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, with responsibility for
Italian and Spanish paintings and drawings.
Michael White is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at
the University of York. He is currently working as a
consultant curator on an exhibition provisionally
titled ‘Theo van Doesburg and the International
Avant-Garde’ for Tate Modern in February 2010.
Richard Wrigley teaches in the Department of Art
History at the University of Nottingham. His book
Roman Fever: influence, contagion, and the experience of
Rome is forthcoming.
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