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Charles I: King and Collector @ the Royal Academy

King Charles I is most famous for getting his head chopped off in 1649, at the climax of the civil war he had triggered against his Puritan, ’roundhead’ opponents in Parliament.

(I am aware that there’s controversy about all aspects of the wars, from their very name [should it be called the Great Rebellion, the British Civil Wars, the Wars of Three Kingdoms, etc] through to the dates, because the civil wars across all four of his realms actually started with the rebellion of the Scots at having an English prayer book imposed on them in 1637 – which triggered Charles’s hapless manoeuvrings with his Parliament to get them to fund an army to repel the Scots invasion of 1638 – although it wasn’t until rebellion broke out in Ireland in 1641 that the final breach between Charles and his Puritan opponents in Parliament became irreconcilable. It’s a much more complicated story than usually depicted.)

Anyway, before he mismanaged his kingdoms so badly that he triggered war in all three of them (Wales was not a kingdom but a principality) Charles had been one of the most sophisticated royal patrons and collectors of art anywhere in Europe. This big exhibition at the Royal Academy brings together an impressive number of the sculptures, paintings, tapestries and so on that Charles either directly commissioned or purchased through his roving agents from the leading artists of the day. it is a magnificent display of some 150 works of art, ranging from classical sculptures to Baroque paintings, and from exquisite miniatures to monumental tapestries.

Equestrian painting of Charles I with M. de St Antoine by Anthony van Dyck (1633)

Scattered and reunited

A simple but important point about the exhibition – and a demonstration of the vanity of human wishes – is that, having spent a lifetime collecting all these riches, soon after Charles’s execution the new Puritan regime sold them off to pay their soldiers and all these masterpieces were scattered across Europe.

Some were tracked down and rebought by his son, Charles II after his restoration to the throne in 1660, especially the ones which had gone to British purchasers who were no keen to ingratiate themselves with the new king. Most remained abroad and, indeed, made very nice additions to the royal collections of the Louvre and the Prado. But what was returned, along with the works which Charles’s queen, Henrietta Maria, had taken to France and brought back in 1660, went on to form the core of the future Royal Collection.

Charles the collector

In 1623, two years before he became king, Prince Charles visited Madrid. The purpose of the visit was to sound out the possibility of marriage to Maria Anna of Spain, daughter of King Philip III of Spain. Negotiations broke down when the new king, Philip IV, demanded that Charles convert to the Catholic Church and live in Spain for a year as pre-conditions.

But although the diplomatic aim of the visit failed, one thing made a deep impact on the future king of England, namely the huge and dazzling art collection of the Philip IV. This, thought Charles, was the magnificence and grandeur befitting a divinely appointed monarch! Charles went shopping and returned to England with a number of works, including paintings by Titian and Veronese, while agents were sent to France and Italy to snap up anything which came on the market. Thus Charles was able to snap up the famous Gonzaga collection which had been accumulated by successive dukes of Mantua, through the work of Nicolas Lanier, his Master of Music and agent.

It was this collection which included Andrea Mantegna’s monumental series, The Triumph of Caesar, (1484 to 1492) which is given a whole room to itself in the exhibition.

Triumph of Caesar: The Vase Bearers by Andrea Mantegna (1484 to 1492)

But it wasn’t just a matter of liking fine art. A king’s collection bespoke his power, both to the few subjects who saw it, but, more importantly, to visiting ambassadors and princes. According to historian Jenny Uglow, ‘ceremonies were delayed and dinners cooled as he showed visiting dignitaries proudly round’ his collection, including the so-called Bear Gallery containing works like Titian’s portrait of Charles V with a Dog (1533) and Rubens’s Daniel in the Lions’ Den (1616), to the Privy Lodging Rooms which housed works by Titian, Correggio, Giorgione and others; and then, the core of the collection, the Cabinet Room, which held 80 paintings, 36 statues and statuettes, as well as bas-reliefs, miniatures, books, engravings, drawings, medals and precious objects.

Charles V with a Dog by Titian (1533) Museo Nacional del Prado

Moreover portraits, such as those by van Dyck, then had multiple copies made of them which could be sent to foreign monarchs as testaments to Charles’s majesty and glory.

By 1649, Charles’s collection comprised around 1,500 paintings and 500 sculptures. An inventory compiled by Abraham van der Doort (c.1580 to 1640), first Surveyor of The King’s Pictures, recorded the contents of the collection, providing a detailed account of the artistic tastes and high level of connoisseurship within the king’s circle.

Changing British taste

One of the aims of the exhibition is to demonstrate how Charles was the first British monarch to really grasp the artistic culture of the Continent. The Protestant Tudor monarchs (Henry VIII, Edward VI, Elizabeth I), with the brief exception of the Catholic Queen Mary (1553 to 1558), had been wary of Catholic Europe and its culture.

But Charles’s father, James I, changed this policy. During the long reign of Queen Elizabeth Catholic Spain had been the enemy, justifiably so since its king, Philip II, had launched an armed invasion of England, which, if it had succeeded, would have resulted in the forced conversion of the church and people back to strict Roman Catholicism, with untold numbers of arrests, tortures and public burners of recusants.

James came from a different family and tradition and so was able to break with Elizabeth’s policy and seek a rapprochement with Catholic Spain. During his reign the treaties with Spain were moderate but still sparked murmurs of dissent from the Protestant aristocracy. (Anti-Spanish murmurings became louder when the Protestant hero, Sir Walter Raleigh, was beheaded in 1618, largely at the behest of the Spanish ambassador, and as a result of a last, ill-fated expedition to South America in 1617.)

The apotheosis of James I, commissioned by Charles I from Peter Paul Rubens to form the centrepiece of the newly refurbished Banqueting House, completed in 1636

James’s eldest son, Henry, surrounded himself with scholars, artists and musicians and acquired ‘Catholic’ paintings from Holland and from Florence. On Henry’s death in 1612 his collection passed to his mother, Anne of Denmark, who herself became a keen patron of painters, dramatists and architects as well as court masques, and filled her rooms at Somerset House and Oatlands Palace with religious pictures, still-lifes, landscapes and allegorical scenes.

So this was the family atmosphere Charles grew up in, far more relaxed about Catholic culture than his Protestant forebears of the previous century. The Puritans in Parliament disliked this cultural shift, as they had disliked Charles’s trip to Spain (still Europe’s most Catholic power) and then really disliked Charles’s marriage to the Catholic Henrietta Maria, youngest daughter of Henry IV of France, who – to the Puritans’ outrage – was allowed to attend Catholic masses in the Royal Palaces.

But Charles wasn’t alone in his taste for Continental art. Other super-rich aristocrats vied with him to create superb collections, including Thomas Howard (1586 to 1646), Earl of Arundel, and George Villiers (1592 to 1628), Duke of Buckingham. At the height of his success, Buckingham’s palace in the Strand contained over 300 paintings by artists including Rubens, Titian, Tintoretto and Bassano. It became a fashion and a competition.

Titian was the main man. Titian (1490 to 1576) had loyally served Habsburg monarchs, sending them paintings on a wide range of subject from his base in Venice. Titian’s portraits, especially those of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, proved him the supreme painter of kingly, military and diplomatic power, and Charles wanted some.

The Allocution of Alfonso d’Avalos to His Troops by Titian (1540 to 1541) Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Charles and Van Dyck

The artist most associated with Charles is Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599 to 1641). Charles persuaded the great Flemish painter to come to London in 1632, where he was appointed ‘principalle Paynter in Ordenarie to their Majesties’.

Triple Portrait of Charles I by Sir Anthony van Dyck (1636)

Van Dyck’s achievement was immense. His fluency and sense of composition, his extraordinary ability to capture not just the likeness but the mood and character of his sitters, was unparalleled. The exhibition includes some of his most spectacular works, including:

  • Charles I and Henrietta Maria with Prince Charles and Princess Mary (1632)
  • his two magnificent equestrian portraits, Charles I on Horseback with M. de St. Antoine (1633) and Charles I on Horseback (1638)
  • ‘Le Roi à la chasse’ (1635)

Many portraits were done in several versions, to be sent as diplomatic gifts or given to supporters of the increasingly embattled king. Altogether van Dyck has been estimated to have painted forty portraits of Charles himself, as well as about thirty of the Queen.

Such was the impact and range of his works that van Dyck became the dominant influence on English portrait-painting for the next 150 years. Charles awarded him a knighthood and a £200 annual pension. When van Dyck died young, in 1641, he was buried in (the old) St Paul’s Cathedral.

The Mortlake tapestries

But it wasn’t just van Dyck. Charles I commissioned some of the most important artists of his day. Beside the ceiling of the Banqueting House (above) Charles commissioned from Peter Paul Rubens paintings such as ‘Minerva Protects Pax from Mars’ (1630) and his ‘Landscape with Saint George and the Dragon’ (1630 to 1635).

Another major highlight of the exhibition is the Mortlake tapestries of Raphael’s Acts of the Apostles. These have a complicated history. In 1513 Pope Leo X commissioned Raphael to design a set of tapestries of the Acts of the Apostles to be hung in the Sistine Chapel. Detailed versions of the works were painted in gouache on sheets of paper which were glued together to achieve the scale required, and these preparatory studies are referred to as ‘cartoons’. These cartoons were the send to Brussels, at that time the premiere centre of tapestry making in Europe. The final tapestries took some time to create but were complete and delivered to Rome by the time of the Pope Leo’s death in 1521.

The cartoons were kept on at the workshops in Brussels for some years, and more versions of the tapestries created from them. But a hundred years later many had found their way back to Italy, to the city of Genoa to be precise. And it was here that one of Charles’s agents ascertained that they were available for sale and so young Prince Charles hurriedly bought them.

His aim was to bring the cartoons to England, where they could be used as models for the tapestry factory established in 1619 by his father, James I, at Mortlake in south-west London, and several partial sets of the Acts of the Apostles were indeed woven here over the next two decades. After passing through the hands of various monarchs, the reassembled cartoons were eventually gifted to the Victoria and Albert Museum. And it’s these huge and awesome works that the visitor can see in a room devoted to them.

The Miraculous Draft of Fishes by Raphael (1515 to 1516)

Summary

To visit the exhibition is to bask, for a while, in the reflected glory and magnificence of royalty, strolling past the masterpieces mentioned above as well as stunning works by other Renaissance artists such as Correggio, Agnolo Bronzino, Jacopo Bassano, Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese as well as Albrecht Dürer, Jan Gossaert, Hans Holbein the Younger and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. What a banquet of Baroque art, a visual feast fit for a king.

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by Simon on February 17, 2018  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on February 17, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/02/17/charles-the-first-king-and-collector-royal-academy/

Modigliani by Doris Krystof (1996)

Taschen Publishing specialise in medium-sized art books (23 cm tall x 18.5 cm wide). They’re all originally written in German, this one was translated into English by Christina Rathgeber. I picked it up for a fiver in some art shop years ago, and dusted it off and reread it to coincide with visiting the big Modigliani exhibition at Tate Modern.

The text is eminently readable and it has 88 good quality colour reproductions, not just of paintings and sculptures by the man himself but of works by contemporaries like Picasso, Kirchner and Brancusi, as well as classic nudes by Titian and Giorgione, quoted to compare and contrast with Modigliani’s famous nude paintings.

It is a real visual treat just slowly flipping through the pictures and soaking them up.

Biography

The outline of Modigliani’s life is clear enough. Born in 1884 to an arty Jewish family in northern Italy (his mother translated poetry, wrote essays and book reviews), his creative tendencies were encouraged so that by age 14 he was studying at the art academy in Livorno. He studied from books and attended a life drawing class; he visited Rome and Florence and Venice where he revelled in the Old Masters. He attended the Venice Biennale of 1903 and stayed there two years.

By which point it was time to move on and he headed for the Mecca of modern artists, Paris, arriving in 1906. Quite quickly he made important friends, not least the Spaniard Picasso and the Romanian sculptor Brancusi. For the next few years he experimented with a number of styles, from Cézanne (who had died in 1906 and quickly had several exhibitions devoted to his late work) to Edvard Munch, who impressed everyone with the work displayed at the Salon d’Automne of 1908 – although he avoided the main new movement of the day, Fauvism (given its name in 1905 and which flourished for the next few years).

Similarly, Modigliani was well aware of, but avoided, the arrival of Cubism in 1908, pioneered by Picasso and Braque, which swept up many lesser talents. Instead, he pursued his core interest of depicting the human form using outlines of graceful arabesques.

From about 1909 to 1912 Modigliani devoted himself entirely to sculpture, heavily influenced by the new taste for ‘primitive’ art from Africa and Oceania which became modish from around 1905, and by his friendship with the modernist sculptor, Brancusi.

Although some of his sculptures are obviously influenced by (copies) of African fetish masks which were becoming popular in artistic circles, Modigliani was just as obsessed by the idea of the caryatid, the statue of a woman bearing the weight of a building which had been developed in ancient Greece. He produced scores of sketches and variations on this crouching, hunched-up, female shape.

Eventually Modigliani gave up sculpting, maybe because the dust was bad for his chronic tuberculosis, but his painting style was now purified of the earlier variety and experimentalism – the faces in particular from now on were all variations on the elongated, oval shape with schematic, one-line features (eyes, eyelids and mouth all drawn with a crisp elegant line) which he had perfected in the sculptures and in the numerous preparatory sketches he made for them.

He continued to paint a wide variety of portraits of friends, lovers, fellow artists, collectors and patrons, and in the middle of the Great War began to paint a series of nudes. These differ from the portraits in being really simplified – the skin tone is generally a consistent warm orange colour, and the facial features are purified down to a handful of lines. They sold well – what’s not to like?

Towards the end of the War, Modigliani was advised to head south by his dealer and set up shop in Nice, along with his mistress, Jeanne Hébuterne, mother of his daughter. Here he painted lots more portraits, but in a noticeably lighter style, and of ordinary people – instead of the rich and famous of Paris’s art world – of peasants, hotel cleaners, and even of children. These, along with the nudes, became his most popular images.

By 1919 he was back in Paris, and the final portraits of his mistress and patrons show a further tendency to elongate both the neck and the face even more, making each person even more of an abstract collection of lines and colours.

Modigliani died after a long decline in his health on 24 June 1920. Soon afterwards friends and acquaintances, lovers and patrons began writing their memoirs, and quite quickly the myth grew up of the handsome, charming Wunderkind artist, who endured great poverty in his undying devotion to his art. And his paintings began to sell.

The works

Early paintings

Having seen a lot of the ‘greatest hits’ at the Tate Modern exhibition, I was taken by the more out-of-the-way works included in this book, especially of the early works before he’d perfected the Modigliani ‘look’.

Sketches

From early on he developed a hyper-simplified line, which comes over in nude sketches and then very much in the sketches he made from African artefacts in the Louvre and the Museum of Ethnography.

Sculptures

He took up sculpture in 1909, nobody knows why. Perhaps because he had always revered the sculptural legacy of his native Italy, perhaps because his paintings weren’t selling, perhaps because he moved to a bigger workspace in Montparnasse, perhaps because he met Constantin Brancusi in 19090 and was hugely influenced by him. Or all of the above.

Brancusi (b.1876) had perfected a smooth highly stylised way of working in stone which anticipates Art Deco.

Modigliani’s sculptures are of two types, a squat square type, which could fit at the top of a column –

And the much-better known, highly elongated, ‘primitive’ mask like heads. Although the politically correct like to raise the issue of ‘cultural appropriation’ and the way so many of the avant-garde artists of the 1900s looked to sculptures from Africa or Oceania, the book points out that there are also strong European origins for this look, in the stunningly abstract heads carved in the Cycladic islands of Greece thousands of years BC.

Apparently he conceived of the sculptures, these stone heads, as all being together in one place, creating a kind of temple of beauty. This may partly explain their thematic unity, that they were designed to be displayed and seen as an ensemble.

Nudes

Krystof makes a simple but effective point that it’s not so much in the sculptures but in the sketches for the sculptures, and especially in the sketches of caryatids, that we see Modigliani really simplifying his technique, perfecting a way of depicting the human body entirely made up of simple, one-line, shallow curves – no sketching, and repeated lines or cross-hatching – just one pure line to create the body’s outline, another to distinguish to the two legs, meeting another curve which creates the loins, two simple curves, maybe a bit pointed, to indicate the breasts, a curve for the mouth, a long narrow triangle for the nose, two almonds for eyes – in many ways a child’s eye view of the human body.

She also makes the good point that these curves are consciously not like the focus on blocks and squares and diagonals and geometric shapes of the suddenly fashionable Cubists. It is in pursuit of shallow curves that Modigliani is at odds with the art of his own times, a one-off.

And so to the female nudes which make up about 10% of his output – about 30 nudes in total – and in their simple outlines, as well as their very simple orange flesh colouring, present a kind of cartoon simplicity and pleasingness.

He began painting them in 1916, helped by the important patronage of dealer and friend Léopold Zborowski, who lent the artist use of his apartment, supplied models and painting materials, and paid him between fifteen and twenty francs each day for his work.

The simple graceful outlines, the soft orange skin and pink nipples, the simplified facial features, and the tonal unity of the paintings (compare and contrast with the violent garish colouring of the Fauves) makes Modigliani’s nudes understandably popular even among opponents of modern art.

Krystof also takes some time to explain another reason for their sense of familiarity, the reason they seem so assimilable. It’s because the poses are often based on established classics of Western art.

Quite systematic copying or borrowing or pastiching, isn’t it?

Krystof makes another, subtler, point. In all the classic paintings above you can see the entire body – you, the viewer, are standing some way away. By contrast, all of the Modigliani nudes are cropped, at least part of the arms or legs are out of the frame – as if you were really close up to the model, not so much contemplating them as about to fall over them. Immediacy.

Portraits

But the 20 or so nudes mark a sort of apricot-coloured interlude in Modigiliani’s core activity during his final years, which was the obsessive painting of hundreds of portraits.

Krystof divides them into two categories – one of friends, lovers, patrons, fellow artists and named individuals – the other category of scores of anonymous models, peasants and children.

They are all rougher and harsher, in design and finish, than the nudes.

To get at the essence of the Modigliani approach, Krystof compares his portrait of Jean Cocteau with a portrait done at exactly the same time and place by Moise Kisling.

The immediate and obvious conclusion is the huge amount of clutter Modigliani has chucked out – the window, shutters, table, vase, stove, chair, dog and rug are all not there – and the way he has zoomed in to focus on the top half of the body to create an image which is much simpler, sparer and more intense.

Hence Krystof’s suggestion that Modigliani developed in his portraits ‘the art of omission’ (p.53)

The same technique – cropping sitters at the bust and showing no interest in the details of the backdrop – characterises many of the portraits, which are more varied and interesting than the nudes.

Flight south

In the spring of 1918 the Germans began a final offensive. Planes and Zeppelins bombed Paris and many feared the city would fall. Up to a million people fled the capital, including Modigliani and his mistress / common-law wife, Jeanne Hébuterne, who gave birth to their daughter in 1918. The young family spent over a year in Nice and Cagnes-sur-Mer, where Modigliani painted more feverishly and intensely than ever before.

The light of the South of France lightened his palette and the texture of the paint he used, the paint is thinner. Also the local people he got to model for him lack the specificity of the Paris portraits, becoming more generic – which may account for their later popularity.

Jeanne Hébuterne

Modigliani painted at least 25 portraits of the mother of his children. Photographs of her make her look absolutely stunning, in fact she has something of the long-tressed, full-lipped beauty beloved of the pre-Raphaelites.

In his last paintings of her, the neck and face are more elongated than ever, the background painted in with lighter sketchier colours than previously.

Conclusion

This is a really handy book, containing not only nearly 90 beautiful full-colour illustrations which give you an immediate and comprehensive feel for Modigliani’s unique style, but also a more thoughtful and insightful text by Doris Krystof, than is usual for Taschen books.

Possibly my favourite portrait comes right at the end of the book, one of the few Modigliani portraits which has even a hint of feeling and emotion, in this case a self-contained, winsome sadness.

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by Simon on December 20, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 20, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/12/20/modigliani-doris-krystof/

Michelangelo and Sebastiano @ the National Gallery

Introduction

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born near Arezzo, in Tuscany, in 1475. At age 13 he was sent to study art in Florence, the greatest centre of art and learning in Italy, where he was apprenticed to Ghirlandaio, a master in fresco painting, perspective, figure drawing and portraiture. Here he imbibed the Florentine principles of meticulous figure drawing and careful planning of a composition.

Sebastiano Luciani, later nicknamed del Piombo, was born ten years later in 1485 in Venice. He became a pupil of Giovanni Bellini and then of Giorgione. From the latter, especially, he absorbed a more improvisatory approach to composition, combined with a soft almost misty use of light, along with the traditional Venetian emphasis on gorgeous colour. (The greatest colourist of all, Titian, was born in Venice just 5 years later.)

In 1511 Sebastiano arrived in Rome whose art world he found riven with rivalries, especially that between the established genius, Michelangelo, who was hard at work painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (a commission which took from 1508 to 1512) and his main rival, Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino – otherwise known as Raphael  born in 1483, who was soon to be commissioned to paint the walls of the nearby Vatican library.

Michelangelo never liked oil painting; he was more a sculpture or a creator of frescos. He quickly realised that Sebastiano was the only oil painter in town who could take on Raphael, so there was a strong element of calculation in his befriending of the younger man. Sebastian, for his part, was able to work with the greatest genius of the age.

It was the start of a 25-year-long friendship, which included a long correspondence, and collaboration on a number of major commissions. This exhibition features seventy or so works – paintings, drawings, sculptures and letters – which are masterpieces in their own right, shed light on the working practices of both men, and chronicle a unique friendship at the height of the Renaissance.

Differing approaches

Their differing approaches are epitomised in the first of the show’s six rooms by two unfinished works. Michelangelo is represented by a painting of The Virgin and Child with Saint John and Angels (‘The Manchester Madonna’). Note the careful composition, the adult figures and child figures in neat rows, and the high finish of the human skin, almost like sculpted stone.

The Virgin and Child with Saint John and Angels ('The Manchester Madonna') by Michelangelo (about 1497) © The National Gallery, London

The Virgin and Child with Saint John and Angels (‘The Manchester Madonna’) by Michelangelo (about 1497) © The National Gallery, London

Compare and contrast with Sebastiano’s Judgement of Solomon. It’s possible to see, on the unfinished legs of the figure at right, various other postures which have been tried out and superseded. Also the faces are much softer and misty, something which is especially clear on the face of the mother on the right.

The Judgement of Solomon (about 1506-9) by Sebastiano del Piombo © National Trust Images / Derrick E. Witty

The Judgement of Solomon (about 1506 to 1509) by Sebastiano del Piombo © National Trust Images / Derrick E. Witty

Collaborations

1. The nocturnal Pieta

Lamentation over the dead Christ, also known as the Viterbo Pietà (about 1512 to 1516) was Michelangelo and Sebastiano’s first collaboration. Michelangelo did the design and detailed sketches of the figures (sketches which can be seen here, next to the finished work) while Sebastiano actually painted it, adding the background landscape characteristic of Venetian art. (Compare and contrast with the softness of the figures and the mysterious background in the famous Tempest of Sebastiano’s teacher, Giorgione). In fact, this is, apparently, one of the first nocturnal landscapes in European art.

For my money, by far the best thing about it is the body of Christ. It has the best of both artists – Michelangelo’s sense of structure and musculature, softened by Sebastiano’s smooth oil technique.

Lamentation over the Dead Christ (1512-16) by Sebastiano del Piombo. Museo Civico, Viterbo © Comune di Viterbo

Lamentation over the Dead Christ (1512 to 1516) by Sebastiano del Piombo. Museo Civico, Viterbo © Comune di Viterbo

2. Raising of Lazarus

There are several stories about this painting.

1. It was commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici in Rome, who simultaneously commissioned a ‘Transfiguration’ from Raphael. The Lazarus was taken to Cathedral of Narbonne, where Giulio was cardinal.

2. Raphael’s Transfiguration is arguably the better painting, in terms of the drama of its structure and composition. The Sebastiano comes over as more cluttered and cramped. In fact the reproduction below makes it look better – more dramatic – than it is in real life, where it feels immense and overpowering.

3. X-ray photography has shown that Sebastiano changed the posture of some of the figures. The audioguide suggests that Michelangelo dropped by after the initial outline was created, and suggested changes to make it more dramatic e.g. the arm of Lazarus (bottom right) originally stretched out towards Christ and his head was further back. Changing the arm and head positions makes his figure more dynamic.

4. Lastly, the painting came into the ownership of the British collector Sir George Beaumont who, in turn, left it to the nation in 1824, in the collection which was to become the foundation of the National Gallery. All the NG’s works are numbered and this painting is actually the very first in the catalogue – NG1.

The Raising of Lazarus (1517-19) by Sebastiano del Piombo, incorporating designs by Michelangelo © The National Gallery, London

The Raising of Lazarus (1517 to 1519) by Sebastiano del Piombo, incorporating designs by Michelangelo © The National Gallery, London

3. The Borgherini chapel

The Borgherini Chapel was commissioned by Michelangelo’s friend and broker, the Florentine banker Pierfrancesco Borgherini (1488 to 1558) and was created inside the church of San Pietro in Montorio in Rome.

The frescoes showing The Flagellation of Christ and The Transfiguration were painted by Sebastiano. Michelangelo was slated to provide the designs, but left Rome for Florence after only providing drawings for the central Flagellation and possibly a layout for the Transfiguration. The entire wall and alcove of the chapel has been recreated using state-of-the-art digital technology by Spanish workshop, Factum Arte.

The composition is in three levels: centre bottom is Christ being flagellated; above in the ceiling is Christ rising to heaven; above that is the coat of arms of Pierfrancesco Borgherini. He is flanked by three sets of ‘authorities’: on the lowest level, by Saint Peter (left) and Saint Francis of Assisi (right) (the namesakes of the sponsor); to either side of the transfigured Christ are Moses (left) and Aaron (right); above, on the flat wall, are St Matthew (left) and Isaiah (right). It is these last two figures which are most reminiscent of Michelangelo; they could both have come straight from the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

The exhibition's digital recreation of the alcove at the Borgherini Chapel in the church of An Pietro in Montorio in Rome, featuring designs by Michelangelo but painted by Sebastiano del Piombo

The exhibition’s digital recreation of the alcove at the Borgherini Chapel in the church of San Pietro in Montorio in Rome, featuring designs by Michelangelo but painted by Sebastiano del Piombo

It’s only mentioned a few times, mainly in reference to the stunning over-life-size sculpture of Jesus by Michelangelo which is displayed here in two versions, but I was fascinated to learn how the image of the resurrected Christ was an object not only of anatomical beauty but of philosophical and theological inspiration for these artists and contemporary humanist reformers. The perfection of the naked body, as first created by Greek sculptors 2,000 years earlier, embodied a perfection of moral and theological being to which all humans could aspire. Hence there is a kind of luminous perfection of Michelangelo’s sculptures.

The Risen Christ (1897-8, after the Risen Christ, 1519-21, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome) after Michelangelo. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen © SMK Photo / Jakob Skou-Hansen

The Risen Christ (1897 to 1898, after the Risen Christ, 1519 to 1521, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome) after Michelangelo. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen © SMK Photo / Jakob Skou-Hansen

Catholic Christianity and its discontents

It’s sort of obvious, but all these works celebrate Roman Catholic Christianity, at its headquarters in Rome, working for its chief officer on earth, the Pope. As a Protestant I am always aware that these exquisite art works were produced with money mulcted from the peasants and poorest people of Europe by huge numbers of roaming tax collectors, penance providers, summoners and pardoners of the kind satirised by Chaucer over a hundred years earlier, and whose cynicism and corruption so disgusted the monk Martin Luther that he undertook a sweeping condemnation of the entire structure of the church and its underlying theology.

These years of glorious artistic achievement also saw the start of what came to be known as ‘the Reformation’, triggered when Luther nailed his 95 theses against the church to the door of his local church in Wittenberg in 1517.

Luther’s theology was diametrically opposed to the optimistic humanism of Michelangelo and many of the other artists of the High Renaissance. While they thought humans could aspire to an almost supernatural perfection – bodied forth in their immaculate statues – Luther emphasised the irredeemably fallen state of degraded sinful humanity – incapable of anything, any action, any moral behaviour, any thoughts of beauty, without the all-powerful grace of God to lift us.

The sack of Rome

The Reformation itself doesn’t impinge on any of these works, but the chronic instability of central Europe certainly does. For the cardinal who commissioned Sebastiano’s Raising of Lazarus went on to become Pope Clement VII, ruling from 1523 to his death in 1534. In the interminable conflict between the Holy Roman Emperors (in this case, Charles V), the Papacy and the rising power of France, Clement made the mistake of allying with France. This led a large mercenary army of Charles V to lay siege to Rome and, on 6 May 1527, to breach the city walls and go on a week-long rampage of looting, raping, killing and burning.

Clement retreated to the enormous Castel Sant’Angelo, where he was accompanied (presumably among many others) by Sebastiano who forged a close friendship with him. Before and after the siege Sebastiano painted several portraits of Clement. As a result, in 1531 Clement appointed him piombatore, or keeper of the lead seal which was used to seal papal messages. It was a lucrative sinecure paying a stipend of some eight hundred scudi and explains why in later life he was nicknamed ‘del Piombo’, which translates literally as ‘of the lead’ and, more figuratively, as ‘of the seal’.

Portrait of Clement VII (1525-6) by Sebastiano del Piombo/Museo di Capodimonte, Naples © Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale di Napoli

Portrait of Clement VII (1525 to 1526) by Sebastiano del Piombo/Museo di Capodimonte, Naples © Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale di Napoli

End of the friendship

Raphael had died suddenly, very young (aged 37) in 1520, at which point Sebastiano became the leading painter in Rome. During the 1520s he gradually lost his Venetian style, adopting more monumental forms and a cooler range of colour. According to Michelangelo’s friend, the painter and great historian of Renaissance art, Giorgio Vasari, Sebastiano grew increasingly lazy, addicted to gaming and drinking.

His friendship with Michelangelo seems to have ended in the mid-1530s. Michelangelo had spent much of the 1520s in Florence, carrying out various commissions for the Medici family. In 1534 he returned to Rome and to a major commission to paint the end wall of the Sistine Chapel with the scene of the Last Judgement. The story goes that Michelangelo asked his old collaborator to prepare the wall for him, but that Sebastiano prepared it to be painted in oil – using a technique he had developed in Michelangelo’s absence. Apparently, Michelangelo was furious, had Sebastiano’s preparatory work torn down and insisted on doing the fresco his way.

Maybe. But Michelangelo was notoriously touchy. As the historian who is interviewed on the audioguide put it, Sebastiano had a longer run than most friends of the irascible genius, possibly because through most of the 1520s they’d lived in different cities. Maybe it was simply living in the same city again, that led to an inevitable break.

The works of art in this exhibition are stunning. But it can also be enjoyed as the story of a remarkable friendship; as giving fascinating insight into the compositional and painting techniques of the High renaissance; and as shedding an oblique light on the seismic contemporary events of the reformation and the Sack of Rome.

Although housed in just six rooms, it feels very, very full – of ideas, insights and breath-taking works of art.

Favourite

It’s easy to be over-awed by the brilliance, or certainly the size, of many of the works on display here. For me (the copy of) Michelangelo’s sculpted Pietà was head and shoulders better than anything else on display. It is an astonishing work and mind-boggling to realise that he made it when he was only 25!

Pietà (copy after Michelangelo's Pietà, 1497-1500, St Peter's, Vatican City) © Photo Vatican Museums

Pietà (copy after Michelangelo’s Pietà, 1497 to 1500, St Peter’s, Vatican City) © Photo Vatican Museums

But it would be easy to overlook the maybe thirty sketches and cartoons by both artists – the Michelangelo generally more forceful and energetic than the Sebastiano. My favourite work in the whole exhibition was Michelangelo’s Seated nude and two studies of an arm. I love sketches and drawings which emphasise structure and draughtsmanship. And I like unfinished works, which are full of mystery and suggestion. So this really pulls my daisy.

Seated nude and two studies of an arm (1510-1512) by Michelangelo © Albertina, Vienna

Seated nude and two studies of an arm (1510 to 1512) by Michelangelo © Albertina, Vienna

The video

No self-respecting exhibition these days is without at least one promotional video.

Related links

Reviews of other National Gallery exhibitions

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by Simon on March 14, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 14, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/the-credit-suisse-exhibition-michelangelo-and-sebastiano-the-national-gallery/

In the Age of Giorgione @ the Royal Academy

At the very start of the 16th century Giovanni Bellini was still the leading artist in rich, imperial Venice. But a younger generation was emerging in his wake, including Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian, and another newcomer, later referred to as ‘Giorgione’.

Little is known about Giorgione and there is little agreement on which works can be firmly attributed to him. According to the National Gallery website, he came from Castelfranco in the Veneto, and is referred to as ‘maistro Zorzi da Castelfranco’ in an inscription dated to 1506, Zorzi being Venetian dialect for Giorgi. Giorgione means ‘Big George’.

Giorgione in his time

This exhibition brings together 39 oil paintings, 6 drawings and one carved relief to set Giriogione in the context of the Venice of the day, among his eminent peers, Bellini and Titian, as well as other contemporaries such as Sebastiano del Piombo and Lorenzo Lotto and the largely neglected Giovanni Cariani, with mention of notable visitors to the city at around this time, namely Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci (there are several portraits and drawings by Dürer, to show his influence, nothing actually by Leonardo).

Attribution

Giorgione was only active from around 1500 to 1510 when he died, probably in his 30s, probably from the plague. During that time he developed a style notable for its intimacy, sensuality and mystery. But study of Giorgione is plagued by problems of attribution. Numerous paintings here have had contested attributions: Is it Titian? Bellini? Big George? Listening to the audio commentary became quite confusing after a while because so many of the paintings have been attributed first to one, then to the other.

You think you’ve got the hang of Giorgione’s style from the second work in the exhibition, and maybe the best, the Terris portrait.

This is one of the few really brilliant works in an otherwise disappointing show and well worth the admission just to see it in the flesh. The use of shadow on the right side of the face, by the nose, the stubble, the darkness of the chin and jowls, create a tremendous sense of personality and depth. The commentary says the work appears to use or have been influenced by Leonardo’s technique of sfumato, or smokiness.

But having established this as Giorgione’s signature style, surprisingly few of the subsequent works attributed to him show this degree of subtlety and mastery.

Compare and contrast with the Giustiniani Portrait, below. The gaze is striking as is the pose with the hand on the lintel in the foreground, but it is not a complete masterpiece like the Terris portrait, it lacks the amazing modelling of the features, the softness and depth. And there’s something childish, almost naive, about the overall image, unlike the tremendous maturity of the Terris portrait.

Portrait of a Young Man ('Giustiniani Portrait') by Giorgione. Gemaldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preubischer Kulturbesitz. Photo (c) Jorg P. Anders

Portrait of a Young Man (‘Giustiniani Portrait’) by Giorgione. Gemaldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preubischer Kulturbesitz. Photo © Jorg P. Anders

The exhibition is divided into sections: Portraits; Landscape; Devotional works; Allegorical portraits. The room on landscapes includes a lot of bad paintings by contemporaries, and some so-so drawings by Domenico Campagnola and Titian. Look at the musician’s face and his post-Michelangelo weightlifter’s legs in this Arcadian idyll, attributed to Titian.

Titian, Two Arcadian Musicians in a Landscape. Pen and brown ink over black chalk on paper. On loan from the British Museum, London (c) The Trustees of the British Museum

Two Arcadian Musicians in a Landscape by Titian © The Trustees of the British Museum

Maybe Giorgione’s most famous painting is The Tempest, a puzzling and haunting work, the hazily realistic depiction of an unexplained and strangely symbolic scene, pregnant with meaning. Who is the woman suckling the baby? Who is the man watching (or guarding) them? What city lies (half ruined?) in the background? Why is it set during a storm?

This work isn’t in the exhibition. The nearest thing is the large and nearly as strange work, The Sunset.

Il Tramonto (The Sunset) by Giorgione. The National Gallery, London. Photo (c) The National Gallery, London

Il Tramonto (The Sunset) by Giorgione Photo © The National Gallery, London

Only in the flesh can you appreciate its strange details: a tiny big-beaked bird in the centre right at the bottom, a strange beast emerging from a cave in the bottom right, another weird creature lying on the surface of the pond at the bottom right. The commentary complicates matters by saying the painting was only discovered in the 1930s in a badly degraded condition and was sent off to Rome to be restored. When it reappeared much improved it did so with the completely new figures of St George on horseback lancing the dragon in the centre right! Why? Did the restorer think it needed improving? Did the dealer who went on to sell it think it would sell better if it had a bit of narrative excitement?

And to the amateur eye, although the subject matter is obscure, the overall visual feel of this painting is very different from the Tempest, in at least two striking ways: in The Tempest the focus is very much on the human figures, especially the suckling woman looking at us; here the human figures are an afterthought in what is basically a strange landscape; and the Tempest is green, very green, green grass, green trees, even the river is green; this whole painting is a muddy brown.

This is just one of the most striking examples of the problems of attribution and authenticity which afflict Giorgione’s works.

Devotional works

The biggest room focuses on devotional and religious works by Giorgione and his peers. All of these struck me as ugly and clumsy. At one end is the big work, Jacopo Pesaro being presented by Pope Alexander VI to Saint Peter which is attributed to Titian.

Close up, I didn’t like it at all: the clumsiness of the composition eg the dais St Peter is sitting on is wonky, the way it cuts into the floor tiles is not convincing. Worse still is the way the floor ends and the sea just begins, as if about to pour over the floor at any moment: something is badly wrong with the perspective.

Then there’s the subject matter: this painting glorifies the Pope presenting to St Peter, one Jacopo Pesaro, bishop of Paphos who led the Venetian navy to victory over the Ottoman Turks at the battle of Santa Maura on 28 June 1502. I think it’s a hilariously unsuitable subject for an oil painting: a portrait of the victorious admiral would be one thing: the Pope blessing the victorious admiral would work; but the badly drawn Pope presenting the victorious admiral to St Peter, depicted as sitting on a wonky dais decorated with scenes from Greek mythology, seems tackily ill conceived.

The paintings in this room glorify a Roman Catholic Papacy which was already a byword for rapacity and corruption. Only ten years or so after this painting was made, Martin Luther would rebel against the systematic theological and financial corruption of the Italian church, leading to the wholesale rejection of its organisation, theology and practice by the north of Europe – the Reformation; an upheaval which would then lead to the shambolic attempts to reform the Catholic church known as the Counter-Reformation.

Thus the religious paintings of Giorgione and his peers celebrate the Catholic church at the most corrupt period of its long history. Maybe we could overlook this fact if the paintings were of a ravishing and transcendent perfection. But they aren’t. Here’s Bellini (1430 to 1516) at his best – Virgin and Child with Saint Peter, Saint Mark and a Donor. Not a very appealing painting, I think; the faces of the Madonna and baby Jesus are, in my opinion, actively unpleasant to look at, like looking at photos of deformed people. The commentary points out that the donor’s hand isn’t quite touching the baby Jesus’s feet, but is everso slightly overlapping them, as if this is clever, or as if it it redeems the unattractiveness of the painting. I know it was traditional in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and beyond for rich people to pay for themselves to be included in paintings of the Madonna, of the Crucifixion and other key moments in Jesus life (less so the Sermon on the Mount or when Jesus attacked the moneylenders in the Temple) but to the liberal mind it always looks phenomenally crude, arrogant and blasphemous.

It is included in the exhibition to demonstrate Bellini’s clarity and crispness of image, the sharp outlines of the figures against the bright blue background, the detailing of the stone plinth behind the Madonna, a clarity which Giorgione and Titian were replacing with their more shady, smoky visions.

Virgin and Child with Saint Peter, Saint Mark and a Donor by Giovanni Bellini. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Photo (c) Birmingham Museums

Virgin and Child with Saint Peter, Saint Mark and a Donor by Giovanni Bellini. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Photo © Birmingham Museums

The Bellini and Titian are hung alongside 10 or so other religious paintings, but directly contrasted with the big painting at the other end of the room, Christ and the Adulteress, which is also attributed to Titian.

Christ and the Adulteress by Titian. Glasgow Life (Glasgow Museums) on behalf of Glasgow City Council. Archibald McLellan Collection, purchased 1856 Photo (c) CSG CIC Glasgow Museum Collections

Christ and the Adulteress by Titian. Glasgow Life (Glasgow Museums) Photo © CSG CIC Glasgow Museum Collections

There is something appealing about the frank posture of the man with the red pantaloons but I am not much moved by the fainting adulteress, let alone the head of the old man in the middle or the dead-looking person at the far left. The audio commentary tells us that for a long time this painting wasn’t attributed to Titian, and even an amateur can see why, because it does seem completely different from the crisp sharp outlines of The Presentation of Jacopo Pesaro. (I was gratified to see the mismatch between these two paintings highlighted in the London Review of Books review of the show by Charles Hope, link below.)

It’s yet another contested attribution which undermines your confidence in a lot of the works here. As if that weren’t enough, the commentary then continues with the stunning revelation that we’re not even sure the painting is depicting the scene of Christ and the adulteress; just possibly it’s depicting the Old Testament scene of Daniel judging Susannah. We’re not sure who painted this painting and we’re not even sure what it depicts!

Mystery, intimacy and sensuality

Nonetheless, through the slightly confusing fog of problematic attribution and doubtful naming, I had just about got the general message that Giorgione’s works are notable for their use of shade and shadow to create a special closeness, a sense of ‘mystery, intimacy and sensuality’, when I came to almost the last painting in the show, an unsparing portrait of an old lady (maybe the artist’s mother, maybe not).

Probably, as so often in an exhibition about a specific artist, we are meant to approach the final works with a hushed feeling of sympathy and pathos, as if last works carry a special message from a genius who has plumbed the depths of wisdom to us, his earthly followers (cf the final work in the big National Gallery Goya exhibition which showed the artist and his doctor in a would-be moving scene).

Certainly La Vecchia is an appealingly vivid picture, a poignant depiction of old age – but surely it’s completely at odds with the smoky use of shadow, with the mystery and sensuality which we first saw in the Terris portrait and have been hearing about ever since. The clarity of the wrinkles, the lined flesh, the detailing of the sparse hair, the quality of the even, unshadowed light, these all look like the work of a completely different artist. Another case of mistaken attribution? Time will tell…

Conclusions

I thought hardly any of the paintings on show here were beautiful: none of them took the breath away for their masterful depiction of the human face, or evocation of the sights and smells of landscape, or pleasing composition or ravishing use of colour. Rather, this exhibition is quite a demanding lesson in art history; it sets out to illustrate the birth of a new, more smooth, sensual and mysterious style in the Venice in the early 1500s, but turns out to be as much or more about quite knotty problems of attribution and authentication.

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More Royal Academy reviews

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by Simon on March 26, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 26, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/03/26/in-the-age-of-giorgione-the-royal-academy/

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