Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
Burlington Contemporary is the Burlington Magazine’s free online platform for reviews and research on international contemporary art.
The exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints by Edouard Manet, currently at the Prado, is a landmark in the Museum's history.1 It is one of the very few shows to be given there to an artist not represented in the permanent collection and certainly a first as far as artists of the 'modern' period are concerned. Also, it has been organised from within the Museum itself where curators are more used to dealing with earlier masters. The Prado's generosity towards the organisers of the exhibition Manet/Velazquez: the French Taste for Spanish Painting, held in Paris and New York in 2002-03, has been wonderfully repaid with several of Manet's greatest masterpieces from collections in Europe and the United States. Outstanding are the loans of paintings from the Musee d'Orsay (the Balcony, the Fifer, Emile Zola), the Metropolitan Museum of Art {Boating), the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (the Street singer and the big study for the Execution of Emperor Maximilian) and the National Gallery of Art, Washington (the Railway); the exhibition closes with Manet's last substantial painting, the Courtauld's Bar at the Folies-Bergere. In spite of this string of iconic works, the show is not a straightforward retrospective, nor is it a simple crowd pleaser. Although all of Manet's career is covered, the emphasis is on the early period during which his devotion to Spanish art was confirmed by his visit to the Prado in 1865. Here, the combination of paintings, copies, prints and drawings establishes an impressive and detailed picture of Manet's debt to Spanish art as a profound aesthet ic catalyst, while not forgetting that the ubiquitous bull fights, guitars and mantillas in his work were the result of an enjoyable cultural tourism shared by many of his French contemporaries. To hang four of Manet's paintings, each one isolated on a screen, down the centre of the Prado's grand galerie, flanked on all sides by works by Ribera, Velazquez, Goya and others, was a bold move. If it intro duces the visitor, before the exhibition proper is reached, to Manet's maniere espagnole amid the very works he emulated, it also removes some of the complex power that paintings such as the Balcony and the Fifer might have revealed if they had been integrated within the show. Even so, the compar ison by no means diminishes Manet, for his best works belong in this company. Such a juxtaposition occurs once more: halfway through the exhibition, in a separate room, there is the astonishing confrontation on facing walls of Goya's 3rd May and two versions of Manet's Execution of Emperor Maximilian, a coup de theatre visitors are unlikely to forget. Up to the mid-i870s all is well; thereafter the show falters a little in its choices with two or three disagreeable paintings and some visual confusion in the hang. But three superb scenes of contemporary life, Boating, the Railway and, in the final room, Bar at the Folies-Bergere, Manet's last great effort as his fatal illness took hold, save the day. It should be added that throughout the exhibition the wall texts in Spanish and English are exemplary and, in the case of the very last one, detailing Manet's final months, even moving.
'After he had returned to Venice, for the father-in-law of Giovanni da Castel Bolognese, Titian did a painting in oils on canvas of a naked shepherd and a country girl who is ofFering some pipes for him to play, with an extremely beautiful landscape. This picture, today, is to be found in Faenza, in Giovanni's house.'1 Although Titian's picture thus described by Vasari in the house of Giovanni da Castel Bolognese in Faenza has long been associated with the Three ages of man of c. 1513 in the collection of the Duke of Sutherland (Fig.29),2 recent historians have left open the possi bility that Vasari might have been referring to another version of the same composition. The reason for this caution is only partly that Vasari's description is incomplete and not quite accurate. More important is the evidence of the X-radiograph (Fig. 30) which, as convincingly deduced by Giles Robertson in 1971 in relation to other visual evidence,3 shows that Titian must have contemporaneously produced at least two other versions of the composition. Part of the purpose of the present article is to reaf firm that the Sutherland picture - which Robertson was certainly correct to identify as the original - is indeed identical with the picture seen by Vasari. In addition, the article will identify the unnamed father-in-law of Giovanni da Castel Bolognese: in other words, the person for whom, according to Vasari, Titian painted his early masterpiece.
Although an unusually large amount of documentation exists on the restoration of the celebrated Warwick Vase (Figs.36 and 37),1 hitherto nothing has been known with regard to who actually restored it. However, the spectacular marble crater attract ed several visiting travellers on the Grand Tour when it was in the restorer's workshop and three previously ignored descriptions of the vase are found in the diaries of the Dutch travellers Arnout Vosmaer (1720-99),2 Gerrit Jan de Hochepied (1742-1807) and Maarten van der Goes (1751-1826), who gave accounts of their visits to the workshop of the French sculptor and restorer Antoine Guillaume Grandjacquet (1731-1801; see the Appendix below).3 When Vosmaer and Hochepied went to Grandjacquet's work shop in the Piazza di Monte d'Oro in Rome on 10th October 1775 and again, this time accompanied by Van der Goes, on 26th December, the vase was already finished, after several years of restoration. Its antique constituents, twenty-four pieces according to the Dutch travellers who must have been repeating Grand jacquet's own description, were discovered during excavations in 1769-70 in the marshy area called Pantanello, on the northern boundary of Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli, by the Scottish painter and art dealer Gavin Hamilton (1723-98). Writing about his discover ies some ten years after the excavations to one of his customers, the great collector of antiquities Charles Townley (173 7-1805), Hamilton provided a list of the most important antiquities and their buyers. What was to become the Warwick Vase is not mentioned separately, but Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) is indicated as purchaser of a 'great number of Fragments of Vases, Animals of different sorts, and some elegant ornaments and one Collosial head',4 and it was from some of these fragments that the Warwick Vase was fashioned.
Sassetta's triptych at cortona of the Madonna of humility with saints (Fig.i) was brought to the notice of art historians in 1866 by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, who discov ered it in the sacristy of the church of S. Domenico in Cortona.1 Although it is neither documented nor signed, the altarpiece has been unanimously accepted as a work by Sassetta of the mid-1430s intended for the Dominican church.2 The latter assumption was proved to be correct in 1974 when John Pope-Hennessy linked the painting with one referred to as being in S. Domenico in 1452, in the chapel of St Nicholas belonging to the heirs of Niccolo di Angelo di Ceceo Del Peccia.3 Previously the document had been erroneously associated with a triptych by Fra Angelico from the same church (Fig.2). The patron of Angelico's triptych has subsequently emerged as Giovanni di Tomma so di Ser Ceceo, a wealthy merchant of Cortona.4 The two altarpieces appear to have much in common: both have a format that combines a triptych and polyptych, both were originally located in the lateral apses of the church (Figs.4 and 5), and their patrons knew each other. The Dominicans' strategy of attracting wealthy local lay patrons to pay for the decoration of their church can also now be shown to extend to Fra Angelico's Annunciation (Fig.3), for which the name of the cloth-merchant Giovanni di Cola di Cenno is here proposed as patron. This article presents new documents concerning the decoration of S. Domenico at Cortona and its patrons, and investigates the reasons for Sassetta's participation.
In the early nineteenth century the French writer Henri Beyle, better known as Stendhal, praised the painterly quality of Domenichino's frescos in the Cappella dei Santi Fondatori of the Abbazia di S. Nilo (the Badia) at Grottaferrata (Fig. 15), noting in passing that their subject was St Nilus, 'a Greek Monk', and concluding: 'The subject adds nothing to the merits of the painter; it is rather like the words of a libretto in relation to the music.'1 His neglect of the chapel's iconography was not new; already Domeni chino's biographers Bellori and Passeri had apparently misinterpreted some of the frescos' iconographie details.2 Modern scholarship has corrected these by tracing the source of Domenichino's scenes to the hagiographical accounts of Sts Nilus and Bartholomew but has left open the question of the chapel's overall significance. Nor has this been solved by a study of the career of Cardinal Odoardo Farnese (1573-1626), who commissioned the decoration, and was appointed commendatory abbot of the Badia in 1589.3
Peter Lasko, who died on 18th May, will probably enjoy a posthumous reputation as the dynamic man of action who estab lished art history at the University of East AngUa in the 1960s (he was founding Professor of the Visual Arts from 1965 to 1973); and who later, as Anthony Blunt's successor as director of the Cour tauld Institute of Art (1974-85), took the first decisive steps in bringing the Institute to its present home in Somerset House. These considerable achievements in academic administration were the high points in the second half of a career that had begun quiedy as a keeper in what was then the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities at the British Museum. The ebullient extro vert was already apparent at that time and, like his colleague David Wilson (who went on to become director there), he was some thing of an odd-ball in that august institution. Few who knew him then suspected the latent flair for manoeuvring in the corridors of power that was to emerge in due course.
Ernst Kitzinger, who died at the age of ninety on 22nd Janu ary 2003, was one of the twentieth century's most influential scholars of medieval art. Perhaps best known for his work on Byzantine art, especially his lifelong project on the mosaics of Norman Sicily, he contributed extensively to other fields. His distinctive conceptualisation of the visual culture of the late Roman and early Byzantine periods, in publications that included Byzantine Art in the Making (1977), was central to the rethinking of that period carried out by scholars over the last three decades. He brought the same visual sensitivity and intellectual rigour to other subjects, including Anglo-Saxon art, late antique floor mosaics, and problems such as the sources of Iconoclasm and the relation ship between Byzantine art and the art of the West. Particularly known for elegant insights into the processes of production and artistic conception in complex periods of cultural transformation, he provided a model of the art historian who remains close to objects, while articulating their relationship to complex historical and social settings, thus illuminating the larger culture of their periods. At the same time, his brilliant, but more general Early Medieval Art in the British Museum, first published in 1940, has remained in print for decades, introducing generations of under graduates and the general public to medieval art. Like his cousin Richard Krautheimer, another illustrious Byzantinist, Kitzinger joined a generation of scholars who fled Nazi Germany, trans forming the practice of art history in the United States by introducing a rigorous combination of visual, iconographie and historical analysis.
, first published in 1940, has remained in print for decades, introducing generations of under graduates and the general public to medieval art. Like his cousin Richard Krautheimer, another illustrious Byzantinist, Kitzinger joined a generation of scholars who fled Nazi Germany, trans forming the practice of art history in the United States by introducing a rigorous combination of visual, iconographie and historical analysis.Centrally positioned in the physical and mental geography of Spain, Toledo is an ideal subject for scholars who wish to challenge the marginalisation of Hispanic studies, especially those of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. For in those periods, Spain is all too often viewed as merely the object of cultural colonisation at the hands of the French, the Italians or the Flemish. Lynette Bosch's book sets out to contest this and to establish one of the building blocks in a specifically Spanish Renaissance, 'a vital cultural movement infused with an aware ness of classical culture and connected to mainstream humanistic culture'. Despite this overarching framework, the book is somewhat uneven and does not come together entirely satisfactorily.
The palace acquired in 1654 by the Span ish crown from its former ambassador the Count di O?ate became the first permanent foreign embassy building in Rome. That it remained almost the only example of a combined chancellery and ambassadorial residence for nearly two hundred years is curious in itself, but it is even more surpris ing and worthy of study given the substan tial move towards increasingly specialised building types in the early modern period. Leaving ambassadors to find and rent then own accommodation certainly defrayed the costs of the crown; no doubt it also remind ed the incumbent of the temporal nature of their appointment and avoided problems of vacating premises when a term of office came to an end.
Until recently, the only study of the career of Jean-Francois de Troy, one of the most representative of eighteenth-century French painters, was an article of some forty pages with eleven illustrations published by Gaston Briere in 1930. A serious mono graphic study with a catalogue raisonne was lacking: now it has finally been pro duced in the beautiful series published since 1978 by Arthena of which fifteen volumes dedicated to eighteenth-century French artists have already appeared, each with a comprehensive catalogue of a calibre that does not always exist for their Italian contemporaries such as, for example, Carlo Maratta, Pietro Longhi or Gianantonio Pellegrini. Meticulously edited, Christophe Leribault's volume is probably one of the most complete of the series. Rich in infor mation on De Troy's life, with a rigorous analysis of the milieu in which he worked, this is the essential work of reference for the illumination of De Troy's art.
This handsome but affordable short book is the third in a new series of studies on individual works of art, or groups of works, in Sir John Soane's Museum, Lon don. In order to describe and contextualise the fifteen remarkable drawings of the three Greek temples at Paestum, made late in 1777 by Giambattista Piranesi and acquired by Soane by 1818/19, the Museum could have turned to no greater authority than to John Wilton-Ely. His essay, structured under eight subheadings, broadly comprises three sections: an introduction to Piranesi's life and to the early history of the Greek Revival; an analysis of the Paestum draw ings and of the problems they raise in relation to the etchings published after Piranesi's death by his son Francesco in Differentes vues . . . de Pesto (1778); and a coda on the legacy of Piranesi's record of Paestum, especially with regard to Soane. The fine illustrations include all of the drawings in Soane's Museum, eight of them reproduced in colour, plus the two other drawings from the set that survive in other locations (although fig. 17 surely shows the printed plate I rather than, as captioned, the drawing now in the Bibliotheque nationale, Paris).
The thesis of Claude Cernuschi's book is that ethics, aesthetics, epistemology and politics can be shown to intersect in early twentieth-century Vienna in ways impor tant to our understanding of the early por traiture of Oskar Kokoschka. He argues that art and politics have a symbiotic relation ship (rather than art being a retreat from the political, as Cernuschi identifies in the writ ing of Schorske), a relationship into which, for the likes of Kokoschka, Loos, Kraus and Schoenberg, the ethical enters the quest for an artistic style which is '"true" or "gen uine"'(p. 17), as opposed to the 'deceit' of Secessionist ornament. Thus, we are told, Loos championed Kokoschka because his art scandalised Jugendstil taste and thus made his art a weapon in Loos's opposition to the Secessionist aesthetic. Within this framework of intersections, Cernuschi attempts to show which diverse cultural, political and ethical concerns come into play. Thus, apart from the apparent 'truth/ illusion' conflict, he situates Kokoschka's work in the context of turn-of-the-century mythology, psychoanalysis, anti-feminism and anti-semitism/Jewish assimilation. In the process he covers considerable theoret ical ground beyond that of Kokoschka's more immediate circle to include lengthy discussions of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Weininger, Bachofen and, not least, Wittgenstein.
Illuminating the renaissance is the tide of the magnificent exhibition of Flem ish illuminated manuscripts, seen by this reviewer at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and opening on 29th November at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (to 22nd February). The two exhibitions differ considerably in content since, of the 172 items catalogued, nearly half are to be shown only in one or other of the two venues. In London the show will be more widely representative of secular texts.
It takes courage to organise an exhibi tion devoted to the relationship between Jesuit beliefs and art, but this is exacdy what the Musee des Beaux-Arts, Caen, did in Baroque, vision jesuite, Du Tintoret a Rubens (closed 13th October),1 presenting works of art that were not only beautiful in their own right but also had the specific function of winning souls. Who were the Jesuits? There were ten of them in 1539, about a thousand in 1556 (when St Ignatius died), 15,500 in 1626, and their objectives were two-fold: gaining personal sanctity and preaching the Gospel. The Jesuit order was set up to do charitable works; the example of Jesus had to be followed at all times, which even included his ultimate sacrifice as a saviour. It was the Jesuits who took most seriously the challenge of a worldwide apostolate. Having adopted the Church of Rome's universal aim to pro claim, defend and propagate the Faith, the Jesuits' missionary strategy was to exploit all the persuasive powers of communica tion, including sight: the heart of the spec tator had to be reached through his eyes. Densely packed pictures had to captivate the eye and overwhelm the person at prayer.
Genre painting in Haarlem is both a fascinating field and a terrifying swamp. Some of the paintings are of world class, and their subjects attractive and inspiring, but on the other hand there is an abundance of more or less mass-produced images which are extremely hard to sort out. There are also the problems of iconography, meaningand reception, which force the student of this genre to enter an art-historical discussion which has been going on for decades without there being a dependable compass to sail on. The Frans Hals Muse um, Haarlem, must be praised for its courage in staging the first ever exhibition devoted entirely to this subject, Entertain ment and satire: Genre pieces by Frans Hals and his contemporaries, 1610-1635 (to 4th Jan uary).1 Here and there an enticing glimpse of the field is offered, but the smell of the swamp is never far away.
To the public of northern Europe, Italian still life is less familiar than that of Germany, Flanders and Holland, and the first version of this exhibition was conceived by Mina Gregori as an introduction to the subject. It was first shown at the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung in Munich last win ter,1 and then at Palazzo Strozzi, Flo rence (closed 12th October), with some works substituted and a new, weighty cata logue.2 Exhibitions of this genre have been mounted in Italy in the past few decades, at a time in which still life has been held in ever higher esteem by both scholars and collectors, but no one has undertaken such a wide-ranging survey as this, encompassing Italian still life from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century in all its chief centres of production.
In this ambitious exhibition, Himalayas. An Aesthetic Adventure, first shown at the Art Institute of Chicago and now installed at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smith sonian Institution, Washington (to nth January), the curator, Pratapaditya Pal, has brought together 187 objects representing the artistic traditions of three main regions of the Himalayas: Jammu, Kashmir, western Himalayas and west Tibet; Nepal; and central and eastern Tibet and Bhutan. The exhibition is accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue,1 an audio-visual guide and a brochure to help those visitors for whom the art of these three regions is a complex and esoteric subject.
