Previous Posts: March 2012

Quite why the National Gallery is bringing together the British landscape painter with the 17th-century French classical landscapist, I can only wonder. It is only three years since Tate Britain mounted Turner and the Masters, a fascinating overview of his rivalries and influences – including Claude Lorrain.

Most of the works here are in British collections, the majority from Tate Britain and the National Gallery itself. There are only three major foreign loans, all from the US. So it will cost you £12 to see lots of paintings we already own. Perhaps the exhibition is intended to give respite to all the guards who had to shepherd the fainting, weeping and often hysterical crowds around its recent Leonardo show. Turner apparently burst into tears when he first saw Claude's 1648 Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba. As well as being moved, he probably realised how far he would have to go to beat Claude as a painter. There is nothing new in this observation; nor does this exhibition have anything new to say about the relationship between the two artists.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why the National Gallery has gone to so much trouble to tell us something that most people with an interest in British art already know. [...]

The show is a muddle from start to finish. The best I can say about it is that the curators have borrowed some wonderful pictures to hang alongside much-loved warhorses from the National Gallery and Tate. But in the catalogue essays, art historians are given carte blanche to waffle on for page after page explaining ideas that could be written on the back of a postcard.

Don’t get me started on the labels: surely there are limits to the number of synonyms curators may use for “soft”, “glow” and “light”. And you only have to tell us once that Turner left Sunlight Rising through Vapour to the National Gallery in his will.

After seeing the exhibition, I found myself writing a single word in my notebook, but that word happens to be the kiss of death for any exhibition: “Why?”

In fact, the whole thing was a fiasco from first to last. The two artists had as little to do with each other as possible. Leonardo, who had had problems with fresco – tempera on wet plaster – while working on the ‘Last Supper’, took the unprecedented step of applying oil paint directly onto the wall. A thunderstorm created excessive humidity, causing the colours to drip and merge into each other. Discouraged, he abandoned the project.

Michelangelo completed a cartoon, or full scale drawing, but had barely begun the painting itself when he was called to Rome to work on the tomb of Pope Julius II, whereupon his cartoon was destroyed by a jealous rival.

These unfinished, compromised works faced each other across the hall for half a century, before the Florentine authorities decided to get some proper frescoes painted over them in 1555 by Giorgio Vasari, author of ‘Lives of the Artists’, a brilliant chronicler of the artists of his age, but a mediocre painter.

Leonardo’s painting is known principally from a powerful drawing by Rubens, made from a later engraving. Michelangelo’s work, a supremely unrealistic catalogue of male nudity, is known from a copy of his cartoon made by a pupil.

Both of these works and the preparatory drawings produced for them, have been not only endlessly ‘quoted’ over the centuries by artists of the order of Titian, but have been talked and fantasised into a kind of cult-phenomenon.

While it would be wonderful to get further insights into either of them – and in the wake of the London Leonardo exhibition interest couldn’t be higher – I’m not going to get over excited on the strength of two holes bored into a wall and a few minute fragments of plaster.

Vasari may have been a self-serving opportunist, but he genuinely revered both artists and it’s impossible to believe he would have painted over a significant work by either of them. There is of course the currently much discussed possibility that he painted onto a false wall erected to save Leonardo’s painting.

Yet even if a substantial chunk of the Battle of Anghiari is unearthed I suspect the experience will be disappointing. Not only will it be in a deleterious condition, but rather like those lost and legendary albums you wait half a lifetime to hear, only to find your internal life somehow the poorer for the experience, the idea of Leonardo’s painting may prove to be far more potent and inspiring than the actuality.

Researchers in Florence say they are one step closer to proving a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, The Battle of Anghiari, is painted on a hidden wall in a cavity in Florence's town hall, where it has remained unseen for five centuries.

After drilling tiny holes in a fresco painted on a wall which hides the cavity, the researchers inserted a 4mm wide probe and took samples of paint, which they say is similar to that used by Leonardo when he painted the Mona Lisa. [...]

The research team's probe confirmed the existence of an air gap, originally identified through radar scans conducted of the hall, between the brick wall on which Vasari painted his mural and the wall located behind it. "No other gaps exist behind the other five massive Vasari frescoes in the high-ceilinged hall," the team said.

A sample of black material removed from the back wall was analysed with a scanning electron microscope using energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy to identify its chemical makeup.

The chemical composition "was similar to black pigment found in brown glazes on Leonardo's Mona Lisa and St John the Baptist, identified in a recently published scientific paper by the Louvre, which analysed all the Da Vinci paintings in its collection", the team said.

"Note that Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa in Florence at the same time," said Seracini, who was featured in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.

Flakes of red material were also found. "Analysis of these samples seems to identify them as organic material, which could be associated with red lacquer. This type of material is unlikely to be present in an ordinary plastered wall," the team said.

Tomaso Montanari, an art historian who has led the opposition to the research said that he did not "consider the source of these findings credible."

He added: "What do they mean by saying the findings are compatible with Leonardo? Any painting from the Renaissance would be. Anything from that era could be painted on that wall."

...we then explored some of the paintings we didn't know. One (from the Gallery at Parma) was a curious self-portrait of Zoffany apparently putting on a friar's outfit, actually getting ready to go out to party in fancy dress. And he's looking forward to a good time, for on the wall were hanging up, the label said, two condoms.

"But" asked the husband, "why do they say "two"? There's three of them hanging up -- a pair, and one a bit further to the right."

And that's certainly what it looked like. In fact it looked as if the condom on the right was neatly hanging over yet another version of the Venus of Urbino...just to rub in what the painting was all about. We didn't linger long, but decided to check it out when we got home.

That's where the story took a curious turn. Every single image I could get of this painting, including the one in the catalogue (above), crops off a good few centimetres on the right hand side, so you can't actually see what's going on there, and whether there's a third condom or not. In fact, in a major article on Zoffany self portraits (in the Art Bulletin 1987), William Pressly explains that even he hasn't seen the original painting and has only had access to a photo slightly cropped on the right. On the basis of that, he concludes that Zoffany had painted a strange tear in his image of the Venus of Urbino -- a significantly condom-shape tear (and that's the line repeated in the new catalogue). 

Being part of a trust is like going off to work or university for the first time – terrifying but totally worth it. You may make mistakes, you may blow the budget on getting Sky Plus or food from Waitrose instead of Lidl but you soon learn that your mistakes affect no one but yourself and you pretty soon put them right. 

In my experience, being part of a local authority museum service means bland corporate marketing, no freedom to respond to new media, and a procurement system that has a minor meltdown when you try to order a replica Viking helmet.

It means councillors who know practically nothing about what their museums and galleries are really for and whose social skills mean any opportunities for advocacy are cancelled out as they make a beeline for the free buffet. 

As for favourable employment conditions – after recent ructions over local authority pensions who can say how long these benefits will continue to outshine those in the private or third sectors? 

No, give me trust status any day and I’ll follow the advice of Adrian Babbidge (as I did when taking over the management of the Uttoxeter Heritage Centre from the local town council) and ensure a water-tight agreement between the local authority and the trust so that museums don’t close or run into the ground from lack of investment.

Alas, it is too small and, crowded and cramped, will be uncomfortable for visitors. With Hockney hogging the main floor of the Academy, poor Zoffany is hidden away in an attic that is as gloomy as a cellar, the number of paintings exhibited far fewer than the number in the catalogue, their impact weakened by a plethora of negligible prints, drawings and even knick-knacks. Nevertheless, even if only an hors d’oeuvres riches rather than a banquet, it is a sound introduction to a painter with a very wide range of experience and patronage.

[...]

Zoffany deserves a longer review to match a more comprehensive exhibition; from the Academy’s there are absentees beyond understanding — those from the National Gallery, the Tate and Greenwich peculiarly irritating; there are more examples in the Royal Collection, and I would like to have seen again the small full-length portraits of Mrs Salusbury in widow’s weeds (black is such a test of a painter’s ability) and Sir Elijah Impey, Chief Justice of Bengal, indulging in dramatic oratory. And we should have been able to see Zoffany’s paintings in the daylight that floods the great rooms below, currently occupied by Hockney.

In Renaissance art historical scholarship, the category of the portrait has provided a key framework for thinking about and discussing representations of the individual, an emphasis that has been echoed in a range of recent exhibitions celebrating Renaissance ‘faces’.

The inaugural Renaissance postgraduate symposium invites new scholars to explore the limits of this framework. It aims to encourage students of the Renaissance, in its broadest definition, to consider the domestic, devotional and urban environments of portraits. Contributors are invited to consider how the experience of viewing, commissioning and living with portraits affects our understanding of their meaning and function, situating the images within their historical contexts rather than within the museum’s exhibition space. Likewise, we invite participants to challenge the terminology of portraiture and to consider objects and images which do not fit into the conventional category of the ‘portrait’ but which nevertheless ‘portray’ individuals.

The exhibition, the first at Hampton Court on the Stuart period after a decade spent on the Tudors and Henry VIII, is in the Queen's state apartments, which were created in the late 17th century by Sir Christopher Wren for Mary II.

"Beauty was a very thin line," the show's curator, Brett Dolman, said. "On one side, beauty is taken as a symbol of virtue and perfection, beauty could allow you to rise far beyond your original station in life. On the other, beauty is viewed with suspicion as a snare and one wrong step and your reputation is destroyed forever."

He must be the greatest painter of English royalty between Van Dyck and Winterhalter. In his royal paintings, such as the wonderful Queen Charlotte With Her Two Eldest Sons, royalty appears with the necessary spectacle, and even with a whimsical appearance, but also off-duty, relaxed. Other painters of the period, like Gainsborough, rendered royalty as private individuals; Zoffany’s royals have a curious quality, suggesting that they have wandered off from stiffer, stately duties and have flung themselves down without changing their clothes to be alone with each other and the painter. They have, unexpectedly, a connection with Zoffany’s large and innovative series of portraits of actors in their best and most memorable roles.

Zoffany's eye for the manners of the English was ironic and true. His strange and wonderful Tribuna portrays the reality of the Grand Tour – a social, not a cultural pilgrimage. It also reveals a trait in British society that remains constant to this day: the studied shallowness of the elite. In Zoffany's grand anthropology of the English ruling class, great art is just a prop for fashion and the rituals of the privileged.

In terms of disclosure of the details of the acquisition, we are always completely open, as our members would expect us to be, about any grants we have offered to a museum – in this case £100,000. 

Regarding the total cost of the acquisition, we generally also announce the cost at the time of announcement unless the acquiring museum wishes to publish this information separately (which in this case, Tate will do in their annual review, which I believe is published in September).

The amount of tax settled by the Guercino is 3.2 million pounds. As I imagine the work would have been subject to the same 40% tax hit as all the other Spencer items sold in 2010, (including the King David and the Rubens), the value of the Samian Sybil has been determined to be the same as the King David, (which sold for at auction for 5.2 million pounds).