An Artist of the Golden Age: Zurbarán at the National Gallery

     

      Los santos se han de pintar de manera que no quiten la gana de rezar en ellos, antes pongan devocion pues el principal efecto y fin de su pintura ha de ser esta.

     Back to my flying visit to London the other week, and after I had photographed the Comyn Ching Triangle I headed off to The National Gallery in Trafalgar Square and the current exhibition of work by the Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664).

    This was my first in depth encounter with his work, and for that matter, with the exception of Picasso, any Spanish Art of any period.  I think I may only have encountered Zurbarán's work in reproduction to be honest.  I can only therefore describe this exhibition as a revelation.  An intense, at times profound, experience, with the visitor immediately plunged into devotional world of the Spanish Counter Reformation.  The world of the Spanish Mystics, of St Theresa of Avila, St John of the Cross, and St Ignatius Loyola.  What you might think of as the unseen engine of this exhibition.

     Confronting the visitor is a monumental depiction of the Crucifixion - the earliest signed work by Zurbarán - Christ is near to death, the darkness has come upon all the earth, blotting out everything. He is naked save for his brilliant white loin cloth, and his is alone.  Alone as forlorn, alone as the sole focus of devotion.  It is said that his contemporaries thought they were viewing a sculpture, not a painting.

      And then, to the right, there is the breath-taking 'Martyrdom of St Serapion' of 1628.  The saint, who came from the Great Britain and was martyred for his ransoming of Christian slaves in North Africa and is depicted, dressed in the habit of the Mercedarian friars, hanging by his wrists, head on one side, heavy with either exhaustion or death. In reality he was crucified and his body hacked to pieces.  To be honest I don't think I've ever seen a painting quiet like it, the composition is so unusual.  Both paintings point to Zurbarán's supreme mastery of fabric.  In the martyrdom it is almost all fabric.

     Francisco de Zurbarán was born in Fuente de Cantos, in Extramadura, at the mid-point of the Golden Age - the Siglo de Oro - a roughly two hundred year period marked at one end by the completion of the Reconquista, and Columbus's first voyage to the New World, and at the other the Terminus ad Quem of the Treaty of the Pyrenees of 1659, and (according to some historians) the Terminus post Quem of the death of the dramatist Pedro Colderon de la Barca in 1681. A period not only of Spanish military and political dominance in Europe and beyond, but a remarkable expansion in the arts and architecture.  Zurbarán's working life was spent mainly in the city of Seville, a place that was both provincial (a long way from the artistic centres of the Italian Peninsular and the Low Countries) and the hub of trans-Atlantic trade between Spain and her empire.  There was, therefore, a lot of money to be spent on art.

     To put him into an artistic, and European, context, Zurbarán was born, lived, and died  during the nascence of the Baroque, when the city of Rome underwent an extraordinary century long transformation. Bernini was his exact contemporary. In Spain, El Greco had died when Zurbarán was sixteen, and Velasquez, Murillo were near contemporaries.  And yet, except for the possible influence of Caravaggio,* Zurbarán seems hardly touched by any of this.  He eschews the writhing ecstasy, the effulgence of sensation.  And, as pointed out by Jaspreet Singh Boparai, writing in The Spectator (25.4.26), he eschews blood.  Zurbarán's art, in contrast, is sober, possessing an austere spiritual intensity that seems to look back not only to the High Renaissance, but the Late Medieval Art of the Low Countries.** His figures have heft.

     All of this is not so far from 'estilo disornamentado' - aka the Arquitectura Herreriana - the architectural style developed by Juan de Herrera during the construction of El Escorial, the vast palace complex commission by Philip II outside Madrid.  Like the painter, the architect before him rejected the excesses of Mannerism, retaining a preference for the High Renaissance, and like the painting the architecture has a lingering sense of the Gothic. What was produced by these men was a sort of distilled creation, shorn of the extraneous.  Zurbarán's use of tenebrism is, perhaps, part of that process of elimination.

     To return now to the paintings.  The second room (there are seven in all) contains the single picture in the exhibition I actively disliked.  (There always had to be one.)  'The Virgin of the Rosary with the Carthusians', 1648-9.  It hangs between two other paintings, 'The Circumcision' and 'The Adoration of the Magi', which together formed a single tier from what must have been a colossal altarpiece, commissioned by the Carthusians of Jerez de la Frontera.  'The Adoration' I particularly liked.  A fine composition, rather Netherlandish.

     The third room contains of what you might term religious portraits - virgin martyrs in beautifully rendered contemporaneous costume and two depictions of St Francis of Assisi.  One, of St Francis standing, is often used to exemplify Zurbaran's work.  Justifiably so.

     Movingly, in the fourth room, a group of three immense crucifixions, and on the wall opposite two Assumptions of the Virgin Mary. In the fifth, some rare secular work, particularly three (?) paintings from a series of seven of the Labours of Hercules.  Opposite two of larger series of the sons of Jacob, on loan from the Bishop's Palace at Bishop Auckland in County Durham, where they grace the Prince Bishop's State Dining Room.  I think they were the first of Zurbaban's paintings to arrive in Britain.  They are quite different in tone from the Labours of Hercules, and from a lot of work in the exhibition, what with their exuberant costumes and colouring.  And then there is the Giant Head - an enormous painting of a man's head that has relatively recently been accredited to Zurbarán, placed as to visible from the other end of the enfilade in room 3  It's rather compelling.  If not strange.

     In contrast, the exhibition concludes with two rooms given over to small works; still-lives & devotional works. As the popular reworking of a saying of St Theresa of Avila has it: 'Dios anda entre los pucheros.'***  These still-lives illustrate, for me, a recuring element in Zurbarán's work, a sense of distance, if not unreality, which occurs also sometimes, say, in the work of David Hockney.  A sort of disengagement, that seems particularly strong in the pictures of fruit (invariably lemons) in baskets.  Though obviously painted from life there is an air of detachment about them that could be due to the strange use of light and colour. A juxtaposition of hyperreality of the lemons and the almost schematic treatment of the basket.  In general there is a recurrent strangeness, an awkwardness if you will, about Zurbarán's work that sets it apart, and sometimes disturbs the viewer.

      We are also introduced to the work of his son Juan de Zurbarán, particularly his mesmerizing still-life 'Plate of Grapes', of 1639, painted when he was a mere 19 years old.  Masterly.

 

*       Zurbarán has been called the 'Spanish Caravaggio' from his masterly use of chiaroscuro.  However, it seems unlikely that he had any contact with the art of Caravaggio.  It has been suggested that 

**    King Philip II was avid collector not only of Venetian Art, the art of the Low Countries.

*** 'God moves between the pots and pans.'

Joseph Wright of Derby: Out of the Shadows

     

     To London for a couple of days.  And very welcome it was. Gallery-going and shopping.

     On our first day we went to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square to see the exhibition 'Wright of Derby: From the Shadows'.  A small exhibition, but rather the eye-opener that caused me to refresh my interest in this most remarkable of painters.  I've known of, and to a certain extent admire, the work of Joseph Wright for years now, but it remained, to me at least, rather sunk in the general miasma of 18th century British art.  I knew some of his work, particularly 'An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump', 1768, and possibly his most famous work; 'An Iron Forge' of 1772; and his arresting 'Portrait of Brooke Boothby' of 1781.  The rest was terra incognita.

     Wright was born in the English East Midland city of Derby in 1734 and was trained in London. He worked in his home town, in Bath and in Liverpool, at various stages of his life. He is connected to both Romanticism and the British Enlightenment.  He was a friend of Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgewood and Joseph Arkwright, and has been called 'the first painter of the Industrial Revolution'. He was a fine portraitist and landscape painter, but we tend to think of him for his dramatic tenebrist paintings - Wright called them his 'Candlelight' paintings - which he painted from the 1760s onwards, of which 'An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump' is the finest, and most famous, example.  A nocturnal, often occluded, world.  Tenebrism, I should explain at this point, is an essentially Baroque technique, an extreme form of Chiaroscuro.  Coincidentally, the work of another, earlier, tenebrist, the enigmatic French painter Georges de La Tour was the subject of an almost concurrent exhibition in Paris, at the Musee Jacquemart Andre.

     Staged within a suitably darkened gallery space, this exhibition, which is on until May 10th before moving on to Derby, concentrates solely on that tenebrism.  The first to do so, apparently. 

     The paintings on display - they are all oils - are accompanied by a wall of mezzotints - quite the perfect media - of those paintings.  Which, I wonder, influenced the selection of the other?

     With the exception of one painting - 'The Earthstopper' of 1773 - these are rather contained if not, at times, claustrophobic images. Perhaps the most extreme and strange - and virtuosic - is 'Two Boys fighting over a Bladder' of 1770.  The bodies of the boys - one in complete and deep shadow - fill the canvas to the exclusion of all else except the bladder which is lit eerily enough from a hidden light source.  That hidden light source is a recurring motif in these works, and it used to great effect throughout.

     Although thought of as an Enlightenment painter. These paintings, in addition to their claustrophobia, have a rather intense dreamlike quality.  We are called to enter into a world of mystery and initiation - an initiation amongst other things into the worlds of craft, science, and of alchemy.  A world too, of the Gothic.

The National Gallery: Siena and the rise of Painting 1300-1350 Part Two

     Well, here, finally, after an very long wait, is the 2nd part of my review of  'Siena and the Rise of Painting 1300-1350' at the National Gallery.  I'm not that sure it makes much sense.  Make of it what you will.

    And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.  And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.

      Now to the actual exhibition, and as is so often the case with exhibitions of this type, it is haunted by absence. In many ways the viewer is presented with a mystery.  In this particular case there is the unknowable, yet palpable, presence of the Medieval city, which sometimes saw itself as the New Jerusalem.

    During the near half century covered by this exhibition Siena was at the height of her wealth and power.  A city where, like the meeting of two great ocean currents, the Gothic north and the Byzantine east came into fruitful contact.  As this exhibition shows it produced an interesting, scintillating synthesis; as to whether in doing so, as the curators argue, it kickstarts Western Art I have my doubts.  Much is made of the position of the city on the Via Francigena, the Pilgrim route between Canterbury and Rome, with the suggestion that objects - luxury objects - such as illuminated breviaries and ivory triptychs were brought to the city by pilgrims.  They would have to be pretty grand pilgrims, it must be said.  Only it isn't said. It is suggested also that pilgrims ordered items from Sienese painters to be picked up later on the return journey.  There is no evidence for this, as far as I can see, and again they would have to be at the wealthier end of pilgrim traffic; the items in this exhibition are 'high status'.  But then nature abhors a vacuum, and something, i.e. supposition, must take its place.

     Nothing is made, as far as I can remember, of what must have been the presence of contemporaneous Byzantine art in the city.  Its presence, like that of Gothic art from the North must be inferred because its influence, like that of the Gothic, is there in Sienese art, particularly in the work of Duccio.

    At this time Siena was ruled by a mercantile oligarchy - hardly the 'most representative', or 'inclusive' (yes, that is on one of the information panels at the start of the exhibition).  Out of this oligarchy, the 'Noveschi', a nine men council, the 'Nove', was elected to govern the Commune of the city for periods of two months at a time. This provided, in a city state that was notoriously unstable, a sustained period of relative political stability.  I say 'relative', because for all her power and wealth during that those five decades Siena was still subject to regular bouts of communal violence.  Be that as it may, that half century saw a remarkable flowering of art and architecture in the city, as the authorities sought to re-order the city politically and spiritually. In 1348, however, came the fearful arrival of the Black Death, the population of the city was decimated and in the ensuing years there was the repeated threat of famine.  In 1355, after 68 years, the rule of the 'Nine' was overthrown. 

       And then there is the absence of two immensely large, and immensely important, paintings, both works by Duccio: 'The Rucellai Madonna' and 'The Maesta'.  Presences that may have had the ability to change the 'narrative' of the exhibition. I have talked about the former before, here.  Panels from the predella of the latter form the centre piece of the exhibition, occupying the central octagonal room. Along with the panels in the preceding room they clearly show the master's profound debt to Byzantine art.  For some they are evidence that Duccio may have been trained by a Byzantine master, but tempting though that is we are back to supposition.  The Maesta was designed as a free-standing altarpiece for the cathedral in Siena.  The front is essentially a massive icon of the Panakranta type with the Virgin and the Christ child sitting enthroned and surrounded by all the company of heaven. The reverse however is a collection of scenes - a collection of icons - of a devotional scale.  How much any this was clearly visible to the congregation, i.e. the laity, is another matter.

    In Duccio's work the Theotokos continues to wear the blue Maphorion; other later artists, as this exhibition illustrates, are not so humble in regard to the tradition.   

   Of the works exhibited I find Duccio's the most sympatico; I certainly felt less warm to some of the work of the Lorenzetti brothers.  I however, particularly warm to a panel painting - religious in theme, I cannot remember if the artist was named - that hung in the tax office of the Palazzo Pubblico.  And why not?

     The strange thing is that while the exhibition began with icons it ended with an icon: Simone Martini's 'Christ Discovered in the Temple'.  The Virgin Mary still wears her dark blue Maphorion. Is the exhibition actually saying nothing has changed? A narrative could be created thus.

* On June 9th, 1311, the newly complete altarpiece, the embodiment of the cultural, political, economic, and spiritual power and aspiration of the city was brought in procession from Duccio's workshop to the cathedral.  Like the Ark of Covenant, in 1 Samuel 6 and 1 Chronicles 13 it rode upon a cart drawn by oxen to its resting place. The Theotokos being the ark of the New Covenant, and the tabernacle in the passage quoted at the head of this post which is from the Book of Revelations. This extremely large double-sided altarpiece was placed behind the High Altar until it fell victim to fashion and was eventually riven asunder, with parts of the predella ending up in the National Gallery.

  

The National Gallery: Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300 -1350 Part One

Apologies for the tardiness of this post.  We are still in the midst of family illness.

Introduction

   I feel I should have done some research before going to this exhibition, which is a collaboration between the Metropolitan Museum in New York and The National Gallery in London.  It would certainly have helped, for although filled with beautiful and lustrous images, this is a hard exhibition to take in.  As I said to a friend later that day over lunch, there is a limit to the number of panel paintings one can take in at one sitting, and I write as somebody who usually loves this sort of thing, but something, for me at least, was not quite right.

'The Art that shaped the Future': Art History in the Age of Stupid?

     For the ignorant, and I think I may include myself in that category, Sienese art of the Middle Ages being a bit esoteric, both galleries have produced introductory videos to the exhibition.

    The Met video features the James Pope-Hennessy Curator in Charge of European Painting, Stephan Wolohojian and Caroline Campbell, then Curator of Italian Art at the National Gallery.  At one point Wolohijan said: '[....] in the last years of the 1340s Europe is infested by the Black Death, this great plague that was especially present in Italy, so by the end of our story none of these artists survive."  The implication being they had all died of the plague. This is nonsense.  Simply not borne out by the facts. Of the four artists that this exhibition focuses upon, Ambrogio Lorenzetti and his brother Pietro may indeed have died of plague, but Duccio died c1318 and Simone Martini died in Avignon in 1344 at the age of 60.  Towards the end of the video Wolohojian stands in front of the beautiful 'Christ Discovered in the Temple' by Simone Martini with its delicate cusped & subcusped Gothic arch and lilting Gothic folds in the clothing of the three figures and says: "No gable, no Gothic form, a truly kind of framed painting, the way you could see made today...." Why do people make such statements like that, when, in this particular context, the exhibition is filled from beginning to end with panel paintings in square frames without 'no gable, or Gothic form'?
     The National Gallery video, grandiloquently subtitled 'The Art that shaped the Future', features, amongst others, a local Sienese artist Chiara Perinetti Casoni, who has it appears a real downer on Byzantine art. (I hate how in order to re-enforce an argument it is done at the expense of something else.)  She seems to speaking from a place of ignorance and one perhaps tainted by a certain anti-clericalism. In common with the other talking heads she presents a view of Byzantine art that is crude and almost unrecognisable.   She implied, for instance, that Byzantine icons were produced solely by religious ie monks.  However, icons were created both in a monastic and secular milieu.  There were professional secular artists in the Empire creating icons in a workshop system that couldn't have been that different from the one operating in Siena. Too much Vasari, and too much Romanticism.  Certainly, this whole exhibition is indebted to Georgio Vasari and his book 'The Lives of the Most Excellent Artists, Sculptors, and Architects' .

     A claim is made in both videos that the icon tradition is 'rigid', 'rote and stale' and yet icons developed over time just like any other pictorial art, for example the introduction of Chrysography or 'striations'.  Contrary to the impression given, the depiction of the Virgin & Child in Orthodox iconography is not tied to the 'Hodegetria' type, which, according to legend, was established by St Luke the Evangelist.  There are other ways depicting the Theotokos and Child eg. 'Panakranta', 'Pelagonitissa' and most importantly in this context the 'Eleusa'.  According to Wiki it is sometimes referred to the in the West as the 'Virgin of Tenderness'.  Perhaps the most famous example of this type is the Vladimirskaya which dates from c 1130.  So claims that the it was the artists of Siena - 'true artists', mind you - those men, 'whose blood boiled' and 'felt strong emotions' who introduced tenderness & emotion into the dead language of Byzantium have to be taken with a pinch of salt.  Italian artists before Duccio were producing art with emotion; for example there is the work of the Florentine artist Meliore di Jacopo (fl 1255-85).  Two of his paintings spring to mind: The Madonna and Child with Two Angels, c 1270-75, and The Enthroned Madonna and Child of the same period.

     But then, sadly, although this exhibition opens movingly with a room of icons from the city, it underplays the role of those images in the religious and civic life of the contemporaneous Italian city: there were, for example, processions of icons in Rome and in the cities of Lazio to the south, and in Siena itself, where in addition the cathedral and San Niccolo al Carmine possessed miracle-working icons of the Virgin Mary.  In researching for this post I soon realised that I knew very little about the cultural spread of Byzantine art in Northern Italy.  The presence of Byzantine culture in Venice I understood, and in southern Italy and Sicily too where there were then still Greek speaking communities worshipping according the Byzantine rite. 

      What, however, was worse about these productions is that virtually no speaker in either video could bring themselves to say 'Byzantine', 'Gothic' or 'International Gothic'.  And these are the categories, the concepts, after all, that exhibition is dealing with. 

     You know, looking at these videos I felt just that bit cheated - I mean, all this people educated - lengthily, expensively, exclusively - talking with all the inanity of a fashion journalist.  PR rules.

    

London

       To a sultry London on Sunday for a few days and hefty dose of culture, and (it could be argued) you can't get more cultural or arcane than an exhibition of Medieval Sienese religious art at the National Gallery.  That was Monday morning.  I intended to post everything in order over the next few weeks or so, but I still need time to form a response to the art on display, so I will have to return to this topic at a later date when my thoughts are clearer.  (You may, perhaps, want to read this 'reluctance' on my part as a tacit admission that I wasn't that impressed, but I couldn't possibly comment.)  The two photos below were taken in Covent Garden on the way to the National Gallery.  The first is a contemporary reconstruction of an entrance arch by Inigo Jones - one of pair flanking his church of St Paul.  Jones as Mannerist.  The second is Russell House, attributed to the English Baroque architect Thomas Archer.

     It's funny how on these little trips of mine themes sort of emerge from the serendipitous.  On this particular visit three themes emerged.  The first was Post-Modernism.  After the exhibition, and a visit to the remarkable Maison Berteaux on Greek St., I headed into Covent Garden via Seven Dials to buy a new shirt. I couldn't resist, however, popping into the Ching Court.  A triangular public space formed out of a chaos of backyards and sheds in the centre of the urban block created by Monmouth, Mercer and Shelton Streets - the so-called Comyn Ching Triangle. The result is a beautiful, serene piece of urbanism.  It is an early work (1978-86) by the architect Terry Farrell, combining, in a Geddesian manner, the old (Georgian terrace houses) and the new (three new architectural interventions - one at each corner).  How one felt the optimism of those heady days when it seemed that Modernism was finished!  I particularly like the detailing of the three wooden porches on the w side of the court.

     Afterwards lunch with a friend who now works for another friend Ben Pentreath, at his rather glamorous studio in Lambs Conduit St. We ate at 'La Fromagerie' over the street from Ben's office.  Quite the best gnocchi I have eaten in a long time.  A rushed supper at 'Hare and Tortoise' in Bloomsbury interrupted by extraordinary behaviour of a diner when her child misbehaved and that left the other diners open mouthed in disbelief.  From there to the Art Workers Guild where RIBA TAG was having a symposium and summer party.  I managed to arrive very late, all the chairs were taken, the speeches dull, and the heating on. I lasted half an hour before leaving.

Further Reading

'Terry Farrell' (Architectural Monographs No9), Terry Farrell & Frank Russell, Academy Editions, 1985

Back in London: The National Gallery

      From the York Water-gate, I made my way to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, via St Martin-in-the-Fields, which is an admirable building but worldly.  Deserving, though, of a post to itself.   In preparation for this post, I was trying to remember when I was last at the National Gallery.  The last time I blogged about a visit was, I discovered, in 2016.  I simply can't believe that that last visit was so long ago.  I must have been there between times, surely?  One difference between then and now was immediately apparent, the massively increased security.  Similar measures were present, also, on last year's visit to the British Museum.

     Not sure what the following selection says about me, apart from I like Bronzino and I'm not so keen on tenebrism.

     From that National Gallery I waked to St James, to do a bit of shopping, and then walked back to the hotel, stopping in Maison Bertaux for cake. For lunch I tried Gails in Bloomsbury - busy and a bit chaotic, food good - before walking south to Grey's Inn. Dinner in Hare & Tortoise, previous night dinner in the wonderfully 'Old Skool' Caio Bella in Lambs Conduit St.  Sinner that I am I had veal.